Books
EROTIC JUSTICE: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism by Ratna Kapur. Permanent Black, Delhi, 2005.
THE task that Ratna Kapur attempts in this book is to position the sexual subaltern as an erotic subject, and by doing so to bring this subject from the margins to the very centre of dominant discourses, disrupting the latter and radically reconstituting them in the process. Law is the lens, as in her earlier work, through which this process is explored. As she puts it, ‘the subaltern’ is a device that offers a normative challenge to the assumptions of law operating from a postcolonial location – that is, its claims to universality, neutrality and objectivity. In each of the four essays here, Kapur reconceptualises law as a site of struggle, in which the role and place of the world’s cultural Others – transnational migrants, Muslims, homosexuals, or sex-workers – is fought out. Each chapter challenges the dominant narratives of modernity that ‘do not pay attention to the uneven development and variously disadvantaged histories of nations, races and communities… Erotic justice therefore requires a revisiting of historical claims and dominant narratives.’
The first essay, ‘New Cosmologies’, outlines the ‘postcolonial feminist legal project’, beginning with a critique of liberal internationalism as developed especially by Martha Nussbaum, with its claims to provide universal remedies for injustice experienced by women across the globe. Much of the sharpness and effectivity of the critique comes from Kapur’s skilful mapping of postcolonial critiques of liberalism which lead her to assert that ‘the specific liberal tradition referred to by Nussbaum not only incorporates arguments about freedom and equal worth, it also incorporates arguments about civilisation, cultural backwardness and racial superiority.’ Thus, law and the liberal project on which it is based have had a troubled reception from their very introduction into the postcolonial world, subordinating the native, denying her rights to sovereignty and her very humanity. When the liberal rights discourse emerges in the postcolonial context then, it is no guarantee against majoritarianism, as Kapur demonstrates through a study of the Hindu right’s politics in India. Far from rejecting this discourse, the Hindu right pursues its agenda in and through the discourse of rights, and law becomes a key terrain for its attempt to reconstitute women’s rights, sexuality and culture.
In the second essay, ‘Erotic Disruptions’, Kapur explores the debates around law, nation and sexuality in India, laying out the two positions that emerge. Both deploy cultural arguments – cultural essentialism to reaffirm dominant sexual ideology, in which something termed national culture is viewed as static and immutable; while on the other hand, cultural arguments are also made by those challenging dominant narratives of nation and sexuality. However, Kapur argues that this latter kind of argument is distinct from the first because at a deeper level it is based on notions of cultural hybridity. A wide range of material is explored in order to make the argument that the erotic subject can ‘recuperate a space for sexuality within the cultural text.’ The controversies over the films Bandit Queen, Kama Sutra and Fire, legal responses by the public to representation of sex on television, the increasing surveillance of sex-workers as ‘risk-populations’ in the context of AIDS, and the regulation and criminalization of homosexuality through Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code – this rich and complex body of material is examined in the light of their location in the legal arena – the site of contest over the meaning and construction of Indian culture.
The third essay, ‘The Tragedy of Victimisation Rhetoric’, turns to the international women’s rights movement, and offers a critique of its discourse for producing the Third World female subject exclusively as victim. It is in this essay that the argument for the erotic subject emerges most clearly, challenging the idea of the disempowered tragic subject. The erotic subject can shatter, says Kapur, any claim to a universal sexual or cultural truth, as sexual subalterns are diverse and pluralistic. It is important to note that Kapur does not deny exploitation and violence in the lives of women. Rather, she uses the erotic subject as a heuristic device to challenge the representation of her exclusively as victim.
The final and most fascinating essay, ‘The Other Side of Universality’, addresses an issue somewhat new to feminist legal scholarship in India, the transnational migrant subject. Here the contemporary phenomena of migration and border crossing are seen as offering a fundamental challenge to both the liberal subject and the nation state. Three state initiatives are studied – the US anti-trafficking Act 2000, recent UK government policy to assess the ‘genuineness’ of marriage among immigrants (targeting ‘arranged marriage’ in particular) as well as to encourage the assimilation of the immigrants into something defined as ‘British’ culture and ways of life, and third, the Australian government policy towards refugees and asylum seekers. Through the discussion on these policies, Kapur shows the circulation of notions of security and terrorism, legitimate and illegitimate cultural attitudes, and the relentless disenfranchisement of the transnational migrant subject. Equally significant is Kapur’s argument that the legal regulation by nation states of the movement of people across the globe invariably conflates issues of trafficking, migration and terrorism in such a manner that all agency is demonised, and the only legitimate position that can be occupied by the postcolonial subject is that of victim.
In Kapur’s argument, the focus on erotic desire and exclusion is not intended as a simple exaltation of the subject and her agency. The sexual subaltern as erotic subject is invoked rather to emphasize how her ‘exclusion, erasure, abjection and constant disruptive return’ forces a reconstitution and interrogation of the legitimate sexual subject itself.
One of the most creative thinkers in feminist legal studies today, Ratna Kapur inflects dominant discourses of sexuality, nation, culture, rights and progress through the lens of cultural, geographical and historical specificity, producing a rich and multi-layered analysis of the contemporary moment.
Nivedita Menon
FROM PLURALISM TO SEPARATISM: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh by Mushirul Hasan. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2004.
THIS book is an excellent account of the contribution made by Masauli Kidwais and other prominent Muslim families to the qasbai life in Barabanki district and its adjoining areas. Distinguished by its cultural, moral and social ethos, the word qasba was first noticed in the year 1495 when it possibly stood for both a township and a sub-district. The qasbai identity was seen in sharp contrast to the city life. While life in the cities was dull and devoid of colour, the qasbas of the 18th and 19th century were known for their high culture, and virtually seen as ‘a nursery of ideas and social forces.’ So strong was the association that many learned families distinguished themselves by attaching the name of the qasba to their name; the ‘Bilgrami’ identity of those from Bilgram is a case in point. Rajas and taluqdars, Sufis, poets and administrators famously enchanted by this world often returned to these qasbas to nurture their artistic vision. It became a nurturing ground for young talent.
As a comprehensive history of qasba life the book provides an incisive account of the lives and values inherited by the qasba people. There is much in it for those interested in religio-cultural synthesis of the qasbas where pluralism refused to be merely an idea and instead defined everyday practice, in effect becoming a way of life. Hindus and Muslims lived in harmony. Mutual interpenetration, coexistence and a deep respect for each others beliefs and a growing concern for happiness and prosperity of the two communities were some of the remarkable features of qasba life in the second half of the 19th century. Hasan’s book traces not merely the differences and diversities but relationships and interactions amongst the people. In the face of everyday anxiety and distrust targeting Islam and Muslims, both within and without, the book endeavours to remove misinformation and pejorative stereotypes. Writing with a sense of lament, Hasan perceives the process of dislocation as an inevitable moment in qasbaic history.
By focusing on individual families of the likes of Wilayat Ali Kidwai (in Arabic Kidwai stands for ‘elevate’) whose forefathers with Turkish origins came to India in the 13th century, Hasan traces the socio-cultural milieu of one of the oldest Muslim families in North India. Qazi Kidwai reached India in 1205 and was responsible for the conversion of many Hindus to Islam. The Kidwais of Juggaur moved to Barabanki and became well-known as Masauli Kidwais. 1856, a turning point in the history of Awadh, witnessed a series of significant changes when Barabanki and Awadh come under British rule. Hasan argues that ‘qasbas of Awadh were the sites where religious loyalties were more often than not fused with an emerging pan-Indian identity in a seamless web of symbols and sentiments.’ He brings out the role of Maulvi Muhammad Zahiruddin whose productive contribution to society led to the opening of schools for women and children.
However, colonial intervention is held responsible for fissures in the qasbaic set-up. It is Hasan’s contention that as pluralism gave way to separatism, its worst victims were the people of Awadh. Over the years the qasbas became sites of hopeless dependency and the focus shifted to the political climate in Allahabad and Lucknow. While the former was seen as the ‘intellectual capital’ of UP, Lucknow came to be known as the ‘social capital’. As a cultural hub it was home to distinguished men of ideas like Saiyyid Masaud Husain Rizvi, Saiyyid Ehtisham Husain who joined Lucknow University in 1939, Josh Malihabadi, Majaz, Abdul Aleem, Rashid Jahan, Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi and Sajjad Zaheer among others. Amidst social unrest and political instability a constant exchange of ideas was the need of the hour.
Imperial authority was met with resistance but partition came as a final blow to the Awadh Muslims. The anxiety and nervousness of the displaced had disturbing implications. Both the Hindus and Muslims suffered severe losses. While Major General Shahid Hussain and Saiyyid Hasim Raza decided to make Pakistan their home, poet Hasrat Mohani chose to stay back. Caught between changing times and history many of the Kidwais had the privilege to choose and decide their country unlike some of their other contemporaries. All that was golden and resplendent soon disintegrated into ‘fractured memories’. With the abolition of the zamindari system the social elites were forced to lead a life of restraint. A lucid account of Rafi Ahmad Kidwai’s meteoric rise to power at the Centre has been carefully outlined as also his indispensable contribution.
I would recommend the book to anyone wanting to get an insight into Awadh’s composite history where scholars, poets, thinkers and writers, with remarkable sensitivity and pluralistic consciousness participated in rich literary and cross-cultural debates.
It is indeed touching to read about Anwar Jamal, one of the most progressive and secular of the Kidwais who during his stint as vice-chancellor of Jamia earned a reputation for being a rebel with a cause. Hasan’s book is a tribute to the modern but serving spirit of the elite Muslims who despite all opposition set out to ‘change, restructure and revolutionize’ the social structure with reformist enthusiasm and energetic imagination. A very well-researched document, it strives to dispel unexamined formulations that have led to a popular assumption that all Muslims supported the formation of Pakistan, connived with the British agency and played at the hands of dogmatic forces. Hasan’s somewhat polemical research is carried out with a persuasive intensity.
The lives and contribution of the prominent families is attractive, and the reader is drawn to the tehzeeb and nafasat of the illustrious elite. However significant as this might seem, it fails to bring out the opinion of the common people who served and waited.
History relies on evidence. It stimulates and draws much of its sustenance from the written word. Women and children are conspicuous by their absence in history and so are the very common people. Of course there are exceptions like Anis Kidwai who lost her husband during the communal riots in October 1947 and at the behest of Mahatma Gandhi committed herself to the well-being of refugees. Such examples are few and far between. We hardly get to know the life of a qasbai woman – how she lived, the consequences of repeated child-bearing on her mental and physical being. Circumscribed by her gender she virtually had no say. The dilemma and the experience of partition – how did she look at the issue of partition, was her opinion taken into account, did she agree to move or stay, appear inconsequential questions for most historians and of which we have no satisfactory account but in literature. It is difficult to talk of ‘what is not there’. Perhaps it was not the project of this study. And yet one feels that if we wish to reconstruct history both as tribute and trajectory, we have to do it by acknowledging the contribution of its women and the extraordinary lives of the ordinary people.
Ranu Uniyal
BRITISH MILITARY POLICY IN INDIA 1900-45 by Anirudh Deshpande. Manohar, New Delhi, 2005.
KANDY AT WAR: Indigenous Military Resistance to European Expansion in Sri Lanka, 1594-1818 by Channa Wickremesekera. Manohar, New Delhi, 2004.
MODERN research accepts that the rise and fall of the West’s hegemony over the non-western world was to a great extent shaped by the interplay of organized violence. Trans-continental military power-projection capabilities, asserts Geoffrey Parker (The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, Cambridge, 1988), enabled the West to subdue the rest in the early modern era. Thanks to the international credit system crafted by the Europeans, the latter could sustain their global power projection capabilities. In fact, the economic decline of the European powers, claims Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000, 1988, reprint, London, 1990), resulted in the loss of their colonies after World War II. In this essay, we take up two books which analyse the rise and fall of colonialism in South Asia, giving special emphasis to the military dimension. While Channa Wickremesekera portrays the intrusion of European militaries in Sri Lanka, Anirudh Deshpande explains the military collapse of the British Indian Empire during the 1940s.
The European powers got interested in Sri Lanka towards the end of the 16th century. The Tamil kingdom of Jaffna collapsed but the Sinhalese kingdom of Kandy in the central highlands of the island was able to hold at bay the western intruders till the beginning of the 19th century. Kandy did not enjoy any technological advantage over the Portuguese, Dutch and the British who successively threatened the kingdom. Moreover, the monarchy at Kandy did not have any standing army or navy. Polities in mainland India like Mysore under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan, and the Marathas under Mahadji and Daulat Rao Scindia (which controlled more manpower and financial resources compared to the puny kingdom of Kandy), imitated the European military revolution. Nevertheless, Mysore and the Marathas, unlike Kandy, collapsed quickly when confronted against British might. How might we explain Kandy’s long drawn attritional defence?
Wickremesekera deserves praise for situating Sri Lanka within the landscape of modern military history. He writes that the people of Kandy exploited the terrain of their homeland for conducting hit and run attacks on the baggage-heavy, foot-slogging European military contingents. The thickly forested and sparsely populated mountainous region enabled the part-time soldiers of Kandy to surprise and ambush the unsuspecting slow European columns. While in India the British established their hegemony by playing off the various princes against each other, Kandy played the same game with the European powers. In the third decade of the 17th century, Kandy used Dutch aid to eliminate the Portuguese.
In 1795, the British intervened in Sri Lanka. This event, according to Wickremesekera, was a point of no return for Kandy. Unlike the Portuguese and the Dutch, the British controlled the financial and demographic resources of the subcontinent and they were left with no other European challengers at their rear. Moreover, the Royal British Navy controlled the Palk Straits and all the water bodies around Sri Lanka. Previously, Kandy used to get aid from the South Indian rulers. By 1800, this was no longer possible because not only were all the ports of Sri Lanka under British control but equally the South Indian chiefs were themselves destroyed by the East India Company. The climate of Sri Lanka did not suit the Europeans. Hence, the Company used British trained Indian manpower, i.e. the sepoys, to subdue Kandy after 1815.
If the 19th century represented the apogee of British power, the stress due to imperial overstretch was becoming apparent in the first decade of the 20th century. Influenced by Correlli Barnett (The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation, 1986, reprint, London, 2001), Anirudh Deshpande in his Ph.D. turned monograph writes that the first half of the 20th century witnessed a linear global British military decline. The British financial and military weaknesses became most apparent during the two total wars of the 20th century. Behind this general backdrop, Deshpande points out the ramifications of imperial collapse in India.
For Deshpande, imperial decline was further accelerated by the British policy of racial discrimination. This was most evident in the sphere of Indianization of the officer corps of the sepoy army. The historians have poured a lot of ink on this issue, yet the debate continues. Most of the scholars (see for instance William Gutteridge, ‘The Indianization of the Indian Army: 1918-45: A Case Study’, Race, 4(1963), 39-46; Stephen P. Cohen, The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation, Delhi, 1990) argue that Indianization was opposed tooth and nail by the British because it was the last bastion of white exclusivity. A minority view propounded in recent times by Pradeep Barua in The Army Officer Corps and Military Modernization in Later Colonial India (Hull: The University of Hull Press, 1999) asserts that it was not the Indian moderate nationalists but the inner dynamics of the reform-oriented British politico-military hierarchy that ensured slow and steady Indianization. Barua’s argument is logically unconvincing and empirically skimpy. Deshpande’s bibliography too does not mention Barua’s book. Deshpande like Gautam Sharma (Nationalisation of the Indian Army: 1885-1947, New Delhi, 1996) shows that Indianization was forced upon the British due to the demands of the total war.
Deshpande’s real contribution lies in linking demobilization with decolonization. It is a good break from the overdose of Gandhian freedom movement and micro studies of peasant rebellion that characterize the writing of modern Indian history. Credit is due to Deshpande for tapping the hitherto unused sources available at the Ministry of Defence Archives at R.K. Puram. He shows that when after the surrender of Japan, Britain tried to reduce the size of bloated Indian Army, the sepoys became hostile to the colonial state. Deshpande says that slow Indianization and economic discontent alienated the Indians even during the war. As a result there was large number of desertions and the Indian Army fought badly. Deshpande, however, cites no source to back his claim regarding large number of desertions.
Daniel P. Marston’s Phoenix From the Ashes: The Indian Army in Burma Campaign (Westport, Connecticut, 2003) shows that from 1944 the Indian Army fought quite well in Burma. In British Military Policy, the author says that when the Indian soldiers realized that they were led astray by false promises of wartime recruitment propaganda, they turned against the Raj. Deshpande ought to have engaged with Tan Tai Yong who in ‘Mobilization, Militarization and "Mal-Contentment": Punjab and the Second World War’, South Asia, n.s., 25 (2002), 137-51, shows that due to Raj’s war time economic policies, Punjab, the sword arm of the colonial state, was alienated. One might say that once the British government in India failed to secure jobs for the demobilized sepoys, then the latter became nationalists. C. Bayly and Tim Harper’s Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-45 (London, 2004) accepts that the whole British position in South and South East Asia disintegrated under the impact of the Pacific War.
The military history of South Asia is yet to be integrated with mainstream history. Campaign studies and monographs on military hardware are left hanging in the footnotes of history books. From the 1990s, there has been some spark of interest in the ‘war and society’ approach. The danger is that too much emphasis on social minutiae and cultural complexities will clog our views regarding the original functions of the military. True the army functioned as a channel for upward mobility for various social groups. And military expenditure had a multiplier effect on regional economies. But, in the final analysis, armies exist to deter and ultimately to fight wars. Deshpande and Wickremesekera turn the limelight on the armies in the midst of war.
While Wickremesekera shows that local factors need to be taken into account before applying Parker’s military revolution model wholesale in explaining the rise of the West, Deshpande points out the role of global wars and long term extra-Indian structural factors in dismantling colonialism. Probably these two good books will be able to bridge the gap between general history and the specialized sub-discipline of military history. This reviewer can only hope that these two books will emancipate the study of colonialism from the straitjacket of economic history and the Congress-Raj action-reaction dialectics.
Kaushik Roy
TRIBES, FOREST AND SOCIAL FORMATION IN INDIAN HISTORY edited by B.B. Chaudhuri and Arun Bandopadhyay. Manohar, New Delhi, 2004.
TRIBES are crucial to the understanding of our histories and it has often been seen that a tribal background or heritage has been hidden by later generations only to survive in a very early text. Further, tribals have also been seen as closely linked to the forest areas, though many have not always been in this condition. An overview of these issues seems to have worked their way into this comprehensive volume.
In the prehistoric period, the transition from a tribal to an agriculturist has been seen as a problematic, especially since present day tribals are also agriculturists. Rajan Gurukkul cites cases (pp. 78-79) where ‘with the expansion of the new relations of production and the spread of wet-rice agriculture that became characteristic to the period from sixth-seventh centuries, the social formation structured by the dominance of forest economies came to an end. In short, the disappearance of the social formation dominated by forest economies involved a series of transitions like the transition from kin-labour to non-kin labour, multiple functionaries to hereditary occupation groups, clans to castes, simple clannish settlements to structured agrarian villages, and chiefdom to monarchy.’
B.B. Chaudhuri cites cases in pre-colonial and colonial India where tribal and forest relations have changed. However, in the course of his analysis he mentions that tribals would require iron from caste groups or other communities that prepared iron. He ignores the fact that many tribal groups in eastern and central areas were extracting iron from mines and smelting it in the pre-industrial period. This must have been for exchange, for we see little use of iron by them in this period. Further, there are iron working tribal communities still present in this region.
An excellent ethnographic account by Kesavan Velluthat of the Koragas of South Canara describes the existence of a community in the fuzzy region between tribe and caste while Shishir Kumar Panda describes many ancient texts describing the earlier Orissa kingdoms as being ruled and peopled by a variety of tribes. K.S. Singh traces a multiplicity of responses from the tribal region of Chotanagpur where various communities have differentially responded to forest and personal/communal lands in the region.
This highlights the fact that the issue of the forest is perhaps also one of classification. How the state visualizes the forest and how it sees its usage also determines its viewpoint regarding those who live there, according to B.D. Chattopadhyaya. This visualization of the forest may have come from pre-colonial or colonial periods and continues to the present date. This visualization of the forest enables officials to exploit forests exhaustively for various reasons as has been described for the Cochin area by K.T. Thomas. The British government in Cochin was led by commercial forces and even its limited conservancy was guided by these factors.
A study in the Madras Presidency region by Atlury Murali describes the complex relationships of a loose hierarchy that becomes a stringently managed tough bureaucracy within the forestry officials. This relationship is also experienced by the local people in the context of their attempt to subvert forestry rules and laws in their search of traditional minor forest produce which gradually becomes even more restricted over time.
This issue is seen to be present in the different context of central Indian tribal areas by Archana Prasad. According to her, a major cause of the problems of tribal identity and linkage with communal forces in the region has been due to the way tribal economies have been damaged over the years, leaving them with little recourse but to sell forest produce and become labourers. Without redressing this problem, perhaps, no other issue may be resolved.
It has been noticed by many studies in tribal regions around the world that one way closed communities cope with sudden change is by forming millenarian movements. P.K. Shukla describes one such millenarian movement, the Dubia Gossain movement of Chotanagpur between 1870-1880. In all such movements, there is usually a ‘pure’ leader who exhorts others to follow his example and to conduct certain rituals that he diagnoses as being necessary for the restoration of an earlier status quo (in this case, Santhal dominion). Such movements often help tribals to adjust to change through a new ideology wrought out of these movements.
In the present context, Arun Bandopadhyay studies the Joint Forest Programme in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. Other issues of democracy, grassroots policy-making, gender and equity began to get caught up in the major issue of creating enough forest areas for the people. Though the human-forest relationship has changed irreparably, there may be reasons to celebrate that these new areas recreated from the past seem to acknowledge the centrality of common property resources that people require to survive.
The issues linked to human beings, whether tribals or not, and forests are complex. It is unlikely that all the various possible issues will ever be described in a single volume. However, newer cases are welcome as are newer forms of analysis. What one misses, perhaps, is the freshness that comes from a new perspective, a new cause that may become an underlying theme or an overview of an issue that is currently under discussion.
Abhik Ghosh
INDIA IN MIND by Pankaj Mishra. Picador India, Delhi, 2005.
INDIA’S ties with the West have always been ambivalent. The idea of Enlightenment that reached India through colonialism liberated India’s soul but tied down its body. Despite irritants, India is today the eastern inheritor of the traditions that grew up in the West.
For centuries, to India the West was predominantly a European entity; India too was regarded by the West for centuries as a lazy, dirty giant lying on the land between the northeast of Afghanistan to the extreme east of Myanmar. Over the course of time, the idea of the West has undergone considerable change as has the idea of India in the western mind. The West is divided into two – one classical gull-like benevolent Europe; the other, the ruler of the world’s politics, the American eagle. The western perception of India too has changed. The lose expansive political territory of South Asia has been firmed up into a single united India neighboured by other former parts of the Raj. The idea of India is constantly in motion, in geography and in politics and culture. This motion, sadly, is not often reflected in the writings on India by the stalwarts of western literary canon invited by Pankaj Mishra to be a part of his ambitious India in Mind.
India in Mind’s fabulous collection is a testimony to the unchanging idea of India in the West. That so many people could think about India in so many different ways while essentially being more or less similar to each other shows that India does not have a dynamic quarter in the mindscape of the West. Even as many new voices like Patrick French and William Dalrymple are writing for the new India, the established canon of western writings on India continues to consist of various voices thinking alike.
There is a scene in the film Kalapani by Priyadarshan, where a British woman working tirelessly for the benefit of prisoners in the infamous Cellular Jail in the Andamans, counters the non-stop rhetoric of the anti-colonial fighters with, ‘We made India.’ The white woman in the film has a point. Colonial rule indeed made India what it is today. Modern India is the child of a defamed parent and perhaps the tension between the West and India can be explained in this way.
The ideational proximity between India and the West is so dense and close that it is difficult to disengage the slobbery son from the immaculate mother that is the West. India and the West are tied to each other in a cycle of responsibility and revulsion. On the recent 60th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, The Hindu’s front page carried two rows of world leaders paying tribute at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow. The photograph did not only portray the reality of the world order today and India’s place within it, the image also showed where modern India came from and what its duty is in the larger frame of the world. India, like many post-1789 European countries, came from the 19th century liberal spring, and, it is its duty to protect the condition of freedom that midwifed its birth into the modern world.
The writings of the modern greats selected by Pankaj Mishra for India in Mind show the distance and proximity between India and the West. India’s relation with the West is not uniform. Everything related to India is schismatic, so is the relationship between the two civilizations. India interacted with the West in two forms – one, colonial, other neocolonial: the former Europe-centric, the latter U.S.-centric. Pankaj Mishra’s work shows both aspects of the relationship; the European section of the West finds it possible to write about India from a connected position. Though flawed and partial, the European voices write from a location better known as Orientalism. But on the other hand this is not visible in the work of the American contributors like Allen Ginsburg. Though engrossing for variations of style and tenor, contributions from the non-European authors stand out because they continuously remind that, in their zeal to curve out a separate relation with South Asia, the non-European authors failed to evolve any meaningful relationship with India. No surprise that as far as India is concerned, the United States is still ‘playing in the dark’.
While Europe’s relations with India run deep into history, the United States, which is the centre of the western world, is yet to find out who or what India is. The mystery, the mystique, and the occasional burst of disgust that American authors often display, are indicators of aimless wanderings in the ocean before the sailor finally strikes the new land. The version of India in the western mind that emerges from the conference introduced by Mishra reminds us of the gigantic head of Shiva in the caves of Elephanta which had so enchanted and intrigued André Malraux. It is the Indian way to be diverse while essentially being united. Finally, the phenomenon that so confused Malraux at Ajanta finds its place in the Indian Constitution and ‘unity in diversity’ becomes a very Puranic resolution of the centrifugal ambitions of various constituents of India. Each face of India is filled with its unique variety of the essential idea that forms the common body. India is thus near and distant at the same time, articulate and autistic from whichever angle you choose to enter it.
Mishra’s moderation brings us to the crucial issue: what should be the relation of India to the West in general and the United States in particular. As far as Europe is concerned there is some hope. The discursive mistakes of the past are being carefully avoided. Orientalism has been exposed and the postcolonial school is doing its bit in exposing the spectacles of power through which India was perceived. But it is in this very advantage that we can trace the table that is supposed to bridge India and the United States – while the postcolonial school tries to bring India face to face with the western structures of power from the cosmopoles of Europe, it does so from the citadels of knowledge in the United States. This untiring exposition goes on in the United States. The real beneficiary however is not the host society: it is the European post-colonial axis. Whatever bit of the post-colonial idea makes it into the U.S. society, does so through the back door of the African-America, Hispanic-America and the old fashioned liberals from the east coast near Boston and thereabouts. The white, male ruling establishment of the United States has never understood India, the ‘other’ democracy and its strange ways. Unlike conservative Britain that had a specific relationship with the ‘jewel in the crown’, it is difficult to log on to a specific perception of India in the ‘mainstream’ United States.
The collection called India in Mind does please with its names and the ease with which so many authors with such high and broad seats have managed to park themselves side by side in a single volume. This is also the fact that bores the reader because when so many writers agree or at least seem to talk in the same distant travelogueish ways about an experience as multitudinous as India, one knows the book should have a few more writings on the developments in this country during the last three decades of the 20th century. Mishra has succeeded in encapsulating how India has been perceived by so many in the West. By doing that he has also proved the uniformity in western thought regarding India.
Unfortunately for such a book that hopes to stand out because of its illustrious composers, India in Mind fails to do what is expected of it. Each of the writers is introduced with great pomp by the editor, leaving the reader with wild expectations that are barely met. What comes out of the writers is an affirmation of India’s mysterious nature. In short, India was never introduced to them as one among the modern civilizations. They are blissfully ignorant that it was in India that some of the greatest East-West synergetic events like the Theosophical Society occurred. They do not mention Henry Vivian Derozio; nor do they remember Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Tagore’s Gitanjali. As was recently shown by Shantiniketan-based William Radice, Tagore always wrote a new poem instead of translating his Bengali verses while composing the English version of the Gitanjali which got him the Nobel Prize. Each introduction that Mishra culls from under the folds in the western mind goes on to show that these introductions have not reduced the distance between India and the West; they have increased it. Such is the desire to present India as an irresolvable and enigmatic other that even those who portray a more or less sympathetic and insightful account of India and the Indians – e.g. Mark Twain and George Orwell – are full of that strong desire to present the Indian colonial possession as a case where few mutually satisfying steps are possible.
Little wonder then, India and the West are yet to hold each other’s hands. That partnership is yet to begin. A shadow of this lack of mutual comprehension is visible in the Indian diaspora’s desire to be counted as one among the major cultural forces in the West. While the African-American population has produced a whole wave of culture consisting of music, sports, literature and academics since early 20th century onwards, the Indian or the South Asian community has not produced great cultural waves that could be counted fit partners to accompany their success in the software industry. The United States does not acknowledge rebel music coming from the Indian-American or the South Asian community because of the reasons which fly on our consciousness like a heavy piece of rock, because they have never ever been introduced to each other as normal next door cases shorn of the air of mystery and silence. As a result India has never managed to get a ride to the centre of the western mind; India is on the periphery of the western mind because western narrators of India have failed it. Pankaj Mishra’s work is a tired reaffirmation of that conclusion.
Kallol Bhattacherjee
‘BARE ACTS’: Sarai Reader 05. The Sarai Programme, CSDS, Delhi, 2005.
A whole new body of work is slowly emerging under the aegis of the Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi that maps new and intriguing features of the contemporary moment. Over the past few years, Sarai has made available to us a new language for apprehending the enormous changes taking place over the last decade which have radically transformed our existence.
In his celebrated work on postmodernism, Frederic Jameson characterized the phenomenon most notably as ‘the staging of the aesthetic popular’, embodying a significant turn away from high modernist art and architecture towards popular mass culture. In Jameson’s reading, this move involves the effacement of boundaries between high culture and popular culture, rather than a turning away from high culture altogether. Crucial to this idea is his notion of pastiche, which is mimesis or mimicry without purpose or destination. Pastiche mimics high art, but unlike the form called parody, holds Jameson, has no respect for the original – for parody, even as it mimics, exalts itself through its reference to the original.
To be sure, this condition is not exclusive to the domain of art and architecture. The effacement of boundaries is a pervasive condition that is evident in many different fields in the postmodern condition – both in the domain of knowledge as well as real life. We may add to Jameson’s idea of pastiche that the copy (or mimicry) is not merely a degraded form of the original; once the canon collapses and boundaries blur, the copy acquires a life of its own. It mocks, even threatens, the original. This is true of the great ideologies of the 20th century – Nationalism, Marxism, Liberalism, for instance – whose existence has been threatened by what the purists claim are popular corruptions but which might be the only form in which such high ideologies could become popular. It is equally true of the world of commodities and consumption where the cheap and ‘pirated’ versions of the branded goods swamp the market, becoming a major source of anxiety for the corporations producing the latter. Frenetic attempts to police the production and circulation of such pirated goods has increasingly led to repressive measures being adopted by the governments in countries like India.
The central figure in the context of these new and intense conflicts is that of the ‘pirate’ – a term redeployed in the context of the new cyber-economy from its earlier usage as one who pillaged on the high seas. The pirate today is one who copies, multiplies and distributes or sells with scant respect for the original except as an object of consumption. Often, s/he who is called the pirate, in fact merely shares information and products with others. Effacement of boundaries in this arena of commodity and consumption has caused much anxiety, even panic. Raids by Delhi police on medical students’ hostels and confiscation of photocopied books – usually unaffordably priced foreign publications – can be considered symptomatic of this new anxiety. However, the really sharp conflicts have taken shape around the new possibilities of copying and sharing made available by new digital technologies and the Internet. ‘Intellectual property’, copyright and trade mark are the new banners of capitalist aggression – threatened as it is today, not by the working class, but by contraband capital – its own cheap copy.
It is this moment that the Sarai Programme chronicles. In so doing it challenges our received language. It forces us to see the world from a different vantage point from the ‘pirate’ and ‘hacker’ but refer to an existential condition, even a political stance. In drawing attention to this domain of new conflicts, Sarai has also forced us to think in a more sustained way on the everyday practices of ordinary people – away from the large, ideologically driven structures like the state and political parties. Sarai Readers, published annually, each focusing on a new and different theme, have become important aids for those who wish to explore the frontiers of the world of ideas and deal with a range of new issues that confront us today. The Reader is a unique product, even in terms of form: neither book nor journal, it is a purely experimental enterprise that combines contributions that range from the academic to the literary, from the purely textual to the visual, from detailed ethnographic reports to fairly dense theoretical writings. In fact, it will not be an exaggeration to claim that the Sarai Reader embodies in every sense the collapse of all boundaries of form, style and genre.
The volume under review is the fifth of the annual Readers published by the Sarai Programme. The thematic title, ‘Bare Acts’ is a play on the generic name used for documents that contain the Law or Act as such. On the other hand there is also the ‘bare’ act of living, if one may use the term for the everyday practices that drive people across borders of their homes, villages, cities or nations – across the frontiers of the law. These are the bare acts of living and consuming, of ceaseless innovations, including copying, ‘pilfering’ and enjoying. ‘Illegality’ here is less about wilful violation of the law; rather it is something to be negotiated, like a hurdle that must be overcome every day in order to go about the normal business of life. ‘Bare Acts’ is thus about the law and its everyday negotiations/violations and transgressions. It is about the ‘quiet politics of stealth’, as Solomon Benjamin argues in his piece on the unspectacular but persistent struggle of the poor over urban space in Delhi; it is about the sleaze and consequent porosity that marks the institutional spaces of the law – Tis Hazari courts in this instance – as Chander Nigam’s ethnographies show. Or as Lawrence Liang puts it, it is the world of ‘porous legalities’ – ‘created primarily through a profound distrust of the usual normative myths of the rule of law, such as rights, equality, access to justice, etc.’ The lived experience of most people, Liang argues, points to a network of day-to-day negotiations with power that renders vacuous any neat binary of legal/illegal. Liang’s own essay deals with these anxieties, which are explored through the fascinating instance of the music cassette industry and piracy in the India of the 1980s and 1990s.
Awadhendra Sharan’s piece maps the ‘fashioning of the urban environment through the law and science’ and focuses on the actual process of the law and government. Clifton D’Rozario examines, through the example of the Narmada tribals, the actual ways in which the very act of entering the space of law and legal institutions renders voiceless those who speak a different language. If contributions like these illuminate the processes of law and power, there are others that explore the other side of law. So, for instance, Aarti Sethi’s reconstruction of the famous Nanavati murder case (where a naval officer murdered his wife’s lover) and the drama enacted around it, reading it through the optic of ‘honour killings’, reveals interesting ways in which the bare act of life (non-modern practices, at that) gets inscribed into the very process of the law, thus ‘effacing the boundary’ in somewhat disconcerting ways. Between these two kinds of contributions lie a range of others that speak of the paranoia of state elites confronted with the collapse of more borders than just these. Kai Friese presents a moving account of the policing of Indian borders along the Himalayas and his attempts at tracking down two Chinese prisoners of war languishing in a Ranchi mental asylum. Naveeda Khan’s examination of the attempts in Pakistan by the orthodox Muslims to police the borders of ‘true Islam’ as it were, and the astonishing attempt by the judiciary to invoke a discourse (yet to be born) by utilizing copyright laws for validating the claims of the ‘original’, provides an unintended comic element to the matter.
So, if the Bare Act of the law is an embodiment of the norms of rights, equality and justice, the bare act of life is about border crossings and transgressions: across nation states, across the sexual divide, across the moral and the amoral.
With a vast range of contributions (more than 60), presented through an array of visual and textual material, this is a truly impressive volume. However, precisely for this reason it is impossible to do justice to all contributions and one can only pick some of them arbitrarily. For reasons of space, I have selected only some that relate to the South Asian experience. This should not give the impression that this is all that there is in this volume. Ursula Bieman’s ‘On Smugglers, Pirates and Aroma Makers’ for example, which relates to a video Europlex, co-produced with visual anthropologist Angela Sanders, plots the lived micro-geographies along the Spanish-Moroccan border on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. It looks at everyday practices: ‘perilous nocturnal boat voyages by clandestine migrants; helicopter patrols keeping watch; itinerant plantation workers who pick vegetables for the EU market; commuting housemaids, domesticas who go to work for the senoras in Andalusia…’ Shujen Wang looks at piracy in China and the ambivalence of the Chinese government in controlling it while Franscesca Da Rimini explores the fate of Asian asylum seekers in Australia in another disturbing account. Between these different contributions, we are presented with a glimpse of our enigmatic and troubling times.
Aditya Nigam
