May 68, More on Behenji, Moderate Islam, New Wave Latin American Literature

The BBC’s Philosophy in the Streets recalls the last upheaval of the Left in the West. The point that the radio talk makes is that the Left’s politics may have died out, but the schools of philosophy that were the offshoot of May 1968 still carry on- if that is a consolation. I felt that the programme is a little unkind to Sartre’s role during the student revolt, though it ties with my own observation that Sartre has become less relevant today compared to Camus, to say nothing of Foucault and Derrida. The talk is about 25 minutes long and well worth the time.

*

Rediff has an interview with Ajoy Bose, author of Mayawati Kumari’s biography “Behenji”, as she is popularly known. Some of his observations are quite insightful, for example, this one about how the BSP’s politics is different from most other parties in India today:

The significance of Mayawati is that she is completely different from everybody else in any ways. She doesn’t belong to any old political formations.

…

In most parties there is a political leadership structure. There is a ladder which you climb in the party hierarchy. In the Bahujan Samaj Party there is Mayawati on top and then, there are some functional people. You find Satish Mishra, Nasimuddin Siddiqui and Baburam Kushwaha but they are not leaders fitted somewhere in the hierarchy. You can’t say that this particular BSP leader is moving up, this particular MLA will become MP one day. There is absolutely nothing like that.

(Link via Mayawatijee)

*

Tarek Fatah’s book Chasing a Mirage: The The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State , has been expectedly getting good reviews in the Western press, it remains to be seen how it will be received in Pakistan and the (so- called) Muslim world. A review in The Star from Toronto.

Writing of Saudi Arabia, he says that 95 per cent of Mecca’s heritage buildings have been destroyed in the last two decades, mostly to build lucrative highrises overlooking the Ka’aba, or Grand Mosque.

Lost structures include the house of the Prophet’s wife Khadijah, demolished to make way for public toilets, and the house of Abu-Bakr, the Prophet’s successor, for a Hilton Hotel.

Even the Prophet’s 1,400-year-old home is under threat, he says, quoting London’s Independent newspaper and other sources, for a project known as the Jabal Omar Scheme, which includes seven apartment towers and two 50-storey hotels.

(Link via HD)

A more critical review at the Amazon.

*

This PEN discussion at the Literary Review brings a focus on a number of new writers from Latin America, and notes how much a big elephant Garcia Marquez is in the Latin American literary room:

Reviewers and readers, he complained, expect a certain pattern from Spanish and Latin American fiction — but expectations of a particular style or kind of fiction seem to be an issue in Spain and Latin America, too. Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez noted that for decades Colombian authors found it almost impossible to get around the overwhelming figure of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. No country, he suggested, has had such a dominant literary figure, and the effect was in many respects stifling, as readers came to expect everything to follow in that same magical realism-mode.

Link via Conversational Reading

Introducing Occasional Links: Mayawati, Kafka, Urdu Poetry, Books, Publishing

I plan to have an occasional post with a round up of what I have been reading, will try and make it once a week, else it will appear, well, occasionally. The continuity will be determined to a large extent by your response, of course.

*

Tehelka has an excerpt from Indian Dalit leader Mayawati’s forthcoming biography, exploring her relationships with the men in her life- her grandfather, father and Kanshi Ram. A Miracle of Democracy

*

In his short story A Hunger Artist, Franz Kafka examined the life of a hunger artist that audiences would pay for the tickets to watch him go without food day after day, especially during the last days of the 40 day show. This 40 day duration was determined not because it was a reasonable number of days for a person to survive without food, but because the owner of the show calculated that to be the attention span of the audience- anything beyond forty days, the audience would dwindle and it was no longer lucrative to keep the show going. A magnificent story of the decline and marginalization of the artist as well as the poor. A Hunger Artist

*

Ghazala has the original nazm in Romanized Urdu as well as the translation of hum gunahgaar auratein hein (We are the sinful women), a poem by Pakistani poet Kishwar Naheed. We, Sinful Women

It is we sinful women
who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns

*

The NYT has an article on the explosion in the number of books published: “In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006.” This has happened partly because of self- publishing but paradoxically also at a time when reading is in decline. Are you an Author? Me, too! (link via John Baker)

*

Andrew Gallix, in the Guardian writes on why some feel that while what is written is good, what is not written is still better. Besides, it saves on paper. A reader’s guide to the unwritten

May Day

Paintings by Diego Rivera : From the cycle: Political Vision of the Mexican People (Court of Labor):

Tehuana Women. / Mujeres tehuanas
Exit from the Mine

The first May Day celebration in India was organised in Madras by the Labour Kisan Party of Hindustan on May 1, 1923. This was also the first time the red flag was used in India. The party leader Singaravelu Chettiar made arrangements to celebrate May Day in two places in 1923. One meeting was held at the beach opposite to the Madras High Court; the other meeting was held at the Triplicane beach. The Hindu newspaper, published from Madras reported:

“The Labour Kisan party has introduced May Day celebrations in Chennai. Comrade Singaravelar presided over the meeting. A resolution was passed stating that the government should declare May Day as a holiday. The president of the party explained the non-violent principles of the party. There was a request for financial aid. It was emphasized that workers of the world must unite to achieve independence. “(Wikepedia Source)

Wang Anyi’s Short Story on China’s Cultural Revolution

At the time, young wives in our village didn’t have regular names. Add the word “xiao”–young–in front of their maiden names, that’s how they’d be called: “Xiao Qian,” “Xiao Sun,” “Xiao Ma.” After they had borne children, it would then be all right to call them “so-and-so’s ma,” such as “Xiaomei’s ma,” “Liu Ping’s ma.” Only Wang Hanfang, everybody called her by her own name.

At Words Without Borders read Wang Anyi’s short story Wang Hanfang about life during the cultural revolution. WWB’s April issue has a focus on China.

The Low Side of High Growth

I wish I could summarize Amit Bhaduri’s critical take on India’s high growth rates in recent years-titled India’s Predatory Growth from last week’s EPW. It is, however, so succinct that I’d suggest reading the whole article. Here are a few excerpts:

Statistical half truths can be more misleading at times than untruths. And this might be one of them, insofar as the experiences of ordinary Indians contradict such statistical artefacts. Since citizens in India can express reasonably freely their views at least at the time of elections, their electoral verdicts on the regime of high growth should be indicative. They have invariably been negative. Not only did the “shining India” image crash badly in the last general election, even the present prime minister, widely presented as the “guru” of India’s economic liberalisation in the media, could never personally win an election in his life.

…

In contrast to earlier times when less than 4 per cent growth on an average was associated with 2 per cent growth in employment, India is experiencing a growth rate of some 7-8 per cent in recent years, but the growth in regular employment has hardly exceeded 1 per cent. This means most of the growth, some 5-6 per cent of the GDP, is the result not of employment expansion, but of higher output per worker. This high growth of output has its source in the growth of labour productivity. According to official statistics, between 1991 and 2004 employment fell in the organised public sector, and the organised private sector hardly compensated for it.

…

At the extreme ends of income distribution the picture that emerges is one of striking contrasts. According to the Forbes magazine list for 2007, the number of Indian billionaires rose from nine in 2004 to 40 in 2007: much richer countries like Japan had only 24, France 14 and Italy 14. Even China, despite its sharply increasing inequality, had only 17 billionaires. The combined wealth of Indian billionaires increased from $ 106 to $ 170 billion in the single year, 2006-07 [information from Forbes quoted in Jain and Gupta 2008]. This 60 per cent increase in wealth would not have been possible, except through transfer on land from the state and central governments to the private corporations in the name of “public purpose”, for mining, industrialisation and special economic zones (SEZs). Estimates based on corporate profits suggest that, since 2000-01 to date, each additional per cent growth of GDP has led to an average of some 2.5 per cent growth in corporate profits. India’s high growth has certainly benefited the corporations more than anyone else.

Food in the Time of Crisis

What we are witnessing today is not so much a food crisis, but the question of food in a time of crisis.

Senior Indian ministers have mistakenly attributed the current rise in food prices to the poor consuming more because ‘the economy is growing’.

This fallacy arises when one is blind to both history and the present.

A few days after agriculture minister Sharad Pawar blamed the South Indians for eating more chapatis causing wheat shortage, commerce minister Kamal Nath on Friday said increased food consumption by poor people is a challenge before the government. “We have great supply-side challenges in India at the moment with 15 million people moving from having one meal a day to two meals a day,” Nath said on the the sidelines of a conference in Singapore. (source, via anindianmuslim)

[To be fair, Sharad Pawar has had an afterthought, though he still does not hit the bull's eye:
Pawar said that agriculture was globally faced with serious challenges from factors like climate change, natural calamities and crop failure, diversion of agriculture land for bio fuels and increasing prices of food grain. (source)]

The production this year is estimated to about 227m tons, which is little less than the the current consumption.

It is certainly not a supply side problem, contrary to the minister’s assertions.

Since the food riots of the 1970s, the country, especially its middle classes, have not witnessed a large scale famine or a crisis. However, historically, some of the biggest famines were caused during an earlier phase of globalization- it was then more bluntly called colonization.

In neither case the reason was the insufficiency of food grains. On the contrary, both then as now, the reasons were linked to the vagaries of the world market, ‘free market’ only in name and controlled by financial interests in reality. During the 18th and 19th centuries, for example:

One third of the population of the then province of Bengal, which includes today’s Bangladesh, West Bengal, Orissa, Bihar and South Assam, were wiped out in the famine of 1770, immediately after Bengal was occupied by the British East India Company, due to their inhuman tax system. According to author Mike Davis, during the famine of 1876, “the newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought stricken districts to central depots for hoarding…In Madras city, overwhelmed by 100,000 drought refugees, famished peasants dropped dead in front of the troops guarding pyramids of imported rice.”

Interestingly, “these famines took place at the very same time that annual grain exports from India were increasing.” (source).

Does history teach us anything? Is there anything in common with the present, almost sudden food crisis?

In the 18th and 19th centuries India suffered terribly as millions starved to death, its countless tons of grain were exported to England because the mother country could afford higher prices impoverished Indians couldn’t.

The situation is similar today though the immediate triggers are different. The 19th century crises was caused because of the de- industrialization of India, forcing a movement from the town to the countryside and increasing the pressure on land At the same time there was a dismantling of its traditional grain reserve system. Finally, the focus of crops shifted to growing “cash” crops that were exported to the global market.

There certainly is no crisis because of the production, or its possibilities, in not being able to cater to demand. It is not a question of supply versus surging demand. Certainly, demand has increased over the years- though not because, as Kamal Nath would like us to believe “because the poor are eating more”.

It is partly due to the increasing demand from the rising middle classes in Asia (FP edit), and also wastage in the developed world. The structural reforms unleashed over last two decades have led to a general agricultural crisis (impacting food grain production as well):

Between 1996 and 2001, prices of all primary products (cotton, jute, food grains and sugar) fell by 40 to 60 per cent and farmers who had contracted private debts in particular, became insolvent. The syndrome of hopelessly-indebted farmers committing suicides in Andhra Pradesh and Punjab started in 1998 and rapidly spread to other areas where cultivation of cash and export crop was predominant. The crash in pepper, coffee and tea prices came a few years later after 1998 and farmer suicides in Kerala and insolvency of tea estates in West Bengal date from around 2002.

Most recently, rising fuel costs that have shot up to $117 from $50 three years ago, have turned many in the developed world towards bio fuels, which means that instead of grains feeding human stomachs they now feed the cars and vehicles in the rich world.

More immediate is the role of finance speculation in futures trading (which means that future products are purchased in advance), because finance capital has to invest where the returns are the highest and in light of the fuel crises means that bio fuels are promising speculations.

Commodity speculation spread long ago from standard products like oil and gold to anything edible and available for trade on the Chicago Futures Exchange. These days there are futures contracts for everything from wheat to oranges to pork bellies. The futures market is a traditional tool for farmers to sell their harvests ahead of time. In a futures contract, quantities, prices and delivery dates are fixed, sometimes even before crops have been planted. Futures contracts allow farmers and grain wholesalers a measure of protection against adverse weather conditions and excessive price fluctuations. They can also help a farmer plan how much to plant for a given year.

But now speculators are taking advantage of this mechanism. They can buy futures contracts for wheat, for example, at a low price, betting that the price will go up. If the price of the grain rises by the agreed delivery date, they profit.

Some experts now believe these investors have taken over the market, buying futures at unprecedented levels and driving up short-term prices. Since last August, this mechanism has led to a doubling in the price of rice — including the 500,000 tons that the Philippine government plans to buy in early May to address its own shortage. (source)

If railroads were responsible for moving foodgrains from areas of surplus to be sent to the ports for shipping to England instead of to areas of famine, computer networks today provide a lightening speed strike for finance capital to move funds from one sector to another, one country to another, creating sudden imbalances. The rich can afford to pay more for food and so that is where the the direction of flow is.

As Woody Allen commented in one of his movies, “the universe is one big restaurant”, in which everything from stars to the lowly organisms in the food chain on this lonely, and at the same time boisterous planet is busy devouring each other, and are thereby linked to each other. One cannot explain the food crisis without looking at whole picture. The food crisis is linked to the fuel crisis which is linked to the war in Iraq. It is also linked to the sub- prime crisis in the United States and the need for finance to grow and bring increased returns to its investors, which at best constitute not more than 15% of the population in any country, whether in the developed world or the so called ‘emerging world’ or the ‘developing’ world (no one seems to use the phrase ‘under- developed’ nowadays, though- even Haiti is referred to as a developing country).

To cut a long story short, it is not the increased food consumption of the poor, but the cycle of production and the fleeting moods of finance capital and the production and exchange cycle that it increasingly determines and that now flows faster than the sun traverses the world each day, that lies behind the crisis.

In the current context of food availability, one of the more fundamental contradictions of capitalism is coming to the fore- when it starts consuming its own potential consumers, when it is not able to sustain their bare minimum existence.

Much of the media, especially television, focuses on single issue of the day, one day it is Tibet, another Iraq, another day it is rising fuel costs and yet another it is food riots now in Haiti and then in another place. Those like the Dalit intellectual Chandrabhan Prasad too err when they stretch the identity issue too far and start looking at globalization and even the British rule as beneficial for Dalits, most of whom are at the receiving end of globalization, whether during the British mis- rule or the contemporary wave of globalization.

TOT

I had not heard about TOT, till I chanced upon it while reading up on “Freudian slip.” There is even a story by Anton Chekov on TOT.

“What is TOT?,” you ask….hmm… let me remember… something to do with a Hotentot, or was it something to do with a tiny tot, or perhaps … give me a minute to recollect… something like… why do I always have that temporary amnesia at the exact moment I need the word or its explanation and I know that I know it?

Ah well ! That’s what it is.

The Age of the American Empire

Unlike European powers, US imperialism has sought to create and maintain its hegemony via puppet regimes or via local elites (see the post below with an extract from David Harvey’s interview), leading to an impression that it is not a colonial power like, say, England or France that ruled their colonies directly and more visibly.

Howard Zinn, well known as the author of the path breaking A People’s History of the United States, unfolds the imperial nature of the American Empire in extensive detail in his latest book, A People’s History of American Empire, in a graphic adaptation format published last month.

I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called “The Age of Imperialism.” It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire — or period — of “imperialism.”

- Howard Zinn in Empire or Humanity

Tomdispatch has an illustrated autobiography of Zinn that his fans may like to read (it too is wonderfully illustrated in the comic book format.)

A short video Empire and Humanity from the site.

A Rare Interview with Shiv Kumar Batalvi

Watching this interview with the Punjabi poet, the late Shiv Kumar Batalvi, I could not but reflect that poetry, and art in general, is far greater than its creator. Once the poet’s idea finds a language, the language works on its own- the shared repository of mankind’s long history and engagement with ideas and emotions, it cannot but dwarf its lonesome creator.

Batalvi’s talk is almost child like in the interview, and his answer to questions about “getting away from myself” and the death of an intellectual are as naive as they are innocent. Same for his answer to the question of the inspiration of his poetry. Batalvi was not a great Punjabi poet, at the same time, his poetry is marked by a melancholy lyricism that brought a freshness to the language. As in a previous post on Batalvi, I wonder if its melancholy has something to do with the partition and confusion of ideas and identities, rather than a purely personal sadness. Batalvi’s answer seems to confirm that it was more than something purely personal- he seems to have had a happy life as he states in the interview.

Here is the rare footage from the BBC’s television with Batalvi in 1970, when he was 32. He died three years later at the age of 35. The interview is in Hindi/Urdu.

Link

(I must say that the person who has uploaded this rare footage deserves kudos for this rare treat.)

While on Batalvi, here is a rendition by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: mae ni mae mere gitaan vich. I like this better than other renditions because of its monotone and the relative lack of emotion in the voice, thus letting the words speak for themselves.

Related Post: Shiv Kumar Batalvi

A Neo Liberalism Primer

David Harvey, the social theorist known for his work in diverse areas, published his book A Brief History of Neo- Liberalism couple of years back. The book is really short and succinct- I happen to be reading it right now, and hopefully, more will follow on the subject. Meanwhile, here he covers the same issues in an interview.

But here’s the interesting thing: it’s unreasonable to think that actually the US imposed neoliberalization on Mexico. What happened was that the US was putting noeliberalizing pressures on Mexico and an elite inside of Mexico seized the opportunity to say: yes, that’s what we want. So it was a coalition between the elite in Mexico and the US Treasury/IMF that put together the kind of neoliberalization package that came to Mexico in the late 1980s. And actually if you look at the pattern, it’s very rare for there to be a straight imposition of neoliberalizing policies through the IMF or the US. It’s nearly always an alliance between an internal elite, as it had been in Chile, and US forces that put this thing together. And it’s the internal elite who are as much to blame for neoliberalization as the international institutions.

Literature from the Evil World

The London Book Fair this week celebrates Arabic literature. As Ahdaf Soueif states, there may be a crisis in the Arab world, but there is no crisis in the Arabic literature as such, though I must admit that I have seen very little or read very little of the same. Perhaps this has to do with the relative lack of availability of its literature in translation. The US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan has, if that is any consolation, turned some attention to Arabic literature.

My own limited excursions are confined to some early readings of the Lebanese- American poet Kahlil Gibran and Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy. Here is a poem from Gibran’s most well known work The Prophet.

Children

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, “Speak to us of Children.”
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

source

Feminist Narratives of Indian Left

Unlike in Russia and China, the communists did not fully triumph in India. They were a small, even fringe, though in many ways radical part of the national struggle for liberation. After independence, especially after their embracing the path of parliamentary politics, they emerged as the biggest opposition to the ruling Congress party, creating a record by having the first elected communist state government in history when they formed the government in 1957 in Kerala and still later perhaps the longest elected state government in West Bengal. Thus, while they did not succeed to the same extent as in Russia or China, they did not fail either, unlike in the West.

This, however, gave a very specific dichotomous character to the Indian communists, whom the historian D.D. Kosambi called the “Official Marxists” or, literally and metaphorically, OM. Thus, they re- created the structures of ruling communists parties in the major citadels, at the same time they also internalized traditional Indian social structures. This part- success also led them to miss the emergence of the New Left and their ideas since they never had to go back and question their basic premises in their wishful thought to continue to pursue their “party- line” even as it swerved from supporting the Congress at one time (in 1975 as well as now) to indirectly supporting the BJP (the CPI and CPM both supported V.P. Singh’s National Front government which was also supported by the BJP.) In other words, they have become totally engrossed in parliamentary politics.With the rise of caste politics since the late 1980s, they have missed the boat completely as their class based analysis had no place for caste. Even today, they are yet to reconcile their theory with caste.

Similarly, the Indian communist Left has remained completely indifferent to the questions raised by feminists. In this very well written narrative from the Naxalite movement of the early 1970s, Krishna Bandhopadhyay recalls how, even a nascent communist outfit without an entrenched bureaucratic structure, patriarchal ideas and practices dominated. Needless to say, the CPI and the CPM are far worse off.

Naxalbari Politics: A Feminist Narrative (pdf!) (alternate source)

Anyway, she would give all the boys ‘chatu’ (barley) in one hand and ash in the other and say, “Go to the corner of the road and scatter the ash in the name of your enemies and the chatu in the name of your friends”. One of my cousins was of my age. Spotting the ash and barley in his hands I would start demanding, “Give it to me, I’ll scatter it for my friends and enemies”. In her east Bengali dialect, pishima would comment, “Where will friends and enemies suddenly appear from for girls? Do you think girls are human beings?”. Everyone would laugh at this, and I found that everybody agreed with her. I would feel very small compared to my brothers. Ashamed and insulted, my eyes would fill with tears and I would cry silently and secretly. Even later in life I would cringe at the discrimination in every aspect of life – be it eating habits, education, freedom of movement. In my own way I protested once in a while, but not a brick on the wall of “don’ts” was affected by it. I always thought that something needed to be done about this.

…

So many women joined the movement, but on the party’s part there was no actual directive as to what their role was expected to be. Many commented that even in the case of the men, there were no specific directives. For the sake of argument this is perfectly true, but the party leadership was male and can it be denied that their policies would automatically tend to be patriarchal?

The legendary heroine of the Naxalite movement, K. Ajitha, has also pointed out on this earlier.

The women were always in an inferior position in the movement. I was highly disturbed by the loss of opportunities on account of being a woman. The men either showed a protective approach towards women or treated them as a sexual commodity. They considered the support the revolutionaries got from their wives and mothers as their duty. They did not realise that these innocent women had to suffer a lot because of their actions. The police and the authorities constantly harassed them. They also failed to appreciate our intellectual capacities and human feelings. Marriage was prohibited for revolutionaries as the party felt it hinders freedom. Later, however, the party allowed marriages approved by it. If anybody fell in love with those who did not like the party, it acted like a feudal lord.

Incidentally, her auto- biography has been recently published.

Related Post: The Left, Caste and Dalits: A Troubled Relationship

Demandalizing Mandal

When the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report was announced during VP Singh led National Front regime, my first reaction was to oppose it. This natural, even if a knee jerk reaction, was because it did not reconcile with the notions of class and in my view it actually was detrimental to formation of class consciousness. It was not that I was not aware of the caste system or its vagaries, however, I shared the unstated Nehruvian belief that economic development and education would do away with the caste system. The first pillar of belief that fell in those days, therefore, was that education could be equated with egalitarianism and humanism.

My views changed quite dramatically within a few days as opposition to the announcement gathered force and “upper” caste-ism came to the fore. This aroused my first doubts - if this Report is something that is so rabidly hated by those, who I agreed were relatively privileged “upper” caste folks, then something is amiss. What clinched the issue was the intemperate and insulting language the protesters employed against whom they considered to be the beneficiaries- the backward castes but also the scheduled castes who were more easily identifiable because they were already availing the reserved quotas.

In the early days following the announcement, it was difficult to even get hold of the Report. I managed to get a xeroxed copy from a local NGO’s social scientist. What amazed me was the sheer force of the arguments in the report that transformed my views within a few days, if not overnight. So, it is a bit disconcerting that even after nearly two decades, I am not able to find an online version of the Report, because I remember it went much beyond just making the case for reservations. In the process of implementing one of its recommendations, it’s thrust has been diluted, and hence “demandalized.”

However, I have been able to find this 2003 article by SS Gill, who was the secretary to the Commission when it submitted its report and where he points to the bigger picture painted by the Report.

Diluting Mandal

On the face of it, the radical change in the political landscape of the country marks the setting right of ancient historical wrongs. Or does it? In fact, to some extent, the Mandal Commission report was `demandalised’ during the very process of its implementation. Of the dozen or so recommendations, only one pertaining to reservation was picked up, as it had the highest visibility and attracted immediate attention. More far-reaching recommendations regarding structural changes in the land-tenurial system, and institutional reforms for the educational and economic uplift of the OBCs were not even noticed. The attention thus got focussed on the fruits rather than the roots and branches of the tree of affirmative action.

Related Post: Dr Ambedkar on reservations for OBCs

60 years of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus

One of the very dark modern novels, and understandably so, is Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus written in 1947 and first published in English in 1948. Based on the medieval myth about Dr. Faustus and his pact with the devil, Mann trans creates it in the backdrop of Nazi Germany’s “pact with the devil.” A thick, dense novel it also uses music as an allegory. The novel is in the tradition of German writers and their fascination with philosophy. What I did not know till I read Urich Grothus’ review of the novel on its 60th anniversary is that it was based on Adorno’s book Philosophy of the New Music and that Adorno himself reviewed the manuscript of the novel “that makes you believe to hear music that actually has never been composed.” Also insightful are the reviewer’s observations on the place of philosophy and music in contemporary Germany where its fascination with irrational- ism seems to have vanished and interest in philosophy declined.

This is a novel about music. Mann’s main musical advisor in writing the novel was Theodor Adorno, one of the founders of critical theory, who had studied composition with Alban Berg, one of Schönberg’s first followers. Adorno saw atonal, dissonant, and polyphonic music as the only progressive way for the further development of musical material and as the adequate musical expression of the contradictions of advanced capitalist societies. Adorno was less convinced of the constraints that the twelve tone system imposes on the creative process, in that it prescribes literally every tone that may be used at a given place in the composition.

…

When I read the novel again last summer, I was thinking: What has remained of the Germany that Mann described in so desperate and still so loving terms, and what has changed? Germany is very different today, it would seem to me. Of course, the unparalleled crimes committed by Germans under the Nazi regime, are, and will forever be, central to the German collective memory. Any sign of renascent racism there is taken more seriously, at home and around the world, than in most other countries, and rightly so.

Still, the strain of irrationalism that Mann describes and that was so fraught with disaster has all but vanished in contemporary German culture. It would even seem that the national obsession with philosophy has ceased altogether. In the former “land of poets and thinkers”, philosophy has become the specialty of a small profession. 95 per cent of German university graduates of my, or the younger, generation, have probably never read a philosophical book, and if so, it was mostly Foucault, Habermas or Marx. Most books by Martin Heidegger, Germany’s most influential and most compromised philosopher in the 20^th century, are not even available in paperback, for lack of popular demand. The love and high esteem of music, however, seems to have survived. Nearly half of the world’s opera houses, I am told, are in Germany – and mainly play Italian opera. There are good reasons to believe that, finally, democracy in Germany has been the success that Thomas Mann, in Zeitblom’s words, had already hoped for during the Weimar Republic. “It was an attempt, a not utterly and entirely hopeless attempt (the second since the failure of Bismarck and his unification performance) to normalize Germany in the sense of Europeanizing or “democratizing’ it, of making it part of the social life of peoples.”

While on the theme of novels about (Western classical) music; here is the review of a more recent work; Romanian author Dumitru Tsepeneag’s novel Vain Art of the Fugue.

Markets Forget Nothing, and Learn Nothing

David Bensman writing in the Dissent Magazine points to five major lessons from the impending collapse of US economy (link via Bookforum) and summarizes:

An earlier generation believed that the world learned its lessons from the Great Depression. Governments created regulatory agencies to rein in irrational exuberance and make sure that the fundamentals—a stable currency and sound financial institutions—served the needs of the real economy by making it possible to buy, sell, trade, and invest. In this chastened world, governments regulated banks so that investors could borrow to build new factories and inventors could raise funds to build prototypes.

Neo-liberalism turned this world on its head. By deregulating financial markets, neo-liberal ideology cast financial institutions as our primary innovators—the principal engines of wealth creation. America returned to the pre-New Deal days chronicled by Thorstein Veblen, when financiers hobbled engineers, when mergers and acquisitions (they were called trusts and monopolies back then) provided the fast track to profits and glory, when conspicuous consumption represented greatness.
…

More than a decade ago, James Tobin suggested that taxing global currency transactions would be a grand way to restrain speculation while raising money for development. Today, Dean Baker, chronicler of the real estate bubble, suggests a similar tax on stock transfers. Neo-liberals and their apologists will condemn this approach as a sure way to retard capital formation. Let’s hope that people have finally learned their lessons from neo-liberalism’s recurring fiascos. It is time to get real.

The Great Reader

“I wouldn’t define myself as a writer. I would define myself as a reader.”

I like this statement because it states so much about myself. The statement comes from an interview with Alberto Manguel, who once read to the great Borges and is the author of many books on reading, including the History of Reading and With Borges.

Brian Sholis has an excellent review of his book published last week The Library at Night.

“Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose,” he writes at the outset. And yet humankind continues to hoard what knowledge it can in an attempt to order that universe.
…

“Books come together because of the whims of a collector, the avatars of a community, the passing of war and time, because of neglect, care, the imponderability of survival . . . and it may take centuries before their congregation acquires the identifiable shape of a library.” In the year 336, a monk had a vision of his Lord and painted scenes from the life of Buddha on the walls of a cave. Over the course of a millennium, chance turned this cave and others nearby into repositories of religious manuscripts and paraphernalia; nearly a millennium after that, chance led to the rediscovery of the site, now known as the Mogao Caves. What do such storehouses of memory grant us? Both The City of Words and The Library at Night come to the same conclusion: “consolation for suffering and words to name our experience.”

A podcast of Albert Manguel’s CBC Massey Lecture 2007 (need to register)

Our Country and Advani’s Life

BG Verghese critically reviews L.K. Advani’s autobiography, “My Country, My Life”…. the life may be his, but the country is fortunately far more than any single individual’s. The title is reminiscent of the individualism propagated during Rajiv Gandhi’s time: “mera bharat mahan” (”my India is great”) which IMHO, would have been more slightly more generous had the “mera” (my) been replaced by “hamara” (our). That is, if at all the slogan was apt in the first place.

Mr Advani has also referred to Satyapal Dang, the CPI leader from Punjab as “the late Satyapal Dang”. The veteran leader has responded by proclaiming that he is still alive, and that though Advani may admire him, it would be most unfortunate if Advani became the Prime Minister.

A few excerpts from the review, followed by a statement issued by Comrade Satyapal Dang.

So where does this leave “cultural nationalism”? Mr Advani describes the 1992 Babri demolition as a “Hindu awakening” and is pleased to cite Girilal Jain’s certificate that “You have made history”. Having taken a bow, Mr Advani describes the day as the “saddest” in his life. Yet he laid the ground for that day with his 1990 Rath Yatra that sowed dragon seeds of hate. The event was followed by a trail of riots that took 600 lives. He lit the fire but blames the wind.

The same with the Gujarat riots, one of the worst blots in India’s record since Independence. Mr Advani commends Modi, but disowns any responsibility as a leading BJP stalwart, Gandhinagar MP and Union Home Minister. He cites the communal count of those killed in police firing to suggest even handedness and promptitude of action, setting aside contemporary evidence of official complicity which continues to this day. Police officers who stood firm were promptly “promoted” and transferred! Speaking over AIR, Mr Modi told terrified victims of the holocaust that if they desired peace they should not seek justice. Nothing more despicable could have been said. Alas, Mr Advani fiddled while Gujarat burned.

Here is the news item with Comrade Dang’s rejoinder as well as Bhai Ranjit Singh, the former Jathedar of the Akal Takht pointing to yet another discrepancy in the book.

In chapter 7 of the book “The trauma and triumph of Punjab” Advani has written “as the late Satya Pal Dang, an Amritsar-based Communist leader whom I admire for his courageous campaign against Khalistan”. Though Advani said that he admire Dang, the latter said it would be most unfortunate if a person like Advani became Prime Minister.

The facts on high profile Nirankari murder given in the book are also distorted, which earned flak from Bhai Ranjit Singh, former Jathedar, Akal Takht, who spent a long time in Tihar Jail in connection with the assassination of Baba Gurbachan Singh Nirankari. He said Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwala was never among the list of 20 accused persons as mentioned in the book. He claimed that there were only four persons arrested by the CBI who were later released on personal bonds.

The former jathedar said it was shocking that Advani did not know the bare facts pertaining to the Nirankari murder case because Giani Zail Singh was not the union home minister when the four arrested by the CBI were released. The union home minister was P.C. Sethi, he claimed.

Ex- Voto Paintings of Mexico

The Spring 2008 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review has a fascinating article by Rosamond Purell on the Ex- voto paintings of Mexico. These have been painted on paper by unknown artists and have adorned the walls of churches. They narrate stories, generally about saints and ‘miracles’. Often, these correspond to some real life events and are followed by a description of the painting in words.

each ex-voto narrates a saint in action, intervening in a near-disaster, accident, or illness that befalls ordinary human beings or animals. Each commemorates the miraculous intervention and expresses the gratitude of the survivors or loving families—husbands and wives, parents and children.

Take this image, for example:

About 1900 in Mexico City, the horse-drawn tranvia gave way to the electric trolley, leading to a rash of accidents involving horses, bicycles, and pedestrians. This four-part drama shows moments in the life of a young woman struck down by a trolley: first as a devout young girl; second, as a fashionable young woman falling in front of the on-coming trolley; and third, as an unconscious invalid in a four-poster bed attended by a praying woman draped in a black shawl. Each scene is set off in a burnished alcove, like episodes from the life of a saint, but the woman’s fate remains mysterious. The legend, though etched in an elegant hand, has vanished into a script as thin and ineffable as a spider-web.

…

I’m beguiled by these straightforward captions, believing that through their deceptive specificities—names, places, times (sometimes down to the hour of the day of the year)—the story can be decoded. I want to do my research, my homework; I want to get the miracle straight. The text painted on or scratched into the surface with a stylus is frequently faded to near-obscurity by the time I get my hands on it. The names, cryptified by dialect, effaced by rust, or painted over previous scenes, tell me little more than I can already surmise by studying the painted scenes. Yet, something about the scuffed and scratched surfaces of ex-votos conspires to increase their mysteries. Secreted beneath the multiple strata of revelations contained beneath its skin, I know, there lies the essence of personal despair and redemption.

The Assistant by Robert Walser

The Assistant was first published in 1907 in German and has been translated for the first time in English by Susan Bernofsky and published by New Directions last year.

It caught my eye when I saw a reference to Kafka in a blurb about the novel. Apparently Kafka admired Robert Walser, and looked forward to his writings each week. After a spate of novels and short stories, Walser’s writing career ended quite grotesquely when in 1928, he was admitted to a mental asylum, where he was confined till his death in 1956. He is supposed to have remarked to one of his visitors that ‘I am not here to write, but to be mad’, a statement that to my mind makes his madness suspect. As in the case of all those who blossom early but are then ill fated, he leaves behind a sea of mournful conjectures of smothered possibilities.

The Assistant is marked by a minimalist plot. Josef Marti- an alter ego of Walser when Walser himself worked a similar job once- joins an entrepreneur to work as his assistant. A veritable Man Friday, he helps out in the household chores as well. The novel follows Marti’s days as the entrepreneur falls into decrepitude, and his enterprise fails to take off. Marti is not paid for months but lives with the family and shares their bourgeois lifestyle, even if it is lived on borrowed money.

The novel is an ode to the little man, the minor character of the everyday wage worker, a clerk in Walser’s time but could be anyone who works for a living and has someone or the other for an often domineering boss.

If the plot is minimalist, the action is still more so. Indeed, the lack of action in the novel might have been nauseating were it not for Walser’s exquisite prose peppered with insights into human behavior that transcend a century between when it was first published and now. I was constantly reminded of Anton Chekhov’s deep humanism while reading the book, especially of a story called The Clerk, though there are obvious differences between Chekhov’s short story and Walser’s novel. Chekhov’s clerk Ivan Tchervyakov is a self- effacing and apologetic character who tragically dies when he is unable to get a forgiveness from a general on whom Ivan had inadvertently sneezed in a theater. Marti, on the other hand, has a series of intermittent and hesitant bouts of rebelliousness, ending in his parting of ways with his financially ruined employer.

Yet, the concern for the small man and the travails of everyday life are the same in both the stories. Vasiliy Grossman, in one of the more unworthily obscure novels of the last century, Life and Fate, had remarked that Chekhov was the most democratic writer among the Russian classic writers. Walser, at least in this work, certainly shares a similar honor.

“Wherever there are children, there will always be injustice”, Walser observes at one point when describing the children in his employer’s household. Elsewhere, when Marti’s employer Tobler is presented with yet another bill that he cannot pay, Walser describes it quite imaginatively thus:

The steep amount presented in this bill was so clearly expressed in the furrows on Tobler’s brow, expressed with almost mathematical precision, that one might have been asked to read the exact figure presented there.

Marti has, at one time, even had a brush with the most modern and provocative ideas of his age- socialism. They, however, hardly spark his imagination or make any impact on his mind and life. Great ideas, great movements of history, even great moments in life bypass the inhabitants of the Tobler household, yet there is a magic of life that weaves itself through the routine banter and the changing seasons.

Cross Posted at desicritics

***

Read an excellent review here, and via the same site, a wonderful blog dedicated to Robert Walser.

There are no Flying Carpets in Baghdad anymore

In the story The Thief of Baghdad, Prince Ahmad’s friend Abu steals a flying carpet to help his friend escape from the clutches of the evil vizier Jaffar. For most people of Iraq, however, there are no flying carpets to escape from the clutches of a mindless war that has unleashed too many evil jinns seemingly impossible to put back in the bottle. After five years of the invasion, the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussain seems preferable even to some of its critics.

Aljazeera reporter Rageh Omaar returns to Iraq after five years and reports the state of the country and its people. Just the scale of the humanitarian crisis unleashed by the war is revolting, just as its barbarism is. A very touching piece of reportage.



Watch Part 2 and Part 3 too. The last one covers the stories of the refugees from Iraq- that number 1.5 million into Syria alone.