*Jolly Good Fellows and the Mau Mau Insurgency

 

The ruling by a high court in London two weeks ago allowing three veterans of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s to sue the British government for damages for torture is quite likely the most significant admission in recent years that British colonialism was far from being the gentleman’s form of oppression that it is often made out to be.  One of the many idioms in which the great game of colonialism survives today is in those numerous discussions that seek to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ colonialisms, between the barbaric Germans or King Leopold’s Belgian officials in the Congo and, on the other hand, those colonialists who allegedly brought the fruits of European enlightenment to underdeveloped people.  It has long been held by some apologists of empire that the British were jolly good fellows: they may have committed excesses every now and then, but the country that gave the world cricket, a gentleman’s game complete with half-sleeved sweaters, fingers sandwiches, tea, and, in the version that reigned supreme until relatively recent times, the likelihood of a drawn result after five days of genteel competition, cannot have bred mass murderers or genocidal fiends.  On a state visit to east Africa in 2005, then Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown candidly declared: “I’ve talked to many people on my visit to Africa and the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it” (Daily Mail, 15 January 2005).

 

The British repression of the Mau Mau rebellion forms one of the more gory chapters of violence in a century filled with brutality.  The subjugation of Kenya commenced in the late 19^th century when the European powers carved up Africa amongst themselves.  British interest in Kenya was mainly strategic, and a railroad line was built in 1901 from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast to Lake Victoria in Kenya’s interior to facilitate access to the source of the Nile.  The settlers who arrived immediately thereafter were offered farmlands in the Central Highlands at nominal prices.  The indigenous Kikuyu were driven off the land, forced into reserves, and subjected to a draconian regime of taxation.  Those outside the reserves became squatters on white-owned plantations and labored as virtually serfs.

 

Over the next few decades, following a long established British policy of developing a creamy layer of native elites who would serve the empire faithfully as collaborators, a small number of Kikuyu were also drawn into schools run by Christian churches.  By the late 1930s, a movement of resistance had built up on several fronts, one among squatters whose pauperization had become unbearable and, secondly, among radical intellectuals centered in Nairobi.  Moreover, though over 75,000 Kikuyus served the British empire during World War II, the veterans who returned home found themselves barely acknowledged and became part of a drifting and embittered slum population.

 

The economic and political conditions at the end of the war were thus ripe for a full-blown rebellion against British rule.  Anti-colonial movements were sweeping Asia and the example of Indian independence, achieved in 1947, was paramount.  By 1950, Kikuyu political formation would converge around three blocks, among them the militant nationalists who invoked the critical issue of landlessness and were thus able to forge ties of resistance among the working class, peasants, trade unionists, and the urban proletariat.  When, in October 1952, a prominent loyalist, the term used to characterize those wealthy conservatives, usually Kikuyu chiefs, prominent landowners, businessmen, and churchmen who had thrown in their lot with the white settlers and the colonial regime, was assassinated in broad daylight, Governor Evelyn Baring imposed a State of Emergency.

 

The four years of the Mau Mau insurgency, which ended with the decimation of the rebel forces in late 1956, furnish a grim history of the naked violence of the colonial state.  One part of the British campaign against the Mau Mau rebellion was directed against the rebels who fought from the cover of the forest, another against the larger civilian population that was thought to have taken the Mau Mau oath and provided the insurgents with food, shelter, and moral succor.  Though a vast system of “detention camps” was set up to contain the rebels and their supporters, the British achieved something much more sinister, indeed something quite without parallel in history.  Unlike the Nazis, who deported Jews to concentration camps, the British struck on the expedient of transforming extant Kikuyu villages into “emergency villages”, each of them complete with barbed wire, trenches, watch towers, and armed patrols. Nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million was rendered suspect and thus placed in “detention”, and it is the civilian population that had to bear the greater burden of a war allegedly fought against insurgents.  This was scarcely the first time that an oppressor failed to make a distinction between civilians and insurgents, but the concept of “emergency villages” puts a whole new complexion on our understanding of the history of concentration camps.  Of course, no such narrative is without its complexities:  the rebellion pitted insurgents not only against the colonial state, but as much against the “Home Guard”, comprised of Kikuyu “loyalists” who feared a change of regime.

 

Much of this history has been written about previously, but the quest for justice by a group of Mau Mau veterans –– Wambuga Wa Nyingi, Jane Muthoni Mara and Paulo Muoka Nzili –– who alleged torture at the hands of the colonial state’s functionaries led earlier this year to a previously undisclosed archive of documents that provides bone-chilling details of the suppression of the insurgency.  One is not surprised that knives, broken bottles, and rifle barrels were inserted into women’s vaginas, or that Kikuyu men were anally raped.  Some details, such as the account of a man roasted to death, are gruesome.  Those who are familiar with the wretched history of British colonialism will not be surprised by some of the other matters recently brought to light, such as the fact that ministers in London were fully aware of the murder and torture being waged in the name of empire.  The perpetrators of the worst atrocities were given full legal immunity.  There is a warning in all this, though not the one drawn by counter-insurgency experts such as John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, who in September 2003 wrote apropos of the British strategy of setting up Kikuyu “pseudo gangs” against the Mau Mau:  “What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today’s terror networks.”  The United States, which has in many respects become the successor imperial state, should not delude itself into thinking that it can emerge from its own military adventures without a similarly heavy toll on its own psyche and culture.

– A slightly abridged version has been published as “Jolly Good Fellows”, Times of India – Crest Edition (27 October 2012), p. 14.

 

 

 

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*A Liminal Presence: Sikhs in America

 

The history of Sikhs in America, it may appear to some, is bookended by violence directed at them.  News of the shooting on August 5^th at a Sikh Gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, where a white gunman with pronounced neo-Nazi views shot dead six Sikhs as morning services were about to commence, reverberated throughout the United States and beyond.  It is reported that the gunman, Wade Michael Page, was an army veteran, had a tattoo commemorating 9/11, and played with the white supremacist heavy metal bands End Apathy and Definite Hate.  His motives remain unclear:  some argue that ‘hate crimes’ need no motive as such, as they feed upon a visceral fear of the Other, though many have speculated that Page mistook Sikhs for Muslims.  Mainstream American media organizations, such as CNN and Fox News, wasted little time in characterizing Page as an anomaly to ‘peaceful, mainstream America’, and deplored the shooting as a ‘tragic mistake’ perpetrated ‘against the peaceful Sikh community’.

 

‘What we call the beginning, T S Eliot wrote in ‘Little Gidding’, ‘is often the end / And to make and end is to make a beginning.’  The end, not unexpectedly, ‘is where we start from’, but the end so often seems prefigured in the beginning.  Indians first started appearing in some numbers on the west coast of the United States and Canada around 1900:  though the majority of them were Sikhs, all Indians were commonly described as ‘Hindoos’.  I suppose we should call this a ‘tragic mistake’ as well.  Indeed, the US Immigration Commission of 1911 stated that, for purposes of immigration, Indians were to be labeled as ‘Hindus’.  If, in the old American adage about American Indians, the only good Indian is a dead one, the few hundred (Asian) Indians who had made their way to the US by around 1905 were seen as a menace to American society.  ‘Hindu Invasion’ was the phrase used by one Fred Lockley in the Pacific Monthly in May 1907 to describe the presence of turbaned Indians; a year later, the Overland Monthly would similarly speak about ‘The West and the Hindu Invasion’.  Eerily, the 9/11 –– in 1907, not 2001 –– edition of the Bellingham Herald carried a headline more than an inch thick, ‘British Columbia Threatens to Secede; Horde of Hindus Landing at Vancouver.’

 

Though the Sikhs who marked their presence in America dressed mainly in Western clothes, they were distinguished by their flowing beards and turbans:  the local press took to calling them ‘rag-heads’.  In the town of Bellingham in Washington, many were employed as lumbermen, much to the chagrin of white labor leaders who alleged that Indians had stolen their jobs and driven down wages.  On September 4, 1907, a large crowd of white men instigated large-scale violence against the Indians.  The Indians were driven out of the city; many were herded into the city jail, ostensibly for their own protection.  Three days later, the Bellingham Herald, in an article entitled ‘Bellingham Sees Last of the Hindus’, announced with evident pride:  ‘Entire Colony is Wiped Off City Map’.  The Asiatic Exclusion League would continue to agitate vigorously for keeping America empty of ‘undesirable Asiatics’, achieving this outcome with the Immigration Act of 1924 that barred nearly all Asians from the US.

 

It is of course Muslims, not Sikhs, who are today viewed as the undesirable hordes who have invaded America.  There is something grotesque in the argument that the shooting of the Sikhs at the Oak Creek Gurdwara was a ‘tragic mistake’:  if it was a ‘mistake’, a deviation from the right path, how could it have been any better to have killed Muslims?  Would Page have stood exonerated if his victims had been adherents of Islam?  The Oak Creek shooting raises so many profound questions, beyond those that have been raised about America’s endless fascination with guns, the nearly unfathomable influence that the National Rifle Association exercises in American society and politics, and the country’s subcultures of white supremacy.  Since Page turned the gun on himself in bringing the killing rampage to an end, should we not characterize him as akin to a suicide bomber?  Might that not be one way to ensure that we do not think of countries where suicide bombings have been taking place as strangely barbaric?  Had Page been a Muslim, is it not certain that he would have been immediately branded as a ‘terrorist’ and the country would have been deluged with calls to eradicate Muslim fanatics?

 

Less than two weeks after the Oak Creek massacre, SALDEF (Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund) reported the murder of shopkeeper Dalbir Singh, a member of the Oak Creek Sangat who was not present at the Gurdwara on August 5^th.  However well Sikhs have done for themselves, they occupy a liminal position in American society, indeed the world over.   At the turn of the century in America, around 1900, they were mistaken for Hindus, and in India itself Sikh secessionism has had much to do, from the 1920s until the movement for Khalistan that peaked in the late 1980s, with disputes over the precise nature of Sikh identity.  In the American imagination, one hundred years later, Sikhs have been conflated with Muslims.  Many Sikhs are bound to feel anxious, troubled, and perhaps even resentful, and will insist upon their distinct identity; some, doubtless, will hold on to the hope that an appreciation of their true identity will alleviate their distress.

 

The Sikhs have, throughout their history, been wonderfully energetic and marvelously receptive to new cultures.  They are, as well, an eminently diasporic people.  But what is most distinctive about them is precisely their liminality, even if they should wish to insist upon their distinctiveness.  The question, ‘Just who is a Sikh?’, is always lurking on the horizon; even their scriptures have an intricate relationship to both Islam and Hinduism.  Even as this liminality makes them vulnerable, it is the source of their greatest strength and wisdom.  As the world shows increasingly little ability to live with ambiguity and difference, the Sikhs must remain a beacon of hope to those who wish to resist the painful infliction of certitudes upon an ever greater number of people.

(First published in Times of India, Crest Edition, 25 August 2012).

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*Anna Hazare’s Improbable Politics

 

 

Politics, it is often said, is the art of the possible.   If metaphysics addresses that which lies beyond the realm of ordinary experience, and by another reckoning is the underlying reality of social phenomena, politics has always appeared to concern itself with the here and the now.  It is partly for this reason that those, a distinct minority to begin with, who enter politics with the expectation of ‘doing good’ or acting with more than the customary rhetorical gestures in the direction of reform, are dubbed ‘idealistic’. The domain of politics is one where the operative ideas revolve around instrumentality, the advancement of self-interest, and negotiation.  However, with his declared intention of creating a new party to infuse Indian politics, and more generally the public sphere, with a moral sense of responsibility and some notion of accountability, Anna Hazare has opened a different if vaguely defined front in politics.  He may not quite have thrown a monkey wrench into normal politics, but he has given expression to an improbable politics.

 

Much less than two years ago, Anna Hazare burst onto the Indian political scene from a position of relative obscurity.  This will seem a considerable exaggeration to those who will point to Hazare’s many years of public service in Maharashtra, where he acquired something of a reputation for his efforts to expose corruption, prevent the government from enhancing the production of liquor from food grain, and facilitate the passage by the state of a Freedom of Information Act.  Nevertheless, there is no gainsaying the fact that Hazare only won a national following when, in early April 2011, he decided to initiate a satyagraha campaign in an effort to extract from the government a promise for the passage of what he and his followers deemed an iron-clad anti-corruption bill.  Hazare staged, at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, an oracular demonstration of how the body might be inserted into the body politic, declaring that ‘I will fast until [the] Jan Lokpal Bill is passed.’

 

Following countrywide expressions of support for Hazare, the government was moved to issue a notification in the Gazette of India announcing the formation of a joint committee, consisting of ‘five nominee ministers of the Government of India and five nominees of the civil society’, and charged with drafting a bill that would create a climate of opinion indestructibly opposed to corruption and thus conducive to the prosecution of government officials found guilty of trespassing upon their oath of selfless public service.  Thus, on the fifth day of his fast, on April 9^th, Hazare relented to demands that he give up his fast.  Four months later, however, as the government appeared to renege on its pledge to secure a strong Jan Lokpal Bill, Hazare again raised the spectre of an indefinite fast.  In scenes highly reminiscent of the cat and mouse game between English suffragettes and the government in the early 20^th century, Hazare was taken into custody a mere four hours before he was to begin his fast.  Though he would be given unconditional release within hours, Hazare refused to leave Tihar Jail and commenced a fast that he then took to Ramlila Grounds.  People poured into the Ramlila Grounds, and the show of solidarity appeared to have entirely unnerved the government’s principal functionaries and spokespersons; as an anxious nation watched, the Lok Sabha passed the Jan Lokpal Bill in an emergency sitting of the Indian Parliament.  On August 28^th, thirteen days into his fast, Hazare could, as he must then have thought, declare victory.

 

A year later, Anna Hazare has evidently arrived at a very different assessment of what, if anything, was achieved by his movement –– and what course of action might be followed if everything he stood for is not to come to naught.  In one widespread reading of Indian politics, governance has crumbled if not disappeared; scams follow one another in numbing succession; and the government totters from one fiasco to another.  Such doomsday scenarios –– a few readers might even recall Selig Harrison’s India:  The Most Dangerous Decades (1960), and in like fashion, many predictions about the break-up of India –– have never been far from the minds of commentators on Indian society and politics, but Hazare’s statement announcing the disbanding of Team Anna wisely eschews such pronouncements and dwells instead on the possibility of other alternatives that might rid Indian society of the malaise of corruption.  Writing on his blog in Hindi, Hazare admits:  ‘The government is not ready to enact Jan Lokpal bill.  How long can one keep on fasting time and again?  It’s time to stop fasting and give the nation an alternative.  This demand kept on mounting from the people.  I, too, have come to the awareness that this government is not committed to the eradication of corruption.’  As ‘Team Anna was formed to work for Jan Lokpal’, and relations with the government have been shown to be unproductive, Team Anna has, Hazare wrote, no cause to continue its existence.  Hazare presents the alternative that came to his mind almost as an epiphany:  if good people, possessed of ‘selflessness, moral fiber, [decent] profession, and patriotism’ could be found in numbers to contest elections, would it not be prudent to create a new political party?

 

Many who were severely critical of Hazare for undermining constitutional politics should, at least in principle, welcome his declared intention of entering into the mainstream of political life, albeit in the role of a senior statesman.  In the hurly-burly of politics, such magnanimity was not to be expected:  as some Congressmen remarked, Hazare’s interest in founding a party suggests that all along he, posing as a fakir (though not half-naked), was only interested in the exercise of power.  There are some who are asking if Hazare can lick the political system, and if there are precedents for such political interventions elsewhere in the world.   The principal political parties are so well entrenched, indeed even drenched in money, that a party comprised of a ragtag group of activists and their sentimental followers seems hardly poised to make even the slightest dent in the brutal landscape of Indian politics.  Party Anna, on this scenario, will merely have replaced Team Anna but will similarly sink into the gargantuan quicksand of Indian politics.  Some will point to the experience of the United States:  though Ralph Nader has contested several presidential elections, several of them as a Green Party candidate, on a platform resolutely critical of both the Republican and Democratic parties as agents of naked capitalism, wholly indebted to corporate honchos for their survival, he has been unable to disturb even remotely the general tenor of American political culture.  No one has been able to question Rader’s own political integrity, but, interestingly, in the only election where his presence might have made a difference to the outcome, an outcome where one would have chosen (as in every other American election) between Tweedledee and Tweedledum, it is the liberals who pounded him for having ‘stolen’ votes from Al Gore and handed the election over to Bush.  The Greens are commonly thought to have been more successful in several European countries, but it is clear that they still operate largely at the margins.  The closest parallel to Hazare is the former head of the Montreal police, Jacques Duchesneau, whose exposures of corruption in Quebec’s political culture catapulted him to public adulation and to a vaunted place in the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) as one of their star candidates.  This new party, however, has yet to contest an election.

 

The question, however, is not whether Hazare’s proposed political party is likely to succeed, even if success is to be measured not by the usual canons of politics but rather by the fulfillment of the objectives of the ‘India Against Corruption’ movement.  There is a more intriguing question:  how much of politics does Hazare understand at all?  Though many activists will never admit as much, they were angered and disturbed by the thought that a truck driver had been able to galvanize, with comparatively little effort and in lightening quick time, large crowds all prepared to launch India’s ‘Second War of Independence’.  That would seem to suggest that Hazare is not altogether a political novice.  Yet, in most respects, Hazare has shown himself unaware of what may justly be called politics.  In undertaking one fast after another, for example, Hazare betrayed his inability to take the measure of things. In the arts of negotiation, Hazare would certainly find much to learn from the book of Gandhi.  There is, behind all this, a deeper conundrum:  more so than in an autocratic state, genuine dissent is, in our times, impossibly difficult of attainment in a democracy.  Hazare’s fast at Jantar Mantar illustrated the difficulties of dissent in a democracy –– and such dissent is likely to become even more improbable, now that Hazare has signified his interest in moving closer to a conception of normal politics.  Little did Anna Hazare know that he would become the hunger artist.

(First published as “Improbable Politics”, Times of India, Crest Edition (11 August 2012).

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*Günter Grass and the anti-Semitism Canard

Günter Grass, some say, invites controversy.  For many years, he excoriated his fellow Germans to come clean about their past and confront the brute facts that might help explain how Germany became the seat of most terrifying machinery of human extermination that the world had ever witnessed.  However, not until Grass was nearly 80 years old did he confess that, as a 17-year old at end of the war, he was conscripted into the Waffen-SS, a paramilitary force attached to the Nazi party.  Grass is in the eye of the storm again, this time with a poem, published in several European newspapers on April 4^th and rendered in English as ‘What Must Be Said’, that warns the world that ‘Israel’s atomic power endangers / an already fragile world peace’.    Declaring himself sick of ‘the West’s hypocrisy’, Grass hopes that with his poem

many may be freed

from their silence, may demand

that those responsible for the open danger

we face renounce the use of force,

may insist that the governments of

both Iran and Israel allow an international authority

free and open inspection of

the nuclear potential and capability of both.

Israel has, in consequence, declared Günter Grass persona non-grata.  A once eminently diasporic people, formerly scattered to the ends of the earth and living their lives in exile until they could claim Palestine as their homeland, have apparently surmised that the banishment of Grass from Israel represents the most fitting punishment for the aged but unrepentant poet.

Just what, we must surely ask, was Grass’s sin?   The fury whipped up in Israel, and among Israel’s supporters in the West, points to several considerations.  Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, expressed outrage that Grass should have had the audacity to compare Israel to Iran.  Netanyahu described the comparison as shameful, offensive, shall we say, to the dignity of every civilized person:  ‘In Iran there is a regime that denies the Holocaust and calls for the destruction of Israel.  This comparison says very little about Israel and a great deal about Mr. Grass. It is Iran, not Israel, which poses a threat to world peace. It is Iran, not Israel, which threatens to destroy other countries.  It is Iran, not Israel, which supports terror organizations that fire missiles on innocent civilians. It is Iran, not Israel, which supports the massacre that the Syrian regime is carrying out on its civilians. It is Iran, not Israel, which stones women, hangs gay people, and ruthlessly suppresses the tens of millions of citizens in its country.’  No doubt, the present regime in Iran cannot be viewed as other than highly authoritarian, though there is no reason to suppose that the suppression of some freedoms has stifled all dissent, or creativity in art, music, cinema, and literature.  It has not helped Iran that its most public face is provided by Mahmud Ahmedinejad, succinctly and not inaccurately described in Grass’s poem as a ‘loudmouth’ who earned undying notoriety in the West when he described the Holocaust as a fiction.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to resist the view that Netanyahu protests too much.   However enormous the misgivings one may have about Iran’s political regime, Iran has never posed a threat to any other country, nor has it launched an attack on another nation.  Netanyahu is no less boorish than Ahmedinejad, and it is idle for him, or indeed for any other Zionist, to pretend that Israel has not been the perpetrator of untold number of atrocities against the Palestinians –– choking, numbing, and starving them into submission in a war of gravely disproportionate resources.  It is no surprise that the list of accusations hurled against Iran did not include its real or alleged sponsorship of political assassinations, since Israel is likely without peer in its mastery in this department of covert politics.  But there is something else underlying the swashbuckling behavior of Netanyahu and his predecessors in high office:  Iran and Israel have long fought a shadow war, and they need each other desperately.  The ayatollahs in Iran say and do enough to keep states such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan frothing at the mouth; similarly, the Shia clergy can always count on the presence of Israel to summon the faithful, particularly when internal dissent appears to pose grave threats to the regime.  Whether or not the relationship of Iran and Israel can be characterized as one informed by what Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences”, there is no gainsaying the fact that these two countries understand each other very well.

The more Iran and Israel begin to look alike, the greater the swagger with Israel must contemptuously dismiss Iran as the irredeemable other. Israel has long thought of itself as the sole democracy in the Middle East, ringed by unruly Arabs within and hostile states beyond; and if on occasion its unmitigated repression of Palestinians has evoked a mild rebuke from its allies in the West, it has nearly always conducted itself in world politics with the assurance that it may act with impunity.  Iran, on the other hand, has for an equally long time labored under it reputation in the West as, in the vocabulary of our times, a ‘rogue’ state.  The nationalism of countries such as Iran has always seemed to many in the West, even those who style themselves liberals, as ‘problematic’.  The nationalization of Iran’s oil industry in 1951 was bound to lead to serious repercussions for then Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who would be removed in a coup two years later.  His overthrow, orchestrated by the CIA and British military intelligence, brought Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, whose gratitude to his benefactors would amply be on display in the decades ahead, to the helm of power.  Since the revolution of 1979, which installed the mullahs in power, and the subsequent Iranian hostage crisis, a rather humbling experience for the Americans, Iran has effectively been shunned as a ‘pariah state’ by the West.

The countries in the West which for years have rallied behind the United States to declare Iran a ‘rogue’ state have, historically speaking, treated their Jewish population much worse than did Iran, which even today has the largest population of Jews outside Israel in the Middle East.  It is barely necessary to recall, for example, the barbarism of the French, whether with respect to the Jews or their colonial subjects in Algeria, Indochina, and elsewhere.  On the received narrative, however, the anti-Semitism that was so characteristic a feature of European society is a thing of the past; indeed, what generally gives Western civilization its distinct prominence over other civilizations is its capacity for atonement and repentance.  It is precisely in this respect that Grass has been found by Netanyahu and other like minded yahoos to be severely wanting:  as Grass had disguised his past for over six decades, he is said to have been absolutely stripped of credibility.  Writing for Haaretz, long established as the voice of Israeli liberals, Anshel Pfeffer ponders in a piece entitled ‘The Moral Blindness of Günter Grass’ why ‘a highly intelligent man, a Nobel laureate no less’, does not understand that ‘his membership in an organization that planned and carried out the wholesale genocide of millions of Jews disqualifies him from criticizing the descendants of those Jews for developing a weapon of last resort that is the insurance policy against someone finishing the job his organization began. What could be more self-evident?’ For the likes of Grass, there is, quite self-evidently, no atonement, no remorse, only the certitude of eternal condemnation.  Yet the poet had clearly anticipated it all:

But why have I kept silent till now?

Because I thought my own origins,

tarnished by a stain that can never be removed,

meant I could not expect Israel, a land

to which I am, and always will be, attached,

to accept this open declaration of the truth.

When critiques of Zionism, or of Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians, cannot be adequately answered, there is always the weapon of last resort, the ultimate weapon with which to tarnish the voice of informed democratic and humanistic criticism:  the charge of anti-Semitism.  ‘This general silence on the facts’ –– the fact, which Israel is in no position to repudiate, and which Grass’s poem has now uncomfortably brought into the limelight, namely that Israel’s own nuclear program remains without supervision, inspection, or verification, subject to no constraints except those which its leaders might impose upon themselves in the light of reason –– forced Grass’s hand; and it was not without awareness on his part of how the end of the narrative was foretold.  Writes Grass,

This general silence on the facts,

before which my own silence has bowed,

seems to me a troubling, enforced lie,

leading to a likely punishment

the moment it’s broken:

the verdict “Anti-Semitism” falls easily.

To consider just how easily the verdict of ‘anti-Semitism’ falls on the critics of Israel, let us recall the opprobrium that Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi and the co-founder and then President of the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence at the University of Rochester, had to face when he penned a short blog for the Washington Post (20 January 2008) entitled, ‘Jewish Identity Can’t Depend on Violence’.  Though Arun Gandhi recognized that Israel was far from being the only purveyor of violence in that part of the world, he nevertheless thought that ‘Israel and the Jews’ were the ‘biggest players’ in promoting the ‘culture of violence’.  On a visit to Tel Aviv in 2004, Gandhi wrote, he was surprised to hear even peace activists defending the separation wall and the military build-up as the unavoidable condition of their secure existence.  The future of Jewish identity struck Arun Gandhi as ‘bleak’:  too many Jews remained ‘locked into the holocaust experience’, not merely convinced of the absolute exceptionality of the Holocaust but firm in their view that their victimhood gives them unique entitlements.  The case of Israel, Gandhi argued, ‘is a very good example of [how] a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. . . . the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews.’  What hope is there, asks Arun Gandhi, that Israel will ever come around to the view that its existence cannot be secured by ‘bombs and weapons’?

Fast and furious was the response to Arun Gandhi, and in much less than a week he had been forced to step down as President of the M. K. Institute for Nonviolence.  Though Arun Gandhi cannot be accused of disguising his Nazi past, nothing prevented him from being brandished with the scarlet letters of anti-Semitism.  One cannot downplay the persistence of anti-Semitism over the centuries, and it is similarly instructive to what extent a forgery such as the ‘Protocol of the Elders of Zion’ continues to resonate among those who are convinced that the Jews are uniquely capable of conspiring to ensure their domination over the world’s financial markets and the power elites in the United States and Europe.  But it is a form of totalitarianism to insist that all criticism of Israel is itself a form of anti-Semitism.   Even the Jew might not critique Israel; if he or she does so, the Zionists have a phrase for such a person: a self-hating Jew.  Moreover, it is imperative to recognize that in the United States and much of Europe, it is not anti-Semitism but rather a visceral hatred and fear of Islam which is by far the greater problem.  In large swathes of respectable European and American society, the open display of xenophobic behavior towards Muslims is not burdened by the fear of censure.

It is Israel, rather than Günter Grass, that has come across poorly in this recent exchange.  This has happened all too often in the past, and Israel will have to do more than hide behind those gigantic scarlet letters that spell ‘anti-Semitism’ if it is to confront the reality of its own demons.

– First published in the Economic and Political Weekly XLVII, no. 17 (28 April 2012), 23-24, under the same title; for much shorter version, see ‘Stake in the Grass’, Times of India – Crest Edition (21 April 2012), p. 14.

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*Ours But To Do and Die: The Culture and Politics of Death in India

Ours but to do and dieThe news that flashed across television screens a few days ago had a numbing familiarity about it:  ten people had been killed in a bomb blast outside the Delhi High Court, scores more were injured.  It was only some weeks ago that multiple bomb blasts, engineered by another terrorist outfit, caused havoc and panic in Mumbai, a city that, in the clichéd view, has learnt to rise above such atrocities and display a resilience that ought to put a dent in the armor of terror itself.  Since in this matter as in nearly all others the middle class Indians whose voices are heard in the media have embraced American idioms of expression and thought with a frightening fidelity, we have designated these dates as 26/11, 11/7, 7/9, and so on.  But, try as we might, our 26/11 or 11/7 or 7/9 can never have the resonance that 9/11 has come to acquire around the world, and that is not merely on account of the immense scale or gravity of what transpired when the Twin Towers were brought down and the Pentagon, the very seat of orchestrated terror masquerading as the guardian of world order, itself became susceptible to a sudden suicide attack.  The French have always displayed an admixture of admiration and disdain for things American; and, yet, when 9/11 occurred, Le Monde, the custodian of French intellectual republicanism, unequivocally declared that ‘Now we are all Americans’.  Are there people around the world who, after the attacks on the Indian Parliament in 2001, the 2007 terror strikes on Mumbai’s trains, or the Delhi High Court bomb blast, have been moved to say, ‘Now we are all Indians’?

Political commentators in India and its educated élites more generally have long complained that no one pays much attention to India’s claims that it is spectacularly vulnerable to terrorist attacks.  Indians like all others deplored the events of September 11, 2001, but some might have thought that the attacks would have the desirable effect of awakening the world to the threat of Muslim terrorists.  It cannot be doubted that the Hindu chauvinists who launched the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat, barely six months after the attacks of September 11^th, did so with the conviction that the world would barely take notice of atrocities that targeted Muslims –– among other things, September 11 succeeded remarkably well in rendering terrorism synonymous with Islamic terrorism.  The multi-pronged attacks on a number of Mumbai’s landmarks and buildings in 2008 were perhaps the first occasion when the world took notice of the problem of terrorism in India, but it is doubtful that the terrorist strikes this year, in Mumbai and Delhi, have created more than a fleeting impression.  No one outside India much cares, notwithstanding the customary messages of concern; in India itself, people have been inured to violence, and the threshold for what are considered acceptable levels of violence has been raised.

The most familiar part of the story, then, is very simply captured in the feeling that was often voiced in colonial times and is increasingly encountered in people’s anguished voices:  human life has little value in India.  There are variations on this argument, of greater or lesser subtlety.  For the middle class, one piece of evidence predominates over all others:  if America has thwarted all attempts at terrorist attacks since 9/11, why cannot India do the same?  How can we overlook the ignominy of repeatedly being made to look like fools? One school of thought takes refuge in the view that the Indian state is alarmingly inept when it is not corrupt, and that standards of security and safety have been seriously compromised ­­–– not only in the matter of counter-terrorism, but with respect to safety on our roads, railway tracks, and in our skies.  Another school of thought highlights the contrast with the US to different effect:  if in India human life appears to be cheap, the US has a singular obsession with accounting for every American life, particularly the lives of those who serve the country.  Consider, for example, that more than six decades after the conclusion of World War II, there is still an active mission along the borders of India and Burma to search for Americans ‘missing in action’.  The Indian state barely has time for its living subjects, many of whom have never remotely been accorded the dignity of being viewed as citizens:  indeed, a great many people, in the extant ideology of development, are so much waste that has to be shunned aside.  In the colonial anthropology of India, the individual as an atom did not exist; only collectivities –– masses of people shaped by their caste, religion, ethnicity, linguistic background –– were to be found in India.

The social Darwinism that began to mould India 150 years ago remains a vibrant part of our middle class sensibility.  The generation of colonial officials writing shortly before independence remained convinced that the ‘rising flood of human beings’ was the principal cause of Indian poverty and the reason why the British had been unable to raise standards of living. The grim Malthusian reading of India that, whether expressly or tacitly, still informs most middle class perceptions of the great unwashed has not departed very much at all from this view.  With 1.2 billion people, some might think of India as a country that has always registered significant population growth, but that is far from the truth.  For close to two hundred years, British rule in India was book-ended by famines –– ten million perished as hunger, anomie, loot, and confusion accompanied the British takeover of Bengal, and another three million were sacrificed to save the world from the peril of Nazism and Japanese militarism –– and in between epidemics, disease, war, and other famines took a massive toll of human life.  While life expectancy in Britain, most of Europe, and the United States increased significantly from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, in India it declined from 24.6 in 1871-81 to 20.1 in 1911-21, and on the eve of independence life expectancy was still less than 30.

Death seems, then, to stalk this ancient land.  If famines, as these are ordinarily understood, no longer strike India, and life expectancy has increased to the mid-60s, malnutrition remains endemic, afflicting close to half of the population.  The advocates of ‘Shining India’ crow over India’s economic growth, but India also leads the world in infant mortality, fatalities from road and train accidents, HIV/Aids infections, and much else that the country would rather not advertise to the rest of the world.  The colossal loss of lives at construction sites, mines, hazardous waste sites, shipbuilding docks:  all this remains largely undocumented, on the rare occasion dignified by mention in a newspaper or a footnote in a human rights report.  Tens of millions of females are, in the euphemism made popular by Amartya Sen, ‘missing’.  Some degree of ‘concern’ for the poor has now become part of the sanctified middle class sensibility, but the conviction persists that the poor will always remain poor.  The middle class has even come to hold to the view that the poor do not experience death as it does, and that the loss of loved ones means comparatively little to those who are both accustomed to sudden death and have, by giving birth to a large number of children, taken out insurance to guard against Yamaraj’s unexpected moves.  We give little thought to the fact that the poor cannot afford the luxury of long mourning; tears are not theirs to shed, work lies ahead:  ‘Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die.’

Whatever the merit of those views which dwell on India’s demographic excess, Social Darwinism, the great gulf between the rich and the poor, the callousness of the state and the grinding ineptness of government machinery, or the supposed absence of the individual in Indian culture, they do not take stock of how death is experienced and the changing contours of the culture of death.  The course of the long history of attitudes to death in the West was to culminate, Philippe Aries argued in a seminal book on the subject in 1976, in a concerted attempt to obscure the social reality of death.   Throughout the nineteenth century, improvements in sanitation, hygiene, and nutrition, besides the more celebrated innovations in medical care, led to enhanced life expectancy and it seemed as if the moment of death could be forestalled.  Yet this grand narrative of progress was to be rudely disrupted:  the trench warfare of the ‘Great War’ which saw millions of young men being sent to death like so many sheep being taken for slaughter, and the nearly countless dead of the World War II, deepened the resolve in the West to restore the pact which would render death, as Aries terms it, ‘forbidden’.  The entire care of death in the West has, over the course of the last few decades, been turned over to professionals and managers.   The loud mourning that characterized the 19^th century has been replaced by quiet funerals; to the extent possible, death has become sanitized.  Responsibility for the patient is handed over to nursing homes and, of course, hospitals.  Ivan Illich, in a devastating critique of the modern culture of death in the West, called it ‘the medicalization of death’.

India presents the greatest possible contrast with the ‘death of death’, and not only because, however much we may attempt to banish the dead from our lives, there are people dying in our midst –– from malaria and dengue fever, untreated and undiagnosed illnesses, accidents at factories and industrial sites, and so on.   In every middle class family where there are cooks, drivers, maids, and washerwomen, there are such stories to be told.  Death is everywhere in more ways than we imagine.  The dead are taken through the streets to the cries of ‘Ram nam satya hai’.  The dead continue to exert a visceral presence through the living, through elaborate funerary rites as much as the fact that males and females of Hindu families might become walking signifiers of death.  If males shave their heads and facial hair, the upper caste Hindu woman who enters into a state of widowhood is recognized by her simple clothing and renunciation of the right to adorn herself.   Banaras is the City of Light, but it must also be unique among the world’s great cities in being devoted to death; one goes to Banaras to die.  Banaras is the great cremation ground; and in its midst, along the riverfront, is Manikarnika, the epicentre of the dead.  Where most other cultures bury their dead, Hindus burn their dead.  This must be one reason among many, as I have elsewhere written, for the supreme indifference of Hindus towards their own history.  The body –– the physical body, the body of history ­­­­–– is placed on the funeral pyre for all to see; and when it has been burnt to ashes, those who make their living off the cremation ground sift through them in search of valuables.

The dead and the living, as the Mahabharata instructs us, are knotted together:  in the words of the Shanti Parva (175.24), ‘Death is connected with life from the moment one is born’.  The Mahabharata is also clear that one may suffer a psychological death long before the biological fact of death stares one in the face:  death takes many forms, among them hatred and greed, anger, and the drunkenness of the mind (Udyoga Parva 42.7).  Beyond all this, as the Mahabharata recognizes only too well, there remains the one insuperable fact of life.  When it comes to death, the human instinct is always to think of the death of another, not the death of oneself.  In the justly famous passage of the Mahabharata that has come to be known as the ‘Yaksha Prasna’, Yudhisthira is asked what is the most wondrous thing in the world.  All around oneself, says Yudhisthira, one sees death and the fire of destruction, countless number of living beings taken to the beyond; and yet one persists in the belief that one alone is immortal.

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*Journeys of the ‘Black Christ’: Art & Resistance in Apartheid South Africa

Ronald Harrison – courtesy: Damian Samuels

In Memoriam:  Ronald Harrison, 18 March 1940 Cape Town – 28 June 2011 Cape Town

 

Ronald Harrison, a Cape Town-based artist whose painting ‘The Black Christ’ provoked the apartheid regime of South Africa to fury, has passed away.  ‘Uncle Ron’, as he was affectionately termed by his younger friends, had been suffering from cancer over the last two years, and he died of a heart attack just as he had finished the last of a series of five new paintings.  Those who had the great fortune to know him also know how deeply his loss will be felt among his friends, fellow artists, and soul-mates in South Africa’s journey from apartheid to freedom.  I still recall our first meeting in Cape Town, in the fall of 2006:  Ronald, a man of intense energy, softness, elegance, and compassion, not to mention fortitude, left an extraordinary impression on me as he must have on everyone else.

 

To understand the contours of Ronald Harrison’s life, one must begin with Albert Luthuli.  A majestic figure, a hereditary Chief of the Zulus, Luthuli was clearly the most inspirational figure of his generation in South Africa, and his untimely death at the age of 69 in circumstances that can only be described as suspicious robbed South Africa of its most creative exponent of nonviolent resistance to apartheid.  Luthuli had joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1945, and he rose to become president of the provincial Natal branch of the ANC in 1951; the following year, Luthuli was among those who organized resistance to the notorious pass laws.  His part in the Defiance Campaign earned him the opprobrium of the government, and he was offered the choice of renouncing his membership in the ANC or being stripped of his Chieftainship.  Luthuli, characteristically, was never in doubt about his decision – but even as the South African government sought to demote him in the eyes of his people, he was elevated to the Presidency of the ANC.  Many honors were to come Luthuli’s way, including the Nobel Prize, the first ever awarded to an African, for Peace:  but the most lasting testimony of this gentle colossus’s fortitude and valor is the fact that the apartheid regime ‘banned’ him for much of the last fifteen years of his life, restricting his movements and preventing any mention of his name in public.  Luthuli nonetheless remained President of the ANC until his death, allegedly an accident on a train track close to his home, on 21 July 1967.  Few people doubt that Luthuli’s death was engineered by the apartheid state.

 

It is under Luthuli that Mandela, who was his deputy and president of the ANC branch in Transvaal, attained political maturity.   Though robbed of his Chieftainship, Luthuli clearly remained Chief to all his people – not only black South Africans, but all the oppressed of his nation.  Among those who viewed Luthuli as their political and spiritual mentor was Ronald Harrison, who was born in 1940 and grew into adolescence as Luthuli was coming into his own as one of the principal architects of the anti-apartheid movement.  Harrison was nearly fifteen years old when apartheid’s enforcers arrived at Sophiatown, near Johannesburg, and dismantled the entire black township within a few hours.  Later that summer, in 1955, the ANC adopted the Freedom Charter, whose Preamble stated that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based upon the will of the people”.   Twenty thousand women – African, colored, Indian, white – marched the following year to demand an end to injustices against African women.  The government’s response to the rising tide of resistance appears to have been to unleash more oppression:  at Sharpeville, nearly 60 peaceful demonstrators were killed in a police firing.

 

Harrison, meanwhile, had been gravitating towards art, and he has described himself as having the feelings of an angry young man as oppressive political events unfolded around him.  His “role model”, Chief Luthuli, had been exiled from the political world, and the ascendancy of Hendrik Verwoerd, described in Luthuli’s autobiography as “the author of our destruction”, to the Prime Ministership of South Africa in 1958 signaled to apartheid’s opponents that the regime would step up its repression.   In his inaugural speech, Verwoerd declared himself as “absolutely convinced that integration in a country like South Africa cannot possibly succeed”.  Where the US Supreme Court, in its famous 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, had signified that it was prepared to overturn the century-old dogma of ‘separate but equal’, in South Africa Verwoerd was reaffirming precisely that discredited view:   “The policy of separate development is designed for the happiness, security and stability provided by their home language and administration for the Bantu as well as the whites.”   Verwoerd appointed as his Minister of Justice and Police B. J. Vorster, who lost little time in introducing the notorious Detention Without Trial Act:  though it conferred on the state the right to hold detainees without any right to legal representation for a period of 90 days, in actuality it was designed to permit detention for indefinite periods of time.

 

Faced by apartheid’s onslaught on humanity, Harrison pondered whether he, as an artist, could somehow contribute to the liberation movement.  As a Christian, Harrison felt immensely troubled that the apartheid regime claimed the mantle of Christianity; however, Luthuli, himself a man of intense if quiet religious conviction, represented the other, more ennobling and emancipatory, face of their faith.  Late in 1961, Harrison was to write in his book The Black Christ:  A Journey to Freedom (Claremont, South Africa:  David Philip Publishers, 2006), he was struck by something of an epiphany:  what if he were to signify the suffering of South Africa’s black people by equating it with the crucifixion of Christ, rendering Luthuli as a modern-day Christ and apartheid’s ideologues, Verwoerd and Vorster, as Roman centurions, “the tormentors of Christ” (p. 26)?  An Asian St. John and a coloured Madonna, Harrison surmised, would complete the picture.  So came about the birth of “The Black Christ”, the painting around which revolves Harrison’s multi-layered narrative of the struggle against apartheid, the terror tactics of the South African state, the relation of art to politics, his own troubled life until the dismantling of apartheid, and the fate of “The Black Christ” itself.  Though Harrison does not reflect on the history of representations of Christ, we might say that with “The Black Christ” he was also returning Christianity to its true origins in black Egypt, in defiance of Europe’s attempts to escape the Afro-Asiatic roots of Western civilization.

 

Completed in June 1962, “The Black Christ” could be exhibited in public only briefly before the state pounced upon Harrison.  The Dutch Reformed Church, to which apartheid’s proponents belonged, asked Luthuli to repudiate publicly this representation of him as a crucified ‘Black Saviour’, little realizing that, as Luthuli was under banning and gagging orders, it was strictly illegal for any newspaper or other media to even mention his name, much less reproduce anything attributed to him (p. 31).  Summoned to appear at a police station to explain his conduct, Harrison issued a statement describing Luthuli as a man of peace, someone in whom the artist had found his “perfect image of Christ” in the here and now.  Urging everyone to recognize the “predominant spiritual atmosphere of the painting”, Harrison felt that the painting showed that “racial discrimination should not be practiced, for we are all united in one bond with Christ” (p. 35).  Harrison was not only let go, but shortly thereafter informed that he could hang the painting in any church of his choice – one of those gestures through which a totalitarian state lulls its subjects and even opponents into a false sense of security.  Apartheid’s “two main icons” had, however, been ridiculed, and Harrison never supposed that his offence would be overlooked.  Sure enough, only a week or two after it appeared that Harrison had been granted a reprieve, the Ministry of Interior issued orders prohibiting any further display of “The Black Christ” until the Board of Censors had certified that the painting was not calculated to offend the religious sentiments of a section of the public (p. 39).  Harrison himself was briefly taken into custody and roughed up:  this may have sufficed to persuade him to heed the advice of friends and activists, who were keen that the painting be smuggled into London where funds obtained from its public displays would be channeled to the political victims of apartheid (p. 41).

 

Even as “The Black Christ” found its way to Britain, Harrison’s own crucifixion commenced.  Over the following year, he would be hauled into torture chambers on several occasions.  His interrogators sought to know at whose instigation he had painted “The Black Christ”:  they wanted an account of a conspiracy to humiliate Verwoerd and South African whites when there was none.  Harrison describes the merciless beatings, the constant abuse, the nights in dark cold cells huddled up in the nude (pp. 47-60). There is a chilling account of a doctor brought to ‘heal’ Harrison’s wounds:  as two men held Harrison down, the doctor yanked out the nail of his right foot’s infected big toe with a huge pair of pliers (p. 57).   After several days of confinement, Harrison was released; but several months later, he was again hauled into custody and ruthlessly beaten up into a piece of pulp (pp. 71-85).  Enveloped by darkness, Harrison might well have become a statistic were it not for the unexpected kindness of two jailors, in particular an African woman whose gentle touch brought him back to life (pp. 79, 83-84).

 

In the second half of his autobiography, Harrison moves in considerable measure from the travails of his own life to the turmoil in the nation and the history of resistance to apartheid. The odious nature of apartheid, Harrison suggests, is most visible in such barbarisms as the Group Areas Act (1950), which entailed large-scale uprooting of coloreds, blacks, and Indians and decimated entire communities, among them the famous District Six in Cape Town.  As his narrative shifts to the early 1990s, to the period when Mandela and ANC leaders were released from jail, and Mandela was elected to the office of the President of South Africa, Harrison recalls the long-term effects of apartheid.  He notes with sadness how a majority of colored people in many Western Cape communities, who had doubtless imbibed some of the racist rhetoric about the unworthiness of black people, voted for their former oppressors rather than the ANC, declaring that they would not consent to be ruled by ‘kaffirs’ (p. 157).

 

Over a period of 35 years, Harrison’s “The Black Christ” had found shelter in the basement of an English home, and Harrison movingly recounts the painting’s triumphant return home and its eventual acquisition by the South African National Gallery.  Though the original is now stored in the gallery’s basement, a replica is on display at the offices of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.  Madiba is among many of Harrison’s admirers and friends, and Dr Albertina Luthuli, daughter of Albert Luthuli and author of the foreword to Harrison’s book, was present at the funeral ceremonies along with Cape Town’s mayor.  As one contemplates the course of Harrison’s life, however, what unfailingly strikes one is the manner in which, to the very end, he continued to display remarkable qualities of compassion and forgiveness.  Nowhere in his book, or (as is commonly said) in his book of life, is there the slightest touch of hatred against his former oppressors.  Even the assassination in September 1966 of apartheid’s chief architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, elicits from Harrison the remark that he could not share in the jubilation experienced by apartheid’s victims:  “Verwoerd had been a monster; he had been a tormentor.  But he had also been a loving husband, a caring father, someone’s friend, the beloved son of proud parents.”  As he cautions us, we must ever endeavor not to become like those whom we despise.  The author’s generosity is present throughout his book, in his celebration of somewhat lesser known heroes of the struggle such as Barney Desai, who was instrumental in having the UN declare apartheid a ‘crime against humanity’, and equally in his willingness to accept the most elevated thoughts, whether their source be the Quran, the teachings of Christ, or the life of Gandhi.  Ronald Harrison’s life is palpable proof of how fortitude, equanimity, and a simple faith in the goodness of people might yet prevail amidst crushing adversity.

 

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*Thesis Seven: The Geography and Psychogeography of Home

In a trenchant and famous critique of Edward Said to which I have previously alluded, the Marxist scholar Aijaz Ahmad drew attention to what he described as postcolonialism’s fetish with the idea of exile.  Ahmad had in mind the fact that the most compelling figures in Said’s intellectual landscape – among them Conrad, Adorno, Auerbach, Mahmud Darwish, C L R James, and Faiz Ahmad Faiz — lived as exiles.  Said placed himself squarely in that lineage, but went much further in his claim that modern Western culture was fundamentally a creation of exiles.  Said advanced this claim in yet another,  perhaps more compelling, language:  modern culture, he wrote, could be described as the product of a conflict between the ‘housed’ and the ‘unhoused’.  Ahmad’s criticism that Said and postcolonial intellectuals who have fetishized the idea of exile are quite oblivious to their own positions of immense privilege is not without some merit, but can we locate a different and less acrimonious point of entry into this question?  There are obvious and pertinent considerations that remain tacit in Ahmad’s critique.  We are living in an era characterized not only by the mobility of émigrés and exiles, but by nearly unprecedented movements of masses, such as domestic and sex workers, political and economic refugees, stateless persons, immigrants, and so-called undocumented aliens.  The intellectual émigré is surely member of a miniscule minority, but does such an admission suffice as a basis on which Said might be critiqued?

To the extent that the ‘nation’ remained, if only as the subject of critique, the fundamental operative category in postcolonial writings, the idea of home went unexamined.  Just what is this thing we call home, and does the geography of the landscape that might be called ‘home’ correspond to the psychogeography of home?  That little-noticed passage in Said, where he characterizes the problem of modern culture as the conflict “between the unhoused and housed”, helps to push his insights further.  The death, less than two years ago, of Samuel Hallegua, a Jew whose family had been resident in the coastal city of Cochin for a little more than four centuries, brought home to me the problem of ‘home’ in modern thought.  Every scholar of global Jewish history admits that, in India at least, Jews never encountered the slightest trace of anti-Semitism. Nathan Katz, author of Who Are the Jews of India?, writes candidly that “Jews navigated the eddies and shoals of Indian culture very well.  They never experienced anti-Semitism or discrimination.” He goes on to describe in what respect India could have served as a model for the world:  “Indians Jews lived as all Jews should have been allowed to live:  free, proud, observant, creative and prosperous, self-realized, full contributors to the host country.”  Yet, in the aftermath of the creation of Israel, there was an exodus of Indian Jews to the new Jewish state. How and why their numbers dwindled will seem no mystery to those who, citing the horrendous experience of European Jews, the long history of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world, and the passage of the Law of Return, deem it but natural that India’s Jews also sought to migrate to Israel.  But is it really all that ‘natural’ that the modern nation-state should be construed as the only entity capable of commanding the loyalties of human beings, and should we effortlessly concede that primordial ties, of blood and religion for instance, reign supreme in human affairs?

In their passage from India to Israel, many Indian Jews may have gained much – solidarity with other Jews, perhaps new employment prospects, and the sense of freeing themselves from their hitherto eternal diasporic condition.  Some of them, it is certain, would also have experienced a sense of loss – not just a feeling of nostalgia, but even discrimination as they found themselves representing strands of Judaism all but foreign to other Jews.  Their children and grandchildren will perhaps not be privy to such sentiments.  But what of Mr. Hallegua’s contemporaries?  If they desired the comfort of numbers, what enabled Mr. Hallegua, who never left Cochin, to resist that easy temptation?  Should we conclude that he was less enterprising than his peers and less willing to take the risk of dislocation?  Or should we entertain the possibility that Mr. Hallegua, in his own quiet manner, was registering a dissent against the ethos of modern political and social identity?  The Hindu, in reporting the death of Mr. Hallegua, quoted him as saying of India, “It has been more than tolerant.  The Santa Cruz High School I went to was run by Jesuit priests.  My sister studied in a school which was managed by Italian nuns.  But we were never under pressure to shun Judaism.  The country accepted us as we have been.  I’m a proud Indian.  I’m also a Hindu in an apolitical sense.”  With the decimation of Cochin’s Jewish community in the aftermath of Indian independence and the creation of Israel, we might say that the logic of the nation-state prevailed over the possibilities of civilization, and that the modern political arithmetic of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ triumphed – as it has so often in our times.

I do not wish to say that Mr. Hallegua heroically mounted a resistance to the arithmetic of modern politics; but he nevertheless refused to give this arithmetic his endorsement.  He did not speak the language of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’, and he refused to be drawn into thinking that identity is reducible to some primordial markers of religion, ethnicity, and the like.  Or, let us put it this way, Mr. Hallegua had an expansive conception of the politics of home.  He may even have recognized Israel as the longed-for home, but perhaps it was the home to which he could not or would not return.  He may have refused to idealize Israel; or, if he did, he could have thought that it would be best to hold up the idea of Israel and yet have no truck with the reality of a nation-state predicated on the notion of religious identity.  What is  certain to my mind is that new paradigms in the aftermath of postcolonialism will have to help us resist the debilitating arithmetic of modern politics.

See also previous posts in this series:

Thesis Six: In incommensurability is the promise of more democratic futures

Thesis Five: The Moral and Political Imperative of South-South Dialogues

Thesis Four – Nonviolence: A Gaping Hole in Postcolonial Thought

Thesis Three: Postcolonialism’s critique of the nation-state remains inadequate

Thesis Two: Postcolonialism has had nothing to say about the imperialism of categories

Thesis One: Postcolonialism never mounted an effective critique of history

The Politics of Culture and Knowledge after Postcolonialism: Nine Theses (and a Prologue)

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*Thesis Two: Postcolonialism has had nothing to say about the imperialism of categories

It is nearly an axiom of contemporary thought that we live in a shrinking world, in a world of unprecedented transnational exchanges, the global movement of peoples, flows of goods and ideas, and so on. The world has never seemed smaller, some commentators argue, and clichés about the present situation abound, among them the idea that the world is a ‘global village’; others, in a variation of this argument, speak of a world that is increasingly ‘flat’.   Global village sounds trendy, chic, even sexy and, in some vague way, ethically responsible.  It gives rise to the satisfying idea, which however demands no action on our part, that our humanity links us all.  We may be all connected, in much the bland way envisioned in cell phone ads; at the other end, if one is to take a highly optimistic view of the matter, perhaps the idea of ‘global village’ may be said to have been anticipated in John Donne’s famous observation, ‘No man is an island’.

There are obvious rejoinders, of varying complexity, to the notion that our world has shrunk and that information travels at immense speeds not even remotely imaginable a mere few decades ago.   Visa and passport regimes have been considered tightened, borders have never seemed so hostile and insurmountable, and walls – in Palestine, between India and Bangladesh, along the US border with Mexico, and many others — have come up where they never existed before.  The increasing turn towards biometric measurements and national identity cards points to the fact that surveillance regimes have the world over become normalized.  One wall, in Berlin, came down, but many more have come up in its place. There are, of course, many walls besides those built with brick and mortar, or with electric wiring calculated to leave dead or shock into submission those daring to transgress the law of borders.  It is not even necessary to enter into discussions about whether the Euro will survive over the next decade or two; of more interest is the question whether the EU is at all the harbinger of a freer and more ecumenical world as it is sometimes made out to be.  Free trade agreements offer relatively unhindered movement of goods, but no nation-state will even remotely contemplate the free mobility of outsiders across its borders.  Those living in the Global South can barely indulge in the idea of wanderlust.  (On a recent visit to Germany, the Schengen visa issued to me, a citizen of India with permanent residency in the United States, holding professorships at leading universities in India and the US, specified the exact dates during which I was permitted to be present in the land of former Nazis:  21 to 25 November 2010.  Just how easy is it for those without invitations, immediate family members in the country of destination, professional positions, or reasonably lucrative businesses to travel to the Schengen zone or North America?)  Leaving aside, however, for the present such obvious criticisms of the regnant ideas of the day about our so-called ‘global village’, what would a more trenchant critique look like?

There is much talk of ‘knowledge cities’ and ‘knowledge societies’, and no one doubts that the sum total of our ‘knowledge’ of the natural and social world is much greater than it has ever been before.  But everything hinges on what we mean by knowledge, and what relation knowledge has to awareness, wisdom, perspicaciousness, and insight; moreover, any pride we may feel in our capacity for knowledge is at once moderated when we begin to ask, whose knowledge, to what end, and for whom?  Even as our knowledge of the world has perhaps grown, the means by which we oppress and remain oppressed have grown dramatically.  Oppressive class relations, the military-industrial complex, feudal norms that stipulate the place of overlords and servants, the brutal exercise of sheer military force:  all these have persisted through the advent of modernity.  Nevertheless, there is little if any awareness of the fact that oppression is increasingly exercised through what might be described as the imperialism of categories established by modern knowledge systems.  What are the categories of knowledge bequeathed to us by the social sciences through which we are induced to comprehend the world around us, and how have these categories become nearly impermeable to critique?

One of my earliest books, Empire of Knowledge:  Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2002; enlarged Indian ed., Sage, 2005), is largely orchestrated around the idea that, if knowledge helps to liberate us, it also enables a more thoroughgoing and rigorous oppression than anything else that we have so far witnessed.  Even concentration camp inmates understood that it was possible to be broken in the body but not in the mind.  From there we move to the more complex idea that the interpretive categories through which we understand the world have shrunk rather than grown, even as disciplines have developed and multiplied and the entire knowledge industry has grown by gargantuan proportions.   The social scientist may object that certain categories are dropped as they are found to be inadequate, false, misleading, or unproductive, but in truth the social scientist establishes an imperialism of categories.  If the idea of the nation-state holds us in captivity, as is obvious to those who have thought about the fact that the nation-state appears to be the only form in which corporate political community is now conceptualized, why should we expect that the categories with which economists and social scientists work, such as ‘development’ and ‘growth’, or ‘poverty’ and ‘scarcity’, to be any less compromised?  The Palestinians and Kurds may simply want ‘freedom’, but why does freedom necessarily have to take the form of a nation-state?  [See Thesis Three, next, for a greater elaboration of this point.]

How did a category such as ‘literacy’, if I may take another example, become so normalized as to become sacrosanct?  The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, usefully, that though the word ‘literate’ was first used in the English language around 1432, the word ‘literacy’ only entered the language in 1883.  [See the essay on literacy by Barry Sanders in Ashis Nandy & Vinay Lal, eds., The Future of Knowledge and Culture:  A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century (Viking Penguin 2005).]  There have always been literates and illiterates, but ‘literacy’ as an evaluative scale, used to judge one nation-state in relation to others, only came into use in the age of eugenics.  To reiterate: even though military domination, class relations, and other familiar structures of hierarchy may not have diminished, increasingly oppression will be exercised through the imperialism of categories established by modern knowledge systems.  The corollary is that our conceptual categories have, contrary to received opinion, shrunk dramatically.  The implications of this are all the more frightening to contemplate when we consider that the Global South cannot even remotely claim intellectual autonomy since the practice of the social sciences is borrowed lock, stock and barrel from the West.

See also previous and subsequent posts in this series:

Thesis Four – Nonviolence: A Gaping Hole in Postcolonial Thought

Thesis Three: Postcolonialism’s critique of the nation-state remains inadequate

Thesis One: Postcolonialism never mounted an effective critique of history

The Politics of Culture and Knowledge after Postcolonialism: Nine Theses (and a Prologue)

 

 

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*The Mosque at ‘Hallowed’ Ground, Part II: Some Notes on the Politics of Place & Name

One of the most notable elements in the public discourse on the proposed Islamic Center in lower Manhattan, which is conceived as a multistory building of which the mosque will constitute one part, is the extraordinary and troublesome ease with which it came to be characterized as the “Ground Zero Mosque”.   The association of ‘mosque’ with ‘ground zero’ informs all arguments emanating from those who have voiced their opposition to this project, just as it becomes the pretext for rendering this ‘Ground Zero’ as “hallowed” ground.  Some supporters of the project, and even those who might profess indifference to the entire controversy, have observed quite rightly that the Islamic center and mosque is in fact two city blocks away from ‘Ground Zero’.  But such an argument presupposes that opponents of the proposed Islamic Center are interested in, and willing to be persuaded by, facts.  If one were interested in facts, one could point to many more that are pertinent to this discussion:  at least two churches – St. Paul’s Chapel, which dates to 1766, and the Church of St. Peter, in what is described as “New York’s oldest parish” — exist in closer proximity to ‘Ground Zero’ than the proposed mosque.  The supposition that adherents of Islam wish to claim ‘Ground Zero’ solely for their own faith is nothing short of preposterous.  But none of this is very germane, since such controversies are never at all about ‘facts’.

If the numerical table begins with zero, let us likewise also commence with ‘ground zero’ and the implications of rendering this as ‘hallowed ground’.  The term ‘ground zero’ is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “that part of the ground situated immediately under an exploding bomb, esp. an atomic one.”  The OED has traced the first occurrence of the phrase to an article appearing in the New York Times on 7 July 1946 (p. E10), wherein it was stated, apropos of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, that “the intense heat of the blast started fires as far as 3,500 feet from ground zero”; as a further illustration of how the phrase has been deployed, it points to the September 1955 of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:  “There was no noticeable contamination even at ground zero at Hiroshima.”  We can see that the OED’s stress on “esp[ecially] an atomic” bomb, to describe the impact on the ground situated directly underneath an exploding bomb, is not misplaced.  Now, within hours of the attack upon the Twin Towers, the phrase ‘ground zero’ began to be used by American reporters:  the intent, it is reasonable to infer, was to suggest that that the destruction of the World Trade Center (and a portion of the Pentagon) was America’s Hiroshima (and Nagasaki).

It is precisely this sleight of hand, this tacit attempt to draw a parallelism between the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the one hand, and the terrorist attacks upon some of the most iconic structures of the American landscape, that must be decisively repudiated – and, at the same time, affirmed for very different reasons than those which are summoned by those who speak of the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’.  The parallelism is gravely suspect, and not merely for the reason, if at all that is a reason, considering that the loss of one innocent life is too excessive a loss, that the 3,000 odd victims of the September 11 bombings are a much smaller number than the more than 200,000 dead from the atomic bombings:  more importantly, unlike the attacks of the September 11 suicide bombers, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were authorized by the President of the United States.  The wanton destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of state; the same cannot be said of the September 11 attacks.  If, further, we are to identify the suicide bombers of September 11 as Muslims, as everyone has so effortlessly done so, even if it might be with the implicit encouragement of the terrorists themselves, should we not also identify Truman and the members of his war cabinet as Christians?  And, so, let us concede that the attacks of September 11 also call to mind the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:  if the atomic bombs forever altered warfare, ushering in an altogether different register of the mind at war and bringing forth a new conception of terror, we might well say that the September 11 attacks have similarly necessitated a radical rethinking of the conditions under which war might be waged.  Let those who seek to sanctify ‘Ground Zero’ also understand that the terrorism of the atomic bombings is the underpinning of all modern forms of terror.

Even as the controversy over the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ continues, many Americans have begun to describe ‘Ground Zero’, where the Twin Towers stood and then collapsed, as “hallowed ground”.  Obama himself sanctified this usage when, in the White House iftar dinner last week, he declared: “I understand the emotions that this issue engenders.  Ground zero is, indeed, hallowed ground.”   Some Americans, at least, will at once recognize the hallowed provenance of “hallowed”, as it calls to mind the address, “short, short, short” (in the author’s words), delivered by Lincoln at the battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on 19 November 1863.  The north and the south were in the grip of “a great civil war”, proclaimed Lincoln, “testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”  Let us leave aside, so that we can get to the notion of “hallowed ground”, the obvious temptation to probe whether some American commentators are not convinced that the United States today is similarly faced with a test of endurance:  if the likes of the grunting troglodytes on the right are to be believed, America’s future is jeopardized both by enemies from within (so-called liberals and leftists, whatever these anodyne terms mean in the US) and from without (Muslims).  Here is what Lincoln was moved to say:  “We are met here on a great battlefield of that war.  We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.  It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.  But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow this ground.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.”

Thus, to render Ground Zero as “hallowed ground” is at once to lay claim to the legacy of Lincoln, the most hallowed figure in American history, and to render the space of Ground Zero as ‘sacred’.  Lincoln significantly abjures the idea that the ground can be rendered hallow:  “But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow this ground.”  It is human sacrifice that consecrates a ground as sacred, and what is sacred is a form of being rather than a form of becoming.  For the present purposes, though, it suffices to note that the opponents of the proposed Islamic Center are firmly attached to the idea that ‘Ground Zero’ is sacred space and that the construction of the mosque would desacralize this space.  If it is sacred, then it is sacred for a religion, or – as is the case with some religious sites or cities, such as Jerusalem — sacred for several (but not all) religions.  Yet, what makes ‘Ground Zero’ sui generis as a sacred site, if at all it is sacred in the same way that Gettysburg is hallowed ground, is that the adherents of perhaps all the faiths — and certainly Muslims — were present in the Twin Towers, and we know as well that more Muslims have paid for those bombings than the practitioners of any other faith.  Those who would deny Muslims an Islamic Center on ‘Ground Zero’, on the grounds that it is sacred space, have thus arrived at a conception of the sacred that has no room for the Muslim at all.  That opens further the doors of the Islamophobia that has already crept upon the United States.

See also Part I, The Controversy and the Meaning of ‘America’

and

Part III (forthcoming):   Islamophobia and the new Anti-Semitism in the US

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*The Expulsion of the Roma: France & the Anxieties of Transgression



Some 150 years after the French Revolution, Chairman Mao was asked what he thought of that watershed moment in modern history.  Mao is reported to have said, ‘It’s too early to tell’!  Mao has been credited with many things, but his sardonic wit has been underestimated.  What might he have had in mind?  That a revolution devours its own children is something about which Mao would have known a thing or two.  Could it be that the promise of the French Revolution had never been fulfilled?  Whatever liberties the revolution brought to France, it diminished neither the appetite for colonies among the French nor their bloodthirstiness in suppressing the aspirations for freedom among others.   Toussaint Louverture and the Haitians were among the first to be brought to the brutal awareness that ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’ were intended to enrich the lives of not all humans but only those who pompously declared themselves custodians of civilization.

The French are at it again:  when they are not purifying their language, or congratulating themselves for their supposed refinements – from wines and perfumes to lingerie and fashions — they are busy engaging in ethnic cleansing.  Their attention has now turned to the Roma.  Well might it be said that they scarcely have a monopoly on this exercise, what with Americans flying repeated sorties over the last few decades over Cambodia, Vietnam, Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to mention only some of the darker nations which have experienced the terror of American bombing, but of course no country has such fanciful ideas about its own ‘civilization’ as do the French.   The French have never been short of overweening pride:  the law of February 23 2005, before it was repealed by President Jacques Chirac in early 2006, stipulated that ‘school courses should recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in north Africa.’  Even as the French National Assembly was pushing through this odious piece of legislation, the heavy hand of the state was coming down upon young men of North African origin who are largely viewed as inassimilable to French society.

On Thursday last week, the government of Nicolas Sarkozy expelled 700 Roma – or, in more common parlance, gypsies — from France, and many more expulsions are anticipated in coming weeks.  The French police are dismantling what they describe as ‘illegal camps’ and deporting the Roma to Romania and Bulgaria.  Some in the French government are describing themselves as surprised by the attention being given to the present round of expulsions, since they claim to have carried out 10,000 such expulsions last year without any publicity.  Another predictable argument being furnished in favor of the expulsions is that the Roma are prone to theft and criminal activity, and public safety demands the removal of those who have overstayed their welcome.  We might quibble about the word ‘welcome’, since even a modicum of familiarity with the history of the Roma suggests that they have never been welcomed in most parts of Europe.  (The Roma, in varying numbers, have been expelled, quite recently, from Italy, Sweden, and Denmark.)  Indeed, it is commonly forgotten that Hitler directed a ferocious campaign of extermination against the Roma as much as he did against Jews.   But France has struck upon another ingenious method to ward off criticism:  in the official version, the departures of the Roma are ‘voluntary’ and the resettlement sum of US $385 that has been given to each Roma is a testimony to the goodwill of the French.  This piece of deception serves two purposes:  first, it seeks to insulate the French against a legal challenge from human rights activists and, in particular, the European Court of Human Rights.  Secondly, since international law specifically prohibits targeting an entire group on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual preferences, and so on, France can present the departing Roma as animated by individual choice.

We need not waste time in asking if the French are racist.  They are.  Their history of barbaric conduct, whether in Indochina or Algeria, provides unimpeachable evidence of their sentiments.  The question now raised by their expulsion of the Roma is a different one:  just what is it about the Roma, small in numbers and living at the extreme margins of society, that arouses the anxieties of the French and others in Western Europe?  Supposing it were true that the Roma are prone to criminal activity, as is commonly argued even if it is far from established, it is also clear that they largely stand charged of insolent behavior, petty theft, and conduct that fills ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ people with uneasiness.  The Roma seem menacing; that, apparently, is their real crime.  We notice how, in the dominant discourse about the Roma, they are always spoken of as a collectivity, so that every Roma stands implicated in criminal activity, something like the ‘criminal tribes’ invented by the British in colonial India.  Supposing, again, that they were criminals, their petty crimes pale in comparison to the monstrous atrocities committed by the French in their colonies.  So what is it about the Roma that disturbs the placid waters of French self-enchantment?

The history of the modern world has been shaped around the nation-state, and many historians, among them Eugen Weber in his famous Peasants into Frenchmen, have chronicled the bloody process of nation making.  People have to be cajoled into constituting themselves as subjects of the nation-state, and the national anthem and the national flag exist to remind those with wavering loyalties that the nation-state is a stern taskmaster.  Above all, however, the nation-state is marked by boundaries, generally well-defined and occasionally contested, and the map is enlisted to turn these boundaries into stone.  Once the nation-state comes into place, it views its boundaries as sacrosanct and worthy of the highest approbation.  The most characteristic feature of the Roma, of course, is the fact their entire mode of living is in defiance of the logic of the nation-state.  The Roma represent a time when, in their (from the standpoint of modernity) state of unfreedom, the ancestors of those Europeans who today inhabit the various nations-state of Europe could wander around relatively unhindered.  Modernity’s own preferred narrative about itself is to think of modern times as uniquely characterized by extreme mobility, but such mobility is, in fact, highly restricted and bears little relationship to the nomadic sensibility of the Roma.  There is, thus, in the activities of the Roma a mix of anxiety and envy that Europeans experience:  envy because the Roma, forsaking the protocols of the nation-state and modern bourgeois living, embody an admirable spirit of freedom and lack of self-restraint; and anxiety because their transgressions generate acute uncertainty, a fear that the boundaries placed between the self and the other will collapse.  If Europe is not to become even duller than it is, living on its museums, heritage sites, and the various affects of ‘the refined life’, it would do well to learn to live with the Roma.

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