*The Provocations of Ashis Nandy

 

For close to four decades, Ashis Nandy has occupied a liminal presence on the Indian intellectual scene.  In nearly every respect, whether from the standpoint of the intellectual positions he has adopted, the trajectory of his professional life, his stance towards religious faith, or the politics that he embraces, Nandy has carved out a worldview that is distinct even singular.  Though he is viewed in the public domain as an academic, he has always kept a distance from university life as such and has spent his entire career as a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.  There are few scholars who have subjected the very idea of ‘development’, and the certitude with which experts speak of ‘developing societies’, to such rigorous scrutiny as has Nandy.  For all his immense learning, he has little use for the pedantry that often passes for scholarship –– one reason, among others, why some people characterize him as a maverick, gadfly, or contrarian.

 

Trained as a clinical psychologist, Nandy has disavowed the profession of psychology.  Some of his readers grumble at his propensity for psychoanalytical readings of personalities, but his use of Freud is, so to speak, homegrown.  There was a time, though this is much less so the case now, when left intellectuals routinely branded Nandy, born into a Christian family, as a Hindu fundamentalist.  I doubt very much that he can at all be described as a man of faith, but he has kept faith with the idea that non-believers have no higher duty than to defend the right of each person to his or her faith.  One could continue in this vein, almost ad infinitum:  thus, to take one last illustration, though one can hardly describe Nandy as a biographer, it is striking that much of his work pivots around individual lives, whether it be Gandhi, Tagore, Rammohan Roy, Jagdish Chandra Bose, the mathematician Ramanujan, the ‘first modern Indian environmentalist’ Kapilprasad Bhattacharjee, the ‘first non-western psychoanalyst’ Girindrasekhar Bose, the jurist Radha Binod Pal, and many others.  These lives provide the frame around which Nandy has spun complex narratives, though some will call them yarns, about the culture of politics, the politics of culture, and the manner in which knowledge systems insinuate themselves into the praxis of everyday life.

 

The highly anomalous mold within which his thoughts are wrought lead Nandy to some extraordinary insights but also make him unusually vulnerable to attack. His writings on communalism and secularism provide a case in point.  Though scarcely all the nuances of his position can be enunciated here, one might begin with his firm view that communal riots in India are largely an urban phenomenon.  There may be many reasons for this, among them, to use Gandhi’s phrase from an interview he gave to the Reverend Mott in the mid-1930s, ‘the hard heartedness of the educated’.  This was in response to the query, ‘What filled Gandhi with the greatest despair’.  The educated in India are also prone to deploy the idioms of historical thinking, and one cannot begin to understand the conflict over the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmasthan until one has an awareness of how middle-class Hindus, much like nationalists elsewhere, have mobilized history, with consequences that were to be seen in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, in the service of the nation-state.  Though myth is one of the ugliest words in the lexicon of Marxists, positivists, liberals, and modernizers alike, Nandy has argued eloquently that myths are a more reliable and humane guide to the past –– and link to the future.  One of the many hidden transcripts in his recent comments on corruption among OBCs, SCs, and STs, which have enraged some people, is the implicit suggestion that the liberation of the Dalits will be better achieved by their use of creative myth-making than by attentiveness to the history of their oppression.

 

In an essay that Nandy penned on ‘the alternative cosmopolitanism of Cochin’, he demonstrates amply the radical tenor of his thinking.  He set out to inquire why Cochin, which has large numbers of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, has been free of communal riots for 500 years.  The people he met from these ‘communities’ do not even remotely describe themselves as secular; indeed, shocking as this might be to the liberal sensibility, which insists upon the ‘caring’ ethic, an anodyne form of good neighborliness, the elimination of prejudices, even (as in the United States) diversity workshops, nearly everyone Nandy met admitted to holding rather severe stereotypes about members of the other communities.  Nandy concludes that it is, in a manner of speaking, a healthy balance of prejudices that has sustained Cochin’s religious pluralism.

 

Cochin’s ‘cosmopolitanism’ has not been imposed from above, as a diktat of the liberal state, nor does it stem from the Enlightenment’s putative idea of the fellowship of liberated rational subjects thinking beyond themselves and invested in the fate of the earth.  While the vast bulk of liberal and left scholarship has been concerned with exposing the pathology of irrationality, Nandy has spent the better part of his life zeroing in on the pathology of rationality and its most characteristic outcomes ––development, the nation-state, vivisectionist science, an (aggrieved) sense of history, to name a few.  This has entailed immense risk-taking, even hazardous remarks on more than one occasion, but where is the ethical intellectual life without such provocations?

(Published under the same title in The Times of India – The Crest Edition, 9 February 2013, p. 9.)

See the related post:  From the Ludic to the Ludicrous:  The Affair of Ashis Nandy on this site.

 

Read Full Post »

*Gandhi and the Art of Dying

“Martyrs of Humanity”, cartoon by D. R. Fitzpatrick in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12 February 1948

[On the occasion of the anniversary of the death of Mohandas K. Gandhi (January 30)]

There is but no question that Mohandas Gandhi remains, more than six decades after his assassination, the most iconic figure of modern India. He was one of the most widely photographed men of his time; an entire industry of nationalist prints extolled his life; and statues of his abound throughout India and, increasingly, the rest of the world.  Gandhi has been a blessing to cartoonists, ever since he signalled his arrival on the political scene in South Africa; and most Indian artists of consequence over the course of the last half-century, from M. F. Husain and Ramkinkar Baij to Ghulam Muhammad Sheikh and Atul Dodiya, have engaged with Gandhi in their work.  What is equally striking is that this immensely rich visual archive, which encompasses such unusual items as caricatures of Gandhi in Fascist publications, anti-Gandhi Soviet propaganda posters, and lewd comics of Gandhi from Tijuana, Mexico, has altogether escaped critical scrutiny –– barring some recent scholarly work on nationalist prints, and an occasional article on Gandhi and photography.

A distinct iconography began to develop around Gandhi’s figure in his own lifetime.  Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that, deities, the great bhaktas, and the founders of religion such as the Buddha aside, there is no figure in the history of India who could be so readily signified, whether by Gandhi’s trademark spectacles, his walking stick, the sandals he himself made, or the time-piece tucked into a corner of his dhoti.  Cartoonists delighted in those large ears that prompted Sarojini Naidu to dub him ‘Mickey Mouse’, and some of the most striking photographs are those where, in the midst of men dressed in overcoats, silk suits, or other formal wear, Gandhi appears singular in the shining armor of his nakedness.  One cartoonist had the good sense to represent the battle between Gandhi and the forces of violence as the struggle between ‘the shirtless’ and ‘the shirted’.

However, the various representations of Gandhi cannot be interpreted as offering a seamless narrative on his unique place in the national imaginary or as a figure of global protest.  What we do not see is just as important as what we do see.  Printmakers, photographers, painters, and sculptors are alert to different considerations.  The photographers of Gandhi, for instance, were naturally sensitive to the play of light and shadows, while printmakers drew on mythic material that they construed as the grounding of Indian civilization. The interpretation of public statuary leads us to a different set of questions:  where are statues of Gandhi placed, with what effect and consequences, and to what end?  The vast archive can also be viewed in the light of other interpretive strategies.  We can speak, for example, of ‘the seated Gandhi’, ‘the walking Gandhi’, ‘the spectral Gandhi’, and so on.  A consideration of ‘the sartorial Gandhi’ would enable us to gauge his life from the clothes that he wore at different stages of his awakening, and arrive at an assessment of how, after he had made a decision to reduce his clothing to the bare minimum, he came to embody, in the most profound ways, the idea of nakedness in its fullness.

It is, as we approach the anniversary of the Gandhi’s assassination on January 30^th, of ‘the martyred Gandhi’ that I shall now speak.  Many have argued that Gandhi had a premonition of his death.  There had been several assassination attempts on his life in the preceding fifteen years.  What is unequivocally clear is that he spoke often, especially in the aftermath of Indian independence and the country’s vivisection, of wanting to die –– as he told his grand-niece Manu after the failed attempt on his life at Birla House at January 20^th, ‘On this occasion I have shown no bravery.  If somebody fired at me point-blank and I faced his bullet with a smile, repeating the name of Rama in my heart, I should indeed be deserving of congratulations.’  On January 27^th, Gandhi, still recovering from the fast that brought peace to Delhi and conviction to Nathuram Godse that the old man no longer deserved to live, told the visiting American journalist Vincent Sheean, ‘It might be that it would be more valuable to humanity for me to die.’  Yet, at other times Gandhi had, with equal assurance, declared that he wished to live for 125 years.

Some still dispute whether Gandhi died with the name of Rama on his lips.  The front cover of the 25 January 1970 issue of Illustrated Weekly of India echoes the confusion and shock experienced by all those around him; unusually, the revolver seems almost suspended between the assassin’s hands, though by all accounts Godse executed the task with firm and efficient resolve.  Indian printmakers went to work almost immediately after Gandhi’s death, likening him to Christ and Buddha:  though Gandhi was no founder of a religion, he seemed to some of his contemporaries to have had a similar impact on those who encountered him or had some awareness of his teachings.  These printmakers borrowed effortlessly, recognizing no cultural boundaries.  Gandhi adored Michelangelo’s Pieta and would have been humbled by the comparison.

Gandhi was also a world historical figure and his death was registered across the globe.  In the United States, the eminent cartoonist D. R. Fitzpatrick, long associated with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was reminded of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  His cartoon, ‘Martyrs of Humanity’, points to the place that Gandhi had come to occupy in the American imagination.  One doubts very much that the nation-state meant to Gandhi what it meant to Lincoln, but the image provokes precisely such questions.  Two decades later, another assassination would shake the world.  More so perhaps than any other cartoonist, Bill Mauldin of the Chicago Sun-Times captured the poignancy of the killing of another architect of non-violent resistance.  In his famous cartoon, published in April 1968, an avuncular-looking Gandhi stretches out his hands towards Martin Luther King in a show of solidarity and says, ‘The odd thing about assassins, Dr. King, is that they think they’ve killed you.’  Men such as Gandhi, who knew better than most the art of dying, have to be assassinated repeatedly.

(First published under the same title in Sunday Times of India, 27 January 2013, p. 9)

Read Full Post »

*From the Ludic to the Ludicrous: The Affair of Ashis Nandy

 

The Jaipur Literary Festival is known to stir controversy.  So is Ashis Nandy, often celebrated as India’s most arresting and provocative thinker.  For well over three decades, Nandy has been in the business, shall we say, of unsettling received ideas, controverting the most established opinions, and deploying the tactics of a street fighter against institutionalized forms of knowledge.  He scandalized many in India who view themselves as progressive when, in the mid-1980s, he published ‘An Anti-Secularist Manifesto’, though it is no exaggeration to say that the substance of his critique of secularism has now become part of the new commonsense of informed scholarship. 

 

Appearing in this year’s edition of the Jaipur Literary Festival, one should have expected that Nandy would come up with one of his startlingly fresh insights –– more so when the discussion at a panel in which he was participating veered towards corruption, a matter which has greatly agitated the country, particularly its middle classes, since at least the time Anna Hazare launched his movement to deliver India from this menace.  The fact that Anna Hazare, however well intentioned he might be, is nearly clueless, and that the popular movement which he initiated generated, in intellectual terms, little more than platitudes made Nandy’s remarks seem all the more radical and even incomprehensible. 

 

Commencing his remarks with the critical observation that he was going to make a ‘vulgar statement’, Nandy added:  ‘It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the OBCs, the Scheduled Castes, and now increasingly the Scheduled Tribes.  And as long as this is the case, the Indian Republic will survive.’  Not surprisingly, the first line alone has been replayed in the media over and over again.  Nandy’s fellow panelist, the TV journalist Ashutosh, immediately pilloried him as a representative of ‘elitist India’, characterizing his remarks as ‘the most bizarre statement’ he had ever heard ‘in this country’.  Mayawati has called for Nandy’s arrest, and a FIR has been lodged against him under the Schedules Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.  In Patna, members of organizations of SCs and STs marched from the High Court to Dak Bungalow Square, where they burnt an effigy of Nandy.

 

It is, of course, a feature of our times that attentive reading of texts and the work of interpretation are seen as luxuries that can be ill afforded when the country is thirsting for ‘change’, ‘fast’ track courts, and the speedy resolution of complex social issues.  The dedicated do-good activist types, in particular, are generally without humor and find irony a hindrance to whatever noble cause they wish to espouse.  Nandy had not spoken in a vacuum:  preceding him as a speaker, Tehelka’s editor Tarun Tejpal had argued that ‘corruption’ should be recognized as a strategy by means of which the poor and the marginalized, operating in a hierarchical society with deeply encrusted forms of oppression, are able to enter into the public domain and do precisely what the upper castes have been doing for centuries, namely leveraging their power and privileges to advance their own interests.  The most eminent sociologist of the previous generation, the late M. N. Srinivas, would perhaps not have balked at the suggestion that this might be viewed as a form of what he called ‘Sanskritization’, the emulation of the upper castes by lower castes on a trajectory of upward social mobility.

 

It is these ideas with which Nandy was signifying his agreement, adding his own inimitable touch to the discussion.  Scholars have long been familiar with debates about text vs. context, and critics of Nandy might reasonably argue that he should have known that his remarks would be, as is commonly said, ‘taken out of context’.  Moreover, the most insistent Indian tradition of intellectual argumentation insists that one’s reasoning should anticipate, and account for, objections to one’s argument.  But, to understand Nandy, we can even do without the context:  not only was he showing self-reflexivity in prefacing his remarks with the observation that he was going to make a ‘vulgar statement’, he delivers a resounding defence of how the Dalits and the poor have mobilized electoral democracy with the suggestion that the resort to corruption by the OBCs, SCs, and STs ensures that ‘the Indian Republic will survive.’

 

We need not even enter into the other nuances of Nandy’s argument, such as the proposition that the corruption of the rich and powerful is largely invisible.  Having lagged behind for generations, the poor and the deprived will certainly have to be ‘more’ corrupt if they are to make inroads into India’s political system.  There are, however, more critical questions at stake here.  How did we come to have such fragile sensibilities? What kind of intellectual culture do we seek?  Should we be party to the epidemic of apologies that has swept the West and insist that Nandy take back everything he has said?  Nandy’s fellow Bengali, the writer Nirad Chaudhuri, dedicated his autobiography to the memory of the British Empire in India since Pax Britannica shaped ‘all that was good and living within us’.  Should we have insisted that Chaudhuri apologize to the nation for implicitly denigrating the nationalist movement? 

 

To enter into Nandy’s works is to encounter a mind that is not only deeply thoughtful but also forever engaged with the suppleness and play of ideas.  It is the ludic or playful element in Nandy’s work, which seldom leaves him satisfied with the certitudes of received intellectual opinion, that easily distinguishes him from his intellectual contemporaries.  The tragedy of if it is that, judging from the shallow and profoundly unreflective response to Nandy’s provocations, we have moved from the ludic to the ludicrous.

(Also published in Outlook magazine, at http://www.outlookindia.com, 29 January 2013,

as “From the Ludic to the Ludicrous”)

 

Read Full Post »

*’A Christmas Gift’ and the Hunt for Homosexuals in Uganda

 

It has never been easy being a gay or lesbian in most countries, but homophobia has scaled new heights in Uganda, where the country’s legislature may be acting soon on a bill which calls for the infliction of a sentence of imprisonment for life for the mere offence of homosexual orientation or gender identity.  The bill also stipulates capital punishment, ‘death by hanging’, on conviction for ‘aggravated homosexuality’, which purports to describe the conduct of homosexuals who have sex with more than one person, or sex more than once with the same person, as well as those who knowingly engage in sexual conduct despite being HIV-positive.  The Anti-Homosexuality Bill further prescribes a term of seven years in prison for anyone who ‘aids, abets, counsels, or procures another to engage in acts of homosexuality’, a measure that would, to take one common instance, cover landlords who knowingly rent out their premises to homosexuals, and a term of three years for those who, while in a position of ‘religious, political, economic, or social authority’, fail to report anyone violating the act.  The Speaker of the Ugandan Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga, eager to bestow ‘a Christmas gift’ on a beleaguered community, had reportedly promised the bill’s passage before the end of the year.  However, Parliament went into recess before the vote could take place, though Ms. Kadaga has vowed that the vote will take place in February.

 

A nearly identical bill was tabled before the Uganda Parliament without success in 2009, shortly after ethnic riots had engulfed Kampala; and observers of politics in Africa suggest that simmering political dissent has similarly precipitated the present re-introduction of the bill.  But the intervening three years have unfortunately not been uneventful for Uganda’s gay and lesbian community. The 19 April 2009 edition of the Ugandan tabloid, The Red Pepper, carried out a promise, first made in a 2007 article called ‘Homo Terror’, to name and shame the country’s ‘top homos’.  ‘This is a killer dossier’, the article states, ‘a heat-pounding and sensational masterpiece that largely exposes Uganda’s shameless men and unabashed women that have deliberately exported the western evils to our dear and sacred society’.  In October 2010, Rolling Stone, a newly founded local journal, published 15 photos of the country’s ‘leading’ homosexuals, all to the accompaniment of a headline reading, ‘Hang Them’, and reported that it would expose another 85 gays and lesbians.  A few months later, David Kato, advocacy officer of the organization Sexual Minorities Uganda and the country’s most prominent gay rights activist, would be found murdered.  His photograph had been published in Rolling Stone.

 

Just what is it that has brought Uganda to this state of affairs?  Uganda appears to be exhibiting the most severe form of the sexual panic that has gripped other African countries where extreme homophobia is rampant, among them Zimbabwe, Namibia, Swaziland, and Kenya.  In Uganda, reportedly 96% of the people have declared themselves opposed to homosexuality, though it is not clear how such a survey was conducted.  Some human rights activists have argued that in countries where human rights are generally trampled upon, homosexuals would be lucky to receive any protection at all from the state.  The rights of sexual minorities may scarcely be viewed as a priority in countries where democracy has yet to take root and bitter conflict wages over land resources, mineral wealth, ethnic identity, political entitlements, and so on. 

 

While this may be so, why should Uganda, and perhaps other African countries, be more vulnerable to homophobic behavior, whether expressed as state repression or severe social opprobrium, than other conflict-ridden or relatively impoverished countries?  Are notions of masculinity and femininity especially rigid in African societies and is homosexuality consequently an intolerable assault on received notions of sexual conduct?  Does Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill, with its draconian measures, appear to vindicate those commentators who argue that, by any evaluative scale we can think of, African societies are clearly ‘backward’ and have yet to give minimally adequate recognition to those notions of pluralism, human dignity, and tolerance for the ‘other’ that are expected of nations which seek to be part of ‘the international community’?

 

The remarks proffered by Ugandan and other African politicians appear to suggest that tolerance for homosexuality is viewed as an imposition of Western values.  Writing a few years ago, President Chiluba of Zambia echoed one widely held view:  ‘Homosexuality is the deepest level of depravity . . .  That homosexuals are free to do as they please in the West does not mean they must be free to do the same here. … The things they do would multiply the rate of spread of AIDS – which was first spotted among American sodomites in the first place . . .’ (Times of Zambia, 19 October 1998).  Namibia’s President Nujoma was likewise of the opinion that ‘most ardent supporters of these perverts [gays] are Europeans who imagine themselves to be the bulwark of civilisation and enlightenment’ (Mail and Guardian, 14 February 1997).  Uganda’s President, Yoweri Museveni, has added another complexion to the debate in suggesting that ‘the African Church is the only one that is still standing against homosexuality.  The Europeans are finished.  If we follow them, we shall end up in Sodom and Gomorrah.’  At a time when it seems difficult for many to imagine that Africa is in the vanguard of anything at all, some Africans may be taking pride in the fact that what was once characterized as ‘the dark continent’ may now be offering a sliver of light to those who believe that the West is slowly being lost to Christianity. 

 

If colonialism’s imprint can never ultimately be ignored in reading Africa’s history, we should not be surprised that a more complicated narrative unfolds if we cast the net wide.  In the colonial view, Africans were purveyors of profligate sexuality, unrestrained in their sexual conduct or mores; on the present view, Africans have gone to the other extreme in aggressively criminalizing homosexuality.  Yet this narrative disguises the critical role played by American-style evangelical Christianity, which has witnessed explosive growth in countries such as Uganda, in promoting a climate of hatred against homosexuals.  The Anti-Homosexuality Bill’s chief sponsor, David Bahati, who flaunts the motto, ‘kill every last gay person’, runs the Ugandan branch of ‘The Family’, a super-secretive American evengelical organization with tentacles around the world and whose members include American senators, highly influential corporate CEOs, and venerated military officials.   Long before the bill was first introduced in 2009, Scott Lively, Paul Cameron, Don Schmierer, and Caleb Lee Brundidge, American evangelists ferociously committed to combating what they call the ‘homosexual agenda’, and exponents of the view that homosexuals can be ‘healed’ and turned straight, had already made Uganda their happy hunting ground.  Indeed, as the United States itself becomes more hospitable to homosexuals, American evangelists will increasingly prey upon the rest of the world.  ‘African savagery’ becomes, yet again, another name for colonialism.

 

(A slightly shorter and earlier version was first published as “Nowhere People”, Times of India – Crest Edition, 15 December 2012, p. 13).

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

*A Diaspora Epic: Indians Abroad

 

The Indian diaspora is an ineluctable fact of contemporary global culture.  Its presence around the world is signified by Indian writers of renown settled in the Caribbean, Britain, the United States, South Africa, east Africa, and Fiji; the widespread availability of at least some generic, or allegedly ‘Mughlai’, form of Indian cuisine; the emergence of hybrid forms of music –– among them, desi hip-hop and chutney; the proliferation of software engineeers and doctors of Indian descent; a nearly ubiquitous fascination for Bollywood; the growing engagement of diasporic Indians with the political cultures of their adopted lands; and much else.

If India, in some fundamental respects, is not one country, the Indian diaspora similarly does not exist in the singular.  One can speak of the diasporas of the north and the south, though, in India, there is still little awareness of the complex histories of displacement, migration, and overseas settlement that have informed the Indian diasporic experience since the 1830s and 1840s when Indians first departed for Mauritius and the Caribbean.  Newspaper reports from the last few days mention the emotional visit of the Prime Minister of Mauritius to the village in Bihar from where his ancestors made their way to an island that was one of the more remote outposts of the former British empire.  More than a decade ago, something similar was reported about the homecoming of Basdeo Panday, then the Prime Minister of Trinidad, to his ancestral village.

In India’s metros, and increasingly in larger towns, a good number of people have some kin living abroad.  When the designation NRI first came about around three decades ago, it signified only those diasporic Indians who, in the middle class imagination, had done the country proud.  Indeed, it would no exaggeration to suggest that for many people, ‘NRI’ meant only Indians settled in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Canada and Britain; in recent years, Australia has made the cut.  It is said that more than 25% of the start-ups in Silicon Valley are run by Indians, and statistics are flaunted with evident glee to suggest that Indian scientists, engineers, and especially doctors occupy a hugely disproportionate place, considering that Indians are just marginally less than 1% of the American population, in the professions.  This is the diaspora that the Indian middle class holds up as an example to India itself.  Thus the observation, encountered at every turn in conversations at middle class homes, that the same Indians who are unable to make anything of themselves in their country flourish overseas.

However, even in the US the story of the Indian presence has more twists and turns than is commonly imagined. The Punjabi farmers, students, and later Ghadrites who made their way to the US in the late 1890s and in the subsequent decade saw their numbers dwindling when the entry of Indians and other Asiatics to the United States was prohibited by law in 1924.  Many Indian men married Mexican women, and thus we have Punjabi-Mexican Americans. The vast bulk of Indians arrived in the US following the immigration reforms of 1965:  notwithstanding the common impression that they are largely affluent and highly educated professionals, Indians also ply taxis in New York, dominate the Dunkin Donuts franchises around the country, and of course have a huge hand in the motel business.  In California’s Central Valley, which Indians have helped to turn into one of the country’s greatest agricultural hubs, 14% of the Indians according to a 2005 report lived below the poverty level and 35% had not even earned a high school diploma.

The origins of the other Indian diaspora lie elsewhere, in the political economy of colonialism that sent indentured laborers, mainly from the Gangetic heartland and the Tamil country, to forge the white man’s empire of sugar, rubber, and cash crops.  As one prominent scholar opined, indentured labor was simply a new form of slavery.  Nationalist opinion, and the efforts of English sympathizers such as C. F. Andrews, aided in shutting down the system of indenture in 1917, but not before 1.5 million Indians had sold themselves into debt-bondage.  They lived in appalling conditions, in the “lines” formerly inhabited by the slaves.  These Indians humanized the landscape, tilled the soil, and put the food on tables:  they are the great unsung heroes and heroines of our diaspora.

At the present moment, in the midst of the ‘NRI season’ and the celebration of the recnetly concluded Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, it is well to reflect on the future of the Indian diaspora.  Among the affluent Indians in Britain, Canada, and especially the United States, there is some desire to influence the course of events in India itself.  On the other hand, as the massive exodus of Indo-Fijians since the coups of 1987 and 2000 suggests, ‘mother India’ is frankly unable to do very much to enhance the rights of its dispersed children besides engaging in grand rhetorical exercises in impotent institutions such as the Commonwealth.

India’s policymakers are mainly interested in how the diaspora can feed the engine of growth in India.  But we need a less impoverished and more civilizational view that would make us aware not merely of the accumulated narratives of our Silicon Valley ‘miracles’ and the triumphant success, year after year, of Indian American children at the National Spelling Bee, but also of the histories of those Indians who, braving conditions of extreme adversity, nurtured new forms of music, literature, religious worship, and even conviviality.  It is a remarkable fact that, from within the depths of Ramacaritmanas country in Fiji, we have had the first novel ever written in Bhojpuri.  Our Indian diaspora, complex and variegated, needs a hefty Purana.

–First published in a slightly abridged version as “Diasporas of India: Shiny NRI success stories obscure older migrations from our colonial past”, Indian Express (18 January 2013), p. 12.

 Slightly amended Hindi version published as “Bharatiya Nagarikon ka Purana”, Prabhat Khabar (22 January 2013), p. 8.

Read Full Post »

*When Hinduism Meets the Internet

 

Hinduism, most of its adherents believe, is the oldest religion in the world.  They are not excessively or even at all bothered by arguments that Hinduism may be an ‘invented religion’, or the view that until the 18^th century, those we describe as Hindus would have known themselves as Vaishnavas, Saivites, Tantrics, Shaktos, and so on.  The internet, on the other hand, is a little more than two decades old, and it has been fashioned largely in the United States.  So do the startlingly old and the exceedingly young make for strange bedfellows?  Or might one well argue the extreme opposite, namely that the internet and Hinduism exist in a marriage that appears to have been made in heaven?

            There is but no question that Hinduism is the most apposite religion for the internet age.  As is commonly known, Hinduism is a highly decentralized faith.  Unlike Muslims and Christians, Hindus do not uniformly adhere to the precepts of a single book.  Some Indian nationalists elevated the Bhagavad Gita as the supreme text; in more recent times, the advocates of the Ramjanmabhoomi Movement have held up Tulsidas’s Ramacaritmanas as the most venerable book of the Hindus; and yet other Hindus regard the Srimad Bhagavatam as the ‘holy book’, while others are of the view that the essence of Hinduism is crystallized in the Upanishads.  The Gita Press in Gorakhpur, which has printed something like half a billion copies of ‘the Hindu scriptures’, has however not printed the Rig Veda:  since this text is apurusha, not made by the hand of man, it similarly ought not to be reproduced by man.  Thus the text held to be the fount of Hinduism is, unlike the Koran or the Bible, not really meant to be read at all.  What would be considered a highly anomalous situation in any other religion is something with which Hindus have been comfortable for a very long time.  Furthermore, Hinduism has neither a historical founder nor a Mecca; and its Shankaracharyas represent competing schools of authority.   

Only Hinduism, then, can match the internet’s playfulness: the religion’s proverbial “330 million” gods and goddesses, a testimony to the intrinsically decentered and polyphonic nature of the faith, find correspondence in the world wide web’s billion points of origin, intersection, and dispersal.  Hinduism has thus appeared to anticipate many of the internet’s most characteristic features, from its lack of any central regulatory authority and anarchism to its alleged intrinsic spirit of free inquiry and abhorrence of censorship.  If, moreover, cyberspace is awash with images, no religion is more fecund in this respect than Hinduism.  Not only do Hindus keep images of their gods and goddesses everywhere around them, but the notion of darshan, or the gaze, is central to popular Hindu religiosity.

            What is equally clear is that Hinduism’s adherents, nowhere more so than in the United States, have displayed a marked tendency to turn towards various forms of digital media, and in particular the internet, to forge new forms of Hindu identity, endow Hinduism with a purportedly more coherent and monotheistic form, refashion our understanding of the history of Hinduism’s engagement with practitioners of other faiths in India, and even engage in debates on American multiculturalism.  Moreover, the aspiration to create linkages across Hindu groups worldwide, embrace Hindus in remoter diasporic settings who are viewed as having been severed from the motherland, and create something of global Hindu consciousness, has a fundamental relationship to India’s ascendancy as an ‘emerging economy’ and the confidence with which its Hindu elites increasingly view the world and their prospects for prosperity and political gain. 

            While adherents of Hinduism are by no means singular in being predisposed towards digital media, there is nonetheless an overwhelming amount of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence to suggest that Hindus have been particularly conscientious, if not innovative and aggressive, in mobilizing members of the perceived Hindu community through the internet.  The rise of Hindu militancy in India since the late 1980s, signaled by the term Hindutva, had its counterpart in the creation of new Hindutva histories on the internet.  The internet was but a few years old when the Global Hindu Electronic Network (GHEN), an exhaustive site on Hinduism and its enemies, was put up by an enterprising Indian American student in the US as a point of entry into ‘the Hindu Universe’.  Some of the other manifestations of viewing history as the terrain on which new and more robust conceptions of Hindu identity were to be shaped can be seen in the creation of the virtual Hindu Holocaust Memorial Museum, dedicated to advancing the argument that the holocaust against Hindus in India over a thousand years is without comparison, and in the manner in which aggrieved Hindu parents in the US waged a determined struggle, largely over the internet, on the question of the representation of Hinduism and the ancient Indian past in history textbooks intended for middle school students in California. 

            In some respects, however, we are on wholly uncharted territory in thinking of the future of Hinduism in cyberspace.  A good illustration of some of the difficulties that might creep in, especially from the viewpoint of a devout believer, is furnished by the phenomenon that is described as online puja.  The altar, or alcove where the deities are housed, in the Hindu home is kept clean.  Now suppose that a person wishes to perform online puja on his computer screen.  What if that same computer screen had been used fifteen minutes earlier to watch pornography?  Can one ‘clean’ the computer, and erase all traces of one’s activity, by emptying the cache, resetting the browser, junking one’s files, and then deleting the trash?

            In recent years, advocates of Hindutva, online and offline, have been staunch supporters of the view that Israel, India, and the United States are three democracies that are besieged by the soldiers of Islam.  The website, HinduUnity.org, describes Hindus and Jews as natural allies in the allegedly global struggle against Islam.  Digital media technologies have thus created new interfaces for articulations of rights, grievances, and interests in a world where rules of civic engagement on the internet are still under negotiation.  Just how far internet Hinduism will proceed in helping us understand changing protocols of citizenship in a transnational world remains to be seen.

(A slightly abridged version of this has been published as “When Hinduism Meets the Internet”, Sunday Times of India, 20 January 2013).

 

 

           

Read Full Post »

*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).

Read Full Post »

*Iran’s Revolution and the Global Politics of Resistance

 

[Review of The People Reloaded:  The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future, eds. Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel.  Brooklyn, New York:  Melville House, 2010.  439 pp.]

 [First published in the "Economic and Political Weekly", 24 March 2012; also published in "Truthout.org"]

In the euphoria over the ‘Arab Spring’, which has brought revolutions to the doorsteps of autocratic regimes that only last year seemed unflappable in their resolve to keep the aspirations of their peoples suppressed, it becomes imperative to recall that the first sustained signs of change in West Asia in recent years appeared in Iran.  The Arab world seemed so firmly in the grip of monarchs and dictators, many of them bolstered by the United States, which has been in the business of exporting the rhetoric of electoral democracy to the world but has feared reform and revolution at every turn, that no one expected the people to take to the streets in millions.   And how people have stormed the streets, facing police barricades, braving tear gas and baton charges –– and not just in the Arab world!  The ‘Arab spring’ turned into a long summer of discontent, as signs of protest began to appear in other parts of the world, in Athens, Rome, Madrid, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere.  As these lines are being written, the Occupy Wall Street movement has even brought dissenters and rebels to the fore in the United States, where politics for far too long has been reduced to an exercise of choosing between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.  Yet, all this was anticipated in Iran’s dramatic political upheaval in June 2009, the outcome of which, perhaps contrary to received opinion, is far from settled. 

 

Though nearly everything in Iran is marked by the watershed events of 1979 that led to the ouster of the Shah and the assumption of power by the Ayatollahs, it is possible that some years from now the phrase, ‘after the revolution’, will resonate with an altogether different meaning.  The burden of the present collection of essays, The People Reloaded, which brings together the reflections of some fifty scholars, activists, and observers of contemporary Iranian society, is to suggest that we may be in the midst of another momentous upheaval in Iran thirty years after the revolution which replaced the dictatorship of the Shah with the rule of a theocratic elite.  Some of the contributors take a long-term view of Iranians’ ‘bloody and painful march towards democracy’ (p. 27), commencing with the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and the coup, engineered by the CIA and British military intelligence, of 1953, which led to the deposition of the nationalist hero Mohammed Mosaddegh; others hearken back to the Shah’s despotism and the political skill with which Khomeini and his supporters orchestrated his removal; and yet others set their sights resolutely on the mammoth protests against the ‘stolen election’ of 2009.  But all the contributors are clearly animated by one central question, aptly reflected in the book’s subtitle, ‘The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future’:  how might political action in Iran continue to be steered in directions that would help to secure a future for the country’s citizens that allows for the fulfillment of legitimate political aspirations, the free pursuit of one’s livelihood, economic security, and some commonly agreed upon conception of human dignity? 

 

‘Iran’, writes Ervand Abrahamian with precision and elegance, ‘has a healthy respect for crowds –– and for good reason’ (p. 60).  It is the crowds that started gathering in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and other provincial towns in June 2009, most particularly the million or two or more people who converged on Tehran’s Azadi [Freedom] Square on the 15^th in a silent rally, as the 10^th presidential election since the 1979 revolution came to an end, that are the subject of this book.  As the election results were announced, unambiguously affirming the victory of the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran appeared to be engulfed by huge waves of disbelief.  A host of pre-election polls suggested that Ahmadinejad and his closest competitor, the reformist Mir Hussein Moussavi, were neck-to-neck; yet, Ahmadinejad would be declared the winner with 64% of the vote.  Moussavi, it was announced, had been unable even to carry his hometown of Tabriz; meanwhile, another candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, apparently had more people campaigning than voting for him.  Reports of fraud came streaming in –– an extra 14.5 million ballots had been printed, and could not be accounted for; or, to take another example, voting had not even been completed in some districts when Ahmadinejad was declared the victor on state-owned television.  The complaints lodged with the Election Commission would have a predictable outcome:  on investigation, the Interior Ministry dismissed allegations of rigging and fraud as baseless, and went on to issue advisories urging people to accept the electoral results and desist from protests. 

 

Over a few days, notwithstanding Supreme Leader Khamanei’s admonitions that protestors, characterized by Ahmadinejad as ‘specks of dirt’, would face the wrath of the law, the crowds surged in size.  Tehran’s own conservative mayor estimated that three million people had gathered in Tehran on June 15^th to register their dissent –– one of the largest gatherings of people, bereft of arms and intent on nonviolent resistance, in recent history anywhere in the world.  If repression is generally the only language in which the modern nation-state trades, then Iran’s response cannot be viewed as entirely surprising. On June 20^th, the twenty-seven year old Neda Aghan-Soltan, a philosophy student and budding musician with no previous history of involvement in politics, was shot dead by a member of the Basij (government) militia as she approached the site of the protest.  Three amateur videos of her death went viral:  within days, millions around the world had viewed them and Neda had become, at least in the West, the supreme icon of resistance to theocratic despotism.  As criticism of the government mounted, the full machinery of state repression was brought crashing down upon the dissenters.  Before the end of the month, the protestors had largely dispersed.  The state might have imagined that it had broken the backbone of the movement, and dulled the protestors into abject submission with beatings, police firings, and targeted assassinations of dissenters; yet, less than two years later, Iran would again be rocked by a series of demonstrations over the course of a month in February and March 2011.

 

What, then, is the Green Movement, and what are some of the strands of Iran’s complex history and culture that have been interwoven into the nation’s contemporary politics?  There remain differences of opinion among the volume’s contributors on the question of the movement’s demography: while the American sociologist Charles Kurzman argues that the less educated in Iran have repeatedly shown themselves to be more supportive of Ahmadinejad (p. 17), the Iranian blogger and writer Nasrin Alavi is among those who soundly reject the argument that the movement drew its support largely from educated urban elites.  The student leaders, Alavi avers, ‘are not the children of affluent citizens of north Tehran, but instead come from provincial working-class families or are the children of rural schoolteachers and clerks’; indeed, she goes so far as to say that ‘these future leaders of Iran hail from the very heartland of Ahmadinejad’s purported support base’ (p. 211). 

 

What is indisputably true is that those under thirty have predominated among the dissenters, and that it is among the ranks of the young that unemployment rates are the highest –– but in these respects the protests in Iran would not appear to be at all atypical.  What is far more noteworthy, particularly in view of images about the Muslim world that freely circulate in the West and one suspects in some measure in other parts of the non-Muslim world, is, as a number of contributors point out, ‘the sizable female presence in the Iranian Green Movement’ (p. 37); indeed, if the eminent scholar of contemporary Iranian society, Hamid Dabashi is to be believed, ‘the most well-known aspect of these anti-Ahmadinejad demonstrations is that women visibly outnumber men’ (p. 23).  Contrary to the overwhelming impression about the docility of Muslim women that has been formed in much of the world, Iranian women have played a not inconsiderable role in the political life of the nation.  The ‘Million Signatures Campaign’ (2006), which has resulted in the arrest of some of Iran’s most respected feminists and human rights campaigners, sought to put men on notice that Iranian women sought complete equality under the law; and the ‘Stop Stoning Forever’ campaign has sought alterations to Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, the greatest burden of which has, not surprisingly, fallen upon women.  If the 1979 revolution imposed constraints on women, it also emboldened those who came from traditional families and who were reluctant to enter higher education in the days of the Shah to step into the public sphere once the revolution mandated segregation by sexes.  This may partly explain why, even if a little more than 12% of Iran’s labour force is comprised of women (p. 38), women are nearly two-thirds of all entering university students. 

 

The prominence of women at demonstrations in Iran may offer as well some cues on the remarkably nonviolent nature of the protests.  The dissident cleric Mohsen Kavidar, asked to explain the most salient aspects of the Green Movement, noted that it is ‘peaceful and against violence’ (p. 113), and the Toronto-based Iranian philosopher, Ramin Jehanbegloo, is certain that Iran in 2009 experienced a ‘Gandhian moment’ (p. 19).  Moussavi’s advisor, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, writing in the Guardian (London) in the thick of the struggle, may have put the matter more accurately when he said of his leader:  ‘Previously, he was revolutionary, because everyone inside the system was a revolutionary.  But now he’s a reformer.  Now he knows Gandhi –– before he knew only Che Guevara.  If we gain power through aggression we would have to keep it through aggression.  That is why we’re having a green revolution, defined by peace and democracy’ (‘I speak for Moussavi. And Iran’, 19 June 2009).  The colour green has long been associated with Islam, and Kavidar suggests that in flaunting green ribbons and banners, the demonstrators may even have sought to convey the idea that they were not prepared to relinquish their Islam to the Ayatollahs and other official purveyors of the religion.  To be ‘Green’ and ‘Gandhian’, however, means much more than abstention from violence and adherence to nonviolent strategies of resistance to oppression.  It may be too much to expect that nonviolence should become for everyone, as it did for Gandhi, the very law of our existence, an unimpeachable and incontrovertible guide to everyday conduct; nor would it reasonable to suppose that everyone should accede to Gandhi’s firmly held belief that to hold to the law of nonviolence entails the transformation of one’s whole life such that one might live it with the full awareness of ecological plurality and attentiveness to every little detail.  Nevertheless, one has the feeling that the characterization of the ‘Green Movement’ as Gandhian has received insufficient critical analysis, just as on occasion some of the contributors seem to want to embrace, rather too easily, slick terms such as ‘cultural Jiu-Jitsu’ or ‘Green Tsunami’ or facile comparisons with the American Civil Rights Movement to highlight the significance of Iran’s own great movement of dissent.

 

A more intensely political reading of what has transpired in Iran over the last few years may perhaps suggest other shortcomings in the volume to some readers.   Iran has been looking down the barrel of a gun for decades:  though the profoundly democratic aspirations of the volume’s contributors need not be doubted, few of them choose to consider how the relentless assault on Iran’s sovereignty, spearheaded since the revolution of 1979 by the United States, has played its part in shaping the worldview of the so-called ‘hardliners’.  Similarly, many of the contributors underestimate the intense resentment that persists against Britain in many sectors of Iran’s society, and in general the history of anti-colonial sentiment and resistance receives little attention in this volume.  These deficiencies may, in the last analysis, be overlooked, since the contributions essayed in this volume offer nuanced and perceptive insights into the remarkable display of people’s power in Iran.  Those who have lavished their attention on the ‘Arab Spring’, or, more lately, on the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement as it unravels across the United States, Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere, would do well to turn their gaze back on Azadi Square in Tehran, June 2009.  The democracies in the global North have long thought that it is their prerogative to lead the way; but, if there is at all a grave inference to be drawn from the movement in Iran documented and dissected in The People Reloaded, it may be that the vanguard of resistance to oppression will be found in all those places where it has been least expected.  For this reason, if for none other, Iran’s Green Movement augurs a new phase in the global politics of resistance.

Read Full Post »

*Thesis Nine: The Dissent that is Beyond Dissent

 

A meeting at Penang in autumn 2010 of like-minded intellectuals and activists from the Global South committed to a radical decolonization of knowledge commenced with a screening of the late Howard Zinn’s documentary, We the People.  A few years ago, the World Social Forum in Mumbai opened with a screening, before thousands of people, of the documentary, Manufacturing Consent, focused on the ideas and work of Noam Chomsky, the most well known American voice of dissent at home and abroad.  In either case, most people would be justified in thinking that the choice was sound.  Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States — a work attentive to the voices of the marginalized, critical of mainstream narratives, sensitive to histories of labor and the working class, and so on — has sold over a million copies in various editions; moreover, Zinn’s life, marked by an ethical impulse to do, in common parlance, what is right and stand by what is just, is one that many might seek to emulate.  Chomsky, for his part, has been the most relentless and forthright critic of American foreign policy:  if there is one liberal voice which to the world represents the ability of the United States to tolerate its own critics, it is surely the voice of Chomsky.  Critical as Chomsky is of the United States, one suspects that he can also be trumpeted by his adversaries as the supreme instance of America’s adherence to notions of free speech.  Chomsky is simultaneously one of America’s principal intellectual liabilities and assets.

 

I am animated, however, by a different set of considerations in this discussion of Zinn and Chomsky.  Why, we should ask, did the organizers settle for Zinn and Chomsky, both American scholars – and that, too, at meetings, especially the Multiversity conference in Penang, committed at least partly to the idea of intellectual autonomy, self-reliance, greater equity between the global North and the global South, and so on.  An ethical case might reasonably be made for the gestures encountered at Penang and Mumbai.  No less a person than Gandhi sought alliances, throughout his life, with the ‘other West’.  Holding firmly to the principle that freedom is indivisible, and that it is not only India that needed to be free of colonial rule, but also England itself that had to be liberated from its own worst tendencies, Gandhi sought out those writers, intellectuals, and activists in the West who had themselves been reduced to the margins.  His tract of 1909, Hind Swaraj, which is intensely critical of the modern West, lists ‘eminent authorities’ whose works Gandhi consulted, and the bulk of them are figures such as Tolstoy, Thoreau, Edward Carpenter, and Ruskin.  Those who rightly recall this critical aspect of Gandhi’s life conveniently forget that Gandhi, on more than one occasion, also described the West as “Satanic”.  If he accepted English, America, and European friends as allies in the struggle for Indian independence, he also never wavered from his firm belief that ultimately Indians had to fight their own battles.  Thus, following  him, some difficult questions that come to mind should not be brushed aside.  Is the Global South so colonized that it must borrow even its models of dissent from the West?  If the theorists of global import, from Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Adorno, Heidegger and Althusser to Lacan, Habermas, Levinas, Judith Butler, and Agamben all hail from the West, are the ultimate dissenters also from the West?

 

What begins in people’s minds can only end in people’s minds.  All over the colonized world in the nineteenth century, Locke, John Stuart Mill, and Tocqueville were held up as the torchbearers of freedom.  Almost no one recognized Tocqueville, even today a sacrosanct figure in the United States, as the holder of the most virulently racist ideas about Arabs and Muslims.  Mill’s ideas about representative government extended only to people he conceived of as free, mature, and possessed of rational faculties.  The habits of simulation in the global South are so deeply engrained that Americans become the ultimate and only genuine dissenters.  The rebellions of the dispossessed, oppressed, and marginalized are generally dismissed as luxuries possible only in permissive democracies, as the last rants of people opposed to development and progress.  However, the problem of dissent is far from being confined to the global South:  it is, if anything, more acute in the United States, where the dissenters have all been neatly accommodated, whether in women’s studies, ethnic studies, or gay studies departments at universities, or in officially-sanctioned programs of multiculturalism, or in pious-sounding policies affirming the values of diversity and cultural pluralism.  The dictators of tomorrow will also, we can be certain, have had “diversity training”.  Is there any dissent beyond what now passes for dissent?   How will we recognize the dissent of those who do not speak in one of the prescribed languages of dissent?  The United Nations has officially recognized languages, but the world at large has something much more insidious, namely officially recognized and prescribed modes of dissent.  Those who do not dissent in the languages of dissent will never even receive the dignity of recognition, not even as much as a mass memorial to ‘the unknown soldier’.

CONCLUDED

See also the previous posts in this series:

Thesis Eight: Postcolonial Thought and Religion in the Public Sphere

Thesis Seven: The Geography and Psychogeography of Home

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)

 

 

Read Full Post »

*Thesis Eight: Postcolonial Thought and Religion in the Public Sphere

 

Proposition:  A more ecumenical conception of the future must contend with the question of religion in the public sphere

I do not think it can be doubted that postcolonial thought has displayed a stern reluctance to engage with the question of religion or, more broadly, the language of transcendence.  Let us acknowledge, in the first instance, that the very template of ‘religion’ comes from the canon of Western thought; more precisely, ‘religion’ the world over was sought to be remade in the template of Protestant Christianity.  The nineteenth century also saw the establishment of an hierarchy of religions; even the notion of world religions, as the work of Tomoko Masuzawa [The Invention of World Religions:  Or, how European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (2005)] suggests, served to enforce the idea of European modernity in the guise of pluralism.  Though a “religion” such as Hinduism could be accommodated within the Aryan-Semitic divide, it posed distinct problems for many of its adherents, many of whom unwittingly or tacitly accepted the notion of Protestant Christianity as representing the acme of an authentic and proper religion.  To become a proper religion, and be viewed as one, having, that is, the notion of a singular savior, a single book, and a clear and unambiguous theology, became the aspiration of many modernizing Hindus as well.

 

To admit all this is only to say that we must begin with a deep recognition of the limitations attached to the idea of ‘religion’.  Moreover, in speaking of religion, one is already severely compromised into using a language that cannot fully describe the various modes in which peoples experience the divine, the transcendent, the notion of the after-life, or, even, the ethical life.  But once we are past this admission, the problem persists:  it is all but clear that postcolonial theory had almost nothing to say about the place of religion in the public sphere, and that too at a time when the world over religion was making inroads into politics and the everyday life of communities.  If there is a larger and entirely legitimate question about how postcolonial thought was positioned in the public sphere, it is in the realm of religion that postcolonial thought proved to be wholly inadequate.  This lacuna is most evident in the work of Said himself:  insofar as he engaged with the question of religion, he did so by talking about the representations of Muslims in the western world, whether in the media or in works of scholarship.  He adverted, as well, to the rise of religious fundamentalism or rather we should say extremism; to the extent that he acknowledged religious belief, it is only the perversion of such religious belief that came to his attention.  Said’s critical scholarship is equally an illustration of his steadfast indifference to religious works, theological treatises, the religious life, the nature of religious practices and rituals, or even the philosophy of religion.

 

This indifference to religion, in Said and many other postcolonial thinkers, can be described in part as stemming from their fear that religion claims dominion over “universal ideas”.  The postcolonial scholar has always found it easier to engage with works that fall under the rubric of ‘reason’ (in all its registers, from ethical reason to the brute instrumentalization of reason).  Said’s response was to put into place a critical humanism that he hoped would serve, in the manner of religion, as a template to generate competing universal ideas.  It is in this rather odd fashion that we can think of Said as a religious thinker.  But, more to the point, the consequences on the part of secular and postcolonial scholars of abandoning the public sphere are there to be seen – in, to take three examples, the dramatic rise of Christian evangelicals and their forging of a worldwide network, the ascendancy of the Hindu right and its heady if often inadvertent embrace of what were once colonial conceptions of Hinduism, and the numerous manifestations of violence in Islam.  Postcolonial secular scholars never had anything that can remotely be described as an adequate response; and they never even contemplated the possibility that perhaps the greater ethical response from a committed non-believer is to come to the defense of religious belief.

See also the previous posts in this series:

Thesis Seven: The Geography and Psychogeography of Home

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)

 

Read Full Post »