Violence at UCLA: Open Letter to Chancellor Gene Block

3 May 2024

Chancellor Gene Block
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Dear Chancellor Block:

On the night of April 30, just before 11 PM, a violent and armed mob comprised of something like 100-150 “outside instigators” or “counter-protestors” entered the Palestine Solidarity Encampment which had been built at Dickson Plaza on the UCLA Campus, and unleashed horrific violence on the students, faculty, and staff in the encampment. According to multiple reports from various news outlets, none of which are disputed, this mob used sticks and other objects to beat the protestors who were offering nonviolent resistance and threw fireworks and metal barriers into the barricades in an attempt to breach the barricades. This grisly violence went on unchecked for nearly four hours. It is also not disputed, and once again this claim is attested to reports by multiple witnesses, that the campus police stood by idly while violence was being let loose upon the students.  Such an egregious dereliction of duty, indeed encouragement of violence, must be weighed against repeated assurances given by you that you value nothing more than the safety of students and everyone else from the “Bruin community”. You apparently called the mayor of Los Angeles around 1 am on May 1^st and it is not until 3 am that the LAPD and other police offers moved in and sought to separate the mob from the protestors in the encampment.

This round of violence, in which the complete abdication of duty and moral responsibility on the part of the UCLA administration headed by you is all too transparent to any observer, and to which I shall return momentarily, was followed by the events of the morning of May 2^nd starting around 2 am.  For nearly the entire day of Wednesday, May 1, the campus had been turned into a garrison or police state. I was on campus for most of the day and left the campus around 12:40 am and saw well over 150 policemen armed to the teeth and apparently prepared for civil war.  Then, about 2 am, this horde of policemen moved in, and over the next two hours they deployed rubber bullets, stun grenades, and flash-bang devices to forcibly remove the protestors, place them under arrest, and dismantle the encampment. Rubber bullets, in case you are not aware, have been used in intense political disturbances such as “The Troubles” in Ireland.  Apart from a miniscule number of minor skirmishes, all the protestors nonviolently submitted to arrest. It is necessary for me to add that, in describing them as nonviolent protestors, I am speaking as a scholar of the history of nonviolence who has been writing and teaching on these matters for close to four decades. I am aware that, weighed against the most stringent and rigorous conception of nonviolent resistance, the protestors may not always have passed the test, but all scholars and students of nonviolence are equally mindful of the fact that we cannot apply a wholly purist conception of nonviolence to every situation. There is not an iota of doubt in my mind that the protestors displayed an extraordinary and disciplined adherence, all the more remarkable for their youth, to the principles of nonviolence.

The events at UCLA have shocked not merely the campus community and the city of Los Angeles but many others around the world who are aware of the reputation of the university and have been following the student protests.  There are many reasons for the outbreak of violence and the events the last 60 hours, and there is certainly much blame to go around, but there is one person, and one person alone, who is principally responsible for this tragic turn of events—and that one person is you, Chancellor Gene Block. You cannot run away from this fact, however much you have tried to do so and will doubtless continue to do so, but it is important that everyone understand your culpability. Your naked partisanship towards Israel and Zionism, and your scarcely disguised indifference to, if not contempt for, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims has been transparent since you arrived on this campus ten years ago, and has become painfully visible to everyone in the aftermath of the horrific attack launched by Hamas against Israel on October 7.

I shall turn, very briefly, to some considerations to make known to the world the way you abandoned UCLA’s students to the wolves.  You’ve spoken often in your usual anodyne language of “shared values”, the “Bruin community”, the “Bruin family”, and so on, but let us consider whether such language has ever been anything more than sheer humbug and chicanery.  Consider, for instance, your statement to the “Bruin Community” of October 13.  The subject heading was, “Reflections at the Close of a Difficult Week.”  The first sentence begins with an expression of your desire to share some “reflections” on a “challenging week”.  You then mention that “six days ago” a “heinous assault was perpetrated upon Israeli civilians by the terror organization Hamas, a despicable attack that included the killing of children and the elderly as well as the taking of innocent hostages.” I concur with you entirely, but you then point out this what happened on October 7 was “the largest one-day killing of Jews since the end of the Holocaust.”  This is not the time and place for a history lesson, but let me alert you to the fact that even many of the most reputable scholars of the Holocaust, and you are most emphatically not one, have pointed out how inadvisable it is to make such a comparison, and many have even argued that there is grave peril in exploiting the narrative of the Holocaust to confer perpetual immunity to the state of Israel for any and every kind of action it deems fit. But let us ignore all this: by October 13^th, Israel had already inflicted massive and illegal collective punishment on the Palestinians, destroyed large chunks of Gaza, and killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children.  Yes, I suppose all this made for a “difficult” and “challenging” week. Indeed, your very framing of the mass killings of Palestinians as producing a “challenging” time, while of course the attack perpetrated by Palestinians was “heinous” (which, let me reiterate, it indeed was), is an incitement to hatred for Palestinians.  As for the “hostages”, I will not refer to the tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them but boys, who have been languishing in Israeli jails under the grossly inhumane practice of administrative detention, which allows Israel to hold them in confinement for indefinite periods of time without charging them.

Let me, however, turn to the chronology of the last 2-3 days alone. You declared the encampment “unlawful” and “unauthorized” on the afternoon of April 30, and less than twelve hours later the violent mob tore into the protestors at the encampment.  It is not at all difficult to imagine that they construed your declaration of the encampment as “unlawful” and the warning to the students to take it down as a green light to proceed to expedite the outcome that you desired. As I have suggested, you have persistently been throwing dog whistles at Islamophobes, racists, and Zionists, and it is also remarkable that repeated letters addressed to you by faculty concerned about this incitement to hatred against Palestinians and Muslims were never answered.  Perhaps you think that it is beneath you to reply to faculty, though you periodically mouth the customary platitudes about “shared governance”. Did you take the faculty into consideration before you declared the encampment “unlawful” and threatened that it would be taken down? I am not aware that you did. And, similarly, did you consult with the faculty before you summoned a massive police force—an ungainly sight if there ever was any, and one that should mortify anyone who thinks of the university as a home to the exchange of ideas and as “temple” of learning—to take down the encampment and arrest the students? But, to return to the chronology of events, the newspapers reported just a couple of days ago that you have been summoned to testify before the US Congress on May 23 on anti-Semitism at the UCLA campus.  You saw, as we all did, how a McCarthy-like inquisition was unleashed upon the presidents of three Ivy League institutions a few months ago, and the painful consequences two of them had to bear as a result of the congressional hearing.  You were determined to prove that you could stand up to the protestors.  And so, of course, this meant that you were determined to show to the students that you meant business.

Many canards and fabrications have been floated by you, your acolytes and the extreme Zionists on this campus.  One of those canards, which constitutes the principal justification you have advanced for your actions, is that many students were blocked from entering classrooms or were obstructed in their day-to-day business around campus.  No evidence has been furnished by you or anyone else: one student appears in nearly every media video showing that he was obstructed, and one might even allow for the possibility that a few were, but those of us who have been teaching on the campus and speaking with others have witnessed no such incidents nor have we heard of any. This is yet another instance of the cheap, instrumental, and deplorable use of the term “anti-Semitism”—which, let me be very clear, is a real problem in this country—to tarnish protestors.  The sad part of the story is that the protestors understand very well, as you apparently do not, the difference between anti-Semitism, which I agree should be condemned unequivocally at every turn, and anti-Zionism.  The fabrication about the threats being experienced by Jewish students became one of the principal justifications for deploying a massive police force on campus and terrorizing and intimidating students. No one can fail to notice that, when the police were needed on the night of April 30, they were nowhere to be found; when they were not required at all the following night, had the protest been allowed to continue, they were deployed with your authorization. As Nithya Raman, Los Angeles City Council member for the 4^th District has noted, “The police actions at USC and UCLA have implied that the response protestors get from law enforcement is dependent on their politics, not their actions.”  Senator Bernie Sanders has described what is happening in Gaza as “ethnic cleansing”. I will allow you to draw your own inferences on what I might possibly mean in invoking Senator Sanders in describing the turns of events on our campus.

You, doubtless, are aware of the clear-headed editorial of May 1 published in The Daily Bruin which describes the attack by the police on student journalists and the “complicity” of the UCLA administration.  Please do not rub salt into the wounds of the students by arguing, as you have been doing all along, that you are acting to protect the campus from anti-Semitism and to ensure the “safety” of the students.  “The whole world is watching”, says the editorial, and the whole world also knows the donors and politicians to whom you are beholden.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had the audacity, several days ago, to demand that the National Guard be called in to crush the protestors and you evidently appear to have been all too happy to take your marching orders from this much-reviled foreign leader.  You may wish to reflect on the indubitable fact that there has throughout been a significant presence of Jewish faculty, staff, and students in the encampment, and Jewish voices for peace have been important in ensuring that the world understands that the war in Gaza is a war against humanity.  Many of the Jewish protestors, it appears to me, are speaking from an awareness of the deeply rooted ethical traditions in their faith and an attack on them is, in fact, the real anti-Semitism in which you may be complicit.  Nothing gives the lie to the claim that the protests were marked by anti-Semitism as much as the solidarity of Muslim and Jewish protestors, though what is equally remarkable is the extraordinary commitment to the cause displayed by people from all walks of life, nationalities, religious backgrounds, and ethnicities who are not being driven by a narrow-minded conception of identity politics. If you have seen the videos of the encampments at UCLA and at other university campuses, and videos on the anti-war protests more broadly, you could not have failed to notice the very large, indeed I would say almost dominant, presence of women and female students of color from all backgrounds. They have been at the forefront of this movement which, quite rightly, speaks of an alternative and better future.  It is precisely this aspiration that the administration has sought to crush at UCLA.

Since, in the tradition of nonviolence, I do not like to use the language whereby one makes demands of others, and who am I in any case to make demands of a powerful person such as yourself, I would like to invite you to take the steps enumerated below if you have any sense of contrition.  Though I have no expectations in this regard, I invite you to (1) issue an unconditional apology to the entire UCLA community, and specifically to those in the Palestine Solidarity Encampment who have been harmed; (2) issue whatever rejoinders you can muster in the form of an open letter; (3) pay for the medical treatments borne by the students who were injured in the violence; and (4) tender your resignation, effective immediately.  I would be amiss if I did not suggest to you, considering that you end nearly every letter to the “Bruin community” with suggestions about counseling resources, that you undertake intensive sensitivity and anti-racist training.

Yours sincerely,

Vinay Lal
Professor of History and Asian American Studies

Tagore’s Dak Ghar in the Warsaw Ghetto: The Art of Living in the Art of Dying

Something remarkable happened exactly this time of the year, perhaps almost to the day, in 1942.  A play by Rabindranath Tagore, Dak Ghar, would be performed, of all places, in the Warsaw Ghetto.  Some days later, in early August, the Nazis started to empty out the ghetto with the transportation of its residents to Treblinka, among the most notorious of the extermination camps in the vast, almost incomprehensible, labor and death camp universe created by the Nazi regime. The children who acted in the play and its director, who headed the orphanage in the ghetto, all went to their death in Treblinka and disappeared without a trace.  Some will say, therefore, that what happened was not so much remarkable as ordinary:  those who vanished into the darkness of the night were only among the six million who suffered a similar fate, and whatever “light” the play may have cast was soon extinguished. One of the difficulties in comprehending the Holocaust, of course, is that the scale of the killings renders each death, the death of six million, remarkable–as in noteworthy, calling itself to our attention–and ordinary at the same time.

Monument to Janusz Korczak, Warsaw.

The fact that Janusz Korczak, a pediatrician, writer of children’s literature, and advocate of children’s well-being, should have chosen to perform Dak Ghar [the post office] in the face of death is in itself of singular importance and presents something of a puzzle. Just why did Korczak seek to mount something like a spiritual resistance to oppression by resorting to a play by an Indian writer?  Did he seek to prepare the children under his charge for death?  Did he think that the art of dying is just as important as the art of living?  Did his embrace of Tagore at this juncture signify his willingness and indeed aptitude to transcend the barriers of time and space?  The circumstances under which Korczak was moved to embrace the play are best comprehended with brief considerations of the origin of the ghetto, the outline of Tagore’s play, and the worldview that Korczak most likely came to adopt.

Poland capitulated to the German blitzkrieg just days after the country was attacked on 1 September 1939 and the Nazis at once enforced draconian anti-Semitic measures besides subjecting many Jews to forced labor.  In October 1940, the Nazis announced the establishment of a Jewish ghetto, and by the following month nearly all the 375,000 Jews in Warsaw—constituting a third of the city’s population—had been forced into the ghetto, which occupied just 2.4 percent of the city’s surface area and was fenced off from the rest of the city by a wall that Jews were forced into building. The ghetto was designed to keep Jews isolated from the world, and not only from the rest of the city; economic activity was largely branded illegal and food was in such short supply that deaths from disease and starvation mounted.  The ghetto would, doubtless, have been eliminated in time, considering that at least by 20 January 1942, when the Nazi leadership struck upon the plan euphemistically if not chillingly coined as the “Final Solution” at the Wannsee Conference, the idea had taken root that all of Europe’s Jews would be put to death.  In 1943, following an uprising, the Warsaw Ghetto was razed to the ground; however, months before, in July 1942, the transportation of Jews to the killing center known as Treblinka, 60 miles to the northeast of Warsaw, had commenced.

Among the ghetto’s residents Janusz Korczak, born in 1878 as Henryk Goldszmit, was doubtless among the most recognized figures in Warsaw.  A pediatrician by profession, he had by his late 20s already gained something of a reputation as a writer of children’s books, and in 1911-12 he assumed the position of director of an orphanage for Jewish children.  Korczak embraced a conception of childhood that was breathtakingly radical: while he allowed children every latitude as children, recognizing childhood as a special form of dispensation, he also saw children as entirely capable of exercising their own agency.  Children were treated as the equals of adults, and rights and duties were assigned to them as they were to adults; according to the US Holocaust Museum online “Holocaust Encyclopedia”, the orphanage was “run as a ‘children’s republic.’  The young residents  regularly convened a court to hear grievances and dispense justice.”

Korczak with children.

When all Jews including Korczak were forced into the ghetto, the number of children under his charge grew as disease and starvation rendered more of the children orphans.  His principal concern throughout remained sheltering them from suffering, though life in the ghetto scarcely permitted such an outcome, and Korczak strove to maintain their physical and mental well-being.  On the eve of the commencement of the deportations to Treblinka, his friends offered to help him escape; reportedly even some of the German officers who were admirers of his work claimed that they could help Korczak to safety.  Korczak refused all such offers of assistance and insisted that he would have to remain by the side of the children.  In “A Generation” (1956), the first film by the master of Polish cinema, Andrej Wajda, Korczak is seen leading the children in singing a song as they march, almost merrily, to the deportation site (umschlagplatz).

It may be said that Korczak’s other response to offers to help him avoid the fate of other Jews was to stage Tagore’s Dak Ghar.  But why this play?  The protagonist of Tagore’s play is an orphaned boy, Amal, who has some terminal illness; though his adoptive uncle and aunt have brought him up lovingly, on the doctor’s advice he is prevented from going out in the open air and is confined to a room within the house.  Amal spends most of the day by the window, looking out on the world; he strikes up conversations, through the window, with passers by, among them a group of boys, a flower girl, and the village watchman.  He fantasizes about places that he would like to visit and the journeys that he might yet undertake.  Across the road, a post office is being built, and Amal hopes to receive a letter one day from the King; as the play nears its end, Amal believes that the letter has arrived.  The King’s herald enters with a splash and lets it be known that the King himself will make a regal entry at the stroke of midnight, and the King’s physician then follows in anticipation of the visit of His Majesty.  Seating himself by Amal’s bedside, he commands everyone to be silent and whispers:  “Sleep is coming over him.  I’ll sit by his pillow; he’s dropping into slumber.  Blow out the oil-lamp.  Only let the star-light stream in.  Hush, he slumbers.”

Izaak Celnikier, “Umschlagplatz (Korczak)”, another title: “Death of Janusz Korczak (detail). Izaak Celnikier (1923-2011) was a ward of the Korczak Orphanage from 1934 to 1938. He survived several concentration camps. This is how he imagined Korczak’s arrival at the Umschlagplatz. Collection: Jewish Historical Institute.

In his preface to The Post Office (1911), William Butler Yeats recognized “deliverance as the theme of the play”:  though Amal dies at the end, he does so not merely with dignity but almost regally.  The room may have confined him physically, but it could not constrain his imagination.  Indeed, death is but a deliverance:  though on the base level it is the freedom from the shackles of an existence where generally the development of the soul is crippled, the imagination fettered by petty thinking, and life reduced to a series of misfortunes, deliverance may also be actively courted as the very affirmation of life—even as, paradoxically, the only form of eternity.  In the stuffy and still life of the cramped quarters of the ghetto, with hundreds of children to one Amal, it would have been an enormous challenge to stage the play and bring the light of a starry night to tender souls whose lives had been blighted by those who had forsaken their own humanity.

The Warsaw Ghetto would, the year after Korczak and the children under his care were sent to their death at Treblinka, erupt in an uprising.  The Nazis retaliated in the language to which they were accustomed and with the tools of their trade:  they killed thousands of Jews in retaliation, bombed and burned every building in turn, released gas into the sewers, booby-trapped manholes, and more.  The ghetto was reduced to rubble, yet not to naught:  from dust we come to return to dust. Here, in the staging of the play, Korczak by contrast sought to play with the very idea of defiance, showing that defiance may express itself in more than the customary languages of defiance.  There is, unquestionably, something remarkable—no, let us describe the phenomenon by a more glamorous, more telling word, and call it wondrous—that, practically on the eve of their death, the children at Warsaw Ghetto would be guided into staging a performance of The Post Office.  Korczak had conveyed two subtle and yet inexpressibly messages that he sent through the post office. In the art of dying is the ultimate art of living.  And, secondly, victory may be more catastrophic for the victor than for the defeated. We are, it seems, yet to receive those letters.

This is a slightly modified version of an article first published under the same title at abplive.in on 20 July 2023.

The Feverish, Beautiful Madness of the World Cup

Saudi Arabia mid-fielder Saudi Arabia Salem Al-Dawsari (center) celebrating with a flip after scoring a spectacular goal that gave Saudi Arabia the lead and the win in the Group stage match against Argentina at Lusail.

The World Cup started in Qatar less than a week ago and, my oh my, it has set the world on fire. What else is there in life to compete with the feverish, beautiful, almost inexplicable madness of the World Cup?

There is, in reality, only one World Cup.  India and a few other countries that, with the exception of the late entrant to cricket, The Netherlands, inherited the game from England as former colonies recently competed in the ICC T20 World Cup. There is similarly the ICC One Day International version.  America has the gumption to call its baseball finals the “World Series” and similarly the National Basketball Association (NBA), which is confined to the United States (with a slight nod to Canada) and until a couple of decades ago barely even had any players from outside the US, describes the winners of the finals as “world champions”.  But the inescapable truth is that these are all comparatively parochial exercises in sports.  The only event that merits the designation of World Cup is the global battle for football supremacy.

In our day, as has been the case for some time, nationalism is inextricable from sports.  Thirty-two teams, having gone through the qualifying rounds, are competing this year in Qatar for the champion’s trophy, and in 2026 the number of countries that will field team increases to 48.  The fans come decked in their country’s colours.  The thrill that passes through their entire body when their country scores, sending them into convulsions, is akin to sheer bliss.  And, yet, it is the particular feature of what the Brazilians call “the beautiful game” that nationalism is just as often transcended as it is reinforced.  But let us not get ahead of ourselves.

To get a glimpse of what moves the world, what animates people, and the passion that impels men to invest their life savings and travel thousands of miles to follow their beloved team, one must turn to the World Cup.  It is a phenomenon quite unlike any other:  many suppose that the splendour of the Olympics is more than a match for the World Cup, but that is a wholly erroneous view.  There is something quite staid and officious about the Olympics; it projects power in a dull and orderly fashion.  To be sure, every now and then an Usain Bolt comes along and acts like a lightning rod, and likewise the female gymnasts and the divers with their synchronized moves before they plunge into the water impress and earn not only a name for themselves but cultural capital for the countries that they represent.  But the Dionysian – the ecstatic, sensuous, emotional, Bacchanalian – element that characterizes the World Cup is missing from the Olympics.  It is no surprise that China has over the last two decades made its way to the top besides the United States in the Olympics medals standings but is a non-entity in the World Cup.  The boring monstrosity that is the Chinese Communist Party would be lost at sea in the excess and ecstasy that is the World Cup.

This edition of the World Cup in Qatar has had its share of scandals, stories, and surprises—and the event is still in its early stages, with Brazil just having played its opening game.  There are rumours that the Qataris bribed their way into becoming the Chosen Ones.  For Europeans, from whom the rest of the world has learned a great many abominations such as racism, colonialism, and genocide, to pretend that that this alone is scandalous is something like the kettle calling the pot black.  Qatar is very hot in the summer, the usual time of the year when the World Cup is staged, and so it was moved to November-December, a comparatively “cooler” time of the year in a country where it remains at least warm throughout the year.  Perhaps the timing of the world’s most famous sporting event is inconvenient for Europeans, but it is time that Europe, which receives far more slots than any other continent, learned that it is no longer the center of the world.

There is much grumbling that Qatar is not permitting fans to wear armbands that display support for LGBTQ+ rights and European fans are scandalized that the sale of beer at World Cup stadiums has been prohibited.  But, if one had to speak of the scandalous, far more pertinent is the fact that several hundred migrant labourers, whose story I will convey in a separate piece, have died building World Cup stadiums in Qatar.  Their deaths will be put down to the usual weary disclaimer, “That is the way of the world.” Meanwhile, FIFA, the international football governing body that organizes the World Cup, has revenues of $5 billion and many of the players themselves earn tens of millions of dollars annually. 

Nevertheless, unless we think that the beautiful does not have a sordid side to it, this World Cup has already been a joyous explosion of talent, generating a feverish excitement and results that have stunned those who love this game that, at its best, is absolutely mesmerizing.  Spain demolished Costa Rica, 7-0, even if at times it appeared to be just playing a practice match.  Iran, which is being hammered by protests back home—another story which the world should watch with utmost attention—received a different kind of drubbing on the field as England made mincemeat of it, 6-2.  France had a spectacular beginning and, by a score of 4-1, made short work of Australia.  But this World Cup has been nothing if not a mélange of the predictable and the unpredictable, reason and superstition, the mundane and the extraordinary—and the unpredictable is always more promising. Who would have thought that Japan would send Germany, a powerhouse of football, into misery?  Two goals from two Japanese strikers were more than enough to neutralize and subdue the Germans who had one goal from a penalty. 

It is said that Japan’s victory had been foretold.  The day before the match, Taiyo, a river otter at an aquarium, had placed a miniature football in a blue bucket adorned with a Japanese flag, ignoring both the red bucket with a German flag and the yellow bucket that signified a drawn game.  In an earlier generation, the Europeans would have chuckled at this story and described it as a species of “Oriental superstition.”  But the world is now chuckling at the Germans.  The Japanese are calling upon the government to declare a national holiday—and thus emulate Saudi Arabia, which brings us to the most astonishing surprise unleashed thus far at this World Cup, or indeed in international sports.  No one expects anything much from the Saudis:  the oil-rich kingdom is, in the common imagination, good for nothing, its opulence having derived from neither from the labour nor the skill or intelligence of its own citizens. The country has made many strides in becoming green, while making the rest of the world dependent upon oil.  It is known the world over for many other unpleasantries, from unattractive potentates to forbidding women (until just some months ago) from driving cars.

Saudi Arabia has barely a presence on the international sport scene, except perhaps in falconry, and its football team is home-grown with little experience in international matches. Their opening match was with Argentina—a country that, much like Brazil, dreams football. Argentina came into the World Cup fresh from its victory over Brazil in COPA 2021, the championship that establishes football supremacy in South America.  Saudi Arabia’s leader, Mohammed bin Salman (known generally as MBS), had apparently instructed the players to go and enjoy themselves, and not think about winning.  The Saudi footballers more than enjoyed themselves; they disobeyed MBS and pulled off a stunning victory over Argentina, a win all the more spectacular as it came off an extraordinary goal—a demonstration of enormous skill, a flight of pure joy—by Al-Dawsari.  MBS declared the following day a national holiday in Saudi Arabia.

How far Saudi Arabia will go in this World Cup is anyone’s guess.  There was, a decade ago, the Arab Spring—a rather more momentous development in world politics. It did not last very long; some will say that it eventually led to chaos and lawlessness, even facilitating the rise of autocratic leaders such as Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the President of Egypt who rules with an iron hand.  Saudi Arabia’s victory over Argentina is being described as a miracle, almost as an awakening of the Arab world.  It suggests that football, too, is being democratized:  the day when neither a South American nor European team wins the World Cup may not be very far off into the future.  The ascent of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations in the football world is a lovely thought. 

But this victory too can only be seen as bittersweet. MBS is, to use a colloquialism, a nasty piece of work, at least privately thought by the US and European countries to have ordered the gruesome killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018.  He has been looking for ways to rehabilitate himself and one can be certain that he, much as many other autocratic “leaders” have done, will use the victory of the Saudi national football team over Argentina to flaunt himself as a genuine leader, a visionary who is opening the country to the West and inspired the players to outdo themselves. The World Cup has never been only about football:  power, politics, and nationalism are intrinsic to the game.

Yet, there is, still, the artistry and elegance of that delivery into the net by Al-Dawsari that sent the world into a tizzy.  It is all this that makes for the beautiful, feverish madness of the World Cup.

First published in English at abplive.in under the same title on 25 November 2022.

Hindi translation published as विश्व कप की बेकरारी, बेताबी वाला खूबसूरत सा पागलपन फीफा on 25 November 2022.

Telugu translation published as ఫుట్‌బాల్ ప్రపంచ కప్! ఇది కేవలం ఆట కాదు అంతకుమించి! on 25 November 2020 at telugu.abplive.com

Bengali translation published as বিক্ষোভ, প্রতিবাদের মিছিলেও কাতার মেতেছে ফুটবল উৎসবে on 25 November 2020

Sangam and Agora: A Forum of Poets, Philosophers, Scholars, and Autodidacts

A Short Note or Informal Manifesto

Vinay Lal and Grzegorz Kwiatkowski

Though the idea for a new international forum comprised of poets and philosophers, writers and scholars, and activists and public intellectuals was conceived by us some months ago and has been germinating in our minds for much longer, the recent turn of events signaled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has underscored the desirability of such a venture.  However reprehensible this act of aggression, and whatever the geopolitics that inform the present circumstances, we aver that war is always a crime against humanity.

The uncomfortable fact is that the world has been spiraling out of control for some years, oddly enough in the wake of the triumphant declaration by the United States, following the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that the entire world appeared to be gravitating towards liberal democracy and the ethos of the free market economy.  Even as countries such as China and Russia have hardened their resolve to suppress dissent at home, many established democracies have been veering towards authoritarianism in recent years. On the economic front, it is widely conceded that inequality in nearly every country has grown immensely, and the various goals that the United Nations and its myriad agencies have set from time to time for the elimination of poverty, hunger, malnutrition, or illiteracy are not even remotely close to being met. The goalposts, whether with regard to literacy, access to health care, schooling, and so on, have shifted an innumerable number of times in the last half century.

However, the tenor of our present malaise or, to use an overly wrought word, “crisis”, cannot be captured by the decline of liberal democracy or the obscene economic disparities that make a mockery of our pretensions to a world where considerations of equity, social justice, and peace reign supreme.  Beyond all this, the stark, brutal, and unremitting reality of climate change threatens to make every other misfortune or even catastrophe look puny in comparison.  The most recent “Sixth Assessment Report” (2021) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes for grim reading, unequivocally clear as it is that the efforts to mitigate global warming have been woefully insufficient.  It declares that “global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21^st century unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades”, and it goes on to warn that “continued global warming is projected to further intensify the global water cycle, including its variability, global monsoon precipitation and the severity of wet and dry events.”  The extreme weather events that have plagued the world—not the least of them 100°F temperatures in Siberia—in recent years will almost certainly increase, though speaking of plague should of course remind us of the catastrophic coronavirus pandemic that gripped the world.

War, political authoritarianism, the drift away from democracy, unmitigated climate change, the spiraling increase in consumption, the reduction of the human to homo economicus:  catastrophic as all this is, it is insufficient to describe what ails us today.  Nor will it be adequate to add to the above narrative other elements of the global situation in the hope that we will better comprehend the temper of our times. It is entirely reasonable, for instance, to suggest that the seductions of globalization have given way to the recrudescence of nationalism.  Some of us, especially if we have been life-long students of anti-colonial movements and have partaken of them in our own modest ways, recognize nationalism as a ‘disease’.  The difficulty of persuading those who have been at the receiving end of colonialism to think beyond nationalism must be recognized, but nationalism cannot be deflected or confronted merely with anodyne expressions of the fact that people are fundamentally ‘good’ and affirmations of the necessity of being a ‘world citizen’.  All too often, the ‘world citizen’ is a citizen of nowhere, and therefore bears none of the responsibilities that attach to the idea of citizenship. The ‘world citizen’ is only another expression of the rights-bearing individual who in principle has become the normative expression of what it means to be human, a stark indication of how far we have moved away from the language of ‘duties’.

The malaise of which we speak points to something deeply disturbing in the human condition at present—something akin to the end of imagination, even as all around the world common people take to the streets to signify their dissent, publishing flourishes, and the internet seems abuzz with thousands of ideas.  Language can restrain, limit, and enslave us as much as it liberates us. Everywhere there is the injunction ‘to think outside the box’, though it should be obvious that anyone using so cliched a phrase is unlikely to ever do anything like that.  Whoever heard anyone proudly declaring that they would like to think inside the box?  (A similar problem exists with the vastly overused and banal word, ‘excellence’, regarding which Bill Readings made the most apposite observation, in The University in Ruins, that it signifies absolutely nothing.) T. S. Eliot, in “Little Gidding” (The Four Quartets), put it this way, “History may be servitude, history may be freedom.” To the great detriment of the world, the languages in which the human predicament has been framed in the post-World War II have been largely shaped by the practices of the social sciences in the United States.  The problems of America become, willy-nilly, the problems of the rest of the world; when America sneezes, the rest of the world sneezes.  When the master is sick, as Malcolm X put it inimitably, “we sick”.  Identity politics of the sort that is exceedingly common on the American university campus and has slowly made its way into other sectors of American society has now become part of the common conversation in many countries, but we do not think that ‘identity politics’ is a very productive way of delivering a just society or an equitable social order.

What is required is a greater appreciation of more fundamental questions that underscore the precarity, ambiguity, and uncertainty of human experience.  Every generation, admittedly, tends to think that its own woes are the worst, but we would do well to inquire what makes our malaise profound and distinct. We have already pointed to the conjuncture of various circumstances, at the apex of which stands the problem of the Anthropocene, but the gravity of the problem can be amplified by seeking to understand what makes our gross indifference to our common future, as well as man’s inhumanity to man, different in these times.  The 20^th century was a century of total war, but first World War I—the “Great War”, the war that was supposed to wean us from all wars—and then World II put an end to the idea that humankind had freed itself of the addiction to war.  We need not add to the tally of these “world wars” the wars generated by the Cold War or modern-day genocides such as the one that decimated Rwanda in 1994.  In the last two to three decades alone, just exactly what have diversity training—little do the bureaucrats know that even dictators have to undergo “diversity training”—corporate social responsibility, “respect” training, and other respected shenanigans wrought except the great delusion that somehow we have become more sensitive and caring human beings and the idea that incrementally societies will free themselves of their prejudices.  The late David Graeber wrote wittingly and illuminatingly on ‘bullshit jobs’, but it is just as true that trillions of dollars are expended on ‘bullshit’ research that over the last several decades has yielded very little.

There is a character in Albert Camus’s novel, The Plague, who says that at the end of the day there is only one way to address the plague—“decency”.  But whatever happened to decency?  Or, even more tellingly, whatever happened to the idea of “shame”?  Does the idea of ‘shame’ have any currency at all in most societies these days?  We would go so far as to say that “shame” has virtually disappeared from the public vocabulary of our times.  Whoever speaks of “virtue”—except perhaps students of Greek philosophy, immersed in the reading of Plato and Aristotle.  The malaise of which we speak is captured in the unimpeachable and disturbing fact that every language of dissent has been hijacked, first and foremost by the gargantuan world of the American university.

This enterprise, which seeks no corporate or foundation funding, and is premised on the hope that goodwill, intellectual appetite and rigor, and imagination taken singly and in combination can command an audience, is thus animated by the conviction that poets, philosophers, writers, public intellectuals, scholars, and others must assume a greater place in thinking about the human condition and working on producing an ethical praxis more in congruence with ideas of social justice, equity, compassion, and even wisdom. Poetry makes nothing happen, wrote Auden, but of course as someone dedicated to the craft over decades he secretly pined for the day when Shelley’s apotheosization of poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” might bear fruit.  There is no such expectation on our part, but we would like to see what we can do across borders—the borders that persist between nations-state, between self and other, between disciplines, between the cerebral and the manual, and the other borders too numerous to mention that make radical transgression a key political and ethical imperative of our times.

Our modest hope is to convene this forum once a month, or at least every six weeks, and have a poetry reading, short presentations, and vigorous discussion.  Meetings will be held over zoom, and we may even in time use the transcripts to create volumes of collective authorship.  If, after several meetings, it appears that the enterprise does not inspire us enough, it can be abandoned—or passed on to others who are able to marshal creativity and intellectual insights more forcefully.

We will have our first meeting via zoom on Saturday, April 23^rd, at 10:30 AM (Los Angeles), or 6:30 PM—London; 7:30 PM—Poland; 11 PM—New Delhi.  Registration at this link is required:

https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIvf-uqqjgqEtHmmbAMikxJcbUDWXXTuCye

Vinay Lal, Los Angeles/Delhi: cultural critic, public commentator, blogger, and Professor of History, UCLA [email:  vlal@history.ucla.edu]

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, Gdańsk:  poet, writer, musician, and co-host of the Oxford workshop, “Virus of Hate” [email:  gregor.kwiatkowski@gmail.com]

Sangam=from the Sanskrit, meaning confluence of rivers, especially of the Ganga, Yamuna, and the (mythical) Saraswati at Prayag; also refers to the Tamil Sangam poets, who flourished 500 BCE-300 CE; Agora=from the Greek, an open public space for markets, assemblies, and itinerant philosophers

Militants Strike, Britain Out: The 1946 Naval Indian Mutiny

The Naval Indian Mutiny (RIN) mutiny, which ‘erupted’ on February 18, 1946, has long been overshadowed by the political trials of INA (Indian National Army) officers and soldiers which commenced in November 1945 and captured the nation’s attention. What was, of course, behind the INA was the charismatic figure of ‘Netaji’ Subhas Bose, whose storied exploits had been the talk of India and won him the affection of tens of millions of his countrymen and women.  In 1939, running for the Presidency of the Congress for a second time, against the express wishes of Gandhi, Bose had triumphed only to discover within weeks that the Congress machinery was behind the Mahatma and that he could not function effectively as President of the Congress.  In 1941, while placed under house arrest, Bose staged a daring escape from his Calcutta home from where he made his way to Afghanistan and eventually to Germany where he managed to get an audience with Hitler.  All this was theatrical enough, but merely icing for the cake:  in 1943, he took over the Azad Hind Fauj (INA) and in October that year he formed the Provisional Government of Free India.  The INA would see military action, most famously at Imphal and Kohima, and in Burma, but months before the war ended the INA had been decimated.  Bose’s own immediate future was uncertain at best, considering that Britain triumphed at the end of the war and that he had fought for the enemy, but providence had something else in store for Bose.  He is reported to have been killed in an air crash near Taiwan in September 1945.  Many in India refused to believe reports of his death; some still do so. It seemed a bizarre, certainly an unfair, death for one anointed ‘Netaji’, the hero of the nation.

The country was still reeling from the death of Subhas Bose when the British decided to initiate legal proceedings against some of its officers on charges of sedition, murder, and waging illegal war against the King-Emperor. That may explain, in part, why the RIN mutiny went into near obscurity, but oddly enough it was the saga of the INA that was, again in part, the catalyst for the RIN strike.  What cannot be doubted is that the naval mutiny was, as Sumit Sarkar, one of India’s leading historians, wrote, ‘one of the most truly heroic, if also largely forgotten, episodes in our freedom struggle.’  The rebels themselves underscored the importance of what they had achieved: ‘Our strike has been a historic event in the life of our nation.  For the first time the blood of men in the Services and in the streets flowed together in a common cause.  We in the Services will never forget this.  We know also that you, our brothers and sisters, will not forget.  Long live our great people!  Jai Hind!’

The enlisted sailors (or ‘ratings’, as they are known in naval jargon) had grievances galore. They were recruited under false promises of a decent salary, prospects for some advancement, good food, and a steady uniformed job in the defence of their nation.  What they got in return was rotten food, poor working conditions, and the racial insults that Indians were expected to bear chin up, even in good humour, with the alleged stoicism of their English officers.  It is not only conventional to think that subalterns cannot think for themselves, but also that they cannot look beyond their own little worlds to the world outside. Yet, the words of the ratings, and the pronouncements of the Naval Central Strike Committee, formed to represent the demands of the rebels, unequivocally suggest that they had other concerns as well.  The end of the war meant that men would be released back into civilian life and prospects for employment for demobilized men were poor.  Moreover, the ratings objected to the fact that they were being deployed in Indonesia, where the Dutch were determined to restore the colonial order after the Japanese interregnum, to stifle the genuine political aspirations of Indonesians. Besides all this, there was also the brute fact that there was a yawning gap between the treatment of British and Indian sailors.

On February 18, the ratings at the HMIS Talwar, a signals training establishment, struck.  The groundwork, one might say, had been laid weeks before.  The Commanding Officer of HMIS Talwar was given to vile racial abuse and contemptuous treatment of the ratings and had earned notoriety among them.  He commonly addressed them as ‘sons of bitches’, ‘sons of coolies’, and sons of bloody junglees’.  On 1 December 1945, the HMIS Talwar and other naval ships and shore establishments were expected to be displayed to the elites of the city, but early that morning British officers found the parade ground sprayed with signs, among them ‘Quit India’, ‘Revolt Now’, and ‘Down with the Imperialists’.  This was later determined to be the handiwork of Balai Chand Dutt, a senior telegraphist who had served with the navy for five years, and whose published memoirs furnish one of the key expressions of subaltern dissent.  Pramod Kapoor, whose book on the RIN mutiny is being released as this essay is being written, has shared precious and little-known details which suggest that, however spontaneous the uprising, the mutineers worked with the design of precipitating the revolt.  As one instance, the young journalist, Kusum Nair, later the author of such classics on Indian agriculture as Blossoms in the Dust and In Defence of the Irrational Peasant, engineered crushed stones to be placed on the evening of February 17 in the dal that was dished out to the ratings.  The food was customarily inedible; more so would it be on the day of the uprising.

“Rioting on the Streets in Bombay”, Royal Indian Navy Mutiny, 18-23 February 1946.

Just how widespread was the disaffection became clear soon enough:  in less than three days, at the height of the strike, the revolt had spread to over 75 ships, 20 shore establishments, and 20,000 sailors, all under the age of 26.  The British were inclined to respond with force, more particularly because, as Field Marshall Wavell, the Viceroy of India, put it in a telegram to Prime Minister Clement Attlee, the ‘example of the Royal Air Force, who got away with what was really a mutiny, has some responsibility for the present situation.’  The alarm in the establishment can be gauged from the fact that, astonishingly, Admiral John Henry Godfrey declared that he was prepared to see the navy decimated but that he would not tolerate insurrection.  What is not less remarkable is the widespread support the striking ratings received from workers and the residents of Bombay who responded to the Naval Central Strike Committee’s call for a city-wide hartal with enthusiasm.  Though, as shall be seen shortly, neither the Congress nor the Muslim League, the two main political parties of the day, were supportive of the strike, common people engaged in uncommon acts of fraternization. Many of the ratings had been on a hunger-strike; others, besieged by British troops, had run out of food; but, as the newspaper accounts and other testimonials suggest, people freely distributed food to the ratings and shopkeepers even encouraged them to take whatever they needed and refused payment.  Meanwhile, the strike spread to naval establishments over the country, and in Karachi the HMIS Hindustan was subdued after a gun battle.  The state of affairs in Bombay is suggested by the headlines, generally spread across the entire length of newspapers, that appeared on February 23, the day after Bombay no longer seemed under the control of the colonial state: ‘Bombay in Revolt: City a Battlefield’ (The Hindustan Times); ‘Nightmare Grips Bombay’ (Dawn—then published in Bombay); and ‘Rioters Machine-Gunned in Bombay (The Statesman).

HMIS-Hindustan after the British reasserted their control.

Around 400 people would be killed in the conflict.  Yet, after all this, the strike came to an end on February 23—suddenly, all too suddenly. The capitulation of the Strike Committee is said to have been forced by the fact that, barring Aruna Asaf Ali, none of the political leaders were behind the strike.  One might reasonably expect that Gandhi, who at least took a principled stand against violence, would throw in his weight to persuade the ratings to give up their arms.  Just how much influence he could still exercise in such an affair is a question that few have asked.  It is, nevertheless, the position of the other principal political figures that has in the historiography of the naval mutiny come under scrutiny and sometimes withering criticism. Nehru is said to have wanted to rush to the sailors and lend his support to them, but the conventional narrative states that Patel, who had been authorized by the Congress to converse and negotiate with the members of the Strike Committee, dissuaded Nehru from doing anything so rash.  It is on Patel’s assurance to the ratings that their grievances would be addressed, and that equally they would not be punished if they surrendered, that they are said to have called off the strike.

As Kapoor has detailed in his book, 1946—The Last War of Independence:  Royal Indian Navy Mutiny, the story of the betrayal of the ratings is one of the more wretched chapters in the history of Indian nationalism and the failure of political leadership. The sailors were imprisoned, put into camps, dismissed without payment of past dues, and sent back to their villages.  They would be lost to history. Yet ‘failure’ is an anodyne word to describe the hard-boiled realism that prompted Patel, Azad, Nehru, and Jinnah to throw the ratings to the wolves.  That is a reasonable interpretation, especially from the standpoint of those who have always been inclined to view the Congress as a bourgeois organization that was only interested in the trappings of power.  Independence was on the horizon and an insurrection in the armed forces of the nation—a nation that was about to be parceled out between the Congress and the Muslim League—was not to be tolerated.  As Patel (in)famously wrote in defence of his action to persuade the ratings to surrender, doubtless with the steely pragmatism and determination for which he is now admired by the country’s political leaders, ‘discipline in the Army cannot be tampered with. . . . We will want the Army even in free India.’

There are far too many other interesting questions that emerge from the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 that cannot be addressed here, but two points may, in conclusion, be raised for further reflection on the part of the reader.  The communists alone are credited with having given the ratings their full support, but one must recall that communists had lost ground owing to their failure to support the Quit India movement.  They had now found an opening for redemption that they were scarcely likely to give up.  What is of course in many ways distinctive about Indian communism is the fact that there are many strands within it, and that most Indian communists have long been reconciled to working within the constitutional framework.  One suspects that a more nuanced reading of the communist support of the mutiny is needed, more particularly because in most countries communist regimes have been ruthless in suppressing dissent within the armed forces.  Secondly, nearly every commentator has pointed to the fact, highlighted by the ratings themselves, that Hindus and Muslims found themselves joined in a common cause and exhibited what appear to be feelings of brotherhood. If that was indeed the case, then there is all the more reason, given the fact that some within India would like to move the country towards the path of a Hindu rashtra, to celebrate the ability to transgress the religious divide.  It is a pity that this act of insurrection, coming at the tail end of the long struggle for freedom, has remained hidden from history considering that in its course and outcome it has something in it for nearly everyone, not least for those who think that it hastened the end of the British Raj.

This is a slightly revised version of a piece first published under the same title at abplive.in.

For a Gujarati translation, 1946નો ભારતીય નૌસેના બળવો: ક્રાંતિકારી હડતાલ, બ્રિટન ધરાશાયી, click here.

See also a companion piece, substantially different, published in The Indian Express in February 2018 and republished at this site called “An Inconvenient Insurrection“.

The Peregrinations of a Supposed Revolutionary: The Many Guises of Udham Singh

Part II of Udham Singh:  A Colonial Massacre and the Birth of a ‘Revolutionary’

Sardar Udham is curiously both an ambitious film that is lured by the idea of the epic and at the same time marred by a profound unself-reflexivity and insularity that also characterized Udham’s own life.  To say this much is already to invite the wrath of those who have canonized Udham as a great shaheed, a worthy addition to the country’s gallery of martyrs, but the film inadvertently furnishes grounds for taking the view that however courageous Udham may have been, he worked with a very limited if not impoverished conception of ‘revolution’.  The film does not purport to be a full-length biography, but it is tempted into being one.  The viewer acquires no knowledge of his life before the massacre, except for the fleeting remarks shared between police officers about his childhood at an orphanage after the loss of both his parents at an early age.  Attempts to claim Udham as a Khalsa Sikh doubtless also have something to do with the fact that he was raised at the Central Khalsa Orphanage from 1907 onwards.  The film commences in 1931, when Udham was released after four years in jail after being caught with a cache of arms and prohibited political literature which led to his conviction under the Arms Act.  We see Udham moving from one country to another, assuming aliases, taking up jobs in which he had little interest but which apparently allowed him time to foment his plan to assassinate O’Dwyer. Udham worked in various factories, as a peddler, carpenter, and engineer, and even as a lingerie salesman and as an extra on a film set. Throughout his adult life, the film suggests, Udham remained laser-focused on his objective just as Bhagat Singh remained his idol.  Whatever the vicissitudes and setbacks of life, Udham never lost sight of the objective he had set for himself, and similarly it is the teachings and memory of Bhagat Singh that animated him.  Just why it took him more than twenty years after the massacre, and some seven years after his arrival in England, to snuff out O’Dwyer’s life remains something of a mystery.  But what is even more striking is that Udham does not appear to grow very much in these years:  he was never a very lettered man to begin with, and where Bhagat Singh was to the end of his young life—he was sent to the gallows at the age of 23 in 1931—a keen if not voracious reader, Udham does not seem to have had any attachment to books.  The only book that left an impression on him was Heer Ranjha, perhaps in the rendering of Waris Shah, and it on this book that he chose to take an oath when he was put on trial for the murder of O’Dwyer.

It may be that, in Sircar’s own view, some of Udham’s movements do not quite add up to the main narrative, but their omission from his film point perhaps to Udham’s provincialism and certainly to the filmmaker’s own inability to comprehend the place of the wider Indian diaspora in the making of Udham Singh.  The film is silent on Udham’s intriguing years in Africa—according to some accounts, in Nairobi, and more likely in Uganda, where Indian labour was the backbone of the railways—where the young political rebel could conceivably have developed a sharper sense of the solidarity of the working class.  Even more tellingly, Udham’s first long trip to the US in 1924, resulting in a long stay of three years, is omitted from the narrative.  Udham is said to have become involved with the Ghadar movement in the US, but the American sojourn also netted him a wife—a Mexican woman, no less, if only because the Johnson-Reed (Immigration) Act of 1924 and other anti-Asian legislation shut out virtually all Asians from the US and compelled Indian men already in the US to take Hispanic women for their brides.  The only half-decent biography of Udham by Anita Anand, The Patient Assassin, furnishes more details than we have ever had of Udham’s life with Lupe Hernandez, whom he deserted, along with their two children, when he left the US in 1927.  Apparently Udham’s many supporters seem to have swallowed whole the notion that revolutionaries can be forgiven not only their excesses but such derelictions of family duty and parental responsibility if for no other reason than that making “revolution” is a forbidding task and that revolutionaries must not be subjected to the standards of bourgeois society.  In the US, in any case, Udham would for some time have been part of the Punjabi-Mexican community, though we can also locate him in the vortex of what the scholar Vivek Bald has charmingly described as ‘Bengali Harlem’, a network of Indians who merged into Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and African American communities where present-day Global South solidarities were anticipated in their own fashion.  These already elusive histories do not even leave a trace in Sircar’s film.

Udham Singh’s comings and goings may suggest to some that he was a man of cosmopolitan interests, or a theorist of revolution who was inspired by the idea of contributing to a worldwide upheaval of the working class, but this would be a very charitable interpretation of a peripatetic existence that remains something of an enigma.  To be sure, the film hints that Udham was aware of some of the immense footprint of the British empire, and he would have come to know that the Irish were among those who had withered under English oppression.  He was at one time even a gunrunner for the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and in one scene he tells an IRA man, ‘We had our Bloody Sunday’, a reference of course both to the Amritsar massacre and to the killings of civilians by British troops at a football match in Dublin in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence. In his broken English, Udham explains to the Irishman, ‘Your revolution and mine are the same.  You lamb, I lamb:  the butcher the same.’ But there is no hint that, in twenty years of this itinerant living, Udham derived a keener understanding of the struggle in India, or that he arrived at fresh insights after his interactions with the working class and communist political activists in Africa, Europe, and the United States.  Udham’s links to the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA) were largely through Bhagat Singh, though the precise historical record of their association is tenuous at best, and even Udham’s activities as a HSRA member were quite limited.  He seems in the film to go in and out of shadowy meetings with self-styled revolutionaries in Moscow and London, and there is much talk of ‘revolution’, but slogans do not make a revolution.  Indians, V S Naipaul would have said with his characteristic cynicism, are exceedingly good at shouting and sometimes coining slogans; but what is the more surprising thing is how many academics have been taken in by stories of the gallantry of the HSRA, which was as much of a slogan-making factory as it was a bomb-making workshop.

‘Let the world know’, Udham says to detective inspector John Swain at their last meeting before he goes to the gallows, ‘that I was a revolutionary.’  We are no wiser at the end of this film than we were at the beginning as to what is a revolutionary. Udham was in the vicinity of the massacre and, the film strongly avers, arrived at the blood-soaked Jallianwala Bagh later in the evening; and he then took an oath that he would avenge the massacre.  He nursed this grudge for twenty-one years before felling O’Dwyer with shots from his revolver and thereby demonstrating his patriotism, but what is “revolutionary” about such a practice of politics?  It is doubtful that Udham knew, but the one man who had reflected for decades on these matters, on political upheaval, violence, and the radical transformation of society, was Mohandas Gandhi.  We do not need the life of Udham Singh to write about Gandhi; however, it is impossible to engage with either Bhagat Singh or Udham Singh except in the backdrop of Gandhi, who absolutely dominated the political scene and whose presence was inescapable to anyone who sought to enter into politics.  One would not know this from watching the film, where Gandhi is mentioned but once, and from which the innocent viewer might walk away with the impression that freedom from colonial rule was wrought by a bunch of young boys and some girls wielding country-made guns and shouting themselves hoarse with the slogan, ‘Inquilab zindabad’ (‘Long Live Revolution’).  The martyr’s supporters, no doubt, have little time to spare for Gandhi, who was as usual forthright and uncompromising in his denunciation of the assassination of O’Dwyer and the injuries inflicted on Lord Zetland (Secretary of State for India) and two other English politicians as an act of ‘insanity’ which had caused him ‘deep pain’. While expressing his condolences to ‘the deceased’s family’, Gandhi noted that ‘such acts have been proved to be injurious to the causes for which they are committed’ (Statement to the Press, 14 March 1940).  Unlike the enterprising and brilliant if self-serving V. K. Krishna Menon, who at first unequivocally repudiated Udham’s act as ‘abhorrent’ but then engineered his appointment as junior counsel for the defence of Udham once he saw the enthusiasm with which expatriate Indians as well as Indians at home were willing to embrace the assassin, Gandhi remained consistent in adhering to the view that his differences with O’Dwyer and Zetland alike did not permit him to condone murder or an act of insanity. Writing a few days after the death of O’Dwyer, Gandhi described it as incumbent on the exponent of nonviolence to ‘make every Englishman feel that he is as safe in our midst as he is in his own home.  It fills me with shame and sorrow that for some time at least every Indian face in London will be suspect’ (Harijan, 23 March 1940).

What Sardar Udham misses, in common with nearly every film that has ever been made on Bhagat Singh, the HSRA, and Udham Singh, is the opportunity to cast the relationship between these revolutionaries and Gandhi as something other than purely adversarial.  It is Gandhi who was the principal author of the Congress Committee Report on the Punjab Disturbances, an extraordinary retort to the official Hunter Commission and a devastating indictment not only of the colonial machinery of repression but specifically of the culture of violence bred by both O’Dwyer and Dyer.  O’Dwyer knew of Gandhi’s role in the making of the Congress report, and there is a point in the film where O’Dwyer, shown promoting his book, The India That I Knew (1928), critiques Gandhi for suggesting that he, O’Dwyer, had sought to suppress political consciousness among Indians. Whether Udham—and the HSRA revolutionaries—knew or even cared is an interesting consideration.  But there is another point of intersection, one which often escapes the attention of commentators.  Whatever his distaste for violence, and his principled repudiation of acts of political sabotage and assassination, Gandhi was adamant that the colonial state was never to be permitted to cast political acts as common crimes.  Gandhi abjured the methods adopted by the HSRA, and even more so the rank opportunism of someone such as Vinayak Savarkar, but he recognized the political nature of their acts.  It is this outlook which shaped even his relationship to Savarkar, whose tendency to political chicanery and encouragement of violence among others Gandhi deplored even as he saw it fit to state that Savarkar deserved attention as a political offender.  Udham, one hopes, would have seen in Gandhi a supporter of his own adamant repudiation of the colonial attempt to cast him as a common criminal, as this exchange in the film between the prosecutor and Udham shows:

            Udham:  I was in jail for four years [1927-31].  But not for a crime.

            Prosecutor:  Why on earth would anyone be in prison for four years if they

                        had not committed a crime?

            Udham:  No, no, no crime.  I was fighting – fighting for freedom . . .

(to be continued)

See also Part One, The Making of Sardar Udham: A Massacre, a Young Man, and the Burden of Revenge.

Objects and the(ir) Objective: The Story of India

[A Review article on India:  A Story Through 100 Objects, by Vidya Dehejia.  Delhi:  Lustre Press/Roli Books, 2021.  ISBN:  978-81-94969174.  279 pp.]

Some years ago Sunil Khilnani, author of the elegantly written The Idea of India, a long discursive essay on post-independent India very much shaped by a Nehruvian sensibility, embarked on a rather different enterprise as he attempted to grapple with a country characterized by a long past.  How might we imagine the history of India if we were to view it through the lives of some of its most arresting men and women—and equally some who won little recognition beyond their own community, fell into obscurity, or were architects of policies that have long since been disowned?  The outcome was a book that Khilnani called Incarnations:  India in 50 Lives (2016).  It is understandable that his narrative should be peopled by the likes of the Buddha, Ashoka, Shankara, Kabir, Nanak, Mirabai, and Gandhi, but the choice of Charan Singh, a wily politician who served as the country’s caretaker Prime Minister for six months at the head of a wobbly coalition, will seem odd to many except perhaps to those who remember his reputation as an unstinting champion of the rural peasantry.  The choice of Satyajit Ray may seem inspired to film afficionados who recognize him as one of world cinema’s supreme auteurs, and whose Apu Trilogy is a landmark of humanism, but I suspect that the hundreds of millions who follow Salman Khan or Shahrukh Khan have barely heard of a director who crafted his films in the image of Mozart’s operas where, as Ray once explained, ‘groups of characters maintain their individuality through elaborate ensembles’.

Khilnani did not claim to be writing about the 50 most influential Indians, or the ‘greatest’ Indians, but it is in the nature of things that his 50 lives should have been construed as in some ways the lives of the most eminent Indians.  Any enterprise such as Khilnani’s must be marked by eccentricity.  It is a similar eccentricity, if that is the word to designate choices that sometimes appear unstable, quirky, and occasionally outlandish, that characterizes Vidya Dehejia’s audacious and intellectually provocative attempt to narrate the story of India through 100 objects.  Dehejia is principally an art historian and would doubtless have been inspired by A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), an attempt by Neil MacGregor to write a ‘world history’ through 100 objects in the gargantuan collection of the British Museum of which he was then the Director.  MacGregor was constrained only by the parameters set for him:  ‘The objects had to cover the whole world, as far as possible equally’, and address the totality of human experience, not only the lives of the rich and the powerful; consequently, the objects chosen could not merely be great works of art but had to speak to everyday life.  Dehejia in principle sets for herself a somewhat similar task with regards to the objects that she chooses, stating that she has tried not to privilege any political standpoint and that she has sought to be ‘even-handed and fair-minded’ in the story that she tells.  The desire to be ‘even-handed and fair-minded’ may evoke some cynicism from the reader with a knowledge of the British attempt in India to represent themselves as neutral gatekeepers, but others might say only that Dehejia is being true to the calling of her profession.

It is, however, in the structure of her book, lavishly illustrated and meticulously produced by New Delhi-based Roli Books, that she most closely emulates MacGregor with one significant difference.  Both books are divided into twenty chapters and generally four to five objects illustrate the thematic argument of each chapter; however, where MacGregor proceeds strictly chronologically, moving from one phase of history to another, Dehejia’s fidelity to chronology extends only within each chapter. Thus, for example, in discussing ideals of womanhood in India, Dehejia moves from a bronze statue of Queen Sembiyan Mahadevi, c. 900 CE, to a watercolour on paper from 1615 of Nur Jahan, whom some readers may perhaps be surprised to discover was an expert markswoman; and from there to a recent statue of Ahilyabai Holkar, who was an astute ruler as much as she was a pious Hindu in the mid-18^th century, to two early nineteenth century representations of Saraswati and Bharat Mata.

To understand the circumstances that have conspired to make possible a work such as Dehejia’s, it is necessary to recapitulate a few recent developments in historical scholarship.  There is, after some decades where cultural studies predominated and the gaze was riveted on the politics of representations, once again the turn to material history. It is immaterial that the Chola Temple Walls which Dehejia adroitly describes as a ‘Public Record Office’ (pp. 68-69), covered as they are with inscriptions, cannot quite be held in one’s hands as is generally true of many objects. Her objects are artefacts that inscribe a past, speak to the present, and occasionally portend the future. Secondly, Dehejia is still beholden to one of subaltern history and postcolonial theory’s most potent insights, namely the place of the ‘fragment’ in the imaginary of the nation.  Taken together, her objects—and other like objects—are more than the sum of the parts; but each is a fragment, sometimes calling forth other associations, occasionally a whole unto itself, and sometimes orphaned.  Thirdly, and relatedly, since national histories have become suspect to enlightened liberals, more particularly as they generally degenerate into becoming nationalist histories, scholars have had to search for new ways to write national histories without succumbing to the nationalist malady. Dehejia’s history of India through 100 objects can certainly be read in this vein.

It is as an art historian that Dehejia comes to her task and this shows equally in her choice of themes and the objects to illustrate the themes. Though four to five principal objects are apportioned for each part, the section on the ‘Art of the Illustrated Book’ is an exception with seven objects—and all these are examples of what may be called ‘high art’, folios from rare manuscripts and miniature paintings. At least half of the objects chosen by her are sculptural works or miniature paintings and the overwhelming and some will surely say misleading impression left upon the reader is of a civilization that was shaped predominantly by the artistic sensibility of Indian people.  One hundred objects are numbered but the ‘100’ is not to be taken literally, nor are the objects always drawn from India, even if they are clearly ‘Indic’ in origin or produced in some fashion under the sign of the Sanskrit cosmopolis:  thus, for example, a 9^th-century Sri Lankan statue of the Buddhist goddess Prajnaparamita is offered as an illustration of the ‘yogic body’, but the argument is supplemented both with seals from the Indus Valley (ca. 2000 BCE) to suggest the antiquity of yoga in India’s imagination and the famous 7^th century CE open-air ‘Great Penance’ relief carved on two boulders at Mamallapuram where yogic postures are depicted (pp. 34-37). The commentary that ensues is what one might expect from an art historian, though here Dehejia’s declared intent to eschew a political position here perhaps does short shrift to the subject.  There has been a lively debate in recent years, particularly in the United States, on whether yoga is intrinsically related to Hinduism: both the Christian right and Hindu nationalists have affirmed (though for different reasons) such a relationship, while many especially liberal practitioners of yoga claim that it is a wholly secular practice shorn of any religious underpinnings.  There is some controversy over whether the main motif of this magnificent sculptural relief is Arjuna’s penance or the descent of the Ganga, but in either case yoga’s associations with Hinduism seem unimpeachable. 

-Great Penance Relief at Mamallapuram (formerly Mahabalipuram), Tamil Nadu, 7th century CE. The figure of the ascetic in a yogic pose can be seen at the center, about a third of the way down from the top.

Dehejia is less reticent, however, on how what objects tell us about Hindu-Muslim relations and the contemporary project to read Hindu aspirations into the past.  She does not state her position bluntly but her repudiation of the communalist standpoint is clear enough.  It is a measure of the restraint with which she writes that the discerning reader will at once understand her position while the reader who is disposed towards Hindu nationalism is perhaps likely to think anew his or her own position.  Consider her treatment of this subject through two objects. A Chalukyan period (ca. 1000 CE) granite sculpture of a dvarapala (door guardian) interests her since it frequently changed hands, moving one from Hindu king to another in a tale of vanquishers and the defeated (pp. 62-63). Sometimes objects, and sacred centres—most famously Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, otherwise known as Sancta Sophia—fell to the conqueror of another faith, a phenomenon that she rightly points out can be seen ‘in most parts of the world’.  The communalist would like to read such phenomena exclusively through the lens of religious animosity, but it is the politics of conquest and the quest for power that characterize this history rather than the politics of religion. More arresting for many reasons, not the least being that even educated Indians know very little about the Deccan sultanates (1527-1686) and their extraordinary cosmopolitanism, is her choice of two miniatures from Bijapur (ca. 1604, pp. 106-7).  One features Ibrahim Adil Shah, Sultan of Bijapur, who wore the rudraksha beads associated with Shiva, playing the tambura; in the other miniature, produced at the Sultan’s behest, the goddess Saraswati, a veena resting on her left rap against her right shoulder, is rendered much like a Mughal princess.  This hybridized painting is emblematic of the syncretism of the Muslim courts.  Adil Shah had inscribed along the top the words, ‘Ibrahim, whose father is guru Ganapati and mother the pure Saraswati.’  Should we be surprised that in more recent times Ustad Bismillah Khan, the master of the shehnai (the double-reeded oboe common in north India) nonpareil, played at the Kashi Viswanath temple and that he regularly prayed to Saraswati?

Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah playing the tambura; ascribed to Farrukh Beg in an inscription written by Muhammad Hussain Zarin Qalam, c. 1610-11. From an album page. Collection: National Museum, Prague.

I would like to insist that one cannot begrudge Dehejia her choices.  Nevertheless, even as she candidly terms them ‘idiosyncratic’, the debate is not thereby closed.  Each object tells a story, and she is adept in narrating the story, but thousands of other objects, each illuminating in its own fashion, would have served her equally well. A number of arguments may be raised in this connection, again less so as criticism than as provocations. First, I wonder if it is not the case that Dehejia has been perhaps overly influenced by trends highlighting “diversity” and the occluded subjects of history.  A watercolour from 1615 of Empress Nur Jahan underscores her abilities as ruler and as an expert markswoman (pp. 236-37), and the aforementioned bronze statue of the 10^th century Chola queen Sembiyan Mahadevi and the 2011 statue of the 18^th century Ahilyabai of the House of Holkar are in the same vein (pp. 234-35, 238-39). In recent years there has been a spate of biographies of Mughal women of the royal household, some written, it seems, to counterbalance the lavish attention bestowed on the great Mughal rulers.  This is all fine and admirable, but still at the end a rather anodyne exercise, establishing only, as Dehejia argues more than once, that patriarchy in India (and elsewhere) has prevented women from attaining their full potential.  The more critical question is whether women in politics may furnish us a politics that will yield a more just and equal society. Secondly, and somewhat in this vein, India has historically provided richer possibilities of imagining a world that is not tethered to rigid conceptions of male and female, masculinity and femininity.  The stunning statue from a copper alloy of ca. 1000 of God as ardhnari (half-woman) points to a world where both masculinity and femininity were preceded by androgyny (pp. 84-85).  According to Dehejia, ‘the dominance of the male is clear in the fact that the composite image is called Shiva as Half-Woman’, but one must perforce ask:  ‘called’ by whom?  There is nothing intrinsic in the image which suggests the conception of God as predominantly female or male.  But supposing that Dehejia were right, one is then moved to inquire whether the art of the West, or of China, Japan, or Africa, also allowed for such imagery of the divine godhead?  Is the dualistic framework of thinking as much a problem in classical Indian thought as it is in the philosophical systems of the West?

Shiva as Ardhnari (Half-woman), c. 1000 CE, from Nepal. Copper alloy with gemstones. Approximately 83 cms. Collection: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The colonial civil servant and ethnographer William Crooke wrote a delightful and now forgotten book called Things Indian (1906). There are some 175-200 odd essays on subjects such as amulets, bamboo, the bazaar, camels, carpets, curry, diamonds, elephants, embroidery, fairs, rice, salt, tea, and snakes.  I am tempted to ask, after reading about amulets in Crooke’s book, why ‘bangles’ are not one of the 100 objects that Dehejia writes about:  the bangle-seller has been a ubiquitous presence in our bazaars and fairs, and the scene of a woman breaking her bangles upon learning of her husband’s death is to be found in scores of Hindi movies. A similar thought might arise regarding the mango and the banyan tree, but here Dehejia anticipates the reader in capturing these two ‘objects’ alongside the tiger, the peacock, and the lotus flower in the definitive stamps released by the Indian government’s post and telegraphs department (pp. 260-61). But their reproduction in this doubly diminutive form nevertheless suggests once again that everyday objects are slighted in favour of works of arts.  Where, the reader may also ask, is the cricket bat? If cricket is, alongside popular cinema, the enduring passion of so many in the country, it would appear to be deserving of some attention.  I was thinking likewise of the matka (clay water pot), the belna (rolling pin), and the pots and pans of the Indian kitchen.  The pressure cooker—the traditional one, not the new incarnation known as ‘instant pot’—was invented in the US and became practically obsolete there, except as a retrofitted bomb, but in India it has found an enduring home and the Indian kitchen is unthinkable without it.  Yet it is a mark of the suppleness of Dehejia’s thinking that some of these pots and pans do make their appearance in her ‘objects’, having entered into the imaginary of the contemporary artist Subodh Gupta’s massive installations, ‘Spill’ and ‘Very Hungry God’ (pp. 268-69). Objects with which we have lived for a very long time may take on new forms.  We can read new meanings into them.  It is to Dehejia’s credit that her book allows for this fecund play of possibilities.

Subodh Gupta, “Spill”, 2007.

[First published in a slightly shorter version in Open magazine (26 July 2021) under the title “An Objective History” and also available online (16 July 2021) here.]

Anyone but England: Race, Empire-Building, and Some Thoughts on the Euro Final 2020

Sunday afternoons are proverbially meant for relaxation and time with that simultaneously oddest and most ‘natural’ of social institutions called ‘the family’.  And what better way apparently to relax than to watch the Euro 2020 Final between England and Italy, both vying yesterday, July 11, for the trophy after a long drought:  Italy last won it in 1968 and England last won any major international football tournament in 1966 when it lifted the World Cup with a 4-2 defeat over Germany.  England has never owned the European Cup.  But England is nothing if it is not a football nation:  however, though it is scarcely alone in its passion, its fans are singular in having earned a notoriety all their own.  Indeed, the American journalist Bill Buford wrote in 1990 an engaging book on football hooliganism, Among the Thugs, focusing largely on English football fans from Manchester United with whom he traveled to many matches.  He found these football hooligans, whose devotion to their team rivals in intensity the religious feelings that the devout have for their faith, also shared some traits with those English who are affiliated to the white nationalist party, the National Front.  More pointedly, as he was caught in riots among these football fans in 1990 in Sardinia where the World Cup was being played, he unexpectedly found the violence to be ‘pleasurable’.  Violence, he wrote of these football fanatics, ‘is their antisocial kick, their mind-altering experience, an adrenaline-induced euphoria’ that shares ‘many of the same addictive qualities that characterize synthetically-produced drugs.’

The Creative Scholar: A Tribute to James Carse, Philosopher of Religion

Finite players win titles; infinite players have nothing but their names. — James Carse

           

James Carse, a philosopher of religion ‘by profession’ and an extraordinarily creative thinker at large, died on September 25 last year.  He was 87 years old. 

Australia and India in the Time of Covid: Racism, Colonialism, and Geopolitics

There was a time when Australia, a poor country cousin to both Britain and the United States,  was never on the minds of Indians—except when it came to the subject of cricket.  Australians have long had a reputation for being ferociously competitive in all sports and I recall from my childhood in the 1970s Indian commentators lamenting that their own sportsmen, unlike the Aussies, lacked ‘the killer instinct’. Defeating Australia on their home ground remained for Indian test cricket an objective that was only achieved thirty years after the two countries played their first test series in 1947-48.  If the first test on Australian soil was won in 1977, it took a little more than seventy years for India to win a test series in Australia.  But India’s most spectacular win might have been just months ago in January, when, much to the astonishment of Indians and Australians alike, indeed the entire cricketing world, India cast a spell at the Gabba stadium in Brisbane, where Australia had been undefeated against any team in 32 years, and won the test—and the series—with three wickets to spare.

A celebration by the Indian cricket test team at the Gabba stadium in Brisbane, January 2021. Source: https://www.sportskeeda.com/cricket/news-that-shows-strength-character-courage-michael-clarke-lauds-team-india-historic-series-win