Shunya's Notes

On Ambedkar and 'The Annihilation of Caste'

In the story of modern India, as any schoolkid will confirm, the anti-colonial struggle looms large. Almost all national heroes are men associated with it. To what extent is this because the Congress, which led the anti-colonial movement, ruled in the decades that followed? Why do mainstream histories — by Indians and, for their own reasons, even by the British — give political emancipation most of the air time and lionize Gandhi and Nehru at the expense of others? From what perspective does it seem that no other movements of significance were afoot besides anti-colonialism, no other heroes?

Notably, Ambedkar, who didn't quite participate in the anti-colonial struggle — focusing instead on the emancipation of the "depressed classes" — was sidelined for decades. At best, he received grudging respect as the architect of the Constitution, arguably a small and surely the least subversive part of his legacy. Was this dimunition because Ambedkar was openly combative and critical of both Gandhi and Nehru, attacked Hinduism's most sacred scriptures and age-old practices, converted to Buddhism, and became a trenchant spokesman of the oppressed castes? Did that made it easy for the defensive Hindu elites to pigeonhole him as a partisan man of his people, rather than a revolutionary social thinker? Was this because the dominant castes and their intellectuals had not done even the minimal soul-searching necessary to embrace Ambedkar's most profound and radical ideas? Indeed, why is it that far more upper caste Indians have read works by Gandhi, Nehru, and Tagore, but almost nothing by Ambedkar? Do non-Dalits have little to gain from reading Ambedkar? Meanwhile, his bold and subversive analyses continue to inspire countless low-caste activists and writers, who continue to goad Brahminical India towards a long overdue reckoning with its past and its heroes.

According to historian Perry Anderson, Ambedkar was "intellectually head and shoulders above most of the Congress leaders". The fact is that Ambedkar, uniquely among the major national figures, not only overcame enormous personal odds, he also developed a pioneering critique of Indian society based on the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Indeed, he was far more modern than even Nehru. This aspect of Ambedkar — rooted in a scrupulously reasoned, secular and radical egalitarianism, coupled with bracing civil rights talk of social justice and human dignity — is unprecedented among Indian leaders and it still hasn't received its due in mainstream scholarship.

For a good introduction to Ambedkar's mind, few documents will surpass The Annihilation of Caste. Originally written in 1936, it was meant to be a speech that was never delivered — the reasons for which appear in the prologue. This reprint in 1944 is accompanied by a critique by Gandhi, followed by Ambedkar's brilliant rejoinder. Read it and realize why perhaps more than any other leader of modern India, Ambedkar remains relevant to every dream of a just, modern, liberal, secular, humane, and democratic society in India. 

Simon Critchley on John Gray

Dear loyal readers: the unannounced seven-week hiatus on this blog — prompted by the relocation of two of its authors from the United States to India and attendant distractions thereof — is now over. We're resuming the normal cadence of 6-10 blog posts a month.
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For many years, I've read British philosopher John Gray with both interest and irritation. I like that he attacks many dominant secular faiths of our own age — sometimes for the right reasons — but often, unfortunately, from a vantage point whose implications I find troubling. Few thinkers are as bleak and pessimistic, as lacking in compassion, as wilfully blind and relentlessly negative towards the arc of modernity led by the Enlightenment. This was evident is Straw Dogs, which revealed to me the hollowness of his vision, based as it is on commitments no less questionable, even cowardly. Simon Critchley's thoughtful review of Gray's new book, The Silence of Animals, describes many of Gray's admittedly interesting forays into the world of ideas before repudiating the larger worldview of which they are a part.

Sometimes I think John Gray is the great Schopenhauerian European Buddhist of our age. What he offers is a gloriously pessimistic cultural analysis, which rightly reduces to rubble the false idols of the cave of liberal humanism. Counter to the upbeat progressivist evangelical atheism of the last decade, Gray provides a powerful argument in favor of human wickedness that’s still consistent with Darwinian naturalism. It leads to passive nihilism: an extremely tempting worldview, even if I think the temptation must ultimately be refused.

The passive nihilist looks at the world with a highly cultivated detachment and finds it meaningless. Rather than trying to act in the world, which is pointless, the passive nihilist withdraws to a safe contemplative distance and cultivates his acute aesthetic sensibility by pursuing the pleasures of poetry, peregrine-watching, or perhaps botany ... Truth to tell, the world of Gray’s passive nihilist can be a lonely place, seemingly stripped of intense, passionate, and ecstatic human relations. It is an almost autistic universe, like J.A. Baker’s. It is also a world where mostly male authors and poets seem to be read, although Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind. As Stevens writes in his Adagia, “Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.” Gray, like Stevens, seems preoccupied with place but, unlike Stevens, appears untroubled. What Gray says is undeniable: we are cracked vessels glued to ourselves in endless, narcissistic twittering. We are like moths wheeling around the one true flame: vanity. Who doesn’t long to escape into an animal silence?

Of course, love is the name of the counter-movement to that longing. Love — erotic, limb-loosening and bittersweet — is another way of pointing outwards and upwards, but this time towards people and not places. But that, as they say, is another story.

More here. Also check out this review of Crtichley's Faith of the Faithless.

Revisiting the Idea of India — Part 2

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

A two-part review of The Indian Ideology by Perry Anderson. Part 1 is here. The review appeared as "No Saints or Miracles" in the Himal Southasian print quarterly 'Are we sure about India?' (January 2013), and is reproduced with permission [this version is slightly modified].

Perhaps no single event has had a greater impact on the politics of modern South Asia than Partition, which created the nation-states of India and Pakistan, and later Bangladesh. The genocide it triggered forced the migration of 12-18 million people, the largest in world history, a million deaths, and a poisoned well of politics in the region. What were its causes? Which key players deserve more blame than others? Could it have been averted? Not only do perceptions differ sharply but most Partition narratives are steeped in nationalist posturing, demonization, and layers of taboo.

Last year, for instance, Jaswant Singh, a leader of the Indian right-wing party BJP and former defense and foreign minister of India, caused a storm with his biography of Jinnah. In it Singh assigned greater blame for Partition to Nehru and even praised Jinnah for his sundry qualities. No BJP official attended the book launch, after which Singh was summarily expelled from the BJP and his book banned in Gujarat. So while emotions still run high on the topic, it’s also true that at least among scholars today, Singh’s interpretation has gained ground. Yet few historians have offered a sharper account of it than Perry Anderson, who humanises many icons of Indian nationalism, restoring to them their rightful share of human follies.

One such icon is Nehru, a disciple of Gandhi with a crippling psychological dependence on him, but whose ‘intellectual development [was] not arrested by intense religious belief’. Nehru, a Brahmin, was born into a higher social class than Gandhi, a Bania. Nehru was not religious, had extramarital affairs, and ‘had acquired notions of independence and socialism Gandhi did not share’. That said, Nehru’s ‘advantages yielded less than might be thought’ and he ‘seems to have learned very little at Cambridge’, becoming ‘a competent orator’ but never acquiring ‘a modicum of literary taste.’ The Discovery of India, ‘a steam bath of Schwärmerei’ with a ‘Barbara Cartland streak’, reveals ‘not just Nehru’s lack of formal scholarship and addiction to romantic myth, but something deeper ... a capacity for self-deception with far-reaching political consequences.’ He combined qualities like ‘hard work, ambition, charm, some ruthlessness’ with ‘others that were developmentally ambiguous: petulance, violent outbursts of temper, vanity.’

Monbiot on Carbon Omissions

In 2006, China surpassed the U.S. to become the leading producer of green house emissions. But a big reason for its higher emissions is that China has become the industrial heartland of the world. Developed countries that claim to have reduced carbon emissions have, in effect, shifted their factories and pollution to China (this is one outsourcing no politician in the U.S. complains about). As consumers, all of us are now a party to China's green house emissions. Each time we buy a plastic toy, a blender, or an iPhone, we inject a blast of CO2 over China.

In a new article and the animation below, George Monbiot describes the bogus accounting that's de rigueur in measuring carbon emissions. It only accounts for territorial emissions, not outsourced emissions. With proper accounting that's linked to consumption, the U.S. is still way ahead of China in its contribution to climate change. The difference is even starker if we consider emissions per capita.

When nations negotiate global cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, they are held responsible only for the gases produced within their own borders. Partly as a result of this convention, these tend to be the only ones that countries count. When these “territorial emissions” fall, they congratulate themselves on reducing their carbon footprints. But as markets of all kinds have been globalised, and as manufacturing migrates from rich nations to poorer ones, territorial accounting bears ever less relationship to our real impacts.

To Save Everything, Click Here

The innovations of the last two decades, led by the Internet and mobile devices, have fundamentally altered the way so many of us live, work, and play. Is modern technology a problem or a solution—and why? How is the disruptive impact of the Internet shaping human societies and cultures, our values, ideas of Self, and relationships? What trends should worry us the most, and who should we hold responsible for them? The viewpoints here are perhaps as numerous as people themselves, even as we cluster them in categories like evangelists, pioneers, enthusiasts, skeptics, laggards, technophobes, curmudgeons, and so on.

Evgeny Morozov, an analyst of technological trends, has a new book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. In it, he attempts a critique of a culture that worships technology as the great hope and savior of humanity. I just read an interesting exchange between Morozov and Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist for Slate. I might read the book though my impression from this exchange is that while attempts like Morozov's are badly needed and he does raise many good questions, in the end young Morozov seems to me simply out of his depth for the ambitious task he has taken on. Here are links to the exchange:

Entry 1: Manjoo's opening salvo against Morozov

Entry 2: Morozov on what Manjoo gets wrong about his book

Entry 3: Manjoo on why Morozov has Silicon Valley absolutely wrong

Entry 4: Morozov on why and how technology journalism needs to evolve

The Art of the Gonds

I had a pleasant exchange recently with Dr. Michael Yorke, British anthropologist, filmmaker, and Senior Tutor of Ethnographic Film, University College London. In the course of a discussion that began with my Kumbh Mela film, Michael pointed me to the Adivasi Arts Trust, "an organisation that promotes awareness of Indian tribal culture, and works with the tribes involving them in digital media projects to make their arts more widely accessible." AAT works with some of the nearly 400 Adivasi communities that survive in various parts of India.

Googling then led me to Michael's short film on the art of the Gond people of Central India and a workshop in Bhopal where "a group of Pardhan Gond artists worked with Leslie MacKenzie and Tara Douglas to create an animated cartoon of their own folkstory" (parts one, two). Read more about the remarkable Gond Animation Workshop, participating Gond artists, some Gond folktales, and samples of their music and dance. Other folk stories covered include those of the indigenous people of Nagaland and neighboring states.

We're Moving to India!

Friends, we're excited to announce a big change coming in our lives: a month from today, we'll leave the United States to live in India for an indefinitely long time. Both of us (Usha and Namit) have resigned from our Silicon Valley jobs, which, while spiritually and intellectually dreary, were at least lucrative, and for this we feel very lucky indeed. This is a move that we've long considered and planned, so we can stop working for wages and take on new adventures in life.

What will we do in India? We'll do more of the things that we've long enjoyed doing, like reading and writing. We'll also backpack in India and in other parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. We'll try some new projects too, such as making documentary films and finding new ways to make ourselves useful to others. We share many hopes and aspirations for this move, but for Namit this will also be the fruition of a desire and responsibility he has long felt to be close to his parents in their later years.

We can't know just how all of this will unfold, since the change is huge and the uncertainties many. But we are keen to move into a new chapter of our lives and grow from our discoveries. India is a phenomenally interesting place to both of us. Namit grew up there, and we both visit often and lived there for two years from 2004-06, so we know the challenges we'll face — power and water shortages, bad driving, pollution, corruption, and more — but we also expect the compensating factors to be numerous enough. We'll be busy the next few weeks with packing and farewells. And by early May, we should be settling into a rental apartment in Gurgaon, a few miles southwest of Delhi.

—Usha & Namit

Butalia on Being Childless

In Childless, naturally, Urvashi Butalia (b. 1952) reflects on not being a mother, questioning many oppressive ideas of motherhood that run deep in India. Notably, Butalia says she didn't choose to be childless—at one point in her life she even pursued the possibility of adoption—but she concludes that being childless is not a bad place to be. Her vantage point may resonate with many mothers, probably more so than that of a woman who consciously chose not to be a mother and who might have experienced less brooding doubt about her childlessness. Butalia's essay is rare and interesting enough, especially in India, but I'd really love to read a thoughtful piece of the latter kind too.

... Am I fooling myself when I say I feel no active desire to have children — am I saying this because, in truth, I want them, but I do not want to seem lacking in any way so I imagine I don’t? It’s difficult to say. I’m constantly suspicious of myself though and worry: am I really the contented person I think I am or am I just pretending? ...

My mother and I are talking. I worry for you, she tells me, what will you do when you grow old? Everyone needs someone. If you don’t want to marry, why don’t you just adopt a child? But is that a good reason for adopting a child, I ask her, to have someone around when you grow old? And what’s the guarantee anyway? No, no, she quickly switches tack. That’s not why I think you should adopt. But just think what wonderful grandparents this potential child is missing out on! Good enough reason for adopting, don’t you think? I take her seriously. Perhaps she knows more than I do, I tell myself, and I start to search out adoption possibilities. For a while, I am quite excited by the change in my life that this promises, but in the end, I do not have the courage, or the motivation. I give up....

For years I have identified myself as a single woman. It’s important to me this definition: singleness is, for me, a positive state, one that is not defined by a lack, by something missing, by a negative—as for example the word ‘unmarried’ is. But with this children business, we don’t even have the language to define a positive state. I mean, there is childlessness and there is childlessness. How often have we heard that a couple is childless, that a woman who cannot bear a child is defined as barren. Why should this be? I did not make a choice not to have children, but that’s how my life panned out. I don’t feel a sense of loss at this, my life has been fulfilling in so many other ways. Why should I have to define it in terms of a lack? Am I a barren woman? I can’t square this with what I know of myself.

Of Bonobos and Men

Primatologist Frans de Waal has a new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist. Below is an excerpt from an early review in the New Republic (click photo for the Amazon listing; the Publisher's Weekly blurb is here).

Those familiar with de Waal’s previous books ... will recognize many of the same arguments resurfacing here, including the idea that human morality has biological origins. “Fairness and justice are … best looked at as ancient capacities. They derive from the need to preserve harmony in the face of resource competition.” De Waal uses the bonobo—a peaceful, sex-loving primate who may be as closely related to us, or more closely related, than the more Machiavellian chimpanzee—to attack the prevailing notion of human nature as selfish and violent, and that we are constantly battling to suppress our terrible “animal nature.” “Everything science has learned in the past few decades argues against this pessimistic view that morality is a thin veneer over a nasty human nature.”

What’s new here is that de Waal wades directly into the atheism-versus-religion debate, which he claims is often mistakenly cast as a science-versus-religion debate. He argues that a biologically evolved “bottom-up” morality obviates the need for the “top-down” morality imposed by religion. And yet, he sees science (and himself) as aligned with secular humanism, which is not necessarily anti-religion. He would like to see the influence of religion fade, but acknowledges that a moral code is not all religion provides: “The question is not so much whether religion is true or false, but how it shapes our lives, and what might possibly take its place.”

More here. Read more about the book and an excellent interview with de Waal here. Also see a review on NPR.

The Letters of Auster and Coetzee

Here is a review of Here and Now: Letters (2008-11), which gathers a correspondence between two friends: Paul Auster and JM Coetzee.

For potential pen pals, these two famous writers might seem at first an unlikely pairing. Auster, the younger by seven years, is an enthusiast, or certainly I’ve always thought of him that way: his fascination with coincidences and odd circumstances; his bottomless bag of anecdotes; his championing of out-of-the-way books and films that always end up being very good. Meanwhile Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning South African, seems more of a skeptic, a fastidious thinker and uncompromising moralist, who strips away social and political conventions in search of an ethics of essential experience. Yet whatever their differences, real or perceived, what quickly becomes clear in the pages of “Here and Now” is that they have far more in common than not.

They both love sports, for example, and the fact that they don’t love precisely the same sports, or love them for precisely the same reasons, is largely why they have so much to say to each other about them. Discussing the nature of sports’ appeal, Auster proposes they are “a kind of performance art.” Coetzee responds that his interest in sports is “ethical rather than aesthetic,” having to do with “the need for heroes that sports satisfy.”

More here (via 3QD). Also check out this very interesting excerpt from their exchange on sports. Two more reviews here and here.

'River of Faith' meets Amazon

Folks, it turns out that River of Faith has done well, amassing 27K views on YouTube in its first 3 weeks [and 75K at the end of 6 weeks]. Which means it has even bested a whole lot of cat videos! Furthermore, I've been persuaded to offer it on Amazon.com for those who like DVDs, including institutions. Check out the DVD cover below (sans barcode and DVD logo). This should be up on Amazon in early April and ready to ship within days (I'll announce when it is). Also, for the first time ever, a magazine introduced me last week as "a documentary filmmaker". Watch out, you documentary filmmakers! :)

Update (25 April, 2013): The DVD on Amazon is now shipping!

River of Faith

A new documentary film about the Kumbh Mela 2013, Prayag, Allahabad. 56 minutes. (Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

The Kumbh Mela is an ancient pilgrimage festival that happens once every three years, rotating across four locations in India. The largest of these riverside fairs happens every 12 years in Allahabad at the confluence of two rivers, Ganga and Yamuna. On its opening day in Jan 2013, I was among its estimated ten million visitors. During the 6-8 weeks it lasts, tens of millions come to bathe in these rivers — as a meritorious act to cleanse body and soul — making it the largest gathering of humanity on the planet. On the festival's most auspicious day in 2013, an estimated thirty million pilgrims came. The Kumbh Mela is also a meeting place for ascetics, sadhus, sants, gurus, yogis, sannyasis, bairagis, virakts, fakes, misfits, and crooks of various sects of Hinduism, who camp out in tents on the riverbank, lecture and debate, smoke ganja and drink milky-syrupy chai, and are visited by pilgrims seeking spiritual renewal. The sprawling floodplain resounds with devotional movie songs and bhajans, some strikingly melodious and familiar to me from childhood.

The Mahabharata mentions Prayag as a site of pilgrimage, but the first historical record occurs in the account of seventh century CE Chinese traveler Xuanzang, who wrote about Prayag and its ageless, month-long festival at the confluence of two rivers. As the eleventh century traveler Al-Beruni noted, "pilgrimages are not obligatory to the Hindus but facultative and meritorious." Indeed the idea of pilgrimage is commonplace in human cultures. Rivers, lakes, streams, springs, wells and other bodies of water too have been revered around the world. The writer Hilaire Belloc saw pilgrimage as "a nobler kind of travel ... an expedition to some venerated place to which a vivid memory of sacred things experienced, or a long and wonderful history of human experience in divine matters, or a personal attraction affecting the soul impels one. ... a pilgrimage may be made to the tomb of Descartes, in Paris, or it may be a little walk uphill to a neighbouring and beloved grave, or a modern travel, even in luxury, on the impulse to see something that greatly calls one."

This documentary film looks at the Kumbh Mela from many angles, focusing on one of its key pillars: the militant-monastic orders called akharas, whose members, including the naked ash-smeared Naga ascetics, see themselves as part of an ancient lineage of defenders and propagators of Sanātana Dharma. There are seven major and many minor akharas, some over a thousand years old, predating Islam in South Asia. Highly political and hierarchical organizations, the akharas compete for numbers and prestige, and have often in the past fought deadly battles with each other over matters of money and power — the akharas are hardly the happy family that their media-savvy spokesmen claim they are. Some are more liberal than others. Many akharas, I learned, choose their leaders through internal elections every third year at the Kumbh Mela, though I'm not sure when this custom began. Who are their members, how do they live, what do they believe? Such questions may have only partial answers but above all in this short documentary, I've tried to demystify the event, its history, and its participants.

The Kumbh Mela, 2013

NEW: River of Faith, a new documentary film about the Kumbh Mela 2013 by Namit Arora (56 minutes).

Last week I attended the greatest of the Hindu pilgrimage festivals, the Kumbh Mela, a riverside religious fair that takes place at the confluence of the Ganga, the Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati. Bathing in the river during the Kumbh Mela is considered a meritorious act, cleansing body and soul, and it attracts tens of millions over 6-8 weeks, making it the largest gathering of humans on the planet for a single event. A hundred million might attend the 2013 event that opened on Jan 14 with about ten million in attendance, including me and Usha. Click on any photo below to see a lot more of my photos (with captions) from the Mela's opening days. Next month, I also intend to put out a travel essay and a video documentary on the Kumbh Mela, including many interesting interviews with naga sadhus.

'Storytellers' by Mo Yan

An endearing Nobel Lecture by Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012. Yan talks about his mother, his childhood, the town he spent his first 21 years in, the sources of his inspiration, his penchant for basing his characters on people around him, and more.

I was born ugly. Villagers often laughed in my face, and school bullies sometimes beat me up because of it. I’d run home crying, where my mother would say, “You’re not ugly, Son. You’ve got a nose and two eyes, and there’s nothing wrong with your arms and legs, so how could you be ugly? If you have a good heart and always do the right thing, what is considered ugly becomes beautiful.” Later on, when I moved to the city, there were educated people who laughed at me behind my back, some even to my face; but when I recalled what Mother had said, I just calmly offered my apologies.

My illiterate mother held people who could read in high regard. We were so poor we often did not know where our next meal was coming from, yet she never denied my request to buy a book or something to write with. By nature hard working, she had no use for lazy children, yet I could skip my chores as long as I had my nose in a book.

A storyteller once came to the marketplace, and I sneaked off to listen to him. She was unhappy with me for forgetting my chores. But that night, while she was stitching padded clothes for us under the weak light of a kerosene lamp, I couldn’t keep from retelling stories I’d heard that day. She listened impatiently at first, since in her eyes professional storytellers were smooth-talking men in a dubious profession. Nothing good ever came out of their mouths. But slowly she was dragged into my retold stories, and from that day on, she never gave me chores on market day, unspoken permission to go to the marketplace and listen to new stories. As repayment for Mother’s kindness and a way to demonstrate my memory, I’d retell the stories for her in vivid detail.

A controversy recently arose over Mo Yan's selection for the Prize, in which Salman Rushdie criticized Yan's political affiliations and was ably defended by Pankaj Mishra. See the entertaining public exchanges between these two one, two, three, and four.

Rowena on Indian Nationalism

For citizens of modern nations, there is no life outside nationalism. The only question is: what kind of nation and nationalism? In all nations, the dominant groups shape the idea of the nation to their advantage, an idea that is contested by other groups. Here is a piece of the latter lineage, The Protests in Delhi and the Nationalist Paradigm, by Jenny Rowena, a faculty member at Miranda House, Delhi. Food for thought.

Most mainstream understanding of Indian nationalism think of it as a postcolonial phenomenon, where in a suppressed colony asserted itself against an oppressive empire. In spite of this, they argue, nationalism was often accessible only to the upper castes. So it excluded the lower castes and minorities, who fell outside its ambit and thereby of Indian modernity itself.

However, one sees a different way of thinking about nationalism in the writings and speeches of many dalit and bahujan leaders like Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar; later theorists like G Aloysius, Braj Ranjan Mani;and writers like K KKochu and J Raghu in Kerala. All of them seem to think of nationalism as a strategic organizing principle of the upper castes, which allowed them to successfully consolidate themselves against the onslaught of the anti-caste identities of various lower caste and dalit groups in India. With it, the brahminical upper castes, who had made use of colonialism to consolidate their cultural power, came forward to demand a transfer of power towards their own benefit.

In other words, it was not that the brahminical class had better access to nationalism and modern categories, which resulted in the exclusion of all “others.” Instead the argument that can be built from the available pool of dalitbahujan thinking is this: the brahminical upper caste re-imagined themselves through national categories, put forward a nationalistic politics and countered the lower caste mobilizations that invoked particular caste categories and locations, with a more universal and all pervading nationalist identity. With this they took over the nation and its various dominant categories like secularism, merit, progress and modernity, and gained almost absolute control over its numerous institutions – from academics to administration to art and popular culture.

Black Women, Rape, and Resistance

In late 2011, Danielle L. McGuire published a book that revisits the history of a certain "rape culture" in the United States, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. The book recounts experiences of black women that have obvious parallels with the struggles of Dalit and Adivasi women in India today:

"The author gives us the never-before-told history of how the civil rights movement began; how it was in part started in protest against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men who used economic intimidation, sexual violence, and terror to derail the freedom movement; and how those forces persisted unpunished throughout the Jim Crow era when white men assaulted black women to enforce rules of racial and economic hierarchy. Black women’s protests against sexual assault and interracial rape fueled civil rights campaigns throughout the South that began during World War II and went through to the Black Power movement."

As this review relates, "African-American women had been victimized for centuries by white sexual violence in the South, but fear of reprisal kept most crimes from being reported, let alone prosecuted." In her review of McGuire's book, Jennifer Jensen writes:

McGuire argues that rapes of black women by white men were largely ignored by mainstream society due to an underlying racial and economic hierarchy. As a result, rape systematically subjugated the black race and also challenged black respectability. Black people—women especially—were under continuous public scrutiny. Consequently, when black women were raped, the unwarranted violent sex acts allowed society to blame the victim for the assault, which was attributed to deficiencies of their race. ... McGuire’s method contrasts media coverage against extant state or court documents. The result reveals how newspapers reported the rape cases, in what context the victim was portrayed, and any public outrage incited because of the inertia of law enforcement. The state and court documents illustrate the lack of legal recourse black communities had when women were raped and, more importantly, the legal barriers built into the system to subjugate black people through sexual racialization.

Read two more reviews of the book here and here. The second of these two reviews mentions the story of Taylor, "one of many black women attacked by white men during an era in which sexual assault was used to informally enforce Jim Crow segregation." Decades later at age 90, in words that are nothing short of haunting, Taylor grapples with why she was gang-raped. “I was an honest person and living right,” Taylor said. “They shouldn’t have did that. I never give them no reason to do it.”

Of Sacred and Paraded Bodies

On the recent Delhi gang-rape, here are two probing and insightful essays I've read. The first is by Madhuri Xalxo. An excerpt:

I am a bit shaken by what outrages the mainstream media on rape. The incident is horrifying and yet so very familiar to us dalit, bahujan and adivasi women.

In the same Delhi, hundreds of adivasi girls are taken as domestic slaves and get raped, and go missing.  Why doesn't the mainstream media even consider that newsworthy?  Why is there no uproar for the death penalty for these upper caste men from elite backgrounds raping us? Is it because we are born to get justly raped by the others?

The present protests and silences only endorse the caste hindu paradigm that the upper caste woman's body is sacred and its violation requires the highest retribution while the bodies of dalit, bahujan and adivasi women and women under military regimes such as Manipur and Kashmir are 'rape-worthy' and the men's sexual depravity on these women need no correctives.

The second essay is by Urvashi Butalia. An excerpt:

Protest is important, it shakes the conscience of society, it brings people close to change, it makes them feel part of the change. And there is a good chance that the current wave of protests will lead to at least some results — perhaps even just fast track courts. But perspective is also important: we need to ask ourselves: if it had been the army in Manipur or Kashmir who had been the rapists, would we have protested in quite the same way? Very likely not, for there nationalism enters the picture. Remember Kunan Posphpora in the late nineties when the Rajasthan Rifles raped over 30 women? Even our liberal journalists found it difficult to credit that this could have happened, that the army could have been capable of this, and yet, the people of Kunan Poshpora know. Even today, women from this area find it difficult to marry — stigma has a long life. Would we have been as angry if the rape had taken place in a small town near Delhi and the victim had been Dalit? Remember Khairlanji? Why did that rape, of a mother and her daughter, gruesome, violent, heinous, and their subsequent murder not touch our consciences in quite the same way.

Both excerpts raise the question of selective media coverage and public outrage. One response might start by saying that all humans participate in overlapping moral communities, such as whites, males, Brahmins, Americans, Muslims, heterosexuals, urban professionals, Arabs, and so on. Membership rules and benefits vary but those within our moral community evoke more of our empathy and are more real to us. (We also tend to identify with the pain of those "above us", who we envy and emulate.) The recent killing of 20 children in Connecticut provoked massive outrage among folks who aren't much perturbed by American drones killing children in Pakistan. Is there any doubt that the intensity of the outrage owes much to the ability of every soccer mom and dad in America to relate to the tragedy? Never mind the larger violence beyond their daily lives, to both human and non-human animals, that their privileges both require and blind them to (which may well be a wider human problem).

The moral community of urban upper-caste Indians (and, by extension, of the media institutions they control) is likewise circumscribed. It discounts the travails and the humanity of other Indians "beneath them". Moral communities can of course expand and become more porous or inclusive — usually not without a fight — where greater moral consideration is accorded to outsiders, including even to animals. Affecting this change then, through various means (socialization, law enforcement, public debate, etc.), is the struggle ahead in India and elsewhere.

State of the Species

Charles C. Mann discusses how homo sapiens, from very humble beginnings devoid of language or symbol use, went from anatomically to behaviorally modern humans, becoming thereafter a highly successful species — so successful that it now risks wiping itself out, unless ...

Homo sapiens emerged on the planet about 200,000 years ago, researchers believe. From the beginning, our species looked much as it does today. If some of those long-ago people walked by us on the street now, we would think they looked and acted somewhat oddly, but not that they weren’t people. But those anatomically modern humans were not, as anthropologists say, behaviorally modern. Those first people had no language, no clothing, no art, no religion, nothing but the simplest, unspecialized tools. They were little more advanced, technologically speaking, than their predecessors—or, for that matter, modern chimpanzees. (The big exception was fire, but that was first controlled by Homo erectus, one of our ancestors, a million years ago or more.) Our species had so little capacity for innovation that archaeologists have found almost no evidence of cultural or social change during our first 100,000 years of existence. Equally important, for almost all that time these early humans were confined to a single, small area in the hot, dry savanna of East Africa (and possibly a second, still smaller area in southern Africa).

But now jump forward 50,000 years. East Africa looks much the same. So do the humans in it—but suddenly they are drawing and carving images, weaving ropes and baskets, shaping and wielding specialized tools, burying the dead in formal ceremonies, and perhaps worshipping supernatural beings. They are wearing clothes—lice-filled clothes, to be sure, but clothes nonetheless. Momentously, they are using language. And they are dramatically increasing their range. Homo sapiens is exploding across the planet.

What caused this remarkable change?

More here.

Queues, Quacks, and Chaos

Over half of Indians do not have access to any professional healthcare. For those who fall ill, where else in the world is money, in particular, as well as place of residence, such decisive factors between living and dying? How much of this gap—in one estimate, the richest 20% outlive the poorest 20% by over 15 years—can be bridged by a functional public health system? And why isn’t this aspiring superpower building one? In India, questions like these are a dime a dozen. The following video provides a quick overview of the state of Indian healthcare.

David Harvey on Capitalism

David Harvey, social theorist, Marxian scholar, proponent of zero growth in advanced economies, and author of The Enigma of Capital, offers an uncommon perspective on how capitalism has worked out in recent decades, its many crises and modes of resolution. After stating that it is "easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism", he nevertheless looks at why it is so hard not only to imagine an alternative to capitalism, but even to the kind of capitalism we have today. At the very least, there is food for thought here.

The Woes of a Drone Operator

A peek into the world of drone operators, including one who couldn't continue being one. 

A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit of the United States Air Force in New Mexico. He kills dozens of people. But then, one day, he realizes that he can't do it anymore.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren't flying through the air. They're just sitting at the controls.

Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact ... Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.

More here.  Nearly four years ago, I commented on a related post that "this robotics led war has the potential for significantly altering the debate: the costs of war are dramatically different to one side (fewer dead soldiers and injured veterans, for instance), which will tend to lower political resistance to war. It can be mobilized stealthily and conducted below the media radar, so to speak. Also radically different will be the experience of war (fought by remote control from suburban offices), redefining things like heroism and courage in combat, or loss and suffering. Welcome to a brave new world for war".

We Call This Progress

Arundhati Roy on the recent arc of economic development in India. I think her voice is important for lending support to certain radical and moral ideas in public life, esp. since so few public intellectuals in India do so with any force or clarity. I say this even though I don't share her romantic disenchantment with modernity and globalization, at least not most of the time, and find some of her analysis too simplistic.

I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. The Indian government, which was for many years one of the leaders of the nonaligned movement, suddenly became a completely aligned country and began to call itself the natural ally of the U.S. and Israel. It opened up its protected markets to global capital. Most people have been speaking about environmental battles, but in the real world it’s quite hard to separate environmental battles from everything else: the war on terror, for example; the depleted uranium; the missiles; the fact that it was the military-industrial complex that actually pulled the U.S. out of the Great Depression, and since then the economies of places like America, many countries in Europe, and certainly Israel, have had stakes in the manufacture of weapons. What good are weapons if they aren’t going to be used in wars? Weapons are absolutely essential; it’s not just for oil or natural resources, but for the military-industrial complex itself to keep going that we need weapons.

Sex & Style in Murakami's 1Q84, A Review — Part 2

By R Alexander

This is part 2 of 2 of a review of Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84. You can link to the first part here.

Structurally, non-realist narratives are no different from more standard “realistic” fictions. They create a narrative tension, often involving some sort of conflict, and then they resolve that tension in some way. What I’m addressing here is narrative structure, and what I’ve posited sounds simplistic, I suppose. Even if a story is non-realistic (as in, say, magical realism, surrealist fiction, slip stream stories, science fiction or fantasy, fabulist pieces, and whatever else), there is some sort of hook or some way that the reader can relate to what’s going on, and there is narrative tension built on conflict. In addition to this, stories provide a sense of closure, at or near their end. Non-realist stories tend to play with the conventions of these two aspects of story and to make that play an explicit part of the narrative. Kafka, for instance, tells the story of a person who turns into a bug. That story takes as its starting place an event that is impossible and also horrific. We can become involved in this story though, not because we are interested in entomology, but because we recognize something human in the situation. Sympathetic readers of the story will recognize that it is about, among other things, alienation, about the creaturely nature of our nature, and about family. So the story involves us in a very straightforward way. And the story has a very straightforward sense of closure at the end. The story ends with Gregor Samsa’s death and with changes that occur among the family because of it.

Writers of whatever stripe engage their readers in diverse ways. Gabriel Garcia Marquez' works, the sine qua non of "magic realism," plunge into family, history, and culture, into the relations of people among themselves and their struggle to achieve relationships or the way those familial, historical, and cultural relationships become entangled and complicated and fulfilled or frustrated. The dream-like fleetingness of Garcia Marquez’ style is itself part of what he is saying about the nature of those relationships. Likewise Salman Rushdie’s picaresque style enacts part of the argument he is making about the accidental sometimes indecent or inhumane shape human lives can be twisted into by historical and/or cultural forces. Samuel Beckett's pieces are musings on language, memory, and identity, and his works are like the mind at play. Borges is the master, invoking mirrors and libraries and labyrinths, and thereby taking up notions of perception, of quantum realities and the forking nature of time and causality, and of notions of historicity and knowledge. 

Curator of a Hollowed Conscience

Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal on the great short story writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, whose birth centenary was celebrated this year.

Saadat Hasan Manto ... once remarked that any attempt to fathom the murderous hatred that erupted with such devastating effect at the time of the British retreat from the subcontinent had to begin with an exploration of human nature itself.

For the master of the Urdu short story this was not a value judgment. It was a statement of what he had come to believe after keen observation and extended introspection. Shaken by the repercussions of the decision to break up the unity of the subcontinent, Manto wondered if people who only recently were friends, neighbours and compatriots had lost all sense of their humanity. He too was a human being, ‘the same human being who raped mankind, who indulged in killing' and had ‘all those weaknesses and qualities that other human beings have.' Yet human depravity, however pervasive and deplorable, could not kill all sense of humanity. With faith in that kind of humanity, Manto wrote riveting short stories about the human tragedy of 1947 that are internationally acknowledged for representing the plight of displaced and terrorised humanity with exemplary impartiality and empathy.

More here.