Shunya's Notes

The Insularity of American Literature

Check out this essay by Anis Shivani on what is wrong with American literature. Sure, lots of red meat here, and one can always poke holes in his thesis: isn't there a super great writer X that Shivani is overlooking? But that objection may well reinforce Shivani's point, which I take to be meaningful in the sense of a statement like "Outsiders find rural Bihar rough to travel through", and citing a comfortable itinerary does not negate the qualitative truth of the statement. :-) In any case, I think it is decent food for thought. Enjoy.

"There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world...not the United States," Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, recently said. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature...That ignorance is restraining." ...

Engdahl couldn't be more correct. We are too insular. We specialize in quantity, not quality. Our publishing model, like that of the lapsed auto industry, is a failed one. It survives only because of our gigantism--mere volume is sufficient to ensure a certain amount of financial success, but it is not producing a worthwhile cultural product. Just as we might have 500 television channels but not one will ever offer the challenging movies of Buñuel or Godard, or a Wagner opera, we might produce 175,000 books a year, but quality is elusive. What we're talking about is a business model that is outdated, cannot keep up with globalization. There ought to be no bail-out of American writers. It is a case of market monopoly run amok, taking self-publicity for truth.

We have a generally overinflated estimation of our "literary giants"--Roth, Updike, DeLillo, Pynchon, the perennially rumored contenders for the Nobel Prize--that the rest of the world might not share. Consider, from the point of view of someone in Tokyo or Cairo or Lima, what each of these writers has to offer them. These are American writers first, not in the sense that Fitzgerald or Hemingway were (questioning their Americanness), but American in a curiously isolationist way, preoccupied exclusively with the predicaments of our nation, and no other in the world. The knee-jerk defense American newspaper and magazine editors mounted immediately after Engdahl's comments--not even taking a moment to pause and consider whether he had a point--should tell us a lot about the degree to which sheer defense of our dinosaur model of literature is the driving force for so-called critics. How could they say that about us, those sissy Europeans? Our writers are as good as any other country's, no, better, yes, much better! The Europeans are just jealous. Their writers are too parochial, too small, too little studied. Did you ever hear of Le Clézio? Who is he? We don't read him here. We don't do any scholarship on him. Not to mention Dario Fo. Dario Who? Phoo!

BBC Documentary on Gandhi

A three-hour BBC documentary on Gandhi (2009) is now on YouTube. It does a reasonable job of covering Gandhi's life: basic biographical details, historical events, key influences, lucky breaks, setbacks, etc. Based on mainstream scholarship, it avoids edgy controversy while conveying a sense of this immensely bold, complex, and charismatic man who, despite his many flaws and idiosyncrasies, still captivates people worldwide and has become an icon for non-violent resistance. It includes some rare historical footage as well.

Click here to watch all video clips consecutively on YouTube. The three episodes are: The Making of the Mahatma, The Rise to Fame, and The Road to Freedom. (Whoever posted the video has curiously inserted "British Propaganda" in the name! Is that merited you think?)

The Absence of Ambedkar

Hartosh Singh Bal, political editor of Open Magazine, has a good essay in 3QD. Here is an excerpt:

One of the arguments I have heard over and over again explaining the success of Indian democracy is the invocation of a civilizational ethos, our tolerance, the claim goes, is rooted in the traditions of Hinduism. While it is not entirely untrue, this idea is given too much credit. The dailts are a huge counterargument, tolerance for oppression is as much a part of Hinduism as a tolerance of other faiths.

If today revolutionary groups such as the Maoists seek recruits and fail to find them in large numbers among the untouchables it is largely because of Ambedkar.  At the same time Ambedkar as much as Nehru is responsible for the calm rationalism of the Indian Constitution. Gandhi lends himself to every new age anti-science fad, Ambedkar is one of our key antidotes. Far more than the Ganga or Gandhi, if writers and academics  needs to make sense of India they need to spend time on Ambedkar.

More here.

The Leatherbacks of Trinidad

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

Grande Riviere, a tiny village on the northeastern coast of Trinidad, is one of the few beaches in the world where the leatherback turtle comes to nest. It lies near the end of a serpentine road that hugs the palm-fringed Atlantic coast for miles, then cuts through the lush rainforest of the Northern Range. A river, for which the village is named, and the rainforest—abuzz with the sound of crickets and birds—tumble onto its Caribbean sands, giving the place a remote and sensual air.

Cacao plantations once flourished here but the few hundred people of Grande Riviere now rely on fishing and ecotourism. All three or four of its pricey tourist lodges are near the beach; a village bar, a couple of provision stores and eateries, and a post office are on the main road further behind. The star attraction, and the primary reason for our visit last month, is clearly the leatherback.

My partner, Usha, and I arrived in the early evening with Ulric, our gentlemanly guide of Afro-Carib ancestry, whom we had hired in Port of Spain to drive us to a few places on the island. After we decided to stay at the Le Grande Almandier (the LP guidebook called it "the best value"), he left to spend the night at a friend's place in a nearby town. Being the kind who love their work, he had gone out of his way to bring alive the island and its people to us, not the least through his own personal history. All day his Trini English had grown on me. Dinner consisted of vegetarian pickings from a Creole-French menu, a legacy of the plantation era culture in these parts. At the Visitor Center, we secured our permits to see the turtles, saw a documentary film on them, and waited.

Is there another animal that appears more often in human mythology, folklore, and literature than the turtle and its land dwelling cousin, the tortoise? They have variously stood for wisdom, tenacity, longevity, fertility, or stability in cultures around the world. The leatherback is the largest of all living turtles, the male up to 900 kgs and 3 m. It feeds mostly on jellyfish and lives up to 45 years (a disputed number). Unlike other turtles, it lacks a bony shell but has a hard leathery skin. That plus its powerful flippers and hydrodynamic body allow it to dive down to 1400 m and swim as fast as 35 kmph. Given its large size, its natural predators include only sharks, killer whales, and now humans.

On Amitav Ghosh

A new interview with writer Amitav Ghosh has appeared in Guernica magazine. Parts of it reminded me of a saying by Plutarch: "It isn't always in the most distinguished achievements that men's virtues or vices may be best discovered: but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person's real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battle." The interview, between the lines, sheds light on Ghosh's India, the audience he addresses, and his social vantage point. Consider his claim:

"People often talk about identity. It's not one of the things which really is washing about in my head at all. One of the reasons why is because anybody who's lived in India knows that India is incredibly, incredibly diverse.… That's one of the wonderfully liberating things about India; it lets you be exactly who you want to be."

Umm, really? Or is that the privilege of a tiny social class—his own? Ghosh laments that lit critics in America "think primarily about identity ... I mean from the age of like fourteen onwards when they first read Catcher in the Rye or whatever, they're taught that that's what literature is about. So that's what they think it's about." Really? A novelist—and former social anthropologist—scoffing at the lens of identity in understanding the lives of others?

It's quite possible that the above remarks didn't come out sounding right in the interview form, so perhaps we should cut him some slack. But he then makes other half-baked remarks: "What we see today in [sic] that nation-state is fading to be replaced by these enormous diasporic civilizations. India is one, China is one ..." These two are fading nation-states? On the contrary, they have grown more nationalistic in recent decades. A bit later, the interviewer, Lila Azam Zanganeh, asserts that Ghosh is "constantly compared to V.S. Naipaul." By whom? I have not heard that myself, nor can I think of any justification for it. Ghosh, promptly contrasting himself with Naipaul, explains:

"I was very lucky in that unlike Naipaul I was from a large country—a large, increasingly self-confident country. Often I think the weaknesses of Naipaul's work come from the fact of his having grown up in a circumstance where there were very intense small conflicts. Where he, I think, could never really claim Trinidad for himself, and never felt enabled to claim it for himself. But I felt very much that I was looking at the world as an Indian. So I think that was certainly one of the huge differences."

Why is that a source of weakness in Naipaul's or anyone else's work—and not strength? What differences does Ghosh speak of, if not of identity? His luck, I submit, lies not in his being from a large country, but from a privileged class, whose members have the vantage point to behold the world "as an Indian" (though when asked directly, he says there is no such thing as "being Indian"). His feel-good invocation of an "increasingly self-confident country" (presumably without "intense small conflicts"?) must resonate with his disaporic fans in the West, who he claims form 60-70% of his audience at readings. They frequently take pride in their country in ways that resemble chauvinism more than self-confidence. Who but a member of his social class can coolly say, "As late as the nineteenth century every Bengali learned Persian; it was normal! We've always learned Sanskrit." Every Bengali? Sanskrit? We? What slice of India does Ghosh confuse for the whole?

Göbekli Tepe

According to the dominant scholarly view of pre-history today, our human ancestors were once nomadic hunter-gatherers, with many recognizable religio-cultural practices like burying of their dead, wearing bone and stone jewelry, and even creating cave art and figurines. What followed, in more or less this order, was agriculture and domestication of animals, permanent settlements, pottery and metallurgy, the rise of cities, specialized crafts and trade guilds, social hierarchies, organized religion and monumental architecture, and eventually money, writing, and the alphabet.

However, at a site in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, a monumental temple built ~11,600 years ago by hunter-gatherers suggests that at least here, organized religion preceded the rise of agriculture and many other aspects of civilization. In recent years, Göbekli Tepe has cast serious doubt on many established theories about our pre-history.

... the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.

At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple's builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision....

 ... archaeologists studying the origins of civilization in the Fertile Crescent are [now] suspicious of any attempt to find a one-size-fits-all scenario, to single out one primary trigger. It is more as if the occupants of various archaeological sites were all playing with the building blocks of civilization, looking for combinations that worked. In one place agriculture may have been the foundation; in another, art and religion; and over there, population pressures or social organization and hierarchy. Eventually they all ended up in the same place. Perhaps there is no single path to civilization; instead it was arrived at by different means in different places.

More here. Watch a video of an artist's reconstruction of Gobekli Tepe, and a photo gallery.

The Tribes of the Deccan

Here is a documentary based on the footage gathered by Austrian anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf on the hill tribes of the Deccan in the 1940s (archive). This includes the tribes of the Chenchus, the Reddis, the Koyas, the Bondos, the Gadabas, and more. It may well be the only visual record of these groups from that period—their rituals, hunts, dances, foods, marriage ceremonies, material life, and more. It is revealing too of anthropology from another era, with notions and judgments that seem positively quaint and superficial by today's standards. Note, for instance, the force and frequency of words like "primitive" and "civilized", and the need to delineate borders between them. I don't know much more about Fürer-Haimendorf beyond what is on wikipedia, but this is nevertheless a valuable historical record. The film was made in the 1960s and narrated by a 30-something rising star at the BBC named David Attenborough.

Fukuyama on Political Order

Nicholas Wade has an interesting review of Francis Fukuyama's new book, The Origins of Political Order. I must admit that I have not had a particularly favorable opinion of Fukuyama as a scholar, colored no doubt by his neo-con politics. However, this ambitious book seems to me worth a read and I've just acquired it. Here is an excerpt from Wade's review:

Dr. Fukuyama, a political scientist, is concerned mostly with the cultural, not biological, aspects of human society. But he explicitly assumes that human social nature is universal and is built around certain evolved behaviors like favoring relatives, reciprocal altruism, creating and following rules, and a propensity for warfare.

Because of this shared human nature, with its biological foundation, “human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures,” he writes. It is these worldwide patterns he seeks to describe in an analysis that stretches from prehistoric times to the French Revolution.

Previous attempts to write grand analyses of human development have tended to focus on a single causal explanation, like economics or warfare, or, as with Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel,” on geography. Dr. Fukuyama’s is unusual in that he considers several factors, including warfare, religion, and in particular human social behaviors like favoring kin.

More here. More reviews in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and a less charitable one in the Guardian.

What’s Left of the Left

An engaging biographical sketch of Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, including his political and economic vision, views of Obama, personal values, quirks of character, blind spots, etc. Alongside, it also sheds light on how many liberals like him responded to the major economic events of recent years.

Krugman has been building, in his columns and on his blog, not just a critique of [the Obama] presidency but something grander and more expansively detailed, something closer to an alternate architecture for what Obamaism might be. The project has remade Krugman’s public image, as if he had spent years becoming a chemically isolate form of himself—first a moderate, then an anti-Bush partisan, and now the leading exponent of a kind of liberal purism against which the compromises of the White House might be judged. Krugman’s counterfactual Obama would have provided far more stimulus money and would have nationalized Citigroup and Bank of America. He would have written off Republicans and worked only with Democrats to fashion a health-care reform bill that included a so-called public option. The president of Krugman’s dreams would have made his singular long-term goal the preservation of the welfare state and the middle-class society it was designed to create.

This purism is not a role Krugman is altogether comfortable with, but it is one he has sought: His blog is titled The Conscience of a Liberal. He uses it as a kind of workroom for his column, and it is now, according to Technorati, the most popular single-author blog online ... The comment section has become a repository for a certain form of liberal anguish, and a community unto itself: “His campaign promised a better, more equitable America. Those who believed him feel betrayed,” wrote one commenter in regard to a recent column titled “The President Is Missing.”And another: “Come on, Professor Krugman, will you lead the people out?”

In December [2010], Krugman and five other liberal economic thinkers (Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Jeffrey Sachs, Alan Blinder, and Larry Mishel) were invited to the Oval Office for a 90-minute off-the-record audience with the president. It was a month after the midterms, and many progressives were worried that even the modified liberalism of the administration’s first two years would dissolve in a new spirit of conciliation with the ascendant right. The economists present understood the meeting, one of them says, as the moment when Obama “talked to the left.”

More here.

Debate in Tibetan Buddhism

Have you heard of the 900+ years old debating tradition of Tibet? In 2005, I saw many examples of it in Dharamsala. Though fascinating to watch, their nuances were lost on me since they took place in Tibetan. This Asia Society video (1 hr, 42 mins) begins with an introduction by Daniel Perdue, showcases four debating Tibetan monks, includes an excellent lecture by Geshe Thupten Jinpa (the star attraction), presents a sample debate between Perdue and Jinpa in English, and ends with an engaging Q&A. Here is Perdue's intro to the tradition:

Since the time of the early Buddhist kings, Tibet has enjoyed a rich history of philosophical enquiry ... Buddhism is a "wisdom tradition," meaning that it is based on the realizations or insights of the historical Buddha and that it holds that all suffering and even the suffering of death are related to a failure of wisdom. They hold that one is freed by wisdom, by seeing the nature of things. Philosophical debate is part of this effort ... The central purposes of Tibetan monastic debate are to defeat misconceptions, to establish a defensible view, and to clear away objections to that view. [The point of debate is] to understand the nature of reality through careful analysis of the state of existence of ordinary phenomena, the basis of reality. (Read more)

A Letter from an IITian

(Some weeks ago, the editor of The Scholar's Avenue, the student-run campus newspaper of my alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, invited me to contribute a 750-word guest article addressing the student body. The text below appeared in it last month.)

When I came to IIT Kharagpur in 1985, I saw it as my big achievement. Most people I knew saw my All India Rank of 190 as a reward for my academic merit and hard work, and bestowed on me enough awe and respect to embarrass a minor god. I had prevailed in what everyone believed to be an open, fair, and tough competition, for which I — Namit Arora — deserved all the thunder and applause.

This is still how most people see it but I now have my doubts. If I am honest with myself, I can’t really take credit for it. I suspect that much of my achievement was not of my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being at the right place at the right time. I came to this view after reflecting on the three implicit claims that attribute it to my own achievement: (a) my performance in a fair competition (b) my academic merit (c) my drive and hard work.

Consider the first claim: Is it true that the IIT-JEE is a fair competition? Can anyone compete and win? Or is the game strongly rigged to favor some over others, based on socioeconomic factors that are arbitrary and derive from accidents of birth? India lacks equality of opportunity due to many disadvantages, for e.g., of family income, social class, gender, caste, language, etc. So the runners on the racetrack to the IIT don't begin at the same starting point. What does it mean to say that the first to cross the finish line deserve their wins?

Take my own example. I was born into an upper-caste, riding on eons of unearned privilege over 80% of Indians. I was a boy raised in a society that lavished far more attention on boys. In Gwalior, my parents fell closer to the upper middle-class, had university degrees, and valued education and success. I lived in a kid-friendly neighborhood with parks, playgrounds, and a staff clubhouse. I had role models and access to the right schools and books, the right coaching classes, and peers preparing for engineering entrance exams. My background gave me a sense of security and self-confidence that put me ahead of perhaps 96% of Indians—the odds that I would excel in the JEE were huge from the start. This made me think: was it me or my background that won?

Atheism, Ethics, and Pornography

An interview with Nina Hartley, humanist, proud atheist, vocal feminist, and a pornstar with 600+ adult films to her credit:

The Humanist: What do you think could be done to improve the [porn] industry?

NH: The widespread notion that legal porn production is a sink hole of abuse and coercion that takes advantage of poor, innocent women, is the biggest smack leveled against the business. It’s almost entirely a function or projection of people’s fears and discomfort about women, gender relations, sex, sexuality and the graphic depiction of sexual acts. The idea that a woman could choose, on purpose, to perform in pornographic videos for her own reasons still goes deeply against the notion that women are somehow victims of male sexuality, that they’re delicate flowers who need the protection of a good man, or the law.

The best protection for women everywhere, especially in the sex trades, is full decriminalization of all consensual sex work. Porn is legal to shoot in California. We pay taxes, buy permits, and the like. Any woman can pick up her phone and call her agent, or the police, and get full support if anything happens on a set. My biggest complaint these days is how the anti-sex work camp has, for the purpose of public confusion, conflated legal, consensual sex work, specifically pornography, with illegal, non-consensual trafficking of women for forced labor (some of it of a sexual nature). There is no connection between the legal material we make here in California and any trafficking of women. Full stop.

Are there some directors or agents with less-than-stellar reputations? Of course. This is not a business of selfless do-gooders (of course, the entire entertainment business is not run by selfless do-gooders). But the world can’t be made a child-safe day nursery. We either accept that performers are adults making their own choices (no matter how we may feel about those choices), or we go back to pre-Women’s Liberation days, when women couldn’t get credit in their own names, obtain birth control without their husband’s permission, or wear pants in the work place. Do we really want those days back?

But that's only part of the story. For a complementary viewpoint, on the impact of porn on men and women, read this by Naomi Wolf.