Shunya's Notes

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.’

Revisiting the Idea of India — Part 1

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

A two-part review of The Indian Ideology by Perry Anderson. Part 2 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].

‘Nations without a past are contradictions in terms,’ wrote Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Precursors to every modern nation are stories about its past and the present — stories full of invention, exclusion, and exaggeration — which help forge a ‘national consciousness’. Historians, wrote Hobsbawm, have ‘always been mixed up in politics’ and are ‘an essential component of nationalism’. They participate in shaping a nation’s mythos and self-perception. In his vivid analogy, ‘Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.’ The more nationalist a historian, he held, the weaker his bid to be taken seriously as a historian.

But not all historians are equally complicit. Some are deeply skeptical of the dominant national histories and claims of nationhood. ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,’ wrote the scholar Ernst Renan. The skeptical historian may see value in nationalism, but she always sees a pressing need to inspect and critique its claims, assumptions, omissions, myths, and heroes. Scrutiny may reveal that a ‘cherished tradition’ is neither cherished, nor a tradition; likewise for supposedly ancient origins and customs, traits and virtues, arts and culture, and other qualities of life and mind said to define the essence of a nation and its people. This approach is especially common among Marxist historians (their analytical orientation defines the genre, not their views on communism). The best of them know that there is no ultimately objective history, but who yet seek to write history from below and attempt to expose the actual conditions of social life, including the divisions, conflicts and oppressions that plague any nation.

This, then, is the vantage point of Marxist historian Perry Anderson’s magnificent and lucid new work, The Indian Ideology. What does the title refer to? In his own words, it ‘is another way of describing what is more popularly known as "The Idea of India", which celebrates the democratic stability, multi-cultural unity, and impartial secularity of the Indian state as a national miracle.’ Anderson offers a critique of this idea.

Nationalism in India arose in the 19th century. A native elite, responding to British colonialism, began articulating a consciousness based on a new idea of India. Until then, despite civilizational continuities, the Subcontinent had no sense of itself as ‘India’, no national feeling based on a shared identity. Rival political units and ethnic groups abounded, divided by language, faith, caste, geography, history, and more. There was no historical awareness of the ancient empires of Mauryas or Guptas, or that the Buddha was Indian. This and much more of the Indian past would emerge via European scholarship, profoundly shaping ‘Hinduism’ and Hindu self-knowledge. Anderson surveys the rise of Indian nationalism and offers sharp vignettes of the minds and matters that drove Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Bose, Ambedkar, Mountbatten and others. His analysis of the forces that led to Partition is astute and provocative. He assesses the performance of the independent nation-state and subjects Indian intellectuals to a withering critique for what he diagnoses as their comfort with ‘the Indian ideology’. Though not without shortcomings, Anderson has given us a masterwork of critical synthesis — trenchant, original, and bold — that should fuel discussion and debate for years ahead.  

Tagore: An Interpretation

I came across this recent and promising intellectual biography of Tagore by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya.

Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya is an attempt at an interpretative biography of Tagore. Instead of giving the mundane details of his day-to-day life, the writer weaves a fascinating account of Tagore’s struggle with the changing world around him. Bhattacharya’s basic motive is to unveil the life of the legendary figure while focusing on the intellectual evolution of his work. He tries to frame his work in the genres of biography and literary criticism — calling the result an intellectual biography. He admits that “to look at the interrelationship of the inner and outer life of Rabindranath Tagore is not easy for a biographer”.

Remembered as a poet and lyricist today, Tagore was also a thinker who greatly influenced his contemporaries and successors alike. The political and social atmosphere of his time helped form his philosophy of life. Empire and nation are two inseparable discourses that emerged out of the close contact between European imperialism and Third World nationalism.

A believer in the multi-faceted nature of humanity, Tagore was equally suspicious of imperialism and modern nation states and considered them as hindrances in cultural interaction. Although an eminent supporter of the Swadeshi movement, he never restrained from criticising the emerging discourse of nationalism in India for being guilty of chauvinism and parochialism. He believed in a balanced development of the individual, and by extension, the whole nation.

More here. Two more reviews appear here and here. I've just ordered my copy and hope to write a review at some point. I've been reading some additional works by Tagore lately, particularly his selected essays and his novel Gora, both of which I received as gifts from a friend.

Joseph Anton, a Memoir by Rushdie

Salman Rushdie has written an autobiography in the third person. This New Yorker excerpt describes how his life changed after the fatwa:

Afterward, when the world was exploding around him, he felt annoyed with himself for having forgotten the name of the BBC reporter who told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin. She called him at home, on his private line, without explaining how she got the number. “How does it feel,” she asked him, “to know that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?” It was a sunny Tuesday in London, but the question shut out the light. This is what he said, without really knowing what he was saying: “It doesn’t feel good.” This is what he thought: I’m a dead man. He wondered how many days he had left, and guessed that the answer was probably a single-digit number. He hung up the telephone and ran down the stairs from his workroom, at the top of the narrow Islington row house where he lived. The living-room windows had wooden shutters and, absurdly, he closed and barred them. Then he locked the front door.

Pankaj Mishra finds this memoir lacking in significant ways. His review resonated with my own assessment of Rushdie's life and work:

Certainly, Rushdie's neat oppositions between the secular and the religious, the light and the dark, and rational literary elites and irrational masses do not clarify the great disorder of the contemporary world. They belong to an intellectually simpler time, when non-western societies, politically insignificant and little-known, could be judged solely by their success or failure in following the great example of the secular-humanist west; and writing literary fiction could seem enough to make one feel, as Tim Parks wrote in a review of Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, "engaged on the right side of some global moral and political battle".

Indeed, such complacencies of imperial intellectual cultures were what Rushdie had bravely attacked in his brilliant early phase. "Works of art, even works of entertainment," he had pointed out in 1984, "do not come into being in a social and political vacuum; and … the way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics, from history. For every text, a context." No text in our time has had contexts more various and illuminating than The Satanic Verses, or mixed politics and literature more inextricably, and with deeper consequences for so many. In Joseph Anton, however, Rushdie continues to reveal an unwillingness or inability to grasp them, or to abandon the conceit, useful in fiction but misleading outside it, that the personal is the geopolitical.

Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar - the Movie

Last night I saw an absorbing film made in 1999 on the life and times of BR Ambedkar that is now on YouTube (in English, 3 hrs). It provides a good biographical sketch of an extraordinary and inspiring man who prevailed over some breathtaking odds. This movie shows why in terms of sheer intellect, critical scholarship, and humanistic vision, Ambedkar was head and shoulders above the better known leaders of the Indian nationalist pantheon, including Gandhi and Nehru. The movie also won several National Film Awards in 1999.

Also check out the 20 Aug, 2012 issue of Outlook India magazine that is dedicated to analyzing Ambedkar and his legacy.

Perry Anderson on Gandhi

In this first of three essays on Indian history in the London Review of Books, British Marxist historian Perry Anderson takes on Gandhi (one, two, three). We might as well call this a rite of passage for historians of South Asia, and Gandhi, with his voluminous writings, iconic status, and polarizing persona, lends himself to prolific reinterpretation. Anderson sees Gandhi as alternately Machiavellian and naive, and presents many of his dubious ideas and intellectual blind spots. I agreed in particular with his take on Gandhi's anti-modernism, religiosity, and attitude to caste. Anderson considers him an overrated figure who did more harm than good, especially in his infusing the Congress Party with a strong Hindu sensibility, which, suggests Anderson, laid the ground work for Muslim alienation and the partition. More contentiously, Anderson seems to discount Gandhi's moral courage too, calls Satyagraha, his non-violent struggle, much less successful than is presumed, and argues that "contrary to legend, his attitude to violence had always been — and would remain — contingent and ambivalent."

Above all though, Anderson holds forth on Gandhi with not a modicum of hauteur, posing as a clear-eyed external observer who only sees insufficiently critical scholarship, "patriotic reveries", and nationalistic hagiographies from Indian scholars. Not surprisingly, his essay has invited many critiques (see letters to the editor below the article and Anderson's response), taking some of the shine off his otherwise extraordinary account.

In orchestrating these great movements, Gandhi displayed a rare constellation of abilities in a political leader. Charismatic mobilisation of popular feeling was certainly foremost among these. In the countryside, adoring crowds treated him as semi-divine. But, however distinctive and spectacular in his case, this is largely a given in any nationalist movement. What set Gandhi apart was its combination with three other skills. He was a first-class organiser and fundraiser – diligent, efficient, meticulous – who rebuilt Congress from top to bottom, endowing it with a permanent executive at national level, vernacular units at provincial level, local bases at district level, and delegates proportionate to population, not to speak of an ample treasury. At the same time, though temperamentally in many ways an autocrat, politically he did not care about power in itself, and was an excellent mediator between different figures and groups both within Congress and among its variegated social supports. Finally, though no great orator, he was an exceptionally quick and fluent communicator, as the hundred volumes of his articles, books, letters, cables (far exceeding the output of Marx or Lenin, let alone Mao) testify. To these political gifts were added personal qualities of a ready warmth, impish wit and iron will. It is no surprise that so magnetic a force would attract such passionate admiration, at the time and since.

But Gandhi’s achievements also came at a huge cost to the cause which he served.

More here. 

UPDATE (5 Sept, 2012): Having read all three essays and upon further reflection, Anderson's account has really grown on me. I now think that most of the Indian critiques that appear below his piece are defensive and weak, and Anderson's analysis cannot be easily dismissed. While not without its problems, I now see Anderson's account as a masterpiece of critical scholarship that requires engagement, and his digs at Indian historiography are remarkably perceptive. I know I'll be returning again to these essays to dwell on their amazingly sharp insights.

Bilgrami on Gandhi

Akeel Bilgrami, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, has written a very interesting essay on Gandhi's philosophy. Bilgrami is struck by the integrity of Gandhi's ideas, in the sense that they derive "from ideas that were very remote from politics. They flowed from the most abstract epistemological and methodological commitments." Here is a brief excerpt for a flavor of Bilgrami's argument (via 3QD):

What I mean by truth as a cognitive notion is that it is a property of sentences or propositions that describe the world. Thus when we have reason to think that the sentences to which we give assent exhibit this property, then we have knowledge of the world, a knowledge that can then be progressively accumulated and put to use through continuing inquiry building on past knowledge. [Gandhi's] recoil from such a notion of truth, which intellectualizes our relations to the world, is that it views the world as the object of study, study that makes it alien to our moral experience of it, to our most everyday practical relations to it. He symbolically conveyed this by his own daily act of spinning cotton. This idea of truth, unlike our quotidian practical relations to nature, makes nature out to be the sort of distant thing to be studied by scientific methods. Reality will then not be the reality of moral experience. It will become something alien to that experience, wholly external and objectified.

It is no surprise then that we will look upon reality as something to be mastered and conquered, an attitude that leads directly to the technological frame of mind that governs modern societies, and which in turn takes us away from our communal localities where moral experience and our practical relations to the world flourish. It takes us towards increasingly abstract places and structures such as nations and eventually global economies. In such places and such forms of life, there is no scope for exemplary action to take hold, and no basis possible for a moral vision in which value is not linked to 'imperative' and 'principle', and then, inevitably, to the attitudes of criticism and the entire moral psychology which ultimately underlies violence in our social relations. To find a basis for tolerance and non-violence under circumstances such as these, we are compelled to turn to arguments of the sort Mill tried to provide in which modesty and tolerance are supposed to derive from a notion of truth (cognitively understood) which is always elusive, never something which we can be confident of having achieved because it is not given in our moral experience, but is predicated of propositions that purport to describe a reality which is distant from our own practical and moral experience of it.

All these various elements of his opposition to Mill and his own alternative conception of tolerance and non-violence were laid open by Gandhi and systematically integrated by these arguments implicit in his many scattered writings.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Steve Jobs is dead. Watch once again his Stanford commencement speech, 2005. Also check out two interesting articles about him. The first introduces his biological father from Syria, and the circumstances that led his biological parents to put him up for adoption in the U.S. The second is a view into the mind of the amazing inventor he later became. It comes from an ex-colleague and the former CEO of Apple, John Sculley. And finally, from The Simpsons show, come satirical clips on Steve Mobs of Mapple, on thinking differently, and on a Mapple Store.

The General in Anna's Labyrinth

(Also consider reading my related opinion piece, On Public Corruption in India.)

Mehboob Geelani has an interesting profile of Arvind Kejriwal, a well-known Indian social activist and anti-corruption crusader most often associated with the Right to Information (RTI) Act. By many accounts, Arvind is the main strategist and mastermind behind the Jan Lokpal bill that is at the heart of the currently raging anti-corruption movement whose populist (and problematic) figurehead is Anna Hazare.

Full disclosure: Arvind and I were batchmates at IIT Kharagpur. We lived in the same hostel, Nehru Hall, for four years and have met many times since, especially during my two years in India, 2004-6. Even in college he was articulate and self-confident, and had a quiet intensity about him. He was Nehru Hall's mess secretary in his second year and was very active in Hindi debate and theater, serving as governor of the Hindi drama society in his final year. I liked him well enough. For me, he was also a fellow Hindi belter, relatively few in Kharagpur.

I can't however recall any specifics that foreshadowed his later firebrand activism, moral outrage, impassioned oratory, media savvy, and organizational acumen. Perhaps I simply failed to recognize the cues in college, or perhaps he did blossom later on, leading him to quit his corporate job and switch to a civil services career, an uncommon vocation for an IITian. Based on a 2005 conversation and hanging out with him during a movement against water privatization in Delhi, I can say that the man has derived much inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi. He told me that he would never run for office. In recent years, I have come to admire his personal integrity, courage, and dedication to fighting injustice, especially the kind that can be addressed by bringing transparency and accountability to governance.

Though Hazare is the recognised face of an anti-corruption campaign that began with his fast on 5 April, Kejriwal is the architect of the movement—the man journalists swarm to, seeking an interview. At press briefings, he often sits next to Hazare and helps the self-styled Gandhian handle tough questions: Kejriwal whispers into Hazare’s ear or scribbles key points on a piece of paper lying between them. When questions are posed to Kejriwal, he responds like an impassioned professor explaining a complicated problem—piling detail upon detail with the supreme confidence that his answer is the correct one. His essential message never changes: only a powerful independent anti-corruption agency, with wide-ranging authority and minimal government interference, can cure the plague of graft—and anything less will fail.

The ideas that would eventually lead to the Jan Lokpal Bill—and plans for a mass mobilisation to support it—had been on Kejriwal’s mind at least since September 2010, when public frustration with the inept preparations for the Commonwealth Games erupted into fury over evidence of widespread corruption. India’s middle classes, who already saw the event as a tremendous waste of money, were further enraged when the Games delivered nothing but international embarrassment and a multi-million rupee scam. Kejriwal, however, saw an opportunity to mobilise public opinion against corruption, and began to plot the course that would lead “Team Anna” into a high-profile showdown with the ruling United Progressive Alliance coalition. He spent his days consulting with experts and prospective allies, from lawyers to bankers to former bureaucrats and religious leaders, as well as his colleagues in the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI). He devoted his nights to drafting and revising a bill to create a new Lokpal: an independent body vested with the extraordinary powers—to investigate, prosecute and sometimes even judge—that Kejriwal thought necessary to prevent any politician or bureaucrat from obstructing the agency’s work.

More here.   Also check out an interview with and four speeches by Arvind: What is the Jan Lokpal Bill? (2011), Team Anna answers your Qs (2011), War Against Corruption Rally (2011), India Against Corruption rally in Guwahati (2011), Against Water Privatization (2007).

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.

Lelyveld's Gandhi

In the NYRB, Anita Desai reviews Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld.

Even in his lifetime the legend of Mahatma Gandhi had grown to such proportions that the man himself can be said to have disappeared as if into a dust storm. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography sets out to find him. His subtitle alerts us that this is not a conventional biography in that he does not repeat the well-documented story of Gandhi’s struggle for India but rather his struggle with India, the country that exasperated, infuriated, and dismayed him, notwithstanding his love for it.
...

One might think that Gandhi’s legacy on the whole has been depicted negatively [by Lelyveld] and yet there is no denying Lelyveld’s deep sympathy with the man. The picture that emerges is of someone intensely human, with all the defects and weaknesses that suggests, but also a visionary with a profound social conscience and courage who gave the world a model for nonviolent revolution that is still inspiring. It was a model for revolution both on the vast political level and on the personal and domestic one: nothing was unimportant in Gandhi’s eyes, and nothing impossible. He set an almost impossibly high standard and struggled personally to meet it. So if it is all seen as ending in tragedy, it was, Lelyveld writes,

not because he was assassinated, nor because his noblest qualities inflamed the hatred in his killer’s heart. The tragic element is that he was ultimately forced, like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his world.

3 Quarks Daily 2011 Arts & Literature Prize

I am delighted. I wish more of my Monday mornings began like this. :-)

Yours truly has won the 3 Quarks Daily 2011 Arts & Literature Prize, which includes $1000.

I would like to thank the editors of 3QD for hosting this contest and for running an amazing site that has certainly turned me into an addict. It never ceases to amaze me how they can find such high quality content day after day. No wonder 3QD has attracted such a smart audience. Thanks also to Laila Lalami for judging the final round of the contest. If you have not visited her beautiful website, please do so now. While there, check out a video of her talk and book reading at Google. Here is what she said about my review.

Namit Arora’s powerful review of Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan: A Dalit’s Life for 3 Quarks Daily places this 1997 memoir in a personal, cultural, and literary context. Arora gives a very moving portrayal of a kind of life I knew little about, an honest reckoning of the privileges of his own upbringing, and a thoughtful analysis both of Valmiki’s work in Hindi and its translation into English.

I also wish to acknowledge my real source of inspiration for this review: Omprakash Valmiki, for writing such a powerful memoir. As I wrote in the review, it is "the kind of book that becomes ‘the axe for the frozen sea inside us.’" The best kind of literature does that; I think literary stories have the power to teach, awaken, and reach us in ways that other kinds of writing do not. Particularly gratifying to me has been the response to this piece from upper-caste Indians in my orbit, giving me hope that raising consciousness about past and present wrongs led by our communities is not a lost cause. I hope more people will open themselves to literary works from India that are neither originally written in English, nor are confined to urban middle-class worlds.

Finally, I pledge to donate the prize money to one or more Dalit organizations engaged in the struggle.

An Arab Bearing Gifts?

Here are two interesting articles about Steve Jobs. The first introduces his biological father who is from Syria, and the circumstances that led his biological parents to put him up for adoption in the U.S. (via 3QD).

Steve Jobs, arguably the most influential CEO in the world, is the biological son of an Arab American who was born in Homs, Syria, and studied [in] Beirut. ... Abdul Fattah “John” Jandali emigrated to the United States in the early 1950s to pursue his university studies. Most media outlets have published little about Jandali, other than to say he was an outstanding professor of political science, that he married his girlfriend (Steve’s mother) and by whom he also had a daughter, and that he slipped from view following his separation from his wife ... The 79-year-old Jandali has deliberately kept his distance from the media [until now].

The second is a view into the mind of the amazing inventor he later became. It comes from an ex-colleague and the former CEO of Apple, John Sculley. Below is a random excerpt:

What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do – but the things that you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist ... The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates — Bill was brilliant too — but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. He would put out whatever he had to put out there to own that space. Steve would never do that. Steve believed in perfection. Steve was willing to take extraordinary chances in trying new product areas but it was always from the vantage point of being a designer. So when I think about different kinds of CEOs — CEOs who are great leaders, CEOs who are great turnaround artists, great deal negotiators, great people motivators — but the great skill that Steve has is he’s a great designer. Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing.

Also check out his Stanford commencement speech from 2005. And finally, from The Simpsons show, come satirical clips on Steve Mobs of Mapple (below), on thinking differently, and on a Mapple Store.

Joothan: A Dalit's Life

A review of a memoir by an ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s in rural Uttar Pradesh.

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily. This review was judged Top Quark in the 3 Quarks Daily 2011 Arts & Literature Contest. Read more about it here.)
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I grew up in the central Indian city of Gwalior until I left home for college. This was the 70s and 80s. My father worked as a textile engineer in a company town owned by the Birla Group, where we lived in a middle class residential quarter for the professional staff and their families. Our 3-BR house had a small front lawn and a vegetable patch behind. Domestic helpers, such as a washerwoman and a dishwashing woman, entered our house via the front door—all except one, who came in via the rear door. This was the latrine cleaning woman, or her husband at times. As in most traditional homes, our squat toilet was near the rear door, across an open courtyard. She also brought along a couple of scrawny kids, who waited by the vegetable patch while their mother worked.

My mother often gave them dinner leftovers, and sometimes tea. But unlike other domestic helpers, they were not served in our utensils, nor did the latrine cleaners expect to be. They brought their own utensils and placed them on the floor; my mother served them while they stood apart. When my mother turned away, they quietly picked up the food and left. To my young eyes this seemed like the natural order of things. These were the mehtars, among the lowest of the so-called ‘untouchables’. They worked all around us, yet were ‘invisible’ to me, as if part of the stage props. I neither gave them much thought during my school years, nor recognized my prejudices as such. I, and the kids in my circle, even used ‘untouchable’ caste names as playful epithets, calling each other chamaar and bhangi.

It’s possible that I first reflected on the idea of untouchability only in college, through art house cinema. Even so, upper caste Indian liberals made these films and it was their viewpoint I saw. It is hardly a stretch to say that the way even the most sensitive white liberals in the US knew and described the black experience of America is partly why one had to read Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and other black authors. A similar parallel holds for Native Americans, immigrants, and women, as well as the ‘untouchables,’ now called Dalits (‘the oppressed’), numbering one out of six Indians. In recent years, they have begun to tell their own stories, bearing witness to their slice of life in India. Theirs is not only a powerful new current of Indian literature, it is also a major site of resistance and revolt.

Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki is one such work of Dalit literature, first published in Hindi in 1997 and translated into English by Arun Prabha Mukherjee in 2003 (she added an excellent introduction in the 2007 edition). It is a memoir of growing up ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s outside a typical village in Uttar Pradesh. Told as a series of piercing vignettes, Joothan is also a remarkable record of a rare Indian journey, one that took a boy from extremely wretched socioeconomic conditions to prominence as an author and social critic.

The New Dalit Consciousness

Laura Brueck on the emerging complexity of Dalit consciousness in Himal Southasian:

Hindi Dalit literature’s moment has arrived. After years of obscurity and unflattering comparisons to the maturity and expressiveness of Dalit literature in languages such as Marathi and Tamil, creative Dalit writing in Hindi is finally reaching a more visible level of popular recognition. Hindi Dalit novels, autobiographies, short-story and poetry anthologies, as well as volumes of literary criticism, are today being regularly published by Delhi’s top Hindi-language publishing houses, Rajkamal and Radhakrishna Prakashan. Dalit writers infuse the pages of Delhi’s top Hindi literary magazines, such as Hans and Katha Desh, with their poetry, prose and political perspectives....

With the growing shift of Hindi Dalit literary voices from marginalised spheres of ‘alternative’ social discourse to more mainstream platforms, Hindi Dalit literature is quickly becoming deeply embedded in the changing cultural politics of modern India. But it is wrong to think of Dalit literature as speaking in a single voice in the Hindi literary and political landscapes. In what might be best categorised as the Hindi Dalit literary sphere, there exists a plurality of people, life experiences, literary voices and perspectives that often find themselves at odds with one another when trying to fulfil the demands of a mainstream audience for a recognisable, ‘authentic’ and even ‘digestible’ Dalit literary voice. There are fissures within the Dalit literary sphere, situated along the fault-lines of gender, geography (urban and rural) and class, which create a vibrant and vital field of debate over the strategies of ‘writing resistance’.

Here is another article on the topic in the WSJ. My review of Omprakash Valmiki's Joothan with appear here and in 3 Quarks Daily on 29th March, along with pointers to other English translations of recent Dalit literature from other Indian languages.

Early Islam, Part 4: The Mystic Tide

Part 1: The Rise of Islam  /  Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam  /  Part 3: The Path of Reason

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two major currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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‘Mysticism is ultimately rooted in the original matrix of religious experience, which grows in turn out of man’s overwhelming awareness of God and his sense of nothingness without Him, and of the urgent need to subordinate reason and emotion to this experience.’ [1]

Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, first arose in Syria and Iraq in the 8th century CE. Arab conquerors, a century earlier, had taken Islam all over the Near East, which included lands with a long tradition of ascetic thought and eastern Christian monasticism—a tradition that valued religious poverty, contempt for worldly pleasures, and a secret world of virtue beyond that of obedience to law—no doubt encouraged by the fact that for three centuries, until after the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, Christians in the Near East were a minority subject to suspicion and persecution by the pagan Romans.

But old habits die hard, and even as Islam spread, many new converts, beneath a slim veneer of their new faith, persisted with asceticism and detachment. What transformed asceticism into mysticism was something quite radical: an unabashed love of God. This transformation has been symbolically ascribed to a woman from Basra, Rabi’ah al-Adawiyah (d. 801?), among the first to articulate the mystic ideal of a disinterested love of God, as in her prayer below.

‘O God, if I worship Thee for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thy own sake, grudge me not Thy everlasting beauty.’ [2]

Many believers who were also drawn to rational philosophy found its objective accounts of God unsatisfactory. They yearned for a God who was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote God of the philosophers and the legalistic God of the theologians (the ulema). Early Islamic mystics, or Sufis, [3] thus evolved a more subjective notion of God: each of us can experience the divine differently; revelation is an event that unfolds deep within us; each of us, through our own effort, can reach out to the divine.

A systematic destruction of the ego (fana) and surrender of the self to God became central to the Sufi ideal: one who discards his ego to discover the divine presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realization and self-control. ‘Man becomes dead unto himself and alive unto God.’ [4] Many practiced celibacy as a mystic ideal, flouting the example of matrimony set by Muhammad himself. Scholars like Majid Fakhry have noted Hindu influences on ‘this bold concept of annihilation of the ego and the reabsorption of the human in the divine’ (many early mystics in Persia had Hindu teachers).

Early Islam, Part 3: The Path of Reason

Part 1: The Rise of Islam  /  Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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Islamic scholars during the golden age of Islam (roughly 9th-12th centuries) widely referred to Aristotle as the ‘First Teacher,’ evidence of the high regard in which they held the ancient Greek philosopher. The man ranked by them as second only to Aristotle was a tenth-century Muslim thinker by the name of Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE). [1] Perhaps a good way to illustrate the rational current of early Islam is through the life and times of this important thinker. In the words of Muhsin Mahdi, a modern scholar of Islamic studies,

‘[Al-Farabi was] the great interpreter of the thought of Plato and Aristotle and their commentators, and the master to whom almost all major Muslim as well as a number of Jewish and Christian philosophers turned for a fuller understanding of the controversial, troublesome and intricate questions of philosophy ... He paid special attention to the study of language and its relation to logic. In his numerous commentaries on Aristotle’s logical works he expounded for the first time in Arabic the entire range of the scientific and non-scientific forms of argument and established the place of logic as the indispensable prerequisite for philosophic inquiry.’ [2]

For a flavor of what other notable thinkers of his age thought of him, consider this remarkable passage from the autobiography of Ibn Sina (aka Avicenna, 980-1037 CE), the Persian philosopher and physician famous in the West as the ‘Islamic Galen.’ Ibn Sina wrote that after a diligent study of ‘the logical, natural, and mathematical sciences’ in his youth, he finally reached the study of metaphysics:

‘I read the Metaphysics [of Aristotle], but I could not comprehend its contents, and its author’s object remained obscure to me, even when I had gone back and read it forty times and had got to a point where I had memorized it. In spite of this I could not understand it nor its object, and I despaired of myself and said, ‘This is a book which there is no way of understanding.’ But one day in the afternoon when I was at the booksellers’ quarter a salesman approached with a book in his hand which he was calling out for sale. He offered it to me, but I refused it with disgust, believing that there was no merit in this science. But he said to me, ‘Buy it, because its owner needs the money and so it is cheap. I will sell it to you for three dirhams.’ So I bought it and, lo and behold, it was Abu Nasr al-Farabi’s book on the objects of Metaphysics. I returned home and was quick to read it, and in no time the objects of that book became clear to me because I had got to the point of having memorized it by heart. I rejoiced at this and the next day gave much in alms to the poor in gratitude to God, who is exalted ...’ [3]

Champion of the Green Revolution Dies at 95

Who has heard of Norman Borlaug? I had not heard of him until now, after his death, when the Wall Street Journal calls him "arguably the greatest American of the 20th century".

Borlaug's life work, the Green Revolution, is the reason the world is not starving today as it was half a century ago. As the individual responsible for spreading high-yield agricultural practices through the hungriest parts of the world, beginning with South Asia in the 1960s, he was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2006. He changed the world, as much as did Louis Pasteur or the Wright Brothers, yet his name is commonly unknown outside the Developing World. And his contribution is today seen as controversial.

He is eulogized today in the Wall Street Journal:

Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work ending the India-Pakistan food shortage of the mid-1960s. He spent most of his life in impoverished nations, patiently teaching poor farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World War II.
....

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists "have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things."

In Light of Nalanda

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

I don’t know many books in which ‘Go west, young man!’ would be a call to go to India. One such book is Journey to the West, ‘China's most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure,’ published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. The novel’s hero, ‘a mischievous monkey with human traits ... accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture.’ [1] It allegorically presents pilgrims journeying toward India as individuals journeying toward enlightenment. [2]

The inspiration for this novel was a journey made by a 7th cent. CE Chinese man, Xuanzang. [3] Though raised in a conservative Confucian family near Chang’an (modern Xian), Xuanzang, at 13, followed his brother into the Buddhist monastic life (Buddhism had come to China around 2nd cent. CE). A precocious boy, he mastered his material so well that he was ordained a full monk when only 20. Disenchanted with the quality of Buddhist texts and teachers available to him, he decided to go west to India, to the cradle and thriving center of Buddhism itself. After a yearlong journey full of peril and adventure, across deserts and mountains, via Tashkent and Samarkand, meeting robbers and kings, debating Buddhists on the Silk Road and in Afghanistan—where he saw the majestic Bamiyan Buddhas—he reached what is now Pakistan.

He spent 17 years, from 629-645 CE, in the Indian subcontinent, traveling, visiting places associated with the Buddha’s life, learning Sanskrit, and studying with Buddhist masters, most notably at the Nalanda University in modern-day Bihar, one of the first great universities of the world, where subjects like grammar, logic, philosophy, metaphysics, astronomy, medicine, and theology were taught. His erudition seems to have brought him fame and royal patronage in India. In a convocation of religious scholars ‘in Harsha’s capital of Kannauj ... Xuanzang allegedly defeated five hundred Brahmins, Jains, and heterodox Buddhists in spirited debate.’ [4]

The Nalanda establishment greatly admired Xuanzang. Beseeching him to stay, they even offered him a senior position on their academic staff. But he declined with this reply: ‘Buddha established his doctrine so that it might be diffused to all lands. Who would wish to enjoy it alone, and to forget those who are not yet enlightened?’ For scores of years, he was accorded a place in Indian temple paintings with his ‘hemp shoes, spoon and chop sticks mounted on multicolored clouds.’ [5]

This Way for the Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen

Tadeusz Borowski was 21 years old when he was deported to the cluster of concentration camps in southern Poland, collectively known as Auschwitz, in 1943. His fiancée had mysteriously disappeared one night; when he went to look for her, he was befallen by her same fate: entrapment by the Nazis, arrest, and deportation for participation in the Polish resistance.

     

Until that night, young Borowski had been a student of literature in the underground university of Warsaw. Since it was the Nazis' intention to enslave the Poles, secondary school and university were forbidden to them during the occupation. Still, thousands risked death and deportation, meeting in small groups in private homes in order to pursue their studies. (This was a system revived from an earlier time, as similar restrictions had been resisted by Poles under the Russian occupation some decades earlier, when Marie Curie had studied in the underground "Floating University" of Warsaw.)

Borowski had started to write early, publishing his dark poetry through the underground press during his student days. While at Auschwitz, he wrote lengthy letters to his fiancée in the women's camp, and immediately after the war he wrote several devastatingly stark short stories recalling his life in the camps. A selection of these letters and stories have been published and translated in a small volume with the English title This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (although his story by that name doesn't appear in the collection). Having survived two years, mostly as a high-level prisoner, in a place where surreal violence and suffering were normalized and experienced as mundane, Borowski's first-person stories are characterized by a brutal acknowledgment of the fact that such extremes of acceptance, of behavior, are, indeed, humanly possible. The penetrating honesty and deep compassion of his writing confronts the reader surprisingly, a mixture of darkness and wonder that opens more questions than it settles on the nature of the human beast and gives a more textured evocation of life in a Nazi concentration camp than any I've read before.

While working in a position of relative comfort as an orderly in the medical facility at Auschwitz, where prisoners are healed or used for experimentation, where infants' corpses are cataloged, he writes to his lover in the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau about the normalcy of the absurd, the daily goings on around him. These letters constitute the heart of this collection. In them, as in his stories, he writes about death, about the lines of prisoners headed for the gas chambers, about other murders and tortures inflicted by prisoners or guards; he writes about love, about his dreams for the future, about the emptiness that encroaches upon them all. He writes about the exhilaration of a prisoner boxing match, the pleasure of listening to the prisoner symphony orchestra, the greedy desire of the men prisoners for the women of the "Puff," the camp brothel where women prisoners are both pimped and privileged by the camp authorities.

A Journey to the West

Journey to the West, "China's most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure," was published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. The novel's hero, "a mischievous monkey with human traits ... accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture." * It is "an extended allegory in which ... pilgrims journeying toward India stands for the individual journeying toward enlightenment." * Indeed there aren't many books in which "go west, young man" would be a call to go to India.

The inspiration for this novel was a journey made by a 7th century CE Chinese man, Xuan Zang (or Hieun Tsang). Though raised in a conservative Confucian family near Chang'an (modern Xi'an), Hieun Tsang followed his brother into a Buddhist monastic life (Buddhism had come to China after the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 CE). A precocious boy, he mastered his material so well that he was ordained a full monk when only 20. Disenchanted with the quality of Buddhist texts available to him, he decided to go west to India, to the cradle and thriving center of Buddhism itself. After a year-long journey full of peril and adventure, crossing deserts and mountains, meeting robbers and kings, debating Buddhists on the Silk Road and in Afghanistan (where he saw the Bamiyan Buddhas, recently destroyed by the Taliban), he reached what is now Pakistan.

He spent 17 years in India, traveling, visiting places associated with the Buddha's life, learning Sanskrit, and studying with Buddhist masters, most notably at the famous Nalanda University. His erudition seems to have brought him fame and royal patronage in India when in a religious convocation "in Harsha's capital of Kannauj during the first week of the year 643 ... Hieun Tsang allegedly defeated five hundred Brahmins, Jains, and heterodox Buddhists in spirited debate." *

For his return, he gathered hundreds of Sanskrit texts (sutras), loaded them on pack animals, and set off for Xi'an. Many of them got destroyed en route but he still managed to bring back 657 books. It was the time of the Tang dynasty in China, best known for its cultural effulgence akin to the Guptas of India (not the least because Shunya came into being then :). The Tang were Buddhist and, like the Guptas, major patrons of Buddhism.

Upon his return and for the remaining 19 years of his life, Hieun Tsang worked with a team of linguist monks to translate many of the 657 books and wrote a commentary on them. He also published an account of his travels which is now a precious historical record. He founded the Faxiang school of Buddhism whose ideas live on in the Zen variant. When Buddhism died out in India, its texts lost forever, these translations would become the only version of the Indian originals -- like the many Classical and Hellenistic Greek texts we know only via Arabic translations made during the so-called golden age of Islam in Baghdad.

The Tang emperor, Gaozong, supported Hieun Tsang's enterprise. He even built a pagoda -- now called the Big Goose Pagoda -- to house his translations, many still in use and displayed in a small museum on site. Outside the entrance stands an elegant modern statue of the man. It is said that the emperor canceled all audiences for three days when he heard of his death.

Like Chinese food in India, Buddhism altered its flavor in China. Confucianism, above all, stood for hierarchical relations, social order, respect for authority, orthodox family values, practical success, and ancestor worship. Despite their shared agnosticism and focus on this world, the centrality of the individual spiritual quest, detachment, and monasticism in Buddhism must have threatened Confucianism. What therefore arose in China was a "Confucianized" Buddhism. And just as Hinduism borrowed from and then pushed out Buddhism in India, Neo-Confucianism marginalized Buddhism in China only a few centuries after Hieun Tsang, not the least because it was a "foreign faith" (though it would not disappear as completely as in India).
   

(Note: Xuan Zang is variously spelled Hsüan Tsang, Hiuen Tsang, Xuanzang, Hiouen Thsang, Hsuan Chwang, Hsien-tsang, etc.)

Death of a Colonel

Col. Vasanth V, commanding officer of the 9th Maratha light infantry battalion, died on Tuesday, July 31st. He was injured while battling a group of militants who were trying to cross the India-Pakistan Line of Control (LOC) in the Uri sector in Kashmir.

I had met Col. Vasanth briefly in 1991 when I was on vacation in India. He was a soft-spoken man with a good sense of humor. He had surprised me with his knowledge of obscure things by asking whether the culture of the Cajuns in Louisiana was still alive. I hadn't known about the Cajuns before coming to the US, and hadn't expected that someone in India would know about them. So I naturally asked him how he even knew of their existence. Though he couldn't recall exactly where he had read about them, he brushed off my surprise by saying "We used to read a lot of things, including the newspaper the samosas came wrapped in"! I could immediately sense a kindred soul, having been book and library-starved during my childhood. For some reason, that moment of resonance came back to me today, when I heard about his death.

I have often wondered if the chaos of the world of political violence, either within countries or between them, is going to affect me directly. There are so many conflicts in the world that I must count myself incredibly fortunate never to have come within sniffing distance of any. This time though, the violence has come quite close. Col. Vasanth and I had only one degree of separation. He was a long-time colleague and a good friend of my brother.

I wonder if the planners of violence like the generals and spy agencies pursuing "strategic depth" or "balance of power" ever pause to think of the misery they are inflicting upon people. Scratch that. It is quite obvious that they don't. For them, the jihadi groups are pawns in a broader chess game.

We read of the deaths of people in the news reports so often. Yet, when a person we know dies, we are forced to pause and reflect on the tragedy. Our own sorrows, frustrations and hassles start looking trivial by comparison. A death you reflect upon forces you to evaluate life again.

Cross-posted from Neutral Observer.

Wise Man Socrates

Socrates, like Jesus and the Buddha, never committed his ideas to writing.* Our main sources on him are Plato, his student, and Xenophon, the historian. The picture that emerges from their accounts make him perhaps the greatest man of Classical Greece. This is by no means an original insight, but one that I was able to convince myself of many years ago.

Socrates is justly famous for declaring that the unexamined life is not worth living, and for his dialectic method of inquiry, the Socratic Method. With Socrates, the central problem of (Western) philosophy shifted from cosmology to the formulation of a rule of life through understanding, to a practical use of reason. He upheld self-knowledge and the supremacy of the intellect, insisting that one must work hard to discover the right and wrong. As the Apology relates, Socrates advocated the tending of one’s soul, to make it as good as possible – and not to ruin one’s life by putting care of the body and possessions before care for the soul.**

Socrates was no retiring ascetic but an urbane intellectual of aristocratic lineage, a man of the world, famed for his practical wisdom, modesty, self-control, generosity, alertness, and integrity. "There was no complacent self-righteousness of the Pharisee nor the angry bitterness of the satirist in his attitude toward the follies or even the crimes of his fellowmen. It was his deep and lifelong conviction that the improvement not only of himself but also of his countrymen was a task laid upon him by his God, not to be executed with a scowling face and an upbraiding voice. He frequented the society of promising young men, and talked freely to politicians, poets, and artisans about their various callings, their notions of right and wrong, the matters of familiar interest to them."**

In his youth, he had served in the Athenian army, apparently with distinction. Yet he missed no opportunity to be a gadfly to the establishment, working "to undermine the collective notion of 'might makes right' so common to Greece during this period."*** A story goes that Socrates, when pronounced the wisest of men by the oracle at Delphi, earnestly set out to investigate the truth of this claim. He interrogated poets, craftsmen, politicians and other 'wise men'. After investigating, his conclusion certainly didn't help him win friends among them:

Percy Julian, Chemist Extraordinaire

The story I will tell you tonight is a story of wonder and amazement, almost a story of miracles. It is a story of laughter and tears. It is a story of human beings, therefore, a story of meanness, of stupidity, of kindness and nobility. —Percy Julian, 1899-1975

Percy Lavon Julian, born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1899, the grandson of slaves, was one of the most accomplished chemists of the 20th century. His work, especially in the field of steroid chemistry, positively affected countless millions of lives and did nothing less than to help change the world.

In the Jim Crow South, libraries were closed to blacks and public schooling ended with 8th grade; teacher’s colleges were available for aspirants to the 10th grade. This education was seen as adequate to produce laborers for the larger economy and teachers for the black community. Though Percy’s parents had but a basic education themselves, they scraped together their coins to build a home library for their six children, all of whom would grow up to earn post-graduate degrees. Percy went first when at sixteen years he gained admission to DePauw University, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, as a “sub-freshman” who had not completed high school. DePauw would be life-changing for Julian, as he recalled, “On my first day in College, I remember walking in and a white fellow stuck out his hand and said ‘How are you?–Welcome!’ I had never shaken hands with a white boy before and did not know whether I should or not.”

Percy Julian was not the only black student at Depauw, but he was surprised to find upon arrival that campus hostel facilities were closed to them. Alone in a strange town, it took young Percy a day and a half before he found a place that would serve him a meal. Eventually, he made a deal with a college fraternity for bed and board in exchange for his service as a waiter. He also took work digging ditches to help pay his tuition. Far behind his white classmates in education, Julian attended the local high school while pursuing his first two years of university studies. He did catch up with his peers and by the end of his fourth year, Percy Julian graduated Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian: first in his class.

At commencement time, my great-grandmother bared her shoulders, and she showed me, for the first time, the deep scars that had remained from a beating she had received when, one day, during the waning days of the Civil War, she went through the Negro quarters and cried out, “Get yourselves ready, children. The Yankees are coming. The Lord has heard our prayers!” And then, proudly, she took my Phi Beta Kappa key in her hand and said, “This is worth all the scars.”

Julian’s dream was to get a PhD in chemistry, following the inspiration of St. Elmo Brady, the first African American to have accomplished the same a few years before. But Julian's professors dissuaded him; they would not recommend him for graduate programs; they showed him letters from top graduate schools expressing concern that he would over-qualify himself as a black man and be unable to find a job. So Julian took a teaching position at Fisk University, a historically black college in Tennessee. Though he was terribly unhappy, he made the best of his role, writing a completely new series of lectures for organic chemistry. When he showed these to William Blanchard, his mentor at DePauw, the professor was so impressed he finally advocated for him to win the Austin Fellowship in Chemistry at Harvard University.