Shunya's Notes

Confucius and Modern China

An interesting article on China's emerging political culture by Daniel A. Bell, professor of ethics and political philosophy at Tsinghua University, Beijing. A communitarian at heart, he has written perceptively about the so-called Asian values and against the universal pretensions of western liberalism. He is also the author of China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society.

Four decades ago, it would have been suicidal to say a good word about Confucius in Beijing. Confucius was the reactionary enemy, and all Chinese were encouraged to struggle against him. Chairman Mao himself was photographed on the cover of a revolutionary newspaper that announced the desecration of Confucius’s grave in Qufu. My own university was a hotbed of extreme leftism.

How times have changed. Today, the Chinese Communist Party approves a film about Confucius starring the handsome leading man Chow Yun-Fat. The master is depicted as an astute military commander and teacher of humane and progressive values, with a soft spot for female beauty. What does this say about China’s political future? Confucius bombed at the box office, leading many to think that the revival of Confucianism will go the same way as the anti-Confucius campaigns in the Cultural Revolution.

But perhaps it’s just a bad movie. Confucius received the kiss of death when it went head-to-head against the blockbuster Avatar. A vote for Confucius was seen as a vote against the heroic blue creatures from outer space. In the long term, however, Confucian revivalists may be on the right side of history.

More here. To get a better measure of the man, check out this 2008 video interview (17 minutes; the interviewer is a tad painful!).

UPDATE: Here are two more articles of related interest. One by Mark Lilla, One Set of Shoulders: China's Hidden Revolution, and another by Perry Link, Waiting for WikiLeaks: Beijing's Seven Secrets. Beneath Link's article, read the comments by Jack Cameron (esp his second one), which I suspect Bell might agree with strongly. Also interesting is Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on Communitarianism, written by Bell.

Sex at Dawn

 Eric Michael Johnson reviews "Sex at Dawn" by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá over at SEED:

But why should a species often described as monogamous be so hypersexual? Monogamous animals by definition don’t have to compete for reproduction and, as a result, are generally characterized by a low level of sexual activity. But according to Ryan and Jethá humans top a very short list of species that engage in sex for pleasure. “No animal spends more of its allotted time on Earth fussing over sex than Homo sapiens,” they write. In fact, the animal world is filled with species who confine their sexual behavior to just a few periods each year, the only times when conception is possible. Among apes the only monogamous species are the gibbons whose infrequent, reproduction-only copulations make them much better adherents of the Vatican’s guidelines than we are. In this way, Ryan and Jethá argue, repressing our sexuality should not be confused with reining in an “animal” nature; rather, it is denying one of the most unique aspects of what it means to be human.

....

However, by looking at modern indigenous societies and comparing the findings of anthropologists with the latest results in behavioral psychology and biology, Ryan and Jethá piece together a remarkably coherent pattern from an otherwise fractured understanding of human sexuality. From societies that believe that multiple men are necessary for a successful pregnancy (what researchers refer to as “partible paternity”) to those where not having an extra-marital tryst will cause a man to be labeled “stingy of one’s genitals” by his female suitors, the authors conclude that marriage may be an established social arrangement among many hunter-gatherers but it’s one in which sexuality is decidedly fluid. A range of physiological evidence from Western populations is further offered to support this position, from the year-round libido in both sexes, to the unusually large size of men’s genitalia compared to other apes, to the shifting sexual strategy during various stages in women’s reproductive cycle (and lest we forget multiple female orgasms?). All suggest that our species is adapted for several concurrent sexual partners.

Blocked by Caste

Is urbanization and industrial development defeating the inequities of caste in India, as many upper-caste Indians like to believe (using it to buttress their opposition to caste-based reservations)? Well, not quite.

Cities do offer greater anonymity and a diversity of jobs unrelated to traditional caste occupations, thereby weakening many, perhaps even the worst, forms of rural casteism. An office-going Brahmin is unlikely to worry about being polluted if he brushes against a Dalit in a crowded bus, or object to eating out lest a Dalit prepared the meal. But even as many old caste abuses have vanished or weakened in the face of urbanization, others have arisen or evolved into malignant forms. Industrialization is indeed a turbulent force for the caste system, but it is not in itself a socially progressive force. Depending on the injustice and inequities already present, capital and industry can deepen preexisting social privileges and discrimination, which seems to be the case in India.

As many historians of caste have noted, caste in the urban milieu has morphed to behave more like an ethnic community, whose members not only harbor notions of "ethnic" distinctiveness but also a strong consciousness of rank vs. other caste communities. This continuing lack of egalitarianism then poisons urban civic life. It impacts hiring decisions; access to rental housing, health care, and public services; response from law enforcement; judicial verdicts; etc. In our age of economic liberalization, even the Indian private sector oozes discrimination from all its pores. If this is a surprise, a recent and extensive study, Blocked by Caste, should decisively dispel the belief that the private sector is mostly caste-blind and hires based on ‘merit’. It shows that equally qualified Dalit and Muslim résumés are much less likely to get picked than upper-caste ones, and exposes other "hidden nuances of caste prejudice in the language of globalisation that contemporary India speaks."

Below are two reviews of Blocked by Caste. The obvious question this study raises is: shouldn’t affirmative action be part of the strategy for equalizing opportunity in the private sector? I've included another related study (and here is a story about housing discrimination in Delhi).

The economics of caste inequity

"HR bosses, one and all, swore by merit in their choice of candidates and were dead set against reservation of jobs. But, the commitment to merit was voiced along with the conviction that merit tends to be distributed by caste or region! Such stereotyping, [the authors of the study] found, made it impossible for highly qualified, low-caste applicants to be hired for their skills and accomplishments. In sum, employers were not “caste blind” as they claimed."

Caste & the labour market

"There is a myth, however, that caste does not matter in the urban milieu and that, with the anonymity of the big city and with education and associated job and occupational mobility (assisted by affirmative action), traditional caste-based discriminatory practices disappear." ... "Caste discrimination not only persists but has taken new forms and penetrated into new systems."

Dalit is a Dalit even in a ‘free’ market

"Sirswal, 75, had started off as a sweeper but is now one of the oldest businessmen in Panipat, Haryana. He quit his sweeper’s job once his handloom unit was on its feet. His success, he says, came largely because he hid the fact that he was born a Valmiki Dalit. Customers who discovered his caste origins shunned him. Banks would not give loans because caste matters to them too, and Dalit entrepreneurs are too few and far between to work the system as a group like the upper castes do."

Deresiewicz on Education

A really good essay by William Deresiewicz on what it means to be educated, and the many downsides of attending elite universities. It also made me think of my own gripe four years ago against my alma mater, IIT Kharagpur. :)

... if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? Don’t they work harder than anyone else—indeed, harder than any previous generation? They are. They do. But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.

If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

Storybooks for a Plural World

Here is an article that examines children's storybooks in India, the kind I grew up reading, like the popular series Amar Chitra Katha. I did of course enjoy them as a kid but as an adult, I've had to unlearn so much of their implicit worldview and "wisdom". Indeed, were I responsible for a child today, I'd agonize over exposing her to most Indian storybooks. Others might say the same about storybooks from other cultures, but for years now, I've wanted to write an article such as this about Indian storybooks:

... Yet more than 50 years later, it comes as a shock to find, in book after book ... both protagonist and audience so obviously elite and upper caste. It took the women’s movement and activists raising questions of caste and religious community for the public to realise how systemic, and how related to the nature of power and authority, these representations were.

In India, children’s reading materials were long (and continue to be) addressed to an urban, middle- and upper-caste child in ways that reflected his or her economic resources, family relationships, beliefs, school experiences, food habits and language. They recorded and endorsed the world, the sensibility and the authority of this child, resulting in a self-assured hold over the world that was later a key enabling factor in such children’s success. Other children, however, were not provided with such psychic support. In such books we hardly ever found a child who had come to school hungry and sits there dreaming about food, for instance, or one who had to scheme in order to acquire books for class. Children from different contexts sometimes did find a place in these stories, but were generally forced to establish their ‘smartness’. A tribal boy, for instance, needed to establish that his knowledge of the forest can be valuable for his urban, middle-class classmates; a disabled girl must excel as a craftsperson. Even in the case of middle-class children, only a restricted set of situations were generally admissible, thus glossing over the fact that children often lead complex lives. We rarely encountered a child whose mother was depressed or one who was coping with a death in the family – such children lived with the knowledge that they must anxiously guard such secrets.
...

Over the years ... it has become particularly clear that the concept and metaphor of inclusion is inadequate to address issues of marginalisation in India today. Equality and self-respect of minorities requires a rearrangement of the way that the ‘life worlds’ themselves are imagined – a process that involves a critical pulling-away from old certainties. It suggests new frameworks in which we can think about the challenge of education in a plural world, but it also involves the creation of new narrative fragments, new figures, new settings and new dramas – ultimately, a new structure of feeling and knowing, a new idiom of speech. These are radical tasks. Yet they are necessary tasks for a contemporary aesthetic.

More here.

Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay

Comparing China and India has become a popular pastime in some quarters, including aspects of their national economies, political systems, infrastructure, human development, environment, and more. In this audio interview, Romesh Vaitilingam interviews Pranab Bardhan of UC Berkeley about his new book ‘Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India’. It is a brisk yet insightful overview (via Robin Varghese/3QD).

Click below to listen. 

Is India a Flailing State?

In this interesting paper, Lant Pritchett argues that India, despite its economic strides and democracy, is a "flailing" state:

How does one reconcile the contradictions of a booming economy and democracy with world class elite institutions and yet chaotic conditions in service provision of the most rudimentary types?  I argue that for India we need a new category.  I argue that India is today a flailing state---a nation-state in which the head, that is the elite institutions at the national (and in some states) level remain sound and functional but that this head is no longer reliably connected via nerves and sinews to its own limbs.  In many parts of India in many sectors, the everyday actions of the field level agents of the state—policemen, engineers, teachers, health workers—are increasingly beyond the control of the administration at the national or state level.

The contrast with China could not be more striking.  In China one worries that, due to the lack of the processes of democratic representation the head of the state, while capable, is beyond the control of the citizens.  Yet, at the same time one reads of local government officials being executed for corruption.  Clearly the head has a strong interest in retaining control of the administrative apparatus of implementation. 

More here.

Mathematics in India

David Mumford reviews Kim Plofker's Mathematics in India:

Did you know that Vedic priests were using the so-called Pythagorean theorem to construct their fire altars in 800 BCE?; that the differential equation for the sine function, in finite difference form, was described by Indian mathematician-astronomers in the fifth century CE?; and that “Gregory’s” series ... was proven using the power series for arctangent and, with ingenious summation methods, used to accurately compute π in southwest India in the fourteenth century? If any of this surprises you, Plofker’s book is for you.

Her book fills a huge gap: a detailed, eminently readable, scholarly survey of the full scope of Indian mathematics and astronomy (the two were inseparable in India) from their Vedic beginnings to 1800.
...<snip>...

It is important to recognize two essential differences here between the Indian approach and that of the Greeks. First of all, whereas Eudoxus, Euclid, and many other Greek mathematicians created pure mathematics, devoid of any actual numbers and based especially on their invention of indirect reductio ad absurdum arguments, the Indians were primarily applied mathematicians focused on finding algorithms for astronomical predictions and philosophically predisposed to reject indirect arguments. In fact, Buddhists and Jains created what is now called Belnap’s four-valued logic claiming that assertions can be true, false, neither, or both. The Indian mathematics tradition consistently looked for constructive arguments and justifications and numerical algorithms. So whereas Euclid’s Elements was embraced by Islamic mathematicians and by the Chinese when Matteo Ricci translated it in 1607, it simply didn’t fit with the Indian way of viewing math. In fact, there is no evidence that it reached India before the eighteenth century.

Basharat Peer on Kashmir

Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer, author of the memoir Curfewed Night, discusses the Kashmir conflict with writer Pankaj Mishra (who also reviewed the book on the NYRB Blog). Basharat's readings from his book are vivid and moving, and provide a window into ordinary life during the two-decade old Kashmir conflict (1 hr, 18 min). Basharat also appeared on the Diane Rehm radio show where, during Q&A, he was attacked by Indian nationalists (via Amitav Kumar).

Curfewed Night is a brave and unforgettable piece of literary reporting that reveals the personal stories behind one of the most brutal conflicts in modern times. Since 1989, when the separatist movement exploded, around 70,000 people have been killed in the battle between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Born and raised in the war-torn region, Basharat Peer brings this little-known part of the world to life in haunting, vivid detail. It is a tale of a man's love for his land, the pain of leaving home, and the joy of return—as well as a fierce and moving piece of reportage from an intrepid young journalist.

Joothan: A Dalit's Life

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

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

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, 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.