Category: Politics
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What We Talk About When We Talk About the Future
[The 19th (and final) part in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
No, it’s not your imagination, this feeling that we are entering a time of escalating crises brought by Nature: more frequent and severe storms, floods, and forest fires; more debilitating heat-waves; mounting crop losses and failures; rising water stress, hunger, and related conflicts; unrelenting pest and disease threats for us, our “livestock,” and our crops. Our planet is moving beyond the stability of the Holocene—the narrow climatic range that enabled our modern civilization—to enter a much harsher climate regime, and its effects are starting to engulf us. Today, these effects are being felt much more by some than others, with weather related disasters primarily responsible for having forcibly displaced more than one percent of humanity from their homes by the middle of 2021—already an unprecedented human calamity. Ten times that number—eight-hundred and eighty million people—now lack sufficient food to eat, an increase of over a hundred-million hungry souls compared to two years ago. And if you worry that it might get worse, the answer is a hard yes: under the best-case scenarios, it will get much worse—and at a faster rate. This is according to the most comprehensive assessment of climate-change impacts compiled to date, part two of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report by Working Group II, released in March 2022. The report projects, for instance, that in Africa alone half the population—seven-hundred million people—may be displaced due to water stress by 2030. Earlier forecasts cited by UN agencies that a billion people could be desperately displaced by 2050 do not seem improbable.
Category: 3QD, Anthropology & Archaeology, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Politics, Science, Video -
India: A Forecast
A thread of 20 tweets, on what I see ahead in India. Click below to read the rest.India: A Forecast 🧵
India is on a sinister path, much darker than most worried citizens foresaw in 2014. Things have gone downhill rather fast. So what do I see as the near-term outlook (5–7 years) for India? I offer my provisional thoughts in this thread. Hope I’m wrong. (1/20)— Namit Arora (@NamitArora0) May 3, 2022
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What a Way To Go
[The fifteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
I began writing this series eighteen months ago to explore the human experience and human potential in the face of climate change, through the stories we tell. It’s been a remarkable journey for me as I followed trails of questions through new fields of ideas along entirely unexpected paths of enquiry. New vistas revealed themselves, sometimes perilous, always compelling. And so I went. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve come to realize that our present environmental predicament is actually far worse off—that is to say, more threatening to near-term human wellbeing and civilizational integrity—than most of us recognize. This journey is changing me. So when I now look at contemporary works of fiction about climate change—so-called cli-fi, which I’d hoped might provide fresh insights—so much of it strikes me as somewhat underwhelming before the task: narrow, shallow, tepid, unimaginative, or even dishonest.At the same time, a few conclusions have begun to coalesce in my mind. Some of these may seem controversial, largely because they run contrary to the common narratives that anchor our dominant understanding of how the world works—our stories of human exceptionalism, technological magic, and the tenets of capitalist faith. Indeed, many of my own assumptions and worldviews have been challenged, altered, or broken. In their stead, new ways of thinking have taken root, as I began seeing through at least some of our most cherished cultural fabrications to understand our quandary with a different perspective.
Category: 3QD, Anthropology & Archaeology, Art & Cinema, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Politics, Science, Video -
Namit Arora interviewed by Scroll
Scroll commissioned my friend and fellow writer, Abdullah Khan, to interview me over email. I enjoyed responding to his excellent questions. Read it here, or read it on Scroll.in where it was first published with the title below.
________________‘No one person gets to limit what it means to be Indian’: Namit Arora, author of ‘Indians’
To write his book, Arora travelled to the seats of the different civilisations of India
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, History, Justice, Politics, Religion, Science, Travel -
Namit Arora featured on Cyrus Says
I’m the sort who dreads even the thought of appearing on live broadcasts with AMA style audience Qs, but I quite enjoyed my conversation on Indians with Cyrus Broacha, the smart, funny, inimitable host of the podcast Cyrus Says. Do listen! (Apple, Google, Spotify, Adori, etc.)
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Books & Authors, Culture, History, Humor, Politics, Religion, Travel, Video -
A Response to Harish Trivedi
(I think unfavorable reviews of books are at least of two kinds: (1) Unfavorable for the right reasons, which can be humbling and provide opportunities for reflection to the author; (2) Unfavorable for the wrong reasons, rooted in the reviewer’s misreading, willful ignorance or prejudices. Given how propagandized popular history has become in the age of Hindutva, I expect many reviews of the second kind, which are usually best disregarded. However, a recent mixed review in Biblio includes critiques of the second kind from Harish Trivedi, a scholar of postcolonialism. It bugged me enough to compel the response below, to also appear in the next issue of Biblio.)
Harish Trivedi (image source)As readers, we expect book reviewers to draw out the major arguments in new books. But often, reviewers end up revealing much about themselves, as does Harish Trivedi, a scholar of postcolonialism and translation studies, in his recent review of my book, Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization. Appearing in Biblio (January–March 2021, p. 9), his review reveals troubling intellectual positions and attitudes, manifest in his misreading, falsification and clouding of my arguments. So I feel compelled to respond.
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Upheaval and Migration
[The ninth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
—Change. Resilience. Where do we start? I’ve got no idea. What happens after this? Listen! The answer is here!—These words, splashed on posters, jumped out at me from images sent by a friend. The posters were part of an exhibition called We Need To Talk About Fire, hosted at an artists’ gallery along the Nowra River, about halfway between Sydney and Canberra. The Nowra River region had been hard-hit by the catastrophic Australian bushfires of 2019–20, following an unprecedented drought. Fire season in Australia is worsening as the planet warms, just as it is in the western United States, the Amazon, and Siberia. And the 2019–20 Australian season was particularly horrific, igniting a follow-on spate of depression and suicides in the area. What struck me about these posters was the raw simplicity of their messages, which ranged from forceful platitudes to agonized queries.
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Namit Arora on Indians: The Avid–BLF Lecture
I spoke about Indians in an online lecture, my first one based on the new book (1:08 hr). Hosted by Avid Learning and supported by the Bangalore Lit Fest, I delivered it on 25 Feb to listeners on Zoom (occasional choppy audio). If history or Indians interest you, check it out.
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Views of Future Earth
[The eighth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
In the late fifteenth century, European seafarers began searching for what they called the “Northwest Passage,” a fabled route across the Arctic Ocean, which would allow them to sail northward from Europe directly into the Pacific in search of fortune. But the Arctic of their time, during the so-called Little Ice Age of the fourteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, was covered by thick, impenetrable sheets of ice and densely packed icebergs. Nor had they any reasonable expectation that the great mass of ice would soon melt away. That they imagined finding a reliably navigable route through a polar sea seems to me a case of wishful thinking, a folly upon which scores of lives and fortunes were staked and lost, as so many adventurers attempted crossings, only to flounder and often die upon the ice.But now that the Arctic sea ice is melting away, the Northwest Passage has become real in a way the adventurers of old could not have dreamed. Today, nations encircling the Arctic Ocean jockey for control of its waters and territorial rights to newly exposed northern continental shelves, which promise to be full of oil and gas. What had been a deadly fantasy is now a luxury cruise destination flaunting an experience of rare wonder, including opportunities to watch polar bears on the hunt. “A journey north of the Arctic Circle is incomplete without observing these powerful beasts in the wild,” entices the Silversea cruises website, with nary a note about the bears’ existence being threatened by the very disintegration of their icy habitat that makes this wondrous cruise possible. Meanwhile, in China, the emergent northern sea routes have been dubbed the Polar Silk Road, projecting a powerful symbol of their past wealth and influence onto an unprecedented reality.
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INDIANS: A Book Trailer
My sales pitch for Indians, or as they euphemistically say in the industry, a ‘book trailer’. 🙂
A shorter book trailer with just music (and on-screen text) is here. To learn more about the book, click here.
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Art & Cinema, Biography, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Justice, Philosophy, Photography, Politics, Religion, Science, Travel, Video -
Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization | Namit Arora
Dear friends, I’m delighted to announce that my third book, Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization, was launched today by Penguin Random House India. Among other things, it’s a story of the defining cultural ideas, megatrends, and conflicts of Indian civilization. It’s a history of migration, conflict, mixing and cooperation. It’s also a book of journeys and discovering what it means to be Indian. Click HERE for more details. 🎉🥁🍹This book, over its multiyear gestation, has gained from influences too numerous to mention. Among these are my life partner, my editor, family and friends, and many scholars whose efforts I’ve leaned on. I’m grateful to them and to others who gave advice, opened doors, offered contacts, aided us on our travels, or shared their stories and time. I’m indebted to friends who read early versions. Finally, the six endorsements on the cover come from writers and scholars I admire greatly, who gave me their time and trust—what can be nicer? For their generosity I’m grateful.The book’s release got delayed by the pandemic, but here it is—and open for preorders on Amazon.in (it’ll happen on Amazon.com and other int’l sites in a few weeks; check for links here). The cover shows no Indians, but can you spot the cute stray doggie?
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Our Moment on Earth
[The seventh in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
“Our plan B has always been grounded in our beliefs around the continued evolution of technology and engineered solutions to address and react to whatever the climate system and its outcomes present to us, whether that be in the form of rises in sea level, which we think you can address through different engineering accommodations along coastal areas, to changing agricultural production due to changes in weather patterns that may or may not be induced by climate change.” —Rex Tillerson, as CEO of ExxonMobile, to shareholders in 2015
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For the past few years, I’ve been taking a fairly deep dive into attempting to understand the physical and ecological changes occurring on our planet and how these will affect human lives and civilization. As I’ve immersed myself in the science and the massive societal hurdles that stand in the way of an adequate response, I’m becoming aware that this exercise is changing me, too. I feel it inside my body, like a grey mass coalescing in my chest, sticking to everything, tugging against my heart and occluding my lungs. A couple of months ago, I decided to stop writing on this subject, to step away from these thoughts and concerns, because of their discomfiting darkness. -
Talk Less, Work More
On India’s troubled relationship with democratic values. (First published in The Baffler.)
Sometime after midnight on June 25, 1975, over six hundred political leaders, social activists, and trade unionists in India were rudely awakened by knocks on their doors. By dawn, they had been placed behind bars for inciting “internal disturbance.” In parallel, the government shut off electricity to newspaper offices, blocking their next day’s editions.“The President has proclaimed the Emergency,” Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced in a surprise broadcast the next morning on All India Radio. “This is nothing to panic about.” The previous night, she had made a bleary-eyed President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed trigger the Emergency provision in Article 352 of India’s constitution, which allowed her to postpone elections and suspend most fundamental rights, including those to speech, assembly, association, and movement. With the stroke of a pen, Gandhi had effectively dismantled India’s democratic infrastructure, concentrating dictatorial power in herself. Total press censorship was imposed, and foreign journalists who did not toe the line were summarily expelled, including stringers with the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph. On June 28, someone snuck a clever obituary into the Bombay edition of The Times of India: “D’Ocracy—D.E.M., beloved husband of T. Ruth, loving father of L.I. Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope, and Justice, expired on 26th June.”
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Lost and Found in Eden
[The fifth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
High in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of northern Colombia, the Kogi people peaceably live and farm. Having isolated themselves in nearly inaccessible mountain hamlets for five hundred years, the Kogi retain the dubious distinction of being the only intact, pre-Columbian civilization in South America. As such, they are also rare representatives of a sustainable farming way of life that persists until the modern era. Yet, more than four decades ago, even they noticed that their highland climate was changing. The trees and grasses that grew around their mountain redoubt, the numbers and kinds of animals they saw, the sizes of lakes and glaciers, the flows of rivers—everything was changing. The Kogi, who refer to themselves as Elder Brother and understand themselves to be custodians of our planet, felt they must warn the world. So in the late 1980s, they sent an emissary to contact the documentary filmmaker, Alan Ereira of the BBC—one of the few people they’d previously met from the outside world. In the resulting film, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning (1991), the Kogi Mamos (shamans) issue to us, their Younger Brother, a warning akin to that which the Union of Concerned Scientists would also later issue in their World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (1997, with a second notice in 2017): that we must take heed of our damage to the planet; that if we don’t stop what we’re doing to it, we will destroy the world we know.The Kogi warning, however, is couched in the language and metaphor of their own knowledge system. They speak of The Great Mother, who taught them “right from wrong,” and whose teachings still guide their lives. “The Great Mother talked and talked. The Great Mother gave us what we needed to live, and her teaching has not been forgotten right up to this day,” they tell us. It’s Younger Brother who is causing problems. “They are taking out the Mother’s heart. They are digging up the ground and cutting out her liver and her guts. The Mother is being cut to pieces and stripped of everything,” the Mamos scold. “So from today, stop digging in the Earth and stealing the gold. If you go on, the world will end. You are bringing the world to an end.” You can hear in their tone that it doesn’t occur to them that Younger Brother might not listen.
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A Day of Shame
A double whammy day: a year of Kashmir in chains and a vulgar display of majoritarian pride in Ayodhya. Today, it’s worth listening to Baba Laldas, the former priest at the Ram Janmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya, on the motivations behind the Ram temple movement and its leaders. This is an excerpt from the documentary, Ram Ke Naam (‘In the Name of God’, 1992) by Anand Patwardhan, now on YouTube. Laldas spoke openly against Advani’s rath yatra and the demolition of the Babri masjid. He was shot dead within a year and the case remains unsolved.
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Caste and the Delusion of “Merit” in Indian Higher Education
(This essay first appeared in The Caravan, Aug 2020, where it has received many comments. Its full text is also available on Magster.)
The great engineers of medieval India were mainly Shudras. Members of the lowest varna in the caste hierarchy, the Shudras produced a steady supply of architects, builders, stonemasons, bronze sculptors, goldsmiths and other professionals. Sometimes called the Vishwakarma community, these artisans and craftsmen worked in hereditary guilds. They studied structural design, mathematics, material science and the artistic conventions of the day. Commissioned by kings, merchants and Brahmins—who disdained all manual labour themselves—the Shudras, aided by the labour of those considered “untouchable” and outside the varna hierarchy, built all of India’s engineering marvels, including its grand temple towns, magnificent cities such as Vijayanagar and medieval fort-palaces.
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Satire by Pushpa Jijji
I recently discovered Pushpa Jijji (Cheshta Saxena in real life), a talented satirist who performs mostly in Bundeli. I was especially charmed by her use of Bundeli language that I often heard growing up in Gwalior (Hindi speakers should get most of it). She has been putting out short videos on YouTube in which she pokes fun at Indian patriarchy, politics, and, lately, their interface with the pandemic (no subtitles). As with most good satire, the laughs lie uncomfortably close to a substrate of grim realities.
If you like the episode below, check out a few others I liked: one, two, three, four, or visit her YouTube Channel.
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Of Migrants, Muslims, and Other Non-People
(First published in The Baffler)
The Coronavirus entered India by plane, hidden in the lungs of upper-class travelers. It then jumped to their family members, colleagues, drivers, and maids. The first case of Covid-19 was reported on January 30, but it was only over a month later, in early March, that the government began screening passengers from all international flights. By then, there were twenty-eight known cases in five states; in some parts of the world, the virus was killing nearly as many people as all other causes of death combined.India is the world’s second most populous country. Yet it boasts one of the globe’s lowest levels of public expenditure on health care, just 1.3 percent of GDP, less than a fifth of what the European Union countries invest. Knowing this, the government recognized the virus as a grave, perhaps catastrophic, threat. Public health officials heroically pursued contact tracing. “Social distancing” and “self-isolation” rapidly entered the national lexicon. By March 23, with the number of confirmed cases nearing five hundred, the government had prudently shut down all domestic and international flights and hardened its borders.
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A Collective Madness
What Modi’s victory says about today’s India. (An op-ed published in Himal Southasian, where it has received many comments.)
In Varanasi recently, I took an auto-rickshaw from Godowlia to Assi Ghat. Like everyone else in town, the driver and I began talking politics. The 2019 general election was a week away and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seeking reelection from Varanasi. The driver was an ardent Modi fan and would hear no criticism of him. He even claimed that demonetisation had punished the corrupt rich. One topic led to another and soon he was loudly praising Nathuram Godse as a patriot — Gandhi deserved no less than a bullet for being a Muslim lover. “You don’t know these people,” he thundered. “Read our history! Only Muslims have killed their own fathers to become kings. Has any Hindu ever done so? Inki jaat hi aisi hai. You too should open your mobile and read on WhatsApp. Kamina Rahul is born of a Muslim and a Christian; Nehru’s grandfather, also Muslim, Mughal. Outsiders all. Modi will teach them!” Fortunately, my destination came before his passion for the topic could escalate further.I entered Assi Ghat with a numbing sadness. Was this really Kashi, among the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world, known for its religious pluralism and massive density of gods, creeds and houses of worship, with its long history of largely peaceful coexistence? The Kashi of the Buddha, Adi Shankara, Kabir, Ravidas and Nanak? The Kashi of shehnai maestro Bismillah Khan, who lived in its tangled gullies and regularly played during the aarti in Balaji temple, or of Hindustani vocalist Girija Devi, whose family kept mannats on Muharram? What still remains of its famed Ganga-Jamuna tehzeeb? No, I consoled myself, my auto driver was not the norm in Varanasi, but he did herald certain fundamental changes now sweeping the country.
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What Freedom Means
(This essay appeared in Outlook India on the occasion of India’s 72nd Independence Day. It’s now also on Medium.)
Freedom is the ability to pursue the life one values. This view of freedom is inclusive, open-ended, and flexible. It embraces our plural, evolving, and diverse conceptions of the good life. It also admits other long-standing ideas of freedom, such as not being held in servitude, possessing political self-rule, or enjoying the right to act, speak, and think as one desires.Some people naively equate freedom with an absence of social restraints. But should I be free to do whatever I want? Should I be free to pollute the river, not pay any taxes, or torture the cat? To play loud music on the metro, not rent my apartment to Dalits, or incite hate or violence against other groups? I hope not. My freedom requires limits, so that others may enjoy their freedom. Edmund Burke held that freedom must be limited in order to be possessed. A freer society is not necessarily one with fewer social restraints, but one with a wisely chosen set of restraints as well as provisions, such as public education, healthcare, and ample safety nets for all.
