Tariq Ali has a powerful piece in LRB on the low status of Pakistani women, in their country.
If cheating in bed was always settled by the bullet, many of us would be dead. Gerald Martin’s new biography of Gabriel García Márquez reveals that Chronicle of a Death Foretold was based on the murder of the novelist’s friend Cayetano Gentile in Sucre in 1951. He had seduced, deflowered and abandoned Margarita Chica Salas. On her wedding day Margarita’s husband was told that she was no longer a virgin. The bride was sent back to her family home. Her brothers then found Gentile and chopped his body into pieces. Márquez blamed the socio-moral dictatorship of the Catholic Church.
But of course it is usually women who are killed for breaking codes of sexual conduct. There have been several recent cases in Britain. Banaz Mahmod, a 20-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered in Surrey at the behest of her father because she’d left an arranged marriage and her father didn’t approve of her new boyfriend. Iraq has lately seen a spate of such murders. Last month acid was thrown at three women in Basra who were talking to a male friend. Yet Iraq once had the highest proportion of women integrated into every level of society of any Arab country.
And then there is Pakistan. In 2005 Pervez Musharraf pushed through legislation making honour killing a capital offence yet official statistics admit to 1261 honour killings in 2006 and half that number again the following year. The actual figures are probably much higher, since many deaths go unreported. ‘Women are considered the property of the males in their family irrespective of their class, ethnic or religious group, and the owner of the property has the right to decide its fate,’ Tahira Shahid Khan of Shirkat Gah, a group that campaigns for equal rights for women, reported in 1999. Domestic violence too, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, is ‘considered normal . . . A sample survey showed 82 per cent of women in rural Punjab feared violence resulting from their husbands’ displeasure over minor matters; in the most developed urban areas 52 per cent admitted being beaten by their husbands.’
Consider the following. A man dreams his wife has betrayed him. He wakes up and sees her lying next to him. In a fury he kills her. This really happened in Pakistan and the killer escaped punishment. If dreams are to be treated as justification for an honour killing, what woman is safe? Since the police and the judicial system regard murder in the family as a private affair, most cases don’t get to court even if they’re reported. Society, it’s said, needs to protect its foundations. So mostly we rely on the information collected by the Human Rights Commission and on courageous lawyers like Hina Jilani and Asma Jehangir, two sisters both of whom have received numerous death threats.
In 1999, Hina Jilani was in her office with Samia Sarwar, a mother of two from Peshawar seeking a divorce from her husband, when Sarwar’s mother burst into the room with two armed men in tow and had her daughter shot dead. In 1989 Samia Sarwar had married a first cousin. For six years he beat her and kicked her. But after he threw her downstairs when she was pregnant with their second child, she went back to her parents’ house. The minute she told them she wanted a divorce they threatened to kill her. Yet they were educated and wealthy people.
One widely reported murder this year was that of Tasleem Solangi, the 17-year-old daughter of a livestock trader in the Khairpur District of Sindh. She wanted to go to university and become a doctor like her uncle, but instead agreed to marry a cousin in order to settle a protracted family dispute over property. Her mother, Zakara Bibi, tried to stop her, but Tasleem was determined. Her father-in-law, Zamir Solangi, came to collect her and swore on the Koran that no harm would befall her. A month after the marriage, Zakara had a message from her daughter: ‘Please forgive me, mother. I was wrong and you were right. I fear they will kill me.’ On 7 March, they did. She was eight months pregnant. The Koran-swearer accused her of infidelity and said the baby was not his son’s. She went into labour, her child was born and instantly thrown to the dogs. She pleaded for mercy, but the dogs were set on her as well and the terrified girl was then shot dead. On this occasion at least there was an inquiry. Her husband was charged with Tasleem’s murder and is currently awaiting trial.
Another case much discussed this year is that of five women in Baluchistan who were buried alive in Baba Kot village, about 250 miles east of Quetta, the Baluch capital. Three of the women were young and wanted to marry men they’d chosen for themselves; two older women were helping them. Three male relatives have been arrested. According to the local police chief, the brother of two of the girls has admitted that he shot three of the women and helped bury them, though they weren’t even dead. The trial date is awaited.
Traditionalists have always considered love to be something that brings shame on families: patriarchs should be the ones to decide who is to be married to whom, often for reasons to do with property. If you fall in love, the 18th-century Urdu poet Mir Hassan explained (more than once), you will be burned by its fire and perish. That is what happened in the Punjabi city of Wah in late October. Now Wah has half a million inhabitants and Pakistan’s largest ordnance factories, but it was once an idyllic village almost floating on water. The streams and lakes that surrounded it attracted the Mughal emperor Jehangir, who stopped there on his way home from Kashmir, and is said to have exclaimed ‘Wah!’ or ‘Wow!’, thus giving the village its name. Before that it had been called Jalalsar after one of my forebears, Sardar Jalal Khan, a leader of the Khattar tribe around 800 years ago. His successors wanted to please the emperor and agreed to the name change. I can’t imagine that the decision was taken without a fierce struggle (one faction is said to have been deeply hostile to the arriviste Mughals), but those speaking sweetnesses to power won the day.
Jehangir built a beautiful, domed rest-house in Wah, surrounded on all sides by flowing water. In 1639, his son Shah Jehan supervised the landscaping of beautiful water gardens and pavilions. More than half a century ago, I used to play hide and seek here with my cousins. The pavilions were ruins by then, which made them even more magical on a moonlit night. A cousin swore that the ghosts of the Mughals could be seen in the mist on a winter night, but nobody believed her. The caretaker was extremely sharp-tongued, although when talking to my uncles and aunts, he masked his intelligence in language of exaggerated humility. We were never deceived and threatened to expose him if he gave us a hard time.
Other ghosts lurk there now. A mile and a half from the old village, my youngest maternal uncle, Sardar Ghairat Hyat Khan, built himself a house and moved out of the decaying manor house we’d all shared. My Kashmiri great-grandmother, Ayesha, moved with him. Before she became completely blind she was the best cook in the world and my visits were always rewarding. Shortly before I left Pakistan for Britain I went to say goodbye to her. She said: ‘I feel a moustache. Is it really you?’ ‘No,’ I replied trying to make my voice deeper, ‘I am a stranger here, but I was told your bakarkhanis tasted like heaven.’ Bakarkhanis are a crumbly, Kashmiri version of the croissant. I’ve not been to his house for a long time but I’m told it’s in a state of disrepair and crumbling like the bakarkhanis.
In the last week of October, my uncle’s granddaughter, Zainab, barely 18 years old, was shot dead by her brothers, Inam and Hamza Ahmed. Zainab apparently had a lover and despite repeated warnings refused to stop seeing him. She was on the phone to him in her grandfather’s house when her brothers pumped seven bullets into her body. I don’t know whether her mother, Ghairat’s oldest daughter Roohi, whom I last saw when she was about ten, was part of the plot. Whether or not she was involved, I find it deeply shocking that my uncle allowed the young woman’s body to be buried that same day without at least insisting that a First Information Report be lodged at the local police station, let alone demanding an autopsy. Zainab deserved at least that. I am told that Ghairat is old and frail, that he was angry and wanted to ring the police, but was talked out of it by his daughter and other members of his immediate family, who collectively recoiled at having to accept the consequences of what they had witnessed. Perhaps his faith in a just and merciful Allah was not as strong as he used to claim. Whatever the reason, it’s unacceptable. The body should be exhumed, the murderers arrested and put on trial, as the law requires.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Is Mumbai’s resilience endlessly renewable?
Arjun
Appadurai analyses the Mumbai attacks from a geo-strategic perspective.
I grew up in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the 1950s and early 1960s. I spoke Tamil with my mother, a combination of English and Tamil with my siblings and my father, and various brands of Gujarati, Marathi and Hindi with friends, domestic helpers, neighbors, bureaucrats and shopkeepers.
I studied with the Jesuits in St. Xavier’s School, in Dhobi Talao, no more than two kilometers from the Taj and the Oberoi Trident. We had the most recent reunion of the Class of 1965 at The Ritz Hotel in January 2008, only about five hundred meters from the Taj and the Oberoi. This reunion brought together a group of “old boys” near their sixtieth birthdays. They included Goan Catholics who are now engineers, hoteliers and priests; Marwari, Gujarati and Sindhi classmates who are now portly magnates or diabetic executives; Parsis and Iranis in various walks of business and commercial life; and Tamil-speakers who are about to retire from the software, medical and academic worlds. Some had come from California, some from the Persian Gulf, some from New York, many from other cities in India, a few from London. But the majority was still in Mumbai, though they now lived in places further away from South Mumbai than before. It was a riotous polyglot event, to which spouses were not invited for reasons of space and cost. A drunken set of singing, reminiscing “boys,” joking about their bald heads and big bellies, making plans to see each other again in Dubai, or Toronto, or San Francisco or perhaps Mumbai again, in another five years.
No one at the reunion talked about Hindutva, or Islamic terror, or Mumbai’s class cruelties or about the poorer members of our graduating class, who could not afford the $25 fee for the food and drinks, or were too ashamed that their lives and careers had gone nowhere. The night was a palace of memories, a requiem for our dreams of a Bombay of mixing and fixing.
In the mid 1960s, I attended a great colonial institution, Elphinstone College, the academic jewel of the University of Bombay. It is hardly a hundred meters from the Café Leopold, whose customers were butchered by the gunmen from the sea, a hundred and fifty meters from the Taj, and perhaps three hundred meters from Nariman House where Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were re-enacted in miniature. Those were magic years too, where seventeen and eighteen year old boys and girls from high schools across the city discovered Tennyson, Ionesco, calculus and joyous libidinal upticks. My college had magazines and “wallpapers” (early versions of blogs) in English, Marathi, Urdu and Gujarati, and our beloved “canteen,” a filthy little hangout, was the scene of political banter about Marx and Mao, chit-chat about the theatre of the absurd, loans of tattered copies of The Waste Land and the latest James Bond novel, as well as of feverish efforts to prepare for exams in logic, Indian history, development economics and much else. The high-end South Mumbai flaneurs among us fancied ourselves the envy of the “vernaculars” (who still were most comfortable in various Indian languages) but some of these boys and girls from humble and unglamorous backgrounds ranked first in the examinations and put the South Bombay slickers to shame. Elphinstone College was an aristocracy of the mind. We hardly knew anything about Delhi, and almost none of us had heard about St. Stephen’s College, which we only learned to envy when we met the Delhi Dons in Oxford, or Cambridge or Berkeley or New York, years later.
We lived blissfully in the cocoon of South Mumbai, roaming past the Taj, wandering through the cafes of Colaba Causeway, including Café Leopold, sneaking away from classes to the Regal cinema to watch re-runs of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, hoping for own nights of pillow talk. Our cosmopolitanism extended from Satyajit Ray to Ingmar Bergman, from Raj Kapoor to Charles Bronson, from Encounter to Photoplay, and from Bakri-Id to Diwali. I grew up thinking that Jews were a sect of Muslims and that the distance from Vohras to Bohras was no more than a typo.
Our parents also thrived in this golden period of friendships and business relationships which cut across differences of language and food, religion and neighborhood, though always restrained by the exclusions of caste and class, which we Anglophones were privileged to ignore. I left Bombay for the United States in 1967 and though I visited regularly thereafter, I soon knew that things had begun to change. The first big sign was the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple by the Indian Army, which led to a nationwide and shocking series of attacks on Sikhs, inspired in part by the regime of Indira Gandhi, who had been killed by some Sikhs among her bodyguards. This was the first major ethnic trauma of India’s still young secular democracy after Partition. Sikhs were painted as India’s enemies, in effect a fifth column of faux Hindus, Muslims in disguise. The rape, burning and brutalizing of poor Sikh populations, especially in Delhi, was the first sign that any Indian minority could henceforth be the “other” and that Hindu mobs were capable of organized bestiality on a grand scale.
The mid 1980s also saw the rise to respectability of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its sister organizations committed to Hindu nationalism, some of whom had already won their colors in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. The BJP rose to national prominence at the very same time that Rajiv Gandhi (the son of Indira Gandhi) opened up India’s markets and laid the foundations for free market competition, state capitalism and cyber-technology, even before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In India, 1989 marked the moment when the Hindu Right became politically legitimate and launched its major nation-wide campaign of mobilization, propaganda, revisionism and violence against Muslims, which culminated in the now notorious destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which could have been prevented by the Government had they had the will and the courage. This led to a wave of Muslim mobilizations and reactions across the country and created a powerful link in the minds of young Muslims between the devastating nature of Indian state violence in Kashmir and the growing terror against Muslim religious institutions, identities and organizations across India from the Hindu right, both official and informal.
The late 1980s, widely seen as the period when Islamic fundamentalism went global, also witnessed the birth of an aggressive global Hinduism, sponsored by traveling Hindu ascetics, youth camps, newspapers, and fund-raising campaigns that connected overseas Hindus, especially in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom to their models and teachers in India. Their message was simple: India is Hindu; all non-Hindus in India are potentially treacherous minorities; Muslims are especially dangerous because they substantially support Pakistan; and Pakistan is armed, dangerous and belligerent, especially in Kashmir. Muslim militants in Kashmir, meanwhile, linked their struggles to Palestine, Chechnya, Kabul, as well as to London, Europe and elsewhere in Asia. Today, the global Hindu Right is forcefully represented in the United States by Indian lobbying groups, pseudo-academics, cultural cover organizations and bland philanthropic para-organizations, who work assiduously to peddle soft Hindutva even as they whitewash genocide and cultural terror in India. This twenty-five year process today threatens to sneak by even the sharp eyes of President-elect Obama’s transition team.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Indian Hindus and Muslims became globalized together. Muslims were brought together by fundamentalist messages from the radical elements of the Sunni world, by funds from Saudi Arabia to build mosques and madrassas in India, by the opportunities for smalltime Arab men from the Persian Gulf to purchase poor Muslim brides from India, and above all, by the increasing brutality of India’s military forces in Kashmir. Pakistan, meanwhile, steeply morphed into South Asia’s most dangerous failed state, provoked Muslim anger against the West in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere, helped to breed the Taliban in its Northwest provinces, hosted Al Qaeda in the late 1990s and after, and has recently discovered that it is now a hostage to Islamic terror itself.
These parallel globalizations met fatefully in Mumbai on November 26 and that too in multiple ways. Global Islam seems the easier to describe. The suspects clearly had ground support in Pakistan, quasi-official elements in Pakistan must have known of the plan, Kashmir was invoked by the lone survivor among the gunmen, and other evidence exists not only of Pakistan-based support but also of India-based human infrastructure for the attack. All this is clear, and in coming weeks the forensic wheat will be separated from the chaff.
What of the Hindu side? On the face of it, Hindus (and Muslims, Jews and Christians) were apparently just victims. But global Hindutva was also implicated, at least in two ways. First, Mumbai is the major site where global finance intersects with the major Hindu fascist party of the last 40 years, the Shiva Sena. The Shiva Sena, which began as a bunch of lumpen Marathi-speaking thugs who took advantage of the linguistic chauvinism of Marathi-speakers has grown into a forceful, protean and sustainable source of vile anti-Muslim propaganda from the 1960s until today. Second, Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, perhaps the most dangerous and persuasive BJP ideologue in India today, an aspirant for the Prime Ministership, and a remarkable blender of genocidal Hindu nationalism and soft development-speak in Gujarat, has been to Mumbai regularly in the last few years, including since the recent terrorist attack.
Not only is this a God-given opportunity for Narendra Modi, few analysts have observed that Modi’s recurrent appearances in Mumbai over the last decade and his highly publicized appearances with major Mumbai-based business leaders in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi and elsewhere remind us that Gujarat never forgave Marathi nationalists for successfully annexing Mumbai to their side after the linguistic riots of 1956. Gujarati-speakers still regard Mumbai as their city, usurped by the Maratha peasantry and the Marathi-speaking lumpenproletariat of the city. Among other things, the recent events in Mumbai are a struggle between the Indian Ocean (the Arabian Sea) and the Marathi and Gujarati hinterlands for control over Mumbai. Modi is the voice of the Gujarati jihad against the Islam of the Arabian Sea, just as Bal Thackeray is the voice of lumpen Maharashtra against its land-based enemies from Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, U.P, Bihar, etc., all now telescoped into the battle against land-based Islam in India.
Atop this deep struggle, which could arguably be read back into the geo-politics of the Indian Ocean for at least the last five centuries, lie the interests of New Delhi, which sees Mumbai as a homegrown Shanghai in its aspirations for global economic stardom. In addition, Mumbai is the home of the Western Command of the Indian Navy, by far the most powerful base for Indian ships, sailors and naval strategists, all of whom have a massive presence within a few hundred meters of where the terrorist visitors landed on the night of November 26, 2009. Mumbai is also the home of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (in Chembur) perhaps 30 kilometers from the major attacks, and a key part of India’s nuclear apparatus. A vast proportion of Mumbai’s real estate is directly or indirectly controlled by the Indian Navy, the Indian Army, the Mumbai police and various other military or security agencies. Mumbai is armed to the teeth, though it is primarily seen as India’s commercial hub. This makes the terrorist attacks an amazing kick in India’s military teeth.
Last, but hardly least, Mumbai has been the cosmopolis of criminal interests in gold smuggling, arms smuggling and other forms of oceanic crime linking the Persian Gulf, Pakistan and the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra for at least a few centuries. Inland from the West Coast of India, and on the Eastern side of the hills known as the Western Ghats, Maharashtra and Gujarat have massive differences, a history of ethnolinguistic conflict and a classic struggle between elites based in commerce (Gujarat) and elites based in warfare and agrarian control (Maharashtra). But on the West Coast of India, looking out to the Persian Gulf, it’s a different story, in which smugglers, pirates, fishermen and politicians, as well as ship-owners, dhow captains, commercial brokers and policemen have seamlessly crossed the lines between coastal languages, castes, classes and ethnicities.
Mumbai is where this coastal world meets the Mumbai underworld and it has long been a meeting place between communities of Hindus and Muslims from as far afield as Tamil Nadu, Afghanistan, Goa, Konkan, Kerala, and the island world surrounding Mumbai. True, the major criminal figures who have long been involved in linking smuggling, gold, cinema and real estate in Mumbai, famously Dawood Ibrahim, have been Muslims. But beneath this religious identity lies a complex patchwork of identities and biographies that range across much of the West Coast and peninsular India. In short, the links between Mumbai, Pakistan and the Gulf are now profoundly multi-lingual and do not easily match the tensions between speakers of Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Hindi that constitute the land-based politics of the Shiva Sena. Thus it is not a minor matter that Dawood Ibrahim is a Muslim from the Konkan region, between Goa and Kerala on the West Coast of India.
In other words, as we learn more about the deep geo-politics behind the terrifying attacks on Mumbai earlier this month, we need to recognize that there is a tectonic struggle going on in and near Mumbai on at least three axes: the deepest axis (from a historical point of view) is the struggle between the Indian Ocean commercial/criminal nexus and the land-based nexus that stretches from Mumbai to Delhi to Kashmir. The second, more recent struggle is the struggle between political and commercial interests now located in Maharashtra and Gujarat for control over Mumbai, a struggle that was superficially resolved in 1956, when Bombay was declared the capital of the new state of Maharashtra. The third, most subtle, is between a land-based, plebeian form of Hindu nationalism, best represented by the auto-rickshaw drivers and small street vendors of North Mumbai and Greater Mumbai, who would be happy to see South Mumbai destroyed; and the more slick, market-oriented face of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose elite supporters know that South Mumbai is crucial to the mediation of global capital to India, and where business tycoons like Mukesh Ambani are building homes larger than many global hotels.
The gunmen who struck Mumbai are probably unaware of these tectonic struggles. Those who answer the call to self-immolation in the cause of war rarely are. But the way they arrived on Mumbai’s shores, the sites of their targeted violence, the fact that they could blend into the local population a few hundred meters from the might of the Indian Navy, and the fact that they struck sites where both upper and lower class Mumbaikars rub shoulders with each others most, should give us two kinds of pause. The first is to be sure to place the politics of the world after 9/11 in various longer histories of Mumbai and its terrestrial and oceanic hinterland. The second brings me back to my fears as a child of Mumbai in its magic years.
Many well-meaning observers have stressed the “resilience”, the mutual generosity, the quotidian heroism and the remarkable resistance of Mumbaikars to jump to quick conclusions or hasty reprisals. I too congratulate and celebrate these facts. But I fear that all resilience is historically produced. And what history gives, history can take away. Yes, we are all Mumbaikars now. But in a world that links Mumbai, Kashmir, Karachi, Madrid, Peshawar, London, Wall Street, Washington and Faridkot, that is not necessarily a source of comfort. Resilience is a public resource. But, unlike terror, it is not indefinitely renewable.
thanks Amitava for the link
Appadurai analyses the Mumbai attacks from a geo-strategic perspective.
I grew up in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the 1950s and early 1960s. I spoke Tamil with my mother, a combination of English and Tamil with my siblings and my father, and various brands of Gujarati, Marathi and Hindi with friends, domestic helpers, neighbors, bureaucrats and shopkeepers.
I studied with the Jesuits in St. Xavier’s School, in Dhobi Talao, no more than two kilometers from the Taj and the Oberoi Trident. We had the most recent reunion of the Class of 1965 at The Ritz Hotel in January 2008, only about five hundred meters from the Taj and the Oberoi. This reunion brought together a group of “old boys” near their sixtieth birthdays. They included Goan Catholics who are now engineers, hoteliers and priests; Marwari, Gujarati and Sindhi classmates who are now portly magnates or diabetic executives; Parsis and Iranis in various walks of business and commercial life; and Tamil-speakers who are about to retire from the software, medical and academic worlds. Some had come from California, some from the Persian Gulf, some from New York, many from other cities in India, a few from London. But the majority was still in Mumbai, though they now lived in places further away from South Mumbai than before. It was a riotous polyglot event, to which spouses were not invited for reasons of space and cost. A drunken set of singing, reminiscing “boys,” joking about their bald heads and big bellies, making plans to see each other again in Dubai, or Toronto, or San Francisco or perhaps Mumbai again, in another five years.
No one at the reunion talked about Hindutva, or Islamic terror, or Mumbai’s class cruelties or about the poorer members of our graduating class, who could not afford the $25 fee for the food and drinks, or were too ashamed that their lives and careers had gone nowhere. The night was a palace of memories, a requiem for our dreams of a Bombay of mixing and fixing.
In the mid 1960s, I attended a great colonial institution, Elphinstone College, the academic jewel of the University of Bombay. It is hardly a hundred meters from the Café Leopold, whose customers were butchered by the gunmen from the sea, a hundred and fifty meters from the Taj, and perhaps three hundred meters from Nariman House where Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were re-enacted in miniature. Those were magic years too, where seventeen and eighteen year old boys and girls from high schools across the city discovered Tennyson, Ionesco, calculus and joyous libidinal upticks. My college had magazines and “wallpapers” (early versions of blogs) in English, Marathi, Urdu and Gujarati, and our beloved “canteen,” a filthy little hangout, was the scene of political banter about Marx and Mao, chit-chat about the theatre of the absurd, loans of tattered copies of The Waste Land and the latest James Bond novel, as well as of feverish efforts to prepare for exams in logic, Indian history, development economics and much else. The high-end South Mumbai flaneurs among us fancied ourselves the envy of the “vernaculars” (who still were most comfortable in various Indian languages) but some of these boys and girls from humble and unglamorous backgrounds ranked first in the examinations and put the South Bombay slickers to shame. Elphinstone College was an aristocracy of the mind. We hardly knew anything about Delhi, and almost none of us had heard about St. Stephen’s College, which we only learned to envy when we met the Delhi Dons in Oxford, or Cambridge or Berkeley or New York, years later.
We lived blissfully in the cocoon of South Mumbai, roaming past the Taj, wandering through the cafes of Colaba Causeway, including Café Leopold, sneaking away from classes to the Regal cinema to watch re-runs of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, hoping for own nights of pillow talk. Our cosmopolitanism extended from Satyajit Ray to Ingmar Bergman, from Raj Kapoor to Charles Bronson, from Encounter to Photoplay, and from Bakri-Id to Diwali. I grew up thinking that Jews were a sect of Muslims and that the distance from Vohras to Bohras was no more than a typo.
Our parents also thrived in this golden period of friendships and business relationships which cut across differences of language and food, religion and neighborhood, though always restrained by the exclusions of caste and class, which we Anglophones were privileged to ignore. I left Bombay for the United States in 1967 and though I visited regularly thereafter, I soon knew that things had begun to change. The first big sign was the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple by the Indian Army, which led to a nationwide and shocking series of attacks on Sikhs, inspired in part by the regime of Indira Gandhi, who had been killed by some Sikhs among her bodyguards. This was the first major ethnic trauma of India’s still young secular democracy after Partition. Sikhs were painted as India’s enemies, in effect a fifth column of faux Hindus, Muslims in disguise. The rape, burning and brutalizing of poor Sikh populations, especially in Delhi, was the first sign that any Indian minority could henceforth be the “other” and that Hindu mobs were capable of organized bestiality on a grand scale.
The mid 1980s also saw the rise to respectability of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its sister organizations committed to Hindu nationalism, some of whom had already won their colors in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. The BJP rose to national prominence at the very same time that Rajiv Gandhi (the son of Indira Gandhi) opened up India’s markets and laid the foundations for free market competition, state capitalism and cyber-technology, even before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In India, 1989 marked the moment when the Hindu Right became politically legitimate and launched its major nation-wide campaign of mobilization, propaganda, revisionism and violence against Muslims, which culminated in the now notorious destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which could have been prevented by the Government had they had the will and the courage. This led to a wave of Muslim mobilizations and reactions across the country and created a powerful link in the minds of young Muslims between the devastating nature of Indian state violence in Kashmir and the growing terror against Muslim religious institutions, identities and organizations across India from the Hindu right, both official and informal.
The late 1980s, widely seen as the period when Islamic fundamentalism went global, also witnessed the birth of an aggressive global Hinduism, sponsored by traveling Hindu ascetics, youth camps, newspapers, and fund-raising campaigns that connected overseas Hindus, especially in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom to their models and teachers in India. Their message was simple: India is Hindu; all non-Hindus in India are potentially treacherous minorities; Muslims are especially dangerous because they substantially support Pakistan; and Pakistan is armed, dangerous and belligerent, especially in Kashmir. Muslim militants in Kashmir, meanwhile, linked their struggles to Palestine, Chechnya, Kabul, as well as to London, Europe and elsewhere in Asia. Today, the global Hindu Right is forcefully represented in the United States by Indian lobbying groups, pseudo-academics, cultural cover organizations and bland philanthropic para-organizations, who work assiduously to peddle soft Hindutva even as they whitewash genocide and cultural terror in India. This twenty-five year process today threatens to sneak by even the sharp eyes of President-elect Obama’s transition team.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Indian Hindus and Muslims became globalized together. Muslims were brought together by fundamentalist messages from the radical elements of the Sunni world, by funds from Saudi Arabia to build mosques and madrassas in India, by the opportunities for smalltime Arab men from the Persian Gulf to purchase poor Muslim brides from India, and above all, by the increasing brutality of India’s military forces in Kashmir. Pakistan, meanwhile, steeply morphed into South Asia’s most dangerous failed state, provoked Muslim anger against the West in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere, helped to breed the Taliban in its Northwest provinces, hosted Al Qaeda in the late 1990s and after, and has recently discovered that it is now a hostage to Islamic terror itself.
These parallel globalizations met fatefully in Mumbai on November 26 and that too in multiple ways. Global Islam seems the easier to describe. The suspects clearly had ground support in Pakistan, quasi-official elements in Pakistan must have known of the plan, Kashmir was invoked by the lone survivor among the gunmen, and other evidence exists not only of Pakistan-based support but also of India-based human infrastructure for the attack. All this is clear, and in coming weeks the forensic wheat will be separated from the chaff.
What of the Hindu side? On the face of it, Hindus (and Muslims, Jews and Christians) were apparently just victims. But global Hindutva was also implicated, at least in two ways. First, Mumbai is the major site where global finance intersects with the major Hindu fascist party of the last 40 years, the Shiva Sena. The Shiva Sena, which began as a bunch of lumpen Marathi-speaking thugs who took advantage of the linguistic chauvinism of Marathi-speakers has grown into a forceful, protean and sustainable source of vile anti-Muslim propaganda from the 1960s until today. Second, Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, perhaps the most dangerous and persuasive BJP ideologue in India today, an aspirant for the Prime Ministership, and a remarkable blender of genocidal Hindu nationalism and soft development-speak in Gujarat, has been to Mumbai regularly in the last few years, including since the recent terrorist attack.
Not only is this a God-given opportunity for Narendra Modi, few analysts have observed that Modi’s recurrent appearances in Mumbai over the last decade and his highly publicized appearances with major Mumbai-based business leaders in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi and elsewhere remind us that Gujarat never forgave Marathi nationalists for successfully annexing Mumbai to their side after the linguistic riots of 1956. Gujarati-speakers still regard Mumbai as their city, usurped by the Maratha peasantry and the Marathi-speaking lumpenproletariat of the city. Among other things, the recent events in Mumbai are a struggle between the Indian Ocean (the Arabian Sea) and the Marathi and Gujarati hinterlands for control over Mumbai. Modi is the voice of the Gujarati jihad against the Islam of the Arabian Sea, just as Bal Thackeray is the voice of lumpen Maharashtra against its land-based enemies from Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, U.P, Bihar, etc., all now telescoped into the battle against land-based Islam in India.
Atop this deep struggle, which could arguably be read back into the geo-politics of the Indian Ocean for at least the last five centuries, lie the interests of New Delhi, which sees Mumbai as a homegrown Shanghai in its aspirations for global economic stardom. In addition, Mumbai is the home of the Western Command of the Indian Navy, by far the most powerful base for Indian ships, sailors and naval strategists, all of whom have a massive presence within a few hundred meters of where the terrorist visitors landed on the night of November 26, 2009. Mumbai is also the home of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (in Chembur) perhaps 30 kilometers from the major attacks, and a key part of India’s nuclear apparatus. A vast proportion of Mumbai’s real estate is directly or indirectly controlled by the Indian Navy, the Indian Army, the Mumbai police and various other military or security agencies. Mumbai is armed to the teeth, though it is primarily seen as India’s commercial hub. This makes the terrorist attacks an amazing kick in India’s military teeth.
Last, but hardly least, Mumbai has been the cosmopolis of criminal interests in gold smuggling, arms smuggling and other forms of oceanic crime linking the Persian Gulf, Pakistan and the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra for at least a few centuries. Inland from the West Coast of India, and on the Eastern side of the hills known as the Western Ghats, Maharashtra and Gujarat have massive differences, a history of ethnolinguistic conflict and a classic struggle between elites based in commerce (Gujarat) and elites based in warfare and agrarian control (Maharashtra). But on the West Coast of India, looking out to the Persian Gulf, it’s a different story, in which smugglers, pirates, fishermen and politicians, as well as ship-owners, dhow captains, commercial brokers and policemen have seamlessly crossed the lines between coastal languages, castes, classes and ethnicities.
Mumbai is where this coastal world meets the Mumbai underworld and it has long been a meeting place between communities of Hindus and Muslims from as far afield as Tamil Nadu, Afghanistan, Goa, Konkan, Kerala, and the island world surrounding Mumbai. True, the major criminal figures who have long been involved in linking smuggling, gold, cinema and real estate in Mumbai, famously Dawood Ibrahim, have been Muslims. But beneath this religious identity lies a complex patchwork of identities and biographies that range across much of the West Coast and peninsular India. In short, the links between Mumbai, Pakistan and the Gulf are now profoundly multi-lingual and do not easily match the tensions between speakers of Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Hindi that constitute the land-based politics of the Shiva Sena. Thus it is not a minor matter that Dawood Ibrahim is a Muslim from the Konkan region, between Goa and Kerala on the West Coast of India.
In other words, as we learn more about the deep geo-politics behind the terrifying attacks on Mumbai earlier this month, we need to recognize that there is a tectonic struggle going on in and near Mumbai on at least three axes: the deepest axis (from a historical point of view) is the struggle between the Indian Ocean commercial/criminal nexus and the land-based nexus that stretches from Mumbai to Delhi to Kashmir. The second, more recent struggle is the struggle between political and commercial interests now located in Maharashtra and Gujarat for control over Mumbai, a struggle that was superficially resolved in 1956, when Bombay was declared the capital of the new state of Maharashtra. The third, most subtle, is between a land-based, plebeian form of Hindu nationalism, best represented by the auto-rickshaw drivers and small street vendors of North Mumbai and Greater Mumbai, who would be happy to see South Mumbai destroyed; and the more slick, market-oriented face of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose elite supporters know that South Mumbai is crucial to the mediation of global capital to India, and where business tycoons like Mukesh Ambani are building homes larger than many global hotels.
The gunmen who struck Mumbai are probably unaware of these tectonic struggles. Those who answer the call to self-immolation in the cause of war rarely are. But the way they arrived on Mumbai’s shores, the sites of their targeted violence, the fact that they could blend into the local population a few hundred meters from the might of the Indian Navy, and the fact that they struck sites where both upper and lower class Mumbaikars rub shoulders with each others most, should give us two kinds of pause. The first is to be sure to place the politics of the world after 9/11 in various longer histories of Mumbai and its terrestrial and oceanic hinterland. The second brings me back to my fears as a child of Mumbai in its magic years.
Many well-meaning observers have stressed the “resilience”, the mutual generosity, the quotidian heroism and the remarkable resistance of Mumbaikars to jump to quick conclusions or hasty reprisals. I too congratulate and celebrate these facts. But I fear that all resilience is historically produced. And what history gives, history can take away. Yes, we are all Mumbaikars now. But in a world that links Mumbai, Kashmir, Karachi, Madrid, Peshawar, London, Wall Street, Washington and Faridkot, that is not necessarily a source of comfort. Resilience is a public resource. But, unlike terror, it is not indefinitely renewable.
thanks Amitava for the link
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
2008 Kluge Prize to Romila Thapar and Peter Brown
Here is more detail about this $1 million prize.
Historians Peter Brown, Romila Thapar Named Recipients of $1 Million 2008 Kluge Prize for Study of Humanity
Peter Robert Lamont Brown and Romila Thapar will receive the 2008 Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity in a ceremony Dec. 10 at the Library of Congress. They are the sixth and seventh recipients since the Prize’s 2003 inception.
Endowed by Library of Congress benefactor John W. Kluge, the Kluge Prize is unique among all international prizes at the $1 million level in rewarding a very wide range of disciplines including history, philosophy, politics, anthropology, sociology, religion, criticism in the arts and humanities, and linguistics, as well as a great variety of cultural perspectives in the world. Each awardee will receive half of the $1 million prize.
Both Brown, 73, and Thapar, 77, brought dramatically new perspectives to understanding vast sweeps of geographical territory and a millennium or more of time in, respectively, Europe and the Middle East, and in the Indian subcontinent. Brown brought conceptual coherence to the field of late antiquity, looking anew at the end of the Roman Empire, the emergence of Christianity, and the rise of Islam within and beyond the Mediterranean world. Thapar created a new and more pluralistic view of Indian civilization, which had seemed more unitary and unchanging, by scrutinizing its evolution over two millennia and searching out its historical consciousness.
The scholarship of both broadened and deepened over time as they marshaled a vast range of evidence from an expanding range of sources and a bewildering array of languages to bring a new comprehensive understanding of large questions of human development. They addressed their scholarship not only to specialists, but also intentionally shared their insights with broader lay audiences. In re-imagining familiar worlds with eyes unprejudiced by existing paradigms, they each opened large areas of human experience to new historical inquiry.
Commenting on Peter Brown, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said: "He is one of the most readable and literary historians of our time, having brought to life both a host of fascinating, little-known people from ordinary life during the first millennium of Christianity, as well as a monumental biography of the most prolific and famous St. Augustine."
One scholar reviewing nominations for the Kluge Prize wrote: "Peter Brown ranks with the greatest historians of the last three centuries." Another said: "There are few scholars in the world today who have changed their fields as much as Peter Brown has changed the study of what we used to call ancient and medieval history."
Remarking on Romila Thapar, Dr. Billington said: "She has used a wide variety of ancient sources and of languages, and introduced modern social science perspectives to help us better understand the richness and diversity of traditional Indian culture. And she, like Brown, has written a great biography of one of its giants, the Buddhist emperor Asoka."
Her prolific writings have set a new course for scholarship about the Indian subcontinent and for the writing of history textbooks in India. One scholarly reviewer said that "Thapar’s rigorous professional standards are cast against a background of her implicit appreciation of an India that accommodates civilizational diversity." Another said: "Thapar’s relentless striving for historical truth–independent of the superimposition of vacillating, fashionable theories of current sociopolitical conditions–is a landmark in the global writing of history."
THE SELECTION PROCESS
First awarded in 2003, the Kluge Prize is international; the recipient may be of any nationality, writing in any language. The main criterion for a recipient is deep and sustained intellectual accomplishment in the study of humanity that has an impact beyond narrow academic disciplines.
The process that led to the selection of Brown and Thapar began nearly a year ago. In search of those individuals worldwide who have demonstrated a lifetime of excellence and innovation in the study of the human condition, the Librarian of Congress sought nominations for the Kluge Prize from every corner of the world. Some 3,000 letters requesting nominations went out to a broad range of institutions and individuals knowledgeable about quality scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
The recipients included a broad range of university and college presidents, scholarly associations and research institutes, as well as individual scholars, writers, and selected friends of the Library.
In order to broaden the international pool, the Librarian of Congress also asked the Library’s large number of knowledgeable foreign Area Specialists to provide nominations for the prize based on their areas of expertise and to identify outstanding universities in each country from which nominations were solicited.
The nomination process was also opened to the general public via the Internet. This process resulted in 286 outstanding individuals from 90 nations.
These nominations were reviewed by a committee of the Library’s expert curators and specialists, who then conducted extensive biographical and bibliographical research to gather written critiques, writing samples, and multiple peer reviews for each candidate.
The first review of the most competitive nominees was conducted by the Scholars Council, a select group of preeminent scholars from around the world. Following their guidance, a group of 11 was chosen as "finalists." For these 11, Library staff conducted deepened research and presented detailed dossiers on each finalist for a five-member final review panel of top outside scholars. After deliberating as a group at the Library, each member of the panel submitted his or her own detailed individual recommendations to the Librarian, who then made the final selection.
Brown and Thapar, who will officially receive the Kluge Prize on Dec. 10, 2008, at the Library of Congress, will both return to the Library next year to present a scholarly discussion of their respective bodies of work.
PETER ROBERT LAMONT BROWN
As both scholar and teacher, Peter Brown has worked at the highest level of scholarly intensity and creativity for more than 40 years. His books have captivated thousands of readers, and his celebrated lectures and seminars have inspired students and younger scholars around the world. A scholarly Prospero whose magic consists in equal parts of learning and eloquence, Brown has opened up our understanding of the world of late antiquity and has reformulated the history of the Mediterranean world from the 2nd or 3rd century to the 11th century C.E., as a coherent historical period marked not by the tragic death of an old civilization but by the difficult birth of a new one.
Brown launched his career with an extraordinary biography, "Augustine of Hippo" (1967). Drawing on the massive traditions of historical and ecclesiastical scholarship, he sought to understand the experiences and sensibilities that characterized the various phases of Augustine’s life. Brown offered profound interpretations of the most demanding of Augustine’s writings, presenting his analyses in vivid prose that does justice to technical scholarly debates while still remaining accessible to non-specialists.
In 1971 Brown brought out what remains perhaps his most effective synthesis, "The World of Late Antiquity." Using a vast range of sources, visual as well as verbal, he described the evolution of pagan philosophy and the rise of Christianity as part of a single social world. Fascinated by the figures of saints who spent their lives on pillars and hermits and monks who inhabited desert sites, Brown tried to enter their worlds and empathetically to imagine the reasons for their actions. He also traced the story of late antiquity forward into the rise of new empires and civilizations in Persia, the Islamic world, and in Byzantium as well as Western Europe. Brown saw 200–1000 C.E. as a whole period that had not previously been seen as such; and he set the agenda for a new field of study and influenced many in other areas.
In a series of articles and chapters written over 25 years, Brown contemplated the figure of "the holy man," and wrote about that in the context of community networks and embodiments of the central value system of Christianity. As Brown’s knowledge of the Near East and its languages widened, he came to understand that in many ways these figures were unremarkable when seen in their context.
Brown in his "Cult of the Saints" (1981) put to rest the tendency to think of a theological elite as separate from a superstitious, pagan populace. His "The Body and Society" (1988), an extension of his work on Augustine, inquires deeply into the meanings of a life devoted to holiness, as seen in the works of great Christian thinkers. It helped create the new field of "body history," so important for psychohistory and gender scholarship. He saw asceticism not as rejection of the world but as, in complicated ways, a powerful force within it.
As Brown developed a capacity in Arabic, Persian, Syriac and Turkish, as well as in the major classical and European languages, he reconceived Western history from the sixth to the 11th century as a pan-Mediterranean era in which Islam played a fundamental role, and he saw the rise of Christianity as the emergence of a new social and intellectual world long before the Renaissance.
ROMILA THAPAR
The pre-eminent historian of early India, Romila Thapar opened the study of that rich, ancient civilization to habits of inquiry and conceptual frameworks arising out of the modern social sciences. She formulated new questions about the social development of nearly 2,000 years of Indian history and challenged existing paradigms of historians from both the colonial era and from the more recent nationalists. Making innovative use of familiar archeological and literary sources and mining new data, she stretched our understanding of this continental nation of more than 1 billion people.
Her iconoclastic approach is not without controversy, but the cutting-edge research that she and like-minded colleagues advanced has profoundly changed the way India’s past is understood both at home and across the world. However future generations ultimately evaluate her conclusions, her opening up of an era and her intellectual integrity in humanistic study have had great impact in and beyond India.
At the beginning of her career, Thapar challenged the conventional historiography. In her "History of India" (1966), she broke from the prominently held view of an unchanging India characterized by a past and static Golden Age. This work accelerated the adaptation of the social sciences in Indian universities and quickly became a teaching text in Indian schools.
She portrays complex interplay among political, economic, social, religious and other factors, and always takes a holistic approach. Faced with the absence of reliable dating, she finds new information in ancient texts–Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and Jain–in Old Tamil traditions and folklore, and she integrates it all with findings from archaeology, numismatics, linguistics and inscriptions.
Thapar completely revised and greatly increased the size and scope of her "History of India" in 2002. Thapar acknowledges the uncertainties involved in writing history in the absence of a reliable written record. She also presents her view of the most likely interpretation of the evidence. Thapar has written or coauthored 15 substantial books, beginning in 1962 with her major biography of Asoka.
Thapar’s work has reached beyond the academy and into school textbooks, and her perspective on Indian history has placed her in the midst of contentious debates. Thapar has persistently championed a history grounded in evidence drawn from multiple sources in multiple languages from all levels of society across time. Willing to revisit her conclusions, she has also consistently sought to counter simplifications not borne out by the evidence and to support, implicitly, an appreciation for a pluralistic view India. An emeritus professor of Ancient Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi who has held visiting posts and received honorary degrees from universities on three continents, Thapar has made an enduring contribution to India and the world that lies with her role in innovating methodologies for historical research and her transforming our knowledge of Indian history.
PAST RECIPIENTS
The cumulative contribution of Kluge Prize winners is remarkable for deep scholarship, relentless inquiry, international breadth, and the impact of their work on audiences beyond the academy:
* Leszek Kolakowski (2003) magisterially established, as a philosopher from within the Soviet Empire, the intellectual bankruptcy of Marxist ideology and argued for the tolerance of diversity and a continuing search for transcendence to reestablish individual dignity. His voice was influential in Europe as a whole and provided the intellectual backbone for the Solidarity movement in Poland.
* Jaroslav Pelikan (2004) analyzed two millennia of documents concerning the history and practice of worship, and doctrinal and creedal forms of Christian history. He wrote the most definitive study of any major religion in the 20th century, brought the Eastern or Orthodox tradition into the hitherto largely Western story, and compiled an inventory of today’s vibrant and varied forms of African Christianity.
* Paul Ricoeur (2004), working at a high level of philosophical analysis and explication, drew on the entire tradition of Western philosophy to explore enduring common problems in the nature of human responsibility, by analyzing modern writers deeply and providing an enduring model of humanistic criticism for a wide variety of disciplines.
* John Hope Franklin (2006) mined the documentary record of African American history and demonstrated that African Americans have been active agents in shaping both their own and the nation’s history. His pioneering and varied scholarly work transformed thinking about American history and society and established African American history as a key area of professional study and popular understanding.
* Yu Ying-shih’s (2006) work spans Chinese history, thought and culture across many disciplines, vast time periods and enduring issues. The most widely read and discussed contemporary cultural historian writing in Chinese, Yu and his work are well known throughout the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other nations of East Asia. He has rescued the Confucian heritage from caricature and neglect and has stimulated new generations to rediscover the richness and variety of traditional Chinese culture after the ravages of Mao’s "cultural revolution."
Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another to distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. Past senior scholars include President Fernando Henrique Cardosa of Brazil, President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, the great Russian linguist Viacheslav Ivanov, and the Belgian historian of worldwide capitalism Herman Van der Wee. These senior Kluge scholars, like Kluge Prize winners, interact informally with members of Congress, as well as with Library staff within the Library’s Jefferson Building. For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.
Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution. It seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs and exhibitions. Many of the Library’s rich resources can be accessed through its Web site at www.loc.gov and via interactive exhibitions on a new, personalized Web site at myLOC.gov.
thanks to Chapati mystery for the link.
Historians Peter Brown, Romila Thapar Named Recipients of $1 Million 2008 Kluge Prize for Study of Humanity
Peter Robert Lamont Brown and Romila Thapar will receive the 2008 Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity in a ceremony Dec. 10 at the Library of Congress. They are the sixth and seventh recipients since the Prize’s 2003 inception.
Endowed by Library of Congress benefactor John W. Kluge, the Kluge Prize is unique among all international prizes at the $1 million level in rewarding a very wide range of disciplines including history, philosophy, politics, anthropology, sociology, religion, criticism in the arts and humanities, and linguistics, as well as a great variety of cultural perspectives in the world. Each awardee will receive half of the $1 million prize.
Both Brown, 73, and Thapar, 77, brought dramatically new perspectives to understanding vast sweeps of geographical territory and a millennium or more of time in, respectively, Europe and the Middle East, and in the Indian subcontinent. Brown brought conceptual coherence to the field of late antiquity, looking anew at the end of the Roman Empire, the emergence of Christianity, and the rise of Islam within and beyond the Mediterranean world. Thapar created a new and more pluralistic view of Indian civilization, which had seemed more unitary and unchanging, by scrutinizing its evolution over two millennia and searching out its historical consciousness.
The scholarship of both broadened and deepened over time as they marshaled a vast range of evidence from an expanding range of sources and a bewildering array of languages to bring a new comprehensive understanding of large questions of human development. They addressed their scholarship not only to specialists, but also intentionally shared their insights with broader lay audiences. In re-imagining familiar worlds with eyes unprejudiced by existing paradigms, they each opened large areas of human experience to new historical inquiry.
Commenting on Peter Brown, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said: "He is one of the most readable and literary historians of our time, having brought to life both a host of fascinating, little-known people from ordinary life during the first millennium of Christianity, as well as a monumental biography of the most prolific and famous St. Augustine."
One scholar reviewing nominations for the Kluge Prize wrote: "Peter Brown ranks with the greatest historians of the last three centuries." Another said: "There are few scholars in the world today who have changed their fields as much as Peter Brown has changed the study of what we used to call ancient and medieval history."
Remarking on Romila Thapar, Dr. Billington said: "She has used a wide variety of ancient sources and of languages, and introduced modern social science perspectives to help us better understand the richness and diversity of traditional Indian culture. And she, like Brown, has written a great biography of one of its giants, the Buddhist emperor Asoka."
Her prolific writings have set a new course for scholarship about the Indian subcontinent and for the writing of history textbooks in India. One scholarly reviewer said that "Thapar’s rigorous professional standards are cast against a background of her implicit appreciation of an India that accommodates civilizational diversity." Another said: "Thapar’s relentless striving for historical truth–independent of the superimposition of vacillating, fashionable theories of current sociopolitical conditions–is a landmark in the global writing of history."
THE SELECTION PROCESS
First awarded in 2003, the Kluge Prize is international; the recipient may be of any nationality, writing in any language. The main criterion for a recipient is deep and sustained intellectual accomplishment in the study of humanity that has an impact beyond narrow academic disciplines.
The process that led to the selection of Brown and Thapar began nearly a year ago. In search of those individuals worldwide who have demonstrated a lifetime of excellence and innovation in the study of the human condition, the Librarian of Congress sought nominations for the Kluge Prize from every corner of the world. Some 3,000 letters requesting nominations went out to a broad range of institutions and individuals knowledgeable about quality scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
The recipients included a broad range of university and college presidents, scholarly associations and research institutes, as well as individual scholars, writers, and selected friends of the Library.
In order to broaden the international pool, the Librarian of Congress also asked the Library’s large number of knowledgeable foreign Area Specialists to provide nominations for the prize based on their areas of expertise and to identify outstanding universities in each country from which nominations were solicited.
The nomination process was also opened to the general public via the Internet. This process resulted in 286 outstanding individuals from 90 nations.
These nominations were reviewed by a committee of the Library’s expert curators and specialists, who then conducted extensive biographical and bibliographical research to gather written critiques, writing samples, and multiple peer reviews for each candidate.
The first review of the most competitive nominees was conducted by the Scholars Council, a select group of preeminent scholars from around the world. Following their guidance, a group of 11 was chosen as "finalists." For these 11, Library staff conducted deepened research and presented detailed dossiers on each finalist for a five-member final review panel of top outside scholars. After deliberating as a group at the Library, each member of the panel submitted his or her own detailed individual recommendations to the Librarian, who then made the final selection.
Brown and Thapar, who will officially receive the Kluge Prize on Dec. 10, 2008, at the Library of Congress, will both return to the Library next year to present a scholarly discussion of their respective bodies of work.
PETER ROBERT LAMONT BROWN
As both scholar and teacher, Peter Brown has worked at the highest level of scholarly intensity and creativity for more than 40 years. His books have captivated thousands of readers, and his celebrated lectures and seminars have inspired students and younger scholars around the world. A scholarly Prospero whose magic consists in equal parts of learning and eloquence, Brown has opened up our understanding of the world of late antiquity and has reformulated the history of the Mediterranean world from the 2nd or 3rd century to the 11th century C.E., as a coherent historical period marked not by the tragic death of an old civilization but by the difficult birth of a new one.
Brown launched his career with an extraordinary biography, "Augustine of Hippo" (1967). Drawing on the massive traditions of historical and ecclesiastical scholarship, he sought to understand the experiences and sensibilities that characterized the various phases of Augustine’s life. Brown offered profound interpretations of the most demanding of Augustine’s writings, presenting his analyses in vivid prose that does justice to technical scholarly debates while still remaining accessible to non-specialists.
In 1971 Brown brought out what remains perhaps his most effective synthesis, "The World of Late Antiquity." Using a vast range of sources, visual as well as verbal, he described the evolution of pagan philosophy and the rise of Christianity as part of a single social world. Fascinated by the figures of saints who spent their lives on pillars and hermits and monks who inhabited desert sites, Brown tried to enter their worlds and empathetically to imagine the reasons for their actions. He also traced the story of late antiquity forward into the rise of new empires and civilizations in Persia, the Islamic world, and in Byzantium as well as Western Europe. Brown saw 200–1000 C.E. as a whole period that had not previously been seen as such; and he set the agenda for a new field of study and influenced many in other areas.
In a series of articles and chapters written over 25 years, Brown contemplated the figure of "the holy man," and wrote about that in the context of community networks and embodiments of the central value system of Christianity. As Brown’s knowledge of the Near East and its languages widened, he came to understand that in many ways these figures were unremarkable when seen in their context.
Brown in his "Cult of the Saints" (1981) put to rest the tendency to think of a theological elite as separate from a superstitious, pagan populace. His "The Body and Society" (1988), an extension of his work on Augustine, inquires deeply into the meanings of a life devoted to holiness, as seen in the works of great Christian thinkers. It helped create the new field of "body history," so important for psychohistory and gender scholarship. He saw asceticism not as rejection of the world but as, in complicated ways, a powerful force within it.
As Brown developed a capacity in Arabic, Persian, Syriac and Turkish, as well as in the major classical and European languages, he reconceived Western history from the sixth to the 11th century as a pan-Mediterranean era in which Islam played a fundamental role, and he saw the rise of Christianity as the emergence of a new social and intellectual world long before the Renaissance.
ROMILA THAPAR
The pre-eminent historian of early India, Romila Thapar opened the study of that rich, ancient civilization to habits of inquiry and conceptual frameworks arising out of the modern social sciences. She formulated new questions about the social development of nearly 2,000 years of Indian history and challenged existing paradigms of historians from both the colonial era and from the more recent nationalists. Making innovative use of familiar archeological and literary sources and mining new data, she stretched our understanding of this continental nation of more than 1 billion people.
Her iconoclastic approach is not without controversy, but the cutting-edge research that she and like-minded colleagues advanced has profoundly changed the way India’s past is understood both at home and across the world. However future generations ultimately evaluate her conclusions, her opening up of an era and her intellectual integrity in humanistic study have had great impact in and beyond India.
At the beginning of her career, Thapar challenged the conventional historiography. In her "History of India" (1966), she broke from the prominently held view of an unchanging India characterized by a past and static Golden Age. This work accelerated the adaptation of the social sciences in Indian universities and quickly became a teaching text in Indian schools.
She portrays complex interplay among political, economic, social, religious and other factors, and always takes a holistic approach. Faced with the absence of reliable dating, she finds new information in ancient texts–Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and Jain–in Old Tamil traditions and folklore, and she integrates it all with findings from archaeology, numismatics, linguistics and inscriptions.
Thapar completely revised and greatly increased the size and scope of her "History of India" in 2002. Thapar acknowledges the uncertainties involved in writing history in the absence of a reliable written record. She also presents her view of the most likely interpretation of the evidence. Thapar has written or coauthored 15 substantial books, beginning in 1962 with her major biography of Asoka.
Thapar’s work has reached beyond the academy and into school textbooks, and her perspective on Indian history has placed her in the midst of contentious debates. Thapar has persistently championed a history grounded in evidence drawn from multiple sources in multiple languages from all levels of society across time. Willing to revisit her conclusions, she has also consistently sought to counter simplifications not borne out by the evidence and to support, implicitly, an appreciation for a pluralistic view India. An emeritus professor of Ancient Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi who has held visiting posts and received honorary degrees from universities on three continents, Thapar has made an enduring contribution to India and the world that lies with her role in innovating methodologies for historical research and her transforming our knowledge of Indian history.
PAST RECIPIENTS
The cumulative contribution of Kluge Prize winners is remarkable for deep scholarship, relentless inquiry, international breadth, and the impact of their work on audiences beyond the academy:
* Leszek Kolakowski (2003) magisterially established, as a philosopher from within the Soviet Empire, the intellectual bankruptcy of Marxist ideology and argued for the tolerance of diversity and a continuing search for transcendence to reestablish individual dignity. His voice was influential in Europe as a whole and provided the intellectual backbone for the Solidarity movement in Poland.
* Jaroslav Pelikan (2004) analyzed two millennia of documents concerning the history and practice of worship, and doctrinal and creedal forms of Christian history. He wrote the most definitive study of any major religion in the 20th century, brought the Eastern or Orthodox tradition into the hitherto largely Western story, and compiled an inventory of today’s vibrant and varied forms of African Christianity.
* Paul Ricoeur (2004), working at a high level of philosophical analysis and explication, drew on the entire tradition of Western philosophy to explore enduring common problems in the nature of human responsibility, by analyzing modern writers deeply and providing an enduring model of humanistic criticism for a wide variety of disciplines.
* John Hope Franklin (2006) mined the documentary record of African American history and demonstrated that African Americans have been active agents in shaping both their own and the nation’s history. His pioneering and varied scholarly work transformed thinking about American history and society and established African American history as a key area of professional study and popular understanding.
* Yu Ying-shih’s (2006) work spans Chinese history, thought and culture across many disciplines, vast time periods and enduring issues. The most widely read and discussed contemporary cultural historian writing in Chinese, Yu and his work are well known throughout the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other nations of East Asia. He has rescued the Confucian heritage from caricature and neglect and has stimulated new generations to rediscover the richness and variety of traditional Chinese culture after the ravages of Mao’s "cultural revolution."
Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another to distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. Past senior scholars include President Fernando Henrique Cardosa of Brazil, President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, the great Russian linguist Viacheslav Ivanov, and the Belgian historian of worldwide capitalism Herman Van der Wee. These senior Kluge scholars, like Kluge Prize winners, interact informally with members of Congress, as well as with Library staff within the Library’s Jefferson Building. For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.
Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution. It seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs and exhibitions. Many of the Library’s rich resources can be accessed through its Web site at www.loc.gov and via interactive exhibitions on a new, personalized Web site at myLOC.gov.
thanks to Chapati mystery for the link.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Making Toast
Roger Rosenblatt
has a heat breaking story in the current issue of the New Yorker about
the death of his daughter and taking care of her children.
The silence teaches him to hear. To live life is to value the passing of time.
ABSTRACT: PERSONAL HISTORY about the death
of the writer’s daughter, Amy, at the age of thirty-eight. Writer
describes searching in the trash for a tooth lost by his seven-year-old
granddaughter, Jessica. This sort of activity has constituted his life
since the death of his daughter, Amy, the previous December. Amy
ElizabethRosenblatt Solomon, pediatrician and mother of three,
collapsed on a treadmill in the downstairs playroom at home. It was
ruled a “sudden death due to an anomalous right coronary artery.” Her
condition was asymptomatic; she might have died at any time in her
life. Writer describes his daughter as a very clear person. Her clarity
could make her seem harsh or cutting, yet it also contributed to her
kindness. Describes the in-law apartment in his daughter’s house where
he and his wife have more or less taken up residence since Amy’s death.
Tells about the ways in which they help to care for their
grandchildren. Two things have been of immeasurable use to them: a
friend created a Web site inviting other friends to make dinner for the
family; and their nanny,Ligaya , said, “You are not the first to go
through such a thing, and you are better able to handle it than most.”
Tells about Amy’s three children:Bubbies (James), a toddler, Jessie,
and Sammy. The writer rises early to empty the dishwasher and prepare
breakfast for the family, including making toast forBubbies . Amy’s
husband, Harris, a hand surgeon, is stoic and undemonstrative. He
rarely speaks about his feelings. “I’m a scientist. It’s hard for me to
deal with things thataren ’t facts.” Tells about non-sequential
conversations he has with his grandchildren. Throughout the winter and
the spring, there is hardly a moment for anything but play,caretaking, schooling, chauffeuring, and, by 9 P.M., sleep. Tells about a play the children put on at the writer’s house in Quogue over the summer. One night, the writer reads imaginary letters from James Joyce to Bubbies
. Describes going to the cemetery to visit Amy’s grave. One of the few
pieces of work the writer has done since his daughter’s death was a
review of David Lodge’s “Deaf Sentence” in which a character says, “now
I see how one was unable to value the passing time.” As far as the
writer can tell, that is how to live—to value the passing
time.
has a heat breaking story in the current issue of the New Yorker about
the death of his daughter and taking care of her children.
The silence teaches him to hear. To live life is to value the passing of time.
ABSTRACT: PERSONAL HISTORY about the death
of the writer’s daughter, Amy, at the age of thirty-eight. Writer
describes searching in the trash for a tooth lost by his seven-year-old
granddaughter, Jessica. This sort of activity has constituted his life
since the death of his daughter, Amy, the previous December. Amy
ElizabethRosenblatt Solomon, pediatrician and mother of three,
collapsed on a treadmill in the downstairs playroom at home. It was
ruled a “sudden death due to an anomalous right coronary artery.” Her
condition was asymptomatic; she might have died at any time in her
life. Writer describes his daughter as a very clear person. Her clarity
could make her seem harsh or cutting, yet it also contributed to her
kindness. Describes the in-law apartment in his daughter’s house where
he and his wife have more or less taken up residence since Amy’s death.
Tells about the ways in which they help to care for their
grandchildren. Two things have been of immeasurable use to them: a
friend created a Web site inviting other friends to make dinner for the
family; and their nanny,Ligaya , said, “You are not the first to go
through such a thing, and you are better able to handle it than most.”
Tells about Amy’s three children:Bubbies (James), a toddler, Jessie,
and Sammy. The writer rises early to empty the dishwasher and prepare
breakfast for the family, including making toast forBubbies . Amy’s
husband, Harris, a hand surgeon, is stoic and undemonstrative. He
rarely speaks about his feelings. “I’m a scientist. It’s hard for me to
deal with things thataren ’t facts.” Tells about non-sequential
conversations he has with his grandchildren. Throughout the winter and
the spring, there is hardly a moment for anything but play,caretaking, schooling, chauffeuring, and, by 9 P.M., sleep. Tells about a play the children put on at the writer’s house in Quogue over the summer. One night, the writer reads imaginary letters from James Joyce to Bubbies
. Describes going to the cemetery to visit Amy’s grave. One of the few
pieces of work the writer has done since his daughter’s death was a
review of David Lodge’s “Deaf Sentence” in which a character says, “now
I see how one was unable to value the passing time.” As far as the
writer can tell, that is how to live—to value the passing
time.
Urmila Venugopalan
NYTs quote's Urmila Venugopalan on the fact that Laskar-e-Taiba has outgrown it's original sponsors.
As American, European and Middle Eastern governments crack down on Al Qaeda’s finances, Lashkar still has a flourishing fund-raising organization in South Asia and the Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, counterterrorism officials say. The group primarily uses Jamaat-ud-Dawa to raise money, ostensibly for causes in Pakistan.
The Mumbai attacks, which included foreigners among its targets, seemed to fit the group’s evolving emphasis and determination to elevate its profile in the global jihadist constellation.
Lashkar also has a history of using local extremist groups for knowledge and tactics in its operations. Investigators in Mumbai are following leads suggesting that Lashkar used the Students’ Islamic Movement of India, a fundamentalist group that advocates establishing an Islamic state in India, for early reconnaissance and logistical help.
An Indian man arrested in connection with the attacks, Fahim Ahmad Ansari, had been described beforehand by Indian newspaper reports as a former member of the Students’ Islamic Movement who met with Lashkar operatives in Dubai in 2003.
American officials said investigators were looking closely at the likelihood that the attackers had local support in Mumbai.
Mr. Hoffman said that Lashkar had developed particularly sophisticated Internet operations, and that intelligence officials believed the group had forged ties with regional terrorist organizations like Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia by assisting them with their own Internet strategies.
Although Pakistan’s government officially banned Lashkar in 2002, American officials said that the group had maintained close ties since then to the Pakistani intelligence service. American spy agencies have documented regular meetings between the ISI and Lashkar operatives, in which the two organizations have shared intelligence about Indian operations in Kashmir.
“It goes beyond information sharing to include some funding and training,” said an American official who follows the group closely. “And these are not rogue ISI elements. What’s going on is done in a fairly disciplined way.”
Still, officials in Washington said they had yet to unearth any direct link between the Pakistan spy agency and the Mumbai attacks. “I don’t think that there is compelling evidence of involvement of Pakistani officials,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on CNN’s “Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer” on Sunday. “But I do think that Pakistan has a responsibility to act.”
She said evidence showed “that the terrorists did use territory in Pakistan.”
An American counterterrorism official said: “It’s one thing to say the ISI is tied to Lashkar and quite another to say the ISI was behind the Mumbai attacks. The evidence at this point doesn’t get you there.”
Moreover, some terrorism analysts said that Lashkar’s dependence on its original sponsors had lessened in recent years. With wealthy donors in no short supply, an established recruiting pipeline and a series of training camps, Lashkar “has outgrown ISI’s support,” said Urmila Venugopalan, a South Asia analyst for Jane’s Information Group.
The protection that Lashkar operatives enjoy inside Pakistan has allowed the group to thrive at the same time that Al Qaeda’s leaders have been forced to hide in caves and occasionally transmit messages to one another using donkey couriers.
In a public statement in May, Stuart Levey, the under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, called Lashkar a “dangerous Al Qaeda affiliate that has demonstrated its willingness to murder innocent civilians.”
But other terrorism analysts offer a more nuanced view of the group’s Qaeda ties.
On the one hand, Al Qaeda and Lashkar share many positions: a belief in a strict interpretation of the Koran, a desire to establish a government based on strict Islamic laws and a priority to evict United States troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. Lashkar has helped Qaeda fighters move in and out of Afghanistan. In March 2002, a Qaeda lieutenant, Abu Zubaydah, was captured in a Lashkar safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, according to a State Department terrorism report. Eleven detainees currently at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are suspected of having some kind of connections to Lashkar.
But Lashkar and Al Qaeda do not always see eye to eye, terrorism analysts said. While Lashkar strives for the creation of a pan-Islamic state across South Asia, Al Qaeda aims to create an even larger entity. Al Qaeda is wary of Lashkar’s relationship with the ISI, an American official said. A spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar’s charity wing, denied last week that the group or its founder, Haffiz Muhammad Saeed, had any connection to the Mumbai attacks. The surviving gunman in Mumbai has claimed to have met Mr. Saeed at a training camp in Pakistan.
On Friday, Mr. Saeed gave his regular sermon at his mosque in Lahore, Pakistan, where thousands listened to him denounce Hinduism, praise Islam and criticize Ms. Rice for visiting the region. Surrounded by security guards, Mr. Saeed, 63, a stocky man with a huge, untrimmed beard, spoke for 50 minutes to a rapt congregation that sat on the wide lawns of the Qadisiyyah Center in central Lahore.
“Now Condoleezza Rice has rushed to India and Pakistan because infidels are united,” he said. “If infidels do not stop their anti-Muslim activities, the Muslims are second to none in taking revenge.”
As American, European and Middle Eastern governments crack down on Al Qaeda’s finances, Lashkar still has a flourishing fund-raising organization in South Asia and the Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, counterterrorism officials say. The group primarily uses Jamaat-ud-Dawa to raise money, ostensibly for causes in Pakistan.
The Mumbai attacks, which included foreigners among its targets, seemed to fit the group’s evolving emphasis and determination to elevate its profile in the global jihadist constellation.
Lashkar also has a history of using local extremist groups for knowledge and tactics in its operations. Investigators in Mumbai are following leads suggesting that Lashkar used the Students’ Islamic Movement of India, a fundamentalist group that advocates establishing an Islamic state in India, for early reconnaissance and logistical help.
An Indian man arrested in connection with the attacks, Fahim Ahmad Ansari, had been described beforehand by Indian newspaper reports as a former member of the Students’ Islamic Movement who met with Lashkar operatives in Dubai in 2003.
American officials said investigators were looking closely at the likelihood that the attackers had local support in Mumbai.
Mr. Hoffman said that Lashkar had developed particularly sophisticated Internet operations, and that intelligence officials believed the group had forged ties with regional terrorist organizations like Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia by assisting them with their own Internet strategies.
Although Pakistan’s government officially banned Lashkar in 2002, American officials said that the group had maintained close ties since then to the Pakistani intelligence service. American spy agencies have documented regular meetings between the ISI and Lashkar operatives, in which the two organizations have shared intelligence about Indian operations in Kashmir.
“It goes beyond information sharing to include some funding and training,” said an American official who follows the group closely. “And these are not rogue ISI elements. What’s going on is done in a fairly disciplined way.”
Still, officials in Washington said they had yet to unearth any direct link between the Pakistan spy agency and the Mumbai attacks. “I don’t think that there is compelling evidence of involvement of Pakistani officials,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on CNN’s “Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer” on Sunday. “But I do think that Pakistan has a responsibility to act.”
She said evidence showed “that the terrorists did use territory in Pakistan.”
An American counterterrorism official said: “It’s one thing to say the ISI is tied to Lashkar and quite another to say the ISI was behind the Mumbai attacks. The evidence at this point doesn’t get you there.”
Moreover, some terrorism analysts said that Lashkar’s dependence on its original sponsors had lessened in recent years. With wealthy donors in no short supply, an established recruiting pipeline and a series of training camps, Lashkar “has outgrown ISI’s support,” said Urmila Venugopalan, a South Asia analyst for Jane’s Information Group.
The protection that Lashkar operatives enjoy inside Pakistan has allowed the group to thrive at the same time that Al Qaeda’s leaders have been forced to hide in caves and occasionally transmit messages to one another using donkey couriers.
In a public statement in May, Stuart Levey, the under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, called Lashkar a “dangerous Al Qaeda affiliate that has demonstrated its willingness to murder innocent civilians.”
But other terrorism analysts offer a more nuanced view of the group’s Qaeda ties.
On the one hand, Al Qaeda and Lashkar share many positions: a belief in a strict interpretation of the Koran, a desire to establish a government based on strict Islamic laws and a priority to evict United States troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. Lashkar has helped Qaeda fighters move in and out of Afghanistan. In March 2002, a Qaeda lieutenant, Abu Zubaydah, was captured in a Lashkar safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, according to a State Department terrorism report. Eleven detainees currently at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are suspected of having some kind of connections to Lashkar.
But Lashkar and Al Qaeda do not always see eye to eye, terrorism analysts said. While Lashkar strives for the creation of a pan-Islamic state across South Asia, Al Qaeda aims to create an even larger entity. Al Qaeda is wary of Lashkar’s relationship with the ISI, an American official said. A spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar’s charity wing, denied last week that the group or its founder, Haffiz Muhammad Saeed, had any connection to the Mumbai attacks. The surviving gunman in Mumbai has claimed to have met Mr. Saeed at a training camp in Pakistan.
On Friday, Mr. Saeed gave his regular sermon at his mosque in Lahore, Pakistan, where thousands listened to him denounce Hinduism, praise Islam and criticize Ms. Rice for visiting the region. Surrounded by security guards, Mr. Saeed, 63, a stocky man with a huge, untrimmed beard, spoke for 50 minutes to a rapt congregation that sat on the wide lawns of the Qadisiyyah Center in central Lahore.
“Now Condoleezza Rice has rushed to India and Pakistan because infidels are united,” he said. “If infidels do not stop their anti-Muslim activities, the Muslims are second to none in taking revenge.”
Sunday, December 07, 2008
The Future of Indian Democracy
Dipesh Chakrabati on the future of Indian Democracy.
It is difficult to be completely impersonal about what happened in Mumbai last week. Some friends lost their near and dear ones to the mindless bullets of murderous terrorists. An old acquaintance from college escaped with his life from the Taj Hotel, having been deprived of food and drink for all the time the siege was on. Watching a Muslim taxi-driver on Indian television describe in heart-rending terms how he lost members of his family at the Chhatrapati Shivaji (Railway) Terminus to assassins, who presumably thought that they were fighting for the cause of Muslims, was enough to remind anyone that this mayhem was not about religious differences or the struggles of the Kashmiri people for a just political future. This was indeed terrorism, an attempt to wield fear as a political weapon by killing innocent and unsuspecting people in large numbers. It was, like all acts of terror, whether carried out by groups or states, a crime against humanity.
To say this is not to deny the many long-term problems that can cause partisan ire in the subcontinent. To be sure, Kashmir is a problem that bears on Hindu-Muslim tension in the region and urgently needs to be addressed, but this will not happen overnight. True, India needs to work with people and officials in Pakistan who are also against terror, for it is important to foil any attempts to cause friction between India and Pakistan. But much depends on Pakistan being able to mobilize a political will to engage merchants of death such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba (one does not know of similar groups in India bent on producing destruction and mayhem in the neighboring country). It is also true that the politics of hatred and division promoted by the BJP or Shiv Sena weaken the Indian nation by alienating minorities. But this again is a long-term problem: so long as there are effective votes in these divisive sentiments, political parties are not going to abstain from using them.
The most recent Mumbai tragedy points to a general way in which some of the negative effects of globalization are changing the nature of democracies in the twentieth century. Given the diverse global tensions in the world—terrorism, economic-environmental crises, and civil wars that dislocate populations—democratic states will increasingly tend to develop a strong security aspect in the coming decades. The violence in Mumbai was perceptibly different from the terrorist violence that India has seen before. This time the terrorists themselves wanted to create a “global” event. Their targets included many “ordinary” Indians, but also the international elite that patronizes the most well-known hotels of Mumbai, itself the most global city in India. Their technology and targets were global—witness their use of a Voice over Internet Protocol system to keep in touch with their masters in Pakistan, and their deliberate targeting of a small Jewish community from overseas. Thanks to this orgy of violence, Indian democracy has now, sadly, been ushered into a major debate of the twenty-first century: should democratic states become security-states as well? Security measures are, of course, no substitute for the political processes needed to heal rifts between countries and communities. But they cannot be ignored either. The terrorists have already threatened to repeat in Delhi what they did in Bombay. How could India ignore questions of security in the lackadaisical way it has so far?
This immediately raises two challenges. One is related to questions of democracy in general. The prospect of a security state understandably and rightly concerns rights-activists. Yet it is clear that, given the globalization of all major problems of the world, one of the great debates of this century will be about liberty of individuals versus security of populations. In the developed countries today, it is hard to distinguish measures adopted to fend off terrorist attacks from the politics of refugees and “illegal” immigration. Realistically, I cannot see how liberal-democratic nations can now avoid demands about their citizens’ right to security, and balance this against other rights. Of course, the balance cannot be decided in any a priori fashion, which is why it always should be open to debate with reference to specific contexts. There is, besides, the very important question of ensuring that the pursuit of security does not become a tool for oppression of and discrimination against minorities or immigrants. But the globalization of this debate is what marks our times. One now expects this debate to gain further momentum in India.
The second challenge, in this context, arises from deep within the history of Indian politics and is peculiar to India to some extent. To have an effective cordon sanitaire against terror would require India to inject a degree of efficiency, alertness, and performance into an administrative apparatus that simply has not delivered on these scores for decades. For many interesting historical reasons (that need not detain us here), government and public institutions in India gradually ceased to be effective deliverers of goods and services, beginning in the 1970’s. There is much that democracy in India has achieved, including the famous overturning of the autocratic Emergency Rule that Mrs. Gandhi once imposed and the sense of participation many low-caste communities have in the country’s governmental institutions. But democracy in India has also become predominantly a means of electoral empowerment of different groups—low-castes, dalits, minorities, or even majoritarian Hindus who claim to have been “weakened” by the “privileges” accorded to minorities.
The growth of this politics of identity has made elections into the mainstay of Indian democracy. It has distanced politics from issues of governance, and has gone hand in hand with a deepening degree of corruption, financial and otherwise, on the part of politicians and officials. A large number of the elected members of parliament have criminal cases pending against them, and media reports suggest an elephantine, unaccountable, inefficient bureaucracy mired in the self-indulgent use of resources (corruption and inefficiency often going together). There was, as last week’s events made clear, no effective coast guard force on the Indian seas, in spite of the government having been warned of possible terror attacks on Mumbai from the sea. When the Taj Hotel caught fire, it took the first lot of firefighters three hours to respond. The commando force had to be dispatched from Delhi and it took about nine hours to mobilize them, as they are usually kept busy providing “security” to politicians, many of whom see such security as a matter of status and prestige. It also turns out that the majority a very large grant recently given to the Bombay police for its modernization was spent on buying luxury cars and other expensive items for the use of senior officers and their ministers! Creating a security system that will effectively protect the population from terrorist attacks will not be easy. Corruption follows public money in India, as it does, unfortunately, in many countries, and undermines performance. Additionally, the effective functioning of any institution in India in a non-partisan manner would require that institution to be insulated from political interference. The second condition is not easily met in India. The required reforms thus call for a certain kind of political will that the political class in India has not quite shown in recent times.
Yet India cannot avoid debates over security and other rights any longer. The government has already announced certain measures that will make anti-terror laws more stringent than before. Other reforms will certainly follow on paper, and perhaps in action as well. Many members of the Indian educated middle class are currently angry at the inability of their government to protect them. We do not know how effective that anger will be in bringing about change. If the nature of the political class remains the same, Indians will probably have to get used to living with a degree of terror the exact quantum of which is difficult to predict at this stage. My most optimistic scenario is this: that Indians will address both the long-term and short-term problems together so that, important as security considerations are, this tragedy will initiate not just a rethinking but also a revitalization of democratic institutions in India as they cope with the challenges of this global century.
thanks Chapati Mystery for this link
It is difficult to be completely impersonal about what happened in Mumbai last week. Some friends lost their near and dear ones to the mindless bullets of murderous terrorists. An old acquaintance from college escaped with his life from the Taj Hotel, having been deprived of food and drink for all the time the siege was on. Watching a Muslim taxi-driver on Indian television describe in heart-rending terms how he lost members of his family at the Chhatrapati Shivaji (Railway) Terminus to assassins, who presumably thought that they were fighting for the cause of Muslims, was enough to remind anyone that this mayhem was not about religious differences or the struggles of the Kashmiri people for a just political future. This was indeed terrorism, an attempt to wield fear as a political weapon by killing innocent and unsuspecting people in large numbers. It was, like all acts of terror, whether carried out by groups or states, a crime against humanity.
To say this is not to deny the many long-term problems that can cause partisan ire in the subcontinent. To be sure, Kashmir is a problem that bears on Hindu-Muslim tension in the region and urgently needs to be addressed, but this will not happen overnight. True, India needs to work with people and officials in Pakistan who are also against terror, for it is important to foil any attempts to cause friction between India and Pakistan. But much depends on Pakistan being able to mobilize a political will to engage merchants of death such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba (one does not know of similar groups in India bent on producing destruction and mayhem in the neighboring country). It is also true that the politics of hatred and division promoted by the BJP or Shiv Sena weaken the Indian nation by alienating minorities. But this again is a long-term problem: so long as there are effective votes in these divisive sentiments, political parties are not going to abstain from using them.
The most recent Mumbai tragedy points to a general way in which some of the negative effects of globalization are changing the nature of democracies in the twentieth century. Given the diverse global tensions in the world—terrorism, economic-environmental crises, and civil wars that dislocate populations—democratic states will increasingly tend to develop a strong security aspect in the coming decades. The violence in Mumbai was perceptibly different from the terrorist violence that India has seen before. This time the terrorists themselves wanted to create a “global” event. Their targets included many “ordinary” Indians, but also the international elite that patronizes the most well-known hotels of Mumbai, itself the most global city in India. Their technology and targets were global—witness their use of a Voice over Internet Protocol system to keep in touch with their masters in Pakistan, and their deliberate targeting of a small Jewish community from overseas. Thanks to this orgy of violence, Indian democracy has now, sadly, been ushered into a major debate of the twenty-first century: should democratic states become security-states as well? Security measures are, of course, no substitute for the political processes needed to heal rifts between countries and communities. But they cannot be ignored either. The terrorists have already threatened to repeat in Delhi what they did in Bombay. How could India ignore questions of security in the lackadaisical way it has so far?
This immediately raises two challenges. One is related to questions of democracy in general. The prospect of a security state understandably and rightly concerns rights-activists. Yet it is clear that, given the globalization of all major problems of the world, one of the great debates of this century will be about liberty of individuals versus security of populations. In the developed countries today, it is hard to distinguish measures adopted to fend off terrorist attacks from the politics of refugees and “illegal” immigration. Realistically, I cannot see how liberal-democratic nations can now avoid demands about their citizens’ right to security, and balance this against other rights. Of course, the balance cannot be decided in any a priori fashion, which is why it always should be open to debate with reference to specific contexts. There is, besides, the very important question of ensuring that the pursuit of security does not become a tool for oppression of and discrimination against minorities or immigrants. But the globalization of this debate is what marks our times. One now expects this debate to gain further momentum in India.
The second challenge, in this context, arises from deep within the history of Indian politics and is peculiar to India to some extent. To have an effective cordon sanitaire against terror would require India to inject a degree of efficiency, alertness, and performance into an administrative apparatus that simply has not delivered on these scores for decades. For many interesting historical reasons (that need not detain us here), government and public institutions in India gradually ceased to be effective deliverers of goods and services, beginning in the 1970’s. There is much that democracy in India has achieved, including the famous overturning of the autocratic Emergency Rule that Mrs. Gandhi once imposed and the sense of participation many low-caste communities have in the country’s governmental institutions. But democracy in India has also become predominantly a means of electoral empowerment of different groups—low-castes, dalits, minorities, or even majoritarian Hindus who claim to have been “weakened” by the “privileges” accorded to minorities.
The growth of this politics of identity has made elections into the mainstay of Indian democracy. It has distanced politics from issues of governance, and has gone hand in hand with a deepening degree of corruption, financial and otherwise, on the part of politicians and officials. A large number of the elected members of parliament have criminal cases pending against them, and media reports suggest an elephantine, unaccountable, inefficient bureaucracy mired in the self-indulgent use of resources (corruption and inefficiency often going together). There was, as last week’s events made clear, no effective coast guard force on the Indian seas, in spite of the government having been warned of possible terror attacks on Mumbai from the sea. When the Taj Hotel caught fire, it took the first lot of firefighters three hours to respond. The commando force had to be dispatched from Delhi and it took about nine hours to mobilize them, as they are usually kept busy providing “security” to politicians, many of whom see such security as a matter of status and prestige. It also turns out that the majority a very large grant recently given to the Bombay police for its modernization was spent on buying luxury cars and other expensive items for the use of senior officers and their ministers! Creating a security system that will effectively protect the population from terrorist attacks will not be easy. Corruption follows public money in India, as it does, unfortunately, in many countries, and undermines performance. Additionally, the effective functioning of any institution in India in a non-partisan manner would require that institution to be insulated from political interference. The second condition is not easily met in India. The required reforms thus call for a certain kind of political will that the political class in India has not quite shown in recent times.
Yet India cannot avoid debates over security and other rights any longer. The government has already announced certain measures that will make anti-terror laws more stringent than before. Other reforms will certainly follow on paper, and perhaps in action as well. Many members of the Indian educated middle class are currently angry at the inability of their government to protect them. We do not know how effective that anger will be in bringing about change. If the nature of the political class remains the same, Indians will probably have to get used to living with a degree of terror the exact quantum of which is difficult to predict at this stage. My most optimistic scenario is this: that Indians will address both the long-term and short-term problems together so that, important as security considerations are, this tragedy will initiate not just a rethinking but also a revitalization of democratic institutions in India as they cope with the challenges of this global century.
thanks Chapati Mystery for this link
Kavita Karkare
Shefalee Vasudev writes in the outlook about the stoic and brave resilience of Kavita Karkare while grieving for her husband. No more donning a widows white sari or removing symbols of her marriage like her bindi and bangles, but at the same time make sure that manipulative politicians like Narender Modi are not able to score points for her husbands untimely death.
Kavita Karkare, slain Maharashtra ats chief Hemant Karkare's wife, did not meet Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi
when he dropped by at her home to offer condolence. Two days later, an
image of dignified restraint, she came before the eyes of the tearful
police force, friends and thousands ofMumbaikars who came to bid
goodbye to her martyr husband. In both her actions, she made a choice.
Blink, and you will miss the inspiration in that choice that needs to
be emphasised.
In a society where grief over death is rarely a
private practice, where formalised mourning rituals encourage families
and communities to survive loss by reliving it through loud
expressions, where bereaved women are expected to wear white and look
distraught,Kavita Karkare refused to mount her sorrow publicly. The
light had gone from her eyes, leaving behind an opaque curtain of
despondence. But she held through, unknowingly conveying the power of
personal will. Dressed in a red and light brown sari, a smallbindi on her foreheard
, a red bangle on one of her arms, her hair neatly combed, she
projected an image of forbearance that badly needs to be registered in our collective consciousness as dark fears surround us.
The
life-denying white of widowhood is now being given a decent burial.
Let's hope cinema also takes note and rewrites cliched film versions of
funerals where women in extreme white bid theatrical goodbyes to fallen
soldiers. RememberKareena Kapoor in LOC Kargil? Kavita may not be the first woman to wear a red bindi
at her husband's funeral, but as the stoic wife of a martyr, she should
inspire women who feel pressurised to lament death in socially accepted
ways. Or suffer because people want them to suffer. Years back, after
the death of her husband Dr Bali, renowned dancer-actressVyjanthimala
continued to sport marital symbols, confessing that they resonated
remembrance and love for her husband. All of us know a few women who
made similar choices. Instead of abandoning them within hours, using
signs of marriage as support systems in loss is a touching way to cope
with heartbreak such asKavita's . In all our talk of the women's
movement in India and stories of personal evolutions, we have forgotten
to list how some women now deal with mourning and widowhood. Why some
no longer want to be a part of the chest-beating community where
bangle-breaking, wiping off thebindi and appearing dishevelled is considered appropriate widow response. Kavita
, just by being herself, mirrored this change that must be noticed.
Instead of breaking down in copious tears or succumbing to fainting
spells before the world, she stood silently, struck mute by grief. What
comes across—and not all of it can be emotional paralysis—is will over
obligation. Let's salute it.
Nobody judges people by the way
they grieve. There is nothing wimpish about white or black, both
significant colours of death in different cultures. We don't even know
how VinitaKamte, spouse of ACP Ashok Kamte, or encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar's
wife reacted to the news of their husbands' deaths. Yet, none of them
was seen screaming in front of TV cameras. If they had, nobody would
have raised an eyebrow. The fact that they did not is noteworthy. What
matters is thatKavita spoke of Modi—a man who slandered her husband a few days back for manipulation of the Malegaon
blasts probe—as an "elderly man". The image we will remember is of her
deathly calm during the funeral. Not of a wailing widow, cursing
politicians because the situation gave her sanction. This image should
remind us that individuality is our closest friend in bereavement.
Kavita's
personalisation of grief during the very public funeral of her husband
is an interesting starting point to understand how cultural changes in
India emerge even in death.What an unlikely time to realise with
reassurance and respect how stereotyped widowhood is changing without
opening rebellious fire onanyone's feelings.
In this confessional era of ours when TV acts as mediator, offering conversation and commiseration; when the internet has opened graveyards to bloggers, when the rudaalis of the past are replaced by bereavement websites, candlelight marches and empathetic SMSes, Kavita Karkare's
restraint is indicative of how we learn to form our boundaries,
creating a private space for grief even when it is invaded by goodwill.
When an entire nation mourns the passing away of a loved one, resilient
silence is a new rite of passage.
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