Taslima Nasreen vs Javed Akhtar

Posted on October 2, 2025 by secondsaturn

Taslima Nasreen dropped the atom bomb on the politics of Bengal, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan by observing that the Bengali culture is foundationally and fundamentally Hindu. There cannot be any category like a Bengal Muslim unless as an oxymoron. To this Javed Akhtar added, also in a tone of appreciation that while Dr Nasreen was right, it would also be in place to appreciate the Ganga Yamuna Tehzeeb, or the Hindu Muslim syncretic culture of the country.

The Ganga Yamuna syncretism is the culture of the ruling elite, where Hindus were absorbed among the ruling class in Mughal India. The mixing was in the realm of the highbrow. In Bengal, syncretism was just the opposite, it happened among the lowest echelons of the society, in the peasant societies and those among the simpler communities of the boatsmen. The difference arises because of the different circumstances of Islam meeting Hinduism.

In the north, Islam met Hindus as conquerors would meet the conquered. Whereas, throughout the Sultanate period, Hindus were shut out from any public display of religion and culture , the Mughals opened up the doors for Hinduism to flourish, themselves being deeply interested in the various aspects of the faith. Ganga Yamuna mix was a result of this acceptance, accommodation and even respect.

In Bengal, it was not so much Islam but pre–Islamic Arabic beliefs that came with merchants, saints and medicine men. Bengali syncretism has deities and tithis, rituals and rites that closely resemble those in pagan Arabia. Goddesses like Mannat, Uzza and Ahlat became our Kali, Saraswati and Lakshmi. In the deeper villages, even today while worshipping Monosha, Asan Bibi, Bon Bibi and Loknath Baba, there is little understanding of the lines of difference between Islam and Hindu. When Islam finally barged in with the raised sword in the form of Ikhtiyar bin Bakhtiyar Khiljee, many converted willy nilly because there was already a familiarity with Arab customs especially its ritual foods, like dodhikarma, kodma, shinni and a few others.

The Ganga Yamuna Tehzeeb was cultivated in the courts of rulers, in order to attain richness that diversity and assimilation invariably brings on, musicians, poets and above all theologians were patronized and promoted to create a cultural high ground that would match the moral legitimacy of the Mughals not only across the subcontinent but also as far as the courts of Persia and Turkey. Hence the mix of cultures, the one in the courts and the other among the folk, are two different entities not to be confused.

The spirit of syncretism in the north percolated down from the courts to the folk through the popular Bhakti movements. The legend of Baiju Bawra is a case in the point. In Bengal, the mixed culture osmosed upwards especially in the Hussain Shahi dynasty which promoted the Bengali language. Unfortunately, the conquest of Bengal by Akbar suddenly encouraged a Hindu elite to consolidate themselves and there upon, from then till Raja Rammohun Roy there was progressive cleansing of the syncretic binds into neater segregations. The Muslim was a despised category, to be cast away from any participation in history or involvement in memory. The Muslim endeared in the Bengali memory only as an Abdul Majhi or a Gofur Mian and the jokes of the kutti. Politics of Islam in eastern Bengal was the agony of Bengali Muslims to be reckoned as rightful partakers in the evolution of Bengal’s destiny. In the north, the Hindus razed syncretism out as the insignia of an erstwhile ruling class. The BJP still calls the liberal Indians as “muslims” because of the mix up in the chronology of recall of the ruling class, Mughals, or British or post Independent India.

When Dr Nasreen rues about the Hindu foundation of the Bengali culture, she does not retrieve the roots of the Bengali culture in its historical whole but selectively picks on the spirit of the reclamation of Hinduism of a Bengali ruling class, which under Akbar had almost become fully Hindu. When Mr Akhtar ruminates about the Tehzeeb, he recalls the culture of a ruling elite made defunct by the British rule. They are talking about different things, distinct forces and while they are true in a sense, they are both false in another.

Note: cultural analysis is not child’s play.

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Tikli Bottom

Posted on September 13, 2025 by secondsaturn

My young cousin planned a visit for the family to Tikli Bottom. This is a property at the bottom of the Tikli hills, off Gurgaon, where the Aravallis rise for the one last time to eventually run off in undulations into the flood plains of the Yamuna. This is a property at the bottom of the Tikli hills and hence called as Tikli Bottom. This is a resort opne and yet closed for tourists for the owners, now the late Howard couple, Anne and Martin were discerning as to who should enter their premises. Presently, their daughter being more pragmatic and responsive to inflation and kind enough to retain most of the huge staff on the premises is more lenient towards filmwallahs who seem to be shooting daily there. As far as tourists are concerned, the property holds on to its grounds, allowing very little guests only after detailed scrutiny.

Tikli Bottom is a British bungalow of the days of the Mutiny, but what strikes me is that it was built in the vintage of heritage only in the 1990’s. Every wedge in the wall, every step in the courtyard and every nook of the stairways is constructed with the precision of the aeons of time that the style has seen. Filling the space inside the bungalow are furniture and Knick knacks, curios, paintings, photographs, artefacts and crafts collected carefully from the itinerant banjaras and iterating bazaars of India. While one can still think the building being built in a retro style, one was astounded at the prospect that all of such stuff could also be accessed in the present times, perhaps from auction houses. The owner told us that the collection of curios and paintings and the furniture were part of their ancestral legacy as members of many generations of the family had spent the service careers in India.

As we looked around the grounds of the property, which partly was built as a patio, partly as a drive way, in part a lawn and blending on all directions into a farmland, I sensed that in the mind of the owners space was organized just in the manner of a typical North Indian where dwelling in which a home with a garden must look like a hotel and a farm house all at once.

The hospitality was typically of an English farm as we read in Enid Blyton – the present owner and her staff treated us like children back from hostels, lavishing us with snacks and drinks and then insisting that we eat more of the food laid out generously on tables with white crocheted cloth. When Madhusree opted for a foot massage, the mood swung back into a hotel spa.

The farm makes honey and marmalade, so typical English. But where the property becomes India is in the landscaping of its grounds. Here the idea of the owner is neither to show off her flowers or trees, but to plan each hedge and shrub and the acacias in a manner to bring out the beauty of the Aravallis. The garden of the property is a fashion accessory for the beauty of the Tikli hills to bloom.

What endears in the property is the deep love that the owners have felt for the countryside, this Godforsaken village of a backward state of Haryana, dry, dreary and desperate for civilization. There are a few farmhouse properties along the road to Tikli Bottom, razed out grounds, artificial grass, garish gadgets set up to catch the attention of the passers-by. There is no purpose of these properties other than crass tourism of the loud louts, those of whom must be kept firmly off the grounds of Tikli Bottom.

Aesthetic of the property is its ownership of the Nature in which it not only ensconces itself but defines itself as a sense of belonging. Beauty is not only for the eyes of the beholder, it is a positioning of the soul which engages with and embraces the cosmos, both as its present as well as in its future hope and indeed as its distant origin beyond the dimensions of Time.

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Pause and Rhythm of Birju Maharaj

Posted on August 8, 2025 by secondsaturn

I watched Birju Maharaj as part of the Spic Macay programme in the Jhelum Lawns in JNU. Besides Dover Lane Music Conference, JNU was the other place where my education by exposure to excellence happened in Hindustani classical music and dance. In those days, I had just begun my work on the study of Amitabh Bachchan, as a popular star and was increasingly anxious in trying to find apt frameworks to set up an analysis of the star image. As a sociologist, I was to study the popularity of Amitabh, the superstar, the making of the image, but I possibly, despite an entire school of phenomenology developed out there, could not start with the premise of popularity because of the risk of tautology. I needed to start with the constitution of the phenomenon with attributes independent of the explanandum, which was popularity of the star. Hence, to study the aesthetics of stardom, a set of artistic techniques which made the star and made it possible for me to compare the image of Amitabh Bachchan with a slew of other stars in my range of watching.

Everyone I sought guidance from invariably pointed out of the Natyashastras, the most unhelpful of all tips I ever received. The text is useless on all counts as a guide to the principles of aesthetics. Having trashed it back to the NML Library, I walked towards aesthetic theories. Both Hegel and Adorno made huge sense where the Hindi film was concerned, but the aesthetics for them were in terms of what emanated from the work, and not what was in the work, especially put in with the intent to be a work of art. Heidegger was so-so, Aristotle worse than Bharatmuni. It was then that I watched Birju Maharaj dancing on the underground water storage tank of Uttarakhand, which raised its tip like a giant iceberg to create a stage ideally suited for performances. If I recall well, then strange as it seems it was this very performance that he presented that evening.

As I watched Birju Maharaj dance with rapt attention, I sensed that there were movements and there were pauses. For some movements, he was merely responding to the music, in some he was using music as a prop to create a movement. The former produced small movements and small pauses, the latter, large movements and large pauses. As I watched the dance, it started to appear to me that the intention of the performance was as much about the pause as it was about the movement, in fact the purpose of the movement was to arrive at the pause; and as the pauses became longer, the movements preceding those became more willful than mere responses. In a flash, I understood, the constitutive elements of a star; one needed to study the cinematic image like the dancing image, a series of movements and pause, of speech and silence, or recesses, of suspensions and absences. It was to this pause that all stars must move towards.

We may use the format of movement and pause, of sound and silence, presence and absence to create a template to study stars, compare one with the others, develop a scale of assessing performance and hence attain a theoretical foundation to eventually frame the study of stars.

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India’s Ancient Wisdom

Posted on July 9, 2025 by secondsaturn

There are many enthusiastic young scholars and teachers who imagine that the Sanatan dharma of India is the core of its ancient wisdom and knowledge and hence India exerts or should exert a moral power as in the eponymous epithet of the Viswa guru. It is that there are no scholars or researchers of the Sanatan dharma, and should you pick up books bearing the same title, each book is likely to say something totally different from the rest. Hence, not only is there no single author of Sanatan dharma but there also seems to be no compilation with universal consensus. However, there are various combinations of the Puranas, Manusmriti and the Upanishads smattered into patchworks claiming eternity from the spirit of the Vedas. The texts are basically pagan and like all pagan texts claim to have been written by an eternal order lying at the base of all things manifest. There is neither the clarity of Confucius nor the elegance of Buddhism, though the Sanatan Dharma purports to be these as well. This is, however, not the point of our discussion because presented in this manner, then far from being the Viswaguru we would appear more as self-gloating fools.

If the scholars are keen to present the uniqueness of the Indian wisdom, then let them understand the point of uniqueness of this wisdom. There have been two distinct occasions when foreigners have eagerly sought Indian wisdom; monks came from China to India to study the Buddhist texts and then scholars and philosophers came from the west to learn about the Hindu wisdom. In the first instance, the texts were Pali, in the second case, it was Sanskrit. The Fort William College and the Asiatic Society of India were instrumental in providing the much-needed push for the search. In both the above instances, the search for Indian thought systems were looked up because it was thought to fulfill some deep doubts within the systems of China and later of Europe.

The Chinese Empire, long guided by Confucius needed a revolution when the ruling empire was overthrown by newer wannabe dynasties which now needed newer systems of philosophy. Buddhism fitted the purpose. The importance of Buddhism emanated from it being the religion of emperors, whether in India or in China and across Central Asia and later in southeast Asia. Even in the 19th and 20th centuries, Buddhism returns as a colonizing ethos in Ladakh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim.

In case of the West, Renaissance was the start of modern philosophy which immediately encountered the doubts and even guilt of disobeying God. Reason could not always defy faith without an innate feeling of hurting God, especially the Christian God, whose son had sacrificed his life for the sins of the adherents. Islamic civilization has even till date not been able to move out of faith into reason; if they have to excel in science then there would be Muslim scientists but not followers of the religion. Europe faced this dilemma of whether to shun faith and embrace reason or whether to keep both complementary to each other. It was this paradox that drew them to the Indian wisdom.

The Indian wisdom, whether it be the Vedas, or the Upanishads, or the dharmashastras, is unique in its Godlessness. There is not only no idea of evil as Manusmriti spells out clearly, but also no sense of the Divine. There are two sets of interventions in human life – those pertaining to the species or biological existence, life, birth and death and the other is about marriage, relationships, dealings and exchanges with other humans. Biology operates on universal laws of the Universe, guiding all matters. The social is one which the Dharmashastras command, civil law in the days of the Manusmriti, but customs, codes, constrains in the medieval age of Muslim rule.

Modern Europe’s transformation out of its medieval ties constituted a change in its civil laws, institutions, management of everyday life and bringing with it many changes in the human body, especially the pandemic of plague due to greater human contacts. There were voyages and colonies and hence exposures to societies and cultures fundamentally different from their own. To many European philosophers, especially of Britain and America, or the English-speaking nations, the ancient Indian wisdom of the dharmashastras, the Vedas and the Upanishads held promise. Europe was better developed in science and if the Indian sciences were sought at all centuries later these were in the form of exotic alternatives. Indian science and arts, in other words its secular contributions to civilization were Orientalized, it was its religion that the West came seeking. The interest of the West was ancient religion, and not the temples and rituals of India in late medieval times which is when they met us.

The Muslim rule threw India off gear because here the valiant kshatriya warriors met armies whose strength they could not match. The Muslims came with weapons and wheels, fast moving cavalry and foot soldiers. They conquered and ruled and even in the places in which they did not rule, Muslims spread their methods of administration and extraction of surplus. The scale of politics, economy and society changed and expanded. The Hindu power centres were shattered and together with racial discrimination of the conquerors towards the conquered, the Hindus felt endangered. The Muslims damaged the Hindu Universe and soon, in the form of syncretism, much of Hindu thought invented personal God, Krishna being the prime among those. The Sultanate did not allow any public display of religion but in the 15th century, the establishment of the Mughal rule allowed every form of religious practices. Temples were built, deities invented, superstitions conceived, and epics were written, but what never evolved were shastras which supported higher thoughts of organization. Wisdom in India remained ancient, not evolving any further after the Sultanate and neither revived with the Mughals. These suggested that the Hindus no longer remained in command of their civilization, culture and politics.

The Renaissance, which started in Bengal as the Bengal Renaissance also, like other resurgences looked to the past beyond the medieval. Expectedly then, we discovered secularism, true to the godlessness of our religion. Our secularism made the ancient religion modern and made it lucrative for the world to follow. Unfortunately, the rise of the right wing on the platform that Hinduism is in danger fears secularism and hence fears its own ancient wisdom. Fearful of its own history, the right wing distorts it to suit an agenda of medievality of a Hindu assertion against the Muslim domination and forgetting while during this period, Hinduism lost its power and went about being defensive. What the right wing tries now is to claim ancient wisdom, its own understanding that is locked in the memories of medieval times. Hence it projects the dark ages of Hinduism as being Viswa Guru; no wonder we have no takers and instead are short of being laughed at.

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Enola Holmes The New Detective on The Block

Posted on June 22, 2025 by secondsaturn

Nancy Springer: The Uncorseted Feminist

Nancy Springer, quite unknown to me, was born on the 5th of July 1948 and spent 76 years of her life living life and writing a great deal about it. She has authored 50 novels, of which, I landed up with only one, namely the first of the series of Enola Holmes, the new detective in literature, a mythical figure as the imagined sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. Enola is a late child to her parents and causes much embarrassment to her much older brothers and perhaps her father too, whose sharp brains of reason and rationality and hence puritanical would hate sex and reproduction. The three men wish her nonexistent and are dismissive towards her. As the father dies, Mycroft inherits the estate and pushes mother and the sister into his mercy. We get a Jane Austen’s world as the feminine gender inherit the stranglehold of male control over their destinies through the male heir of the patriarch.

The mother then suddenly disappears leaving Enola, all fourteen, to fend for herself helped by a faithful dog and loyal servants. It seems that mother, taking advantage of the male indifference towards how women manage their domestic chores, creates fake lists of activities and employers, draws allowances on those and then embezzles out of her monthly budgets. This money, now quite a sum, is left for Enola to discover by decoding the puzzles involving the language of flowers. This brings us to

On hearing of her disappearance, the brothers arrive. Sherlock arranges for the London police to locate the missing mother while Mycroft stays back to organize Enola’s life. In sum, she is to be sent to a boarding school. It is in those preparations that Enola experiences the repression of patriarchy. Notwithstanding the size of her head, which is smaller than that of an adult male which prompts her brothers to say that she is small brained, she is made to feel fatter as she is pushed into a steel corset to give her a dainty figure and carried off to the school for as tight-fitting academic training as her clothing. It is the entitled domination by her brothers and the corset that Enola suddenly understands why her mother disappeared; she disappeared to escape control. While not finding her mother, Enola naturally is inclined to looking towards the misfits, mostly the gypsies. Here is Enid Blyton, the runaway child and the gypsies.

There is a long description of London, bringing us right into Sherlock’s own habit. Here is Conan Doyle. The pitiable poverty of London, crimes born out of those, diviners who locate missing persons, cross dressers and disguised criminals and eventually Enola’s finding of the missing prince with her sheer intuition and groundwork shows her as several steps ahead of her deductive and logical brother.

Once the mother’s missing report is filed and the missing prince been found, it is now the turn for the police to set upon the task of hunting down Enola. Here we suddenly have Mark Twain moments, with the prince wanting to be the pauper. Enola becomes at once a Robin Hood and a Florence Nightingale, a lady in the black gown of a widow going about the streets helping the poor, the ascetic, the nurse, the messiah of the poor, all rolled into one. One has to read through the book to know why Florence Nightingale, Sister Nivedita and Mother Teresa, fled home, to avoid the steel cage of the corset which came with the iron grip of patriarchy.

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Rammohun Roy’s Legacy: Challenging Religious Extremism

Posted on May 24, 2025 by secondsaturn

Fight Theology for 22nd May 2025, 253rd Birth Anniversary of Raja Rammohun Roy

Rabindranath Tagore wrote of Raja Rammohun Roy that if Bharat struggles to find itself, it will keep looking out for Rammohun. Truly, in everyday life of India i.e. Bharat, we keep referring to Raja Rammohun Roy. Most pertinent of all times is now, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in Baisaran, Phulwama. The fight against terrorism cannot be resolved by an act of war of one country on the other because in this, entire nations and races are bracketed into its religious adherence. Just as all Hindus cannot be massacred in order to stop Sati because Sati is practiced only by Hindus, all Muslims cannot be killed to eliminate terrorism because all terrorists are Muslims. Hence, arguments of Rammohun against Sati may well be used to diminish and demolish Islamic terror.

It is not true that every Hindu woman who lost her husband jumped live into the burning pyre; and in fact, only a nano fraction of the population committed this suicide for martyrdom. It was also true that most Hindus did not enjoy such feats, cringed and nauseated whenever drums beat to screams and shrieks of a woman burning alive and yet, no Hindu, even the most educated ones such as Radhakanta Deb and Kashinath Tarkabaagish who valiantly fought for western education also moved up as far as the Privy Council to bring Sati back. This is because, Sati represented the pinnacle of purity of the Hindu Shastras. Hence to criticize Sati would be to undermine the purity of Hinduism.

Much is the same for the terrorist and this is why no Muslim can ever imagine of criticizing the cruelest bout of killing. Just as one had to stand outside the shastric Hinduism to attack Sati, similarly only those born as Muslims but not live as Muslims or adhere to the faith will be able to find fault with terrorism. This is because like Sati, terrorism too is steeped in ideologies of religious purity. You cannot attack terrorism without attacking the core of Islam and if you do so, then you would, necessarily stand outside Islam. This is the crux of why terrorism will continue to bother us as long as Islamic ideals are not questioned.

Rammohun dissected and deconstructed the Shastras, demolishing the core of its ideals, and resurrected the religion with a whole new peak of a Vedic flavour of the Advaita. The Divine was now a force of Nature, it could be of any religion, and it belonged to the Pope as much as it belonged to Newton. In his book, Tuhfat, the earliest work on anthropology of religion, Rammohun argues that religion should occupy the region of the mind’s wonderment and curiosity those which were yet unsolved by the ever progressive scientific discovery; like the Puritanical Revolution in science, for Rammohun, science and religion should not be separate and that there should not be any element of faith and belief in either.

Islam must die for terror to be eliminated. The terrorist is one who fights for his religion, deploying its ideals to eliminate the faithless and kill to release his victims into the eternal dhimmi. The opening lines of the kalma that there is no God but Allah is atrocious to human reason, and offensive even for the staunchest among the monists. A fight against terror must be at the level of theology; a fight that Rammohun waged and won against both Hindu as well as Christian theology. That fight must now be fought against Islamic theology.

Rammohun qualified as the zabardast maulavi at the young age of 14 at the Patna madrashah. Though he fought Hindus and Christians alike, Buddhists and Jews, Parsis and Armenians on the side, as far as he could access them, he toyed with the idea of another treatise on Islam. Since Islam was then at its liberal best, synergized with other faiths raising no conflict with any hue of belief despite how removed it was from its own tenets, there was less of a need to pay attention to it. But now, one needs to deconstruct the faith badly; for only then like Sati, Islamic terror will be construed as being backward and foolish and not progressive and fit for our times.

All reactions:

7Indira Majumdar, Krishna Sengupta and 5 others

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Jab Chhod Chale Lucknow Nagari

Posted on April 11, 2025 by secondsaturn

Gulabijaan is a fictional character, a stereotyped tawaif who came to Calcutta with the entourage of Wajid Ali Shah when he was exiled to the city by the East India Company in 1856, just a year before the Sepoy Mutiny. The court of Wajid Ali at Awadh was a seat of the most refined culmination of the Mughal era of music, dance, poetry and drama. With the Nawab cast away to Calcutta, the entirety of this high culture too comes to rest in the city with his entourage of musicians, performers, magicians, dice players, cooks and tailors. As Awadh, the luminary of a bygone world eclipsed, Calcutta, the star of the new age was rising. Lakhnavi nostalgia is eagerly lapped up in Calcutta’s modernity and this we know from the many ghazals and thumris of the court which can clearly be recognized as refurbished versions of the court of Awadh.

While the tawaifs of Lucknow only reveled in their glorious past, the Bengali baiji, to name a few, Akashi, Batashi and Golapbalas lapped up their emotions and poetry to create songs which endear the Bengali high culture of the times. In fact, due to their long residence in Calcutta, many tawaifs also started to write in the Bengali language.

When cinema came, many of these songs found their way on to the silver screen and they do so even today. The merit of the presentation directed by Shukla Banerjee lies in its exacting archival research into the poetry and songs of the court of Awadh which make them bring forward the ghazals and thumris with which we are familiar and hence can relate to.

The rendition of Kathak by Ramandeep Kaur was unlike anything I have seen before. Wajid Ali Shah took the kathak much patronized in the Mughal court and refined it, once again in the form that we know today. Ms Kaur’s performance of Kathak was sheer transcendental in grace and beauty, she was light, graceful and flowed like a musical fountain. I found her spellbinding in her perfection and aesthetics.

Prof Pamela Singh, an established doyen of the ghazal used her age to the fullest advantage in playing the role of Gulabijaan, exiled and out of job, with only memories to help her remain afloat as she composes the famous Bengali ghazal, Jochhona Korechhe Aari, to lament a world that is passing her by. Her humourous presentation of her most pitiable state of existence made one laugh out loud and yet wipe a tear from the eye.

The show made an important point in which the tawaifs were far from being prostitutes; they were ascetics in the harem with their creativity and though they worried about the men, mostly their patrons, they too had worries about their creativity. This is why notebooks and pen are found to be as much around Gulabijaan as her hookah and paan are. While at Awadh, the main patron was obviously the Nawab but in Calcutta, the patrons were the lesser men, the sundry and commonplace zamindars and some noveau riche upstarts who rarely ever knew what Mughal imperial culture was and these patrons crossbred the obscene khyamta of the nautch girls who came with the Maratha soldiers with the noble suavity of Lucknow. That was precisely how the Bengali baiji was born. As the economic status of patrons descended, the baijis doubled up as prostitutes to earn their living.

With the decimation of the Mughal power, there were many wannabes especially the Maratha nobility and militia who sought their revenge on the empire by producing parallel courts in their respective precincts. The Lavani with varying grades of obscenities also emerged as court culture. This too was a downgrading of the tawaif and more so because many Maratha soldiers now sought upward social mobility by becoming their lovers. The tawaif was invaded by lower social class with crass culture.

As the events spiralled towards the Great Mutiny of 1857, the tawaif now found a new role – that of a leader of the revolutions and often that of an executed martyr. Here tawaifs found an equal status with the married wives of Nawabs, who too led the sepoys and were either exiled or killed in action. The Mutiny of 1857 was the last cry for survival of both the medieval India as well as of the tawaif, both of whom modernity consumed leaving them behind in our hoary myths and hazy memories.

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Proletariat Struggle Through The LoudSpeaker

Posted on March 1, 2025 by secondsaturn

Municipality elections are this weekend in Faridabad. Electric three wheelers are rampaging the streets, with loudspeakers blaring slogans and songs composed around the candidates elevating them to statuses of Gods and Prophets. There are no election speeches, no meetings, no visits of candidates to people’s homes, no tea drinking ceremonies, no active pamphleteering, no writing of witty slogans on walls and no manifesto of promises. We are only to vote for contestants by listening to hagiographic songs; it is expected that our allegiance to the candidate should only be out of an attraction or attachment that one feels for some unseen guru or deity. The deification of electoral candidates and the exercise of the voters’ choices based on principles of devotion has taken the democratic and secular space to the private and sacred. Such is the prognosis of democracy as it succeeds, and should not be seen as its failure, though the sacred is a contradiction of democracy, which must, at the cellular level, be secular. And this huge transformation of democracy from the secular to the sacred is achieved through the power of the sound, namely the loudspeaker.

I was watching a movie on OTT in which the police in an American town busts a drug racket because of loud music emanating from a building beyond midnight. This is unthinkable in India since blaring despicable noise on mics is the assertion of one’s existential rights in the public space. The big cars, enclosing pavements, hawking on streets, closing off roads with pandals for parties are seen as an assertion of rights to be equal to anybody else and thus placing into inequality slot numerous citizens by disturbing the everyday routine of their work. Authorities throw their weight by putting up roadblocks and traffic barriers. Sound belongs to this category, of claiming and occupying the public space. Music is played by puja pandals, or in Jagran lay such claims on space. Sound boxes up space, marks it out through its field of amplitude, contains it, conquers it. War drums, battle cries, drum beat for announcements, are targeted at space and all those who inhabit that space. Sound overpowers, it turns humans into passive receivers, louder the sound is, more it captures the senses of the person.

Sound seemingly falls into the same category as the spectacle. It may be said to be the poor man’s spectacle, it is boisterous, it imposes, closes public space and wraps up human attention till in gasps of breath. Like the spectacle it unifies by eliminating any nuance of a counter sound, it silences because it deafens.

I have just reached Kolkata to the blaring mics at our local temple on Shiv Ratri. Since the past five decades that I recall that come a Saraswati Puja, or a Kali Puja and now of late the Shiv Ratri and Jagaddhatri, mics have mercilessly blared. As it happens, those exams fall close to these festivals and there are always some who are old or sick or both and the sound expectedly disturbs them. Later as I emerged in my teens and some kind of social awakening, I realized that the sound was meant and targeted to disturb us, the “bhadraloks” or the “residents” (basinda) as the slum would call us. This was a class war when the school dropouts held us, who were studying in schools with contempt. It was then also that I sensed that the fact that we cared so much for our elders and the sick also made them resent us because they had to let go so much because they could not afford these.  The sound blared so much that we could all well be dead; it was a salvo, an air raid, a ground attack on our lives, every waking moment of it and even deep into slumber. The boys would suddenly turn on heavy beat music past midnight only for a few minutes, enough to disturb your sleep but not long enough to get used to the sound and doze off.

Things have improved a lot, and the noisescape shows this to us. Walking through a short cut encircling the slum, I find it largely silent, one hardly gets to hear screams and cries, or of quarrels, or of shrieks from children at play. The roads inside the slum are empty for the children are away in school and the adults, mostly women have gone for work. Even the idle men lolling around is thinner in their throng, except some elderly now not only cared for by their families but also have found some employment in manning the tea stall or the biri kiosk in street corners. Sometimes, they even are found guarding the scrap dumps. The improvement in the material conditions of the slum, which has in most cases made them more tolerable neighbours for us has also created political agency, where ballot power is exercised as power to the proletariat to affect changes in the system. The mikes blare once again, this time to assert the allegiance towards one party over the other. Hence the atrocious songs in Hindi, loud croaking voices of devotional music, accompanied by equally loud light decorations. My brother tells me that the electrician had actually tried to climb our walls to put up the toony bulb streamer, once again symptomatic of molesting property as the deafening mics are.

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Is India Poor?

Posted on February 11, 2025 by secondsaturn

It is true that poverty in India has declined. It has declined in absolute terms to just about 4.62% of the population, a massive step up from the 66% we had at the time of Independence. It is also true that the poverty one got to see some 50 years ago, and even perhaps 30 years ago, is no longer the case in India. Except for the pavement dwellers and beggars at traffic lights, the number of poor who are visible in the streets, shops, markets and public transport are much lower. Even to the naked eye, India’s poor is indeed less than 5% of its people. Today’s people are better dressed and except the technologically challenged elderly people, almost everyone owns a smart phone. Slums are clean, villages are peri urban areas with Amazon deliveries and icecreams. People speak better, read better, and can follow complex written instructions to run mobile phones and laptops. More encouraging is the fact that the distribution of knowledge of new technology crumbles the arrogance of knowing of the older class stratifications. While in olden times, household helpers would ask us to write their bank deposit or withdrawal slips, today it is our domestic servants who help us with glitches in smartphones or wi fi routers. Therefore, the redistribution of technical knowledge that also accompanies the fall in absolute poverty in India, seems to establish very securely the fact that India is overcoming its destitution.         

Yet, there are economists and influencers who have presented official data to show that India is still trapped in poverty. The reasons for India’s concerns are the falling share of savings as percentage of GDP, the shrink back of the manufacturing sector, the lack of formal and perhaps even informal employment, the lack of skilled workforce due to the poor standards of education, rising expenses on health and education and the falling consumption of households. However, if the per capita GDP income subjected to the deflators of inflation has not fallen in absolute terms, this might be hasty to comment that India is getting poor. What makes India a possibly poor in future are the falling share of savings as percentage of personal income and the rising share of education and health expenses compounded by unemployment. This means that India is suffering from a want of structured income and employment and for which the possibility of maintaining of net worth of households have come under fire. But is this a correct view of things?

What do we see around us? We no longer find people in tattered clothes, emaciated bodies, we do not hear of people dying from want of medical care, nor do we see dropouts from education. Instead, both education and health business seem to be growing, the real estate market climbs steadily as land prices soar and cities sear into farmlands, expanding suburbs. There does not appear to be poverty at all.

The latest Household survey data by the Government of India shows that the relative inequalities in consumption has declined in both rural as well as urban areas, more for rural India than its cities. Then why do we say that India is poor? We say that India is poor because its economic development and growth is happening in the poor segments. In culture, in education, in healthcare, industry, food systems, transportation, it is the poor person’s growth. Educational institutions are churning out some rote materials called education and no wonder the graduates are not worthy of employment. The footloose educated are thronging to the service sectors such as Swiggy and Zomatoes, Blinkits and Instamarts, delivering needs of simple stuff to simple people. The need for online has increased as the population is increasingly dispersed spatially across the city, far away from its place of work. This reduces the time for shopping for daily provisions and hence the online services. Start ups in Shark Tank are overwhelmingly about banana chips and snacks, or sundry software projects for espionage products like door cameras. Healthcare seems to be conventional, hospitals and packages for surgery. The OTT platforms are replete with cheap dramas of kitsch. All the above are poverty ridden. India’s innovative capital, its administrative and governance capital, its health capital and educational capital are driven by its poor and delivered to its poor. In no sense any aspect of India’s development can add to its assets, tangible or intangible and the slow erosion of savings as percentage of personal income amply reveals that.

Politics of India is also the politics of the poor; it thrives on jealousy and envy of those who have done well, just the immediately well to do. Indians are scared to take on the powerful class, salivating at videos of celebrities and weddings of Ambanis; the target is the better performing classmate, who may be mercilessly ragged and brutally murdered. Indians are also among the world’s highest number who die by suicide, telling us that a falling stock market may not be the only source of despair.

India of the present is the India of the French Revolution, war of classes fought on moral righteously of exploitation and the language of rights. Those who were the middle class intelligentsia of the society find themselves losing their assets and worthiness; those from below are driving the growth engine of the country with talents and knowledge that they know of, learning to do nothing better.

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Asha Purna Devi, 8th January 1909 to 13th July 1995

Posted on January 13, 2025 by secondsaturn

On the 8th of January the media and social media celebrated the birth anniversary of Ashapurna Devi, a prolific novelist of Bengali language who never ceases to fascinate her readers by the sheer volume of her work and by the fact that she was an unschooled and prepubertal bride married off by a conservative father and yet rose to a status where she could appreciably fill up the emptiness left by the demise of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee. Those who knew her personally remember her writing even in the kitchen. But more informed sources say that she wrote sitting at a desk of her own in the deep hours of the night’s dense silence.

Ashapurna did not use her surname, but she came from a Bengali Baidya family, a caste that especially seems to have emerged as a distinct social group through the opportunities offered by the British rule. Economic prosperity and cultural modernity did not always go hand in hand as the guilt of material wellbeing found a compensation in the hardening of the conservative shackles upon the women of the family. Women found their escape, many times in the politics of the freedom movement but mostly in the printed books and journals. As a part of this pattern, Ashapurna’s mother was a voracious reader of books, and it was this atmosphere at home that propelled her to teach herself to read and write. Her inspiration was of course Tagore to whom she wrote once a fan mail. Tagore wrote back to her with his best wishes and blessings but in that letter, he addressed her as Sampurna. That began her soul’s journey from the aspirant fulfilled of dreams as in Ashapurna to the complete realization of the self, as the name Sampurna meant. What is interesting is that her novels, if arranged chronically would reflect the journey of an aspiring woman to one who wholly evolved into emancipation. To my mind, this journey of evolution from a suppressed woman to a fully liberated one should be the principal focus of feminist research.

Scholars with interest in women authors find in Ashapurna Devi a feminist because of the trilogy namely Prothom Protisruti, Subarnalata and Bokul Katha. But as she matures her novels become progressively patriarchal. Agni Pariksha lionizes child marriage, working women are often exiled from families, liberated women from fashionable families are the villains and are found as templates of present-day soap serials. Beyond the trilogy, Ashapurna seems to be done and dusted with oppressed women trying to find windows of assertions as humans. She now emerges upon the world of her readers, as one who is indeed free of the domestic bonds and transcends the world of the bride into the world of a genderless observer, distanced and dispassionate, not of women but of families, the world of institutions, architecture of the city, rise in new professions and the rule of modern law based upon rights but low on responsibility. Here she critiques a modernist view of liberation, which she finds individualistic and selfish, loathing ambitions and even a desire for consumerism. She is aware of the vulnerability of the family as an institution, seeks the fulfilment of this as an establishment, acknowledges its desirability and along with such realizations, starts to tread carefully conscious that a feminist assertion of women’s rights and individualities can wreck the system. Her writings veer increasingly towards a search for stability of the family and what gets more interesting is she lets the man off the hook and instead lays the burden of protecting the family upon the woman. She starts to look upon men as vulnerable, plagued by modernity, pathetically emaciated and dangerously stripped of their selves, who can only be saved by women of merit, will, strength, talent and empathy through adjustments, compromise and even camouflage of their talents. Here, she starts to read like a make chauvinists dream, and this is why, bland feminist scholars are wont to discuss her works beyond the trilogy.

 I am not decided whether I would wish to take to Ashapurna as a feminist writer; I would like to consider her as a dispassionate judge who does not a prioritize situations and instead, likes to discover a woman as a bundle of responsibilities instead of voices asserting rights. Through her depiction of failed women, failed in family, failed in career, failed in education, failed as a ahomemaker, she searches for the impossibility of a successful woman; her women remain Ashapurna, the Sampurna elude her readers in her novels. But the writer in her is emancipated because she can write along with a husband, in laws, sons and daughters in law. That alone speaks volumes for her personal success. I wonder whether the scholars would like to retrieve her as a career woman and a homemaker through intensive interviews of her surviving heirs. I am not aware if such a project has ever been attended.

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