Female Genocide

Posted on May 18, 2012 by secondsaturn

Samar Harlankar writes in the edit page of Hindustan Times, 27th January 2011 that girls are getting killed off in India as the country progresses economically and materially. Natural theory has it that the female in every species has higher chances of survival than the male because nature intends to protect the female reproductive capacity to hold the foetus and finally to give birth. Therefore, the sliding number of females per thousand male in India at a steady pace means that someone somewhere is interfering with the natural process. Females can only not be born at all if they are aborted as foetuses or they are killed off physically. The Census data shows that in the age group 0 to 6 years, girls have declined from 1010 per thousand boys in 1941, to 945 in 1991, then to 927 in 2001 and now in the 2011 census they are below 900. This amounts to 1370 girls killed off each year as compared to 250 deaths due to road accidents and 6 in case of terrorist attacks. What is worse is that more educated the household is, more economically prosperous and more urbanised it is, chances are higher that they will kill its girls. Attitude towards girls and economic prosperity are related, the question to ask is, what way is the relationship. Do attitudes towards the girl child become intolerant with economic progress or whether the nature of economic opportunities is such that it requires women to be killed off?

I am not sure whether the rich kill their women. In pre modern times when work was more of physical labour and riches meant that one could live off un laboured surplus, it must have been fashionable to draw women out of economic participation. In those days before modernity, labour often was not free and one way to assert the worker’s unfreedom was also the exploitation of female bodies by classes who paid the working class. Further, in the pre modern days, knowledge was not an essential category for work and hence work did not have the professional calling that people were expected to have with Weberian modernity. In those days, women who did not need to go out of homes were looked upon as being privileged.

With modernity this changed. Modernity came riding on the back of capitalism, a regime in which the entrepreneur was valued, the non working woman was valued as well. But because the political regime fought privileges of feudalism in the name of individual freedom and civil rights, it was forced to also recognize women as human beings. Of course, intense feminist struggles helped achieve this goal. But there was one thing in European development and which is with the rise in prosperity, the need for economic reproduction declined and which then saw rich men being contended with their only daughters as heirs to their estates. All through this period when weak and frail women were married to couches in rich men’s homes as decoration pieces while the husbands developed flings for the more physically robust red cheeked girls. The romantic love was brought in a major way to be projected as the best thing that can happen to a woman and because she was to marry after falling in love, she was also given access to the public space such as “gatherings” and “parties” where men could see her with their fixed gazes a la Darcy. Apropos to this game plan, women were also taught skills that would make them pleasing to men and also at the same time steadily move them away from the public sphere of economic participation. No wonder then Florence Nightingale was such a scandal, Mother Theresa such a rebellion, Sister Nivedita so much of an impudence and character of Jane Eyre so pitiable.

In India, modernity came to a privileged class of the rich and English educated. Women in this class were more liberated thanks to the social reforms and Freedom Movement. Women of the privileged class were relatively freer from the pressures of the society and their riches immunized them from patriarchy in a large way. The poor women of course continued as usual with their physical labour and drudgery. The high class as everywhere else is one that sets the rules, the low class is one which is excluded out of the rules and there is a huge middle ground where rules are blindly repeated and followed. The middle class that holds this large middle ground is a dangerous element in human history.

Because the middle class requires only reproducing the order, it necessarily needs to stereotype rules and roles. It becomes a non reflective mass given to the herd instinct of competitiveness. When its population increases and people who were hitherto poor rise into this class, this class suffers from over population because opportunities available are fewer than the number of aspirants. There is always a tension in the middle class; it has an anxiety of falling back into poverty and a compulsion to do well so as to secure its economic position. The lethal combination of anxiety and compulsive upward mobility makes it seek spaces and resources. In politics, this translates into communalism and ethnic assertions and within the family it translates into fewer resources for girls. In middle class homes, girls have to struggle to survive. They have to survive on less food, less investments on education, and at the same time must be presentable in the marriage market to marry well. Hence they must have lean bodies, wear enticing clothes, use fairness creams and do “computer” courses where they have a chance to meet boys. A love marriage is actually okay because it saves on the dowry. In most of north India, girls work outside the home, not as liberation but to earn their dowry. All is well except girls must have anuloma marriages, i.e. marry up the social ladder. More girls struggle for resources, less they are equipped to have incomes that would help them find their own feet, and more women depend on male approval and the hooking the man route to material comforts. A girl finds that the only way for her to survive is by pleasing the men folk. The media picks up this need of the young females and weaves its narratives and constructs its images. No wonder modern young women shun feminism and even seasoned feminists are so apologetic these days (one had to only witness the Women’s Reservation Bill debate).

The more girls are starved of resources the more they are subject to the structures of patriarchy and less they can emerge as persons in their own right. Girls are in no mood to fight patriarchy and too eager to get into the reproductive positions and kill off girls born and yet to be born unto them repeating the same middle class processes that upholds the order. The trigger for this girl killing machine namely the middle class, lies in a growth where the only opportunities for a dignified life lie in occupations designated as middle class and where every other kind of livelihood for a decent living are wiped off through a predatory capitalism that takes away farm lands and destroys local industry. The more opportunities get restricted and the variety of opportunities decline, more is there a competition for resources; in politics this leads to ethnic hate and in the family, it gets adverse on girls.

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I Don’t Need Anna Hazare

Posted on May 18, 2012 by secondsaturn

I Don’t Need Anna Hazare.

by Susmita Dasgupta on Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 10:51am ·

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I don’t need Anna Hazare. I never needed him. I never felt the need to blackmail anyone even if it is the Government. I can command the Government to do what I want it to do. The demands that I make on the State are justified and legitimized by the Constitution and I know my texts. I have an idea of the offices, the respective duties of officials and know where to find them. I am educated and articulate and not lazy in writing. I was only twenty three when I knew my first victory against corruption. Since then I have got policemen suspended, workmen transferred, officers investigated as and when I have felt offended by them.

I was only twenty two when I was helping an elderly relative in Delhi for some work in the post office and the man behind the counter was pugnacious. I wrote a complaint to the post master against this chap with a copy to the Post Master General and Minister of P&T. After three weeks a letter came to me, and after a month, yet another and after three months a third; while the earlier two were from the local post office and Sarojini Nagar respectively, the third was from the Ministry and all confirmed that the offending employee had been transferred with a warning. My subsequent visit to the post office was only greeted by salaams.

My next “victory” was a rude conductor in the DTC Bus no 507; then a bank clerk in JNU’s State Bank of India, followed by yet another post office personnel in the IIT Post Office Speed Post counter. I have had refunds from MTNL and BSNL and from the DESU, the electric supply corporation of Delhi before it was privatized as the BSES. Once I was travelling to Kolkata by the Rajdhani and encountered an eve teaser on one of the berths. I had him detrained at midnight in Mughal Sarai. I had a parking attended picked up by a police patrol 100.

But my most sterling victory was against the Delhi police only three years ago when some of them came into Haryana in the wee hours of a chilly winter morning and picked up my cook, Malati on the charges that she was a Bangladeshi !! My cook who hails from Canning is nowhere even remotely connected to East Bengal, ranted, raged, stomped and stamped at the impunity of being sharved into the police jeep. Though the Delhi police have no clue on how to identify Bangladeshi’s from their accent, yet felt intuitively that Malati spoke, dressed and behaved rather differently from what a typical illegal migrant did. They let her go almost immediately and she returned fuming at the insult that was meted out to her, a free citizen of the country. In the evening she poured out her woes and I did a literal translation of her agonies in English and sent them, with a covering note to the Home Minister. The next morning, Madhusree and Vinod made 345 photocopies of the letter and sent them to each and every member of the Parliament. In the letter Malati asked whether the rounding up of Bangladeshi migrants was not a surreptitious way of ethnically cleansing of Delhi of Bengalis. This astounded Mr Chidambaram and the few days that followed saw the press and Deputy Commissioner of Delhi and Inspector General of Haryana swoop down to Malati to seek her forgiveness. I was personally made to witness the order by which seven policemen that included a woman were suspended. The suspended policemen called me up several times for forgiveness but I advised them to go through the punishment for a better after life.

In the same combing of Bangladeshis, a Bengali Muslim man was also picked up. He was an auto driver who had come to India as an infant from East Pakistan as a refugee. He had since then lost his parents and lived with relatives who had opted to stay back in India after 1947. This man had married a woman, who like him also was a refugee in a Delhi slum; the only problem was that her parents went back to Bangladesh sometime in the 1990’s, after the Babri Masjid riots. The Indian State decided that she was a Bangladeshi and deported her, leaving her husband behind. The couple had two infant children and the police decided that one of the children was an Indian citizen and hence was to remain behind with the father. The man, Khalil came howling to me with his bawling baby son. I took them along, went to the confinement area of the FRRO, requested the Deputy Police Commissioner to at least take in the son, who should not be separated from the mother so that the mother could have both her children together. This having been done, I again made rounds of the FRRO to help Khalil hand them over warm clothes, because it being winter they would be suffering. Then the problem came of deportation because women thus deported can also be trafficked. It was out of this fear that I met the civil society organizations. It was here that I encountered the civil society.

I first spoke to Prof Zoya Hassan of the Minorities Commission trying to explain that the deported woman, Salma was not a Bangladeshi because her parents migrated to Bangladesh much later. She was very dismissive of me, almost said that it did not really matter to her if some Bengali poor Muslim was picked up. She taunted me with my pronunciation of “kh” of Khalil, because mine was not from the epiglottis, so I knew the politics of the epiglottis as soon as I watched the film My Name Is Khan. Next I went to Shabnam Hashmi, who again refused to extend any assistance whatsoever. Then I visited Apne Aap, a NGO that was won international accolades; alas, no help. I appealed to everyone so that Salma had someone to receive her in Bangladesh when she would land up there so that she would be safe in an alien land. The civil society was high flying, it was supposed to step in when the State behaved badly with its citizens; but I saw them in their true colours. Anyway, I went to the Seelampur mosque, got the clerics to make some contacts in Bangladesh, persisted till they made some phonecalls to Salma’s father who came as far as India’s border to pick her up with her children. Khalil eventually got his passport and a job in Kuwait. He will be visiting Bangladesh and carry his family away beyond the Arabian Sea into the shores of safety. All through this ordeal, Shabnam Hashmi, Zoya Hassan, Ruchira Gupta remained silent, indifferent and aloof.

Some years ago, I carried a child into the CRY office and asked them to take his custody. CRY refused saying that I could not directly recommend a child and had to sponsor via a cheque. I have since then stopped my donations because I have charity to do all by myself.

Recently I requested Vandana Shiva to provide me with details on POSCO and we will take it up in the Ministry of Steel, where I work as an economist. I gave her a CD into which her office was to copy a documentary film showing the outrage that the State has committed. I explained to Ms Shiva how the Ministry must take action whenever graft gets reported in a file to them and becomes a file noting. She refused to use this space to negotiate a better deal for the people; instead she maintained the people’s victim status because she insisted on maintaining her own power as their champion. I repeatedly try to convince Navadanya to place Posco’s issue with the Ministry and to enter it as a discussed matter in the Steel Room; after which no affair may be disposed off without a concrete action, Ms Shiva steadfastly chose never to try out this path of a possible solution because were the Ministry of Steel to take a positive view of displacement, Ms Shiva’s “power” as an activist would have been compromised.

I have a very poor opinion of the civil society; I have realized that they intend no solution to problems; all that they need is the problem so that they can emerge as champions. The civil society has slowly conspired to keep status quos and perhaps never made an honest attempt at empowerment of any kind. This is why, the so-called moral leaders of our country were so rude to me when I was trying to find some solution for a helpless woman with her infant children!! I find it impossible to deal with a set of supercilious self righteous humans who have only a deep contempt for the people whose causes they supposedly champion. They use people’s distress not to help them out but to “shame the State”. Beneath the mask of philanthropy, the civil society is a will and a desire for power. This is why, I wish to have nothing to do with them. The State, I can handle; I know my rights and I know the limits to my rights. The civil society is a devious space in which the elite of the society wish to wield power against the State and against the political class. Sometimes, this may turn into an anti-people zone where the elites position themselves as intermediaries through whom the people must themselves be represented. When this happens, the civil society becomes worse than a despotic State, for the latter is constrained by elections, whereas the civil society is free of this encumbrance. I find the State to be far more responsive to me than the civil society.

Anna Hazare’s movement is strange because there was hardly any build up to the fast. It seemed to emerge suddenly out of nowhere with big image supporters like Kiran Bedi, Kiran Majumdar Shaw, Kabir Bedi, Ramdev, Ravi Shankar and with these names came an avalanche of support. Getting such celebrities could not have been out of nowhere; it is possible that elaborate whispers had already got the groundswell going before surfacing as the hunger strike.

The huge support in favour of the Lokpal Bill shows that beneath the seemingly indifferent middle class of India, there is a spark waiting to be ignited; India’s win in the World Cup Cricket also put the middle class into such a participation mode. The middle class finds a far greater affinity with Anna than it finds with Binayak Sen, or a displacement over Vedanta or even the firing at Nandigram or Kalinganagar. Anna fights big capital and political power, both of which the middle class aspires to enter but gets classed out. The middle class loves the rich and the powerful and often its moral tirade against big capital and big power is a concealed envy of them. Apropos to this psychology is also its hatred for those who are behind them, the poor, the Muslims, the tribals fall under this category. Hence Hazare hails Narender Modi, a man who exemplifies this sentiment of the middle class. The huge support of the middle class for Anna is the class’s desire for power; will to rule, albeit not through the process of democratic politics but by denouncing it via the authoritarian assertion of morality.

I do not need such a middle class, hence I do not need a Anna Hazare. I am far more concerned about the everyday corruption that disrupts my everyday life, distracts me from pursuing my excellence and sabotages my access to opportunities presented in the public space. For me, the RTI, the sexual harassment bill, the woman police, the operation of the PDS, the containment of the corrupt police who disturb my service providers, the officers who do not perform their duties, the tea drinking man at the post office counter who does not attend to customers, the bank manager who staves off poor people from opening savings bank accounts are worse offenders; it is on their immorality and dishonesty that the huge edifice of corruption is built upon. No Mayawati could be she if her staff were dead honest. No Raja could be he were his electorate was immune to bribes. The Lokpal Bill tries to catch the more visible faces while wholly ignoring the sources where corruption begins, namely the people taking as well as paying bribes. We need vigilance below the surface of media beams, governance down under, perhaps vigilantism in a manner.

I understand that corruption can be without the exchange of money. The surreptitious elimination of names from the voters’ list of certain people, landlords who refuse to rent out apartments to some other kind of persons, the subtle discrimination that happens when the social affiliations of a candidate overrides her merit in selection for jobs, the biases and prejudices of the judiciary against some kinds of persons are also corruption, because these, like money also distort signals of a “free market”. To address these I will file an RTI, or PIL and for these I know what is there to be done; I don’t really need Anna Hazare.

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Oath of Bhanurekha, d/o Pushpavalli

Posted on May 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

Bhanurekha, alias Rekha, born on the 10th of October, 1954, the daughter of the Telugu actress Pushpavalli took her oath as a Parliament elder on the 15th of May 2012. Nominated to the House of elders on grounds of excellence in her achievement in the field of arts and culture, Bhanurekha who the world knows as Rekha attains a landmark in her life. Rekha’s biological father, Gemini Ganesan, never acknowledged his paternity and Rekha was left along with her mother, Pushpavalli also a film actress to fend for themselves. Money was a matter with the household and soon Rekha was withdrawn from school to join cinema to earn for the family. Despite being born of a Tamil Brahmin, Rekha and her mother were relegated to lives of Devdasis. Sobha De’s soulful portrayal of her character in her novel, Starry Nights draws out painfully how Rekha as a child artist was sexually abused and exploited. With a truncated education and lost childhood, Rekha emerged as a star in films such as Sawan Bhado and Rampur ka Laxman when the world of Hindi cinema was exploring the feudal, rural, tacky and violent zone of the male characters. Rekha was a part vamp, part siren and definitely not the image of a woman to be followed either for fashion or for virtue. For years she remained space filler, a prop whose sexual image was also up for a voyeuristic exploitation by a growing number of the male audience as cinema tried to spread to the vernacular lands. Rekha was pushed forward by the lobby the south Indian investors and distributors.

Despite a poor career graph all through the 1970’s, Rekha’s debut which was in Hindi and was called Sawan Bhado in 1970 formed the basic script upon which Rekha’s image was founded. It was the image of a powerful village belle, tomboyish, a fighter, fearless and good enough to run the show. Personally then Rekha had already emerged as the pater familias with her being the main breadwinner for her mother and siblings. Hers was the real life image of Meghe Dhaka Taara, the seminal cinema of Ghatak, said to be a mother of all cinemas. In many of her better known films, Rekha’s image of the fighter impresses us. In Mr Natwarlal she fights a tiger; in Khoon Bhari Maang she takes revenge on the villains, and in Bhrastachaar, she simply excels.

Rekha was a middle range star who took her career as a breadwinning proposition and remained essentially a street fighter. For the likes of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Rekha was essentially a slum girl who was to be Rajesh Khanna’s love interest in Namak Haram. Despite her patrilineage of being the daughter of an eminent film personality and a Tamil Brahmin, Rekha’s state of being an illegitimate child declassed her into the gutter. Hers was a life that was a journey into an endless night of neglect, drudgery, boredom and hopelessness. Then she met Amitabh Bachchan, a man who transformed her because he saw in her a princess, a lady second to none. It was through his mentoring that she emerged into the epitome of beauty and sophistication that we see her endowed in. She fell in love with her Pygmalion but who like her biological father again disowned her and denied as having anything to do with her. She soon became the lady who pined for her lover, the eternal Meera swooning at the thought of her beloved who seemed to be vanishing without recovery every passing day. She claimed that her love was not one-sided; he claimed that there was never any. But like Ekalavya, Rekha grew from strength to strength in beauty and grace, completely as an autodidact.

Amitabh Bachchan is a man of ambitions and like every man with ambition he suffers from a sense of deprivation. He imagined his family to be poor, loved to play the father, loved the idea of him being the source of wealth and fame for his family and uphold the dynastic mantle. These were Amitabh’s fantasies; while Rekha truly was all of this. She was the man of her home, the father to her siblings, head of the household who made decisions and provided for everything. Amitabh had been a student of chemistry, Rekha’s father, Gemini was a teacher of chemistry in the Madras Christian College. Did the story of Jurmana emerge from this?

Amitabh struggled to get a foothold in the industy; Rekha struggled for dignity. However, I think that Amitabh had truly admired Rekha for having shouldered the responsibilities of a family and to this extent had fallen for her. Amitabh’s Deewaar ended a whole life for Amitabh that was before him and started a new one with a new sense of purpose; according to Rekha’s own admission, Deewaar was also her discovery of the “Book”. I think that they discovered a higher purpose of life together after Deewaar; Amitabh was the image that Rekha dreamed of, secure in family, living with parents and emotionally well chaperoned and guarded by them. In Rekha, Amitabh too may have seen a self of his which perhaps lived in the corners of his mind where he was helpless, discarded and ignored which he indeed was in the days of his struggle. In many of Amitabh’s later films especially Lawaaris and Sharaabi, scenes from Rekha’s film especially Sawan Bhado have been replayed with Amitabh in the narrative. This was a time when the Rekha and Amitabh affair was supposed to have got over! There are more instances like this in which one gets an idea that Amitabh has continued to explore and seek Rekha long after they were no longer acting together. Unfortunately Rekha’s imitating Amitabh was more apparent despite the fact that Rekha was the original fighter who could crush tigers and shoo away dacoits.

Amitabh has been Rekha’s fatal flaw; it was to be desirable to him that she compromised on her spirit. She became glamorous and sophisticated, graceful and restrained in a manner of offering herself to “Him”. She relegated herself to his shadow, trying to find a shelter in his chaperone, a shade that Amitabh, like her father, Gemini refused to extend to her. Rekha was not wrong in hoping for Amitabh; in her mind, second marriages and concubines were not wrong for she came from a society of bigamies and out of wedlock relationships. She also saw Hema and Dharmendra get married without the man divorcing the first wife; indeed bigamies were all around her in the film world and only Amitabh made such a big case with monogamy. If I know Amitabh well, he would never have brought Rekha home; she was not the social kind from whose wombs he would have liked to have his seeds flow. Extremely conscious of social status, Amitabh could never have taken a woman born out of wedlock and denied by father as his wife. His respectability would have revolted.

Days on she waited for him making her almost into a joke. She was the eternally jilted woman, the Umraao Jaan reincarnate, a role for which she was justly awarded and a role which was her autobiography. A woman who could stall a thousand ships on the high seas incarcerated herself indoors almost into invisibility assuming the role of a woman in love abandoned by her lover. She was lucky to have admirers like Ramesh Sippy and Rakesh Roshan who cast her in apt roles. Hrishikesh Mukherjee gave her a role of a lifetime in Khubsoorat, a character she truly could be had Amitabh Bachchan not cast his shadow over her.

Amitabh sequestrated Rekha, keeping her guessing, waiting, weeping and sighing over him. When quizzed by Simi Garewal he denied having anything to do with her except the routine interactions demanded as a co star. Shobha De, who was fond of Rekha and supported her case by incessantly spilling out the stories of their affair in Stardust suddenly called her a liar and said that she was making things up about Amitabh Bachchan. Shobha De, now respectably married to an already much married Dilip De has suddenly become a harbinger of monogamy and a thorough patriarch who supports Amitabh in shooing Rekha away from his side. The episode of Amitabh darkened Rekha’s dignity which came her way after a long struggle away from her position of an underdog in the industry.

As Rekha stands today in the Rajya Sabha to take her oath, I feel somewhere that she has won the war, especially on Amitabh Bachchan. Amitabh’s arrogance of social respectability because he had people close to the government now stands challenged. Rekha is on the same grounds as the Bachchans; she has been awarded by the very instruments with which Amitabh has looked down upon her. As she is accompanied by Farzana Sheikh, Rekha becomes the synosure of all eyes; no nomination has been so lauded as Rekha’s has been. She faces a grouchy and grumpy Jaya, the wife of the very man who she loved, and the man who seemed to have completely ignored her, just as her father did. The wife’s misdemeanour clearly hints that while Amitabh may have always denied their love story, the wife’s intuition has seen through the lies.

I think that Rekha’s nomination has conferred upon her respectability which she deserved many times over but was belied by a brutish, selfish and a cruel father who opened her to abuse and exploitation knowingly and willingly. She has suffered endless indignity at the hands of Amitabh only because she was devotedly in love with him. I think that today the balance has been struck right; what would a father not do to have a daughter in the Parliament, and what a leading male filmstar would not do to see his most popularly paired co star in a position which his family and he had always covered and cherished. The two men are braced today by the very woman who they decimated with their patriarchal arrogance and false consciousness of social respectability.

 

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Formula Won

Posted on May 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

We are just recovering from the headiest yet audio visual event ever on Indian soil, the Forumula One Car Racing. It is said that the spectators in Europe and America and later in Singapore had tired themselves of this tournament and the sponsors had lost habitat. India, just at this time suited them with its rapid liberalization, mammoth real estate projects, ruthless land acquisitions and mindless speculative investments into what one today knows as megacities. In India, the virus of global finance finds a willing host and settles down to produce numerous maggots in the shape of car racing fans. Formula One Car Racing in many ways is central to India’s neoliberal society, economy and polity.

The image of a racing car is so close to the performing, winning, surging, rushing and gushing individual who is literally racing, pacing, huffing and puffing her way through the maze of competing claims on her. She is stressed out by many “obstacles” of many demands made on her time through multiple tasks. She has to earn, drop children to school, face the perennial threat of retrenchment and pink slips, risk danger of pursuing career at the cost of certainty of employment, leer at the latest fashion trends at the shopping malls and then be able to afford a coffee and an ice cream at the side at costs that must cover enormously high rentals of the malls. So she races all the time, she gives into such races, only when race thrills her she will be able to live with her life; if she resents the pace that life demands of her she is left behind without that branded purse, without the latest cut in fashions, without her avant garde make up, without the dazzle of diamonds. And without social respectability. So the races, the shine of the metallic patina, the roar of the engines, the ground biting speed, all rev up imageries that suit the overriding rhythm of life as it unfolds in today’s India.

The only way to be honourable in life is to win in a race. Femina Miss India, Crorepati, Indian Idol, Bigg Boss, X Factor, Just Dance is all about racing to be the one and only at the top. At work, the workforce is always getting downsized, race to survive; one races up against spiralling prices, galloping bills and bloating EMIs; one races to buy property and gold and invest to hedge against the erosion of the value of savings in the free run of inflation. Education costs a lot, employment and pay packets are tenuous, so race to make up margins. You have to rush to buy that block of gold, you have to hurry to avail of the last opportunity to buy homes cheap. Opportunities are few; windows narrow, everything opens only for a Divine Moment, race up to grab these or else you will miss them forever. The life is one of only racing ahead.

Race therefore is the central motif of our lives. It means speed, it means beating a competitor, and it also means tricking time by moving ahead in step. The television images that sense and replay such central motifs of our lives could only move towards creating a mega event out of the world’s largest motor car racing. National Geographic Channel also beams out the Himalayan Rally, but those are images more of danger, of terrains, of geography, the glades, slopes, snows and storms that surround and constrain speed. The car race is the thrill of pure, abstracted thrill.

There was a film named Race directed by Abbas Mastaan released a few years ago. It was a murder mystery, with dollops of suspense and conspiracy thrown in. Films like Dhoom 1 and 2 have tended to prize out an abstracted sense of speed from its embeddedness in the narrative. But cinema and television are not the same. Raymond Williams is very categorical about television being a continual flow of images, defining life as it appears, or helping define life as it should appear. Unlike a film, it does not break expectations and patterns to seep in the new. The television, says Williams must appear to be a continued flow even in its commercial breaks. This is why, it is the television that helps establish continuity with social pace and the opportunity for the Indian television to beam in car racing is so well timed.

The Formula One Race brings into India a kind of a national pride, we have done it, and we have arrived on the global scenario, a kind of a pride that comes from belonging to an organization, a herd instinct that beckons the meek and the passive. The Mallyas, the Jaypees, and the many sponsors of the event are lauded as heroes doing India proud. No one questions that it is an event for the rich to spin more money, hosting global capital to become richer among the rich. No one ever asks what happens to equity when such money is spun around in such high echelons, whether the nation that gets agitated about Swiss Banks should also not question the source of such humungous outlay of finance on such monstrous opulence. It is alright as far as the Indians go because the racing tracks, the high barriers, the controlled traffic, all add value to the venue as a mega city, the engine of growth for the future. Yes, hosting of the car racing is a way to develop the city value of the space, the ultimate aim of global finance. This is why, money from grain trading, mineral trading, and other businesses are gravitating at top speed into real estate, the ultimate industry that uses the ultimate scarce resource, land.

India sold its liberalization pogrom on naïve and trusting persons like us on the promise of developing markets and industries. One imagined that opening up economies and globalizing markets would mean even greater competitiveness for the Indian industry which will also help the small and medium enterprises grow. But people like us missed out the “catch” that soon industries would rush for raw materials which at the end of the chain constitute the finite and exhaustible natural resources. Neoliberal politics, the State and corporate nexus, the pursuit of super profits by firms, the striving of companies towards becoming monopolies are all with the aim of grabbing more and more of the inexhaustible natural resources. Land, just plain land is at the top of the charts. The Formula One Car Race is a way of grabbing land via the hugely legitimate motifs of national pride and the race interlaced into one another. The Mallyas and the owners of the Jaypee Greens have made a killing, so have the global financial companies involved in circulating their funds through this event and while only a few have benefitted from this extravaganza, those of who as spectators have had to pay astronomical sums for theatre tickets believe that this few, richer of the richest have made us, as a nation very proud !!

What really slips from one are that the very process of and acquisition creates irreversible inequalities of income that pushes many of us down the ladder of purchasing power. An economy with rising wealth for a few sends the rest of us into the abyss of penury in terms of relative incomes and from there into the race again to forever catch up with things that slip out of our shopping carts. The race begins again.

Some kinds of people have contested this bonanza; the farmers who feel that they sold their lands rather cheaply to the real estate companies or the government are an unsatisfied lot. They defy the race wallahs by playing kabbadi near the tracks. There has been one Mr Yadav who wants to charge into the security zone in a Lamborghini; he seems to ask if he is any inferior to the people in the stands in view of this substantial wealth which he possesses via the Lamborghini. These are acts of defiance because the qualifying level to be a part of the races is not to be merely rich, but to be the elite among the elites, the cream in the creamy layer. For this one has to have style and elaan besides the might in the banks. The act of Liberalization does not spare the rich, it impoverishes many of them with its tendency in redistributing every kind of capital, financial, cultural, intellectual and even emotional towards fewer and fewer heads. The large pool of poverty that neoliberalism creates happens because it impoverishes the rich in its logic to create fewer and fewer of the ilk, and this is because the final source of opulence resides in the ownership of natural resources, limited in supply and restricted in availability.

My historian friend Rakesh Batabyal, also in FB points out the repeated motif of the Buddha as in the Buddha circuit, Buddha International and so on. I think that the oft dropped name of Buddha too has a hidden code. Buddha, in India is a code for Dalits and the venue of the races, Greater Noida is under a Dalit leadership. The Dalits much like the Muslim League in 1942 who sought prizes from the British by opposing the Quit India Movement, try to break the mainstream society of caste Hindus. Dalits today are eager to race ahead of the mainstream caste Hindus; nothing sabotages the mainstream economy and society than neoliberalism. Neoliberalism will kill the economic agents in India among who the Dalits are not in any way counted, and then the Dalits will rise on the ashes expressing their solidarity with the neoliberalists, offering to serve them as workers and reserve such positions for people of their kind. Reservation politics lie at the root of the Dalit support of neoliberalism.

Years ago Pune University organized a Seminar on Dalits and Economic Liberalization in which I presented my confusions over what would happen to reservation politics when the State under whose employment such affirmation has any meaning ceases to be an active agent of development? As the State withdraws from production what would happen to the Dalits because a government job is the basis of entering the mainstream society for the Dalit groups. Little did I realize that there was another route, to rise from the cinders of the fire that neoliberalism sets on domestic economies, a fire that would not touch the Dalits because they are not even included in it. Neoliberalism has a great scope for clearing off forests, lands, settlements and economic networks and when all those who oppressed the Dalit were wiped out by bigger oppressors, Dalits would rise. The Formula One races thus works with a definite plan of the political party in Uttar Pradesh.

Friends who have been to the races have come back with the sounds of the cars in their ears. It is an event that they would remember for many more months to come. It has not only been a great visual, but a great aural experience as well. It is now the new thing to be in; a new mark of social respectability, of class, of elegance and indeed of privilege and a stepping stone into making new social contacts and occasion for networking.

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Karwa Chauth

Posted on May 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

My friend Dr Kalinath Jha, a feminist sociologist has asked of us in facebook whether Karwa Chauth is a festival that abrogates a woman’s dignity by asking her to pray for her husband’s long life especially in view of the fact that the husband never really prays for his wife’s longevity. I, as Dr Jha’s fellow sociologist, am tempted to elaborate the sociology of the festival.

Karwa, typically means an earthen pot and chauth means the fourth day and these two combined with the practice of biting neem leaves after throwing water connects the ceremony of karwa chauth to a death ritual. The moon is seen only through a cloth or a sieve or in water, hinting that one is watching an eclipse, again signifying a dead moon. The ritual assumes that the woman in question has lost her husband, views his dead face, because even the husband is seen through the sieve or in his reflection on water. It is typically a ritual of mourning; the bride’s clothes imply that as she readies to celebrate a wedding life with her husband she loses him. It is a ritual that emphasizes her widowhood while in her wedding clothes.

The death motif is further strengthened by the custom that the woman and her children obtaon new clothes from her natal family and her fasting food is offerred to her by her mother-in-law, the sargi. These are typical of rituals followed in ceremonies pertaining to death and widowhood.

Karwa chauth is celebrated in Punjab and Western UP and marks the beginning of the sowing season of the winter crop. A woman just widowed before the sowing season becomes barren both in her womb as well as her fields, for owning no property rights and no right to hold the plough, she can neither participate in the productive nor the reproductive economy. Therefore, it is in her interest to negotiate with Yama, the Lord of Death to return her husband to her safe and sound.

The motif of a married woman, dressed in her wedding attire just widowed and pleading with the lord of Death to resurrect her dead husband is common throughout the northern Indian River plains.

The myth of Behula and Lokhinder, the story of Savitri Satyavan are instances of such motifs. These myths are common especially in areas where women not only have no property rights but have no rights of existence as individuals without husbands. The south is better due to the system of cross cousin marriages where her rank as an aunt has some meaning in the family set up; in case of the exogamous northern India, a woman much else ceases to be when she has no husband. The prevalence of Karwa Chauth in Punjab and western UP hints that the costs of widowhood are not only very hard to bear but the fear of death looms larger here than elsewhere where life has been more certain. The geography of karwa chauth has been areas of heavy warfare, of conquests and genocides and it is perhaps in this perspective that this kind of essentially death ritual may be reckoned with.

Karwa Chauth finds a new meaning with Karan Johar’s cinema and emerges as an occasion for women to display their husband’s wealth and splendor. It is often a means of asserting social powers of the family, of conveying its affluence. Karan Johar also reinvented the ritual as one where young nubile pine for husbands. Films determine the constitution of public space; this makes cinema an apt vehicle to launch new deities such as Santoshi Ma and highly revised and remodeled versions of traditions such as the karwa chauth. While the original meaning is lost, in its new kind of existence, I find it to be a reiteration of women’s need to draw power from husbands both existing and anticipated. While the tradition reaffirmed a woman’s purity of heart in persuading Yama to let go of her husband, in the modern times, it reassures the woman’s belief that her only way to social power and prosperity lies solely in her ability to land up with a nice man via matrimony

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Jewish Question Encore

Posted on May 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

Jewish Question Again: Edmund de Waal- Hare with Amber Eyes. 2010.

Karl Marx wrote his essay, On The Jewish Question in 1844 to contest a thesis by Bruno Bauer how Judaism as a religion directly conflicts with the interests of a modern and free political society. Judaism is a religion of the merchant, a religion that only knows self interests and has no pragmatic grounding. They have no nation, cannot belong to any state but to their own imagined utopia as chosen people. In its bid only to accumulate money, the Jew trades relationships between man and woman, sell women as chattel and has no taste in art. Edmund de Waal’s book, Hare With Amber Eyes contests this Jewish Question. Speaking as an insider of the famous Ephrussi family, de Waal draws out a historical biography of Charles Ephrussi, an art collector and a connoisseur. The hare that has amber eyes is one among the 264 odd netsukes that Charles has collected and thereafter gifted them to his family making those into veritable heirlooms. Throughout the book, the author challenges Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer on the thesis on the Jews by investigating his own family history and shows how contrary in real life the Jews were to what philosophers and thinkers made them to be.

The netsuke is an interesting object; this is a Japanese arte d object used as buttons to toggle pouches hung from sashes of kimonos serving as pockets. The netsukes attained very high level of craftsmanship and aesthetic standards especially given the smallness of their dimensions. The netsukes emanate out of the Japanese way of mingling art into the everyday life of pragmatic applications and it is the Japonaise of finding the purity of aesthetics in the content of the practical that inspires realists like Renoir and Manet of Europe. European modernity is founded upon rationality and its esthetics is defined as the reconciliation of the opposites of the concrete and the abstract, the context and the rule, the specific and the general, the particular and the universal. The points of difference between West and Japan is while the former maintains the hierarchy of the universal over the particular, of the abstract over the concrete and the concept over the content, Japonaise finds the two sets of attributes intermingled. The sense of life in Japanese art does not rise towards a higher level of the sublime but becomes the sublime in its state of being. It is the state of being as the sublime that really attracts schools of art like realism and impressionism to Japonaise. Renoir and Manet are so much like the Japanese prints and since Charles has both paintings and prints, the similarities are explicit.

The Ephrussis are the Ashkenazi Jews, meaning the eastern Jews. It is a belief among such Jews that they and the Japanese were once, in the aeons of time, the same people. The repeated motif of the netsuke perhaps tries to establish ties with Japan. Japan is an important land; it aligned with the Nazis and fascists during the Second World War and hence by the logic of extrapolation was against the Jews. But the seeking of Japan by the Jews is interesting; it is the search of common interests of finance capital. The Jews were bankers, financiers of both war and grain trade, in fact grain trade was one of the main ways in which the Ephrussi and Rothschilds made their money. Japan was the non-European power that Europe admired and the Jews were quite instrumental in financing Japan’s trade of silver into Europe. Japan’s economic surplus that was invested into the various economies of European countries helped Europe emerge as a major economic bloc in the pre War era. Jews were well entrenched into these societies on the might of their financial powers and in fact befriended and pampered by Emperors.

The problem with Jews emanated with European nationalism. Nationalism was based on localism, linguistic uniformity and Christianity; it was rooted in manufacturing and industry. Jews holding onto a religion that was not grounded in the local contexts and histories, their fraternity with their ilk across national and linguistic boundaries and their pursuit of rituals that were not founded on folklore alienated them as being foreigners, non secular and anti-nation people. If the Jews fell then they fell to persecution of nationalism and not by Empires. It was the nation with its rigid borders and the industries that chose to maximize margins within the enclosure of national economies that fell apart with interests that were of global finance.

The Eastern Jews were somewhat looked down upon by the Western Jews as well as by the Christians. The Christians claimed their superiority through a higher level of spirituality; a spirituality that was grounded and this worldly. The Jews on the other hand were pronounced as being merely mercantile in interests and covertly push their rather selfish interests through a ritualistic religion that claimed at best an inferior kind of other worldliness. But the author shows that the Jews because of their riches could finance and thus create very large art markets, art being one of the main arteries through which Christian spirituality claimed its legitimacy. Art is thus a way in which the members of the Ephrussi family seek their acceptance into the cultures and ideologies of the non Judaic people in whose society they stay in.

The character of Dr Elisabeth Ephrussi, the author’s grandmother with a doctorate degree is evidence that flies in the face of the contention that women were not free among the Jews. The Jews fashioned themselves after the rich and this in turn confined their women into the inner spaces of the dressing rooms, they pursuing fashions where it could take a very long time and a retinue of helpers to get the dresses on. This was unlike the Christians who modeled themselves along the poor and the workers; with greater simplicity that brought with it easier mobility. Elisabeth’s mother was one such a Jew woman who would take hours to dress and was so privileged that even her sexuality was not bound by marriage since her husband and lover coexisted in mutual congeniality. Some rich Jews pursued erudition in European history and the author traces how these very Ashkanazi Jews were the ones to have really studied, promoted and held most fondly created the history and culture of Europe. Yet, these are the very ones who Europe pronounced as being outsiders and dispensable to its reason of history.

As Jews were being persecuted, the lower classes among them felt the burden at first. Such Jews streamed from all over Europe into Vienna, the seat of European drama in the inter War period. During such exodus, the richer among the Jews were hateful of their less fortunate brethrens and it becomes rather clear in the later part of the book that the movement for Israel emanated out of a need of the lower classes of Jews to be placed under the protection of the richer ones in the community.

De Waal’s book is an interesting inside story of the glamoured opulence of the Ephrussi-Rothschild family; sometimes money, especially in Austrian Ringstrasse can become rather tiring for a mind that is more in tune with ideas of socialism, equality and citizenship. But it tells us the bitter truth that without money, the spirituality of civilizations cannot thrive and the Jews did a good turn to Europe by promoting art in a way that circulated its spirituality away from Churches into the secular world. One cannot help but notice the netsuke as being the core of the writing, and also notice that in recent times there has been a renewal of searching a link between Japan and the Jews, especially because Japan today owns most of the global financial capital like the Jews once did.

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Happy New Year

Posted on May 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

Happy New Year.

by Susmita Dasgupta on Sunday, January 1, 2012 at 12:53pm ·

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I am a bit uncomfortable with New Years; it is usually a time for regret, of promises not fulfilled, of goals not attained. I rarely rest on my laurels, what remains beyond me somehow assume a greater importance for me than what I seemingly have attained. Failure, non completion, occupies my mindscape with greater force than satisfaction. I read somewhere among Tagore’s writings that such is the mind of a pilgrim utterly unattached and sublime; I also read somewhere else among R.D.Liang’s works that such is a mind of an overtly competitive person unable to remain contended. Anyway, whatever the case be I suspect that somewhere the notion of a time flying past me, bringing in an unprecedented and untasted new and relegating all that is familiar behind me into an irretrievable past bothers me with a stranger anxiety. I rather like the vernacular New Year, which is poila boishakh, a time that will come every year, representing a circular notion of time. I like festivals, those which are renewed each year, with a certainty that there will always be a next time. The New Year is so unlike these, there is a definite goodbye to the bygone in favour of one which is novel and largely unknown and untested.

My friend Zuchamo Yanthan has posted a note about how Christmas is a relatively novel festival brought on board only in the beginning of the middle Ages, a festival around a birthday being a rather new concept and quite absurd. Usually a birthday is not something for celebration, there is no promise in being merely born until and unless human live births are rare and human life is valued in a new way. The celebration of Christ’s birthday was neither due to a new value of human life, nor because of its rarity but because of Christ being especially “sent” in by God in Heaven to rule men on earth. In this way, Christ’s birth was an event of great importance, an expression of God’s Will. Christ’s birthday i.e Christmas has therefore an enormous significance for the believers in the sacred realm. In the profane realm, the custom of celebrating birthdays must have had something to do with a new importance that is attached to the individual. The birth of any and every individual must have brought in a sense of anticipation of the society from that individual. In an age in which individual talent and genius was beginning to play a part in scientific discoveries, planning of expeditions, writing of texts, paintings, sculptures and other performative arts, the birth of a person invariably brought in a set of expectations and anticipations. While such sentiments of the middle Ages can justify the celebration of birthdays, the celebration of a new year as new time would be connected to the idea of a longitudinal time as opposed to circular and seasonal ones.

Celebrations of the New Year are then invariably tied to the idea of longitudonal time which itself seems to have been affirmed through the notion of a unidirectional and progressive evolution. History has it that the celebration of 1st January as the New Year was observed in ancient Rome as the day of the God Janus bringing with it prosperity and wealth. But this celebration was to bring in a season, not a new time that drives the old one into lost memory. The idea of the calendar where time slips away into the abyss of the Infinite seems to be somewhat an attribute of modernity, where the new and emergent is superior to all that has been, where history is continually being improved upon, innovated and renovated.

I have not evolved as yet to longitudinal time; I am more comfortable with rhythms that return, cycles that repeat, seasons that come and go away only to come again. The circularity brings for me a sense of certainty, an assurance that something is not irretrievable into the past but will revive again, reborn and resurrect. Hence New Years feel a little eerie to me; I am still vernacular celebrating seasons, cycles of circular time.

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Sociology in JNU

Posted on May 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

Indian Sociological Conference Diamond Jubilee – Lazy Sunday on JNU Lawns.

by Susmita Dasgupta on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 6:13am ·

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The Indian Sociological Society was at last convened in JNU, New Delhi on the occasion of its Diamond Jubilee. The theme, true to the spirit of a Diamond Jubilee was the Subject In and the Subject Of Sociology. It was recognition in a much needed inquiry of the subjectivity the sociologist brings into the subject of sociology. The subject of sociology has changed over the years and has been different with every scholar purporting to do sociology. Interestingly, despite its claim to a scientific discipline, sociology has never been fixed in its scope precisely because it has rarely been able to define what its subject matter really is.

Durkheim thinks that it has something to do with social facts, the objective results of individual action calculated to confirm and enhance her position in the society and which is why suicide is important to his thesis as the grand exception to his rules. Max Weber imagines that sociology studies the meaning and intent of individual actions that produce one form of society rather than others. What is Durkheim’s concern with society is clearly not Max Weber’s. Durkheim is interested in the internal coherence and discipline of society, seeking answers to his problematic of why do societies sometimes become disintegrated. This is understandable given the fact that Durkheim was a Jew and married into the Dreyfus family of the famous Dreyfus scandal and faced the rising tide of anti-Zionism against him. Weber, on the other hand was a well entrenched Huguenot with deep roots in the Church and an unquestionable Christian. These parameters shielded him from being persecuted and left him with questions that pertained to the superiority of Christian societies of Western Europe as they held sway over colonies elsewhere in the world which had been initially civilizations of greater superiority. The subject matter differed with the subject in sociology and we are left with confusion over the scope of the subject matter, what of society does sociology study? Typing in the google search about sociology, one gets interesting results. Sociology is supposed to study both the integrity of the society as well as its change, it studies how one society is different from the other and what social contents like art, crime, sports, governance do to maintain or violate the internal coherence of our society. Societies like those of the US and Canada and of created new societies of post colonial India and other countries have goals, the goals that attempt to establish the best principles of the western civilization within their specific contexts of historical “givenness”. The greatest challenge of sociology is therefore often to identify the major concern of the society, a concern that attaches itself with the aspirations of the very people who make that society up. This brings us to the role of the sociologist, whose voice does she represent, what her own social class is, what her own aspirations are for all of these will eventually colour what sociology transpires into as an academic discipline.

Popular art is central to sociology; in fact one can think of locating sociology almost entirely into popular art, its discourses, its ideology, its narrative, its premises, its circulation, and reception and inter textuality. The sociologist is not unlike a popular artist; for she has to imagine herself as touching the nerves of “society” as a universalized space which in reality is constituted into several strata, often in competition, if not in conflict with one another. Surprisingly, scholars (especially like me) have never been able to extend this simple lemma of popular art into the theoretical concerns of sociology. Since my area of specialization is popular art I am somewhat bitter at the subject never been taken seriously by sociologists. This seems to have coloured my relationship with the community of sociologists in general and hence my visit to JNU Campus on the warm sunny Sunday was purely to meet friends and not to expect anything much from the discussions.

It is always great meeting old friends and making young acquaintances. I met my teachers who welcomed me like a daughter returning home after her stay in a faraway place. I met young students of the contemporary batch who under the aegis of my teachers extracted a promise from me that I would return to the centre periodically to ‘coach” PhD students to write insightful thesis. Teachers are now saddled with ever growing numbers of students, reflecting the population growth of the country and of course an ever expanding middle class. Sociology, in my time was a residual subject, one studied it because one could not qualify for other courses and only a handful came into the centre in search of a higher meaning of life, especially it’s pursuit could land one up in the civil services. Sociology as the basic discipline for the non government development sector or the media was not as yet very well formed opportunities. Today, the situation is changing and truly enough, sociology is growing as a discipline that would help jobs in development, banks, media, entertainment, tourism, hotels, human resources development and the hospitality industry. It is a subject that is still to be recognized as a veritable profession in the more serious businesses like corporate strategy, natural resource management, peace studies and conflict management. It is a subject that is still centred on a popular culture like role, reflecting concerns that are transcendental and intellectual and discursive and not as those constitutive of basic opportunities and outcomes in society. The conference therefore was populated with sociologists only from the academia and none from development, media, HR or administration and social policy.

An old friend and I sat discussing her published work, the maid servants and the care givers. While men within the family might treat such workers with contempt and in some cases lust, these workers are indispensable to the liberation of middle class women. Were these women not around, would the middle class women have been able to leave home for work? These paid care givers subsidize enormously for the “liberation” of the high middle class often paying heavily in terms of neglecting their own families. Children of maid servants often grow up into drug and alcohol addiction suffering from the want of motherly care during infancy. Television advertisements boom out images of “health food” in terms of Maggis and Knorrs and maids who are too tired to cook after a twelve hour working shift usually feed their children on such fast food and towards the end of the month on street food. The rising rates of anaemia, food deprivation and malnutrition that infest the Indian population may often be traced to the drudgery of such women work force.

The degree of opportunity available to the working woman is directly proportional to the salaries of the maids they can afford to employ. Interestingly, the maid servant no longer remains only an employee on the rolls of the household, she develops her own bonds of affection and wants to be regarded and respected for the same. It is on such expectations that there enters yet another dimension in the domestic power struggles, those which are often themes explored in television serials through power struggles among women albeit not always in an employer-employee relationship. My friend wants to write of these but she hesitates precisely because there are no schemata for holding such observations. Institutions, curricula, professional cronyism creates such rigidities in theories that the world out there can barely hope to have any relevance in the cocooned isolation of the academia. Sociology in its quest for being a perfect science has often failed persons like my friend in addressing the ever evolving social reality changing every moment defying established concepts and abstractions.

A young faculty from a reputed institution specialising on the tribals in India greeted me warmly. I asked him about the concerns of his institutions and he said that he really had no idea about the direction and ideology of his institution but he was working on rehabilitation and resettlement issues of the tribals displaced on account of mining projects. I asked him whether he knew anything about the tribal aspirations, how the children imagined their futures and how they envisioned development; the young man insisted that the tribals were only illiterate fools incapable of having any aspirations. This is generally how intellectuals stereotype and construct as the “other” persons who they exclude from participating actively in the public space. Contrary to this intellectual’s belief, during my own visits to Gumla, Ranchi and Latehar, the hinterland of his employer institution I found that the young children of the Jharkhandi tribes all wanted to be scientists and women were so keen on science of agriculture that they wanted superior organic techniques to combat the monopoly of multinational seed and fertilizer companies! Indeed, in Orissa when an activist fighting for tribal rights was informed of how tribals really used simple techniques and principles for seed preservation because they wanted to stall the onward march of Cargill and Monsanto, the activist was immediately suspicious that Maobadis must have been mentoring the tribals otherwise how else would such ignorant people know of Monsanto. I had no heart to tell the activist in Orissa that deep inside the forests of Sukinda I noticed the dish antennae of channel television. The Indian intellectual uses his knowledge to consolidate the boundaries of his own social class and this is why in the entire exercise of knowledge the world around him must be stereotyped, controlled and administered and never engaged with in its own terms. It is sad that day in and day out we dole out curricula for teaching that so ceaselessly sustains the class conflict between the intellectual and the rest of the society; the intellectual drawing out generalizations, broad sweeps, snap shots and often theorizing commonsensical ideas without any attempt to participate in the field of her observation.

Sociology emanated from the same social class of middle income professional Indians who were the vanguard of the Indian society all through the Freedom Movement. This class has always wanted to be in control of the society at large. As an intellectual it has extended its control via stereotyping and constructing as the “other” the actors from the wider society and attacked the State, politicians, film makers and popular writers any of who this class imagines is making an impact on the wider society. No wonder sociology keeps the study of popular arts at such an arm’s length.

A young faculty from the host institution lamented that he felt rather orphaned because our senior professors seemed to have retired almost all at the same time. Why this lament I asked to which he replied that he wanted to grow under someone’s shadow. The organization of professions is just this; you must have a shade to grow under. If everyone grows under the shade who will grow into a shade giver? This is a question that my discipline is not really prepared to answer and as private funds come into education and as getting a Western degree that relies so heavily upon recommendations and referees become indispensable for a decent employment in India, there is a rush to catch shades. Academic independence is compromised as the political independence of the middle class is compromised in the rise of the corporate domination over our lives. The result of globalization, my retired teacher of Economy and Society looks towards the horizon, Globalization he sighs, how to theorize it, he goes off into a depression. It is right under our noses actually working through the corporate domination. Globalization is not a coherent, constrained social fact that has a causal relationship over other well rounded externally constrained social facts; it is a process stealing its way to constitute the very reason that affect our entire lives. You are so right, exclaims my teacher. Then why, I ask, did you spoil my PhD on popular cinema, does not popular art also provide a reason that purports to offer us better principles to found our entire lives upon? In sociology we look for principles that constitute our lives as members of the society, integrate us culturally, and resolve our conflicts ideologically. This is exactly what popular culture intends to do, then why should I be considered as an outsider to my discipline?

Yet, I could see that sociology in India was making a desperate attempt to become more relevant by including themes such as development, governance and extremism as its concerns. These themes are bound to make sociology into a dynamic and interactive discipline because these themes are mounted upon the essential strain of social conflict. Social conflict is a more vital model as compared to social problems; the latter is the Durkheimian anomie that can be bounded, hounded and rounded into an administrative solution. The social problem is static, “othered” and stereotyped. Social conflict is struggle, acting, participating, bargaining, negotiating and fighting, here the parties are equal and superior control of any one class is difficult. It is in these themes of social negotiations that the future of sociology will eventually emerge. The conference organizers showed a remarkable foresight.

The food was excellent, crowd managed with empathy, book stalls were tempting. Again, I spent beyond my budget and left the place quickly to avoid another avalanche on my credit card. Another old friend has published his fourth book on Development. I glanced through on what appears to be a promising volume. Will read it through in the course of time but not before I have finished my paper on Habermas and the Indian Popular Culture.

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Makarsankranti

Posted on May 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

Makar Sankranti – Boromani’s Day

by Susmita Dasguptaon Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 11:15am ·

I always associate Makar Sankranti with Boromani. Dida would call the last day of the Poush as Poush Sankranti but Boromani would invariably call it as Makar Sankranti and give it that extra ritualistic flavor with which she always celebrated the day. My generation in Bengal never quite knew the seriousness of this festival except that we would have a chapter here and there in our school’s vernacular texts saying how Makar Sankranti was a day of reaping the bountiful harvest, how one invariably made a variety of sweet meats and savouries on this day and often would go out far into the mouth of the Ganges where it mingled into the inexhaustible Bay of Bengal to take a holy bath in the freezing cold of the middle of January. But Boromani made this out to be a day of delectable feast for us. She would make pithey and payesh, koraishutir kochuri and aloor dom. And all the while we stuffed ourselves with these delicacies with greed overtaking appetite; Boromama would stand with a bottle of Carmozyme to control any damage that such gluttony would bring with it. The picture would be filled with exclamations and high pitched cacophony of all heads talking all at once with the sheer joy of partaking in the grand gastronomical feat. This is how I best associate Makar Sankranti and Boromani.

Boromama is my mother’s first cousin, the son of her father’s oldest sister. Boromama was called as Borda by my mother and her siblings to denote not only his seniority in age but also his superiority in his position as the eldest in the family of my maternal grandfather. He was much older than the children born to my maternal grandparents and yet one of the same generations as my uncles and aunts; Boromama seemed to occupy the interstitial space between the adult world and the world of the children. In Bengal, this space has been valued and the series of “Da’s” such as Feluda, Tenida, Ghanada, Motada and later Rijuda seem to occupy this space somewhere between an adult and a child and become the repository of all kinds of fun and adventure. Boromama introduced my mother and her siblings to Shonibaarer Chithi, Sandesh, Shuktara and to music played on the radio. He was the one who would devise endless tricks to play on his cousins and their friends. He invented interesting ways to scare the young children and had this endless reservoir of ghost stories. Boromama’s stories were varied and almost always from another world of the villages where trees grew dense and dark, where in the secret of shadows lurked dacoits; or of strange dak bunglows where spirits stalked him, or of sit outs by ponds and damps where petnis could be seen with burning eyes. These stories thrilled us; he also knew of Freedom Fighters, of members of the Anushilan Samiti, Raj Kapoor and his monimela, and many budding young Bengali authors, poets and radio artists. He also knew some of India’s Presidents and Vice Presidents. Boromama’s employment as an officer of the State Bank of India had once taken him to head the bank’s branches in the Andaman Islands where he received many eminent Indian celebrities as his house guests. Boromani was his wife, again a much older Boudi to my uncles and aunts, old enough to seek various indulgences and young enough to pull her leg and tease her. Boromama and Boromani’s home with their three daughters was an open house with unlimited parties.

I was too young to partake in these halcyon party days at Boromama’s residence; except for a brief and hilarious visit to Burnpur where I saw my life’s first steel plant breathing and spitting burning fire and belching thick black smoke. In my profession as a steel policy economist I seem to have surprised my colleagues and my unit by always being extra favourable to IISCO, not letting out my subconscious secrete that I associated the plant with Burnpur and to Boromama.

But I was in the right frame of mind and appetite when they came to Kolkata and took up residence at Palm Avenue, close to our home in Dover Lane. This was the time when we visited Boromama’s home every evening; the evenings of Makar Sankranti were among this routine. Families such as ours had practically never known this festival and my grandmothers, both paternal and maternal, despite being gourmet chefs never quite retained the art of pithey making. This art of savouries had something to do with the structure of families, position of women, layout and architecture of kitchens and helping hands and in this lay a deep sociology of the Indian families, urbanization, social mobility, middle class mobility and other features of the Gemeinschaft.

Families on either side of my parents were in many ways rootless and displaced; my maternal grandmother, Dida came from a broken home in the sense that she lost her father very early in life leaving her mother as a young and disconsolate widow. As soon as her father died, Dida was taken out of school and married off to my grandfather, a young officer of the Imperial Bank who was posted for most of his life in West Punjab, now Pakistan. Here she lived a life among Punjabis and Sindhis and while she picked up enormous skills from these women, she never knew the Bengali delicacies of Makar Sankranti. Dida had large kitchens but she never had women to help her out with the kneading, rolling and shaping of the pitheys; she had a family of eight children who she was too busy feeding with regular meals and had no time to spend on the luxuries of Makar Sankranti. On my father’s side, we had small families with little custom of shared meals and so the reason and the opportunity to fry on pitheys with platefuls were being brought on to the table in an unbroken flow simply did not exist. With both sides of the family having no rural roots ever had bounties of coconut, sweet potatoes and sweet vegetables delivered at home by share croppers and lessees on land. With both sides of the family living in city homes with no shared community life with neighbours had little incentive for women to roll up savouries while chatting away in afternoons and keeping one another company.

Boromani came from a family with roots; she had seen and known of communities those that were not yet nucleated in the waves of urbanization and competitive examinations. This was amply evident in the way she related to her neighbours in the city, giving away precious rations of sugar and rice to those she felt were in need of these. Though she was a banker’s wife and had three daughters to dowry off, she refused to save money. She never let considerations of the material world come in her way of building enormous levels of human relationships. Her way of building bridges among people was through gifts, nothing elaborate but extensive, rice, paan, sugar, gur, mosquito nets, duster cloths, just the way it would be done in the feudal world. In many ways she resisted modernity in its self seeking, individualistic, reified avatar, instead retained and extended the web of the Gemeinschaft, through gifts and givings in order to build a labrynth of human relations around her. The feast that she threw for Makar Sankranti was a representation of the world she inhabited; the festival she chose is such a misfit for the city life, a festival where bountiful of food is used, food that is not usually bought off shelves or shacks of the market place, but food that one usually gathers and collects as part of the larder in the home, food that is usually exchanged through goodwill of neighbours, shared through an informal camaraderie. I loved this world of Boromani’s, a world of the old world, a world of secret continuities of tradition, a world that refused to mingle into a mindless modernity.

I can see myself so far back in time; sitting on a formica top table in the narrow space of the dining area, stuffing myself with chaanaar jilipi and ranga aloor pithey with Boromama assuring me with generous supplies of Carmozyme and my cousins Shwetadi and Chhandadi preparing rolls of khili paan as mouthfresheners. After this grand feast we would end by talking of the weather and how after the last evening of Poush, early spring would set in Kolkata. In those days, I took Boromani and her culinary spread for granted; never imagining a time when all of that would no longer exist. These days I am more respectful of things that I have, knowing that like the Poush all will end one day and the new spring would open for someone else, not me.

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Fatal Flaws of Feminism

Posted on May 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

When I was born a girl child, being the first born in a family of sparse fertility, my parents decided that never in my life as an adult they will allow my gender to get in my way. Thus while I have known moments of long hair and short hair, flowing clothes and plain trousers, pierced ears and been shorn of adornments, one thing I was certain that I was going to pursue my personhood despite my gender. My mother warned me to choose my marriage partner with care and to avoid types that try to push women indoors and enslave them into child rearing roles. But my father was the more radical one, as a man he knew for certain that one could not fight patriarchy while being within its institution. Marriage, he knew was organized for the benefit of men, and like his class fellow the now celebrated Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, my father opined as back as in the 1960’s that matrimony and family life cannot but oppress women. Never marry, he said, because you like to be the sole ruler of your own life, a man would never allow that. These words stuck to me and as my parents encouraged me to stand on my own feet, build my own house with my self earned income, I left home at the age of twenty two with a single bag by my side to Delhi to make my own living. I could have gone to Mumbai, then called Bombay but my father’s head office was located there and I was sure that I could not lead my life as unchaperoned and as anonymous as I could do in Delhi.

 

In all such ventures, my parents were misled by Dev Anand movies and I by Amitabh Bachchan films. Like film stars I was searching for my personhood; nameless to begin with but end up as kings at the close of the journey. It was in such an endeavour that I made my discoveries. My training in sociology and economics and especially sociology in Indian Universities where the discipline is close to anthropology helped me understand the world better in terms of stereotypes. It is not important who you are, you are never rewarded for your identity, but on the basis of how others look at you. I had to create the right kind of an impression. It was during such times that needed me to walk miles all alone in public transport thinned of its crowd in the late hours of the evening that I discovered that I needed to work on an image that would ward off possible dangers over my body. Yes, I sacrificed a lot. I sacrificed late night movie shows, late night parties, late night wine and cheese cocktails in embassies; I did compromise on my liberty for what was my safety. In all of this I saw that I was jeopardised only because women are never alone out in the streets in large enough numbers because they hardly ever lead their own lives being tied to routines of husbands, children, kitchen and cleaning. The lack of liberty for women was brought about by women being hemmed enclosures off the public space. Women marrying, settling down into routines clearly reduced my liberty as a person beyond her gender; my gender was stereotyped in the statistical regularities of their occurrences.

 

Later in office, my state of not having a family has been a matter of silent discrimination and were it not for my unabashed intellectual aggression, I could also have been harassed. Reason, I was not a married person, rich, educated and not also a prostitute; my total unavailability to men was an issue of utter disbelief because women are generally available to men in some measure or the other; as wives, as mothers, as girlfriends, as call girls, as girlfriends. All these categories of women jeopardised my pursuit of personhood hopelessly leaving men imagining who the lucky man in my life would be. After my hysterectomy, which has to be public because my medical expenses are paid for in office, my status in every which way has slided down to being totally ignored at work. The covers of my papers are torn off and replaced by other names and though I might be a part of a team, I am never called for in meetings. It is only as a mentor that I am valued because there it is a different space with a different economy.

 

The institution of the family has drained my chances of being accepted as an individual in my own right; the inhabitation of the public space which has no backing of a private sphere of commensurate importance becomes an issue with the significant others. My travels on work is frowned upon, I am never sent to attend seminars until and unless I am presenting papers; and on one occasion my privilege of being a person who has no dependents can claim travel allowance each year to visit her hometown was struck down because I was assumed to have no family. The prevalence of marriage as a preferred state jeopardizes chances of a dignified life of anyone who wishes to remain out of it. In a similar fashion, when call girls and prostitutes inhabit the public space claiming full dignity, women like us who travel by late evening flights, emerge from official dinners or even go to attend a musical performance are jeopardized. The image of a woman being in the sexual trade is socially learnt and this jeopardises asexual women like us. The crux of a woman’s problem is her gender, her sexuality is the basis of discrimination against her in a world which is constantly accumulating the masculine principle and eroding its feminity. What happens when the value of a commodity declines? Plain economics restrict its supply. The supply of sex must be retarded to raise the value of women; more women must come out of institutions of patriarchy, marriage as well as prostitution.

 

In every idea of emancipation there is a sacrifice. To become a progressive and secular bhadralok, propertied men of Bengal had to let go of their concubines, socialism requires enormous sacrifice of the propertied, universal society must let go of privileges of slavery; what does feminism let go of? What does it sacrifice? Nothing. Worse still in its post modernist avatar, feminism clings on to sexuality as its life belt in a stormy sea, the very basis of gender oppression. The warnings of climate change and imminent ecological danger tells us that we need to restrict the reproduction of our species, then what is the use of female sexuality for civilization? The need for the feminine principle in our Universe is declining, this is why women is such a surplus, women looked upon as women are killed as foetuses, left to die as infants, abandoned as girls, trafficked as adolescents, burnt for dowry, murdered by beating, abandoned as widows, and all of this because she is repeatedly being defined in terms of her sexuality, something whose instrumental reason in the world is only waning. Therefore, if woman has to survive, she must emerge into personhood, beyond sex. Otherwise feminism will continue to do the impossible, be at two places at the same time, a life of compromise that never left the world any better.

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