Robibaarer Tuki Taaki..

Posted on May 13, 2012 by secondsaturn

13th May 2012, Just a Day In The Life of India

I sit this morning with my back to a hot and scorching sun pouring into my balcony. I am inside my room with just a khadi curtain between me and the sun rays and it feels like being in an oven. The shades of the balcony are down. The workmen are here fixing a grill beyond the banisters so that in the hot summer nights I can keep the door to the balcony open sleep peacefully without the fear of intruders tickling at the back of my deep subconscious.

I have just glanced through the newspapers and picked up pieces of news here and there. Suddenly I wondered why was it that I never thought of putting all the news together and see what kind of a pattern emerges out of it.

I first read the Dalit Panther’ attack on the NCERT office in Pune because they oppose a cartoon that was drawn before Independence. The cartoon shows Ambedkar sitting on a giant snail, called the Constitution, desperately trying to make it move through a long tether while Nehru tries to whip it from behind in a bid to hasten it forward. This was perhaps the time when Pandit Nehru was getting impatient with Ambedkar on why he was sitting on the Constitution instead of finalizing the text. Ambedkar being a legalist was deliberate and ruminative took a long time to arrive at decisions avoiding finalities and certainties, while Panditji was performance driven, result oriented, not too sensitive always to uncertainties and contingencies and on the whole cared less for details. For me the picture is common place, I have seen this millions of times, my way to my mother’s village, in the outlying village roads off Santiniketan, on the Delhi-Haryana highways, where poor people carry cart loads of wares pulled by bullocks where one sits on the head of the cart and a helper cracks the whip from behind. The whip cracked behind the animal gives it a forward motion while the stick on the head guides the animal to keep on the desired track. The Dalit Panther taking offence to this simple imagery of everyday life beyond the city limits, shows how little these city bred young Indians are ignorant of such common everyday realities. Every Bengali knows this little rhyme by Tagore by heart; gaari chalaye bonshi bodon, shonge je jaaye bhaagne modon. But more than being ignorant of simple realities, these young Dalits do not wish to be associated in any way with India, its history, its past. They wish to imagine the Dalit as a distinct ethnie, a specific community, and wish to deny any kind of connections they may have had with India and Indians. The desire to deny the common life is so great that it seems fine for them also to have the contributions of their own intellectuals denied and decried. This is the typical Partition politics; a politics that the Dalits seem now to be geared up for. No wonder then Salman Khurshid raised issues for Muslims that seemed to have been settled after the Partition, and there was such a landslide voting in favour of the Samajwadi Party, a Party that alone could keep the Dalit power at bay. Now Mayawati says that she fears for her life. The Dalit politics today is the politics of Partition; it is a politics which only tries to hurt the mainstream Hindus without actually having an agenda to benefit its own members.

There was another story of groups within the army fighting amongst themselves in Ladakh. Only a few days ago, the army chief asserted his ego over the State, something which has never been seen before in India. Various reports of militancy being promoted in the areas where the military is posted are not new; the army personnel make enormous money by selling arms and ammunition to militant groups. With such interests of the army growing in local affairs, the outfit develops into a constituency of its own and once this happens we are straight on the path to a situation like Pakistan and Bangladesh where the military runs the State. This could be the only reason why the army must be immediately withdrawn from Jammu and Kashmir and other insurgent areas.

There is a story of a gang of pickpockets who commit this crime as acts of artistry and refinement; the money they collect out of picking bags and pockets are spent on alcohol and kebabs !! They never operate near their homes where they say that they have impeccable records. Such crime is neither a reaction to poverty, nor revenge against deprivation but artistic command over technology that gives ample scope for power, a kind of a secret and unsaid power over the other, a satisfaction at having thoroughly beaten the system, its laws, its vigilance. It is the same power that film makers unleash on their viewers; an ability to use technology creatively, create technology out of creativity and surprise the viewer into sheer wonderment; no wonder the pristine always seem to connect cinema and the underworld together, or debunk films as instigators of the unsocial and illegitimate activities.

I also read that divorces in Mumbai are going up especially those over petty matters. A man wants to divorce his wife because she never seems to put the latch properly, in another case the man wants his wife to cook meat over slow flame and not in a cooker and in a third a wife wants to get rid of her husband because he would never allow their child to have a fancy water bottle. While the news reporter says that these are trivial affairs, I see in them serious and irresolvable problems. Why does a wife in the first case not latch the door they way her husband wants it, why does the wife in the second not want to cook meat the way her mother-in-law does and why the husbands in either case not to the tasks themselves and why in the last instance, does the wife not buy that desired water bottle for the child out of her own money? In each of these cases there is a refusal to accept the other as a person in her or his own right, a certain defiance of the other, a certain impulse to defy, deny and decry the existence of the other; in each case mountains have been made out of molehills and that’s the seriousness of the business of divorce. These stories show that stress levels are now cracking down human beings, searing through character consistencies, cracking up normalcy and throwing up anomie. The human personality is under severe threat; it is unable to carry on the simplest of social functions, to marry, have a family and raise children. The stress of neoliberal living has oppressed the basic existence of the homo social, individuating her in such a way that she breaks up in the face of minimum social role playing. If this is not a sign of social collapse then what is?

The Indian system is under collapse; its sovereignty threatened by military mutinies, its politics threatened by yet another kind of Dalit minorityism leading into undertones of Partition; its economy threatened by criminal artistry, its society threatened by the anomie of alienation. Will the success of India still be counted in terms of the growth of its GDP and the growing number of billionaires and individuals of high net worth?

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Poriborton, whats the new politics?

Posted on May 8, 2012 by secondsaturn

Just as I am working on editing a book that I purport to name as the Sociology of Displacement, I wonder why displacement which is now an ever growing anomaly to our model of economic development not find a voice in our politics. Democratic politics, says Prof Sen, is the most certain panacea against famines and democracy is the sole reason why India has been relatively free of famines while China has fallen to famines and often harboured chronic food insecurity. But the very same democracy that saved India from acute food shortages in the 1960’s and the 1970’s seems helpless in the face of displacement of populations that everyday seems to grow in numbers; of these the tribals form a definite majority. Development therefore goes against tribals the most, which live in isolated and self contained economies and find it difficult to organize the same self sustenance when their ecologies are taken away. With political parties wooing minorities, one wonders why politics of displacement has not yet been a part of the mainstream political discourse.

Were displacement to become a part of politics, then such politics would challenge the very foundation of development and when that happens, the foundations of the system upon which our democratic politics rests are invariably shaken. What is the foundation of democracy in India? It is neither cultural pluralism, nor multi lingual universalism, nor a unity that absorbs and transcends diversities; but it is capitalism which creates and sustains a middle class in such a manner that the rest of the society races to occupy this narrow space. India’s democracy is successful because all of us agree to participate in the same race. All our diversities assume significance and lives of their own only because of a strong unity in all our purpose, which is to occupy this narrow band of life style called the middle class. Before economic liberalization the Indian state was the largest capitalist; through the public sector and the bureaucracy it was the largest employer; it decimated smaller capitalists by taking over units and allowing only those units to thrive as were required to serve its cause as ancillaries.

The Indian state created a middle class based upon competition; always the aspirants were larger in number than the incumbents. The game was well defined and universally accepted and everyone knew that there was one game, modern education, competitive examinations, and salaried employment to grab that refrigerator, dining table, sofa set, and later the television and the Maruti car. The well known sociologist and our teacher Professor T.K.Oommen term this phenomenon as the Marutization of the Indian nation. The Marutization tells us of a certain one-dimensionality that manifested because of a universally accepted model of competition through which one acceded to the middle class and remained there. The universality of the rules of the game to attain the universally accepted modes of existence is the real reason why we have a model of economic development which cannot tolerate any other modes of economic production and hence displaces. Thus while we are tolerant of cultural multitudes and linguistic diversities we are absolutely intolerant of economic diversities.

The competitive model to belong to the middle class makes all of us not only pursue the same goals and play the same game but also makes us accept the singular source of that game, namely the model of economic development which fewer winners and more losers.

However, this model of one dimensional development can collapse when some people stand up to it and say that they do not believe in playing the game. They do not wish to be middle class, do not wish for the model of the car, and do not wish to own the latest gadgets in their kitchens. All they wish is to introduce some other kinds of games with other kinds of goals, and so what? This was exactly what happened in Bengal. Suddenly we all seemed to want to change but change towards what? We wanted not to be drawn into this mindless game of industrialization, visionless of resorts and parks and projects with golf courses and swimming pools. We wanted just to be ourselves, amake amaar moto thaakte dao, to pursue culture, sing, play the guitar, write poetry again. We did unexpectedly not want to grab a seat in the newest restaurant; we were surprisingly not interested in buying gold. The persona of Mamata expressed this disinterestedness towards things that matter for everyone else; simple clothes, unadorned body, undecorated demeanour, no heir to accumulate for, no one to go back home to, only to retire into rest by reading books and listening to music. This image of hers which is now also that of Bengal and this is Bengal’s Poriborton, the change of essence and the discovery of an immanence that scares the world. Hillary Clinton belongs to that ruling class which in America for three centuries now has scuttled the most promising labour movement anywhere in the world by using the Church, the media and the public schooling system. This is why they have crushed Communism everywhere else in the world should a strain waft unexpectedly into America and ignites minds with the possibilities of revolution. The Poriborton, for America, is one such a regime that dangerously challenges that game that has made humans run relentlessly towards singularly defined goals for ages now. The Poriborton’s real promise is amake amaar moto thaakte dao; please spare me from running in that mindless competition. When such a mentality becomes a will to power, it spells disaster for that development which displaces. So Hillary comes after Mamata, what is your vision she asks. Apparently the former says the visit is all about FDI, Mamata says it is not. All these are eyewashes, the real issue is the game change.

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Kolkata As Star

Posted on April 13, 2012 by secondsaturn

In Shrijeet Mukherjee’s 22shey Shrabon and Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani, the star is the city of Kolkata, and that too such a powerful star that it could render the Bengali superstar, Prosenjit in the former and the Hindi film star Vidya Balan in the latter into supporting actors in the film, profiling, embossing and raising into relief the main character, the city of Kolkata. In both films, Kolkata refused to remain only as a backdrop, it emerged into a veritable character of its own wrenching the characters in the film of their individuality and putting them forth merely as typecasts. Were an anthropologist to watch these films, she would have a fine idea of how it felt to live a daily like in Kolkata amidst its streets, its festivities, its business as usual. Both these films, with the recovery of poetry in one and Rabindrasangeet in the other, seek a city that seemed to have lost in the reams of the long hibernation of the thirty four years of the CPIM rule. The liberal use of TMC symbols on the walls of 22shey Shrabon and at least in one instance in Kahaani connects a sort of cultural recovery with the politics of the present incumbent in power.

22shey Shrabon used the storyline of a serial killing as a peg to hang its real tale, namely the tale of poetry, Bengali poetry of the last century covering a range from Tagore, Sukumar Ray, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, Sukanto Bhattacharya, Jibananda Das, Binoy Majumdar and the latter’s ilk the Hungryalists of the 1960’s defined the Bengali spirit. Connecting poetry with death is a special style of the Hungryalist movement of the 1960’s and the film held Bengali poetry through the decades of the last century in the format of the chaos and death by associating poetry with gruesome and mindless murders. Death was found in the streets of Kolkata, its investigation took us all over the city in its growing megapolis, its decrepit hutments, its narrow alleys, its phlegmatic trams, its pervert lawkeepers, its sorrows, sighs, exhilirations and chaos. The world of Kolkata is unequal; its plush offices and stench slums; its wide roads and narrow by lanes, a rising class of stars among journalists and professionals and the failing multitude forced to remain in unorganized and if not illegal occupations. Poetry of despair, separation, nonsense rhymes and epitaphs try desperately to bridge the gap between the two worlds.

In Kahaani, the squalor of Kolkata is never conscious to its alter ego, namely the plush city lights. In fact, the scene never leaves the pallor. The contrast to the damp miasma of a life led by losers as is amply spelt out in the lyrics of the title song as the city is always in a rush but never seems to go anywhere, is a power centre located far away in Delhi, the “centre” favourite whipping horse of every political party in power. This “centre” is Bengal’s angst, the curtailment of its autonomy, of its Bengali nationhood and in extreme cases, of its racial destiny. Here, the more visible and hence “public” aspects of the Bengali culture, namely Rabindrasangeet and Durgapuja bridges the divide between the centre and the state; hence Bollywood and non Bengali actress plays a protagonist as one married to a Bengali and Amitabh Bachchan sings a Tagore song.

Sujoy Ghosh admits unabashedly that he uses Satyajit Ray’s format of filming; indeed one can see the liberal use of the camera in the style of Ray in Joy Baba Felunath, a superhit children’s film. The advantage of this Ray film is that it uses the skittle alleys and slip lanes of Benares sometimes teeming with crowds and at times utterly deserted and sometimes hustling with the hectic pace of street food and unknown occupations in order to carve out in relief crimes that can only emanate out of the city and not be merely located in it. The suspense and the thrill of Kahaani is not so much in the investigation alone, but in the pursuit of a crime, as yet unknown to us but possible only because of the way the city of Kolkata seams within its fold the medley of daily pursuit of  everyday life. The film reveals to us the world of Kolkata, a city cosmopolitan because of its ability to absorb a vast sea of humanity accommodating everyone also produces crime and anonymity. The face of adaptability is the police, a clear advertisement punch line, shown as the set of a much publicized “shenshitive” anthromorphs; while the truth is quite to the contrary.

Sujoy Ghosh then uses Kahaani to project Kolkata to a wider world and hence the Durga Puja and the Rabindrasangeet renditioned mellifluously with the right gayaki by Amitabh Bachchan notwithstanding his poor accent. This is the Kolkata where the “world” i.e. the rest of India descends, succeeds and learns to appreciate and respect the ethos of a city so far looked down for its lack of wealth but now emergent as a leader in culture, ethos and civilization. Kolkata as civilization is the new cultural project of both the intellectual and the new political incumbent in the state.

Shrijeet Mukherjee’s film 22shey Shrabon has more to do with the city’s internal contradictions; a rising Bengali intelligentsia freed from a thirty four year old and two and a half generation of cultural ennui now wakes to new freedom even if that is of mayhem and chaos into searching for its own concepts rather than be dictated as poor imitations of countries beyond the borders namely Russia and China. In this new awakening Kolkata rediscovers its poetry; the city’s crux is not about an image that it will project to the world outside for investments and enterprise but about its own self, its divides, its despair and its hopes to mend its fractures. Shrijeet’s Kolkata is a city in deep meditation over its own self; its future as one that will emerge from within itself. The protagonist of this movie says this over and over again; the solution to the mystery will emerge in the drawing room, in my head, through rumination and reflection, through senses culled from the deep insides of a mutable memory. This is in sharp contrast to Kahaani’s protagonist, one who explores the city’s chaos to find an order but is herself extremely well ordered and well ensconced in her consciousness. The protagonist of 22shey Shrabon is all confused, confounded, and struggles within himself to emerge to light. In fact all the characters in 22shey.. are like this, struggling in their own confusions to emerge into illumination; the splurge of TMC symbols show this anxiety, the new politics is about an internal struggle within darkness to seek light. Kahaani is much better off; it is about projecting Kolkata to the outside world and while its protagonist is a woman married to a Bengali, the crime against the city is committed by outsiders, Parsis, Jews, Christians, South Indians and the like. The Muslim outsider from northern India is a pretentious fool made use of; the clever ones are Bengal’s own sons, the Kolkata police and of course, the protagonist because of her Durga like courage she has to be one, who if not born a Bengali, is one by marriage and hence by spirit.

I favour 22shey Shrabon.

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Har Team Mein Ek Hi Goonda

Posted on April 13, 2012 by secondsaturn

Didi has done it again; she has turned against those who had supported her. Mamata Banerjee seems to have a penchant for doing this, turning her rage against the very people who helped her grow, emerge, consolidate and win; a strange affliction especially in a person who has to turn to the “peepul” over and over again for votes. The recent thrashing of the Nonadanag protestors is a point in the case. Yet one wonders what did the APDR imagine, that they could protest, rouse the rubble and raise voices and Sardar bahut khush hoga kya, sabaasi dega kya? It is Mamata who like Gabbar controls the den; in her world she is the boss, a la Caesar Milan the famous Dog Whisperer who says that one has to be a pack leader and dog lovers are poor pack leaders. The mistake that many make about Mamata is that in her presence they can assume to lead the pack; when she is in charge she is the leader and just one strays out of the pack, the leader must bark it back and in cases of the more recalcitrant ones, the leader catches those by the neck and shakes them into obedience. Seven years of dog walking in the forest parks of Delhi has shown this to me. Mamata is that perfect pack leader. Better be totally disciplined in her kingdom, otherwise you are a conspirer against the State. Mamata’s world seems paranoid, sensitive to criticism, thin skinned and easily alerted into an offence for defense. Is Mamata being constructed as a brat by perceptions that completely miss her logic?

I noticed Mamata with Singur and Nandigram and that was when she was nearly forty years old in active politics. For forty years she has walked lonely and solitary, she has lived in exile, almost in anonymity, unseen and unspoken about. All these years whenever she has been elected she has almost always been given a Ministry of Cabinet rank; she has resigned her Ministry at the drop of a hat; many say she is irresponsible but she also has never shown any attachment to office. Political parties have gone after her; she has never sought favours with any. In her long years of politics, she many not have a bound script for her agenda nor has a documented ideology but on a case by case basis, she has always spoken her own mind, her own convictions without caring who has heard her and much less who has supported her. I was disgusted with her when she raised her voice against Dhananjay Chatterjee’s hanging; a crime absolutely unpardonable and though I am against the death sentence I had no doubt that the offence was the rarest of the rare and if there is a death sentence in the country then the offender in this case deserves it. Much later as I read through the case papers on the Internet, I find a gaping hole in the witness accounts; my long hours of watching Adalat and CID has tuned me to the nuances of examination of evidence. If the incriminating evidence was a blood smeared shirt then why did no one see him wearing the shirt when he came out of Parekh’s flat; if he had changed his clothes then why did no one notice him carrying a packet? Surely, the DNA test not being done, there are reasons to suspect that the sentencing was not fool proof. My point is that Mamata did not speak through her hat, she must have noticed something.

In Damayanti Sen’s case, I was sad that such a bright young woman officer had to leave; but unfortunately she in the height of her enthusiasm did something an officer should never do; talk to the press that was glorifying her. Many years ago when Field Marshall Manekshaw claimed credit for the Bangladesh War in a press conference, Mrs Gandhi sent him a warning and the mighty soldier immediately apologized, profusely. Ms Sen was abrogating office discipline and that too when she really had investigated nothing; she followed no procedure of medical examination, the offenders were known to the victim, she merely went ahead and arrested them from their respective addresses provided by the victim. There was actually no detective work, no analysis, and no investigation. Ms Sen, an upright and a sensitive officer rightly said that medical examination is not needed to establish rape, but given the circumstances of it being past midnight and the gentlemen in question being trusted friends of the woman, one requires more restraint in projecting the crime as being one committed against women. It is not the same as a woman being abducted and raped while on her way home from work, or out all alone to fetch medical help for an ailing parent. Ms Sen was all flushed with her maiden achievement which was actually not so much of an achievement and flashed it to defy the government. It is our problem if we never knew of Mamata; but she is actually a political class and she acted like a true politician in crushing a bureaucrat secretly hungry for publicity. Ms Sen would never have taken this liberty with a Jayalalitha, or a Nitish Kumar or a Deve Gowda; but with regard to Mamata, Ms Sen thought her as vernacular, a maid servant class, poor, un English and hence powerless and malleable. Ms Sen went out weeping for taking Hitler Didi for granted.

In case of Kabir Suman, and now Koushik Sen and others, those who were out of favour during the Left Rule fantasized a new role of political importance in the new government. The intellectuals desire for power is a special moment of fascism which swept through Europe in the early twentieth century, a moment when intellectuals who no longer control the means of production and finding themselves at the bottom of the heap vis-à-vis the capitalist class, where in the earlier centuries they had come from the bourgeoise class leading the industrial revolution. Intellectuals like Heidegger and Nietzsche and before him Kant and Hegel were instances of such individuals like our present day Mahashweta Devi et al. Nonadanga slum resettlement was a place where they united to stake claims to a greater share in the government; I knew of this plan of the APDR right at the time of Singur episode because one of its leaders invited me there and I spent an entire day looking around the resettlement area. I do not believe that the displaced can be resettled; a displacement is a displacement. Resettlement is a displacement in itself. The greater part of the Nonadanga resettlement was that people lost their livelihoods and faced enormous trouble. Expectedly no one wanted to come to this colony; my own displacement from south Delhi and resettlement in a Haryana suburb has thrown my life out of gear, made me a different person. I think that I know. Similarly there were various places from where the displaced persons protested and all led by the APDR. The APDR is misguided, too drunk on power with too little patience to acquire it. They treated Mamata as one who they could control and command, she being grammatically incorrect in English and her accent in Bengali had difficulties in producing cultivated intonations of the rophola. Through her the APDR willed power thinking her government as a power vacuum. Murderous rage erupts to show who the boss is; one needs politicians for democracies to survive for how can play cricket without the ball?

Singur and Nonadanga are not the same in Mamata’s eyes though to us who believe in human and civil rights both are cases of loss of livelihood. But what was Mamata defending in Singur and what did she offend in Nonadanga? Much as we like to believe that she was on the side of the sarbohara, we do not notice that the Singur battle was also a property battle. Too many people wrote on Singur without actually visiting the homes and the people, too many people saw the outer shell and then fitted their own theories of movements and protests. What was the discourse behind the Singur protest; we all may eventually give up our land, the farmers said but we want to part with it at our will, our choice and our decision at the best prices. If we are alienated of land today then we lose our hold on the future value of the asset. Singur’s battle was a battle over property; where the small owner resisted the bigger land shark, the Tatas in this case, albeit in the guise of putting up an industry. In case of Nonadanga, it is the poor, the marginalized, the homeless and the stray that moves into the shadows of the palaces to seek shelter. The slums are asylums from the economic distress and political mayhem in Bengal villages; how is it possible that the refugees of development now face the same circumstances that had uprooted them, is it not the same as the famous Kishore Kumar song, the water that quenches the fire has now become the inflammable source that conflagrates?

It is not so much against the protests that Mamata has wielded her stick, it is a stick that she brandishes out to cower the APDR to submission. Those who thought her as backward and not wanting capitalism and hence imagined her to be a puppet to such theories has now the rude shock; one tight slap across your face, educated or no educated, artist or no artist, I am the boss. She has shown that there is no power vacuum in Bengal which the APDR or the Congress will rush to fill. Bengal has a government, a CM, a very rough one at that. Like SRK’s famous dialogue of Chak De, every team can have only one goonda and I am that goonda, the only one for the team, Chak De Phatte.

In her election manifesto she had promised that she will make Kolkata like London; I know that she will. What I fear in Mamata is not her inabilities to fulfill her promise, but her ability to do exactly what she has set out to do. She has a will to power and in her way she has no tolerance for doubt. On the very afternoon when the police beat up citizens over Nonadanga, humiliated intellectuals, the CM was addressing a group of children. She said that no one will ever know you for your despair; everyone will know you for your hopes. Ruchir Joshi in his book on Poriborton tells us of Mamata’s hyperactive mind and energetic body; she has enormous amount of energy and with this super surplus energy she has only remained in anonymity and ignominy over the long forty years. What has she done in the long decades of exile. In her own interview she says that she has walked, travelled, conversed and listened in all the streets and lanes of Bengal, all homes of the people, in the city of mirrors she has grown to know each of her neighbours, arhsi nogorer porshider ami jone jone chini. No Bengali is unknown to her. It is from this vantage point that she now plays her game of eliminating her enemies, the contenders to her Empire. It is an imperial game that Mamata is playing for if Kolkata should be London, the government too will have to be British.

Mamata is not a new incumbent; she is a seasoned politician and despite her walks in Nandigram, she remains a quintessential mainstream politician who uses the elections to come to power. She is also the least manipulative politician of our times, one who does not disguise her moves; if she does not like something she tells you on your face then and there. Not a single of her moves has any shade of inhibition or restraint; she does so without any heed to what such actions appear to the civil society. Whatever you may accuse her of, it cannot be doublespeak. Since we do not speak from the ground and talk in terms of ideologies which are universals hegemonising particulars, we assumed that because of Singur Mamata will treat Nonadanga kindly. Never imagine so; even before Nonadanga fell to the APDR, Mamata never met them. She held out that this was a slum that had to be in Nonadanga and that there was no going back to the canal. She never entertained Nonadanga’s needs because she never wanted to take up the case; she took up the cases of Singur and Nandigram. Please notice that in both cases she is defending property and not standing against it; in Singur she defended the farmer’s property, in Nonadanga she defended the State property, eminent domain!

Whenever I see Mamata in her mercilessness, in her indifference to win friends, in her casualness in creating enemies, her disregard for rewards, her comfort with defeat, I realize that hers is a biography that is today the most marginalized, the most attacked, relegated to the bottom of the heap. A single woman, an individual outside any kind of institutions, poor, socially not in the high echelons, a category who everyone resists inviting over for meals (my married cousins never invite me as an individual and on occasions my friends’ and cousins’ husbands have abused me to the point of being physical because they think that I am spoiling their wives by making them confident), a woman because she is a woman a man’s world cannot believe that she speaks sense ( the problem with women scientists is not that they have to manage home and work but their observations are taken as not being scientific). With these things loaded against her at every step where the world has always wanted to control, discipline and punish such a woman if ever she takes a free stride (my FB friends’ comments at Mamata shows how every move of hers is examined and derided even if they are only routine matters of the government), Mamata can rise up to any kind of bullying, whether of the CPM, or Congress, or the APDR, or the refugees, a category to which she herself belongs, or the Tatas, or Horsho, the aspiring Neotia. In the driving seat, behind the wheels, it is her.

In Mamata Banerjee’s autobiography there is an interesting anecdote which to my mind constitutes her views of the world. It seems that the Haldars of Kalighat refused to accept a sari which her mother had asked to be draped around the idol saying that it was too plain. Mamata nonetheless handed the sari over and left the temple. In the afternoon on her way back home she dropped by the temple and was amazed to see that the very same plain sari was draped around the Goddess. When she inquired how was it that the saree that was rejected in the morning was up there in the noon? The Haldar told her in exasperation, what to do, not a single sari beside yours came for Ma today. This is the crux of Didi; she has given you a sari to wear; keep it aside and wait for anything better to come your way. If there is another wear it by all means, but if there is none…

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Dastaan-e-Ghare Baire

Posted on February 29, 2012 by secondsaturn

Dastangoi, is a medieval form of storytelling devised by the Prophet’s father-in-law, Amir Hamza Esquire and contains stories of magic, fairies, truant students and naïve maulavis. The form has been revived in modern India through Danish Hussain and Amar Farooqui. The stories are told by the duo without props or sound effects and in chaste Urdu. The intonation, the phraseology, the syntax and the humour of the dastaan presenters resemble the courtly culture of the elite narrators and their refined audiences in the highly urbanized setting with the scent of spring. There are silver wide mouthed water bowls kept alongside the fat volumes of the dastaans while Dan and Farooqui sit on thick mattresses buttressed by round and long pillows covered in crisp white covers telling us stories of the modern times, the Partition, the sedition and now of Tagore’s novel Ghare Baire with the flavor of Amir Hamza travelling through the sands of Arabia and the streets of Byzantine. I never quite followed why Tagore ever wrote a novel like Ghare Baire; written in the form of diaries with autobiographical voices of the three characters ( rather Chinese style) around which the plot revolves on a story of betrayal and adultery. There are two men, each of who represents the two kinds of characters and hence two kinds of ideologies and one woman who decides each man’s worth. The problem of reading too much in school is that not everything gets absorbed and I for one could never make any sense of this novel of the great poet. I watched Ray’s film Ghare Baire and was so disappointed with the novel that I never returned to read it ever again; Bimala seemed to be a confused sort, Nikhilesh, a saint and Sandip a villain as the film halted, faltered and then rolled off. It was a film made in colour, a medium that Ray could not handle very well except in his children’s films and it was made during the later years of his career when like many of his ilk; he had lost a clear vision of his onward journey. On the other hand, it was a novel written by Tagore in his matured years and like many of his kind, he seemed to have developed a new clarity in his advanced years. Ghare Baire must be located in multiple texts and one such text is the cinema. Tagore explored every art form and stopped just short of cinema; Ghare Baire is that penultimate zone from which were Tagore to live on, he would have certainly graduated into cinema. The cinema in India was not merely an art form, it was born out of discourses that were to address issues far deeper that any kind of art had ever done before; it was a medium that accompanied us in our civilizational journey from tradition to modernity, from ahistory towards history, into a nation state with Western institutions, with changes in family and meaning of marriage, the discovery of a new form of individualism. Ghare Baire addressed such issues, far beyond the merely personal, or simply national, into the idea of citizenship where the person and the nation intertwined, intermingling the home and the world, the private and the public. The dastangois explored Ghare Baire in the spirit of cinema; they were quick to feel the exact points where the pulse beat in the novel, namely over what the ideal of womanhood should be in the context of modernity where women were to inhabit the world as much as the home, where the balance between the two lay and what kind of men women should prefer and how they must define their own femininity vis-à-vis how they define masculinity. Tagore extended the politics of gender, the construction of gender ideal types, the limits of both, their obligations towards each other and one another into the larger politics of the nation as if to show the mindless pursuit of nationalism as aggressive anti incumbency to have emanated in a strong sex drive which has only hedonism and competition at its heart instead of the calm of creative meditation. The two drives, one meditative, reflective and creative and the other glamorous, macho and attractive makes Bimala swing from one to the other. In Ray’s film I got the impression that Bimala was less endowed with a mind of her own and when she was set free by Nikhilesh to explore the world as she wished to she made the mistake of choosing Sandip over him, a mistake that cost her dearly and eventually widowed her imprisoning her back into the home in a far worse state than before; the taste of the world that she got through her husband was nullified in his death. It was important for Nikhilesh to die in the film because it helped Ray to position Bimala in a set of contrasts, powerful as wife and powerless as a vicious adultress now widowed. There seemed to a moral judgment in the film; a growing conservatism of a master who in his fall years found little to look forward to. In the Dastaan presentation Bimala is not helpless; she is a judge who is constrained by her limited experience to evaluate the apparent. Nikhilesh, by bringing her into the world extends her into being a person in her own right from one who merely has the outward signs of modernity by way of style and fashions taught to her by her English governess. As genuinely modernized soul it is important for Bimala to be able to assess tradition and modernity, the merits of being at home and in the outside world, the need to accommodate both, the ability to differentiate between ingenuity and glamour, between a reasoned citizenship and an impassioned patriot. Nikhilesh has ambitions for Bimala; she should be able to accommodate her home in a world which she must decide to shape. She must be an informed decision maker; she must exercise a sense of agency, a sensibility of one in command rather than someone who is an unreflective indolent and flows with the ideology unquestioningly. To the best of my understanding this was also Tagore’s authorial intent. Ghare Baire was written in 1916 with heavy doses of Vidyapati’s verses. Vidyapati’s full name was Vidyapati Thakur and he lived and wrote in Mithila, an area close to where Rabindranath Tagore’s family also came from. Tagore, an anglicized version of Thakur has roots tracing back to the erudite tradition of Mithila and to the Vaishnav tradition of Tripura and Manipur. Many of Tagore’s poems and dance drama are located in these areas of the north east. It is possible that Tagore imagined himself to have been linked to his hoary ancestor, Vidyapati and his novel Ghare Baire may therefore be a fictionalized account of the episode of the poet’s illicit love with the Queen Lakshmi. Ghare Baire too has the zamindar Nikhilesh seriously ill in the end just as the King Shiva Singha in Vidyapati’s case. In 1937, Debaki Bose captures these episodes in his film Vidyapati produced by New Theatres, again a company formed by Pramathesh Barua, a zamindar from the very same areas that Tagore writes of in so many of his poems. Debaki Bose writes his dialogues using the arguments and the tone of discourse from Ghare Baire. Satyajit Ray’s film Ghare Baire invariably draws a comparison with Vidyapati and to my mind performs poorly. One has to understand Ray’s remarkable success with Charulata and his falling out of sorts with Ghare Baire. If one watches Ray’s documentary on Tagore one is struck by Ray’s centering of the poet on Jibonsmriti, a kind of an autobiography in which Tagore looks at the world mainly through the eyes of a child. As a child, Tagore uses the opening of his windows to peer into the world outside, to catch its sights and sounds, to let his imagination run wild into the shades of a huge banyan tree and the water in the pond beyond. This is exactly how Charulata watches the world, this is also how Ray also sees and this is how, as audiences we also watch his films. Charulata yearns for the world, trapped at home. Bimala is fine at home, knowing that as her world, who becomes homeless in the world. It is her challenge to rediscover herself in the world so that her home may expand to include both, the home and the world. Ghare Baire, unlike Charulata is about the outer world, a novel written when Tagore is amidst the vastness of the Padma in Kushthia; it is not a movement inside the private space. Ray’s films are overwhelmingly about the private space that is shaken when encountered with slightest stimuli. Ghare Baire requires the exercise of agency in the public sphere; it is a film about the public space, a space where popular cinema is located. This is why, a popular film maker Debaki Bose addressed the issues of Bimala through the Queen Lakshmi far better in Vidyapati than did Ray in Ghare Baire. Unlike Ray, no popular film maker would want to handle Charulata as their protagonist. Bimala is punished in Ray’s films when she becomes the very same image of her sister-in-law, a category that she has always feared to fall into. This is so similar to Aparna Sen’s film, Paroma, released a year ahead (1984) of Ghare Baire (1985). A few years earlier, in 1977, Hrishikesh Mukherjee cast Chhaya Devi in Alaap, a much older actress now in what the director imagined would have eventually become of Queen Lakshmi in the later years of her life. Dastan storytellers come from the culture that tries to seek a public space, a cultural unity that cuts across specific cultures in India despite using a very culturally rooted tool of the Dastangoi. Theirs is a format which is closer to cinema in India and hence as a theme they could handle Ghare Baire far better than what Ray did. Kudos !! Congrats !! Thanks to them I understand Ghare Baire and Tagore much better than before.

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Salman Khurshid Demands Pakistan

Posted on February 25, 2012 by secondsaturn

My friend, Kavita Chowdhury sends me an interview with Salman Khurshid taken by her from Uttar Pradesh. Salman Khurshid has promised a Muslim quota within the already existing reserved categories of backward classes. While this should have been read as an attempt to break the caste unity that has emerged as the support base of the incumbent BSP, Salman’s stormy rhetoric favouring the Muslim minority is being interpreted as a cry towards another Pakistan. UP has been a hot bed of communal riots, time and again riots have spilled blood and hate among communities otherwise united in similar states of economic marginalization. Besides, Salman Khurshid is a bit of a shocker because liberal Muslims hate nothing more than the Muslim quota, which can escalate into yet another rallying point for the Muslim masses to demand another Pakistan. Liberal Muslims know it only too well that the demand for Pakistan had deep roots in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh but due to the geographical anomalies such demands could not be granted. Now with Salman Khurshid’s tirades and in the context of virtual worlds taking over the concrete geography, resurgence of Pakistan is imminent in the quota politics. This is at least how the media wants us to understand things. But I see something different.

I am intrigued by Mayawati and her politics. While I have not exactly taken to her as a virgin in the same way I take Mamata but somewhere these “girls” help me see beyond what is merely apparent. Mayawati, like Mamata has found a new pulse beating in her constituency and has been quick to pick it up; she has matured and reaped that fruit in Dalit politics what Ambedkar had merely sown. It is the same politics as of Jinnah, the politics of Partition. Mayawati has sent out the right kind of cues to global greedy finance in her development of the real estate, in her formula one race, in her projects of megacities and even in her aides being held for graft. In all of this Mayawati is waving her handkerchief out of the window to tell international finance to fly in and settle on her sill. While the world may continue to occupy the Wall Street and its likes, the global finance with its Soros and his ilk will identify Uttar Pradesh despite its reek of dung and smoke of sugar cane husks that here is geography willing to get into the flesh trade of prostituting its natural and human resources. It is here that she is the diametric opposite of Mamata; for the latter holds on pristinely to her assets while the former, flaunts the same. It is the only way out for the Dalits; Dalits who have migrated the most, Dalits who have given their bodies for assault, the very same Dalit will now be pimps in trading out sovereignty, natural resources, land to drive out those very people who own them and by whose very ownership the entire category of marginalized Dalithood was created in the first place. Mayawati’s development model is thus dispossession; Dalits never owned anything and they never quite gained by economic production. Rather they had much to gain through migration into big cities; Maya thus makes mega cities, mega malls, mega marts, metro rails to create the Dalit jobs, sweeping, swapping, and cleaning and to accommodate them in cities that are bigger and better than the ones the Hindu mainstream could ever create.

Rahul Gandhi’s defense of farmers at Bhatta Parsul, perhaps in the manner of Mamata’s Singur politics only went to vindicate Maya’s stand that mainstream politics has always being on the side of the land owner. Dalits want land alienation and displacement because that is the only way the society can be leveled; the Dalit discourse is not one of participation, it can never be, because once Dalit elites get into the mainstream, they disown their lesser brethrens. The middle class model can only be alienating for the Dalit as a block; opportunities of reservation have been too located in a politics that has only condescended but never centralized the Dalit issue. Mayawati’s politics is a politics of hanky waving, sending off hints to those clever in the game of cues; the global finance who looks for politicians who can produce moles, who do not adhere to ideals of sovereignty or socialism, those who are clearly willing to create wedges in the national space by playing one constituency against the other. This is the very same politics of Jinnah, the politics of the Partition. The Congress must have realized this much later and all of a sudden one day, hence the launch of a new force in the form of Priyanka and hence the free hand to Salman Khurshid to revive once more the communal card of divisive politics and demand a separate constituency for the Muslim minorities a la the Muslim League.

 

 

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Scheming Men, Stupid Women

Posted on February 22, 2012 by secondsaturn

Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in his essay Manushyaphal (Humans as Fruits) said that a woman was very much like a coconut, naïve and sweet when young (youthful and desirable by men) and a hard nut to crack when ripened into post menopause. However, where women resembled coconuts the most were in their brains, which were only in two halves. What these halves were he did not specify but he said that whatever it was women could only hold half as much as a man at a point of time. He also analysed the novels of Jane Austen and said that they were only in two halves. I fumed with fury when I read this essay; fortunately for me I had, by then read most of his novels otherwise I would have stopped reading him altogether. Later on in my life as a Jane Austen fan I discovered that Bankim was actually right but to my mind, his observation was actually a compliment to the English author. Austen writes as two minds; one from the perspective of women terribly constrained and giving in to the male order, another voice emerges out of the novel, jeering cynically at the stupidity and meaninglessness of it all. It is the second voice, a kind of a smothered one that helps crash Austen’s novels into a nothingness and a lie; this nullity of the novel that comes as the end is the source of her aesthetic appeal across countries, cultures and over generations. Later extensions and extrapolations of Jane Austen’s novels are built around this collapse, for instance PD James’s work, Death Comes To Pemberley sabotages the edifice on which Pride and Prejudice is built. Jane Austen has been my inspiration of being studious and never marrying; I wanted to be like her, able to see and see through. I have imagined her saying to me that one cannot be a part of the system and critique it, one need to stand outside it. Therefore, the first duty of a scholar is to be able to stand as a renouncer of rewards, acceptability, approbation and comfort in order to understand wholly a world that constrains her. I cannot be a critic until and unless I abandon my position of interest, a Marxian maxim raised to superfinery in Althusser. It is from this perspective that I wish to address questions around feminism that confuse and confound us.

The crux of feminism is that women are second grades in the world without access to equal opportunities as men. The reason for the discrimination against them is their sexuality, so far used in the reproduction of the species. In the public sphere, a man does better than a woman because of the absence of reproduction in the former and the presence of the same in the latter; in the private sphere, the older woman who is over her reproductive functions is more powerful than the young woman who still have to get into the sex act. Sexuality tied to reproduction is therefore a basis of the social discrimination against women. The invention of the contraceptive helped women in this sphere; the progress of modernity in any way made reproduction less desirable among classes who gained by the spread of the capitalist order; the poor who were marginalized by capitalism and lived off its crumbs reproduced speedily to have more hands with which to pile up the crumbs. Anyway, among the entrenched middle class, the social vanguard of liberal democratic states, women were, for the first time drawn to the work sphere. The modern state with its interventions in the society helped protect the weak from the arbitrariness of the strong, monopolised force and set up institutions that promised human liberty. The woman, in the eyes of the man emerged as a new source of competition, protected by law as an equal and upheld by the courts as an individual beyond her class, income, gender, religion.

But there were processes at work and none other than Habermas could see this; an expanding social sphere meant the emergence of a social class, which much later sociologists called as the lower middle class, a class somewhere in between the exploited labour and the owner of capital, a manager, a clerk, in custody of the capitalists’ interests against the worker but not owning the moolah or its reproductive powers. The clerk thus is a compromised person, a reproducer of knowledge rather than an innovator and it is the expansion of his class that ultimately takes the reason out of public space and reduces the middle class from an intelligentsia into a consumer. Consumerism means conservatism; in order to consume more, one has to accumulate, if not capital, then wages. While one would assume that such a consumerism would drive women to work in droves, but this was to happen much later after the oil shock and not in the middle of the past century. What happened then was media, women’s magazines, the Woman and Home in England and Cosmopoliton in America which decided how women should cook, how they should furnish homes, how they should look and above all how they should learn the craft of not only not letting husbands stray but also how to hook men. When I went to college in Kolkata, second hand book stalls had stacks of these magazines, albeit worn out through being in use over at least two generations. Feminists never despair at women have to fit into the desirata of the male gaze. What feminist scholars never inquired is that the middle class, now an overwhelmingly lower middle class lay value to marriage as a cementing factor and accumulation of social capital and of savings, if not of productive capital. Though women had property and inheritance rights, yet for a woman to claim equal pay for equal work was as yet a distant dream, a dream that was soured increasingly after the oil shock of 1973. The issues of equality dominated feminism rather than the magical jugglery of family and home.

It was not until the 1980’s that with the regime of outsourcing of manufacturing processes and the decline of manufacturing in the West that the family really tottered and toppled. The inconstancy of incomes, the compulsion of double incomes and the long hours of work in the service industry and the frequent lay offs subjected people to the will of the employer as never before. For women, armed with education and sexual liberation and with the era of Woman and Home images breathing down their necks to be good homemakers and the images of Cosmopoliton harassing them to look their seductive best, the situation became one of endless achievement. One had to be a super mom, a super wife, a super girlfriend, a super worker and in all this, feminism now sought the home and work balance. Women, breathless and exhausted perhaps had too little time to fight those things that held them back; they never noticed that in the race in the workplace, more than performance, amiability, congeniality, obliging nature, obedience and meekness did better to keep them in their jobs. The cost of independence was too much, the worth of compromise were substantial. Women’s politics defined now by compromise suddenly moved around their bodies.

The centrality of the body in the feminist discourse is to solve the major issue of her sexual need. Marriage, she understands with the kind of rights she has and with the kind of time saving gadgets she can afford is no longer important for a nice looking picture perfect home as repeatedly wagged in front covers of the magazines. What is now needed is to be able to keep her income flowing in, the workplace. As politics of women shifts primarily to the workspace, a space where discourses around workers rights are steadily being appropriated by HR practices, she suffers the terrible need to be accepted. Her spirit so released from her womb and her home, and even from the male altogether because of gay rights, has nonetheless compromises to make in the office. The office now pushes women into a certain kind of make up, a certain kind of clothes. This is what Arundhati Ghosh, my FB friend writes on her status as not been able to have a normal cold cream because everything is either fairness or an age defying product. I have a similar experience while buying cardigans; they were all stocked for women below twenty five with the twenty five inch waist line.

One can talk of freedom from marriage, for there is a possibility of standing beyond it. But in the context of the jobless growth driven by the service sector, it is difficult for the woman to stand out of the productive sphere. Hence women readily fall into the trap of having to look a certain way, having to dress and negotiate in a certain way, all either satisfying the male gaze or removing her from a straight competition with the male colleagues. Feminists concern over the body precisely comes from an arena where she was promised a level playing field that looked beyond the body, beyond gender into an anonymous space where performance, qualifications and merit mattered. It is this space that the shrinking employment and male competition that today oppresses the woman the most; reducing her to someone who cannot afford to do without male acceptance and approbation. Family network, social contacts, circulation of information are controlled by men and constitute a vicious circle; because men dominate the work world, they dominate these circulations and because they dominate such circulations, women must play their game to be in the know of things and to remain in the circuit. A woman needs to pub and party, stay late nights, have dinner meetings, travel, socialize and so on; sometimes more than men to prove her point. Seen from the point of view of the male gaze, this is an independent woman with an independent life style, free with men; tweak this image a little bit and remove her as a competitor of the man, one gets a call girl. Twist a little from the point of an independent woman; she becomes the asexual, hermit like amazon.

There are two levels of dichotomy here; one the separation of the woman from her embeddedness in domesticity and biological reproduction and hurtling her into the space of work and the other is her entrapment in the very work space, where she shorn of the dignity of her reproduction and even marriage and shooed away as a competitor of the male is the most ideally constructed as one who is free with her sex, more dignified than the run of the mill prostitute, a kind of a sophisticated call girl, a high level escort and some such terms. Women who do the side business of call girls are rising at every level of the society; sometimes with active support of families who see in such extra curricular activities the source of a girl’s dowry. In this avatar of hers, a woman is the best positioned in terms of social rewards, another term for male favour. North Indian society is particularly moved by this trend; it is easy to see girls beautiful by their genetic endowments, tall and slim wear revealing clothes with the right kind of giggles and mobile phones travel on the metro. I am educated by participants in the trade that the bag and the phone, the colour of the nail polish and the brand of the bag are cues for the right kind of pick up. This is the ideal image of a girl; it is in this image that she earns the most brownie points. It is not a surprise that it is in North India that the most foetal deaths happen, most girls go missing from here; sociologists have never asked what the main reason is; it is the impossibility of a moral life for a girl if she survives into adolescence.

When the Kolkata rape victim is rushed to be lauded by the CPIM, apart from being a party in opposition has always been pathetically patriarchal and along with that a host of my friends on FB men and women, I see this male shrewdness in upholding the image of a woman that all women of neoliberalism have stupidly jumped into. Positing the escort against the woman CM who shuns beauty and approval, who has risen solely on the dint of her own merit without a male in the horizon, and one with who no deal can be struck along the lines of her gender, is the society’s declared war on the independent woman, who by the dint of her capabilities has made it to the top.

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Fatal Flaws of Feminism

Posted on February 21, 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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Death Comes To Pemberley – P.D.James, 2011

Posted on January 22, 2012 by secondsaturn

For persons like me who are die hard Pride and Prejudice fans and love PD James, and look at texts critically, Death Comes To Pemberley is a dream come true. PD James is an established detective fiction writer who is not running out of ideas and hence her choice at a retake on Pride and Prejudice is not like a Bollywood remake of cult films when directors take the lazy way out by recasting older milestones. If she has chosen the immortal Pride and Prejudice, it is with a purpose; like a detective herself she has pried into what seems to be perfect and utopian and looked for dark shadows that lurk otherwise held through ages as the perfect romance and the perfect marriage between Elizabeth and Darcy. The idea of the novel, Death Comes To Pemberley is not so much to write another detective novel by merely using Pemberley as a backdrop as much as it is to internalize the Austenalia, write in the author’s own voice and while doing this recover through the very same doubts that Jane Austen herself infuses into her novels while closeting her characters into happy homes and warm hearths.

Jane Austen’s novels on hindsight are in fact the perfect setting of crime. Detectives often do best when set in enclosed spaces; either it is the idyllic English village depopulated by war conscriptions, or by death by epidemics, or just abandoned as farming economies collapse or sometimes they are luxury cruises on the Nile or the elaborate properties like the Hollow. In these villages where nothing seems to ever happen or in those palatial abodes where all is always well, crime seems to thrive the best as a contrast to utmost normalcy and serenity. Jane Austen, to a crime fiction writer inhabits just those worlds that are as listless nothings as the ones mentioned above. Her novels are therefore natural settings for crime fictions.

Pride and Prejudice is the pinnacle of Jane Austen; no wonder that it has survived the best. Its characters are sharp profiles out of Sense and Sensibility and then drop off to emerge as Emma. Only Persuasion purports to be different despite the all is well ending. In all these novels, the author gives us a distinct feeling that she is writing in two voices, one conformist and the other cynical. PD James catches the latter and then rewrites Pride and Prejudice by extending it to the present work under discussion, namely Death ..

Is the present novel under discussion as being a sequel to Pride and Prejudice? A sequel is an aftermath of the events presupposed to have been concluded within a particular piece of work and in whose resolution the author of the sequel is dissatisfied with. The sequel says that the story is far from being over and that there is unresolved karma whose loose ends need to be tied up. The Uttar Ramayan is a case in the point because it explores Rama’s fragility of mind, something that sticks out like a sore thumb even as celebrations explode in Ayodhya at the conclusion of Rama’s exile and his victory over Ravana in what is said to be the final war. Death at Pemberely tries to address unresolved issues, whether Lydia is all that wrong after all, whether Elizabeth Bennett at all has the perfect romance, was Darcy as much of an idol as he is made out to be. To these questions that arise as fatal doubts to readers like me who read Pride and Prejudice whenever and wherever I find the opportunity, PD James has tried to write a reply.

PD James raises the fatal doubt over Pride and Prejudice, was the Elizabeth and Darcy romance as great as it has been accepted by us as one? It had none of the free flowing spontaneity of Georgina’s or the hopeless head over heels syndrome of Bingley and Jane’s. Hers was a romance based more on a sense of challenge, ensconced in repartee and resistance, the last of which emanates from a denial of attraction. Elizabeth was also fighting herself when she disliked Darcy, a way to perhaps tell that she better distance this hopelessly attractive man before he rejects her advances. She could not have loved Darcy for what he was because they really never interacted. Theirs was a romance of inklings and not of intimacy and perhaps a free intimacy was not possible since there was an overriding element of being overwhelmed. The marriage of Elizabeth to Darcy was the end of a long of arduous journey between two persons helplessly attracted to each other and yet fighting it within themselves to deny the allure. The marriage is such a neat and a tight conclusion that the reader can only imagine for the two as happily ever after; where does such a final and certain conclusion leave any room for speculation except as cracks that the marriage encounters. The cracks do appear in Elizabeth’s slight envy of Georgiana’s laughter in love, a state of free spirit that her romance has never known, a feeling that she quickly smothers down with her intensely rational and rationalizing self. Elizabeth immerses herself in her role as the incumbent mistress of Pemberley.One cannot but feel disappointed with such a cardboard cutout of Elizabeth but Gita and I felt that there could be no other way.

The other crack appears when we see Darcy as a non performer; apart from walks in the park and being a model husband, and a proper master of an inherited property, he really has little sense of agency. He almost slyly follows Elizabeth with his famous “eyes” and then approaches Elizabeth with a straight proposal for marriage without any effort at courtship. What he “arranges” for Lydia is because he has the reigns of Wickham in his own hands and he has money. There has been more activity around Bingley, Wickham and even Colonel Fitzwilliam than around Darcy. PD James insists in her carboardization of Darcy’s character that there never has been and nor can be any much more out of a man who is so well ensconced in his property and social class that he is entrenched into a deep passivity of fulfillment. Ditto same for Elizabeth after marriage.

One fantasizes that Elizabeth should have been the detective, snooping around, intuiting and then logically rationalizing. But this too is not to be. Elizabeth is too absorbed and preoccupied in her role of a mistress of Pemberley and the wife of a prize catch that she seems to have lost the personality traits amidst keeping up traditions such as Lady Anne’s Ball. She neither has the autonomy nor the leisure to hone her own personality after her dream marriage to a dream man, not so much because she loves him but because he is such a desire for other women nor so well aligned to the morals and manners of the contemporary society.

Wickham turns out to be just as one expects him to be; the story is not so much about Wickham really. Instead, the story is about Lydia, a woman who, by the dint of her devotion to a wild and hence attractive man as her husband, must face and continue to face ill consequences of her impassioned choice. I don’t think I noticed this nuance while reading the book. For me, this comes as an afterthought.

As a story of crime and detection was too straight-line, passive voiced and obvious and neat. The murderer after all turned out to be a man who would die a natural death and Wickham would be absolved of all charges; and the detection brought about through the practice of the confession. One wonders why PD James seems to have at all conceptualized this rather watered down story when she herself is such a renowned writer of crime fiction? This should not be an observation on the author but rather this is the question to be addressed.

In a manner of a detective let us look deep into the author and her present work. It is her intention to peer into Pride and Prejudice, into its world, inside Pemberley to look what is systematically pushed under the carpet. That hanging of a poor boy on false charges that absolved a gentleman makes us wonder whether it was after all not Colonel Fitzwilliam who was the killer, whether or not it was he who, being rejected twice once by Elizabeth and then by Georgiana did not take out his frustrations on a poor tenant’s daughter? Was Wickham, also like the executed poor boy an easy target, easier because of his inherent waywardness? The death of Wickham’s half sister brings into the story a sharp contrast with the genteel relation between Darcy and Georgiana and the passionate devotion of an older sister for her half brother. The devotion of a sister to a brother suddenly raises a doubt in my mind, whether Wickham was not the victim of a class war, because with a strongly devoted family behind him, his wonderful manners, his sharp mind and his charming and seductive ways, he could have moved up the social ladder and as easily slip into the upper echelons of the society, a la Eliza Do Little honed by Prof Higgins? Indeed Wickham and Lydia’s emigration to America a land known for its equality away from the class divided and class conscious England is a hint for us to pick up the real story that PD James is investigating, namely that of the cracks in the polished veneer of Pemberley.

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Eonomics Adda, French Toast, Chocolate Cake, Kebabs and the issue of FDI in Retail

Posted on December 17, 2011 by secondsaturn

I find scraps of overheard conversations, casual adda, heated arguments with amateurs provoke my thoughts better than reading through the tedious lines of non interactive curriculum. The “adda” over tea, cakes and kebabs at my cousin’s house last evening was over the FDI in retail. Cousin is a management person from India’s top of charts business school and accordingly has served as a CEO for several years till his recent retirement. For reasons of his training in management, he obviously supports the FDI in India’s retail business. His arguments in favour of the case are impeccable and assuring. On paper and logic, FDI in retail will help eliminate the middle man and given the scandal of onion, sugar and dal prices, it is expected that his margins when divided between the farmer and the consumer will help the former recover high prices and the latter afford discounts. The FDI would set up food stores across the country with their large capital base and what it would sacrifice by way of margins would be made up by volume. In fact the FDI can amass very large volumes of sales and this is the precise reason it can compromise on unit margins giving more to the producers and charging less for the consumers. On paper, there is nothing better than the FDI, a liberalized India’s answer to the decline of the PDS.

What then are the flipsides to this story? The problem with retail is that more than the price of goods, retail chains must carry within their costs of the real estate they occupy. The crux of a retail business is not sourcing, shelving and selling; it does its business to create a real estate value. On the one hand, departmental stores seek suburban properties to avoid rents in the city; on the other hand, they dare not go too far into the moors into the sparse population because they would lose customers. Large retail needs a certain frequency of footfalls for stocks to be sold before expiry dates. Retail stores must maintain certain level of stocks which requires a certain level of purchases, only possible in areas of relatively higher population density. A smart retail business CEO can alternatively think of smaller chains across the country; possible but that would increase the transport costs rather high. FDI in retail cannot compromise on the level of its profits because FDIs must be indifferent to the level of profits with respect to alternative avenues of investments; retail cannot afford to offer returns lower than what the FDI would have earned elsewhere. Hence whether in Mograhaat of Paschim Bangla or in the cities in Pennsylvania, investments should earn as much. This makes retail stores that come up with FDI money locate themselves within the limits of the city rather than in the obscure villages or district towns.

Within the city then FDI creates a new value for real estate and it is through the route of the real estate value that the local kirana shop in India gets displaced. Bill Quinn in his book on Walmart tracks down how the retail giant has changed the rules of the game for procurement, stocks and stores and even employment leaving everyone worse off than before. I am not so sure that in India this will quite be the case for Walmart’s lethal power will be absorbed and quelled in India’s chaotic diversity and inequality. Walmart cannot attack the local kirana shops the way it drove the Mom and Pop shops out by buying off their wares and selling them initially at a loss and then when the small shops disappeared, Walmart increased prices because it was a monopoly. In India, this is fortunately not the case but the kiranawallas are still displaced because of the push that outfits like Walmart bring forth. The local kirana, if it is owner run, suddenly discovers a new price for his retail outfit sells the space and exits the business just to be in the same relative position in the income distribution curve. This is how, an Arambagh, a retail chain financed by a poultry initiative in my locality of Dover Lane in Kolkata has displaced all the retail shops down the lane including the age old chemists! The kirana shop just another furlong down, rented out by my cousin mentioned above, has completely changed his wares. I used to get roasted peanuts for my father, locally produced and packed in cellophane; now he doles out a company packaged tin at ten times the price. He only keeps stock of exercise notebooks and notepads that are branded and hence four times the price of the stationery I used to live off all through my college days. In this way, my cousin’s shop keeping tenant has changed the commodity composition from an affordable bundle into a more expensive one thus trying to keep margins at par with Arambagh.

The shop on rent could have still kept cheap stocks inviting higher turnover, but due to the limitations of space and difficulty in acquiring more space due to the rise in real estate value, he maintains his level of stocks but increasing the value and margins on those stocks in order to be at par with the Arambagh store; he has to be at par with Arambagh otherwise he cannot source his stocks from the pool of wholesalers. In this way, whatever connections the local cottage industries had with the market are severed off. Interesting that the FDI really never asks the kiranawallahs to close down, they raise real estate prices through which the retail business is reorganized to sell high end products for luxury consumption of people in the higher brackets of income. In a localities of south Delhi like Hauz Khas and Green Park, one finds zip repairs, tailors, blanket cover makers, suitcase repairs, local barbers, plastic goods stockists, simple furniture stores selling packing wood shelves and folding writing tables disappear to yield spaces for Costa Coffees, Nokia mobiles, Madonnas and others most of which do not constitute a part of everyday consumption. My everyday life is disorganized, my routine gets upset at having nowhere to go if I have to fix the zip of my jacket or stitch my bag up. FDI in retail has a strange way of raising my levels of anxiety because life has become so disorganized around me with the disappearance of the support services I used frequently.

I have tried an interesting exercise; I carry the same list to the Matri Store inside Aurobindo Ashram complex and Big Apple in Hauz Khas and my bill in the former is at least a hundred rupee less every time. Retail shops do not sell cheap, they keep the relatively more expensive stuff so that even after discount you end up buying dear. Soaps like Rexona, Hamams are replaced by Doves and Pears, the cheaper toothpastes are replaced by the more expensive brands, so that even with dollops of discounts you end paying them more. The discount trick does wonder to convince a naïve mind that they are being very considerate. My grand aunt insists that she will arrange good quality rice at an affordable price for me from Big Apple but the store only sells bags of ten kilos. Bulk packaging is yet another way in which retail chains dupe the customers.

The proponents of FDI in retail insist that it gives a good deal to the farmers. Farmers lobby in India is indeed one of the main supporters of FDI in retail. The middlemen have fleeced them so much that for most farmers incomes from farms no longer keep them in the social strata that they were used to. The FDI sourcing helps them be free of the middlemen. However if the real estate prices in cities shoot through the roof and household income growths are slower than the price of real estate indices, farmers may face a stagnation in the prices at which the retail stores procure from them. They return to the starting position, having nowhere to go. Farmers growing coffee and tea for chains like Starbucks and Costa Coffee are tapped from all over the world; when Sri Lanka demands a better deal, the chains source from India. When Indian tea growers shut shop with rock bottom auction prices, they move to Africa and the cycle of robbing Peters to pay the Pauls go on. FDI in retail has a crucial link with real estate prices and it is through this link that they create all the confusions that there is to do.

 

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