Dusting During Lockdown

Posted on November 11, 2020 by secondsaturn

Ever since the lockdown I have taken passionately to sweeping and mopping floors of my homes in Faridabad and Kolkata. I visualise and plan the best ways to do the turns of the rooms, which order must I sweep them so that the dust collected by my broom finds the easiest passage to the dust pan. I have also visualised the corners in which dust collects and how best to reach them through ways more innovative than ever. The results have shown, floors look clean and feel soft. After this mammoth activity, I use the mop to clean the grills and here in lies the tale that I will tell today.

The house where my parents live was built by my grandfather in 1960, the same year as my birth. Fortunately for everyone my father is an only child and the house did not need to go to the builder. My mother has maintained it really well and this is one area where she has never compromised on finances. The house thus remains much as it was, except some renovations to get me a room to myself after my brother got married and claimed more space in the house. This story is therefore to tell the readers that the grills on the Windows have not been changed. I dust these grills, as old as me everyday. They remain as usual glossy and sleek. These are those flowers with impossible curves so that if you clean these with ordinary cloth both the cloth and the skin on your fingers can meet the same level of bruises.

But when I do the same exercise of dusting the grills in my Faridabad home, the grills tend to rust. These grills are only 15 years old and modern, straight lined in geometric designs and are so much easier to dust. Curved lines tend to rust more than straight lines, and the curved ones are older than the straight ones by 45 years, or three life cycles of an automobile. Then what happened? The quality of steel has seen a drastic deterioration over the long term so much so that people no longer trust steel. The substitution of steel by plastics, the tendency to use no steel in constructing pucca houses, the ongoing popularity of wood and new research on alloys to replace mild steel are signs that people trust steel less and less. The overwhelming use of stainless steel in place of mild steel in rural India is a point in the case. We are having a lower quality of steel by the day.

Then I also discovered that the helps in both places left the bottom of the cupboards and the back of the chairs undusted and unswept. As soon as I took to the broom and the mop suddenly the floors shone in a manner that I did not know that they could. I realised soon enough that as much as I took pride in my activity, servants hated it. I do not remember that sweeping and mopping was so resented by our servants in our childhood. This morning when I discovered that I had a bruise in my forearm and could not remember where I could have hurt myself, the maid readily told me that I hurt myself when I was in the act of cleaning. I notice that servants in either place do not care to remove even a mat to sweep the floor clean, let alone remove furniture and I think that they fear that they will hurt themselves or they will be strained. The problem is that the present generation is not attentive enough to do sweeping and mopping any more. Cleaning needs mental focus, one cannot clean stuff until and unless one is mentally calm. India is unclean because most of its people are mentally agitated. The lack of calm that makes India unclean also is the underlying cause in producing poor quality of steel, the lack of focus.

Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Last Lear – Rituparna Ghosh’s Thesis on Amitabh Bachchan

Posted on October 12, 2020 by secondsaturn

Many moons ago, my senior in Jadavpur University, now a eminent gender economist, was keen that Rituparna Ghosh who was a year senior to me in the class and I should become very good friends. I barely knew who he was except that he was a pretty boy, effeminate with a crop of curly hair and a nickel rimmed spectacle those which sat precariously on his nose bridge, being a bit too large for his face. I had no time to even notice this fellow busy as I was in campus politics and debates. Yet, the reason why my feminist senior insisted that we should be friends was because she felt that Ritu was a girl despite being born a boy and I was a boy despite being born a girl. In those days, contrary to my cultural legacy of the highbrow, I became a fan of Amitabh Bachchan and hence started watching Hindi films. Ritu, I now learn from his writings was out of Bollywood by miles. My interests in Amitabh Bachchan and my own surprise as t why I became a fan of a Hindi film star led me to pursue an academic career in sociology out of which I emerged with a MPhil and PhD but also with a theory of stars and the possibility of using these persona as texts for reconstruction of an era during which they lived and were loved. Ritu’s distance from Bollywood led him to revive the high culture of Ray, Sen, Tapan Sinha and in some instances even Aparna Sen and Ghatak. Then he returned, when he was older and less shy of himself to Bollywood,to Amitabh Bachchan, to whom he, I suspected was always attracted to but was too repressed to admit. In an interview I read long ago, Ritu said that one of his secret desires was to score a perfect 16 in KBC. So, he returned to touch his deep inner psychology in what turned out to be his last film, Last Lear.

Last Lear was Ritu’s thesis of Amitabh Bachchan. There was a palpable projection of himself on the star, who he imagined as one that ended his life and could now be accessed as a relic. It seems that this theatre artist long retired and is now sought again by a director who wishes to shoot a film on Shakespeare’s King Lear, a role the artist wanted to play but did not. However, the artist is injured and is bedridden after he tries to perform his stunts himself. Last Lear is a film about remembering his performance as an actor. I realized that Ritu stayed away from Amitabh because somewhere the masculinity of the image scared him; he must have thought in his mind that Amitabh if they ever met would disapprove of him. In the film Amitabh speaks poorly of homosexual men, Ritu’s self-infliction of wounds for his own guilt and inferiority complex. Now, in his matured years, with a body of extremely commendable work under his belt and Amitabh, sufficiently toned down and mellow without his scripts meet through the film, Last Lear, a role that is biographical, metaphorical and essential to the megastar of Bollywood.

Ritu captures the essence of Amitabh in his meticulous sense of ordering, his loyalties and commitments, his overpowering dominance, a tendency to bully, exactness of articulation, perfection in performance and the sheer force of personal presence. In these, he becomes like King Lear, one who is finally exiled and dies in the mercy of those who look after a maimed body long after his spirit dies. There are two women in the film too; one we may read as Jaya, because of the way the actress reacts and speaks and the other is Rekha, the actress who he mentors not merely in her craft but making her conscious that her craft needed to free her repressed emotions. Both women, suffer bad marriages when they come to him, and he provides them shelter and solace, respectively. This is the way Ritu looked at Amitabh, one past his prime, one left with little to live for except his personal habits, eccentricities, and quirks. And in this he moves into Amitabh’s personhood from his star persona. He explored the person carrying his proclivity of gossip to construct an image of the real-life Amitabh. This shows that Ritu was in awe of the man, approaching him only when he became less dangerous at the end of the journey, weakened a great deal with age, with his sharpness now coated with more grace.

Ritu has never been a philosophical person, not being able to graduate to larger world views out of what remains as personal struggle among his characters. As his classmate tells me that Ritu can never be a Ray because he is such a domesticated man, he can never get the global flavour of Ray. This mutual friend is not a film critic but has understood Ray very well. Ray used Amitabh only once and uncomfortable as he was with the star system used only Amitabh’s voice as the narrator in Shatranj Ki Khiladi. Ritu also used the very apparent and the visible parts of the actor, like Ray’s used Amitabh’s voice, Ritu used his personal habits. Both were advertising persons; they knew how to use the apparent stuff.

Posted in Film Reviews, Rituparna Ghosh | Tagged , | Leave a comment

15th September, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee

Posted on September 15, 2020 by secondsaturn

Today is the birth anniversary of Sarat Chandra Chattpadhyay, the greatest novelist that India has ever known, perhaps the greatest in the world, if the impact factor is taken in. He wrote in Bengali and has been the world’s most translated author, perhaps after the Bible and such was the structure of his language that a Telugu reader thought that Sarat Chandra originally wrote in Telegu, or the Gujarati reader thought that the author’s mother tongue was Gujarati and so on. Hence, Sarat Chandra was also the most translatable of all authors. Regrettably, this aspect of the author, namely his semantics has not been studied adequately for us to learn why Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay is so translateable? Why is the appeal of his language so universal? We get too hung up on the content of his stories, realizing little the role of the form, namely the language to carry the stories across regions and over generations.

I knew of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay through hearsay, then read his biography in Hindi by Vishnu Prabhakar and finally a sixty-four-part series published in Bengali in the weekly Bartaman. Most, if not all his stories are true episodes from his own life which he lived in northern Bihar. He represented the quest of a quintessential Bengali, that of a practitioner of culture as well as that of a traveller, vagabond, in his own words. Settling down nowhere and yet telling tales of settled people, Sarat Chandra wrote fanatically of individualism and this is why he chose to write so much about women as women, in his eyes were the most contained and controlled elements of the society. He was a feminist because he championed the cause of the creative individual, not particularly the romantic, but of the free willed ones, exercising a singular choice, and that of just to be. Perhaps this makes the author so universal.

Essential to Sarat Chandra is the Hegelian tragedy, tragedy born of the impossibility of existence of things which have been decided upon as being mutually exclusive. Bindu is only an aunt, she cannot be a mother to the child she loves so dearly. Ram is only a brother in law, contender to the inheritance of his widowed sister in law, Narayani and yet, instead of rivalry over property, Ram looks upon Narayani as the mother he never had and he, for Narayani is her first born child. The story of Mahesh, if voted upon could easily be the world’s most intense tragedies. Sarat Chandrian tragedy has constituted the tragedy of the Indian popular cinema of each region. The form and structure of the Indian popular cinema is Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay; those who do not fall into his form are considered as parallel cinema. This is an important fact to be noted and pursued when discussing the writer who could well be called as The Novelist like Aristotle is The Philosopher. Like his feminism, his tragedy is also individualistic, about individuals who unite on an emotional plane, irrespective of the roles and statuses they occupy.

It is due to the great emphasis of the individual, her freedom to be just her, which also makes him, according to his own description of himself, a vagabond that Sarat Chandra is modern, humanist, rational, secular, post-colonial, existential and universal and yet deeply rooted in the ethos of the Indian life.

Posted in About Books, Bengali Icons | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Indian Secularism

Posted on September 10, 2020 by secondsaturn

My friend Reshmi Bhaskaran asked us through her Facebook posting what secularism was? On the face of things, secularism, by its European definition would be the ineffectuality of religion in the affairs of politics and of public life since ideas of the Divine were to remain relegated strictly to the realm of the personal and the private. In India, secularism, which has had far longer a tradition than in Europe, usually meant equidistance from all religions. Parliament of religions which we frequently ascribe to emperor Akbar was, in fact quite the tradition in India.

Religious tolerance, tolerance of every faith and every creed was in fact quite an intrinsic part of a king’s dharma. Indeed, the cult of Jagannath launched by the great Ganga king Indradyumna at Puri is a veritable synthesis of all shades of beliefs, tribal, Vaishnav, shakes, Tibetan, Egyptian and even of Sri Lanka. Religious pluralism has been an essential component of good governance in historic india. IHow was such religious tolerance possible in India and for so long? Why was it necessary that every king worth his name would practice religious tolerance, plurality and equidistance? A possible reply for this is that religion never really mattered in the affairs of the state.

Religion was a cultural capital, cultivated as a matter of social refinement and not to govern the people. For governance, law and jurisprudence, India had its own dharma, a set of laws that were created purely on the basis of ideas of social equilibrium, or even perhaps of social status quo. A study of ancient and medieval law would give one an ample idea that principles of justice held equally for persons of all religion. In fact, it is only now that India does not have a uniform civil code.

The civil code, based on discourses of social equilibrium automatically relegated religion into the private sphere, though it may not have rendered it into a personal affair. Religious conversions often happened against social oppression, never in was close to empires, or to seats of power where the state was active enough to meet out justice to the aggrieved parties precisely on merits of hearing by a jury or even just a single judge. In short, India has always been secular even from the western point of view, because state and society were always separate, God belonged to society and the king to the state. These are my views.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Detective and the Thriller

Posted on September 7, 2020 by secondsaturn

Culture, taste, literature/detective

Detective vs the thriller

Sociology of literary genres

August 2020

Last week I finished reading two books on the Amazon kindle, one was a detective story and the other one was a thriller. Women in their early 50’s wrote them and both hailed from similar backgrounds in terms of income, class, legacy, education and most importantly, caste. In fact, they also belong to the same family; the writer of the detective story is a daughter while the writer of the thriller is the daughter in law. Yet, the flavour of the books were different as chalk and cheese or what is the same thing as typical detective novels would differ from the genre of a thriller. The difference is crucial between the two and has interesting sociological ramifications.

The detective novel which I read, as the name suggests is part of a series called Cosy Mysteries which means that it has a sense of cosyness about it that comes from contentment, partly because one has things in abundance but this also means that there is desire for no further. The detective, a woman, like the author in her mid-50’s is a development professional, bound to her wheelchair for movement outside of her home and depends on a crutch to move about indoors. She loves food, cooks well, entertains guests, gardens a bit, loves to travel, and does a lot of that, visits cafes and read books. Though her movements are over long distances, such distances do nothing to her behaviour, she speaks, thinks, reacts, responds, and sleeps and eats the same way as she would were, she never to leave her cottage in Shantiniketan. In this novel I read, the detective travels to Shimla to solve a suicide which she thinks is murder.

The thriller involves huge travel. The protagonist is a young male, a NRI who flies down to inherit a kingdom on the death of a childless patriarch and to find himself in the midst of a family power rubric wherein lies the lust and the love, the romance and the vengeance as the title suggests. The hero behaves differently in his new milieu as he has been born and brought up in the USA, comfortable in neither space, the opposite of the cosy and couch feel of our detective series. The pace of the thriller is racy, as characters are darting here and there for purposes know only to the hidden agents at work. The characters in the detective novel follow routines rhythm of their daily chores and even if they are fazed by something or the other, they return The pace seems crazy especially as the protagonist is unfamiliar in his surroundings unlike the detective who seems to be comfortable in all worlds at all times. While the detective’s movement is through her mental faculties, observation, reasoning, collation, and inferences, as they take the reader through mental calisthenics of guessing the criminal. The movement in the thriller is physical; the mind does not move here because the mind cannot move owing to the unfamiliarity of the circumstances that the protagonist finds himself in. He spends the narrative spaces in absorbing the strangers in whose world he finds himself in in the face of adversities as well as opportunities. Women are falling over him; men are tugging at him as he negotiates spaces of a medieval architecture. The detective, on the other hand is never caught unawares in the regal Shimla building of the Institute of Advanced Studies. She belongs to modernity and hence encounters her familiar world which may have people she has never met but they are just as well from within her world.

The thriller is too medieval for comfort discovered by a post-modern young man, there is a sharp contrast between the too desi and the one shade too much of the NRI. The agitation of one with the other constitutes the drama that is resolved through the sleaze of physicality. The detective, on the other hand encounters restrained emotions and sharp reactions of the mind, dualities of modernity over reason and passion.

When an incorrigible sociologist like me writes on the two genres, obviously would mean that the above is meant to climb spaces of the social reality. The detective is the elite whose space in the society is assured; the cosyness comes from her command over time and outcomes of the use to which she puts her time into. This means that she commands adequate social and intellectual resources to be comfortable with herself. The thriller writer, like her protagonist is a little iffy, she does not feel secure in her social entity, edgy with fear of being examined by the people who she lives with, always finding herself in alien situations, overwhelmed by strange people breathing down her neck. In other words, the thriller writer has stranger anxiety. Her strangeness with her situation is expressed in the youth and the masculinity of her character, the detective’s comfort is expressed in her protagonist, middle aged woman slightly compromised in her physical movements.

I mention that both writers come from the same social background, then how do they experience their objective reality so differently to represent the world views of two different classes? The detective has always been the entrenched elite, explaining the essential cosyness and the mental acumen rather than the need for physical energy while the high physical energy of the thriller is a will to strive, to achieve, to span across spaces, from which she has been hitherto debarred. The detective stories have morals and ethics, thrillers have egos, physical brawls, competition, and the need to get ahead of others, through chase and race. Thrillers do not need well ordered spaces, for the crime to be committed, to be hidden and to be detected. The thriller is an aspiration, detective stories are leisure. The difference between the two authors thus does not lie in the state they are in but in the state they want to see themselves in and the gradient between the two; the length and the angle of the gradient between the two states is the aesthetic quotient of the thriller.

Leave a comment

Movie Making In The Mind… Suraj and Vikas Yadav

Posted on August 8, 2020 by secondsaturn

How Do We Watch Films? Vikas Dubey’s Death

On the 9th of July 2020, Vikas Dubey a dreaded gangster of Kanpur died in a police encounter. Weeks before he died, he killed eight policemen at point bank range when they raided his den of vice. As if in an act of revenge, the police killed him too in a supposed encounter, brought him dead to the government hospital in Kanpur and thus ended the life of Vikas Dubey. Now this drama was almost telecast live through the 8th of July 2020, which had Suraj, my 35-year-old domestic help glued to his mobile phone. Thoroughly excited with the dramatic encounter which involved the very city hospital in whose premises he was born and raised before he migrated as a casual worker for sundry jobs in Delhi. Suraj’s day was made, the episode charged him up, got all his nerves alert and excited and made him joyful in the daily the drudgery of the routine chores in our house. So, elated he was that the very same hospital in whose premises he stole mangoes, had his wounds dressed by an attending nurse, and had that surgery of his hernia by the resident surgeons, the very chowk at which one had to take a turn into the campus were not only the site of the drama but also beamed over in all the news channels. Suraj gathered every detail in his head of the encounter, from Vikas Dubey’s arrest in Ujjain, the spot where he was slapped by the police for saying that he was Vikas Dubey, Kanpurwallah, the spot where the accident was made to happen, namely in the overturning of the police car. In his mind, Suraj enacted every bit of the events, sometimes taking on the role of Vikas Dubey, sometimes the policemen, as he narrated and narrated the story, to us and his friends in the neighbourhood or discussed with his brothers over phone, he presented a solo drama, playing all the characters as they appear in the narrative and weaving the narrative tighter and tighter with each retelling.

Suraj manages to read the Hindi newspaper which we subscribe at home for him. He scanned the newspaper for each threadbare detail on the case. He devoured all the channels in YouTube to get as many details about Vikas Dubey. In his inspections he gathered details of how he married at the age of 20, love marriage, he underscored, how his children are studying abroad, how he emerged into the world of crime, how he planned kidnaps and ransoms, appropriation of land and properties and even fraud. Dubey, it seems had politicians and policemen in his pay roll as well. Next, he reads the news of how his mother shut herself up in her room after she received the news of the death of her son, Suraj now imaginatively fills in the emotions. I think that this is how we watch films.

Step One

Firstly, he gets charged by a movement, there is unusual movement in the rhythm of things. Why is it that Suraj gets charged and not I? It is fine to say that Suraj gets all excited with car chases and shoot outs because he is unlettered and uncultured, and I may get excited by discovering a new author writing on fascism because I am so erudite and elitist. Well, these differences are with us and cannot be used to explain an immediate and perhaps a short lived phenomenon; for there are many things those which invoke the same responses from Suraj and I, namely the Covid 19, the sorrow at the loss of our pet, and to outcomes to India’s performance in T20 matches. The immediate cause must be related to something in the phenomenon of immediate response, namely the event of Vikas Dubey’s dramatic encounter and death. To my guess, it must be the movement itself, the movement which is of a different beat to the beats of everyday life as it unfolds for Suraj. Suraj has a more anxious and agitating life than I do for he lives on far many more contingent parameters. Compared to my parents back in Kolkata I have a more agitating life because relative to them, the existential parameters for me are more uncertain and tentative.

Suraj lives in an overcrowded slum, struggles over water and his turn into the washroom, fights mice, ants, and lizards in his cramped room, faces frequent raise of rents and tuition fees for his children and lives at our beck and call. The rhythm of his life is high pitched, disharmonious, and high strung as compared to mine. My life is high strung with frequent power cuts and uncertain water supply, conflict over car parking as compared to that of my parents. My liberation lies in rhythms those are at a pitch higher than those I face at present, which would mean access to better quality of service deliveries. I vote for a government that promises “vikas”, not the Dubey, but genuine development. Suraj has no chance of a better life, for him the liberating rhythm would be a release of his tense nerves those which grow taut within constant confinement of his life, namely waiting for his turn in the washroom, fighting pests at home and so on. His emancipation lies in the release of his energy, which could be sports but then that needs social camaraderie which the poor do not have, nor access to playgrounds and far less the access to institutions which support sports. He would thus love the opportunity to be on the streets. The popular Hindi film, known as Bollywood these days has a lot of street in it where heroes chase and fight villains, romance heroines, ride on vehicles with wind in their hair. Here in the streets also grows the high drama, high decibel, fast movements, actions like shoot out resulting in the serious consequence of death. Such an ensemble of stuff presents a rhythm that Suraj, in his social condition finds redeeming and even relaxing. Suraj thus absorbs the rhythm of the events within his body as he mono acts the entire “play” of Vikas Dubey’s arrest.

In this he finds as most inspiring the fact that the “sets” of the drama are his very own. He immediately identifies with the film since he can ‘’enter’’ easily through the familiarity of the subject. The “film” has no “hero” he can identify with, no issues, he identifies with its “sets” which are the premises of his home in Kanpur. The identification is the “point of entry”.

Once he aligns into the rhythm and finds the identification, the two may exchange places or happen simultaneously, he is eager to set into his heads as many details he can and place them in a logical sequence. In the first few rounds of the retelling of the stories, he uses the details which are apparent in what is shown to him, namely through the news videos but as soon as he organizes them in a time sequence, he goes back into looking for details on Vikas Dubey’s biography, his marriage, children, parents and even childhood. His mind, now over with the initial excitement of the drama seems to settle down into the “research” mode in which he looks to collect details those which are not directly available or accessible to him; namely details of Vikas Dubey’s past.

Meanwhile he also taps on the prevailing emotions in the story, tragedy of the mother having lost her son, resignation of her family, the anger of the policeman, the villainy of politicians. Only after engaging with the possible emotions, Suraj concludes the story, Vikas Dubey killed. Then he emerges into the morality of the plot for without drawing a moral QED, the story does not end for him for he is sincerely a theist who believes that there is justice in this world, might not be for individuals but for the system as a whole. The bad men need to die. Didi, he tells me, Vikas Dubey had to die because he was immoral. But did Suraj really think that way? Was there not an admiration in his voice for the guy? His children study abroad, he said, with suppressed satisfaction, he has made a lot of money, again admiration and looked after his mother very well, deep respect. Yet, he had to be killed, fatalism as watching the antihero, acceptance of the consequences of the huge risk this man took in his life. Vikas Dubey, on further reflection started getting transformed from dangerous dacoit to a loving family man who gave up his own life for the comfort of his family, the ultimate sacrifice and heroism of a man in the Indian society. Suraj, like millions of men like him, feels the pressure of being a breadwinner, often the sole breadwinner of his family for even if wives and children work, their contribution is not a serious income, it is only man who is supposed to earn for the family. When opportunities of legitimate incomes are few and far between especially in societies with low education and high unemployment, avenues of upward mobility are often through illegitimate means. This sociology is the genesis of the antihero in Hindi films. Once Suraj finds a moral rationale for the death of Vikas Dubey, namely he had to die, he dwells on his personal attainments, his sacrifice, the emotions and even the other side of the question, that he was a brave and a brilliant man who finally achieved what every man dreams of achieve, a wonderful life for his family as members of the upper class. Vikas Dubey, now punished is over; what remains of Vikas Dubey is what Suraj is free to cherish, his persona, his being a perfect family man. Sounds so familiar to the last dialogue of the mother in Deewar where she hands over the gun with which the police will kill her son and says to herself, that as a mother she has punished the son, as a woman she will now go to her progeny; as a social being she has disciplined, as a natural being she will love. Ditto same for Suraj.

What we see then in the above story of Suraj, the making of a film audience, indeed a popular film, the low brow and the kitsch and not the high art for the high brow audience.

Tagged , | Leave a comment

Steel Authority of India Limited

Posted on July 12, 2020 by secondsaturn

SAIL was set up in 1954, on the 19th of January with head quarters in Kolkata. Born out of the Industrial Committee Report of 1951 led by Subimal Dutt, SAIL was to use public money to build capital where only a thin pool existed in India. India of the 1950’s was hungry, naked, ill and poor and only the government had the money to make capita expenditures. The idea was to lay down a broad industrial base producing basic goods upon which further investments using such basic and intermediate goods were to be hosted. Thus, was born the Steel Authority of India. Aligned with its power over capital, SAIL attracted the best of employees and since these employees were to run pioneering and new technology, these had to be the absolute best of professionals. SAIL paid very well, in tune with international standards, housing employees in plush bungalows, state of art hospitals, the very best schools with the best teachers, steel cities were islands of high living resembling self sufficient Greek city states, boundaries to cut it off from the land of indigenous tribes and enclosing within it, the best standards of urban dwelling.

Those who lived inside its premises, because of the high life they led and because at work they handled the best of machines, unknown to most of India, SAIL made the best steel in terms of quality, the most in terms of quantity and earned the highest in terms of profits. Like the cities the employees lived in, SAIL had its own coal, iron ore, limestone, and dolomite mines, it had its captive power plants and water supply system. SAIL survived in an island, wholly owned by it but which was a firm spot on which it stood to move the world. Those days were the days of SAIL. It was literally the sailboat to a bright future of India.

SAIL’s sail got a hole for the first time in 1964 when the Joint Plant Committee was constituted to orient the company to the market economics. It was as if Greece was being shadowed by Rome; the idyllic city states were now to be sewn together as an Empire. The Joint Plant Committee was born of the Raj Committee Report that sought to ‘decontrol’ the steel industry which meant that the surpluses those were earned by each company, namely Bhilai Steel Plant or Rourkela Steel Plant would be used by the respective plants to expand their capacities and produce more steel. The years starting with 1964 were bad years for the Indian economy yet steel demand seemed to increase on pressures of urbanization; some shifts were taking place as population was moving from the villages to cities and in increasing numbers. The JPC put its finger on the first step of decontrol, namely the price. It allowed companies to charge their own prices; and to prevent them from charging high prices which they could have because of the oligopolistic nature of steel production, the JPC devised the famous price formula. By this formula, parameters of efficiencies were demarcated and “fair costs” calculated with a mark-up. Therefore, only the efficient firms could make profits and expand. Clearly the Bhilai Steel Plant and Bokaro Steel Plant expanded while Durgapur and Rourkela did not. The pricing spread to semis as well as all mill products.

While expansions would be made from profits, yet one would have to be careful about the demand of the mill products. JPC started collecting end user data and forecasting demand based on such demand. Integrated mills do not have significant flexibility of product mix and thus the demand was first disaggregated and then divided up across all mills so that every mill had a fair chance to optimally use their plant and machinery. This exercise was done by the Economic Research Unit, or ERU that was set up in 1983. ERU ran a grand model of optimization based on the linear programming and its first recruits were not economists but operations research persons. Economics came in much later, to the best of my memory only after 1997, post the Asean meltdown. Before that cost accountants and technical persons had a far greater say in matters of the ERU.

Under the JPC system and more so under the ERU, SAIL was opened to the surgical lights of analysis in terms of stuff those threatened its exclusive ensconce within the walled cities. Much of its autonomy was compromised, not because someone took it away, but because every decision of it was to pass through the JPC system, into the Ministry and then if the company was lucky, these were approved without further loops once more into the ERU. Most of the JPC personnel were respectful of SAIL as many came to the JPC system through SAIL, but one could never rule out the rude cost accountant, the arrogant operations person and the disdainful technical guy, and one negative comment could sour SAIL’s confidence because the management stood upon sensitive humans under a sheltered environment. Few realized that SAIL was aristocratic, it could function only when its exclusiveness was assured. SAIL was not trained to face rough weather; if one wanted it to perform one had to give it the assurance that its superiority would not be challenged.

Unfortunately, in 1991, SAIL was completely punctured as was divested of its exclusivity as the economy opened to private capital. SAIL was construed as being inefficient, slow, and slothful only because it was in the public sector. Discourses in the media, in the mind of the people, among politicians and in the Ministry, SAIL was discredited because it was in the public sector. All of us systematically exercised to damage the confidence of the company, or literally to take the wind out of its sail. Despite the hostilities around it, it is only SAIL which has consistently performed in a steel industry given to unsold stocks, excess capacities, and mounting debts in the form of the NPAs. It is not a matter to set aside that the steel industry leads the economy in NPAs especially it is supposed to be an industry promised to grow by 300%!.

As the private sector mindlessly pursued capacity expansions, SAIL held on its own ground, adding less and less of gadgets and kept its nose on routine production. When the lockdown happened, SAIL was thus positioned to be the only company that survived the flight of the workers. When life limped back again, SAIL was the only company that could resume production for its integrated supply system and resident employees. Also, being within a city, it could keep itself protected from the pandemic. When the waters started to recede, it could fire furnaces in no time. That is the beauty of the company and that is the worth of the public sector. SAIL is founded on solid ground with solid staff; its workers live in the steel city, their needs are met by the steel city, they don’t leave the plant and can swing back to production where others have to fight the flight of workers. SAIL does not need to be flashy, nor flighty, nor showy in buying and selling of steel facilities across the globe, it does not need to straddle continents in search for strategic acquisitions of minerals; instead SAIL can just focus on its work and deliver astounding profits just like the one it has done right now. SAIL needs respect and give that to the company, it will flourish.

Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Rituparna Ghosh into Eternity

Posted on July 1, 2020 by secondsaturn

Rituparna’s Eternity

On the 31st of May 2020, the anniversary of Rituparna Ghosh’s cross over day from a body with a soul to just a soul in the eternity of time, I read through his writings published in two volumes of First Person. The second volume, though thicker is not too relevant as these are notes on his travels for shooting or for film festivals and also contains some scripts those which were never made into films. The latter volume though could have been nice travelogues, but they were not because these travels were not; he was too full of himself and worried about work to notice the world he was travelling to. But the first volume though written badly, and Ritu never claims himself to be a writer, contains some interesting clues about the persona from where sprung some of the most amazing cinema in my opinion, why in Bengali but perhaps anywhere else in the world.

Rituparna is a fragile child, emotional and sentimental whose life’s purpose is to protect himself from hurt. He seeks spaces and creates those crevices into which, if ensconced well he thinks that he will be protected. He is scared of the outside world because of its violence, he shudders when he encounters the murder of Nirbhaya, hates it when the world oozes cruelty on Pinky Pramanik, he cringes at communalism but the final violence that gets him are the violence of Singur and Nandigram. The CPIM, he observes is another religion, a party behind the veil of ideology is a religious fundamentalist. How does he emerge into this world then?

Boys are supposed to be boys; Ritu must have hated his biological birth for an aversion to the violence of the external world to which boys were subject. He shrunk into a space of his own closer to girls, for he remembers many of them and suffered a sense of loss when the girls grew up because then he had to fall into the gendered role of his being a boy and different. One of the reasons why psychologically Ritu remained a child was because that helped him stay away from gendered existence. I was getting a feeling that his involvement into books and stories both of which required quiet and secured places lay at the root of his aversion to more intense physical activities. He may have been a sporty guy were it not for the fact that he loved being with books more than with a cricket bat. He shied away from being a boy because that would involve running, rushing, punching, kicking, none of which gave him as much of a high as stories did.

I don’t get the feeling that he read detective novels, nor ghost stories, for he admits he suffers a deathly fear of ghosts. He doesn’t seem to be too fond of travelogues either. But he loves novels, short stories and most of all, he loves poetry. And he reads almost every Bengali author those which have walked the earth. I am not sure whether he is attracted to music; he may be but he gets excited more with Lata Mangeshkar than anyone else, not for her Hindi songs but for her Bengali non cinema songs, which would blare from the microphones of the local clubs in preparation to their run up to the Durga Puja. Ritu’s favourite season seems to be autumn, he loves everything about it and Lata Mangeshkar somehow sits irretrievably meshed up into the blue vaulted skies with its white pile of cottony clouds. I am not sure whether he is much into the arts as well, he loves Jamini Roy though for his paintings of the faces of Goddesses, the prime Goddess being Durga, Ritu’s favourite and once again of the autumn. I may be wrong but I get a strange feeling that Ritu doesn’t quite like the spring time as he loves the other equinox; somehow he gives March, death. Memories in March is about loss, and spring in Bariwali is ominous.

Ritu loves movies, and like almost every Bengali of his times adores Ray and wants to be a filmmaker. But he is has no eye for the photograph because he can’t click photos and hence does not carry a camera when he travels. He is not a traveller at all and now he admits that he has no eye for the photograph as well. Then what is it about his movies? I was trying to think what is it about Ritu’s films that I recall as soon as I think of those. I remember dialogues of Bollywood, frames in Satyajit, faces in Uttam Kumar and Bengali movies but in Ritu’s films, I remember the flow; just the flow of one frame into the other, smoothened cuts and edits without sharp edges. His films are not jumpy, never surprise you, do not scare you, don’t try to titillate you, but just as a river would flow, the film just flows on. That flow is what one remembers. Satyajit Ray’s introduction to filmmaking, it seems started when he assisted the French director, Renoir as the master made his film, River. Renoir made the flow of the river as his essential theme and Ray understood that cinema is not the story it tells through its characters, nor the ideologies it professes; these are the pegs on which hangs the real tale, the real tale being the movement of the cinema. Deleuze was to write of this some years later and he did so after reading Henri Bergson, a French continental philosopher who placed said that art appealed to humans not through the ideas it presented by through the physical stimulations it invoked in the body. That’s was Ray believed, his inspiration from Renoir was to seek the real story of his films in the movements; so was Ritu’s in the flow.

Ray is expressionist; Ritu is impressionistic. Ray agitates the frame and produces images out there, unambiguous, unhesitant. Ritu really has no image, it’s always a flow of images, of movements, movements those which absorb images, loosen their borders, mix them up and surge them into the narrative stream. I think that the mastery of the flow is where Ritu becomes the master director of his craft.

Tagged | Leave a comment

Shakespeare as a Social Scientist

Posted on June 2, 2020 by secondsaturn

This is not out of boredom of the lock down, I have far too much in my schedule to find time even during these days. I have been pursuing Shakespeare for quite some time now, more as a sociologist than a connoisseur of literature. I am completely convinced that he is a genius because he seemed to anticipate categories of thought and analysis which would come into vogue at least 300 years after his plays were first staged. He is a genius because he could see the limitations of his age in each of the discourses those were in circulation during his times and he imagined a set of virtues for the individualism that came to be recognised by social sciences centuries after his death. Presented below are some of Shakespeare’s less read plays because of their scant presence in our syllabus and school and college curricula. Here they are:

Richard II

Often construed that Richard II as portrayed by Shakespeare is a construction of Queen Elizabeth, her deep suspicions of her nobility, among who she feared may arise to depose her. Richard II is a war monger trying to unite Britain by claiming Ireland and for this he raises money from the noble lands. The nobles feel threatened that they may be deprived of their property and hence plot against Richard. Richard seeing that he has lost the support of the nobility abdicates his throne in favour of his cousin Bolingbroke, who would eventually rule as Henry IV.

The outstanding part of the play is the penultimate scene with Richard’s monologue in the prison where he is counting his numerous thoughts, reviewing his multiple selves, and ruminates on who an individual is, beyond what he is born into, beyond the accidents of life. This is a long discourse on individualism, a definite beginning of modernity.

Henry IV

An interesting play and yes it is more in the tavern and less about the Royal courtyard. And the character who stands out is not the King but the fool, the comedian, the anti hero, Falstaff. Indeed, the historical plays are overwhelmingly around the repeated appearance of Falstaff. Despite this attachment to Falstaff, and the fact that the King goes on without any specific description, to me Henry IV is a remarkable document of history of the early 15th century England.

The King tries to unite Wales, Ireland and Scotland into England in the name of Christianity so that he may also wage the Holy Crusade. His principle aids like Northumberland, a very well respected regional ruler is happy to remain in his autonomous region as its sovereign head but feels betrayed when Henry imposes uniform taxations to perhaps collect money for his dream project, the Crusade. Henry faces rebellions from Wales and Scotland and though he suffers defeat in Wales, his close aide Hotspar wins Scotland. But eventually the friends turn foes as allies turn rivals of the King. The King fails to merge as a moral agent despite his unification plans, ideation of the nation and Christianity. Prince Hal, whose primary aide Falstaff is turns into a highway robber, a metaphor for the royalty and the State, it collects taxes backed by force and violence. Dialogues and conversations speak too much of hanging, let me be hanged, let the executioner come and so on, referring to the practices of punishment.

The conversations in the tavern shadow the court, what is the court if not the tavern? One drinks the wine of power. The conversations between the tavern owner, a woman and Falstaff where he calls her names and hurls obscenities upon her, may be a metaphor of the rapacious State that is molesting the more local and earthy communities under its more esoteric idea of the nation. The play is a criticism of the King, who is nothing but a better version of the highway robber, of the idea of the nation which is an insult to the more real local communities and Christianity that supports such robbery and rapacious activities of villains.

The rebellion of Henry’s aides show that power and not ideals brace the royalty, greed for power.  Prince Hal is interesting, he is royalty and like his father brave as well. But for most of the play, while he is still the prince, Hal is a waster. He then represents the individual over the dynasty, a guy who is yearning to be on his own.

Henry V

Now Prince Hal is Henry V. After ascending the throne he is a changed man, kind, wise, honest, moral and astute and loyal to the country. He exiled Falstaff who has died of a broken heart and intends to change the idea of a kingdom. But his assumption of moral power especially under the idea of a nation scares the Catholic Church, who then plot to divert the king’s attention, albeit in the name of the nation towards France. A war is waged though Henry V creates rules of war, no stealing, no pillage and hangs his close aide from his tavern days for a petty theft. He was especially cruel to his close ones so as to emerge as an exemplary King who was both strict and was equally disposed towards one and all.

There is a scene and interesting it has not caught much attention and which is that Katherine, the daughter of the French King learns English from her maid. This shows that culturally England was gaining ascendancy and this was due to the proliferation of its common people across the public spaces, most probably due to the rising commerce. Would this then mean that the English were already gaining a foothold in the economy even before the industrial revolution?

The armies of the French and the English are unequal. The English army is about a tenth of the French army. Despite this, the English win. The English win due to a combination of strategy and determination and Henry gives an arousing speech on the eve of the war infusing patriotism. This speech is a mettle of management people and the speech is used in many places especially by football coaches and management gurus. But to my mind, this speech when contrasted with the encounters of Henry V as he moves in disguise among his soldiers the night before the war. In the later case, the soldiers are eager to understand whether the sins of their death in battle would be on the King or not, to which Henry replies that each will live or die according to his individual fate and that the King is only a cause. It might be interesting to note that the concerns of the soldiers are purely Catholic and Henry’s answer is Protestant and the rousing speech is nationalistic.

The next point of interest is Henry’s wooing of Katherine. Here he says that he has come to love France and contribute towards it, the marriage is an alliance. History tells us that this peace was short lived because the battle of Agincourt was the start of the 100 years war between England and France.

The attitudes of the French and the English are interesting as well, the French underestimate Henry as a wannabe, refer to his wanton days and imagine that he can do nothing. This attitude of condescension that the entrenched and the privileged have over the newly emerging talents is a sure reason for their defeat.

Henry VI

Henry V dies a respected King. But he leaves behind his infant son Henry VI. There is a clamour among the elites to gain control of England, Lords are going over to the Church to become cardinals and for this they pay money. They have to raise the money again from their fiefdoms. The plays of Henry VI revolve around elites, nation and the Church. The Church continues its machinations into politics. England though it raises the bogey of nationalism, it now seems that France has been able to forge together a nation. Though France does not spell out the nation yet it brings together the common men, the nobles, the pagan leaders like Joan of Arc who now leads the army against England.

The discourse that braces England is no longer the rousing inspiration of Henry V but the release of superstitions of Catholic Christianity against paganism when Joan of Arc us burnt at stake.

There is an interesting appearance of women characters. From the independent and autonomous tavern owner in Henry IV to the passive Royal women of Henry V to the more active women namely the Lady and Joan both of who play important roles in the defense of France. When men lose their vision and power, women step in. Lord of Suffolk falls in love with Margaret, a commoner and marries her off to Henry VI so that the prince remains within his command. Mortimer, the real claimant to the throne dies in prison and here genuine royalty falls to ambitions of meaner and baser men. Power struggle is only power struggle, avaricious, capricious and mean. There is no higher ideal in any of this.

King John

This is about King John the 12th century King from the Plantagenet dynasty who introduced primogeniture in England and appears as the popular villain, King John in Robin Hood. King Philip II of France raises the issue of the claims of John to the throne of England insisting that Arthur, the son of Richard, the Lion hearted should be the King, suggesting primogeniture. Suddenly there arrives two brothers of a decorated officer, where the older one claims that he is not the son of the same father as the younger guy. He uses facial resemblance between father and the younger brother and his own lack of it to say that he is not the biological son of his father. A long debate ensues on who the father is, whether it is the pater or the genitor. King John faces baron rebellion owing to his wavering with the rules of inheritance and eventually survives with the help of the Church.

King John was instrumental in the Magna Carta in 1215, the document that made every individual subject to the same set of laws and trial by jury. This was later in the Henry VI plays diluted as law was replaced by the nobles’ machinations and manipulation so. Whatever it is, King John in the play was a guy concerned with inheritance. He kills Arthur, the primogeniture. It seems that France gained ascendancy over England, dictating which laws it should follow and who the rightful inheritor to the throne should be. How did France get such a hold over the affairs of England? Through the Church and in the name of the Crusade, the Imperial Christianity.

Richard III

Richard the Third reads more like Othello, a story of personal revenge by a bad looking man. This is a gregarious guy who tries to get everybody’s confidence, pretends that he is a friend to all but conspires against each and every. His ultimate revenge is on his brother’s wife because it seems to him that the only way he can get a woman is by defeating her husband and then claiming the vanquished wife as his own. Richard III destroys the ruling dynasty as he is its last King.

Pericles, the Prince of Tyre

This is a morality play of the truthful prince, Pericles, how he is attached by the King of Antiochus for revealing dark secrets about him and how he is on the run. The play is literally about the flight of Pericles from persecution and his exile. He faces shipwrecks and separation from his wife and daughter. In the end everything works out for him because he is an honest person, thus so far ends most of the interpretations of the play. Considering the tumultuous times of Shakespeare, caught between two epochs, the pandemic of plague and the civil war, we may try and understand that ideals of behaviour, the right values and morals in modern terms were yet to develop and be articulated from a very different set of morals of medieval times. In this regard, Shakespeare must have been a genius to have articulated modernity.

But why is Pericles a good man? He tells the truth, he accepts his fate calmly, and even in the face of utmost misfortunes he never loses gratitude. He remains an altruist, has very little consciousness of his own interests, and looks to uphold the needs of others. He remains himself in the company of the rich and the poor alike, and when he is accepted as a ruler of Antioch, he accepts it without being overwhelmed or taking it as a personal glory. He reaches food to those states which need them, he stands in for people who call upon him for help. His daughter, who he thinks is dead, too is an epitome of strength. When she is taken away to be raped in a brothel, she convinces the rapist that he has more to gain from her if she earns money by teaching crafts and skills than she can by prostituting herself. The rapist is convinced because she instils in him a higher self by showing him that he can do the very task that he has set himself to do through honest and noble means. The goodness of Pericles and Marina, the daughter lies in the fact that they can appeal to the larger interests of humanity and therein lies their goodness which is a broadness of mind and understanding. Hence, Pericles is a story about rationality more than it is a morality play.

One wonders what incest had to do with the story, why the story must revolve around the incest of the father and daughter of Antiochus. Was Shakespeare speaking against the Greek God, Zeus? And hence against the Greek morality, and thus against the Renaissance? Did he find the Greeks too hedonistic? Did he look for morals which were both utilitarian and humanitarian?

Timon of Athens

This too is a severe critique of the Renaissance. Timmons is a rich gentleman of Athens and soon has unctuous flatterer a surrounding him. He loses his wealth through overspending on works of art, paintings and throwing lavish parties. When he is thus broke he has no one to stand in for him and he leaves the city to go and live in the forest, or to die in it. His faithful servant, Flavius, knowing fully well that his master cannot pay him nonetheless decides to serve him. Timor discovers gold in the forest, returns and pays his creditors back and compensates Flavius but does not return to his flatterers nor does he reveal anything regarding his discovery of gold. Timor realized the value of wealth and refuses to spend above his immediate wants because once it is used in surplus, it invites falsehood. The play is a criticism of the high elite culture of Renascent Europe and hence perhaps Athens is used as its metaphor.

Troilus and Cressida

This is a play out of Homer, where Troilus is against war. He finds no glory in war except a competitive ego, which in turn is based upon a peculiar construction of masculinity. The play has a very strong discourse against masculinity.

Measure for Measure

This is a critique of Puritanism where Puritans are shown to be people jealous of the status of the high elite and their culture. The Puritan lobby gets too powerful and the Duke goes on a vacation leaving Angelus, a Puritan baron in charge of the city. The Duke does not leave the city and instead stays on, disguised as a friar to observe the going on. Angelus arrests Claudius, a gentleman of high standing on grounds that he is immoral, the immorality being his status. thus Angelus’s Puritanism is exactly what right wing of today is, more to do with status anxiety than with other concerns.

Claudius is not subject to law but to will because Angelus soon asks Isabella, Claudius’s sister who is becoming a nun to sleep with him, if she wants her brother’s life. Isabella decides to let go of her brother rather than to compromise on morals and the Duke, still disguised, substitutes the head of an already deceased prisoner as the head of Claudius. The prisoner suggested that another prisoner, long due for execution be executed in place of Claudius but the Duke stopped it. The discourse turned against capital punishment. Meanwhile, he also substitutes Marianne, Angelus’s fiancée to go in place of Isabella. Angelus rejected Marianne because her dowry was sunk in a shipwreck.

The Duke appears in the city to free Claudius and force Angelus to marry Marianne and forces another baron to marry the prostitute by who he has an illegitimate son. The Puritans are thus shown their place and eventually the Duke proposes to the remaining Puritan, Isabella to marry him. The play is a full tirade against Puritanism.

Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Famine of 1943 and the Partition in 1947 – Bengal Crisis

Posted on May 1, 2020 by secondsaturn

Bill Gates predicted the epidemic and during this epidemic said that the fight against the virus is uniting the whole world. While he was right on his first prediction, he went horribly wrong in his second one as the pandemic has divided humanity as never before. There are concerns over child and woman abuse in quarantined homes, rapes in hospitals, doctors who are all fangs against patients of a different community, landlords who are turning doctors and nurses out of homes, theories that say that minorities are behind the pandemic, conspiracy theories linking the Chinese to a wilfull spread of the virus like suicide bombers, villagers attacking students from cities who return home, natives attack the migrants.  In social distancing, each one is against the other, constructing any and every human as a source of infection, portending death. Untouchability has never attained such a high rationale as now.

The pandemic with its panic has invoked within each human each of her hate categories who, in her mind must yield her the space to live by dying off or disappearing from the face of the earth. Something very similar happened during the Bengal Famine of 1943, whose direct fall out was the Partition. Few historians have connected the two dots, namely of communalism and famine together and encouragingly Rakesh Batabyal is one of the very few, if not the only one to do so. Using the data he has placed, I will attempt a sociological analysis as why pandemics, famines, disasters invariably invigorate the social fault lines so bitterly, often to points of no return.

What happened when the Famine took place?  In simple Malthusian terms, there was less food than there were mouths to feed. So, if people died and demand for food was adjusted to the reduced supply, one would need to take a decision as to who should die; the one who is taken as a surplus; for Hindus, it were the Muslims and vice versa. It need not have been this way if a communal feeling was not already endemic within the Indian society.

Hindu Muslim enmity and rivalry is not an invention of the British nor is Divide and Rule their sole creation. One has to read Al Biruni, Jaisi, Amir Khusro and the various accounts of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu to know that the hate towards each other came right at the start of the Muslim conquest of parts of India. For the Hindus, India lost freedom with the conquest of the Turks, meaning Qutab Uddin Aibak and the establishment of the Slave Dynasty. Now that Freedom drew close, it was time to reclaim Independence; for the Hindus, this meant freedom from both the British as well as the Muslims. For the Muslims, at least as per the accounts of Richard Eaton, the arrival of the Islamic conquerors meant a semblance of order to the rather fragmentary and tentative rule of Hindu kings. We must recall that just before the Islamic conquests, the political map of India was highly fragmented with constant skirmishes among small kings and petty regional powers. Many Hindus converted to Islam, not so much due to social oppression as it is made out to be, but more in a desire to be with the winner class, as Hannah Arendt says in her book, Banal Evil. The Hindus and Muslims represented two kinds of politics, two kinds of world views and at the level of religion, they did have distinctly different cosmologies. So the first line of division in the political space, where considerations of nature of the State, or the idea of nation, or of the idea of sovereignty are concerned, the Hindu Muslim divide is the first cleavage along which the society would respond.

During the Famine, these ideas of the State, nation, sovereignty were raised; and this was again because the famine broke the social network of production relations, as Schumpeter has so clearly written in his essay on the Circular Flow of Economy, turning people into destitute with only the State to support them. The state did a very bad job of it and as Amartya Sen writes that the drop in production was only about 10%, there was widespread speculation and hoarding that made people without the means to buy food drop dead in the streets. The Bengal Famine killed 3 million persons, the largest death so far before the Chinese Famine under Mao which clocked 5 million. Rakesh Batabyal finds that during this time, both Hindu and Muslim merchants hoarded rice, but the Muslim merchants used their supplies to use as relief and thus created a feeling that as if the Muslim League was in command and could ensure food security. The Hindu merchants made money and accumulated capital. The Hindus, who had a sense of land and construed Muslims as being outsiders and aliens, notwithstanding the fact that they were of the same ilk, felt that if the Muslims went away, the lowered supply of rice would match the lowered levels of population and hence equilibrium could be achieved. It is interesting to observe that Hindus wanted the Muslims out, Muslims wanted their own people to head the Government. Jaya Chatterjee presents such a thesis.

The problem with the Famine was that in either case, people lost faith in the governments because the State was seen as being incapable of helping people live on. The Hindus, who were socially more entitled imagined that they could drive out the excess, or the unnecessary or the surplus population, namely the Muslims away, while the Muslims thought that a better protection would be to go under the Muslim League because of their relief work. Unable to arrive at any equilibrium bargaining point, the country tore, the game ended.

Pandemics work first by disturbing the social networks which ensure the flow of goods and money; or the tracks on which the economic goods run. Once the social units are delinked from the track, they turn to the State, and if the State cannot fulfil the needs, riots ensue which means that people using one identity try to stave off people from other identities so that the lowered supply of goods equal to the lowered population, lowering being achieved by rampant killing and genocide. Rakesh Batabyal’s work on Communalism and Famine in the context of Bengal in the 1940’s is a step by step key to the dangers that disaster can spell for communal unity, social integrity, political legitimacy which are crucial infrastructure that hold any economy together.

Leave a comment