I met some beautiful people, of whom the 198 String Band described below are indisputably the most respectable. I met them at the “Imagining America” conference; attending that was an official requirement. This was one of the longer pieces I wrote off my beat — most of my “reporting” consists of squiggles and squeees. I had fun writing this, tight word-count and all, and it is (you might notice) a new style for me. I call it my school voice, because bogey wouldn’t be caught corpsified assumin’ y’all need this much explainin’.

But that’s why bogey’s dead, see.

We’d rather not be on the rolls of relief.

One friday in early fall, a small band of Occupy Wall Street protesters were busily organizing Columbus Day insurrections in Zuccotti Park. They were planning rallies and writing protest music, oblivious to the minor miracle underway in the Westinghouse Building a few steps across Broadway, where an equally tiny tribe of genteel New Yorkers were gathered for an evening sponsored by the New York Council for the Humanities. There, in offices that shared space with bankers and accountants, the 198 String Band resurrected Woody Guthrie.

The 198 String Band began in tribute to the “other” Guthries, the forgotten minstrels of the Great Depression. “Unlike Guthrie and Steinbeck, these people didn’t choose to be in the Dustbowl” one member of the band said, “they just picked up the family banjo and played from the land”. Alongside each song, they curate photographs from the Library of Congress archive, choosing images that chronicle the lives of migrants during the depression. The inspiration behind the presentation is to provide audiences a textured history of the folks that the late, great historian Eric Hobsbawm would have called “uncommon people”.

The 198 String Band is Tom Naples (banjo and guitar), Peggy Milliron (guitar, vocals and photographs) and Mike Frisch (fiddle and vocals). All of them are lifelong musicians, though none of them played professionally before they started the 198 String Band five years ago. Tom, who could fool anyone into believing he misspent his youth on the hippie circuit with his dimples and his untidy ponytail, is a retired businessman. Peggy and Mike are both historians, and claim they’re still learning stagecraft. “Only recently I began playing the fiddle close to my chest,” Mike said, “and I can’t sing when I do. But I keep at it, because it feels like I’m at a barn dance in the middle of the city.”

The 198 String Band isn’t a live band in the traditional sense. Though Tom argues that “we follow the music” their passion for education is equally obvious. The day after the concert opposite Zuccotti Park, they held a workshop for teachers at the Imagining America conference. They played the same songs and displayed the same photographs, yet the energy in the room was very different. Friday’s show had been a relaxed wine-n-cheese gig in a room flowing with friendly laughter; on saturday, the band fielded eager questions about everything from high school historiography to the ethics of the Farm Safety Act to the authenticity of Woody Guthrie wannabes in the year of his centenary. They answered them all with the easy elegance of professors long accustomed to the dispensing of wisdom.

It’s certainly true that the band’s fascination with the Depression lends itself easily to earnest then-and-now conversations. Only a person with a wooden imagination wouldn’t leap eighty years when they sing “we thought we were intelligent before that fateful fall/but now we’ve come to realize we didn’t know it all.” Yet the chorus to that song remains utterly removed from current experience: “Was the fall of 50-50, you lost yours and I lost mine/but it made us all the more human since the fall of ’29”. Who would claim today that the recession has been either a humanizing or an equalizing experience?  If the Depression was a time when America came together, this recession has been a time of epic polarization, and popular discourse in the 21st century is emphatic about the one percent versus the rest.

Stavin’ Chain singing ‘Batson’, FSA archive

At times it can feel like old folk songs are describing our planet with an entirely new cast of characters. Many of them combine radical politics with a genuine affection for the President and his government. There are songs about elections and President Roosevelt and even specific policy proposals. One song, written in praise of the Townsend Plan for a revolving pension plan, is cheeky propaganda (life will just begin at 60/we’ll all feel very frisky); another, “Sylvester”, is a blues staple that describes a man who calls President Roosevelt about his lost mule. “Democratic Donkey” is about the election that made Roosevelt, a patrician from the north, a beloved President for farmworkers in deep south.

“We have songs about the NRA, about the WPA, about pensions and presidents… really, who writes songs about government agencies these days? This is optimism squared.” Tom jokes, but at the heart of the levity is a serious observation about the changing nature of social upheaval. People sing about the things they care about. In the ’30s, that was politics, and these songs had power: it was popular agitation for the Townsend Plan that forced social security legislation into fruition. These days even a disaster on the scale of Hurricane Sandy is unlikely to inspire songs about FEMA or climate change.  It isn’t only that ordinary people were different “back in the day”. The establishment was as well, Peggy pointed out. Would President Obama dare suggest that public money be spent to record and archive poverty? That the art so collected defy copyright and remain public domain, so that later generations can access them and interpret them? In a cultural economy obsessed with individual copyright, is it futile to retain hope for a creative commons?

Folk songs, like computer viruses, are version nightmares. They disperse through populations, until no one plays the same song twice. The very act of recording them, of sealing them in time, is counter-intuitive: how do you know you have the “authentic” or the “original” song? A famous example of this gap is Lead Belly’s farewell homage to Charles Todd in certain versions of “Careless Love”, where he inserts the lyrics “I may be right, Mr. Todd, and I may be wrong/ but you know we’re going to miss you for the time while.”

Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin were the most influential of the federal recorders working in migrant camps. They collected hundreds of songs, yet, Peggy notes, the relationship between the urban “outsiders” recording music and the sharecroppers making music was sometimes hostile. The folklorists were employed by the federal government and eager to collect positive reactions to camp conditions, but they were facing an insular community knitted together by deprivation and homesickness, a community that was rarely trusting of strangers from the cities. The people in the camps wanted to portray themselves as independent, while the people recording them wanted to tell stories about the generous government.

Todd & Sonkin

“The camps were a real laboratory for democracy” Mike suggests “not the welfare handouts people now think they are. They organized committees and unions and got real things, like sanitation and repairs, done. We call our show We’d rather not be on the rolls of relief  to reflect their complicated attitudes to these camps. They were grateful for the help but they were also working very hard to get into real homes and real lives.”

A lot of the despair migrant workers felt living in tents far away from their homes is channelled into humor. Plenty of the songs performed by the band are lyrically hilarious, even when the mood and the instrumentation are melancholic. One of the biggest challenges the 198 String Band faces is to retain this contrast. This they do by juxtaposing Peggy’s thin, wry, “almost Appalachian” voice against the photographs. In the funniest of their songs, the chorus of which goes “doggone, the panic is on!”, the imagery depicts decrepit buildings and woebegone people. The effect is stark and often startling. It forces listeners to realize just how grim conditions were, as well as to marvel at the resilience of people who could still find things to laugh about while they survived them. It’s enough, indeed, to make you echo the Democratic donkey and cry Hee Haw Hallelujah!

Sanya Glisic, Der Stuwwelpeter.

A hefty bit of bogey’s composite is an absent ally.  On behalf of every ghost within the works, his pledge for 2012 –

Listen carefully,

Neither the Vedas

Nor the Qur’an

Will teach you this:

Put the bit in its mouth,

The saddle on its back,

Your foot in the stirrup,

And ride your wild runaway mind

All the way to heaven.

Kabir

(trans. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra)

In the final year of college, as my friends went about the business of ambition, I spent my nights adapting The Coast Of Utopia for the NLS playfest. Stoppard credits Isaiah Berlin as an inspiration, and so I started Russian Thinkers. Here my theatrical pretensions quickly quailed, for Berlin was my window into a tradition far removed from everything an Indian legal education teaches you about the world. He showed me the ‘tangled undergrowth’ of modern history, enticing me into an alien universe populated by folk my textbooks only accorded footnotes to. Three years later, I documented the journey in the first mystic myna column.

Isaiah Berlin was the 20^th century’s foremost preserver of forgotten genius. He can only be read, as Erasmus would say, spinning in the salon of your imagination. Voltaire argues with Bakunin, Herzen battles Hegel, Hume and Diderot team up in an unlikely alliance against Marx. Everyone despises and adores Rousseau in turns, nearly everyone twists Kant into their personal utopia. The challenge, whilst reading Berlin, is in plotting a course. It is important to fix a firm question in one’s head, a destination to aspire towards.

My Berlin-quest followed the ‘romantic exiles’ of 19^th century, navigating along The Coast of Utopia, which chronicles the lives of the intelligentsia that fled Russia during the ‘long night of obscurantism’ between the Decemberists in 1825 and the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.  The plays revolve around the debate between Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen about the Fate of Revolution, and are weighted (like Berlin’s book) in favour of Herzen’s gloomy liberalism. Bakunin, harbinger of modern anarchism, is thus dismissed by Berlin in a glorious sentence-paragraph:

Bakunin, with his gusto and his logic and his eloquence, his desire and capacity to undermine and burn and shiver to pieces, now disarmingly child-like, at other times pathological and inhuman; with his odd combination of analytical acuity and unbridled exhibitionism; carrying with him, with superb unconcern, the multi-coloured heritage of the 18^th century, without troubling to consider whether some among his ideas contradicted others—the ‘dialectic’ would look after that—or how many of them had become obsolete, discredited, or had been absurd from inception. Bakunin, the official friend of absolute liberty, has not bequeathed a single idea worth considering for its own sake; there is not a fresh thought, not even an authentic emotion, only amusing diatribes, high spirits, malicious vignettes, and a memorable epigram or two.

In Belinsky he finds a living legend and the instigator of the ‘Dostoevsky complex’:

The original prototype of these sincere, sometimes childish, at other times angry, champions of persecuted humanity, the saints and martyrs in the cause of the humiliated and defeated—the actual, historical embodiment of this most Russian type of moral and intellectual heroism—is Vissarion Belinsky

Belinsky is the thread that unites the disparate patterns within the tapestry of early socialism:  German idealism, Russian lucidity, French decadence. Everyone, in Russian Thinkers and The Coast of Utopia alike, is perpetually debating Belinsky’s ghost. This is convenient all around, for Belinsky said many contradictory things, as prolific and impoverished writers must. This combination of humble origins and elite approval ensured his place in Russian history, and his views about the ‘social’ criticism of literature were the battleground for the next century of Russian thought. Belinsky’s premature death in early 1848 installed him as an icon for the next generation of ‘violent’ thinkers like Chernyshevsky and Pisarev, officially the fathers of Bolshevism.

For most of his life an earnest Hegelian, Belinsky astutely overturned his mentor’s dialectic. Hegel, he said, had discovered the algebra of revolution rather than its physics. History isn’t ordained or governed, but formulated: millions of variables interacting within predictable (and partial) patterns. In a letter to the artist Vasily Botkin, Belinsky echoes Bertrand Russell, claiming the ‘unfolding of the World-Spirit in time’ expects the cosmos to scramble towards Hegel’s philosophy:

 All Hegel’s talk about morality is utter nonsense, since in the objective realm of thought there is no morality. Even if I attained to the top of the ladder of human development, I would still have to ask Hegel to account for all the victims of life and of history, all the victims of accident and superstition, of the Inquisition and Phillip II, otherwise I will have to throw myself head-downwards.

Herzen, the protagonist of Stoppard’s plays, was as rich as Belinsky was poor. He was the illegitimate son of a Russian nobleman and a German lady, and declared himself ‘Polish at heart’.  Temperamentally, too, they were mismatched: Belinsky was dour and ardent; Herzen convivial and mutable.  Herzen was accused of speaking from the sidelines all his life, and by the end of it he had estranged the Left with his bitterness and the Right with his liberalism.  Belinsky, for all his torment, was never tentative. Yet, it was these two thinkers—the perplexed idealist and the flamboyant emigré—who were to prove, together, their generation’s most eloquent thinkers.

Herzen, potrait by Rafael Levitsky

Herzen clarified and interpreted Belinsky’s insight into Hegel’s philosophy.  Living in London during the disappointed 1850s, he founded the Bell, which proclaimed revolution as loudly as it decried it. Things had to change, Herzen agreed, but let us not delude ourselves into believing our sacrifices are in service to an abstract noun. Consider, as proof, Berlin’s favourite paragraph of Herzen, which wound its way into a delicious joke (as well as a sad refrain) across The Coast of Utopia:

If progress is the goal, for whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, draws back; and as a consolation to the exhausted and doomed multitudes can only give the mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn the human being to live in the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others to dance on … wretched galley slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge with ‘progress in the future’ upon its flag? Not only does Nature never make one generation the means for the attainment of some future goal, but she doesn’t concern herself with the future at all; like Cleopatra, she is ready to dissolve the pearl in wine for a moment’s pleasure…(elsewhere) Who will finish us off? The senile barbarism of the sceptre or the wild barbarism of communism? A blood-stained sabre or the red flag?

… Logic when it comes of age detests canonised truths. It thinks nothing sacrosanct, and if the republic arrogates to itself the same rights as the monarchy, it will despise itself as much, nay, more.. Tis not enough to despise the crown—one must not be filled with awe before the Phrygian Cap; it is not enough to consider lèse majesté a crime: we must look on salus populi as being one.

 – From the Other Shore. 

 I chose my unruly lot within Russian Thinkers—Belinsky and Bakunin rather than Turgenev and Tolstoy—for they resonated with my reading on the Indian exile M.N. Roy. The parallels are uncanny: Roy was as virtuously poor as Belinsky, as flexibly fervent as Bakunin, as prophetic and peripatetic as Herzen. He shares their horrified fascination with the unraveling of revolution in their respective eras (Roy was a pivotal part of the early Comintern). As with Roy, these neglected Russians uncovered an essential truth controversially early in the ‘history of ideas’. They suggested that the Spirit that animates both communism and nationalism—Hegelian Inevitability—was theosophy’s latest fraud.

The Russians led me into the tradition that spawned them, and I began The Roots of Romanticism, a voyage from ‘de Magus de Norden’ (the mystic Johann Hamann) to Hegel. Roots is the chattiest of Berlin’s books (perhaps because it began life in lectures) and full of the lively caricature he was so skilled at. Herder considered the French ‘desiccated monkeys’; Hume abhorred the ‘hideous prison of the multiplication table’; ‘pity appears to Kant a detestable quality’. Rousseau is ‘a dervish from the desert: the point was that no one could love as Rousseau did, nobody could hate as Rousseau hated, nobody could suffer as Rousseau suffered’.

Roots is constructed chronologically and progressively, a tricky enterprise within a movement as frenetic as romanticism. The defining experience of the romantic, Berlin warns you, is contradiction. This is also the lesson he would have you learn from them—the fine art of prevarication, of negotiating multiple and overlapping realities. If nothing can be established, everything can be argued. Romantics can be fascist or feminist, conservative or radical, existential or nihilist. What matters is the choice and the commitment, an assertion of Defiant Will against unpredictable Nature. Ends, sincerely chosen, justify their means. This was what the Russians were counting on, and the world-view they eventually dismembered.

Harry Clarke, illustrating Poe.

The qualities Berlin admires most in Herzen are his clarity and his willingness to complete a logical argument without being bound by it. Unlike Belinsky, he didn’t seek sublimation within the Truth.  Unlike Marx he believed civilisation existed because of all the gore and misery it entailed. Unlike Bakunin he never confused contradiction and paradox. Pragmatic vacillation (which would pass in daily life as common sense) is a rare feat in philosophy, and it is an ability Berlin prizes. This sometimes encourages an odd taste in thinkers,  such as his fondness for the sinister Joseph de Maistre.

Joseph de Maistre, a ‘royalist Jacobin’, was a Savoyard who found himself in Russia in the early 1800s. He lived through the high age of German idealism, and borrowed much of its rhetoric against the nobility of man and the natural sciences (‘tissues of coherent falsehoods’) in his fight to restore the feudal order of Europe. He stood for all the things Herzen despised—serfdom, religion, monarchy—yet they shared a ‘ruthlessly deflationary’ approach to reality, which is why Berlin counsels his reader to respect Maistre’s voice. Maistre believed humans to be debased beings, serving out their time on the penal settlement of Earth. They were to be governed as slaves and monsters, purifying themselves to achieve the kingdom of Heaven.  He thus dedicated his life to ‘razing Utopia to the ground’.  A Big Picture discernible by the proper use of intellect was, to him, blasphemy: the divine and the devil were inscrutable, and that was why they survived.

Maistre used the weapon of reason, Berlin argues, to defeat reason: In an effort to disprove that history is Reason in Action, he multiplies examples of self-defeating rational institutions… To his contemporaries, perhaps to himself, he was gazing calmly into the classical or feudal past, but what he saw even more clearly proved to be a blood freezing vision of the future. Reading Maistre, especially after Russian Thinkers, is a disconcerting lesson in the art of spin.  Compare, for instance, Herzen:

to be the passive tools of forces independent of us, to be the blind instrument of fate, this is not for us. The scourge, the executioner of God, needs a naive faith, the simplicity of ignorance, wild fanaticism, a pure, uncontaminated, child-like quality of thought.

And Maistre,  in his celebrated Soirées:

The Hangman is not a criminal. Nevertheless no tongues dares declare that he is virtuous, that he is an honest man, that he is estimable. No moral praise seems appropriate to him, for everyone else is assumed to have relations with human beings: he has none. And yet all greatness, all power, all subordination rest on the executioner. He is the terror and the bond of human association. Remove this mysterious agent from the world, and in an instant order yields to chaos: thrones fall, society disappears. God, who has created sovereignty, has also made punishment: ‘for Jehovah is master of the twin poles and upon them he maketh turn the world.’ ( [1 Samuel]  2:8)

Harry Clarke, illustrating Perrault.

Both passages, you will notice, say the same thing. The public executioner is a figure  in which the dilemma of human evil finds its definitive embodiment.  Is killing, usually the worst of all evil, to be considered a public service?  Herzen passionately denies this and demands we evolve away from such brutality; Maistre proudly accepts it and demands we devolve back. Neither opinion, however, clouds their judgment about the present, and Ideology is a contemporary activity. We study the past and theorise the future only to find evidence of ourselves. The realisation that these selves are torn souls at odds with one another is, for Isaiah Berlin, the first step on a long ladder towards wisdom.

 The next is the understanding that wisdom itself is a shifting category, that the shaman and the scientist both have something to contribute to our understanding of the world.  Every intellectual choice one makes—Bakunin or Turgenev, Maistre or Herzen—demands the irreparable loss of equally valid alternatives. Once you grasp this, the vicissitudes of history and cartography fade. You realise how long humanity has endured. He calls this quiet epiphany entrare, the force of imaginative insight.  Entrare, pioneered by Vico, is the window between cultures. In the house of human history there are many mansions, Berlin writes, and one shouldn’t perpetuate anachronisms under the influence of national or epistemological vanity.

Praise of entrare is as close as Berlin gets to a moral core within his personal philosophy—‘Value Pluralism’—a philosophic version of Fitzgerald’s aphorism that the ability to hold incompatible beliefs is a symptom of intelligence. He clarifies that while it is one alternative to the ‘sonorous generalisations’ of universality, pluralism isn’t ‘relativism’, with the quicksilver detachment that term implies. Pluralism isn’t about accommodating the many breeds of men, it is about admitting that all people are only human. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, as Kant once said, no straight thing was ever made.

We shall have to settle for essay(s) on Said instead, both published in early November. I compare Manan to him in my review (v. grandiloquent, agreed, I hope he forgives me) and it might be amusing to read them together? ‘Tis a good excuse to put it up, anyway, and an updating bogey needs little else.

The Late Edward Said

November offers caramels of granite.

Unpredictable!

Like world history

Laughing at the wrong place.

Tomas Tranströrmer, November in the Former DDR

 “November is a mournful month in the history of Palestine” begins Edward Said’s obituary for the venerable Isaiah Berlin.   November, he continues, frames the Palestinian tragedy.  The Balfour Declaration began the British policy of “demographic transformation” within mandate Palestine on November 2, 1917. The U.N. partitioned Palestine in November 1947; the Yom Kippur war ruined Palestine forever by November 1973.  In less than sixty years, four million people became refugees, both at home and in exile.  Edward Said, emblem of this diaspora, was born in Jerusalem eighteen years after Balfour began eroding his country.

 Edward Said’s life was devoted to dispelling cobwebs. He was destined to be a stranger in many strange lands, growing up a Christian in Cairo and dying an Arab in America. This eclectic heritage fashioned a thinker willing to probe every truth, and skepticism was the cornerstone of his advice to aspiring intellectuals.  Be alert, he warns descendants, to the threat of seizure.  Never allow your conscience to be subsumed in service to illusions.  He elaborates upon this duty in Representations of the Intellectual:

“That this involves a steady realism, an almost athletic rational energy, and a complicated struggle to balance the problems of one’s own selfhood against the demands of publishing and speaking out in the public sphere is what makes it an everlasting effort, constitutively unfinished and necessarily imperfect.”

We are a wound, Said is saying, a wound that fights.

 Said investigates the cleavages language inflicts upon reality; the perpetual battle over meaning in a postmodern cosmos. He explores, across the body of his work, the osmosis through which ideology infects language and language affects knowledge. All along his sprawl, he contemplates exile. “Exile is life led outside habitual order”  he observes “no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew.”

To be uprooted, for Said, is to be trapped a contrapuntal calendar that is forever oscillating against history.  His writing is a process of negotiation with this fate, and the notion of distance -  between a critic and his text, a writer and his world, a maestro and his music -  is central to his thinking.

Another of Said’s contributions to thought is ‘secular interpretation’. This is an idea that writers like Judith Butler and Talal Asad have since evolved. Said’s version (it grows more complex in later iterations) intends to construct an intersecting culture; a civilisation which, in effect, chooses from all the world’s thinking whilst discarding those elements that can be divisive or demeaning. Said’s understanding of nationalism is an excellent example of this ethos.

“The dense fabric of secular life”,  he notes in one interview, “can’t be herded under the rubric of national identity or can’t be made entirely to respond to this phoney idea of a paranoid frontier separating ‘us’ from ‘them’… The politics of secular interpretation proposes a way of dealing with that problem, a way of avoiding pitfalls, by discriminating between the different “Easts” and “Wests”, how differently they are made, maintained, and so on” 

 Individual books develop these impulses into distinctive trajectories.  The iconic Orientalism (1978) introduced the “Other” into our cultural lexicon and made him a legend in ivory towers everywhere. He builds upon this theme in Culture & Imperialism (1993). Within these books, Said terraforms comparative literature by highlighting the exclusion embedded within European perceptions about the rest of the globe.  It’s not as much about denunciation, he argues, as about dismissal. Colonial writing doesn’t disagree with native experience,  it undermines and ignores it.  His first Palestine trilogy,  beginning with The Question of Palestine (1979),  grounds the abstract reasoning of this criticism in concrete experience and historical fact.  Another book echoes Said’s poet-compatriot Mahmoud Darwish in its demand: where should birds fly after the last sky?

Said calls his escape from epistemologies that debase their subjects a ‘politics of abduction’, suggesting that such politics demands a bold imagination eager to extrapolate without filters. ‘Tis only when you notice everyone that you can include them in the future.

Covering Islam (1981) is the bridge between Said’s early books and Culture & Imperialism. The slim book was written during the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and published one year before the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila camps.  It combines an analysis of news coverage about contemporary Islam with the insights of Orientalism and the historical sensibility of The Question of Palestine.  

With all these pundits bemoaning barbaric Muslims again,  Said wonders, does the onslaught of liberal sanctimony signify renewed imperial interest in the region?  The years would prove his nightmare to be true, and by the first Gulf war he was critiquing American foreign policy and Arafat equally. The Politics of the Dispossession (1994) collects political essays written between “Black September” (the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan in 1970) and the Oslo Peace Accords. Israel consistently infringes upon human rights, Said insists within its pages, meanwhile the PLO collapses morally and politically.  Together, the two books exemplify Said’s mature writing, his ‘exfoliation from a beginning’.

Covering Islam and Dispossession were directed at the West and written from the perspective of an ambassador from countries lost to modernity.  Despite his unflagging effort on behalf of the Palestinian cause, Said was neither effusive nor romantic about his nation’s prospects. There isn’t a harsher critic to be found of the post-Oslo Palestinian Authority.  He was staunchly opposed to the fantasy of reclaiming Palestine with violence, and was amongst the earliest proponents of a dialogue with Israel to restore the 1967 borders.  His pragmatism, while wise, rendered him unpopular, and he remained marginal within the liberation movement. The early Palestine books hadn’t even been translated into Arabic when Dispossession was published.

 After Dispossession,  Said’s focus shifts radically. Witness to the deepening shadow of neoliberal America over the Arab world, he cultivates the nearly impossible contortions expected from an exiled exile. He revisits Palestine to write a childhood memoir (Out of Place, 2000) and starts writing for Arab newspapers. He borrows faith from Faiz, believing that cages will dissolve when imprisoned men open their eyes.  His work in this period is more reportage than commentary, stacking maps upon fact upon death tolls in an excruciating tapestry of suffering. He manages to locate hope amidst the wreckage: the courageous activists on both sides of the evanescent border, the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, the ingenuity of a nation inured to deprivation. These columns culminated in his second Palestine trilogy: Peace & Its Discontents (1995),  The End of the Peace Process (2000), From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (2004).

 The key to reading Said is following in his footsteps: construct a chronology, track trajectories of thought, torment yourself with text until you locate context.  In his criticism, Said is the consummate professor, detached and authoritative. The conceptual analysis is incisive, his normative thrust provocative and precise. The arguments are eloquent, the sentences elegant, the conclusions evident.   In his books about Palestine, especially in the early essays of The Politics of Dispossession, he is more liable to prickly defensiveness, qualifying each insight and eternally in transition between the personal and political.

If Edward Said was the epitome of the “rootless cosmopolitan” as the historian Tony Judt  styled him, it was not for lack of love for his homeland.  It was fate, not destiny, that made him the spokesperson for a neglected nation, while his decision to wield his voice like a weapon is the bravest choice anyone in the business of ideas can make. By his final Palestine book- 2004‘s From Oslo to Iraq - Said is splendidly suave again, if bitterly (and justly) angry.

“In the history of art late works are catastrophes” Edward Said notes in his virtuoso finale On Late Style.  This book contains his finest literary performance,  linking poetry to drama to music to an abiding love for the philosopher Adorno:

Late style is what happens if art doesn’t abdicate its rights in favour of reality…it is the predicament of ending without illusory hope or manufactured resignation.. For Adorno, lateness includes the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal.. Fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present… [lateness is life as] an ageing, disobliging, and even embarrassingly frank former colleague who, even though he has left one’s circle, persists in making things hard for everyone. 

***

 This essay combines  “Remembering Edward Said”, published in TSG, and bits of “Come November”, a Hebdomad post. Today’s tumblr stuff is also manan-shaped — a collection of links to his blog, Chapati Mystery + infatuated blather+ Darwish poem.

Filed under: Clubs, Minor Arcana, Politics/History ]]> http://chaosbogey.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/lately-said/feed/ 0 chaosbogey donquixote 06-richard-teschner markharmon,parasoldragon http://chaosbogey.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/we-apologise-for-the-inconvenience/ http://chaosbogey.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/we-apologise-for-the-inconvenience/#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2011 04:35:30 +0000 chaosbogey http://chaosbogey.wordpress.com/?p=1476 ]]> In one week, a fantastic essay will be published. In two, I turn 25. For all my abundant solipsism, I’ve never written a birthday post to myself. I don’t intend to start. If you wish to celebrate that I… arrived, buy a copy of December’s Caravan*. It hosts epic dithering on epic fantasy by this din. In print, too. Cheers all.

*January’s Caravan, which means I will have to get that tattoo after all. and the rest of you have to buy me books.

The  reverberations of age have me thinking. This year, bogey steered clear of din. Once the quest was to highlight the pest. The tipping point, for those who care, was a prophecy about the transience of digital identity I wrote during the mylaw chronicles. After the whedon essay back in march, bogey became my cave, a safe vantage for netscapin’. Best, I figured, to plan for redundancy and assume irrelevance in one’s experiments. If bogey were wholly whimsy, she would stay solely mine.  There’s a price, to be sure. My arcana were abandoned while reviews were drafted and articles assembled. Hebdomad plods along, pilfered poetry has been banished to twitter. We teetered along the brink of 50 posts for six months, bogey and I.

This is It.

Errol Le Cain; Cinderalla

Over the next month, I provide patterns to the chaos. Finally we see what unravelled and pray that I evolved when I wasn’t looking. While writing said caravan essay, I asked the brilliant Sridala Swami if fantasy triggered her poems. “I read it equally for the language, for the possibilities, for the opening of the imagination”, she replied, “what is poetry if not a thing composed of the strange, the wonderful, the absurd, and the yoking together of ideas, whether by violence or by other means?” Poetry and fantasy are alike, she continued, in investigating possibility, they attune their reader to the unlikely. They teach a reader to trust their text, to always anticipate and never predict.

Surprise is the most elusive of literary virtues, even as it is the most necessary; it is what poetry and speculation specialise in. ‘Tis an element that has faded from my writing, this thrill of the splendidly pointless, where the only thing that hangs together is every sentence (if that). Thickets of metaphors were hacked down and merry cartwheels against syntax restrained by wiser editors. It was a heady year, handing over my words for adult supervision. Now I hunt for style again. Hullo my lovely, bogey’s back. The plan, point being, is this: three posts a week; one old, one new, one hebdomad. To begin, as ever, with a historic tale of woe, this month’s ‘slut essay.

Absurdity’s Victims. 

You, standing at the doorsteps, come in

And drink with us our Arabic coffee

For you may feel that you are human like us.

I am one of those annoying people chronically disposed to gloom during festivities. This Diwali I was writing essays about suicide bombing, and the burden of a brooding bogey fell upon my besieged family.

 grandmother: will you pray this year?

 ”guilt is for the naïve native.”

mum: wake up and bathe!

“the absurd has meaning only insofar as it is not agreed to.”

Diwali, as if to mock my misery, fell upon a vintage week in Bangalore. It rained every evening to wash away the day’s sin. Dying smoke swirled upon the wind, like a drowsy kite drifting up on an obliging current. ‘Twas moon-gazing weather, meant to be spent with a dog and a balcony.

People acquainted with the parental abode will know it possesses many balconies and boundaries, all of which are duly lit up for the goddess. My family frowns upon modernity during festivals: no electricity, no lanterns, not even metal lamps.  Only diyas will do.  The one time in living memory we wavered was when I suggested a menorah in the throes of my Hebraic phase.  “It might teach her something” academic parent reasoned. “Only to be confused”  practical parent agreed “but where will we find one tonight?” .

Diyas are fickle fiends, especially under lyrical October skies. Sundry family flew across rooms at first, tending to walls and windows that had their diyas doused. We were next deployed as guards, lighting up rows of diyas only to turn and find them extinguished. This proved isolating and hungry-making, so prosperity was postponed for tea and Bollywood. I was abandoned upon the ramparts, a final sentinel for the goddess.  “Sisyphus had it better” I yelled to a retreating Random “no thanks to Camus”. Later that night , his lullaby was via Marvin:

‘Now the world has gone to bed,

Darkness won’t engulf your head’,

‘I can see by infra-red,

How I hate the night.’

‘Now I lay me down to sleep,

Try to count electric sheep,’

‘Sweet dream wishes you can keep,

How I hate the night.’

An Absurd Victim.

I sip my tea, and criticise

     The war, from flying rumours caught;

Trace on the map, to curious eyes,

      How here they marched, and there they fought.

In intervals of household chat,

      I lay down strategic laws;

Why this manoeuvre, and why that;

    Shape the event, or show the cause.

“The due of the dead”, William Thackeray.

Diwali arrived early in 2011, a portentous matter by any calendar.  Whether this is auspicious or ominous depends on which of my grandparents you ask. One told me an early Diwali marked a fresh cycle of years and new endeavours, another that it meant the gods were going to be hasty all year. Either way, they agreed, it was a good year to be devout. The third granted the premises but not the conclusion: it was a bad time to pray, the gods would be nervous. Better to mollify and then forget.

Whatever your perspective on worship, there are many reasons to celebrate Diwali. It’s the end of harvest and the birth of a new year. The Ramayana has it as the anniversary of Ram’s return from Lanka. Another victory, from the Mahabharata, is reminiscent of the Lord of the Rings.  Narakasura, like the witch-king of Angmar, is impervious to the “hand of man”; he falls, instead, to the princess Satyabhama in disguise.

Diwali is also the birthday of the goddess Lakshmi, and she’s coaxed into homes across the subcontinent during the festival. The daughter of demons, Lakshmi is a welcome visitor that distributes wealth wherever she goes. It is for this tradition- lighting lamps to invite her across the threshold- that Diwali is called the festival of lights.

As I invited prosperity into my home,  I couldn’t help but wonder: what good does Lakshmi do to those who need her most? Diwali brings in the harvest, yet is anyone thinking about those thousands of Indian farmers that quietly commit suicide each year? How are they different from the ‘terrorists’ that convert their suicide into spectacle? Did this relate to another question that haunted me all week: is there a difference between those who die to kill, and those who kill to die? If some people may only be sacrificed and never terminated, can others be merely terminated and never sacrificed?

It was to answer these questions that I read Talal Asad, whose essay On Suicide Bombing was written in response to my turmoil.  He carefully explains why there is nothing “Islamic” or even religious about what the world calls “jihad”. It’s a purely modern crime, he insists, insofar as it is one.  Martyrdom, he explains, is multivalent. In its strictest sense, that of a person sanctifying himself, it has no cognates in Arabic.  Self-sacrifice ennobles Christians and rescues their flailing souls, while Islam rejects such mediation between humanity and Allah. In Hinduism, by way of contrast, sacrifices are an expediency, a way to converse with the gods.  This can imply anything from personal austerity to elaborate ritual. Sanskrit employs a different word for each sort of communiqué. English, meanwhile, collapses tapas and yagna and puja all into one flexible word.

Semantics aside, all communities have a vocabulary for sacrifice.  In Hindi, as in Arabic, shahid is general usage for someone who has died in unjust circumstances. All my life, I’ve called them  “martyrs”,  never once assuming that the person is some manner of Christ-figure. I’ve translated qurban or balidaan as “sacrifice” equally often with no intention of invoking the sacred. Some impulses are simply built into language.  If I were to call a soldier shahid, as plenty of songs and movies do, will the attendant instability suggest that he was motivated by Shiva to wreak destruction upon the earth?

Under siege, time becomes a location, solidified eternally

Under siege, place becomes a time, abandoned by past and future

The only plane of Indian experience that the ‘worthy’ sacrifice applies to is political: the glory and triumph of death in service of your country.  This is a truism of nationalist ideology, all states motivate war.  Participating in politics, Asad suggests, imparts secular immortality. One must range farther, into murky metaphysics, to investigate the question behind this essay: who is a suicide bomber, this walking wound alienated by both nation and religion? Why is (s)he defined only in opposition: as fighting against something and not for it? Were all these dead people nihilists?

Neither politics nor theology provides a clear frame for their dilemma; psychology is impossible. Hunting for motive behind suicide bombings is futile without the culprit’s testimony.  How can anyone analyse a ghost?  Besides, to argue motives is to shift the conversation from meaning to morals, the most intimate of  social constructs. Critics of “jihad”  blame “Islamic law” for legitimating the murder of innocents. The argument, by their own terms, is founded on the definition of crime. If two legal systems clash, which prevails? The debate turns on a collision between lived experiences, the basis of all morality — how will it be resolved with moral or legal reasoning?

In search of metaphysics, I ventured into Camus, an unlikely advocate for “Islamic terror” at first glance. Camus, after all, was Algerian like Kipling was Indian. Despite his early anarchism, his reportage of the French Resistance,  his disdain for righteousness, Camus proved to be on the wrong side of history. Predictably, the ongoing Algerian revolt is never mentioned within the history of The Rebel.

Better, perhaps, to revert to Sartre, who championed Frantz Fanon in the metropolis. With us there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism, Sartre wrote in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters. Later, he sketches the postcolonial jihadi: we have sown the wind, he is the whirlwind.

Despite this eloquence, ’tis Camus’ fastidious assassin that finds himself in Asad’s essay.

Suicide, for Camus, is an expression of despair in the face of absurdity, while revolt is the one coherent philosophy available to those who realise that life is, in fact, utterly absurd. One negates absurdity, the other affirms it. Fusing them is a perilous business ripe with possibility, because such action constructs boundaries out of calamity. The Rebel uses the Russian Decembrists to clarify:

“For them, as for all rebels before them, murder is identified with suicide. A life is paid for another life, and from these two sacrifices springs the promise of a value… (later) In assigning oppression a limit, within which begins the dignity common to all men, rebellion defined a primary value. It put in the first rank of its frame of reference an obvious complicity among men, a common texture, the solidarity of chains.. On the level of history, murder is a ‘desperate exception’ or it is nothing. The disturbance it brings to the order of things offers no hope of a future.. It is that limit that can be realised but once, after which one must die.The rebel has only one way of reconciling himself with the act of murder if he allows himself to be led into performing it: to accept his own death and sacrifice.”

The paradox of the jihadi launched this essay.  Do they kill to die or die to kill?

Talal Asad answers that suicide attacks are, above all, history. They remain, nonetheless, skewed history, recounted always by victims and never by victors. Success empties the suicidal rebel’s dilemma of all significance, it transforms a shahid into a jihadi.  As with the Decembrists in their time, the jihadis in ours are exemplary, if not efficacious. They try to set limits upon atrocity by extinguishing life. The horror of the decision implies they can never be praised for this desire, but dismissing their warning will only intensify it.  If Camus is right, the impulse behind jihad isn’t to be located in politics, or religion, or even history. It is to be found in the climate of the absurd, the habit of living in a senseless universe.

“I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument” begins The Myth of Sisyphus, setting itself up to elucidate circumstances within which people do precisely that.  To live, Camus argues, is to elude mortality and obscurity.  It is the art of forgetting everyone always dies and the world never intervenes.  The absurd mind acknowledges death with a “weariness tinged by amazement” even as it explores the edges of reason.

If anything can be argued, if truths can contradict,  how can one reconcile with the status quo? Camus’ answer is simple. One can’t.  Sanity demands perpetual revolt. Suicide repudiates this revolt; to die voluntarily is to recognise that the cosmos is crazy without resigning oneself to reality.  Echoing The Rebel, Camus suggests that suicide “settles” absurdity by engulfing it in certain death.

The absurd life resides in defiance and remorseless logic:  All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimise or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be judged calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion.

Suicide challenges absurdity by imposing a meaning upon life.  Camus, who has little patience with weakness, prefers living in a manner that funnels absurdity rather than confining it. He wants us to derive value from futility and satisfaction from ephemerality.  However, all his absurd heroes- Don Juans, actors, conquerors, creators- approach the problem from privilege. They depend on civilisational complacence, none of them would survive in a hardscrabble society struggling to persist. Like Sisyphus, who mocked the gods and was punished for it, their miseries are largely self-inflicted. They choose, for better or worse, to scorn theology or rationality and embrace chaos.

Camus evades the victims of absurdity. He ignores the refugees, the dispossessed, the hungry, the bereft communities that are threatened daily with death. The premise of civilisation is immortality; people die, customs and institutions evolve. Snatched of this certainty, how is any society to respond to a cruel world?  As with Camus’ absurd man, all any absurd society can do is deplete itself. It mutilates its young, using their bodies to inscribe a last, desperate message to a silent and unheeding world. And so the choice remains ours, not theirs. Will we listen? To borrow a phrase from Kipling, the odds are on the cheaper man.

The siege is lying in wait.

It is lying in wait on a tilted stairway

in the midst of a storm.

**

Standing here. Sitting here. Always here. Eternally here,

we have one aim and one aim only: to continue to be.

Beyond that aim we differ in all.

We differ on the form of the national flag

(we would have done well if we had chosen, o living heart of mine, the symbol of a simple mule).

We differ on the words of the new anthem
(we would have done well to choose a song on the marriage of doves).

We differ on the duties of women
(we would have done well to choose a woman to run the security services).

We differ on proportions, public and private.

We differ on everything. We have one aim: to continue to be.

After fulfilling this aim, we will have time for other choices.

**

He said to me, on his way to jail,

 “When I am released I will know that praise of nation
is like pouring scorn on nation-
a trade like any other!”

All the bits of verse are by Mahmoud Darwish, in State of Siege

(Part I was Deluded Democracy, about elections around the world.)

The first of these.. snippets is a dismembered essay I wrote for popmatters back in February. That essay makes less sense every time I read it, and I’m hoping the remnants of it will fare better. Another essay that would’ve made it into this series is Of Nativity, where my allegiance to Frantz Fanon was recorded for posterity to note. It has already found its way onto this blog, however, and that’s that as far as introduction goes.

Playing Cassandra.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a woman of demonstrably diverse talents. If she should want to find conventional employment, one would assume it would be a fairly easy process. Bait and Switch is a detailed exposition into why one would be wrong. In it, she goes undercover again, as she did in Nickel and Dimed, this time in the very white collar world of PR and marketing. Excluding the publishing world, she starts the book applying and searching for marketing/PR positions promiscuously, sans moral qualm and geography. Her single string is income level, yet she spends the rest of the book upgrading herself in vain. 

I read this book amazed at the ‘transition’ industry unemployment in America has spawned, converting desperation into dollars. By synthesizing selfishness with self-help, Corporate America seems to have learnt how to systemically shed people while simultaneously convincing them it’s their own fault they’re out of a job.

Ehrenreich describes her steady line of career coaches offering contradictory advice on the basis of loopy personality tests, one of whom hilariously advises her to work on her writing skills. She negotiates the catch-22 of “appropriate” attire for corporate women (simultaneously professional and feminine, without being either threatening or provocative), encounters the evangelical Right, and discovers the new workforce makes the people it retains as miserable as the ones it fires. Several of the people she networks with are employed, but desperate to find alternate employment: either because they are underemployed and dissatisfied, or because they are stretched far too thin compensating for fired colleagues. Apart from time and energy, she ultimately spends $6,000 on her job search: money spent on coaches, resume-checkers, job sites, networking “clubs” and “events”, bootcamp (essentially group therapy), a wardrobe consultant, a “professional development seminar” until, finally (and fittingly), she is offered the chance to pay someone to employ her.

Mervyn Peake, Mad Hatters.

In her penultimate chapter Ehrenreich introduced me to “independent contractors”- a term I associate with people who can violate most Indian labour legislation. In American unemployment circles, it apparently means working for companies as direct sales people, with neither benefits nor salaries. The only income comes from commissions, which can be of two kinds: finding more agents to sell the product for the company; or from direct sales of the product to consumers.

In one instance she describes, Ehrenreich is offered the chance to sell “supplemental health insurance” for AFLAC, but when she enquires about her own health insurance, she is evaded with: “We’re independent contractors, we get our own”. “Supplemental health insurance”, as the name somewhat obliquely suggests, is additional health insurance for people who don’t receive adequate coverage from their employers; a business that is booming, her interviewer hastens to inform her, as people have less disposable income while healthcare costs are ballooning.

To become part of the dubious AFLAC-family Ehrenreich needs to get a license and attend training ($1900); and then hope that the local market for the product hasn’t already been saturated. The more people she can pull into the scheme, either to buy or sell, the more money she earns; and even there, as Ehrenreich points out, it’s tough to distinguish pyramid schemes from legitimate ones.

As an option for the white-collar unemployed, there are thousands of commissions only sales jobs such as the one AFLAC offered me. According to the Direct Selling Association, 13.3 million Americans worked in such sales jobs in 2003, selling $25 billion worth of goods. In many cases, like AFLAC, these jobs offer rewards not only for selling the product but for recruiting new people to do so as well. On it’s dark side, the direct-selling world is filled with traps for the unwary- pyramid schemes in which the ultimate product is valueless non existent. An outfit called JDO Media, for example, enticed people to make money by enlisting others to sell a sketchily- developed ‘marketing program’- for which privilege each recruit had to put up as much as $3,500…

… a real job involves some risk taking on the part of the employer, who must make an investment to acquire your labour. In real estate, franchising, and commission-only sales, the only risk undertaken is by the job-seeker, who has to put out money upfront and commit days or weeks to training. Then she is on her own, fearful that the market will soften or that the quasi-employer will flood the area with competing sales reps or franchisees.

“Independent contractors” must be a global euphemism for the unregulated underbelly of the corporate world. As Ehrenreich wryly observes at the close of her last interview with Larry, the AFLAC minion, she “might as well have applied at Wal-Mart and been given a pushcart full of housewares to hawk on the streets”.

 Bait and Switch was published in 2005, long before one noticed the words ‘recession’ or ‘economic crisis’ bandied about in the popular press. It talks about the slow extinction of a class: the powerful American executive, the golden boys of capitalism. It confirmed what I had been reading on the fringes: that the recession unfolded across a decade, gathering momentum, with different classes hit at various times and accreting intensity.

The fringes in India are making similar noises today about the drive towards a fully corporate, privately owned economy and its costs upon our ecology and our people. The mainstream remains complacent about the advantages of “modernization”, unwilling or unable to hear protest, even as it rises to a crescendo of desperate violence. Ms Ehrenreich outlines a disturbing evolution in the pattern of global capital: if the American corporate workforce is being forced to adapt to a permanently “lean” culture, which recruits and discards at will, how much worse will things become in India?

In India, privilege still seems to ensure jobs, the “boom” is on, and I am no economist. Nonetheless, it appears a fragile dream, grafted onto a vast quagmire of extortion and exploitation. Employment in India has always been uniquely ridden by the scepter of caste, and the corporate dream may only be the latest avatar of the Brahmin imaginary.

The Brahmin Imaginary.

The Brahmin stranglehold on the telling of Indian history is twofold: literacy, and legitimacy. As the clergy, Brahmins were the only caste where formal education is in the job description. This made them readers, and collectors of manuscripts, in a predominantly oral culture; the genetic intelligentsia. As a class, they have always been dependent upon royal power: first for ritual sacrifice, later for land grants. Divine kingship has always been a potent symbol in Indian politics: even the Mughals fell under its spell. The Brahmins, intermediaries to the gods, were convenient legitimators for any king seeking to attest his kingship and establish a dynasty; ritual sacrifice persisted in royal consecrations long after it had disappeared from the popular religion. The British found them handy collaborators, and from colonial times Brahmins have drifted off the land and into the professions.

Even in 2010 India, Brahmins dominate education, especially higher education. I suspect the trend would be especially prominent in the professions and the higher echelons of management: the very executives Bait and Switch talks about. Companies owned by other communities are nevertheless likely to employ a fair number of Brahmins in managerial posts. While the civil services and public companies reserve posts for the “scheduled” castes, private enterprise is free to hire who it wants, and they tend to prefer the dwija.

(More Fintan Taite illustrations can be found on his website. There are more than a few scattered across chaosbogey, but they’re but the tip of an iceberg.)

The obvious disadvantage Dalits in corporate India face is that they are relatively alone in a culture still dominated by kinship bonds: they have a far smaller network of family and friends to turn to for employment. Even as family businesses give way to the more impersonal firm and the corporate meritocracy entrenches itself, the process of exclusion is likely to continue unabated: caste privilege can operate in many covert, insidious ways. Idiomatic English, comfort with technology, dietary habits, an elite education, even a person’s name and home address can flag off their caste to potential recruiters, making candidates vulnerable to the other person’s prejudices.

In any case, verticality far predates the birth of the corporation in India, so one can be sure that access and promotion remain two very different things. It would be very interesting to study to how two famously opaque hierarchies, caste and corporation, interpenetrate within Indian corporate culture to create a new heaven of conspicuous consumption for the Dwija, oblivious to reality. For the Dwija, reality comes with an escape clause. But for the excluded majority, the really interesting question is this: when the lean times come, who amongst the dwija will be shed?

Ms. Ehrenreich tells a compelling story about betrayed people living out the nightmare inversion of the American dream. I will hazard the guess that the advantages of the lean, mean corporate machine will suggest itself to Indian employers soon. When this new Brahmin heaven implodes, as so many have in the past, I am curious to see what the tenacious bunch do next. India’s rulers no longer require divine legitimacy, the traditional route Brahmins have for bouncing back. But Brahmins have spent centuries arbitrating employment and honing their blaming-the-victim expertise. So maybe they’ll just morph into the transition industry in the (even more) destitute India their vision leaves in its wake.

(yes, I’m one too, and the choice of pronoun in this essay was self-evasion. What to do, no?)

Third Generation Sales.

Numbers are a notoriously relative factor within Indian politics, existing only to be massaged at every corner. The distinctive semantics of numbers is nowhere clearer than in the convenient slippage between lakhs and millions in the media’s perpetual quest for the more glamorous statistic. 5 million is, after all, a far more imposing figure than 50 lakhs, unless one has cultivated the esoteric skill of fluently flitting back and forth between numerical systems. In a country where “crorepati” and “millionaire” are practically synonymous, it’s safe to assume such literacy remains an elite skill even among the educated. Add to that the inevitable and instinctive association between millions and dollars, and a million is virtually guaranteed more eyeballs than a paltry 10 lakhs.

Conversely, when an effort is being made to downplay the magnitude of a certain value, the ingenious “hundreds of lakhs” are trotted out in defiance of mathematical logic. Corporate accounts, for instance, enumerate in the hundreds and even thousands of lakhs by default. But the big money still talks in crores, the Indian billion, seamlessly transiting between the hoi polloi and the haute. By this marker, the recent sale of 3G spectrum to telecom majors within India was almost too haute to touch.

The Government of India laughed its way to the Reserve Bank this past week, even as the Pakistani Government was busy ejecting its country out of the internet revolution. 3G spectrum, which enables the further diffusion of the web across India, sold for twice its estimated revenue, at a whopping 67,700-odd crores (677 billion rupees or 15 billion dollars, for those who prefer an alternate gloss). I should reiterate, before my compatriots get smug about our relative freedoms, that this diffusion is strictly an elite phenomenon, as anything that assumes more than barely-there literacy is bound to be. Besides, it’s easy to forget that internet access is expensive in the subcontinent, a reality that posher phones are not likely to address. The average internet monthly plan can (and does) feed entire families for weeks, if one neglects the attendant requirement of a computer/smart phone. My internet bill is half the (optimal) monthly minimum wage. Despite our burgeoning cyber-cafe culture, this disparity is not easily resolved. The web has been a home to many of us while remaining a myth to many more.

From, of course, xkcd

Sermons aside, when news of the final 3G deal broke on 19th May, Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee was asked how the windfall was to be spent “for social interest” by a zealous (if naive) television journalist. The minister acted coy, if only because he realises the bounty is hardly about to reach those who most need it: India’s budget allocates a paltry 900 crores towards agricultural production, indisputably India’s poorest profession (after, possibly, day-labour, but that is not even considered a profession within India’s three pronged system of manufacturing, agriculture, and services). We are, they tell us, a perennially poor country. So poor we can’t afford to offset an obscene 16% inflation rate on basic food grains and commodities.

Well, anyway. Woe betide the less fortunate. It is, after all, what they are there for: to be used as lightning rods for all the squalor and misery we live amidst. To most of my peers, the sale of 3G spectrum deserves attention because it marks a transition in our paradigm for mobile information (the pun is intended, but forced: I am using mobile as an adjective, not a noun). It’s shift embodied by the iPad: once 3G settles down, the iPad will go from being a bewildering and largely useless gizmo to another splendid toy for the social climber’s stable. We are a young, voracious nation unwilling to be left out of the gadget wars, a fact telecom companies obviously respect enough to cough up such astonishing amounts. That is, I suppose, all for the better, if it ensures that I will never be bereft of wikipedia. And I can’t wait to be able to stream movies while I read, rock, surf, skype, and play video games on the train to heaven.

Where Green Ants Dream.

An Allegory for Niyamgiri and the Dongria Kondhs.

Green Ants can be interpreted at various levels- it can be constructed as a classic tale of the human and environmental costs of human greed, as a study of the encroaching tides of western rationality upon profoundly different ways of thought or as an indictment of a civilisation that respects no other. At its heart is a question: can you really consider yourself civilised if you cannot understand another person’s perspective, or at the very least respect it?

The story of green ants is a tale about corporate profit clashing with aboriginal beliefs. It is, in some ways, the story of advancing capitalism. Capitalism has always laid waste what came before it- whether it was the “red” Indian or the brown one, the yellow man or the black one. The white man, they say, was blind to his own history and imported his blindness to the colonies. This was done by subordinating, undermining and dividing cultures with the ruthlessness only the religion of profiteering can muster. How can it be otherwise? If all is fair where money is to be made, how easy it must be to poison societies where wealth is respected but not worshipped. Historically, imperial ambitions have always mixed well with religious fervour: the only difference in the modern world is that money is the new false god.

In Herzog’s movie, a mining company wants to excavate the holy ground of a group of Australian aborigines: they believe that the land that is to be mined is where the green ants, upon whom existence depends, dream; and upon that dream rests reality. On the face of it, it is irrational and absurd, but really is it any more absurd that ordering existence for the benefit of the unqualified zeal for profit? Than unrestrainedly exploiting resources, when the finiteness of them is beyond question? The “American dream” is today what constructs reality- and it is no more tangible (and some would argue possible) than the green ants’ dream. This film, to some extent, exposes it for the myth it is by deconstructing other myths that have sustained other cultures in their fight for survival.

The sharpest voice protesting capitalism today says that it steals from the poor to reward the rich. The latest recession, for instance, will hit aid to dependant Africa and the sundry poor of the world worse than anyone else, because they are the most expendable. It was caused because of the recklessness of big business and banks; yet they received a trillion dollars in stimulus packages. This is a story about how stealing from the poor, the unrepresented, the helpless, is the easiest and quickest crime in history and one that has always borne rich dividends. It is made easy by dismissing their qualms and their claims as irrational, backward, irrelevant and placing them against “real” truths, like the fact that the world needs to mine constantly to support a wasteful and extravagant system. It is made easy by the fact that the privileged of the world- economically, culturally, socially privileged- are so few and yet so powerful, and the only ones that have the resources to be able to stick together. And the fact that they disguise their minority so effectively by forcing the majority to fight amongst themselves for scraps. In fights for survival, metaphysical questions about the “system” and its validity are a luxury. It is only when one’s basic beliefs about existence are challenged that one begins to consider actually fighting, and by then it is often too late.

Over the next week, I shall be putting up collections of things I wrote this year that haven’t made it to this blog yet. Pre-bogey readers, all ten of you, will remember I blogged for Himal SouthAsian earlier in 2010, and these were mostly written to that end. They are ‘political’ reportage, if you will be generous with your definition. Mostly, I talk about news I find interesting. This year that happened more often than is usual, as Chaosbogey’s Politics will tell you. Here is me covering other elections from the year.

The second part of the reversal was Playing Cassandra.

Antique Wine in an Antique Bottle.

June, 2010

The recent demolition of the West Bengal CPI (M) in Calcutta municipality elections brokered many fates. In a country where some form of election is a daily occurrence, municipal elections inevitably get the short shrift. Not so here.  Newspapers and pundits portend that it marks a turned tide, that 2011 assembly elections shall see the party in the bay rather than in Bengal. Writers’ Building (in Calcutta, even administration must have a booksy air) might finally see new occupation: Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress.

Writers Building

The party in present form is evidently just the Lady, a few trusted deputies, and her unwavering agenda of uprooting the CPI (M). One wonders how this party will cope with the delegation of government. To the facile observer, Banerjee’s Didi might echo that other formidable and self-reliant Lady CM: Mayawati’s Behenji (even their honorifics collide). An important difference remains. Mayawati has had spells of power to considerably enrich herself, while Mamata is that rare mystery: an impecunious politico. She is currently Union Railway Minister, an easy route to padded bank accounts. Perhaps her restraint was just prudence: what is a ministry compared to the treasury of an entire state? Will she stay uncorrupted by power once her crusade is accomplished? It is a wager Bengal appears willing to take.

Foreshadowing of the immanent change has been gathering for a while: the brutalities at Nandigram and Lalgarh; the clumsy break between the left alliance and the Congress in 2008 over the nuclear deal; the rebellion and public spat in the Kerala chapter last year; the death of the hypnotic Jyoti Basu earlier this year.  Both Kerala and West Bengal, India’s two communist bastions, elect new state assemblies next year, a year that looks poised to establish some very unpleasant realities for the new decade.

The official left in India has been hamstrung, time and again, by the tension involved in reconciling all-embracing revolution with too much revolution, and it has rarely emerged the stronger for it. In the ‘60s they squabbled about Maoism, in the ‘70s about Naxalism, in the ‘90s they conflated the two categories conveniently. The only coherent policy attributable to the current CPI(M) is a not-so-subtle game of playing both sides against the middle, and it has served them terribly this past five years. They are the socialist government that sold out farmers to Big Industry, paradoxically arguing against privatisation of public assets at the same time. “Confused” doesn’t begin to describe it.

I live with a Bengali forsworn to Mamata Banerjee, and arguably I am partisan. Yet, at this point, even the most dyed-in-the-wool red must recognise that the government in Calcutta does little to bolster either Marxist philosophy or praxis, let alone popularity. 35 years of denied democracy is a hard pill to swallow however ardently one desires social transformation. Coupled with the sceptres of murdered farmers, I find it impossible to resist the conviction that our socialist experiment, like so many globally, has failed. Marx has proven over the last century to be as fallible to twisted dogma as the next dead man. That said, Indian socialism has not failed the same way, or for the same reasons, that European communism did: our “communism” has forged independently tortured paths right from its official founding in Tashkent in 1933. No rhetoric can paint Mamata Banerjee into Lech Walesa.

Everything’s looted, betrayed and traded,
black death’s wing’s overhead.
Everything’s eaten by hunger, unsated,
so why does a light shine ahead?

By day, a mysterious wood, near the town,
breathes out cherry, a cherry perfume.
By night, on July’s sky, deep, and transparent,
new constellations are thrown.

And something miraculous will come
close to the darkness and ruin,
something no-one, no-one, has known,
though we’ve longed for it since we were children.

Anna Akhmatova.

Like all things that take root in India, communism has gone native. The way out of these woods is for us to discover as well, if we are not to go the way of rudderless Eastern Europe, and jeering at a flogged ideal rarely dispels it. The more marginalised and venal the parliamentary left gets, the stronger militant factions will grow. Hannah Arendt and her descendants might choose to interpret the tendency of socialist government to implode as proof of socialism’s natural totalitarianism. I believe that it is institutions that rightly bear the charge of tyranny, not ideas nor individuals. We stand agreed that bureaucracy and socialism are not well-mixed. The dispute lies in which part of the equation we would emphasise and which we would dismantle.

The Ballsified Clegg.

A White Man Who Ran

That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won’t be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
– From: Going, Going by Philip Larkin.

Britain goes to polls on 6th May 2010. In a single day, the tiny island will elect more legislators than the masses of India do over the course of two months. Clearly, British elections are not the mela we are used to around election season, where skeletons are harried out of closets for months in order to provide the electorate with a good show. All the same, 13 years under the same government will make anyone twitchy, and the Britons are determined to make the best of a bad job. As Hugh Rifkind noted yesterday, this proved an excellent election for bullshitters, and the only thing that need constrain one’s observations is one’s imagination.

For years, one would be laughed out of any British pub (or Indian clubs frequented by posh folk that ‘follow’ politics in the mother country) at the very mention of the Liberal Democrats (Lib-Dems). One such Scotch uncle suggested my breath and ‘youthful exuberance’ were better wasted upon the Greens. Astonishingly, in just under a month, the British media resurrected the party and concocted a passable (and regrettably pale) shadow of Obama. We are all (those of us who inhabit countries where elections remain a thankfully periodic affair) a few elections into the naughts now, and we demand our jollies. It is a decade in which the liberal-left has felt singularly defeated; we now demand politicians come with a firm fix of messiah.

The omnipresence of information in our decade sometimes blinds us to how easily manipulated it remains, especially in the era of publicity politics – and one is easily seduced into buying into left-liberal pinups Obama-style. The usually clamourous Brit papers seem fully committed to Cleggmania; as with Obama, one must head to Chomskyland to find anything resembling a critical appraisal of the man and his politics slanted from the left. The Guardian granted him a fanboy-editorial; the Independent, a paper one can usually count on for nastiness, is being remarkably effusive. It is all eerily similar to Obama-mania and the attendant conversion of a complex political dilemma into a simplified personal faith.

The chief difference is the length of the campaigns – Obama’s mojo took years in the making and penetrated every level of popular culture (I was initially introduced to Obama as Rory Gilmore’s post-college job back in 2007). British productions are more subdued. Besides, the goal of the Obama-campaign was infinitely more ambitious: it convinced citizens that a system as politically infantile as rigidly bipartisan democracy is sustainable and innovative. Cleggmania is merely intended to buffer the bumpy road to coalition politics; a cross any mature democracy in the postmodern world has to learn to bear.

Nonetheless, if this media gush-fest should succeed, it will only strengthen the narrative and ensure sequels, as each new faux-Obama slowly chips away at the real one’s achievements. Rahul Gandhi looks set up to be 2014’s Obama, with a complimentary campaign of Change!  Irony is so last century.  Maybe they’ll launch the Kaun Banega Obama? show, where politicians from across the globe compete to receive six months of great press and the Nobel Peace Prize.

All too soon, the historic Black Man Who Could could only be remembered as the first in a dynasty of media-fashioned political leaders, propelled along by the power of the headline. It took Obama less than a year to bring everyone thudding back to earth – it will likely take Clegg, should he slip into power, correspondingly less. That said, I can’t deny I would rather see Clegg flamenco into Downing Street than watch Britain go wholly Tory in denial. Hilarity, if nothing else, is guaranteed.

I say this as a college-age Indian not particularly invested in the next British PM. I like the sound of accessible visas and university funding, and I am told the Lib-Dems have the best policy on both (of course, given my taste in media, it is unlikely that I would be told otherwise). If I were British-Asian, I suspect my calculations would be more agonised. It would then be a choice between representation and ideology. I would be intensely suspicious of the Lib-Dem’s miserable record when it comes to representing women and people of colour: it has the lowest number of MPs from both groups.

Of the 15 ethnic minority MPs in the last Parliament, 13 were Labour and 2 Tory; there were no African or Asian MPs in the 63-strong Lib-Dem contingent. The party is fielding only four this time with a shot at winning. In contrast, the Tories have opened up their party under David Cameron (though not without a fight). The Tories are fielding as many minority candidates as Labour (44), ten of whom are standing from reasonably safe seats. In an election where even the Tories are making a point about diversity and encouraging ethnic-minority candidates for the first time (albeit dubious ones, like the ultra-right PR goddess Priti Patel) Lib-Dem apathy must be looking especially dismal. In other constituencies and on the other extreme, political parties founded on the sole plank of identity politics threaten Labour even in London’s solidly red East End. (Respect, one such, is a Bangladeshi-focused party founded, weirdly, by a Scot).

Even worse, the party that does best with catapulting my community and gender to elected office- Labour – would be the worst hit by a Lib-Dem victory. In some areas the clash is especially poignant: Diane Abbott, the first black woman in British Parliament, is defending her seat against a 20-something white man standing on the Lib-Dem ticket. To quote the local newspaper:

Meanwhile the Lib Dem challenger Keith Angus reckons, in this campaign video posted on YouTube, that it’s a two-horse race between him and Abbott. Well, yes, but only in the sense that one horse is a Grand National winner and the other is a Blackpool beach donkey.

I am glad I am not this hypothetical British voter, bewildered amidst political psychosis, as surely as she is glad not to be me. ‘Tis true we have embellished versions of each other’s lives. That is as much part of the diaspora as a consequence of it, and it is unlikely that I will ever stop checking in with the Scotch Uncles to try get a better glimpse into her world.

The fact is we both make the same series of non-choices in our political lives: between converging forces more apart in rhetoric than in reality; but that is not something we enjoy being reminded about. Rather, we engage in the metaphysics of coalitions; the subtle skill of calculating when and whether undercutting can lead to undermining. This is expertise better sought from the study of third world democracy, where the coalition was mastered, than from first world variants hostile to the form. To that limited extent, I’m the luckier of the pair of us.

****

I owe the title of this post to a senior who will (hopefully) write a book with similar title one day. He also had, from a distance, the prettiest eyes in college; and legions of fangirls as a consequence (yes, women, I think he noticed). So you will agree there is much to thank him for.

people fed from the same breast,

tree whose roots

keep me in prison,

because I am here to love you

and I am here to defend you

with my blood and with my mouth

as two faithful rifles.

— Sitting upon the Dead, Miguel Hernandez.

(An edited version of this essay appeared on mylaw.net)

The Spanish Civil War is a bellwether for humanities geeks. For most, it was just one more brutal event in a brutal decade: with things like the Holocaust and atomic bombs to report, how interesting are a bunch of anarchists running around trying to change the world? There are a smattering of those in every war. For us nerds, however, the war means much more: it was a harbinger, a prophecy, a betrayal. This was as true at the time it happened as it is now; which is why all the eccentrics and writers of the world were drawn to the battle like moths to a flame. It was a war in which, as Auden once wrote, poets exploded like bombs.  Think back to any mid-century poet or journalist, and odds are they were annealed by fires across Spain. Orwell describes a very cosmopolitan Catalonia, brimming with Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, Poles, not to mention the Russians; Neruda, for that matter, made his way all the way from Chile. Spain, too, offered up her own literary sacrifices: Lorca, killed by Franco in Granada; Miguel Hernandez, lost to prison and pneumonia.

Orwell was amongst the first wave of these adventurists, and Homage to Catalonia is a bitter love-story about the country and the ideals he was determined to save. It begins in 1936, when Orwell first joined the POUM militia on the Aragon front, and closes in 1937, when he is running from Barcelona with the police, as he put it, one jump behind him. The story of how a soldier became a traitor is the story of Homage to Catalonia.

Unlike most Englishmen rushing off to Spain in the late ‘30a- say, Esmond Romilly, or Rupert John Conford, or, briefly, Eric Hobsbawm- Orwell was no reckless adolescent. He was published, married, well into his life, all of which he risked on the front for close to a year.  By the time most journalists thought it might be worth their while to head into Spain- Martha Gellhorn, for instance, reached Madrid around the summer of ’37- Orwell was already a veteran; already, in fact, a fugitive. His perspective on the war both benefits and is hobbled by this early vantage- no later book will describe the infighting between the anarchists and the communists in as much detail, yet the bombing of Guernica finds no mention in his story.

The first part of the memoir is spent ruminating about the country and his comrades, amidst a dull, weary routine of foraging for firewood and scheming to stay awake in the freezing nights. War, it appears, is mostly in the anticipating.

In secret I was frightened. I knew the line was quiet at present, but unlike most of the men about me I was old enough to remember the Great War.. War, to me, meant roaring projectiles and skipping shards of steel; above all it meant mud, lice, hunger, and cold and scrambling up and down over the jagged limestone that knocked one’s boots to pieces, pouncing eagerly on tiny twigs of wood.

Given the ragged state of the militia that Orwell describes- very few rifles, no ammunition, no candles, no boots or uniforms, little food- the relative calm seems serendipitous. In the summer months, we are told, there was fierce fighting in the area; however, this being rugged terrain, once the trenches had settled in, there was very little to be done. He describes the weird claustrophobia of trench warfare, where the enemy is too close for comfort, yet too far to hit:

The new sentries were no sooner in the trench than they began firing a terrific fusillade at nothing in particular. I could see the Fascists, tiny as ants, dodging to and fro behind their parapet, and sometimes a black dot which was someone’s head would pause for a moment, imprudently exposed…. They were simply remote black insects whom one occasionally saw hopping to and fro.

At first, he deplores the hopeless amateurs he is fighting alongside, especially considering the brutal professionalism of the other side. Franco’s Spanish Foreign Legion (at the core of the military rebellion that began the civil war) are hardy, longtime soldiers; Goliath, as it were, facing off against an army of Davids armed quite literally with slingshots: “There were nights when it seemed to me our position could be stormed by twenty Boy Scouts armed with air-guns, or twenty Girl Guides armed with battledores, for that matter”. Over the course of his time at the front, however, he comes to appreciate the revolution the militias have initiated in army discipline, especially in contrast to the brutal treatment meted out by the Fascists to their own as much as to others. In yet another first for this war, the Popular Army that replaced the militia system in 1937 was a midway between the two types- though, of course, Orwell could not have known this would be the prototype of the postmodern armed forces: voluntary in theory, conscripted in practice.

Considering the contrasting approaches across the jagged front, he writes:

They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of a classless society. Of course there was not perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would’ve thought conceivable in time of war…. the newly raised draft of militia was an undisciplined mob not only because the officers called the privates “comrade” but because raw troops are always an undisciplined mob. In practice, the democratic ‘revolutionary’ type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers’ army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It depends on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. Revolutionary discipline depends on political consciousness- on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed, it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square.

After long stretches describing the long tedium of the war, the lack of cigarettes, and sundry observations about the changing political scenario in Republican Spain, Orwell is suddenly thrown into action.  The Government, he tells us, has finally “produced a decent bomb.” The militia, long unused to the concept of ammunition, are enthused by the sudden influx of weapons and plan an offensive down the line. Orwell’s redoubt is called upon for volunteers, and off he goes to try kill the Fascists.

He describes his first, and only, attempt at killing the enemy with a typical combination of detail and dry wit:

The Fascist, Robert Capa.

If I had fired I could’ve blown him to pieces. But for fear of shooting one another we had been ordered to use only bayonets once we were inside the parapet, and in any case I never even thought of firing. Instead, my mind leap backwards twenty years, to our boxing instructor at school, showing me in vivid pantomime how he had bayoneted a Turk at the Dardanelles. I gripped my rifle by the small butt and lunged at the man’s back. He was just out of reach. Another lunge: still out of reach. And for a little while, we proceeded like this, he rushing up the trench and I after him on the ground above, prodding at his shoulder-blades and never quite getting there- a comic memory for me to look back upon- though I suppose it seemed less comic to him. Of course, he knew the ground better than me and soon slipped away.

The whole thing plays out like a comic opera. Orwell and fellow troopers storm the Fascist post, kill a few people and almost steal a telescope, and then are killed in turn and retreat. The whole point, we are told, was to make sure that the Fascists couldn’t divert troops to a bigger offensive down the line; in the logic of war, the night was considered a well played tactic. Orwell, on the other hand, concludes his recounting of the absurd night regretting the abandoned telescope.

The kind of war Orwell describes appears anachronistic in our age of martial megatrons: the primary weapons of the early Spanish war were bayonets and machetes. It was in the Spanish war, nonetheless, that the defining civilian experience of war changed from that of privation and disease (with the harrowing fear of slaughter should their side lose) to one of destroyed cities and poisoned air. It was the Spanish war that erased the innocent from the annals of history: in modern war, anyone’s game. This is a side of war Orwell is singularly silent about, being himself a soldier; bombing campaigns inevitably target cities and productive populations, not chaotic front-lines where it is hard to tell ally from enemy. Martha Gellhorn, observing the war in Madrid, wrote what is likely one of the first accounts of a bombed-out shell-city; “the shadows”, she writes, “crawled over chaos”.  In our time, the sceptre of charred landscapes resides at the tip of our collective memory- images from pitted Sarajevo compete with the napalm-burned jungles of Vietnam- to the point where further description seems close to obscene. At the time, however, Guernica set Europe aflame with horror, yet another symbol in this concertedly significant war.

Guernica, Picasso

And you forget them at your peril

For though you fight as well as they

You’ll be betrayed, as we were.

David Marshall, I lived in a time of heroes.

Everytime Stalin swaps partners, Marxism has to be hammered into a new shape.
— George Orwell, Inside the Whale.

Capa, Falling Soldier II.

Capa, Falling Soldier I

The quintessential experience of modern war- bombing- was perfected by the Luftwaffe over Spain; tens of thousands of bombs were dropped on every major city: Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga and, of course, Guernica, where the Basques convened under the holy oak. It was, as Sven Lindqvist points out in A History of Bombing, a symbol waiting to happen, given the savage precedent set by colonial wars of earlier decades. For the bomb had already been used, extensively, across Africa and Asia  by assorted European ‘great powers’; it was only a matter of time before the weakest link within the metropolis would be targeted.

Franco was the last to leave Chechaouen (in “Spanish” Morocco) in 1924 and the first to return in 1926 when France had won the war for Spain. He never forgot Chechaouen. It was there that the taboo against calling in the air force of a foreign land to bomb one’s own territory was first broken- and the taboo against bombing a city full of defenceless civilians. Chechaouen laid the foundation for Guernica.

Throughout the interwar years, the fear in Europe grew- the fear of a new kind of war, a war that would suddenly strike like lightning from a clear sky at peaceful, unarmed people….Guernica gave a name to that fear…  The destruction of Guernica made such a huge impression because it was precisely what everyone was waiting for… The painting was hung in Paris while the air in Guernica was still acrid with smoke… Chechaouen had no Picasso. There was not even a camera there to record the destruction. Among the tens of thousands of documents collected by Ali Raisuni, there is not one single image of Chechaouen after the bombing.

If Orwell has nothing to say about this innovation made to the practice of war, he has plenty to say regarding the other contribution the Spanish made to 20^th century world-history: the blueprint for every betrayed revolution. One of the worst kept secrets of revolutions is their hopeless factionalism: hardly do the suborned masses capture the castle, it appears, that they begin self-stratifying. One of the better kept secrets about revolutions is that while the circumstances may distort terms within the debate, the hoary political distinction between ‘left’ and ‘right’ remains intact.

In every revolution, the hidden power-play has been between the left and the right within the revolutionary forces, only later to be exploited by authoritarian forces seeking to squish the revolt wholesale. Imagine a revolution to be the siege of a city that can only be taken down from inside, and inevitably is, if only the army outside can hold out for long enough. In 18^th century France, the Jacobins, far to the left of most, won the internal battle; till Thermidor claimed Robespierre’s head. In Russia, Lenin’s left-wing Bolsheviks prevailed against the gentler Mensheviks. Later, in a reversal, Stalin kicked Trotsky out; partially why Russian socialism swirled around ‘Marxism’ in such a demented ballet.

In Spain, following this pattern, the war and attendant revolution devolved into a twisted menage a trois: anti-Fascists tussling amidst themselves, with orthodox Communism at the extreme-right end of the spectrum. As Orwell notes, the Comintern was obsessed with Russian survival by the late ‘30s, and that depended on Russian military alliances with liberal (and, later, fascist) Europe. Having had their hopes dashed by the ill-fated German revolution of the ‘20s, and alarmed by the rise of Hitler as a symptom of the failure of world-revolution, the Comintern was no longer interested in the ‘wheels of the world revolution’ that Trotsky wanted to set into motion. Stalin’s Russia retreated  into a “socialism in one country” formula, whether for preservation or for purification we will never know, and global socialism has never recovered from that taint. The global policy of Soviet Russia, at any event, was containment and preservation, not expansion or solidarity.

This policy-shift impacted Communist movements worldwide- Indian communists not least- with the consequence that global communism spend much of the ‘30s behaving like an eccentric pendulum, swinging upon the drift of Russian foreign policy. The Russians, for their part, used their status as the primary arms-dealer to the Republican government much like Hitler and Mussolini used their connections to Franco: to introduce conformity in Spain for a greater geopolitical cause. Spain, was, in every sense of the word, an experiment: a petri-dish breeding scuppered revolution, modern war,  and postmodern political theory.

The Progress of Orwell's War.

The Collapse of 1938

At the beginning of the war, the working classes and unions defended the cities and countryside against Franco’s revolt to restore the monarchy (which had fallen in 1931 to popular unrest).  In spring and summer 1936, during the fiercest fighting, a quiet revolution conducted itself across vast swathes of the Republic.  Land and production were collectivised, militias organised, and both the Central and the Catalan government, Orwell argues, “could be said to represent the working class”. Power was shared by the CNT (Anarcho-Syndicalist trade unions), the UGT (socialist trade unions), and the government was headed by Caballero, a left-wing socialist.

Slowly, however, the coalition was purged from within; ‘syndicalist’ unions like CNT and ‘trotskyist’ militias like POUM were phased out in favour of more reliable ‘Stalinist’ forces. In May, the fragile Catalan government was shattered, Barcelona erupted in riots, and the anarchists‘ long expulsion gathered momentum. One year into the war and the revolution, the government  consisted primarily of liberals and right-wing Socialists who served Russian ambitions more than Spanish ones. In six months, Catalonia went from revolutionary government to a liberal one: Lenin’s October revolution in mirror- inverse. The consequences of this shift upon the war effort were both enduring and dramatic, as Orwell notes:

One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the right… I grasped that the Communists and the Liberals had set their face against allowing the revolution to go forward. I did not grasp they might be capable of setting it back… There is very little doubt that arms were held back lest they should get into the hands of the anarchists, who would afterwards use them to revolutionary purpose; consequently the big Aragon offensive, which would have made Franco draw back from Bilbao, and possibly from Madrid never happened. But this was comparatively a small matter. What was more important was that once the war had been narrowed down to a ‘war for democracy’, it became impossible to make any large-scale appeal for working-class aid abroad…

Since the 1914-1918 ‘war for democracy’ has had a sinister sound. For years past the Communists themselves had been teaching the militant workers in all countries that ‘democracy’ was a polite name for Capitalism. To say first “Democracy is a swindle!” and then “Fight for Democracy!” is not good tactics. If, with the huge prestige of Soviet Russia behind them, they had appealed to the workers of the world in the name not of democratic Spain but of revolutionary Spain, it is hard to believe they wouldn’t have got a response…

What clinches everything is the case of Morocco. Why was there no rising in Morocco? Franco was trying to set up an infamous dictatorship, and the Moors actually preferred him to the Popular Front Government! The palpable truth is no attempt was made to foment a rising in Morocco, because to do so would have meant putting a revolutionary construction on the war. The first necessity, to convince the Moors of the Government’s good faith, would have been to proclaim Morocco liberated. And we can imagine how pleased France would have been with that! The best strategic opportunity of the war was flung away in the vain hope of placating French and British capitalism”

Orwell, by happenstance, was actually in Barcelona when the fighting between the POUM and PSUC, anarchists and communists, exploded. In the weeks prior, the tensions between the CNT and the UGT had escalated, and finally the city rioted, caught between the Civil Guards and the various militias. Orwell was recovering from an injury as he met with his wife in the city, and had requested a transfer to the International Brigade, stationed in Madrid. In the meanwhile, waiting for a pair of boots (‘the kind of detail that is always deciding one’s destiny’), he got caught up in the Barcelona fighting as a partisan for POUM.  Three days after the fighting ceased, he was back at the front, still fighting along the anarchist line (he declined to join the PSUC-affiliated International Brigade after his Barcelona experience).  “If we could drive Franco and his foreign mercenaries into the sea”, he writes in his journal, “it might make an immense improvement in the world situation, even if Spain itself emerged with a stifling dictatorship and all its best men in jail’.

While he was off at the front, however, conditions for POUM worsened, helped along by a largely PSUC-partisan press which painted the syndicalists to be fascist fifth columns who had engineered the riots to weaken Barcelona and soften it for Franco. POUM veterans were harassed and imprisoned, which proved disastrous for the scores of foreigners affiliated with it, especially the Italian and German fugitives who faced deportation back to their own country.  Bob Smillie, who had served on the front even longer Orwell,  disappears into prison on his way back to England; Georges Kopp, a Belgian and Orwell’s onetime CO, is arrested on his way to a promotion. By late June, Orwell himself is injured again, this time so badly that he is declared unfit for further combat.

As usual, he writes of the horror of a bullet-wound with calm detachment:

The whole experience of being hit by  a bullet is very interesting and worth describing in detail… Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion…Not being in pain, I felt a vague satisfaction. This ought to please my wife, I thought; she always wanted me to be wounded, which would save me from being killed when the great battle came.

Ivor Hele

Back in the city after his hospitalisation, he describes the change in Barcelona’s once-jolly and brave camaraderie with wrenching and wretched disappointment: “No one who was in Barcelona then, or for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food-queues, and prowling gangs of armed men… It was as though some huge evil intelligence was brooding over the town “. The evil intelligence is soon alerted to his presence in the town, and Orwell skips out of Spain with the police hot on his trail, after a few days spent playing hobo on Barcelona’s streets.

The war, of course, went on long after Orwell left; and the Republic, despite all the sniping, put up a brave, honourable front. In September 1938, the International Brigade was withdrawn from the fronts by the Spanish government, following a volley of diplomatic chatter about “intervention” and its pitfalls from the liberal left. By this time, the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact was less than a year away, and arguably Russia had overplayed it’s hand in Spain, festering understandable resentment amongst its leaders (the Brigade was communist, almost to the man). One of many open questions about the war is what might’ve happened if the thousands-strong International Brigade, so valorised in song and memory, was allowed to stick around to repel Franco’s overwhelming Italian and German support. Be that as it may, the turn of events served to accelerate away from Orwell’s brave brethren at POUM, and history has recorded them as cowards, fools, or traitors. Even the otherwise impeccable Hobsbawm fell prey to the fallacy; he spends a goodly portion of Revolutionaries excoriating Spanish anarchism. Belying Orwell’s experience, he argues that Spanish anarchism was simply too haphazard, and, well, anarchic to fight a war; further, that it made the mystifying error of not attempting to change the style of ‘primitive Spanish revolt’. The communists, he suggests, had the only rational policy to achieve these fine goals, which explains why they prevailed while anarchists foundered (though he is much too fine a scholar to fall for the party-line blather about the Fascist fifth column cunningly hidden behind POUM).

Ivor Hele

Homage to Catalonia’s final chapters, written in England in late 1937,  are full of denunciations of the demonisation of POUM and the developing ‘Left’ orthodoxy coalescing around the Republican government’s altered history of the war.  Dumbfounded to the point of incoherence, Orwell piles invective upon insult; he is desperate to give history an account of the ‘real war’ to stand against the Republic’s blatant hypocrisy. He points out the irony of a government planning elaborate schemes of disinformation and censorship even as it  denounces libellous fascist propaganda about ‘red atrocities’ (such as Franco’s famous thesis that Guernica’s denizens burned down their own town); he shudders at the prospect of heresy-hunters in a land once transformed by freedom; he balks at the choice between alternate tyrannies. Orwell distilled his fury and bewilderment from these chapters in his 1942 essay Looking Back on the Spanish War:

Early in life I had noticed that no event was is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I aw newspaper reports which did not bear any relationship to the facts, not even the relation implied by an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of the imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened… This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate, similar lies, will pass into history… I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

I’m still glad I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton. If Hillary had won the election, every single day would be a festival of misogyny. We would hear constantly about her voice, her laugh, her wrinkles, her marriage and what a heartless, evil bitch she is for doing something – whatever! – men have done since the Stone Age. Each week would bring its quotient of pieces by fancy women writers explaining why they were right not to have liked her in the first place. Liberal pundits would blame her for discouraging the armies of hope and change, for bringing back the same-old same-old cronies and advisers, for letting healthcare reform get bogged down in inside deals, for failing to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan – which would be attributed to her being a woman and needing to show toughness – for cozying up to Wall Street, deferring to the Republicans and ignoring the cries of the people. In other words, for doing pretty much what Obama is doing. This way I get to think, Whew, at least you can’t blame this on a woman.

- Whatever Happened to Candidate Obama? Katha Pollitt.

One day in 2008, we all woke up to the news that the long-suffering Hilary Clinton was capable of such gymnastics as public weeping. I am not now, and I certainly was not then, a news junkie. All the flap about Obama had passed me by entirely: wasn’t he the guy who declared his desire for the presidency on a talk show? I had assumed that Clinton was a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination, that she would probably win, and the world would trundle on heedless. Washington is united when it comes to ‘security’ wonks: Blackwater, for instance, was defended by a firm run by Clinton strategist Mark Penn. In the corner of the globe that most of us inhabit, that simple truth is often all that matters.

Yet here she was, whimpering, and the election was close to a year away. India’s Indira and Germany’s Angela, it appeared, didn’t translate into America’s Hillary.

That was the day I swallowed my pride and sought education from sundry politics nerds: the mystifying distinction between primaries and caucuses, conventions and their delegations; and how, exactly, did colleges get to elect the president of a country? Most began with an admirably concise answer to the first question: they’re both dogfights for the nomination. Unfortunately, I was then at the height of my elections-are-gimmicks-and-circuses phase (which I am yet to fully recover from); and there was the predictable flame-out before the conversation could turn to other foundations of American Civics 101. The profusion of talking heads obsessed with Ms. Clinton did, however, get me interested in the interplay between feminism and electoral politics: what, really, is the price worth paying for a woman in power?

Two years later, the liberal web is aflame with gossip about the renewed onslaught of Mama Grizzlies, invading from the newly discovered continent of Republican Women. The tone ranges from panic (Is Feminism Dead?!) to prophetic (Feminism Is Dead!) to poetic (Whither tarry them wanton women?). The Nation recently devoted a whole issue to the phenomenon; unique in this election’s news-cycle, a measure of rational curiosity prevailed. They snigger some (how could one not), they swagger more (look to us, true feminists) yet there is enough genuine appraisal of events to make it worth reading. The analysis follows four broad rubrics:

1.    Dems ain’t lovin’ their women enough. The Democratic Party must learn, Salonista Traister argued in the follow-up to her New York Times op-ed, ‘to treat its women as a fundamental asset rather than a vaguely irritating embarrassment.’ Get thee to counselling and save this union!

2.    It’s Clinton’s fault, or Obama’s, or the media’s; depending on your perspective on 2008. The underlying argument remains the same: the primary campaign broke feminism’s back by polarising the movement, and then Palin clinched the squabble.

3.     It’s feminism’s fault for being a bad mother: first releasing Sarah’s tribe into the wilderness, and then wandering off to establish a lesbian commune. “Get your own damned torch”, Robin Morgan once snarled at a younger rival. “I’m still using mine.” And so they did.  This is the meta-version of Point 2.

4.    The notion that conservative women were ever not a force is a fallacy. It is true that such women are active and hogging the headlines this year, but that is true of conservatism in general, for reasons that go far deeper than the headlines. It is creditable, I suppose, that the GOP might finally graduate from being an old boy’s club, but women have always been the invisible half of most movements as well as most populations.

These are interlocked arguments: Democrats are alienated from some factions in their base because of policies the Clinton administration orchestrated, not least the widespread dismemberment of the welfare state. Obama’s term is yet to endear itself, all the frantic messaging in recent weeks about the ‘legislative president’ notwithstanding. This has made its core constituents – feminists, but equally trade unions or civil rights activists – apathetic to potential Republican gains this season: how much worse can it get, so why not let them burn themselves out? Feminism, similarly, is in a dire quandary today because too many people it helped elect, women and men alike, betrayed the ideals that got them into office. If Bill Clinton is feminist by today’s standards, why can’t Sarah Palin lay claim to the dubious prize?

Causes.

The question of how feminism came to sail such dire straits is best resolved by a spot of chronology. The story begins with the last time one of these ‘Years of Women’ was announced in the land, back in 1992. That cycle, it was Democratic women on-stage, but the underlying dynamics of governance accelerated away from feminist causes alongside the purported landslide. (Random trivia: Barbara Boxer, the California Senator who is now relying on marijuana to keep her seat in this year of absurd womanhood was first elected in 1992. Her opponent this election is Carly Fiorina.)

The 1992 Women of the Year.

Katha Pollitt’s Reasonable Creatures (1995) and Subject to Debate (2001) are a fascinating feminist foray into Clinton-era politics, and she highlights, across both, the growing disaffection of the organised female vote:

So what really matters is horse trading with your colleagues and helping Bill Clinton keep his election promise to ‘end welfare as we know it’, even if hundreds of thousands of children go hungry and their mothers end up on the streets (in apologist circles, this was also known as ‘overhauling the system’) … Well, as I find myself saying more and more these days, it’s good to lose your illusions. The fact is, congressional women have been pretty disappointing in the Age of Newt … like other social justice movements, organised feminism is caught in a co-dependent relationship with electoral politics: no matter how often and how blatantly our hopes are betrayed, we keep coming back, begging to have our illusions rewoven for another bout at the polls.

- ‘Where are the women we voted for?’ in Subject to Debate.

When you consider the contortions demanded of women, who must contrive to combine, or appear to combine, attractiveness and asexuality, brains and deference, zeal for work and absence of ambition, it doesn’t seem to much to ask that men in politics live by the family values they are to enforce on the rest of us … single mothers, discarded housewives, and other family-values victims: forget the elections. Vote with your feet!

Family values and the cult of the nuclear family is, at bottom, just another way to bash women, especially poor women. If only they would get married and stay married, society’s ills would vanish. Inner city crime would disappear because fathers would communicate manly values to their sons, which would cause jobs to spring up like mushrooms after rain. Welfare would fade away.

-  ‘Why I hate Family Values’ in Subject to Debate.

Pollitt was a trenchant critic, from the left, of the Clintons’ administration; she would’ve agreed with Michael Kelley as he argued the Clintons’ practiced the ‘politics of virtue’, if not quite in the spirit he intended. Clintonian Democrats espoused what they called ‘business liberalism’: extensive welfare cuts coupled with a feel-good family-values hypocrisy designed to demonise people (such as young unwed mothers) whom such programs had once helped. It proved to be a strategy with notable, if paradoxical, dividends; endearing dissolute Bill to Middle America while laying the foundations for the Republican sweep of the 1994 midterms, the Newt Gingrich Congress which shut down government for Good (and cos they could).

As a consequence, the ‘90s were terrible years for organised feminism and allied movements: social safety nets collapsed, reproductive rights came under fire from the resurgent Gingrich-right, and intoxicated young women began to care more about making out on camera than about hard-won liberties. Already battered by Reagan, serious left-radical dissent curled up to die. If you ever wondered how it came to pass that the Left in American politics would be the furthermost Right elsewhere, now you know – failing all else, blame the New Democrats.

This, you will recall, was the heyday for toes and sex-scandal politics (ironic, as Pollitt points out, in a land with family values); the baby boomers drove an already dysfunctional ‘First Wife’ syndrome to fresh and ridiculous heights. In an era of ‘campaign theatre‘ and news-cycle presidencies, popular politics in the US appears unlikely to recover from the assumption that politicians’ wives are little more than political capital, detachable subsets born within a single personality. A decade down, it is now Washington wisdom that no one can win if their wife will not campaign, will not behave, and will not pretend she prefers pregnancy and her hookin’ husband to multiple orgasms. There is a game to be played while deciding whose sexual peccadilloes are to be paid out to the press as fodder for the madding crowds, and the women involved rarely play it, at any stage.

It was this languid state of decay that made (mostly male) pundits conclude Obama Hope-Changer was the obvious choice for the Democratic nomination in 2008: the vaunted ‘Clinton fatigue’ that so much hay was made of at the time. Obama, they argued, was more feminist than the HillBillys would ever be: look, he’s even willing to pass the Lilly Ledbetter Act for pay equity as the first thing he does in office! (He did.) Women pundits embraced the more-strident-than-thou approach in response to this ridiculing of ‘their’ candidate (though Hillary, recovered Goldwater gal, was a lukewarm feminist at best) and thus was battle engaged: would you rather be racist or feminist?

The tangled web of decisions progressive women faced in their choice between Clinton and Obama in 2008 was, thus, extremely fraught. They were caught between deploring the Clinton administration’s feeble record on causes close to the caucus, like abortion, welfare, and health-care (even starker in comparison with Obama’s strong, if untested, liberal credentials) and recognising the very real need for effectual women in politics. Either way, liberal women found themselves apologising to someone: Gloria Steinem pontificated incessantly about how feminists were betraying their gender if they didn’t support the first woman to seriously run for President, while Oprah told her audience they were racist if they didn’t vote for the nominally black dude. On the one hand, women are better represented than African Americans in elected office; on the other, well, there are about four times as many women as blacks around in the first place, and half those blacks are women. Intersectionality, that dreaded word introduced by late-wave feminism into academic parlance, was now a frightening political reality. Are black women more black than women? It’s a raging (if rather pointless) debate, one that this ‘Year of Conservative Women’ conveniently exploits, for there is no denying Tea Party conquistadoras assume white women are more white than women.

It was a primary season that balkanised the democratic female base, helped along by a media notorious for painting Ms Clinton into every corner they could contrive. She was a sensation about which the media was, for once, bipartisan: MSNBC and Fox News alike spent months competing for the Clinton-bashing ratings. Is she too masculine? Is she too feminine? Should she have worn skirts or pants? Why did she cry? How could she not cry, the pathetic Ms. Lonely-Hearts whose husband loves him some beehive? It was enough to make the most ardent Hillary hater into a frustrated acolyte.

Consequences.

Despite the din surrounding the dilemmas women face about electoral politics, everyone on the left appears to have coalesced on the party-line on two matters:

- That conservative women running for office are dupes; useful idiots, by Frank Rich’s reckoning, intended to mollify and entertain, while the (discernible) Republican agenda descends ever deeper into economic lunacy. Palin’s feminism, the cruder version of this argument runs, was invented for the benefit of white men.

- That women are, fundamentally, Democratic voters

Christine and Sarah- Can you tell 'em apart?

There is convincing evidence for the first hypothesis. For one thing, female representation is set to hit a thirty-year low if Republicans do really well this season, grizzlies and all. Most women currently in power are vulnerable Democrats: 25 of the 38 female senators in history have been Democrats, and 69 of the 90 Congressional seats currently held by women belong to Democrats. Statistically, liberal or moderate women are likelier to fall and be replaced by conservative men than by conservative women (many of whom are fighting toss-up elections; and their chances aren’t helped by the constant, arguably justified, feast of ridicule). Further, where they have won thus far, Tea Party grizzlies have done so on their own steam, often fighting derision from within the Republican camp. The big scandals dogging controversial Republican women – Nikki Haley in North Carolina, Sharron Angle in Nevada, the inestimable Christine – were originally leaked to the press by their (male) opponents in the Republican primaries. Most damnably, even demonstrably intelligent GOP candidates this election – say, ex-CEO Carly Fiorina – have come out in favour of palpably absurd policy proposals, such as cutting federal aid to bankrupt states (California is so broke it hasn’t bothered to come up with a budget for three months). The loony outliers, like Delaware’s Christine, spend their time clarifying that they aren’t witches. It is worth noting just how ironic this is, as Betsy Reed does in The Nation:

The fiscal crisis in the states cuts to the core of women’s economic security: as Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress points out, women are suffering the brunt of it because they make up 60 percent of state and local government employees, and they depend disproportionately on the social services, such as childcare, that states provide. Although the first wave of this recession hit men hardest, Boushey says we are undergoing a shift toward job losses for women as cuts in the public sector mount. The reductions in childcare subsidies that states are contemplating, for example, will affect a workforce that is 95 percent female; and at the same time, the loss of services will surely make holding jobs impossible for many former welfare recipients who now, thanks to Democrat-inspired welfare reform, have nowhere else to turn.

It’s insidious how Republicans are deploying women candidates to pitch government belt-tightening to women as the “keepers of the family budget,” as if the stresses of working families are increased by childcare, healthcare, eldercare, after-school and other social programs… It’s one thing – and not a small thing – to celebrate the strength of women in politics. But it’s supremely cynical to do so, as the GOP Year-of-the-Woman revelers have, while working to undercut the strength of women in society.

On the second point- that women are born Democrats – I must confess I find myself terribly amused. After all, the first generation of suffragettes voted Republican, almost to the woman. There is, admittedly, sustained evidence for a ‘gender-gap’ in recent elections: women, relative to men, are more likely Democratic voters; battleground races can turn on the female vote. Nonetheless, in terms of electoral data, this is about as helpful as saying that alternate sheep in Iowa would vote Vegan. To be fair, the gender-gap is not blatant nonsense – folk like Bart Stupak could do with some reminding of who elects them – but for strategic purposes it is, effectively, deadweight (similar to the ‘Bradley Effect’ when it comes to race in electoral politics). The gender-gap doesn’t even imply that the majority of women vote Democratic; more women voted for Reagan than against him, for instance. It simply means that a high percentage of the losing vote in that election (or the winning vote in 2008) was cast by women voters. Women can, and do, swing elections – but rarely entirely on their own. We are not a marginal constituency, strictly speaking, but we are, as they say, creatures of momentum.

American Elections, that lucid conservative Michael Kelley once wrote, are about three kinds of voters, upon whom one must perform assorted functions. The first is the base, which one must enthuse and palliate; the next is the counter-base, which one can never woo, though one may defuse; and the most important is the vast (and growing) swing vote to whom one must render oneself ‘minimally acceptable’ by taking ideological positions somewhere between base and counter-base. This last is an amorphous array of populations that have to be first seduced into politics and voting and only then into party lines. The permutations are close to infinite: One can rely on a strategy of whipping up core constituencies while confusing everyone else, and hope they turn out in record numbers while enemy partisans flag, which is the Republican strategy this time (and a pretty sound one at that during midterms). One could, alternately, craft a coalition that ‘spans the swing‘, which is how Democrats are positioning themselves. Or one can set out, as Obama did in 2008, to invest under-tapped and under-represented populations and supplement one’s base; relying on them, in turn, as you battle more important categories within the vested electorate.

In a country that doesn’t like to vote, yet is forced to do so in bushels, political acumen is measured by how you frame the game as much as how you play it; the wizardry lies in accurately mapping these three categories against demography, money, and geography.  Lisa Murkowski (an Alaskan senator ousted by Sarah Palin) is discovering precisely this in her exciting three-way race this season: after being slammed from the right during primary season, she’s now fuelling her write-in candidacy based on a newfound ‘moderate‘ status. It this political tightrope that GOP folk fresh off the Tea Party Express will have to learn to walk, now that they have purged themselves of all moderates, and it will spell their future electoral success. Will they follow the Democratic women of 1992 and abandon their base, or the Gingrich Congress of 1994 in riding the wave till it drops? What will be the verdict of this election season: that Republicans cannot win without moderates, or that moderates cannot win without Republicans?

Such as do build their faith upon
The Holy Text of pike and gun
Decide all controversy by
Infallible Artillery
And prove their doctrine orthodox
By Apostolic blows and knocks
call Fire and Sword and Desolation
A godly-thorough-Reformation.

Samuel Butler.

This monster-post, inspired by the book The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch,  has been in the works for a long time. I have been reading it for an even longer time (it is not quite a book one finishes). The history he tells bursts with anecdotes, people and ideas; they combine headily during a heady time. Writing about it was intended to illustrate the principle of Fortitude, eleventh in the Tarot; that one must practice what one preaches.  Often in the reading I felt like a lone sailor lost upon a vast vessel, nipping between coasts and trading information: had the priests became pastors and wives replaced concubines? Were they likely to? Who was invading whom? Had the Habsburgs blitzed through yet?

.

Storm At Sea, Bruegel

I am caught within the wave of the large book. There are primarily two reasons people read non-fiction, discounting the obvious motive of pleasure: one is to figure out a ‘position’ to a specific question/ related set of questions (what can you do about a problem like Sarah?), the hunt-for-data; the other is to get an inkling of perspective, context, the hunt-for-the-idea (How is American Conservatism different today from 100 years ago?). I defy you to find anyone willing to undertake a book longer than 300 pages for the former cause. If polemic cannot be condensed down to that size, it has no right for exist: any heft will simply be more excuses for the opinion, all the more suspect for being disguised. Passionate manifestos, incendiary reporting, pithy histories, reasoned commentary — these are all excellent reasons to read a book, but they are limited by the demand for relevancy, this devotion to defining the conventional wisdom of the times.

The pleasures of weighty tomes are that they allow detail and deliberation to build rather than argue.  A long history, a sustained piece of philosophy, these are written with the desire to enable the fashioning of an autonomous hypothesis from the broad welter of fact.  An essayist marshals facts that suit her story, a historian marshals stories that surround her every “fact”.

McCulloch’s history, in keeping with his tradition, doesn’t short-circuit by telling you who to side with in the multifaceted debates of his chosen time: it just lays them all out, in sometimes interminable detail, within a complex web of shared relationships and assumptions. He describes events and their ripples, ideas and their diaspora, people and their migrations; all set within a narrative best described as Transylvania talking to Scotland.   He demonstrates how the same scriptures led to many forms of worship in one city even as they’re being hacked down to meet the partisan requirements of its neighbour. It is this meandering quality that makes large books, especially those that aren’t anthologies, so damnably hard to write about. They pool in the shadows and form backdrops, but are rarely showpieces. It is impossible to pinpoint what such a book made you think about, which hunches it confirmed and which it dismissed, for the journey is made between amorphous hunches and nebulous conclusions.  I don’t know what I thought about the Reformation before I read this book: I began the book because I didn’t know what to think.

I can tell you, instead, why I am reading about the Reformation. First, as devoted readers (hullo parents) know, I am interested in the ways divinity interacts with humanity.  Not very much survives the tumult of human passage, save two truths: there are ideas, and there is matter; only a very few entities may transcend both. I am fascinated by the divine as a bridge between human eras: constantly evolving, yet always retaining the core kernel of faith every religion needs to survive.

Does one trick people into believing in the power of the metaphysical; persuade, coerce, or reason? Does one contemplate or act or purify one’s way into a happy immortality? Is there an insurance policy for the family we can invest in while alive?   Religion, it is easy to forget in our era of theocrats and evangelists, is the purest free market that exists. It is a barometer of human madness, as variable and contrarian as the spirit it seeks to channel. It is the fallacy of fundamentalism and rationalism alike to imagine that religion can shape the zeitgeist, rather than be shaped by it. Slavery was legalised by Papal Rome while Dominicans in Spain were reviving jus gentium and inventing the concept of human rights.

We live in an era the most determined humans call postmodern; which is unlucky for those of us who only achieved modernity meagre decades ago. Then again, perhaps we ought to be glad to have made the goalpost when so many others are consigned to the pre-modern. In any case, I felt it was time to get to the root of the uprising, back to when modernity was first fashioned. And thus we come to the Reformation, one bridge across time in one small part of the world. Pick any modern ill you find strewn across our conversations- nationalism, secularism, communism, capitalism, fascism, colonialism, liberalism- and you will find analogues or antecedents in the Latin Reformation, that brutal, cold time in history.  So, really, my question is: why aren’t you reading 800 pages about that?

Which is my way of saying I can’t think of any earthly reason you would want to know this stuff, so I shall just plug along and hope that I am entertaining enough to reward the effort this enterprise involves. If I must have fortitude, after all, so must you. What follows is my mini-history of the Reformation, for the curious, the insane, and the bored. It’s the broad outline of an infectious revolt, beaten back here and then there but never everywhere.

My aim is to sketch how this time folds into ours: how movements born with radical visions were trapped in fresh prisons woven out of ‘purity’, patriarchy, and racial pride. The Reformation is a study in how rights can grow broader even as the communities they accrue to grow ever narrower. My perspective diverges slightly from MacCulloch’s. He observes, with a tinge of triumph, the birth of tolerance amidst all the sectarian violence. You will forgive me for being less impressed by the miracle of pluralism. As with ‘plural’ Hinduism, tactical freedom was accessible only to the elite, not the general mass of humanity, upon whom most behaviours are imposed. MacCulloch, to give him due credit, ably argues that most lives were increasingly constrained by the renewed interest everyone had in their private life and souls.  The “Reformation of Manners” had a dramatic impact on longstanding social and sexual practices, and steadily degraded the rights of women. Many Free Cities, for instance, revoked the right to female citizenship during this era, as women began to be considered legal chattel.

Patriarchy was ceasing to be a microcosm of the God’s purpose and an expression of what was considered the the natural make-up of a mechanical universe… Society, once integrated by the cosmology of humours and by Galen’s theories, with gender a continuum, was from around 1700 conceived in terms of rigidly divided opposites- especially gender. By 1800, men were told that they must exercise rigid self-control and never shed tears; women that, after all, they were not uncontrollable and lustful like Eve, just passive and gentle crybabies, to be shielded from life’s brutalities.

Church weddings and the legitimacy of children rose in importance, as every Church rushed to exert their influence among the faithful, and marriage was now seen as a necessary sacrament, a ‘holy contract’. Cohabitation and premarital sex, once encouraged by the practice of long engagements, came under much fire in this era, as the clergy discovered the pleasures of marriages and insisted everyone ought join their state of bliss. Brothels found their licenses revoked across cities (rampant and fatal syphilis probably helped that along).  In the protestant world, clerical wives replaced nuns as the apogee of a pious woman’s ambition; the brides of god had become wives of men.  The growth of nuclear families proceeded apace in these lands, and the new justification that marriage was the ‘natural state of man’ made the social stigma surrounding homosexuality worse.  The patriarchal order within the family was emphasised even by so-called humanists, who would, one might think, feel compelled to ‘humanise’ women simply to be consistent.  Not a bit of it:

A good example [of humanist scholarship] is Mary I of England’s tutor Juan Luis Vives. He wrote the popular treatise The Education of a Christian Woman, which did indeed recommend education for all women, but that thought was overwhelmed by a good deal of talk about women’s need to control their passions, battle against their weak nature and obey their husbands. Vives also made explicit a double standard in chastity: ‘human laws do not require the same chastity of the man as the woman’, he said reassuringly, ‘men have to look after many things; women only for their chastity’

Yet, for all such instances of subtly reorganised dogma, it remains a revelation to learn how inexhaustibly diverse people are, even within close confines. What could more claustrophobic than the  revealed scripture of the Only God? Yet the ruckus, once raised, took two centuries to resolve.   Some bits of this story, it must be said, are right out of the plot of Lost: consider Martin Luther stamping out of the Diet at Worms in fury, declaring the Pope to be the Devil masquerading as the Saviour (the original ‘AntiChrist’) and suggesting that the faithful ought to follow his own example, stampede the false Church, and recreate the true Church. Substitute Jack Shepherd  for Luther, John Locke for Pope, and the Island for the Church, and tell me that isn’t the final season in a nutshell. Here I stand, and I can do no other, like the man (apocryphally) said.

This being a long essay, I divided it into pages. Look below the little facebook and twitter icons below to go further.

The Hindu sense of time is intense; the importance of time as an agency for change, the sense that things that happen come to fruition at a particular moment- now- pervades the great history called the Mahabharata

Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternate History

SouthAsia emerges from prehistory in the grip of two equally frustrating protagonists. On the one hand is the ‘Indus Valley Civilization’ , rich in symbolism but spare on meaning till the script is deciphered. With the fading of the Indus cities ride in the pastoral tribes popularly called ‘Aryan’, who left little to account for their existence save a literary tradition. This juxtaposition of those who speak against those who act is a prototype for subsequent Indian history, with the literati firmly secluded and policed behind caste lines.

The Hindus takes on that complacent literati with it’s own arsenal, and she spends much of the book pointing out instances in Indian mythology and philosophy where the brahmins denounce interesting folk in their society. Her choice of texts (apart from a digression into Tantra, albeit a domesticated Tantra) is the orthodox combination of the Shruti and Smriti, a Pujari couldn’t ask for better. Considerable energy has been devoted in Indian historiography towards freedom from their hegemony, and the paradox of Doniger’s work is that it bolsters the  very orthodoxy she challenges. It is a challenge from inside the tradition of authorized texts, which raises the hackles of its conservators while the rest of us doze, or revel in the anarchy.

All art in this post is by the gorgeous Antoine Helbert, and thank you bluefloppyhat for bringing him to my attention by downloading his stuff onto my laptop.

Doniger is unflaggingly affectionate, but rarely indulgent, towards the people she calls “Hindus”. The book extends into modern times, and includes a chapter on Hindu-Americans, the identity at the nub of the latest diaspora, but the real meat of the book is pre-colonial India. Many reviewers have derided this incompleteness, I think it’s apt. Doniger’s project is to let the texts speak for themselves, and the rough outlines of a canon were in place around the period her narrative begins winding down.  The heated theological ‘scene’ Doniger describes evolves into the classical texts the British and then the nationalists were so keen on.

Somewhere between colonialism and modernity, Indian historiography lost the pulse of “itihas”- history by and of the precolonial subcontinent. I’m proof of this bias: with it’s lack of interest in linearity and frequent fatalism, ‘itihas’ had me flummoxed. How can respectable history loop around endlessly and accommodate centaurs, bird-women, ambiguous reptiles, immortal sages? Doniger helped me understand that ellipses are easier patterns to trace than straight lines. Texts in her telling shadow one another, defying modern epistemology. So much was forgotten and relearned, yet people managed to debate across millennia, and things that were forgotten in Magadha were remembered in Madras (imperial organization, for instance).

There is no category for the sacerdotal in most Hinduisms; ritual literature (Atharva Veda, the Brahmanas) was irrelevant to popular praxis before Christ was born. The rest of the canon is poetry (the Rig Veda), philosophy (Upanishads), technical treatises (Shastras, Sutras) and mythological history (Puranas). The epics- the Ramayana and the Mahabharata- are poems, histories, morality tales, philosophical debates and political charters. But in Hinduism these distinct “subjects” blend: the Brahmanas have their share of mythology, the Puranas and the Tantras their distinct philosophies, the Upanishads their share of political controversy: each supplementing the others, spawning countless commentaries in a dialogue across history. The basic element of the ‘Hindu’ heuristic arsenal is the story, with everything embedded into narrative: sermonising, dissent, change, disapproval, quandaries, riddles. Stories were bastardised, purged, overhauled; evolving into an intertwined tapestry of ideas that survives better than any ruin from prehistory.

Doniger’s book is an elaborate exegesis of the Hindu canon, a magnum opus of literary criticism. Is that, in itself, a history? She liberates a corpus of texts from stodgy Brahmanical tellings, and picks on specific themes: animals, women, ogres. It is certainly a service to the ignorant. Doniger, by unpacking, organizing and dating the texts for me, and highlighting the bits I would’ve sought in them, fills an important gap in my reading. The nuanced, interminable debates about the after life, the shifting relationship with the divine, the stories people tell about themselves are more revelatory of the zeitgeist than dynastic lists.

Doniger can only be read alongside an academic history for a full glimpse into the society she describes. Otherwise one would have no idea of the context within which these debates are being held; why, at certain times, certain ideas sprouted up in certain places: why Kashmir became so active in the Tantra debates in the 12th century and how South India successfully challenged the notion that it was the North’s shabby cousin. This was done not only ideas and ideologues, as one would think reading Doniger’s work- but by armies, traders, and politicos of every stripe- people The Hindus alludes to, but rarely discusses.

This is the nub of my problem with The Hindus: it too easily substitutes the human for the divine and assumes that conversations about the divine can replace conversations about the human. It treats theology and politics like they are two sides of the same coin, instead of very different currencies. Doniger’s justification for this is that Hindu discourse’s shaped by abstraction.

A philosophic people, so to say, we would rather rebirth than redistribute.

I find it hard to believe that the only people doing any talking were the sadhus and the rishis. She has, to be sure, undertaken a religious history, but there are ways and ways to write those that her heavily textual approach evades. The next blog post is about The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch, also a religious history, but one which treats theology like a variable in social change. MacCulloch benefits from the quantities of extant political/social/economic research in his chosen period — European early modernity is probably the most researched period in history (they know how many bastards were born in any given decade!) while any similar forays into third world history are inevitably clouded by the generations of people who romanticised, orientalised, or rejected the notion that we had histories. We simply don’t have the data that MacCulloch so masterfully corrals into his book, yet doesn’t pretending such knowledge is.. irrelevant, or secondary, only deepen the problem?

I initially read Doniger for my essay on the Brahmin Fantastic, and because I wanted some textual context for my reading of the Mahabharata, so I wouldn’t irreverently hoot at the passages like the one below without any understanding of them.

“The learned are of the opinion that death results from ignorance. Ignorance is death and so, knowledge, the absence of ignorance, is immortality (elliptical, eh?) Death does not devour people like a tiger: its shape itself is indiscernible. Besides this form of death, some imagine Yama to be death. This, however, is due to the weakness of the mind. The pursuit of Brahman or self-knowledge is immortality. The imaginary god Yama holds his sway in the region of Pitris. It is at his command that death, in the from of wrath, ignorance or covetousness, arises among men. Swayed by pride, men walk in paths that are unrighteous. None of them succeeds in attaining his true nature. Their understanding clouded, and themselves swayed by passion, they fall repeatedly into hell. They are always followed by their senses. It is thus ignorance receives the name ‘death’.

These men that desire the fruit of their work, proceed to heaven when the time comes, casting off their bodies. Hence they cannot avoid death. When the merits of work are exhausted, they fall and rebirth is inevitable. Embodied creatures, from inability to attain the knowledge of Brahman and from their connection with earthly enjoyments, are obliged to go through a round of rebirth, up and down and around.”

Vidura Neeti

I concede I also read Ms Doniger out of solidarity. If one is to comment on the West one must accept their right to comment on us, however much it has been abused in the past. Besides, I got sick of everyone insisting that by broadening the scope of the conversation to include sexual and gender discourse she was somehow defaming Indian eggheads from Bheeshma down. We need the robust infusion of the bawdy and tawdry she includes in her book, but we also need a shot of the empirical when we talk about ourselves. Up and down and around, as Vidura would say.

To conclude with Blake, because he is a nice way to end:

A Divine Image

Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secresy the human dress.

The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart its hungry gorge.

This is a tentative step back into the daily grind of political comment (however tangential) because I could no longer bear the whine of my stats chart as it plummeted to numbers it hadn’t seen since the early days of june . A friend forwarded me this excellent article, and it reminded me of another essay I was once called upon to present in class. Yet another nostalgia post, this one.

Negotiating the Mohalla.

I spent two terrifying months in Gurgaon, where I was prevented from leaving the gated community I was lived in by zealous security guards. I was walking out to buy groceries on a Monday afternoon, and they suggested I take a car  so’s not to be kidnapped. To further deter me from such foolhardiness, they pointed out alleys where goons lurked for prey. (they have guns also, madam, but in the day that draws too much attention. Maybe your husband might go with you?). I had no car that day, and not getting kidnapped/raped/murdered/all was my responsibility and none the State’s. Even on Republic Day.

I’ve never figured whether this incident was fanciful fiction inspired by rivalry between security companies (we check every car and ensure there is no one gagged/drugged/locked in the boot but they don’t) or it was actually feasible for people to be bundled into cars in broad daylight without a thing being done in prevention. The logic I employed that day has convinced generations of exasperated law school women that ‘Rape Capital’ is no cruel misnomer. During the course of our many internships in that unpredictable city, we have been felt up, salivated over, harassed, and lectured about our morals on public transport. A school friend was told by her stalker that no policeman would help her in invading the “sarkari” part of town to arrest him (he was the son of, ironically, a judge). A college mate had acid drizzled on her as she walked back to her PG from the subway. I was nearly abducted in the heart of Central Delhi during my clerkship.

Any lone woman in Delhi will tell you it is better to be safe than sorry, for sorry is a very likely state indeed, and tis only you who will feel any regret. It might not be empowering for the modern woman to stay holed up in the lap of luxury, but I would rather be theoretically oppressed than literally transgressed. I defy you to find me someone who wouldn’t.

When I “responded” to the mohalla article in class, I talked about identity. And community. And how the latter is used to justify construction of the former, even where it is merely a convenient fiction. I talked about modernity and the privileging of the public over the private as the zone of “effective” action; the zone of politics and economics and all the other epistemologies that shape every day circumstances. How the Indian challenge to colonial reality was to solidify “personal” power structures in the name of culture, and then immunise culture from evolution. I said that this is why we still have no law against marital rape. And that the only way we can change these power equations is by claiming our rightful space in the public domain, and charting that domain within fresh terrain — which we can’t do for fear of our lives and dignity.

I should’ve talked about how it is really circumstance and not high falutin’ ideas about identities and communities and essential natures that shape behavior. I should’ve said Muslim women wear the hijab not only because it is their “culture” and they are proud of it, though that is always a partial reason, especially when a way of life faces the kind of threat it does in India today. I didn’t say all that because I thought it was obvious, and the faults of that assumption were stark in the discussion that followed. Even within the environs of law school, vain as we are of our cultural specificity, one must highlight that humans aren’t perfect, remote agents guided by individual conscience.

One of the first achievements of a feminist movement is to get women to think of themselves as a community, instead of as fragmented individuals in other, more important, political communities. To get women to accept the multiplicity inherent in their identity, as it is in any identity, so they can imagine lives unconstrained by all identities. If one’s lived experience is battered by threats and pauperisation, and said life is spent within insular ghettos for safety, it’s hard to consider other identities as equally worth preserving and fighting for. But, really, all I wanted to say was that Muslim women wear the chador in high summer in India neither because it is pleasant and empowering nor because they are backward and ignorant. They wear it because they are told by their murky ‘guardians’ that it’s the only way they can protect their bodies against a demonstrably hostile world. They wear it for the same reason my grandmother was under purdah and the reason I ordered a thousand buck lunch instead of simply making it. The reason you don’t play with fire after you learn how bad it can burn. Why is that so infernally hard for most folk to grasp?

Saying this aloud, a mere whisper lost to the the deep night, is terrifying. The quick phrase feels like the slow stripping of all agency, a rape of my right to speak of the world and its concerns, forced to leave them to ‘better men’. To be native is to be blind and have one’s tongue cut off and limbs turned automaton. It was easier when I cut off my balls (rhetorically, you understand) and identified with femininity, however jaggedly and doggedly I fight the helplessness assumed of that affinity. Writers like Frantz Fanon give me the strength to remember that I would, nonetheless, prefer to be Injun over cowboy. Equally, he reminds me that as an urban mongrel with no ‘native village’ to speak of (wait, do university campuses count?), I am as much settler as native. Our homes shift upon residence.

Fanon

Two worlds: that makes two bewitchings; they dance all night and at dawn they crowd into the churches to hear mass; each day the split widens. Our enemy betrays his brothers and becomes our accomplice; his brothers do the same thing. The status of native is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the setter among colonised people with their consent (sic)

I am rereading The Wretched of the Earth in memory of Frantz Fanon, who would have been 85 today.  So far I have made it past the preface and am already flooded by excerpts (as above).

The rest of this post is thus from memory and fourth year squiggles. Let me begin by conceding said memory is heavily reconstructed from aforementioned preface. In defence, you try jumping off the freaking Sartre-wagon. There is also a birthday rhyme to give Fanon’s bones a good bouncing about their grave. Besides, I strive to inject great guffaws into all your days, and disdain is small price for a grin.  If you feel the urge to chant Dryjhna! Dryjhna! Dryjhna! after the closing excerpt of post, please do tell. I will be gratified not to feel alone in all this wide world. If you continue to chant sporadically for the better part of a night, maybe there is something to be said for lunacy being a social hobby.

White Algiers

Remembering Frantz Fanon

Had he lived, he would turn 85 today. To his virtues, let me quote Sartre:

Fanon is the first since Engels to bring the process of history to the clear light of day… [he constitutes] step by step, the dialectic which liberal hypocrisy hides from you and which is as much responsible for our existence as for his.

There are many empires, uncountable hundreds, vying for the patriotic mind. One itches like a parasite at the skin of erstwhile India, another marches out of Kashmir to meet it. Another variant is mapped out across the water in Africa and Arabia. Yet another engulfs the fluctuating borders of meta-Europe, bleeding at this end and drowning at those, weighed down by ennui and the Oneiroi. Regional empires, of crime, of time, of political bastions, of cities and Panchayats, blot upon the body-politic of my democracy as much as all others.

The modern mind is under similar siege. Industry steams on brutally appropriated soil and soul. Will o’wisps markets tumble crooked in the wind, bent out of shape and reason. Nationalisms sour almost as soon as the nation is born, if not before. Revolutions seduce wantonly around street corners, peddling salvation and cocaine, obscuring the hangover. Patriarchy everywhere runs riot, corrupting what we coyly call the worlds within. Superimposed on all this chaos is the empire of the mind: the bipolar internet where we lucky few tweet, text and tattle.

Frantz Fanon wrote in a time that did not have these sparkly links that connects us all; just as he wrote before the potential for planetary destruction: by pollution, drowning, warfare, was as yet not fully realized. We live now in a world of indefinite scale; calling upon the cleansing fire of violence to expiate sinning humanity risks global conflagration. Fanon, and Sartre, who introduced him to fellow Frenchmen, wrote in the extraordinary cusp century that was the last, and their prophecies are never more dated than when they look to Dien Bien Phu for dreamscapes. Many things changed in the ‘60s, and nothing evolves faster than war. Read them, instead, for their diagnoses.

Seven years after Fanon’s masterpiece,The Wretched of the Earth, Parisians rose in revolt. You know, like they do. Paris, a city Cocteau had mocked for “speaking only of itself”, rebelled in the most revelrous anarchy it was to witness in a hundred years. Sartre called May ’68 “Freedom in Action” in an interview, and this was a man of legendary standards for freedom. For all his doom-ridden jeering (that fat, pale narcissist, Europe), it is Sartre who is the more optimistic of European prospects. As a European, he says in 1961, I steal the enemy’s book and out of it I fashion a remedy for Europe. What would the defeated 1968 man have made of the fact that his fire and brimstone resonates half a century later, when his ‘super-europe’ chugs smug on battlefield oil?

It is the moment of the boomerang: the third phase of violence; it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do not realise any more than we did the other times that it’s we that have launched it. The liberals are stupefied; they admit that we were not polite enough to the natives, that it would have been wiser and fairer to allow them certain rights in so far as this was possible; they ask nothing better than to admit them in batches and without sponsors to that very exclusive club, our species; and now this barbarous, mad outburst doesn’t spare them any more than the bad settlers.

The Left at home is embarrassed; they know the true situation of the natives, the merciless oppression; they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done everything to provoke it. But all the same, they think to themselves, there are limits; the guerillas should be bent of showing they are chivalrous; that would be the best way of showing they are men… let them endeavour by peaceful undertakings to deserve it. Our worthiest souls contain racial prejudice.

Sartre’s preface baits from the get-go, battling the basic hubris of settler ideology: that if you are the point of the discussion, you are its natural audience and final verdict. It is discomfiting, to go from subject to object, to be booted down from discussants to the discussed. It is a gap that colonialism uses to devastating effect: know your enemy, for it is all grist to a divisive mill. The preface is bitter, defensive, romantic (The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity). It is Sartre who is cruel:

For with us there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism, since the European has only been able to be become a man through creating slaves and monsters.

It is hard to imagine Fanon ever topping that whopper.

To Fanon, an appraisal of Europe is instrumental: not apologetic, nor sympathetic, nor reactionary. He could very well be dissecting alien life: not in the sense of difference, but with indifference, implacability. When the book is angry, and it is angry plenty, it is the stoic scorn reserved for any blindly predatory beast. This is where they are headed, my brothers, he says: do you want to go there? I can only hope to find he equally appealed to his sisters. His romance, such as exists, is all reserved for Africa.

Would Fanon, transplanted to the world circa 2010, agree with Robert Fisk that decolonisation was newspeak for recolonisation? Out with the old, in with the new, Fanon proclaims, bring on the tabula rasa. Little did he guess his ‘instantaneous translation’ would secure and elevate crony collaborators over seditionists; translating henchmen, inadvertently or intentionally, to faraway masters. Even less did he suspect that it was embedded within a precise logic.

All the brave ‘50s frogs, conservative and radical, Fanon and Sartre and Aron alike, croaked themselves hoarse about naked empire, and some chic boutique off the Champs Élyées stepped in to spin a fresh shielding glamour of gossamer lies. None of them foresaw the Algieria of today, locked as surely in an ignored orgy of violence in 2010 as it was in 1960. Or did they? For here is an uncanny sketch of the postcolonial terrorist:

This potential dead man has lost his wife and his children; he has seen so many dying men that he prefers victory to survival; others, not he, will have the fruits of victory; he is too weary of it all. But this weariness of the heart is the root of an unbelievable courage. We find our humanity on this side of death and despair; he finds it beyond torture and death. We have sown the wind, he is the whirlwind.

Their writing and indictment is as haunting now for the simple reason that it still applies.

To conclude with cheer, a rhyme for a birthday.

Truths cling to survive,
lies swing and splice.
History strikes a balance;
never the same strife twice.

Ok, so it makes no sense and it barely rhymes. So sue me for not being a poet. It made yeh smirk, eh?

Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History and
Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.

In two interlocking review-essays.

was roundly rejected.

for it featured most alarming graphs.

Limits, in math, are a clever, offside approach to concrete integers. If you apply them to functions, they can illuminate indeterminate relationships and make them almost comprehensible. Ranajit Guha attempts something similar in his book. He sneaks upon the Geist-of-the-world, the angst of world-history: Spirit, Reason, God, all wrapped up into one. He studies modernity-minted “stages” in history, laying out, in parallel, the invention of prose. He demonstrates, very effectively, the irrationality at the heart of rational-minded positivist historiography. He contests the view that historiography can be tied down to specific places, people and times; suggesting that E Pluribus Unum is a doctrine better suited to zealotry than to history.

To use the supremely rational art of math to make my point.

He contests a linear approach to history, like so:

Cartesian History

In favour of a reciprocal relation; or if that be too simple, a secant-function.

Inverse History

Reverse History

Though he concedes that sometimes a mere change in co-ordinates, from prose to poetry, does the trick.

Polar History

My approach was undergirded by Guha’s insistence in History at the Limits of World History that conceptualising history as a path along which we plod, qua Hegel, is flawed: what we need is a more diverse, fragmented historiography, the better to frame our fragmented selves. Different models need to be adopted for different phenomena: a narrative on colonialism can use reverse-history where one on the postcolony might find the inverse-history formula more appropriate, while globalisation can only be described as a polar phenomenon.

My other point was the ol’ paradox of rationality: an argument stolen from Mahmood Mamdani, among oh-so-many others. Those enlightenment-bogies, the neo-liberals, wage war masquerading as a defense of “liberal values”. They have inherited a particular thought-system from their forbears, as have we, to some degree: one which equates progress with rationality and rationality with mathematico-empirical inquiry. My outrageous graphs were an attempt to formulate those premises within drastically different arguments. Maths itself, it should be noted, sees no causality between reason and increment.

****

A List for Today

Hermit, Tarot Nine.

Five Things Best Done Alone.

Trig. well, yeah.

Theory. My brand surgery.

Cartography. I draw maps under acute stress.

Drink. If one must… exorcise, anyway.

Scrabble. Obsessively.

Clearly we need a break from me.

Montesinos was the Head of Intelligence in Peru in the ‘90s, when Fujimori was in power. Via SIN (how’s that for evocative language?), he bribed his bosses’ way into power. He paid off parliament members, judges, newspapers, and news television channels – this last he paid the most money of all. The authors provide several  explanations:

• Television channel owners are generally richer than the average politician. In an endemically corrupt system, they get box seats.
• Channels  influence public perception more than individual judges and senators do.
• He had to buy all the news channels in order for his control to be effective, while he just needed “enough” judges and politicians.

Finally, they argue the fourth estate — gagging the press amounts bypasses democratic institutions, and thus a democracy produced a dictator. All fine points that miss something basic. Fujimori wasn’t a dictator.  He was formally elected, and not by a banana republic margin, even if he did wrangle himself a third term in power.  Once Peruvians found out about the scandal, he obligingly ran away. Besides, tyrants don’t pussyfoot around buying off television channels. They kill offensive journalists.

The capture of the media isn’t something Montesinos dreamt up, and it isn’t a symptom of corruption. It is a symptom of governance in sufficiently “evolved” societies. It undermines democracy, but that’s only relevant if one separates the idea of democracy from the working of democracies. Fujimori wasn’t a dictator, he was Eco’s Man from Television, an early model Clegg or Obama.

This is a president intent on charming the pants off the gullible, and the tragedy is that so many of these people exist. Democracy was to free us of the personality cult and encourage debate on policy. So where did all the skeptics of the liberals’ fond imagination go? Where are all those American people who should be wondering right about now why their country has such mystifying foreign policy? Why aren’t there more? Cos they’re all watching Gossip Girl and Survivor: Tiny Island. What about all the Indians who should be wondering why our government puts people into ghettos? We, too, are watching Gossip Girl, but then we live within an empire, so ’tis to be expected.

For decades, people like Guy Debord have warned us of the difference between spectacle and symbol, of the inhumanity in being an audience to suffering. I won’t go into the whole capitalism-alienation-apathy argument here, but surely tis evident that the mass media isn’t geared for a thinking citizenry. If a thinking citizenry is what democracy demands, we doom ourselves to failure. This isn’t subversion of democracy, it is annihilation, and it happens everywhere.

I spot some holes. Surely there’s a difference between an apathetic public and a state where even the enterprising few who seek real information are prevented from doing so?  The argument is one of access, somewhat like saying that an equal right to work automatically implies that all women will be self sufficient. But if one agrees with the broad point: that a free media is one where people say what they want to, even if no more than a handful can read it, then I think Fujimori’s lack of dictatorial cred. becomes relevant. So either Fujimori was a really inefficient dictator, or he wasn’t one at all.

We none of us live in utopia, so let us stop theorising on its presumptions. We live in varieties of obfuscation.  If the Gauls weren’t afraid of anything but the sky falling down on their head, most netizens are afraid of our own shadow (as anyone who watches Law and Order marathons would be). So when the sky does fall down on us, we think it an acceptable (logical?) solution to bomb cities out of existence and “liberate” or “claim” territories.

Why? Do we lack the judgment to figure out that if you inject more fear and desperation into a beleaguered people, sooner rather than later they’ll get really vicious? Don’t we understand that to lose a home, a child, a limb, hurts equally wherever in the world it happens? Or is our judgement clouded by the novelty of watching bits of burning buildings falling in our cities, while buildings burning in Iraq or Afghanistan or Kashmir is numbingly familiar? The media today is stretched out on a lot of front lines. How is our populace so inured to wars? Even the Russians, those last awful imperialists, understood the suffering war entails. Those of us in modern empires read about it constantly, watch it  in “real time”, so we know “what it’s like”. Is this the arrogance of the ignorant or the ignorance of the arrogant?

Which brings me to the televised debate I endured — “National Security: A New Framework of Criminal Justice?”

It was panel of four people- an anonymous activist, parliamentarians from both sides of the fence, and Kiran Bedi, who was militant about the need for “strong measures” to combat “terrorism”. The activist, roundly ignored all around, argued that we have draconian laws aplenty, and it might be a good idea to consider other means to combat terrorism- such as not beating up everyone we deem to be a terrorist to secure convictions. The two parliamentarians- lawyers both- then had a heated definitional debate- would this new law/policy (as yet a mystery) affect people who burn churches as much as people who burn police stations? Arun Jaitley: “The law that should apply will apply”. Well, yes, but, break.

Kapil Sibal bangs on about how POTA didn’t really get as many convictions as one would like. Jaitley:  “no major terrorist crimes have been brought to book without it”. Again, the activist suggests that POTA catches the wrong people, that it’s a dragnet law that puts vulnerable people in jails where the police duly tortures them. Which means all you get is little fish confessing to big crimes. Under POTA, police brutality and “disappearances”- never a cosy statistic in India- skyrocketed. He is roundly ignored.

And so the panel proceeds- endless blather about the need for “stronger measures” to “battle terrorists” but with “safeguards” (what safeguards?). This went uncontested, and no one explained why the current law lacks ferocity. These are questions, according to the lady cop, for the experts. But who are these experts, if lawyers and policemen and activists aren’t?

At this stage I started watching Mick Jagger videos on VH1. MTV India and Channel V now air reality television with women in short shorts that climb hillocks: “independent women” carrying out “challenges” to impress men. Spectacle, it seems, dogs us.

The debate staggers on, but I doubt I miss anything that might aid the vigilant citizen my democratic nation demands I be. But if I wanted to find out what the latest schoolgirl brutally murdered in Delhi wore, or who Rani Mukherjee didn’t marry, the ticker tape proved most helpful. This is the new media: disparate bursts of censored material, with little analysis and no logic. This is the free media?

No wonder India sleeps while Kashmir burns, while Gujarat burns, while the north east is destroyed.  We comfort ourselves that we confront the horror because we watch it unfold on television.  In India we wage war upon ourselves, as any well-behaved colony must. We fragment, we disappear, we lost sight of what hurts us as a people.  That the media has let this come to pass, this is our capitulation. McMillan and Zoido point out Peru’s, Chomsky points out America’s. But these are all democracies. India and America are even hallmark ones. So if we are all “subverting” democracy, the time has come to question one of the two words. And to remember that democracy is a word, not a mantra.

All paintings in this post are by Nayanaa Kanodia, save the last (beh Bruegel).

A List for Today.

Icarus, Tarot Seven.

Eight ways to get around

Dragons. Along with elves, probably the most overused tropes in spec fic. Unlike milksop elves, this is because they are so fucking cool. The best dragons are no one’s conveyance. Obedient dragons are pathetic shadow-dragons (I’m looking at you, Eragon). But then there’s Cordelia, the baddest ass in hell-LA. S/he adopts Angel and takes on Illyria.

Spaceships. There are all kinds of spaceships in fiction. The coolest of all time is, of course, The Heart of Gold. The smallest of its virtues is a transmogrifying whale. Generation-ships freak me out, or the sentient ship in Dust might come a distant second. As it stands, Serenity is probably the shoo-in for second place, mostly because she’s dragon-like. She competes with the ouster biospheres from Endymion; though they are technically generation-ships, they have flora, fresh air, animals, and all the other benefits of terra, as well as exotic mutant-humans. I was not a big fan of the Hyperion sequence, but the tree-ships and the ousters have stayed with me long after I forgot the messiah lady’s name and angst.

The Floo Network. The idea of brooms induces chafing in body-parts I’d sooner leave alone. I’m not including apparation and teleportation in this list, because technically you don’t go between places with such measures. You just hop across, which always felt like cheating to me: what about the whole journey-is-the-destination shtick?

Warrens. Roughly, portals channelled through any given aspect of space or spirit, carved out by magic. They shorten paths and increase danger. Read Malazan for details, which are many and wondrous. Heck, read Malazan anyway. The Ogier Ways were WoT’s sloppy shady version.

Velocipedes. Bikes by another name sound so much more fun.

Talking Magic Carpets. In-flight entertainment can make all the difference. Though I don’t remember where I read about loquacious weaves. (din, 2011: Calcifer!) Alternately, floppyhat recommends giant boomerangs and frisbees hoisted around by giants. With boomerangs, you parachute down to your destination, but the return trip is free.

Hot Air Balloons.  picnic baskets, rolling vistas, soothing breeze.

Wings. Duh. Preferably not wax.

Wendy Cope, After Prague

 I came to The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ well disposed to Philip Pullman, and I left with my illusions intact.  Pullman tackles the central conundrum of the Christianity: how did the oh-so-radical Jesus leave the oh-so-conservative church as his sole legacy? Pullman’s answer: He didn’t. It was all the fault of his bookish younger brother. Jesus was the radical political rhetorician, Christ was the gullible historian. His point, historically speaking, is this: The son of god and the word of god were different creatures, and the latter was the more corruptible.

As the impostor-angel tells Christ:

We who know must be prepared to make history the handmaiden of posterity and not its governor. What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom [of God: everyone seems certain it’s around the corner, in keeping with other accounts of the period] than what was…. When you look down upon the story as God looks down on time, you will be able to have Jesus foretell to his disciples, as it were in truth, the events to come of which, in history, he was unaware.

St Matthew and the Angel, Caravaggio

If I had a kid (Christ forfend, and Jesus save her) this would be the book I introduce Christianity to her with.  All the biblical highlights exist, subtly and seamlessly twisted into new meaning. He envisions a world in which the miraculous and the mundane aren’t distinct; where myth and miracle are reinforcing, and a miracle is only as good as its chronicler.  When they discover that they can (sort of) pull them off, the question of miracles begins an intense debate between the brothers. Jesus is of the opinion that ‘conjuring tricks’ can be of no service to spreading God’s message or love. Christ sees in them instrumental value, arguing that people need “signs and wonders”, and, conversely, that miracles are a good way to collect what we would call social capital.

This conversation leads into Christ’s proposed church:

I can see the laws an the proclamations issuing from the centre to the furtherest edges of the world. I can see the good rewarded and the wicked punished. I can see the missionaries going out bearing the word of God to the darkest and the most ignorant lands, and bringing every loving man and woman and child to the great family of God- gentiles as well as Jews. I can see all doubt vanquished, I can see all dissent swept away, I can see the shining faces of the faithful gazing up in adoration on every side.

Jesus is skeptical, as anyone would be after that little soliloquy:

Do you think your mighty organisation would even recognise the Kingdom if it arrived? Fool! The Kingdom of God would arrive at these magnificent palaces and courts like a poor traveller with dust at its feet. The guards would spot him at once, ask for his papers, beat him, throw him out into the street.…

And, later, he remains a prophet, if not quite in the mold Christ intends:

And from time to time, to distract the people from their miseries and fire them with anger against someone else, the governors of this church will declare that such-and-such a nation and such-and-such people is evil and ought to be destroyed, and they’ll gather great armies and set off to kill and burn and loot and rape and plunder, and they’ll raise their standard over the smoking ruins of what was once a fair and prosperous land and declare that God’s kingdom is so much the larger and more magnificent as a result.

A prophet who damns neoplatonism, no less:

I’m not one of those logic-choppers, these fastidious philosophers with their scented Greek rubbish about a pure world of spiritual forms where everything is perfect and which is the only place where the real truth is, unlike this filthy real world which is corrupt and gross and full of untruth and imperfection.

As surely as he systematically destroys the holy cows of christian faith, Pullman is charitable to everyone traditionally considered “evil” in that scripture (save Pontius Pilate, who is perhaps irredeemable): Judas is Christ’s informant, but only because he thinks recording his master’s speeches is worthy work; Nicodemus sees to the crucified body’s internment when none of the apostles can be bothered; even the Sanhedrin who betray Jesus are simply civic authorities caught between Jesus’s radicalism and his popularity.

All through, perhaps paradoxically, I felt far greater affinity to Christ than to Jesus. His motives and jealousy are relatable; his credulity is explained by the great desire I share for a clean-cut world that matches neat legal definitions and well-plotted stories. He is the insecure introvert obsessed of his stylus, who “clings to rules because he fears there is no passion there at all”, the brother who is not bursting with hope for humanity. This could be me, circa whatever BC.

***

A List for Today

The Heirophant, Fifth of the Major Arcana in a standard Tarot deck

Ten Interesting Facts about Reformation Popes.

1. The first Medici pope- Leo X- incensed Martin Luther by his ‘indulgences’.
2. The second Medici pope- Clement VII- incensed Henry VIII by his intransigence when it came to the question of divorce.
3. He was killed by a “death-cap mushroom”. Post-burial, his body was exhumed, stripped of all valuables, and dragged across Rome.
4. Clement’s successor- Paul III, was a Roman mobster who spent his papacy securing fortunes for his children.
5. He authorised slavery in the papal states: he issued the famous Bull which legalised the slave trade and repealed the ancient Roman law which provided slaves some right to sue for their freedom.
6. His successor, the allegedly gay Julius III, devoted his career to pushing through the Tridentine formulae, which were to change the face of Catholicism indelibly.
7. With Marcellus II, the next pope, died the last hope of a truly reformed Catholic church. The accession of the hardline Bishop Carafa as Paul IV saw the imposition of the Spanish inquisition on the papal states, the creation of the jewish ghetto in Rome, and the stamping out of the mystical Spirituali. This was a pope who turned on his own folk,  persecuting Reginald Pole (who oversaw the Marian reconstruction in England) and cutting off Michelangelo’s pension.
8. Pius IV, next in line, was yet another Medici, but not consequential enough to be called a “Medici pope”. His successor Pius V nailed in Mary Stewart’s coffin by excommunicating Elizabeth I.
9. Gregory XIII,  post Pius, instituted the Gregorian calendar and sealed in the Tridentine   counter-reformation.  Popes named Gregory have proved good for the church- it was one so called who instituted “Christendom” in the 12th century by seizing upon a chaotic political situation, and it was “Gregory the Great” back in the 6th century that united a schismatic church under the banner of strict trinitarianism.
10. There have been no popes named after any of the apostles, though there have been no dearth of Pauls. Odd, innit, in a religion with such a complex relationship to its conversos? (In this context, I mean catholicism when I say religion. Protestantism, evangelical from the get-go, has reconciled such stress with less dithering).

In and Out of Cipher.

but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;
then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote.
Derek Walcott,  from The Sea is History

Umberto Eco tells us there is a fate that links the historical novel to medieval topics, that our conflicts can be traced to the tumultuous, ongoing, break between the dark ages and ‘today’– the chugging engine of modernity.  We live, he claims, within a wave of the neo-medieval. The trick is to identify what brand of Middle-Ages is being traded, and Eco identifies ten variations upon the theme. Of the lot, he comes out in favour of the philological Middle-Ages, which “lack sublimity, thank God, and thus look ‘human’”. He would rejoice in Wolf Hall’s painstaking historiography.

If the medieval does haunt the modern, Eco himself fed our steady fascination. No one stalked the antecedents of modernity better than Eco in Name of the Rose or Baudolino.  And no one, Eco inclusive, has injected the modern as precisely into the feudal as Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall. Mantel is aided by her choice of protagonist. A more modern man than Thomas Cromwell you would be hard-pressed to find in our postmodern, neo-medieval times. One might long for Fr. William’s lucidity while parsing the difference between Reginald Pole and Martin Luther, but he remains too enmeshed within the organisation of an earlier time to look through it as astutely as Mantel’s Cromwell does.

Plenty of critics have emphasised the confusion created by Mantel’s consistent use of the third person nominative to refer to Cromwell: there is only one ‘he’ in her novel. I found the device ingenious: substituting the omnipresent divine ‘Him’ with a personal ‘him’ as the driving feature of narrative is a splendid caption for the altering gestalt she captures.

Eumenides/Erinyes.

I walked, till suddenly on the wind
A chill heresy was borne
‘No wishing in your starveling heart
Nor choice of unharmonious mind
Brought you in these great riches any part’.

—- Larkin, from Because the image would not fit

From the balance sheet of History, here is a divine joke for the tidy-minded taxonomist: three Catholic Marys (Guise, Stewart, Tudor) and three Protestant Annes (Emden, Cleves, Boleyn).  Three Furies and Three Graces, yet how are they to be assigned? This is the Reformation gone from being a debate within St Augustine’s mind to a Freudian battle between God’s mother and grandmother. But let us back-pedal into some context.

16th century ‘Christendom’ was protean place: heresy and literacy spread the land, the New World was found, Old Ideas were newly recovered. It was a century when people flipped religions like pancakes, and theological unbuttoning released a sudden burst of freedoms. Women, tightly confined by the rigours of birth and hearth, had little voice in the new doctrines spilling through society. Only noblewomen, secure and reasonably educated, could stake their claim as new sources of authority were explored. Where Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabella of Castile pioneer, two generations of aristocrats gracefully glide. It happens in stages- first as wives, then as widows and spinsters – as the fate of my gender goes.

By the time the 1550s draw around, there are any number of fascinating, powerful women about.  From being Caesar’s to being Caesar. In the shade of a paltry possessive a moon-landing hides. In England such sudden feminism is especially poignant. Three women anointed Queen in the decade after Henry VIII! If one is to argue the public benefit of Henry VIII, it can only be this: it proved to generations of aristocratic women that men’s shadows are fickle places to inhabit.

The six wives as drinking tokens

The progress of Henry VIII’s wives might once have had value as an allegory for the Reformation. The promise of dangerous freedom turned to greed/tyranny etc.  The six wives of Henry VIII are now the Reformation’s celebrities; you can blame them for as much or as little for perceived degeneracy as suit your morals. ‘Philologically’ recreating them, qua Eco, is futile- in their own times, rumours and scandal about them cropped up ‘like mushrooms in the damp dawn grass’. Historical perspective, the pride of hindsight, is mutilated by gossip accreted into five centuries of propaganda.  One must work crab-wise to sift the impulses that motivated these cautiously emancipatory queens.

Wolf Hall  allows us a glimpse into how society was unlaced, if for men more than women. In her choice of Cromwell, Mantel escapes the noose of female agency and representation, while retaining the perspective of an alien in the corridors of power.  The Reformations might have stultified into fresh dogmatic prisons, but her account of Henrician England highlights a society absorbing profound flux:

The world is not run from where [Harry Percy] thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence.. from Lisbon where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and the click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and the shot… The fates of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase.

Thomas Cromwell did womankind-at-large little service; he might have recovered divine law for secular intelligence, yet he simultaneously redeployed the marriage-metaphor: the Church was once bride of God, the ruler is now husband of the ruled. Yet, great individuals (even of the unexpected gender) arise from the entropy encouraged by the collapse of rigid orthodoxies.  The momentum is not infinite, but it can be profligate while it lasts, as this cavalcade of almost-queens along the Atlantic coast demonstrates.  Only Elizabeth successfully split Cromwell’s conundrum, and she would not have found a man better pleased.

Elizabeth’s revelation, however coerced by circumstance, was that dynasty is a taint on governance. Unlike Catherine de Medici, perennially parrying and feinting to defend her family’s uneasy hold on the throne, Elizabeth had the freedom of riposte.  If Cromwell was the patron saint of modern bureaucracy, as Elton has argued, she was its midwife.  Her father broke England in his quest for a million sons to divide up his realm. Elizabeth, in a singular stroke of genius, bound Scotland and England into an intertwined future.

All legacy is castles upon winds: the future is temperamental, and no amount of fretting or breeding will sort out posterity.  Besides, entitlement dampens one’s desire to be productive. Elizabeth I, bastard child of a homicidal king and a heretic whore, certainly had the entitlement well expelled from her. Mantel’s Cromwell would have enjoyed Elizabeth: they would have made a wicked team, with a mutual sense of humour and taste for equipoise.

The Person, Cromwell.

Is it possible
That so high debate,
So sharp, so sore, and of such rate,
Should end so soon and was begun so late?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
That any may find
Within one heart so diverse mind,
To change or turn as weather and wind?
Is it possible?

As men wed ladies by licence and leave.
All is possible.

Sir Thomas Wyatt, from Is it Possible?

Cromwell

Thomas Cromwell was a quintessentially Renaissance man, of an age with Erasmus and Zwingli, Gropper and Contarini; his generation saw much probing into possibility and potential while barricades between churches were blurry and shifting. His personal faith reflects the negotiating they did between new and old notions of God. He may resent priestly privilege and spurn the sacraments, but his personal loyalty extends to the nether-realms: he negotiates with the church for Cardinal Wolsey’s soul to be transferred from limbo to more comfortable lodgings in purgatory.

What I grew up with and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment and then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of the world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory’”… “Show me where it says relics, monks, nuns. Show me where is says ‘Pope’”… “Show me where it says, in the Bible, that you can’t have beef-olives during Lent”

Women writers are often accused of trafficking in the domestic at the expense of the political and the existential. Mantel turns the cliche of the redundant household ferociously upon such critics, and in her hands domesticity is the ultimate test of hypocrisy.  Thomas More is a petty tyrant in private, whipping his children and taunting his wife;  Cromwell would arm his nieces and “despatch them to Ireland”.

Cromwell has an abandoned-puppy approach to family: he picks up abused strays and polishes them into men of the world. By the end of the novel, he has a small army devoted to him- “hawks in the mews who move to the sound of his voice”.

The Austin Friars is like the world in little. These few years its been more like a battlefield than a household; or like one of the tented encampments in which the survivors look in despair at their shattered limbs and spoiled expectations. But they are his to direct, these hardened troops; if they are not to be flattened in the next charge it is he who must teach them the defensive art of facing both ways, faith and works, Pope and new brethren, Katherine and Anne.

History tells me Cromwell’s fate. I know Call-Me Risley will turn on him, that adopted son Richard is Oliver Cromwell’s forefather, that Stephen Gardiner carried More’s legacy into Marian England. I know trigger-happy Henry will squander the wealth Cromwell spent his life amassing on an unwise war. But there are details of considerably more importance I’m awaiting in The Mirror and the Light.

How does Cromwell reconcile his betrayal of Anne Boleyn? He loathes the Boleyns out of loyalty to Cardinal Wolsey, but he recognises the queen as a cornerstone of his own project: “A world in which Anne can be queen is a world in which Cromwell can be Cromwell”. How can he compel himself against the grain of such conviction?  Will he realise how conjoined they are even as he does it? Anne surely does:

‘I am Jezebel. You, Thomas Cromwell, are the priests of Baal.’ Her eyes are alight. ‘As I am a woman, I am the means by which sin enters the world. I am the devil’s gateway, the cursed ingress. I am the means by which Satan attacks the man, whom he was not bold enough to attack, except through me. Well, that is their view of the situation. My view is that there are too many priests with scant learning and smaller occupation.’

Then there is that overwhelming question floating across our neo-medieval lens: how will Cromwell- this urbane thug who refuses inquisitorial torture and friars’ flagellation equally- acquiesce to one to repudiate the other? If there is an aspect of modern man (and state) that demands urgent inspection, it is the proclivity for torture inherited from the medieval church.

All Cromwell achieved was the trans-substantiation of heresy into treason.  As ghost-Wolsey warns Cromwell, when fortune turned, only he felt her lash (and axe). Henry merely descended further into madness. Already, in his last conversations with More, the ‘sturdy spirit’ of 1533 is giving way to the weary Cromwell, ‘tired out from the effort of deciphering the world, of smiling at the foe’. He knows that More’s evasive intransigence coupled with Henry’s obstinacy scapegoats him:  ”in the eyes of the world we will be the fools and the oppressors, and he will be the poor victim with the better turn of phrase.”

The Pilgrimage of Grace is a heart beat away as Wolf Hall closes. That revolt, unfolding at the heels of Munster’s millenarian anabaptist prophet, heralded the faith-storms about to engulf Christendom. Cromwell’s solid ambivalence is to be severely tested: how does one compromise between doctrines when each is twisted into a myriad horrors? Thomas Cromwell, newly at the helm of England as we leave him, was more finely attuned than anyone to the great break initiated on his world-historic ‘miserable rainy island’. It’s his body, not Henry’s harem, upon which history’s engraved.

****

A List for Today

The Empress, Third of the Major Arcana in a standard Tarot deck.

The Three Who Were One.

Three Catholic Marys
Stewart, Tudor, Guise.
Three Protestant Annes
Emden, Boleyn, Cleves.

Virgin Mother, Sinning Grandmother
you prefer Eve to Lillith?
Adding Ana Nzinga
Unfurls splits in myth.

Dulle Griet, or Mad Meg, by Bruegel

An edited version of this post appeared in OpenDemocracy, here.

Five years ago, the Tamil actress Khushboo said something innocuous in the course of an interview. She expressed surprise that adult men expected virgin brides, and went on to say that it was prudent to use protection while one does the big nasty. I gather (the original interview was impossible to trace) she said so within the pages of a sex survey, a titillating cocktail of statistics, porn, and pop psychology that the news-glossies run in slow weeks in the hopes of drawing out a less repressed Indian. (Sample question: do you routinely participate in mixed-gender orgies with your spouse?) In a sea of salacious oh-no-you-wouldn’t content, Khushboo’s plug for protection and sex-ed appears (to me) remarkably level-headed.

Khushboo acknowledged people had sex outside of marriage in a survey based on that exact premise. The culture-warriors, of which species India has an infinite variety, understood that to mean she endorsed it. Of course, she might have added that people enjoy sex of every stripe, she might have recommended fornication fervently and described in vivid and scurrilous detail, and undoubtedly she now wishes she had. This might make her later fate slightly more comprehensible. Unfortunately for both of us, posterity has only recorded the most responsible of her comments, and has judged her extremely harshly for them.

The fracas followed a week later, a long time in news cycles; a flawless edifice built around the magic point where text starts to get flayed of its context for popular amusement. In the intervening time, Khushboo raised the ire of a fellow member of the Tamil film fraternity by successfully forcing an apology from him when he likened actresses to prostitutes. To the extent that actresses in Tamil Nadu are routinely sexually exploited, the noble hero was certainly right, yet I doubt his analogy was motivated by feminist concerns about equality of labour and the casting couch. This man had some politicos in his posse, as such men do, and they obligingly raised a ruckus on the flimsy grounds they were forced to work with.

Khushboo

Khushboo is emblematic of the gypsy-actresses of independent India. Bollywood is the nerve centre of a whole host of interconnected, osmotic regional cinemas; it leaches off talented folk and replaces them with its discards. This is especially true of actresses, and some of Bollywood’s most famous faces are South Indians and Bengalis who have learnt Hindi on the job. Actors travel less successfully, and have longer shelf lives besides; an actor can afford to stick around and hope to be discovered in his 30s, an actress must make a place for herself by 25. Khushboo was one such nomad- after a few years attempting to break into Bollywood during the ‘80s, the Gujarati traipsed down south to find better luck.

The peak of her success in Bollywood came young: as a child she starred in the Bachchan blockbuster Laawaris. The other highlight of her Hindi movie career was the song Bol Baby Bol. It is a typical product of ‘80s Bollywood: nonsensical lyrics (the singer offers to teach his audience how to dance the tequila), weird dances and weirder fashion. Any self-respecting Bollywood song routine demands, at a minimum, three wardrobe changes, and this one is an ever deepening sartorial disaster. Khushboo starts off in a baby pink sweatsuit, switches to polychromatic ruffles, and winds down in tinsel boots.

Despite her willingness to look like an acid-addled can-can dancer, Khushboo never got to make her mark on Bollywood. It was the Tamil film industry that gave her a lasting home and a measure of fame. I don’t understand Tamil well enough speak for her skills as a thespian, but I do respect statistics, and Khushboo acted in an astonishing number of movies in every south Indian language.

Unlike the average Bollywood starlet, south Indian celebrities are rarely nationally recognised. Pay scales, similarly, are lower the further you go from glitzy Bombay, especially for women. However, regional cinema has a devoted, often rabid audience, and popular actors from the southern film world usually consider politics their retirement plan. Actresses are less lucky and terribly treated, even in comparison with Bollywood, itself no bastion of equal rights and fair play. The ones who strike a chord get a decent run as such things go.  Khushboo, for instance, has had temples and recipes dedicated to her in the course of her decade-spanning career. Even after her film career waned (and she turned 35), she had a thriving career as a talk show host and television ‘personality’, and was well ensconced in Tamil society and popular culture. That was five years ago. Since then, the woman has been lynched, threatened, humiliated and hauled around the legal system for observing that people had sex, that sex has consequences, and that it is best to protect against them.

In the tragic farce tradition of Indian politics, the sordid incident dragged in a far deeper malaise than the shallow comment warranted. The motivating force behind the ugly incident is a deepening shadow over the once cosmopolitan Indian South, a growing regional xenophobia that fuels many of the peninsula’s conflicts. A more detailed analysis of the incident and the identity politics behind it can be found in Tushar Dhara’s essay “Reverse Culture Jamming” in the SARAI Foundation’s 2006 reader Turbulence. For the purposes of this post, suffice it to say that Khushboo, once a goddess in Tamil Nadu, became the focal point of a raging debate about ‘Tamil Culture’ and its vulnerability to ‘pollution’ from outsiders (whom the actress, owing to her Gujarati-Muslim origin, ostensibly represented). Criminal cases, on legally mystifying grounds, were filed against both Khushboo and Suhasini Manirathnam , her sole comrade-in-arms from the film community. The Madras High Court refused to go near the affair, despite the egregious attack on both liberty and privacy, forcing the Supreme Court to step in and finally dismiss the cases.

It took the intervention of the highest court in the land to uphold India’s constitution (and common sense) by confirming that opinions and facts aren’t illegal; to ‘prove’ that the alleged criminality hounding the poor women is utter baloney whipped up by crazed fanatics.

I could rant about this. I choose instead, as a Tamil woman and a lawyer, to celebrate even the little victories (half-Tamil, but close enough. I am Tamil through the paternal line, and I figure if they can appropriate me, I can appropriate them). I post this poem in solidarity with every woman who defies patriarchy: If men can’t fuck us while we have lives, fuck them! (better still, fuck someone else)

Rimininny!

If you can’t fuck me while I read, fuck off.
You’re not the best of what’s been thought or said,
Not yet. But youth, with genius, is enough.

Menage a trois is greatness, not rebuff,
If you gain art from what art’s represented.
If you can’t fuck me while I read, fuck off.

In case the mechanics were confusing anyone.

I want you, and I want a paragraph
Of lengthy James, he does go on. My love,
Can You? I shouldn’t praise his length? Enough

Of him? The body of work’s living proof
We’re all rare forms, and living in the dead.
If you can’t A Little Tour in France me while I read,
fuck off.

I signal lusts by title, not handkerchief,
Since I’m the sex of all that I have read;
Sometimes I write this sex. Kiss me enough,

And well enough, that I may bear the snub
That reading’s not a sexual preference.
If you can’t fuck me while I read, fuck off,
Or rave how I’m a work of art enough.

S.X. Rosenstock, The Paris Review, 1996.

The latest news on the Khushboo front is the speculation that she is getting ready to join the Congress party and stand for public office. This seems a fortuitous alliance for the protagonists: she is the heroine of the moment, and one of her few political allies during the mess was Chidambaram’s lawyer son. The charismatic Khushboo, conversely, might help the flailing and insignificant Tamil Nadu Congress establish a foothold in the famously insular state. Her other political option is the regional DMK, also a member of the ruling UPA coalition. Karunanidhi’s daughter Kanimozhi is another rare Khushboo champion. Her feminist credentials, such as they are, conflict with important factions within the party: it was an influential DMK-lackey (and fellow member of Karunanidhi’s clan) who offered the ‘protesters’ a forum in the Tamil media. It might be stretching the (admittedly loopy) logic of public affairs in India to expect any propaganda machine to switch seamlessly from vilifying a woman to deifying her. Whatever her decision, the saddest consequence of the persecution is the likelihood that the actress’s radicalism, if it did truly exist, is by now well and thoroughly played out.

***

A List for Today

The High Priestess, Second Card of the standard Tarot deck.

Five Feminist Classics

(nonfic, in no particular order)

1. Virginia Woolf, Room with a View

2. Susan Brownmiller, Femininity ( I haven’t read Against Our Will yet, though I have owned it for a while. Rape is a subject I try avoid. )

3. MFK Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

4. Ellen Willis, Don’t Think, Smile! (I have lost my copy of this. Despite the brilliance of Beginning to See the Light this will always be the one-that-got-away.)

5. Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War

This list is one my more mutable ones. It changes each time I think about it, and if I were to make it tomorrow at least one book would be different. Already, I am counting up the excellent writers it so merrily neglects (Winterson, Wollstonecraft, Sontag, Klein, Roy) as well as other books by the one it doesn’t. Oh well. As far as I can tell, these were the books that made me a feminist, for better or worse. Them, or, you know, Buffy and The L Word

My library wanders between zoo and carnival.

There are always some islands. Last night, one was John Gray.  Someone that defines politics as “the art of devising temporary remedies for recurring evils- a series of expedients, not a project for salvation”  is after my very soul. It is someone to trust for lucidity and humour, someone that has the enough perspective to be anti-communist and yet write, in the heyday of Fukuyama’s festivities to celebrate the end of history, this:

Ours is the era in which political ideology, liberal as much as Marxist, has a rapidly dwindling leverage on events, and more ancient, more primordial forces, nationalist and religious and soon, perhaps, Malthusian are contesting one another.. If the Soviet Union does indeed fall apart, that beneficent catastrophe will not inaugurate a new era of post-historical harmony, but instead a return to the classical terrain of history, a terrain of great-power rivalries, secret diplomacies, and irredentist claims and wars

I am, short to say, hooked. That he enjoys Isaiah Berlin without getting all sentimental about the man (and quotes him accurately, a rare feat in Berlin fandom. Most people, self included, mutilate his argument in pursuit of their own) is the olive in my martini. I bring him up because his essays remind me of a review I wrote during college where I inadvertently make a clever point. See if you can spot it.

Book: Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom. 

Berlin.

The Choice between Freedom and Autonomy.

I chose Raz for this assignment for two reasons: one, he makes impeccably polished arguments; second, he’s an icon in the last bastions of unadulterated white maleness. Analysing Raz from a gendered perspective, especially  something as fragile and as controversial as freedom, is an interesting challenge. I didn’t understand half the book, but I do have opinions on some of it, and they are what I shall lay out in the course of this review.

The first thing I learned with Raz is to begin resolutely skeptical. This can only be done by sternly separating the conceptual philosopher from the normative philosopher. One must prise his arguments apart, herding the premises to a place they can be assessed independent of their conclusions. As a conceptualist, Raz is flawless.  I wasn’t able to spot a single instance where he’s inconsistent, vague or obvious.  When he differentiates between consent and agreement, or between duty and obligation, his subtlety is humbling.

The normative philosopher is more yielding to my pugnacity, probably because how things should be is that much more susceptible to opinion than how (or what) things are. The normative thrust of the book is simply this: that freedom (or, rather, autonomy, which he defines as a form of responsible freedom) has moral value, and so it is a worthy goal to protect in a polity.

Raz argues that autonomous individuals are the only way a plural society can survive, as they internalise an “ideal of toleration” necessary for any modern just society. Next, Raz suggests that the “legitimate state” in a political set up has a responsibility to try ensure that this liberal utopia succeeds and actively promote it (opposed to the framework where the state interferes as little as possible to create said utopia). His argument here is ingenious: it is impossible for a state to be value neutral; all actions it takes (including inaction) will have consequences; it may as well be judged by the consequences and not what it “ought” and “ought not” do, as general notions of limited government suggest.

I have two problems with this, after an unrelenting hunt-

• I dislike utopias (din, 2011: *retracts*)
• I don’t understand why an already autonomous person deserves so much attention or protection from the state, when most people aren’t autonomous and that’s generally a worse situation to be in.

I realise that what Raz is saying isn’t that autonomous people should somehow be singled out, but that autonomy itself should be, that the state should try make us all autonomous. The state has been called upon to do many ambitious things in the history of jurisprudence, but the scope of that charge led me down a weird new path: moments of overwhelming pity for this forlorn creature stuck playing good-fairy to an unrepentant humanity. But I digress. What Raz means by “autonomy”, as far as I understood it, is the agency possessed by a moral actor to make unhindered choices and shape (partially) her own life. It is the ability of a person to make both long term and short term decisions from a bouquet of options. An autonomous person essentially lives the good life, they face no overwhelming compulsions that might cloud their reason or their options- say, poverty, or disease, or war, or abusive marriage.

The role of the state in all this is to enable individuals (by extension, groups) to coexist without endless dither about core moral principles. Naturally, Raz concludes, a legitimate state determines when someone’s freedom ought to be curtailed in favour of another autonomous person.

The state isn’t the final judge on this point: it lays out a system with which ordinary individuals gauge prevalent social debates to act on them with temporary certitude. Should they feel that they have a compelling reason for acting a certain way, and that reason hasn’t been adequately considered by authority, Raz would argue that the individual is perfectly justified in doing what he thinks is right.

Raz never advocates an unilateral duty of obedience. What he does emphasise is are universal “moral goods” (like keeping promises and identifying with a ‘just’ society )  that form the basis of autonomous persons’ judgement. How they are to be reconciled and acted upon he leaves to individuals.

This is his theory about autonomy.

The fourth section of the book is a theory of value for freedom(s), to enable people to rank and sort them, but that’s the bit I found unfathomable. This kind of autonomy, one which is “morally” valuable for its social benefit, is really just another variant of hegemony. It replaces the structure of law and state with cerebral conformity. I’m not denying that we’re products of society, or that we all have a moral compass — but to suggest that this moral compass is ascertainable (and, goodness, measurable!) by some universally acceptable standard is to make a mockery of freedom. Orderly living demands we be responsible with freedom- but freedom and responsibility are distinct concepts. They differ symbolically as well as consequentially.

If I am free, I am allowed to be irrational, irresponsible, disorderly- an ‘idle, steady vagabond’- as long as I accept the consequences. I am  allowed to rant and change those consequences (all consequences: moral, social, legal, and religious ones). I am expected to have goals that aren’t determined by the society I live in. I am allowed amorality.  Raz seems to suggest that because we should all be respectable gentry, it’s worth constructing a potential society where we are/can be.

Utopias are profoundly ahistoric and make for excellent propaganda, which ensures they are fertile breeding-spots for all manner of lunacy. Raz is (obviously) no lunatic, but his assumptions venture too close to illusion for comfort. Benign statehood notwithstanding, I’m fairly certain that we won’t leap from extreme exploitation to an organic commune in Cockaigne. If one is to place an ideal of freedom at the heart of politics, and on this point I am in full agreement with Raz,  it can’t be done by obfuscating individual freedom.

Freedom is an individual good,  and to be free is not to be content nor tractable (it is possible to be all three; but they aren’t nested ideas). Freedom’s value can only be gauged through its benefit/outcome: creativity. The way forward in any battle for true freedom, in my opinion, is not to intertwine freedom and responsibility but to celebrate freedom and its twin manifestations in independence and debate. We don’t need to tolerate-sanitise diversity, we need to celebrate it, and that’s the only way enough people will be free for the word to be worth a damn.

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I am saying, in the flammable fashion of yesteryear chaos, this:

For the ideal of toleration we have inherited [from the liberal tradition] embodies two incompatible philosophies. Viewed from one side, liberal toleration is the ideal of a rational consensus on the best way of life. From the other, it is the belief that human beings can flourish in many ways of life.

If liberalism has a future, it is giving up the search for a rational consensus on the best way of life. As a consequence of mass migration, new technologies of communication and continued cultural experience, nearly all societies today contain several ways of life, with many people belonging to more than one. The liberal ideal of toleration which looks to a rational consensus on the best way of life was born in societies divided on the claims of a single way of life. It cannot show us how live together in societies that harbour many ways of life

John Gray, “Modus Vivendi”, Gray’s Anatomy

Who knew? Not me. Weighty words like “Liberal Paradox” worked far better than my flimsy freedoms in law school.

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A List for Today .

The Magician, First of the Major Arcana in a standard Tarot deck.

Four Things Christianity inherited from Persia-

1. “The belief salvation is a type of historical event is an innovation, most likely originating around three thousand years ago with the persian prophet Zoroaster.

2. The belief that history is a battle between good and evil, and good can win derives from Zoroastrian traditions.

3. So does the belief, which is unknown in ancient Hebrew thought, in an approaching end-time”. (John Gray)

4. The word “Magi”, which in Persian meant “Priest” (Ganeev, via Dalrymple’s In Xanadu)

“Protestants like to be good and have invented theology in order to keep themselves so. Catholics like to be bad and have invented theology in order to keep their neighbours good” ,

Bertrand Russell, “On Catholic and Protestant Skeptics” Why I am not a Christian.

If you know me at all, you probably know I have had theology on the brain this past month. Specifically, Latin-Christian theology and its endless schisms.

Somewhere between the jargon and the wars, I found a painter I am madly in love with- Pieter Bruegel whose patrons included the most eclectic (and controversial) prince of the time:  Rudolf Habsburg in Prague. I especially love the fact that one never knows who painted any given canvas attributed to him- it could easily have been his son, or his nephew or some random chap from the “Bruegel” dynasty. The art at the background of this blog is one such disputed painting: The Festival of Fools. His paintings brought the period alive for me, far more effectively than Micheal Hirst ever did.

Compare, for instance, his “Conversion of Saul Tarsus” with Caravaggio’s “Conversion of St Paul” : the difference encodes an important key to the Reformation(s). One is busy, cosmopolitan, you can barely make out the Blessed Event; the other is all individual agony and giant horse’s ass.

Bruegel

Caravaggio

They might seem apposite- one is told constantly that Protestantism is the individual’s religion, while Catholicism is obsessed by the body of the Church in toto. But these lines are barely drawn that they blur. The urge behind Protestantism seems to have been to weave the laity more seamlessly into the church- by ending priestly privilege, preaching in the vernacular, and allowing priests to marry. Besides, the Calvinists policed their flock more strictly than the most militant pope’s deepest fantasy. Catholicism too has its deeply individualist traits: the power of monastic discipline and accompanying ritual, Talal Asad has argued, is that it produces a newly fashioned self- humble and servile, and devoted to God alone. This was a trait Ignatius Loyola took to logical extreme with the Jesuits during the counter-reformation. If one is obedient to God, and in His silence to the temporal authority of the church,  then any sin one may incur is wiped off the spiritual slate and handed up the chain of command (of course, popes would then burn in the deepest circle of hell, for what sin hasn’t been committed in their names? Perhaps popes and God have an understanding)

Of Christianity’s many metaphors, it is the shepherd one I find most disturbing (well, apart from the whole sorry conflation between church and bride, which subordinated women more effectively than it did any church in recorded history). I mean: why sheep? Dimwitted, woolly, these are the animals we put ourselves to sleep with. There are plenty of interesting animals that live in packs: we could’ve been zebra, or giraffe, or bison. If one must have a misanthropic religion (and evidence suggests one must) then why not compare us to cockroaches- breeding by the billion only to be squashed underfoot- and be done with it?

It is very easy, when writing from a colony, to consider ‘Christendom’ the Grand Simplification and amuse oneself with bald generalities like Russell’s above. There was the ancient world, bustling and cosmopolitan, and then came metaphysical unity and the first incarnation of ‘just’ war to hold up matters for a thousand years. It is only a closer study of the religion that allows one to perceive its role as synthesis between materiality and idealism, a debate that ultimately tore its faithful apart. Monotheism doesn’t preclude a hundred variants upon the One God and Catholic thought accommodated significant diversity long before the 16th century.   Indeed, on the most fascinating questions of the Reformation is why it happened when it did- Meister Eckhart was charged as an heretic in his century for saying pretty much what the more mystical Lutherans and the Spirituali of Italy were saying. ‘Christian’ thought, strictly defined as theological thought- borrowed and cobbled together it may have been- but it did develop on chronologically older thought.

Indian Christianity, as far as I know, has managed its schisms fairly pragmatically (and we have pretty much the full spectrum to deal with), which is perhaps why the ‘reformation’ and all its attendant violence over dogma confounds so many Indians (I’m skating on thin ice here- perhaps I should just say ‘Hindus’ and have done with it until I investigate native christianity more thoroughly. But that would only serve to obscure other differences of faith. Gah.) Centuries of strife about the perfectibility of a triune god and offending humanity? About the transmigration of bread?  Even us Anglophiles, schooled in the art of the absolute and the general schema of Christian thought, have difficulty with the subtlety of the discussion, masked as it inevitably is by semantic triviality: Calvin’s olive branch of distinctio sed non separatio is, after all, only matched in obscurity by the bizarre “separate-but-equal” race debates in 19th century America.

Then there is justification by faith- which is the (Lutheran) doctrine that one cannot attain salvation through good works alone (or at all), it is god’s grace that saves people from being damned to hell. Calvinists (or Presbyterians) take a similar view- only they believe in the even grimmer “double predestination”, which is that people are damned/saved long before they are corporeal, since god and bulldogs are similar in that they incapable of changing their minds. The church, thus, must weed out this elect and keep them ‘pure’. Some things make more sense: the hierarchy of the Elect in Calvinism, for one; hell vs. purgatory, for another. Stratification is a subject close to Hindu hearts.

The link between dogma and divine authority doesn’t seem a particularly important one in Hinduism. The gods are the gods: we must placate, persuade and police them, never fearing that we are more dispensable to them than they are to us. Humans and their copious gods are a co-dependent bugbear; strange men and their gods are better acclimated than assimilated.  Divine intercession is a cornerstone of Hindu worship, but not in the sense of judgement or salvation- such matters are up to the soul- but in mundane daily life. Your gods are supposed to protect and counsel you in the pursuit of good dharma; if they don’t, you switch gods. In return, you sustain their ego through worship.  Hinduism has an independent soteriology, embedded within caste justification, where divine will has little authority. A god can secure individual passes to heaven for important devotees, but these are strictly short-term: the karmic wheel inevitably reclaims them.  The many gods reflect many virtues (and appropriate flaws), with no hint of the all-collapsibility of Christianity and neoplatonism. They are stronger than humans (indisputable), wiser (questionable), more resourceful (arguable) and generally more relevant to the affairs of the world than the average human.  They are very rarely kinder than the average human. And it would be very strange if they took to judging us.

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The title, by the way, was a hilarious misprint from our tax law textbook- “Discharging gods on the high seas ensures that the law of custom cannot apply to them”. What divine insight!