South Asia Citizens Wire - 4 July 2017 - No. 2942 [via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]
Contents: 1. Pakistan’s jirgas: buying peace at the expense of women’s rights? | Ayesha Khan 2. Pakistan: HRCP statement regarding assault in courtroom on associates of prominent lawyer Asma Jahangir 3. Announcing the Campaign Peace Now & Forever Between Pakistan - India (1st July - 15 August 2017) | Tapan Bose 4. Bangladesh: Writer, Columnist, Farhad Mazhar Kidnapped - news reports 5. The politics of religious hate-mongering in India | Jeff Kingston 6. India: Memorandum to Prime Minister - Contain Religious Adventurism in Faridabad-Mewat-Alwar Belt | V.K. Tripathi 7. Dissecting Hindutva: A Conversation with Jyotirmaya Sharma | Nagothu Naresh Kumar 8. India: Romeos to rakshaks - How violence became normal | Pankaj Butalia 9. India: ’We are the mob now’ | Latha Jishnu 10. India: Nafrat ke Khilaaf Insaaniyat Ki Awaaz [Voice of Humanity Against Hatred] leaflet for a citizens protest rally in Bombay 3 July 2017 11. India: BJP summoned the gau raksha genie, now it must bottle it | Akaar Patel 12. India: Amendment to the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act 2010 - Press Statement by SAHMAT 13. ’NotInMyName’ 28 June 2017 Citizens Protest Across India Against Cow Vigilantism and Lynchings - Photos and News Coverage URLs 14. India: Letter to National Commission for Minorities While Returning the National Minority Rights Award of 2008 | Shabnam Hashmi 15. Recent on Communalism Watch: - India Is on Its Way to Becoming a Hindu Nation | Teesta Setalvad - RSS Gay Wing Launches New Pride Flag for India - Excerpts from a satirical Post on Gaylaxy - India: Poems read out by Danish Husain at during the #Notinmyname protest in Bombay - Burhanpur sedition case fits the larger pattern of MP police acting under prejudice and RSS pressure - India: Fear and loathing in Chhapra - India: Kovind, Dalit Politics and Hindu Nationalism - Has India become “Lynchistan”? | Rupa Subramanya - Fascism Without Fascists? A Comparative Look at Hindutva and Zionism | Satadru Sen in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies Volume 38, 2015 - India: Mitali Saran reponds to Swapan Dasgupta's blog in Times of India critiquing 'Not in My Name' protests against lynchings - India: Normalising the killing of Muslims (Apoorvanand) - Video: Taxman versus VHP - a clip from Ram Ke Naam a documentary by Anand Patwardhan - India: Invitation to Join a Mashal Juloos in Kolkata Against Communal Hate Crime (Calcutta, 4 July, 2017) - Pakistan: The Jamat-e-Islami, and rape | Usmann Rana - Pissing in the wind against the Notinmyname campaign | Ashley Tellis - India: Editorial in Hindustan Times regarding VHP’s demand for scrapping minorities panel ::: URLs & FULL TEXT ::: 16. Former Indian diplomat Nirupam Sen dead 17. India: Eid in the Time of Adityanath | Anonymous 18. India: Speaking truth to power: The media must question those in power | Rajdeep Sardesai 19. The Fortune Teller | Pallavi Aiyar 20. UK: Southall Black Sisters Intervention in Court of Appeal case on Gender Segregation 21. Socialism’s Future May Be Its Past | Bhaskar Sunkara 22. Deshmukh on Nerlekar, 'Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture' ======================================== 1. PAKISTAN’S JIRGAS: BUYING PEACE AT THE EXPENSE OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS? | Ayesha Khan ======================================== Why are foreign donors so enthusiastic about alternative dispute mechanisms when they deliver second class justice for women? http://sacw.net/article13353.html ======================================== 2. PAKISTAN: HRCP STATEMENT REGARDING ASSAULT IN COURTROOM ON ASSOCIATES OF PROMINENT LAWYER ASMA JAHANGIR ======================================== Lahore, June 22: The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has strongly condemned an attack by scores of lawyers on renowned lawyer Asma Jahangir’s associates inside a courtroom in the Lahore High Court. http://sacw.net/article13364.html ======================================== 3. ANNOUNCING THE CAMPAIGN PEACE NOW & FOREVER BETWEEN PAKISTAN - INDIA (1ST JULY - 15 AUGUST 2017) by Tapan Bose ======================================== We request all to join in this initiative to oppose war and demand that India and Pakistan, abandon their war like stances and return to dialogue immediately. http://sacw.net/article13345.html ======================================== 4. BANGLADESH: WRITER, COLUMNIST, FARHAD MAZHAR KIDNAPPED - NEWS REPORTS ======================================== Rapid Action Battalion members were conducting drive in Khulna to rescue Farhad Mazhar as the columnist was traced there this evening hours into he went missing from Dhaka. http://sacw.net/article13362.html ======================================== 5. THE POLITICS OF RELIGIOUS HATEMONGERING IN INDIA | Jeff Kingston ======================================== The irresistible urge to mix politics and religion usually comes at the expense of secularism, tolerance and vulnerable minorities. We saw this recently in Asia with extremist Islamic groups spewing anti-Chinese hate speech to defeat the incumbent governor of Jakarta, the ebbing tide of secularism in Bangladesh, insurgency in the Philippines and the resurgence of violence targeting Muslims in Sri Lanka with apparent impunity. Power politics and hatemongering in the name of religion sows seeds of instability and violence. http://sacw.net/article13333.html ======================================== 6. INDIA: MEMORANDUM TO PRIME MINISTER - CONTAIN RELIGIOUS ADVENTURISM IN FARIDABAD-MEWAT-ALWAR BELT | V.K. Tripathi ======================================== The merciless lynching of 16 year old Junaid (resident of Khandawali, Ballabgarh) in a crowded train in broad day light on June 12, 2017 is a high point of religious humiliation and violence being perpetrated on the Muslim masses by organized gangs in the Faridabad-Mewat-Alwar belt for the last 2 years. http://sacw.net/article13341.html ======================================== 7. DISSECTING HINDUTVA: A CONVERSATION WITH JYOTIRMAYA SHARMA | Nagothu Naresh Kumar ======================================== t’s a good time to be a populist. Across the world, populism has made significant strides. Sanctimonious populism coupled with ironclad convictions seems to be the staple diet of contemporary politics. The emergence of right-wing populism, nationalism and anti-Muslim politics is not confined to Europe but is manifest in other regions as well. Likewise, illiberal nationalism is not exclusive to Muslim-majority states but is also evident in India in the form of the chauvinistic Hindutva movement–the Hindu nationalist ideology. http://sacw.net/article13348.html ======================================== 8. INDIA: ROMEOS TO RAKSHAKS - HOW VIOLENCE BECAME NORMAL | Pankaj Butalia ======================================== Three years after he became Prime Minister, Modi made his second statement against the vigilante violence unleashed by cow hoodlums in different parts of the country. The speech, welcome though it was, lacked conviction primarily because Modi heads a government in which ministers have openly lauded such ’gau rakshaks’, and given them state financial assistance. Just a week ago, home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi said hate crime was not new in India and that the only thing new was its over-reporting. http://sacw.net/article13358.html ======================================== 9. INDIA: ’WE ARE THE MOB NOW’ | Latha Jishnu ======================================== THINGS happen with such rapidity these days that it is hard to comprehend what is happening to the Indian republic. On the one side are the relentless attacks, attacks of such orgiastic violence that it leaves most people shaken. http://sacw.net/article13363.html ======================================== 10. INDIA: NAFRAT KE KHILAAF INSAANIYAT KI AWAAZ [VOICE OF HUMANITY AGAINST HATRED] LEAFLET FOR A CITIZENS PROTEST RALLY IN BOMBAY 3 JULY 2017 ======================================== Citizens of Mumbai will take out a rally from Kotwal Garden to Chaityabhoomi to protest the series of lynchings and hate crimes that are occurring in this country with nauseating regularity. http://sacw.net/article13361.html ======================================== 11. India: BJP summoned the gau raksha genie, now it must bottle it | Akaar Patel ======================================== The killings are directly linked to government policy. I would hold the government personally responsible for these murders and any reasonable person would. The data journalism website Indiaspend has reported that 97% of lynching murders by gau rakshaks have come after 2014. They are the gift to us of the Modi government and of the state BJP governments (Haryana and Maharashtra in particular but they are not alone) which lit the fuse on gau raksha through legislation and rhetoric on cow slaughter. Almost no violence was happening before this on the matter of cattle, as the data proves. http://sacw.net/article13360.html ======================================== 12. India: Amendment to the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act 2010 - Press Statement by SAHMAT ======================================== We have received with great dismay the recent news report that the Union Cabinet has approved amendment to the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act 2010 and that it has been decided to allow centrally funded projects to be set up in the prohibited area of the nationally protected monuments http://sacw.net/article13346.html ======================================== 13. ’NotInMyName’ 28 June 2017 Citizens Protest Across India Against Cow Vigilantism and Lynchings - Photos and News Coverage URLs ======================================== Protest demonstrations, spontaneously organised on the social media, draw thousands across 18 Indian cities and five locations overseas, including New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Boston among others http://sacw.net/article13340.html ======================================== 14. India: Letter to National Commission for Minorities While Returning the National Minority Rights Award of 2008 by Shabnam Hashmi ======================================== I return today the National Minority Rights Award conferred on me in 2008 by the National Commission for Minorities. http://sacw.net/article13339.html ======================================== 15. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH: ======================================== - India Is on Its Way to Becoming a Hindu Nation | Teesta Setalvad - RSS Gay Wing Launches New Pride Flag for India - Excerpts from a satirical Post on Gaylaxy - India: Poems read out by Danish Husain at during the #Notinmyname protest in Bombay - Burhanpur sedition case fits the larger pattern of MP police acting under prejudice and RSS pressure - India: Fear and loathing in Chhapra - India: Kovind, Dalit Politics and Hindu Nationalism - Has India become “Lynchistan”? | Rupa Subramanya - Fascism Without Fascists? A Comparative Look at Hindutva and Zionism | Satadru Sen in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies Volume 38, 2015 - India: Mitali Saran reponds to Swapan Dasgupta's blog in Times of India critiquing 'Not in My Name' protests against lynchings - India: Normalising the killing of Muslims (Apoorvanand) - Video: This is what happened to a Tax official of India's govt when he exposed tax frauds by VHP - a clip from Ram Ke Naam a documentary by Anand Patwardhan - India: Invitation to Join a Mashal Juloos in Kolkata Against Communal Hate Crime (Calcutta, 4 July, 2017) - Pakistan: The Jamat-e-Islami, and rape | Usmann Rana - Pissing in the wind against the Notinmyname campaign Source| Ashley Tellis - India: Editorial in Hindustan Times regarding VHP’s demand for scrapping minorities panel -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/ ::: URLs & FULL TEXT ::: ======================================== 16. FORMER INDIAN DIPLOMAT NIRUPAM SEN DEAD ======================================== IANS | New Delhi July 2, 2017 http://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/former-indian-diplomat-nirupam-sen-dead-117070200486_1.html ======================================== 17. INDIA: EID IN THE TIME OF ADITYANATH by Anonymous ======================================== (Arre - June 26, 2017) My hometown Allahabad was a city of education and open political debates. Now it is overrun by saffron-gamcha-wearing bikers, where to live as a Muslim is to live in subterfuge. June 18, 2017. Around 10.15 pm. “Eid Mubarak ho bhai. Aap ki team jeet gayi.” It took me some time to recover from this congratulatory message. It was sent by a school classmate from my hometown Allahabad, after the Pakistani cricket team defeated us in the finals of the ICC Champions Trophy. I am an atheist with an Islamic name: Someone who grew up in a Muslim family, recited “Our father who art in heaven” every morning for 13 years in an all-boys Catholic school in Allahabad, studied in an Arya Samaj college in Delhi, and who now works in an Indian-American corporate in Mumbai. It took me 23 years to realise the weight of my religious identity. It was only when I came to Mumbai, a city that self-identifies as a “cosmopolitan” and “liberal” place, that I was made to feel like a Muslim. I was denied houses in societies because my middle name is Mohammad. In the event of an Islamic terror attack anywhere in the world, I was expected to be the first to condemn it. Even then, some people were openly taken aback, and some admired the fact that I was a liberal man without a skull-cap and the “Muslim beard”. I took solace in the fact that this was in distant Mumbai, far away from my beloved Allahabad, where my Islamic identity had never really mattered. Allahabad is a city known for its education and as the birthplace of Jawaharlal Nehru (for those of us who still remember him) and Amitabh Bachchan. Uttar Pradesh, as we know, is a state that often lives up to the stereotype of a land where people like Faizal Khan and Ramadheer Singh live and die by the gun. Goondaism – which thrives by employing “baalaks” and grassroots workers for almost all political parties – might be a persistent narrative from the state, but it’s not the only one. In my perhaps hallowed imagination, Allahabad has a genteel air. It is a political city, where everyone has an opinion on the CPM-Congress-BJP clashes in Kerala or the Cuban Missile Crisis or Donald Trump. Any chacha in a chai shop knows more about politics than fancy TV panellists and open political debates happen at every adda with the passion and eloquence of Antony and Cicero. But even in such a political city, I’ve never had to go the extra mile and appear extra enthusiastic to support India in a cricket match against Pakistan. I have never had the added burden of proving my loyalty to the motherland. Now, it’s more like home was Allahabad. What people don’t get is, if I had to leave India, why would I go to Pakistan and not, say, the French Riviera where I could sip beer and eat tapas? At the risk of sounding hopelessly naïve, Allahabad was a city where we celebrated kapda-phaad Holi with as much enthusiasm as Christmas. Around Eid, the whole city lit up; the night before, on chaand raat, people shopped and soaked in the festive spirit. Eid Mubarak rang in the air, along with “Saat Samundar Paar” and “Nakabandi” over loudspeakers. Everyone visited their Muslim friends in search of biryani, kebabs, korma and that Eid speciality, the diabetes-inducing sewain. It was a more innocent time, when people wearing kurta pyjama and skull cap were not looked upon with suspicion. Things are different now. In the last few years, I could sense a gradual change in the mahaul of UP, but at least we were happy that the ultra-right wing was still the fringe. Then the fringe arrived near the centre, but it was still cool. And then, the fringe took over. Earlier this year, Uttar Pradesh became a state ruled by an ultra-right wing Vin Diesel lookalike, who believes that cow urine is liquid gold. That SRK speaks like Hafiz Saeed. That when a Muslim man and a Hindu woman are together, love jihad is being waged. And most recently, that Taj Mahal does not fit in his picture of India. I went home a month post the declaration of Adityanath as chief minister. Now, healthy political debates at chai addas have been replaced by Pakistan Immigration Agencies. The number of times I was offered a ticket to our friendly neighbour by the people I knew (or thought I knew), would run Thomas Cook out of business. The other day, I was chatting with someone about the glorious utopic days of demonetisation when we’d ride unicorns on rainbows in the beautiful long queues outside ATMs, and he asked me to shut up or go to Pakistan. What people don’t get is, if I had to leave India, why would I go to Pakistan and not, say, the French Riviera where I could sip beer and eat tapas? But then, logic isn’t something modern Indians – who learn their nationalism from WhatsApp – are really known for. The point is, my dear Allahabad has turned into a place where you can’t question the government and authorities anymore, because nationalism baby. A close entrepreneur friend, who voted for the BJP in the state elections, had a heated exchange with his client recently when my poor friend had had the audacity to merely question the GST. The client eventually cancelled the deal after lecturing my friend on how people like him were not allowing India to develop. A few days into Adityanath’s takeover, came the real low blow – the shutting down of “illegal” slaughterhouses which slowly turned into a targeted campaign against Muslims. No slaughter means no dead buffaloes means no sexy food means life fucked. I am not even touching upon the mammoth number of people who’ve lost their livelihood or those who have lost the option of cheap protein-rich food. But I suppose nationalism will feed them. “UP me rehna hai to Yogi Yogi karna hai” is chanted all over, from social media to random rallies. A classmate who shared the rites of passage with me – bunking school, discovering porn, smoking that elusive cigarette – recently put up a Facebook post: “Viraat Hindu Rashtra ka aagman Uttar Pradesh se hi hoga. Yogi Ji ke saath mandir yahin banayenge, Pakistaniyo ko bhagayenge (UP will be an example of the strong Hindu nation. With Yogi ji, we will build the temple here and drive away Pakistanis).” So after all these years, according to him, a Pakistani is all that I am. On my visit, the number of people I saw wearing saffron gamchas, riding away on their bikes was scary. That they were riding without any fear of authorities was not what scared me – it was the performance of their aggressive right-wing nationalism. Sitting hundreds of kilometres away in Mumbai, I fear for my family back home: Who knows what will set the bike brigade off? Could it be my father, who might accidentally bump into one of these men while driving in his car? Or my mother cooking her heavenly mutton korma whose aroma can travel miles? Our Muslim lives are now meant to be carried out in subterfuge. As I write this, Mughalsarai’s name is being changed to something more nationalistic, since Mughals apparently weren’t like the Aryans who came to India on proper visas and didn’t take the natives out. Maybe a change of Allahabad’s name is on the cards next. Amid all this, Eid is here. My equally morally corrupt, anti-national, libtard Hindu friends have already made their plans to come over, not to meet me but for my mum’s biryani and sewain. Their favourite buff kebabs will be missing from the menu. This is how we all grew up; together, with no real distinction and differences. But now, even animals have a religion in UP: Goats are Muslim, and cows and buffaloes Hindu. And Uttar Pradesh is like that cow. A creature that everyone has milked – from Mayawati to Mulayam to Adityanath – and who will eventually be left to rot. Just that this time, the rot is deep. Old wounds have been scratched open and new ones have been created, which are going to take ages to heal. Maybe some day, we will have a Patanjali balm to help out. Until then, Eid Mubarak. Anonymous The author does not wish to be named as he already has a huge stash of tickets to Islamabad (but no visa). He is also scared. And hankering for some beef or buff. ======================================== 18. INDIA: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER: THE MEDIA MUST QUESTION THOSE IN POWER | Rajdeep Sardesai ======================================== (Hindustan Times, June 22, 2017) When the country’s most powerful politicians won’t take ‘political’ questions, isn’t that indicative of the skewed nature of our democracy? Sadly, rather than defend the media’s right to dissent and speak truth to power, there are many who choose to applaud an opaque, authoritarian leadership. It wasn’t always like this.(Getty Images/iStockphoto) “We don’t need to be told by media or opposition what we need to do for farmers. We would rather listen to farmers and not to carping, negative opposition or ‘know-all media’ that knows little of grassroot realities”: GVL Narasimha Rao, BJP spokesperson during a television debate on July 12. When one of the more affable voices of the ruling party chooses to launch a diatribe against the media when asked a simple question on whether demonetisation is one of the causes for growing farmer unrest, you realise how easily power can accentuate hubris and reduce serious issues to an echo chamber for the ruling class. But why blame Mr Rao, whose nightly task is to defend the government on prime time television. The disdainful attitude towards the media begins right at the top. The prime minister has chosen to virtually bypass the mainstream media, preferring instead the one way communication offered by routine messages through Twitter or a feel-good monthly Mann ki Baat on radio. No press conferences and only the odd pre-scripted interview, prime minister Narendra Modi, who was once an extremely popular and communicative BJP spokesperson himself, has now chosen to make himself mostly inaccessible to media scrutiny. As a result, there hasn’t been, till date, any serious questioning of the prime minister on the single biggest move undertaken by his government. Why, for example, do we still not know how much of the old demonetised currency is back in the system? Or what exactly happened to the government’s ‘war’ on black money or on counterfeit currency? Is it not legitimate to ask for at least a White Paper on demonetisation? Unfortunately, with the narrative being spun in a manner where any questioning of authority is now seen as ‘anti-national’, influential sections of the media are being pushed on the defensive, forced to oscillate between self-censorship or else get fully embedded as cheerleaders of the ‘establishment’. But why single out the prime minister? The Congress president Sonia Gandhi has been in public life for almost two decades but has never shown a willingness to answer uncomfortable questions on contentious issues like political corruption. Last November, I had the rare chance of interviewing Mrs Gandhi. Just ahead of the interview it was made clear that only questions related to Indira Gandhi on the occasion of her centenary celebrations could be asked. “No political questions!” I was told in no uncertain terms. When one of the country’s most powerful politicians won’t take ‘political’ questions, isn’t that indicative of the skewed nature of our democracy? This unwillingness of those in public life to be held accountable has now spread like virus through the political system. In 2015, Mamata Banerjee chose to walk out of an interview because I raised the issue of the Saradha chit fund scam. Mamata at least agreed to an interview; Mayawati hasn’t given one in a decade so we still don¹t have answers to allegations of disproportionate assets. An imperious Jayalalithaa refused to step out of Fortress Poes Garden to meet the press, Naveen Patnaik follows a similar ‘no questions’ policy in Odisha, while in Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan has never hidden his open hostility towards the media. Sadly, rather than defend the media’s right to dissent and speak truth to power, there are many who choose to applaud an opaque, authoritarian leadership. It wasn’t always like this. When Indira Gandhi muzzled the media in the Emergency in the mid-1970s, those who stood up to her were celebrated. In the late 1980s, when Rajiv Gandhi introduced the Defamation Bill, the media rose in one voice to protest. In almost every instance of arbitrary use of state power against the media, the citizenry has been on our side. Not any longer: now, when a politician takes on the media, there is a sizeable audience which cheers from the sidelines, perhaps reflective of ideological cleavages in society. Maybe we in the media also need to introspect as to why we have allowed this to happen to us. When sensation replaces sense on television news, when political alignments determine news priorities, when ownership patterns are non-transparent, then we make it that much easier for the netas and their hired armies to chastise us as ‘presstitutes’. Actually, we aren’t a ‘know-all’ media as Mr Rao suggests; maybe we are just a media which has lost its moral spine to fight back. Post-script: Earlier this month, the BBC, in the spirit of true democracy, had both the prime ministerial candidates in Britain face the general public with no choreographed questions. How many of our political leaders are willing to subject themselves to a similar no-holds-barred interrogation? Rajdeep Sardesai is senior journalist and author ======================================== 19. THE FORTUNE TELLER | Pallavi Aiyar ======================================== (The Indian Quarterly - Jan-Mar 2017 issue) JH Somerville Pallavi Aiyar Weighing machines at Indian Railways Much before iPhones and YouTube, a gaudy machine on our railway platforms provided entertainment and information. It’s all but gone, but a fortuitous meeting makes Pallavi Aiyar’s childhood spring to life Wighing machine Nostalgia transforms ordinary objects into talismans. The constituents of the material life of one’s childhood can, just by the feel of their names rolling in the mouth, evoke pathos: a longing for the past, its innocent excitements and vast promise. I grew up in the pre-liberalisation Delhi of the 1980s. Childhood in those days meant Ambassador cars with seats so high that little legs couldn’t touch the floor. It recalls a white heat, relieved only by chilled banta, spicy lemonade in glass bottles, stoppered with a marble. There were Harrison talas with which to lock cupboards, 150-gram Nirma detergent tikiyas to wash clothes and Hawkins pressure cookers for the kitchen. There was also the railway-station weighing machine. This was a time when to travel meant taking a train (airplanes were objects of almost unbearable, and unattainable, luxury). But train stations with their red-coated coolies weaving through the throngs, piles of suitcases balanced on their turbans, the balletic steam of spicy chai wafting in the air, the aural assault of train announcements and people yelling to each other to be careful and eat well and not to forget to write, were an intrinsic part of the weft of life. But for me the greatest thrill was receiving a one rupee (or was it 50 paise?) coin from my parents to slot into one of the ubiquitous weighing machines that dotted train stations. Once the coin was in, the multicoloured pinwheels located behind the glass casing along the semi-circular top of these machines began spinning like manic ballerinas accompanied by all manner of whirring and pinging. Rows of green, red and blue lights flashed. And then out came a rectangular ticket-sized piece of cardboard with not only one’s weight printed on it, but also a fortune. The railway weight ticket was the Indian version of the Chinese fortune cookie. The fortunes were almost always optimistic, their language dignified. I often didn’t understand the words and only rarely understood the import. But at a time when I owned very few things, the fortune-weight tickets were mine. I hoarded these for years in the drawer of my desk. “EAT well and thrive,” one said. A tad ironic given that this was a weighing machine. “JOVIAL in disposition and cordial in manner, your passions are healthy, spontaneous and without inhibitions,” read another. The machine knew me well. “SUDDEN travel and change of place may be imminent. Be prepared,” warned a third. Well, this was a railway station. The whole process of acquiring a ticket from these machines evoked a pleasure that combined elements of the fun fair, divination and consumerism. It was heady. The years rolled on. Fast-forward a few decades and I hop on planes almost as frequently as I change socks (snarky folks, I mean a lot), but only rarely take trains. When I do, I pass the time like everybody else by staring at my iPhone, checking email and looking at cat videos on YouTube. I haven’t seen a one rupee coin in about 15 years. My Fitbit takes care of any weight-related queries I might have. The railway-station weighing machines of my childhood were thus in the process of quietly disappearing from my memory, until a chance meeting with an Australian neighbour in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta. In the style of the weighing machine fortunes: TRUTH is stranger than fiction. I’d been living in a leafy, residential neighbourhood of south Jakarta for about three years when I received a note, slipped under the door, inviting me to a housewarming party at new neighbours’. I duly rang the bell of the immaculate bungalow that stood diagonally opposite our more humble home that evening and was let in by Raj, an Indian Malaysian whom I learnt had lived in Jakarta for close to a decade. His wife was a statuesque Australian, Michelle Somerville, who tended to haunt the pages of magazines like Indonesia Tatler. Pallavi Aiyar2 Glory Days: Michelle, in Jakarta, with a photograph of Nehru’s visit to Eastern Scales || Photograph: Pallavi Aiyar I noticed an unusual preponderance of Indians at the party, which I ascribed to Raj’s ethnicity. And it was only after we gradually became friends that I realised the one with the deeper connection to India was in fact the very blonde Michelle. My Australian neighbour had grown up in Calcutta, the city that was home to her family’s manufacturing company, Eastern Scales Pvt Ltd—makers of my beloved railway-platform weighing machines. The company was established in 1939 by JH Somerville, Michelle’s paternal grandfather, an Australian of Scottish descent, who immigrated to India drawn by the lure of economic opportunity in the aftermath of the Great Depression. He’d been stationed in India during World War I, which was when he first became attracted to the idea of seeking his fortune in what was then a British colony. Somerville started out life in Calcutta importing miscellaneous goods, amongst them ticketing and slot machines, delicatessen scales and railway weighbridges. At one point machines owned and operated by Somerville printed virtually all the tickets to India’s major tourist attractions, including the Taj Mahal and Victoria Memorial, as well as bus tickets around the country. But it took a few decades for the signature weighing machines of my childhood to make their debut. Initially Somerville simply imported huge, wrought-iron weighing scales from West Germany. These were drab and lacking the carnivalesque accoutrement of later models. But, after Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi restricted the trading activities of Indian companies in the 1970s, Eastern Scales was forced to adapt by manufacturing its own scales. With an infusion of the tickets, coin slots, flashing lights and weight displays that had characterised the company’s early imports, the railway-platform weighing machines I remembered were born. * Michelle had almost no memory of her grandfather, who had died soon after she was born. But we spent a few hours looking through old family pictures at her home one morning, over generous slices of plum cake and a decadent glass of champagne. There was a whiff of colonial grandeur in my neighbour’s lifestyle, which sense only intensified as I flipped through the pictures. I was particularly captivated by a shot of Grandpa Somerville and his wife, Grandma Dunhill (a relative of the eponymous cigarette dynasty), probably aged about 30. They are a dashing couple. She is wearing pearls and a flapper dress, her large, kohl-rimmed eyes gazing into the distance. Somerville is decked out in bow tie and pinstriped shirt, his hair groomed to perfection. “He loved machines. He understood them,” said Michelle of her grandfather. In the photographs he looks more like an aristocratic fashion model than the adventuring tinkerer he must have been. Somerville went on to have three boys: Jack, who was the eldest, Bill and Jim. It was Michelle’s father, Jack, who eventually took over the reins of Eastern Scales from 1980, until his passing in 2004. somerwell Glamour couple: JH Somerville and his wife || Image courtesy: Michelle Somerville While researching this story I found a blog on a shipping website in which a British sailor posted his memories of meeting with a “tall laconic Australian,” Jack Somerville, in Calcutta in the 1970s. “Jack was quite high-up in the social pecking-order of Calcutta and introduced me to people who wouldn’t, normally, even glance at me! One guy, who was a great friend of Jack’s, was a very wealthy Indian called ‘Daddy’ Mazda and I remember going to a party in his flat and was absolutely floored by the sheer luxury and opulence of the place. It had massive tiger-skins on the floors in the main sitting-room, which was absolutely huge, and the whole place just reeked of wealth and there was me!….Jack was rather partial to Scotch whisky and would come aboard whichever ship I was on and sink copious amounts of it and then get wafted home, feeling no pain, in his Ambassador by his driver.” There was very little “India” in the pictures Michelle showed me. The backgrounds were mostly parties in stylish living rooms that could have been anywhere in the world. The exception was one framed black-and-white portrait of Prime Minister Nehru visiting the shop floor of Eastern Scales. Michelle lived in Calcutta until she was seven years old, after which she studied in Hong Kong and Australia. Her memories of her time in India are hazy. She talked about her parents playing bridge at the Tollygunge Club. And being forced to take horse-riding lessons even though horses terrified her. Her afternoons were spent with her ayah whose job it was to bathe and feed her. It was only after little Michelle was made “presentable” that she was taken to see her mother in the evenings. Pallavi Aiyar1 Calcutta Days: Michelle Somerville and her father, Jack || Image courtesy: Michelle Somerville Michelle’s mother, Roberta Somerville, is now 82 years old and until a few months ago lived in Calcutta in the family bungalow. But Eastern Scales itself has fallen into near-bankruptcy. It’s been a somewhat precipitous decline. For example, as recently as 2001, the weighing machines made Rs 26 lakh in the city of Mumbai alone, but by 2012 this figure had fallen to Rs 1.7 lakh. There are multiple reasons for this fall. The regularity and frequency of trains have improved in many cities, reducing downtime on platforms. More and more commuters now own scales at home. And the entertainment value of weighing machines is not much of a match for smartphones and iPads. One critical blow to the weighing machines was a new commercial circular regarding the scales that was issued by the Ministry of Railways in 2010. Under these the share of revenue received by the railways was increased from 35 to 60 per cent and every railway division had to issue a tender for new weighing machine contracts. Almost no one bothered to do so and Eastern Scales ended up with only two contracts. The company is also mired in damaging litigation that has followed from a family dispute. Michelle told me that she couldn’t imagine returning to India to try and revive the business. She finds India “stimulating to an extreme” and too much of a cultural shock. She was sad, nonetheless, that Eastern Scales’ days are probably numbered. “It’s like closing the door on an era,” she said with a wistful shrug. A few days later she WhatsApped me pictures of some of the fortunes that her grandfather had composed himself. I found myself tearing up. “YOU will emerge triumphant from your most serious reverses. A happy and comfortable old age.” “IF you are a woman you have a rare unapproachable delicacy, poise and a charming manner.” I felt an ache, I suppose, that just as meeting Michelle had jogged my memory about those magical moments on railway platforms when I was little and the future vast, I simultaneously became aware of their imminent demise. There is pain in the impermanence of objects for it only points to our own ephemerality. Eventually, it was one of Michelle’s grandfather’s fortunes that made me laugh: “YOU have a great reverence for the past but an exaggerated idea of its virtues.” This article was published in the Jan-Mar 2017 issue of The Indian Quarterly. Subscribe here. Elsewhere in the issue, Jai Arjun Singh writes about caring and communicating with an ill mother he is exceptionally close to, Jerry Pinto ponders over familial bonds and what lies at the heart of the family. Sydney-based writer John Zubrzycki tells the wondrous story of Ramo Samee, the most famous Indian magician of the 19th century. Anita Roy visits the Lancelot Ribeiro retrospective in London and find how the painter found his distinct voice. Karan Kapoor talks about his inspiration, his parents, Shashi and Jennifer Kapoor. Mandakini Dubey reflects on the nature of family ties. About the author Award-winning journalist Pallavi Aiyar has spent over a decade reporting from China, Europe and Indonesia. A Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum, she is the author of Smoke and Mirrors, Chinese Whiskers and Punjabi Parmesan. ======================================== Myanmar refuses visas to UN team investigating abuse of Rohingya Muslims | Reuters ======================================== (The Guardian - 30 June 2017) Government led by Aung San Suu Kyi says it will deny entry to mission after UN report said treatment of minority group could amount to ethnic cleansing Aung San Suu Kyi said the investigation ‘would have created greater hostility between the different communities’. Photograph: Hein Htet/EPA Myanmar will refuse entry to members of a United Nations investigation focusing on allegations of killings, rape and torture by security forces against Rohingya Muslims, an official has said. The government, led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, had already said it would not cooperate with a mission set up after a human rights council resolution was adopted in March. “If they are going to send someone with regards to the fact-finding mission, then there’s no reason for us to let them come,” said Kyaw Zeya, permanent secretary at the ministry of foreign affairs in the capital, Naypyidaw, on Friday. “Our missions worldwide are advised accordingly,” he said, explaining that visas to enter Myanmar would not be issued to the mission’s appointees or staff. Aung San Suu Kyi, who came to power last year amid a transition from military rule, leads Myanmar through the specially created position of “state counsellor”, but is also minister of foreign affairs. Although she does not oversee the military, Aung San Suu Kyi has been criticised for failing to stand up for the more than 1 million stateless Rohingya Muslims in the western state of Rakhine. She said during a trip to Sweden this month the UN mission “would have created greater hostility between the different communities”. The majority in Rakhine are ethnic Rakhine Buddhists who, like many in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, see the Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Some 75,000 Rohingya fled northwestern Rakhine state to Bangladesh late last year after the Myanmar army carried out a security operation in response to attacks by Rohingya insurgents that killed nine border police. A UN report in February, based on interviews with some of the Rohingya refugees, said the response involved mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya, and “very likely” amounted to crimes against humanity and possibly ethnic cleansing. Myanmar, along with neighbours China and India, dissociated itself from the March resolution brought by the European Union, which called for a mission to look into the allegations in Rakhine as well as reports of abuses in ethnic conflicts in the north of the country. Indira Jaising, an advocate from the supreme court of India, was appointed to lead the mission in May. The other two members are Harvard-trained Sri Lankan lawyer Radhika Coomaraswamy and Australian consultant Christopher Dominic. Myanmar insists that a domestic investigation – headed by former lieutenant general and vice-president Myint Swe – is sufficient to look into the allegations in Rakhine. “Why do they try to use unwarranted pressure when the domestic mechanisms have not been exhausted?” said Kyaw Zeya. “It will not contribute to our efforts to solve the issues in a holistic manner.” An advisory panel headed by former UN chief Kofi Annan is set to propose solutions for the broader issues in Rakhine but has not been asked to investigate human rights abuses. ======================================== 20. UK: SOUTHALL BLACK SISTERS INTERVENTION IN COURT OF APPEAL CASE ON GENDER SEGREGATION ======================================== (Southall Black Sisters) SBS is intervening on a legal case in the Court of Appeal on 11th – 12th July against gender segregation and has organised a protest outside the court. Gender segregation in education School X – a co-educational, Muslim voluntary aided school in the UK – segregates its pupils based on their gender. From the age of 9 to 16, Muslim boys and girls are segregated for everything – during lessons and all breaks, activities and school trips. On 13 and 14 June 2016, the school was inspected by the regulatory body, Ofsted, which raised concerns about a number of leadership failings including those involving gender segregation, the absence of effective safeguarding procedures, and an unchallenged culture of gender stereotyping and homophobia. Offensive books promoting rape, violence against women and misogyny were discovered in the school library. Some girls also complained anonymously that gender segregation did not prepare them for social interaction and integration into the wider society. As a result of what it found during the inspection, Ofsted judged the school to be inadequate and placed it in special measures. ‘Separate but equal’ The school took legal action to stop Ofsted from publishing its report. They argued that, amongst other things, the report was biased and that gender segregation does not amount to sex discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. On 8 November 2016, following a High Court hearing, the presiding judge, Mr Justice Jay, found that there was no sex discrimination because of his reading of the law and the lack of evidence before him. He found that gender segregation did not amount to sex discrimination since both boys and girls were ‘separated equally’. He noted that although women hold minority power in society generally, there was no evidence before him that girls suffered specifically as a result of the segregation in this school. Mr Justice Jay noted the differences between segregation on the grounds of race in the USA and South Africa in previous decades and gender segregation in the UK today, concluding that he had not heard evidence that gender segregation made girls feel disadvantaged or inferior. Ofsted appealed against the ruling of the High Court which will be heard at the Court of Appeal on 11 and 12 July 2017. The case for intervention Southall Black Sisters and Inspire are intervening in the case because of its great public importance – especially for minority women and girls. Although, gender segregation and its implications are not specific to School X, but apply equally to a number of other faith schools, the point of our intervention is two-fold: First, to show how the growing practice of gender segregation in education is not a benign development: Like racial segregation in the USA and South Africa, gender segregation within BME communities in the UK, has a social, and political history that can be traced back to the Rushdie Affair when religious fundamentalists sensed an opportunity to seize education as a battleground and a site on which to expand their influence. Since then, we have seen emboldened fundamentalists in South Asian communities attempting to impose gender segregation in schools and universities. Mr Justice Jay did not look into the wider social and political context in which gender segregation is practiced in minority communities. Had he done so, he would have seen its broad-ranging and long-lasting effect on all areas of women’s lives: that gender segregation is a political choice and that the struggle against it mirrors the struggle against racial segregation. Second, we want to ensure that gender equality is placed at the heart of Ofsted inspections in all schools, irrespective of their status and composition. We recognise that gender segregation can sometimes be educationally beneficial. But in the hands of ultra-conservatives and fundamentalists, it has an entirely different intent and consequence which is to mount a wholesale assault on women’s rights: socially, culturally and politically. A violation of human rights UN human rights experts have noted that ‘fundamentalists everywhere target education in different ways: In some places, they kill teachers or carry out acid attacks on students. Elsewhere they attempt to impose gender segregation in schools or to exclude women and girls altogether. In other places, they seek to change the content of education, removing sex education from the curriculum or censoring scientific theories with which they do not agree’ School X’s approach is consistent with Muslim fundamentalist ideologies that strive to create a fundamentalist vision of education in the UK: one that discourages mixed-gender activities as ‘Un-Islamic’ and ultimately legitimises patriarchal power structures. Their aim is to reinforce the different spaces – private and public – that men and women must occupy, and their respective stereotyped roles, which accord them differential and unequal status. This approach constitutes direct discrimination under the UK’s Equality Act 2010. It also violates International human rights laws, standards and principles on equality and non-discrimination such as CEDAW and Goal 5 of the Sustainable Development Goals, to which the UK has signed up. Women’s rights must take priority over intolerant beliefs that are used to justify sex discrimination. Gender segregation is gender apartheid This is a significant and potentially precedent-setting case about sex discrimination and equality. Ultra-conservative and fundamentalist gender norms are seeping into the everyday life of minority communities. Education has become a gendered ideological terrain upon which the potential of women and girls together with their hopes, aspirations and dreams are extinguished. Gender segregation in school X is part of a wider political project that is ideologically linked to the creation of a regime of ‘gendered modesty’: one that promotes an infantilised and dehumanized notion of womanhood and, ultimately, amounts to sexual apartheid. What you can do We are mobilising for the Court of Appeal hearing on 11 and 12 July 2017 from 9.30am onwards. We urge you to join us by: protesting outside the court on both days – Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London, WC2A 2LL; packing out the public gallery in the court so that the judiciary is under no illusion as to what is at stake. publicising our campaign widely and encouraging others to join us. Please also spread the word through social media and on Twitter using the hashtag #SeparateIsNotEqual We ask for your solidarity in what is becoming a key battle between feminists and fundamentalists. ‘Every step forward in the fight for women’s rights is a piece of the struggle against fundamentalism’. For further information contact: Pragna Patel, Southall Black Sisters pra...@southallblacksisters.co.uk 020 8571 9595 @SBSisters Maryam Namazie, One Law for All maryamnama...@gmail.com 077 1916 6731 @MaryamNamazie BM Box 2387, London WC1N 3XX, UK Sara Khan, Inspire sara.k...@wewillinspire.com @wewillinspire ======================================== 21. SOCIALISM’S FUTURE MAY BE ITS PAST by Bhaskar Sunkara ======================================== (The New York Times - June 26, 2017) One hundred years after Lenin’s sealed train arrived at Finland Station and set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags, the idea that we should return to this history for inspiration might sound absurd. But there was good reason that the Bolsheviks once called themselves “social democrats.” They were part of a broad movement of growing parties that aimed to fight for greater political democracy and, using the wealth and the new working class created by capitalism, extend democratic rights into the social and economic spheres, which no capitalist would permit. The early Communist movement never rejected this broad premise. It was born out of a sense of betrayal by the more moderate left-wing parties of the Second International, the alliance of socialist and labor parties from 20 countries that formed in Paris in 1889. Across Europe, party after party did the unthinkable, abandoned their pledges to working-class solidarity for all nations, and backed their respective governments in World War I. Those that remained loyal to the old ideas called themselves Communists to distance themselves from the socialists who had abetted a slaughter that claimed 16 million lives. (Amid the carnage, the Second International itself fell apart in 1916.)Of course, the Communists’ noble gambit to stop the war and blaze a humane path to modernity in backward Russia ended up seemingly affirming the Burkean notion that any attempt to upturn an unjust order would end up only creating another.Most socialists have been chastened by the lessons of 20th-century Communism. Today, many who would have cheered on the October Revolution have less confidence about the prospects for radically transforming the world in a single generation. They put an emphasis instead on political pluralism, dissent and diversity.Still, the specter of socialism evokes fear of a new totalitarianism. A recent Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation report worries that young people are likely to view socialism favorably and that a “Bernie Sanders bounce” may be contributing to a millennial turn against capitalism. Last year, the president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, Thomas J. Donohue, even found it necessary to remind readers that “Socialism Is a Dangerous Path for America.” The right still denounces socialism as an economic system that will lead to misery and privation, but with less emphasis on the political authoritarianism that often went hand in hand with socialism in power. This may be because elites today do not have democratic rights at the forefront of their minds — perhaps because they know that the societies they run are hard to justify on those terms.Capitalism is an economic system: a way of organizing production for the market through private ownership and the profit motive. To the extent that it has permitted democracy, it has been with extreme reluctance. That’s why early workers’ movements like Britain’s Chartists in the early 19th century organized, first and foremost, for democratic rights. Capitalist and socialist leaders alike believed that the struggle for universal suffrage would encourage workers to use their votes in the political sphere to demand an economic order that put them in control.It didn’t quite work out that way. Across the West, workers came to accept a sort of class compromise. Private enterprise would be tamed, not overcome, and a greater share of a growing pie would go to providing universal benefits through generous welfare states. Political rights would be enshrined, too, as capitalism evolved and adapted such that a democratic civil society and an authoritarian economic system made an unlikely, but seemingly successful, pairing.In 2017, that arrangement is long dead. With working-class movements dormant, capital has run amok, charting a destructive course without even the promise of sustained growth. The anger that led to the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the Brexit vote in Britain is palpable. People feel as if they’re on a runaway train to an unknown destination and, for good reason, want back to familiar miseries.Amid this turmoil, some fear a return to Finland Station via the avuncular shrugs of avowedly socialist leaders like Mr. Sanders and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France. But the threat to democracy today is coming from the right, not the left. Politics seems to present two ways forward, both decidedly non-Stalinist forms of authoritarian collectivism.“Singapore Station” is the unacknowledged destination of the neoliberal center’s train. It’s a place where people in all their creeds and colors are respected — so long as they know their place. After all, people are crass and irrational, incapable of governing. Leave running Singapore Station to the experts.This is a workable vision for elites who look at the rise of an erratic right-wing populism with justified fear. Many of them argue the need for austerity measures to maintain a fragile global economy, and worry that voters won’t take their short-term pain to spare themselves long-term dysfunction. The same goes for the looming threat of climate change: The science is undisputed among scientists, but is still up for debate in the public sphere.The Singapore model is not the worst of all possible end points. It’s one where experts are allowed to be experts, capitalists are allowed to accumulate, and ordinary workers are allowed a semblance of stability. But it leaves no room for the train’s passengers to yell “Stop!” and pick a destination of their own choosing.“Budapest Station,” named after the powerful right-wing parties that dominate Hungary today, is the final stop for the populist right. Budapest allows us to at least feel like we’re back in charge. We get there by decoupling some of the cars hurtling us forward and slowly reversing. We’re all in this together, unless you’re an outsider who doesn’t have a ticket, and then tough luck.The “Trump train” is headed this way. President Trump can’t offer tangible gains for ordinary people by challenging elites, but he can offer a surface-level valorization of “the worker” and stoke anger at the alleged causes of national decline — migrants, bad trade deals, cosmopolitan globalists. The press, academia and any other noncompliant parts of civil society are under attack. Meanwhile, other than having to adjust to more protectionism and restrictive immigration policies, it’s business as usual for most corporations.But there is a third alternative: back to “Finland Station,” with all the lessons of the past. This time, people get to vote. Well, debate and deliberate and then vote — and have faith that people can organize together to chart new destinations for humanity.Stripped down to its essence, and returned to its roots, socialism is an ideology of radical democracy. In an era when liberties are under attack, it seeks to empower civil society to allow participation in the decisions that affect our lives. A huge state bureaucracy, of course, can be just as alienating and undemocratic as corporate boardrooms, so we need to think hard about the new forms that social ownership could take.Some broad outlines should already be clear: Worker-owned cooperatives, still competing in a regulated market; government services coordinated with the aid of citizen planning; and the provision of the basics necessary to live a good life (education, housing and health care) guaranteed as social rights. In other words, a world where people have the freedom to reach their potentials, whatever the circumstances of their birth.We can get to this Finland Station only with the support of a majority; that’s one reason that socialists are such energetic advocates of democracy and pluralism. But we can’t ignore socialism’s loss of innocence over the past century. We may reject the version of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as crazed demons and choose to see them as well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis, but we must work out how to avoid their failures.That project entails a return to social democracy. Not the social democracy of François Hollande, but that of the early days of the Second International. This social democracy would involve a commitment to a free civil society, especially for oppositional voices; the need for institutional checks and balances on power; and a vision of a transition to socialism that does not require a “year zero” break with the present.Our 21st-century Finland Station won’t be a paradise. You might feel heartbreak and misery there. But it will be a place that allows so many now crushed by inequity to participate in the creation of a new world. Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) is the editor of Jacobin magazine and a vice chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America.This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution. ======================================== 22. Deshmukh on Nerlekar, 'Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture' ======================================== Anjali Nerlekar. Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture. FlashPoints Series. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. xix + 292 pp. $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8101-3274-0; $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8101-3273-3. Reviewed by Madhuri Deshmukh (Oakton Community College) Published on H-Asia (July, 2017) Commissioned by Sumit Guha Modern Literature from Maharashtra Anjali Nerlekar’s Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture focuses on a fascinating and pivotal period, place, and poetics that, if studied carefully, can overturn a good lot of common literary assumptions about language, modernity, nationality, and cosmopolitanism in South Asian literary criticism today. First off, Bombay Modern is worthy of notice for the simple fact that it is one of so few studies to focus on South Asian poetry rather than fiction or history or sociology. Indeed, it would seem absurd to think of English or American or European modernisms without the poets, and yet, when it comes to South Asia, the poets have been largely overlooked in the efforts to articulate the “alternative modernisms” of the subcontinent. Nerlekar’s book makes a convincing case that the poem is “the unit of the modern rhythm of post-independence Bombay” (p. 213). The book introduces us to a periodization that will strike those trained in English-language literary studies as new: Sathottari, referring to literature written between 1955 and 1980 and published in little magazines, often edited by poets themselves, and by the small publisher movement that emerged in Bombay as a defiant challenge to the literary establishment and the polite, middle-class readers who were its patrons. Indeed in introducing readers to this period, Bombay Modern enacts the very thing it is trying to locate, the bilingual nexus of writing in English and Marathi that defines the modernity of poets caught in the tension between the global and the local, the national and regional. The writing of this period was, in many ways, a response to two significant events: the carving out of the monolingual state of Maharashtra, with polyglot Bombay city as its bleeding heart, and, in 1956, the conversion of millions of Dalits to Buddhism under the leadership of Babasaheb Ambedkar. Nerlekar shows that the post-independence disillusionment incarnated in the Angry-Man of the 1970s films actually has its roots in the transgressive, highly physical, sometimes scatological, demotic poetry of the Sathottari period. Nerlekar divides the book into two parts: the first part is a detailed overview of the little magazine and small publisher movements that emerged in Bombay between 1955 and 1980, and the second and more compelling part, a study of the work of Arun Kolatkar, arguably the most important of the poets to emerge out of this rich period. The second half includes a first-ever study in English of Kolatkar’s astonishing Marathi magnum opus, Bhijaki Vahi (2003) (The Drowned Manuscript), a book about and in the voices of women, some real and some mythical, who have faced the oppression and violence of patriarchy. The title itself is drawn from the story of the drowned notebook of Marathi bhakti poet Tukaram, who was compelled to throw his poetic compositions into the river by Brahmins threatened by his poetic and religious stature. It is also, as Nerlekar shows through analysis of the poems and graphic art, an image of a book drenched by the tears of the women in it: Cassandra, Helen, Rabia, Kim (the young girl fleeing napalm in the Vietnam War), Dora Marr (Pablo Picasso’s girlfriend), Susan Sontag, and Maimun (a Muslim girl from Haryana, India, who was gang-raped and killed for marrying outside her caste)—just to name a few. One poem analyzed by Nerlekar is about Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of Osip Mandelstam, in which the speaker says: “My eyes are simply / Quoting these tears / Without your permission / Nadezhda // I am not going to wipe them off // These quotation marks / standing in my two eyes / let them stay hanging there / forever” (p. 157). Kolatkar’s “quotation marks” here refer not only to a self-consciousness about his cultural appropriation of Nadezhda’s suffering but also to her own act of writing out her husband’s banned poetry from memory after he had been exiled by Joseph Stalin. Nerlekar’s translations and careful analysis of these poems gives English readers a glimpse into the importance of Kolatkar’s prodigious Marathi poetry. Notable also is Nerlekar’s comparative analysis of Kolatkar’s most well-known book of poems about an important religious and pilgrimage site, Jejuri (1977), written first in English and then translated into Marathi, though the term “translation” does not do justice to the varied literary acts involved in the endeavor as Nerlekar shows with her fascinating and original side-by-side analysis of the companion English and Marathi poems. Kolatkar was roundly criticized for writing Jejuri in English, not only by Nativists, like the novelist Bhalchandra Nemade, but also by many others who were taken aback by the way the use of English defamiliarized and distanced such a well-known local place. The poet Dilip Chitre rather brilliantly writes about Jejuri that “even Kolatkar could not have conceived it in Marathi. Its ironic objectivity is a property of Kolatkar’s poetic ideolect, and he is using his other language—as the language of the other in a spiritual sense as well” (p. 196). Nerlekar shows that this sort of grappling with the dislocations of modernity, linguistic and religious, can only be seen and studied through a multilingual critical approach. In spending so much time on the little magazine and small publisher movements in the first half of the book, Nerlekar seems to have one particular element above all others in mind, the importance of the materialist-textual context and contours of the poetics that governed this period. Thus, the ephemerality of the little magazines, covered in detail in the first half, itself becomes a kind of aesthetics that helps us better understand the fluidity and editorial history of Kolatkar’s Bhijaki Vahi, while Kolatkar’s involvement in the technical decisions of layout and graphic arts as an editor of a small press and an award-winning graphic artist in his own right helps us to see Kolatkar’s poetry as “a materially oriented act of imagination where ‘meaning’ is most fully constituted not as a conception but as an embodiment” (p. 179). Indeed, Nerlekar’s analysis of layout, the effect of blank spaces, the retro and verso placement of poems, and the graphic elements of his books, all published by small publishers, sheds new light on his poetry and makes a convincing case for their meaning-making centrality. There is, however, less emphasis on interpretation of the content of the poems here, on those elements we might group under the word “meaning.” Perhaps this is because the very materialist aesthetics Bombay Modern draws out cautions against any such forays as mere speculation. As the poets strove to marry word and thing, so Nerlekar stays grounded in the material-textual presence of the poems and their immediate literary context, never straying much further to interrogate the larger cultural and historical concerns of the poets themselves. For example, more detailed analysis of the crossovers, contrasts, and concerns of Sathottari poetry and the Dalit Renaissance of the 1970s might have helped readers new to the literature better understand their historical place and significance. In general, the hefty questions of caste, gender, class, and ideology addressed by the poets of the Sathottari period take a backseat to the literary-textual focus of Bombay Modern. To some this may seem a weakness of the book, and indeed there are places in the book where one wishes for more critical engagement, but given the relative paucity of focus on literary concerns in South Asian scholarship, dominated as it is by the social sciences, Bombay Modern still remains refreshingly distinct. Nerlekar’s comparative methodology draws in poets from all over the world, not only Allen Ginsberg and the Beats who actually knew and promoted the Sathottari poets, but Adrienne Rich, William Wordsworth, Margaret Atwood, other Marathi writers, A. K. Ramanujan, and many others, thus clearly hewing out a unique multilingual literary space for analysis. Nerlekar’s notable contribution to literary studies is her unique focus on bilingual South Asian poetry as a challenge to the facile pronouncements of an English-dominated global cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and to the parochial Nativism of monolingual writers who also, in the opposite way, fail to account for the polyglot realities of South Asian lives on the other hand. The bilingual poets of the Sathottari period shed light on the intricate, multilingual, and local workings of modernity in South Asia, the alienations and deracinations effected by it, and the changes wrought by it. Kolatkar and other poets of the period, like Chitre, did not see this alienation as particular to the modern, but, as their engagements with the corpus of bhakti poetry shows, in continuity with a particular South Asian past and also the global present. It is this particular moment in time, neither past nor present but both at once, and aesthetic space, neither global nor local, national nor regional, but all of these at once that Nerlekar attempts to bring into focus for us. As Kolatkar puts it in his unfinished poem “Making Love to a Poem”: “Some of the finest poetry in India, or indeed in the world, has come from a sense of alienation.... It is the central experience of a lot of bhakti poetry for instance / it’s at the bottom of a lot of Dalit poems / it has given us poems like ‘Cold Mountain’ / folk poetry where women sing their lot” (p. 183). The best thing that can be said about any book of literary criticism may be said of Nerlekar’s book: it makes readers want to go and read the poets for themselves again. Hopefully, Bombay Modern will bring much deserved scholarly attention to the words and legacy of Kolatkar, to the Sathottari period, and to the momentous output of South Asia’s bilingual poets so far so unjustly neglected in studies of South Asia. _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ South Asia Citizens Wire Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on matters of peace and democratisation in South Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/ ##### #### _\_ ________ ##=-[.].]| \ \ #( _\ | |------| # __| | |||||||| \ _/ | |||||||| .--'--'-. | | ____ | / __ `|__|[o__o]| _(____nm_______ /____\____ DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers. ===================================== _______________________________________________ SACW mailing list SACW@insaf.net http://insaf.net/mailman/listinfo/sacw_insaf.net
