Rohith Vemula gives them the perfect point of departure

 
Delhi is a city that has naturalised caste: a gardener believes he is born to be a gardener; a maid believes she was born to be a maid. Its so called efficiency has something to do with this aspect. Even among academics and students, the understanding and discussions of caste stay at their abstract best. Most of them are well meaning to be concerned about the “upliftment of Dalits” but in the busy-ness of their own professional lives, they really couldn’t do much. The city kept running on the shoulders of the Dalits. Caste was a matter to be encountered only in reservation debates and that was a sort polemics only the political class could go through with.
 
But Rohith Vemula’s one-note altered the caste debates in the country, from asking, “How can discrimination against Dalits be stopped?” or, “How can Dalits be uplifted” to, “Why is our society so inhumanly casteist?” or, “When will upper castes improve?”, making every one ask the question, “Why are we like this?”. The fact that his suicide note did not have a single word about caste discrimination, it only spoke about the need to travel from “shadows to stars” and the impossibility of it, struck a code with Delhi’s students. Now they knew it was not about Dalits alone; it was more about them. Or the impossibility of being themselves ethically in this system. Now the onus was on the academic community: to make sure that Rohith is the absolute last to be orphaned to death.
 
The huge march in solidarity with JNU (against the trending #ShutdownJNU) on February 18 had many posters of Rohith Vemula and slogans such as, “JNU to bahana hai, Rohith ka mudda dabana hai” (JNU is an excuse to distract from Rohith’s issue) prominently demonstrated such a change. The straight-line from FTII through HCU and OccupyUGC to JNU that students kept drawing was quite in place: the central government doesn’t seem to understand the ways in which students work or think.
 
The Narendra Modi government might be good at attacking known political or social formations but students are an evolving social category and it clearly doesn’t have the tools. If FTII was a clear case of trying to show “we can, so we will”, OccupyUGC was an unnecessary provocation and HCU was MHRD’s flexing its muscles gone terribly awry and JNU its hurried conclusions riding on hyper sensationalist jingoism. The mass media debates on national/anti-national, continued on social media, made students realise their common sense and regular discussions were stuff that could be termed “anti-national” and they found themselves in a strange situation where they had to explain their very existence to friends and family in the “tax payer entitlement” narrative. Students who were not part of any existing political formation also felt alienated and they kept telling themselves and others: students have to fight as students. In fact, they found a student issue with a cosmic objective to fight for.
 
The “Chalo Dilli” march on April 23rd and its clarion call “Delhi for Rohith Vemula” became exciting not just because more than 5,000 people walked a kilometre together from Ambedkar Bhawan to Jantar Mantar, or because there was a representation from all parties other than the BJP for the rally, but because the students had found a new icon in Rohith Vemula. It was difficult to dispute him or reject him if you didn’t have party obligations or social interests.

The speciality of this icon was in its social content: caste was becoming an issue of political debate in student lives. Some Delhi students whose encounter with caste as a political issue was rather new also kept shouting “Jai Bheem” in an event primarily organised by Dalit organisations. 
 
One of the limitations of the Indian student movements has been their being floated and managed by students who socially belong to the ruling elite of the country. This is quite different from the Western situation where student movements have been political, academic and cultural manifestations of social changes. The chemical change of thinking in the 1960s was a result of socio-economic changes that ushered in women, African Americans, refugees, third world students and homosexuals into academe in huge numbers.
 
In India, such a turn hasn’t happened. Nationalism and universal class wars were the concerns of student politics in earlier decades. But now the organising principle of Indian society is their problem as students. It might be the caste turn for student discourses. 
 
Surely, unlike in the University of Hyderabad, where the number of Dalit students is huge and the discourse of caste is very strong, Delhi still doesn’t have such a situation. But it must now emerge to address the huge blind spot they have now realised. And Rohith Vemula gives them the perfect point of departure. 
 

The post Rohith Vemula March: The Caste Turn for Student Delhites? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image Courtesy: News18

1979… exactly 40 years ago. That was when a Pakistani military dictator (allegedly) on American payroll, with the help of majoritarian Islamist groups – America had cold war to win, Islamists had to change the character of Pakistan for their theocratic state and scotch-sipping military generals had to make millions in dollars -, took Pakistan down that nightmarish world of war economy by hosting terrorists, first as America’s proxies and then as their own proxies… that was their route to being a failed state.

And now a whole new generation has grown up in that country, who knows how much of energy and time they have lost, how much blood, fear and suspicion have been spreading and how much of life and their country have been stolen away from them (ten times more than what India lost in these decades). And these people seem to control the common sense of the country now. Thanks to social media, they can express themselves, let the world know they exist and they matter… 

Dr. N. P. Ashley is Assistant Professor of English at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. His areas of interest in research are youth culture, new historicism and performance studies.

The post Opinion: Pakistan paves the way for Peace in South Asia appeared first on SabrangIndia.

On this day, October 14, last year, NP Ashley, a Muslim hosted a 'Pork Dinner' to combat growing religious extremism

Some months ago, Sugathakumari, a Malayalam writer and a supporter of the Hindutva ideology, criticised Beef Festivals which came up protesting against cow-protection groups' deadly misbehaviour, asking a rhetorical question: "Have you ever thought how much provocation it will cause if somebody were to conduct a pork festival to insult Muslims?"

Last November, Hanuman Sena, a hard Hindutva group, did hold a "Pork Festival" in Kozhikode in an unsuccessful attempt to provoke the Beef Festivallers. Having organised a Muslim-hosted pork dinner as a protest-demonstration to the murderous mob of Dadri, these events gave me a chance to think to myself: what are they even trying to do or warn people against? I thought the pork dinner had already happened, though not with their intentions. In fact, if anything, it nullified their very frame.

When Teesta Setalvad asked me to write a piece for Sabrang on the Pork Dinner event on its first anniversary – today, October 14 — I was both hesitant and lost: hesitant because it had already given me a lot of embarrassing public attention from national and international media for what I deemed was a purely personal response to the insufferably inhuman discourses around beef and a vacuum of action. Lost, because I had already said everything in the many interviews and a post-event piece in Huffington Post. What more do I say about that small little staging of the everyday as a political statement? What made that minor step to have the "table-turning" effect that it did?

An Indian Brahmin, who doesn't eat beef serving beef, or an Indian Muslim who believes pork is haraam serving pork to his friends can very well be part of the idea of India. When the choices we are given make us feel like we are in some food Kurukshetra or jihad, embodying a different possibility helps.

Topical sentimentality or sensationalism is as limited and limiting as exceptionalist celebration is. Any step needs to make a point and find a way to be typical — to show some ability to give socio-political insights. Both the event and its reception fell short of that. This write-up is an attempt to make those connections, in retrospect. 

Just like the false opposition between Hindu and Muslim was created and propagated in the non-existent Hindi-Urdu language divide, beef-pork divide is ingrained in the debates of the subcontinent. In the colonial text of creating oppositional categories, assigning of communities to Hindu and Muslim categories allowed a certain performance of anti-colonialism in the form of 1857 mutiny (The immediate reason for the mutiny was the rumour of gun powder being made of beef and pork meat, taught the school history texts). Then we got stuck with it, playing it up from time to time.

Had the Hindutvavaadis, who bought into colonial vertical divides, not readily borrowed from this inventory, they wouldn't have brought in pork ever into this debate for it really is a weird short hand: beef means Muslim; pork means anti-Muslim.

Asserting beef-eating right as a citizenship right, questioning who has to do the looking after, skinning when it dies and who has to bury it (like the Dalits of Una have asked — and Jignesh Mewani is taking it forward in one of the most amazing struggles of modern India) as a matter of interrogating the socio-economic content of the symbolicity of beef and criticising in no uncertain terms the acts of gau rakshaks as people who believe in the law of the land, are all steps of political resistance. 

But, in addition, an inclusive political ethos also requires positions that waste the charged, antagonistic paradigms is my sense. Rather than answering wrong questions, there is a need to present glimpses of a model as to what kind of a society we envisage. An Indian Brahmin, who doesn't eat beef serving beef, or an Indian Muslim who believes pork is haraam serving pork to his friends can very well be part of the idea of India. What is so new in this? Nothing. But when the choices we are given make us feel like we are in some food Kurukshetra or jihad, embodying a different possibility helps. The actualisation of the promise called India requires inclusivism to be nurtured and there is a culinary angle to it.

Pork dinner is clearly middle class and urban. It can't pretend to be rural or lower class. Just like our communalism, our secularism has also been caste-blind. The frame of this event doesn't address these issues. Just as much as it is important not to universalise the particular, thinking and performing politics in one's givens is also pertinent. In the perpetual war-condition that media and politicians force us to live, scarily and agitatedly in consolidating the existing categories, there is a space outside where there can be negotiations. The saturation of the middle class, urban and communal debates integrates the nation into a debate we could easily do without; it is important to point to this characteristic. Not destroying, but playing off is what we can do with a symbol. Rejecting a set question paper was a beginning point for this. 

Any nation requires a people who believe in some kind of shared destiny. In the absence of such entities, we start creating community narratives around losses: the Golden India before the arrival of the British, the Golden Bharat before the arrival of the Muslims and the Christians, the amazing period during which Islam ruled the world or the wonderful heydays of the Roman Empire. To avoid this danger, looking out forward and pointing to what we might envisage is an important part of becoming a people.

Does the gesture have all these at the heart of it? I can't say. But as thoughts from a dead end, and as intended for an inclusivist milieu, I hope it is not clearly out of place to think of such possibilities, post facto. 

(Social commentator and dramaturge, NP Ashley teaches English at St. Stephen's College, Delhi)
 

The post Turning the Table: Beyond the Pork Dinner Performance appeared first on SabrangIndia.

एक राज्य में जहां पैसा देश में बाहर गए लोगों के जरिये आ रहा है वहां सांस्कृतिक श्रेष्ठता का दावा अपने आप में विरोधाभासी है।

मशहूर मलयाली लेखिका सुगतकुमारी ने 24 सितंबर को लोकप्रिय अखबार मातृभूमि के अपने कॉलम में जो कहा* उसने केरल में खलबली पैदा कर दी है। नीचे उन्होंने जो कहा, उसका सरल अनुवाद है –
 
`केरल अपने दौर के सबसे मुश्किल समस्या से मुखातिब है। दक्षिण के इस छोटे प्रदेश में देश के दूसरे राज्यों की बेकाबू भीड़ बढ़ती जा रही है। प्रवासियों की बढ़ती तादाद भविष्य में केरल के लिए भारी सांस्कृतिक आपदा का सबब बन सकती है। जो लोग यहां रोजगार की तलाश में आ रहे हैं, उनसे हमारा कभी भी सांस्कृतिक मेल-मिलाप नहीं हो सकता। ये लोग न सिर्फ शैक्षिक तौर पर पिछड़े हैं बल्कि उनमे कई आपराधिक पृष्ठभूमि के भी हैं। ये लोग आखिरकार यहां मकान बना कर शादी कर (यहां की महिलाओं से) बस जाएंगे।

सुगतकुमारी की यह भविष्यवाणी कई मायने में आश्चर्यजनक है। एक, कोई केरलवासी याने की भारत की सबसे बड़ी आप्रवासी आबादी (लगभग 40 लाख) का प्रतिनिधि अगर यह कह रहा है तो वह अमेरिकी राष्ट्रपति पद के उम्मीदवार डोनल्ड ट्रम्प की भाषा बोल रहा है, जिन्हें आप्रवासियों से एलर्जी है। यानी खुद बड़ी आबादी वाले आप्रवासी समुदाय के प्रतिनिधि के तौर पर वह आप्रवासियों के प्रति अपनी हिकारत जाहिर कर रही हैं। दूसरे, जाति के वर्चस्व वाले पुराने सामंती ‘स्वर्णिम’ दिनों की समर्थक सुगतकुमारी को हमेशा बाहर से आने वाले पैसे से समस्या रही है। उन्हें लगता रहा है कि यह पैसा केरल को बरबाद कर रहा है। पर इस बार उन्होंने गैर मलयाली लोगों पर निशाना साधा है। तीसरे, वह अति राष्ट्रवादी भारतीय जनता पार्टी की कट्टर समर्थक होते हुए भी वह भारत के अन्य राज्यों के लोगों के खिलाफ हैं।

इस विरोधाभास की पहेली में राज्य के बहुसंख्यकवाद को समझने के सूत्र मिल सकते हैं।

केरल में अन्य राज्यों की तुलना में जो समृद्धि दिखती है वह भारत के अन्य हिस्सों और दूसरे देशों में काम कर रहे मलयालियों के कमाए हुए धन का नतीजा है। यह एक जाना-माना तथ्य है। अगर देश के दूसरे राज्य के लोग रोजगार की दृष्टि से केरल को आकर्षक मान रहे हैं तो उसकी वजह राज्य की उपभोग आधारित अर्थव्यवस्था है। कंस्ट्रक्शन सेक्टर में आया तेज उभार है। शुरुआत में यह समृद्धि केरल के गैर-कुशल कर्मचारियों की खाड़ी से कमाई गई दौलत की बदौलत आई। इस दौलत में 1960 के दशक में अमेरिका और यूरोप गईं नर्सों की कमाई और उसके बाद आईटी सेक्टर में काम करने वालों की कमाई का हाथ भी था।

इस तरह के एक राज्य में जहां पैसा देश में बाहर गए लोगों के जरिये आ रहा है वहां सांस्कृतिक श्रेष्ठता का दावा अपने आप में विरोधाभासी है। कतर, अमीरात, अमेरिका, जर्मनी और यहां तक कि बेंगलुरू और मुंबई के लोग भी यही नजरिया मलयालियों के प्रति रख सकते हैं। लोग अपनी सांस्कृतिक श्रेष्ठता का दावा करने के चक्कर में इतिहास को तथ्यों का दबाने का सुविधाजनक रुख अपना लेते हैं। यह रुख बहुसंख्यकवाद को स्थापित करने की बुनियाद है।
प्रवासियों के विरोध के इस मुद्दे में हम कुछ बुनियादी तथ्यों को भूल जाते हैं-

जब तक कहीं रोजगार उपलब्ध होगा वहां से कोई दूसरी जगह रोजगार की तलाश में नहीं जाएगा। यानी रोजगार की तलाश में ही प्रवास होता है। प्रवासी श्रमिक होता है, जो आपके लिए काम करता है। मेक्सिको के लोग रोजगार की तलाश में अमेरिका आते हैं और अमेरिकी उन्हें इसलिए काम देते हैं कि उन्हें यह तुलनात्मक तौर पर सस्ते में करवाना होता है। ब्रिटेन ने अगर 1948 के दौरान कॉमनवेल्थ देशों से अफ्रीकियों को बुलाकर अपने यहां की नागरिकता दी तो इसलिए कि वे युद्ध से बरबाद अपने शहरों का पुनर्निर्माण करना चाहते थे।

दरअसल यह सोचना कि हम उन्हें (प्रवासियों) अपने यहां आकर कमाने का मौका देकर अहसान कर रहे हैं, सामंती राष्ट्रवाद की निशानी है। श्रमिक आपका काम कर आपको सेवा दे रहा है। इस सोच में एक नैतिक खामी है मालिक काम देता है और श्रमिक काम करता है।

केरल में अगर प्रवासी मजदूरों की स्थितियों का जायजा लिया जाए तो पता चल जाएगा कि हम इनके प्रति किस कदर अमानवीय हैं। केरल के किसी भी सुदूर गांव में दो कमरों के मकान का किराया 3000 रुपये से ज्यादा नहीं हो सकता। लेकिन केरल के मकान मालकिन इन दो कमरों से 15000 रुपये की तक कमाई करते हैं। बंगाल, बिहार या असम के दस-दस श्रमिकों को इन दो कमरों में रखा जाता है और एक बेड के लिए हर दिन 50 रुपये वसूले जाते हैं। रहन-सहन की स्थिति की तो कल्पना ही की जा सकती है।

बाहर से आए इन श्रमिकों को अवमानना की निगाह से देखा जाता है। केरल की ‘पवित्र भूमि’ में ये श्रमिक 'अपवित्र' माने जाते हैं। यह एक तरह की रणनीति है, जिसके तहत श्रमिकों के अदृश्य बल में बदल दिया जाता है।

केरल की सांस्कृतिक श्रेष्ठता या विशिष्टता को थोपने के लिए उन्हें हमेशा रक्षात्मक बनाए रखा जाता है। वाल्टर बेंजामिन के शब्दों में कहें तो – बहुसंख्यकवाद राजनीति का सौंदर्यीकरण है।

सुगतकुमारी हमेशा से उस रुमानी माहौल के प्रति लोगों की संवेदनाओं को उभारने की समर्थक रही हैं, जो एक सुनहरे अतीत की तस्वीर पेश करता है। और भविष्य की मंजिल के तौर पर इसकी पैरवी करता है।

लेकिन जिस सामाजिक विरोधाभास की दुनिया में हम जी रहे हैं उसमें इस तरह के सामंती नोस्टेलजिया को उभारना नामुमकिन है। यही वजह है कि सुगतकुमारी बाहरी पैसे और बाहरी संस्कृति के खिलाफ हैं। उनके लिए ये चीजें यहां की पवित्र हरियाली के विनाश का कारण हैं। यह राज्य के सुनहरे चरित्र को बिगाड़ रहा है। यह ध्यान देने लायक बात है कि मलयाली सांस्कृतिक श्रेष्ठता को थोपने के लिए उन्होंने इस वक्त इस तर्क या आख्यान को छोड़ दिया है। जाहिर है बहुसंख्यकवाद फौरी, मौजूदा और आसान धारणा का पकड़ लेता है, जिसके इर्द-गिर्द लोगों की लामबंदी की जा सके। अक्सर मिथक को इतिहास पर थोप दिया जाता है।

बीजेपी में सुगतकुमारी का जो विश्वास है, उसका मलयाली कट्टरता से सीधा सामना है। बीजेपी एक अखिल भारतीय हिंदूकरण में विश्वास करती है जो क्षेत्रीय, भाषाई विभेद को नकारता है। बीजेपी एक मिलीजुली धार्मिक पहचान का निर्माण करती है। अगर मलयाली मानस शिवसेना जैसा आतंक का फॉर्मूला अपनाता है तो लंबी अवधि में कामयाब नहीं होने वाला। एक क्षेत्र, धर्म और भाषा वाला यूरोपीय राष्ट्रवाद भारतीय संवैधानिक और एकीकृत राष्ट्रवाद के ऐतिहासिक यथार्थ को नुकसान पहुंचाएगा।

सुगतकुमारी का बयान अमित शाह के उस शुभकामना संदेश के बाद आया था, जिसमें असुर राजा बलि को दरकिनार कर वामन जयंती को याद किया गया था। यह बयान बीजेपी के कोझिकोड सम्मेलन के ठीक पहले आया है। हालांकि जिस मलयाली सांस्कृतिक श्रेष्ठता का सुगतकुमारी नारा बुलंद कर रही हैं वह बीजेपी की योजना की विरोधाभासी है। फिर भी यह बहुसंख्यकवाद के मुफीद है। यह क्षेत्रीय और स्थानीय स्तर पर कारगर है।

यह बहुसंख्यकवाद के डीएनए में है। अगर यह और आगे बढ़े तो गणराज्य के बिखरने की वजह बन सकता है। इस यथार्थ को पहचानने की जरूरत है लेकिन सुगतकुमारी जैसे लोगों को गणराज्य के संविधान की कोई परवाह नहीं है। वह सिर्फ वर्चस्व की चिंता करती हैं । चाहे वह मलयाली के तौर पर हो हिंदू के या फिर सामंती शख्स के तौर पर।

सुगतकुमारी के बहुसंख्यकवाद को ठोस, स्थिर, ऐतिहासिक और नैतिक रणनीति से चुनौती दी जा सकती है। इसके लिए संवैधानिक राष्ट्रवाद पर आधारित सामाजिक समावेश का चरित्र विकसित करना होगा।
 
 
*सुगतकुमारी ने 25 सितंबर के मातृभूमि के बयान में जारी कर कहा कि उन्हें मिस कोट किया गया। मैं इसे संज्ञान में नहीं ले रहा हूं कि मातृभूमि को दिए इंटरव्यू से उन्होंने दूरी नहीं बनाई है। इंटरव्यू में उन्होंने जो शब्द इस्तेमाल किए हैं मातृभूमि में उन्हीं का जिक्र किया गया है। अगर उनकी सफाई पर सरसरी निगाह भी दौड़ाई जाए तो भी वह प्रकारांतर से वही कह रही हैं जो कहना चाहती हैं।
 

The post केरल की मशहूर लेखिका ने बंगाली, बिहारी और असमिया श्रमिकों के खिलाफ जहर उगला appeared first on SabrangIndia.

For a state, Kerala, funded almost exclusively by the capital its expatriates bring in to be claiming cultural exceptionalism is a contradiction in terms.

A quote by the noted Malayalam writer, Sugathakumari, in the Malayalam newspaper Mathrubhumi’s column for quotable quotes (September 24), has created a lot of stir in Kerala. A verbatim translation could read as:

“The biggest problem Kerala is going to face is the uncontrolled migration of people from other states (to Kerala). This will take Kerala to a terrible cultural calamity. Those who are coming here to our state for jobs are people who we can never get along with culturally. Not only are they low in education, but most of them also have criminal backgrounds. They will (eventually) become locals by building houses and marrying (women) from here.”*

There is much that’s intriguing about Sugathakumari’s prediction: one, a Malayali, when Malayalis are the famous diasporic lot of India with a whopping 4 million for numbers, is saying this — sentences which could have been mistaken for Donald Trump’s, using the Ctrl+H key to search and replace United States with Kerala. Two, Sugathakumari, the champion of feudal nostalgia for a golden period of upper caste dominance who always found problems with the foreign money that was “ruining of Kerala” has now decided to shift the focus of attack on to the non-Malayalis. Three, an ardent supporter of the hyper-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is so dismissive against the people of “other states of India”. The intrigue, alongside the mutual incompatability, can provide some insights into the nature of majoritarianism.

The relative affluence of Kerala is earned by the Malayalis who are working in other states of India and in other countries. This is a fact well known and adequately illustrated. If labourers from other states find the state alluring, it is the consumerist economy and its construction boom, funded initially by the money earned by unskilled labourers in Gulf countries and by nurses in America and Europe starting in the 1960s, who were later (post-1990s), joined by the IT-Corporate officials in cities of other Indian states that make it so.

For a state funded almost exclusively by the capital its expatriates bring in to be claiming cultural exceptionalism is a contradiction in terms. That the Emiratis, Qataris, Americans, Germans, Bangalorians or Mumbaikars could say exactly the same about Malayalis is forgotten rather quickly in an exercise that negates recent history completely. This convenient and false suppression of the fact is fundamental to feeling superior — a basic need of majoritarianism.

One fundamental aspect of anti-migrant narratives is its amnesia about a basic issue: there will be no migrant coming over to any region unless there is work to be done. The migrant is a labourer who is doing the work for you. The Mexican comes to America and the American employs him/her because the work has to be done and mostly they come at a lesser cost. Britain invited Africans offering citizenship to the people from the commonwealth in 1948 because they needed people to reconstruct their war-ravaged country.  

It is a feudal idea of nationalism to think that “they” are coming to “our” country/state and hence we are helping them. The labourers are doing you more of a service by getting your work done. There is an ethical flaw in understanding the owner as the “job-giver” and the labourer as the “job-taker”.

Any study of the treatment of migrant labourers will reveal how inhuman the “labour-camps” that have sprung up all over Kerala are. A quick illustration: two-bed room houses in interior villages of Kerala where the monthly rent cannot be more than Rs 3,000-4,000 are given out to a minimum of 10 Bengali or Bihari or Assamese labourers at a rate of Rs 50 per night per bed. The monthly income for the landlord then is Rs 15, 000; five times what he would otherwise make and the conditions are for anybody to guess!

The fact that these people who work for Malayalis are treated with contempt as “impure bodies” on the “pure land” of Kerala is a strategy to make their labour invisible and to keep them defensive by invoking Keralite cultural exceptionalism. To adapt Walter Benjamin, “majoritarianism is the aestheticisation of politics”.

Sugathakumari has always been a champion of sentimentalised environmental romanticism, which creates a golden past and advocates a return to it as the destination for the future. As that is the only template of environmentalism available, for a long time she had been called “environmentalist” in the state. The social contradictions we live through are simplistically and unrealistically dismissed in this “going back to the origins” project, invoking feudal nostalgia. Hence she has been allergic to ‘foreign funds’ and ‘foreign religions’ which to her are responsible for the deforestation of the sacred groves and for the ruining of the state’s ‘golden” ethos.

It is noteworthy that she has given up on this narrative for the sake of “Malayali cultural supremacism” now, keeping aside her own earlier views. Majoritarianism works only with what is immediately available (“in the air”) and easy notions around which people can be mobilised, replacing history with myth.

It sees the current state as a trans-historical given, cancels out the experience by drowning in a mythical past. Her nothing-short-of-racist fear of miscegenation (not to forget the inhuman assumption of migrants as people with criminal backgrounds), which thrives on appealing to the pride of the clan and the egos of its “protective” male members, furthers this aspect: majoritarianism can never question male chauvinism. When a community is created solely against its “others” who it economically and physically enslaves and exploits while alienating culturally, it can’t even think of the socio-economic content of exploitation.

Sugathakumari’s faith in the BJP is in direct conflict with her Malayali chauvinism: the pan-national cultural Hindutvaisation hopes to devour regional, linguistic differences for the sake of a concocted religious identity. The Siva Sena sort of territorialism will emerge totally incompatible with this project in the long run. The European ideals of nationalism as a homo-regional, mono-religious and mono-lingual sabotage the Indian constitutional and historical reality of union of nationalisms.

Her statement comes immediately after Amit Shah’s widely condemned dubbing of Onam as Vamanajayanthi rejecting the Malayalis cherishing of their asura king, Mahabali and before the well-publicised BJP national council meeting in Kozhikode doesn’t only point to the contradictions embedded in the very project but also to yet another exigency of majoritarianism: it works in clearly territorial, local terms. It refuses to leave these geographical, temporal units they get to be outspoken in the most sensationalist sense.

It has no other go. It is in the DNA of majoritarianism. Pushed further, it can only cause disintegration of the Republic. That’s a reality best reckoned with but Sugathakumari-like people wouldn’t for they don’t care about issues of Constitution or Republic; what they care about is the dominance here and now, as and when what is convenient: be that Malayali, Hindu or feudal.

It would be erroneous for the pluralist, socialist and constitutional side to exploit these contradictions to troll Sugathakumari, for fascism can always make contradictions invisible through a spectacle of power, be that a war or a communal riot. The route is to bring in the concrete, the material, the historical and the ethical to counter these narratives and create a counter-ethos of inclusivism and egalitarianism based on our constitutional nationalism.

* Sugathakumari has issued a statement (Mathrubhumi, September 25) claiming she had been misquoted by Mathrubhumi. I am not taking that into account as she hasn’t yet distanced herself from her interview published in the Janmabhumi, Onam Special edition (2016). The words she used in the interview are exactly those quoted by Mathrubhumi. Even if her clarification is taken at face value, it does not help much for she goes on to express the same concerns in slightly round-about ways, or by bringing in “better” arguments for why “we” need to be scared of “them” in “solely practical and experiential terms”.

(Social commentator and dramaturg, NP Ashley teaches English at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi).
 

The post Malayali Writer Spews Venom Against Bihari, Bengali, Assamese Labourers in Kerala appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Encounters of a personal kind with a Palestinian classmate and an Israeli friend. 

I didn't notice him initially. In the beginning, he was somewhere in the last row of chairs. 

Nidal Al Jamala, the only Palestini in that MA English class in Hyderabad University, did find his way to the first row and make himself visible and heard through unstoppable interventions in his heavily Arabised English. As Indian students of literature, we were clear about the liberal/left/progressive/social justice positions we were supposed to take – we were all feminists, dalitists, African Americanists and gay-lesbian supporters. We, by now, knew which authors to cheer and which to deconstruct. We really were seasoned in the ecosystem of English BAs of India. He wasn't.

Nidal spoke in long paragraphs in totally strange ways. The self-evident aspects of gender and caste were either too alien or too unacceptable to him. His verbal noodles often didn't need to be tasted, forget chewed and digested in that proper Baconian idiom. He should have asked for clarifications, yes in shorter sentences or made the points only a quarter of the times – not that he really had to say much, I used to feel. But he went on and on all the time.

Towards the end of each discussion, his monologue almost signalled the time for switching off brains. Assignment and exam scores reiterated the sense of pointlessness in him. I didn't say it because he was, after all from Palestine, the mother of all conflict zones. He was way elder to all of us, I had gathered. Outside the class room, other than "hullo brutheR, howare you?" and waving out from his curious cycle, there weren't too many interactions. 

It took four semesters for me to be surprised by him. In the Literary Criticism and Theory paper, his seminar topic was "Can the Subaltern Speak" by Spivak – yes, that marvelous essay you pretend to understand as a grad student but will have to keep reading over and again to teach it even after a decade. We were supposed to read the essay and go. In all honesty, I tried but failed terribly. In the class, I was looking at the sealing indifferently when Nidal approached the essay through certain demonstrations.

With a classmate who incessantly tried to create verbal territories of belonging on the one side and a friend who is conquered by the fear of being attacked any time to the point of being driven into violence on the former, I could now feel the vacuum spaces of articulation… and sound does require a medium to travel, my school Physics book taught me.

I can't comment on the exactitude of the exercise due to my personal lack of understanding. But one could sense a certain methodical rigour and nuanced approach in talking about colonialism, imperialism and the subaltern. He was wearing that yellow sweater he wore all of winter, the heavy Arabic pronunciation continued to make it difficult, but there was a new kind of personality dissecting history and historiography. 

That didn't change Nidal for good. He went back to being the incorrigible him as a discussant. One morning, he was particularly outrageous both with positions and his lack of any understanding that was going on. It somehow got into my nerves. I just went ahead and snapped, and snapped badly. I knew I could shut him up because he was bordering on the drivel. He did shut up. I felt the class grew heavy with that closure. But his eyes suggested the troubled search of a locked off cat when I looked at him.

I went back to my room: 510 of D hostel. His eyes started haunting me. I knew I had done something very wrong by the evening. I got out and started walking towards the international hostel beyond the post office. It was not difficult to locate his room. He was lying on a coat without a mattress, aggrieved. I didn't know what to do. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, "Nidal". There was no welcome gesture, no attempt to explain anything, no nothing. I apologised for my behavior – he wasn't particularly noticing. He was not even conversing. From the talk that followed with him and his friend from the Middle East, I could make out that Nidal's close friend and neighbour had died in an Israeli air strike. His family could also be eliminated? I was afraid to even ask. 

 But now I knew one thing: talking, talking incessantly, was his way to come to terms with the nightmare realities he was supposed to figure into his life. I suddenly understood: he was not talking for anybody to hear but was trying to create a cell with his own voice for him to inhabit. Its long-windedness was a response to the barbed wires that history had kept for his like. Kites in the Darwishian last sky with no other option…

While grading papers for Google, I chanced upon this interesting response to the question, "One Law You would Implement if You Could": "Most problems now in the world are due to the foundation of two states by the colonial masters, viz. Israel and Pakistan using religion as its only foundation. I will pass a law to undo these two nations".

Debates on Israel and Palestine standing in for a Jew-Muslim conflict is quite baffling, primarily because Muslim anti-Zionism sometimes finds justificatory logic in either wondering if Hitler wasn't all that wrong in taking the shortest way with Jews or in dismissing the Holocaust as a Jew-conspiracy (America is doing all that it is doing because of the Jew lobby, is part of the common sense fuelled by conspiracy theories!).

About 2000 years of anti-Semitism was an entirely Christian thing. Adolf Hitler was by no stretch of imagination the first anti-Semite – he only reinvented and put to practice what was rampant all across Christendom a couple of centuries ago.

The Christian interest of the project is well established by Daniel Golfdhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners and so on. The pre-Israeli Jew lives in the Middle East has been far more positive than the "evacuation" policies Europe had, some historians have argued. Now the talk is that the fight is between Jews and Muslims and America and Europe are "only mediating". Edward Said said "imperialism alters not only the present or the future but also the past". In that sense Israeli-Palestinian conflict's historical amnesia is fodder to the imperialist folklore. 

I understood Israelis also feel wronged in the whole scheme of things when I happened to work with an Israeli theatre director, a lovely person. As an Israeli for some generations, he was very critical of the fanatic streak in the settler Jews and he called them nothing less than dangerous. But he was also convinced that Israel was a victim of the world politics: "everyone is against us. The whole of the Arab world has ganged up against us. Americans have to toe the line of these Arabs because of oil money. Europe also has business interests in the Middle East. We have to fight everyone for our very existence. Why does everyone do this to us?"

That was new. I had only heard how Jews are terribly manipulative and are the root cause of all issues in international relations. Little did I realize everybody, including the Zionists, are telling themselves stories about themselves in the absence of which you can't claim your deeds.

I was reminded of a story I read somewhere: In sixth century Madina, people got together to kill a dangerous big snake they spotted somewhere in the marketplace. By the time they got equipped with a heavy enough stick the snake had already left. Seeing all this Prophet Muhammed smiled: "Just like you got saved from the attack of the snake, the snake also got saved from your attack". 

People think of themselves as people and "others" as snakes. 

With a classmate who incessantly tried to create verbal territories of belonging on the one side and a friend who is conquered by the fear of being attacked any time to the point of being driven into violence on the former, I could now feel the vacuum spaces of articulation… and sound does require a medium to travel, my school Physics book taught me.
 

The post When People Think of Themselves as People and “Others” as Snakes appeared first on SabrangIndia.