sotosay

There are new ways of controls and regulations all the time. We are of course becoming what Deleuze called ‘controll socities’. A number of recent happenings in a various areas point to how there is increasing regulation of the life as it is led. Some are direct controls. A fine discussion of one such mechanism is here in an article on “The 21st century politics of college clothing “.

“The move to impose a dress code is a response to the anxieties that today, women will wear spaghetti straps to college, tomorrow they will have careers, the day after refuse to be chaste Indian women, the next week make love to the wrong kind of men, the next month declare they prefer women to men, and from there who knows what else”

What is however more appalling is the ways in which regulation takes place that doesnot even appear as if it is a regulation. This is when we are made to want to conform to certain norms. This is where I guess disciplining and controlling differ. If I am made to feel that a particular manner of being, living, responding etc are better, the chances are that these are choices I am making in accordance under a regime of regulation. My hunch is that some of the K serials on TV have signs of such a regime in operation.

Sorry, havent elaborated the point very well. Shall do so in the future, as the issue of controll society is very important to understand. 

Check out the following poem by a Kurdish poet. For more check here 

  The Gun

by Latif Halmat (1947 -) Iraqi Kurdistan 

Tell Mother Mary
not to wet the white church bells
with blood and tears
in memory
of her son.

Tell Mother mary so
if she is not tired of mourning.

Thousands of Jesus’s
are crucified everyday.
Tell Mother Mary
not to cry anymore.

This is no time for tears.
This is the age of guns.

So ask her –
Why doesn’t she buy a gun?

- Translated by Omid Varzandeh

In Kannada there has been a major school of bhakti scholarship (on vacanakaras) that treats bhakti poetry as having ‘radicality and transformative potential’. For some time I have been developing doubts about these claims. I have suspected that much of the socially inclined investment in bhakti poetry has invested its own preferences and priorities all over the bhakti poetry. That is, the equality, freedom and such other ethical ideas that we come across in bhakti poetry perhaps meant something very different then from what it means to us today. If that is the case, then when we see ethical sociality in our reconstructions of bhakti we perhaps are anyway operating within the matrix of modernity. Our dissatisfaction with modernity notwithstanding, we are reinscribing the bhakti into modern discursivity. I am not suggesting that the problem is only that of recovery; but that our own ethics today leads us to value code our pasts. The point I wish to make is that the problem of recovery apart, our reading of bhakti tends to bring in modern ethicality. It is not a problem with me as long as this move is not collapsed with that of recovery – one that claims that we can obtain alternative angle to ethical issues from bhakti; because that is when we stealthily insert precisely what we hope to banish – modernity.

Now this is a slippery area – this modernity. I understand a project that aims to work towards resisting the snares of modernity for all the good reasons. To inflect our current practices of literary reading, for example, with something other than the matrix of modernity. Now the grand narrative of modernity has usually been criticised in
India for the western accent it carries (Nandy, Alwarez etc). I suspect that conceiving modernity within its western career is limiting and also falling prey to its own grand narration. Despite the various symptomatic common modalities of modernity – progress, reason, freedom, state, and so forth,- modernity can very well have a different career in India given the specific socio-cultural topos as well as time in which it is deployed here. Again, how it is deployed. It is possible that modernity has lived both a western career as well as a specific career here. And if we attend to the career of modernity that is different from that of west, (or, that of what we are dissatisfied with in its western avatar) we may still make our current concerns not be burdened with the tired orbit of modernity. In such a scenario, our interpolations into past, our reconstructions of bhakti, need not be bogged down to our resistance to western epistemic arrogance and primacy.

Another point: I feel that the eagerness as well as the anxiety about western modernity are two sides of the same coin. Both maintain that dependency logic one or the other way. If we see west as producing us as much as much other contacts have, it will at least provide us the respite to go beyond the travails of colonisation. I am one of those who believe that colonisation is hardly an issue today in
India. Not because we are post to it, but because coloniser need not be seen in a pure identity: of a white British, or a white Christian etc. What Balagangadhar calls colonial consciousness is strangely its own victim. Because, such theorising never decenters the west (white, or Christian or whatever) despite its eagerness to break free of colonial consciousness.

There is of course, nothing called Indian modernity. That is a hollow boast. Modernity is European, sure. My point however is that it need not have only one impact; the claustrophobic atmosphere that modernity creates and the enabling effects it has are both real. Nandy tells me ethical tools for a just life in a society are not something that (only) modernity provides; these can be seen present in the non western worlds too. How true he is. But the institutions with which we live today mean that it is the heritage of modernity that we have to reshape and re-equip rather than a pure past. Nandy’s ‘gods and goddesses’ are reborn in modern discourses – no dindi is complete without the curious trappings of modern institutions.

In his article SECULARISM, COLONIALISM AND THE INDIAN INTELLECTUALS, Jacob de Roover says:

“the history of the idea of secularism and … the deep roots it has in the religious doctrine of the Christian West. Next, I will analyse the role it has played in the colonial domination over the subcontinent and its intellectuals. The idea of secularism has been one of the backbones of the colonial educational project, which approached
India as a backward society in need of conversion to modern western values. The Indian secularists are today sustaining the colonial stance towards their own culture and society. They presuppose that the modern value of secularism or toleration is the superior way of organising a plural society. Given this assumption, they easily come to the conclusion that India should adopt this value like all other modern nation-states; the secularists take as a presupposition what they actually have to prove: the superiority of the modern value of secularism. The consequences are dramatic. Alternatives to secularism  e.g., the “traditional” ways of living together as they have developed on the subcontinent  are not even taken seriously as solutions to the predicament of pluralism in twenty-first-century
India. Thus, secularism limits the options of the Indian intellectuals to two equally flawed positions: either one continues the colonialism of the last three centuries through a dogmatic adherence to “modern secular values;” or one fights this stance on its own terms by becoming an “anti-modern”, “anti-western” or even “anti-scientific” fanatic.”  

It is an interesting article. It can be accessed at: http://www.india-forum.com/authors/31/Jacob-De-Roover
I want to ask this question to Roover’s thesis: I think Roover is hasty in characterising secularism in
India as rooted in colonial rule. Descent is here taken as continuous phenomena. I think it is important to assume (for I don’t have empirical data with me now) that ideas though derived don’t remain unchanged across their origins and adoption as well as across temporal and spatial plane. I believe it so not because change is a supreme value or some such thing but because ideas don’t travel on their own; it is people who adopt them and I would like to believe that people have enough sense to impart to borrowed ideas local hues where necessary and making the copy not a mirror image but a new alloy. Hence to set out with the belief that secularism is derived from the colonial past and that it is steeped in religious doctrines of Christianity need not lead us to identify the problem of this concept in
India today. 
The tangled question of the alternatives to secularism is a genuine one. Let us not pretend that it is not so, or that there is no need for alternatives. But Roover’s critique has a few loopholes in its premises. When he says that “secularism limits the options of the Indian intellectuals to two equally flawed positions: either one continues the colonialism of the last three centuries through a dogmatic adherence to “modern secular values;” or one fights this stance on its own terms by becoming an “anti-modern”, “anti-western” or even “anti-scientific” fanatic”  he is already assuming a singular character to the understanding and practice of secularism in India over the years. This to me poses a problem because it means that people (not one or the other intellectual) imitate blindly. It undermines the agency of people and their intelligence in accepting and assessing an idea, as well as the possible mingling / interaction of such an idea with the various local practices of pluralism. If we attend to the various discourses of secularism we may notice not only the Christian and colonial provenance but also certain local notions of pluralism / cross-cultural co-habitation embedded in them. It is not sufficient to attend to only the academic and political discourses in this respect but one should also look at other areas such as art, literature, rural co-operative movements, anti-caste discourses etc. Now my hunch is that secularism has been variously configured whether or not traces of its origins in religious doctrines of Christian west can be found in it.   

Harsh Mander’s Unheard Voices (published in 2001 by Penguin India) is a collection of twenty case studies that he undertook during his tenure as an IAS officer and some as Head of Action Aid
India. These are real-life stories of people that rarely enter into the public arena and if they do, are read and forgotten fast. Here are accounts of humiliation, denial of justice, of access to constitutional provisions, violation of integrity – physical, emotional, religious. These are stories where human rights have been cruelly compromised.

            Harsh Mander has put together stories from different places of
India, written at different times. From Anantpur, Bhopal, Bundelkand, Bangalore, Bhagalpur, Delhi,
Hyderabad and many other places come accounts of oppression and exploitation. There are destitute children from impoverished broken homes, HIV affected women from closed-down brothels, dalit youth crushed by the collusion between the babus and Caste Hindus, tribal peasants dispossessed of their land … people in the clutches of a system that leaves no space for the disempowered. Predictably, the victims are Dalits, tribals and women. They are from the lowest rung of the economic ladder as well, hoping to be able to climb it one day. What makes this collection valuable is that it presents success stories along with the sad ones, thus not reducing the book to a cheap tearjerker.

Mr. Mander presents straightforward narratives with only names changed and claims that he has retained the ‘voices and experiences of the people’. His access to these stories is first hand, though in most cases there are intermediaries. Some of the cases, we are told, are ones in which he was involved as a government official. But he has largely been able to be self-effacing with the ‘I’ rarely entering the narration. While this keeps the focus firmly on the victims, the style of presentation is objective enough to provide it a ring of authenticity. The adherence to specificity of details with dates, years, place of occurrence, official designations of involved persons and identification of groups responsible for certain actions, prevent these from being ‘fictional’. A real-life account presented without specifics risks being equated with literary text.

            ‘After
Bhopal’ is the story of Sunil rendered orphan along with two siblings after the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. His travails with the callous Company, corrupt officials, and demonic state power move us to rage. While the average middle class looks up to judiciary as the only sane institution, ‘Hounded like Criminals’ brings out the insensitivity of the judiciary and its class prejudices. ‘TheLand of
Jagtu Gond’ chronicles the ravages modernity brings with it in the life of tribals whose land and livelihood are taken away from them by the outsiders arriving with ‘development’. As a counterpoint to the hopelessness of victimization, an intelligent and brave attempt to improve ones life is the story of Anand whose story starts with rags and though it does not reach riches yet, ends with new horizons opening up for him.

            Shyam Benegal’s 1998 film
Samar was based on two of the stories of this collection. ‘A Short lived Revolt’ and ‘The Obeisance’ are stories of Dalits that recur with unflinching regularity in every part of
India. The unholy nexus between the state machinery and the oppressive caste hierarchy pushing the marginalized Dalit populace to the very edges of society has by now become a type. But the cruelty of it is still jolting to any who read these accounts.

            Woven into the narratives of these victims are the stories of some committed individuals and organizations. Mohammad Ali and Sathyu in ‘After Bhopal’, Wilson Bezawada of ‘Scavenger Narayanamma’, George Kollashany of ‘A Home on the Streets’ and a score of others along with their organizations bring some humane help to the helpless. The efforts of such agencies and individuals focus on the available means of change within the system. The stories are thus also a road map for possible alternative approaches. 

Mr. Mander’s prose makes easy reading, while it leaves our conscience disturbed. The author deserves appreciation for conveying the tragedies of the people he is writing about without ever sentimentalizing the incidents. There is compactness even when a story spread over years is related. But the intensity of suffering is ably communicated.

 This well-produced book is a testimony to how constructive such attempts can be. While it might also raise questions about the agency of the oppressed and whether ‘Unheard’ voices can be voiced at all, they serve some purposes. They contribute to the mobilization of public opinion and sympathy against violation of human rights. The mediation by an educated, upper class, government representative voice does beg some questions about what is heard.

This book is a must read for anyone concerned with the nature of our society and the direction it is taking. It is such a book that might remind the historically inclined minds the forgotten story of our ‘tryst with destiny’. It is a collection of narratives that remind us that we are not yet become a nation. The victims of sagas chronicled here are the backs on which a growing nation is building its tall dreams.