The Big B will make a personal appearance at Lincoln Center!

Fri April 15: 7:30 at Alice Tully Hall. Special ticket price: $60. Please Note: All tickets for this evening only must be purchased at Alice Tully Hall Box Office: 212-875-5050. They can also be purchased online through lincolncenter.org. Tickets will go on sale starting March 15.

Walter Reade Theater in New York City will have a 13 film retrospective of Amitabh Bacchan’s films. Films include:

The Walter Reade Theater will present 13 of AB’s best-loved films including Zanjeer (1973), Abhimaan (1973), Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), Satte pe Satta (1982), Agneepath (1990), Aankhen (2002), Dev (2004), Black (2005) and others.
For Tickets and Program go to Lincoln Center’s Website.

They rightly call him the biggest film star in the world, but are in error when they say that his fans call him AB, unless I read my Stardust wrong for all those years.

The Indian Government will provide a third box in its gender category on passport forms:

The new “Passport Information Booklet” relating to instructions for filling up application forms, states, “In case of Male/ Female option, please write M or F in the box space provided. For eunuch, please write ‘E’ in this box.”The new “Passport Information Booklet” relating to instructions for filling up application forms, states, “In case of Male/ Female option, please write M or F in the box space provided. For eunuch, please write ‘E’ in this box.”

I had blogged in the past about Hijras having problems getting insurance in Tamil Nadu, transgendered prostitutes in the US, and Georgie Bayer’s problems in New Zealand, so this is an amazing development. However, I haven’t seen it reported in other papers yet so can’t compare all the reports.

Sepia Mutiny had an interesting post on the discriminatory practices of the Salvation Army (which is supported by public funds), and its support for the same by the Justice Department. It turns out that the Salvation Army also has a “venerable” history in the Imperialist project. Among other things they were involved in the rehabilitation of “criminal tribes” in India, as they say, “at the invitation of the Government in 1908.”

India has about 60 million people who belong to “Denotified Tribes.” The colonial government did not like nomadic and tribal peoples they could not control and tax, so entire communities were notified as Criminal Tribes by the British in 1871. Forcible settlement and persecution followed this piece of legislation. One of the players in this sorry history is the Salvation Army. Rudolf Heredia in his review of two books, Branded By Law: Looking at India’s Denotified Tribes by Dilip D’Souza and Dishonoured by history: “criminal tribes” and British colonial policy by Meena Radhakrishnan, says:

The official intention then of the legislation was not so much punitive and retributive as preventative and remedial. It was all part of the ‘civilizing’ mission of the colonial raj. The Criminal Tribes Act provides a window through which we can examine how such good intentions of the government work themselves out into an oppressive hell for those it was supposed to benefit…..

An important player in this sordid drama was not just the government but the Salvation Army that served more as a self-conscious imperial agency rather than the evangelical sect it portrayed itself to be. It had a significant role to play in criminal legislation in Britain and all over the empire. The various schemes visualised by William Booth, its founder, in his rather pompous proposals, In Darkest England, The Way Out: A Study of Poverty and Vice in England and a Scheme by the Salvaion Army for Reclamation of Criminals and Prevention of Crime, laid out a regime in 1890 for ‘the starving, the criminal, the lunatics, the paupers, the hopeless, the drunkards and the harlots’ (p. 17) which became models that influenced British administration elsewhere as well.

Settlements were established to “rehabilitate” these communities, and it became a way to appropriate land for agriculture and provide cheap labor for industry.

We were in India in December working on a documentary about a community from one such settlement in Ahmedabad, (read about it on Kerim’s blog), and we met an old lady who had lived in the settlement, she told us how they had to take permission to even go to the bathroom, how they couldn’t go anywhere without a pass, and the list just continues.

Its so hypocritical that organizations like the Salvation Army are not held accountable for the immense harm they have caused to so many people and in fact get support from the State, and Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham want to air drop salvation into the “area of darkness” that is Asia. While the powers that be scream themselves hoarse about the threat from those “religious fanatics, out there.”

It looks like no political party has won a majority in Bihar and President’s rule might be declared. Bihar has the reputation of being one of the most backward states. Of course the green fields of Punjab wouldn’t be so green and the factories of India wouldn’t chug along without all the labor and raw materials that come from the state. So it pretty much suits everyone that it is underdeveloped. In the middle of all this is the impossible figure of Laloo Prasad Yadav. Here is a little bio:

Born in 1948, Yadav was elected to the sixth Lok Sabha at the early age of 29 years in 1977. In 1989, he became the leader of the opposition after being in the Bihar Legislative Assembly for two terms before becoming Chief Minister of Bihar in 1990, a post he held till 1997, when he was forced to resign on widespread corruption charges. Handing over the reins of the state to his wife, he served prison sentences before being re-elected to the 12th Lok Sabha for a third term.

He has a degree in law and his interests vary from reading revolutionary books to writing articles on politics and debating. But his real passion seems to be surviving in politics, a skill he has mastered like few others. Critics point to the worsening socio-political scenario of Bihar while he and his wife have governed the state, but he has his legions of admirers, who are ready to die for him.

Laloo Prasad has managed to survive without completely aligning himself to the Congress (which has generally been the junior partner to his RJD (Rashtriya Janata Dal) party) nor the BJP. He seems to be a populist whose corrupt practices have not harmed his political fortunes, except this time round. Despite his bad record on development, he has a very good record on communal politics and violence in Bihar, as this article from Indian Express (archived on Communalism Watch) points out:

Although the Sangh parivar never got to rule Bihar, it had attained more power on the streets of the state than in the Patna assembly. Riots would rage for a month and administrators would not know how to control them. In 1990, when Laloo Prasad Yadav came to power, the Ayodhya movement was at its peak. Muslims in the state were living under a pall of fear. Certainly, riots broke out even under Laloo’s guard but he knew how to control them. When violence erupted in Sitamarhi, for instance, the man who for many was only a ‘joker’ camped in the city, holding a torch in one hand and a danda in other. When a riot broke out in Nawada, Laloo was in Delhi on an official assignment. When news of the riots came in, he dropped everything and rushed to the trouble spot. The riots were controlled in a jiffy.

Among other things Laloo Prasad did a guest appearance in a Bollywood film, “Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav,” which seems to have done very badly. It would probably have been a better idea to do the film on him or at least a musical!

Gandhi’s march to Dandi to break the salt laws in 1930 is being re-enacted. While it may be a gimmick on part of the Congress party, their answer to the Hindutva rath yatras, the salt march is a seminal event for Indian history worth remembering. The Hindu has an article on the history of the march. One of the things I learnt was:

The salt tax was no trifling matter. As many essayists sought to demonstrate, a tax of about 1,000 per cent on the cost was “the worst blot on our revenue system”. Although difficult to imagine now, we should bear in mind that in 1930, Indians were forced to spend a considerable fraction of their income on salt. People could not manufacture their own salt and most of it was imported. An astonishing five per cent of national tax revenue was from salt!

The article mentions a painstakingly researched book on the march by Thomas Weber, On the Salt March: The Historiography of Gandhi’s March to Dandi, it seems that Weber was a journalist in the 30′s. To understand the significance of salt, Mahasweta Devi’s story Salt in the collection Bitter Soil is a good introduction, it tells the story of a poor tribal community that steals the salt licks from a reserve forest. For an interesting social history of salt, there is Salt: A World History. And for the situation of salt workers in India see Kerim’s blog.

Despite winning an Oscar, the documentary Born into Brothels seems to have its share of troubles, read Amardeep Singh for the questions raised and other links. A review by Seema Sirohi in Outlook is particularly negative:

Born Into Brothels is being hailed in the West as the ultimate uplifting film, a