A rather vivid account of Lord Macauley’s 206th birthday celebration in the Indian Express. The event was organized by Dalit leader Chandrabhan Prasad, which included the unveiling of a portrait of English, the Mother Goddess:

Dalit poet Parak sang a couplet to the portrait – a refashioned Statue of Liberty, wearing a hippie hat, holding a massive pink pen, standing on a computer, with a blazing map of India in the background – Oh, Devi Ma/ Please Let us Learn English/ Even the dogs understand English, to cheers and laughter, even as Lord Macaulay’s portrait, looking the perfect English buccaneer, gazed below.

Alas, I haven’t been able to find an image of the portrait. Prasad’s reveres Macauley because:

…his insistence to teach the “natives” English broke the stranglehold of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic teaching, a privilege of only the elite castes and, he argued,for the European kind of modern education, with focus on modern sciences. “Imagine, if we had only followed indigenous study,’’ said Bhan, “we would be like Afghanistan or Nepal today.’’……“Today, English-speaking Dalits and Adivasis are less disrespected, therefore, empowered by Goddess English, Dalits can take their place in the new globalised world.’’

An interesting contrast to the view of Hindu Nationalists, for whom “Macaulay’s Children” is a favored insult for members of the English speaking Indian intelligentsia:

They are not real people, but zombies programmed by Macaulay to act like the Caliban, the slave.

Much as I enjoy the irony of using Shakespeare to advance the Hindutva agenda, I am much more inclined to sympathize with Ashis Nandy who seems to have had a jolly time at the party:

“I certainly do not agree with some of Bhan’s thesis,’’ said an aghast Nandy, “but I certainly support every oppressed community or individual’s right to pick up any weapon, be it political, academic or intellectual incorrectness, to fight the establishment. It’s the sheer audacity of it that makes it so forceful.’’

New York Review of Books (requires an e-subscription) has a review on a book by historiarian Maya Jasnoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 by David Gilmour. I suppose one the advantages of blogging is that you can comment on a review of a book you haven’t read, so I am going to avail myself of this opportunity. Gilmour complains:

Many historians who call themselves “postcolonial” have taken it for granted that colonial rule was always evil and colonialist motives always bad.

From this complaint he goes on to describe Jasnoff arguement as being:

Empires tend to be inclusive, especially as they expand; their borders are porous, above all the cultural ones…

In service of refuting a “fundamental” postcolonial belief that “people cannot cross borders: they are either the colonialists or the colonized, the oppressors or the victims.” The evidence that Jasnoff presents is an account of Europeans who collected Indian Art and “went native,” specifically in Lucknow. I am not an academic, so I think I can freely say, “What crap.” So a bunch of Europeans crossed boundaries and got themselves a couple of Indian wives and Persian names, could the same be said of Indians who might have gone to England? Even a simple reading of Kipling’s Kim makes it clear that Kim, insofar as his whiteness goes, can cross boundaries at will, but the same privilege is not accorded to Hurree Babu, who is a believer in the Imperial project, despite being a somewhat comical but courageous figure, whose greatest ambition is to be a member of the Royal Geographic Society. Or to take a current example, when I had to go to the UK for our research trip, I had to exhibit every little bit of my life to the authorities to assure them that I was going to be free of disease and financially solvent, and thus worthy of entering ye olde England. What is more, when I came back, they asked our friend who wrote me a letter of invitation whether I had actually visited her as planned. What sort of visa did they have when they appeared on India’s shore I’d like to know. Apparently crossing boundaries, including political ones is a different story for different people.

The review ends with:

Historians who are interested in the people who make history are usually better writers than those who prefer theories. And Jasnoff is certainly a fine writer. She delights in scenes form the past; she knows how to describe the sights and smells of an eighteenth century bazaar as well as the personalities of her art collectors. She can visualize and imagine history, as well as study it in the archives and the seminar room, and this makes her book a particularly valuable account of the realities of empire.

The man may as well use the “e” word. If I wanted smells from my history books, especially a particular kind of smell, I’d read M.M. Kaye, not history. And God forbid anybody actually thinking about what they are studying, it would just make them “too theoretical.” Like those, oh so awful, Postcolonial theorists who are destroying the fabric of good scholarship with their pig headed interventions. Gilmour and Jasnoff both insist that they are not suffering from Imperial nostalgia. I am not so sure that its not the case (The same issue of NYRB has a very favorable review of Niall Ferguson’s new book, which seems to be about how bad it is when Empires crumble, because lots of people get killed. Never mind the fact that lots of people get killed over a long period of time when an Empire is being built and maintained.)

In all fairness though, Jasnoff’s book could be interesting, including the second half that describes how the Anglo-French rivalries played out in the subcontinent and the role of the invasion of Egypt in 19th century history. So I hope if anybody reads the book they’ll write something about it. I’d be curious to know more. Even if from the review it looks like there is a willful ignorance of the complexity of what postcolonial scholars have written, or maybe they are just mad that Europeans are not at the center of every inquiry.

I have been on the National Archives web page for the last couple of days, researching films and photos. While looking around, I found this photo:

“Rickshaws are almost as common in India as they are in China. Some of the…troops are on their way to see `Tarzan’s New York Adventure’—in India…”

African American soldiers going to see a Tarzan film in Calcutta. What can you say about that? It was interesting to find this in conjunction with the rumbles about the new Clint Eastwood film about the battle for Iwo Jima, where the absence of Black soldiers has been noticed by those who took part in it, like Sgt. McPhatter:

…almost 900 African-American troops took part in the battle of Iwo Jima, including Sgt McPhatter…..”Of all the movies that have been made of Iwo Jima, you never see a black face,” said Mr McPhatter. “This is the last straw. I feel like I’ve been denied, I’ve been insulted, I’ve been mistreated. But what can you do? We still have a strong underlying force in my country of rabid racism.”

And here is a tidbit about the newsreel footage from that time, from auhor Melton McLaurin:

“One of the marines I interviewed said that the people who were filming newsreel footage on Iwo Jima deliberately turned their cameras away when black folks came by….

Out here in rural Taiwan, one of the most entertaining things to do is to take bike rides. Which also brings one into contact with the huge variety of dogs in this country. These dogs seem to have a varied social life. Some are loners, and go about their sad mangy business, and avoid all contact with you, others roam in couples or packs. In the couples, I’ve noticed that one member will usually be aggressive and bark at you, while the other waits around for it’s partner to be done, before they get back to whatever it was they were doing. The packs on the other hand, are very much like a gang of teenaged kids, they run up pretending to be aggressive, but really they are just showing off for their comrades benefit, and probably just want to play. Most of the these dogs are probably stray, since the ones with owners are often tied up. The saddest of these being the big guard dogs who are tied up all the time, or put in cages. They just seem like they are going out of their minds.

The other day, a friend from Boston was visiting, and we took a bike ride on one of my usual country roads. There is giant dog, who is tied to a tree in one of the farms, he gets hysterical every time anyone passes. Normally I ignore him, but this time I couldn’t. The beast had somehow come untied and started to run after us. It was like a bad dream, every time you think he might have stopped, he’d just start again, looking very ferocious. Thankfully we were going downhill, and the dog’s chain kept getting in his way. But its been a week, and I haven’t dared take another bike ride.

Looking around the net, it seems we were doing everything wrong. According to the Humane Society:

* Never scream and run.
* Remain motionless, hands at your sides, and avoid eye contact with the dog.
* Once the dog loses interest in you, slowly back away until he is out of sight.
* If the dog does attack, “feed” him your jacket, purse, bicycle, or anything that you can put between yourself and the dog.
* If you fall or are knocked to the ground, curl into a ball with your hands over your ears and remain motionless. Try not to scream or roll around.

I don’t know about you, but when a great big hound comes leaping towards me, I run and scream. Kerim tells me that postmen use a water and ammonia solution to spray a charging dog to disorient it without harming it. Others use pepper spray, though there is controversy whether to use the stream kind or the fog kind. I found other articles on the net, like what the military teaches people, which begins with the reassuring line, “Dog bites hurt.” What I liked the best, however, was reading other biker dog stories from Tyler, Texas, which give you the addresses and descriptions of the dogs and their particular styles of dealing with bicyclists.

Mahasweta Devi gave the inaugural speech at the Franfurt Book Fair. You can read excerpts on Tehelka’s website. Like everything about her, the speech is fearless, eloquent and fierce:

I have said over and over, our Independence was false; there has been no Independence for these dispossessed peoples, still deprived of their most basic rights.

How to save and protect one’s culture in these circumstances? Which culture do we protect? And what do we mean when we speak of Indian culture in the 21st century? What culture? Which India? Sixty years after our hard-won Independence, the khadi sari is India just as the mini skirt and the backless choli is. A bullock cart is India just as much as is the latest Toyota or Mercedes car. Illiteracy haunts us, yet the same India produces men and women at the forefront of medicine, science and technology. Eight-year-old children toil mercilessly, facing unimaginable working conditions and abuse as child labourers. That is India. On the other hand, there is another lot of eight-year-olds who spend their time in air-conditioned classrooms and call their mothers at lunch break using their personal mobile phones. That too is India. Satyam Shivam Sundaram is India. Choli ke peechchey kya hai is also India. The multiplex and the mega mall are India. The snake charmer and the maharishi — they too are India.

I feel luck to have spent a week in her company filming her. It was a privilege.

Filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo died at 86 in Rome on Thursday. Pontecorvo was the director of the amazing, Battle of Algiers, which is about a chapter in the Algerian war of independence from France. This film has a diverse audience (NYT):

“The Battle of Algiers” won the Golden Lion for best film at the 1966 Venice International Film Festival. (Mr. Pontecorvo directed the festival for four years, starting in 1992.) But its legend grew as it was used as a kind of training film by both urban guerrillas and the authorities trying to suppress them. The Black Panthers studied the film in the 1960’s, and in 2003, months after the war against Iraqi insurgents began, the Pentagon screened the film for military and civilian war planners.

Its been interesting looking at what is out there regarding this film. The American Conservative opines:

In Algeria, torture worked. What the film doesn’t show is that in France, though, the public started to lose the stomach for the “necessary consequences.” Alarmed that the politicians might throw away their fallen comrades’ sacrifices, the paratroopers threatened to drop on Paris in May 1958 unless Gen. Charles de Gaulle became France’s strong man.

Once in power, however, that great patriot resolved to cut and run. He had to weather two coup attempts and countless assassination plots, but, minus the Algerian tumor, long-suffering France emerged peaceful, prosperous, and democratic.

Sounds familiar! doesn’t it? Here is a link to Democracy Now’s take on the film and it’s implication for the current war and the role of torture. There is more extensive discussion of the Algerian Revolution and the film at the Monthly Review.

Most of the articles I read, are made uneasy by the fact that Pontecarvo was a member of the Italian Communist Party, and even if they like the film they have a queasy feeling about it. I think the film is a lot more complex and as such its difficult to co-opt it with complete ease by anyone who wants to draw easy lessons for our current dilemmas.

My writer friends google themselves often, mostly to make sure that they are not getting ripped off by companies using their work for commercial gain, or doing unauthorized productions of their plays, and finally to find out which unlikely places they may have turned up in.

Since I am procrastinating instead of editing our documentary, I googled myself and came across the following:

Bikiinimõrvar jääb pikaks ajaks trellide taha

It is a news headline, and the language is Estonian, which took me a while to figure out. It’s a story about Charles Sobhraj, and somewhere in the end it mentions a film by me, I think:

Mees on jõudnud ka filmilinale, sest tema elulugu pakub ainest huvitavale käsikirjale: kümned mõrvad, noored ja imekaunid naised ning julged ja edukad põgenemised maailma eri vanglatest. Nii on India lavastaja Shashwati Talukdar näiteks teinud sarimõrvarist juba kaks filmi.

I don’t know what it means, maybe it just says, “and some idiot Indian filmmaker thinks Sobhraj makes good fodder for films.” I have no way of telling, but it sounds cool to know that I,”näiteks teinud sarimõrvarist juba kaks filmi.”

Update: Language Hat actually owns an Estonian dictionary, and here is what he has to say:

I’m afraid I don’t know Estonian, but I have a small dictionary, which
sheds a bit of light:

Nii [so] on [?] India lavastaja [producer] Shashwati Talukdar näiteks
[for example] teinud [second? another?] sarimõrvarist [serial
killer??] juba [already, yet] kaks [two] filmi [film(s)].

Sari is ’series’ and mõrvar is ‘murderer,’ so I don’t know what else
sarimõrvarist might mean. Make of it what you will!

In 1941, 17 year old Diana Elias was among the 19,000 British civilians captured by the Japanese in Hong Kong for being British. She was interred in Stanley Camp, and was forced to work on the “Railway of Death” between Thailand and Burma.

In 2000, the UK Government announced a compensation of £10,000 to British civilians interred during the war, as a ‘debt of honor.’ However:

Several months after details of the scheme were published, the government decreed that claimants should show a ‘blood link’ with this country

Which disqualified the 83 year old Diana, because her parents are of Indian and Iraqi heritage and she was born in Hong Kong, . Apparently she was British enough to be interred, but not British enough to receive a ‘debt of honor.’ In 2005, she took her case to the Parliamentary Ombudsman and received her compensation. You can listen to Diana on BBC radio regarding the case.
Diana is now pursuing the case in court to get the Ministry of Defense to acknowledge that the blood-link rule is racist, and among other things apologize.

You can read parts of her witness statement here.

After meaning to see it for a year, we finally got a chance to see Good Night, and Good Luck. It was really good– very absorbing and dramatic. And interestingly more like a play than a movie, despite its artful use of archival footage, and good cinematography, which did not treat the scene like a filmed play, but was very much part of the drama in its movement and framing, in short, very cinematic. I suppose the impression of it being a play comes from the action being confined to two or three indoor locations- a TV studio, control room, offices, and a couple’s bedroom, and also the spareness of the narrative, which does not venture into Murrow’s personal life to “explain” his “motivations” and all those pop psychology things most films feel compelled to incorporate. Straithern’s Murrow was quite enigmatic and opaque. Anything personal was given over to the supporting cast, through whom the film showed us the toll McCarthyism, and the general atmosphere of paranoia and distrust took on people’s personal lives and careers.

According to an article in Slate, Murrow’s role in bringing down McCarthy was just one of the strands of the larger story. There were other courageous people who paved the way for Murrow, who came rather late into the game. Whatever the historical lapses of the film, the fact remains that the Red Scare and McCarthyism destroyed many lives and careers, and was a shameful period in American history, which most people seem to have forgotten about.

The film is perhaps more a commentary on our times than an attempt to be a history lesson, which it manages to do rather effectively.