I love encountering Dehradun and Mussoorie in Hindi movies. It is supposed to be this wonderful place where the climate is always exotically cool, and depending on the movie, a destination for the glamorous and rich (Teesri Manzil) or the pure of heart (I can’t think of a movie like that right now) who run through verdant fields. Dehradun is a very nice place, but its not quite the stuff of movie imagination.

The Library Bazar, Mussoorie. Probably from 1917. 10 cm x 15 cm, Chromolithograph (Courtesy Priya Paul Collection and Tasveer Ghar)

I’ve always wondered how it got its reputation. And a few months ago I got the chance to find out. I was asked by Tasveer Ghar, a digital network of popular culture, to write an essay based on materials donated by collector Priya Paul. The collection itself is an embarrassment of riches, but my heart skipped a beat when I saw picture postcards from Mussoorie and Dehradun. Yellow with age, almost a hundred years old, with images of places I have known since I first learned that places have names.

The results of my exploration are up at the Tasveer Ghar site.

Here is a review I did for Shrabani Basu’s Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan for the Sawnet website:

The story of Noor Inayat Khan is a remarkable one. A descendant of Tipu Sultan, Noor’s father was a musician and a Sufi teacher. Her mother was an American from New Mexico, who defied her family to marry the much older Inayat Khan. Noor was the eldest child in this non-traditional household. The Khans lived in Paris, where Noor went to the local school, while her father and uncles ran the Sufi Order International and gave music performances.

Noor might have become a leading author and illustrator of children’s stories, when history intervened, and she became a radio operator working for the British secret service in World War II.

Shrabani Basu’s ‘Spy Princess’ is a meticulously researched biography of this World War II heroine. Basu takes care to not make any claims she can’t back up with documentary evidence. She is very careful to avoid exoticizing Noor as some sort of a Mata Hari figure of popular imagination. Using papers that were declassified in 2003 and Noor’s personal papers, Basu sticks to the facts. At times, this can make for some dry prose. However, Noor herself is a heroine to the writer, who sees her as a brave and gentle soul who followed the dictates of her conscience. This creates an interesting tension in the writing. On one hand it almost reads like the research notes of a diligent graduate student– quite often we find out the exact date and wording of a banal memo, coupled with hagiographic asides about Noor’s patriotic feelings. This has a curiously flattening effect, especially in the first part of the book which deals with Noor’s childhood and adolescence. We get the relevant facts about the Inayat Khans and Noor, but it doesn’t add up to a complete picture. One senses that the Inayat Khans are a brilliant family who have to deal with an uncertain financial situation, and depend on the goodwill of their followers to be able to live. Indeed, their home in Paris, Fazal Manzil was donated to them by a rich Dutch aristocratic follower of the Sufi order. This is not a typical bourgeousie family.

By all accounts, Noor’s family was an unusual one, probably more so by virtue of the era, when a mixed race family of musicians and Sufi teachers must have brought its own baggage of being held in high esteem in some quarters, and viewed with suspicion in others. But its hard to get a sense of what it was like to be such a family in that particular time. Perhaps, in the interest of keeping the book focussed on Noor, Basu does not provide the sort of context which would be required to get such an insight. She performs her role as a writer as one who reports back to us only what she could tangibly observe, rather than as a social scientist who can bring in other strands of knowledge to help us see things in a new way. Or a documentary writer who sticks to the “facts” but nevertheless understands the imperatives of narrative.

In all of this, Noor herself disappears. She emerges more or less a paragon of virtue. A dutiful daughter, loving to a fault; a diligent student with an artistic bent. We don’t really get a sense that she is a complicated person, with contradictions. To be fair, it is hard to get to know Noor, who doesn’t seem to have left too many clues about her internal life. And with so many people who were close to her now dead, it is difficult to actually fathom her motives and feelings. Especially glaring, is the opacity of one of the most important romantic attachments in Noor’s life, to a Romanian Jewish musician and fellow student. The only thing we learn about him is that he had the surname Goldman. Noor’s family disapproved of the relationship and apparently it was a source of great stress to her. Basu is very careful to not say anything that might be construed as being critical about the family, probably in deference to Noor’s brother and nephews who made their family papers available to her. So the tone of the writing may be very objective, but it ends up not being very revealing.

The book picks up during the war years. The writers fondness for bureaucratic minutae serve the book well when describing the working of the covert Special Operations Executive (SOE). They seem to have left enough of a paper trail to demonstrate their incompetence and amateurishness. If you are fond of reading memos and bureaucratic entries, this section is actually pretty exciting. Through cumulative detail, Basu manages to convey the danger and drudgery of covert operations during the war. She is able to throw into sharp relief Noor’s bravery and intelligence. It seems that though Noor was a talented and smart radio operator, she was not well suited to spy work. She could be careless of her personal safety, was liable to leave her code book lying around, and was hopeless at dealing with the simulated interrogation she was put through. Being a radio operator was one of the most dangerous jobs during the war, since the likelihood of detection was very high. Despite this, the shortage of radio operators in enemy territory prompted the SOE to send Noor to France, before she was quite ready.

Despite her unsuitability to be a spy, Noor performed her duties with success and dedication. In the end, she was betrayed to the Gestapo. Noor tried to escape on several occasions and was ultimately deported to Dachau. After suffering the horrors of solitary confinement, being chained, starved and beaten, Noor was executed in 1944.

Noor Inayat Khan is a difficult subject. She remains elusive, all we are left of her are a mosaic of details that hopefully focus into a gestalt.

My grandparents, for some reason saved their copies of the Illustrated Weekly from the fifties onwards. They only stopped saving them during the Emergency in the mid-seventies, the censorship of that era probably made the gesture meaningless. We spent our winter holidays at their home in Allahabad, and I would spend hours leafing through those old magazines. Which is how I found out about the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971, years after the fact. From the BBC:

The crisis was precipitated when East Pakistanis (who later became Bangladeshis) voted overwhelmingly in favour of autonomy and West Pakistan responded by sending in its army.

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, including Hindus, political activists, intellectuals and students. The Pakistani army carried out “collective punishment” where they suspected villagers of helping the freedom fighters.

Thousands of women were raped, millions fled into India. Bangladeshis say the killings amounted to a genocide and that three million people died.

Sometimes one can pin-point the exact moment one’s sense of self and the world changes irrevocably. Reading about that war was a moment like that. I must have been about ten, and it dawned on me that the world could be an anonymously cruel place. I did not know what the words ‘rape’ or ‘massacre’ meant, but it didn’t matter. The horror of 1971 was hard-wired into my brain.

I had an occasion to recall that feeling on reading about an effort in Bangladesh to prosecute perpetrators of the atrocities for war-crimes. One of the main organizations behind this effort is the War Crimes Fact Finding Committee, which is pressuring the Government of Bangladesh to go over its documents, gathered over 19 years and prosecute those responsible. Interestingly, many of the people it wants to be brought to justice are those who collaborated with the Pakistani army in the massacres:

In one of the most notorious incidents of the war, more than 150 academics and journalists (including BBC reporter Nizamuddin Ahmed) were rounded up in Dhaka on the eve of Pakistan’s defeat and killed by members of a group call Al-Badr, which was allegedly made up of members of the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami.

Jamaat-e-Islami is a coalition partner in the present government, so this is a very large skeleton rattling in its cupboard. And true to form, as things go in these circumstances, Dr. Hassan, one of the organizers of the movement, has received death threats for his trouble.

To find out more about this particularly dark period in Bangladesh’s history look at the Bangladesh Genocide Archive. I didn’t quite have the stomach to go through it. Wikipedia has a good entry about the war and its political and cultural context.

The Guardian has an article by Priyamvada Gopal on the troubling tendency of Western liberals to see the fight for gender equality as an exclusive quality of Western civilization, with its corollary — its frequent invocation to justify dubious interventions in the name of saving Brown Women from Brown Men.

The article is a butchered version of the original — all the significant details have been taken out. Read the original underneath:

Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike the occasional story about the last of the Mughals driving a rikshaw in Delhi, and the last of the Romanov’s living in genteel poverty in Coney Island, this one doesn’t reek of melancholy and nostalgia, as much as a prosaic middle-class take-everything-in-your-strideness.

Balthazar Napolean de Bourbon, a lawyer in Bhopal seems to be the next in line to inherit the throne of France. From the Guardian:

Prince Michael of Greece, the cousin of Prince Philip, this week published a historical novel called Le Rajah de Bourbon, which traces the swashbuckling story of Mr Bourbon’s first royal ancestor in India. Prince Michael believes Jean de Bourbon was a nephew of the first Bourbon French king, Henry IV. In the mid-16th century Jean embarked on an action-packed adventure across the world which saw him survive assassination attempts and kidnap by pirates to be sold at an Egyptian slave market and serve in the Ethiopian army.

In 1560, he turned up at the court of the Mogul emperor Akbar. It was the beginning of a long line of Bourbons in India, who centuries later would serve as the administrators of Bhopal and become the second most important family in the region.

These days the Bourbons live a respectable middle class life and the very down to earth Mr. Bourbon:

….is aware that his family’s fortunes waned in Bhopal long ago. He describes the Indian branch of the family as Bourbons on the rocks.

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….

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.

Today is the anniversary of the massacre in 1941 at Babii Yar, near Kiev. Here is a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko about the event. I especially like the italicized lines (mine), about the monuments that nature builds when societies refuse to acknowledge the history in their midst. It reminds me of the poetry of Night and Fog. I am not too keen on the line about the “Philistines” considering where that sort of thing has led us, but the poem is worth reading nonetheless.

Babii Yar

No monument stands over Babii Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.
I am afraid.
Today I am as old in years
as all the Jewish people.
Now I seem to be
a Jew.
Here I plod through ancient Egypt.
Here I perish crucified, on the cross,
and to this day I bear the scars of nails.
I seem to be
Dreyfus.
The Philistine
is both informer and judge.
I am behind bars.
Beset on every side.
Hounded,
spat on,
slandered.
Squealing, dainty ladies in flounced Brussels lace
stick their parasols into my face.
I seem to be then
a young boy in Byelostok.
Blood runs, spilling over the floors.
The bar-room rabble-rousers
give off a stench of vodka and onion.
A boot kicks me aside, helpless.
In vain I plead with these pogrom bullies.
While they jeer and shout,
“Beat the Yids. Save Russia!”
some grain-marketeer beats up my mother.
O my Russian people!
I know
you
are international to the core.
But those with unclean hands
have often made a jingle of your purest name.
I know the goodness of my land.
How vile these antisemites–
without a qualm
they pompously called themselves
“The Union of the Russian People”!
I seem to be
Anne Frank
transparent
as a branch in April.
And I love.
And have no need of phrases.
My need
is that we gaze into each other.
How little we can see
or smell!
We are denied the leaves,
we are denied the sky.
Yet we can do so much–
tenderly
embrace each other in a dark room.
They’re coming here?
Be not afraid. those are the booming
sounds of spring:
spring is coming here.
Come then to me.
Quick, give me your lips.
Are they smashing down the door?
No, it’s the ice breaking…
The wild grasses rustle over Babii Yar.
The trees look ominous,
like judges.
Here all things scream silently,
and, baring my head,
slowly I feel myself
turning gray.
And I myself
am one massive, soundless scream
above the thousand thousand buried here.
I am
each old man
here shot dead.
I am
every child
here shot dead.
Nothing in me
shall ever forget!
The “Internationale”, let it
thunder
when the last antisemite on earth
is buried forever.
In my blood there is no Jewish blood.
In their callous rage, all antisemites
must hate me now as a Jew.
For that reason
I am a true Russian!

(Translated by George Reavey)

About 30,000 Jews were killed over a period of 48 hours in the ravine of Babii Yar, and later 60,000 Roma, Soviet POWs and other “undesirables” were slaughtered at the same spot.

I suppose the poem could work just as well for Delhi 1984 and Gujarat 2002.