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.

Kerim has a post on Savage Minds about the Gujjars and the recent violence in Rajasthan.

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 »

After thinking about it for 22 years, a declaration on the rights of indigenous people was approved by the United Nations. Global Voices has a round up of all the blogs that have covered it. Sadly, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have voted against it.

This American Life did a show back in June about Deception. The second story (24 minutes into the show) is about an upper middle class African American Lawyer who worked in a country club in Greenwich, Connecticut, as a bus boy. That was the only way they were going to admit him. Its a fascinating story in its horribleness. The funny thing is, its really hard to understand what era these people belong to, they sound so 19th century. Unfortunately, the reality is, its our own. And these people are hardly an exotic sub-species, they probably own everything and we can thank them for our lousy jobs.

See Dilip D’Souza’s post on the latest attack on Taslima Nasrin. As usual “religious sentiments have been hurt” is being handed out as so much stale mithai, and as Dilip points out, it has an eery resemblance to recent events in Baroda. This shameful episode is rightly being condemned widely, however, with certain qualifiers:

“The government should immediately cancel her visa and make her go out of the country,” he said adding, “she should realise that this is not Bangladesh or Pakistan, but India where the sentiments of all communities are respected”.(Delhi Minorities Commission Chairperson Kamal Farooqui)

And further:

No doubt Taslima Nasrin’s penchant to flirt with the religious sentiment of the Islamic community and her outright defense of right to indulge in sex outside marriage is not less outrageous as such ideas in print form only contribute to pollute the purity of the general mind to a larger extent.

Taslima Nasrin makes everybody uncomfortable. There are those who are complaining that “secularists have double standards because they are not doing dharnas.” Which, as Amardeep points out doesn’t seem to be completely true. And others who are annoyed with her because it makes Muslims look bad in the eyes of the West (look what you are making the crazy mullahs do, stop writing this sh!t already) because:

If Taslima is all about this major literary voice being stilled, why is it that very little analysis is being done of her writings? Why is she always in the news for a perspective other than one of literary or ethical significance? Even when she wrote an autobiographical account in which several writers and political figures were mentioned, not for their role in damaging society but for sleeping with her, she was harping on freedom of speech.

A former professor, Shohini Ghosh, has an article, Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms (its a pdf download) in the Sarai Reader. The article was written in response to the West Bengal Government’s ban on Nasrin’s autobiography in 2003, and is about the “critical overlap between hate speech and sexual speech.” She points out how Taslima’s writing are neither “traditionally feminine nor desirable by Bengali canonical standards.” And how, “too much sexual agency deserves to be punished.” It points out how sexual stigma is used in hate campaigns. It leaves one with a chilling sense of the implications of these various forms of moral policing that are being advocated.

If you have been following the immigration debate, you might know that the DREAM Act is one of the provisions that applies to young people who came here with their parents. It essentially allows these kids to have a fair chance to compete with every one else for access to education and jobs.

My colleague Theresa Thanjan and I have made a music video for a song written by a couple of kids about the DREAM Act.

Some of the stories about these young people are just heartbreaking. This American Life has a story about one such girl who is struggling to get an education.

To get involved, get in touch with New York State Youth Leadership Council.

So said director Mike Figgis when he landed in Los Angeles airport. This got him a five hour interrogation by Homeland Security.

I thought everyone in LA had a script for a movie or TV show sitting in their sock drawer, so how could the officers not know a pilot is a TV term. Besides, Figgis is white, without a generally non-white sounding name like Cat Stevens’ (Yousuf Islam), so I am surprised he got pulled aside at all.

 Update: Turns out the story is untrue (Boing Boing). Well, well, well. Now I almost wish the story was true, begging the pardon of Mr. Figgis.

I haven’t seen too much discussion about this on the blogs, I guess people get tired of getting hate mail from the SS (Saffron Sympathizers). I am assuming most people have heard of the arrest of MS University Art student, Chandra Mohan who seems to have simultaneously offended the self-appointed protectors of Hindu and Christian sentiments, with his MFA thesis paintings:

A group of VHP activists led by Niraj Jain, an advocate and a local VHP leader, barged into the university campus at around 3.30 pm on Wednesday, when the internal evaluation of the student works was being held. They allegedly manhandled Mohan and hurled abuses at the faculty members and other students.

They had tipped off the local police who were soon at the spot and took Mohan into custody, as he was ‘a threat to the secular atmosphere of Baroda’.

Yes, you heard right, the saffron shirts barge into a university examination, not open to the public, rough up people, and the victim gets arrested.

The dean, Shivji Panniker would like to file a complaint against the attack, instead he has been suspended by the vice chancellor of the university who apparently apologized to the attacker. The students have responded by arranging an exhibition of religious art, and the faculty has released a press release in support of Chandra Mohan and the dean.

The latest news is that Chandra Mohan has been denied bail, and the Rev Immanuel Kant (does the man know he shares his name with an Enlightenment philosopher?) is planning a rally to protest Chandra Mohan’s depiction of Jesus.

I haven’t found any images of the offending paintings, but MS University has one of the top Art departments in the country, and from what I have seen of the work of their students and faculty, its a well deserved reputation. So its hard for me to believe that the student’s work is simply crude and aimed at being offensive.
Still, I would be willing to accommodate Jain’s assessment that these paintings are offensive if I could actually believe that the man is a competent art critic. But given similar brouhahas in the past, I am not so sure. Remember the whole anti-Hussein protest last year? Here is an example of one of the paintings that was being protested. The caption on the web page says: Goddess Durga in the nude having sexual intercourse with a tiger. I looked at this picture for a long time and just couldn’t see it as such, a rather tired reference to Cubism, but intercourse? Nope. I guess you need to have a dirty mind to see it. (See the whole series and what is supposedly objectionable about them here)

Update: The Fine Arts faculty at MS University has a blog with updates and links.

2nd Update: Here is a video of the incident (via Chapati Mystery)

I had blogged Lord Macauley’s birthday celebration a couple of days ago; An occasion where a portrait of Goddess English was unveiled. As a result of that post, the organizer, Chandrabhan Prasad very kindly e-mailed me an image of this fantastic portrait by Shant Swaroop Baudha.

In his e-mail Prasad said:

Will the future generations of Dalits/Adivasis fit into a world shaped by their own Goddess? The answer is a clear NO. The remedy for that NO is to accept the Goddess in Her entirety – and become English speaking at the earliest.

Goddess English is all about emancipation. Goddess English is a mass movement against the Caste Order, against linguistic evils such as Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telgu and Bangla for instance. Indian languages as more about prejudices, discrimination and hatred and less about expressions and communications.

I don’t know if I would characterize Hindi and Marathi as linguistic evils, but I couldn’t agree more about the importance of learning an international language.

Anything that will be a step towards stopping another Kherlanji from occurring again is welcome.