Indian Writing

Via BitchPhD, this hilarious post at The Little Professor:

3. I’m terribly, terribly unhappy, because
- I thought life after tenure would be bliss, and it’s just the same-old, same-old
- my colleagues fail to appreciate my scintillating qualities
- there’s a poststructuralist/Marxist/cultural materialist/New Historicist/Lacanian/ deconstructionist/other in my department
- there isn’t a poststructuralist/Marxist/cultural materialist/New Historicist/Lacanian/ deconstructionist/other in my department
- there are politics! in academia!
- if I had been born fifty years ago, there would have been no politics! in academia!
- if I had been born fifty years ago, there would have been my kind of politics! in academia!
- academic work isn’t all about Twoo Wuv for your subject
- people are so mean to me
- students don’t appreciate all the effort I put into teaching them…

Why is it such a big deal to yield
to a woman like me
who lets others cut her off on the roads…

And meanwhile, the UN calls for a three-day truce to allow children, the elderly and the disabled to be evacuated.

Rushdie and Greer are rowing again, this time over the filming of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.

Greer had written, bizarrely, that “the community has the moral right to keep the film-makers out” - though she added, quickly enough, that they didn’t have the right to complain if the film was made on some other location presented as Brick Lane.

Here’s Rushdie’s characteristic response:

Germaine Greer’s article (G2, July 24) about the proposed filming of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane is a strange mixture of ignorance (she actually believes that this is the first novel to portray London’s Bangladeshi community, and doesn’t know that many Brick Lane Asians are in favour of the filming); pro-censorship twaddle (no, people do not have the “moral right” to prevent the making of a film simply because they have decided in advance that they will not like it); and ad-feminam sneers about Monica Ali. Her support of the attack on this film project is philistine, sanctimonious and disgraceful, but it is not unexpected. As I well remember, she has done this before…

To say that local residents have the right to be upset about their portrayal in the media is one thing; to say that anyone representing a “community” has the right to hinder the free speech of writers and film companies and enflame considerable tension, is quite another. There is no basis for it in philosophy or law, and it is no foundation for a healthy pluralistic society. Besides, it’s absurd to say that Monica Ali can’t tell this story because she’s not sufficiently one of them. Who hands out licences to multicultural storytellers? Not Germaine Greer, surely.

The film is an extension of that success, but for the community it is another reminder of how they are so often portrayed as a negative, narrow minded, uneducated and backward community. The fact that this is an imaginary novel does not help: the film will be seen and taken by people to reflect some elements of reality. This is where the community feels their lifestyle, their persons and their whole culture is being derided. Ms Ali has the right to freedom of expression and the film makers have the right to make a film but the community has the right to feel offended and organise protests, especially if the filming is going to be done on their doorstep….

My previous posts here and here.

The August issue of Himal is up. Much to linger over, including Sukumar Muralidharan’s essay on the ToI strategy:

..by 1994 the TOI had long since internalised the most significant rule of competition. Simply put, the advertiser was king, and the readership, no longer a burden to be borne, a distant abstraction with little immediacy to the newspaper except as a shopping entity..

The irony is that the threat to security from censorious religious groups is the threat they themselves pose. It is hard to understand why the religious groups responsible for fomenting riots against offensive works are not being prosecuted, and in their places are writers, artists and filmmakers.

It is impossible to believe that a city with real heart would allow 60 percent of its residents (that’s more than seven million people) to live in slums. If India’s most affluent city really had a soul, it would not countenance the inequalities that allow children in the shanties to grow up malnourished…

And this piece by me on some of the documentaries on the city, most recently Madhushree Datta’s “Seven Islands and a Metro”:

One image from Datta’s film comes to mind, that of small, stamp-sized photographs floating in water. Although perhaps a clunky image, it is all the more evocative after the recent train blasts in Bombay. Life seems so fragile in this city by the sea, where six million people travel in the suburban trains every day, clinging on by their fingers, occasionally falling, some dying while crossing the tracks. Inside the cars, they travel tightly packed – some become friends, singing bhajans, sharing intimate family stories, even cutting vegetables. When there is a crisis, they rush to help each other. Other days, the moment they separate, they atomise into the city, as people of different classes, genders, ethnicities, eating habits, smells and stories.

How nice, to be a tubli person:

Estonians are generally not very outspoken in offering praise or recognition of others’ achievements, but one utterly complimentary attribute can be heard from their lips almost every day: the word tubli. This adjective of wide and flexible application can express a range of positive personal qualities and behaviours - from “goodâ€?, “orderlyâ€?, “strongâ€?, “capableâ€?, “hard-workingâ€?, “persistentâ€?, and “productiveâ€?, to “setting an example or model to othersâ€?, “behaving properlyâ€?, or “having will-powerâ€?.

This small Baltic nation’s Finno-Ugric tongue has a rich folklore in which tubli features prominently. One proverb emphasises perhaps the word’s most important aspect, work: Tublidus ei tule tööta, osavus ei hooleta (Being tubli will not come without work, nor skill without care).

A forum on the case of Juan Cole. Weighing in are academic bloggers Siva Vaidyanathan, Daniel Drezner, Michael Berube,Ann Althouse, Glenn Reynolds, Bradford DeLong, and Erin O’Connor.

Cole’s response here:

The question is whether Web-log commentary helps or damages an academic’s career. It is a shameful question. Intellectuals should not be worrying about “careers,” the tenured among us least of all. Despite the First Amendment, which only really protects one from the government, most Americans who speak out can face sanctions from other institutions in society. Journalists are fired all the time for taking the wrong political stance. That is why most bloggers employed in the private sector are anonymous or started out trying to be so….

I am a Middle East expert. I lived in the area for nearly 10 years, speak several of its languages, and have given my life to understanding its history and culture. Since September 11, 2001, my country has been profoundly involved with the region, both negatively and positively. Powerful economic and political forces in American society would like to monopolize the discourse on these matters for the sake of their own interests, which may not be the same as the interests of those of us in the general public. Obviously, such forces will attempt to smear and marginalize those with whom they disagree. Before the Internet, they might have had an easier time of it. Being in the middle of all this, trying to help mutual understanding, is what I trained for. Should I have been silent, published only years later in stolid academic prose in journals locked up in a handful of research libraries? And this for the sake of a “career”?…

The disparity in pay between men and women has been narrowing, but equal pay is still some time away… about 150 years, that is, according to this report by the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), at the London School of Economics. It’s not only because women have babies and take time off from their careers to bring up the children (though there’s that too, and society really needs to come up with more flexible working practices as well as fairer ways of sharing home responsibilities). There’s also this:

The report on women’s salaries found that even those who worked full-time and did not take career breaks would earn 12 per cent less than their male counterparts after ten years.

Near the beginning of Vikram Chandra’s new book, someone asks Sartaj Singh, a police officer, whether he believes in God. Sacred Games, Chandra’s third book, is the answer to that question. No wonder it took over seven years to write.

Sartaj Singh is the weary, all too human Sikh police officer who first appeared in Chandra’s short story “Kama” in the collection Love and Longing in Bombay. In that story, Sartaj is tough but also thoughtful and occasionally vulnerable - the rare kind of character who seems to have many stories inside him, and whom one hopes to meet again in another book. In the story, during one of their quarrels, Sartaj’s wife tells him that his face is like that of a terrorist. “I hate the world you live in,” she says before leaving him. Sartaj thinks of replying that it’s her world too, that he lives in the parts she doesn’t see and that he lives there for her sake. But he remains silent.

In “Kama”, the police officer was dealing with the demands of a changing city. “Bombay was never like this,” says Sartaj’s boss at one point in the story. Sartaj shrugs: “It’s a new world.”

In mid-2006, it’s a new world again in Mumbai. On 11 July this year, a series of bomb explosions in the commuter trains at rush hour claimed nearly 200 lives and left the city in shock.

Sacred Games is a contemporary epic of Mumbai, a cocktail of organised crime, politics and religion. Sartaj Singh reappears in this novel. He is now in his forties, his marriage long over, his mind tired as he goes after an underworld gangster, Ganesh Gaitonde. The novel charts the individual journeys of the two men, interweaving their lives.