Falling Behind - Durgapur, New York

A year has now gone by since my daughter was born. It is as good an excuse as any to take stock, since she is growing up in a place that I cannot stop regarding with extreme ambivalence. It is a place where strangers become familiar and family, inevitably, is a little strange. So this will be a little essay about immigration and procreation, and about children and parents in provincial towns and the world city.

Of the various cities where I have lived, New York is not the ugliest. It comes close, but there are saving graces like Prospect Park and the view of the sunset from my rooftop. The climate is miserable for half the year, and the nearest wilderness is the state of New Jersey: there is no desert, no mountains. But fall is wonderful and even the summer has its sweaty pleasures, like endless evenings of ice clinking in a glass while a breeze comes in off the Hudson. The people suck very badly. Not only do they resemble an assortment of raccoons and possums, they are sullen, abrasive and unintelligent. (The check-out girls in the grocery stores are the best examples. Every encounter leaves me awestruck.) The native accents – by which I mean the Bugs Bunny speech of old Brooklynites, and the many variations on Rosie Perez that one hears in Queens – are particularly grating. Traffic is horrible; I can think of no silver lining there. New Yorkers are not only the worst drivers in America, it has never occurred to them that gridlock, rampant double-parking and lanes with no shoulders call for small vehicles, not SUVs. I would not willingly own a car in this city, and have long since fallen behind in my knowledge of cars. Cars are another life that doesn’t matter anymore. (It amazes me that at one point in my life, back when I was a Californian, I knew the number of g-forces that any new car could sustain when cornering, and planned life accordingly.)

But my corner of Brooklyn – Greenwood Heights, now rapidly being absorbed into Park Slope – is also the closest thing to a neighborhood that I have known in thirty years. On the ten-minute walk from my home to the gym, I can count on being greeted by at least five neighbors: first, the motorcycle enthusiast sitting in his garage fondling his latest acquisition, then the legless man on his porch just around the corner, then the Algerian brothers hanging out in the doorway of their shop, then the homeless guy in the park (who has survived, against all odds, through winter after winter), then the old lady with the sweet-faced beagle at the corner of 7^th and Windsor. If I walk in the other direction towards the bars on 5^th Avenue or the cafes on 6th, I walk past two friendly off-duty bartenders before I have gone three blocks. (Alas, I know their names, and they know me.)

Coming to New York was the climax of a long expansion. Durgapur, the city where I lived until I was fourteen, was in some ways an Indian version of Mayberry (or an Americanized Malgudi), albeit with three hundred thousand people. People knew each other, it was impossible to get lost without being quickly found and returned to your owner, and children lived in cocoons of total safety and familiarity. Neighborhoods – a series of orderly company townships – were absolutely stable: nobody moved away unless somebody died, nobody thought seriously about changing jobs. Our mothers had known our friends since the latter were babies and continued to be feared by the ex-babies. To misappropriate a German word, our world was relentlessly gemütlich: cozy. The fathers all worked for the organizations that went into the alphabet soup of Indian industry: DSP, ASP, DVC, AVB, CMERI, DPL, DTPS, FCI, PCBL, MAMC. They came from similar middle-class, engineering backgrounds. There was no great wealth or poverty. Within a limited range of variations, their salaries were similar: enough for comfortable lives of modest desires in an economy that prioritized steel plants and research laboratories over TV sets. We had a car, but it was twenty years old. Nobody that I knew had a new one. It was all distinctly Indian and quite novel. Our parents came from all over the India and spoke many different languages, but the children all spoke a relaxed mix of English, Hindi and Bengali. The older ones knew some Punjabi obscenities, and it left us with the idea that Punjabi is fundamentally obscene.

There was never any question in anybody’s mind that the shape of our lives was temporary. Durgapur was a place of transience, where one grew up and then left:  a cocoon for Nehru’s fantastic awake-at-midnight butterflies, dusted with industrial pollution. The Mayberry-ness of it was deceptive, but it was romantic all the same. Nehru aside, our cultural-historical parents were the American New Dealers: the men who dreamed up the Tennessee Valley Authority (that inspired the Damodar Valley Corporation, which, along with steel, was the bedrock of Durgapur), and Joseph Allen Stein, the socialist architect who fell in love with Nehru and became an improvised Indian. Stein was a Midwesterner, a San Franciscan and a New Yorker who went east in 1952, looking for a frontier. How can I not be fond of him? His footprints are not famous buildings in New York City, but the Steel Township in Durgapur, and subsequently, the India International Centre and Habitat Centre in New Delhi. We walked in those footprints. Our parents were not fanatics but they were not cynics either: they took nation-building seriously. It was the same in the other sooty cities that came up in twentieth-century India: Rourkela, Bhilai, Bokaro, Jamshedpur, Chittaranjan, Chandigarh. Emblems of the nation of science and socialism, we were simultaneously cosmopolitan and insular: startling novelty, sleepily going nowhere. One would have to look at the Soviet Union to find another example of this kind of urbanity.

It is, of course, possible and even likely that these places never existed. There can be no doubt that the classless world of engineers was an elaborate fantasy, in which the underclass was only better hidden, more effectively tucked away, than in older Indian cities. And no doubt our parents lived with anxieties and terrors that belied their modest-but-comfortable salaries, and of which the children were only dimly aware, if at all. Later on, in the final stages, there were whispers of broken marriages and drug addiction. Whenever I have returned to Durgapur, I have wanted to run away as fast as possible: appalled by the sprawl, depressed by the overwhelming shabbiness, disconcerted by the gap – and also the proximity – between what I remembered and what I was seeing. Yet, objectively, the place is bigger, richer, more thriving now than ever before. There are shopping malls and multiplexes. I have never been able to decide whether the apparent shabbiness is a real consequence of congestion and decay, the eating away of the city’s remaining open spaces, or merely in my head: the shock of confronting childhood retrospectively. A bit of both, probably.

When people who begin in such places end up in New York, it is the closing of a circle. It surprises me to realize that some of the kids I had known in kindergarten, or in the fifth grade, in that dusty nowhereland are now on the other side of the planet but still on the same side as me, a short subway ride away. We can face each other over a beer in lower Manhattan, almost overwhelmed by this circle-closing business. ‘I remember this banker from when we were nine years old in a town where our parents were pioneers. Almost everyone that I knew, he knew also.’ But more than that there is a sense of inevitability about it. The expanded world – the process of growing up cosmopolitan – has collapsed back upon itself. Once again, I am a non-driver. Once again, the comfort zone of everyday life is an intimate circle of neighborhood parks and rooftops, living-room sofa and local pub, uncles and aunties who never seem to move a yard. But that restless old desire to get out, to find someplace bigger, to seek out strangers, has more or less gone away. There is no place to live that is bigger and more filled with strangers than New York City. If Durgapur was a place to grow up, New York is a place where one can die, more or less content.

For that reason, parallels between growing up in a Nehruvian backwater and growing up in New York can only be metaphorical: the bad poetry of middle-aged nostalgia. Falling behind is what is real, but so is the impossibility of going back. Here at the center of the world, Mira will acquire a kind of provinciality, barely suspecting the existence of margins – which are also lost centers – where children saw letters like CMERI and DVC as the natural building blocks of cities and lives. It will be very hard for her to imagine Stein standing on a dimly lit railway platform in the middle of the jungle, dreaming of socialist traffic circles.

And then there is the matter of language. What languages will Mira speak? English, of course, and perhaps some Spanish or French. Some German, if I can swing it. She will probably avoid the fate of talking like Bugs Bunny and, with a bit of luck, Rosie Perez. But it is unlikely that she will have more than a smattering of Bengali or Hindi. She will almost certainly never be proficient in literary Bengali, or appreciate the humor of the minefield where the literary meets the colloquial, or be able to tell the difference between ghoti and bangal. Nor will she have that marvelous ability to improvise continuously and switch in mid-sentence, without effort or deliberation, between Bengali, English and Urdu.

Who has fallen behind here? Who will have lost something? Not Mira – just the father. The children of immigrants ‘lose’ their parents’ languages, but because the languages are not their own, they miss nothing. There is, at most, a mild regret that can be made good in college. Even parents don’t feel the loss equally or predictably. There is no shortage of middle-class Indian immigrants in America who speak to their children only in English, as if the little buggers might not learn English otherwise. This is understandable when the parents come from different Indian states and English is their shared language, but when we are talking about two Bengali parents, or two Hindi-speaking parents, I find it almost inexplicable, and I must admit, perverse. The only explanation that comes to mind is that language, as a source of self-hood, is not especially important to these people.

If that is granted, then a certain logic becomes discernible. Among Indians who become NRIs (the fabled Non-Resident Indian, which is not just a signifier of ethnicity-in-emigration but a middle- and upper-class condition to be found exclusively in high-value destinations like North America, Britain and Australia), language comes loose from identity even without emigration. It is quite common to find children in India who call their parents ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ (or even ‘Pop’). The phenomenon is particularly widespread in the Hindi belt of northern India, where words like ‘Pitaji,’ ‘Abba’ and even ‘Ma’ have been consigned to obsolescence. This is not entirely new: two generations ago there was ‘Mummy' and 'Daddy.’ But it is not entirely old either. Mummy and Daddy have seeped downwards from the elites of society to the aspirational middle class, i.e., to people who used to say ‘Amma’ and ‘Abba.’ Our parents spoke to us in Bengali, or Tamil, or Kannada, albeit sprinkled with English words and phrases.  Yet on every trip to India, in shops and restaurants, I encounter perfectly ordinary families in which parents routinely speak to their young children in English. When these classes reproduce in North America, they see no reason to do things differently. My point is that they are simply continuing to be Indian, not being overly American. And since this is an Indian norm, I cannot deny that I have fallen behind.

Why this Mom-and-Pop nonsense should be more prevalent in the Hindi belt than, say, in Bengal or Tamil Nadu, I do not know. It could be that in spite of years of huffing and puffing on the part of the chauvinists of the rashtrabhasha, Hindi never made the grade as a source of cultural prestige. But it is probably true that for people who grow up at ‘home,’ so to speak, identity is assured in so many ways that particular ways – like the notion of a mother-tongue – become dispensable.

For people who leave ‘home’ in the formative moment of adolescence – children whose sense of home is disrupted by emigration – language is absolutely and obsessively vital. In North America and Britain, it is an escape, an armor and a weapon in a daily race war. And like houses and cities that were abandoned before they were fully discovered, language becomes both dreamlike and very real: something to revisit constantly, to re-explore, to reinvent. These explorations produce the stuff of who we are: neither quite like the children with whom we went to kindergarten, nor exactly like the grown-ups amongst whom we live.

Mira will not be entirely free of these concerns. Already the color of her skin is a topic of conversation: my relatives mutter about how light she is, people on her mother’s side mutter about how dark. But in New York City, where light brown is the norm, nobody will bat an eye. Departure and arrival – something as mundane as a walk through an airport – will not be fraught with issues of loss, acquisition, and the suspect nature of memory and reality. Nobody – except I – will care whether she speaks Bengali or not, whether she has access to the houses and cities of her father’s youth. And it is my caring that gives the game away: I am slightly behind the times, and the lag gets longer with every passing year. Introducing Indian movies at the ongoing film festival at my college, I am less sure of myself, more out of my depth, the closer the films get to the present time. (Not a good predicament for a historian, I admit.) I find A.R. Rehman’s music highly overrated. I am bored by the present generation of Indian cricketers, and the prevalence of corporate-speak in Indian culture – the casual use of words like ‘brand’ and ‘equity’ – makes my skin crawl.

Let me summon up some literary support for what I am trying to say. In The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie outlined a distinction between immigrants and exiles. Immigrants are both transformational and transformed by movement, Rushdie suggested. Exiles are fossils and madmen, clinging – often violently – to what they imagine to be the changeless universe of the homes they have left but not abandoned. Rushdie left little doubt about which type he preferred, and I agree with him. But what makes The Satanic Verses a great novel, I think, is the implication that immigrants are transformed in ways that are misaligned with where they are, as well as with where they once were. Their destinations are always slippery and insufficiently acquired, they fall behind the cities that may never have existed, they fall behind their own children, and the struggle to keep up is exhausting and futile. My daughter will be not be ‘like’ me any more than I am ‘like’ my former or present countrymen. As soon as we are past the baby-talk, language will prove to be as much a chasm as it can be a bridge, unable to communicate the essential melancholy of the half-remembered smell of burning leaves on an autumn afternoon, or the echoing sound of a playing field in the twilight. But she has begun to call me Baba, and that is something.

October 20, 2012

Hitler in India

The fashion potential of the Nazis has been undeniable from the outset. Hugo Boss knew it, Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl recognized it, and glamorous Englishmen from David Bowie to the current princelings have shown their appreciation. Americans have been resistant (except in prison wards and Idaho), but recently in India, in Ahmedabad of all places, a shiny new store named after Adolf opened its doors, the ‘i’ in the ‘Hitler’ dotted cleverly with a small swastika. (It cannot be pretended that this is the innocent Hindu swastika, although that cover can of course be utilized if necessary.) Hitler does not sell storm-trooper uniforms, jackboots or even armbands. It sells run-of-the-mill menswear to well-heeled men in the ‘best governed state in India.’ (A brown shirt or two can probably be found on the racks.) Nevertheless, Ahmedabad’s tiny Jewish community has protested, reporters have shown up with cameras, the Israeli embassy in Delhi has made some very mild unhappy noises, and the proprietor has issued a decidedly unapologetic defense.

What the gentleman said boils down to this: only a few Jews are complaining, ‘the Hindu majority’ doesn’t seem to have a problem (so what’s your beef?), and besides, Hitler wasn’t all that bad. He was being a bit brazen, no doubt, but not all that unusual in the middle-class Indian context, where a casual fondness for the Führer has long been evident. ‘I have read his autobiography and agree with a lot of what he wrote,’ declared another businessman-admirer recently. Mein Kampf is sold openly in sidewalk bookstalls all over India, and it’s certainly possible – although unlikely – that the man, carried away by his fascination with interwar German angst, actually read the whole thing in its tedious entirety.  A German friend who teaches Indian history is regularly confronted, during visits to India, by people who declare their admiration of Hitler and congratulate him on his good fortune at being the great man’s compatriot. My friend is married to a woman with an Indian parent, has blond children with Indian names, and lives in kick-out-the-black-sheep Switzerland, so he has enough on his plate without being asked to raise his arm in Aryan solidarity. He is more polite than I would be in his shoes. Taking umbrage and responding with ‘Sala, fuck you,’ would be unbecoming of a research scholar in a foreign country, and like most other Germans, he makes an earnest attempt to explain that Hitler was a bad guy.

But is that explanation really necessary? The answer, in the Indian case, is yes and no. That Hitler killed a lot of people is known to Indians who know his name. But the details, the context and the history are typically a blank. Moreover, it is known (as Justice Radhabinod Pal noted in his dissent at the Tokyo war crimes trials) that history and its judgments are the discourses of victors. And since the victors in this case are also the colonial powers from whose grasp modern India emerged, the history that declares Hitler to be a bad guy is automatically suspect, something to defy along with tut-tutting foreign reporters. What become more vital are Hitler’s credentials as an enemy of Britain, which in the absence of credible history are easily construed as a kind of anti-colonialism. Indian nationalism, like many other anti-colonial nationalist movements (including, ironically, the Zionist) flirted more or less openly with Germany and Japan during the war, and that rationale – with its mixture of delusion and canny opportunism – remains alive.

Beyond that, however, the substance of Indian Hitlerphilia becomes unreliable and thin. The ideological foundations are either missing or very different. There is no recognizable anti-Semitism in India; most Indians couldn’t care less about Jews one way or the other. They neither hate them nor feel guilty about them. They usually don’t know any personally either, since there are about five thousand Jews in all of India, give or take a ‘lost tribe’ in Mizoram. Indians think about Jews as often as they do about Kung ‘bushmen’ in the Kalahari. There is nothing strange in this: how many Americans, or Germans for that matter, spend time thinking about the Kung or the Herero, or even about Europe’s own Roma and Sinti? There is nothing automatic or natural about the status of history’s victims: it must be achieved politically. The notion that anti-Semitism is a ‘universal’ problem that everybody should prioritize merely reflects a larger hegemony. Anti-Semitism is Europe’s misfortune: a problem within a specific arrangement of culture, religion and race.

It can be argued that everybody should know about the Holocaust, or that one should not have to be a Jew or a Gypsy to recoil from mass murderers, but mass murder is so ubiquitous in the history of the modern world that there is no space in a ‘world history’ textbook to include every episode, and to reject all the murderers on principle would be to call into question the organization of the world itself. Even Gandhi, who was ready to ask such questions, and who counted Jews among his most intimate partners, knew practically nothing about the Holocaust, which led him to make idiotic remarks about the Jewish predicament in wartime Europe. In the brief moment between the end of the war and his death, with political disaster and mass killing creeping over India, Gandhi could hardly be expected to pay much attention to a European catastrophe, yet he could not ignore it either. In such circumstances, parochialism, ignorance and stupidity become normative responses to ‘world history.’ It is more embarrassing for people in the ‘Third World’ than it is for Europeans and Americans, because whereas the latter are not expected to know anything about Third World catastrophes and hence have no obligation to respond, the former cannot remain untouched by Western history and must improvise responses, especially if they are to count as modern and worldly.

The opening of the shop called Hitler reminded me of an incident on the cricket field a few years ago, when Indian fans in Baroda and then Bombay made monkey gestures at the black Australian player Andrew Symonds. It was disgraceful, and was justifiably condemned by Indians as well as Australians. I think, however, that there is room for debate on the specific condemnation, which was a charge of racism. As a form of spectator behavior, monkey gestures directed at black players are straight out of the copybook of European football, where racism is an ongoing problem, and which is now accessible on television to newly moneyed sports fans even in a provincial city like Baroda. Given that African students are routinely abused and insulted on Indian college campuses, and that Indian immigrants in America have appalling views on kallus, it would certainly appear that racism of the European sort has established its Indian pedigree. This is, however, misleading. Kallu-phobic NRIs take their cues from the white-American mainstream; their sense of a ‘bad school’ or a ‘bad neighborhood’ is only half-baked when they first arrive at JFK or LAX. Anti-black racism, like anti-Semitism, requires discursive meat: it needs, in other words, a deep consensus about what race is, what blackness is, what a Jew is like, and so on. Those discourses are so threadbare and shallow in India that it becomes rather doubtful whether a monkey gesture in Baroda means what it would in Barcelona or Liverpool. (This is not to say that the effect on the target is less hurtful.)

What then does it mean? What might an Indian who has picked up a copy of Mein Kampf mean when he says that he agrees with Hitler, assuming he is being sincere and not merely provocative? He means, presumably, that he empathizes with what he perceives to be a desire for order and a stifled nationalism: the Romantic notion of a community defined not only by its humiliation by outsiders but also by its failure to be a community united in purpose, yearning for unity, purity, revenge and fulfillment. What is peculiar about the Nazis is not the fact of mass murder, but the extent to which they imbued murder with the magic of industrial-bureaucratic efficiency. That magic is largely alien to India: it is desired in a general way by the middle class, but resisted in its particulars by nearly everybody, including the middle class. Indian admiration for Hitler is, in that sense, an ‘innocent’ empathy, or the misidentification of one set of frustrations with another. Likewise, the behavior of the monkeys in Baroda and Bombay was a kind of innocent pleasure: that of being a crowd in the winter sunshine, having a bit of fun at the expense of a total outsider who was just passing through anyway. The members of the crowd knew that they were being hurtful, but had only the vaguest idea of the historical context and political significance of the pain, and hence, of the scale of the offence.

As an insider of sorts in America, I do not – cannot – use the word ‘innocence’ innocently. I recall Hugh Richmond saying years ago, in a class on Shakespeare, that innocence is the highly destructive conviction that your own ignorance, honesty and good intentions (or at least the absence of malice) will have good consequences. (Richmond is an Englishman, and several students were outraged by his cynicism. Graham Greene had their ilk in mind when he wrote The Quiet American.) Modern Indian society is hardly innocent of racism, but the races at the heart of this racism have been local: Dalits, Adivasis, northeasterners, Muslims, and so on. When it comes to them, there can be no claim to innocence. When it comes to the victims of Western racism, however, Indian malice can be as innocent as American benevolence, although less deadly. It is, to some extent, a matter of aping a Western norm of desire and display that is represented by Hitler and football hooligans. More than that, however, it is the utilization of Western symbols – Hitler, football hooligans – to assert a modernity that is substantially autonomous of the West. When European and American news readers are startled by a boutique named Hitler, or a politician’s son named Stalin Karunanidhi, or a restaurant in Japan with a concentration camp theme and swastikas on the dinner plates, much of the shock comes from the recognition of this autonomy.

It would be a mistake to assume that because the autonomous use of Hitler in Asia is counter-hegemonic and innocent, it is harmless. This is not merely or even largely because it offends the local Jews. It is because when a businessman in Gujarat cites the feelings (or rather, indifference) of the Hindu majority, he is not talking about the impertinence of Jews. He is talking about Muslims, who have a long and deep discursive history as the ‘misfortune’ of the Indian nation. When another Indian ‘agrees’ with Mein Kampf, he is not expressing an opinion on Anglo-French perfidy or trying belatedly to join the NSDAP, but indicating his sympathy for a vision of Indian nationhood that privileges perceptions of victimhood, sabotage and resurgence, and devalues the rights of individuals, dissidents and internal minorities. Who needs France when you have Pakistan? Pakistan is not just a country, but also an Indian state of mind: the historical misfortune that is as much within as without the nation. This nationhood, with its fantastic/innocent visions of Hitler and Stalin, is of course fundamentally hybrid in its parentage; it could hardly be otherwise. But it is more dangerous to Indians than it is to foreigners.

September 2, 2012

Note: Since I wrote this piece, the owner of the shop in Ahmedabad has decided to change the name of his business. May I suggest 'Arthur Harris' as the new name? The initials would remain the same and nobody would complain, although business might suffer from public apathy. Alternately, he could call it 'Modi.' Catchy, ethnic, popular.

An Olympic Scatology

Writing about the recently concluded Olympic Games in London, Uri Avnery made an observation that should be familiar to Indians. Israeli athletes don’t win many medals in international competitions. But when they do, the Israeli press goes a little nuts, immediately claiming the victory and the medal ‘for the Jewish people.’ The typically large Indian contingent in London (some eighty-odd men and women) managed, quite atypically, to pick up a half-dozen medals. There were no golds, and it was by almost any measure another stupendous display of underachievement. Nevertheless, it was the most medals that any Indian Olympic squad has ever won, and each person who picked up a silver or bronze was declared by the Indian media to have ‘brought glory to the nation.’ Politicians fell over themselves to congratulate them (headlines along the lines of ‘Chief Minister fellates wrestler’ became common) and give them millions of tax-payer rupees that are denied to schools and hospitals. (Recently, a five-day-old baby died in an Indian hospital under circumstances that would make Ayn Rand sit up in hell: when the parents could not pay a 200-rupee bill, the hospital removed the infant from the ICU. So it goes.)

An Olympic bronze is nothing to scoff at, of course, and the athletes who won those medals – and even those who failed to win – deserve nothing less than admiration. What is disturbing is the ‘glory to the nation’ business: not only the swallowing of the individual by the mob, but also the assumption that a bronze (or gold, for that matter) can bring ‘glory’ to a nation. Glory, by definition, requires a certain amount of basking. To bask effectively, you need admiring others. So when a bronze brings ‘glory to the nation,’ there must be a presumption that the rest of the world, or at least a significant part of it, is looking on admiringly. The level of deluded narcissism is amusing at best, but mostly it’s pathetic. Nobody else cares, bhai. Get over it.

It is no doubt true that this tendency towards overreaction has to do with the rarity of medals and victories. When you finally get one, you celebrate a little too much, like a drunk after a successful game of darts at the bar (or Virat Kohli after a Test century). The US typically wins a lot of medals at the Olympics, so there is no great jumping up and down after any one medal, give or take a ‘miracle on ice’ against the Soviet Union. (An absurd tamasha of national glory if there ever was one, typically American in its over-the-top sentimentality.) 

But the key issue is not just the ‘glory,’ but the ‘national.’ Middle-class Indians have a nasty habit of turning every success into a case for national glory. Not just wrestlers and boxers, but beauty queens, film-makers, economists and chemistry professors become the gymnasts of the nation. We are like that only, we claim you, a simpering Shekhar Gupta told a nervously giggling Manoj ‘Night’ Shyamalan some years ago. (That was back when ‘Night’ – who imagines himself to be an American Indian, not to mention an Indian-American – was being feted by Newsweek as the next Spielberg. No nation that takes its glory seriously would approach him anymore.) Those who resist, like the Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, are treated with consternation, as if their discomfort with the national embrace is a sign of moral depravity.

What brings on this bizarre breaking of nationalist wind? The reasons must vary quite a lot from nation to nation. In the Israeli case, it might be the neurosis of a small country that thrives on imagining itself as permanently beleaguered: its public discourse seeks to fortify the morale of the laager on the one hand, and on the other, reach out to a wider ‘Jewish people.’ The laager is simultaneously affirmed and denied. In the American case, looking to ‘Team USA’ as a source of glory is actually the exception, not the norm, where sport is concerned. (Thank God for that. The sight of right hands pressed reverently to athletic bosoms in roaring stadiums is bad enough: a cross between a prayer and a Nazi salute.) Besides, the US goes to war – the real thing, as Avnery points out – so frequently that sport is generally not required for national glory.

In the Indian case, we have the usual tangle of motives. The rhetoric of ‘Team India’ (first applied to cricket, naturally) is a direct imitation of ‘Team USA.’ (Now, just as amusingly, the Brits have followed suit and given us ‘Team GB.’ Not even Mrs. Thatcher thought of that one.) But unlike Team USA, Team India is tasked quite seriously with national glory, which means being like the US in its structures and symbols. Having a ‘Team India’ is, in other words, itself glorious: a whiff of relevance, glamor, America. It is the rhetoric of power that, in the ideal outcome, combines with the oxygen of victory. When Abhinav Bindra won a gold medal in shooting four years ago in Beijing, the national hoopla had nothing to do with any appreciation of target-shooting. It was about the gold and the impoverished tribe: we have a winner.  Likewise, when the altogether inspiring Mary Kom wins a boxing bronze in London, what matters most is not her skill and courage, or the fact that she comes from a humble background in a marginal state, has two kids, and was fighting in a higher-than-usual weight class, but the sense that she has added to the national wealth. We have a winner, sort of.

Not every nation that is not America reacts like this to international competition; neither do all Indians. It is, predictably, the middle class that displays its insecurities so nakedly. It might be argued that what fuels this insecurity is not an excess of numbers (like a billion-plus population) as a paucity of numbers: i.e., the fact that the class that is most ardently nationalistic, the most infatuated with international completion, is outnumbered in its own country by people who don’t care all that much about these things. Its cultural space is constantly encroached upon by the great unwashed, who also sit in Parliament, show up in the same political demonstrations on the Ram Lila grounds, make their own claims to being the face of the nation, and worst of all, contaminate those who would otherwise be glorious. The latter must therefore underline its distinct modernity by declaring its love of ‘Team India’ or ‘Force India’ or whatever.

This internal insecurity breeds insecurity on the world stage. The obsession with ‘national glory’ through Nobel prizes and Olympic medals is actually closely tied to babies dying in hospitals because their laborer parents could not pay two hundred rupees. Middle-class Indian patriots are quite aware that such things don’t happen in ‘winner’ countries, and that their inability to prevent it in their own country is utterly inglorious. It reduces them to the level of the impotent and devastated laborers, who are their compatriots, after all. Victories and medals are needed in compensation. Abhinav Bindra's air gun (which could be considered slightly comic, like air guitar and air kisses) becomes something more lethal and important.

We are talking, therefore, of a particular form of ressentiment, or the nationalism of existential envy. Normatively (if we concede without a struggle that Europe is the norm), ressentiment nationalism had to do with a sense of having been ‘done in’ by foreigners and aliens: the French, the British, Jews, Muslims, cosmopolitans, communists. They screwed us over, so we are behind them in the number of battleships and natives we command: self-assertion and self-fulfillment are inseparable from revenge and victory. That sense of thwarted glory generated the hunger for a place in the sun, whether that place was on the victory stand, the battlefield or the map. In India, the greater fear and hatred are directed against the Self that has disgraced itself. By being Team India, by winning medals on the international stage, we appear in our own eyes to conquer and transcend ourselves.

This is also a problem of liberalism, which is why the phenomenon doesn’t materialize in every country where hospitals throw poor babies out of Intensive Care. No doubt there are other such lands, but the political culture of those countries was not magically impregnated by Mill, Gokhale, Nehru and Ambedkar. In India, where the pregnant lady (Mother India, naturally, who is accustomed to multiple/ambiguous fathers) actually gave birth to the uncertainly wanted child, the frustrations of liberal nationhood inevitably take the form of an increasingly strident insistence upon the supreme importance of the national community and state. Nehru stumbles and loses his way; Bose and Savarkar step forward, saluting breathlessly under a ton of marigold.

It is not a pretty sight. The statue of Bose on the seafront in Port Blair can take one’s breath away simply by being grotesque: Billy Bunter meets Mussolini, stabbing the air with his finger like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. There is, it would seem, no other way to be: not only no other way to be a community, but also no other way to be a person. The individual embarrassed by his failure as a liberal citizen must seek his dignity – and, impossibly, his individuality – by burrowing deeper into the bowels of the national collective, producing a rampantly illiberal nationhood.  Exhausted by the attempt to distinguish himself from those who apparently place no value on individuality, he seeks to redeem everybody – the indifferent, the reluctant, the peasant, the wrestler – by stuffing them within the national body.  A badminton player wins a bronze when her opponent pulls a muscle and defaults, and – Jai ho! – brings glory to the nation. (No fault of Saina Nehwal: a wonderful athlete.) Meanwhile in Calcutta, Mamata Banerjee taps into glory by turning Independence Day into an occasion for a police parade on Red Road, giving the cops a break from arresting her critics. If the thought of the Calcutta Police marching past with their pot bellies and Lee Enfield rifles is funny, the immediate model – the Republic Day parade on Janpath, with its combination of missiles and ‘culture’ – is hardly more edifying. The search for national glory is never too far removed from farce.

Ressentiment and a place in the sun, medals and national redemption, parades and salutes! I write this rambling mess sitting in Munich, after having spent a few days in Berlin: evocative cities in Olympic history. One evokes a highly orchestrated attempt to bring glory to the nation, while the other evokes murder, or at any rate, hostage-taking and a botched rescue, also charged with the desires and embarrassments of national redemption. Ach, armen Deutschen. But there were other things, that can be described as either flies in the ointment, or simply joyful. Jesse Owens, for instance. Also in Berlin in 1936, the Indian hockey team beat Germany 8-1 in the final in front of a full house. (Leni Riefenstahl generously included a part of the match in her film Olympia.)

Indeed, it can be argued that in the past, Indian sport delivered the occasional dose of joy; glory was not on the menu. Indian athletes inspired affection rather than awe. P.T. Usha, one of the few truly great athletes India has produced (the others being Sachin Tendulkar and Dhyan Chand), never won an Olympic medal; yet her run in Los Angeles in 1984 was as moving as any gold. ‘Losing’ a race by one-one-hundredths of a second is more than heartbreaking: it is reasonable cause for a wry contemplation of the interrelationship of mathematics, technology and truth in the modern world. Nevertheless, Usha’s run in LA was a matter of joy. Before her, there was Milkha Singh in Rome in 1960 and Mushtaq Ali in Manchester (in 1936, coincidentally). ‘Relaxing?’ a friendly journalist asked Milkha by the hotel pool. ‘No, Milkha Singh,’ he is reported to have replied earnestly. In Amsterdam in 1928, the Indian hockey players defeated the United States 24-1 in another Olympic final. The Dutch spectators (another full house) were hugely entertained, as, of course, were Indian supporters back home. It is said that the only American goal was scored when Indian goalkeeper Richard Allen was off the field signing autographs. That kind of humor in sport is incompatible with glory, which is a prickly, deadly serious and mean-spirited thing.

Between the joy and the glory is an aesthetic chasm that is also a chasm of language. Who in Europe talks about glory anymore? The Serbs, and perhaps the French right, but not many others. The English would soon start to giggle. (The ‘queen’ parachuting from the helicopter at the Olympic opening ceremony gave the game away once again: glory has been transmuted, thankfully, into a satire of power and pomp.) Few Germans would even think in terms of national glory, and that is the most attractive thing about present-day Germany, aside from Weissbier on the banks of the Isar in the summertime. The German football team in the 2010 World Cup was a thing of joy, not glory.

Yet in India, the rhetoric of national glory has not only persisted, but expanded in scale and scope, grabbing larger and larger swaths of public discourse. It might be argued that this is a problem of English-as-a-second language: that the translated meaning (i.e., what is written and said) has not kept pace with the political meaning (what is thought). It may indeed be that the Indian understanding of national glory is significantly different from, say, the French in 1914, or the German in 1938. But there is more to it than that. There is an ugly innocence that the Indian middle class shares with its counterparts in America and Israel, and this is something that the loss of empire, two world wars, genocide and a partial rethinking of nationhood has eroded in Europe: innocence about what the defenders of freedom/empire actually do when they are doing their jobs, innocence about what has been done to the Palestinian people, innocence about the consequences of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. (The last signed into being by Nehru, although, one likes to imagine, with a grimace and a pat of the bronze hand of Lincoln on his desk.)

Such innocence is fundamentally primitive, childish and allergic to irony. Not only does it produce the delusions about butt-chinned men ‘saving the world’ that remain a staple of American culture, it’s the sort of thing that once led Europeans to celebrate the outbreak of the Great War, and that leads Indians to put garlands on new tanks without giving a thought to what a tank shell does to a human body. The notion that the body will always be that of an enemy soldier and not of a child, or even your own, is part of this innocence. Garlanding tanks and doing a little puja for a new warship has very little to do with ancient rituals of worshipping weapons and everything to do with the modern fetish of nationalist display, in which nationhood itself is fundamentally innocent and pure. The unconsidered images of dismembered bodies and the public images of flower-bedecked tanks constitute the visual aesthetic of national glory, which makes it possible to imagine Olympic events as battles for collective validation.

The Olympic ‘movement’ itself has been deeply schizophrenic about these things, since from its inception it has emphasized both international competition and depoliticized individual effort, while remaining hazy about the connection between them. Is sport a metaphor of war, or of peace? Was the ‘Black Power’ salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlo in Mexico City controversial because it violated the Olympic truce, or because it blocked the appropriation of their medals by the grubby hands of national glory and constituted an intolerable counter-aesthetic? Did Jesse Owens bring ‘glory’ to the United States? Few Americans would have thought so in 1936, and Owens was eventually remembered for having achieved something much more important, which was muddying up the rhetoric of national glory. Not even the Indian hockey teams of those years could bring an uncomplicated glory: there were too many Anglo-Indian players for that (including the missing goalkeeper in Los Angeles), and Anglo-Indians do not fit easily into the concept of the Indian nation. Was Richard Allen Indian? Was Norman Pritchard? Who remembers old Norm, anyway? What Olympic organizers, cheerleading journalists and commentators on Internet forums tend to avoid is not politics as such, or even individuals. They recoil from loose cannons.

It is, I hope, clear in this essay that I am not at all opposed to nationalism in sport. Nationalism is the spice of sport; it would be impossible, otherwise, to take pleasure in a five-day game of cricket. The citizenship of P.T. Usha and Mary Kom, not to mention Sachin Tendulkar, is central to the joy they have provided. Indeed, sport is probably the only setting in which a modern individual can enjoy his membership in a collective without killing somebody or having a leg blown off. A nationalist with an air gun is almost always preferable to a nationalist with a real gun. I am not even opposed to tanks in all circumstances. A tank, like a turd, has a function in the world. I am griping, because I have nothing better to do, about a particular way of talking about nationally organized sport, and a particular way of picturing tanks (festooned with flowers like a newlyweds' Ambassador). I am griping about an aesthetic that is crass, undignified, unnecessary, destructive of the very norms of liberal citizenship that make nationhood worthwhile, and ultimately inseparable from failures of the worst kind.

August 17, 2012

Teaching Mohammed Ghandi at CUNY

Indira Gandhi, a CUNY undergraduate recently wrote on his final exam, was the wife of Mohammed Ghandi. This startling bit of information reached me in the same week that a friend who teaches at Princeton raved about brilliant screenplays and short stories his freshmen had just written about Bahadur Shah Zafar and communal riots.

I reacted somewhat ungraciously to my colleague’s joy. Taking pleasure in the excellence of one’s students is only natural, of course. But the week of final exams, for professors no less than for students, can have overtones of Hum ne maana, yeh zamaana, dard ki jagir hai. (For non-aficionados of filmi shairi, that’s “I accepted that this age is the fiefdom of pain.”) Needless to say, the pain is worse in the trenches. In those circumstances, for Princeton faculty to exult “Where do they make these kids?” is a bit like buying a car at a Mercedes dealership, exclaiming about what a nice car it is, and asking (rhetorically) where it was made. But mostly, my dard had to do with the discovery of Mohammed Ghandi in my classroom.

To be fair to CUNY undergraduates, howlers like that are rare. We usually get one per class per semester. (“Buddha? Have we heard of this guy?” greeted me in my first year.) And usually, there is a prosaic explanation. The student answering the question about Mrs. Gandhi, for instance, had not come to class very often. Nearly every other student knew who Indira Gandhi was (although one did try to cover her bases by describing her as “the daughter of Nehru Gandhi”), because they had not been absent the day I lectured about Indian politics in the mid-1960s. Nevertheless, a missed lecture is not much of an excuse, since anybody who has finished high school can reasonably be expected to have heard of Buddha, and even to know that ‘Mohammed Ghandi’ is not an alternative spelling of ‘Mahatma Gandhi.’

To say that the public schools of urban America have major problems is to understate the obvious, and I will not get into those issues in this short essay. I will limit myself to noting that at CUNY, where training schoolteachers is a large part of our mission, we contribute to those problems by taking in, and then sending down, people who are sometimes shockingly unqualified to teach. Still, bad teachers and poor funding are not adequate explanations for the crisis of secondary education in this country; if the institutions are at fault, so are the clients. I am not talking about problems of ‘intelligence’ or even about learning disabilities. I have in mind a more diffuse problem of culture that is laid bare at an institution like CUNY, which seeks to provide – or rather, confront – the products of urban high schools with a standard liberal-arts university curriculum.

The symptom of this culture is a pervasive indifference to academic work that sometimes reaches the level of hostility. Its commonest form is not mistakes on examination papers, but missing class. On the first day of every semester, I make an earnest – and, I hope, frightening – speech about the importance of regular attendance, the correlation between attendance and grades, and so on. Students look surprised and skeptical, and many do not shake that skepticism even after the results of the midterm examinations have driven my point home. Come to class every day? What an idea. In one class, I encountered a sardarni complete with turban (something you rarely see on Sikh women in India, but immigrant subjectivities often call for overcompensation): highly intelligent, reasonably well-informed, confident, articulate, entirely promising. The A was there for the asking. Yet she displayed a curious habit of skipping class every once in a while, ignoring the polite warnings. On the final exam her luck ran out and the missed lectures caught up with her. Schade.

Examinations themselves become rituals of cultural revelation. Students will simply fail to show up for an exam, without prior notice or subsequent anxiety, and expect to be given a make-up test. During any two-hour final examination, some students will stroll in half an hour late, not looking the least bit flustered. During the same test, a few will hand in their blue-books thirty minutes into the session, so that some students are leaving while others are still walking in. Nobody cries, hyperventilates, goes into convulsions or faints, in the way that thirty or ninety minutes of forfeited examination time might trigger at, say, Princeton, not to mention an Indian university. It’s just not that big of a deal.

There are, of course, gratifying exceptions. In general, there are two kinds of exceptional students at the CUNY colleges. One is the exceptionally diligent. In the past semester, I had two young women in my class who had taken the course, and failed, the previous year. They came back, as failed students sometimes do, to try again. But unusually, they tried very hard, beginning with identifying where they had gone wrong the last time. One contacted me before the semester began to ask for reading assignments, and did not miss a single class. The other, sullenly silent last year except for occasional displays of ‘attitude,’ was impressive with her eager participation this time around. (She began the semester by sending me a note reading “I’m back! Boo!”, but I refused to take the bait.) Both students finished the semester with B’s.

CUNY is, indeed, a mecca of second chances. It is a place where people who have made a mess of their initial encounter with higher education, but become more determined and disciplined, can start over. They include faculty with burned fingers and broken ladders, but mainly it's the students: the public-school teacher's aid who has realized she can do better, as well as the Olympic-level show-jumper, so academically driven that I would tease her about it in class (she was one of the few who did hyperventilate about the clock during exams), who writes an essay on gender and class identity that is so good that I read it aloud to my mother, herself a former professor. When they are aware of their limitations, they tend to rise above them. Teaching such students is in some ways more satisfying than teaching the ones that shine immediately and effortlessly. But even the easy shiners – the other exceptional type at CUNY – have a tendency to stumble at the finish line, tripped up by the limitations of what we have been able to do for them, and by the culture of Mohammed Ghandi.

It might be argued, not without merit, that the ‘culture’ that I have in mind is nothing more or less than a culture of poverty: that absenteeism and tardiness are bread-and-butter realities for a student body that comes substantially from the working class and small-business backgrounds. Many students have jobs that necessarily take priority over classes, and/or must take care of children or other family members. But it quickly becomes apparent to the professor who those students are: they are slightly frantic, apologetic, and will almost always explain the problem. They are rarely the casual late-comers and no-shows. One of my best, most serious, students this past semester was a mailman, who would – as often as not – rush into class late, postal uniform soaked in sweat, mumbling with a wry smile that he had not been able to get away from work in time. Another student, after having missed a couple of classes, waited sheepishly in the corridor with her little daughter for permission to enter the classroom; she had not been able to find a babysitter. She wrote a fair paper analyzing Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night from a Gandhian perspective, comparing (Mahatma, not Mohammed) Gandhi’s utilization of the press in the Salt Satyagraha with the handling of the media by anti-war marchers in Washington in 1967. No CUNY faculty member that I know is unsympathetic to such students or unwilling to accommodate their needs, even if it means turning an indulgent eye to a seven-year-old in the classroom. (The children, I should say, are almost always impeccably behaved.)

The majority of the absent and the late, however, have no excuses beyond dead grandmothers. (“I had to go to Guyana for the funeral,” said a student who had missed an exam and was demanding a make-up. I asked for a boarding pass stub or ticket receipt, which was not forthcoming.) They don’t come to class because they have better things to do; the notion that school is the most important thing in the life of a college student is not a part of their cultural make-up. The dynamics of a commuter school, which is not one’s home like a residential college but a place that must compete with the obligations of home, come into play. Their families are often struggling but they are rarely destitute. Families do, however, become a problem in ways that are unimaginable at Princeton or Berkeley. They are often profoundly ambivalent about university education. In an abstract sense, they ‘support’ it and want their children to have the degrees that come from it. They typically make the necessary financial sacrifices. But at critical moments, they fail to provide the necessary push, or actively get in the way.

It is, for instance, a ubiquitous experience for faculty at Queens College, and presumably the other CUNY campuses as well, to find themselves trying – and failing – to persuade their best students to look beyond New York City for graduate school. Queens may be New York’s most ethnically diverse borough, but it is also, paradoxically, highly provincial. (The other boroughs are no different, for the class of New Yorkers that goes to CUNY.) The world beyond the bridges and tunnels might as well be Uranus. Parents balk, and not just with girls. Last year, one of my students was accepted into the Ph.D. program in history at the University of Edinburgh. His India-born parents refused to let him go, although they would have been quite willing to finance his studies had he been accepted into the CUNY Graduate Center. Another student – a vivacious, sardonic, absurdly promising young woman, also of South Asian origin – was, likewise, given to understand that while marrying ‘out of state’ was acceptable, studying ‘out of state’ was not. A brilliant Orthodox Jewish girl who could, potentially, have entered any doctoral program in the country was told firmly that she would remain in New York City and study accountancy.

These restrictions are, to some extent, the peculiarities of immigrants who come from outside the university-educated upper classes of their old countries. Having been dislocated, dispersed and stripped of social status once by emigration, they are reluctant to see another dislocation, dispersal and demoralization, brought about this time by the prospect of children moving away to ‘find themselves’ at distant universities, beyond the cultural oversight of parents and husbands. What is liberating to the ‘model minority’ at Stanford and Columbia is deeply threatening, and not quite as important, to the classes – often from the same ethnic backgrounds – that sell the model minority their ethnic groceries. For the latter, higher education is not just about upward mobility, it is also disruptive: a place and a current where one can tread gingerly, but not become immersed or swept away.

For professors in the classroom, this ambivalence on the part of the clientele poses all kinds of problems, which I flippantly summarized as dard. Faculty in the CUNY colleges come from the same undergraduate and graduate programs, and usually the same class backgrounds, that feed any other university in this country. Dealing with a student body that does not share the standard priorities of university education – manifested in very basic things like coming to class, taking notes, and taking examinations seriously – is almost inevitably a shock, and it would be disingenuous to represent this as something other than a type of culture shock. (I would add grinning inanely at your cell phone to the list of shocking behavior, but I suspect that happens at Princeton too, and that my horror is generational rather than class-based.)

Beyond culture shock, and far more serious, are the problems of pedagogy. There are, I think, two issues here: one tactical, the other strategic. Tactically, it becomes very difficult to teach the serious and the semi-serious, the capable and the severely underprepared, in the same classroom and from the same syllabus. Mohammed Ghandi inevitably imposes restrictions on what can reasonably be assigned and what questions can be asked, either in discussions or in examinations. There is no point in assigning a book or article that two students will read and one will understand. For the sake of Mohammed Ghandi, readings are cut to the bone, which necessarily undermines the education that we might offer to those who can – and would like to – read, discuss and write at a much higher level. These students, like the young Indo-Guyanese-American woman who wrote this paper on Orwell and Kipling, then become lost exceptions, awkwardly stranded in classes where nobody else is on the same page. Strategically, it becomes difficult to answer the question of just what CUNY’s undergraduate programs are supposed to achieve. If the goal is to train university graduates of a recognizable standard, then the current arrangement is seriously flawed; those of our students who reach that standard do so in spite of the system, not because of it. If, on the other hand, the goal is merely – as one colleague put it – to ‘make them a little better,’ then is it reasonable to deploy the title, curriculum and credentials of the university? There are no answers – nothing practical, at any rate.

There are, of course, all kinds of imaginable institutional fixes. CUNY is a sprawling, bloated structure that (except at the level of doctoral study) desperately prioritizes quantity over quality, so changing that would be an obvious place to begin. We can call, quite reasonably, for significantly higher standards for admission, a clear separation of missions between the community colleges and the four-year colleges, the early and aggressive identification of the severely challenged and the promising, and their separation into discrete academic tracks, smaller classes for seminars and writing workshops, and the provision of discussion sections for all lecture courses. When grading papers, I am often struck by the phenomenon of the half-understood concept, which is also, ironically, a gateway into unexpected insight. Answering a question about nationalist thought in India and Pakistan, several students wrote that while Hindutva is incompatible with secular democracy, the Two-Nation Theory is not. It was clear from their answers that they had only a partial understanding of the Two-Nation Theory, and the fault is undoubtedly mine to share. But it was also evident that they were not entirely wrong and had stumbled into a complex analysis. The only way to unearth and unpack these things in time is discussion in a small group, in addition to the usual three hours of lecture each week. But additional hours of instruction and the small-group format are expensive, beyond the financial reach of CUNY in the age of budget cuts. And other reforms – higher admission standards, for instance, or the dismantling of CUNY altogether to restore the autonomy of the individual colleges – are politically untenable.

The political aspect of the problem is, of course, inseparable from the financial: CUNY is paid for with votes just as much as it is paid for with money. As an institution, it is curiously representative of post-colonial democracy, in which the Brahmin institution of the university has been taken over by Dalits – and the notorious Mohammed Ghandi – for their own purposes and imaginations, creating a hybrid that is necessarily somewhat painful for the pundits. But that pain is inseparable from unusual compensations that are also hybrids: turbaned sardarnis, rebellious girls in hijabs, intellectually inclined mailmen anticipating the demise of the postal service, retired dentists who remember Kissinger’s stance on the Bangladesh war, a brilliant young feminist who asks, worriedly, if there is a lot of violence in the Mahabharata before she begins to read Vyasa's poem. CUNY is a backwater, but it is also a frontier, the Deep Space Nine of higher education, and sometimes it becomes necessary to remind ourselves of that.

May 25, 2012