The Art of Invisibility

Introductory remarks to panel on "Cinema and the National-Security State" (Representing South Asia on Film series of screenings and talks, Queens College, November 8, 2012)

Some of you might recall that immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and the artist Damien Hirst both remarked that the attack was nothing less than a spectacular work of art. Stockhausen and Hirst were quickly condemned. Some of the condemnation seems justified, since the remarks came across as callous, to put it mildly. But it can also be pointed out that seeing art in disasters, crimes and atrocities is a very large part of our culture. If that sensibility did not exist, and if it did not enjoy a pretty broad public acceptance, the war movie as we know it would not exist. TV shows like 24 and Homeland would not exist.

The modern state, as George Orwell suggested sixty years ago, is inseparable from anxieties about security and fantasies of violence: images of mushroom clouds, images of cruise missiles being launched from warships. These anxieties and fantasies lend themselves extremely well to art. It is, I think, fair to say that without that art – the war movie, the TV show about terrorism, the photograph of the raising of the flag in Iwo Jima, the movie about that photograph – our culture and our state would both have to be reimagined. These are the aesthetics of citizenship, i.e., the prettiness or the majesty of the relationship between the individual and the state. Even the September 11 event, in spite of the criticism of Stockhausen and Hirst, was almost immediately treated as art, not just by avant-garde composers and provocative artists, but also by photographers, illustrators and editors who looked for the most dramatic angles and the most moving montages, and by the citizens who found the images striking.

But the aesthetics of citizenship is not a simple structure, because citizenship is constituted by a series of power relationships or inequalities. Not only is the individual not equal to the state, not all individuals are equally unequal. Here, we can make a crude but useful generalization. Mainstream or popular art, like commercial cinema, either takes the side of the state over the individual when there is a conflict, or refuses to acknowledge that there is a conflict. In this vision, the state is the extension, the representative and the absorber of the individual. Through policemen, or soldiers, or CIA agents, it thinks, decides and acts. And that agency is not only legitimate, it has aesthetic substance, which enhances the legitimacy.

Then there is the art of how the state acts upon the individual. This can, of course, be characterized in various ways: resistance art, guerrilla art, non-commercial, non-mainstream, non-monumental, and so on. I think, however, that a more useful characterization is to see it as the art of impotence, or of passivity. This is not to say that it is art without agency: obviously, the act of making a film, any film, is a form of agency. But the kind of cinema that I am talking about, and that we are going to be looking at this evening, comes out of a particular ideological space within the modern state where agency is fraught with difficulties. I want to explain this very briefly with reference to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

In two books that he wrote on either side of September 11, Agamben argued that at the heart of the modern, democratic state is a moral and constitutional black hole, which he called a state of exception. The state of exception is a situation in which what is abnormal – illegal, unethical, impermissible – becomes the norm, and the lines between legality and illegality become blurred. The constitution effectively suspends itself, at least in some contexts. You can think of it as a permanent state of emergency, in which the specifics of the emergency and the specifics of constitutionality are both forgotten. You can also think of it as a particular institution, such as a concentration camp or a CIA ‘black site,’ or a legal regime like the Patriot Act in America and the Prevention of Terrorism Act in India. The name of each of those laws, I want you to notice, is deliberately bland and blank, showing you nothing except complacence, anxiety and a citizenship that calls for its own renunciation. It functions very much like a generic image of a waving flag, or a burning skyscraper against a hard blue sky. It’s a rhetorical technique that Norman Mailer called ‘Bureaucratic Technologese’: an inscrutable, vanilla language that makes the violence of the state invisible.

For the person caught in a state of exception, Agamben suggests a name: Homo Sacer, which translates roughly as ‘bare man,’ or ‘empty man.’ Homo Sacer is a person, or a demographic, that has absolutely no rights. He is included in the body politic by virtue of being excluded. His place in the law is that he has no legal status. He cannot be killed through the legal or constitutional process, but he can nevertheless be killed at any time, by anyone, without it constituting murder.

The most obvious example of modern Homo Sacer in a state of exception, Agamben suggested, was the Jew in Nazi Germany. But his point is that we do not need such dramatic examples for the model to work. In any case, extreme examples can be misleading, because they suggest that the problem is far away and rare, when in fact it is ubiquitous. The commonest Homo Sacer, Agamben wrote, are the inmates of detention camps for illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees, which can be as small as a cell tucked away in a corner of an international airport, or as large as the French facility at Sangatte, which was closed down a few years ago. It can be as remote as Guantanamo and Bagram, and as nearby as New York City itself.

These camps are not prisons, Agamben reminded us. This is a crucial distinction in the history of the modern world. Michel Foucault argued, back in the 1970s, that the prison is the defining institution and metaphor of modern society. But Agamben argued that the detention camp has surpassed the prison in its utility as a model. Prisoners have rights, they have access to lawyers and appeals, they have an existence in the public record, they have been through a constitutional process of trial and conviction, and their sentences are definite (although this is changing in the era of sex-offender registries and similar systems of information-based control and permanent probation). Camp inmates do not have those things. The detention camp is a place with rules but no rights, and it exists within a constitutional state but the constitution does not exist within it. These dynamics make it the perfect example of a state of exception.

After September 11, America acquired a more or less new archipelago of states of exception, and a new population of Homo Sacer. These are for the most part Muslims, although non-Muslims have not been immune. They are mostly non-citizens: immigrants, foreign students, people on work visas, people who have been kidnapped overseas by the military or the CIA. But they also include US citizens, and the citizens of countries that are allied to the United States. They include scientists, office managers, and people who looked suspicious to a flight attendant or a fellow passenger on a plane. These are people who are included in America by virtue of their exclusion from the constitutional protections of citizenship, and simultaneously, by their subjection to the power of the state.

It is not surprising that South Asians have been at the very heart of this particular state of exception. This is not only because of the American military adventures in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also because of the large population of South Asian Muslims in America, and because even those that are not Muslim seem to fit the profile. (It is, I think, a remarkable phenomenon that the image of the ‘terrorist’ in America has shifted eastwards from the Arab in the 1980s, to the Pakistani and even the Bangladeshi in the present day.)

The documentary films that we are showing you today reflect the experiences of these South Asians, and they were made by a group of artists and activists, the Visible Collective, that includes quite a few South Asians. In that double sense, they are the art of passivity as well as of agency: art that comes from the intersection between a metaphorical detention camp that captures us all, and the actual camp that captures some but not others. The film-makers may disagree with that characterization, but I’ll leave it to Uzma Rizvi (of the Pratt Institute) and Prerana Reddy (of the Queens Museum of Art) to address that issue, if they choose.

I want to make a couple of quick points first, before I shut up. One has to do with the South Asian diaspora in America. And this point is that there is really no such thing as the South Asian diaspora. There are many South Asian diasporas. They are separate by class, by education, by country of origin, by language, by religion, and very importantly, by legal status. By the terms of my analysis, they can be divided into two broad groups: the visible and the invisible. The visible are people like me, and like Uzma and Prerana. We have some money, some social status, American passports, command of the English language, acid tongues, colleagues who can and will stand up for us when the acidity gets us into trouble.

The invisible are the cab drivers and waiters, who typically remain unseen by us even when they are in plain sight. They see themselves, of course, but their sight is unconnected to the political power that makes the difference between rules and rights. If they were to earnestly declare at the airport, ‘My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist,’ nobody would understand their accent and the consequences would be unpleasant. So they remain invisible when they are secretly approached and intimidated by the NYPD or the FBI, and when they disappear into a detention site without a charge or a trial, not knowing when they will reemerge, and under what conditions. What the visible group sometimes attempts to do, as Visible Collective has tried to do, is recover these people from invisibility, even if it is for the seven or eight minutes of a short film. The short film format is particularly appropriate, I think, because it constitutes an aesthetic of anti-monumentality, doing without grand spectacles, slow-motion video montages, and even pretty pictures. The stripped-down starkness that we see in these films is the aesthetic of Homo Sacer, glimpsed from the perimeter of the camp.

My other point – the last one, I promise – is that the visible people, the ones who are not in the camp, are in fact within the orbit of the camp. Sometimes even Imran Khan and Shah Rukh Khan must explain that they are not terrorists. The state of exception is not just a concrete box or a razor-wire fence for people without passports and credit cards. The camp, as I said before, is also a metaphor: a fate that can befall anyone, including citizens and film-makers and the visible, including people who are not South Asian or Muslim, or even brown. The shadow of Homo Sacer – the predicament of being excluded from citizenship – falls on all citizens of the modern state. 

As promised, I will now shut up. We will be showing you four short films, imbedded in the talks by Uzma and Prenana. Following that we can have a discussion with the audience. 



The films shown are:

FEAR OF FLYING: http://vimeo.com/24910890 
LINGERING TWENTY: http://vimeo.com/39513929 
INVISIBLE MAN: http://vimeo.com/39473380 
PATRIOT STORY: http://vimeo.com/39450303

 

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