Review: 'Pundits From Pakistan' and 'Brave New Pitch'

Main ne maana ki kuchh nahin Ghalib
Muft haat aye to bura kya hai?

In these darkest of days for Indian cricket fans, I had the pleasure of reading two outstanding books about Indian cricket. Pundits From Pakistan, by Rahul Bhattacharya (Pan Macmillan, 2005, 352 pages), is older than the date suggests. The other – Samir Chopra’s Brave New Pitch (Harper Collins, 2012, 224 pages) – is very contemporary indeed. That time-lag between the two publications is actually very apt, because Pundits From Pakistan  was written when Indian cricket was soaring. India had beaten England in England, Australia at home, tied Australia in Australia, and then beaten Pakistan in Pakistan. Chopra’s book, on the other hand, has come after an altogether pyrrhic World Cup victory, in the midst of the dead embers of Test cricket in India. The two books are, in that sense, eloquent bookends.

These are very different volumes, and Bhattacharya’s book fits more easily into the template of ‘good cricket literature.’ The writing is clunky in places, but there is nevertheless a touch of Cardus in how the author imagines the game: that unmistakable touch of nostalgia, in which even the present comes to be seen through a sepia curtain of late-afternoon sunshine, or filtered through the crackle of the radio on a cold winter morning. Without that nostalgia, that slight confusion between being awake and dreaming, cricket would not be worth following or even playing.

The trick, when writing in that spirit, is to avoid slipping into the maudlin even as the writer teeters on the edge of sentimentality. Bhattacharya pulls it off. He knows that he is writing at a peculiar moment in the history of Indian cricket: the near-miraculous convergence of Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman, Ganguly, Sehwag, Kumble and Harbhajan, the dizzying promise of Irfan Pathan, the presence of a talented and nearly inexhaustible supporting cast in Zaheer, Balaji, Nehra, Agarkar, Shiv Sundar Das, Wasim Jaffer and Mohammed Kaif. He knows that Ganguly’s captaincy and John Wright’s coaching has added something unprecedented to the mix: a magic cocktail of swagger, cool-headedness and professionalism. And he knows that it will not last forever. He is out, therefore, to relish the meal while it lasts. In the process, he treats the reader to the high drama of the matches as well as the throwaway details of a great team on tour: the small encounters in the hotel lobbies and dressing rooms.

The other star of Bhattacharya’s narrative is Pakistan. Bhattacharya is quite aware that he is writing about a team that has lost its superstars: this is Pakistan without Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram, to say nothing of Imran Khan, Javed Miandad and Zaheer Abbas. He compensates by giving us intimate portraits of ‘lesser’ players like Mohammed Sami and Danish Kaneria, and a grand little epic of Inzamam-ul-Haq, who sinks slowly over the course of the series like the Titanic after a collision with a floating mountain of halwa. Bhattacharya’s admiration and affection for the Pakistan captain are palpable. But just as importantly, the retired stars – the Javeds and Imrans – keep intruding into the pages, hotel lobbies and interviews. They are gone and have never gone away: in the best traditions of cricket, the past hovers over the present like a stubborn ghost, imparting continuity between childhood and middle age, supplying that old crackling-radio feeling.

Then there is Pakistan the country, beyond the dressing room. Here, we find another flowering of the stubbornly Romantic nature of cricket writing. Those who follow the sport know that within the small world of Test-level competition, some relationships and rivalries matter more than others. The Ashes, for instance, have taken on a distinctly racial significance: whenever England play Australia, their journalists, fans, players and administrators behave as if they are engaged in a holy and altogether superior ritual, floating high above the world of bloody natives. (The spectacles of Jardine-as-Dracula and Larwood-battering-Woodfull have been replaced entirely by the image of Flintoff making out with Brett Lee.) The India-Pakistan cricket relationship is more fraught, being subject to the actual hostility between the two countries, frequently interrupted sporting ties, the fulminations of Maharashtrian fascists and a beheading or two. It has, nevertheless, its own tragic intimacy, at the heart of which is the opportunity to cross the barbed-wire fence and discover a lost home and a lost half on the other side. Bhattacharya describes banners reading “One Blood” being held up by the crowd. He reminds us of the stitched-together flags and the faces painted in the colors of both countries. In the narratives of spontaneous hospitality and late-night feasts in the bazaars of Lahore, the stories of visas granted and denied, there is the Romantic longing for wholeness that is at the very heart of modern Indian and Pakistani identity; it is more meaningful than victory or defeat in cricket but is, of course, more enjoyable when you win.

This brings me to Samir Chopra’s book, which comes at a time when the victories have not only dried up, but quite possibly become extinct. Fittingly, then, whereas Bhattacharya speaks to the fan in a poetry of sorts, Chopra delivers a cold blast of prose in an age when considerations of blood and bootleg Scotch have been overshadowed entirely by dollars and cents. Less than a decade separates the two books and situations, but Brave New Pitch comes to us in the era of the Indian Premier League. It is largely about the IPL and the giant shadow it has cast upon the game. When Chopra began writing the book, the IPL had taken shape but Indian cricket had not yet gone to pieces. When he made the final revisions, he had to account for that sequence of eight defeats in a row against England and Australia. To his credit, he wove that disaster adroitly into his analysis. But his book also makes clear that there is no longer room in Indian cricket for romance of the Cardus-meets-Ghalib variety.

Coming between the starting and the finishing of the book, the Indian disasters in England and Australia (and since then, at home) have divided Brave New Pitch into two major themes. One is an issue that has been a part of cricket since the nineteenth century: fair compensation for players. Even more powerfully than Packer and World Series Cricket, the IPL has brought this issue to the forefront, by generating a conflict between the club that pays extremely well and the country that makes moral demands upon the loyalty and identity of the individual cricketer. There is no need to go into the details of the conflict here, but it must be pointed out that fans and cricket journalists – those that have not been bought off by the BCCI, at any rate – have not always been kind to players who have refused to ignore the money on offer at the IPL. Chopra, however, is unequivocal in his sympathy for the players, who are, he points out, entitled to the same financial security that other professionals and workers expect for themselves. In fact, one of the great strengths of the book is that it looks at the current tensions within Indian and world cricket through a clear, historical lens of labor relations. Chopra’s knowledge of the economics of American professional sports comes in very handy here, providing his analysis with an easy cosmopolitanism that is rare in the insular worlds of sports history.

The other main theme of Brave New Pitch – the undeniable damage done by the IPL to the quality and international competitiveness of Indian cricket – is somewhat at odds with the author’s inclination to see the IPL as a good thing for Indian cricketers. That, however, is not so much an inconsistency in the analysis as a reflection of the twisted and unresolved situation within the administration of the sport in India (and to some extent, the world). Chopra is aware that the initial hopes – which he shared – that the IPL could be accommodated into a reasonable calendar of international cricket, while generating money, security, entertainment and a higher standard of play, have not worked out. He insightfully explains why this has been the case: the naked conflicts of interest between the ownership of IPL teams and the management of the BCCI (which are often in the hands of the same people), and the growth of what he calls India's ‘gold-rush economy,’ in which the primary impulse of entrepreneur-administrators is to utilize new money-making opportunities to get very rich very quickly, with minimal regulation, oversight or judicial intervention. He acknowledges that the changed demographics of the Indian crowd have partially vacated the old Romantic mansion of cricket, but points out that even the post-Romantic IPL-era crowd has been shortchanged by the mafia of cricket bosses and corporate bean-counters.

Like other thoughtful commentators on Indian cricket, Chopra has very good ideas about ‘what needs to be done’: changes in the structure of domestic First Class cricket, infrastructural and professional support for the game at the local level, adjustments in the format of Test and one-day cricket, and so on. One may or may not agree with the particular suggestions he makes. What is more pertinent is the author’s perceptible pessimism about whether sensible reforms, transparency and accountability can be implemented in the current economic and bureaucratic environment. The game has passed from the hands of players and dreamers – however tenuous their grasp may have been in the past – and now resides entirely with those who are determined to suck it dry until it is dead, and then move on.

No review is complete without some nitpicking, and I do have a nit to pick: Chopra wastes far too much printer’s ink on the issue of popularizing cricket beyond its historical base in the Commonwealth countries. This has recently been a favorite pipedream of cricket writers as well as a pet project of the ICC. Planning for the return of cricket to America, beyond the enclaves of Commonwealth expats, is not a serious use of anybody’s time. Nor, one might add, is it important that the ‘average American’ in Philadelphia and elsewhere play cricket. All sports are played in specific historical contexts, and cricket has its own context and its geography. The fantasy of expansion is unnecessary, especially when there are real problems to address.

All things considered, however, Chopra has written one of the most thought-provoking and knowledgeable cricket books to be published in recent years. He writes with a keen sense of history: not just the history of the game, but that of the world in which the game is played. That alone places him head and shoulders above most other contemporary cricket writers: above, for instance, Gideon Haigh, who writes with an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport but little sensitivity to the political and social realities that motivate those who follow the game. In having an ‘ear’ for these realities, Chopra is not so far removed from Bhattacharya, in spite of the prosaic tone of his writing.

February 5, 2013

Black Man, Brown Men

On April 22 of last year, Yannick Nihangaza was set upon by a crowd of eight or nine young men in Jalandhar, in the Indian state of Punjab. The twenty-three-year computer science student from Burundi, on his way to a party, was beaten with extreme savagery – rocks and chunks of cement were used – and left for dead. Nihangaza went into a coma from which he has only now emerged. His brain is damaged, his cognitive functions are more or less destroyed, and he is unlikely to speak again.

The Nihangaza case has attracted much less attention in India and elsewhere than the horror that befell Jyoti Pandey – another twenty-three-year-old student – on a bus in Delhi recently. And it can certainly be argued that the incidents are not comparable. They are both examples of the public violence that is increasingly recognized as a fact of life in urban India, but whereas the rape, torture and killing of Pandey was obviously a gender crime, the assault on Nihangaza had to do with race. (The police report stated that the attackers had declared their intent to ‘teach the black a lesson.’ It remained unclear for months whether they targeted Nihangaza specifically or if it was a case of mistaken identity, but now it seems that there had been an 'altercation' with Nihangaza shortly before the assault.)

But at an instinctive level, for me and a few others, what holds these episodes together is their shared ‘north Indian’ character. And with thinking that, not to mention posting the thought on the Internet, comes the obligation to justify or rethink the assumption. Lynching was not invented in north India, after all: it has an impeccable American genealogy. Racially motivated assaults remain a fact of life on the streets of European cities; racist violence against Indian students in Australia recently has received much attention in the Indian press and in diplomatic channels. (An irony of the Nihangaza case is that one suspect has fled to Australia on a student visa. It is tempting to hope that he learns a lesson or two.) Indian cities outside the north – Pune, even Bangalore – have an established record of discrimination and harassment when it comes to Africans, although assaults are rare. It was in Mumbai, that most self-consciously cosmopolitan of Indian cities, that the black Australian cricketer Andrew Symonds was subjected to monkey gestures by the crowd. And certainly rural India has a rich history of lynching, which (along with rape) has typically been a tactic of power used against ‘uppity’ Dalits and aboriginal people. So what, if anything, does it mean to say that the Nihangaza assault and the Pandey rape are ‘north Indian,’ apart from signifying your own prejudices?

 A casual look at the public spaces of the Indian north, compared with those of the south, reveals right away that the northern street is a relatively homosocial space, populated largely by males. Women commonly serve beer in restaurants in the south. In the north, that would be nothing short of a sign of prostitution or moral ‘denationalization,’ and in either case, an ‘invitation’ to sexual abuse, even rape. (The courts in Delhi have recently ruled that the city cannot prevent women from working as bartenders, but a woman bartender in Delhi had better wear body armor and a chastity belt.) Given the peculiarities of Indian national discourse, denationalization – to be excluded from the moral community of Indianness – is also to be excluded from ‘honorable’ womanhood, and to be left vulnerable to the consequences of dishonor. But rape is not the only form of violence that is produced when women are absent from public spaces in India. I would argue that what happened to Yannick Nihangaza is also a product of this absence.

I am not suggesting that the presence of women in public spaces has a ‘civilizing’ or ‘moral’ influence – in the Victorian sense of civilization and morality – on male behavior. I am saying, rather, that the absence or presence of women in the streets, bars and assorted places of congregation indicates whether a serious problem already exists. It indicates, first of all, a set of problems that men of that society have with women, such as the reluctance to accept women as equals in public (which means, inevitably, in private as well), the readiness to see them as transgressors, threats, curiosities or ‘fair game’ when they appear in public, and the simple, tragic, deadly ignorance of how to interact with ‘public women’ in a manner that is both egalitarian and courteous, i.e., not tied up in notions of honor and dishonor. (One of the most depressing things about the aftermath of Jyoti Pandey’s rape was the number of Indians who sought to shield women behind concepts of honor, declaring that Indians either do, or should, treat women with 'reverence.' Reverence, unfortunately, is nothing but the other side of the coin of contempt: as soon as a woman has been demarcated as a repository of honor, she becomes a target for dishonor.)

It indicates, secondly, a warped culture of maleness, in which masculinity in public spaces is enacted for other men alone. This male subculture is marked by the continuous experience of desire, repression and display. It takes the form, for instance, of simultaneous homoeroticism and homophobia. It also takes the form of hypermachismo and showing off through aggression: experiencing and displaying manhood largely through violence, whether that violence is directed at women or at other men. Needless to say, this is not exclusively a north-Indian phenomenon, nor is it equally apparent everywhere in the north. But within India, ‘north India’ is to some extent a state of mind, disseminated as well as concentrated by Hindi cinema into a national popular culture of reactionary gender relations and homosocial masculinity. Its indigenous systems of restraint, such as 'reverence' for women or guests (the mehmaan, which Nihangaza arguably was in India) have proved to be tissue-thin in the face of its need to occupy and monopolize public space.

It can and should be noted that Enoch Powell’s England or the American South of the Jim Crow era were not saved from lynch mobs or skinheads by the presence of women in public. Problems within the ideology of heterosexual masculinity played a role in those places also, but with overdetermined phenomena like public violence we need to disaggregate the variables very carefully. The racial presumptions that applied when, say, Kiaran Stapleton shot Anuj Bidve in Salford in 2011, do not fully apply in India in a case such as Nihangaza’s beating, or even in a less devastating episode like the taunting of Andrew Symonds. Color 'preference' is as Indian as tandoori chicken, and like tandoori chicken, it is more deeply rooted and also more nakedly visible in the north. It is, arguably, even worse in Pakistan, where any need to accommodate the darkies within the community aesthetic evaporated after 1971. But race is more than color of skin or place or origin: it is an encyclopedic body of knowledge, nearly all of it bogus, which is shared very unevenly across cultures. The Indians that attacked Nihangaza would have had some awareness of the Western meanings of race, blackness, and so on, thanks to the various processes of cultural globalization. But it would have been superficial: enough to identify an outsider, but not enough to inspire murderous hate.

That hate comes from forces and processes closer to home, that are reshaping, but only partially, how gender, hegemony and dominance work in Indian society. It is important to understand that the attacks on Yannick Nihangaza and Jyoti Pandey represent a new phenomenon. They derive only partially from ‘Indian culture.’ (Tandoori chicken is not that old either.) The transformation of the Indian economy and class relations over the past two decades (in Punjab, it began earlier) has been a major factor in their emergence. Nihangaza was enrolled in an institution called Lovely Professional University. The name itself is a giveaway: a new, entirely commercially driven, somewhat subliterate vocational school (not unlike academies with names like ‘Vista’ and ‘Horizon’ that are advertised on the New York City subway), promising middle-class lives to those who would not have been part of the middle class a generation ago. These are start-up institutions for start-ups and gatecrashers, both Indian and African. The attack took place in Jalandhar: a mid-sized provincial city that has become cosmopolitan and prosperous without shedding its provinciality. And in a sense, it could have happened only in Jalandhar, which is both a place and a metaphor. The new economy has created a brash and rough-edged new middle class, in which older notions of respectability and expectations of masculine public space have persisted even as affluence and power have done away with deference, and globalization has introduced new sexual desires, greatly intensified repressions, and newly ‘legitimate’ targets of violence – such as black people.

Like Jyoti Pandey’s death, Yannick Nihangaza’s fate is a tragedy that cannot be repaired. His father has spent a great deal of time in India, trying to get an apathetic and reluctant Punjab government to take the case seriously. To their credit, the state government has (belatedly) covered the medical expenses, made the arrests, and offered – rather too eagerly – to transfer Nihangaza back to Burundi. To their discredit, they are now denying (in spite of their own police report) that the attack had anything to do with race. And gender does not enter the discussion at all. So it goes, Kurt Vonnegut would have said. 

January 20, 2013

Sparing the Rod

From Newtown to Delhi

In this final month of the year, we (a notoriously vague pronoun, perhaps best reduced to the royal ‘we’) were distracted from our everyday lives by two visitations of unimaginable horror. In Newtown, Connecticut, twenty children were gunned down in their elementary school, along with a half-dozen teachers. And in Delhi, a young woman was raped on a bus, attacked with an iron rod, and then tossed out to die. These are, of course, disconnected incidents, one deadlier than the other, on opposite sides of the world and indicative of different social pathologies. Nevertheless, I want to discuss them in the same frame, not only because they merged in my stomach into a single pool of unexpressed vomit, but also because they suggest some connections between how modern societies generate and respond to extreme violence. In each case, there is a discernible tendency to reduce the problem to a set of symptoms that can be treated with legislation. In each case, there is an explosion of speech around a pit of silence that shields a wider societal culpability.

In a country where school shootings are fairly common, the slaughter in Connecticut was especially horrifying because children were so young, and because the killer was more or less an adult. The American school massacre typically features teenagers being shot by one of themselves: we have learned how to think, talk, and even write black comedies about that scenario. We have not learned to think about child-murder as an act of shooting downwards. We have not learned to imagine what happens to a six-year-old body when it is shot eleven times with a version of the same rifle that is used by the US military. We have learned to accept that school shootings leave some students dead and others wounded, but not to face a situation where there are no wounded, because each child has been carefully executed at close range. I found myself wondering how there could be space for eleven rifle bullets in such small bodies. I could not imagine an answer, so I fell back to thinking of my own daughter, and wanting to pick her up early from daycare and wrap my arms around her small, solemn self. That reaction, I think, was fairly common among friends of mine who have young children, and for parents around the country. We personalized the calamity, withdrawing into ourselves and our families.

In that maneuver, as in all maneuvers, certain refusals and silences are imbedded: the refusal, for instance, to put ourselves fully in the shoes of the police and other first-response personnel who entered the school when the shooting was over. We talk around what they saw: we sympathize with their predicament, we acknowledge that they will be scarred, we are relieved that they have taken that responsibility off our shoulders. We do not invite them to actually describe what they saw. Not even the New York Post will seek out the initial police photographs for its front page. Such images will perhaps be left to the horror movies in ten years’ time, but even then, no director would dare to actually ‘show what happened,’ or linger on the visions for more than a split second.

To do those things would shut us down as a society. It would shut us down not only because it would show us the costs of the Second Amendment, the NRA, inadequate mental health care, and other such specific phenomena, but also because it would show us what we are capable of as a society, and indeed, what we routinely do as a society. It is not, after all, enough of an explanation that Adam Lanza, the killer in Newtown, was mentally ill, or even that he had access to guns. He also had a particular vision of what a man in his situation does, and that vision included shooting first-graders. An individual acts according to the templates with which he is provided, such as the template of the massacre by an angry man (or, for that matter, templates of men having fun in particular ways). Adam Lanza followed the template.

What I am getting at is that killing children is not all that extraordinary in our society. It can, in fact, become almost casual. I am reminded of the supersaturation of popular culture – especially the culture of young males – with the toys, games and pornography of violence, which make shooting at people harmless, aesthetically pleasing and erotic. I am reminded that our most normative form of political organization is based on the idea of legitimate homicide, so that the willingness and ability to kill permeates our idea of what it is to live a worthwhile life. I am reminded of Seymour Hersh’s reporting on the My Lai massacre, the phenomenon of ‘collateral damage,’ and the entire premise of nuclear deterrence and strategic bombing. We accept that children will be shot, burned or blown up. We expect only that it will not be our children and that we will not have to look, and are flustered when Hersh – or Adam Lanza – violates that tacit agreement.

Now, on to Delhi: the city where roads, rebels, refugees, invaders, migrant workers and graduate students converge, the city that is always the destination and a little too far, Dilli chalo and Dilli durast, where my wife - unnerved by the experience of being stared at by yet another open-mouthed stranger - snarled 'Kya dekh rahe ho ji? Ghar mein ma-behn nahin hai?' ('What the hell are you staring at? Don't you have a mother or sister at home?' I was reminded of Captain Haddock's encounter with a Nepali porter.) Delhi is simultaneously graceful and ugly, it tends to set women and even men on edge, it has a reputation, it is the notorious 'rape capital.' That sobriquet may be unfair; there are cities where women fare worse. But in Delhi, crowds of angry citizens have been facing off against police armed with water-cannons. They are angry because there has been another rape in the Indian capital. A young paramedical student and her male friend, returning from watching Life of Pi, were waiting at a bus stop at around ten o’clock at night. They were given a ride by an off-duty bus. The bus crew and their joyriding friends – six men in all – immediately began to taunt the couple, then attacked them, beating the man unconscious and raping the woman for over forty minutes. Thrown out of the bus, the victims were discovered by passers-by and hospitalized. The media then descended upon the story, and a crescendo of public rage quickly developed, directed at the government, the police, and Delhi itself. There have been calls in Parliament to amend the law and institute the death penalty for rape; the demand appears to have overwhelming public support.

On the surface, the violence inflicted upon the couple in this particular case is appalling but not extraordinarily so – not at the level needed to bring out enraged citizenry, water-cannon and hangmen. Yes, the couple had been badly beaten; yes, the woman had been raped; but those things happen in Delhi, and in other cities. Other people shake their heads and carry on. The extraordinary horror of the bus rape lies below the surface. Tucked away in the coverage of the incident, on the first day, was a report of just what been done to the woman by her attackers. She had been raped with an iron rod (specifically, the crank that is used to raise and lower the jack), rupturing her uterus and destroying her intestines. Doctors expected that she would die, and it speaks volumes for the staff at Safdarjung Hospital that she is still alive.

From the second day onwards, as if by a quiet agreement, the details of the assault vanished from the news. The story continued to dominate the news but the text changed subtly. A coded language emerged: the woman had been ‘beaten’ with the iron rod, although it had become necessary for surgeons to remove nearly her entire intestinal tract, the attackers were ‘sadistic,’ they had ‘tortured’ the woman, the police chief had never before encountered such a brutal rape. Nobody is deluded about what happened on the bus, of course. Everybody knows exactly what took place, and is horrified. That is why there are crowds, police batons and panicky politicians on the streets. But the particulars were deemed so shameful, so unspeakable, that they had to be rendered in a combination of silences and codes.

How do we unpack the horror that is shrouded by this rendition? In an editorial in The Hindu, Ratna Kapur offered one approach. The attack on the unnamed woman (who is now being called Amanat in the press, in yet another display of coded speech) represents the fury of men confronted with ‘smartly dressed women’ in all walks of Indian life, Kapur wrote: as men perceive themselves losing exclusive control of their social and economic bastions, they (and the less educationally and economically competitive among them in particular) are lashing out violently.

That insight, while not quite new, is reasonable enough, and revealing beyond the author’s intentions. The incident has laid bare, especially, the class tensions of urban India. In an unmistakable yet unthinking attempt at restoring the disturbed balance of power between the ghetto and the gated community, middle-class journalists armed with television cameras, blinding lights and great hairy microphones descended upon the slum where the alleged rapists lived, barged into their homes, and interviewed the cowering families about what should happen to their sons, not letting up until one obviously intimidated father agreed that hanging was the only acceptable option. It is inconceivable that power, privilege and presumption would have been deployed so contemptuously towards ‘respectable’ Delhiites in Defence Colony or Vasant Vihar.

Kapur’s analysis is also somewhat incomplete. For one, the woman on the bus does not seem to have belonged to the ‘smartly dressed’ set of middle-class Indians: her family comes from the subsistence level of the economy, although they clearly had middle-class aspirations. For another, while it is certainly true that middle-class women in Delhi and other Indian cities are vulnerable to sexual assault, the likelihood of their being raped by the proverbial rogue autorickshaw driver is considerably lower than that possibility that rural, poor, Dalit or tribal women will be sexually assaulted by a policeman, an employer, a village politician, a neighborhood bully or a husband. This is a pattern of violence that middle-class Indians are aware of, but prefer not to look at. Their adoption of the bus-rape victim as one of their own was almost accidental: a slippage within liberal citizenship, as well as a sentimentality.

Consequently, Kapur’s essay only obliquely explains the explosive public reaction to the bus rape: the unedifying and ubiquitous calls for the death penalty and castration, the near-rioting which may have cost a policeman his life, the violence unleashed on the protesters – in the name of crowd control – by an angry police force and a beleaguered administration. The Indian middle class does not typically react to rapes with such extraordinary vehemence. It has been suggested that the protests of this December are about more than this particular incident: that they form an extension of the middle-class disenchantment with the nature of the Indian state, which became evident during the Lokpal movement a couple of years ago. (‘Nothing works,’ as one angry demonstrator shouted at a journalist.) In other words, while we are ostensibly talking about a rape, we could also be talking about the municipal water supply, the mismanagement of the Commonwealth Games or cronyism in land development.

I would suggest that that analysis too, while entirely accurate, is quite inadequate. Its inadequacy is indicated by the violence of the protests – the startling rhetoric of mutilation and hanging – as well as by the gaps in what is being said about the rape of ‘India’s Amanat.’ Much like the Newtown massacre, the naked savagery of the assault has forced a traumatic surfacing into the public consciousness of the violence woven into everyday reality of Indian nationhood: the violence of gender and class, the violence of the state, the violence within families, the violence of the mob in Gujarat in 2002 (where disemboweled Muslim women were effectively disowned by the nation).

Like child-murder in American culture, that violence lies below the skin of society; it is intractable, overwhelming and intimately familiar. In it, there is an unbearable interpenetration of the ordinary and the extraordinary: the extraordinary is within the ordinary, and vice versa. Rape with a 'foreign object,' perpetrated by a gang of drunk and laughing young men, may appear to overshoot all templates of masculinity, violence and community, but it is the template: a part of the cultural mainstream. For all its horror and outrage, the Delhi incident has already passed into advertisements for Amul butter. Some years ago, when a woman was raped with a flashlight (and murdered) off the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass in Calcutta, a defensive/dismissive Jyoti Basu remarked, 'These things happen.' ('Ei rokom to hoyei thake.')

'These things' thus have to be acknowledged as real, even commonplace; yet they cannot be spoken in the ordinary way. How do you talk about rape with a tire iron without talking about pathological gender norms? How do you talk about violence and gender without talking about the family, labor relations, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, and the implication of all sections of society in all of the above? It would be like discussing the bayonet rapes of Nanjing without raising broader questions about the organization of life and thought in 1930s Japan. It is easier to not talk: i.e., to talk around the particulars of yet another rape, about ‘anti-social elements’ or poor government or the death penalty for rapists. The periodic, anguished howl of the mob takes the place of what cannot be spoken by liberal citizens confronted by the limits of liberalism.

December 26, 2012