The National Shit

Recently, I had the opportunity to peer-review an article on the politics of shit in India. It was a fine contribution; I recommended that it be published, and it will, presumably, appear in print at some point in the near future. The author sought to make some connections between the phenomenon of outdoor defecation in India, and the inequalities of caste, arguing, more or less, that Indian attitudes towards shit reflect the extreme exclusions faced by communities that have traditionally been associated with ‘unclean’ tasks. I was persuaded by the arguments, but found myself thinking more broadly about Indian shit.

The politics of Indians’ defecation is not only about caste; it is about nationhood itself. Not surprisingly, when non-Indians have thought about India in the past, they have sometimes felt compelled to talk shit: Katherine Mayo, Günter Grass, V.S. Naipaul, and various others.  Indeed, ‘where Indians defecate’ has entered global public discourse: whenever there is a demonstration of Indian national prowess, such as the ISRO Mars mission, the comments sections of foreign news sites mushroom with reproaches about wasting money on rockets when half your population shits in the open. This has become one of those things that even (or rather, especially) people who couldn’t place India on a map are confident about. Over the past year, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has itself played a leading role in highlighting the toilet issue, trumpeting the cause of “Swachch Bharat” (Clean India) and urging ministers, actors, athletes and other prominent citizens to pose with brooms before the television cameras. These well-heeled jharuwallas are, of course, quite aware that Swachch Bharat will not come anytime soon, and are not overly bothered.

That leaves us with a few questions that I would like to address very briefly. One concerns the persistent popularity of the subject of Indian defecation. Here there is a difference between the ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ discourses. The foreign narrative is either aggressively colonial, or, in a variation, nervously defensive. It emerged in the 1920s, precisely when the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms had given Indian politicians a measure of control over the lower levels of the government of the country. Talk of filth functioned, in this context, as a nullification of this self-government: natives were clearly incapable of running the machinery of administration. In the period after 1947, as Nehru and the Jadavpur/IIT generations made machinery (literally) a new basis of Indian civilization, missing toilets became a technological counterthrust: a way of putting upstarts in their place, and shoring up increasingly precarious distinctions and hierarchies between the natures of whites and natives. Dams and spacecraft swirled into the hole of the absent toilet, giving the lie to their own existence. Just as importantly, they left behind a moral stench, because the accusation was not simply about missing latrines, but about deluded self-indulgence: the refusal to take care of one’s own, preferring Martians to peasants.

The Indian narratives are more complex and interesting. They emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, in two contexts that remained resolutely separate: the formulation of the middle-class family, and municipal sanitation. In the first, the polemics of cleanliness came largely from people who identified themselves as conservatives, and sought to articulate a ritual purity, in the literal sense of rituals of purity, that could be contrasted with the impurity and unhealthiness of a colonized public sphere. This meant elaborate instructions on how to defecate (do not linger, do not talk, try to avoid sniffing) and how to wash up afterwards (use ashes, not soap). Some of these same men became interested in what Benoy Kumar Sarkar later called ‘mistrification,’ or the cultivation of a mechanically adept subjectivity across the classes: respectable men who possessed, and were not afraid to use, the tools of home repair, and who displayed what became an elusive grail of Indian nationalism: 'scientific spirit.' The householder, conceivably, could be his own mistry, plumber and even janitor. Such schemes enjoyed a glimmer of popularity during the National Education project associated with the Swadeshi movement, but then faded almost entirely.

Municipal action, on the other hand, touched upon shit only in the context of disease-control, and even then very gingerly. Without the pressure of cholera, and sometimes even then, public shit remained somebody else’s problem, because the public defecator was reliably somebody else, and ‘the public’ not much more than an occasionally useful abstraction. It was only when Gandhi began holding up latrine democracy in his communes as the metaphor of a new public life, and pointing his finger at how the respectable continued to shit in their own homes (not very cleanly at all), that some connecting threads began to appear: between the communal latrine and the bathroom, between the toilet and the temple, between caste justice and democracy. These threads were, of course, by and large brushed away with the rest of Gandhi’s agenda of social reorganization.

They are now, apparently, being picked up again by the Modi regime, but these are of course not the same threads. They are at once a charade and a distortion, first because they are not accompanied by an agenda of economic and caste justice, second because they constitute an empty gesture of purposeful statecraft that is itself sinister, and third because they mistake public toilets for a public habit.  An important part of the BJP’s support base, including the prime minister himself, is openly enamored of the cleanliness of places like Singapore and leaders like Lee Kuan Yew. This is not a new trend in Indian nationalist discourse; the longing for a strong leader who will clean things up in the name of the state goes back at least as far as the 1920s. Since Indian political realities have stubbornly refused to either accommodate or legitimize that kind of state or elite action, the interventions have typically been sporadic, illicit or theatrical: pogroms, the Emergency, and less malignantly, Swachch Bharat. None have solved the problem of filth in Indian society, except in terms of providing a transient satisfaction to those who understand the connections between cleanness and power.

One of the laudable things about the Swachch Bharat program is that it has included the actual building of latrines: both public facilities and home toilets. (In the later case, it has carried forward an initiative which actually began under the previous government.) The problem, as everyone involved in these projects knows, is not only that proudly-built sewage lines terminate in rivers and on beaches (Indian municipal sanitation is largely about moving the stink downwind), but also that even when the toilets are made available, Indians continue to prefer the great outdoors when nature calls. There is a practical side to this perversity. Private homes often have a premium on space, and cannot spare a room for the bowels. Anybody who has visited a public toilet in India – in a bus station or on a train, for instance – knows that these are extensions of hell, best avoided. Words fail the user; there is no need to proscribe talking. Even facilities that the middle class (would rather not) use, such as school toilets, inspire a dread that must be smelled to be believed; boys at the most respectable schools shit in their pants rather than venture into the latrine. Nowhere is there an assurance of soap and water, let alone ashes. No institution, government or private, invests anything substantial in training or compensating those who are charged with cleaning public toilets, and such staff – where they exist – are treated with the dual contempt that is reserved in India for the low-caste and poor, who, in their undernourished skins and dirty uniforms, function as a race apart. For them, indifference to their assigned tasks becomes a perfectly reasonable form of resistance.

Practicality, however, is only part of the problem of Indian toilets, and it is of course not distinct from ideology and politics. It can hardly be denied that for many Indians, the toilet itself is inherently unclean, something to avoid and banish from the home. And even middle class householders make themselves at home with - but not in - dank, slippery, roach-infested bathrooms that are a sort of afterthought to domesticity. While caste prejudices have something to do with this, much of it is connected to a compartmentalized tolerance of filth, and patterns of urban dirtiness we would recognize in the fairly recent history of the European city, where people might simply pitch their shit out the window with a warning shout of “Gardyloo!” These are the habits of urban peasantry, who became ‘civilized’ in Europe partly through the mitigation of extreme poverty, and partly through absorption into the more or less horizontal community of the national population.

In India, where poverty remained romanticized as ‘authentic’ but nationhood remained fundamentally vanguardist, there was no corresponding mass de-peasantification. The most glaring failure, I would suggest, came in the area of primary education. When Nehru and his colleagues declined to prioritize public education, they neglected a basic function of the nationalizing project of the modern state, which is the transformation of habit into the stuff of historical agency. In this project, compulsion is as automatically legitimate as nationhood itself, and the refusal of the Indian state to enforce compulsory education was the abdication of a power that is prized in the rhetoric of the left as well as the right. “There must be compulsion,” Benoy Sarkar had remarked about urban governance, without feeling he was being anti-democratic or illiberal. The modern citizen – the fascist as well as the liberal – will shit right only if subjected to a measure of compulsion; toilet-training is a part of what Norbert Elias saw as the civilizing process both within and without the family. Bentham's invisible guard must of course be internalized, but the little savages must first be hauled into the circles of civilization.

Relatively few Indian children attended school consistently. Those who did, learned to hold it in. Yet it is children who are not afraid to shit at school that recoil from the prospect of public defecation, and it is those who have been trained to regard brooms and plungers as ordinary implements that do not shrink from toilets and janitors. In India, where such people are mainly fantastic, the failure to compel children to go to school is intertwined with the resounding refusal of the national elites to teach themselves the value of working with tools. The Indian model of development produced, ironically, a nation of engineers who disdain mechanical proficiency and regard mechanics as dirty, but see dirt as both normal and external to themselves. They take it for granted but refuse to own it, holding their noses, as it were. Disgust with and tolerance of shit –the unpleasant bathroom that one uses but does not inhabit – then undergirds a national habit, producing, among other things, a rhetoric of cleansing power that is itself a discursive habit of ressentiment nationalism. But development is first and foremost the building of habits that can sustain and be sustained by infrastructure. It is, consequently, in the arena of habit that India continues to be a grossly underdeveloped nation.

September 4, 2015

On Self-Hate and Romance

            In the latter part of the 1980s, as Rajiv Gandhi’s honeymoon with the voters who had given him a thumping majority in Parliament came to an end, people began muttering about alternative leadership. Some names were muttered more than others. One was V.P. Singh, who in fact became the next PM. Another was Arif Mohammed Khan, the dissident Congressman who had opposed the government’s handling of the Shah Bano affair and resigned soon afterwards. Arif was (and remains) a Muslim, of course, and for that reason few took him seriously as a prime ministerial candidate. He later joined the BJP. But in that moment, when the Congress – internally eroded by Mrs. Indira Gandhi – was showing its weakness, various Indian politicians who had no nationwide base became viable contenders for the top job: not only V.P. Singh, but also Chandra Shekhar, Inder Gujral, H.D. Deve Gowda and Narasimha Rao. Arif’s religious identity, which made him an unlikely candidate, also gave him a certain romantic appeal, quite apart from his reputation as a man of conscience in a cynical capital. I want to suggest that although it came to nothing – his political career went downhill – Arif’s brief moment in the sun reflects a strain of Hindu self-hate that is worthy of recuperation.

            The romance of the Muslim is both an unlikely and a resilient part of Indian nationhood. The cultural history of the republic is littered with it, from Mughal-e-Azam, through the cricket captaincy of Pataudi, to the popularity of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam at the height of the Hindutva wave. It may be argued that Akbar, Pataudi and Abdul Kalam were all “safe” or “palatable” Muslims: one dead, one secular-debonair, and one a missile scientist. They did not hold forth on unpleasant subjects like police brutality or discrimination in housing and employment. But the fact remains that they were also quite different types, and the nationalist imagination had room for them all. Had Abdul Kalam been a Hindu, he would have been a rather ordinary figure. But a Muslim president who wrote poetry about nuclear weapons and presided over a BJP administration was, well, romantic. It was as if the historical project of national purging, or Muslim-exclusion, had unexpectedly unearthed – even produced – a miracle of inclusion. The novelist Anita Desai recognized the dynamic in Clear Light of Day, which is probably her best work: as the Partition takes its bloody course, the bed-ridden Hindu poet Raja fumes at the ongoing attacks on Muslims, pens derivative shairi and fantasizes about heroic feats of rescue. Desai is somewhat unkind to Raja, who “saves” (marries) a Muslim neighbor with a rich father and becomes rich and fat in consequence. Nevertheless, the self-indulgence of his heroism and bad poetry do not altogether efface a particular type of romantic majority-subjectivity that is very much a part of Indian nationalism. As much as Indian secularism, from which it is not fully distinct, its most basic function is the rescue and protection of the religious minority – specifically, Muslims – from the dangerous margins of majoritarian nationhood.

            In general, romantic nationalism is an artifact and instrument of the right; our understanding of the phenomenon is inextricably bound with the histories of European fascism. But it would be more accurate to say that all nationalism is romantic: sooner or later, even the most drily civic and liberal nations acquire fuzzy, feel-good mythologies in which liberalism itself becomes a romance and a bloodline. Romance is both a necessity and a danger within nationalist projects, sustaining the community by making the exclusion of outsiders a source of pleasure. Indian majoritarianism (and indeed, the Pakistani and Bangladeshi) indicates, however, that alongside this exclusive “mainstream,” with its erotics of violence and demonization, there is a romance of inclusion which produces alternative communities in which majoritarian considerations are not so much set aside as differently deployed, often by the same people who subscribe to the more conventional constructions of identity and nationhood. Simultaneously normative and deviant, these other romances are redemptive possibilities within majoritarian democracy.

            That redemption is most readily visible in the movies. Indian popular cinema retains a small but powerful and resilient niche for narratives of Muslim-inclusion: Mughal-e-Azam, Jodhaa Akbar, Bombay, Pinjar, Veer Zaara, and so on. These are very different films. Mughal-e-Azam invited the audience to identify with protagonists who were largely Muslims. It succeeded at least partly because Akbar’s status as the patron-emperor of Indian unity meshed with the Nehruvian secular ethos, allowing a momentary nostalgia for Mughal Hindustan. Since then, secularism has acquired the “pseudo” prefix and Akbar has become a marginal icon (streets and jumbo jets are no longer named after him), needing a Rajput princess to capture the sympathy of Hindu cinema-goers. But the films continue to articulate fantastic desires for union or reunion, or an alternative/hybrid Indian self that not only admits the greatest possible intimacy between Hindus and Muslims, but that spotlights the menace of pure selves. In this recuperation of a self that is “both,” there is the modern promise of a secular Indianness that arches over communal identities, as well as a residue of older, un-partitioned maps and imaginations. Each is a romance of a nationhood that may never have existed, but that is nevertheless experienced as both lost and real. It exists as a ghost ideology, or a recurring dream to which even fascists are susceptible.

            This brings me back to Arif Mohammed Khan and Muslims in the BJP. Quite apart from the big names – Najma Heptulla, M.J. Akbar and others – some three millionMuslims have joined the party this year alone. It is not difficult to understand why Muslims might join an overtly anti-Muslim party. The reasons are entirely prosaic: affiliation brings a measure of security and patronage. There is also the nature of the BJP, which is not just an anti-Muslim organization. It is increasingly taking the place of the Congress as India’s “big tent” political party. It is possible, given the right incentives, to overlook the more rabid expressions of Hindutva and focus on other things. 
            It is harder to gauge the effect of Muslim participation on the BJP. In theory, small numbers of Muslims function as a fig leaf, giving the party the respectability of a secular veneer. In practice, however, even modest numbers of Muslim politicians and voters function as brakes on the chariot: every vote counts in a tight election, and the hate-speech must be tamped down to give spin doctors like M.J. Akbar something to work with. Just as importantly, it reflects and strengthens a political and ideological environment in which respectability comes from inclusion, and the realism of the minority is tied up with the romantic imagination of the majority. This is why the presence of Muslims in the BJP is qualitatively different from a hypothetical situation in which Jews join the NSDAP, and even the participation of Palestinians in Zionist parties. No Arab politician could be a spokesman for Likud in the way that M.J. Akbar can be the spokesman of the BJP.

It can be argued that the Muslim who joins or votes for the BJP exhibits a form of self-hate. But what is self-hate? If we consider the modern Jewish concept of the self-hating subject, it is immediately evident that there are two, intertwined, forms of this perversion. One is the angst of Herzl’s “new Jew,” who remained insecure about his distance from the “old Jew,” who he saw much as gentiles did: stunted, weak, cringing, easily murdered, unenlightened, Oriental, and so on. The other is the treason of the Jew who refuses to align uncritically with Zionism. Among Indian Muslims, something akin to the first variety can be glimpsed in Syed Ahmed Khan’s remark that compared to the English, his compatriots were dirty animals. The second variety would materialize later, in the post-1937 Muslim League narrative of Congress Muslims. Ironically, in independent idea, a diluted version of that second criticism has been adopted by the secular left and aimed at BJP Muslims. But generally speaking, Indo-Muslim self-hate has migrated to Pakistan and more problematically, to Bangladesh, where like Hindutva (with its contempt for the “pseudo-secular” Indian and obsession with “appeasement”), a reformulated Two-Nation Theory can thrive on epithets pinned on critics of the unfettered power of the majority.

            Self-hate in Indian nationalism is primarily a phenomenon of the modern Hindu who loathes what he sees as the historical weakness of his compatriots: their indiscipline, effeminacy, cowardice, fatalism, servility, softness, excessive spirituality, military incompetence, indifference to the hard requirements of the material world, and reluctance to embrace the prerogatives of the majority on its own land. The Hindu right’s hatred of Gandhi, Faisal Devji pointed out, was rooted in the perception that he practiced a politics of minority activism: coming out of South Africa, where Indians were a minority, Gandhi never made the switch to majoritarianism. Indeed, it may be accurate to say that modern self-hate is intertwined not so much with fear of a particular minority as with fear of minority-ness, or the minority condition in the scheme of popular sovereignty.

            At the same time, it is readily apparent that the rhetoric of self-hate secretes a series of fractures within the modern self. The separation between the hater and the hated remains unreliable. Moreover, the barb can be – and is – flung in either direction across the left-right divide, with each side accusing the other of being self-hating, and not without justification. (It is not a coincidence that in Indian politics, the charge of having strayed from secularism is a weapon of the right as well as the left.) Self-hate is, in fact, ubiquitous in nationalism. It reflects not so much a disavowal of communal identity, as a refusal or failure to be sealed within it. From the standpoint of justice, the acceptance of identity is as important as the ambivalence towards it, because it undergirds a responsibility that is otherwise diluted to homeopathic proportions within liberal-secular universalism. It is the combination of acceptance and refusal/failure that produces cosmopolitanism, and more specifically, the cosmopolitan citizenship that makes calculations of majority and minority contingent and fascists apoplectic. There is something salutary about it, and I am entirely in agreement with Mike Marqusee’s remark that people without a measure of self-hate are not to be trusted. It is precisely those nationalities that have been pushed by historical circumstances into hating themselves a little – Germans, the Japanese – that have produced the more encouraging examples of non-militaristic nationhood.

            In South Asia, the liberal form of secularism has not worked very well: that much, I think, is apparent to liberals as well as to those who do not care much for liberalism. Various romances have flourished instead: those of Syed Ahmed Khan, Bankim, Iqbal, Savarkar. Typically, the authors of these romances have urged their co-nationalists to remember: to remember Mahmud and Somnath, Shivaji and Aurangzeb, Punjab in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971, Saurabh Kalia and Papa II, and so on. But people also tend to forget, and what we see in India’s cinema of the intimate Muslim is a desire to forget, which is inseparable from the urge to conjure up mythical tales of Akbar-and-Jodhabai, and a self that has overflowed its communal boundaries. In Mani Ratnam’s Bombay, the frantic father searching for his children in the middle of a riot shouts that he is neither a Hindu nor a Muslim, only an Indian. To describe that desire as secular is to strip it of its meaning and power, because what it really is, is romantic. Self-hate, in other words, is as much about forgetting as about remembering, and where memory has been harnessed to the power and violence of the nation, forgetting functions as an intimate form of resistance to the hegemonic ideology. It generates unexpected variations on nationalist iconography. In Yash Chopra’s Veer Zaara – an utterly mainstream product and one of the most commercially successful Hindi films ever – the standard heroic figure of the uniformed warrior swaggers into the frame in the decidedly non-violent form of a rescue pilot in an unarmed helicopter, and even he resigns his IAF commission midway into the movie. Our self-hating Squadron Leader is no Top Gun.

            When the liberal foundations of secular citizenship are weak, as they are in India, the bases of tolerance and minority rights have to be sought within majoritarian nationalism itself. Forgetful desire is not, of course, a reliable means of justice. Modern states are by definition creatures of memory-making and record-keeping, and it is at best naïve to believe that the Indian state (or the Pakistani or the Bangladeshi) will wither away, leaving happily devolved communities of Gandhians and Nandians. The building and maintenance of secular-liberal institutions and the production and dissemination of histories that are not recycled Orientalist fables remains essential, even as we acknowledge that these will remain embattled in their existence and compromised in their operation. But it is also important to see that such institutions, which may be resented by the illiberal nationalist, can complement the unreliable boundaries of self-hating subjectivity, and that majoritarian romance is a resource that deserves to be taken seriously and better utilized in everyday discourse and practice. What makes the romantic fiction of Indian secularism hopeless also keeps it alive.

June 8, 2015