Hitler in India

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 2, 2012

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

An Olympic Scatology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 17, 2012

Teaching Mohammed Ghandi at CUNY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 25, 2012

Standing in the Middle of Life (with My Pants Behind Me)

I’m standing in the middle of life with my pains behind me…

is a line that, for many years, I heard as “I’m standing in the middle of life with my pants behind me.” It made more sense that way. Whether a thirty-three-year-old woman can credibly claim to be “standing in the middle of life” is a reasonable question, but in fairness to Chrissie Hynde, she grew very convincingly into the song. (Part of being middle-aged, for me, is the startling realization that CH is now in her sixties.) But even at the outset, I was able to grasp that when Ms. Hynde described leaving her pants behind she had just joined the ranks of the procreationally disposed, and that parental nakedness was a ritual of snarlingly meditative middle age.

By and by, other songwriters offered further suggestions about the meaning of middle age. Moving to the east coast, for instance, was nicely foreshadowed by an annoying Irishman who wrote one of the finest songs ever recorded about New York City:

Hit an iceberg in my life / but I’m still afloat

Lose your balance / lose your wife

In the queue for the lifeboat...

Just got a place in New York.

Having got a place in New York under more or less the above-mentioned circumstances, I went whole hog and knocked up the first woman who insisted. The results are, on the one hand, a heart-warming affirmation of life, renewal, magic, innocence, and so on. On the other hand, it is a chastening discovery of what lies beyond the pants one leaves behind.

The social side of having reproduced, which I had dreaded, has turned out to be quite bearable. Some of it is indeed as bad as I had expected: there have been the inevitable "Now you see how instantly, wonderfully and irrevocably your life has changed, don’t you? Well, don’t you?" congratulations from assorted parents, indifferently pleased at the sight of a parent-basher biting the dust. Anything short of a sheepish admission of reformed foolishness marks you as a Nazi. The smug admonishment is often accompanied by effusive praise, as if I – or they, who joined "the club" earlier and apparently with less ambivalence – had performed something other than a fairly commonplace biological function. But with a few exceptions, even my relatives have been reasonable and restrained. They merely urge me to acknowledge that the baby is cute, which I am happy to do. They also declare earnestly that it looks like me. (The wife and the pediatrician did the same.) I stand reassured, although it looks like a baby to me.

I also stand extended in both directions, albeit ambiguously. In the new monkey-baby, I cannot help seeing the fossils of old family trees. There are residues here of a dead father, dead grandparents, faces known and unknown: schoolteachers and bookworms from Dhaka and Pabna, an orphan girl from Benaras tormented by reluctant caretakers, a young foreman (once similarly tormented) in the Kidderpore docks, shadowy priests from UP and pioneers from Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, and even further back, almost unimaginable shapes that crossed the Hindu Kush in rags or the Arabian Sea in rafts. There are Slovak and German peasants, and possibly a Native American tree in Algonquian country that French fur-trappers had climbed. There is (my mother was told by a gossipy in-law) a similar rumor of an amorous Portuguese pirate in the Ganges delta. I have now done my bit, given them all a slightly longer lease on a sort of life, kicked the football down the field, pushed the fossils and chromosomes a few years further into the future. And in the process, I have bought insurance for my own fossil: the creeping sense of mortality that marks the beginning of middle age, the panicky fear of one’s own approaching death that sets in as each year passes a little faster than the one before, has been assuaged somewhat. Such self-extension by diaper-changing is the satisfaction of an embarrassingly animal urge, but the acceptance of one’s bestial-democratic instincts is quite appropriate for those who have dutifully read their Subaltern Studies.  

But mostly I stand humbled. Not by the ‘miracle of life’ or any of that rubbish, but by the inadequacy of middle-aged manhood. When my daughter is asleep in my arms and I look at her face, I realize that nothing that I can do will protect her adequately, or at all, from what lies ahead: the cruelty of strangers, the callousness of boyfriends, frat parties, failed marriages, ungrateful children, old age, irremediable mistakes, loneliness, death. When I look at the two-weeks-old baby, I cannot help imagining her at seventy. (Not for nothing the Bengali tendency to call little girls buri.) So I printed out Kahlil Gibran’s On Children and taped it to the fridge. This too is embarrassing; On Children nearly took on the status of a greeting-card when Gibran, along with Spock, became one half of the gay couple that raised the Baby Boomers. But whereas the Boomers embraced the poem as a manifesto of the liberation of the child, I love it for liberating the parent. To be resigned to being unable to protect and preserve what you love: that may very well be the trick to standing in the middle of life, with or without your pants.

November 16, 2011

A Denied Visa and a Girl on a Pole

Just over a month ago, the Canadian government made headlines by refusing entry visas to a handful of Indian applicants. The disappointed individuals were nondescript enough, including a bureaucrat in the Intelligence Bureau and officers in the Border Security Force (BSF) and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), a paramilitary organization used most frequently to deal with ‘internal disturbances.’ The Canadian High Commission provided a forthright explanation: membership in these organizations was incompatible with Canadian principles of human rights. The government in New Delhi was enraged, made loud noises of protest, and Ottawa quickly backed down and apologized. The embarrassing episode was blamed on overzealous staff in the High Commission, and Indian democracy and human rights were pronounced to be adequately Canadian in their benevolence. The would-be tourists presumably got their visas. K.P. Nayar, writing in The Telegraph, praised the Canadian bureaucracy for its transparency and simultaneously sneered at it for having given in so often to bleeding-heart human-rights activists that it was practically ungovernmental.

Let me begin by noting that there is nothing Canadian about being hung up on human rights. The country has a historical record – and a recent record – of racism and racial thuggery that may fall short of American standards, but not by much. So the high commission officials who initially denied the Indians their visas do not have a particularly high moral ground to stand on. At the same time, it must be conceded that the Canadian government does, at least occasionally, demonstrate some sensitivity to issues of human rights, and that its response to the Indian visa applicants was consistent with that sensitivity. Two questions that remain are whether the Canucks violated Indian sovereignty by raising the issue of human rights in such an undiplomatic and hypocritical way, and whether such violations are to be countenanced. The answer to both, I suggest, is an unequivocal yes.

Where I lived in India, there was a CRPF barrack not far from my home. In the cool of the early mornings, I would sometimes see the CRPF men running on the road that connected my home and my school. The jawans in their shorts and singlets did not look particularly menacing. They carried no guns, they never approached us; like Indian soldiers in general, they existed in their own enclave, separate from and only occasionally visible from the world of middle-class civilians. There was nothing about them that might suggest the barbaric. Yet this barbarity, too, is the face of the Indian state, and of the modern nation-state in general.

How are we to explain that the Canadian state occasionally makes a fuss about barbarism, and that not only does the Indian state not make a fuss, its defenders scoff about such fussiness? Part of the answer might be found in a split that the historian Partha Chatterjee has identified within the nature of the Indian state: the coexistence of a ‘discourse of rights’ and a ‘discourse of policy.’ The Indian nation-state is not identically a state of all its citizens. Its inventors and investors are an elite which longs for certain things that appear to be universally desirable: middle-class comforts, geopolitical status, military power, clean straight roads and shiny airports. They also care about democracy and constitutional liberties, about judicial procedure, about limits on police power and about the invisibility of soldiers in civilian society. Chatterjee calls them ‘proper citizens.’ Proper citizens in India are not necessarily cynical people, but like every elite in the vanguard of a state that anticipates the modernity of its people, they live with an inescapable dilemma, which has to do with those other Indians: the ‘improper’ citizens whose slums that encroach upon roads and runways, who stubbornly reject the notion that the countryside is a collection of minerals and national parks, who remain indifferent to the need to compete with China and to the ‘national interest.’ They are at best a nuisance and at worse a threat like the ‘Maoists.’

The Indian state approaches the former category of citizens with a model of governance that emphasizes rights, but regards the latter as the objects of policy: as problems to be solved, ideally by absorption into the circle of proper citizens, but more commonly by displacement and arbitrary police action, and sometimes by torture and murder. This inevitably produces various levels of dehumanization, among which the image of a dead woman casually slung from a pole is by no means the most extreme. Such dehumanization is a basic reality of life in unevenly modern societies. North Americans might need to go some distance to discover them – to Bagram, Abu Ghraib, My Lai, the inner city, the past – but there are Abu Ghraibs in India every day. The arbitrary, extra-legal, dehumanizing deployment of violence been a part of the project of nation-building since Nehru winced at the thought of his soldiers burning Naga villages and raping Mizo women but could advance no real alternative. It can be argued that this is precisely why the CRPF exists: it allows the regular military to distance itself somewhat from the dirty work of policy-implementation.  The CRPF is no more a terrorist organization than the Mounties are a terrorist organization, but the former supports an ongoing project of social transformation that necessarily relies on extralegal violence. Police torture is ubiquitous in India and the middle class does not bat an eye. It is seen – or more accurately, not seen and only tacitly acknowledged, because proper citizens do not want to see such things – as an unavoidable aspect of governance. It is only when the police go too far and begin targeting the children of the middle class, as they did during the Naxalite movement in the early 1970s, that there are murmurs of alarm, calls for restraint, literary outpourings, and so on.

K.P. Nayar’s reaction to the Canadian visa incident makes very good sense in this light. Canadians no longer have to deal with rebellious peasants (except in Afghanistan), so they can inhabit a modern state in which everybody is a proper citizen, enveloped by a discourse of rights. They are not engaged in the aggressive pursuit of superpower status or overly prickly about their sovereignty, partly because they are already at or close to the center of things, and partly because they suffer from neither the pretentions nor the insecurities with which the ex-colonial Indian bourgeoisie is infused. They can, thus, ‘give in’ to liberal activists at every turn, conciliate international forums, and coddle their Quebecois separatists instead of ‘disappearing’ them in the manner of Siddhartha Shankar Ray and K.P.S. Gill. In denying visas to Indian policemen they are deeply hypocritical, but it is not their hypocrisy that bothers Nayar. It is an effeteness – the effeteness of those comfortably ensconced in a society in which rights and policy are not mutually hostile concepts – of which the Indian enthusiast of a hard state and shiny modernity is simultaneously contemptuous and envious.

What can be done for the victims of their enthusiasm? It is impractical to ask for a radical ideological shift in which middle-class Indians suddenly become Gandhians. As long as the nation-state – a middle-class fetish – persists alongside a large population that is marginal to nationhood, we will see more dead women being carried by soldiers like hunting trophies in an operation appropriately named Green Hunt, the continued normalization of police brutality, and the effective existence of two states within the same society. It is equally silly to imagine that the nationalist classes can be ejected from the offices in which policy is made. The ‘Maoists’ can win a few skirmishes and carry out the occasional act of terrorism, but they don't have a ghost of a chance against the power of the state, which has already begun to withdraw its military helicopters from UN peacekeeping missions so that they can be deployed closer to home. The riff-raff may eventually cease to embarrass the proper citizens, but I suspect that will happen only after India, like Canada, has achieved a measure of evenness by ruthlessly flattening its more uneven Indians.

In the meantime, however, the best thing that can happen is for Canada and other countries to keep rejecting visa applications. The problem cannot be solved but it can be mitigated. Let the Indian government reject some visa applications too, and not just those of Pakistanis. Let boycotts fly and sanctions ring. Hypocritical and inconsistent it might be, but it would not be meaningless or ineffective. George W. Bush was responsible for astronomical violence and misery, but no amount of praise is too high for his State Department for denying a visa to Narendra Modi. These things don’t always stop the barbarians, but it gives them pause. (There are, I'm told, several countries that Henry Kissinger did not dare to visit after the 1970s, and Israeli generals have learned to stay on the plane when in Britain. Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani is still alive in Iran.) The defenders of national sovereignty – like Nayar – may find this unpalatable, but national sovereignty is usually the enemy of the rights of the individual citizen, who needs all the friends he or she can find, regardless of where those friends are located.

July 5, 2010