News stories frequently use anonymous sources; it's a necessary part of the trade, but easy to abuse. Like most media people, I read articles with one question always at the back of my mind: "Whose interest, if anybody's, does this piece serve?" I'm not a conspiracy theorist. Quite often, an article will appear balanced, quoting multiple viewpoints. Or else it will be a manifestly opinionated piece of editorialising, making no claims to neutrality.
But every day I come across articles which appear to be unbiased reportage, but are clearly of help to some individual or organisation. Take this piece by Laltendu Mishra in today's Hindustan Times, for instance:
The price war among airlines is now intensifying on the long-haul routes to London, Brazil and Malaysia.
Jet Airways in partnership with TAM Air is offering an all-inclusive economy class return fares to Brazil for Rs 76,000 via London and Rs 86,000 via New York.
Passengers can fly from Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai to Brazil’s Rio and Sao Paulo airports at these fares. This is comparatively cheaper than Emirates’ India-Brazil all-inclusive return fare of Rs 94,000, which industry executives say has been the cheapest going. Currently Emirates flies bulk of the passengers in the India-Brazil route through its hub in Dubai. On the eastern side, Singapore Airlines has introduced a special economy class fare in the India-Kuala Lumpur sector. An all-inclusive return ticket is priced at Rs 14,500. This is against Jet Airways’ Chennai-Kuala Lumpur all-inclusive return fare of Rs 14,715.
Jet is offering a Mumbai-Singapore return fare for Rs 11,428 in its lowest slab.
There is also intense competition in the Mumbai-London sector.
Air India is offering the cheapest basic return fare at Rs 8,900 (all inclusive Rs 27,922) as against British Airways’ Rs 11,990 (all inclusive Rs 28,390) and Jet’s Rs 11,990 (all inclusive Rs 18,390), according to information gathered from travel trade.
As traffic is declining due to various factors including slack economic growth worldwide, airlines are expected to make more attractive deals to stimulate flying, airline officials say.
In other words, Jet Airways offers the lowest priced tickets to Brazil. It also offers reasonable prices on the Mumbai - Singapore sector and nearly matches Singapore Airlines' special fare to Kuala Lumpur. Oh, and it beats the competition by 10 grand on the India-London route.
When I first read the piece, I felt it was a plant by Jet Airways. On digging deeper, I'm not so sure. As of today, the Jet Airways site offers no tickets to Brazil at all. On the Singapore route, I tried different dates but wasn't offered anything close to the lowest slab fare quoted in the article. As for the London price, it is a misprint: the actual total fare after adding taxes and a hefty surcharge (which all airlines tack on in India, cheating customers in the process because oil prices are no longer high enough to justify surcharges) is exactly the same as British Airways, Rs.28,390, not 18,390.
Anybody trying to book a ticket through the Jet Airways website on any of these sectors after reading the article is going to be disappointed and probably angry.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
And now Tata
I contacted the Tata people, formerly VSNL, to provide me with a broadband connection, handing them a multi-month advance as demanded. For three days in a row they said they'd send men across and didn't. Finally, on the fourth day, the installers arrived. One was small-built, wore spectacles, and had just three fingers on each hand. The index and middle finger were fused together and twisted as were the ring and little finger. For some reason, I thought of the toes of a Cassowary, though I've never seen one of those birds. Great that the Tatas have maintained their commitment to the handicapped, I told myself, trying to shut out jokes about digital have-nots. The job, unfortunately, required a fair bit of manual dexterity. Eight thin, colour-coded wires had to be slipped into plastic connectors at both ends of a long cable. Cassowary's partner was a rookie who couldn't help because he knew nothing about electronics. He was the roof man. Tata Broadband uses Wimax technology, which involves placing a square antenna in an open space where it can receive a signal from one of the towers installed by the provider. The signal was weak at my first floor window, so we headed for the terrace.
"I hope this isn't like Tatasky TV", I muttered. "I don't want my connection failing every time it drizzles".
I was assured that wouldn't happen.
Roofman got to work, attaching the receptor pad to a rusty television antenna, and jumping down onto a wet ledge from where he lowered the cable to my window. Once Cassowary had finished checking signal strength and GPS coordinates, we headed down to drag the cable into my home and try out the brand new connection.
It did not work.
Roofman was told to move the square antenna this way and that to catch the signal better. He did not have a cellphone which made coordination between first floor and terrace less than efficient. Ultimately, I went upstairs and played interlocutor between the two using my mobile.
"I almost slipped while dangling that cable" Roofman said.
"The work looks really dangerous", I replied.
He’d spent the last few months installing dish antennas for Big TV. His beat was in an insalubrious part of town; most new Big TV clients there lived in shanties. His partner had put his leg through a sheet of corrugated metal the other day, requiring many stitches. The house owners fought with him for half an hour as he bled, insisting he owed them money for repairs. That’s when Roofman decided to switch companies. Broadband, he said, was used by good people in good homes.
It began to rain. After twenty minutes of instructing us to twist and turn the antenna, Cassowary gave up. The square pad was taken down, the cable disconnected and hauled up, bags packed.
"So, this means I can't get a broadband connection from you, right?"
"Right", Cassowary replied, downcast. Some weeks, he said, he'd visit ten houses and manage only one successful connection. The previous few days had been good, he'd been working mainly in Colaba, in high rises close to the sea where the signal was loud and clear.
I wouldn't have expected the Tatas to adopt such hit-and-miss technology. But then, I wouldn't have expected them to roll out a satellite television service which malfunctioned at the slightest hint of rain. They've done the brand few favours in recent years.
As for me, it is back yet again to square one: to MTNL and surfing in ten-minute bursts before having to unplug, replug and hope.
Monday, July 6, 2009
The budget and the market
Finance ministers delivering budget speeches are normally constrained by having to earn more or less what they dole out. So, when Pranab Mukherjee began listing dozens of programmes which were going to receive funding boosts of between 50 and 200%, I was thinking tax, tax, tax must follow spend, spend, spend. But that's not the way the world's working at the moment. We've already seen the Obama splurge, and now India's got its own stimulus special. The idea is that government handouts will boost demand which will boost growth which will boost revenues down the line. If India returns to a 9% GDP growth rate, it should be able to bring the deficit down to a reasonable level, but that's a big If. Meanwhile, Mukherjee must have enjoyed the chance to throw around the freebies.
The market, meanwhile, behaved like a guy determined to score on a first date, and unwilling to settle for anything short of the big bang his friend Mr. Media had hinted was coming his way. Unable to make it to the bedroom, he goes home convinced the episode was a disaster. Reflecting on the evening later, he thinks, "well, she obviously is into long-term stuff rather than one-night stands (reform is a process, not an event), the dinner was fun, if a bit pricey; the goodbye kiss wasn't bad (FBT scrapped, 10% surcharge on income tax out); and she seemed serious when she told me to call her".
Maybe the market will make that call a few days down the line, and it could be the start of a wonderful relationship.
The market, meanwhile, behaved like a guy determined to score on a first date, and unwilling to settle for anything short of the big bang his friend Mr. Media had hinted was coming his way. Unable to make it to the bedroom, he goes home convinced the episode was a disaster. Reflecting on the evening later, he thinks, "well, she obviously is into long-term stuff rather than one-night stands (reform is a process, not an event), the dinner was fun, if a bit pricey; the goodbye kiss wasn't bad (FBT scrapped, 10% surcharge on income tax out); and she seemed serious when she told me to call her".
Maybe the market will make that call a few days down the line, and it could be the start of a wonderful relationship.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Tyeb Mehta July 26, 1925 - July 2, 2009
One of modern India's greatest painters, Tyeb Mehta, died last night. A little less than a year ago, I was invited by Sotheby's to deliver a lecture in Delhi on Tyeb's art. I'm uploading that lecture with some modifications. Delhi's Vadehra Art Gallery gave me permission to use images from the book, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges. Other images have been lifted off the Web. The resolution of all has been reduced substantially, so please do not judge the impact of Tyeb's paintings based on these low-quality photos. Apologies for the changes in font; I haven't figured out how to cut and paste onto Blogger without having fonts go haywire.
The vertiginous composition above, from 1967, allows the agony of the falling subject full expression. These paintings are all fairly large, 5 to 6 feet high or wide.
Occasionally, Tyeb mixes two of these themes, combining bull and rickshaw, or falling figure and rickshaw as in this painting from 1993.
Since the mid 1980s, he has frequently painted Kali,
and the buffalo demon Mahisasura, sometimes engaged in combat with Durga Mahishasuramardini
It is evident that Bacon has turned on their head the lavish symbols of power evident in the Spanish master's portrait.
The resemblance of the composition to common reclining-mother-with-child images like this 1906 painting by Paula Modersohn Becker was unmistakable, and shocking in its reversal of the usual tender intimacy of the subject.
Relating Tyeb's exploration of the trussed bull motif to the common use of the animal as an emblem of masculinity, the replacement of the infant with a bull's head seemed telling. I looked at his rickshaw works and noticed that females frequently appear in them, but relate to the vehicle in a very different way from the male pullers.
The lolling female above is a picture of relaxation in comparison with male figures who appear to be surrounded and hemmed in by their mode of sustenance. In at least one instance, the female appears in a dominating position looming over a struggling man.
Tyeb's encounters with rickshaws go back to childhood visits to his grandmother's home in Calcutta, but his interest in film assures us that he was familiar with Bimal Roy's seminal film Do Bigha Zameen, during a crucial scene of which a rich woman orders the protagonist to pull his rickshaw ever faster as part of a game, leading to him crashing the cart and injuring himself.
The mother goddess Kali was easy to incorporate into a scheme in which the male is at the mercy of or destroyed by a dominant female. In an earlier era one would be tempted to interpret Kali's mouth as a vagina dentata (at least one important critic has apparently has done so as part of an extensive Freudian analysis in an essay that, unfortunately, has never been published).
More interesting than Kali is the case of the goddess Durga and Mahishasura, the buffalo demon. In the legend, Mahishasura proposes to Durga and she accepts, before changing her mind, turning into an implacable opponent and ultimately slaying her former suitor.
If my interpretation is valid, Tyeb's work reiterates throughout his career the theme of the threatened male and destructive female . To my knowledge, he has never hinted at such a preoccupation in the course of conversations with friends. An attempt at biographical excavation is probably pointless, for he rarely speaks about his childhood. For those desirous of talking to him about the way his life and art intersect, the story begins in his twenties, with a skull smashed during a riot, with a bull in a Bandra abattoir. Had I observed this thread running through his painting earlier, I might have attempted to take it up with him, knowing the discussion would probably be futile. Now, that time is certainly past, and I am filled with regret that I did not pay closer attention to his paintings when I first began writing about art.
Though India's art lovers have admired Tyeb Mehta's work for decades, his real moment in the sun came in 2002, when his triptych Celebration became the first Indian painting to sell at auction for over 10 million rupees. In 2005, he secured a place in the history of the art market by becoming the first Indian artist to have a work sell for over a million dollars. His place in the history of Indian art had, of course, been secure for a long time, but it is good he has lived to see himself gain pride of place on the financial side of things as well.
I edited a magazine called Art India between 1998 and 2000, a time when few believed such astronomical prices would be achieved in the near future. The first issue under my direction had a Tyeb Mehta painting titled Mahishasura on its cover.
Actually the painting was called Mahishasuramardini, but with M F Husain being victimised by the Hindu Right, Tyeb preferred to omit the reference to Durga. His health was fragile and he wanted no distraction from his work.
I went over to his apartment to collect the slide for the cover, and to speak about his paintings. We sat in a small living room that doubled as his studio. I knew Celebration well, since it hung in the Times of India building which I visited regularly. Seeing his tiny working space, I asked how he'd managed to paint that massive canvas. This is what I gathered: his studio was only large enough to hold one panel of the triptych. His neighbour, who owned a bigger flat, would take his family out every weekend. With his permission, each Sunday afternoon, Tyeb would have the three panels of Celebration moved to the flat next door so he could see them side by side. Then he’d paint for the rest of the week on the basis of that memory. Since his work is so much about balance, hearing how he painted Celebration made his achievement all the more astonishing.
DEVELOPMENT
That real public acclaim should have come to him in his late seventies is, in a way, appropriate. He is not a man to rush things. Even his introduction to art was slow to come, and he matured as a painter long after his most talented contemporaries. His family had connections in the movie business, and he trained first as a cinematographer, and then as a film editor. Around the time of Partition, he began finding it difficult to make the journey from home in
His first significant painting, Trussed Bull, was executed in 1956, when he was 30 years old.
The picture reminds me of diagrams showing edible sections of cattle; the haunch, the rump and so on. The bull has fascinated the artist for over fifty years since that early effort. He continues to explore the image, along with select others that form a small repertoire of motifs. There is the rickshaw puller, depicted in this charcoal drawing from 1959;
the diagonal, represented by these two paintings, from 1969 and 1979 respectively.
and the falling figure, visible below in a transitional painting from 1966 in which Tyeb divided the picture space into a grid, foreshadowing later, more successful attempts to combine deeply emotive figuration and geometric precision.
The vertiginous composition above, from 1967, allows the agony of the falling subject full expression. These paintings are all fairly large, 5 to 6 feet high or wide.
Occasionally, Tyeb mixes two of these themes, combining bull and rickshaw, or falling figure and rickshaw as in this painting from 1993.
Since the mid 1980s, he has frequently painted Kali,
and the buffalo demon Mahisasura, sometimes engaged in combat with Durga Mahishasuramardini
The trussed bull, earliest of Tyeb's abiding concerns, was inspired by a visit to an abattoir. The artist saw the animals being tied up and then slaughtered, and the vision obsessed him thereafter. The idea of such a strong animal rendered helpless became for him symbolic of attacks on the spirit in general. After traveling to
This phase of Tyeb’s art is often said to be deeply influenced by the English painter Francis Bacon.
It is evident that Bacon has turned on their head the lavish symbols of power evident in the Spanish master's portrait.
Tyeb’s work, in my opinion, never has the ruthlessness that Bacon’s does.
In this painting, for example, it looks like the bull is lying in the lap of the figure as it breathes its last. Violence and trauma are fixtures in Tyeb’s art as well as Bacon's, but the impelling force behind a Tyeb painting rarely appears to be destructive. There is usually more sympathy, a sense of victimhood, implied in the Indian artist's figures.
The variance in approach is, in my view, attributable to the very different histories of modernism in
In
Tyeb continued painting in this expressionist mode through the sixties, before receiving a Rockefeller grant to visit the
Tyeb has often said that seeing colour field painting physically was entirely different from viewing images of it as he had previously done. And that is true of a lot of painting which uses geometrical patterns, whether Mondrian or Raza. All Raza bindu paintings look similar in reproduction, but there’s a huge qualitative difference between them that becomes apparent on carefully observing them in the cloth, as it were.
After returning to
In his own account, after many attempts at incorporating Newman, the artist threw paint at the canvas in frustration. To this day, incidentally, Tyeb destroys paintings if he isn’t completely satisfied with the result. The time he flung paint at the canvas, though, was providential. The paint described a rough diagonal on the canvas and, staring at it, Tyeb realized he may have a way out of his predicament. He began to work on dividing the picture space diagonally rather than vertically as he had previously done.
The diagonal is more dynamic than the vertical or horizontal, a fact utilised by artists in numerous eras, notably the Baroque age, in which painters distinguished themselves from the classicism of Raphael and his followers by emphasising diagonals, thus creating a sense of movement.
Tyeb’s application of paint changed dramatically during his early experiments with the diagonal. He abandoned thick impasto and began to employ flat, bright planes of colours. To this day, he prefers pure colours and doesn’t use many layers, so the first application is important, it has to come out right. From the perspective of the connoisseur as well as the collector, there is a reason to be thankful that Tyeb abandoned impasto. Time has not been kind to his early works. It is not unusual to see paint peeling off canvas, and if you come across any painting of his from before 1968 which appears in pristine condition you can assume it has been heavily restored. [Dadiba Pundole, who was at the lecture, commented that Tyeb's paintings on board have survived well, while those on canvas have suffered].
With the diagonal, Tyeb arrived at the style that he has retained into the 21st century. His commitment to the figure stayed constant
INTERPRETATIONS
When I speak of connections and relations and break ups, there is a meaning aside from the stylistic which is being evoked. It is only natural to surmise that the diagonal was substantially inspired by the memory of
It is worth asking, though, why Partition should come up as a subject for examination so many years after the event. Surely even with so single-minded an artist as Tyeb, some expiry date exists beyond which memories lose their intensity. It could be that the upheaval in
A major leap in Tyeb’s art took place in 1985, when he was living in Santiniketan as artist-in-residence. His health had undergone a turn for the worse: he'd suffered a debilitating bout of Hepatitis and, four years later, a heart attack. These were hardly the conditions under which one would expect original art to be created by a man approaching old age, but Tyeb produced in Bengal a three panel work known simple as the Santiniketan Triptych which is, I believe, one of the greatest images to be painted by an Indian in the twentieth century.
What you see on the screen does it no justice. You really need to go and spend a lot of time in front of it, absorbing the marvelous equilibrium orchestrated between forms and colours. Luckily, anybody can view the triptych because it is in a public collection: in fact, it hangs at the other end of this road, in the National Gallery of Modern Art.
I haven't been able to find even a semi-adequate image for the whole painting, so I'm adding details of the three panels separately, starting with the one on the left.
Before this painting, Tyeb had worked with one, two, at most three figures. To expand suddenly to some two dozen while retaining his hard-won formal rigour was a remarkable achievement. Obviously Tyeb had been influenced, like so many who have been to Santiniketan, by the Santhal tribals who live in the surrounding areas. The drummers who appear in the left panel would become a feature of his study in coming years.
One issue he faced when tackling this canvas was that of narrative. He comes from a school which believes making a story out of a painting and explaining it in those terms is trivializing art. It’s difficult enough having two figures without narrative, but what do you do in the case of so many? There is clearly something happening whose broad framework one can discern, even if one had not heard of the charak puja conducted mainly in rural areas of Bengal at the end of spring.
The collection of figures with the musicians on the left indicate it’s a ritual, perhaps a procession of the kind depicted in his second such triptych, Celebration, created a decade later.A green figure on the right appears to be strung up, as if by a lynch mob. In the central panel we see an upside down head and hand at the feet of an androgynous figure, female in the frontal view and male in the white profile. A deity of some kind, perhaps. All these clues might indicate a human sacrifice , but the seated woman at the centre makes a tender picture with the goat which nuzzles up to her, and perhaps grows human limbs to embrace her.
And what of the faces of the women behind her? Are they celebrating or mourning?
It is, I believe, pointless trying to fully resolve these ambiguities, though Ramachandra Gandhi made a heroic effort to do so in his book Svaraj, which uses the Santiniketan triptych as a take-off point. Gandhi’s complicated interpretation involves seeing the panel on the left as representing the secular humanism that currently dominates the world, the panel on the right as religious fanaticism which is at war with secular humanists, and the central panel as a reconciliation of the two in the Advaita philosophy of dissolving the barrier between the I and the Other.
While I believe Ramachandra Gandhi’s interpretation is a case of over-reading, perhaps a conscious one, I do feel that the idea of reconciliation is central to the painting. So much of Tyeb’s work is about equilibrium, and in this case the equilibrium involves reconciling the opposite poles of grief and joy, celebration and execution, devotion and ritual sacrifice.
If Gandhi brings an advaitist perspective to bear on a single monumental painting, Ranjit Hoskote reads Tyeb's entire oeuvre in the light of the artist's Shia (Dawoodi Bohra to be specific) upbringing. Tyeb's focus on injustice and physical suffering might be traced to his religious background, but I believe Ranjit overstates his case when he suggests that many of Tyeb's recurrent images are "avatars of Hussein", whose death in the battle of Karbala is the prime focus of Shia devotion. Martyrs are heroic victims, their heroism derived from the cause they represent. They have the option to save their skin but refuse to compromise because they believe their cause is worth dying for. Do Tyeb's falling figures, trussed bulls and trapped rickshaw pullers fit into this scheme?
To my eyes, they have no agency, make no choices, represent no cause. They are victims, pure and simple, not martyrs or avatars of Hussein. (I omitted this passage from my talk because Ranjit was not present to defend his viewpoint. I am publishing it now because this is a public forum. Ranjit's long essay, which appears in Vadehra Art Gallery's Tyeb Mehta: Idea Images Exchanges remains the best general introduction to the artist's life and art currently in print)
To return to Tyeb’s
This sort of depiction is not unfamiliar within the Indian tradition. I want to take a step back and then two steps forward to contextualize it. The step backward involves the history of colonial interpretations of Indian art, specially of Hindu iconography.
Sculptures like this one of Chamunda were not assimilable into the canon of European ideas about the beautiful, and were therefore dismissed as monstrous. This changed with the intervention of the philosopher-politician Edmund Burke, best known in
In the current global scenario, art is not particularly interested in the sublime. Much contemporary work is completely different in spirit from Tyeb’s paintings. Where he is intense and invariably serious, aiming to create universal images, work by young artists tends to be intellectually playful, ironic, interested in pop images rather than classical culture, and engaged with particular political issues of the moment.
To illustrate this difference, compare Tyeb’s response to
It is instantly identifiable as an echo of Hanuman carrying Dronagiri mountain in calendar art images like this one.
Such depictions of Hanuman, devoted servant of Rama, were part of a nexus of imagery co-opted by Hindu nationalists when they pressed to build a Rama temple in place of a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya. In his canvas version, Jitish-Hanuman's mace is inscribed with the text of a secularist pledge taught in
Though Tyeb has never departed from his high modernist ideals to work in this kind of postmodern mode, one painting by him stands out in being as close to the postmodern spirit as he will ever get. That is his backhanded tribute to Francis Bacon, titled The Play, in which two wrestlers, one a Tyeb Mehta figure, the other a Baconian portrait tussle for supremacy.
I hope one of the things I have done in this lecture is to show that the reputation the artist has in some quarters of being excessively derivative of Bacon is a deeply misguided and limiting view of his considerable achievement.
MALE VICTIM, FEMALE DESTROYER
The resemblance of the composition to common reclining-mother-with-child images like this 1906 painting by Paula Modersohn Becker was unmistakable, and shocking in its reversal of the usual tender intimacy of the subject.
Relating Tyeb's exploration of the trussed bull motif to the common use of the animal as an emblem of masculinity, the replacement of the infant with a bull's head seemed telling. I looked at his rickshaw works and noticed that females frequently appear in them, but relate to the vehicle in a very different way from the male pullers.
The lolling female above is a picture of relaxation in comparison with male figures who appear to be surrounded and hemmed in by their mode of sustenance. In at least one instance, the female appears in a dominating position looming over a struggling man.
Tyeb's encounters with rickshaws go back to childhood visits to his grandmother's home in Calcutta, but his interest in film assures us that he was familiar with Bimal Roy's seminal film Do Bigha Zameen, during a crucial scene of which a rich woman orders the protagonist to pull his rickshaw ever faster as part of a game, leading to him crashing the cart and injuring himself.
The mother goddess Kali was easy to incorporate into a scheme in which the male is at the mercy of or destroyed by a dominant female. In an earlier era one would be tempted to interpret Kali's mouth as a vagina dentata (at least one important critic has apparently has done so as part of an extensive Freudian analysis in an essay that, unfortunately, has never been published).
More interesting than Kali is the case of the goddess Durga and Mahishasura, the buffalo demon. In the legend, Mahishasura proposes to Durga and she accepts, before changing her mind, turning into an implacable opponent and ultimately slaying her former suitor.
If my interpretation is valid, Tyeb's work reiterates throughout his career the theme of the threatened male and destructive female . To my knowledge, he has never hinted at such a preoccupation in the course of conversations with friends. An attempt at biographical excavation is probably pointless, for he rarely speaks about his childhood. For those desirous of talking to him about the way his life and art intersect, the story begins in his twenties, with a skull smashed during a riot, with a bull in a Bandra abattoir. Had I observed this thread running through his painting earlier, I might have attempted to take it up with him, knowing the discussion would probably be futile. Now, that time is certainly past, and I am filled with regret that I did not pay closer attention to his paintings when I first began writing about art.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Gay rights and religion
Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code states, "Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years..." The same law is on the books in Singapore, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, and has been interpreted differently in each of those nations.
In India, section 377 is used by the police to convict pedophiles and harass males interested in sex with fellow men. An activist group, the Naz Foundation, has filed suit in Delhi asking for the law to be read down so it no longer applies to voluntary intercourse between adults. As the time for a verdict draws closer, different arms of the government are speaking in contradictory voices. The first to break ranks and favour decriminalising gay sex was the former Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss His successor, Ghulam Nabi Azad, has been more circumspect. The law ministry had earlier backed the status quo, but the new man in charge, Veerappa Moily, gladdened liberal hearts by signalling a shift in position.
Moily has since backtracked. He now says his comments were misinterpreted, and that a decision will be taken only after consulting with religious groups. This is a ridiculous idea. The head of the Darul Uloom is hardly likely to emerge from such a consultation saying, "Homosexuals behave in accord with the Quran and Hadith and, besides, the ones I know are seriously cool dudes". The Shankaracharya of Puri is not about to preside over gay wedding ceremonies in his temple. The stance of religious groups is well known, and is broadly against any repeal or watering down of Section 377.
Why should the opinion of these luminaries count outside their sphere of influence? The Pope, who considers homosexuality a cardinal sin, also believes condoms ought to play no part in contraception and AIDS prevention. This hasn't stopped the Indian government from encouraging condom use, and producing zillions of rubbers in state factories. India didn't consult with Pentecostals before legalising abortion. We didn't do so because we are a secular republic. The law minister appears not to have read the constitution recently.
OK, so gay sex is haram. But so is eating pig and drinking alcohol, and I can enjoy both those things legally pretty much anywhere in India. We have laws against caste discrimination, against dowry, against child marriage, all of which were pushed through despite opposition from conservative Hindu circles. Religions may bless marriages between geriatric men and pre-pubescent girls while frowning of the love or lust between adult males, but liberal society thinks in exactly the opposite way and so should the state.
It is time India reclaimed its status as a liberal republic committed to progressive ideals. It's bad enough that my hometown appears to be ruled by an elephant-headed god and a seventeenth century monarch.
In India, section 377 is used by the police to convict pedophiles and harass males interested in sex with fellow men. An activist group, the Naz Foundation, has filed suit in Delhi asking for the law to be read down so it no longer applies to voluntary intercourse between adults. As the time for a verdict draws closer, different arms of the government are speaking in contradictory voices. The first to break ranks and favour decriminalising gay sex was the former Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss His successor, Ghulam Nabi Azad, has been more circumspect. The law ministry had earlier backed the status quo, but the new man in charge, Veerappa Moily, gladdened liberal hearts by signalling a shift in position.
Moily has since backtracked. He now says his comments were misinterpreted, and that a decision will be taken only after consulting with religious groups. This is a ridiculous idea. The head of the Darul Uloom is hardly likely to emerge from such a consultation saying, "Homosexuals behave in accord with the Quran and Hadith and, besides, the ones I know are seriously cool dudes". The Shankaracharya of Puri is not about to preside over gay wedding ceremonies in his temple. The stance of religious groups is well known, and is broadly against any repeal or watering down of Section 377.
Why should the opinion of these luminaries count outside their sphere of influence? The Pope, who considers homosexuality a cardinal sin, also believes condoms ought to play no part in contraception and AIDS prevention. This hasn't stopped the Indian government from encouraging condom use, and producing zillions of rubbers in state factories. India didn't consult with Pentecostals before legalising abortion. We didn't do so because we are a secular republic. The law minister appears not to have read the constitution recently.
OK, so gay sex is haram. But so is eating pig and drinking alcohol, and I can enjoy both those things legally pretty much anywhere in India. We have laws against caste discrimination, against dowry, against child marriage, all of which were pushed through despite opposition from conservative Hindu circles. Religions may bless marriages between geriatric men and pre-pubescent girls while frowning of the love or lust between adult males, but liberal society thinks in exactly the opposite way and so should the state.
It is time India reclaimed its status as a liberal republic committed to progressive ideals. It's bad enough that my hometown appears to be ruled by an elephant-headed god and a seventeenth century monarch.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Mathur and da Cunha's SOAK revisited
Earlier this afternoon I looked around SOAK again. Dilip da Cunha had written to me suggesting a discussion after reading my previous post, and he sought me out while I was at NGMA. I was gratified to be able to share perspectives.
While our exchange of views did not change my interpretation of the show, I did regret restricting myself to what I felt were its negatives. There is much to commend about the energy and dedication the authors have put into their research. Their ideas about rejigging the way Bombay deals with the monsoon deserve serious consideration by municipal authorities. Though I disagree with da Cunha and Mathur's reading of the city's history, I'm sure that, should their proposals be put in practice, they would be preferrable to the slipshod actions of BMC planners.
During our back and forth, both authors suggested I had misread their writing. After looking at their texts carefully once more, I am satisfied I have not done that, aside from employing straightforward assertions instead of sentences that use phrases allowing for wiggle room like 'not necessarily' and 'cannot be assumed'.
I've transcribed a few panels from the show to provide a taste of the da Cunha / Mathur style and mode of thought. Each bit of text is in italics, and is followed by my own analysis.
"Mumbai's history, in most accounts, pivots on its European occupation -- the Portuguese from 1534 to 1665, but more significantly the British from 1665 to 1947. Little is said in these accounts about an attitude to and vocabulary of terrain that was constructed through this occupation, a vocabulary that rests on a fundamental belief not necessarily shared by previous occupants of Mumbai, namely that land and sea should be divided.
This division was instituted by European seafarers, but more concertedly by English marine and land surveyors in the late 1700s with the drawing of a line on a map. This line traverses rocks, swamps and beaches of an aqueous terrain, asserting entities that are taken for granted today in descriptions, planning and everyday administration of Mumbai. Three of these entities are significant: the island of Mumbai, the coast of the Indian subcontinent, and a major concern following the 2005 flood, the Mithi river. The reality of these entities cannot be questioned. But they are essentially things singled out from the dynamic, at times chaotic terrain of an estuary by an eye driven to simplify, perhaps at a cost that is being paid for by floods in Mumbai today."
Mathur and da Cunha provide no evidence to show that the belief in dividing land from sea was "not necessarily shared by previous occupants of Mumbai". I don't understand how fishermen could ply their trade or sailors could navigate their boats without having a clear idea of what constituted land and what sea.
"Until 1843, there was general agreement that Bombay Island was once more than one island, but no agreement on how many. In 1843 R.X.Murphy put speculation to rest by providing an empirical basis for arguing that the island once comprised seven islands. Based on a study of place names, which suggested a water edge, his conjecture matched a place called Heptanesia that the Greek geographer, Ptolemy, in the second century located off the coast of land that he referred to as India inter Gangem. It is today popular fact. Indeed the islandness of Mumbai has even gone indigenous, with stories of native settlers -- the 'Kolis' -- inhabiting an island; and their goddess Mumbadevi being the 'goddess of an island'. Yes the islandness of Mumbai in the fluid terrain of an estuary cannot be assumed. Mumbai was willed to be off shore."
When Mathur and da Cunha state that "the islandness of Mumbai has gone indigenous", they mean that locals have come to believe the fiction constructed by Brits. In their view, the idea of Mumbadevi as the goddess of an island did not come about because kolis independently understood that the temple was built on an island, but because they swallowed incorrect colonial ideas. Again, there is no evidence provided for this rather strong assertion. My own feeling is that fishermen would know very well what was an island and what was not. Why presume they do not have this knowledge?
The final sentence of this section is unambiguous: "Mumbai was willed to be offshore". In other words, the city was never an island or collection of islands; the idea of Bombay as an island is a social construct, a colonial construct. I disagree. As far as I know, it was never possible under any tidal conditions to walk from Colaba to Vashi or Alibaug back in the 17th century. Bombay was, indeed, a collection of islands, and the locals knew this because humans can walk on land but not on water.
The temptation at this stage is to think, "surely they can't actually be suggesting Bombay was not an island". But that is precisely what they are suggesting, which is why I wrote in my earlier post of contemporary academic theory being fundamentally foolish (I have removed that word because it was too personal. I want to emphasise it is the theory itself I consider foolish, not any individuals).
A kindred example of this kind of argument is Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove's contention that what we call slums are, in fact, not slums at all. You can read my posts about the Srivastava / Echanove theory here and here. Rahul is an associate of PUKAR, one of the organisations that has backed SOAK, and he wrote a glowing preview of the show in his column in Mumbai Mirror.
I mention this to indicate that the da Cunha / Mathur line of thought is part of a tradition of looking at urban development. I wrote sympathetically about it in a post about demolitions in Ahmedabad. Unfortunately, among some academics, the tradition has degenerated into an anti-rational conspiracy theory.
"The articulation of a line between land and sea has largely gone unnoticed. It was a taken-for-granted visualization in the milieu of colonial power and landed property. Today, it is deeply embedded in everyday language and an intrinsic part of imaging Mumbai and imagining its future. Questions have been raised regarding the form of this line from the time Mumbai was occupied by the English. More recently, the purpose and enterprise of its drawing have been discussed. But little is said about its presence, about the battlefront that it sets up between land and sea, and between land and water in general which, in Mumbai, includes the monsoon".
Notice the rhetorical sleight of hand by which a (questionable) argument about the relationship of land and sea is widened to include the rain. It is unclear to me why the drawing of a line sets up a 'battlefront' between land and sea. Maps were necessary for navigation, and they did their job very well. A good map is an accurate and useful representation of reality, not an instrument of imperialist power. Mathur and da Cunha themselves make use of maps of Bombay for their proposals, and those maps, too, divide land from water.
"The monsoon in Mumbai is a moment of fresh water saturation that people once made every attempt to extend through the year. They built bunds to hold monsoon waters where they fell and they made wells to increase the porosity of the surface and allow (and access) saturation at lower levels. But by far the most ingenious way of extending the monsoon was the talao.
Far from being passive collectors as they are often considered to be, the talaos of Mumbai are active landscapes that operate to extend the monsoon at the level of the sea. They deploy surface runoff, earthen embankments, and importantly, the pressure harnessed by tapping into fresh water aquifers sandwiched between strata of blue clay, limestone, littoral concrete, basalt and saline aquifers to keep salt water on the surface at bay. Accessing fresh water aquifers without disturbing saline strata is an art fraught with chance. It was to become a lost art as the search for an assured and abundant water supply led to the idea and project of big dams, reservoirs and pipes, and to making a surface that was not about saturation, but runoff to the sea via rivers and drains."
A fake contrast is set up here. What is this 'extending of the monsoon' that Mathur and da Cunha speak of? All it means is that water that falls in the rains is available for use at a later time. Any sort of storage, then, is a form of 'extending the monsoon'. In which case, the huge reservoirs built by the British and by administrators of independent India are also methods of extending the monsoon. It's true that talaos operate "to extend the monsoon at the level of the sea", while the big reservoirs are on higher ground, but why should one be preferrable to the other in and off itself?
"Contrary to its common use to mean drain, a nullah is a surface of overflows. Its identity hinges on the operation of devices that hold monsoon waters. When seen individually these devices are simple structures like bunds built to allow a spill-over at a certain height. Seen collectively and in operation, however, they activate a surface that gathers and dissipates with a complexity and temporality that beguile the eye. Their workings do not form lines like rivers that run through settlement but rather the field of settlement itself."
I don't understand what is so complex and temporal about the working of nullahs. I confess I have never found them beguiling and never will, but if the squalor of slums can be romanticised, why not the working of drains? The last sentence is this passage is puzzling. "Their workings do not form lines..." what are these workings? "... do not form lines like rivers that run through settlement...". I thought rivers existed prior to settlement. They 'run through settlement' because settlements are formed on their banks. "...but rather the field of settlement itself". You got me. I have no idea what this last phrase is meant to mean.
While our exchange of views did not change my interpretation of the show, I did regret restricting myself to what I felt were its negatives. There is much to commend about the energy and dedication the authors have put into their research. Their ideas about rejigging the way Bombay deals with the monsoon deserve serious consideration by municipal authorities. Though I disagree with da Cunha and Mathur's reading of the city's history, I'm sure that, should their proposals be put in practice, they would be preferrable to the slipshod actions of BMC planners.
During our back and forth, both authors suggested I had misread their writing. After looking at their texts carefully once more, I am satisfied I have not done that, aside from employing straightforward assertions instead of sentences that use phrases allowing for wiggle room like 'not necessarily' and 'cannot be assumed'.
I've transcribed a few panels from the show to provide a taste of the da Cunha / Mathur style and mode of thought. Each bit of text is in italics, and is followed by my own analysis.
"Mumbai's history, in most accounts, pivots on its European occupation -- the Portuguese from 1534 to 1665, but more significantly the British from 1665 to 1947. Little is said in these accounts about an attitude to and vocabulary of terrain that was constructed through this occupation, a vocabulary that rests on a fundamental belief not necessarily shared by previous occupants of Mumbai, namely that land and sea should be divided.
This division was instituted by European seafarers, but more concertedly by English marine and land surveyors in the late 1700s with the drawing of a line on a map. This line traverses rocks, swamps and beaches of an aqueous terrain, asserting entities that are taken for granted today in descriptions, planning and everyday administration of Mumbai. Three of these entities are significant: the island of Mumbai, the coast of the Indian subcontinent, and a major concern following the 2005 flood, the Mithi river. The reality of these entities cannot be questioned. But they are essentially things singled out from the dynamic, at times chaotic terrain of an estuary by an eye driven to simplify, perhaps at a cost that is being paid for by floods in Mumbai today."
Mathur and da Cunha provide no evidence to show that the belief in dividing land from sea was "not necessarily shared by previous occupants of Mumbai". I don't understand how fishermen could ply their trade or sailors could navigate their boats without having a clear idea of what constituted land and what sea.
"Until 1843, there was general agreement that Bombay Island was once more than one island, but no agreement on how many. In 1843 R.X.Murphy put speculation to rest by providing an empirical basis for arguing that the island once comprised seven islands. Based on a study of place names, which suggested a water edge, his conjecture matched a place called Heptanesia that the Greek geographer, Ptolemy, in the second century located off the coast of land that he referred to as India inter Gangem. It is today popular fact. Indeed the islandness of Mumbai has even gone indigenous, with stories of native settlers -- the 'Kolis' -- inhabiting an island; and their goddess Mumbadevi being the 'goddess of an island'. Yes the islandness of Mumbai in the fluid terrain of an estuary cannot be assumed. Mumbai was willed to be off shore."
When Mathur and da Cunha state that "the islandness of Mumbai has gone indigenous", they mean that locals have come to believe the fiction constructed by Brits. In their view, the idea of Mumbadevi as the goddess of an island did not come about because kolis independently understood that the temple was built on an island, but because they swallowed incorrect colonial ideas. Again, there is no evidence provided for this rather strong assertion. My own feeling is that fishermen would know very well what was an island and what was not. Why presume they do not have this knowledge?
The final sentence of this section is unambiguous: "Mumbai was willed to be offshore". In other words, the city was never an island or collection of islands; the idea of Bombay as an island is a social construct, a colonial construct. I disagree. As far as I know, it was never possible under any tidal conditions to walk from Colaba to Vashi or Alibaug back in the 17th century. Bombay was, indeed, a collection of islands, and the locals knew this because humans can walk on land but not on water.
The temptation at this stage is to think, "surely they can't actually be suggesting Bombay was not an island". But that is precisely what they are suggesting, which is why I wrote in my earlier post of contemporary academic theory being fundamentally foolish (I have removed that word because it was too personal. I want to emphasise it is the theory itself I consider foolish, not any individuals).
A kindred example of this kind of argument is Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove's contention that what we call slums are, in fact, not slums at all. You can read my posts about the Srivastava / Echanove theory here and here. Rahul is an associate of PUKAR, one of the organisations that has backed SOAK, and he wrote a glowing preview of the show in his column in Mumbai Mirror.
I mention this to indicate that the da Cunha / Mathur line of thought is part of a tradition of looking at urban development. I wrote sympathetically about it in a post about demolitions in Ahmedabad. Unfortunately, among some academics, the tradition has degenerated into an anti-rational conspiracy theory.
"The articulation of a line between land and sea has largely gone unnoticed. It was a taken-for-granted visualization in the milieu of colonial power and landed property. Today, it is deeply embedded in everyday language and an intrinsic part of imaging Mumbai and imagining its future. Questions have been raised regarding the form of this line from the time Mumbai was occupied by the English. More recently, the purpose and enterprise of its drawing have been discussed. But little is said about its presence, about the battlefront that it sets up between land and sea, and between land and water in general which, in Mumbai, includes the monsoon".
Notice the rhetorical sleight of hand by which a (questionable) argument about the relationship of land and sea is widened to include the rain. It is unclear to me why the drawing of a line sets up a 'battlefront' between land and sea. Maps were necessary for navigation, and they did their job very well. A good map is an accurate and useful representation of reality, not an instrument of imperialist power. Mathur and da Cunha themselves make use of maps of Bombay for their proposals, and those maps, too, divide land from water.
"The monsoon in Mumbai is a moment of fresh water saturation that people once made every attempt to extend through the year. They built bunds to hold monsoon waters where they fell and they made wells to increase the porosity of the surface and allow (and access) saturation at lower levels. But by far the most ingenious way of extending the monsoon was the talao.
Far from being passive collectors as they are often considered to be, the talaos of Mumbai are active landscapes that operate to extend the monsoon at the level of the sea. They deploy surface runoff, earthen embankments, and importantly, the pressure harnessed by tapping into fresh water aquifers sandwiched between strata of blue clay, limestone, littoral concrete, basalt and saline aquifers to keep salt water on the surface at bay. Accessing fresh water aquifers without disturbing saline strata is an art fraught with chance. It was to become a lost art as the search for an assured and abundant water supply led to the idea and project of big dams, reservoirs and pipes, and to making a surface that was not about saturation, but runoff to the sea via rivers and drains."
A fake contrast is set up here. What is this 'extending of the monsoon' that Mathur and da Cunha speak of? All it means is that water that falls in the rains is available for use at a later time. Any sort of storage, then, is a form of 'extending the monsoon'. In which case, the huge reservoirs built by the British and by administrators of independent India are also methods of extending the monsoon. It's true that talaos operate "to extend the monsoon at the level of the sea", while the big reservoirs are on higher ground, but why should one be preferrable to the other in and off itself?
"Contrary to its common use to mean drain, a nullah is a surface of overflows. Its identity hinges on the operation of devices that hold monsoon waters. When seen individually these devices are simple structures like bunds built to allow a spill-over at a certain height. Seen collectively and in operation, however, they activate a surface that gathers and dissipates with a complexity and temporality that beguile the eye. Their workings do not form lines like rivers that run through settlement but rather the field of settlement itself."
I don't understand what is so complex and temporal about the working of nullahs. I confess I have never found them beguiling and never will, but if the squalor of slums can be romanticised, why not the working of drains? The last sentence is this passage is puzzling. "Their workings do not form lines..." what are these workings? "... do not form lines like rivers that run through settlement...". I thought rivers existed prior to settlement. They 'run through settlement' because settlements are formed on their banks. "...but rather the field of settlement itself". You got me. I have no idea what this last phrase is meant to mean.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson was an A grade singer-songwriter, an A grade performer, and an A grade weirdo. After 1993, the balance started shifting decisively in favour of weirdo. He gained fame as a child, developed into the biggest star of the MTV generation, and burnished his credentials further in the era of globalisation. His last good album, Dangerous, came out when Russia and China were open for business. As the tallest figure in the entertainment industry at that moment, Jackson could with justice claim to be the first truly global superstar since Charlie Chaplin. Half the sales of his greatest album, 1982's Thriller, had come from North America; in the case of 1991's Dangerous it was less than a third.
The best-known video from Dangerous, Black or White, advertised the new era. It took in sub-Saharan tribesmen, Thai, Indian and Russian dancers, and climaxed with people changing faces and races in front of one's eyes as if by magic. That magic was the technique of digital morphing. It is so commonplace now that the public incorrectly believes any image can be seamlessly replaced by any other. Watching the video today one can identify points where the transitions between actors are rough. Back in 1992, though, one viewed it with wide-eyed wonder; it seemed a perfect match of cutting-edge technology, style and content.
In Jackson's homeland, a number of commentators noted that the singer's recourse to cosmetic surgery to lighten his complexion and sharpen his features cut against the grain of Black or White's message. The weirdo side of his personality had begun to harm his songwriting. When the first allegations of child sexual abuse came out in 1993, things turned ugly. This was not any more a matter of personal eccentricity. There were lawsuits, attacks in the media. Jackson, who never understood why a gentle person like himself who would not physically harm anybody was being hounded for sleeping with his young boy friends, developed a persecution complex. The new songs in the 1995 album HIStory merged his personal grouses with injustices being perpetrated on a global scale. The videos highlighted the uneasy marriage of public and private complaint. When Jackson sings 'They don't care about us' in a Brazilian favela, he implies he belongs with the underprivileged of the world. Who could swallow that?
Beginning with HIStory, joy and playfulness were swept aside in favour of melancholy, tedious ballads, a sententious attention to this or that cause. The life became more interesting than the music, its trajectory spiralling relentlessly downwards: the divorces, the debts and, finally, death. Many fans insist the O2 performances scheduled to start later this summer in London would have afforded Jackson some redemption. I seriously doubt it. I don't believe he had the mental stamina to complete anything close to 50 shows. The weirdo had taken over too completely from the consummate performer.
The best-known video from Dangerous, Black or White, advertised the new era. It took in sub-Saharan tribesmen, Thai, Indian and Russian dancers, and climaxed with people changing faces and races in front of one's eyes as if by magic. That magic was the technique of digital morphing. It is so commonplace now that the public incorrectly believes any image can be seamlessly replaced by any other. Watching the video today one can identify points where the transitions between actors are rough. Back in 1992, though, one viewed it with wide-eyed wonder; it seemed a perfect match of cutting-edge technology, style and content.
In Jackson's homeland, a number of commentators noted that the singer's recourse to cosmetic surgery to lighten his complexion and sharpen his features cut against the grain of Black or White's message. The weirdo side of his personality had begun to harm his songwriting. When the first allegations of child sexual abuse came out in 1993, things turned ugly. This was not any more a matter of personal eccentricity. There were lawsuits, attacks in the media. Jackson, who never understood why a gentle person like himself who would not physically harm anybody was being hounded for sleeping with his young boy friends, developed a persecution complex. The new songs in the 1995 album HIStory merged his personal grouses with injustices being perpetrated on a global scale. The videos highlighted the uneasy marriage of public and private complaint. When Jackson sings 'They don't care about us' in a Brazilian favela, he implies he belongs with the underprivileged of the world. Who could swallow that?
Beginning with HIStory, joy and playfulness were swept aside in favour of melancholy, tedious ballads, a sententious attention to this or that cause. The life became more interesting than the music, its trajectory spiralling relentlessly downwards: the divorces, the debts and, finally, death. Many fans insist the O2 performances scheduled to start later this summer in London would have afforded Jackson some redemption. I seriously doubt it. I don't believe he had the mental stamina to complete anything close to 50 shows. The weirdo had taken over too completely from the consummate performer.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Sloppy City: Mathur and da Cunha's SOAK
On days like this, I am especially glad I didn't complete my doctorate. Had I done so, I would have been tempted to settle down in a teaching job at some university in England or the United States. In which case, I'd constantly have had to read books like Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha's SOAK, books by very smart people written in language so dense, only people familiar with the jargon might comprehend the flimsiness of the arguments. Since most of those trained in the jargon have bought into the academic system, they are about as likely to harm their careers in the name of intellectual honesty as Shia clerics in Iran are to say, "Hold on, this whole Islamic republic idea is bollocks, isn't it?"
SOAK is a book presenting Bombay from a novel perspective, and is also an exhibition currently on view at the National Gallery of Modern Art. The bulk of the show consists of text, maps and diagrams, but two boring installations have been created to forestall criticism that the show has nothing to do with art and should, therefore, find no place in NGMA.
Mathur and da Cunha's argument, paraphrased, is this: The British created modern Bombay based on a belief that sea had to be divided from land. Early European maps which vary in their representation of the city's boundaries do so because, in reality, these boundaries were fluid rather than fixed. Locals did not necessarily view land and sea in the same cut and dry, adversarial fashion as Europeans. Their traditional ways of harvesting and draining rain water, namely talaos (ponds) and nullahs (drains), are preferable to the underground sewers and the dam-created reservoirs favoured by colonial administrators and expanded after India gained independence. If we had retained our earlier notion of the land-sea relationship, we'd have been saved catastrophes like the flood of 2005. To reinvigorate the city, it is helpful to use the idea of an estuary, which is neither fresh nor salt water, neither sea nor river, but something in-between. Bombay is an estuary rather than an island.
I take issue with Mathur and da Cunha for the following reasons:
1) The authors have not quoted one single local source to back up their belief that non-Europeans had a different take on the Bombay mix of land, sea and fresh water. It's all very well to complain about the city's history being dominated by colonial accounts, but the complaint falls flat when the people doing the complaining show no evidence of having read any non-colonial writings on the city.
2) There is plenty of evidence that traditional Indian thought divided land and sea very firmly. Islands make an appearance early in the Indian literary canon, the Sanskrit word for them is 'dvipa'. In the colonial era, there are Maratha maps which depict Bombay as an island or a series of islands, proving that it wasn't only the Brits and Portuguese who thought in this fashion.
The foundational dogma of modern critical theory is that everything is a social construct. However, normal humans outside the academic echo chamber know that the difference between earth and water is not something constructed by nasty imperialists.
3) It is incorrect to say colonialists made an absolute distinction between land and sea. They knew about tracts which sometimes appear to be land and at other times are covered with water. The current word for them is, simply, wetlands, and they include marshes, swamps, bogs, sloughs and mires. Wetlands are great for biodiversity, but rarely congenial to human habitation. That's probably why, when we talk of being mired or bogged down or swamped, we aren't speaking of happy experiences.
What is now central Bombay was once marshland. Not only could nobody live in the marsh itself, it made everything in the vicinity inhospitable for humans. The rate of deaths from malaria in the 15th century has not been recorded, but we can guess it was catastrophically high. Which is one reason why, while the mainland immediately to the north and east flourished for millennia, Bombay remained sparsely populated and impoverished.
4) Which leads to the next bone of contention: reclamation. Mathur and da Cunha condemn reclamation as a kind of crime against nature, an emblem of the imperialist desire to fight nature and conquer it. The fact is, however, that Bombay could became a proper city only because of reclamation, particularly the transformation of its wetlands into dry land. One might object to further reclamation today, but to make a general case against it would be to argue that Bombay ought never have become an urban centre.
5) There are towns in India which do not have massive water reservoirs or underground sewers. They retain their faith in talaos and nullahs. The ones I have visited are, without exception, filthy and water deficient. I see no empirical reasoning behind the notion that talaos and nullahs are superior to large reservoirs and underground sewers. In fact I find it hard to imagine the demands for water of a city of 15 million being adequately served by traditional talaos or variants thereof.
6) The flood of 2005 was not exacerbated by planning in and of itself, but by bad planning, or the failure to plan. Illegal construction, and construction legalised where it should not have been, were the primary reasons why water remained standing for days in some areas. It is perfectly possible for a city to reclaim land and build on it on a grand scale while protecting itself from natural disasters; a case in point is Hong Kong, which faces storms regularly without seeing the sort of damage that the July 2005 flood visited upon Bombay. The point is to plan and execute efficiently.
I will write more on this issue in a day or two, connecting it with past posts of mine, and providing a taste of the Mathur / da Cunha style by quoting directly from their book. It costs 2000 rupees, and I am not prepared to shell out that amount, so the quotes will have to wait till I can borrow a copy or return to NGMA to transcribe a few passages. For the moment, MTNL has provided me a window of opportunity to upload, who knows when I'll get it again?
SOAK is a book presenting Bombay from a novel perspective, and is also an exhibition currently on view at the National Gallery of Modern Art. The bulk of the show consists of text, maps and diagrams, but two boring installations have been created to forestall criticism that the show has nothing to do with art and should, therefore, find no place in NGMA.
Mathur and da Cunha's argument, paraphrased, is this: The British created modern Bombay based on a belief that sea had to be divided from land. Early European maps which vary in their representation of the city's boundaries do so because, in reality, these boundaries were fluid rather than fixed. Locals did not necessarily view land and sea in the same cut and dry, adversarial fashion as Europeans. Their traditional ways of harvesting and draining rain water, namely talaos (ponds) and nullahs (drains), are preferable to the underground sewers and the dam-created reservoirs favoured by colonial administrators and expanded after India gained independence. If we had retained our earlier notion of the land-sea relationship, we'd have been saved catastrophes like the flood of 2005. To reinvigorate the city, it is helpful to use the idea of an estuary, which is neither fresh nor salt water, neither sea nor river, but something in-between. Bombay is an estuary rather than an island.
I take issue with Mathur and da Cunha for the following reasons:
1) The authors have not quoted one single local source to back up their belief that non-Europeans had a different take on the Bombay mix of land, sea and fresh water. It's all very well to complain about the city's history being dominated by colonial accounts, but the complaint falls flat when the people doing the complaining show no evidence of having read any non-colonial writings on the city.
2) There is plenty of evidence that traditional Indian thought divided land and sea very firmly. Islands make an appearance early in the Indian literary canon, the Sanskrit word for them is 'dvipa'. In the colonial era, there are Maratha maps which depict Bombay as an island or a series of islands, proving that it wasn't only the Brits and Portuguese who thought in this fashion.
The foundational dogma of modern critical theory is that everything is a social construct. However, normal humans outside the academic echo chamber know that the difference between earth and water is not something constructed by nasty imperialists.
3) It is incorrect to say colonialists made an absolute distinction between land and sea. They knew about tracts which sometimes appear to be land and at other times are covered with water. The current word for them is, simply, wetlands, and they include marshes, swamps, bogs, sloughs and mires. Wetlands are great for biodiversity, but rarely congenial to human habitation. That's probably why, when we talk of being mired or bogged down or swamped, we aren't speaking of happy experiences.
What is now central Bombay was once marshland. Not only could nobody live in the marsh itself, it made everything in the vicinity inhospitable for humans. The rate of deaths from malaria in the 15th century has not been recorded, but we can guess it was catastrophically high. Which is one reason why, while the mainland immediately to the north and east flourished for millennia, Bombay remained sparsely populated and impoverished.
4) Which leads to the next bone of contention: reclamation. Mathur and da Cunha condemn reclamation as a kind of crime against nature, an emblem of the imperialist desire to fight nature and conquer it. The fact is, however, that Bombay could became a proper city only because of reclamation, particularly the transformation of its wetlands into dry land. One might object to further reclamation today, but to make a general case against it would be to argue that Bombay ought never have become an urban centre.
5) There are towns in India which do not have massive water reservoirs or underground sewers. They retain their faith in talaos and nullahs. The ones I have visited are, without exception, filthy and water deficient. I see no empirical reasoning behind the notion that talaos and nullahs are superior to large reservoirs and underground sewers. In fact I find it hard to imagine the demands for water of a city of 15 million being adequately served by traditional talaos or variants thereof.
6) The flood of 2005 was not exacerbated by planning in and of itself, but by bad planning, or the failure to plan. Illegal construction, and construction legalised where it should not have been, were the primary reasons why water remained standing for days in some areas. It is perfectly possible for a city to reclaim land and build on it on a grand scale while protecting itself from natural disasters; a case in point is Hong Kong, which faces storms regularly without seeing the sort of damage that the July 2005 flood visited upon Bombay. The point is to plan and execute efficiently.
I will write more on this issue in a day or two, connecting it with past posts of mine, and providing a taste of the Mathur / da Cunha style by quoting directly from their book. It costs 2000 rupees, and I am not prepared to shell out that amount, so the quotes will have to wait till I can borrow a copy or return to NGMA to transcribe a few passages. For the moment, MTNL has provided me a window of opportunity to upload, who knows when I'll get it again?
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Suspend or Fire
If you're Indian and follow the news, you've probably heard of the Shopian murders. Two Kashmiri women out in the evening were abducted by securitymen, exactly who is as yet unclear. The women were raped, killed, their bodies dumped in a shallow canal, and the incident covered up as an accidental drowning. The truth came out, serving to further alienate and inflame Kashmiri public opinion. Now, four police officers involved in destroying evidence have been suspended from service.
When I hear about such incidents, I wonder why these chaps aren't sacked immediately. Suspension, after all, means getting a substantial portion of your salary for doing no work. It sounds more like a sabbatical than a punishment. The only police officer I recall being fired was Sunil More, who raped a teenage girl in a police chowky on Marine Drive.
I've just read an Associated Press article which indicates New York faces the same suspension versus sacking conundrum. 700 teachers in New York are currently being paid their full salaries for doing nothing. They report to an off-campus office each workday morning and spend eight hours amusing themselves as best they can, reading, surfing the Net, playing board games. They're under suspension, but cannot be fired before a proper enquiry is conducted, and that takes months. Many of those suspended claim they're being victimised by bosses they angered.
It's a difficult balance to strike: making state employees more fully accountable will always have the side effect of leaving underlings vulnerable to persecution by seniors with grudges. Solutions, anybody?
When I hear about such incidents, I wonder why these chaps aren't sacked immediately. Suspension, after all, means getting a substantial portion of your salary for doing no work. It sounds more like a sabbatical than a punishment. The only police officer I recall being fired was Sunil More, who raped a teenage girl in a police chowky on Marine Drive.
I've just read an Associated Press article which indicates New York faces the same suspension versus sacking conundrum. 700 teachers in New York are currently being paid their full salaries for doing nothing. They report to an off-campus office each workday morning and spend eight hours amusing themselves as best they can, reading, surfing the Net, playing board games. They're under suspension, but cannot be fired before a proper enquiry is conducted, and that takes months. Many of those suspended claim they're being victimised by bosses they angered.
It's a difficult balance to strike: making state employees more fully accountable will always have the side effect of leaving underlings vulnerable to persecution by seniors with grudges. Solutions, anybody?
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Our forensic experts mess up again
It's exactly as I expected. Two forensic labs have come out with contradictory conclusions about the Varun Gandhi footage. Lucknow says the footage is fine, Chandigarh claims it is not. No wonder the BJP wanted to play a wait and watch game. The party heads knew forensics would only muddy the waters, providing the Hindutvavadis with an escape route.
The issue, actually, is what the term 'doctored' connotes. According to Chandigarh's lab, the footage has been edited and spliced together, and that is enough for it to be catalogued as 'doctored'. But the editing was apparent even to casual observers; we didn't need a forensic lab to tell us about it. Part of the footage has Varun sitting down with a group at night, another section has him standing up addressing a large crowd in daylight. Nobody with even a basic understanding of video could fail to see the discontinuity. If mere editing constitutes doctoring, virtually every speech played on TV is doctored, because, except in rare cases, only portions are ever broadcast.
Was Varun's voice over-dubbed? No, say both labs, the voice is his. Did he say what he is alleged to have said? Both labs agree he did. The brief of forensic experts should end there. Questions of context and of how meaning can be influenced by the juxtaposition of two discontinuous clips are not matters about which precise answers can be arrived at through scientific enquiry.
When a task includes ambiguous phrases like 'doctored', contradictions are assured, particularly considering our forensic experts differ even when their brief is crystal clear ("Is the woman in this video Anara Gupta?")
As a sidelight, it is amusing to hear chaps like Vinay Katiyar demanding to view the 'original CD'. Somebody should tell them there is no such thing as an original CD; footage is always transferred to viewing media like DVDs and VCDs.
I can't be too harsh on Katiyar for his ignorance. After all, even institutions of learning like the Asiatic Society don't understand what 'original' denotes. As I mentioned in one of my Time Out columns, Bombay's Asiatic Society promotes a manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy in its possession as an 'original', though it is one of several copies made long after the Italian poet composed his magnum opus.
If we misunderstand the concept of originality in matters concerning the middle ages, we can hardly be expected to comprehend it in relation to digital media that allow images to be replicated instantly and infinitely.
The issue, actually, is what the term 'doctored' connotes. According to Chandigarh's lab, the footage has been edited and spliced together, and that is enough for it to be catalogued as 'doctored'. But the editing was apparent even to casual observers; we didn't need a forensic lab to tell us about it. Part of the footage has Varun sitting down with a group at night, another section has him standing up addressing a large crowd in daylight. Nobody with even a basic understanding of video could fail to see the discontinuity. If mere editing constitutes doctoring, virtually every speech played on TV is doctored, because, except in rare cases, only portions are ever broadcast.
Was Varun's voice over-dubbed? No, say both labs, the voice is his. Did he say what he is alleged to have said? Both labs agree he did. The brief of forensic experts should end there. Questions of context and of how meaning can be influenced by the juxtaposition of two discontinuous clips are not matters about which precise answers can be arrived at through scientific enquiry.
When a task includes ambiguous phrases like 'doctored', contradictions are assured, particularly considering our forensic experts differ even when their brief is crystal clear ("Is the woman in this video Anara Gupta?")
As a sidelight, it is amusing to hear chaps like Vinay Katiyar demanding to view the 'original CD'. Somebody should tell them there is no such thing as an original CD; footage is always transferred to viewing media like DVDs and VCDs.
I can't be too harsh on Katiyar for his ignorance. After all, even institutions of learning like the Asiatic Society don't understand what 'original' denotes. As I mentioned in one of my Time Out columns, Bombay's Asiatic Society promotes a manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy in its possession as an 'original', though it is one of several copies made long after the Italian poet composed his magnum opus.
If we misunderstand the concept of originality in matters concerning the middle ages, we can hardly be expected to comprehend it in relation to digital media that allow images to be replicated instantly and infinitely.
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