Someone posted a link to Mukul Kesavan’s recent column in the Telegraph on our News Tab. It is, I think, the first full-frontal attack on the desi blogosphere that I’ve seen published in an Indian newspaper.
And it’s so, so wrong. Let’s start at the beginning:
Every English-speaking Indian man between 25 and 60 has written about the Hindi movies he has seen, the English books he has read, the foreign places he has travelled to and the curse of communalism. You mightn’t have read them all (there are a lot of them and some don’t make it to print) but their manuscripts exist and in this age of the internet, these masters of blah have migrated to the Republic of Blog. A cultural historian from the remote future (investigating, perhaps, the death of English in India) might use up a sub-section of a chapter to explore the sameness of their concerns. Why did a bunch of grown men, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, write about the same movies, novels, journeys and riots? Why Naipaul? Why not nature? Or Napier? Or the nadeswaram? Why Bachchan? And not Burma? Or Bhojpuri? And, most weirdly, why pogroms and chauvinism? Why not programmes on television? link)
First, my biggest complaint with Kesavan’s piece is his refusal to name names. The “Republic of Blog” is for him guilty of a mind-numbing sameness, but if he doesn’t tell us what blogs he’s reading, it’s impossible to verify what he says.
Second, why only men? Aren’t there lots of Indian women bloggers? Indeed, there are too many to list, so let’s just name one good one: Rashmi Bansal’s Youth Curry. (Readers, feel free to name other Indian women bloggers based in India that you would recommend.)
Third, why not acknowledge that people are blogging in various Indian languages? In addition to its English “main page,” Desipundit links to blogs in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bangla, and Marathi. (Sadly, no Punjabi…)
Then the substantive question — amongst Indian male bloggers writing in English, is there in fact a deadening sameness? Do people really only talk about, as Kesavan suggests 1) Hindi films, 2) English novels, 3) various and sundry travels, and 4) Communalism? And do the comments on communalism all take a left-center approach (commonly derided as “pseudo-secular”)? Two of the four topics named by Kesavan, English-language novels and communalism, are a little strange coming from him; Kesavan is himself the author of an English-language novel (quite a good one, actually), as well as a book called Secular Common-Sense. (More recently, he published a book about Cricket, Men in White which I haven’t seen.)
I think a quick look at some of the links at the (now dated) Top 100 Indian blogs at Blogstreet.com suggests a great deal more diversity than Kesavan allows. He doesn’t mention all the tech blogs (there are LOTS of those, and they get many more readers than even popular general interest blogs like India Uncut), cooking blogs, defense policy blogs, or, for that matter, cricket blogs.
It’s true that a lot of what people post on their blogs often isn’t that exciting; it’s intellectual chit-chat, quick links, and regurgitated news. But I think that chit-chat is, in an indirect way, actually a really important sign of a society’s well being. And when the discussions turn to politics, the to-and-fro of conversations (and yes, arguments) that take place on blogs as well as the mainstream media can be a really important way by which democracy sustains itself. Blogging can be one measure of the health of civil society.
49 Amitabh, There may be a tiny minority of a few Indo-Anglian writers that are more comfortable with English than their native tongue. But the vast majority are very comfortable with their mother tongue and interact in it and use it in a variety of spheres in India to warrant their treatment of their mother tongue including Hindi as some strange and exotic being divorced from their everyday existence. That is simply not true. On the other hand, this may be true for a vey small subset of writers that he is railing against.
It depends. For a traveler with plenty of time on her hands, a relaxed non-judgmental travel guide would be a blessing. But for someone with a week’s vacation in say, Bangkok, an ideal guide would be one which says “Go to this place, and skip that one”. I think, the western lonely-planet-type guides do that pretty well, regardless of how unfair and shoddily researched they might be.
Ok, and why has this discussion devolved into a Hindu-Muslim etc thread again?
Certainly contributory to the curmudgeonly tone of his column. Even in my greatest cricket geekery moments, I pause to think about the wisdom of commenting on any post in Men In White (I have in the past and it is not terribly conducive to fostering any sort of coherent debate).
Amitabh – Although Indian English (?) is my primary language, my preferred language of romance is not English but any South Indian language ( cant flirt in Hindi). Many DBDs find it easier to romance / flirt in the local language. Whether this is due to learning English in a structured fashion or due to lack of English speaking romantic role models is debatable. I have also found that romance with a non-native speaker of English is easier than with a native speaker of english. I can easily lapse into romantic tamil or malayalam without the recipient feeling uncomfortable.
41- Ardy,
Ardy, it’s interesting that you bring up Turkey, although I am not sure Turkey stands cleanly as an example of a successful secular Muslim government- albeit, one with some serious problems. And one of those problems is significant denial of what happened to the Armenians less than 100 years ago. This inability to reconcile a nationalistic and manipulated religious past with the “modern secular” State (+ the fact that Attaturk truncated Turkish history by switching to the Roman Alphabet has created a schizophrenic populace in some areas- and thus the suicides that Pavluk writes about in Snow. May the lesson lies in what Turkey has not done rather that what it seems to have done.
I have read men in white in the past and have found it generously littered with petulant tripe, from the author as well as the commenters. I wouldn’t give Mr. Kesavan and his writing any more attention that it deserves.
You could very well be right. They have a lot of conflict even today and I think the primary reason is that the Army tries to be artificially secular and tries to be overly European while denying their own culture and religion. However. I do like the approach the current Prime Minister s doing – a religious guy whose wife wears the Hijab and who is trying to balance secularism with their religion. The army there of course is not too happy. The point was that they do have success in certain things and together with their failings can be used to learn things from.
Petulant tripe is right, that’s how I would describe the current article in question. It is wordy, logic presented is hard to follow and doesn’t make much sense. Plus love the way he excludes women, people over 60 and younger than 25 and bloggers who don’t blog in English and lack of facts to support his sweeping generalizations. Based on his current article I will in future avoid reading what Mr Kesavan has to say. By the way I am DBD, equally comfortable in English and my mother tongue. Though its little bit rusty since I don’t have the opportunity to use it as much since I no longer live in India. Also I suffer from no nostalgia for Hindi films, I have always found most of them (with a few exceptions, films by Gurudutt come to mind) to be silly, overly long and in general a waste of time.
I would be mighty curious to see an analysis of blogs with some numbers.More particularly, on what side of the normal curve is this diversity? Stereotypes are often formed on the majority world-view.
% of Indian women who have/do not have mommy blogs and food blogs and poetry blogs % of Indian women bloggers who blog about sports % of men bloggers who blog/do not blog about cricket, bollywood and English novels
Turkey did something interesting with language that India has tried to do as well…supposedly ‘purify’ it. The written language of Turkey used to be Ottoman Turkish, which was a Turkish substrate, overlaid with a heavy Perso-Arabic vocabulary, and written in the Perso-Arabic script. This to me is analagous to Urdu, which has a Hindi substrate with heavy Perso-Arabic borrowings and loanwords. Modern Turkish was created by removing all the Perso-Arabic words, replacing them with either original Turkish words OR NEWLY-COINED Turkish words, and writing it in the Roman script. Similarly, modern Hindi was formed by removing all the Perso-Arabic words from Urdu, replacing them with Sanskrit, and writing it in Devanagari script. The parallels are amazing. The difference is that in colloquial Hindi, a large amount of Perso-Arabic vocab remains, whereas in colloquial Turkish, there is very little of that left. Personally I like colloquial Hindi because it better reflects the history of its region…which includes the Mughal heritage too.
Anyway, I know some Turkish people in NYC, they are all nominally Muslim, but you would never guess that…they rarely pray, they drink alcohol, sometimes they eat pork, and they are fairly relaxed about female sexuality (meaning that the men don’t mind if the women are dating, even if they’re dating non-Turks or whatever). The ones I know do not fast for Ramadan, but will still party for Eid. Considering that their great-grandparents would all have been traditional, conservative Muslims, it’s amazing the kinds of changes that society has been through.
If you want to see things change, you will have to get mainstream Hindus enrolled in the effort to defend secularism.
And, why should they defend secularism when BS like the following is forced on them?
Bihar official faces suspension for sporting tilak
Thanks L for choosing to not respond!
Thanks L for choosing to not respond!
I probably am missing some of the context behind your comment, but why don’t we want to have a rational discussion about mainstream Hindus (at least a large part) leaning away from secularism.
Are you thinking that discussion would hijack this thread? If that’s your logic, I am on board. Don’t have much to offer on desi blogs – SM is the only one I have time for.
Telugodu: First of all I think people who want to wear tilaks should be allowed to. I am all for freedom of expression. Does it equally bother you when moral police in India who make rules for what people (mostly women) should wear. For example the rules banning jeans, t-shirts etc for female students on campuses in India.
How do you figure that “mainstream” hindus are leaning away from secularism? what exactly do you mean by secularism? Do you mean the pandering practiced by Congress and the socialist parties or do you mean keeping religion out of politics?
the merits/demerits of his arguments about anglophone indians aside, i didn’t find his column sexist. he says in the first line he’s referring to anglophone indian men of a certain age and i think all his subseqent comments refer to them. he’s commenting about a specific slice of the indian blogosphere and not the indian blogosphere as a whole (which includes women, different languages etc), as far as i can see. he does switch between anglophone indian men and the more general indian anglophones, but i think he uses them to refer to the same subset of men. it’s just an off-the-cuff — perhaps somewhat simplisitc — personal musing on certain indian bloggers.
Modern Turkish was created by removing all the Perso-Arabic words, replacing them with either original Turkish words OR NEWLY-COINED Turkish words
Right. This is why modern Turks like Orhan Pamuk have to read “translations” of the Ottoman classics in his tradition. No one in Turkey can make heads or tails out of pre-Kemalite Turkish!
Anyway, I know some Turkish people in NYC, they are all nominally Muslim, but you would never guess that…they rarely pray, they drink alcohol, sometimes they eat pork, and they are fairly relaxed about female sexuality (meaning that the men don’t mind if the women are dating, even if they’re dating non-Turks or whatever).
Right. Very relaxed, western mode of life. Many of them consider themselves “philosophical Sufis” but would abhor living by any sort of Islamic code.
Amitabh,
Attaturk’s changes to Turkish are precisely what makes “modern” Turks able to sidestep the Armenian problem debate because they cannot read any of the original documents for themselves. The divorce between the present and the past is so great that they cannot fathom that what happened to the Armenians was not done by Othman Turks in some distant shadowy past but by their grandparents and great-grandparents.
My impression exactly. The column reads like something Mukul Kesavan dashed off quickly to produce a light, readable and mildly provocative piece. Somehow, I get the impression he was trying to argue something rigorously.
For those of you who have not read it, R.K. Narayan’s ‘My Dateless Diary’, his travel book about the United States in the 1950s is truly one of a kind. And it disproves Kesavan’s point.
Well, yes actually. Mukul Kesavan’s immediate social cohort in his undergraduate college in India has produced a number of very good Indo-Anglian writers, including Allen Sealy, Amitav Ghosh, Ramachandra Guha, Upamanyu Chatterjee and Shashi Tharoor.
See
http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-November-1997/gandhi.html
http://www.museindia.com/showcont.asp?id=266
and
http://thesaurusrex.wordpress.com/tag/st-stephens/
Kesavan asks, and he asks it precisely of people like himself, from his generation in India. Salman Rushdie started this whole trend, with his Indian-childhood references in his novels, and it was taken up by practically every single Indian writer writing in English from then on. Mukul Kesavan is bored with this, and laments (I think) that the availability of a blogosphere has worsened the situation as every Desi (from the group he refers to) feels the need to reveal their precious childhoods in an imagined golden post-independence India. Salman Rushie, in fairness, actually alludes to this in his ‘Imaginary Homelands’ essay, though strictly from the viewpoint of the emigre Indian.
Bulle Shah must be spinning in his grave to hear sentiments like that aired so freely today. 70 million Punjabis in Pakistan and millions more in India y’know. I think it is highly unlikely!
Spot on (as my Brit office colleague says irritatingly often). This goes back to the issue of Kesavan’s cohort.
This one throws me for a loop. Kesavan’s background, interests and history would hardly indicate that he would be sympathetic to the saffron brigade. Their fascist polemics of using imagined majority community grievances against minorities (think Nazis, Germany, Jews) are utterly repellent to any decent person.
And I too hate the epithet “pseudo-secular”. It is a very obfuscatory term which implies that the secular are not truly secular at all, and so secularism is irrelevant in the Indian context.
Heh. This has always amused me, since the Mahatma’s own autobiography reads like one too.c.v. his passages on the sanitation and drainage arrangements of a certain well to do Gujarati family in ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth”
Amitabh:
I have run into v few english-educated DBDs who can’t speak at least one Indian language v fluently (many can speak two, some of my friends can speak four or five). I don’t know what your sample space is, but I’ll guess that as an ABD it is perhaps more biased than your realize.
I didn’t say that Punjabis will die out…I said the language will die out. Only time will tell…I agree it won’t happen in our lifetime. But eventually it will suffer the fate of Irish. There is really nothing in place as of now that could prevent that from happening (it’s not too late to prevent it but I don’t see anyone doing anything in time either). As for Pakistan, there are Pakistani proponents/activists of the Punjabi language who already predict that the Punjabis there will become a mass of people bereft of their language.
Sicilian was very strong just 60 years ago…today it’s on the verge of extinction. Prior to WW One, Europe was FULL of different languages…but later, standardized versions of languages like German, French, Italian, etc. drove dozens of those regional tongues into oblivion. Swiss German is a rare exception, but it’s becoming more and more like Standard German over time.
Anyway, now I’m really off-topic.
I agree with this. Its like the old story of the blind men with the elephant. Kesavan probably takes an interest in a part of the blogosphere, and is mistaking that for all of it. As Amardeep points out, his own interests are not v different from those of the blogs he is tired of.
Maybe its just his midlife crisis coming through 😉 .
Nor I. My point is that there are more Punjabi speakers in this world than German speakers, and that Punjabi is not in the position of some languages with a much smaller number of speakers, such as Tulu in Southern India (or Welsh or Irish in Europe).
But there are a few, though fewer than in the immediate pre & post independence years, when boarding school educations and anglicized upper-class Indian parents created a group of kids who were very shaky in their grasp of any Indian language. Kesavan arguably belongs to that group.
I’m not convinced at all, though, about his speculation about Hindi movies and their preciousness to English speaking Indians. He may be talking about his own experience, or about the more recent trope in India about Bollywood being a linchpin in defining how modern, upper-class, English-speaking India is still very authentically Indian.
When pressed you will find many an English speaking metropolitan former kid, who vastly preferred movies like the Sound of Music, or Lawrence of Arabia to the then Hindi movie competition. Somehow, it is not done to admit it, but there have been many, many Indians who simply did not like the Bollywood product particularly
No. Sindhi will completely die out, if it is not dead already. The Hindu Sindhis barely speak it, mainly because they were driven out of their homeland and are living all over the world. The Muslim Sindhis of Pakistan are ashamed to be called Sindhis. ‘Sindhi’ is something they associate with Hindus. I have an anecdotal experience with this. There is a call in Desi radio show here and people were calling in about some Sindhi related topic. A gentlemen called in and when the host asked him if he was Sindhi, he said ..”No I am not Sindhi. I am from Sindh in Pakistan”. Punjabi on the other hand is spoken widely and there is still a big part of Punjab in India. Punjabi also features prominently in Hindi movies and songs (although the “faux” kind Punjabi). The prominence of Punjabi in Hindi movies is way too high. Almost all other Indian languages are ridiculed in Bollywood movies, except Punjabi. Sindhi on the other hand is rarely mentioned in Hindi movies. Whenever it is mentioned it is the object of ridicule. I find excessive Punjabi representation and ridiculing of Sindhi and Gujarati and Marwadi deeply offensive.
Well, it’s really not that simple…the Hindu Sindhis are certainly losing the language, at least in the younger generations…mainly because they are almost entirely a diasporic community, stretched across the globe, living as small minorities everywhere, and with each generation they get further and further from their roots in Sindh.
In Pakistan, it gets complicated because ethnic Sindhis are very barely even a majority in their own province of Sindh….Muhajirs (ethnic Urdu-speakers with roots in current-day India) are almost as numerous as Sindhis. And in Karachi, Muhajirs are a HUGE majority, followed I believe by Pashtuns, and then either Sindhis or Punjabis are next in terms of population…so in Karachi, ethnic Sindhis are a small minority even though technically the city is in Sindh province. The guy who said “No I am not Sindhi. I am from Sindh in Pakistan” was most likely an Urdu-speaking Muhajir rather than an ethnic Sindhi. The reason I say this, is because Sindhis in Pakistan are very proud of their language and culture, and have really struggled and fought very hard to win recognition and state patronage for Sindhi…many of them detest Urdu. As a result of their efforts, Sindhi is the only provincial language of Pakistan to be used as the medium of education in government schools in the province. In other provinces like Punjab, Urdu is used as the medium of education in government schools. I would say that in Pakistan at least, Sindhi is in much better shape than Punjabi.
There is no way you could call that pathetic mishmash to be Punjabi. It’s basically Hindi in an overdone, stylised Punjabi accent, with a few words of Punjabi (often incorrect) thrown in. They don’t get even the basics right…like in Punjabi, a man would never say ‘sohniya’ to a woman…he’d say ‘sohniye’…nor do people say ‘ve’ to women, they say ‘ni’…these are just a few examples. Basically, Hindi movie dialogues are intended to be understood by Hindi-speakers. Proper Punjabi would not readily be understood by Hindi-speakers right away (although if they heard it for a while I think they would get an ear for it and gradually start to understand a lot of it).
You know what I saw on a tv show once? This actress was trying to speak ‘faux Punjabi’…she was trying to say ‘kaan’ (ear) in Punjabi…so she said ‘kaaN’…whereas the real word is actually ‘kann’.
In general Pakistani educated elite associate non-Urdu languages with being un-sophisticated. I have heard Pakistanis begrudginly speaking in Punjabi(with 80% Urdu and English in it), if they are at a setting where they want to appear sophisticated, but have yet to come across a Pakistani Sindhi to first proclaim that he/she is Sindhi and then also attempt to speak the langugage. May be my sample size is smaller.
My freind and roommate spoke Marathi almost as good as he spoke Sindhi (as he was Sindhi from Pune). Anyways, I hope that Sindhi language is retained somehow. I have memories of counting in Sindhi while playing Gulli-Danda back home.
There are few Sindhis in that group.
There are few Pakistani Sindhis in the West. I have only met one in my life…and he was very proud to be Sindhi and speak Sindhi.
Agreed. It’s a charming language, with an earthy and warm sound. A very good friend of mine is Sindhi, I hear it at his house all the time, and I really like it. I actually do think Sindhi will survive in Pakistan for a while yet…because they have something in place to protect it (Sindhi-medium education, as well as the political dimension of Sindhi vs. Muhajir).
Yes, there are a few. Amitabh asked all the DBDs out there, and that is why I made the clarification that most DBDs don’t lose fluency in their mother-tongue simply by getting an english education. It happens only when their family is determined to anglicize them, or they move in v restricted circles. If you speak only english, you can’t possibly be talking to a lot of people in India.
I agree with that.
Sakshi,
Well said,
But the sad truth is (or was, until a couple of decades ago), that an upper-class person in Bombay (or Delhi) could talk to all the people who mattered to him or her. Very, very basic Hindi (with plenty of grammatical mistakes and howlers) sufficed for basic communication with the hoi-polloi.
I guess I gave away my SES. 😉
But you are right, I occasionally run into people who have managed with english alone, so they still exist. I just wanted to make the distinction that getting an english education does not automatically mean you lose your mother tongue. It is a common and dangerous misconception because: a) ultimately its the responsibility of the parents to pass their language and culture on, if they want to, and it absolves them of the responsibility, b) people expect the state to take charge and make sure the culture is not lost, usually with kooky ideas like converting all govt. school education to the regional language. The kids from poor families are then saddled with the task of preserving the greatness of the culture, while the rich kids get an english education, with all the privileges it brings in India.
this is really unfortunate. i am one of the very few of my generation who can speak it, which is basically thanks to my grandfather and mother who spoke to us only in sindhi and expected us to make the effort to converse in the language as well (until I was about 10 or so my grandfather had a strict rule that none of his grandkids could speak in any other language at his house). at that time i thought that this was pretty fascist of him, but ultimately i am glad that i learned to speak and love the language. most of my cohort does not speak sindhi (and i cannot neither write it nor claim a familiarity with sindhi fiction and poetry). many of the people in my parents’ generation were ashamed of being sindhi – to the extent that i know of many families changing their last name en masse (since sindhi last names are generally very recognizable). although hindu refugees from pakistan were never stigmatized to the extent that the muhajirs in pakistan are, a lot of people feel distinctly uneasy about being sindhi; perhaps because the fragmented nature of the community and its traditional professional paths make them want to appear assimilated and also due to the fear of being confused with sindhi muslims.
hey there are lots of sindhi-speaking communities. infact, hindu sindhi, i dont know much but i have seen them worship a young looking holy man. and i haven’t seen the young resent the language or culture, infact they are quite proud of it,maybe its coz they are the richest people in my place, but the commmunity is nowhere near dying.
on sindhi, Great to hear your account. Nice that some people are trying to preserve it. It would be a shame to lose it.
One of such Hindu refugee from Pakistan is L K Advani. He came preety close to being the prime minister. I am always amazed at the Sindhi community’s struggle and what they have achieved since taking refuge in India. Only after living in the US have I come to realize this.
I never said that community is dying. Community is thriving in their diasporic existence. It is the langugage that is in the endangered langugage list.
Since this is coming from a Sindhi, I have to accept that there must be some truth to it, but it’s very counter to my experience with Hindu Sindhis…the ones I’ve met (and I’ve met a lot, of both my gen and the older gen) have invariably been proud of being Sindhi and fond of the language (despite being unsuccessful at transmitting it to their kids). Sindhi Hindus from my experience love to party and are very outgoing people…the distinctly Sindhi aspects of their culture are receding, but as a community they seem to share a lot of personality traits that set them apart from other Indian groups. One thing I noticed…even more than other groups, they seem to be embracing Bollywood culture to fill the vacuum of the loss of Sindhi culture. Another thing is, that they live in far-flung places like Indonesia, Hong Kong, Dubai, Kuwait, Spain, the USA, the Caribbean…but they are so tightly-knit as a community…they have global links with other Sindhis throughout the world. I’m convinced that between any two Sindhi anywhere on the globe, there are at most three degrees of separation. And most of them feel strongly about marrying only other Sindhis…something they’ve been fairly successful with so far.