Author Archives: manish

Macaulay’s Minute

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An argument is raging in Pakistan about the reform of religious education in madrassas. Lord Macaulay’s infamous Minute on Indian Education, a treatise on imposing English-language education on India, anticipated many of the same arguments.

Macaulay’s text was openly racist…

I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia… the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England… We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language… The languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.

… shrewdly imperialist…

What we spend on the Arabic and Sanscrit colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth… If there should be any opposition among the natives to the change which I recommend, that opposition will be the effect of our own system. It will be headed by persons supported by our stipends and trained in our colleges. The longer we persevere in our present course, the more formidable will that opposition be.
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Middle Eastern mutiny

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Robert Kaplan draws a comparison in the NYT between this blog’s namesake revolt and the war in Iraq. He argues that rather than evangelizing instant democracy, the U.S. should temper its ambitions:

… Iraq has turned out like the Indian mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the attempts of Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers in London to modernize and Christianize India – to make it more like England – were met with a violent revolt against imperial rule… The bloody debacle… did signal a transition: away from an ad hoc imperium fired by an intemperate lust to impose domestic values abroad, and toward a calmer, more pragmatic empire built on international trade and technology.

Kaplan’s description of the British Empire pre-Sepoy Rebellion is oddly enervated. Modernize India? Methinks the evangelicals were mainly interested in conversion. To them, heathen Hindus were the sub-Saharan Africans of the 19th century, a teeming continent of raw material for Christianity. Alexander Pope chastised Hindu beliefs in his ‘Essay on Man’:

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor’d mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple nature to his hope has giv’n,
Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler Heav’n,
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the wat’ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no Angel’s wing, no Seraph’s fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.
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Walking the dog

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Slow news day at Slate? An Arab-American finds that a new puppy makes him more palatable to neighbors:

Muslims are prohibited from touching the saliva of dogs. If you do come in contact with a dog, you’re supposed to wash your hands seven times before you pray. Most Muslims will avoid dogs at all cost to stay clean for their daily prayers…

People on the street, in their cars, in the parking lot, and at the supermarket were giving me a new look–a friendly one. Strangers who used to skillfully avoid eye contact now wanted to engage me in warm conversation. Patriotic national hotline tippers, who are usually more concerned about Muslim sleeper cells, now stopped me and cordially inquired about my puppy’s sleeping habits, breed, and big black eyes.

The puppy effect is old news, the author must’ve missed Eddie Murphy’s dog gimmick (and dawg role) in Boomerang. Maybe he should try strolling babies or handing out lollipops and unicorn stickers. It’s a cute story, but the point of civil rights is the freedom to be as punk as you wanna be without being hosed by bureaucrats — the triumph of clean, fair play over arbitrary prejudices.

White House celebrates Diwali

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The White House hosted its second Diwali celebration Wednesday, which is very cool. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays with the evangelicals who equate Hinduism with devil worship. Former ambassador to India Robert Blackwill hosted the party; it was his last day in government, he just resigned as head of Iraq policy due to a staffer abuse mini-scandal.

Dubya and Laura, Karl Rove (who attended last year), and Representative-elect Bobby Jindal were no-shows. One fundraiser said that for Indian-Americans, ‘pay to play’ is all pay, no play; he threw a hissy-fit when Bush attended a Ramadan dinner a few hours later:

Community activists were told that if the President and the First Lady attended the event of one community or nationals, there would be pressure from others. But a few hours after the Diwali event, Bush attended an Iftar dinner hosted by the White House to mark the end of Ramzaan… “We raised millions for the President and the GOP… and this is what we got in return,” the activist, also a physician, fumed.

Many Republican desis attended, and the mithai and samosas were ordered from the same New York midtown restaurant, Bukhara Grill, which catered Salman Rushdie’s wedding and is a favorite of Bill Clinton’s. Great food is nonpartisan, time for a pilgrimage:

Dhandu Ram is the man behind the tandoor at Bukhara Grill in New York. He is a master tandoor who hails from Rajasthan, but got his training on the job at the famed Bukhara at the Maurya Sheraton in Delhi… As a tandoor chef, Ram is the star attraction at Bukhara Grill and agrees that more respect is given to chefs here… He points out that a tandoor chef generally gets a green card because this is a task that no one else can really do.

Update: Someone who once worked for the host of the party chimes in on Daniel Drezner’s blog:

Blackwill is an incredibly brilliant thinker with absolutely no interpersonal skills… I never saw Blackwill touch an employee other than to shake hands. His manner is such that embassy staff wondered that he could have fathered three children… He sleeps four hours a night… By the time I’d arrive in my office at 0730… I would find between 20 and 30 e-mails from Blackwill, time-stamped from 0330 onward… he was always a decent human being. I think his major fault was that he simply lacked empathy toward other human beings…

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Pakistan Supreme Court bans wedding feasts

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Pakistan’s high court has banned feasts at weddings as being un-Islamic:

The court bench then went a step further to criticise some of the most popular customs linked to South Asian weddings, including the colourful rituals of mayun and mehndi… and baraat… Describing them as social evils, the court said the state should take steps to eradicate them.

I found truth to be stranger than fiction:

The excision of all Hindu-inspired culture from a nation cleaved Siamese-style from its dominant twin leaves it with nothing more than echoes of Arabic, a thin rind of astringent Wahabbism and insufficiently comprehended talibs, freshly imported. This fingernail clipping, this ecliptic corona, this Venn diagram of loss leaves the nation with a desert of prohibited activities enumerated with the heavy delicacy of a tax code.

Amardeep jests that it’s a good remedy for boring weddings:

… it’s a little ridic. to dance for six hours on the street celebrating the marriage of a distant cousin one (sometimes) barely knows, who is sitting uncomfortably on a horse, while a band of profoundly underpaid horn-players tries to do a very un-funky version of “Koi Kahe Kehta Rahe.”

Historian from Bangalore denied entry into U.S.

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Ramachandran Guha, a historian from Bangalore, was denied entry into the U.S. on a lecture trip to Oberlin and UC Berkeley. He says he had a valid visa and supporting letters. The reason? Immigration officials disbelieved his sizeable speaking fee (via Amardeep Singh):

Why was I stopped? One reason might have been my jhola, a patch of mirrorwork on red… Another, certainly, was the letter of invitation from Oberlin, which specified a fee for my lectures which greatly angered [immigration officer] McCullough. “How can they pay you so much,” he said more than once, adding, “And for teaching history.”…

Berkeley and Oberlin are now planning a joint letter of protest. Meanwhile, they’ve written me handsome letters of apology, expressing shock at “such discriminatory and unjustified exclusion”, and anger at the “terrible injustice you had to endure… [from] these cretins”.

A passage to Brooklyn

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A Brooklyn theater company is presenting a minimalist staging of E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India:

… the company uses a single, brushed-metal set, simple white costumes, a few chairs and props, and a small cast of actors to present Forster’s multilayered story of cultural conflict in colonial India… there are some clever bits of invention in Ms. Meckler’s staging – for example, a lumbering elephant represented by a pyramid of softly swaying actors… no more illuminating is the decision to recast the tale as a flashback, and employ the novel’s most prominent Hindu character, Godbole, as narrator…

[Forster] clearly meant Dr. Aziz to embody the unfettered emotionalism that he observed in Indian Muslims. As played by Mr. Caan, he is temperate and considered, a perfectly turned-out, machine-tooled product of British colonialism. Dr. Aziz concludes the play with a passionate speech denouncing the British occupying forces, but you wouldn’t be surprised to see him turn around and invite his enemy to join him in a game of cricket.

At Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene through Saturday.

Sarita Choudhury in ‘Sakharam Binder’

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Sarita Choudhury is starring in acclaimed playwright Vijay Tendulkar’s work ‘Sakharam Binder’ in Manhattan. This play, Tendulkar’s most famous work, was once banned in India:

“Sakharam Binder”… tells the story of Sakharam’s seventh and eighth “birds” (as his envious friend Dawood calls Sakharam’s women). Laxmi (Anna George) is shy, submissive and pious, whereas Champa (Sarita Choudhury), her successor, is brash, voluptuous and spoiled… Ms. Choudhury radiates a proud, willful acuity that reads as desperate indignation as Champa shirks, malingers and turns to alcohol to blunt her disgust at Sakharam’s sexual demands…

Mr. White vividly captures the strange and complex pathology of Sakharam, who seems to want to please his “birds” even as he bullies them and who speaks like a freethinking crusader for women’s rights one minute and like an philistine scornful of their devotion to him the next… Like Brecht’s Mother Courage, he exploits a corrupt system for personal advantage, then discovers that the price of playing the game is everything he hoped to protect.

The last play I heard of starring Choudhury was the off-Broadway ‘Roar’ by Palestinian-American playwright Betty Shamieh. I ran into Shamieh at a BBQ; despite her heavy subject matter, she’s very funny in person.

Part of the IAAC’s Tendulkar Festival, through Nov. 14 at 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th St., Manhattan.

Represent! (-ative)

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Jindal elected to Congress: 33-year-old Bobby Jindal was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana in yesterday’s national election. As expected, Jindal won decisively with 78% of the vote. Several challengers split the remaining vote, with no one else getting more than 7%. Jindal follows Dalip Singh Saund, a California Congressman in the ’50s, as only the second South Asian American ever elected to Congress.

Aside from being of Punjabi origin, Jindal and Saund’s stories differ markedly. Saund was a progressive lettuce farmer who attended UC Berkeley, while Jindal is a conservative Rhodes Scholar who attended Brown and Oxford. But they both persevered in the face of electoral disappointment: Jindal recently lost a close race for Louisiana governor, while Saund won a race for a judgeship but later had to re-fight the campaign:

Saund ran for his friend’s office and won. But because he had only been a citizen less than a year, he was barred from taking office. A petition signed by twice the number of people who had elected him did nothing to help his cause… Two years later, he again ran for the judgeship and won despite anti-immigrant bashings made by his opponent who had tried to incite the public with sayings like “Hindu for Judge.”

Other elected desi politicians at the state legislature level include Nikki Randhawa-Haley and long-serving doyen Kumar Barve.

Previous posts on Jindal: 1, 2, 3, 4