Author Archives: amardeep

Indian Enough For You? Bollywood and the Oscars

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Following on Siddhartha’s discussion of the “Desi Angle” question, there’s an insightful piece in the Indian Express by Shubhra Gupta (thanks, SP) on a related question: is it possible that the only foreign films that have a chance at getting nominated for the Oscars are those that register as completely “other” to the West? This year, India’s official choice, Rang de Basanti, didn’t make the top 10, while the Canadian-financed Deepa Mehta film Water, did. (The final nominees will be announced next week.)

But Paint It Yellow/Saffron (that’s what its English-subtitled version [of Rang de Basanti] is called . . . didn’t travel too far down the road to the Oscars for that exact same reason: confused, contemporary youth exist all over the world. To a foreign viewer, the film is not ‘Indian’ enough, not in the same way as, say, a Water is: it is also, and this is not a well-known fact, very strongly reminiscent of Canadian film Jesus Of Montreal, in which a group of actors’ lives change drastically as they put on a passion play.

Incarcerated widows in a pre-Independence Indian ‘ashram’. Oooh, that’s Indian. Where else would you find little girls and beautiful young women and old crones with tragic backstories and cruelly shaven heads? It’s another matter that even today, Vrindavan’s widows lead lives of quiet desperation. It’s also another matter that major portions of the film had to be shot in Sri Lanka, which masquerades as Varanasi. But Water has the backdrop of the British ‘raj’, the horror of child marriage and ‘sati’, and brutal oppression. Can’t get better, can it? (link)

Gupta is right on many counts here. Rang de Basanti does have urban, middle-class kids speaking liberal amounts of English (as well as a white girl, speaking Hindi). What she’s overlooking, of course, is that while Rang de Basanti is a lot of fun, it just isn’t that serious a film. It doesn’t have the sense of gravity or “prestige” that makes a film a plausible Oscar contender. A much better choice, by far, would have been Omkara — which has the three A’s: it’s Arty, “Authentic” (though still legible to western audiences, via Othello), and most importantly, Adult. (I often feel that NRIs or ABDs should pick India’s official Oscar selections, since the Board that currently makes this selection clearly has no idea what it’s doing. Paheli?)

Still, I fear that the three Indian films that have reached the nomination phase over the years — Mother India, Salaam, Bombay, and Lagaan — do all fit a pattern: they focus on desperate poverty. While this is undeniably an important (and continuing) part of Indian society, it’s sad that only the exotic, impoverished India of street urchins or rural desperation is likely to make an Oscar-worthy film.

Someone might object: why should Indians care about the Oscars? No Satyajit Ray film was ever nominated (though I must admit I don’t know how many of his films were officially submitted). And isn’t this is the same Academy that gave Best Picture to A Terrible Bore A Beautiful Mind? But, whether or not it’s justified, there always seems to be a great deal of interest in the Indian media about the Oscars — despite rampant evidence that Americans simply don’t get Indian cinema.

Perhaps we should start our own awards? The Mutinies? Continue reading →

Anthems of Resistance: Progressive Urdu Poetry

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Vijay Prashad has a nice review of a new collection of Urdu poetry up at this month’s issue of Himal Southasian. anthems of resistance.jpg The book is called Anthems of Resistance, and it’s edited by Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir, two brothers from Hyderabad who now teach at universities in the U.S. (While it’s not for sale in the U.S. yet, this Indian book-seller will send it to you for $7.00 USD + postage.)

Prashad’s opening by itself raises some interesting questions (and memories):

In 1981, the cinema theatre near my home in Calcutta became a mehfil-e-mushaira. At the end of each show, majnoohs walked out of the darkness humming tunes and reciting ghazals. Muzaffar Ali’s Umrao Jaan allowed non-Urdu speakers to revel in the richness of Urdu culture, which most of us non-Muslims saw as exotic and attractive, yet distant. (Muslim culture would be further rendered exotic in 1982 in two films, Nikaah and Deedar-e-yaar.) These are all films of decline, where a supposedly homogenous Muslim culture is rife with problems – some easy to overcome (divorce rates), and others intractable (the demise of the kotha culture). The elegance of the language thrilled many urbane Indians, who enjoyed the patois but felt uncomfortable with the working-class and rural sections that actually spoke it. (link)

This is an interesting analysis of the appeal of Ghazals and the musical Mehfil culture of to many non-Muslims. Of course, the cinematic culture (i.e., the tawaif, or courtesan film) he’s referring to is now long dead, as the writers who wrote the songs and scripts of Bollywood’s early Urdu films are now gone (Kaifi Azmi died in 2002). Recent films like Fanaa have temporarily revived popular interest in Shayari (the recitation of poetic couplets), but in my view it’s more a gimmick than anything else. (I frankly don’t know what to make of Aishwarya Rai’s recent remake of Umrao Jaan.)

The rest of Prashad’s review is about the poets themselves — the writers of the Progressive Writers’ Association — who wrote as much about politics as they did about love. (I wrote about another PWA writer, Ismat Chughtai, here. Also, see Saadat Hasan Manto, who was not a member of the PWA as far as I know, though he did have certain things in common with them) Continue reading →

An Afternoon With Yahya

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The middle of an academic’s winter break is the perfect time to be saddled with irritating errands. In this case, I had been commissioned to stay home on a Friday afternoon so a SatTV (fake name) technician could fix the problems we’ve been having with our Hindi-language channels.

SatTV is essentially a hive of incompetent technicians. A previous technician had come a month earlier. He spent five minutes looking around, cursed the installation guy that had preceded him, and declared there was nothing he could do. Though Yahya too would also accomplish nothing in the three hours he spent in my house, he was at least more interesting to talk to.

When he told me his name, I said, “oh, like the famous Pakistani general” (fortunately, I did not say “dictator”). He was impressed, it seemed, by my knowledge of history, and it started us on a good footing. He said he was from Sialkot, and industrial town in a Punjabi speaking area. Yahya himself was Punjabi, though to my relief he seemed perfectly happy to speak in English — his English was confident and effective, though lacking in the grammatical niceties that come with years of English-medium schooling. To begin with, he came to the U.S. fifteen years ago, to work as a chef. Yes, a chef: he said he had studied at a culinary institute in Lahore, and then worked as an executive chef at a “five star hotel” there before coming to Philadelphia with his wife. Continue reading →

Bangladesh on the Brink

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It looks like Bangladesh is at a critical point politically right now. The interim President, Iajuddin Ahmed, recently declared a state of emergency, and then abruptly resigned as interim leader.

The central issue seems to be the accuracy of the country’s voter rolls, which has on it the names of 13 million people who shouldn’t be there — out of a total population of 150 million. The voter rolls also excludes most minority voters, though that doesn’t appear to be as big a problem politically for either party. The best summary of what is happening is probably Naeem’s at Drishtipat:

The controversy around Jan 22 elections center around few things:

i) Voter List: Subject of raging court battles for last 2 years. BNP defied a court order to update existing voter list (created by AL in 2000), and instead created a brand new voter list. An NDI survey found 13 million extra names on the Voters List. Minority voters (esp, Hindu+CHT Pahari voters) are of course wholesale missing from this list–– par for the course. The total voter count was 93 million, a mathematical impossibility from 2001 census. In face of mounting domestic/international pressure EC finally agreed to correct the voters list, but the work was incomplete when opposition boycott began.

ii) CTG (Caretaker Government): This was a system instituted after the 1996 vote-fraud marred elections, whereby, 3 months before each election the gov’t steps down, and a CTG takes over to conduct “fair”elections. This worked in 1996 and 2001, but by 2006, surprise surprise, the CTG itself has become super-controversial. The AL alleges it is now full of BNP partisans. After a long campaign to remove a partisan candidate, the chess move was placed by Iajuddin who took over as head of CTG bypassing the normal process. Since taking power Iajuddin proved to be a horrorshow autocrat. He repeatedly bypassed and ignored his advisors in taking decisions about voter list, election date and army deployment. A month ago, 4 of his advisors quit in protest. (link)

The two main political parties in Bangladesh are the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which leans Islamist, and the Awami League (AL), which has been historically more secular/left (though recently they have been making overtures to some Islamist parties). The BNP is currently dominant, but the AL has been putting pressure on them to run the upcoming elections fairly, and had been threatening a boycott unless the voter rolls are corrected. Drishtipat’s Naeem and others have suggested that the inability of the two parties to negotiate a way to manage elections might well lead the military to take matters into their own hands in the next couple of weeks. That isn’t a good thing, but clearly things can’t continue much longer as they are.

About 40 people have died thus far in the violence that has accompanied the current political standoff. I’m crossing my fingers that, however, this is resolved, that number doesn’t go any higher. Do readers have suggestions for readings that might shed more light on what is happening in Dhaka right now? I’m especially curious to see ‘on the ground’ blog reports of what is happening, if there are any. Continue reading →

Secularism and Reverse-Engineering (and, an announcement)

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The debates about secularism we’ve had over the months I’ve been on Sepia Mutiny have sometimes gotten stuck due to differences in terminology. People have different ideas of what “secularism” means, and not simply because one party is “right” and the others are “wrong.”

In fact, there is some slipperiness in the way many people use the term on a day-to-day basis. Some people think of secularism as a cultural attribute, indicating the opposite of religiosity. A society where people are not very religious might be termed secular, and under this terminology, Europe would be very “secular,” while the U.S. would be less so, even if (and Razib has often pointed this out) there is actually more religion taught in public schools in most northern European countries than is allowed in the U.S. system. India is a society that is also very non-secular by this definition, partly because the overwhelming majority of its citizens would identify themselves as belonging to one or another religious community. Moroever, one of the unique features of life in the Indian subcontinent is the fact that a person’s religious identity is often publicly visible to others –- it’s built into one’s name, as well as various kinds of bodily markings and religiously-coded attire. A Bindi might mark a woman as a Hindu; a turban and beard might mark a man as a Sikh; and any number of identifying marks are possible for Muslims. (Christians and Buddhists, interestingly, are less visibly marked.)

The problem with the cultural definition of secularism is that it seems very difficult to think of changing anything. If the people in a given society are seen as religious, one could claim that thereÂ’s no need for a legal or political system that requires separation of church and state. Nor need there be any particular incentive to reform aspects of a traditional culture that are incompatible with the idea of civil rights. Also out the window are specific protections for religious minorities, as well as vigilance about protecting individuals (as in, women) from religious coercion. If a woman (or even, as is often the case, a girl) is being pressured by her family to accept a marriage she doesnÂ’t want, under the culturalist definition of secularism there isnÂ’t really justification to help her: thatÂ’s simply the culture, one could say. Continue reading →

The Year (2006) in Books

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Red Snapper wrote me and suggested a post reviewing the books of 2006. This is of course somewhat difficult to do, because unlike some readers I tend to spend most of my time reading books written years and years and years ago — and I often let new works of fiction simmer into paperback before venturing to sit down with them. In this case, I haven’t actually read several of the books on the list below, and the list is as much a “to read” as it is a “best of.”

Secondly, the ordering isn’t especially significant. The list is more about the group as a whole than it is about putting X above Y or Y above Z. As I mentioned, I haven’t read some of the titles, and anyway ranking books isn’t usually a very intelligent exercise, especially when you’re talking about different genres of writing.

Third, I’m curious to know what was on your list in 2006. What am I leaving out? Continue reading →

Indo-African Writers (report from a conference)

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My after-Christmas is usually spent in a suit and tie, at the big, 3-day MLA conference — where all the literature professors in North America get together and try to impress one another with advanced theoretical jargon and turtle-neck sweaters in the darkest possible shades of black. For the past six years, the South Asian Literary Association has also had a conference that piggybacks on the main MLA. Everyone calls it the SALA conference (I know, unfortunate acronym; trust me, it’s been noticed before!), and it’s an academic space where no one looks at you funny if you are in a sari or a “FabIndia” khadi kurta.

This year the focus at SALA was on literature of the South Asian diaspora, and the keynote speaker was Gaurav Desai, who gave a talk was closely focused on the literary history of South Asians in East Africa. I won’t say much here about Gaurav’s actual thesis (look for his upcoming book, which is entirely dedicated to the Indo-Africans); instead, I’ll stick to simply mentioning some of the names he mentioned. While Gaurav did make brief reference to some famous Indian Ugandan exiles, like M.G. Vassanji, most of his talk was focused on lesser-known figures, such as Peter Nazareth and Yusuf Dawood. He also gave some helpful leads for others interested in the topic. He mentioned, for instance, Robert Gregory’s 1972 history of “India and East Africa,” as well as Cynthia Salvadori’s We Came in Dhows, which is actually quoted on some Sikh websites for the background on East African Sikhs.

Commentators like Shiva Naipaul (Sir Vidia’s deceased brother) focused earlier on the distance of the Asian community from black Africans before the traumatic exodus of the early 1970s. And indeed, anecdotally, one hears that the Asians in Africa tended to hold themselves aloof from “native” Africans, at least before Idi Amin. Desai argues that there were some members of the Asian community — especially artists, playwrights, and poets — who were trying to envision a sense of shared culture with their black African neighbors.

One name that came up a lot in this regard in Desai’s talk was Rajat Neogy, a Ugandan of Indian descent who started a famous African magazine called Transition. Neogy’s magazine was a freethinking forum for many of the major postcolonial intellectuals in the 1960s and 70s (some of them are named at Wikipedia, while others are named at the Transition website). The magazine went defunct in 1976, when Neogy was arrested by Idi Amin’s henchmen, but it was revived in 1990 by Henry Louis Gates (among the early contributors to the magazine). Transition is now based in the U.S. — as are most of the writers who wrote for the original magazine, not surprisingly.

Another name mentioned by Desai was Peter Nazareth, a writer of Goan and Malaysian ancestry, who actually worked briefly in the Idi Amin regime before getting out in 1973. He wrote a novel about Amin, called The General is Up, that sounds pretty interesting. According to the Wikipedia entry on him, Nazareth now teaches at the University of Iowa.

Finally, Desai mentioned a writer named Yusuf Dawood, who has also written about the mass exodus of Indians from Uganda in a novel called Return to Paradise.

Has anyone read any of these writers’ works?

While on the subject of east Africa, a quick side-note: at the main MLA, I was thrilled to see Ngugi w’a Thiong’o read from his new novel, The Wizard of the Crow on Friday evening. Parody is one of the best weapons with which to battle the sickening corruption of postcolonial dictatorships, and Ngugi wields it with ferocity and charm. I’m looking forward to getting the book. Continue reading →

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Travelers: Beaches of Bangladesh, Chatting on Indian Trains…

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I hope y’all are enjoying your holiday travels. For me it’s yet another December spent at home on the East Coast, followed by 3 days of hard-core academia at the annual South Asian Literary Association and Modern Language Association conferences. (Note: I’m not really complaining: this year we are blessed by the presence of a smiling, gurgling little baby. But yeah, a change of scenery would still be nice.)

Travel journalists, by contrast, get to have leisurely travels all the time — for work. Today I was particularly drawn by a recent New York Times article about visiting beaches in Bangladesh, and a Times of London travelogue (thanks, Indianoguy) of a reporter’s trip all around India. Going to the beaches of Bangladesh (on the eastern tip, near the border of Burma/Myanmar) is something I would never have thought of doing, but it actually makes perfect sense. Incidentally, the tourist board’s official motto is perhaps unintentionally comical, but actually works despite itself: “Visit Bangladesh Before Tourists Come.”

And my favorite bit from the London Times travelogue is about a train ride to Jhansi:

Train journeys here are great levellers. Few Indians frantically fill their time, as westerners do, with work or reading. They regard the journeys as a chance to “interact” and talk, about anything from the price of aubergines to the finer points of Tantric meditation. By the time they get off, they’re exchanging business cards and pledging eternal friendship.

As fillings turned to extractions, the cabin attendant slouched past with an urn of peppery tomato soup, which he served in plastic cups (they would have been biodegradeable pottery cups five years ago). He scattered it with a handful of croutons from his pocket. The lady dentist seized her moment. “How does your daily routine here compare with back home?” she asked.. “How does India compare with UK?”

I said the UK is ordered, startlingly quiet and clean in comparison, and that its people are reserved and, in places, few and far between. I mentioned North Ronaldsay, the Orkney island which is three miles long and one mile wide, and has a population of less than 50. “Amazing!” said the dentist. And I described how my wife and I go walking in the Derbyshire Peak District and sometimes meet no more than six or seven people in four hours. “Astonishing!” said the biotechnology student.

He had a point. In the packed 3rd class carriage next door, some sort of evolutionary struggle for survival seemed to be going on. I said that British trains sometimes travel with as few as a dozen passengers. And that, if it’s even ten minutes late, there could be a riot.

This was a lie, but it seemed pretty relevant, as our train was now four rather than three hours late. (link)

I especially like the point about how mass-transit in the west is largely anti-social, while the experience in India (or perhaps all of South Asia?) is the opposite. (Does anyone have favorite subcontinental train/plane/bus experiences they want to share?)

Incidentally, if you’re sick of reading about western travelers in India (while they’re far from uniform, the stories always seem to have comments on the crazy traffic patterns and the smell), there are some great “internal” desi travel stories up at OkTataByeBye.com. I thought this in-depth article on Lucknow was an especially good read. And there are plenty more. Continue reading →

Arthi Meera’s Pop Lullabies; and, a question on “fusion”

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arthi meera.jpg I recently discovered the music of Arthi Meera on Myspace, and even though it’s probably too late to get counted on Siddhartha’s end of the year poll, I think readers might want to go check her out.

Of the songs that are up at Myspace, “Silty Sea” has gotten the most plays — and it’s a lovely song. But “Wander Away” is a catchy and infectious pop melody. Her album is also available via Itunes (I would recommend “In my head” and “It’s not you.”).

Arthi, who plays guitar and sings on all her songs, was raised in Chicago, and lives there now. She says she was trained in classical Hindustani singing, though the songs on her album show no trace of that particular background. Snippets of her voice, singing “Pardesi Jaana Nahin,” are in the closing credits of the film V For Vendetta (listen to BKAB Speechless at Ethan Stoller’s Myspace page; incidentally, Manish mentioned this song months ago). [Correction: that is not Arthi Meera’s voice, I’m told.]

I was a little curious about how she went from ‘A’ to ‘B’, so I sent her an email with some questions. Her reply was pretty thought-provoking. Continue reading →

The Myth of “Martial Races”

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Gurkha.jpg Though I’ve always been proud of the Sikh tradition in military service — particularly in the First and Second World Wars — the fact that the British Raj designated certain ethno-religious groups as martial races makes me uneasy. And recently I’ve been reading a book on the Gurkha regiments, (Byron Farwell’s The Gurkhas), and after reading a number of chapters I’m ready to throw out the designation entirely.

For those who are unfamiliar, the Gurkhas (or Gorkhas) come from a region of Nepal west of Kathmandu, and have been actively recruited by the British for service as mercenaries since 1815. It so happened that the British discovered the Gurkhas’ military aptitude after defeating them in a series of particularly tough battles — just as they did with the Sikhs, the Marathas, and indeed, the Zulus (all of whom would be designated “martial races”; see the full list here). Often, troops from one recently conquered region would be instrumental in defeating the next group (the Gurkhas were deployed in the Anglo-Sikh Wars, for instance).

As a side-note, though most Gurkha regiments joined the Indian army at independence, the British did retain a small number of Gurkhas for the British Army after 1947 — and they still actively recruit them today (on a fully voluntary basis, of course). Gurkhas were deployed in the Falklands’ War, in Kosovo, and are now in Afghanistan. Retired Gurkhas are also probably going to be deployed to monitor the fragile peace agreement between the Maoists and the new government of Nepal. Joining the Gurkha regiments in the British Army is considered desirable, but it’s a tough gig to get: one of the physical tests in order to be accepted involves running uphill for 40 minutes with a 70 pound bag of stones strapped to your back!

The author of the book on the Gurkhas is mainly a military historian, not an anthropologist, so it’s probably too much to expect to ask him to deconstruct the idea of “martial races.” But it’s extremely frustrating that in episode after episode Farwell seems to reiterate a few straightforward stereotypes as explaining the Gurkhas’ effectiveness in battle on behalf of the British: they are simple peasants, they are hardened by life in a mountainous region, and they have a strong sense of cultural identity. The same could be said of many other ethnic groups, most of whom were not designated “martial races.” So why the Gurkhas?

It seems hard to escape the conclusion that “martial race” is a convenient term created by the British to continue military recruiting patterns favorable to the progress of imperial expansionism. Continue reading →