Playing football rather than reciting the Gita will take one near to God

- Swami Vivekanand

There is little evidence to show that soccer or hockey were any less popular than cricket in India until the early 80s. In fact, India achieved early successes in hockey and soccer that led Anthony de Mello, one of the founders of the BCCI to declare,

Heightened by our hockey success at Amsterdam, our ambitions for Indian sport know no bounds just then. We visualized our cricketers playing at the Oval, at Lord’s ….

In his paper, Batting for the flag: cricket, television and globalization in India, Nalin Mehta of the La Trobe University explains how the popularity of cricket in India is not the product of some

peculiar Indian affiliation for the game, but inextricably linked with the expansion of Indian television and a confluence of other factors: the creation of a large middle class, economic reforms, the politics of identity, the birth of the satellite television industry and broader trends in globalization.

Indeed it should surprise an objective observer that cricket is this popular in India. Simple economics do not encourage the playing of the sport. Considerable investments are required to start even a simple game, although as with many other things Indians have adapted the game to their environment.

Cricket has becoming an almost inextricable part of urban, middle-class India’s identity. Expatriates now run extensive cricket leagues even in America, where the game is almost unheard of. It has become part of the consumption triangle of middle India along with Bollywood and Western pop culture. It remains a fact that India’s successes even in a relatively (in global terms) non-popular sport like cricket, have been few and far between, with the team having losing records against most competitors even though its population dwarfs that of any other cricket playing country. So why is middle India hooked to cricket ?

Mehta argues that,

in a land divided at multifarious levels by factors such as language, caste and custom, the unrelenting drive to construct and capture a national market for maximizing profits has led television producers and advertisers to turn to cricket as the lowest common denominator.

Indeed, the expansion of cricket was driven by compelling economic reasons and enabling technological advances like the,

launch of INSAT-1A and later INSAT-1B, allowed the creation of what became known as the National Programme which was envisaged as a tool for uniting people

And the administrators of cricket capitalized on this tool and success in the 1983 World Cup to popularize the game and in turn make it an indispensable tool for the advertisers who needed a medium and brand ambassadors to communicate with the emerging middle classes. Why did hockey and soccer not succeed ? Sadly the,

decline in hockey standards began to turn spectators away at a time when television was providing opportunities for building an entirely new support base.

As for soccer, the decline ironically started after the broadcast of the 1982 Soccer World Cup as the fans in Bengal and Kerala suddenly became aware of,

the gap between their own local heroes and the great international stars

In contrast, the rise of Indian television coincided with some of India’s greatest cricketing achievements, and the cricket team conveniently became an easy release for the aspirational nationalism of middle class Indians. No one can deny the excitement and passions cricket can arouse among Indians. But the question is, is it worth the cost to other sports ? Especially those like hockey and soccer that were once integral to the ‘Indian’ identity,

the victory would fill every Indian with joy and pride to know that rice-eating, malaria-ridden, bare-footed Bengalis have got the better of beef-eating, Herculean, booted John Bull in that peculiarly English sport.

- The newspaper Nayak after the victory of Mohun Bagan over British East York Regiment in 1911 soccer game

What do these college newspaper headlines tell one about higher education in America ?

Lets start with the very fact that universities in America typically have functioning newspapers. Here is a list. Their presence and popularity indicates several things. First and foremost, it emphasizes the society’s commitment to freedom of speech, encouraging the gathering and spread of information among the population and cultivating quality journalists and reporters. Also, it increases the sense of ownership the students of a university have regarding their alma mater. Third it helps administrators and officials get a feeling for the general sentiment in the campus, i.e. it acts as feedback and is one of the things that keeps universities from becoming static ‘assembly lines’.

As I have pointed out earlier, social science studies in India are in shambles, with little support from the state or society. India does have elite institutes that have great reputations, but these institutes are in the engineering fields. There are some reasons to question this concentration of ‘eliteness’ in a specific field. Notwithstanding what the state’s motivations for the creation of elite engineering schools were/are, one has to ask how effective they really are ? And more importantly, are they enough ?

Is engineering really a discipline that needs elite graduates to progress ? In terms of their jobs and functions as an engineer, will there be much difference between a high GPA graduate from MIT or one from Louisiana State University ? I will argue not. This is because one can only become an effective engineer once one is actually in industry, the engineering profession is not one that a person can necessarily prepare for in 4 years of college.  Yes, you do need the basics and obviously there will be a difference between an average MIT and LSU engineering graduate, but that will be more due to basic intellectual capacity and motivation than their college education.

The laws of physics and mathematics are invariant in space, so are their applications¹, so how differently can they be taught in different places ?

But does this analogy apply to a social studies or economics graduate ? I will argue not. Because in social sciences education, exposure, interaction and peer groups matter a lot more. Taking a class with a leading social scientist with 5 other highly motivated young people where there are frequent discussions and debate cannot be the same educational experience as one can get at less prominent schools, where simply finding one more person interested in understanding a social problem can be impossible.

So one must now ask the question, where else will a curious, intelligent college going Christian girl actually get the chance to interact with Muslim girls in veils, think about what it actually means to wear one, wear one and then communicate to others on campus (including engineers on the cutting edge of solar energy) what her experience was like. Who will become a better social scientist or journalist, a person who is educated in such an environment or one that goes to some neglected ‘humanities’ department in an Indian university ?

One can see how this reflects on the general Indian society itself. The nation which can launch rockets to the moon still cannot figure out how malnutrition is to be tackled.

1: I dont mean to say that applications of engineering wont vary with location but that the teaching of how to apply the laws of math and physics will not vary much from place to place.

During the Gujarat riots of 2002, the rioters did not just attack the lives and properties of Gujarati Muslims. But they also deliberately attacked and defiled the sites of their heritage and contribution to Gujarati and Indian culture. One example was the destruction of the shrine of the 16th century Muslim poet Wali Gujarati, which has not yet been rebuilt. Intolerant emperors like Aurangzeb destroyed temples and beheaded Sikh gurus to advance their political goals. Although often done in the name of religion, these actions are not meant to protect or preserve any religion or culture, but to appropriate the markers of culture for their own gains and also to destroy India’s secular space, carefully constructed over hundreds of years of co-mingling.

India’s multicultural society faces enormous strains and contradictions as it urbanizes and modernizes. The old bonds of shared tradtions, sufi shrines, composite culture and rural economic interdependance often evaporate in the hustle and bustle of urban India’s unforgiving capitalism and consumerism. But this also presents an opportunity, an opportunity to reshape and remould India’s secular space into a more socially progressive co-existence. India’s entertainment industries, are an important aspect of this evolving space. I am not claiming that the movie and television industries have or are playing a singularly positive role in the reconstruction of this space. But some pivotal persons have played an enormous role in the development of a new syncretic Indian identity, in recent times none more than AR Rahman.

Rahman’s music not only infused a new Tamil and Sufi input into a stale and stolid palette of Bollywood music in the 90s, but he has taken every opportunity to reclaim India’s secular space. An example is Bankim Chattopadhyay’s patriotic hymn Vande Mataram, that had been appropriated by many a chauvinist group for their political purposes. Vande Mataram, a tribute to India’s rivers and lands, became a polarizing force. One might argue that by reworking Vande Mataram, Rehman’s work gives credance to the claims of the right, however Rehman’s reworking is just one of many that have come since the song was introduced. If his song has become so popular, that is mainly because of Rehman’s own musical talents and his understanding of India’s young and old cultures.

Rahman took on all sides of the debate by calling his tribute to India, Vande Mataram and infusing the song with markers of his own identity as a Tamil and an Indian Muslim. Vande Mataram searched on youtube, now leads one to a song sung, composed and dreamed by an Indian Muslim, an evocative call to the Motherland by a faraway son or daughter. With much new and innovative music and lyrics, the song retains the essential quality of Chattopadhyay’s version, a Vande to a mother’s riches alongwith a Salaam to her wonders.

Rahman, in fact, goes much further. By visually inserting the marginal India of Ladakh, western Rajasthan and Kerala onto the screen, he claims India’s public space for these marginalized groups. One might argue that those visuals are merely reflect the consumption of a marginal, exotic India by the ‘mainstream’. However I feel that the style of their representation (in particular their control of the Indian flag) and the complete absence of any urban Indian in the visuals says quite the opposite. It is easy to dismiss songs like Vande Mataram as nationalist fanfare. There are indeed many Bollywood songs that are just that. But Rehman’s Vande Mataram emphasizes that unity is as much about respecting and appreciating difference as it is about using those differences to create an ever evolving space of co-existence.

Just the fact that 47 people died so that the general elections could be held speaks volumes about the state of democracy in parts of India.

Only 44.47 % of the electorate voted in Bihar as compared to 58.02 % in 2004.

Only 46.45 % of the electorate voted in UP as compared to 48.16 % in 2004.

Is the heartland losing its faith in democracy ?

If the day of elections is also a day of curfew in Srinagar, what does it tell you about democracy there ?

Instead of celebrating a vote for stability, should’nt we think about why every opinion poll/ every analyst on our English media was so wrong ? What does that tell you about how out of touch our chattering classes are from the masses ?

Nita’s post on the question of the Kashmir valley started a furious debate on the legitimacy and practicality of the Indian nation. A variety of positions were taken, indeed the comments that the post generated have been a learning experience in themselves. However missing were the voices of the marginalized themselves. I have rarely seen Kashmiris engage with (other ?) Indians on India’s blogosphere. Apart from the Mizo community, there has not been much interaction with people from the North East either. I felt that this would be the right time to talk about a paper I had read a while back. The paper examines the Mani Ratnam movie Dil Se, in the context of the relationship between the dominant and marginalized groups of India.

It is interesting to note, first off, that Dil Se was not a commercial success, which was perhaps a bit surprising given the high profile director, actors and music composer. Why did the movie fail commercially ? Perhaps the movie raised uncomfortable questions. In her paper, ‘Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining: Minority Subjectivities in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se‘, University of Leeds professor Ananya Kabir points out,

Dil Se exposes the libidinal economy of the federal democratic framework, urging groups currently alienated within that framework to work towards a successful politics of bargaining in order to claim their rightful place within the nation, and initiates processes of mourning for cultural losses sustained through homogenizing majoritarian discourses

The three characters of the movie, Amar Verma (SRK) the ‘typical’ North Indian Hindu male, Meghna (Manisha Koirala) the mysterious ‘terrorist’ whose humanity is snatched away from her by the state and Preeti (Preity Zinta) who represents a previously marginalized but now assertive people from the margins.

Who are the marginalized ? In India this is a very complex question. In a vast and ancient land, masked as a new republic dominant groups can become marginalized when locations change. Marginalized groups can become dominant due to the actions of the state. Kabir defines the minority subject of Dil Se (Koirala) as being in,

a state of self-awareness when the subject finds her private allegiances at odds with the discourses of public culture. This moment is also one of solidarity, as she/he finds her/himself part of a group that does not share ‘the symbols of authority, the values that are propagated from the centre, and the culture that emanates from the centre’.

I think Kabir misses out on the point that one may also not share the values that propogate from the centre if the centre itself does not adhere to those values.

The protagonist Meghna rebuffs the advances of the ‘hero’ Amar, who sees her as beautiful, exotic and simultaneously dangerous. He pursues her, ostensibly trying to ‘rescue her’ (but really to satisfy his desires), not understanding her powerful motivations and lost innocence. His rather mindless pursuit brings both him and her to their ends with his love being requited only in his death with Meghna. He learns nothing from his conversation with a militant leader early in the movie,

Militant leader: ‘Fifty years ago promises were made to us but they havent been kept. Instaed we have been oppressed …’
Amar: ‘But India is your country, isnt it ?’
Militant Leader: ‘No. It only seems like that to you. Delhi is India. Do you know why ? Because small states like us, languishing in a corner, have no meaning for you;’

Wounds inflicted by a group cannot be simply forgotten for an individual’s naive curiosity.

For ‘mainstream’ India, the national space is

homogenised through the erasure of crucial differences such as the linguistic, on the one hand, even while fetishising, on the other, less crucial points of divergence, such as the physiognomic.

So. in addition to the attitude and actions of the centre, the movie, through the character of Amar Verma also exposes the crude and self-centred nationalism of the North Indian elite. A prominent example: the urban middle class of North India often displays an attitude to the Kashmir issue centred totally on territorial claims and consumerist fantasy rather than the aspirations of Kashmiris themselves.

But perhaps the most important and practical message is given by the character of Preeti. Her identity as a woman and a Malayali is forcefully asserted by her throughout the movie,

She uses her mother tongue, Malayalam, to assert her status as bride-to-be among the younger generation of Amar’s extended family, and she teaches Amar phrases from Malayalam, thereby encouraging him to speak her tongue.

Her power as an ascendant member of a minority is fully crystallised in the song Jiya Jale, where she transports herself and her husband to be from the pre-wedding henna ceremony of North Indians to her state in Kerala where,

she transforms herself from virginal and demure North Indian bride, with covered head and hennaed palms, to erotically empowered ‘Kerala woman’, dressed in the tight half-sari and blouse typical of Kerala fisherwomen.

If Preeti represents a previously marginalized group that has bargained effectively with the centre, then Meghna and Amar’s tragic reality at the end represents that if the marginalized groups are,

not allowed self-expression on their own terms, other groups who have ostensibly succeeded in their negotiations with the centre, and indeed the centre itself, will suffer.

Amit tagged me with the book tag,

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Franz Kafka and Stephen Crane, I dont own the books, most were checked out from the library

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
Dont have more than one copy of any book

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Didnt notice

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Not Applicable

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene and The Trial by Kafka

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
I did not read much back then but most likely Champak

7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
I am pretty selective about things I devote more than 10 minutes too and books usually take days to finish

8 ) What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
Smoke and Mirrors by Pallavi Aiyar, also A Journey Interrupted by Farzana Versey and Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid. Getting to know the neighbours

9) If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?
I dont like to force things on people, but I would highly recommend Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
No clue …

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Actually that wish has already been fulfilled, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? by Philip Dick was made into Blade Runner. I actually feel that A Journey Interrupted could be made into an interesting movie if spiced up a little bit

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
I dont like negative thinking And hey, movies create jobs

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
Dont think I have had any

14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?
Refer to question 7

15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
Havent found any difficult so far

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?
Not applicable

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
Why ?

18) Roth or Updike?
Not applicable

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
?

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
What ?

21) Austen or Eliot?
Not a poetry fan

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
Hindi and Marathi literature

23) What is your favorite novel?
Not a novel person (as you can tell from my blog )

24) Play?
I really liked Urdu dramas by Umer Shariff when I was young

25) Poem?
Lyrics of Hum Na Samjhe The from the movie Gardish

26) Essay?
Oh common …

27) Short story?
Stories from the Panchtantra

28) Work of nonfiction?
Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid

29) Who is your favorite writer?
No single favourite …

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
No idea …

31) What is your desert island book?
Idiots Guide to Escaping from a Desert Island

32) And… what are you reading right now?
Forgive Me Amma: The Life and Times of Dhanraj Pillay

Thanks for the tag Amit .

I tag odzer.

India’s national motto is ‘Satyameva Jayate’ (सत्यमेव जयते) but Indians refuse to hear or see the truth.

There are two reasons for me writing the post. First, the importance of the question in its own right. I have frequently alluded to and reviewed papers about a Dalit Revolution in North India. The paper I will talk about contests this notion, and does it quite convincingly. The other reason is to contrast the legitimate criticism that the paper makes by unearthing ground realities, with the half-baked and prejudiced criticism of Mayawati one finds in India’s ‘mainstream media’.

Who will cry about our sadness ? Who will listen to us ? …. How can we complain to local state officials ? The people whom we would complain are the same people about whom we would be complaining! So in this situation, we can do nothing. The Jats, in their big houses, are drinking our blood.

In this blog, I have frequently raised the issue of the idenities and aspirations of India’s Dalits and the political processes they are engaging in to fight upper-caste domination. Many scholars have contended that a ‘Dalit Revolution’ has taken place in Uttar Pradesh, with its culmination being Mayawati’s election as CM in 2007. However three researchers from the Universities of Washington and Edinburgh, have presented quite different conclusions in their paper ‘Dalit Revolution ? New Politicians in Uttar Pradesh, India‘. In their paper they speak of the emergence of new low caste politicians in rural UP and the subsequent changes in local politics and social gains, but they conclude that the new politicians have been either unable or unwilling to bring about the deep structural changes needed to equalize society in rural UP,

In the villages and small towns of UP, educated Dalit young men have come to challenge the power of dominant sections of society, raising political awareness among marginalized populations and communicating new political and cultural ideas to their communities ….. But there is as yet little evidence that Dalit political activists have effected a substantial change in the distribution of economic, social and political opportunities in rural UP.

Ground Realities
The researcher did their field-work in Nangal, a village located in UP’s ‘prosperous’ Bijnor district. Its population of about 5300, was 48 % Dalit, 26 % Jat and 12 % Muslim. The Jats however owned 83 % of the agricultural land, in addition they owned several shops, schools and sugarcane processing plants. On the other hand the Dalits were mainly employed as local manual wage laborers, and in most cases had to depend on Jats for employment. In terms of material goods, Dalits had few goods, with only 10% possesing TVs as compared to 70 % of Jats.

In consonance with Dr. Anjum Altaf’s excellent essay on why South Asia fares poorly on literacy levels, the author’s note the following about education in Nangal,

Jats dominated the management committee of the Nangal Junior High School, the larger and better funded of the village’s two secondary schools. The Ambedkar Junior High School catered mainly to Dalits, Muslims and MBCs … facilities and standards of teaching at the government primary schools and Ambedkar School were particularly poor … Jats typically sent their sons to private primary schools in Nangal, which maintain a better standard of education than the schools used by Chamars and Muslims.

This raises several important points, one simply renaming government schools in the name of Babasaheb, will not change ground realities of poor state education in UP. But note how the English media constantly talks about the supposed futility of Ambedkar memorials in Lucknow, without ever highlighting the neglect of Ambedkar schools that have a more direct impact on the lives of Dalits. A parallel can be drawn here with the Indian media’s incessant fear-mongering about reservations in elite schools without highlighting the neglect of primary education in general.

New Politicians

The authors describe one ’successful’ young Dalit politician Brijpal who embodied,

a distinguished Dalit masculinity that owes much yo the example of Ambedkar

There was a class of such Chamar netas, as the authors call them. But their actions were not adequate and even contradictory to the stated aims of the Dalit struggle. Far from challenging the existing systems of patronage and corruption in the village they,

acted as political fixers in the efforts of friends and relatives to accomplish tasks through state officials. … Chamar social initiatives falied in part because netas sometimes prioritized their own interests over those of their caste. In spite of trying to help many Chamar families, Jogender (a neta) defined himself as a profit-seeking broker (dalal) … the beneficiaries of his efforts to acquire more development resources for Chamars were concentrated among members of his extended kinship group and friendship network.

The Chamar netas have thus had limited impact on their broader communities. Many netas seem to have put personal gain first, undermining the BSP’s claims of Bahujan Samaj. Not only this, the Jat politicians have successfully countered their strategies by propaganda that makes the Revolution appear more successful than it is, galvanizing the Jat vote. The netas often emphasized Chamar progress through comparisons to the Muslims, who were often portrayed as not being interested in progress.

Consequences

The authors present an ominous conclusion,

What emerged quite powerfully from our study was not just the frequency with which higher-caste dominance reasserted itself in the practices of the police, politicians, and other state representatives but also the strength of Chamar’s feeling of their poverty and social isolation. The prevailing political mood among Chamars was one of despondency, cynicism, and thinly veiled anger.

Simply claiming Dalit self-respect is a legitimate but incomplete goal. In fact for most of the Dalits in Nangal the notion of respect and improving access to resources are deeply linked. Without the right access, anger is brewing in a cynical and increasingly desperate peasantry. This anger could explode anytime and India could be in for a few very bloody decades.

Nita and Vinod raised the question, are the poor in America worse off than India’s poor ? One can realistically only talk about the urban poor, simply because rural India is very different from America in many important ways that make comparisons difficult. For example, income in rural India depends heavily on timely and adequate monsoon rains, no such factors affect the poor in America in general.

So let us restrict ourselves to the urban poor in India. The very mention of urban poverty brings to mind slums, open sewers and general neglect. Indeed, India’s poor increasingly face both a neglectful and a repressive state, alongwith a middle class that both exploits them economically while tacitly approving the state’s violence. Nowwhere is this more evident than in the very heart of Indian democracy, the capital of the largest ‘free’ nation on earth, where the poor are being kicked out of both homes and livelihoods to make way for the ‘world class’ capital that India’s middle class so desperately craves.

Do the poor in America face such repression ? I am no expert on this matter, but I feel that a lot of the violence that America’s middle class inflicts on the poor and marginalized, is more psychological than physical. The city I live in, Austin, seemingly one of the most progressive and ‘multi-cultural’ in America is still divided along class/racial lines. East Austin, being populated by the underclass where most on the other side will not venture after dark.  Certainly it is ‘better’ than the violence and absolute poverty of urban India, but the worrying thing is that this is how things have been for decades now. When people judge their lives, their benchmarks are often the lives of their parents and their general surroundings, and in this respect the poor in America must consider themselves extremely unlucky.

America seems to have reached an unequal equilibrium.

India on the other hand is undergoing a hasty transformation towards an even more unequal equilibrium than the semi-equlibrium it was in. Economic inequalities are accentuated by a return of the psychological violence that India’s elite have engaged in for centuries. Even the acquisition of material goods by the urban poor means little when their general quality of life is constantly being degraded by increasing pollution, overcrowding and crime, when their lives are themselves threatened by an authoritarian state and ethnic/religious extremism.

Indeed if India’s poor can manage to laugh and smile in middle of all their bad luck, then they are luckier than their counterparts in America; who for some reason are supposed to be lucky that they are poor in America, not somewhere else.

I saw an NDTV video that showed an elderly lady touching Jyotirao Scindia’s feet while he was campaigning in his constituency. I saw that video and thought, shouldnt it be the other way around ? Shouldnt a young, aspiring politician who believes in Indian values touch the feet of an elderly lady. But Indian values aside, in a representative democracy shouldnt the representative feel grateful for the support and adoration of his constituents rather than the constituents feel grateful for him/her being their ‘member’ in parliament ?

The Indian Parliament in New Delhi

In America, both the members of the legislative assemblies and the media refer to themselves as ‘representatives’ not ‘MPs’. Even I, a non-American have been getting emails from ‘my’ new representative in Congress ! I dont want to make any generalist comments, but I feel this reflects a fundamental differnce in how Indian ‘MPs’ and American ‘reps’ perceive themselves. I suspect more often than not Indian legislators think of themselves as members of some exclusive club who can dole out patronage to their constituents as they wish. Whereas American legislators think of themselves as the people’s representatives, who are accountable to their constituents and have to represent their interests in Parliament.

American Congress

The Indian masses have done their bit to reverse this attitude, the infamous anti-incumbency phenomena in Indian states is evidence enough. Unfortunately they do not have the time and resources to actually hold their reps accountable. However, India’s middle class can, today more then ever. First by voting and actually doing their part in choosing their member of parliament. Then using their organizational skills, their access to media, the courts, legislation like the RTI to make sure this member actually is a representative.

Jai Ho !

The Indian Parliament image is from the Tamil Wikipedia and the US Congress image is from knowledgerush.com.