Books
VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRACY IN INDIA edited by Amrita Basu and Srirupa Roy. Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2007.
IT goes without saying that the Gujarat violence in 2002 was one of the most gruesome instances of communal violence in the history of India. The wounds inflicted on the Muslim community in Gujarat during 2002 might never heal and the questions, which are constantly asked and sought to be answered are, why Gujarat – the land of the Mahatma and an economically thriving state, and why this intense hatred-laced brutality against a helpless people who are no less Gujarati than others living there. The edited book under review makes the 2002 violence in Gujarat its reference point in trying to grapple with these questions. Additionally, it attempts to engage with a larger normative question – is violence exceptional to a democratic polity or otherwise, as it tries to establish a linkage between the occurrence of violence and democracy in India.
The main consideration of the book, thus, is to show ‘how the roots of exceptional violence can lie in politics-as-usual’ (4). Moving with such a concern the editors note that social science scholarship has generally looked upon violence as exceptional to democracies and that democracies are less violence-prone than non-democracies. Sometimes, according to the editors, these ‘theories of democratic peace’ (3) are mere statements of observations than explanations. At others, the explanations advanced look at violence as part of unstable and weakly institutionalised democracies rather than all democracies. A third set of explanations identifies a range of factors that lead to violence. These causally influential factors can be as varied as the type of electoral system, the size of population, the nature of socio-economic cleavages, and so on. Expressing their inability to agree with this analysis, the editors on the other hand argue that violence is not exceptional to democracies and that the relationship between violence and democracy is ‘enabling rather than inherently oppositional’(5).
Some of the authors in the book focus on the 2002 violence as a specific instance to explore why the violence acquired the gruesome and inhuman proportions the way it did in Gujarat. Some others look at violence or communal violence in India or South Asia as a general theme to examine how it is affecting the body politic. Willem Van Schendel looks at contemporary violence in South Asia and argues that decolonization here was not merely a ‘series of clinical operations’ (37) that produced the four states of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma. Rather, it is their ill-defined territorial borders and an incomplete physical separation that accounts for much of the violence and tension in the region. Ravina Aggarwal focuses on an instance of violence in Ladakh to argue that ‘refusing to locate violence within Ladakhi history and society diverts attention away from the difficult and painful process of analysis, reconciliation and unification that had begun to materialize just before rangdum (violence)’ (169).
Raka Ray in her article, ‘A Slap From the Hindu Nation’, points towards the symbolic usage of the word ‘slap’ in the recent Indian discussions of Muslims in India, who are seen to be at the receiving end of the ‘slapping’. She argues that the phrase ‘a slap on the face’ has acquired a particularly urgent resonance in Hindutva India (94). In the Hindutva worldview, according to her, ‘If the hypermasculine Muslim has in the past been thought to have slapped, raped and penetrated the body of Hindu India, the same must now be done to him’ (95).
Martha Nussbaum builds her argument on the terrain of psycho-analysis to look at the violence against Muslim women in Gujarat in 2002 – an explanation which has resonance across spatial and time divisions, especially when it comes to brutal sexual violence against women in riots and conflict situations. She shows how objectification of women works in tandem with the idea of instrumentality that deny women an agency and a status as ends in themselves. In Gujarat, she points out that this kind of objectification worked with a sense of ‘disgust’, an emotion ‘that plays a key role not only in misogyny but in many types of racial hatred’ (108).
These and other essays in the book discuss specific instances or locales of violence and its effects. However, its structure and selection of articles seems somewhat puzzling. The initial impression one gets from the introduction is that the book is primarily about the Gujarat violence of 2002, probably because it has a lengthy discussion of this violence and the role of the Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi. However, one is later informed that the collection is not only about Gujarat but other instances of violence as well.
The non-Gujarat essays explore varied themes like the role of the media, minority politics in Bangladesh, discourse on communalism and the Indian state’s attempts to deal with communal violence. They try to arrive at causal explanations about the occurrence of violence, or state’s response to the violence, but do little by way of linking the findings to the larger question the book begins with. As a consequence, the book remains anecdotal in its analysis and specific in its explanations rather than provide an overarching understanding of why violence is endemic in democracies. The first and the last essays take up the issues of violence in South Asia (van Schendel) and minority politics in Bangladesh (Siddiqi) respectively, both of which sit a bit uneasily in this collection considering the fact that the book begins with a specific title and certain definitive formulations of examining the issue of violence within India.
One question which remains unexplored and could have added substance to the main normative idea being examined is: does the eruption and handling of violence in a democracy differ from that in an authoritarian regime? This question acquires an urgency for a better understanding of the working of a democratic polity and the occurrence of violence therein. Violence may not be exceptional to a democracy, as the editors argue, but we must not forget that it is only in a democratic set-up that there are open and operative mechanisms that can subject the perpetrators of violence to public scrutiny and punitive action. Several forces and pressures, both institutionalised and informal, are at work for the control and prevention of such violence and the settlement of contentious issues through negotiation practices. Despite several hurdles in the way of justice, one cannot ignore that only in a democracy are there certain accountability processes which everyone, sooner or later, has to conform to and that includes the governing power itself. In addition, the working of a system of checks and balances between the varied institutions and organs of the state ensures that violence is prevented or contained and the guilty are brought to book. The governmental machinery is ultimately answerable for its actions to the larger political processes at work in a democratic polity.
All this is absent in authoritarian states. The non-existence of accountability in these regimes makes the ruling power ‘total’ and the outbreak of violence and the state’s response to it usually has dimensions which are completely different from what happens in a democratically governed state. Here, the state’s complicity in violence or the state’s management of violence has to be seen in the light of the legitimacy potential or the controlling grip which this violence provides the ruling power, geared eventually towards the goal of silencing dissent. A consideration of these issues could have substantially supplemented the varied themes discussed in the book and helped broaden its ambit of analysis.
Manjari Katju
IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE: Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen. Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin Books), London, 2006.
THOUGH Amartya Sen’s book focuses on the ‘ideas of identity and their relation to violence’, the central message of the book is more about an urgent need to supplant the reductionist view of the world with an expansive approach to reason, echoing the philosopher Sir William Drummond’s eagle-eyed affirmation: He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not a slave. Subtitled ‘Illusion of Destiny’, the book is an attempt to introduce conceptual clarity to issues of self and social identity. An exposition on the fallacy of compartmentalized identity (s/he belongs to only this religion or caste), it endorses the value of choice in selecting one’s identity (s/he may want to be a good teacher notwithstanding any religious membership). Sen builds a case to popularise the essentially good character of plural identity, arguing that we as individuals have multiple identities, and that it is more a problem of conceptual ignorance rather than malicious intention that makes us adore the flamboyance of a singular identity like Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Sikh. In particular, he points to the overwhelming insufficiency of a single identity in the guise of religion. S/he can still be a lawyer, singer, liberal and a social worker, despite belonging to any religious group. These extra-religious activities too are a marker of one’s identity.
According to Sen, people often become easy victims of ‘singular and belligerent identity’ propagandists whose espousal of exclusive identity provokes violence by encouraging antagonism against those classified as the ‘other’. Derivative, arbitrary categorization of people (into one group) is nothing but a capricious concept negating the robust plurality of identities. Terming the act of reducing people to a single dimension as ‘civilizational confinement’, Sen interdicts anyone from imposing a single identity for two important reasons: it neglects the naturally prevalent heterogeneity of identities, and engenders a confrontational self-perception. Expectedly, Sen is vehemently opposed to Samuel Huntington’s naive manner of ‘classifying people into lumpy civilizational units with religious correlates.’
Of particular interest is the discussion on Asian values as against the western system of economics and ethics. Supplementing the discussion on Asian values is the exposition of the roles of tradition and culture in the formation and development of the Oriental identity. Soon we find the economist in him, sitting most comfortably in chapter 7 (pp. 120-148) which is dedicated to how various groups of people (pro and anti-globalizers) perceive the effects of globalization, the prime mover of volatile identities in the modern world. Sen debunks the idea that globalization is a western-machinated scheme of economic activity, instead introducing the need for scepticism on the part of people on the efficacy of globalization.
How could, all of a sudden, being a Muslim or a Hindu, make one a target for communal rioters, laments a concerned Sen. Given the coexistence of multicultural groups in a geographical area, the impulsive and all-too unexpected hatred against one another can be the handiwork of none other than ‘proficient artisans of terror’. It is here, once again, that Sen’s ‘development as freedom’ thesis surfaces. Sen advocates that proper reasoning and thorough scrutiny in choosing to be as one wants to be (self and social identity) can free the world of ‘turmoil and barbarity’. After all, there is ‘room for us to decide our priorities’, hinting implicitly at the importance of the economic and social system that one is embedded in. The role of choice of identity can be belittled only at the risk of stirring up turbulence. There is little sense in violating the multifaceted identity of an individual and creating the euphoria of rightful violence. Ella Wilcox Wheeler’s verse is most sympathetic to Sen’s inner urge: So many gods, so many creeds/So many paths that wind and wind/While just the art of being kind/Is all the sad world needs.
G. Narasimha Raghavan
GANDHI’S TIGER AND SITA’S SMILE: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture by Ruth Vanita. Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2005.
CHOCOLATE, AND OTHER WRITINGS ON MALE-MALE DESIRE by Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’. (Translated from Hindi and with an Introduction by Ruth Vanita.) Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2006.
THE human body is the defining unit of the modern era. Modernity is influenced by the design and norms of the human body. The normative hold of the human body is visible in the ‘entry-exit’ model of the cinema halls, public buses and trucks that look like brides. Nevertheless, despite the human body serving as the most pervasive normative structure for modern times, that influence is rarely talked about. The inner space of the body too is left alone for the simple reason that whatever is inside cannot be outside without destroying the modern as well as traditional concepts of purity. Literature, myths, social order, conception of the universe, politics, the idea of the state, cars, aircraft, houses, architecture and so on, are all shaped by their ultimate service to the body.
The first reference to the normative power of the human body appears in the Purusha Sukta in the Rig Veda where the metaphor of body is used to conceive the social universe. The Purusha is a poetic imagination and works as a useful supra-human form to imagine the world. In later periods this poem would be used to set up the social order currently under attack from the contemporary anti-Manuvadis. But the sukta itself does not appear to have any value other than the poetic though the hold of the human body in the conception of the ‘beyond’ is significant. In ancient Greek, Indian and Roman-Byzantine traditions, the divines were given bodies that were copies of the human form. Their divinity was not limited by human qualities. Some of the divines like Kama in India and Ba’al in Phoenicia/Lebanon had licentious personalities, their divinity humanized by proximity to human frailty.
The great Purusha was imagined in no other form but human. If Purusha Sukta is the beginning of the power of the body in textual history, it is no less present in the state system and contemporary political economy. That the human body is not the sole model of creation is a valid argument; there are other bodies too that share the same dynamic and mechanical qualities of the human body. But these other bodies are modelled upon the human body, as if the human body is the master copy and the others are part of the grand design to create and sustain a universe built upon the master copy.
Ruth Vanita in her work Gandhi’s Tiger, Sita’s Smile foregrounds the secret ties between the body and the text, her erudite re-reading of South Asian texts across literary traditions highlighting the relation between the body and literature and social norms. In so doing she has liberated the body while exposing its ties with the textual roots of South Asian civilization. Her work establishes the overarching role the body has in human society and how it was policed through texts. Ruth Vanita explores how the body is administered to the readers through literature. She begins with breaking down traditional representation of nayikas like Draupadi and Sita. Next is a brilliant essay where she points out how the Indian male literary elite in the 19th century borrowed from the masculine models of western literature. She then travels to Rekhti poetry of the 19th century as also deals with gender in Bollywood films like Tamanna and Dosti. Far from remaining confined to the strictly male or female body, Vanita also looks at the bodies that are caught in between. Clearly it is the human body rather than the gendered body that is at the centre of her work.
Whether it be literary representation, cinema or homoeroticism in Indian advertisements, Vanita is in total control of her radical agenda as she unearths how the body was tied up by various cultural devices and how it has slowly come out of those bondages. Vanita, known widely for her earlier alternate text edited with Saleem Kidwai on same sex stories from India, shows how the arts like cinema and literature sometimes create anti-freedom normative chains for the human body. She deploys her best skills in the deconstruction of a film like Mard and texts like Kamasutra to show how beyond the stereotypes of ‘the angry young man’ and ‘free sex’ lie deep-rooted policing impulses.
Her reading reminds us of the puritanical ways in which the Kamasutra was treated in the early decades of the 20th century. The examples that she chooses from films and literature and other areas of textual history and heritage of South Asia are crucial elements of the anger and pride discourse marking late 20th century India – the angry young man, Emergency, the ethnic-religious outbursts in Assam, Mumbai and Gujarat have all been built on the body of the outsider, sexual discourse of the exotic and increased communication of social conservatism to the masses. The more one sees contemporary discourse, the more illumined becomes the body-matter ties. Vanita’s book linking the present to the past discourses provides fresh insight into affairs of world history. Note how immediately after the anthrax scare in the United States, George Bush called for the most expensive bio-weapons defence structure the world had ever seen. Evidently, the scare of germs was treated as a threat to the body of the United States. In short, the hold of the human body is never too far from polity and society in the contemporary world.
A good part of her writing deals with the work of Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’s’ story Chocolate, an early 20th century work which created controversy for its homoerotic content. The writer, though a nationalist, nevertheless refrained from passing judgment over the ‘unnatural’ acts committed by the ‘Chocolate’ lovers. Though ‘Ugra’ has been treated in a single essay here, Vanita has also translated and edited the story along with other stories by the same author, thereby unearthing early 20th century notions of genderless love.
In Chocolate, and Other Writings on Male-Male Desire by Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’, Vanita translates, apart from the title story, other nationalist-colonial literary gems like ‘We are in Love With Lucknow’, ‘Kept Boy’ and ‘Waist Curved Like a She-Cobra’. However, author ‘Ugra’ and translator Vanita have different readings of the issue of sexuality. ‘Ugra’s’ stories, almost in a Gandhian way, caution his readers about the perils of same-sex affection, whereas it is precisely this cautionary conclusion that constitutes a problem for Vanita. In this Vanita shares common ground with Ashis Nandy who foregrounds the colonial underpinning of Indian nationalism. Through a discussion of ‘Ugra’s sin-avoidance warnings, Vanita points out how modern Indian fiction often reversed pre-modern gender representations prevalent in India.
Vanita’s consistent effort at equitable gender representation is often classified as gay and lesbian, but it’s better not to do so. Her work is linked with projects like Enlightenment in Europe and colonial experience in South Asia and beyond. Her efforts reflect a deeper understanding of culture and the politics of power that governs the human body. In this twin sabotage she settles her score with the power of the body over the text.
Kallol Bhattacherjee
