This Friday (February 3rd) come to my book launch and art opening in Philadelphia at Twelve Gates Gallery. The paintings in question will be mostly South Asia related, with the centerpiece being my series of watercolors of Jackie Kennedy’s visit to the Subcontinent. Dedicated CM readers will recognize this series instantly from my old but gold post I am a Horse. These paintings have never before been shown outside of the internet! And to top it all off, the opening will also mark the launch of my new book, The Little Book of Terror, published by Foxhead Books. The opening starts at 6:30 PM, and the paintings will remain up until February 25th. Farangi and I will both be present. Come one come all!

[This is a guest post from Rohit Chopra -eds]

16 excursuses in despair

0.
Sepoy and Lapata have very kindly given me the opportunity to share some thoughts about the Rushdie affair (the new one, at the Jaipur literature festival this year, which, of course, is connected to the old Rushdie affair, 23 years to the day on February 14) on Chapati Mystery, following an effort to express them as tweets yesterday. Here goes my attempt to unpack the events related to the controversy and the subsequent flood of commentary that followed. I will assume the events and many views shared in mainstream media the world over do not need repeating, since the pipes of the Internets and Twitters have been choked with nothing else for the last so many days. The particular reflections below—which, foregoing the artifice of transitions find form as aphorism—do not invalidate each other; that, hopefully, should be clear. For any philosophical contradictions, I remain responsible but might hide behind Wittgenstein.

I.
I thought Rushdie was intimidated and terrorized by the Rajasthan police and Indian state (yes, we can and should use that word, wresting it back from the WOTists or War-on-Terror-ists). A false death threat qualifies surely.

II.
I do not feel the need to prove my credentials here as a defender of free speech.
Nor prove that I am a friend of Muslims. Nor prove that I am a believer. Or a rationalist. Or secular. Or Indian. Or an atheist. The merits of my argument do not, and should not, rest on any of these.

III.
I did not attend the festival, but got a ringside view of the drama on the Internet. I grew sick of it at some point of time, but could not stop reading or reacting on Twitter. This was not just gratuitous rubbernecking if I may say so myself. What bothered me was the way in which the debate had been hijacked—not just by Rushdie’s detractors and critics but, equally, by his supporters—effectively prohibiting the expression of any nuanced political view beyond Rushdie-or-Deobandi. I could not help think. “You are either with us or you are with the enemy”. Where had I heard that before?

IV.
If Maulana Nomani of Deoband and his supporters were and are guilty of a revolting piety, then Rushdie’s supporters were and are surely guilty of sanctimony. For instance, in their unfair demand—not unlike a theological diktat—that all right-minded Muslims, Indians, Indian Muslims, lovers of literature, and lovers of free speech everywhere are obligated take up cudgels on behalf of Rushdie. And in their exaggerated claim that such an act will reverse decades of intolerance and make whole India’s compromised modernity and failed enlightenment.

V.
Because such a claim assumes that India is locked, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase, in the “waiting room of history,” til Sir Salman of South Bombay and his band of merry men and women usher it in to the clear future of liberal utopia, away from the darkness in which medieval Muslim hordes and Hindu obscurantists keep us. Because it plots a graph of Indian intolerance—Rushdie, Laine, Nasreen, Mistri, Ramanujan—that does not recognize the many ways in which Indians struggle everyday for their rights, including the right of freedom of expression and the right of freedom of religion. And just because the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal do not acknowledge these struggles, that does not mean they do not exist.

VI.
Because those who paint the Rushdie-Deoband spat as a battle between Gandalf and Sauron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauron should consider if they judge Rushdie’s friends and supporters by the same yardstick. Rushdie’s pals, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Hitchens—the “liberal supremacists” as Terry Eagelton calls the breed— have made the vilest remarks about Muslims, and yet they are touted as great defenders of liberal values. In contrast, anyone who disagrees—even civilly—with the stance of Rushdie and his acolytes is cast as a narrow-minded, unenlightened, bigot.

VII.
Eagleton reminds us: “Both Hitchens and Salman Rushdie have defended Amis’s slurs on Muslims”

and for good measure,

“The irony is clear. Some of our free literary spirits are defending liberal values in ways that threaten to undermine them. In this, they reflect the behaviour of western states. Liberals are supposed to value nuanced analysis and moral complexity, neither of which are apparent in the slanderous reduction of Islam to a barbarous blood cult.”

VIII.
I found it puzzling that David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, should state at the festival that the Rushdie affair was “a blot on Indian democracy.” This was not postcolonial sensitivity on my part. I wondered if Remnick, a supporter of the Iraq War, would state that the war on Iraq was a blot on American democracy.
On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Remnick wrote:

“Ten years after the attacks, we are still faced with questions about ourselves—questions about the balance of liberty and security, about the urge to make common cause with liberation movements abroad, and about the countervailing limits. Only absolutists answer these questions absolutely.” (italics mine)

I replaced the word ‘liberty’ with ‘freedom of expression’ in the sentence above. Many in India had made the same argument. As had many about the freedom of speech not being absolute in India or anywhere. I do not necessarily agree with them. But why do we see them as enemies of free speech and Remnick as a defender of liberal values?

I thought of another asymmetry. Would an Indian or Pakistani or Kenyan editor be able to declare, at the New Yorker’s festival, that any of the policies of the American state were a ‘disgrace to American democracy’? Would he or she be invited back again? Or get a visa?

IX.
Amit Chaudhuri has, in this article fleshed out the sorry implications of the fiasco for freedom of speech in India with devastating thoroughness, identifying with equal precision the sources of intolerance in Indian life. Thus: “In India, though, I get the feeling that the liberal middle class is only dimly aware of the importance of the arts, and how integral they are to the secular imagination, except in a time of media-inflated crisis, when it becomes a ‘free speech’ issue.”

This too is part of the problem.

I also liked this statement “The secular middle class – in which I include myself – needs to learn that free speech can’t be arrived at via a well-mannered compromise with its enemies,” because Chaudhuri speaks of the enemies of free speech here not of the enemies of the middle classes. For sometimes the Indian middle classes decide that their enemies—the poor, illiterate masses who demand some security and subsidies from the state—are also, conveniently, designated as the enemies of modernity, rights, free speech, and correct English.

X.
If it has been clear for some time now that there is such a thing as the ‘Rushdie Limit,’ there is also such a thing as ‘Rushdie Capital’

Rushdie Limit: the point at which people who claim to be defenders of free speech find out they aren’t. Thus, when the Satanic Verses controversy blew up some two decades ago, Jimmy Carter, Germaine Greer and John Berger hit their ‘Rushdie Limit’ pretty quickly. Or if I had to make another sentence, I might say, “after initially defending Rushdie, Hari Kunzru seemed to hit his Rushdie Limit when he wrote on his website ‘I apologise unreservedly to anyone who feels I have disrespected his or her faith.’”

Rushdie Capital: Benefit, tangible and intangible, such as cash, votes, visibility, scoops, or publicity to be gained by supporting or defending Rushdie. Thus Barkha Dutt reminding us on Twitter that she had got the prized Rushdie interview and was going ahead with it. And Kunzru, again, on Twitter, on January 24, about the traffic to his website after he posted his explanation for reading from The Satanic Verses “I think my website is about 500 unique users from falling over. #jlf”

XII.
Yes Barkha, we know you are also brave. And that you like the word ‘antediluvian’

And that it’s pretty fucking ironic that you claim to stand up for free speech when you are a one-woman chilling effect army threatening to sue anyone who you don’t like.

XIV.
None of this means that I am equating Rushdie with Maulana Nomani of Deoband. Sometimes these things need to be clarified threadbare.

XV.
Because brilliant and courageous as Salman Rushdie is, the histories of Islam, late twentieth-century India, Indian Muslims, and free speech exceed him.

XVI.
And it is amazing that not a single article on the controversy has actually bothered to discuss the The Satanic Verses. Which is a crying fucking shame because it is a spectacular book. Because it tells us that one person’s sacred verses are another person’s Satanic verses. And it paints a picture of religion as dreamfever quite different from the Marxist claim of religion as opium for the masses. And it shows a writer at the peak of his powers effortlessly claiming, commenting on, and transforming every tradition which sustains him: religious, literary, cultural, civilizational.

I try not to say much when I am a little overwhelmed. Agha Shahid Ali overwhelmed me a while ago – when I started to seriously read his collected works. Over the years, I have mentioned him many times here, or quoted his Faiz translations or highlighted writings on him. But when I began to go through his poems, I stopped. At first there was too much grief. The poems on his mother, on Kashmir, on murders in Kashmir. So, I put it aside, as my own griefs were too raw for other griefs to lay nearby.

Many months later, at home, in a different world, I began to read from him. This time, the grief surrendered to smiles and Kashmir dwindled to reveal America.

This essay, which I was reluctant to write, is a bit of revisionist take – on him as a poet of exile, and on the capacity to see past the somberness of his grief to his smiles. There is a lot more I want to say – on his translation of Faiz and Darwish, and his tonal poems and the usage of Shi’a imagery. Some other time.

Hope you like it (the online version has some italics issues and I will post pdf once I get it).

Postcard from Kashmir, The Sunday Guardian, Jan 15, 2011:

In a sense, Hafiz, Ghalib or Faiz (but really, if we are to talk of Ali, we ought to include Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Mahmoud Darwish) have their work enhanced by reams of commentary, of scholarship and of cultural weight. Shahid Ali remembers that he grew up in a household where those names, and their words, were oft recited and fondly remembered. Ali, who died on December 8, 2001, has not attracted that kind of attention yet. By which I mean, specifically, an attention to his contribution to the language of human emotions. Tonight the air is many envelopes/again. Tell her to open them at once/and find hurried notes about my longing/for wings. Tell her to speak, when that hour comes,/simply of the sky. Friend, speak of the sky/when that hour comes. Speak, simply, of the air. Thus concluded the thirteenth, and final, canto of “From Another Desert” — Shahid Ali’s telling of Laila and Majnoon guised in that Poundian structure. Yet what it contains — a rumination on love, on defiance, on the ways in which epic and belief coincide in religion and poetry — makes “From Another Desert” that rarest of creations, a masterpiece, one that Faiz would gladly claim for himself. Certainly that sour Muhammad Iqbal would.

Sepoy insists that I share this painting of Nehru by my grandfather. He also has asked me to share my thoughts and feelings. Here they are: When I painted Nehru, I didn’t realize, at least not consciously, that my grandfather had painted him. When I found out, it made me feel kinda funny.

Look at the background of the picture. That’s the best part! Dada Sahib had his own style, as we all know, but he also could paint in anyone else’s style. Further evidence in this painting, for which he painted the Pollock using the same methods as Pollock.

As a bonus, here is a photo of him pretending to paint the Nehru painting.

The biggest event on CM was the publishing of “Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination – “a curated, edited collection” of sepoy’s posts in book form, with foreword from Amitava Kumar, launched with much fanfare, and earning rave reviews (here, here).

Meanwhile, commentaries and reflections on happenings in Homistan continued to grace CM: Ramanujan’s transformative texts, Salmaan Taseer’s murder and an exploration of the “emergence of the Prophet as a centralising and orienting raison d’etre for Pakistan,” Pakistan’s fugue state and “the notion of treason and affiliation in the colonial and postcolonial setting,” the state of Pakistan’s ways of seeing, and the forgotten “memory of East Pakistan and the sins of West Pakistan.”

Sepoy continued his essays on the frontier in imperial imagination, experts and policy prescriptions that aid the myopia of empire.  Reflections on the 10 years since 9/11 by Sepoy, Farangi, and Lapata delighted CM readers, as did discussions of Imperialism and racism (I, II, III).

Lapata was busy holding art-shows and winning awards for her writing , but found time to hold a flash fiction contest with Kuzhali Manickavel as judge, which Amitava Kumar won. The Best Writer of 2010 brought us insightful review essays of Aag ka Dariya, Teju Cole’s Open City, Dictator literature, “Yashpal’s great Partition novel, Jhootha Sach,” and a reflection on the interior landscapes in early Indian novels (and an adda post!). Lapata also interviewed some “prominent Blaft personages” including the “illustrious flash fictionista Kuzhali Manickavel,” and reviewed a host of Tamil pulp fiction.

PS. Naim Sahib contributed a characteristically brilliant review of Deborah Baker’s “The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism.”

PPS. Jassasa’s Goat Spy won the internets (here, here, here, here).

PPPS. See Lapata on OBL, and dental care.

PPPPS. More pics! (here, here, here).

PPPPPS. See yours truly’s humble attempt at an essay.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. His fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in various international magazines including Granta, Vallum, Caravan, and Words Without Borders. He was one of Granta’s New Voices for 2011 and one of the eleven recipients of the 2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant. He teaches literature and fiction writing at LUMS, Lahore. He’s a CM fanboy.

Pakistan

• Pakistan’s General Problem: Mohammed Hanif / OPEN Magazine
  The sanest reading on Pakistan and the Generals who run the country. This would be hilarious if it wasn’t entirely true—but it’s still pretty hilarious. (By the way, I am still waiting for a designer to come up with t-shirts that read: murshid, marwa na dena. I’ll buy two, I promise.)

• At Sea: Manan Ahmed / Chapati Mystery
  The best post on the OBL saga. If you want perspective, if you want understanding, this is the place to go. 

• Forfeiting the Future: Manan Ahmed / Caravan
  And not surprisingly, the best piece on the ghastly murder of Salman Taseer was also by Manan Ahmed. Others may give you information. This gives you understanding. 

DFW
This was the year of DFW’s The Pale King. I read so many reviews but none was particularly memorable. However, two pieces are worth remembering. First, DFW’s nasty letter to his editor at Harper’s where he threatens his editors in footnotes. Second one is on the tangled youths of DFW, Franzen, and Eugenides and how that led them to create great books. One heck of a read.

• David Foster Wallace’s Threats to Harper’s Magazine
• Just Kids: Evan Hughes /NY Mag

Places, Loved Ones

• Seven Places in My Heart: Mohammed Hanif / Newsline
  Of the most charming essays I’ve read in 2011, this beautiful ode to Karachi by Mohammed Hanif is my winner. Over the course of the year, I have returned to it many times for its little stories, quirky characters, and hilarious situations. I tell you, there is a funny, affecting novel buried in this piece. I hope Hanif writes it one day. I hope he’s listening. 

• A.A Gill: Dubai on Empty / Vanity Fair
  The curmudgeon-travel writer I love visits a city I loathe. I reread Gill all the time for his mind bending sentences. Nobody writes like him. He can tell you about his writing desk and make it read like a thriller. Favorite reading.

• What if We Lose This Match?: Khurram Husain/ The Express Tribune
  We weren’t paying much attention to the newspapers on the day of Pakistan-India World Cup semi-final. But we did to this piece—because it captures subcontinent’s collective madness and raging euphoria for the game of cricket. Amazingly, incredibly, impossibly. It simply nails it.

• Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.: Johnathan Franzen / NY Times
  Nobody talks about love these days; not even poets. Thank God for Franzen.

Some of the Best Writing Is Writers Writing About Books
No, really.

• The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami: Sam Anderson / NY Times
  Since he’s moved to NY Times Book Review, Sam Anderson has been focusing on his Sentence of the Week column that, generally speaking, I find pretty uninspired and uninspiring. But the Sam we know and love makes a return here and shows some serious love for Murakami, Tokyo, weird things. In between he also talks about Murakami’s new novel, 1Q84.

• Daisy Rockwell: Night-Smudged Light / Caravan
  In this review of the first-ever translation of Yashpal’s monumental Hindi novel, Jhoota Such (This Is Not That Dawn), our friend, Ms Rockwell, takes a long view of Partition narratives in fiction, history and photography and point to the limitations of the existing conversation on Partition—and looks to expand it.

• La doublure: The singular fabrications of Raymond Roussel—By Ben Marcus / Harper’s Magazine
  Ben Marcus is probably the smartest writer I have met. Here he reviews Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa. A random favorite sentence from the review: “The procession of strange set pieces comes so fast in Roussel, the effect—an intoxicating disquiet out of a world that is ravishingly gorgeous, if wholly unrecognizable—is almost punishing.” (Subscription required, sadly.) His New Yorker podcast on Ishiguro is also a must listen by the way.

Teju Cole
You know who made an appearance this year and rocked our world right away? His name starts with a T and he writes such transparent, light sentences that I seethe with envy. I share two pieces by him.

• Miracle Speech: The Poetry Of Tomas Tranströmer: Teju Cole / The New Yorker Blogs
  
  
• Essays From One of Our Best Wishful Thinkers: Teju Cole/ NY Times

Other Stuff

• Falling Man: Vinod K. Jose: / Caravan
  This profile of Manmohan Singh, is a must read even if you are not interested in Indian politics. It details the long and fascinating story of a man who is “an economist among politicians and a politician among economists.” 

• Paul Simms: GOD’S BLOG / The New Yorker
  This, I think, was the funniest thing I read on the internet in 2011. And it gets better upon rereading.

And Finally, Some Lit Crit
It’s a bad, bad world out there. Writers are constantly asked: Writing is fine, but what do you really do—and, more importantly, why. Two favorite literary critics articulate the role of literary criticism in our age of opinion and numbers. (Technically, these are 2010 – but hey, 31 December, 2010 is so 2011.)

• The Intellectual at Play in the Universe: Pankaj Mishra / NY Times
• Translating the Code into Everyday Language: Sam Anderson/ NY Times
  

I like to think I wrote a fair amount this year – maybe not as much as last year but still, a fair amount. But I also have a bunch of posts stuck in the “Draft” view. Gonna delete them, but here are the snippets for what-might-have-beens.

Objects

Yesterday, I went to see Schätzes des Agha Khan at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. Later, on the U-Bahn, I tried to rationalize why I was rather disappointed in the curator-ship. Most of the list which formed – think Africa is not a country, chronology is not a suggestion, objects have uses etc. – led back to a discussion I witnessed on the future of Museums in Berlin in early 2010. I had meant to write about it, but clearly I missed
link, link…

Things

Sir Alexander Cunningham and the Beginnings of Indian Archaeology (Dacca: Asiatic Society of Pakistan, 1966), 53n.Schmidt, Richard. (1898) Śrīvara’s Kathākautuka. Die Geschichte von Joseph in persisch- indischem Gewande. Sanskrit und Deutsch. Kiel.

People

Roma, Zigeuner, Tzigane, Gitanos, Zincali, Zutt, Jats.
In Johann Zedler’s 1749 Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Kuenste they are wicked and godless. In Denis Diderot’s 1750 dictionary they are vagabonds who will trick you. “c’est ainsi qu’on appelle des vagabonds qui font prosession de dire la bonne aventure, à l’inspection des mains. Leur talent est de chanter, danser, & voler.” By 1783 they were connected to India – philologically – as in Johann Rüdiger’s Von der Sprache und Herkunft der Zigeuner aus Indien

Sounds

The soundtrack to my recent trip: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Rant

I haven’t actually read Mohsin Hamid’s short story, Terminator: Attack of the Drone.

I joked on twitter about Hamid confusing two movie franchises.

I also commented that he was channeling Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In terms of the patois.

Ok, I read the first paragraph.

I was totally turned off his short-story in Granta: Pakistan issue which was some first-person account of a beheading.

I didn’t like it.

And I didn’t like his essay on how Pakistan is teh Awesome in an edited volume I reviewed.

Like is a flimsy word. I was angry at that essay.

I have not read his novels, except that first one.

Given all that, I am not going to say anything about the Mohsin Hamid short-story. I want to rant however on the idiocy that compels us to theorize all around the issue of the drone except to the basic point: they are a form of illegal warfare that eliminates human beings without any specific criminal judgement. Let alone civilians, the drones kill members of a violent group itself without any

Moon

Much “academic” work taunts and haunts, but some rabbit holes are just too enticing. One is the moon.

The light streaming down from the moon has no part in the theater of our daily existence. The terrain so deceptively illuminated by it seems to belong to some counter-earth or alternate earth. It is an earth different from that to which the moon is subject as satellite, for it is itself transformed into a satellite of the moon. Its broad bosom, whose breath was time, stirs no longer; the creation has finally made its way back home, and can again don the widow’s veil which the day had torn off. The pale beam the stole into my room through the blinds gave me to understand this. The course ofmy sleep was disturbed; the moon cut through it with its coming and going. When it was there in the room and I awoke, I was effectively unhoused, for my room seemed willing to accommodate no one besides the moon.
- Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, p. 115

(my thanks to KP)

From Kāvyamīmāṃsā (found in Bhojaprabandha – later text/collection), p.46, Dalal, Sastri edition, (transl. mine, feel free to improve if you wanna use it)
For men who are together with beloved, long night is diminished to a moment,
when they are separated the coolest moon is heating like fire.
Since I have neither a beloved nor separation, for me, in both situations
the moon shines in a form of a mirror, neither cool nor hot.

An Anthology of Sanskrit Poetry, Vidyākara’s Subhaṣitaratnakoṣa, tr. by Ingalls
You have not seen my mistress’ face, cakoras,
its charms arranged by Love himself;
for had you seen its perfect loveliness,
how could you relish still the taste of moonlight? [Rājaśekhara] p.170 v.411

Cast your glance beyond the hedge and guess
what cool-rayed orb is this
that wanders on the earth without its deer.
The cakoras of the park, who feed on only nectar,
follow as she scatters moonlight
white as ripened parrot-plum. [Rājaśekhara] p.175 v.447

You listened not to words of friends,
you heeded not your relatives’ advice;
but when your dearest fell before your feet
you struck him with the lily from your ear.
So now the moon is burning hot
and sandal paste turn into fire,
the nights each last a thousand years
and the lotus necklace weighs like iron. [Amaru?] p.231 v.702

“Like to a fire surrounded by sharp rays –
a very wonder. Can the sun my friend,
be rising even now at night?”
My sweet, it is the moon.”
“But how should moonlight bring me fever?”
“Ah, what is not contrary, child,
to one without her husband!” [Puṣṭika] p.238 v.738

At me the bow of Love shoots arrows fiercely,
the humming of the bees brings pain
and the moon casts rays of fire;
but these being shamed by the alluring beauty
of my darling’s brow, her sweet-toned voice, her face,
I fare not think what angry measures
the three may take with her. [Śāntākaragupta] p/247 v.776

Your birth was from the sea of milk;
Śrī was your sister, the kaustubha jewel your brother;
your friends are waterlilies and your beams
flow with ambrosia, while your face
is rival to the lotus face of women;
how then, oh moon, crest jewel of God,
should you poor forth on me these painful fires? [Rājaśekhara] p.250 v. 799

Drink all this sea, cakora birds, of moonlight
darting your beaks out as you raise your necks,
that the moon thus reft of brilliance spare the lives
of those who pine in separation from their loves. [Rājaśekhara] p.250 v.800

The moon was born of the same womb as poison;
the sandalwood is known to shelter snakes;
pearls are raised from the salty sea
and lotuses are lovers of sun.
How then could anything exist in these
to assuage the flames of love?
But by mistake of their appearance
we forget the truth and are deceived. [Rājaśekhara] p.250-1 v.801

Grieve not, oh earth; the darkness will not last.
Be happy, lily pond; do not despair cakoras.
The moon now rises, a lamp to all the world,
sole mountain from which flow
all streams of moonlight nectar. [Rājaśrī] p.273 v.899

The cat, thinking its rays are milk,
licks them from the dish;
the elephant, seeing them woven through the lattice of the trees,
takes them for lotus stems;
the damsel after love would draw them from her couch
as if they were her dress:
see how the moon in its pride of light
has cozened all the world. [Bhāsa?] p.274 v. 905
*(I know it’s not exactly what you need but I like this verse )

The moon, which here has multiplied its light,
checkered with spots of darkness by the beaks
of cakora birds unsteady with intoxication,
constructs a graceful foliage of finger painting
to serve for strewing on the couches
of damsels weary from their bouts of love. p.278 v.929

A palace for the sports of damsels fair as moonlight,
a lake whose waves are nectar,
a lump of butter churned from the sea of milk,
a waterstone for cooling the earth’s fever,
forehead ornament of night, sole recourse of those in love:
the moon climbs into heaven, a rain of camphor,
giving its light to the suppliant cakoras. p.282 v.955

Two or three stars are left, the color of old pearls;
the cakoras sleep, inert of limb from drinking of the moonlight.
The moon, pale as an empty honey comb, goes to the Western Hill.
while the east receives the color of a kitten’s eyes. [Rājaśekhara] p.284 v. 964

Walking

“As the Romans liked to say, Solvitur ambulando! (Solve it by walking.)”
–Edward Casey,

Taking

What?

what?

The recent hissy fit thrown by historian Niall Ferguson (racist! imperialist!) because Pankaj Mishra wrote a scathing review in the LRB deserves comment.

Mishra’s review of Ferguson’s TV-Book Civilisation, Watch This Man, led with drawing attention to White supremacists like Theodore Stoddard and the twin peaks of their insanity – the inherent belief in their racial rule and the imminent rise of the non-white. He carefully placed Ferguson’s tele-tectonic career within those peaks, as Ferguson maniacally catapulted from one to another to back to forth; content only when everyone was praising his wit or inviting him to exclusive seances with Dick Cheney. Well, sure. Ferguson was only one among many intellectuals who took the post 2001 moment and led the charge of the key boards. Let us never forget Fouad Ajami or Bernard Lewis or Kanan Makiya or Boot or Kaplan or Zakaria or Friedman. Let us never forget.

Here is what Ferguson wrote in October 2001:

The future of Afghanistan must, if the war is successfully prosecuted, be very similar indeed to those states currently under this kind of international colonial rule. Nothing else will do. Contrary to popular arguments made in the 1980s, imperialism is affordable for the richest economy in the world. You could argue that the cost of isolationism could be much higher in the long run than the cost of confident intervention in rogue states. When the British empire controlled 25% of the world’s surface and population, the British defence budget averaged around 3% of GNP. Currently the US defence budget accounts for slightly less than that. It would not be beyond the bounds of possibility that by increasing the defence budget to 5% of GNP, still below the levels of height of the cold war, more effective military intervention could be undertaken.

There is no excuse for the relative weakness of the US as a quasi-imperial power. The transition to formal empire from informal empire is an affordable one. But it does not come very naturally to the US – partly because of its history and partly because of Vietnam – to act as a self-confident imperial power. The US has the resources: but does it have the guts to act as a global hegemon and make the world a more stable place?

This is what he wrote in October 2003, reviewing a book:

Perhaps the book’s real problem is that the very concept of “hegemony” is really just a way to avoid talking about empire, “empire” being a word to which most Americans remain averse. But “empire” has never exclusively meant direct rule over foreign territories without any political representation of their inhabitants. Students of imperial history have a far more sophisticated conceptual framework than that. During the imperial age, for example, British colonial administrators such as Frederick Lugard clearly understood the distinction between “direct” and “indirect” rule; large parts of the British Empire in Asia and Africa were ruled indirectly, through the agency of local potentates rather than British governors. A further distinction was introduced by the British historians Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in their seminal 1953 article on “the imperialism of free trade,” in which the authors showed how the Victorians used naval and financial power to open markets well outside their colonial ambit. There is an important and now widely accepted distinction between “formal” and “informal” empire. The British did not formally govern Argentina, for example, but the merchant banks of the City of London exerted such a powerful influence on that country’s fiscal and monetary policy that its independence was heavily qualified.

Ferguson has bristled (BRISTELD) that Mishra “called” him a racist. Ferguson has threatened to sue LRB and Mishra because, well he is NOT a racist. Mishra, to his credit, has used the Letters to further skewer and flay Ferguson and one great, great service Mishra has done to humanity (the thinking third) is to wipe the sheen off that smug face. Bravo.

I am less interested in the racism debate, and more in the imperialism. In a recently published article, historian Richard Drayton, succinctly blasts the defenders of cultural imperialism.

It is important now to be clear about the reality of Imperialism, in ways its historians so rarely are. For it is not merely, as it was at its origin, a word of political abuse. It is a useful category through which we may make sense of a phenomenon which recurs in world history wherever a power gap allows one soci- ety to become predatory towards others. Imperialism, in all its contexts, is a regime through which external entities derive maximum gain from the labour and resources within a territory. A foreign power, with or without formal colonization, although always with local collaborators, secures a protected and privileged sphere for its economic actors. There the relationship of labour to capital is manipulated via the suppression of taxes, wages, social or environmental protections, by forms of coercion which drive labour towards that direction of employment and limit its legal or practical ability to resist the regime, and from which tribute, commodities and profit may be freely expatriated. The social rent paid by capital is minimized, as both the costs of social reproduction (childhood, ill health, aging) are borne from the wages of labour and the costs of infrastructure through which the external actor derives extraordinary benefit – roads, deepwater harbours, airports, electricity networks, local policing and repression – are funded mainly out of taxation of the wages and consumption of the squeezed wages of labour. Those on the under- side of this regime derive reduced benefit from their labour and resources, and live in circumstances of insecurity, if not permanent malnutrition. The upshot of this is high levels of unnecessary mortality sustained over very long periods, a kind of slow-motion mass manslaughter. Violence is a constant and necessary corollary of such an order, needed to install, defend, discipline and replace local collaborators. Torture is not just a problem that oddly pops up in the midst of imperial adven- tures: it is the necessary recurrent partner to a non-consensual regime of exploita- tion, where the application of force to bodies to extract information, to spread terror, to break the will to resist, is fundamental. But Imperialism always comes wearing the mask of community, promising that its form of domination is in the universal interest. To such a claim historians and their colleagues in the social sciences lend active help.¹

Drayton criticizes historians who took the cultural turn of making imperialism about representation:

But even these new currents of Imperial history as a subject rarely posed a critique of either the past of British Imperialism, or even less, a challenge to the forms of domination and exploitation which it had shaped and which survived its formal collapse. For the ‘cultural turn’ was associated with an ascent of Idealism in the historiography of British imperialism which was remarkably compatible with the Neo-Liberal moment. On the left, the postcolonialists were preoccupied with how the British perceived the colonized, and with the imperial life of cultural ste- reotypes.15 On the right, as we shall see, apologists for contemporary British and American power sought to revive the Whig history of the British Empire. Somewhere in the centre, we were told of the ideological origins of the British Empire. Colonial encounters, for Cannadine, became mere consequences of how the British imagined social class. The mental worlds of individuals at the frontier, usually white, became the subject of many elegant studies from Linda Colley and her two distinguished students Kathleen Wilson and Maya Jasanoff.17 A focus on subjectivity, on how people in Africa, Asia, or Latin America thought about things, displaced examination of practical and material experience. Historians appeared to be more bothered by ‘epistemic violence’ than the real thing. The exceptions to this have been few – David Anderson’s and Caroline Elkins’s studies of the violence with which the colonial state repressed the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya stand out, and the hostility with which both, but particularly Elkins, were received, is an emblem of the costs involved in breaking the code of silence.

In important ways, post-colonial Imperial and world history is still written mainly for the pleasure of the reading classes of past and present imperial powers.

This is a serious critique that deserves to be taken seriously by historians – especially those among us who wish to show the rot in the fruits of imperialism. I am going to take my time and write more on Drayton’s critique but for now, just wanted to highlight this to you (my thanks to Mishra for drawing attention to this essay).

In the meantime, the likes of Ferguson will never go away (I blame TV) until the true horror of imperialism is distinguished along with the representations of imperialism.

Gitmo is real.

1. Richard Drayton, “Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism“, Journal of Contemporary History 2011 46: 671

Nandini Ramachandran reviews WTWFA for the Sunday Guardian:

The size of its betrayal would’ve forced Manto into asking his fellow citizens what he once asked Uncle Sam — my country is poor, but why is it ignorant? This is a query that haunts Manan Ahmed as much as Manto, and his book is an antidote to the assumptions many make about Islamic societies. Wild Frontiers taps into the angry bewilderment of generations of postcolonial thinkers. Why is it, everyone from Frantz Fanon to Eqbal Ahmad to Mahmood Mamdani has asked, that modern civilisation insists on operating in binaries?

In the meantime: THERE IS NOW A KINDLE VERSION OF THE BOOK!!!! and it is also more affordable for the holidays.

More actual content will come on this blog soon. Sigh.

Below the fold, a twitter-based debate on a review essay in NYT.

(A version of this review essay ran in The Friday Times, Vol. XXIII, No. 41)

Review Essay by C.M. Naim

In May 1962, when the first groups of America’s newly established Peace Corps were flying out to various “underdeveloped” countries to help them along the road of “progress”, a twenty-eight years old woman set off in a Greek freighter from New York, to a self-imposed exile in one of those same countries, Pakistan. She traveled under the name Margaret (Peggy) Marcus that her parents—racially Jewish, politically Zionist, religiously members of the then quite the fashion Society for Ethical Culture—had given her, but to herself she was Maryam Jameelah (the Beautiful Mariam). Having only recently converted to Islam after a long struggle with her parents and her milieu, she was traveling to Pakistan not to join hands with her compatriots in the Corps but to find shelter from her painful and troubled past in a well-to-do suburb of New York, and to gain a new, purposeful and happy life at the home of the founder of Jama’at Islami, Maulana Abul Ala Maududi. She possibly felt she had found in the Maulana the understanding father she needed, while the Maulana might have taken comfort in believing that she would be the ideal person to expose for the benefit of the Pakistani youth the spiritual hollowness of the West and its notions of Modernity and Progress.

Jameelah had already written strong denunciations of her inherited culture, and of the U.S.-aided Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. Even at the age of eleven, she later noted, she had felt herself drawn to Islam and the Arabs; she had also convinced herself that any Jewish desire to seek a home in Palestine was a desire to recreate the golden days of Arab-Muslim-Jewish fraternization and creativity in Andalusia. Consequently, she was horrified to discover in 1948 that her almost non-Jewish, Ethical Culture-liberal, comfortably suburban parents could be openly racist with reference to the Arabs—particularly, the Palestinian Arabs—and could enthusiastically contribute to fund Zionist ambitions in Israel. I must add that like almost all Americans then and now, Peggy Marcus too identified Palestine only with its Muslim population, when in fact, in 1948, there were at least 140,000 Christian Arabs in the British Mandate area, and even now there are about 200,000 Christians in the West Bank and Gaza (9% of the population), as compared to the 150,000 in Israel (2% of the population). Further, she never showed, even in her later polemics, any awareness of those Jews within Israel and the United States who steadfastly opposed aggressive Zionism and demanded a just and equitable resolution. Likewise, the fate of the Palestinians handed over by the British to the son of their Arab ally against the Turks was of no concern to her—as has been the case with other Muslim commentators like her.

Jameelah was welcomed into the Maududi household at Lahore when she reached there in July 1962, but soon problems arose. In quick succession the Maulana packed her off to another family outside Lahore, then had her confined to the lunatic asylum at Lahore for a few months—her parents in Mamaroneck, N.Y., had done the same to her a few years earlier—and finally got her married to a Pakistani man who already had a wife and children. Through all this her ideological embrace of the Jama’at remained unbroken. Eventually her husband, Mohammad Yusuf Khan, became her publisher, and she began writing articles and small books on the themes that were dear to her and the Jama’at. These trenchant writings first appeared in English, and then in Urdu, Arabic, and other languages. Her name became widely known as an ardent Islamist. Anyone interested in Islam in South Asia in the Sixties and Seventies knew who Maryam Jameelah was. She became to countless Muslims a living proof of Islam’s supremacy as religion: a well-educated Jewish woman who left the comforts of American suburbia to live out a life in Islam in Pakistan, voluntarily going into strict purdah and marrying a married man—all for the sake of her chosen faith, and in obedience to the wishes of her self-appointed “father-in-Islam.”

Jameelah’s presentation of herself to Pakistan and Muslim intelligentsia in 1962 was rather dramatic for the time. Her first book, a collection of previously published essays, was brought out by a prestigious publisher of Lahore, Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, which had also been publishing Iqbal’s The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam for many years. The book’s title, Islam Versus the West, seemed to suggest an aggressive reversal of the apologetic posture implied in the expression “The West Against Islam,” used in similar polemics in Pakistan and India. Hers was an assertive posture, that of an Islam launching a preemptive attack. And a brief text on the cover indicated that the fight was going to be on two fronts: “Read how Islam is far more seriously menaced from within than from without.” The back cover carried a picture of the author, her face encircled by a chador but otherwise fully exposed, and a brief resume of her life, bravely including a mention of her two years in a mental hospital. It ended with this bold statement: “The author wishes to be able to use her talents and abilities to further the cause of Islam.” Her next book, Islam and Modernism (1965), published by her husband, was a collection of new essays exclusively condemning Muslim “modernists” scholars. And it contained a picture of the author in an all-covering burqa—the exposed hands were encased in gloves—that seemed to challenge the women of Pakistan to live up to the “truly” Islamic standards of modesty. Its caption made the intention clear: “Thus do I, an American-born convert, speak through this picture to my Muslim-born brothers and sisters misled by an education hostile to all that Islam stands for and blinded with its false standards and ideals.” While the introductory title in the first book was simply, “How I Became Interested in Islam,” the opening essay in the new book was titled: “Why I Embraced Islam.” Nothing was tentative now; henceforth there will be nothing but uncompromising conviction.

Needless to say there was a great deal more to the story, and a brilliantly presented account is now available in The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism by Deborah Baker (Greywolf, 2011). For one, Jameelah had an eye on posterity all the time. Over the years she made several deposits at the New York Public Library, consisting of her writings, correspondence—some of it heavily revised—and paintings and sketches, where they were safe but also readily available to any curious reader. Baker stumbled upon the hoard by chance, and at an opportune moment when the Jama’at, Extremism, and Jihad—not to mention Islam itself—had become hot button words within the American society. It was equally opportune for Jameelah that it was Baker who found her papers, and not some perfervid, jargon-struck academic. As an experienced writer, Baker rose to the occasion by deciding to tell Jameelah’s story more or less as it unfolded for her, honestly sharing with us her frustration as contradictory details—even deliberate deceptions—stumbled out. She has skillfully created a narrative that grabs our interest fast, and then compels us to read the book as avidly as one reads a good whodunit. Of course, in this case, it is not the question “Who?” but “Why?” that lies at the center. As expected, there is no single powerful answer. Nor does Baker ask the question so crudely. Placing before us any number of credible causes and explanations, ranging from the personal and familial to the global and ideological, she allows us to gain much from her insights while letting us come to our own conclusions.

It is a wise and engaging book that should generate many useful discussions in these troubled times. Most importantly, her book might make many readers more aware of one terrible feature of today’s discourse on terrorism. Presently it is as if a “terrorist” has only an ideology or religion that dictates his actions, while the rest of us could safely use family situation, peer pressure, mental or psychological issues and much more to explain our actions. Even the “Unibomber” had a psychological life, but not Major Nidal Hussain. In the latter’s case, his “Muslim” name explains everything.

Baker’s book was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Award. But it deserves much more attention than it has received so far. I have not heard her being interviewed on national radio and TV programs, and her book has not received much mention on the blogs that deal with Islam in South Asia. It is, however, a book that should be read by many, in particular by young Muslim men and women in the United States and South Asia. Not as a cautionary tale, but in order to obtain a more nuanced understanding of what they might be experiencing. Their present lives are filled with challenges that cannot be met with easily, and Baker’s book should help them discover that easy answers usually come at a heavy cost.

My only quarrel with Baker is the word “Exile” in the subtitle of the book. Who exiled Jameelah? And if it was a self-imposed exile, why can’t we simply call it migration? As I see it, Jameelah went to Lahore to find happiness, security, and fulfillment on her terms, just as one of the Maulana’s sons later traveled to New Jersey seeking the same boons in the United States. The Maulana passed away in 1979, in a hospital in the United States. Some say his sudden collapse was caused by the insensitive and hurtful behavior of one of his acolytes who visited him in the hospital. His house in Lahore is now a disputed property between the party he created and the children he sired. As his precious library rots in sealed cabinets, his writings continue to make money for the Jama’at and the family. Jameelah continues to live in Lahore, no more a prolific writer but still working for the Jama’at to earn an income for her family. Her two sons live in the United States, but the two daughters seemingly live the same secluded married life as she does. Way back in 1949, the fifteen-year old Margaret—her parents called her Peggy—had fallen in love with the voice of Umm Kulthum and spent all her allowance on a stack of the great Egyptian singer’s records. One can only hope that she allowed herself—or was allowed by her husband—to find some similar joy and comfort in the company of Farida Khanum and Abida Parween. The Maulana’s daughters reportedly did.

Naim Sahib, one of my teachers at Chicago, has a must-must-must read “rant” (as he puts it) in Outlook India. I really think it is one of his best and critically lays bare a key disconnect between the intellectual engagements within Urdu and English presses when it comes to matters of Muslims and Islam. I think almost everything he writes, holds true for the case of Pakistan. Please read, print, and frame it.

C. M. Naim, “The Deadening Silence of Good Intentions“, Outlook India, Nov 18, 2011

Let me put my argument this way. In Kerala, for example, local Muslims at all levels of the society not only speak the language of the region but also think, argue, and communicate—with each other as well as their non-Muslim peers—in that language. The same can be said to be true for the Muslims of so many other states. A Muslim professor of sociology in Bengal will not only be conversant in Bengali but also very much aware of what was being said or written in Bengali on the issues that should be of concern to him. Likewise, a Muslim intellectual in Gujarat would not hesitate to jump into some cultural debate in the Gujarati press because she would most likely be a part of its readership. These persons of my examples are unlikely to be entirely circumscribed by the English media in their regions. That situation, I aver, does not exist in Delhi, U.P., and Hyderabad. (I leave out Bihar and Madhya Pradesh since I know nothing about the Urdu press there.) Over the last five or six decades, the educated Urdu-speaking Muslim elite in Delhi and U.P., particularly those equipped with higher education in social sciences and thus expected to hold and express considered views on socio-political and economic issues, have become cut off from the Urdu-medium discourse around them. Those who seriously read and write on contemporary issues do so almost exclusively in English. That disconnect does not affect their wellbeing either professionally or personally. Most remain oblivious of it, and a few cheerfully so. Many of them, in my experience, express a little disdain when Urdu press comes up in conversation. Of course, that is to their loss. But, more importantly, it is a greater loss to the general Muslim population of the region.

Taste the war paint on my tongue/as it’s dripping with my sweat/place my gaze in the futures path/seeing things that ain’t come yet

Many years ago, a different me was in a car driving down a highway I had travelled many hundreds of time to a destination I was intimate with, and from a base which was called home. I guess it was 2001-2? I was thinking, listening to My Morning Jacket (review of Circuital), on the car’s cd player that I must talk to farangi about this band. Must. This was the best of jam-band and this guy had a voice that I couldn’t quite believe. Plus, they were from Kentucky – a place that is well, legend to me.

watchin’ a stretch of road, miles of light explode/driftin’ off a thing i’d never done before

Plus, they seemed not only to be amazing musicians but also had a deft way with lyrics. I liked them.

Every one else in the car hated them.

Years passed and they released more records, which I purchased. Listened to them. They toured within reach of me. But I never saw them. Once, I remember trying to make a plan with farangi to watch them, but who knows. We didn’t.

A few nights ago, I saw them in Berlin. In a very intimate little venue in Kreuzberg. I saw Jim James channel his inner qawwal and dance as if the haal was on him. When they started “Outta my system” I was bouncing from the ceiling. Standing within arm’s reach of the band, the sheer weight of polished rocking inexorably lifted all weights on me.

Have you ever lost yourself at a rock concert?

But, here is the well thing. At one point Jim James puts a towel over his head and sings through “Gideon” and “Mahgeetah” and I am transposed immediately to the haal-singers in sufi circles in Lahore, where the act of veiling is precisely to note that the voice coming out is supernatural. James’ voice is supernatural.

Thanks, Berlin.

Oh, and after, the roadie tossed me the set-list. Guess a salt-and-peppered-bearded-brown guy bouncing all night elicits sympathies.

Some more important readings for you in terms of the DU/Ramanujan.

– Shahid Amin (Professor, History, Delhi University), When a Department Let a University Down, The Hindu, Nov. 3, 2011

At the first sign of trouble, in a letter written in September 2008, OUP decided to thank those who felt aggrieved by it, “for pointing … out … that the essay has the potential of hurting religious sentiments.” It went on to add “that neither are we selling the book nor there are any plans to reissue it.” This was a corporate’s way of being economical with the truth, for the apology left unsaid that the offending article was also a part of another OUP-published volume, the Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, and whether that academic bestseller was being trashed forever as well. That was not the end of the story. The Press also served a veritable notice on DU’s History Department for infringing its copyright (and in effect profiting) by including the Ramanujan article in a book of readings! There was no such book, and no intent, only a bunch of photocopies including that essay in a campus photocopy shop, and stories planted in the press about it. The publishing house was being simultaneously both supine and assertive.

- Ananya Vajpeyi (Resident Intellectual, Delhi), Old tale, Modern Hate: The Ramayan returns to haunt Indian Polity, Nov. 3, 2011

Towards the end of the 20th century, India returned once more to the Ramayan. In the late 1980s the epic was serialized and broadcast, bringing the cable television revolution to India. A resurgent Hindu Right demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, claiming it stood on the hallowed ground where Ram himself had been born on earth. A constitutional crisis, widespread violence between Hindus and Muslims, legal battles in India’s courts on the authenticity and historicity of competing religious beliefs and claims, and the attenuation of minority rights in secular India followed throughout the mid-1990s.

On the back of its virulent Ramjanmabhoomi movement (a campaign based on the idea of recapturing the so-called “birthplace” of Ram from Muslim control), the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power and led the national government until the general elections of 2004.

- Rukun Advani (Publisher, Permanent Black), Narrow View at the Top: Ramanujan, a publisher’s perspective, The Telegraph, Nov. 7, 2011.

A history department prescribes it. A hurt Hindu, his sentiments backed up by the sort of antagonism to ideas in which only cretinous Indian vice-chancellors specialize, takes the publisher to court. And what does the publisher do? Instead of preparing for a siege and sticking his Oxford Blue banner into the battleground, the publisher grovels. He agrees that what he has published can cause religious offence, and that by publishing Ramanujan he has caused it. He promises in court that he will renounce Ramanujan and not reprint the offensive essay.

Do read!

Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day

1935. Professor of Sanskrit
on cultural exchange;
passing through; lost
in Berlin; reduced
to a literal, turbaned child,
spelling German signs on door, bus, and shop,
trying to guess go from stop;
desperate
for a way of telling apart
a familiar street from a strange,
or east
from west at night
the brown dog that barks
from the brown dog that doesn’t
memorising a foreign paradigm
of lanterns, landmarks,
a gothic lotus on the iron gate
suddenly comes home
in English, gesture, and Sanskrit,
assimilating
the swastika
on the neighbour’s arm
in that roaring bus from a grey
nowhere to a green.
– AK Ramanujan

I have a piece on Ramanujan’s essay and the DU controversy in The Caravan, All the Myriad Ways:

It’s no surprise, then, that so consistently we receive a singular history of the State, a composite account that tells an overwhelmingly familiar arc of progress towards the very moment in which you—the school child, the dutiful citizen—happen to be reading and accepting that history. That the United States is a melting pot, or that India contains multitudes is itself a monolithic and singular account.

We, for whom the history of the State is a familiar battleground; we, who grew up in dictatorships, for whom history was the first and most potent weapon for warfare, know this intimately. In Pakistan, there is no multitude of narratives when it comes to our pasts. In Islam, there are no voices that interpret scripture in divergent ways. Notions like these are quickly labelled heretical and such voices are shunted off to the mortuary. Notice the fate of Punjab’s governor, Salmaan Taseer, who dared to imagine a Constitution that might include another voice, admit to another living diversity.

Do tell me what you think.

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/uses_of_history_ramanujan_edition.html/feed 3 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/holydays/oh_go_aawwn.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/holydays/oh_go_aawwn.html#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:30:33 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6645

I loved the space and the wonderful people at the Asian Writers’ Workshop who were kind enough to host my book launch a month ago. Magical! So, I pass on, with enthusiasm, a festival of awesomeness for their 20th anniversary! They feature Teju Cole, Amitava Kumar and some other people (ok some of the other people are also very cool, but really, we only have eyes for TC and AK {though, appearance by Jennifer 8. Lee!!!}).

Please do go.

And.

Here is the deal.

If you provide a dishy/photo-filled festival diary to CM of the event, I will buy your ticket. Email me. (those who promise photos of CM loved ones will clearly have an unseeming advantage here, but um, whatever)

Deets:

PAGE TURNER FESTIVAL

http://pageturnerfest.org/#festival

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011, 11AM-7PM
POWERHOUSE ARENA, 37 MAIN STREET, BROOKLYN
$5 PER EVENT / $20 ALL-DAY PASS / $30 ALL-DAY PASS (W/ AFTERWORD PARTY)

Come rub elbows and knock knees with your favorite writers at one of Brooklyn’s best alternative literary festivals: the third annual PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival. Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the festival features a Korean taco trunk, two stand-up comedians, five National Book Award finalists, seven Guggenheim Fellows, a killer afterparty with the best playlist of all time, and you!

An all-star line-up featuring: Junot Díaz, Amitav Ghosh, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Hari Kunzru, Jayne Anne Phillips, Suketu Mehta, Min Jin Lee, Mark Nowak, Amitava Kumar, Granta editor John Freeman, and Guernica editor Joel Whitney.

Your favorite new voices: Teju Cole (author of Open City), Danielle Evans (NBA 5 Under 35 winner), Booker finalist Hisham Matar, Pen Faulkner winner Sabina Murray, Whiting Award winner Alexander Chee, Brooklyn Poet Laureate Tina Chang, National Book Award finalist Monica Youn, and NBCC finalist Brenda Shaughnessy.

Multi-dimensional program includes: a staged reading directed by Ralph Peña; artist Wangechi Mutu (MOMA, Guggenheim) talking about immigration; an open mic featuring Jen Kwok (Date an Asian), Negin Farsad (Nerdcore Rising) and others; stories from twenty years of the Workshop; and hard-hitting conversations about Occupy Wall Street, Islam and the West, the rise of China and India, and the national crackdown on immigration.

Keep coming back as we update our full schedule at http://www.pageturnerfest.org/schedule. Co-sponsored by powerHouse Arena, Verso Books, MTV, Guernica, and Granta.

THE AFTERWORD PARTY

http://pageturnerfest.org/#afterword

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011, 8PM-11PM
VERSO PRESS
20 JAY STREET, SUITE 1010, BROOKLYN
$10; $30 FOR 4; $30 WITH FESTIVAL DAY PASS

The Saturday before Halloween join us for music, drinks, dancing, and fine company for the raucous afterparty for the Page Turner Literary Festival. We’ll have a stunning view of the Manhattan skyline at night, a killer playlist for your dancing shoes, cake, noisemakers, glitter, a giant piñata, and infinite quantities of beer and wine. Special guests include former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee and celebrity chef Eddie Huang of Baohaus, who will DJ part of the night’s festivities.

Additional playlist selected by some of New York’s hottest cultural figures: Kris Chen (head of XL Recordings in America, the label of Vampire Weekend, the XX, Sigur Ros), hip hop trio Das Racist, sports blogger Nathaniel Friedman (The Classical, Free Darko), literary enfant terrible Tao Lin, Jefferson “Chairman” Mao (Ego Trip NYC), writer Luc Sante (author of Low Life, Factory of Facts), novelist Lynne Tillman, music journalist Dave Tompkins (author of How to Wreck a Nice Beach), Michael Vazquez (Senior Editor, Bidoun magazine), music critic and DJ Oliver “O-Dub” Wang (soul-sides.com). Before the dancing starts, we’ll also honor the winners of the Fourteenth Annual Asian American Literary Awards: AMITAVA KUMAR, winner of our nonfiction award which will be presented by past honoree Suketu Mehta, and KIMIKO HAHN, our poetry award-winner. The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, one of the country’s premiere literary arts spaces, is throwing the party to end all parties. We want you there. Celebrate our twentieth anniversary and reserve your space today. Co-sponsored by MTV World, Verso, Granta, Guernica, Beerlao, NoveRoma wines.
–
Executive Director, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop

http://www.aaww.org

110-112 W. 27th Street, Sixth Floor, NY, NY 10001
212.494.0061 tel.
212.494.0062 fax
kchen@aaww.org

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/holydays/oh_go_aawwn.html/feed 0 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/potpurri/screedery.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/potpurri/screedery.html#comments Sun, 23 Oct 2011 16:03:32 +0000 lapata http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6637

I have a review of Granta’s ten years post-9/11 issue up on The Sunday Guardian (New Delhi). When I first wrote my draft, I sent it to Sepoy, because I was worried it was too much of a screed. Sepoy, upon reading it, was disappointed in the lack of screedishness of the review. He had hoped for something more screed-like. Now it is for you to judge, Dear Readers, whether or not this is a piece of screedery. Here’s a preview:

Early in the morning on September 11, 2001, I spoke on the phone with a student of mine. After briefly discussing the attacks on the World Trade Center, which had just occurred, he asked, half joking, “will you come visit me at the concentration camp?” He was referring to his religion (Muslim by birth) and his skin color (brown). A couple of days later, a group of female students came to my office. They all wore hijab and were anxious because, they said, their fathers had told them not to wear any head coverings for the time being to avoid hate crimes. They had previously understood their commitment to wearing hijab as an act of pride in their faith that should not be abandoned in the face of ignorance or hate. But should they ignore their fathers? They did.

Read the rest here.

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/potpurri/screedery.html/feed 2 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/univercity/madison_2011.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/univercity/madison_2011.html#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 01:27:25 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6635

#OccupyMadisonConcourseHotel2011!!

Ahem.

It is the Annual Awesomeness that is the Madison conference – this is the 40th one! Big times now. I will be on two panels – giving a paper on something I am quite excited about and discussing a set of papers elsewhere. I wish there was a way to link to my panels but that technology is currently unavailable. You are welcome to go here and kinda browse around, however.

Friends and scholarship. What more can a historian want?

]]> http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/univercity/madison_2011.html/feed 0 http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/univercity/nauman_naqvi_on_sadequain.html http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/univercity/nauman_naqvi_on_sadequain.html#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:21:50 +0000 sepoy http://www.chapatimystery.com/?p=6629

We were just talking about the scholastic and the imaginative that underpins some gems of scholarship – such as Ramanujan’s work on the Ramayana (and his work on poetry, in poetry), and here comes another deeply inspiring articulation.

Nauman Naqvi, anthropologist, delivers a wonderfully framed, evocative,(and beautifully filmed) lecture ruminating on the art, the poetics of Sadequain – linking his calligraphy, his art, his poetic imagination, and then moving out towards the act of witnessing, of sacrifice and of truth.

It really is a must-must-watch.

A Muslim Meditation on Violence from nofil naqvi on Vimeo.

What is the source of Islam’s potential for a beautiful, passive revolution today? How are the greater and lesser jihads distinct and entangled? What are the experiences of force given in the Muslim tradition? What are the relations between beauty, divinity, history and the forces of peace, truth and violence in this tradition? These are the prayers, the questions silently addressed in this filmic presentation of the anguished work of poesy and asceticism against historical violence in the painter-poet Sadequain (1930-87) – a presentation of the experience and logic of another force given in Islam, and dramatized in the life and oeuvre of this postcolonial Pakistani artist. Through a range of effects – including a generous and dynamic display of striking images juxtaposed with ravishing lyric from both Sadequain, as well as the larger Indic-Muslim and affinate traditions of the pre- and post-colonial modern period – this lecture-film enacts the experience and logic of this other force in three dramatic scenes of a performative lecture given by Nauman Naqvi at The Second Floor (PeaceNiche) in Karachi. The scenes – the hand, the head, and gesture – are scenes of what Sadequain called the technique of ‘mystic figuration’ in his painting: a certain tortured entanglement of the aesthetic, the ethical and truth in Muslim inheritance. An anguished entanglement of beauty, the good and truth in their ecstatic appearance in the secular world – the world of sight and sound – that is inseparable from the demand of sacrifice, of a strenuous self-canceling intention given in the aspect of a subtle violence of immanence in the Muslim understanding of being and existence. In tracing this haunting, subtle force of life, the lecture-film gestures towards the potential inheritance of a radically ethical politics of universal grace in Islam.

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