The prophet and the critic: Placing the op-ed and social critique in context

There are dangers associated with writing a regular op-ed, and cramming it with visions of utopia. One of these dangers is the reader’s presumption that the author self-consciously preaches from a position of perfection. This is to say, it is assumed that the author says ‘I am perfect, I have found the route, be like me’. To read the author in this way is perhaps a mistake. Dealing with this situation, the scholar of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant sought to thrust the blame for this situation on the audience. Kant reasoned that it was because of laziness and cowardice that it was so easy for other to set themselves up as guardians. ‘It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides upon a regimen for me, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all.’

While not as confident as Kant of the reason for this state of affairs, this column would like to grapple with this problem for a while.

An opportune way to enter into this discussion was presented in a response given by Arundhati Roy in an interview with G. Sampath of the Bombay-based newspaper DNA. G. Sampath asked Roy why, given the nature of her politics, Roy had not disassociated from her “big, MNC publisher and shifted to a smaller, perhaps not-for-profit publisher?” G. Sampath’s question could have been framed in another, perhaps more common and direct format: ‘You are not perfect (you associate with corporate interests) and yet you preach (disassociation from corporate interests). Do you not think you are being hypocritical?’

Roy responded that she “could also write these essays and stand outside the station and distribute photocopies. It’s very complicated. This system doesn’t leave you the option of being pristine. If you write a book, even if it’s a book on political stuff, you get royalties, you put it in the bank; even if you don’t do it, the bank invests the money in the stock market, so none of us can be pure, really. And if you are, then you have to live in your own purity and outside of engaging. In that pursuit of pristineness, you end up being ineffective in some way. I have to live with certain contradictions, as do all of us.”

Reading Roy and Kant together, it appears that both of them suggest that there are some of us who are willing to break the conspiracy of silence that surrounds issues that ground the status-quo, despite our being immersed in, and benefitting from this status quo. This will emerges merely from an inability to stomach our own discomfort, not necessarily from consciousness that we will liberate the world and lead us on to utopia. A previous column had remarked on the value of Pope Benedict XVI’s caution in his encyclical Spe Salvi against the presumptions of seeing human effort alone as capable of bringing utopia. This caution seems particularly apt here.

The value of the social critic lies in articulating the discomforts in society and speaking the unspeakable. Giving words to the inarticulate is the first step, allowing for a vocal public opinion to manifest. In the course of this process, the critic may also propose possible ways to think about the issue. To see these as THE answers is to miss the point of ‘social science’. As a friend once pointed out, ‘science is about love for questions rather than love for answers.’

One could also see the role of the social critic, indeed as some of us would like to see Roy, as that of the contemporary prophet. But then, neither are prophets or saints (at least the saints of the Catholic Church) free of sin or error. Made from the same flesh as us, they too are entitled to personally struggle with the standards that they may intellectually acknowledge and go on to announce. I seek to make a distinction here between an intellectual understanding of an issue, fairly easy to achieve; and an emotional understanding. It is the journey of emotionally internalising a formulation intellectually arrived at that is often the challenge.

And yet, this emotional inability of the messenger, does not necessarily compromise the validity of their observation. Perhaps we have been too spoiled by traditions that insist that their central figures were without fault, and free of blemish. This tradition prevents us from entering into a dialogue with those who do propose challenges to the status quo and harness the power of moral codes to highlight that something is amiss in our current actions. The claim of self-perfection is one we read onto them, not one that is necessarily self -adopted. On the contrary, as Roy very aptly points out, the search for the pristine location would ensure that we fail to engage with others and wind up merely wrestling with ourselves.

Roy’s comments urge us onto yet another level of engagement, the discomfort with the idea of perfection. Returning to Spe Salvi, Benedict XVI teaches that perfection and utopia, can be the work only of the Messiah, and is hence always delayed. Our engagements with society, our critiques, our grasping towards perfection are necessarily a process. This would be a rather healthy recognition, because while acknowledging that there are problems with the status-quo, it does not fix a permanent solution. It does not set up the social critic (or the critique), as the font of truth. On the contrary, once we are able to reach the possible solution that has been proposed, we recognise new problems, and move toward the attempt to resolve these. While recognising the critic as merely a messenger, this proposition ingrains in us the ‘love for questions rather than love for answers.’ It commits us to thinking perpetually about process, rather than stasis. Stasis represents the establishment of idols, process their continual overturning.

This love for questions, and the insistence on emphasising process rather than stasis, would have been something Kant would have welcomed and delighted in. It also places the regular op-ed in context, it argues, and engages, it does not preach, and refuse to participate in reasoning out the positions it proffers.

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times 18 May 2011)

Resisting nationalism’s seduction: When a Goan boy in Australia is attacked

Last week this column discussed the manner in which nationalism highjacks humanist causes that rise above the petty and parochial politics of nationalism. Sometime between that column and this one, there was another incident that seemed custom-made for highjack by nationalism. Some of the many responses to the incident demonstrate however the manner in which we can respond to the human element by building larger solidarities and side-stepping the seduction of nationalism.

On October 18, two boys attacked a 12 year old school boy of Goan origin at their school in Melbourne, Australia. This boy was so brutally beaten up that he has reportedly had to have a titanium plate inserted under his eye, and may possibly loose sight in that eye. Some of the reporting on the incident sought to colour the incident as yet another racial attack on ‘Indians’ in the continent. However rather than go down that road, some of the responses to the incident have had a warm, familial, concerned response that seem better suited to the trauma that the family has been expressing.

Responding to the incident, a Goan resident in Goa felt that there was a need to reach out to the family, writing, ‘when a father feels that there is no future in remaining in Australia anymore (due to this incident), it becomes a defeat of the dreams one nursed for the future of his children having giving up everything one had in one's own land for a future for one's off-springs.’ This letter placed concern very appropriately in the interests of a family that had already possibly sacrificed much to get to Australia. To go down the ‘Indians being attacked’ road would have possibly gotten international and governmental attention, but would such concern for the individual family necessarily have received attention? More importantly, would it have received such fraternal solidarity from individuals, unrelated by blood?

At a more systemic level, where one needs to make sure that such incidents do not get repeated, other Goans pointed out that there are high levels of violence in some schools, and that these need to be tackled at the level of the school. These observations did not rule out that there is a possible racial element to the attack, but seemed to refuse to get trapped in the ‘racist attacks on Indians’ formula. It seems to have helped that this particular Goan was particularly critical of the failings within India. To raise slogans against Australia, he felt, would only be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Touché!

Yet another Goan pointed out that while he was raising the issue and not denying the possibility of a racist element to the attack, he also agreed that there needed to be a larger response to the incident. The Indian Government uses these incidents to boost its own international visibility, attempting to act like its role model, the U.S. State that reassures its citizens even when they are abroad. Rather than pull in the Indian state, perhaps one could reach out to existing organizations in Melbourne that seek to work against racial stereotyping and addressing the social problems that emerge in multi-racial and immigrant neighbourhoods like Noble Park where the school is located.

Speaking at the much maligned conference on Azaadi at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi a couple of days ago, Arundhati Roy made a powerful observation that we would do well to apply here. Kashmiri’s who want Azaadi for Kashmir, she said, would do well to forge solidarity with other movements for justice within India. Similarly, if we as Goans are concerned for the fate of this boy and his family’s continued residence in Australia, we would do well to work towards fostering bonds with groups that work on social harmony. The answer to the Indo-Pakistan conflict, some believe lies in person-to-person contact. There is no reason why we cannot manage such a contact, rather than engage in nationalist sloganeering.

Seeking alternatives to nationalism is imperative if we are to resolve a number of the problems we face. Very often nationalist thinking is so ingrained in our thoughts that we fail to see alternative ways of thinking. The responses to this Goan boy’s sad plight however shows the multiple levels at which we can respond to the issue.

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times 3 Nov 2010)

A Post-Colonial agenda for IFFI 2010: Pointing the significance and relevance of 2010 to a peoples’ history

A couple of days ago, Dr. Nandkumar Kamat, from the Goa University, made a rather interesting suggestion via email to the Chief Minister of Goa. Rather than be an occasion to mindlessly spend huge amounts of state revenue, he has suggested that the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), now held annually in Goa, be themed for the year 2010 to commemorate “Colonialism and peoples’ struggles / movements across the world”. To this already interesting proposition he adds one more laudable suggestion; rather than invite an actor or actress from Bombay, who as he says leave no ideas behind, why not invite Arundhati Roy to inaugurate the festival? Roy, he suggests, could also be asked to speak on “Colonialism down 500 years a topic which would be suitable considering the completion of 500 years of Goa's conquest by Afonso de Albuquerque, on 25th November 2010 and foundation of colonial rule in Asia”.

This is perhaps one of the more incredible suggestions that have been made regarding the IFFI and perhaps in the intellectual and cultural life of the State. Subsequent to his email to the Chief Minister Dr. Kamat has requested public support for this suggestion and it is incumbent on all of us to support this suggestion and ensure that it gets converted from an idea to solid fact. This column today, seeks to be not just a public show of support for Dr. Kamat’s stellar suggestion, but a request to all those who may read this column to send emails of support to the Chief Minister’s email id and ensure that the proposal is converted to reality.

There are a number of reasons why this proposal must be supported wholeheartedly. The organization of recent IFFI has been disappointing to say the least. Rather than an occasion to reflect on the messages that film can and do generate, the focus seems to be on creating a hedonistic bubble where movie stars can be feted. Where a number of Goans believed that the arrival of IFFI would contribute to the intellectual and cultural life of ordinary Goans, we have been disappointed to see that rather that critical world cinema, it is Hindi potboilers that have been dished out to the Goan public as a part of the festival. To theme the IFFI in the manner Dr. Kamat suggests would perhaps reorient the Entertainment Society of Goa (ESG), the local organizers of the IFFI to ensure it contributes to an enhancing the referents for local cultural articulations.

But Dr. Kamat’s suggestion has value beyond the limited scope of a renewal of the possibilities of the IFFI. Some weeks ago a Coimbra based researcher remarked that there was an almost eerie silence, both in Portugal and in Goa as regards the fact that the year 2010 marks 500 years since the formal establishment of the Portuguese State in Goa. Kamat seems to underscore this fact and points that this event that inaugurated the long durée of colonialism in Asia deserves some reflection. Kamat’s suggestion is wonderfully nuanced in that is skips over the polemics that often govern this field to nudge us in the direction of recognizing that colonialism and the struggles that challenge it did not end with formal decolonization. The colonial relationship has been continued, if not renewed, under the aegis of the national states that were left behind by the colonial regimes. It is because these national states fail to mirror the desires of substantial sections of its people that popular movements of discontent plague these post-colonial states across the world. India is but one of those states.

Dr. Kamat further nuances our appreciation of the moment of 2010 and its possible commemoration by pointing out the double significance of the year, a century since 1910 when formal citizenship rights were definitively extended and claimed by a wide variety of Goans. In doing so, he once more eases us out of nationalist jingoism, to make sure our focus is on the rights of peoples, rather than some nationalist one-upmanship. The point of the commemoration of 2010 is not about Portugal, or India, it is about focusing on the need for the recognition of the rights of people.

Dr. Kamat’s suggestion is rather daring in that it challenges both the Goan and Indian state to display its true commitment to democracy. By inviting Arundhati Roy he argues, ‘the government and state of Goa would be able to demonstrate that the most dissenting voice is given a public platform in this state and we're not a ‘failed democracy’. In so doing, Kamat rightly points out that democracy is sustained not by quinquennial elections, but in fact only by ‘our own willingness to welcome dissent and dissenters’.

As wonderful as his suggestion is however, it is possible that it has come a little too late in the day for the IFFI 2010. This should however not dampen our spirits. By a queer twist of history, the year 2010 melts into the year 2011, the latter marking fifty years of the end of the Portuguese State in India. If 1510 opened a new chapter in global history, and 1910 opened new possibilities for the Goan, then so did 1961. If we cannot get the IFFI to focus on colonialism and peoples’ struggles in 2010, then 2011 would be just as well. If however the organizers of the IFFI refuse to comply, then there is nothing that should stop the people of Goa from organizing their own festival in which they could commemorate the dates that are significant not just to their own history, but the global history of colonialism and peoples’ rights. There is a precedent here in the actions of the Ganv Ghor Rakhon Manch who in 2008 organized parallel to the IFFI, the Goan Peoples’ Film Festival. Organized in a remarkably short time, the festival managed to attract some attention and international support. There is no reason why this story should not be repeated, with Arundhati in attendance, in 2010. One hopes however that the Goan government will take Dr. Kamat’s suggestion seriously. In doing so it would redress the unjustified silence in marking 2010, it would reorient the IFFI to make it more meaningful than just a bash for national and international film stars. In this latter aspect, this reorientation would only add to the prestige of the IFFI, and simultaneously enrich the cultural lives of the Goan people, which is the primary reason why some of us welcome the IFFI in Goa.

Thank you Dr. Kamat, and all power to your suggestion. As for you dear Reader, remember your emails to the Chief Minister!

(First published in the Gomantak Times, 23 June 2010)