Divining reasons for the state of traffic

Last Christmas season my family and I fled tourist-invaded Goa for some peace and quiet. Little did we realize, despite friendly advice, that our destination, Sri Lanka, was also one of those holiday favourites that gets flooded at Christmas time. Along the five days that we were on the island, in addition to experiencing the incredible beauty of the country, we were also forced to spend much of our time in traffic jams, whether in the capital city Colombo, in Kandy, home of the famous Temple of the Tooth, or on the roads between these two cities.

I had been to the island-state some years prior to this family holiday, and I am sure that the country I witnessed was entirely different in terms of the amount of traffic that one experienced. If anything, my journeys then were experiences of smooth flows from one destination to another. It appears that the end of the decades-long civil war may have released extra income into the economy creating the kind of spurt in traffic that one witnessed on my last trip.

Yet, despite the fact that we spent a good amount of time in traffic jams our experience of traffic in Sri Lanka was not the same as that in India, and/or Goa. A traffic jam in India is an occasion for tons of honking and attempts by individuals to cut through the traffic jam by getting onto the opposite lane and charging to the head of the line. Others follow the lead of the first offender which ensures that within a matter of minutes the jam has been complicated beyond imagining and that instead of two lanes, one has multiple lanes, tempers rise and what could have been resolved within a shorter time takes forever to be repaired. 

In the course of the short stay in Sri Lanka my experiences of traffic jams were anything but similar. To begin with traffic jams were the result not of indiscipline, but because of the usual reason for the phenomena, too much traffic on small lanes. Rather than cut across lanes and try to short circuit the system people waited patiently for the traffic to move. It took us a couple of minutes to realize that our experience of the first jam in Sri Lanka was different from what we encountered in India. There was no honking! So strange was the situation that we could just not contain ourselves, and kept repeating this fact, over and over again, to ourselves, and then when we returned home to every one we met.

How can this difference between the road experience in India and Sri Lanka be explained? While in Sri Lanka I did notice that there were clear signs, at least in Colombo, indicating that lane discipline had to be maintained at all time, and the presence of traffic police at regular intervals. Speaking with the driver of the cab we employed we got the sense that the police are invariably on hand to take any offender to task. Responding to our queries he also suggested that it was unlikely that the police would accept bribes from offenders.

In the course of our journey, as we grew close to our driver, he shared much with us about his country. What I would like to focus on, as I try and resolve this question of the traffic discipline in Sri Lanka, is his narratives about the State. He spoke about the health care system that offered free, reliable and dependable service to all Sri Lankans. Trying to build a pattern from all that I had heard from him, I realized that in Sri Lanka the people were assured of an ever present state that was reliable, and dependable. I doubt that the same could be said about India. 

In India, one knows that one cannot rely on the state to maintain the law. The infrastructure of the state is invariably seen as tools to enrich those who gain access to public office. The enforcement of the law is not uniform. Any one in Goa will acknowledge that if one has connections to the officer’s superiors one can get away not only without a fine, but after having insulted the traffic officer. In other words, in India one knows that the state will not look after you, nor will it work to create a level playing ground. You have to look out for yourself in a dog eat dog world. In other words, it is not rules that help you get ahead in India, but the violation of rules, and muscling in on a scene gives you more than waiting patiently in line. The absence of a traffic etiquette in India is therefore the result of a failed state.

In sum, it seems that if there is a difference between traffic behavior in Sri Lanka and India, the reason can be pinned down to the fact that at least at the level of the average citizen, the Sri Lankan state is seen to be a neutral arbiter of rules that are taken seriously, while in India, one knows that the state has abandoned its role and made way for the so-called laws of the jungle to take root.

(A version of this post was first published in The Goan, on 10 April 2016)

Writers, Awards and the Insecure Goan

On the fifteenth of this month a number of Goans awarded by the Central Government came out with a statement wherein they indicated their upset at the spurt in violent attacks in the country. Subsequently, some of the individual members of this group, and a few other awardees made independent statements indicating their upset at the intolerance that was being manifested in the country. All of these Goans awarded by the Sahitya Akademi made statements indicating that they while they would have liked to return their awards, they would in fact not do so just yet. Rather, they would wait to see what the executive committee of the Sahitya Akademi had to say.

There is something quite odd about these Goans’ statements. To not actually return an award, but merely threaten to do so is frankly quite bizarre. After all, if one wants to return the award, one should do so. If one is not going to return the award as yet, one should keep quiet about it, until one actually does so. Contrary to the opinion of the noted lyricist Gulzar, returning an award is not the only option that litterateurs have to protest. As wielders of the pen, they can essay articles, issue press statements, script plays of protest, before they actually get down to returning the symbolic honour that has been bestowed on them. To threaten to return their awards, therefore, seems not only presumptuous, but in fact craven.

Rather than coming across as an act of moral uprightness, the statements of these Nagari Konkani writers comes across as cowardly. It is as if the Sahitya Akademi award meant too much to them, such that they could not bear to return it. Some would argue that this is not the case; that these writers were influenced by the opinion of Amitav Ghosh who argued that one should not disrespect the institution by returning the award, but take issue with the current leadership of the Akademi. Hence, the route preferred by our Goans, of waiting till the Executive Committee of the Akademi made a statement condemning the murder especially of Prof. Kalbargi.

This is a plausible explanation. However, if one observes the nature of the relationship between the Nagari Konkani writers and the Sahitya Akademi as a representative of the Indian nation, one realises that there was a reason why these writers would have been susceptible to the Ghosh’s advice in the first place. To explain this relationship, one must make reference to a statement made by Pundalik Naik at the Konkani Rastramanyathay Dis 2008 (Konkani National Recognition Day) organised by the Goa Konkani Akademi (GKA) on 20 August, 2008. At this event Naik, who was then President of the GKA indicated that it was only in 1992, when Konkani was included in the Eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution and recognised as a national language, and when subsequently Konkani in the Nagari script found space in the Indian rupee note, that he felt like he had become a full citizen of the Republic.

One could dismiss this statement as mere rhetoric, but looking at Naik at that moment, I was convinced that it was more than rhetoric. Naik was making an honest representation of his sensations at the time. It struck me then that the fact that Naik, possibly representative of many Nagari writers, felt like a full citizen of India only in 1992, when in fact Goa had been integrated into India way back in 1961 was indicative of a profound sense of insecurity about one’s identity of belonging to the Indian nation. Having been thus alerted, I realised that the history of the interventions of this Nagari writers can be read as evidence of their insecurity as to whether they belong or not. This insecurity can explain the vehemence with which many of them have launched themselves against both Konkani in the Roman script, as well as the demands that English be recognised as a state-supported medium of instruction. Given that until 1987 it was Konkani in the Roman script that defined Konkani in Goa, they were keen that a script that is perceived as foreign by some benighted Indians not be the mill-stone that prevents them for participating in Indian nationalism.

This kind of insecurity is evidenced not only by the Nagari writers, but a variety of others as well. Take the full scale destruction of Goan temples that have taken place since Goa’s integration into India. Temples in the peculiar Goan style have made way for structures of dubious aesthetic merit that are seen as more in keeping with styles that are seen as properly Indian.

A similar anxiety is evidenced among (Indian) nationalistically inclined Catholics as well. They go out of their way to provide Sanskritic names for their children, eschew English, or Portuguese, make a fetish about educating them in Konkani, ask their wives to wear saris.

Given that the awardees from Goa were among the only group in the country to threaten to return their awards, one can suggest that there is some unique about the Goan condition that allowed for this situation. I would argue that these writers were loath to return these awards because they are insecure about their Indian identity, and see these awards are assurances that the Indian nation recognises them as one of their own. If this is true, then the situation is highly unfortunate and merely a statement of the impossibility of the Goan ever being fully Indian.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 30 Oct 2015)

What Amitav Ghosh can teach us

While a number of litterateurs across India were making a symbolic protest against the rising intolerance in India under the Modi regime by returning their awards from the Sahitya Akademi, a bunch of Sahitya Akademi award winners from Goa, along with two Padmashri awardees, made a very odd statement.  On the fifteenth of October these persons made a statement indicating that “[s]ome of us wanted to return the awards but we have withheld the decision in view of Sahitya Akademi’s incoming Executive Council meeting where the Akademi is hopefully expected to condemn the cultural talibanism in the country.”

This seems like a bizarre statement. First, rather than mention Hindutva violence, they refer to the Taliban. Further, as I have discussed elsewhere some of these notables themselves have been associated with Hindutva violence.  But most bizarre of all is their announcement of an intention to return the awards. After all, if you want to return your award and make a point about the scuttling of various freedoms in contemporary India and the threat of a breakdown of law and order, one should do so. To indicate that we would like to, but will not, because we expect the Executive Council to issue a statement seems bizarre at best. One gets the sense that these awardees may have slipped down a rabbit hole to Wonderland.

If one looks at their company, however, one realises that these notables from Goa may have acquiesced to the logic of Amitva Ghosh, who as a result of his part-time residence in Goa seems to have integrated into some of the local literary circuits. In interventions in the Indian Express and Scroll.in, Ghosh made it very clear that while he is appreciative of the actions of those who returned their awards to the Sahitya Akademi, he himself will not follow suit. Ghosh suggests that outrage “should be directed at the present leadership of the Sahitya Akademi rather than the institution as such.” Ghosh articulates that there was a time when the Sahitya Akademi was held in greater esteem, that there have been presidents and office-bearers of the institution who would have protested vociferously against the current political climate in the country, and “that to return the award now would be more than an expression of outrage at the Sahitya Akademi’s current leadership: it would amount to a repudiation of the institution’s history.”

Does Ghosh have a point? Is the problem merely with the current leadership of the Akademi, and by extension with Modi, or is it possible that there are larger problems with the Sahitya Akademi itself and the project of the Indian nation-state?

The Sahitya Akademi was instituted in 1954, when the Indian nation-state was still young, and there was a need to assert cultural homogeneity in the country, and a need to assert uniformity within regional literary cultures. This agenda may look innocent, and indeed the institution may have awarded and promoted literature and critical litterateurs, but this is but one side of the story.  Linguistic development in colonial South Asia was critically tied to orientalist ideologies. This ensured that it was dominant-caste forms of South Asian language that came to be recognized as the forms deserving of becoming the standard. Consequently, language forms of the marginalized caste groups, and their speakers, were actively disparaged in the process of standardisation.  To this extent, the post-Mandal challenge regarding the meaning of merit, needs to be levelled against the works that the Akademi awards.

This modus operandi of the Akademi is eminently visible in the case of the Konkani language. If one has a look at the list of those who have been awarded for production in the Konkani language one is confronted by a long list of almost exclusively Brahmin names. Further, as many Konkani litterateurs will testify, despite the fact that the Konkani language is written in five scripts, it is only the Nagari form of the language that has merited awards, despite extensive or greater production in the Roman script and the Kannada scripts. These choices have as much to do with the privileging of upper-caste forms of language that is dominant in India, as with the casteist politics that has dominated the sphere of the Konkani language. Since at least 1987, when Konkani in the Nagari script alone was recognized as the official language of Goa, the language, and its speakers, not just in Goa, but also in the other states where it is spoken, have been held hostage by the assertions of the Saraswat caste and allied individuals who seek to convert Konkani into a brahmanical language. This has meant privileging the Antruzi form spoken by Saraswats in Goa, linking it with Sanskrit, and Aryan heritage, and also tying it to the Nagari script. This has meant that the peculiar history of the language, where it was first produced and popularized through missionary efforts since the sixteenth century, and subsequently given form through the lyrics, poems, and plays of laboring caste Catholics have been ignored entirely. In fact, until the mid-twentieth century, Konkani was seen largely asa language of laboring Catholics, and disparaged both by Hindu brahmins and upper-caste Catholics in Goa. Despite these facts, the Konkani committee of the Sahitya Akademi has been party to the attempt to destroy the language form in the Roman script in Goa.These facts are not extraneous to the question I pose to Ghosh’s argument, since it is with these persons that, either consciously, or unconsciously, Ghosh has combined with in Goa.

The point is that these politics are not an aberration from the Indian norm. Ghosh may think otherwise, and indeed, many of those returning their awards, like Ashok Vajpeyi, also seem to think that India stands for a liberal tradition of tolerance and acceptance. If anything, however, this image of India is a myth created in a large part by upper castes groups, and especially Hindu upper-caste groups who dominated Nehruvian India.

A view from the perspective of the many marginalized groups within the country, whether caste, ethnicities, or religions, would suggest a less tolerant India. For these groups, it appears that the problem may not be the current political dispensation, as much as the ‘idea of India’ itself, a country created to satisfy the desires of dominant castes across the subcontinent, and united through varying degrees of Hindu nationalism.

When Ghosh suggests, therefore, that it is merely the current dispensation of the Sahitya Akademi that is the problem he is merely speaking from the position of the Indian nationalist, refusing to see, and in the process preventing an exposure of, the deeper rot. Merely blaming the Modi government is simply not going to resolve the tensions that we are witness to today. These tensions have been building up since the start of Indian independence. In other words, the problems lies with the project of the Indian nation-state itself. This is, of course, not surprising, given that, as I have pointed out in an earlier observation on Ghosh's statements, that Ghosh speaks, and indeed writes, from a position of the imperial Indian. An India that would like to speak for the rest of the global south, even as more fundamental issues, like that of internal equity, are left unattended. Take, for example, his interview with the magazine Guernica, where he suggested "one of the wonderfully liberating things about India; it lets you be exactly who you want to be." This would be more than a bad joke for the many marginalized groups in India for whom their very non-Hindu and/ or non-upper caste identity is the reason for quotidian violence.

(A version of this post was first published in Round Table India on 22 October 2015)

Scoring Beef, Underscoring Banal Hindutva: The Limits of MTV’s activism

Recently, MTV India released a video that on the face of it is a statement of resistance to the ban on beef lately legislated in Maharashtra. While the video is well-intentioned, and adds another voice to the chorus of protests, rather than offering a radical resistance to the fascist moves of the Indian state, it merely re-inscribes the banal Hindutva of quotidian Indian life. By banal Hindutva I mean the kind of common sense that animates daily life and which, despite its serious implications, is seen as unproblematic. Further, rather than offering a politics that privileges livelihoods, the video restricts the frame of the debate to a politics of consumerism. This article will unpack the underlying assumptions of the video and point to its various problems.

The video commences with a scene in which a nervous young man makes a phone call to a “dealer.” The word he uses, maal (goods), suggests that he is speaking with a trafficker of hashish or marijuana. The dealer proposes a meeting, where the trade of maal for money will be made. Subsequent to the rendezvous and the successful transaction, the video returns us to the home of the boys to reveal that the trade was not of hashish, but beef.  The video ends with a scene of three young men savouring sandwiches that they have made with the clandestinely purchased beef kebabs. The video has become extremely popular, gaining 254,086 views and 6,787 shares via Facebook at the time when this article was written. The popularity of the video apparently lies in the manner in which the circumstances normal to a transaction for hashish, a prohibited narcotic, are superimposed on to what should be a regular transaction for purchasing food.

The video makes a smashing case of lampooning how the state of Maharashtra has criminalised what should be an unproblematic act of purchasing food. By having the young man asks for beef cooked in the manner as prevalent in Goa, Kashmir, Hyderabad, the video also does an excellent job of identifying the locations that present a challenge to the attempt to create India as a Hindu homeland. However, there is much more to the ban on beef in Maharashtra than the issue of consuming and enjoying beef. Indeed, the first problem with the video is that despite being conscious of the livelihood issues involved in the case of the ban, the producers reduce the issue to that of middle class consumption. In other words, the only right that the video celebrates is the right of the middle class to consumption and enjoyment. The issue therefore is not of the violation of citizenship rights, but a violation of the right to consume; a rather narrow neo-liberal frame.  All of this is very much in keeping with my casual observations of social media, where most of the outrage seems to have emerged from the fact that these upper class and upper caste consumers will not be able to enjoy their steak, privileging their gustatory pleasures rather than the livelihoods of those involved in the production of beef.

The video very clearly marks out the caste, class, and sectarian identities of the actors in the transaction. The boy who makes the call for beef is marked out by his wearing a kadaa –steel bangle- on his forearm. Another wears a sacred string on his wrist. These objects, along with the kind of Hindi they speak, identify them as Hindus from north Indian. The presence of posters of Che Guevara, Bob Marley and laptops, suggests that these young men are upper middle class students in the city of Bombay. It needs to be highlighted that the entire video is shot from the perspective of these young men, i.e. of upper middle class North Indian Hindus. One can understand that this choice was perhaps a deliberate design of the producers of the video, given that it makes the clear point that it is not just the minoritised groups of India (Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, Christian) who eat beef but upper caste Hindus as well. In ensuring the centrality of these Hindu figures, however, what the video unwittingly does is efface these other groups and re-inscribe the centrality of the upper caste North Indian male in the India project.

In making this choice of protagonists, the video furthers the politics that privilege taste and consumerism alone. Given that the demand for beef emerges from young students living outside of parental supervision, what it does is reduce the case of the consumption of beef to one of taste, that too a possibly guilty pleasure. While many Hindus do consume beef, this consumption is often done surreptitiously, outside the home, and often as an act of rebellion against familial values. Indeed, such dominant caste Hindu consumers of beef are known to ensure that a ban on beef is enforced when marginalised groups demand space for beef in public kitchens. While these circumstances may mark Hindu upper caste life, this is not the case for all citizens of India. The demand for beef is not guided by the need for cheap protein alone; it is also guided by the fact that in addition to providing a cheap source of protein, this food type is a defining feature of the identity of many groups. For Catholics from Goa, Mangalore, or Kerala, for example, the various ways in beef can be cooked is a part of their identity. For these groups, beef is not a surreptitious food to be consumed outside of the home. On the contrary, it is linked to fond familial and communal memories. This right to identity has been neatly effaced in the video.

If one were to try to dismiss the proposed reading of the video, one could argue that the kadaa is not worn by Hindus but essentially by Sikhs, that the sacred string is also worn by visitors to Sufi shrines, and that the third man is unmarked by any religious symbol. However, as much scholarship has demonstrated, this is precisely the way in which the ideal urban upper caste North Indian Hindu is represented without any sectarian markings. This representation is possible because all other groups are invariably identified by their sectarian symbols. In the case of the video, this contrast is starkly effected by burdening the figure of the dealer in beef with multiple symbols of Indian Islam.

The video very clearly marks out the dealer as a working class Muslim. The young man making the call clearly identifies the dealer as Mustaq bhai. This Mustaq is shown wearing an amulet around his neck, sitting in front of a kitschy poster with various symbols of Islam common in many working class Muslim establishments. Further, his class location is marked by the way he touches and adjusts his genitalia in public upon arriving at the rendezvous. In marking this identity, the video clearly plays to the popular imagination of Muslims as producers of beef. Once again, the reality of the production of beef is much more complex. It is not just those who are denominationally classed as Muslim, but also those classified as Hindu, and others, who are involved in this production. In fact, the image of the Muslim as butcher and cow killer was one of the foundational symbols that allowed early upper caste nationalists to mobilize a Hindu community around the symbol of a sacralised cow as mother and deity.

Despite this complexity, the video chooses to represent a Muslim as the dealer in beef. In doing so, rather than contesting the politics of aggressive Hindutva embodied in the ban, the video underlines the banal Hindutva that sees Muslims as butchers. Further, in giving the character of Mustaq the title bhai, placing the Muslim in the role of the dealer of a prohibited substance, the video draws on a criminal history of Bombay; i.e. the presence of gang lords some of who, such as Dawood Ibrahim and Chotta Shakeel, happened to be Muslim. Bollywood played its role in convincing the Indian populace that such men are addressed as bhai. As a result of this link, the only representational space that is offered to Mustaq is that of someone who exists outside the law, not because he is forced to do so by the existence of a law, and state practice, but because this is the way that he prefers it. The video from MTV makes sense only because it employs these multiple notions of the Muslim as deviant, and disrespectful of the normative culture of the Indian state.

This nexus between deviance and anti-national behaviour is compounded by the fact that the video lingers on the fact that the kebabs are wrapped in an Urdu newspaper. There is a long history of strains of Indian nationalism projecting Urdu as a Muslim language. Once again, rather than challenge the problematic assumptions of banal Hindutva, the video only reinforces these assumptions that have led not only to the near-death of the Urdu language but the very real killing and brutalising of thousands of Muslims in the country.

Viewed in light of this discussion, it appears that contrary to appearances, the video seeks not so much to protest as to generate laughs. While humour can very often be an effective tool of resistance, perhaps the case of the banning of beef requires more than just the generation of laughs. Further, if we are to ensure that the foundational violence of our societies is not reproduced, the route through which humour is generated must also be given serious thought. No such awareness seems to feature in the video.

In choosing to make the transaction between a Hindu and a Muslim, the video follows the time-tested politics of Indian secularism, and communalism, where the central crisis of the country is seen as the need to manage relations between these two groups. These groups are presented as if they are without internal diversity, and as if other groups do not exist. Thus, if broken down to basics, in presenting urbanised upper caste North Indian as protagonists, the video effaces the presence of a variety of non-Hindu groups, and uses the figure of the Muslim only as a criminal making a quick buck. While there is no clear assertion of a revolutionary figure in the video, the mere fact that the plot follows the desires of these young men seems to suggest that in violating a bizarre law, they are the proto-revolutionaries of our age. This proto-revolutionary possibility is underlined by the overwhelming presence of images of Che Guevara and Bob Marley in their room. Once again, therefore, we are back in the realm of the Hindu upper caste subject as the revolutionary who leads India to justice. Banal Hindutva is never far from asserting the centrality of the Hindu to the Indian national project.

To wrap up this discussion, the video suggests that in the case of the ban on beef, livelihoods are not an issue; after all, the Muslim seems to take to operating in a black market in his stride and without any problem. Thus, the video perpetuates an idea of Muslim criminality. The emphasis is on the upper caste, class and Hindu enjoyment of the meat. While MTV probably thinks it is being radical in making a statement about Hindus wanting beef, it fails to realise that it is re-inscribing the centrality of the Hindu to the Indian state. In sum, what MTV offers is a politics of consumerism, rather than a politics of economic and cultural security.

Before I conclude there is one last argument that I would like to make. I received a number of responses to the initial critique of the video that I posted on Facebook. One response read, “You are over-thinking the issue! It is only a video from MTV!” I suspect that this article will now receive many similar responses. My argument should not be seen as a dismissal of the video, but an attempt to demonstrate the limits of neo liberal activism, and extant secular liberal politics in India. I would argue that it is precisely because the video is from MTV that it reveals to us the common sense of dominant segments of Indian society, i.e. urbanised, upper middle class and upper caste Indians. The howls of protest would also indicate that we live in a society that is not only incapable of appreciating, but opposed to, deep readings of narratives. We prefer to remain at the level of the immediate. I am not arguing that the reading that this article provides is the only possible interpretation of the video. On the contrary, a number of readings are possible. What bothers me is the response that seems to demand a simplistic take on life and suggests that there is nothing more to the video than what appears superficially. In other words, we are faced with the insistence that we dumb down the debate and prevent alternative readings. It is this popular demand for censorship that is most worrying and indeed provides the basis for the rise of fascism in contemporary India. At the end of the day, it is this refusal to develop complex readings of our society, history and politics that marks banal Hindutva, and is allowing for the contemporary emergence of aggressive Hindutva embodied in the ban on the production and sale of beef.

(A version of this post was first published in DNA India on 15 April 2015)