Book Review Pages
The Kathmandu Post Review of Books
Vol. 3, No. 9
Issue Coordinator: Mary Des Chene
Martin Chautari for
CSRD and The Kathmandu Post
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Essay
Reviews
- Geographical Thought (R.D. Dikshit)
- We Sinful Women: Contemporary Feminist Urdu Poetry (ed. & transl. Rukhsana Ahmad)
- Calcutta Chromosome (Amitav Ghosh)
CTBT Bogey: Red Herring of Nuclear Nationalism
Anand Patwardhan
In recent times one of the few issues to have united left and right, secular and fundamentalist, is the understanding that India must refuse to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). As the CTBT appears to favour those who have already amassed and tested their atomic devices (the USA, UK, France, Russia and China) over newer aspirants of the nuclear club ( India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, Iraq and other threshold nuclear powers), anybody who argues in favour of its signing is branded as an American stooge.
Perhaps some anti-imperialist credentials, whatever these are worth today, are in order. For one thing, I must be one of a handful of Indian citizens to have spent time in an American prison for the act of opposing America's military policy.
In 1970 as a student in Boston, I became a part of the anti-Vietnam War movement and was arrested for peacefully protesting the war. We blocked traffic outside the gates of Raytheon Corporation known to be a manufacturer of deadly anti-personnel weapons such as grenades filled with plastic pellets that could not be detected by an X-ray machine.
In April 1971, during a peace march to Washington DC which culminated in war veterans throwing their medals back at the Pentagon, I was part of a 200 strong group that linked arms and marched towards police barricades. We were beaten, gassed, and finally arrested and charged with attempting to "break police lines". As a non-white and a non-US citizen I was singled out for special treatment, stripped, searched and abused. The authorities noted my passport and visa number and threatened to send me back "where I came from".
The camaraderie that formed between the protesters over the next few days in custody was worth it all. I got to meet many anti-imperialist Americans. One was Dave Dellinger, a long term pacifist who had been the prime accused in the Chicago 8 Trial along with Abbie Hoffman and the Black Panther, Bobby Seale. Another was a much loved author of child-care books, the eighty year old Dr. Benjamin Spock. My sociology professor was amongst those arrested. I graduated, spent a further six months working with Mexican immigrant workers ( Cesar Chavez's United Farmworkers Union ) and returned to India.
This was meant to be a brief preamble to my CTBT argument, but perhaps it is just as well that I spelt out where I am coming from and why I cannot divide the world into pro and anti-American, or pro and anti-Indian or Pakistani. Today the counterparts of Vajpayee, Advani, Fernandes, and Abdul Kalam are being felicitated in Pakistan while brave voices of peace and dissent continue to speak out for sanity in both countries.
It is true that the CTBT is not fully satisfactory because the big powers escaped the chance and the responsibility of declaring a time bound schedule for total nuclear disarmament. But in that it says "Thus far and no further" with regards to nuclear testing, the CTBT applies to all nations equally. It could have been better than a mere test ban treaty, but it is still a necessary but not sufficient first step. To reject it is to reject a consensus that was arrived at with great difficulty at a time when the nuclear clock is ticking.
There are plenty of nuclear hawks in America like Jesse Helms and other lobbyists of the military-industrial complex who have always opposed America's signing of the CTBT. Republican leader Newt Gingrich's support for the Indian tests may have come from such an agenda. They would not only like to see America resume testing, they would like to keep selling American military and nuclear technology in the markets of the world. Tragically India would emulate such "greatness". There was no more shameful aftermath of the Indian nuclear tests than an announcement by Defense Minister Fernandes (it is useless to dwell on the fact that in 1974 this man was an opponent of the Pokhran test ) that defense technology would now be shared with private industry to create opportunities for nuclear exports!
CTBT then is not an American plot but a multi-lateral agreement signed by all the countries approached other than India and Pakistan. And Pakistan has long stated that if India signs, so will Pakistan. Indeed if India and Pakistan do not sign, given that the treaty is dependent on full consensus and not on a vote, the treaty will become null and void, fuelling another international arms race. So Greenpeace, an organization that has long fought against American, French and other nuclear weapons and tests believes CTBT to be a necessary but not sufficient first step. The Hibakusha (Japanese victims of the American atomic bombs) believe the same. Hopefully no one in their right mind will accuse the Hibakusha of being pro-American.
The BJP and the Hindutva brigade have used machismo and nuclear nationalism as a passport to power. This is not forgivable, but it is consistent and predictable. Their whole existence is predicated on recreating a hated "other" and their self-esteem depends on delusions of greatness and a rejection of the "effeminate" and the "debilitating".
What of the secular and Left forces? They have raised their voice against weaponization but the fact is that if the Indian government had signed the CTBT last year (before the BJP came to power) , Pakistan would have been forced to follow suit and our region and the world would have been ten tests safer. Unfortunately the Indian Left which could have influenced Prime Minister Gujral to sign CTBT, did the opposite, perhaps because the Left did not want to be left behind on the "nationalist" bandwagon but primarily because nuclear weapons are seen as a tactical rather than ethical issue. This preference of the "materialist" over the moral overlooks the fact that most of us began to identify with the Left precisely out of a moral conviction, to make the world more just, more peaceful and more humane.
The Hibakusha have no such ambivalence. They know what the bomb does. They know that nuclear weapons are not bargaining chips. You cannot say no to other nations' nukes if you have your own.
America is the only nation in the world to have used weapons that no human has the right to use. America continues to be the biggest weapons-monger in the world, nuclear and otherwise. Yes the Americans have no right to lecture us. But we should not need a lecture to know what every child knows, indeed what Vajpayee knew when he was a child, what Fernandes knew in his youth. Opposition to weapons of mass destruction cannot be a matter of tactics. It is an ethical imperative without which we cannot but betray the human race. Let us disarm unilaterally. Without waiting for America. Without waiting for China and Pakistan. In the present atmosphere of nuclear nationalism it will take courage to revive the spirit and language of internationalism. Anti-nuclear people of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our bombs. And a world to gain.
How much cleaner the air already feels as we utter these words.
(Anand Patwardhan is a documentary filmmaker. This essay was written in early July during his efforts to organize South Asia-wide protests on 6 August against a nuclearized sub-continent, while commemorating the victims of America's atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In Kathmandu, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Nepal took up his call).
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Geographical Thought: A Contextual History of Ideas
Author: R. D. Dikshit
Publisher: Prentice Hall of India Private Limited, New Delhi, 1997
Price: IRs. 175
History of Geography
C K Lal
"Chunder Seekur Opedeea", Agent on the part of the "Rajah of Nipal", who handed over the Treaty of "Sugaulee" to Ochterlony, Agent of the Governor General of the East India Company, must have been a learned man to have been entrusted with such an important task. However, he evidently had not recognized the importance of either geography or history. Geography would have told him to be precise about the location of Kali and history would have warned him to be wary of a treaty drafted by the stronger party to establish and perpetuate its hold over the weaker one. Had he done that, King Mahendra's concession to the Indian Army could not have been construed as submission and it would not have resulted in the continued occupation of a part of Nepal by that army. A sound case to ground our policy makers in geosophy. If some of them need to make a beginning, Prof. R. D. Diksit's new book is an exceedingly well compiled primer.
For the definition of geosophy, Dikshit turns to J. K. Wright who regarded the subject to be "to geography what historiography is to history, it deals with the nature and expression of geographical knowledge, both past and present--with what Whittlesey called 'Man's sense of territorial space'". The discipline also deals with "geographical ideas both true and false held by all manner of people, accounting for human desires, motives and prejudices". Extending this line of thought, W. Zelinsky demands that a geographer must be involved as a diagnostician, forecaster, and an architect who could present the blueprints for achievement of the preferred future. One may not agree to this all-encompassing role for a geographer, but a study of geographical ideas through the ages makes one appreciate the strength behind this seemingly audacious argument.
More than the depth, it's the breadth of scholarship in this book that is truly breath-taking. Even though billed as a textbook by the publishers, it's an attempt by the author to appreciate the vastness of the area of study undertaken by him. Consequently, what readers get of the great geographical ideas is merely a taste; for their fill they'll have to go back to the originals themselves. Diskhit leafs through history till the 18th century for geographical ideas and decides to build upon the philosophical contributions of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Thereafter, his path demarcated by chorology (space) on one side and, on the other, by chronology (history), he takes readers on an exciting tour of ideas, deftly guiding them through the maze of theories and the milestones in Physical Geography, Spatial Analysis, Humanistic Geography, Political Economy of Geography, Regional Analysis, Historical Explanations, Ecological Thoughts, Environmentalism, Human Geography, Geography of Gender and Post-Modernism before bringing them back to the holistic view of the subject propounded by old Greek masters. The tour is a journey of discovery and Dikshit is a competent, even if sometimes dull, guide for this exploration.
The book can perhaps be summed up in one sentence of the author, "More recently, the emerging convergence between historical geographers and social and economic historians and historical anthropologists on the one hand, and between historical geographers and palaeobotanists, historical climatologists, and archaeologists on the other, has been... a major source of interdisciplinary integration, evidenced by the increasing methodological convergence between historical geography and the rest of the subject, as also general recognition given by geographers to the important role played by historical specificity in the explanation and understanding of problems of human geography". However, as you must realize, one needs to read the whole book to take the impact of that one sentence.
The book sparkles with luminous quotes that throw an entirely new light upon old ideas. For example, it puts Collingwood's claim that all history is history of thought up against Marx's adage that all history is history of class struggle and then pits them together against the view of geographer Samuels that, "The history of mankind is ... always a geography of man's search for roots. The first man is, as it were, the man who invented a boundary to delimit his place, and human history is, therefore, a history of boundary-making, maintaining and changing". Do you still wonder why our Crown Prince Dipendra chose geography as his field of study? In the realm of historical geography, insists Harris, "There is no useful disciplinary line separating present from past, space from time". Such a subject would be indispensable to any one keen upon understanding human civilization.
Readers would be well advised not to rush through this book. An academic work, it is meant to be studied, not read. The effort is rewarding as one listens to the masters down the ages speaking through an interpreter who clearly knows the language and is a fellow student of the subject. Dikshit knows the road, has some idea about the destination that often proves to be another beginning, and enjoys the journey along with the readers. How often does one come across such efforts at humanizing knowledge?
Professional geographers are not the only ones who stand to benefit from this book. Perhaps it would be of equal use, if not more, to any scholar engaged in interdisciplinary studies. The volume would have been immensely more interesting had some thoughts of Eastern thinkers been included in it. Then the relatively cursory overview treatment meted out to Economic Geography annoys. Settlement Geography gets even less attention and Planning Geography barely a mention. Although no book can be comprehensive on any subject, one expected an introduction to these ideas of far reaching implications in a venture as ambitious as compiling a contextual history of ideas in geographical thought.
Lastly, remember that it's the work of an academician and a specialist aimed at an audience mature enough for the force of sometimes raw ideas. The language is no Archer, nor the flow of narrative that of Michener. The book needs effort but the view from the peak, once reached, is breathtaking and well worth every drop of sweat generated in reaching there. Marx insisted that we must always be aware of the historicity of our conceptual constructions. Paying attention to geosophy would take us far in that regard.
(C. K. Lal would like to believe that he is a student of interdisciplinary studies)
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We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry.
Translator and editor: Rukhsana Ahmad.
Publisher: The Women's Press, London, 1991
Challenging the Canon: Urdu Feminist Poetry
Carla Petievich
This collection, published first in Pakistan as Beyond Belief (ASR, Lahore 1990), will be of interest to any reader of contemporary South Asian feminist writing as well as those more specifically interested in Urdu literature or progressive poetry. In an informative and accessible introduction, the editor-translator boldly asserts her belief that "the most innovative, the most radical and the most interesting poetry of our time is being produced by women" in a literary tradition that is "male dominated and devoted to the past". These may prove to be fighting words, as even the token acceptance granted to feminist criticism in the academy during the past decade has yet to be manifest in the world of Urdu letters where publishers, critics and patrons still tend overwhelmingly to be male. Readers will judge for themselves whether they agree with Rukhsana Ahmad's assertions, but all should be glad of the opportunity she has afforded us by bringing together for the first time these 51 poems by 7 modern female poets.
The volume suggests an alternative literary canon, comprised of poets whose work represents "brave departures from that [male dominated] literary tradition [devoted to the past]". Readers will not be surprised to find represented here such famous writers as Kishwar Naheed and Fahmida Riyaz (indeed their selections comprise about half the volume, and the title itself is taken from one of Naheed's acclaimed poems). Kishwar Naheed and Fahmida Riyaz are undoubtedly the two best known female names in modern Urdu poetry, and even a casual dabbler on the scene will probably have been exposed to both, repeatedly. Their fame in no way compromises their credentials for inclusion in this volume, for both have consistently written woman-centered poetry over some thirty years. Furthermore, both are responsible for establishing an authentic female voice--a voice of feminine desire--within Urdu poetry while casting their nets far beyond the prescribed concerns of gender-segregated "female" realms to include, for example, contemporary Pakistani electoral, legal and linguistic politics.
Indeed, the editor poses anti-sexist values and social content explicitly as criteria for feminist writing in Urdu. In her explanation of why such a beloved poet as Parveen Shakir is absent from We Sinful Women, she writes that "the acceptance of sexist values and the absence of a social context makes [Shakir's] writing distinctively un-feminist". This explanation underlines another major contribution of the volume, one that is long overdue in Urdu literature: the exercise of a critical distinction between feminist writing and any work by a female writer.
At the centre of this collection are three poems by Sara Shagufta which constitute a call to arms grounded in articulate rage. Their focus on mothers, daughters, and the isolation of being a woman identify the logical base from which to launch feminist struggle. Tragically, the call came too late for the poet herself, who committed suicide at an early age, "deeply pained by the indifference of a chauvinistic poet husband who was surrounded by 'critics/friends' ready to deride her work". A complement to Shagufta can be found in Ishrat Aafreen, whose first volume of poetry heralded the arrival of a young, vigorously intellectual, perhaps neo-traditional (?) poet. Aafreen, who hasn't published since her marriage, writes such direct and piercing lines as:
| Mera qad mere baap se uncha nikla aur meri maa jeet gayi |
I grew Taller than my father And my mother won |
Ahmad points out that the best-accepted female poets tend to be those who conform both to socio-political norms of gender identity and the literary tradition. As someone who puts little faith in the notion that those voices which get heard are a matter of any coincidence, I offer an inverse illustration: I had never before read anything by Saeeda Gazdar. whose powerful nazm "Twelfth of February, 1983" is included here. This long poem expresses fiery protest against the police violence encountered by women in Lahore when took to the streets on that date in opposition to Laws of Evidence curtailing women's status as citizens. Zehra Nigah, on the other hand, writes poetry far less overtly political or expressive of protest, and perhaps less challenging to the status quo. The editor notes that the poems included here "illustrate the pathos of her resignation" to the forces working against feminist writing, and "stay well within the bounds of 'protest' expected and permitted in women's writing from the subcontinent". Zehra Nigah is a much-loved and highly respected poet in Pakistan. Rukhsana Ahmad's point is well taken.
The translations themselves are very competent, and where one might find herself imagining slightly different choices occasionally, they would only join a continuum of legitimate possibilities, rather than claiming to be corrective in any way. Translation is always a matter of choice, and subjective, and we can but applaud the translator who takes the risk of displaying her choices so unguardedly. One also commends her decision to put the Urdu original on the page facing her translation, a welcome convention gaining increased popularity in recent years.
Some of the selections--especially works by Naheed and Riyaz--have appeared in translation before. While one always hopes to increase the volume of Urdu poetry in English translation, Ahmad here makes yet another contribution with her own selection: by putting her own translations up against those of, say, Bedar Bakht (translator of Kishwar Naheed's The Price of Looking Back, Lahore 1987) she affords us the opportunity to engage in a dialogue concerning the nature and implication of translation itself, a subject that is necessarily comparative.
A central concern of both We Sinful Women and this review is that of access and exposure, of canon formation. Who owns Urdu poetry? Whose tradition is it? Who selects and represents it to the outside? Who translates it? What gets translated?
During an interview, Rukhsana Ahmad spoke of this project as having helped to bring her back to her own roots, to a tradition she was losing but is glad to reclaim. The catalyst to undertaking this project was a query from a young British Asian feminist who spoke some Urdu but did not read or write. Her appeal was simple: was there anything in this literature with which she could identify? Were there women poets in Urdu? Is there any tradition of feminism in Pakistan? The fact that she did not know speaks volumes about who and what represent Urdu literature to the non-Urdu world.
By seeking out and presenting the poems in We Sinful Women, and by framing them as she does with her introductory remarks, Rukhsana Ahmad has taken a giant step beyond those who ruefully shake their heads, agree that the tradition--nay, the society itself--is male dominated, and carry on editing and publishing anthologies which neither offer increased representation to women poets, nor indicate that male poets are tackling the problem on their own. It is no exaggeration to say that We Sinful Women represents the first serious attempt to really challenge the modern Urdu canon (anyone proving me wrong will do me the favour of exposing me to more poetry I am keen to read).
An Indian or Nepali edition of this collection would be most welcome. Because of its script and the increasing hazards of communalism in a world where the language is associated so exclusively (and incorrectly) with Muslim culture, Urdu has gradually lost the wider readership its literature enjoyed in the past. But the literary and social concerns evident here reflect very closely those of other literatures across the subcontinent.
(C. Petievich is the author of Assembly of Rivals: Delhi, Lucknow, and the Urdu Ghazal (Manohar, 1992), and many articles on Urdu poetry and the historical politics of Urdu literature).
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The Calcutta Chromosome
Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: Ravi Dayal Publisher, Delhi, 1996
Price: IRs. 190
Malarial Imaginings
Kathryn Hansen
In The Calcutta Chromosome, his fourth novel, Amitav Ghosh takes on a new persona by writing a history of science thriller. With breathtaking agility, he leads his readers on a merry chase between Calcutta, Manhattan, Secunderabad, and Renupur, a remote Bihar village. The romp has a serious side, for at stake is the cure for malaria, one of mankind's most ravaging and unvanquishable diseases. Events pivot around August 20, World Mosquito Day, established in honor of Sir Ronald Ross, the Nobel laureate who discovered that malaria was a mosquito-borne disease. In classic science-fiction fashion, the geographic planes are connected by travel through time, so that the narrative crisscrosses between the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, creating a sort of triple helix. Ghosh drops clues in dizzying succession, challenging the reader to identify the correspondences between characters that will solve the final mystery. If his patterns seem finally to demand computer analysis, his comic vignettes buoy up the book and return solid entertainment.
A bifocal gaze on scientific progress emerges as the principal theme of the novel. Ghosh's fascination with the annals of medicine animates its central pages. Here the focus is the career of Sir Ronald Ross, a poet and gentleman who almost inadvertently becomes a scientist. Sent off to join the Indian Medical Service, Ross gets entangled in the search for the malarial parasite vector. Medicine is at such a primitive stage at the end of the 19th century that malaria is introduced into patients suffering from syphilis to relieve their symptoms. Ross's adventures in the lab are paralleled by the manic quest of L. Murugan, an archivist for an international health organization, who is searching for the "Calcutta chromosome" exactly one hundred years later. This elusive bit of genetic material has the potential, Murugan believes, to transform the human personality and maybe even to extend life.
For both Ross and Murugan, the process of scientific discovery is vexed and fraught with peril. Partly this is due to the limitations and irrational impulses of the scientists themselves, but even more to the fact that they are part of a larger experiment controlled by a higher power. The two quests are lodged within a third time-frame, indeed are visualized with the help of Ava, an all-knowing and all-seeing master computer. In the dystopian world of the 21st century, the progress created by science has run amuck. Computers know the dialects of the world better than their native speakers, and the lives of their operators, like the depressed Antar, are arid wastelands ruled by the clock and Ava's panoptical scrutiny. Humanity still seeks not only for the relief of physical ailment but for liberation of the spirit from the everyday.
Science then is countered in the novel by a fascination with the mystical, the arcane, the hidden. Spiritualists on the model of Madame Blavatsky hold seances in late-Victorian parlors where scientists go into trance. Ross's lab assistants lead double lives as cult figures with strange nighttime rituals. The microscope, tool of discovery, itself becomes a mystical icon, appearing in the hand of a terracotta image at the shrine to Ronald Ross's memory. Delirious visions contribute a hallucinatory quality to the novel's texture, becoming the trajectories for glimpses into the other world. All three protagonists, Ross, Murugan, and Antar are infected with malaria, and during their bouts with fever they experience altered states of consciousness. Extrasensory powers are also associated with the novels' female characters, Tara, Urmila, and Mangala, all of whom contain a secret force that enables their male counterparts to make their discoveries. In this quality, they suggest the great goddess of Hinduism, worshipped as Shakti in Bengal.
A curious subplot concerns a writer named Phulboni, a fictional amalgam of such real-life literary figures as Tagore, Bonophul, and Phanishwarnath Renu. Phulboni on first acquaintance appears on stage at an official award ceremony, delivering a soporific speech on his lifelong pursuit of Silence. Later he gets his comeuppance in the tiny railway station near Renupur, but only after finally communing with the splendid, vast northern Bihar plain at sunset during the monsoon. Phulboni is the subject of the research of Urmila, a young journalist. Her particular interest lies in the "Laakhan stories," written during an early part of the author's career. Laakhan links a number of strands across time and space, transforming into Lutchman, Lachman, Lucky, and a nameless adolescent in a T-shirt throughout the book's pages. Nonetheless Phulboni's purpose in the novel is rather opaque. Is he there as Ghosh's alter ego, or as a signal to the debt Ghosh owes to his literary forebears?
These are only a few of the questions that the reader is likely to pose at the end of this bewildering book. What we have here is a puzzle or anagram rather than a study of character and environment. Although Ghosh borrows from Renu in particular for snatches of regional color, he seems less sure of his language and sense of place than in his earlier fiction. Murugan's monologues in their attempt to mimic a trashy American tone are often unconvincing. Nor can the feel of Calcutta be conjured simply by reciting the map of its urban landscape. Yet if the reader wishes a window into the fevered aspect of Ghosh's imagination, there can be no better starting point than this. The Calcutta Chromosome is recommended as a unique journey into the uncharted domain of Indian science fiction.
(K. Hansen is the author of Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India, and has translated the short stories of Hindi novelist Phanishwarnath Renu.)
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