Day 359: May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons

In 1985, Rajiv Gandhi casually referred to Calcutta as a “dying city” when he responded to a question in Parliament about why most major airlines no longer flew there. This provoked an uproar in Calcutta and an angry demand for a retraction from the state government, which was controlled by one of India’s two Communist parties. The Telegraph, the city’s most literate newspaper, quickly conducted a poll and reported that two thirds of Calcutta’s citizens felt the city was not dying at all but merely “decaying,” a distinction perhaps best appreciated by the residents themselves. In fact, Rajiv Gandhi was only the most recent notable to continue a long tradition of denigrating the city. Rudyard Kipling once referred to Calcutta as “the city of dreadful night” and Winston Churchill, in a letter to his mother, observed, “I shall always be glad to have seen it—namely, that it will be unnecessary for me ever to see it again.”

And yet, I eventually came to love Calcutta, in a complicated, guilt-ridden way. For all of its troubles, Calcutta remained India’s thriving center of culture and thought, the nation’s largest and most alive city, more proud to have been the home of India’s three Nobel laureates than of the merchants and industrialists who had made Calcutta a thriving commercial center at the turn of the century. Once the capital of all of British India and in recent years of the state of West Bengal, the city was a crazy, appealing mishmash of architectural styles. The English imperialists had erected near-replicas of the government buildings they remembered from home. Calcutta’s rich had displayed a weakness for Italianate arches, domes, turrets, pilasters and porticos, and built hundreds of “palaces,” most of them now decrepit but still so romantic that parts of the city looked like a stage set of old Southern mansions from a Tennessee Williams play. Calcutta was also the headquarters for Mother Teresa’s worldwide network serving the poorest of the poor. Every day at her home for the dying, the sisters tended rows of twisted, emaciated forms; in the evening they returned to the simple walled complex known as Mother’s House, and softly chanted prayers as they knelt on a cement floor in a candlelit room.

But what I loved most about the city was its people. Calcutta was defined by the Bengalis—creative, passionate, deeply intellectual, sensitive—a stereotype accepted by the Bengalis themselves, and one I found in many ways to be true. Within the city lived one of the world’s greatest concentrations of poets, artists, filmmakers, novelists, actors and thinkers. Very few actually made a living from their creative activities, but that was beside the point. When I met a Calcutta accountant, he told me he was really a writer; a surgeon invited me to his latest play. A rickshaw puller knew how to find the home of Moni Sankar Mukherjee, one of India’s most successful novelists, because Mukherjee, he informed me, was his favorite author. Calcutta had also produced Satyajit Ray, one of the few Indian filmmakers with an international reputation, who told me that his work “has been possible only because I have lived here, and have loved Calcutta.” Bikash Bhattacharya, an important young artist whose paintings of the city were haunting in their satire and desperation, said simply, “Calcutta is my mother.”

Calcutta had been the home of many unusual women, too. The nineteenth-century reform movement in Bengal that sought to ban purdah, sati and child marriage had elevated the status of wives in the middle class, and a hundred years later, Calcutta’s women were still better off than those in the north. Dowry deaths were rare in Calcutta, and women were not as afraid of harassment and verbal abuse in the public streets. Calcutta’s women had also benefited from the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore, the city’s poet laureate and its most famous Nobel Prize winner, who had been one of India’s greatest supporters of women’s rights.

Calcutta was a place of a thousand revelations, but I was especially struck by the way it worked as a leitmotif in the lives and the work of three creative women: a filmmaker, a painter and a poet. All of them worked under adverse conditions unimaginable in the West, and yet all said they could not be as creative living anywhere else. They alternately romanticized their lives and felt guilty about Calcutta’s squalor, and simultaneously loved and hated their city. But they seemed to blossom not in spite of but because of the misery around them, and the city always appeared in some startling form out of this tension in their work.

I also found in the subtleties of their creations some of the most impassioned statements and sentiments I had encountered about women in India, and women anywhere—even though not one of these women considered herself a feminist, associating the word with politics and single-minded groups that they saw as ineffective and uncreative. They wanted their work to speak to a much wider audience, in a voice that was strong, angry and even accusatory, but still tempered by irony and a sense of life’s ambiguities and biological contradictions. In the end, the three women taught me not only about Calcutta, but about the relationship of an artist to her environment, and why women who thought and created in the India of the 1980s found it impossible not to rebel.

... [Sections on Aparna Sen, Veena Bhargava, Nabaneeta Dev Sen]

All I know is that I will return to Calcutta and be as guilt-ridden as before. I also know that in the end, for me, Calcutta was a case study in how misery and oppression may produce creativity, and how they can sharpen an artist’s insights into society and herself. But it was interesting, and not surprising, that the mightier influence on the three women’s work came from the experience of simply being a woman.

The three Calcutta women I met identified themselves as filmmaker, painter and poet first, but it was undeniable that their experiences as women enriched their lives because they had to be, in a sense, both men and women—professionals, and mothers and wives. Although the partitioning of their lives took time and concentration away from the creative process, ultimately it brought enormous depth to their work. “Women are broken into little parts all the time,” Aparna Sen told me. “It’s very difficult to arrive at harmony, because in this kind of work, you need to give of yourself completely. At the same time, a woman has a tremendous emotional experience to draw on.”

None of the women said they felt a larger responsibility toward improving the lives of other women in India; they hoped that their work spoke for itself. “I’ll tell you in all honesty that I can’t think of devoting my life to the education of women, because that’s not my scene,” Aparna Sen told me. “But I can make films. Perhaps I may sound awful to you, but I feel that by doing my own thing the way I believe, and not abiding by every single rule that is laid down, I am in a way holding myself up as an example. I don’t presume that I am, but I don’t see what else I can do.” Nabaneeta Dev Sen had told me much the same thing. “Every feminist poem is one woman’s way of speaking of all women,” she said. “Even confessional poetry speaks about a group.”

She paused and smiled. “Don’t you think that every creative woman is a lover and a revolutionary?”

~~May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among The Women of India -by- Elisabeth Bumiller

Day 344: Japan: A Reinterpretation

“In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention,” Oscar Wilde wrote in 1889. “There is no such country, there are no such people.”

Japan had opened to the West just thirty years before Wilde made this observation. Europe was awash in what the French call japonisme. Degas, Manet, Whistler, Pissarro—they were all fascinated by the imagery of Japanese tradition. In 1887 van Gogh decorated Le Père Tanguy with prints of Mount Fuji and geisha in elaborate kimono. Gauguin made gouaches on paper cut to the shape of Japanese fans. This infatuation permeated society. It was reflected on teapots and vases, in the fabric of women’s dresses, and in the way people arranged flowers.

But what did japonisme have to do with Japan as it was? The Japan of the 1880s was erecting factories and assembling steamships, conscripting an army and preparing a parliament. There were universities, offices, department stores, banks. As Wilde elaborated, “The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them.”

Wilde was ahead of his time. We now have a word, albeit a contentious one, for the phenomenon he touched upon in “The Decay of Lying.” We call it Orientalism. Orientalism meant “the eternal East.” In his account of Japan Wilde left out only the quotation marks, for he was writing about the simple, serene, perfume-scented “Japan” of the Orientalist’s imaginings.

Orientalism was made of received notions and images of the people, cultures, and societies that stretch from the eastern Mediterranean to the Pacific. There was no dynamism or movement in the Oriental society. The Orient was fixed in immutable patterns, discernible through the ages and eternally repeated, like the mosaics in Middle Eastern mosques. It did not, in a word, progress. Deprived of the Enlightenment, the East displayed no rational thought, no logic or science. The Oriental merely existed, a creature ruled by fate, timeless tradition, and an ever-present touch of sorrow. The Oriental was “exotic” rather than ordinary, “inscrutable” rather than comprehensible, dusky rather than light. The Orient was the “other” of the West, and the twain would never meet.

Japan, farthest east from the metropolitan capitals and least known among explorers, became the object of extreme Orientalist fantasies as soon as Europeans arrived, in 1542. The first Westerners to record their impressions were missionaries, who took Japan and the Japanese to be a place and a people “beyond imagining,” as an Italian Jesuit put it, “a world the reverse of Europe.” Europeans were tall, the Japanese were short. Churches were high, temples low. European women whitened their teeth, Japanese women blackened theirs. Japan was an antipodean universe, ever yielding, ever prostrate. “The people are incredibly resigned to their sufferings and hardships,” the Jesuit wrote on another occasion, “yet they live quietly and contentedly in their misery and poverty.” Francis Xavier, who arrived in 1549, asked why the Japanese did not write “in our way”—from left to right, across. His Japanese guide replied with a question that would have done Francis some good had he troubled with its implications: Why did Europeans not write in the Japanese way, from right to left, down?

The observations of sixteenth-century Europeans were not pure invention. By tradition Japanese women did blacken their teeth. An air of resignation is as evident among the Japanese today as it must have been then. And Japanese locks—a peculiar obsession among these first visitors, noted again and again—are still opened by turning the key to the left, not (as in the West) to the right. But what makes these observations faintly ridiculous? Why did they produce the enduring idea of a place populated by mysterious gnomes? From our distant point of view it was a simple failure of perspective. The early travelers made no connections: That is, the Japanese were not permitted, if that is the word, their own history, a past by which their great and small differences could have been explained.

Orientalism grew from empire. One of its features was the position of the observer to the observed: The one was always superior to the other. As Edward Said stresses in Orientalism, intellectual conventions reflected relationships based on power and material benefit. So Orientalism came into full flower in Britain and France, the great empire builders of the nineteenth century. Japan was never formally a part of anyone’s empire, but it was hardly free of the Orientalism associated with imperial possessions. Its relations with Europe were based on the same material interests and were marked by the same presumed superiority on the part of Europeans.

Today, of course, we call someone from India, Indonesia, Taiwan, or Japan an Asian rather than an Oriental. Our term is an attempt, at least, to acknowledge human complexity and diversity—and equality. To call someone an Oriental would give at least mild offense, because it would recall relations that no longer exist—at least not on maps. But this is not to say that the habits of Orientalism are not still with us, as any Asian can point out. Our Orientalism is remarkable only for its fidelity to the ideas of centuries past: Japanese society is “vertical,” while in the West social relations are “horizontal”; Westerners like competition, the Japanese compromise. When an earthquake struck Kobe in 1995 an American correspondent described the city as “an antipodean New York with more sushi.” Asians stoically accept natural calamities as part of the timeless order of things, he explained, so that “the Japanese of Kobe are ideal disaster victims.”

There was one peculiar aspect of Wilde’s idea of Orientalism. He observed that the image of Japan abroad in the last century was partly a concoction of the Japanese themselves. Wilde called the Japanese “the deliberate self-conscious creation” of artists such as Hokusai, whose woodblock prints were much the fashion at the height of Europe’s japonisme. This was exceptionally astute. We could easily make the same assertion about many of Japan’s leaders and thinkers throughout history. “Japan” has long been an act of the imagination among the Japanese, too, and to call some Japanese Orientalists is to stretch the term but slightly.

~~Japan: A Reinterpretation -by- Patrick Smith

Day 332:The Struggle for Modern Tibet

My name is Tashi Tsering.   
In Tibetan, Tashi means "good luck" and Tsering means "long life." Looking back on my life now, I believe my name has turned out to be prophetic. For a long time, though, it didn't seem so. But that is getting ahead of my story.
   
There was nothing particularly unusual about my childhood. I came into the world in 1929 the year of the "iron horse"in a small village called Guchok in a mountain river valley about a hundred miles west of Lhasa. I was born during what is now called the "old society," although while I was growing up I had no idea there was going to be a ''new society." There was simply our traditional Tibetan way of life.   

My first ten years were like those of most other Tibetan peasant boys. When I was very young, I ran and played on the slopes and in the meadows, carefree and without many duties or responsibilities. On those wonderful days when it was warm enough in our valley, I sometimes ran around naked with the other children just for the joy of it. Although the country was rugged, the horizons were majestic. There seemed to be an endless expanse of great mountains and beautiful valleys, and I loved the physical sense of freedom.   

Guchok was like most other small Tibetan villages. The few hundred inhabitants lived in clusters of stone houses scattered along the sloping foothills of a mountain valley fed by a glacial stream that provided the precious water needed for irrigating our crops. The flat-roofed houses were two and three stories high, and like most families, we lived on the second and third floors, keeping our animals on the first.
   
Guchok was divided into an upper and a lower village. We lived in the upper village, in the higher part of the valley where it was harder to grow crops but easy to find forage for the grazing animals. Thus not only did we grow barley and lentils, but we kept many yaks, goats, and sheep. Ours was basically a subsistence economy. We ate the produce of our fields and flocks and made virtually all of our clothing spinning our wool and weaving it on wooden looms. When we needed something we couldn't produce ourselves, such as salt, we bartered to get it, although Tibet had its own coinage, which we sometimes used. Like most villagers throughout Tibet, we were surprisingly self-sufficient.   

My family was large, ten of us in all. There was my mother and then my four paternal aunts who, though they were celibate Buddhist nuns, mostly lived at home and provided the family with a significant labor force. There were also my paternal grandmother, two younger brothers, and my two fathers. I say two fathers because it is common in Tibetan society for brothers to take a wife jointly. It was only when I lived abroad that I learned how rare and shocking this marital custom was to Americans and even to other Asians like Chinese and Indians. I never thought about it then, and it does not bother me now. In our culture, it was completely natural for brothers to marry the same woman, and there was no stigma at all about brothers sharing a woman sexually. We saw this custom as an effective way to conserve resources and enhance the material well-being of the family. We believed that polyandry, as this custom is called by anthropologists in the West, prevents fragmentation of the family's land across generations. If each son in a family marries monogamously and brings in a new unrelated bride, we think the family is unstable and likely to split up, with each son and his wife and children taking a share of the land. By contrast, with polyandry, there is only one wife and one set of children, so fission is far less common.   

Keeping brothers together was also important for us because not only was all of the work of our household done without machines by people (and animals)but our normal activities often involved the need to provide people for free corvée labor. For example, we had to provide animals and people to move goods and commodities for the government's transportation system. The more available the labor, the stronger the whole family unit became.

The older of the two brothers who were my fathers was the one we actually called "father." He also was the head of the household and slept with my mother in a separate room on the second floor of our stone house. My other father, his younger brother, was always called "uncle" in our region. In our household, he slept downstairs, where we kept the animals. I remember now that my mother would sometimes go downstairs to sleep with him, but I didn't think much about it at the time. In our culture the wife played the key role in holding such marriages together. She was responsible for visiting all the brothers regularly and making sure they were satisfied and that the marriage and household functioned effectively. My mother must have done a good job, because there was no friction between my fathers.   

We never worried about who the biological father was, and I had no idea which of the two fathers was actually mine. My mother never told me anything, and it never occurred to me to ask. I don't think the brothers knew the truth themselves or cared. Both "father" and "uncle" called me "son," and they treated all the children equally. To this day I cannot fathom why non-Tibetans find polyandry so strange and even disgusting. In America it is common for one woman to have two or three husbands in the course of her life and occasionally to have sexual relations with more than one man at a time. In Tibet it is the same; the only difference is that sometimes both husbands are there at the same time, and they are brothers. We find this system eminently logical and natural.   

My family was relatively well off by local standards, and I had a carefree youth with little or no work until about the age of seven, when I started doing odd jobs around the house. My first major responsibility came when I was eight years old and my father told me I was to work as a shepherd in the summers like the older boys. I was thrilled. My job really was not hard, but I felt great pride. I had to help drive the animals (about three hundred sheep and goats) into the mountains each day, stay with them while they grazed, and bring them back in the evening. In summer the days were long, the skies were immense, and the mountain valleys were beautiful. I loved the feeling that I was doing something that mattered to my family. But I have to admit that it was mainly just fun, because I met many other young herders like myself, and there was always something to do while watching the herd graze. When the weather was hot, we shepherds played in the icy streams. And despite the dominance of Buddhism in our society, with its strong emphasis on the sanctity of life, we often hurled stones at birds and rabbits with our slingshots, and sometimes we even caught fish in the streams with our hands. When we spotted a fish hiding we reached out with cupped hands, careful that no sudden movement frightened it. Then, holding our breath, we would grab as fast as we could. Usually we missed, but occasionally we got lucky and were able to fling a fish onto the bank. We boys thought that was a great feat and would immediately set up a makeshift hearth of stones and dung, which we lit with the flint strikers we all wore. I can still recall the glorious taste of the freshly cooked fish. On quieter days we spun wool on simple handmade spindles or sewed boots for the winter. We ran, occasionally fought, and mostly played and enjoyed the delicious feeling that we were on the way to becoming men while our charges grazed on the mountain meadows! Herding was serious work since our animals represented the major portion of our family's wealth, but for us kids, it was mostly fun.   

The way my family and my village lived from day to day, season to season, and year to year seemed a timeless, comfortably repetitive pattern. As I think back about this life after so many years, I find it easy to idealize and to become nostalgic but only up to a point. Most of the people I knew then had no interest in change. They worked hard to improve their place in the social and economic system but not to change the ground rules. They had no wish to leave the places they were accustomed to or to break the seamless continuity of the traditional way of life. However, even as a young boy I began to realize that I was different. I liked the life I was living, but I also began to feel dissatisfied. As a child I found it hard to put my finger on exactly what was wrong, and I recall feeling more than a little bit confused about my misgivings. Somehow I felt I wanted something more out of life even though I had no words to describe it. I think that this feeling stemmed from my intense desire to become literate.

~~The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashi Tsering -by- Melvyn Goldstein, William Siebenschuh, and Tashi Tsering

Day 327: Golden Holocaust

Cigarettes are one of the most carefully designed small objects on the planet. But it was not an easy thing to get people to smoke. To make smoking as ordinary as, say, eating carrots or drinking orange juice, you needed an elaborate marketing and promoting apparatus, the likes of which the world had never seen. People also had to learn how to smoke. And while this is easy enough in a world of ubiquitous smoking peers and visual models (just look at today’s Hollywood films), there was a time when people had to be taught how to smoke. In the 1930s the American Tobacco Company organized classes for such purposes, directed principally at women. Company reps used dolls to demonstrate the proper way of holding, lighting, and smoking a cigarette, and some of these manikins can be found on display in tobacco museums. The saturation of film and virtually every other medium with smoking has to be seen in this light: smoking had to be made socially acceptable, and huge budgets were devoted to this cause.

Anthropologists like to talk about “material culture,” meaning the diverse ways physical objects are built into the daily life of a people. The material culture of smoking has a long and complex history, appreciated best perhaps by the collectors of tobacciana, comprising the endless variety of pipes, cards, silks, lighters, humidors, matchbooks and cigar boxes, wooden Indians, tobacco tins, posters, advertisements, and other paraphernalia that now fill the world’s (mostly industry-run) tobacco museums. Collectors prize the well-made meerschaum pipe, the lighter carved in a World War I trench, the agate snuff box cut for the European aristocrat, the minstrel-era matchbox or tobacco tin.

But cigarettes have been built into life in many other ways. The front shirt pocket that now adorns the dress of virtually every American male, for example, was born from an effort to make a place to park your cigarette pack. Alternate uses of course have become common—just as we now plug electronic devices into holes once meant for lighters—but the fossil function testifies to the intrusive power of the cigarette and to how easily we overlook the origins of everyday objects. There are many other examples. Germans still talk about male formal wear as a “Smoking” (jacket), and in many parts of Europe you get your newspaper from “Le Tabac.” My vote for the creepiest goes to the U.S. military, which in the wake of the Korean War outfitted war-wounded veterans with artificial arms housing built-in cigarette lighters.

VENDING MACHINES AND ASHTRAYS

Vending machines may already seem like an anachronism, but for more than sixty years they were a prime source of cigarettes in the United States, especially for young people, who could get their fix of sticks in perfect anonymity by simply dropping in a few coins. Early vending machines dispensed gum and other novelties—the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives 1895 as the first known use of the expression—but prior even to its breakup in 1911 American Tobacco owned a controlling share in the Garson Vending Machine Company, part of its effort to control all links in the cigar and cigarette supply chain. Patents for the automatic dispensing of cigarettes and cigars date from the 1880s, but serious exploitation of such devices doesn’t really begin until after the First World War, when skyrocketing consumption and standardization of packaging led to new commercial opportunities. An American by the name of William Rowe invented an improved cigarette vending machine in 1926, and by 1938 the Rowe Cigarette Service Company of New York was operating 14,000 dispensers in twenty-two U.S. cities. Coin-operated sales grew steadily up through the late 1970s, when 875,000 machines in the United States were bringing in $2.7 billion in annual cigarette business. This was an effective way to move product, and companies paid a premium to place their brands in favored spots inside the machines (center column was best) and in high-traffic areas of a store or a city. Nothing was left to chance; the industry’s archives preserve detailed calculations of how placement or on-the-machine advertising would affect sales. Cigarette companies also paid for lobbyists to defend such machines when efforts arose to have them banned.

Vending machines were often criticized for making it too easy for children to get cigarettes, and in 1988 Surgeon General C. Everett Koop urged a ban on all such devices. Trade associations fought back, with the Amusement and Music Operators Association distributing brochures with titles like “A Responsible Program for Cigarette Vending Machines,” recommending ways to block youth access. The whole point of these machines was to automate sales, however, which is why kids were so easily enticed. A number of U.S. states enacted bans in the 1990s, though automated cigarette dispensers remain legal in many parts of the world. Japan may have more than any other nation and has come up with some high-tech—and ridiculous—ways to bar access from underaged smokers, such as optical scans and software for detecting facial wrinkles. Clever teens can apparently game the system by simply making a contorted face.
Ashtrays are another example of the insinuation of cigarettes into everyday life. It is hard to imagine a world without, but ashtrays were not a common part of life until about a century ago. The word we most often use (and spell) did not even exist: until the twentieth century ash-tray was typically spelled as either two separate words or a hyphenated compound, and the OED records the first single-word spelling (with no hyphen) in 1926.

Louis Kyriakoudes, director of the Oral History Project at the University of Southern Mississippi, has shown that cigarette makers spent a great deal of time and effort getting ashtrays into American consumer products. Automakers were cajoled into putting one into every car, and anyone who flew in a commercial plane in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s will remember ashtrays in the armrests of their seats—later stuffed with trash or gum after the smoking bans of the 1990s. Ashtrays were ubiquitous in offices and restaurants, hospitals and doctors’ offices, trains and taxis, and for a time it was hard to get very far from one without hiking into the woods. Movie theaters and university lecture halls had ashtrays built into the seats, and ashtrays were built into barber chairs. I have seen (Japanese-made) slot machines with built-in ashtrays and “smokeless” ashtrays powered by batteries or USB cables. Bridge tables had clip-on ashtrays, and Kyriakoudes tells how Edward Bernays, the marketing genius for American Tobacco, approached furniture makers in the 1930s to get them to build ashtrays into kitchen cabinets. Designers threw themselves into the art, fashioning ashtrays in the shapes of pianos, shoes, turtles, toilets, tires, and naked ladies. I have seen ashtrays celebrating Walt Disney World, Penn Central Station, the 1980 Olympics, and every state in the Union.

My all-time favorite, though, is the ashtray built into the U.S. military’s SAGE computer, a digital brain behemoth designed in the 1950s to protect U.S. airspace against a Soviet nuclear attack. SAGE—Semi-Automatic Ground Environment—was the world’s most advanced electronic brain, linking hundreds of radar stations in the United States as “the first large-scale computer communications network.” The charming part of this doomsday machine, now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, is the cigarette lighter and ashtray built into the console, just to the left of the radar screen intended to reveal enemy aircraft or missiles penetrating our airspace. One can imagine these guardians of our national security, stoic in their morbid duties, carefully extinguishing their cigarettes as the world descends into Armageddon . . .

~~Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition -by- Robert N. Proctor

Day 322: Monsoon

Al Bahr al Hindi is what the Arabs called the ocean in their old navigational treatises. The Indian Ocean and its tributary waters bear the imprint of that great, proselytizing wave of Islam that spread from its Red Sea base across the longitudes to India and as far as Indonesia and Malaysia, so a map of these seas is central to a historical understanding of the faith. This is a geography that encompasses, going from west to east, the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, and Java and South China seas. Here, in our day, are located the violence- and famine-plagued nations of the Horn of Africa, the geopolitical challenges of Iraq and Iran, the fissuring fundamentalist cauldron of Pakistan, economically rising India and its teetering neighbors Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, despotic Burma (over which a contest looms between China and India), and Thailand, through which the Chinese and Japanese, too, may help finance a canal sometime in this century that will affect the Asian balance of power in their favor. Indeed, the canal is just one of several projects on the drawing board, including land bridges and pipelines, that aim to unite the Indian Ocean with the western Pacific.

On the Indian Ocean’s western shores, we have the emerging and volatile democracies of East Africa, as well as anarchic Somalia; almost four thousand miles away on its eastern shores the evolving, post-fundamentalist face of Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world. No image epitomizes the spirit of our borderless world, with its civilizational competition on one hand and intense, inarticulate yearning for unity on the other, as much as an Indian Ocean map.

Water, unlike land, bears no trace of history, no message really, but the very act of crossing and recrossing it makes this ocean, in the words of Harvard professor of history Sugata Bose, a “symbol of universal humanity.” There are Indian and Chinese, Arab and Persian trading arrangements creating a grand network of cross-oceanic communal ties, brought even closer over the centuries by the monsoon winds and, in the case of the Arabs, Persians, and other Muslims, by the haj pilgrimage. This is truly a global ocean, its shores home to an agglomeration of peoples of the fast-developing former “third world,” but not to any superpower: unlike the Atlantic and Pacific. Here is the most useful quarter of the earth to contemplate, pace Fareed Zakaria, a “post-American” world in the wake of the Cold War and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rudyard Kipling’s turn of phrase “east of Suez”—from the 1890 poem “Mandalay,” which begins in Moulmein in Burma, on the Bay of Bengal—applies more than ever, though few may realize it.

Cold War military maps highlighted the Arctic, owing to the geography of the Soviet Union and its principal ports. Former president George W. Bush’s so-called war on terrorism underscored the Greater Middle East. But the geopolitical map of the world keeps evolving. The arc of crisis is everywhere: a warming Arctic could even become a zone of contention. Because the entire globe is simply too general an instrument to focus on, thus it helps to have a specific cartographic image in mind that includes the majority of world trouble spots, while at the same time focusing on the nexus of terrorism, energy flows, and environmental emergencies such as the 2004 tsunami. Just as phrases matter for good or for bad—“the Cold War,” “the clash of civilizations”—so do maps. The right map provides a spatial view of world politics that can deduce future trends. Although developments in finance and technology encourage global thinking, we are still at the mercy of geography, as the artificiality of Iraq and Pakistan attest.

Americans, in particular, are barely aware of the Indian Ocean, concentrated as they are, because of their own geography, on the Atlantic and the Pacific. World War II and the Cold War confirmed this bias, with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Korea, and Communist China all with Atlantic or Pacific orientations. This bias is embedded in mapping conventions: Mercator projections tend to place the Western Hemisphere in the middle, so the Indian Ocean is often split up at the far edges of the map. Yet, it is this ocean to which Marco Polo devoted almost an entire book of his travels near the end of the thirteenth century, from Java and Sumatra to Aden and Dhofar. Herein lies the entire arc of Islam, from the eastern fringe of the Sahara Desert to the Indonesian archipelago; thus it follows that the struggle against terrorism and anarchy (which includes piracy) focuses broadly on these tropical waters, between the Suez Canal and Southeast Asia. The Indian Ocean littoral, which takes in Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, constitutes a veritable networking map of al-Qaeda, as well as one of disparate groups smuggling hashish and other contraband. Indeed, Iran has supplied Hamas by a sea route from the Persian Gulf to Sudan, and then overland through Egypt.

Here, too, are the principal oil shipping lanes, as well as the main navigational choke points of world commerce—the Straits of Bab el Mandeb, Hormuz, and Malacca. Forty percent of seaborne crude oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz at one end of the ocean, and 50 percent of the world’s merchant fleet capacity is hosted at the Strait of Malacca, at the other end, making the Indian Ocean the globe’s busiest and most important interstate.

Throughout history, sea routes have been more important than land ones, writes Tufts University scholar Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, because they carry more goods more economically. The sea silk route from Venice to Japan across the Indian Ocean in the medieval and early modern centuries was as important as the silk route proper across Central Asia. “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hands on the throat of Venice,” went the saying. Another proverb had it that if the world were an egg, Hormuz was its yoke.

Today, despite the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and two thirds of all petroleum supplies travel by sea. Globalization relies ultimately on shipping containers, and the Indian Ocean accounts for one half of all the world’s container traffic. Moreover, the Indian Ocean rimland from the Middle East to the Pacific accounts for 70 percent of the traffic of petroleum products for the entire world. Indian Ocean tanker routes between the Persian Gulf and South and East Asia are becoming clogged, as hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese join the global middle class, necessitating vast consumption of oil. The world’s energy needs will rise by 50 percent by 2030, and almost half of that consumption will come from India and China. India—soon to become the world’s fourth largest energy consumer after the United States, China, and Japan—is dependent on oil for more than 90 percent of its energy needs, and 90 percent of that oil will soon come from the Persian Gulf by way of the Arabian Sea. Indeed, before 2025, India will overtake Japan as the world’s third largest net importer of oil after the United States and China. And as India must satisfy a population that will be the most populous in the world before the middle of this century, its coal imports from Mozambique, in the southwestern Indian Ocean, are set to increase dramatically, adding to the coal that India already imports from Indian Ocean countries such as South Africa, Indonesia, and Australia. In the future, India-bound ships will also be carrying enormous quantities of liquefied natural gas across the western half of the Indian Ocean from southern Africa, even as it continues to import gas from Qatar, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This is how African poverty may be partially assuaged: less by Western foreign aid than by robust trade with the richer areas of the former third world.

~~Monsoon : The Indian Ocean And The Future Of American Power -by- Robert D. Kaplan.

Day 263: Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players and Postcolonial Theory

When Ray made Jalsaghar in 1958 he did not imagine it would have success outside of India. In later years he told his biographer Andrew Robinson, “I didn’t think it would export at all.” The film’s screening in Paris in 1981 was part of the French reassessment of Ray’s films. American and British critics described Jalsaghar as Ray’s “most perfect film,” a film “of unique delicacy and refinement.” Ben Nyce attributes the film’s “universal” appeal to “the fairly common idea that often the greatest art is created in that space of time just before the processes of disintegration take over.” Nyce’s words encapsulate the general reaction to Jalsaghar and may well explain why this film enjoys a minor cult status in the West. If we take seriously Ray’s judgment that the film would not translate “at all” outside its specific Indian context, then we are forced to ask what makes Jalsaghar one of Ray’s most culturally intriguing films, and what accounts for the cult status of this film in the West. The answer to both questions can be sought in the burden of meaning Ray brings to bear on music in Jalsaghar, and the function of music in this film. Nyce’s statement suggests that by universalizing music as great art, it is possible for viewers to consume the musical soirees in Jalsaghar. Contrary to Nyce I suggest that Ray’s purpose in the film is to map resistance through the visual deployment of Bishwambhar as body without speech. Bishwambhar does not refute or explain any constructions about him. Ray essays an aural and visual critique of the colonialist/nationalist discourses about the idle landlord class. The aural critique is established through the way music is structured in the narrative and through the supervaluation of music. The visual critique is presented through the use of the large, framed mirror that dominates the music room.

Each jalsa is preceded and framed by the landlord/patron’s paucity of funds. In order to pay for the first jalsa Bishwambhar mortgages his wife’s jewellery. For the second concert he uses his last bag of money. For the final jalsa, Bishwambhar draws on the last of his wife’s jewellery. Each musical soiree is narratively and structurally framed through alienating devices. The viewer is never allowed to be in a secure place and position from which to gaze at the scene and pleasurably enjoy the music or dance. For example, the first jalsa is a flashback and therefore functions as a reminder of happier times when Bishwambhar’s life was not totally denuded. Ray frames the musical event with a series of alienating devices. There is a dissonance between the sublime grandeur of the first jalsa, performed on screen by the famous vocalist Begum Akhtar herself, and earlier scenes of a band playing a Western tune with minimal competence. The gap between the beauty and coherence of Akhtar’s singing and the unmusical band suggests that culture is fractured due to the legacy of colonialism. The jalsa itself is followed by a scene that alienates the viewer by underlining the toll taken by this cultural pursuit: Bishwambhar’s angry, tearful wife accuses him of excessive expenditure on his obsession with music and requests him to close the jalsaghar before all her jewellery is mortgaged.

The second jalsa fuses music, time, and the stormy weather in Salamat Khan’s rainy season raag. As viewers we know, unlike the members of the concert audience, that Bishwambhar has ordered his wife and son back in the stormy weather and their journey by boat puts their lives in jeopardy. Therefore the viewer cannot share the jalsa audience’s enjoyment, the music is framed by a sense of impending doom. A sense of premonition passes over Bishwambhar’s face. The sense of abrupt discontinuity culminates in Bishwambhar’s gesture, he disrupts the jalsa by leaving mid-way, unable to sit and enjoy the music. Disruption of viewer pleasure is also suggested by Ray through other visual cues, such as the carved boat on the mantelpiece turning over and the insect drowning in the glass. The sequence ends with Bishwambhar looking on as his dead son’s body is brought ashore.

Ray’s film steadily breaks the connection between culture and the viewer/spectator’s pleasure. The third and final jalsa is framed by Bishwambhar’s history of loss and his despairing recklessness in selling the last piece of jewellery. The jalsa ends with Ganguli’s attempt to humiliate Bishwambhar by pre-empting his reward to the performer with a larger sum of money, thereby emphasizing Bishwambhar’s decline in money and status. Ganguli is not an indigenous entrepreneur but a profiteer of British colonialism. As a moneylender Ganguli has prospered and branched out into other economic activities like quarrying sand. Ganguli is a subtle reminder that the services and professions available to upwardly mobile Indians were comprador economic activity which made them part of the colonial infrastructure and aided the colonial government in the exploitation of natural and human resources. However Ganguli is not content to be the nouveau riche, he wishes to accumulate cultural authority by boasting to Bishwambhar that he has lived in Lucknow and learnt to appreciate music and even play “some little” tabla. Ray interweaves displeasure into those very parts of the film that he characterizes as containing the “sweetness and greatness” of the northern Indian classical music composed for the film by Vilayat Khan. In The Music Room to enter into the pleasure of the music is also to be inserted into the film. Viewers are interpellated not through identification but through struggle, the struggle to understand Bishwambhar’s historical predicament, his lack of options, his lack of desire to master his predicament, and his reckless disregard for consequences in the pursuit of his passion for music. It is only in and through this struggle that Ray allows the viewer to question the value and function of music.

The Music Room rejects the notion that there is an organic and unmediated access to culture and cultural value. As viewers we do not have direct access to music the way Bishwambhar does. Ray makes this proposition explicit in a scene before the last jalsa. Bishwambhar has refused to accept Ganguli’s invitation to attend his rival jalsa. Ray’s camera captures a motionless Bishwambhar sitting, as the hours pass, in the same pose and on the same couch in which he received Ganguli. The camera moves into a slow medium close-up of Bishwambhar, on the soundtrack we hear the music of a jalsa. This music is not coming from Ganguli’s residence, it is used by Ray as internal diegetic sound. These musical sounds can only be heard by Bishwambhar and viewers. A fine, low shot of Bishwambhar shows him lifting a finger to mark, with impeccable accuracy, the rhythm of the music. This scene mirrors the first scene of the film where we first saw the motionless Bishwambhar impelled to speech and movement in response to the shehnai music. This intertextuality suggests that for Bishwambhar music functions as memory. Yet music as memory only recalls for Bishwambhar memories of other music, suggesting that for the protagonist and perhaps for the director, music is its own identity.

~~Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players and Postcolonial Theory (Culture, Labour and the Value of Alterity) -by- Reena Dube

Day 262:The Jazz Exiles

As the war raged on in Europe, a musical revolution, spearheaded by the standard-bearers of bebop, was taking place on New York's 52nd Street. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk led a brigade of experimenters who sought to free themselves from the confines of the big swing bands and into the more adventuresome harmonic and rhythmic complexities of what would become known as bebop. In Europe, the boom in traditional jazz continued, but even in America the new developments in jazz were obscured by an additional factor.

A recording ban, which went into effect on August 1, 1942, and lasted until the fall of 1944, prevented anything like a mass audience from hearing the bands of Earl "Fatha" Hines, singer-trumpeter Billy Eckstineboth of whom employed a number of bebop musiciansor the small groups of Gillespie and Parker.
   
By 1945, bebop was firmly entrenched, and its effects were already causing reverberations in the big dance bands that had been the mainstay of the swing era. The bebop innovators injected their own ideas into the big band format and forged an entirely new music. In addition to Gillespie, Parker, and Miles Davis, pianists Bud Powell and George Wallington, bassist Oscar Pettiford, and drummers Max Roach and Kenny Clarke all sought and found new outlets for a new music. Pianist Tadd Dameron would emerge as the most important arranger of this period. Of these key musicians, four would become exiles.   

Although there were a number of holdouts from the more traditional forms of jazz, many of the leading swing players found themselves working alongside the beboppers in the clubs that dotted 52nd Street. Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young were two such musicians, but it was tenor saxophonist Don Byas who was regarded as the best to bridge the gap between swing and bebop. For Byas, 52nd Street proved to be only a brief stopover on the road to Europe, where he would become the first important modern exile. Byas had come to New York with Eddie Mallory's band in 1937. He remained for eighteen months before brief stints with Don Redman, Lucky Millinder, and Andy Kirk. In 1941, Byas joined the Count Basie Band. When he got off the bus in 1943, he began to work with Gillespie, a number of all-star groups, and several small bands under his own name.

Byas's playing was much in the vein of Coleman Hawkins, and the early records with Gillespie clearly show Byas was at home with the demands of the new music. His already melodic lines were further enriched by the influence of Parker and his disciples. With the lifting of the recording ban, Byas recorded for several of the new, small jazz labels that were springing up everywhere. He even had a minor hit with his own version of "Laura" in 1946. The same year, he garnered first place honors in the Esquire jazz poll. But Byas was restless, and when Don Redman formed another band, Byas joined him for an extended European tour. When the tour ended, Byas stayed on in Europe to have a look around. He was still looking around a quarter of a century later. He was not seen or heard in the State again until 1970 when he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival. His Newport appearance was to be the final scene in a documentary film on his life in jazz, produced by a Dutch production company.
   
As the first of the postwar exiles, Byas became a guiding figure in the careers of the many musicians who would follow in his footsteps. Living first in France, Byas later settled permanently in Holland and was regularly featured at jazz festivals throughout Europe as a soloist with visiting bands such as Duke Ellington, or with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic tours with Coleman Hawkins and Stan Getz.

While in Europe, Byas took up skin diving and deep-sea fishing and became something of a physical fitness buff. He had left a drinking problem behind, which was one of the principal reasons he had left the States, but eventually encountered the hazards many of the exiles experienced. His stay in Europe was so lengthy that he began to be taken for granted and was considered a "local" by many promoters and club owners. The mushrooming number of exiles that followed Byas's lead made working conditions difficult and bruised his fierce ego. He began to drink heavily again and his physical condition deteriorated. Finally, he became almost inactive, playing only sporadically, but often losing jobs to other Americans who ironically had come to Europe after him.

At one point, Byas considered going home. "I may do that," he said. "One more trip, one grand tour. I'll make some money, come back, and then I'll lie down and die." He returned to the States for the 1970 Newport appearance and toured Japan with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1971. He returned to Holland the following year and at age fifty-nine died of cancer.

~~The Jazz Exiles : American Musicians Abroad -by- Bill Moody

Day 259: Hinduism and Modernity

On the morning of Thursday, 21 September 1995, a miracle took place in a Delhi temple. The image of elephant-headed Ganesha drank up the milk offered to him in worship. News of this event spread throughout India and was reported world-wide the next day. Hindus in every continent, in temples and in homes reported that their Ganesha too was drinking the milk offered to him. A barrister reported from Malaysia that the plastic Ganesha on his car dashboard had exhibited the same thirst. The London Guardian of 23 September reported it as ‘probably the first example of global religious fervour propagated by mass telecommunications’.

 This world-wide Hinduism was counterbalanced by the modernity of the national press in India which generally declared it to be no miracle, to be indeed a waste of time and milk – under such headlines as ‘Ganesh Hysteria Peters Out’, ‘Have the Gods had their Fill?’ and ‘Temples Deserted, Rationalists Prove Capillary Action Works Always’. The usual editorial line was that such superstitious credulity was incompatible with the secular and scientific orientation of independent India. Among English-language publications it was left to the Hawaii-published Hinduism Today to lament that ‘in India, which has taught mankind so much about religious tolerance, it is a surprise to see such an antiHindu bias. Years of British “divide and rule” policy, Christian missionary attacks and Marxist influence have created this atmosphere of bias. Lord Ganesha, Guardian of Dharma and Remover of Obstacles, has now revealed this anomalous situation to the entire world.’ That is, Ganesha had deliberately exposed the anti-Hindu bias of the Indian press. Here we see at once the global scope of Hinduism today, the strength of traditional belief, the rational scepticism of the Indian press, and the embattled attitude of the new fundamentalism.

 Ganesha became the first god to span the world instantaneously. What occurred was not simply world-wide reporting of a miracle, but the instantaneous world-wide occurrence of multiple instances of the same miracle. This miracle contrasts with the popular myth wherein the chubby Ganesha opts out of the hassle of circumnavigating the globe: when Shiva offers his two sons a mango as prize for the first to race round the world, six-headed Skanda dashes off on his peacock, while Ganesha merely ambles round his parents to claim the mango, explaining that they are the universe in themselves.
...
 Like six-headed Skanda, modernity encircles the globe. Ganesha, with his elephant trunk, pot belly, and plate of sweets, most bizarre of gods to Western eyes, sums up in himself the chaotic variety of Hinduism. Shiva got his sons to run a race. I venture to set Hinduism against modernity: I propose a consideration of Hinduism and modernity by means of which each will cast light on the other. Skanda, of course, is no less profoundly Hindu than Ganesha, an ‘ejaculation’ of Shiva’s semen while Ganesha is made from a fold of Parvati’s sari; Skanda’s origins lie deep in south India. But the rivalry of the two brothers justifies for the moment my metaphor.

 Both Hinduism and modernity are somewhat arbitrary intellectual constructs. Modernity is not a word used in ordinary speech. Modernity is not simply the modern world or modern times; it is the theorization of the modern world. Hinduism too, though an older term than modernity, began as an extraneous, external term for the indigenous religions of India other than the reform movements that became separate, clearly self-identified, religions: Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Hinduism comprises Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and Shaktism, themselves refracted in turn into more distinct groupings. Both terms – Hinduism and modernity – constitute theorizations.

 Our point of focus is not India and the West today, though that combination is the background of our investigation, the theatre in which this performance proceeds, the stage that Hinduism and modernity tread. Hinduism is the religion of 80 per cent of Indians, but it has only recently been sharply defined. Modernity is the time in which we all live, but here it is used in the sense of a coherent body of doctrine, a kind of sociological theology, a reified entity. Hinduism as a unit is set out in a stream of mainly Western books; it is mainly Western scholarship that has set out for inspection Hinduism as a ‘world religion’. Modernity is conjoined with endless subjects in hundreds of book titles; its hard core is provided by studies of such authors as Max Weber and Walter Benjamin. The world has become disenchanted, art has lost its aura. For Weber the peculiar conditions of the modern world were to be explained by the uniqueness of Europe; for Benjamin, messianic materialist, modernity is the landscape of the metropolis. For Weber, modern bureaucracy has created an iron cage for mankind; for Benjamin, mankind is seduced by the bright lights of arcades of shops in the big city. These two cult figures for current definers of modernity serve to delimit our view of modernity.

~~Hinduism and Modernity -by- David Smith

Day 257: The Garden of the Eight Paradises

After retreating from northern Afghanistan back to Kabul sometime in 1514, almost nothing is known of Babur’s life until five years later when his narrative resumes in January 1519 as he and his men begin an attack on the fortress of Bajaur, over a hundred miles east-north-east of Kabul. By his own evidence Babur started 1519 still trying to pacify his petty Afghan kingdom, a “state” whose territories were then primarily concentrated along the section of the road that ran from northeast from Ghazni through Kabul and then east to the Khybar pass, extending perhaps to the banks of the Indus. His direct control of this modest region may have extended in 1519 fifty to sixty miles north of Kabul to the Hindu Kush passes, while he exercised a loose suzereignty over the Qunduz region in northeastern Afghanistan in the person of his cousin, Ways Mirza Miranshahi. The richer plains of Balkh along the Amu Darya immediately west of Qunduz were in 1519 probably divided between the Uzbeks, the Safavids and to some degree Babur himself. East of Kabul his authority was restricted in some areas to no more than a few miles to the north and south of the road.

Yet, little more than a month after subduing Bajaur, Babur crossed the Indus on a raid that led to the first, albeit temporary capture of Bherah, situated on the bank of the Jhelum river in the northwestern Panjab. The occupation of Bherah, an outlying district of the wealthy Lahore province, apparently led Babur to think seriously for the first time of taking Delhi, for according to his own testimony, after taking the town he sent a message to the newly enthroned ruler of Delhi, Sultan Ibrahim Lodi, claiming the territories Timur had conquered in 1398. By 1523 Babur established his authority in Lahore, the capital of the Panjab, little more than a hundred miles southeast of Bherah, and in November 1525 he led an army out of Kabul that in April 1526 defeated Ibrahim and founded Timorid rule in northern India. His conquest was an act of military imperialism legitimized by Timor’s brief invasion. It represented a dynastic conquest in the mold of the Ottomans and Uzbeks. Unlike the Safavid founder, Shah Ismail, Babur was not an ideologue and did not enter India on a religious crusade. Having failed to restore his own rule and Timurid fortunes in Samarqand, he invaded India for simple mulkgirliq reasons, to ensure the power and prosperity of his paternal and maternal relations, the Miranshahi Timurids and the Chaghatay Chingizids. Those practical political and material goals remained typical of the dynasty throughout most of its history, whatever the legitimizing affectations of later monarchs.

From Babur’s description it is apparent that the attack on Bajaur in January 1519 was no simple chapqun or raid, although it may have been partly that, but a pacification campaign by which he directly extended his power in the region. This can be inferred from his remark that after the successful assault and massacre of more than three thousand Dilahzak Afghan inhabitants of the fort, he sent heads of some of the captured and executed defenders as proof of his victory not only to Kabul but also north to Badakhshan, Qunduz and Balkh, perhaps to Ways Mirza in Badakhshan and Muhammad Zaman Mirza in Balkh. His purpose in capturing the fort and slaughtering so many Bajauris also seems to have been designed as a pointed lesson to other Afghans, for one of Babur’s new-found allies, the Yusufzai Afghan chief Shah Mansur who was present during these events, was sent back east to his Yusufzai kin with “chastising orders.” The Bajaur massacre seems to have had an immediate effect, for one of the competing rulers of Swat, Sultan "Ala" al-Din, offered his homage to Babur a short time later, evidently hoping to exploit the new regional power to counter a rival Afghan chief. Then following a typical post-battle interval of drinking, hunting and eating the local narcotic sweet kamali, Babur continued his campaign by marching due east into the Yusufzai homeland in Swat to attack tribesmen who had not yet submitted to him. While in the vicinity he consolidated his territorial gains by marrying Shah Mansur Yusufzai’s daughter. Babur’s alliance may have been strengthened with another Yusufzai marriage to one of his men, for he mentions that shortly after his marriage Shah Mansur’s younger brother “brought his niece to this yurt,” this “campsite.”


Babur justified what he terms the “general killing” or massacre of the Dilahzak Afghans of Bajaur by claiming that they were not only “rebels” but had adopted “the customs of unbelievers.” By this he does not seem to mean that they imitated their Kafiri neighbors, who never had been and as late as 1890 still were not Muslims. Rather he reports that some thirty or forty years earlier some of the Dilahzak Afghans and the Yusufzais had become heretics by joining a darvish or wandering ascetic or sufi by the name of Shahbaz Qalandar. Having said this without elaborating on the nature of this man’s “heresy,” he reports that after the brief seige of Bajaur, while visiting a nearby hill for the view of the countryside, he happened on the tomb of the qalandar and had it destroyed, since the tomb of a heretic sufi was not a fitting monument for such a lovely spot, where he then sat and enjoyed some ma'jun.

Heresy offended his aesthetic as well as his religious sensibilities, and like many religious men B§bur was more offended by heretics than by unbelievers. Yet he seems to have been more than just a little bit hypocritical when he invoked religion to justify the slaughter of so many Bajauri men—their captive women and children were soon released with the surviving male prisoners. From the time he arrived in Kabul B§bur treated Afgh§ns far more ruthlessly than he did his Turkic and Mongol enemies in Ferghanah. He regularly slaughtered Afgh§ns who either attacked or resisted him, memorializing his hostility with the minarets of skulls that dotted the countryside. When he describes the Bajauris as “ignorant, wretched people,” for refusing his first demand to surrender their fort, he expresses himself with the same visceral contempt used to characterize other Afgh§ns, some of whom he later ridicules for their lack of knowledge of etiquette, as “rustic and stupid.”

~~The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483-1530) -by- Stephen F. Dale

Day 253: Post-Jazz Poetics

Ron Mann’s 1982 film Poetry in Motion features 24 poets performing and discussing their work, sometimes accompanied by musicians whose compositions respond to the spoken word. One such musical- poetic performance takes center stage in the five- minute segment on Jayne Cortez’s work. Here Cortez describes the improvisatory ethic that guides both her writing and her work with the Firespitters, the band with whom she performs her pieces:

    I’m playing with the visual and the verbal connections. On paper. And then when I’m reading, then it’s, you know, the verbal and the, the music coming together. It’s sound, it’s about sound. The sound of the poetry against the sound of the music. The way I work is, improvised or invented off of the word, it’s like the call and response pattern, which is an old African pattern. I am making statements, or I’m asking questions, and the music is responding to me, and I’m responding back to them, and we’re listening to each other. Making not only comments on what you’re doing, but extending that, taking it out and exploring the possibilities of the    poetry and the music together. (Poetry in Motion)

Cortez provides this analysis in voiceover as the picture cuts back and forth between a scene in which she sits on a couch with Mann and one in which she and the band react to one another midperformance.

This collage precedes the group’s rendition of Cortez’s poem “I See Chano Pozo.” Here she wears a red- and- blue- striped dashiki with dark pants and a large silver necklace in the shape of a stylized African face. Her decisions to wear traditional African clothing and to perform this particular poem with the band demonstrate that naming takes a central place in her poetics. Like Sonia Sanchez, she depicts her performance’s cultural roots as African in order to invoke a specific set of historical associations. The poem affirms Pozo, a Cuban conga player who is credited alongside trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie with introducing Afro-Cuban elements to jazz. The poem’s repeated lines assert that Pozo’s music motivates “Atamo,” “Mpebi,” “Donno,” “Obonu,” “Atumpan,” “Mpintintoa,” “Ilya Ilu,” “Ntenga,” “Siky Akkua,” “Batá,” and “Fontomfrom” : “various Africa drums” (Cortez, Coagulations 111) whose timbres resonate with music’s power to articulate human emotion. By repeating her affirmations of Chano Pozo and varying through vocal tone and inflection the printed versions of the poem, Cortez oversignifies the poetic form, defying the rhetorical boundaries of both print and previous performance. Her naming of Pozo’s accomplishments functions as a political act that positions his work in opposition to Western methods of public communication. Her commitment to social protest through linguistic alteration roots her textual improvisations in a cultural ethic that resembles Sanchez’s later strategies.

Jayne Cortez’s work explodes, through hyperbolic poetic images and innovative performance strategies, the social and rhetorical structures that enable oppressive social conditions. Her poetry’s themes, many of which are articulated via scatological imagery, align her work with contemporary artistic movements such as Black Arts and the early-century surrealists. Franklin Rosemont describes surrealism as an “unparalleled freedom” of image and a commitment to revolution “in every aspect of life” (“Introduction” 65, 67), both elements that Cortez continues to explore. She has published work in the surrealist journal Arsenal and in Franklin Rosemont’s 1980 collection Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices (Woodson 73), though specifically African- American sources help to shape her brand of surrealism. Tony Bolden argues, for instance, that surrealism’s “radical politics . . . are compatible with the ideas of Black Arts theorists” ( Afro- Blue 121). Aldon Nielsen calls Cortez’s artistic approach “a black American surrealism” drawn from “the compacted imagery of the blues” (Black Chant 225). D. H. Melhem uses Cortez’s own term “supersurrealism” to denote the associations she creates in her poetry between graphic surrealist imagery and political offenses (“Supersurrealist” 206). She employs surrealism in order to critique modern social conditions, while her poetry’s performative elements signify a rebellion against conventional methods of public expression.

Cortez crafts poetry based in conceptually difficult surrealist imagery, yet she also advocates the communal, egalitarian atmosphere of spokenword performance. This juxtaposition, which might at first seem contradictory, illustrates her work’s political resolve. Her audience cannot participate in her poem’s affirmation of Chano Pozo as an innovative cultural icon without understanding the rationale behind the images—like “a very fine tube of frictional groans” (line 4)—that she uses to characterize him. The poetry occupies a narrow space on the edge of competing differences, often refusing reconciliation and synthesis even as it moves with a sense of deliberate uneasiness among oral and written traditions. The best theoretical framework for understanding these differences derives from the cultural traditions of the African- American music to which Cortez owes much of her source material. Some of her vocal performance strategies, for instance, originate in gospel music. The esoteric imagery of her surrealism also shares thematic material with the blues and artistic impulses with heavily theorized jazz traditions like the bebop and free jazz movements; several of her musician friends worked in these movements. The historically black musics of blues and jazz thus provide her with a flexible yet culturally specific language in which to voice her critiques of contemporary political situations.

~~Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History -by- Jennifer D. Ryan

Day 242: The Poetics of Rock

Bob Dylan’s original recording of “All Along the Watchtower,” like the rest of John Wesley Harding (1967), is an austere affair. Against the contemporary trends in recording, which tended in varying degrees towards the sonic opulence exemplified by Sgt. Pepper’s, and in contrast even to the “thin wild mercury sound” of Dylan’s own Blonde on Blonde album, it strips things down to an elemental level—bass, drums, acoustic guitar, voice, harmonica, three chords, and no obvious sonic manipulations. In this unadorned state the song’s themes of alienation and dread come across with an air of stark resignation.

By contrast, Jimi Hendrix’s recording of the song presents, from its powerful opening flourish, a dramatic narrative that imparts a very different meaning. Hendrix’s rendition has a heroic defiance about it. If the two approaching riders in the song’s lyrics represent uncertainty, if the wind and the wildcat represent danger, if the businessmen are the world’s agents of betrayal, and if claustrophobic confusion threatens to undermine the will of the protagonist, in this version of the song he is willing to pit his musical power against it all.

Hendrix uses various kinds of dramatic strategies in the course of the track to accomplish his transformation of Dylan’s song. In the series of guitar solos that come with each refrain, for example, he superimposes a long-range musical line—which unfolds in a steady ascent across the span of the entire piece—on top of the relentlessly repeating three-chord cycle. He also sharpens the narrative delineation of the track by way of extreme textural contrasts between verses and refrains. The significance of these gestures emerges over the course of the track. But at the beginning it is the sheer sound, the way it “leaps off the record and goes into your ear,” that lets us know we are in for something altogether different from the original version.

While the two tracks share the same song, their material elements are developed in quite different ways. In Hendrix’s version both the instrumental and the vocal performances have an intense urgency about them in their aggressive articulation and rhythmic drive. Throughout the track the timbres are more varied in color and affective significance and fill far more of the frequency spectrum than in Dylan’s version. From the highs of the cymbals and tambourines to the lows of the bass guitar and bass drum, the frequency space is put in play in a way that both animates the musical surface and delineates the track’s structural design. The Hendrix track also presents the ear with striking uses of echo and ambience, which play on our sonic consciousness like impressionistic reflections of the song’s lyrics. The echoes that trail behind their sources as they move across the stereo space resonate with the swirling confusion and untamed defiance of the song’s protagonist. And among the track’s many ambient images, that of the wood block stands out immediately; it casts a prominent shadow that disappears into the depths of the track, a sonic allusion to the “cold distance” from which the two mysterious riders approach. These are among the elements woven together to form the textural tapestry whose interaction with the song imparts the full sense of Hendrix’s recomposition.

The elements that I’ve sketched out fall into five broad categories that represent all of the sound phenomena found on records: 1) musical performance, 2) timbre, 3) echo, 4) ambience (reverberation), and 5) texture. It is the configuration of relationships among these elements that gives the Hendrix track, or any other track, its full meaning and its unique identity. In addition to their phenomenal aspect, these categories include the activities and processes that shape the sounds. Timbre, for example, may be affected by electronic processes such as filtering and compression. Ambient images may be tailored using a variety of ambience simulation techniques. Although these five categories are interdependent, in this chapter each will be explored as a discrete aspect of the compositional project. While this is partly for the sake of analytic discussion, it also reflects something of the compositional process. For in practice the compositional focus continually shifts between isolated elements, various groupings of elements, and the piece as a whole.

~~The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records -by- Albin J. Zak III

Day 239: See You at the Crossroads

The dominant narrative of Jesus as a White, perfectionized image of deity has proven to be both problematic and offensive to rappers and the Hip-Hop community. Thus, the need for a contextual, relevant, and appropriate Christ was—and still is—needed to interpret deity and spirituality for the ‘hood’. In the song Black Jesuz by Tupac and The Outlawz (Tupac & Outlawz) there is an attempt to make a god—which appeared too perfect, too nice, and too White on a social level—more accessible to the ‘hood’. A White, blonde haired, non-relatable symbol of Christ is problematic for not only Hip Hoppers, but for those of ethnic minority descent who seek a more contextual image of deity who actually represents who they are. Understanding the theological message, tone, structure, and discourse in music is what Jon Michael Spencer calls theomusicology. Spencer states that “theomusicology is a theologically informed musicological study of how music is created, shared, and encountered...it is how a particular peoples perceive the universal mysteries that circumscribe their mortal existence and how the ethics, theologies, and mythologies to which they subscribe shape their worlds and THE world.” In their article Theomusicology and Christian Education: Spirituality and The Ethics of Control in the Rap of MC Hammer, N. Lynne Westfield and Harold Dean Trulear state:

Theomusicology treats Black music in a holistic manner and secularity as a context for the sacred and profane rather than as the antithesis of the sacred ... As such, theomusicology is a tool for us to move beyond the simplistic notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that are uncritically used to characterize Black secular music and especially rap music, and to help us develop an understanding of the meaning system under construction by African American youths.

The complexity between the nature of the sacred and profane is important to study; even more so when that which is labelled “profane” is religiously and socially constructed. When those labelled as deviant and “lost,” religion, in turn, becomes problematic. Typically in those situations, this process of labelling emerges from hegemonic structures and continues what Monica Miller refers to as “religious marketplace maintenance.” Thus, it is imperative to study and explore the nature of the sacred and profane in order to grasp what the actual context is detailing and to explore if that which is defined as “sacred” and / or “profane” is what it is defined as. Hence, Spencer’s theomusicological method is a particular helpful process to gather data from the context without defining it as deviant or part of the “profane.” Therefore, within the song Black Jesuz, an attempt to make hell on Earth— life in the ‘hood’—more understandable; to create a space for the thug, the nigga, and the pimp to find God; and a space for some sort of reconciliation to the social environment are at work. The intersection of Spencer’s trinary construct is at work: where the sacred and the profane both reveal themselves in secular contexts—in this case, Hip-Hop artists. Tupac reverses the hermeneutical flow and uses culture—in this case HipHop—to interpret God in a context, which is hostile.

The song is in three parts: 1) the Doxology—giving respect & acknowledgement, 2) the Lament—how is life and love done in this ghetto hell, and 3) the Benediction to Black Jesuz—we are searching for a Jesus for us.

Tupac opens the song with a call out to a Jesus who can relate, the Doxology: Searching for Black Jesus Oh yeah, sportin’ jewels and shit, yaknahmean? (Black Jesus; you can be Christian Baptist, Jehovah Witness)

A God whose religious affiliation does not matter:

Black Jesus; you can be Christian Baptist, Jehovah Witness) Straight tatted up, no doubt, no doubt (Islamic, won’t matter to me I’m a thug; thugs, we praise Black Jesus, all day) Young Kadafi in this bitch, set it off nigga. What?

Once again, Christina Zanfagna reminds us once again that “Hip-hop wrestles with the ways in which the hedonistic body and the seeking soul can be fed and elevated in dynamic tension. This wrestling is often expressed through a dialectic of pleasure and pain or recreation and suffering.” Here, the search is clear; a Jesus who is “blinging,” without denominational, or religious affiliation, and one who can relate to the suffering, pain, disenfranchisement, and historical oppression that they are experiencing. The “thug Jesus” is someone to be praised and a deity figure needed from the Outlawz stance.

Kadafi from the Outlawz exegetes his environment with laments to Jesus: 1) it’s a nightmare, 2) times are desperate, 3) the form of religion does not relate, and 4) questions if God can relate.

Kadafi below exclaims:

Stuck in a nightmare, hopin’ he might care Though times is hard, up against all odds, I play my cards like I’m jailin’, shots hittin’ up my spot like midnight rains hailin’ Got me bailin’ to stacks more green

The visibility of pain and suffering is evident while the assertion to “survive” and make money is also evident. Can a God who “loves” everyone conjure up a resolution within a “nightmare” situation? The ageless theological inquiry of doubt begins to manifest itself:

Gods ain’t tryin’ to be trapped on no block slangin’ no rocks like bean pies Brainstorm on the beginnin’ Wonder how shit like the Qu’ran and the Bible was written What is religion? Gods words all cursed like crack Shaitan’s way of gettin’ us back Black

~~Essay: BAPTIZED IN DIRTY WATER from See You at the Crossroads: Hip Hop Scholarship at the Intersections -ed- Brad Porfilio, Debangshu Roychoudhury, Lauren M. Gardner

Day 204: The Origin Of War

The human capacity for culture and all that it entails (intelligence, language, morality, altruism, justice, etc.) posed a real and serious problem to the early evolutionists (Cronin, 1991). Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-founder of classical Darwinian evolutionary theory, for example, became more and more convinced that natural selection could not possibly account for our advanced mental attributes and the distinctly human brain. And, what is worse, some of these refined capacities would even have been a downright nuisance and a danger "in the severe struggle he [the savage] has to carry on against nature and his fellow-man" (Wallace, 1891).

Charles Darwin strongly disagreed with this view, as did, initially, Thomas Huxley. Eventually, however, ’Darwin’s bulldog’ came to believe that human morality must have been the result of cultural evolution only: the struggle for existence in nature, he held, is so profoundly red-in-tooth-and-claw that it would smother a developing morality at birth because morality must necessarily work against nature: "[S]ince law and morals are restraints upon the struggle for existence, the ethical process is in opposition to the principle of the cosmic process [the Hobbesian war of each against all], and tends to the  suppression of the qualities best fitted for success in that struggle" (Huxley, 1894).

Herbert Spencer, the founding father of Social Darwinism (which we shall encounter later on) argued that the inheritance of acquired characteristics was the only possible evolutionary force responsible for the evolution of human morality. His vision was that the inheritance of acquired characteristics (a theory of evolution associated with the French naturalist Lamarck) would bridge the gap between biological and cultural evolution, forging them into one grand seamless process (Cronin, 1991). In the next section I shall return to some of these issues.

My point of view is that many phenomena surrounding war and warfare, war practices, rituals, motives, etc. cannot be properly understood without the sociocultural context (i.e., the shared set of meanings, ideas, concepts, beliefs, values, assumptions) in the construction of the various social cosmologies. We simply cannot do without cultural categories, as will be exemplified in the discussion of the materialist school and the sociocultural construction of what constitutes a resource (Ch. 5). I regard human beings as shrewd social strategists, clever manipulators, and conscious, intelligent decision-makers in the service of their inclusive fitness, operating within the constraints of their cultural semantics: the signification and interpretative frameworks (the semiotics and ethics) provided by the culture they happen to have been born in. The cultural aspects of human behavior should not, however, be portrayed as disembodied systems of symbolic information, as is commonly done by cultural anthropologists. This is a rather curious stance in light of our knowledge of cultural universals (D. Brown, 1991). It is far more plausible to assume that these cultural universals - including language acquisition and structure, toolmaking, kinship rules and incest avoidance, religion, morality, age- and sex-differentiated roles and statuses, some degree of ethnocentrism and territoriality, etc. - are grounded in universal features of human nature, traits that, in turn, are intimately linked to properties of the human central nervous system. As such, both the capacity for and the expression of cultural behavior may be viewed as products of evolution by means of natural selection (Crippen, 1992).

Yet another tentative answer might be: Basically, both natural and cultural evolution are processes of information transmission. One transmits the information contained in the DNA, the other the information contained in the mind. For example, sex (male/female) is a biological category. Gender (masculine/feminine), on the other hand, is a cultural category, implying norms, standards, values, meanings, and templates or prescriptions of appropriate conduct and role behavior; but ultimately the cultural category of gender does not make any sense without the biological category of sex.

It is often asserted that culture is a Lamarckian process. It means that social knowledge and organization are transmitted not by genes but by learning, from simple imitation to linguistic information. The function of culture is to transmit the information acquired during individual life from generation to generation. In this sense culture really is a Lamarckian process that departs radically from biological evolution in both structure and dynamics.

However, culture may conform to the Darwinian ’logic’ in at least three different senses. Firstly, the biological capacity for culture itself is transmitted genetically. Secondly, sociocultural traits still cannot escape ultimate evolution by natural selection. Finally, cultural evolution could follow the same laws and principles that work in biological evolution.

The core of the sociobiological approach is that behavioral capacities and tendencies have developed in response to the environment in human evolutionary history through natural selection. Human customs, social institutions and cultural forms have not developed in a biological vacuum, but under the conditions of interactions with natural selection. The biological nature of early Homo must have faced the ecological challenges in the ancient environment, have influenced the elementary shapes of social structures, and have constrained possible trajectories of human history.

~~The Origin Of War: Evolution of a Male-Coalitional Reproductive Strategy -by- Johan M.G. van der Dennen

Day 192: Muslims and Jews in America

A Few Good Men could well describe more than a famous movie starring Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and Jack Nicholson about U.S. Marines and their struggle to balance what they experience as the competing demands of fealty to “the Corps” with their obligations as human beings sepa rate from the military. It could also describe, with the addition of a few good women, the struggle of interreligious relations, which all too often is a struggle to balance these same competing demands. The best-known line in the script is voiced when a young attorney demands the truth from Nicholson’s character, Colonel Nathan R. Jessup. Believing that his experience commanding troops in Guantanamo Bay is too complex to be properly understood by his examiner (an irony I will not examine here), Jessup angrily screams back, “You can’t handle the truth!”

In this instant, two things become clear to the viewer. First, however painful it may be, the truth must always come out. The inability to shine a light on the dark corners of the communities we love most ultimately weakens and even destroys them. This is what happened with Colonel Jessup and the Marines under his command. Second, it becomes clear that what one understands as “the truth” is very much rooted in personal experience, something that demands respect. And yet, respect for the personal context that shapes the understanding of truth must not be used as an excuse for less-than-forthright discussions of even the most difficult issues.

Colonel Jessup, fully consumed by his own personal experience and the narrative that both shapes and is shaped by it, is not so different from any one of us. Yes, he is an extreme example of what can happen when our guiding narratives become entirely self- referential, lacking a mechanism to be kept in check. But more importantly, he represents the impulse to cover up those things we do not want to confront. Jessup also embodies the belief that the tough stuff cannot be fully explored with those outside one’s community because not only will such outsiders fail to appreciate “the truth,” they will use any newly acquired information shared by insiders to harm those who were brave enough to risk divulging it.

With only a few names changed, this entire discussion could easily describe the state of interreligious relations in much of the United States, especially between Jews and Muslims. This essay explores the current state of affairs between these two communities—our two communities— and how we might improve them. I should point out that to even speak of the Jewish or Muslim community, especially in contemporary America, is a misnomer. There is no single Jewish or Muslim community in the United States or elsewhere. But there are organizations representing large segments of each community, as well as media, advocacy, and educational institutions that are seen as indicative, if not fully representative, of Jews and Muslims in America.

While I believe that there are as many ways to be either Jewish or Muslim as there are people who identify as such, these institutions and organizations often present themselves and/or are perceived of as being synonymous with Jews, Judaism, Muslims, and Islam. Since, as is often remarked, the biggest difference between perception and reality is that perception is more difficult to change, it remains useful to use the language of Jews, Muslims, and communities herein. Yet I do so with the acute awareness that these are terms of convenience and not in any way exhaustive of the ideological and spiritual range claimed by all Jews or Muslims.

The bulk of this essay explores the ethical obligations that devolve upon both individuals and the institutions that claim either to represent them or speak in the voice of their traditions. How do we keep from becoming Nathan Jessup? How do we build our capacity to “handle the truth?” How do we nurture this capacity in others? How do we become more honest about the challenges within our own communities and make it safe for members of other communities to do the same? Only when these questions are fully addressed will we find ourselves on the path of maximizing the relationships between America’s Jewish and Muslim communities.

We must begin by raising the bar on our expectations regarding interreligious encounters. We must not confuse feel- good moments of mutual affirmation, which too often pass for genuine interreligious dialogue, with accomplishing the harder work of recognizing genuine differences between communities. It’s not that the so-called kumbaya experiences do not have their place, but they are not enough. Such experiences bring people together without actually being inter- anything. They are simply opportunities for mutual self-congratulation about that which is already shared. Yes, the identification and celebration of shared values remains a critical component of peace-building work. But time and again we have seen that without a healthy capacity to examine and address the moments of breakdown between groups, things quickly devolve into ugly rhetoric and even into violence.
~~Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalities, Contentions, and Complexities -ed- Reza Aslan & Aaron J. Hahn Tapper