Mass Migration after India's Independence from British dominion, 1947, by Margaret Bourke-White. (From LIFE Archives)

Three years later, India would celebrate it's first Republic Day.

Mumbai Jihad: Overwhelming Force or Judicious Prudence

As the debates rages on in the Indian sub-continent about an appropriate response to the Mumbai Jihad, thinkers and policy makers in India lurch between an all-out war espousing the annihilation of Pakistan to understanding terrorism as a symptomatic response to past injustices...

Speech by Arun Shourie to the Rajya Sabha. His basic premise being 'Not an eye for an eye, but for an eye, both eyes'.

Please realize -- this is a point for the liberals also -- whenever we are pushed into such a situation we say that NO, force should not be used. Only minimal force should be used. But no war is won with minimal force. It is won by overwhelming the enemy. As it has happened in Mumbai now. You can't do it with minimal force. You try and kill six people in China and see what happens. Here you can kill 60,000 people and nothing happens to the killers!. Not an eye-for-an-eye, not a tooth-for-a-tooth. That is completely wrong. For an eye, both eyes! For a tooth, the whole jaw! Unless India has that determination and that clarity, we will continue to bleed like this all the time.

Arundhati Roy seeks rationality in the actions of the terrorists and reminds us of the historical background behind the current conflict.

There is a fierce, unforgiving fault line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let's call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially 'Islamist' terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself. Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm's way.
So, on balance, if I had to choose between Side A and Side B, I'd pick Side B. We need context. Always.
In this nuclear subcontinent, that context is Partition. The Radcliffe Line which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain's final, parting kick to us. Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people—Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India—left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Each of those people carries and passes down a story of unimaginable pain, hate, horror, but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still un-severed muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can't seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives. Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic republic, and then, very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths. India on the other hand declared herself an inclusive, secular democracy. It was a magnificent undertaking, but Babu Bajrangi's predecessors had been hard at work since the 1920s, dripping poison into India's bloodstream, undermining that idea of India even before it was born. By 1990, they were ready to make a bid for power. In 1992, Hindu mobs exhorted by L.K. Advani stormed the Babri Masjid and demolished it. By 1998, the BJP was in power at the Centre. The US War on Terror put the wind in their sails. It allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, even to commit genocide and then present their fascism as a legitimate form of chaotic democracy. This happened at a time when India had opened its huge market to international finance, and it was in the interests of international corporations and the media houses they owned to project it as a country that could do no wrong. That gave Hindu Nationalists all the impetus and the impunity they needed. This, then, is the larger historical context of terrorism in the subcontinent, and of the Mumbai attacks.

Interestingly, in many of the conflicts around the world, there is always the ever-present ghost of colonialist policies practiced by the British. Africa, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent were the prime theaters used to by the British to satiate their appetite for unlimited access to raw materials, free or borderline cheap labor and access to regional riches. I see their guilty hand in almost every conflict; of course, many of these conflicts have now been conveniently wallpapered over and relabeled as regional uprisings, religious zealotry or intra cultural discords endemic to a regions peoples and attendant cultures. Delve a little deeper and one finds the pernicious effects of British rule lurking under the covers… Someday I hope to write more on the enduring effects and the daily horrors that one has to put up just because the English decided that it was in the best interests of their people to invade countries around the world.

The site of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center seven years after the towers went down. I remember taking this picture walking past it a couple of months back...

Colonial diaries

Reading a recent review of an exhibition showcasing luxury tableware produced by Indian craftsmen in the 1800's during the British occupation, I found myself drawing parallels to the trend of outsourcing technology jobs to India... To subvert the last line from the review below: outsourcing technology jobs to India, where skilled local programmers did fabulous work for a song, made sound business sense...

Whatever its purpose or destination, each item embodied particular images of India, true or false to different degrees, and often pure invention, as India itself was to the colonial eye. As Ms. Dehejia points out in the catalog, in the first half of the 19th century, when early cast silver first appeared there, the subcontinent was still a mystery to much of the Western world, a distant land whose natural resources and benighted natives invited intrusive cultivation.
Tea was one of those natural resources; silver another. After Britain’s early contact with China, tea had become the national addiction. And when it was discovered growing in northern India, the British rejoiced in a limitless supply. Silver tea services had long been fixtures of British domestic design. And outsourcing production to India, where skilled local craftsman did fabulous work for a song, made sound business sense.

Begs questions like the following: Does globalization and in turn outsourcing imply a veiled form of colonialism? Do ideals like The Theory of Comparative Advantage used so skillfully by Western economists point to inherent colonialist tendencies and a desire to profit from the so called underdeveloped nations? Using the ideas generated from the theory of comparative advantage, are we in turn forever 'type casting' certain countries into their perceived areas of expertise and thus preventing them from expanding into new areas?


Four piece Tea Service (teapot, milk jug, sugar bowl and hot water pot). Scotland in the Indian taste, ca 1881, Silver (image ripped from the Wallach Art Gallery website)

Note: “Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj” ends tomorrow at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University

Colonial diaries

Those of us who have moved from the villages into big cities in the hopes and dreams of making it big will resonate with James Wood's thoughts as he reviews Patrick French's biography of V. S. Naipaul (that Indian writer whom some love to hate with a passion). Personally, I am still unsure if I like him or detest him.

In his writing, Naipaul is simultaneously the colonized and the colonist, in part because he never seriously imagines that the colonized would ever want to be anything but the colonist, even as he uses each category to judge the other. This dialectic seems familiar because it may have less to do with race and empire than with class; it is the classic movement from province to metropolis, whereby the provincial, who has never wanted to be anywhere but the metropolis, nevertheless judges it with a provincial skepticism, while judging the provinces with a metropolitan superiority.

Naipaul's words on making sure that the Free World (read The Brits) feel the guilt in their colonial sojourns is searing...

Put yourself in my place for a minute . . . If my father had 1/20 of the opportunity laid before the good people of British stock, he would not have died a broken, frustrated man without any achievement. But, like me, he had the opportunity—to starve. He was ghettoed—in a sense more cruel than that in which Hitler ghettoed the Jews. But there was an element of rude honesty in the Nazi approach; and they at any rate killed swiftly. The approach of the Free World is infinitely subtler and more refined. You cannot say to a foreign country: I suffer from political persecution. That wouldn’t be true . . . But I suffer from something worse, an insidious spiritual persecution. These people want to break my spirit. They want me to forget my dignity as a human being. They want me to know my place.

The story of his life is succinctly put in a review of the same book in Harpers recently...

We gather that he was a pessimist, a narcissist, and a misanthrope from his West Indian beginnings—disdainful of Trinidad, especially its “Negroes”; his own family, except for his ambitious failure of a journalist father; and those very teachers and politicians upon whom he depended for a scholarship to England. Once sprung from the provinces to Oxford and London, he expects to be indulged by everyone in his difficult apprenticeship, even as he finds everything around him mediocre. He will marry Pat, a smart, socially insecure, masochistic young Englishwoman, to make himself comfortable. He will neglect her to look for dirtier sex in brothels, abandon her when he travels abroad with his Argentine mistress to research his books on India and Islam, and then propose to a Pakistani journalist whom he marries within days of Pat’s dying of breast cancer. Colleagues and friends are shamelessly exploited and suddenly shunned when they presume too much intimacy or even dare to express a contrary opinion. He has no interest in movies; detests music; refuses to sign a letter protesting the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a “leftist” whose books he pretends not to have read; and scorns Gabriel García Márquez, whose Caribbean is more magical than V.S. has even fantasized.

Images of sculptural artwork from the website of Ukrainian artist Tamara Pivnyuk. "My dolls are made from air-hardening or oven-baked clays. I use in my work natural materials – natural fabric, leather, fur, wood. I use different hand craft techniques like embroidery, patchwork and others."

Indian independence day

Today is the 60th anniversary of India's independence from England's colonial rulers. What started off as a company trading in spices and cotton eventually morphed into a colonial behemoth whose echoes can still be heard across parts of India. A lot of bits and ink online and off are being split in dissecting the turmoil that precedes a nation’s birth (mutiny, Jallianwala, partition) and after, and I did not think much can be gained out of me here adding to the clangor and din.


I wanted to focus a bit on a more peaceful time at this hour of celebration. It was a time of relative peace (in the 1820's), when surprisingly, a lot of amity existed between the English and the Indian. At Strand, I ran into an out of print book that contained images of a bucolic kind - the kind that existed when the visitor's from England and the local populace co-existed - albeit for a short time. It is also instructive to read some of the original captioning for the images by the unknown painter – reveals the unconscious social mores. Hope you enjoy them. Buy the book if you run into it, it contains a fabulous six piece pullout in full color that shows the Indian cavalry of the 1800's in uniformed regalia and splendor so reminiscent of the time.

A party of the 1st Irregular Cavalry or Skinners Horse. Well known by the familiar name of Yellow Boys from the color of their uniforms - a splendid corps raised by the late Colonel Skinner C.B. and at one time consisted of 3000 men

A Tangah or conveyance without cover

A Rauth or covered vehicle for ladies of rank

Nautch or dancing girls

The observatory at Delhi denominated 'Juntar Muntar'

Mode of conveying females either on a long journey or through arid countries

A Nanuck Punthee or follower of the Sikh devotee Nanuck - a religious mendicant

By the way, I found a great collection of splendid black and white photographs by an American G.I. stationed in India during the year of the partition (1947) here.