Photo

From Northwestern University Library's collection of more than 7,600 photos chronicling the European colonization of East Africa between 1860 and 1960. Taken by European explorers, colonial officials, settlers, missionaries, military officials, travelers, and early commercial photographers, the photos document the changing relationships among Africans and between Africans and Europeans during a period of dramatic change.

A Kikuyu warrior buying a wife from her father, the King, (payment in goats), East Africa.

Kikuyu women with water vessels (gourds) beside village store-houses, East Africa.

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."

The latest shamefaced lie behind oil prices

The newest rhetoric regarding escalating fuel prices is here. For the little bit of background, the initial reason bandied about before was the specter of rising demand and consumption by the BRIC economies (Brazil, Indian Russia and China). When nobody paid heed to that piece of drivel, it was the turn for the economists to pin the blame on speculators and the fact that hedging ones bets in the marketplace is detrimental to the stabilizing the price of oil. When this argument did not seem to stick, people opted for the convenience that came out of explanations like rising political tensions between the United States and Iran and the resultant skittish market psychology playing a role in the see-sawing fuel prices. Of course, a recalcitrant OPEC who refuses to change the output and the constant vitriol spewing from Venezuela's Chavez have always been ready reasons handy when all other explanations fail to stick to the wall.

The latest explanation doing the rounds (and this time being given wide coverage shamefully by the New York Times on its front page) is the fact that fuel subsidies overseas is taking its toll on oil prices in the United States. The current president of the United States made a telling comment last week in trying to bolster this explanation by telling us the following in sage terms: “I am discouraged by the fact that some nations subsidize the purchases of product, like gasoline, which, therefore, means that demand may not be causing the market to adjust as rapidly as we’d like”. It was the same person who made the equally sage comment on rising food prices around the world by telling us that “when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up", until it was found out that that biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75%..

While most of the developed countries have had a bull run for the last two hundred years with established growth rates and a voluminous GDP built on the back of colonial booty and slave labor, it is indeed disheartening to note that these very same countries who have had two to three centuries to bootstrap themselves are wagging their really engorged fingers at the new kids struggling to get a little bit of the leftovers. Add to that the recent shocking statistic that the entire state of California with its 37 million people uses more gas than the whole Chinese nation with its 1.3 billion people.

California alone uses more gasoline than any country in the world (except the US as a whole, of course). That means California's 20 billion gallon gasoline and diesel habit is greater than China's! (Or Russia's. Or India's. Or Brazil's. Or Germany's.) One more choice statistic: gasoline usage in California has increased 50 percent, that's 6.7 billion gallons, since 1988. Has there been anything close to a commensurate increase in quality of life here to accompany that rise in energy use?

When nations who are bootstrapping themselves to climb aboard the great economic growth train (whether that is a good or a bad thing is a whole different debate) subsidize the costs of fuel to its citizens, all they are doing is trying to level a highly loaded playing field (that was tipped in favor of the industrialized west for many centuries) by lifting the basic standards of living for its impoverished millions to a little more of a decent level. They are trying what the industrialized west achieved for its citizens a hundred to two hundred years back. It is also worth noting that as these nations try and level the playing field in a short 20-30 year span, they are doing so without the booty plundered as a result of colonialism and the cheap labor juiced out of imported black slaves worked to the bone.

Apologies if that last bit sounded a little too bitter, but this time the spin really got to me..

Check the fuel price in this photo of a dilapilated gas station on Route 66. Picture ripped from here.

Colonialist yokes

If one were wondering what business millions of Burmese had in what was once an uninhabited mangrove swamp typical of the Irrawaddy delta (which cyclone Nargis tore through effortlessly), one again needs to look back to a country's colonialist past.

From the Times:

Before the mid-19th century, the area was a thinly inhabited swamp. But the British colonial rulers saw this as an ideal place to cultivate rice and help feed their empire. They built dikes and drained the land. In the twilight years of British rule, colonial Burma was the world’s largest rice exporter, and millions of Burmese moved here to cultivate the rich alluvial soil. The government says that 6.3 million people lived in the delta before the storm.

Mangu Putra, ‘No More Words II’, acrylic and oil on canvas, 200 X 200 cm (source: artreviewdigital.com)

Colonial throwbacks of a linguistic kind

Oftentimes, one can gauge a country’s colonialist past from examining the outwardly odd sounding phrases employed by its peoples. What might sound funny or plain stupid might have been the normal mode of expression back in one’s lands. I remember the times when I would refer to my graduation year as ‘the year I passed out’ and the horrified looks I received from potential employers here (now, 'passed out', here in the United States would mean to 'faint/swoon' – but it was the accepted term for graduation back in India – courtesy; the British). India had the Brits lording over it until 1947 and the resultant linguistic vestiges remain, albeit twisted.

I was reminded of this when I ran into a great piece on Nigerian English in the International Herald Tribune.

Some excerpts from everyday usage:
- A TV isn't switched on or off — it's "on-ed" or "off-ed."
- Nigerian congratulating someone on a success or victory will likely "felicitate" him rather than offer felicitations.
- Similarly, people are invited to "jubilate," or celebrate, a triumph.
- In Nigerian English, a very small boy would be a "small, small boy."
- Eateries are called "Chop Houses"
- Upset stomach? Take "gripe water."
- A flat while driving along? Take the tire to the "vulcanizer" to fix the ‘puncture’
- Street children are "urchins," and police often brand criminals as "touts," "rascals," or "miscreants" who carry "cutlasses" — machetes.
- In reporting crime, Nigerian newspapers say police ‘opened a can of worms’ when ‘raiding criminal hideouts’.
- A dead or jailed robber is often said to meet his ‘Waterloo’.
- Politicians "heap calumny" on those they accuse of corruption.

This is a link to an online Nigerian dictionary (a small but a very interesting one):

Some of my favorite entries in this document :

- Copyright: applied to a song performed by a popular entertainer previously made popular by another entertainer. Often said with slight scorn. as in That song is copyright)
- Defile the air: to fart (as in Who is defiling the air?)
- ESCORT: the number plate given to cars that escort an important dignitary
- Jam: to collide, to bump against, to hit (as in 'the moto jammed me' will translate to "The car ran into me")
- Now Now: immediately, at once (as in "Do it now now")
- Xerox: copy in an exam- Put to bed: to give birth (as in "She put to bed a bouncing baby boy")
- Sugar-mummy: older woman who supports younger man in exchange for sex
- Within: within the campus (as in "He is within" will translate to "He is somewhere in the building")

This blog has further interesting stories.

George Knapton (England, 1698 – 1778), ‘Portrait of John Ross Mackye, Full length, standing, wearing Turkish dress, a letter in his left hand, a negro page beyond’, oil on canvas, 93” X 57” (Image from a Sotheby’s auction book featuring British paintings from 1500 – 1850)