Friday, August 31, 2012

economist despite its whites-must-rule instincts, finds it difficult to totally trash @namo, but damns with faint praise

http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/08/judgment-gujarat?fsrc=nlw|wwp|8-30-2012|3296332|35042158|

the economist is generally the flag-carrier of european/NATO imperialism, and believes that whites have a manifest destiny to rule.

but they do note that the assam and sikh riots did not stick to the teflon congress. not surprising because of the neta-journo nexus

RoP Plot Thwarted -- ELM Outrage To Follow

A JUNIOR software engineer in the DRDO and a journalist working for a leading local English daily are among 11 people arrested by the Bangalore police in an alleged terror plot to attack a Right-wing columnist in a prominent Kannada daily, Hindu leaders and politicians. They were in regular touch with Lashkar-e-Toiba and Harkat-ul-Jehadi-al-Islami operatives in Saudi Arabia in connection with the alleged plot. 
Among them are Muthi-ur-Rehman Siddiqui, 26, a journalist who has been with Deccan Herald for the last three years, Ejaz Mohammed Mirza, 25, a junior engineer in DRDO, his brother Shoaib Ahmed Mirza, 25, a masters in computer applications, and Mohammed Yousuf Nalband, 28, an electrician.
The others arrested from Bangalore are Abdullah alias Abdul Hakim Jamadar, 25 and Riyaz Ahmed Byahatti, 28. Among the arrested from Hubli are Obaidullah Imran Bahadur, 24, Mohammed Sadiq Lashkar, 28, Waheed Hussain, 26, Mahaboob Bagalkote, 26, and Dr Jaffar Iqbal Sholapur. 

IE: Journalist among 11 arrested for Karnataka terror plot

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Mobile Tower Radiations To Be Brought Down

The exposure limit of radio frequency fields (base station emissions) across the nation will be brought down to one-tenth of the existing level from September 1.
This comes in response to petitions in High Courts and the Supreme Court on fears of health hazards from mobile tower radiations. The issue of mobile tower radiations causing cancer has been a cause for concern to people across the country. In the past few months, members of civil society and resident welfare associations across the nation have been opposing the installation of new towers in their localities and questioning the continuance of the existing ones. 
The Hindu: Mobile base station radiation limit will be cut from September 1

Confessions of a troubled #secularist - Shiv Visvanathan | what, the isi cheque bounced? Or common sense dawns?

Remarkable if something penetrated the thick fog of obfuscation these fellows inhabit.

Quick, take screenshot before the mafia take it down.

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On Aug 30, 2012 7:24 AM, "sri  wrote:
>
> Confessions of a troubled secularist
>
> http://www.asianage.com/columnists/confessions-troubled-secularist-053
>
> Aug 23, 2012
>
> Shiv Visvanathan
>
> If Muslims insist on speaking exclusively for Muslims and do not recognise Bodo suffering then theirs is an ethnic of narcissism
>
> This is an essay on secularism and the Indian Muslim. And I must admit the recent events have made this a difficult piece to write. Let me begin at the beginning.
>
> I was born in Jamshedpur where I saw riot after riot triggered in urban areas. I still remember the day in school when my classmate Obidul Islam came to say goodbye. He told me sadly that his family was going back to Pakistan. Obidul was a brilliant 100-metre runner and I am still unsuccessfully racing against him.
>
> As I grew older and watched the Mumbai 1992 riots and the Gujarat carnage of 2002, I saw with sadness how for the majority community, democracy tasted like castor oil, good for health but difficult to consume. While studying the Gujarat violence I saw how the community of Muslim survivors built a new citizenship around a community of law. I heard Mr Bandukwala, once professor of physics at Baroda University, tell the Hindus that even if you do not apologise I forgive you. Listening to all this I wondered what secularism meant.
>
> My secular friends practised a strange kind of casteism. In the aftermath of the riots they would talk to Muslims but stay away from Hindus who had also suffered. I found secularism becoming a form of ghettoisation where one community’s suffering was privileged over others. Worse, I found secularism empty and non-dialogic. It was catechism without a theology, a form of political correctness, where the Hosannas were the sons to the minority community and truth flew out of the window.
>
> Secularism, at least in terms of the relation of science to religion, is based on a false history. The battle between science and religion is a falsely constructed one. Tracts about the conflict between religion and science were published as a result of a struggle for power between scientists and theologians battling to control the modern university. They both wrote history backward, destroying the fact that religion and science have been reciprocally creative.
>
> I think Indian secularism cannot not engage with religion but must create a communicative relationship with it. I am reminded of the ending of an old movie, Inherit the Wind, where the hero, Clarence Darrow, picks up Darwin’s The Origin of Species and the Bible and holds them up as great books, each inspired by a different kind of truth. Secularism as dialogue insists on critique and this is what I am going to engage in.
>
> What happened in Mumbai, and is still happening, is atrocious. If Muslims are as rabid as Bal Thackeray, or Raj Thackeray, then one must say so. If Muslims insist on speaking exclusively for Muslims and do not recognise Bodo suffering then theirs is an ethnic of narcissism, and not a secular value. Unless Muslims realise that over a million Bodos have been displaced, the displacement of three million Muslims will make little sense. One man’s suffering cannot be the cause of another man’s celebration. This cannot be the secular way or the secular ethic.
>
> In our society, secularism has to be defined differently. It cannot be a battle between religion and science or separation between state and religion. Secularism is the way we respond to strangers. The stranger is the other who defines us. The first law of secularism should be hospitality. We welcome the other because he is not us. The other is the reminder that we are not complete as truths, that as fragments we need each other. The second law of secularism can be formulated after the Dalai Lama’s comment that George Bush’s behaviour “brings out the Muslim in him”. Similarly, after the Gujarat carnage I can say that Narendra Modi brings out the Muslim in me. It is a way of giving secular space a meaning where we become the other in their moment of suffering. Yet, our secularism allows for boundary walls. It realises that violence might come when identities are too close and separations are not maintained. Our secularism understands difference and distance creatively because our secularism is a theory
> of diversity not homogeneity.
>
> As a human rights activist I have to be secular by definition. I cannot fight only for Hindus because I am a Hindu. But I fight for Muslims because I am a Hindu. My duty extends beyond my community because my rights also extend beyond it. The very dialogicity of this secularism demands that I challenge both Muslim fundamentalism and Hindu fanaticism. Our society has become fragile today because Muslim violence and exclusivity has become a problem. To criticise the Muslim is not to demonise them. It is to use the reciprocity of citizenship to mirror each other. We have to realise that a few more riots can change the very nature of
> politics.
>
> I am writing this because I am concerned about the fate of democracy. The situation is tense and let’s not forget that Assam is the state with the second largest Muslim population in India. We need to understand that a coercive minoritarianism is as putrid as bully boy majoritarianism. The Muslim fanatic and the Hindu fundamentalist both threaten democracy and we need open ended democracy that challenges both. A Mulana Abdul Qadir Alvi is not an alternative to Raj Thackeray. He is merely a Muslim Modi with a skull cap. The danger is that a few riots can create an insecurity, a climate of hate that could bring a politician like Modi to power. This is a history that a secularist must seek to avoid. The current meaning of secularism is too narrow and impoverished. We have to reinvent words so that we understand the worlds we wish to live in. The pomposity of a narrow state-sponsored Western secularism is utterly useless in this new democratic battle.
>
> The writer is a social science nomad
>

How To Thwart Hackers And Dictators With One Free Download | #emergency2012 #goiblocks vpn

Poor in India Starve as Politicians Steal $14.5 Billion of Food | UP success story. Kudos, akhilesh, mulayam

Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

Ram Kishen, 52, half-blind and half- starved, holds in his gnarled hands the reason for his hunger: a tattered card entitling him to subsidized rations that now serves as a symbol of India’s biggest food heist.

Kishen has had nothing from the village shop for 15 months. Y...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-28/poor-in-india-starve-as-politicians-steal-14-5-billion-of-food.html

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Abandoned at sea - the forgotten #hostages of the Somali pirates | these #Indians are not victims. Not rop or rol, must be

Article: The Two Americans Shot In Mexico Last Week Were CIA Operatives

Picture: Apple Visits Samsung in the Hospital

Women gets 4 years for stealing Motorola secrets | how China succeeds in business

Frustrated by lack of protection, Kenyan churches sue government | #minority #rights

In the wake of the torching of churches in Kenya's coastal city of Mombasa and grenade attacks on other churches around the country, Protestant leaders are trying a new tack to get more help from the government: they're suing.

Christian leaders say the targeting of churches with grenades, bombs...

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2012/0829/Frustrated-by-lack-of-protection-Kenyan-churches-sue-government

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Article: 20: Blue Jacaranda - In pictures: 20 of the world's most beautiful trees

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Article: Anger as 'superhero' school fails to teach special powers | Han snake oil

Article: Pakistan: A nation in turmoil

Sex education doesn’t cut teenage pregnancy

Lessons on sex education and handing out contraception freely to young people has little impact on cutting teenage pregnancy rates in the UK.
DH: Sex education doesn’t cut teenage pregnancy

India?s Modi Outlines Economic Platform - WSJ.com

Daily chart: Pole glancing | The Economist

Suzuki's labour troubles in India: A routine meeting turned violent | The Economist

Article: Economic Pros and Cons of Longer Life Spans

But something different is happening now. “Instead of additional years of life being realized early in the life cycle, they are being realized late in life,” Stanford University economists Karen Eggleston and Victor Fuchs write in the cu …

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/08/28/economic-pros-and-cons-of-longer-life-spans/

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Happy Onam to all. May mahabali bless you this year

Article: Economic Pros and Cons of Longer Life Spans

But something different is happening now. “Instead of additional years of life being realized early in the life cycle, they are being realized late in life,” Stanford University economists Karen Eggleston and Victor Fuchs write in the cu …

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/08/28/economic-pros-and-cons-of-longer-life-spans/

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Article: New Genitalia-Headed Fish Is Evolutionary Mystery | talk of head up its ass :-)

Soldiers in Anti-Obama Plot Wanted to 'Give the Government Back to the People' | interesting sentiment. Good ends, bad means

Apple now bigger by market cap than Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook combined | too big to fail

Apple is an enormously wealthy and profitable company, we all know this. Sometimes, though, there’s a bit of context that really snaps it into crisp detail. One such observation was made earlier today by Counternotions on Twitter and shared on Mactrast.

The comment pointed out that the combined...

http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/08/29/apple-now-bigger-market-cap-microsoft-google-amazon-facebook-combined/

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Botched art restoration in Spain earns worldwide fans | is there a metaphor hidden in the old lady's work?

Article: Bigfoot hoax ends badly: Montana jokester hit, killed by car | Darwin award candidate

Article: Fighting continues in Mombasa after death of radical Islamist preacher

Hate crime trial under way in Amish beard-cutting attacks | the hirsute ones in a brawl

'Burning Monk' Photo | #human #rights of Buddhists under convert Madame nhu, who enjoyed monk 'barbecue'

Afghan beheadings could signal confusion in Taliban ranks | then again, this could be their true intent #women's #rights

(Reuters) - It was meant to be another night of music and dance, a brief distraction from life in the searing heat and dust of Afghanistan's conservative rural south for a small group of boys and girls in Helmand province's Roshan Abad village.

Instead it ended in brutality that even the Taliba...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/28/us-afghanistan-beheadings-idUSBRE87R0GZ20120828

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Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Azad Maidan Violence Video

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sandeep

Subject: Azad Maidan Violence Video
To:
Date: Saturday, August 25, 2012, 8:14 PM

 
Shameful and inept handling of incident.
Hope people do not have short memories to remember such incidents in 2014. That is the time when the people of the country will get a chance to show that they will not be taken for granted and tolerate such unruly behaviour and shameful and inept handling.
Preserve this email and resend it to everyone of your contacts in 2014. Remember to use your franchise and use it wisely.   

 

 
 










Article: Why Everyone Watching China Should Keep An Eye On The Price Of Pig

Xerox Zakaria - 1 | Radia Media - 0

Fareed Zakaria’s apology was instant and unambiguous. Pit that against Barkha’s defiant non-apology. “I was gullible…I was silly…I may have been innocent, I made an error of judgement. I am sorry for that but that’s all…I’m not apologising for anything else.” She shall now live with the sword of doubt hanging over her head because every time I see her the Radia tapes play in my head. And I think she knows that. 
Firstpost: Why the fall of Xerox Zakaria is unthinkable in Indian media

Monday, August 27, 2012

onam: Greetings from India Video


 

  Sharing the sweet memories of a bygone era of peace and prosperity, Onam, the harvest festival of Kerala, India is here once again.

During this festive occasion India Video sends you and your dear ones, a bouquet of video images from Kerala. Please click on the link :

http://www.indiavideo.org/greetings/onam/card.php?id=MTE1Njk4NDI5

 
     
  We respect your privacy. We will not share your email address with others because of this video greeting. To view our privacy policy, click on the link below:
http://www.indiavideo.org/privacy-policy/
 

Article: Fall Movie Preview: 20 Movies to See This Oscar Season

Watch Live - Swami Vivekananda Women Chess Event! (27 aug 1545 IST)

27th aug 2012 CE

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gujarat India <gujarat@gujarat-india.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 12:37 PM
Subject: Watch Live - Swami Vivekananda Women Chess Event!
To: rajeev.srinivasan@gmail.com


#emergency2012 jethro tull: "your wise men don't know how it feels/to be thick as a brick"

from the album thick as a brick, 1972

"so! where the hell was biggles when you need him last saturday?
and where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you through?
they're all resting down in cornwall
writing up their memoirs for a paper-back edition
of the boy scout manual."

indeed, where were the superheroes? the cricket stars? why did all of them, including the jewel of india, say precisely nothing about the murder of freedom of expression?

your heroes, folks, have feet of clay.

Exemption to PC -- Nation feels cheated

Investigation should proceed against P. Chidambaram in 2G spectrum allocation scam.

Please sign and promote this petition to show our disapproval of this gross misjudgment.

What #Apple would kill | New NASA Satellites Have #Android Smartphones for Brains

NASA is aiming to launch a line of small satellites called "PhoneSats" that are cheaper to make and easier to build than those it has produced in the past. To achieve this, engineers are using unmodified Android smartphones -- in one prototype, HTC's Nexus One, and in another, Samsung's Nexus S -...

http://mashable.com/2012/08/26/nasa-satellites-android/

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Article: NMC entrenching minority victimhood

The National Commission of Minorities (NCM) has stirred up a hornet’s nest by coming up with a report which indicates an excessively skewed focus on the condition of Muslims in the recent Assam riots. A team representing NCM visited the riot-hit areas in Assam to prepare a report on the condition...

http://www.niticentral.com/2012/08/nmc-entrenching-minority-victimhood.html

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Rio Tinto Unveils Inaugural Diamond Jewelry From Indian Mine | until 1890s, India was major (only?) source of diamonds

Why India's Middle Class Hates Its Rulers

Here's why India's middle class hates the country's rulers:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-19255958

Article: Book Review: "Resiliency: Why Things Bounce Back" by Zolli and Healy

Article: Apple Samsung jury speed doubts raised after “punishment” ruling

The validity of the jury decision in the Apple vs. Samsung patent trial has come under renewed scrutiny, with concerns that the speedy ruling could mean fundamental aspects of the process have been overlooked. Many were surprised that the jury in the San Jose case reached its $1bn decision agains...

http://www.slashgear.com/apple-samsung-jury-speed-doubts-raised-after-punishment-ruling-26243946/

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Family of slain US activist awaits verdict | strange that no activists die for rights of Tibetans

Article: Food shortages could force world into vegetarianism, warn scientists

The Mole At Our High Commission

The initial narrative that unfolded in the media, of a disgruntled spinster-turned-spy, spilling state secrets for love or money or revenge—perhaps with the assistance, witting or unwitting, of the R&AW station chief—appeared to have come from the officials that investigated the case in the IB and Ministry of Home Affairs. The fact that RK Sharma’s identity had been leaked as well, however, suggested there might be a bigger story that had gone untold: one that had little to do with Madhuri Gupta, but instead revealed a bitter turf war that had played out inside the Indian High Commission in Pakistan, which pitted officers of India’s two civilian intelligence agencies against one another.  
The Caravan: Team of Rivals

AN AMERICAN HINDU (OF NON-INDIAN ORIGIN) IN US CONGRESS?

interesting. but let me note that the kauai temple (san marga) is probably not all that small. the (american-origin) monks there, are followers of the late sri subramuniyaswami and the saiva siddhanta sabha. they have been publishing 'hinduism today' for two-three decades. i have written a few pieces for them in years past, and was at one time quite friendly with the editor, acharya palani swami.

i also remember with great fondness their priest at the old san francisco murugan temple on sacramento avenue. i was astonished many years ago to wander in there and find sadhaka diksha kandar, a white man, do a perfect, practiced rendering of archanas.

sadhaka diksha kandar passed away a few years ago. acharya palani told me about how the sadhaka, who had cancer, entered samadhi by voluntarily denying himself food and drink.

these monks, one they took their diksha, never spoke any more of their earlier lives, as they had abandoned them completely.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ram Narayanan


INDIA ABROAD, AUGUST 24, 2012, PAGE A 28

’First time in history, Hindus will have a representative in the US Congress’

George Joseph

Tulsi Gabbard last week defeated her main opponent, former Honolulu mayor Mufi Hanneman, in the Democratic primary with 55.1 percent votes to 34.3 percent from the 2nd Congressional District in Hawaii.

’This was a huge, come-from-behind, grass roots upset’ said United States Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat, New York), who had endorsed Tulsi. ’And we know she has what it takes to beat her Republican challenger in November… We’re one step closer to sending yet another strong progressive woman with an independent voice to Congress’.

Gabbard, 31, acknowledged Gillibrand’s support in glowing terms. ’When I was trailing my opponent by double digits, Senator Gillibrand came to me and said she’d do anything she could to help me. And she did,’ Gabbard said. ’Not only did she give me amazing advice and encouragement, she introduced me to her tremendous grassroots supporters. Because Kirsten believed in me -- because you believed in me -- I now have the chance to go to Washington where I can fight for the progressive values we all believe in.

Gabbard seems set to win the election from the predominantly Democratic district in November. Though a Republican opponent is in the fray, nobody doubts Gabbard’s chances.

Though Gabbard is not Indian she is Hindu (India Abroad, July 27). She thanked the Indian American community for its support.

"First time in history, Hindus will have a representative in the US Congress," said Houston-based Indian American community leader Vijay Pallod, who was one of her earliest supporters. "All major faiths have their representatives in Congress with the exception of Hinduism. Hindus all over US are very excited about her win, especially the second generation. An American friend of mine in Hawaii, Vrin Parker, informed me about Tulsi. I looked at her credentials and was very impressed. I sent my first contribution check. I have contributed two more times.

Pallod arranged a conference call with Gabbard to introduce her to the Hindu community workers in the US.

"I have known Tulsi Gabbard since she was the shy child of the Gabbard family," Vrin Brannon Parker said. "Now she has become the dynamic new star of Hawaii’s political scene. She is shattering barriers and raising the bar of what it means to be a public servant. Tulsi refers to her political role as ’servant-leadership,’ and it is no exaggeration to say that this concept is rooted in the Hindu ethos by which she was raised. As a fellow American Hindu, it is quite heartening to see the rise of a Dharmic political leader. Her story truly represents the American story. In fact Tulsi’s career is a result of the long-term confluence of ancient Indian wisdom and the dynamism and energy of modern America. Now, in Tulsi, we have some one in the mainstream political scene that shares our values. She will speak for us, stand with us, and millions of other Americans that recognize the great potential benefits of the Dharmic traditions of India."

Hawaii is mostly Christian and has a significant number of Buddhists (10 to 15 percent). There are only two Hindu temples in the State -- the ISKCON Temple in Oahu and the Aadheenam Temple in Kauai.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

why isn't india fishing in these troubled waters? | In aid of Gilgit Baltistan by khurram hussain in DAWN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: sanjeev 


Some points
1. there are only two overland linkages that the Northern areas have with the rest of Pakistan + both of them have seen brutal sectarian murders.
2. The Karakorum Highway has been ripped up almost completely from the China border almost down to Thakot. It is being repaved by a Chinese construction company, and some stretches do present a fresh look,
3. The people living north of Attabad lake have been trapped in a low-intensity disaster zone for more than two years now, and the tragedy is that the country appears to have forgotten about them. – If India considers POK part of India should India offer to send aid.
 

ALL through the Eid holidays, my mind has been on the Northern Areas.

The brutal sectarian murder that took place near Babuser Pass may not sound like much of an economic story to most people, but it is of such universal importance that it would be naïve to think that economic matters are divorced from the steady descent of our country into a boiling cauldron of primitive hatreds.

However, the human tragedy that the killings represent is the first order of priority to highlight. There are only two overland linkages that the erstwhile Northern Areas have with the rest of Pakistan, and both of them have seen brutal sectarian murders.

The eyewitness accounts are chilling, where passengers are offloaded from buses, their papers examined, and Shias separated from Sunnis.

Then the grim firing line is assembled and in one quick burst of gunfire, those belonging to the minority Shia sect are gunned down. In one online eyewitness account, in the most recent of such killings, those whose lives were spared were made to shout slogans declaring the murdered ones infidels before they were allowed to resume their journey — in many cases those sent on
were family members of the dead — leaving behind the bodies of their murdered fellow travellers.

With both roads that connect them with the rest of the country now under attack, the people of the Northern Areas are effectively cut off from their own country. Air travel is far too limited to handle the traffic that goes back and forth, and there is no rail link.

Tourism is an important source of income for many people in these areas, which see visitors in large numbers from across East Asia and more spirited enthusiasts from across Pakistan. Of course, the killings deter people from visiting and impose a heavy cost on the people across this area.

Adding to the difficulties faced by the people in this region is the still unresolved issue of the Attabad lake, formed in January 2010 when a massive landslide blocked the Hunza River near what was the village of Gojal.

When the river levels rose with the arrival of summer, the water formed a lake behind the landslide, rising to a height of almost 100m in some parts and flooding a stretch of almost 20km of the Karakorum Highway. More than 6,000 people were displaced by some counts and the overland link to China was cut off.

To this day, the lake has not been drained, and the government appears to have abandoned all efforts to drain it. More than two years after the original tragedy, the only way to go beyond Attabad is by an hour-long boat journey in completely unregulated crafts.

During a recent visit I saw food, fuel and medicines being carried across the lake in those boats, taken down to the water’s edge on the backs of hardy young men. This is no way to keep a population of more than 30,000, north of Attabad lake, supplied with daily necessities or to operate our only road link to the world’s fastest-growing economy. This is no way to live up to state obligations to safeguard the livelihoods of citizens.

The people living north of Attabad lake have been trapped in a low-intensity disaster zone for more than two years now, and the tragedy is that the country appears to have forgotten about them.

Compounding the situation is the condition of the Karakorum Highway. This once proud road has been ripped up almost completely from the China border almost down to Thakot. It is being repaved by a Chinese construction company, and some stretches do present a fresh look, but the journey on this road has been turned into a nightmare as a result.

The highway is more than a strategic link for the army; it is a vital artery that connects all those living in the northern areas with the rest of the country, and with each other. The journey from Gilgit to Hunza, which used to be a most pleasant three hours or so now takes more than five hours. South of Gilgit the situation gets worse.

A simple question that everybody who has seen this road wants to ask is: why did they rip up the entire road to repave it?

Couldn’t it have been done in sections? Who gave the order to rip up the whole road?

It has been lying in this state for over two years now, and from the looks of it, it will be in this condition for at least as much longer.

Between murderous gangs prowling the road in the south and a disaster zone in the north, the people of Gilgit-Baltistan are stuck in a nightmare from which there seems to be no escape. They’re having a great deal of trouble getting the government to pay attention to the seriousness of the situation they face, and many of those who have tried to organise the local community have found themselves targeted by the security services and detained indefinitely.

The Gilgit-Baltistan government under Chief Minister Mehdi Shah should wake up to its responsibilities and work harder to resolve the issues under its control. It must make a greater effort to awaken the federal government to its responsibilities in the area too. He may be from Skardu himself, but the chief minister would do well to remember that he is an elected representative of Gilgit-Baltistan which also includes Hunza, Passu, Diamer, etc.

But the biggest responsibility belongs to the federal government. Until its fair share in federal resources is made available to it by virtue of having provincial status, Gilgit-Baltistan will continue to require federal assistance to execute its responsibilities.

The federal government can start by making a strong and credible commitment to maintain law order in the access routes to Gilgit-Baltistan.

The writer is a Karachi-based journalist covering business and economic policy.

Warm Regards
sanjeev nayyar
https://twitter.com/#!/NayyarSanjeev
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black hole of empire: lousy history, reviewed by fellow leftie, rebutted by acerbic scholar

a bit like that prize ass pankaj mishra was spanked by mihir sharma. 

anybody who claims to be subalternist in india is basically an apologist for fascism or stalinism.

these charlatans have stolen our history. 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: G
Date: Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 2:21 AM
Subject: IHR Reviews
To:


Self indulgence and self-aggrandisement on a handsome $ income, with
the usual distortions about the unalloyed joys of Islamic rule before
Clive and Hastings. Partha Chatterjee is predictably and egregiously
silent on Tipu Sultan's own private Moplah pogroms of forced
conversions, etc. and Siraj's dismal rule, the subject of acerbic
comment by Ram Mohun Roy. The latter of course welcomed the British
incursion as liberation from grievously oppressive Islamic rule.

Apparently Partha Chatterjee was a personal witness to 18th century
Bengal, just as the harridan, Romila Thapar effectively insinuates she
was present when Mahmud of Ghazni visited India on a tourist package
and marvelled at the splendours of Somnath, before returning home
satisfied.

Getting an obscure Leftie Bengali, of humbler professional status, to
review one's book is a smart subterfuge, but rather too obvious!

GS

The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power

Book:

The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power
 Partha Chatterjee
 Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2012, ISBN: 9780691152011;
440pp.; Price: £19.95

Reviewer:
Professor Neilesh Bose
 University of North Texas

Citation:
Professor Neilesh Bose, review of The Black Hole of Empire: History of
a Global Practice of Power, (review no. 1307)
 URL: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1307
 Date accessed: 23 August, 2012

See Author's Response


Popular references to Calcutta (now Kolkata) – once the gleaming
capital of British India – in Anglo-American contexts often conjure
images of poverty, crowded city streets, unbearable traffic, smog, and
residents that require a savior. Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi’s 2009
memoir (1) includes a description of his performance in Roland Joffe’
s 1992 City of Joy, the film adaptation of Dominique Lapierre’s 1985
novel of the same name. Swayze portrays Max, a jaded Texas doctor who
searches for spiritual enlightenment in Calcutta to work as serving
the poorest of the poor. Not only did the film project the image of
Calcutta as a place beyond saving, but Swayze himself remarks about
how he was assigned by the director to travel himself to Calcutta to
prepare for his work. He diligently prepared for his role at home and
then ‘went to the black hole of Calcutta’ (p. 181). After discussing
the smog, the dirt, the eerie lighting at night, he ends his
description with a casual reference to ‘the black hole’, which, for
English readers, must link Calcutta with the characteristics of
backwardness and poverty. In the 2012 film Avengers, the savior Bruce
Banner tries to keep his inner Hulk in control as he attempts to save
leprosy victims in Calcutta, invoking familiar images of poverty,
over-crowdedness, congested streets, and people in need of a savior.
As critics of Avengers have opined, the vision of Calcutta in the film
was ‘a complete throwback to an older idea of India, where the lights
are dim and the televisions flicker feebly, where wide eyed children
tug at the sleeves of the good phoren doctor’.(2) Though the
‘Calcutta’ portions were shot in New Mexico, critics also stated that
the city looked quite similar to the area depicted in City of Joy,
twenty years earlier – ‘cramped, squalid, leprous’.(3)

A discursive coherence to the representations of Calcutta as cramped
and squalid emanates not only from popular-cultural American
Orientalism, but from a longer history of imperial practices in
colonial India, as discussed by Partha Chatterjee in The Black Hole of
Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power. The story of the Black
Hole of Calcutta, well known to historians of India, and well known to
travelers to India from the 18th century through the late 19th
century, finds an odd place in the history of India and the history of
modern empires. Though probably cited in popular ways by many amateur
Indian history buffs, professional historians seem to have forgotten
about it. The Black Hole refers to the site where allegedly many
Europeans (the precise number has never been settled in the
historiography, though the fact that some people died is beyond
dispute) died by suffocation as prisoners of Nawab Siraj-ud-daulah,
Bengal’s ruling nawab, in 1756. This signature event led to a chain of
conflicts and encounters that ultimately resulted in the English East
India Company’s conquest of Bengal in the late 18th century,
coinciding with their political rise in Southern Asia and the loss of
the American colonies.

By the mid 19th century, most of what is now the nation-state of
India, was conquered by the British Empire. The colonial encounters
between Europeans and India at discursive and material levels
generated landmark debates and historical changes about issues central
to the modern world, such as the nature of capitalism, the spread and
role of the modern state, the extent and desirability of imperialism,
and the nature of nationalism and decolonization in Asia. These modern
encounters, at some level, derive their potency from the starting
point of conquest, during and immediately after the literal Black Hole
incident in the 1750s. The ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’, therefore,
comprises a story that not only commands lasting rhetorical power in
popular Anglo-American culture, but also refers to one of the most
important events in the history of the modern world.

Partha Chatterjee, the pioneering political theorist, historian, and
one of the pioneers of subaltern studies, argues that the ‘forgetting’
of the story by professional historians and the maintenance of a
certain image of Calcutta in the popular imagination, actually tells a
larger story about the nature of empire in the modern world. In this
book, he tells the story of how the narrative itself changed and
impacted different writers – European and Indian – but also claims
that the history of Empire is best understood through a coherent
faithfulness to a certain type of mythos. Chatterjee tracks such a
history of mythos through the history of the story.

In ten chapters, Chatterjee provides a narrative of the Black Hole
story and its physical manifestations, as they slip in and out of the
historical record. Interspersed with the narrative are a series of
critiques of political thought and imperial historiography. His first
chapter, ‘Outrage in Calcutta,’ includes a preface to his narrative of
‘the mythical history of the British Empire in the East’ (p. 1) with a
brief disquisition on the nature of black holes, which establishes the
claim upon which the entire book is built. Chatterjee offers an
analogy of the history of modern empires through a comparison with
black holes in space: just like scientists infer the existence of
black holes without direct observation, historians and present-day
critics and political analysts often detect the presence of imperial
practices, without a grasp of empire’s discursive history. In order to
address the discursive history of empires in the modern age, he
pursues ‘many layers of narrative and doctrine that lay buried under
our currently fashionable postimperial edifice of the global community
of nations’ (p. 1).

Chatterjee begins with an analysis of a monument that represents how
the mythos of empire has impacted Indians, through a tour through the
famous monument in Calcutta’s St. John’s Churchyard. Completed in
1902, under the direction of then Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, this
monument was erected in memory of the victims of the ‘Black Hole’
incident in 1756. The monument leads him to reflect on how various
place names and relationships to space, empire, and nation are
literally inscribed in the built environment of India. From this
point, he starts his story, as he claims that ‘to trace the movement
of the Black Hole Memorial is to unravel the mythical history of
empire’ (p. 6).

In this first chapter, the author provides a detailed history of the
conflicts between the English East India Company (and in particular,
Clive) and Siraj-ud-daulah, as the newly ascendant nawab of Bengal.
His chapter two, ‘A secret veil’, begins with an analysis of political
theory regarding sovereignty in the early modern period, by providing
a schematic listing of the different positions on conquest and
sovereignty in discussions amongst European powers. He also begins a
critical literary history of how the Black Hole story and its
representatives in literal structures (the memorials) changed over
time.

Introducing Orme, the first author of English language histories of
the Black Hole in 1763, Chatterjee establishes how Orme sets the
standard for how discussions about conquest would proceed, based on
both the idea that Indians were naturally servile to those in power
and that Europeans had the right to retaliate and reclaim territory if
serving a higher purpose of conquest. But at this stage, in the late
18th century, the discursive meaning of empire still demonstrated
ambivalence about its origins, as writers such as Burke and others
aimed for a ‘a secret veil’ to be shrouded over the signs of duplicity
and treachery that accompanied the conquest of Bengal by Europeans. It
is in this context that the original memorial for the survivors of the
Black Hole incident was taken down in 1821, as Chatterjee mentions at
the end of chapter two.

In chapter three, ‘Tipu’s Tiger,’ Chatterjee continues to analyze the
discursive history of conquest and sovereignty (how these important
aspects of empire’s ‘Black Hole’-ness were understood by historical
actors) through the late 18th-century history of European conquest in
other regions of India, notably southern India, and the fall of Tipu
Sultan, the ruler of the Sultanate of Mysore from 1782–99. An active
diplomat and ally of the rising Napoleonic force in Europe and Africa,
Tipu Sultan represents what Chatterjee delineates as one aspect of
‘early modernity’ in South Asian history. He introduces the idea of
the ‘absolutist early modern’ and the ‘anti-absolutist early modern’
and concludes that an ‘absolutist early modern’ formation appeared in
various parts of India in the 17th and 18th centuries. For Chatterjee,
this ‘absolutist early modern’ form included various elements such as
the need to establish state sovereignty, the comparability of power,
creating new disciplines via the military, and focusing on effective
leadership and skills, not lineage or status. This ‘absolutist early
modern’ formation was most effectively harnessed by Tipu Sultan, in
his modernization of his military, fiscal revenue collection, trading
practice, irrigation, cultivation, and his gun and saltpeter factories
developed in his domain.

Chapter four, ‘The liberty of subjects,’ and chapter five, ‘The
equality of subjects’ establish the other part of Chatterjee’s
characterization of early modern India, that of the ‘anti-absolutist
early modern’. As the ‘absolutist early modern’ form was taking shape
in Tipu Sultan’s realm in south India, in Calcutta of the late 18th
and early 19th centuries, Chatterjee shows how a multi-racial
intelligentsia of Bengali Hindus, Europeans, and mixed-race subjects
of the British Empire started to press for radical and
proto-democratic representative institutions and privileges. In
chapter four, he discusses the first movements to establish, promote,
and push for ‘rights’ – here in the 1780s, by James August Hickey, who
started Hickey’s Bengal Gazette. In this publication, the editor and
contributors aggressively pursued the right to critique corruption in
the Company as well as the liberty to publish and circulate journal
copies outside of the Company’s interference. This, for Chatterjee,
‘enunciated perhaps for the first time in a British colony in the
East, a classic antiabsolutist statement of the innate and inalienable
liberty of the freeborn British subject’ (p. 111). Though a growing
racialized order was visibly appearing in urban transformations of
public space, as he details in these two chapters, he also discusses
how Indians, such as Rammahon Roy, the pioneering intellectual and
social critic of the age, asserted the equality of subjects.

In chapter six, ‘The happiness of mankind’, Chatterjee returns to a
critical textual analysis of how the Black Hole figures in
English-language writings from the late 18th century onward. Here, he
dissects Macaulay (infamous for his 1834 minute on education in which
he professed his belief in the innate superiority of Western
literatures to Oriental literatures) and his writings about Clive and
the Black Hole incident in the 1840s. Macaulay’s essay on Clive, read
by schoolchildren in the metropole, turned the Black Hole story into a
founding myth of empire. This founding myth was sustained because for
Macaulay, Clive’s moral improprieties (ambivalently hidden in the
‘secret veil’ phase earlier) were condoned because he initiated what
would later be good government in India. As Chatterjee states,
Macaulay made


empire safe from its own infamous origins. The secret veil could now
be lifted. Clive’s history could be taught to British schoolchildren
as a fable of moral instruction, to instill pride in their hearts not
merely for the valor of their compatriots but also for the selfless
service they were rendering to the people of the empire (p. 167).

Chapters seven ‘A pedagogy of violence’ and eight, ‘A pedagogy of
culture’ return to political theory and the nature of imperial
practice, after the periods of ‘absolutist early modern’ and
‘antiabsolutist early modern’ politics had faded. Chatterjee argues
that by the 1840s empire functioned on pedagogic grounds, and by one
of two models only: violence, exemplified by rapacious territorial
conquest in the mid to late 19th century, and culture, in which
education, language and literature, the arts would all develop in
tandem with Europeans, but on segregated lines, refracted through the
lens of colonial difference. In chapter eight, Chatterjee discusses
the arena of Bengali popular theater, where cultural appropriations of
various acts of interpretation of the Black Hole incident appeared
from the 1870s through the 1900s. In these plays, by writers such as
Nabin Chandra Sen and Akshaykumar Maitreya, produced by the famed
regisseur-director Girishchandra Ghosh, Chatterjee traces a glimmer of
resistance to the various discursive practices of empire examined in
earlier chapters. Sen’s 1875 Palashir Juddhya (The War of Palashi)


gestured, if only rhetorically, to the possibility that Bengal under
Siraj, although badly
governed, was at least sovereign, and therefore free, and had a state
where even though the ruler was a Muslim, Hindus nonetheless enjoyed
positions in the highest echelons of government (p. 242).

In chapters nine ‘Bombs, sovereignty, and football’ and ‘The death and
everlasting life of empires’, Chatterjee shifts the focus to the
popular sport of football in late colonial Bengal as well as rising
nationalist sentiment against the Holwell monument marking a new
memorialization of the Black Hole victims. This last monument, built
by Curzon, in 1902, appeared in the midst of rising nationalist
agitation and four decades later, as Chatterjee shows, immense public
mobilization on behalf of Indian football teams competing against
European teams. By the early 1940s, Chatterjee argues, the public
culture of Bengal’s sporting world and nationalist activists had
merged, such that the nationalist opposition to the Holwell monument,
which began in earnest in 1940, included the large world of football
fans. As he states in chapter ten, ‘it is quite certain that there was
considerable overlap between the public that celebrated the victories
of Mohun Bagan or Mohammadan Sporting Clubs on the Maidan, the public
that agitated for the removal of the Holwell monument, and the
murderous public that went on a rampage on the streets and in the
slums of Calcutta’ (p. 335).

The chapter, and the entire book, ends with an 11-page analysis of
empire’s discursive and practical career in the present day, along
with a concise statement of the book’s anchoring claim, which is
demonstrated through his history of the conquest of India: ‘the most
reliable definition of an imperial practice remains that of the
privilege to declare the exception to the norm’ (p. 337). He lists
examples of this privilege of declaring the exception to a norm
constructed by those in pre-eminent nation-state power (previously, by
those in imperial power), such as the decision of who gets to sit on
the UN Permanent Security Council, the decision of who acceptably may
house nuclear weapons, the decision to allow for differential
treatment of victims of tragedies. In this final example, he compares
the way that American victims of the recent BP gas spill have been
treated compared to the victims of the Union Carbide gas leak in
Bhopal, India, in 1984. Furthermore, as a way to demonstrate how the
career of empire’s technologies live in the present day, he mentions
how imperial ventures today by powerful states like the United States
proceed both by pedagogical discourses of violence (justified in Iraq
by the United States) and through non-violent means (Saudi Arabia and
Burma, as examples).

Chatterjee has produced a virtuoso performance that integrates a
powerful combination of narrative history and political thought. He
has mastered a diverse set of archives rare for historians, such as
the treasures of dramatic literature, fiction, historical writing,
urban history, and histories of space. His extensively researched
narrative history is fruitfully interrupted with exciting discussions
related to present-day politics and historiography.

Chatterjee conducts a cultural history by employing various strategies
of reading texts, aimed not at empirical certitude or sociological
clarity, but aimed at the resolution of the genealogy of enduring
discursive questions. The need for precise empirical research, then,
does not accord the same meaning as it would for a social history (as
an example of another methodological approach to history). But might
questions of social history complicate the way that Chatterjee
interprets the history that is required to make sense of his critique
of political thought? There are two ways that questions of social
history may complicate his own presentation: one, through an
exploration of alternative textual readings of the very same sources
he offers and two, an assessment of the global reach of the ‘Black
Hole’ narrative. Chatterjee opens his book with the claim that ‘the
global phenomenon of modern empire’ (p. xi) is represented by the
history of this story. Pursuing these avenues into his work opens a
window into a larger question about the way hegemony is conceptualized
in Chatterjee’s book and the implications of this conceptualization
for the writing of history.

Though the texts Chatterjee interprets are certainly multi-faceted and
deserving of close readings, do any alternative reading strategies
uncover underlying discursive elements that went into the making of
those texts? In his section ‘One the poetic and historical
imagination’, he offers a wonderfully detailed analysis of
representations of Siraj-ud-daulah in the writings of Bengali Hindus,
like Nabin Chandra Sen, and his play Palasir yuddha, first published
in 1875, produced in the 1870s and also in the 1890s. In this play,
Siraj appears as a cutthroat tyrant, probably due to the English and
English-inflected sources about him that Sen received. This depiction
received a critique about 20 years later by Akshaykumar Maitreya, who
countered Nabin Chandra Sen’s depictions of Siraj by using varieties
of new evidence from the period. Maitreya showed him as a ‘absolutist
ruler fighting to defend the sovereignty of the state, which he
believed was the precondition for peace and prosperity in the kingdom’
(p. 245). This move not only showed sympathy and humanity for Siraj,
countering Orientalist and stereotypical constructions of Muslim
rulers, but created the ‘foundations of nationalist anticolonial
historiography’ (p. 243). Chatterjee then discusses the ‘dramatic
national popular,’ worked out by playwrights and theater artists in
the wake of these debates, as led by Girishchandra Ghosh in the first
two decades of the 20th century.

Chatterjee’s exposure of these debates and tracing of the origins of
nationalist thought are detailed and nuanced. But there are two areas
in his presentation that cry out for more expansion. One, though he
mentions without any notes or references that ‘Muslim critics had
often complained about the unfair portrayal of Siraj in Nabinchandra’s
Palasir yuddha’ (p. 242), he devotes not a single line to any Muslim
Bengali writers, critics, or political figures who had a stake in this
entire debate. It is not incumbent upon Chatterjee to offer an
analysis of each and every text and/or community that produced
responses to these sorts of discourses, but a history of discourse
without any grappling with the social markers on the ground leaves
readers wondering about the historicity of these moments. When
discussing how such a nationalist and idealized form of India’s past
came to occupy these writers through the figure of Siraj, Chatterjee
does not discuss how this very form potentially excluded Muslims from
taking an active role in the nationalist imagination in this
particular way. As Chatterjee states, Nabin Chandra Sen provided


the key elements of the rhetoric of Hindu-Muslim fraternity that would
ring out so loudly in the days of the Swadeshi movement…This was not
the fraternity premised on the abstract citizen-subject, grounded in
homogenous and equal citizenship, and then handed down as the liberal
ideal of civic nationalism, most exemplarily since the French
Revolution. Rather it was based on Hindus and Muslims constituting
distinct communities that were nonetheless bound by the solidarity of
naturalized kinship (p. 249).

Such a textual reading may provide quite insightful for understanding
Nabin Chandra Sen as well as nationalists who also reproduced this
rhetoric, but does it apply to Muslim intellectuals of the same time
period? Or, for that matter, to intellectuals grappling with these
ideas in other regions of India? Since Muslims were the majority of
Bengali speaking people at this time, readers have no way of assessing
the manner in which these constructions actually represented anything
beyond the Hindu intelligentsia. Or if there were discursive and
intellectual encounters that transcended the boundaries that Nabin
Chandra Sen, Akshaykumar Maitreya, and Girishchandra Ghosh
represented.

During the age of this nationalist thought-world, from the 1870s to
the 1910s, many Muslim writers wrote in Bengali; like Mir Musharraf
Hussein, who wrote novels, plays, and verse, in particular, the
three-part Bishad-Sindhu (Ocean of Sorrows) about the Battle of
Karbala, and Ismail Hossain Shiraji, who traveled to Turkey during the
Balkan Wars, wrote travelogues about Turkey in Bengali as well as
seditious anti-colonial literature. These writers were certainly also
affected by the newly ascendant discourses of nation and community.
Though not a particularly visible or remarkable part of the
vernacular-educated Bengali middle-class literati, these writers also
grappled with issues of sovereignty, in particular through idealized
connections with the Islamic world as well as Islamic literary and
ethical themes in Bengali that had been present in the language since
at least the 17th century CE. Given that the Muslim portion of Siraj’s
identity was crucial for the stereotype of him as a tyrant, why not
include any assessment of Muslim Bengali writing during the age of
nationalist thought? Chatterjee mentions how by 1940, ‘the Muslim
public in Calcutta was being mobilized for entirely new political
futures’ (p. 323), but without any sense of the exclusions that were
discursively operating in the thought-worlds of Bengali letters at the
time. Inputting an awareness of the exclusions operating at discursive
levels would allow readers a sense of the texture of how hegemonic
ideas generate force and power. These questions reflect on the larger
issue of how hegemony is understood in this work, for the broader
audience of scholars of modern politics and political thought. Is
hegemony always already given and does it not have a history? What
happens to the contingent moments of the construction of the hegemonic
ideas in the making of ‘imperial practices’?

Near the end of the book, Chatterjee mentions a way of disaggregating
the Indian nation by presenting a potential critique of its post-1947
career: ‘there is no reason to believe that a postcolonial democracy
such as India would not harbor ambitions of playing such an imperial
role, just as democracies of the nineteenth century had done’ (p.
344). Such a statement exposes the assumption that the making of
Indian national ideas itself was free from such ambitions and only the
post-1947 set of state practices requires such a disaggregation. Could
one pursue the making of exclusions in India’s own past – for example,
the Bengali Hindu writers that he discusses, and the particularly
upper-caste Hindu nationalist community that is created by them –
through directly addressing areas of the Bengali and broader Indian
landscape they systematically ignored?

Besides an assessment of the social realm in the making of discourse
and an appreciation of discursive power, what also remains unaddressed
is how a narrative like the Black Hole story of Calcutta is so
powerful that it, and its career, should assume the burden of
representing the ‘the global phenomenon of modern empire from the
eighteenth to the twentieth century’ (p. xi). In order to demonstrate
the power of the Black Hole story, Chatterjee uses the example of one
third of 115 senior college students knowing about it and most (how
many of the one third of 115 constituted the ‘most’ was not mentioned)
believing it to be true. Does this exercise represent the extent of
the power of this sort of ideology of empire that the Black Hole
represents? Did the story resonate with colonized peoples and colonial
officials elsewhere, as opposed to New York college students in 1947?
As Chatterjee mentions other types of imperial-modern forms, such as
the settler colonial and the plantation types, do those types not
require a discursive unpacking and examination, or are readers to
assume that the ideological bases for their imperial practices are
easily understood? In his laudable pulling of the curtain back from
European political thought’s hypocritical self-representations and
false universalisms, Chatterjee potentially inserts a comparable
blindness in his generalization of ‘African and Asiatic’ peoples as
represented by the particular place of Calcutta and the various ways
that Hindu elites in the modern age understood political power.

These questions aside, Chatterjee’s work proves relevant to
post-colonial scholars, political theorists and early modern
historians, regardless of the region of specialization. His history is
a discursive history of the modern world, a post-colonial counterpart
to synthetic world histories that have appeared in recent years, such
as C.A. Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 and Eric
Hobsbawm’s many ‘Age of …’ books, particularly his The Age of Empire,
1875-1914.(4)

In a manner that departs from these authors, he grapples with how
imperial practices are imbricated in knowledge reproduction, much
likes Nicholas Dirks’ The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of
Imperial Britain.(5) He achieves this particularly successfully in his
reading of how the Black Hole story changed in the 19th century from
requiring a ‘secret veil’ to creating a justification for conquest.
The consequent manners of appropriation of ideas of conquest in the
Bengali Hindu intelligentsia are also, similarly, parsed out in
excellent detail. Doubtlessly, specialists of other regions of the
world which experienced discursive shifts in ideas of conquest will
benefit from Chatterjee’s approach. His work would be profitably read
against Bayly, Marks, as well as contemporary theorists of global
history, such as Bruce Mazlish and recent debates about the ‘new
global history’ (6) in order to situate the role of empire in the
history of modernity.

This work figures as a significant moment in Chatterjee’s career as a
distinguished scholar of politics, culture, and history. Author of
groundbreaking contributions to political thought and history, such as
the 1998 Nation and its Fragments (7), required reading for South
Asian specialists of all stripes as well as post-colonial theorists,
Chatterjee has managed to develop new positions outside of his earlier
works through The Black Hole. For example, in his section on
‘antiabsolutist early modern’ politics, exemplified by Rammahon Roy,
he offers a tour through many newly unearthed primary sources that
have yet to be studied together and uncovers modes of learning and
thought that were not shaped directly by colonial education. His
spotlight on how pre-colonial debates about monotheism and religion
emanated not from the encounter with the ‘West,’ but from internal
Indian debates that included Muslim, Hindu, and Zoroastrian thinkers,
warrants particular attention. This angle is a departure from his
previous work, such as Nationalist Thought and the Postcolonial World
(8) and A Nation and its Fragments, in which the late 19th-century
figurations of nationalism in the latter and key archetypal modern
Indian nationalist figures in the former were the objects of study.
Here, Chatterjee transcends the focus only on the colonial encounter
and manages to include a detailed analysis of intellectual debate in
the Indian realm of letters before the rise of modern colonialism.
This work, for South Asian specialists, may be read as a profitable
successor to many of his earlier works about hegemony, culture, and
colonial and post-colonial politics.

Chatterjee offers a wonderfully provocative ending to his book, about
yet another mythos, that of the national, as opposed to the imperial,
through the interpretation of how Curzon’s plaque about the Black Hole
had ended up in the Philatelic Museum. At least according to one of
the museum’s staff members, Subhas Chandra Bose, the great late
colonial Bengali nationalist, wanted it removed and so hammered it
loose from the wall. As Chatterjee states, ‘the ground remains fertile
for nationalist mythology’ well after the formal careers of empires
have come to a close. One wonders, though, whether such fertility is
restricted to Indian nationalists, like Bose, and those with the
privilege of identifying with and therefore debating the contours of
an empire or nation. Or does it touch a wider swath of humanity across
the spectrum of life touched by the rhetorical power of empire?

Notes
 1.Swayze, Patrick and Lisa Niemi. The Time of My Life (New York, NY,
2010).Back to (1)
 2.Sandip Roy, ‘An Incredible Hulking shame: The Avengers go to
Calcutta’ <http://newamericamedia.org/2012/05/if-the-avengers-is-right.php>
[accessed 17 July 2012].Back to (2)
 3.Ibid.Back to (3)
 4.C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford,
2004); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London, 1989); The
Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (London, 1962); The Age of Capital,
1848-1875 (London, 1975).Back to (4)
 5.Nicholas Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of
Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA, 2006).Back to (5)
 6.Bruce Mazlish, The New Global History (New York, NY, 2006).Back to (6)
 7.Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and
Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ, 1993).Back to (7)
 8.Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World
(London, 1986).Back to (8)
 August 2012

Author's Response


Partha Chatterjee

Posted: Thu, 23/08/2012 - 12:00

I thank Neilesh Bose for his appreciative review and have no quarrel
with his evaluation. However, he raises three points at the end of his
review to which I would like to respond.

First, the important question of the exclusion of Muslims from the
nationalist imagination of Hindu upper-caste Bengali intellectuals has
been frequently discussed in the existing literature and it was not my
intention to survey that field.(1) As for the response from Muslim
critics to Nabinchandra Sen’s treatment of Siraj in his poem, this too
has been recently discussed by Rosinka Chaudhuri in her essay, cited
in my book (p. 240, fn. 47).(2)What is remarkable about the Siraj
story is not exclusion at all but rather the enthusiastic embrace by
Bengali Muslim intellectuals of the history of the British conquest of
Bengal as written by Hindu nationalist historians such as Akshaykumar
Maitreya. This was shown in particular by the demand raised by Muslim
intellectuals in the 1930s for the correction of derogatory references
to Siraj in school textbooks and the removal of the Black Hole
monument from the central square of Calcutta, as well as by the
revival of the Siraj theme in the Calcutta theatre in 1939. In every
such speech, resolution or play, the authentic historical source cited
was Maitreya. I have mentioned this in the context of my account of
the movement among Muslim intellectuals and students in 1937–1940,
trying to put pressure on the Fazlul Huq government to act despite its
dependence on the European members of the Bengal legislature. Thus,
while the larger story of the exclusion of Muslims from the
nationalist imagination of Hindu intellectuals and, in particular, the
glaring exclusion of Muslims from the Calcutta professional theatre
(though not from its audience) is familiar, the Siraj and Black Hole
story is a rare case of congruence of Muslim and Hindu popular views
on a historical episode. This is one more reason why I was concerned
to take the story of myth-making outside the sphere of high
intellectual history into the popular cultural fields of theatre and
football.

Second, the question of possible imperial ambitions held by the
nationalist political leadership of the new Indian state needs more
careful analysis than was possible within the space of my book. I
would suggest that the key lies in my distinction between empire as
technique and empire as ideology. In ideological terms, the Indian
political leadership was, for obvious historical reasons, overtly,
loudly and, one need not doubt, sincerely anti-imperial. In terms of
its technical uses of power, however, as I have suggested on p. 196,
it used many of the same imperial techniques used by the British, such
as, for instance, in the integration of the princely states into
India, including the use of armed force in Hyderabad and Kashmir.
There are many instances where one will find undisturbed continuities
in the technologies of power employed by the erstwhile imperial rulers
and the present state leadership in India.

Third, the narrative strategy of using the Black Hole story as a
fulcrum for depicting the various stages and discontinuities in the
history of empire as a global practice was not meant to place upon it
the entire burden of representing the phenomenon of empire. One of my
central arguments is that there is no monocausal explanation of modern
empire (such as claims of racial superiority or profits or export of
finance capital or what have you). The narrative advantage of
employing a story such as that of the Black Hole is the facility it
affords with each retelling of moving from one stage of empire to
another and from one level of determination to another. There are
several causal explanations of time-bound and context-bound phenomena
that I offer in different chapters of my book. But the Black Hole
story is not the sole dependent variable in this history. On the
contrary, what is remarkable is the capacity of this story about a
foundational event to be metamorphosed every time into a new narrative
that carries an entirely new moral, political and emotional charge,
including the currently prevailing consensus among professional
historians that the story is not worth remembering. I mentioned the
report on New York undergraduates because when I first came across it
ten years ago, I was startled to discover that so many young Americans
of the mid 20th century knew about the Black Hole story. If I asked
the same question in my class today, whether in New York or Calcutta,
I doubt whether a single undergraduate would know anything about it. I
am reluctant to accept that this represents the triumph of scientific
history writing or of post-imperial politics. On the contrary, I
strongly suspect the amnesia is the effect of a new practice of
imperial power.

Notes
 1.In the field of intellectual history, see, for instance, Rafiuddin
Ahmed, Bengal Muslims 1871–1906: A Quest for Identity (Delhi, 1996)
and my own treatment in Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its
Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ, 1993),
chapters four and five. Discussions of the political implications of
this ideological exclusion include Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided:
Hindu Communalism and Partition (Cambridge, 1994) and Pradip Kumar
Datta, Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth-century
Bengal (Delhi, 1999).Back to (1)
 2.Rosinka Chaudhuri, ‘The politics of poetry: an investigation into
Hindu-Muslim representation in Nabinchandra Sen’s Palashir Yuddha’,
Studies in History, 24, 1 (2008), 1–25.Back to (2)


the pioneer: Policy is foreign to Government by Swapan Dasgupta

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: sanjeev 


 

At a time when the governance of the country is in total disarray, foreign policy is the least of India’s national preoccupations. Yet, thanks to a blundering Government that has lost its balance, India has committed one astonishing blunder and may be on the verge of another diplomatic boo-boo.

The first, predictably, centres on Pakistan, a country which is internally beleaguered and externally short of credibility and friends (barring China). Last week, in an astonishing show of cynicism, the Union Home Secretary accused forces in Pakistan of disseminating fraudulent and inflammatory propaganda aimed at inciting communal troubles in India. The purpose was charmingly blunt: to suggest that the tensions all over India flowing from the troubles in Assam’s Kokrajhar district were the creation of the proverbial ‘foreign hand’.

It is no one’s contention that forces in Pakistan, both official and non-official, are not inimical to India. For a very long time, official thinking across the Radcliffe Line has salivated over the likelihood of an eventual break-up of India. The war of a thousand cuts that General Zia-ul Haq launched in the early-1980s was aimed at encouraging every separatist trend in India, be it in Jammu & Kashmir, Punjab or the North-East. Since 1993, Pakistan has also been hyper-active in fermenting Islamist terrorism and its role in the Mumbai attack of 2008 has been extremely well documented. Even to this day, the promoters of the notorious Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are allowed a free run within Pakistan to disseminate their hateful anti-India message.

 

That certain Pakistani websites run by extremist elements (with or without official backing) did their bit to promote and nurture a sense of Muslim victimhood over events in Assam and Myanmar isn’t in any doubt. Some jihadi elements within India also echoed these themes in their websites.

However, it is one thing to be alert to the dangers of cyber disinformation. It is a completely different matter for the Centre to argue that the mobs in Mumbai, Lucknow and Allahabad were instigated by Pakistan.

The argument that otherwise good Muslims were cynically misled by dark forces may be good for TV chat shows. The problem arises when the Government starts touting this as the official explanation. Naturally Pakistan has demanded proof. And never mind supplying evidence that would leave Islamabad squirming in embarrassment, the Home Ministry has failed to satisfy colleagues in the Ministry of External Affairs. Indeed, India’s diplomats are themselves shamefaced over this ham-handed bid to pin the responsibility for our internal failings on Pakistan. Apart from everything else, this amateurish buck-passing has ended up putting needless question marks over the credibility of the evidence on Pakistan’s culpability in the Mumbai attacks. If there was a well-directed self-goal, this was it.

The Government, it would seem, is so caught up with obfuscation that it can’t tell its rear from its elbow. This week, the Prime Minister is going to take a break from ‘coalgate’ and other domestic headaches and travel to Teheran for a completely useless Non-Aligned Movement summit. I am no kill-joy and would not like to deprive junketeers of the opportunity of buying Persian carpets at bargain prices. Yet, there is a compelling case for the PM to cite domestic preoccupations and despatch External Affairs Minister SM Krishna to shake hands with President Ahmadinejad and other representatives of the Iranian theocracy.

That India and Iran has deep ‘civilisational ties’ is a cliché that often rivals the ritual boasts of us being a 5,000-year-old civilisation. No doubt both contain grains of truth which are supplemented by material interests. India still needs Iranian oil and needs Iran for an overland access to Afghanistan. The strategic importance of both should not be underestimated. If he doesn’t, it will be shameful.

At the same time, there are some features of the Indo-Iran bilateral relationship that could do with some clarification. The most important of these is the question of Iranian involvement in international terrorism.

It is understandable, though not morally defensible, that India chooses to look the other way (and at times even condone), Iran’s activities in Lebanon, Syria and Israel. As a country that has a glorious track record of preachiness, India has chosen to keep remarkably silent about Ahmadinejad’s repeated threats to wipe out Israel from the face of the earth — the latest one being his Quds Day address on August 17. But why has India chosen to be silent when Iran exports its terror to New Delhi?

The Delhi Police, after an uncharacteristically unpublicised inquiry, has gathered enough evidence to indicate that three Iranian nationals, along with one Indian, were involved in the explosion that left an Israeli diplomat seriously injured in February this year. Despite the evidence linking the Delhi bombing with the Bangkok bombing where Iranian nationals were also involved, Tehran has chosen to brazen it out, in the understanding that India is powerless to do anything. The issue is not merely that Iran must not be allowed to export its terror, but that India must make it clear that it will not countenance any physical harm to the representative of a friendly country — which is what Israel unquestionably is.

For too long, India has allowed its policy to be guided by spurious sectarian concerns. If the Prime Minister does go to Tehran at this inopportune moment, the least we can expect is for him to tell Ahmadinejad to lay off.

Warm Regards
sanjeev nayyar
https://twitter.com/#!/NayyarSanjeev
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