More Censorship

Sometimes blogging lands you up in funny places. Abhi and Patrix from Desipundit were recently quoted in an excellent San Francisco Chronicle regarding the new Indian comic books. A mystery man named "Ennis Singh Mutinywale" was quoted all over the place after dropping this bombshell. Manish Vij had, as mentioned earlier, a quality piece in Salon after the Mumbai blasts. And a number of bloggers (naturally) were quoted in mainstream media coverage of the Indian blog ban -- not surprising since several prominent desi bloggers are also professional (or at least freelance) journalists.

Today it was my turn, albeit in a smaller way: the Times of London called for a comment on Sonia Gandhi's attempt to suppress Jag Mundhra's planned biopic about her (starring Monica "Mary Magdalene" Belluci as the young Sonia Gandhi). I blogged about it two months ago, and somehow that turned into this:

Despite priding itself on a constitution that guarantees freedom of expression, India has a history of censorship. It was the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Central Board of Film Certification regularly uses the fear of civil unrest between its Hindu and Muslim communities to demand cuts from directors or to keep certain films out of cinemas. Only yesterday, a ban was lifted on 17 websites that ministers claimed were fanning religious hatred after the bomb blasts in Bombay on July 11.

Amardeep Singh, assistant professor of English at Lehigh University, in Pennsylvania, was not surprised by Mrs Gandhi’s attempts to stop the film. "There is a knee-jerk censoriousness in Indian politics and it is a sad reaction to try to suppress the film before it has even been produced," he said. "It is meant to be a respectful biopic, but I think they’re just nervous because the director has a reputation for the unsavoury." (link)

Admittedly, that last statement was pure speculation on my part (one always wishes the reporter quoted the other thing you said!). But this censorship problem is, as Dilip D'Souza has ably argued, a systemic problem we need to be continually vigilant about. India would be a better place if the default were to allow people to have their say rather than block, ban, and censor. (And it's not just a Congress Party thing; the BJP were no slouches when it came to censoring views they weren't happy about.)

Sadly, the filmmakers here have apparently decided to shelve the film rather than insist on their right to make it.

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

"But I Warn You, They Are Not as Peaceful as Me"

Community leaders from Tower Hamlets, London have started a campaign against the filming of Monica Ali's 2003 novel Brick Lane. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a big commercial and critical success. Reactions by many South Asian readers I heard from were mixed, mainly because of Ali's use of a kind of pidgin English in the letters from the main character's sister in Bangladesh, Hasina. (Our blog-friend DesiDancer also had a succinct review: "utter crap", were her delicate, carefully chosen words)

Of course, the quality of the book is mostly irrelevant to the censorship campaign under way. This campaign seems to be an extension of the campaign against the book itself in 2003, and includes some of the same players and the same sad rhetoric of outrage and offense that is routinely trotted out these days in response to something or other:

In an echo of the controversy which surrounded the initial publication of the book, set partly in the east London borough, the novel is accused of reinforcing "pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes" and of containing "a most explicit, politically calculated violation of the human rights of the community".

Community leaders attacked the book on its publication in 2003, claiming that it portrayed Bangladeshis living in the area as backward, uneducated and unsophisticated, and that this amounted to a "despicable insult". (link)

The misguided attempt to protect the community's honor through censorship will be ineffective, and the censorship campaign itself has the ironic effect of making the community look really, really bad.

The leader of the campaign is making an only thinly-veiled threat of violence if film cameras are brought to Brick Lane:

He brushed aside suggestions that a work of fiction couldn't be seen as an attack on a community. "It's not a fiction book," he explained. "This is all lies. She wanted to be famous at the cost of a community."

He also claimed that community groups prevented Monica Ali from being awarded the Booker prize. "This book was contesting for the Booker prize," he said. "We stopped that."

Mr Salique raised the spectre of a worsening in community relations if filming goes ahead on location. "We are living in a multicultural society," he said. "We are in a peaceful situation. This film will make a lot of problems for local people."

He threatened mass protests if the company attempts to film on the streets of Tower Hamlets, saying that "the community feels strongly about this. We are not going to let it happen.

"Young people are getting very involved with this campaign. They will blockade the area and guard our streets. Of course, they will not do anything unless we tell them to, but I warn you they are not as peaceful as me." (link)

I love the part where he says, "this is not a fiction book . . . It's all lies." Speaks for itself, donnit? And "I warn you they are not as peaceful as me" is a really ominous, nasty little threat, which I hope the filmmakers will ignore.

Here's a paragraph from the novel itself describing the physical space of Brick Lane in London. Does it really merit this kind of censorship campaign?

A horn blared like an ancient muezzin ululating painfully, stretching his vocal cords to the limit. She stopped and the car swerved. Another car skidded to a halt in front of her and the driver got out and began to shout. She ran again and turned into a side street, then off again to the right onto Brick Lane. She had been here a few times with Chanu, later in the day when the restaurants smelled of fresh boiled rice and old fried fat and the waiters with their tight black pants stood in doorways holding out menus and smiles. But now the waiters were at home asleep, or awake being waited on themselves by wives who only served and were not served in return except with board and lodging and the provision of children whom they also, naturally, waited upon. And the streets were stacked with rubbish, entire kingdoms of rubbish piled high as fortresses with only the border skirmishes of plastic bottles and grease-stained cardboard to separate them. A man looked up at some scaffolding with an intent, almost ardent, expression as if his love might be at the top, cowering on the high planks or the dark slate roof. A pair of schoolchildren, pale as rice and loud as peacocks, cut over the road and hurtled down a side street, galloping with joy or else with terror. Otherwise, Brick Lane was deserted. Nazneen stopped by some film posters pasted in waves over a metal siding. The hero and heroine peered at each other with epic hunger. The scarlet of her lips matched the bandanna tied around his forehad. A sprinkling of sweat highlighted the contour of his biceps. The kohl around her eyes made them smoke with passion. Some invisible force was keeping them (only inches) apart. The type at the foot of the poster said: The world could not stop their love. (Brick Lane, page 32)

Now, if I lived in Tower Hamlets or worked on Brick Lane I might not be happy about the piles of rubbish Ali describes (from my own experience visiting the place five years ago, I don't remember any piles of rubbish, though I visited in the middle of the day). But why are people always so quick to find characterizations like these "offensive" or "insulting"? Is it really worth rioting over?

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

A Poem on Bombay, from Adil Jussawalla

I found the following in the Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry.

Sea Breeze, Bombay

by Adil Jussawalla

Partition's people stitched
Shrouds from a flag, gentlemen scissored Sind.
An opened people, fraying across the cut
country reknotted themselves on this island.

Surrogate city of banks,
Brokering and bays, refugees' harbour and port,
Gatherer of ends whose brick beginnings work
Loose like a skin, spotting the coast,

Restore us to fire. New refugees,
Wearing blood-red wool in the worst heat,
come from Tibet, scanning the sea from the north,
Dazed, holes in their cracked feet.

Restore us to fire. Still,
Communities tear and re-form; and still, a breeze,
Cooling our garrulous evenings, investigates nothing,
Ruffles no tempers, uncovers no root,

And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories.

This poem is really a response to the Partition of 1947, but I think it has bearing on the questions people are asking a day after a particularly horrifying terrorist attack.

Jussawalla describes a rootless island city that is in some sense cut off from the "mainland's histories" -- that is on its own. But that sense of detachment has its limits, as Bombay has also been the destination point for waves of migrants and refugees from the subcontinent's recurring troubles. These immigrant Bombayites (or now, Mumbaikars) bring new life and energy to the city ("restore us to fire"), and also tie the city tightly to the mainland's darker episodes (the other meaning of "restore us to fire"). Some elite Bombayites have historically been ambivalent about their connection to the mainland, and even today, there are people who talk about instituting a kind of Hong Kong-esque autonomy to Mumbai, to prevent its being held back by the mainland's elephant slowness.

The idea of Bombay paying for traumas occurring elsewhere was probably true in the case of bombing and riots of 1993, which were triggered by the razing of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, though it's undeniable that local Muslim-led gangs and homegrown Shiv Sena thugs exploited that event for their own purposes. Something similar may be afoot now, if we assume that the bombers in yesterday's Western Line attacks were associated with Kashmiri separatist militants.

And yet, through it all, though the trauma of the tearing and re-forming of communities, and the chaos of life in Bombay (even without terrorism), there is, as Jussawalla says, the reassuring constancy of a cooling sea-breeze, which "uncovers no root,/ And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories." Rootless, and yet yet never detached -- that's Bombay.

Bombay Blasts

Some recommended links:

Mumbai Help (in Bombay)
Desipundit
Ultrabrown (in Bombay)
Sepia Mutiny
Dilip D'Souza (in Bombay)
India Uncut (in Bombay)
Suketu Mehta at the Washington Post
Indianblooddonors.com
Mumbai Train Blasts blog

Raja Rao (RIP) and Czeslaw Milosz

Indian author Raja Rao passed away in Austin, Texas, at the grand old age of 96. He's best known as the author of Kanthapura, and is one of those authors so strongly identified with the 1930s and 40s that it was actually a little surprising to find out he was still alive. (But then, his contemporary Mulk Raj Anand only passed away fairly recently himself.)

Rao was born and raised in Mysore, and oddly enough for a South Indian brahmin boy, he received his education mainly at Muslim schools in Hyderabad (his father worked for the local government, I believe). According to excerpts of his memoirs here, he also studied at Aligarh Muslim University until he received an invitation to come to a university in Montpellier, France from a visiting French professor, in the late 1920s. He ended up staying in France for more than a decade, studying Christian theology -- and married a French woman who was also in acdemia. The marriage soon fell apart, and Rao return to India on the eve of the Second World War, becoming more and more religious. He spent a great deal of time in ashrams in the 1940s, though he was also active in the independence movement. Later Rao returned to France, though he ultimately moved to Austin, Texas, where he taught Philosophy (alongside G.V. Desani) until he retired in 1980.

* * *
One of the most remarked-upon aspects of Rao's writing is his language. Though Rao spoke Kannada and studied extensively in France, he wrote in English. Some critics have said that he didn't actually know English all that well at the time he wrote his first novel, while others have presumed that he intentionally implanted a Kannada rhythm into his language in Kanthapura, for effect. Here are the opening paragraphs -- what do you think?

Our village--I don't think you have ever heard about it--Kanthapura is its name, and it is in the province of Kara. High on the Ghats is it, high up the steep mountains that face the cool Arabian seas, up the Malabar coast is it, up Mangalore and Puttur and many a centre of cardamom and coffee, rice and sugar cane. Roads, narrow, dusty, rut-covered roads, wind through the forest of teak and of jack, of sandal and of sal, and hanging over bellowing gorges and leaping over elephant-haunted valleys, they turn now to the left and now to the right and bring you through the Alambe and Champa and Mena and Kola passes into the great granaries of trade. There, on the blue waters, they say, our carted cardamoms and coffee get into the ships the Red-men bring, and, so they say, they go across the seven oceans into the countries where our rulers live.

Cart after cart groans through the roads of Kanthapura, and on many a night, before the eyes are shut, the last lights we see are those of the train of carts, and the last voice we hear is that of the cartman who sings through the hollows of the night. The carts pass through the main street and through the Potters' lane, and then they turn by Chennayya's pond, and up they go, up the passes into the morning that will rise over the sea. Sometimes when Rama Chetty or Subba Chetty has merchandise, the carts stop and there are greetigns, and in every house we can hear Subba Chetty's 350-rupee bulls ringing their bells as they get under the yoke.

While some of the unusual stylistic elements here may be for effect, there are a few phrases that do come across as non-idiomatic English. I find it somewhat uninteresting (and unlikely) to think that the unusual idiom of Kanthapura is purely an accident of the author's imperfect mastery of the English language. It might be both correct and charitable to say that most of the effects are intentional, while some odd phrases ("granaries of trade") are accidents of Rao's newness to the language.

Unlike some readers of the book who might find the eccentric language charming, I tend to think that the more awkward phrases ought to have been edited out of the book by a friend or an editor.

One doesn't see such phrases in Rao's later fiction, though I must confess that aside from The Serpent and the Rope I haven't read very much of the later books. And I even found The Serpent and the Rope quite difficult to get through, though I was an impatient graduate student when I read it. It might read differently now...

* * *

Rao studied in Europe near the peak of the modernist moment, and was hardly untouched by that experience. Indeed, in some ways even his approach to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism in his later books seems to be tied up with modern western philosophical concerns. Throughout his career, he was in continual dialogue with many of the great world writers of his era, one of them being the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Milosz devoted one beautiful poem to Rao, which explored their commonalities (they were both nomads as well as religious seekers), but also stressed at least one key philosophical difference. Here is an excerpt from Milosz's poem "To Raja Rao":

[From “To Raja Rao"]

Raja, I wish I knew
the cause of that malady.

For years I could not accept
the place I was in.
I felt I should be somewhere else.

A city, trees, human voices
lacked the quality of presence.
I would live by the hopes of moving on.

Somewhere else there was a city of real presence,
of real trees and voices and friendship and love.

Link, if you wish, my peculiar case
(on the border of schizophrenia)
to the messianic hope
of my civilization.

Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic,
in the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption.

Building in my mind a permanent polis
forever depreived of aimless bustle.

I learned at last to say: this is my home,
here, before the glowing coal of ocean sunsets,
on the shore which faces the shores of your Asia,
in a great republic, moderately corrupt.

A couple of things should be said to explain these lines. First, one might want to refer to some biographical background on Milosz. The "tyranny" above is Poland under the Nazis. One "republic" would have been Paris, where Milosz lived in the 1950s. After 1960 he lived in the U.S., the "great republic, moderately corrupt" mentioned above. Those places are important in Milosz’s writing more broadly (he has a lot to say about California in particular, which he was pretty ambivalent about).

Philosophically, Milosz extends the framework of the Platonic ideal ("the city of real presence") to modern social and political anxieties. For him the "city of real presence" (which is clearly an allusion to Plato’s Republic) is longed for not just because it represents Truth, but because it represents something like a functional, happy community. That’s happiness. And it’s not that the "republic" doesn’t exist at all. Republics do exist, but they are all in some sense corrupt. By the last stanza quoted above, it seems like Milosz has taught himself to accept them as they are, far from ideal.

The end of the poem brings us back to Rao (I'm omitting the middle part of the poem):

I hear you saying that liberation is possible
and that Socratic wisdom
is identical with your guru’s.

No, Raja, I must start from where I am.
I am those monsters which visit my dreams
and reveal to me my hidden essence.

If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever
that man is a healthy creature.

Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness
had to make our agony only more acute.

We needed God loving us in our weakness
and not in the glory of beatitude.

No help, Raja, my part is agony,
struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,
prayer for the kingdom
and reading Pascal.

Like Milosz, Rao also led a very complex, nomadic, 20th century life. Rao, like Milosz, studied Catholic theology intensely at a time of political repression. In the section of the poem above, "liberation" seems to have somewhat of a political connotation, though clearly the primary emphasis is spiritual.

Milosz, I think is partly defining himself as a realist against Rao's spiritual idealism ("I must start from what I am"), and partly marking the lessons learned from the violence of the 20th century first hand. "I am those monsters which visit my dreams" is a way of talking about the psyche, but I also read it historically, as a reference to Poland in the war. And of course, it's an acknowledgment of Milosz's attachment to Catholicism, in which "my part is agony,/ struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,/ prayer for the kingdom/ and reading Pascal." The difference between Milosz and Rao is in that sense theological: Rao's is a sprituality without "self-hate," while the "agony" must be the starting point for Milosz as a philosophical Catholic.

As far as I know, Rao did not respond publicly to this poem, though I am quite curious as to what his thoughts might have been.

[Note: a predecessor for this post can be found here, warts and all. Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny.]

Saadat Hasan Manto's "Letters to Uncle Sam"

Even in translation, the writings of Saadat Hasan Manto are blindingly good. Manto published about 250 short stories in a very brief career -- alcoholism killed him at the age of 42 -- and countless nonfiction pieces for newspapers and magazines. Much of Manto's nonfiction writing is witty and sharp, though he also has a dark side that comes out in some of his best work. Partly because they're available online, today I'd like to point readers to a series of rhetorical "Letters to Uncle Sam" Manto wrote in the early 1950s. There were nine in total, and four of them have been put online at Chowk: one, two, three, four.

If you know Manto well, you might want to skip down a bit for quotes and comments on the "Letters." For those who don't know Manto: the stories are amazing, often horrifying. The Partition stories Manto wrote are about the darkest you'll ever see. Several of them deal explicitly with the psychic effects of rape, on both men and women, perpetrators and victims. Even Manto's pre-Partition writings (stories like "Khushia," for example) are deeply pre-occupied with the problem of masculinity and the dehumanization of women, from a perspective that is only partly feminist.

Manto was in Bombay through the Partition (in 1948, he decided to move, with his family, to Lahore), so it's unclear to me whether he personally knew people who had experienced this kind of violence. But stories like "Open it!" and "Cold Meat" (both of which provoked obscenity trials in Pakistan) seem to be inspired by a very personal awareness of the effects of traumatic violence. Whether or not he was there, Manto's partition stories keenly capture the dehumanization that follows communal violence.

(As a place to start, I would recommend the collection Black Margins, though pretty much any collection will do.)

On to the "Letters to Uncle Sam," which were written in Urdu between 1951 and 1954. These "letters," which Manto says he cannot send as he lacks money for postage, are opportunities for Manto to comment on the strangeness of his new country, as well as on the surreal aspects of American life as discerned from magazines and newspapers. In the letters, Manto happily describes his poverty, and contrasts it to the image of fabulous American wealth. But in some ways, Manto argues, the two countries may not be that far apart after all; the letters are as irreverent in their treatment of "Uncle" as they are of life in Pakistan.

Manto begins the first letter with a note of rancor over the Partition, which led to his displacement from his film-writing career in Bombay and his resentment at the recurring obscenity trials:

My name is Saadat Hasan Manto and I was born in a place that is now in India. My mother is buried there. My father is buried there. My first-born is also resting in that bit of earth. However, that place is no longer my country. My country now is Pakistan which I had only seen five or six times before as a British subject.

I used to be the All India’s Great Short Story Writer. Now I am Pakistan’s Great Short Story Writer. Several collections of my stories have been published and the people respect me. In undivided India, I was tried thrice, in Pakistan so far once. But then Pakistan is still young. (link)

Manto was right: Pakistan was indeed still young then. (There would be two more obscenity trials for his stories before his death. If Manto had lived, you can presume he would have spent most of his life in prison for his writings.)

Of course, America wasn't without its own controversies over obscenity. D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was still banned in the early 1950s, and Manto was struck by the obscenity trial of a novel by Erskine Caldwell, called God's Little Acre:

All I really wanted to do was to convey my good wishes to brother Erskine Caldwell. You will no doubt recall that you tried him for his novel God’s Little Acre on the same charge that I have faced here: pornography.

Believe me, uncle, when I hear that this novel was tried on an obscenity charge in the land of seven freedoms, I was extremely surprised. In your country, after all, everything is divested of its outer covering so that it can be displayed in the show window, be it fresh fruit or woman, machine or animal, book or calendar. You are the king of bare things so I am at a loss to understand, uncle, why you tried brother Erskine Caldwell.

So, I read the Caldwell judgment . . . The last lines of [the judge's] judgment point to the intellectual reach of his mind. He writes: "I personally feel that if such books were suppressed, it would create an unnecessary sense of curiosity among people which could induce them to seek salaciousness, though that is not the purpose of this book. I am absolutely certain that the author has chosen to write truthfully about a certain segment of American society. It is my opinion that truth is always consistent with literature and should be so declared."

That is what I told the court that sentenced me, but it went ahead anyway and gave me three months in prison with hard labour and a fine of three hundred rupees. My judge thought that truth and literature should be kept far apart. Everyone has his opinion.(link)

Ah yes, everyone has an opinion (including a judge); it's in those last lines that you see Manto's characteristic barbed wit at its finest.

The second letter is lighter in tone, and details some of Manto's run-ins with American troops stationed in Bombay during the war. Perhaps the highlight is where he talks about women's legs in American films:

Uncle, your women are so beautiful. I once saw one of your movies called ‘Bathing Beauty’. “Where does uncle find such an assemblage of pretty legs?” I asked my friends later. I think there were about two hundred and fifty of them. Uncle, is this how women’s legs look like in your country? If so, then for God’s sake (that is, if you believe in God) block their exhibition in Pakistan at least.

It is possible that women’s legs out here may be better than legs in your country but, uncle, no one flashes them around. Just think about it. The only legs we see are those of our wives: the rest of the legs we consider a forbidden sight. We are rather orthodox you see.

I have digressed again but I will not apologise because this is the sort of writing you like. (link)

Note the passive-aggressive turn at the end: "this is the sort of writing you like." It's something Manto does again and again. Even as he's mocking the conservative values of the new Islamic nation, at any moment he might turn it around, and mock the absurdities of America as he understood it.

The third letter gets into politics and religion a bit. In addition to writing stories the authorities (British and Pakistani) deemed obscene, Manto was chronically irreligious, as illustrated by the following jab at the local Mullahs:

You have done many good deeds yourself and continue to do them. You decimated Hiroshima, you turned Nagasaki into smoke and dust and you caused several thousand children to be born in Japan. Each to his own. All I want you to do is to dispatch me some dry cleaners. It is like this. Out here, many Mullah types after urinating pick up a stone and with one hand inside their untied shalwar, use the stone to absorb the after-drops of urine as they resume their walk. This they do in full public view. All I want is that the moment such a person appears, I should be able to pull out that atom bomb you will send me and lob it at the Mullah so that he turns into smoke along with the stone he was holding.

As for your military pact with us, it is remarkable and should be maintained. You should sign something similar with India. Sell all your old condemned arms to the two of us, the ones you used in the last war. This junk will thus be off your hands and your armament factories will no longer remain idle.

[Ouch.]

One more thing. We can’t seem able to draft a constitution. Do kindly ship us some experts because while a nation can manage without a national anthem, it cannot do without a constitution, unless such is your wish. (link)

"Unless such is your wish" -- yes, exactly: a bit of fake obsequiousness to expose the often ethically dubious American approach to fighting Communism in the 1950s.

The fourth letter gets into films, Bollywood and Lollywood. As with the other letters, it seems oddly relevant to the present moment. Either our era is strangely similar to the 1950s, or nothing has changed and people have been talking about the same things for fifty years:

One more thing. Your moviemakers are taking a great deal of interest in the Indian film industry. We cannot tolerate this. Recently, when Gregory Peck was in India, he had himself photographed with the film star Surayya whose beauty he went on record to admire. Another American moviemaker put his arms around our star Nargis and kissed her. This is not right. Have all Pakistani actresses croaked that they should be ignored!

We have Gulshan Ara. She may be black as a pot but she has appeared as the lead in many movies. She also is said to have a big heart. As for Sabiha, while it is true that she is slightly cross-eyed, a little attention from you can take care of that. . . .

There is something about lipstick that I need to mention to you. The kiss-proof lipstick that you sent over did not gain much popularity with our upper-class ladies. Both young girls and older women swear that by no means is it kiss-proof. My own view is that the problem lies with the way they kiss which is all wrong. Some people kiss as if they were eating watermelon. A book published in your country called The Art of Kissing is quite useless here because one can learn nothing from it. You may instead like to fly an American girl over who can teach our upper classes that there is a difference between kissing and eating watermelon. There is no need to explain the difference to lower and lower-middle class people because they have no interest in such matters and will remain the way they are.(link)

And there you have it, the great Saadat Hasan Manto. The next time you're kissing someone or eating watermelon, you will, I hope, remember him.

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

Contemporary Indian Speculative Fiction

Samit Basu has put together a wonderful series of essays and interviews on the subject of contemporary Indian speculative fiction ("speculative fiction" is an umbrella term, which includes sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and alternative history).

It's really a small encyclopedia rather than a blog post, so here are a couple of pointers to start you off. First and foremost, Samit deals with the question of Indian speculative fiction in the context of the recent flourishing of "literary" Indian Writing in English here. He deals with the question of "authentic" Indian superheroes (as opposed to the bad, but familiar, ripoffs of western superheroes) here. Both are highly recommended links. Basu also gets into some questions about the publishing industry and the current dominance of diasporic writers here; the publshing and marketing questions are less intrinsically interesting to me than formal ones, but in the case of this genre it's hard to get around them.

* * *

On the definitional and generic question, the highlight of Basu's essay may be the following:

This set of essays, however, is fundamentally flawed on many levels - it is about a nascent, hard-to-define sub-section of literature, the as-yet-mostly-nonexistent sub-genre of Indian speculative fiction in English, which is itself a bastard child of two parents who, not being dead, are difficult to analyze as they are not only infinitely complex at any point, but, to complicate things further, change all the time as well. . . . (link)

Note that the "two parents" are Indian Writing in English and Western speculative fiction, respectively. To continue:

What is Indian/South Asian literature in English? Even if we get past the tricky question of origin, which has obsessed scholars since the term came into being, and include the non-resident and the genetically partially South Asian, in recent years the growing diversity in South Asian English literature should lead to more questions –- having overcome the 'South Asian' part of the question by being all-inclusive, how do we now define 'literature'? Do we include comics and graphic novels, speculative fiction, thrillers, chick-lit, campus novels and crime fiction, all of which have reared their heads in India over the last decade? This should prove a lot more difficult for the sagacious and scholarly to do, given that literary snobbery is far more acceptable than racism -– and that Indian-origin writers abroad might have very thin connections with India, but large advances and literary awards add a great deal of density to the study of the field -– build its brand, in other words, however gut-shrinking that might sound, while diversity in the form of new, not necessarily mainstream writing increases the number of spices in the curry, but, in the eyes of many not-so-neutral observers, does not necessarily add to its taste. (link)

I think Basu is on the right track here. It doesn't make that much sense to rail against the "Opal Mehta's Arranged Monsoon Marriage Under the Curry-Smelling Mango Trees" school of masalafied Indian fiction, partly because such fiction does possibly "strengthen the brand," as Basu puts it. Writers like Basu himself may potentially benefit even by some irksome predecessors, partly because those predecessors carve out space on bookshelves for the next generation of writers, and raise the awareness of both publishers and readers. (Though that holds only if the reputation of the whole isn't permanently overwhelmed by the reek of rotting pulp.)

In his "Indian Superheroes" essay, Basu talks about the bad Indian copies of western superheroes ("Mr. India"; "Indian Superman") as well as the Indian connections of some western figures like The Phantom, before moving on to the real subject at interest, which is the emergence of real, homegrown "Indian superheroes," whose stories and cultural context is identifiably Subcontinental. To some extent the idea of authenticity means the symbolism of the superheroes may be derived from traditional Indian mythology -- though I think even simply grounding those figures realistically in the modern Indian cultural context probably goes a long way.

As a teaser, one of the gleanings from Samit's discussion of India-related superheroes is the baddie formerly called "Commcast," who is defined on Wikipedia as follows:

Garabed Bashur, a native of India, is a cyberpath who possesses the mutant ability to psychically retrieve, interpret and store data from any form of electronic media (essentially a highly potent electronic form of telepathy). He was trained in this ability by Professor Charles Xavier, but Xavier rejected Bashur upon learning of his criminal tendencies. (link)

In an era of outsourcing and the explosion of Indian high tech, it's not at all surprising to see Marvel Comics go this route. I think it's funny that they've given him a name ("Commcast") that essentially rhymes with the name of my current Cable/Internet company ("Comcast"). (And actually, it's a pretty good name for a villain.) And while he is a bit on the geeky side for a supervillain, at least they didn't give him the name "TeeVo"!

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

Hum

Today I almost bought you a hummingbird feeder,
thinking, why not have their long, hovering beaks over for nectar?

Since we have big weeds and loud singing birds already
squawking, really, in this sticky wet air,

With hammers and bells in the Sunday streets
And the steady blowing fan, the annoying horn of the train,

Until we reach a clearer hour, which flattens the bad music
Leaving only a hum that falls like water on leaves

After three years and three people soon in this house
And always more versions of “hum”-- nous, nahono, assi, uns

Just this something, only a bumbling attempt to express myself
With a wish for hummingbirds and other things to come.

Dalrymple on 1857: the Religious Component

William Dalrymple, a British travel writer and scholar of Indian history, sometimes gets himself into hot water with Indian critics. He was attacked by Farrukh Dhondy a couple of years ago for criticizing V.S. Naipaul's pro-communalist comments, and then more recently by Pankaj Mishra for lamenting the state of non-fiction writing in and about India. But whatever you think of his role in these arguments, Dalrymple as a historian is the real deal: his book Delhi: City of Djinns is an amazing historical travel narrative, which blends Dalrymple's experiences in modern Delhi with a great deal of careful research into Delhi's formidable past.

The current issue of Outlook India has a nice essay by Dalrymple on the Indian Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857 (thanks, Indianoguy!). The essay is really in three parts: one is a fresh look at the fall of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the "last Mughal" -- whose sons were all executed (murdered) by the British after the Rebellion. The second part is a discussion of "Mutiny papers" in the National Archives of India that Mahmoud Farooqi has been translating from Urdu. These documents show the Indian perspective on the events of 1857, where one finds, among other things, that the rebels were motivated by religious rage to a very great extent. Finally, there is a discussion of contemporary Delhi -- in which preserving the emblems of this past is of very little interest to most people.

Though I remember reading somewhere that one of the main causes of the failure of the Rebellion was Zafar's age and his failure to act decisively (see details at Wikipedia), Dalrymple has a slightly different take. There's no doubt that Zafar was old at the time the Mutiny occurred (he was about 80), but his weakness was not his fault. He only ascended the throne at age 60, by which time it was too late to do anything to revive his family's dead empire. Moreover, he contributed a great deal to literature:

Zafar came late to the throne, succeeding his father only in his mid-60s, when it was already impossible to reverse the political decline of the Mughals. But despite this he succeeded in creating around him in Delhi a court of great brilliance. Personally, he was one of the most talented, tolerant and likeable of his dynasty: a skilled calligrapher, a profound writer on Sufism, a discriminating patron of miniature painters and an inspired creator of gardens. Most importantly, he was a very serious mystical poet, who wrote not only in Urdu and Persian but Braj Bhasha and Punjabi, and partly through his patronage there took place arguably the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history.Himself a ghazal writer of great charm and accomplishment, Zafar's court provided a showcase for the talents of India's greatest love poet, Ghalib, and his rival Zauq—the Mughal poet laureate, and the Salieri to Ghalib's Mozart. (link)

One could of course argue, echoing Tagore, that mystical poetry is the consolation of a defeated people, but this is definitely better than the standard image of Zafar as an indecisive invalid. (Some of Zafar's Urdu ghazals are here)

Dalrymple also strongly condemns the violence involved in the suppression of the Rebellion, including the (ghastly) British decision to summarily kill all of Zafar's sons and the wanton destruction of priceless monuments (including the palace inside the Red Fort) in Delhi and other Indian cities. This wasn't enlightened Liberalism or Imperial benevolence, but a dirty war in which indiscriminate killing and humiliation were used to ensure victory.

From my perspective, the most interesting parts of Dalrymple's piece detail the 20,000 Urdu documents in the National Archives that are now being translated by Mahmoud Farooqi. Partly they are interesting because they add to our image of everyday life in India at that time:

What was even more exciting was the street-level nature of much of the material. Although the documents were collected by the victorious British from the palace and the army camp, they contained huge quantities of petitions, complaints and requests from the ordinary citizens of Delhi—potters and courtesans, sweetmeat-makers and over-worked water carriers—exactly the sort of people who usually escape the historian's net. The Mutiny Papers overflow with glimpses of real life: the bird-catchers and lime-makers who have had their charpoys stolen by sepoys; the gamblers playing cards in a recently ruined house and ogling the women next door, to the great alarm of the family living there; the sweetmeat-makers who refuse to take their sweets up to the trenches in Qudsia Bagh until they are paid for the last load. (link)

But it's more than that. What the papers underline is the extent to which religious feelings drove the rebels. It goes well beyond the question of "greased cartridges":

As the sepoys told Zafar on May 11, 1857, "we have joined hands to protect our religion and our faith". Later they stood in Chandni Chowk, the main street of Old Delhi, and asked people: "Brothers: are you with those of the faith?" British men who had converted to Islam—and there were a surprising number of those in Delhi—were not hurt; but Indians who had converted to Christianity were cut down immediately. It is highly significant that the Urdu sources usually refer to the British not as angrez (the English) or as goras (Whites) or even firangis but instead almost always as kafirs (infidels) and nasrani (Christians).

Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, in Delhi a flag of jihad was raised in the principal mosque, and many of the insurgents described themselves as mujahideen, ghazis and jihadis. Indeed, by the end of the siege, after a significant proportion of the sepoys had melted away, unpaid, hungry and dispirited, the proportion of jihadis in Delhi grew to be about a quarter of the total fighting force, and included a regiment of "suicide ghazis" from Gwalior who had vowed never to eat again and to fight until they met death—"for those who have come to die have no need for food". One of the causes of unrest, according to one Delhi source, was that "the British had closed the madrasas". These were words which had no resonance to the historians of the 1960s. Now, sadly, in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7 they are words we understand all too well, and words like jihad scream out of the dusty pages of the source manuscripts, demanding attention. (link)

I don't think Dalrymple is saying that everyone involved in the Rebellion of 1857 was motivated by this kind of religious feeling (indeed, as I understand it there were as many or more Hindu sepoy rebels). But it is worth considering whether people might feel differently about the concept of "jihad" when one shares a political and military goal with a Jihadi.

Finally, Dalrymple talks about the total indifference to the past that many contemporary Indians feel. As Dalrymple puts it:

I find it heartbreaking: often when I revisit one of my favourite monuments it has either been overrun by some slum, unsympathetically restored by the asi or, more usually, simply demolished. Ninety-nine per cent of the delicate havelis or Mughal courtyard houses of Old Delhi have been destroyed, and like the city walls, disappeared into memory. According to historian Pavan Verma, the majority of the buildings he recorded in his book Mansions at Dusk only 10 years ago no longer exist. Perhaps there is also a cultural factor here in the neglect of the past: as one conservationist told me recently: "You must understand," he said, "that we Hindus burn our dead." Either way, the loss of Delhi's past is irreplaceable; and future generations will inevitably look back at the conservation failures of the early 21st century with a deep sadness. (link)

Cremating the dead is one thing -- but forgetting them entirely is quite another.

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

More Vicarious Traveling: "The Lost Temples of India"

Someone posted a Learning Channel documentary called "The Lost Temples of India" on Google Video.

It exploits many of of the annoying clichés you would expect, including repeated references to elephants and a near obsession with the phallic symbolism of the Shivalingam.

It also plays a bit of a geographic and historical trick on viewers, by starting and ending with the erotic temples at Khajuraho (which it insists are "lost" and "forgotten"), and shots of the Taj Mahal. But in between it is actually mainly about the South: the temples built by Rajaraja Chola, the city/kingdom of Vijayanagar, and the Meenakshi Temple at Madurai. The attempt to link the Hindu temples of Southern India with Khajuraho is nonsensical, but I suppose the producers felt they had to sex it up a bit (elephants alone would be insufficient!).

Despite its many flaws, it must be said that the cinematography in "The Lost Temples of India" is quite good -- there are some beautiful shots of the temples in question. And there are actually a couple of facts in the documentary, though they sometimes get lost amidst the Orientalist cheese. Since we're traveling vicariously, why not enjoy it a little?

Traditional Indian Architecture: Vicarious Traveling via Flickr

While browsing the deeply-discounted "remaindered" aisles at my local Barnes & Noble, I came across Satish Grover's Masterpieces of Traditional Architecture. It's a coffee-table book with beautiful photographs and appreciative descriptions of fourteen of India's ancient and medieval architectural masterpieces.

In his introduction, Grover points out that the ancient sites in India are all religious (Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Muslim), not because India was traditionally especially devout. In fact, only the religious structures were carved in stone, so they are the only edifices to survive. The secular architecture of ancient India might have been pretty wonderful too, but those brick and timber buildings have all vanished.

Since I can't do any real traveling this summer because of work, I thought I would link to images on the web of the various monuments in Grover's book as a kind of vicarious travelogue. A lot of people have tagged these sites in their Flickr photos, though for slightly more obscure places like the Karle Caves you have to search on the open internet to see what comes up.

First, one of the oldest of the structures described is the Buddhist temple that has been carved out of a cave at Karle, close to Lonavla in Maharashtra. Building was started at 100 BC, during the height of the earlier, "Hinayana" school of Buddhism (i.e., when the Buddha was not considered a God). The cave is designed to mimic the design features of a wooden temple, and contains flourishes and columns that aren't actually structurally necessary in a cave (they would be if the building were freestanding). In some ways the stone carving is similar to the caves at Ajanta, though Ajanta has wall paintings that Karle lacks.

This reporter from the Tribune went to Karle, and was underwhelmed at the gaudy tourism trade that's opened up outside this truly ancient temple. There's also a Hindu temple to Ekveera Devi that's been built outside of the cave, which is now for most visitors the main attraction. Visitors throw coins and picnic by the Buddhist stupa in the main prayer hall, also called chaitya. Perhaps to avoid all this, one could go at an awkward hour (i.e., early in the morning).

The second ancient monument is also Buddhist, the Sanchi Stupa and temple complex, which is near Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh. Here, Wikipedia has a pretty good description as well as high resolution images. The Stupa was built by Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE to house relics of the Buddha, though additional structures were built over the course of many centuries. This site also has some helpful summaries of the Jataka stories that are represented in the many stone carvings that surround the main Stupa.

One of the earlier temples near the Stupa, oddly, resembles a classical Greek structure because of the design of the pillars. This description of Sanchi, written in 1918, suggests that it might have been the handiwork of foreign stone carvers in India.

My favorite discovery from Grover's book is the Kailashnath Temple (sometimes spelled "Kailashnatha"). This is a beautiful site, carved out of a huge slab of basalt rock. This temple is the heart of the Ellora caves (which also have Buddhist and Jain caves/carvings), and it was built starting in the 7th century C.E.

Here Professor Fran Pritchett's site at Columbia University has the best images. I would especially recommend this page, which has early British engravings of the temple. In the various close-ups one finds, the carvings look truly stupendous; check out this image, depicting the story of the Ramayana carved on a large slab of rock. Wow; this site is high up there on my "must visit" list.

Then of course, there's Khajuraho, which everyone knows about -- but how many people actually visit the site? (I won't link to specific images for obvious reasons, but if you do a search in Flickr or Google Images there is a lot to choose from.) In addition to being "ancient porn," as one Flickr commentor bluntly put it, the sixteen temples at Khajuraho really are beautiful structures. The question of what inspired these erotic carvings, and how they fit into the local Hindu religious rituals, is one that is seriously worth pondering. (One of Grover's speculations is that the carvers might have been from a local tribe or cult, bringing in ideas from outside of Hinduism.)

The Konark Sun Temple in Orissa, built in the 13th century, appears to be a glorious architctural experiment that didn't quite come off as planned. The shikharas, or spires on the top of this temple collapsed some time after it was built, and the temple was on the verge of collapse when the British took charge of its restoration in the mid-19th century. Their efforts, and subsequent efforts by the government of India, have kept it standing, but you can't actually go inside. See Wikipedia, as well as this Indian history site

There aren't a lot of good shots on the internet of the Dilwara Jain Temples in Rajasthan. You get good exterior shots, but I haven't been able to find the beautiful interior carvings reproduced in Grover's book on the internet. These temples were built in the 11th-13th centuries, and were carved entirely out of white marble. Grover doesn't claim that there is a special, Jain architectural style, but he does suggest that these temples are demonstrations of the Jain community's wealth and influence.

One group that did obviously bring a distinctive architectural style were the successive waves of Muslim rulers. Besides the Taj Mahal, the Qutub Minar, and Fatehpur Sikri (all of which have entries in Grover's book) there are places like Gol Gumbaz, the mausoleum of Adil Shah. It was built in the mid 1600s in Bijapur, and it is one of the largest one-piece domes ever constructed. (See this Flick image). Unfortunately, the inside of the building is dark and effectively unadorned. (This is where you wonder if religious devotion impeded the imagination of the builders.)

(If you read the Wikipedia entry on Gol Gumbaz, you'll find a link to an entry on the architecture of Domes in general, which is pretty informative. I now know what "squinches" and "pendentives" are!)

There are several other sites mentioned in Grover's book, but I think I'll end with the Meenakshi Temple at Madurai. This is one of the most widely photographed temple sites in India, and you can see why: it's a huge temple (built in the 1500s), surrounded by nine massive, beautifully decorated Gopurams (gates). Here is a beautiful image taken at night. And here is one taken at dusk. (Seriously, click on those; you won't regret it.) Another must-visit site for me at least.

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

Trying to Finish a Book

You may be wondering why the blogging here has been so light of late. No, I haven't been traveling; I've actually been holed up in my basement with piles of books and photocopies for the past month, editing my academic book manuscript. For the first couple of weeks it was possible to be a bit relaxed about it, but recently the prospect of having to actually submit it to meet a deadline has made it hard to think about much of anything else.

The book started as a dissertation, and has undergone many changes of direction in recent years. First, it wasn't until 2004 that I really figured out how to simplify and straighten the thesis enough so it could be explained in normal English to a layperson. Then I had to find a publisher, which I did last fall. After that, the biggest challenge was to standardize the language of the book into a single, readable "voice": for better or worse, how I sounded in 2000 is quite different from how I sound now. A lot of my old material (almost 100 pages) had to get cut, but there's some new material written this past year that I'm excited about -- new chapters on "Secularism and Indian Feminism" and "Secularism After 9/11."

It was also surprisingly difficult to get it into the form my publisher wants -- which essentially entails making the pages of the book look like they will if/when it's published. MS Word is incredibly powerful (it can build your index for you!), but it has many odd quirks. Getting the chapter headers and pagination right took a surprisingly long time (damn you, "Same As Previous" default! curse you, "Continuous Section Break"!), and making an "intelligent" Table of Contents that met the publisher's style requirements ultimately defeated me.

But the good news is, Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction is about done, and is headed for the hands of an editor.

'Temple Cleansing' in Malaysia and Pakistan

An Indian blogger in Malaysia named Sharanya Manivannan recently posted an open letter to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (thanks BitchPhD), asking him to take a stand on the Hindu temple demolitions that have been occurring in the country:

But I ask you this: when temples that stood for over a century are destroyed, what really dies? Not stone and statues. Not bells and prayers. Not – thankfully and thus far – people. You see, what frightens me is not the loss of these temples themselves, though architecturally speaking, that too is often a disappointment. What frightens me is what these temples are taken to represent, and by extension, what their demolitions therefore represent. (link)

Elsewhere in the letter she points out that the Indian government did send a letter of "official displeasure" to the Danish government following the publication of the anti-Islamic cartoons. Why the silence so far on the "temple cleansing" in Malaysia? She also makes some poignant comments about how Indians are treated as a whole in Malaysia, which I'll come back to below.

Some background: In the past few months, Malaysian authorities have demolished a number of Hindu temples in different parts of the country, stating that they were built without a proper permit. But local Hindus have complained that they had applied for permits, sometimes waiting as long as 30 years for a response! Moreover, according to the BBC, at least two of the temples destroyed were more than a century old, which clearly suggests that getting a permit to build is not at all the issue driving the demolitions.
Indeed, it seems pretty clear that these demolitions are part of an organized campaign in a country that is growing increasingly intolerant of religious minorities. (Churches and other religious structures have also been demolished along the same lines.)

Indians make up about 8% of the settled population of Malaysia, which amounts to about 2 million people, and the majority of Malaysian Indians are Hindus. For the most part they have lived in Malaysia in peace (communal violence is very rare), but Indian Malaysians do often complain of discrimination and mistreatment. They have traditionally been a working class population, who came to Malaysia initially to work on rubber plantations.

This turn is especially sad, as Malaysia (like Indonesia) has ancient connections to India and Hinduism. Tamil traders established settlements there as far back as the third century A.D., and ruins of ancient Hindu temples have recently been discovered.

Which brings us back to Sharanya Manivannan. In her blog post, she talks about a picture she saw in the newspaper that encapsulated for her the emotion these temple demolitions provoke in her. It was a picture unrelated to the demolitions, but somehow it triggered her to finally take some positive action:

It was a newpaper picture of a retired gardener, S. Sarimuthu, whose only daughter had died on June 11th as a result of viral eningoencephalitis and secondary pneumonia contracted while at National Service camp. In this picture of him, which I can't find online, he looks profoundly forlorn. He looks like his heart had been wrenched out of his body, pounded to a pulp, and then poured back inside.



This picture made me cry and cry and cry, and then write this letter. And cry even more the morning after I did, as I explained to someone what made me do it. The family wasn't Hindu. The girl wasn't the victim of genocidal hate-mongering. But I saw that picture and in my mind I saw that father at hospitals, at home -- I saw the way the nurses looked at him, the way the doctors spoke to him, the way hospital authorities dismissed him as she slipped into a coma. I saw him throughout his life, I saw the way this [f-ing] state in one way or another has taken away even this, even her. I saw the colour of his skin and the sheer, unmitigated loss in his eyes, the way his loss and the loss of these temples were entwined, and I could not not write this letter. (link)

Hindu groups are starting to organize and actively protest. The Indian Financial Express reports that Indian groups have been appealing to the Malaysian Prime Minister.

Also, in some of the press coverage of the temple demolitions, some Malaysian authorities have begun to express concern that Hindus may begin to turn violent in resisting the demolitions. In fact, the tenor of the resistance is already changing: several people were injured and arrested when they refused to vacate the premises of a temple that was about to be demolished. I wouldn't advocate violence, obviously. But it may be time to get Gandhian on their asses: mass public demonstrations, and a campaign of nonviolent resistance. (And yes, Sharanya, keep blogging about it: make it personal, tell the world your version of the story.)

Two additional wrinkles:

While the Malaysian press, according to the blogger Sharanya I quoted above, has remained silent about the Hindu temple demolitions occurring in the country, I did find articles in Malaysian newspapers about the Hindu temple demolition that recently occurred in Lahore. [UPDATE: The temple may not have been demolished after all...]

Secondly, a version of this has been occuring in recent months (in reverse) in India itself, as an important 300 year old Sufi Dargah was pulled down in Vadodara (formerly Baroda), leading to communal riots that left six people dead. To be clear, Mandirs were also demolished in this campaign (now halted) in the interest of "development," but the lead-in to the Express India story reminds us that India is itself far from immune to indifference to the concerns of religious minorities:

Two demolition drives, and two different ways of going about it. So while in Gujarat’s cultural capital Vadodara, the BJP went about doing a "balancing act" by razing a 300-year-old dargah, in Rajkot, the BJP fought the Municipal Commissioner tooth and nail for removing a small temple that was encroaching on RMC land. (link)

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

Student Gambling on Campus

Should colleges ban online poker? These sites have no redeeming social value, are of questionable legality (especially since they don't pay U.S. taxes, though they run on U.S. money), and have significant harmful potential. But there is also a freedom of speech issue, and danger involved whenever colleges move to strongly restrict student behavior.

I was thinking about this after a Lehigh student, who had been losing money at online poker sites, casually robbed a Wachovia Bank on his way to a movie in December. It seemed a shocking story at the time, especially since the student was President of the Student Council, and the son of a minister from Ohio. (Needless to say, the student was arrested within a few hours of the incident, and is currently facing charges.)

Though I teach at Lehigh, I myself didn't hear much gossip about it after it happened. But I was intrigued to finally see a detailed account of Greg Hogan's story in this past Sunday's s New York Times Magazine. The story describes how Hogan got to the point where he felt the only way to fix his growing gambling losses was to rob a bank in broad daylight.

Here's some background on the problem -- which is nationwide, and hardly limited to Lehigh -- from Schwartz's article:

An estimated 1.6 million of 17 million U.S. college students gambled online last year, mostly on poker. According to a study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the number of college males who reported gambling online once a week or more quadrupled in the last year alone. "The kids really think they can log on and become the next world champion," says Jeffrey Derevensky, who studies youth problem gambling at McGill University in Montreal. "This is an enormous social experiment. We don't really know what's going to happen."

Greg Hogan is far from the only college student to see the game's role in his life grow from a hobby to a destructive obsession. Researchers from the University of Connecticut Health Center interviewed a random sample of 880 college students and found that 1 out of every 4 of the 160 or so online gamblers in the study fit the clinical definition of a pathological gambler, suggesting that college online-poker addicts may number in the hundreds of thousands.

And here's what's different about online gambling:

Online, Hogan would play 60 to 100 hands an hour — three times the number of his live games. There was no more shuffling between hands, no more 30-second gaps to chat with his friends or consider quitting. Each hand interlocked with the next. The effect was paralyzing, narcotic. "Internet poker induces a trancelike state," says Derevensky, the McGill professor, who once treated a 17-year-old Canadian boy who lost $30,000, much of it at PokerStars. "The player loses all track of time, where they are, what they're doing." When I spoke with an online hold-'em player from Florida who had lost a whopping $250,000 online, he told me: "It fried my brain. I would roll out of bed, go to my computer and stay there for 20 hours. One night after I went to sleep, my dad called. I woke up instantly, picked up the phone and said, 'I raise.' "

It became clear pretty quickly that Hogan had a problem with online gambling, and both his family and the university were putting pressure on him to address his problem. This is where I wonder if the university might have taken stronger action:

Greg Sr. then made the six-hour drive from Ohio to install a $99 program called GamBlock on his son's computer. Highly regarded among gambling counselors, GamBlock makes it impossible for users to access any Internet casinos. (The company's founder, David Warr, says that half of his customer base, which he will only put in the "thousands," is connected to a college or university.)

Hogan soon found a way to circumvent GamBlock, gambling by night in the library's computer lounges. "It was funny to see how many other kids were playing," he says. "By this point I didn't really care so much who saw me." Greg Sr. realized what was happening and asked the administration to lock poker sites out of the public terminals. He says he was told that nothing could be done.

I don't buy it -- nothing could be done? Actually, GamBlock has a 'Corporate' version, which could easily block gambling sites for the entire Lehigh community. As I understand it, the university already regulates illegal downloading from campus computers by detecting patterns of bandwidth usage and punishing users who seem to be downloaders. But again, as with underage drinking, downloading videos and music from BitTorrent or peer-to-peer filesharing programs is illegal, so the university is again obviously justified (and smart) to do this.

Is banning gambling from campus computers really justified? I must confess that while I'm leaning towards banning, I haven't fully made up my mind about this issue -- I'm curious to hear from others on the pros and cons.

An Inconvenient Triumph: Climate Change and the Indian Subcontinent

I just saw An Inconvenient Truth and I think it's beautifully done -- I would strongly recommend it. Even if you don't love Al Gore as a politician, the science is convincing and all the pictures of vanishing glaciers and dried-up inland lakes (Lake Chad!; the Aral Sea!) are terrifying.

In the film, Gore refers several times to the potential catastrophic consequences of Global Warming in the Indian subcontinent. It's somewhat ironic, because countries on the Indian subcontinent are far smaller contributors of greenhouse gases than the developed countries (India's per capita emissions are one sixth the world average) but you can be sure that the subcontinent will feel its effects. As I understand it, there are two major consequences of global warming for the Indian subcontinent that are essentially guarantees, and a third which seems to me to be a maybe:

First guarantee: significant amounts of land in the Bay of Bengal are going to disappear if oceans rise even 1 foot, as is predicted to occur in the next 50 years. Most estimates I've found give the number at about 15% of the total landmass of Bangladesh, with a comparable loss of land in West Bengal on the Indian side. As many as 60 million people will be displaced in both countries.

In Orissa, the receding coastline is already a fact of life. In the Satabhaya region of the Orissa coastline, according to this article, the shore has moved 2.5 km inland over the past 25 years, displacing a number of villages. And it continues to move. (The article doesn't specify what could be causing the rising sea levels in that specific part of the state.)

In the short run, scientists are already noting a pattern of a growing number of low pressure systems (leading to cyclones) in the Bay of Bengal in the post-Monsoon season. These are expected to worsen -- meaning that extreme storms may force mass evacuations of coastal regions well before the land itself disappears. (See this article for more.) Also, erosion caused by the storms is already seriously affecting these regions. As Banglapedia puts it:

Flooding and erosion/sedimentation Bangladesh experiences moderate to severe flooding every year. Frequent storm surges also cause severe coastal flooding. The flood situation is further aggravated by the high tide in the Bay of Bengal. It has been seen with a 1.4m rise in sea level water level rises to about 6m near the meghna estuary. Even with a 0.2m rise in sea level, water level rises between 4.5 and 5m near the estuary. Since most of the coastal area is below 1.5m above mean sea level (MSL) and the area near the confluence of the ganges and Meghna is below 3m above MSL, both depth and area of inundation will increase extensively. However, the water level in the Ganges and Upper Meghna also increases significantly due to backwater effect as a result of changes in the hydrodynamics of flow. Hence the severity and extent of flooding will increase even in the upstream portion of the river. On the other hand, a rise in sea level will also move the shoreline landward and this will result in loss of farmland, leading to the shifting of agriculture, reduced crop yields, and loss of cultivable areas. Increased flooding will cause problems with existing irrigation and drainage system too. (link)

Even small changes in the mean sea level could lead to a cascade of problems for the Bengal delta, because the water systems are all interdependent. Even before the land disappears, the damage caused by increased flooding is expected to make a lot of coastal land essentially uninhabitable.

Tyler Cowen, when he was in India a couple of years ago, did a thought experiment on this. It's a little in the "heartless economist" vein, but it's worth reading.

And here's a Salon article about attempts that are being made in Bangladesh to raise awareness about the coming catastrophe.

The second guarantee: The glaciers will disappear, leaving all of the subcontinent's major rivers dry. Abhi already posted on this last fall, though he didn't get much of a response to this shocking fact at the time. These rivers, as everyone knows, provide the vast majority of water to India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. (And glacial water also feeds China; in total, 40 percent of the world's population is dependent on water from the Himalayas.) The retreat of the Himalayan glaciers is not a prediction; it's happening. The only question is when the effects will start to kick in. But I would say that even if it takes 100 years for the water supply to crash, it's not to early to start doing something about it.

But here's the irony: in the short run, the rapidly melting glaciers may actually cause flooding in the plains.

The third "maybe" consequence is that the whole weather pattern could change if ocean currents change as a result of rising water temperatures. The monsoon could disappear entirely (or it could double in intensity!). There's not much to say about this -- because no one really knows -- except that it reminds us how little we really know about what is happening.

In An Inconvenient Truth Gore talks about an instance where scientists were surprised by the rapidity of change. In Antarctica, in 2002, the Larsen ice shelf collapsed over the course of a few weeks. No one predicted that a chunk of solid ice the size of Rhode Island could break up so fast. But now scientists think it was probably caused by earlier partial melting, leading to the creation of 'moulins' under the ice, that exponentially speed up the break-up of ice shelves. Those same moulins are being observed in Greenland, suggesting that large melt-offs may be imminent there too.

In effect, the predictions for ocean level rise over the next fifty years may be understatements: it could be much sooner than that. Scientists have been unpleasantly surprised by things like this before, and may be again.

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]