Dinner near New Friends Colony in Delhi, with Shruti, Siddharth, and Pragya. At one point, Pragya says that while she was in Bihar she knew that people around her thought of girls as social inferior but it wasn’t till she came to Delhi that she realized that women there were seen as nothing. That scrap of conversation returned to me when in early January the BBC reported that more than 10 million female births in India may have been lost due to selective abortion in the past 20 years.

“The BBC’s Jill McGivering says the problem is complicated by advances in technology. Ultrasound machines must be officially registered but many are now so light and portable, they are hard to monitor.” Now, matters have gone further. There is a globalization of murder, or what a blogger on Sepia Mutiny has called an “outsourcing of abortion.” The British newspaper The Observer reported last month that “pregnant British Asian women, some in effect barred by the NHS after numerous abortions, are now coming to India for gender-defining ultrasounds and, if they are expecting girls, terminations.”

While the BBC reports and others like it emphasize the fact that in places like Haryana and Punjab men are finding it difficult to get wives, it makes more sense, I think, going back to Pragya’s comment, to talk about how the brutal practice of female foeticide is part of the systemic violence against women. The idea that female foetuses are deemed unworthy of living is not removed from the set of reasons which earned Delhi the nickname of “the rape capital of the world.”

The brief BBC report mentioned above had ended with the following words: “Although doctors in India must not tell couples the sex of a foetus, in practice, some just use coded signals instead, our correspondent says.” This detail stopped me. I am interested as a writer in the injustice rampant in our societies, but I’m also curious about language and its uses. How is it that a doctor in Chandigarh or Ludhiana conveys to a young woman–and, alas, to many, many more like her–that she is likely to give birth to a child of the “wrong” sex? What secret analogy is considered suitable? How crude is it in its invention?

Hemingway’s short-story “Hills Like White Elephants” is about a young woman and a man who are waiting for a train, and while they wait they are talking of a “simple operation” that the woman is going to have. I hadn’t realized, when I read the story the first time, that it was about an abortion. I have taught the story more than once, and am always surprised that not all students get that meaning on the first reading either. And yet, if you read it again, the signs are all there in plain view.

“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”
The girl did not say anything.
“I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.”
“Then what will we do afterward?”
“We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.”

I have tried to remember what I had felt when I had first read this story without understanding what the operation was about. I had only been in touch with the unhappiness, I think, the difficult sadness that surrounds the young woman. It is possible that I had read the story somewhat abstractly, about men and power, or even about the cruelty of those who impose their desires on others while arguing that it is for the general good. I remember that I had resolved to be tender in my fights with my girlfriend.

But, as Hemingway’s story shows, cruelty can be indirect and still concrete. It is this which makes me wonder about the woman in the clinic in Haryana.

A corner of the field will always be foreign to certain practitioners of the game! This is a shot of politico Lalu Yadav at a match played in the Moin-ul-Haq stadium in Patna yesterday. But then I notice the number of people standing behind the stumps, giving company to the wicketkeeper, and I begin to think that I have judged too quickly and wrongly. Look at the relaxed poses of the men behind the wicket. The brand new uniforms and gear. The jaunty cap. In ‘Trobriand Cricket’ we had learned of the islanders making the foreign sport a flamboyant part of their tribal life and even a part of the expression of their colonial history and freedom. Lalu’s cricket is no less complicated. A sporting foray by a man who has recently taken a beating on other fields; he has also found a wonderful way to introduce his cricketer son to the world; he once again assumes, maybe even mocks, the role of the sahib; and how can I even guess what the event must have been like on the field, with its festive air of a part-bureaucratic, part-feudal tamasha? (At one point in this particular match, there were fifty-plus players on the field. Like Lalu’s illusory democracy, this was about the feeling of participation–real representation, actual play, and the rules of the game be damned.) This too is a part of the larger story of the cricket being transformed in the subcontinent and other corners of the world. It is comical, of course, but no less significant for that reason. Here are more photos from the event forwarded to me by my friend TV.

A thousand miles away the test match between India-Pakistan is to begin in a few hours in Karachi. India Uncut reports on the atmosphere in that city.

A new semester has started. I am teaching two courses, one in non-fiction writing and the other in media studies. The latter course I’m calling “Tourist-Theorist-Terrorist” and it deals with a diverse body of literature dealing with the Middle East and Islam. Here is the required reading list for the course: Edward Said, Covering Islam; Ahmad Rashid, Taliban; Edward Said and Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky; V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers; Orhan Pamuk, Snow; Amitav Ghosh, In An Antique Land; Jon Lee Anderson, The Fall of Baghdad. Additional texts will include essays by Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, Hanif Kureishi, Pankaj Mishra, and Mahmood Mamdani, as well as several films, to be viewed by students in the library, including “The Battle of Algiers,” “Where is My Friend’s House?, ” and “My Son, the Fanatic.”

How many Hindi film awards will Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s ‘Black’ win this year? Probably many. But should it?

Let’s consider what the hacks have to say. Subhash K. Jha, who has made a career of offering paens to the powerful, has this assessment of the film’s achievement: “Stop right here. Hindi cinema has turned a corner. And it will never be the same again.”

Oh, really?

Has Bhansali successfully stripped melodrama away from films, especially his own films? Has he inoculated art against the kind of self-indulgence only the wealthy can afford?

Has Bhansali discovered an aesthetic that is superior and more subtle than that of a lavish advertiser selling his story as a glitzy product?

‘Black’ is the story of an old teacher giving a blind and deaf girl the gift of words. The story is very loosely based on the real-life account of Helen Keller. But because Bollywood is about inflating any story with the helium of implausible gas, the story is also turned into an account of the blind girl giving back to the teacher, when he is struck with Alzheimer’s, something akin to memory and language.

Bhansali might imagine he is paying a sincere tribute to the courage of the blind; by giving them the power to make miracles he has robbed them of the courage to lead ordinary lives.

The first lesson in civility that Debraj Sahai, played by Amitabh Bachchan, provides the blind girl is an early example of the film’s incoherent approach to blindness.

Bachchan shouts in that famous baritone of his—at a child who in addition to being blind is also deaf and mute. Who is the audience at that moment? Should we turn a deaf ear to such stupidity?

There is no denying the visual opulence in the film. However, the deep rich interiors illuminated by giant paintings cannot hide the barrenness of the film’s conception. When the word “B-L-A-C-K” is first introduced to little Michelle McNally, her teacher bends his fingers into the shape of the letters and loudly enunciates the sound. But why? The little girl cannot see or hear. Why is the girl’s own hard reality so preposterously hidden from the viewer? Why is her experience so completely falsified?

On 5 April, 1887, when Helen Keller was seven, she was led to a water pump by her teacher Anne Sullivan. Keller would later recall the life-changing event: “We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honey-suckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.”

Within the next few hours, Helen Keller had learnt thirty words, including the name “Teacher.”

It is the simple, transformative power of this discovery, and the amazing intimation of what real education can be about, that is the strongest moment in Bhansali’s film. His tinny ear for truth and his obsession with rich wrappings is unable to quiet the small sound of a girl finding her own voice.

I still cherish that moment despite the smothering sentimentalism, despite also the hammy performances and plotting, and, above all, the awful, gigantic waste. I wish the applause to end. Sanjay Leela Bhansali has not found a new way to make films. He has only found new ways to spend money.

Attention, academic readers of this blog: Michael Ryan and I edit a web-journal called Politics and Culture. The latest issue is up, presenting new writing by younger scholars in the humanities. We’re carrying in this issue reviews of topic and books by people who are, for the most part, graduate students in the U.S. working on their dissertations. A couple of the special issues I edited in the past include one on The Politics of Disaster and another offered as a tribute to Edward Said.

Graphic testimony

Trauma on Loan (3MB pdf)
In July 2003, two Iraqi businessmen were seized in Baghdad by US troops. They tell graphic artist Joe Sacco about beatings, fake executions … and being thrown to lions.

This appears in the Guardian. Go to the site and scroll down on the ‘Books’ page. I offer Sacco as another example of what I was saying yesterday about Berger’s travel-writing. The attentiveness to people, to broken histories, and a voice that is sensitive to its own failings. (Sacco has produced his own acclaimed account of a visit to the Occupied Territories.) Note, for instance, in the Guardian excerpt, his alertness to the notion that the sympathetic journalist is also in a sense an interrogator. The discomfort is shared by the reader, at least by this reader, when Sacco writes:

“Because after a while, in certain situations, a journalist in a room begins to smell; even he notices.”

The Italian poet Franco Fortini had described “the difficulty of writing in an age when the poet is trapped between epitaphs and manifestos.” There is also the difficulty of writing from amidst the rubble of words. In a fine piece published on Open Democracy, John Berger reports from Palestine. He quotes the poet Mahmoud Darwish: “Ours is a country of words. Talk. Talk. Let me rest my road against a stone.” I like Berger’s kind of travel writing, attentive to people and broken histories, attentive also to one’s own inevitable flaws and the flaws of others, finding in the rubble around him what in a remarkable phrase he calls “undefeated despair.”

By Amitava Kumar
Published in The Times of India, January 17

Have you ever visited a town that remained hidden in perpetual darkness?

All that you will remember later will be the ghoulish faces of the people talking to you. Faces lit by a smoky lantern. Or sometimes by harsh flash-light, the bright light turned away from you, as if the person holding it were pissing in the night.

That is how it is when I visit Bettiah, a small town in Bihar where my uncle lives. The inhabitants of Bettiah are satisfied, especially during summer, if the power supply revives for a few hours every three days.

The last time I was there, I was interviewing people who were old childhood friends of the Bollywood actor, Manoj Bajpai. Bettiah is where Bajpai was born and had grown up.

I had arrived late in the evening. A gentle, middle-aged man named Sudhanshu was telling me that in school, back in the mid-seventies, Bajpai used to recite one particular line from the Hindi film “Kuchhe Dhaage.” Kabir Bedi played a dacoit in the Chambal ravines. His rival was Vinod Khanna. In one scene, Bedi said to his rival’s mother, “Eh budhiya, dekh inn aankhon mein. Tumhe lakhon ki maut nazar aayegi.” “Old woman, look into my eyes. You will see here the murders of many.”

But I could not look into my interlocutor’s eyes. It was already very dark. I only heard the words, and the steady singing of mosquitoes.

The light from the hired jeep in which I was travelling bounced and fell on the shuttered doors of shops. Bettiah had been suffering from a spate of kidnappings. The dacoits slipped into the nearby forests and then made ransom calls on their cellphones. This was the reason why businesses closed as soon as it was dark.

But there was one shop called Vaishnavi Jewellers that was still open. A petromax lit its interiors. The shop was owned by Umesh, another old friend of Bajpai’s. He was waiting for me.

Umesh quickly closed his shop and we walked to his house in a lane nearby. His son unlocked the chains that were wrapped around the front door. We drank tea. Umesh said that the first film he might have seen with Bajpai was “Gora aur Kaala” in 1975. This was at the inauguration of the local Priya Cinema. Umesh remembered the film. His eyes had looked hollowed by the dark but I could see a twinkle in them. He said, “Rajendra Kumar in a double role. Opposite Hema Malini.”

We went to Priya Cinema. Umesh’s torch raked the patches of cowdung in our path. At the movie theatre, a loud generator was providing power. The film showing that night was a Salman Khan starrer “Tumko Na Bhool Payenge.” The projector room was hot and the light that tunneled out of that room picked out the slow swirls of beedi-smoke in the hall.

Umesh bought me some sweets at a mithai-store that he said had a fine local reputation. He had high blood-pressure, Umesh said, but there was nothing to hold me back. In the dark, I ate greedily the ras-malai that was heaped on my plate.

We got back in the jeep and went to meet Pawan, a building contractor, who was also a great childhood friend of Bajpai’s. But Pawan wasn’t at home and we were asked to wait. In Pawan’s front-yard, two boy-servants were busy, lanterns swinging in their hands, with a black cow that was about to give birth. The youths explained that the last time one of the cows had given birth, it had been in the middle of the night. No one was around to take care of the new-born calf. In that crowded stall, the mother had accidentally trampled the calf to death.

Within fifteen minutes, the calf arrived, its legs thin and crooked as in a child’s drawing. The mother licked her young and would pause only to loudly low with her neck close to the ground. I was so happy I wanted to knock on all the barred doors on the street and give everyone the good news.

When Pawan didn’t come for an hour, Umesh said we could go and look up another friend. The light from the jeep scoured the dirty walls in the narrow streets. In the vivid darkness of the night, our presence was an intrusion. Lives had been carefully constituted, out of sheer habit, around a routine of darkness. Whole families sat out on cots or on the steps of the houses we passed. Again and again, we surprised people who were eating or resting. Women turned their faces away, and men shaded their eyes, whenever we turned a corner, headlights blazing.

Umesh rattled the door of a decrepit house. A woman appeared on the roof above. I didn’t know it was a woman till I heard her voice. Her husband was not at home. Umesh asked her where he could have gone in the dark. She remained silent.

We made our trip back to Pawan’s house. Once again the terrible embarrassment: the head-lights tearing into shreds the thin cover of privacy that the night offered. I felt as if I was party to a crime. We were revealing to the people of Bettiah the unprotected dimensions of their cramped lives.

Pawan was now back. He was a short, squat man with a thin moustache and mischievous eyes. He laughed a lot even though we weren’t saying much. He spoke of the time when Bajpai had come to town with Raveena Tandon. The film “Shool” was being made there. It was probably the first time that a film had been shot in Bettiah. Pawan was happy that Bajpai had acted with him as if nothing had changed despite the years and the changes in fortune.

I decided I would watch the film as soon as I could, although I knew that, in the dark, all the towns in Bihar look alike.

Will someone suggest a caption for the above photograph? I saw this billboard near a highway in Bombay and understood that it was an ad for a newspaper called DNA. I would describe it as the pavement-level version of a Rushdie novel—self-satisfied metropolitan fiction for consumption by the metropolitans. It is not the buffalo who has decided to carry a reminder on its body that it must work for Bihar; instead, it is some clueless cosmopolitan who is announcing his never-to-be-really-actualized intentions about–what exactly?–social activism. If this individual has recovered from his new year’s hangover by now I’d like him to consider why the geography of a land and its peoples is reducible to the flat banality of a buffalo’s hide. No complexity here. No refinement of style. Just something as bare as a blackboard and chalk, elements in a dreamscape of juvenilia. Perhaps I am over-reacting but this is because the rag in question has dung in its DNA. I refer you, dear reader, to the non-review whose display of ignorance is exceeded only by its viciousness. Blind to the achievements of Siddharth Chowdhury’s striking debut novel Patna, Roughcut, in particular the presentation of a character who engages, with rare elan, world literature and cinema while rooted in his provincial locale, our fearless writer from DNA plants his hooves everywhere, flattening everything said in its 186 pages about artistic ambition, even enlisting poor Pankaj Mishra as a Bihari, and making a pointless comparison to The God of Small Things which makes you suspect that Arundhati Roy’s novel is the only other book the reviewer has read in the past five years. Didn’t someone suggest a while back that reviewers should have to pass some basic tests of literacy before they can be allowed to judge a book?

Click here to read “Bihay By Night”

I know, I know, Lynne Truss (author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves) is to be thanked. Fellow-English teacher Frank McCourt has said “If Lynne Truss were Roman Catholic I’d nominate her for sainthood.” But I’m unimpressed. Witty engagement with punctuation might provoke some people. I prefer Orwell. Or Pinter. Or Alan Bennett’s diaries in a recent London Revew of Books. Here is Bennett’s entry for 4 August, 2005: “One has grown accustomed to — inured to would I suppose be nearer the truth — T. Blair’s use of supplementary adverbs, ‘I honestly believe’, ‘I really think’, which diminish rather than augment his credibility. It’s always sloppy but sometimes offensive. A propos the shooting of Mr de Menezes the prime minister says: ‘I understand entirely the feelings of the young man’s family.’ No ordinary person would put it like this. The only way Mr Blair could ‘understand entirely‘ the feelings of the young man’s family would be if Euan Blair had been hunted down in Whitehall, stumbled on the steps of Downing Street and he, too, had been despatched with seven shots to the head. Then Mr Blair would have had that entire understanding to which he so glibly lays claim, the claiming, one feels, part of his now developing role as Father of the People.”