Newsweek magazine prepares us for the Bush visit to India by carrying a piece by Jhumpa Lahiri.

“When I was growing up in Rhode Island in the 1970s I felt neither Indian nor American.” Lahiri goes on to say that the sharp division between the two places, and therefore also between her two lives, has ceased to matter so much. Rather than investing too heavily in historical generalizations, Lahiri seeks her truths in more concrete, individual details of her family-past. She writes: “While I am American by virtue of the fact that I was raised in this country, I am Indian thanks to the efforts of two individuals. I feel Indian not because of the time I’ve spent in India or because of my genetic composition but rather because of my parents’ steadfast presence in my life.” There is a sort of safety in such analysis, but also a touching kind of truth. Especially when Lahiri goes on to write about her parents: “Everything will change once they die. They will take certain things with them–conversations in another tongue, and perceptions about the difficulties of being foreign. Without them, the back-and-forth life my family leads, both literally and figuratively, will at last approach stillness. An anchor will drop, and a line of connection will be severed.” We’re back in real history with these lines, the history of two different generations in this country, and, of course, the history bound by birth and death.

“It’s About Who You Know And Who You Hang With.” This is the name of a mixed-media installation by Jeeyun Ha and Naeem Mohaiemen. The installation highlights the detention of migrants who form a part of the invisible underclass in the U.S. But the effort by these artists is also a part of a more ambitious, and highly laudable, political attempt at representation and intervention. A video from the project is currently on show at the 2006 Whitney Biennale in New York City.

“It’s About Who You Know And Who You Hang With” also makes use of a few of my poems from Passport Photos. I’m delighted to be a part of this art-work. Here is one of the poems that the artists have used:

My friend and fellow-Bihari Neeraj Priyadarshi has sent these pictures he took at Navapur after the arrival of the avian flu. This is what Mike Davis had written last year: “Deadly avian flu is on the wing. The first bar-headed geese have already arrived at their wintering grounds near the Cauvery River in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Over the next ten weeks, 100,000 more geese, gulls, and cormorants will leave their summer home at Lake Qinghai in western China, headed for India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and, eventually, Australia.”

More from Davis: “An unknown number of these beautiful migrating birds will carry H5N1, the avian flu subtype that has killed 61 people in Southeast Asia and which the World Health Organization (WHO) fears is on the verge of mutating into a pandemic form like that which killed 50 to 100 million people in the fall of 1918. As the birds arrive in the wetlands of South Asia, they will excrete the virus into the water where it risks spreading to migrating waterfowl from Europe as well as to domestic poultry. In the worst-case scenario, this will bring avian flu to the doorstep of the dense slums of Dhaka, Kolkata, Karachi, and Mumbai.”

Outlook Magazine provides an update on the flu situation in India. Please read Mike Davis, The Monster At Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, published by the New Press. And thank you, Neeraj.

Dear President Bush,

On Tuesday last a large group of protestors outside the Parliament were shouting out your name and they were saying “Cowherd! Cowherd!”

I felt a great deal of attachment for you—I realized you were from my caste. And therefore we were brothers. But it was too good to be true. A press fellow explained to me that the agitators were calling you “Coward! Coward!” which means something else.

Arre, who cares for these things? I have heard that you have a ranch, which means that you also own cattle. Cows, buffaloes? Please tell me whether this at least is true or not.

I am the Railways Minister of India. When you come to India, please insist on travel by train. You will be able to see more of the country than it will be possible by air. You can also drink tea from a kulhar.

Arre, if you had encouraged rail travel in America, the bad men on September 11 would have only captured two or three trains—and the Twin Towers would still have been standing.

Anyway, no use talking about the past. No use crying over milk that has been spilt and the black billi has already licked.

I hope you are coming with family. I would like to meet Lauraji. See, I have an idea. I know it is a fact that you are enjoying low popularity rate in your country. No problem. You should do what I did. Make Lauraji the President of your country and then just luto the mazaa…

I am talking very frankly with you. Please do the same with me.

Have you heard my name linked with the fodder scam? It is mostly true. Actually, I made more money than it is alleged. My intention is not to boast. I have your good in my heart. Tell me, if you wanted money or if Cheneyji’s company Haliburton wanted money, why did you need to go and invade another country? You should have just invented a fodder scam!

Arre bhai, suppose you needed badla from Saddam for how he had misbehaved with your father, and you wanted to take revenge by shifting all the oil from Iraq to Texas, still—instead of destroying the whole country why did you not do what we do in Bihar, just kidnap the person who will pay you the desired amount?

You could have done apaharan of Saddam Hussein, and if you needed help I would have sent my own brother-in-law. Absolutely no need to kill lakhs of people.

Believe me, as a person who is anti-communal, I have always liked Saddam. He is anti-communal too. He named his bigger son Uday.

Anyway, you come we will talk about all these things in detail. Kindly come to Bihar. It is now unfortunately owned by another fellow, but I can still show you the sights. If you don’t like Governor House, you can stay at Beur Jail. Believe me, it is more comfortable.

Yours truly,

Lalu Prasad Yadav

P.S. You people have been outsourcing in Bangalore, but why not Bihar? Our roads are even worse than those in Bangalore.

A news-item appeared on my screen today. It said that the U.S. Army has charged 7 soldiers from the 82nd airborne for their participation in a video shown on gay porn web-site.

What can we learn about the war and its violence by looking at pornography? Is this even the right question to ask, especially in the context of this site?

I’m interested in the experiences of soldiers in Iraq, and in trying to tell the story of this war from their viewpoint. Not to stage a defense of war or for that matter simply to decry it, but to understand its brutality from a different, more complicated angle. In a brief piece published in the Feb 25 issue of Tehelka, I have argued that I’d rather teach in my class a book like Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, a US sniper’s account of the first Gulf War, than anything written by the likes of Noam Chomsky and the anti-war brigade. This is partly because Chomsky and his admirable cohort tell my students little that is new about how they could understand war. More than that, given the education and upbringing of my fairly liberal, fairly privileged students at Vassar, I’d rather they read the story of a Marine’s “pride, bravery, stupidity, fear” than another well-reasoned tract by an erudite professor at MIT. The latter will no doubt better explain to my students what were the processes through which contemporary American realities were shaped, but it is the former that will bring them closer to how this reality is experienced by a large portion of the population.

In the closing pages of Jarhead, Swofford writes that “the war has been mine to fight but not mine to win or lose, and I know that none of the rewards of victory will come my way, because there are no rewards, not on the field of battle, not for the man who fights the battle—the rewards accrue in places like Washington, D.C., and Riyadh and Houston and Manhattan, south of 125th Street, and Kuwait City. The fighting man receives tokens—medals, ribbons, badges, promotions, combat pay, abrogation of taxes, a billet to Airborne School—worthless bits of nothing, as valuable as smoke.” This expression of bitterness and, perhaps more surprising, the later despair about the violence and Swofford’s empathy for the Iraqi dead, is more convincing precisely because it follows the gung-ho saber-rattling of the earlier pages. An academic or political tract that already knows beforehand the position it is going to argue is in comparison far less persuasive.

I recently came across a website nowthatsfuckedup.com maintained by soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is an amateur porn site that claims to be a political resource site. Perhaps it is. It is going to be shut down in April because of a legal wrangle. One of the visitors to the site writes: “Come on, it’s obvious why they are going to single this guy out. The war photos are a public relations nightmare for the US military. The gory pictures make Abu Ghraib photos look like Disneyland. Rumsfeld wants to portray current Iraq like it’s pie-in-the-sky and the photos show what’s really going on out there. It’s a hell hole.” The photos that are being referred to here could be considered pornographic in their own right. They are also ghastly. They are filed under names like “Fried Insurgent” or “What Happens to Iraqis Who Mess with the US,” and even one called “Saddam Chillin ” Equally disturbing is that fact that these photos co-exist on the site with what the site administrator calls “wife and girlfriend pictures.” We’re back in that country which is neither Iraq nor America but maleness beseiged and insecure. Here is Swofford in Jarhead: “Near the regimental mess there is a Wall of Shame, where jarheads post photos of unfaithful women, women who’ve gone bad on debts or stolen some poor jarhead’s car and all of his clothes or simple informed him that the ride has ended.”

No Wall of Shame likely with pictures of twelve year-old Ali Ismail Abbas, though. Remember him? Here’s Jon Lee Anderson describing Ali in The Fall of Baghdad: “The child’s legs were untouched, but there was a catheter and tube attached to his penis. His torso was entirely blackened, and both of his arms had been burned off. At about the biceps, the flesh of both extensions became charred, black grostesqueries, one of the hands twisted and burned into a hideous melted claw, the other much shorter and apparently burned off below the elbow, with two long bones sticking out of it. It looked like something that might be found in a barbecue pit.”

Maud Newton has provided two posts of relevance to those interested in British Asian literary representation: the first concerns the statements made by Haider Rahman who recognizes himself as the real-life model for one of the characters in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth; the second is an update on an earlier report that Sameera Reddy was to star in the film-adaptation of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.

A dear friend of mine in Delhi, Sujata Bose, ordered a video-tape for me on the internet and had it mailed to my home. I didn’t know all this, however, when the tape arrived at my door. It came in a box that said “Women & Men: Stories of Seduction.” No receipt, no note. The following day was Valentine’s Day. My wife and I sat down to watch the film, and it wasn’t till late into the session, when the third part of the tape began to play, that I guessed why I had received this gift.

Some time ago I had posted a blog called Hemingway in Haryana, mentioning the short-story “Hills Like White Elephants.” Sujata had written in response about a film made from the story, with Melanie Griffith and James Woods in it. In “Stories of Seduction,” the first film is an adaptation of Mary McCarthy’s fun tale “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” the second film is based on Dorothy Parker’s “Dusk Before Fireworks,” and the third, directed by Tony Richardson, is an adaptation of the Hemingway story, with the script written by Joan Didion and her late husband John Gregory Dunne.

Hemingway’s story is considered a masterpiece of understated narration. The word “abortion” is never used in the text. I was disappointed to see that in the film version, perhaps because of the demands of television, Didion and Dunne had tried to give the story a fuller, more explicit form. Hemingway had lines like “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig.” Didion and Dunner have the woman say, “They put a knife in you.” Perhaps the latter believed that “the American” in the story was Hemingway himself and wanted to critique the idea of a macho male writer; the script plays clumsily for a while with the irony of the man worried about losing a manuscript but not about losing a child. I bristled a bit at this. I have always treasured the terseness of Hemingway’s prose, and here I was getting what sounded like a term-paper.

And then, partly because of the way in which Hemingway’s lines still shine through, partly because of Melanie Griffith’s performance as the pregnant woman, and partly also because the idea of a writer’s life gathered more momentum and density, the story became powerful in the closing minutes. Didion and Dunne have produced a few lines of marvelous dialogue when the woman imagines the man going his separate way and writing about the abortion in a story which she will one day come across. The woman says, “And I’ll be wherever I am and I will read this story by you… And I will put it down and I won’t show it to whoever I am with.” The man says, “I don’t want to write a story about this.” “But you will,” she replies, and sketches a quick scene, involving a man and a woman, waiting for a train, and, she says, the man and the woman in the story will, and also not, be them. The way the woman says this is disturbing, and haunting, and you are left feeling that she is right.

(The above image shows Melanie Griffith delivering that famous line toward the end: “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”)

I had opened the discussion of Hemingway’s story in the context of gendered violence in India. Female foeticide, especially in northern states like Punjab and Haryana, may have claimed 10 million lives over the past 20 years. The latest issue of Outlook magazine has a cover-story on this. Also check out the accompanying article by Khushwant Singh that he begins with this broad historical take:

Punjab has a long history of doing away with newborn girls. The preferred method today is foeticide after a sex determination test, but centuries ago, the practice was to bury them. This tradition perhaps goes back to the days of repeated invasions by Muslim armies from the northwest, who used to carry off girls as booty for their own pleasure or to be sold in the slave markets of the Middle East. Today, it is the extortionate dowries that parents of girls have to provide on her marriage. The custom of polyandry in Punjab probably arose out of the shortage of girls—the eldest son of a family would take a wife, his younger brothers would also have access to her.

Edward Said: A Personal and Intellectual Tribute

There are a very few intellectuals ––Bertrand Russell, E.P. Thompson, and Noam Chomsky come to mind in the English-speaking world— whose writings and whose lives provide a kind of pole that thousands of people look toward so as to feel that they are not wholly lost or marginal for possessing instincts for justice and humanity, and for thinking that some small steps might be taken towards their achievement. Edward Said was, without a doubt, such a man. The daze and despair so many of us here at Columbia feel, now that we have taken in that he has gone, is only a very local sign of what is a global loss without measure. And to think of what it must be like for his own brutalized people to lose him, is unbearable.

Read the rest of Akeel Bilgrami’s tribute (delivered at a memorial service for Edward Said on September 29, 2003) from today’s post at Three Quarks Daily. (Thanks, Abbas Raza.)

After my last posting on Said, Projjal Dutta of ArtsIndia wrote to recommend an article by Irfan Husain at the Dawn.

One of my favorite books is to be published in the U.S. eighteen years after it first came out in India. This book, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August, is being brought out by NYRB in April.

“I’ve a feeling, August, you’re going to get hazaar fucked in Madna.” “‘Amazing mix, the English we speak. Hazaar fucked. Urdu and American,’ Agastya laughed, ‘a thousand fucked, really fucked. I’m sure nowhere else could languages be mixed and spoken with such ease.’” You read these lines on the very first page of the new novel by a twenty-six-year-old writer–and if you too were in your twenties, and had misspent many years in Delhi, and, like the protagonist, had had sex more often with yourself than with others, this language found you suddenly willing to conduct lightning.

When I heard that this delightful novel is going to come out in America I went back to those acerbic parts where Chatterjee mocked assumptions that any foreign visitor might have about small-town India. Remember the moment when a British visitor expresses surprise that there is a video parlor, possibly showing blue films, in a remote Indian town? This is what Agastya said to his guest: “‘About sixty-five per cent of the population of the block of Jompanna–a block is roughly one-sixth or one-seventh of a district–is illiterate. But one doesn’t need to be brainy or literate to watch a blue film on video. Your real surprise is just the…’ he looked for the word, ‘juxtaposition, isn’t it?’ and then he was galled by Avery’s solemnity (and so began, in Madan’s phrase, to ‘finger’ him), ‘but that’s because India is a land of sublime and fascinating contradictions, where the Himalayas of the soul arise out of dung, and dance hand in hand with the phallus of Shiv.’”

I hope the book garners good reviews here but I also know that Chatterjee probably doesn’t care. A part of the reason English, August is just so good is because its author hasn’t tried to cultivate an audience that doesn’t recognize his world immediately. That explains the book’s wonderful comedy and irreverence–its ability to mock itself and the world of its readers. Nevertheless, I hope they give Chatterjee a Pulitzer. No, wait! They are really provincial in places like New York. Even more so than Hollywood. You have to be an American, silly, to get this award! Even though it is true that much of America has been outsourced to places closer to Madna.