With more than 200 schools in at least 44 states already participating, “Guantánamo: How Should We Respond?” is an unprecedented collaborative effort of academia, journalism, religion, medicine and even the military in exploring the Government’s detention policy and practices in the “war on terror.” On October 5th, Seton Hall will host an all-day conference available at academic institutions across the United States to study the national and international implications of indefinitely detaining hundreds of individuals deemed “enemy combatants.”

“Guantánamo: How Should We Respond?” has taken on increased importance since President George W. Bush’s announcement on September 6 that fourteen suspected terrorist previously held in secret United States facilities abroad will be transferred for trial by military commission at Guantánamo. This decision casts into question both what it means to have a fair trial in such a setting and the failure of the Government even to bring charges against the vast majority of the present detainees.

The Guantánamo Teach-in will offer participants incisive analysis with diverse perspectives. Across America, from Maine to New Mexico, from Florida to Hawaii, and from Texas to Montana, law schools, colleges, universities, community colleges and seminaries will be linked in a national dialogue on the lessons of Guantánamo, sparked by, but not limited to, the broadcast presentations.

guantanamo-teach-in

The jihad ad has been pulled. The one shown above is the leaked newspaper ad.

jihad-car-ad

Laila Lalami at Moorishgirl alerts us to a Washington Post op-ed on torture by the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat. The Bush administration has beaten down the Congressional opposition and there’s very little hope for the detainees in the CIA’s “black” prisons. It is in that pressing context that Danticat’s piece against torture makes particular sense, although what brought me up short was a passage that made of the torturer a specific kind of a writer:

Rare is the opportunity, as we seem to have now, for the torturer to plot out methods in advance and in public. Should a person be strapped to a board and have water poured down his nose? Should she be forced to stand for long periods of time in the cold without being allowed to sleep? Should he be slapped in the chest, face or belly? These are almost novelistic questions with no more rational answers than some haywire plot or dark verse.

P.S. Also, please read the questions that Ariel Dorfman asks in the same paper on the same day.

edwidge-danticat-ariel-dorfman-torture-washington-post

Vikram Seth has been in the news lately for being one of the principal signatories to a campaign launched by Siddharth Dube. The petition says: “We, concerned Indian citizens, support the overturning of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial-era law dating to 1861, which punitively criminalizes romantic love and private, consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex.” (I’m also one of the long list of additional signatories. A few reports on the campaign against Section 377: the Hindustan Times, the New York Times, Sepia Mutiny. Amartya Sen has also released in statement in support.) Now, in the aftermath of that campaign, Outlook magazine has carried an interview with Seth. At the beginning of the interview the following, rather wonderful, exchange takes place:

Did this law affect you in a similar way? Did it have a personal effect on your own life?

Yes. For instance, when my mother was a lawyer and later when she became a judge, I enjoyed browsing around in her law books. When I was quite young, I came across Section 377 which was in fact written in very odd Victorian phrasing about carnal intercourse against the order of nature with man, woman and so on. And as I read the description of what this section actually meant, I realised it even included, if you can believe it, oral sex between a husband and wife. A crazy law like this has no place on our books. And of course a law that is selectively used is in one aspect even worse than a law that is generally used because it puts a lot of power in individuals’ hands and makes government a rule not of laws but of people.

Now you ask me whether this directly affected me. Yes. When I realised that I had feelings for men as well as women, at first I was worried and frightened, and there was a certain amount of Who am I? Am I a criminal? and so on. It took me a long time to come to terms with myself.

Seth’s private life hasn’t, thank god, been the stuff of tabloids. And you do not have to be a Ph.D in literature to note the gravity as well as restraint in his voice. (Second thoughts: a Ph.D in literature would have been a drawback in any case.) But the interviewer, Sheela Reddy, who has long been waging a mighty battle to keep literary culture in India at the level of gossip, wasn’t to be put off her quest for something more shallow, if not also smutty. Here, almost at random, are some of the other questions that Seth was asked, and to which he provided his own honest, measured responses:

Q: I’m not sure I quite understand what bisexual means?

Q: But if you can be straight, and life is so difficult as a gay, isn’t it simpler to just be straight?

Q: This is something that people often snigger about: has boarding school anything to do with you being gay?

Q: Are you in a relationship just now?

For a link on this site to an earlier exchange between Seth and Reddy, go here. Also Shivam Vij on the above interview.

vikram-seth-section-377-sheela-reddy

The amazing Ami Vitale saw this in Kashmir.

ami-vitale-kashmir

Salman Rushdie came to Vassar College earlier this week to deliver a lecture to the Class of 2010–but he made it clear to the organizers that he would cancel if I was involved in his visit. I had earlier been asked to introduce him, and then, well, I was disinvited. Mr Rushdie and I have never met, although I have heard him speak several times. I presume his dislike of me has to do with essays like this that I have written about him in the past. I cannot say whether he has read my Passport Photos but it’d be fair to say that the book takes its cues from Rushdie. It was from him that we really learned to show some attitude. When I say “we” I’m talking of many contemporary Indian writers in English. But we have also sought our own paths, and in doing so we’ve also sometimes sought to renounce our past, the past in which Mr Rushdie looms so monumentally. I don’t know whether I could’ve usefully involved the freshmen at Vassar in a public discussion of any writer’s troubled relationship with his or her forbears; nor am I certain how much they (or, for that matter, our honored guest) would’ve valued a dissection of the ways in which criticism must survive in the world. But despite those uncertainties, I very much feel that an opportunity has been lost. In any case, here’s a part of what I had intended to say in my introduction:

In Bombay, the city of Salman Rushdie’s birth, more than six hundred films get made each year. In the theatres in the Indian small towns (like the one in which I grew up), the arrival of the film’s hero—a cigarette flung on the floor and rolling out of sight or the dark boots in the frame announcing his dramatic advance—is usually greeted by loud cheers and whistles. I’m speaking here of the vast majority of films, the ones that attract a substantial part of the 12 million daily viewers, viewers who recognize that melodrama is our real national birthright. Everyone in the audience knows that the villain, who till a moment ago might have been molesting the timid heroine or pushing around a retired old man, or, because there isn’t a whole lot of premium on subtlety, even slapping a handicapped beggar, his crutches lying beside him on the street—this monstrous villain is about to be very quickly brought to his knees. People who in their actual lives might have very little power or wealth go wild with excitement. Men in the audience have been known to tear off their shirts as they welcome the hero in that dark space of the theater, which we all know is also a space of fantasy and imagination.

About twenty-five years ago, with the publication of Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie met with the reception usually accorded to Hindi film heroes. His book won the Booker Prize and some years later the Booker of Bookers.

Now, you might know this, but in the first hour or so of the three-hour Hindi film, our hero often vanquishes a bad character who then becomes a staunch ally in bigger, more dramatic battles that are sure to follow. I guess I would be speaking for a lot of readers, particularly in those parts of the planet that used to be called the Third World, who saw Mr Rushdie as having fought and won against, and made an ally of, the English language, the alien language that had come to us with our colonial rulers. Mr Rushdie has had to fight many other battles since; he has made many friends and enemies; and we (I’m speaking as an Indian here) we, as his readers and as writers, have followed his actions, his songs, his mannerisms, and even when we have chosen not to follow him into the sunset, we’ve always had to define ourselves, and our rebellions, against this image we have had of him, looking down at us from giant billboards at each street-corner of our past.

One of Mr Rushdie’s most heroic struggles has been the one with a cleric who put a price on this writer’s head. Well—as our honored guest has himself remarked, of the two adversaries, only one has lived to tell the tale.

salman-rushdie-vassar-college-amitava-kumar

…“Train to Pakistan,” Mr. [Khushwant] Singh’s slim, seminal 1956 novel whose opening paragraphs contain one of its most unsettling lines: “The fact is, both sides killed.” An estimated one million people were killed during the partition, and more than 10 million fled their homes: Hindus and Sikhs pouring into India, Muslims heading in the other direction, to Pakistan. The novel tells the story of an uneventful border village that gets swept up in that violent storm.

Now, in a new edition of the novel, Roli Books in New Delhi has paired his story with 66 unflinching black-and-white photographs of the Partition era, some never before published, by the American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. This new incarnation of “Train to Pakistan,” which Roli hopes to find international distributors for at the Frankfurt Book Fair next month, has given the book what its author happily calls “a new lease on life.” It has also given Mr. Singh, who at 91 has borne witness to several rounds of carnage in his country, an occasion once again to warn against forgetfulness.

“The wounds of partition have healed,” he likes to say as often as he can. “The poison is still in our system.”

Bourke-White, known equally well in India and Pakistan for her portraits of Gandhi at his spinning wheel and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, sitting straight-backed in a chair, was among the most effective chroniclers of those wounds.

The photographs reproduced in the book are gut-wrenching, and staring at them, you glimpse the photographer’s undaunted desire to stare down horror. There is a street littered with corpses, an audience of vultures looking down from a roof. There is a dead man in a hand cart, his open eyes staring through the spokes of the wheel. There is an old man, only skin and bones, leaning on his pile of bedding, vacantly staring at the sky.

Two years before Bourke-White shot these pictures, she photographed the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald. She was the first woman the United States Army accredited as a war correspondent during World War II.

The photographs were displayed recently at the posh shopping center Khan Market, near Mr. Singh’s home in Delhi; Khan Market was once known as a “resettlement” hub, where refugee traders from Pakistan were offered storefronts. The only thing more astonishing than the images blown up large as life was the number of shoppers who seemed not to register them, marching on instead to inspect the latest running shoes or stem crystal. There was at least one passionate response. Pramod Kapoor, the publisher of Roli, recalled a sweeper at the market telling him that he felt like tearing up the pictures.

Today there is not a single memorial to the partition in India, Mr. Kapoor points out, let alone a museum. It is only remembered, or forgotten, by the people who lived it.

More.

khushwant-singh-margaret-bourke-white

Atul Dodiya’s “Mirage” (2002), enamel paint on a metal shutter.

More.

When I put up this post yesterday, I was thinking of the terrifying power of Raj Kamal Jha’s reportage from Gujarat:

A child’s English workbook: Learning to Communicate, by S K Ram and J A Mason (Oxford University Press, 124 pages).

This book was on the balcony of an empty house in Gulbarg Society (38 burnt alive, 12 missing), for over 60 days, first touched by the fire, then by the 45-degree sun. The stain of a damp patch in the top left-hand corner has seeped into every page. The Fire Brigade came here to wash the dead, it must have been water from their hoses.

From the child’s handwriting in the book, I can’t make out if it’s a boy or a girl. There’s no name on the book, just a phone number on the inside cover, again in the child’s handwriting. I call.

‘‘Hello,’’ says a woman.

I wanted a slit uterus as a souvenir but it had grown two little feet, marched to the Rashtrapati with Sahmat activists. From there, perhaps, to George’s to tell him it wasn’t as old as 1984. So all I got were some books in the ashes. Unlike humans, books don’t burn so easily

‘‘I’m looking for a student,’’ I take a shot in the dark.

‘‘No, this is The School Post,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s a monthly newspaper for schoolchildren that we bring out.’’

Maybe the child sent in a poem, a sketch, so I ask if she has heard of any contributors missing?

‘‘This is the summer vacation,’’ she says, ‘‘I’m sorry, all schools are closed.’’

The child’s writing ends on Page 84. After that, the book is unread, the blanks unfilled.

On Page 43, there’s a lesson called Fire In a Hotel about a blind man called John Brown and his dog Chum who are trapped in a hotel fire. ‘‘I smelt smoke! A fire! I felt the door of my room. It was hot so I didn’t open it. I wet some towels and put them along the bottom of the door. (The child has underlined this sentence). I felt my way to the window and opened it. But because I can’t see, I could not climb out.’’

I can see, so I look up at the child’s window, there’s nothing there, just a black rectangle.

The child has marked a poem: There is smoke everywhere I go. There is only one thing that I love, and that is the sky far above. There is plenty of room in the blue, for castles of clouds and me, too. Maybe the Poet-PM could weave this in his next musings from Manali or wherever.

The publisher’s note about Jha’s forthcoming book makes you instantly aware that the novel takes as its point of entry what the writer had witnessed and recorded in Gujarat. Although I cannot, alas, take credit for Jha’s new novel, I want to draw the attention of this blog’s readers to what I had said about Jha’s Gujarat report in my review of his previous book If You Are Afraid of Heights in Outlook:

Among all the articles that were written by journalists who visited Gujarat after the riots, the most original and moving piece had been Jha’s. His essay recounted the experience of opening the pages of a partially-charred children’s textbook. The writer had picked up the book from Gulbarg Society where 38 people had been burnt alive. “On Page 43, there’s a lesson called ‘Fire In a Hotel’ about a blind man called John Brown and his dog Chum who are trapped in a hotel fire. ‘I smelt smoke! A fire! I felt the door of my room. It was hot so I didn’t open it. I wet some towels and put them along the bottom of the door…I felt my way to the window and opened it. But because I can’t see, I could not climb out’.”

It is impossible not to think of Jha’s reportage from Gujarat when reading If You Are Afraid of Heights. The pages are haunted by the sound of a child crying. In his writing about the little girl’s rape, Jha demonstrates both rage and finesse. More than once, he shows us a child working through her English lesson. In one scene, a girl reads about a deposed king, Robert Bruce, who, hiding in a cave, watches a spider fail and then succeed at spinning a cobweb. We are in touch with a young imagination struggling with a world of adult rules and expectations. The scene, exemplifying an attitude, offers what I think of as a real Jha moment, when we see tenderness glowing like a firefly in the dark.

raj-kamal-jha-gujarat-riots

Raj Kamal Jha is a writer whose imaginative talent can light up the night sky. Fireproof, his new novel, his third, is soon to be released at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The German edition is published by Goldmann of Verlagsgruppe Random House. They are publishing this very important book — a novel that begins on a night in February 2002 when a hundred Muslim men and women are burnt alive in Gujarat — as their lead autumn-winter title.

It’s the last night of February 2002. Before sunrise the next day, more than a hundred Muslim men, women and children will be killed, most of them burnt alive. Above a city on fire, some of the dead get together. And decide to take matters in their own hands. Propelled by rage and horror, Fireproof plumbs the harrowing depths of darkness. In prose breathtaking in its ability to evoke terror and, at the same time, tenderness, in a form so original it defies description, Raj Kamal Jha has created a work that could serve as a tract for our times. From the author of The Blue Bedspread and If You Are Afraid of Heights comes Fireproof, a fierce testimony to the ordinary nature of collective evil. And to the extraordinary power of individual conscience.

Below is the cover of the English edition, forthcoming from Picador; it is full of mystery and urgent appeal, like a dramatic moment from a film by M. Night Shyamalan.

raj-kamal-jha-fireproof