“Oscar Wilde soon became Information Central. As the first gay bookshop in the country, we amassed something that proved to be invaluable for organizing a march,” wrote Fred Sargeant in his 2010 first-person account for the Village Voice.

Meanwhile, Washington, DC’s Drum and Spear Bookstore, “was a creative hub for black power, black consciousness and internationalist activism” from 1968 to 1974, according to the Library of Congress. The bookshop eventually shut down due to debt. 

Despite being bastions of societal advancement, community and mental nourishment, bookshops have dwindled due to factors like competition from Amazon and the popularity of e-books. In 2021, the United States Census Bureau pointed out that “the number of U.S. Book stores (as listed in the North American Industry Classification System) dropped from 12,151 in 1998 to 6,045 in 2019.”

The pandemic furthered this downward trend. In October 2020, Focus Finance reported that “sales turnover from brick and mortar bookstores declined by 31% from January to July 2020. Some bookstores are even seeing year-over-year sales declines as high as 80%.”

Discover Orca, Olympia’s largest independent bookstore

In April 2020, when Covid-19 was in full swing, the Orca bookstore in Olympia, Washington stayed afloat by adopting the co-op model. As the shop’s site explains, owner Linda Berentsen “was ready to retire, but wanted to ensure that the store lived on.”

“Diversifying was the only option,” says Kait Leamy, an Orca worker-owner since December 2021. “People didn’t want Orca to go away, so turning into a member-owned co-op was a great way to fundraise at the time.”

Leamy explains that the shop, which existed in various forms for nearly three decades before becoming the Orca Books Cooperative, is now owned by its employees and supportive Olympia community members.

“I think people in this area love that community-run aspect of things,” they state, adding that Orca owes its survival to this communal spirit. “The community has saved our lives several times. People in town are supportive on a day-to-day basis by shopping here and also when big, crazy things happen.” For example, one crowdsourcing campaign replenished funds lost to an embezzling bookkeeper. Another helped cover veterinary expenses for the shop’s resident cat, Orlando.

The bookshop has two kinds of memberships: “Basic Consumer [and] Low-Income Consumer.” Each member pays a fee that provides some benefits, discounts and voting rights.

Olympia is a hot spot for co-ops. In 2019, the Northwest Cooperative Development Center told the social justice publication Works in Progress that the city had “more cooperatively owned businesses per capita than any other US city (one co-op business for every 5,255 residents).”

Leamy, who was a member of several co-ops while in college, notes, “Now I can’t have a job with the hierarchy that regular corporate jobs have, because I am so used to this co-op model where everybody has autonomy, [all] voices are equal, and no one is telling you what to do.”

As Olympia’s largest independent bookstore, Orca is a space where customers and staff “from all walks of life” form “a vibrant, supportive, and generous book-loving community,” the store’s site states. “We rejoice in offering a wonderfully eccentric haven for our wonderfully diverse patrons.”

The shop’s amenities include a free coffee cart and a mutual aid table with medical supplies. Orca also carries cards, calendars, stickers, prints, magnets, t-shirts and other items crafted by local creatives like noted papercut artist Nikki McClure.

It also serves as a “community hub for book trade, resource sharing, and community re-cycling.”

“You don’t have to spend money to be here,” Leamy notes. “These days, there are so few places in the world that you’re allowed to just be in, so we try hard to make Orca a welcoming place. I think that helps us because people care and are invested.”

Selling mostly used books, Orca strives to keep its prices as low as possible, “so people can have access to the information,” according to Leamy. “We’re told all the time that we’re the cheapest bookstore in town. That feels important to us because new books are getting more and more expensive. A new hardcover these days can be $45.”

Rather than participating in a wholesale process, local authors can sell their books in small numbers at Orca. The shop takes only a small cut, leaving the author with the majority of the sale price.

Orca hosts events such as author talks, poetry readings, mending circles and book club meetings “where [people] come together, read the same thing, talk about it, and talk about life and the world,” Leamy says. “You can’t do that on Amazon. Having a physical space and a physical book instead of digital feels important.”

Combined with right-wing efforts to ban and burn books, the decrease in face-to-face interaction in the digital age makes the survival of shops like Orca more important than ever.

“Bookstores, particularly, are hard [to maintain] these days,” Leamy observes. “There are some days where we say, ‘Are we going to make it?’ and some days where we’re flying high. I think there are enough people out there who want bookstores to exist [bettering the odds] that we can make it.”

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

[Local Peace Economy produced this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Community Support Helps the Orca Book Cooperative Stay Afloat appeared first on Fair Observer.

Nathdwara became a unique centre, its rituals and traditions remaining virtually unchanged for over 300 years. Until recently it was in a time capsule, maintaining artistic traditions that had vanished from the Rajput courts. It was the archive for the styles and techniques of the courtly painting studios of Rajasthan as well as the home to its own unbroken artistic tradition for over three centuries. There were hundreds of artists from the Jangir and Adi Gaur castes dedicated to serving the temple and providing painted icons for the pilgrimage trade.

Until the seventeenth century Nathdwara (Door to the Lord) was only a remote dusty village called Sinhar in the state of Mewar. It soared to fame when Shrinathji and his followers, threatened by the rise to power of the iconoclastic Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, fled Krishna’s sacred homeland of Braj and sought refuge in Rajasthan. It is said that the Maharana of Mewar with a retinue of 100,000 warriors went out to escort Shrinathji personally to his capital of Sesodias but that the bullock cart carrying Krishna became bogged down in the mud in the small village of Sinhar. It was taken as a sign that Shrinathji had selected this spot along the Banas River as a haven.

It is debatable whether the Vallabhacharis, so named for their guru Vallabhacharya (VS 1535-1587; 1478-1530 CE), fled the area out of fear of persecution or whether they made a judicious decision to resettle in Rajasthan. It is possible that the uncertainty caused by Aurangzeb’s threats reduced the pilgrimage trade and affected the temple revenue. The Shrinathji ki Prakatya Varta records that Aurangzeb’s messenger delivered an ultimatum to Vallabha’s grandsons that ‘either the fakir of Gokul show some miracle or leave the Mughal Empire. This rude warning must have come as a shock. Prior to Aurangzeb’s reign the Vallabhacharis had enjoyed Mughal favours and were protected by several firmans issued by Akbar and Shah Jahan that gave them grazing rights over the land stretching from Gokul to the whole district of Mahaban. In addition, they enjoyed the privilege of being exempt from taxation. It is debatable whether they fled or simply decided to reestablish the sect in the land of wealthy Rajasthani maharajas whom they had cultivated as devotees. E. Allen Richardson argues that Maharana Raj Singh of Udaipur, beginning in 1665, with the gift of the village of Asotiya in Mewar to two goswamis, was preparing a place for the Vallabha Sampraday and that Maharana Raj Singh foresaw the economic and social benefits of bringing the popular sect to Mewar.

Among the Vallabhacharis there is a story that explains the situation without tarnishing their relationship with the Mughals. On one of his missions, Vitthalnathji (VS 1572-1642; 1515-1585 CE), the son of Vallabhacharya, had visited Sinhar where he initiated into the sect one Ajabkurivar, the sister-in-law of the legendary Bhakti poetess Mirabai. Ajabkunvar became so passionately attached to Shrinathji that she asked him to visit her every night. Shrinathji granted her wish and came every evening, traversing hundreds of miles from Braj, to play with her his favourite parcheesi-like game of chaupar. Finally, seeing him red-eyed and exhausted from his travels, Ajabkunvar requested Shrinathji to settle in Mewar permanently. Shrinathji replied that it was not possible for him to do so now but that he would in the future after the time of Vallabhacharya and Vitthalnathji. In 1669 when the persecution grew acute, Vitthalnathji and Vallabhacharya had both passed away. It was time for the promise to be fulfilled. The bullock chariot carrying Shrinathji reached Sinhar in VS 1728 (1671 CE) and it came to rest beneath a pipal tree where Ajabkunvar’s house had been located. It was to be Shrinathji’s new home. Tradition holds that Shrinathji’s shrine is the only one in the sect with a tiled roof in imitation of Ajabkunvar’s house.

Interestingly the account of the move in the Shrinathji ki Prakatya Varta records none of the pomp that James Tod describes in his Annals of Rajasthan. According to Harirai (b. 1590), author of the Shrinathji ki Prakatya Varta, and a member of one of the thirty-six families that accompanied Shrinathji to Rajasthan, the move was done as quietly as possible. Perhaps it was the Maharana of Mewar who wanted to make a great show of Shrinathji’s arrival whereas the Vallabhacharis wanted only safety for their svarup.

No doubt the flight was a major disruption for the Vallabhacharya Sampraday. When the upheaval occurred in 1669, the sect had been established well over 150 years on Mount Govardhan, the location where Shrinathji first appeared, It was a shift not taken easily for this was Krishna’s birthplace, the playground for his lilas (sports) and most importantly the site of Shrinathji raising Mount Govardhan as an umbrella to protect his people from the punishing deluge sent by the storm god Indra. Even though the teenaged Tilakayat Damodarji (VS 1711-1760; 1654 -1703 CE) was supported by his uncles, Gopinathji and Balakrishnaji, it must have been an emotionally trying decision for him to make. The sect had strong roots in Braj.

After Shrinathji’s arrival in Sinhar a shrine was erected in VS 1728 (1671 CE) which was purposefully designed as a haveli (mansion) instead of the traditional shikara-style (towered) temple. The architect of the new temple built on the pattern of an aristocrat’s mansion was Gopaldas Ustad under the supervision of Hariraiji, the author of the Shrinathji ki Prakatya Varta. Every part of the new structure was to recall the sacred topography of Braj, Krishna’s homeland.

Today pilgrims throng the halls of the haveli for every ceremony, jostling each other to reach the Nij Mandir where Shrinathji resides. The viewing periods are short, and thousands seek his darshan (viewing). Although the seva (service) is done with the utmost respect the crush of pilgrims tries the patience of those attempting to feel at one with their Lord. Outside in the streets there is almost a carnival-like atmosphere. Entire lanes are dedicated to outfitting the private shrines of pilgrims. There are shops filled with embroidered fabrics to embellish the sacred chambers and glittery brocade dresses fashioned for every size and shape of image as well as a profusion of painted, printed and sculpted images of Shrinathji. Prasad, which is made in the haveli kitchens in great quantities, is available for purchase. There are piles of ghee-laden laddus, pots of thick sweet rabri and mounds of savoury besan sev—all Krishna’s favourites. Nathdwara fosters an entire industry dedicated to the worship of Shrinathji.

Since the founding of Nathdwara, artists have been drawn to this sacred place to fulfil the needs of the haveli and to provide pilgrims with painted devotional images for their shrines. While the other schools of Rajasthani painting have died out for lack of royal patronage, Nathdwara has continued, fed by the passionate desire of devotees to serve Shrinathji and to be one with their Lord.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Nathdwara Paintings from the Anil Relia Collection: The Portal to Shrinathji, by Kalyan Krishna and Kay Talwar, Niyogi Books, 2021.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Nathdwara Paintings from the Anil Relia Collection: The Portal to Shrinathji appeared first on Fair Observer.

The birthplace of Islam in the 7th century, Saudi Arabia, which occupies most of the Arabian peninsula, became an independent kingdom in 1932 and, after the end of World War II, grew to become a major economy, revolutionized by the exploitation of the area’s oil resources. It is the world’s second top oil producer after the USA, accounting for 13.2% of the world’s oil. Saudi Arabia (population 31,500,000) is ranked 18th richest country in the world.: wi

But there are strong objections, which seem to crystallize around four main concerns. The kingdom’s human rights record, which includes issues such as the suppression of dissent, lack of freedom of expression and use of capital punishment, is often raised.

Like other Gulf states, Saudi Arabia has faced allegations of exploitative labor practices, particularly involving migrant workers and, despite promises of reform, questions about workers’ conditions during the preparation for such events persist.

Homosexuality is illegal in Saudi Arabia, and same-sex relationships are punishable by imprisonment, flogging, or even the death penalty under Sharia law. This contrasts sharply with FIFA’s promotion of LGBTQ+ rights and inclusivity.

Arguably, the most powerful objection is Saudi Arabia’s subjugation of women. The kingdom now allows women to participate in the workforce and drive cars unaccompanied, but guardianship laws that require women to obtain permission from male relatives for many activities and limited representation of women in leadership positions reflect deep-seated social inequality. Despite this, I believe Saudi Arabia is an appropriate host and offer ten reasons why.

1. Promoting ethical labor practices

Saudi Arabia’s World Cup preparations will involve many large infrastructural projects, and FIFA’s oversight should ensure these adhere to global standards. Over the next decade, FIFA’s inspection teams will monitor construction sites to safeguard workers’ rights, promote ethical labor practices and insist on compliance to its own standards. This decade-long timeline gives Saudi Arabia an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to improving working conditions, addressing past concerns, and setting new benchmarks for fairness and safety. By making transparency and compliance a condition, FIFA can leverage its influence to leave a lasting legacy of ethical labor reform in the region.

2. A wider conception of inclusivity

FIFA’s stated mission is to celebrate cultural diversity. This presumably means the organization is prepared to embrace different cultures, regardless of whether their values and norms differ from Western equivalents. But FIFA’s adoption of inclusivity as an animating principle is, at present, limiting: It effectively excludes nearly a quarter of the world’s population, who subscribe to Islam. For this group (numbering about 1.9 billion), same-sex relationships are a sin and women are not equal to men. As such Muslims’ fundamental beliefs contrast with FIFA’s commitment to LGBTQ+ rights and women’s status in terms of rights and opportunities. FIFA has approved of players wearing rainbow colors and promoted women’s football to signify its resolve. By selecting Saudi Arabia, FIFA may broaden its conception of inclusivity by welcoming nations with different and possibly conflicting religious beliefs.

3. Productive dialogue on LGBTQ+ rights

Hosting the World Cup in Saudi Arabia will surely promote dialogue about differences in approaches to LGBTQ+ rights. No one is naïve enough to believe Islam will change dramatically, if at all. But there is at least the possibility that religious and cultural differences can be addressed in a respectful and constructive manner. While significant cultural gaps exist, the visibility of LGBTQ+ issues during the event could encourage awareness and sensitivity, promoting incremental progress. The World Cup’s traditional role as a unifying force could highlight the importance of diversity and inclusion.

4. Advancing women’s rights

Saudi Arabia has made some strides in improving women’s rights, and hosting the World Cup could accelerate this progress. The event’s global spotlight will encourage the kingdom to further expand opportunities for women in sports and beyond. Recent developments, such as the introduction of women’s sports leagues, indicate a willingness to evolve. A World Cup’s emphasis on equality and inclusion would act as a stimulus, pushing for greater gender parity in sports while inspiring young Saudi women to break barriers and participate fully in social change.

5. Women’s rights in other Islamic territories

While it’s a lofty ambition, the World Cup in Saudi Arabia could also catalyze deeper global dialogue on women’s status in Islamic societies. While the kingdom has made progress, significant cultural and religious restrictions remain. By hosting the tournament, Saudi Arabia would face international expectations to showcase advancements in women’s rights. This external pressure, combined with internal aspirations for modernization, could foster more material changes, providing a platform for discussions about balancing tradition with contemporary gender equality. This sounds quixotic but the World Cup could help redefine how women participate not only in sports but in wider society.

6. Only Gulf States can afford global sports tournaments

World Cups and Olympic Games are increasingly expensive to stage, and by 2034, only a handful of nations may possess the resources or the political will to host such massively costly events (Qatar is estimated to have spent $220 billion on the 2022 World Cup). Saudi Arabia’s substantial financial capacity makes it an ideal candidate to sustain these costs and one of only a handful of countries prepared to. This pragmatic adaptation reflects the new reality of global sports, where Gulf States are becoming central hubs for high-profile events (see 10, below). FIFA’s decision acknowledges this reality, ensuring that the World Cup remains a sustainable and spectacular global celebration despite mounting financial challenges. After 2034, countries outside the Gulf may not be able to afford the World Cup or, for that matter, the Olympic Games. Saudi Arabia, together with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates may become permanent homes.

7. “Sportswashing” is a misnomer

Critics often accuse Gulf States of using sports to improve their international image, a practice known as “sportswashing.” Yet, hosting high-profile events inevitably has exactly the opposite effect, drawing global media attention to a country’s human rights record. By selecting Saudi Arabia, FIFA will guarantee that critical issues — such as labor rights, freedom of expression, and gender equality — remain in the media. This scrutiny will put pressure on the host nation to address their limitations, leveraging global attention to drive meaningful change or face the consequences of bad publicity. The World Cup’s visibility thus becomes a tool for accountability and meaningful change rather than mere optics, or image management.

8. Saudi Arabia will build state-of-the-art stadiums

The stadiums built for the Qatar World Cup in 2022 received widespread acclaim for their innovative design and advanced technology. Saudi Arabia is likely to follow the pattern, constructing state-of-the-art venues that will no doubt set new standards for sports infrastructure. These facilities would serve not only the World Cup but also future sporting and cultural events, providing lasting value for the kingdom and the broader region. By investing in cutting-edge infrastructure, Saudi Arabia would ensure a world-class experience for players, fans, and broadcasters alike, leaving a legacy of excellence in global sports.

9. Growth of the Saudi Pro League

The Saudi Pro League has not yet emerged as a significant player in global soccer, even though it now boasts several world-class players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar. But, by 2034, this competition could rival the English Premier League, Serie A and La Liga, showcasing top-tier talent and competitive matches. Hosting the World Cup could solidify Saudi Arabia’s position as a global soccer hub, drawing attention to its domestic league and boosting its credibility. Increased investment in local clubs and player development would further elevate the Pro League, creating a sustainable ecosystem for soccer within the region.

10. The tectonic plates of sports are shifting

The Gulf States have made their intention signally clear: They want to be sports’ center of gravity. They have monopolized world heavyweight boxing title fights, created a LIV golf tour to rival the PGA, staged F1 Grands Prix and hosted an ATP Tennis Open. It’s possible that Qatar will petition for a tennis Grand Slam that will rival Wimbledon. Fans may balk at the idea, grumbling that there is no natural tradition of sports in these areas. But the clink of coin can be heard everywhere. No one knows for sure why the Gulf states want to “own” professional sports. They lose prodigious amounts of money on it. There is a certain cachet in staging prestigious sports events, for sure; but do the wealthy territories need status, distinction and acclamation? The nearest we can get to an answer is another question: Why does the billionaire art collector David Nahmad want the largest collection of Picasso paintings in the world? He currently has about 300 works and explains, somewhat inscrutably, his artworks are “as dear to him as children.”

[Sport and Crime by Ellis Cashmore, Kevin Dixon and Jamie Cleland will be published in March 2025.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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In recent years, the Northeast Region of Brazil has become the center of the country’s film production industry and has caught the attention of festivals worldwide, with some of the most important awards being given to Brazilian filmmakers over the last two decades. Is there a Northeast wave ready to make Brazilian cinema a new cultural soft power?

I spoke with some of the most important filmmakers in the region to get some answers.  Director Gabriel Mascaro told me,

At the end of last century, Northeast filmmakers got tired of aligning their work with the expectations of the Brazilian movie industry dominated by a carioca (Rio de Janeiro) look. That stimulated more independent and original productions, which connected with international filmographie’s expectations. Today, some TV and streaming companies have begun to wake up to this potential. Streaming bet on us and are getting good results.

Mascaro won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for his movie Neon Bull (2015), which also won the Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. Neon Bull tells the story of Iremar, who works for a rodeo in northeastern Brazil. He lives in the truck that transports the rodeo animals, where he dreams of a future as a tailor in the region’s booming clothing industry.

Far from Rio

Brazilian audiovisual production has been historically concentrated in major southeastern cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Rio is where TV Globo operates, the largest TV company in Latin America and among the world’s five biggest commercial television stations. For the last four decades, TV Globo has been exporting telenovelas to almost one hundred nations, making it one of Brazil’s most successful exporters of cultural soft power. The drama Escrava Isaura (Isaura the Slave) was distributed in 104 countries and watched by around 1 billion viewers in China alone.

However, in Brazilian cinema, the Northeast Region generates the most award-winning films globally. “There has always been a tradition of cinema in the Northeast, since the silent cinema of Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, of the 1920s. It also helps that great writers are from the region, like Gilberto Freyre. It’s not a surprise that Northeast cinema would explode in the world someday. Northeast filmmakers make their films with local colors, local music, local accents and strong cultures that leverage comedies and dramas. The great inheritance of the New Cinema movement is the decision to take risks with an inventive and pulsating cinema,” says Marcelo Gomes.

Gomez won the Cinema Prize of the French National Education System at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005 for his film Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures and the Silver Q-Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival for Paloma (2022).

The 2005 film tells the story of two men who meet in Brazil’s arid northeastern backlands in 1942. One of the men is a German refugee who travels through cities as an aspirin salesman. The more recent 2022 film is the touching story of Paloma, a farmer who wants a traditional church wedding with her boyfriend Zé, but is refused by local priests because she is a transgender woman.

Paloma, directed by Marcelo Gomes. Used with permission.

Big box offices

Half a century ago, the New Cinema movement put Brazilian cinema on the world map for the first time, with movies that emphasized social inequality and intellectualism. Influenced by Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, it helped Brazilian filmmakers win the most important international awards.

Glauber Rocha won the Fipresci Prize at the Cannes Film Festival with Entranced Earth (1967) and Best Director at Cannes for Antonio das Mortes (1969). Nelson Pereira dos Santos won the Ocic Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Dry Lives (1964), based on the book by the Northeastern writer Graciliano Ramos. Lastly, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade won Best Film at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival for Macunaíma, a surreal comedy and social commentary about a lazy hero who leaves the backlands with his brothers.

However, none of these films from the New Cinema movement made waves with substantial audiences in Brazil. They were less popular because they were seen as too intellectual and superficial, unlike telenovelas.

“The explanation for this is exoticism. International festivals have a very reductant view about Brazil, like if we were zoo animals. Exoticism really matters. Stories about communities in the Northeast, indigenous, quilombolas (afro-Brazilian residents of quilombo settlements, first established by escaped slaves in Brazil) end up gaining great resonance. There’s also a certain historical guilt, a certain desire for reparation, for being colonialists for too long. There are also the stereotypes that we are less developed and very virulent. Movies with those aspects get more attention outside,” says Aly Muritiba.

Muritiba won Best Film at the Venice Film Festival for Private Desert (2021), about a suspended police officer who goes to the Northeast to meet a mysterious woman and falls in love with her, but then discovers that she is transgender. 

Rio de Janeiro is still the source of some of Brazil’s most successful box office hits. Central Station (1998), nominated for Best Foreign Film and Best Actress at the Academy Awards, was seen by 1.6 million people. City of God (2002) received four Academy Award nominations and was seen by 3.4 million viewers. Elite Squad (2007) won the Golden Berlin Bear in the Berlin International Film Festival and was seen by 2.4 million viewers. The sequel, Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within, was seen by 11 million in theaters. Recently, Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here (2024) reached 2 million viewers and is in the running for Academy Award nominations. It tells the story of a congressman who was kidnapped and murdered during Brazil’s military dictatorship. All of these films were produced and set in Rio de Janeiro.

However, the numbers show the Northeast is fighting back. The region’s first phenomenon was A Dog’s Will (2000), based on a classic story by the northeastern writer Ariano Suassuna. It was a huge success as a TV show and a film, seen by 2.2 million people in theaters. On TV, productions located in and based on popular stories from the Northeast were distributed by TV Globo internationally.

Today is Maria’s Day (2005), nominated for best miniseries at the International Emmy Awards is one example. Another is Bacurau, directed by Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho, it won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, extremely violent and erotic, is about a city where strange things happen after the death of the city’s matriarch. With clear similarities to New Cinema, but with commercial appeal, it was seen by almost eight hundred thousand in theaters. 

Recently, Prime Video’s New Bandits (2023), directed by Aly Muritiba and Fabio Mendonça, became an international hit. It was a Top 10 show in 49 countries, including 24 African countries, 9 Asian countries, Canada, Portugal and Brazil. It is one of the more recent shows produced in Brazil at this level of sophistication.

The show is a modern version of The Bandit (1953), about a man who terrorizes poor villages in the Northeast of Brazil. It was renewed for a second season and won the International Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

A new cultural soft power?

Is the wave of Northeastern cinema a new Brazilian soft power? “Yes!” says Halder Gomes, a comedy director based in the region. “Northeast movies are desired and hoped for by international festival curators. They already know that the region is a hotbed of potent films. Northeast cinema is already a ‘commodity,’ in a good way, in international festivals.” Half a million viewers have seen the local Cine Holliúdy in theaters and O Shaolin do Sertão (2016) has been seen by over six hundred thousand in theaters.

Both productions generated sequels, spin-offs and TV versions for TV Globo and Netflix. “But I think there must have been a political will among the states of the region and the federal government to make the Northeast cinema a soft power. A will to expand, distribute, the same strategy the American government did with Hollywood in the 1940s and South Korea is doing today,” Aly Muritiba reminds us.

That may be true. But not even political will can turn a cultural product into soft power without genuine artistic talent behind it. Today, the Northeast of Brazil is a hub for great filmmaking.

Besides the filmmakers above, the region also gave the world Sergio Machado, winner of the Award of the Youth at the Cannes Film Festival with Lower City (2005); Claudio Assis, winner of the CICAE Award at the Berlin International Film Festival with Mango Yellow (2005); and Monique Gardenberg, whose TV version of her movie Ó pai, Ó was nominated for an international Emmy in 2009.

The region’s Karim Ainouz, nominated for Berlin’s Golden Berlin with his Futuro Beach (2014) and Cannes’ Palme d’Or and Queer Palm for Motel Destino (2024), tells stories set in the northeast state of Ceará in both films.

Brazil’s cultural products have exerted soft power in the past. Bossa Nova seduced the ears and hearts of the world beginning in the 1950s. In the 2000s, funk and trap became the new move. Brazil’s Carnival festival is still one of the most celebrated events in the world, attracting millions of tourists from across the globe.

However, all these cultural phenomena have been centered around Rio de Janeiro. Maybe now is the time for the stories and artists of the Northeast to shine brighter and become a new center for Brazil’s cultural soft power.

[Joey T. McFadden edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Northeast Cinema Wave: A New Center of Soft Power for Brazil? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Richard Head and Tony McClenaghan in their book, The Maharajas’ Paltans have said that the armed forces of Marwar were formed from the feudal contingents provided by Jagirdars (nobles) when needed, until Maharaja Vijay Singh’s reign (1753-1793). However, the growing power of these nobles and increasing menace of the Marathas led Maharaja Vijay Singh to raise a small force of his own, chiefly composed of the foreign mercenaries—Rohilas, Afghans, Nagas and Purbias. At the time when the Maratha power was in the ascendant and the Pindaris were ravaging India, the Jodhpur forces numbered some 12,000 men, of whom 4,000 were Jagirdar Sowars. The latter, were called out to aid in time of war, whilst the remainder were a mixed force including guns, cavalry and infantry. These mercenaries were more unscrupulous and less faithful than the indigenous force. Thus, the Marwar army degenerated into a heterogeneous, indisciplined and poorly equipped force till conclusion of the treaty of 1818, whereby the state was freed from all fear of external attack, the necessity of maintaining a large standing army for the defence of the Raj disappeared.

Some of these men were habitual consumers of opium, which they consumed just before going to war. The Rajputs always fed some to their horses as well, so as to make them immune to fear and to permit them to better endure the fatigue of battle. Opium, which made the warriors fearless and oblivious to danger and increased their force and courage tenfold, worked as a cure-all for their soul. This excessive consumption of opium at the time of war led to a habit of daily consumption. Sanctioned by its usage, comes the Rajput expression of ‘sharing of opium,’ to ratify a solemn engagement, an inviolable promise. (The consumption of opium was not illegal and it was consumed openly and distributed to users while on active service even during the Great War. This practice was, however, completely eradicated during the inter-war period of 1919 to 1939).

On 6 January 1818 a treaty was signed with the British at Delhi, thereby bringing the State fully under British protection. Under article 8 of the Treaty of 1818, the Jodhpur Maharaja was required to furnish a contingent of 1,500 horse for the service of the British Government whenever required. This proved unsatisfactory and it was revised on 07 December 1835 by substituting the payment of 1.15 Lakhs annually for the obligation to furnish a contingent of 1,500 Horse.

This sum was at first devoted to the formation and maintenance of a Corps known as the Jodhpur Legion Cavalry and stationed at Erinpura. Recruitment for this force started in January 1836 at Ajmer, but in November of the same year the force moved to Erinpura, about 78 miles south of Jodhpur. The Jodhpur Legion was a composite force of cavalry, infantry and artillery.

The Panjdeh incident in March 1885, when the Russians attacked an Afghan force on the North West Frontier, led to fear of an impending war with Russia. This led Viceroy Dufferin to announce on 17 November 1888, the scheme of Imperial Service Troops (IST) i.e., the troops held for the support of the Imperial interests. He asked the Indian Princes to locally recruit their troops, train and equip them at their own cost, to a standard of regular army, so as to be available to the Government of India in times of war. Great care was taken that these troops should be the real state troops and not resemble the old contingents of foreign mercenaries. It was hoped, incidentally, that these troops would furnish interesting and more active employment for young nobles and gentry to whom the life within the State might fail in affording a career, and to a certain extent it had these results.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from The Story of the Jodhpur Lancers: 1885-1952, by Mahendra Singh Jodha, Niyogi Books, 2018.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Story of the Jodhpur Lancers: 1885–1952 appeared first on Fair Observer.

According to her daughter Primavera, Hilde struggled in Bombay. At first she had no place to stay and slept on the therapy table in the consulting room of a South Indian doctor. There she met a young Parsi homeopath, Dr A.K. Boman-Behram. Wartime regulations required foreigners to register daily at the police station; the young doctor took Hilde there on his motorbike every single day. Romance flourished and they married in 1940. They lived in Queens Mansion in the Fort area where Hilde turned the large hall into her dance studio. Hilde’s first performance in India was at the Taj Mahal Hotel.

She soon began to absorb the vibrant forms of Indian classical dance and art, and to strike up friendships with other artists in the city such as Uday, Menaka, and Sachin Shankar. The dancer Ram Gopal taught at her studio. Magda Nachman, the Russian artist, was her closest friend. In 1941, two ballets (The Selfish Giant and Russian Fairy Tale) with music by Russian composers and with costumes by Nachman were presented by the Excelsior Theatre. They were written and choreographed by Holger using her female dance students, many of whom were Parsis.

Hilde’s dance studio was quintessentially cosmopolitan. An unconventional choreographer, she had her dancers perform under the open skies on the beach at Juhu with the waves rolling in the background and their orchestrated movements reflecting the rhythms of the cosmos. The young Parsi, Avan Billimoria, captured these performances in timeless photographs. The sea and the dancers, each mirroring the strength and energy of the other, the sun flashing on both—nature and art blending together by way of stunning movements sculpted in time. Hilde always stressed the line—the center of balance that passes through the center of the body. But the forms she created were always unconventional.

Hilde had met and admired Gandhi, treasuring till her last days the photograph he signed for her. On the fateful day of Gandhi’s assassination, Hilde recalls that she was directing a dress rehearsal and “a dreadful sadness came over all of us, Indians and Europeans” alike. The theatres shut down as the country mourned. Continuing communal riots in the country in the wake of the partition of India compelled Hilde and her family to leave for London, where she started the Hilde Holger School of Contemporary Dance.

However, there were new difficulties. In 1949, her son Darius was born with Down’s syndrome. Determined to help him live a meaningful life, she created a form of dance therapy for those with disabilities. Darius enjoyed music, played the drums, and contrary to expectations, lived to be almost 60. Primavera herself learnt dance initially from Hilde, performed in her productions, and designed costumes; she has worked in theatre and film, and also designed jewelry. She has made a film titled Hilde—Her Legacy on her mother’s fascinating journey.

Primavera directed me to one of her mother’s students, the charming Feroza Seervai, who grew up in a westernized milieu and whose husband H.M. Seervai was the Advocate General of Maharashtra. Feroza animatedly recollected how “Hilde taught free movement and the importance of the line in dance.” The artist Shiavax Chavda would sit in at the rehearsals, sketching. Feroza danced in several performances at the Excelsior and St. Xavier’s College Hall. Feroza recalled Hilde’s playful wit. On a trip to South India, when someone asked her where she was from, Hilde replied, “I’m made in Vienna!” So she was. But I cannot help thinking that perhaps she was made by Bombay too, and that figures like her hint at a different Bombay whose history is yet to be written.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Jews and the Indian National Art Project, edited by Kenneth X. Robbins and Marvin Tokayer, Niyogi Books, 2015.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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jaa tan ki jhaaim paraim syaama harit duti hoi.

Sri Radha, Krishna’s soulmate and paramour, is a unique phenomenon in the religious and spiritual history not just of India but of the world. In no other tradition is there a female character quite like her, a humble milkmaid elevated to the supreme status of the erotic and holy beloved of the Supreme Godhead. What makes her story unique is that she is not mentioned in the classical sources or scriptures. Even later, during the medieval period, while the name of Radha occurs in various places, her rise to prominence as an important goddess alongside Krishna is actually a comparatively recent phenomenon. According to Charlotte Vaudeville, ‘her emergence in the cultic and devotional sphere of Vaishnavism as Krishna Gopala’s beloved and Shakti is known to have taken place rather late, certainly not much earlier than the sixteenth century’(7).

In the Bhagavata Purana, the source of much of the later Krishna cult, there is no reference to Radha. The only clue to her identity is the single, unnamed girl with whom Krishna disappears in the Tenth Canto, which celebrates Krishna’s amours in the forest on the night of the full moon. While all the gopis cavort with Krishna in that scene, there is one he takes aside, much to the consternation, even dismay, of the others. Perhaps, that exceptional partner gave our medieval myth-makers the germ of the story of Radha which Jayadeva narrates in Gita Govinda. As Guy L. Beck notes:

Within the entire Sanskrit canon that is accepted by normative Vaishnava traditions, Radha is actually never mentioned by name. In the earlier canonical texts there is only the suggestion of Radha’s character, not her actual name, as one of Krishna’s favorites among a number of ‘unmarried’ (Harivamsa) or ‘already married’ (Bhagavata Purana) cowherd girls (gopis) who nonetheless seek his attentions during his childhood life in Braj. (Beck 72)

Thus it is to Jayadeva and his remarkable Gita Govinda that the real credit for creating Radha goes. As Valerie Ritter says:

The Gita Govinda, a highly popular and influential Sanskrit poem by Jayadeva, thought to have been composed in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries CE, was the first to focus extensively on Radha, in a manner evocative of the courtly nayaka and nayika (hero and heroine) of Sanskrit poetry. (Ritter 180)

But when Jayadeva makes her a full-fledged nayika or heroine of his most influential poem, Gita Govinda, it seems as if we have always ‘known’ or at least craved for Radha’s presence, nay, predominance in the love story of Krishna.

Once created by Jayadeva, Radha steadily rose in importance as Krishna’s chosen paramour, partner, spouse (as she was later in the Radhavallabha sect), and thus the supreme Vaishnava goddess. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486–1534), who gave the Krishna cult its decisive form, at least in much of northern India, contributed a great deal to the character and theology of Radha:

Radha’s presence in poetry and her theological importance increased with the growth of the Caitanyite sect of Vaishnavism in Bengal, which saw the integration of poetic theory of the sringara rasa (the erotic sentiment) and its taxonomies of the nayaka–nayika with theology concerning the love of Radha and Krishna. (Beck 180)

But we cannot forget Jayadeva’s fundamental contribution to this apotheosis. According to Barbara Stoler Miller:

The compounding of Krishna with Radha into a dual divinity is central to Jayadeva’s conception of Krishna, not as an incarnation (avatar) of Vishnu, but as the source (avatarin, dasavidharupa, dasakrtikrt) of all the incarnate forms he himself assumes in order to save the world. (Quoted in Beck 73)

While the Gita Govinda institutionalised and legitimated Radha’s centrality in Vaishnavite Bhakti literature, her character, persona, and role was further embellished and moulded by eastern Indian poets like Chandidas and Vidyapati, who created the platform for the great devotional and political upsurge marked by the advent of Chaitanya. But others, notably Nimbarka closer to the Jayadeva, and Vallabha around the same time as Chaitanya, also played a crucial role. Later, most of the great Krishna-worshipping poets such as Surdas also exalted Radha till she became almost secularised and universalised in the Ritikal with poets like Bihari (1595–1664).

With the beginnings of modernity, Radha the goddess, underwent another drastic modification, now coming more often than not to represent illegitimate sexual desire. In the new puritanism fostered during the socalled Indian renaissance, Radha and her dalliance with Krishna, proved an embarrassment to the agenda of social reform that the proponents of Hindu modernity espoused. Yet, Radha persisted in folk songs and, later, in many popular art and craft traditions. The final twist in the Radha tale was added by twentieth century feminists who began to see in her a victim of the patriarchy or, even the special symbol and voice of a male poet, as in Ramakant Rath’s celebrated Sri Radha. Sometimes, Radha became a symbol of the degraded and exploited woman or she was even depicted as a fallen or abandoned woman, her tale a cautionary reminder of what happens to such women in our society.

All told, the story of Radha is extraordinary, not only in itself, but in the larger context of the history of Indian art, culture, religion and spirituality.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Radha: From Gopi to Goddess, edited by Harsha V. Dehejia, Niyogi Books, 2024.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Sexual assault across countries and cultures

Jane’s home country of India is known as one of the most dangerous countries for women. Sexual violence is so pervasive that some consider it the norm. Many girls grow up expecting to experience sexual harassment or assault at some point in their lives.

In early August, the rape and murder of a female doctor in training on her college campus in Kolkata added to India’s troubling record of horrific sexual violence against women. The brutal attack sparked massive protests and strikes across the country after she was found dead on the podium of a seminar hall with injuries that suggested torture. Months later, the government is still responding to the crime and its repercussions as women demand justice and legal reform.

The Kolkata incident represents just one of the thousands of cases documented each year, with a rape reported every 15 minutes. Women in rural communities or those in lower castes, particularly the Dalits, are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse. Dalits are known as impure “untouchables” in India, often working as street sweepers and latrine cleaners. They are sometimes manipulated into forced labor or prostitution.

Seen as lesser than others, Dalit women who face abuse are often dismissed, silenced or are subjected to victim-blaming. This is despite overwhelming evidence of abuse — with one study finding that over 83% of Dalit women face sexual harassment or assault in their lifetime.

Upper-caste men often target lower-caste women who are less likely to report them. They leverage their social standing and associated privilege to manipulate or cover up the case. This pattern is mirrored in the US, where men in positions of power target women who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder because they believe they will not be caught (i.e., men like Harvey Weinstein).

In India, cultural censorship of women, combined with inefficient government support, discourages them from reporting assaults and seeking help. Outdated practices, such as the two-finger test, which some doctors still use to verify if a woman was penetrated, are just one of many ways women are humiliated in the aftermath of an assault.

India’s patriarchal culture and gender roles run deep, especially in communities with inadequate access to education and opportunities for development. Even if women stand up to violations of their human rights, they often face shame and ostracization, leading many to avoid coming forward.

Some studies estimate that as many as 99% of rapes go unreported in India. In the US, an estimated 63% of sexual assaults go unreported. The majority of data surrounding sexual abuse in India focuses primarily on rape, with studies on sexual harassment and other types of sexual assault (nonconsensual kissing, groping, touching etc.) receiving far less attention.

Public outrage has led to legislative reforms and increased institutional support for women in recent years. However, sexual assault remains commonplace in India, even for women from more privileged backgrounds, like Jane Doe.

Sexual misconduct in places that are meant to be safe for women, such as work, school or religious institutions, is not unique to countries with a poor track record on these issues. Women also face such threats in American institutions that continuously fail to respond effectively and transparently to cases of sexual misconduct.

Violence towards students in the US

While a family in Kolkata sought justice for their daughter in light of her rape and murder, Jane began her own pursuit of justice in a small college town in Minnesota.

In 2019, Jane left her family behind in Delhi and began her studies at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She planned to study computer science at the elite institution.

Carleton mandates its academically gifted students to leaven tough coursework with required P.E. classes in their early years on campus. Jane selected a Salsa dance taught by Smith, a Carleton graduate and high-ranking administrator whom the college claimed was an award-winning Salsa dancer. According to a complaint filed with the US District Court in Minnesota (Doe v. Carleton College, 2024), Smith groomed and assaulted Jane over the COVID years in an escalating pattern of abuse. 

The complaint states that Smith hired Jane as his co-instructor, requiring her to rehearse with him on campus and at his home nearby. Jane alleges Smith forcibly massaged her against her will, spanked her, forcibly kissed her, bit her and assaulted her multiple times during rehearsals at his house and on campus. The assaults could be brutal and allegedly included beatings, choking and drugging.

According to the college, Jane told a Carleton dean in early February 2022 that she had been attacked at the home of a faculty member, and that she needed extra time to complete assignments due to the trauma caused by those attacks. The dean refused to assist, however, and essentially told Jane to work harder. Discouraged by Carleton’s inaction and Smith’s claim that his administration ties would protect him against her allegations, Jane endured escalating abuse until she presented Carleton with Smith’s written confession and photos of her injuries. Carleton quietly terminated Smith after some time, and the college’s Title IX coordinator told Jane to keep quiet about the incident. 

Like many victims of campus sexual assault, Jane’s academic performance suffered. Rather than assist Jane, Carleton placed her on academic review and at threat of suspension for missing a COVID test while she was being assaulted by Smith. Jane said she felt “even more trapped” and that “she struggled to cope with the emotional distress caused by the instructor and the institution.” Despite her hardships, she met Carleton’s academic standards but continued to be harassed by the school.

Jane’s complaint alleges that Carleton failed to adequately supervise the instructor’s behavior and that the school was deliberately indifferent to the misconduct. It further states that the Title IX Coordinator failed to investigate the situation, allegedly violating Carleton’s Title IX policies and procedures, as well as federal law.

Jane is now suing Carleton for five counts per the First Amended Complaint: Vicarious Liability for Assault and Battery, Vicarious Liability for Sexual Abuse, Negligent Retention, Negligent Supervision and Vicarious Liability for Negligence.

In response, Carleton has called Smith a “predator” and said it regrets Jane’s experience at Carleton, but that Carleton has no legal liability for the sexual assault committed by its administrator. On August 19, two months after the initial filing, Carleton filed a motion to dismiss the case. The school claims — in direct contradiction to federal law — that it has no responsibility to investigate sexual misconduct. The motion was subsequently withdrawn after Jane amended her complaint. 

Despite cultivating a DEI-friendly institutional facade that includes a full-time dedicated Indigenous Community Liaison on a small campus with a negligible indigenous population, Carleton College has a sordid history of turning a blind eye to campus sexual assault. A group of Carleton alumni, frustrated with the college’s attempts to whitewash its past, started a website dedicated to collecting survivor stories starting from the 1960s and documenting the numerous lawsuits Carleton has faced, including a seminal 1991 lawsuit that helped establish national standards for responding to complaints made under Title IX. Carleton has already responded to some of the allegations in Jane’s lawsuit by firing at least one of the administrators involved and appointing their lawyer’s employee as Carleton’s Title IX coordinator. 

A dark history of sexual misconduct

Maxwell Pope graduated from Carleton in 2020 with a major in Dance and Psychology. During his time at the college, a male professor, Jay Levi,  was accused of sexual misconduct. One student alleged the professor groped her inner thigh multiple times and pressed his body into her while they were in a dark room together. Levi was also Smith’s academic advisor during his time at Carleton. 

According to Carleton’s student paper, The Carletonian, this was just one of at least nine Title IX claims brought against the professor. Title IX, part of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibits gender-based discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding.

After students reported the professor’s inappropriate sexual behavior, he took a “sabbatical.” He returned to campus in 2018. In 2019, a piece in the Carletonian claimed the Title IX investigation was “adjudicated with an opaque set of sanctions.” In a subsequent piece, a student writer expressed shock and anger in response to the misconduct and urged Carlton faculty to “redesign” the sexual misconduct complaint process.

Discussing his time at the college, Pope said, “It was definitely a situation with [Levi] where it felt more like students looking out for students, or students informing students.” He stated, “I don’t remember a time where the college was initiating those conversations — it was definitely a keep-it-quiet situation.”

According to Pope, “transparency would have felt better” in situations of sexual misconduct on campus, a sentiment that is echoed by students across the country in light of cover-ups and institutional censorship.

In recent years, a plethora of elite schools, such as Harvard and Stanford, have been accused of mishandling sexual misconduct. Inadequate responses from administration officials angered students. Given this poor track record, future students fear what will happen if they are assaulted.

Women are at serious risk of sexual abuse in US institutions of higher education. Many institutions refuse to take accountability for enabling continued abuse. One in five women is sexually assaulted during their time in college. Two-thirds of college students are sexually harassed.

Yet according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC), in 2014, 40% of US colleges stated they had not investigated a single sexual assault case in the previous five years. Compare this data to the number of reported sexual misconduct cases on college campuses, and the fact that two-thirds of assaults in the US go unreported. The numbers don’t add up.

Justice from India to the US

The frequency and perception of assaults vary from country to country. A closer look at how universities in the US respond to accusations of sexual misconduct shows that women are often hurt by a lack of transparency. Jane left a country where both data and attitudes indicate she would have been exposed to sexual misconduct at home, only to encounter it upon arrival in the US.

In India, women face sexual misconduct in schools, hospitals, workplaces, public transportation and at home. Women are raised to be aware of the high likelihood of harassment, abuse and, in the worst-case scenario, rape.

They intimately understand the hardship of speaking out in a country where bureaucratic processes, cultural shame, the caste system and gender roles often form insurmountable obstacles for women seeking justice.

Despite cover-ups and pay-offs, cases from the Kolkata incident in August to the Nirbhaya gang rape of 2012 – which led to the creation of the death penalty for rape in India — galvanized the public and advanced the fight for greater accountability, justice and legislative reform.

In the US, there is greater overall gender equality, better access to medical resources and mental health support, and a longer history of both legislative and institutionalized systemic support for survivors.

In recent years, there have been significant but insufficient cultural shifts toward believing in and standing up for women. Many women are now taught not only how to stand up for themselves, but also that they can stand up for themselves.

Yet beneath the sparkling facades of US institutions, industries and college campuses, there are people like Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar and Roger Ailes. There are cover-ups, pay-offs and the slow but sure suffocation of victims by bureaucracy. And then, silence, until women like Jane come forward.

Hailing from the “rape capital of the world,” Jane arrived at an illustrious college campus in the prairies of Minnesota to pursue an education. She describes her college years as polluted by grooming, harassment and assault that severely damaged her physical, mental and emotional well-being.

This story, one of many, forces us to face disheartening truths and uncomfortable realities. Many US parents quake at the thought of sending their daughter to India when she is young, vulnerable and alone. Consider a family in Delhi or a rural village in Bihar and their excitement at the opportunity for their daughter to attend an elite US college.

Imagine them finding out she was abused, manipulated, assaulted and coerced by an educator in a position of power at an institution they believed was safe for their daughter.

It is time we address the reality of sexual abuse in the US, especially in the education system. The lack of transparency and accountability is catastrophic. It hinders both current and future students like Jane from making informed decisions about their educational environment and the associated risks of sexual harassment and assault.

Before pointing fingers at countries like India, we should be honest with ourselves, our communities and our students about the reality of sexual misconduct in our own nation. We must make tangible changes and consider victims in both how we prevent abuse and how we obtain justice.

[Joey T. McFadden and Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Similarly, ‘Dalit literature’ has been equated with texts produced by writers with a ‘Dalit consciousness’ (Muktibodh 1992: 267). What, then, determines this Dalit consciousness? How do you develop it? Is it different from simply being Dalit, i.e., can non-Dalits have Dalit consciousness? Are there Dalits who do not have it, and why not? Finally, how do we judge the authenticity of it, either its experience or its expression?

Limbale goes so far as to suggest that the character of Dalit consciousness is univocal. He writes, ‘The experiences narrated in Dalit literature are very similar. Untouchables’ experiences of untouchability are identical’ (2004: 35). This is precisely challenged by Navaria, who separates groups and classes within Dalits. He emphasises ‘Worlds within Worlds’. The key concept, as Brueck (353) points out, around which most Dalit authors and critics—Limbale, Valmiki, Naimishray—rally is the idea of ‘Dalit consciousness’. There is a sense in their work of a singular ‘consciousness’ that for them underlies the emergence of Dalit literature. Further, it is a gauge to test the authenticity of any given work. ‘The function of the theoretical concept of Dalit consciousness is articulated in the expressive and interpretive practices of writing and reading. Dalit consciousness has emerged in recent years in a large body of Dalit literary criticism as a theoretical tool with which the architects of Dalit literary culture are able to set boundaries for the growing genre of Dalit literature as well as launch a distinctly Dalit critique of celebrated works of Hindi literature’ (Brueck 353).

In many ways, Navaria echoes mainstream Dalit consciousness. He shows Premchand in a dream sequence, and refers to him in other places in a critical vein, similar to other Dalit critics. He speaks repeatedly about Ambedkar as the beacon light for Dalits from whom they derive, or should derive, their primary energy. However, in the same dream sequence, he shows many sleeping homes who do not respond to a call to rise in the name of Ambedkar. His constant comparisons with gender and feminism, class conflict and Marxism, and global inequality and postcolonial thought, all serve to argue further the point about internal differentiation, and the utter and total lack of any unity of consciousness.

Navaria must have worried about this:

…arbiters of Dalit literature are constructing a critical framework based on the rhetorical practice of strategic essentialism. Dalit consciousness is the Dalit literary sphere’s rendering of this practice for the political purpose of making an intervention into the mainstream literary-cultural sphere and claiming there a small space of their own in which they have the power to determine, by means of this essentialist concept, what authors and what texts may also share that space. (Brueck 355).

Brueck’s invocation of Gayatri Spivak’s 1985 piece on strategic essentialism is reminiscent of Marx’s emphasis on the singularity of the working class, which many subsequent Marxists challenged. Similarly for feminists, there is always a negotiation between the politically expedient one-ness of women, and by implication, men, and the existential and artistic reality of plurality, easily recoverable in research (see Kumar 1994, 2001.)

My own experience as a translator of this novel may contribute to the discussion of Dalit consciousness. If I am not a Dalit, should I feel diffident as a writer in translating and speaking for Dalit consciousness? I have never hesitated to write about the West (though from the East), about men (though a woman), about lower classes (though privileged), and about disabled or otherwise disadvantaged people while personally sharing none of their disadvantage.

Partly, I have treated ‘difference metaphorically. Thus, for me, the ‘wretched of the earth’ are not only the materially or politically dispossessed, which I am not, but the otherwise victimised as well, such as those who suddenly, unaccountably, lose their beloved, as I did. We, all the hurt and abandoned who experience that loss, are the true and authentic ‘wretched of the earth’. Partly, I have achieved an intellectual self-confidence where I can justify speaking for the ‘Other’ precisely because no one is essentially fixed in ‘one’ identity or category, either ‘the self ’ or ‘the other’. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover myself responsible for a novel in which all the characters are Dalit and everyone is judged by their caste, and no savarna voice can speak for lower castes or Dalits.

Really?

But if I plead the case that mine is as authentic a voice as anyone’s, am I saying that the author Ajay Navaria has not succeeded in depicting the existential suffering of Dalits but, once again, shown caste to be merely a discourse, a category, a weapon used differentially?

To some extent, yes. The author, just like the narratorprotagonist in the novel, is himself privileged. Not only is the narrator-protagonist educated, well-off and sophisticated in his consciousness, he is fair and good-looking. He has rich and successful friends. A Dalit is by definition downtrodden. Once you are not downtrodden, you are not a Dalit. It is analogous to my weeping of the woes of ‘women’ without acknowledging that, along with me, many women are, in fact, supremely privileged and powerful. And if the privileged insider can speak of their downtrodden communities, so can the intelligent, aware outsider who is not of the same blood lineage but shares the politics.

The author questions it all. One could wish that he would question yet more, or less, depending on one’s perspective.

There is, however, another dimension of pain. ‘I had not asked his caste,’ he says. ‘I had understood by now that people with my non-casteist thinking were in a tiny minority in our society.’ There is this tiny group that one may belong to. One may then feel marginalized and misunderstood by the majoritarian groups. To have no voice is painful no matter where you stand.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Worlds Within Worlds, Ajay Navaria, translated by Nita Kumar, Niyogi Books, 2024.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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In honor of Jones’s passing on November 3, 2024 at the age of 91, I’d like to retell the story of this groundbreaking partnership.

Something in my head

Jones was on the film set of The Wiz, a film version of a Broadway musical based on the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, starring an all-black cast. Diana Ross played Dorothy, originally Judy Garland’s role. Jackson, part of the Jacksons, was also in the film. At the time, he was a known commodity, but far from being the world-renowned figure he became.

Director Sidney Lumet was a friend of Jones’s and wanted the composer/producer to provide orchestral gravitas for The Wiz’s soundtrack. Jones wasn’t impressed by the musical, but apparently felt he owed Lumet a favor or two. He and Jackson didn’t know each other before the film but struck up a serviceable working relationship. Jones later told The Hollywood Reporter’s Seth Abramovitch that he remembered Jackson approached him with a task: “I need you to help me find a producer,” he said. “I’m getting ready to do my first solo album.” (Truthfully, he had made two previous solo albums.)

The two men discussed the possibility of renewing that relationship again on the projected solo album for which Jackson had already written three songs. Jones became curious about how Jackson was able to write songs without a musical instrument. According to Time’s Steve Knopper, the conversation went something like: “I hear something in my head. I make the sounds with my mouth.”

On hearing this, Jones grew interested. “There’s an instrument that can make the sounds you want. I can write anything down on paper,” Jones replied. “If you can hear it, I can write it down.” We’ll never know whether Jackson’s career would have soared and crackled like a rocket or merely hissed like a squib had Jones not been intrigued and agreed to work on the mooted album.

Transformation

All the same, inviting Jones to take the weighty role of producer carried some risk. Like any entertainer, Jackson must have been aware of audience expectations: they must have been sharpened to a point by the then-popular Philadelphia Sound and the Saturday Night Fever disco that captivated the public in the mid-1970s. The sweet-sounding Jacksons were perfect for the late 1960s and early 1970s. But against a background of Sylvester’s thumping synth on “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” or Chic’s twanging bass lines on “Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah),” the brothers sounded tame and, perhaps worse, quaint.

The last thing Jackson wanted at his pivotal stage in his professional life was to sound old-fashioned. So, Jones, for all his mastery, wasn’t an obvious choice. He was 45 in 1978. Five years earlier, he had produced Aretha Franklin’s “Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky),” which lacked Franklin’s gutsy blues quality and hadn’t overly impressed critics or consumers. His own double-album, I Heard That!, had been released to little impact in 1976.

Somehow, Jackson became convinced Jones could provide him with the kind of transformative makeover he wanted. Perhaps it was a compelling incongruity, like casting Charlize Theron as prostitute-cum-serial killer prostitute Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’s 2003 film, Monster. It looked so odd, it might just work. Known for her glamor, Theron gained weight, wore false teeth and turned herself into a believable Wuornos. Jones seemed such an unusual producer for Jackson’s project, it too might yield something surprising.

George Benson, once a guitar prodigy who grew to prominence with his distinctive style of soul-infused jazz, once reflected on his own particular relationship with Jones. For years, Benson was discouraged from singing by his record company. Jones produced his breakthrough album Give Me the Night in 1980 and issued contradictory advice. “Quincy Jones looked at me and said: ‘I know you better than you know yourself.’ This made me feel angry, though I didn’t say anything. But he was pushing me to do things that didn’t come naturally to me,” Benson told the Financial Times’ David Cheal. “He was always pushing me to do things. He persuaded me to sing in a way that didn’t feel comfortable.”

Once outside his comfort zone, Benson sang in the unnatural way Jones suggested and the process yielded a record. “And it was a smash,” he said. The album won him three Grammys in 1981. Jackson never said Jones pushed him in the way Benson described, though the product of the collaboration suggests Jackson might also have been displaced from his comfort zone — with similarly agreeable results.

Life ain’t so bad at all

Those results were well-received, though not ecstatically. Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden called their album, Off the Wall, “A slick, sophisticated R&B-pop showcase with a definite disco slant … A triumph for producer Quincy Jones as well as for Michael Jackson.”

There was disagreement over Jackson’s voice. New Republic’s Jim Miller discerned that, “Jackson’s voice has deepened without losing its boyish energy. He phrases with delicacy, sings ballads with a feather touch.” But the Los Angeles Times’s Dennis Hunt thought, “The adolescent frailties that linger in Jackson’s voice are nagging enough to, if uncontrolled, undermine good material and production.” In the end, though, he commented, “Thanks to producer Quincy Jones, that didn’t happen here. The result is one of the year’s best R&B albums.” Presciently, Hunt wondered, “Is it possible that he’s outgrown the Jacksons?”

Between them, Jackson and Jones captured the audacity of a notionally prosperous, upwardly mobile African-American population. They were willing to take risks, avoiding a disco saturation but absorbing enough of the euphoria that animated dancefloors around the world. They added lush arrangements that might, with another artist, have sounded too sickly, or worse, clichéd. Here, they sounded innovative and sophisticated.

Even the cover art radiated aplomb: 21-year-old Jackson was wearing black tie, tuxedo and loafers. He seemed to be searching for something. His right to be free from his brothers? Or family, perhaps? Or more likely, self-validation: with Jones, he seemed to discover a license to be a fully-fledged independent artist.

Sure, he had released four solo albums before. But none came close to Off the Wall in terms of artistry and imagination — and maybe irony. The expression “off the wall” meant unusual or strange, and the chorus of the title song was, “Life ain’t so bad at all if you live it off the wall.”

Reviews for The Wiz bore no resemblance to the warm approval Off the Wall had drawn. Time expressed the film critics’ consensus in its headline, “Nowhere Over the Rainbow.”

Off the Wall is regarded as a classic. It won a Grammy in 1980, multiple American Music Awards in the same year. It was inducted into the Grammy musical Hall of Fame in 2007. It reached number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 and spawned four Top 10 hits, including “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and “Rock with You” — both number ones.

Yet, as often happens when two artists collaborate and produce a creation for the ages, they had a falling out.

The sour aftermath

“Mr. Jones and Mr. Jackson had worked together for years, forging one of the most productive and profitable relationships in pop music,” The New York Times’s Colin Moynihan reported. “The two worked together on albums … that sold tens of millions of copies and catapulted Jackson — already famous from his days in the Jackson 5 — into superstardom.” And yet, years after Jackson’s death, Jones found himself in court, head-to-head with the Jackson family.

They had continued to work together. Jones produced two more Jackson albums: 1982’s Thriller, which became the best-selling album of all time; and 1987’s Bad, which was the first album to have five consecutive singles reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Cumulatively, they have sold over 100 million copies.

The three albums were made and released at a time when music videos were hitting their stride and practically every record had a short companion movie. Jackson and Jones never fought or, as far as we know, even argued. But the release of Kenny Ortega’s 2009 film, This is It, a documentary feature based on rehearsal footage shot while Jackson was preparing for his proposed comeback in 2009, brought conflict. Jackson died on June 25 of that year and never made a comeback, of course.

Songs originally produced by Jones were included in the film’s soundtrack album. Jones filed suit against the Jackson estate, claiming, as Rolling Stone’s Miriam Coleman summarized, “under the contracts, he [Jones] should have been given the first opportunity to re-edit or re-mix any of the master recordings and that he was entitled to producer credit for the master recordings, as well as additional compensation if the masters were remixed.” Obviously, no one could have foreseen how such an opulently smooth album could lead to legal convulsions decades later.

In 2013, Jones claimed Sony Music Entertainment and Jackson’s estate owed him close to $30 million in royalties for edits and remixes of music he produced with Jackson during their collaboration. Four years later, in 2017, a jury in Los Angeles County Superior Court decided that Jones had not been sufficiently rewarded by the Jackson estate for the use of records Jones had produced and which were featured in This is It. The court awarded him $9.4 million in 2017.

Three years later, a California appellate court reduced this to $2.5 million, this being the amount due to Jones for the use of his master recording and other fees. It seemed a bitter conclusion to a relationship that, in many ways, remolded Jackson into a legitimate icon. While Jones maintained his dispute was not with Jackson himself, journalist Martín Macías, Jr. quoted the Jackson estate’s attorney as saying: “Quincy Jones was the last person we thought would try to take advantage of Michael Jackson by filing a lawsuit three years after he died asking for tens of millions of dollars he wasn’t entitled to.”

Jones too seemed to turn vindictive. While he’d enjoyed an amicable relationship with Jackson over many years in the 1970s and 1980s, he later reflected, “He [Jackson] was as Machiavellian as they come.” In a 2018 interview with Vulture’s David Marchese, he declared, “Michael stole a lot of stuff,” meaning his compositions incorporated passages from other artists’ music.

It was a sour end to an artistic collaboration that ranks with the greatest of modern times. Nothing will, in practice, diminish the significance of Off the Wall. It is established in pop music’s pantheon. For all his colossal contribution to music, Jones’ elemental role in the creation of Jackson’s album will be his defining achievement.

[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” is published by Bloomsbury.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson and Off the Wall appeared first on Fair Observer.

I have been fascinated by all things handcrafted, especially textiles. Since the last few years, I have been trying to identify the exceptional qualities, beyond heritage value, of handloom fabrics to differentiate these products from machine-made textiles, and to emphasise their uniqueness for these fabrics to continue being relevant in present times. These deliberations led me to Gandhiji’s writings to understand how and why he chose khaddar, the coarse handspun and handwoven cotton worn by the common man, which he named ‘khadi’, as a symbol of India’s Independence.

During India’s struggle for freedom from British rule, social and political activism reached new heights under the visionary leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. He saw the revival of the local village economy as the key to India’s spiritual and economic regeneration and he envisioned homespun khadi as the catalyst for India’s economic independence. Khadi became the fabric of the freedom struggle, and the charkha, the spinning wheel, the symbol of India’s Independence Movement. Rahul Ramagundam in his book, Gandhi’s Khadi, mentions that ‘Gandhi’s khadi movement, in many substantive ways, was the first social movement in modern India that brought poverty to the centre stage of Indian consciousness and made livelihood rights an issue of mass mobilisation’.

Soon after Gandhiji returned to India from South Africa in May 1915, he established the Satyagraha Ashram with 25 residents at Kochrab, Ahmedabad, and in July 1917, the ashram was shifted to a new location on the banks of the river Sabarmati. It was collectively decided that all the members of the ashram should wear khadi. Their objective was to stop using the imported mill-made cloth, which benefited the British at the expense of the Indian artisans, and clothe themselves in fabrics created by their own hands.

The American Civil War (1861–1865) had caused a shortage of American cotton, and Britain started buying raw cotton from India. Indian cotton was exported to Britain, starving its own looms of raw material, and cheaper British machine-made yarn and manufactured cloth were sent back to India taking away the livelihood of millions of men and women who earned a living by spinning yarn manually. Before the Industrial Revolution, Indian fabrics had been in great demand in Britain and comprised almost 70 per cent of the East India Company’s exports, but later, Britain had imposed restrictions on their import, and the multitude of people involved in the production of cotton textiles in India had been affected.

Everyone at the ashram was willing to learn to spin and wear the khadi fabric produced from their own handspun yarn but they could not find either a spinning wheel or someone to teach them how to spin. Around this time, Gandhiji was invited to preside at the Broach Educational Conference where he met Gangaben Majmundar, a remarkable woman with an enterprising spirit. Gandhiji requested her to look for spinning wheels, and after a long search she found what she was looking for in Vijapur, in what was then Baroda State. Many in this region had spinning wheels stored in their lofts as there was no demand for handspun yarn since the market was flooded with the imported yarn from Britain. They expressed their willingness to resume spinning if they were assured of a steady supply of cotton slivers, and that the yarn they produced would be bought back.

Gandhiji mentioned the need for a regular supply of cotton slivers to Umar Sobani, a textile mill owner, who willingly sent the sliver ropes from his spinning mill to Gangaben, and soon, vast quantities of yarn began to pour in from Vijapur. Gandhiji could not take Umar Sobani’s generosity for granted, and he also realised that it was morally wrong to use mill-made slivers. Once again, Gandhiji requested Gangaben to find a person who would be willing to teach a few youngsters to clean and card cotton by hand and make slivers. She went a step further and also found weavers to weave the yarn that was spun in Vijapur, and soon, Vijapur khadi gained a solid reputation.

While these developments were taking place in Vijapur, the spinning wheel gained a strong footing at the ashram. Maganlal Gandhi, who was closely associated with the Satyagraha Movement, was able to make some improvements in the traditional spinning wheel. He developed a new model of the box charkha with a double-wheel drive, which helped control its speed, and was an improvement as far as comfort, productivity and portability were concerned. Gandhiji led by example and spun for an hour every day. All ashram inmates started wearing khadi and were encouraged to spin daily for a minimum of one hour. They realised that apart from creating the yarn for their clothing, spinning calmed their minds, helped to increase their focus and was a meditative experience.

Gandhiji wore Indian mill-made dhotis but was impatient to start wearing only handspun and handwoven cotton khadi, but the coarse khadi produced at the ashram and at Vijapur was only 30 inches (76 cm) in width. He asked Gangaben to find a weaver who could weave a khaddar dhoti in 45 inches (114 cm) width for him. She managed this within a month and, soon after, there was a full-fledged weaving centre at the ashram to weave sarees, dhotis and running yardage. This was the beginning of the Khadi Movement. Soon after, spinning and weaving were elevated to an ideology for promoting self-reliance and self-government. To identify with the poor, in 1921 Gandhiji changed from formal Gujarati clothing to a simple, short dhoti and a shawl from formal Gujarati attire.

In the past, the charkha had supplemented agricultural income. It was a friend of the poor, the solace of the widow who was shunned by society, and kept the villagers from idleness. Every village had a family of weavers who wove coarse cotton fabrics without any patterns for use by the local communities. The weavers were supported by the women in the family who, in their free time, spun the yarn and created the bobbins for weaving. They had all lost their livelihood to the machine-made fabrics from Britain that were flooding the markets. The new demand for khadi provided them with regular work and rescued them from abject poverty. Gandhiji did not just revive India’s flagging handloom industry, he made the humble handspun khadi fabric the symbol of the Swadeshi Movement. He wrote: ‘Swaraj (self-rule) without swadeshi (goods made in the country) is a lifeless corpse and if swadeshi is the soul of swaraj, khadi is the essence of swadeshi.’ Through his initiative, khadi became not only a symbol of resistance but the face of an Indian identity, ‘The message of the spinning wheel was much wider than its circumference.’

Gandhiji saw khadi as a tool for reviving the village economy but he never suggested that ‘those, who are more lucratively employed should give up their employment and prefer spinning’. As he clarified to Charlie Chaplin in 1931, ‘The return to spinning did not mean a rejection of all modern technology but of the exploitative and controlling economic and political system in which textile manufacture had become entangled. Machinery in the past has made us dependent on England, and the only way we can rid ourselves of the dependence is to boycott all goods made by machinery.’ He continues ‘This is why we have made it the patriotic duty of every Indian to spin his own cotton and weave his own cloth.’

When Gandhiji encouraged people across India to boycott clothes made in Britain, spin their own yarn and wear khadi, he was encouraging them to rediscover their heritage as well as to support handloom production in rural centres. This understated masterstroke took the Freedom Movement beyond the rarefied circles of the social elite and out to the masses.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Crafting a Future: Stories of Indian Textiles and Sustainable Practices, Archana Shah, Niyogi Books, 2021.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Crafting a Future: Stories of Indian Textiles and Sustainable Practices appeared first on Fair Observer.

It seemed an extraordinary crime, though, in a sense, it was less extraordinary than it seems: children kill their parents more often than readers might suppose. It’s called parricide and the most recent instance of this emerged recently in Great Baddow, Essex, in England, where Virginia McCulloch, now 36, poisoned her father with prescription medication that she crushed and stirred into his drink and, in the attorney’s words, “beat her mother with a hammer and stabbed her multiple times in the chest with a kitchen knife bought for the purpose.” This happened four years ago. She stored the putrefying corpses at the family house until discovered by police.

There are other comparable murders in recent times. 1998, Auckland, New Zealand: Matthew and Tyler Williams, aged 14 and 13, killed their parents.1998, Beverly Hills, California: Lyle and Erik Menendez killed both parents. 2011, Port St. Lucie, Florida: Tyler Hadley pummeled both his parents to death after they refused to let him host a party at the family home. 2013, Albuquerque, New Mexico: 15-year-old Nehemiah Griego killed his parents and three younger siblings. 2015, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma: Robert and Michael Bever, murdered their parents and three siblings in a mass stabbing. There have been related cases, for example, that of Jennifer Pan, who hired assassins to kill her parent in Ontario, Canada: She was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of both first-degree murder and attempted murder. 

Parricide in history

Abhorrent and unnerving as parricide strikes us, it was prevalent in the medieval era (specifically, the 11th–14th centuries). Disputes over succession and land ownership were usually the source of dynastic violence: Younger children, ambitious or desperate for control but blocked by their parents, killed fathers, sometimes mothers and occasionally siblings in their pursuit of control.

Even in territories dominated by cultures that encouraged honoring and respecting, as well as loving parents, and norms that emphasized filial duties, there are examples of children either killing or trying to kill their parents. Most famously, Aurangzeb, the sixth Mugal emperor of India (1658–1707) — famous for building the Taj Mahal in memory of his wife — imprisoned his father and killed many of his male relatives in his rise to power. While technically not a case of parricide, Byzantine Emperor Constantine VI imprisoned and reportedly blinded his own mother.

Historical cases of parricide are often intelligible in terms of ancestral struggle, though we should also remember current conceptions of the family as a cohesive, supportive natural unit in which love, caring and unselfishness are taken as natural, are products of a relatively recent understanding of the conjugal family. Earlier forms of the family tended to be different.

Multi-dysfunctional families

One of the most ferocious critiques of the family, particularly the modern nuclear family, was that of R. D. Laing, who challenged the assumption that the arrangement was wholesome and beneficial to children. Laing’s argument about the impact of family relationships on mental health offers a way of comprehending contemporary parricide. For Laing, our image of the family has been pasteurized. His own account is more adulterated: The family is often a multi-dysfunctional amalgam from which children sometimes escape bruised, if not permanently damaged emotionally and cognitively (and sometimes physically). The family imposes roles, identities, and expectations on individuals in ways that can lead to anxiety, distress, sometimes schizophrenia and what we today euphemize as “mental health issues.”

Children, on Laing’s account, sometimes experience a suffocating sense of captivity and believe there is either no escape from family demands. Parricide, from this perspective, would be a violent attempt at liberation or self-assertion. In all of the cases in recent history, Laing’s approach appears to have relevance.

So, why do some children embark on the putatively forbidden path while others think about it and then withdraw just in time for them to leave home feeling virtuous? In other words, if Laing it to be even half-accepted why isn’t parricide most widespread? Here I ask readers to ask a question usually ignored by criminologists and other social scientists. Not, “Why do children kill their parents,” but, “Why do so few children kill their parents?”

Why isn’t there more parricide?

What if we tried to explain conformity instead of spectacularly conspicuous divergences from socially accepted standards? Philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) did exactly this, of course, his aphorism being “The life of man [is] nasty, brutish and short.” Human beings are driven principally by selfish concerns, the fear of extinction being the primary one. So, the “natural” condition of humanity is warlike: Society, as we know it, is an artificial apparatus to accommodate the coexistence of divergent, self-seeking individuals at once. We frame rules, laws and norms so that over time, we become conventional, behaving in a way that meets others’ expectations. Mostly.

The disorienting implication of Hobbes’ thoughts is that we are all not just capable of but have an inclination or natural tendency to behave in a way that serves our own interests, no matter what the cost to others. Why don’t we then? Travis Hirschi, an American criminologist, in the 1930s, supplied an answer: We learn to conform and tend to remain compliant with rules by forming affiliations that secure us to conventional society.

In Hirschi’s model of society, individuals are stitched into conventional life in four ways: attachment, investment, beliefs and reputation. The most important one is attachment to parents, peers and other people who matter to us in some way. Hirschi also believed that as we mature, we invest in society, specifically the years we spend in formal education and in pursuing our careers and starting a family. In many cases, individuals acquire a reputation that they try to maintain or enhance. In other cases, individuals fail to reach the standard, status or rank they had been aiming for. Our attachments prevent us from breaking rules or norms. When they are loose, slack or broken, the probability of transgressive behavior becomes pronounced.

The fathomless McCullough case

We know little of the McCullough case at the moment, though Hirschi’s theory gives it a shape. But there are other perplexities: Virginia, the self-confessed killer, had three sisters, none of whom has been implicated. During the investigation and trial, there were no allegations against these siblings for complicity or involvement in the murders or the subsequent concealment of the bodies.

It seems the siblings were unaware of their parents’ deaths and had somehow been reassured by Virginia that their parents were either unwell or away from home. Virginia contrived an incredible and — at least to this writer — implausible series of excuses for years. Statements from the siblings during the trial suggest they trusted Virginia. One sibling referred to their parents as “blameless victims.” 

Even in the context of other cases of parricide, the McCullough killings are staggering. The actual killings are explicable in terms of misfiring family dynamics and the failure of at least one family member to experience little or no meaningful bonds with wider society. But storing what must have been two rotting cadavers at the family home for four years without arousing the suspicions of neighbors, care agencies, or other family members takes some fathoming. This is a case that is destined to confound us for years.

[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” is  published by Bloomsbury.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The Nampūtiri men of Perinchalloore were acclaimed for their scholastic eminence. Their intellectual engagements included debates and discourses, especially on the Vedas, literature and grammar. Scholars from far-off places came to partake of them, gauge their own erudition and earn fame and recognition if they triumphed in debate.

At some point, the spectre of barrenness came to loom over a reputed Nampūtiri family in Perinchalloore. To avoid the family line ending thereupon, the elders sought to offer special prayers to propitiate their deity, Rayaramangalathu Bhagavati, in the hope of being blessed with a baby boy. But a baby girl was born instead. The parents and even other family members accepted her as the family goddess’s gift. Thus, she was named Daivakanya, meaning both god’s own girl and a young and virgin goddess.

Devi was exceptionally bright. She was given the best possible education in those times. As per the custom, her family members counted on her to preserve the family’s legacy, even though she would become a member of her husband’s family upon wedlock. She utilised the rich library of her family and forebears to enhance her scholarship and was soon considered a child prodigy. Her fame spread like fragrance in the breeze, sweet and swift.

Nonetheless, the other scholars of Perinchalloore refrained from recognising her scholarship because of her gender. Many of them tried to shut her down in public debates. But all of them routinely failed, resulting in their ego and reputation being bruised. Devi’s renown for her scholarship and beauty spread far and wide.

As a practice among the then Nampūtiri clans, she was to be married off when she turned twelve. Devi’s stipulation that she would marry the one who defeats her in a debate was accepted by her father. The wedding was scheduled. Aspirants from around prepared to compete, starting to reach the venue a couple of days before the scheduled date. But none could defeat her in the first two days.

Realising that it was nearly impossible to win over Devi in debates and that she would be a significant threat to them in the future, some of the influential Nampūtiri scholars conspired to disparage her. As planned, the next day, they steered the debate to the nine basic rasas (feelings), asking her about the most significant among those. Shringara (that exudes the kama rasa or eroticism), she replied promptly. Their following query was on the most intense suffering. The pangs of childbirth, she responded. She had won, but all those astute men assembled sniggered, ‘How can a virgin answer these questions so accurately?’

There were many takers for this line of slander and character assassination. The ‘wise’ men unanimously decreed that she wasn’t a virgin. She was insulted publicly. She had experienced the elation of sex and undergone the throes of labour in secret, was their ruling. Her father’s pleas fell on deaf ears since nobody wished to displease the hardliners in the community, whose decisions were interpreted as ‘God’s dictum’. Loose talk about her self-esteem spread quickly, amounting to her being ostracised and the wedding cancelled.

Profoundly distressed and determined that she would establish the truth, Devi walked away. She politely declined to accept the landed properties¹ that her father wanted to assign her to take care of future expenses. Nonetheless, he arranged for a kāryasthan² to provide her with essential facilities such as food and clothing.

Devi moved forward, undeterred. On the way to the Eachikkulangara Srinarayana temple, she prayed as if she were doing penance. On the fortieth day, Devi was driven by the desire to leave her body. She wanted to jump into the fire to prove her innocence. The next day, Devi woke up at the Brahma muhurta,³ walked away after praying at the temple, and shortly reached Karivellur. She thought it was the ideal place to end her life on earth.

She made a pyre, lit it and, praying all the while, leapt into it. She kept aside one of her anklets before leaping in. To achieve her goal, she needed a much bigger fire. A Thiyyan⁴ was passing by carrying bundles of dried coconut. She pleaded with him to empty it into the flames, as Agni (fire) was scared to touch her. The man, realising the enigma, fled. (It is believed that Thiyyan is later deified as Kaikkōlan Theyyam.)

A stoic Devi continued waiting. After a while, she saw a Muchilōṭan⁵ coming with coconut oil needed at the Rayaramangalam (also known as Dayaramangalam) temple at Pilicode. This time Devi’s entreaties for help worked. Sensing her divinity and praying, ‘let the fire be put out,’ he poured the oil onto the pyre. Blessing the Muchilōṭan, Devi disappeared, engulfed by flames. Shocked and terrified, the Muchilōṭan searched the pyre in vain and returned home instead of continuing his journey. He saw his empty thuththika (pot for carrying oil) moving fast and the fuel flowing out of it after a while.⁶ He realised that Devi was Goddess Bhagavati herself, incarnated. (This Muchilōṭan was later deified as Thalachchiravan Daivaṃ, worshipped by the Vāṇiya as the foremost Muchilōṭan.)

One morning, the kāryasthan deputed to follow the ostracised Daivakanya got worried upon not seeing her at the Eachikkulangara temple. In search of her, he reached Kottaparambu in Karivellur, owned by Panikkassery Nambi. There he saw an extinguished pyre and one of her anklets nearby.

The mystified kāryasthan returned, reported the matter to her parents, and handed over the anklet. They prayed for her salvation. Soon, the Brahmin scholars instrumental in ruining her reputation, and their kin, faced many tragedies and succumbed to illnesses such as smallpox, leprosy and insanity. Nobody knew what happened to that anklet; most likely, it was passed on and destroyed in the annals of time. During the Theyyam festivals nearby, rituals are conducted adjacent to the spot where the incident was believed to have occurred, subsequently known as Theekkuzhichchāl. During the night of the pooram day, the Kōmaraṃs of Muchilōṭṭu Bhagavati and Rayaramangalathu Bhagavati meet at this spot as a part of the ritual. This original site is now taken over by the newly constructed national highway.

Subsequently, Muchilōṭan’s wife, while drawing water, happened to have an apparition of Muchilōṭṭu Bhagavati in full attire inside the well.⁷ Astrological deliberations that followed pointed towards the deceased Devi’s divinity and suggested that Daivakanya be deified as Bhagavati Theyyam at the places of worship in their Muchilōṭṭu community. Muchilōṭṭu Bhagavati thus became the consecrated deity at all the entailing annual festivals of Muchilōṭṭs, beginning with Karivellur, the foremost one.

It is one of the positively gorgeous Theyyams that attracts a vast throng, irrespective of caste or religious differences.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Theyyam: Indian Folk Ritual Theatre—an Insider’s Vision, K. K. Gopalakrishnan, Niyogi Books, 2024.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Theyyam: Indian Folk Ritual Theatre—an Insider’s Vision appeared first on Fair Observer.

One often asked quibble, for instance, has been whether the course of history would have been different had the nose of Queen Cleopatra been an inch longer. Or, from Cowley’s example, if the Persians had beaten the Athenians in the historic Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, or nearer home, if the first war of independence in 1857 had a different outcome. Such instances are plenty and juxtaposing them with the actual happenings is apt to give a new insight into many of the long-held assumptions on men and matters that shaped the course of mankind.

The contextual relevance to Cochin can hardly be missed. The fame and fortune it came to acquire over decades, even centuries, would not have possibly come about had the massive tsunami of 1341 not destroyed the then booming port town of Muziris and opened up Cochin as a major port of call on the west coast of India. What enabled the latter were the bounteous quantities of mud that got deposited off the Cochin coast, creating in the process a long stretch of mudbank which subsequently helped build one of the finest all-weather, deep-water natural ports in the world. Thus began the saga of Cochin.

Arguably, the port was just the trigger that set in motion a slew of facilitating support systems-broadly understood as infrastructure-which together hastened the transformation of the cluster of fishing villages into a teeming metropolis. Indeed, it was the indomitable will and determination of a few men like Sir Robert Bristow, His Highness Sir Sri Rama Varma of Cochin State, Dewan Sankara Warrier, Sir Shanmukham Chetty and a few others who worked on their shared dream that finally made it actionable.

Bristow’s vision did not stop just at the port. He knew it well that without matching support systems-good road and rail connectivity to bring cargo from near and far, well. equipped warehouses to store outgoing and incoming cargo and a township with all the necessary amenities to house the workforce and their families, to name the more important- the port would not only be unviable but purposeless. It was with this in mind that he insisted on extending the mainland railway network to the port area, aside from improving road connectivity with both the mainland and neighbouring Mattancherry. This inevitably meant roping in official agencies like the railways, civic bodies and a host of major and minor departments. In the event, it wasn’t easy and often proved tauntingly tricky just as the detractors’ manipulations to stall the port project were challenging.

Not that these factors had not been factored in while planning for the port and the support systems. If Bristow had been able to overcome most of them, it was only because he had anticipated most of them and strategised his responses. A close reading of his ground-breaking work, Cochin Saga, will vouch for it. 

But overall, neither the East India Company nor the British Empire was averse to investing in infrastructure. Both knew that in the long run it was necessary to serve their larger politico-economic interests. The general impression in England was that improving and modernising inland communications-roads, railways, ports, etc. would eventually open up new areas of investment for enterprising Europeans. The optimism was not misplaced as India did emerge as a major source of enrichment of the British Empire. No wonder, it earned the sobriquet ‘the brightest jewel in the British Crown. All other colonies, by comparison, remained far less lustrous.

There was, however, a short interregnum in economic activity in the aftermath of the First War of Independence in 1857, largely, if not wholly, out of pique over what happened that, more than anything else, deeply hurt the British pride. ‘The Rebellion, as it was also termed by British historians, was a watershed in the 200-years-long British rule. It marked the end of the East India Company as the sole dispenser of power and pelf and the beginning of direct rule by the British Crown. The then reigning queen, Victoria, became the Empress of India. It was a major shift in the fortunes of the British Empire in every sense of the term.

Indeed, the change of guard was more in form than substance. The colonial mindset of the new rulers was no different from that of the East India Company, and it became clear at the beginning itself. In a seemingly knee-jerk reaction to the events of 1857, the new rulers decided to put all development projects in abeyance just to teach the natives a lesson. Many prime projects-the Cochin Port and allied works, the coffee and tea plantations that later became the leitmotif of British entrepreneurship and few rail and road projects were among the casualties,

But it did not take much time for the rulers back in London to realise that neglect of infrastructure-bridges, rails and other communication networks was one reason why the British army took a bloody beating in the early days of the native onslaught, as the army could not be moved in time to contain the movement. It, therefore, called for early rectification. In the event, projects that had been put on the back-burner were taken out and dusted off for quick implementation. The 250-km-rail track that had been laid down by 1856, for example, was stretched to 6400 km by 1870 and further to 16,000 km by 1880. Similarly, construction on inland and overland telegraph links was revived, taken up on a war footing and completed by 1870. That, in sum, opened up new vistas of development. Incidentally, the first telegraph link in India, commissioned in November 1850, was between Calcutta and Diamond Harbour, a distance of about 50 km.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Cochin: Fame and Fables, M. K. Das, Niyogi Books, 2024.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Cochin: Fame and Fables appeared first on Fair Observer.

Less than a decade ago, British Viceroy Lord Elgin had said, “India was conquered by the sword and by the sword it shall be held!” Now, in an ironical turn of events, the youth of Bengal seemed to be returning Elgin’s comment. Many genuinely felt that violence was the only language the foreigners understood. Armed terrorism thus became closely intertwined with the fight for swaraj. In 1907, Aurobindo’s brother Barindra Ghose, began using his family home in Maniktola (then a suburb of Calcutta) as an arsenal-cum-school for revolutionaries. His compatriot, Hem Chandra Das from Midnapore, went to Paris to learn bomb making and understand revolutionary politics. As Bipin Chandra Pal, Ashwini Kumar Dutta, Aurobindo Ghose and others took control of the militant movement, the police files of the British became thicker and thicker with the names of young ‘suspects’ and ‘preventive detainees’. The same files now also had a name for this movement—’Bengal Terrorism’!

‘Bengal Terrorism’ was at its peak between 1908 and 1910. It was an organised movement that did not approve of individually motivated acts and secret murders. The objective was to stage a popular uprising and revolution that could bring down the edifice of British imperialism. This they hoped to do by forming secret societies that could enthuse the youth with higher values of bold action and sacrifice for the country, train them in the manufacture of bombs and explosive devices and the use of arms and also arm them for the fight.

Through the assassination of British officials they hoped to demoralise the British, paralyse the administration and uproot all enemies of India’s freedom—Indians or foreigners! Guerrilla warfare, inciting the army to revolt, arranging arms supplies from nations hostile to Britain—these revolutionaries were open to following many paths.

An official report of the time mentions about 210 revolutionary outrages and 101 attempts involving hundreds of revolutionaries in the decade between 1906 and 1917 in Bengal. This includes several failed and aborted attempts on the lives of high officials between the announcement of partition in 1905 and the Muzaffarpur bombing carried out by the Jugantar revolutionaries Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki in April 1908.

These were times when the Criminal Intelligence Department (CID) could hardly afford to lean back and take a moment’s rest. Swamped with work, all its attention was now focused on tracing the web-like threads of revolutionary activity to their points of origin. All attempts to force a breakthrough had proved futile. On a more specific note, the CID was also aware of an assassination plot building up against the former Calcutta Presidency Chief Magistrate, Douglas Kingsford (now posted as District Judge in Muzaffarpur), but had not been able to unearth it. And then suddenly, the Muzaffarpur bombing happened!

A turning point in India’s revolutionary history, the incident created a sensation in British India. The blast was followed by deafening silence in stunned British circles. Young, impassioned, 18-year-old Khudiram Bose was arrested for the bombing. Through the incident and the investigations that followed, the British were able to unravel the functioning of a wellspread network of secret societies and the people associated with it. The Muzaffarpur bombing became the starting point of the famous trial known as the Alipore Bomb Case or the Alipore Bomb Conspiracy. The Muzaffarpur incident was the first real eruption of a volcano that had made many attempts to surface in the recent past. Before the bombing, several unsuccessful attempts had been made on the lives of high-profile British officials. In 1906, Bampfylde Fuller, the Lieutenant Governor of the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, was trailed from Guwahati to Rangpur, but no attempt was made. On the night of 6 December 1907 an attempt was made near Narayangarh in the Midnapur district to blow up the train in which Andrew Fraser, the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, was travelling. Another attempt was planned on the Lieutenant Governer’s train near Chandernagore in which Barindra Ghose was accompanied by his close associate Ullaskar Dutt and Prafulla Chaki. The attempt failed because the special train did not come that way on the appointed night. December 1907 also saw a group led by Narendranath Bhattacharya carry out a dacoity in Chingripota (24 Parganas) and the shooting of B.C. Allen (District Magistrate, Dhaka) by members of the Dhaka Anushilan Samiti. On the night of 11 April 1908 an attempt had been made on the life of the Mayor of Chandernagore who had incurred the wrath of the revolutionaries for stopping a swadeshi meeting from taking place. The police, therefore, had enough reasons to keep a close watch on the activities of some people in Calcutta, whom they suspected of having links with the revolutionaries.

Events had been in motion for a while, but deep in their hearts the revolutionaries were getting impatient for that one big bang that could shake the British to their foundations. It is in this context that the Muzaffarpur bombing assumes great historical importance. When Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki threw a bomb at what they presumed to be the carriage carrying Douglas Kingsford on 30 April 1908 in Muzaffarpur in Bihar, they brought matters to a head. Instead of assassinating Kingsford, the bomb, however, killed his bridge partners Mrs. Kennedy and Miss Grace Kennedy, the wife and daughter of Mr. Pringle Kennedy, Advocate-at-Bar at Muzaffarpur. But even though it missed the desired target, the bomb that was hurled that fateful evening blasted the myth of British invincibility and shook the empire at its roots. Indeed, even a century later, the modest bomb remains one of the loudest explosions in Indian history.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from The Alipore Bomb Case: A Historic Pre-Independence Trial, Noorul Hoda, Niyogi Books, 2008.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Alipore Bomb Case: A Historic Pre-Independence Trial appeared first on Fair Observer.

Nao Jr was seemingly always busy, either ‘on duty’ in the only medical unit that Strait Island had, distributing medicines in case there was a need for anyone on the island, or fishing in the early morning or late evening, or just sleeping, which was his favourite pass-time. He agreed to help me record the folk tale only after 9 at night and I agreed to his terms, as I was excited to find at least one person in the entire habitat of eight households who claimed to remember a tale. He promised to visit me in the guesthouse. I was very anxious to receive him at the stipulated time.

I remember distinctly that it was 21 January 2006. Nao came to the guesthouse, thinking that he would finish the job in one evening. Little did he know that linguists have the bad habit of checking each and every word and phrase that is uttered. In the first sitting, he tried to narrate the story in Andamanese Hindi. He would halt in between, groping for the right words or phrases. When he was not satisfied with the Hindi version, he would suddenly revert to the appropriate Andamanese word. This was rather exciting and educational for me. The long-lost language was getting revived gradually in an ancient tale. I never expected this!

The loud choruses of the crickets and frogs had begun in the tsunami-created marshes and swamps behind our guesthouse; the power had been switched off and we were all sitting in the dark. We knew it was past 11 pm. We used to get electricity only for two hours. Nao wanted to retire. I extracted a promise from him to visit us the next day, at his convenience, but with the Andamanese version and not the Hindi one. He said he had forgotten it all. When I insisted that he could attempt to remember it at night while going to bed, he agreed to try but was sure that his memory would fail him. ‘Chaaliis saal se sunaa nahiin, kaun bolega? (It has been 40 years since I have heard it; who can narrate it?)’ He was sure he would disappoint me.

Then came the next day. I was making some grammar notes sitting on the wooden bed in the afternoon. I saw Nao standing at my door with an expectant look on his face. The moment I looked up, he said in Hindi, ‘Kuch kuch yaad aataa hai (I can remember a little).’ I invited him in and then we sat around the bed, turning it into a makeshift table. He started narrating the same story in short Great Andamanese phrases, not very fluently, but mixed with Hindi. Narayan, my student, assisted me in recording and transcribing the story. This is how our long journey of the Great Andamanese narration started, a journey into the past. I would interrupt him to get Hindi equivalents and he could, with a 90 percent success rate, render them. It took us several days, to get the full version of the narration of ‘Phertajido’ and the subsequent word-for-word translation. Sometimes, we would have our sessions in the afternoon and sometimes after 9 pm, as he was always busy fishing by the Strait Island jetty after sunset. This was a great story and I could see he loved narrating it.

The translated version of this story had some gaps, which I realized only after coming back to Delhi. I decided to go through the entire process again during the next trip. I was lucky enough as Nao obliged me during my next trip to Port Blair in December 2006, almost 11 months after our previous visit.

On reaching Port Blair in December 2006, I discovered that Nao was in Strait Island and not in Port Blair as I was informed by a tribal friend on the phone before I left Delhi. The AAJVS officials not only failed to honour my already sanctioned permit to visit Strait Island but were also on the lookout to catch and arrest me if I pursued my research. No one in the mainland would believe that a researcher could be arrested for hearing a story from the Great Andamanese tribes for work. Under the pretext of safeguarding the protected tribes, the concerned official would disregard the sanction given to us by the Home Ministry and would expect us to grease his palms. I neither had the means nor the inclinations to oblige him.

There was no way of informing Nao of my arrival in Port Blair. Unfortunately, Strait Island had no phone connections. The only wireless communication that the island had, was in the hands of the government officials. I had no option but to visit the Port Blair jetty and take a chance and see if I could run into any of my tribal friends on the ship. Ships for Strait Island leave very early in the morning at about 5:45 am. It was 19 December 2006; I reached the jetty much before the stipulated time. A crew member from one of the ships recognized me. By then, many local officials, especially those who worked on ships and boats, had started recognizing me as a friend of the Great Andamanese tribes. As soon as this man, a ticket checker at the departure gate saw me, he indicated towards the next ship moored in the distance and said, ‘Go and see Reya. She is going to Strait Island.’ This was a girl from the Great Andamanese tribe, whom I knew very well and who had married a Bengali man. I ran towards her, lest I lose her. She immediately recognized me and greeted me with a namaste. She introduced me to her husband. She asked me in Hindi, ‘Kab aayaa (when did you come)?’ Reya is one of those Great Andamanese tribal girls, who loves to amalgamate herself into our society and is happy to forget her heritage language. I told her that I desperately wanted to see Nili (the pet name of Nao). She informed me that Nao was on Strait Island and had no plans of visiting Port Blair. My world was falling to pieces.

I knew requesting the administration to transport Nao Jr to Port Blair would not help. I knew that getting permission to travel to Strait Island will be equally difficult, as some officers-in-charge were against any research on these tribes. It is a shame that the members of these tribes are kept as captives in their own land and are restricted from meeting other Indian citizens. Had it not been for the initiative of the Great Andamanese themselves, they would have never befriended locals and visitors like us. I immediately fished out a piece of paper from my purse, wrote a note in Hindi in bold letters, and gave it to Reya to pass it on to Nao. I told her to ask him to have it read out to him by one of the school-going children. I also told her that the sole purpose of my trip to the Andamans was to meet Nao and my other tribal friends, but Nao in particular. She promised to deliver the message.

[Listen to a song included in the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuqMVBnNoWs.]

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Voices from the Lost Horizon: Stories and Songs of the Great Andamanese, Anvita Abbi, Niyogi Books, 2021.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Voices from the Lost Horizon: Stories and Songs of the Great Andamanese appeared first on Fair Observer.

Nepali Proverb

(Those who live in a place from where the Himalayas cannot be seen may not be trusted.) 

At the time of writing, the monkey menace is a lightning rod for a great deal of public anger in the hills. Everyone seems to be perpetually persecuted by them. At the old Charleville, guards armed with airguns stalk the campus to scare off the simians, especially after one of the aggressive rhesus monkeys lunged at one of the Deputy Directors, completely disregarding his seniority, forcing him to take immediate evasive action. He jumped over the railing straight into the defile down below. Result? A broken arm!

Or you could say that Mr Obtuse, a college professor was to a certain extent responsible for the sudden explosion in the rhesus population. Don’t jump the gun and get me wrong. It all goes back to the winter vacation when our dear teacher went off to his home in the plains.

On meeting an old friend, he jokingly complained of a flagging libido. ‘I’ll fix that!’ promised the friend. Later, he gave him some specially concocted sweetmeats put together by a renowned herbalist, who’d made a minor fortune peddling cures for all kinds of sexual ailments, near the Clock Tower in Moradabad. Fortified with a box brimming with aphrodisiacs, our professor came home to his flat in the narrow lanes of our bazaar. On the very first day, he ate one, leaving the box near the window. The rest, as they say, is history— not his, theirs! A pesky monkey grabbed the box, spilling the contents on the ledge below. In the ensuing free for all, the sweets were gobbled up by a troupe of monkeys. Now don’t ask me if it worked. Honestly! I don’t know. But you have my word for it—there was an immediate jump in the population of simians. I hear there were rumours that one of these red-bottomed rhesus’ had a big grin on his face whenever he peeped through the barred windows of the learned professor’s abode looking for fresh supplies!

And grinning were the langurs too at one of the town’s best walkers, a certain Miss Crabbit who, having retired from a girl’s school settled here and has not stopped walking since. Given to the belief that those who walk sixteen kilometres a day are blessed with an eternal life, she sets off on her walk after a frugal breakfast, returns home for lunch, and takes off again to stagger home at dusk.

Things went well for years, that is until one of her nieces brought her a silvery fur coat to keep her warm through the cold winter. Hardly had she stepped out of her flat, when she noticed that she was being trailed by a troupe of amorous black-faced langurs marching in step behind her!

Now! That’s real monkey business.

Up until the 1960s, we had a tradition of doctors who made their way to the mountains from the sultry Ganges delta of Bengal. Foremost among these was a Dr Mitra, who ran a private clinic near the Old Theatre. On retiring, he passed on his practice to Dr Bagchi who, for some weird reason, always wore a monkey-cap. You could tell that summer had come when the good doctor removed his cap and little kids on the road went around yelling: ‘Papu ki topi uttar gayey!’ (Old man’s taken off his cap!)

Dr Bhaduri though had no cap fetish, he specialized in sex problems. Right next to the Electric Picture Palace cinema, he had a garish hoarding that showed an exhausted lion lying flat on its face before imbibing his magical aphrodisiac, while on the other side there was that magnificent pride of Africa, roaring at the tourists much in the manner of the MGM lion. Things were going well for the good doctor, up until the day police came knocking at his door.

What could he have done? He wondered. His medicines were not that bad!

The warrant stated he had certified as dead a man who was alive and kicking, and mad and angry too, because meanwhile his estranged wife had run off with the proceeds of his insurance policy. Off to the police station they marched and into the lock up he went for the night. The barred metal door clanged shut only to be opened the next morning when he was produced before a magistrate.

Lo and behold! As luck would have it, the doctor recognised Mr Tormented, the duty magistrate, as the errant youth whom he had a long time ago treated for venereal disease. Now, seated on his august chair, memories of another day came flooding back, he could still remember the burning sensation every time he had to visit the loo. Bashfully, he now remembered approaching the doctor, and managed to mutter: ‘Doctor Sa’ab, I think my thing has a cold.’

Dr Bhaduri had taken one look, smiled and said: ‘Till it sneezes, may be I’ll treat you with penicillin.’

On this fated day, their eyes met again. Time’s relentless sand papering had weathered them both as the clock rewound to twenty years ago. What mattered was that at the decisive moment, they were partners in crime again.

‘Doctor Sa’ab! What are you doing here?’ asked the judge.

‘Police say I’ve certified the living as dead! And his wife has taken off with his insurance!’

‘How did that happen?’

‘These men dragged me out of my bed at night and into a hotel room,’ he recalled, almost as in a dream. ‘Yes! There was a body. I wrote the name they gave me. Can you ask a dead man his name?’

‘True! Very possible!’ nodded Tormented, saying: ‘A case of mistaken identity. Bail granted.’

For the rest of his days, I am told Dr Bhaduri stopped taking house calls. The word was out that he would break out in hives if you so much as phoned him to take a house call.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Gupp and Gossip from the Hills, Ganesh Saili, Niyogi Books, 2012.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Chances are, if you’re someone who consider yourself a reader, you have also spent a significant amount of time perusing the stacks labeled YA at your local bookstore or library. YA is home to some of pop culture’s biggest hits, like Divergent, The Hunger Games and Twilight. However, the fact that YA has become so popular does not mean that it is intended for all audiences. In recent years, adult readers have poured into the category, altering it significantly.

What is YA?

YA is a category — not a genre. A genre groups books by a set of thematic elements, while a category groups books by their intended audience. When YA gets redefined as a genre, it can lose touch with its audience.

The Young Adult Library Service Association first created the YA category in the 1960s to cater to readers aged 12–18. They realized that there was not a space for teens in the literary world, so they gave them one.

Other than age range, there are no conventions that YA must follow. However, there is a lot of overlap in the content that these stories explore. YA books tend to share common tropes, character archetypes and plotlines. The main characters tend to be 12–18 years old, the same age as the readers. “Good girls” and “bad boys” are frequent archetypes. Plots often center on love triangles and coming-of-age narratives. 

Since YA is intended for a younger audience, it tends to avoid explicit content like intense descriptions of sex and sexual or physical violence. YA can explore these topics, but not with graphic detail; you’re not going to find Game of Thrones sitting in the YA section. Think of YA in terms of cinema: If it were a rating, it would be PG-13.

In the past five years, however, the content we have been seeing would be rated R. Adult consumers of YA have demanded more explicit content. This raises the question: Why are so many adults reading YA in the first place?

Why are adults flooding into YA?

As an active reader and a participant in online book communities for a decade, I can safely say that most — if not all — of the books I have read in the past five years have been recommended to me via social media. The Internet connects us all, and the book community is no exception. The literature sides of TikTok, Instagram and YouTube (affectionately dubbed BookTok, Bookstagram and BookTube) have allowed readers to share the works they love with one another.

An unintended consequence of this connection is the use of these platforms as a means to promote books. BookTok especially has had a major impact on the way that books are being promoted. Walk into your local Barnes and Noble and there will be a display table piled high with books that are “Popular on BookTok!”

The problem with this form of marketing is who is participating. Most YA promoters are adults, and most of their audience is adults too. It’s not that teens don’t use social media or that they aren’t also a part of these spaces, but they do not make up a large enough portion to have a voice. There are fewer of them, and besides, they have less money to spend.

Adult marketers attract adult readers and isolate teen fans by reducing YA to a set of tropes that readers are accustomed to seeing, without regard to who they are meant for. The protagonist is a teenager and the plot is a love triangle, not because this is what appeals to young people but because this is what the aesthetic demands. Booktok promoters hawk books on popular tropes — “try this new enemies-to-lovers book!” These are abstractions of teenage experiences, and often cliches, that no longer appeal to young people as such. This ageless marketing strategy draws in readers from across the board.

In April, The Guardian reported that 74% of YA readers were adults; 28% of them were over 28. If you go onto BookTok, Bookstagram and BookTube, you’ll find that the vast majority of people promoting YA books are above the intended reader age range.

How are adult readers changing YA?

There is nothing wrong with adults reading YA books. In fact, a lot of adults gravitate to YA because it contains less smut. However, since the typical buyer is now over 18, authors are shifting to please the largest and most vocal part of their reader base.

Remember that YA is a category, defined by its age base. With the influx of adult readers, it has instead become a genre that peddles the same themes but to a redefined audience. When you pick up a “YA” book now, you will find the same characters, plots and tropes you would have found 15 years ago — but in between these familiar themes, you’ll also find loads of “spicy” content meant to service the new audience.

YA was the perfect place for teens to begin to explore the topic of sex. This came in the form of fade-to-black, closed-door or non-graphic sex scenes. Today, you’re going to find very detailed — and numerous — descriptions of sex. While these scenes might not use the exact vocabulary that novels in the Adult category would, the level of detail becomes graphic regardless of the word choice.

One notable example is the A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) series by Sarah J. Maas. When Maas originally wrote the book, she intended for it to be published in the Adult category. However, her existing fan base was in YA, thanks to her Throne of Glass series. So, Maas’s publisher pushed ACOTAR into the category. She accepted this change on the condition that she would not have to cut any of the smut.

The first four books in the ACOTAR series were all published as YA despite containing chapter-long, in-depth sex scenes. Only with the release of the fifth book — A Court of Silver Flames — came a rebrand of the series as Adult. Which raises the question: Why was it ever allowed to be published as YA if the content has always been Adult?

How does adultified YA affect young readers?

The YA category is meant to be a space for teens to find themselves and explore topics that help them through their adolescence. For these readers, sexuality is something new, unfamiliar, awkward and exciting. They deserve books that can help them make sense of this part of reality — not just books that put it on display for a meaningless thrill.

The more Adult books get pushed into YA, the more teens engage with explicit content. Remember, YA starts as early as 12. Between the ages of 12 and 18, there is a lot of mental development occurring. It is not healthy for children to be reading what can — in some of the worst cases — be porn. Whether we can “separate fiction from reality” or not, the media we take in affects us mentally. Porn has documented effects on the brain similar to drugs or alcohol, especially for children who lack the mental defenses to this sort of assault.

Sex in YA novels is not inherently a bad thing. However, there is a difference between scenes that are meant to convey the awkwardness of adolescence and new experiences and scenes that are meant to be erotic. Authors need to be very conscious of what purpose the sex in their books has. If they want it simply for the sake of having it, then YA is not the category they need to be publishing in.

How do we prevent children from reading porn?

The lines get even blurrier when you consider that there is no longer a uniform age range for YA. When the Young Adult Library Service Association coined the term, the age range was 12–18. If you look up what the age range for YA is today, you might get a slightly different answer. The lack of uniformity allows people to stretch the bounds of what is acceptable for the traditional YA reader to be exposed to. The older the age range gets, the more explicit the content becomes.

The term “Young Adult” itself is confusing. I have spoken to many people who quite naturally interpreted the phrase as “adults who are young,” aged 18–24, rather than 12–18. Dan Weiss and S. Jae-Jones of St. Martin’s Press attempted to resolve this confusion by creating a new category for the 18–24 age range called New Adult (NA). It would serve as a bridge between YA and Adult by allowing these people to have their own space to explore this transitional period in their lives.

Despite the need, NA has failed to pick up as a category in its own right. Most publishers will tell you that it simply doesn’t exist. A big part of its failure is due to the perception of NA as “YA with smut.” Ultimately, the public does not understand that NA is a category, not a genre. They see no value in creating NA because, when seen as a genre, it produces similar stories to YA. Until the public can learn to separate genres and categories, NA will continue to fail and YA will continue to suffer. 

You sometimes see explicit books marketed to “older YA” audiences. They’ll have labels like “16+” to convey that the material is not suitable for everyone who falls under the YA category. However, YA is still YA. There is no real differentiation between “older YA” and “younger YA” in terms of publishing. Libraries and bookstores do not uniformly police this distinction. Authors, editors and publishers should consider that, when it comes to YA, a 12-year-old might always pick up their book.

Just as importantly, 12-year-olds are still an important part of the YA reader base, and they deserve to be treated as such. Instead of trying to split up YA into “older” and “younger”, authors and publishers need to focus more on promoting NA as its own category and leave YA to the people it’s meant for.

Ultimately, re-labeling categories is not going to magically fix the problem. The forces at play are too great to be stopped by a sticker on a dust jacket. What we have is a cultural problem, and it needs a cultural solution. Authors, editors and publishers of integrity should nudge adult readers to seek explicit content in the Adult section instead of pushing it into a space meant for kids.

It’s never going to be possible to give YA a hard set of rules and conventions to follow, because there is a lot of subjectivity involved in defining what is appropriate for its audience. However, we can give some soft recommendations to follow so authors can write content suitable for everyone who falls within their target age range. A rule of thumb, to which I alluded above, is that if sex is presented primarily for the reader’s pleasure, it does not belong in YA.

None of this is meant to shame people for what they read or write. If you’re an adult who loves YA, great! I love YA. There is nothing wrong with reading books that fall outside of your age category. But as responsible consumers and producers of literature, we can make sure that there is enough space for all to enjoy the joys of reading.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Adults Are Now Pushing Teens Out of Teen Literature appeared first on Fair Observer.

The essential tenets of education as propounded by Gandhi can be summed up as follows:

1) Education must serve the nation’s needs consistent with the philosophy of freedom, truth and non-violence.

2) Equality of all religions and all men.

3) Equal importance to intellectual training and manual work, which should be socially useful and productive.

4) Mother tongue as the medium of instruction at all levels along with the compulsory teaching of Hindi.

5) The curricula and other arrangements should aim at serving the needs of villagers.

It was a basic principle of all Gandhian institutions that teachers should regard untouchability as a blot on Hindu society and should strive for its removal and should never exclude a boy or girl for reasons of his being an untouchable, nor treat him or her differently after admission.

Manual work was an integral part of Gandhian education. There is no point, he used to say, in developing the brain only. One has to develop one’s brain through one’s hands.

Gandhi had been engaged in the work of rural reconstruction, harijan uplift and political regeneration and therefore, his fingers were constantly on the pulse of the common people. He realised that unless education was given a new orientation, it would not be possible to build the social order that he cherished. He placed before the nation a scheme which he had been evolving for 40 years—a scheme popularly known as the Wardha Scheme of Education, which he called ‘Nayee Talim’ or New Education. He defined it as education for life and through life.

Gandhi’s educational ideas grew out of his experiments in education with his family and in his ashrams in South Africa and India before they were formulated and publicly announced. By education he meant an all-round drawing out of the best in the child and man—body, mind and spirit.

‘That education alone is of value,’ he said, ‘which draws out the faculties of a student so as to enable him or her to solve correctly the problems of life in every department.’

‘Nayee Talim means teaching through craft. That basic craft has to be selected in the light of the conditions and produce of the region.’

According to him, self-reliance was the most important characteristic of Nayee Talim. The knowledge that this system imparted could not be had from books. It was from nature that this knowledge had to be obtained. ‘Knowledge directly derived from anything was much better than knowledge derived through a written lesson or through symbols. That was the essential basis of Nayee Talim.’

Basic education discarded bookish learning and aimed at an all-round development of the child so that he could become a useful and productive member of the society. In his last talk on Nayee Talim on 14 December 1947, Gandhi said, ‘Basic education is generally interpreted as education through craft. This is true to a certain extent, but this is not the whole truth. The roots of Nayee Talim go deeper. It is based on truth and non-violence in individual and collective life.

The Wardha scheme left out teaching of religion because Gandhi held that religions as they were taught and practised led to conflict rather than unity. Truths common to all religions could be taught. No denominationalism or factionalism was to be encouraged specially between Hindus and Muslims.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Gandhi’s Vision: Freedom And Beyond, Aparna Basu, Niyogi Books, 2018.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Long before the Emperor’s entourage set out, astrologers and wise men were consulted to determine the most auspicious time for the Emperor to enter Kashmir. Nothing was left to chance. Over 3,000 stonecutters and labourers were hired to improve the condition of the road, while officials headed to the hills to determine the location of the huge camping areas fit for an Emperor and his court. The arrival was a sight to behold. Bystanders watched in disbelief while wide-eyed ragamuffins scurried for cover as their village was transformed into a camp city packed with merchants and vendors, astrologers, men of arms and men of letters accompanied by a huge retinue of advisors and attendants

Leaving the heat and humidity of Lahore far behind, the Emperor’s party gradually ascended the Himalayan foothills. The trails through the forests and verdant meadows became increasingly attractive. The spring flowers thrived at the margins of the snowmelt, shepherds lead their flocks to the summer pastures, while golden eagles glided on the thermals. It was a world away from the bustling markets of Lahore or Agra. In such alpine splendour Akbar relished the prospect of undertaking an extended tour through the enchanted Vale of Kashmir.

It took the best part of a month for Akbar to reach the base of the Pir Panjal. It was the last week of May 1589 and rumours were rife of snowdrifts blocking the pass. Akbar’s advisors met late into the night, mindful that the decision to advance could not be taken lightly. While the Pir Panjal Pass (2,830 m) is not high by Himalayan standards they were acutely aware of the ferocious pre-monsoon storms that could descend on the pass for days on end. They might also have been aware that the ancient sages had cast spells on the pass so that whenever a foreign force attempted to cross the pass, ‘black clouds soon gather and rain and snow pour down’. The next day would determine who was right, the court astrologers or the ancient sages.

Reaching the camp beneath the Pir Panjal Pass the weather seemed perfect. As darkness fell, no one read the ominous signs in the night sky. Whether the Emperor’s entourage were equipped to withstand the elements was soon to be put to the test. When Akbar set off the morning was clear and the day was full of promise. Within the space of an hour gale-force winds slowed his advance to almost a standstill. When he finally set foot on the pass his view was totally obscured in a maelstrom of deep swirling clouds. The distant claps of thunder were a further portent not to linger. Any chance of Akbar savouring his first spectacular view of Kashmir was vanquished in the storm. It was not the most auspicious start to Mughal rule over Kashmir.

Akbar had been Emperor for over 30 years before he visited Kashmir. By then Kashmir had been secured by his army. After crossing the Pir Panjal Pass they encountered little resistance before making a triumphal entry into Srinagar in the first week of October 1656. The Mughal Empire now extended from Kashmir as far as Kabul and Kandahar, a vast territory that had not been governed by a single entity since the times of Kanishka and the Kushan Empire in the first century. The groundwork was now in place for Akbar’s arrival.

Akbar’s three visits to Kashmir offered a welcome escape from the prosaic demands of ruling his empire. Kashmir was to be known as his private garden, a retreat from the rest of his empire. A popular yet in some ways misleading reference, for it was his son, Jahangir, and grandson, Shah Jahan, who were responsible for commissioning Kashmir’s famous Mughal gardens.

Akbar spent five weeks on his first tour of Kashmir. The countryside with its meadows dotted with spring flowers, the scented pine forests and the temperate climate, a world away from the soaring heat of the Indian plains, exceeded his expectations. Yet, if this was a paradise on earth no one had informed the people. Court officials forewarned Akbar that the people were forever subject to famine and abject poverty. The country was in dire need of sound administration, but where to start in a land where ‘there is an abundance of futile talks and concealers of the truth’. It was fortunate that the Emperor could turn to Todar Mal, his acclaimed Finance Minister, who proposed wide-ranging land reforms including an equitable tax system that was not too onerous for the villagers.

As the Shahenshah—the King of Kings—Akbar assumed an almost god-like status. In his exalted position he encouraged debate between Muslims, Brahmins, Christians and Jains, while his Court facilitated freethinking, granting patronage to poets, writers and artists. Not surprisingly, he made time to seek out pious men and hear their version of the divine. Less than a month after his arrival he sought out Wahid Sufi, who lived in solitary existence in a cave deep in the countryside to the south of Kashmir. The highly regarded Sufi led a life ‘gathering happiness on an old mat … Concerning himself little with men’s customs, some called him mad and some called him an atheist. He lived apart from joy and sorrow and took nothing from anybody except broken bread’ .  It is a testimony to Akbar that he acknowledged how the humble Sufi taught him how he could, ‘keep his soul always well pleasing to God as far as his power would allow’.

The Emperor made his third tour of duty to Kashmir in 1597. By now the Mughal army needed to secure its presence and an order was given to build a fort at the base of the Hari Parbat hill. To ensure the army did not place undue strain on the local economy, the precincts of the fort were made into a cantonment. High-ranking government officers were quick to acquire the most prestigious blocks of land to build opulent houses with uninterrupted views across Dal Lake to the ridges of the rugged Zabarwan Range. The huge walls encircling the cantonment were completed later during the reign of Akbar’s son Jahangir. Sections of the masonry remain intact, including the Kathi Darwaza—the main entrance— where an inscription remains in place commemorating Akbar’s reign.

Well before his father’s death in 1605, Jahangir was enamoured with Kashmir. He returned briefly two years later but it was not until 1620 that he came back and spent the best part of nine months in the valley. It was a heaven-sent opportunity to experience the full change of seasons. Little of beauty escaped his notice and like his father he was enthused with the natural wonders of the valley.

Kashmir is a garden of eternal springs or an iron fort to a palace of kings—a delightful flower bed and a heart expanding heritage for dervishes. Its pleasant meadows and enchanting cascades are beyond all descriptions. There are running streams and fountains beyond count. The red rose, the violet and narcissus grow of themselves; in the fields there are kinds of flowers and all sorts of sweet scented herbs, more than can be calculated. In the soul enchanting spring the hills and plains are filled with blossoms; the gates, the walls, the courts, the roofs are lighted up by torches of banquet adorning tulips.

Jahangir took particular delight visiting the mountains. He recounts the beauty of Toshamaidan close to Gulmarg, where he identified over 50 varieties of wildflowers. He describes the flowers with all the passion of a man temporarily removed from the tedious life of day-to-day politics. Indeed the retired British administrator H. Beveridge who edited Alexander Rogers’ translation of the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri or Memoirs of Jahangir (also known as the Jahangirnama) from Persian to English, asserts that ‘had Jahangir been the head of a National History Museum (rather than an Emperor) he would have been a better and happier man’.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Kashmir: A Journey Through History, Garry Weare, Niyogi Books, 2020.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Republican candidate George W. Bush stood and started to answer this question before the chair interrupted him and warned he was digressing. “Help me with the question,” he requested after getting tongue-tied. The questioner wanted to know how he was personally affected. Democratic candidate Bill Clinton took his turn to answer. He stood, walked toward the audience and spoke, not to the audience but to the woman who had asked the question. He motioned to her, his eyes fixed on hers. “In my state, when people lose their jobs, there’s a good chance I’ll know them by their names.”

It was a transformational moment in politics. Of course, we didn’t know it at the time, but on October 15, 1992, at the University of Richmond’s Robins Center, politics changed. The hapless Bush was aloof and seemed almost contemptuous while Clinton interacted relaxedly with the audience without feints or deviations. It was as if he was having private conversations that could be heard, not overheard.

Outside politics, cultural change was turning us all into voyeurs. I don’t mean that people started to take an unwholesome pleasure from watching others engaged in sex or suffering in some way (although some might have). No, the new voyeurism involved the guiltless enjoyment of observing or eavesdropping on private conversations and discovering intimate details of others’ lives, particularly through television and, later, social media. This reflected a growing fascination with the personal and often unfiltered experiences of others. We called it curiosity. It soon extended into politics.

Political celebrities who seem like real people

Celebrity culture was, for many, a Trojan horse: Innocuous-looking enough to allow into our lives but baleful in its consequences. Our captivation with the lives of other people seems perfectly natural now. But it wasn’t in the 1970s. The misleadingly inoffensive horse entered in the 1980s, so that by the early 1990s, it had already taken up residence. Impatient with entertainers who were cautious about sharing details of their private lives, audiences wanted everyone to be like Madonna: unsparing in their distribution of the minutiae of their lives. 

Audience appetite was for real people —  not the disproportionately impersonal and untouchable godlike characters who dominated public life for most of the 20th century, but people who resembled the other people they were supposed to entertain. 

This affected politicians. It seems laughable that we once looked up to them. For most of the 20th century, they were guardians in a benevolent moral and ministerial sense. The electorate admired, respected and, in some cases, idolized these near-transcendent beings. By the 1990s, however, audiences no longer admired politicians from afar; they wanted close-ups. What’s more, they demanded access to their private lives, blurring the lines between public service and entertainment.

Clinton seemed to understand the power of ordinariness. The folksy, down-to-earth charm that characterized him and allowed him to face several accusations of impropriety and an impeachment with equanimity made him one of the most popular presidents in history.

Clinton’s kind of ordinariness became a valuable resource. Audiences responded to politicians who mirrored themselves: They may have had more power, authority, status and attention; they may even have led more opulent lifestyles; but, unlike politicians of earlier eras, the new breed could and probably should exhibit the same kinds of flaws and problems as the people who followed them. So, Clinton’s sex scandals, far from being a source of damnation, worked like a celebrity benediction. There had been sex scandals before, but never anything approaching Clinton’s triple obloquy. The media, which by the early 1990s were ravenous for scandal, covered it extensively.

Related Reading

Sex in (and Out of) the White House

Bush’s struggle to connect with the audience starkly contrasted with Clinton’s approach, highlighting a shift in what Americans began to value in their leaders. Bush followed Clinton to the White House. He was prone to gaffes, making him the object of parody and criticism, especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

By contrast, Bush’s successor Barack Obama masterfully balanced the demands of celebrity culture with a scandal-free image, projecting the persona of a cool president. He had suaveness, eloquence and an uncommon ability to connect with a broad range of people, from appearances on talk shows to a preparedness to share his taste in music (he was known to favor Beyoncé, Tyla and Kendrick Lamar.)

Harris, Trump… and Oprah

Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, entered politics as a fully formed celebrity in a similar way to President Ronald Reagan and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — all three were well-known entertainers before their forays into politics. Trump hosted The Apprentice for 14 seasons from 2004 till 2015, so, by the time he won election in November 2016, he was an established figure in the media and popular culture.

Trump may have lacked Clinton’s magnetism and Obama’s relatability, but he could challenge both with his sex scandals and ability to dominate the news cycle. He had little experience in public office but was adept at maneuvering the media. Perhaps he still is. But is his audience still excited? Or are we witnessing Trump fatigue?

Audiences like novelty, freshness and new personalities. If Trump’s celebrity appeal begins to wane, Kamala Harris emerges as a pristine face in American politics. Despite being vice president since 2021, she’s relatively unknown. She’s probably the least-known nominee in living memory. She didn’t even benefit from the exposure of going through primaries. Ironically, this might not be such a bad thing.

Her paradigm will surely be Oprah Winfrey. A proven kingmaker with her pivotal “We need Barack Obama” speech at Des Moines, Iowa on December 8, 2007, Oprah has already given Harris her seal of approval.

Related Reading

Do Celebrity Endorsements Help or Hurt Politicians?

As far as I’m aware, there is no celebrity equivalent of osmosis in which style, knowledge and appeal can pass from one person to another. If there were, Harris should learn how it works. Harris’ campaign already has an Oprah feel: The “Joy” theme is confection, though not meaningless confection: It suggests Harris will, if elected, be a person who brings great pleasure and happiness — as celebrities often do.

The most amusing political spectacle in history

It seems frivolous to discuss celebrity culture in the solemn context of politics. But let’s face it: politics is no longer solemn: The dignity that once seemed to ennoble politicians has vanished and whatever they say seems glib or, at best, rehearsed. Small wonder that audiences expect value-for-money entertainment from politics. Politicians, at least the successful ones, know this and often respond in a way that elicits a reaction. Trump has an intuitive grasp of this: His bombastic statements and bumptious behavior guarantee him an expectant audience and a breathless media. His dismissal of a miscellany of accusations with a shrug gives him a certain sheen. He also recruits established showbusiness stars, sometimes to their chagrin (Abba asked Trump to stop playing their music at his rallies).

Like everything else, politics changes. Some might despair at the prospect of politics succumbing to trashy and meretricious celebrity culture. But voters demand it: They want politicians who are as imperfect as they are, empathic enough to be relatable, unpredictable in a way that keeps everyone curious and, above all, entertaining. And, if they’re not, they’re gone: There are plenty of politicians with presidential aspirations who rose to prominence but not for long. Who remembers Deval Patrick, Jim Gilmore or Lincoln Chafee — all hopefuls from recent political history?

Voters are accustomed to being entertained by all manner of celebrity, some weaponized with talent, others just disposable and quickly forgotten. Harris and Trump both want to convince voters that they’re not celebrities but serious politicians. That means much of the campaign will be about trying to command the media’s attention and shape the way it presents the candidates, whether as impressively august with superabundant leadership skills or just pretenders. This guarantees the campaign will deliver a theatrical, extravagant and probably the most amusing political spectacle in history.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of Celebrity Culture, now in its third edition.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Voters Want Politicians Like Trump and Harris to Be Celebrities appeared first on Fair Observer.

From his udukkai was born waves of sound

From that sound was born music

From that music was born the different dances

From dance was born the form of koothu

From that koothu was born the grammar of dance

From that was born the style of drama

(Saathanar in the Kootha Nool, p.189.)

Dance has always been associated with Shiva, the one who is called Adavallan, or expert dancer, and worshipped at Chidambaram as Nataraja or the king of dance.

Everywhere is the holy form

Everywhere is Shiva and Shakthi

Everywhere there is Chidambaram

Everywhere there is the sacred dance

Since He is everywhere, everything is the manifestation of His dance.

(Thirumoolar in Tirumanthiram, verse 2674.)

This dance, at the behest of the gods, was codified and given to humans so that they may offer it as worship to them particularly to Shiva as Nataraja. The dancer experiences through her movements, the sublime heights of emotion, the pleasure of the divine consciousness, and leads her audience to the same state.

Amongst the most ancient dance forms in India, Bharatanatyam can be called the child of Thanjavur for it was here that it was systematised as we know it today, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Originally called Sadir, it was in the preserve of the devadasi community and was later adapted and rechristened as Bharatanatyam. As mentioned earlier, dance, drama and music were closely linked in ancient and medieval India and were seen as offerings to the divine.

Indian dancing is not a mere movement of arms and legs but one where every part of the body from the little finger to the eyes has a significant role. All poses have been codified centuries ago and the greatness of the artist lies in how she uses her entire body to capture that pose and how she makes the audience feel the emotion conveyed by that pose.

Dance has two primary elements—nritta and natya. Nritta are rhythmical and repetitive elements of thirty-two body parts, such as head, hands, heel and eyebrows, which are used by the dancer to dance to the beat and are interspersed with natya. Natya is the dramatic art, and is a language of abhinaya, mudhra and poses using the limbs. The dancer uses both nritta and natya to tell a story that is sung to music. Abhinaya could, for example, be facial expressions to show various emotions. Mudhra could be the using of fingers and hands to denote animals or attributes of gods. Since mudhras and abhinaya in general cannot be seen from a distance as in a large hall, dance was meant for small groups.

There are nine main or primary emotions, also termed rasas or moods in Indian aesthetics: shringara (love), hasya (mirth), veera (heroism), roudra (anger), bhayanaka (terror), bibhatsa (disgust), adbhuta (wonder), karuna (compassion), and shanta (tranquillity). Incidentally, Bharata’s Natya Shastra and Tholkappiyam (most scholars date this to the pre-Christian era) mention only eight rasas; shanta rasa was introduced in the 9th century by Udbhata.

Like music, dance is also an ancient tradition in Thanjavur. One of the earliest inscriptions on dance is in Arachalur which dates to circa 250 CE and is written in the Brahmi script. It contains a set of syllables that creates a rhythm or sollu kattu in today’s parlance of Bharatanatyam. The syllables ‘tha’, ‘thai’, ‘thi’ are still in use in Tamil Nadu. Paintings from this period in the Sithanavasal Jain temple also depict dancers. Silappadikaram written around the same time has dancers as protagonists—Kovalan the hero is smitten by Madhavi, who was able to dance eleven different types of dances.

Texts like Kootha-nool (koothu means dance and nool refers to a book) by Sattanaar need special mention for their rich content on dance. This work was written in the 12th century or earlier and talks about various aspects of dance. Suvai nool is about the aesthetic aspects of dance; togai nool describes different dance forms including the 108 Tandavas (or dance routines) of Shiva; vari nool celebrates folk dances including the aka vari dances which deal with love and human psychology,pura vari dances which deal with natural phenomena and mukha vari dances or the acrobatic and exhibitionist dances; vachai nool is about ludicrous dances; kalai nool is the largest of the nine nools and deals with the anatomy of the human body; karana nool talks about dance sequences; tala nool deals with time measurements and rhythm; isai nool explains the thirty pann; avai nool describes the architecture of the stage, rules for lighting, costumes, makeup and so on; kan nool describes dance as a form of yoga and advises the dancer to maintain her mental and physical form to keep her performance at the highest level.

Koothu indicates a close connection between dance and drama in the 12th century and earlier. Dramas were probably composed of several units of dance with appropriate music. The word natyam does not appear to indicate dance in any of these ancient texts. Unfortunately, no Tamil treatise on dance has survived; however, we have some of their names. Dance had taken two forms by the 14th century—one was more rigidly defined by the Sanskrit Natya Shastra and the other one, the koothu, became a more popular dance form confined to the villages and patronised by commoners.

By the Chola times there were dancers of both sexes and the position became hereditary, provided the new entrant had the right credentials. The dancers were called devaradiyar if they were dancing in the temples of Lord Shiva and emberumanar adiyar (adiyar literally means slave, here it means devotee) if they were dancing in the temples of Lord Vishnu. Dance became one of the shodasha upachara or sixteen important offerings to the deity.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Thanjavur: A Cultural History, Pradeep Chakravarthy, Niyogi Books, 2010.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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On July 9, 2024, Modi embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin, to the chagrin of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In the following media briefing, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar defended the prime minister, noting, “In our part of the world, when people meet people, they are given to embracing each other. It may not be part of your culture, but I assure you, it’s part of ours.” This statement encapsulates the cultural divide that Modi’s hugs often bridge and the misunderstandings they sometimes generate.

Historical embracing in India and beyond

In India, embracing, or Aalingan, is deeply rooted in cultural and spiritual traditions. It’s not merely a greeting but a profound expression of trust, respect and connection that transcends verbal communication. This practice finds its origins in ancient Indian epics and spiritual texts.

In the Ramayana, one of India’s most revered epics, the embrace between the gods Lord Rama and Hanuman symbolizes not just friendship, but a deep, spiritual bond. Similarly, in the epic Mahābhārata, the god Krishna’s embraces with his friends and devotees are portrayed as acts of divine love, emphasizing the spiritual significance of physical connection.

The concept of Aalingan extends beyond mythology into everyday Indian life. It is a common form of greeting in many communities, especially among family members and close friends. It’s seen as a way to express affection, offer comfort and strengthen bonds between individuals.

While Modi’s hugs are rooted in Indian tradition, the act of embracing as a form of greeting or expression of kindness is not unique to India. Throughout history and across various cultures, this action has played significant roles in social and diplomatic interactions.

In ancient Greece, the concept of aspasmós referred to a greeting that often included an embrace. The Greeks, known for their emphasis on personal relationships and philosophical discourse, understood the power of physical connection in fostering mutual understanding. In Greek literature, this contact often signifies an emotional reunion or reconciliation between former enemies. Think of the embrace between the disguised Odysseus and his wife Penelope at the end of Odyssey. At first, Penelope does not believe Odysseus when he reveals his identity. Their hug signifies both reunion and the restoration of trust.

The Romans, too, recognized the importance of physical gestures in both personal and diplomatic contexts. The Latin terms amplexus (“embrace”) and complexus (“entwining”) were used to describe close physical contact that conveyed sincerity and built trust. In ancient Rome, the embrace signified brotherhood and common purpose. The celebrated Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs, depicting the four Roman co-emperors in a mutual embrace, amply demonstrates this custom.

Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs, Venice, Italy.

In the Middle Ages, the “kiss of peace,” or Pax, was a common greeting among European nobility and clergy, often accompanied by an embrace. This practice, rooted in early Christian traditions, was seen as a way to express unity and reconciliation within the community.

Even in cultures where physical contact is generally more reserved, there are historical instances of embraces being used in diplomatic contexts. For example, the famous “socialist fraternal kiss” between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German leader Erich Honecker in 1979 became an iconic image of Cold War diplomacy.

Depiction of the socialist fraternal kiss in Berlin, Germany. Via LBM1948 on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The strategic significance of Modi’s hugs

Against this rich historical backdrop, Modi’s embraces take on a deeper significance. They are not just spontaneous displays of affection but calculated diplomatic moves that bridge ancient traditions with modern international relations.

Geopolitics are often cold and formal; interactions are guided by strict protocols and careful words. Touch, therefore, serves as a disruptive force. It humanizes interactions, breaks down barriers, and creates a sense of intimacy that few other diplomatic gestures can achieve.

When Modi embraces a world leader, he is sending a clear message: India values personal connections, and relationships are built on more than just agreements and treaties. This approach aligns with India’s broader diplomatic strategy, which emphasizes soft power and cultural diplomacy as key tools in its international relations.

To dismiss these hugs as mere quirks or cultural misunderstandings would be to underestimate their strategic significance. In a world where geopolitical tensions often dominate headlines, these embraces serve as powerful symbols of unity and shared humanity.

Modi’s embraces have become a unique form of non-verbal communication in his diplomatic toolkit. They can convey warmth where words might fail, break ice in tense situations or reinforce the strength of existing relationships. In some cases, they have even become newsworthy events in themselves, drawing attention to India’s diplomatic engagements and the prime minister’s personal brand of leadership.

Moreover, these hugs align with India’s aspirations on the global stage. As India seeks to position itself as a bridge between East and West, North and South, Modi’s hugs symbolize the country’s ability to connect diverse cultures and political systems.

This “hug diplomacy” has drawn criticism, however. Some view the embraces as overly familiar or even culturally insensitive, especially when dealing with leaders from more reserved cultures. Others argue that such gestures can be seen as unprofessional or distracting from substantive diplomatic issues.

There’s also the risk of overuse. If every diplomatic meeting ends with this gesture, does it lose its significance? Critics argue that the frequency of the prime minister’s embraces might dilute their impact or make them seem less sincere.

The power of human connection

Despite these challenges, the enduring popularity and discussion surrounding Modi’s hugs speak to a fundamental truth about human interaction: Physical connection matters. In a world increasingly dominated by digital communication and remote interactions, a simple embrace can carry profound meaning.

As the ancient Greeks and Romans understood, and as Indian tradition has long emphasized, physical gestures can convey what words often cannot. They can build trust, foster goodwill and create lasting impressions in ways that formal speeches or written agreements cannot.

Modi’s “hug diplomacy” is more than just a quirky diplomatic style; it’s a bridge between ancient cultural practices and modern diplomatic strategies. Drawing from the rich traditions of Aalingan in India and echoing touch’s historical significance across cultures, the hugs serve as a powerful reminder of our shared humanity in a divided world.

As we continue to navigate the complex, high-stakes landscape of international relations, perhaps we should view these embraces not as oddities to be questioned, but as invitations to consider the role of personal connection in diplomacy. While divisions seem to grow by the day, a warm human touch might just be the simplest yet most profound way to unite us.

As the saying goes, “hugs are the universal medicine.” Sometimes the most effective solution can be a heartfelt embrace.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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This led me to ask: what does it truly mean to be responsible? 

When I first started college, even something as simple as paying my bills felt like a significant responsibility. But five years later, that task has become so routine that it barely registers as such. It seems that once I grow accustomed to an activity I once considered challenging, it no longer feels like a responsibility.

I now entertain the idea that responsibility is not a fixed destination but rather an evolving process that shifts with our perception and familiarity.

The threshold of responsibility as an Indian doctor 

During my clinical postings in the second and third years of medical school, a senior was always there to correct my mistakes. Whether I took an incomplete history, misdiagnosed a condition, messed up the insertion of a venous cannula or struggled with a nasogastric tube, someone more experienced ultimately bore the responsibility. Professors reassured us that, as the junior-most medical personnel in the hospital, we shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes. While this system was comforting, it did little to bolster my confidence in my own knowledge and skills.

India’s overpopulation offered a solution to my low self-confidence. When the patients vastly outnumber the doctors, each medical professional becomes an invaluable resource for the community.

For a long time, I didn’t grasp that responsibility isn’t something Indian medical students have to actively seek; it’s imposed on us before we’ve had a chance to contemplate our competence. I began to understand this when the community medicine and family medicine resident doctors packed a group of 25 students, including me, onto a bus for school health checkups. I quickly forgot about my craving for responsibility faster than my friends’ birthdays. My new thought was: Shouldn’t we be trained for this?

As we headed to the school, I hoped for a briefing from the residents, but none came. Upon entering the building, we set up our tables and equipment and waited for the students to arrive. I continued to anticipate some last-minute guidance or instruction, but when the students emerged, I realized I would need to rely on my raw clinical judgment for the day. These children’s lives and wellbeing were in my hands, and despite my persistent self-doubt, I resolved to rise to the challenge with everything I had.

Ignorant children

My first station for the day was the anthropometry table. Instead of making challenging diagnoses, my tasks were simple. I read the weighing scale and told the kids to stand up straight with their heels and heads against the stadiometer to measure their height. I imagined the worst-case scenario: mistakenly adding a few kilograms to a child, labeling them as obese and crushing their hopes of being the popular kid in their social circle. 

I sought to experience the burden of responsibility, but all I could think about was that three years of medical school had led me to read numbers from various devices. Even my friends at the ear, nose and throat (ENT) station, who struggled to hide their disgust at the sight of hoards of earwax, seemed to be having more fun.

When my group found a student with a high BMI, we advised them to cut back on junk food, eat more fruits, go outside and exercise, blabbering generic recommendations that seemed unlikely to make a difference. We were providing lifestyle advice to children with helicopter parents, ignoring the fact that these kids had as much control over their existence as a boat in a storm. We should have educated the parents instead. They were the ones allowing their children to consume junk food, discouraging outdoor play and possibly even forcing them to attend tuition classes instead of playing with friends. Moreover, if these parenting methods were reflections of societal expectations of how children should be raised, the scale of the problem was far beyond the scope of 25 immature medical students. I couldn’t help but question whether our advice to the children was ultimately futile.

Thankfully, our stations changed soon after. I left behind the stadiometers and moved to the ENT station. 

My first patient sat before me. I asked his name, which I promptly forgot two seconds later, and chalked up his age as “young and insignificant.” I picked up a tuning fork from the table beside me, and he began to whimper. I patiently observed his reaction, trying to understand what might be causing him to behave so strangely. His eyes seemed to be trying to wish the tuning fork away. I reassured him that I wasn’t planning on shoving it inside his ear, and he quickly calmed down.

I explained the procedures for the Rinne and Weber hearing tests, telling him I would place the tuning fork at various points on his head and he’d need to let me know when he stopped hearing the vibrations. These tests would help me determine if he had a hearing problem, which ear was affected, and whether it was due to an ear canal obstruction (conductive hearing loss) or a nerve injury (sensorineural hearing loss). He nodded five times during my explanation, leading me to believe, beyond a doubt, that he was either a genius or a con artist. I realized I would spend the time trying to determine which one he was, rather than assessing his conductive and sensorineural hearing. 

To perform the Rinne test, I struck the tuning fork and placed it on the mastoid bone behind his right ear. I instructed him to raise his hand when he could no longer hear the sound. After a few seconds, as the vibrations of the tuning fork gradually diminished, he raised his hand. I then moved the tuning fork’s prongs close to his ear and asked if he could still hear it. He listened intently for a few seconds — during which I stopped feeling the fork’s vibrations entirely — before shaking his head. I almost felt like telling the kid that I had just diagnosed him with hopelessness. After all, it was my job and moral duty to counsel him about his condition. 

However, before jumping to conclusions, I decided to confirm my diagnosis with the Weber test. I struck the tuning fork again and placed it at the top of his forehead. When I asked if he could hear the sound, his eyes converged on my hand with a curious expression, as if trying to see the vibrations. He replied that he wasn’t sure. I didn’t bother asking the real question — which ear was the sound louder in. Clearly, he hadn’t understood how the tests were supposed to work.

I set aside the tuning fork, feigned seriousness, and slowly explained the tests’ procedures again. The kid nodded just once this time, but that didn’t reassure me. While it could mean he understood better, it could also mean he understood even less.

After repeating the tests I obtained theoretically sound responses. The Rinne test was negative in his right ear and the Weber test was localized to his right ear, indicating right-sided conductive hearing loss. Such findings typically suggest an obstruction in the ear canal — most likely earwax.

I picked up an otoscope, and the student’s eyes instantly widened with a mix of trepidation and reverence. He clung to my promise not to insert anything into his ear, but I was about to break our pact. I reassured him that I would just take a peek and that it wouldn’t hurt. Before he could respond, I swiftly positioned the otoscope at his ear. He squirmed, as children often do out of habit when facing medical procedures, regardless of their invasiveness. However, he quickly settled once he realized it wasn’t painful. Meanwhile, my own stomach began to churn. 

A few months earlier, I had been studying late into the night in my room. I could tell by the way my friend strolled in and collapsed onto my bed, his semi-solid form molding to its shape, he had grown weary of his exam preparation. Seeing that I would no longer make any more progress memorizing the TNM staging of cervical cancer, I closed my book and asked him what was new.

He told me to choose any object in my room. Surprised by his randomness, I rolled my eyes, which landed on my favorite dusty fluorescent jacket hanging on the door. He then asked if I could guess what it would taste like. I narrowed my eyes, and a rough, dust-filled taste burst into my mind. Turning back to my friend, I was quite impressed by how he was unapologetically steering us towards failing our exams. He explained that he had read somewhere that we could imagine the taste of anything we saw, even if we hadn’t tasted it in real life.

Back in the present, as I stared down the magnified view of a large glob of earwax in the student’s ear, I could confirm my friend’s theory was accurate. The taste, indeed, seemed greasy, a bit sticky and salty. Suppressing my gag reflex and projecting some annoyance at the student, I advised him to visit a doctor to restore his ability to listen in class. 

Small conversations

After spending considerable time acknowledging the ear wax-producing ceruminous glands, I moved on to the psychiatry station. This was the station I was most excited about. I enjoyed talking to small children; they wore their hearts on their sleeves, said amusing things and kept me entertained. Our task at this station involved asking specific leading questions to assess common issues such as ADHD, learning disorders and signs of depression. Additionally, we were to counsel girls on menstruation.

A scrawny, freckled boy sat before me, looking nervous. I asked how he was doing. “Good,” he replied. I inquired about school, asking if everything was okay. “Yes,” he said. Are there any issues in class? Are your grades good? “Yes.” Do you have friends? “Yes.” Is everything all right between you and your friends? “Yes.” At any point in time, has anyone told you that your behavior isn’t appropriate? “No.” Is there anything you’d like to discuss? We can talk about anything that you want. “No.”

I stared at him blankly, and he stared back. Concluding that he had long outgrown the need for my advice, I sent him off. Another girl took his place, and the exchange played out similarly. Perhaps I was too intimidating? I didn’t think I was. I spoke directly in everyday situations, but I used an overly sing-song voice with patients and kids to soften my demeanor.

This wasn’t going well. I wasn’t entertained, nor was I confronted with any high-stakes, life-or-death scenarios. Sure, I had always desired a peaceful life, but I hadn’t realized that peace would inevitably come with boredom.

The little girl with too many “best friends”

A tiny girl approached the chair next, making a small leap to climb into it. She settled with her back hunched and her legs dangling, giving me a scatterbrained expression. I asked her name and a few basic questions, which she answered with little enthusiasm. “Do you have friends?” I inquired as politely as possible — any softer and I would have been singing. She said she had a best friend. I nodded encouragingly. “Can you tell me more about her?”

“Yes, she’s my best friend. We eat together, play together and have lots of fun. But sometimes, she doesn’t talk to me.” 

“Why do you think that is?” 

“I don’t know,” she said dejectedly. “When she does that, I stop talking to her too. But then, after a few days, everything returns to how it was.”

Now this was more engaging. At least she was responding to my questions. Perhaps I could now move on to the actual problems I was supposed to evaluate.

“Okay.” I paused. “How are your studies—”

“I have another best friend,” she interrupted, looking directly at me. “And sometimes, both of them start talking to each other and ignore me. Then I feel sad.”

“Why do you think they do that?”

“I don’t know.”

I “hmmed” and asked slowly, “Do you think you might have done something to upset them?”

She looked up with a concentrated expression. “One time, she asked me for water, but I didn’t give it to her because everyone drinks my water, eats my food and finishes all of it.”

“That’s not very nice of them,” I agreed, remembering all the times my own friends’ parasitism peaked. 

“And one time she didn’t do her homework, so I told the teacher and the teacher scolded her,” she added, looking at me.

I tried to detect a hint of humor, but she seemed genuinely confused. Maybe she had some form of intellectual disability, I considered, staring at her, nonplussed. “Do you think what you did may have annoyed her?”

“Yes. But I said sorry afterward, and then we became friends again.”

I had forgotten how dynamic and random childhood friendships were. “Well, that’s good. Now, do you get good grades in…” Even as I asked the question, I felt like a hypocrite. The girl was in fourth grade, and I was quantifying her intellectual capabilities based on test results. 

In contrast, I had never taken a test until my 10th-grade board exams. I had no right to judge her, considering my history. I didn’t want to propagate the notion that failing to obtain good grades indicated a mental condition. 

Luckily, the girl interrupted my question. “I have another best friend,” she said with the same blank look, but her voice was enthusiastic now. “His name is Virat Kohli.”

As in the Virat Kohli, the world-famous cricketer? 

In my first year of medical school, I learned about the urethra and its two muscles that prevent urine leakage from the bladder. One, the internal urethral sphincter, opens involuntarily when the bladder fills with urine. The other, the external urethral sphincter, is under voluntary control — or so it was said to be. 

What the little girl said almost made me forget normal physiology — I very nearly wet myself. 

I felt as if the world had faded away. What remained was me, the girl, and — according to her — a 30-something-year-old cricketer attending fourth grade in a small school in Jodhpur, India.

I composed myself. “Do… umm — is Virat Kohli here right now?”

The girl nodded, and I suddenly understood why people found movies like Annabelle scary. “He’s right there,” she said, turning around and pointing toward a mass of students at the anthropometric station.

I couldn’t see anyone in particular. But then again, I doubted the girl was pointing to someone specific. Perhaps he wasn’t even tangible. The crushing weight of responsibility suddenly hit me like a train. Was this girl having hallucinations? What if I missed diagnosing her, her condition worsened, and she became a mortal danger to others? How many lives were at stake, hinging on my juvenile clinical judgment? The predicament was bigger than I had imagined. I wanted to be responsible for patients, but was I capable enough? How many budding serial killers would I need to miss before I gained the experience to detect them accurately and confidently?

As I tried to get a read on the girl, she met my gaze with the same emotionless expression. Yes, she fit the pre-serial killer profile perfectly. Her cute demeanor was most certainly part of the act.

I tried to recall the signs of hallucinations and how to rule them out. “Does Virat Kohli talk and interact with you?”

“Yes. Virat is his actual name, but we call him Viraht Kohli.”

I hadn’t asked for the information, but my body responded. I could once again hear the clamor of the students and the residents scolding my batchmates. The blurred world came back into focus, and suddenly, the girl seemed like an average child. I felt a wave of annoyance wash over me. A slight miscommunication between us had almost led to me wetting my pants.

“Is there anything else you’d like to talk to me about?” I tried to mask my irritation.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

I observed her, unsure of what to say. I saw an expectation in her eyes.

“Do you want to tell me more about your friends?” I asked tentatively.

She nodded eagerly and continued telling me about her other best friends. It turned out that even the children who pulled her hair were her best friends. I was beginning to consider diagnosing her with Dependent Personality Disorder.

But I was no longer annoyed. I now felt as if I could empathize with this little girl. She was enjoying the chance to share her life’s problems. 

Someone to listen

I recalled that when I was ten, my biggest concerns revolved around friends: Who was mean to me, who I wanted to be friends with but wasn’t cool enough for, who I had a crush on and so on. I wanted to tell someone my age at the time, but no one listened attentively. After all, if a child can voluntarily sit still and pay attention for a long time, there’s a high chance that something is wrong with their upbringing. That’s why I realized I needed someone older and more mature to listen to my “serious” problems.

I had been excited to talk to the children today, but I didn’t expect their problems to be genuine. I approached the interactions like an ignorant adult, thinking their concerns were tiny and insignificant. I felt guilty. So for the next 15 minutes, I paid close attention to every bit of nonsense that exited the girl’s mouth. 

She told me about her best friend who stole her homework, pushed her and ate her lunch. She had another best friend who told lies to others about how mean she was. Someone else kept stealing her bottles and pens. There was a teacher who scolded her for no reason, though sometimes it was because she didn’t complete her homework. At home, her older brother annoyed her.

I “hmmed” and “aahed,” acknowledged her stories, asked leading questions based on what she told me, until finally, she stopped talking.

There was a peaceful silence between us. “Is there anything else you want to talk about?”

“No,” she said, but didn’t leave.

I waited thirty seconds, but she continued to watch me.

“Okay, you should go to the next station now. They will check to ensure there’s nothing wrong with your eyes,” I said. “I enjoyed talking to you.”

“I liked it too,” she replied in a sing-song voice before climbing out of her chair. 

As she tottered away, I considered my role in our interaction. I had wanted to make her feel understood, give her a space to share and provide relief. However, I hadn’t given her any advice or suggestions about her problems that would help in the long run.

In my experience, when people thrust their advice at me it makes me hesitant to share my emotions. The girl’s talkative nature might have mitigated that discomfort, but I didn’t want to take the same risk with her. As a result, I changed nothing in her life. I simply listened to her, hopefully made her feel accepted in the process, but I made no lasting impact.

Perhaps my duty was to explain what she should do, hammer it into her head, and push for change. While that approach might have left her feeling misunderstood, maybe it would have been more beneficial for her in the long run.

Or maybe there was some middle ground. The possible ways I could have handled the situation were endless. I couldn’t decide which one would have been the right decision, the responsible thing to do.

But what if responsibility doesn’t necessarily mean always doing the right thing? Of course, I would strive to take the correct course of action. But perhaps it’s not so straightforward — distinguishing what is correct and what isn’t. Maybe responsibility isn’t about always doing what is right, but rather about making a conscious effort to do the right thing.

[Ting Cui edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post An Indian Medical Student’s Perspective on Responsibility appeared first on Fair Observer.

Twenty-two years later, the news broke: Bennifer is over — again. In the interim, there had been an engagement, two marriages (to other people), five children, more than 18 new fragrance endorsements, a few box office bombs, several spells in rehab and an Oscar. And, for a while, the kind of media delirium that produces headlines like “BEN AND JEN: BODY LANGUAGE: WHAT IT MEANS,” “J.LO: ‘BEN DEFINITELY WEARS THE PANTS’” and “STRIPPER TELLS OF NIGHT WITH BEN.” Perhaps the most memorable was “BEN AND JEN SAY ‘NOT YET.’” In September 2003, Lopez visited her spiritual guide, spent two hours with her, then announced she was calling off her hugely publicized wedding with Ben Affleck. So the most recent breakup conjures a sense of déjà vu.

Here’s my question: Why? No, not why does this pair keep getting together, splitting up and then kissing-and-making-up before parting again? The more interesting question is: Why on earth are we so fascinated by them? For that matter, why are we fascinated by celebrity couples and their endless caprice?

Taylor-Burton: The beginning of celebrity couple coverage

Precedents can be found in the life of Elizabeth Taylor, whose combustible affair with Richard Burton imploded in 1974, after 12 years, only to regenerate itself in 1975. They married each other for the second time, but this marriage ended in less than a year. Taylor’s volatile romance is customarily considered the first modern celebrity coupling in the sense that it was copiously covered by the media. Because of this, it effectively promoted audience interest in how the other half love.

The Taylor-Burton amorous entanglement was a commodity — open, visible, public — compared to, for example, Ava Gardner’s erratic but essentially private romance with Frank Sinatra in the same period. With Gardner, the media were made to work for their stories.

Taylor, probably more than Burton, practically handed out press packs. Their relationship was a romance in the golden age of the American dream factory. As such, it was glitzy, glamorous and, at times, gaudy. There might have been some hesitance, perhaps even reluctance to stampede into Gardner’s and Sinatra’s private lives, especially as there were spouses and, more importantly, children to consider. Were the media likely to contribute to marital disharmony and even the sadness of innocent children merely by reporting the relationship? Taylor removed those kinds of uncertainties. She practically directed events, which involved double-home-destruction on a catastrophic scale.

Taylor, like Gardner, reminded the world that women could be and often were prime movers in relationships. Sinatra went on to become one of the preeminent entertainers of the 20th century. But during the marriage (1951-1957), Gardner, not he, was the main attraction. One inquisitive enquirer once asked her why she stayed with the 119-pound Sinatra. Gardner replied “Well, I’ll tell you — nineteen pounds is cock.”

Similarly, Taylor was the force field that pulled in media from all over the world. Being the consummate Hollywood star — Burton had learned his art on the stage — Taylor knew the value of ostentatiousness. She behaved as if she were always in front of a camera. She usually was.

Tabloids and the new voyeurism

There was nothing comparable until 1999, when Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt appeared together at the Emmys and announced a relationship that was, for all intents and purposes, conducted in front of cameras. This included a lavish Malibu wedding in July 2000. The marriage lasted until 2005, by which time J.Lo’s epic relationship with Affleck was known, had taken over as the celebrity coupling du jour and, in time, supplied a narrative of Homeric proportions.

There were other breakups that took the entertainment world by storm: Britney Spears and Kevin Federline separated in 2006. Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz broke up in 2007. But Lopez and Affleck was epochal: It characterized a period when the media’s interest in the unappetizing areas of celebrity life was rising and audiences gave their approval to the increased coverage. One way they did this was by buying tabloid magazines.

Sales of the likes of Us Weekly, People and Star have slipped in recent years as social media has become the main conduit of celebrity gossip. But their impact in the early 2000s was appreciable and played no small part in cultivating our near-voyeuristic interest in glamorous couples. It could be plausibly argued that there was little new in this. Some might maintain that audiences had long been attracted to dreadful experiences while they remained at safe distance. Living through awful times vicariously may have its rewards: Just imagining how others feel rather than actually feeling is a pain with its own analgesic properties.

The decision by Aniston and Pitt to split and Pitt’s subsequent romance with Angelina Jolie was the affair that shook tabloid journalism. It alerted editors that audiences enjoyed learning about how people who otherwise led charmed lives were just as susceptible to the same painful ordeals and privations as anybody else.

This is part of the reason for our prolonged captivation with Lopez and Affleck and, to a lesser extent, other celeb couples. We might envy their lifestyles and adulation. We might even engage in wish-fulfillment and imagine what the world must be like with an A-list partner. Yet, there is gratification in learning that even the world’s most fabulous couples experience mundane squabbles and domestic discord, reminding us that beneath the glamor, they too are just as human as we are.

Performative coupledom and authenticity

That’s not the only reason we’re drawn to celebrity couples. Harper’s Bazaar writer Marie-Claire Chappet uses the term “performative coupledom” to describe the way many couples like J.Lo and Affleck present themselves to the media for our delectation. Chappet argues that celebrity couples are not passive recipients: They pull out as many stops as they can to maximize the inquisitiveness of the media. Coupledom can be a valuable and highly commodifiable item.

Chappet also suggests there is a kind of synergy in performative coupling. “Just look at Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez,” she writes, “both huge stars whose wattage flickered all the brighter once they got back together. In fact, in many ways, this couple are the ultimate embodiment of this trend.” The colossal coverage given the latest breakup underlines her point.

Neither party swept gracefully upwards after the 2003 breakup. Affleck had scored a triumph with his Oscar-winning film Argo, but had featured in flops, too. He struggled with alcohol dependency and had at least three periods in rehab. Lopez’s career also seemed to spiral downwards when she appeared on the television series American Idol. But to her dubious credit, her Super Bowl halftime show appearance in 2020 elicited 1,312 complaints from viewers to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). She was 50 years old at the time and most of the complaints were about the sexual explicitness of her performance. The latest rift will surely regenerate interest in the ill-starred duo.

No celebrity couple is perfect. Even the best-matched partnerships hit unexpected and often hidden snags, obstacles that complicate or even destroy relationships. If a couple is seen as just too good to be true, the adage kicks in: It usually is. Celebrity couples must have the imprimatur of genuineness to captivate us. This means extremely short affairs, like Kim Kardashian’s 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries, are dismissed as stunts. Or, in the case of Britney Spears, whose marriage to Jason Alexander lasted 55 hours, they’re viewed as false-starts.

The seeming contradiction between an authentic relationship and performativity is smoothed over by audiences who like to see people at their best and worst. Today’s celebrity-savvy audiences suspect staging here and there and accept it. They are celebrities, after all. But couples must humanize themselves and remind audiences of their authenticity with everyday emotions, quarrels and fall-outs that serve to maintain captivation. An occasional rage helps, too.

J.Lo and Affleck may be waving goodbye to each other, but they might just as well be waving a banner bearing the slogan, “This is our pitch for immortality.” Individually, they’re probably worth a lot less than they are together. But even breaking-up unites them as far as the media and its audiences are concerned. The heartbroken pair appear to be marching toward celebrity immortality. Meanwhile, we wait for the reconciliation.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of Celebrity Culture, now in its third edition.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post This Is What Makes Celebrity Couple Drama Interesting to Us appeared first on Fair Observer.

On 17 October 1947 my father returned with the tidings that a special train for government servants would be leaving for Amritsar the next day. We packed our meagre belongings in no time. We had expected reserved seats in the train. However, when we reached the Chaklala railway station we saw a sea of surging humanity with all sorts of baggage already there. There was no question of reservation; it was free for all. An unusually long train could be seen at some distance.

There were very few coolies and they demanded fifty rupees a piece to carry the baggage. My father, Vijay and I carried the trunks. My sister and mother managed to drag the bedrolls till I was able to come back to carry one. We made for the nearest compartment. The first batch of occupants tried in vain to block entry to newcomers saying there was no accommodation. Those outside first begged and then became abusive and aggressive. The occupants had to relent more out of fear than sympathy. More families arrived by the minute. They did not ask, did not care and shoved their baggage through the door which had been half-barred by the pressure of baggage of the occupants. ‘There is no space,’ someone shouted from inside. ‘Never mind, we will go and sit on the roof. Just let our bags in.’ Soon there were more people on the roof of the train than inside. A large number of men clung to the doors and windows of compartments.

Our compartment carried a notice in English and Urdu: ‘To seat 17 persons only.’ I counted thirty men, women and children.

Soon the small compartment became a mound of trunks, bedrolls and all sorts of packets, big and small. Children clambered up the heaps of baggage and made a sport of rolling down, going up, and rolling down repeatedly.

We were relieved to notice that platoons of Gurkha soldiers mounted guard in front of the engine, in the middle of the train, and behind the last compartment of the train. They were protected by sandbags and armed with machine guns.

Having settled down in the safety of the compartment, all of us heaved a sort of collective sigh of relief. Across from us a newly married young couple sat snuggled together, the woman still in her bridal finery and forearms covered with ivory and multicoloured glass bangles. An old woman sat next to the man, probably his mother. Looking at the young couple, Vijay and I exchanged mischievous, knowing glances about what they might be feeling. Armed Gurkha soldiers patrolled the length of the train on both sides a number of times before they gave the all-clear. Then we heard the guard’s whistle. The engine hooted in response and the train started moving slowly. Soon it was dusk and the compartment was only lit dimly. Passengers began opening their packets of food — stuffed parathas and other snacks for the evening meal, some offering to share their food with others, a tradition of railway journeys in the country.

We were in the middle of our meal when we heard the sound of gunfire. The train came to a sudden halt and then began to reverse. After what seemed to be a long time, the gunfire became sporadic and then stopped. After that there was nothing to do except to try and sleep. But there was no place to even stretch our limbs. I dreamt I was sleeping on a plush bed in a palace. A jolt of the train woke me up and I found that I was lying on a heap of luggage. Such dreams came in repeated short snatches. Everyone was probably having similar dreams. It was indeed a long night. My father pulled out his pocket watch off and on and announced the time for general benefit. At long last, dawn peeped through the window shutters. Some people starting going to the toilet, the door of which was somehow kept free from any obstruction. Someone announced that we should be reaching Lahore soon. My father lifted the window shutter to check the name of the station the train was passing by. We were barely halfway to Lahore. He saw a crowd at the platform waving for the train to stop. Presumably they were refugees like us waiting to be evacuated. But the train did not stop. It was already overloaded and there was a risk that there might be an ambush. Those were not the times when people were bothered much about others.

About an hour later the train stopped again. Again there was the sound of exchange of fire. Someone climbed down from the roof and said that a burning tree had been laid across the rails and a crowd, shouting slogans and firing shots, had surrounded the front of the train not knowing that the train had a Gurkha escort. Instinctively, my mother stopped distributing whatever was left of the stock of our parathas. She whispered to us that we had to make do till we reached Lahore. ‘There we can buy something more to eat,’ she offered by way of reassurance. We understood.

But the whole day passed and there was no sign of Lahore. The train stopped twice more for extended periods. The sound of sloganeering mobs and the sight of distant arson accompanied by exchange of fire between the rioters and Gurkhas made us down the window shutters, keep quiet and hope for the best. For the time being hunger and thirst were kept at bay.

The train picked up speed and Vijay, still ‘Aslam’, started reciting chal chal fata fut, chal chal fata fut – a children’s rhyme mimicking the sound produced by wheels of an express train. That lifted the tension in the compartment.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from A Bonsai Tree: An Autobiography, Narendra Luther, Niyogi Books, 2017.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post A Bonsai Tree: An Autobiography appeared first on Fair Observer.

The inception of Chandigarh began with the trauma of partition of the country in 1947 and the urgent need to build a new capital city for the now truncated state of Punjab apportioned to the Indian side, as well as the pressing need to shelter millions of homeless refugees. Besides the great healing touch that Chandigarh imparted to the traumatised refugees by accommodating them in the new city and giving shelter, its aesthetic landscape perhaps too played a soothing role with its mantle of greenery clothing its built form of brick and concrete.

Before one delves deeper into Chandigarh’s landscaping, it is essential to address the question as to what landscape really is? Whenever we experience a building in an urban setting, there is either a foreground or a background comprising some component of vegetation or built-form. So cities are experienced in motion as one continuum of images: both built-up and landscapes. This underscores how critical is the role of nature in cities for a holistic and humane experience of urban areas.

In the Indian tradition knowledge was always transmitted by the guru/teacher to the disciple beneath a tree as was the occurrence of spiritual enlightenment. Trees were always planted around temples and worshipped, signifying their importance. In the medieval times in the walled cities of India, because of the fear of invaders, the built-form grain was very dense with winding narrow alleys and self-shading courtyards. The community focal point called chaupal usually had some big tree or a grove of shade giving sacred trees like banyans or peepuls where people congregated. As the structures were small and low, people could easily connect with the elements of nature and cosmos with everyday use of roof terraces and courtyards. So there was always a connection with the elements of nature and an experience of surrounding distant landscape, unlike in the present clutter of high-rise, densely spaced blocks in the cities mushrooming all over the country.

When the Mughals came they brought to India the great tradition of ‘Formal Gardens’ that basically originated from the Persian Gardens with their core elements of symmetry, the quadrant charbagh and use of water for cooling. Le Corbusier often visited the nearby Mughal Gardens at Pinjore located close to Chandigarh to observe and sketch copiously for possible solutions to deal with the challenge of climatic issues for his proposed buildings. With the advent of the British Raj in India about 200 years ago, it was decided to use the tools of architecture and landscape to make a political statement of imperial assertion. The grand Central Vista at New Delhi between the Viceroy’s Palace (Rashtrapati Bhawan) placed atop the Raisina hill and India Gate is a grandiose, monumental language of landscape. The British civil lines and army cantonments spread all over the country located outside the old, native cities too had Edwin Lutyens’ kind of layouts with beautiful, neat tree-lined avenues, gardens and parks.

When the Chandigarh project came up, the ruling elites of the post- Independence India steeped in the hierarchal social structure inherited from the British, too wanted to get away from the unhygienic narrow alleys of the old, traditional cities. The old bazaars might have been very picturesque and exotic for the visitors with their aromas and colours, but if one wanted to live there it was not all that romantic for the haves and neo-rich of the country. When A.L. Fletcher, an important bureaucrat tasked with the preparation of the brief for the new city for the future architect, began his work, there were a lot of uncertainties. Basic questions like a city for how many people, what should be the budget, etc., needed to be addressed. What will be the nature of the city: administrative, commercial or mixed? Fletcher, who was widely travelled and familiar with the Garden City movement in Britain was very impressed by the Ebenezer Howard’s concept for green towns. Though such experimental towns in Britain were much smaller settlements as an inspirational model for the Chandigarh project, it was nevertheless decided that Chandigarh should have the core attributes of a Garden City. Dr M.S. Randhawa, a distinguished senior bureaucrat and a qualified agricultural scientist at that time, too, had an enormous contribution in the landscaping for the city. He exhorted that the new city would urgently require a ‘mantle of greenery’, as the buildings in the city would come up much faster than the time taken by plantations to take root.

The original team of American architects and planners comprising Albert Mayer and Mathew Nowicki who were initially assigned the Chandigarh project had to be soon replaced by Le Corbusier, owing to the tragic death of Nowicki in a plane crash and Mayer’s inability to continue in his absence. However, the Americans too had shown a strong predilection for weaving in a lot of landscaping components in their conceptual master plan proposed for the city. Many of the seed ideas underlined by them in this regard, became precursors of what Corbusier too developed later on, including the alignment of the city plan towards the mountains.

During Corbusier’s training in an art school in his home town La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, his brilliant and inspiring teacher Charles L’Eplattenier, made the students go out to the mountains to vigorously sketch pine trees there. They left a great mark on him as he used them as motifs in his early residential projects as kind of modern decoration on their edifices. He was always collecting a repertoire of possible ideas and forms from his observations of nature for future application, and the pine tree became one of those motifs. So his training as a landscape painter influenced him towards establishing a special relationship between landscape and architecture.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Le Corbusier Rediscovered: Chandigarh And Beyond, edited by Rajnish Wattas and Deepika Gandhi, Niyogi Books, 2018.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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If you’re reading this foreword, it’s probably because, while you’re in the habit of skipping a foreword when you see one in print, that habit has not yet transferred to text on a screen. We all do it, of course. If I’m picking up a book, I presumably want to hear from the author, and not someone else the editor has decided to inject at the beginning of the book. Still, we probably skip over forewords more or less without thinking. What Ranjani Iyer Mohanty has done is take this unthinking reflex into conscious consideration. She asks: “What do I really have to gain from reading a foreword?” As you will see, this question is materially equivalent to “What do I have to gain from reading a thoughtful, knowledgeable and invested fellow-reader?” And the answer to that is, quite evidently, “A great deal.”

I hesitate to call myself knowledgeable, but I am invested and, I hope, thoughtful. I will testify that Ranjani has convinced me to pay more attention not only to my reading but to the way I approach reading. As I write this on Sunday, Western culture’s traditional time to slow down and pay attention, I am reminded that, if I am sitting down to read a book at all, I ought not to be in a rush. Reading is leisure, and in a world dominated by the false binary of “work” and “entertainment,” we must fight to preserve that one scrap of time that is more serious than entertainment and more liberal than work. So, the next time I open a book, I will turn to page i and not just to page 1. I hope you will consider doing the same.

Anton Schauble

Reader, Editor and Occasional Foreword-Injector

Whenever I crack open a book — like Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, which my daughter recently gave me as a birthday present — I turn to the foreword first.

By foreword, I do mean the foreword, not the introduction or the preface. I say this with a specious confidence because I only recently discovered that they’re not the same. While all are located before the main body of the book and offer contextual information to readers, they differ in terms of writer and purpose. An introduction is written by the author and, as the name suggests, introduces readers to the main topics in the book.  A preface is also written by the author and “tells readers how and why the book came into being.” Both can be found in works of fiction and non-fiction. A prologue is written by the author but from the perspective of a character in the story, often gives details of what happened before the main story began, and is therefore found only in works of fiction.

My slight annoyance with introductions and prefaces and prologues is that the authors have already had ample opportunity to say whatever they want in the main body of their work. So why should they be qualifying it with an add-on? Did they forget to say something? Do they just like the sound of their own words?

A foreword is different. It is written by someone other than the author of the book and therefore brings something new, different and hopefully insightful. The foreword is generally written by an authority either on the author or the topic, or both. Its purpose is to increase the credibility of the author, the relevance of the book and ultimately attract more readers. Oftentimes, the fame of the foreword writer itself is sufficient to improve book sales, regardless of the quality of the book or even the foreword. Today, any foreword written by Taylor Swift may well push an average book up the ranks into a The New York Times bestseller.

While a foreword is spatially placed before the main section of the book, it is always written after the main text — sometimes years or even centuries later. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was first published in the early 1800s, but M.K. Joseph wrote a foreword to it in the early 2000s. This distance gives the foreword a certain independence from the text.

A foreword is also different from a book review or critique in that the foreword is, as a rule, favorable. It is usually written by someone who loves or at least values the book. In some sense, reading a forward can serve a similar function to a book club meeting where you get to hear other people’s perspectives of a book. Only, with a foreword, you get to read a singular, coherent and favorable perspective, and you get to do so in an uninterrupted manner.

Moving forwards with forewords

Most people skip the foreword, and they have good reasons to do so. They may be excited to get directly to the story. They may not want someone else’s thoughts on or interpretations of the work, preferring to make up their own mind. They may not want any context before they start reading the work and indeed want to be surprised.

But I find forewords fascinating. Isabel Allende said, “Every life of a character is within a context.” Similarly, I think every life of a book is within a context. And how nice if some authority can explain that context to me, or at least their vision of the context. 

A foreword can act as a guide and tell us how to navigate the book. It can provide succinct summaries and insightful observations. It can explain certain complexities of the work or place it on a more philosophical or sociological plane. It can highlight the uncommon or link it to other similar works. It can explain why the subject matters. It can praise the author and the writing. It can help us relate to older works in several ways: by highlighting the work’s timeless concepts and emotions, by explaining that older context or by showing the work’s relevance to present times and current audiences. It can draw connections between both writers (the author of the book and the writer of the foreword) and thereby also hope to connect with the reader. Ultimately, a foreword should and can provide the context to make a book shine.

Forewords also have the advantage of catering to my highly efficient — ok, lazy — side. Sometimes, after reading a brilliant foreword, I feel so fulfilled, I don’t bother to read the rest of the book.

One amazing foreword

The virtue of some forewords lies in the famous personality of the foreword’s writer. However, in order for the foreword to be memorable, it needs to go beyond their fame to establish a visceral link. Oprah Winfrey’s 2015 foreword to Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is not just the convergence of two famous personalities but a friend commenting on the writing of a friend. In Maya’s memoir of her childhood, Oprah finds herself: “I was that girl who loved to read. I was that girl raised by my Southern grandmother. I was that girl raped at nine, who muted the telling of it.” Oprah hopes that by highlighting this deep connection, the many people, particularly women, who feel an affinity with her will feel a similar affinity towards Maya.

The virtue of some forewords lies in the shared topical expertise of the foreword’s writer and the book’s author. Such is the case with influential diplomat Richard Holbrooke’s foreword to eminent historian Margaret Macmillan’s book Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. Holbrooke served as US Ambassador to Germany and the UN as well as US Assistant Secretary of State for two continents (Asia and Europe). His practical overview compliments Macmillan’s detailed academic work.

There are even some forewords in which the author and the foreword writer are closely related, and the virtue of these forewords lies in how intimately the foreword writer knows the author. Christopher Tolkien wrote the foreword for his father’s 50th anniversary edition of The Hobbit. More recently, Rebecca Walker wrote the foreword for her mother Alice Walker’s book We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For.

Then, there are forewords that do not rest on any special characteristic of the writer other than the strength of their own insightfulness. The virtue of the foreword lies in the foreword itself.

Andrew N. Wilson’s foreword to Excellent Women is one of these. Wilson is not a famous personality; he’s not an expert on the subject of “excellent women”; he’s not Pym’s son. But he has written an amazing foreword.

Wilson places Excellent Women in context in several ways. He explains the title from a sociological perspective. He describes the economic atmosphere in which the book was written in 1952. He compares and contrasts the book to famous works written a generation earlier, and finds that while “the conventional romantic novel ends with marriage,” Pym “very deftly turns comic tradition on its head.”

Then, Wilson wades into Pym’s personal life, her friends, her particular style of writing and how her life is reflected in this book. His subtle observations — like those of the author — speak volumes. He compares Pym to her close friend, the poet Phillip Larkin, and finds both similar in important aspects: “muted in their emotional response to life,” feeling that “life cannot hold out very exciting opportunities” and having “their eyes fixed firmly on the inevitability of age.”

Wilson concludes by saying that “any amount of social change does not alter the fact that the majority of human beings find life emotionally unfulfilling, and humdrum.” While this statement is unsettling in its nearness to a universal truth, it’s also strangely comforting. I find relief just in hearing someone voice it. Of still more comfort is Wilson’s observation that Barbara Pym’s books continue to speak to such people. 

Forewords and daughters

The foreword is not only another person’s perspective on the book, but it’s a person who is speaking directly to me, the reader. It seems personal, revealing not only of the book and its author but also of the writer of the foreword. And when the foreword writer says, “I feel this way about the book,” “The book has led me to feel this way,” “This is how I interpret the book,” or, “This is how this book connects to this universal phenomenon,” it gives me the license to do the same.

How wonderful it would be if I wrote a foreword to each of my most loved books and left them for my daughter when she comes to read those same books. Then, once my daughter finished reading the book, she could write a backword for me.

Backwords — more commonly called afterwords — are less usual than forewords but they do exist and appear at the end of the book. The writer of the afterword has the opportunity to write more freely, without fear of giving away any secrets or spoiling the plot because the reader has already read the book. They can even discuss alternative endings or offer a different perspective.

George Orwell’s iconic 1984 has a foreword by American novelist Thomas Pynchon and an afterword by social psychologist Erich Fromm. Some editions of To Kill a Mockingbird have a foreword by Oprah Winfrey and an afterword by writer-musician James McBride.

Mind you, my daughter has now far surpassed me in her reading and thinking, and so would no doubt be well able to write nuanced, insightful, humorous forewords for me. Then I would have the role of writing the afterwords for her. Forwards and backwards. Forewords and backwords. Mother and daughter. Daughter and mother.

After finishing Excellent Women, I called my daughter and told her how much I loved the book. It was the perfect birthday present. And of course, the foreword was the icing on the cake.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post A Book’s Foreword Is Your Greatest Forgotten Resource appeared first on Fair Observer.

Her grief into joy. 

Her rejections into approvals. 

If no one believes in her 

It does not matter. 

She believes in herself. 

Nothing stops her. 

No one can touch her. 

She is woman

Sita, born of the earth, raised among sages, the non-uterine daughter of King Janak of Mithila, devoted wife of Lord Ram, and single mother of twins Kush and Luv, is the central female character of the Hindu epic Ramayana. Sita, as an integral part of the Indian psyche, has been venerated by Valmiki in the first chapter itself,

Sita, the best one among ladies, a possessor of all best qualities befitting an ideal lady, the one who is as though fashioned by a divine marvel, born in Janak’s fany and became Dashrath’s daughter-in-law and she who is the loving wife and an ever-amiable alter ego of Ram, even she followed Ram to forests, as with Lady Rohini following the Moon… 

A paragon of beauty, intellect, dedication, and sacrifice, Sita, the ideal woman, struggled with maintaining her dignity, her identity, and her rightful place in a patriarchal society. Worshipped throughout India, she is considered a symbol of chastity, the wife who stayed unwavering in her devotion and loyalty towards her husband Ram, like Ruth who, swearing eternal fidelity to her husband, said, ‘Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God.”

It is believed that Sita’s birth preordained the elimination of evil forces, and that she was the link between the opposing forces of righteousness and evil, symbolised by Ram and Ravan respectively. Her sense of dharma or duty was superior to that of her husband, the most perfect of men, the maryada purush Ram, who sacrificed his conjugal life at the altar of ‘higher’ duties, first to fulfill the expectations of him as a son, and subsequently, that as a king. Sita’s devotion and love for Ram, her firmness of purpose in upholding the truth, even at the cost of her own life, are all put to the test. Ram, her beloved husband, publicly declares that he rescued her to save his own honour, and Sita is made to prove her chastity multiple times. She passes each test and wins hands down, like the devotee who triumphs over the god he worships.

Fiercely independent, Sita dared to challenge social norms and break loose from the shackles of patriarchy, while making her own choices with courage and dignity. She did not allow her life situation to choose for her, nor did she let the abuse dishearten her. Finding strength in the knowledge of her own uniqueness—self-confident, self-disciplined, and selfless—she chose to uphold her self-respect, thereby exemplifying the power of womankind. Sita’s offer of agnipariksha (after the battle) was not an act of self-annihilation, nor that of surrendering to the whim of an unreasonable husband. On the contrary, her emerging from the fire unscathed was proof of her defiance in challenging her husband’s aspersions, showing him to be so flawed in his judgement that the gods had to come and pull up Ram for his foolishness. When a pregnant Sita was abandoned deceitfully in the cruelest manner, placing her and her unborn child’s life in jeopardy, she demonstrated to the world that it was possible for an abandoned single mother to not only survive, but successfully raise two outstanding and fearless sons. Sita loved her husband wholeheartedly, and sacrificed a life of luxury to be exiled with him in the forest; but when her honour was repeatedly doubted by her beloved for what he considered his kingly duty, she chose with supreme dignity to reject her husband and return to Mother Earth. Rightfully so, people perceive Sita’s steadfastness as a sign of emotional strength, because she refused to forsake her dharma in upholding the truth, even though Ram forsook his dharma as a responsible husband.

Often underplayed is the fact that Sita had a mind of her own; she stood her ground and remained determined not to give up even if the odds looked daunting. She even went to the extent of rebuking her husband that he was not man enough to take his wife along into exile. During their exile in the forest, Sita envisaged the danger in Ram’s decision to eliminate the rakshasas of Dandaka forest without any provocation, and felt it was her role as a wife to remind the maryada purush of his dharma when she perceived he was straying from the path of righteousness.

Delivering a powerful discourse on non-violence, she reminds Ram that duty always pairs with privilege, and since he had renounced his Kshatriya powers, he should avoid involving himself in activities that run contrary to forest life and its norms Sita, not one to be cowed down, proudly proclaimed that since she was Janak’s daughter and Ram’s wife, she could not refrain from free speech on observing dharma retreating. Graciously Ram responded to her words of caution and said ‘Oh, graceful Sita, you are the co-pursuer in dharma with me, hence you are loftier to me than my own life…’ When Hanuman had come to Lanka searching for her, she could have easily made her escape. But, not wanting to steal her husband’s glory, she chose to wait for Ram to rescue her from Ravan’s captivity. When Ram wanted her to testify to her own innocence for the second time, instead of complying, Sita prayed to Mother Earth to take her into her recourse

Sita epitomizes the struggle of women throughout the world.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Sita Returns: Modern India Through Her Eyes, Charu Walikhanna, Niyogi Books, 2018.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Possible overtones?

Invited to respond, Argentinean President Javier Milei and Vice President Victoria Villarruel shrugged and said Fernández was just being truthful. Aurélien Tchouaméni and several other players on the French national team are of Cameroonian descent. Ousmane Dembélé is of Senegalese, Mauritian and Malian descent.

Days later, football fans in Argentina were repeating the chant. Fernández was investigated by association football’s world governing organization, FIFA, which has prioritized the fight against racism in the sport. The players can be suspended for up to 12 matches if the chant is found to be racist.

Is it racist?

I asked a Spanish-speaking friend for a translation of the comments, and he confirmed the above is accurate. He reckoned the chant had racist “overtones,” meaning it implied that to be properly French, you had to be white. I accept there were overtones. I also accept that the verse was derogatory and insulting to France’s black players. But I am still not convinced this is racism. Then again, racism itself changes.

The myth of race

In 1950, UNESCO published a significant report titled “The Race Question.” This report was one of the first major efforts to expose the scientific invalidity of race as a biological concept. It concluded that “for all practical purposes, ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.”

Despite its mythic status, no one doubted the devilish concept’s potency. “Racism” referred to thoughts and theories predicated on the validity of “race” and the corresponding assumption that the human population was divided naturally into a hierarchy, with whites permanently at the top.

“Racialism,” on the other hand, described language or behavior that reflected those beliefs. So, racialism, or racial discrimination as it was often called, was obviously much more damaging to groups conceived as lower in the purported hierarchy. Anti-discrimination laws and policies were designed to manage racialism rather than educate people.

During the 1980s, the terms racism and racialism converged in academia, public discourse and policy discussions. “Racism” increasingly described both the belief in racial superiority and the resultant discriminatory behaviors. The focus shifted to recognizing that racist beliefs and actions were part of a larger, interconnected complex of injustice and subjugation.

Institutional racism

The term “institutional racism” was first used by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton in their influential book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Over time, the term became closely associated with the UK’s report on the death of Stephen Lawrence, published in 1999. In this case, institutional racism was defined as “the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behavior which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”

According to the report, institutional racism is not only about overt acts of racism but also about the more subtle and systemic practices that lead to unequal treatment — what are now known as microaggressions. Institutional racism and plain racism were soon used interchangeably to mean widespread discrimination.

The parameters have shifted so that the concept of “race” is no longer germane. In 2018, for example, many people from Wales felt they were discriminated against on the grounds of national identity. Under the UK’s Equality Act 2010, these concerns could be considered justified. The Welsh were a “protected group.” The defining feature of racism, in this conception, is not “race” but vulnerability to discrimination. 

The Boy Who Cried “Wolf”

The benefits of categorizing racism in this way are many. Groups that have been treated wrongfully or prejudicially, be that presently or historically, are protected by law and can use the emotively powerful claim of racism in their defense. Offenses motivated by a victim’s supposed ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, disability or similar characteristics are now grouped collectively as hate crimes. The defining characteristic is the perpetrator’s intention, not the victim’s attributes. A claim of a racist attack on a cisgender, fully abled, while male heterosexual has merit.

But there are dangers, the most obvious one captured by the phrase “cry wolf.” The fable of the tricksy shepherd boy who playfully misleads people with false cries of, “Wolf!” is illuminating. When a wolf actually does appear, others are so used to the boy’s stunts that no one takes notice. Repeatedly claiming “racism” calls attention to an unpleasant and widespread presence, but may also devalue such claims. The enlargement of the concept to cover all manner of discrimination tends to trivialize racism in the form it once had.

Racism has disfigured America’s history from the 17th century and Europe’s from the 1950s. It has provoked slave uprisings, riots, protest marches and other forms of civil disobedience. Torture, mutilation and death have been its grimmest byproducts. To cluster these sins under the same rubric as microaggressions against the Welsh lessens their significance in the eyes of many.

Racism in the Fernández case

I am certainly not condoning the behavior of Fernández and his teammates. It was not just careless, but wrongheaded, pernicious, arguably defamatory and possibly malicious. France’s black players were subject to abuse on social media following their World Cup defeat to Argentina in 2022, so these kinds of irresponsible deeds can have consequences. But was it racist?

Fifty years ago, no. Thirty years ago, still no. In fact, in 1998, France won the FIFA World Cup with a multicultural team that included Zinedine Zidane, Patrick Vieira, Lilian Thuram and Marcel Desailly, among others. Had Fernández’s video been released then, it likely would have been ridiculed and dismissed as a case of “sour grapes.” But today we err on the side of assuming malignancy.

The impact of racism has been diluted by our eagerness to recognize it in any situation in which hatred of particular groups is involved. This is not a bad thing and in a great many instances, there has been a racist component buried among other sordid motivations. Yet the danger lies in spurious attributions. Some offenses, even hate crimes, are not impelled by spurious beliefs about race and should be treated as conceptually distinct.

None of this excuses Fernández et al. But perhaps we should laugh at their idiocy and childlike attempts to make fun rather than dignify them — which is what we do when we endow them with serious motives.

[Ellis Cashmore is the editor of Encyclopedia of Race and Ethnic Studies]

[Emma Johnson edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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These questions followed me since I began researching for my book Poder Suave — Soft Power, launched in Brazil in 2017. That following year, my book was a finalist in the Jabuti Awards, the most important literary award in Latin America under the creative economy category, which recognizes artistic contributions to economic growth. I focused my research on cultural soft power — power that is seductive and that draws in viewers worldwide. Some examples include Hollywood and Bollywood movies, French fashion, Russian ballet, the British Invasion of the 1960s (bands like the Beatles) and Brazilian bossa nova, Carnaval and telenovelas.

A general conclusion from my research shows that what society deems as desirable, such as believing one actor is persuasive or buying into certain fashion choices, is built upon accepted trends. With corporate and governmental support, these manifestations of “soft power” can reach new heights — like how Russia used ballet as a diplomatic tool during the Soviet era. Cultural influence is not limited to wealthy countries. Indian film and Brazilian music, for example, both reach wide international audiences.

Via the author.

However, the importance of trends, while real, did not satisfy my curiosity. I pondered over why some underprivileged creatives emerge onto the global stage, whereas other artists never reach their potential, despite having numerous advantages. What is the secret behind their success or failure?

I investigated this unsolved mystery in my doctoral thesis on socio-cultural progress with the help of the Capes Foundation Scholarship (Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education). After five years of research, my thesis and newest book Poder Cultural finally provides the answers.

First, cultural power is the ability to universally influence people into thinking a movie, work of art or related product is good. Cultural power can move other countries’ economies, shape consumer habits and create new industries. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, for instance, contributed $4.3 billion to the US GDP, according to Bloomberg Economics. The tour largely boosted the hospitality industry, including hotels, local businesses and tourism revenues.

Even writers go through an audiovisual medium, such as movies, TV shows, telenovelas or social media, to make their books relevant. Keila Shaheen was an unknown writer until her video went viral on TikTok and promoted Shadow Work Journal to a bestseller.

Relevant politics in cultural power

Research has proven that artists with culturally relevant attitudes and products are more likely to become powerful. Emerald Fennel had never won an award as an actress, writer or director until her movie Promising Young Woman won the 2020 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Its violence, not unlike films such as First Blood, spoke to young media consumers who are sensitive to themes of female oppression and Eurocentrism.

Another example is Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, who is better known in India than Brad Pitt. How is that possible? Khan is an undoubtedly attractive man. This fact alone gets him attention in the movie industry. In the beginning, Khan, like Pitt, used his good looks to obtain roles, even cheap flicks that would only be watched once. After ascending to stardom, Khan was able to reinvent his image by selecting roles with more cultural relevance. Take Khan’s performance as the alcoholic in Devdas (2002), which brought awareness to the struggles of addiction. 

Both Khan and Pitt support international causes that positively shape their images: Pitt is involved with One Campaign, which fights against AIDS and poverty in poor countries; Khan is the ambassador of Pulse Polio, the National AIDS Control Organization and the Make-a-Wish Foundation in India. However, Khan has one notable advantage over his competitor. He has a greater command over social media, which he uses to mobilize his appeal to millions. Khan posts about his children and his long marriage to Gauri Chibber. His 42 million followers on Facebook, 30 million on Instagram and 42 million on Twitter eat up his family narrative. Days after his interview with David Letterman on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, the television host named him “the greatest star of the world.”

Major components of disproportionate recognition

Both stars and politicians use social media to increase their power. In the music world, video clips are the most important audiovisual tool for singers to achieve cultural strength. Musicians Dua Lipa and Anitta must know this well. Their power extrapolates to music. In 2020, Dua Lipa posted a video for her 46 million followers on Instagram, criticizing the way the Israeli Defense Forces treat Palestinians. Israeli NGO Im Tirtzu opened a petition demanding that Dua Lipa’s songs be banned from the Israeli army radio, the most popular in the country, although her request was not granted. Likewise, Brazilian, far-right, former president Jair Bolsonaro criticized Anitta on his social media for supporting the legalization of marijuana. Bolsonaro also used this platform to denounce former candidate and then-elected president Lula in the 2022 election over her views on the use of the Brazilian flag. 

Dua Lipa and Anitta’s content share similarities regarding aesthetics, techniques and lyrics. However, what makes Dua Lipa more effective, despite Anitta launching twice as many videos, is another crucial aspect for cultural power: language. Dua Lipa has always sung in the most popular language in the world, English, which helped close publicity contracts for the singer.  She also developed her career in one of the world’s fashion capitals, London. Located outside any “English centers,” Anitta invested in more English videos, like “Girl from Rio,” “Downtown,” “Faking Love,” and “Boys Don’t Cry” to be more widely noticed.

Are these aspects to obtain cultural power fair? Definitely not. Because of these constraints, many culturally significant artists are ignored.  Helena Solberg, for instance, was the only female director from Cinema Novo, the Brazilian New Cinema movement from the 1960’s and the most important film movement of the southern hemisphere. Her movies discussed the roots of the underdevelopment situation in Latin America. She lived from 1971 to 1990 in the US and gained recognition with movies like The Brazilian Connection (1983), Home of the Brave (1986) and Carmen Miranda — Bananas is My Business (1994).  However, none of her films infiltrated Hollywood since they were independent productions, giving her much less cultural power than expected. 

Another example of disproportionate, language-biased representation is the career of Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye.  She was the mother of African cinema and the first Sub-Saharan African woman to direct a commercially distributed feature film, Kaddu Beykat, released in 1975. Her movies were essential to understand the lives of women in African tribes, a genre which had not been explored. Yet, she was never given global recognition since her films were in languages like Serer and Wolof, African dialects that remain absent from Google. Faye’s death in 2024 was mostly ignored by major news channels and cultural magazines in the Western world. The case of Safi Faye proves that what is available to Western viewers is very much regulated by Eurocentric cultural tastes.

The purpose of researching Poder Cultural was not only to understand the unspoken rules in achieving stardom, but mainly to show how the dice are rolled in arts and entertainment industries across countries of differing wealth and privilege. Exposing inequality and analyzing success are the most important steps to change the rules of the game and, therefore, make cultural power more accessible to all. 

[Gwyneth Campbell and Jamie Leung edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What Gives an Artist Profitable Cultural Power in the World? appeared first on Fair Observer.

I sat at home improvising at the piano. My poodle puppy Keba suddenly perked her ears and woofed. She stuck out her tongue and sat up as if she really liked what she was hearing. A minute later, she lay down and went back to sleep. Those next ideas were too boring.

A few months later, Keba decided to sleep at the front door. Any time the neighbors had guests, she howled and barked to let us know there were strangers among us.

She started to recognize the words “beef,” “cheese” and “chicken” when my family discussed dinner, waiting inside the kitchen for a treat.

When I felt sad, she would lick me or put a paw on my hand and stay there.

I wanted to know what drove such behavior. Why did she care about me?

A working relationship

Humans and dogs have helped each other for a long time. One only needs to look back at history. The fossil record preserves traces of early human civilization.

On the icy Siberian island of Zhokhov, scientists found the first archaeological evidence for work-dog breeding 15,000 years ago. There, dogs went polar bear hunting and pulled sleds through thick snowdrifts. Larger and smaller dogs were selected to perform different tasks.

They demonstrated a remarkable ability to cooperate with their owners and other dogs. The pack must have shared a strong relationship. Dogs’ cooperative nature is one of the features that distinguishes them as friends.

Modern work dogs perform functions like livestock protection, scent detection, search and rescue and assisting police forces or militaries. In Alaska, huskies still pull sleds in the Arctic Circle in the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. All of these jobs require years of training and careful attention to temperament when breeding the dogs.

Take the herding breeds as an example. Generations of selective breeding resulted in the Border Collie, Old English Sheepdog and Australian Cattle Dog having the urge to herd rather than harm livestock.

Dogs present a remarkable ability to communicate non-verbally. Unlike wolves, the muscles above their eyes allow them to raise their eyebrows. As their eyebrow muscles changed, so did facial muscles, allowing dogs to smile.

Scientists have shown dogs recognize up to 400 words. Dogs can actually discern subtle differences in peoples’ speech. These differences include telling complete words from the syllables that compose them (e.g., a deconstructed phrase) and identifying commonly versus rarely used words. Even primates are not as attuned to their close relatives.

Dogs try to communicate in ways we understand. We imparted this urge through domestication. In what scientists from Duke University call “social cognition,” dogs have evolved the ability to process humans’ communication without formal training. Wolves, on the other hand, require extensive training to accomplish the same level of understanding, if they do so at all. This does not mean wolves are less intelligent, but it does suggest that dogs are more in tune with what people want. This came from thousands of years of exposure to human behavior.

From utilitarian animals to friends

Companion dogs have been around almost as long as working dogs. It is theorized that small dogs arose by random chance as humans domesticated the Middle Eastern Wolf 12,000 years ago.

The first lap dogs were bred in Ancient China in 3000 B.C. They were early versions of the Pekingese, kept in the Imperial Court. The Chinese royalty carried them in the sleeves of their long robes, much like some owners take their small dogs out in carriers.

Chinese folklore says the Pekingese was born from a love affair between a lion and a butterfly. The lion was too big for the butterfly, so he wished to be smaller. The Buddha transformed the lion and butterfly into compatible shapes. The Pekingese had a lion’s heart and a butterfly’s delicacy.

Dogs were main characters in myths and legends for many ancient cultures. In the earliest urban civilization, Sumer, they were linked with goddesses and the supernatural. Gula, the Sumerian goddess of life-giving and healing, frequently sat with a dog in artistic depictions. Anthropologists believe that dogs were not a common symbol in Middle Eastern art at the time, yet Gula was represented by canines in figurines at temples, cylinder seals, tablets and stone sculptures, indicating their inclusion was purposeful. Dogs were seen as divine because of the goddess.

Tomb Relief, Ancient Egypt, 2435–2152 BCE.

Ancient Egyptian artifacts reveal representations of canines in paintings, relief carvings and small figurines. One limestone relief from an Old Kingdom tomb (2435–2152 BCE) depicted a servant walking his Basenji while carrying a pole during a funeral ceremony. The relief included three hieroglyphs that spelled the dog’s name, “Ebony,” showing that the Egyptians named their pets and incorporated them into the fullness of life.

European merchants traded dogs for thousands of years. In the middle ages, diverse classes of people owned them. Small dogs caught rats. Sporting dogs such as greyhounds were status symbols, kept by noblemen for hunting — their main leisure activity when not at war. Well-off farmers might train a herding dog to protect their cows and sheep. Paintings from the 15th century show that owners took care to groom their dogs with flat combs like we do today.

French painting of a hunter combing his hound dog (1430–1440).

Perhaps the main change in how dogs were viewed in the transition from the middle ages to the early modern period was a newfound purpose of companionship. Small dogs who could not perform labor but were affectionate gained traction amongst the European nobility.

Ladies had small dogs for leisure. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales mentions a prioress who fed her little dogs “roasted flesh, or milk and fine white bread” and “wept if one of them were dead.” Upper-class women like the prioress kept pet dogs as animal friends.

Evidence of the small dog’s popularity appears in art. At the beginning of the Renaissance, young ladies were painted inside their houses, which often featured a small and scruffy dog. The Arnolfini Portrait by Belgian artist Jan van Eyck, one of the most famous portraits of the time, shows a husband and wife standing in their home. At the bottom of the canvas, blending in with the brown wood floor, is a Brussels Griffon, a breed that still exists today.

Arnolfini Portrait, Jan Van Eyck (1434).

From friendship to emotional support

Therapy was one of the oldest jobs for dogs. Like the Sumerians, the ancient Greeks and Romans associated dogs with healing. They believed that dogs’ licks had the ability to heal. In Epidaurus, the Greeks built the Sanctuary of Asklepios so people could receive medicinal treatments, including getting licked by a sacred dog. Roman archaeological sites at Gloucestershire revealed similar reverence for dogs. Archaeologists uncovered nine toy-sized sculptures, made of copper alloy, and coated with precious metals.

In 9th-century Belgium, dogs on farms provided rehabilitation to the disabled as they worked together. Throughout the Enlightenment, dogs were placed in asylums to help people with their mental health. Florence Nightingale wrote in 1860: “A small pet is often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases especially.” Doctors in the 19th century began to realize that dogs could lift peoples’ spirits in a measurable way.

Today, service dogs go through training from puppyhood to provide essential help to people in need. They respond to commands, give physical assistance, and alert their owner of drops in heart rate and blood pressure. They can predict seizures and other critical conditions. Some service dogs perform deep pressure therapy for people who have post-traumatic stress disorder or panic attacks.

Back to business

My dog Keba curls up in the corner of the room and sometimes lets me comb her hair. When she gives me an “I want food” look, I realize it’s not just luck that makes me give in to her request. Thousands of years of conditioning have brought us together to this time and place where communication flows both ways we can understand.

My dog runs over to comfort me. She always welcomes my hug. I think back to the Ancient Greeks and Romans who believed that dogs not only helped people feel better but could actually cure their illnesses.

I could be an Egyptian stepping next to the Nile or a Renaissance woman walking cobblestone streets. A hunter or a hunter-gatherer. I might wear a tunic or a gown made of wool. No matter who I imagine I am, I hope Keba will never get tired of seeing me. The most rewarding part of having my dog is knowing we are best friends.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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To absolutely no one’s surprise, you are hand-in-hand with the aforementioned Frenchman, who just so happens to have a pack of cigarettes and the most flawless jawline of all time. A three-day fling ensues, during which he utters the irrevocable words, “Je t’aime.” We must allow the French their romantic flair, of course. 

A tad ridiculous? Perhaps. Classically French? Absolutely. This brings me to today’s topic: a comparison of nationalities in terms of relationships, romance and sex.

From the Martian mountain tops of Bolivia to the pristine shores of Australia, I’ve enjoyed the company of Chileans, Estonians, Sri Lankans and Frenchmen; Russians in all their astuteness; Colombians and their sensual joie de vivre. As far as intimacy goes, Americans may not be the most notorious of nationalities, but I assure you, we can certainly fall prey to its modalities.

Back in my post-grad days of sun-bleached hair and wide-eyed wonder, I spent many months gallivanting about Latin America. My time there taught me that, if a showering of love and adoration is your type of seduction, Latin countries are the place to be. However, while, “Cómo eres guapa, qué lindos son tus ojos,” is certainly flattering, I should warn you that it is also the most unoriginal pickup line in the Spanish-speaking world. Latin men will make you feel like the most attractive woman on earth — and they’ll make tomorrow night’s gringa feel the same. 

Now, don’t let this dissuade you from joining a local in a little salsa number on a bartop. It is ridiculously good fun, and there are few places as thrilling as the hot and heavy ambience of Medellin’s reggaeton clubs. I will warn you though, if you are more of a “relationship type,” maybe think twice before taking one of your many dance partners home.

Let’s return to Mr. Perfect Jawline from the beginning of this analysis. My first experience with French men was in Paris on a last-minute spring break trip. I was in a hazy, smoke-filled underground club a few steps away from the Arc de Triomphe with a friend from Cologne. I remember being in the smoking room. Two lanky French boys came up to me, insisting on sharing a cigarette. I reminded them I was American and that we didn’t really ruin our lungs like that in my country — perhaps our one selling point. 

Escaping the stuffy lounge, I ended up on the dance floor decorated with hypnotic indigo strobe lights. Twenty seconds into a dance with one ridiculously handsome but awfully presumptuous Frenchie, hands went much too far and I immediately raced to find my girlfriend in the bathroom. Unfortunately, I have found boundary-crossing and immensely sexualizing behavior to be common themes in my interactions with the French. Don’t get me wrong, they can be ridiculously sensual and wonderful in bed. Just make sure that’s where you want to end up because, honestly, that’s probably where they’ll take it.

Of course, we cannot forget the Brits. Those darling, playful, mischievous flirts. I adore them, truly, and have found them the easiest to connect with, likely due to our relatively similar backgrounds. That being said, I’ve also found English boys to be well aware of their charm and to use essentially the same nearly foolproof strategy with any girl they might fancy. Embarrassingly, I must admit it usually works.

I must note one thing about the English: In my experience, “foreplay” doesn’t seem to be in their vocabulary. It took me one too many gin-and-tonic-fueled nights to realize this. On one such occasion, I remember asking my rather attractive, if deodorant-averse, companion what he liked. His response? A moment of silence, then a short string of unintelligible words that, upon reflection, sounded much more like a grunt. When it comes to Brits, take my word for it and save yourself from a handful of rather disappointing one-night stands. Apparently, their navigational skills are limited to nautical endeavors.

Of Argentinians and Italians, I have nothing but positive remarks. Perhaps I associate them with each other due to their historical ties, but they do seem to be similarly playful and genuine. When it comes to lovers of cornetti and facturas, they have my stamp of approval.

Finally, this would not be a respectable analysis of international affairs if I left out the Dutch. Oh, how I love the Dutch. Consistently sociable, well-spoken and some of the most stunning people you will rest your eyes upon. Don’t get me wrong; they certainly have their flaws, the most common of which is cockiness. But if you can find the good ones, of which there are many, they are just nice. Predictable. Nothing wrong with that — in fact, it can be rather refreshing sometimes.

I will close with some words of advice before you diversify your own research in international affairs. Of my many one-night stands, two-week flings, even six-month situationships formed across vast oceans and towering mountain ranges, I have developed a few recommendations for romantic endeavors abroad. If superb quality of life and a happy marriage are what you seek, I recommend the Dutch. If you’d like your partner’s hairline to last the length of the relationship, perhaps it is best to avoid the English. If you want to be swept off your feet, head to Costa Rica or Colombia — just don’t expect to be the only one your partner is charming. 

With that, I send you off into the world. May your endeavors be fruitful — figuratively — and remember, most hostels have cameras. 

Until next time,

Blake ♥

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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—John Berger, Ways of Seeing

During the 18th and 19th centuries, many British landscape artists arrived in India to sketch and paint its imposing forts and richly decorated palaces, temples, pagodas and mosques. They captured the grandeur of the Mughal cities in decline, the new colonial settlements in growth and, of course, the Himalayas with the flow of the Ganga and other rivers from the hills to the oceans and bays. Besides these topographical views, the appearance, attires, culture and customs of the diverse people of India were fascinating subjects to paint and share with Europeans back home, filling in their curiosity of this far-off land. The fabled flora and fauna continued to be painted till much later, taken up as a popular subject by the Englishwomen arriving in India by the late 19th century. Pioneer landscape artists like William Hodges, Thomas and William Daniell, Charles D’Oyly, William Simpson and James Baillie Fraser travelled across India exploring and sketching remote regions. Their work created a sensation in Europe, being much in demand between the years 1770–1880. This pushed the emergence of new picture printing techniques towards mass production, beginning with Prague based Alois Senefelder’s innovation in lithography in 1796. The original paintings were multiplied as engravings and lithography prints for sale in the European markets and, over the years, numerous “illustrated travelogues of India”, which included these engravings and lithographic pictures, were published, becoming extremely popular.

In 1768, the English artist and writer William Gilpin in his book Three Essays: on Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscapes defined the term “picturesque” in so many words:

Disputes about beauty might perhaps be involved in less confusion, if a distinction were established, which certainly exists, between such objects as are beautiful, and such as are picturesque, between those which please the eye in their natural state; and those which please from some quality, capable of being illustrated in painting.

The landscape artists who travelled across India focused exclusively on the picturesque. They even used a pre-photography gadget, the camera obscura, as a tool to edit, alter proportions and facilitate capturing the picturesque. The accompanying text and travel narratives to these picturesque paintings, published as books, further created an enigma of an Oriental wonderland.

With the invention of the camera, early photographers of India from the 1850s, such as Robert Gill, Felice Beato, R.B. Oakley, Linnaeus Tripe, Captains T. Biggs and E.D. Lyon, to the prominent photographers of the 1890s, such as John Burke, Lala Deen Dayal, Samuel Bourne, Charles Shepherd, Johnston and Hoffmann and T.A. Rust, began replacing the landscape artists, but their emphasis continued to be on the picturesque. Felice Beato, who had reached Lucknow and Kanpur just after the 1857 War of Independence, even stage-managed his war photographs using actors to create photos with the right aesthetics, not too different from the way many photographers use the Photoshop software today.

Often financed by the East India Company, the early European photographers in India replaced not just the landscape and the portrait artists (Company School) but extended their role to support colonial designs through documentation and propaganda. Many of them were English army officers and surgeons living in India. The picture postcard started recording everything from 1910 onwards, not just the picturesque. The photographers took up ethnographic studies of the local population, capturing their everyday life, their religion and mythology. Famous personalities were photographed and photographic cataloguing of Indian antiquities was undertaken. The photographers travelled with the British Army, photographing the wars and the cantonment life with its club and sports facilities. They reported the news, were involved in land surveys and photographed the development of the railway network and other new technology or infrastructure and urban planning efforts undertaken in the large cities. Postcards featured the newly built town halls, high courts, universities, clubs, boulevards and gardens.

Images of the old modes of transport were one of the favourite subjects on early picture postcards, sent home by Europeans living in India. Horse-driven carriages (ticca garhi), tongas, recklas, bullock carts, palanquins, camel and elephant rides continued as the favoured modes of personal transport for both Indians and Europeans.

Today, anyone working on the social history of that time can find an ocean of information in these picture postcards. There are even picture postcards about postcards, post offices and their processes, of stamps, coins and flags of that time. Often, postcards were used as a medium of commercial advertising, or as invitation for events or by shops and establishments to reach out to customers.

The colonial perspective comes out most clearly in the ethnographic subjects of the picture postcards which documented, at times mockingly, the “types of native people” of India and their “jobs or occupations”. Coupled with books like Behind my Bungalow and Inside the Katchery, the lavish lifestyle of the colonial European with an army of servants became a popular subject of picture postcards sent back home by the Europeans.

Many years later, the granddaughter of Babu Jagjivan Ram, a Dalit leader and freedom fighter of India, came across such postcards being sold on the streets of London, when she relocated there for her studies. Devangana Kumar, who grew up in elite Delhi bungalows as a politician’s daughter, was so taken aback by the social inequalities of colonial India that she brought some of these picture postcards to India and created an exhibition showcasing them in 2012. Today, these picture postcards are an important reminder of India’s past and not mere nostalgia of a time gone by.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Picturesque India: A Journey In Early Picture Postcards (1896–1947), Sangeeta and Ratnesh Mathur, Niyogi Books, 2018.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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It was the most potent celebrity endorsement of a political candidate in history. Distancing herself from partisan politics, Oprah insisted she was acting out of a sense of obligation: “I feel compelled to stand up and speak out for the man who I believe has a new vision for America.”

She closed with gravity, drawing on Ernest J. Gainer’s 1971 novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which tells the life story of a woman born in slavery at the end of the American civil war. The book recounts how each time a new baby was born, its mother would take it to Jane Pittman, who would hold the baby John-the-Baptist-like and wonder aloud whether the child would be the deliverer of black people: “Is you the one?  Oprah refined the grammar, changed the context and answered affirmatively that Obama was indeed The One.

Rarely, if ever, has a single affirmation been so pivotal: It was less an endorsement, more a proclamation. But is a thumbs-up from rapper-turned-country music star Kid Rock going to make much difference to Donald Trump’s chances at this year’s presidential election? For that matter, is anyone’s endorsement going to make an impact? I can think of one, but more on that later.

More than entertainers

Politicians have attracted endorsements from popular entertainers since the 1950s. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, in 1952 and 1956, recruited the likes of Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman at a time when the popular assumption was that Hollywood stars were communist sympathizers.

Frank Sinatra re-recorded “High Hopes” complete with the line “Vote for Kennedy” as part of JFK’s successful presidential campaign in 1960. Around the same time, Britain’s Labour Party leader Harold Wilson received conspicuous support from the Beatles. Twenty years later, Sinatra donated $4 million to Republican Ronald Reagan’s successful presidential campaign.

Jane Fonda threw her weight behind Democrat George McGovern in the 1972 presidential

campaign. Fonda’s endorsement aligned with her opposition to the Vietnam War.

Celebrities, including athletes, have been conspicuous in every postwar US presidential campaign, though basketball star and shoe endorser Michael Jordan famously remained absent from a Senate race in 1990 explaining — when invited to endorse Harvey Gantt, an African-American Democratic candidate in North Carolina — “Republicans buy sneakers too.”

Bill Clinton garnered support from celebrities, including Barbara Streisand and Whoopi Goldberg, during his presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996. The value of Michael Jackson’s endorsement was arguable. While Jackson was an immensely popular and influential figure with a vast global fanbase, Jackson faced allegations of child sexual abuse. (He was eventually cleared.)

Since Clinton, celebrity endorsements for presidential candidates are a required part of campaigns. The 1990s witnessed an expansion of the roles of showbusiness entertainers: Perhaps they felt the need to demonstrate they were more than entertainers and held solid beliefs, values and commitments. Politicians enthusiastically gave them a platform and what evidence there is suggests they benefited.

Risky business

In 2016, Trump counted Mike Tyson and Kanye West among his celebrity endorsers. While Tyson was a convicted rapist, having African Americans among his cohort presumably lent Trump credibility among blacks. Black voters make up about 11–12 percent of the US electorate and Trump lobbied for their votes, though he managed only 8% of black votes in both 2016 and 2020.

While West, or Ye, as he prefers, had previously favored Democrat candidates, his approval couldn’t have done Trump any harm. Today, Ye is kryptonite (the fictional green mineral that weakens Superman). His flip-flopping was one thing, but his antisemitic remarks in 2022 persuaded sportswear manufacturer Adidas that it should cancel his best-selling “Yeezy” line, valued at $250 million per year.

Adidas’s experience with Ye may have chastened political candidates. Popular, black and seemingly multitalented — he designed his own clothes range — Ye imploded with an unexpected stream of invectives. He did have a history — having described slavery as a “choice” in 2018 — so Adidas must have known he was a risk. As are many other celebrities, of course. Many rose to prominence after scandals and know how to ride them like surfers conquering waves, transforming controversy into a vehicle for even greater fame.

Consumer culture

Endorsements have been integral to consumer culture, which began properly in the economic prosperity following the end of World War II in 1945. Hollywood stars appeared in advertising campaigns, and their effect on sales was encouraging enough to persuade ad agencies to pay for their services.

Today, they pay mightily: in 2015, LeBron James signed a multi-year deal with Nike valued at $1 billion. James used his platform, including social media and public appearances, to express his support for Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, in 2020. Political candidates don’t pay endorsers, of course.

The value of celebrities to advertisers is reflected in sales: Some individuals, including Oprah, Jordan, George Clooney and Jennifer Aniston, can pitch for almost anything and make it sell. On the other hand, Rihanna didn’t work for Nivea, which dropped her in 2012. Often, the relationship is symbiotic, with celebrities enhancing their reputations by associating themselves with popular brands.

However, selling things, inanimate material objects, is one thing; selling living sentient beings is another. Politics, like every other aspect of society, has been penetrated by celebrity: Votes are cast as much for people as what those people stand for. Ideals, values, policies and commitments will always feature in the mix when voters decide. As will relatability: Politicians strive to make voters think they share their concerns, identify with their problems and understand their feelings. When they can’t do it, they hope their endorsers can.

Convictions or self-aggrandizement?

Oprah was so influential she shooed off disbelief. Her blessing was strong enough to convince, even empower voters. But she was extraordinary. Other celebs elicit a note of cynical perspicacity. Voters suspect them more than respect them.

I have only inference and extrapolation to back up my claim. A recent research project, in which I was involved, centered on sports fans’ reactions to athletes, clubs, sponsors or entire sports leagues that push boundaries and make pronouncements on causes, such as war, racism and LGBTQ+ issues. A swath of fans detected their sermonizing was largely self-aggrandizement, as if saying, “We want you to take us seriously and accept that we truly believe in this cause [whatever it is].” If their gestures and pronouncements do little else, they prove athletes know how to read the room: They are aware of voguish attitudes and values and adapt themselves to suit them.

It may be fallacious to use the same logic for voters. Or it may be instructive. If the latter, celebrities see elections as pretexts for posturing and, ever-eager to provide an illusion of depth to further their ambitions, they offer their support. In this sense, presidential elections offer painless opportunities to burnish any celebs’ profundity. At least, if we follow the logic. Joe Biden’s alarming performance in front of 51 million American viewers recently may give prospective endorsers cause for thought. How much burnish is there in associating with a faltering politician?

What about Taylor?

The endorsements ringing for Biden sound like cracked bells: Barbra Streisand, Julia Roberts, George Clooney (since retracted, however) and others, including Robert De Niro, have all made their allegiances known before. Apart from the aforementioned Kid Rock, Donald Trump has only a handful of celebs, most of pensionable age, in his corner.

The unique figure in modern cultural history is, of course, Taylor Swift. She bridges many gaps, between pop and art, poignancy and jubilation, intensity and matter-of-factness. Is the gap between entertainment and politics one she aims to traverse? With 283 million followers on Instagram, she’s not hard to imagine running for the presidency herself. There’s even a conspiracy theory about her political ambitions. In the meantime, no human being has more

influence. Her endorsement would match Oprah’s.

Some celebs have genuine convictions and nail their colors to the mast without considering whether publicizing their political preferences will affect their careers. Others are primarily concerned with boosting their reputations. I sense that voters think they are all in the latter camp. So, why are politicians so keen on having them in their corner?

Oprah and Taylor are sui generis: They are both unique, albeit in their different ways and capacities to galvanize voters. No one else presently comes close and, while this year’s presidential candidates clearly welcome support from any quarter, the support of celebs is probably worthless and, if the message of our skeptical sports fans is any gauge, counterproductive.

[Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is Celebrity Culture, 3rd edition.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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One of them was Kodandapani, the research creamery’s caretaker, accompanied by a short, thin man, popularly known as ‘Barot Kaka’. Barot Kaka, on seeing Kurien, flashed a smile at him and extended his hands to take hold of the luggage. Kurien shook his head and politely rejected, saying, ‘No, no. I’d carry them myself.’ But Kaka would hear nothing of it and snatched all the luggage from Kurien.

Kurien shrugged his shoulders, smoothed his dishevelled hair, and kept checking the time. Kodandapani, almost bursting with joy, thought to himself, ‘Thank God, Kurien is here! Now I can return to Bangalore on the next available train. Anand has just tired me out!’

While they were still talking to Kurien, he started walking in search of a parked vehicle that he assumed they had come in to pick him up. Instead, he saw a bullock cart with two handsome bulls swishing their tails, waiting for them. Barot Kaka threw the luggage in and jumped into the driver’s seat. A perplexed Kurien clambered into the cart, and the cart carriage lurched forward. Kodandapani also hopped in, winking at him. Kurien asked the bullocky to take them straight to the research creamery. That was Kurien’s first rickety, bone-rattling ride to take them to the neglected research creamery under the National Dairy Research Institute.

Kurien kept ironing out his wrinkled shirt with his palm, and there was dirt on his pants which he probably got from the long journey on the train. His hair was also caked with dirt and looked shabby. Kodandapani took a good look at Kurien. ‘You need to rest first,’ he warned Kurien, adding an afterthought, ‘Today is Friday the 13th. Don’t start your new duty on an unlucky day. Why don’t you wait a day more and join tomorrow?’

Kurien frowned, shook his head, and said, ‘No. I don’t like what I see here. Let me take charge today and allow things to go wrong. I’m not interested in staying here too long.’

Riding in the bullock cart was new for Kurien, and his entire body started rattling at the same time simultaneously. He frowned and sweated profusely, though it was early winter. The trees were bare, and the path deserted. There was not even a shop in the vicinity. This was worse than he had imagined. He couldn’t see a single automobile, and people were walking or hitchhiking on bullock carts. Most of them chattered away in either Hindi or Gujarati; they gaped when they heard English. Everything about Anand made him miss the thriving New York nights. He closed his eyes and tried to erase the memory of the roaring automobiles that passed through the crowded streets in America. His heart skipped a beat when he thought of his friends and the lively parties all night, laughing and enjoying themselves.

Picture courtesy: Ministry of Railways/Wikimedia Commons.

Kurien took a deep breath and was determined to fit in, though he knew it was not an easy task. To make matters worse, he was a non-vegetarian and a Christian. The people of Anand stared at the young gentleman who came to their village with strange and foreign habits, and they stifled a laugh. Some also went to the extent that they were reluctant to rent him a house. He went knocking at every door to find suitable accommodation. Barot Kaka also tried talking to the villagers in favour of his boss. The villagers averted their heads and barely acknowledged him. It bothered him that they could hardly accept him as part of their lives. Moreover, him being a Malayali bachelor added to his woes. In 1949, the orthodox and vegetarian Gujarati community was too prejudiced to welcome an outsider like him.

Finally, Kurien managed to rent an untended garage owned by the research creamery’s superintendent. The garage was next to the creamery. It was a dingy place with no windows or bathrooms. To top it all, the floor had a pit filled with grease. Kurien thought to himself; perhaps the hole would have been used by the mechanics to stand and repair the car. He gritted his teeth in frustration, but suddenly, the engineer in him awakened, wasting no time. Soon he made a temporary bathroom by partitioning the room with a piece of canvas. He burrowed a hole and made windows on the wall. He threw some mud into the grease pit and levelled the ground. Kurien was all ablaze. This zest in Kurien to solve anything life throws at him led him a long way in the future.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Verghese Kurien: The Man Who Brought Milk to a Million Homes, M. S. Meenakshi, Niyogi Books, 2024.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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There are stories to explain the presence of a particular stone (The Story of Kamhua Noknu village; The Story of the Stone), tree (the banyan tree at the centre of the village, in the Kamhua Migration Story) or the origins and characteristics of various animals and plants, mankind and his institutions. Two narratives, How God Settled on Earth and The Story of the Two Gourds, recount the activities of semi-divine heroes. In the former story, the lower world becomes the human domain but there is no description of a glorious heaven as in the Christian traditions. We are told instead that the upper and lower worlds are close and that it is possible to move from one to the other by a ladder. Topa, who is the hero of the latter story, is claimed as an ancestor to a family that currently resides in the village and by the melding of fiction and fact, the story is anchored to specific territory which makes it personal and meaningful. For the Wancho, life after death was imagined to be a natural continuation from life on earth and in one story a boy undertakes a journey with his mother to the world of the dead, and he is sent back to earth.

Illustration by Tara Douglas accompanying The Story of the Two Gourds.

Wancho fables that ascribe human qualities to animals sometimes enclose a moral message, although it is not always explicitly stated. The Wancho people are fond of anecdotes that are based on sharpness of wits and the interest of stories that show the cleverness of one animal and the stupidity of another, lies in the humour of the deceptions. Clever Tortoise (Mongman Khunkhalo) is a variation of a familiar story about a race that was popularised by Aesop, and appears in cultures from eastern Asia to Native America. In the local version, it is the tortoise and the tiger that are competitors and the story meanders beyond the conclusive deception that secured the race to relate how the tiger’s desire for revenge was repeatedly foiled by the clever tortoise. In contests with stronger opponents, the weak hero always enjoys the favour of the storyteller. For instance, The Story of Tiger, Man and Cicada shows weak but clever Ajusa (who, as a human being, is the hero of the story), defeating the strong tiger in a series of contests by seeking alliances with smaller creatures: the cicada and the bulbul. In another tale, the deceptive boasts by the small (but cunning) Porcupine (Odee) makes him thoroughly intimidating to the elephant. The archetypal mischief-maker, who features in the myths of Native America and Canada, appears in The Story of Flying Fox (Loakla): this flying fox is a liminal being that is not easily categorised, and acting as a double agent, he becomes the instigator of conflict between species. Trickery is a recurring theme of the historical recollections and if the pranks appear unsophisticated to the newcomer, the presentation is easy to recollect.

The spoken memories of the Wancho storytellers convey realistic, fluid portraits of reality and human nature: of lived experience, its textures, sights and senses at a particular period of history. Territorial rights are the common cause of bitter disputes, and covenants or pacts are drawn between villages over land, as recalled by The True Story of how Lonu (Ogamaan) Jing was given to Kamhua Noknu by Mintong Village. In the separate account of The Story of our Village and the Village in Myanmar the kinship relations of Kamhua and Kahdan (a village in Myanmar) are exposed in the extraordinary alliance that had been considered necessary for the security of the village at the time. Hence these memories shed light on historical relationships between villages: the social hierarchy between paramount and subsidiary villages and the resilience of the Wancho people during volatile periods that were sometimes characterised by immense physical hardship.

Some Wancho stories are recollections of the journeys of migration from specific villages and the subsequent establishment of new villages. The storytellers of Kamhua Noknu summon vivid details of the strategies that were mobilised by the people of nearby Nyinu to outsmart the rival villagers and lay claim to the land. Chailai Pansa also reported that Nyisa had once been comprised of inhabitants from Nyinu and from Wakka, the two powerful villages on either side. The notorious villagers of Nyinu had succeeded in outsmarting their rivals who were compelled to relocate to another place.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Myth, Memory & Folktale of The Wancho Tribe of Arunachal Pradesh: The Stories of Our Ancestors, Tara Dougals and Jatwang Wangsa, Niyogi Books, 2024.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Nervous and demoralized, she asked, “What am I doing wrong?”

“You’re ignoring everything I’m teaching!” the instructor snapped, clearly exasperated. “Did you divide the face you’re drawing into equal thirds for eyes, nose and mouth? No? And where are the horizontal and vertical lines you need to build symmetry?”

Now Taty felt even worse. “I don’t feel the portrait if I do it your way,” she complained. “I need to start with the person’s eyes. I need to feel I’m with the person, looking into their soul.”

The instructor turned out to be a kinder man than Taty initially thought. “OK, make a drawing of me, and do it your way,” he said. “If I like what you do, I won’t ask you to change.”

To everyone’s surprise, including his own, he loved the results. Taty earned her expressive style, and even now, she still starts her portraits by painting her subject’s eyes. She has come a long way since those days in her native Ukraine. She’s learned a great deal in the United States and honed her artistic skills over decades of work.

But traveling to the US was not an easy decision. It took aggravations great and small to make her family depart for the Western world.

Leaving Soviet censorship and antisemitism

Taty’s parents had both done well under the Soviet regime that prevailed in Ukraine in the 1960s and ‘70s. Taty’s mother was no mere doctor in the Russian Army — she was an esteemed surgeon. Her father, an engineer, was in high demand for his ability to solve the government’s complicated engineering problems.

But life was far from perfect for the young artist and her family. A small but real annoyance for Taty was censorship. The Soviets censored all Impressionist art. She wasn’t allowed to view it on the grounds that it was anti-socialist.

Antisemitism was a bigger factor in their decision to emigrate. The treatment of Jews in Soviet Ukraine was terribly prejudiced. Taty was born to a Ukrainian mother and Jewish father; to avoid the fierce racism, her parents gave her her mother’s surname, Horoshko, at birth instead of her father’s German-Jewish surname, Bronzaft.

As the family kept their Jewish heritage concealed, attending synagogue was out of the question. A particularly noxious result of Soviet antisemitism is that Taty’s parents feared she might inadvertently reveal their Jewish roots. For security, they raised her to believe she was Egyptian.

Taty recalls one painful moment from her school days. A teacher approached her best friend, a pure-blooded Ukrainian, and told her to disassociate with Taty. “Her family can be a potential traitor to the Soviets,” the teacher reasoned. Additionally, other school children would regularly search for Jewish surnames in the class journal and mark them as targets to bully.

Starting a new life in the US

The decision to leave Ukraine was a difficult one. Taty’s parents knew that if they became émigrés — people who emigrate, often for political reasons — they’d lose their homeland and all their possessions. They would be forced to start over with no more than $300 cash. But ultimately, they knew they had to move. Taty and her family became political refugees when she was 15, and sought a fresh start in the US.

When they reached US shores, young Taty was astonished by the kindness they encountered. They spent their first year in the state of Michigan, where both parents quickly found jobs. When they arrived in the city of Flint, Jewish refugee supporters rented an apartment for them. They provided the family with not just furniture, but sheets, towels and decorative paintings. Taty had never experienced such generosity from strangers.

The following year, they moved to New York, where they still live. Taty was quickly accepted at the Parsons School of Design. This bolstered her love of painting and got her more experience than she had in her Ukrainian academy.

Taty’s powerful art supports veterans

Now in her 60s, Taty has made a personal discovery. “In the last few years, my art has a new purpose,” she says. “Always before, I thought that being a philanthropist meant you had to be super wealthy. But now I’ve learned that my voice through art can be louder than just money.”  

Taty co-founded Portrait of Freedom, Inc. This organization supports veterans, first responders and their families through art. She often donates as much as half of the proceeds from her sales.

With war raging in Ukraine, her old home is part of her life once more. Moved by the sacrifice of Ethan Hunger Hertweck, a US soldier who gave his life fighting for Ukraine’s freedom from Russia, Taty created a new portrait. “I painted his portrait because I wanted to show that he wasn’t just a statistic, that this is a real person who gave his life for what he believed in,” she stated.

Taty painted the portrait as a gift to Hertweck’s family. She worked rapidly, completing it in one 24-hour period. “I stood at my easel, looking at photographs of Ethan. I stared at his eyes and then I used my iPad to take close-up photos of his eyes,” she commented. “These zoomed-in photos on my iPad are far bigger than in the original photo. I look at the enlarged photos and I see a window to his soul.”

Taty’s art has an incredible effect on its beholders. “I sent a picture of the portrait to [Ethan’s] mother, and as we were texting back and forth, we realized we were both crying,” she said.

Her portraits are so much more than paint on canvas. She captures the essence of her subjects, starting with their eyes and metaphorically connecting with their souls. Her art is a powerful voice for freedom and humanity.
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post This Ukrainian Artist Makes Surprisingly Powerful Art Starting With Eyes appeared first on Fair Observer.

The canal Ali Mardan Khan built was the extension of an older canal built during the 14th century. In its modified form it transported water from the upper reaches of the Yamuna River, some 75 miles upstream, to the new capital. The canal was 25 feet wide and 25 feet deep for much of its course. It was presumably a somewhat narrower, shallower channel by the time it entered the city at its north-west corner, through the Kabul Gate, which no longer stands.

It was soon realised that as it traversed the ground outside on its way to the city, the canal’s water could be used to good effect. One of the first people to lay out a garden next to the canal outside the city wall was the princess Roshanara, Shahjahan’s daughter. Her older sister Jahanara, who was her father’s favourite, had been given a garden inside the city walls, and next to it she had developed a large sarai and a market square known as Chandni Chowk, or ‘Moonlight Square’. Roshanara was less favoured, but nevertheless, like most women of the Mughal royal family, she had independent means and considerable resources. Out of these resources in 1650 she commissioned the garden which is named after her. The garden lay midway between the canal and the highway that stretched all the way from Bengal to the north-western provinces of the Mughal empire and which later came to be known as the Grand Trunk Road. We have little evidence of what the garden would have looked like in Mughal times. It was probably surrounded by a wall, since a brick gateway with traces of coloured tilework on the exterior survives on the eastern side. The wall is now a modern one.

At some distance inside the gateway lies a building. In form it is a large pavilion, or baradari, standing on a platform in the middle of a shallow pool. The pool, which no longer contains water, has a decorative edge. In the middle of the baradari is a small roofless chamber supported on pillars. The pillars are of the style called ‘cypress-bodied’, evoking the cypress tree in their tapered shape. They are covered in a pattern of leaves. The plaster surfaces above the pillars are painted with botanical motifs, among which the sita ashok trees with their bunches of flowers figure prominently. In the centre of the chamber lies a patch of earth which marks Roshanara’s final resting place.

Painted limestone plaster and intricately carved stone jalis are seen at the tomb of Roshanara Begum (1617–1671). Photograph by: Prabhas Roy

The princess had lived through some ups and downs. She grew up in the shadow of her older sister Jahanara, and there is likely to have been some rivalry between the two. Jahanara was not only her father’s favourite, she was also close to her brother Dara Shukoh, who had been nominated the heir apparent by their father. Roshanara was closer to another brother, Aurangzeb, and she actively supported him when he rose up in rebellion against his father and seized the throne. Roshanara was rewarded for her support. When Aurangzeb had his formal coronation in the Red Fort on 5 June 1659, she had been given presents worth five lakhs of rupees, which was a huge sum in those days.

With the accession of Aurangzeb, Roshanara became the head of the palace, a position Jahanara had earlier occupied. Within a few years however she fell out of favour with Aurangzeb, who suspected her of political intrigues. Then in 1666, when Jahanara returned to Delhi and Aurangzeb made her the head of the palace, Roshanara again retreated into the shadows, where she died in 1671. She was buried in this pavilion in the garden she had created.

After Roshanara’s death her garden remained royal the garden was confiscated, along with other royal property, with members of the Mughal royal family using it as a retreat from time to time. As the power of the Mughal emperors declined, particularly in the first half of the 19th century with the coming of the British to Delhi, they did find it difficult to exercise complete control over these royal properties. In 1853 some people went to the extent of building a house in the Roshanara Bagh, driving away the emperor’s guard when he tried to intervene. In 1857, after the revolt had been suppressed, the garden was confiscated, along with other royal property.

Red powderpuff (Calliandra haematocephala) flower in full bloom at Roshnara Bagh. Photograph by: Prabhas Roy

Then in 1874 it was handed over to the city’s Municipal Committee, which turned it into a pleasure garden for public use. The baradari was repaired, and creepers were grown so as to cover its walls. Goldfish were introduced in the pool. The character of the garden at large was altered by the building of motorable roads through it.

A landmark in the history of the garden came in 1922, with the establishment of the Roshanara Club, which was founded, as an official letter of the time put it, ‘to provide for the opportunity of sporting and social intercourse among gentlemen in Delhi irrespective of politics, caste and creed.’

Topiary work enlivens the green lawns of Roshanara Bagh. Photograph by: Prabhas Roy

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Gardens of Delhi, Swapna Liddle and Madhulika Liddle, photographed by Prabhas Roy, Niyogi Books, 2024.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Gardens of Delhi appeared first on Fair Observer.

Knowledge of supernatural and divine powers and their local manifestation

Goddesses, gods and ghosts are transcendental powers with particular qualities that become powerful at specific moments of time and at specific places and then can interfere in the life of the community or an individual. These powers may be classified in the following manner:

1. Divine powers with sacred places

These are “Mother-goddesses” like Devli-madi, Gumai-mata, etc. and male gods like Ahindro dev, Govaldev, Kalakad dev or Kavadiyo dev. All these divine powers have a local character, i.e. they are worshiped mainly by the people living in the direct environment of their main sanctuary.

2. Divine heroes

Several narratives speak of male and female “creator-heroes” like Koldabio and Kuntarani, who are considered to have been powerful personalities of the past, responsible for introducing new techniques or customs, who, however, don’t receive much worship nowadays and who are by many thought of as being no longer active in this world. But their names appear often in invocations along with deities.

3. Powerful animal gods

The most dreaded animals are tigers, crocodiles and probably also poisonous snakes. They are considered to be spiritual powers with a strong influence on human welfare. They are not only directly destructive with their teeth and claws through attacks on humans and cattle; they can in addition send misfortune, cause but also prevent disaster.

4. Field and disease gods

There are strong supernatural powers whose activities are specialized, i.e. who are like Kakabalio, tough disease-bringers and at the same time healers or, like Himariyo, helpers in agriculture but also destroyers of crops. Contrary to the goddesses and gods with well-known sanctuaries open for worship to everyone, these “local” gods are worshiped everywhere nearby the farm houses and hamlets.

5. Souls of the dead

Because the souls of the deceased are considered to be active powers that can harm the living, they, too, are looked upon as supernatural powers, which need to be given regular attention – at least for some time until they have quieted down and are no cause for disorder anymore. 

6. Hindu goddesses and gods

Since the 1950s, Hindu gods and goddesses like Shiva and Ganesh, the Devi, Krishna, Rama and Hanuman replace more and more traditional divine powers. Several bhagats, priests, included in their stories names of gods like Ram, Mahadev (Shiva) or Bhagvan, replacing the ones of local traditions with these names of impressive Hindu gods.

Indigenous voices on divine powers

When a bhagat, a priest and healer like Honio bhagat of Ranveri spoke of an “unspecific deity”, he used the word dev, god, for the divine male and devi, goddess, mata, mother, or the diminutive madi, small mother, for the divine feminine power. Only one bhagat preferred the Hindu term bhagvan and another one used Ram for any male deity in narratives.

Most of these deities, whether they are connected with a well-known sanctuary or are animal gods, field gods or disease gods and goddesses, are present for everyone in the form of stones or natural rocks.

Likewise, Honio bhagat of Ranveri (near Valod) says:

Pathar no dev chhe, pan pathar nathi, god is of stone, but is not the stone.

It is likely that specific stones and rocks stand for divine powers, i.e. mark the spaces where these deities can become manifest; these gods and goddesses, however, “look” different. For them, the rock, where the goddess or god “lives”, is a golden palace, visible only to the devotee during a ceremony. The deity can move at her own will and becomes visible in human form.

Worship site for Himariyo Dev, marked by a terracotta horse offering. Via the Eberhard Fischer Photographic Archive, Museum Rietberg, Zürich.

Religious narratives

Whatever we heard from the bhagats were unconnected bits of knowledge about their own divine powers and their accomplishments, but we are not aware of any well-structured body of sacred knowledge. The stories recited were more entertaining than containing beliefs substantiating moral standards or cultural values.

Creation myths

How the earth had come into existence is told by Radatia Jethia, bhagat from Jamkhadi:

The sun (or Ram) asked karchelo, crab (or Mahadev, Shiva): ‘This flood and water is everywhere. So, what should we do?’ Mahadev-karchelo dug holes all over and the water seeped through these holes and thus the land came into existence.

How human beings and animals were created, Honio bhagat narrated:

(Once) Bhagvan sent two legs, two feet and one nose to the earth. They arrived separately. And he combined them here. One man and then one woman were made, in the same way. Both of them got together. By this the family grew, it became larger and larger.

Mulji Khura, bhagat from Khumbia tells another version:

Raja Bantol and Balvindhan made two statues of clay and gave them life. That is how we (humans) came into existence. Balvindhan and those people painted dots on stones and by that Ahindro (dev) and Kavadio (ghosts) came into existence. The first rain fell on Kalakakad.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Art for Tribal Rituals in South Gujarat, India: A Visual Anthropological Survey of 1969, Eberhard Fischer and Haku Shah, Niyogi Books, 2021.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Art for Tribal Rituals in South Gujarat, India: A Visual Anthropological Survey of 1969 appeared first on Fair Observer.

This is a necessary evil when we are all really on a conveyor belt of advancement towards a very unknown and, quite frankly, murky future. The developed world has iterated so often that we have carved the future out of absolutes from a need to reach a final destination without equivocation. 

A dystopian view this is not.

Indeed, many of the voices amplifying the path forward do so through passion projects and years of research fueled by a never-give-up attitude. The future, one might argue, is a lot like our notion of love — a wonderment wrought with the pain of experience and the savvy of repetition over time. We might think that we grasp what the future will look like and how we might partake in the mythical nature of next, but the reality is far less precise than the dreams of tomorrow. For this treacherous narrative, many ought to rethink and reset the value of contributing to our future not by one innovation but rather by the collective voice that shares in the pursuit process and not the result. 

A trip forward 

I am often on the edge of sanity or insanity interviewing notable minds across the globe in search of the story that unlocked their greatness. Sometimes, the tables are turned, and I find myself at the nexus of the story. A recent journey to the Middle East and the United Arab Emirates landed me in the future not as a witness but as a vocal and representative participant. 

A new book published and written by noted futurist and Dubai resident Tariq Qureishy, Voices of the Future, blends a multimedia approach with a nod to traditional books and an embrace of the technology of content weaving audio, video, QR codes, communities and a manuscript through 110 voices worldwide. 

The selected recipients range in age from 7–80 and from dozens of countries, disciplines, ethnicities and political leanings. Qureishy calls it his “kaleidoscope” — an apt term uniting numerous forecasts rooted in disciplines spanning the arts, sciences, medicine, technology, writing and oration for this 21st-century platform of people and ideas. 

A city, a future landscape?

A delicate dance occurs when I visit a new land — one that serves as a series of introductions to her charm and culture and my thirst to compress the getting-to-know-you phase. I want the feeling of knowing a place, the rhythm of her transit, the beat of her city lights and the comfort of feeling like a local — a tall task by any measure, and one that requires patience when time is short.

The future, as they say, is now. 

While being included as a future voice in Qureishy’s latest publication, I glean a look into the future through conversations on the margins. Prior to the book launch event, I crisscrossed Dubai via local transit in search of stories outside the sheen of a newly minted book with crisp pages and wonderous imagery. 

Seven happenstance conversations spanning taxi rides, shade-seeking discussions, seaside chats and shared exploration brought me closer to Dubai.

When I could not see her yesterday… today, she shone brightly.

I learned about life here from Pakistani taxi drivers, discussed a young man’s dreams originating from the Dominican Republic, shared a story or two between a young Ugandan woman and this wilting Mzungu (name for white skin) under the canopy of foliage while gazing at the Persian Gulf and found reality from a Sri Lankan who has worked for 18 years in Dubai to send money back home to his family.

Within the margins of these moments, I stared up at the wonders of the Museum of the Future, walked onto the shore of the Persian Gulf and shared a cigar with a Moroccan who discussed the plight of refugees around the world, the power of free speech and the beauty of taking a chance, one visa application at a time. 

The future isn’t tomorrow or next year for this illuminating cast of characters. Their future is now, and their patience is burning hot under the heat of the Dubai desertscape. 

The main event underscored the power of story through the accomplishments and collective vision of a cohort of futurists I’m proud to be a part of. A night of quilted conversations with leading voices from England, Australia, India, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, the US and so many more. 

The future of hope, medicine, technology, story and sustainability won the evening. The people and personalities brought me closer to the aspirations of Dubai and the region and, ultimately, the shared hope we all have for this very small planet.

I am not sure if I am a voice of the future or if those whom I met today are who gave a vibrant voice to a city, a country and a region I am just getting to know.

A bucket for the future

This journey to Dubai was about the future, the voices of the future and those whose efforts will likely craft our experience and understanding of an ever-changing world. Instead of artificial intelligence leading the charge, this journey represents the people and ideas behind the technology that will eventually author our collective next.

The futuristic excursion across the planet serves as a cultural nightcap for an experience steeped in a brighter and broader horizon. Ideas were summarily challenged, assumptions humbled and the notion of one’s own voice understood.

At the closing event, I met a fabulous woman who may reside a generation north of mine but whose vitality for life rivals more than I can heartily count. She shared something that was a profound first — last year, she completed her bucket list. Over 35 years, she completed 283 items. A story, you may say, with a beginning, middle and an end, yet this powerhouse of a human anxiously wonders, “What’s next?”

As the event descended into the night sky, she asked if I might sign her copy of Voices of the Future. I attempted to sum up my time in Dubai on one simple note:

Dear Michelle,

Thank you for sharing your inspiration. May we share your 284th adventure together.

All the best,

Rod

A woman of powerful stories and adventures ripped from either a spy novel or a National Geographic expose served as my narrative concierge as I put a bow on a wonderful and magical fortnight in Dubai.

The future, for some, has arrived, while for many of us, it remains the carrot to the universe’s stick. The question remains — will we be able to live within the uncertainty as we pursue answers to tomorrow’s questions or find ourselves stuck within the confines of being right? 

There’s a soapbox with my name on it somewhere. 

I, like many of you, wonder when it will be time to turn over the hurt and scars of the past to stand up and join the kaleidoscope of the future. Trust me. From my vantage point, there’s plenty of room on this ever-expanding horizon line or soapbox of our planet’s next. 

The future… awaits!

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post A Trip to Dubai, Future Voices and a Touch of Story appeared first on Fair Observer.

Commenting on the complex intersections between medicine and literature, Jane Wood notes, ‘medicine and literature [have] looked to each other for elucidation and inspiration’. In their article, ‘Literature and Medicine: Contributions to Clinical Practice,’ the authors focus upon the relationship: ‘Narrative accounts of patients’ experiences of illness are regularly considered in medical school courses and in professional reflections on the patient-physician relationship, aging, death and dying, disability, and women’s health’ (Charon et al.). They also claim that the acquaintance with literary works and ‘writing in narrative genres allow physicians and students to better understand patients’ experience and to grow in self-understanding, and literary theory contributes to an ethical, satisfying, and effective practice of medicine’ (Charon et al.). Fictional depictions of epidemics, diseases, and other health conditions can create awareness about health and hygiene. Literature can play a crucial role in generating awareness about health and society and may persuade readers to contemplate important questions on the intersections of health and humanities.

In the European as well as American literary histories, some of the prominent authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, William Somerset Maugham, Anton Chekhov, Robin Cook, and William Carlos Williams hailed from medical disciplines. Similarly, doctor-writers such as Rashid Jahan, Kalpish Ratna, Punathil Kunjabullah, Guruprasad Kaginele have made their mark on the literary map of India.

Across the globe, India is identified as the birthplace of Ayurveda and Yoga, the ancient systems of medicine and health, and is also known for ancient medical texts such as Sushruta Samhita and Charaka Samhita produced by early medical practitioners. Other classical systems of medicine such as Siddha, Amchi, and Naturopathy have also been prevalent in different parts of India for centuries. Apart from the indigenous systems of medicine, the country has also nourished foreign systems of medicine such as Unani (Graeco-Islamic), homeopathy, and allopathy on its soil by adopting and adapting them. Medical pluralism has existed in India for centuries but, as Khatri and Joshi claim, ‘the healthcare of the masses was always dependent upon the more informal and un-institutionalized sector’. In early times, it was difficult for the common folk to get access to Ayurvedic and Unani practitioners. The practitioners ‘easily invariably catered to the needs of the kings, lords, and the elites. There has always been a divide between the folk and professional sectors of medicine, with folk medicine catering to the masses’. As an alternative system, folk medicine has also been existing along with other systems. The presence of magico-religious healers, bone setter pahalwans, street-dentists, snake-bite healers in both urban and rural localities underscores how even in contemporary India, folk healing is a popular alternative system of cure and healing for the masses.

The roots of the modern/western system of medicine can be traced back to colonialism. It is believed that the Portuguese introduced western medicine in India in the sixteenth century. In his book, Projit Bihari Mukharji comments on the presence of ‘western medicines’ in the region: ‘South Asia had been exposed to ‘western’ medicine for at least two centuries before the term daktar emerged as a socially significant entity. Numerous European medical travellers such as Francois Bernier, Niccolao Manucci, Garcia d’Orta, and John Ovington, visited Mughal South Asia’ (Mukharji 1). The East India Company brought medical practitioners with them and established medical departments in various parts (Bengal, Madras, and Bombay presidencies) of colonial India to look after the health and the welfare of their military personnel and civilians. Commenting on the medical system in colonial India, David Arnold notes: ‘Nineteenth-century India presents us with a medical system that attempted not just to function for the benefit of the colonial rulers themselves (though that was undoubtedly one of its priorities) but also, often ineffectually, to straddle the vastness of a peculiarly colonial divide’ (Mukharji 7). The advent of modern medicine (allopathy) in India appears to have created a dichotomy in the medical landscapes of India—a binary between traditional systems of medicine and modern medicine.

Though scholars of medicine have been writing manuals, treatises, and other medical texts on health and hygiene from ancient times, it won’t be wrong to say that the genre of fiction provided authors to reflect upon the issues on health, hygiene, and cure. Thus, from the beginning of the twentieth century—when the genre of short fiction was still in its early phase—several celebrated and less-known authors, wrote short stories dealing with the issues of illness, trauma, health, and medicine. Their writings demonstrate the ethnomedicinal wisdom of different communities, home remedies, plural cultures of medicine, and issues of biomedicalization amongst others.

Medical Maladies: Stories of Disease and Cure from Indian Languages focuses on various contexts of health, illness, patient care, and medical ethics. Stories in the collection deal with different facets of disease and cure in India: How are the different systems of medicines depicted in the genre of short fiction? How are traditional practitioners (vaids, hakims, folk healers, midwives) as well as modern doctors and surgeons represented in Indian short fiction? How do doctors incorporate medical knowledge into their narratives? How are the spaces of hospitals, nursing homes, health clinics depicted in short stories? In what ways are the ethics of care and empathy dealt with in the genre of short stories? Who has the right over the patient’s body? How are issues of medical paternalism portrayed in Indian short fiction? How do authors narrate the doctor-patient decision making process in their stories?

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Medical Maladies: Stories Of Disease And Cure From Indian Languages, Haris Qadeer, Niyogi Books, 2022.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Medical Maladies: Stories of Disease and Cure From Indian Languages appeared first on Fair Observer.

‘Probably requires recharging,’ I mumble, in quick defence.

The caller is not satisfied with this. He continues bombarding me with more questions. 

‘You have been reminded time and again not to ever switch off your VHF (Very High Frequency) radio, even when it is plugged in for recharging the battery. When have you last got it recharged?’

Somehow, having been able to dodge the first blow, I now feel fully awake underneath the quilt and somewhat capable of uttering lies nonchalantly.

‘I got it recharged last night as well’, I mutter, without a trace of hesitation.

The voice on the other side appears to tone down. ‘It shouldn’t have got drained so fast in that case. You all are supposed to remain in constant touch with the Radio Maintenance Department.’

Suddenly it dawns on me that in such a situation if I politely say ‘Sorry’ once, the matter ends there, and I attempt to do so. It is seven o’clock in the morning.

The harshness of the voice appears to have diminished and the tone sounds gentler this time.

‘Is your evacuation bag ready?’

I get a big jolt of dismay. My heart is already in my mouth. The imaginary consequence of unforeseen devastation instantly engulfs my thought process and channels it towards gloom and despondency. No mirror is required to gauge that my face, if not red, has at least turned purple with anxiety.

The tips of my ears tingle with a rush of heat. Many a worrisome possibility crowd in. Has any bad news arrived from back home? Has one of my colleagues suddenly taken ill? Has anybody met with an accident? Instantly I realise, a mishap in this land often means shaking hands with death. Or, is it that the internal security situation of this country has become so unstable that foreign experts like us are no longer safe here?

As my mind constantly veers from one heart-breaking possibility to another, comes the authoritative instruction from the powerful voice on the other side of the cell phone. ‘Keep your evacuation bag ready. A vehicle is arriving shortly. Don’t make a move out of the guest house till the car arrives.’

‘If the driver of my official vehicle is alerted he can come with the car at once’, I try to say.

My intention is to inform the caller about the existence of my official car and that he should not bother deploying another motorcar and driver for me. The caller seems not at all in a compromising mood. He is rather, a bit annoyed. At least the tone of his voice suggests so.

‘Red Alert has been declared in the city of Kabul since this morning. So, at any moment you may be escorted out of the city. Listen carefully! This is not a security instruction, but an order. Oh yes, you have not yet switched on the radio.’

Indeed the connection snaps this time. How long can such a tiny device withstand such high decibel verbal onslaught! I have no other option but obey the order; hence the VHF radio comes to life. It immediately starts breaking the peace and quiet of the room with a continuous ripple of roaring and crackling. Breaking through the monotonous and noisy sound waves, words like ‘Charlie’, ‘Roger’ or ‘Kilo Delta’ surface rather abruptly.

I lower the volume of the radio but dare not switch it off again. Feeling lonely under the quilt and having been intimidated sufficiently, I now realise the importance of the companionship, unfathomable by any stretch of imagination earlier, of this otherwise irritating stream of noise. Counting every unbearable moment of compulsory waiting time stretching on endlessly till the security vehicle finally reports and the fear and anxiety of an unknown imminent danger has taken firm grip, I soothe my strained nerves by listening to the varying tones of different fascinating rasping sounds from the radio.

Another constant companion is the cell-phone. I am so not well-conversant with the multiple functional options of this device that it always attracts a nervous glance from me! The layout of the keypad of my cell phone is a flat one, individual keys are not separable by touch from the base of the keypad. Hence I use the keypad with great caution lest I end up pressing the wrong key. However, with very little practical experience of handling it, I try to connect some numbers with which I am comparatively more familiar, but in vain. I continue trying to connect to some other numbers. Every attempt is unsuccessful; the tiny device fetches no other response than a faint ‘ding-dong’ and a dark screen. At this point, I find that on the signal indicator sign there is a red cross-mark. It means the jammer is active and hence all cell phone users are blocked from transmitting or receiving any call.

It’s Friday, the weekly holiday. Without any further security related instructions, I come out of bed around eight, wash and prepare to have a look outside. Though the central heating system is in full swing and one feels comfortable under the quilt with a few layers of clothing, one has to be careful nevertheless, while opening the front door. Covering myself with more warm clothes and pulling on my socks and shoes I venture out with anxiety writ large on my face. Before stepping out I check on TV the morning temperature of Kabul. It is (-)29˚C.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Kabulnama, Amitabha Ray, Niyogi Books, 2013.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Thakurbari is now mainly known as the home of Rabindranath Tagore. He lived in Thakurbari from his birth in 1861 until 1890 and it was the place of his death in 1941. The links of the family to the colonial administration is shown by his older brother, Satyendranath, being the first Indian to enter the Indian Civil Service. Rabindranath received a knighthood in 1915 for his contribution to literature. He disowned it after the 1919 massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar.

It is clear from his writings that Thakurbari and its gardens had a special place in Rabindranath’s heart.

A [translator’s] footnote in his My Reminiscences describes the house as:

[An] irregular three storeyed mass of buildings, which had grown with the joint family it sheltered, built around several courtyards or quadrangles with long colonnades along the outerfaces, and narrowed galleries running around each quadrangle giving access to a single row of rooms[1].

The original plans or drawings of the house and contemporary descriptions of the building have yet to be unearthed. The basic layout of Thakurbari is, however, standard in that it has a bahir mahal and an andar mahal but the plan is complex as the building possesses a number of courtyards of varying size. Most appear to serve as little more than light wells and ventilation shafts. The building, painted a deep red, is now situated at the end of a narrow lane on its west with the entrance being via a gate on its south. A walk through large iron gates (Fig. 6.18a) leads today to a well-kept garden surrounded by Ashoka trees. It features a bust of Tagore.

During Tagore’s childhood in the 1870s the gardens were more extensive with inner and outer components; at the time much remained to remind him of the rural heritage of the family with the remnants of dairies and grain storage units in the house’s grounds. The inner garden was his earthly paradise with rows of coconut trees. From the terrace of the house he could see across the other terraces, gardens and tanks hidden amongst trees stretching towards ‘greyish blue of the eastern horizon.’ Behind the house was its own tank which was used by residents of the para. Tagore described it in the following terms:

In the south-east corner of our outer apartments … Just below the window of this room was a tank with a flight of masonry steps leading down into the water; on its west bank, along the garden wall, an immense banyan tree; to the south a fringe of cocoa-nut palms. From early morning the neighbours would drop in one-by-one to take their baths, which would go till past noon. The bathing ghat would become deserted and silent and only the ducks would remain, padding about after water snails or busy preening their feathers, the live-long day[2].

By 1917, the tank had been filled in and the banyan and coconut trees were long gone.

The view from the thakur dalan showing the raised performance area of the courtyard. Photographed by Joanne Taylor in 2006

The house itself is partly three storeys and partly two storeys in height. On its exterior paired columns flank doorways above which are decorative arches. Double columns on the first floor hold fixed louvres and wrought iron balustrades. The third level consists of shortened columns flanking decorative wrought iron panels. Above it sits a long eave which acts as a cornice. There is neither a grand facade nor grand entry to the building; a simple narrow passage leads to the bahir mahal. To the right of the courtyard on entry is an extended raised performance space, puja mandap, where many of Tagore’s plays were first presented to an audience. In Tagore’s childhood wooden pillars were planted in the courtyard for ‘supporting chandeliers during the Magh Festival.’[3]

The furnishings of the house are long gone but those belonging to Dwarkanath Tagore listed for sale in 1841 give us a hint of what they must have been like. It included chandeliers, clocks, mirrors, couches, marble-topped tables, mahogany chairs, a grand pianoforte and a Dauraville organ. Much of it was made by British craftsmen such as Shearwood and Currie. The collection was sold to make way for the use of the space by local artists. Getting rid of the original accumulation of furnishings reflected an emerging rejection of British and European design concepts as a means of showing modernity and the recognition of Indian modernising ideas. It parallels the emergence of Bengali modernism in the fine arts. This attitude was later furthered by Rabindranath Tagore in his development of the arts and architecture at Santiniketan during the early twentieth century.

The Thakurbari complex is now part of the Rabindra Bharati University. A museum contains paintings by Tagore and the Bengali and Anglo-Indian schools of art and many manuscripts.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from The Great Houses of Calcutta: Their Antecedents, Precedents, Splendour and Portents, Joanne Taylor and Jon Lang (Niyogi Books, 2016.)]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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… But not this India, not this valley of Skeletons.

—K. Satchidanandan (Fever)

A.K. Ramanujan concludes his informal essay, ‘Is there an Indian Way of Thinking?’ by narrating a parable told by the Buddha: ‘Once a man was drowning in a sudden flood. Just as he was about to drown, he found a raft. He clung to it and it carried him safely to dry land. And he was so grateful to the raft that he carried it on his back for the rest of his life.

The concept of a cultural Indianness that transcends the contexts of language, caste, class and gender is not unlike this raft: it has saved us from drowning on many an occasion in the past, the last one being during our struggle against British colonialism. But cultural nationalism today has become synonymous with a carnivorous revivalism that seeks to recreate the past in its own image and impose its oppressive authority over the present whose truth and strength lie in its cultural pluralism. India is a republic of languages, literatures, religions and ethnicities, each of which is authentically Indian and not ‘regional’ as they are often dubbed; any attempt to standardise Indian culture is more than likely to invite the disaster of Balkanisation. Constructing an India over the tomb of cultural differences that constitute the mosaic of its culture is certain to please the Orientalist with his perceptions of a homogeneous Indian culture, the globaliser who seeks to hand India packaged in a comprehensible and easy format over to the alien consumer awed by its inaccessible plurality, and the obscurantist who seeks political hegemony through biased cultural representations that entirely marginalise the women, Dalits, tribals and entire linguistic and religious minorities of India with their different, often subaltern if not subversive, traditions and perceptions of Indian culture. The construction of a monolithic Indian culture, character or literature is thus an act of civilisational violence that inevitably involves a negation of heteroglossia, a silencing of ethnic diversity and religious pluralism and a bulldozing of diverse cosmologies and world views that together constitute the federation of Indian culture. This is not to deny certain shared patterns of literary evolution, linguistic kinships and intercultural ties developed over centuries of co-existence. The foreign observer looking from a distance does find a semblance of cultural unity in India, but coming closer one begins to see hundreds of Ramayanas and Mahabharatas, dozens of philosophical systems and religious cults, which were never called Hindu until the 19th century, as many modernisms as there are languages, as many different ways of negotiating foreign influences and as many ways of ethnic and linguistic expression that reflect the genius of the Indian people. ‘Indian culture’ and ‘Indian Literature’ are no more than convenient umbrella terms that embrace diverse cultures and literatures, whose historical and geographical co-existence has led to certain exchanges and at times produced examples of multilingual creativity. The raft that saved us is gradually, imperceptibly, turning into the old man in the Sindbad story pressing us down, suffocating our cultures and silencing our many voices, reducing them all to a mere stammer.

We are not unfamiliar with the European stereotypes of India, both positive (e.g. Max Muller) and negative (e.g. Hegel). The salient features of this characterisation are: the denial of empirical reality, the inability to distinguish the self from the non-self and interior from exterior, a neglect of universal human nature, a refusal to create synoptic systems, and the consequent construction of an illogical bricolage of tools and systems, the theories of karma or of samsara, the hierarchies of caste, the hegemony of vedanta in philosophy or of dhvani in literature or rasa in theatre: but each one of these has not merely exceptions but parallels and alternatives. A.K. Ramanujan in the essay cited earlier, labours hard to discover and define a certain movement in Indian thought from the context-sensitive to the context-free. He points out how the Indian concept of dharma has always been particular, bound as it is to region and caste. No Indian literary text, even the dateless and anonymous ones, until the 19^th century comes without a context or a frame and that every story within the epics is encased in a meta-story like the tale of Nala told by a sage to a dependent Yudhishtira in his exile in the woods, which itself is part of the macrotale called Mahabharata. The taxonomy of landscapes in Tamil cankam poetry is another example of intense contextualisation, where the character and mood are related to the patterns of landscape, labour and food. Again, Ramanujan points to the collapsing of nature and culture as against the Levi-Straussian opposition, a metonymic view of man in nature or an expression of culture that is enclosed in nature. Such a pattern of concentric containments, like when the little Krishna swallows the three worlds and his mother sees herself and her son also within his open mouth, is then supposed endemic to Indian cultural representations. Even space and time are particularised and each kind of soil, each type of house, each season, each hour of the day has its special mood and character. Thus from the caste-system in society to the raga system in music, everything seems to reflect context-sensitivity. Hence all counter-movements in India according to Ramanujan are attempts to be context-free: rasa in aesthetics, moksa in the purusharthas (or the aims of life), sannyasa in the asramas (or the stages of life), sphota in semantics and bhakti in religion define themselves against a background of inexorable contextuality. They are universal and generalised and betoken a liberation from the context—let it be from relational social roles as in moksa, from worldly ties as in sannyasa, from the particularity of bhavas as in rasa, from the sequence and time as in sphota or from caste, ritual, gender and custom as in bhakti. If in the West, the revolt is against a status-quo that is abstract, universal and context-free, in India, the rebellion is against the context-bound, to create universals.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Positions: Essays on Indian Literature, K. Satchidanandan, Niyogi Books, 2019.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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With the typical imagery of the ‘calligraphy’ and the ‘coil’, Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) revealed his Oriental connections rather unwittingly when he wrote: ‘The earth is a calligraphy of coils’ (‘From Another Desert’: ANMOA). This implies further that he perceived the earth as a complex script that recorded myriad conditions of being, as it moved in a circle. Ali’s poetry seeks sustenance from earth’s vitality, and it connects those conditions of being together in a synchronous whole. As such, persons, places, and predicaments; love, death, and loneliness; and language, form, and poetry are richly coiled together in a remarkable calligraphy. This calligraphy has no breaks or discontinuities; in fact, one extends into the other and creates what Edward Said called a ‘contrapuntal rhetoric’, marked by similarity of occurrences.

A strong rhetoric persuades strongly, as does Ali’s poetry, which seeks to connect the constituents of this calligraphy in an organic whole. His poetry is essentially a manner of seeking an address, a name, a way of belonging. He finds an address for himself in each of these conditions individually, as in all of them wholly. He creates an extremely rich community of beings composed of human and non-human, reverberating with life and invoking a rare empathy. Poets always yearn to achieve this state, but Ali does it differently with different attributes and baggage. He has his own space, his own people, his own influences, and his own longings. It is a longing for an individual identity, a form, or a language to speak in.

Places are vital presences in Ali’s poetry. He has a large space to operate upon in physical and poetic terms. A poet who lived and wrote in America was in America, and yet not in America. Ethno-racial labels of Indian-American, Asian-American, or Kashmiri-American did not work for him like neat labels or addresses of belonging. In calling himself a Kashmiri-American, he made vital pronouncements of being a Kashmiri at both the ends, as the label suggests, and remaining an American at the centre from where he could look back and forth. In hyphenating his locus, he achieved a metaphoric connectivity while retaining his space for himself with great conviction. Even though Kashmir is not at the centre of his identity tag, it remains so in spirit and has its constant pull on him. The very titles of these collections of poems— Rooms are Never Finished [RANF] (2001), The Country Without a Post Office [TCWPO] (1997), A Nostalgist’s Map of America [ANMOA] (1991), and The Half-Inch Himalayas [THIH] (1987)—are indicative of his being space centric. ‘The Blessed Word: A Prologue’ spells it out rather dramatically:

Let me cry out in that void, say it as I can. I can write on that void:

Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere, Qashmir, Cashmir, Cashmire,

Kashmere, Cachemire,

Cushmeer, Cachmiere, Casmir. Or Cauchemar in a sea of stories? Or:

Kacmir, Kaschemir, Kasmere, Kachmire, Kasmir, Kerseymere?

(TCWPO: 3)

This is like calling a beloved by many names. The poem invokes various images of Kashmir: its glorious past, its murky present, the festival of Id-ul- Zuha, chinar leaves, songs of the legendary Habba Khatoon, Jhelum, and Zero Bridge. More importantly, he is moved by Osip Mandelstam, a Russian poet, whom he quotes in the epigraph to this poem—‘We shall meet again, in Petersburg’—and appropriates this reference for his own sake in saying: ‘He reinvents Petersburg (I, Srinagar), an imaginary homeland, filling it, closing it, shutting himself (myself) in it’. (3)

Several other poems invent and reinvent the images of Kashmir and confirm Ali’s concern vigorously. In all these poems, Kashmir emerges as a point in space that suffers and resuscitates, but remains a living entity both in memory and reality. It shines in its glory and remains a constant historical, political, and cultural reference:

I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir,

and the shadowed routine of each vein

will almost be news…

(‘The Last Saffron’, TCWPO: 13)

Again I’ve returned to this country

where a minaret has been entombed.

(‘The Country without a Post Office’, TCWPO: 25)

Kashmir is a constant refrain in Ali’s poetry. It is a refrain of love, anger, and despair. The examples quoted earlier underline his concern with his home and his identity. He assembles them, image by image, spread all around in the land of his birth. The place is rehabilitated in reality, memory, and fantasy. His cartographic imagination works to create a map of belonging for him. While he can identify his locus, he can also extend its frontiers liberally, allowing one to enter into the other. As such, one place becomes all places and all places become one. Kashmir melts into Amherst (‘Lenox Hill’, RANF), Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Arizona into Calcutta (‘In Search of Evanescence’ ANMOA), Delhi into Arizona (‘Snow on the Desert’, ANMOA), the valleys of Kashmir into the peaks of Zabarvan (‘A History of Paisley’, TCWPO), and so on. The memories of the place are not evoked in Ali in the way they are evoked in those living in a state of forced exile. In his case, they are evoked out of his intense concern for the land. This concern is both political and cultural in nature, and has significant implications in the growth of Ali as a poet, a citizen, a political being, a cultural historian, and a myth-maker.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Socioliterary Cultures in South Asia, Anisur Rahman, Niyogi Books, 2019.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Of abiding interest – and not without an air of mystery – were the bungalows for the itinerant in the moffusils: the sub-divisional officer on duty, the engineer on inspection and the forester out to trap poachers. Thus, irrigation, canal, forest and the generic inspection bungalows catered to these specialised personnel. The circuit houses were for the judiciary while the dak bungalow acquired a certain ubiquity – and, as we shall see, notoriety. Taken over from the Moghuls, the dak system relied on relays of runners who carried the mail. Dak bungalows marked the point where relays changed, and also where officers and other travellers could rest for the night. For inexplicable reasons, these rather basic and often uncomfortable abodes excited the imagination of the likes of traveller-informant Francis Younghusband, ICS-wallah John Beames and creative writers from Rudyard Kipling to Satyajit Ray.

In the absence of anything but tents, and maybe even the open sky, they were indispensable to many and not only those on official duty – wayfarers, Younghusband on his several trips – acknowledged or secret – or the homeless traveller in search of salvation. Deep verandas with ancient planter’s or deck chairs, old trees in the compound, a tattered but fascinating visitor’s book and the decrepit khansama, that general dogsbody whose watery matan ishtoo, no match for his cornucopia of anecdotes and fairytales, were essential components of the mise en scène. Culinary finesse or the lack of it depended upon the khansama’s virtuosity, age and mood. While the assured entry of crème caramel for dessert earned it the sobriquet of ‘365’, a few were lucky to be treated to fine Mughlai cuisine prepared by the last survivor in a line of Muslim khansamas. More often, if one was fortunate, a passable Country Captain chicken appeared within minutes of the disappearance of a squawking bird, its ‘sudden death’ more than apocryphal. Or if one was not that fortunate, one would have to stomach dished up ‘fowls [that] lay the eggs of finches, but develop the bones of vultures’. So wrote a frustrated dak bungalow inmate in that other institution of the dak bungalow, the much-thumbed visitor’s book.

Nicer dak and forest bungalows were usually situated on the banks of pristine streams, amidst deep forests or on hilltops. Even then, often, sylvan daytime surroundings were quickly transformed into the eerie and insecure when, with nightfall, the jungle’s brooding presence seemed a little too close for comfort, a howling wind keening like a wayward banshee. Nor was it difficult to mistake the hollow cough of the chowkidar for that of an ambitious panther or see the coils of a hamadryad in the dim half-light of a dying candle. Who would argue that the gnarled branches of the peepul or neem swaying in the breeze on a full-moon midsummer’s night did not harbour the shreds of a makeshift noose? Particularly if one’s by-the-wavering-light-of-the-kerosene-lantern bedtime reading had been of a selective nature. Rajika Bhandari reminds one of the chequered history of many a dak bungalow during the 19th century when cholera, malaria and other deadly fevers carried off many. Often when travellers fell ill far away from home, the dak bungalow was their only refuge – and it was not unusual for some to be found dead the following morning. Rudyard Kipling added darkly, that in the days that men drove from Calcutta to the Northwest, some of the dak bungalows along the grand Trunk road had ‘handy little cemeteries in their compounds’. Indeed stark testimony to long days and rough rides! His wry comment on the dak bungalow ghost is instructive: ‘A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a dak-bungalow would be mad of course’. Yet as so many close to madness had indeed died in these places ‘there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts’.

In ‘My Own True ghost Story’, Kipling writes of these ‘objectionable places to put up in’ where khansamas were as old as the bungalows and often ‘an excited snake’ was on the threshold to welcome the weary traveller. Hardly surprising that one such bungalow – and Kipling had lived in many, it being his ‘business’ to do so – is the locale for a spine-chilling ghost story; until, of course, the denouement. Scampering rats are the culprits, enticing a fervid brain to think of billiard balls, if not cannons, in the next room separated from his by a flimsy partition. Many decades later, Satyajit Ray noted that ‘if a place is spooky – and dak bungalows have a reputation of being so – it will be so at all times’. Thus in ‘The Indigo Terror’ (or ‘Neel Atanko’), he found the dak bungalow, with its charpoy and chair with only one arm intact, a suitable venue for the tragic end of an indigo planter who had shot his dog and then himself a hundred years ago. His restless spirit finds refuge in the protagonist, and so the tale proceeds.

Interestingly, successive post-Independence governments have seen fit to leave the musty old official British bungalow strictly alone, spookiness and all. The ramshackle dak bungalow, the eerie forest rest house, where wild animals nudge hopefully at creaky bathroom doors, or the stately Lutyensesque residence in the country’s capital are testimonies to the Raj’s eclectic architectural career. Cities and roads have been renamed, railways and the armed forces modernised, but railway colonies, stations and cantonments retain their basic colonial architecture, layout and design.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Memories of Belonging: Images From the Colony and Beyond, Malavika Karlekar, Niyogi Books, 2015.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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When I stepped out of the airport and into Las Vegas, I felt like I had entered the outer edge of the universe. The low skyline met with the ancient seabed, and the city seemed to float in the azure sky. It was as if I were in a snow globe with toylike monuments — the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building and a pyramid were all around me. As night fell, the proprietors of the globe flicked a switch, lighting Las Vegas up. “Sin City” swaggered to center stage out of an innocent daytime.

And then there was Sphere. It was like its own planet within the galaxy of Las Vegas. Its phantasmic exterior lighting made it appear as a giant, extraterrestrial eye. U2 wielded Sphere to eclipse the typical characterizations of the infamous city.

U2’s shows at Sphere went beyond concerts; they were full-body journeys that enveloped each audience member with wraparound illusions. This held true even at the very outset, as the dome was made of faux cathedral stone that seemed to spiral to the stars above.

Although drawing from multiple albums, the shows centered on U2’s 1991 album Achtung Baby. The band, with lead singer Bono, had previously staged the album in the 1992 Zoo TV Tour. Sphere, decked out with the world’s largest LED screens and costing $2.3 billion to construct, opened the door to a new type of concert.

Intensity vs intimacy and meeting past selves

U2’s performance style had taken a turn in 1992, escalating from relatively unembellished stage setups to sensory overload. With their revolution of rock show techniques, fans grew concerned that the spectacle could diminish the music. That’s why it is paramount to learn how the band approached its new show in this regard.

After my trip to Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to interview Bono about the show.

India Nye Wenner: The first topic I want to discuss is U2’s relationship to the audience in the fresh Achtung Baby production, and how you dealt with the immersiveness of Sphere.

Bono: Originally, when Achtung Baby came out, we had a tour called Zoo TV. Part of it was deliberately disorientating. We wanted not to have a friendly relationship with our audience. It was a kind of confrontational relationship. We bombarded our audience with media; I shapeshifted into your worst-nightmare rock star. It was the time of grunge, and everyone was kind of thinking, “We’re really authentic, man, we’re wearing plaid and we don’t believe in even a light show.” We said to ourselves, “We’ll go in the exact opposite direction and be the opposite of authentic, and we’ll bombard our audience.” These were more art principles than music principles.

With this show, it’s the same. It starts in what’s known as Plato’s Cave. But it starts, really, at the invention of fire, if you want to think of it like that — early experiences of cave paintings, aloneness. I walk out on stage without any glasses and I sing this ancient Irish melody, and it feels like you’re in a cave. And then it quickly moves to a nightclub in Berlin in the 90s and it gets all very kind of decadent and fun and playful, and we become your worst nightmare of rock stars — which is kind of fun, too, ’cause playing that up is fun. So we let the ego run rampant for a while, so even that’s not super connected. In the middle […] you have songs like “One,” which do connect. But it doesn’t become truly intimate until we get to the bit where we turn off the technology.

Wenner: As an attendee of two of U2’s Sphere concerts, I can attest to the energy shift that accompanied the middle of the show.

Bono: We break things down into this kind of acoustic, radical intimacy, I would call it. Because of the acoustic technology in Sphere, Sphere itself is a speaker. And no matter where you are in Sphere, you get perfect sound. You’re able to whisper and be heard at the very back. So we realized that the acoustic set where we’re just playing acoustic guitar and these deconstructed versions of our songs is as powerful as the big visual extravaganza. Because you had been so disoriented by the first part of the show coming at you at full throttle, when we got to this moment of intimacy, it was really intimate. People started to sing, people got very emotional and they opened up more.

Then we get to this bit that I’m just talking to you about: the breakdown acoustic set on [musician] Brian Eno’s stage, a turntable with algorithms that change its colors. Then we get back into more visuals and then finally into this cathedral of the natural world, which [stage designer] Es Devlin designed with all the endangered species of Nevada. And people get really emotional at that point. And I’m looking out there, and there are people with tears in their eyes — a lot of them are men. And sometimes I’m one of them.

Wenner: Each U2 show at Sphere lasted a little over two hours. With over 20 songs, 120 minutes, 18,600 attendees and 1.2 million LEDs, I’m curious to hear how you made sense of such vast potential.

Bono: The arc of the show is the thing that’s most successful. In theater, you have a sort of arc. And to get to what the Greeks call catharsis, you have to go on a journey. So I think that’s why this show worked well. I think you allow the visuals to overpower the music because in the end, the music comes back and […] wins. I wondered: If it was like that all the way through, would it have been as powerful? I don’t think so. It’s the arc, this theatrical arc.

You just always enjoy a three-act structure, believe it or not, even though most rock ’n’ roll bands are like jukeboxes. They just play their songs, and it’s great, because it might be different every night. With [rock singer] Bruce Springsteen, you never know what you’re gonna get when you see him play, which is amazing. Bruce is so clever. He creates a three-act structure just with his music every night. But to do it with visuals of this scale, you have to lock in a few things. And so in that sense, it’s a little restrictive. But I think it’s a worthwhile compromise to make.

Wenner: In your Zoo TV Tour of Achtung Baby, you were 32 years old. Now you’re 63, and you’ve just performed the same songs you wrote 31 years ago.

On top of revisiting the past, as lead singer, you were tasked with maintaining harmony as a pillar amidst the tsunami of Sphere’s visuals. U2 was just four men within the universe of lights. What did you learn about yourself as a performer throughout the show?

Bono: I have to confess to you that I still suffer from a kind of stage fright. I can wake up in the morning, and it’s not that I think I can’t sing the songs — it’s just I wonder if I’ll have the essential energy to really make tonight the best night. U2’s grandiosity or arrogance, or whatever you want to call it, is [that] we want every night we play to be not just a Friday night, we want it to be New Year’s Eve. Every night. That’s our insanity. We go out with that kind of commitment.

What I was so surprised by performing those sounds was stepping inside the songs. I discovered the person who wrote them 20 years ago, 30 years ago, whatever it was. And it was a challenge — you meet your different selves. I could see some ways that I’d grown and become, I think, a better version of myself. But I could see in others where I hadn’t grown.

In order to sing these songs, I have to really get inside them. The songs towards the end are very emotional; they’re quite operatic. To be able to sing them, I gave everything I had — and I discovered that I didn’t want to go out after the show. Or I couldn’t meet anyone before. When I was younger, even ten years ago, I’d be the guy who’d be saying hello to everybody, going out afterwards, having a laugh. But this show was very demanding, so I accepted that while I’m here, this show owns me. My best friends would come by and I wouldn’t get to see them. I’d be preserving my voice. So it’s been quite challenging on that front. But when I’m on stage and with the band, I am so alive. And I’m okay if it’s just two hours a day that I’m fully alive.

Achtung Baby’s new relevance and the perils of love

Early in the show, a projected stone wall cracks apart. This is a nod to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. It allows brilliant light to seep through its cracks and set the venue aglow. Today, in contrast to the unity that came in 1989 in Germany, walls are being built up across the world. Bitter divides have gone up in the Middle East, social battlements mortared with intolerance in America. And Russia continues to brutally encircle Ukraine.

By putting the spotlight onto Achtung Baby again decades later, U2 urges listeners to hear the songs in the larger context of our modern world.

Wenner: What made Achtung Baby, as opposed to The Joshua Tree or Songs of Innocence, the album to be re-energized and to bring Sphere to life?

Bono: We’d made two albums before Achtung Baby: One was The Joshua Tree, and another was called Rattle and Hum, which was really an extension of The Joshua Tree. So we really wanted to move away from a focus on the United States, on America and its mythology, to a more European perspective. It just felt fresh for us to get involved in electronic music. We went to Berlin just as the wall was coming down and the Soviet Union was ending, and freedom was growing around the world. It was a very exciting moment to be in Berlin, when the wall came down and the world changed shape almost overnight. It was an astonishing moment in history. 

Even though our song, “One,” was written with very personal themes — “We’re one, but we’re not the same, we get to carry each other” — it resonated in Berlin because East and West Germany were coming together. That song has gone on to mean a lot to people who are at odds with each other or trying to move towards some kind of union that’s difficult, whether it’s in a marriage or a country. And it just seemed that Achtung Baby and the album that followed it, Zooropa, was the right thing for us to do in the 90s.

It’s like an artist does a retrospective because they want people to remember their earlier work. A museum will curate their work from a period and you go and re-experience it some years later. It felt like that. It was like an anniversary. It was the right time to remind ourselves, as well as the rest of the world, that we’ve made this album. And some of the themes of unity, or the lack thereof, were present again — because now the wall is starting to be built back up. So I think that song in particular might be newly relevant.

After an opening of staggering lights and illusions, Sphere wrapped itself in solid-colored wallpapers, and the music took hold of the room. The song was an unsettling one. As silhouettes of butterflies began fluttering against the cobalt blue backdrop, Bram van den Berg — filling in on drums for Larry Mullen Jr, who was recuperating from surgery — struck up a quiet but gripping rhythm. The foursome, including van den Berg, Adam Clayton, David “Edge” Evans and Bono, began to play “Love is Blindness.”

Wenner: What was your thinking behind pairing “Love is Blindness” with the mise-en-scène of butterflies and brooding blue?

Bono: The short answer is it’s setting up what comes later: the ode to the natural world, the Nevada Ark, Es Devlin’s work. But we made it a little eerie and a little spooky. I’m very interested that you should mention “Love is Blindness.” We did the best version we’ve ever done in our life last night. I couldn’t believe it. Sometimes a song can come into itself 20, 30 years later. I’m really enjoying singing that at the moment, and it’s such a bleak song in one sense. How love can turn in on itself. Love is blindness. This thing that should be light itself, love, can turn sour and lead you into a dark place.

You’ll see this in relationships. I imagine you’ll see it in some of your own or your friends’. They’ll get into relationships… and they’re just not good for them. It can overpower you. When I was writing it, I was throwing in some terrible, frightening images, like car bombs. It’s very melodramatic stuff, but it’s like a cabaret song.

Have you heard of the chanson tradition? I had these really extreme images which I’d taken from Ireland as we were dealing with terrorism and trying to get a peace agreement with paramilitaries. Last night, I was singing it, asking myself, “Where did these lyrics come from? How did I write them?” They’re so intense. And there is something about grasping the nettle. It’s okay sometimes to stare at the world and see that occasionally, it can have a dark heart. You don’t want to stay there, but it’s okay to look at it at times in your life and just say, “Here’s a problem. Here it is. I’m stating it, and this relationship is not going well. It’s not good. It’s going to blow up my life.” And the person who’s writing the song, the character at the center of the song, the protagonist — his relationship is destroying him.

Finding awe in nature and people

As the audience sat in Sphere, transfixed by the lights and absorbed into the music, we suddenly found ourselves outside. The walls had become transparent like a crystal ball, and our attention fixed upon a surreally mundane vicinity: a drab car lot, hotels and a fluorescent Ferris wheel. And before our eyes, in a stop-motion erosion of time, Las Vegas began to disappear. From top to bottom, the framework of each building was exposed and dismantled, until we were returned to the sweeping desert that lay beneath the glamorous city. Water sprung from sandy fissures and washed over the land until Las Vegas was rendered a placid sea, the ancient ocean floor it once was.

Bono: Making the building disappear and then making Las Vegas disappear came to me very early on. I realized that the resolution of the screens was so high that if you showed people what was going on outside, at the same time, people would confuse reality, and it would look like the building disappeared. And from that we had this idea: What happens if then we deconstructed Las Vegas? What if we brought Las Vegas back 100 years? Then what if we brought it back a million years? Because the Nevada desert wasn’t the desert then; there was water over it.

The show was a spiritual experience in itself, complete with cathedral-like imagery consistent with the motif of faith present in many of U2’s songs. Prior to the band taking stage, Sphere projected the stonework of a gothic cathedral that appeared to stretch all the way to heaven. As the show started, the stone panels were traded in for codes of neon numbers. They flickered as they proliferated into a digital age church, a rainbow of integers that rose to a peak. They closed in on the audience, locking viewers into a sort of digital infinity.

Elvis Presley then swooped in to free the audience from this box, rocketing them into a celestial stained glass window of glamor and allure, joined by gilded displays of gamblers and ravishing women. After Las Vegas’s debauchery, the audience ended with exultation in a cathedral of the natural world, filled with the endangered creatures of the Mojave Desert. At the center of each distinct cathedral stood one continuity: the preacher U2, guiding guests along the pilgrimage through each facet of human nature.

Wenner: What did you want people to take away from the church of U2?

Bono: We wanted people to understand that every one of us has many different selves. From a very egocentric self, to a playful self, to an earnest, caring, change-the-world self. The thing that we wanted people to leave the building with was a word that you Americans have ruined. And the word is “awe.” It’s one of my favorite words, but I know everyone says, “everything’s awesome!” And I always laugh saying the word, but I actually like the word. But we use it too lightly. It’s not just Americans; Irish people do, too. But awe is, I suppose, wonder?

And the thing that U2 has always challenged, in all our different incarnations, was jadedness. Being bored. I have never been bored. Maybe I was bored when I was 16 in school, but once I joined U2, I could write songs, and there was always stuff for me to do. And I just wanted people to wake up in the world, and realize it’s awesome, and realize that the world is fragile. It’s a fragile ecosystem. We have to take care of it and we have to take care of each other. 

The sins of Las Vegas are just more obvious. What’s going on in Las Vegas does not stay in Las Vegas. It is going on all over the world. There’s that kind of hard commerce, but there’s a lot of people who work really hard. I always try and thank people, the taxi drivers, the servers. The people who work there, they work around the clock for people who probably don’t work as hard as them. And it’s a little microcosm of America.

We live in a time where people are very judgmental of each other — your politics, where you’re at in your life. And if this show succeeds, people will come out caring about the person they’re walking out with a little more, and a little less cynical at the world around them. As people are leaving, as well as being in awe of the natural world and being alive, I’d like people to notice each other more, be grateful to each other. And as they look around at this sort of adult playpen, kind of smile at the human condition, and go, “Yeah, we are funny. We’re funny, us human beings.”

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Bono Goes to Las Vegas: Let There Be Light appeared first on Fair Observer.

A hush enveloped the gallery space that day. Gentle breeze wafted in playing with the blue-pink flush of sunlight through the jali wall, creating a pattern of tinged diamonds on the beige, tiled floor. Tubular cerulean-teal benches with sleek curved legs, placed in the centre of the rooms offered ease and comfort. The canvases of varied sizes clung to the cream wall, with lemony muslin curtains fluttering here and there. Music played, tinkling and tripping like trickling water from a drinking fountain. Intermittently a babble of voices would permeate the space, reaching a peak and then ebb out.

The gallery was full of voluptuous women. They were the artist’s nudes who stood tall and self-possessed in ivory lacquer-plated frames. While some had empty beatific intelligence on their faces, others stood gazing in a matter of fact way or caught ruptured in an agonizing moment. A few more stood laughing—was it maddening laughter or a triumphant whoop? But surprisingly not one seemed shy, skinny, shamefaced, self-conscious, self-effacing, shrinking or sheepish. An air of confidence infused the body language of the nudes. They weren’t titillating, sexually inviting or erotic in the clichéd sense, but rather grotesquely ugly at times. They seemed to portray women more naturally than any other female portraits I had seen through Western art history. They were definitely more inclined towards sculptures of Indian temple art, but with a distinctive modernist twist.

The golden nude wasn’t pure golden yellow like the sunflower is yellow, but butterscotch bumblebee yellow. Peering closely at the impasto application of paint, I was suddenly startled to hear the nudes speak against a backdrop of a babble which had invaded the gallery space once again. I was at the receiving end, as the voices originated from varied corners of the gallery. The nudes seemed to speak together, in quick succession one after the other and it sounded like a chant that had begun long ago, probably in the middle of the last century—a unanimous craving for someone to hear them sing. I stood rooted to the spot, primevally bewitched.

Each canvas was like the marriage bed in Donne’s poem. The nudes chorused that their bloods—that of the artist and their own had mingled with “no sin, nor shame nor loss of maidenhead.” The most powerful emotion rather was that of the terror of mutual sexualities—obsessive drives that are generally over-heaped with myths, the mind being a palimpsest of places, culture and experiences.

The nudes chimed, what Souza liked to do was to sound his “barbaric yawp” clearly and with all his might. Deeply connected to nature, he revelled in being one with the sea, the breeze, the waves, the flowers and the trees. In complete rhythm with forces of nature, animate and inanimate matter, he expressed his innate vocabulary on his canvas with vitality and vigour.

Watching those nudes that day and listening to their chant, I felt as if the whole place was being illuminated by some other earthly light. Unparalleled in history, here was an artist who really wanted to mingle and have a real conversation. Here was someone who had been privy to those hush-hush feminine affairs, where men had never wanted to go or see.

The nudes hummed along:

Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Whoever degrades another degrades me,

And whatever is done or said returns at last to me…

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

—Walt Whitman

… Beyond scopophilia, I became “a woman looking at Souza look at women.” Gazing at the nudes with fresh eyes, I met Dora Marsden’s13 “Freewomen,” women who had walked a long way ahead from being bondswomen—those ordinary women shackled by convention, pawns in patriarchal history (as wives, mothers, sisters, spinsters, prostitutes or other gendered selves)—giving birth to “individual ends in themselves.” But the lay observer groomed a voyeur on three-millennia-old patriarchal art, where female sexuality served man’s fancy, fantasy and the F word, obviously did not get it. On the contrary, they were repelled by Souza’s explicit imagery of women’s sexuality—love, lust, giving birth and sexual freedom—a human right to be her egotist self.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from F. N. Souza: The Archetypal Artist, Janeita Singh, Niyogi Books, 2024.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post F. N. Souza: The Archetypal Artist appeared first on Fair Observer.