Two nuns, two Indias and the politics of identity

Swarna Rajagopalan, Through their bodies we strive, New Indian Express, November 3, 2008.

(Also available here.)

In October, two Catholic nuns from India made news.

First, news broke about the gang rape of a nun in Kandhamal on August 25, 2008. Her rape was part of the anti-Christian mob frenzy that followed the killing of Lakshmananda Saraswati. She was dragged out of her hiding-place, raped and paraded naked in the market-place. She alleges that the police were watching and did nothing. Neither did others in the marketplace.

Second, Sister Alphonsa was canonized and India celebrated. Saint Alphonsa’s miracles were remembered and her followers and faithful interviewed, as we watched the Vatican ceremony live. Those who had never heard of Alphonsa before that day now know a great deal about her, her hometown, her miracle and her schoolfriends.

Within us, live two Indias.

The first India I know is that of my great-grandmother, walking down from her home to pray at “Alphonso kovil” in the neighbourhood, a ritual we continued on every visit to Chennai. The nun from Kerala, her contemporary, became a much-loved part of our family pantheon.

The second India, also somewhere within many of us, has responded to communal violence against Christians in Orissa and Karnataka in a shamefully muted way. It is petulant about the pride we felt collectively at Alphonsa’s canonization, pointing out that India has other women saints.

But this article is not about my family, communalism or ‘Indias,’ old and new. It is about the way in which women become the currency or the medium through which we transact or express identity politics. In October, what the Orissa nun and Saint Alphonsa had in common is that their lives and stories were drawn into political battles far removed from their own experiences.

Women, their bodies and their lives are too often gadgets deployed in political struggles over delineating what defines a national (or local) community and what relationship each part of society shall bear to this whole.

The symbols of the group are cast as women, whether as Mother India, Britannica, Thamizhthai or Rosie the Riveter, inspiring the group to act upon its self-definition. The symbol is given attributes—a nurturing temperament, the spirit of battle, divinity, chastity, sacrifice, discipline—that are then extrapolated onto women in the group. This works, first, to stereotype women in the group; they are uniformly nurturing, feisty, adventurous, chaste, and so on. Then it serves as a moral code for women, laying out do’s and don’ts for them of dress and behaviour. Expressing the group’s values, these become custom, ritual and norm, into which all the members of a group are socialized and to which they are expected to conform. Women, who live this code, become its first teachers; prisoners becoming jailers, one might say. Transgressions of this code are punishable by the group, physically, through shaming or ostracism. These codes also assure that when Mother India and Rosie the Riveter are done with their work of inspiring the troops, they can return to the private sphere to live and teach the group’s code.

Because women come to embody the group, its values and the continuity of the code that defines it, they are the most effective target for its opponents. Historical and contemporary case studies around the world show that subjugation is often expressed through sexual violence. The abduction, rape and enslavement of men and women is a common detail in accounts of most military encounters. The acquisition of concubines and wives from the enemy’s ranks is a symbol of military victory. This is what Helen of Troy ultimately stands for. The recognition of rape as a weapon of war is an acknowledgment that interpersonal acts of violence are not isolated from hostilities between groups.

‘Jauhar,’ ‘sati’ and ‘karo-kari’ all express the belief that the honour of the group (whether community, family or clan) lies in the bodies of women. Women must die rather than risk the loss of this honour which does not bind the group’s men in a similar way. (That this honour is in strange ways tied to property, inheritance and succession is the subject of another article.) Riots and mob violence pose particular threats for women and girls, because rape, especially rape by a gang, is both to act out and to express hostility and dominance. The war begins elsewhere, but is ultimately waged on and over female bodies.

Gender stereotypes, gender roles and behavioural codes have one unintended consequence. In times of conflict, they create an unexpected space for agency. Women are able to act as mothers, even when the demands of group honour restrict their movements in the name of protection. ‘Mothers’ have organized to search for missing children, to tend to the wounded, to organize supplies and to rally for peace. Where daughters, sisters and wives are confined to the so-called safe haven of the home, mothers cross its threshold into public action, time and again in Chile, in Kashmir, in Northern Ireland, in Sri Lanka and other conflict zones.

The two nuns, working in Kerala and Orissa, could have scarcely imagined that their lives would be a part of a political discussion that also evoked Mother India, Helen of Troy or the Chilean Mothers of the Disappeared. Patriarchy unrelentingly weaves them all into the politics of identity as symbols, as vectors and as battle-grounds and makes their lives currency in battles over conscience, culture and history.

Swarna Rajagopalan directs Prajnya Initiatives (www.prajnya.in).

Work as extreme sport

Swarna Rajagopalan, Going to work is fraught with great risk, New Indian Express, October 13, 2008.

Recently reported events have demonstrated that earning a living is becoming a dangerous undertaking.

The first is Saumya Vishwanathan's murder while returning from her work at a news channel late into the night. The Delhi Chief Minister acknowledged that Delhi was unsafe and then described the victim as "adventurous" for returning home by herself at that hour. Since less adventurous Bangalore call-centre employees who had office transport, met similar fates at the hands of those who were supposed to escort them safely, this comment has rightly offended many. In an earlier incident, a Chennai domestic worker was burnt alive by her (female) employer for not returning a loan and not showing up to work. The employer then tried to buy the silence of those around and inevitably got caught.

Both of these people were put at risk not by entering an adventure show or participating in combat but by simply going out to earn a living. Neither of these appears to be a gender-related crime, but the fact is that going out to earn a living is a particularly high-risk enterprise for many women.

The litany of working women's challenges is not news—unequal pay for equal work, work environments that disadvantage them by rewarding male bonding and cronyism and of course, workplace sexual harrassment.

Sexual harassment is defined by the Supreme Court as unwelcome sexual behaviour including physical contact, soliciting sexual favours, sexual comments, showing pornography and any other kind of sexual overture. What makes sexual harassment abominable is that it is not an expression of interest between equals but that the abuser leverages their power within the organization to contrive a favourable outcome. Sexual harassment also takes the form of a work environment that is uncomfortable or hostile to work in.

Since the Vishakha judgment, many organizations have created procedures for lodging and investigating complaints. But how well these work is another question, as is the ability of a victim to access them. There is also the question of abuse of these provisions.

Other challenges faced by working women relate to working conditions. A few weeks ago, when a Saravana Stores outlet caught fire, reports also emerged about the conditions in which their workers were housed and how little they were paid. They were more shocking than the safety conditions that prevailed in the store.

Getting to work and getting back from work are also fraught with risk. Street sexual harassment is a reality in every city. Walking to the bus stop, girls are accosted and propositioned. Crowded buses alone are not intrinsically dangerous, but when they are packed with male passengers who feel free to touch, pinch and fondle, the dread begins right there. Going to work on a bike is no doubt better, but the chances of being followed down quiet stretches of road remain. Company transport is not a foolproof solution either.

The patriarchal response to these challenges is protection rather than social, attitudinal transformation. What is it about our society that makes men behave like predators and what is it about our culture that practically condones it?

But when women cannot go out to work, what happens? Workplace and street safety affect livelihood security and public health.

First of all, statistics about violence within the home belie the fond hope that women and girls (or boys) are safer at home. Silences about violence within the family are arguably louder than those about workplace harassment. Lack of economic independence locks domestic violence victims in abusive relationships. The social environment is changing, but in the absence of alternative support, all the woman has is the age-old advice to 'adjust' to her situation.

Working women contribute to the household income, and when that income falls, nutrition levels fall, first affecting women and girl children. Weak, undernourished women give birth to weak, low birth-weight children. Low birth-weight children remain sickly throughout their lives, burdening their families and ultimately, society with the cost of keeping them in good health and compensating for their inability to work.

The inability of women to contribute to the household income further devalues the girl child, reinforcing the attitudes that encourage sex-selective abortion. The idea that girls are a burden also results in their forced marriage or even sale to traffickers, to say nothing of her not earning money towards her wedding.

Education and employment empower, but if going to work is a risk-taking enterprise, where does that leave us?

The Chennai domestic worker probably took a loan from her employer because no one else would give her one. The job, the loan and failure to repay the loan were probably all factors beyond control. Neither that nor absence from work deserve the death penalty.

Saumya Vishwanath was a bright, dedicated professional. Whether male or female, and even in our notoriously unsafe national capital, her commute should have been safe.

As with so many other things, in discussing safety and work, our instinct is to punish women by restricting their movement rather than to proactively seek and punish those who cause harm to them. It is not a perfect universe, and people have to be careful, but how long will society and its ruling elite hide behind these admonitions? How long will we accept them as a substitute for firm action to make cities and workspaces safe? When will we go beyond protection and punishment towards re-engineering social attitudes towards women?

Swarna Rajagopalan directs Prajnya Initiatives. http://www.prajnya.in

Gender and disasters

Swarna Rajagopalan, Kosi’s distressed daughters, New Indian Express, Chennai, September 17, 2008.

On August 18, the Kosi river broke through its embankments to flood most of Bihar and change course. The disaster has taken several lives, displaced over a million people and laid waste to hundreds of villages, not counting those who will die of waterborne infectious diseases in its wake.

So far, women have been mentioned in news reports in the context of childbirth and pregnancy. Some pregnant women have been abandoned by their husbands, but many others have given birth, naming their children after the Kosi.

There have also been reports of sexual harassment of female flood victims, describing government concern relating to the same. Many of the consequences of disasters cut across gender lines.

Death, disease, displacement, bereavement and the overnight loss of livelihood and homes are consequences that happen to men and women. The way in which these consequences are experienced is, however, different.

Studies have shown that women form a disproportionate number of those who die during disasters. The reasons reflect the limitations placed on them by virtue of their gender. After the tsunami, for instance, it was found that many girls and women drowned because, in spite of living in coastal areas, they had not learnt how to swim.

A dramatic change in sex ratio results, partly from death and disease and partly from men migrating to seek alternative livelihoods. Scholars have shown with examples from history that when men vastly outnumber women, levels of violence in general increase, and especially violence against women.

In fact, increased levels of violence and increased vulnerability to violence may be described as the second disaster to strike women and girls in the aftermath of natural calamities.

In a 2005 report, the World Health Organisation stated that interpersonal violence including child abuse and neglect, intimate partner violence, sexual violence and exploitation including sexual exploitation are likely to increase after a disaster. When women and girls lose their homes and livelihoods, they are particularly susceptible to forced marriage and trafficking.

Along with this comes the increased threat of getting sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS.

In other contexts, feminist scholars have speculated on what it means to a woman when her home — ostensibly her safe haven — is destroyed. Homes are also the site of their closest relationships and much of their work.

The loss or destruction of a home can be particularly traumatic in settings where women are confined to their homes by the norms of their culture. Researchers have also explored the way the home changes when relatives who are also coping with disaster move in or when the family moves, for instance, to the roof or a boat for shelter.

For young girls, it can mean the loss of privacy for personal rituals, from changing clothes to washing. The risk of incestuous sexual abuse is heightened.

Often, discussions about gender and debates about security tend to dwell on macro-level structural or ideological questions, but for women coping with emergencies of any sort, it is the very personal, immediate needs that pose the biggest challenge.

Whether at home or in refugee camps, safe access to scarce bath and toilet facilities pose a real challenge. Harassment en route, prying and molestation while bathing and using the toilet, combined with the need to observe society’s norms of modesty limit when and how women can address their simplest bodily needs.

They end up limiting their excursions to the point where they are at risk for other kinds of illnesses and infections.

Between falling sick due to lack of basic facilities for hygiene and not being able to walk to work without fear of molestation, the ability of women to take care of themselves is greatly diminished. The loss of children in the tsunami resulted in an increased demand for recanalisation surgery as women came under pressure to give birth again.

Forced marriages occur in these circumstances as men seek to rebuild a family structure soon after the loss of their wives. Orphaned girls are particularly at risk. Female-headed households are not unique to post-disaster settings; however, compensation and relief are often distributed on the assumption that only men head households.

Where existing property papers are lost as are male property-owners, title is hard to establish. This is exacerbated by the loss of livelihood in the agricultural and informal sectors.

Without compensation, relief, the ability to reclaim a home or to access agricultural land or other means of livelihood such as a boat or a loom, women cannot rebuild their lives.

Disasters thus return women to a Hobbesian state of nature where life is “nasty, poor, brutish” and if you are lucky, short. If you are not lucky, you have to find a way to survive against the odds. As we look at the Kosi crisis in Bihar, the true challenge is not in providing symptomatic relief to victims. It is in recognising those elements of our social and cultural life that place women and girls especially at risk and in ensuring that these are not reproduced in the post-disaster dispensation. Where disaster is anticipated or occurs predictably, such as the Bay of Bengal cyclones and river floods in northeastern India, planned relief should take into account the special challenges faced by women and girls. Unchecked, the real catastrophe for women and children lies in post-disaster violence and loss of livelihood.

(Copied and pasted here because the link is not stable at this site. E-paper version.)

Peacekeeping and Gender

Swarna Rajagopalan, Guardians stray from the straight path, New Indian Express, Chennai, August 25, 2008.

The exemplary record of India’s peacekeeping troops is in danger, and thus, one of its claims to good global citizenship.

An internal UN investigation has reported that some Indian peacekeepers in the Congo supported and perhaps even participated in a child prostitution racket near their base camp. Involving over a hundred officers, these charges follow earlier reports that Indian soldiers had been involved with gold and drug smugglers and that an Indian officer was publicly expressing support for one rebel group—charges that pale in comparison to the recent allegations.

The Indian army’s investigation has already begun, and experts underscore the fact that this is an aberration in India’s record. India has readily contributed troops to several of the stickiest UN peacekeeping operations since 1950 and is among the top three contributors to UN peacekeeping operations worldwide.

Thousands of Indian soldiers have served as observers, combat troops, medical missions, election observers, mine experts and engineers in operations that have claimed several Indian lives. In Somalia, Indian and Pakistani peacekeeping troops worked together to offer humanitarian assistance to local communities. In Liberia, a contingent of female paramilitary troops provides security to the President in addition to participating in field operations. With its store of experience, India now offers peacekeeping training.

In the UN peacekeeping operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, India and Pakistan have the largest contingents in the mission. Set up in 1999 to implement the Lusaka Accord which ended the civil war in Congo, the mission is currently engaged with the disarmament, demobilization, repatriation, resettlement and reintegration of combatants as well as the transition to democracy. India has contributed both military and police personnel to this mission.

One crude and callous response to allegations of physical abuse by soldiers and one that does no credit to any serious army is that such incidents are inevitable given the stresses and strains of military operations, especially when soldiers are stationed far away from their families. To be fair, this dismissal is rarely offered as serious analysis or justification—but one does hear it.

More thoughtfully, it is suggested that lust and aggression are products of the same bio-chemical process and therefore, keeping the balance between self-control and the aggression that army work requires is hard. But the Indian army takes great pride in its socialization of its soldiers and in the various efforts it makes to minimize the possibility of such incidents. One learns that they offer counseling, yoga, sports and service activities to occupy soldiers in these circumstances. So what happened in the Congo? The Indian people also need to express concern over the reasons and results uncovered by the army investigation.

Sexual abuse and exploitation are intrinsically offensive. Where the accused carry arms, and carry them with the sanction of a state, however, these actions occur in the context of a very unequal relationship. UN peacekeeping troops, like colonial troops in another era and occupying troops in other contexts, are outsiders invested not just with weapons but also with the sanction of the international community. They are there as outsiders to impose or oversee the imposition of an order that is tenuous and likely, contentious. Peacekeepers are better-fed and better-stocked with essentials, to say nothing of better-paid, than most people in the communities that surround. The ability to barter food and supplies for sex may make them even more powerful in this context than the possession of arms.

Such huge differences make even the possibility of consensual relationships between adults debatable. What chance does a small girl or boy, a frightened adolescent have to resist rape or trafficking? It is this that places sexual abuse by military personnel, in war, in counter-insurgency or peacekeeping operations, beyond the pale and right on the same continuum as incest and child sexual abuse within the home, street and workplace sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence.

Responsible militaries (or police) in a democracy need to investigate and punish offenders in a transparent fashion, a requirement minimally met by a press release. Responsible parliamentarians, male or female, need to raise this issue disregarding the ‘morale’ bogey. Responsible citizens, male or female, need to keep vigil even when a story slips off newspaper pages. For good soldiers, parliamentarians and citizens alike, good morale rests in doing what is right and not stuffing dirty laundry under the bed.

As such charges crop up against the military and paramilitary, at home and abroad, and investigations fade into the shadows of tomorrow’s headlines, what are Indian women to make of soldiers that also fight in their name?

When this Pandora’s box opens, it will release all kinds of uncomfortable questions within both family and polity. Because Indian soldiers everywhere fight in the name of all Indians, Indian women will need to ask whether these actions speak for them: child sexual exploitation, trafficking, smuggling. They must ask whether Indian soldiers regard Indian women, girls and boys to be as usable and dispensable as they apparently did those in the Congo—and acknowledge that ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are both unpalatable answers. They must doubt the foundations of their own family life for if male soldiers cannot be true to their training and orders, their other loyalties may also be weak. And if Indian women fail to vigilantly follow the investigation and its findings, they must reflect on their own culpability in making such behavior possible.

Articles in New Indian Express

1. Swarna Rajagopalan, Guardians stray from the straight path, New Indian Express, Chennai, August 25, 2008.
2. Swarna Rajagopalan, Kosi’s distressed daughters, New Indian Express, Chennai, September 17, 2008.
3. Swarna Rajagopalan, Going to work is fraught with great risk, New Indian Express, Chennai, October 13, 2008.
4. Swarna Rajagopalan, Through their bodies we strive, New Indian Express, Chennai, November 3, 2008.
   

The New Indian Express URLs are not stable, so I will copy and post the articles here. They are also posted at http://keepingcount.wordpress.com.

Whose security are we talking about?

Published in InfoChange, November 3, 2008.

Whose security are we talking about?

Security is not just about nation-states. It is about the Delhi journalist killed on the streets, the Christian suddenly prey in her home, the bewildered victim of a terror attack, says Swarna Rajagopalan in this new series on security

The festive season in India has become a season of bomb blasts, reaching from city markets to small towns. The almost-stock images of blood on roads, smouldering buildings and stunned survivors piecing together eyewitness narratives are in Indian living rooms every few days. From Assam to Delhi to Malegaon and from Kashmir to Kannur, the ostentatious arrival of a town or a neighbourhood on the 'terror map' opens up questions not just about physical safety and the cross-currents of political socialisation, but also about the 'cleanliness' of financial transactions, interpersonal trust within society and the rule of law.

Two Delhi journalists were victims of violence in September 2008. The first was killed on her way home from work around 3 am. The second was attacked at his bus stop at 9:30 pm. The Delhi Chief Minister's response to the first was to concede that Delhi was unsafe and to pronounce the killed journalist 'adventurous' for driving home alone at that hour in such a city. She argued that it was hard to keep Delhi safe given that it was bordered by villages, drawing in migration and urban-rural relations into a consideration of individual safety.

The violent animosity shown towards Christians and churches spread beyond Orissa with the speed of an infectious disease. Even states with large Christian populations like Kerala and Tamil Nadu have fallen prey. There seems to be very little political will to act.

In the same month, India signed the nuclear deal with the US following many months of political struggle within the Indian political elite. Energy security, which underpins economic security, was the rationale for the deal. Opponents argued that it would compromise sovereignty and limit military security. The diplomatic goal of the US was to end India's isolation, with a view to securing India's de facto adherence to non-proliferation principles and opening up nuclear trade with India. Multi-layered diplomatic efforts, within, between and across states led eventually to the passage of the deal.

Formally dressed (or uniformed) men sitting gravely around a table discussing top-secret matters relating to the life and death of … the State. The ritualistic protocol of diplomacy, the ceremonial pageantry of the military, the romantic intrigue of espionage and the politicking of the high table are the images traditionally associated with security. Of the news items listed above, it is the nuclear deal that most resembles this picture—summit discussions, military calculations and expert consultations, shifting coalitions and internal negotiations.

In general, a closer look reveals diplomacy to be mundanely about visas, trade promotion and being nice to visiting artistes. The army, which does all the hard and unpleasant jobs in society from disaster relief to riot control, sometimes makes situations worse. Espionage is a convenient accusation traded by governments and it does not seem to yield enough intelligence to keep people safe much of the time. Moreover, not every spy lives like James Bond. The road to the high table is paved with more politicking than happens at the high table itself. Regular official meetings, back-channel diplomacy by special envoys and now, people-to-people contacts create the conditions in which the high table convenes.

Very interesting, and very distant from where most lives and their attendant insecurities are played out. But where does that leave the Delhi-ite for whom stepping out of the house is adventurous and the Christian who is suddenly prey in her own home?

Understanding security to refer to a narrow sphere of people and activities leaves so many stories untold; stories from your life and mine, that are better reflected in children's fiction and poetry.

• "My mother said, I never should play with the gypsies in the wood."

• "Anna Gopala, I am afraid to walk through the forest."

• The wolves that stalked Red Riding Hood and "huffed, puffed and blew down" pig dwellings.

• The loaded treasure of Panchatantra stories.

Childhood cautions to young girls—don't stay out late, don't go out alone, don't walk that way at night, don't stand at that bus-stop, don't smile at strangers, don't tell strangers your address, the almost-inbuilt discomfort with touch—were found reflected in these stories and rhymes.

What was real in those stories was missing in the traditional scholarly literature on security. As more women, more individuals outside traditional elite families entered this field, the further from our realities the issues, the debates and the stories seemed.

There are three important areas in which contemporary reality challenges traditional views of security.

The starting point of thinking about security is the question "Whose security?" and the referent of choice traditionally has been the nation-state. There are two problems with this in the real world. Internally, the State faces multiple challenges, relating to its physical (territorial) form, to citizenship and exclusion and to what kind of State it is going to be. Moreover, who are the people who act in the name of the State and on whose behalf do they do so? Combined, they undermine the legitimacy, even the very existence of a given State. Securing such an embattled State is a complex enterprise. The greater the number and fervour of the challenges, the more aggressively defensive the response, intensifying the confrontation. Securing the State comes to equal rendering sections of the State's population insecure.

The second problem arises from the multiplicity of collective and individual actors who are all potential referents like the State. Those who challenge the State within; those whose communities lie across State borders; groupings of States; non-state actors whether in international civil society or the global economy; local-to-global networks that are using today's advanced communications systems to connect and disseminate ideas; individuals who are born in one State, study in another, emigrate to a third, work in a fourth, own property in a fifth and remain connected to all contexts politically, socially and economically and individuals and families who remain completely local in their lifestyle and worldview. Whose security matters? The answer is everyone's, in which case the traditional scope of the field—the nation-state—is obsolete.

Also obsolete is the notion of a multi-tier global political dispensation where each tier is sealed off from the rest, beginning with the home and ending with the international system as a whole. Everyday, in each of our lives, every one of these tiers intersects, interacts and has an impact. Traditionally, the home was regarded as outside the public, political sphere. Today, however, not only do we call on civil society to transform and the State to enact and enforce protections for those within the home, but international agencies like the United Nations Women's Fund also support campaigns against gender violence. Whether bird flu or a financial meltdown, what starts in one place quickly reaches the other. Conflict in one small area leads to displacement, leads to trafficking and finally, sexual exploitation and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in a totally different setting. What is 'security' about in such a world?

Traditional scholarship about security recognises the 'security dilemma'—when one State buys more weapons, the other becomes insecure and is forced to do the same, leading the first to top up, the second to follow suit… in an unending spiral where security leads to insecurity. In today's interdependent world, insecurity is contagious; no one is secure and well as long as anyone is starving, sick, unsafe or vulnerable. Not taking on the burden of each other's struggles may well make us all more insecure than potential inter-state hostilities.

This fine-sounding affirmation simply brings to the realm of security studies and policy what people already know in development work, in movements for democracy and social change, from newspaper reports and in spiritual teachings.

•Not paying attention to public health and civic sanitation issues kills more people from diarrhoea and dengue (not to mention HIV/AIDS) than most conflict situations do;

•Not paying attention to livelihood issues drives displacement and trafficking;

•Not caring about another person's rights and dignity drives them to express their discontent through militancy.

Terrorism, migration, globalisation and unprecedented ability to communicate worldwide have created a very closely interconnected international society. Social and political actions in one context or at one level have an impact that extends beyond the immediate to everyday life in apparently unrelated settings. For any security perspective to be meaningful or effective today, we need new thinking that has clarity and creativity, combining traditional views with contemporary critiques. If everyone is not secure, in the broadest, most humanistic sense of the word, no one is secure at all.

(Swarna Rajagopalan is a Chennai-based political scientist specialising in security, broadly defined. She is the founder of Prajnya Initiatives for Peace, Justice and Security, a new Chennai non-profit (http://www.prajnya.in).)

Infochange News & Features, November 2008

For Kosi's distressed daughters, September 17, 2008

Swarna Rajagopalan, Kosi's distressed daughters, New Indian Express, Chennai, September 17, 2008.

On August 18, the Kosi river broke through its embankments to flood most of Bihar and change course. The disaster has taken several lives, displaced over a million people and laid waste to hundreds of villages, not counting those who will die of waterborne infectious diseases in its wake.

So far, women have been mentioned in news reports in the context of childbirth and pregnancy. Some pregnant women have been abandoned by their husbands, but many others have given birth, naming their children after the Kosi.

There have also been reports of sexual harassment of female flood victims, describing government concern relating to the same. Many of the consequences of disasters cut across gender lines.

Death, disease, displacement, bereavement and the overnight loss of livelihood and homes are consequences that happen to men and women. The way in which these consequences are experienced is, however, different.

Studies have shown that women form a disproportionate number of those who die during disasters. The reasons reflect the limitations placed on them by virtue of their gender. After the tsunami, for instance, it was found that many girls and women drowned because, in spite of living in coastal areas, they had not learnt how to swim.

A dramatic change in sex ratio results, partly from death and disease and partly from men migrating to seek alternative livelihoods. Scholars have shown with examples from history that when men vastly outnumber women, levels of violence in general increase, and especially violence against women.

In fact, increased levels of violence and increased vulnerability to violence may be described as the second disaster to strike women and girls in the aftermath of natural calamities.

In a 2005 report, the World Health Organisation stated that interpersonal violence including child abuse and neglect, intimate partner violence, sexual violence and exploitation including sexual exploitation are likely to increase after a disaster. When women and girls lose their homes and livelihoods, they are particularly susceptible to forced marriage and trafficking.

Along with this comes the increased threat of getting sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS.

In other contexts, feminist scholars have speculated on what it means to a woman when her home — ostensibly her safe haven — is destroyed. Homes are also the site of their closest relationships and much of their work.

The loss or destruction of a home can be particularly traumatic in settings where women are confined to their homes by the norms of their culture. Researchers have also explored the way the home changes when relatives who are also coping with disaster move in or when the family moves, for instance, to the roof or a boat for shelter.

For young girls, it can mean the loss of privacy for personal rituals, from changing clothes to washing. The risk of incestuous sexual abuse is heightened.

Often, discussions about gender and debates about security tend to dwell on macro-level structural or ideological questions, but for women coping with emergencies of any sort, it is the very personal, immediate needs that pose the biggest challenge.

Whether at home or in refugee camps, safe access to scarce bath and toilet facilities pose a real challenge. Harassment en route, prying and molestation while bathing and using the toilet, combined with the need to observe society’s norms of modesty limit when and how women can address their simplest bodily needs.

They end up limiting their excursions to the point where they are at risk for other kinds of illnesses and infections.

Between falling sick due to lack of basic facilities for hygiene and not being able to walk to work without fear of molestation, the ability of women to take care of themselves is greatly diminished. The loss of children in the tsunami resulted in an increased demand for recanalisation surgery as women came under pressure to give birth again.

Forced marriages occur in these circumstances as men seek to rebuild a family structure soon after the loss of their wives. Orphaned girls are particularly at risk. Female-headed households are not unique to post-disaster settings; however, compensation and relief are often distributed on the assumption that only men head households.

Where existing property papers are lost as are male property-owners, title is hard to establish. This is exacerbated by the loss of livelihood in the agricultural and informal sectors.

Without compensation, relief, the ability to reclaim a home or to access agricultural land or other means of livelihood such as a boat or a loom, women cannot rebuild their lives.

Disasters thus return women to a Hobbesian state of nature where life is “nasty, poor, brutish” and if you are lucky, short. If you are not lucky, you have to find a way to survive against the odds. As we look at the Kosi crisis in Bihar, the true challenge is not in providing symptomatic relief to victims. It is in recognising those elements of our social and cultural life that place women and girls especially at risk and in ensuring that these are not reproduced in the post-disaster dispensation. Where disaster is anticipated or occurs predictably, such as the Bay of Bengal cyclones and river floods in northeastern India, planned relief should take into account the special challenges faced by women and girls. Unchecked, the real catastrophe for women and children lies in post-disaster violence and loss of livelihood.

(Copied and pasted here because the link is not stable at this site. E-paper version.)

Cross-posted at The PSW Weblog.

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 7

The six preceding blog posts are my attempt to begin thinking through this challenge: of designing from scratch with no preconceived ideas about what we are doing a course that captures many of the issues that we are interested in as we reflect on contemporary South India.

Maybe a completely non-derivative way of doing this is impossible. But I am just trying to start as far away from where the course generally is at, in order to be able to approach it in a way that belongs here.

If you happen to read this posts and have suggestions, please do leave comments.

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 6

What would I teach? Let me back up and describe the issues I think it would be interesting and fun to explore at this point, sitting in South India. In no particular order.

• This year, we were struck by urban renewal/conservation issues. Particularly because we were visiting heritage sites that were once an integral part of planned urban centres.
• I think models of 'development' are interesting. What do people do towards developing specific areas? Whether it is a school or propagating a particular kind of farming. These lend themselves to larger questions about 'development' and about globalization both.
• Although we decided not to rehearse the nationalism course, I think identity politics is still interesting, particularly in its interface with a rapidly changing political economy.
• I think that nature and direction of change is always interesting to think about.
• I remain very concerned about governance issues.
• And of course, gender.
• How could we be in Chennai and not think of the role of technology, particularly ICT?
  

If we did a course on all this, to me the common factor is change. How to change on purpose? How to imagine change and make that come true? What are the sources of such imagination? And also, how to cope with unintended change? What is the politics of change? What is the politics of making a particular change? And what is the politics of change that catches you unawares? How do you manage change politically?

To me, it is the debates surrounding particular choices that are interesting. But the teacher in me is conservative, wanting also to furnish information even as we teach students how to think about particular issues. As Professor Malapur would have put it, to come up with the right questions... because there are no answers.

So I want to design a course whose framework will set us all up to ask the right questions, and whose cases will give us a chance to debate the answers and the discourse itself.

What would I call such a course? "The Politics of Change"? "The Politics of Socio-Economic Change"?

I would lose the 'Third World,' 'Emerging Nations,' 'Development' tags for sure. 'Change' is more open-ended. And not necessarily linear.

And I think I would build the discussion in the course around what now seem to me to be false binaries, but that have been juxtaposed as critical binaries by different schools of thought:

• Growth versus Equity
• Small versus Big
• Liberty versus Equality
• Market versus State, Civil Society versus State
  
• Global versus National versus Regional versus Local
• Indigenous versus Foreign
• Modern versus Traditional
  and of course,
• Third World versus Advanced Industrial,
  to list just a few....
  

Or maybe not.

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 5

So what is this course about?

As it is usually taught in the US, it is about everything. A little bit about colonialism, a little bit about nationalism, a little bit about development, a little bit about gender and a little bit about international relations.

In India, we do not teach politics as if it is special in a developmental context but as students in Bombay University a couple of decades ago, we did study Development Administration. In fact, when I think about it, there was a large development component to my own BA degree: Macro-development Economics, a course on Appropriate Technologies which had some other name as well, Planning and Development Strategies, Development Administration. The Political Science classes were classic topics in political thought, international relations, taught more as humanities than as social science.

I think the problem I am having is not WHAT I would teach as much as what the rubric is that I would give it.

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 4

Courses in this area are usually some extension or variation of "Government and Politics of.." courses. By appending Third World, I think they aspire to capture something of the process of change. Once they do that, they cannot be just about politics.

'Third World' states were more or less the same as those states of Asia and Africa and on some issues, Latin America, that had once been colonized. Colonialism, by the definition of anti-colonial writers everywhere, was only partly about politics and administration. It was also ideological and cultural; and it had begun as economic exploitation. Therefore, studies of these places that were 'Third World' had to be also about other dimensions.

Especially, cultural. Since colonized peoples were somewhat backward and definitely traditional, the most useful variable to explain anything about them must be 'culture.' Not politics. Not economics. Nothing quite so rational and gentlemanly.

And then you look at the origins of the study of these states in American academia. It is rooted in 1950s anxieties about containing communism. What made states stable? What allowed democracies to develop? What would prevent revolutionary activity? These are the kinds of political questions that motivated that literature. It is a different matter that these questions inspired some really interesting empirical work and a useful vocabulary for describing politics. But Third World countries got frozen for a few decades in a certain taxonomy, defined not by them but for them.

The shift occurred when authoritarian governments started falling in Latin America and then in Eastern Europe. Democracy became a topic that could be associated with the 'Third World' suddenly, and there is still an industry of democratization experts, both academic and field, out there. Illustrated best by the Ukrainian expert sent by the National Democratic Institute in Washington DC to advise Sri Lankans on their election process. in 1980.

Then there was the course I taught in my last semester at graduate school: Emerging Nations. I taught it once as the politics of development and then chose to interpret it once narrowly and in keeping with my dissertation, as nationalism and decolonization and the politics of the same. Worked better as the last, but really, that was quite a departure from the intended purpose of the course. But from where were the 'Nations' emerging? Which 'Nations'? Were they also states? And into what were they emerging.

No idea at all.

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 3

A linear view of history and the human experience makes it possible to place communities along a continuum and label them 'backward' and 'advanced'. All of us do it in the judgments we pass on each other on a daily basis. However, as an intellectual construct, it is hard to accept and harder still to teach.

One could place colonial-nationalist-postcolonial on some sort of a timeline, but what did they mean for the more practical details of everyday life.

• In the 1950s, Jawaharlal Nehru called large multipurpose hydro-electrical projects the 'temples of modern India.' India did benefit from them. But over time, the problems with large projects have become evident as well, whether for their seismic effects as in Tehri or for the displacement of peoples as in Narmada. Are we now moving to the model the Cholas and their Sri Lankan counterparts used--large networks of smaller canals--for irrigation on the one hand and nuclear energy on the other? Is this forward, backwards or lateral movement?
• Allopathy is regarded as the modern system of medicine. So why are more and more people gravitating towards alternative systems that are older, such as ayurveda, yoga, yunani and siddha? Is this retrogressive motion?
• Thousands of young Indians work in high-paying but more or less dead-end jobs in the IT sector. Are they doing better or worse than the tradition artisan who earns less but at least has infinite scope for creativity?
• Or are this last question and others of this sort utterly inappropriate in that they romanticize the past at the expense of well-being today?
  
• What is today's well-being if it creates a less than liveable tomorrow?
  

Because questions like this come around again and again as we travel and discuss Indian history and politics, it seems appropriate to do a course that will ask them formally and systematically.

But that is not what traditional 'Third World Politics' do. The term 'Third World' ties us to development issues, and 'development' is imagined in linear terms. They posit a certain unidirectional journey, in which a large swathe of humanity is condemned to trail the front-runners, fighting neverending battles for unreachable goals. Rostow's four-stage model of growth is an example; as Busybee liked to joke in his Independence Day columns, India was perpetually stuck in the take-off stage.

Teaching "Third World Politics":Reflections 2

Let's start with this 'Third World' tag.

Forget the political correctness stuff. Dress the term any way you like and you still have no way of understanding what it means.

• poverty
• inequality
• tradition
• old technology
• unresolved political issues
• 'backwardness'

Where can you find these? Today, practically everywhere. Being 'Third World' is a condition not a location. Teaching in nice classrooms in the 'First World,' sometimes the 'Third World' was three streets away, sometimes a neighbourhood my student had left behind and sometimes a place far away.

Once you accepted that, what was your course about? Almost everything, every place and everybody.

What was the difference between teaching this course, teaching introductory political science or government and teaching American or Indian politics? Just a little value judgment, a little prejudice and a little historical accident.

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections

One of the crosses one bears when one teaches politics in the West and is a lowly, non-Western person, is that one sometimes has to teach a course that is variously modeled as 'Politics of development,' 'Third World Politics' or in my alma mater, 'Emerging Nations.' I did not enjoy this course in any incarnation for the simple reason that it seemed to need to be about everything with only fourteen-sixteen weeks in hand, a student body with virtually no previous training in world history or geography and an underlying logic that across its incarnations, was rooted in a worldview to which it was hard to make reality conform.

My survival strategy while writing the syllabus was to include what was important to the department and what was important to me, overloading the course even further. My version of the course was an improbable combination of the way development economics was taught by our professors at Elphinstone College; my experience growing up in 1960s-70s India; the political development literature of the 1960s, and a grab-bag of emerging points of view from wherever I had wandered. If the original conception of the course covered, as I snidely put it, everyone but four white men, by the time I was done with it, it was un-teachable.

The worst classes I ever taught were in this course. And this, in spite of this being a subject of interest to me. (Maybe that is why?) Ten years after I was last forced to teach this couse, this summer as we planned a year ahead, I found myself saying very gingerly, perhaps we should offer THAT class. My colleague was shocked, having heard me complain bitterly on more than one occasion. A grab-bag of random reasons made me think this could be workable.

• The course is located in Chennai, India.
• We are constantly talking about change, about old and new, tradition and modernity.
• The interface between global and local, colonial and postcolonial are everywhere around us.
• So much of the politics we discuss is about social transformation.
  
• Governance challenges, heritage and identity come together in the places we visit.

My instinct is that the course can be made to work, but having said that, I am realizing that it can only be done if every assumption upon which the Western courses are based is examined critically. I have to go beyond, gosh, there is, there has to be a better way, and beyond, I will find that way, and I am sure this can work... to making it happen in a way that is worth taking a chance that teaching this course will once more be a miserable experience.

To this end, I am going to start a series of blog posts, where I think aloud and try to make something that I can live with.

Morality, dress and the state

Saris with tummies exposed too sexy for Nigeria, IANS/ CNN-IBN, August 6, 2008.

Talk about imported moralities--traditional dress that bares the midriff is also suspect.

Something positive?

I just found this extremely cheering:

Nimisha Srivastava, McVada: What's cooking between Shiv Sena and Macs, CNN-IBN, August 6, 2008.

Maybe it's the prospect of something having taste at MacDonald's should I ever be forced to eat there again.

Research visas for non-Indian scholars

According to this Times of India report, the procedure for applying for a research visa appears to have gotten easier.

D Suresh Kumar, New rules for foreign scholars, TNN/ Times of India, 4 Aug 2008.

Watch this space for updates.

How we preserve our heritage

I am on the road with a group of visiting students and we visited the Brihadeeshwara Temple in Thanjavur. This is the main temple in a complex of Chola temples in and around Thanjavur, designated as World Heritage Monuments. The designation has funded a great deal of restoration activity which is ongoing, but in the meanwhile, our own unique instinct for cultural conservation has led visitors to....

leave fragments of broken glass bangles in a courtyard where visitors are barefoot....

inscribe their hopes and aspirations on the wall to match Raja Raja Chola's...

litter food and bottle caps hither and yon...

If the great builders of India's past had known their progeny would be messy vandals, would they have bothered to build anything at all?

Making a difference, making us proud

Tiana Tozer, who studied Political Science at Illinois when I did, makes us proud over and over again. Check out this NBC news report that features her.

You cannot have it all!!!

A speech by Mr. Aziz Narejo is posted on Indus Asia Journal Online. I am thrilled that Mr. Narejo has read my book to learn about Sindhi history, but dismayed that he thinks I am a man.

You cannot have it all, so in this instance, I will just thank him, wherever he is for citing my work.

But, Mr. Narejo, I do not belong to the default gender. No, no, no, sir!

New book on Indian cinema and Soviet audiences

Check this out: Urmi Sahni, Book recounts Russian penchant for Indian films, CNN/IBN, May 7, 2008.

Everyone is nepotistic; why not me?!

Two things I read this morning and enjoyed

The easy way out for a blogger is to link to good stuff written by others. I returned to read the Hindustan Times column section this morning after a long gap, and this is what I enjoyed reading:

Vir Sanghvi, Mood of Middle India, Hindustan Times, April 26, 2008.
Which lets you read scores of questionnaires over his shoulder, a fascinating sample survey or snapshot of who we are.

Vir Sanghvi, Pity the Poor Drivers, Hindustan Times, April 12, 2008.
In which he reads the Wahab-in-the-cockpit incident as a text that reveals the classist nature of political discourse in India.

How to punish the victim, again and again and again

Opt for marriage or get jail term: Court to rape accused, Indian Express, February 1, 2008.

For the second time in the last couple of years, a court has regarded marriage between a rapist and his victim a suitable conclusion for charges of rape.

There are so many things so very wrong with this point of view.

1. Rape is not a crime of passion; it is an act of violence perpetrated on the body of the victim. Such a judgment completely fails to recognize rape as violence. The victim by its reckoning is to live with the person who traumatized her once, for the rest of her life.

2. What makes rape heinous is its violence, not its violation of patriarchal codes of chastity.
If the latter were in fact the problem, then marrying the rapist and the victim would make sense because in the eyes of patriarchal societies, the victim is then soiled and spoiled for other men. So the rapist must atone by taking on the goods he has soiled, sparing other men and saving the honour of the family of the soiled.
Tamil usage reflects this view: karppu adaippu for rape (effacement of chastity) and the use of 'kedututaan' (he has spoiled) or 'kettu poitta' (she has been spoiled) to describe rape in the course of conversation.
The victim here is patriarchal society and it is thus compensated for the crime committed.

3. Who is punished by such court judgments, the rapist or the victim?
It seems the court regards marrying the victim to be a punishment for the rapist, man to man. After all, notwithstanding his part in creating the situation, the rapist must live with spoilt goods all his life.
It must also consider the victim compensated because the greatest part of the crime was not the traumatic act of violence she suffered but the fact that no one else will marry her.

If this is justice, the original act of violence seems benign!

When will acts of violence against women be recognized as acts of violence and when will all of us, in equal measure, see that justice does not further punish the victim?

Indo-Stalinist Architecture: A New Masterpiece

The Ministry of External Affairs is getting a new home on Rajpath, that magnificent road in front of Raisina Hill, and it will be designed and built by those masters of Indo-Stalinist architecture: The Central Public Works Department.

Gautam Bhatia, PWD Classic on Rajpath, Indian Express, January 26, 2008.

Now the difference between Bombay and Delhi will be the difference between Indo-Gothic and Indo-Saracenic buildings in the former and Indo-Stalinist buildings in the latter. If we were to read the skyline and the landscape as text, what would we learn about the two cities?

Do Indian women feel safe?

If you need to think about that answer, here is some information you could use.

Yogendra Yadav and Sanjay Kumar, Outside home, Indian woman unsafe; inside, she needs luck, Indian Express, January 24, 2007.

See also their box with data 1 and box with data 2.

Sanitation newswatch continues

How did I miss this one?

Yamini Aiyar, No toilets please, we’re Indian, Indian Express, November 20, 2007.

Because I know her mother...

Nina Paley is a well-known American cartoonist who discovered the Ramayana when she lived in India for a while.

Shocked by what Sita had to endure, she did what every Indian has done since the first appearance of this story, and retold it the way she liked as 'Sitayana.' This narrative has since evolved and taken the form of a critically acclaimed animation film: When Sita Sang the Blues.

A Rediff.com story on the film and Nina's fund-raising efforts, here.

Beyond comment

Jatin Gandhi, Shame: Rape is India’s fastest growing crime, Hindustan Times, January 13, 2008.

Mister ya Missus? Neither please, leave me alone!

Statutory warning: This is not a post or an essay so much as a rant, and a rant which has brewed a long time.

I have noticed in the last few years how people cannot tell gender any more: from name, from dress, from voice, from personal appearance. The reason it has taken so long to record this rant is that I get irritated by this to the point of incoherence.

Some examples of what I mean:
1. The doorbell rings during courier hours. I turn on all the lights in the doorway area and answer. The package bears my name: Dr. Swarna Rajagopalan. The courier lets me sign for it. And then asks: You are? I say, same person. He asks again: You are? I get annoyed. I shut the door.
It was not important enough to ask me while I took the parcel from him. But now that it has been delivered, he wants to know. Why? Because Dr. cannot be a woman. Because laydiss cannot possibly receive official looking packages.

2. I go to an office for a business transaction. Let's say it is a bank. I fill out a form to open an account or fixed deposit. The entire transaction has been conducted in person, I have furnished identification. There should be no doubt about who or what I am.
A week I get a parcel, delivered by another courier, who does not seek to ascertain my identity at all. I take the package and go in. And then I notice.
The account or the FD is in the name of MR. Swarna Rajagopalan. This has happened with new phone connections, bank certificates, insurance.
A couple of years ago, I stopped accepting letters addressed to MR. Swarna Rajagopalan. This policy applied to bills, and my reasoning was: I am not this person, therefore, the bill does not apply to me.
Moved by my resolve, if not my logic, corrections would hastily be made.

3. A couple of days ago, I got a call from my ISP. They wanted to speak to Mr. Swarna Rajagopalan. I was (go ahead, be proud of me) very calm. I asked if the business could only be transacted with him. The young lady was very accommodating; she would be happy to do business with me. Would I identify myself? I did.
And then the inner teacher took over: why, when she was also a woman, was she reluctant to grant that account-holders could be female? Did she have no pride in her gender? (Oh go on, feel sorry for her, but only if you can feel my pain at being mistaken for a man.)

My first inkling of this social revolution in India was when I was a graduate student. I had presented a paper on South Asian politics at a conference. The nearest Indian consulate wrote to Mr. Swarna Rajagopalan asking for a copy. I did send it, but recorded my objection to the error in a cover letter. I have no reason to assume they read it or cared. I got no apology.

Lest you, the unwitting reader, wonder: some of my best friends are men. I have no intrinsic problem with them. I just find it deeply offensive to be mistaken for one. I find it offensive because of the underlying assumption that only men could belong in the public sphere of paper-writing, account-opening, parcel-receiving and buying or selling. As a woman, even, the only way my activities are possible is if by some magic, you can commit a speech act and turn me into a man.

I cannot tell if this is worse or better than being taken for a married woman. Again, for the record, I have nothing against marriage or married people. Good for them, I say, and may they be happy for as many lifetimes as they wish! However, I am not Misssusss Swarna. No thank you, I will not miss you, and you may vanish instantly from my sight.

I am so close to my middle-years that they are teetering under the pressure of my closing in on them. But I am not married.
I am a grown-up, and I make decisions about domestic and professional matters. But I am not married.
I am a ladies (nothing in Tamil Nadu is singular). But I am not married.
I am not married. (Can you hear the scream coming on?!)
I am not married. I do not have a ratty old mister looming somewhere behind me. I do not come with brats attached. I was not stupid enough to get married; just stupid enough to be in an interaction with someone who thinks the only way to show me 'respect' is to marry me off, at least in title.

[SCREAM!] Sorry, needed that release.

I don't know what infuriates me more: being taken for a man or being taken for a married woman.

To you, these may not be huge issues. For me, this is like nails on a blackboard and then some.

I have so many questions about this ridiculous binary: Mister or Misssusss.
1. WHY? (We will return to this later.)
2. What happened to Amma, Didi, Akka, Madam (I cannot spell the Tamil version) or even Aunty? (No, strangely, I have no problem with Aunty!) Hey, give me a few years and I will even take Paati.
3. What is the need to list a telephone number with a Mr. or a Mrs.? Is my name not enough? If you do this, is my friend or colleague supposed to look under M, S or R? (And that is another issue, writing my name as Mrs. R. Swarna, but in the interests of salvaging a working Sunday, I will desist..)
4. If you can indulge in creative social licence and make me a man or a married woman, I ask you, why not: Your highness, Your excellency, Professor, Commander, Captain, Doctor, Alampanah, Bharat Ratna... you get my drift?
5. Finally as promised: WHY?

Last words then: Because of this, I introduce myself to couriers, plumbers, electricians, cab company despatch clerks and other service providers as Doctor Rajagopalan. They deal with me, I pay for the service with a cheque bearing my name, but the fact that I am called 'Dr.' comforts them: I must be a man (or may be assumed to be one: Aswatthama atah kunjarah), so they can serve me well with a clear conscience. You can call it sneaky; I call it payback!

Somewhere, someone... cares!

2008 is the International Year of Sanitation, the UN Secretary-General has declared.

Do also check out WaterAid's report on The State of the World's Toilets 2007.

Finally, I propose that now that Ratan Tata is done with his one-lakh car project, he turn his attention and ability to get things done to another people's need: public toilets in India. I think that Shahrukh Khan, whose views resemble mine on this topic, join forces with him. Between them, we may actually solve this problem to my satisfaction: Tata will get things done, and SRK will convince people it is what they always wanted.

That may well be my Pongal wish for India! And if the two of them pay heed to my blog post, I will strongly recommend their names for the Bharat Ratna.

January 14 Postscript: Darn, someone else got to Ratan Tata first! Reeba Zachariah reports in the Times of India that he is going to work on clean water provision next. Just remember: I am next in line with my idea!

What Gandhiji, Dev Anand and Vikram Sarabhai have in common

I have read three biographies in the last twelve months, choosing to do so with great enthusiasm either for the author or the subject or both. Last night, as I made my way through the third, I was struck by the similarity between these remarkable individuals, however unlikely it seems when I list their names: Gandhiji, Dev Anand and Vikram Sarabhai.

Gandhiji


Gandhiji is a fixture of any Indian child's early history lessons, an impossibly moral figure who cannot be real, a sculpture often overlooked in our city-scapes, a road which is often the 'main street' of our urban centres... anything but a person who lived, thought, felt, struggled as we did. This, in spite of the fact that he wrote copiously, candidly and compulsively about his life, thoughts and 'experiments with truth.'


Rajmohan Gandhi's account of Gandhiji's life and times brought home to me a person who was heroic mostly because he was trying and so honestly. I was moved by his transparent uncertainty, his need to be true to oneself and others, and his ability to reconcile life with ideal and do so without compromising the latter. I am awed by his ability to treat small and big things (by my definition) on the same plane: a household/prison/ashram routine, remembering details about individuals around him, projects that reflected his individual predilections (from naturopathy to brahmacharya) and visions that embraced humanity (satyagraha and independence). Not for him what is so easy for me to do: I cannot finish this chore today because I have a paper to write; I cannot exercise because I have to think about conflict resolution.


Dev Anand

Dev Anand. I cannot type this name without smiling; can you read it without smiling?


Dev Anand has epitomized charm for me since long before I thought about 'charm' or knew the word 'epitomize.' As he sashayed through town and country, wearing baggy pants and open smile, a beautiful SD Burman or Jaidev song on his lips, building houses and solving mysteries and facing moral dilemmas, I thought, they don't make real people like this! And even when the orange scarf came to stay and his face and mannerisms aged (it hurts to write this) while his spirit did not, I thought, they still don't make people like this! A few years ago, he was on 'Walk the Talk' and his energy was as infectious as his smile and his charm had been. I discovered another layer of Dev Anand-ness that I could really, really admire.


Dev Anand announced then that he was writing his memoirs and I waited for them like his countless other fans. He said he would launch them on his birthday (September 26) last year, and I ran to the bookstore on the very day. But how ironic! For this is a person who wrote about his past with the impatience of something speedier than Shinkansen (the Japanese bullet-train) and pronounced in his promotional interviews that he never listened to any of his old songs. Excerpts dwelt on his love-life, as does he in the manner of a stock-taking exercise. But this is not what is interesting about him. This is not why I think he is just phenomenal.


Dev Anand's autobiography impresses upon you his optimism, his self-confidence and his need to keep moving. He is sure we love him (of course!); he is sure his creativity is boundless (and it is!) and he has too much to do to conduct post-mortems on anything: movies, relationships, anything at all. I read the tome virtually non-stop, finishing it in two night-sessions. The writing style is unmistakably colonial university and there are stretches that are tedious for even those who do love him, but the compulsion to keep moving is irresistible and finally, that drives the reading process as well.



Vikram Sarabhai

And then, Vikram Sarabhai, as depicted by my contemporary at Elphinstone, Amrita Shah. Sarabhai was not someone I knew much about, but this looked like an interestingly written biography, fluently balancing the individual's story with that of his times. If I had to analyze my motivation for buying this, it would be partly that Amrita wrote this and Amrita writes well, and partly that biographies of this sort are still unusual in India.


Having never given Dr. Sarabhai any thought, I did not expect to find myself reading the story of a visionary, an institution-builder and a team-builder. As I read her account, I found myself thinking, 'Wow! Could I be like that?' I envied him his confidence and hoped there were things about him that I could identify with. The story of small beginnings to major institutions, the chutzpah to just go out and ask for what you need, the ability to take no for an answer and most importantly, the charisma and energy to draw talent to one's vision and the self-confidence to nurture another's genius--are all inspiring to one who is setting up a space of her own, with far fewer resources.

The commonalities


As I read Amrita's book, I found myself reflecting that in one year, I had been drawn to read three life-stories that have certain elements in common. Gandhiji, Dev Anand and Dr. Sarabhai were all raised in comfortable-to-affluent homes, but each in their own sphere of work was starting afresh. They were not without support, but it cannot have been easy to predict the way things would turn out for each of them. All three showed an unusual measure of self-confidence, whether because of temperament, a prediction or because they were to the manner born. However, that kind of confidence can also make a person stagnate and this happened with none of them. They chose their line of work, they followed their conscience/creativity/curiosity and they took chances.

All three individuals are high achievers but because their own success and achievement became by-products rather than their singular objective, they were able to create legacies that will survive them by generations.

In Gandhiji's case, arguably, we are that legacy, each of us Indians. In Dev Anand's case, it is a tremendous body of work, hits or flops, in Indian cinema which we will enjoy and analyze for years. In Dr. Sarabhai's case, that legacy is a network of enterprises and institutions that have been benchmark centres of excellence.


All three individuals began right where they stood. They did not wait for another life, another stage, another moment. Gandhiji's political career began when he found himself in a situation that needed a neutral arbiter soon after he arrived in South Africa. He did not ask: is this the moment, am I the right person? He just did what was needed to be done. Dev Anand did the rounds of studios and auditions, working as a postal censor during the Second World War. He took risks and capitalized on whatever opportunities came his way. Vikram Sarabhai put his fine education and his family resources to work in ways that remain visionary today. His biographer tells us that his scientific work pales in comparison to his institution-building, without prejudice to the former. To envisage the need for research laboratories, for cultural centres and for institutions for management education is not unusual, but to start them confidently in sheds, in available houses, with what one has, confident that other things will follow... to do this without waiting for the perfect moment. To me that is what he has in common with the two Librans in this discussion.


Those who spread dread are countless, especially, I am sorry to say, in India. Those who dream are fewer, but still not impossible to find. Those who make their dreams come true, a rare breed.


But rarest of all is a quality that these three gentlemen had/have in common: the ability to make their dream the dream of many, many others. Gandhiji told us we could win freedom through non-violence, and most Indians came to believe it with all their hearts. Dev Anand's portrayals of urban sophistication and charm are iconic, and his choice of themes and stories always surprising and new. Navketan's oeuvre will outlive his own story. Sarabhai, we are told, made everyone around him eager to make his dream come true and be the best they could be.


In all these life-stories, I saw glimpses of what every spiritual teacher advocates: mindfulness, being in the present moment, integrity, creativity and the courage to be creative. Ego, too, does not seem all bad; it is where confidence and conviction can receive reinforcements and it is what allows you to bounce back from failures. The ability to build partnerships and coalitions is also a common factor in all three stories, with Gandhiji being the best communicator by far of the three.


I don't really have a conclusion for these reflections are works-in-progress. I do know that this year, I will need a lot of these lessons as we work on creating our own non-profit research space in Chennai. The examples of these fine people will have to take me through the challenges of fund-raising, coalition-building, team-building and an endless procession of drafts and revisions for every single thing we write. I am sure this is not the last you will hear on this subject in this blog!