The troubling response to the Delhi gang-rape

I write this entry as the horror and the theatre of the brutal rape and the ensuing protests play out in India.  The rape itself sickened and enraged me; but the mass-protests that have followed, which have included calls for the death penalty and castration for rapists have left me equally disturbed. 

 

I agree that this rape has brought an issue to the forefront of Indian consciousness that otherwise is given no voice.  Rape, usually a taboo subject, has become a topic of widespread discussion.  The government and the police, though slow in reacting and responding, are beginning to show some signs of life – but I fear that this awakening will be brief, and the “system” shall go back to its usual torpidity soon enough.  Still, something has shaken us out of our stupor, certainly.  All this notwithstanding, I am left troubled, unsatisfied, and uneasy by the response to this rape.  Here are some reasons why:

 

I.  We have to realize that there is a distinction between wanting retribution for an act of violence against a woman, and actually believing that women are equal to men and deserve to be treated as such.  There have been reports of women being molested at the protests by men protesting beside them.  It’s clear from this that for many of the men protesting and asking for stringent punishments for rape, it is not so much that a woman has been denied basic respect and dignity, but that a woman has been disrespected and dishonoured.  Whereas the former ideas are about the fundamental right of a human being to expect that she shall not be violated, the latter concepts involve notions of society’s and family’s ownership of a woman’s body that can be violated under some circumstances and not others.

Of the thousands of men and women who protested, a sizeable number of them – both men and women – will continue to live out and perpetuate unequal social norms in their daily lives: at weddings, they will expect the bride’s family to acquiesce to their material demands in the form of wedding arrangements and dowries; they will pressure their wives and daughters-in-law to abort female fetuses and will physically and/or psychologically abuse them for giving birth to girls; they will impose restrictions of dress, movement, speech, and action on the women in their families; they will presume that the first priority of a woman is as a daughter, a sister, a wife, and a mother, and that her priorities to herself as a woman are negligible if not non-existent. 

The loudest voices at the protest have come from those demanding dire judicial consequences for rapists, but unless our national dialogue stays focussed on combatting the underlying misogyny of our culture and the inequities of patriarchy, it will not mean much change for the average Indian woman.

 

II.  Why has this rape caused outrage, and not others?  We have heard the dreadful statistics of rape in India: estimates are that several hundreds of thousands of rapes occur each year in India, and forget convictions, a scant few are even reported by the victims for fear of persecution and dishonour.  This rape was brutal and horrific, no doubt.  But even as protestors vented their outrage at this rape, women and members of alternative gender and sexual orientations continue to be victims of sexual assault throughout the country.  This rape, in many ways, fits conveniently into our pre-programmed notions of violation and abuse: urban, educated, middle-class women assaulted by lower-class, mostly-uneducated men.  For many of us who have a voice in India – we members of the urban middle- and upper-classes, the educated – violence against women is something that is perpetuated by men at the margins: habitually drunk men in the slums of India’s cities who beat their wives as a matter of course, or the rural uneducated who think that over-lordship over women is their birth-right.  While these men may certainly be part of the demographic, what we ignore in making these presumptions is how much violence and abuse of women occurs in middle-class urban homes; how much sexual violence is used as a tool of intimidation and control by upper-caste men over dalit women, by the police and the armed-forces over the citizens they are entrusted to protect; and we are totally blind to the abuse of transgender men and women (hijras/kothis).  Even as the protests continue, there are claims being made that this is a problem that we are being subject to from some alien, outside sources, or because we have forgotten our Indian traditional values; there continues to be a refusal to accept that rape, sexual violence, victim-blaming, and the marginalization of women are endemic to our culture, and that we must all bear the burden of this, and the responsibility to fundamentally change it.

 

III.  Violence only perpetuates violence, it does not resolve it.  Violence is useful as a weapon of provocation; it is woefully inadequate as a tool of justice.  When we demand that violence be punished by death or with equal brutality, we tacitly affirm that violence is a legitimate way to resolve our problems.  The death-penalty, police-brutality, torture, rape, psychological and verbal abuse, and class-, caste-, and sex-based subjugation are all part of the same continuum of violence.  The problem here is not that rapists are dealt with too leniently, or are not punished harshly enough.  The problem at the heart of the issue is the culture of violence, in which violence is acceptable social tender.  The only way to extricate ourselves from this web of abuse (we are all both victims and perpetrators in this), is to remove violence from the equation. 

 

In the end, all I can say is that our energies are better spent struggling against violence and oppression (based on class, caste, religion, sex, or skin colour) at every level, than to insist that rapists be hanged and women be protected.  This is not a problem that will go away through the judicial or criminal- “justice” system, or by telling women how to ensure that they are not raped.  No.  This is more basic than that.  It starts with how we raise our sons and daughters, and with our acceptance of oppression and violence as inviolable truths of life.

Adult Behaviour

Tarek Masoud's recent Slate article just got my goat.   It had the sensationalist title, Why Can't Muslims Remain Calm? (which was prudently changed to Is This the Clash of Civilizations?) that we now come to   expect from most news media, where the glibly used identity-marker of "Muslims" covers a staggering 1.6 billion people, and the desired (but sadly unattained) emotional state for said billions is an opiated state of "calm".  The subheading and most of the article speaks of how the United States is being an "adult" in this whole situation -- how they are responding to "Muslim Rage" and senseless mob violence with an even-toned and very reasonable call for afore-mentioned calm.  This elicited from me a sardonic smile, a mirthless chortle.

Michael Muhammad Knight hits the nail on the head when he writes of the kind of violence being exported from the United States abroad, in his response to recent events: "[The anti-Islam movie] is simply the playground bully calling your mother a slut after already breaking your jaw, and then wondering why you can’t take a joke."But on the face of it, the United States response does seem to be a very grown-up one -- sensible press releases and press conferences that speak of sorrow at loss, condemnation of a "reprehensible" video, defense of free speech -- the very epitome of good sense...on the face of it.

Here's the thing to not lose sight of, though.  The United States is a two-headed beast -- both the good cop and the bad cop. Official press-releases and statements from the United States are all markedly elegant and restrained, not allowing for more than a creased brow and a sombre tone.  And yet, this creature coexists with a United States that routinely kills civilians through drone attacks (read as "collateral damage"), places its own citizens on "kill-lists", indefinitely detains people whose only crime is being born in the wrong country and being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and props up oppressive regimes all over the world.  

The violence we're seeing in response to the video, and the deaths that have resulted are tragic and horrifying.  That is a given.  But to say that "the United States is the only one willing to act like an adult" in all this is tantamount to commenting on the restraint of Don Corleone and the elegant cut of his suit, while paying no heed to the bloody horse-head under the sheets. 

Calling a spade a spade

I was listening to an older podcast of WNY's Radiolab (an excellent show, BTW, that I highly recommend) yesterday that featured a segment about how about 16 million men in the world today can claim direct descent from Genghis Khan.  To really get a sense of how crazy that number is, it was noted on the show that statistically speaking, a man who lived around the time of Genghis Khan could expect to have about 800 male descendants today.  That's 800 vs. 16 million.  The sheer disparity here boggles the mind.  
But there was something else about that segment that struck me.  Something about the tone of the show that struck me as terribly dissonant.  Throughout the segment, the hosts and the scientists talked about this discovery as "thrilling"; that basically, Genghis Khan is probably the most successful biological father in human history.  The show featured people who enthusiastically talked about wanting to know if they could trace their descent to Genghis Khan; and even a restaurant in England that had a drawing in which the winners could be tested for that characteristic Y-chromosome (it costs around $300 to do).  There was something markedly celebratory about the whole thing, and this disturbed me.  
Yes, scientifically speaking, I found the whole thing fascinating.  But what was with all this hip! hip! hurrah!-ing of Genghis Khan's loins?  Because, really, however you want to spin this, what we're saying here is that Genghis Khan managed to rape more women than any other man we know of.  Rape. That's the word.  And that's the word that was missing from this conversation.  
This got me curious.  I wondered if this avoidance of the reality of what this data meant was more wide-spread.  Turns out that this celebratory tone is pretty much what's out there.  A google search of 'Genghis Khan' and 'genes' popped up tons of reportage on Genghis Khan and his 16 million descendants -- about half a million hits, actually.  And most of them were in same vein as the Radiolab segment.  I next plugged in 'Genghis Khan', 'genes' and the added criterion of 'rape' and I got close to half the number of hits than the previous search.  And this is when things got really disturbing.  
Here were articles that acknowledged the "rape and pillage" of the Mongol hordes, that acknowledge that access to women was part of the "spoils of war".  But the acknowledgement of these facts did not prevent these articles from lionizing Genghis Khan for his sexual conquests.  Many of these articles were from popular mainstream news media. Like the Guardian article with the headline:  We owe it all to Superstud Genshis Khan, which talks about how Genghis Khan "claimed" women during his "merciless conquest", but then follows it up with talk of Khan's " enthusiastic mating habits"; or this priceless headline from the The Daily Mail: Genghis Khan: The Daddy of all Lovers. Or this from The Times: Genghis Super-Y -- the gene for a true alpha male.  National Geographic does not disappoint either: Genghis Khan a Prolific Lover, DNA Data Implies.  
I found only a few science blogs that tackled this story with purely scientific interest and did not comment, either positively or negatively, about Genghis Khan's sexual appetite.  And only a few that called Genghis Khan a rapist (but the comment threads to these posts made me want to curl up in a ball and disappear).  
When we look at the vast majority of the stories out there, these are not conversations about the science of tracking the Y-chromosome, or articles that talk about rape as evolutionarily adaptive behaviour.  These discussions talk about how amazing it is that one man is ancestor to so many millions; yes, it's rape at a grand scale, but come on! the dude was a "superstud", an "alpha-male", a "prolific lover"! 
Forgive me if I'm not so thrilled.  

[Of related interest: Chauvinism in reporting. ]    

Men in suits

A couple of weeks ago I watched (with a smirk, I'll admit) CNN's Wolf Blitzer reveal to his presumedly shocked audience that Qaddafi's youngest sons had been interning with a corporation in the United States till very recently.  Blitzer, in his characteristically sleep-inducing cadence, informed us that Khamis Qaddafi had been a high-level intern with AECOM, an engineering firm.  The central idea that was being sold as a shocking revelation was that a man associated with such brutality (Khamis Qaddafi heads the feared Khamis Brigade, an elite unit of the Libyan armed forces) had till recently been hobnobbing with the corporate elite in the United States.
Though I found this disbelief to be utterly bizarre, I was glad this story was receiving some reportage.  For a while now, folks in the United States have been given to believe that the bad-guys, the much talked-about "enemies of freedom", are men in flowing robes, head scarves or turbans, sporting decidedly un-fashionable beards; men who think up their diabolical plans in desert caves, and execute them with the words "Allah hu akbar" [God is great]!  All of this played quite well into the 'us-vs.-them' narrative of Euro-American governments, in which the 'us' were the freedom-loving people of the West, and the 'them' were the afore-mentioned troglodytes.
But since January, the face of "evil" has been dramatically altered in current mainstream reportage.  And I dearly hope that those in America watching the recent events of the Middle East have taken note of this.  It started quietly enough with President Ben Ali of Tunisia being ousted; but by all accounts, Ben Ali was the mildest of the lot and left without too much fuss.  Egypt came next, and with Hosni Mubarak, the image of a stoic, clean-shaven man with brilliantined hair and an immaculately tailored suit entered the Euro-American public consciousness.  But the image that perhaps chilled us to the bone was that which followed in Libya.  In Saif al-Islam Qaddafi's first appearance on television in the early days of the troubles in Libya, he is cool and detached.  His rimless glasses, his smart tie and crisp suit add a bureaucratic detachment to the scene as he casually threatens that blood will flow in the streets of Libya. And now we have rumblings in Syria and what promises to be a brutal suppression of dissent at the hands of President Bashar al-Assad, another man in a suit.
Brutality, tyranny and suppression meted out by men who would look quite at home in corporate boardrooms and martini lounges has been a reality the world over for a while, but we're seeing it on full view after a long time.  These men, often educated at elite Western academic institutions, who live lavish life-styles complete with yachts and parties on Greek islets, cannot so easily be relegated to an Other-ness, to a world-view far removed from our own experiences.  These men are visibly modern. Their excesses and their repression cannot be dismissed as the products of some obscure alchemical processes.  They represent regimes that have long been political and economic allies of Euro-America.  And they are what they are not in spite of these alliances, but because of them.  I hope that these images and the accompanying coverage by the mainstream media will add complexity and nuance to a picture that has been painted for too long in primary colours. 

An update

Several weeks ago I posted about how responsible the Egyptian military had been while the Revolution of Tehrir Square played out.  Well, over the past couple of weeks we have been witnessing a very different, and at times diametrically opposite, face of the Egyptian military.
Mubarak has been ousted, but he has been replaced by a military regime.  Though the military government purports to be merely transitional, the Egyptian people have quite naturally been less than sanguine about the regime and the intentions of its constituent members.  And so, to ensure that this transitional government does not forget its mandate, crowds of protestors have continued to gather every Friday at Tahrir Square.  And as these protests continue with unabated intensity, reports have been pouring in of dissidents being imprisoned and tortured, journalists being obstructed and suppressed, and just today, we hear news of an Egyptian blogger being sentenced to prison by a military court.
So I fear that I spoke too soon, and was too readily wooed by the men in khaki.  The Egyptian military's supposedly-transitional government is now, by all accounts, a junta.
Vive le revolucion...

Mixed signals?

A few days ago, we were confronted with two pieces of news that were seemingly at odds with each other.  First, we heard that the Arab League had endorsed the idea of a no-fly zone over Libya.  Second, we heard that many Gulf States (Saudi Arabia and the UAE included) were sending troops to Bahrain to help the ruling family put down civilian protests. My first reaction to this was to think that surely we had here two incompatible stances. On the one hand, the Arab League was acquiescing to foreign intervention to aid rebels in their bid to oust the leader of an Arab state; and on the other hand, they were actively providing military support to an Arab regime to quash unarmed rebellion within its territory.  Mixed messages?
On further reflection, I realized that there was a huge difference in the way these countries perceived Libya and its leadership (for want of a better term), and the way they perceived Bahrain and its ruling family.  And the word 'family' is one of the keys to this conundrum.
Libya is certainly like the Gulf States in that its politics and society is shaped in many ways (perhaps even dominated) by issues of clan/tribe membership, and Qaddafi's loyalties to his al-Qaddafa tribe speak to this matter.  However, the origins and the sources of Qaddafi's power are markedly different.  A colonel in the army of Libya's King Irdis, Qaddafi staged a successful coup in 1969, abolished monarchy and established a republic. His power is based on an anti-monarchical stance, and is entirely contemporary in origin.
Contrasted to this are the ruling families of the Gulf States.  The ruling families in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and the various city-states of the United Arab Emirates trace their power to authority that has been inherited, and not usurped.  Though the domination of such families as al-Saud, al-Nahyan, and  al-Khalifa can be traced back only a few generations, these families most likely see their rule as an entitlement, rather than a consequence of various fairly-recent geo-political forces (such as colonialism, the discovery of oil and various bargains made with the religious elite).  In this view, while the ouster of the upstart Qaddafi is a worthy cause, the dethroning of the al-Khalifa family is not at all an option.  The power vested in the al-Khalifa family is too much like the power they possess.  Theirs is power taken for granted as a consequence of their birth; Qaddafi's power comes from its seizure, and can therefore be seized away from him just as surely.
The presence of a large Shia population ruled by a Sunni ruling family in many of these Gulf States has also a role to play in this drama. But that may have to be the topic of another post.

The world changed ever so slightly

I was listening to NPR the other day, and the panel of commentators and experts were discussing the labour and union-related protests in Wisconsin.  And as the discussion wound down, one of the panelists said something that gave me pause.  She said that the intensity of the protests in Wisconsin may not let up as soon as one might imagine, and that some of that endurance and resilience could be a direct result of the events in Egypt.  That the power of the masses was tested and proven half a world away in Egypt, and the people in Wisconsin drew strength from this.


Had I heard the mainstream media in America ever speak of events in the Middle East in such terms before?  Arabs had flexed their democratic muscle and how refreshingly odd it was to hear of Americans drawing inspiration from this.  I had become so accustomed to hearing of freedom and democracy as America's primary exports to the world.  But here the current of ideas and ideologies seemed to have changed direction in a way that I would not have predicted as possible a mere month ago.


Perhaps this is a temporary reversal of roles, and perhaps American presumptions about the rest of the world shall in the long term remain unaltered.  But the optimist in me would like to believe that something has changed for good, if ever so slightly.  For once, our gaze in America looks farther away than the limits of red, white and blue.  For once, there is an acknowledgement that the freedom of another people is not being won at the end of American gun-barrels; that the rage of a mass of bearded men is a just rage; that veiled women are women with will and women with voices that can and are heard; and that we who have been lulled into complacence by the warm and fuzzy ideal of 'inalienable rights' have been awakened from our stupor by the voices of men and women we presumed to be mute.


How can we go back to the way we were after all this? 

Egypt, 2011: The military amid the protesters

Protesters graffiti-ed tanks with anti-government slogans; the 

military did not stop them. This tank says, "Down with Mubarak"

and "No to Mubarak". 

The events of the past two weeks in Egypt have been breathtaking to say the least. Images of tens of thousands of people gathering in Cairo's Tahrir Square, insisting that their voices be heard, have left us inspired, concerned, jubilant and hopeful.  This is the metaphorical public square reified.
But in all of this, I have been left stunned by the maturity shown by Egypt's military.  As the protests began some thirteen days ago, the one issue I was most curious and concerned about was what the response of the military would be to the situation .  Who would they side with? Would we see a brutal and bloody repression of the largely peaceful protests at the hands of the Egyptian armed forces?  If it were so, it would not have been the first time in the history of the modern world when the military had come to the aid of a regime that found itself in a precarious position.  
I certainly breathed a sigh of relief the day that I woke to the news that the Egyptian army had announced it would not fire on protesters.  How easy it would have been for the army to decide that these protests were disrupting a stable political, economic and social environment (which they are), and thus had to be repressed.  How uncomplicated it would have been for it to side with the powers that be.  But in all of this, the Egyptian military has not taken the easy and uncomplicated way out.  It has decided that its job is not to defend the Egyptian regime, but the Egyptian people; that it is a neutral entity when it comes to political stances and changes, and it is not for the military to decide which way the socio-political sands shall be allowed to shift.  

Over the past two weeks we have seen them act as arbiters of order, without ever attempting to muffle the voices of dissent in a sham of orderliness.  They have acted as a bedrock of strength amidst the throngs of protesters, without ever actively flexing its military muscle. There were moments when the seemingly miraculous balance achieved seemed to tip in the direction of violence - all it would have taken was one bullet fired by a uniformed soldier.  But the Egyptian military's promise to the Egyptian people has held.  
I can only hope that this maturity and foresight holds strong in the weeks, months and years ahead, as Egypt and its people undoubtedly face turbulent and uncertain times ahead.  I will watch, with baited breath, to see if the Egyptian military continues to respect its mandate as a defender of the nation's people, and not the brokers of power and authority. 

The cringe test

I'l admit that I'm more than a little amazed at the hullabaloo that surrounded Juan Williams' remarks about being afraid of Muslims in "Muslim garb" (whatever that is...) on planes, and his subsequent firing. Actually, what really amazed me was how little was said about his remarks before NPR decided to fire him for them. The outrage, it seems, is less about his seriously troubling remark and more about NPR's "intolerance".  Yes, the world 'intolerance' has been tossed about quite a bit these past couple of days, and most of it with reference to NPR.  Check out these headlines: "NPR's Taxpayer-Funded Intolerance" [WSJ, Oct 22]; "NPRs Intolerant Funding of Juan Williams" [The Examiner, Washington, Oct 21]; "a Brief History of NPR's Intolerance" [foxmews.com, Oct 21]. 

And of course, the whole "free-speech" argument is made.  And this is what makes it all so tricky. Should Williams have been fired for exercising his freedom of speech?  Now, there are a couple of points I want to make in this regard. One, is that while we all are awarded the freedom of speech here, I do think that as with most freedoms, this one too comes with certain responsibilities.  And if we occupy a position where our opinion is heard, considered and given more value than that of the average schmoe, it is doubly incumbent upon us to exercise this freedom with some thought and restraint.  Two, we may be free to say what we want, but we are not guaranteed freedom from every consequence of what we say.  So, really, we ought to think more before we speak. Free speech is so much more valuable when it is thought-provoking, rather than being merely provocative. In this world of tweets and sound-bites, considered speech seems to have taken a back seat to merely free speech.  And our lives are not the better for it. 

But if still in doubt, then I strongly recommend putting the rhetoric in question through the "Cringe Test".  Here's how it works:  replace the word 'Muslim' (or whatever other ethnic, religious, political category is currently under scrutiny) with the word 'Jew' or 'Black man/woman'.  If the resulting statement makes you cringe, then it's probably not as acceptable as folks would have you believe.  Try it.

On a side note, the best response I have encountered to this whole fracas has been the site, "Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things." 

Why does it matter?

I read recently that the apparel retailer 'Gap' had come out with a new logo, but then ended up reinstating the old one because of a huge outcry.  To quote from the BBC article: 


"US clothes retailer Gap has scrapped a new logo just one week after its introduction following an "outpouring of comments" online...The new logo on the website had "Gap" written in black against a light background with a small blue square behind the top of the letter "p". But critics attacked the rebranding on social networks and online forums.

More than 2,000 comments were posted on the company's Facebook page on the issue, with many demanding the return of the traditional logo." (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11520930) 

And reading this, I wondered, "Who are these people?!"  Personally, I don't think I could get myself worked up enough about the logo of a company unless they threatened to paint it on my front-door.  If the company is making the same clothes as before, their stores are not moving en-mass to the other end of town, and their stance on wages, sweatshops, out-sourcing, resourcing or what have you has not changed in any substantial way, why in the world does it matter if their logo looks different?  

Are people's lives so insipid that something as pointless as this could get them all riled up?  There are other more pressing issues that could do with some of that consumer anger and angst.  Facebook's removal of their lovely round-edged thumbnails, for instance... It makes me so angry...

Meeting the bug-eyed aliens...

I read this article the other day: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11041449.  It talked about the suggestion that folks ought to expand the search for extra-terrestrial life to include "sentient machines" and not just biological life. And this got me thinking. Who is doing the looking?  And has anyone really granted them the right to look? Let me explain. 


I'm an optimist, and I've been bred on my fair share of well-intentioned  aliens.  But  for every pointy-eared stoic Vulcan who has taught us something about being human, there is a menagerie of fanged, slavering, bug-eyed, ice-cold, robotic-limbed, cybernetically enhanced, disappearing, mind-reading, probing, spindly-fingered creatures that has given us the shivers.  And while trying to assess any possible intelligent life out there through an anthropomorphic lens of 'good' and 'evil' may be silly, it still begs one to wonder if contacting these intelligent beings may not be in our best interest.  After all, most humans don't consider themselves evil for tromping over ants in our path or eating chicken.  What if the alien beings who may be out there just consider our little planet a yummy source of food or fuel, or just another rock in the way of a Galactic Super Highway (shout-out to Douglas Adams!)?  Do we really want to be letting these critters know we're out here?


And this brings me to my main point: Considering the potential hazards of signalling our existence, has anyone asked humanity for its collective permission to seek out alien life-forms?  Generally speaking, we don't really take the folks looking for aliens too seriously. But this means that there has never been a referendum to determine if such a search is a good idea or not.  For something that could have huge implications (for better or for worse) for everyone on this planet, we have not really stopped to ask if this is ok with the rest of humanity.  There has been no vote on whether all of us, or even if most of us, want to find or contact alien intelligence.  And if/when this does happen, we may be asking ourselves one big question: who the hell signed off on this? 

When your interlocutors can google you

Over the past year in the field, I've googled myself assiduously. This I've done not out of vanity, but to make sure I knew and managed what information about me was out there.  To have control over what is to be known about me is an entirely reasonable thing to want. But out in the field, where one hopes to share confidences with one's interlocutors, the willful withholding and management of information about myself enters an ethical grey zone.  One begins to tread that fine line between being a private individual and being disingenuous.

I’m not being naive here. I really don’t believe that my interlocutors, as close as my relationship with them may have become, share every detail of their lives with me.  I am not even presuming that they always tell me “everything” that is relevant to my area of research. And that is their prerogative. 

But I approach them as an ethnographer knowing that they are part of a certain social/economic/political/religious/linguistic group. And most likely, it is their membership to any or all of these groups that has led me to them.  So while I may not claim certain knowledge of their inner motivations, I do know a great deal about who they are in these milieux, what their backgrounds are and, in many cases, what their public activities in these spheres are. They, on the other hand, cannot claim the same. Most of them only know that I am a student from a university in the United States who is doing research in India on Sufism; they know of course that I am an Indian Hindu.  Some who have heard of anthropology would know that I am one of that breed; some would know I am married, have no children, and have relatives who still live in India. They may have a faint idea about my economic and social, but would really have very little idea of my political and social views, my hobbies, my friends…unless I choose to tell them.  It is clearly an imbalanced equation. 

I am sure that they have constructed and deconstructed me. I’m sure they have imagined what my life in America must be like, and what my routines and motivations might be.  But on many accounts, their imaginings would be off the mark by miles because they only see me out of the context of my usual life.  I change my mores and lifestyles so that I may fit in better with them and learn more from them by not being a jarring presence in their midst. And it is this “modified me” that they know and construct their imaginings from.  And it is with this “modified me” that they interlocute, and in so many cases accept within their homes, their families, their sacred spaces.  And all of this makes me wonder…would they tell me the things they tell me, permit me the kind of access they do, consider me an equal in many measures, if not all, if they knew all they would if they saw me in my “natural habitat”?

I work with people who are for the most part, socially conservative.  They are wonderful people who are extremely generous and kind to me when they really have no reason to be; they get nothing much out of my research, and yet give me so much.  But these are also people who quite clearly believe that homosexuality is a sin, or that drinking alcohol, wearing clothes that don’t cover you from neck to ankle is a sign of moral lapse.  And so I again wonder: How would my interlocutors react if they saw photos of me carrying supportive banners at a Queer Pride parade, or knew that I drank and wore sun-dresses?  Would they still think me worthy of the information they give me?  And this is especially pertinent since my research is on issues of religion and spirituality—topics deeply entangled with questions of morality.

     We no longer live in an age where what biographical details we wish to disclose is entirely within our control. Doing research in urban areas among folks who have access to the Internet means that your interlocutors can google you.  And as it stands, I certainly don’t want them to have access to those photos from the Pride parade or that picture of me with the tankard of beer!

But I struggle with this.

Of trees and forests

Gaining an empathy for trees is perhaps an occupational hazzard (I use the term quite loosely) for most socio-cultural Anthropologists. I speak metaphorically, of course. We work with and within relatively small groups of people, gaining confidences, building long-lasting relationsips and bridges along the way. We get to know the people we work with not just as members of larger communities, but as complex personalities with complex desires and aspirations. Is it any wonder then, that Anthropologists make for very bad liberals, and worse liberal reformers? Revolutionary reform requires one to look at the big picture, to think of change en-mass, macroscopically. If the lived realities of a hand full of people have to be sacrificed for this "larger good", some great and much-needed reform, so be it. If one concerns oneself with the minutae of human existence and the violence inherent in sudden change, one is not meant to be a reformer or a revolutionary...in the conventional understanding of these terms. 

Think of the veil, for instance (I know, I know...cliched). But really. I'm not talking about the hijab (a scarf of some sort worn to cover just the hair and ears), which frankly is a non-issue made disproportionately political. Think of the full-body veil--the naqaab or the burqa. Bluntly put, I don't like it. I honestly feel that it robs women of their person-hood in many ways, and places the onus of moral regulation too heavily on women's shoulders. This is an old and oft-made argument. And I know enough people who think that it should be banned, or that the movement for "liberating" Muslim women should be focussed on throwing off the burqa, and that only a revolutionary act of that nature can bring any change to the warped person-hood created by the full-body veil.  But as much as I think the burqa is a form of violence against women, I cannot bring myself to join this revolutionary cry and equate unveiling to liberation. I know too many women who are able to exercise agency in some measure simply because of the burqa. They are mobile because of the burqa; they have access to education and employment because of the burqa; they are able participate in public spaces (and public spheres) thanks to the burqa. In communities where "female modesty" is taken very seriously, the burqa allows them to leave the confines of their homes and become a part of a larger world. And while I am aware of the feminist discourses on patriarchal hegemony and a need to reject them, I cannot but conclude that any law, any mass and imposed effort or discussion to do away with the burqa would be an act of immense violence against these women for whom the burqa ensures a measure of freedom. *
Even in terms of the anti-sweatshop movement in the US, I find myself often on the "wrong" side of the debate. For as much as labour reform is needed, as much as labour conditions in sweatshops are dispicable and need desparate change, boycotting certain manufacturers can mean loss of much-needed unemployment, penuary and starvation for real people in the short-term. The long-term goal of labour reform requires the sacrifice of the basic requirements of human beings somewhere in Indonesia and Vietnam right now. And my conscience cannot entirely abide by this. 
Someone once asked me, "But isn't reform good? Isn't it necessary? How can you be against reform?" I'm not sure what the solution is. How can macro-changes be effected while ensuring that individuals caught up in these revolutionary moments of "reform" are not victims of violence, that their agency is not stripped from them for the "larger good"? Maybe the solution is the lack of one--that is, not that one side is conseded to be the right one and the other, the wrong, but that the battle is ensured continuance. That for every person who wants to ban whaling (or veiling), there is someone willing to stand up for traditional whaling (or veiling) communities; for every radical revolutionary who wants to reconfigure the forest, there is a naiively empathetic tree-hugger. Both sides may be nuts, but someone's got to do it. For descending into solipsism is not a happy option, methinks. 


* I personally think it's a good move when criticism of the burqa becomes part of the religious discourse and debate among Muslims themselves.  As with this example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8290606.stm. This means that the anti-burqa discourse is framed not in third-wave feminist terms, which has so many problems of its own, but in terms of the worldview of those who veil or support veiling. 

Of ignorant informants?

How does one define an 'expert' in the field? This question has been on my mind since I've got here, and is nowhere close to being answered.  So many times, my informants in the field have treated me as the expert.  Being more than well-acquainted with the core texts, concepts and debates in Islam and, more specifically, Sufism, I can hold my own in most conversations on Sufi Islam, and also answer questions posed to me about certain topics with reasonable ease and confidence.  But I still find these instances of being the expert quite disconcerting.  As an anthropologist, being positioned as the expert seems to be at odds with the idea that it is the "native interlocutor" who is the person in the know.  I'm here, or at least that's the script most ethnographers tend to follow, to learn what local informants have to teach me...even though many of my local informants feel that I know way more than them about Islam. 
This hierarchical valuation of the "little tradition" and the "great tradition" (to borrow Robert Redfield's terms from old-time Anthropology), understandably makes me uncomfortable.  Where I value what the subaltern has to say, I find that the subaltern sometimes sees little worth in its own knowledge-production.  
Where my subaltern informants are willing to speak, to tell me what they know and feel about Sufi Islam with enough self-assurance, there is also the internal hierarchy among those in the field that I must contend with--the hierarchy between the lettered folk with textual expertise in Islamic theology and Sufi schools of thought on the one hand, and those who transmit and/or adhere to folk-Sufism or Sufism for the masses (if I may use such terms) on the other.  Ask a member of the former group and they usually tell me that any time I spend talking to those of the second category is time wasted, that I will learn nothing about Sufism or Islam from them.  To them, my informants who are not well-versed in the textual dialogues of classical Islam are wholly ignorant. 
While it is true that most of these people, who are members of India's Islamic Intelligentsia (I adore accidental alliterations), could tackle the nuances of theological and philosophical debates within classical Islam with ease, they don't know jack about the ways in which ordinary people's life-ways are fundamentally altered by these larger intellectual debates; they could hardly give me even an idea of the kind of religious transformations that Sufism and the lack of it renders in the contemporary Indian setting. 
So who then is the expert? Me? My scholarly interlocutors? Or my lay informants? And who among us is ignorant? And of what?

Yearning for order

It's been nearly a month since I got to Delhi and unlike in Gulbarga, where I was before, here I feel a little lost. There is nowhere that I have to be everyday, no one I have to meet regularly. Things have to be accomplished, but not necessarily in any particular order, or by any soon-to-arrive moment. I am master of my own schedule, and I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with it. The past few years on campus have been so goal oriented--working towards term papers, exams and proposal deadlines. I chugged along happily for the most part then... a little tug-boat on her way to some not-so-far port. Now I feel like a sail-boat adrift on some windless ocean.

It's quite common, I'm told...this ethnographic ennui...this feeling that nothing is happening when all sorts of liminal-taboo-transgressive-totemic-PoCo-PoMo-metareflexive moments were promised in all those fascinating ethnographies written by others who went before you. I guess I just need to dig my own little groove here; set myself tasks that need to get done everyday. Else, this spiral of unaccounted hours and days threatens to overwhelm the next six months.

Here's hoping for some structured sanity.

Finding a measure of home

I am a nomad. Born of a father who "escaped" to Bombay from his home in the heart of Kerala at the age of 16 and a mother who herself was reared in Bombay, far from the place of her birth in the hinterlands of Karnataka. I was raised in the United Arab Emirates: an ocean away from Bombay, where I was born (itself a place far removed in space and life-ways from the points to which I trace my cultural and linguistic ancestry). The United Arab Emirates was a land full of nomads like me, and the country was understood by most who had travelled there to be but a caravanserai in the grander enterprise of making a living and a life. And though home was past some distant shore to many of us--whether Cairo, Khartoum, Manila or Bombay--we all found in that little oasis called Dubai some measure of home. We made of those who lived and travelled with us friends and family, created and recreated the familiar amidst the foreign and dug our heels into the drifting sands of that desert port.
And just as I was metamorphosing into some semblance of a grown up, I found myself again in an alien land. And here in the United States too, I made for myself a home, where for the past nine years I have woven strands of my past lives and my present world into a complex and ever-changing cultural fabric.
Now, for the fourth time in my life I am transported--but this time I am back in that elusive Leviathan of a home called India. And I find that in these 23 years since I left its shores, I have arrived back with many more homes than I left with, with many oases that I dwell on fondly and yearn to return to. India is of course a beast of many colours and aspects, and Delhi, where I am at present, is not much like Bombay or Bangalore, where I have lived before. But I know that here too I will find bits of the familiar in places I least expect to, and I will come to find comfort in things newly encountered. And so it is my task once more to find a measure of home.

The long overdue update

The last two months have been spent gallivanting ... first in the UAE for a week and then as a TA with a study-abroad programme in North India. It's been exhausting, but fun; and I've encountered things relevant to my research in the most unexpected of circumstances--cantankerous men placing some Muslim reformist groups on the same continuum as the Taliban, Mahatma Gandhi's grandson giving a speech at the Aligarh Muslim University in which he speaks of Sufism as the only hope against religious extremists, tour-guides at various Indian monuments praising the Mughal emperor Akbar for his syncretic religious beliefs... It's amazing what you hear when you're actually listening. Aside from sweet serendipity, which seems to be the mainstay of us Anthropologists (can serendipity be serendipity if one looks forward to it?), there have been other interesting moments worthy of mention.

• My students ask me odd questions about India: "Are AA batteries available here?" and "Is there a pharmacy in Agra?". Add to this a student who brought along a 4 month supply of shampoo with her to a land that gave the world the word 'shampoo' and you have me rolling in laughter.
  
• I avert disaster by pointing out to my student that when she says the Hindi word for "bangles" it sounds more like the Hindi word for "pussy".
  
• I saw more horny animals in the past six weeks than I care to remember (is it mating season?)
  
• On my 27th birthday I went to a monkey-infested temple in a gorge, climbed up Jaipur's highest mountain wearing a sari and flip-flops, watched the sun set from a Sun Temple at the peak of said mountain, descended its slopes singing Clementine, got a delivery of roses and chocolate cake from my man across the oceans, then went to dinner where there were live ghazal singers, was then surprised by my students in the hotel bar where I imbibed some awesome scotch, and then danced to Bollywood music till the wee hours. Life can be sooo good.
  
• I communed with elephants and swayed with some snake charmers (don't let anyone tell you there aren't any of those in India).
  
• (Very) Briefly drooled over a poster of a hot guy in my room only to realize moments later that it was Jesus.
  
• Grooved to some amazing Qawwals at the Salim Chishti shrine in Fatehpur Sikri...that white marble island of tranquility in an ocean of burning red sandstone.
• Bathed in the icy waters of the swift-flowing Ganga at dawn and felt the rising sun warm me. I was thus technically sinless for at least a day.
  
• Heard peacocks call out to each other across a desert valley.

Discomfort in indifference

I was at the madrassa a few days ago for my usual week-day Quranic exegesis class with the Maulvi. There were two other female students in the class with me (the number of students, aside from me, who sit in on these classes varries considerably). At the end of the class the Maulvi asked if anyone of us had any questions. One of the other women asked the Maulvi what were the consequences if a Muslim in jest and without thinking declared themself to be a non-believer (kafir). The Maulvi thought about this a bit and said that declaring unbelief was tantamount to regecting Islam, and that one would have to formally accept the faith again if they wished to avoid eternal hell-fire. The woman grew visibly distressed at this--she flushed, tears trickled down her cheeks, she began to mumble that she had spoken without thinking, just for fun, and had not realized the enormity of what she'd done. She had clearly been thinking about this for a while and had come to class solely to pose this question to the Maulvi. And now her anguish at the thought that she had somehow rejected her faith, that she had risked being relegated to hell, was palpable.
For those brief moments that I was witness to this ordeal I was suddenly made aware of that great chasm that lay between us. It was not the divide between belief and disbelief, between an unreserved faith in the existence of something and an unerring faith in its non-existence. The chasm was one between faith and indifference. Here was someone who was so vested to her identity as a believer, and so intensely feared the consequences of disbelief...her fear, her repentence, and genuine sorrow at her error were so raw and visible. And here was I, who did not even give these notions the dignity of disbelief. I thought about them in academic terms, as things others believed in, as concepts that moved others, but not me. At a personal level, I care little about acts of faith and disbelief, of how things spiritual and supernatural shape me and my life. How could I care so little about something that meant literally everything to someone else? Never has my indifference towards the sacred left me in a state of such disquiet.

Encounters with a Hindutva klansman

The past week has whizzed by at break-neck speed. I was acting as RA for a Professor doing research at a shrine in Karnataka. As part of the assignment I had to interview a member of the Bajrang Dal, one of the more popular Hindutva outfits in India. I can safely say that this has been by far the most infuriating and frightening experiences of my adult life. We sat at a table in a restaurant in the middle of town--my prof, Anil and I. He seemed like a normal, mild-mannered guy, speaking in tones so soft they were barely more than a murmur. And there he sat across from me speaking so casually about intimidation, violence and hatred. He smiled wistfully as he spoke of the early years of his involvement in the group when their violent mobs were subjected to laathi charges and shell-firing from government authorities. He grew more intense as he spoke of how Muslims lived in "our" country, ate "our" food, breathed "our" air, and about how "we Hindus" had to reclaim what was ours by whatever means. "If a mosquito bites me, I am not willing to sit there and let it suck my blood. I will do whatever is in my power to rid myself of the pest," he said. And then he took on a proud and smug air as he talked about the group's current and future plans: of spreading "awareness" among the public about the threats to our "Hindu nation", of how they "educated" the community and urged them to keep an eye on the Muslims who lived around them, of how they would reclaim Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh to form an undivided and Hindu India.

What was so infuriating was that he presumed that just because I was a Hindu, I had some natural empathy for his worldview and his cause; that all that he was doing, he was doing on my behalf, for my sake. And equally frustrating was that I could do nothing to correct this grossly incorrect assessment on his part; had I revealed my politics to him, he would not have been as candid as he had been thus far, thus denying us access to his chilling rhetoric.

This encounter has made me very glad that I did not take up Hindu-Muslim issues in India as the core of my dissertation research. The horror of each encounter, each interview, each new ethnographic relationship, would have driven me quite literally insane. And I do not think I could have dealt with the constant and vivid reminder that this kind of violence and hatred was so close to home, and took on a guise that was so deceptively normal.

An ode to the vegetable market

My greatest joy every week is my trip to the vegetable market. It's located in an alleyway on a bustling street called the Super Market. You get off the auto at the auto stand, make your way past the green and white mosque, past the plastic-walah and his hoard of scrubbers, combs, little boxes, funnels, marbled red and white buckets and toothbrush holders, and then left between the flower-sellers' carts with their gorgeous marigold and tuberose garlands, and their mountains of rose and jasmine. Walk down a few steps and you're in a world that assaults your senses. A make-shift arcade, the vegetable market is cobbled together with bamboo poles and jute sacks as roofing, a few dry goods and vegetable stores made of more solid stuff holding the whole thing together. The moment you step into the market you're hit with the smell...the pungent smell of people and peppers--hundreds and hundreds of people walk past, crushing underfoot green and red peppers that have dropped from the vegetable carts onto the paving. And then as you walk past each , you're nose is seduced by something new, something different...curry leaves, mint, bell-peppers, daikon raddishes...and oh! fenugreek! I stop and buy two bunches of lush green fenugreek leaves for five rupees, their sharp, fresh smell already conjuring visions of methi parathas and aalumethi.
The air is buzzing with the white noise of a thousand voices; here and there you can make out a boy calling out the price of his curry leaves, or a woman hawking garlic...but otherwise, it's a gush of human sound, incoherent and chaotic. And the colours--the colours of people, of clothes of fruit and flowers and vegetables and spices and intermittent patches of blue in the midst of the jute-brown roof.
Then down to my fruit-seller. He sits in the same corner every day. His store is just 3 feet squared--him in the middle (the lord and master of his fruity court), wearing the typical white button-less shirt and pajamas of a marathi merchant, his sacred thread peeking out by his shoulder. I'm a regular here now and he asks: "Apples again today?" But I'm distracted by the pile of fresh figs at his side. They're expensive...fifteen rupees for around seven or eight of them...but I don't care...they're fresh figs! "They're really sweet", he says, and hands me one to eat. I bite into it and only twenty-six years of breeding stops me from moaning in sheer delight. He wraps half a kilogram in newsprint and drops it into my bag. Then finally to the dry grocers. He too sits surrounded by his wares--lentils and rice, nuts and spices. He peers at me through his glasses. His eyes are small and beady through those glasses as thick as coke-bottle bottoms. His silvery beard is chest-long and he wears an embroidered skull-cap. I ask for rice and he produces, seemingly out of thin air, a gigantic ladel. It's bowl is as large as a wall-clock and it's handle around 4 feet long. He stands up, leans over and dips the ladel into a sack of rice miles away, then pours it onto the weighing scale at his side and finally tips it into a bag. I buy 10 grams of cardommom from him, say "shukriya" and head out into the open air.
I cram into an auto with two other women and head home. I stare at my bulging bag...I have rice, lentils, cardommom, raddishes, bell-peppers, grapes...but best of all, I have my frankincense and myrrh--fenugreek and fresh figs.