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CONFLUENCE February 2009

South Asian Perspectives

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COVER STORY

WRITING BRIT-ASIAN CITIES: FROM MIGRANTS TO MULTICULTURALISM Shailaja Fennell

We know that the city is the site of contention and contestation between the capitalist class and the worker as early capitalist tendencies give way to the mature stage of industrialisation. The life of Britain’s capitalist cities has been written by many hands, and the municipal corporation has taken on the mantle of the official storywriter. The municipality is variously regarded: as an institution that mediates and moderates the capitalist process; a vehicle for the advancement of capitalist strategies; an institution that pays obeisance to the wealth churned out of the proverbial dark satanic mills. Avner Offer provided us a magisterial survey of the rise of the municipality in the city and a protector of urban property and wealth in his 1981 volume, Property and Politics 1870-1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Indeed, the cities of Bradford, Manchester, Birmingham, London and Leicester are fine examples of such cities that stand today as two hundred year old memorials to industrialisation. These symbols of industrial wealth were forged by large waves of agricultural labour coming in search of the economic liberation that was delivered by the proletarian wage. Though the backdrop of industrialisation has now crumbled and all that remains is the tired chimneys that do not even have the energy to send up the wispiest puff of smoke, the cities continue to stand as evidence of the power that capital casts over those who seek their fortunes within the realm of capitalist accumulation. The lives of labouring people are etched on the buildings and streets of the industrial city and through the nineteenth century these were increasingly situated away from the factory and around football stadiums, dog track meets and men’s clubs. The excitement and exuberance generated within these social sites was in sharp contrast to the larger context of exploitation and harshness that prevailed in the processes of production and accumulation that drove the factory system. What is noteworthy is that this social transformation was written largely in terms of the embedding of a new set of social expectations and demands, influenced almost wholly by domestic concerns. In fact, during

the nineteenth century, colonialism remained restricted to the margins of the industrial economy. The encounter between colonialism and capitalism had to wait for the twentieth century in England, with the First World War bringing in a new set of industrial workers. The migrants who came from the Caribbean, South Asia and Africa to live and work in these large industrial cities in Britain were a challenge for both the established white working class as well as the municipality that had come to be regarded as the administrative authority of the city. What is less understood, and even less appreciated is that our very understanding of colonialism has been subjected to rounds of academic rereading and rewriting and the imprint of these iterations is distinctly observable on the process and pattern of construction of knowledge. The outcome of these rounds of reworking on the colonial process is that the colonial encounter was one where both the coloniser and the colonised interacted to create new forms of hybrid, even cosmopolitan cultures, in the colonial city. The ideas generated by these encounters were creations of the colonial process itself, with the new words themselvesshampoo coming from the Indian word champi (oil-massage)-pointing to the importance of exchange, and the migrants themselves being the vehicles for the transmission of these new ideas and terms. Migration from colonies, and the ideas that travelled between colony and mother country experienced a new wind ushered in by the emergence of newly independent nations claiming their place in the established world order in the decade after the end of the Second World War. There was a heightened sense of national identity within these countries and achieving a national identity, was cast as the single, and most important goal for colonised countries that would liberate a collective of people and Partha Chatterji provides a powerful analysis of the social forces behind creating a nation and the impacts of the constituent parts of the state, particularly the inadequate attention accorded in this process to the tendencies therein that are opposed to a single identity in his The Nation and its Fragments,1993. It is important to remember that the creation of a post-colonial world

Dame Helen Suzman, South Africa’s “boots on” politician, passes away (P5)

was often dotted with acute periods of struggle, acts of extreme violence and considerable bloodshed. The now independent states were not stable social formations, and the migrants leaving the shores of their mother countries had often been exposed to protracted periods of opposition to the policies of the new government, as in the case of the farmer who could no longer find decent employment in the fields of the Punjab, and migrants from post-colonial South Asia to British cities often carried with them these painful memories of the making of the nation (and there is a distinct and rapidly growing literature on the impact of the Partition on the South Asian psyche). South-Asian migrants bring with them these particular memories: the emergent nationalist discourses of anti-colonial struggle; the heightened sense of citizenship on a new nation. While the migrant who left under colonial rule was subject to both coercive and disruptive procedures, these passages were without any political opposition from colonial subjects within the colonies. In contrast, the post-colonial migrant suffers from both a sense of dissatisfaction at not gaining an economic foothold in the home country but also of a political displacement, accentuated by echoes of nationalist rhetoric. Consequently, South-Asian migrants making their way to British cities had their heads filled with a jumble of colonial and nationalist ideas. This also led to a visualisation of these cities as industrial sites inscribed by working people and capitalist profit even though these cities were rapidly closing down the factories and the mills during the 1970s and 1980s. These cities still remain powerful ideational symbols for the migrant, with new facets being added to the original encounter between labour and capital as groups of migrants, differentiated their place of origin and the time of their arrival, contend with each other over the remains of capitalism. The official view of migrants as colonial labour without different personal and political topographies does not do justice to aspirations and mental maps that the new entrants carry within and with which these read the large post-industrial British cities. These peoples are both products of the colonial or postcolonial state which they have now physically left behind but which accompany

CONFLUENCE BUSINESS (P7)

FRONT ROW: Visual Art (P8,9,10)

them in the ideas and images that they have brought with them. We need to replace the depiction of the migrant as simple labourer with an image of the South Asian migrant that both reflects and reconfigures the changing face of the city in post-war Britain. The manner in which the city has been socially transformed by successive waves of South-Asian migrants seeking jobs needed to be brought to the attention of the official city. This dimension does not have any place in the assimilationist model that adopted by the British state, became the accepted policy of city councils, the successor of the grand municipalities of the previous century. Assimilation that saw colonial labour as a simple addition to the existing British labour force that would increasingly approximate the norm of Anglo-conformity, has been replaced by a multicultural model in public policy by the 1980s. The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) has been a key player in bringing in national legislation of racial equality into various walks of life, social services and organisational spaces and bringing the debate on multiculturalism to the centre of the official establishment, and ensuring that race equality policies are part of the core operations of city councils. Bringing concerns of race into official documentation has permitted a conversation to be initiated about difference and its relationship to equality. Official policy regards race as a form of difference within the multicultural framework; it is based on an unchanging migrant identity whose cultural differences need to be accommodated. It does not comprehend that the categories of South Asian, and within it of Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan, are not immutable. Rather than being crystallised forms these identities are organic: that the second generation British South Asian youth use new terms that have fluid and agentic qualities. These notions are often hybrid or hyphenated such as those found in Brit-Asian voices: in the jagged nature of their account of lived experiences in Leeds and Bradford. Here Brit-Asian is a term that reflects their claim to their past and present inheritance, with roots that lie in colonial, postcolonial and British memories, and in protest against ‘othering’ and social exclusion.

Yet, the policies on equality have not been able to reduce the ‘othering’ of British South Asians, forcing them to live parallel lives and a major cause of the riots in northern British towns, from Oldham to Bradford. The Cantle report published in December 2000 put forth the need for community cohesion to ensure peace in these race-riot hit towns, yet it was not able to enunciate how it conceptualised this term, nor could it set out how this objective should be achieved by city and county councils. What was still missing from the official discourse on safeguarding the rights of British South Asians is any recognition of the textured and variegated ebb and flow between global, national and local imaginaries that constitute and reconstitute markers of community identity. The interactions of global, national and local have- been evocatively drawn on in the formulation of global ethnospaces (Appadurai 1991) and investigated by Avtar Brah (1996) in her concept of diasporic space (1996) where the sense of the transnational is interspersed with nodes of concentration where various imaginaries coalesce. These imaginaries do not work in the same direction, and the young Brit-Asian generation has traversed it in a manner that represents a sharp contrast to that of their parental generation of South-Asian migrants. If we are to make sense of the move from colonial to post-colonial in the lives of South-Asian migrants in British cities it is by ‘speaking of colonialism and postcolonial theory as global, but also of recognizing the specificities of colonial and postcolonial experiences’ (Gilmartin and Berg 2007) and this double moment that would help us address mutually constitutive processes at the centre of Brit-Asian. This is particularly pertinent as we encounter a string of racerelated ominous dates that fade into numerical markers: 9/11; 7/7; that have created their own image in these cities and where South-Asian voices need to be heard over the increasing clamour for racial, religious and cultural identities to be classified into official categories, even if these are cultural nametags or youth fashions. Shailaja Fennel, Fellow of Jesus College, lectures in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. Email: [email protected]

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger reviewed (P11)

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The 2009 Festival of Asian Literature

Editorially Speaking FALSE COMPLACENCY The role of the Indian diaspora in this country has been debated and discussed from time. What exactly is its role and how far has it succeeded in making life better for itself the country of its adoption and for the ‘home’ country? There is hardly any dispute that a diaspora has a prime responsibility towards contributing to and influencing policy decisions in the country of its adoption. Numerous young men and women of the Indian diaspora have found places in the leading political parties of this country and have had their positive contributions acknowledged. A few of them have done well enough to represent largely white constituencies and even repeatedly been returned by them in contests with native British candidates. Which speaks volumes for the great advances made in the thinking of this country when it is remembered that it was only just fifty years ago that the Race Relations Act was introduced to staunch the spread of racial poison and prejudice – a remarkable change wrought in so short a spell of time. The Indian diaspora in this country is seen to be happy and contended, satisfied and complacent with what has been achieved. Yet it is a complacency that fails to take note of the tremors that one hears from time to time – tremors in the form of creeping advances being made by the BNP in various constituencies and by elections from time to time – one or two at a time just now, but still signifying a growing discontent however subdued, with the way things are shaping in this country, from their point of view, Enoch Powellian in mindset and mentality as they are. Let us remember that Britain has thus far has been spared the right of centre shifts that have swept across Europe. Leading parallel lives as most of us do in the name of multiculturalism can be the grist to the BNP mill. Subscribe to Confluence and have your copy delivered regularly at your doorstep: £10/- for UK subscribers and £15/ for overseas. Please address cheques to: Confluence Foundation, Flat 13, Claremont Court,172 Selhurst Road, London, SE25 6LS Published by Confluence Foundation Flat 13 Claremont Court 172 Selhurst Road London SE25 6LS Publisher/Editor: Joe Nathan (J.A. Sothinathan) Telephone: 020 8771 1156 email:[email protected] Designed by Teddy Valassidis [email protected] The views expressed by interviewees or contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect Confluence editorial policy. No part of this publication or part of the contents thereof may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form without the permission of the publisher in writing

The 2009 Asia House Festival of Asian Literature will take place from 11-22 May at Asia House in Marylebone, Central London. The only Festival in Britain dedicated to writing about Asia, The Asia House Festival of Asian Literature celebrates the newest and best of writing across a broad spectrum of Asian countries in a series of talks and discussions. The programme for the Festival’s third year features preeminent authors : Amit Chaudhuri, Sir Mark Tully, Ziauddin Sardar, Kamila Shamsie, Nadeem Aslam

Shashi Tharoor (top) addresses a packed house at 2008 Asia Lit Fest as well as BBC journalists Frank Gardner and John Simpson. Debate topics will include Terrorism and War in Central Asia, Politics and Place in Fiction, Music and Literature, and The Future of China. Three special pre-Festival events in April and early May will

feature Man Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga, Azar Nafisi, in her only solo London appearance and Tash Aw launching his new novel A Map of the Lost World. The 2009 Festival will showcase authors writing about India, China, Malaysia, Iran, Iraq,

Afghanistan, Indonesia and about Asians in Britain. Other authors participating this year are Pankaj Mishra, Kenan Malick, John Man, Jonathan Fenby, Hardeep Singh Kohli, Guo Yue, David Loyn, Patrick Cockburn and Nirmalya Kumar.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR Dear Sir, Dr Stephen Gill’s article on the Indo Canadian diaspora (Confluence, January 2009) is interesting and also instructive, particularly since I don’t know the Canadian “scene”, never having visited that country. However, there are some points which are not clear to me. In the very first paragraph, Dr Gill states that the word “diaspora” is not a substitute for “immigrant”. I suppose while “immigrant” refers to an individual, “diaspora” implies many, somewhat on the lines of, say, the distinction between one person and a “crowd”. But can’t someone be both an immigrant and a member of a diaspora, an individual who, together with others, goes to form a diaspora? Dr Gill says that diaspora is “a bitter experience of dislocation” leading to “alienation”, and I wondered whether an immigrant or immigrants cannot also experience dislocation and alienation? He goes on to say, still in the first paragraph, that those of the diaspora (as distinct from the mere immigrant) are unable to go back to their country of origin, but my copy of The New Oxford Dictionary, having defined the term diaspora gives, among others, this example: the Ukranian diaspora flocked back to Kiev (italics in the original. Note “flocked back”).

So too, the Jews claim they have “returned” to Israel after centuries of diasporan life. Now it is those Jews who are outside Israel who are seen as living in exile, as forming the Jewish diaspora. Further on, Dr Gill states that those Indians born in Canada cannot be termed part of the Indo Canadian diaspora, but isn’t “diaspora” more a feeling than one based on a set of criteria? Can someone who “qualifies” for recognition and acceptance as belonging to a diaspora, still reject this inclusion and persist in seeing herself as an individual? If someone born to Indian parents in Canada were not to feel at home in Canada and (however misguided) were to see India as her real home – even though she has never been there - would that person not be entitled to consider herself a part of the Indian diaspora? Isn’t home more a feeling than objective facts? In this context, what Sarvan cites (page 12, same issue of Confluence) about the word “nostalgia” is apposite. Further on, Dr Gill writes that those Indians who came to Canada from the Caribbean or Africa (I suppose from countries such as Uganda and Kenya) cannot be included under the classification ‘Indo Canadian diaspora’. Is there in Canada competition and claim over the term “Indian diaspora”, an excluding attitude of, “I belong to

the authentic Indo Canadian diaspora, you don’t?” That would be rather like the term “native” which word, during the imperial past, was a term of contempt but now is claimed with pride: “I am a native”, implying, “You are a foreigner or newcomer”. Are the marginalised, in turn marginalising; the excluded, excluding? Is there, in short, competition and argument over membership of the Indo Canadian diaspora? I am grateful of Dr Gill for having opened this window, and will be happy to be instructed. A Confluence reader

Dr.Gill responds: These are not unexpected questions. The answer is in my article that is based on the historical concept of the word Diaspora. I agree that this expression has not the same connotation today that it had years ago. Language keeps changing. Certain expressions which Shakespeare has used in his plays have different meanings now. So is the word Diaspora that has been used long before Shakespeare, in the Old Testament. It is obvious in my article that I use the word Diaspora in its original sense.

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The beginning of Democratic Processes in Kashmir - Nyla Ali Khan Although Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah viewed the accession of J&K to India as a strategic and pragmatic necessity and sought to justify it by deploying the rhetoric of socialism and secularism, he harboured hopes for the creation of a sovereign Kashmir. In October 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India reinforced the stipulation that New Delhi’s jurisdiction in the state would remain limited to the categories of defence, foreign affairs, and communications, which had been underlined in the Instrument of Accession Sheikh Abdullah’s unsurpassed achievement during his years as Prime Minister of Indian administered J&K from 1948 to 1953 was the abolition of the exploitative feudal system in the agrarian economy. He was also responsible for the eradication of monarchical rule. A.M. Diakov, a Soviet specialist’s comment on India, speaks volumes about the progressive and democratic politics adopted by Abdullah’s National Conference, “After the Second World War, a national movement in Kashmir developed the program of doing away with the Maharaja, of turning Kashmir into a democratic republic, of giving to the people of Kashmir the right of self-determination.” The Dogra monarchy was formally abolished in 1952 and the last monarch’s heir apparent, Karan Singh, was declared the titular Head of State. Disregarding the attempts of the Indian government to ratify its authority in J&K, the Security Council passed a resolution in March 1951 reminding the governments and authorities concerned of the premise of the Security Council resolutions of 21 April, 1948; 3 June, 1948 and 14 March, 1950, and United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan resolutions of 13 August, 1948 and 5 January, 1949, according to which a final decision about the status of Jammu and Kashmir would be made in accordance with the wishes of its people expressed in a free and fair referendum held under the impartial auspices of the United Nations.. The resolution also determined that the convening of a Constituent Assembly as recommended by the general council of the ‘All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference,’ and any decision that Assembly might take and attempt to execute determining the political affiliation of the entire State, or any part thereof, would not be considered in accordance with the above principles and would, therefore, be disregarded. When Abdullah first voiced his unrelenting opposition to autocratic rule in the state, his political stance was applauded by some sections of the Indian press which in foregrounding his position further brought it out of the catacombs of provincialism: “It is imperialism’s game to disrupt the great democratic movement led by the National Conference. . . . there is no doubt that the National Conference would defeat these disruptive efforts by placing in the forefront the issue of ending the present autocratic regime and establishing a fully democratic government in accordance with its programme.”

Despite the injunction of the Security Council, Abdullah and his organization convened a Constituent Assembly in 1951. The National Conference regime found unstinting opposition in the Hindu-dominated southern and south eastern districts of the Jammu region. Disgruntled elements comprising officials in the former Maharaja’s administration, who had been divested of their authority by the installation of a democratic regime in the State, and Hindu landlords stripped of their despotism by the NC administration’s populist land reforms founded an organization called the Praja Parishad in late 1947, which was at loggerheads with Abdullah’s regime since 1949.[iv] Despite all odds, Abdullah sought to maintain Kashmir’s autonomous status. Tariq Ali makes an astute observation regarding Abdullah’s locus standi: If Abdullah had allied himself with Pakistan, the Indian government and its troops would have been unpleasantly disarmed. But he considered the political and social ideologies of the Muslim League extremely conservative and was afraid that if Kashmir acceded to Pakistan the Punjabi feudal lords who were at the helm of the ship of policy making in the Muslim League would hamper political and social progress. In order to prevent such an occurrence Abdullah agreed to support the military presence in the State provided India promised to fulfil its pledge to hold a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir under United Nation auspices. India agreed to hold a free and impartial plebiscite in the State. At a mass public rally in Srinagar, Nehru with the towering Abdullah by his side solemnly promised to hold a plebiscite under United Nations auspices. There was opposition not just from royalist elements but also from

Ladakh’s Tibetan Buddhists who were apprehensive about the sudden rise of a new Kashmiri Muslim elite and were particularly fearful of the implications of its land reform policies for the Buddhist clergy’s enormous private landholdings in Ladakh. As the elected head of state Abdullah “pushed through a set of major reforms, the most important of which was the ‘land to the tiller’ legislation, which destroyed the power of the landlords, most of whom were Muslims. They were allowed to keep a maximum of 20 acres, provided they worked on the land themselves: 188,775 acres were transferred to 153,399 peasants, while the government organized collective farming on 90,000 acres. A law was passed prohibiting the sale of land to nonKashmiris, thus preserving the basic topography of the region.” The new economic plan of the state was formulated and executed by Abdullah’s government. It underlined cooperative enterprise as opposed to malignant competition, which in keeping with Abdullah’s socialist politics implied the organization and control of marketing and trade by the state. This revolutionary economic agenda in a hitherto feudal economy enabled the abolition of landlordism, allocation of land to the tiller, cooperative guilds of peasants, people’s control of forests, organized and planned cultivation of land, development of sericulture, pisciculture, and fruit orchards, and the utilization of forest and mineral wealth for the betterment of the populace. Tillers were assured of the right to work on the land without incurring the wrath of obnoxious creditors and were guaranteed material, social, and health benefits. These measures signalled the end of the chapter of peasant exploitation and subservience and opened a new chapter of peas-

ant emancipation. The purportedly autonomous status of Indian administered J&K under Abdullah’s government provoked the ire of Hindu nationalist parties, which sought the unequivocal integration of the state into the Indian union. The unitary concept of nationalism that such organizations subscribed to challenged the basic principle that the nation was founded on: democracy. In this nationalist project, one of the forms that the nullification of past and present histories takes is the subjection of religious minorities to a centralized and authoritarian state buttressed by nostalgia of a “glorious past.” As Bose is quick to point out, the unequivocal aim of the supporters of the integration of Indian administered J&K into the Indian union was to expunge the political autonomy endowed on the State by India’s constitutional provisions. According to the unitary discourse of sovereignty disseminated by Hindu nationalists, Indian administered J&K wasn’t entitled to the signifiers of statehood—prime minister, flag, and constitution. The concept of nationalism constructed by Hindu nationalists bred relentless violence and underlined the delusions of militant nationalisms. Although Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah viewed the accession of J&K to India as a strategic and pragmatic necessity and sought to justify it by deploying the rhetoric of socialism and secularism, he harboured hopes for the creation of a sovereign Kashmir. In October 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India reinforced the stipulation that New Delhi’s jurisdiction in the state would remain limited to the categories of defence, foreign affairs, and communications, which had been underlined in the Instrument of Accession. This stipulation was provisional, the final status of which would be decided at the resolution of the Kashmir issue. Subsequent to India acquiring the status of a republic in 1950, this constitutional provision enabled the incorporation of Article 370 into the Indian constitution, which ratified the autonomous status of J&K within the Indian Union. Article 370 stipulates that New Delhi can legislate on the subjects of defence, foreign affairs, and communications only in just and equitable consultation with the Government of Jammu and Kashmir State, and can intervene on other subjects only with the consent of the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly. Abdullah’s pro-independence stance received a severe blow when the dissident faction within the NC was joined by the Constituent Assembly speaker G.M. Sadiq and D.P. Dhar, a Pandit deputy minister of interior. The Soviet stance on the Kashmir issue seems to have had an influence on this group. In 1953 the Soviet propaganda organ New Times labelled the Kashmir conflict an “internal affair” of India and condemned alleged “imperialist [American-led] efforts to turn the Valley into a strategic bridgehead.” Abdullah made some controversial observations in an interview with the London Observer. He voiced

his concern over the increased vulnerability and instability of J&K between two countries that were hostile towards each other. Abdullah expressed his solicitude over the political and economic hardships that the location of the state would cause its populace. The only viable option, according to him, would be for J&K to have a neutral status vis-à-vis both India and Pakistan. However, because of the ruptured politics within J&K given the diverse political, religious, and ethnic affiliations within it, the sovereign and autonomous status of the state would need to be acknowledged and guaranteed not just by India and Pakistan but by the United Nations and world powers as well. Abdullah’s candid observations created a furore in New Delhi. His “politically incorrect” views met with particular objection from India’s deputy prime minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, whose right-wing political ideology was well known. Subsequently, Abdullah withdrew his remarks in an interview with an Indian newspaper, The Hindu, a couple of months later. In 1952, Abdullah voiced his relentless hostility toward Hindu majoritarianism in the stronghold of the Hindu right-wing Praja Parishad. He referred to the attempts of the Congress party and the central government to enforce the complete integration of J&K into the Indian Union as juvenile, impractical, and ludicrous. [x] In March 1952 Abdullah stated, “. . . neither the Indian Parliament nor any other Parliament outside the State has any jurisdiction over our State. . . . No country—neither India nor Pakistan—can put spokes in the wheel [sic] of our progress.” He roared that, “the existence of Kashmir did not depend on Indian money, trade, or defence forces, and he did not expect any strings to be attached to Indian aid. Threats and taunts would not intimidate him into servile submission.” Delhi Accord of 1952: The subsequent negotiations in June and July 1952 between a delegation of the J&K government led by Abdullah and a minister of his cabinet, Mirza Afzal Beg, and a delegation of the Indian government led by Nehru resulted in the Delhi Agreement, which maintained the status quo on the autonomous status of J&K. In his public speech made on 11 August, Abdullah declared that his aim had been to preserve “maximum autonomy for the local organs of state power, while discharging obligations as a unit of the [Indian] Union.” At the talks held between the representatives of the state government and the Indian government, the Kashmiri delegation relented on just one issue: it conceded the extension of the Indian supreme court’s arbitrating jurisdiction to the state in case of disputes between the federal government and the state government or between Indian administered J&K and another state of the Indian Union. But the Kashmiri delegation shrewdly disallowed an extension of the Indian Supreme Court’s purview to the state as the ultimate arbitrator (continued on page 4)

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REFRACTIONS Chitra Sundaram When slumdogs don’t bite, they’re praised! So who doesn’t want to be a millionaire? A slumdog millionaire? No cheers. No. The Indians are protesting the film: “The ones who love the film are all foreign! Even the ‘Indian’ hero is British! They’ve exposed and exploited and appropriated our poverty! They think they are superior! We are more than this! ‘Dog’ is an insult to us! The Big B expected this and turned down the offer to play the Game Show Host!” But the top-dogs of the latest Brit-onIndia film are barking with delight. Their low-budget poor-boy-from-slum-strikes-rich story has been honoured with a gazillion awards and accolades, and it has captured the ire and imagination of people, for good or ill – even of those who haven’t seen the film! Alas, it won’t change India’s marketing hype and hubris. Bizarrely lucky for Mumbai, India’s much flaunted capital of commerce: one of its biggest sores – “Asia’s largest slum” – gets bared to the world, and it pays off handsomely. (For whom, though?) An estimated million people live in Dharavi’s squalor-filled and violence-ridden miniworld. I grew up in Sion and hadn’t realised until now that it actually bordered my locality; I just knew our domestic help lived in Dharavi and took buses. It is vast at 75 hectares. Dharavi was a feared far neverland. Now we will have press coverage of Dharavi, of human interest stories of true grit and commercial enterprise: there are at least 15,000 one-room home-cum-factories there. Perhaps even organised tourist bus turns. To see for yourself. Perhaps. But Dharavi seems not particularly perturbed. Their world won’t change, no, not really. The mother of one of children in the film protested to the press: Hum ne socha zindagi badal jayegi!” (We thought our lives would be changed). She didn’t realise it already had changed. Because she and her children had been left behind in a transformed India. Forgotten on the platform even as the slow train of economic reform left in 1991. When India went global on the back of trickle-down socioeconomics. The yawning gap is what has changed their lives – slyly, exploitatively. So, many of them from Dharavi or their likes – from slums and low income parts of the city – would have been out there in November last year. Outside Mumbai’s famed Taj and Oberoi hotels. Or glued to TVs in shop windows and other places. Transfixed if not transformed. Feeling one with those being killed or trapped inside the beautiful places that they on the outside would never dare or afford to enter. Or so said Barkha Dutt, one of India’s leading TV journalists as she covered the attack on-site. That all of Mumbai, even all

of India, “is truly one today”. Were they all truly one? Or was it that the unprecedented attack and moment were so immense as to temporarily obliterate all sense of difference? Were they just mesmerised by the staging of an intense human drama? Or were they selflessly empathising with the newlyterrorised rich? Because they know how it is to live daily with unpromising futures, with its terror, even if it’s not of the media-grabbing gun-wielding imported variety? What lines were fed them! Yes, there was this massive outpouring of sentiment from the ordinary man and woman on the street. And with what equanimity and entitlement they took it. The wealthy. The chatterati. Dutt’s plea was not much different from Bush’s doctrine of loyalty: “If you are not with us, you are not a Mumbaikar!” Mumbaikars or ‘Mumbai folks’ never needed such heady sloganeering to move them to altruistic action. That has been their signature. Please don’t get me wrong. I have eaten at the home of one who got shot dead that day too. And I grieved for the destruction of lives, in places that were ironically as familiar as home in my youth. But I grieved less than I did in 1992 when Mumbai lost its innocence and killed for faith. But where’s the faith in this: on NDTV’s We The People programme aired right after the siege ended, once actor, now charming TV host Simi Garewal said something to this effect to the Indian Javed and Janaki Q. Public audience: “Go to the rooftop restaurants or penthouses of the Four Seasons or any of the five-star hotels around here and look down at the slums below. What will you see? Green flags, with the crescent and star! Pakistani flags!” Blaming Pakistan aside, how many Mumbaikars can afford to go up to those restaurants and penthouses? How Marie Antoinette! The gap between bread and cake in Dharavi is not to be measured in years now but in generations, or eternities. Water may yet become a human right in India. Meanwhile what trickles by as River Mithi in Dharavi is a treacle of human waste. It dully reflects an image of Incredible India Shining! These slumdogs will not get any bones until they begin to growl, or even better bite. Ask Balram Halwai. * Copyright Chitra Sundaram 2009 * Balram Halwai is the boss-murdering driver-turned-entrepreneur protagonist of The White Tiger, the Booker Prize winning novel on the current Indian class struggle.

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in all civil and criminal cases before Indian administered J&K courts. The Kashmiri delegation was also careful to prevent the financial and fiscal integration of the state with the Indian Union. The representatives of the J&K government ruled out any modifications to their land reform program, which had dispossessed the feudal class without any right to claim compensation. It was also agreed that as opposed to the other units in the Union, the residual powers of legislation would be vested in the state assembly instead of in the Centre. Despite the ephemeral victory, it became increasingly clear over the years that the autonomy issue remained unresolved and anti-autonomy factions in Jammu and Ladakh did not lose their political clout. Abdullah tried to defuse this complicated situation in 1953 by proposing a plan for devolution of authority to provinces within the state through the Constituent Assembly’s basic principles committee: according to the plan, the Kashmir Valley and Jammu regions would be entitled to elected assemblies and separate councils of ministers with the authority to debate and legislate on certain affairs of local and regional importance. This multi-pronged devolution was intended to maintain the threatened autonomy of Indian administered Jammu & Kashmir while mollifying regional and sectarian opposition in Jammu and Ladakh regions. But the sectarian conflict in Jammu and Ladakh which was fuelled by right-wing Indian nationalist elements could be appeased by nothing short of the overthrow of the Abdullah regime. From the 1960s, militant Hindu groups in the Jammu province have blatantly advocated and supported the secession of the Hindu majority province from the Muslim dominated Kashmir Valley. But this politically unwise demand negates the social, religious, and cultural complexities of the Jammu province. If this demand were fulfilled, the three Muslim-majority districts—Doda, Rajouri, and Poonch--of Jammu’s six districts would, “almost certainly refuse to be bracketed with Dogra Hindus and prefer to stay with the Valley Muslims.” Rupture in the National Conference Top Brass and Installation of the Bakshi Government: Later in 1953, Abdullah adopted a combative tone and appointed a subcommittee comprising members from the Muslim, Pandit, Sikh, and Dogra groups. This subcommittee propounded four viable options for Kashmir’s future, all of which involved holding a referendum and independence for part or whole of the disputed territory. The subcommittee recommended, on the suggestion of Maulana Masoodi, the general secretary of the National Conference, that the people of Kashmir be offered the option of independence besides the option of acceding to either India or Pakistan. Abdullah decided to publicly advocate the third option as a feasible choice. But in the summer of 1953, an unbridgeable rupture occurred in the NC top brass. This rift pitted Abdullah and

Mirza Afzal Beg (Valley Muslims), against Shyamlal Saraf (a Kashmiri Pandit), Giridharilal Dogra (a Jammu Hindu), and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad (a Valley Muslim). Abdullah’s pro-independence stance received a severe blow when the dissident faction within the NC was joined by the Constituent Assembly speaker G.M. Sadiq and D.P. Dhar, a Pandit deputy minister of Interior. The Soviet stance on the Kashmir issue seems to have had an influence on this group. In 1953 the Soviet propaganda organ New Times labelled the Kashmir conflict an “internal affair” of India and condemned alleged “imperialist [American-led] efforts to turn the Valley into a strategic bridgehead.” The fall-out of this rift was the dismissal of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah as prime minister by the titular head of state, Karan Singh, and his arrest under a law called the Public Security Act. Abdullah would be shuttled from one jail to another for the next twenty-two years, until 1975. This coup was authorized by Nehru. Subsequent to his arrest, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad was installed as prime minister. A few days later, Abdullah loyalists including Mirza Afzal Beg, were also arrested under the Public Security Act. Bakshi’s de facto regime was given some semblance of legitimacy by being formally ratified by members of the NC general council and Constituent Assembly delegates in specially convened sessions. In September 1953, Nehru, who earlier had underscored Abdullah’s importance to the resolution of the Kashmir issue, did a political volte face: he justified Abdullah’s undemocratic eviction from office before the Indian parliament by asserting that the latter had “autocratic” methods which resulted in the loss of the majority of his cabinet and had caused trauma to the electorate. Despite his political manoeuvers, Nehru and his ilk were unable to provide democratic justification for Abdullah’s shoddy removal from office. The well-planned coup in Kashmir that led to Abdullah’s prolonged detention, mass arrests of his loyalists, and fabricated shows of loyalty to the new regime, unveiled the strategies deployed by New Delhi as manipulative measures that lacked political and ethical legitimacy. For instance, one of the dissenters who was given a position of political import in the new regime, Syed Mir Qasim, makes candid observations about the overwhelming popular protests against Abdullah’s removal and the police brutality that was deployed to quell the unrest. This blatant suppression of defiance made it amply clear that any attempt to erode New Delhi’s supreme authority would be tantamount to political harakiri. Sadly the Congress is, yet again, is a position of absolute power in J & K. The two mainstream regional parties, the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party, are pawns in the game of chess in which the dice are heavily loaded in favour of New Delhi. Hail Sonia Gandhi! Dr.Nyla Ali Khan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, USA.

CONFLUENCE THE DEVI RAJAB COLUMN

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South African newsletter Dame Helen Suzman, South Africa’s “boots on” politician, passes away South Africa lost one of its most treasured citizens when Dame Helen Suzman, the iconic advocate of liberalism and human rights, died peacefully on the 1st of January 2009. For those of us who knew her well it was not a happy start to the New Year. Knowing her as we did though, she probably didn’t want to drag herself into yet another year of disintegrating health. Her mind was alive and kicking but her body was crumbling. We spent her 91st birthday as fellow Scorpios eating a delicately shaped samoosa together. Nelson Mandela had just visited her the day before, adorning her internationally trampled drawing room with magnificent flowers. The walls told the story of great accolades received from various esteemed quarters throughout her many years as SA’s most outstanding human rights fighter and Member of Parliament. Helen Suzman’s contribution to the struggle for democracy and the consequent demise of apartheid was perhaps more significant than many people today realise. Sole attribution to the ANC’s armed struggle in the liberation movement often undermines the role of protest pressures from within. As a lone voice in a formidable patriarchal parliament, Helen Suzman used her extensive political rigour and ready wit to expose the iniquities of apartheid to the world. For this she became world renowned, twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, receiving numerous honorary doctorates, and the DBE from the Queen of England in 1989. Our friendship started through my husband who became a colleague of hers when he joined the PFP in 1985. She took him under her wing and mentored him as a young newcomer in the House of Delegates of the much-criticised Tricameral parliament. It seemed that she had handpicked him over others, as she appeared not to have extended this generosity to all and sundry. Our friendship soon

developed through the years and I recall that fairly early in the relationship my husband, Mamoo Rajab arrived with a gold bangle belonging to Helen, which a certain Indian jeweller had made for her. My husband wished to copy the pattern for me and she was generous in sharing her jewellery with no reservation. For many years we sported the same bangles and her only comment was that he was too miserly, as he had only made me 8 bangles while she had a bulky dozen. Our relationship grew over the years and as we became firm family friends we would spend time staying over at each other’s homes, experiencing the joys of ’hearth and mirth’. I would often marvel at the fact that in her repertoire of famous people who clogged her life with accolades and admiration, how did she make space for the ordinary people. But this was precisely the nature of her character, if she liked you she would not be deterred by fame and fortune. Her only abiding uncontrollable nature lay in her belief in fairness. She did not ever waver on this score. In the dark days of apartheid Albert Lutuli, the noble peace prize-winner described her as the “only bright star in a dark chamber”. Her integrity in fighting for her principles for liberal democracy was legendary. Helen’s legacy of tackling issues in an informed manner became the hallmark of liberal opposition politics in South Africa. Already in 1969, she spoke of apartheid as structural violence that disrupted black lives in a most personal way. She was an ardent fighter against the laws, which directly affected our lives – the Group Areas Act, the Mixed Marriages and Immorality Acts. She abhorred the Race Classification Act of 1950 that determined the status of everyone born in SA, where they went to school, where they worked, whom they could marry and sleep with, which public amenities they could

Helen Suzman with the writer use, and where they could or could not live. She did not bend to authority that was illegitimate. Accordingly on issues of justice, no Prime Minister, no Minister, no government official escaped her barbs. Those who took her on did so at their peril. She deflected their abuse and insults with a sardonic wit that made headlines the world over. Having served under five formidable presidents – DF Malan, JG Strydom, HF Verwoerd, BJ Vorster and PW Botha - from 1953 to 1989, Helen showed tremendous courage in single-handedly taking on the plight of the oppressed. Her battles for a just society were never done sanctimoniously. She gave as good as she got. Often as the only woman in Parliament she took on men who probably had the most daunting visages of any politicians in the world. “It is not my questions that are an embarrassment, it is your answers”, was one of her world famous retaliatory comments when a Minister blamed her for the world’s negative perception of SA. Helen Suzman was a politician of a special type. She was elected as a member of the United Party in 1953, which she left soon afterwards with colleagues to form the Progressive Party, later known as the Progressive Federal Party. Rhoda Kadali, a close friend and human rights activist notes that Helen was always “armed with devastatingly

accurate information gleaned from her insistence on seeing things for herself, she became a “boots-on politician”, going where the action was.” From prisons to squatter camps she traversed the country in search of the truth as its archangel and protector of justice. This role was a self imposed one driven by passion and a mission to defend what was always right. She became the mouthpiece of the voiceless masses. When she made submissions to the Fagan Commission in 1947, hoping to influence the Smuts government to reverse a battery of laws that reduced black men, women and their families to mere chattels, she was clearly driven to speak up for the oppressed. She fought those pernicious laws to the end of her career in 1989 with the ferocity of a tiger, holding up a mirror to a world that might have remained ignorant because of prevailing media censorship. For her, principles mattered more than personalities. I was in the audience a few years ago when she addressed a group of invited guests in Cape Town’s Jewish Museum on the occasion of the official opening of the Helen Suzman-fighter for human rights exhibition. She took us down memory lane of a richly endowed political career of opposition politics extending over a period of five prime ministers. She recalls that Vorster once paid her a compliment by saying that she was worth ten United Party

MP’s which she thought was an understatement. He also told her that she had “allowed herself to be used too much”, implying that she was one of Lenin’s “useful idiots”. On one occasion during her regular spats with her hated opponent P.W.Botha he called her a “vicious little cat”. To which she retorted: “If you were female you would arrive in parliament on a broomstick” Her skill lay in her sharp wit, her stamina and her doggedly determined nature. None of this spunk left her character in her final years of her life. She openly chastised our current government for some of its present excesses. While she acknowledged that SA was undoubtedly a better country than it was during Nat rule she felt that we still needed a strong opposition to prevent a return to a one party state. Her chief gripes were against the ANC government for its failure to deliver a comprehensive anti aids programme, its attack on the judiciary for a racial mindset and its uncritical support for Mugabe in Zimbabwe. In an excerpt of her speech delivered at the University of Cape Town on receiving the penultimate of one of 26 other honorary doctorates she said: “I am proud to acknowledge that I am a liberal who adheres to old fashion liberal values such as the rule of law, universal franchise, free elections, a free press, free association, guaranteed civil rights and an independent judiciary” These words were boldly featured at the entrance to the exhibition with a grand picture of a young Helen who had she not taken up politics may have made it on the cat walks for her physical attributes of great beauty. Beauty brains, guts and heart were certainly what made the chemistry of one of SA’s most amazing personalities. Dr. Devi Rajab is a leading South African journalist and can be reached at: [email protected]

CONFLUENCE

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COMMUNITY

Multiculturalism or pluralism By Dr.Jagdish Sharma

While Britain progresses on the road to a culturally pluralistic society, a sense of ‘Britishness’ needs to be strengthened Multiculturalism means different things to different people. In recent times it has come under attack as a failed idea and policy from different people in different contexts. At a recent seminar hosted by the Royal Society of Arts and chaired by Trevor Phillips, Chairman of Equality and Human Rights Commission, Multiculturalism was described by David Cameron, Leader of Conservative Party as a failure, both as concept and as state policy. He blamed the policies adopted under multiculturalism for all sorts of manifestations of cultural diversity which are creating divisions in society. Over zealous political correctness was also, according to David Cameron, a gift of our sensitiveness to the recognition of cultural differences. He cited an example of a school head unable to put up posters on the school notice board warning of the evil practice of forced marriages lest it generates hostility from the Muslim community. He even blamed multiculturalism for the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan William’s recent reference to Sharia Law becoming ‘unavoidable’ in modern Britain. The discussion that followed did not deal with the conceptual analysis of multiculturalism nor its historical context. Multiculturalism was a simple descriptive word recognising the fact that Britain back in the nineteen seventies was becoming a society of many cultures, different cultures coming in with immigrant communities. It implied not only recognising the situation as a matter of fact but dealt with the newly created situation in an appropriate manner that would pay due deference to different cultures in the new Britain as it was shaping. It was a sort of progression from the first attempts of new immigrants to integrate and, perhaps assimilate into the host society. In the context of Britain it demanded ‘behaving like

the British, speaking English like an Englishman did, and in those days, the Queen’s English or BBC English. If you lived in London, you also needed to pick up a smattering of Cockney. Many were quite successful in Anglicising or Westernising themselves. Even names were Anglicised which meant adopting the nearest English sounding name. My own experience illustrates the point: as I introduced myself as Jagdish to another teacher on my first day as a teacher in a London school, I had to spell Jagdish out for him. I had only mentioned the first three letters, when I was interrupted, “Can I call you Jag?” And, before I knew it, he had already introduced me to the next teacher as ‘Jack’; and so it took less than a minute to transform Jagdish to Jag and to Jack. This name stayed with me as long as I taught in that school. Such attempts to integrate were more successful for immigrants from Europe such as the Jewish people than for the black or brown skinned people from the new Commonwealth countries. Back in the sixties I recall objecting to an educated Englishman calling me a ‘wog’, he justified it by saying that he meant it as a ‘Westernised Oriental Gentleman’. Many such situations, examples and experiences highlight the difficulties faced in attempts at integration and assimilation with the host community, not only by Hindus and Muslims but even by Anglo-Indians and other Christians from the Indian subcontinent, despite the fact that they shared a common religion. Experiences of black immigrants from the Caribbean trying to attend church services in the early days were equally, if not more, harrowing. Social thinkers came up with the concept of multiculturalism as an ideal situation in which many different cultures

Dr.Jagdish Sharma could co-exist side by side. It assumed a recognition, acceptance and respect for each other’s ways of life and traits of culture such as religion, language, dress and food habits. This concept became very popular in the seventies. All schools in Britain especially in London made an attempt to propagate multiculturalism. I myself conducted many inservice seminars at Avery Hill Teacher Training College promoting multiculturalism. At the World Jewish Conference which I attended at the City University London in 1972 many intellectuals presented papers on the subject of multiculturalism as an ideal solution for modern societies. During discussions I asked a question: Are we trying to be (1) the same, therefore, equal? (2) different, therefore, unequal? (3) different but equal? Obviously the conference leaned towards the idea of ‘different but equal’. Multiculturalism allowed for that. Britain showed political commitment by passing the Race Relation Act of 1976 and later setting up the Commission for Race Equality. Many places of worship and community or cultural centres were set up by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. This, however, in no way reduced discrimination in jobs, housing and schools etc. Nevertheless people were better able to assert their identity. The English were now able to recognise and accept the differences and were making an

effort to say your name in its original pronunciation. My name too reverted from Jack to Jagdish and so my identity was restored. The question of identity again became a cause for concern when the second generation of immigrants, born and brought up in Britain became aware of various levels of cultural conflicts. The ‘Britishness’ in their thinking and behaviour had to co-exist with cultural values, morals, manners and mores of their parental cultures. It is easy to find a successful business executive or a professional fully British in dress, manners, etiquette, behaviour and dealings during the working day but turning to Indian dress, music, food and Bollywood movies on television in the evenings. His children attending a prestigious fee-paying public school during the week and going to religious and ethnic language classes over the weekend. Cultural dualism is not an easy phenomenon for the young to cope with, who also face many other pressures in academic and social life. Cultural dualism is sometimes referred to as ‘hybrid culture’, a phrase I personally don’t like. Lately, however, the concept of ‘cultural pluralism’ has become more popular, which for me actually represents a natural progression of multiculturalism. It envisages a society in which many different cultures exist side by side. They are recognised in their own right and are regarded as of equal

importance and are mutually respected - not just tolerated but respected. Cultural differences are explained as cultural diversity. Diversity is recognised as a positive source of cultural enrichment. Followers of different religions are able to attend their different places of worship, wear their distinctive cultural dress and speak their language without any intimidation or fear of reprisals. Bilingualism and multilingualism are regarded as assets and are encouraged by the education system. “We don’t talk in Hindi or Punjabi as long as we are inside a pub” I was reminded by a friend back in the nineteen sixties, now a thing of the past. These days you can hear many different languages spoken in a London bus or in the tube. While Britain progresses on the road to a culturally pluralistic society, political and social requirements of ‘Britishness’ need to be recognised and inculcated through our education system and other socio-cultural institutions. The ‘sameness’ generated by our common values will negate the influence exerted by the sense of ‘otherness’. Generally speaking these values are Fairness and sense of fair-play in our dealings, Respect for the rule of law, Freedom of speech, Equality of opportunity, Respect for others, and Responsibility towards others. Acceptance of these values, their appreciation and inculcation and practice will lead to creating a truly pluralistic society where good relations and community cohesion will automatically prevail. The thin line of demarcation between being ‘different’, which is a desirable requirement for maintaining one’s identity, and being ‘separate’, which is a negative social condition, will and must disappear. Dr.Jagdish Sharma MA. MPhil, Ph.D is Chairman & Director Human Rights, Hindu Council, UK

CONFLUENCE CONFLUENCE BUSINESS

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Hindu Undivided Family: Tool for Tax Planning for Non-Resident Indians - Jyoti Dialani

Every Hindu living in the UK, is entitled to considerable tax savings through HUF (Hindu Undivided Family), irrespective of whether he holds an Indian, British, US or any other passport even if India is not his country of birth.

of personal income of a member will be regarded as the member’s individual income and not the income of HUF. A HUF can also contribute funds or capital in a partnership firm and the share in profits will be regarded as income of HUF and taxed accordingly in the hands of the Karta or the representative of the HUF. A Karta is thus taxed in two capacities, his personal individual capacity and in his capacity as representative of HUF. If the HUF gives a certain sum of money as salary to the Karta or manager for any services rendered by him, such income is taxed in the hands of the Karta in his personal capacity. A HUF, being a separate legal entity, can earn income from many sources such as house property, business, capital gains, or other sources. However, a HUF cannot earn income from salaries as salary is earned for personal skills and services rendered by an individual and a HUF is not an individual.

Distinct and Separate Legal Entity Status granted to HUF under Indian Tax Law Hindus constitute a majority of the Indian population. Hinduism, being an ancient religion and a way of life, has customs, traditions and rituals centuries old followed by its members to this day. The joint family system, in which members of one family lived together under a common roof, including married brothers, their children and grandchildren, is in practice even today amongst most Hindu families. Under this system, the members of a family share houses, properties, business, income, wealth, food and their value systems and principles. Therefore, in India, a joint Hindu family is given a separate legal entity status called ‘Hindu Undivided Family’ (HUF) and this status is shared and enjoyed by all members of the family. Tax savings through HUF HUF is an excellent tax saving device as being a separate legal entity under the tax law it is assessed to tax separately as a distinct legal person. Therefore, a person can file two income tax returns, one in his personal individual capacity and the other in the name of his HUF. This gives him the benefits of dividing his taxable income between two entities and also double deductions and expenses in both capacities. This brings down his total taxable income and tax liability substantially. For example. at present, the tax free income for males in India is Rs. 150,000 per annum. (for women, this limit is Rs. 180,000). An individual can thus claim a minimum of Rs. 300,000 as total exempt tax free income, (Rs. 150,000 in his personal and an equal amount in his HUF return). In addition to the basic exemption, he can also claim other specific exemptions in both capacities provided under sections 80CCA, 80CCB, 80D, 80DD, 80DDB, 80G, 80GG, 80 GGA and the rebate under section 88 of the Income Tax Act 1961, the Indian tax legislation. A HUF also enjoys exemptions under sections 54 and 54F in respect of capital gains. Non-resident HUF What applies to non-resident individuals will also, in some cases, be applicable to a non-resident HUF. A HUF, whose management and control is exercised wholly outside India during the financial year is a non-resident under the Indian tax provisions. From a tax point of view, if it can be shown that all decisions concerning the family members and the affairs of the HUF were taken outside India during the relevant year, that HUF will enjoy all benefits available to a non-resident individual and the same tax exemptions.

Assets of HUF

Resident but Not-Ordinarily Resident HUF (RNOR) A HUF can get a resident but not ordinarily status (RNOR) if the Karta or manager has been a non-resident in India in nine out of the ten preceding years or has been a resident in India in two out of the seven preceding years. Thus, where the Karta decides to return to India after his residence in any country, the HUF will not turn to resident HUF in India straightaway but it will get the benefit of a RNOR. A RNOR HUF also enjoys tax advantage as on the return of the Karta, the HUF is treated as RNOR for the next nine years. The advantage of RNOR status is that all income from property or investments belonging to the HUF outside India will be exempt from tax in India. Formation of a HUF There is no formal procedure to form a HUF as it is automatically created. As the name suggests, a HUF means a family of Hindus. However, under the Indian tax law, persons belonging to the Jain and Sikh religion can also form HUFs. In order to form a HUF, the family must have at least two members, of which at least one is male. A HUF can also consist of female members, being the wives and unmarried daughters of the male members. A HUF is automatically created once a member of a HUF receives any ancestral property from any relative three generations preceding him, (preceding in the family tree).. For example, if a married Hindu male receives any ancestral property from his great grandfather, that property will automatically be regarded as his HUF’s property. Another way a HUF is formed is by receiving an asset or property by way of gift from a lineal ‘ascendant’ (meaning from a relative of a generation earlier) with a

specific instruction by the donor that the same is being gifted to the HUF. Although generally, a HUF always exists in a Hindu family, from a tax point of view, it is created only when it receives assets or any property or is engaged in any commercial activity. A PAN (Permanent Account Number, a distinct number issued to an Income tax payee by the Tax authorities) card may be issued by the Income-tax Department in the name of a HUF and an account gets created for filing of tax returns. HUF and Hindu Coparcenary A joint or undivided Hindu family consists of male members, their wives, unmarried daughters and widows, if any, of the deceased male members of the family. A Hindu coparcenary is a smaller body than the HUF as it can only consist of male members of the family who are entitled to or acquire a right to, by birth, an interest in the joint or coparcenary property. These are the sons, grandsons and greatgrandsons of the holder of the joint property, that is, three generations in lineal male descent from the holder. The senior most member is called the Karta (Manager), who generally manages the joint or coparcenary property, belonging to all coparceners. A HUF must consist of at least two male members but in the event of a partition of the HUF, the smaller family can form a HUF even with a single male member if it receives a part of the property. Income of HUF and Karta All income arising out of HUF’s properties and from investment of HUF’s funds belongs to the HUF and is separately assessed in its hands. One should be careful to declare only that income in tax returns which is earned out of HUF assets or investments. Any income, which arises out

A HUF can hold assets such as shares, securities, jewellery, movable and immovable property. These assets can be either acquired by a HUF by way of a gift which is specifically instructed to be given to the HUF or it can receive assets on partition of a larger HUF of which its coparcener was a member and the same is treated as HUF property. Assets can also be received by a HUF by way of instructions provided in a will where the assets are instructed to be bequeathed to the HUF. However, after the enforcement of the Hindu Succession Act in 1956, if there is no will, on the death of a benefactor, the assets cannot devolve upon a HUF but only on the individual inheritors. Tax benefits to HUF As income such as that from house property or from business or capital gains can be taxed separately in the hands of a HUF and is not ‘clubbed’ (aggregated/ combined) with the individual’s income, there can be substantial savings in taxes as income is divided between two entities, that is, the individual and the HUF. The expenses and deductions can also be claimed in both returns, that of the individual and the HUF. Further, if an individual is already employed with somebody, he can carry on a business and earn income in the name of a HUF and get benefits in the form of exemptions and deductions from that income as well. Substantial tax savings through HUF An important advantage of the creation of a HUF is that any income earned by an individual in his capacity as member of HUF is not taxable in his individual capacity as it is already taxed in the hands of the HUF. A HUF being eligible for all the exemptions and deductions as an individual, results in considerable tax savings as the total personal income of an individual, being a member of the

HUF, is split between the return filed in his personal capacity and the HUF return. Joint assets or properties under inheritance of a family can be gifted to the HUF instead of gifting to individual members of the family. This can result in tax savings as there is no gift tax or inheritance tax and clubbing of income provisions will also not apply. Similarly, a Karta of a HUF can give by way of gifts, certain amounts or assets out of HUF properties to its members over a period of time to gradually build assets in their individual names. A HUF can also build its capital by way of borrowings from non-members and the income so earned from investments of the capital will only be HUF income. Individual members may also transfer their personal funds in a HUF for the purpose of investment in tax free instruments. Income thus earned from these instruments will be tax free and cannot be clubbed with the individual’s personal income. Such income, if reinvested in instruments, income of which is subject to tax, will also not be clubbed as only income earned from transferred amounts is clubbed. Crucial tips in HUF tax planning The bank account of a HUF should be either in the name of the HUF or in the name of the Karta of the HUF with a specific declaration to the effect that the account is of the HUF. The members should also be careful not to deposit any personal funds in the HUF bank account as only funds belonging to the HUF can be held in the account. Usually the Karta is authorized to sign all cheques and operate bank accounts of the HUF. However, he may also authorize any other member of the HUF to operate on behalf of the HUF. A person, who desires to bequeath some property to his son or sons, may also provide a specific instruction in his will to transfer the assets on his demise to the HUF or to his son or sons. This will result in effective tax savings in the hands of the beneficiary sons.

Jyoti Dialiani is a non-practising Solicitor (Eng. & Wales) and Advocate (Bombay) She can be reached at [email protected] and on M: 07776021035. The views expressed in the above article are for general guidance of the reader explaining the current position of the law. While the law remains uniform in general cases, every individual or taxpayer’s case is unique and appropriate legal advice is recommended before taking any action. The author does not accept any liability or responsibility for any loss suffered by any person/entity relying and acting on the information provided.

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CONFLUENCE

FRONT ROW visual art ‘The Ramayana: Love and valour in India’s Great Epic’ A British Library Exhibition - reviewed by Sheila Malhotra The United Kingdom’s national library, The British Library, located in London, which provides access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive research collection, and a treasure-trove of knowledge, has something new to offer in the visual

arts not only to the people of Britain, but to the peoples of the world every year. Besides a large collection of permanent exhibitions, there is always something fresh to look forward to. The summer of 2008 saw the

exquisite display of ‘The Ramayana: Love and valour in India’s Great Epic’ supported by the British Library Patrons and Friends, and designed by the Tara Arts Theatre Company. Tara Arts Theatre Company excels in connecting cultures

through theatre, bringing together Eastern and Western traditions that had transformed the gallery space into a pulsating, visual theatrical stage. An added attraction was the award winning ‘Turning the Pages’ production of Jagat Singh’s Ra-

mayana manuscript, supported by Sir Gulam and Lady Mohini Noon, where images were digitised and the viewer could turn the pages and read or listen to expert commentary on each page of the manuscript. (Continued on pages 9,10)

The Ramayana paintings in sequence Rama, Laksmana and Sita distribute their jewels and material wealth Laksmana and Sita have decided to accompany Rama in exile. There is a hint of pathos as Sahib Din paints Sita, seated in the pavilion on the left, distributing her jewels before leaving the palace. Likewise Rama (with a blue body) and Laksmana, in the pavilion on the right, give away their jewels, horses, elephants and camels. Having gracefully given up their material comforts and royal attire, they are now clad in ascetic garments. Only the princes’ diadems and weapons are not given away.

The final farewell A densely textured painting, depicting the moment of the final farewell, as Rama, Sita and Laksmana ride off in a chariot for their fourteen years exile. Dasaratha (the king) and Kausalya, (Rama’s birth mother) according to Valmiki’s text, hurry after the chariot until Rama, unable to bear the sight, has to tell the charioteer to fasten his pace so that they would be left behind. Whereas many of Sahib Din’s paintings employ simultaneous narration, in which several episodes appear in one painting, this climatic image focuses powerfully on one incident in the story

News of the death of king Dasaratha This beautiful painting is a classic depiction of simultaneous narration where the action proceeds in an anticlockwise manner from the top left. Rama greets his younger brothers Bharata and Satrughna by embracing them. Bharata gives Rama the sad news of their father’s death and pleads Rama to return to Ayodhya to govern his kingdom. Rama, unable to bear the shock, faints (bottom left) Then Rama, his three brothers and wife go down to the river to perform a ritual offering of water, (as is customary) and return to the hill top grieving outside their hut. The five participants each appear at least six times, yet there is no effect of crowding.

Rama and Sugriva have a conference The demon king Ravana had abducted Sita and taken her to his kingdom of Lanka. In this illustration Rama and Laksmana come to the monkey kingdom of Kiskindha to seek help from Sugriva, the king of the monkeys. They swear friendship. Here the style of the painting has changed. The dresses of the two brothers are now depicted in Deccani fashion. It is an anonymous style heavily influenced by the painting schools of the southern sultanates of the Deccan, identified with the monkey kingdom of Kiskindha. In this period artists and paintings passed back and forth between the Deccan and Rajasthan. In the Deccan style, the colour palette is more sombre, figures are larger and often the artists concentrate on a single episode of the story unlike that of Sahib Din’s paintings which employ simultaneous narration. In this picture an artist from the Deccan is attempting to work in a Mewar style

Hanuman gives Rama’s ring to Sita In Lanka, perched on a tree, Hanuman sees Sita, sunk in melancholy, surrounded by Ravana’s wives, female demons and others. Ravana, who has ten heads and twenty arms, begs her to marry him, but she repulses him. He threatens to kill her if she refuses and leaves. Hanuman comforts Sita, revealing himself to her as Rama’s messenger with his ring, but she cannot allow herself to be rescued by him: that right and the glory of so doing belongs to her husband alone. She gives Hanuman a jewel as a token for Rama.

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Battle strategies of Ravana and Rama This painting is about battle strategies of Ravana and Rama. Ravana sends out spies to assess his enemy’s strength. Having counselled with them and his ministers, he places key demons at key points for Lanka’s defences. Rama confers with his allies as to the best plan of assault. The monkeys surround the city in preparation for the attack.

A fierce battle This is one of the most dramatic paintings by Sahib Din where he combines a bird’s eye viewpoint with a conceptual rendering of Lanka. Rama and his allies launch a general attack on Lanka from all gates and all sides, in which many marvellous feats of skill and daring are performed. Ravana ascends to the roof of his palace and orders a sortie.

Ravana dies in battle The god Indra has sent down his chariot and charioteer Matali to help Rama and Laksmana. After a tremendous fight, in which Rama shoots off Ravana’s heads with his arrows only to see them grow again, Matali reminds Rama to use his Brahma-weapon. This weapon pierces Ravana’s breast and he falls lifeless from his chariot. At the bottom Rama can be seen consoling those who have lost their near ones in war.

Preparations for Ravan’s funeral Rama in full council instructs Ravana’s brother Vibhisana, and the remaining demons to perform Ravana’s funeral rites. Monkeys and demons gather wood for the funeral pyre. Ravana’s body is surrounded by his lamenting wives headed by his chief wife Mandodari, with her back to us as she unbraids her hair The women express their grief with eloquent gestures.

Rama’s coronation-the beginning of a golden age Sahib Din paints Rama, Lakshmana and Sita returning triumphantly to the palace in Ayodhya. They drive through the bazaars with their festive hangings. Ayodhya rejoices once again. After being reunited with Bharata and Satrughna, they are received by their mothers. Rama’s coronation begins his auspicious reign, a truly golden age for mankind - Ram-raj

continued from p8 The exhibition which ran through four months - from summer to autumn drew an average of 938 visitors daily, and a total of 114,488 visitors, from all walks of life. I could see ardent art-lovers and academicians immersed in each painting, while there were the less serious casual viewers too. Then there were those with some initiation into the story of the Ramayana and those who had no idea at all. Not least of all were the school children, who swarmed around the televised film show and other audiovisual excerpts of the Ramayana. I Those behind this Exhibition I must say had brought the story of the Ramayana into the twenty first

century so graphically that viewers found themselves overwhelmed by an epic more than 2000 years old. The Ramayana, an ancient Sanskrit epic was written around 500 BCE to 100 BCE, and is attributed to the creative genius of the sage Valmiki. What sage Valmiki bequeathed the Indian civilisation and South East Asia is perhaps unparalleled. His verses relating to the life of Rama and Sita, and the roles played by Gods, men, monkeys and demons spans volumes of ancient Indian literary works. Opinions are varied over when the Ramayana was written, but presumably, the verses were composed as the events of the Ramayana un-

folded. Another theory has it that Valmiki had written the Ramayana even before it ever took place. With the passage of time however, celestial dimensions came to be woven around the story and led to the creation of seven books carrying 24,000 verses.The lives of Rama and Sita came alive first on palmleaf and then on paper. People began to worship Rama as a divine being. With a deep and abiding impact on the Indian psyche the Ramayana has also greatly influenced Indian art and culture. Versions of the story have also appeared in the Buddhist canon. The Ramayana has been dramatised, retold, enacted and even

glorified in dance-form, paintings, sculpture and translation into various languages over thousands of years. The Ram-lila (Rama-play) enacted in village theatres, towns and cities, on streets and on stages is an annual event watched by millions in India even to this day. The British Library has brought Valmiki’s masterpiece into the twenty first century through showcasing over a 100 paintings from the Ramayana manuscript with their accompanying texts complemented with an attractive catalogue. Each painting by Sahib Din, considered the greatest artist of the 17th century, has the events of the Ramayana brought vividly to life. A study of

these colourful, minutely detailed, intricate paintings can be a truly uplifting experience. An exhibition of this calibre was made possible through loans of paintings, sculptures and textiles from the art collections of the V&A, the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum. Shadow puppets and dance costumes had been loaned from the Horniman Museum and displayed on the periphery, complementary to the paintings. Original British Library sound archive recordings of readings and chantings from the Ramayana, and the singing of devotional hymns to Rama gave added authenticity to the Exhibition. (continued on p 10)

10

Ramayana

CONFLUENCE Poetry at Lauderdale House - continued from p8,9

Every inch of space seemed to be covered, yet there was no sense of overcrowding. On display were some rare manuscripts in Devanagari and Tibetan scripts as well as some Kashmiri manuscripts. Deeply engrossed as I was in these paintings I suddenly encountered something huge - a gigantic Ravana (King of Lanka) made of scripts of different Indian newspapers. The figure stood handsomely high with Ravana’s 10 heads sitting proudly on his shoulders with his mighty sword gleaming on his side. The screens displaying the paintings ran across the Paccar Gallery carrying one through seventeenth century art that merged into the twentieth century. The art styles, phenomenally different as they were, yet depicted the merger of the past and the present and were indeed mind-boggling. The stylised paintings of Sahib Din with attention to every detail of costume and jewellery, and flora and fauna, with Ravana’s highly decorative attire thrown in, contrasted with works by modern Indian artists like M.F.Hussain and Jemini Roy (the impressionists) employing but minimum strokes on canvas or paper, not forgetting the realistic school of Ravi Verma paintings. Vying for the visitor’s attention close at hand, were also the rather garish posters advertising the Hindi film Bajrangbali (Hanuman) The storyline was the same - the styles were different. The British Library had not missed out on any of them. The story of how the manuscripts and illustrations got to the British Library makes interesting reading The Rajput rulers of Mewar who claimed to be descendents of Rama and Rana Jagat Singh of Mewar (1628-52) commissioned the Ramayana manuscripts, which had fortunately remained intact in a single collection. Comprising over 400 paintings, they are indicative of the artistic talent of the time. Of the seven books of the Ramayana, illustrated in three different styles of Mewar painting, two books were by Sahib Din. Four of the seven books and part of a fifth found their way into the British Library from India more than 150 years ago. In fact, Rana Bhim Singh of Mewar gifted them to Col. James Tod, the first British political agent in Rajasthan, who brought them to London in 1823. The British Museum acquired them in 1844, after which they were moved to the British Library where they have remained in the library’s archives being shown to the public for the first time at this Exhibition. The most ancient of Indian manuscripts were of palm-leaf, where the text was written on the leaf itself. After the thirteenth century there were paper manuscripts. In the UK, three such large bundles were inlaid into a variety of heavy sized paper and bound up in three European goatskin covers. But applying western treatment to the Indian manuscripts caused problems and they started to curve. There was paint loss or even cracking of the paint that it became necessary

to separate each paper again. Once separated, they were painstakingly mounted into separate frames and brought out for this extraordinary exhibition. In European or Islamic illustration, each picture usually depicts a single episode of the story, but in the Indian or Hindu method, the artist painted the same character several times in a single framework in order to show continuity of events. Jagat Singh’s artists usually followed the ancient narrative of simultaneous narration of which Sahib Din’s paintings are a good example. Though a Muslim, he illustrated a specifically Hindu epic, which over time began to hold a religious sanctity for the Hindus. The artists of the time had painted an ancient epic, but their paintings bore mid-seventeenth century influence. The story of Ramayana is woven around Rama the prince of Ayodhya. He (the rightful heir) gives up his throne at the behest of his step mother Kaikeyi, who wants her own son Bharat to ascend the throne with Rama to go into exile for fourteen years. Obeying her commands, he leaves his kingdom accompanied by his wife Sita and his younger brother Laksmana. Initially they make Chitrakuta their home, later moving deeper into the Dandaka forest. Here they lived for a number of years leading a meagre but happy life, until the demon king Ravana, the king of Lanka with10 heads and 20 arms (symbolic, to project his great intelligence and immense strength) kidnaps Sita and takes her across the sea to his own kingdom. With the help of an army of monkeys headed by their chief Hanuman, and following a fierce battle with Ravana, Sita is rescued. Sita when challenged proves her chastity by stepping into a huge fire and remains unscathed. On their return to Ayodhya after fourteen years Rama is crowned and so began the golden age of Rama’s rule – Ram Raj with Ayodhya lit up with candles in welcome. This day is celebrated by Hindus as Diwali to this day with every Hindu household adorned with candle lights. Rama, is considered an avatar or incarnation of God Visnu, the Preserver, (attaining an anatomy of blue) born on earth in human form to fight all evil. He is considered the embodiment of virtue, selflessness and righteousness and worshipped by Hindus as a god. Sheila Malhotra is an accomplished artist and an art critic for the Confluence magazine. Her latest series ‘Playing with the Millennia’ view the world at the dawn of the new millennium and the dusk of the previous one. Her paintings are overlaid on turn of the century editions of original UK newspapers, which in due time should become collectable. Besides recycling newsprint, Sheila has preserved ‘time’ itself on her canvases through allowing her works to encompass time in motion. [email protected]

TIME: 8-10PM; TICKETS £5.00 (CONCESSIONS: £3.00). 020-8348 8716 VENUE: LAUDERDALE HOUSE, WATERLOW PARK, HIGHGATE HILL, LONDON N6 5HG Programme for Mar-Apr 2009 12 Mar 2009: Kate Bingham, Ruth Fainlight, Martha Kapos, Fiona Sampson Kate Bingham received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1996. Her first collection, Cohabitation, was published the following year. According to Poetry Wales, Kate Bingham’s poetry “possesses a hushed power; a charm that creeps up on you, catching you unawares”. Sam Leith in the Telegraph wrote: “can’t imagine anyone - poetry buff or no - reading it without pleasure”; according to the Guardian, “her command of form is enviable and her grasp of subject-matter complete”. Quicksand Beach (Seren), her second collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize 2006. As well as books of poetry, she has published two novels and writes for the screen. She lives in London. Ruth Fainlight was born in New York City, but has lived in England since the age of fifteen. She has published thirteen collections of poems in England and the USA, as well as two volumes of short stories, translations from Portuguese and Spanish, and has written libretti for the Royal Opera House and Channel 4 TV. Books of her poems have appeared in French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian & Spanish translation. She received the Hawthornden and Cholmondeley Awards in 1994, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her 1997 collection, Sugar-Paper Blue, was short-listed for the 1998 Whitbread Award. Her latest collection of poems is Moon Wheels, 2006, and a Collected Poems is scheduled for 2010. Her new translation of Sophocles’ Theban Plays, in collaboration with Robert Littman, is published in Spring 2009. Martha Kapos is an American, originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts, but now thoroughly rooted in London. She came here initially for a gap year after her Classics degree from Harvard and never returned. She studied painting at the Chelsea College of Art and then taught in the Art History Department for many years before she became Assistant Poetry Editor of Poetry London. Her first collection, My Nights in Cupid’s Palace (Enitharmon Press) came out in 2003. It received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and won the Jerwood/Aldeburgh Prize for Best First Collection. Her second collection, Supreme Being, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Fiona Sampson has published fourteen books – including poetry, philosophy of language and books on writing process – of which the most recent are Common Prayer

Shanta Acharya

(Carcanet 2007, shortlisted for the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize), On Listening (Essays: 2007) and Writing: Self and Reflexivity (with Celia Hunt, Macmillan, 2005). Her awards include the Newdigate Prize; ‘Trumpeldor Beach’ was shortlisted for the 2006 Forward Prize. She has been widely translated, with eight books in translation, including Patuvachki Dnevnik (Travel Diary), awarded the 2003 Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia). Other prizes include writers’ awards from the Arts Councils of England and Wales and the Society of Authors, and, in the US, the Literary Review’s annual Charles Angoff Award. She was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Nijmegen. She has a PhD in the philosophy of language, and is Fellow in Creativity at the University of Warwick/RSC Capital Centre. She is the editor of Poetry Review. 16 Apr 2009: Sarah Lawson, Rose Flint, Kate Rhodes, India Russell Rose Flint is a poet, artist and art therapist. She teaches Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes at Bristol University and is Lead Writer for the Kingfisher Project, working in the hospital and community of Salisbury. She has four collections of poetry, Blue Horse of Morning (Seren), Firesigns (Poetry Salzburg), Nekyia (Stride) and Mother of Pearl (PSAvalon). Awards include two Poetry Places and a Year of the Artist Award. She won first prize in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition 2008 and the Petra Kenney International Poetry Competition 2007. Sarah Lawson was born in Indianapolis in 1943; after studying English at Indiana University and University of Pennsylvania, she went to Scotland for her PhD at Glasgow University and wrote a thesis on Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. She has been publishing poetry since the 1970s. A group of her poems was published by Faber in Poetry Introduction 6 in 1985. A pamphlet, Dutch Interiors, appeared in 1988 pub-

lished by MidNAG, and Down Where the Willow Is Washing Her Hair (16 poems about China) by Hearing Eye in 1995, but her first full collection was Below the Surface (Loxwood-Stoneleigh, 1996). That was followed by two pamphlets from Hearing Eye: Twelve Scenes of Malta (2000) and Friends in the Country (2004) and another full collection, All the Tea in China (2006). Her translation of Jacques Prévert’s Selected Poems was published by Hearing Eye in 2002. Kate Rhodes was born in London in 1964. She now lives in Cambridge and works as a freelance creative writing teacher. She has completed a PhD on the work of American dramatist Tennessee Williams. Kate’s first collection Reversal was published in 2005, her second book, The Alice Trap, appeared in 2008; both published by Enitharmon Press. Kate has held a Hawthornden Fellowship and has twice been nominated for the Forward Prize. Writing in the Guardian, Charles Bainbridge has described Kate’s poems as “remarkable and moving. The poems are pared back and fastmoving, full of an energetic lightness of touch.” India Russell read German and Norwegian at University College London and was appointed Junior Research Fellow at King’s College, London, where she began research for her thesis on Hölderlin and taught eighteenth and nineteenth century German literature. She holds a Speech and Drama Licenciate at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In her role as a professional actress, she has toured her own one-woman dance-drama on Ibsen’s last plays, The Secret Rooms of the Mind. India’s poetry has been widely published; The Kaleidoscope of Time is her first collection. Poetry at the House events organised and hosted by Shanta Acharya, [email protected]; Ph: 020-8341 7799

BOOK REVIEW

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Aravind Adiga unravels the real India For one who has led a privileged life Adiga has captured, quite unbelievably, the psyche and thought processes of the Indian underdog, says Reginald Massey [The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, New York: Simon and Schuster; London: Atlantic Books. ISBN 9781843547204. HB. 321pp. £12.99] A great many journalists secretly nurse the ambition of writing a bestseller. Few ever do. Hammering out a 600 word piece for next day’s rag is one thing, patiently crafting a 100,000 word novel that holds the reader’s attention page after page is quite another cup of tea. Therein lies the difference between a hack and a writer. However, some choice spirits such as Dickens and Hemingway did bridge the gap. Aravind Adiga is such another. He worked for Time magazine in India and also reported for other papers. His background is rather international: born in Chennai, he lived in Australia before proceeding to Columbia and Oxford. He now lives in Mumbai. This is his first novel and it scooped the 2008 Booker prize. First time lucky ? You can say that again. For one who has led a privileged life Adiga has captured, quite unbelievably, the psyche and thought processes of the Indian underdog. The protagonist of this most unusual story, one Balram, is not only an underdog but is also quite a nasty dog to boot. He is, in fact, booted by one and all; his family, his fellow servants, his employers and by society in general. But he’s a survival expert who uses his conspicuous corpus of native wit to outwit his oppressors. The narrative, comical and tragic by turns, is difficult to label. Is this novel a picaresque piece or is it an epistolary effort ? Balram is certainly a rogue, at times almost likeable, and the tale is told in the form of a letter addressed to none other than His Excellency Wen Jiabao, The Premier’s Office, Beijing, Capital of the Freedom-Loving Nation of China. Written when the former

char/domestic servant from the north has made it in south India as the owner of a fleet of taxis, the epistle informs His Excellency Wen Jiabao that the wide ranging report on China’s southern neighbour is being despatched From the Desk of The White Tiger, A Thinking Man, And an entrepreneur living in the world’s centre of technology and outsourcing, Electronics City Phase 1 (just off Hosur Main Road), Bangalore, India. It begins with the memorablel sentence: Neither you nor I can speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English. And then the entrepreneur proceeds to unburden his soul. And what a guilt ridden, sodden soul it is. Our hero, if that is what one must call him, was born in a malodorous village called Laxmangarh not far from Bodh Gaya where the Buddha found Enlightenment. The Buddha preached universal love, understanding and compassion. However, not much of these excellent virtues were evident in Laxmangarh. Life was hard for our hero’s father, an illiterate rickshaw puller. He found it difficult to feed his wife and children and, to make matters worse, his fellow villagers were exploitative, grasping and mean minded. The extended family that owned the surrounding land and the havelis, mansions, exercised power with all the ferocity that the feudals of India had done for centuries. After the death of his parents Balram was pulled out of school by his relatives and put to work scrubbing the floor, tending the fire and clearing the tables in a teashop near the village bus stop. Being an ambitious lad he decided to get away and, as soon as he got the opportunity, that is what he did. In Dhanbad, the city of coal, he managed to procure a driving licence. He then wangled a job as the second chauffeur cum odd job man in the esta-

book cover blishment headed by a grandee from Laxmangarh who with his elder son operated dodgy coal mines in the Dhanbad area. The grandee, known as The Stork because he owned the river that coursed past Laxmangarh and often dipped his beak into the fishermen’s nubile daughters, had sent his younger son Ashok (Mr Ashok to the servants) to the States. There, to the Stork’s great disappointment, the Americanised Ashok had contracted what in India is called a love marriage. Moreover, Pinky Madam was not a Hindu and this the family found intolerable. They had expected Ashok to return to India like a good boy and accept an arranged marriage to a well brought up girl from the right caste, the right family and with, of course, the right dowry. Mr Ashok and Pinky Madam had just arrived in India when Balram is taken on and our hero is detailed to drive them about on their shopping and sightseeing trips. Pinky Madam has taken an instant dislike to India and its inhabitants but Balram has taken a shine to Pinky Madam. Her generous bosoms which she heaves frequently stir base desires in him and he soon memorizes her favourite swear words which had better not be repeated here. Soon the westernised Mr Ashok and his wife are despatched to Delhi where, with their

suave ways and command of English, they are to cultivate and bribe ministers and senior civil servants. All in the cause of, you will understand, lubricating the Stork’s wheeling and dealing. They live not far from the international airport in a plush apartment in Gurgaon fitted with all the latest mod-cons. The driver of their Honda City is our hero who is consigned to a cockroach infested servant’s room at the bottom of the high rise condo. It is in the great capital of the resurgent nation that Balram’s education takes off. As he confesses in one of his weaker moments, he is a good listener. He eavesdrops on all the conversations in Hindi and Hinglish. The latter, a handy though inelegant mode of expression, being the bastard lingua franca of the upwardly mobile Indian in a hurry to haul himself up to the topmost rung of the socio-economic ladder. Hinglish, in fact, is a first cousin of Pakistan’s Urdish. The post-1947 elites of the two countries are amazingly similar. Delhi is described with accuracy and relish. The traffic jams, the pollution, the arrant snobbery of the new rich, the chasm between the Johnnie Walker imbibing class and those for whom clean drinking water is a rare luxury, the daily humiliations meted out to the poor, etcetera, etcetra, etcetra, are set down in the words, thoughts and feelings of Balram who understands, without an iota of doubt, that he is not only a driver but a serf as well. However, he bides his time. After all, in every underdog there is always an avaricious overdog waiting for the right moment to pounce. How Balram longs to enter the swank shopping malls and airconditioned luxury hotels and restaurants. But he knows that he’d be unceremoniously shunted out by the security guards who can suss out mem-

bers of the servant class from half a mile. After all, they too are servants and soon recognize their own caste and kind. And thus while Mr Ashok and Pinky Madam entertain their high powered contacts in five-star establishments, he sits patiently and passively, sometimes even plotting, in the Honda City. Any minute the loudspeaker might bark: Driver Balram! Honda City ka Driver Balram, Jaldi karo! Mr Ashok is waiting to be picked up from the front foyer.’ (The functionaries who issue these orders are often former havildar-majors). God help him if the call comes while he’s in the middle of a surreptitious leak behind one of the ornate palms that graciously screen the hotel car park. The New Morality that his compatriots have embraced is soon grasped with both hands by the man from the Darkness who thought that he had seen the Light. Like the Stork, like Mr Ashok, like the corrupt ministers, industrialists, judges, generals and bureaucrats, like the police and their political bosses, like the pickpockets, pimps and prostitutes, Balram too becomes an entrepreneur of the New India. How he manages this is revealed in Adiga’s revealing book. And how come the strange title? I have already told too much. Nevertheless, it must be said that Balram has an ear for poetry. He believes that the four best poets in the world are Muslims. Among these are Rumi, Ghalib and Iqbal. Unfortunately he has forgotten the name of the fourth. He can be forgiven; he is always in a hurry. Reginald Massey’s latest book is INDIA: Definitions and Clarifications (Hansib, London). Last year he was Writer-in-Residence at the Wolfsberg think tank in Switzerland. Born in Lahore before the partition of the subcontinent, he lives in Wales.

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POETRY RENDEZVOUS A NEW DAWN “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” Martin Luther King: From sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, July 4, 1965 That hate could be about pigmentation I learnt first as a schoolgirl Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin

No new Martin Luther King Will ever have to declare“Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro In the United States of America is an untouchable” A spectacular new Rainbow House A confluence of colours and cultures Melting binaries forever

Hate transformed into empathy The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Redeemed hope

Audaciously dreaming of a world Where all colours will blend and dance In the radiant swirl

That hate could be so relentless I learnt from Roots, a tale of miserable uprooting Mercifully, soon I learnt about warriors too-

Peace, happiness and prosperity Will return to the pristine earth And poets will write again

Rosa Parks, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X And the curious visitor to India - Martin Luther King Introduced as a Dalit in a school classroom

Not about bombs, guns and blasts Not about limbs, fractures and body bags Not about shattered minds and horrible trauma Poets will hail the new dawn of hope Tinkle of a rare mellifluous music Of the linked human chain

Five decades later the chemistry of black and white Has created this one pathfinder Who chants the mantra of Change He stood tall that triumphant night A Lighthouse in the encircling gloom Connecting all, not some.

My Home The whimsical moon shot past me like an arrow, in a flux I saw it as a mirror revealing myself to me. My home. I love sitting here in the windy balcony and flying in the night sky. This is my home in Delhi, Delhi away from Delhi, my dream home the home of my long-cherished desires at the foot of the hillock flowers all over. Here I am given more than I could ask for. Peacocks dance to the tune of the wild rain camels graze, birds of hue sing lullabies to my tired soul. My little son plays around runs like the wind on the sloppy road, the country road, a feast to my eyes; lying on my bed I watch him with flower-like kids flying audible kisses from there at me I hum a tune to myself in my velvety voice keeping a book close to the chest. The pretty dappled trouts with joyful haste move in the aquarium like the brook. This was a present to my son on his award of a medal – he wants trouts for he loves to see them moving patient, for not being noisey.

“The principal introduced me and then as he came to the conclusion of his introduction, he says, “Young people, I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.” And for a moment I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable...” From The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr, Chapter 13 –’Pilgrimage to Non-Violence’. Martin Luther King Jr visited India in 1959 accompanied by his wife Correta King and a few others.

A trailblazing journey Of discovery, recovery And a healing beyond Human words I arrange my home with a careless care – nightlong in winter, I hear the silence silently here. In full moon nights the nightingales sing frantically in summer. The passionate rain with its vibrations tinkle my inner self, here. I discover a newer world close to nature, close to a power, unknown, and rediscover myself. I cry no more my world is wet enough here my heart is grilled with green moss I have transfigured myself, the base of my harmony is my loneliness. I have just started to count life beneath my fingertips.

Loving Stranger After you left only after you left I could guess that your shadow spreads beneath my lonely heart, and you are a stranger the most loving stranger; time came to a halt pain sprinkled over my earth. This contention crushed me to dust clipped my wings addicted to fly pushed me off the branch where I was resting, relaxed in an endless sphere; my heart broke. The vibrations spread across the sky. Can I ever write a love poem for you? Exclusively for you?

Sanjukta Dasgupta Professor, Dept of English Calcutta University Time is ripe sharpening its claw to rupture the skeleton of pallid earth. Why am I roaming in the sun when the shady tree has always waited even though the shadows have only troubled me playing hide and seek. Why didn’t you play that tune earlier taking away all pain giving joy of self-introspection? There is no want to drink when the cup overflows. I had always wanted to drink life to the lees, but a poor mortal that I was I saw an empty cup and pierced my heart with thorns. Safely sail through life. Oh fateful one, tears are dear to you. Beneath the troubled waters I too love to float. Today I am awarded with a life time of turmoil and a stranger, loved the most.

Who says death is the only truth? See, your body of fog is still seated on the throne. You still shine in the firmament of stars.

That Foot (for my Baba) That foot that has walked on thorns all through the day for you. That foot which has shown you foot-steps to follow. That foot. That foot behind the orange sun has walked through arches bare foot on fire, on water near parapets has cracked doors and windows for you to enter safe. That foot. That foot walked, crossed the never-ending roads when you aspired for the colossal. That foot. Your passport to utopia, to dream of new truths, passport to planets uncharted. That foot, is walking away, weak, parting with fantasia forever. Will you join?

Who Says Death is the Only Truth? Death stands at a distance all day all night, smiling, unblinking, like that picture under the staircase. Are you waiting for the last bus? Do you know, the sands are slowly rolling through the gaps of your fingers? Tighten your fist. You are enlightened to pick one – the coffin or a life of action. From one birth to another, augment the civilization. Does your laugh tear your shrunken lips? Open your wardrobe, cover the breast of the poor, apply on your lips the balm of a millennium’s rebellion.

Dr. Nandini Sahu is a double gold medalist in English literature and award winner at the All India Poetry contest

CONFLUENCE

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BOOK REVIEW Persaud’s intellectual engagement with India defines his imaginative landscape says Shanta Acharya In a Boston Night by Sasenarine Persaud TSAR Publications, P.O. Box 6996, Station A, Toronto, Ontario M5W 1X7, Canada ($16.95). ISBN: 978-1-894770-49-1 In a Boston Night is Sasenarine Persaud’s seventh collection of poems. Also a novelist and short story writer, his awards include the K. M. Hunter Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award (1996), and the Arthur Schomburg Award (1999) for his literary aesthetics which he refers to as Yogic Realism. Persaud’s fiction was shortlisted for the 1997 Journey Prize (Toronto) while his poetry was nominated for the 1998 Canadian National Magazine Award, and twice (1989 and 1998) shortlisted for The Guyana Prize for Literature. A recipient of several fellowships and scholarships, his most recent was the Leslie Epstein Fellowship at Boston University, 2005-06. Persaud’s work has been included in major anthologies such as the Anthology of Colonial and Post Colonial Short Fiction (Houghton Mifflin, Boston & New York, 2006 & 2007), The Journey Prize Anthology: short fiction from the best of Canada’s new writers (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1997), The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (Oxford University Press, 2005) and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (Oxford University Press, 2000) among others. Persaud left Guyana joining a growing community of migrant Guyanese writers in Canada, mainly Toronto, before moving to the USA, where he now lives in Tampa, Florida. It is Boston however that is the focal point of this collection, and as the blurb on the back cover of the book reminds us, it “deftly threads his reflections about places, events, and histories” which include “a conflict between Anglo- and Franco-Canadians at a Brookline art exhibition; the ‘Boston Tea Party’ as a symbol of resistance to American English, subtly underlined by the description of a Walcott reading in an overflowing university hall.” As Persaud recounts, “In a Boston Night” came about as he

Sasenarine Persaud at his book launch in Toronto was on his way to a literary party at the house of the poet, Robert Pinsky. “It was early evening going across the river from Boston/ Brookline where I was staying and dark when returning. It came to me as we were crossing the river that I would write a book of poems, that a book of poems was being gifted to me. My best books of poetry have all come to me this way, in an instant even before writing the first poem knowing that a book was upon you, a gift of the ‘gods’ or the Muse if you will.” In “Green Line, Boston,” Persaud writes: “You are searching/ the night for the perfect imagery. You are/ that which we see, cannot get, cannot be.” Inter-woven with all of this in the poem “In a Boston Night” (and throughout the book) is poetry about love and desire in its erotic sense as much as in a broader sense i.e. desire and “want” in the sense of love and also in the sense of “fame”, “recognition”. The poem ends with the persona’s voice repeating the voice of another: “I want it now. I want it all, every time, and/ if you will you will. If you must you must.” This collection contains various ‘voices’, which are easy to confuse with the poet’s, especially in some of the poems such as “Revision, World War II”. The book is a richly nuanced, multilayered collection of voices that speak with equal ease of “a wasteful war could buy/ healthcare for the

nation,” (“Backing the Charles”) or of “gulab jamuns soaked in red wine” (“Boston Cheek”). “In a Boston Night” also references Derek Walcott’s In a Green Night and the poet’s own engagement with Walcott in several ways: styles of writing, on craft, and as symbol of the Establishment and the so-called School of “new formalism” as well as his ‘quarrel’ with Walcott’s quarrel with Naipaul, which is described in the long poem “Audience: Walcott in Boston”. Persaud is also writing about his engagement with language (English versus American English versus Caribbean English etc) and aesthetics. In a Boston Night is packed with allusions and inter-textual cross-references to other works, writers, mythologies; and of course his favourite subject, Hinduism and/or Indianness. Even a casual reader of Persaud’s poetry cannot miss this element in his poetry. The third line of “In a Boston Night” refers to “a Krishna-blue bulb.” There are several deeper references to various aspects of Hindu philosophy and aesthetics. Challenged at a conference of mainly Caribbean scholars at the University of Miami to define his ‘Indianness’ manifest at the center of his work, Persaud replied that if you took Indianness/ Hinduism away from his work it could not exist, that he could not exist. This is not unusual among poets and writers; one would not

understand a lot of Eliot without Christianity. But for someone who has never been to India, Persaud’s intellectual, philosophical engagement with India defines his inner self and imaginative landscape. In an essay entitled “Kevat: Waiting on Yogic Realism” Persaud defined yogic realism as a continuation of a literary tradition going back centuries and which has at its core the concepts of yoga. Yogic Realism, in a nutshell, in the words of Persaud is “the application of the spirit of yogic principles and forms, the application of Indian philosophy and concepts, to writing...where the writing is serving as a conduit or yoga for union with the divine spirit/consciousness -- not yoga serving ‘art’.” This concept of art and the imagination at the service of a higher consciousness is not confined to Indian thought though its philosophy is more congenial to such endeavors. Reflecting on Persaud’s concern with life, art, language, it is worth pointing out that when they come together in words that achieve an unity with ease as in “Christmas” where “… the Florida sun rubbing our heads/ like Granny’s hand as she poured fresh coconut oil, in our hair…” or when he urges Bostonians: “Do not grow older by a second/ do not let spears grow into leaves/ and goodbyes and the rustling/ of dresses; a friction of summer trees.” (“Spring:

Toronto-Boston”). Here the images are free, unselfconscious, not weighed down by the message. In a Boston Night has many poems dealing with what Persaud refers to as his “odyssey” including his past life in Guyana and his travels through North America. The poem, “Odysseys, My Love” depicts his own journey away from home, his keeping faith: “I have kept faith, I tell you – Ulysses’/ Nothing and Rama’s knowing Hanuman’s/ Chest, when opened to Sita, is a flower/ Still scented and waiting your touch.” Interweaving his own persona with that of the protagonists of Greek and Hindu mythologies, placing himself alongside the Greek hero Ulysses (Odysseus) and the divine Ram (Rama), Persaud is placing his personal exile in context. Unpacking his richly layered text would indeed be a challenging assignment for students of literary criticism. For readers who simply enjoy words, settle for not wishing to ‘understand’ the meaning of everything, I direct them to “Her Dancing On Leaves: Re-reading Palace Of The Peacock:” “An exile is always lonely, I would/ call after your back, we tend to look behind once/ in a while. I head outside instead, the Boston snow/ like white sands on the edges of a tropical forest –/ I went there once, enchanted. I loved – was born there –/ a shout rang out. We died and yet we lived and lived again.” The nature of exile, the role of language and poetry in defining a new personal identity are common among creative writers and thinkers, but more so among exiled poets. Poetry is not only the way home; it is also a way of coping with the loneliness of exile. Shanta Acharya was born in India, educated at Oxford and Harvard, and has lived in London since 1985. Her four collections of poetry are Shringara (Shoestring Press, UK; 2006), Looking In, Looking Out (Headland Publications, UK; 2005), Numbering Our Days’ Illusions (Rockingham Press, UK; 1995) and Not This, Not That (Rupa & Co, India; 1994). Her doctoral study, The Influence of Indian Thought on Ralph Waldo Emerson, was published by The Edwin Mellen Press (USA; 2001). www.shantaacharya.com.

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FURTHER VIEW POINT Stifling the Voice from Within: A Discourse on the Problem of Literary Communication in Indian Writing in English- Dr. Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal All great imaginative literature is carved out of the highest emotional upheaval in the heart of the poet. A particular emotion catches the soul of the poet and the result is the outpouring of the excessively creative poetry.1 Poetry is nothing but the drainage/ exit/ gush of the excessive emotions in the poet’s heart. Through this cathartic or therapeutic release, through poetry, a poet receives aesthetic relief from the burden of feelings. Poetry cannot be created, if emotions are dried up in individuals. Poetry lacking the rhythmical vibrations in the poet’s heart will come across as artificial and lack in spontaneous ‘fullthroated ease’. Poetry should come as naturally to a poet, as leaves to the branches of a tree. Poetry emerges in a poet effortlessly without any strain. Wordsworth held that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. A great poet is able to universalize his personal sensations. The sage Valmiki had the same experience when he saw the killing of the Krauncha bird. About this episode in the life of Valmiki, G.Mohan writes thus: When the sage Valmiki saw one of the Krauncha pair shot dead by a hunter, he was overcome by sorrow. But, this sorrow was transformed into infinite compassion for suffering humanity (10). So, a literary product is the result of an excessive flood of emotions in a poet’s heart. An imaginative poet universalizes his subjective feelings. Now, the question is— what should be the medium of expression of these intimate emotions of a creative artist? Can these feelings be effectively and suitably communicated in an alien language, which is not the language of one’s emotional make-up? One’s innermost feelings can only be truly expressed in one’s native language. Nostalgic memories of one’s childhood, if narrated in a foreign language, lose that intimate personal touch. Suppose, my hand is burnt or I fall from a speedy vehicle and get injured—what will be the language of my communication? I will definitely say—Hai Ram Mar Gaya. I will not say: O God, I am injured. The second statement is not from the core of my heart. That cry on being hurt is spontaneously from the deepest recesses of the heart; this outburst is the purest form of poetry and is marked by the Wordsworthian concept that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Most importantly, this inner expression of pain pours out in my first or native language, not in any foreign tongue. Shreesh Chaudhary,

The ecstasy of Holi and the revelry of Deepawali can best be explained in my mother-tongue Professor of English at IIT, Madras, has outlined the difference between the first and second languages thus: …people ‘acquire’ the first language… and learn the second language…After all, the circumstances and results of learning these languages are often quite different for many people….While everybody has abundant exposure to the language to be learnt in the context of first language acquisition (FLA), it is not always so with the second language. Neither does everyone get to learn the second language in ‘natural’ circumstances like one’s first language. People often learn it through instruction (95-96). This distinction between the first and second languages clearly indicates that the later one is not the spontaneous medium for poetic communication. Here, some issues are doing their rounds in mind. If inner sentiments of one individual are properly conveyed in one’s native language, why have the Indo Anglians chosen English as the mode of their expression? Why have they not adopted the languages of their own region for the free flow of their ideas? Are they not completely unlike Valmiki, who was overcome by the deluge of emotion when he saw the killing of the Krauncha bird? Are not emotions dried up in them due to their employment of a second language? Native experiences can rarely be communicated in an alien language. The ecstasy of Holi and the revelry of Deepawali can best be explained in my mother-tongue; if expressed

in the second language, it will smack of artificiality and be devoid of the fragrance of the indigenous soil. My point of view is that Indian Literature written in English (a language, used by Macaulay to rule over India) fails in certain situations because of its non-indigenous nature. Here, it is pertinent to quote certain words from Macaulay’s celebrated Minute: We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect (qtd. in Krishnaswamy and Krishnaswamy 31-32). To make a class of Indians British in taste, the English language was employed as a tool - a powerful weapon in the hands of the colonizer to colonize our minds. It was used by the empire for their mission of ‘civilizing’ the backward minds of the natives. Gramsci, a revolutionary thinker, has propagated the view that the ruling class alters the ideologies of the ruled through the mutual consent of the latter. In a way, “the element of coercion is ruled out but the major emphasis is on consent which is obtained by the ruling class through exploiting institutions like the church, the school, the family, the media (Rajnath 78).” Due to this indirect control of the empire, “Indians were so brain-washed by educational, cultural and religious activities of the West that they began to reckon themselves as inferior and developed a

propensity for everything Western including administration and governance (Rajnath 78).” The civilizing mission of the colonizer left us to believe in the superiority of their institutions and the inferiority of our own. We may call it the colonization of the mind, which is worse than the colonization of the land. In this process of civilizing the backward minds of the subjects, the tools of English language and literature were employed to strengthen the colonial domination in India. Taisha Abraham has suggested the same idea, “Educating the colonized through the use of the English language and literature was central to colonial rule (68).” When the empire was successful in stuffing our minds with the ideas of their superior rationalism and our inferior backwardness, there began the presence of some authors reproducing their literary works in their language and thus started a literature, the very foundation of which is the imperialistic bias of the Whites. But the question is—how can this weapon of exploitative oppression become the language of creative expression in literature for the colonized people? How can a writer reveal his inner ideas, feelings, sentiments and the surrounding ethos in this language, while the subconscious/ unconscious layers of our mind deride it as a heinous colonial tool, employed by the colonizer to control us? Why is this mad rush after Indian Literature in English? Another objection to this literature of the anglicized

Indians is—what is the readership of this type of literature? Naturally, millions of Indians cannot be its readers, because of the ignorance of the natives about the intricacies of this language. Of course, Kerala is a highly literate state. I salute the people of this region for their high rate of literacy. But, that is not the case with the other parts of India. People cannot even comprehend the English newspapers and magazines, not to speak of the masterpieces of the Indo Anglians. The supporters of Indian Writing in English may argue that they target an audience outside India. Even here, there is a problem. Indian Writing in English is imbued with classical mythological references and the writers mostly talk about an Indian ethos. How will an outsider understand all this? Pritish Nandy in his poem ‘Calcutta If You must Exile Me’ has the following expression: Calcutta they will tear you apart Jarasandha-like… (Prasad and Singh 85). Besides, mark the following expression from Kiran Desai’s Man Booker Prize winning novel The Inheritance of Loss: In Stone Town they ate samosas and chapatis, jalebis, pilau rice…. Saeed and Saeed could sing like Amitabh Bachhan and Hema Malini. He sang, “Mera joota hai japani…” and “Bombay se aaya mera dost—oi (53)!” The whole of Indian English literature is stuffed with these Indian words and names. How will a foreigner follow the references to Jarasandh, samosas, chapatis, jalebis, Amitabh Bachhan and Hema Malini and the songs from Bollywood? So, for whom are these works of the Indo- Anglians produced? Of course, they are not for the masses. Indian English Literature is not without defects. Still, every year numberless works are produced by Indians in the English language. What is the target audience of this literature? It is in the main written for the public school bred and English speaking pseudointellectuals of India. This literature of the elite class drawing-room idlers caters to the tastes and moods of these people. For these snobs, literature is not an aesthetic realization, rather a tool of social prestige. The classics of the great masters are not works of high imagination for them; they imagine that the mention of a particular work of literature in conversation imbues them with social class. A literary text is no better than a detective piece, as they are not Sahridaya

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CONFLUENCE STIFLING THE VOICE FROM WITHIN- Cont from p14 Readers (connoisseurs of art and literature). Here, it will not be out of place to say that literature has two types of meanings—literal and figurative. Only the microscopic eye of a Sahridaya Reader can unearth the latent meaning. Kunjunni Raja, while discussing Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka, elaborates this idea thus: In the Dhvanyaloka, Anandavardhana establishes his theory that suggestion is the soul of poetry. He says that beautiful ideas in poetry are of two kinds: literal and implied. The latter is something like charm in girls which is distinct from the beauty of the body; this implied sense is something more than the literal meaning. This suggested sense is not understood by those who merely know grammar and lexicon; it is understood only by men of taste who know the essence of poetry. This suggested sense is the most important element in poetry; in fact it is the soul of poetry (287-288). And so a genuine reader is able to derive pleasure out of literature by exploring the inner meaning of a work, while the mundane types go through just the primary meaning. The elites just take literature at the primary level of understanding, as they discuss literature to exhibit their awareness of culture and civilization. At this juncture, I am reminded of T.S.Eliot’s expression in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. (3). What I mean to say is that it is a literature for the elite classes and not for the masses. Even a majority of authors are from the upper strata of society brought up in an anglicized and European atmosphere. Anita Desai was born to a German mother. Salman Rushdie was born of an affluent Muslim family in Bombay. He was educated, first at Cathedral School in Bombay, a classic neo- colo-

nial enclave that ‘groomed’ him, he says, for the exclusive British public school, Rugby. John Mee in his essay ‘After Midnight: The Novel in the 1980s and 1990s’ talks of a group of writers identified with Delhi’s elite St. Stephen’s College. Allan Sealey, Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, Upmanyu Chatterjee, Rukun Advani, Mukul Kesavan and Anurag Mathur were all students of this college in the early 1970s. Kiran Desai, the daughter of Anita Desai, spent the early years of her life in Pune and Mumbai. When she was around nine years her family shifted to Delhi. When she turned fourteen, the family had moved to England. A year later, they shifted to the United States. Kiran completed her schooling in Massachusetts. She did her graduation at Columbia University. Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London. She was raised in Rhode Island. Lahiri received a B.A in English Literature at Barnard College, and later received her M.A in English, Creative writing, and Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, as well as a Ph.D in Renaissance Studies from Boston University. Vikram Chandra graduated from Pomona College (in Claremont, near Los Angeles) with a concentration in creative writing. He then attended the Film School at Columbia University in New York.2 What we see is a literature by the elite class for the elite. But the irony is that these upper class people read and write about social problems they have hardly ever experienced. They are an outsider’s response to these tangling issues of society. Kiran Desai for example writes about the alienation of Biju in The Inheritance of Loss: They were men; he was a baby. He was nineteen, he looked and felt several years younger (16). We must know that it is an outsider’s response to the problem of diasporic alien-

ation. Belonging to upper class society as she does, she finds difficulty in understanding the pains of the underdogs of society. Her response to the predicament of the poor Indians in the West will be considered out of place, as she has not possibly felt the same pain, which Biju in her novel feels. Only a person, who has lived through the pain, can describe its intensity as human experience is opaque. Most of the Dalit writers hold the same opinion. They believe that upper class people, even if they do have an emotional bond with the Dalits, cannot delineate the age old scar of casteoppression, as they have not felt it. The notable Dalit writer J.P.Kardam told me in an interview: I would like to quote here the words of Dr. Manager Pandey, a renowned Hindi critic, who wrote in the preface to a collection of Dalit short stories edited by Ramnika Gupta that “Only ash knows the experience of burning”. This indicates that Dalits know the experience of burning -- burning in the fire of sorrows, hatred, disrespect, injustice, inequality and untouchablity. Non-Dalits do not have this experience. To be very honest, the feelings of these anglicized Indo-Anglians from the upper strata of society for the bottom dogs of the society are just synthetic. They are not from the core of their being.. In place of Indian Writing in English, we should promote literatures in regional languages as a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. I am not completely against the Literature of England authored by the native speakers of the English language. I mean to say that literature written in one’s native language is better than literature in an alien language. Here, I must clarify that I have just presented certain issues about Indian Writing in English. I am not against the use of the English language

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in day to day life. English is a global language and any cultural or social group, without effective communication skills in this language, will lag far behind in technological and scientific fields, as much innovative research is being done in this lingua franca of the world. It is the language for dry scientific and mechanical studies and also for research in various branches of social sciences. English does not lend itself for emotional literary purposes in India, in my view. In the opinion of I. A. Richards, there are two uses of the language—scientific and emotive. In India the English language should be promoted for its scientific use and communication skills. It has no place in the production of literary output. Notes and References 1. In this paper, I am equating all imaginative literature with poetry. 2. All information about the authors in this paragraph is borrowed from the following sources: ™ Mehrotra,Arvind Krishna, ed. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. ™ Walsh, William. Indian Literature in English. London: Longman,1990. ™ . ™ < http://voices.cla.umn. edu/vg/Bios/entries/ lahiri_jhumpa.html>. ™ < h t t p : / / w w w. v i k r a m chandra.com/Default. aspx?tabid=129> Works Cited Abraham, Taisha. Introducing Postcolonial Theory: Issues And Debates. Macmillan, 2007. Agarwal, N.K. “D C Chambial: In Discussion with Nilanshu Agarwal.” Muse India Sept. - Oct. 2008. 13 Sept. 2008 . “Only ash knows the experience of burning: An

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Interview with Dalit Writer Jai Prakash Kardam.” thanalonline Sept. 2008. 22 Oct. 2008 . Chauadhary, Shreesh. “First Language Acquisition vs. Second Language Learning.” Readings in English Language Teaching in India. Ed. S. Kudchedkar. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2002. 94-124. Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. Penguin, 2006. Eliot, T.S. Selected Poems. Ed. Manju Jain. New Delhi: OUP, 1992. Krishnaswamy, N, and Lalitha Krishnaswamy. The Story of English in India. New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2006. Mohan, G.B. The Response To Poetry: A Study in Comparative Aesthetics. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1968. Prasad, Hari Mohan, and Chakradhar Prasad Singh, eds. Indian Poetry in English. New Delhi: Sterling, 1985. Raja, Kunjunni. “Theory of Dhvani.” Indian Aesthetics: An Introduction. Ed. V.S.Seturaman. Chennai: Macmillan, 1992. 287-309. Rajnath. “Edward Said And Postcolonial Theory.” Journal of Literary Criticism 9.1 (2000): 73-87. This paper was presented at the ‘Language And Identity’ Seminar, organized during The International Literary Festival, 2008, hosted by Kerala Language Institute at Calicut (Kerala, India). Dr.Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal is Senior Lecturer in English at Feroze Gandhi College, Rae Bareli, (U.P.), India. He has his doctorate on T.S. Eliot from Allahabad University. Dr. Agarwal is interested mostly in Indian Aesthetics, Diaspora and Contemporary Critical Theory. For earlier articles in this series visit www.confluence.org.uk

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