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Tag Archives: Indira Gandhi

The Crisis of Modernity post socialism

12 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by opus125 in Indian History

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Indira Gandhi, mdernity, socialism

indiragandhi

 

Since Indira Gandhi India is officially a socialist Secular state. Not that it ever was, even though Nehru held informal socialist sympathies. Third World was a term that meant non aligned with NATO (First world) or Communism (Second World), and as a leader of the non-aligned movement, leaders such as Nixon were sceptical of India falling to Russia.

I suggest that India’s diversity illustrates what was one of the biggest problems in Socialism. Governments have been forced to sink or swim in the maelstrom of the world market modernist critical culture keeps free imagination alive.As long as they are they are, as Octavio Paz put it “condemned to modernity” we will see the Third World marching to its chaotic drum.

Although during the Emergency Indira Gandhi altered Indias Constitution to describe the nation as Socialist as well as secular, I don’t ever think India truly has been socialist.

It seems social theorists, including Marx, have often called on myth, usually Grecian, as metaphor of their world view. In a land that defies any definitions, perhaps this is why neither Socialism nor Capitalism seem to quiet fit here.

Herbert Marcuse and Hanna Arendt criticised Marx for celebrating the value of labour bur neglecting other aspects of the human spirit – for a lack of moral imagination.

In his Eros and Civilization  Mercuse attacks Marx culture hero Prometheus  as “a culture hero of toil, productivity, and progress through repression … A trickster and (suffering) rebel … Archetypal hero of the performance principle.”

Marcuse prefers the image of Orpheus, Narcissus or Dionysius who “stand for a different reality … Theirs is the image of joy and fulfilment, a voice that does not command but sings, the deed which is peace and ends the labour of conquest”  he said.

Marshall Behrman in his wonderful All that is sold melts into the air – the experience of modernity, admits Marx imagination lacked the joys of peace but qualifies this adding Marx fetish is “the free development of physical and spiritual energies” ; “development of a totality of capabilities in the individual themselves” and “the free development of each will be the free development of all.”

Marx wants to embrace Prometheus and Orpheus says Berman, he says differing with Mercuse.

Mercuse and the Frankfurt school promoted the goal of harmony between man and nature. The problem was it would require an immense amount of Promethean energy to create it. The endless task would turn mankind into Sisyphus cursed to push a boulder to the top of a hill only to see it role down and be forced to return it for eternity!

Hanna Arendt in The Human Condition suggests another idea relevant to my view of India – the problem of Marx is not draconian authoritarianism but that that Marxism lacks a real basis for authority.

“Marx predicted correctly, though with unjustifiable glee, the ‘withering away’ of the public realm under the conditions of the unhampered development of ‘the productive forces of society’.”

Communists find themselves “caught in the fulfilment of needs that nobody can share and which nobody can fully communicate.” The depth of Marx individualism can lead to nihilism.

In a society where the free development of each is the free development of all, what will hold them together?

If they share a common quest for infinite experiential wealth  this would be “no true public realm, but only private activities displayed in the open”. It risks a sense of collective futility: “the futility of a life which does not fix or realise itself in in any permanent subject that endures after its labour is past.”

Arnedt doesn’t get closer to solutions but is  unclear what right action is supposed to be. She does distinguish the political and day to day production “the cares of the household” which is in her mind devoid of the capacity to create human value. She does rightly note that Marx did not develop a theory of political community this is the problem of modernism nihilistic thrust is unclear of what or who modern man can be, explains Behrman.

Ironically Behrman points out that those who criticise modernity the most need it the most. He suggests Marx is not  away out of life’s contradictions but a way back in.

 “He knew that we must start where we are: physically naked, stripped of all religious, aesthetic, moral haloes and sentimental veil, thrown back on our own individual will and energy, forced to exploit each other and ourselves in order to survive; and yet, in spite of it all, thrown together by the same forces that pull us apart, dimly aware of all we might be together, ready t outstretch ourselves to grasp new human possibilities, to develop identities and mutual bonds that can help us hold together as the fierce modern air blows hot and cold through us all.”

But I wonder is that completely true? Yes Modern India risks losing some of its charm in the rush to globalise.  However, India’s  deep religiosity could take it in (atleast) two directions.

Indian life is in many ways sacramental, daily life is elevated by rituals that offer meaning to the mundane. Could this be India’s saving grace? Or will religious nationalism pollute the search for inner meaning and tear the country apart?

I have never been a Marxist, yet suggest Marx idealised society was a gestalt not individuals but the sum of the interconnections between them. The whole was meant to be greater than the sum of its parts.

The focus seemed to be both the surface effects and the internal relations that produce them.

In India there is the conflict of class, especially caste, but we do have an agency greater than our natural needs.  We labour for some structure in a changing, contradictory and some fear self destructive modernity. But Marx could have never for seen how Capitalism and labour would mediate new forms of social independence.

In the 19th century, Newtons laws of Thermodynamics were the metaphor of change.  Now a protean transformative energy now fuels the world with chaotic quantum speed.

The philosopher von Weber’s metaphor was the power of rational ideas. Yet seems most discourse is illogical. The ‘argumentative Indian’ that Amartya Sen writes of, seems to want to argue for arguments sake. As long as he has a voice he will speak, but forget to listen.

But as Ilya Romanovich Prigogine reminds us that systems become more chaotic and either form new levels of order or collapse. So, It is up to India to decide if her new unleashed energy will create an new world or collapse into chaos.

What Weber succeeds in explaining – and matters for India today – is that the even in a religious society a prophet succeeds when he can articulate rationally his message and systematise the  living conditions and forces of his time. Then his charm is seen as genuine.

In the diversity of India who has a clear vision big enough? Markets have delivered prosperity but at a cost of the deep yearning of soul that fires the nation.

Perhaps India needs another Gandhi like figure. What if life becomes an art form or sacrament? Could this be India’s saving grace.

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Mother India nationalism and making martyrs

07 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by opus125 in India

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Tags

Bhagat Singh, bharat mata, Indian Patriotism, Indira Gandhi, martyrdom, Shaheed

Delhi indiagate040When I first visited Delhi, I visited the Memorial of Martyrs.  I admit the use of the word martyr made me feel uneasy.

Now I admit coming from a Christian background the word perhaps has a different sense and connotation.

Perhaps, my unease comes from its Islamist use in our post 911 media.

I wondered if all war dead could really be called martyrs. The word comes from the Greek meaning witness; someone who proclaims, preaches or dies for a belief.

From the early days fighting for Independence,   the image of Mother India, the Bharat Mata, has adorned the memory of dead men. The first female example was Indira Gandhi during the 1971 war with East Pakistan, and later her assassination.

bhagat singh

The most notable early example was of the atheist socialist Bhagat Singh, hung in 1931. The Islamic term shaheed was applied to him.  The word shaheed, similar to the Greek martyr, refers to a pious Muslim who dies in defence of Allah.

While I honour the memory of those who sacrifice for their belief of Independence, was this a religious act?

Has religion been  replaced by the religion of nationalism?

That India is a secular state (although some of the Hindu right would prefer it not be) suggests nationalism has usurped religion into the ideology of the state. Many of the founders were British educated and perhaps inspired by the enlightenment. For me, thereligious pursuit of truth becomes a problem when draped by the call to the tribe.

Now, India has always respected female deities. Nationalist Aurobindo Ghoshe once proclaimed “Do you see this map? It is not a map, but the portrait of Bharat mata: its cities and mountains, rivers and jungles form her physical body. All her children are her nerves, large and small…. Concentrate on Bharat [India] as a living mother, worship her with the nine-fold bhakti [devotion].”

As art historian Jyotindra Jain writes how this art form uses “a visual language of collage and citation which, in turn, act[s] as a vehicle of cultural force, creating and negotiating interstices between the sacred, the erotic, the political, and the colonial modern” .

ma ki pakar

As previously explained, following the 1857 Mutiny, some British claimed revolutionaries were exploiting Indian tendency toward eroticism and criminality. To Victorian mind, early marriage weakened the mind.

Hindu nationalists like Aurobindu Ghose would use both the Bharat Mata and Kali’s image to inspired armed revolt against British invaders.

Or as Aurobindo Ghose insisted rhetorically in 1905, ‘What is a nation? What is our mother country? It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. It is a mighty female power (shakti), composed of all the powers of all the millions of units that make up the nation” .

“It is curious how one cannot resist the tendency to give an anthropomorphic form to a country. “ wrote Nehru in 1936, who is note for a less violent patriotism “Such is the force of habit and early associations. India becomes Bharat Mata, Mother India, a beautiful lady, very old but ever youthful in appearance, sad-eyed and forlorn, cruelly treated by aliens and outsiders, and calling upon her children to protect her. Some such picture rouses the emotions of hundreds of thousands and drives them to action and sacrifice.”

It was during the country wide elections of 1937 that many patriotic Muslims, unable to worship India as the mother Durga , were accused of being unpatriotic.

It is also true of other nations. China has a ‘long tradition of embargoes on national maps’ writes Timothy Brooks in his book Roads to Mr Seldons Map of China who had a map confiscated at the border. To the border official, the map ‘did not merely represent China’s sovereignty: it was that sovereignty. For him the map existed on a level of reality higher than the real world.”

amar bharat atma

“The geography of a country is not the whole truth. No one can give up his life for a map” wrote Rabindranath Tagore in 1919. But in in 1948 Gandhi was shown  ina poster Swargarohan (Ascent to Heaven), irising to heaven as if for the map. The Hindu trinity, Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma, along with their wives, waits to welcome him.

indiragaandimartr

For me, a more potent memory is the death of Indira Gandhi.

The poster Indira Gandhi: Mere Khun Ka Har Katara Desh Ko Mazbut Karega (Indira Gandhi: Every Drop of My Blood Will Strengthen the Nation;) is described by Pinney :

Indira is reported to have said this [“every drop of my blood will strengthen the nation”] at a rally in Orissa shortly before her death and her supporters believed this to be her premonition of her own murder…. Raja mirrors this linguistic message with a visual trace of Indira’s blood?several drops and rivulets at the bottom left of the image?on what must be the surface of the image. Like all his [Raja’s] images, this picture lacks depth. Indira is not a body located in three dimension space but a flat representation looking out at the viewer, and the most significant space of the image is not behind the picture plane, but in front, where the blood drips … In Raja’s portrait the only space that matters is that between Indira and the viewer, the space deter mined by her gaze meeting one’s own and in which the viewer can reach out and touch the blood on the surface of the image.

To my mind, Democracy means reasoned, well informed debate which sadly rarely win votes. Hating an enemy – real or imagined – is more news worthy.

As  Joan Landes  reminds us “The nation is a greedy institution; economically, physically, and emotionally. It is the object of a special kind of love; one whose demands are sometimes known to exceed all others, even to the point of death”

 

Reference:

I am extremely indebted to Sumathi Ramaswamy for the article Maps, Mother/Goddesses, and Martyrdom in Modern India that sourced the image and many details for this blog post.

Maps, Mother/Goddesses, and Martyrdom in Modern India, Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Aug., 2008), pp. 819-853Published by: Association for Asian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20203426 .Accessed: 23/07/2014 00:52Your

 

 

 

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Beautiful Delhi where are you?

13 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by opus125 in India

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Delhi, Emergency, havelli, Indira Gandhi, slums

Reflecting on Delhi's architectural past

Reflecting on Delhi’s architectural past

Behind the seductive brochures of medieval forts is a city of conflicting stories. Where chai wallahs are photo-shopped out of the A city “masquerading as a great metropolis” says Bharat Chaturvedi (Finding Delhi: Loss and renewal in a mega city). It has no soul said Surbi, an artist friend from Bhopal. She preferred the art scene of Mumbai.

Perhaps it has lost its soul along with the loss of historic delicate havelis.

During the 2010 Commonwealth Games the carts of wallahs vying for trade, so much a part of the real India, were moved out, even banned from Old Delhi. Betrayed by the need to appear modern. Worry abut “what will foreigners think” about potholes when for decades no one cared about the life of the locals.

Did tourists come to see India or its Disney-fication? Why hide the beauty of common people under a Western facade that camouflaged the beauty of this country I love?

Was it necessary to pave streets in stone – so glorious to look on – that prevents water seeping into Delhi’s dwindling water table? Was it necessary to rush flyovers so poorly planned the free flowing traffic became bottlenecks even death traps?

Was it necessary to put the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lane in the middle of roads and clog traffic? (Actually, I think it was. The need to discourage traffic in Delhi is an important pollution issue, but also a cause of near social war!)

The facade did not hold, incomplete work by a corrupt system soon moved the media at first bustling with pride to cry in shame  of financial mishandling. Meanwhile, most sports loving tourists enjoyed themselves.

Cities are unbelievably complex. They are not just bricks and mortar. A city is not the aspirations of corporations that rarely consider what people would want to call their home. Cities are memories of family, and history, of loves gained and lost. Cities grow organically, they need a planned infrastructure that alows people to contribute and recreate their life.

But Why? A little developmental history

 

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Perhaps this only extended the trend begun by Britain in 1911 to 1937 founding of New Delhi. The poor migrants of that new city, now wage workers in construction or as coolies were forced rent in the dilapidated katras of the walled city. It became so congested  that it was a focal point for nationalists and the British were forced to act but was reluctant to spend money on ‘native’ areas. “In spite of the consistently hiigh level of frustration at their failure to reverse the process of environmental degradation, the colonial agency never questioned the shibboleth that urban development should be driven by profit and prestige motives of the dominant classes.” (Sandeeep Hazeerasingh, 2001,’ColonialModernism and their flawed paradigms of Urban renerawl in Bombay, 1900-1925‘ Urban History, Vol 28,No.2, pp 242 in A.Sharan, 2006 ‘In the city,out of place: Environment and modenity, Delhi 1860s to1960’s‘,Economic and political weekly, 25 November, Vol 41, No. 47, pp 4905-11.) 

We cannot deny the impact refugees flooding to Delhi after Partition, and a reformist industrial agenda.

The First Five Year Plan saw slums as ‘a national problem’  and a ‘disgrace to the country’. The Second Five Year Plan for ‘balanced’ and ‘orderly’ development included resettlement with ‘minimum dislocation’ that rehoused people from slums as near as possible to their existing employment. The focus was on environmental conditions and not the legality or absence of the settlements . It seems the policy was ‘followed more in violation than compliance’  observed Lalit Batra (‘Out of sight, out of mind: Slum dwellers in ‘World Class” Delhi‘ in Bhrarat Chaturvedi).

Haphazard and unplanned growth was starkly revealed when in 1955 700 people died of jaundice.

Indira Gandhis suspending Constitutional freedoms in the Emergency allowed for attacking the contraditictio of Delhis actual versus planned city.

Large scale and brutal clearing of Delhi Development authority to evict over 150,000 squatter families from the inner city.

DDA chairman Jagmohan was unapolgetic of his plan to build an ideal city, that imparted urbanity and civility, epairing the Walled City being destroyed by ‘the flood of migrants and squatter’ who ‘like a plague or some other kind of fever will cripple and kill Shahjahanabad.”

At Turkman Gate in 1976, 12 people were killed by police for protesting at their home demolition.

Relocations stopped for two decades after the Indira Gandhi’s 1979 electoral defeat with a shift to slum improvement.

What has changed notably since is the effect of liberalisation and globalisation from the 1990’s. The growing middle class see slums as both a legal and environmental issue, which bourgeoisie environmentalists claimed denied ‘citizens’  the legitimate right to the city.

‘Citizen’ should be understood to mean property owners.

As the economy grew so did inner city land values.

Squatting, sice inherently illegal, an ‘unscrupulus element’ that was odered to be removed by the High Court in 2003.

The ironic twist is that – especially since the Commonwealth Games – the middle class want their cheap maids and labourers while expecting them to live in a distant periphery of the city.

Lalit Batra concludes that while the British started the process ‘the elite effortlessly slipped into the shoes of the colonists”  with a hegemonic block of politics, corporation, media, judiciary and affluent citizens.

As a firengi looking on

A haveli courtyard in Old Delhi (c) by Varun Shiv Kapur [http://www.flickr.com/photos/varunshiv/3968814237/]

A haveli courtyard in Old Delhi
(c) by Varun Shiv Kapur
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/varunshiv/3968814237/]

While as a firengi looking on, frightened by the challenge of social dislocation, the historian in me looks back at the beauty that is forever lost. As the water table declines soil structure may change, could that risk building stability?

City design is not like designing with lego blocks. No monolithic god like designer can build the perfect master plan. Cties should invite people to sit and play, to grow and thrive as a community.

Communities make cities.

As historian William Dalrymple  lamented the destruction of Delhi’s  historic haveli’s he was given this reminder.

“You must understand,” he said, “that we Hindus burn our dead.” Either way, the loss of Delhi’s past is irreplaceable; and future generations will inevitably look back at the conservation failures of the early 21st century with a deep sadness. 

Yet the rituals of cremation in part is a symbolic remembrance of the cycle of life and rebirth and a respect for nature. Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist traditions ask us to hold onto the bones of our humanity. Their ritual remember the cycles of nature. Insead corporation distances us from both nature and our compassion.

Cities will outlast our sojourn on this earth so can we ensure they reunite us to the beauty of life and community? Is Delhi losing its natural beauty?

 

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