Reading Compreh...

    One of the most prolific authors of all time, Isaac Asimov was influential both in science fiction and in the popularization of science during the twentieth century, but he is also justly famous for the scope of his interest. Although the common claim that Asimov is the only author to have written a book in every category of the Dewey decimal system is untrue, its spirit provides an accurate picture of the man: a dedicated humanist who lauded the  far-reaching power of reason. His most famous work, the Foundation trilogy, can be read as an illustration of Asimov's belief in reason and science, but even while he expressed that belief, science itself was calling it into question.

    Foundation describes a time which a vast Empire spanning the galaxy is on the verge of collapse. Its inevitable doom is a consequence not if its size, but of the shortsightedness of its leaders. In this environment, a scientist named Hari Seldon devises an all encompassing plan to help human civilization recover from the trauma of the Empire's coming collapse. Using mathematics, Seldon is able to predict the future course of history of thousands of years, and he takes steps that are geared toward guiding that future in a beneficial direction. The trope of the benevolent and paternalistic scientist shaping existence from behind the scenes, present in much of Asimov's fiction, is never more explicit than in the Foundation series, which describes with an epic sweep the course and progress of the Seldon Plan.

    As naive and, perhaps, self-serving as the conceit of Foundation may seem to contemporary readers, it retains to some degree its ability of comfort by offering and antidote to the complex and unpredictable nature of experience. Science in Asimov's time was, in popular conceptions, engaged in just this pursuit: discerning immutable laws that operate beneath a surface appearance of contingency, inexplicability, and change. But even while Asimov wrote, science itself was changing. In Physics, the study of matter at the subatomic level showed that indeterminacy was not a transitory difficulty to be overcome, but an essential physical principle. In Biology, the sense of evolution as a steady progress toward better adapted forms was being disturbed by proof of a past large-scale evolution taking place in brief explosions, of frantic change. At the time of Asimov's death, even Mathematics was gaining popular notice for its interest in chaos and inexplicability.

In 1945, a Bombay economist named A.D Shroff began a Forum of Free Enterprise, whose ideas on economic development were somewhat at odds with those then influentially articulate by the Planning Commission of the Government of India. Shroff complained against the 'indifference if not discouragement' with which the state treated entrepreneurs.
    At the same time as Shroff, but independently of him, a journalist named Philip Spratt was writing a series of essays in favor of free enterprise. Spratt was a Cambridge communist who was sent by the party in the 1920s to foment revolution in the subcontinent. Detected in the act, he spent many years in an Indian jail. The books he read in the prison, and his marriage to an  Indian woman afterward, inspired a steady move rightwards. By the 1950s, he was editing a pro-American weekly from Bangalore, called MysIndia. 

There he inveighed against the economic policies of the government of India. These, he said, treated the entrepreneur 'as a criminal who has dared to use his brains independently of the state to create wealth and give employment.' The state's chief planner, P.C.Mahalanobis had surrounded himself with Western leftists and Soviet academicians, who reinforced his belief in 'rigid control by the government overall activities'. The result, said Spratt, would be 'the smothering of free enterprise, a famine of consumer goods, and the tying down of millions of workers to soul-deadening techniques.'
    The voices of men like Spratt and Shroff were drowned in the chorus of popular support for a model of heavy industrialization funded and directed by the governments. The 19050s were certainly not propitious times for free marketers in India. But from time to time their ideas were revived. After the rupee was devalued in m1966, there were some moves towards freeing the trade regime and hopes that the licensing system would also be liberalized. However, after Indira Gandhi split the Congress Party in 1969, her government took its 'left arm', nationalizing a fresh range of industries and returning to economic autarky.

In Manu Joseph's debut novel Serious Men, the protagonist, Ayyan Mani; is a shy, scheming Dalit-Buddhist who almost gets away with passing off his partially deaf son, Adi, as a prodigy, a genius who can recite the first 1,000 prime numbers. The garb of satire-where almost every character cuts a sorry figure-gives the author the license to offer one of the bleakest and pessimistic portrayals of urban Dalits. Despite his savage portrayal of Dalit (and female) characters-or perhaps because of it?- Serious Men has won critical appreciation from a cross-section of readers and critics.

    At a time when a formidable body of Dalit literature writing by Dalits about Dalit lives-has created a distinct space for itself, how and why is it that a novel such as Serious Men, with its gleefully skewed portrayal of an angry Dalit man, manages to win such accolades? In American literature- and particularly in the case of African-American authors and character-these issues of representation have been debated for decades. But in India, the sustained refusal to address issues related to caste in everyday life- and the continued and unquestioned predominance of a Brahminical stranglehold over cultural production- have led us to a place where the non-Dalit portrayal of Dalits in literature, cinema and art remain the norm.

    The journey of modern Dalit literature has been a difficult one. But even though it has not necessarily enjoyed the support of numbers we must engage with what Dalits are writing- not simply for reasons of authenticity, or as a concession to identity politics, but simply because of the aesthetic value of this body of writing, and for the insights it offers into the human condition. In a society that is still largely unwilling to recognize Dalits as equal, rights-bearing human beings, in a society that is inherently indifferent to the everyday violence against Dalits, in a society unwilling to share social and cultural resources equitably with Dalits unless mandated by law (as seen in the anti-reservation discourse), Dalit literature has the potential to humanize non- Dalits and sensitise them to a world into which they have no insight. But before we can understand what Dalit literature is seeking to accomplish, we need first to come to terms with the stranglehold of non-Dalit representation of Dalits.

    Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, published 15 years ago, chronicles the travails of two Dalit characters- uncle Ishwar and nephew Omprakash- who migrate to Bombay and yet cannot escape brutality. While the presence of the novel is set at the time of the Emergency, Ishvar's father Dukhi belongs to the era of the anti-colonial nationalist movement. During one of Dukhi's visits
to the town, he chances upon a meeting of the Indian National Congress, where speakers spread the "Mahatma's message regarding the freedom struggle, the struggle for justice," and wiping out "the disease of untouchability, ravaging us for centuries, denying dignity to our fellow human beings."Neither in the 1940s, where the novel's past is set nor in the Emergency period of the 1970s- when the minds and bodies Ishvar and I+Omprakash, are savaged by the state- do we find any mention of a figure like BR Ambedhkar or of Dalit movements.

In his 'nationalist' understanding of modern Indian history, Mistry seems to have not veered too far from the road charted by predecessors like Mul Raj Anand and Premchand. Sixty years after Premchand, Mistry's literacy imagination seems stuck in the empathy- realism mode, trapping Dalits in abjection. Mistry happily continues the broad stereotype of the Dalit as a passive sufferer, without consciousness of caste politics.

In Manu Joseph's debut novel Serious Men, the protagonist, Ayyan Mani; is a shy, scheming Dalit-Buddhist who almost gets away with passing off his partially deaf son, Adi, as a prodigy, a genius who can recite the first 1,000 prime numbers. The garb of satire-where almost every character cuts a sorry figure-gives the author the license to offer one of the bleakest and pessimistic portrayals of urban Dalits. Despite his savage portrayal of Dalit (and female) characters-or perhaps because of it?- Serious Men has won critical appreciation from a cross-section of readers and critics.

    At a time when a formidable body of Dalit literature writing by Dalits about Dalit lives-has created a distinct space for itself, how and why is it that a novel such as Serious Men, with its gleefully skewed portrayal of an angry Dalit man, manages to win such accolades? In American literature- and particularly in the case of African-American authors and character-these issues of representation have been debated for decades. But in India, the sustained refusal to address issues related to caste in everyday life- and the continued and unquestioned predominance of a Brahminical stranglehold over cultural production- have led us to a place where the non-Dalit portrayal of Dalits in literature, cinema and art remain the norm.

    The journey of modern Dalit literature has been a difficult one. But even though it has not necessarily enjoyed the support of numbers we must engage with what Dalits are writing- not simply for reasons of authenticity, or as a concession to identity politics, but simply because of the aesthetic value of this body of writing, and for the insights it offers into the human condition. In a society that is still largely unwilling to recognize Dalits as equal, rights-bearing human beings, in a society that is inherently indifferent to the everyday violence against Dalits, in a society unwilling to share social and cultural resources equitably with Dalits unless mandated by law (as seen in the anti-reservation discourse), Dalit literature has the potential to humanize non- Dalits and sensitise them to a world into which they have no insight. But before we can understand what Dalit literature is seeking to accomplish, we need first to come to terms with the stranglehold of non-Dalit representation of Dalits.

    Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, published 15 years ago, chronicles the travails of two Dalit characters- uncle Ishwar and nephew Omprakash- who migrate to Bombay and yet cannot escape brutality. While the presence of the novel is set at the time of the Emergency, Ishvar's father Dukhi belongs to the era of the anti-colonial nationalist movement. During one of Dukhi's visits
to the town, he chances upon a meeting of the Indian National Congress, where speakers spread the "Mahatma's message regarding the freedom struggle, the struggle for justice," and wiping out "the disease of untouchability, ravaging us for centuries, denying dignity to our fellow human beings."Neither in the 1940s, where the novel's past is set nor in the Emergency period of the 1970s- when the minds and bodies Ishvar and I+Omprakash, are savaged by the state- do we find any mention of a figure like BR Ambedhkar or of Dalit movements.

In his 'nationalist' understanding of modern Indian history, Mistry seems to have not veered too far from the road charted by predecessors like Mul Raj Anand and Premchand. Sixty years after Premchand, Mistry's literacy imagination seems stuck in the empathy- realism mode, trapping Dalits in abjection. Mistry happily continues the broad stereotype of the Dalit as a passive sufferer, without consciousness of caste politics.

In Manu Joseph's debut novel Serious Men, the protagonist, Ayyan Mani; is a shy, scheming Dalit-Buddhist who almost gets away with passing off his partially deaf son, Adi, as a prodigy, a genius who can recite the first 1,000 prime numbers. The garb of satire-where almost every character cuts a sorry figure-gives the author the license to offer one of the bleakest and pessimistic portrayals of urban Dalits. Despite his savage portrayal of Dalit (and female) characters-or perhaps because of it?- Serious Men has won critical appreciation from a cross-section of readers and critics.

    At a time when a formidable body of Dalit literature writing by Dalits about Dalit lives-has created a distinct space for itself, how and why is it that a novel such as Serious Men, with its gleefully skewed portrayal of an angry Dalit man, manages to win such accolades? In American literature- and particularly in the case of African-American authors and character-these issues of representation have been debated for decades. But in India, the sustained refusal to address issues related to caste in everyday life- and the continued and unquestioned predominance of a Brahminical stranglehold over cultural production- have led us to a place where the non-Dalit portrayal of Dalits in literature, cinema and art remain the norm.

    The journey of modern Dalit literature has been a difficult one. But even though it has not necessarily enjoyed the support of numbers we must engage with what Dalits are writing- not simply for reasons of authenticity, or as a concession to identity politics, but simply because of the aesthetic value of this body of writing, and for the insights it offers into the human condition. In a society that is still largely unwilling to recognize Dalits as equal, rights-bearing human beings, in a society that is inherently indifferent to the everyday violence against Dalits, in a society unwilling to share social and cultural resources equitably with Dalits unless mandated by law (as seen in the anti-reservation discourse), Dalit literature has the potential to humanize non- Dalits and sensitise them to a world into which they have no insight. But before we can understand what Dalit literature is seeking to accomplish, we need first to come to terms with the stranglehold of non-Dalit representation of Dalits.

    Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, published 15 years ago, chronicles the travails of two Dalit characters- uncle Ishwar and nephew Omprakash- who migrate to Bombay and yet cannot escape brutality. While the presence of the novel is set at the time of the Emergency, Ishvar's father Dukhi belongs to the era of the anti-colonial nationalist movement. During one of Dukhi's visits
to the town, he chances upon a meeting of the Indian National Congress, where speakers spread the "Mahatma's message regarding the freedom struggle, the struggle for justice," and wiping out "the disease of untouchability, ravaging us for centuries, denying dignity to our fellow human beings."Neither in the 1940s, where the novel's past is set nor in the Emergency period of the 1970s- when the minds and bodies Ishvar and I+Omprakash, are savaged by the state- do we find any mention of a figure like BR Ambedhkar or of Dalit movements.

In his 'nationalist' understanding of modern Indian history, Mistry seems to have not veered too far from the road charted by predecessors like Mul Raj Anand and Premchand. Sixty years after Premchand, Mistry's literacy imagination seems stuck in the empathy- realism mode, trapping Dalits in abjection. Mistry happily continues the broad stereotype of the Dalit as a passive sufferer, without consciousness of caste politics.

In 1945, a Bombay economist named A.D Shroff began a Forum of Free Enterprise, whose ideas on economic development were somewhat at odds with those then influentially articulate by the Planning Commission of the Government of India. Shroff complained against the 'indifference if not discouragement' with which the state treated entrepreneurs.
    At the same time as Shroff, but independently of him, a journalist named Philip Spratt was writing a series of essays in favor of free enterprise. Spratt was a Cambridge communist who was sent by the party in the 1920s to foment revolution in the subcontinent. Detected in the act, he spent many years in an Indian jail. The books he read in the prison, and his marriage to an  Indian woman afterward, inspired a steady move rightwards. By the 1950s, he was editing a pro-American weekly from Bangalore, called MysIndia. 

There he inveighed against the economic policies of the government of India. These, he said, treated the entrepreneur 'as a criminal who has dared to use his brains independently of the state to create wealth and give employment.' The state's chief planner, P.C.Mahalanobis had surrounded himself with Western leftists and Soviet academicians, who reinforced his belief in 'rigid control by the government overall activities'. The result, said Spratt, would be 'the smothering of free enterprise, a famine of consumer goods, and the tying down of millions of workers to soul-deadening techniques.'
    The voices of men like Spratt and Shroff were drowned in the chorus of popular support for a model of heavy industrialization funded and directed by the governments. The 19050s were certainly not propitious times for free marketers in India. But from time to time their ideas were revived. After the rupee was devalued in m1966, there were some moves towards freeing the trade regime and hopes that the licensing system would also be liberalized. However, after Indira Gandhi split the Congress Party in 1969, her government took its 'left arm', nationalizing a fresh range of industries and returning to economic autarky.

In 1945, a Bombay economist named A.D Shroff began a Forum of Free Enterprise, whose ideas on economic development were somewhat at odds with those then influentially articulate by the Planning Commission of the Government of India. Shroff complained against the 'indifference if not discouragement' with which the state treated entrepreneurs.
    At the same time as Shroff, but independently of him, a journalist named Philip Spratt was writing a series of essays in favor of free enterprise. Spratt was a Cambridge communist who was sent by the party in the 1920s to foment revolution in the subcontinent. Detected in the act, he spent many years in an Indian jail. The books he read in the prison, and his marriage to an  Indian woman afterward, inspired a steady move rightwards. By the 1950s, he was editing a pro-American weekly from Bangalore, called MysIndia. 

There he inveighed against the economic policies of the government of India. These, he said, treated the entrepreneur 'as a criminal who has dared to use his brains independently of the state to create wealth and give employment.' The state's chief planner, P.C.Mahalanobis had surrounded himself with Western leftists and Soviet academicians, who reinforced his belief in 'rigid control by the government overall activities'. The result, said Spratt, would be 'the smothering of free enterprise, a famine of consumer goods, and the tying down of millions of workers to soul-deadening techniques.'
    The voices of men like Spratt and Shroff were drowned in the chorus of popular support for a model of heavy industrialization funded and directed by the governments. The 19050s were certainly not propitious times for free marketers in India. But from time to time their ideas were revived. After the rupee was devalued in m1966, there were some moves towards freeing the trade regime and hopes that the licensing system would also be liberalized. However, after Indira Gandhi split the Congress Party in 1969, her government took its 'left arm', nationalizing a fresh range of industries and returning to economic autarky.

In recent weeks the writers William Dalrymple and Patrick French, among others, have come before a fusillade of criticism in India, much of it questioning not their facts, not their interpretations, but their foreignness.

  "Who gets to write about India?" The Wall Street Journal asked on Wednesday in its own report on this Indian literary feuding. It is a complicated question, not least because to decide who gets to write about India, you would need to decide who get to decide who gets to write about India. Rather than conjecturing some Committee for the Deciding of Who Gets to Write About India, it might be easier to let writers write what they please and readers read what they wish.

    The accusations pouring forth from a section of the Indian commentarial are varied. Some criticism is of a genuine literary nature, fair game, customary, expected. But lately, a good amount of the reproaching has been about identity.     In the case of Mr. Dalrymple, A Briton who lives in New
Delhi, it is- in the critics' view- that his writing is an act of re-colonization. In the case of Mr.French, it is that he belongs to a group of foreign writers who use business-class lounges and see some merit in capitalism and therefore do not know the real India, which only the commentarial member in question does.

    What is most interesting about these appraisals is that their essential nature makes reading the book superfluous, as one of my Indian reviewers openly admitted. (His review was not about the book but about his refusal to read the book). The book is not necessary in these cases, for the argument is about who can write about India, not what has been written. For critics of this persuasion, India surely seems a lonely land. A country with a millennial history of Hindus, Christians,  Jews, Muslims and Buddhists living peaceably together; a country of hundreds of dialects in which so many Indians are linguistic foreigners to each other, and happily, tolerantly so; a country
that welcomes foreign seekers (of yoga poses, of spiritual wisdom, of ancestral roots) with open arms; a country where, outside the elite world of South Delhi and South Bombay, I have not heard an Indian ask whether outsides have a right to write, think or exist on their soil.

    But it is not just this deep-in-the bones pluralism that challenges the who-gets-to-write-about-India contingent. It is also that at the very heart of India's multifarious changes today in this glimmering idea: that Indians must be rewarded for what they do, not who they are.

    Identities you never chose-caste, gender, birth order are becoming less important determinants of fate. You deed how hard you work, what risks you take- are becoming more important.

    It is this idea, which I have found pulsating throughout the Indian layers, that leaves a certain portion of the intelligentsia out of sync with the surrounding country. As Mr.French has observed, there is a tendency in some of these writers to value social mobility only for themselves. When the new economy lifts up the huddled masses. then it becomes tawdry capitalism and rapacious imperialism and soulless globalization.

    Fortunately for those without Indian passports, the nativists' vision of India is under demographic siege. The young and the relentless are India's future. They could not think more differently from these literatis.

    They savor the freedom they are gaining to seek their own level in the society and to find their voice, and they to be delighted at the thought that some foreigners do the same in India and love their country as much as they do.

In 1945, a Bombay economist named A.D Shroff began a Forum of Free Enterprise, whose ideas on economic development were somewhat at odds with those then influentially articulate by the Planning Commission of the Government of India. Shroff complained against the 'indifference if not discouragement' with which the state treated entrepreneurs.
    At the same time as Shroff, but independently of him, a journalist named Philip Spratt was writing a series of essays in favor of free enterprise. Spratt was a Cambridge communist who was sent by the party in the 1920s to foment revolution in the subcontinent. Detected in the act, he spent many years in an Indian jail. The books he read in the prison, and his marriage to an  Indian woman afterward, inspired a steady move rightwards. By the 1950s, he was editing a pro-American weekly from Bangalore, called MysIndia. 

There he inveighed against the economic policies of the government of India. These, he said, treated the entrepreneur 'as a criminal who has dared to use his brains independently of the state to create wealth and give employment.' The state's chief planner, P.C.Mahalanobis had surrounded himself with Western leftists and Soviet academicians, who reinforced his belief in 'rigid control by the government overall activities'. The result, said Spratt, would be 'the smothering of free enterprise, a famine of consumer goods, and the tying down of millions of workers to soul-deadening techniques.'
    The voices of men like Spratt and Shroff were drowned in the chorus of popular support for a model of heavy industrialization funded and directed by the governments. The 19050s were certainly not propitious times for free marketers in India. But from time to time their ideas were revived. After the rupee was devalued in m1966, there were some moves towards freeing the trade regime and hopes that the licensing system would also be liberalized. However, after Indira Gandhi split the Congress Party in 1969, her government took its 'left arm', nationalizing a fresh range of industries and returning to economic autarky.

In Manu Joseph's debut novel Serious Men, the protagonist, Ayyan Mani; is a shy, scheming Dalit-Buddhist who almost gets away with passing off his partially deaf son, Adi, as a prodigy, a genius who can recite the first 1,000 prime numbers. The garb of satire-where almost every character cuts a sorry figure-gives the author the license to offer one of the bleakest and pessimistic portrayals of urban Dalits. Despite his savage portrayal of Dalit (and female) characters-or perhaps because of it?- Serious Men has won critical appreciation from a cross-section of readers and critics.

    At a time when a formidable body of Dalit literature writing by Dalits about Dalit lives-has created a distinct space for itself, how and why is it that a novel such as Serious Men, with its gleefully skewed portrayal of an angry Dalit man, manages to win such accolades? In American literature- and particularly in the case of African-American authors and character-these issues of representation have been debated for decades. But in India, the sustained refusal to address issues related to caste in everyday life- and the continued and unquestioned predominance of a Brahminical stranglehold over cultural production- have led us to a place where the non-Dalit portrayal of Dalits in literature, cinema and art remain the norm.

    The journey of modern Dalit literature has been a difficult one. But even though it has not necessarily enjoyed the support of numbers we must engage with what Dalits are writing- not simply for reasons of authenticity, or as a concession to identity politics, but simply because of the aesthetic value of this body of writing, and for the insights it offers into the human condition. In a society that is still largely unwilling to recognize Dalits as equal, rights-bearing human beings, in a society that is inherently indifferent to the everyday violence against Dalits, in a society unwilling to share social and cultural resources equitably with Dalits unless mandated by law (as seen in the anti-reservation discourse), Dalit literature has the potential to humanize non- Dalits and sensitise them to a world into which they have no insight. But before we can understand what Dalit literature is seeking to accomplish, we need first to come to terms with the stranglehold of non-Dalit representation of Dalits.

    Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, published 15 years ago, chronicles the travails of two Dalit characters- uncle Ishwar and nephew Omprakash- who migrate to Bombay and yet cannot escape brutality. While the presence of the novel is set at the time of the Emergency, Ishvar's father Dukhi belongs to the era of the anti-colonial nationalist movement. During one of Dukhi's visits
to the town, he chances upon a meeting of the Indian National Congress, where speakers spread the "Mahatma's message regarding the freedom struggle, the struggle for justice," and wiping out "the disease of untouchability, ravaging us for centuries, denying dignity to our fellow human beings."Neither in the 1940s, where the novel's past is set nor in the Emergency period of the 1970s- when the minds and bodies Ishvar and I+Omprakash, are savaged by the state- do we find any mention of a figure like BR Ambedhkar or of Dalit movements.

In his 'nationalist' understanding of modern Indian history, Mistry seems to have not veered too far from the road charted by predecessors like Mul Raj Anand and Premchand. Sixty years after Premchand, Mistry's literacy imagination seems stuck in the empathy- realism mode, trapping Dalits in abjection. Mistry happily continues the broad stereotype of the Dalit as a passive sufferer, without consciousness of caste politics.