Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo
The Beautiful and the Damned, by Siddhartha Deb
India's political and business elites have long harbored a desire for their country to become a great power. They cheered when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh finalized a nuclear deal with the United States in 2008. Indian elites saw the deal, which gave India access to nuclear technology despite its refusal to give up its nuclear weapons or sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, as a recognition of its growing influence and power. And Indian elites were also encouraged when U.S. President Barack Obama announced, during a 2010 visit to India, that the United States would support India's quest to gain permanent membership on the United Nations Security Council, which would put the country on an equal footing with its longtime rival, China. In recent years, such sentiments have also spread to large segments of the Indian middle class, which, owing to the country's remarkable economic growth in the past two decades, now numbers around 300 million. Nearly nine out of ten Indians say their country already is or will eventually be one of the most powerful nations in the world, an October 2010 Pew Global Attitudes survey revealed.
Symbols of India's newfound wealth and power abound. Last year, 55 Indians graced Forbes' list of the world's billionaires, up from 23 in 2006. In 2008, the Indian automobile company Tata Motors acquired Jaguar and Land Rover; last year, Harvard Business School broke ground on Tata Hall, a new academic center made possible by a gift of $50 million from the company's chair, Ratan Tata. And in 2009, a company run by the Indian billionaire Anil Ambani, a telecommunications and Bollywood baron, acquired a 50 percent stake in Steven Spielberg's production company, DreamWorks. Gaudy, gargantuan shopping malls proliferate in India's cities, and BMWs compete with auto-rickshaws on crowded Indian roads. Tom Cruise, eyeing the enormous Indian movie market, cast Anil Kapoor, a veteran Bollywood star, in the most recent Mission: Impossible sequel and spent a few weeks in the country to promote the film. "Now they are coming to us," one Indian tabloid gloated.
But even as Indian elites confidently predict their country's inevitable rise, it is not difficult to detect a distinct unease about the future, a fear that the promise of India's international ascendance might prove hollow. This anxiety stems from the tense duality that defines contemporary India, an influential democracy with a booming economy that is also home to more poor people than any other country in the world...
Of course, staggering poverty and crippling inequality at home do not necessarily prevent countries from trying to project their power abroad. When India won its independence, in 1947, it was even poorer than it is today. Yet Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's founding prime minister, sought to raise India's international profile, providing significant political support to independence movements in British colonies in Africa and Asia and helping found the Non-Aligned Movement. Throughout the Cold War, Indian leaders sought to use their country's victory over British colonialism to inspire other subject peoples in their own struggles for self-determination -- and, in the process, to gain more global influence than otherwise might have been possible for an impoverished country. In this way, India's Cold War-era foreign policies, although primarily concerned with national interests, contained an element of idealism, and the country's growing international profile during those early decades of independence served as a powerful symbol of freedom and autonomy in the Third World.
Over time, however, India has exchanged idealism for realism, as the country's leaders have gradually abandoned an anticolonial distrust of hegemony and embraced great-power ambitions of their own. Thus, although India has made admirable progress in many areas, it is unclear whether an ever-growing Indian role in global affairs symbolizes anything more than the country's expanding definition of its self-interest. It is therefore hard to avoid feeling a sense of ambivalence when considering the prospect of India's ascent, especially when one scrutinizes the poverty, corruption, and inequality that suffuse Indian life today -- as do two recent, revealing books: Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo, and The Beautiful and the Damned, by Siddhartha Deb...
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137530/basharat-peer/indias-broken-promise?cid=soc-facebook-at-review-india_s_broken_promise-043012
Showing posts with label Books and literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books and literature. Show all posts
Monday, 30 April 2012
In search of Sa'adat Hasan Manto
Every time young Sa'adat came down to Paproudi for his vacation, Ujagar Singh knew exactly what needed to be done. In the small, quiet village in Punjab's Samrala tehsil the friends had their own ritual. Grab some makki ki roti and sarson ka saag and meet at their regular hangout - the common well in fellow villager Kartar Singh's fields. Or as they fondly put it, "Kartaarey da khoo" . That was where they would bathe, eat and while away time playing football. Ujagar Singh admits his memory is rusty. He is, after all, close to a 100 years old. But when he talks about the little things he does remember, his heavily lined face further creases into a smile. "He (Manto) really liked playing football. He would get one himself. For all the years he was here, I never heard him utter a single swear word." His disjointed memories of the time he spent with his childhood friend are frequently punctuated with "Bahut hi changa banda si (he was a very fine man)."
As young kids playing in the wheat fields that surround Paproudi even today, Ujagar Singh says he never imagined his playmate Sa'adat Hasan Manto would some day become one of the greatest short story writers the Indian sub-continent had ever seen. Being unlettered, he has never read Manto. But he knows Manto was written about in the papers. He remembers nothing of the time when the writer was charged with obscenity and tried in court for six of his stories. "Maybe something like that happened. I don't know," Ujagar Singh says, the words tripping over each other as they come out of his mouth in a near-incomprehensible mumble.
In its absence, Ujagar Singh's memory mirrors that of Samrala. There is a vague sense of acknowledgement that a writer of renown once belonged to these parts. But it's easy to find vignettes of rustic Punjab in Manto's stories like 'Thanda Gosht' (Cold Meat). Gurbhajan Singh Gill, president of the Punjabi Sahit Akademi, calls Manto a "real son of the soil" . Manto's characters worked to shock and turn societal stereotypes on their heads. For example, Mozel, the Jewish woman who accepts, spurns and then dies for her Sikh admirer. Or Babu Gopi Nath, who does all he can to get a young prostituted woman married off to a rich man. Manto's accounts of the riots and violence that followed Partition are chilling yet remarkably sensitive at the same time. 'Khol Do' is one stand-out example that immediately comes to mind. 'Toba Tek Singh' , perhaps his most famous story, is a telling commentary on the madness of Partition.
Manto's treatment of sex and sexuality was something that earned him the ire of the British government as well as the rulers of Pakistan, where he had migrated to in the late 1940s. His openness and direct approach to the subject was taken for obscenity and perversion then. Today, though, he finds place even in the Delhi University syllabus, regarded as a man ahead of his times. Manto, however, did not stay in his village of birth for long. He studied in Amritsar and later moved to Bombay for work. But had Manto been around, he'd be happy to see that finally, after all these years, a small group of people are putting all their might to revive the writer in Samrala and neighbouring Ludhiana.
On May 13, two days after Manto's birth centenary , the Punjabi Lekhak Manch and the Punjabi Sahit Akademi have scheduled a seminar in Samrala , inviting the writer's three daughters from Pakistan. The Ludhiana chapter of Punjab University will also stage a play based on one of his short stories. In Malerkotla, a village about 40 km away from Samrala, an Urdu bi-monthly magazine 'Nazariya' plans to bring out a special issue dedicated to Manto. Advocate Daljeet Singh Shahi, who works in the Samrala civil court and is also president of the Punjabi Lekhak Manch, proudly points out that it's the same court where Manto's father served as subjudge years ago. A Punjabi short-story writer himself , Shahi is unhappy at the lack of recognition for Manto in Punjab today. "I feel people have forgotten him. There is very little interest in literature here," he says. Talking about the centenary celebration plans, he turns to two people waiting in his office and politely explains to them who exactly it is that is being discussed. The men have never heard the name Manto before.
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-04-29/special-report/31475556_1_toba-tek-singh-partition-obscenity
See also: Saadat Hassan Manto and the partition of India —Ishtiaq Ahmed
This year marks the centenary of one of the most remarkable Urdu short-story writers of the Indian subcontinent: Saadat Hassan Manto (May 11, 1912-January 18, 1955). His contemporary, Krishan Chander (1914-1977), himself a literary icon who some critics have described as the “the imam of the Urdu short-story” graciously wrote in his obituary on Manto that indeed he was the greatest short-story writer of his generation...I will end by narrating one of my other favourites. In his, ‘Siyah Hashiye’ (Black Borders), Manto depicts an excited pro-Pakistan mob that attacks the statue on the Lahore Mall Road of the great Hindu philanthropist of Punjab, Sir Ganga Ram. One of them blackens its face with tar. Another collects old shoes, strung into a garland, and is about to put it around the statue’s neck, when the police shows up and begins firing. The man who is about to put the garland of shoes around the statue’s neck is injured. He is sent to the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital for treatment.. (The writer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.)
As young kids playing in the wheat fields that surround Paproudi even today, Ujagar Singh says he never imagined his playmate Sa'adat Hasan Manto would some day become one of the greatest short story writers the Indian sub-continent had ever seen. Being unlettered, he has never read Manto. But he knows Manto was written about in the papers. He remembers nothing of the time when the writer was charged with obscenity and tried in court for six of his stories. "Maybe something like that happened. I don't know," Ujagar Singh says, the words tripping over each other as they come out of his mouth in a near-incomprehensible mumble.
In its absence, Ujagar Singh's memory mirrors that of Samrala. There is a vague sense of acknowledgement that a writer of renown once belonged to these parts. But it's easy to find vignettes of rustic Punjab in Manto's stories like 'Thanda Gosht' (Cold Meat). Gurbhajan Singh Gill, president of the Punjabi Sahit Akademi, calls Manto a "real son of the soil" . Manto's characters worked to shock and turn societal stereotypes on their heads. For example, Mozel, the Jewish woman who accepts, spurns and then dies for her Sikh admirer. Or Babu Gopi Nath, who does all he can to get a young prostituted woman married off to a rich man. Manto's accounts of the riots and violence that followed Partition are chilling yet remarkably sensitive at the same time. 'Khol Do' is one stand-out example that immediately comes to mind. 'Toba Tek Singh' , perhaps his most famous story, is a telling commentary on the madness of Partition.
Manto's treatment of sex and sexuality was something that earned him the ire of the British government as well as the rulers of Pakistan, where he had migrated to in the late 1940s. His openness and direct approach to the subject was taken for obscenity and perversion then. Today, though, he finds place even in the Delhi University syllabus, regarded as a man ahead of his times. Manto, however, did not stay in his village of birth for long. He studied in Amritsar and later moved to Bombay for work. But had Manto been around, he'd be happy to see that finally, after all these years, a small group of people are putting all their might to revive the writer in Samrala and neighbouring Ludhiana.
On May 13, two days after Manto's birth centenary , the Punjabi Lekhak Manch and the Punjabi Sahit Akademi have scheduled a seminar in Samrala , inviting the writer's three daughters from Pakistan. The Ludhiana chapter of Punjab University will also stage a play based on one of his short stories. In Malerkotla, a village about 40 km away from Samrala, an Urdu bi-monthly magazine 'Nazariya' plans to bring out a special issue dedicated to Manto. Advocate Daljeet Singh Shahi, who works in the Samrala civil court and is also president of the Punjabi Lekhak Manch, proudly points out that it's the same court where Manto's father served as subjudge years ago. A Punjabi short-story writer himself , Shahi is unhappy at the lack of recognition for Manto in Punjab today. "I feel people have forgotten him. There is very little interest in literature here," he says. Talking about the centenary celebration plans, he turns to two people waiting in his office and politely explains to them who exactly it is that is being discussed. The men have never heard the name Manto before.
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-04-29/special-report/31475556_1_toba-tek-singh-partition-obscenity
See also: Saadat Hassan Manto and the partition of India —Ishtiaq Ahmed
This year marks the centenary of one of the most remarkable Urdu short-story writers of the Indian subcontinent: Saadat Hassan Manto (May 11, 1912-January 18, 1955). His contemporary, Krishan Chander (1914-1977), himself a literary icon who some critics have described as the “the imam of the Urdu short-story” graciously wrote in his obituary on Manto that indeed he was the greatest short-story writer of his generation...I will end by narrating one of my other favourites. In his, ‘Siyah Hashiye’ (Black Borders), Manto depicts an excited pro-Pakistan mob that attacks the statue on the Lahore Mall Road of the great Hindu philanthropist of Punjab, Sir Ganga Ram. One of them blackens its face with tar. Another collects old shoes, strung into a garland, and is about to put it around the statue’s neck, when the police shows up and begins firing. The man who is about to put the garland of shoes around the statue’s neck is injured. He is sent to the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital for treatment.. (The writer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.)
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
Academic research on Rushdie's literary work sabotaged by Deoband Ulema
LUCKNOW April 24: Taking a strong exception to the UGC's decision to award post-doctoral fellowship on Salman Rushdie's writing, Darul Uloom Deoband has demanded "immediate remedial steps to correct the high impropriety". The Islamic seminary is apparently miffed by the topic - "Use of Magic and Realism in the major novels of Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth" - chosen by a scholar in the Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut.
"To glorify Rushdie is a an overt act of treachery and a government body like UGC should have used its imagination better. This step raises serious concerns about its style of functioning. Darul Uloom Deoband strongly condemns it," official spokesperson Ashraf Usmani said on Monday."Our stance on Rushdie has been clear. The author of 'The Satanic Verses' has blasphemed against Islam and hurt sentiments of devout Muslims all over the world," Usmani told TOI over phone. "Any attempt to glorify him or his writings would only lead to promotion and build up of his image. He deserves to be shunned. Moreover, 'The Satanic Verses' still carries a ban by Indian government and going by the law, he should be considered blacklisted. Meerut University and the UGC, who are apparently party in the grant of the fellowship, must cancel it with immediate effect," he said..
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-04-24/india/31392019_1_darul-uloom-deoband-salman-rushdie-satanic-verses
Deoband heat 'forces' university to scrap paper on controversial author Salman Rushdie:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2135170/Deoband-heat-forces-university-scrap-paper-controversial-author-Salman-Rushdie.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
Chaudhary Charan Singh University (CCSU) in Meerut has cancelled the post-doctoral fellowship of Prabha Parmar, who was awarded research work on the novels of three authors, including controversial writer Salman Rushdie. Darul Uloom Deoband had opposed any study on Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, which is banned in the country, though Parmer's ambit of research reportedly did not cover the novel.
But in an official communication dated April 23, 2012, sent to her, Prof. Arun Kumar, department of English, (CCSU), gave another reason for cancelling her fellowship: That she is on maternity leave and is yet to start the research work sanctioned by the UGC this January. 'This has reference to the UGC letter dated January 23, 2012, on the subject of the award for fellowship for the year 2011-2012 (Category OBC) for your topic Use of Magic Realism in the Major Novels of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth in the subject of English. 'You joined the department on February 13, 2012, and on the next day asked for maternity leave for three months till May 13, 2012,' the letter read. 'You have technically not started your research work, which was approved by the UGC on January 23, 2012.'Please be informed that the department of English will not be able to provide any facilities for your fellowship,' it stated.
Not ready to speak on the issue, Parmar merely confirmed the receipt of the letter on Wednesday. But a source close to her said that the department had not raised any objection before some members of the university tried to create a controversy. Ashraf Usmani, chairman of Darul Ifta, fatwa department of Darul Uloom, Deoband, had said on Monday they were preparing to oppose the fellowship. 'The CCSU had allowed a student to do research on a book (The Satanic Verses) which was banned in India. 'This means that the ban on the book is mere eyewash and the government supports a student to read it and do research on it,' he had said. Expressing his satisfaction over the fresh decision, Usmani said: 'They stand corrected. We are happy about it.'
***************************
NB: Over the past four months, the Deoband Ulema has contributed to the climate of intolerance and religious bigotry in India. First by opposing Rushdie's presence at the Jaipur Literature Festival, and now by sabotaging a perfectly legitimate subject for research. In the first instance they succeeded by riding on the backs of various hooligans disguised as 'Muslim leaders', and now by presenting themselves as the self-appointed representatives of 'hurt sentiment' - that tried and tested weapon of communal politicians of all colours. (Witness the hue and cry over AK Ramanujan's Many Ramayanas). They want Rushdies work to be excluded from bona-fide literary research, even if the research does not explicitly take up The Satanic Verses. In Jaipur, there were threats of violence - with talk of 'rivers of blood' etc. The Ulema ought to have condemned such statements in clear and explicit terms, but we did not hear of it. We only heard of their sentiments. After this precedent, the Deoband Ulema can continue dictating our research programmes indefinitely.
By any sensible standard of reasoning, to research something does not imply 'glorification'. If I study various versions of the Ramayana, this does not imply that I'm glorifying this or that version. If I study the bombardment of Hiroshima, this does not mean I approve of atomic warfare. The study of Mein Kampf does not imply an admiration of Adolf Hitler. If I read Golwalkar's or VD Savarkar's writings, it does not follow that I sympathise with the RSS. Studying Pol Pot does not make the researcher a proponent of genocide. The Deoband Ulema should reflect on the damage they are doing to the very basis of academic research by citing 'hurt sentiment' to oppose a legitimate literary research programme.
It's ironic that in India today we can study the ideas of mass murderers, Nazis, fascists, racists, imperialists, communalists etc etc., but Deoband will not let us study Rushdie. Wonderful! I suggest the Ulema examine the compatibility of their religious norms and sentiments with the brutal treatment of Asiya Bibi, a worker and mother of five children, condemned to hang on mere hearsay; and the acquittal of the men who assaulted Mukhtar Mai. The intellectuals of Deoband need to understand that by raising such issues repeatedly, they contribute to the fascist degeneration of the Indian polity - Dilip
See also: Communalism feeds on itself:
http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2012/01/communalism-feeds-on-itself.html
and: The purging of AK Ramanujan's Many Ramayanas:
http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2011/10/delhi-university-and-purging-of.html
"With force I have subdued the brains of the proud" - Epitaph on the tomb of Cardinal Saint Roberto Bellarmino, Cardinal-Inquisitor who ordered Galileo to abandon his ideas on heliocentrism in 1616.
NEWLY POSTED PRESS STATEMENT: "WE CONDEMN THE ATTEMPT OF BODIES LIKE DEOBAND TO ENCROACH ON OUR ACADEMIC SPACE" - 27 April 2012
This is yet another assault on the space of scholarship and free enquiry which represents the essential character of a university. In recent months there have been many instances of academic institutions succumbing to threats issued by religious and sectarian bodies and withdrawing texts and films or modifying syllabi or curricula to please them. The point at issue is not the controversial nature of the text, because freely debating such texts is the very purpose of intellectual inquiry. Rather, the crucial point is the climate of intimidation and the thinly-disguised threat of violence that informs the language of those making such demands. They constantly remind us that their sentiments are inflamed enough to spark off bloodshed. They crush the spirit of inquiry by intimidating those who disagree with them. They assume the fake title of representatives of this or that community to enforce their claims. And our spineless authorities allow them to do this with impunity. This time it is the Deoband ulema who have claimed yet another academic victim.
http://www.sacw.net/article2662.html
"To glorify Rushdie is a an overt act of treachery and a government body like UGC should have used its imagination better. This step raises serious concerns about its style of functioning. Darul Uloom Deoband strongly condemns it," official spokesperson Ashraf Usmani said on Monday."Our stance on Rushdie has been clear. The author of 'The Satanic Verses' has blasphemed against Islam and hurt sentiments of devout Muslims all over the world," Usmani told TOI over phone. "Any attempt to glorify him or his writings would only lead to promotion and build up of his image. He deserves to be shunned. Moreover, 'The Satanic Verses' still carries a ban by Indian government and going by the law, he should be considered blacklisted. Meerut University and the UGC, who are apparently party in the grant of the fellowship, must cancel it with immediate effect," he said..
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-04-24/india/31392019_1_darul-uloom-deoband-salman-rushdie-satanic-verses
Deoband heat 'forces' university to scrap paper on controversial author Salman Rushdie:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2135170/Deoband-heat-forces-university-scrap-paper-controversial-author-Salman-Rushdie.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
Chaudhary Charan Singh University (CCSU) in Meerut has cancelled the post-doctoral fellowship of Prabha Parmar, who was awarded research work on the novels of three authors, including controversial writer Salman Rushdie. Darul Uloom Deoband had opposed any study on Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, which is banned in the country, though Parmer's ambit of research reportedly did not cover the novel.
But in an official communication dated April 23, 2012, sent to her, Prof. Arun Kumar, department of English, (CCSU), gave another reason for cancelling her fellowship: That she is on maternity leave and is yet to start the research work sanctioned by the UGC this January. 'This has reference to the UGC letter dated January 23, 2012, on the subject of the award for fellowship for the year 2011-2012 (Category OBC) for your topic Use of Magic Realism in the Major Novels of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth in the subject of English. 'You joined the department on February 13, 2012, and on the next day asked for maternity leave for three months till May 13, 2012,' the letter read. 'You have technically not started your research work, which was approved by the UGC on January 23, 2012.'Please be informed that the department of English will not be able to provide any facilities for your fellowship,' it stated.
Not ready to speak on the issue, Parmar merely confirmed the receipt of the letter on Wednesday. But a source close to her said that the department had not raised any objection before some members of the university tried to create a controversy. Ashraf Usmani, chairman of Darul Ifta, fatwa department of Darul Uloom, Deoband, had said on Monday they were preparing to oppose the fellowship. 'The CCSU had allowed a student to do research on a book (The Satanic Verses) which was banned in India. 'This means that the ban on the book is mere eyewash and the government supports a student to read it and do research on it,' he had said. Expressing his satisfaction over the fresh decision, Usmani said: 'They stand corrected. We are happy about it.'
***************************
NB: Over the past four months, the Deoband Ulema has contributed to the climate of intolerance and religious bigotry in India. First by opposing Rushdie's presence at the Jaipur Literature Festival, and now by sabotaging a perfectly legitimate subject for research. In the first instance they succeeded by riding on the backs of various hooligans disguised as 'Muslim leaders', and now by presenting themselves as the self-appointed representatives of 'hurt sentiment' - that tried and tested weapon of communal politicians of all colours. (Witness the hue and cry over AK Ramanujan's Many Ramayanas). They want Rushdies work to be excluded from bona-fide literary research, even if the research does not explicitly take up The Satanic Verses. In Jaipur, there were threats of violence - with talk of 'rivers of blood' etc. The Ulema ought to have condemned such statements in clear and explicit terms, but we did not hear of it. We only heard of their sentiments. After this precedent, the Deoband Ulema can continue dictating our research programmes indefinitely.
By any sensible standard of reasoning, to research something does not imply 'glorification'. If I study various versions of the Ramayana, this does not imply that I'm glorifying this or that version. If I study the bombardment of Hiroshima, this does not mean I approve of atomic warfare. The study of Mein Kampf does not imply an admiration of Adolf Hitler. If I read Golwalkar's or VD Savarkar's writings, it does not follow that I sympathise with the RSS. Studying Pol Pot does not make the researcher a proponent of genocide. The Deoband Ulema should reflect on the damage they are doing to the very basis of academic research by citing 'hurt sentiment' to oppose a legitimate literary research programme.
It's ironic that in India today we can study the ideas of mass murderers, Nazis, fascists, racists, imperialists, communalists etc etc., but Deoband will not let us study Rushdie. Wonderful! I suggest the Ulema examine the compatibility of their religious norms and sentiments with the brutal treatment of Asiya Bibi, a worker and mother of five children, condemned to hang on mere hearsay; and the acquittal of the men who assaulted Mukhtar Mai. The intellectuals of Deoband need to understand that by raising such issues repeatedly, they contribute to the fascist degeneration of the Indian polity - Dilip
See also: Communalism feeds on itself:
http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2012/01/communalism-feeds-on-itself.html
and: The purging of AK Ramanujan's Many Ramayanas:
http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2011/10/delhi-university-and-purging-of.html
"With force I have subdued the brains of the proud" - Epitaph on the tomb of Cardinal Saint Roberto Bellarmino, Cardinal-Inquisitor who ordered Galileo to abandon his ideas on heliocentrism in 1616.
NEWLY POSTED PRESS STATEMENT: "WE CONDEMN THE ATTEMPT OF BODIES LIKE DEOBAND TO ENCROACH ON OUR ACADEMIC SPACE" - 27 April 2012
Resist the Climate of Intimidation in Academics
It is a matter of deep distress that a threat from Darul Uloom Deoband has forced Prabha Parmar , a research scholar at the Chaudhary Charan Singh University to change the topic of her post-doctoral research: Use of magic and realism in the major novels of Salman Rushdie,Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth. Taking strong exception to the UGC's decision to award a post-doctoral fellowship to the scholar on a topic that included Rushdie’s writings, Darul Uloom Deoband demanded “immediate remedial steps to correct the high impropriety.” Terming the award an act of ‘glorification’ of Salman Rushdie, the seminary asked for the writer to be blacklisted and for the award to be cancelled with immediate effect. The atmosphere of fear and intimidation created by this statement led Meerut University to cancel the fellowship. Later the scholar withdrew her research proposal.
We condemn the attempt of bodies like Deoband to encroach on our academic space. It is time for all Indian academicians and intellectuals who believe in the freedom of thought to firmly defend our right to free enquiry and the pursuit of knowledge. We appeal to Meerut University and the UGC to stand by the scholar and encourage her to pursue her research on a topic of her choice.
1. Aditya Nigam, CSDS
2. Amlan Dasgupta, Jadavpur Unv
3. Aniket Alam, Senior Assistant Editor, Economic and Political Weekly.
4. Anita Cherian
5. Apoorvanand , Professor, DU
6. Arma Ansari, ANHAD
7. Arshad Ajmal, Sahulat, delhi
8. Asha Bhagat
9. Ashok Vajpeyi, poet, writer
10. Biraj Patnaik, Right To Food campaign
11. Dhruva Narayan, Managing Editor, Daanish Books
12. Dilip Simeon
13. Furqan Qamar, VC Central Unv of Himachal Pradesh
14. Gauhar Raza, scientist, poet
15. Gautam Bhan
16. Harsh kapoor
17. Irfan Khalifa, television journalist
18. Ishwar Dost , Asst. Prof., CSSEIP, Goa University.
19. J Devika, Centre for development studies, Trivandrum, Kerala.
20. Jairus Banaji
21. Jamal Kidwai
22. Jyoti Punwani
23. Jyotirmay Sharma
24. Kausar Wizarat
25. Kavita Panjabi, Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla
26. Kavita Srivastava, PUCL National Secretary
27. Khairunnisa Pathan, Parwaaj
28. Khurshid Anwar
29. Mahmood Farooqui, Dastango
30. Mahtab Alam, civil rights activist and journalist
31. Manoj Mitta, Journalist
32. Mary E John,
33. Mehtab Alam
34. Moinak Biswas
35. Momin Latif
36. Mukul Sharma, Writer and Researcher
37. Musab Iqbal, Editor, newzfirst.com
38. Naseem Mansuri, Niswan
39. Naseem Shaikh, Niswan
40. Nasiruddin Haider Khan, Journalist
41. Naveen Kishore
42. Nayanjot Lahiri, professor, DU
43. Nilanjana Gupta, Professor of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
44. Nirantar, Resource Centre for Gender & Education
45. Nivedita Menon, JNU
46. Noorjahan Ansari, Niswan
47. Noorjahan Diwan, ANHAD
48. omair anas
,cwas/sis jnu
49. Parthasarthi Bahumik, Jadavpur Unv
50. Prof Rama Kant Agnihotri (Rtd., Univ of Delhi)
51. Purwa Bharadwaj
52. Ramchandra Guha
53. Rehana Qureshi, Nyayagrah
54. Rohan D'Souza
55. S.Irfan Habib, historian
56. Satya Shivaramn
57. Satish Deshpande, DSE, DU
58. Semeen Ali
59. Shabnam Hashmi, social activist, Anhad
60. Shakeel Shaikh, Ahmedabad
61. Shamina Diwan, Parwaaj
62. Sharifa Chhipa, Niswan
63. Sheba george, Sahr waru, Gujarat
64. Shivam vij, journalist, delhi
65. Shuddhabrata Sengupta, artist/writer
66. Sohail Hashmi, Writer, Film Makerli
67. Sucheta Bhattacharjee
68. Usman Shaikh, Nyayagrah
69. Waqar Qazi, Social Activist, Anhad, Gujarat
70. Zafar Syed, banker, Mumbai
Sunday, 22 April 2012
Book Review: Victor Serge; Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Victor Serge is one of the great men of the 20th century - and one of its great writers too. He was an anarchist, an agitator, a revolutionary, an exile, a historian of his times, as well as a brilliant novelist, and in Memoirs of a Revolutionary he devotes all his passion and genius to describing this extraordinary -and exemplary- career. Serge tells of his upbringing among exiles and conspirators, of his involvement with the notorious Bonnot Gang and his years in prison, of his role in the Russian Revolution, and of the Revolution’s collapse into despotism and terror. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, where he evaded the KGB and the Nazis before fleeing to Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary recounts a thrilling life on the front lines of history and includes vivid portraits not only of Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin but of countless other figures who struggled to remake the world.
Peter Sedgwick’s fine translation of Memoirs of a Revolutionary was abridged when first published in 1963. This is the first edition in English to present the entirety of Serge’s book.
More on Victor Serge (1890–1947): He was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-Tsarist exiles, impoverished intellectuals living “by chance” in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he participated in an anarcho-syndicalist uprising before leaving to join the Revolution in Russia. Detained for more than a year in a French concentration camp, Serge arrived in St. Petersburg early in 1919 and joined the Bolsheviks, serving in the press services of the Communist International. An outspoken critic of Stalin, Serge was expelled from the Party and arrested in 1929. Nonetheless, he managed to complete three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) and a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), published in Paris. Arrested again in Russia and deported to Central Asia in 1933, he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936 after international protests by militants and prominent writers like André Gide and Romain Rolland. Using his insider’s knowledge, Serge published a stream of impassioned, documented exposés of Stalin’s Moscow show trials and of machinations in Spain, which went largely unheeded. Stateless, penniless, hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947. His classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his great last novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev (both available as NYRB Classics), were written “for the desk drawer” and published posthumously.
http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/memoirs-of-a-revolutionary/
Peter Sedgwick’s fine translation of Memoirs of a Revolutionary was abridged when first published in 1963. This is the first edition in English to present the entirety of Serge’s book.
More on Victor Serge (1890–1947): He was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-Tsarist exiles, impoverished intellectuals living “by chance” in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he participated in an anarcho-syndicalist uprising before leaving to join the Revolution in Russia. Detained for more than a year in a French concentration camp, Serge arrived in St. Petersburg early in 1919 and joined the Bolsheviks, serving in the press services of the Communist International. An outspoken critic of Stalin, Serge was expelled from the Party and arrested in 1929. Nonetheless, he managed to complete three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) and a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), published in Paris. Arrested again in Russia and deported to Central Asia in 1933, he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936 after international protests by militants and prominent writers like André Gide and Romain Rolland. Using his insider’s knowledge, Serge published a stream of impassioned, documented exposés of Stalin’s Moscow show trials and of machinations in Spain, which went largely unheeded. Stateless, penniless, hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947. His classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his great last novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev (both available as NYRB Classics), were written “for the desk drawer” and published posthumously.
http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/memoirs-of-a-revolutionary/
Friday, 20 April 2012
Book Review: Gandhi through a Marxian lens
REVOLUTIONARY GANDHI By : Pannalal Dasgupta; Translated from Bengali by K. V. Subrahmonyan; Published by : Earthcare Books, Kolkata.
Written in Bengali in 1955 by Pannalal Dasgupta of the RCPI, an English version is only available now. KV Subrahmonyan has done a brilliant job in painstakingly translating 'Gandhi Gabeshana'
The book was originally written by Indian author and a top communist leader Pannalal Dasgupta in 1955 and the English version offers an insight into the thinking of Gandhi on socialism and how he thought it could help form a nation. “Revolutionary Gandhi” tells its readers of Gandhi’s firm belief that a thorough change in the socio-political environment must start with an individual, rather than with society as a whole. Gandhi’s approach to socialism was inspired by the spirit of putting oneself in order first. “Beginning with oneself was central to all his thoughts and actions. He also felt the need for a classless society and had no hesitation in calling himself a socialist or even a communist.” Pannalal argued that on hindsight, left-leaning Indian freedom fighters had failed to recognise Gandhi as a true revolutionary force. He even ventured to state that this was a historical blunder. Pannalal should know. After all, he was a revolutionary communist leader – widely known as the indomitable rebel – during the years India was fighting for her independence from the British. The 490-page “Revolutionary Gandhi” is not the ordinary biography or narrative-based book on Gandhi; rather it offers a valuable, penetrating vision into the thoughts of Gandhi while in the midst of preparing his non-violent campaign against the British. The book gives us a chance to understand and see for ourselves the inner character and underlying truth for all the actions taken by Gandhi, including his decision to embark on the non-violent movement, as well as on his fallouts with other nationalists at that time, including with his one-time ally and revered leader, Subash Chandra Bose.
Pannalal had done extensive research for this book, and had quoted various authoritative sources, including from Gandhi’s own writings, to establish a single thesis – to show Gandhi in a new light to the Indian leftists and to present the historical Gandhi to the so-called diehard Gandhians. For any reader of Gandhi, the two chapters on ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha (truth force) are well worth reading as the author has attempted – successfully, if I may add – to formulate Gandhi’s ideologies and definitions of these two concepts, which have now become universal catchphrases.
There are 18 chapters in “Revolutionary Gandhi”, including two which give excellent insight into Gandhi’s relationships with Indian freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose and the great Indian thinker Rabindranath Tagore.
Other interesting highlights include Gandhi’s views on Hindu-Muslim unity, education, women empowerment, religion, the Harijans and his experience with the truth. A chapter is also dedicated to Gandhi’s perception of individual life, where he expounds on his concept of socialism.
Translator Subrahmonyan (picture below) though not a Bengali, has succeeded in keeping Pannalal’s underlying message intact. “Shed your ego. That’s what Gandhi wanted to teach everyone. His sadhana throughout his life was to reduce himself to complete insignificance,” Subrahmonyan told this writer. “The formula for life is to equate oneself to zero,” he added. Gandhi himself had said: “Think of ‘I’ and ‘0’ in juxtaposition and you have the whole problem of life in two signs”. “He has left us with so many lessons to learn. This book will show us some of them,” said Subramonyan.
The story of the book: “Revolutionary Gandhi” is no ordinary book indeed. It would not be wrong to say that it has been a work-in-progress from 1954-1955 when the author was languishing in the Alipore Central Jail in Kolkata, serving a life sentence over a mishap which occurred in a fight against a factory management. Pannalal was then the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI) and had taken responsibility for the incident. He was later released when there was a change of the Bengal government. While he had worked on the manuscript in 1954, the first edition of the book in Bengali was only published in January 1986, followed by the second edition in December 1998. Pannalal had always harboured the intention to have his book translated into English and the opportunity for that arrived when he met the saintly Subrahmonyan in Haridwar in the early 1990s. However, since no copies were available then, translation work only started on a few years later. “Gandhian philosophy was his (Pannalal’s) every breath of life. He was political extremist turned holistic revolutionary. “I offered to translate ‘Gandhi Gabeshana’ into English. If no Bengali came forward to translate it, why not a Tamilian attempt?” quips Subrahmonyan in his note in the English version of the book. Subrahmonyan told this writer that he only translated three pages per day, calling it an arduous task that nevertheless deepened his understanding of Gandhi.
Pannalal passed away in West Bengal in 1999, at the age of 96, just before Subrahmonyan could complete his translating task. “Pannalal died when almost all chapters had been translated. I completed the translation three months after his death,” said Subrahmonyan, who is 80 now and has lived in ashrams in many parts of India for more than 40 years, including in the Himalayas.
Gentle and erudite in speech, he is conversant in seven languages and passable in another handful.
Having completed the translation, Subrahmonyan had to wait for another 11 years for a publisher to release the English version, in which time the translator had moved to the Ramana Maharishi Ashram in Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu. “In 2009, I met Ramanendu Chatterjee at this ashram through whom the initiative to publish the English translation through Earthcare Books was revived,” he explained. His translated version was eventually ready for sale in January 2011.
http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/leisure/2011/09/09/gandhi-through-a-marxian-lense/
About the Book: http://www.mkgandhi.org/nbook/revolutionary_gandhi.htm
Pannalal Dasgupta (aka Panna Babu) wrote the Bengali original of this outstanding, insightful book on Gandhi in 1954-55, when imprisoned in the Alipore Central Jail. An indomitable revolutionary himself, he realised that Gandhi was indeed an extraordinary revolutionary who sought a radical change in the human condition, which could not be brought about without causing a ferment in society. Gandhi was a dreamer, but also a man of action par excellence. His revolution was unique in that it had to be non-violent, and had, at every step, to be tested on ‘the touchstone of truth’. “Truth is God,” he declared. His enquiry pervaded all fields of life: food, agriculture, education, health, society, man-woman relationship, cottage industry, uplift of the downtrodden, religion, politics, struggle, and above all, human freedom. The book delves deep into Gandhiji’s personality to understand his spiritual quest, which he insisted was an intrinsic part of his political activity. In a strikingly original chapter, Panna Babu examines Gandhi’s views in the light of Marxism, and Marxian thought and action from the Gandhian perspective. He regrets that the Indian leftists failed to recognize Gandhi as a true revolutionary and an incomparable leader of the Indian masses. That was a historical blunder. Entire chapters are devoted to Gandhiji’s relationship with Rabindranath Tagore, and with Subhas Bose; as also to his views on Hindu-Muslim unity, constructive programme, economics and ethics, and trusteeship. In the end, the issue of Gandhism – and whether there is something as Gandhism – is incisively discussed, including the relevance of Gandhi in modern times. Doubtless, he raised many fundamental questions to which no ideology or ‘ism’ has yet been able to furnish a satisfactory answer.
About the Author: Pannalal Dasgupta (born in or around 1905) founded the 'Tagore Society for Rural Development' in 1969 with financial assistance from Jayaprakash Narayan. The activities of the Society are now spread over the states of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. In 1978, Panna Babu also revived 'Amar Kutir' in 1934 which was once a refuge for the activists of the freedom movement. In the fifties, he was greatly influenced by the non-violent revolutionary Gandhi. Ha was also keen on reviving the charkha or spinning wheel, in consonance with Gandhi's vision of self-reliant production by the masses.
K. V. Subrahmonyan (KVS), born in 1932 in Tamil Nadu, translated this book from Pannalal Dasgupta's original in Bengali, titled Gandhi Gabeshana. He is conversant with several Indian languages and a few European ones as well and has lived in ashrams and done social work for more than forty years. http://www.mkgandhi.org/nbook/revolutionary_gandhi.htm
Written in Bengali in 1955 by Pannalal Dasgupta of the RCPI, an English version is only available now. KV Subrahmonyan has done a brilliant job in painstakingly translating 'Gandhi Gabeshana'
The book was originally written by Indian author and a top communist leader Pannalal Dasgupta in 1955 and the English version offers an insight into the thinking of Gandhi on socialism and how he thought it could help form a nation. “Revolutionary Gandhi” tells its readers of Gandhi’s firm belief that a thorough change in the socio-political environment must start with an individual, rather than with society as a whole. Gandhi’s approach to socialism was inspired by the spirit of putting oneself in order first. “Beginning with oneself was central to all his thoughts and actions. He also felt the need for a classless society and had no hesitation in calling himself a socialist or even a communist.” Pannalal argued that on hindsight, left-leaning Indian freedom fighters had failed to recognise Gandhi as a true revolutionary force. He even ventured to state that this was a historical blunder. Pannalal should know. After all, he was a revolutionary communist leader – widely known as the indomitable rebel – during the years India was fighting for her independence from the British. The 490-page “Revolutionary Gandhi” is not the ordinary biography or narrative-based book on Gandhi; rather it offers a valuable, penetrating vision into the thoughts of Gandhi while in the midst of preparing his non-violent campaign against the British. The book gives us a chance to understand and see for ourselves the inner character and underlying truth for all the actions taken by Gandhi, including his decision to embark on the non-violent movement, as well as on his fallouts with other nationalists at that time, including with his one-time ally and revered leader, Subash Chandra Bose.
Pannalal had done extensive research for this book, and had quoted various authoritative sources, including from Gandhi’s own writings, to establish a single thesis – to show Gandhi in a new light to the Indian leftists and to present the historical Gandhi to the so-called diehard Gandhians. For any reader of Gandhi, the two chapters on ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha (truth force) are well worth reading as the author has attempted – successfully, if I may add – to formulate Gandhi’s ideologies and definitions of these two concepts, which have now become universal catchphrases.
There are 18 chapters in “Revolutionary Gandhi”, including two which give excellent insight into Gandhi’s relationships with Indian freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose and the great Indian thinker Rabindranath Tagore.
Other interesting highlights include Gandhi’s views on Hindu-Muslim unity, education, women empowerment, religion, the Harijans and his experience with the truth. A chapter is also dedicated to Gandhi’s perception of individual life, where he expounds on his concept of socialism.
Translator Subrahmonyan (picture below) though not a Bengali, has succeeded in keeping Pannalal’s underlying message intact. “Shed your ego. That’s what Gandhi wanted to teach everyone. His sadhana throughout his life was to reduce himself to complete insignificance,” Subrahmonyan told this writer. “The formula for life is to equate oneself to zero,” he added. Gandhi himself had said: “Think of ‘I’ and ‘0’ in juxtaposition and you have the whole problem of life in two signs”. “He has left us with so many lessons to learn. This book will show us some of them,” said Subramonyan.
The story of the book: “Revolutionary Gandhi” is no ordinary book indeed. It would not be wrong to say that it has been a work-in-progress from 1954-1955 when the author was languishing in the Alipore Central Jail in Kolkata, serving a life sentence over a mishap which occurred in a fight against a factory management. Pannalal was then the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI) and had taken responsibility for the incident. He was later released when there was a change of the Bengal government. While he had worked on the manuscript in 1954, the first edition of the book in Bengali was only published in January 1986, followed by the second edition in December 1998. Pannalal had always harboured the intention to have his book translated into English and the opportunity for that arrived when he met the saintly Subrahmonyan in Haridwar in the early 1990s. However, since no copies were available then, translation work only started on a few years later. “Gandhian philosophy was his (Pannalal’s) every breath of life. He was political extremist turned holistic revolutionary. “I offered to translate ‘Gandhi Gabeshana’ into English. If no Bengali came forward to translate it, why not a Tamilian attempt?” quips Subrahmonyan in his note in the English version of the book. Subrahmonyan told this writer that he only translated three pages per day, calling it an arduous task that nevertheless deepened his understanding of Gandhi.
Pannalal passed away in West Bengal in 1999, at the age of 96, just before Subrahmonyan could complete his translating task. “Pannalal died when almost all chapters had been translated. I completed the translation three months after his death,” said Subrahmonyan, who is 80 now and has lived in ashrams in many parts of India for more than 40 years, including in the Himalayas.
Gentle and erudite in speech, he is conversant in seven languages and passable in another handful.
Having completed the translation, Subrahmonyan had to wait for another 11 years for a publisher to release the English version, in which time the translator had moved to the Ramana Maharishi Ashram in Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu. “In 2009, I met Ramanendu Chatterjee at this ashram through whom the initiative to publish the English translation through Earthcare Books was revived,” he explained. His translated version was eventually ready for sale in January 2011.
http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/leisure/2011/09/09/gandhi-through-a-marxian-lense/
About the Book: http://www.mkgandhi.org/nbook/revolutionary_gandhi.htm
Pannalal Dasgupta (aka Panna Babu) wrote the Bengali original of this outstanding, insightful book on Gandhi in 1954-55, when imprisoned in the Alipore Central Jail. An indomitable revolutionary himself, he realised that Gandhi was indeed an extraordinary revolutionary who sought a radical change in the human condition, which could not be brought about without causing a ferment in society. Gandhi was a dreamer, but also a man of action par excellence. His revolution was unique in that it had to be non-violent, and had, at every step, to be tested on ‘the touchstone of truth’. “Truth is God,” he declared. His enquiry pervaded all fields of life: food, agriculture, education, health, society, man-woman relationship, cottage industry, uplift of the downtrodden, religion, politics, struggle, and above all, human freedom. The book delves deep into Gandhiji’s personality to understand his spiritual quest, which he insisted was an intrinsic part of his political activity. In a strikingly original chapter, Panna Babu examines Gandhi’s views in the light of Marxism, and Marxian thought and action from the Gandhian perspective. He regrets that the Indian leftists failed to recognize Gandhi as a true revolutionary and an incomparable leader of the Indian masses. That was a historical blunder. Entire chapters are devoted to Gandhiji’s relationship with Rabindranath Tagore, and with Subhas Bose; as also to his views on Hindu-Muslim unity, constructive programme, economics and ethics, and trusteeship. In the end, the issue of Gandhism – and whether there is something as Gandhism – is incisively discussed, including the relevance of Gandhi in modern times. Doubtless, he raised many fundamental questions to which no ideology or ‘ism’ has yet been able to furnish a satisfactory answer.
About the Author: Pannalal Dasgupta (born in or around 1905) founded the 'Tagore Society for Rural Development' in 1969 with financial assistance from Jayaprakash Narayan. The activities of the Society are now spread over the states of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. In 1978, Panna Babu also revived 'Amar Kutir' in 1934 which was once a refuge for the activists of the freedom movement. In the fifties, he was greatly influenced by the non-violent revolutionary Gandhi. Ha was also keen on reviving the charkha or spinning wheel, in consonance with Gandhi's vision of self-reliant production by the masses.
K. V. Subrahmonyan (KVS), born in 1932 in Tamil Nadu, translated this book from Pannalal Dasgupta's original in Bengali, titled Gandhi Gabeshana. He is conversant with several Indian languages and a few European ones as well and has lived in ashrams and done social work for more than forty years. http://www.mkgandhi.org/nbook/revolutionary_gandhi.htm
Tuesday, 17 April 2012
Sri Lanka, thirty one years after: Burning of the Jaffna Public Library, May 1981
Destroying a Symbol: the checkered History of Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Public Library
by Rebecca Knuth:
Despite (or, in some cases, because of) modern revulsion for book burning, the destruction of libraries in the last century has continued unabated. My new book, Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction probes the dynamics of library destruction and devotes significant attention to the disturbing phenomenon of ethnic biblioclasm.. Seeing themselves as defenders of a beleaguered people, extremist groups (such as religious nationalists), execute book and library destruction as a high-stake, high-affect tactic in battles over clashing belief systems. With their own community sanctioning their actions, perpetrators operate with relative impunity. Extremism, however, breeds extremism. In Sri Lanka, the destruction (by the Sinhalese) of the Jaffna Public Library, the Tamil minority’s primary cultural institution, led to full-scale civil war. The shattered library served and still serves as a symbol of violation and ethnic violence..
The Jaffna Public Library began as the private collection of the scholar K.M. Chellapha, who began lending books from his home in 1933. In 1934, a committee set up a formal library, with Chellapha as secretary. Initially, 1000 books, newspapers, and journals were kept in a single room, but soon the collection was shifted into a building on Jaffna’s main street and was opened to subscribers. The library was so popular that a cross-section of prominent members of the community began raising
funds to build a permanent, modern building. A noted architect designed the new building, and prominent Indian librarian S.R. Ranganathan served as an advisor to ensure that the library was held to international standards. Educated members of the community donated books. The main building opened in 1959. The children’s section and an auditorium were added later. The collection became well known internationally and was popular with Sinhalese and Tamil intellectuals, as well as the general public. It became the major repository for all known literary source materials of the Tamil people. By 1981, it had almost 100,000 Tamil books and rare, old manuscripts and documents, some written on dried palm leaves and stored in fragrant sandalwood boxes.
Burnt shell of the post event library
Some books were literally irreplaceable: the Yalpanam Vaipavama, a history of Jaffna, was the only existing copy. The library held miniature editions of the Ramayana epic, yellowing collections of extinct Tamil-language newspapers, and microfilms of important documents and records of the Morning Star, a journal published by missionaries in the early twentieth century (“Civilization and Culture…” 2003). It held historical scrolls, works on herbal medicine, and the manuscripts of prominent intellectuals, writers, and dramatists. Indeed, one could think of the Jaffna Library as a national library even though a Tamil nation had not yet come into being...
The Sinhalese claimed power in Sri Lanka on both demographic and ideological grounds. Their destiny as an ethnic group was inseparable from their religious beliefs. Though Buddhists are generally perceived as pacifists, the Sinhalese believed that their charge of preserving the “true” Theravada Buddhism justified violent measures. Post colonial antiWestern sentiments fueled Buddhist nationalist claims that the Sinhalese jatiya (race or nation) had been weakened by the influence of Christianity, modern lifestyles, and foreign commerce. Throughout the 1970s, ethnic conflict was aggravated by the breakdown of traditional norms and the population’s frustration with inflation and economic problems.
Authoritarian measures used to maintain control pitted the government not only against the Tamils but also against civil society, liberalism, and moderation in general. United National Party (UNP) politicians and merchants hired gangs of “thugs” (a term that was common parlance in Sri Lanka) and used state-owned buses to transport them to sites where they broke up political meetings and protests and harassed opposition parties, trade unions, workers, and public employees. The thugs threatened judges, artists, and writers. They beat up Sri Lanka’s best known dramatist Ediriweera Sarachchandra, who had satirized the decay of cultural values brought on by the government’s policies. No one was ever prosecuted or arrested for these attacks. Rather, paramilitaries and the police were empowered by legislation that outlawed “terrorism,” which was the word used to describe dissent in any form.
A renewed sense of national pride grew alongside of an opposition to pluralism. Buddhist nationalism was constructed in direct opposition to the Tamils who were viewed as as “parayo”--foreign inferiors who had to be controlled or cast out if catastrophic disorder was to be avoided. Buddhist extremists promoted the notion that Buddhism was under attack by the Hindu Tamils, who dominated the northern part of the country and the city of Jaffna. “Threat” was magnified by the existence of millions of Tamils in nearby India. The Sinhalese propaganda recast the Sri Lankan Tamils as longstanding enemies and the Sinhalese as chronically having had to fend off Tamil invasions. The violence that erupted was cyclical: when the Tamils balked at Sinhalese-only and other discriminatory policies, whether through peaceful protests or isolated terrorism, the Sinhalese government and people responded in a “mood of savage paranoia”.
The Sinhalese targeted the Tamils in violent riots in 1956, 1958, and 1977. These riots were similar to pogroms in that they were semi-organized and instigated as a frenzied response to atrocity stories and rumors that spread quickly and elicited first horror and then retribution. Systematic discrimination plus mob violence in turn radicalized many Tamils. During the 1970s, a budding culture of resistance, expressed first through literature, became increasingly politicized. In 1973, at its 12th Convention, the major Tamil political party, the Federal Party, invoked the recognized principle of the right to self-determination and resolved that the Tamils were fully qualified to be regarded as a separate Nation by virtue of their language, culture, history, and territory. In the second half of the 1970s, civil disobedience by Tamils increased. Youth groups embraced terrorism as a method of self-defense and viewed themselves as engaging in a holy war against the Sinhalese state. They confronted the government with guerilla tactics and through murder and robbery. They were not well organized, but the desire for a separate state had moved from the “lunatic fringes” into the center of Tamil political calculations and events were building to a showdown.
Flashpoint arrived in Jaffna in 1981 during long-awaited elections in which Tamils hoped to redress a lack of political representation. The Sinhalese UNP party, however, was determined to control the results and sent a contingent of police, paramilitaries, and thugs to intimidate Tamil voters. On Sunday, May 31, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) held a rally at which three Sinhalese policeman were shot, two fatally. That night the Sinhalese police and paramilitaries began a pogrom that lasted three days. The TULF headquarters was burned, as were the offices and press of the Tamil language newspaper. Statues of Tamil cultural and religious figures were defaced and demolished. A Hindu temple and over one hundred Tamil-owned shops and homes were looted and torched. Four Tamils were taken from their homes and killed. Late on the first night, eyewitnesses saw uniformed police and Sinhalese gang members set fire to the Jaffna Public Library. Two Sinhalese Cabinet members who watched it burn from the verandah of the nearby Jaffna Rest House claimed that it was “an ‘unfortunate incident,’ where a ‘few’ policeman ‘got drunk’ and went on a ‘looting spree,’ all on their own”.
National newspapers did not cover the event or the pogrom that accompanied it. Sinhalese politicians expressed no regrets and used subsequent parliamentary discussion to drive home the message sent by the library’s destruction: if the Tamils were unhappy, they should leave Sri Lanka and return to their homeland, India. The Tamils reacted to the loss of the building and collection with intense grief. Immediately afterwards, a journalist found a “heartbroken” local lecturer wandering through rooms thickly carpeted with half-burnt pages: He quoted him as saying “The Sinhalese were jealous of the library”. Twenty years later, the mayor of Jaffna, Nadarajah Raviraj, still grieved at the recollection of the flames he saw as a college student. For the Tamils, the devastated library became an icon of the “physical and imaginative violence” of Sinhalese extremists...
Read more: http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla72/papers/119-Knuth-en.pdf
Also see: Sri Lanka's historic Jaffna library 'vandalised' (November 2010):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11668352
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffna_Library
A comment by Rohini Hensman: An excellent article, I like it very much. There are just two nuances where I would have put things differently. The author says that 'one could think of the Jaffna library as a national library, even though a Tamil nation had not yet come into being.' But I think it WAS a national library in a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic Sri Lanka, and the loss of it was a loss for Sri Lankan culture as a whole. There is not the gulf between Sinhala and Tamil that has been created by nationalists on both sides. For example, of the major Tamil epics, several (I think five) are Buddhist ones, contrary to the usual view that all Buddhists are and always were Sinhala-speaking. Also I would not use 'the Sinhalese' in such a sweeping way ('the Sinhalese claimed power')- many Sinhalese did not see Sri Lanka as a Sinhalese nation!..
Books on the burning of books:
Rebecca Knuth (2003), Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. New York: Praeger.
Rebecca Knuth (2006), Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction. New York: Praeger.
by Rebecca Knuth:
Despite (or, in some cases, because of) modern revulsion for book burning, the destruction of libraries in the last century has continued unabated. My new book, Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction probes the dynamics of library destruction and devotes significant attention to the disturbing phenomenon of ethnic biblioclasm.. Seeing themselves as defenders of a beleaguered people, extremist groups (such as religious nationalists), execute book and library destruction as a high-stake, high-affect tactic in battles over clashing belief systems. With their own community sanctioning their actions, perpetrators operate with relative impunity. Extremism, however, breeds extremism. In Sri Lanka, the destruction (by the Sinhalese) of the Jaffna Public Library, the Tamil minority’s primary cultural institution, led to full-scale civil war. The shattered library served and still serves as a symbol of violation and ethnic violence..
The Jaffna Public Library began as the private collection of the scholar K.M. Chellapha, who began lending books from his home in 1933. In 1934, a committee set up a formal library, with Chellapha as secretary. Initially, 1000 books, newspapers, and journals were kept in a single room, but soon the collection was shifted into a building on Jaffna’s main street and was opened to subscribers. The library was so popular that a cross-section of prominent members of the community began raising
funds to build a permanent, modern building. A noted architect designed the new building, and prominent Indian librarian S.R. Ranganathan served as an advisor to ensure that the library was held to international standards. Educated members of the community donated books. The main building opened in 1959. The children’s section and an auditorium were added later. The collection became well known internationally and was popular with Sinhalese and Tamil intellectuals, as well as the general public. It became the major repository for all known literary source materials of the Tamil people. By 1981, it had almost 100,000 Tamil books and rare, old manuscripts and documents, some written on dried palm leaves and stored in fragrant sandalwood boxes.
Burnt shell of the post event library
Some books were literally irreplaceable: the Yalpanam Vaipavama, a history of Jaffna, was the only existing copy. The library held miniature editions of the Ramayana epic, yellowing collections of extinct Tamil-language newspapers, and microfilms of important documents and records of the Morning Star, a journal published by missionaries in the early twentieth century (“Civilization and Culture…” 2003). It held historical scrolls, works on herbal medicine, and the manuscripts of prominent intellectuals, writers, and dramatists. Indeed, one could think of the Jaffna Library as a national library even though a Tamil nation had not yet come into being...
The Sinhalese claimed power in Sri Lanka on both demographic and ideological grounds. Their destiny as an ethnic group was inseparable from their religious beliefs. Though Buddhists are generally perceived as pacifists, the Sinhalese believed that their charge of preserving the “true” Theravada Buddhism justified violent measures. Post colonial antiWestern sentiments fueled Buddhist nationalist claims that the Sinhalese jatiya (race or nation) had been weakened by the influence of Christianity, modern lifestyles, and foreign commerce. Throughout the 1970s, ethnic conflict was aggravated by the breakdown of traditional norms and the population’s frustration with inflation and economic problems.
Authoritarian measures used to maintain control pitted the government not only against the Tamils but also against civil society, liberalism, and moderation in general. United National Party (UNP) politicians and merchants hired gangs of “thugs” (a term that was common parlance in Sri Lanka) and used state-owned buses to transport them to sites where they broke up political meetings and protests and harassed opposition parties, trade unions, workers, and public employees. The thugs threatened judges, artists, and writers. They beat up Sri Lanka’s best known dramatist Ediriweera Sarachchandra, who had satirized the decay of cultural values brought on by the government’s policies. No one was ever prosecuted or arrested for these attacks. Rather, paramilitaries and the police were empowered by legislation that outlawed “terrorism,” which was the word used to describe dissent in any form.
A renewed sense of national pride grew alongside of an opposition to pluralism. Buddhist nationalism was constructed in direct opposition to the Tamils who were viewed as as “parayo”--foreign inferiors who had to be controlled or cast out if catastrophic disorder was to be avoided. Buddhist extremists promoted the notion that Buddhism was under attack by the Hindu Tamils, who dominated the northern part of the country and the city of Jaffna. “Threat” was magnified by the existence of millions of Tamils in nearby India. The Sinhalese propaganda recast the Sri Lankan Tamils as longstanding enemies and the Sinhalese as chronically having had to fend off Tamil invasions. The violence that erupted was cyclical: when the Tamils balked at Sinhalese-only and other discriminatory policies, whether through peaceful protests or isolated terrorism, the Sinhalese government and people responded in a “mood of savage paranoia”.
The Sinhalese targeted the Tamils in violent riots in 1956, 1958, and 1977. These riots were similar to pogroms in that they were semi-organized and instigated as a frenzied response to atrocity stories and rumors that spread quickly and elicited first horror and then retribution. Systematic discrimination plus mob violence in turn radicalized many Tamils. During the 1970s, a budding culture of resistance, expressed first through literature, became increasingly politicized. In 1973, at its 12th Convention, the major Tamil political party, the Federal Party, invoked the recognized principle of the right to self-determination and resolved that the Tamils were fully qualified to be regarded as a separate Nation by virtue of their language, culture, history, and territory. In the second half of the 1970s, civil disobedience by Tamils increased. Youth groups embraced terrorism as a method of self-defense and viewed themselves as engaging in a holy war against the Sinhalese state. They confronted the government with guerilla tactics and through murder and robbery. They were not well organized, but the desire for a separate state had moved from the “lunatic fringes” into the center of Tamil political calculations and events were building to a showdown.
Flashpoint arrived in Jaffna in 1981 during long-awaited elections in which Tamils hoped to redress a lack of political representation. The Sinhalese UNP party, however, was determined to control the results and sent a contingent of police, paramilitaries, and thugs to intimidate Tamil voters. On Sunday, May 31, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) held a rally at which three Sinhalese policeman were shot, two fatally. That night the Sinhalese police and paramilitaries began a pogrom that lasted three days. The TULF headquarters was burned, as were the offices and press of the Tamil language newspaper. Statues of Tamil cultural and religious figures were defaced and demolished. A Hindu temple and over one hundred Tamil-owned shops and homes were looted and torched. Four Tamils were taken from their homes and killed. Late on the first night, eyewitnesses saw uniformed police and Sinhalese gang members set fire to the Jaffna Public Library. Two Sinhalese Cabinet members who watched it burn from the verandah of the nearby Jaffna Rest House claimed that it was “an ‘unfortunate incident,’ where a ‘few’ policeman ‘got drunk’ and went on a ‘looting spree,’ all on their own”.
National newspapers did not cover the event or the pogrom that accompanied it. Sinhalese politicians expressed no regrets and used subsequent parliamentary discussion to drive home the message sent by the library’s destruction: if the Tamils were unhappy, they should leave Sri Lanka and return to their homeland, India. The Tamils reacted to the loss of the building and collection with intense grief. Immediately afterwards, a journalist found a “heartbroken” local lecturer wandering through rooms thickly carpeted with half-burnt pages: He quoted him as saying “The Sinhalese were jealous of the library”. Twenty years later, the mayor of Jaffna, Nadarajah Raviraj, still grieved at the recollection of the flames he saw as a college student. For the Tamils, the devastated library became an icon of the “physical and imaginative violence” of Sinhalese extremists...
Read more: http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla72/papers/119-Knuth-en.pdf
Also see: Sri Lanka's historic Jaffna library 'vandalised' (November 2010):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11668352
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffna_Library
A comment by Rohini Hensman: An excellent article, I like it very much. There are just two nuances where I would have put things differently. The author says that 'one could think of the Jaffna library as a national library, even though a Tamil nation had not yet come into being.' But I think it WAS a national library in a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic Sri Lanka, and the loss of it was a loss for Sri Lankan culture as a whole. There is not the gulf between Sinhala and Tamil that has been created by nationalists on both sides. For example, of the major Tamil epics, several (I think five) are Buddhist ones, contrary to the usual view that all Buddhists are and always were Sinhala-speaking. Also I would not use 'the Sinhalese' in such a sweeping way ('the Sinhalese claimed power')- many Sinhalese did not see Sri Lanka as a Sinhalese nation!..
Books on the burning of books:
Rebecca Knuth (2003), Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. New York: Praeger.
Rebecca Knuth (2006), Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction. New York: Praeger.
Tuesday, 10 April 2012
Book review: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain
The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain
By Paul Preston
The young Jesuit was an idealist. A slim and bespectacled student of philosophy, Father Fernando Huidobro Polanco dreamed of the redemption of Spain from the evils of its secular, redistributive Republic. A supporter of the military coup by nationalist generals in July 1936, he discounted stories of mass murder of Spanish civilians by the rebels. But knowing that war tries the conscience, he nevertheless wanted to offer pastoral care to the rebel soldiers. When he arrived on the battlefield as a Roman Catholic chaplain that September, he was confronted by two surprising realities. First, many of the soldiers fighting under the banner of Spanish nationalism against the Republic were Muslims, mercenaries from Spanish Morocco. Second, Christian soldiers were little interested in the application of ethics to their deeds. Father Fernando quickly realized that he had been wrong about the honorable behavior of the rebels. The war that he saw, as he courageously wrote to the rebel commander General Francisco Franco, was “without prisoners or wounded,” because they were murdered by nationalist soldiers, along with civilians seen as supporters of the Republic. In April 1937, as Paul Preston records in this breathtaking history, Father Fernando was shot in the back by his own men.
This is but one of the two hundred thousand or so murders of the Spanish Civil War, many of which Preston records at this or greater level of detail. His book is macro-history by way of micro-history, assembling local stories into an overwhelming panorama of a tortured Spain. Reading this study is like running your palms along the walls of the Toledo Cathedral on a dark night, slowly acquiring painful impressions until a sense of dark structure emerges. You have the sense, though Preston never quite raises the issue directly, that something must have been amiss in the Roman Catholic Church. Somewhere beneath his account of sins by Roman Catholics against Roman Catholics, underground like the remains of a mosque beneath an Iberian cathedral, is a further history of colonized Muslims.
What Preston knows about the years of civil war, 1936–1939, is astounding, bespeaking his own formidable record as a historian of twentieth-century Spain, but also the work of Spanish historians who are restoring knowledge of a period that had been protected by a double taboo. After Franco’s victory and the destruction of the Republic in 1939, his dictatorship taught its own self-justifying history for two generations; and after his death in 1975 and the general amnesty of 1977, a consensus prevailed in newly democratic Spain that it was best to delay a historical reckoning until democracy seemed solidly rooted. But that moment finally arrived, and Preston’s work is a powerful intervention in a Spanish discussion. Its significance transcends the events it brings to light, and suggests some basic re-evaluations of recent European history..
That Franco, Hitler, and Stalin all undertook quite similar policies designed to destroy physically an entire political elite in 1939 suggests not only the cruelty of the late 1930s, but also a broader trend in twentieth-century European history. All three regimes, for all their significant ideological differences, were examples of the arrival of neocolonial practices to Europe itself. The Soviets self-colonized (Stalin’s expression) by collectivizing agriculture in order to build industry; the Germans wanted to colonize eastern Europe to build an agrarian paradise for the Aryan masters; Franco brought colonial troops from Africa in order to restore a traditional agrarian order and oppress an orientalized peasantry. All three of these approaches were ideological alternatives to land reform under democratic conditions..
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/102134/spanish-holocaust-francisco-franco?page=0,0
By Paul Preston
The young Jesuit was an idealist. A slim and bespectacled student of philosophy, Father Fernando Huidobro Polanco dreamed of the redemption of Spain from the evils of its secular, redistributive Republic. A supporter of the military coup by nationalist generals in July 1936, he discounted stories of mass murder of Spanish civilians by the rebels. But knowing that war tries the conscience, he nevertheless wanted to offer pastoral care to the rebel soldiers. When he arrived on the battlefield as a Roman Catholic chaplain that September, he was confronted by two surprising realities. First, many of the soldiers fighting under the banner of Spanish nationalism against the Republic were Muslims, mercenaries from Spanish Morocco. Second, Christian soldiers were little interested in the application of ethics to their deeds. Father Fernando quickly realized that he had been wrong about the honorable behavior of the rebels. The war that he saw, as he courageously wrote to the rebel commander General Francisco Franco, was “without prisoners or wounded,” because they were murdered by nationalist soldiers, along with civilians seen as supporters of the Republic. In April 1937, as Paul Preston records in this breathtaking history, Father Fernando was shot in the back by his own men.
This is but one of the two hundred thousand or so murders of the Spanish Civil War, many of which Preston records at this or greater level of detail. His book is macro-history by way of micro-history, assembling local stories into an overwhelming panorama of a tortured Spain. Reading this study is like running your palms along the walls of the Toledo Cathedral on a dark night, slowly acquiring painful impressions until a sense of dark structure emerges. You have the sense, though Preston never quite raises the issue directly, that something must have been amiss in the Roman Catholic Church. Somewhere beneath his account of sins by Roman Catholics against Roman Catholics, underground like the remains of a mosque beneath an Iberian cathedral, is a further history of colonized Muslims.
What Preston knows about the years of civil war, 1936–1939, is astounding, bespeaking his own formidable record as a historian of twentieth-century Spain, but also the work of Spanish historians who are restoring knowledge of a period that had been protected by a double taboo. After Franco’s victory and the destruction of the Republic in 1939, his dictatorship taught its own self-justifying history for two generations; and after his death in 1975 and the general amnesty of 1977, a consensus prevailed in newly democratic Spain that it was best to delay a historical reckoning until democracy seemed solidly rooted. But that moment finally arrived, and Preston’s work is a powerful intervention in a Spanish discussion. Its significance transcends the events it brings to light, and suggests some basic re-evaluations of recent European history..
That Franco, Hitler, and Stalin all undertook quite similar policies designed to destroy physically an entire political elite in 1939 suggests not only the cruelty of the late 1930s, but also a broader trend in twentieth-century European history. All three regimes, for all their significant ideological differences, were examples of the arrival of neocolonial practices to Europe itself. The Soviets self-colonized (Stalin’s expression) by collectivizing agriculture in order to build industry; the Germans wanted to colonize eastern Europe to build an agrarian paradise for the Aryan masters; Franco brought colonial troops from Africa in order to restore a traditional agrarian order and oppress an orientalized peasantry. All three of these approaches were ideological alternatives to land reform under democratic conditions..
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/102134/spanish-holocaust-francisco-franco?page=0,0
Monday, 9 April 2012
Twenty years after - the destruction of books in Sarajevo, 1992
Approximately 1,200,000 book items and 600 sets of periodicals were destroyed... the Nazis burned about twenty million books. But in about 45 different places. August 27, 1992 in Sarajevo may have been the biggest book burning in history. In one day, and one night: a million and a quarter books...
April 22, 1992. Again the daily routine of bombardment all across the city. At about 9:30 p.m., an 82mm mortar shell explodes in our garden, shattering the windows of the living room where we sit. Tiny particles of glass fill the air. We feel a warm blast, and smell the intense smell of explosives and melted glass. Are we still alive? For a moment, which seems to last about an hour, we do not know...Then yes. We have survived. The next morning we notice that the blast had knocked a special book off its shelf: the letters of 1926 between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer Maria Rilke. It is the first book I ever gave to my own Marina. Picking it up from the floor, we are terrified to find a large piece of shrapnel embedded in the cover. And yet, we are grateful, because a kind of miracle has occurred. From this morning on, we call this collection of poets’ letters The Book That Saved Our Lives.
Kemal Bakaršić (d. 2006) stands in the ruins of the once fabulous National Library
May 17, 1992. The aggressors have deliberately destroyed the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo. The loss cannot be measured or ever repaired. In less than two hours, 5,000 unique manuscripts, Turkish, Persian and Arabic, over a hundred plat books from Ottoman times (books that can no longer show that Slavs professing Islam have lived in Bosnia for many centuries), other records of the Ottoman rule numbering some 200,000 pages, 300 microfilm files of Bosnian writings from other manuscript libraries, the 10,000 volumes of the Institute's research library, and 300 sets of periodicals ... All lost in flame.
I hate to go on with this, with this bibliometric accounting of the destruction of two years of terrorism in the Sarajevo ghetto. I hate myself, and deeply regret that the figures are not part of a program of recovery. They are, rather, merely history. On August 27, 1992, in the early morning, the National Library was deliberately attacked and burned. Twenty-five mortar shells struck the building, launched from four positions in the surrounding hills. In support of the attack, forty shells were dropped on adjacent streets, preventing the fire brigade from coming into action. The odd thing about this supplementary attack is that the aggressors had cut off the water to the district before the attack, so there was no need to bomb the fire brigade. But they did it anyway.
The attack lasted less than half an hour. The fire lasted into the next day. The sun was obscured by the smoke of books, and all over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of grey ashe, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and grey negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand. Approximately 1,200,000 book items and 600 sets of periodicals were destroyed. Administrative documents and the card catalog, computer equipment, microfilm and photograph laboratories, the rare book and other special collections, and the university library, which was housed in the same building.
It seems the Nazis burned about twenty million books. But not in one place (rather, in about 45 different places). August 27, 1992 in Sarajevo, then, may have been the biggest book burning in history. In one day, and one night: a million and a quarter books. So. We have to deal with these criminals. I don’t know what the best term is. “Aggressors?” But I think the aim of this kind of aggression, against museums, against libraries, is to erase our remembrance of who we are. Why else would someone want to burn books? Simply to create the situation where the people of a society have no memory of their past...
Read more: http://www.newcombat.net/article_thelibraries.html
About The New Combat: COMBAT was a French newspaper first published underground
by the resistance network Combat during the Nazi occupation. Albert Camus was the chief editor from late 1943 until the newspaper was sold in 1947.
Also see: Burning of Jaffna library, May 31, 1981 (At the time of its destruction, the library was one of the biggest in Asia, containing over 97,000 books and manuscripts):
http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2012/04/sri-lanka-thirty-one-years-after.html
April 22, 1992. Again the daily routine of bombardment all across the city. At about 9:30 p.m., an 82mm mortar shell explodes in our garden, shattering the windows of the living room where we sit. Tiny particles of glass fill the air. We feel a warm blast, and smell the intense smell of explosives and melted glass. Are we still alive? For a moment, which seems to last about an hour, we do not know...Then yes. We have survived. The next morning we notice that the blast had knocked a special book off its shelf: the letters of 1926 between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer Maria Rilke. It is the first book I ever gave to my own Marina. Picking it up from the floor, we are terrified to find a large piece of shrapnel embedded in the cover. And yet, we are grateful, because a kind of miracle has occurred. From this morning on, we call this collection of poets’ letters The Book That Saved Our Lives.
Kemal Bakaršić (d. 2006) stands in the ruins of the once fabulous National Library
May 17, 1992. The aggressors have deliberately destroyed the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo. The loss cannot be measured or ever repaired. In less than two hours, 5,000 unique manuscripts, Turkish, Persian and Arabic, over a hundred plat books from Ottoman times (books that can no longer show that Slavs professing Islam have lived in Bosnia for many centuries), other records of the Ottoman rule numbering some 200,000 pages, 300 microfilm files of Bosnian writings from other manuscript libraries, the 10,000 volumes of the Institute's research library, and 300 sets of periodicals ... All lost in flame.
I hate to go on with this, with this bibliometric accounting of the destruction of two years of terrorism in the Sarajevo ghetto. I hate myself, and deeply regret that the figures are not part of a program of recovery. They are, rather, merely history. On August 27, 1992, in the early morning, the National Library was deliberately attacked and burned. Twenty-five mortar shells struck the building, launched from four positions in the surrounding hills. In support of the attack, forty shells were dropped on adjacent streets, preventing the fire brigade from coming into action. The odd thing about this supplementary attack is that the aggressors had cut off the water to the district before the attack, so there was no need to bomb the fire brigade. But they did it anyway.
The attack lasted less than half an hour. The fire lasted into the next day. The sun was obscured by the smoke of books, and all over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of grey ashe, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and grey negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand. Approximately 1,200,000 book items and 600 sets of periodicals were destroyed. Administrative documents and the card catalog, computer equipment, microfilm and photograph laboratories, the rare book and other special collections, and the university library, which was housed in the same building.
It seems the Nazis burned about twenty million books. But not in one place (rather, in about 45 different places). August 27, 1992 in Sarajevo, then, may have been the biggest book burning in history. In one day, and one night: a million and a quarter books. So. We have to deal with these criminals. I don’t know what the best term is. “Aggressors?” But I think the aim of this kind of aggression, against museums, against libraries, is to erase our remembrance of who we are. Why else would someone want to burn books? Simply to create the situation where the people of a society have no memory of their past...
Read more: http://www.newcombat.net/article_thelibraries.html
About The New Combat: COMBAT was a French newspaper first published underground
by the resistance network Combat during the Nazi occupation. Albert Camus was the chief editor from late 1943 until the newspaper was sold in 1947.
Also see: Burning of Jaffna library, May 31, 1981 (At the time of its destruction, the library was one of the biggest in Asia, containing over 97,000 books and manuscripts):
http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2012/04/sri-lanka-thirty-one-years-after.html
Sunday, 1 April 2012
Book Review: A Concentration Camp Diary
David Koker’s fate was in many ways no different from that of the nearly 6 million other Jews who died in the Holocaust. The eldest son of an Amsterdam jeweler, he was arrested by Dutch police in February 1943 and transported to Vught, a concentration camp built by the Nazis in the southern Netherlands. After being shuffled between other camps, he died on the way to Dachau in early 1945, where he was buried in a mass grave at the age of 23.
Before he died, however, Koker authored what may be the most extraordinary diary ever written inside a concentration camp. “In my opinion, it’s considerably more interesting than Anne Frank’s diary,” said Michiel Horn, a historian and the book’s translator. At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943-1944, was first published in Dutch in 1977 as Diary Written in Vught. Despite immediately being recognized as a classic in the Netherlands, it has never seen publication in English, until now.
David Koker
Part of what makes At the Edge of the Abyss so astonishing is that it survived at all. As the historian Robert Jan van Pelt writes in the book’s introduction, “While the number of postwar memoirs written by Holocaust survivors is enormous, and the number of diaries and notebooks written during the Holocaust by Jews while they were at home, or in a ghetto, or in hiding is substantial, the number of testimonies that were written in the inner circles of hell, in the German concentration camps, and that survived the war is small.” Those few that do exist are often fragmentary, and nearly all lack Koker’s extraordinary powers of observation and analysis.
Part of what makes At the Edge of the Abyss so astonishing is that it survived at all. As the historian Robert Jan van Pelt writes in the book’s introduction, “While the number of postwar memoirs written by Holocaust survivors is enormous, and the number of diaries and notebooks written during the Holocaust by Jews while they were at home, or in a ghetto, or in hiding is substantial, the number of testimonies that were written in the inner circles of hell, in the German concentration camps, and that survived the war is small.” Those few that do exist are often fragmentary, and nearly all lack Koker’s extraordinary powers of observation and analysis.
Koker began his diary on Feb. 12, 1943, the day after he was arrested along with his parents and his younger brother. A published poet and budding intellectual at the time of his capture, he insisted on diarizing for nearly an entire year. As the teacher of the many children interned in Vught, he ingratiated himself with the chief camp clerk and his wife, which provided him with a relatively privileged position. In addition to keeping a diary, he was also able to write and receive letters, some of which are excerpted in the book.
In January of 1944, one of the civilian employees of a corporation that operated a workshop in Vught smuggled Koker’s diary out of the camp and gave it to his best friend, Karel van het Reve, who then gave it to David’s younger brother Max, who survived Auschwitz and received it upon his return to Amsterdam after the war. It was passed on to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, where an employee transcribed it.
Max was reluctant to publish the diary for fear of its impact on his mother, who also survived Auschwitz but never emotionally recovered from the death of her husband and son. Still, David’s former high-school teacher, Prof. Jacob Presser, saw its value and quoted from it extensively in his history of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, published in 1965. Finally, Reve, who had become a famous Dutch intellectual by the mid-1960s, published the diary with just a few notes and an introduction.
Diary Written in Vught was instantly appraised as being of enormous value. “A single book can earn a writer a permanent place in literature, but to do that it has to be exceptional,” one critic wrote. “I do not think that, after reading the book, anyone will dispute that Diary Written in Vught fulfills that condition.” A popular Dutch public television show focused an episode on David, following Max, Karel, and others as they visited Vught, with readings from the diaries interspersed throughout. The book went through two printings within its first year of publication, appeared in magazine format for high-school students in 1985, and in an expanded edition with an epilogue by Max, in 1993. Determined to see an English translation of the book, Max approached a contact at the Anne Frank House, who put him in touch with Jan van Pelt, who in turn approached Northwestern University Press.
Three things mark At the Edge of the Abyss as an utterly distinctive and unique work of Holocaust literature that must be read now that an English-language translation exists. First, the insider account of a camp; second, Koker’s literary and analytic abilities; and third, the only first-person report of an encounter between a Jew and Heinrich Himmler, head Nazi and overseer of all the camps. On Feb. 4, 1944, Koker records that on the previous day he had looked directly at the man responsible for the Final Solution. The haunting entry reads as follows:
"A slight, insignificant-looking little man, with a rather good-humored face. High peaked cap, mustache, and small spectacles. I think: If you wanted to trace back all the misery and horror to just one person, it would have to be him. Around him a lot of fellows with weary faces. Very big, heavily dressed men, they swerve along whichever way he turns, like a swarm of flies, changing places among themselves (they don’t stand still for a moment) and moving like a single whole. It makes a fatally alarming impression. They look everywhere without finding anything to focus on."
What makes this passage remarkable is not just the fact of the encounter but Koker’s careful, emotionally attuned attention to detail. Koker notices not just Himmler but the deference of his supplicants. He observes with nonchalance, as if he were encountering not a genocidal murderer—and the person who keeps Koker in a concentration camp—but an ordinary man on the street.
Tuesday, 27 March 2012
Book Review: Albert Camus, the Guillotine’s Relentless Foe
“I have always held the death sentence in horror and judged that, at least as an individual, I couldn’t participate in it, even by abstention. That’s all. ."
A man woke before dawn, dressed quietly so as not to disturb his wife, and rode into town to watch a man be put to death. It was neither fascination nor bloodlust that pushed him to attend the public execution but a sense of outraged justice: the condemned man had, in a murderous frenzy, bludgeoned to death not just a husband and wife on their farm but their children too. When the man returned home after the execution, he rushed past his wife, vomited in the bathroom and collapsed in bed. Until the end of his life he refused to speak about what he saw that day.
A man woke before dawn, dressed quietly so as not to disturb his wife, and rode into town to watch a man be put to death. It was neither fascination nor bloodlust that pushed him to attend the public execution but a sense of outraged justice: the condemned man had, in a murderous frenzy, bludgeoned to death not just a husband and wife on their farm but their children too. When the man returned home after the execution, he rushed past his wife, vomited in the bathroom and collapsed in bed. Until the end of his life he refused to speak about what he saw that day.
Readers of Albert Camus will recognize this story, which was about his father, Lucien Camus. It surfaces intact in his first and last novels, The Outsider and The First Man, and in his long essay Reflections on the Guillotine, and it floats to the surface of The Plague. This story — one of the few Camus’ mother was able to tell the son who never knew his father — infuses the near entirety of Camus’ writings. For Camus was driven by the same sense of outraged justice as his father.
In Albert Camus contre la peine de mort by Eve Morisi, (Gallimard, Paris, 2011) a stunning collection of extracts from Camus’ fiction and non-fiction, notebooks and letters (many never before published), Eve Morisi has performed an invaluable service. Through her sensitive pairing of fictional and non-fictional works, she reminds us why Camus was one of the most influential and consistent moral voices of the 20th century. And why he remains relevant for our own century.
After the second world war Camus became France’s most eloquent voice of the Resistance, and spoke out on behalf of condemned political prisoners across the world, protesting against (in Morisi’s words) the “death-centred state in all of its guises”. The letters in this volume trace Camus’ interventions for political prisoners in Franco’s Spain and Stalin’s Russia, eastern Europe, Iran, Vietnam and Greece. Throughout, the book underscores his unflagging insistence on moral candor and coherence.
One particularly revealing episode, involving his role in the épuration(purge) in liberated France, shows how Camus publicly revealed his own change of heart... Read more:
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