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Sat Oct 26 23:38:32 IST 2002
Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re:Harsh Kapoor /Redress Alienation in Gujarat Now (Farah Naqvi)
> (Dr. Reyhan Chaudhuri) 2. Riotous Sentimentalism
> (=?iso-8859-1?q?pratap=20pandey?=)
>
> --__--__--
>
> Message: 1
> From: "Dr. Reyhan Chaudhuri" <reyhanchaudhuri at eth.net>
>
> IMPLOSION
> Gujarat burnt
> but were refugees really retrieved ?
> Can State Presiders & prime poets be believed
> As salvage offers and camp closures
> are indefinitely spurned.
>
> Rather than raise a stink
> One can only think ,
> of one's own skin and ofcourse the kin.
> Not to forget above all the darling children.
> Forget the future , world, peace and harmony.
> Fobbing the mob could be the best alimony.
>
> A well wisher seriously suggested:
> Don't wear the name tag on way to work,
> keep it in the bag to say the least.
> The driver maybe chauffeur tested
> and your route may well be upper crusted
> But this is India my dear friend
> you never know who turns beast instead
>
> The mob have no faces you know
> they leave no trace as they go
> The number which the individual replaces
> The sane timbre unrest displaces.
> Is swift and unrelenting
> Even at the judicial hustings.
>
> All this may sound repetitive
> So very spitty & sordid
> As anyway the bullish,
> you see lord it
> And fiends fiercely fjord it
>
> Prayers are namby pamby
> Literacy is exclusive and comely
> The arts are easily distorted
> Talk and therapy could be contorted
> Even Music can be candied
>
> So that leaves us just
> With heightened feelings
> Deadened , distanced dealings?
> When some serious spirited action
> and judicial phenomenal traction
> Could make unmistakable reparation;
>
>
> Must we mask and shade
> the shame?
> Dismiss the ravage & rape;
> Encumber grievances,
> enflame the blame.
> Must we always incinerate
> To mute the implosion?
>
> Yours worriedly,
> R.Chaudhuri
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Harsh Kapoor" <aiindex at mnet.fr>
> To: <reader-list at sarai.net>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 5:29 AM
> Subject: [Reader-list] Redress Alienation in Gujarat Now (Farah Naqvi)
>
>
>> The Times of India
>> WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2002
>> EDITORIAL
>> LEADER ARTICLE
>> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/articleshow?artid=25993353
>>
>> Compromised Citizenship
>> Redress Alienation in Gujarat Now
>>
>> FARAH NAQVI
>>
>> Now that the debris in Gujarat has temporarily settled (or has it?),
>> and cameras turned away from scenes of violence (at the moment
>> they're trained on the triumphant glow of Indian democracy in
>> Kashmir), let us finally count the dead. In terms of lives lost, we
>> know estimates range from 2,000 to 3,000. But what about the living
>> dead? The scores of Gujarati Muslims who exist in the twilight zone of
>> silence, painfully adjusting themselves to life in no-man's land for
>> they are no longer treated as equal citizens of India.
>> What rights of citizenship the burnt and looted Gujarati Muslim had
>> have finally been stripped. When my house is razed, children killed
>> and women raped, I naturally head to the police station. I seek
>> justice through the legal system. I may have little faith in the
>> system to deliver, but I do it still. Because that is my right. That
>> is the law. The idea of legal recourse and entitlement of citizenship
>> is powerful enough to override the reality of tedious legal
>> processes, and low conviction rates.
>> In troubled times we invoke our citizenship rights; we get solace from
>> it. But in Gujarat the natural entitlement of citizenship is over. In
>> its place has arrived alienation, a word used often in
>> decades past to describe the mood in Kashmir. Kashmiri Muslims were
>> alienated from the Indian nation, we were told. We needed to bring
>> them back.
>> So today, as we bask in the democratic revival in Kashmir, let us
>> worry for Gujarat. For, in Gujarat, alienation has taken root. It's
>> been coming for a while. Not just in Gujarat, but elsewhere too. The
>> 140 million Muslims of India, no less than 12 per cent of the
>> population, have never had more than 5 per cent of representation in
>> state assemblies or Parliament.
>> In the services (IAS, IPS and IFS) Muslims range from under 3 per cent
>> to 3.5 per cent. In the private sector, the number of Muslims in
>> executive posts ranges from zero to perhaps 5 per cent. More than half
>> the urban Muslim population lives below the poverty line.
>> The facts are endless, the intent clear, the sum total spells
>> alienation. And now, there's Gujarat. I've been back to Gujarat
>> several times in these past seven months as part of a women's
>> fact-finding team, as an activist, as a concerned citizen. In
>> district after district, Muslims are living lives of humiliation. It's
>> called samjhauta, compromise; allowed back into their towns and
>> villages on condition that they will not file police complaints, not
>> name those who committed violence against them. Step out of line and
>> you will be hounded out.
>> A father in Anand district looks at me, eyes pools of deadened pain,
>> and describes the rape of his daughter. He saw them but there is no
>> police case. No names. No justice. I have to live here, he says. But
>> he no longer has any citizenship rights.
>> In another village in Dahod district, a group of women huddle
>> together in the glow of a solitary kerosene lamp, looking
>> suspiciously at the bindi on my forehead, and say nothing happened
>> here. A fellow activist encourages them, "You can tell her, she's
>> Muslim?". They look at me with new eyes, and slowly words start
>> tumbling out. How they were raped, how they ran -- it is an
>> avalanche, there are so many, I lose count. They know the rapists. But
>> they are not filing any cases. Like many others in Gujarat, this too
>> is a compromise village.
>> I am pained that they trust me not because I am human, but because I
>> have a Muslim name. That too is alienation. In the few villages where
>> Muslims have dared to seek legal redress, their economic survival
>> stands threatened -- their businesses boycotted, their services
>> shunned. Still they hang in there teetering between survival of the
>> flesh and survival of the spirit. That's alienation.
>> Meanwhile the sangh parivar thunders on about minority appeasement.
>> Appeasement. How did we allow it to become such a dirty word? I
>> looked it up in my dictionary. Among other things, it also means
>> propitiation to admit a fault and, by trying to make amends, to allay
>> hostile feelings. Do it, for the sake of India. Make amends to the
>> Muslims of Gujarat before their alienation turns into another
>> bleeding Kashmir-like wound.
>> Take away the Haj subsidy if need be, but give them back their
>> citizenship. But then that's the last thing that elements of the sangh
>> parivar want. They want open wounds. So Narendra Modi is
>> allowed to ride atop a gaurav rath. Hurl invectives at miyan
>> Musharraf, keep alive the Pakistani threat. It should surprise no one
>> that people like Bal Thackeray are against troop withdrawal from the
>> border. The enemy must be kept alive inside and outside.
>> For the Gujarati Muslim, it will mean a life of terror and the tag of
>> a terrorist. Small mercy that when push comes to shove, he will not be
>> allowed to really die. Because there is truly nothing more useless
>> than a dead enemy. So what if it also means killing the idea of India.
>> (The author is a freelance writer and activist)
>> _________________________________________ reader-list: an open
>> discussion
> list on media and the city.
>> Critiques & Collaborations
>> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with
> subscribe in the subject header.
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>>
>
>
>
> --__--__--
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 23:19:21 +0100 (BST)
> From: =?iso-8859-1?q?pratap=20pandey?= <pnanpin at yahoo.co.in>
> To: reader-list at sarai.net
> Subject: [Reader-list] Riotous Sentimentalism
>
> --0-2113309266-1035584361=:50517
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>
> Dear All,
>
> Sentimentalism is an ethic, a posture, a mode of representation, a
> narrative style, a gargoylic closure that emerged in the foment leading
> to the French Revolution. (I am regurgitating, with tears forming in my
> eyes, my inability to possess or even read Peter Brooks' classic text
> on this. I place a bucket under each eye.)
>
> Every human being is equal. Why? Because they cry.
>
> This is a re-statement of: Every human being is equal because they eat,
> piss, and crap.
>
> [Sentimentalism's relation to Menippean satire is extremely
> interesting. In Menippean satire, everyone is equal because everyone
> gorges, and pisses and craps by the litre and the tonne. In medieval,
> and even early modern Europe, till the time the peasantry possesses the
> ability to pamphleteer, Menippean satire is the mode in which the
> excesses of the rich are represented. With the supersession of
> mercantilism into primitive accumulation of capital, came a new regime
> of representation that excluded such expressivities. In an enlightened
> universe and emergent burgher culture, it was difficult to tell such
> enteric truths. Refinement was everything.
>
> In a time of the transformation of the peasantry into labour,
> refinement relegated Menippean satire, and peasant celebration, to the
> sphere of obscenity. Fathers had banned Rabelais; sons were told to
> read the later Dryden, or Racine; grandsons, Shaftesbury's moral
> philosophy. Of course, you could read "well-written" satire. It was
> witty and intellectual; it never crossed boundaries, Voltaire
> notwithstanding.
>
> The appropriation of Menippean satire is then filled in in the form of
> the emergence of sentimentalism. Repression, or the excess of it, finds
> a new outlet.
>
> There is a change here, in how "excess" is defined. There is an attempt
> to shift from a fantasy of control to a fantasy of agency.
>
> The latter fantasy, too, is appropriated.
>
> And how. It is turned into a regime of absolute victimisation, an
> invitation to recognise the absolute overtaking of the subject by
> external forces not under control. This eminently suited the 19th
> century European bourgeosie, which drew its strengths from a belief in
> permanent victimisation. It suited, even more, the ever-in-flux petty
> bourgeosie, which based its lifestyle on an ethic of humiliation]
>
> From the French Revolution to commentary on Gujarat is really jumping
> the gun (what does this idiom mean?). Yet I cannot but help see a
> disjunction, and one continuity.
>
> The disjunction lies in the manner in which appropriated, distorted,
> unrevolutionary sentimentalism (it has travelled wherever there exists
> a middle class; should we thank Charles Dickens for it?) is today
> unleashed as sublimatory vehicle to Global Aeducated Indian invested
> indifference to, and deliberate disinterest in, the fascisisation (ugh!
> what a noun!) of the Indian polity. (Khaa! what a sentence!) The
> forwarded Farah Naqvi article turns me into Nirupa Roy: everytime she
> comes into the scene, buckets fill up with tears. Naqvi wants to touch
> my sensitivities. In the process, she enjoins me to bring in 2 buckets,
> one under each eye. Precisely because of its sensitivities, her article
> is a perfect example of how to assuage false (comfortable) anxieties.
>
> [I can quote ad infinitum over here. If you want, readers, I'll do it]
>
> The continuity lies in always finding the Self as victim, and so
> implicilty and explicitly not bothering about the shape, size, visage,
> predilections, of the perpetrator.
>
> Please, please, please, please, please, please. Can I be informed about
> the perpetrators? Ms Naqvi, others, tell us the truth about Gujarat?
>
> To talk incessantly, in sentimentalist fashion, about the victims of
> the Gujarat unfolding-massacre, is to silkily aeducatedly masturbate.
>
> Who pissed on Muslims in gujarat? Who crapped on them, wilfully and
> with full and guaranteed freedom? Who's gorged, and are still gorging,
> on them? When will I read an ethnography of the Perpetrator,
> beautifully written?
>
> Tell me. Please, please, please, tell me. I am already angst- and
> guilt-ridden. Don't flog me. I don't need you to throw victim-shit on
> me. I am doing that all the time myself. Throw perpetrator-crap at me.
> I will revel in it. Investigate the criminals. Tell me about them. I
> need to know about them.
>
> To hell with sentimentalist coverage and commentary on Gujarat. Get
> real.
>
> Miley sewer meraa tumhara
>
> to sewer baney humaraa
>
> yours,
>
> pp
>
> Post your ad on Yahoo! India Autos.Check out the used Maruti, Fiat and
> Ford models on sale now. --0-2113309266-1035584361=:50517
> Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
> <P>Dear All,</P>
> <P>Sentimentalism is an ethic, a posture, a mode of representation, a
> narrative style, a gargoylic closure that emerged in the
> foment leading to the French Revolution. (I am regurgitating, with
> tears forming in my eyes, my inability to possess or even read
> Peter Brooks' classic text on this. I place a bucket under
> each eye.)</P> <P>Every human being is equal. Why? Because
> they cry.</P>
> <P>This is a re-statement of: Every human being is equal because they
> eat, piss, and crap. </P> <P>[Sentimentalism's relation to
> Menippean satire is extremely interesting. In Menippean satire,
> everyone is equal because everyone gorges, and pisses and craps by the
> litre and the tonne. In medieval, and even early modern
> Europe, till the time the peasantry possesses the ability to
> pamphleteer, Menippean satire is the mode in which the excesses of the
> rich are represented. With the supersession of mercantilism into
> primitive accumulation of capital, came a new regime of representation
> that excluded such expressivities. In an enlightened universe and
> emergent burgher culture, it was difficult to tell such enteric truths.
> Refinement was everything.</P> <P>In a time of the transformation of
> the peasantry into labour, refinement relegated Menippean satire,
> and peasant celebration, to the sphere of obscenity. Fathers
> had banned Rabelais; sons were told to read the later Dryden, or
> Racine; grandsons, Shaftesbury's moral philosophy. Of course, you
> could read "well-written" satire. It was witty and intellectual; it
> never crossed boundaries, Voltaire notwithstanding.</P> <P>The
> appropriation of Menippean satire is then filled in in the form of the
> emergence of sentimentalism. Repression, or the excess of
> it, finds a new outlet.</P> <P>There is a change here, in how
> "excess" is defined. There is an attempt to shift from a
> fantasy of control to a fantasy of agency.</P> <P>The latter fantasy,
> too, is appropriated.</P>
> <P>And how. It is turned into a regime of absolute victimisation, an
> invitation to recognise the absolute overtaking of the subject by
> external forces not under control. This eminently suited the 19th
> century European bourgeosie, which drew its strengths from a belief in
> permanent victimisation. It suited, even more, the ever-in-flux petty
> bourgeosie, which based its lifestyle on an ethic of
> humiliation] </P> <P>From the French Revolution to commentary on
> Gujarat is really jumping the gun (what does this idiom mean?). Yet I
> cannot but help see a disjunction, and one continuity.</P> <P>The
> disjunction lies in the manner in which appropriated, distorted,
> unrevolutionary sentimentalism (it has travelled wherever there
> exists a middle class; should we thank Charles Dickens for it?) is
> today unleashed as sublimatory vehicle to Global Aeducated Indian
> invested indifference to, and deliberate disinterest in, the
> fascisisation (ugh! what a noun!) of the Indian polity. (Khaa! what a
> sentence!) The forwarded Farah Naqvi article turns me into Nirupa Roy:
> everytime she comes into the scene, buckets fill up with tears.
> Naqvi wants to touch my sensitivities. In the process, she enjoins me
> to bring in 2 buckets, one under each eye. Precisely because
> of its sensitivities, her article is a perfect example of how to
> assuage false (comfortable) anxieties. </P> <P>[I can quote ad
> infinitum over here. If you want, readers, I'll do it]</P> <P>The
> continuity lies in always finding the Self as victim, and so implicilty
> and explicitly not bothering about the shape, size, visage,
> predilections, of the perpetrator. </P> <P>Please, please, please,
> please, please, please. Can I be informed about the perpetrators?
> Ms Naqvi, others, tell us the truth about Gujarat?</P> <P>To talk
> incessantly, in sentimentalist fashion, about the victims of the
> Gujarat unfolding-massacre, is to silkily aeducatedly masturbate.</P>
> <P>Who pissed on Muslims in gujarat? Who crapped on them, wilfully
> and with full and guaranteed freedom? Who's gorged, and are
> still gorging, on them? When will I read an ethnography of the
> Perpetrator, beautifully written? </P> <P>Tell me. Please, please,
> please, tell me. I am already angst- and guilt-ridden. Don't flog me. I
> don't need you to throw victim-shit on me. I am doing that all the time
> myself. Throw perpetrator-crap at me. I will revel in it. Investigate
> the criminals. Tell me about them. I need to know about them.</P> <P>To
> hell with sentimentalist coverage and commentary on Gujarat. Get
> real.</P> <P align=center>Miley sewer meraa tumhara</P>
> <P align=center>to sewer baney humaraa</P>
> <P align=left>yours,</P>
> <P align=left>pp </P><p><img
> src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/icon/auto.gif" height=17
> width=28> Post your ad on Yahoo! India Autos.
> Check out the used <a
> href="http://in.classifieds.yahoo.com/display/autos?
ct_hft=ct_hft=search/list&leve
> l=0:Car&mtype=86308693:Maruti" target="_blank">Maruti</a>, <a
> href="http://in.classifieds.yahoo.com/display/autos?
ct_hft=ct_hft=search/list&lev
> el=0:Car&mtype=86308611:Fiat" target="_blank">Fiat</a> and <a
> href="http://in.classifieds.yahoo.com/display/autos?
ct_hft=ct_hft=search/list&leve
> l=0:Car&mtype=86308612:Ford" target="_blank">Ford</a> models on sale
> now. --0-2113309266-1035584361=:50517--
>
>
> --__--__--
>
> _________________________________________ reader-list: an open
> discussion list on media and the city. Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with
> subscribe in the subject header. List archive:
> <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
>
>
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