[Reader-list] Reader 05 Review

[Aarti]

Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts
The Sarai Programme CSDS, Delhi 2005;
pages: 582, paperback; price: Rs 350.00


Reviewed by Aditya Nigam
Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
http://www.india-seminar.com/2005/553/553%20books.htm

A whole new body of work is slowly emerging that maps new and intriguing 
features of the contemporary moment, under the aegis of the Sarai 
Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. 
Over the past few years, Sarai has made available to us a whole new 
language for apprehending the enormous changes taking place over the 
last decade, which have radically transformed our existence.

In his celebrated work on postmodernism, Frederic Jameson characterized 
the phenomenon most notably as “the staging of the aesthetic popular”, 
embodying a significant turn away from high modernist art and 
architecture towards popular mass culture. In Jameson’s reading, this 
move is involves the /effacement of boundaries/ between high culture and 
popular culture, rather than a turning away from high culture 
altogether. Crucial to this idea is his notion of pastiche, which is 
mimesis or mimicry without purpose or destination. Pastiche mimics high 
art but unlike the form called parody, holds Jameson, has no respect for 
the original – for parody, even as it mimics, exalts itself through its 
reference to the original.

To be sure, this condition is not exclusive to the domain of art and 
architecture. The effacement of boundaries is a pervasive condition that 
is evident in many different fields in the postmodern condition – both 
in the domain of knowledge as well as real life. We may add to Jameson’s 
idea of pastiche and in fact say that the copy (or mimicry) is not 
merely a degraded form of the original; once the canon collapses and 
boundaries blur, the copy acquires a life of its own. It mocks, even 
threatens, the original. This is true of the great ideologies of the 
twentieth century (e.g. Nationalism, Marxism, Liberalism) for instance, 
whose existence has been threatened by what the purists claim are 
popular corruptions but which might be the only form in which such high 
ideologies could become popular. It is equally true of the world of 
commodities and consumption where the cheap and “pirated” versions of 
the branded ones swamp the market and have become a major source of 
anxiety for the corporations producing the latter. Frenetic attempts to 
police the production and circulation of such pirated goods, has led to 
increasingly repressive measures being adopted by the governments in 
countries like India.

The central figure in the context of these new and intense conflicts is 
that of the ‘pirate’ – a term redeployed in the context of the new 
cyber-economy from its earlier usage of one who pillaged on the high 
seas. The pirate today is one who copies, multiplies and distributes or 
sells with scant respect for the original except as object of 
consumption. Often, s/he who is called the pirate, in fact merely shares 
information and products with others. Effacement of boundaries in this 
arena of commodity and consumption has caused much anxiety, even panic. 
Raids by Delhi police in medical students’ hostels and confiscation of 
photocopied books – usually unaffordably priced foreign publications – 
can be considered symptomatic of this new anxiety. However, the really 
sharp conflicts have taken shape around the new possibilities of copying 
and sharing made available by new digital technologies and the Internet. 
“Intellectual property”, copyright and trade mark are the new banners of 
capitalist aggression – threatened as it is today, not by the working 
class, but by /contraband capital/ – its own cheap copy.

It is this moment that the Sarai Programme chronicles. In doing so it 
challenges our received language. It forces us to see the world from a 
different vantage point from where “pirate” and “hacker” but refer to an 
existential condition, even a political stance. In drawing our attention 
to this domain of new conflicts, Sarai has also forced us to think in a 
more sustained way on the everyday practices of ordinary people – away 
from the large, ideologically driven structures like the state and 
political parties. Sarai /Readers/ that are published annually, focusing 
each time on a new and different theme, have become important aids for 
those who wish to explore the frontiers of the world of ideas and deal 
with the range of new issues that confront us today. The /Reader/ is a 
unique product, even in terms of form: neither book nor journal, it is a 
purely experimental enterprise that combines contributions that range 
from the academic to the literary, from the purely textual to the 
visual, from detailed ethnographic reports to fairly dense theoretical 
writings. In fact, it will not be an exaggeration to say that the Sarai 
Reader embodies in every sense, the collapse of all boundaries of form, 
style and genre.

The volume under review is the fifth of the annual /Readers/ published 
by the Sarai Programme. The thematic title, “Bare Acts” is a play on the 
generic name used for documents that contain the Law or Act as such. On 
the other hand there is also the “bare” act of living, if one may use 
the term for the everyday practices that drive people across borders of 
their homes, villages, cities or nations – across the frontiers of the 
Law. These are the bare acts of living and consuming, of ceaseless 
innovations, including copying, ‘pilfering’ and enjoying. “Illegality” 
here is less about willful violation of the law; rather it is something 
to be negotiated, like a hurdle that must be overcome everyday in order 
to go about the normal business of life. “Bare Acts” is thus about the 
Law and its everyday negotiations/ violations and transgressions. It is 
about the “quiet politics of stealth” as Solomon Benjamin argues in his 
piece on the unspectacular but persistent struggle of the poor over 
urban space in Delhi; it is about the sleaze and consequent porosity 
that marks the institutional spaces of the Law – Tis Hazari courts in 
this instance – as Chander Nigam’s ethnographies show. As Lawrence Liang 
puts it, it is the world of “porous legalities” – “created primarily 
through a profound distrust of the usual normative myths of the rule of 
law, such as rights, equality, access to justice, etc.” The lived 
experience of most people, Liang argues, points to a network of 
day-to-day negotiations with power that renders vacuous any neat binary 
of legal/ illegal. Liang’s own essay that deals with these anxieties, 
which are explored through the fascinating instance of the music 
cassette industry and piracy in the India of the 1980s and 1990s.

Awadhendra Sharan’s piece maps the “fashioning of the urban environment 
through the law and science” and focuses on the actual process of the 
law and government. Clifton D’ Rozario examines, through the example of 
the Narmada tribals, the actual ways in which, in the very act of 
entering the space of law and legal institutions, renders voiceless 
those who speak a different language. If contributions like these 
illuminate the processes of law and power, there are others that explore 
the other side of law. So, for instance, Aarti Sethi’s reconstruction of 
the famous Nanavati murder case (where a naval officer murdered his 
wife’s lover) and the drama enacted around it, reading it through the 
optic of “honour killings”, reveals interesting ways in which the bare 
act of life (non-modern practices, at that) gets inscribed into the very 
process of the law thus “effacing the boundary” in somewhat 
disconcerting ways. Between these two kinds of contributions lie a range 
of others that speak of the paranoia of state elites confronted with the 
collapse of more borders than just these. Kai Friese presents a moving 
account of the policing of Indian borders along the Himalayas and his 
attempts at tracking down two Chinese prisoners of war languishing in a 
Ranchi mental asylum. Naveeda Khan’s examination of the attempts in 
Pakistan by the orthodox Muslims to police the borders of “true Islam” 
as it were, and the astonishing attempt by the judiciary to invoke a 
discourse (yet to be born) by utilizing copyright laws for validating 
the claims of the “original”, provides an unintended comic element to 
the matter.

So, if the Bare Act of the law is an embodiment of the norms of rights, 
equality and justice, the bare act of life is about border crossings and 
transgressions: across nation-states, across the sexual divide, across 
the moral and the amoral.

With a vast range of contributions (more than 60), presented through an 
array of visual and textual material, this is a truly impressive volume. 
However, precisely, for this reason it is impossible to justice to all 
contributions and one can only pick some of them arbitrarily. For 
reasons of space, I have selected only some that relate to the South 
Asian experience. This should not give the impression that this is all 
that there is in this volume. Ursula Bieman’s “On Smugglers, Pirates and 
Aroma Makers” for example, which relates to a video /Europlex/, 
co-produced with visual anthropologist Angela Sanders, plots the lived 
micro-geographies along the Spanish-Moroccan border on both sides of the 
Strait of Gibraltar, looks at everyday practices: “perilous nocturnal 
boat voyages by clandestine migrants; helicopter patrols keeping watch; 
itinerant plantation workers who pick vegetables for the EU market; 
commuting housemaids, /domesticas/ who go to work for the /senoras/ in 
Andalusia…” Shujen Wang looks at piracy in China and the ambivalence of 
the Chinese government in controlling it while Franscesca Da Rimini 
explores the fate of Asian asylum seekers in Australia in another 
disturbing account. Between these different contributions, we are 
presented with a glimpse of our enigmatic and troubling times.