[Reader-list] Sarai.txt 2.3

[Aarti]

Sarai txt 2.3
15 August - 15 November, 2005
Also see: http://broadsheet.var.cc/blog for previous issues.

*THE STATE YOU ARE IN*

Through what registers can we try to articulate the matrices of fear 
that are part of everyday living? How do movement, space, design alter 
because of fear, uncertainty, anxiety?


Content of the text version:
(Does not include the poster and images)


SIDE 01

- On Walking The City
(Yashoda Singh, Practitioner, Cybermohalla, Sara-CSDS + Ankur and 
Zamrooda Khanday, reader-list post, September 2002)

SIDE 02

- The Day I got Verified (Taha Mehmood, Researcher, Information Society, 
Sarai) + Information Politics (Jeebesh Bagchi, Sarai Reader 02: The 
Cities of Everyday Life)
- Urban Legends
- The "Clap!" (Shveta Sarda, Researcher/Practitioner, Cybermohalla, 
Sarai-CSDS + Ankur)
- Inside The Locality (Aprajita De, Independent Fellow, Sarai) + Late 
Show (Madhavi Tangella, Independent Fellow, Sarai)
- On Taking Flight
- Whose Hands Are Sullied (Lakshmi Kutty, Independent Fellow, Sarai) + 
Late Show (Madhavi Tangella, Independent Fellow, Sarai)
- Notes on Unsettling Memories (Notes from Emma Tarlo's Lecture, City 
One conference, Sarai-CSDS)
- Reading Naukar Ki Kameez (Hansa Thapilyal, reader-list post)

BACKPAGE:
- Sarai[s] : On Daryaganj Bookmarket
- The Stop Ragging Campaign
- This Year, This City
- Credits

write to : broadsheet at sarai.net for print copies.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 


SIDE [01]


I saw a woman. Her face was dark-complexioned and experienced. She was 
trying to cross the road, and was coming in my direction. Four to five 
men were passing by in front of her. I wasn’t looking at them; I could 
see only the woman. My eyes were fixed on the woman’s eyes, to see how 
she reacts while passing through these people. But it wasn’t only her 
eyes that were reacting. The expressions on her entire face were 
changing. A face that had looked normal till then, now had an expression 
of distress. Her hands, fixing the dupatta, were playing on her body. 
Her eyes were raised towards those people, and mine towards her. In her 
eyes I could see the need to hurry past. She passed by those people in 
one second. But in that second, how many expressions had adorned her. 
She walked on, past me.

www.sarai.net/cybermohalla/works/book_box/pages/pdfs/eyescrowd.pdf

Yashoda Singh, yashoda at cm.sarai.net



It was the usual balmy September weather. I rolled my car window halfway 
up as I drove home from work, and switched on the radio set. My mind 
raced through different images from the day as I settled on a channel. 
Rape, harassement, sexual assult seemed to me to be the flavour of the 
month – not just on radio but in newspapers and magazines and on TV as 
well...A voice on Radio FM 102.6 proudly announced what it believed to 
be something for the women of the city to look forward to...

“The New Delhi Municipal Corporation, in its attempt to make Delhi a 
safe haven for women, is planning to make provisions for walkways and 
paths specially reserved for women. These walks will have high walls to 
sheild women from vision. They will be well lit, and with specially 
trained gaurds posted to make sure that no ’male members’ trespass.“

I turned to another channel, exasperated. Was this the solution? Was it 
all so simple? Or were we simply not willing to face the problem and its 
solution in the eye?

http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2002-September/001809.html

Zamrooda Khanday, September 2002

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

SIDE [02]

THE DAY I GOT VERIFIED

Kilokri is a mixed locality. Planned Middle and Higher Income Group 
government flats coexist with settlements, dense unplanned residential 
areas and housing complexes built on encroached land. There is a 
profusion of clustered and cloistered neighbourhoods. I live as a tenant 
in Kilokri.

Last Sunday, as I walked home from the grocer’s, I ran into Mr. 
Malhotra, my landlord. He looked worried. He handed me a tenant 
verification form and said, “You must fill this, otherwise the police 
will create trouble.”

I looked through the form. It was titled, ’Format for Information of 
Tenants’. It was bilingual (Hindi/English) and had three sections: 
landlord’s, tenant’s, and an acknowledgment slip. Landlords were 
required to give their name, occupation with details of office, their 
phone number and address. Tenants were to provide four addresses and 
phone numbers – present, previous, past and office. Other details 
required were: date of leaving, details of office, family details and 
details of any official documentation (passport, driving licence, arms 
licence, ration card, voter ID card, or income tax – and so provide 
their PAN or Permanent Account Number). The acknowledgment slip had: 
received from, son/daughter of, resident of, phone number, residence let 
out to, son/daughter of, date, number of the diary in which entry is 
made, name, designation, signature of the recipient. I, the tenant, was 
required to fill in very minute details about my personal life. I had to 
write the naam (name) and umr (age) of the person I was living with, and 
my sambandh (relationship) with him/her. I found this very intrusive. 
Nevertheless, I filled the form.

Mr. Malhotra was hesitant about filling his section of the form. For 
him, the landlord, the form was a cause of anxiety. He has built three 
stories on his plot, which he has rented out, but has never declared the 
income accruing to him from this to the authorities. He was apprehensive 
that the tenant verification form was a facade to elicit information 
about his property, most of which is constructed in blatant violation of 
existing municipal laws. After much consideration, he forwarded his 
widowed mother’s name as the owner of the house, as she does not have a 
functioning bank account, nor a PAN – sources from which data about 
identity and income can be collated. Having finished filling up his 
section, an anxious Mr. Malhotra turned to me and said, ”Now you must 
come with me to the police station. Lets go after lunch.”

On my way to my room, I ran into the old couple who live on the second 
floor. I asked them whether they had been verified.
Uncle: I had to tell Malhotra the procedure from start to finish. He 
didn’t know a thing.
Taha: I don’t understand.
Uncle: On 2nd December there was a piece in The Hindustan Times city 
supplement stating that all landlords must verify their tenants by 23rd 
December, otherwise they will be fined. Maybe even face arrest.
Taha: So?
Uncle: What do you mean, ’so’? We are old retired people. We don’t want 
any trouble. After reading the piece I went to the police station, got 
the form and told Malhotra about it. I told him to make sure that all 
the tenants fill this form, or we might end up getting involved with the 
police.

I thanked him and climbed up the stairs to my room. I wondered what 
would be done with the forms. What kinds of databases will be made? For 
what would they be used? For the moment, however, filling the form 
created within me frustration, anger, and a feeling of extreme 
vulnerability.

http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2004-December/004702.html

Taha Mahmood, Researcher, Information Society, Sarai-CSDS, taha at sarai.net

***

My mailbox at Sarai has recently been receiving a number of unsolicited 
mails with subject headers like ’Access Control’, ’Biometrics’, 
’Workplace Watchdog’, etc., from companies looking for distributors for 
various Physical Access Control, and IT Security technologies. 
Presumably they hope that I might be interested.

Meanwhile, my father was recently given a ’tenant verification form’ by 
the housing society in which he stays, to be submitted to the local 
police station. He is disturbed about having himself verified after 
thirty-five years of abiding by the law.

Both these events – the emails selling surveillance systems and the 
arrival of my father’s verification form – are pointers towards an 
increasing drive to collect information that will enable greater control 
over access and mobility within urban spaces.

What we are witnessing is a sophisticated compact between state 
institutions, public policy, businesses, voluntary groups and 
technologists to control ’populations’ and erect fortresses (and 
gulags?) of data.

Information is part of a complex flow of a global traffic of investment, 
goods, labour, and instructions. Information, in its commodified form, 
travells towards new frontiers, pushes boundaries, making certain 
barriers obsolete, some porous, some re-configured, and creating more 
refined access regulators.

http://www.sarai.net/journal/02PDF/10infopol/01infopol_intro.pdf

Jeebesh Bagchi, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life, New Delhi, 
2002.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Although no one ever has seen Popo Bawa (Swahili for Bat’s Wing), belief 
in the monster and his unnatural lust is so strong, that entire villages 
in Chaka Chaka sleep out of doors for protection. Popo Bawa, a 
sodomising gremlin, prefers to attack behind closed doors at night. 
Victims tell that they detected a bad smell, became cold and went into a 
trance in the moments before they felt the creature’s inhuman strength. 
Popo Bawa becomes active at election time – a habit that is testing 
nerves ahead of polls due in October.
http://www.phenomenamagazine.com/


A mysterious flying object said to attack sleeping villagers has sparked 
mass hysteria and rioting across the north Indian state of Uttar 
Pradesh. The object, described as a flying sphere emitting red and blue 
light, is said to strike in the middle of the night, leaving victims 
with burns or scratches on their faces and limbs, and earning it the 
name the Muhnochwa (Face-Scratcher). Villagers across the region no 
longer sleep outside, as they usually do during the summer heat, fearing 
they will be easy prey for the Muhnochwa.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-389122,00.htm


Residents of the shantytown Alto do Cruzeiro in North East Brazil, 
reported multiple sightings of large blue and yellow combi-vans, 
allegedly driven by American or Japanese agents, who were said to be 
scouring poor neighbourhoods in search of stray youngsters. The children 
would be nabbed and shoved into the trunk of the van. Their discarded 
and eviscerated bodies – minus heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, and eyes – 
would turn up later by the side of roads, in between rows of sugarcane, 
or in hospital dumpsters. It is said that these ghoulish acts are 
carried out by an international mafia trading in organs for wealthy 
transplant patients in the first world.
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2002-September/001784.html

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE "CLAP!"

Connaught Place was crowded, busy with people on their way. Some 
lingered at the bookstalls laid out on the pavement. Others walked 
slowly, some rushed past. I smiled, thinking about how everyone managed 
without a traffic policeman directing the flow.

But then I realised the crowd wasn’t really moving as chaotically as it 
seemed at first. Curiously, after reaching a unique point on the curving 
pavement, it was as if the crowd parted, made two semicircular arcs, and 
then met again at the other end of the enclosing circle.
I was intrigued. What inside that circle had power enough to choreograph 
the movement of a crowd of strangers? I shifted my gaze, curious to see 
who was directing its flow.

Right in the middle was a short, slight figure dressed in a faded pink 
salwar kameez. Her hair was tied in a bun. Below it, on her neck, a thin 
golden chain shone dully. Her shoulders were broad for her build, her 
kameez sleeves hung loosely on her elbows. A profusion of colourful 
bangles adorned her wrists. Narrow hips, and a pair of hawaii chappals 
on her feet. She stood very still, looking around her. Her back was to me.

I thought, how strange. By herself, she may never have drawn my gaze. 
But the crowd has tied my eyes to her.

At that moment, this slight figure, standing alone in the middle of the 
crowd circling around her, clapped.

CLAP! And the circle moved faster. Footsteps became quicker. Eyes turned 
shifty, unsure where to rest – anywhere but on her who pulled them in 
her direction.

CLAP! And the slender figure caught someone’s eye and moved towards him. 
The young man’s eyes widened with fear. He raised one arm, bringing the 
plastic and paper bags he was carrying between himself and the 
approaching figure, while flailing his other arm, gesturing her to stay 
away. Frozen in his tracks for a fraction of a second, he now fled the 
circle as she, unfazed, moved steadily towards him.

The circle shifted to enclose her within its boundary.

She turned around now, watching the circle. She had deep-set eyes, thick 
eyebrows and the thin stubble of a moustache beneath her nose. Her 
breasts were small and pointed. She wore neither dupatta, nor makeup.

CLAP! She moved again, this time towards a young couple. They stopped as 
she stood in their path, and moved closer to one another, suspicious of 
what she would say or do. She clapped noiselessly, and said something. 
Maybe a blessing for a long and happy married life. The young woman 
unbuttoned her purse wordlessly and handed her a ten-rupee note. The 
couple moved on, turning away from the circle.

What was it about the slight, obscure, singular figure that evoked such 
fear, such loathing, such suspicion? Was it a shared web of stories 
about what people like her do – they steal little boys and make them 
like themselves, they can bless and cast strange spells, if you don’t 
give them money they will bare their genitals, they are queer and they 
beat their dead with chappals? But what could this lone figure do in a 
crowded centre of the city? What did she carry on her person that should 
cause such alarm?

Maybe it was the body she covered deep inside her clothes. The penis 
that was small, the organ that was cut away, the stub that was a mere 
remnant. She was a standing, moving, clapping testimony of our 
collective anxieties, a constant, recalcitrant, perplexing embodiment of 
embarrassed biologies. Loth to tussle with the power our own shame 
exercised on us, we scowled and shunned, growled and flailed, withdrew 
and fled.

And it was her CLAP that we most abhorred. She clapped to announce she 
was there, clapped to catch our attention, clapped to draw us to her 
ambiguous, morphed body. Her clap indicated her location, her closeness 
to our selves; it was her declaration that she was nearby – in the 
adjacent compartment of a moving train, at the next turn in a crowded 
bazaar, among us somewhere in the concentric circles of our tired 
circumambulations of the city streets. With her clap, she pervades and 
surrounds. With her clap she summons us to her, and drives us away.

She turns us from our path, causes a ripple in our course, marks an 
alteration in our time – her clap becomes an interlude to which there is 
a ’before’ and an ’after’.

Shveta Sarda, Researcher/Practitioner, Cybermohalla, Ankur+Sarai-CSDS, 
shveta at sarai.net

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

INSIDE THE LOCALITY

”Outside the pol (locality), people don’t even know each others’ name. 
It is not so here. There is a lot of bonding and ekta (unity), 
especially at times of riots and even during the earthquake. During the 
riots, men and boys took turns to guard the pol round the clock. And 
women took turns to cook for them and give them tea and snacks round the 
clock.

”Everyone came together during the earthquake as well. At that time, the 
entire pol was sleeping outside, on the road. All of us worked together 
(to reconstruct the houses). We ate together.

”But when there is no crisis, there is no cooperation.

”For example, if I wanted to extend this house, everyone would object. 
You can see from here that this road runs into a dead-end. No one uses 
it and it can be of no use to anybody. So if I make some sort of 
construction, everyone would protest against it: ’You are blocking the 
path, blocking ventilation, your construction is illegal.’”

As told to Aparajita De, Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellow, 2003-04, project 
title: ”Imagined Geographies: The Case Study of Ahmedabad”. Text 
excerpted from submission to the Sarai archive.

***

LATE SHOW

Inside a narrow lane, the entrance to Mala Theater was crowded by young 
men trying to buy tickets. Two men sat at the counter, busy selling 
tickets. One of them looked Tamilian, and the other was a young boy in 
his twenties.

”Do you screen Telugu films here?” I asked. Surprised, the young boy 
replied, ”Yes, only on Sunday evenings, at 9.30 pm.”

”How many come to watch the show?” Looking at each other, they said 
about 15-20.

Sensing their reluctance to speak, I smiled and started walking away.

The young man from the counter was following me. I turned back. He 
walked up, scared and anxious. Before he could speak I said, ”I’m not 
from the police.” ”Madam,” he said, ”We own two Video theaters at 
Jogeshwari. Some one like you came and asked for some information and 
then clicked photographs. Next day, she came with the police and we had 
to shut it down. We don’t do ganda kaam (dirty work) now. We at this 
theater don’t show blue films. Hamara naam bhi kharab hota hai (We too 
get a bad name).” And so he got talking.

”My name is Vikas. We don’t show Telugu films everyday. Telugu films are 
screened every Sunday at 9:30 pm. At least 50-70 people come to watch, 
and we show films they demand. We only allow one film per ticket. 
However if a man comes at an odd time, i.e. when a film is on, we allow 
him to get in and continue till the next film is over. We do not want 
him to go back. After all, where will he go till the film gets over?

”And we don’t collect the ticket for the last show. Generally during 
daytime, once the film is over, we take the tickets back and tear them 
up. But for the last show, we allow them to keep their tickets. This is 
because the film gets over at around one in the morning. Very often, if 
it’s late at night, these Telugu people are detained by the police and 
questioned about their movements. They do not have a permanent address 
or any contact phone number or ID card. So, they show the film ticket as 
proof of where they have been. We regularly get requests to stamp, seal 
and sign the ticket.”

http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2005-May/005742.html

Madhavi Tangella, Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellow, 2004-05, 
blueskyandus at rediffmail.com

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


”Do you want to study or not? What do you want to do in life? This world 
has no need for failures.” The young boy stands quietly, his head 
lowered, his eyes fixed on his shoes. The teacher continues to admonish 
and shame him. But by now he is far away from the jeering glances and 
sympathetic looks of his classmates, away from the piercing voice of 
this punishing adult. Maybe he would join his friend who has started a 
small candle-making workshop in the neighbourhood. Was it a mere 
coincidence that the chance came to him only a week ago, and that the 
evenings that he had spent in the workshop were already his most 
memorable ones?

***

A young woman is at the crossroads of her life. Soon she must marry and 
start a new life. For a last outing, to momentarily push away the 
anxiety of the ‘familiar unknown’ of married life, she is allowed a trip 
to the local fair, with its giant wheels and fun shows and traders 
selling trinkets and other wares. She never returns home. She is lost in 
the mela. Her parents register a complaint in the kotwali, that she has 
been enticed away. But in hushed meetings, her friends call her 
‘urhari’, the one who has flown away.

***

How do we understand these acts of ‘fleeing’? What exactly is at stake 
in this effort to construct a world away from its centres? Is it a 
”different thing” that is gained on the byways that lead, seemingly 
nowhere, through journeys towards making and living undestined lives?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

WHOSE HANDS ARE SULLIED?

I’m interested in the public discourse on hygiene, sanitation and 
cleanliness – how this is linked to notions of good health not limited 
solely to medical criteria, but also includes notions of wellness, 
comfort/satisfaction, and the manner in which these discourses play out 
in public spaces, events and interactions.

The promise of a healthy life in a city is not measured, as it 
traditionally has been, in strictly medical terms anymore, but is 
connected to visions of space and openness, the absence of clutter and 
crowds, and the possibility of escaping urban perils while still 
enjoying the city’s benefits. Interestingly, as the criteria for 
healthy/sanitised living change from medical to non-medical, the new 
criteria are themselves increasingly expressed through medicalised 
metaphors. Co-terminus with this is an urgency attached to acquiring 
certain lifestyles/products/services (such as air conditioners which 
filter out harmful microbes and pollutants).

There are parallel discourses which label a certain outlook/attitude/way 
of living as antithetical to health and hygiene, and label certain ways 
of occupying space as a threat to “clean and sanitised“ environs. 
’Segregation’ is crucial in sustaining these narratives.

For instance, by what parameters is an outbreak of jaundice declared as 
an epidemic in Bombay? Which city areas are labelled as ’vulnerable’? 
What social biases are mobilised? How is the “other-in-our-midst“ evoked 
in these narrations? Whose hands are sullied in the process?

http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2005-March/005289.html

Lakshmi Kutty, Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellow, 2004-05, 
lakshmikutty at rediffmail.com

***

TASTY IMAGES, INADEQUATE SMELLS

It was a hot afternoon in Brooklyn. The Mexican diner that I was passing 
by was empty, just the staff strolling around, a lady wiping the floor. 
The whole place, and especially the floor, looked extremely clean, and 
so I asked if they were open at all. The lady behind the counter called 
me in and guided me to a table at the window. As I made my way through 
the room, I was hit by the incredibly strong stench of the chloride 
cleaner. It covered not just the floor but everything within ten metres. 
I was famished, so I sat down and ordered immediately.
I watched the lady mopping the floor.

The floor was clean. It looked clean to me. But from the wet trace the 
lady had left, I could tell she had just started mopping and she seemed 
far from switching to another task. She hadn’t yet been in my area of 
the diner.

She mopped very carefully, slowly.

Once in a while she stopped to have a little chat with the lady behind 
the counter. They giggled.

The front door was open and the orange afternoon sunlight flooded in. 
The moist floor shimmered. What a nice and calm picture, I thought. The 
cook appeared in the open kitchen and started creating a delicious 
burrito. I sat in great expectation of inhaling the incredible odour of 
chopped onions, spices, herbs, black beans and hot olive oil.

But the odour couldn’t make it. It was chopped by the power of the 
dictatorial chloride cleaner.
Disappointed, I tried to salvage the moment by focusing on the image of 
the juggling cook. It felt a little strange, like sitting at home, 
starving, the fridge empty, watching a Mexican cooking show on TV.

Tasty images, inadequate smells.

The dish was quickly made; when it was served, I’m sure my face had a 
“happily ever after“ look.
After my first nip on the burrito, my sensory system sent out a warning:
Food Look + Food Smell => Tasting, Chewing, Swallowing => Digestion. Fine.
Food Look + Chloride Smell => No digestion. Bad.

I tried. Burrito-Burrito. Stomach roaring. No. Enough.

I went to the lady with the mop and asked her, in a very friendly 
manner, if she could stop cleaning till I had finished my food, since I 
was bothered by the smell of the cleaner. She was chatting with the lady 
at the counter. Both ladies were shocked.

“Excuse me, but this floor has to be clean! This is a restaurant and it 
has to be clean! It’s the law!“
“But it’s clean. It looks clean to me!“ I said.
“But what about the germs and bacteria you can’t see? They are there! 
But you can’t see them! So we have to clean even if we don’t see them! 
It’s the law to keep this place clean!“

Got it.

I returned to my table.

Minutes later the law kicked me into the bathroom and demanded my lunch 
back.

http://www.snm-hgkz.ch/mailman/listinfo/driftwood

Monya Plestsch, Hochschule Fuer Gestaltung, Zurich, monya at gmx.at

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

NOTES ON UNSETTLING MEMORIES

Memories lie dormant in hidden recesses of the city, whether in 
neglected papers found in dusty government files, or in the shifting 
vistas of urban landscape, or in the articulated experiences of many of 
the city’s denizens. In these articulations, over the years, areas of 
silence get built – as moments not to be remembered in the history of 
the city. At other moments, multiple factors combine to cause such 
remembrance to atrophy: nationalist sentiment, party political 
interests, individual careers, expedient deaths and social unrest, which 
gain far wider currency than muted intellectual critiques. Of course 
there are also the short-lived narratives – propaganda literature, and 
testimonials produced in the years that follow an incident, a 
state-generated upheaval or repression. Like the Emergency, which has a 
heterogeneous discourse of resentment, guilt and accusation, drawn from 
a variety of sources including prison memoirs, underground resistance 
literature, public hearings, official commissions, fiction, journalists’ 
observations/research, and personal experience. These tides of memory 
and forgetting leave their mark not just on library shelves but also on 
monuments and landscapes of the city. The museum that is created becomes 
a place of forgetting, for it diverts public memory onto a different, 
more pervasive master narrative, which is also inscribed in other parts 
of the city, in the form of gigantesque national edifices. As a 
historian, one moves about the city searching for memories, searching 
that which has since been edited out of history altogether. How can one 
interpret records, which are officially produced artefacts made not to 
provide information but to categorise, present and conceal experience in 
various ways; and so break the mythology of silence, trace how this 
memory is projected, guarded and denied. From my experience of 
researching the Emergency I have learnt that both personal narratives 
and government documents have limited value as evidence or fact. Set 
against one another, however, they provide an account that is 
disturbingly coherent, and alarmingly close to lived experience.

 From Emma Tarlo’s lecture, ”Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the 
Emergency in Delhi” at ’City One: South Asian Conference on the Urban 
Experience’, Sarai-CSDS, 9-11 January 2003.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

READING NAUKAR KI KAMEEZ

Two questions have lingered in my mind for some time now – one, how can 
one understand the current tendencies of the middle-class towards the 
Right? And two, how is English implicated in this? Interestingly, a clue 
to these questions comes from a novel written in 1979 – Naukar ki Kameez 
by Vinod Kumar Shukla. The novel, which I read recently, brought in new 
permutations, spaces inhabited by people I have known – 
lower-middle-class houses. Not sunk into poverty, but in a continuous 
struggle to stay afloat, with dignity. People who have veered into 
right-wing Hindu thought (I do not know much about those who have not – 
though of course they exist, and I should renew my intimacies). Through 
the novel, I have tried to move in some small configuration towards ”an 
ethnography of fascism”.

A lower-middle-class Hindu family lives in a lower-middle-class 
neighbourhood in a town in western UP with a dominant Muslim culture. 
The family has a pride of education, a gentility of poverty, and an 
understated, but present pride of caste. The father holds a petty job in 
the bureaucracy. There is within him a strong consciousness of being a 
minority in the area. He also sees the conservative ways of families 
around him – not as educated, earning a livelihood through small 
business enterprises, and a demand on women to remain indoors.

Elsewhere in the city, in a more mobile middle-class area, a close 
relative of this family is prospering, slowly but surely. A better paid 
job, mobility in a somewhat liberal public sector organisation which is 
public sector but opening up, and the wife’s timely (early ’80s) 
insistence on an ”elite” English education for the children.

The parents of family one attempt to give their children terms for 
dignity: pride in language (good Hindi), hard work, keeping your mind 
clean, learning from the success of the uncle. The distance, rather, is 
from the Muslim neighbour – from a fear of what brews behind those high 
walls. The children will find it hard to struggle out, as the ’80s turn 
into the ’90s. Because they do not manage engineering or medical or a 
bank job. And because two of them are girls. The struggle out is 
defeating, except for the providence of a good match for one of the girls.

The pride in Hindi is a myth maintained among the children to keep the 
real world at bay. The cousin who does not become bitter stays quietly 
in the class he was born into. With sincerity, he struggles at a job, 
refusing favours from his uncle. He is laughed at a bit and loved a lot 
from a distance for being a good man. He salvages his togetherness from 
this. The English-speaking cousins will grow with a sense of their 
privilege, some guilt and maybe they will live with the possibility of 
being downwardly mobile.

The father who built a life of relative privilege – though not 
prosperity – for his children, will work harder, be honest in his work, 
and tough on many people. It is a demand his job makes. He will try and 
help relatives and friends of relatives. He will look around at others 
in his workplace who have had it easier – who were to the manor born – 
and hold them in some contempt. His children have known opportunity, and 
the ease that comes with an education in English. He will feel somewhat 
distanced from them. The distance will wax and wane. Love, affection, a 
desire to love and comprehend will mitigate the process. He will tell 
his children about the worlds they have not known – the apples he wanted 
to eat as a kid but never could, how his mother would tell him they are 
given to people when they are ill, how he would long to be ill. Does he 
adhere to feelings of contempt and anger towards those who ”had it 
easy”? By the mid ’90s he will have labelled them as those who have easy 
secular politics. His own children too.

And the girls of the other family? In the book, one discovered some kind 
of conservatism in one of them, a bitterness at being denied 
opportunity, at the failure of Hindi to fulfill its promise, of the 
glory of school being very different from the situation outside. The 
conservatism probably increased with her good marriage into a reasonably 
well-off family, which was into private business.

The other one maintained her love for Hindi (and a culture rooted in 
Hindi) and would not be bitter about her relatives. She probably looks 
up to right-wing public figures who rose in national politics in the 
’90s as gentle, articulate, complex, as men who keep their word.

A novel is not reality. And this novel is definitely an artifice – a 
work of art. But it may be worthwhile to turn to fiction sometimes to be 
able to isolate the threads running through our lives that get tugged 
at, with time and in different situations.

http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2002-November/001975.html

Hansa Thapliyal, hansatin at yahoo.co.in

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BACKPAGE


SARAI[S]:

Once, in a city not unlike our own, there was a book-market. Books and 
manuscripts from all over the world found their way to the book market, 
to be picked up by waiting hands. Travellers sold books they no longer 
wanted, publishers turned over books no one wanted to read anymore, 
students passed to it old textbooks, and bought new ones. The city had 
few public libraries, and the book-market filled this vacuum. Textbooks 
and manuals, erotic novels and philosophy – from the poetic to the 
profane, or the poetically profane, the book-market sold them all.

But slowly the city began to change. Perhaps the gathering of so many 
words in one place was thought to be too dangerous. Perhaps the piles of 
paper, binding and the noise of words written and spoken, were thought 
too cluttered. Whatever be the reason, one day it was heard that the 
book-market would be closed down.

Somehow, the destruction of this transient library has been staved off 
till today. But it still makes the city ask questions of itself and its 
hospitality.

***

STOP RAGGING!

The 'Stop Ragging Campaign' works to document and spread awareness about 
ragging in India's educational institutions. The campaign assists 
students who wish to register an official legal complaint against a 
particular student/students or the institution, and offers advice and 
guidance on institutional and legal remedies against harassment in 
educational institutions.

To read more about documentation, see postings of Shivam Vij 
(Independent Fellow, Sarai, 2005) on the reader-list archives at:
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list
'Stop Ragging Campaign' website: www.stopragging.org

This website-blog will give you an idea of ragging in all its myriad 
forms, the most reliable source being first hand stories that ragging 
victims and hostel residents are encouraged to share. To know more, 
contact Shivam Vij at info at stopragging.org

***

THIS YEAR, THIS CITY
17 September 2005
3:30 pm, Interface Zone, Sarai

Shifts, transmission, anxieties, exhilarations, public secrets, 
street-corner intimacies – what did the city say to you this year? For 
the past five years, Sarai has played host to a public conversation on 
the year that was, in this our city. This year too we extend to you an 
invitation to come and participate in a conversation on how different 
people have witnessed and experienced Delhi in 2004-2005.

***

PUBLICATIONS @ Sarai

This September sees the launch of three new publications from Sarai. 
They are available for free download in pdf format on the web. Visit:

Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts – http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader_05.html
Deewan-E-Sarai 02: Shahar Nama (Hindi) – 
http://www.sarai.net/language/deewan/deewan02/deewan02.htm
Media Nagar 02 (Hindi) – 
http://www.sarai.net/mediacity/filmcity/medianagar02.htm

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[END OF BROADSHEET]

CREDITS

Editorial Collective:
Aarti Sethi
Iram Ghufran
Shveta Sarda

Editorial Co-ordinator
Monica Narula

Design (print version): Mrityunjay Chatterjee
Photographs: Monica Narula

Write to
broadsheet at sarai.net