False Dichotomies

In 1993, according to a recent article in the Guardian by Pankaj Mishra, current Israeli President Shimon Peres met with BJP leader LK Advani and advised him that the best way to secure long-term Indian control over Kashmir was by settling non-Kashmiri Indians there. This neatly encapsulates the differences in Israeli and Indian policies when it comes to their occupied/disputed territories. Given the obvious injustice involved in maintaining control over a territory against the will of its population, it’s sometimes difficult to take a step back and ask why Israel and India have been so stubborn about maintaining their control of Palestine/Kashmir despite the conflict this causes. But if we are to assess future prospects for Kashmir/Palestine, we have to address the question head-on. Read more

“The United Kingdom and Israel are currently under the sway of massive political unrest. In both countries, the cause of this is systemic economic problems, reflected in increasing public dissatisfaction with neoliberalism, but the contrast between the nature of the unrest is striking: the UK gets riots, while Israel gets some of the most inspiring political protests in generations. Why the difference, and what lessons can be drawn from it?

Socio-economic factors alone do not provide the answer. The failure of neoliberalism justifies massive political protests but it does not justify rioting. The people of Beer-Sheva’s Schunat Daled live in equally poor conditions to the people of London’s Tottenham. Contrary to what Eyal Clyne intimates, however, there is little sign that Israelis will turn on one another in the way that the rioters in the UK have done. So while economic distress explains the timing of the unrest, we have to look deeper into the political cultures of both countries to answer why Britain witnesses unfocused rage while Israel sees the possible birth of a new political movement. My unfashionable explanation for the difference, having lived in both countries, is that Israeli is a nationalist society and Britain is a post-nationalist one.” Read the rest at The Propagandist.

The millions killed during the Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan can be described as victims of a grass-roots genocide. Their slaughter was not ordered by politicians or warlords, but was the result of the brutality of their neighbours, caught up in the frenzy produced by the partition. The perpetrators were not brought before a war crimes tribunal, nor were the bereaved and dispossessed survivors compensated for their losses. It may be difficult to stomach, but today this is maybe for the best. The last thing an ever tense Indian-Pakistani relationship needs is a reopening of the wounds of the original division. But it remains astonishing how little a Western world brought up on the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide and the Balkans knows about the sheer medieval horror of the violence on the subcontinent in 1947.

Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (the word has been translated from Sanskrit as ‘indifference’), written in Hindi and translated into English by the author himself, is perhaps the greatest of all Partition novels. In an unnamed town, presumably somewhere in the Punjab, a shadowy Muslim politican called Murad Ali pays a sweeper named Nathu to kill a pig. The act is described in excruciating detail (“The pig was sniffing at the rind of a watermelon close to its forelegs, its bloodshot eyes blinking and its little tail swishing.”), by contrast with the rest of the novel, which unfolds at tremendous speed. Nathu kills the pig and delivers it to Murad Ali. The next morning, the pig is found on the steps of a mosque. Mayhem ensues, while Nathu withdraws to the background, reappearing every so often as the moral and emotional centre of the novel, bemoaning his actions before being brutally dismissed from the story in one throwaway line in the final chapters.  Read more

Today is Indian Independence Day. Nobody in Kashmir is celebrating. The mobile networks are switched off. As on Martyrs’ Day, Srinagar is on lock-down. The Indian flag will be raised at a local stadium, in the presence of chief minister Omar Abdullah, but the event will be closed to the public. Last year, a J&K policeman used the event as a chance to throw his shoe at Abdullah. This national holiday, so fervently celebrated elsewhere in the country, potently illustrates the failure of India to convince the people of Kashmir that their future lies with the Indian Union.

Kashmiris are famous – or perhaps infamous – for their ambivalence. Pakistan, India, Independence – partition this way, partition that way. Even when talking those fervently in favour of independence, you get the sense that in their heart of hearts they know it to be both unrealistic and impractical. Unrealistic because of India’s massive soft and hard power around the world, and the lack of an effective diaspora lobbying Kashmir’s cause in western capitals. Impractical because, despite having decent resources, particularly in agriculture and tourism, an independent Kashmir would inevitably become squeezed between India, Pakistan and China, making the chances of Kashmir becoming a South Asian Switzerland slim.

So what’s a good Kashmiri to do? I would suggest that there are a number of steps that could be taken which would be both in the Kashmiri and Indian interest. I should hasten to add that these are not original ideas. Read more

We are constantly told, correctly, to ignore the artist and focus on the art. What does it matter if Wagner was an anti-Semite or David Lynch practices transcendental meditation or V.S. Naipaul thinks that women’s writing is shit, when they’re all great artists? And yet the artist’s life continues to tempt us. Perhaps, we think, in learning about their life, we might learn something about the source of their inspiration, and – who knows? – maybe a bit of it will rub off on us.

Then there is the category of artists who only achieve fame with death, following which their lives achieve mythological status, and they dully and tragically become martyrs for the cause of art itself. Perhaps no writer embodies this phenomenon more than Franz Kafka, for whom the concept of the ‘tortured artist’ seems to have been invented, and for whom life was one long trial, without even the closure of an adequate sentence.

Kafka’s myth seems to warn off a biographer like some old temple curse, but Ronald Hayman’s 1981 biography analyses its subject with admirable restraint, with a strict focus on Franz the man rather than Kafka the literary deity he would become. And it is testament to Hayman’s skills that his Franz feels like Kafka’s Franz: timid, bewildered, and above all unqualified for the demands of an early twentieth-century central European life. Read more