Clearing the debris of foreign rule
Review by Shelley Walia
Post-colonial Theory: A Critical Introduction by Leela Gandhi. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Pages 200. Rs 225.Post-colonial Literatures in English: History, Language, Theory by Denis Walder Blacwell. Oxford. Pages 332. £ 13.99.

Prosperity only for a few
Review by B.S. Thaur
Reality and Society by S.R. Sharda. Pages 151. Rs 50.

Human wrongs in India
Write view
By Randeep Wadhera
Human Rights in India edited by S. Mehartaj Begum. APH, New Delhi. Pages xviii + 328. Rs 600.

The exile within and without
by M.L. Raina

Borders, Boundaries and Frames edited by Mae G. Henderson. Routledge, New York and London. Pages 216. $ 18.95.

BEFORE he sailed into the isle of the sirens, Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic, was warned by Circe: “You will come to the sirens, who bewitch everyone who comes near them... he never sees his home again, never again will wife and little children run to greet him with joy... all round is a heap of bones, mouldering bodies and withering skin.” This warning, it seems to me, sums up the pleasures as well as the forfeits of exile.

In its narrow sense a political banishment, exile in the broad sense designates every kind of estrangement, physical, geographical and even spiritual. St Augustine’s is a spiritual isolation as is Dante’s. Hence the fascination of this state in the discussion of contemporary culture. Only in our time wars and persecutions have invested it with a sharper critical aura.

Since exiles and migrants constitute an essential part of the evolution of human societies, it is not for nothing that Heidegger called homelessness an inevitable trait of the human condition. Not until very recently did this condition begin to engage the energies of writers, critics and social scientists. Borders, boundaries and frames acquired highly emotive political and geographical associations.

Such involvement is a far cry from the time when the Duke of Wellington replied to a query as to his identity in these words: “Sir, one is not an ass because one is born in a stable.” Today one is more likely to meet travellers like Naipaul whose belief in the brotherhood of mankind is jolted by the immigration officer at the country’s airport asking for your identification.

Homelessness is the lot not only of those who physically leave their native shores, but also of those who inhabit a world in which economic, social and technological changes have become truly global phenomena. Given the proximity of communities in today’s global village, we are increasingly becoming exiles and migrants and experiencing “otherness” no less perceptibly than we would if we were really homeless like all those refugees whose stark images crowd our television screens almost daily.

At the core of our sense of exile and diaspora is the attempt to reshape our consciousness of cultural frontiers and the evolution of modernity as cultural difference. Also there is a sense among master races and imperial powers of their own status as chosen people with a mission to civilise the barbarians, the aliens and all those who are set up as the opposing other of these races.

Today the notion of the exile and the immigrant is endowed with a legal meaning. It refers to one who is not among the chosen and who is accepted only as a suppliant (consider Aeschylus’ play with this title.) One can see here a prelude to the Greek and contemporary American pragmatism. The Greeks accepted the metics because they were good traders and Americans grant work permits to foreigners because their presence makes for commercial profits.

The outsider remains a potential enemy even as Christian universality is seen as quite compatible with the exclusion, and perhaps persecution, of the heretic and the apostate. The ideology which asserts the supremacy of a national culture over all that is alien reflects dangers inasmuch as the rule of reason is proclaimed as the new mission of the nation state. And yet no culture can remain isolated from others, particularly in the present state of information revolution. This calls for a new shift, a new openness to the dialectic of the stranger and the native which intensifies in the present age to become part of the living experience of the exile and the immigrant.

Given the closeness of the world’s peoples made possible by the interaction of the native and the alien, a mutual interdependence takes place, possibly a symbiotic relationship of what Georg Simmel in a celebrated essay of 1908, “The Stranger”, calls “wandering” and “attachment”. The stranger becomes familiar because of the closeness of physical and cultural contact. In the encounters of our own century, in which we pride ourselves on eliminating grand narratives and the loss of cultural purity, we seek accommodation with this double consciousness of our historical condition in concepts of hybridity and syncretism and navigate our positions between various political and social conditions.

Henderson’s collection covers different aspects of the experience of exile. Its principal virtue lies in the fact that neither the editor nor his contributors have stuck to any one meaning of exile and border-crossings. Indeed the word “exile” with its sense of utter loss is sparingly used. The emphasis throughout the book is on crossings, going over and intermixing through racial, ethnic and linguistic identities. What is of interest here is the way a change of language, more than a simple change of place, creates a deeper alienation from one’s moorings, and makes for that state of mimicry that post-colonial critics regard as a badge of the outsider. As a contributor in the present volume says, all crossings and borders provide the scope for working “on the edges of language” to enter a zone of non-acceptance and resistance.

Jane Marcus’s essay on Nancy Cunard (in my view the best in the volume) explores the boundaries of race, class and sexuality that women in particular traverse in their wanderings in alien cultures. As an Englishwoman who never settled at home, she ranged all over in open transgression of family, racial and cultural codes. As one who “went native” in the sense that she identified herself with the African negro at a time when the British empire revelled in its racial “purity”, Cunard sought her identity in a culture that traditionalists in her time regarded as the other. Cunard was a willing exile for whom her wandering was a state she embraced.

Marcus suggests that because a woman is by her very position a marginalised person, her embrace of the black was an act of solidarity with the other marginalised race. Her editing the “Negro Anthology” and the magazine Negro adds yet another dimension to what is called Modernism inasmuch as it removes the concept from a provincial European name onto a broader stage that also figures the non-European, the non-white.

In the contemporary conceptions of border crossing the ideologies of post-colonialism have emerged as pointers towards the definition of self. In the phenomenon of globalisation the awareness of distinct racial and ethnic identity has brought to the fore the significance of the work of Franz Fanon and W.E.B.Du Bois. In a deep analysis of the two thinkers Anita Goldman sheds light on “border subjects” defined within distinctive “border cultures”. These black intellectuals speak for the making of identities within dominant non-white cultures. Their ability to project a subjectivity fashioned in exile and estragement from their home countries is the result of what Du Bois calls “double consciousness”.

As Goldman suggests, this double consciousness is projected by the two in different ways. For Du Bois the assertion of black civic rights within the white liberal culture constitutes an act of self-representation. In his classic “Souls of Black Folk” he passionately pleads for recognising the black rights by the white liberal establishment and sees the salvation of the blacks in the possibilities offered within that establishment. Du Bois is like those early reformers in India who sought accommodation within the British liberal tradition. Like his Indian counterparts, Du Bois set much store by the English language and believed that its mastery would enable the blacks to challenge white supremacy.

Fanon, on the other hand, rejects any compromise with the colonial establishment and emphasises the importance of what Goldman calls “existential knowledge” to manipulate the discourse of colonialism for the purpose of challenging and replacing it by an alternative discourse. In both cases, however, the writers confront colonialism from their own marginalised positions and challenge its universalist claims.

I chose these two essays in the Henderson collection because they have a direct bearing on the consciousness of the exile in most cases. But there are other essays as well which explore border-crossings from various perspectives. One may cross borders physically but can one really forget the borders within? Here the role of language in border-crossing is crucial.

Kathryn Hellerstein examines the transformation brought about a Polish poet, Kadya Molodowsky, who lost her native Yiddish but found little recompense in America. Her predicament is typical and we in India should be more alive to it than we are. Our zeal to hand out plaudits to every Indian expatriate writer, however mediocre their output (everyone today claims spiritual kinship with Rushdie, himself a derivative writer in spite of his linguistic gimmicks), speaks for an innate inferiority complex on our part.

The essays by Nancy Miller and Sara Suleri are instructive in that they concentrate on personal predicaments in relation to their professional engagements. Both take recourse to autobiographical criticism in order not only to expose the generic fixation of traditional criticism, but also to point out how in bordering and limiting the critical act, the master tropes of available criticism play the same colonising role that master races play in the political sphere.

The essays on popular culture, media studies and the current Anglo-American orthodoxy, euphemistically called cultural studies, seem to me not to belong here. But then border-crossings have such a large provenance in today’s information revolution that anything can be smuggled in.

Henderson’s volume will attract the already convinced, but leave congenital sceptics like me queasy. The trouble is we all race towards where the action is, even if it is taking place in virtual reality.

Clearing the debris of foreign rule
by Shelley Walia

Post-colonial Theory: A Critical Introduction by Leela Gandhi. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Pages 200. Rs 225.Post-colonial Literatures in English: History, Language, Theory by Denis Walder Blacwell. Oxford. Pages 332. £ 13.99.

WE have for too long complacently followed a programme of teaching which is now outdated and obsolete. It has lacked, as persuasively argued by Prof Ronald Bernett, “an overarching educational rationale”, devoid of a coherent vocabulary and a set of “conceptual responses” around which we can build a curriculum for the 21st century. Academics cannot now be forgiven for not being critical and inquisitive about their teaching and their research and scholarly roles.

Sooner or later the leisurely attitude of the teacher has to give in to a serious and purposeful curriculum development and a methodology which takes into consideration not only recent trends in literary theory and post-colonial cultural studies, but also the role of the literary intellectual whose radical work of transformation, whose fight against different types of oppression are carried on at the specific institutional site where he exercises his own expertise and his critical and political pedagogic practice.

The space within the university is not apolitical or inward looking as it is often thought. Criticism has to continuously undermine existing hegemonies of thought and interpretation and produce what Frank Lentricchia has called, “a culturally suspicious, trouble-making readership”.

I strongly feel that the ascendancy of modern critical and post-colonial theory, along with philosophy within English departments, has led to a provocative unorthodox stance aiming to goad the students into a properly irreverent attitude towards received critical assumptions. To so comment on literary texts is to produce an active interrogation of the ways in which we are written into, are written by, and support strategies of power. What is needed is a connection between academic criticism, private feeling, and critical politics so that the literary intellectual can engage himself in radical work, thereby moving history in the direction of a collective will for desirable change.

It is in this context that post-colonial theory becomes relevant. Though there is a plethora of semantic quibbling over the nomenclature, it could be finally concluded that the theory may be called “post-colonialism” and the condition that it addresses may be best conveyed through the notion of “post-coloniality”. As Leela Gandhi writes in her recent book, “Post-colonial Theory”, “Whatever the controversy surrounding this theory, its value must be judged in terms of its adequacy to conceptualise the complex condition which attends the aftermath of colonial occupation.”

The recent infatuation with nativism, which we first saw in C.D. Narasimhaiah and then in G.N. Devy, now followed blindly by their many ardent lovers, is a result of post-colonial amnesia, a desire to erase painful memories of colonial suffering and subordination. The burden of colonial inheritance has to be recognised and this cannot be done solely by emphasising on indigenous and “pure” critical norms. The present-day academics obsessed with translation theory and works in translation along with the overpowering fascination for native critical theory are alright, but this is not enough for the emancipation from the uncomfortable realities of the colonial encounter.

Post-colonialism here becomes “a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath”. Leela Gandhi rightly calls it a “therapeutic retrieval”, because it is only in the encounter with the past that we can profit by a theory that tries to define the cultural and political identities of the colonised subjects.

The obsessive creativity and semantic profusion of Saleem Sinai in “Midnight’s Children” is a verbal profusion that is seen in many Indian writers in English. This phenomenon is synonymous with, as Leela Gandhi points out, the word “utterance” used by Nehru in his “midnight speech” at the dawn of independence. The desire is to create a totally new world out of a subjugated colonised condition. As F. Jameson maintains, post-coloniality is “something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps impossible, dimensions”. Thus, on one side lies its derivative state emerging from a colonial past and, on the other, a “stepping out from the old to the new”, to use Nehru’s words again. This could be the reason of the inventiveness which underpins novels from “Midnight’s Children” to “Everest Hotel”.

Gandhi barges boldly into a minefield of post-colonial theory which is currently among the most fashionable preoccupation of history, literature, and cultural studies. The tremors of this interest in modernism as well as post-modernism can be traced back to the early 1950s when writers like Beckett became interested in writing plays such as “Waiting for Godot” and Sartre wrote a scathing critique of French imperialism in Algeria, or when the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya posed a threat to western hegemony.

More than this, it was a time when Fanon wrote “Black Skin, White Masks” and the works of Cesaire and Albert Memmi became seminal to the uprisings of nationalist movements, thereby giving an impetus to the whole question of rewriting history. Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth”, with its preface written by none other than Sartre, or the reworking of “The Tempest” by George Lamming further added to the ongoing rush of a deep-seated impulse to write oneself back into history.

Post-colonial writing therefore came to be constituted in counter-discursive practices. The marginalised began to have a voice, minority discourses contended with the over-privileging of western history and literature, leading to rethinking about fossilised curricula in English departments, and multiculturalism. The master narrative of western discourse stood challenged finally in Edward Said’s two major works, “Orientalism” and “Culture and Imperialism”.

Leela Gandhi critically examines these texts with a view to giving a brief history from Marxist post-structuralism to Nietzschian influence on contemporary theory. She has a rather wide range of reference — from Shakespeare to Seth, from Homer to Hobsbawm, covering all significant issues such as hybridity, diaspora, feminism, politics of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and academic activism, which have occupied the post-colonial critic in the recent past. This is a formidable grind through extensive scholarship.

She is notably and purposely addressing a broad audience. A literary critic, she believes that her purpose of writing this book is to bring the colonial and post-colonial history and its theorising to the illumination of great public questions. But I do wish she had written in an easy and conversational style with which the book begins as then, the student of post-colonial literature would have had an access to the mass of detailed investigation. But for a more advanced student the book comes through as a lively synthesis and analysis.

***

On the other hand, in an accessible and wide-ranging introduction to post-colonial literature in English, Denis Walder guides the reader through the historical, linguistic and theoretical issues which underpin post-colonial theory. By providing detailed studies on Indian fiction, Caribbean and black British poetry, and contemporary South African literature, he gives a provocative analysis of a major and exciting area of literary studies. The book is a serious read, enlivened by an occasional tongue-in-the-cheek observation and thoroughly researched, especially in the chapter focusing on Achebe, Braithwaite, C.L.R. James, Narayan, Nugugi, Said, Spivak, Walcott, Ondaatje and Dorfman. Those who have the task of understanding the past through history, language and theory would benefit greatly by the historical and socio-linguistic perspective of this book.

But in the end, Walder’s account of post-colonial literature in English leaves one intrigue and stimulated, but also somewhat sceptical. We could, therefore, ask if post-colonialism is a true counter discourse or just another fashionable academic game that involves the migrant academic moving from the West to the East or the East to the West for reasons which seem to be more personal than political or purely academic.

Undoubtedly they have tried to wage a war on totality and recognised the post-modern notion of difference, but they have not succeeded in evolving an expression or an idiom which emerges from their specific cultural and political circumstances. I am not sure if they have succeeded really in moving from the Fanonion first stage of slavish aping of the western forms to the second or the third stage of nativism or the intense revolutionary stance of voicing their views from a wholly indigenous cultural location. How then can we really call their discipline “post-colonial” when it refers neither to the “historical break” signifying the end of colonial rule, nor to an “ideological orientation” which carries the implication of some form of continuing resistance as well as oppression, though not a complete break from the weight of neo-colonial tendencies?

I am quite sceptical of a totally uncontaminated post-colonial theory which positions itself within the universalist or Eurocentric domain and thereby incapacitates itself to speak from the outside. The long history of colonialism cannot be wished away as it has left its indelible mark on the post-colonial consciousness.

Post-colonialism, as Leela Gandhi maintains, “holds out the possibility of thinking our way through, and therefore, out of the historical unbalancing and the cultural inequalities produced by the colonial encounter. And in its best moments it has supplied the academic world with an ethical paradigm for a systematic critique of institutional suffering”. However, Gandhi refuses to regard post-colonialism as the end of colonialism, or for that matter, the onset of utopianism after its demise.

Another important critic, Anne McClintock, takes post-colonialism as being obsessed with the linear movement towards progress and perfectibility, “an enlightened suppression of colonial troubles”. There is a rejection here of any historical break as it is difficult to overlook the glaring divisions in contemporary societies and the persistence of neo-colonialism “held in place by transnational corporations and the international division of labour, linking First World capital with Third World labour markets”.

Recent criticism does get co-opted into a Eurocentrism by giving all priority to western thought and language over the non-western. The western idiom prevails in post-colonial writings and gets assimilated into its theory. You cannot argue on the one hand that post-colonial writings are an assertion of the indigenous creative impulse and then go on to assert that they emerge from interaction with imperial cultures and languages.

This paradox is at the heart of post-colonial theory in which the past stands only repressed and not surpassed, as Lyotard argues. The ambivalent condition of the colonial aftermath has to be tackled for post-colonialism to become a combative and interrogative force in its own right.

Path-breaking book on WTO
Punjabi literature
by Jaspal Singh

PAUL Singh Dhillon is a well-known expert on water resources of Punjab. Two of his books in this field are universally acclaimed. “A Tale of Two Rivers” was prominently reviewed in quite a few national dailies.

His “Mid-Summer Flight’s Dream” is a very interesting travelogue that takes the reader through temporal layers of various socio-cultural formations across Asia and Europe.

Now Dhillon has done a book length study on World Trade Organisation (WTO) and its structural and conceptual aspects. In English a lot has been written about this contentious body but very few people have done anything worthwhile in the regional languages. Dhillon’s book in Punjabi “Aalmi Vapaar Jathebandi ate Bharat Sarkar” (Desh Sewak Publications, Chandigarh) is a pioneering work in the region.

The development of a language does not depend only on its literary output in the form of novels, stories, poems and plays. In fact the full potential of a language is better exploited in religious and philosophical writings, sociological and anthropological studies and in other social sciences like history, economics, political and legal theory and so on.

A casual look at the development of English as a global language corroborates this. Historical narratives by Edward Gibbon, Arnold Joseph Toynbee, Will Durant, H.G. Wells and others, the powerful prose of Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill, political writings of Edmund Burke and Harold Joseph Laski, anthropological writings of Bronislow Malinowski and James George Frazer and so on make delightful reading, whatever their ideological perspective. Even Nehru’s writings in English is smooth and inspiring and captivates the reader with the lilt of words.

This apart, hundreds of novelists, poets and playwrights have also contributed to the enrichment of the English language. In the modern times the English media, particularly the print variety, is adding to the unlimited potential of the language.

Most Punjabi writers, however, think that to be called a writer, one must be a poet, novelist, short story writer or a playwright. Essay is a neglected literary form in Punjabi. Journalism in this language is not as linguistically conscious as it ought to be. An editor friend once lamented to me that even well-known Punjabi writers are casual about the style and syntax of their pieces for the newspaper columns and they usually commit silly mistakes of usage.

Against this background, Paul Singh Dhillon’s attempt to write a book on World Trade Organisation and its various organs and implications is a stupendous step to be lauded by one and all. Dhillon traces the history of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) since World War II and the various rounds of trade talks since then.

He tries to understand the moves of the powerful lobbies which were instrumental in scuttling the International Trade Organisation (ITO) in favour of GATT in 1947. Dhillon says that the principle of equality and non-discriminatory trade visualised in GATT actually goes against the interest of the developing countries because it underplays the principle of a level playing field since it treats all nations, whether rich or poor, strong or weak, on a par in the matter of international trade.

The first three rounds of GATT talks were mainly concerned with tariffs on industrial products. During this time the membership of GATT rose to 39. The next four rounds of talks stressed the need for removing restrictions on trade.

The eighth round of talks called the Uruguay Round is the most important step in the establishment of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which has replaced all the earlier treaties and agreements on trade and tariffs. The Uruguay Round is known for the Dunkel proposals which were discussed at various levels in different trade meets and were ultimately agreed upon on December 15, 1993, at Geneva.

Then on April 15, 1994, the World Trade Organisation was formally set up at Marrakesh in Morocco which was to take off from January 1, 1995.

The major issues discussed and decided in the final round were an agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIMS), patents and royalties, agreement on trade in services, agreement on textiles and clothing, multi-fibre agreement (MFA), integrated dispute settlement system (IDSS), trade policy review mechanism (TPRM), International Standard Organisation (ISO), agreement on bio-technology and telecommunication, agreement on trade in agro-products and aggregate measurement of support (AMS) and the proposals on conservation of environment and ecology and so on.

Giving in detail the various aspects of the provisions of the World Trade Organisation, Dhillon discusses their implications for the Third World in general and India in particular. Some of the issues raised by him figured in the marathon talks held recently at Seattle. In fact the Seattle meet has thrown a lot of light on the future intentions of the developed countries and vindicated the apprehensions of the Third World.

Dhillon believes that the first round of globalisation from 17th century onwards unleashed colonialism and imperialism leading to two devastating world wars and the pauperisation of the Third World. Now the second round is unfolding a new kind of colonialism under a new garb and a new mask which may be called market colonialism, having unlimited access to market for industrial and agricultural products. It may be mentioned here that the advanced countries want to globalise the consumer market but not the labour market and the super-technology market. The flow of both these is jealously restricted by manipulations and subterfuges.

For instance, under the WTO dispensation all member countries will have to import 3.3 per cent of agricultural produce from outside even if the market is flooded with the local produce. Financial institutions in the Third World — banks and insurance companies — may not be able to compete with the foreign companies since most of the Indian companies are labour intensive. The incoming companies are supposed to be slim and smart and technology intensive and they can easily outsmart the Indian ones by sharply cutting down their profits and workforce.

Even Indian newspapers, many of which are run in the traditional manner, may not be able to stand the onslaught of foreign competition. The rigours of the new patent regime and intellectual property management may in the course of time give birth to a kind of neo-Brahminism at the global level, since most of the new inventions and discoveries and also products are being patented by the western countries, particularly the USA. This phenomenon has already shown its devastating impact on the prices of medicines in the country.

In short, a kind of socio-economic Darwinism may become fully operative, edging out poor, infirm nations from independent space under the sun. The first round of globalisation made Britain the omnipotent nation; if everything goes according to the plans and designs of western powers, now the USA will repeat the farce of the colonial tragedy. The middle classes in the Third World, particularly in India, have mindlessly embraced these developments without realising their tragic consequences for the masses of India.

A character in one of Roman poet Virgil’s creations aptly sums up such apprehensions when he says, “I fear the Greeks even when they bring us gifts”. The Indian middle classes have been allured by the “gifts” offered to them by the global industrial and financial capital. It is yet to be seen what price the common people of India have to pay for serving the interests of a microscopic minority of their countrymen.

Dhillon has spelt out these ramifications of the new world order in his Lahorian Punjabi with a good sprinkling of Persian words.

Prosperity only for a few
by B.S. Thaur

Reality and Society by S.R. Sharda. Pages 151. Rs 50.

THERE are writers who make simple themes complex and heavy by jumbling words and bringing in avoidable detail. But the book under review is an offbeat piece dealing with a complex subject in a simple way keeping the ambit of discussion to the thematic core. The book is a paperback edition containing 14 essays in just 151 pages.

Known for his work on Sufism, purely a spiritual subject, the author has now forayed into the temporal area. All the essays deal with the individual vis-a-vis society inter se.

The author believes that modernity — that is capitalism and communism or any other ism — has failed to bring relief from sufferings to the teeming millions. Under the regime of these systems, the author avers in the very introductory passage of the book, “More serious problems like moral degradation, criminalisation of politics, corruption, mafia and don cultures, break-up of family, increase in the incidence of rape, incest, suicide, murder, diseases like AIDS, cancer, blood pressure, diabetes, have appeared.”

The author dismisses spirituality as an alternative philosophy for world peace. He argues that pure spirituality cannot provide the physical needs of the increasing population and cannot defend even political independence from hostile neighbours.

The author attributes all ills in society to the philosophy of modernity and suggests that the remedy lies in the philosophy of “holism” in its right perspective. His complaint is that people (society) blink over the reality. He has titled this book on these two words, reality and society.

He has built his ideas of “holism” on the premise that the universe — the whole existence — is one unit and the individual is a particle thereof. As one of its parts, the individual contributes to the “whole”. The individual has to enjoy his role of contributing to the whole and the contribution of the “whole” accruing to him. The moment the individual assumes himself as different from the “whole”, the former starts exploiting the latter (whole), the trouble starts. The diversities in the “whole” are in the nature of interdependence and then of coexistence. The “whole” remains when the individual is no more. The individual comes from the “whole” not vice versa.

The light of the sun, fruit of the trees, fragrance of flowers, all are not for themselves, rather they are for others — the “whole” from where each one gets sustenance. Working for each other means working for the “whole”. This is the reality.

This is how the author has explained his concept of holism (fundamentals of holistic ethics). Paradoxically, the author, while propounding his concept of “holism” forgets who and what will make the “individual” a docile and disciplined contributor to the “whole” and not consciously seek contribution from others in the “whole”. This part he expects the intellectuals to perform.

This theory of “holism” appears to have been stretched out from the karma philosophy of the Bhagwadgita.

A cursory reading of the book gives an impression of a pack of utopian ideas. However, on second reading one realises that it has very telling substance pointing to the ills of the individual and social conduct making most lives hell, which otherwise are liveable. Some of the write-ups make interesting reading. To quote only two of them, the one with the heading “Break of Family” first. In this essay the author has comprehensively discussed the nucleus of family marriage, matehood and parenthood as the fulfilment of life. The flow of ideas on the issue is racy: “The essence of life is love. The economic needs are only supporting. Family provides the real base of life and is a source of happiness in the form of love of matehood and parenthood.”

At another place in this write-up, the author rates motherhood for a woman higher than Prime Ministership or Presidentship of a country. The importance and advantage of family culture has been emphasised on page 51. “Woman preferring to remain single to pursue career wander about aimless and dissatisfied, moving from one place, one man or one amusement to another but find no interest anywhere. They repent in advanced age when it is too late.”

On Communism, capitalism and Gandhism in the context of modernity, the author has given a superficial comparison. “If the spirit of the first form of modernity — capitalism — is arrogance, that of the latter form, communism, is hatred. But life gets its fulfilment in love which is lacking in both forms of modernity. On the other hand, pure spirituality becomes hypocrisy in the practical life of aggressiveness, when a spiritualist has to face and fight the aggressors even in self-protection.”

As regards Gandhian thought, it was developed by its propounder, Mahatma Gandhi, in the struggle against the British colonial rulers for political independence. It lost relevance the moment its own exponents turned into the establishment and lastly when India cut a sorry figure against China in 1962.”

In this connection, the author flaunts his view of holism saying that it is easier to develop any thought of either spirituality or materialism. Unless there is a synthesis of both those thoughts, there cannot be an order of co-existence and love.

In the chapter “Economico-political functioning” on communism, the author says, “The propounders of communism were true and honest in their mission to get the working people a better position. Marx did a miracle in his speculation in economics but he failed at the human level as personality of man is not recognised in the thought. He thus indicts communism for ignoring the human aspect of life.

While discussing “Wealth — truth and target”, the author has explained the reality of modernity in a few words. “It holds money as the supreme reality and increase in production the focal point of all research in science and technology. If we go by statistics of total production, they show affluence, but if we go by statistics of distribution, the picture would be dismal. More than half of the population in the rural areas would be below the poverty line ...... It causes concentration of wealth in a few hands .... it creates slums, diseases, illiteracy and crimes.”

Human wrongs in India
Write view
By Randeep Wadhera

Human Rights in India edited by S. Mehartaj Begum. APH, New Delhi. Pages xviii + 328. Rs 600.

IT is difficult for an unjust polity to exist for long. It is impossible for a democracy which denies human rights to survive even a day. This truism has been brought home to us in stark relief time and again by events in Indonesia, the erstwhile Soviet Union, Pakistan and other countries. It is precisely for this reason that it becomes imperative for us to safeguard human rights in India.

This book is a compilation of essays on different aspects of the human rights problem by eminent persons in various fields. Justice V.M. Tarkunde points out that it is wrong to assume that democracy implies the rule of the majority community by ignoring the minority aspirations.

Any attempt to establish Hindu rashtra based on the simplistic assumption that 80 per cent of the Indian population is Hindu would be to give a clean chit to Hitler’s idea of final solution. That would be a catastrophic eventually for pluralistic society.

This makes awareness of one’s rights vis-a-vis the state indispensable. In fact the concept of lok shakti propounded by the late Jayaprakash Narain was aimed at ensuring the implementation as well as protection of the common man’s basic rights.

N. Gopalaswami observes that presently there are over 90 million displaced persons the world over. They are witness to untold violence let loose by nations and fellow human beings.

But the violation of human rights is a routine affair in our factories and work places where child labour is rampant and landlords and other powerful persons exploit the poor. While the National Human Rights Commission started working in India in 1993, it has not been able to have as much impact as it could have due to several constraints.

Moreover, since it also takes up social and economic issues, it is virtually inundated with pleas for help from countless persons in a given state. Obviously the streamlining of the functioning of the state level human rights commissions is essential.

Here one must pause and ask: “Is it possible to treat all citizens as equals?” The obvious answer is a firm “no”. The Scheduled Castes and Tribes, for example, need extra help that would enable them to gain parity in society. This makes it imperative that their rights, especially in the rural areas, are protected more zealously.

For this purpose several legal instruments have been brought into effect — namely, the Untouchability Act, 1955, amended in 1976 and renamed as the Protection of Civil Rights Act; the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, etc.

Article 16 (4A) of our Constitution allows for reserved quotas in promotion in various categories of services for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Article 335 stipulates the considerations of claims of Scheduled Castes and Tribes to posts in the state and central governments.

This volume also contains separate chapters on the rights of women as well as children.

It cannot be gainsaid that all these categories do need special attention of our policy makers as well as of international organisations looking after human rights implementation in different parts of the world.

However there appears to be an oversight. What about those who do not fall under any of the reserved categories and are yet living in penury? This anomaly has prompted even some of the upper castes to demand the OBCs status in order to get job reservation and other pecuniary benefits.

The most recent example is that of the Jats of Rajasthan. Another painful omission is the rights of the physically and mentally handicapped persons, which do not find even a passing mention. Why? Must darkness remain a constant companion of these people just because they do not have a powerful enough voice?

Do the learned contributors to the book under review realise what it is like to live in the land of the Mahatma as a handicapped person? Or, will lobbies alone decide the fate of an Indian citizen? Try living for a day by not using one of your limbs or faculties. It will be an eye opener, I assure you.