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A century of more deaths, more
advance
by
Shelley Walia
THERE are very few people
who do not look back to the past with a sense of
nostalgia or to the future with a sense of fear.
We find ourselves at a historical moment in the
process of a major change or destruction. But
propagandists like Fukuyama or short-sighted
politicians like George Bush and Bill Clinton
tenaciously bask in the misapprehension that the
old imperial order has passed and we are
embarking on a New World Order as liberal
democracy takes firm root.
Following the
devastating events of two world wars and the rise
of oppressive ideological dictatorships in the
early part of the century, 20th century thought
has been characterised by pessimism, both over
the future of mankind and the potentially
catastrophic effect of natural science. If
socialism and conservatism have disintegrated,
and politics in the advanced capitalist world is
a conspiracy to defraud the general public, it is
understandable why many historians have written
with a sense of nostalgia and pessimism.
Though a
historian needs emotional and chronological
distancing to write about a period, Hobsbawm has
finally stepped out of a distant past which has
been his concern throughout his career, and has
written "Age of Extremes: The Short
Twentieth Century", an autobiography of his
times that coincides with the larger part of the
20th century, a period that begins, in his own
words "at Sarajevo (as we can now sadly
recognise) and also ends at Sarajevo, or rather
with the collapse of the socialist regimes of the
Soviet Union and the eastern half of
Europe".
This is history
writing, grand in ambition, an eloquently rich
and erudite portrait of a society where once the
Nazi and the communist experiments promised to
remake the world but, instead, Auschwitz and
Kolyma lead us to doubt the basis of human
wisdom.
More than being
circular, history seems to be downhill all the
way. Each age wades deeper into its own blood,
with the 20th century the most bestial, as is
evident from the number of people killed which is
more than ever before in human history. And this
is in spite of the maximum number of people
receiving education in an age which had the
positive features of emancipation, decolonisation
and firm entrenchment of the women’s
liberation movement.
It was
Hitler’s rise to power in Berlin in the late
1920s that determined Hobsbawm’s politics
and his passionate interest in history. Probably,
because of these reasons he differs as an
historian from others who share his views on
historical interpretation: "I must in some
sense see things differently from my friends
whose experience of war was different — from
the late E.P. Thompson who served as a tank
commander in the Italian campaign, or from the
Africanist Basil Davidson who fought with the
partisan in Voivodina and Liguria."
The advantage
that historians like him have is that they can
appropriate the "otherness of the past"
which younger historians are at a disadvanage to
perceive. Change in generations is central to the
writing of the 20th century history.
Though not a
polemical, "Age of Extremes" is a
moving exegesis of three sharply divided periods
in the "short twentieth century": the
suicide of liberal bourgeois order from 1914 to
1945, the golden age of economic prosperity from
1945 to the early seventies, and lastly the
period of communist uncertainty leading to the
collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. Going by
the record of millions dying in the two wars and
other political upheavals around the globe, the
age is truly one of extremes, unlike the peaceful
and quiet 19th century. So, what has science or
reason or the Age of Enlightenment given mankind
if not a "rising curve of barbarism"?
The issue of
growing poverty in the Third World concerns
Hobsbawm and he wonders how the western powers
can possibly feel triumphant and secure over
their progress. While the eastern political
systems have ceased to exist, the stability of
the non-communist states, in both the developed
and the developing countries, can also no longer
be taken for granted.
And if on the
economic front there is not much encouragement,
what about culture with its high modernism which
keeps the masses out of its very elitist
engagements and aestheticism? In his analysis of
arts, Hobsbawm introduces the apocalyptic note,
insisting that western civilisation is sliding
into instability and decline and that this
evidence can be found in the fact that its
literature is rarely tragic or religious.
Within a very
short period humanity had no doubt transfigured
the face of the earth by annihilating space and
time through the revolution in communications and
urbanisation of the world, but when it seemed
that man had almost overpowered nature, the
nightmare of ecological crisis struck with a
terrifying vengeance as hideous as the
liquidation of millions in this age of
catastrophe, of decomposition, of uncertainty.
Scientific
progress, according to Hobsbawm, undoubtedly
gives us reason to believe that we have
progressed, but the nightmare of the Gulag always
lurks in the background making it impossible to
overlook the horrific capacities given to the war
machine to commit mass murders.
Without
appearing pedantic, Hobsbawm gives a marvellous
account of this illusion of economic progress
resulting from the death of reason. Moral
regression and the decaying of social solidarity
are what make up the complacent contemporary
life.
Standing at a
point of historic crisis, Hobsbawm writes at the
end of the book: "The forces generated by
the techno-scientific economy are now great
enough to destroy the environment, the material
foundations of human life. The structures of
human societies themselves, including even some
of the social foundations of the capitalist
economy, are on the point of being destroyed by
the erosion of what we have inherited from the
past. Our world risks both explosion and
implosion. It must change."
This is history
written not only with an organising ideology, but
with passion and with an almost Old Testament
mood of foreboding and fearsome judgement. The
narrative piles horrifying catastrophe upon
another, famine flourishes amidst unimaginable
wealth and the earth edges imperceptibly towards
more global disorder and more military
operations. Wars, massacres, natural disasters:
the storyline rhythmically and bleakly repeats
itself with an end that no one can predict.
Though the
general pattern of his own ideas about his times
imprints itself on his observations, the book,
which is a stimulating reassessment of the
century gone by, presents the view that "the
fundamental experience of everyone who has lived
through much of this century is error and
surprise. What has happened has often been quite
unexpected. Whatever our reactions, the discovery
that we were mistaken must be the starting point
for our reflections on the history of our
times".
The story that
this last of the European humanists tells of this
century is the story of his own life told in such
a vivid and unhysterical tone of voice that one
cannot but be impressed by the desperate
sincerity and humanity, as well as the range and
depth of scholarship behind it.
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Voice of the East: so said
Edward Said
by
Rumina Sethi
MARX’S views on interests of
the dominant groups in society generally forms,
the basis of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of
hegemony which gives the most thoroughg oing
understanding of how a ruling group exercises and
sustains domination through consent and
persuasion. In other words, the ideas of the
ruling class are not directly imposed through
coercion on subordinate groups but permeated in
society through a consensus of subordinate will
in order to appear legitimate and normal.
One of the
spectacular books that appeared in this century
is Edward Said’s "Culture and
Imperialism", where Said treats culture as a
vehicle for the imperialist venture rather than
an area of art and learning alone. Following
Gramscian parameters by treating culture as an
instrument of political control. "Culture
and Imperialism" has the ambitious scope of
defining the patterns of relationships between
the western world and its overseas territories.
Spurred by
American forays into imperialism, Said takes the
reader through 200 years of narrative history
with a view to highlighting the unconscious
imperial attitudes which underline the narratives
of those writers scarcely associated with the
goverance of "others".
Connecting
Conrad and Jane Austen, for instance, with this
enterprise, Said holds them culpable of depicting
native peoples as "marginally visible"
and "people without history". It is in
the very omission of the salient fact of
imperialism that much English literature from
"Jane Eyre", "Vanity fair"
and "Great Expectations" to Raymond
Williams’s "Culture and Society"
assumes its character.
For Said, Conrad
may be deeply anti-imperialist, but he is also an
author who believes with equal conviction that
Africa or South America could never have had a
history or culture independent of their western
masters. Earlier, Defoe’s "Robinson
Crusoe" introduced to English gentry the
founder of a new world and "Captain
Singleton" less explicitly but surely,
related to the annexation of riches and lands
abroad.
Less directly,
Fielding, Richardson, Smolett and Sterne did the
same. Indeed, the English cultural forms like the
novel and the opera served as important cultural
affiliations within England, yet, unconsciously
perhaps, ignored the presence of an area outside
"felt vaguely and ineptly to be out
there" instead of, as a body of humanistic
ideas, preventing the acceleration of imperial
powers.
We are now well
aware of Said’s well-established and
canonical 20th century classic,
"Orientalism", where he defines this
science as a western reading of the Orient that
distinguishes the East from the West. Said has
argued that the epistemological and ontological
categories employed support a relationship of
domination and authority.
Further, he
claims that the Orient is consistent in its
attitudes, behaviour, and patterns of living; the
mind of its people is imagined to be static and
their thinking as "others"is believed
to be vastly inferior to that of the West.
The quintessence
of the Orient is seen in its sensuality and
passivity, and this view has endured. Not many
European travellers, pilgrims, scholars or
academics have disagreed widely with this
Oriental "truth".
Said has
emphasised that the creation of orientalist
stereotypes was past of the intellectual exercise
that strategically made colonialism possible and
legitimised it. The Orient, correspondingly, has
been characterised by a variety of essentialist
characteristics that vary with the trends of
foreign governance.
In the interest
of colonialism, the Orient was a creation which
played a vital role in constituting the differing
religious, political, and aesthetic positions of
European imperialists. For those legitimising
colonialism as a channel of advancement,
imperialism was the prerequisite to progress and
an antidote to feudalism.
From within this
perspective, academic orientalism can be
interpreted in the light of Said’s
hypothesis which does not accept the study of the
Orient as the only motive of the orientalist. In
other words, there is a link between scholarship
and power since orientalism, in Said’s
terms, is not simply a romantic discipline for
disinterested seekers.
Said has been
extremely useful in the last three decades of the
20th century in any discussion that brings the
role of knowledge and power into the
understanding of non-European culture. In general
terms, he has done much work to expose the
creation of the subject as the "Other".
The conglomeration of various cultures into a
single position facilitates an understanding of
counter-strategies of representation.
Even though he
has not outlined any strategy for circumventing
the assumptions of orientalism, his model is
useful in analysing what may be called
"orientalism in reverse". In other
words, Said’s argument can be used to
explain how the indigenous idioms, fashioned to
wrestle with orientalist assumptions, in fact,
correspond closely with the orientalist
problematic and often turn out to be relational
rather than oppositional categories of
orientalism.
"Culture
and Imperialism" shows a concern not simply
with Asia and Africa but with neo-imperialism of
a kind perpetuated by the USA in the guise of a
rationalised "world responsibility".
Having militarily intervented in the Third World
every year between 1945 and 1967, the USA has
been extremely active over the decades in
imposing "the rule of law", most
notably in 1991 when 650,000 US troops travelled
6,000 miles to resist an Iraqi invasion of a US
ally.
What Said, and
earlier Chomsky, have noted is the media exercise
of "manufacturing consent" so that
intervention in Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, Chile,
Guatemala, Salvador and Grenada among others can
have mainstream approval and consensus.
Said is
vociferous in his condemnation of hundreds of
thousands of deaths at the hands of a
"friendly"government and of American
policies (pushed through the United Nations) of
enforcing resolutions for wrongdoing (as in Iraq)
when it has in fact keenly supported, with utter
inconsistency, similar misbehaviour elsewhere (as
in Israel). The presentday American domination
can be traced to its sources in the wars with
native American Indians, allegorised, for
instance, in Ahab’s stubborn quest of Moby
Dick.
As for cultural
hegemony, control is exercised through the
American media imperialism which forces even a
Saddam Hussein to rely on CNN for news. The
American media has built an impression of Iraq as
a "brittle" land, with suggestions of
Arabic subhumanity and aridity, only because such
beliefs can legitimise killing, bombing and
destruction of people who were, it is inferred,
deserving of it.
But what about
giving a thought to Baghdad as the seat of the
Abbasid civilisation? What of the Tigris and the
Euphrates, Sumer, Babylon, Nineveh, Hammurabi,
Assyria and the Mesopotamian civilisation which
laid the foundations of modern-day Iraq?
Said questions
the obeisance and passivity of intellectuals
— much before this subject was to become the
theme of his 1993 Reith lectures — who give
up their "vocation" for
"porfessionalism". Such intellectuals
are accused of brandishing "jargons of an
almost unimaginable rebarbativeness" like
post-modernism, new historicism, deconstruction
and discourse analysis even as Said himself has
addressed the agenda of culture and imperialism
through these very modes.
It is strikingly
apparent that Said belongs neither to that
category he identifies as
"intellectual" because of his position
among the post-modern, post-colonial prophets
imbued with specialised learning, nor with the
"professionals" precisely because of
his easy dismissal of critical movements and
standing as a "public"critic.
It is important
to appreciate Said’s growing concern with
finding alternatives to homogenising tendencies
as long as there is ambiguity in the
representation and definition of culture. In
fact, this book clearly brings out his optimism
that it is not entirely impossible to conceive of
a scholarship that neither
"corrupts"history, nor is indifferent
to human reality. He indicates how
post-orientalist historiography should trace
Third World indentities as relational rather than
essentialist, a view from a vantage point not
external to the actuality of relationship between
cultures or from a privileging epistemology
centred in unequal relationships, but within the
actuality, and as participants in it.
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Old world-view, new
perspectives
by
Anil Rajimwale
TO single out a few books from
among the pile of a millennium or even a century
is a near-impossible task, particularly when the
century is witnessing an information explosion.
As we stand at the edge of a new millennium and
look back, certain great works and authors stand
out as having left a lasting impression on human
history and thought. They stand out by their
ability to grasp the inherent dynamics of human
existence: Aristotle, Newton, Kant, Hegel, Marx
and Engels, Bernstein, Kautsky, Lenin, Einstein,
Max Planck, Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Gorbachev,
Toffler, Fukuyama, Paul Davies, and many others.
Their works were
those of great anticipation, of boldness of
thought, indepth analysis, negotiating major
turns of human history. Hence their lasting
effect and value.
The Industrial
Revolution produced giants of thought, who
grasped its various aspects. Hegel’s
"Phenomenology" and "Science of
Logic", Adam Smith’s "Wealth of
Nations", Marx’s (and Engels’s)
"Capital" and other works took us deep
inside the natural and social phenomena from
philosophical, scientific, socio-economic and
other angles. The Hegelian dialectics was taken
to newer heights by Marx. His works continue to
inspire vast millions, being simultaneously
intellectual works of unparalleled scientific
depth. It was he who along with Engels
discovered, rather than invented, sources of
social and, in particular, industrial and natural
motion, treating society as an object of
scientific investigation, thus transforming
social thinking into a science.
Marx, along with
Engels, in numerous works like
"Manifesto", "Capital",
"German Philosophy",
"Grundrisse", "Eighteenth
Brumaire", "Utopian and Scientific
Socialism" (Engels), and others, unveiled
the dynamics of large-scale production. He
visualised large-scale production with
collectivised and composite labour coming in
conflict with increasingly centralised capitalist
ownership, causing a revolutionary crisis which
would open the floodgates for further development
of productive forces.
As a result, the
ownership would also be collective. The
beginnings of marxist theses are to be found in
"Communist Manifesto", perhaps the most
widely read booklet. "Capital" and
"Manifesto" are the concentrated
expression of the industrial age.
Perhaps, Marx
over-emphasised the capitalist aspect of
industrial society. This is becoming clearer
today when we are having to deal with the problem
of transition from industrial to post-industrial
society, relegating capitalism to a secondary
place. Most of the conclusions of Marx stand
modified or have become unsuitable in the
transition period to post-industrial era.
At the same
time, his notions of dialectical movement of
productive forces continue to be valid. The very
application of Marx’s method invalidates his
theories based on the industrial revolution. The
reason is simple: the forces of production have
taken a forward or "reverse" leap.
Rather than growing into larger scales, they are
growing into progressively small scales.
Besides, with
the introduction of electronics as a technology
and science as a productive force, production is
no more industrial, and hence the concepts and
notions can no more be industrial in nature. This
is where modern marxism has failed. Perhaps,
Marx, the scientist, would have drawn appropriate
conclusions. His followers, barring Lenin, did
not revise marxism.
Lenin’s
writings like "State and Revolution",
"Imperialism", "Materialism",
etc. reflect the growing conflict in industrial
society and the upheavals of world capitalism. He
felt that capitalism in its last, monopoly or
imperialist stage, had begun destroying forces of
production; hence it had become moribund and
parasitic. This conclusion was not fully
confirmed by subsequent history.
Russian
revolution was only partially successful in
raising the productive forces and in creating a
non-capitalist society even as productive forces
in the West kept growing. The revolution was
ultimately overcome by the new technological
revolution. Soviet Russia tried to develop its
productive forces through the Stalinist
repressive machine, something which Lenin had
apprehended and warned against.
Lenin’s
genius lay in unveiling modern capitalism and
raising visions of a real revolution. He had
begun revising his thoughts from 1921 onwards,
preparing for a longer transition through new
economic policy in the absence of a revolution in
the West.
Lenin attacked
the Soviet bureaucracy comparing it to the
Czarist one. He even said the people of Russia
had the right to bring down the Soviet
government, something that really happened
several decades later in a different historical
setting and after much suffering.
None of the
theories of social change has been up to the mark
in the great lab of world society. They have
turned out to be ideological magnifications of
partial truths. Marxism was the more complete of
them. But they all tried to impose their partial
truths on society. The battle of ideologies in
the 20th century has taken thought to new heights
connecting ground reality with abstraction. Yet,
ideologies hid more and more of reality looking
at the latter as if through a prism.
This prismatic
ideological perception was broken through in the
great revolution in recent decades by science and
technology. The means of production and
communication made a quantum jump. Technology and
science had all the time been developing while
ideologies battled it out on a diminishing base
of reality. There was a complete break between
science and technology, on the one hand, and
ideology, on the other. Industrial concepts fell
into a crisis. Economics, social sciences and
humanities lay exhausted and in complete
confusion by the end of this century, unable to
explain the new world.
The Soviet
system slipped into severe crisis, not able to
renew its productive forces and becoming a hurdle
in their path. It needed an
electronic-communication revolution to break its
bureaucratic stranglehold.
And it also
needed a Gorbachev. His perestroika will always
be criticised and also praised. Rarely has there
been a bolder act. It shook the Soviet system,
and the whole world, to its very roots, and began
a rethinking on everything everywhere. It forced
the capitalist world to update its lessons in
democracy. Never before had one individual opened
a whole society and the minds of a people to the
need for democracy. He offered the Soviet
experiment to the stringent criticism of history.
There never was a nobler act.
The computer and
electronics revolution has taken over the world
and science and technology have become the main
productive force. They have relegated social
sciences to the background as themes of the past.
Social sciences, economics and politics are in
deep crisis, refusing to connect with new
science.
Science has made
a quantum jump from Newton to Einstein and to the
present. All established scientific theories have
been upset. Quantum theories, contrary to common
sense, are becoming the driving force in the
present revolution and post-modern society.
Quantum philosophies are emerging, quite
different in nature from traditional
philosophies. Artificial intelligence in the form
of Internet and cyber space engulf the planet,
allied to human intelligence.
Alvin Toffler
has emerged as one of the leading
frontier-thinkers of the electronics age. He has
termed the revolution as "Third Wave",
dealt with its impact in "Future Shock"
and has studied the consequent "Power
Shift". He traces the vast leap in a
compressed time interval from industrial to
post-industrial society in the fifties and
sixties. The concept of post industrial society
as evolved by Daniel Bell, Toffler and a host of
others helps us understand the developments in
social, economic and industrial fields in the
decades since the fifties. The great contribution
of Toffler is that he developed concepts
explaining the new world, a task humanities are
unable to fulfil after the collapse of the
industrial world-view. Hence the need to evolve
new tools of knowledge if we are to interpret the
new world.
The
scientific-technological revolution has overtaken
industrial society before the latter could find
solutions to its problems. The new technology is
based on the use of forces not naturally
occurring on the earth. This imparts novelty to
the revolution. New technology has broken through
the class, national, state and all other social
barriers, and entirely new social strata are
emerging causing dissolution of class features.
The social use
of quantum forces has caused an information and
communication revolution, so much so that Mark
Poster has termed it as "mode of
information", the title of his fundamental
work. For the first time in history, production
has been relegated to a secondary place yielding
primacy to information. The mode of production is
replaced by the mode of information.
And when we talk
of history at this juncture, we cannot ignore
Francis Fukuyama’s "The End of
History." There has been widespread
misunderstanding about the concept. It is natural
because we are habituated to the concepts of the
industrial age. We try to explain the new with
outdated concepts."The End of History"
deals with the end of the existing history and
contradicts its interpretation as a unilinear
one.
The world is
undergoing great historical shifts which have
been dealt with by frontier writers like Toffler,
Fukuyama, Tom Peters, Drucker, and others. Paul
Davies, Robert Nadeau, Alain Aspect, Stephen
Hawkins, John Wheeler, etc. have dealt with the
philosophical aspects of the same. The industrial
revolution produced thoughts and philosophies
that dealt with tangible and mostly visible
things.
The quantum
revolution has brought out limitations of such
thinking, and went into the intangible world. The
Newtonian world-view was upset, and along with it
the philosophies based on and created during the
industrial era.
Time-determination
of events has become the central theme of
post-modern society and its world-view.
Consequently, the planet and its society present
a holistic unity, a moment in the inter-galactic
spaces, a self-discovery of human existence.
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Freedom in all its complex
facets
by
Rekha Jhanji
LIKE one’s choice of friends,
one’s choice of books is also very personal.
These choices keep varying with one’s
intellectual development. Those of us who like
reading autobiographies are interested in knowing
about and learning from the lives of others. The
autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir and her
theoretical work, "The Second Sex",
played a very significant role in forming my
feminist consciousness. Her life is a testimony
to how a woman can realise her creative freedom
and look upon herself as an equal to her male
contemporaries.
Her relationship
with Sartre was an example for all thinking young
women of my times. It was not hierarchical like
the traditional man-woman relationship. They
travelled together and thought and wrote on most
of the important happenings of their times. They
had the courage to defy the bourgeois social
norms and live together without being married.
"Prime of Life" (second part of her
autobiography) gives a very vivid description of
the post-war intellectual scene of France, and if
one can identify its one essential element, it is
the affirmation of individual freedom.
Nothing comes in
the way of this boundless freedom, not even God,
for He is dead and man has no essence. Man is
free to create himself, like a sculptor creates a
sculpture. This philosophy was the leading light
for my formative years.
As I grew older,
I realised that such freedom is ridden with
conflicts — conflict between I and the
Other, and conflict between my own self and my
alter ego. The affirmation of individual freedom
always pits one against others. Each individual
sees the other as a potential threat to his
freedom. Sartre’s dictum "Hell is the
Other" is a logical consequence of this
affirmation of individual freedom.
Also, since
one’s desires keep changing, one is
constantly in conflict with one’s own self.
Further, in the social world some people are
circumstantially more free than others. Sartre
himself accepted that existential freedom is only
notional in those societies which are ridden with
inequalities, for in them there are very few
possibilities of actualising freedom. At the same
time I could not agree with Marx that human being
will become liberated once a classless society is
created.
With the passage
of time, I began to accept that there may be some
necessary conditions of freedom, but they are not
sufficient. Economic equality is one such
necessary but insufficient condition. One may be
economically self-sufficient and yet be
psychologically under all kinds of pressure.
In order to
experience freedom, one will have to understand
oneself. Without self-knowledge it will not be
possible to free oneself from one’s
self-created chains. Amongst these chains, fear
is the foremost.
«««
My search for
freedom prompted me to turn to Indian sages and
seers. A book to which I have constantly returned
for inspiration and guidance is "The
Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramahansa
Yogananda. Yogananda was born on January 5, 1893,
in Gorakhpur where he spent the first eight years
of his life. His father was a disciple of the
great yogi Lahiri Mahashaya. He was initiated
into kriya yoga by Swami Yukteswara Giri,
another disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya.He
established an institute of yoga in Ranchi which
is functioning to this day.
From his early
age he was propelled by the search for truth. By
recounting the story of his life, Yogananda shows
that true freedom does not consist in being able
to do what one wants. It lies neither in being
wayward or arbitrary nor in being adventurous but
in one’s capacity to harmonise one’s
consciousness with the transcendental
consciousness and in accepting the unacceptable.
By merging his
consciousness with the divine, a yogi frees
himself of all desires. He becomes completely
detached and ceases to have any personal agenda
of his own. Since he desires nothing, he has
neither hopes nor fears. Realising his inherent
identity with the transcendental consciousness
frees a yogi from all conflicts with others and
fills him with unbounded love.
For all
"Otherness" is born of ignorance. In
reality there is no Other but only the
transcendental self manifesting itself in
variegated forms and hues. Ignorance lies in
identifying oneself with one’s limited
ephemeral being. This ignorance cannot be
destroyed by rituals but by a concerted search of
one’s true nature.
Yogananda’s
whole life is a passionate search for unveiling
the mystery of this universe and man’s place
in it. Through his autobiography comes alive a
whole galaxy of saints of last two centuries. His
guru, Swami Yukteswara Giri, helped him cleanse
himself of all the blemishes in his personality.
Yogananda also abided by his advice in full
faith.
His guru made it
clear to him that merging one’s
consciousness with the transcendental
consciousness is not to abandon action and live
in apathy but to renounce one’s involvement
in the fruits of actions and become a medium for
the manifestation of the divine. Yogananda
writes: "Truth is no theory, no speculative
system of philosophy, no intellectual insight.
Truth is an exact correspondence with reality.
For man, truth is unshakable knowledge of his
true nature, his self as soul."
Yogananda became
a world teacher and demonstrated the value of
yoga as a scientific technique for experiencing
one’s spiritual being. Through his mahasamadhi
on March 7, 1952, he proved that a yogi has
no fear of death. After concluding his speech at
a banquet in the USA, he entered into mahasamadhi
as peacefully and joyfully as you board a plane
to meet an old friend. There was neither a trace
of fear nor of anguish in the parting.
His was truly an
exemplary life. It was like bhairavi sung
on an early morning on the side of a mighty
ocean. I recommend it to all sensitive readers
who are captivated by the search for truth.
|
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When courts bat for
ecology
by
J.S. Yadav
Environmental
Pollution and Developments: Environmental Law,
Policy and Role of Judiciary by Chander Pal.
Mittal Publications, New Delhi. Pages 544. Rs
995.
POLLUTION can be defined
as a undersirable change in the physical,
chemical or biological characteristics of air,
water or land which can harm the health, survival
or activities of humans or other organisms.
After World War
II the westerencountries witnessed an industrial
boom made possible by a burgeoning population,
advanced technology and a rapid rise in energy
consumption — all symptoms of development.
During the 1950s and 1960s this growth
significantly increased the volume of wastes
released into the environment.
New chemicals,
including insecticides and pesticides, used
without sufficient testing for their
environmental and health effects, caused, and
continue to cause, enormous problem not
anticipated when they were introduced.
Unfortunately,
the problem is worsening as the variety and
amount of pollutants sharply increase while the
capacity of air, water and the land system to
assimilate wastes is limited.
The pollutants
also damage the health of human beings, plants
and animals. The effects of pollution on the
biosphere are numerous and are multiplying every
day. Unless checked, they could make the planet
uninhabitable.
In India, those
most deeply affected by environmental
deterioration are the poor. Displaced and
dispossessed by deforestation and other natural
resource despoilation, they are the first victims
of poor sanitation: foul air, contaminated water
and shrinking fuel and fodder. They are the ones
who suffer the most from the loss of the
nation’s precious "commons" —
water, air, soil and forest.
Their advocates,
especially those who file public interest
litigation, must have the material at hand to
carry on their work. The book under review seeks
to furnish those material and to indicate how
cases and writ petitions can be filed to protect
the country’s environment.
The book is
divided into eight chapters followed by a
compendium of important national and
international documents on environment and a
select bibliography. In fact, this part makes the
book a must for everyone interested in the varied
aspects of environment for one gets all material
at one place.
The first
chapter, "Jurisprudence of global and
national environmental law" deals with the
impact of environment on mankind and issues of
global concern; it also gives a bird’s
eye-view of the pollution problem in India. There
is a brief account of the sources of
environmental law in India and enumerates the
possible ways of controlling pollution. It makes
a forceful plea for teaching environmental law
and proposes a syllabus for the LL.B course.
The next chapter
details the environmental policy with special
reference to legal policy for protection of
environment and the usefulness of environmental
impact assessment. A reference has been made to
the various movements launched for protecting
environment like the chipko, aapiko, etc.
and levels at which the conflicts exist —
economic, technological and scientific —
have been highlighted.
Two other
chapters deal with the control of various kinds
of pollution — water, air, noise and land
— and the laws dealing with these, the
procedure and practice. While describing earlier
attempts at legal control, it discusses the
present-day legislation, bringing out the
shortcomings of the various laws. The judicial
response is the highlight of the discussion.
In fact, a whole
chapter has been devoted to this aspect which
gives an account of the role of the judiciary in
protecting, preserving and conserving
environment.
The Supreme
Court Judges have embarked on complex
administrative exercises. In the Dehradun
quarrying case, for example, the Supreme Court
appointed several expert committees and through
periodic directions monitored the regeneration of
the valley, which had been devastated by
unscientific limestone quarrying.
On other
occasions, the Supreme Court had tried to reduce
the pollution level of the Ganga by closing down
tanneries and directing municipalities to take
immediate action to prevent municipal wastes from
flowing into the river, controlling pollution
affecting the Taj Mahal by closing down iron
foundaries in Agra, reducing air pollution in
Delhi by directing the government to relocate
factories and banning 15-year-old motor vehicles.
These reforms
have altered the complexion of environmental
politics. Judicial activism finds a liberal
mention in this chapter.
The concluding
chapter discusses the possible future trends and
also offers suggestions to control pollution,
save environment from degradation and maintain
sustainable development.
The growing
incidence of pollution, legislation and the
functioning of state-level pollution control
boards notwithstanding, it is the people who are
the important agents of control. There is thus a
need to educate the masses about personal and
community hygiene, and also their rights and
duties. Without education, laws and action plans
will have only a limited success.
Einstein once
said that two things are unlimited: the universe
and man’s foolishness. We can only hope that
the latter does not lead him to go on polluting
his environment until he falls victim to his own
folly.
The book is
addressed to all who have interest in Indian law
on environment. Apart from the law faculty and
students of universities for whom this has been
specially written, others who can benefit include
the judiciary, public interest litigation
lawyers, government officials, members of
environmental organisations and all those with
interest in environmental protection.
The book is a
must for all libraries.
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Unionists: unique actors who
thrived and faded
by
G.V.Gupta
Politics
of Sharing Power — The Punjab Unionist Party
1923-1947 by Raghuvendra Tanvar: Mahohar
Publications, New Delhi. Pages 215. Rs 425.
The rise and fall of the
Unionist Party of Punjab province is an
interesting and unique phenomenon of the Indian
party system in the first half of the 20th
century. A party of purely feudal interests of
both the Hindu and Muslim communities and
strongly supported by a large number of peasant
proprietors, the party was tolerated and even
encouraged by the colonial power. It stressed the
growth of local government and opted for
provincial autonomy and held power for a decade,
denying space to both the Congress and Muslim
League, which held sway over the rest of British
India. In this respect it was an exception.
A question
arises: how could this happen and only in one
province and, again, how could the party just
vanish within such a short time? Prof Tanvar has
made an impressive effort at providing answers.
He has depended on both textual and oral
resources and has been deeply influenced by the
studies of Ian Talbot, a renowned authority on
Pakistan, on the one hand, and the students of
Chhotu Ram, on the other. His heroes are
Fazl-i-Husain and Chhotu Ram, both of whom left
Congress when it called for non-cooperation and
preferred to follow a constitutional path in
pressing their demands.
The basic thesis
of Tanvar is that a skewed land-holding pattern,
low urbanisation, high indebtedness of the
peasantry, restriction on the right to vote only
to property-holders, reservation of
constituencies on religious and urban-rural bases
and a specific religion- and regionwise profile
of the population were responsible for the
creation of a "rural block" of affluent
legislators with numerical domination which
ultimately emerged as the Unionist Party.
The emergence of
this block was facilitated by the Congress
boycott of electoral politics in the mid-twenties
and the colonial policy of extending strong
support to the dominant rural elite for their
role as social intermediaries in army recruitment
and maintaining peace in the countryside. An
administrative structure coopting this group in
important administrative jobs such as
"lambardars" and "jaildars"
also made them loyal. This line was thus strongly
backed by the colonial power.
Once in power,
Tanvar feels, this group consolidated its hold by
taking various legislative and administrative
steps which helped the peasantry which, in turn,
backed this formation. These included banning
sale of agricultural land by cultivating classes,
insulating the personal effects, bullocks and
agricultural implements as also standing crops
from being attached in the discharge of debts,
restricting the total interest on long-standing
loans to the amount equal to the principal,
abolishing the concept of mortgage with an
in-built provision for sale on failure to redeem
and providing for the automatic redemption of
mortgages after a specified time.
The Unionist
Party also recast the provincial budget to start
rural schools and dispensaries and to strengthen
the local government. The religious composition
of Punjab at that time was such that no single
community could form a government, with the
Muslims, Hindus and the Sikhs forming 51 per
cent, 34 per cent and 12 per cent of the
population. The Unionist Party not only
handsomely won the 1937 elections, capturing
almost all Muslim rural seats and all but one of
the Hindu rural seats in south-east Punjab, it
also continued to rule the province till just
before independence.
Tanvar has ably
supported his arguments with detailed statistical
data. Fazl-i-Husain was the political strategist
who organised this block of feudal leaders into a
political party and functioned as its chief
spokesman till his death in 1937. Sir Chhotu Ram
was its ideologue and championed the rural
interests. Tanvar illustrates the superiority of
this combination by pointing out the success of
the zamindara conference organised by the party
compared to the poor attendance at a kisan sabha
held by the Congress at the same place on the
same dates.
The rapid
collapse of the Unionist Party on the eve of
independence is attributed by Tanvar to the weak
character of Sikander Hiyat Khan in surrendering
party interests to Jinnah by allowing its Muslim
members to join the League and the inexperience
of Khizr Hiyat Khan who forfeited the support of
Chhotu Ram’s followers, who had by then
died. He also makes a general remark that the
party of feudal interests, which was infested
with internal intrigues and contradictions, was
no match to the mechanics of the Muslim League
which had caught the imagination of the Muslims.
This brings us
to the essential contradictions in Tanvar’s
approach which, on the one hand, emphasises the
ideological approach of Chhotu Ram and, on the
other hand, finds the Unionist Party devoid of a
coherent and relevant ideology. In counting the
benefits Chhotu Ram brought to rural society,
Tanvar is unable to specify what help small and
marginal farmers and also the landless received.
For the author, rural society is synonymous with
peasant proprietors.
He also slurs
over the fact that the Unionist Party was
dominated by Muslim zamindars with a degree of
collaboration from Hindu landowners. This robbed
the party of the loyalty of the Hindus, Sikhs and
the Muslim masses.
The land
alienation law did depress the price of land by
restricting the type of people who could buy.
Tanvar readily admits the marginal effect of
moneylenders legislation. This debt relief
legislation helped liquidate only 2 per cent of
the total debt. Unimaginative and poorly enforced
debt relief laws lower the commercial value of
land in the absence of an alternate source of
credit. This was proved in Haryana in the late
eighties when such measures had to be hastily
abandoned to keep agriculture commercially
viable, which was threatened in the absence of
private lending.
It is well known
that large farmers monopolise cooperative credit.
A lack of adequate understanding of the
importance of trade and credit in the economy not
only kept agriculture underdeveloped but also in
some ways it hindered the advent of modernising
forces. Haryana till today suffers from a lack of
cultural growth. It continues to be a society
highly oppressive of women and the landless. In
the absence of post-independence land reforms,
Pakistani Punjab continues to be the source of
political instability.
As regards
partition, as pointed out by Ayesha Jalal, it
became inevitable when both Nehru and Jinnah
sabotaged the concept of provincial autonomy. For
Jinnah the security of the Muslims required a
unified and large landmass. For the Unionists,
their interests could be served only in an
autonomous Punjab province. When it became clear
that an autonomous province was not on the cards
the Unionists disintegrated.
Secular
socialisation of the polity in terms of unity of
the agriculturist castes was not possible in the
absence of proportional representation.
Compulsions of constituency-level compromises
require unique formations. When adult franchise
became imminent, the Unionists collapsed. They
were able to create a province-level party only
when franchise was selective.
Secular
socialisation in terms of administrative
structures of the "mahalwari" system
predated the Unionists and has survived them. Its
essential advantage is the very precise and
detailed identification of proprietary rights in
land in the modern sense of property. This
provided stability. Constitutionally mandated
changes have proved after independence that the
old concept of "lambardar" is not vital
to its survival. Land reforms have been carried
out within this structure. Abolition of
pre-emption laws and industrialisation have not
damaged it. Therefore it is not possible to
locate any vital link between this system and the
growth of the Unionists.
But the
Unionists would not have been what they were but
for Chhotu Ram. He was the secular face of a
predominantly Muslim outfit. In him was located
the source of the ideological respectability of
the Unionists. The importance of Chhotu Ram lies
in his realisation of an opportunity to advance
the interests of peasant-proprietors in the
specific context of the agitational politics of
the Congress to the extent that it was tolerated
by the colonial rulers and the Muslim landlords
of central and north Punjab.
The problem with
some of the leftist intellectuals of Haryana has
been their emotional inability to objectively
assess the role of Chhotu Ram. Tanvar also gives
no importance to the role of the Arya Samaj or
the Jallianwala Bagh carnage.
The importance
of the Unionist phenomenon is that communal unity
requires a large dose of decentralisation and of
a fully democratic nature. Jinnah and Nehru were
both votaries of a strong centralised authority
and therefore they had to divide their
prospective empire.
In spite of some
emotional and ideological weaknesses, Tanvar has
done a commendable job.
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| |
Women: Still the inferior
sex
Write View
by
Randeep Wadehra
Women
in Management by Sanghamitra Buddhapriya. APH,
New Delhi. Pages xix + 257. Rs 800.
A COUNTRY that ignores 50
per cent of its human resource does not deserve
to, and cannot, progress materially or otherwise.
This is precisely what is happening in India.
Only since the late sixties the concept of
working woman, especially as manager and
decision-maker, has caught on although fitfully.
In a milleu
where the sex ratio — an important indicator
of woman’s social status — has been
progressively declining from 972 per thousand
males in 1921 to 929 per thousand males in 1991,
Indian womenhave found gender equality a tough,
if not impossible, proposition. However, despite
the rigid patriarchal set-up, she is slowly but
surely coming into her own. One unmistakable
indicator of this trend is the increasing
visibility of women managers in the corporate
sector.
But the
situation is far from satisfactory. Women
employees in the organised sector formed 12.1 per
cent of the total work force in 1980. In 1991 it
rose marginally to 14.1 per cent. In the
management cadre, only 8.7 per cent of the top
managers were women in 1991.
It is true that
there is no legal, constitutional or other formal
discrimination against women but one can notice
that informally, various corporate and other
employers do not consider them as a viable
managerial asset despite evidence to the
contrary. With the expansion of female education,
the changing socio-cultural mores,and more
effective assertion of women’s rights, the
fair sex is able to increase its share in the
managerial segment.
Yet one cannot
help notice that a glass ceiling does exist.
Consequently, while at the lower and middle
management levels one finds more women, at the
top of the corporate pyramid there is rarely a
woman.
This reminds one
of the exasperated retort of a female colleague
long ago, "Never underestimate a man’s
capacity to undervalue a woman’s
abilities." And her contribution, perhaps.
Indeed, even in
these days of information explosion, the
stereotype male attitude towards females
persists. Women, being emotional, are inferior
managers as they cannot be trusted to take
objective decisions. They are more suitable for
the domestic chores and cannot shift to new
places.
However, what is
forgotten is that male members, both at home and
at work place, do their utmost to make her life
difficult. She is invariably burdened with the
dual role of housewife and manager. It is a rare
husband who shares her domestic workload. Rarer
still is the colleague who would ungrudgingly
accept her proven managerial or intellectual
superiority.
This is an
excellent book for those interested in
understanding the changing socio-cultural
scenario in the country. Tables and statistics
supplement the lucid and learned presentation.
«
« «
Women Rural
Labourers by Mahesh V. Joshi. APH, New Delhi.
Pages viii + 270. Rs 600.
ACCORDING
to a national commission ’94 per cent of the
total female work force is employed in the
unorganised sector. According to the 1991 census,
the rural working population comprised 27.06 per
cent women. This is not exactly a happy
situation. Females form a majority of the casual
labour population, ripe for exploitation.
According to
Alwa Myrdal and Vioila Klein,
"Transplantation of seedlings, usually
performed by women, is a tough job." The
women have to stand in water for long periods of
time. While transplanting paddy, they move
backwards in a bent posture for eight hours a
day, because the seedlings should be transplanted
with minimum delay after they are pulled out of
the nurseries.
Articles 14 and
15 of the Constitution enjoin that women are not
discriminated against and are provided adequate
safeguards. The report of the core group on
national perspective plan for women 1988-2000,
observed that women are discriminated against in
the context of wages as well as working
conditions, even when their productivity is at
par with that of men.
They hardly have
a share in their family holdings. Being mostly
illiterate or poorly educated, they get only
low-paid jobs. Deprived of their earnings, rural
women are truly leading a pathetic life. Thus one
of the major factors in keeping their standard of
living very low is the lack of adequate
employment opportunities, as well as roadblocks
in their quest for realising their full potential
as productive and equal citizens of the country.
The research
study, now published in a book form, covered
eight districts of Gujarat. It drew data from 14
castes, mostly backward landless agricultural
families. Most of the female agricultural workers
were married and lived as part of joint families.
The study concluded that, on an average, women
earned Rs 30 or less a day. Their employment was
seasonal with no job or social security.
This is where
the policy makers need to think deeply. How is it
that despite a whole range of welfare measures
and laws, a huge chunk of popultion remains
deprived and exploited?
«
« «
The Divine
and the Mortal, by Joginder Singh Hemkunt
Publishers, New Delhi. Pages 168. Rs 150.
THE
author states that his book is the end result of
his quest for the Almighty. He has narrated
several spiritual experiences at different
periods of life. He has also written about Shri
Guru Nanak Dev, Satya Sai Baba and other saints
as well as places. Frankly, most of us —
yours truly not excepted — seek God only
when in trouble. For people like me Samuel Butler
exclaims, "How holy people look when they
are sea-sick!" When life’s vicissitudes
torment us we cry out, "Have mercy on us O
Shiva!" Pray, why should He?
How does one
define piety? Is it the same as spiritualism?
Again, must one take cognisance of Jung’s
conclusion that nothing is more repulsive than a
furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as
unsavoury as gross sensuality. Perhaps one could
take a more realistic view and quote William
Blake, "You smile with pomp and rigour, you
talk of benevolence and virtue; I act with
benevolence and virtue and get murdered time
after time."
For Dr
Radhakrishnan spiritualism was a philosophical
concept based on irrefutable logic. Spiritualism
is a way of life, an attitude developed over a
period of time through self-discipline,
meditation and self-realisation. It elevates
one’s worldview, enabling him to break the
temporal shackles that promote crass materialism.
Gandhi’s
idea of spiritualism was not born out of any
desire for a tryst with the supreme being. He
postulated that truth is God (and not vice versa
as it would promote fundamentalism of the type we
are witnessing today). In fact he firmly believed
that one should practise piety while living in
the material world and not by fleeing from its
temptations.
This conviction
finds an echo in Samuel Johnson’s assertion
that piety practised in solitude, like the flower
that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance
to the winds of heaven, and delight those
unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and
the actions of men. But it bestows no assistance
upon earthly beings, and however free from taints
of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendour of
beneficence. A religous person is one who seeks
Truth is its absolute form that would, in due
course, fulfil his desire for a date with the
Almighty. Spiritualism is not a byproduct of fear
or an act of hypocrisy.
As Anthony
Trollope once said, "I judge a man by his
actions with men, much more than by his
declarations Godwards. When I find him to be
envious, carping, spiteful, hating the successes
of others, and complaining that the world has
never done enough for him, I am apt to doubt
whether his humility before God will atone for
his want of manliness."
Spiritualism has
other facets too. Shades of double-talk, tinged
with schizophrenia bedevil those who want to be
socially accepted as enlightened beings, when
they are still struggling against minor vices. To
wit, the late British author Daisy Ashford,
"Bernard always had a few prayres in the
hall and some whiskey afterwards as he was rather
pious".
Normally one can
discern a fake sentiment at the outset. There is
no dearth of people who feel that by mere praying
they can achieve sainthood. These are the people
who are less pious than they profess to be. As
the Scottish poet Robert Burns once remarked,
"Their sighin’, cantin’,
grace-proud faces/Their three-mile prayers, and
half-mile graces."
«
« «
Prisoners and
Human Rights by S.K. Pachauri. APH, New Delhi.
Pages viii + 314. Rs 600.
PRISONERS
the world over are looked down upon as sub-humans
who are a menace to society. It rarely crosses
one’s mind that not all of them are habitual
or wilful criminals. Some of them are victims of
circumstances who committed crime either under
duress or out of ignorance. Others might be
actually innocent. Other mitigating factors
should separate the wolf from the lamb. However,
our propensity for generalisation prevents us
from looking at prisoners as fellow human beings
caught in the misfortune not necessarily of their
own making.
Pachauri has
quoted chapter and verse from our law books and
case studies to show that there is need for
treating prisoners with some dignity. While
passing judgement on solitary confinement,
Justice Desai once remarked, "Solitary
confinement has a degrading and dehumanising
effect on prisoners."
So have
third-degree tortures and other forms of torment
that are inflicted in a routine manner in
prisons. Perhaps that is the reason why there was
a violent upsurge in the Chennai jail recently
leading to the death of a jailor and several
others. The reforms implemented in the Tihar jail
by Kiran Bedi had a humanising effect on the
inmates, though much remains to be done.
Similarly it is becoming essential to usher in
wholesale improvements in the way Indian prisons
are run. There is no dearth of relevant laws and
legal provisions safeguarding the prisoners’
right. All that is needed is
politico-administrative will to implement such
laws. The moot point is whether the ruling elite
has it.
«
« «
Self-Hypnosis
for a Better Life by William W. Hewitt. Pustak
Mahal, New Delhi. Pages 183. Rs 80.
IF the
human body is the most complex contraption ever
crafted by Mother Nature, the human mind is the
most sophisticated motor ever structured to run
the contraption. But like all machinery, the
human body too develops defects that may or may
not be possible to repair.
Consequently,
various systems of medicine and meditation
claiming to set right various ailments are in the
market. Self-hypnosis is one of them. Basically a
mind-over-matter concept, this book provides
self-hypnosis scripts for 23 major
problem-solving situations.
It prompts a
person to think positive, enabling him to
overcome negativism. The various audio-tapes,
mentioned in the book, are designed for different
situations. The "Affirmation for
adults’" tape, for example programmes
many powerful, positive, constructive, helpful
and successful suggestions into several levels of
one’s subconscious mind that enrich
one’s life. Similarly there are tapes to
help you enhance your will-power etc.
|
| |
Violence, and the variety of it
by
Surinder S. Jodhka
Problems
of Violence: Themes in Literature by Barinder Pal
Singh. Indian Institute of Advanced Studies,
Shimla. Pages 189 Rs 350.
VIOLENCE has been one of
the most popular subjects of discussion among the
thinkers of all ages. Not only have modern social
scientists and thinkers written on the subject,
violence has been a central issue since the days
of the Buddha and Christ.
Though it has
almost always been viewed as a social and
law-and-order problem, commentators have also
given due consideration to situations where it
becomes inevitable.
Defining
violence also poses many problems. What
constitutes violence? Why does it occur? How to
build a society without violence? These are the
questions that have kept thinkers of all ages
preoccupied.
Barinder Pal
Singh’s book attempts to provide an
introduction to the various theses or
"reflections" on the subject,
"thematising the large corpus of
literature" on violence.
Modern thinking
in the post- Enlightenment phase as well the
early social scientific theory viewed violence in
an evolutionary perspective. Violence was
believed to be linked to the stage of evolution
of a given society. It was a feature of the
barbaric and the primitive human mind. As
societies progressed and became modern and
industrialised, incidence of violence was
supposed to dip. The civilised societies,
beginning with the modern West, were to
eventually become violence-free!
Two centuries
later not only had this prophecy proved wrong,
the later generations of social scientists and
thinkers began to view the very process of
"modernisation" and civilisation (of
the western kind) as a violent one.
Today there are
no certainties about the future of human
societies. New literature seems to suggest that
only the forms of violence have changed and not
its extent.
Singh cites the
example of the process of development introduced
during the post-independence period in India
which many see as inflicting violence and adding
to the misery of the poor and the marginal. They
are being "uprooted from their soil, culture
and traditional occupation". The development
process has already displaced 18.5 million people
in India between 1951 and 1991, of whom nearly 75
per cent are tribals. The story is not very
different in the developed countries of the West
either, as this stream of thought would contend.
It is rather
interesting to note that in much of the existing
literature on the subject, violence is not viewed
in a purely moralistic terms. An important
distinction is made between "violence from
below" and "violence from above".
While "violence from above" is
condemned and is viewed negatively,
"violence from below" has been viewed
positively and could be creative and liberating.
This is a
recurring theme in much of the revolutionary
theories of violence. The Marxist and the
anarchist thinkers did not celebrate violence per
se. However, they recommended that if there
were no other options available, violence could
become necessary for building a truly
"non-violent" and
"non-exploitative" society.
It was in the
later theories of scholars like Sorel, Fanon,
Sartre and Marcuse that violence of the
proletariat and the colonised was glorified. For
example, in his celebrated work, "Wretched
of the Earth", ideologue of the Alegerian
revolution Fanon has argued that for the
colonised individual violence is a cleansing
force. "It freed the native from his
inferiority complex and from his despair and
inaction; it made him fearless and restored his
self-confidence".
Sartre and
Marcuse too wrote in a similar vein and further
developed Fanon’s argument in their writings
on the subject. These thinkers were obviously
criticised for glorifying and preaching violence.
However, none of them celebrated violence just
for the sake of it. Rather they saw violence as
being the only effective mode of action available
to the subordinate groups in a given structure of
power and domination.
Interestingly,
Singh finds many similarities between the modern
theories of violence (discussed above) and the
attitude that religious philosophies have towards
violence. "The pre-enlightenment
philosophies of all major religions of the world
have also advocated the use of violence when all
other modes of redressing a wrong have
failed." It is not only in Islam and Sikhism
that the use of violence was given religious
sanction, even in Christianity and Hinduism
violence was justified if it was required to
"restore order in society and grant justice
to the suffering people".
The contemporary
significance of religious philosophies advocating
violence if required for the good of all,
according to the author, lies in the legitimacy
that it provided to various militant ethnic and
religious nationalist movements at the end of the
20th century in different parts of the world.
The longest
chapter in the book is on "Violence in
science and society" where Singh explores
some other meanings and dimensions of violence in
contemporary societies and their institutions.
Much of the literature reviewed in this chapter
deals with the various critiques of modernity and
themes in the post-modernist writings.
Interestingly,
the contributions of Indian scholars to this
thinking has been quite important. Perhaps the
most popular in this category of scholars are
Ashish Nandy, Veena Das and Vandana Shiva.
Unlike the
modern theorists of violence and the advocacy of
violence by religions, these
"anti-modernist" thinkers approach
violence from a different perspective. For them
violence is not the bloody action of some men
against others. They talk of violence as being
ingrained in the modern institutions of
governance, and particularly in modern science
and technology. Its worst sufferers have been the
people of the Third World countries where in the
name of progress and development, age-old
structures of human relations and ways of life
have been dismantled by borrowed western
traditions and technology.
These scholars
not only talk about the violence inflicted by
modern science on man but also about the violence
modern technology done to nature. Thus the whole
question of environment also becomes a question
of violence. The much-celebrated idea of
development has become the most abhorrent term in
this line of thinking. They look at it as
"an ideology of the ruling elite and
effective means of propaganda" often used to
legitimise the plunder and displacement of the
marginalised strata of society.
"Development
is totalitarian because it simply means
power" and an "officially sponsored
tirade". Vandana Shiva would substantiate
such an argument by referring to the fact that
the peasants in the prime green revolution areas
like Punjab have become poorer and indebted.
Community networks have broken down giving rise
to the kind of violence that Punjab experienced
during much of the eighties.
One is rather
surprised that in such a well-researched book,
one does not find a critical framework. Even
simplistic formulations like those of Vandana
Shiva are presented without any critical comments
from the author. Singh only reviews a large
volume of literature on the subject, which in
itself is quite a commendable job, a critical
perspective of his own would have surely helped
in making his thematisation more meaningful and
richer. However, the book is still makes very
valuable and useful reading.
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Frankly talking
MR P.D. SHASTRI deserves
full marks for plain speaking without pulling any
punches in his review (December 26) of the books
"Fragrant Spiritual Memories" and
"Sai Grace and Recent Predictions".
Among other
things, these books talk glibly and ever so
confidently of the precise identities of saints,
etc. in their earlier "lives" and of
their future reincarnations; and they also
feature at length "accurate"
astrological predictions (although as a rule they
turn out to be accurate only when they relate to
events which have already occurred!).
Quite often
critics soften their language when they have to
say something negative but Mr Shastri has not
hesitated in giving these books the description
they really merit — namely,
"trash".
The reviewer has
also taken a swipe at the The Tribune for wanting
this unworthy type of publications to be
reviewed; one only hopes that some good will
result from that well-intentioned critical
observation of his.
SAROOP
KRISHEN
Chandigarh
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