kindle magazine may 2012

KINDLEINDIA

Critical Re� ective Journalism

www.kindlemag.in

`30

Are you living in exile?

TM

1st May 2012

SpecialSupplement :

Sahitya Akademi Awardee

byLOOKING FOR GREEN EYES Kiran Nagarkar

4|KINDLE india•May 2012

ContentsVolume 2 Issue 11 February 2012

20 SHOPIANRAPES

INTERVIEW:TABISH KHAIR

INTERVIEW:SALIMA HASHMI

PAKISTAN’S ABSENCE IN IPL?

LIVING IN EXILE

RECALLING MOROCCO

INTERVIEW:PRASOON JOSHI

VEDANTA UNSOLVED

ANARCHIST INDIA

by Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal by Paranjoy Guhathakurta

by Rohit Roy

by Shubham Nagby Nitasha Kaul

by Mukherjee P, Saswat Pattanayak, Amit Sengupta

COVER STORY

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May 2012•KINDLE india|25

threatened by this increasing idea of language-standardisation and half-measures. And when the tip of your tongue forgets to articulate the basic screams, howls, yelps and laughter in found phrases, the coloniser moves in stealthily. And you are pushed, shoved and then thrown into the trash can of exile.

To put it not-so-simply, exile always plays havoc with one aspect of our lives: memory. Memory that can be pictorial/coded/noisescapes. Memory that can be historical. Cultural. Selective. Fascist. Left . Melancholia. Rightist overtness. Tactical silence. So absence is neither metaphysical nor a pedagogy but an idea of seeking.

Standing on the green line that divides the island of Cyprus, the peace lines in Northern Island, the Berm, a wall of sand that crosses the Western Sahara from north to south, the barbed wire fence around the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta in Morocco, the wall between Palestine and Israel and the grand theatre that plays out in Gaza, so brutally, so heartlessly; the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, the Line of Control between India and Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, the wails of Rohingyas fl oating mid-water between Burma and Bangladesh, memories of 20 years of the Bosnian blood trail… the presence of these nationalism-sponsored enclaves... shows that the business of exile is a serious business.

...persons or groups of persons, who have been forced or

obliged to fl ee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the eff ects of armed confl ict, situations of generalised violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognised State Border...

Excerpts from the UN Guiding Principles on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)

Closer home, let’s look at Gujarat. Let us look at the tale of internal displacement and internal exile that will only replicate itself in times to come. 10 years of moving on. 10 years of good roads and many memorandums-of-understanding seeking and creating vibrancy, smokescreens of development and tacit sanctions for nursing and manufacturing the idea of the other. And by the way, 10 years of seeking justice. Oh yes! 10 years of being told that “major” infrastructure is a panacea to some stray clamours of “minor” injustice.

Or “minor” injustice is apparently the only fate that the “minorities” deserve in an avowedly secular nation. Of course, 10 years of vibrant Karnavati also belong to a decade of celebrating the majority. In the 10 years, the city of pols has turned from 591 to 601. A decade of clear- cut division which created its own lines of control and its own folklore: “that” part is yours and “this” one is mine. Th e clever and brutal idea of creating

COVER STORY


“IT’S MY SOUL I LOST,

…Here I am, years later, writing, repeating things long aft er the blind palm reader, my grandmother, my mother, and many of my friends and comrades have died. Is it my way of ridding my body of the sickness that wracked it the day I was touched by those I hated so? Is it my way of warding off forgiveness that comes with time? Warding off failing memory or returning to a country where they still practice such repulsive rituals? Warding off memory’s conscious emptying of its rage? Warding

off oblivion, oblivion…

Haifa Zangana, Dreaming of Baghdad

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BEYOND DEFINITIONS

Speaking to Professor Geraldine Forbes, Teresa Rehman observes the inter-disciplinary potential of

Women’s Studies and how it can come out of the academic realm and contribute to our daily lives.

If we are heading towards a matriarchal world, why do we need feminism? While countries like New Zealand, UK and the USA are closing down their Women’s

Studies Centres, a signboard stating “Women’s Studies Centre” can be found dangling in almost every educational institution in Northeast India. But have these centres been able to achieve their objectives? Recently, Professor Geraldine Forbes of the History Department at the State University of New York Oswego spoke at length about the value of Women’s Studies at Assam’s Tezpur University recently.

One of the oldest centres is at Assam’s Dibrugarh University which has also started off ering a one-year part time Post-graduate Certifi cate Course on Women’s Studies (PGCCWS). Th is is the fi rst course of this kind in the region. Th e Centre has a well stocked library with over 1202 books and documents and an archive of newspaper cuttings on various women’s issues.

In fact, women studies began in the 1970s in the West as an outgrowth of the Second Wave Feminism. “It arose as a critique of various women’s movements where women were expected to make

tea, sandwiches and not really make decisions. Women began to question their secondary status and challenged the movements and in a way imitated the movements,” says Forbes.

Courses were started on women’s studies and the aim was to question the male centred society and the academic curriculum which was more applicable to the lives of young men than women. Th ese clusters were pulled together to develop a new inter-disciplinary programme. Th ese kinds of studies started in India way back in 1974, when Neera Desai created a model Women’s Studies Centre that combined the ethos of women’s studies and women’s movement at the SNDT University, Mumbai. Vina Mazumdar, academic, feminist, and a pioneer in Women Studies in India followed her by setting up the Centre for Women Development Studies in 1980.

Some countries like UK, New Zealand and the USA are doing away with their Women Studies centres as they think it’s not relevant. “Critics feel that people are conscious of issues because they have become mainstream. Another section of people argue that Women Studies has not changed anything. Women are still discriminated against and branded as whining victims,” adds Forbes.

However, these Centres have been given importance by the University Grants Commission (UGC) since the VII Plan period. Women’s Studies was initially conceptualised as a branch of the social sciences and humanities. However, today, the Women’s Studies Programme, in addition to social sciences and humanities, must engage with other disciplines and professions such as life sciences, biosciences and other areas of science and technology, such as agriculture and forestry, medicine, and

architecture, as developments in these areas have a great bearing on women’s lives. Th e thrust is to develop fi eld action projects for action, research, evaluation and enhancement of knowledge and partnership across boundaries of caste, class, religion, community and occupations.

India needs to change its attitude towards women. In fact new issues are emerging out of liberalisation like commodifi cation of women. Advertisments set unrealistic standards of femininity- light complexion, petite frame and economic might.

Women Studies programmes are inter-disciplinary. “We have a mythical disciplinary purity. Inter-disciplinary means nothing more than crossing the street and going to a diff erent shop or ideas to fi nd new things. Say issues like climate change can’t be approached without being inter-disciplinary,” she says.

Th ere is also a new thrust towards gender studies. Th e objective of gender studies is to investigate how gendered are institutions and how institutions gender individuals. “We can do gender studies from a feminist viewpoint. It has the potential to change the society. Gender studies mean we focus on relationships and ideas of masculinity and femininity as relational studies,” says Forbes. Th e Th ird Wave Feminism rejects many rigid ideas of the 1970s. Second wave feminism focussed on women and emphasised dualism and did not understand the inter-locking oppressions.

Th ere have also been demands to study men as well. “We study great heroes in history. We don’t study men, how women bring up boys to be men. We have not studied how diffi cult it is for a man to not perform what he is supposed to perform.”

COLUMN: THE SEVENTH SISTER

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RECALLING MOROCCOWhen one thinks of a place beyond guided tours and travel packages and knits a yarn of enduring memoirs through refl ective notebook jottings, one becomes a Flâneur or Flâneuse. This month, Nitasha Kaul saunters through the cities of Morocco.

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TRIBALDANCEOn the eve of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Vedanta, a lowdown by Rohit Roy.

Last month, we were all waiting with bated breath for the Supreme Court decision on the Vedanta Mining issue in the Niyamgiri Hills. Th e

plight of the DongriaKondh tribe due to Vedanta’s plans to mine Bauxite in their lands was to be fi nally addressed. However, in true legal fashion, the judgement has again been deferred to a later, yet unannounced date. Given the re-emergence of the debate in the highest court of the land, and following a desire to not let at least one cause be forgotten, this seems like a perfect time to remind ourselves of the controversy surrounding this issue.

A quick glance at online forums and western and Indian media coverage of the issue will reveal how dramatically similar this issue is to the movie ‘Avatar’ and the plight of the indigenous people – the Na’vi, so much so that it even convinced ‘Avatar’ director, James Cameron to lend his support to the cause of the DongriaKondh tribe. In fact, readers may even recall an earlier article by a separate columnist using the analogy for a diff erent mining incident concerning another indigenous tribe (Th e Hills Are Still Alive; Sayantan Neogi, May 2010).

Th e DongriaKondh is an indigenous tribe found in the hills of Orissa who hack out a meagre sustainable living

from the natural surroundings of their region. Th ey are essentially foragers and hunter-gatherers who occasionally dabble in light agriculture for sustenance. Tribal culture, as is so oft en the case, dictates that their pantheon of gods include deities derived from the natural surroundings. One of their most important deities, in fact, is the very Niyamgiri hill that Vedanta wants to mine.

Vedanta is a FTSE 100 listed company based in the UK, founded by Indian industrialist Anil Agarwal, and headquartered in London, UK. Th e company has massive mining interests throughout India,. Th e two governments with the most infl uence over this company, therefore, are the UK and Indian government. And here lies the opportunity to see the marked diff erence in the environmental and human rights priorities of both governments. Th e UK government has been extremely vocal in its opposition of Vedanta’s activities regarding the DongriaKondh. Th e ethically and morally horrifying implications of eradicating the lifestyle of an indigenous tribe is certainly something the UK government would not want to be associated with (perhaps it is an easier choice, given the distance from the problem).

Th e Indian government, on the other hand, has shown its usual penchant

for fl ip-fl opping. Aft er giving initial provisional permission to mine in the area, it was subsequently revoked. Jairam Ramesh, the then Environment Minister, in one of his more effi cient stands, stood up against Vedanta. Th e Environment Department even came out and admitted that giving mining permission to Vedanta was a mistake in the fi rst place. Although Jairam Ramesh was subsequently put in charge of a diff erent ministry, he did manage to put a temporary spanner in Vedanta’s works.

Th e Supreme Court has revisited this case in the light of the human rights and environmental potential of the situation, and has promised to expedite the process. Th e DongriaKondh has alternatively stated that it will continue its protest and eff ort to stop Vedanta even if the SC decides to allow mining.

Being part of the human rights and environmental debate, it is certainly my duty to articulate that allowing Vedanta to continue mining in the Niyamgiri would not only be morally and ethically erroneous but a missed opportunity by the Supreme Court to show that it is the upholder of the rights of weaker sections of India’s diverse societes against the inherent tyranny of industrial progress. To allow an entire way of living to be destroyed for the sake of industrial ambition would be absolutely criminal and disheartening to say the least.

COLUMN: KEEP OFF THE GRASS


RNI NO. WBENG/2010/36111Regd. No. KOL RMS/429/2011-2013

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