JK Alternative Viewpoint

Book Review: Pakistan, the Garrison State: Origins, Evolution, Consequences, 1947-2011

Author: Ishtiaq Ahmed

Publisher: Oxford University Press, Karachi (January 2013)

Hardcover: 508 pagesA
Price: Rs 1,295

The military domination of Pakistan’s body politic and the country’s tortuous, yet close relationship with the United States have been the subjects of many a book, but it is the first time that both have been comprehensively dealt with in one volume. Professor Ishtiaq Ahmed is pre-eminently qualified for the task, and he has, for the first time, systematically demonstrated that the roots of the creation of Pakistan are firmly anchored in the last-minute British military’s decision to that effect. As to the haste with which Lord Mountbatten effected partition, in his incisive book Shameful Flight, the Last Years of the British Empire in India (OUP, 2006), Stanley Wolpert blames it for leaving “South Asia vulnerable to hatred and terror, compounded by ignorant fears and ugly rumours, multiplied by hundreds of millions.” “Mountbatten’s hyperactive frenzy” led to a killing frenzy, causing up to a million deaths, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu alike.

Ahmed has also shown that the Pakistani leadership started wooing the Americans much before the latter paid any heed. Adlai Stevenson viewed Pakistan as a “tragic outcome of the senseless conflict between blood brothers,” while Chester Bowles referred to it as an unfortunate product of religious fanaticism (quoted in M R Azmi, ed., Pakistan-American Relations: the Recent Past, Royal Book Co, Karachi, 1994). Ahmed notes that the US pre-occupation with Europe and NATO in the context of the perceived Soviet threat ensured that the US paid little heed to South Asia at the time.

It is perhaps fair to say that one is a prisoner of one’s background, and this includes all scholars and writers in varying degrees. But Ahmed, who unhesitatingly announces himself to be a proud Punjabi, and a Lahori to boot, is perhaps a noble exception. He takes a totally unbiased and highly critical view of the Punjabi domination in the Pakistani decision-making circles and corridors of power, particularly the army. He does so without mincing words and cites facts and figures to back his argument.

I am not sure that the current practice of using the western system of citing Pakistanis by their last names, whether in text or in notes, is the right one. Khan is a case in point. Is it Liaquat Ali Khan, Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Musa Khan, Akbar Khan, Asghar Khan, Wali Khan, Fazal Muqeem Khan, Gohar Ayub Khan or Imran Khan? In a nation of tens of millions of Khans, the possibilities are immense. Whereas we know who we are talking about when we mention Johnson, Kennedy, Nixon, Kissinger and Carter or Blair, Thatcher or Cameron, which Khan are we referring to when we say just Khan? The same is true of, say, Ali, Ahmed or Chaudhry.

There are times when the author could have dispensed with citations for well-known, incontrovertible facts (eg. p. 107). And there are places where a citation would have been useful, for instance, when he writes that “Mirza became suspicious of Ayub” (p. 115) or “Pakistan’s [military] success [in 1965 war] was mentioned in a number of dispatches by western correspondents.” (p. 135)

Pakistan’s failure to get a democratic constitution for many years is said to be because “Liaquat Ali Khan evaded elections, primarily because he had no constituency from which to ensure his election” (p 104). This has been taken for granted by every Pakistani author and accepted by all without question. In fact, given the high prestige which Liaquat (or, should I say, Khan) enjoyed by virtue of his contribution to the Pakistan movement, building of the state from scratch and as the Quaid-e-Azam’s long-time deputy, and the goodwill that existed in the early years, he almost certainly would have been guaranteed to win from any constituency in Pakistan, both West and East. Voters in any part of the country would have felt honoured to vote for him as their member of parliament. Even now Pakistani politicians win elections from multiple constituencies (Bhutto of Larkana, Sindh, won from four constituencies in 1970, including Lahore!).

And a fact not mentioned anywhere by anyone relates to the Chinese role, or rather the lack of it, in 1971. In September, the Chinese leadership was plunged into a very grave crisis when Mao Zedong’s deputy and designated successor, Defence Minister Lin Biao, along with many military commanders, launched an unsuccessful coup and died in a plane crash on Sept 13, 1971 when trying to flee. The coup originated in February 1971 and the crisis did not fully resolve until Deng Xiao Ping took charge in 1978. As a matter of curiosity, the plane that crashed along with Lin Biao in Mongolian territory for lack of fuel was a Trident that had been sold to China by PIA some years earlier!

Throughout the book, Ahmed’s mastery of the subject at hand is manifest. One particular strength of the book is his personal interviews with a very large number of participants and scholars from all sides of the equation, namely, Pakistan, India and US, military as well as civilian.

Perhaps Professor Ishtiaq Ahmed has tried to pack too much in one volume. It is perhaps impossible to separate foreign relations from internal socio-economic and political issues, but it may have been a good idea to limit discussions of foreign policy as far as possible. In Pakistan’s case, however, that is easier said than done, given the country’s crucial dependence on foreign economic and military aid and its search for powerful allies against the perceived Indian threat.

In the event, the learned professor has done as good a job as anyone could have aspired to. This book is not merely a great resource for scholars interested in Pakistan but also for college and university students. It should be required reading at Pakistani institutions and academies of higher education. The book skillfully relates Pakistan’s evolution as a garrison state to its search for an identity and the welding of religion and state with very unfortunate results.

During the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, when President Lyndon B Johnson was told by Secretary of State Dean Rusk that President Ayub Khan was desperately seeking US help to bail him out of the quagmire, LBJ complained that Khan took off without even informing him, but now that he was going to crash-land he wanted him (LBJ) to sit with him in the cockpit!

In a twist of irony, the situation has now been reversed and Pakistan probably can have the last laugh. The US got into the Afghan quagmire not only against Pakistan’s wishes but even threatened Pakistan to assist in the venture, but now that it wants a safe and honourable exit from there, it is desperate for Pakistan’s help.

The photo of Brig (retd) Yasub Ali Dogar on the same page (opposite p. 116) as Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Ziaul Haque and Pervez Musharraf, all coup makers and generals-turned-president, is sure to please the brigadier, but whether he deserves their company is another matter. But surely it brings into sharp focus the words “Garrison State” in the title of the book, for Brigadier Yasub Ali Dogar has served as a Director of Operations in the ISI during some crucial years.

The reviewer is a former academic with a doctorate in modern history. His doctoral dissertation was The US, Pakistan and the Soviet Union, 1947-1965; Problems of Security, Ideology and Geopolitics. He also edited Pakistan American Relations, the Recent Past (Royal Book Co, Karachi, 1994). He can be reached at raziazmi@hotmail.com
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2013\05\15\story_15-5-2013_pg3_4

M.N. Roy with his second wife Ellen Gottschalk in Bombay in March 1937.

French director Vladimir Leon’s film on M.N. Roy explores the trajectory of the revolutionary’s life and politics. 

Sometime at the turn of the millennium, an old but famous photograph set internationally acclaimed French documentary film-maker Vladimir Leon on a quest for a forgotten man in the annals of history. Guessing the film-maker’s Russian connection, the Indian historian Hari Vasudevan showed Leon the iconic photograph shot during the second Communist International (Comintern) Congress in 1920. Amidst the tall Bolshevik leaders of the time such as Grigory Zinoveiv, Vladimir Lenin and Maxim Gorky, there was an Indian face in the picture. It was that of Manabendra Nath Roy, or M.N. Roy, one of the founders of the Communist Party of India in 1920.

“Here was a man about whom the world hardly knew anything,” says Leon, who found in Roy’s life the perfect plot for a film. “Roy was a part of incredible moments in history. Imagine a person from a rural family in colonial India being witness to three of the most revolutionary periods of the 20th century.”

Roy, who in the early 20th century was part of an underground revolutionary organisation called Anushilan Samiti in the then Bengal, also founded the Communist Party of Mexico with 10 people, became the leader of the militant peasant movement there, represented both India and Mexico in the second Comintern Congress as an important delegate and, later, participated in the Indian nationalist movement. Despite such struggles, Roy remained on the margins of history.

Leon started filming Roy’s life in 2002 and, in the four years that he took to complete the film, he travelled the entire northern hemisphere, from Mexico to Russia to India and Germany. Through the course of the film-making, Leon discovered facets of Roy’s life that were nothing less than paradoxical. From being a staunch nationalist, inspired by the socio-religious reformer Vivekananda, the nationalist writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and the revolutionary anti-colonial leader Bagha Jatin, all from Bengal, Roy became a devoted internationalist switching between being a Marxist, believing in a worldwide revolution, and a radical humanist in the heyday of his life. He was expelled from the Comintern in 1928, but he remained a Marxist. Like the European communists, he supported the anti-Stalinist politics of the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition). When he returned to India in the 1930s, he drew the wrath of Indian communists because he deviated from communism to become a radical humanist. He formed the Radical Democratic Party in 1940.

To every place that Leon went to learn about his protagonist, Roy was a hated figure. In Mexico, the communists considered Roy a traitor because he did not speak about Mexican problems at the second Comintern Congress. In Russia, Roy was known for having contested with Lenin. While Lenin believed, in principle and in politics, that nationalist movements across the world should be supported if they were anti-colonial in nature, Roy believed that the struggles should not be supported unless they were militant.

Roy cited the example of the Indian nationalist movement, which he felt did not question the status quo of power. He said that the non-violent struggle in India was only a bourgeois struggle for power and predicted that India would achieve independence by a mutual exchange of power, and that the British would grant India independence peacefully for retaining it as a vibrant market, and that in the process, the age-old exploitation of the proletariat would not end and another exploitative state would come to power.

Just as in the other countries where Roy played a role, in India too, he is best known as a communist renegade who deviated from the path of revolution. If not for these paradoxes, Leon would not have named his film The Comintern Brahmin. Leon’s film, made in French and in a style typical of a slow French docudrama, was screened recently in New Delhi and Kolkata with support from the Indian Renaissance Institute that Roy formed.

The film shows Roy’s life unfolding in front of the viewer, without Leon trying to direct the viewer in any one direction. Sometimes investigative, sometimes reflective, sometimes trying to talk about Roy’s personal life, the film tries to merge contemporary political understanding with the historical praxis. Without making him a hero, Leon keeps hinting to the viewer that Roy’s life is a means for a revolutionary to understand contemporary dilemmas.

The title of the film, as problematic as it sounds, became one of its most discussed points. To Leon, it denoted Roy’s paradoxes more than anything else. A communist would not believe in religion but still has to grapple with religious issues. “Roy never fits a category. He was a philosopher and a politician at the same time,” says Leon. “My idea was to conceptualise the dilemmas of the contemporary revolutionary. Roy’s life, back in the early 20th century, reflected such dilemmas at a time when ideologies had a clear political agenda. That is why I named the film The Comintern Brahmin.”

Roy was a committed internationalist and yet thought of political issues in their national contexts. He grew beyond communism to form a radical humanist party, yet his thoughts were steeped in the emancipation of the common people. He came from a priestly class and denounced all forms of tradition in favour of modern ideals of renaissance and enlightenment, and yet he remained one who fiercely debated the Eurocentric ideals of 20th century Marxism.

Was he an individualist? Was he just an intellectual? Or was he actually trying to be a politician, despite repeated failures? These are some of the questions that are thrown to the viewer but remain unresolved until the end of the film.

 
Stills from the documentary “The Comintern Brahmin”: M.N Roy with Bolshevik leaders at the 2nd Comintern Congress of 1920; busts of Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders lying in the dumpyard of a building, indicating the state of communist artefacts in Russia today; (far right, above) Moscow in present times; (far right, below) director Vladimir Leon looking at Roy’s digital photos in the Russian Archives in Moscow.

However, what is clear is that Roy definitely was trying to cull out an alternative political trajectory, despite failing at it. For his internationalist communist self, he deemed it necessary to support Britian in its war against Germany in the Second World War as he considered it necessary to defeat fascism first in order to see any light for a revolutionary democracy. It was precisely for this that he did not support the Quit India Movement of 1942 and also the industrial strikes in Bombay (Mumbai) in the 1940s. At one time, he joined the Indian National Congress with his supporters with the intention of radicalising it, for which he is despised even today by Indian leftists. Despite militantly differing with Gandhi and his support for non-violence, and Hindu traditions and religious ideals, Roy’s political programme of forming people’s committees in villages did not differ much from Gandhi’s local governance programme. While he was a Marxist, he challenged the Comintern so much that his theories became a role model for countries such as Vietnam. “Despite being an internationalist, he felt that a contextual revolutionary base has to be necessarily created in colonial countries because their history is not the same,” says Leon.

Leon says that there are other figures in history who led a life similar to Roy’s. “Walter Benjamin, the great Frankfurt school thinker, and 19th century French thinker Alexis De Tocqueville are similar personalities. Tocqueville was hated by the leftists as he was an aristocrat and differed with Marx on many points. But he also wrote one of the best critiques of a liberal democratic state, and predicted that it had the makings of a totalitarian state, an aspect that was very novel in the 19th century. His predictions are proving true in the present times.

“Benjamin also refused to get into a bracket. He was greatly influenced by the Marxist playwright and thinker Bertolt Brecht but at the same time Jewish traditions influenced him. Like Roy, both these personalities were insiders and outsiders at the same time,” says Leon.

Roy’s politics and philosophy had changed course many a time in his life and touched continents in many ways. But if one were to attempt a lucid narrative on his life and times, one quickly realises that narrative tools tend to fail terribly. For director Leon, the difficulty lay precisely here— the inability to construct an idea of the man, the revolutionary and the thinker in Roy to varied viewers.

The documentary generated a mixed bag of responses—from fierce disapproval to sincere praise. Leon says that the film is a French point of view, and he was ready to face different reactions from people across the world. “To me, Roy’s life is interesting as it points out a world view of an internationalist and the revolutionary politics of those times. He had an idea of India beyond its territory. He thought of the Indian freedom struggle as one that could be an international example, and that is why he dissented from most political practices of that time,” Leon emphasises.

However, he agrees that Roy failed but also stresses that for Roy freedom was the ultimate trajectory to practise any kind of politics. “He was very lonely, very intellectual, a philosopher, a poet, and was part of very radical groups throughout his life in search of his politics. Until his death, he remained a figure that was rejected both by the Left and by the Right. Because for him true freedom, somehow, always clashed with his own ideologies,” says Leon.

Perhaps, it is time to relook and reread Roy since political contexts have changed. Because the paradoxes in which Roy lived have translated into pertinent issues today and hence all those invested in change are naturally implicated in his quest. And to explore the most important question, which Leon phrases aptly, “Is it possible to invent a politics where the freedom of man is not constrained? And, at the same time are you right in politics when you are right alone?”

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20130419300709500.htm

THIS collection brings together 22 insightful papers on Jaina art written over a span of three decades by the distinguished art historian and Indologist M.A. Dhaky. Dhaky favours the appellation “Nirgrantha” to the widely prevalent term “Jaina”—a choice that may intrigue more than a few readers. Yet, Nirgrantha, which translates as “without ties” or “free from bondage”, is the name by which this system of religious thought and practice has been addressed in the earliest Jaina canonical literature. As Nigantha in the Ardhamagadhi dialect, it figures from at least the 3rd-4th century BCE and was used in Maharashtri Prakrit from the early centuries of the Common Era (C.E.).

Buddhist canonical works and Asokan inscriptions speak of the Nirgranthas. In Pali texts, Mahavira is addressed as “Nigantha Nataputta”. The Digambaras have at times interpreted it to mean “without the ties of cloth”, or bare-bodied. The term Jaina, deriving from Jina, came into vogue much later, but by medieval times it had effectively replaced the more ancient Nirgrantha. Dhaky’s choice is perhaps based on the twin reasons of antiquity and semantics, for Nirgrantha also aptly represents the essentials of a religion that emphasises renunciation.

Measured against the weighty corpus of published works on Buddhism and Hinduism, research on Jainism appears woefully undernourished. What is more, studies in Jaina visual culture remained, until recently, strangely insulated from the larger historical discourse on Jainism. While historians of Jaina art, with a few exceptions, have preferred to lose themselves in the nitty-gritty of iconographic riddles and formal descriptions, Jainologists have not integrated the visual expressions of Jaina culture within the matrix of their research, except occasionally to embellish an argument. Seen in this light, Dhaky’s rigorous and interdisciplinary approach to interpreting Jaina art, literature and history stands tall.

The idea and image of the Jina

The Jaina tradition mentions a succession of 24 Jinas (victorious ones) or Tirthankaras (ford makers), with Rishabhanatha being the first and Mahavira being the final one. In the early days of its history, the Jaina philosophical position did not encourage the worship of Jinas or the making of their images. Dhaky explicates this in a long and intense essay on “The Jina image in agamic and hymnic tradition”:

“At the centre of this non-committal and neutral, even cool and indifferent if not totally negative attitude of the agamas [canonical texts] toward the actual representation of the Jina as well as its worship by recluses, is the very ancient Nirgrantha doctrine of which Mahavira himself was the exponent. It, above all, had laid firm emphasis on, and pleaded for an unswerving faith in the supremacy and autonomy of the Self… and this assertive conviction rendered dependence on any external agent or object redundant…” (page 100).

The abstract “Self” in Jainism is believed to be free from karmic bondage and exists in an absolute state of “being”, devoid of desire or power for action. The omniscient Jina thus “does not possess motivating power and can neither bestow favour ( prasada) nor inflict harm… for ‘activity’ in any form is, for the Self, the cause as well as evidence of the state of bondage, not of release” (page 101). It follows from this that worshipping a Jina image to gain favour or to seek protection was not recommended in early Jaina thought.
TAMIL NADU STATE ARCHAEOLOGICAL DEPARTMENT
 
. Mahavira is the last of the succession of 24 Jinas or Tirthankaras mentioned in the Jaina tradition.

Yet, archaeology reveals a different picture and points to an early and persistent presence of Jina images. Dhaky’s research suggests that the practice of making Jina images appears at first to have been initiated by elite lay followers—merchants, tradesmen, ministers, and nobles—with the clergy following soon after, by the early centuries of the C.E. Of significance here is his paper on the much-debated Lohanipur torso, in which he marshals evidence from archaeology and art history to succinctly and sharply argue for reinstating its Mauryan date and Jina identity.

Parshvanatha, the penultimate Jina, whose historicity has been established and whose representations abound in art, is discussed at length by the author. Dhaky describes Parshvanatha as a methodical thinker, “an ascetic-scientist” as compared to Mahavira, an “ascetic-philosopher” (page 8). Parshvanatha’s association with the lord of serpents, Dharanendra, is a favoured narrative in Jaina literature and art. It tells of the protection offered by the serpent lord to the Jina from his formidable enemy (Kamatha, born as the demi-god, Meghamali). In art, Parshvanatha is usually portrayed with the multi-hooded serpent lord’s protective canopy above his head, at times also with attendant imagery dramatising the demi-god’s torment. Dhaky mines a formidable range of ancient and medieval Jaina hymnic literature and relates these to sculptural representations. Placing his enquiries in a chronological framework, he offers insights into the composers’ and sculptors’ “visualisation of the unshaken, dignified, and tranquilly awesome image of the Jina standing in deep trance” (page 41). At the same time, he provokes the reader to understand this narrative and its imagery in terms of “a common cultural milieu of the pre-Christian Era” (page 12), pointing to inter-sectarian borrowings between early Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. In another essay, Dhaky discusses the peculiarities of a sculpture of Jina Rishabha on the Shatrunjaya hills.

While the earliest Jina images presumably needed no accompaniments or paraphernalia as these “associations signifying royal insignia would have gone against the very tenets of absolute asceticism of the early Nirgrantha religion” (page 147), Jina images from the Kushana times onwards included regalia such as the lion throne, the wheel of law, and the fly whisk to signify the Jina as dharmachakravarti (one who sets the wheel of law in motion). The chamara pratiharya (fly-whisk bearer) receives detailed attention in one of the essays, in which Dhaky discusses its stylistics in association with southern Indian Jina images.

Layered histories

Neminatha, the 22nd Jina, is believed to have attained salvation on the summit of the Girnar hills in Gujarat. In one of the lengthier essays, Dhaky discusses the interrelationships between Neminatha and Vasudeva-Krishna, and details the antiquity of the Neminatha-Girnar association with splendid clarity and perception. Traversing the ancient and the medieval, the author brings to life the many voices of history encountered at the site, making the narrative incrementally more layered. The presence of a Buddhist monastery and an encounter between the Buddhists and the Jainas and, next, disputes between the Digambaras and the Shvetambaras are some of the subtexts that Dhaky weaves into his discussion. In a brief paper, he provides fresh hymnic evidence relating to the myth of the birth of Ambika, the yakshi associated with Neminatha and Girnar, who is said to have been a Brahmin woman in her previous birth.
PAUL NORONHA
 
 The minimalist and austere aesthetics of the Jina image are offset in Jaina art by a robust and lively representation of flora, fauna and human forms that pervade and enliven the Jina’s environs in the cave or structural temple that marks his abode. This is particularly true of the Jaina caves at Ellora.

Modhera in Gujarat is famous today for its early medieval temple dedicated to the sun god. In a substantial essay on Modhera, Dhaky analyses the long-term history of the site through a stylistic and iconographical interpretation of its art and architectural remains, and a simultaneous reading of Jaina, Hindu and Persian references to the site at different points in history. His research reveals an almost concurrent prevalence of sun worship and the worship of Jina Mahavira at Modhera from about the 7th century. Communities of priests (Brahmins) and traders (Vaishyas) had settled there, the latter being followers of Jainism, several of whom later embraced Vaishnavism under the influence of Shrimad Vallabhacharya.

In another paper, “The creed-affiliation of the Samiddhesvara Temple in Cittaudgadh”, an incisive re-examination of architectural form, inscriptions, and literary sources leads Dhaky to arrive at the original identity of the structure as being the temple of Neminatha built by the minister Vastupala.

Two essays in this volume offer interesting accounts of the ways in which the southern Indian Jaina tradition was perceived in western India during the medieval period. The first of these discusses western Indian pilgrim notices of Jaina sacred places in southern India. It also includes 14th century literary references to the increasingly affable relations between a devout Jaina statesman and the Muslim rulers of Gujarat, Delhi and Telangana. Significantly, this had resulted in the restoration and building of Jaina shrines in Gujarat and Telangana. The second essay gives several accounts of the esteem in which the colossal 10th century sculpture of Gomateshwara at Shravanabelgola was held in medieval western India.

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20130322300507700.htm
The minimalist and austere aesthetics of the Jina image are offset in Jaina art by a robust and lively representation of flora, fauna and human forms that pervade and enliven the Jina’s environs in the cave or structural temple that marks his abode. This is particularly true of the Jaina caves at Ellora as also the early medieval Jaina temples of Karnataka, a stronghold of Digambara Jainism. Given Dhaky’s eye for visual detail, it comes as no surprise that he devotes several essays to the aesthetic qualities of Jaina art and architecture as it developed in southern India, particularly during the period of the Rashtrakutas, the Gangas and the Santaras. In these, he dwells upon the intricacies of style and iconography, at times also using stylistic evidence from other important sites such as Ajanta and Ellora, to work out the missing links. Apart from a judicious use of texts and a keen awareness of the historical milieu, two qualities are particularly striking in Dhaky’s art-historical writings: first, his intimate familiarity with ancient Indian art forms and his near-encyclopaedic visual memory that seems to imprint the images on his mind’s eye; and second, his acute sensitivity to the subtleties of art and its processes. His description of a fly-whisk bearer in the sanctum of a 10th century temple in Kambadahalli, Karnataka, is a case in point: “The one on the left is more elegant, seeming as though a painting transformed into sculpture… [The quality of painting] is visibly present …in the flow and sweep of the whisk. The figure has the gracefulness of the Ajantan Avalokitesvara (Cave 1) and the gait and verve of the chamara dharas in the Konkan-Maurya caves at Ellora (Buddhist caves). The chamara bearer’s beautiful round-at-the-tip kirita-crown is a forerunner of some Kongu-Keralite types of crown, later paralleled both in stone and bronze and whose descendants are to be seen in one of the types of the Kathakali dancer’s head wear” (page 250).

The Ahmedabad-based publisher Sambodhi Sansthan deserves to be congratulated on bringing together this veteran author’s writings on the varied aspects of Jaina art and architecture. Dhaky retains a direct and elegant style of writing throughout. Yet, this is by no means an easy-to-read introduction to Jaina art. The sheer range of literary sources in different languages and dialects, the intricacies of the visual material discussed, and the insights offered into sectarian complexities and site histories call for intense and focussed attention. But then, the author’s objectives and methods have for long been known to be oriented towards pioneering research. This is a book to be read, reread and referred to—fundamental, enriching, and of lasting value.

Parul Pandya Dhar teaches Art History in the Department of History, University of Delhi.

The writer is author, most recently, of The Apricot Road to Yarkand (Sang-e-Meel, 2011) and a member of the Royal Geographical Society salman.rashid@tribune.com.pk
In August 1991, when I first saw it, the house was in perfect fettle. This was surprising for it was constructed around the year 1830 and was then fully 160 years old. The marble plaque on the façade, fixed by some thoughtful British civil servant after the annexation of Punjab read, “Summer residence of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, AD 1830-1837”.

Inspired by European architecture, the house was unlike a traditional vernacular residence. It had verandas on two sides with rooms on the remaining two and a central atrium. The side rooms and the verandas had lower roofs while that of the central foyer’s was higher. The rafters, door and window frames and every other timber fixture were first class teak.

The house sat on the east bank of the Chenab River, just outside Rasulnagar (Gujranwala district), right by the ancient ferry where a young Ranjit Singh had deprived the Afghans of the Zamzama that now sits outside Lahore Museum. Here, long after he had defeated the Afghans and put an end to their predatory raids, the Maharaja would have reposed with his customary glass of strong drink, watching the brown waters of the Chenab roll past forever and ever.

This house became part of my book Gujranwala: The Glory That Was (1992). It also featured in one of the episodes of my PTV documentary series “Nagri, nagri ghoom musafir” produced during 1998-1999. I returned to the house a number of times thereafter when I was pressing for it to be taken over by the district administration to turn it into a library or a museum so that it may be preserved forever.

But we, the people of Pakistan, have no connection with the dharti. We have severed the umbilical that would bond us with the motherland to give us a sense of belonging and pride. Without the connection, we drift aimlessly in a wasteland harbouring vague and false notions of Arab or Central Asiatic ancestry. The disconnect is so strong that nothing that belongs to this land turns us on. We simply do not care.

Last August, I returned to Rasulnagar again to digitally preserve Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s house. What I beheld left me in tears. The house that had withstood every vagary of nature until about 2004, was a ruined hulk. The roof was gone; every single door, window and ventilator removed. What was once the interior of the house was now a pile of debris.

Until 2004, the house stood in open fields. But this time round, there was next to the historical building, a semi-permanent house inhabited by what seemed to be a family of gypsies. They had plastered the walls of the Maharaja’s house with cow dung patties.

No one seemed to know who had laid low this historic building. Neither the gypsies nor the men minding the nearby tube well. In fact, one man even ventured that the building had been in that state since the time of his ancestors!

Though I do not know who to blame for the crime, I know the teak fixtures of the building now adorn the house of some well-connected thug. When he or his men started to dismantle this historic building which should have been part of the national heritage, the DCO and his minions simply looked away. No one bothered as it went down bit by bit.

Rasulnagar is historically a very interesting place because it sat on a busy ford. An elderly ferryman once told me that until well into the 1950s, there used to be fully 100 boats catering to the back and forth traffic. Moreover, this was the very place where Ranjit Singh, just 19-year-old and leading a small force, had routed a much larger Afghan army to bring their periodic raids to an end.

This also is the place where the Sikhs under Sher Singh Atariwala, 15,000-strong, fought a desperate battle against the British in November 1848. The British prevailed, the Sikhs withdrew to the west of the river to fight and lose their final battle two months later at Chillianwala.

All this — and more — makes Rasulnagar a tourist destination for the history buff. But we do not belong to this land, so what do we do with our heritage? We destroy it.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 9th, 2013.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/517744/the-maharajas-residence/

The writer is author, most recently, of The Apricot Road to Yarkand (Sang-e-Meel, 2011) and a member of the Royal Geographical Society salman.rashid@tribune.com.pk
The Chachnama tells us that in the year 632, during the reign of Caliph Omar (RA), Mughera surnamed Abul Aas, then stationed at Bahrain, led the first assault, a naval expedition, on Debal. He died fighting outside the city’s walls. When Abu Musa Ashari, the governor of Iraq, received news of this debacle, he wrote to the caliph that “he should think no more of Hind”.

In the caliphate of Hazrat Usman (RA) one Hakim bin Hailah Abdi, a poet and orator, was sent out to reconnoitre the approaches to Sindh. From him came this report: “Its water is dark; its fruit is bitter and poisonous; its land is stony and its earth is saltish. A small army will soon be annihilated there, and a large army will soon die of hunger.”

Now, Makran and Gandava (below the Bolan Pass) were already under tenuous control of the Arabs. However, Abdullah bin Amir, the governor of these regions, was advised against an attack on Sindh by the caliph after the reconnaissance report had been received. And so, years were to pass until the next attempt was made during the caliphate of Hazrat Ali (RA) in 660. Coming by way of Panjgur, the Arab force was successful at Kalat, but news of the assassination of the caliph resulted in withdrawal without the expedition reaching its logical end.

The third attack took place during the reign of Muawiya in 664. A force under Abdullah bin Sawad comprising 4,000 men attacked Kalat. The battle was long and hard, which went this way and that between the two sides until the mountaineers of Kalat routed the Arabs who fled to Makran.

Rashid bin Omar leading the fourth attack in an unnamed year (probably 668) also came against Kalat. Once again the contest was hard. The commander fell in battle and the invaders were routed with great loss of life. So far as Sindh was concerned, 12 peaceful years ensued. In 680, the commander of the army in Makran, one Manzir bin Harud, was sent by the caliph on plundering sorties against Sindh to make good the expenses of the failed expeditions.

This unfortunate commander succumbed to diseases, dying in a town named Burabi by the Chachnama. The book does not mention the locale of this place making identification difficult.

In the reign of caliph Walid bin Abdul Malik and governorship in Iraq of Hujaj bin Yusuf, the fifth expedition was undertaken against Sindh. The commander, Buzail bin Tahfa, led a small force by sea and, we read, marched to Nerun (Hyderabad). At this time, the country was firmly in the hands of Raja Dahar and this inland march is clearly an inconsistency. Particularly so because we later read that Buzail died in combat outside the walls of Debal where he had been joined by 4,000 troops from Makran sent by governor Mohammad bin Haroon.

While Ahmad Bilazri (Futuh ul Baladan) confirms this expedition, he tells us in addition of another attack not mentioned by the Chachnama. This being the expedition led by Obaidullah bin Nabhan and his death in battle causing the invaders to withdraw.

Now, as a result of these various battles, while many Arabs had been killed, many more languished in Sindhi captivity. Consequently, appointing Mohammad bin Qasim (MbQ) the general, Hujaj petitioned caliph Walid that it was necessary to free these prisoners. Walid demurred, however, saying that there had already been too many casualties and that the expedition was bound to be ‘a source of great anxiety’. There was, besides, the consideration of the large outlay.

Hujaj wrote back, “I undertake to pay back into the royal treasury double the amount spent on provisions and other items of expenditure for the army (in Iraq)”. The rest, as they say, is history.

Aside: There was a large body of Arabs already in the pay of Raja Dahar. These were the Alafis who, having fallen out with Hujaj, had rebelled and fled some time before. They fought with desperate courage against the Arabs under MbQ. Desperate surely they were because they knew if Dahar fell there was no returning for them to the west where only execution awaited them at the hands of Hujaj and his kinsfolk.

So, who were the Alafis?

Published in The Express Tribune, February 2nd, 2013.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/501426/invasion-of-sindh/

A balanced judgment of the much misunderstood British statesman who was rooted in the liberal tradition of his country’s foreign policy. 

Three decades after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death, a crop of “realists” comprising a former Foreign Secretary, J.N. Dixit, a noted columnist, a few Bharatiya Janata Party figures and some in the media launched a campaign for a “realistic” foreign policy. Their rhetoric rested on two shrill cries—Nehru was a visionary and an idealist who “appeased” Pakistan and China and foolishly pursued non-alignment. They would quote Palmerston’s dicta on eternal interests.

Barren of any interest in the record, they ignored Nehru’s hard-line policies towards all, Nepal included. Also they would misquote Palmerston and ignore the context. On December 4, 1947, in his very first major speech in Parliament on foreign policy as Prime Minister, Nehru said: “India will follow an independent policy keeping away from the power politics of groups aligned one against another.” But if war came and a choice had to be made “we are going to join the side which is to our interest”. The accent was on independence; non-alignment was a corollary.

It would not “fade away because of Cold War relaxations” as a commentator noted, “for, every foreign policy issue that demands a choice presents an opportunity for a display of independence”. Mark these words: “I do not think it is purely idealistic. I think it is, if you like, opportunistic in the long run.” They were spoken by the St. Peter of the misunderstood creed, Nehru.

Palmerston spoke in the House of Commons on March 1, 1848, in reply to charges that he did not help the Poles during the revolution in 1835. His speech deserves to be quoted in extenso: “I hold with respect to alliances, that England is a power sufficiently strong, sufficiently powerful, to steer her own course and not to tie herself as an unnecessary appendage to the policy of any other government. I hold that the real policy of England—apart from questions that involve her own particular interests, political or commercial—is to be the champion of justice and right; pursuing that course with moderation and prudence, not becoming the Quixote of the world, but giving the weight of her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks that justice is and wherever she thinks that wrong has been done”. This is non-alignment.

He added: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. When we find other countries marching in the same course, and pursuing the same objects as ourselves, we consider them as our friends, and we think for the moment that we are on the most cordial footing; when we find other countries that take a different view, and thwart us in the object we pursue, it is our duty to make allowances for the different manner in which they may follow out the same objects.” Note the spirit of tolerance.

“It is our duty not to pass too harsh a judgment upon others, because they do not exactly see things in the same light as we see; and it is our duty not lightly to engage this country in the frightful responsibilities of war, because from time to time we may find this or that power disinclined to concur with us in matters where their opinion and ours may fairly differ.” Nehru’s policy was not much different, except that he was intolerant and censorious of those Asian states that differed with him.

Professor David Brown’s massive and masterly biography follows two previous works on the statesman. For years historians treated Palmerston with disdain. A.J.P. Taylor, who lacked L.N. Namier’s erudition and depth, expended wit and sweeping judgment on the man as late as in 1954. Later works were more just but it is to Prof. Brown that we owe a balanced judgment.

 
Palmerston spoke in the House of Commons on March 1, 1848, in reply to charges that he did not help the Poles during the revolution in 1835.

Palmerston’s philandering, faithfully recorded in his diaries, did him much harm. Entry into a wrong bedroom by mistake and the shrieks of one of the Queen’s ladies prompted Victoria to order his dismissal from office. That he left the Tories for the Whigs added to the prejudice. Both as Foreign Secretary and as Prime Minister his record awaited a fair verdict on this much misunderstood man.

That Prof. Brown delivers: “In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, then, Palmerston has come to represent no-nonsense realpolitik foreign policy. This is not wholly accurate and fails adequately to encapsulate the subtleties of Palmerston’s foreign policy. Palmerston might just as easily, and properly, should have been taken as the root of a more liberal tradition in British foreign policy that stressed his commitment to the principles of freedom and constitutionalism for Europe, much as Webster and Woodward suggested.

“….Palmerston’s attempts to present his foreign policy underpinned by a belief in constitutional government were, to some extent, about how Britain interacted with foreign powers. But it was equally a means by which Palmerston, who spent much of his career at the Foreign Office or dealing with external questions, was able to demonstrate to the British people that he was a defender of their interests. The rhetorical constructions of Britain on the international stage certainly produced a powerful narrative of improvement, which played well to domestic audience eager for a vicarious role in the liberal and progressive mission or project in which Britain seemed to be engaged. But in Palmerston’s case, though the rhetoric could hide inconsistencies, he was not insincere. Palmerston’s commitment to liberal advancement —increased freedom, increased liberty, moral and environmental improvement—was genuine, but for him power was exercised on the people’s behalf by an enlightened, forward looking but moderate elite.”

 
——————————————————————————–

——————————————————————————–
 
http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20130125300108400.htm

In a SPIEGEL interview, synthetic biology expert George Church of Harvard University explains how DNA will become the building material of the future — one that can help create virus-resistant human beings and possibly bring back lost species like the Neanderthal.

George Church, 58, is a pioneer in synthetic biology, a field whose aim is to create synthetic DNA and organisms in the laboratory. During the 1980s, the Harvard University professor of genetics helped initiate the Human Genome Project that created a map of the human genome. In addition to his current work in developing accelerated procedures for sequencing and synthesizing DNA, he has also been involved in the establishing of around two dozen biotech firms. In his new book, “Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves,” which he has also encoded as strands of DNA and distributed on small DNA chips, Church sketches out a story of a second, man-made Creation.
ANZEIGESPIEGEL recently sat down with Church to discuss his new tome and the prospects for using synthetic biology to bring the Neanderthal back from exctinction as well as the idea of making humans resistant to all viruses.

——————————————————————————–
SPIEGEL: Mr. Church, you predict that it will soon be possible to clone Neanderthals. What do you mean by “soon”? Will you witness the birth of a Neanderthal baby in your lifetime?

Church: That depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think so. The reason I would consider it a possibility is that a bunch of technologies are developing faster than ever before. In particular, reading and writing DNA is now about a million times faster than seven or eight years ago. Another technology that the de-extinction of a Neanderthal would require is human cloning. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it’s very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn’t we be able to do so?

SPIEGEL: Perhaps because it is banned?

Church: That may be true in Germany, but it’s not banned all over the world. And laws can change, by the way.

SPIEGEL: Would cloning a Neanderthal be a desirable thing to do?

Church: Well, that’s another thing. I tend to decide on what is desirable based on societal consensus. My role is to determine what’s technologically feasible. All I can do is reduce the risk and increase the benefits.

SPIEGEL: So let’s talk about possible benefits of a Neanderthal in this world.

Church: Well, Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it’s conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.

SPIEGEL: How do we have to imagine this: You raise Neanderthals in a lab, ask them to solve problems and thereby study how they think?

Church: No, you would certainly have to create a cohort, so they would have some sense of identity. They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force.

SPIEGEL: Wouldn’t it be ethically problematic to create a Neanderthal just for the sake of scientific curiosity?

Church: Well, curiosity may be part of it, but it’s not the most important driving force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.

SPIEGEL: Setting aside all ethical doubts, do you believe it is technically possible to reproduce the Neanderthal?

Church: The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a human stem cell. If we do that often enough, then we would generate a stem cell line that would get closer and closer to the corresponding sequence of the Neanderthal. We developed the semi-automated procedure required to do that in my lab. Finally, we assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone.

SPIEGEL: And the surrogates would be human, right? In your book you write that an “extremely adventurous female human” could serve as the surrogate mother.

Church: Yes. However, the prerequisite would, of course, be that human cloning is acceptable to society.

SPIEGEL: Could you also stop the procedure halfway through and build a 50-percent Neanderthal using this technology.

Church: You could and you might. It could even be that you want just a few mutations from the Neanderthal genome. Suppose you were too realize: Wow, these five mutations might change the neuronal pathways, the skull size, a few key things. They could give us what we want in terms of neural diversity. I doubt that we are going to particularly care about their facial morphology, though (laughs).

SPIEGEL: Might it one day be possible to descend even deeper into evolutionary history and recreate even older ancestors like Australopithecus or Homo erectus?

Church: Well, you have got a shot at anything where you have the DNA. The limit for finding DNA fragments is probably around a million years.

SPIEGEL: So we won’t be seeing the return of the caveman or dinosaurs?

Church: Probably not. But even if you don’t have the DNA, you can still make something that looks like it. For example, if you wanted to make a dinosaur, you would first consider the ostrich, one of its closest living relatives. You would take an ostrich, which is a large bird, and you would ask: “What’s the difference between birds and dinosaurs? How did the birds lose their hands?” And you would try to identify the mutations and try to back engineer the dinosaur. I think this will be feasible.

SPIEGEL: Is it also conceivable to create lifeforms that never existed before? What about, for example, rabbits with wings?

Church: So that’s a further possibility. However, things have to be plausible from an engineering standpoint. There is a bunch of things in birds that make flying possible, not just the wings. They have very lightweight bones, feathers, strong breast muscles, and the list goes on.

SPIEGEL: Flying rabbits and recreated dinosaurs are pure science fiction today. But on the microbe level, researchers are already creating synthetic life. New bacteria detect arsenic in drinking water. They create synthetic vaccines and diesel fuel. You call these organisms “novel machines”. How do they relate to the machines we know?

Church: Well, all organisms are mechanical in the sense that they’re made up of moving parts that inter-digitate like gears. The only difference is that they are incredibly intricate. They are atomically precise machines.

SPIEGEL: And what will these machines be used for?

Church: Oh, life science will co-opt almost every other field of manufacturing. It’s not limited to agriculture and medicine. We can even use biology in ways that biology never has evolved to be used. DNA molecules for example could be used as three-dimensional scaffolding for inorganic materials, and this with atomic precision. You can design almost any structure you want with a computer, then you push a button — and there it is, built-in DNA.

SPIEGEL: DNA as the building material of the future?

Church: Exactly. And it’s amazing. Biology is good at making things that are really precise. Take trees for example. Trees are extremely complicated, at least on a molecular basis. However, they are so cheap, that we burn them or convert them into tables. Trees cost about $50 a ton. This means that you can make things that are nearly atomically precise for five cents a kilo.

SPIEGEL: You are seriously proposing to build all kinds of machines — cars, computers or coffee machines — out of DNA?

Church: I think it is very likely that this is possible. In fact, computers made of DNA will be better than the current computers, because they will have even smaller processors and be more energy efficient.

SPIEGEL: Let’s go through a couple of different applications of synthetic biology. How long will it take, for example, until we can fill our tanks with fuel that has been produced using synthentic microbes?

Church: The fact is that we already have organisms that can produce fuel compatible with current car engines. These organisms convert carbon dioxide and light into fuels by basically using photosynthesis.

SPIEGEL: And they do so in an economically acceptable way?
Church: If you consider $1.30 a gallon for fuel a good number, then yeah. And the price will go down. Most of these systems are at least a factor of five away from theoretical limits, maybe even a factor of 10.

SPIEGEL: So we should urgently include synthetic life in our road map for the future energy supply in Germany?

Church: Well, I don’t necessarily think it’s a mistake to go slowly. It is not like Germany is losing out to lots of other nations right now, but there should be some sort of engineering and policy planning.
SPIEGEL: Germans are traditionally scared of genetically modified organisms.

Church: But don’t forget: The ones we are talking about won’t be farm GMOs. These will be in containers, and so if there’s a careful planning process, I would predict that Germany would be as good as any country at doing this.

SPIEGEL: There has been a lot of fierce public opposition to genetic engineering in Germany. How do you experience this? Do you find it annoying?

Church: Quite to the contrary. I personally think it has been fruitful. And I think there are relatively few examples in which such a debate has slowed down technology. I think we should be quite cautious, but that doesn’t mean that we should put moratoriums on new technologies. It means licensing, surveillance, doing tests. And we actually must make sure the public is educated about them. It would be great if all the politicians in the world were as technologically savvy as the average citizen is politically savvy.

SPIEGEL: Acceptence is highest for such technology when it is first applied in the medical industry …

Church: … yes, and the potential of synthetic life is particularly large in pharmaceuticals. The days of classic, small molecule drugs may be numbered. Actually, it is a miracle that they work in the first place. They kind of dose your whole body. They cross-react with other molecules. Now, we are getting better and better at programming cells. So I think cell therapies are going to be the next big thing. If you engineer genomes and cells, you have an incredible amount of sophistication. If you take AIDS virus as an example …

SPIEGEL: … a disease you also want to beat with cell therapy?

Church: Yes. All you have to do is take your blood cell precursors out of your body, reengineer them using gene therapy to knock out both copies of your CCR5 gene, which is the AIDS receptor, and then put them back in your body. Then you can’t get AIDS any more, because the virus can’t enter your cells.

SPIEGEL: Are we correct in assuming you wouldn’t hesitate to use germ cell therapy, as well, if you could improve humans genetically in this way?

Church: Well, there are stem cell therapies already. There are hematopoietic stem cell transplants that are widely practiced, and skin stem cell transplants. Once you have enough experience with these techniques you can start talking about human cloning. One of the things to do is to engineer our cells so that they have a lower probability of cancer. And then once we have a lower probability of cancer, you can crank up their self-renewal properties, so that they have a lower probability of senescence. We have people who live to be 120 years old. What if we could all live 120 years? That might be considered desirable.

SPIEGEL: But you haven’t got any idea which genes to change in order to achieve that goal.

Church: In order to find out, we are now involved in sequencing as many people as possible who have lived for over 110 years. There are only 60 of those people in the world that we know of.

SPIEGEL: Do you have any results already?

Church: It’s too early to say. But we collected the DNA of about 20 of them, and the analysis is just beginning.

SPIEGEL: You expect them all to have the same mutation that guarantees longevity?

Church: That is one possibility. The other possibility is that they each have their own little advantage over everybody else. What we are looking for is protective alleles. If they each have their own answer, we can look at all of them and ask, what happens if you put them all in one person? Do they cancel each other out, or do they synergize?

SPIEGEL: You seriously envisage a new era, in which genes are used as anti-aging-cures?

Church: Why not? A lot of things that were once left to luck no longer have to be if we add synthetic biology into the equation. Let’s take an example: virus resistance …

SPIEGEL: … which is also achievable using synthetic biology?

Church: Yes, it turns out there are certain ways to make organisms of any kind resistent to any viruses. If you change the genetic code …

SPIEGEL: … you are talking about the code that all life forms on Earth use to code their genetic information?

Church: Exactly. You can change that code. We’re testing that out in bacteria and it might well be possible to create completely virus-resistant E. coli, for example. But we won’t know until we get there. And I am not promising anything. I am just laying out a path, so that people can see what possible futures we have.

SPIEGEL: And if it works in bacteria, you presumably could then move on to plants, animals and even humans? Which means: no more measles, no more rabies, no more influenza?

Church: Sure. And that would be another argument for cloning, by the way, since cloning is probably going to be recognized as the best way of building such virus resistance into humans. As long as it is safe and tested slowly, it might gain acceptance. And I’m not advocating. I’m just saying, this is the pathway that might happen.

SPIEGEL: It all sounds so easy and straightforward. Aren’t biological processes far more complicated than you would like to lead us to believe?

Church: Yes, biology is complicated, but it’s actually simpler than most other technologies we are dealing with. The reason is that we have received a great gift that biology has given to us. We can just take a little bit of DNA and stick it into a human stem cell, and all the rest of it is self-assembled. It just happens. It’s as if a master engineer parked a spacecraft in our back yard with not so many manuals, but lots of goodies in it that are kind of self-explanatory. You pick up something and you pretty much know what it does after a little study.

SPIEGEL: Do you understand that there will be people who feel rather uncomfortable with the notion of changing the genome of the human species?

Church: I think the definition of species is about to change anyway. So far, the definition of different species has been that they can’t exchange DNA. But more and more, this species barrier is falling. Humans will probably share genes with all sorts of organisms.

SPIEGEL: First you propose to change the 3-billion-year-old genetic code. Then you explain how you want to create a new and better man. Is it any wonder to you when people accuse you of playing God?

Church: I certainly respect other people’s faith. But, in general, in religion you wouldn’t want people to starve. We have 7 billion people living on this planet. If part of the solution to feed those people is to make their crops resistant to viruses, then you have to ask: Is there really anything in the Bible that says you shouldn’t make virus-resistant crops? I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally more religiously problematic about engineering a dog or a cow or a horse the way we have been doing it for 10,000 years versus making a virus-resistant crop.

SPIEGEL: Virus-resistant crops is one thing. Virus-resistant humans is something altogether different.

Church: Why? In technology, we generally don’t take leaps. It’s this very slow crawl. We are not going to be making a virus-resistant human before we make a virus-resistant cow. I don’t understand why people should be so deeply hurt by that kind of technology.

SPIEGEL: Apart from religious opposition, biotechnology also generates very real fears. Artificial lifeforms which might turn out to be dangerous killer-bugs. Don’t we need special precautions?

Church: We have to be very cautious, I absolutely agree. I almost never vote against caution or regulations. In fact, I requested them for licensing and surveillance of synthetic biology. Yes, I think the risks are high. The risks of doing nothing are also high, if you consider that there are 7 billion people who need food and are polluting the environment.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Church, do you believe in God?

Church: I would be blind, if I didn’t see that faith in an overall plan resulted in where we are today. Faith is a very powerful force in the history of humanity. So I greatly respect different kinds of faith. Just as I think diversity is a really good thing genetically, it’s also a good thing societally.

SPIEGEL: But you’re talking about other people’s faith. What about your own faith?

Church: I have faith that science is a good thing. Seriously, I’d say that I am very much in awe of nature. In fact, I think to some extent, “awe” was a word that was almost invented for scientists. Not all scientists are in awe, but scientists are in a better position to be in awe than just about anybody else on the planet, because they actually can imagine all the different scales and all the complexity. A poet sees a flower and can go on and on about how beautiful the colors are. But what the poet doesn’t see is the xylem and the phloem and the pollen and the thousands of generations of breeding and the billions of years before that. All of that is only available to the scientists.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Church, we thank you for this conversation.

Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/george-church-explains-how-dna-will-be-construction-material-of-the-future-a-877634-2.html

An excerpt from a discussion of the art of painting practised by Gonds in the city of Bhopal in central India, which makes a case for moving the discussion of tribal or adivasi art away from anti-globalization readings that see it and its predicament in the modern world as a form of tragedy.

This article is part of an occasional series on ‘The Political Aesthetics of Power and Protest,’ the subject of a one-day workshop held at the University of Warwick last September. Democracy, since it does not function through command or coercion, requires instead a constant renewal of sets of symbols – symbols which appeal to people and instil in them a sense of belonging and identification. Increasing disenchantment and disillusion with the state, with political institutions, their practices and performance, makes it more important to explore the place of this aestheticisation of political language, the aesthetics of protest as well as of power.

On July 3, 2001, a small newspaper column in India reported that thirty-nine year old Jangarh Singh Shyam had committed suicide in Japan. Jangarh was a tribal or adivasi artist (who belonged to the Pardhan clan of the Gond tribe from central India) working on a contract at the privately owned Mithila Museum in Nigata, Japan, where he had been brought to produce a body of work for a monthly salary of about Rs.12,000 (approximately £150 today).

Although not much is publicly known about the personal circumstances leading to his death – whether his suicide was the culmination of a nagging depression or loneliness in a foreign land, or an act of desperation, if not resistance, against the exploitative conditions of the globalised production of adivasi art – his death was both a catastrophe and an opening.

The demise of a brilliant young artist on the cusp of achieving global fame was tragic enough. But Jangarh was also a mentor and breadwinner for numerous family and extended clan members whom he had brought along to the city to encourage them to become artists in their own right. Indeed Jangarh’s rise to prominence – from the jungles of central India where he carried and sold wood to earn a living, to being “discovered” and brought to Bhopal (the capital of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh) by artist, art critic and patron Jagdish Swaminathan when he was just twenty one years of age, to becoming a celebrated “indigenous” painter whose work adorned state legislative buildings and who went on to gain global currency in the international art market—was already spectacular and the stuff of fairy tale. But what was most remarkable, although not unheard of within the dynamics of a globalized art market, was that his death finally made his art worth accumulating for upper middle class art consumers in India and for those collecting and trading in indigenous art globally.

Jangarh’s death then is in equal measure as fascinating a story as that of his art and of his life and career as an artist. It concerns, among other things, the globalisation of indigenous art production, the politics of the postcolonial state’s relationship to tribal or adivasi art, and the aesthetic challenges of interpreting adivasi art in today’s world. Like Jangarh’s death, responses to these issues are typically rendered in a tragic mode that mourns the evisceration of cultural authenticity against the onslaught of global capitalism. So for instance, the writer Wagish Shukla writes quite bitterly and angrily about the predicament of Gond art in globalisation: ‘the Pardhans have been forced by circumstances to sell their gods. Their oral traditions, their gods are represented in paintings that are now displayed in art galleries and drawing rooms’.

But in exploring the politics surrounding the fate of adivasi art in the modern world, I am concerned with the ways in which the art itself offers an allegory, however partial and incomplete, of the process by which it enters the world and is both transformed by it and transforms it. In other words, I depart from accounts that see adivasi or indigenous art as having been simply ravaged and desecrated by commercialization. Instead I look at how the art itself exposes that process of commodification and accumulation on a global scale, and offers resistance to it.

Postcolonial project    
The figure of the adivasi in Indian history and culture can in fact be traced quite productively from the British colonial archive  (where it is figured as “primitive”) through its circulation in postcolonial articulations of modernity (where it is figured as “backward”) to the adivasi’s current appearance as a conflicted figure of threat to national security (as Maoists) and of a transnational ethics (a heroic victim and warrior in the war against global capitalism and state repression, and a figure of anti-imperial solidarity).

Pushing the colonial archive into the postcolonial period requires one to examine how this figure circulates – in official and bureaucratic policy and discourse, in public culture, in cinema, art and literature, in academic fields and institutions – as a complex of sedimented images of primitivism and backwardness, insurgency and deprivation – against which “modern” citizens define themselves. These images also pose questions of sovereignty and global citizenship with reference to the rights of indigenous peoples within nation states and globally, in the form of transnational movements of indigenous peoples.

Adivasis thus embody a key paradox of Indian modernity. On the one hand the figure of the modern, national tribal provides an alternative vision to the degradations of colonial rule that systematically decimated tribal culture and material life (but not its spirit), and thus produced the tribal as a figure who needed to be protected and redeemed. On the other, the adivasi becomes the object of postcolonial development and the postcolonial state’s lure of modernity.

In recent decades adivasis have emerged as political protagonists in their own right, whether as actors in the Naxalite-led peasant uprisings against state repression and failure of the developmental idea, in labour and environmental movements against the exploitation of adivasi resources, in sectarian or communal politics as antagonists of a secular ideal or as victims of a majoritarian Hindutva, or in more mainstream political struggles for representation on the basis of tribal identity, such as for the states of Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh.

It is necessary then to frame Jangarh’s story, within a larger historical narrative. Adivasis constitute about 8% of India’s population. A significant proportion of them lives in the nation’s geographical and cultural peripheries; the rest live dispersed throughout parts of the Indian heartland. While there are competing definitions of who is an adivasi and what are the historical roots of adivasi groups, especially in relation to Hindu caste categories, it is no secret that they are among the nation’s most marginalized groups of people. About half of India’s 80 million adivasis live below the poverty line, lacking access to basic education, healthcare, employment and state support of any kind. Their impoverishment is only compounded by the fact that they live ‘amid India’s most verdant forests, alongside India’s freest-flowing rivers and atop India’s most valuable minerals’. In postcolonial India, these areas have predictably become key sites of economic exploitation in the name of development and capital accumulation. For this, tribals are routinely displaced in disproportionate numbers to make way for dams and mines that largely benefit urban middle classes, national elites and transnational corporations.

By critically assessing how what Marx called primitive accumulation is not consigned to the pre-history of capital but is in fact integral to the political economy of development in a postcolonial state such as India, particularly as it pertains to tribal lands, resources, labour, culture and life, we can begin to place the political meaning of the practice, circulation and accumulation of Gond art in the context of larger political and economic processes shaping the world today. The doubled sense in which indigenous art, like indigenous knowledge, lands and resources, is wrenched from its producers and forced into the capitalist process is very much central to the discussion.

Among others, David Harvey’s account of primitive accumulation as an ongoing “accumulation through dispossession” offers a necessary and key re-reading of primitive accumulation as an essential ingredient of the ongoing force of global capitalism. Now new enclosures proliferate and colonise all kinds of commons, from land and water to knowledge and art, as ever-new forms of economic crises of accumulation grip the world and threaten profit. Harvey’s argument that capitalism creates an ‘other’ that it can then violently subsume is particularly relevant for adivasi art, as it struggles to find a place within established art institutions such as the museum and the global art market while also standing out of place within them as other, either excluded and annulled, or colonised and commodified.  Its accumulation as a certain kind of posture towards a distant past enables national and transnational profiteering in the cultural realm, even as its accumulation as “primitive” or exotic art (that is also a commodity) in the contemporary world opens up new spheres of trafficking in art in general.

But central to the question of how the tribal is incorporated as a cultural symbol is also that of how tribal art itself can be recognized as a site of negotiation and rebellion under neo-liberal capitalism. I interpret Gond painting as not only playing its part in continuous accumulation through dispossession, but in fact as providing allegories of this political-economic process, and critically registering the multiple temporalities of violence and dislocation integral to global capitalism. These art works are anchored in the material conditions that produce primitivism in the first place such that the primitive is first colonized, then annihilated, and then appropriated as a loss.

A present absence
The story of Jangarh and that of his art and his community is an archetypal story of dispossession. It is also a little known story. The Pardhan Gonds of central India were traditional singers, storytellers and community priests who had the privileged role of invoking the Gond deity Bara Dev for the well-being of the community. Through their story-telling performances they played the role of oral historians and keepers of the ‘collective memory’ of the tribe and were rewarded with the patronage of Gond households and rulers (whose rule lasted for about 1400 years). But as British rule entrenched itself in the Indian heartland, the power of the Gond rulers declined, and the Pardhan Gonds began to lose their economic lifeline and traditional support for their stories and songs. As the twentieth century rolled along, the Pardhan Gonds became landless farmers, wage labourers, casual workers in government-run drought relief schemes and part of the urban poor. Far from being a story of development, this is one of immiseration and dispossession.

Yet, a state project devoted to accumulating its cultural capital by harnessing adivasi culture propelled some of the Pardhan Gonds into the by-lanes of Bhopal. The city in fact has played a key role in nourishing the talents of several adivasi artists, including the Pardhan Gonds. Having been discovered as indigenous artists, their work has been exhibited in state legislative buildings, art galleries, ethnographic museums, and in the city’s unique arts complex, Bharat Bhavan, designed by the famous architect Charles Correa.

Although Bharat Bhavan advertises its art gallery Roopankar as ‘the only museum of its kind in India which houses contemporary folk and tribal art together with urban art’, a visit to the gallery reveals that there too the separation is maintained in the form of two distinctive sections – one for modern Indian art understood to be “urban” and one devoted to folk and tribal art thought to have roots in the village. Even so, Bharat Bhavan is unusual in having opened its doors to adivasi and folk art to be viewed seriously in a gallery format. In an interview with the journalist Mark Tully, its then director, the artist Swaminathan laments the lack of pride Indian intellectuals have in the nation’s tribal heritage and speaks out against a Leftist perspective towards adivasi art that sees the art as backward and as emanating out of superstition. In a disarming way, Swaminathan says:

The stupid fools don’t know what effect Picasso’s discovery of tribal art had on Europe. Where would we be now, artists like me, without that?… You know, we (Bharat Bhavan) were the first people to collect the work of tribals as art, not as folkcraft. When we sent an exhibition to Japan, I was criticised for not explaining where the tribals came from and who they were. I said we are running an art exhibition, not an exercise in ethnography or anthropology. 

Conclusion
In his reading of Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes, Fredric Jameson is interested in what he calls the “raw materials” of Van Gogh’s painting—“the object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state.” The key question that Jameson asks is this:

how is it then that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into a hallucinatory surface of color, while his village stereotypes are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and green? I will briefly suggest…that the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture, an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses…which it now reconstitutes for us as a semi-autonomous space in its own right, a part of some new division of labor in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them.

We see a similar materialisation of backbreaking labour or wageless life into colour in the art of the Gonds. The artist Gulammohammed Sheikh has noted that Jangarh always recalled “how awestruck he felt by the brilliance of these pigments—just touching them sent tremors through his hands”. Perhaps it is the work of the Gond artists themselves then, and their ability to transform a world of deprivation into a work of memory and possibilities, as seen in the paintings by Jangarh’s nephew, Venkat Raman Singh Shyam and leading woman Gond artist Durgabai, that offers both a critique of neo-liberal globalisation (in which the Indian state is embedded) and resistance to it. The art itself is what holds the strongest potential for resisting the forces of commodification and of primitive accumulation as an ongoing dispossession, by offering original and situated critiques of those processes.

The attempt to forge lives as artists in and of the peripheries is of course constantly tested and is extremely risky. The Gond artists now engage new and different media (including designing furniture, illustrating books, writing story boards for animation and documentary film) and participate in transnational commissions and collaborations, even as many are compelled to sell their images for reproduction on cheap coffee cups, greeting cards and “ethnic” cushion covers or do commission work for tourist resorts, five-star hotels and international banks. But as John H.Bowles pointedly reminds us:

for centuries the Pardhan Gonds sustained themselves as itinerant performers accepting payment from far-flung patrons, and so the commercial aspect of their recent visual expression through modern media can be seen as an innovative revival of – rather than a simple departure from – their community’s traditional pursuits.

But he adds a cautionary note: ‘While ‘strategic positioning’ and pandering for profit are (and always have been) lucrative temptations for all professional artists, obviously marginalized tribal artists – who have only recently risen from extreme poverty – are particularly vulnerable’. Thus even as we might intellectually apprehend the impossibility of the purity of art, tradition, identity, the imbrication of adivasi art in the circuits of global capital merits an account that renders the framework of the politics of representation (that privileges questions of identity and authenticity) as no longer adequate to this art. For it is within these circuits of primitive accumulation as ongoing dispossession that Jangarh succeeded in carving out an aesthetic space for himself and the artists who have followed him, a space that is at once both one of maneuver and critique.

In the two decades of economic boom in India since the early 1990s, art has entered the portfolios of financial investment. As a result, it is now possible for more artists than before to make a living and indeed to even become celebrities and part of the elite social set if they are from privileged backgrounds and are able to secure the right agents and access to the galleries. Adivasi artists still struggle to enter these financial calculations and social registers, marginalized as they are by their late entry into the commercial art scene. Yet their “primitive” roots open them up to niche investments, as exemplified by the new crop of “craft entrepreneurs” in the metropolitan centres. The promotion of adivasi art is now wrested from the state and social sector into private capital.

Gond art offers a particularly enabling site to understand the processes of global capitalism that it is enmeshed in, for it is, all at the same time, quintessentially modern, unmistakably a commodity form, and a critique of the very processes that create a desire and logical necessity for primitive accumulation in the double sense. Primitive accumulation is here both a theoretical framework for the process by which this art enters the world, and a metaphor for understanding how adivasi art is commodified and accumulated and how it still transforms its world and ours. It heralds a common destiny that is also an open future. As adivasi commons (land, forests, water, knowledge and art) are systematically appropriated by global capital, it is important to keep in view Sandro Mezzadra’s pointer that,

The common is something to produce, something that is built by a collective subject that is capable, in the process of its own constitution, of destroying the basis of exploitation and reinventing the common conditions of a production structured on the synthesis of freedom and equality.

With this view, any return to a pure indigenous art or identity as articulated within the framework of the politics of representation is not only practically impossible, but is politically dubious as well. Thus it is that the tragic dimension of Gond and other traditions of adivasi art, as they are forced into the history and logic of primitive accumulation, is also the source of its ability to critique and refuse those processes and to offer art as affirmation of alternative possible futures.

This article forms part of an editorial partnership, funded by the Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament research programme at the University of Warwick and the Leverhulme Trust.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/openindia/rashmi-varma/beyond-politics-of-representation-political-economy-of-indigenous-art-in-post

As Waiting for Godot turns 60, Beckett expert Anna McMullan explains why the play still appeals.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered as En attendant Godot at a small theatre on the Left Bank in Paris the Théâtre de Babylone, sixty years ago, on January 5 1953.

It has since become one of the most important and best known plays of the 20th and 21st century and has been performed countless times the world over. Samuel Beckett expert Anna McMullan answers some questions about the seminal work:
What are the standout productions of Waiting for Godot?

Obviously there’s Roger Blin’s first production in Paris. A number of French critics who watched it said: “We’ve never seen anything like this, this is not theatre as we know it.”

Then of course the 24-year-old Peter Hall directed the English language premiere in 1955 just two years later at the Arts Theatre in London. The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan said it changed the rules of theatre.

British critics were initially more confused by it than the French, who had experienced a similar sort of existential drama. But then Tynan and a number of other significant critics began to write about the play. It’s difficult to remember now, but nothing like it had been seen before. It began to change the way people thought about theatre.

Beckett’s own production was important too. He directed it at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in 1975. The production toured internationally and was described as a very balletic production. Beckett took extraordinary care over the costume and design. It’s seen as a definitive version, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t reinterpret the play.

The relationship between the two characters Pozzo and Lucky can be very disturbing. It’s an oppressive and dependent relationship which has lead to the play being interpreted in a number of situations of conflict throughout the world, such as South Africa and Sarajevo – the latter by Susan Sontag under the siege.

 Programme for the first production of En Attendant Godot, Paris, 1953.

Did Beckett make many changes to the play after it was first performed?

Yes, he made a lot of changes. When he first wrote it he really didn’t know a lot about theatre. He had been to theatre as a young man, and some of his friends were involved in theatre but really he learnt the craft of theatre when he attended the rehearsals of his plays during the 1950s.

In the Sixties he began to direct his plays and that’s when you begin to see Beckett really writing the stage direction. He did rewrite parts of Godot and made many annotations when in rehearsals at the Schiller theatre – the originals of which still exist.

 A scene from the first production of En Attendant Godot, Paris, 1953.

So have the scripts had all those changes incorporated?

Not all of them actually and there is an interesting debate about what actually is the definitive script.

Faber and Faber have published a series of notebooks Beckett kept when he was directing a number of his plays. In any case, substantially the play is the same – two tramps still waiting for Godot – but those notebooks have a revised text and anybody directing the play can look at the published text and can consult those notebooks too.

But he was a very precise writer and director, and he really didn’t like people to simply change the text.

 Invitation to a reception to celebrate the first production of En Attendant Godot, Paris, 1953.
What are the standout Waiting for Godot performances?

There have been so many. The characters of Vladimir and Estragon have really appealed to a number of acting partnerships, including Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, Steve Martin and Robin Williams. I saw the production from Johannesburg when it toured to London which starred Jon Kani and Winston Ntshona, which were really wonderful performances.

Recently Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart took on the roles in the West End. Beckett is now almost like Shakespeare: those roles are actors want to cut their teeth in.
The play has confounded many: what do you think it is trying to do?

We could talk forever about its meaning but I actually think, like Beckett, it is about is experiencing the play. You go and take your seat in the theatre and you absorb what’s happening. The characters that are in front of you are waiting and while they are waiting we share the same time, the same space and we watch the human beings as they interact on stage. We watch these moments of tenderness, moments of cruelty and I think it really confronts us with the basic facts of human existence.
Interview by Daisy Bowie-Sell

Anna McMullan is a professor of Theatre at the University of Reading.

The University of Reading host the Beckett Archive, the largest collection of Beckett materials in the world. See www.reading.ac.uk/beckett
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-features/9780077/When-Beckett-wrote-Waiting-for-Godot-he-really-didnt-know-a-lot-about-theatre.html

The writer is author, most recently, of The Apricot Road to Yarkand (Sang-e-Meel, 2011) and a member of the Royal Geographical Society salman.rashid@tribune.com.pk
I first saw this magical place in 1987. The Saruna River (Lasbela district, Balochistan) breaks out of its narrow rocky gorge and, before going on to run into the Hub River, spreads out to form a tarn. Said to be very deep (so far as I know, no sounding has been done to determine its depth), the water is of a striking deep green shade. And the setting is so uncannily beautiful that it does cause a sharp intake of breath.

The lake teems with crocodiles. Local legend has it that one accused of theft or mendacity thrown into the water will either be taken or rejected: the guilty, so they say, will be eaten. The innocent can swim and gambol in the water even as the crocs look on unconcerned.

In 1987, there was one grave said to be that of Ari Pir along with its ancillary burials of lesser saints and one little tea shop and eatery. Ari Pir, so I learned, was a staging post on the route from Sehwan to Lahut Valley that became active in the month of Ramazan when hundreds of bhang-quaffing malangs passed through from the former to the latter. But there was no story about Ari Pir.

In 2000, a legend had been invented and the grave was under a dome; there was a hostel for visiting pilgrims and the shrine was big business. Visitors sacrificed goats and fed the innards to the crocodiles in the lake that were now as overfed as those of Manghopir in Karachi.

They believe Ari Pir was a son of Mahmud, the Turkish (not Pathan) king of Ghazni, who gave up the luxuries of the palace embellished by plunder, to become a peripatetic mendicant. In the course of his wanderings, he ended up in Saruna Valley and liking the place, resolved to make it his home.

Now, the king of Saruna had a right beautiful daughter who somehow old Ari caught sight of. He petitioned the king for the princess’s hand. But the king would have nothing of it. Why, how could he give his lovely princess to a lice-infested beggar who had no fixed abode and no source of income? He told his soldiers to drive the man out of the country. As he was being led away, Ari Pir called down the curse of God on the land. The country that was rich with farmland and orchard, of a sudden withered.

The story has several parallels in history. The most well known being that of prince Siddhartha (Buddha) and 500 years after him, Raja Bhartari of Ujjain, both of whom gave up the throne to spend their lives as saints. But their stories are singularly devoid of malice; they are paragons of compassion for all living beings. In the quasi-Islamic lore of Pakistan, we have dozens of saints who were downright malevolent and I always wonder what holy man would wish to harm his fellow beings and yet claim to revere the Maker. In all these cases, I see a queer strain of Stockholm syndrome spread across generations.

Incidentally, Ari is a rather common name. We have Ari Jam, the king of Kech whose son Punnu, besotted with the dazzling Sassui of Bhambore, refused to return home until his brothers drugged and kidnapped him. The story, immortalised by the great Shah Latif Bhitai, is so haunting and beautiful that it raises goose bumps and mists the eye. The graves of the two lovers lie some way off the Hub Dam Road north of Karachi.

Then we have the shrine of Ari Pir in Lasbela. This was none other than Mohammad bin Haroon, the Arab governor of Makran, who acted as guide to the army of Mohammad bin Qasim. According to the Chachnama, Haroon died of the ague in Lasbela. The shrine, in a quiet corner of town, is a place frequented by seekers of their hearts’ desires. It seems that in Balochi or Lasi (the dialect of Sindhi spoken in Lasbela), Haroon elides to Ari.

There is yet another Ari Pir somewhere in the foothills of the Khirthar Mountains west of Sehwan. This place I have only visited on an army one-inch map. I wonder what tales it holds.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 5th, 2013.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/488994/ari-pir/