Mrinal Sen Films

• Mrinal Sen films via the youtube site – mostly with Eng subtitles, one with Spanish. Happy birthday comrade Sen (90*), it was a pleasure to meet you (circa 1992).
•  The Case is Closed / Kharij (English) Mrinal Sen. Indiaby ImagineIndiaFilmFestFEATURED2,309
•  1:45:30KHANDHAR (English) Mrinal Sen. Indiaby ImagineIndiaFilmFest3,908 views
•  1:49:10My Land / Amaar Bhuvan (English) Mrinal Sen. Indiaby ImagineIndiaFilmFest1,900 views
•  1:46:40Suddenly, One Day / Ek Din Achanak (English)by ImagineIndiaFilmFest1,955 views
•  1:30:36EK DIN PRATIDIN (English) Mrinal Sen.Indiaby ImagineIndiaFilmFest1,134 views
•  2:08:56AKALER SANDHANE (English) Mrinal Sen.Indiaby ImagineIndiaFilmFest1,923 views
•  1:51:45Up in the Clouds / Akash Kusum (English) Mrinal Sen. India. 1965by ImagineIndiaFilm357 views
•  1:36:14GENESIS (Hindi) Mrinal Sen. India. 1986by ImagineIndiaFilmFest4,438 views
•  1:31:17The Confined / Antareen (English) Mrinal Sen. India. 1994by ImagineIndiaFilmFest821 views
•  1:33:59Mr Shome / Bhuvan Shome (English) Mrinal Sen. India. 1969by ImagineIndiaFilm308 views
•  1:32:14Bhuvan Shomeby Jay Bee431 views
•  1:45:30Las Ruinas / Khandhar (Español) Mrinal Sen. Indiaby ImagineIndiaFilmFest55 views

Mrinal Sen 90

Mrinal Sen is 90 today (May 14 2013) and all the best to him. I would argue that he is the greatest living film director, bare none.This YouTube page has some films by and on Sen: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22Mrinal+Sen%22&oq=%22Mrinal+Sen%22&gs_l=youtube.3…2259.6576.0.9023.12.11.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0…0.0…1ac.1.11.youtube. (Thanks Abhijit). I will screen a number of Sen films – especially the Maoist period Calcutta films – Interview, Calcutta 71 and Padatik – in the monday night film screening slot in Autumn term at Goldsmiths. He gave Amitabh B his first break, he made Shabana A an actress, he showed Louis M the way round the city, and more and more. Come along to the screenings – check the what’s on back here or the Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies events calendar for info in late September (it will also be a course for credit as part of the new MA Critical Asian Studies, but its open to all comers like other CCS courses).

IPWA

Rustom Bharucha reports that the Progressive Writers Association has its origins, according to ‘its most distinguished founder- member Mulk Ray Anand’ in ‘the expatriate community of India students in London, who had charted their first manifesto as “progressive” writers in 1935 in a Chinese restaurant’ (Bharucha 1998:29)

Bharucha, Rustom 1998 In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activision in Inidia Delhi: Oxford UP

Tipu’s Slippers

I need to take another look at Derrida on Heidegger on Van Gogh’s work shoes and think about this in relation to the theft of Tipu Sultan’s slippers, appropriated by the wife of Clive and now on display at Powis Castle. Toe-tapping/curling stuff.

On the Courtyard, talk at Tate from January

On 26 Jan 2013, a talk at Tate Modern on the Sharjah Art Foundation Biennale proposed theme of New Cultural Cartographies. My views, given late in the day, reliant on Gayatri Spivak’s hugely influential work, and following talks by the excellent Sarat Maharaj, Yuko Hasegawa and Wael Shawky (interviewed). Slightly combative  and with a slip in putting the Danes in Chandenaggor, it is the talk I wish I could have parsed for Princeton – but that was not recorded, even though some people asked for it (thanks Anisha, Saleh, Ben). Click the picture to get to the Tate link.

Raminder Kaur’s “Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns” in The New Cross Review of Books.

My review of Raminder Kaur’s new book Atomic Mumbai

MA in Critical Asian Studies from Sept 2013 @goldsmiths #culturalstudies #politics #asianstudies

Home > Prospectus > Postgraduate > Programmes > Cultural Studies > MA in Critical Asian Studies

Combining critical theoretical perspectives with an in-depth regional focus, this unique programme provides you with the tools to make sense of the ascendance of Asia and its impact on contemporary culture and geopolitics.

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The MA in Critical Asian Studies will equip you with a critical knowledge and understanding of the cultures and politics of contemporary Asia, focussing in particular on India, China and Japan.

This innovative interdisciplinary programme is taught between both theCentre for Cultural Studies and the Department of Politics, drawing on the considerable expertise of both.

You will be taught by renowned academics. Teaching on China is led by Professors Wang Hui, Scott Lash, and Michael Dutton, while Indian material is covered by Professors Sanjay Seth, John Hutnyk, and Dr Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay. Dr Rajyashree Pandey provides expertise on Japan.

Core courses will introduce you to the most advanced theorists of politics and cultural studies, and to the most up to date issues facing contemporary Asia. For instance, how are the present political economies of China, India and Japan linked to traditional Confucian and Daoist, and in some cases Buddhist and Hindu, philosophies? Must the idea of India, for example, be understood as a product of colonial and capitalist subsumption, or is a global outlook now co-terminus, even constitutive, of the present national imaginary? In China, is the re-emergence of neo-Confucianism indicative of a challenge to Western-style liberal values? And how does Japan complicate this narrative as both coloniser and colonised?

We teach you to reflect critically on the validity of Western history-making and its distinctiveness in actuality from fiction. Can fiction and other forms of material culture equally become a means to tell a much broader story about Asia, as in the case of Manga/Anime in Japan and mud statues in China?

We consider the role of social and political movements, from the struggle for Independence in India to street protests and festivals across all of Asia. At the end of the course, we ask you to write a dissertation that consolidates what you have learnt and which prepares you for further study or engagement in the politics and cultures of contemporary Asia.

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What you study

You will take core courses in Critical Asian Thought and Politics and Culture in Asia, and a Dissertation. You can also tailor your degree to your own individual interests, by selecting additional papers from a range of options from across different departments that complement the programme’s focus.

In terms of practical skills, the MA is unique in offering students the opportunity to study Mandarin in co-operation with Goldsmiths’ newly established Confucius Institute. These courses will provide a platform for those interested in learning Mandarin as a new language, or those already advanced in the language who wish to further improve their skills. Classes will follow a syllabus that has been approved by the Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (Hanban for short), and provide students with a HSK-equivalent qualification useful in many Asian countries (the HSK qualification itself is not a part of the course, but the test may be taken separately).

These courses will increase students’ employability in Asia, as well as provide them with the means to carry out PhD research on topics that require experience in Mandarin.

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Courses

Critical Asian Thought

This core course provides theoretical grounding for the degree programme as a whole. We cover a range of key texts in cultural and critical theory, while seeking to re-evaluate their significance for the contemporary world in the light of Asian philosophies, histories and modernities.

Are liberalism and neo-liberalism specifically Western problematics? Can we locate an ‘alternative modernity’ in the emergence of early market economies in 11th- and 12th-century China and India or during the later colonial expansion of the East India Company? What is the nature of the political in Japan, China and India? Is sovereignty in Asia an issue of statehood, or alternatively of nation, of empire, or of Hindu or Confucian civilisation? What conceptions of art and culture, of revolution and violence would do justice to these sites? In exploring these questions and others, we seek to reframe our understanding of global politics, art and culture.

Politics and Culture in Asia

From the macro-scale to the everyday, this core course explores some of the key transformations in religion and cosmology, politics and economics that define the landscape of contemporary Asia.

In these seminars and lectures, you will encounter cutting edge research into specific issues from Japan, China and India, learning to identify the politics inherent in cultural forms. Outside of conventional politics, we find anxieties about nuclear disaster and utopian fantasies surfacing in Japanese anime and manga. We examine how Chinese Kongfu movies reify and ‘modernise’ ancient traditions such as that of ‘rivers and lakes’ (Jianghu yiqi), how the idea of ‘flow’ (liu) is set against a Confucian tradition of ‘wen’, meaning stability, and how in this worlding the traditional built environment was never ‘utilitarian’ in the Western sense but mapped onto this world of sacred and symbolic understandings. How, too, do we account for the extraordinary popularity of religious festivals like the Ganpati festival in Pune, India – a burgeoning economic powerhouse? Challenging preconceptions about modernity and secularism, the centrality of sacred is here given careful attention, as we aim to understand how other modes of conceptualising gods, spirits and being, continue in critical ways to inflect the form modernity takes in the present.

Dissertation

The degree culminates in the dissertation, researched and written over the summer. This is an opportunity for you to undertake your own research project on a topic of significance to study in the field of contemporary Asia, drawing on the knowledge, understanding and skills developed through the rest of the programme.

Intellectual support, advice on sources and planning, as well as general methodological assistance are provided under the guidance of a dedicated supervisor allocated from either CCS or the Department of Politics.

Option courses

Aside from the core structure of the programme, you are given a variety of other ways to further immerse yourself in the subject of contemporary Asia.

In addition to the two core courses that provide the foundation of the course as a whole, you may tailor your degree to your own individual interests, by selecting additional papers from a range of options from across different departments that complement the programme’s focus.

For instance, you may choose to study Contemporary Asian Film, Politics and Difference, Global Cultural Theory, Postcolonial Theory and Fiction, or modules relating to the field of Urban Studies. Some of these courses will be there to extend the groundwork of the course, while others will be more specially oriented toward advanced study in a particular substantive area or topic.

In terms of practical skills, the MA is unique in offering our students the opportunity to study Mandarin in co-operation with Goldsmiths’ newly established Confucius Institute. These courses will provide a platform for those interested in learning Mandarin as a new language, or those already advanced in the language who wish to further improve their skills. Classes will follow a syllabus that has been approved by the Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (Hanban for short), and provide students with a HSK-equivalent qualification useful in many Asian countries (the HSK qualification itself is not a part of the course, but the test may be taken separately).

These courses will increase your employability in Asia, as well as provide you with the means to carry out PhD research on topics that require experience in Mandarin.

You take two standard-length option papers, or two half-length and one standard-length option paper, in addition to the core course content. At least one option paper must be selected from the following. The remainder can be chosen from the wide range available from Goldsmiths departments and centres.

Contemporary Asian Film

This module introduces films drawn from one or more of the regional film traditions within Asia in the last 60 years – for example Bengali New Wave, Chinese Fifth Generation, Japanese films of Kon, Ichikawa, etc. Each year a regional tradition or director will be chosen by the course leader (Professor Hutnyk) for in-depth study. Ten films, or combinations of shorts and documentaries of suitable length, will be introduced, screened and discussed in terms of content, context and significance. The course is taught through film screenings and seminar discussions, and a premium is placed upon critical film theory and cultural theory contextualisation.

Contemporary Asia: Debates (NB not available 2013-14)

This course teaches you how to combine high-level critical contemporary theory with practical knowledge and understanding of Asia. The course is taught by several members of CCS and Politics, with significant additional input and teaching contributions from visiting professor, Wang Hui.

The module will further the programme’s explicit aim to train graduates who are able to interpret and translate the rapid changes currently sweeping across Asia, and adapt to and even influence these changes through highly developed powers of intellectual engagement in current debates surrounding contemporary Asian culture and politics. For example, we raise the question of whether we should reimagine China as something like what Wang Hui has recently coined the ‘civilisation-state’, a conceptual configuration which recognises China’s diverse regional and ethnic complexities. Through this conceptual prism, we assert a politics of imagining Asia that takes into account not just interregional relationships, but international relations between India, China, Japan, as well as the configuration of Europe and other parts of the Western hemisphere.

Mandarin Level 1 

This course provides practical experience of Mandarin at beginner level. The course is designed to improve your cross-cultural competency and advance proficiency in a language through coursework, exams and intensive linguistic training in small classes with others at the Confucius Institute.

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Length:
1 year full-time or 2 years part-time.

Applying:Applications for 2013 will open shortly.

Applicants are encouraged to submit by 31 May, though applications after this date may still be considered. If you’re applying for funding, you may be subject to an earlier application deadline. For example, the deadline for applicants applying for AHRC funding is 1 March.

Find out more about applying

Entrance requirements:
Degree of at least UK upper second class (or equivalent) in a related subject. If your first language is not English, you normally need a minimum score of 7.0 in IELTS (including 7.0 in the written element) or equivalent. Find out more about our English Language requirements.

Funding:
UK/EU students may be eligible for AHRC funding. Applications must be received by 1 March. Contact Lisa Rabanal, l.rabanal@gold.ac.uk, for further information.

Find out more about funding opportunities for home/EU applicants, or funding for international applicants.

Careers:
The MA provides a sound basis for international careers in areas including, but not limited to: journalism, media, translation, publishing, the Civil Service and voluntary sector, local government, NGOs, teaching and research, and the commercial world (for example semiotic analysis and brand development consultancy firms, and companies that would benefit from bi-lingual or multi-lingual employees).

Skills:
Special expertise and knowledge of Asia; critical and analytical skills; language proficiency; ability to synthesise insights from a range of disciplinary perspectives; detailed and sensitive grasp of key issues in contemporary media, politics, economy, culture and religion.

Fees:
Please see Tuition fees.

Staff research interests:
Please see Staff research interests.

Contact the departments:
Contact Lisa Rabanal

About the departments:
Centre for Cultural Studies, Politics Find out more about:

• the Centre for Cultural Studies
• our varied events programme
• our staff

Talk at Princeton in April

“‘The East as a Career’ – How Disraeli, Marx, Charnok and Clive met in India”

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I want to think about some specific small scenes from Marx’s writings on India, mostly from his journalism and notes, that address the East India Company sending assessors to Bengal and dates like 1690, 1757, 1857, so as to suggest a necessary remap of socio-political contact and the ways concepts like exchange, the social, politics, tolerance, trade and custom might need renovation today, for studies of the past and the present. Charnok, Suraj-ud-Dualla, Clive, Knox feature…

-JH

Cotton For My Shroud – screening with the directors, 6pm 16.1.2013

 

CANCELLED, or rather DIFFERENT FILM!

- news from the directors is that the people organising the premiere (due 19th Jan) have unfortunately balked at our screening, and instead we will have Nandan and Kavita present a curated selection of short films from the International Poetry Festival that they toured with in India – more details soon, same time, same place.

Screening with the filmmakers Nandan Saxena & Kavita Bahl - 6pm Lauri Grove Baths, Council Room, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths

As Multinational Corporations that produced poisons for biological warfare during the cold war positioned their deadly wares as agricultural inputs, the last few decades have seen humans waging war upon themselves.

Vidarbha, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, has become a bloody battleground in this ongoing global war between corporate greed and the people’s ‘Right to life’.

‘Cotton for my shroud’ investigates how Monsanto manipulated Bt Cotton field trials, enticed farmers with lies about yields and reduction in pesticide use. Empty promises, escalating costs, dwindling yields and depressed cotton prices played havoc.

Since 1995, a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide – the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history.

Most of them were cotton farmers from Vidarbha.

While the state and the media label these deaths as suicide, the cotton fields of Vidarbha remain a mute witness to genocide.

Narrated in the first person, the film gives us a window into the drama and despair that forms the warp and weft of life at Vidarbha.

Screening  6pm Lauri Grove Baths, Council Room, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths. All wellcome

“Problematising the History of Literary Culture in India: The Case of Indian English Literature”. 7.12.12

Professor G. N Saibaba

Ram Lal Anand College, University of Delhi

“Problematising the History of Literary Culture in India: The Case of Indian English Literature”.

Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Ram Lal Anand College, University of Delhi.
Social Activist and public intellectual.
Specialisation on Disciplinary rise of Indian English and Literary Cultures in India.

Goldsmiths College, Laurie Grove Baths, Room G3 1PM Friday 7th December 2012

All welcome

Jungle Studies

My copy of Kipling’s Jungle Book begins with Lisa Makman’s pithy (even pith-helmeted) passage on jungles. It well deserves citation:

‘The term “jungle”, derived from the Hindi word jangala, entered the English language only in the eighteenth century; today it evokes dangerous terrain: impenetrable equatorial forests, menacing urban landscapes, and overall mayhem [as in, “it’s a jungle out there”]. Even as jungles have gained a new designation – rain forest – and we have learned of their life-sustaining role in the biosphere, the word continues to conjure images of imperial adventure: the white man cutting his way through the bush to hunt big game, or Tarzan swinging from a vine. We owe our deep associations of jungles with mystery, threat, and the struggle for survival in large measure to Rudyard Kipling (Makman, intro to Kipling 2004:xv)’

I want to suggest that the stalking metaphor for the trinket collecting word-play of storytelling dialectics might be Kipling’s character Kaa, who also had some wisdom, let us not forget: ‘The jungle is large and the Cub he is small. Let him think and be still’ (Kipling 2004:33). Kaa is a storyteller too, not just an old snake: ‘I also have known what love is. There are tales that I could tell that…’ (Kipling 2004:42).

There is much to learn from the names that populate the jungle city. I also note, from my copy of Hobson-Jobson – that amazing compendium of Anglo-Indian loan words, without which neither Midnight’s Children nor Merchant Ivory – that the word ‘Jungle’ is derived from Sanskrit, chiefly used in medical discourses, ‘the native word means in strictness only waste, uncultivated ground’. In the great H-J we read a citation from Valentia, in the year 1809: ‘The air of Calcutta is much affected by the closeness of the jungle around it’ (Yule and Burdell 1886/1996:470). We should be much amused to hear yet again the repetition of this undeservedly bad press for the city, and must surely reject such characterizations, with Kipling in mind, remembering the city he called ‘dreadful night’ was also ‘a city of palaces’ (for discussion see Hutnyk 1996:7). From the silted swamp and urban jungle we move on to horror stories, always evocative, we go to battle the elements together: ‘for we be of one blood, ye and I’.

Hutnyk, John 1996 The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation, London: Zed books.

Kipling, Rudyard 2004 The Jungle Books, New York: Barnes and Noble.

Yule, Henry and A.C.Burnell 1886/1996 Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-English Dictionary. Ware:Wordsworth Editions.

Amit Rai’s Untimely Bollywood, Duke UP 2009

Black Hole Fantasy Again

I’m perversely pleased to see this old chestnut can never die. ‘Sham scandal’ Marx called it. Holwell was writing two years afterwards, and in the wake of Clive’s retaliatory massacre of Suraj-ud-daulah at Plassey. I will refrain from some sort of pun on the name Holwell, but notice that embedded journalists are not exactly a new fold in the fabric of imperialism. But for my take on Plassey, and the quotes from Marx, see here.

The Hindu of course does not go so far as to do more than hint at ‘disputed veracity’.

A survivor’s account of Calcutta’s Black Hole

Bangalorean has the article from ‘The Scots Magazine’

A rare copy of an 18th century publication that contains a first-person account of the imprisonment of British men, women and children in the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta (now Kolkata) is now in the possession of a Bangalore-based document collector. The Scots Magazine contains an account of the episode by one of its few survivors, J.Z. Holwell.

The February 1758 edition of The Scots Magazine carried a 10-page article titled ‘Holwell’s account of the sufferings in the Black Hole’, which recalled the events at a dungeon in Fort William on the night of June 20, 1756, following the defeat of the East India Company by the forces of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal. Holwell, in his account, claimed that 123 of the 146 prisoners put in a crammed dungeon died. But, later, historians have disputed the veracity of his account.

“There are only four known copies of the February 1758 edition in the world,” collector Sunil Baboo, told The Hindu. “It cost me a fortune,” he said, unwilling to reveal the amount.

What is in Mr. Baboo’s collection is the 10-page portion of the magazine that is in good condition. “While two are in the U.K., the other is in the U.S. These three are fully bound in leather-and-marble covers,” he said.

This document collector recently got the part of the magazine from a U.S.-based collector.

“It took a little while to get the copy from him as I had to convince the collector to part with this little piece of history,” he said.

The dungeon, according to Holwell, was a cube of about 18 ft (324 sq. ft) with only two windows in which 146 prisoners were crammed. He recounted the travails of the prisoners in the extremely hot conditions and no fresh air, which left them exhausted and extremely thirsty. He wrote of their attempts to bribe the guards to help them and their efforts to break open the door, all of which came to nought. Finally, a few survivors were brought out of the dungeon on the orders of Siraj-ud-Daulah.

However, while publishing the entire account of Holwell — a letter written to his friend William Davis on February 28, 1757 on board a vessel while returning from East Indies (India) — The Scots Magazine also cautioned its readers about the account being a “little passionate in some places” and in others “somewhat diffused”.

Keywords: The Scot’s Magazine, Calcutta Black Hole, Sunil Baboo

 

The marx quotes link again, here.

Beyond Television Studies article

just out in South Asian History and Culture – Message me to get a pdf sent (first 50 will get one):

John Hutnyk (2012): ‘Beyond Television Studies‘, South Asian History and Culture, 3:4, 583-590

Immigration themed Op Ed from India that should be noticed.

This Op Ed appeared in The Statesman newspaper in Kolkata, and skewers the madness of Tory immigration/xenophobia/economic jingoism on this boggy Isle. The writer is a staffer on that paper – jolly good to see that the rest of the world notices your crap Cameron. ‘Independent ethics advisor’ my arse – he is called Sir, which means he’s hardly independent, nor ethical. And anyway, as an advisor, his job is to tell Cameron what he can and can’t get away with. Not a brake, more an alibi.

The moral netherland

2 June 2012

UK’s increasing non-EU visa restrictions and requirements are symptomatic of a country that has not yet found the means or the will to articulate its ever-decreasing position in the world pecking order, writes lara choksey

Of all the things that the Leveson Inquiry into the ethics of British Press has exposed, perhaps one of the most remarkable is that British Prime Minister David Cameron has an ethics advisor. Responding to the possibility of being called up in front of the Inquiry, Mr Cameron said that should any evidence against him suggest the breaking of ministerial codes, he will call in Sir Alex Allan ~ his independent ethics advisor ~ for consultation.

On one level it seems sensible to have someone in or around Downing Street who can determine the ethical dimensions of political quandaries. On another, it is disturbing that the leader of a country that has not ceased promoting itself as a moral leader in the world needs someone else to distinguish between right and wrong.

In terms of the international Press, there are two stories dominating discussions of the UK. The first is the Leveson Inquiry, which started off as a simple matter of investigating the hacking of celebrity phones by itinerant news agencies, and which has now begun to expose the sordid nature of Downing Street’s relationship with the Murdochs under the Cameron, Brown and Blair leaderships.

This in itself is nothing new; anyone who has watched an episode of Yes, Minister! would expect nothing more. But when placed parallel to the second story circulating across the globe ~ that of implemented and threatened restrictions on UK visas for those who do not meet specific economic requirements ~ the hypocrisy and shortsightedness at Westminster’s rotten core becomes ever clearer.

There are two issues at stake here. The first concerns Downing Street’s idea of Britain as a moral leader in global politics. The second concerns Downing Street’s idea of what constitutes Britain’s nationhood. The discursive frame through which Mr Cameron and his ministers frame Britain domestically and internationally reveals a central administration willfully ignoring the economic and cultural heterogeneity of the population under its control, as well as the hypocrisy of its justifying its actions to the rest of the world on the grounds of moral superiority.

Above any other nation ~ in terms of pure numbers ~ India is the country likely to be most affected by the UK’s increasing non-EU visa restrictions and requirements. According to the International Passenger Survey, Indian nationals made up the largest percentage (11.9 per cent) of immigrants granted entry to the UK in 2010-11. Of these Indian nationals, a large number entered the UK on student visas. Those entering in 2010 would have been granted a two-year post-study work visa.

Fast forward a year, and there has been more than a 30 per cent drop in the number of Indian nationals applying for student visas, with many choosing the United States, Australia and Canada as alternatives. This is partly because the post-study work visa was scrapped this April, and partly ~ according to some British university professors ~ due to the increasing hostility and suspicion shown by the UK border agency towards non-EU students, particularly those from South Asia. This observation is compounded by the fact that the total number of student visas granted by the UK to non-EU residents dropped by 62 per cent in the first quarter of 2012.

We could easily leap to charges of xenophobia, and speculate about a small island closing its borders as a four-year recession refuses to budge. The residual prejudices of post-9/11 homeland security become an increasingly convenient justification for reinforcing national borders. Yet, this logic ignores the pre-Olympic pro-investment road show that various British foreign diplomats have been charged with promoting in their respective countries over the last 12 months, encouraging non-EU businesses to invest in the UK.

In February, the UK immigration minister Mr Damien Green announced that from 2016, people not from the EU and not earning at least £35,000 will not be able to apply to be a permanent resident in the UK. The message is clear: the UK welcomes big business and high salaries, regardless of ideology or investment ethics. Diversity is embraced, as long as it comes with a thick cheque book. In return, multinational companies benefit from tax evasion and low borrowing costs on international financial markets. It is undeniably ~ at least for the moment ~ a mutually beneficial arrangement. Prosaic questions of ethics are put out of the window ~ Britain is in a recession, and dog will eat dog.

Why does this matter to India? Apart from the fact that Britain is still considered to be a desirable place to visit, study and live (although this view is undoubtedly changing), this matters because Britain is behind the times. Specifically in the context of India’s increasing importance on the world stage ~ both economically and diplomatically ~ Britain’s restrictions on non-EU immigration seem ridiculous. Such restrictions are symptomatic of a country that has not yet found the means or the will to articulate its ever-decreasing position in the world pecking order.

For the sake of argument, let us just speculate that Britain once had a right to claim moral superiority over other nations (we need not go very far back in history to look at the violence of such a claim). But as the Cameron government decimates the welfare structures that might have once allowed Britain to claim a certain moral superiority with regard to providing the infrastructure (if not always the materialisation) of holistic care for its population, the claim becomes increasingly fragile.  A national heath service, financial support for people at the bottom of the food chain, and ~ perhaps most pertinently in the context of the visa discussion ~ open borders for economic migrants and political refugees: these are some of the structures that might convincingly constitute the discourse of moral superiority.

Yet, in the last twenty years, these structures have become dirty words in Downing Street, replaced by privatisation, austerity and border security, seemingly in direct spite of the increasing scale of global poverty and warfare: so many people have never been so poor, and genocide has never been simpler. India should take heed: there is a fast-appearing vacancy in the global moral high-ground market that needs prompt filling. In an interview published in The Daily Telegraph on 25 May, 2012, British home secretary Ms Theresa May responded to a question on curbing immigration by saying: “The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration.” We might ask, what constitutes an illegal migrant? The term suggests an international law preventing movement between countries. However, while the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights decrees that a country should grant entry to its own citizens, there is no international law that prevents a person from entering a country in the first place.

Immigration laws are national laws, coded by national interests and national understandings of who should be allowed entry. Thus, we learn much about the way in which a country understands itself by the way in which it categorises those who arrive on its shores. In the UK, the terms of ‘illegal migration’ are clear: it has everything to do with economic status. Those who are not considered fit to make a significant economic contribution to the UK, quite simply, become illegal ~ outside legitimacy ~ and vulnerable to any form of physical or mental subjugation. The right to claim access to Britain is based on purely economic terms: this is the new model of national belonging.

Downing Street has thrown off the mantle of social responsibility, both domestically and internationally. Internationally speaking, its participation in Libya on the grounds of humanitarian intervention is laughable when we consider that there is a British Ambassador ~ Nicholas Ray ~ permanently stationed in Khartoum, Sudan. His purpose is to perform diplomacy with the al Bashir government, an administration currently carrying out ethnic cleansing operations on its borders. Domestically, the British government’s claim to provide for its population (as opposed to its citizens) is being made forfeit by the systematic destruction of structures built on the ideas of a common right to life, and the responsibility of government to provide for its population. The Cameron government’s policies are regressive to a Dickensian degree, and increasing internal unrest ~ characterised by last year’s riots ~ will only be kept at bay by Jubilee morale boosting for so long.  With the removal of welfare structures, Downing Street would model Britain as nothing more than a vast, transnational bank, complete with hordes of the hungry standing outside. From an international perspective, this is the only form of diversity Cameron’s government is currently interested in promoting.
The writer is on the staff of The Statesman

 

[10.6.2012 Lara adds: Clarification: I take it for granted that ‘morals’ are socially-inscribed codes, whereas ethics - broadly speaking - are a means of defending concepts of right and wrong actions. My use of the phrase ‘moral superiority’ is therefore performative - the description or impression of a national discourse, as opposed to ‘ethical behaviour’. A longer piece might make this distinction clearer, but I did not feel it was necessary to point out the ethical importance of, for example, the NHS etc.

To clarify my argument and take it forward: firstly, that Britain’s claim to moral superiority is being made forfeit not because it ever had a right to make this claim in the first place, but because the infrastructure supporting this claim (class/gender/race equality and equal opportunities and so on) is being dismantled: the discourse, or performance, can no longer support itself.

Or so it would seem from one perspective. However, taking this forward, I would suggest that if Britain maintains its performance of ‘moral superiority’ on an international stage, then the discourse (and infrastructure) of ‘moral superiority’ is now based on codes of economic viability. To be ‘moral’, in the context of Downing Street’s national aspirations, one must be financially solvent. Foreign investors are invited to buy a stake in moral superiority.]

Lara Choksey

from The Statesman, Kolkata

 

Targeting a ‘videshi mahila’

 

19 April 2012

ravindra kumar

IT is not unusual for the media to occasionally embark on flights of fancy. But for the past two days, a section of the Kolkata media has occupied itself with identifying a reporter on the staff of this newspaper as a red-headed American “who had worked extensively with the ISI in Bangladesh” and who was seen clad in green trousers and brown top in Nonadanga on 13 April, apparently masterminding anti-India activities in collusion with Maoists.

Lara Choksey marked her 25th birthday on Wednesday, the day a television channel identified with the ruling party first named her as an American ISI agent who had worked extensively in Bangladesh (the previous evening’s telecast had merely described her as a “videshi mahila”). She does own green trousers and a brown top, and she was assigned by this newspaper to cover the problem at Nonadanga (which she has done with concise and balanced reports). She was at the place on 14 April (not the 13th), which she would have been required to be in order to complete her assignment.

But she is not an American; she is British and since September 2011 an Overseas Indian Citizen. Her grandparents were close friends of my predecessor, late CR Irani, and I too have known them for several years. She couldn’t have worked for ISI or for anyone else in Bangladesh, quite simply because she has never been to that country. And if she was recruited by the ISI, it wasn’t in Pakistan because she assures me she hasn’t visited that country either. Finally, she isn’t a redhead.

Lara completed her MA in Cultural Studies with distinction from Goldsmiths College, London last year. Her thesis project was “urban development, architectural rehabilitation and their human costs”, an appropriate area of study considering the assignment she was given at Nonadanga. From 2006 to 2010, she did a BA in English Language and Literature at the University of Leeds. Before that she was in school. She came to India last October and joined The Telegraph’s t2 section. Since early this year, she has been on the staff of The Statesman. A Google search of her name would yield most of this information, and more.

Strange things happen in the world of espionage, but based on the evidence Lara might have found it difficult to fit sleuthing and sabotage into her rather busy academic calendar, which included being a research assistant to her professor at Goldsmiths College and being a researcher and writer for the university newspaper

Why am I sharing this with you? I am doing so quite simply because over the 33 years of my life spent in journalism, I have seldom come across such paranoia-fed, breathlessly fatuous, incompetently researched reportage aimed at defaming a young journalist. The reports claim to be based on Central and state intelligence inputs, and if indeed they are questions must be asked about the intelligence of those who fed this nonsense and of those who swallowed it without so much as a cursory check.

I have a larger concern. Both media houses that reported this story are linked to the ruling party in West Bengal; this might grant to them an exalted status within the bureaucracy and police. Someone in authority might get it into his head that it would be safer to act on these stories than to ignore them. I have offered to Kolkata Police any assistance it might want to arrive at the truth, but have been assured that Lara Choksey is not the subject matter of any investigation

But these are strange times and, whether with or without adequate reason, the state government has allowed suspicion to grow that it is capable of acting before it thinks a proposition through. The best cure to such dark fears is the light that only exposure can provide. The Press can’t function if it is required constantly to look over its shoulder.

CPI(M): “Condemn the arrests and torture of Maoist activists in Kolkata and Mumbai!”

From Communist Party of India (Maoist) via A World to Win:

 

12 March 2012. A World to Win News Service. India has been on a fast track to playing a more major role in the global economy. Indian and international corporations are itching to tear up the land inhabited by tribal peoples to get their hands on the riches that lie under them, minerals like bauxite, coal and iron ore.  The Indian government cannot tolerate the fact that large swaths of the country are not under their control, and are determined to crush any resistance that stands in their way, especially the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the masses hungry for radical change who make up the army they lead. In late 2009, with an array of military forces and the utmost cruelty, the Indian government unleashed a war on the people called Operation Green Hunt. Following is a press release dated 2 March, 2012 from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), signed by its spokesman, Abhay.

 In the last week of February 2012, the police have arrested activists of our Party, including some senior cadres from Kolkata and Mumbai. On the specific intelligence inputs provided by the murderous Andra Pradesh Special Intelligence Bureau (APSIB), joint forces of police and Special Task Force (STF) of Andra Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal have raided the shelters of our comrades in Kolkata and Mumbai suburbs and arrested at least nine comrades, including two women comrades. Comrades Sadanala Ramakrishna, Deepak Kumar Pargania, Sukumar Mandal, Bapi Mudi and Sambhu Charan were arrested from Kolkata, while Comrades Dinesh Wankhede, Aasimkumar Bhattacharya, Suman Gawde and Paru Patel were picked up from Thane in Maharashtra.

 Comrades Sadanala Ramakrishna alias Santosh (62) and Aasimkumar Bhattacharya (65) were the seniors among the arrested. Senior comrade Sadanala Ramakrishna has been working for the revolution for at least four decades. He has been ailing with serious health problems for so many years. A mechanical engineer graduated from the prestigious Regional Engineering College (REC) of Warangal where other martyred leaders like Surapaneni Janardhan and Azad emerged as great revolutionaries of their times, Comrade Ramakrishna sacrificed his bright life for the cause of the liberation of the downtrodden.

 Both the two women comrades arrested – Vijaya and Suman – have been undergoing medical treatment for some time, staying in the shelters outside the struggle zones. Particularly, comrade Vijaya has been suffering from serious heart problems.

 The police forces, known for worst kind of cruelty, have been torturing these comrades mentally and physically while in custody. They have foisted several false cases against these comrades so that they could be languished behind bars forever.

 On one hand the ruling classes are asserting that these arrests are a big success for them, and on the other hand, they are trying to portray our comrades as dangerous criminals, claiming that they have recovered huge amounts of cash and other material that is used for making arms.

 These arrests are nothing but a part of Operation Green Hunt (OGH), i.e. the “War on People” which has been underway since 2009. The comprador ruling classes, in connivance with their imperialist masters, particularly with the US imperialists, have unleashed this brutal war of suppression in the poorest parts of India so that their neo-liberal policies of plunder of resources could go unhindered. They are particularly targeting the revolutionary leadership and eliminating them. As the Pentagon itself claimed recently, the US Special Forces are not only actively involved, but also assisting their Indian counterparts on the ground in the counter-insurgency operations aimed at eliminating the revolutionary leadership. This fact also shows us that the US has been patronizing in the ongoing Operation Green Hunt, making the values such as the freedom, independence, and sovereignty of our country a joke. The exploiting rulers of our country are daydreaming that this movement can be suppressed if its leadership is wiped out.

 The revolutionary movement cannot be crushed with arrests and murders. The bars of the dungeons cannot restrict the revolutionary ideas from spreading among the vast masses.

 The CC of CPI (Maoist) strongly condemns these arrests and the inhuman torture being inflicted on them. We demand immediate and unconditional release of these comrades, as well as all of the political prisoners languishing in various jails in all corners of our land. We also demand the lifting of all the false cases foisted against these comrades.

            -end item-

Social Fabric Symposium 10.3.2012

Social Fabric symposium

Discussions, talks and performances around textile production from guest speakers including trade unionists, artists and academics

Mill label, 1930s, courtesy of Jyotindra Jain and Mr. Abhishek Poddar

How do textiles affect the way we think about art, society and politics? The Social Fabric symposium invites contemporary artists, art historians, curators and cultural theorists to explore this question in a day of presentations and debate.

Taking Iniva’s Social Fabric exhibition as its starting point, it aims to explore textile production and consumption in relation to global trade, labour and radical politics.

In partnership with the Royal College of Art

Speakers

• Professor Sarat Maharaj
• Professors Janis Jefferies (Goldsmiths, Univeristy of London)
• Professor John Hutnyk (Goldmsiths, Univeristy of London)
• Carol Tulloch (TrAIN Senior Research Fellow)
• Kit Hammonds (Curating contemporary art lecturer, RCA),
• Sudhir Patwardhan (Social Fabric exhibiting artist)
• Alice Creischer (Social Fabric exhibiting artist)
• Slavs and Tatars (art collective)
• Grant Watson Iniva’s Senior Curator and Research Associate

Symposium overview

This symposium addresses two basic themes relating to textiles as medium, commodity and ubiquitous presence in everyday life.

Departing from the exhibition Social Fabric at Rivington Place, speakers will draw out the connection between textiles and social processes – the link with patterns of globalised trade, contact between cultures, and textile production as a site of organised labour.

The second strand of the symposium looks at the way artists, art historians and curators have chosen textiles as an area of research, drawn by its relationship to the topics outlined above – demonstrating their reasons for making textile materials and references central to their artworks and exhibition projects.

The Social Fabric symposium highlights how this subject touches on a wide range of different aspects of culture and society, something reflected in the line-up for the day. Speakers with backgrounds in textiles, art, cultural studies and politics, will have a rare opportunity to converse and provide audiences a unique opportunity to join this discussion.

See the full programme for the day here

Venue:

The Tab Centre
2 Austin Street
London
Greater London
E2 7NB

Book online:

Book online here. If you have enquiries please call 0207 749 1240 or emailbookings@rivingtonplace.org.

NB. For a concessionary rate (students, over 60s, unemployed) please enter the promotional code iniva_concession. For group bookings of more than 4 people please contact Rivington Place reception.

Event details

Type:	Symposium
Location:	The Tab Centre
Date:	10 Mar 2012 9:30am – 6pm
Admission:	£25 (£15 concessions) + booking fee

NDTV 24 x 7 The Hanging Channel

A text on NDTV 24×7.

NDTC x 24 Hanging Channel - click for pdf scan.

 ‘NDTV 24 X 7, the Hanging Channel: News Media or Horror Show?’ in Contemporary Indian Media and the Politics of Change, London: Routledge.  Published 2011.

* A study of 24 hour Delhi based news channel NDTV’s reporting of the case of Mohammed Afzal Guru, framed for the Dec 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament and sentenced to hang. This chapter is 9000 words and was published at the start of 2011. Based on substantial television research, viewing and reading or reports, screen analysis of station idents etc. Was originally a conference keynote at a Asian Media conference at SOAS and given once as a talk at the prestigious National Indian Research Institute Shimla.

Matilal and Mahabharata

In response to a request from Jai … Gayatri Spivak has also done work on Indian traditions/texts. This in particular was with Prof Bimal Krishna Matilal – on the Mahabharata. She has written somewhere about Karna, but maybe I am just remembering a conversation we had about it, that is more vivid. I remember her talking about it but cannot find a note. She also mentions some of this work as forthcoming when she speaks with Swapan Chakravorty et al in ‘Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’ a book that came out with Seagull in 2006. In there she talks of non-foundational thinking and that she was going to work on this further … but her interlocutor who was key to the project – the same Prof Matilal – sadly died before more could be done. The Mahabharata stuff was ‘finished’ – whatever that means, as I’ve not read it yet/do not seem to have any copy of work she may have done on this. Shall ask.

A quick hunt offers up a text labeled ‘forthcoming’ in footnote 5 on page 313 of Outside in the Teaching Machine, and I also just found more on Motilal and Spivak in her essay on Narcissus and Echo – I hadn’t read this – good to have now: http://www.scribd.com/doc/25696916/Spivak-Echo

______

Postscript: I asked. The answer: ‘I never did publish the Mahabharata stuff.  There’s the tiniest bit on Draupadi in “Not Virgin Enough to Say That [S]he Occupies the Place of the Other,” Cardozo Law Review 13.4 (Dec 1991), p. 1343-1348. and in Foremothers,” in Susan Gubar, ed., True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School, (New York: Norton, 2011), p. 111-122.  Cheers, G’