SACW - 30 Oct 2016 | Nepal: danger of a constitutional vacuum / India - Pakistan: No War Pact / India: The Right’s problem with history; Academic Freedom Under Fire; Sharing the Waters of the Cauvery - An Alternative / How Poland’s right rules / Russia: Moscow to Mourn Victims of Stalin's Terror / Soviet Union: The Dacha-Owning Classes

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 30 Oct 2016 - No. 2915 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. South Asia: People’s SAARC Statement on the Cancellation of the 19th SAARC Summit
2. India - Pakistan: No-war pact | A G Noorani
3. Stimson Center Report on Military Spending in India and Pakistan
4. Nostalgia: Memories of a teen on the eve of Partition | S. Khalid Husain
5. India: The Right’s problem with history | Audrey Truschke
6. India: Herbal fuel hoax - When faith overrode scientific inquiry | T V Venkateswaran
7. India: Text of submission to the supreme court about separation of religion and politics at election time as in Representation of People’s Act
8. India: Be Open to Uniform Civil Code - Let’s free ourselves of the poison of the clerics! | Arshia Malik
9. India: From Burning Villages to Burning Effigies in Chhatissgarh - Statement by PUDR
10. India: Sharing the Waters of the Cauvery - An Alternative Vision and Approach - Joint Statement
11. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - India: Alternate voices on talaq - Jyoti Punwani
  - India: Central govt officers’ meeting with RSS chief - MP High Court issues fresh notices
  - Religion should not have any connect with politics or administration: Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury
  - India - No lessons learnt from 1947: Professor Irfan Habib
  - India: Horrific Communal Violence in Madhya Pradesh [press release in Hindi 26 Oct 2016]
  - India: Dr. Modi Explains Cow Protection -- Hemant Morparia Cartoon (August 2016)
  - India: Hemant Morparia Cartoon on Vegitarianism - Vigilantism
  - India: Jana Sangh ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya - a Merchant of hate
  - India: Hindutva at the hustings (Suhrith Parthasarathy)
  - India: Wages of Communal Violence in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli (Harsh Mander, Akram Akhtar Chaudhary, Zafar Eqbal, Rajanya Bose)

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
12. Select Editorials from South Asia
13. Nepal: Time to get serious - Our leaders should realise the looming danger of a constitutional vacuum | Khagendra N Sharma
14. Tribute: Dominique Sila Khan – a Scholar of Religion Who Made India Her Home | Shail Mayaram
15. India - Haryana: Academic Freedom Under Fire
  - Nurture artistic & academic freedom | Pritam Singh
  - Police now intervenes in Ashoka University matter | Kritika Sharma 
16. An angry nationalism? | Santosh Desai
17. The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam review – love and war in Sri Lanka | Randy Boyagoda
18. Imy on Basu, 'For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front, 1914-18'
19. Xenophobic, authoritarian – and generous on welfare: how Poland’s right rules | Remi Adekoya
20. Returning the Names: Moscow to Mourn Victims of Stalin's Terror | Daria Litvinova
21. Soviet Union: The Good Old Days - The Dacha-Owning Classes | Sheila Fitzpatrick

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1. SOUTH ASIA: PEOPLE’S SAARC STATEMENT ON THE CANCELLATION OF THE 19TH SAARC SUMMIT
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People’s SAARC, a regional network of progressive South Asian people’s movements and mass organisations, is deeply dismayed at the cancellation of the 19th South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit which was scheduled to be held in Pakistan in November 2016.
http://sacw.net/article12993.html

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2. INDIA - PAKISTAN: NO-WAR PACT | A G Noorani
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SINCE Pakistan and India agreed on a need to address each other’s concern for territorial integrity and protection against covert operations, it shouldn’t be hard for them to define a framework in which a process for resolution of all pending disputes, in particular Kashmir, will be agreed on.
http://sacw.net/article12986.html

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3. STIMSON CENTER REPORT ON MILITARY SPENDING IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN
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http://sacw.net/article12995.html

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4. NOSTALGIA: MEMORIES OF A TEEN ON THE EVE OF PARTITION | S. Khalid Husain
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The ‘we’ were a mixed group of mainly Hindu, some Muslim, and a few Christian and Sikh students in our early teens from St Columbus High School (the name was later changed to St Columba’s) in New Delhi. We played cricket most evenings and weekends on the spreading lawns of India Gate, the New Delhi landmark. We all lived nearby with our parents in a housing complex of 50-odd houses for upper grade government officers.
http://sacw.net/article12997.html

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5. INDIA: THE RIGHT’S PROBLEM WITH HISTORY | Audrey Truschke
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Hindu nationalists claim that India’s past featured the glorious flourishing of a narrowly defined Hinduism that was savagely interrupted by anybody non-Hindu
http://sacw.net/article12990.html

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6. INDIA: HERBAL FUEL HOAX - WHEN FAITH OVERRODE SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY | T V Venkateswaran
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The public’s sympathetic reaction towards Ramar Pillai and against scientific institutions is, on the one hand, a telling commentary on the remarkable conservatism and establishmentarianism of organised science and, on the other, the vulnerability of the secularism project in India.
http://sacw.net/article12976.html

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7. INDIA: TEXT OF SUBMISSION TO THE SUPREME COURT ABOUT SEPARATION OF RELIGION AND POLITICS AT ELECTION TIME AS IN REPRESENTATION OF PEOPLE’S ACT
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Seven Judge Constitutional Bench looking at the crucial issue of Section 123(3) of the Representation of People’s Act which is-at election time-the section of the law to create a wall of separation between Religion and Politics and enforce and ensure the Constitutional Mandate of Secularism. One of the aspects of the Reference being heard is that of the wrong interpretation in our view that an appeal to Hindutva is not an appeal to  (...)
http://sacw.net/article12994.html

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8. INDIA: BE OPEN TO UNIFORM CIVIL CODE - LET’S FREE OURSELVES OF THE POISON OF THE CLERICS! | Arshia Malik
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There is a huge controversy surrounding the triple talaq raging in India these days. It has brought people to their feet with political parties taking positions and even individual victims of this draconian practice brought on various national TV debates to make points. One can also see a robust democracy in progress with the Law Commission of India putting out a questionnaire online and asking for the opinions of the citizens. The questions cover all religions and are wide-ranging.
http://sacw.net/article12987.html

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9. INDIA: FROM BURNING VILLAGES TO BURNING EFFIGIES IN CHHATISSGARH - STATEMENT BY PUDR
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PUDR strongly condemns the burning of the effigies of activists and a journalist by the Chhatissgarh Auxiliary police force across Bastar in a widely publicised ‘offical protest on 24th October. This show of strength by state forces against civilians was the latest and most brazen example of the patronage extended by the government and its systematic fostering of a Police Raj in Bastar. All the public figures whose effigies were burnt- Manish Kunjam, Nandini Sundar, Himanhsu Kumar, Soni Sori, Bela Bhatia and Malini Subramaniam - are members of civil society who have faced violence and intimidation earlier as well for exposing and resisting the ongoing war against the adivasis in Bastar.
http://sacw.net/article12989.html

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10. INDIA: SHARING THE WATERS OF THE CAUVERY - AN ALTERNATIVE VISION AND APPROACH - JOINT STATEMENT
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We, the signatories of this statement, come from diverse backgrounds including social and natural sciences, engineering, policy advocacy and law, community organisation, journalism and science popularisation, but we all believe that sharing the waters of the Cauvery is not only a political, administrative and technical challenge but requires an alternative vision for the entire river basin and informed public discourse to transform conflict into cooperation.
http://sacw.net/article12988.html

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11. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
  - India: Alternate voices on talaq - Jyoti Punwani
  - India: Central govt officers’ meeting with RSS chief - MP High Court issues fresh notices
  - Religion should not have any connect with politics or administration: Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury
  - India - No lessons learnt from 1947: Professor Irfan Habib
  - India: Horrific Communal Violence in Madhya Pradesh [press release in Hindi 26 Oct 2016]
  - India: Dr. Modi Explains Cow Protection -- Hemant Morparia Cartoon (August 2016)
  - India: Hemant Morparia Cartoon on Vegitarianism - Vigilantism
  - India: Jana Sangh ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya - a Merchant of hate
  - India: Hindutva at the hustings (Suhrith Parthasarathy)
  - India: Wages of Communal Violence in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli (Harsh Mander, Akram Akhtar Chaudhary, Zafar Eqbal, Rajanya Bose)

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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12. SELECT EDITORIALS FROM SOUTH ASIA
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(Dawn - October 25, 2016)

DANCE CONTROVERSY

Editorial 

SUCH are the realities of modern-day Pakistan that when a voice of reason sounds, it tends to surprise. Into this category falls the statement made by Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah, when on Sunday he attempted to put an end to the controversy over whether or not dance is being taught at some private schools in the metropolis, and if so, whether this was permissible. Earlier over the weekend, the managements of private schools had reportedly been sent letters by the education department, stating that the practice could not be tolerated. It was left for Mr Shah to point out the progressive values that the province rightfully tries to uphold: “The government of Sindh firmly believes in preserving and promoting culture and heritage as enshrined in the Constitution and it will not be dictated to by isolated extremist elements.” He went on to add: “Dance and music are integral parts of a liberal society and we will continue to support such activities.” The ‘ban’ now stands revoked.

This is exactly as it should be. With the Sindh government putting its weight behind the issue, there can be some hope of schools and colleges not just continuing with the cultural activities that may be part of their agendas as institutions, but of expanding them. While the subjects taught at these premises aim to give students knowledge and hone their faculties of reason, activities that fall into the domain of culture are what give young people a sense of their identity, history and shared belonging. This is invaluable in a society riven with divisions, where the push and pull of competing narratives leaves many feeling confused and rootless. The chief minister is to be commended on taking such an unequivocal stand, and it is hoped that the state administration as a whole, at all levels, strives to promote the liberal values of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. Therein lies the country’s salvation.

Published in Dawn October 25th, 2016

o o o

Th Telegraph - October 25, 2016

Editorial

BEST AVOIDED

Take 'sex' out of 'sex education', and what the nation's schools are left with are lessons on the reproductive system and sermons on population growth. The Indian State's knee-jerk prudishness about the birds and the bees is the stuff of comedy, at one level. But its larger implications are dangerous as well as dispiriting. The Central human resource development ministry has forced a panel of experts to reduce its recommendations on 'adolescent education' to just one sentence allegedly to avoid using the word, 'sex', and its cognates. This linguistic inhibition is indicative of a deeper discomfort with the truth of human relationships that is likely to have a damaging effect not only on policies of education but generally on the health and maturity of India as a modern democracy as well. The unthinking prerogative assumed by the State to decide what might 'offend' the rest of the country's adult as well as younger citizens has spilled over into every sphere of discourse and activity in the daily life of the nation. This is the will to regulate and censor, the unsavoury consequences of which can be, and have been, widespread and profound.

More specifically regarding matters sexual, it fosters a habit of suppression as well as repression that ends up infantilizing all members of society, and not just teachers and students in the country's state-run schools. To refuse to look at the fact of human sexuality in the face, and to make young people a party to that refusal, cannot but have far-reaching consequences. A great deal of juvenile crime in India, for instance, is sexually violent in nature, while the prevalence of sexually transmitted viruses and diseases, including HIV/AIDS, remains high among teenagers from every social background. Refusing to call a spade a spade will not help this situation. Besides, why should adult teachers, policy-makers and politicians confront the issue of sex only in the context of disease, physical hygiene, criminal behaviour and population control? An essential element of what is often euphemistically called 'life-skills' education is the idea of happiness based on mutual respect and pleasure between individuals. Being unsqueamish and uncensorious about sex should be part of this larger vision in any serious reflection on the education of the young.

o o o

The Indian Express - October 26, 2016

THE BURNING QUESTION
CHHATTISGARH POLICE MUST ENSURE PROMPT, VISIBLE ACTION AGAINST THOSE IN THE FORCE WHO BURNED EFFIGIES OF POLITICIANS, ACTIVISTS.

 Editorial 

The spectacle of sections of the police force burning effigies of political and social activists in Chhattisgarh on Monday holds dangerous portents. Across towns in the state, auxiliary constables, many in uniform, informed the media about their protest and later shouted slogans and burnt effigies of politicians Manish Kunjam and Soni Sori and activists, Nandini Sundar, Bela Bhatia and Himanshu Kumar. Their complaint: That by highlighting human rights abuses by security forces in the region, these individuals were speaking on behalf of the Maoists. The trigger for this protest seems to be a CBI status report filed before a special court last week, where security forces have been blamed for burning down 160 houses of Adivasis in Tadmetla village. The state police had claimed that the 2011 incident was the handiwork of Maoists.

Security forces, especially at the lower rung like the auxiliary constables, have a tough fight on hand in Chhattisgarh. The Maoists are well-armed, battle-hardened and have the ideological and organisational sanction to kill their critics and opponents. Yet, in a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law, the security forces do not have the option of countering the Maoists by imitating them. The legitimacy of the Indian state derives from its claim to function within the ambit of a liberal democracy that respects civil liberties including the right to debate and dissent. Indeed, the political and civil societies are expected to speak up on behalf of citizens and raise uncomfortable questions in the event of transgressions by the state. Leaders like Kunjam, a senior CPI leader and a former MLA from the region, and activist-academicians like Sundar and Bhatia, have been outspoken about the state’s failures in the region, including its strategy to enlist vigilante groups to fight the Maoists. They have articulated their views on the appropriate platforms and have sought remedies from institutions like the judiciary. The state, including its security apparatus, must learn to cope with the criticism that emerges from the civil and political society and to address it in the appropriate ways and forums.

Vigilantism has been on the rise in Chhattisgarh and sections of the civil society, including the media, have been its victims. Government inaction in the face of such activities could lead to a breakdown of the rule of law and in the long run undermine the writ of the state itself. That can have devastating consequences for a people who have been exposed to brutal violence by state and non-state actors for years.

o o o

Hindustan Times - 26 October 2016

Editorial

EDUCATION HAS MORE PRESSING NEEDS THAN PROMOTING SANSKRIT 

The country’s heritage, ancient achievements and value systems are of great importance but they are not priorities for the school education system, which is doing far from well. So, it is surprising, indeed worrying, that the minister of state for HRD, Mahendra Nath Pandey, chose a meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) to address state ministers on these issues. He also said that Sanskrit was a great unifying factor and that scientific knowledge should be available in Indian languages. Inexplicably, he spoke of the importance of military education for students. If even 2,000 of the 10,000 students in Nalanda University had undergone military training, according to him, they could have foiled Bakhtiyar Khilji’s plan to raze the university. 

The minister should have kept the focus on the CABE resolution seeking compulsory promotion of students only till class 5. After this it has sought that the states could have the freedom to hold students back if they fail. It correctly focuses on learning outcomes and wants this to be codified. There are many other issues that need attention. One is the training of teachers under the Right to Education Act. Apart from this, the pressing need in school education is infrastructure. There are many regions in which schools do not have classrooms or good sanitation facilities. These deter the girl child from attending classes. These are issues that the HRD ministry needs to focus on more than anything else. The school curriculum as its stands today is both outdated and is geared towards a rote method of learning. If, at the end of class 6, as was discovered by a recent survey, many children cannot string a sentence together, there is something seriously wrong in the way education is being imparted and results assessed.

The HRD ministry should be taking the lead in formulating ways of not just ensuring enrolment but also retention in schools. Access to schools is also a major problem, especially in tribal areas. Education should be all about progress. Knowledge of Indian languages is beneficial but it should not be at the cost of English. The HRD ministry should keep its eye on the ball as far as the real needs of the education system are concerned. It should not seek to detract from this by bringing in heritage and ancient culture as talking points in a serious discussion on the subject of making changes in the education system.

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13. NEPAL: TIME TO GET SERIOUS - OUR LEADERS SHOULD REALISE THE LOOMING DANGER OF A CONSTITUTIONAL VACUUM | Khagendra N Sharma
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(The Kathmandu Post - 23 October 2016)

In academic parlance, the Indian signal is called intervention in the internal affairs of an independent country. But in the practical world, such signals are the rule rather than the exception

Oct 23, 2016- When the political parties went for the second Constituent Assembly (CA) election, the people correctly evaluated their performances in the first CA and punished the forces that had indulged in excesses. The Madhes-based parties and the Maoists were cut to size and the Nepali Congress and the CPN-UML were given a fresh mandate to take leadership in formulating the constitution. The country could have been on a smooth road after one year of the enforcement of a new constitution, but we are still travelling on a very bumpy track. What went wrong?

There are various minor factors but the main hurdle was the unpredictable acts of the Maoists. First, they reacted to the people’s judgement by rejecting the vote count. Next, they tried to operate a nexus of national opposition by leading a so-called 31-party alliance, which failed to make any positive impact on the road ahead and only vitiated the political climate by creating new feuds and frictions. Leaving behind the alliance midway, the Maoists corrected their course and joined the mainstream parties in aiding the process of constitution-making with the 16-point agreement and became

partners with the NC and the UML, paving the way for the finalisation of the constitution. But they did not stop there and put the whole political process in an ‘L turn’ by breaking their partnership with the UML with the concurrence of the NC.

Major problems

A fundamental problem was the swiftness in the finalisation of the constitution by following what the leaders called a ‘fast track’ process. In the haste, people were not given enough time to ponder over the draft. Most of the people were not even consulted in the first place, and whatever opinions were collected were not fully integrated into the document either. The constitution was in progress for ages and the leaders did not have the patience for a week or two. If things were done correctly, the people would have accepted the constitution. The leaders missed this opportunity.

The refusal to respond to the Indian signal to delay the promulgation of the constitution by a few days to accommodate the (Madhesi) people’s demand was also a mistake. The Madhesi leaders, who were rejected by the people in the second CA election, were in the streets and India did not hide its intention to protect and promote them. Our leaders did not give enough consideration to the underlying threat and went ahead with the constitution’s promulgation. India responded by imposing a prolonged embargo on the supply of essential goods to Nepal. The Madhesi leaders were strengthened by the Indian support and carried on the bandh for several months.

In academic parlance, the Indian signal is called intervention in the internal affairs of an independent country. But in the practical world, such signals are the rule rather than the exception. In the international arena, big nations bully small nations, especially their neighbours, every now and then and expect appreciation of such bullying as their affection. In fact, it is the actors in the small countries who invite bullies by asking for favour to ascend the ladder of state power. Some exceptions were king Mahendra and former PM KP Oli. Was it not obvious from the fall of Oli? Independent observers consider Prachanda and Deuba tools used by India to shatter the national consolidation process started by the preceding coalition.

Another flaw was the dissociation of the NC from the mainstream during the process of the constitution’s implementation. The NC-UML-Maoist alliance that finalised the constitution should have been maintained until the implementation of the document so as to neutralise the bullying and to safeguard the national interest. The NC’s departure created a vacuum, weakening the state’s will. The NC’s decision to withdraw support to the prevailing leadership further weakened national solidarity. Consequently, Nepal has reached its weakest point in recent history. The NC and the Maoists may celebrate their victory for now, but they are least likely to fulfil their objective of managing the transition by implementing the constitution.

Elusive consensus

One more factor is paradoxical. While the Oli-led strategy was successful in raising Nepal’s head vis-à-vis India and diversifying trade and transit, its efforts at internal preparation for the constitution’s implementation were lacking. The Ministry of Local Development was given the additional ornament of being the Ministry of Federal Affairs, but efforts were not made to create a Federal Affairs Division in the ministry. Worse, Kamal Thapa, who was given the responsibility of foreign affairs and local and federal affairs, ignored the latter and focused only on the former. Oli’s fault was in not assigning the federal affairs responsibility to a more committed leader who could lay the foundations of the federal state’s structure.

The other flaw was the failure to hold serious negotiations with the protesting Madhesi and ethnic parties. The Madhesi leaders assert how there were 36 rounds of ‘drama’ but not a single serious session of dialogue. Perhaps the claim is exaggerated, but there is still ample room to doubt the sincerity of the government’s efforts. But, with the UML unnaturally ejected from power, the present coalition has created an additional adversary to appease. Consensus seems even more elusive.

A ray of hope

Nepal stands at the crossroads of a fundamental shift. We need to move ahead, not reverse our steps. We have rejected monarchy and embraced republicanism. But we have utterly failed to institutionalise republicanism. Worse, our leaders are not even aware that they are standing on shaky grounds. Unless they realise their mistake, there is no chance of improvement.

I do not want to end this piece on a pessimistic note. There is a slim hope that the leaders will realise the looming danger of creating a constitutional vacuum and mend their past ways of pulling each other’s legs, thus paving the way for consensus. And consensus can only be reached through dialogue. It requires tireless efforts on the part of sensitive and sensible leaders from each of the major parties. When consensus is achieved among the major parties, equally sincere efforts must also be made to win the confidence of the minor parties, particularly the protesting ones. Only we can resolve our problems and we must succeed. Who wants to fail? Do you, leaders?

Sharma is a political analyst. He can be reached at knsad66[at]yahoo.com

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14. TRIBUTE: DOMINIQUE SILA KHAN – A SCHOLAR OF RELIGION WHO MADE INDIA HER HOME | Shail Mayaram
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(The Wire - 23 October 2016)

Dominique was part of a small group of scholars working on the shared and overlapping cultures of Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent.

The morning’s emails rolled into my inbox, one with the shocking news of the passing of Dominque Sila Khan, one of the most talented scholars of religion in South Asia. I had first met Dominique in the early 1990s at a conference on Rajasthan and was hugely impressed with the dynamic energy of her paper and presentation. She was then unravelling the hidden and secret identities of Ismaili missionary-saints in Western India, including Ai Mata, Jasnath, Jambha and Ramdev, mostly followed by ‘untouchable’ and ‘low’ castes who had been converted to Ismailism in the 13th and 14th centuries by missionaries of the Ismaili dawa working in Multan.

The question for me is who converted whom. Ismailis were in constant conversation with Hindu religious practitioners such as the Nath Yogis and Kabirpanthis, and there was much mutual learning until the 19th century when the idea of singular religious identity began to thrive and create bounded identities. Over a period of time, saint-hero-gods such as Ramdev who had a major following among Dalit communities became appropriated as Hindu and Vaishnava.

Dominique’s doctoral work Conversions and Shifting Identities: Ramdev Pir and the Ismailis in Rajasthan gives us accounts from traditions of the Dalit caste of Meghvals of the persecution by the Delhi Sultans of holy persons who were disciples of Pir Shams. Hence, the martyrdom of Khivan along with Ransi Tanwar, the grandfather of Ramdev, by the Delhi Sultan. His body was then miraculously transformed into milk and he acquired the name Dudh Pir. There is a similar hagiography of Phul Pir.

Information on the Ismailis had until then depended on the orally performed traditions of the Ismailis, the ginans or devotional hymns – Dominique’s work excavated architectural and mythic evidence of an expanding Nizari dawa.

Over the years, Dominique and I came to share many interests and borrowed deeply from each other’s work. On some questions we also diverged – I was critical of the idea of crypto-Islam that she used in her later book, Crossing the Threshold. Dominique and I were part of a small group of scholars working on the shared and overlapping cultures of Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent, which included Ann Gold, Yogi Sikand, Veronique Bouillier, Tazim Kassam, Carla Bellamy and others. A volume titled Lines in Water: Religious Boundaries in South Asia is one of the volumes that came out of some of our work.

Some of us were part of a conference on liminal identities in Goa, which also produced an edited volume titled Lived Islam. The challenge before us was how to conceptualise the identities that emerged around these diverse and culturally interconnected universes. Surely all identities are mixed – unless moulded to the contrary by ideological intervention – but the hybridity of some has been especially pronounced, such as of Mewatis, More Salam and Malkana Rajputs, Khanzadas and Kayamkhanis, among others.

All of us struggled with vocabularies to signify this space. Dominique used the concept of acculturation then popular in French anthropology, but veered around to using the idea of liminality that for me signified the in-between spaces between religions and that defied boundary-making enterprises.

Dominique herself had a novel location: she was born Jewish and was the author of a fairly successful novel. She was educated in Paris but moved to Jaipur after her marriage to a Sunni Muslim from the Shekhawat region of Rajasthan. Dominique was the writer, but Sattar Khan partnered her at home and in fieldwork. He knew intuitively what she arrived at in the way of scholarship and together they uncovered the traces of Ismailism over a millennium.

Dominique’s work on the Imamshahi Satpanth showed how the dharma parivartan campaign of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in the 1980s forced the Patidars, members of an agricultural caste representing about 75% of the Imamshahi Satpanth to remain gupti (in hiding). In the 1980s, Kaka Karsan Das of the Pirana shrine assumed the Hindu title of acharya and claimed to be the spiritual leader of the community. He initiated a process of Hinduisation so as to make the sect acceptable to the Sangh Parivar, involving modifications in rituals and the sacred literature.

Her research into the Pranami tradition suggested how Gandhi’s early association with the Pranami tradition has been underplayed, even obliterated in several biographies, as also in his own autobiography. Gandhi admits only in passing in the latter that his mother was a Pranami and that, in his childhood, he would also go to the Porbandar shrine and read from both the Gita and Quran. He mentions that many people thought that they were Muslim. The Qulzam Sharif, the holy scripture of the sect, defines the Pranami religion as Islam or din-i Islam.

At the turn of the century, Dominique, whose Hindi was fluent – Rajasthani and Gujarati just a little less so – decided to learn Malayalam and immersed herself in the Hindu, Christian, Muslim and Jewish cultures of Kerala. The outcome was Sacred Kerala, a book I have taken on each of my journeys to the Malabar coast.

Sadly, a recent political position in India celebrates the nativist intellectual, ignoring how scholars such as Dominique made India their home, opting for a deeper understanding and experience of Indian cultures rather than a position in a European university. Even as livelihood remained a struggle for Sattar and her, one of her last projects was to set up an institute of pluralism.

As I look at the copies of Dominique’s books in my office, I think of how in the end this is all that remains: our witnessing of the past, of footprints on the sand that are erased by time and of vanishing worlds as the quest for pure religions and totalised identities is undertaken at a frenzied pace in the subcontinent.

Shail Mayaram is a historian and political anthropologist whose most recent book is Israel as the gift of the Arabs: Letters from Tel Aviv

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15. INDIA - HARYANA: ACADEMIC FREEDOM UNDER FIRE
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(The Tribune - Oct 25, 2016)

NURTURE ARTISTIC & ACADEMIC FREEDOM | Pritam Singh 

Let the sons and daughters of Haryana develop as a hundred flowers bloom. Universities must support creative endeavour to enable cultural renaissance and human development.

Protests against staging of Mahasweta’s Draupadi in Central University of Haryana have damaged the image of the state internationally.
I have had a soft corner since my student days in India for Haryana's economic, political and cultural development. My first piece of research, my MA dissertation, was on Haryana agriculture with a focus on the so-called inverse relationship between farm size and productivity. Unlike some Punjabis who bemoaned, in an imperialistic sort of way, the separation of Haryana from Punjab in 1966, I tracked Haryana's progress with interest and admiration. I interpreted Haryana's speedy progress as a flowering of the creativity and autonomy of the people of Haryana. It was an honour to accept an invitation some years back from a university in Haryana to be a visiting professor there.

Haryana has had an uneven record since 1966 in its development pattern. The state has had very impressive economic development in agriculture but especially in industry which provided the  much-needed ammunition to political and economic theorists who argue in favour of smaller states and against the dysfunctional nature of larger states. It acquired, slowly and steadily, its own political rhythm with many pitfalls on the way as it became free from the erstwhile dominance of the Punjab region and its political leadership in united Punjab. Haryana did not do as well in the cultural, artistic and intellectual domains, as it did in the economic sphere.

Intellectuals and artists of any nation are its soul and voice.  The British economist Keynes had once said that philosophers and economists of any nation leave deep imprints on the frames of thinking of the nation.  In all advanced societies, their intellectuals and artists are highly valued, respected and honoured. When Sartre, the celebrated French philosopher who refused to accept the Nobel Prize in literature in 1964 because he did not want to be “institutionalised”, died; there was a national mourning in France and more than 50,000 people joined his funeral procession. When Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian died in 2012, it was a lead story in the British media — with many top political leaders admitting that they had politically grown up on Hobsbawm's writings on British history and politics. Any new nation, nationality or cultural identity needs intellectual and cultural vanguard who can articulate the problems, aspirations and visions of the emerging identity. There is no linear path to progress and that is where artists and cultural workers come in expressing the multi-dimensional nature of anxieties, contradictions and zigzags through literary works and artistic creations. In one sense, one could say that Haryana could have benefitted from the so-called advantage of late development. 

Theorists of advantages of backwardness argue that the late developers can skip stages by learning very quickly what the earlier developers had already done, thus leapfrogging to a higher stage of development. In order to do that, Haryana needed to have first-class universities without the baggage of any previous unwanted practices; it needed to have its active state and society-funded organisations in the fields of music, theatre, cinema, paintings, sculpture, folk dance, folk crafts and the diverse Haryanvi languages and dialectics. It needed to have museums to record Haryanvi history and culture to propel the articulation of distinctive Haryanvi creativity. With this background in mind, when I read recently that a university in Haryana had chosen to discipline rather than celebrate the creative impulses of some of its faculty members and students, I felt sad and disappointed. The harassment to which a group of staff and students of Central University of Haryana (CHU), who were involved in putting together a performance based on award-winning writer Mahasweta Devi's acclaimed short story Draupadi are being subjected to is a retrogressive development in a state which needs the talent of its younger generations to flower.  The story Draupadi was written in 1971 and represents Mahasweta's creative expression of the exploitation of India's tribals.  It is regularly taught in a course in the syllabi all over India and the world. The adaptation of the story into a play by the CHU staff and students was a creative endeavour to commemorate the literary achievements of Mahasweta, the recipient of some of the most prestigious Indian and international awards. The critical references in the play to the Army's role in treating the tribal population is now being twisted by the right-wing Hindu nationalist student groups and organisations as being anti-national and anti-Army. An attempt is being made to pit the soldiers of the area against the academics of the university. 

This is extremely harmful both from the viewpoint of creating an anti-artistic atmosphere as well as projecting a damaging image of Haryana nationally and internationally. There can be a difference of opinion on a particular stance of the play but that is no basis to bow down to coercive pressure from any quarter on artistic expression and academic freedom. It is this unsavoury aspect of the whole episode which has attracted the attention of academics and scholars in the UK and Europe who work on South Asia. They have expressed solidarity with their academic colleagues in CHU, who have come under attack from narrow-minded right-wing groups. 

At such critical moments, it is the moral duty of heads of the university to protect the staff and the right to free expression of creative impulses.  In its immediate context, it may seem like a pure, and perhaps difficult, administrative task but from a long-term historical point of view, it is a responsibility of immense significance. Given the transition Haryana is going through, it needs this cultural renaissance perhaps more than its agricultural and industrial development in which it has already made impressive strides. 

The writer is a Professor of Economics at Oxford Brookes University, UK.

o o o 

Daily News and Analysis

POLICE NOW INTERVENES IN ASHOKA UNIVERSITY MATTER

by Kritika Sharma | Tue, 25 Oct 2016-08:20am , New Delhi , DNA

Police has initiated action against those who were a part of a petition in Ashoka University, supporting plebiscite in Kashmir.

Haryana police has sought details about the email through which the petition was circulated and those who were involved in signing of the petition. The alumni member who initiated the petition is also being kept a watch over by the police.

The police officials from Haryana’s Sonepat district visited the campus recently and submitted a letter to the Vice Chancellor seeking a report on the issue. “We have sought information on what was the e-mail that has been circulated and the action that has been taken on the students on the basis of the mail. Once we get the reply to the mail, we will take further action on its basis,” a senior police officer from Sonepat district said.

“An ex-student had started the petition. We are keeping a watch on the student and those who are related to him,” the official added.

A petition signed by 88 members of the university, addressed to the J&K government and the central government that condemned the violence after militant Burhan Wani’s death got circulated on social media. Following this, two members of the administrative staff quit the university, even as they cited personal reasons for this, the petition was being cited as the reason.

Meanwhile, amidst fears of a clampdown of free speech in the university, the Vice Chancellor of the university, Rudrangshu Mukherjee in an internal communication to the students and faculty members reiterated: “Ashoka University is committed to free speech and the question of diluting this commitment does not arise”.

“I would like to clarify that no staff or faculty have been dismissed for expressing their opinion by signing a petition,” he added.

He also added that the “Kashmir petition’’ expressed the views of a very small group within the Ashoka community.

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16. AN ANGRY NATIONALISM?
by Santosh Desai
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(The Times of India - October 24, 2016

The difference between the idea of a surgical strike and its aftermath cannot be more striking. If the actual action was about stealth and precision, everything that has surrounded it is full of empty posturing and crude politicking. The strikes sought to change the tenor of the Indian relationship with Pakistan by recalibrating the costs attached to frequent territorial incursions enabled by the Pakistani state. It also dismantled the idea that strategic restraint on the Indian part was linked with the fear of retaliatory nuclear action by Pakistan. This is an important and decisive shift, and one that ought to have created a new sense of confidence within the country.

Instead what we see is the opposite. From ham-handed efforts to extract personal glory from the action of the military to the hyper-nationalistic overflow of tokenism and intimidation, the wider reaction has been uniformly overblown. If the action itself was rooted in a new language of strength, the reaction is a product of age-old fears and anxieties.

The action against Pakistani actors indicates small-minded fear, rather than confident courage. One can understand the emotion that drives such a reaction, but mature societies refrain from acting upon these impulses. Banning them from working in India serves no real purpose; it certainly does not help Indian soldiers on the battlefield, but it does communicate a tendency to react with a surfeit of emotion.

In particular, it is very difficult to fathom what drove Maharashtra CM Devendra Phadnavis, to help broker a settlement between film producers and someone who has absolutely no locus standi, official or otherwise, to ‘allow’ a film to be released. As many have pointed out, for films that were started when the Indo-Pak relationship was much better to face problems today on account of their casting, makes no sense whatsoever, and anybody, regardless of their political affiliation should be able to see that. To have to pay Rs 5 crores as ‘penance’ is bizarre, more so, given that this has the official sanction of a senior representative of the government.

There can be no justification for such an action and for the government to supervise such an agreement while claiming that no ban exists against Pakistani actors in the first place, is to actively abet the creation of a climate of fear. The sight of more film makers falling in line and mouthing politically expedient homilies is cause for alarm and not satisfaction, for it tells us that even the trivial everyday business of entertainment is now tainted by an undercurrent of fear.

Externally, if the Indian strategy is to isolate Pakistan, then that is something that requires calculated narrative building; one that presents India as the side representing a superior moral position. To expand the arena from the Pakistani state to the people of Pakistan is unlikely to carry much weight, and might serve to render the Indian position untenable. Those that cite the case of South Africa and apartheid, forget that in that case the state was identified with a power elite founded on a belief in its racial superiority. The Pakistani situation is completely different; the ordinary Pakistani is not complicit in the state’s decision to support cross-border terrorism.

Even domestically, the Modi support base derives its legitimacy by nursing a sense of injured victimhood, which enables its reactions to be encased in an aura of self-righteousness. But when the victim becomes the bully, and that too in a situation where the alleged offenders are transparently innocent of the ‘offence’ they are accused of, then the tide of sentiment can begin to turn. This is the kind of situation where even some die-hard supporters of the governments, as well those that have maintained a discreet silence so far, will feel compelled to speak out. The media has been tamed, so it may not lead the charge, but at some stage, even this might change. The nationalism narrative has helped the BJP immeasurably, but there is a danger of pushing it too far. Potentially, patriotism is an idea that can be used in an absolute sense to justify virtually anything and this makes it very difficult to use it in a controlled way.

The temptation to use nationalism as a wedge issue that helps polarize constituencies in the UP election is easy to understand, but as the Bihar experience shows, it is very easy to overplay this appeal. Besides, if Bollywood becomes the primary arena in which to play out the nationalism debate, then films will continue to get released and the outrage will never stop. One can only imagine what will happen when Aamir Khan’s Dangal hits the screens.

The Modi government must regain control over this issue. It is a volatile fault line that can create a climate of fear and intimidation that serves nobody well. It is certainly at odds with Narendra Modi’s attempt to be acknowledged as a globally respected statesman. Even as a political device, the utility of nationalism as a platform lies in its unrealized potential; if its plays out fully, the issue may lose its power. The Ram Janmabhoomi issue is a case in point- so much has been said on it that today it has lost its ability to mobilize sentiment, even in the state of UP.Beyond all the political calculations, there is something deeply troubling about the current discourse. That there is such a great need to puff up our significance and strut about with exaggerated displays of strength is a pointer to how much we fear the opposite. Loose talk about boycotting Chinese goods, for instance, reveals an insecurity about one’s ability to play on a big stage. From a country that is, in the global scheme of things, doing quite well, and from a government that has a comfortable majority and has every reason to believe that it will continue in power for some time to come, one would expect a more mature and self-confident demeanour.

Beyond all the political calculations, there is something deeply troubling about the current discourse. That there is such a great need to puff up our significance and strut about with exaggerated displays of strength is a pointer to how much we fear the opposite. Loose talk about boycotting Chinese goods, for instance, reveals an insecurity about one’s ability to play on a big stage. From a country that is, in the global scheme of things, doing quite well, and from a government that has a comfortable majority and has every reason to believe that it will continue in power for some time to come, one would expect a more mature and self-confident demeanour.

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17. THE STORY OF A BRIEF MARRIAGE BY ANUK ARUDPRAGASAM REVIEW – LOVE AND WAR IN SRI LANKA
by Randy Boyagoda
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(The Guardian - 22 October 2016)

A debut novel which raises timely questions about how we regard the suffering of others

The opening sequence of Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel, in which a six-year-old child with a shrapnel-shredded arm is brought to an open-air operating theatre, feels horribly timely. The young man carrying the listless little boy finds a strange solace in discerning the child’s prospects: “Soon the doctor would arrive and the operation would be done, and in no time at all the arm would be as nicely healed as the already amputated thigh … According to the boy’s sister [that] injury came from a land mine explosion four months before, the same accident that killed their parents also.” It brings to mind the images of stunned, bloodied children now coming out of Syria and other war zones. The novel both implicitly and explicitly raises crucial questions about the aesthetic and ethical stakes involved in regarding the suffering of others.

Arudpragasam uses placid, even poetic prose, with results that range from brilliantly unsettling to questionably indulgent. The novel is set approximately seven years ago, in the Tamil-majority north of Sri Lanka. Its action takes place over a few days during the harrowing final months of the island’s vicious civil war. Recalling José Saramago, The Story of a Brief Marriage takes a fraught political-historical moment and creates out of it a fable-like novel: a boy and girl meet and get married. These are humble characters known only by their first names, Dinesh and Ganga. They live in an unnamed village and in a makeshift camp in lush woodlands that are thick with tropical heat, artillery smoke and the constant threat of sudden death.

Accepting the impossibility of his own survival, Ganga’s father decides to do what best he can for his daughter and proposes that Dinesh marry her. Given their collective horrible situation, Dinesh is surprised by this offer. But in keeping with the muted feeling and fatalism that mark every character in the book, he accepts, as does Ganga, though neither seems particularly excited about it. The carnage surrounding them is too much for a newlywed couple to overcome, given how much each has already lost: “But if they couldn’t talk about their pasts, what could they say to each other at all, given that there was no future for them to speak of either?”

They try to make a shared life, and their efforts produce the novel’s most moving material. Never mind the constant probability of death, wounding, forced conscription, starvation and rape: Ganga and Dinesh are shy, uncertain and tentative – just as any other sudden new young couple would be. He proposes a stroll, which they take silently; she makes him a small meal of rice and dhal that he revels in, not least because she made it for him. Arudpragasam describes each gesture and thought, all the way down to the “shape and taste of the soft grains” that Dinesh savours, “cleaving the rice into separate sections in his mouth”. Only at chapter’s end does Arudpragasam reveal that all this haute literary deferring enacts the young couple’s own unspoken interest in delaying the inevitable: “Dinesh licked the last grains of rice off his fingertips … aware that it was time now for them to spend their first night together.”

Soon enough, Dinesh and Ganga’s bleak expectations are fulfilled, though it’s here that the novel’s aesthetic and ethical ambitions fail to cohere. Shells fall once more, and amid the infernal “smoke and sulphur”, Dinesh searches and searches for Ganga. Eventually, he discovers her: “Her left eye was half-open and the right corner of her parted lips was kissing the dirt.” The cheaply evocative wording of this image suggests a literary immaturity at odds with the restraint and poise found elsewhere in this often formidable novel.

Randy Boyagoda’s Beggar’s Feast is published by Penguin.

• The Story of a Brief Marriage is published by Granta.

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18. IMY ON BASU, 'FOR KING AND ANOTHER COUNTRY: INDIAN SOLDIERS ON THE WESTERN FRONT, 1914-18'
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(H-Net)

 Shrabani Basu. For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front, 1914-18. New Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. 256 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-93-8405291-1.

Reviewed by Kate Imy (University of North Texas)
Published on H-Asia (October, 2016)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Indian Soldiers WWI

As a journalist and author of popular nonfiction, Shrabani Basu has an eye for a good story. This proves to be a major asset throughout her impressive new book, For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front 1914-18. Any narrative of India’s contributions to the First World War benefits from the dramatic realities of the historical events. Over 1.5 million Indians including combatants and noncombatants served in the conflict, resulting in the loss of over 72,000 dead or missing (p. xxi). South Asians served in all fields of battle—from Singapore to France, Hong Kong to Mesopotamia—although Basu focuses almost entirely, as her title suggests, on the western front. Yet she recognizes that British concerns about sedition and revolution during the war spanned the globe, leading to decisions that contributed to some of the most heated and dramatic events after the war, forever changing the relationship between South Asia and the British Empire. To this well-known series of events, Basu adds a surprisingly detailed and intimate account of several individuals whose lives were forever changed—or tragically lost—by this unprecedented conflict.

The most unique feature of the text is Basu’s decision to signpost the work with a series of individual stories. She takes readers along on the journey with many different “characters” inspired and informed by real-life people whose historical lives have hitherto been confined to names on memorials or official correspondence. She considers some of the thoughts and feelings that may have occupied everyone from Sukha, an “untouchable” sweeper, to the Ganga Singh—the Maharaja of Bikaner—who was among the signers of the Peace Treaty in 1919. She details, with the flair of a novelist, the journey of a Garhwali soldier as he leaves behind his young wife in the hills, and Indra Lal “Laddie” Roy, who left his privileged upbringing in Kensington to become a pilot. Especially gripping is the complex tale of brothers Mir Mast and Mir Dast—one of whom won the Victoria Cross while the other switched sides to the Germans in the hopes of returning to his home on the North West Frontier.

Basu’s work is divided into thirteen thematic chapters, which provide a unique lens through which to view the conflict. The first chapter, “Monsoon,” proves an especially engaging introduction. Pulling from the symbolic tension between the relief that rains provide in India and the sense that the First World War was a series of storm clouds gathering, she uses the opportunity to introduce the diverse men and women who populate the book. This chapter opens and closes with a young Garhwali wife as she sees her husband for the last time. In between are the tales of mothers, sweepers, Oxford cricketers, Cambridge boxers, and men destined for infantry and flying corps. Subsequent chapters, including “Brighton,” “Bandobast Sahib,” and “Comfort Kameti,” provide great insight into the range of British official perspectives of Indian troops—which were at times sympathetic and attentive, and at others cautiously skeptical of the men they treated as near-prisoners and would-be mutineers. Of course, some chapters are stronger than others. In “First Blood,” the narrative sometimes comes off as a “greatest hits” of the most famous or triumphant stories—usually pulled from regimental reports. Others, such as “Trenches” and “Winter,” drift away from the main theme of the chapter, losing focus.

What helps Basu’s story throughout is that she not only considers stories from the distant past, but also examines how the war has been remembered. She takes readers from the Chattri memorial in southern England, where Sikh and Hindu soldiers’ bodies were burned, to the many graves and plaques commemorating Indian troops in France and Belgium, ending finally with the triumphant statues of individual soldiers that fill squares in India. She even includes numerous photographs of these sights, giving readers the chance to visualize the physical traces of the conflict around the world. In fact, several helpful images—from the postcards sold to commemorate the use of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton as an Indian hospital, to pamphlets and posters of Indian soldiers—provide readers with the opportunity to engage meaningfully with the visual memories of the war. Readers can see how English photographers and audiences hoped to represent and view Indian soldiers—as with the numerous wartime photographs produced for official purposes. At the same time, Basu also provides a unique glimpse into how such men presented themselves, as in the case of “Laddie” Roy, who proudly posed for a headshot dressed as a pilot and even drew his own illustrations of the aircraft he flew.

One of the most valuable features of the text is Basu’s use of interviews with soldiers’ descendants in India. These remarkable accounts fill in the details of soldiers’ lives that are so often absent, missing, or outside the purview of the immediate concerns of imperial and military record keeping. Striking examples include details about Garhwali soldier Gabar Singh’s life before the war, and the life of his widow, Satoori Devi, as she wore his Victoria Cross and carried on his memory when he did not return. This helps to supplement the innovative research of scholars such as David Omissi, whose Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18 (1999) utilized hundreds of censored Indian letters, a strategy which Basu also employs effectively as well.

One area that could have been improved in the text is Basu’s engagement with secondary source literature. Lengthy sections providing seemingly contextual details have few or no footnotes, leaving attentive readers and scholars wondering about—or hoping to learn more—about the source of the information. This proves especially true in sections dealing with Indian sedition during which Basu relays several interesting anecdotes with minimal reference to either archival or primary source texts (pp. 58, 73). In fact, major events such as the Singapore mutiny get little more than a couple of paragraphs (p. 107). One noteworthy absence in this regard is Maia Ramnath’s Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (2011), which could have provided ample context about the international anticolonial networks emanating across Afghanistan, India, England, the United States, and beyond. Some of Basu’s sources indicate why there are absences in these stories, as she often relies on British and regimental archives, along with military memoirs, slanting the story toward a loyalist account. Engagement with Gajendra Singh’s recent work The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (2014) may have enlivened Basu’s analysis of sources by considering the complexities of using colonial archives to convey South Asian soldiers’ experiences.

In other ways, one wishes that Basu were more precise in descriptions of certain commonly held misconceptions about the British Indian Army. She occasionally restates the features of the “Martial Races” recruiting strategy, arguing for instance that Nepalese Gurkhas were descended from Rajputs with “a strong mix of Mongolian blood” (p. 30). At other times, she repeats the assumption that all the soldiers were “illiterate” peasants despite later admitting that between ten and twenty thousand letters poured out from Indian soldiers per week (p. 50). This suggests that some, if not many, soldiers were either literate or found it easy to find literate men. While it is true that some men received assistance writing letters in hospitals, it is also true that many learned to read during their time in military service. There are a few moments when oversimplification clouds what would otherwise be powerful moments in the text. This includes Basu’s characterization of Udham Singh’s assassination of Michael O’Dwyer in 1940 as an act of vengeance against General Dyer’s massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar (1919)—events separated by over twenty years (p. 185). A more nuanced picture of the changing dynamics of Punjab, of O’Dwyer’s other debilitating policies, and the particular context of the Second World War would have been more convincing, but may have fallen outside of the purview of this work. Without it, however, the story, however interesting, mostly seems out of place.

Nonetheless, Basu’s text is such a fascinating read that one may wish that she had not confined herself to the western front alone. A similar analysis of other theaters of war—which were neither so well managed nor commemorated, would have added much to her later gesturing toward postwar anticolonialism. It would have been noteworthy to examine why exactly Indian troops won the same number of VCs in the first 1.5 years of the war on the western front as were given through 3.5 years on other fronts. Did soldiers become less brave or worthy of praise? Or did the celebration of Indian soldiers lose its political significance as they shifted farther from Britain’s home front? Examining other fronts would have been a useful contrast to the more well-promoted aspects of Indian service in the First World War, by considering how these spaces affected the postwar world as service got even messier, more grueling, and provided more connections with international anticolonial networks.

Minor scholarly protestations aside, Basu’s work is a very engaging and thoroughly researched addition to the expanding field of Indian participation in the First World War. It is a valuable asset for scholars, who can benefit from the interviews and less well-known stories that Basu engages. It also serves as a fascinating introduction to the topic for general readers. Basu is able to combine attention to detail with a flair for storytelling, giving these soldiers a well-deserved tribute. Her sympathetic novelistic approach is ideal for modern audiences, who are not untouched by the hardships of war, empire, and feelings of being adrift and isolated in an interconnected—and fragmented—world.
 
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19. XENOPHOBIC, AUTHORITARIAN – AND GENEROUS ON WELFARE: HOW POLAND’S RIGHT RULES | Remi Adekoya
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(The Guardian - 25 October 2016

The Law and Justice party’s enduring popularity after a year in power should serve as a warning for liberals across Europe

President Andrzej Duda
‘President Andrzej Duda is a personable unassuming type who helps the Law and Justice party maintain a folksy image.’ Photograph: Szilard Koszticsak/EPA

Not since the communist era has a Polish government faced as much criticism from the west as the one in charge today. It is now exactly a year since Law and Justice (PiS), a socially conservative, Eurosceptic and nationalist party, swept to power, winning a parliamentary majority with 37.5% of the vote. This followed the triumph of PiS’s Andrzej Duda in the earlier presidential election, giving the party full control over Poland’s executive arm of government.

Since then, the ruling party has come under heavy fire from western media and institutions, which have accused it of dismantling democracy with policies designed to limit civil liberties, control media, politicise the civil service and neuter judicial independence. In July this year, the European commission issued Warsaw with a three-month ultimatum to address threats to the rule of law or face potential sanctions. PiS reacted scornfully, with party leader Jarosław Kaczyński calling the commission’s ultimatum “amusing”. Kaczyński has also been widely criticised in Europe for claiming migrants arriving on the continent could cause “epidemics” due to “various parasites and protozoa, which don’t affect their organisms, but which could be dangerous here”.

Poland's abortion ban proposal near collapse after mass protests

Yet, despite the barrage of critical opinions from the western world, which Poles have historically aspired to, PiS remains the most popular party in Poland, currently polling at 38%, which is higher than the combined support of all other parliamentary parties put together. There are several reasons for this, revealing dynamics observable not only in the wider eastern European region, but further west as well.

While PiS is strongly rightwing on social issues, its economic approach can be described as leftist. It emphasises the need to tackle inequality and propagates strong welfare policies. It introduced unconditional monthly cash payments equivalent to £100 for all parents who have more than one child towards the upkeep of each subsequent child until he or she is 18. So if you have three children, you get £200 per month and so forth. For parents with one child, the payment is conditional on low income.

No previous government ever embarked on such a generous social programme. PiS’s approach puts many Polish leftists in a bind. On the one hand, they deplore the party’s unashamedly xenophobic rhetoric; on the other, they like its economic views, especially in comparison to the main opposition parties, Civic Platform and Nowoczesna, both dominated by folk still enamoured with Hayek. In effect, some on Poland’s left are not as mobilised against PiS as they could be.

While the west may have considered post-communist Poland a model of free-market success, many Poles felt marginalised in a society where successive governments espoused a “sink or swim” attitude towards citizens, irrespective of whether it was the left or the right in power. Individual success was emphasised above all. PiS’s more communitarian approach is appealing to many Poles who feel they now have a government interested in more than just macro-economic indicators.

A poster of Jarosław Kaczyński

‘Jarosław Kaczyński has been widely criticised in Europe for claiming migrants arriving on the continent could cause ‘epidemics’.’ Photograph: Kacper Pempel/Reuters

A second factor in PiS’s continued popularity is that western Europe, where most criticism of the ruling party stems from, is now viewed far more critically than before by many Poles. PiS and its rightwing media allies are successfully portraying it as a den of politically correct madness, where hopelessly naive policies have put Europeans at increased risk of Islamic terrorism and being overrun by migrants. 

EU elites are portrayed as fanatical multiculturalists and secularists who are furious that a traditionally oriented, non-politically correct government is in control of Poland. Meanwhile, Kaczyński insists: “It is completely untrue that to achieve western levels of development, we have to adopt their social models. That is hogwash.” He insists Poland can achieve western-level economic development while maintaining age-old traditional Polish values and remaining a homogenous white Catholic country. In an age when much of Europe is facing an identity crisis, this message is resonating.

A few years ago, no Polish government would have been able to get away with openly defying EU institutions without losing credibility domestically. But western opinion no longer has that kind of influence in Poland, especially among the numerically dominant conservatives. This is one of the most significant mental shifts in contemporary Poland and signals a new era in societal attitudes towards the west, one in which its economic development remains admired, but its cosmopolitan liberal values are largely rejected.

PiS also remains popular because while Kaczyński is highly controversial and generally disliked, the official faces of the government, Beata Szydło, the prime minister,  and Duda, the president, are both personable unassuming types who help the party maintain a folksy image. There is currently no leftist party in parliament and the liberal opposition is weak and divided. Moreover, both opposition party leaders, Grzegorz Schetyna of Civic Platform and Ryszard Petru of Nowoczesna, are nauseatingly opportunistic, the kind of politicians who won’t take a public stance on any issue till they’ve seen at least half a dozen opinion polls. People are sick of sly, calculating politicos; these days people value authenticity, even if they disagree with their views. PiS employs crude rhetoric, but comes across as authentic.

Barring any major political or economic earthquakes, PiS will likely rule Poland for a while to come, providing momentum to the generally Eurosceptic, illiberal and authoritarian tendencies currently triumphing in eastern Europe. Its success should serve as a warning bell to liberals and leftists in the whole of Europe. A growing number of people are becoming increasingly willing to tolerate authoritarian and xenophobic tendencies from parties that offer them a sense of community and security.

Ignoring this reality won’t make it go away. On the contrary, if we don’t respond adequately to this dynamic, we might all soon wake up in a Europe where parties similar to PiS have suddenly become the mainstream.

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20. RETURNING THE NAMES: MOSCOW TO MOURN VICTIMS OF STALIN'S TERROR
by Daria Litvinova
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(The Moscow Times - Oct 28, 2016)
Every year on Oct. 29 hundreds of Muscovites line up in front of the FSB headquarters and read out names of victims of Soviet terror.

On Oct. 29, the eve of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression, hundreds of people will gather on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad near the Solovetsky Stone. They will patiently wait in line for hours, and then, one by one, read out the names of people executed in Moscow during the darkest days of the Soviet Union.

The reading will last at least 12 hours and some 1,500 names are expected to be read in front of the Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters, former home of its predecessor, the dreaded KGB secret police.

Titled “Returning the Names,” the event is organized by the Memorial human rights group. It has been held every year since 2006. This year it will take place despite the fact that Memorial was declared a “foreign agent” earlier this month — a label that, ironically, has strong connotations with Soviet repression.

Under the 2012 law, NGOs which receive foreign funding and engage in loosely defined political activity must register as “foreign agents” and be subject to additional scrutiny from the government.

At a time when the government is trying to construct its own narrative of the past, and more people approve of Josef Stalin’s brutal regime, such work — preserving the historical memory about victims of repression — is now more important than ever, says historian Pavel Gnilorybov.

On the day of “Returning the Names,” Gnilorybov guides tours around Lubyanka devoted to events and personalities of the Great Terror.

“We live in a country of absolute reticence. We haven’t talked about so many historical events — be it what happened in 1917, or [war in] Afghanistan, or [war in] Chechnya,” Gnilorybov told The Moscow Times. “At some point we will have to talk about all those events, and [by holding events like ‘Returning the Names’] we are preparing the grounds for it, foundations for this discussion that would make it civilized instead of just squabbling.”

10 Years and 40,000 Names

“Returning the Names” was launched ten years ago, in 2006.

“We wanted to give people the opportunity to participate, instead of just attending a rally and listening to speeches,” Alexei Makarov, a Memorial historian and one of the organizers of the event, says. “We decided to compile a list of people executed in Moscow, with small biographical notes that we could hand out to people who would read them aloud and thus make them public.”

During the past ten years, almost half of the list — that includes more than 40,000 names — has been read aloud.

Every year, more and more people take part in “Returning the Names.” People come to Lubyanskaya Ploshchad and are willing to spend hours in line no matter what day of the week it is or what the weather is like. “At first, we were afraid that the chain of readers would break on weekdays — we thought that no one would come to the event in the middle of a working day, but people were coming at all times,” Makarov says.
Foreign ambassadors traditionally attend the event, too.
Foreign ambassadors traditionally attend the event, too. October29.ru

The process of reading is very simple. People are given notes with a person’s name, age, profession and the date of execution. They read them at an improvised tribune with microphones, often adding the names of their relatives that had been executed. Some say that no one from their family was executed during the terror era, but their relatives were involved in persecution of those repressed, and apologize for that.

“Every year we have several of those confessions,” Makarov says. “It demonstrates that people from both sides need to talk about it, to make their personal memories public.”

Moscow is not the only host of “Returning the Names.” In 2016, the event will also take place in a dozen Russian cities including: St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Murmansk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Tomsk, Tula, Vladimir, Orenburg, Rostov-on-Don, Penza, Biisk, Bryansk, as well as several cities abroad such as Warsaw, London, Washington. In every city, Makarov told The Moscow Times, separate lists of victims were compiled.
Opposing Memories

In recent years, “Returning the Names” has been happening at strange times. On the one hand, the growing number of people coming to the Solovetsky Stone every Oct. 29, shows that society is willing to remember victims of terror. The government seems to be willing, too: authorities have already approved a large-scale monument to victims of political repression to be installed in the center of Moscow.

On the other hand, polls demonstrate a growing approval of Stalin’s rule; monuments to the dictator are being installed across Russia, and law enforcement officers show growing reluctance to open archives that will shed more light on the atrocities of the terror era.

There is no agreed strategy in the Kremlin, believes historian Gnilorybov. “This is why opening a monument to Ivan the Terrible in their minds stands right next to the idea of a monument to victims of political repression,” he says. “It’s ideological disarray.”

Arseny Roginsky, chair of the Memorial group, disagrees. Nowadays, the Russian state imposes its own version of historical memory — the one that is based exclusively on victories, he explains. The main milestone of this type of historical memory is, of course, the victory in the Great Patriotic War — which, inevitably, brings up Josef Stalin, the Supreme Commander, and puts him on the same positive footing as winning the war. “And there is nothing unnatural about that,” says Roginsky.

“If the memory about victories had been built in parallel with the memory about the cost of those victories, the situation would have been different. But there is no memory about the cost of the victory. Instead, there is a myth about Stalin — the master that executed people from his entourage, but was very warm to the people,” Roginsky says.

That is why reading out the names of individuals is a very important move: “It is about people. It is opposing the memory of the state and its glory,” Roginsky told The Moscow Times.

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21. SOVIET UNION: THE GOOD OLD DAYS - THE DACHA-OWNING CLASSES | Sheila Fitzpatrick
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(London Review of Books - Vol. 25 No. 19 · 9 October 2003, pages 18-20)

    Summerfolk 1710-2000: A History of the Dacha by Stephen Lovell
    Cornell, 259 pp, £18.95, April 2003, ISBN 0 8014 4071 8
    Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc edited by David Crowley and Susan Reid
    Berg, 261 pp, £15.99, November 2002, ISBN 1 85973 533 9
    Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia by Jukka Gronow
    Berg, 179 pp, £15.99, October 2003, ISBN 1 85973 633 5
    The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism by Caroline Humphrey
    Cornell, 265 pp, £13.95, May 2002, ISBN 0 8014 8773 0

Who could ever forget everyday life in the old Soviet Union? The sheer oddness of the way the place functioned, the incongruity between functioning and pretension. The discomfort and inconvenience, the drabness, the constant shortages and roundabout ways of getting things, the ubiquity of pull and patronage, the insignificance of money, the awfulness of officials, the splendid company of friends talking philosophy around kitchen tables, the sense of being caught in a time warp that was supposed to be the future but felt like the past. When I first went to the Soviet Union as a British Council exchange student in 1966, I thought it was only foreigners who noticed the oddness of Soviet life. But it turned out that the locals, or at least the local intelligentsia, felt it too. ‘If only we could have a normal life!’ they would sigh, not just in Moscow but in Budapest and Prague as well. ‘Normal’ had once referred to the way things were before the Revolution, or in Eastern Europe before Sovietisation. By the 1970s, however, most people didn’t know what that ‘normal’ was like and redefined it in terms of a Western lifestyle and culture that was not only unattainable but also hazily understood. Normality itself became a utopian concept.

Nothing ever changed in the old Soviet Union. That, at any rate, was how it seemed in the stolid smugness of the Brezhnev years, with the upheavals and terrors of Stalinism definitively in the past and the fleeting excitement of the post-Stalin Thaw long gone. Khrushchev’s boast about the imminence of Communism was a joke. As a founding myth, the Russian Revolution was largely displaced by the Second World War, and the Brezhnev regime seemed more committed to gradualism than any Fabian. To be sure, in the postwar period the Baltic states and Eastern Europe received a Soviet-taught Short Course in revolution from above, featuring such prewar staples as collectivisation, terror against class enemies, affirmative action in education and Socialist Realism in the arts. But in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, the sense of the impossibility of change – of being held for eternity in the claustrophobic embrace of the Soviet elder brother – was even stronger than in the Soviet Union. There the older generation, at least, remembering Stalinism, could see some merit in a relatively benign stasis.

And then the unthinkable happened. Soviet power crumbled, first in Eastern Europe and then in the Soviet Union itself. In principle (as Soviet spokesmen used to say when they meant that the reality was more complex), the emergent nations of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union embraced democracy, the free market and Western culture; in principle, normal life could begin. In practice it wasn’t so easy. The governmental anarchy and economic chaos that followed the collapse in the Soviet Union didn’t seem normal at all. Mafias were not normal; neither were unemployment, pensions made worthless by inflation, and pornography being sold on the streets. Democracy was a good idea, but politics, it turned out, was a dirty business, best ignored if possible. It wasn’t normal for life to be so disorderly and unpredictable; for everyday survival to be even harder for most people than it had been in the past.

Stephen Lovell’s choice of the dacha as a prism through which to look at the changes in Russian society is inspired. His book is not light reading: the story is complex and he has done a lot of research (if readers want to try something less demanding first, they can go to his article, ‘Soviet Exurbia: Dachas in Postwar Russia’, in the Crowley and Reid collection).[1] But it shows Lovell to be a first rate social as well as cultural historian. Like his mentor, Catriona Kelly (whose recent study of Russian advice literature is an essential source for anyone interested in Russian and Soviet consumerism),[2] Lovell paints on a broad canvas, starting in the 18th century and going right through to the present.

The origins of the Russian dacha were aristocratic: in the early 18th century, Peter the Great gave his noble servitors plots of land on the road between St Petersburg and his new palace at Peterhof and required them to build (at their own expense) suitably impressive and well-landscaped country houses (hence the term dacha, meaning ‘something given’). But it was as a bourgeois phenomenon of the late Imperial period that the dacha came into its own; and one of the great merits of Lovell’s book is that it gives a sense of the continuity of the middle-class lifestyle across the Revolutionary divide. Like many bourgeois phenomena, the dacha has often had a bad press, with dachniki lampooned as vulgar, snobbish, pretentious, unappreciative of the nature they claimed to worship, and accused of corrupting the peasantry by their presence. The dacha was a cut-price competitor of the noble estate (usadba) in the late Empire, and anyone with connections to the real thing was bound to despise it. Dachniki – or rather the economic changes that led a declining nobility to sell off their estates at the turn of the century and urban weekenders to use that land for dachas – are the off-stage villains in The Cherry Orchard. But Chekhov himself was a dachnik, as was another critic of the bourgeois dacha, Maxim Gorky. In time, dachniki, like the nobility before them, developed their own mythology about the land and the virtues of physical work, fresh air and exposure to the beauties of nature. In addition, dacha life became associated with qualities thought to be peculiarly Russian, such as sociability and hospitality.

The story of the dacha in the Soviet period is particularly interesting. Soviet dachas could be owned, which made them one of the few substantial forms of private property available. The appalling conditions that most people endured in their city apartments made escape to the dacha seem extremely attractive. In Stalin’s time, dachas were mainly a perk of the Party and cultural elites, though a few ordinary mortals who had owned them before the Revolution managed to hang onto them (Nikita Mikhalkov’s 1994 film Burned by the Sun gives a picture of elite dacha life in the 1930s, based on firsthand experience). Post Stalin, dacha ownership and use spread and, by the 1980s, it was rare to find an intelligentsia family that did not have access to one (a 1993-94 survey of seven Russian cities showed that almost a quarter of all households owned one). The distribution of small plots of land to city dwellers so that they could grow potatoes and other vegetables, which had began on a large scale during the Second World War, assisted the expansion, since many cultivators managed to build on their plots. When the Soviet Union, and with it the urban economy, collapsed at the beginning of the 1990s, growing vegetables on dacha plots became part of the standard survival strategy of town dwellers. In 1997, it was estimated that between 60 and 80 per cent of families in St Petersburg had some kind of plot.

Dachas are part of the East European story, too. The Czech version (the chata) is the subject of Paulina Bren’s essay in Socialist Spaces. Like Lovell, Bren sees the dacha as a private space, valued as somewhere one could escape the pressures and demands of urban life. In the context of Soviet-type societies, ‘private’, as the antonym of ‘public’, always raises the possibility of nonconformity with the regime; and this is one of the central concerns of the Crowley and Reid volume, edited by two cultural historians who have played a leading role in the development of studies of the everyday in the former Soviet bloc. Some scholars have argued that in totalitarian states the private is necessarily absorbed in the public; others point to evidence that the private survived, regardless of the state’s intentions. Still others note that the state awarded private space to favoured citizens (the dacha settlement at Peredelkino, given by the Politburo to the Soviet Union of Writers in the early 1930s, is an example), while adding that privacy was often ‘an illicit haul’ won by cunning. Bren’s conclusions on the post-1968 chata in Czechoslovakia is that it was a form of private space that the regime tolerated (indeed allowed to flourish: by the early 1980s, according to Bren’s figures, about two-thirds of Prague households owned or had access to a chata), in contrast to hiking, a competing leisure activity which was seen as having more definite oppositional connotations.

Urban apartments were owned – as well as designed, built and allocated – by the state, in both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But they could still be cherished, even though they were not strictly personal property. In his essay on Warsaw apartments in the 1950s and 1960s, David Crowley quotes Czeslaw Milosz’s remark that ‘to protect his position and his apartment (which he has by the grace of the state), the intellectual is prepared to make any sacrifice or compromise; for the value of privacy in a society that affords little if any isolation is greater than the saying “my home is my castle” can lead one to surmise.’ The apartment must also, therefore, be seen as a site of privacy – at least as long as it was a separate apartment, not the ill-famed kommunalka (‘communal apartment’) of the Soviet 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

In the Soviet Union, separate apartments are another instance of a ‘gift’ of privacy given by a regime that in principle regarded privacy with suspicion: the mass movement out of communal and into separate family apartments was the keystone of Khrushchev’s housing reforms of the 1960s. These standardised, mass-produced and hastily constructed separate apartments were later to be stigmatised as khrushchoby, a coinage linking Khrushchev with the Russian word for slums, but at the time they were greatly appreciated; in the 1970s and 1980s they were the site of the famous kitchen-table sociability of the Soviet intelligentsia (there was no such thing in communal apartments, whose residents used the kitchen neither for socialising with each other nor for entertaining friends). In Eastern Europe, where large tracts of Soviet-inspired apartment buildings went up in the postwar decades, the (separate) apartments were also wryly regarded as a Soviet gift and despised for that as well as for their poor design and workmanship. All the same, as Crowley shows, the interior of the apartment – the part the resident could make his own, and to which he could retreat – was regarded in Poland in the 1950s as a private sphere embodying family and domestic values. A popular magazine ran a series of articles on celebrities’ apartments that focused on the way they had managed to create ‘a congenial and individual atmosphere’ despite the ‘banal architecture’ that unimaginative state planning had forced on them.

The communal apartment is the pièce de résistance in the chronicle of the miseries of Soviet everyday life. Contrary to the myth, they were not a product of collectivist ideology. Rather, they developed out of urban overcrowding and the low budgetary priority that the Stalinist regime gave to housing – these, and a dose of Revolutionary schadenfreude which made local authorities eager to punish the bourgeoisie by forcing them to give up part of their apartments to proletarians. A whole folklore exists about the humiliations, petty vindictiveness, fights and resentments associated with involuntary communal living.

Kitchens and bathrooms were the sites of epic battles over property (saucepans, washbasins) and use of space. Readers of Svetlana Boym’s Common Places (1994) will recall the nightmarish story of her parents’ efforts to entertain foreign visitors in their room in a communal apartment while a stream of urine from a drunken neighbour in the corridor trickled slowly under the door. According to interviews quoted by Katerina Gerasimova in the Crowley and Reid volume, communal lavatories caused so much unhappiness that being able ‘to sit down on one’s own lavatory’ was one of the major pleasures of finally moving to a separate apartment. As for collective spirit, there are a few kommunalka memoirs that mention mutual support among neighbours and a feeling that one was part of an extended family. Much more common was the sense that the family’s room, not the kommunalka as a whole, was home; and as for neighbours, as one of Gerasimova’s respondents said, you just tried to pretend they weren’t there.

There wasn’t much room for possessions in the kommunalka, or even in the small separate apartments. This was just as well, as goods of all kinds, even basic necessities like food, shoes and clothing, were in short supply throughout the Soviet period. Yet shortages did not mean that Soviet citizens were indifferent to consumption. On the contrary, getting hold of scarce goods via connections and various under-the-counter arrangements became a national pastime. Marxist ideology may have emphasised production, but in the Soviet Union it was hierarchies of consumption (based on preferential access to goods) that mattered.[3] From the citizens’ standpoint, the key decisions of Soviet-type governments were all about allocation: that is, who got what goods.

While the Soviet regime may be said to have discouraged consumerism by keeping goods scarce, it was not ideologically on the side of asceticism. On the contrary, future socialism was always conceived in terms of plenty: according to the regime’s Socialist Realist perception of the world, the meagre supply of goods in the present was only a harbinger of the abundance to come. More goods (especially luxury goods) was conflated with more culture; and in a society where it was hard to get enamel bowls to wash up in, connoisseurs of silverware were held up for emulation and newspapers ran stories on the delivery of grand pianos to Stakhanovite milkmaids. In Champagne with Caviar, Jukka Gronow describes the development in the hungry 1930s of a Soviet rhetoric of cultured living that privileged luxury commodities like champagne, caviar and perfume, though only the last of these came near to reaching a mass public. This is not a particularly original book, but the thorough research in the archives it is based on makes Champagne with Caviar useful to scholars, and general readers will enjoy its vivid illustrations. In an endearing prefatory note, Gronow remarks that a post-Soviet sighting of the once ubiquitous torty (cakes, very sweet, packed in white cardboard boxes) was to her as the madeleine was to the narrator in Proust, bringing back memories of the 1970s and ‘my first glasses of Soviet champagne with caviar sandwiches’. (‘Sandwich’ is a misleading term: what she surely has in mind are buterbrody – pieces of bread, buttered only if you were at the Bolshoi Theatre, each topped by a teaspoonful of caviar.)

It was not until the 1960s that serious efforts were made to increase the supply of consumer goods to the whole population. Khrushchev didn’t just make rash promises about achieving Communism: he also said that the Soviet Union would catch up with America in the field of consumption. Despite the real gains to the Soviet consumer (the proliferation of dachas, separate apartments and even, under Brezhnev, private cars), the promises were not fulfilled and popular disillusionment followed, together with a wistful desire for the Western consumer goods that were now known to exist but remained largely out of reach.

In her stimulating book The Unmaking of Soviet Life, Caroline Humphrey – one of the few anthropologists with substantial field experience in the old Soviet Union – explores changing attitudes to consumption. Consumer desire, she argues, was both aroused and frustrated in Soviet-type societies and ‘acquiring consumption goods and objects became a way of constituting . . . selfhood.’ In Eastern Europe, this was an implicitly anti-regime process but in the Soviet Union, as Humphrey points out, the oppositional connotations of consumerism were less clear-cut because, after all, the regime was ‘ours’, not imposed from outside. In the Soviet Union, as in Eastern Europe, Western goods were coveted, and their arrival en masse with the collapse of the regime at first seemed like a miracle. Who can forget that sudden influx of Mars bars, Snickers, foreign liqueurs (or at least bottles adorned with foreign labels), Nike running shoes, Dutch tomatoes, real and fake Italian leather jackets, and brightly coloured anoraks, sold from ramshackle booths and tables by newly minted entrepreneurs under the watchful eye of Mafia protectors? But consumer fatigue and (justified) doubts about quality soon set in, and Humphrey suggests that by the end of the 1990s the old Soviet assumption that ‘foreign’ (importnyi) meant ‘better’ – universal in the 1970s and 1980s – had largely gone.

The exception to Humphrey’s generalisation are the so-called New Russians, the widely despised nouveaux riches of the post-Soviet period, whose ostentatious embrace of Western goods and Western-style consumption is one of the main reasons people dislike them. Humphrey has a wonderful essay on New Russian villas: those elaborate, architecturally bizarre two and three-storey brick kottedzhi whose sudden eruption on the outskirts of Moscow, clearly visible from the air, dramatically transformed the landscape in the 1990s. Built in an eclectic style combining Scandinavian modern and a ‘Napoleon III’ style described as ‘a blend of Classical, Baroque and Renaissance’, complete with jacuzzis (often not functioning) and armour-plated doors, and sitting behind high fences on empty plots that often have trash piled in the yards, these villas, in Humphrey’s words, ‘rear upward in several storeys, with sharply tilted roofs, pointed gables and porches’. In their rawness and ‘thrusting verticality’, they are symbolic of the New Russians’ awkward relationship with their native land.

One of the virtues of Humphrey’s book is that the words ‘democracy’ and ‘capitalism’ – so enthusiastically invoked by Western commentators in the early years of Russia’s ‘transition’ – are used sparingly. Based largely on field trips in the first half of the 1990s, it shows life being unmade rather than remade, but Humphrey gives little cause to anticipate a happy outcome. Noting the ‘cruelty’ of the process of economic readjustment, the increasing ‘aggressiveness of everyday life’ in Russia, and ordinary people’s continuing sense of powerlessness and victimisation (though by a new set of oppressors), the most optimistic note she can sound in conclusion is that ‘the everyday economies of Russia are a site of ethical choices’ – meaning, I think, that people have the option of behaving more or less badly to each other – ‘and from this some new, possibly more benign, arrangements are bound to emerge.’ It may be reasonable, from the vantage point of 2003, cautiously to raise the level of optimism, and suggest that Russians are already settling into new behaviour patterns and growing used to new institutions and that the very worst times are probably over – the years when the struggle for economic survival coexisted with the catastrophic collapse of the old Soviet value system. But that is not to say that, subjectively speaking, Russians are finally attaining that longed-for ‘normal’ life. With the perversity of veteran sufferers, many have started to look back nostalgically to the good old Soviet days when there was order and discipline and guaranteed employment; when bosses were paternalistic, and there was plenty of time to socialise at work; when people lived simply, helped each other and were indifferent (sic) to possessions; and the corruption of Western pop culture was held at bay. Perhaps Putin will recover some of this Soviet ‘normality’. But those thrusting New Russian villas will remain hard for travellers to ignore as their planes land at Sheremetevo – even if the process of going through customs and passport control provokes, like Proust’s madeleine, waves of memory of Soviet times past.

[1] Crowley and Reid are also coeditors of Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Postwar Eastern Europe (Berg, 256 pp., £50 and £14.99, 2000, 1 85973 234 8).

[2] Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford, 482 pp., £55, 2001, 0 19 815987 0).

[3] See Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia 1927-41 by Elena Osokina, translated by Kate Transchel and Greta Bucher (Sharpe, 320 pp., £50, 2001, 1 5632 4904 9).


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