Pranayam Revolution & the Baba
Varuni Bhatia The Strange Case of Baba Ramdev A young Yadav lad, the son of a low-income Haryana farmer, grows up in the decade of the seventies, the low-point of Nehruvian socialism. He is put through middle school with considerable financial strain on his family. The young boy goes through impressionable years of his life learning of an India of historical greatness, the dreams and aspirations that history textbooks routinely weave in telling a heroic narrative of the nation’s struggle to come into its own. A picture of Ram Prasad ‘Bismil’ and Subhas Chandra Bose allegedly hang in his room. Perhaps he is taken out of the government school that he attends and sent to a gurukul-type private school for a better education. As an adolescent, this boy continues to be influenced by the kind of ascetic masculinity that had spurred early twentieth-century nation building and anti-colonialism—his heroes from the canon of the freedom movement are militant nationalists such as Ram Prasad ‘Bismil’ and Subhas Chandra Bose, as well as hardliners such as Sardar Patel—not a usual fare of Gandhi-Nehru dominated freedom struggle. Thirty years hence, a vernacular godman grips the attention of the world, claiming almost-miraculous powers to yoga and Ayurveda. Breath practices and disciplined living, we are told, can sure diseases such as AIDS; allopathic medicine, we are told, is a charade and must be replaced by Ayurveda; yoga is the answer to all problems. This Swami wows recent spate of Indian diaspora in the first world with his ability to contort his body and subject it to seemingly impossible tortures. The nation, on the other hand, already knows him as a familiar figure, waking up with his call to yoga on Aastha channel every morning. The Swami emerges, already famous, having seemingly bypassed the usual route of a gradual rise to popularity. His online hagiographies already show elements of obfuscation. Lack of particulars notwithstanding, we get a picture of a Swami who has not merely risen as a traditional godman pandering to the elites, but a veritable saffron-clad warrior for vernacular democracy who has done an excellent task of guaranteeing himself a core support group amongst lower income, middle classes of the Hindi belt—precisely the same background that he emerged from; a tour de force that differentiates him from other godmen, as we shall see. Today, this low-income boy who turned into a godman heads an empire of traditional healing practices, that include an Ayurveda university, a traditional healing retreat cum medicine facility, and a yoga retreat (all three near Haridwar); yoga workshops run by trained yoga instructors in various small and large towns of north India; an enormously popular brand ‘Divya Mandir’ of herbal products; a vast internet presence through websites, facebook pages, blogs, and youtube videos; and a sizable and growing support group for his programs both within and outside India. His current worth is estimated at over 1000 crores, and he has successful organizations and centers in various parts of the world especially targeting the Indian diaspora. The Swami’s meteoric rise in popularity and his heady mix of faith-based practices with a program of rejuvenating the nation beg the question as to how is he different from others of his ilk. Purveyors of a new and global Hinduism such as Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Swami Nityananda, Sathya Sai Baba, Ma Amritanandamayi and so on have also amassed a significant following of celebrities and the general public in recent years. Different he is, and it may be of vital importance for us parse out his ultra-nationalist vision, so as not to confuse him with any other godman or woman who largely seem satisfied with doling out Hindu ecumenism for consumption in the global marketplace of spiritualism. The key to Ramdev’s success lies in his projection of himself as a rejuvenator of the Indian nation. He is at the helm of a movement (a self-proclaimed andolan, no less) that has turned him from a savvy businessman and traditional healer into the most contemporary face of neo-Swadeshi and neo-Hindutva nationalism in India. Liberal and left-leaning intellectuals and journalists have condemned him for holding the country hostage to an improbable, laughable and socially conservative agenda, drawing attention to fascistic tendencies underlying his programs. Much of the critique, however, reverts to portraying him as a traditional godman and a charlatan, out to con the intellectually-challenged lower middle class Indian populace who have readily abandoned rational thought to pledge support to this mystic. However, we can no longer ignore a sustained analysis of this contemporary face of Swadeshi socialism and Hindutva culturalism that emerges through the Baba phenomenon. The Baba has been able to cleverly revive and older RSS program based on national pride, majoritarian social justice, and punitively hardline agenda combining it with a savvy use of a keen business-sense, new media practices, and located as its enemy a well-honed notion of corruption, both moral and financial. He has also been able to tap into older RSS networks, which the BJP had alienated in its projection of a ‘Shining’ India, and from where he derives the core of his popular support. As the face of India’s neo-Hindutva movement, the Baba phenomenon is significant enough to merit a sustained analysis of the discursive and operational networks. What is even more remarkable is that these networks have arisen in less than a decade. The Baba may not be a mere passing fad or a momentary fancy, but a new player on the India’s Hindu rightwing spectrum, so any ignorance about his organizational network and capacities will be at our own peril. Structure of a ‘Revolution’: Unpacking Corporate Neo-Swadeshi Underlying Baba Ramdev’s anti-graft movement is a program of Swadeshi economic reform. It is worth considering his network of organizations to see the kind of Swadeshi that is being imagined there. Baba Ramdev’s umbrella organization is called the Divya Yog Mandir, or the Patanjali Yog Peeth, and it is headquartered in Haridwar. The Yog Peeth claims a hoary origin, as an extension
Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGaRtqrlGy8&feature=related] The Revolution Will Not Be Televised You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip, Skip out for beer during commercials, Because the revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox In 4 parts without commercial interruptions. The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia. The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal. The revolution will not get rid of the nubs. The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother. There will be no pictures of you and Willie May pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run, or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance. NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32 or report from 29 districts. The revolution will not be televised. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay. There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process. There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving For just the proper occasion. Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and women will not care if Dick finally gets down with Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day. The revolution will not be televised. There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news and no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose. The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb, Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be right back after a message bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people. You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better with Coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat. The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised. The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live. Poet and spoken word musician Gil Scott-Heron passed away on Friday, May 27, 2011 at the age of 62. Scott-Heron, a classical rapper, is most widely known for his 1970 poem/song, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Glass Consciousness
Brinda Bose & Prasanta Chakravarty The self-reflexive Stephane Mallarme, acutely aware of the limitations of language, acknowledges in his essay ‘Bucolique’ the inability of language to contain grandeur. Language cannot and should not accommodate what lies beyond its grasp, he says. But writing necessitates a human language to be in cooperation with the inexpressible. The moment the poet realizes that his expressions are not sufficiently elevated for his purpose, his language collapses into denial. Hence, his frequent refuge in inspiration. Surely, however, language can create its own grandeur if it concedes the ineffability of expressing the fleeting: smells, colors, a woman’s features, nature and sound? Mallarme is, thus, explorative in his blancs, emphasizing the white spaces surrounding the poem: the image disintegrates, but so does the syntax which once sustained it. The idea of the inexpressible, that words are inadequate in expressing the sublimity of a divine nature, reflects a continuance of two traditions: the rhetorical-literary and the mystical-religious. The first attests to the speaker’s self-confessed inadequacy or modesty or is employed to laud a creature who is indescribable: Dante exploits this device, especially in his praise of Beatrice. The mystical-religious tradition of ineffability, on the other hand, relies on the belief that God exists beyond the limits of human reason and language. This ‘inexpressibility topos,’ as Ernst Robert Curtius calls it in his majestic work European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, has made a grand return in affirming a new formalism in literary scholarship. The expressive material is self-sufficient, aver Isobel Armstrong in The Radical Aesthetic and Sianne Ngai in Categories of the Aesthetic; writing about ‘air’ in Victorian Poetry in an earlier work, Armstrong says: “An air is a song and by association it is that which is breathed out, exhaled or expressed as breath, an expiration; and by further association it can be that which is breathed in, literally an ‘influence’, a flowing in, the air of the environment which sustains life; inspiration, a breathing in. All these meanings are present in the elegy, as perfume, breezes, breath or sighs…” In The Radical Aesthetic, Armstrong tarries with a judicious anxiety somewhere in the broken middle between world and word, with a certain rhetoric of approximation and curtailment, a cordon sanitaire that the critical act seems sometimes to want to throw around its object of analysis. But there is an impulse to strive for that inexpressible form: in her remarkable investigation of the cultural history of glass, for instance. This is before the biographical ineffability of cultural artefacts such as cod, nutmeg, salt, dust, TB and the colour mauve became fashionable. Her work on glass implies the active participation of the substance itself in forming consciousness, what she evocatively calls ‘glass consciousness,’ a phrase which is meant to evoke not just heightened awareness and sensitivity to glass in the new culture of lustre and transparency that burgeoned in the nineteenth century, but a kind of thought and awareness into which vitreous form and organisation have entered and begun to operate. In place of struggle, there is now regulated play. She wants us to be able to see the many ways in which experience is art-work, even as it furnishes raw material for works of art: a notion of the aesthetic which must find a way of having to do with dreams, dancing and gunfire as well as odes and sculptures. The aesthetic will be preserved as the name of the form-giving propensity lifted up to its highest form. As such, it will be what ‘quite simply keeps us alive.’ The aesthetic holds play and disintegration together in Armstrong, which is a return to the cognitive purchase of the inexpressible. In order to re-imagine the inexpressible topos, Sianne Ngai rotates the repertoire of aesthetic categories to contemporize them, in both her earlier work Ugly Feelings and this new one. She is interested in the petite bon¬heur – the charmingly irrelevant and infectious. In Our Aesthetic Categories, Ngai offers us a quotidian triad of aesthetic categories: the zany, the interesting, and the cute – categories which are supposedly marginal to historical accounts of postmodernism as well as to canonical aesthetic theory. Ngai argues that the idea of ‘the aesthetic’ has been transformed by the performance-driven, information-saturated, networked, hyper-commodified world of late capitalism, when im¬material labor is being increasingly aestheticized. The zany, the cute, and the interesting correspond to major representational modes: comedy, in the case of zaniness; romance, in cuteness; realism, in interesting. It is an aesthetic disclosing a surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings – ranging from tenderness to aggression – which we harbour toward ostensibly subordinate and unthreat¬ening commodities. If cute is cool, then zany is its obverse: hot. Hot under the collar, hot and bothered, hot to trot. Naturally hot is the aesthetic unit that shares the space of performance: dance, theatre, happenings, television, film. Ngai is absolutely aware of the inconsequentiality and ‘mereness’ of her formulations, but it is this precise intangibility – the ‘inexpressibility topos’ – that she returns to by making these fleeting moments deeply aesthetic, as opposed to the classical aesthetic categories of the beautiful or the sublime. When reverence for the aesthetic as such, though still advocated by many, no longer seems self-evidently desirable or definable, Ngai makes fun and unfun, interest and boredom, tenderness and aggression part of her new aesthetic repertoire. What does it mean to work with a poetics of air and odour, a philosophy of tremor – that is, to think about the inexpressible once again for our times? Previously blind and insensate material forms prove to be alive with information for the new formalists – who have arrived after theory, as it were. How, they ask, will an aesthetics founded upon the laborious, informing confrontations of the material and the mental, help us to manoeuvre life in which the prerogatives of living seem so little assured and in which material processes, from viruses to hurricanes, have come to seem so unnervingly vivacious? It is through
The City and the Writer: In Bogota with Gonzalo Marquez Cristo
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Bogotá as you feel/see it? I have always believed that Bogotá is a city afflicted by rain, a troubled widow under the storm, a red city without a sky, and since I was a child I was faced with its most devious, and also its most feverish poetic possibilities. The Colombian capital is a city of 8 million people where chaos is opposed to a great life force that keeps you from succumbing. One graffiti emblematic of the seventies, written by an anonymous hand in a salsa bar said: “el país se derrumba y nosotros de rumba” (The country is falling apart and we are celebrating).But it is this playful and delirious state founded by the nocturnal exorcism of dance and celebration that collectively frees the harsh reality of a people who have not solved the most basic experiential problems. Bogotá, therefore, to many sensitive people, is a city built during the night and destroyed with the wound of dawn. What is your most heartbreaking memory in this city? Working as a journalist in November 1985, I covered the developments on the ground when the M-19 guerrilla group took over the Palace of Justice. It ended with a bloody military response and more than a hundred dead and several disappeared. I remember the sound of the guns, since I was five blocks from the Plaza de Bolívar, which was where the military with the backing of then President Belisario Betancur, undertook the recapture of the building which ended in the massacre. Today, 25 years later, finally television images have been shown of guerrillas and civilians who came out of the Palace of Justice alive only, heinously, to be killed by the military in the days that followed. Despite all those who fight against “memoricide,” those responsible for that grim day have not been convicted. What is the most extraordinary detail, one that goes unnoticed by most, of the city? Since the work of the great architect, Rogelio Salmona (1927-2007), who built the iconic Torres del Parque at the end of the sixties, where the use of exposed brick achieved its consecration, the color of the city began to change, and in just three decades it has become a red city, which its inhabitants barely notice submerged as they are in this familiar landscape. His most important designs such as the Centro Cultural Gabriel García Márquez and the Biblioteca Virgilio Barco aremasterworks—with their bare architectural technique, which has produced many imitators. They are simply majestic. What writer(s) from here should we read? Antonio Caballero, Luis Fayad, Evelio Rosero and Mauricio Contreras Hernández, who in some of their works have pursued the same “spirit of place” with which Lawrence Durrell was obsessed while working on Alexandria and Avignon. This extraordinary English novelist declares in one of his texts that if Paris disappeared and were re-founded by the Cossacks or the Mongols a couple of centuries later, someone would write In Search of Lost Time. With this, I mean to say that, the landscape determines our dreams and sometimes shapes our existence. Is there a place here you return to often? When traveling by cable car to Monserrate, Bogotá, the guardian mountain, you can appreciate the city in all its dimensions and take heed of the voracity of its progress, the successes and failures of the giant hive that we have created without the least bit of precaution. From this towering height, I like to observe the path the sun uses—when wounded and in retreat—to escape. Also, I return frequently to the Quinta de Bolivar, the house where the Liberator loved his Manuelita, (Manuelita Sáenz was the mistress of Simon Bolivar, who freed what currently is Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, from the Spanish in the 19th century), and where you can rest beneath the same shade that covered him, offered by those beautiful, hundreds-of-years-old trees. I return to the Gold Museum where the refined technique of pre-Colombian artisans produced pieces that practically levitate. The colonial barrio of La Candelaria is filled with secret places challenging the flight of time—the Botero Museum, contains a hundred paintings by great artists which were part of the master’s private collection of Antioquia and donated to Bogotá in the year 2000, like “Women of Gallant Life” by Paul Delvaux, among many others. Is there an iconic literary place we should know? Silva’s Poetry House, where the poet José Asunción, one of the pioneers of Modernism in 1896 committed suicide, shot in the heart. The Goce Pagano, the first salsa bar Bogotá had, and which, because of the marginal status of the music at the time, was frequented by prostitutes, thieves, and the rebel writers of the seventies and eighties. Are there hidden cities within this city that have intrigued or seduced you? All cities have two faces, a visible one and another, invisible one, which is always the more dazzling. The work of the poet is to make visible the invisible. Sometimes I wonder if the work of the lover or of the mystic is not the opposite: making invisible the visible, since why else would the body of the beloved sometimes be made of smoke or mist? Where does passion live here? Every city is a hieroglyphic sign, an anagram of sensations, a maze of affection and love, and so memory dances in the city streets in an unpredictable way, attacking you in the street corners and theaters, embodied in bars in late hours—and that is where life seems to exist for a moment. What is the title of one of your poems about Bogotá and what inspired it exactly? “The Incandescent Shadow” is the title of a long poem I wrote to exorcise my hometown. This culminating text