What Makes a Pamphlet?
Joad Raymond Though already venerable the word pamphlet prospered in the 1580s, as its meanings shifted and it entered into common use. In 1716 Myles Davies claimed it as ‘a true-born English Denison’, a native idiom, ‘of no longer a Date than that of the last Century, since ’tis almost certain its Pedigree can scarce be trac’d higher than the latter end of Queen Elizabeth’s Reign.’[i] Davies offered a range of meanings for the term, at the root of which was the small ‘stitch’d’ (not bound) book, tending to calumny or scandal. It was perhaps, he noted, etymologically related to Pan = all and I love: ‘signifying a thing belov’d by all: For a Pamphlet being of a small portable Bulk, and of no great Price, and of no great Difficulty, seems adapted for every one’s Understanding, for every one’s Reading, for every one’s Buying, and consequently becomes a fit Object and Subject of most People’s Choice, Capacity and Ability.’ The term first appeared in Anglo-Latin writing in the fourteenth century, and in English in the fifteenth. It derived from Pamphilus seu de Amore, a popular twelfth-century Latin amatory poem. Thence, with the diminutive ending –et, it became a familiar appellation for any small book. Following the spread of printing, the term began to specify a ‘separate’, a small item issued on its own, usually unbound, not substantial enough to constitute a volume by itself. In a minor usage the word described a collection of literary items, in poetry or prose, which were produced to be disposable rather than enduring. These were produced for the market of gentleman readers who sought entertainment or titillation. The printer’s prefatory epistle in George Gascoigne’s poetic anthology A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1579), referred to ‘the publication of these pleasant Pamphlets.’ Here pamphlets refers not to the poems themselves (Gascoigne writes: ‘I may not compare Pamphlets unto Poems’), but metonymically describes separates collected into a volume.[ii] This usage continued into the next century: Robert Anton, in Vices Anotimie Scourged and Corrected in New Satirs (1617) complained of ‘obsceane and shallow Poetry’ produced by and for the university graduate who ‘murders the Presse with fellonious Pamphlets stolne from the imperfections of their dearest friends’.[iii] During the 1580s the meaning of the word pamphlet coalesced with frequent use: it usually referred to a short, vernacular work, generally printed in quarto format, costing no more than a few pennies, of topical interest or engaged with social, political or ecclesiastical issues.[iv] By the 1590s it had found a range of uses: the noun ‘pamphleter’ (and later pamphleteer), the verb ‘to pamphlet’, ‘pamphletary’ meaning pertaining to pamphlets; attributive uses were subsequently coined, including ‘pamphlet Treaties’, ‘Pamphlet-Forms … Pamphlet-Subjects’, and ‘pamphlet war’.[v] These frequently carried pejorative overtones. Pamphlets were unreliable. A character in Henry Holland’s dialogue A Treatise Against Witchcraft (1590) complains that ‘many fabulous pampheletes are published, which give little light and lesse proofe’.[vi] Pamphlets were closely associated with slander or scurrility. This meaning has a discernible trajectory in the second half of the sixteenth century, and can be found in legal contexts. In 1559 Queen Elizabeth issued to the Court of High Commission, the supreme ecclesiastical court of the country, a set of recommendations and instructions regarding their duties. The fifty-first article of these Injunctions charged the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Bishop of London with responsibility for supervising the press: ‘And bycause many pampheletes, playes and balletes, be often times printed, wherein regard wold be had, that nothinge therin should be either heretical, sedicious, or unsemely for Christian eares: Her majestie likewise commaundeth, that no manner of person, shall enterprise to print any such, except the same be to him lycensed’.[vii] John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, was interrogated by the queen’s ministers in 1570; he had written a book, defending the honour and legitimacy of Mary Queen of Scots, entitled A Defence of the Honour of the Right Highe, Mightye and Noble Princesse (1569). Leslie justified himself, ‘that nothing was intended but a defence of her honour against so many blasphemous “treateis” and “pamflettis” as have been set abroad both in England and Scotland, which are printed at London …’[viii] In 1579 John Aylmer, who as Bishop of London bore responsibility for supervising the output of presses, wrote to secretary of state William Cecil, Lord Burghley: ‘I have founde out a presse of pryntynge with one [William] Carter, a very Lewd fellowe, who hath byne Dyvers tymes before in prison for printinge of Lewde pamphelettes.’[ix] In 1580, drafting an act to control ‘the licentious printing selling and uttering of unproffitable and hurtfull Inglishe bokes’, the lawyer William Lambarde spread his net wide to include ‘sundrie bookes, pamfletes, Poesies, ditties, songes, and other woorkes, and wrytinges, of many sortes and names serving … to let in a mayne Sea of wickednesse .. and to no small or sufferable wast[e] of the treasure of this Realme which is thearby consumed and spent in paper, being of it selfe a forrein and chargeable comoditie.’[x] In 1583 a group of stationers complained to the Privy Council that the lack of codified rights to ownership of texts (or ‘copy’) was undermining their profitability. A commission appointed to investigate the privilege warned the Council that, unless some remedial action was taken, ‘onelie pamflettes, trifles and vaine small toies shall be printed, and the great bokes of value and good for the Chirch and Realme shold not be done at all’.[xi] A 1588 royal proclamation, concerned with the import of catholic propaganda into England, requested that all officers should ‘inquire and search for all such bulls, transcripts, libels, books and pamphlets, and for all such persons whatsoever as shall bring in, publish, disperse, or utter any of the same.’[xii] By 1588 pamphlets were disreputable, potentially dangerous works that needed to be monitored. An obsolete, early-sixteenth-century term, ‘pamphelet’, meant a prostitute. This may have coloured the name for a cheap book, available to any in return for a small payment. John Taylor drew
North Indian Classical Music in the ‘Long’ 1940s
Amlan Das Gupta Two Photographs Let me start by telling you about two photographs (that I usually show), one taken probably in the early or mid- 1930s; the other in the early 1950s. The dates are approximate and based on internal evidence. The first photograph depicts a a fairly intimate group of male musicians and patrons: some of the figures are difficult to identify but the four musicians standing in the first row are Ustad Manji Khan and his father Ustad Alladiya Khan of Jaipur-Atrauli; Ustad Faiyaz Khan of Agra; and Ustad Abdul Karim Khan of Kirana. The presence of Alladiya, Faiyaz and Abdul Karim, undoubtedly the three most influential and versatile male vocalists of the early twentieth century in the same frame makes the photograph a rarity. The first three decades of the century, as we know, constitutes a period of intense uncertainty and experimentation. Artists grappled with altered conditions of patronage and performance, the presence of new technologies of sound recording and dissemination, new norms of pedagogy, and above all, changes in taste and audience expectation impel artists to engage with new strategies of self definition and stylistic innovation. Three of the most important vocal styles to achieve prominence were clearly the Jaipur-Atrauli, the Kirana and the Agra, setting the scene for the next half century or so. Legend has it of course that the relationship among the three was sometimes stormy, and in a condition of decaying patronage, occasionally riven with rivalry and prejudice. Even at this late date, one might speculate, the photograph expresses the power of the patron, whose august presence holds together these angular and brilliant artists in a formal and grave unity. A point about habitus if one likes: five figures have walking sticks, the invaluable accessory of wealthy civility: others make do with umbrellas. The second photograph, probably dates from the early 1950s (Ustad Vilayat Khan reportedly said he thought that was taken in 1952). Rajendra Prasad, the figure in the centre of this photograph, became president of India in 1950, and it captures in essence the world of North Indian music in early independent India. Most obviously, it is marked by absences. The “long” 1940s, if I could call it that, is most significantly marked by a number of deaths. First, the figures in the earlier photograph. Abdul Karim and Manji Khan dies in 1937; Alladiya in 1946; Faiyaz Khan in 1950. Other significant deaths around the same time are that of Ramkrishnabua Vaze in 1945; Abdul Wahid Khan of Kirana in 1949; and equally significantly, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande in 1936. The dazzling array of talent surrounding the symbol of the unified source of patronage, honour and reputation, is actually an attenuated one, marked by absence and erasure. There is no significant Agra or Kirana singer in the photograph: the single representative of Jaipur-Atrauli is Kesarbai. What the photograph prophetically suggests is the ascendancy of instrumental music in the post-independence decades: consider the second line of musicians: from the fourth figure on the left we have Keramatullah Khan, tabla; Radhikamohan Maitra, sarod; Ilyas Khan, sitar; Bismillah Khan, shehnai; Kishan Maharaj, tabla; Yususf Ali, sitar; Ravi Shankar, sitar, Ali Akbar sarod; Vilayat Khan, sitar. The seated figures in the front row are appropriately an older generation of artists: Allauddin Khan and Hafiz Ali; Omkarnath, Krishnarao and Anantamanohar Joshi; Mushtaq Husain and Nisar Husain, Burhanpurkarbua, Ahmedjan Thirakwa and Kanthe Maharaj. Another aspect to reflect upon would be the uneasy memory that the photograph bears of the jagged fissure caused in the musical community by Partition: a notable absence in the photograph is the sarangi maestro, Ustad Bundu Khan: absent too is Bade Ghulam Ali, who went over to Pakistan after independence, only to return in the 1950s. The single woman in the second photograph is appropriately Kesarbai, seated cosily next to Rajendrababu. Her unparallelled reputation as the great exponent of Alladiya Khan’s gayaki and standing in the musical world, make her an appropriate inclusion, but she also appears here as a single exclusion to the general prurience of the cultural policy of new state. This is, as far as I can tell, one of the earliest examples of a formal “group” photograph which has a woman artist in it: there are of course earlier examples of family groups, or tawayefs with their male accompanists. The significance of this inclusion is not difficult to judge. B V Keskar had famously laid down that “no one (woman) whose life was a public scandal would be patronized” by the radio and presumably in the wider world of state ceremonial. Women artists were sought to be recruited from music schools, or from “respectable” familiies. As a result the great bulk of women artists – who had kept, for instance, the gramophone industry going – were excluded from the radio. In point of fact, this system of screening was far less effective than one would have expected. Partly this was due to the general lack of interest in classical music among radio administrators: more importantly, at the local level, programme executives and station directors made and followed their own policies, with apparently little central interference. As a result, a number of woman artists were recorded in the 1940s and 1950s and some of these recordings still exist: the relatively longer formats make them a valuable supplement to the extant body of sound recordings. It would, I think, be more accurate to see this as an index of the popularity of woman artists and the popular demand for their music rather than a mark of special favour and generosity on part of the administrators. Thus though Kesarbai is silently coopted into the grand durbar of Hindustani shastriya sangeet, Mogubai, Laxmibai, Hirabai, Gangubai to say nothing of Rasoolan and Siddheswari do not figure in the photograph. It may well be that Kesarbai jibbed at their inclusion: reportedly, she gave up singing for radio because Gangubai had been given a National programme! Arrivals and Departures What I
Walking (an excerpt)
Henry David Thoreau I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great road—follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man. The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs–a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves. Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespueius, nor Columbus, nor therest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen. However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, me- thinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town. THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD Where they once dug for money, But never found any; Where sometimes Martial Miles Singly files, And Elijah Wood, I fear for no good: No other man, Save Elisha Dugan– O man of wild habits, Partridges and rabbits Who hast no cares Only to set snares, Who liv’st all alone, Close to the bone And where life is sweetest Constantly eatest. When the spring stirs my blood With the instinct to travel, I can get enough gravel On the Old Marlborough Road. Nobody repairs it, For nobody wears it; It is a living way, As the Christians say. Not many there be Who enter therein, Only the guests of the Irishman Quin. What is it, what is it But a direction out there, And the bare possibility Of going somewhere? Great guide-boards of stone, But travelers none; Cenotaphs of the towns Named on their crowns. It is worth going to see Where you might be. What king Did the thing, I am still wondering; Set up how or when, By what selectmen, Gourgas or Lee, Clark or Darby? They’re a great endeavor To be something forever; Blank tablets of stone, Where a traveler might groan, And in one sentence Grave all that is known Which another might read, In his extreme need. I know one or two Lines that would do, Literature that might stand All over the land Which a man could remember Till next December, And read again in the spring, After the thawing. If with fancy unfurled You leave your abode, You may go round the world By the Old Marlborough Road. At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the PUBLIC road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come. What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I
Force and Adoration: Ambedkar’s Maitri
Aishwary Kumar In his final work The Buddha and His Dhamma, Bhimrao Ambedkar returns frequently to the concept of maitri, which he most often renders, for the first time in his essay on Marx, as “fellowship”. “Maitri or fellowship towards all must never be abandoned”, he writes in “Buddha or Karl Marx”. “One owes it even to one’s enemy.” In deploying maitri in such a fashion, translating it neither as friendship nor fraternity, and finding its possibility in the actions of the soldier, bandit, magistrate, and even the executioner, the mature Ambedkar departs from the normative rendering of the concept in two ways. Firstly, he understands maitri categorically as that which refuses the foundational distinction between friendship and hostility. Maitri is a gesture that one makes towards the enemy; as such, it militantly exceeds the moral dictates of friendship and fidelity. In his final years, immersed into formulating a rigorously non-humanist and religious critique of religion, Ambedkar deepens the concept of maitri further, including in its ambit not merely the human but also the animal. “Maitri”, he claims in The Buddha and His Dhamma, “is extending fellow feeling to all beings, not only to one who is a friend but also to one who is a foe: not only to man but to all living beings.” Indeed, creaturely life, Ambedkar argues, is most proper to maitri precisely because the normative conception of love (karuna), which human beings express only towards their own species, excludes nonhumans. Maitri, on the other hand, makes both the adversary and animal its intimate subject. It is inclusive in a way that the Christian conception of love is not. Maitri too is religious and quotidian. Yet unlike love, which harbors despite its best intentions a sacrificial hierarchy at its source¾ in a remarkable and paradoxical neologism, Ambedkar calls religious love (bhakti), and the love for religion, “life-force”¾ maitri is anti-sovereignty and non-theological. Acts of sovereignty, manifest in the sovereign’s right to take life in the precisely name of keeping life sacred and safe, whose most violent instance is the death penalty, contaminates the ethical force of maitri. Even if it is marked by an irreducible religiosity, then, maitri resists the pernicious onto-theological alliance between religion and sovereignty. It does not take life in the name of keeping life unscathed. Nor does it give life in the name of charity or pardon. Instead, maitri gives life, even to the enemy combatant, in the name of absolute equality, in the name of forgiveness that refuses to be identified as such. It is this religion without religion that Ambedkar thinks when he recovers the encounter between the Buddha and the dreaded bandit Angulimala in his masterwork. In that encounter, what converts the violent bandit is neither the sudden dawning of guilt upon him nor his momentary exposure to divine luminescence. What converts him instead is the truth manifest in the figure of the Buddha himself. Only this “love of truth” founds the empirical ground of an egalitarian faith and establishes another mode of belief and adoration, one that exceeds both the religious and humanist conceptions of love. Hence Ambedkar’s perennial dissatisfaction with love, affirmed again in The Buddha and His Dhamma, “Love is not enough. What is required is maitri.” Perhaps the proper rendering of what the mature Ambedkar calls maitri, then, is neither fraternity nor friendship, even though he alludes to both throughout the 1940s and the 1950s, but rather adoration; an immeasurable gift of belief and compassion (mudita) across the abyss of species difference. What does this radical reconceptualization of love, this forceful affirmation of life as such, gives us most to think? What might a “religion without religion”, which would, by its very name, also be a religion profoundly aware of its own ineluctable complicity with force and mastery, call forth? In trying to recover Ambedkar’s moral thinking from normative and humanist histories of equality, my intention here is to simply recall that what is living, what exists, and most ontologically, what is, for Ambedkar, is not that which is same but rather that which is wholly other, wholly unequal, and above all, wholly mortal. In this politicization of finitude, this foregrounding of the knowledge of impermanence (sunnyata), Ambedkar does not valorize death or sacrifice in the manner of a satyagrahi, even though he does not renounce the imperative of war and “general mobilization” either. Instead, he recovers in the consciousness of finitude the possibility of an unconditional and collective sacrifice of interest; a sacrifice from which equality amongst mortals might emerge. Thus, in Annihilation of Caste (1936), two decades before his masterwork, and right in the midst of his critique of the antidemocratic structure of Plato’s republic, Ambedkar had already called equality a responsibility towards the “incommensurable”; a responsibility heterogeneous to calculation, substitution, and measure. A responsibility, in other words, that mobilizes force- and what is annihilation (ucched) if not a call to force- in the name of absolute singularity, in the name of the unequal’s irreproducible and each time unique birth and death.[1] It is on this affirmation of life amidst life’s impermanence that the mature Ambedkar’s ahimsaic adoration would come to hinge. In this paper, I offer an archeology of this adoration, of Ambedkar’s radical attempt to formulate the conditions of a love proper and adequate to politics. I will not trace the infinite variations in which this excessive love appears in his itinerary, in neologisms such as “love of truth”, “love of politics”, and so on. I will only attempt, in a necessarily delimited fashion, to follow the rhythms and vicissitudes of this adoration, this egalitarian excess, that the mature Ambedkar eventually calls maitri. Mastery and Measure How does the late recovery of adoration (maitri) turn the thread of Ambedkar’s enduring thinking about force? Does the move away from sovereignty lead to its attenuation? Or is maitri itself the maturation of that militant critique of force that had begun to take shape as early as Ambedkar’s Columbia University seminars in the