London: What Cities Tell Late at Night
Akhil Katyal During late evenings, just before the cemetery closed for the public, you could always notice guys cruising each other. Often returning home on a bus, if you took the fun ‘long-cut’ through Abney Park, you could have guys ask you local addresses as very improbable conversation starters. Imagine being asked by someone for ‘146 Manor Road’ when he is sitting on a bench bang in the middle of a cemetery with no particular hurry to go anywhere. All this was far too exciting for a place, whose founders had after all, in their long train of inspirations, taken their cue from the Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith’s dreary pastoralism in his 1770 ‘The Deserted Village’. A few years back during my Lit Hons years in Delhi, I had suffered his ‘Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain / where health and plenty,’ he fantasized, had ‘cheered the laboring swain’. Those who set up the cemetery in Massachusetts, model for Abney Park behind my house, had very consciously cited Goldsmith’s poem in its architecture, flora and landscaping. Now in a strange turn, my room window looked onto Goldsmith’s dreamland, twice-removed. At nights, I heard its many birds and a rare guy or two who must have jumped the gates to get in. During those nights when I called my friends, I joked about living next to a cemetery and laughed about my own room with a view. Over the next two years, I had moved to the inner city Kings Cross. Although it is synonymous with its two arterial rail stations, till the late 80s it had also been ‘notorious’ as a run down red light district, as a place where it was very easy to get drugs and as a site where the British pop scene had thrived in the now defunct 80s clubs. Till large scale regeneration projects began to give a face-lift to Kings Cross, and litter it with a boring office architecture, it had a look of a post-industrial district, with vacant lots, disused goods and redistribution yards, some social housing and obsolete tube stations. Not for very long now, if you walk north of the station, you can very easily notice the imprint of the second world war, of a city that was oncebombed out. That is now rapidly changing. In its revamp mode for the 2012 Olympics, London is a paradise for the developers’ lobby. Billions of pounds are being invested to make the semi-derelict parts of Kings Cross into a commissioned sort of haven for mainstream culture and commerce, introducing tens of new streets and squares, pushing for a well-packaged vision of an affluent urbanness. An insular, instant city is being culled out of a haphazard history of dereliction, poverty and cultural experiment in Kings Cross. The last set of my late night walks in this city take place in this fast transforming neighborhood, mostly in the parts immediately north of the two stations. They take me past this specific landscape of London that is now disappearing in a city poised on the verge of a mega-budgeted sports event. A sort of event that even as it inspires a superficial cover of a very old kind of nationalism in its host nations, even as it pushes obscure sports and athletes into limelight, what it really does and depends on, especially since the mid-70s, is activating a very global circuit of corporate finance, of high-end property developers and of international broadcasters fighting over television rights. The games themselves pose as a national crisis-point, and policies and public expenditure that any other time would not go uncontested, are steamrolled in a rush of preparation. They become a rallying point for a very untimely national pride. And cause displacement among poorer communities, ejects squatters, have a questionable impact on sports among the lower-class youth and spend outrageous amounts of public money on projects whose benefits rarely trickle down below the developers lobby, the well-advertized sponsors and those few who can afford the white elephants after the games. My last set of night-walks happen in a city that is itself dream-walking into this giant spectacle of the Olympics. This often takes me along the course of the inner city Regents Canal, about two hundred years old, whose waters, long obsolete now for ferrying goods after railways and lorries, are used as a coolant for the high voltage electricity cables that run alongside it and power the inner city. The canal meanders through the heart of Kings Cross’s regeneration project, with the construction sounds now spilling over into the several moored houseboats. People jog or cycle along the path till late in the evening, avoiding it at night for fear of mugging. It was on this particular path, on an early June night this year, that I had noticed a rough-sleeper using a plastic sheet, probably the material of some publicity banner, as a blanket. Her sheet had a large imprint of that spaced-out 2012 Olympic logo on it. Its raw lines and colours had settled in the shape of the sleeping body, moving slightly with her breathing. For the longest time, I had thought that the cities look their most beautiful at night, peaking at dawn. Lately, it has begun to look like that during nights our cities become more difficult, more agitated. Night time isolates the pressure-points of the city, where it is hurting the most. And just before dawn, it seems, it poses these starkest challenges to us. Akhil Katyal is a poet and writer from Delhi, now working from London. He is also finishing his doctoral work at S.O.A.S., UK. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Sputnik in Russian Cultural History
Ethan Pollock Sputnik sent shockwaves through the United States and around the world, but it did not have to be that way. Rocket scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain had hoped to launch an artificial satellite at some point during 1957 or 1958 as part of an internationally coordinated programme to study the earth and upper atmosphere. They also knew that the Soviet Union was capable of being the first. When the President of the US National Academy of Sciences sent a congratulatory letter to the head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, calling Sputnik “a brilliant contribution to the furtherance of science for which scientists everywhere will be grateful”, he was reflecting enthusiasm for what many saw as an international breakthrough, not a particular nation’s chance to gloat. Even the Soviet propaganda machine seems to have played down its significance. Pravda’s announcement of the launch was relatively mild, below the fold, and emphasized basic technical facts. Above the fold? An article titled “Preparation for Winter is an Urgent Task”. These even-handed assessments of Sputnik’s significance did not take into account the symbolic benefits to the Soviet Union of having beaten the US to the punch. Those who saw Sputnik in the context of Cold War competition, and who played up the military threat posed by the Soviet breakthrough, found a storyline with much greater staying power. The nuclear physicist and weapons designer Edward Teller warned on national television that “The US has lost a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor”. Newsweek added that “man’s greatest technological triumph since the atom bomb [has been accomplished by] the controlled scientists of a despotic state”. The Soviet press soon caught the wave. Almost a week after the launch, Pravda declared Sputnik “A Great Victory in the Global Competition with Capitalism”. As the first draft of history, such accounts established a number of claims about Sputnik that have gone practically unchallenged since 1957. Almost all analysts have accepted that Sputnik was an accomplishment of centralized science, of Marxism-Leninism’s technological utopianism, and of an educational system that stressed applied science and practical knowledge in service to the state. Until now. Asif A. Siddiqi, the foremost scholar of the Soviet space programme writing in English, has set out to revise this history. Taking full advantage of the copious archival and published material made accessible since the 1990s, he argues, in The Red Rockets’ Glare, that Sputnik’s origins must be understood in the context of Russian cultural history and the informal networks of space enthusiasts formed long before 1917. The Cold War was the setting for Sputnik’s launch, but it does little to illuminate its origins. In Siddiqi’s interpretation, fantasy is intertwined with technology, while mysticism and public fascination with space are more central than Marxism. The result is a book that forces a reconsideration not just of Sputnik, but of the broader categories of Soviet science and socialist science that dominated professional scholarship on both sides of the Iron Curtain during much of the Cold War and beyond. Siddiqi begins by showing the ways in which popular science, science fiction, scientific societies and independent publishers contributed to a large, decentralized preoccupation with space travel and to some key technological breakthroughs. The space fad continued through the 1920s, even though the Soviet state showed no particular interest in the topic. Yakov Perelman and Nikolai Rynin, for instance, published hundreds of easily accessible books and articles on space travel before and after 1917. Their enthusiasm shaped popular interest in the cosmos more than any official ideological endorsement. Siddiqi is particularly strong when untangling the various legends surrounding Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the “patriarch” of Soviet cosmonautics, who in 1903 mathematically showed that space flight was possible using liquid propellants. According to almost all previous accounts, Tsiolkovsky was ignored until 1917, when the Bolsheviks recognized the importance of his work, honoured him with membership in the Socialist Academy, and then offered him a lifetime pension in 1921. He has stood at the heart of attempts to show that the Soviet state had a far-sighted understanding and natural ideological affinity for space research. But Siddiqi painstakingly and convincingly reveals that despite the outward appearance of official interest, Tsiolkovsky struggled for recognition, received little or no financial support from the State, and even suffered from physical deprivation in the 1920s. In essence, his fanciful and mystical musings made him persona non grata to the established Soviet scientific community; instead, he emerged as a hero in unofficial circles. For Siddiqi, the significance of what happened in the 1920s – and the importance of Tsiolkovsky for the Soviet space programme – has less to do with technological advance or the establishment of state priorities than with the deep public interest in space reflected and amplified by artists, writers and filmmakers. Siddiqi shows, for example, how Yakov Protazanov’s film Aelita (1924), based on Alexei Tolstoy’s science-fiction novel of the same name, about a trip to Mars, gained great popularity in part for its depiction of the technologies of space travel. At the time, most scientists – and the State – dismissed space flight as the naive fantasies of the uninformed, leaving the field to marginal scientific actors and those with no formal education in the natural sciences. Only in the 1930s, when the Cultural Revolution ushered in official anti-elitism and the search for home-grown Russian heroes, did Tsiolkovsky’s outsider status and autodidactic background make him an ideal candidate for Soviet hagiography. Even then, his scientific contributions were publicly praised but privately denigrated – none of his countless designs for airships was ever built. His more utopian ideas were even more out of step with the Party’s renewed emphasis on practical work and the immediate construction of socialism. Tsiolkovsky became a national hero just as the enthusiasm for space he had helped create fell victim to an expanding state and party. This shift has obscured a point that Siddiqi does not want us to miss: “the modern rocket with its new
Ousted from your Poplars
Jack Mapanje The Seashells of Bridlington North Beach (for Mercy Angela) She hated anything caged, fish particularly, Fish caged in glass boxes, ponds, whatever; ‘Reminds me of prisons and slavery,’ she said; So, when first she caught the vast green view of Bridlington North Beach shimmering that English Summer day, she greeted the sight like A Sahara girl on parched feet, cupping, cupping, Cupping the water madly, laundering her palms, Giggling and laughing, then rubbing the hands On her skirt, she threw her bottom on the sandy Beach and let the sea breathe in and out on her As she relaxed her crossed legs – ‘Free at last!’ She announced to the beach crowds oblivious; And as the seascape rallied and vanished at her Feet, she mapped her world, ‘The Netherlands We visited must be here; Norway, Sweden there; Beyond that Russia!’ Then gathering more seashells And selecting them one by one, she turned To him, ‘Do you remember eating porridge from Beach shells once?’ He nodded, smiling at another Memory of the African lakes they were forced to Abandon. ‘Someday, perhaps I’ll take that home To celebrate!’ She said staring into the deep sea. Today, her egg-like pebbles, her pearls of seashells Still sparkle at the windowsill; her wishes still ring, ‘Change regularly the water in the receptacles to Keep the pebbles and seashell shinning – you’ll See, it’s a lot healthier than feeding caged fish!’ ********************* After Celebrating our Asylum Stories at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds So, define her separately, She is not just another Castaway washed up your Rough seas like driftwood, It’s the nameless battles Your sages burdened on her People that broke her back; Define him differently, He is not another squirrel Ousted from your poplars, It’s the endless cyclones, Earthquakes, volcanoes, Floods, mud and dust that Drafted him here; define Them warmly, how could Your economic émigré queue At your job centres day after Day? If you must define us Gently, how do you hope To see the tales we bear When you refuse to hear The whispers we share? ********************************** Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Pipe Still Puffing (Ten Years On) Yesterday, I stopped at another Shell petrol station and recalled how you’d have loved to puff from your pipe there, for your Ogoni people and land; I did not, of course, stop to fill up with petrol, definitely not! I stopped merely to have a good pee, as promised I would when they got you executed. Today, I thought, well, why don’t we treasure the moment we once shared? *************************************** Jack Mapanje , from Malawi, currently teaching Creative writing at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, is the author of 5 collections of poetry, the editor of several more, and the recipient of awards including the Rotterdam Poetry International Award and the African Literature Association (USA) Fonlon-Nichols Award. He studied in England, before returning to Malawi, where he became the Head of Department of English, University of Malawi at Chancellor College, a position he held until his book Of Chameleons and Gods was banned and he was incarcerated for almost four years as a political prisoner in Mikuyu prison. # Copyright © Fonthouse Ltd. and respective copyright owners. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
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