Sheesha Ghat
Naiyar Masud [HUG is grateful to author Anil Menon for providing us with this version of the story] Sad mauj raa ze raftan-e khud muztrib kunad Mauje keh bar-kinaar ravad az miyaan-e maa Each wave that strikes out to embrace the shore Leaves a hundred more perturbed by its departure —Naziri Nishapuri And with such luck and loss I shall content myself Till tides of turning time may toss Such fishers on the shelf —George Gascoigne After keeping me with him with the greatest of love for eight years, my foster father was finally forced to find another place for me. It was not his fault, nor was it mine. He had believed, as had I, that my stuttering would stop after a few days of relaxation with him, but neither he nor I expected that the people here would turn me into a sideshow, the way they do a madman. In the bazaars, people listened to my words with a greater curiosity than they exhibited toward others, and whether what I said was funny or not, they always laughed. Within a few days my situation worsened so drastically that when I tried to say anything at all, not only in the bazaar but even at home, the words collided with my teeth and lips and palate and bounced back the way waves retreat on touching shore. In the end, I would get so tongue-tied that the veins in my neck would swell and a terrible pressure would invade my throat and chest, leaving me breathless and threatening to suffocate me. I would pant, forced to leave my sentence incomplete, then start all over again after I had recovered my breath. At this my foster father would scold me, “You’ve said that. I heard you. Now go on.” If he ever scolded me, it was over this. But my problem was that I couldn’t begin my account from the middle. Sometimes he would listen to me patiently and at others he would lift his hand and say, “All right, you may stop.” But if I couldn’t begin my account from the middle, I couldn’t leave it unfinished, either. I would grow agitated. Finally he would walk away, leaving me still stuttering, talking to myself. If anyone had seen me, I’d have been thought insane. I was also fond of wandering through the bazaars, and enjoyed sitting there among the groups of people. Though I could not utter what I had to say comprehensibly, I made up for this by listening closely to what others said and repeating it in my mind. Sometimes I felt uncomfortable, yet I was happy enough, because the people there didn’t dislike me, and above all my foster father held me dear and looked after my every need. For the last few days, though, he had seemed worried. He had begun talking to me for long stretches of time, a new development. He would come up with questions to ask me that required a long answer, and then listen attentively without interrupting me. When I’d tire and begin to pant, he would wait for me to finish what I was saying, and when I resumed my account he would listen with the same concentration. I’d think he was about to scold me, and my tongue would start to tie itself in knots, but he would just gaze at me, saying nothing. After only three days my tongue began to feel as if it were unknotting a bit. It was as if a weight were being lifted from my chest, and I began to dream of the day when I would be able to speak as others did, with ease and clarity. I began collecting in my heart all the things I had wanted to share with others. But on the fourth day, father called me over and had me sit very close to him. For a long time his talk rambled aimlessly, then he fell silent. I waited for him to pose one of his questions, but he suddenly said, “Your new mother is arriving the day after tomorrow.” Seeing the joy begin to dawn on my face, he grew troubled, then said slowly, “She’ll go crazy if she hears you speak. She’ll die.” The next day my luggage was all packed. Before I could ask any questions, my father took my hand and said, “Let’s go.” *** He didn’t say a word to me during the journey. But on our way, he told a man who chanced to inquire, “Jahaz has asked for him.” Then they both started talking about Jahaz. I remembered Jahaz, too. When I had first come to live with father, Jahaz earned his bread by performing clownish imitations at fairs and bazaars. He would wear a small pink sail tied to his back—perhaps that’s why his name became Jahaz, “ship,” or perhaps he wore the sail because his name was Jahaz. The pink sail would billow when the wind blew hard and Jahaz would seem to be moving forward under its power. He could mimic to perfection a ship caught in a storm. We would be convinced that angry winds, raging waves, and fast-spinning whirlpools were bent on sinking the ship. The sounds of the wind howling, the waves slapping, the whirlpool’s ringing emptiness, even the sails fluttering, would emerge distinctly from the mimic’s mouth; finally, the “ship” would sink. This routine was very popular with the children and the older boys, but was performed only when the wind was high. If the wind halted, however, the young spectators were even more delighted, and called out: “Tobacco, tobacco!” I had never seen anyone smoke tobacco the way Jahaz did. He usevery kind of tobacco, in every way it was possible to smoke it, and when the air was still he would perform such astounding tricks with clouds of smoke that the spectators couldn’t believe their eyes. After producing several smoke rings, he would take a step
In Defense of Poetry
Marjorie Perloff One of the most common genres in writing about academia today is the epitaph for the humanities. In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert Weisbuch–an English professor at the University of Michigan and president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation–declares: Today’s consensus about the state of the humanities–it’s bad, it’s getting worse, and no one is doing much about it–is supported by dismal facts. The percentage of undergraduates majoring in humanities fields has been halved over the past three decades. Financing for faculty research has decreased. The salary gap between full-time scholars in the humanities and in other fields has widened, and more and more humanists are employed part time and paid ridiculously low salaries…. As doctoral programs in the humanities proliferate irresponsibly, turning out more and more graduates who cannot find jobs, the waste of human talent becomes enormous, intolerable. More broadly, the humanities, like the liberal arts generally, appear far less surely at the center of higher education than they once did. We have lost the respect of our colleagues in other fields, as well as the attention of an intelligent public. The action is elsewhere. We are living through a time when outrage with the newfangled in the humanities–with deconstruction or Marxism or whatever–has become plain lack of interest. No one’s even angry with us now, just bored.1 Devastating as that last comment is, it’s all too accurate. Even the current boom in the economy cannot accommodate the best of our new humanities Ph.Ds. Weisbuch does also offer some “solutions” (he calls them “Six Proposals to Revive the Humanities”): (1) gather data on our departments, finding out where our graduates get jobs so as to insure better planning; (2) practice “doctoral birth control,” using Draconian means to cut down the number of entering graduate students; (3) “reclaim the curriculum” by having all courses taught by full-time faculty members rather than adjuncts; (4) “create jobs beyond academe for humanities graduates”; (5) “redesign graduate programs so as to accommodate the new community college market, where teaching skills are more important than scholarly expertise”; and (6) “become newly public”–that is, to make better contacts with the so-called outside world. 2 The trouble with such practical solutions is that they assume that we humanists have a clear sense of what the humanities do and what makes them valuable–that we simply need to convince those crass others, whether within the university or outside its walls, that they really need us. But that assumption is untrue. What are the humanities? Consider the answer provided on the web site of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH): What are the Humanities? The humanities are not any one thing. They are all around us and evident in our daily lives. When you visit an exhibition on “The Many Realms of King Arthur” at your local library, that is the humanities. When you read the diary of a seventeenth-century New England midwife, that is the humanities. When you watch an episode of The Civil War, that is the humanities too. What a wonderful justification, this last, for being a couch potato! And this vacuous statement is not an aberration. Just look up the “National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965,” which brought the NEH and NEA into being: 1. “The arts and humanities belong to all the people of the United States.” What can “belong” possibly mean here? I as citizen do not “own” specific art works and philosophical treatises the way I might own stock or real estate. And how does this compare to the sciences? Does microbiology–or protein chemistry–”belong” to all the people of the United States? 2. “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.” At best, this statement is blandly patronizing. Imagine someone claiming that “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to the humanities alone, but must give full value and support to those great branches of intellectual activity, the sciences and social sciences”? But further: the assertion that arts and humanities somehow make us better persons and citizens is, at best, implausible. Hitler, let’s remember, was so enraptured by Wagner that he attended performances of Lohengrin at the Vienna Opera House ten times in 1908. 3. “The arts and the humanities reflect the high place accorded by the American people to the nation’s rich cultural heritage and to the fostering of mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups.” Do the arts and humanities foster diversity? I know of no evidence for this proposition. Heidegger’s essays on Hölderlin are generally held to be classics of twentieth-century philosophy and literature. They aim to define the poet’s unique genius, but the last thing they foster is “respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups.” But if the NEH’s claims for the humanities are, to say the least, questionable, they are also quite typical. At Stanford, where I teach, the official Bulletin contains this description: The School of Humanities and Sciences, with over 40 departments and interdepartmental degree programs, is the primary locus for the superior liberal arts education offered by Stanford University. Through exposure to the humanities, undergraduates study the ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual dimensions of the human experience, past and present, and so are prepared to make thoughtful and imaginative contributions to the culture of the future. The language used here is revealing. Whereas the social sciences (according to theBulletin) teach “theories and techniques for the analysis of specific societal issues,” and the “hard” sciences prepare students to become the “leaders” in our increasingly technological society, the humanities “expose” students to the “ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual dimensions of human experience.” Exposure is nice enough–but also perfectly dispensable when leadership and expertise are at stake. Indeed, the
Of Certain Dreams
Anchita Ghatak Shahid Smriti is a slum in Calcutta and we – the team from Parichiti – work there with women domestic workers and adolescent girls. The idea of working with girls is to get them to speak out and stand up for their rights. We now meet a group of 18 girls on Mondays and Wednesday every week. On Mondays, trainers from Kolkata Sanved work with the girls on techniques of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT). The idea of DMT is to enable participants understand the joy and power of physical exercise and experience the connectedness between the mind and the body. Different things happen on Wednesday. Maura Hurley of Shikshamitra and her assistant, Jahangir visit Shahid Smriti on alternate Wednesdays with a music system and a boxful of art and craft materials. The idea is to get the girls talking about their lives and also introduce new skills and ideas and have fun while we learn. Of the 18 girls we meet on a regular basis, all but one goes to school and they are between 12 and 18 years old. A few weeks ago, on a Wednesday evening, we had a discussion with a group of 8 girls on why it was important to go to school. “We go to school to learn so that we may realise our dreams,” said a 15 year old. “What are these dreams?” I asked. Two of the girls said that they would like to become police officers. “Why?” I asked. “Don’t you think people in slums have more to lose than gain from the police?” “The police are there to help people,” said Shivani. “We would like to be officers who help people, that is, do what they’re meant to do.” One girl said that being an IPS officer meant that she could do things for people. Quite impressed to find a young girl knowing about ‘IPS officers’ we asked what they knew about the IPS or Indian Police Service. A few of them said that they had heard about ‘IPS officers’ on TV. This was a time when Damayanti Sen, an IPS officer, then Joint Commissioner of the Detective Department, had been in the news for working to get justice for a woman who had complained of rape in what has now gained notoriety as the Park Street rape. The girls, very bright and lively, did not seem to have heard of Damayanti Sen. We learnt that these girls did not read newspapers regularly and neither were they in the habit of listening to the news on TV. We carried on the discussion about ‘dreams’, which focused on career plans that the girls had. It was exciting for us to note that none of the girls said she had no career plans. Two girls said that they wanted to become lawyers, some said they wanted to be teachers, one said that she wanted to become a nurse, another said a doctor. “I love dancing. I want to be a dancer and a teacher,” said 12 year old Puja Baidya, excitedly. In this discussion about the future, we touched on the topic of marriage – a threat, that we in Parichiti feel, hangs over girls in this country. Our experience tells us that despite the fact that the legal age for marriage of girls in India is 18 years, marriage before they attain legal majority is a reality for many girls in India, especially if they belong to poor families. The 2001 Census reported that the average age of marriage of females in India was 18.3 years, yet there is enough evidence to show that a large number of girls get married before they turn 18. The girls in Shahid Smriti said that they were not going to get married before they completed their education. They said that they knew that it was important to get proper education and training if they were to realise their dreams. They spoke of the efforts they were making to bring their friend, Pinky, back to school and books. Pinky is in Class X and had got married some time ago, maybe when she was 14 or 15, to her boyfriend. Her friends were explaining to her that she should continue living with her parents, go back to school and prepare for her Madhyamik exams. As I write this, Pinky is back in school and also participating with her friends in Parichiti activities. It is evident that girls in Shahid Smriti, like in most homes in India, irrespective of class, need an atmosphere that will enable them to speak frankly about sex, sexuality and marriage. A tolerance of sexual experimentation amongst young people will also go a long way in curbing a tendency to run away and get married the moment a young boy and a girl feel attracted to each other. However, all of us know that is easier said than done. The girls in Shahid Smriti are excited about the possibilities their engagement with Parichiti might bring. As we talked about career plans, the girls said that they had seen or met women who were teachers, nurses and doctors. They had never met women who were either lawyers or police officers. Also, they were not very sure what exactly being in certain professions entailed – for example, what was the difference between a doctor and a nurse, what did a lawyer do? We concluded the evening with the decision that Parichiti will organise women from different professions to come for discussions with schoolgoing girls from Shahid Smriti. The girls said that these sessions would enable them to plan their lives. —————————————– Anchita Ghatak is a development professional and a women’s rights activist. She works on issues of poverty, development and rights. She is the Secretary of Parichiti, an organisation working for the rights of marginalised women and girls, especially domestic workers. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Moral Economies of Wellbeing
Supriya Chaudhuri For reasons still unclear to me, I was asked to speak at a research workshop at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, on ‘Moral Economies of Wellbeing’. Neither a historian nor an economist, I was ill-equipped for the exercise. I undertook it in the belief that every individual, however unpracticed in the disciplines of the social sciences, should be possessed of an opinion as to what constitutes a moral economy and what is implied by well-being. It is a part of morality to think about these issues, though it may not add to general profit or wellbeing for me to hold forth on them. My reflections are partial and open to revision. The phrase ‘moral economy’, in the specific context of ‘the moral economy of the poor’, was put into circulation by E. P. Thompson in a famous essay published in Past and Present in 1971. As we know, it was immediately applied to a quite different, non-European setting by James C. Scott in his 1976 book The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), and it became one of the principal terms in a still-inconclusive debate about the motives of action in market- and non-market economies, as illustrated in a much-cited article by William Booth, ‘On the Idea of the Moral Economy’ (American Political Science Review, 88 (1994) 653-667). It is worth reminding ourselves, however, that the confidence with which Thompson used the phrase was bred of a conviction both that we would understand what he meant by it in his special historical instance, and what it might mean as a term in ethics. Twenty-one years later, at a conference in the University of Birmingham (1992: see E. P. Thompson in Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth, Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority, 2000) Thompson was unable to locate the origin of the term from his notes, but felt convinced that he had coined it as the opposite of ‘market economy’. Yet it had appeared long before, in the title of a book by the American philosopher Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy, published in 1909. Perry, who later came to be known for his support of the interest theory of value, offers in this early work a largely Aristotelian account of the moral organization of life, an ideal oikonomia based on ethical principles, and upon an idea of justice arising out of the reconciliation of the widest-possible range of interests. It may indeed be suggested that our theme today, the moral economy of wellbeing, is sited in the space between philosophy and economics, between Perry’s philosophical account of the good life, eudaimonia, and Thompson’s social-historical examination of the rationale for a form of economic action, the food riots of eighteenth-centuryEngland. It may be recalled that the controversy around Thompson’s article largely centred on his presumed hostility to the free-market doctrines of Adam Smith, the most important economic theorist of eighteenth-century England, and in fact it is this opposition, between moral economies and market economies, that has largely sustained the debate till the present day. Booth’s article on ‘The Idea of the Moral Economy’, for example, criticizes the notion of ‘embeddedness’ attributed to pre-market economies by Karl Polanyi (in The Great Transformation, 1944), and argues that the principles of contractual exchange in market economies have an equally embedded and moral character. Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness made much of the presumed network of rights and obligations in an agricultural economy where food production and food entitlement, for example, were linked. Booth argued that market economies also have an inbuilt structure of contractual obligations. What is at stake in much of this debate is a certain notion of distributive justice, of justice as fairness: which is why other sections of Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice than the one in your reading file (for example, the section on equality and liberty) might have been relevant to this problem. In this respect Sen’s idea of justice owes something to Rawls, whose pupil he was, but it is he who of all modern economic philosophers has attempted most consistently to reconcile justice with happiness. Justice requires, one might say, that a moral economy be directed towards, and be capable of achieving, wellbeing. I will begin by briefly considering some points in the discussion of justice in Book V of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1129b 3-5) that may have a bearing upon market economies. Aristotle is at this place talking about particular justice and injustice, that is, justice exercised as one virtue among others by individuals with respect to goods such as honour, money and safety. Aristotle makes it clear that in such cases, injustice (adikia) is rooted in greed, the desire to have more than others (pleonexia). If one knowingly contrives an unjust distribution out of a motive of gain, one is adikos and pleonektes, and a society ruled by greed and competitiveness is therefore likely to be an unjust society. Yet it as Bernard Williams notes (in Moral Luck, Cambridge UP 1981, 92-93), Aristotle does not sufficiently characterize pleonexia here: it is, we can see, not in itself a motive, but a product of desire for specific goods, such as honour or fame on the one hand, and money or property on the other. Williams finds Aristotle’s identification of injustice with pleonexia inadequate and wrong (‘a mistake, one which dogs Aristotle’s account’), but it is worth our asking whether this brief discussion does not point the way to a deeper understanding of justice as fairness, and of the distribution of goods as key to our perception of a just society. The point is relevant to a contrast between moral economies and market economies, though there is, regrettably, no universally accepted definition of the moral economy. If it is a system in which moral predispositions, norms and habits guide economic choices and behaviours, it could be argued (as by Russell Keat and Andrew Sayer) that