Good Reasons (HUG Fiction)
Anil Menon Imaginative resistance. I’d heard the chilly phrase for the first time, just a short while ago, in one of New York Public library’s cavernous lecture rooms. Yet it already feels familiar, as if the phrase had always been in my possession. The speaker had been a philosopher of literature from Harvard, one Doctor Tamar Szabo Gendler. Imaginative resistance, she said, was the unwillingness of readers to imagine morally deviant fictional worlds. I had been so busy wondering if readers could be, would be, so perverse, I almost didn’t recognize the man in the elegant overcoat outside Macy’s on 34th. ‘Humbert!’ ‘Indeed,’ says Humbert Humbert, smiling in that cautious way he has. ‘Coffee?’ He doesn’t introduce his young companion. The look they exchange is apparently an instruction, because she disappears into Macy’s. There is something about her mouth’s appealing pout that invokes clenched fists and crumpled white sheets. Over coffee, I tell him about fiction and imaginative resistance. ‘Sounds like a medical term,’ says Humbert, ‘an absolution for cures that fail to cure.’ ‘Dr. Gendler’s given a name to one of Hume’s puzzles. Hume claimed that a story can do a great many things, but it cannot persuade a reader that an immoral fictional world is right. It seems there’s a fundamental unwillingness.’ Humbert considers my claim. His fingers grip his cup formally, as if he were drinking tea rather than coffee. ‘Unwilling? My dear fellow, an author seduces. What is seduction without unwillingness?’ ‘Let’s not shift topics. Consider this two-line story: In killing her baby, Giselle did the right thing. After all, it was a girl.’ Humbert smiles. ‘And?’ ‘Well, which reader will find that story morally acceptable?’ 1 ‘Trivial. I imagine Giselle has some horrid, extremely painful disease, peculiar to women. Alas, it is also transmissible and incurable. Why shouldn’t she kill her baby? After all, it’s a girl.’ Even if morality was necessarily independent of the imagination, Humbert went on to say, that very necessity could be used to unbutton the reader. I remain unconvinced. ‘Let’s try another. Imagine a deviant, a connoisseur of innocence. Nymphets, perhaps.’ He waited, eyes glittering. ‘Now imagine a story in which a nymphet’s mother knowingly gives lodging to the deviant. I dare you to find it moral.’ Humbert puts down his cup. ‘Yes, readers must be dared. I claim it is an allegory about a God, a deviant serpent and a curious child-woman; to wit, Genesis, chapter 3. Didn’t God know what would happen in that Garden? Yet, millions find the tale quite moral. Imagine that!’ His claim had a certain piquancy. ‘Perhaps God’s Hands were tied.’ Humbert has the air of a man nursing a personal sorrow. ‘What must be done may be forgiven. Who cannot forgive necessity?’ It was a Valentine’s day morning, happy, pure, a premature Spring morning on which anything could be forgiven. His companion smiled and waved at us through Macy’s glass windows. ‘She’s in there supposedly to buy me a card, but I imagine I’ll end up buying her a hat. She’s developing quite a passion for hats.’ Humbert sounds resigned. ‘They grow up so fast these days.’ They do indeed. I remember we talked of other things. Teaching. Transitions. Raising teenagers. We shared many interests, Humbert Humbert and I. Yes, yes, I’ve heard what people say. I imagine he had good reasons. – The End – Anil Menon worked for about nine years in software before wising up, he says, about easier ways to write fiction. His stories can be found in a variety of magazines and anthologies. His novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan, 2009) was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award and Carl Baxter Society’s Parallax Prize. [He can be reached at iam@anilmenon.com.] adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Civil War in Jefferson Country: Lessons from the University of Virginia
Brinda Bose A rain-drizzled, splendidly-verdant, sleepily-calm campus it was, just about a month ago, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, USA – so much so that many of its residents would often laugh and exclaim at its placidity, the almost paradisiacal quality of an island-in-the-mild-northern-spring-sun quite untouched by the rowdinesses that we of the alarming tropics both fear and desire in our daily lives. So much so, in fact, that at a conference on Global Humanities at the UVa’s newly-minted Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures at the end of April, where I was part of a presentation on new administrative policies in Indian higher education (which some of us on our campus here in Delhi perceive as nothing less than an orchestrated, concentrated attack on academia as we value it), it was received by many of the local audience – made up of faculty members across the humanities and social science disciplines, deans and other administrative stalwarts of the UVa – with sympathy and surprise. A few expressed outrage about what was happening at a faraway campus (perhaps quietly thanking their stars for being at the University of Virginia rather than of Delhi). A couple of others (presumably of UVa Rector Helen Dragas’s ilk, as it appears with hindsight) implied in their comments and questions that we in Delhi were perhaps rather naïve to even expect that an university would be run in any way differently from a corporate – what kind of an arcane idealism was that? It aroused curiosity, the Delhi University story of midnight show-cause notices that stank of fake legalese, accompanied by photographic evidence of sniffer dogs, police men and women and rope cordons around a regular Committee of Courses meeting at which its members were to be coerced, initially with veiled threats and ultimately with open punitive action, to sign in favour of what the Vice Chancellor and his team had decreed for the institution: wild and wicked systemic changes whose fallouts, in just over a year or so, Delhi University is already beginning to crumble under. Those there who were far more sharply attuned to grave and fatal rumblings in academia all across the globe (and there were, of course, many of them) knew, of course, that horrific and melodramatic as the unfolding, ongoing DU story was, it was symptomatic of the times we were all thrashing about in. But even they, I can wager, did not in their most vile nightmares imagine that a so-very-similar horror would slam upon their summer-somnolent Charlottesville ‘Grounds’ like a frenzied tornado within the month, just as the last batches of students had slunk away for a glorious summer break after ‘end-sem’ examinations and the beautifully leafy campus was drawing a quiet fragrant breath or two to build up spirit and stamina again for the new academic year to come. I can bet that, even as some of them spoke with pride of the University’s high-ranked Darden School of Business, they did not in their most bizarre dreams imagine it would bring them so much shame and sorrow just as the sun grew stronger on the tall trees and rolling greens and their lovely stately buildings. Brandishing “strategic dynamism” as a weapon in the face of a slow-and-steady academic vision, and ravaging the edifices of loyalty and love among alumni, donors, students and staff overnight that take years of care and understanding to build, a fresh new management-oriented policy of governance has, as suddenly as the proverbial storm on a blithe summer’s day, brought mayhem and melancholy to the University of Virginia this historic June of 2012. And as is already evident from the outpouring of articles, open letters, Facebook posts and tweets, and the massive – now nationwide in America and fast turning global – outburst of reportage, interviews and analyses in the media, the charming, bucolic University of Virginia at Charlottesville will certainly never be the same again – even if, as latest news filtering in gives hope, the tide is stemmed and turned. Just a week ago, two years into her five-year-term, Teresa Sullivan was summarily dismissed from her post as President of the University of Virginia, to the complete shock and disbelief of the majority of the staff and students on campus. Helen Dragas, Rector of UVa’s Board of Visitors (what we in India know usually as a Governing Board/Body), explained this decision cryptically, thus: “The Board believes that in the rapidly changing and highly pressurized external environment in both health care and in academia, the University needs to remain at the forefront of change.” The sticking point, however, was that Sullivan was largely seen as a successful leader in what are extremely difficult times for public universities all over the world, and the one who was attempting to bring change to the institution with vision and grace. This was a very rotten bolt from a pretty serene blue. Bewildered, and convinced that there must be a good explanation for this unexpected move from the Board, the faculty began to ask questions – fast, furious, and increasingly embarrassing. What was revealed subsequently was a tale of Machiavellian wringing and stringing, in the true style of corporate boardroom politicking: hardly astonishing, however, given that the chief protagonists who engineered this coup d’etat under cover of darkness were Rector Dragas and a bunch of wealthy donors to the university, in cahoots with a group of university insiders, some members of the Darden business school of the UVa – fie on them, most of all. (And could Dragas have been better named? Dickensian, according to an astute Facebook comment; one’s literary soul is sated at once.) Farcically enough, an email sent out by hedge-fund billionaire, former Goldman Sachs partner and member of the foundation board of UVa’s business school Peter Kienan by a mistaken ‘reply all’ hit to more people on a university list than was intended, revealed that Sullivan’s removal was shamelessly ‘managed’ by some who are most possessed of those skills
A Song Sung True
Gopal Gandhi Her name responds with images. Of her. O.P. Sharma has a lovely photograph of her. A ‘late’ Kamaladevi, picture-daters would say. She is seated at a table, her hands stretched across it. The round face is lined with scars of battle. The salt march of 1930, for instance. A thousand footsteps on the sand are etched on that face. And a smile washes over them, like the waves at Dandi might do. As you look at the picture more closely, you see a chin of extraordinary determination and eyes of a rare penetration. But it is the hands that grip you. Strong-veined and profusely, almost ostentatiously, bangled. Who says courage and beauty do not go together, she seems to ask. They cannot but. I am proud to be a woman and I celebrate the beauty of womanhood, the whole frame can be heard saying. Let no one, absolutely no one, take beauty to suggest weakness, no fear! And to proclaim womankind’s strength, I will assert its feminity, not ape men. My working, writing, creating hands will proclaim them. Then there is the black and white footage of her fanning a pot of boiling saltwater. The quirk of 8 mm speed-filming gives her hands, bangled again, an extra verve. With each vapour goes a wisp of imperial hubris. Each sedimented salt-crystal makes swaraj tactile. Kamaladevi is in that frame the satyagrahi incarnate. But she is not to be typecast! Not in that scene, not anywhere else. In Mangalore, where she was born on 3 April 1903, father, mother, elder sister and Kamaladevi comprised a rather small family, for those days. It was there, in the verdant garden home of her Saraswat parents – Ananthiah Dhareshwar and Girijabai – that Kamaladevi first saw, touched and began to move the multi-coloured beads on the abacus of her sensibility. Her memoirs (Inner Recesses Outer Spaces, Navrang, 1986) tell us that the twinkling of the mrigasirsha star which heralds rain, the onset of showers in the month ofsravana and the worship of the tulasi plant became a continuum for her, signalling the reassurance, if any was needed in that fecund part of our western ghats, of the creative principle of life. Kamaladevi’s narration of her childhood is no idle amble down a memory footlane. I had not heard it explained anywhere until I read her autobiography that mrigasirsha is so named because the rains it heralds are such as make the mriga (deer) bend its sirsha (head) down under the torrent. For Ananthiah, a district collector, nationalist politics was taboo. But even in her teens, Kamaladevi made her own decisions. Nobody was to give her taboos. In this, she was clearly influenced by her mother, ‘a feminist with a very strong consciousness about women’s rights.’ In 1910, when Kamala was seven, Ananthiah died, leaving no will. Her step-brother claimed the entire estate and offered a subsistence allowance to Girijabai. This the self-respecting widow declined to accept and decided to support her daughters by herself. For those times, this was no ordinary resolve. It steeled the young girl in adversity and resoluteness. But certain customs Girijabai could not resist. By the custom of the times, Kamala was given in marriage while in her early teens – and not surprisingly, was widowed not long thereafter. What could that ‘status’ have meant to a child? In a less enlightened home, it could have meant an irreversible eclipse. But Girijabai’s home was different. Kamaladevi studied, passed her Senior Cambridge and was encouraged to pursue her interests which were clearly taking her towards the arts and theatre. She moved to the intellectual and capital of the South – Madras. Around that time her path met that of Harindranath Chattopadhyay. A musical genius, the young Bengali had poetic and histrionic talents that could only have been matched by those of his sister, the Bulbul-e-Hind, Sarojini Naidu. Kamaladevi and Harindranath found they had shared interests and decided to marry, affronting the orthodox not just because this was, in her case, a remarriage but by its cross-regional nature. Spurred by a joint vision, this did not deflect them. ‘When poet-musician Harindranath and I teamed up it was for a sharing of dreams and ambitions to devote ourselves to create a new theatre in India,’ she writes in her memoirs. But the real theatre of the times was not under arclights or on stage. It was being played out under the sharp daylight of non-cooperation. Kamaladevi was but sixteen when she happened to be in Bombay and attended a mammoth meeting addressed by Mahatma Gandhi. Chowpatty was ‘a sea of heads,’ she recalls, and being there she felt the power of the Mahatma’s appeal. She was enlisted into politics that day, I should imagine. What drew Kamaladevi into that vortex was more than the self-evident political compulsion of the cause. It was the strange mix that Gandhi was offering of political regeneration and constructive renewal. Kamaladevi and Harindranath met the Mahatma and Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan. ‘Tagore felt that personality can be built up through music,’ she records. Whereas Gandhi said it was ‘to be built up through craft – the use of hands.’ Harindranath, restless by temperament and peripatetic by choice, wanted to go to England and savour its world of letters and theatre. Kamaladevi joined him there and enrolled in Bedford College, London, to read sociology and economics. But after a brief spell there she returned home. Not because she would not have made a success of an academic course in London but because her mind was in India. She enrolled in 1924 for volunteer work – no simple badge-pinning work, let us remember, but everything that needs to be done at a mammoth gathering – at the Belgaum Congress. The session was a historic one, presided over by Gandhi himself. The Mahatma had been a volunteer in earlier Congresses himself, when still relatively unknown. Nothing was too menial or too ‘high’ for a volunteer. Kamaladevi’s presence did not go unnoticed. How
Sex, Work & Autonomy
Anchita Ghatak Sex work continues to be a vexing issue. Abolitionists feel that prostitutes or prostituted women are victims of the worst possible kind of sexual exploitation and prostitution should not exist. They will not use the term ‘sex work’ or ‘sex workers’ because they believe that giving exploitation the dignity of work and victims the dignity of workers is supporting and perpetuating exploitation. The other day, I was speaking to an eminent Abolitionist activist, who told me that she had never met a woman who had entered sex work of her own accord and willingly adopted the epithet of sex worker. I replied that I had met several. It is important to remember that many places across the world have seen demonstrations by sex workers and their allies, where people in sex work- women, men, transpersons- have demanded an end to stigmatisation and criminalization, recognition as workers and rights as workers. There are some countries where prostitution is legal. At the outset, I would like to state that while sex workers are not exclusively women, much of this article will focus on women sex workers. Activists who believe that ‘prostitution’ should be abolished, usually work against trafficking. Implicit in their anti-trafficking approach is the belief that trafficking is synonymous to prostitution. Organisations / individuals who work for the rights of sex workers also work against trafficking. They say that human trafficking sells people into forced labour and is a crime. Working to establish sex workers rights, activists, many of them sex workers themselves, have focused on the discrimination, injustice and violence that exist in the sex trade. They have drawn attention to the injustice and harassment sex workers face from the state, their families, pimps and madams, to name a few. They have not tried to portray the arena of sex work as a great and glorious place. They say that many women earn a living as sex workers and their work should be recognized as work and there should be norms and regulations in place that enable women to earn a living in a safe conditions. Many sex workers’ organizations have pointed out that they are against children being in sex work, or any kind of work, for that matter. Children should be in school and not at work. Adults who are in sex work or join sex work should make informed choices – that includes the decision to join or not join sex work, to engage in sex work and any other occupation(s), to leave sex work and so on. Gloria Steinem in a recent meeting in Kolkata told me that body invasion is intrinsic to sex work and so, it is not right to see prostitution as just another occupation in the unorganized sector, where working conditions are unjust and often, inhuman. It is difficult for me and many other feminists to agree with Steinem’s position. The sex worker is selling sexual services – that is her work. She has entered into a contract with her customer to provide sexual services. It is a transaction between consenting adults. To say that the sex worker is being invaded by the very nature of her work, is to deny her agency. In an article, in The Hindu, Steinem disagrees with the proposition that a sex worker is consensually selling sex. She says, “also I don’t think “consenting adults” is practical answer to structural inequality. Even sexual harassment law requires that sexual attention be “welcome,” not just “consensual.” It recognizes that consent can be coerced.” If consent is coerced, it is not consent, surely? Harassment and violence in the workplace is a reality. Struggles against sexual harassment in the workplace are going on everywhere. It is imperative to remember that like all women workers, sex workers too have a right to a harassment free and violence free workplace. Asking for customers of sex workers to be criminalised is a forceful way of denying women control over their choice of livelihoods. Saying that the very act of a woman selling sex is violence and exploitation is as paternalistic a point of view as saying that there can be nothing called marital rape. It is necessary to have a situation where the buying and selling of sexual services is not a furtive, criminal activity. It is such a social climate that will enable sex workers to lay down safe working conditions and bring clients to book if they violate agreed conditions. One has come across news reports, where governments in Northern countries have apparently told women on unemployment benefits that they have to become ‘sex workers’ as sex work is work like any other. Abolitionists often use such examples to argue against adopting the term ‘sex work’ and seeing it as a legitimate arena of work. Surely, this is not the first time that the patriarchal state machinery has appropriated the language of women’s liberation to oppress women? The question here is whether citizens have any element of choice when they are offered jobs instead of unemployment benefits. Abolitionists, as well as those who work for the establishment of sex workers’ rights, agree that if women on the margins have to assert their rights their choices have to expand and they must have access to education, healthcare, food, shelter and safe employment opportunities. It is in the area of employment that there is a sharp difference of opinion. Amongst abolitionists, there is a slight moving away from the term prostitution to survival sex. The question of women’s sexual autonomy in marriage is a vexed question. Is it only ‘prostitutes’ who engage in sex for survival? Sex workers have been categorical that they do not support people being coerced into sex work even if it is a caste based occupation. They are clear that while women have the right to opt to earn a living as a sex worker, they also have a right to refuse to do so. Like women workers in the unorganised sector – domestic workers, construction