The year that was–10 | 2024 in books: Love, hope and resistance—Part 1

READING books is about enlarging the imagination and opening out possibilities that one may not have considered or about affirming ideas that seem a bit out of place.Doing a review of books of the year is about cultivating a reflective space from which to think of the tumultuous world we live in from a space which is a bit removed from the din of the contemporary world.This act of reading or list-making is, however, about the world we live in. As Emily Dickinson put it:Tell all the truth but tell it slant—Success in Circuit lies…The Truth must dazzle graduallyOr every man be blind—.One of the interstices in the Apartheid system for resistance was the space of the law. This was because the Apartheid State had an “obsessive adherence to a legitimising semblance of the legal form”..Thomas Grant, The Mandela Brief.The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid is an account of the work of Sydney Kentridge, a lawyer who for a large part of his career resisted apartheid using the framework of the law. Apartheid South Africa had created a “vast and comprehensive legislative apparatus for the segregation of the population in every aspect of life according to a theory of race, together with the absolute privileging and supremacy of the minority deemed to belong to one of those supposed races”.Under such conditions what did the struggle for justice mean?One of the interstices in the Apartheid system for resistance was the space of the law. This was because the Apartheid State had an “obsessive adherence to a legitimising semblance of the legal form”.Kentridge made the most effective use of this form of the law in his defence of Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela and many other anti-Apartheid activists who faced the wrath of the Apartheid State..Book review: Prof. Upendra Baxi’s life of law.Kentridge was the key lawyer in the Sharpeville Inquiry set up after the Sharpeville massacre by the Apartheid State. Sharpeville, like Jallianwala Bagh in India, was the site of one of the gravest crimes committed by the Apartheid State when incessant police firing into an unarmed crowd resulted in 249 deaths as per the police records. (The deaths were possibly more.)Public pressure led the government to institute an inquiry with several weeks of public hearings. Though the result of the inquiry was an exoneration of those who perpetrated the massacre, the “poignancy of the bereaved and maimed inhabitants of Sharpeville were reported around the world”. The “mendacity” of the police witnesses was “exposed by the cross-examination of Kentridge and his colleagues”.The death of one of South Africa’s most famous anti-Apartheid activists, Steve Biko, in police custody, led to an inquest before the magistrate. In the inquest, Kentridge’s cross-examination exposed to an international audience the falsity of the story of the State that Biko had died due to a hunger strike and pointed towards the true cause of death, a violent brain injury.The cross-examination showed the failure to comply with even the laws of the Apartheid state. Packham reproduces extracts from Kentridge’s cross-examination of Colonel Peter Goosen, who is the head of internal security. .Kentridge was the key lawyer in the Sharpeville Inquiry set up after the Sharpeville massacre by the Apartheid State..Q. Where did you get your authority from? Show me a piece of paper that gives you the right to keep a man in chains—or are you people above the law?A. We have full authority. It is left to my sound discretion.Q. Under what statutory authority?A. We don’t work under statutory authority..The offence of terrorism was phrased broadly and was even used to target giving of charity to African National Congress family members..Kentridge’s closing submission made the point that “this inquest has exposed grave irregularity and misconduct in the treatment of a single detainee. It has, incidentally revealed the dangers to life and liberty involved in the system of holding detainees incommunicado”. Kentridge in his submission makes the connection between the murder of Steve Biko in prison and the larger evil of Apartheid law itself.However, in spite of this forensic taking apart of the case of the State, the magistrate concluded that “the available evidence does not prove that the death was brought about by any act or omission involving or amounting to an offence on the part of any person”.Though the Apartheid legal system was successful in covering up the killing of Biko, it did not succeed in the court of world opinion. As Packham notes, “Sometimes, the law can effect change not through its outcome but in its process.”.Saurabh Kirpal’s new book offers a close examination of the 24-word equality provision in the Indian Constitution.The result of the Biko inquest “caught the conscience of the world” and “its far-reaching legacy was finally to convince the great democracies that Apartheid South Africa was a rogue State that needed to be ostracised”.The grave offences under which Kentridge’s clients were charged included treason and terrorism. Kentridge managed to get acquittals under the treason law, including most famously of Winnie Mandela and Nelson Mandela..The death of one of South Africa’s most famous anti-Apartheid activists, Steve Biko, in police custody, led to an inquest before the magistrate..The offence of terrorism was phrased broadly and was even used to target giving of charity to African National Congress family members. Kentridge’s advocacy, in Edwin Cameron’s words, clipped the wings of the “unlimited scope of the Terrorism Act” through judgments that “blasted a torpedo through the hull of some of the statute’s most menacing provisions”, thereby opening a “life-sustaining space” where “opponents of Apartheid could continue to breathe and work inside the country”.What was the secret of Kentridge’s effectiveness as a lawyer ? In the words of Edwin Cameron, who went on to become a judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, “Kentridge achieved renown as a lawyer not only because of his intellect and his mastery of the technical rules of procedure and hearsay. He made an impact because of his fervour in employing these skills against a system he abhorred.”.The result of the Biko inquest “caught the conscience of the world” and “its far-reaching legacy was finally to convince the great democracies that Apartheid South Africa was a rogue State that needed to be ostracised”..Raymond Williams, Culture and Society.This is a book written in the 1950s by British Marxist Raymond Williams who provides a series of unconventional sketches of key figures in “culture”, provoking a re-thinking of the meaning of culture.When writing about the Romantics, Williams notes that in the nineteenth century “a conclusion about personal feeling became a conclusion about society” and “an observation of natural beauty carried a necessary moral reference to the whole and unified life of man”.However, the subsequent dissociation between the personal and larger political resulted in the image of the Romantic poet or artist as someone who is “by nature indifferent to the crude worldliness and materialism of politics” and who is “devoted to the more substantial spheres of natural beauty and social feeling”.For Williams, these are not who the Romantics are. In fact, “We may usefully remind ourselves that Wordsworth wrote political pamphlets, that Blake was a friend of Tom Paine and was tried for sedition, that Coleridge wrote political journalism and social philosophy, that Shelley, in addition to this, distributed political pamphlets in the streets.”.In Williams’s conclusion, “These activities were neither marginal nor incidental, but were essentially related to a large part of the experience from which the poetry itself was made.”Culture, which Williams understood as a way of life, is intimately linked to society. In an industrial society, in which there is an acceptance of the values of consumerism, accumulation and acquisition, it is in culture that the critique resides.Or as Shelley put it, “Poetry, and the principle of self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.” Figures who carry forward this critique are a range of nineteenth century novelists whose work Williams analyses, including Dickens, Disraeli, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Gissing.All of them wrote novels that expose what it is to live under industrial capitalism and expand on the possibilities of life which is “composed of very much more than economic relationships”. Williams has acute insights on each writer, which emerge through the characters they create and the “structures of feeling that they embody”..However, the crucial connection he draws between culture and society is to ask how the novels relate to the question of changing social order produced by industrial capitalism. There is an ambivalence about the question of being an agent of change.As he puts it, “Recognition of evil was balanced by fear of becoming involved. Sympathy was transformed, not into action, but into withdrawal.” This acute commentary on the “structure of feeling” of “the fear of being involved”, or of “withdrawal” from the world, is not only a commentary on the past. This “structure of feeling” has persisted “into both the literature and the social thinking”, not only of William’s time but ours.William’s interest in the relationship between thought and action and indeed in how literature can create or inhibit the ground for action allows for a critical re-interpretation of Orwell’s work.To Williams, Orwell presents a paradox, “He was a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualised a distinctive squalor. He was a socialist, who popularised a severe and damaging criticism of the idea of socialism.”.Nehru in the age of the RSS-BJP, ‘anti-communism’ and alignment of chakras.The key to the paradox he finds in the condition of what he calls the “paradox of the exile”. The “exile” has “certain qualities of perception” through which he or she can “distinguish inadequacies in the groups” that are on the margins of society.However, even as the sharpness of critique is there, there is no participation in working-class struggles as “the substance of community is lacking”. To the exile, “almost all association is suspect”. The exile, at heart, does not believe that there can be “any settled way of living … in which a man's individuality can be socially confirmed”.He is committed to the idea of a society that will “leave individuals severely alone”. This, according to Williams, is the “bankruptcy of exile”, and the story of a man who “while rejecting the consequences of an atomistic society, yet retains deeply, in himself, its characteristic mode of consciousness”.The need to link the past to both the present and the future is very much part of William’s aim. He concludes, “I have written this book because I believe the tradition it records is a major contribution to our common understanding and a major incentive to its necessary extensions and ways of thinking.”.V. Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India.In an intriguing study, V. Geeta sets out to examine what was B.R. Ambedkar’s viewpoint on socialism. Though that is the main burden of the book, it is studded with insights into Ambedkar’s way of thinking. She characterises Ambedkar as engaging in a “distinctive democratic reasoning, at once practical and normative”, thereby drawing attention to Ambedkar’s rather unique ability to think normatively and act practically.She also draws attention to how Ambedkar sought to turn “the exigent into a purposive moment in time”, gesturing to an ability to bring the normative into discussions of immediate practical politics. She notes that “while committed to practical results in the struggle against inequality and social odium, Ambedkar sustained a utopic imagination, which looked to build a new world, not in the distant future, but in the here and now”.Coming to the burden of the book, which is Ambedkar’s relationship to the idea of socialism, she notes that though Ambedkar “was a resolute critic of Indian communism and communists”, “socialism remained a spectral presence in his thought world, and he did not conjure it away”.Rightly, one cannot begin a book on Ambedkar, even one on Ambedkar’s relationship to socialism, without referencing caste. While class may have been a spectral presence in Ambedkar’s work, caste had a full-bodied presence.Caste which was (is) the law in India, in V. Geeta’s analysis, was “invisible as an object of political inquiry”. It is here that Ambedkar’s contribution is seminal. For Geeta, “just as Marx produced capitalism as an object of historical enquiry and critique, and thus denaturalised the regime of capital, so did Ambedkar historicise the production of caste-related inequality that had been rendered sacrosanct by belief, custom and habit”..Book review— Practices of the State: Muslims, Law and Violence in India.Ambedkar’s work challenged the normativity of the caste order both as a thinker and an activist and he “worked the complex relationship between imagined norm and historical possibility”.Ambedkar’s challenge was how to address the “mental habitude” which rendered Untouchability “normal and caste inequality a given”. In the course of his life, he gave numerous answers to this question. He wanted the modern State to carry out “the pedagogic task of ensuring the cultural and social enhancement of the people it sought to govern”.Thus, he “sought to invest the law with normative force, in order that it could be read in more than literal fashion and in ways that might persuade the State and citizenry to challenge social custom and creed”.This pedagogical expectation of the law as a normative instrument to challenge caste might account for his advocacy of the concepts of dignity, fraternity and the criminalisation of the practice of Untouchability as well as, importantly, the advocacy of challenging the economic order which benefitted the few. Thus, any challenge to the law of caste had to also challenge the structures which kept in place economic inequality.The other great experiment of Ambedkar in challenging the law of both caste and class was the turn to Buddhism. This, in V. Geeta’s analysis, was a “lonely trajectory” as he engaged with a domain which “the Indian Left of his time did not consider important”, namely “religion and ethics”..As he puts it, “Recognition of evil was balanced by fear of becoming involved. Sympathy was transformed, not into action, but into withdrawal.”.However, the turn to religion, as articulated in The Buddha and his Dhamma, is not a turn to God but rather a recasting of the religious duty as a duty to one’s fellow beings. In The Buddha and his Dhamma, Ambedkar expressly critiques the “acquisitive instinct” and speaks about the cultivation of the quality of non-possessiveness, which again speaks to a socialist reworking of Buddhist ideals.It represents a coming together of socialism and Buddhism as Ambedkar sought to counter the “divinely constituted inequality” by the “morally constituted equal and fraternal society”. “The dhamma as an expansive social ideal was thus the basis for a new sociality, the form of the fraternity that Ambedkar held to be the basis of the just and equal society.”The various experiments of Ambedkar in the course of his life were to assert that “social suffering seemed a veritable theft of being” and the ways to “regain the confiscated self” could be through “law, the State, transformed economic lives and through a new and transformative creed”..Humour and nostalgia: A review of Tales of Law and Laughter by Raju Z. Moray.Through these nuanced readings of the Ambedkarite corpus, V. Geeta succeeds in unearthing the spectral presence of socialism in Ambedkar’s corpus and gives us a new lens through which to view Ambedkar.Kuvempu, Bride in the Hills (translated by Vanamala Viswanatha).Bride in the Hills is Vanamala Viswanatha’s brilliant translation of Malegallali Madumagalu, which is considered one of the greatest novels of Kannada literature, by one of Karnataka’s best-loved writers, Kuvempu.This evocative translation by Vanamala Vishwanatha reintroduces Kuvempu to a wider English-speaking audience and will hopefully enable a larger conversation about the importance of Kuvempu in both the national and the global contexts.An important strand of the complex and multilayered narrative of the novel appears in the three love stories, one between Gutthi and Thimmi from the Holeya caste, another between Aita and Pinchalu from the Halepaika caste or community, and Chinnamma and Mukundaya from the Gowda caste.These three love stories, set as they are in the breathtakingly beautiful, though deeply feudal Malnad region, dramatise the barriers love has to cross (social, feudal, psychological and patriarchal) before the couples are united.There is a rich interior life to each of the characters and the author seamlessly moves between the evocative passages on the forest as a pulsating being to the description of the love between Aita and Pinchalu and the repartee between Gutthi and Thimmi. As the novel’s epigraph notes, “Here, no one is important; no one is unimportant. Nothing is insignificant.”Even as you are lulled into a sense of wonderment at the beauty of the Malnad region with its thick forests and majestic mountains, the characters embark on their own interior reflections which plumb the depths of the relations between human beings, bounded as they are by caste and gender. The many nuanced registers in which caste manifests itself in this novel, offer us a novelist’s insight into the nature of caste.The sense of being trapped in an eternal unchanging social order sanctified by religion and tradition is disrupted through the lovers who challenge the structures of feudalism, caste and patriarchy. This challenge takes the form of the love of Gutthi and Thimmi, who flout the limits imposed by feudalism and caste as well as the love of Mukundayya and Chinnamma who transgress the structures of caste and patriarchy in their community..Book review: In Defense of Flogging.The theme of desire erasing the lines of caste recurs at various points in the novel. In one memorable scene, when Mukundaya, Pinchalu and Aita, companions, albeit across lines of caste, class and gender, go crab hunting, Kuvempu describes Mukundayya (who is a Gowda) gazing intently upon the newly married couple Aita and Pinchalu.To him, they appear no more “lower caste serfs who work for him, but rather embodiments of Rathi and Manmatha”. The beauty of Pinchalu quite overwhelms Mukundayya. When he sends Aita back to get a gun to hunt a boar, Mukundaya is left alone with Pinchalu.In Kuvempu’s description, from the point of view of Pinchalu, even if something of a sexual nature had occurred, she would not have seen it as a betrayal of a marriage but rather the extension of a friendship. Mukundayya’s arresting perception of Pinchalu as Rathi indicates the direction his mind traverses.However, the moment passes and what could have easily happened between them does not happen. Yet the invocation of an uncovenanted possibility is rich with the potential of a transgressive future where desire erases the lines of caste.Throughout the novel, there is the lurking possibility of violence as a crucial armature of caste power. This hidden subtext of lawless violence emerges to the surface in the chilling incident of the lynching of Sanna Bira for the offence of his sister, Thimmi eloping with Gutthi, against the will of the master.Thimmi’s elopement is punished by the Gowda masters, with a savage lynching, referred to as the ‘Honnali Hoddate’ (Honnali thrashing.) Sanna Bira is tied up by Ijira Saba. In Kuvempu’s gut-wrenching description, “As soon as Ijara Saba gestures grimly, a quivering Sanna Bira obeys him, his tongue dead in his mouth, like a mute animal, like an ox that is used to following the cartman’s orders when he calls out, obediently lowering his neck for the yoke to be placed.”.Rightly, one cannot begin a book on Ambedkar, even one on Ambedkar’s relationship to socialism, without referencing caste..He is then whipped with tamarind birches, and “Sanna Bira’s back swells up with the first round of lashing”.This eruption of bloody violence represents the concentrated force of the contempt, hatred and indifference of a caste society, which can no longer be contained within that register. It expresses itself in the outward forms of a caste law, which is deployed to take forward an inner register of hatred and contempt..Life of a communist woman: Review of Brinda Karat’s autobiography.This particular portrayal of a brutal lynching evokes what is a continuing reality in many parts of the country. Part of the way Brahmanism has enabled caste to thrive is by invisibilising violence against Dalits. Before the advent of Dalit literature, which decisively broke the silence on caste as violence, we have the important writings of Kuvempu in Bride in the Hills as well as Karanth in Chomana Dudi (Choma’s Drum).Kuvempu is committed to a reinterpretation of Hinduism within the framework of Vedanta which is based on the idea that everyone has a spark of the divine, thereby rendering caste philosophically untenable.In an essay titled, A clarion call for a cultural revolution, Kuvempu engages in a debate with the Dravida Kazagam movement, where he states that “he accepts and understands their movement”, but does not agree with the “burning of the ancient epics”.To him, old epics are like old ornaments, you may not like the design, etc., so what you do is smelt it and make something new out of it, not just throw it away.Kuvempu, even while he wrote beautifully about nature, was extremely alive to both the nuances of the oppression of caste, its brutality as well as ways the caste order could be undermined. The novel imaginatively reconstructs what it means to live, resist and love under the law of caste and for this reason, needs to be read and reread.

The year that was–10 | 2024 in books: Love, hope and resistance—Part 1

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