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 gradually
Or every man be blind—
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 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.”
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.”
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”.
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”.
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”.