Letters on Civil Disobedience

I spent my last morning at the British Library pouring over a volume of letters marked confidential and private “Correspondence with and Noting about Mr. Gandhi 1931-1932, ” which provided a glimpse into the lives of those engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience movement in India as well as the colonial response to those efforts.

The beginning of the collection includes a letter from Gandhi to the Viceroy regarding police brutality against those participating in nonviolent protest. On one incident women who were organizing “to protest against a brutal treatment of a girl 17 years old by a police official,” found themselves too, the victims of such brutality. Gandhi writes:

“The injuries were severe in several cases. Some of those who were assaulted belong to the Satyagraha Ashram at Sabarmati. One of them, an old widow, a Member of the Managing Board of the Ashram, was drenched in blood. To give you some idea of the nature of the police barbarity I give a free translation of her letter to me.”

This translated letter describes not only the abuse these women endured, but also the strength of their conviction and compassion:

“It was on this occasion that I understood somewhat the meaning of Ahimsa. I was quite fearless when the blows were coming down upon me, and I assure you I had no hatred or anger in me. Even now I feel no resentments toward the police, and its is growing upon me that we shall achieve success to the extent we cultivate the spirit of Ahimsa.”

Gandhi implored that the Viceroy look into this matter and set up a Committee “to investigate the allegations of excesses against officials in different parts of India since the inauguration of the Civil Disobedience Campaign…Till I hear from you and know your wish in this matter I am not sending this letter to the press.”

This file did not contain the actual letter back to Gandhi from the Viceroy, but rather draft notes on how to respond. While Gandhi’s letter is a moral plea, the draft response is an offering of advice regarding political strategy.  The language is what Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night called “totalitarianese which is to say ,technologese, which is to say any language which succeeds in stripping itself of any moral content.” Continue reading

The Street Dogs of India

Gardiner Harris, the South Asia Correspondent for the New York Times, recently offended many Indian Animal activists with his story ” Where the Streets are Thronged with Strays Bearing Fangs.”  A multimedia slideshow “A Snarling Menace in India,” accompanies the piece with portraits of seemingly threatening and vicious stray dogs in India

I subscribe to a listserv of Indian Animal Protection groups, and this week, my inbox was filled with comments of criticism and dissapointment in Harris’ article.   The consensus was that the reporting was sloppy and the language sensational.  Many wondered the source for Harris’s estimates of bites per year. (“Free-roaming dogs number in the tens of millions and bite millions of people annually, including vast numbers of children.”).   The overall tone of the piece was one that instilled fear:

“Packs of strays lurk in public parks, guard alleyways and street corners and howl nightly in neighborhoods and villages. Joggers carry bamboo rods to beat them away, and bicyclists fill their pockets with stones to throw at chasers. Walking a pet dog here can be akin to swimming with sharks.”

Many of the Indian Animal advocates who have been in the trenches working on this issue, felt the  threatening portrayal of the dogs to be a gross exaggeration. The article was perhaps  also a missed opportunity to acknowledge the progress that has been made with Animal Birth Control (ABC), Animal Rabies Vaccination (ARV), and spay/neuter return programs. Cities all over the country are exploring humane methods of population control and peaceful coexistence.

The piece  made me reflect on my own experiences with the street dogs of India.  Outside my grandmother’s home in Bangalore, a sweet brown and white dog  took comfort in finding a spot in the shade to rest and was grateful for the plates of rice neighbors often fed him.  On his ear was a U-shapep notch, indicating that he had been neutered.  I had the chance to visit Compassion Unlimited Plus Action, the local shelter,  which also ran a program for sterilizing and vaccinating such street dogs.

Any newcomer to India will take notice of the  street dogs–they are  everywhere.  (Here’s a slideshow of some of the street dogs I’ve encountered, in Bangalore, Varanasi, Gaya, Delhi and Solapur.)

[gigya type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf” width=”600″ height=”400″ flashvars=”host=picasaweb.google.com&captions=1&hl=en_US&feat=flashalbum&RGB=0x000000&feed=https%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F107627304183937202275%2Falbumid%2F5774938130204852961%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26hl%3Den_US” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer”]

You can find them sleeping on the steps of train stations, curled up under a flower walla’s table, or waiting for prasadam outside a temple. Their street smarts are sharp  and they can weave in and out of traffic and have learned to cross the street.   What I had noticed,was that while they were in close proximity, most never directly approached humans, but rather found a way to subsist and survive among them.

The high population of strays, many sick and undernourished, is one of great concern, but human factors are largely responsible.  Harris does briefly acknowledge these human elements and ways to better manage the population:

“Nonetheless, India’s burgeoning middle class has begun to adopt Western notions of pet ownership, buying pedigreed dogs and bringing animals into their homes. But many pedigreed dogs end up on the street, the castoffs of unsuccessful breeders or owners who tire of the experiment.

…The first thing you need to start doing to reduce the stray population is manage your garbage better,” said Arpan Sharma, chief executive of the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organizations. “And the second thing is very aggressive spaying, neutering and vaccinating of animals.”

When confronted with the outpouring of comments on this piece,  Harris responded via email to one of his critics, with this  reply:

“Millions of Indians — including untold numbers of children — are mauled every year by stray dogs. I guess I worry more about children than dogs. But that could be an American thing.”

His response only worsened the original offense, leaving the critic to wonder if Harris meant to imply “that Americans love their children more than Indians.”

Harris is a new foreign correspondent for the New York Times. His post in India began in May, and that was the first time he set foot in the subcontinent.  In a blog post on India Ink, the NYT India Blog, Harris indicated that his  “fresh eyes” could be an asset for the job.  But perhaps his vantage point and perspective  limited his reportage on this subject.

Continue reading

The Salon: Subcontinental Shift- May 30th at Book Court

Hi folks,

I will be facilitating a discussion with this wonderful panel of authors at Book Court on May 30th.  Details below.

A Reading and Discussion About Modern India, the Indian Diaspora and Literature from and About the Region

Wed May 30, 7:00PM at BookCourt, 163 Court Street, Brooklyn

Hosts: Chiwoniso Kaitano-Price & Martin Rowe

RSVP: the.salon.nyc@gmail.com

Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of ‘Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found,’ which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harpers Magazine, Time, and Conde Nast Traveler, and has been featured on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’. Mehta is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Siddhartha Deb is the author of The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India. He was born in northeastern India in 1970. His first novel, The Point of Return, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His reviews and journalism have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Guardian, The Nation, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement. He came to New York on a literary fellowship in 1998, and now divides his time between India and New York.

Kamala Nair is the author of The Girl in the Garden. She was born in London and grew up in upstate New York, Vermont, and Minnesota. A graduate of Wellesley College, she studied literature at Oxford University and received an M.Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin in 2005. She currently lives in New York City.

Rajesh Parameswaran’s stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Fiction. “The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan” was one of three stories for which McSweeney’s earned a National Magazine Award in 2007, and it was reprinted in The Best American Magazine Writing. He lives in New York City.

 


Literary Animal:Reading India Blog Series on Brighter Green

Coinciding with the release of Brighter Green’s Case Study on India, Veg or NonVeg? India at a Crossroads, I will be writing a series of blogs over at Brighter Green about the intersection of recent writings on India with issues raised in our case study: “Over the past several years, there has been a considerable amount of writing about modern(izing) India. From different angles, writers are witnessing and documenting a subcontinent undergoing significant shifts. The New York Times recently launched their first country specific blog, India Ink. At Brighter Green, we’ve been most interested in the social and environmental issues that are emerging with a changing country, a changing diet, and a changing climate.  Our recent paper and our videos on India’s chicken industry [now with over 50,000 views on Youtube!] and dairy and beef industries delve into this further. In this blog series, I hope to highlight writings on India and where they intersect with sustainability, equity, and rights, particularly in the context of food security and climate change.

Read Part I of this series: Red Sorghum and ‘F&B’  which discusses Siddartha Deb’s recent book, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India.

Check out Part II of this series, which discusses AkashKapur’s article in the October 10, 2011 issue of the New Yorker“The Shandy: The Cost of Being a Cow Broker in Rural India.”  The article is an excerpt of his forthincoming book.  India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India.

Part III, of this installment of the Literary Animal: Reading India serieswill be a slight foray into linguistics, and discuss the language of violence and Katherine Russell Rich’s Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language.
Part IV of this series explores the prologue of Amitava Kumar’s book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of his Arm a Tiny Bomb,  where a poultry farmer provides a glimpse into how  both the war on terror and  looks and avian flu have impacted the region of Walavati in Maharashtra State.
Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers is the subject of Part V of this series that explores corruption, justice, gender, and animal rights in slum called Annawadi, outside Mumbai’s airport.
 

Good Books and Good Associations

Kausalya Thirupuvanam

This summer, my brother and I interviewed Kausalya Thirupuvanum just before her 90th birthday.  She and her family set up the Thirupuvanum foundation which sponsors a local government school in Bangalore, and was set up in response to this question:

“How can children deprived of even basic necessities like food, clothing, shelter and even parental care survive in this world… much less learn their abc’s? What future do such children have and how can this situation be alleviated?”

Kausalya Patti, as we call her, has always been full of wisdom and a proponent of education. Her advice to us about the key to a good life, was “good books and good associations.” As a literary animal, I couldn’t help but agree.  She also talked about  Jiva Karuynam–Life Compassion–and the importance of trying to live what we learn.

Here is a video that came out of that interview:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXP8XmI2qGE]

In Search of Sacred Cows

See latest videos I narrated for Brighter Green with some footage from our trip in 2009:

“In this new two-part video series, Brighter Green examines the challenges and effects of India’s beef and dairy industries.”

Double-click to view full screen.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAbUHtFEsC4&w=640&h=390]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du9F9OYehzw&w=640&h=390]