SACW - 19 May 2015 | Nepal: Homelesss / Pakistan: Set Their Minds Free / Sri Lanka: Forced Evictions / India: Protect Retired Judge Jyotsana Yagnik; end to coercion of NGOs; Spectre of Aruna Shanbaug / Women's Court in the former Yugoslavia / support of historians in Japan
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at gmail.com
Mon May 18 18:34:29 EDT 2015
South Asia Citizens Wire - 19 May 2015 - No. 2857
[since 1996]
Contents:
1. Silence on Rohingya minority in Myanmar: Aung San Suu Kyi is a bust | Zafar Sobhan
2. Pakistan: Set Their Minds Free | Pervez Hoodbhoy
3. Religious intolerance and an insecure Pakistan | Ayesha Ijaz Khan
4. New Report on Forced Evictions in Colombo
5. Bangladesh killings of the secularist bloggers continue, this time it is Ananta Bijoy Das: select reports and commentary
6. A Tribute and a Bibliography: Remembering People's Historian Amalendu Guha (1924-2015) | Bonojit Hussain and Mayur Chetia
7. PIPFPD Condemns The Brutal Attack On Ismaili Community In Karachi - Press Statement
8. What is to be done about Indian Universities? - Reflections from Concerned Teachers
9. India: Protect Retired Judge Jyotsana Yagnik - A letter to the Gujarat Govt and to Citizens
10. India: Put an end to coercive actions against NGOs and donors - Open Letter to the Prime Minister
11. The Women's Court in the former Yugoslavia | Marieme Helie Lucas
12. Text of open letter in support of historians in Japan
13. Recent On Communalism Watch:
- India: A year in office, RSS, BJP to invoke Hindu icons (The Times of India)
- India: RSS calls for sealing of India-Bangladesh border
- India: Hindutva activist’s national education policy readied for govt
- India: Congress 'satyagraha' to protest beef ban law in Mumbai
- India: Defacement of signages of road named after Muslim personalities - Statement by Aam Admi Party
- Why Tamil Nadu is likely to be a battleground for conflicting, contradictory ideologies (Sandhya Ravishankar)
- India: Road signs with Muslim names defaced in Delhi, Hindu outfit owns responsibility
- One Year of Modi Sarkar-Hate Speech Galore
- India: Keep Taj Mahal free of controversy says the Approved Guide Association
- Announced: Modi's One Year an office: an evaluation (May 16-17, 2015, New Delhi)
- Open Letter to Gujarat Govt and to Citizens Resist degradation of Indian criminal justice system - Protect Retired Judge Jyotsana Yagnik Against Threats
- India had 57 communal incidents per month in last four years
- India Govt to grant religion based citizenship
- Publication Announcement: Book on Caste and Communalism by Ram Puniyani
- India: Saffronising 'Jatland' -- Mapping Shifts in the Electoral Landscape in Haryana (Radhika Kumar)
- India: BJP's Unprecedented Victory in Jammu — Rekha Chowdhary
- Remembering Mukul Sinha on his first death anniversary
- Jamaat-e-Islami, Chinese Communist Party get into bed
- Book review: How the past saw its past (R. Champakalakshmi)
- India: NDTV programme in Hindi on the Apparent Discovery of Saraswati River in Haryana
::: RESOURCEs & FULL TEXT :::
14. Homeless in Nepal - Editorial, Nepali Times
15. India: The Spectre of Aruna Shanbaug | Ratna Kapur
16. Is India's 100 smart cities project a recipe for social apartheid? | Shruti Ravindran
17. The Nagas of India and Myanmar | Sanjib-Baruah
18. Review: Colonial Botany in British India (Joh Mathews)
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1. SILENCE ON THE PERSECUTION OF THE ROHINGYA MINORITY IN MYANMAR
AUNG SAN SUU KYI IS A BUST by Zafar Sobhan
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There was so much hope for her as a moral leader in Myanmar, but power (or politics) has changed her
http://sacw.net/article11195.html
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2. PAKISTAN: SET THEIR MINDS FREE
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
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Giving logic a back seat has led to more than diminished math or science skills. The ordinary Pakistani person's ability to reason out problems of daily life has also diminished. There is an increased national susceptibility to conspiracy theories, decreased ability to tell friend from foe, and more frequent resort to violence rather than argumentation. The quality of Pakistan's television channels reflects today's quality of thought.
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3. RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE AND AN INSECURE PAKISTAN | Ayesha Ijaz Khan
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A wise man once said, “I am not sure if Pakistan was created in the name of religion but it sure is being destroyed in the name of religion.”
http://sacw.net/article11197.html
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4. NEW REPORT ON FORCED EVICTIONS IN COLOMBO
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The Centre for Policy Alternatives' second report on forced evictions in Sri Lanka's capital city looks at evictions that took place under the previous Ministry of Defence and Urban Development, where as part of its beautification agenda they aimed to create a slum free Colombo by 2020. The report discusses life after relocation to the high-rise buildings as well as the struggles of those still awaiting housing.
http://sacw.net/article11188.html
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5. BANGLADESH KILLINGS OF THE SECULARIST BLOGGERS CONTINUE, THIS TIME IT IS ANANTA BIJOY DAS: SELECT REPORTS AND COMMENTARY
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http://sacw.net/article11184.html
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6. A TRIBUTE AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY: REMEMBERING PEOPLE'S HISTORIAN AMALENDU GUHA (1924-2015)
by Bonojit Hussain and Mayur Chetia
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Prominent Marxist historian, revolutionary, poet and a litterateur from Assam — Dr. Amalendu Guha — passed away at the age of 91 in the wee hours of 7th May at his humble residence in Guwahati. Remaining true to his rationalist outlook, he had willed in 2005 that his bodily remains should be handed over to Gauhati Medical College for scientific research. Before and during Dr. Guha's final ride to the Medical College, large numbers of people had gathered to pay their tributes at his residence, Assam Sahitya Sabha office in Cotton College State University premise and Ellora Vigyan Mancha office in Guwahati.
http://sacw.net/article11190.html
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7. PIPFPD CONDEMNS THE BRUTAL ATTACK ON ISMAILI COMMUNITY IN KARACHI - PRESS STATEMENT
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Pakistan-India Peoples' Forum for Peace & Democracy (PIPFPD) strongly condemns the brutal attack in Karachi where 47 people including women were gunned down. The attackers targetted an Ismaili community bus. Jundullah, an anti-shia militia and a splinter group of Tehrik-e-Taliban, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
http://sacw.net/article11186.html
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8. WHAT IS TO BE DONE ABOUT INDIAN UNIVERSITIES? - REFLECTIONS FROM CONCERNED TEACHERS
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The manner in which the state is intervening in higher education is causing concern and even alarm in the academic community. Both the unlamented UPA — II regime and the current NDA government have been remarkably similar in their authoritarian impatience to introduce wholesale changes without adequate or careful preparation. This position paper is the collective product of roughly six months of discussion among teachers of several central universities in Delhi. It is an attempt to participate in the process of critical self-evaluation of the university system as it is today. It is also our considered response to the many policy statements and directives issued by the MHRD and the UGC recently.
http://sacw.net/article11183.html
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9. INDIA:: PROTECT RETIRED JUDGE JYOTSANA YAGNIK - A LETTER TO THE GUJARAT GOVT AND TO CITIZENS
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Resist degradation of Indian criminal justice system. Retired Judge Jyotsana Yagnik threatened; murder convicts out on bail
An onslaught on justice is taking place in broad daylight. It is now clear that the Modi-led government finds India's criminal justice system and independent judiciary to be an obstacle blocking its long-term plans. The incidence of prejudice in the courts is nothing new - the 1984 pogrom inaugurated a new era in the erosion of Indian justice. The NDA government has given impetus to this process. The ideological hooligans of the so-called 'Sangh parivar' are convinced they are above the law. Corruption does not merely have monetary implications. The erosion of judicial independence taking place before our eyes is also corruption. Building trustworthy public institutions is a prolonged process that takes decades. But they can be destroyed very rapidly, especially when state power is used (covertly or openly), to intimidate judges like Ms Jyotsna Yagnik.
http://sacw.net/article11181.html
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10. INDIA: PUT AN END TO COERCIVE ACTIONS AGAINST NGOS AND DONORS - OPEN LETTER TO THE PRIME MINISTER
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We write to you today as members and representatives of Indian civil society organizations and, most importantly as Indian citizens, to express our deep concern at how civil society organizations in general and their support systems, including donors, are being labeled and targeted.
http://sacw.net/article11167.html
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11. THE WOMEN'S COURT IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA | Marieme Helie Lucas
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Yesterday May 7 the Women's Court on war crimes against women during the war in the 1990ies formally started in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Women have come together from all the corners of the former-Yugoslavia to participate in the Women's Court in Sarajevo, to demand justice for the crimes committed against them during the wars and the enduring inequalities and suffering that followed.
http://sacw.net/article11168.html
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12. TEXT OF OPEN LETTER IN SUPPORT OF HISTORIANS IN JAPAN
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The undersigned scholars of Japanese studies express our unity with the many courageous historians in Japan seeking an accurate and just history of World War II in Asia. Exploitation of the suffering of former “comfort women” for nationalist ends in the countries of the victims makes an international resolution more difficult and further insults the dignity of the women themselves. Yet denying or trivializing what happened to them is equally unacceptable. Among the many instances of wartime sexual violence and military prostitution in the twentieth century, the “comfort women” system was distinguished by its large scale and systematic management under the military, and by its exploitation of young, poor, and vulnerable women in areas colonized or occupied by Japan.
http://sacw.net/article11187.html
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13. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/
- India: A year in office, RSS, BJP to invoke Hindu icons (The Times of India)
- India: RSS calls for sealing of India-Bangladesh border
- India: Hindutva activist’s national education policy readied for govt
- India: Congress 'satyagraha' to protest beef ban law in Mumbai
- India: Defacement of signages of road named after Muslim personalities - Statement by Aam Admi Party
- Why Tamil Nadu is likely to be a battleground for conflicting, contradictory ideologies (Sandhya Ravishankar)
- India: Hindu Janajagruti Samiti file police case against Actress FIR against Sunny Leone for 'destroying Indian culture
- India: Road signs with Muslim names defaced in Delhi, Hindu outfit owns responsibility
- One Year of Modi Sarkar-Hate Speech Galore
- India: Keep Taj Mahal free of controversy says the Approved Guide Association
- Announced: Modi's One Year an office: an evaluation (May 16-17, 2015, New Delhi)
- Open Letter to Gujarat Govt and to Citizens Resist degradation of Indian criminal justice system - Protect Retired Judge Jyotsana Yagnik Against Threats
- India had 57 communal incidents per month in last four years
- India Govt to grant religion based citizenship
- Publication Announcement: Book on Caste and Communalism by Ram Puniyani
- India: Saffronising 'Jatland' -- Mapping Shifts in the Electoral Landscape in Haryana (Radhika Kumar)
- India: BJP's Unprecedented Victory in Jammu — Rekha Chowdhary
- Remembering Mukul Sinha on his first death anniversary
- Fascists Kill Bangladesh blogger Ananta Bijoy Das
- Jamaat-e-Islami, Chinese Communist Party get into bed
- Book review: How the past saw its past (R. Champakalakshmi)
- India: Gujarat judge Jyotsana who convicted Kodnani, Babu Bajrangi gets 22 threat letters
- India: NDTV programme in Hindi on the Apparent Discovery of Saraswati River in Haryana
and More ...
available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/
::: RESOURCEs & FULL TEXT :::
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14. HOMELESS IN NEPAL - Editorial, Nepali Times
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(Nepali Times - 15-21 May 2015 #758)
The challenge now is to provide both short-term shelter and long-term housing, mainly in rural areas but also in ravaged urban centres
The numbers are staggering: 600,000 homes destroyed, 20,000 schools in ruins, government buildings reduced to rubble, dozens of bazar towns that look like they are carpet bombed. And that was before Tuesday’s 7.3 aftershock which finished off the houses that were left. No one has even bothered to revise the figures.
As logistical hurdles and bureaucratic delays are overcome to get more emergency shelter, medicine and food to the affected areas, attention has started turning to the enormous task of rehabilitation and reconstruction. As we report in this edition of Nepali Times, there is the urgent need for short-term emergency shelter so families can tide over the approaching monsoon and winter. Then there is the longer-term need for massive reconstruction which could be financed by remittances, government grants, subsidies and soft loans – all with the intention of creating jobs at home to stem the expected exodus of even more Nepalis going abroad to work.
Short-term shelter requires coordination between government and agencies like UN-HABITAT as well as smaller relief groups in order to quickly cover the sheer geographical scale of the affected area. It is important that these temporary shelters not become permanent homes, and that people are given the financial means and technical assistance necessary to rebuild in the longer-term.
Future reconstruction of the devastated Kathmandu Valley towns, urban centres and district headquarters will need a different kind of focus: how to brace ‘non-engineered’ unreinforced masonry buildings. There is no strict code for these kinds of houses, but there are ‘rules of thumb’ that need to be followed and monitored. As Sonia Awale reports the fact that so many of the reinforced concrete buildings are standing and the traditional clay-mortar brick houses crumbled after the earthquakes has bolstered public perception that concrete is good. That would be fine, except that reinforced concrete construction demand that rules about preparing and using cement are strictly followed.
So, like everything else in Nepal, it comes down to implementation. The 1993 building code needs to be updated and enforced, masons must be trained in reinforcing brick and their work monitored, safer and cheaper designs need propagation. There many alternative housing solutions (some of which we have listed on page 15) but the trouble with alternatives is that they are difficult to scale-up to a national level and be accepted by the mainstream. The lesson from Haiti is not to have grandiose and expensive government housing projects.
Efforts by individual families to rebuild on their own should not be derailed, and government must not be bypassed. However, the state must be put on notice that it can’t botch reconstruction assistance like it messed up the distribution of compensation for conflict victims in which many genuine families never got help.
Most rural rebuilding will have to be (and should be) household-led under benign but vigilant state regulation. The role of local government in the districts should be to provide financial support, enforce technical standards, monitor reconstruction without actually building homes. Proposed housing types should be specific to each community and use existing local materials and skills. A lot of this is already starting to happen, and much of the reconstruction will by default use local materials. However, many will opt for reinforced concrete which needs training and oversight. Unless locals have a sense of ownership (of both private houses and civic buildings like schools) the new construction will not be maintained and looked after.
In some places most families can only afford and understand local construction practices (Tsum, Langtang and other remote areas). In others there will be even stronger aspiration to rebuild concrete houses, especially in urban centres like Dhadingbesi, Charikot, Gorkha or Chautara.
Traditional masonry buildings, whether made of stone or mud-brick, can be reinforced with concrete tie-beams and steel columns but this is neither feasible nor desirable in many contexts. There will be a need to promote earthquake-resistant building methods and planning strategies that are appropriate to particular communities. Schools and homes that are intact or only slightly damaged need to be retrofitted.
Following the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, the local practice of using timber bracing (dhajji dewari) was widely adopted and over 120,000 houses were rebuilt using this technique in Pakistan. Similar methods have been adopted in Turkey, Italy, and Portugal after major earthquakes. There are other ways to build stronger homes using locally available materials, and this knowledge needs to be shared widely and conveyed to people engaged in reconstruction so that they can choose for themselves.
Transportation planning needs to be considered alongside rural reconstruction, given the impact of roads on a mountain landscape already prone to landslides. The survival of our towns and villages depends not just on their reconstruction but also on their ability to tread the ground lightly, respecting an unstable geology and climate.
In urban centres, there is an imperative to implement settlement planning that incorporates new open public spaces, earthquake-resistant community centres, and evacuation routes. Rebuilding of towns and urban centres must strengthen both community-level and government institutions, not undermine them. The idea to limit the height of buildings in the Kathmandu Valley may be misplaced since this can create other problems such as sprawl, which is disastrous in itself.
So far, there is little reason to hope that our elected leaders have either the understanding or the willingness to learn. The culture of business as usual was on full display on Wednesday as CA members scrambled shamelessly to hoard tents for themselves in the full glare of the media. However, we do have a savvy Minister of Urban Planning and officials with experience in relief and reconstruction in other parts of the world. They should be more assertive and proactively overcome the state’s paralysing inertia and ignorance.
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15. INDIA: THE SPECTRE OF ARUNA SHANBAUG
by Ratna Kapur
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(The Wire - 18 May 2015)
Aruna Shanbaug’s case became the face of the euthanasia debate when the Indian Supreme Court in 2011 disallowed a petition brought by Pinki Virani, her friend and author of Aruna’s story based on her life. Virani had asked that Aruna not be fed any more as she was being denied her right to live with dignity. The nurses and medical staff of King Edward Memorial Hospital (KEM) in Mumbai, where Aruna was lying in coma since 1973 strongly opposed the petition, on the grounds that she accepted food, though in recent years she was force fed through a Ryles tube, and that she responded through facial expressions. The Court granted the nurses the right to care for and take decisions on behalf of Shanbaug, At the same time the Court legalised passive euthanasia by means of the withdrawal of life support to patients in a permanent vegetative state (PVS) setting out the broad guidelines to be observed in bringing about such termination.
While a slew of articles will inevitably be written for or against euthanasia, the case of Aruna Shanbaug raises a host of considerations about gender, sexual assault, etc. that were all factors in the way in which her “bare life’’ played out over the course of 42 years. It raises fundamental issues about what constitutes “caring” and the issue of right to bodily integrity and workplace protection, that have all been marginalized or largely ignored, though these factors are central to Shanbaug’s life story.
The sexual assault
The story of Aruna Shanbaug begins on the night of November 27, 1973 when she was attacked. The 25 year-old Shanbaug was a staff nurse at the KEM Hospital when Sohanlal Bharta Valmik, a cleaner at the hospital, strangled her with a dog chain that cut off the oxygen supply to her brain and damaged her cortex, leaving her blind and in a PVS. He also brutally sodomized her. Her threat to report him for an alleged theft was apparently the immediate provocation for the attack. Walmiki was subsequently convicted of robbery and attempted murder and served a seven-year sentence. The charge of sodomy was simply dropped. The administrative head of the hospital at the time discouraged the filing of a charge of sodomy and the then fiancé of Shanbaug from bringing a complaint. Instead a sub-inspector filed the complaint as no one else seemed willing to do so. After the brutal assault, Shanbaug – who belonged to Haldipur in Karnataka – was visited by various family members for sometime, but gradually it was only Virani who remained a constant visitor up to the filing of the Supreme Court case.
A central issue in the Aruna’s story focuses on the politics of caring, who can care, has the capacity to care and who is less caring or less capable of caring. The Supreme Court bypassed Virani’s application to terminate Shanbaug’s life on the ground that she had no standing. However, Virani filed as “next friend” which under Indian law allows an individual to act on behalf of another individual who does not have the legal capacity to act on his or her own behalf. Indian courts have recognized complete strangers to act as “next friend”, including on behalf of deities, to file suits in court, the most notable recent case being the Ayodya temple suit where two deities were made a party to the case through the next friend. The Court awarded guardianship to the KEM hospital staff on the grounds that they had “developed an emotional bonding and attachment to Aruna Shanbaug” and were her “real family.” Emotional bond is not a criteria for “next friend” and the use of the expression “real family” has dangerous implications for those who may have a relationship to the concerned person, but do not fall within the normative remit of “real family”. Will the “next friend” only be eligible when linked to deities or the biological familial ties that render all other non-familial, non-marital, non-heterosexual relationships as ineligible? A decision over life and death rests on the anvil of dignity, and dignity is not a family value, or linked to some essential gendered trait. It is a societal value and hence needs to be delinked from the traditional frameworks of family and gender stereotypes.
Second, while the nursing profession requires support and affirmation more generally, in this instance, there is a deep concern over how the claim to “care” seemed to obscure the deeper considerations that were at play in Aruna’s story. The very fact that the dean of the hospital at the time refused to allow a complaint of sodomy to go forward indicates how the “reputation” of the institute became a central consideration. This move to suppress publicity of cases of sexual violence is a common practice among families as well as institutions of higher education, who should be leading the way rather than following the herd. The attack in KEM was an example of how the workspace was unsafe for women and priority should have been accorded to addressing this fact. Aruna’s case should have been a leading case on women’s rights where “caring” extended beyond the physical support for the individual who was harmed, to taking active steps to improve the working conditions for women, including addressing pervasive and systemic sex discrimination and sexism.
Whose rights?
A third and related concern, is that by bestowing the right to care and take decisions on behalf of Aruna Shanbaug to the KEM nurses, the Supreme Court did not intend that they take away her right to self-determination. While her facial expressions may have been different when she was awake, or she acknowledged the sound of bhajans or twitched her hands, Shanbaug was kept alive through force feeding. The guardians had the discretion to discontinue this practice and allow her to die of natural causes. While starvation is cruel and a painful way to die, the issue is that the right to refuse treatment must not be denied a person merely because he or she is incompetent to so choose. “Self-determination” may be exerted by a surrogate decision-maker where there was clear evidence that person would have so chosen if competent.
And this raises the final connected argument about choice. Had Shanbaug not been reduced to a PVS, would she have chosen to remain in KEM for her treatment after the violent and brutal sexual assault that she experienced in her work place? Or would she have chosen to be treated elsewhere? Would she have sued the hospital for failing to provide her a safe working environment?
At the moment when the “caring” most mattered, when the case of sexual assault and sodomy should have been pursued, the hospital pulled back. Whose interests and what interests informed this decision – profits? The hospital’s reputation? Or the public scandal that such an attack would trigger? Aruna Shanbaug’s case was not centrally about euthanasia, and the legal and medical entanglements that took place through her body after the assault. It was also about the denial of her right to bodily integrity in life and her right to self-determination when it came to death. Her room may remain a shrine in death as it was in “bare life.” Aruna herself vanished the day she was attacked, when her life was constructed thought the narratives of caring, euthanasia, the medical and legal professions, and she became nothing more than a spectre in her own story.
Rana Kapur is a Global Professor of Law at the Jindal Global Law School.
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16. IS INDIA'S 100 SMART CITIES PROJECT A RECIPE FOR SOCIAL APARTHEID?
by Shruti Ravindran
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(The Guardian - 7 May 2015)
The emergence of hi-tech prototype cities is raising concerns that India’s new urban enclaves will override local laws and use surveillance to keep out the poor
A labourer pulls a cable in front of office buildings in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (Gift City). Photograph: Amit Dave/Reuters
In architectural renderings, Gujarat International Financial Tec-City resembles a thicket of glassy blue skyscrapers soaring above the Sabarmati River in Gandhinagar, capital of the western Indian state of Gujarat. Its “signature towers” include the Diamond, a 410-metre spire resembling an icy stalagmite, and the 362m Gateway Towers, a bendy, sinuous version of Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV headquarters in Beijing.
By 2021, the creators of Gift City, as it is commonly known, promise to surround these towers with world-class infrastructure which will provide residents with round-the-clock power and water, a “district-cooling system” that sluices chilled water through buildings, and an automatic garbage disposal system sending excrement hurtling through sewage pipes at 90kph – “faster than most Indian trains”, as the journalist Manu Joseph dryly observed.
The beating heart – or rather, robot brain – of Gift City is its “Command and Control Centre”, which keeps traffic moving smoothly and monitors every building through a network of CCTVs. In a country where more than 300 million people live without electricity, and twice as many don’t have access to toilets, Gift City’s towers sound like hypertrophic castles in the sky. But they are an essential part of the Indian government’s urban vision, one that it wants to see replicated a hundred times across the country. Recently, the Indian cabinet green-lit a £10 billion scheme that will be divided equally between building 100 smart cities, and rejuvenating another 500 cities and towns over the next five years.
In a country where 300 million people live without electricity, Gift City’s towers sound like castles in the sky
A site under construction at Gift City in Gandhinagar. Photograph: Amit Dave/Reuters
Yet many experts and planners fear that such “insta-cities”, if they are made, will prove dystopic and inequitable. Some even hint that smart cities may turn into social apartheid cities, governed by powerful corporate entities that could override local laws and governments to “keep out” the poor.
In a monograph for a conference on smart cities in Mumbai in January, the economist and consultant Laveesh Bhandari described smart cities as “special enclaves” that would use prohibitive prices and harsh policing to prevent “millions of poor Indians” from “enjoying the privileges of such great infrastructure”. “This is the natural way of things,” he noted, “for if we do not keep them out, they will override our ability to maintain such infrastructure.”
The final vision for Gift City. Photograph: Sam Panthaky/AFP
Bhandari’s bald statements sparked social-media pandemonium, and the economist is now at pains to assert he is far from uncritical of such plans. “I am describing the unfeasibility and undesirability of a thoughtless smart-city vision,” he says. “When you invest so much without thinking about services and low-cost housing and governance, then you will end up creating enclaves that keep out the poor.”
In their present form, Bhandari adds, smart cities are essentially rechristened Special Economic Zones (SEZs); neo-liberal business-friendly zones exempt from taxes, duties and stringent labour laws. They are also subject to what urban scholars say is a form of “privatised governance”, due to a constitutional amendment that renders local governments powerless. All of which, according to Bhandari, makes them inherently and unreservedly exclusionary. “The current template for smart cities only mandates infrastructure creation. What we need is democracy and rule of law, not governance by fiat that holds in SEZs and smart cities created in China.”
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Last July, Narendra Modi’s newly elected government allocated 70.6 billion rupees (£762m) to its “100 Smart Cities” plan. This year’s allocation shrank to 1.4bn rupees, yet smart cities remain a key justification for a controversial land-acquisition ordinance the government is aiming to enact, which does away with mandatory consent and social safeguards for those whose lands are forcibly acquired. Over the past few months, smart city-themed conferences have been taking place every week in Delhi and Mumbai, culminating in the urban development minister Venkaiah Naidu’s announcement that the scheme would be “rolled out” imminently.
Yet no one is quite sure of what these cities might look like, or who they’re for. Naidu, with not a little wistfulness, said that smart cities “would have clean water, assured power supply, efficient public transport and would not be polluted or congested”. A concept note from his ministry, last revised in December, explains that they will “have smart (intelligent) physical, social, institutional and economic infrastructure”, guaranteeing their residents employment opportunities and “a very high quality of life, comparable with any developed European city”.
This repeated emphasis on high-end infrastructure and superlative quality of life hints at a discomfiting answer to the second question: who the intended inhabitants of smart cities are likely to be.
A visualisation of Palava City’s lakefront.
A visualisation of Palava City’s lakefront, designed to be the heart of this new city’s cultural and social life.
The current template might have given us Palava City. This self-described smart city across 3,000 acres of Mumbai’s northeastern exurbs is being built by a city-based developer best known for treating skyscraper-erecting as a competitive sport. As its promotional video announces in a smug baritone, Palava City was inspired by the futuristic vision that brought Singapore, Dubai “and even Mumbai” into being.
What this translates into is “essential public infrastructure” such as 24x7 electricity, immaculate wide roads, public transport, malls, multiplexes and luxury housing, including “Mumbai’s first and only golf-course-equipped residential township”. To make sure that no one trespasses on its immaculate privatopia, Palava plans to issue its residents with “smart identity cards”, and will watch over them through a system of “smart surveillance”.
The emphasis on surveillance underlines the stratified, elitist nature of smart cities, according to the academic and author Pramod Nayar. “Smart cities will be heavily policed spaces,” he says, “where only eligible people – economically productive consumers (shoppers) and producers (employees) – will be allowed freedom of walking and travel, while ambient and ubiquitous surveillance will be tracked so as to anticipate the ‘anti-socials’.”
As such, Nayar adds, smart cities will be “more fortresses than places of heterogeneous humanity, because they are meant only for specific classes of people”. One class to be served, the other to be surveilled and contained.
Palava plans to issue its residents with smart identity cards, and watch over them via a system of smart surveillance
Palava City.
Palava City will feature ‘Mumbai’s first and only golf-course-equipped residential township’
“The smart city paradigm comes from mid-scale European cities, and they’re meant to make existing infrastructure work in a more integrated way, whether it’s waste, habitation or transport connectivity,” says Gautam Bhan, a researcher with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Delhi. “But Indian cities struggle with the absence of networks. Just 16% of Indian cities have underground sewage drainage systems. No technology can make the system work better if basic services don’t exist.”
Set against this context, Gift City, which models itself after financial hubs Canary Wharf in London and Paris’s La Defense, starts to resemble the Emerald City, a glittering spectacle at the end of a shiny highway. In India such cities – geared towards high-end services – seem unlikely to provide many meaningful livelihood opportunities in the rural hinterlands where they come up.
“Having islands of well-serviced smart cities amidst a vast sea of poorly-serviced and impoverished villages leads to what urban scholars have called the juxtaposition of the citadel and ghetto,” says Sai Balakrishnan, an urban scholar at Rutgers, who studies land conflicts and urbanisation in India. “If the government does succeed in building these premium 100 smart cities, but does nothing to alleviate poverty and poor services in the surrounding areas, it could well lead to a politically volatile situation. These visible forms of spatial inequalities engender social mistrust and even violence.”
Nowhere is this combination of political volatility and spatial inequality more striking than in the giant expressway projects snaking across the country’s hinterland since 2006. These six-to-eight lane highways, intended to thread together luxury townships and special economic zones, often come up on fertile farmland that is forcibly acquired under the pretext of fulfilling a “public purpose”. In May 2011, one such project just outside Delhi – involving an expressway, private sports-themed city, and the country’s first Formula 1 racetrack – led to months-long protests among farmers from 10 villages. The rally descended into violence when villagers clashed with armed police, leading to the deaths of two farmers and two policemen.
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Not all manifestations of disquiet end in gunshots and death, however. Balakrishnan recounts an incident that took place on the outskirts of Bangalore, where villages are rapidly being replaced with IT parks, gated communities and wealthy villas. A friend returned to her “visibly opulent” bungalow one evening to find a young man lounging on her porch, drinking a cold beer from her fridge. When she took out her phone to call the police, he brandished a small knife and motioned for her to sit down. She did, upon which he finished his beer, thanked her politely and left.
“This incident makes palpable the sense of resentment and alienation among those excluded from partaking in India’s new urban wealth,” Balakrishnan says. “The young man wasn’t out to harm anyone, but he felt justified, entitled almost, to break into an affluent home and to help himself to a few hours of luxury.”
Every new smart city, she suggests, signals yet another “temporary secession, each of them setting in place a new social order that will not be easy to reverse, and that takes urban planning dangerously away from the public domain”. A hundred smart cities could spawn a thousand shadow cities, simmering with resentment and rage.
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17. THE NAGAS OF INDIA AND MYANMAR
by Sanjib-Baruah
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(The Indian Express, May 14, 2015)
Delhi will not succeed in dealing with Khaplang if it fails to understand Naypyidaw’s new priorities.
India China relation, Myanmar, India Look East policy, Look East policy, Northeast India, S.S. Khaplang, NSCN, NSCN-K militants, Naga politics, Wangtin Naga, NDFB, Indo-Burmese Revolutionary Front, IBRF, indian express, expres news, express column
Myanmar’s government has decided that recognising Khaplang’s authority in certain parts of Sagaing makes political sense. Myanmar’s government has decided that recognising Khaplang’s authority in certain parts of Sagaing makes political sense.Myanmar’s government has decided that recognising Khaplang’s authority in certain parts of Sagaing makes political sense.
You can choose your friends, but not your neighbours” is a cliché that our decision-makers like to quote when referring to China. But if geography is destiny, it has lessons for our Myanmar policy as well. Myanmar presents what Samir Das calls a “frontier dilemma” for India’s Look East policy — now awkwardly renamed the “Act East” policy. Its goal may be to connect the Northeast to the “powerhouses” of Southeast Asia. But some of those places are far away. What lies next door to Northeast India is the poor, politically unstable and strife-torn region of Myanmar. To make matters worse, some of the ethno-territorial conflicts in western Myanmar and Northeast India are part of a single regional conflict complex.
Increasingly, the Indian approach to the Naga conflict is at odds with developments across the border. The ceasefire between the government of India and the S.S. Khaplang-led faction of the NSCN has unravelled and there have been attacks on Indian soldiers by NSCN-K militants.
But across the border, relations between Khaplang and the Myanmar government have been on the upswing. The group has signed a five-point agreement with the Thein Sein government. The terms include a ceasefire, the opening of a liaison office to facilitate talks and freedom of movement for unarmed cadres within Myanmar.
Those developments have had an impact on Naga politics on the Indian side. The NSCN-K has split. While the ceasefire with the NSCN-K has been revoked, the Indian government expects to sign a ceasefire agreement with a yet-to-be-named group of former NSCN-K members. There have been efforts to portray Khaplang as a “Burmese Naga” with limited influence on the Indian side. But Khaplang is no more a “Burmese Naga” than Thuingaleng Muivah (of the NSCN-IM) is an “Indian Naga”. The Naga social and political worlds are not shaped by strict international boundaries. Khaplang spent part of his early childhood in Margherita in Assam. Y. Wangtin Naga, expelled recently from the NSCN-K and the person expected to lead the new outfit, is a Konyak from Nagaland’s Mon district. Yet, in April 2012, he was one of the signatories to the agreement between Khaplang’s group and the Myanmar government.
By all accounts, Khaplang, addressed reverentially as Baba, inspires awe and respect among many — and not just among his supporters. Thanks to his influence and authority, many northeastern rebel groups have found a safe home in Myanmar’s Sagaing region. Among them are the United Liberation Front of Asom, the United National Liberation Front, the People’s Liberation Army of Manipur and, at present, the Paresh Barua faction of Ulfa and the I.K. Songbijit-led NDFB.
Khaplang’s ideological worldview — and not just political opportunism — explains some of his political actions. There is an unfortunate tendency in India to reduce Naga political personalities to their tribal origins, and not to take their ideological commitments seriously. Khaplang speaks of “Eastern Nagaland” and the Indian Northeast being “natural allies”. He was instrumental in creating the Indo-Burmese Revolutionary Front (IBRF) in 1991. “Indo-Burma”, for Khaplang, comprises Northeast India and northwestern Burma — “one of the few regions in the world which remains to be liberated from colonial rule”. Before the unravelling of the NSCN-K ceasefire, Khaplang took pride in having signed ceasefire agreements with two governments. It lent legitimacy to his organisation as a cross-border resistance movement, not limited to an ethnic agenda.
Khaplang has significant influence on the Indian side, especially in the Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh and the Mon district of Nagaland. Even Wangtin Naga, after being expelled from the NSCN-K, apologised unconditionally “to my great baba, as no son has any bad intention towards his father”. It is unlikely that any former member of the NSCK-K will try to step into Khaplang’s shoes any time soon.
Baba’s authority and influence should be a concern to Indian officials. Khaplang’s homeground is, after all, where the NSCN began in1980, when Khaplang, Muivah and Isak Chishi Swu were all in the same organisation. The NSCN split in two in 1988, after an outbreak of bloody factional warfare. The divide between Khaplang and the Muivah-Swu factions of the NSCN are deep and bitter. Muivah has made it clear that he will walk out of the talks if the Indian government tries to expand them to include the Khaplang faction or any other group.
The Indian government has, therefore, put all its eggs in the NSCN-IM basket.
Clearly, the NSCN-K decided that a ceasefire without talks is no longer sustainable. It unilaterally withdrew from the ceasefire on March 27.
The talks with the NSCN-IM are supposedly making progress. But it is no secret that the negotiations have reached an impasse on the key issue of reunification of Naga territories. This explosive, emotion-laden issue, with multiple stakeholders, cannot be resolved through talks with the NSCN-IM alone.
India has long put pressure on Myanmar to close the camps of northeastern insurgent groups. Some security officials appear to hope against hope that, some day, Myanmar will do a Bhutan and/ or a Bangladesh (under Sheikh Hasina) and eliminate those camps. Viewed from Myanmar, the NSCN-K does not appear that way. But even with the camps of other northeastern insurgent groups, the chances of that ever happening have receded after Khaplang’s agreement with the Myanmar government.
Thus, the talk among Indian intelligence officials has suddenly shifted to “shutting out” Khaplang in Myanmar, “sealing” the border and even building a fence. Such moves could easily stop the Act East policy in its tracks.
Geography may well be destiny. But proximity is also a matter of definition and neighbours can be chosen. Myanmar’s semi-civilian and semi-democratic government has decided that recognising Khaplang’s authority in certain parts of Sagaing makes political sense. As a region, Sagaing is Northeast India’s most proximate neighbour, and historically an important site for Northeast India’s insurgencies. It is unwise for New Delhi to be so radically out of step with Naypyidaw regarding this key area.
The writer is professor of political studies at Bard College, New York.
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18. REVIEW: COLONIAL BOTANY IN BRITISH INDIA (Joh Mathews)
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(Dissertation Reviews May 4, 2015)
A review of Making Useful Knowledge: British Naturalists in Colonial India, 1784-1820 by Minakshi Menon.
This dissertation takes for its remit the emergence of colonial botany in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British India alongside the introduction of the colonial survey as an accumulator and conduit of knowledge, and the explicit connection of the commercial interests of the British East India Company (henceforth EIC) with the making of natural knowledge on the ground. The project is mediated through a study of three British savants, the Welsh descended Sir William Jones (1746-1794) and two Scotsmen, Francis Buchanan (later Buchanan-Hamilton, 1762-1829) and William Roxburgh (1751-1815). In so doing, the author, Minakshi Menon, draws upon both South Asian history and the History of Science to produce a work that speaks eloquently to both at their confluence. As she writes, “I argue that colonial natural history and the East India Company state were co-constitutive. Natural history was an expression of the manner in which Company’s commercial interests shaped the organization of governance. It was a hybrid way of knowing that brought together different types of knowledge, European and indigenous, in the service of the Company state; and it was useful knowledge, directed to specific contexts of use without necessarily affecting natural knowledge making in Europe” (pp. xiii-iv).
The work is divided into five chapters, the first and last forming the introduction and conclusion respectively, with three intervening body sections. In the introductory chapter (Colonialism, Imperialism and Natural History), the author draws attention to the three broad themes delineated above and introduces the dramatis personae Jones, Buchanan, and Roxburgh. Menon takes for her central argument the position that “colonial natural history was simultaneously a project to study India’s natural world, supply British markets with commodities and create institutions for colonial governance” (p. 1). Useful knowledge results through the placing of “the histories of histories of India and Britain within a unitary epistemological frame, in order to complicate received notions about metropolitan and colonial ‘difference’” (p. 1). Given that the lens she employs is that of natural history (and it must be mentioned here that her approach to the subject is preponderantly limited to plants), the stage is set for a sedulous treatment and analysis of classic works in both the history of the Indian subcontinent and the history of science (with extension to science studies and even more generally social theory), each taking the other into account, even as she produces an intriguing thesis that draws on these several rivers of inspiration. As such, she finds herself responding to an almost bewildering array of celebrated scholars including Kathleen Wilson, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Londa Schiebinger, Claudia Swan, Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, Frederick Cooper, David Armitage, Harold Cook, Pratik Chakrabarti, Sheila Jasanoff, Thomas Trautman, Jan Golinski, Steven Jay Gould, Ranajit Guha, Sumit Sarkar, Deepak Kumar, Gyan Prakash and Kapil Raj. While treating each of them with respect, balance and context, she focuses greatly on the emergence of the statistical survey in Scotland (by Sir John Sinclair) and its eventual purchase in India. The worlds of the savants she has picked are subject to a deep dedication for the forging of natural knowledge in harness to state-level concerns. It is the differing manner in which the three of them prosecute their work with inflected personal imperatives that furnish the kernels of the chapters that follow.
Chapter 2, “Orientalism, Language and Botanical Knowledge-Making: William Jones in Bengal,” shows that Sir William Jones, the junior puisne judge of the Calcutta Supreme Court, was really about the instrumental business of making useful knowledge through his Orientalist project of rendering the cultural world of a region under thrall through intimate treatment of its own languages through Britons (or more generally, Europeans) who had mastered them. A significant result was the creation of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, largely founded on the basis of the Royal Society in London, with the explicit purpose of inquiring into “the History, and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia” (p. 52), a foundational moment for European Orientalism. Such a position was certainly advanced by the EIC’s first Governor-General in Bengal, Warren Hastings, who maintained that “(e)very accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state” (p. 53). The sentiment extended for Jones to the taxonomizing of local plants, particularly in response to the Linnaean forms of taxonomy prevalent at the time, drawing for inspiration upon the French Encyclopédistes and Scottish societal theorists, in particular, Adam Ferguson. The author contends that Jones’ Orientalism had two aspects—instrumentalism, born of the conviction that native works comprised useful facts about nature, which could promote British commercial efforts in India, as well as a deep moral sympathy for native institutions. This effort was palpably clear in his naming of plants. For Jones, Indian plants studied by Europeans in the subcontinent “would have to be tracked through the linguistic practices of the natives” (p. 57). As such, a worker versed only in Linnaean techniques would find the effort wholly impossible unless there was active conversation with the practices and the indigenes that made and furthered them.
Three further sections follow Jones’s evolution of thought on the matter, focusing on his encounter with early Orientalist writing, his work as a judge in Bengal (putting his ideas to the test in ways that are both illuminating and chastening), and finally his ideas on the manner in which botanical knowledge should be prosecuted in India. These ideas he outlined in three essays: The Design of a Treatise on the Plants of India; On the Spikenard of the Ancients; and Botanical Observations on Select Indian Plants. The chapter is deeply rooted in Jones’s correspondence with a number of British functionaries both at home and in India, where both the trappings of administrative power and the ethnological practices that emerge therefrom are investigated. Jones’s turn to Sanskrit to make sense of the modes of comportment of a recently subject people is enlightening, be it along terms of philosophy, history, or civil codes. Botany receives the same treatment—as the author states, “The natural character of the plants of India, the understanding of which was the most important goal for any European botanist working in India, was impossible to arrive at in the absence of a thorough knowledge of Sanskrit” (p. 77).
The subsequent employment of the botanical essays mentioned above is exemplary; the first critiques Linnaean taxonomy and proposes an alternative approach, predicated upon the experimentally determined properties of the plants under study, the second draws into the relief the inadequacies of Linnaean nomenclature and the centrality of indigenous interlocution in the fashioning of botanical knowledge and the last extends the discourse of textual knowledge-making for natural history, i.e. the finding of a natural object, in this case, the Spikenard, through discovery of its presence in a plenitude of languages (pp. 80-81). The instrumental value of such work is always present alongside the scientific practice of experimental history. If for the latter, the work of Ursala Klein [“Experiments at the Intersection of Experimental History, Technological Inquiry, and Conceptually Driven Analysis: A Case Study from Early Nineteenth-Century France,” Perspectives in Science 13:1 (2005): 1-48; and “Technoscience avant la lettre,” Perspectives on Science 13:2 (2005): 226-266] is consulted, the manner in which Carolus Linnaeus conducted his work (for the former) as a methodological operation in cameralism is foregrounded by the author, through works by Lisbet Koerner [Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1992)] and Staffan Müller-Wille [“Nature as a Marketplace: The Political Economy of Linnaean Botany,” in Oeconomies in the Age of Newton Annual Supplement to Volume 35, History of Political Economy,” edited by Margaret Schabas and Neil De Marchi, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 154-172; and “Walnuts at Hudson Bay, Coral Reefs in Gotland: The Colonialism of Linnaean Botany,” in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce and Politics in the Early Modern World, edited by L. Schiebinger and C. Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 34-48]. Menon states that authors like Koerner and Müller-Wille show us that “the Linnaean system was neither self-evidently nor immediately hegemonic…but a situated response to a local problem” (p. 85). Linnaeus’s system may have worked for known species by facilitating movement between contexts through reliable reproduction in Swedish irrespective of context (p. 86), but came-a-cropper where unfamiliar plants were involved and such contexts could not be guaranteed. “They were neither ‘commodious’ nor ‘perspicuous’ outside Europe, since their purpose, as Jones ironically observed, was to cement the social relations of Linnaean botany. And they were particularly ineffective in the tropics” (p. 87). Jones took for inspiration a seventeenth century Dutch administrator, Hendrik Adriaan van Reede tot Drakenstein who, working with indigenous informants in what is now the northern part of the state of Kerala, put together a detailed herbal denominated Hortus Malabaricus. “If Jones accepted the Hortus as a model for his own work, it was because he recognized…that natural knowledge-making in Asia was a new kind of practice, a phenomenon in its own right, not a simple extension of European practices eastward” (p. 89). In this regard, Jones was emphasizing cultural aspects, which were proscribed by necessity in a Linnaean system (based on the simplicity of the comparison of sexual systems) that sought to stabilize the identity of species for botanists anywhere, irrespective of local context.
Other colonial residents like the botanist William Roxburgh who had early befriended Jones, were in wholehearted endorsement of the latter’s methods, both seeing the commercial advantages of such research, and that the chemical properties of the plants studied, which were also promoted, only served to locate the importance of the species in situ. There was an additional angle. Jones’s total approach was rooted in his social context, where increasing miscegenation left an uncomfortable taste regarding the Linnaean system. Ultimately the plants under study “were mutable hybrid objects that embedded local knowledge and gave evidence of colonial social relations and indigenous agency in their very constitution (the Spikenard)….They were evidence…of the hard work that had to be done before their European avatars could bloom in metropolitan botanic gardens, work that compassed the construction of colonial social relations while stabilizing colonial nature” (p. 115).
The third chapter, “A ‘Real Survey’: Francis Buchanan and A Journey from Madras through the countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar,” focuses largely on the career in India of the Scottish stadialist (stadialism being “the notion of stages in the development and progress of societies,” p. 143), Francis Buchanan and his employment of the statistical survey pioneered in his native country by Sir John Sinclair (1754-1835) to produce the regions under examination from a variety of angles ranging from agriculture to the condition of the inhabitants. A protégé of the Governor-General Lord Richard Wellesley (1760-1842), who inhabits the beginning of the chapter, he was put in charge of the short lived Indian Natural History Project to study the animals of India (essentially the higher vertebrates— birds and mammals) at the gubernatorial menagerie at Barrackpore (interestingly, this is one of the very few points in this dissertation where natural history is also seen to include animals; otherwise it is largely treated as synonymous with the study of plants—see above), which suffered for want of endorsement by Wellesley’s principals at the EIC, already less than delighted by the College of Fort William set up under the aegis of his office in Calcutta. Buchanan had earlier undertaken a survey of Mysore after the defeat of Tipu Sultan (1750-1799) at Seringapatam; it was undertaken at the behest of Wellesley, probably to offset the unpopularity of the war against Mysore by enhancing the positive nature of Wellesley’s expansionist tendencies (p. 126). The author states that the chapter’s intention is to examine “the pushes and pulls on natural knowledge-making and state-making in colonial India” (p. 124) and in this regard, a minute from Wellesley to Buchanan exhorted him to ascertain points regarding “Esculent Vegetables, Cattle, Farms, Cotton, Pepper, Sandal-wood, and Cardamoms, Mines, Quarries, Mineral and Mineral Springs, Manufactures and Manufacturers, Climate and Seasons of Mysore and Inhabitants largely directed towards obtaining a measure for assessment and collection of revenue” (p. 127). The eventual document was published in 1807, marking, as the author asserts, “an important moment in the history of British rule in India: the emergence of the survey as an instrument of colonization” (pp. 128-129).
Menon draws on Bernard Cohn’s idea of “investigative modality” which collapsed “all the practices of Company administrators and bureaucrats intent on understanding and mobilizing indigenous knowledge in the service of the state” (p. 130), and in so doing argues that Buchanan’s manuscript was epistemic in its gathering cognitively of this recently colonized region wherein scientific knowledge both travelled and was transacted. In the process, what was being gleaned from native informants was being sedulously transcribed on paper to “create a third language, which could give the colonial state power over indigenous knowledge” (p. 131). That Buchanan took to the task with vigor was no surprise—after all, he emerged from Scottish ranks that peopled considerably the medical and administrative staff of the EIC and who were rooted in the survey-based language of their nation of origin that ultimately sought improvement in the circumstances of the population under study, in this case, in parts of India. To make this case, the chapter abruptly moves from Delhi (the site of the holdings of Wellesley’s Minute for the Indian Natural History Project) to Edinburgh, where the discussion of several thinkers from the perspective of “improvement” and drawing on pedagogy from the university of that city, becomes the focus of the section in which Buchanan himself largely disappears for several pages, reminding me of a similar absence for pages on end of the eponymous monarch in Fernand Braudel’s great work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley: University of California Press, Reprint edition, 1996). What is foregrounded, however, is the manner in which knowledge is made on the ground, be it at the Edinburgh University’s School of Medicine, or Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account, or the agricultural surveys of a polymath and farmer, Andrew Wight (p. 145). With respect to agriculture, the author turns to the notion of the taming of nature, looking for instance to Roy Porter [Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (England: Penguin Books, 2000)] and the “reconstituted idea of nature, one that required a body of experts to understand and explain its rational principles…” (p. 147), which, in linking the lecture theater to the agricultural holding, invokes Steven Shapin [“The Audience for Science in Eighteenth Century Edinburgh” History of Science 12 (1974): 95-121]. Considerable attention is paid to one of Buchanan’s teachers, John Walker, and his lectures on natural history (including the rather arresting proclamation, “a complete system of natural history does not exist anywhere” and apparently “it cannot be collected from books,” p. 161), and names the subsumed areas that comprise the subject, six in number: meteorology; hydragraphy (sic in Walker’s original description); geology; mineralogy; botany; and zoology (p. 161). Chemistry gets foregrounded via a discussion of William Cullen, Walker’s teacher, and altogether, there seems to be vast commitment to Baconian principles of induction aiming towards a “reformed natural history” based upon “an empiricism of particulars” (p. 163).
The section concludes with an explanation of Walker’s use of geology (in a manner similar to the author’s discussion of political arithmetic in Chapter 1) before moving back to India in a succeeding section to highlight the methods used and conclusions drawn by Walker’s acolyte, the re-introduced Buchanan, through his work on the survey of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar. Key to the author’s argument is the fact that while pride of place is often given to Colin Mackenzie (1754-1821), the first Surveyor-General of India, the fact remains that Mackenzie was often a reluctant pioneer, and Wellesley’s demand of Buchanan to conduct a second survey was eminently justified. Buchanan, while undertaking the survey, had asked, as the author points out, different questions from those we might pose today, including one curious entry where he sought of “a native if he knew the exact location of heaven” (p. 187). A present-day understanding of statistics was not the directive of Buchanan’s queries; statistical surveys looked in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ultimately to the overall happiness of the populace under study. A major consideration was caste, and in this regard, the author methodically places Buchanan’s efforts in the larger context of recent seminal works by Susan Bayly [Caste, Society and Politics in India: from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge University Press, 1999)] and Nicholas Dirks [Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001)], a discussion that gets a great deal of attention (see pp. 204-212, for instance). Caste was clearly an important element, not least on account of its fluidity in practice at the time where Buchanan was noting “territorial variations in the domestic practices of groups later treated as homogenous…” (p. 195).
Buchanan drew both on Wellesley for the “scaffolding” of his document and on Walker for its “narrative structure,” coupled with the latter’s injunction to his students to keep “a daily journal of natural history” (p. 196). Agriculture was the first object of inquiry with intimate descriptions of rocks and soils before the role of informants (in their relative positions in society) was considered. One interesting aspect that Menon underscores is the guardedness with which Buchanan treats information obtained from natives (quite at odds with Sir William Jones, for example), as he claimed that Brahmin interlocutors could often be liars and cheats (p. 205); this position was possibly influenced by the Scottish philosopher, David Hume (p. 213). The curiosity of the eventual document produced by Buchanan, often ham-handedly rendered in the writing, was yet no impediment to the directors of the EIC to publish his work (p. 220), possibly driven by their need to show positive developments in India in order to increase investments from Britain in Company shares (p. 221). The concluding section of the chapter points to the fact that the “language of A Journey” (i.e. Buchanan’s survey) “was as much a product of the Scottish Enlightenment as conjectural history or the emergence of crofting [i.e. working small land-holdings called crofts] in the Highlands” (p. 223). Eventually Buchanan’s “language would be appropriated and strengthened by English Utilitarians, who would make it the dominant idiom of colonization in nineteenth-century India” (p. 223).
The title of Chapter 4, “Making Knowledge, Making Patrons, Making the State: William Roxburgh in Madras,” is more modest than its emprise turns out to be, inasmuch as the chapter also considers the career of Francis Buchanan (encountered in the previous chapter) against that of William Roxburgh, who would become the Superintendent of the Botanic Garden in Calcutta. While each studied at Edinburgh University and took the same classes, evinced passion for both botany and more discursively natural history, and went to India intending to return with large fortunes, only Roxburgh succeeded in the last. The disparity between the fortunes of the two men is treated as exemplary for the process of state-making through the medium of the making of natural knowledge in the early modern British Empire (p. 224), with the author stating that her work in this chapter is placed at the intersection of three axes of analysis—the empire-state, the familial state, and “the concept of ‘logistics’ or control of the natural world as a way to build state power” (p. 225). She points to the dual nature of the EIC as a commercial entity and a state, drawing upon Philip Stern’s recent treatise on the subject, [The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty & the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)]. In such a system, Company functionaries also indulged in private trade (p. 225), not least its medical practitioners, experts as they were in “marshalling the facts about nature that underpinned a variety of trading operations” (p. 226).
Given that the Company was insinuating itself into an already complicated political structure where the Mughals had held sway since the early sixteenth century, even if largely emasculated through conflict with rebelling fiefs and other native potentates, the Company had to make its authority felt, be it in a relatively seamless manner, as suggested by Christopher A. Bayly [Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)] or with active administrative intervention, the position taken by Sudipta Sen [Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)], “significantly rearrang(ing) the institutions it encountered, both agrarian and commercial, producing a new colonial terrain that was maintained through force of arms” (p. 227). As Menon states, “[t]he Company’s men on the spot who learnt to navigate the tensions between local revenue officials, landlords and peasants, chiefs and retainers, weavers and merchants, would operate successfully in the interstices” (p. 228). She turns to Frederic Cooper’s notion of the empire-state, “a polity without a clear national core or contiguous territorial existence, which functioned both as a zone of exploitation and a space for moral debate about issues raised by colonization,” (see Frederic Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)), a situation that indeed obtained for the “subordinate periphery” that India was through the social and economic reforms that the Company essayed to introduced into the country (p. 229). William Roxburgh managed to fulfill this role in helping to establish the Calcutta Botanic Gardens instituted by his predecessor Robert Kyd (1746-1793) and in so doing served “to consolidate imperial terrain without a clearly-defined centre” (p. 230).
Roxburgh also understood his position as a functionary of the EIC along familial lines, in the sense of Julia Adams’s The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), both through promotion of his own lineage (he attempted to secure a sinecure for his son at the Calcutta Botanic Garden) and in terms of stewardship as Company Naturalist (p. 231). Patronage for Roxburgh was to be found in London through the powerful figure of Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1920), explorer, member of the Privy Council, President of the Royal Society, and moving spirit behind the elevation of Kew Gardens to its pivotal position in the world of colonial and global botany; and more locally in Madras, Andrew Ross (dates not given in the thesis, but Mayor of Madras, 1757-1758), a man of considerable means and influence and a “portfolio capitalist” (see Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C. A. Bayly, “Portfolio capitalists and the political economy of early modern India”, Indian Economic and Social History Review 25:4 (1988): 401-424), who married commerce and political power (p. 247). Both men functioned as “centres of calculation” in their own rights, the nodal points of command in an informal network of far-flung individuals, which could make or break careers. For their part, natural historians possessed the expertise to detect goods involved in country trade and to judge their quality, where they could be found and how they might be transported—in brief, “the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect” (pp. 240-241) as Chandra Mukerji would claim through the term she would deploy for the purpose, “logistical power” [“The Territorial State as a Figured World of Power: Strategies, Logistics and Impersonal Rule,” Sociological Theory 28: 4 (December 2010): 402-424; and Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)].
In this situation, where professional and personal gain often bled into each other, “[p]rivate trade made the institutions of the colonial state cohere (p. 241). Roxburgh, a Scottish Lowlander, succeeded in obtaining patronage; the Highland-connected Buchanan, however, failed signally in this regard, save in his relationship with the controversial Governor-General, Lord Richard Wellesley (p. 250). While Ross furthered his fellow Scot William Roxburgh’s appointment as Professor of Botany and Natural History to the EIC, Scottish private interests also got a fillip from an English source in Sir Joseph Banks, committed as he was to the notion of improvement (pp. 256-257). A plethora of examples, particularly with regard to Ross and Roxburgh’s mutual benefitting, comprises several pages, to the extent that even when Roxburgh was moved from the Northern Circars (where he was accumulating something of a fortune) to assume the position of Superintendent of the Botanic Gardens, an effort was made by Ross to delay the departure and to try to ensure that Roxburgh remained only temporarily in Bengal (the latter situation, however, not coming to pass). Menon points out that Buchanan, unlike Roxburgh, was not “biddable” (p. 285) and apart from Lord Wellesley, did not seek to work power in the interstices.
A key point of fracas occurred when Roxburgh, seeking to retire from the Calcutta Botanic Garden, attempted to secure his position of Superintendent for his son, something that Buchanan was eyeing. Patronage was sought on both sides and ultimately Roxburgh senior stayed. A key consideration was the difference portrayed between being a botanist versus a naturalist—according to John Walker, Buchanan’s teacher, a botanist methodized and distinguished plants, discovering new ones with a view to their future usefulness, while a naturalist was acquainted with the properties of identified plants and worked to discover qualities in those that were already known (p. 242). In the contest, Buchanan had tried to push his case in terms of being a botanist, expressing indignation that the subject was being given short shrift. For a while, it looked as though Buchanan would obtain the post, but as Roxburgh refused to relinquish it, the situation lingered. Interestingly, Roxburgh tried to convince Buchanan of the benefits of private trade, but Buchanan simply failed to do so. Ironically, the one place where he did attempt to retain some level of personal control was in seeking to take back with him to Britain his natural history drawings (some 500 in number). In this he was thwarted by the Governor-General Frances Edward Rawdon-Hastings (1754-1826), then Earl of Moira, who maintained that they were rightly the property of the EIC. He promptly confiscated them (pp. 289-291), leaving the homeward-bound Buchanan an embittered man. Ultimately, the “shared rule” that allowed private merchants to wield power in state-building (p. 292) resulted in differing results for those naturalists who were able to exploit that situation to their own ends by engaging in similar practices under patronage to the self-same merchants, such as Roxburgh, as opposed to men like Buchanan, who never quite learnt how to play the commercial game.
The bookending-chapter. “Conclusion: Making Useful Knowledge,” places the three savants profiled in the dissertation, Jones, Buchanan, and Roxburgh, into relief, even as it sums up the major claims made across the work. A key similarity among all three functionaries is that they considered themselves useful men (p. 296). Jones evinced a “sentimental empiricism” in his attitudes to Orientalism that extended to his botanical knowledge-making. Buchanan, a Scottish stadialist and inspirer of English Utilitarians, did not, unlike Jones, hold to a great Indian past (even if at the time deemed degenerated from such illustrious priors). Yet, through his surveys he was still committed to maintaining India on the civilizational ladder not least by learning her languages, studying her customs, and understanding her resources across the board in order to produce a “total” history of the country so as to afford comparisons (pp. 298-299), where natural knowledge was gained toward furthering affairs of state. Roxburgh, blurring lines between the commercial interest of the EIC and private trades, “viewed useful natural knowledge through the prism of accumulation and exchange.” Central to his work was the notion that in the re-rendering of native knowledge (for instance a pharmacopoeia), indigenous knowledge was necessary to validate identification, thus framing colonial natural history as a science of two cultures (p. 302). The dissertation is concluded with a reiteration of its two major claims: “that colonial natural history and the East India Company state were co-constitutive; and that colonial natural history was a hybrid way of knowing that brought together different types of knowledge, European and indigenous, in the service of the colonial state” (p. 302).
This dissertation is a tour de force of analysis of the early modern British state in India, speaking at once to South Asian history, British colonial and imperial history, and the history of science, and drawing liberally for context from each. The arguments it makes are couched in strong theoretical frameworks from every discipline mentioned and the bibliographic depth of the work is formidable. It will be indispensable for any serious student of British empire in juxtaposition with natural history, and given its unusual breadth, should be of equal interest to those scholars working in histories of the Indian subcontinent along political, economic, and scientific lines.
John Mathew
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune
john.mathew at iiserpune.ac.in
Dissertation Information
University of California, San Diego. 2013. 337pp. Primary Advisor: Naomi Oreskes.
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