Rachel's space

Lunchtime debates are fun. The audience is free to tuck into their sandwiches and sip their coffee whilst supposedly listening and making mental notes of issues they want discussed in the end, if there is time (and there will be no time). The first one I attended was organised by the European Commission two weeks ago. The theme was ‘Beyond Economic Statistics: India in the 21^st Century’. I took some notes since I had no sandwiches to focus on.

The invited speaker was writer and diplomat Pavan K. Varma currently Director of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in New Delhi. He based his speech on his recent book Being Indian: The Truth About why the 21^st Century is India’s. The book aims to reassess the visible and rapid evolution taking place in the complex and diverse subcontinent of India against 4 principal parameters: the rise of democracy, entrepreneurship, technology and a new notion of pan-Indianness.

The improbably probable survival of democracy in India

India’s positive development, according to Varma, is primarily a result of the survival, initially improbable, of democracy in a country dominated by its 2000-year legacy of cast. Not democratic by instinct, structure or law due to its history of rigid stratification, India succeeded in creating the largest democracy in the world after its independence in 1947 and maintaining it. The democratic system manages to co-exist within a society strongly dominated by social stratification inherent within Hinduism, enabling economic growth and possibilities of mobilisation.

As a democratic state India continues to slowly but surely construct the right base to support and further its economy. As an example Varma mentioned the fight towards eliminating corruption, which is one of the country’s major threats to a stable, rapidly evolving nation. As an anecdote to prove India’s labours in this domain he mentioned the railway system.  Up to 15 years ago the entire railway reservation system and the acquiring of tickets were still essentially corrupt with prices negotiated by individuals at stations. In 1995 the rail transport system was computerised and an online reservation system introduced taking the place of past corrupt mechanisms.

Artha and the birth of entrepreneurship and technology

Varma explained how the pursuit of wealth and material prosperity is thoroughly accepted by the Indian psyche given that Hinduism does not ideologically hinder it. This pursuit of material well-being is represented within Indian households by the statue of the goddess of Wealth and Beauty – goddess Lakshmi. She holds in her hands Hindu symbols for the four ends of human life: dharma or the pursuit of right conduct, kama or the pursuit of desire, artha or the pursuit of wealth and moksha or the liberation of the cycle of birth and death.

The pursuit of wealth - artha, impossible as it may seem for a population dominated by absolute poverty, is paradoxically revered and perceived as a duty. This paradox has created a staunch people with a character boasting ingenuity in adverse circumstance or as Varma put it in ‘the art of muddling through’, an art which he said Indians see themselves to have perfected; a refusal to accept defeat and a creative outlook with plenty of ideas.

This character together with given opportunities has enabled the birth of entrepreneurship and technology which continues to change the way people view themselves in terms of national identity, moving from a scattered colonial identity to a more unified post-colonial one. India prides in its technological boom and its internationally sought for qualified engineers, developments which have brought about a newly found confidence and a redefinition of the way the nation perceives itself against an international backdrop.

Tradition and Modernity- harmonious schizophrenia

As entrepreneurship and technology gradually percolate through the various Indian social structures it will become even more possible than it is now to speak of a unified and uplifted India or of a pan-Indianness in which tradition and modernity continue to exist together, making of Indians the ‘harmonious schizophrenics’ (as Varma nicely put it) they see themselves to be. The rise of the film industry is an example of this existing together. With a 1000 films produced each day a new popular culture, which is less fastidious about the past unites a majority of people from all parts of India.

The battle against illiteracy, poverty and natural disasters is however ongoing and depends on the seeping influences of technology and entrepreneurship. As an example of the ways in which technological developments in India are also reaching the poor, Varma mentioned fishing villages in remote parts of India where fishermen are now able to access U.S. official tidal warning systems before setting out to sea .

Therefore through the survival of democracy, the rise of entrepreneurship and technology and an emerging pan-Indianness, India continues to work its way up exploiting opportunities, which never presented themselvesin the past, overcoming shadows and moving into the international limelight as never before, making this 21^st century India’s. And on this positive note the lecture was over.

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will

After a charged speech the audience was given the floor and of course the first thing one could not help criticising was Varma’s optimism especially with regard to globalisation, which he hailed as the way forward. Someone remarked that the rise of globalisation and capitalism after the failure of socialism in India did not mean the new emerging system would manage to make everyone happy especially since it clashes heavily with India’s casts. His generalisations did also contradict introductory statements where he briefly mentioned India’s vast diversity and complexity. To continue spoiling the fresh taste of positivism and sandwiches Varma left the audience with, another asked about the Indian conflict with Kashmir and Sri Lanka, about Indian minorities in the North, about women’s role in India and whether fundamentalism is a threat to its development. Naturally there was not enough time to go into these questions.

Personally I do tend to receive diplomatic optimism with my sceptical grin. Yet how would the audience and I have received Varma had he attempted to culturally relate a bunch of Europeans to the India of today by focusing on its darker side, known to some and all too familiar to others? Perhaps with a little more credibility in exchange for another exasperating lecture leaving us with faint traces of courage, turning our lunch break into a sour hour. During this debate I kicked back and enjoyed my lunch break and some knowledge, thinking about what to do with it is where sweet trouble starts.

Rachel

Last Thursday, the 12^th of October, the Swedish Academy awarded Orhan Pamuk the Nobel Prize for literature. Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and is the first Turkish citizen to become a Nobel laureate.

Considering the Turkish State’s charges against Pamuk in 2005 for ‘instulting Turkishness’ and Turkish Nationals’ statement that Pamuk was awarded the Nobel for belittling ‘our national values, for his recognition of the [Armenian] genocide’, Pamuk’s popularity in his country is questionable. His international acclaim however lies on solid grounds. He has been praised for renewing the contemporary novel in remarkable ways, placing his hometown Istanbul at the centre of his writing and as his model for a universe which has gained universal appeal.

Professor Horace Engdahl, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, who announced the prize, stated that Pamuk’s works prove that the novel as a literary form is still alive and has a future. Engdahl declared Pamuk’s hometown Istanbul as the main prerequisite for his creativity. A prerequisite which according to Engdahl took him time to discover and find patterns for but in so doing he became one of the finest contemporary writers of our times.

The Academy hailed Pamuk’s novel The Black Book as his greatest creation and most complete, a work which opens doors between two hostile cultures, the European and the Turkish, unveiling hostilities as absurd when considering a common inheritance to both civilizations.

Pamuk interlocks western literary influences such as Kafka, Borges and Eco and Islamic literary influences and classical Persian Poetry like the Shahnameh. Reading The Black Book one enters a labyrinth of mysteries and mirrors surrounding the East and West, literary tours from which it is not easy to escape, the reader gropes for solutions and faces the possibility of finding none.

The melancholic landscape of Istanbul lies at the heart of The Black Book and the majority of Pamuk’s novels as The White Castle, My Name is Red and his latest one Istanbul: Memoirs and the City. Istanbul emerges as the rich and chaotic city with an admiration for the East and a desire for the West and the centre of what some have termed ‘the clash of cultures’. But it is similarities and an understanding of differences which constitute the kernel of Pamuk’s novels using them as a bridge in what for some appears to be the unbridgeable.

Pamuk’s works will undoubtedly rise in their international popularity after his being awarded the Nobel and it is perhaps perfect timing. The simplifications penetrating the West’s perception of the international political sphere mostly through the media need to be met with alternative sources of information; sources which seek to exercise the imagination and engage it in an earnest probing for understanding. Pamuk’s novels will undoubtedly act as such a source.

Wayside info: The first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to French poet and philosopher Sully Prudhomme in 1901. There are in total 733 male Nobel laureates and a miserable 33 women of whom 10 where awarded the literary prize amongst them Nadine Gordimer in 1991 and Toni Morrison in 1993. Let’s hope that the Nobel will become less of a male oriented domain in the very near future, it can’t afford to keep missing out!