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ON THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND A POSSIBLE 5 SECONDS OF FAME

ON THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND A POSSIBLE 5 SECONDS OF FAME
28 september 2006

who knows, maybe i’ll appear on an Indian CNN broadcast. they showed up at our school today to do what i guess was feature story about Americans learning Urdu-- something which people here seem to regard with fascinated incredulity. the big question is always WHY we would want to do study this language. more on this below.

anyway. so, CNN showed up at our school. first they wanted to take footage of classes in session-- “just act natural” and all that [yeah, right]-- as we continued what we were doing, with painful self-consciousness. then they got all of us together in the main room and told us to keep going, even though we were done for the day. “that’s ok: dummy class.” [what? oh my god! but i thought all news footage was purely spontaneous, a transparent window on reality!] so our director made some announcements-- in Urdu-- of things we already knew about while the camera panned around our faces demonstrating our alert comprehension. it was all completely bizarre.

then they wanted individual interviews. they started by randomly choosing people, selecting the blondest, rosiest, bluest-eyed specimens of Typical Americans they could see. “what is your name? where are you from? why are you here? how did you come to study in this program? how do you like India? WHY are you studying Urdu?”
everyone did a good job i thought...but still, there was a lot of quoting of poetry, which the news crew liked, and a lot of statements like “well, i’m studying South Asian Islam, so...”
i felt like something was missing. so although i had not yet been picked-- lacking the necessary wholesome cornfed telegenitude perhaps-- i asked if i could speak too. i said, more or less,[prompts not included]
“My name is Maia Ramnath, and i’m a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My work is in modern South Asian history in a global context. also my father was an immigrant to the United States from India. for these reasons i began studying Hindi, and then expanded my study into Urdu.
“for me it is very important to counter the idea that Hindi and Urdu are two completely separate languages, or that there is one language for Hindus and another for Muslims. i want to emphasize that this is one language, with one mutual base, which has a very large, rich vocabulary of Sanskrit-, Persian- and Arabic- derived words. depending on the context, i may choose to speak in different styles. but it’s not a matter of choosing only one or the other. why not read 2 kinds of script, and have a broader range of materials you can read? why not embrace a larger vocabulary to draw from, in a wider range of contexts? why use half of the whole?”

most likely they won’t use this; they’ll probably air some cute blonde person reciting classical poetry. still i felt it needed to be said.

so, will India’s legions of TV viewers get an answer? WHY would an American choose to study Urdu?

this question is based in a set of common Indian assumptions including: Urdu is a Muslim language. Urdu is the language of Pakistan. Urdu is the language in which terrorism is conducted. Muslims are different than Hindus. Hindus hate Muslims. Americans hate Muslims. Muslims are violent. India is America’s ally in the War on Terror against the Pakistani Muslim Urdu-speaking terrorists.
this Urdu-learning American must be either CIA agent or a terrorist sympathizer, and we’re suspicious.

OR...

Urdu is inseparable from the classical culture of Avadh. Urdu is the language of aristocrats and poets. Urdu is the language of Ghalib, Iqbal and Umrao Jaan. Urdu is a beautiful but arcane language of romantic nostalgia, not of cosmpolitan modernity. To speak Urdu IS to recite shairi [poetry].
this Urdu-learning American must be some sort of orientalist afficionado, and we’re flattered.

moreover, conversations [debates, arguments, fights] about the relative merits of Hindi and Urdu are liable to be carried out in what used to be called Hindustani. If it’s happening between a self-identified Urdu speaker and a self-identified Hindi speaker, they will both be under the impression that they are speaking their own native tongue. Zabaan. Bhasha. it’s true that the most formal and classicized styles of speech at either end-- and of course the written scripts-- are mutually unintelligible. but as for what the news guy called “general baatchit”, movies, daily conversation, etc, how can people possibly be insisting in identical words that they’re speaking different languages? unless you’re putting your fingers in your ears and shouting “Lalalalalala-ican’thearyou!”

still, specifying that you study Urdu and not that you study Hindi-- though for my money i’m studying both, just by walking through the street each day-- makes a unmistakable statement in the domestic Indian context. inevitably, it implies that you have an opinion on communal politics, whether actively pro-Muslim or simply anti-Hindu Right. it automatically places you in a conscious, counterhegemonic position, rather than the default setting of the National Language.

an aside-- along the side of the street outside the post office, there’s a row of men sitting on the ground with typewriters marked either English or Hindi [i didn’t see any Urdu scribes] to write letters for illiterate people. i thought that was pretty cool, because it gave me another idea for something i could theoretically do to make myself useful in the hypothetical society After the Apocalypse.

another aside-- i don’t know much about Indian CNN. but judging from the newspapers and magazines i’ve seen, the intellectual level of at least the print media is far above that of the dumbed-down saccharine-plastic level i’m unfortunately accustomed to. while they are responsibly factual, newspapers also do not flinch from heated editorializing, making erudite allusions, putting current events into historical context, and printing commentaries by publicly-engaged intellectuals-- many of whom happen to be ones who are listed in my QE bibliography. even mainstream centrist publications engage to some degree in discourse about legacies of colonialism, ecoomics and contemporary geopolitics, and take seriously the existence of a wide range of political opinions from far right to liberal to far left. it’s just normal. imagine that.

next time [unless some crazy event happens]: In Which Maia Describes Her Daily Commute to School.

ADVENTURES IN SUFISM

19 september 2006
ADVENTURES IN SUFISM


this weekend we had an adventure that was actually two adventures: one was the Urs, and the other was getting to the Urs. after all, in Sufism, it's all about the journey.

an Urs is the anniversary of the death of a Sufi saint, celebrated by several days of devotional congregating and all-night qawwall at the place of the tomb. this one was for Hazrat Khwaja Sufi Sabir Mohammed Zakaria Shah Hasni; it's also known as the "poor people's Urs," known for distributing eyeglasses, medicine and clothing. his shrine is a place called Mausandi, outside of a village called Purwa in Unnao district not far away from Lucknow and so we decided to make the trek.

no one quite knew exactly where the place was; it wasn’t on any maps. we had only a few notes copied on a piece of notebook paper as to the vague particulars. we weren’t sure which one it was closer to. but we were willing to see how far we could get. so our intrepid band set off in the evening on the Lucknow-to-Kanpur bus. we hadn’t gone more than a few kilometers before the whole bus knew what we were doing, and quite a few of the passengers had advice. the driver thought we were being foolish, that we’d never find transportation by this time of night, that it would be dangerous, and that we should come all the way to Kanpur, spend the night there and return in the morning.

another guy, let’s call him Dipesh, was on his way home to Unnao; Dipesh suggested that we take cycle rickshaws into the town center from the Unnao bypass, and from there he had a friend with a car who could take us to the Urs.

so the bus deposited us at the bypass, which was pitchdark and very sketchy; there was literally nothing there but rickshaws clustered around a spot on the highway waiting for fares, truckdrivers stopping to rest. we were quickly surrounded as we stood conferring in a clump. after some debate we got 4 rickshaws to Unnao. thing is, there was a miscommunication: we thought they knew the spot and would stop when we got there, they thought we were going to signal them when to stop. we figured this out after going a considerable way out of the way, then backtracked to the spot Dipesh had suggested.

the driver was waiting. he was also under the influence of either some powerful ganja or some refreshment from the Deshi Sharaab shop across the street. within minutes he was passed out cold on the roof of his car. we stood around and conferred some more. it was maybe about 10 or 11 pm by this point.

Dipesh was back to check on us: it wasn’t safe for us to be standing around out here, he said; we should come into his house while everything was getting worked out. Dipesh’s house turned out to be a bachelor pad where it was plain, despite the thick camouflage of incense, that 3 other guys had been getting majorly stoned. but they were hospitable nevertheless. one of them proudly explained that their family had been here since 1942, and that his father had been the first doctor in Unnao [meaning the village or the district, i’m not sure.]

Dipesh’s contact eventually turned up with the car. he was initially suspicious: what reason could a group of videshis have for going out into the countryside, other than to make trouble? we had indeed been rather cagey about our movements, up to this point. so now we said we were going to a mela. “a mela? oh, you mean the Urs? ah! that’s all right then.” after some bargaining we agreed that for about 2000 rupees plus gas, he would take 9 people to the Urs and then back to Lucknow afterward; half now, half on arrival home. i think it was now close to midnight.

so there we were, zooming along in the pitchblack rural north Indian night while-- adding yet another layer of surreality-- a really creepy Christopher Walken movie dubbed into Hindi played on the fold-down video screen. just after a guy in the movie had a gruesome encounter with a scissors, we came to an abrupt halt: a tire was flat, punctured by a wicked-looking 6-inch curved spike. while the driver lay under the car changing the tire, we milled about in the single-lane road through fields and sprawling trees, joking about daku ambushes under a gorgeous starry sky with no other lights in sight except for what we thought were some amber airport flares on the horizon and a couple flashes we figured were UFOs. twice trucks approached, and we skulked into the shadow of the car, worried that they would stop and make trouble for us. but they both just crawled carefully around the car and continued.

spare successfully attached: chalo!
we stopped in a village, headlights [sorry, sorry] rousing sleepy residents from where they lay outdoors on charpois or on the backs of wagons. plainly nothing was happening here. we parked across from the local Banduk ki Dukan [gun shop] while the driver conferred with a helpful old guy, who directed us to another village. at least now we knew that the place did exist and that the Urs was indeed happening; the guy knew exactly what we were talking about. the next village too was dark and sleepy. But this time the driver had a brother living there, with whom he stepped out to confer, and then, triumphant, zoomed away.

up until now, we’d been on single lane country roads; from here on in it was dirt tracks through the fields. I was dozing off by this time; it was almost 2am and i’d just about decided that we weren’t going to find it, and that the driver would simply take us back to Lucknow...when a glowing orb appeared against the sky-- an impossible white dome, lit up with ultra-violet, topping a structure lit up with twinkling white and green strands of lights. “it’s a space ship!” “it’s a magic castle!” “it’s Disney world!” no: it was the Urs. in that single second the whole night’s journey was worthwhile: the sight of it was so fantastically unexpected, bright and beautiful. also quite appropriate to the point of Sufism, which is all about the journey.

the driver let us out at the edge of the encampment that had sprung up outside the site; he’d wait. i thanked him fervently and he answered with a huge and gracious grin: koi baat nahin. so in we went,trying to be respectfully lowkey as we hovered around the edges. of course we got some stares: 9 foreigners trooping in during the wee hours, to a location that was literally off the map, inacessible from any city transport, unannounced in any obvious manner. there had been no propaganda, no tourist bait. this was real. once people’s surprise wore off we were ushered [with little opportunity for refusal] into the center of the proceedings.

the shrine consisted of a raised, enclosed square platform, where the saint’s tomb was displayed, and a large, covered rectangular area with a few notables seated on the side nearest the tomb and the qawwali musicians on the far side. first we were waved up into the tomb enclosure, where they draped our shoulders with tinsel-trimmed dupattas before we sprinkled rose petals on the body. the air was thick with some powerful incense or attar, which lingered in my clothes for days. then we were called down into the big space and asked to sit in the row of people framing an open rectangle in the center. behind us, women vigorously waved what looked like either fans or banners, setting up a stiff breeze over the heads of the seated. at appointed moments, men got up to whirl around in the central space-- they whirled until they were dizzy and reeling, at which point their friends would hold them up and assist them as they staggered over to kneel in front of the notables, placing their foreheads on the ground to receive a blessing. a couple of young men seemed to be having such intense experiences that they had to lie prostrate twitching for a little while. i wondered if they were faking until i saw the face of one of them taking deep breaths, supported by a couple of older men as he recovered, and then i didn’t think so anymore.

the males among us were also asked to stand up for the dancing times; the females were not, although we were the only women present to be seated in the inner row. we were, however, handed small rupee notes to take up to the bigwigs, and touch our heads to the ground as well. as we left, a while later, the convener of the event gave us his business card and some prasad and tried [and failed] to get all of our contact info. we got home about 4am, in a fraction of the time it had taken for the outward journey. a few days later, the Times of India, Lucknow Edition, reported that “Urs of sufi saint Sabir Mohammed Zakaria ended...with distribution of clothes and medicines among destitute...a large number of foreign devotees of the sufi saint visited the urs to pay their respect.”

ARRIVAL AND IDENTITY

12 september 2006
ARRIVAL AND IDENTITY

all of it is familiar. .

i haven’t been to india for over 10 years, but everything i perceive is an echo of my earliest memories: the smells [spices, manure, incense...], the colors of the clothing [fiery orange, peacock blue, hot pink], the music, the way the light is in the morning and evening against the heat of the day, the way bathrooms work, the way kitchens work, the lizards on the wall, the voices of crows, the way people drink water without touching the cup, the endless street pageant sprinkled with serene cattle, buzzing swarms of auto- and cycle-rickshaws, carts piled with bananas and pomegranates, shouts of passing [insert item here]-wallas, barbers shaving patrons by the roadside with mirrors on trees, ambient alternation of muezzins and temple bells.... i’ve seen all this before

India is not at all strange to me. it’s me that’s strange to India.

people stare. after all i’m a woman with light skin, blue eyes, short hair, solitary ways and not-conventionally-feminine body language. i make lots of mistakes in speech and procedure. plainly i don’t know what i’m doing. plainly i’m not from around here.
then again i’m kind of strange anywhere, skirting categories habitually.
still, there’s a difference between wilfully flouting rules you know well, and floundering amid rules of which you haven’t mastered the nuances.
there’s a lot i’d like to be able to do here as a participant in society...but there’s so much i have to learn before that’s possible to contemplate.
i want to get fluent and literate in Hindi and Urdu.
i want to be able to feel like, and be regarded as, a resident and not a guest.
and yet that doesn’t mean i want to try to emulate some standardized model of “Indian-ness.” i don’t know what that means, and it would in any case be false. i’m *not* an Indian; i’m a farflung product of South Asian diasporic miscegenation.
what i want, rather is to find a spot to be spliced into the loose strands on the fringes of this uncommonly dense and complex fabric, shot through as it is with counterpoints and contraries, mirrors and embroideries, paisley and [madras] plaid, patches and tears. after all it’s more or less the same way i tend to find myself situated in the US-- slightly outside everywhere, maintaining some freedom and a critical vantage point.

GHAR MEETHI GHAR
The house where i’m staying hosts 4 students on the ground floor, with rooms around a communal courtyard area, and 4 more up above. It’s spacious and airy and there’s also an accessible rooftop, great for fresh air in the evening. [“evening in Lucknow, dawn in Varanasi,” or am i getting it all backwards?]

i’m going to call our hosts Ram and Nasreen.-- they’re kind, generous, energetic and openminded. they say they enjoy having a houseful of young scholars around.

next door is some sort of universalist religious cult center which had its grand inauguration just as we were moving in. almost 24-7 for several days it was everything from chanting mantras to bhajans to qawwali and various fusions of the above, including qawwali stylings of lyrics like Hare Krishna Hare Ram and Om Mane Padme Hum. we sat on the roof one night listening for a while, under a near-full moon and a flurry of bats, enjoying a cool breeze after a hot humid day. but while it’s entertaining to watch it all going on with a birdseye view, i think they’re driving their neighbors crazy. they painted the outside of the newly sleek high-concept design house with red and white candy stripe panels on the outside, and mosque-green on the inside, which is easily visible through the open-sided terrace rooms. they tried to come over the fence to paint on our side too, and when Nasreen complained and said “hey, what are you doing, you can’t paint my house,” they said “but you’re just like our family” to which she retorted “i’m NOT your family.” today she went over to say “the music is great, but when is it going to stop?” so, perhaps to placate her, they invited her to have an audience with the guru. i don’t know if she went.

we’re also close to the military cantonment, and an associated training facility for army and navy officers, whose sign says, “We make the imossible happen/Miracles do take sometime.” [sic] there’s an attractive path with relaxing piped-in music in the cantonment for morning constitutionals, where i go running. i walk or bike to classes at the institute through rather terrifying traffic in which anything could be coming at you at any time from any direction.

classes are intense. it’s incredibly infantilizing to feel so inarticulate and to not always understand what people are saying to me, and sometimes i am bitterly impatient. at times i resent how all-consuming this process can be, and how isolated it makes me feel from the academic and political work i ultimately want to use it for. but this is a temporary feeling. someone warned me to be careful about wishing for instantly uploadable language modules to plug into one’s brain, because they just may be available sometime soon.

[“I know kung fu!”]

ROZ KI BAAT
Lucknow is the provincial of Uttar Pradesh, which is the biggest and most populous province, the traditional “Hindi heartland.” [Delhi has its own federal district, like Mexico City or Washington DC] this means that there’s always some sort of rally or demonstration or garbar or hangama or gherao or hartal or whatnot going on. recent events have included a very military-looking parade of boy and girl scouts on a polio vaccination campaign; a shut-down of the center of town after some students beat up a transit worker and the bus drivers blocked off the roads with their busses in protest; both Sunnis and Shias objecting to the pope’s recent anti-Islamic statements; and a BJP youth wing ransacking and vandalizing an elite Christian school after the school had held a controversial assembly aka “seance” in which they had invited a rickshaw driver called Nobo Kumar Mandal who claims to be channeling the spirit of Jesus and healing people to come and manifest the divine presence for the assembled students. a couple of students had fainted-- whether the disturbing result of occult possession, or natural outcome of a hot and crowded hall, is still under discussion, as is the appropriateness of the school’s holding such a function. aside from that issue, what everybody seems to agree on is that the BJP-sanctioned thuggery was unacceptable.

Nasreen for one was disgusted: “i guess they don’t have anything better to do between now and Valentine’s day. that’s when they beat up any couple that they see out in public-- it doesn’t matter what their relationship is, whether they’re married, or engaged, or dating, or cousins, or siblings, or friends, anyone. They say Valentine’s day is a sign of the sexual decadence of the west, and of moral degradation.
“But with the school, it’s also a class issue. this is an elite instution, English-medium, selective in admissions. Say you went to a Hindi-medium school, you’re not popular and accomplished, so you’re jealous of those who have what you don’t. These were hooligans acting out of personal resentments and bitterness, and now they’ve found an excuse, a justification, to go out and make trouble and hurt people. it wasn't like this 20 years ago."
Ram and Nasreen, by the way, are a mixed Hindu/Muslim marriage. so was one of their parents’, in the years just following Partition. she thinks the communal tension is worse now than it was then.