July 30 2011, The Telegraph …

- The republic of India bans books with a depressing frequency

Politics and play: Ramachandra Guha

Earlier this year, the Gujarat government banned a book on Mahatma Gandhi by an American writer. The book was not then available in India, and no one in Gujarat had read it. The ban, ordered by the chief minister, Narendra Modi, was on the basis of a tendentious news report and a still more tendentious book review.

After Modi announced his ban, the first instinct of the government of India was to emulate him. Congress spokesmen called for a countrywide ban. The then law minister, Veerappa Moily, indicated that he would follow their lead. There was a spirit of competitive chauvinism abroad; how could the Congress allow a non-Congress politician to claim to be defending the reputation of the Mahatma?

In the event, the government of India did not enforce a ban on the book. This was principally because of two quick, focused interventions by Rajmohan Gandhi and Gopalkrishna Gandhi. Both are grandsons of the Mahatma; both, besides, are scholars and public figures in their own right. Rajmohan and Gopalkrishna wrote signed articles in the press saying that a ban would be contrary to the spirit of Gandhi, a man who encouraged and promoted debate; it would also call into question India’s claims to be the world’s largest democracy.

A ban makes news; the withdrawal of a ban does not. Gandhi scholars in particular, and Indians in general, owe Rajmohan and Gopalkrishna a debt of gratitude, for pressurizing the government to allow the free circulation of Joseph Lelyveld’s The Great Soul in 27 states of the country. It remains illegal to own or possess a copy of the book in the 28th state of the Union, which happens to be Gandhi’s own. By banning the book before it was available, Modi thought he could camouflage his sectarian leanings in the protective cloak of the Mahatma’s pluralism. In the event, once the government of India — bowing to the sensible advice of Gandhi’s grandsons — allowed the free circulation of the book, the fact that it is not yet legally available in Gujarat only exposes the insularity and xenophobia of that state’s chief minister.

Sadly, the bravery (and decency) of Gandhi’s grandsons has not been emulated by defenders or descendants of some other great men of modern India. Consider the fate, within India, of a biography of Sri Aurobindo written by Peter Heehs. Heehs is a real scholar, the author of several substantial works of history (among them The Bomb in Bengal). What’s more, he was for many years in charge of the archives in the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.

In 2008, Columbia University Press in New York published Peter Heehs’s The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. The product of a lifetime of scholarship, its empirical depth and analytical sharpness is unlikely to be surpassed. For Heehs knows the documentary evidence on and around Aurobindo’s life better than anyone else. He has a deep knowledge of the political and spiritual worlds in which his subject moved and by which he was shaped.

Alas, this remarkable life of a remarkable Indian cannot be read in India. This is because of an injunction on its sale asked for by self-professed devotees of Aurobindo, and granted by a hyper-active high court in Orissa. Heehs’s book is respectful but not reverential. He salutes Aurobindo for his contributions to the freedom struggle. Before Aurobindo, writes Heehs, “no one dared to speak openly of independence; twenty years later, it became the movement’s accepted goal”. He praises Aurobindo’s contributions to literature and philosophy. However, Heehs is gently sceptical of the claim that Aurobindo possessed supernatural powers. “To accept Sri Aurobindo as an avatar is necessarily a matter of faith,” he writes, adding that “matters of faith quickly become matters of dogma”.

This understated, unexceptionable statement drove the dogmatic followers of Aurobindo bananas. Some devotees filed a case in the Orissa High Court, restraining the Indian publisher from circulating the book in India. Other devotees filed a case in a Tamil Nadu court, seeking the revocation of Peter Heehs’s visa and his extradition from this country. By these (and other) acts, the contemporary keepers of Aurobindo’s flame showed themselves to be far less courageous than the grandsons of Gandhi. Is their icon so fragile that he can be destroyed or even damaged by a single, scholarly, book?

Consider, next, the case of The Polyester Prince, a book about Dhirubhai Ambani published in 1998 by an Australian journalist named Hamish McDonald. This was no work of scholarship — slight in weight and substance, it was yet noteworthy for its documentation of the intimate connections between a successful entrepreneur on the one side and senior politicians and government officials on the other. The book was not sold in India — for reasons never made clear, but which certainly had something to do with the thin skins of the subject’s descendants.

In fact, it was almost impossible to get a copy of The Polyester Prince outside India as well. Someone — we may speculate who or whom — had apparently bought up and pulped the remaining stock. The few available copies were selling on internet sites for upwards of $500 a copy. Last year, the book was issued in a new edition, and with a new title. Now called Ambani and Sons, it contained some fresh chapters on the next generation of the family. However, many critical references to politicians and to the Ambanis themselves, present in the original edition, had been dropped. This was the price asked for by an Indian publisher in exchange for the rights to distribute the book in this country.

As these cases illustrate, the republic of India bans books with a depressing frequency. Three factors promote this culture of banning. First, the descendants or devotees of biographical subjects are often too nervous or insecure to have them discussed with objectivity and rigour. Second, these fanatical or insecure followers have found an ally in the courts. Although the Supreme Court has tended to act on the side of the freedom of expression, lower courts have been less wise. Judges who are malleable or publicity-hungry pass injunctions forbidding the free circulation of books and works of art. Few petitioners have the time, or money, or energy, to wait and fight till the case reaches the Supreme Court (a process that can take years). A ban once invoked is therefore rarely revoked.

The third and most significant reason for the proliferation of bans is the pusillanimity of our political class. An early example was the ban on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses by Rajiv Gandhi’s government in 1989. As the historian, Dharma Kumar, wrote at the time, the ban was “a sign of the Government’s weakness. In a secular state blasphemy should not in itself be a cognizable offence; the President of India is not the defender of any nor of all faiths”.

In subsequent years, governments and politicians of all stripes have recklessly banned books, films, and paintings that simply express a point of view. The Left Front in Bengal promoted a ban on the novels of the brave Bangladeshi writer, Tasleema Nasreen; Narendra Modi has banned a book on Jinnah as well at least one film by Aamir Khan; the party of Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra was instrumental in a ban on a scholarly book on Shivaji; rampaging bands of Hindutvawadis destroyed paintings by M.F. Husain and, by filing case after case against him in the courts, forced him into exile.

It is a sorry tale, this tale of cowardice in the face of intimidation. Lower courts and even some high courts have been accomplices in this process of the stifling of free speech. So too have been politicians of all parties and governments. Indian democrats may take solace in the few exceptions: these being the institution of the Supreme Court, and those public-spirited public figures, Rajmohan and Gopalkrishna Gandhi.

……

and a further note on this article:

please see the true professor Kamal Das here: http://trueprofkamaldas.wordpress.com/

From Prof. Kamala Das

Dear Fellow Bloggers,

In the past few days I sent a couple of nasty e-mails to Ramachandra Guha because he wrote a realistic and depressing article on the pathetic state of affairs of some of our fellow citizen from our glorious republic. You may read Guha’s article here:

http://iyfundamentalism.info/htdocs/joomla15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=166:guhaban&catid=22:standpoints&Itemid=244

I even used Arundati Roy’s name to insult him, but he doesn’t know that in reality I would also like to ban a few of her nasty books because she too believes in this alien notion called Freedom of Expression.

My e-mails to Guha have been widely circulated by the well-oiled propaganda machinery that I have established so I need not reproduce them here and unnecessarily clutter my blog with it.

What must be of greater interest to my readers is Guha’s response, below:

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 2:32 PM, Ramachandra Guha wrote:

Dear Mr Das,

The anger and animosity, the viciousness and the vituperation, in your mail is unbecoming of a man who carries the title ‘professor’ and who is an admirer of Aurobindo.

There is only answer to a book– another book. If you and your colleagues have sufficient moral and intellectual courage, then have the case against Peter Heehs withdrawn, let his book be circulated, and publish and let your book be circulated too. Till such time as you do so, I can only conclude that you have no moral or intellectual case to stand on. with best wishes

R. Guha

Reflections of an ex-Pakistani Army Officer

by

Masood Ashraf Raja

I joined the Pakistan army as a junior cadet in 1981 and graduated as a second lieutenant in September 1985. The graduation followed ten years of service in infantry that involved tours of duty in Sindh, Balochistan, Punjab, the Siachin Glacier, deployment to the first Gulf War, and two tours of duty at the School of Infantry and Tactics. Until I resigned my commission in 1996, I was the most die-hard infantry officer: trained to be a leader of men, highly disdainful of all things civilian, and a strong believer in the absolute superiority of the Armed forces as compared to their civilian counterparts.

This brief article, thus, is based on my personal experiences of being an officer and also a reflective inquiry into the structuring of an army officer’s subjectivity. My account, however, is in no way exhaustive and cannot possibility be read as an all-encompassing explanation for the actions and beliefs of all Pakistan army officers.

The way we were trained had a crucial impact on our worldview and on our self-perception within the national space of Pakistan. I graduated at the height of Zia-ul-Haq’s regime. And though I took an oath to protect and safeguard the ideological and material borders of Pakistan, in my four years of training I was never trained to be a servant of my people. In fact, all formal and informal training was meant to solidify a sense of being above and superior to all Pakistanis who did not have the privilege of wearing a uniform. To be honest, this kind of mindset is not only germane to the army; it also permeates the civil services of Pakistan, but in case of the army the civilians are imperceptibly treated as suspect and not worthy of an officer’s trust.This distrust of the civilian populations was one of the strategies employed by the British to train their officers and men and seems to have been incorporated within the Pakistan army seamlessly. Thus, in a way, the old imperial attitude lives on in the rank and file of Pakistani sahibs, long after the empire has ceased to be.

As one grows in the profession and gets promoted the sense of entitlement and privilege grows exponentially. It is this deeply seated sense of entitlement coupled with a normative suspicion of all things civilians that underwrites the excesses of the army elite. I am not suggesting here that all army officers are corrupt and morally deficient: No, in fact, majority of Pakistan army officers that I knew and befriended during my career were upright straight-shooting men, and our soldiers (Or ORs as our officers call them) are without a doubt the best soldiers a nation can hope for. But, as I have also written elsewhere, most of the corruptions of the army are normalized in such a way that they are accepted as rights and privileges rather than corruptions. And some of these corruptions are institutional and not personal at all and thus simply more palatable. For example, each battalion has something called a battalion fund. Meant to be used for the welfare of troops, this fund is generated by the battalion itself and does not draw on the national military budget directly. In utilitarian terms, this is perfectly fine as the fund IS meant for the welfare of troops. But since these funds are neither audited by an outside authority nor exist officially in a battalion’s public record, they form a sort of hidden economy at a micro level. The ways in which these funds are raised are also highly irregular but are never seen to be so. Some battalions run shops, own rental properties, or own agricultural lands. Those that do not have any such resources rely on other interesting means: coaxing money out of contractors, no not as bribes but as money in lieu of goods. Here is a hypothetical example: If you are deployed in the northern areas, your quartermaster usually deals with more than three contractors directly: the fuel or wood contractor, the fresh rations contractor, and the contractor who dumps rations on your posts. In order to raise money, you can do various things: you can ask the contactor to supply certain things only on paper and ask him to give you a certain percentage of the cost of other things in cash; for your fuel and wood contractor, you can ask him to supply only a prescribed amount of wood/fuel and get the rest in cash; you can do the same with your fresh rations contractors. As I said earlier, none of this money lines the pockets of the officers; it usually ends up in a battalion fund, but since these are black funds, they contribute nothing to the national economy but rather exist in the black hole of a parallel economy.

The case becomes even more interesting if you are in the services: the services deal with large contracts directly and it is there in those large contracts, civilian and military, that huge sums of money are exchanged again without any public record or accounting. Aisha Siddiqua covered this on a macro level; I am only providing some details at the micro level, because it is the moral elasticity of the functioning of the army at micro level that happens to be my concern.

As the officers move through the system of promotions, the degree of their sense of entitlement and their aversion to any kind of civilian oversight increases exponentially. This happens in pretty much all the cases: even for principled officers whom I had admired as a young officer. Obviously, a whole life being protected from the common vagaries of life and lifetime of indoctrination in self worth ought to produce such subjectivities.

What I found especially interesting in my career, as an officer was the unofficial dual layering of the military law. The Pakistan army is governed by two major books of law: The Army Regulations (ARR) and the Army Rules and Instructions (ARI). There is no distinction in the law about how it would be applied to junior or senior officers: all military personnel, in fact, are equal in the rules and regulations. But just as we were being told to avoid talking politics in the dining hall, as it was against the spirit of the army rules, General Zia, our then dictator, was canvassing the nation to gain support for his sham referendum. Of course, we did not have the right to question his authority, but it always made me wonder as to how is it possible for a serving general to act as a politician while his junior officers were not even permitted to speak on the subject of politics.

Similarly, this above-the-board attitude has so deeply permeated the Army elite, that in 1999 General Pervez Musharraf, the then COAS, was actually able to launch a border war—the Kargil debacle—without even informing his own government. It is rumored that when the Indian prime minister called Nawaz Sharif to ask about why Pakistan had started a border war, Mr. Sharif had to tell him that he would have to get back to him after he had talked to his generals. Upon hearing this, it is also rumored, the Indian prime minister had said: “That is the difference between you and us Mian sahib, our generals ask us what they are attempting to do and not otherwise.”

Obviously, there is something broken within the army’s system of subjectivization that creates figures like Ayub, Zia, and Musharraf: I mean how is it possible that all these jokers were able to muster the support of their entire officer corps while obviously violating the very constitution that the army was meant to protect?

Obviously, this subjectivity arises through the systems of training employed by the army: almost all officers are trained to be suspicious of their civilian counterparts and internalize a feeling of systemic superiority over what they consider the corrupt and inefficient civilian-run systems. Naturally, this attitude also plays a role in their view of the popularly elected governments and is further accentuated in case of senior officers who are only accountable to their superiors in uniform.

The myth-making industry—the media and the conservative newspapers—also play a major role in buttressing army’s reputation in opposition to the ineffectual civilian governments. That is why, when going gets rough, our media start imploring the army to takeover and when the take over occurs, the turncoat politicians, the bought judges, and compliant civil servants become a part of a hybrid military-civilian system of power that has nothing to offer to the people except empty slogans. One serious audit of the wealth amassed by all the loyal corps commanders of our former dictators will be sufficient to prove my point. A COAS who takes over the civilian government works through various channels of idealization and appeasement. The first group to be appeased is the corps commanders, who are rewarded heavily for their loyalty. The next group is the politicians who break away from their parties and then sell themselves to the dictators: The chaudries of Gujarat and Shaikh Rashid from my home district are some examples of this bunch.

On lower levels, steps are also taken to keep the lower ranks loyal by introducing various “welfare” schemes that involve cheaply available plots, salary and pension increases, foreign assignments, and civilian appointments of retired officers. This entire system of appeasements, corrupt to the core, enables a dictator to sustain power and where all else fails, the same army can also be deployed to crush any uprising and, interestingly, while the army is deployed to suppress civilian uprisings, they are also paid a daily allowance that comes out of the non-military budget.

I am not opposed to the troops welfare projects; I believe that it is necessary for a nation to provide care for all those who put their lives at risk for the welfare of their nation. But I am, of course, vehemently opposed to spending indiscriminately on the armed forces and its upper crust, while millions of our children go hungry, have no access to healthcare, or a good education.

I hope Pakistan army has probably changed for the better since I left it; but I am also certain that the ingrained sense of entitlement of army officers has also increased. And unless the way we train our officers is altered, this gulf between the army and people they are supposed to protect will continue to widen.

The recent debacle of Osama bin Laden’s long, comfortable tenancy in a house close to the Pakistan Military Academy and what followed after his death is a good example of the army’s holier-than-thou attitude even when their leadership has failed.

While the media, by and large, have done a good job of asking some really pertinent and hard questions of the army and ISI, the civilian government, it seems, has again buckled down and given in to the pressure employed by the military elite.

Looked at differently, this latest failure of Pakistan army and its intelligence agencies is very simple to understand. Here are the facts: The most powerful institution in Pakistan which claims the bulk of our national budget every year failed to notice that the world’s most wanted terrorists was living right next to the home of Amy Officers for FIVE years. What other proof of leadership incompetence do we need? There has to be some accountability for this. But as far as I know, no general has left the service or accepted responsibility. But then, our generals are known for losing half a country without feeling any remorse. And unless our officers are trained as the servants and not the masters of their people, we will continue producing these Muhammad Shah Rangeelas of modern times.

Author of Constructing Pakistan (Oxford UP, 2010) Masood Ashraf Raja is an Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature and Theory at the University of North Texas, United States and the editor of Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies. His critical essays have been published in journals including South Asian Review, Digest of Middle East Studies, Caribbean Studies, Muslim Public Affairs Journal, and Mosaic. He is currently working on his second book, entitled Secular Fundamentalism: Poetics of In

Shanghai: Art of the City

An Exhibition at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco:  2/12/2010 – 9/5/2010

Reviewed by Alain Truong

‘Shanghai’ @ The Asian Art Museum

Catalogue cover of the exhibition

When the Expo opens in 2010, it will be taking place in a country in which over half of its people are newly urbanized. . . . It will also take place in a city that is a shining example of China’s engagement with the world. For a century and a half Shanghai has sat at the center of crisscrossing currents between the country and the city, the Chinese hinterland and the world beyond the sea.” —Wen-hsin Yeh, University of California, Berkeley

From February 12 through September 5, 2010, the Asian Art Museum presents Shanghai, the first exhibition of its kind to explore the visual culture of one of the world’s most intriguing cities. Spanning the time period from Shanghai’s origins as a modest regional center to the dynamic, cosmopolitan, global powerhouse of today, the exhibition reflects upon the history of the city over the past 160 years using art as its mirror. Drawn mainly from the collections of the Shanghai Museum, the Shanghai History Museum, the Shanghai Art Museum, the Lu Xun Memorial Hall, and the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre, the more than 130 artworks include trade oil paintings, Shanghai deco furniture and rugs, movie clips, revolutionary posters, and video and contemporary art installations. Shanghai is co-organized by the Shanghai Museum and the Asian Art Museum, with assistance from the Shanghai International Culture Association. The exhibition serves as the cornerstone of the Shanghai Celebration, a year-long festival hosted by a collaboration of San Francisco Bay Area cultural institutions to honor the region’s long-standing relationship with Shanghai.

“The 2010 World Expo that opens in May is Shanghai’s coming-out party, the official debut as the city reclaims its position as a global powerhouse,” says Jay Xu, museum director. “The Asian Art Museum’s Shanghai exhibition was timed to coincide with this prominent international event. Only through understanding its tumultuous history, can one truly understand the progressive and stylish Shanghai of today.”

“No one can deny the dynamism of Shanghai. It is a blend of old and new, East and West, cutting-edge technology and traditional values,” says Michael Knight, senior curator of Chinese art. “A case-study in globalization, Shanghai derives its unique character from its welcoming of international influences and adaptation of them to complement local values and flavor. The Shanghai exhibition examines the effects of globalization using visual art as its lens.”

Shanghai Exhibition Overview

The Shanghai exhibition is divided into four broad sections providing an overview of the major cultural and historical developments in Shanghai: “Beginnings” (1850–1911), “High Times” (1912–1949), “Revolution” (1920–1976), and “Shanghai Today” (1980–present). “Beginnings” traces Shanghai’s rise from a modest regional center to a city of international prominence after its designation as a “Treaty Port” by Britain and China in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing. “China Trade” oil paintings, Shanghai school paintings, and a series of lithographs present the city as the international economic hub that it became in a short time. “High Times” represents a dynamic era in Shanghai’s history, which many people consider a historic commercial and cultural height. Ink and oil paintings, posters, one-piece dresses called qipao, film clips, and Shanghai Deco furniture together capture the launching of a public romance with the city that continues today. “Revolution” highlights a collection of propaganda posters and woodcuts that document the changing landscape of Shanghai during the Communist reaction against the excesses of the “High Times” period. Other artworks in this section include woodblock prints from the 1930s and 1940s— among the earliest works to express the social criticism that would later lead to the revolution — and ink and oil paintings. “Shanghai Today” presents the visual culture that is emerging as the city reclaims its role as a leading center of global trade and finance. Prints, paintings, and video and installation art demonstrate the assurance with which Shanghai artists have reentered the global art scene with the removal of many of the restrictions of the “Revolution” period.

Shanghai: The Bund, within the Premises of Russell & Company, approx. 1857. By Chowkwa (active 1850-1880). Oil on canvas. Museum purchase with funds donated by the Friends of Evelyn Bartlett, in memory of Evelyn Bartlett and in honor of Dr. H.A. Crosby Forbes. Peabody Essex Museum. AE85781

Wandering Eyes Giving Way to Wandering Thoughts, 1890s. By Wu Youru (1839-1893). Ink on paper. Collection of the Shanghai History Museum.

Because of its scope and scale, the museum has reconfigured its gallery spaces to accommodate the exhibition. Visitors will be directed through South Court to the exhibition’s beginning at the entrance to the Hammond Arcade. In the arcade, visitors will encounter the first work of art, Shadow in the Water, a white porcelain sculpture created between 2002 and 2008 by the Shanghai installation artist Liu Jianhua. The sculpture is a repeating row of landmark skyscrapers found in cities across China, suggesting a sameness in the landscape of China’s metropolises. Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower (one of the tallest towers in the world), Jinmao Tower, and Bank of China Tower are among the buildings depicted.

Shadow in the Water (detail), 2002-2008. By Liu Jianhua (b. 1962). Installation with porcelain and light. Collection of the artist.

The first historical and cultural subsection of the exhibition – “Beginnings” – is introduced upon entering the Osher Gallery. “Beginnings” introduces Shanghai as it was transformed from a modest regional center to an internationally prominent locale after its designation as a Treaty Port in 1842. In 1854, the Shanghai International Settlement – combining the British and American foreign concessions – was established, with its own system of self-governance that was effectively independent from China. In this special environment, which continued until 1943, Shanghai rapidly became a center for artistic production, with Chinese artists creating works for foreign, as well as domestic, consumption.

“China Trade” paintings are among the artworks on view in this section. This genre of paintings and drawings served the purpose of documenting the environs of Western traders and functioned as visual mementos of their time in Shanghai. These works were created by Chinese artists for the new market of Western patrons. The world portrayed in these paintings is dominated by Western-style buildings and images of Western lifestyles.

The handscroll entitled Illustrations of the Antique Collection of Kezhai by Lu Hui (1851-1920) and Hu Qinhan (act. late 19th century) is an example of the types of artworks created by and for the Chinese elite in Shanghai during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The artwork depicts the famous scholar and collector Wu Dacheng (whose poetic name was Kezhai) surrounded by his collection of ancient Chinese bronzes. Shanghai was home to a large number of wealthy, well-educated Chinese – including many artists – who fled to the city during the internal strife that besieged most of China during this time period. Such works show Shanghai artists struggling to find a balance between looking back to long-standing artistic traditions and embracing new directions influenced by Western styles.

The intermingling of Chinese and Western cultures in the city figures prominently in a set of large drawings that served as models for lithographs. Many of the drawings depict interiors with women in fashionable Chinese garb (and with bound feet) in a variety of pursuits, many influenced by the West, from playing pool to using sewing machines. Outside their windows are power lines, electric and gas lamps, and other signs of the Western-influenced modernization.

Covering the period from around the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, “High Times” occupies the remainder of Osher Gallery and continues into Hambrecht Gallery. The boundary between “Beginnings” and “High Times” is marked by a bronze tablet originally erected at the boundary of the American Settlement in Shanghai.

“High Times” begins with a series of paintings and calligraphies in traditional Chinese mediums and formats.  “Bird and flower blossoms,” a hanging scroll by Xie Zhiliu (1910-1997) is an example of the bright colors and delicate brushwork that marks works by artists of the Shanghai school of painting. Artists associated with the Shanghai school broke from the traditional mode of landscape painting and created expressive and dramatic works that responded directly to the demands of their patrons.

Shanghai’s complex and often ambiguous social structure at the time is evident in a painting that appears to be a straightforward portrait of two men in a traditional Chinese garden. The painting, “Huang Jinrong and Du Yuesheng” by Yu Ming (1884–1935), depicts two legendary bosses of the infamous Green Gang. The Green Gang controlled the criminal activities in Shanghai in the early twentieth century.

The next part of “High Times” presents the arts that bombarded the residents of Shanghai on a daily basis: fashion, film, posters, and other graphic arts.  Faces of beautiful Chinese women appeared often in visual products exhibiting Shanghai modernity in the 1920s and 1930s. Two of the many examples on view in the exhibition are posters entitled Moonlight over Huangpu River and A Prosperous City That Never Sleeps, both by Yuan Xiutang (dates unknown). Each of these posters presents a woman, clothed and coiffed in the latest styles, lounging before a backdrop of the city’s skyline. Such a composition exemplifies a successful marketing strategy that linked 1) Shanghai with 2) modernity with 3) the Chinese woman. This triangular association was so prevalent in the city’s visual culture at this time that it compelled the following claim by writer Cao Juren (1900–1972): “Haipai (Shanghai-style) is like a modern girl.”

Moonlight over Huangpu River, 1930s. By Yuan Xiutang (dates unknown). Chromolithograph on paper. Collection of the Shanghai History Museum.

A Prosperous City That Never Sleeps, 1930s. By Yuan Xiutang (dates unknown). Chromolithograph on paper. Collection of the Shanghai History Museum.

Also included in this area are five qipao, a version of traditional Chinese women’s dress that was updated in Shanghai after the 1900s to be slender and form fitting. This style was popularized by Shanghai socialites as well as glamorous courtesans. During the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai had one of the leading and most innovative film industries in the world, and clips of films from that era will be shown on a flat-screen monitor in this part of the exhibition to provide a sense of this genre and a context for the other items on view.

Qipao, 1930s. Silk georgette and silk cut-velvet. Collection of the Shanghai History Museum.

Osher Gallery concludes with a series of oil paintings done in modern Western styles. Very few such works have survived the turmoil of the mid and late twentieth century in Shanghai. The eight examples on view are from a private collection in Shanghai. The Bund by Liu Haisu is an example of a strong work by one of China’s most famous artists influenced by Western artistic sensibilities. This painting is a view of Shanghai’s Garden Bridge and its environs. Its twisting, dynamic forms and vibrant colors reveal the artistic influence of Van Gogh, one of Liu’s favorite artists.

“High Times” continues across North Court in Hambrecht Gallery. An installation of Shanghai Deco furniture and carpets are displayed, as well as photographs of the deco interiors and exteriors of famous Shanghai buildings of the 1920s and 1930s. The pair of armchairs is remarkable in that the original fabric has survived largely intact. The bold swirling fabric in tangerine and fuschia complements the curving lines on the hardwood and burl frames. Other art deco furniture presented include a six-piece bedroom suite, a dining room table with four chairs, and a cabinet, among others.

A pair of armchairs, 1920-1935. Hardwood, burl, and fabric. Private collection.

Rug, 1920-1935. Wool with yin and yang pattern. Private collection.

Vanity and stool, 1920-1935. Hardwood and glass. Private collection.

Round table and four chairs, 1920-1935. Hardwood. Private collection.

A change in wall color marks the transition between “High Times” and “Revolution.” Shanghai was a leader in many of the social and political movements that swept China in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The first image that greets the visitor upon entering the new section is a 1968 portrait of Mao Zedong by oil painter Yu Yunjie (1917–1992).

The next grouping of works looks backward to the 1930s and 1940s at early expressions of the reformist socialist impulses that eventually led to the revolution. The woodcut print artists of the time asserted that the medium could best serve “the people” as it was reproducible, affordable, and mobile. They increasingly pursued Socialist agendas in their prints, tackling societal ills. A good example is a 1935 woodcut print entitled Roar, China! by Li Hua (1907–1994). The slogan “Roar, China!” had become an international rallying cry for the emancipation of all oppressed people. The phrase was representative of the anti-Imperialist mood gripping many countries in the 1920s and 1930s, and it highlighted China as the focus of this global mobilizing effort. The exhibition also includes a 1946 cartoon of Sanmao, the longest running comic strip in China, which like the woodcut prints was aimed to align visual art with populist concerns.

Nanjing Road – From Series of Views of Shanghai, after 1937. By Zhao Weimin (dates unknown). Chromolithograph on paper. Collection of the Shanghai History Museum.

Nanjing Road, 1947. By Ni Yide (1901-1970). Oil on canvas. Private Collection.

Parade for the Founding of the People’s Republic of China (Shanghai),1950. By Hangzhou National Art School, published by Mass Fine Art Publishing House. Chromolithograph on paper. Collection of the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre.

In print, perhaps the most ubiquitous product of the government’s visual enterprise were the large-format, colorful propaganda posters. The posters on display in the exhibition depict celebrations in Shanghai of the new Communist regime. Many of the posters on display were published by the Shanghai People’s Fine Art Publishing House, a state-owned enterprise. In these and in the others on view, famous landmarks of the Bund and Nanjing Road appeared often as sites of new revolutions and campaigns against all that the city had once symbolized.

The last area of Hambrecht Gallery is dedicated to Shen Fan’s 2007 installation Landscape-Commemorating Huang Binhong-Scroll, an homage to one of China’s great artists of the twentieth century. This installation piece with computer-operated neon lights and music introduces the contemporary section “Shanghai Today.” Like most of the works in this section, it was created in the past few years, while a number of works in this section were actually created for the exhibition.

Landscape-Commemorating Huang Binhong-Scroll, 2007. By Shen Fan (b. 1952). Installation with lights and sound. Courtesy of the artist.

After exiting Hambrecht Gallery, the exhibition continues in Lee Gallery, which features contemporary photographs, textiles, ink paintings and calligraphy on paper, acrylic paintings, and oil paintings. For the first time North Court is being given over to art, where two large new works by the leading Shanghai installation artists Zhang Jianjun (b. 1955) and Liu Jianhua (b. 1962) are on view.

Zhang Jianjun’s work Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Garden is situated closest to Lee Gallery on the east side of North Court. It is an installation composed of two silicone rubber Taihu rocks, manufactured from molds of real Taihu rocks which in traditional garden culture are prized for providing city dwellers with a kind of symbolic access to nature. The rocks are accompanied by a silicone rubber vase. Together they are arrayed atop a pavement of gray antique bricks, acquired from the demolition of Shanghai houses constructed between 1923 and 1926. Visitors can walk between the rocks, reflecting on time and process.

Shanghai Lily, 2009. By Zhou Tiehai (b. 1966). Acrylic (airbrush) on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.

Liu Jianhua’s Can You Tell Me? occupies the west end of North Court in the Vinson Nook. The installation is a series of stainless steel books suspended from a vertical wall. Each book presents two questions about Shanghai’s future, one on each page, that are translated into five languages, Chinese, English, French, German, and Japanese. Always changing, propelled by its role as an economic powerhouse, the city suggests endless possibilities some of which Liu asks visitors to contemplate.

Mawangdui, 2009 (detail). By Liu Dahong (b. 1962). Embroidered silk, one of two pieces. Collection of the artist.

The last section of “Shanghai Today” is presented in what is normally used as the Education Resource Room. (The Resource Room is moved temporarily to Tateuchi Gallery, in the southwest corner of the second floor.) This space features contemporary video art, one of the mediums in which Shanghai artists are taking a worldwide lead. Three of the five videos are by Yang Fudong (b. 1971): City Light (2000); Liu Lan (2003); and Honey (2003). A celebrated photographer, videographer, and film maker, Yang frequently explores the feelings of longing and displacement. His works often focus on the lives of young urbanites who despite possessing admirable qualities such as education or beauty, may not be well-adjusted to the environment in which they live.

Honey, 2003. By Yang Fudong (b. 1971). Video. 9 min 29 sec. Private collection.

The steadily rising rate of economic growth in India has recently been around 8 percent per year (it is expected to be 9 percent this year), and there is much speculation about whether and when India may catch up with and surpass China’s over 10 percent growth rate. Despite the evident excitement that this subject seems to cause in India and abroad, it is surely rather silly to be obsessed about India’s overtaking China in the rate of growth of GNP, while not comparing India with China in other respects, like education, basic health, or life expectancy. Economic growth can, of course, be enormously helpful in advancing living standards and in battling poverty. But there is little cause for taking the growth of GNP to be an end in itself, rather than seeing it as an important means for achieving things we value.

Dinodia/Stock Connection/Aurora Photos

Girls in a classroom in the Indian model village of Ralegan Siddhi, northeast of Pune, Maharashtra, 2006

It could, however, be asked why this distinction should make much difference, since economic growth does enhance our ability to improve living standards. The central point to appreciate here is that while economic growth is important for enhancing living conditions, its reach and impact depend greatly on what we do with the increased income. The relation between economic growth and the advancement of living standards depends on many factors, including economic and social inequality and, no less importantly, on what the government does with the public revenue that is generated by economic growth.

Some statistics about China and India, drawn mainly from the World Bank and the United Nations, are relevant here. Life expectancy at birth in China is 73.5 years; in India it is 64.4 years. The infant mortality rate is fifty per thousand in India, compared with just seventeen in China; the mortality rate for children under five is sixty-six per thousand for Indians and nineteen for the Chinese; and the maternal mortality rate is 230 per 100,000 live births in India and thirty-eight in China. The mean years of schooling in India were estimated to be 4.4 years, compared with 7.5 years in China. China’s adult literacy rate is 94 percent, compared with India’s 74 percent according to the preliminary tables of the 2011 census.

As a result of India’s effort to improve the schooling of girls, its literacy rate for women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four has clearly risen; but that rate is still not much above 80 percent, whereas in China it is 99 percent. One of the serious failures of India is that a very substantial proportion of Indian children are, to varying degrees, undernourished (depending on the criteria used, the proportion can come close to half of all children), compared with a very small proportion in China. Only 66 percent of Indian children are immunized with triple vaccine (diphtheria/pertussis/tetanus), as opposed to 97 percent in China.

Comparing India with China according to such standards can be more useful for policy discussions in India than confining the comparison to GNP growth rates only. Those who are fearful that India’s growth performance would suffer if it paid more attention to “social objectives” such as education and health care should seriously consider that notwithstanding these “social” activities and achievements, China’s rate of GNP growth is still clearly higher than India’s.

2.

Higher GNP has certainly helped China to reduce various indicators of poverty and deprivation, and to expand different features of the quality of life. There is every reason to want to encourage sustainable economic growth in India in order to improve living standards today and in the future (including taking care of the environment in which we live). Sustainable economic growth is a very good thing in a way that “growth mania” is not.

GNP per capita is, however, not invariably a good predictor of valuable features of our lives, for those features depend also on other things that we do—or fail to do. Compare India with Bangladesh. In income, India has a huge lead over Bangladesh, with a GNP per capita of $1,170, compared with $590 in Bangladesh, in comparable units of purchasing power. This difference has expanded rapidly because of India’s faster rate of recent economic growth, and that, of course, is a point in India’s favor. India’s substantially higher rank than Bangladesh in the UN Human Development Index (HDI) is largely due to this particular achievement. But we must ask how well India’s income advantage is reflected in other things that also matter. I fear the answer is: not well at all.

Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 66.9 years compared with India’s 64.4. The proportion of underweight children in Bangladesh (41.3 percent) is lower than in India (43.5), and its fertility rate (2.3) is also lower than India’s (2.7). Mean years of schooling amount to 4.8 years in Bangladesh compared with India’s 4.4 years. While India is ahead of Bangladesh in the male literacy rate for the age group between fifteen and twenty-four, the female rate in Bangladesh is higher than in India. Interestingly, the female literacy rate among young Bangladeshis is actually higher than the male rate, whereas young women still have substantially lower rates than young males in India. There is much evidence to suggest that Bangladesh’s current progress has a great deal to do with the role that liberated Bangladeshi women are beginning to play in the country.

What about health? The mortality rate of children under five is sixty-six per thousand in India compared with fifty-two in Bangladesh. In infant mortality, Bangladesh has a similar advantage: it is fifty per thousand in India and forty-one in Bangladesh. While 94 percent of Bangladeshi children are immunized with DPT vaccine, only 66 percent of Indian children are. In each of these respects, Bangladesh does better than India, despite having only half of India’s per capita income.

Of course, Bangladesh’s living conditions will benefit greatly from higher economic growth, particularly if the country uses it as a means of doing good things, rather than treating economic growth and high per capita income as ends in themselves. It is to the huge credit of Bangladesh that despite the adversity of low income it has been able to do so much so quickly; the imaginative activism of Bangladeshi NGOs (such as the Grameen Bank, the pioneering microcredit institution, and BRAC, a large-scale initiative aimed at removing poverty) as well as the committed public policies of the government have both contributed to the results. But higher income, including larger public resources, will obviously enhance Bangladesh’s ability to achieve better lives for its people.

3.

One of the positive things about economic growth is that it generates public resources that the government can devote to its priorities. In fact, public resources very often grow faster than the GNP. The gross tax revenue, for example, of the government of India (corrected for price rise) is now more than four times what it was just twenty years ago, in 1990–1991. This is a substantially bigger jump than the price-corrected GNP.

Expenditure on what is somewhat misleadingly called the “social sector”—health, education, nutrition, etc.—has certainly gone up in India. And yet India is still well behind China in many of these fields. For example, government expenditure on health care in China is nearly five times that in India. China does, of course, have a larger population and a higher per capita income than India, but even in relative terms, while the Chinese government spends nearly 2 percent of GDP (1.9 percent) on health care, the proportion is only a little above one percent (1.1 percent) in India.

One result of the relatively low allocation of funds to public health care in India is that large numbers of poor people across the country rely on private doctors, many of whom have little medical training. Since health is also a typical example of “asymmetric information,” in which the patients may know very little about what the doctors (or “supposed doctors”) are giving them, even the possibility of fraud and deceit is very large. In a study conducted by the Pratichi Trust—a public interest trust I set up in 1999—we found cases in which the ignorance of poor patients about their condition was exploited so as to make them pay for treatment they didn’t get. This is the result not only of shameful exploitation, but ultimately of the sheer unavailability of public health care in many parts of India. The benefit that we can expect to get from economic growth depends very much on how the public revenue generated by economic growth is expended.

4.

When we consider the impact of economic growth on people’s lives, comparisons favor China over India. However, there are many fields in which a comparison between China and India is not related to economic growth in any obvious way. Most Indians are strongly appreciative of the democratic structure of the country, including its many political parties, systematic free elections, uncensored media, free speech, and the independent standing of the judiciary, among other characteristics of a lively democracy. Those Indians who are critical of serious flaws in these arrangements (and I am certainly one of them) can also take account of what India has already achieved in sustaining democracy, in contrast to many other countries, including China.

Not only is access to the Internet and world opinion uncensored and unrestricted in India, a multitude of media present widely different points of view, often very critical of the government in office. India has a larger circulation of newspapers each day than any other country in the world. And the newspapers reflect contrasting political perspectives. Economic growth has helped—and this has certainly been a substantial gain—to expand the availability of radios and televisions across the country, including in rural areas, which very often are shared among many users. There are at least 360 independent television stations (and many are being established right now, judging from the licenses already issued) and their broadcasts reflect a remarkable variety of points of view. More than two hundred of these TV stations concentrate substantially or mainly on news, many of them around the clock. There is a sharp contrast here with the monolithic system of newscasting permitted by the state in China, with little variation of political perspectives on different channels.

Freedom of expression has its own value as a potentially important instrument for democratic politics, but also as something that people enjoy and treasure. Even the poorest parts of the population want to participate in social and political life, and in India they can do so. There is a contrast as well in the use of trial and punishment, including capital punishment. China often executes more people in a week than India has executed since independence in 1947. If our focus is on a comprehensive comparison of the quality of life in India and China, we have to look well beyond the traditional social indicators, and many of these comparisons are not to China’s advantage.

Could it be that India’s democratic system is somehow a barrier to using the benefits of economic growth in order to enhance health, education, and other social conditions? Clearly not, as I shall presently discuss. It is worth recalling that when India had a very low rate of economic growth, as was the case until the 1980s, a common argument was that democracy was hostile to fast economic growth. It was hard to convince those opposed to democracy that fast economic growth depends on an economic climate congenial to development rather than on fierce political control, and that a political system that protects democratic rights need not impede economic growth. That debate has now ended, not least because of the high economic growth rates of democratic India. We can now ask: How should we assess the alleged conflict between democracy and the use of the fruits of economic growth for social advancement?

5.

What a democratic system achieves depends greatly on which social conditions become political issues. Some conditions become politically important issues quickly, such as the calamity of a famine (thus famines tend not to occur at all when there is a functioning democracy), while other problems—less spectacular and less immediate—provide a much harder challenge. It is much more difficult to use democratic politics to remedy undernourishment that is not extreme, or persistent gender inequality, or the absence of regular medical care for all. Success or failure here depends on the range and vigor of democratic practice.¹ In recent years Indian democracy has made considerable progress in dealing with some of these conditions, such as gender inequality, lack of schools, and widespread undernourishment. Public protests, court decisions, and the use of the recently passed “Right to Information” Act have had telling effects. But India still has a long way to go in remedying these conditions.

In China, by contrast, the process of decision-making depends largely on decisions made by the top Party leaders, with relatively little democratic pressure from below. The Chinese leaders, despite their skepticism about the values of multiparty democracy and personal and political liberty, are strongly committed to eliminating poverty, undernourishment, illiteracy, and lack of health care; and this has greatly helped in China’s advancement. There is, however, a serious fragility in any authoritarian system of governance, since there is little recourse or remedy when the government leaders alter their goals or suppress their failures.

The reality of that danger revealed itself in a catastrophic form in the Chinese famine of 1959–1962, which killed more than 30 million people, when there was no public pressure against the regime’s policies, as would have arisen in a functioning democracy. Mistakes in policy continued for three years while tens of millions died. To take another example, the economic reforms of 1979 greatly improved the working and efficiency of Chinese agriculture and industry; but the Chinese government also eliminated, at the same time, the entitlement of all to public medical care (which was often administered through the communes). Most people were then required to buy their own health insurance, drastically reducing the proportion of the population with guaranteed health care.

In a functioning democracy an established right to social assistance could not have been so easily—and so swiftly—dropped. The change sharply reduced the progress of longevity in China. Its large lead over India in life expectancy dwindled during the following two decades—falling from a fourteen-year lead to one of just seven years.

The Chinese authorities, however, eventually realized what had been lost, and from 2004 they rapidly started reintroducing the right to medical care. China now has a considerably higher proportion of people with guaranteed health care than does India. The gap in life expectancy in China’s favor has been rising again, and it is now around nine years; and the degree of coverage is clearly central to the difference.² Whether India’s democratic political system can effectively remedy neglected public services such as health care is one of the most urgent questions facing the country.³

6.

For a minority of the Indian population—but still very large in actual numbers—economic growth alone has been very advantageous, since they are already comparatively privileged and need no social assistance to benefit from economic growth. The limited prosperity of recent years has helped to support a remarkable variety of lifestyles as well as globally acclaimed developments of Indian literature, music, cinema, theater, painting, and the culinary arts, among other cultural activities.

Yet an exaggerated concentration on the lives of the relatively prosperous, exacerbated by the Indian media, gives an unrealistically rosy picture of the lives of Indians in general. Since the fortunate group includes not only business leaders and the professional classes but also many of the country’s intellectuals, the story of unusual national advancement is widely and persistently heard. More worryingly, relatively privileged Indians can easily fall for the temptation to focus just on economic growth as a grand social benefactor for all.

Some critics of the huge social inequalities in India find something callous and uncouth in the self-centered lives and inward-looking preoccupations of a relatively prosperous minority. My primary concern, however, is that the illusions generated by those distorted perceptions of prosperity may prevent India from bringing social deprivations into political focus, which is essential for achieving what needs to be done for Indians at large through its democratic system. A fuller understanding of the real conditions of the mass of neglected Indians and what can be done to improve their lives through public policy should be a central issue in the politics of India.

This is exactly where the exclusive concentration on the rate of GNP growth has the most damaging effect. Economic growth can make a very large contribution to improving people’s lives; but single-minded emphasis on growth has limitations that need to be clearly understood.

Pakistan’s Deadly Game

by Salman Rushdie

Osama bin Laden died on Walpurgisnacht, the night of black sabbaths and bonfires. Not an inappropriate night for the Chief Witch to fall off his broomstick and perish in a fierce firefight. One of the most common status updates on Facebook after the news broke was “Ding, Dong, the witch is dead,” and that spirit of Munchkin celebration was apparent in the faces of the crowds chanting “U-S-A!” last night outside the White House and at ground zero and elsewhere. Almost a decade after the horror of 9/11, the long manhunt had found its quarry, and Americans will be feeling less helpless this morning, and pleased at the message that his death sends: “Attack us and we will hunt you down, and you will not escape.”

Many of us didn’t believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border. An extremely big man, 6-foot 4-inches tall in a country where the average male height is around 5-foot 8, wandering around unnoticed for ten years while half the satellites above the earth were looking for him? It didn’t make sense. Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man’s house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications. The U.S. administration confesses it was “shocked” by the elaborate nature of the compound.

We had heard—I certainly had, from more than one Pakistani journalist—that Mullah Omar was (is) being protected in a safe house run by the powerful and feared Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) somewhere in the vicinity of the city of Quetta in Baluchistan, and it seemed likely that bin Laden, too, would acquire a home of his own.

In the aftermath of the raid on Abbottabad, all the big questions need to be answered by Pakistan. The old flim-flam (“Who, us? We knew nothing!”) just isn’t going to wash, must not be allowed to wash by countries such as the United States that have persisted in treating Pakistan as an ally even though they have long known about the Pakistani double game—its support, for example, for the Haqqani network that has killed hundreds of Americans in Afghanistan.

This time the facts speak too loudly to be hushed up. Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, was found living at the end of a dirt road 800 yards from the Abbottabad military academy, Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst, in a military cantonment where soldiers are on every street corner, just about 80 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad. This extremely large house had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. And in spite of this we are supposed to believe that Pakistan didn’t know he was there, and that the Pakistani intelligence, and/or military, and/or civilian authorities did nothing to facilitate his presence in Abbottabad, while he ran al Qaeda, with couriers coming and going, for five years?

Pakistan’s neighbor India, badly wounded by the November 26, 2008, terrorist attacks on Mumbai, is already demanding answers. As far as the anti-Indian jihadist groups are concerned—Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad—Pakistan’s support for such groups, its willingness to provide them with safe havens, its encouragement of such groups as a means of waging a proxy war in Kashmir and, of course, in Mumbai—is established beyond all argument. In recent years these groups have been reaching out to the so-called Pakistani Taliban to form new networks of violence, and it is worth noting that the first threats of retaliation for bin Laden’s death have been made by the Pakistani Taliban, not by any al Qaeda spokesman.

India, as always Pakistan’s unhealthy obsession, is the reason for the double game. Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India’s supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.

For a long time now America has been tolerating the Pakistani double game in the knowledge that it needs Pakistani support in its Afghan enterprise, and in the hope that Pakistan’s leaders will understand that they are miscalculating badly, that the jihadists want their jobs. Pakistan, with its nuclear weapons, is a far greater prize than poor Afghanistan, and the generals and spymasters who are playing al Qaeda’s game today may, if the worst were to happen, become the extremists’ victims tomorrow.

There is not very much evidence that the Pakistani power elite is likely to come to its senses any time soon. Osama bin Laden’s compound provides further proof of Pakistan’s dangerous folly.

As the world braces for the terrorists’ response to the death of their leader, it should also demand that Pakistan give satisfactory answers to the very tough questions it must now be asked. If it does not provide those answers, perhaps the time has come to declare it a terrorist state and expel it from the comity of nations.