Vladimir Sorokin: Russian Post-Modern Science Fiction – review by Paul Di Filippo

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Vladimir Sorokin
March 11, 2011

The Icebreaker

During its seventy-year lifetime, the Soviet Union was the perfect Other for Westerners: a colossal enigma, alternately dystopian and utopian, onto which we could project all our fears, hopes, and dreams; a funhouse mirror in which our own culture was reflected in amusingly warped fashion; an outré parallel continuum from which bizarre messages trickled out at irregular intervals, bearing cryptic hints of off-kilter wonders, quotidian strangeness and kludgy tech. The Iron Curtain was no mere metaphor, but rather an imposing information barrier like the force field around Coventry, Robert Heinlein’s land of dissidents, rogue ideologues, criminals and nonconformists.

In this ancient era, science fiction readers and writers had some vague notion that the speculative literature of the Soviet Union represented a bracingly alternate family of narratives, a non-Anglo, non-Euro, non-North American, non-Latin American tradition of proleptic storytelling that sprang from an alien lineage of fabulism.

But solid examples of actual SF from the Communist Bloc were sparse on the ground. A few pioneering anthologies cropped up. Isaac Asimov, himself of Russian birth, introduced Soviet Science Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction, both appearing in 1962; Path into the Unknown, Last Door to Aiya and The Ultimate Threshold followed over the next eight years. Meanwhile, a few individual authors, such as Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, were plucked by western translators like beet chunks from the Soviet borscht.

Just when it seemed as if Soviet SF might be gaining a faltering foothold in the consciousness of Western readers, the political empire collapsed, taking the Soviet cultural superstructure with it. Since 1992, interest in—and access to—translated SF from Russia and other ex-Bloc countries seems to have fallen nearly to pre-1962 levels. Only the novels of Victor Pelevin (The Life of Insects) and Sergey Lukyanenko (Night Watch) appear to have made even a dent in American perceptions. Now, with the publication of two new translations of the remarkable work of Russian satirist Vladimir Sorokin—jaunty, despairing, cynical, hopeful, traditional and postmodern by turns – an even more explosive impact seems likely.

In his native country, Sorokin—born 1955—is a figure of controversy and admiration, even occasionally spawning public protests against his bold and irreverent fiction, which was of course mostly suppressed under Communist rule. Reading his newest work, Day of the Oprichnik, part of a concerted publishing effort to introduce him to English-speaking readers, one encounters a Swiftian writer steeped in globally shared images out of science fiction, but whose sensibility is deeply rooted in Russian culture.

In Oprichnik, it’s the year 2028, and Russia has reinstated the Tsar and the royal family, withdrawn from contact with the West behind new barriers, ceded Siberia to the Chinese in exchange for favorable trade conditions, and, most crucially for our story, instituted a new internal security elite called the “oprichniks”, of whom our narrator, Komiaga, is one. Given a free hand to repress dissent, the oprichniks have become a decadent pseudo-SS given to graft and self-indulgence, hypocritically masquerading under the guise of a monastic piety. As we follow Komiaga through the frenetic course of 24 jam-packed hours of brutality, venality, political chicanery and blind absurdism, we watch a country willfully plunge back into the worst excesses and injustices of the nineteenth century, while maintaining a postmodern, technocratic veneer. The oprichniks drive autonomous “Mercedovs,” get their news from holographic “bubbles” and employ rayguns and lasers in their depradations—as well as the old-fashioned torture rack and knives. The blend of antique and futuristic creates a fascinating literary estrangement, as well as symbolically representing our current global dilemma: tied between retrograde and forward-facing horses of stasis and change.

The brilliant self-delivered portrait of Komiaga and his crowd is an achievement on a par with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a book which is certainly the model for Oprichnik. In fact, a literal book-burning scene occurs in subtle fashion at one point, as if in homage to the classic Bradbury text. As with Fahrenheit, the transvaluation of values is so massively and convincingly portrayed that the topsy-turvy world of future Russia begins to assume a nightmare substantiality equal to our current milieu, casting its unborn shadow threateningly backwards in time.

Sorokin delights in an Orwellian buggering of language, even italicizing the worst perversions of speech. For instance, lighting a blacklisted nobleman’s house on fire is called bringing in “His Majesty’s red rooster,” while raping the wife of the disgraced man is “the way it’s usually done.” The oprichniks achieve a leering self-justification through such linguistic hypnosis.

But Sorokin also dazzles with sheer science-fictional wordplay, along the lines of Lem in his The Futurological Congress. The section describing the sanctioned audiovideo channels for tame dissidents is one such passage, reveling in babble such as “the behavioral model of Sugary Buratino, and medhermeutical adultery…” Likewise, Sorokin nods to famous SF works: A scene where the torturers ingest drugs via living fish injected into their veins recalls both Rudy Rucker’s drug Merge and Jeff Noon’s psychedelic feathers in Vurt. And who are some infamous enemies of the state? None other than “the cyberpunks.”

It would be wrong to give the impression that this book is gray and grim. Despite all its too-plausible horrors, it remains a rollicking rollercoaster of a tale, compulsively, LOL-ishly readable (the climactic gay oprichnik orgy is a tour de farce), full of unrepentant rude lifeforce, much like Norman Spinrad’s classic faux-Nazi fantasy The Iron Dream, a debauched fever fugue featuring a womb-crazed return to some fairy tale past—and resembling, to our Western chagrin, a Tea Party convention where attendees dress like the Founding Fathers and spout reactionary bile.

Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy, here translated piquantly by Jamey Gambrell, who also handled Oprichnik, was originally published in three parts from 2002 to 2005. It’s a Cossack of a different regiment entirely, with each installment displaying a contrasting storm of weirdness that add up to a cumulative gonzo hurricane.

Part 1, Bro, starts out like an old-fashioned Tolstoyan bildungsroman. We are introduced to Alexander Snegirev, born in the year 1908 to a well-off family. From birth he’s an oddball, not fitting in, although he tries to play a part in the tumultuous history of the next twenty years. The naturalistic gravitas of this early section convinces you you’re reading a straight historical novel, and grounds the subsequent fantasy with deep roots. For when Snegirev tracks down the Tunguska meteorite that fell coincident with his birth (on an expedition that plays out like Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala), his life veers off the rails. Touching the alien “ice,” he receives a revelation: he is one of an elite cohort, some 23,000 souls, nescient fallen angels trapped in mortal clay. His real name is “Bro,” and his mission is to reassemble his tribe prior to Armageddon.

The rest of Bro reads as if Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing and Thomas Pynchon had re-scripted Hammer Film’s cult classic Five Million Years to Earth, after mainlining Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s a Gnostic odyssey down familiar twentieth-century history rendered utterly Martian by Bro’s perspective and insider knowledge. His death by natural causes at the end of WWII culminates the first book.

Part 2, Ice, immediately throws us for a loop. As with most middle volumes of any trilogy, it’s somewhat protracted and bridge-like. The book opens in contemporary times, and Bro’s recruiters are still active, continuing to search out the missing 23,000. But the conspirators seem to have devolved somehow from the plateau of Bro’s nobility, becoming more violent and meaner, heedless of the “meat machines” (all the humans other than the chosen Brotherhood of Light). In stripped-down, punkish prose, Sorokin offers some Russian mob doings (gangsters have become entangled in the Tunguska ice trade) and details post-WWII Brotherhood history through the eyes of a woman named Khram, the new leader of the fallen angels. We end this installment with the appearance of a young boy who seems destined for large things.

Part 3, 23,000, confounds our expectations again by following immediately upon the last sentence of its predecessor. The mysterious boy is kidnapped by the Brotherhood, subjected to the awakening initiation, and christened Gorn. He is instrumental in the completion of the sect’s century-old quest, a denouement for which Sorokin pulls out all the outrageous stops, masterfully employing two new human viewpoint characters, Olga and Bjorn, whose lives have brushed up against the Brotherhood in the past. Brashly and shamelessly, the author even manages to redeem what amounts to the biggest SF cliché of all times, the “Adam and Eve” New Genesis ending.

Amid all this apocalyptic adventuring, the Ice Trilogy provides a surprisingly trenchant examination of all cults and belief systems and nascent religions, from Mormonism to Jonestown, Scientology to Mayan 2012 Eschatology. There’s a comic-book quality to much of the action (consider how close Sorokin’s story is to that of the X-Men and their Cerebro scanning device that seeks out mutants), but Sorokin uses it to frame genuine philosophical debates about serious ontological conundrums. Ultimately, his trilogy delves with great subtlety into the idea of a life powered by mystical rapture– a notion whose fascinations and dangers require no translation.

the Ice Trilogy provides a surprisingly trenchant examination of all cults and belief systems and nascent religions, from Mormonism to Jonestown, Scientology to Mayan 2012 Eschatology. There’s a comic-book quality to much of the action (consider how close Sorokin’s story is to that of the X-Men and their Cerebro scanning device that seeks out mutants), but Sorokin uses it to frame genuine philosophical debates about serious ontological conundrums. Ultimately, his trilogy delves with great subtlety into the idea of a life powered by mystical rapture– a notion whose fascinations and dangers require no translation.

Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin (Владимир Георгиевич Сорокин) was born in 1955 in Bykovo in the Moscow region. His development as a writer took place amidst the painters and the writers of the Moscow underground scene of the 1980s. His works, bright and striking examples of underground culture, were banned during the Soviet period. Sorokin is considered to be a postmodernist, resorts to various literary styles in his stories and novels. In Soviet times he was close to the circle of Moscow conceptualism and was published in samizdat.

McLuhan at 100 by Nicholas Carr

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Marshall McLuhan at 100

by

Nicholas Carr

One of my favorite YouTube videos is a clip from a 1968 Canadian TV show featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both icons of the sixties, could hardly be more different. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is pugnacious, animated, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, seems to be on autopilot. He speaks in canned riddles. “The planet is no longer nature,” he declares, to Mailer’s uncomprehending stare; “it’s now the content of an art work.”

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Watching McLuhan, you can’t quite decide whether he was a genius or just had a screw loose. Both impressions, it turns out, are valid. As the novelist Douglas Coupland argued in his recent biography, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, McLuhan’s mind was probably situated at the mild end of the autism spectrum. He also suffered from a couple of major cerebral traumas. In 1960, he had a stroke so severe that he was given his last rites. In 1967, just a few months before the Mailer debate, surgeons removed a tumor the size of a small apple from the base of his brain. A later procedure revealed that McLuhan had an extra artery pumping blood into his cranium.

Between the stroke and the tumor, McLuhan managed to write a pair of extravagantly original books. The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962, explored the cultural and personal consequences of the invention of the printing press, arguing that Gutenberg’s invention shaped the modern mind. Two years later, Understanding Media extended the analysis to the electric media of the twentieth century, which, McLuhan argued, were destroying the individualist ethic of print culture and turning the world into a tightly networked global village. The ideas in both books drew heavily on the works of other thinkers, including such contemporaries as Harold Innis, Albert Lord, and Wyndham Lewis, but McLuhan’s synthesis was, in content and tone, unlike anything that had come before.

When you read McLuhan today, you find all sorts of reasons to be impressed by his insight into media’s far-reaching effects and by his anticipation of the course of technological progress. When he looked at a Xerox machine in 1966, he didn’t just see the ramifications of cheap photocopying, as great as they were. He foresaw the transformation of the book from a manufactured object into an information service: “Instead of the book as a fixed package of repeatable and uniform character suited to the market with pricing, the book is increasingly taking on the character of a service, an information service, and the book as an information service is tailor-made and custom-built.” That must have sounded outrageous a half century ago. Today, with books shedding their physical skins and turning into software programs, it sounds like a given.

You also realize that McLuhan got a whole lot wrong. One of his central assumptions was that electric communication technologies would displace the phonetic alphabet from the center of culture, a process that he felt was well under way in his own lifetime. “Our Western values, built on the written word, have already been considerably affected by the electric media of telephone, radio, and TV,” he wrote in Understanding Media. He believed that readers, because their attention is consumed by the act of interpreting the visual symbols of alphabetic letters, become alienated from their other senses, sacrifice their attachment to other people, and enter a world of abstraction, individualism, and rigorously linear thinking. This, for McLuhan, was the story of Western civilization, particularly after the arrival of Gutenberg’s press.

By freeing us from our single-minded focus on the written word, new technologies like the telephone and the television would, he argued, broaden our sensory and emotional engagement with the world and with others. We would become more integrated, more “holistic,” at both a sensory and a social level, and we would recoup some of our primal nature. But McLuhan failed to anticipate that, as the speed and capacity of communication networks grew, what they would end up transmitting more than anything else is text. The written word would invade electric media. If McLuhan were to come back to life today, the sight of people using their telephones as reading and writing devices would blow his mind. He would also be amazed to discover that the fuzzy, low-definition TV screens that he knew (and on which he based his famous distinction between hot and cold media) have been replaced by crystal-clear, high-definition monitors, which more often that not are crawling with the letters of the alphabet. Our senses are more dominated by the need to maintain a strong, narrow visual focus than ever before. Electric media are social media, but they are also media of isolation. If the medium is the message, then the message of electric media has turned out to be far different from what McLuhan supposed.

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Of course, the fact that some of his ideas didn’t pan out wouldn’t have bothered McLuhan much. He was far more interested in playing with ideas than nailing them down. He intended his writings to be “probes” into the present and the future. He wanted his words to knock readers out of their intellectual comfort zones, to get them to entertain the possibility that their accepted patterns of perception might need reordering. Fortunately for him, he arrived on the scene at a rare moment in history when large numbers of people wanted nothing more than to have their minds messed with.

McLuhan was a scholar of literature, with a doctorate from Cambridge, and his interpretation of the intellectual and social effects of media was richly allusive and erudite. But what particularly galvanized the public and the press was the weirdness of his prose. Perhaps a consequence of his unusual mind, he had a knack for writing sentences that sounded at once clinical and mystical. His books read like accounts of acid trips written by a bureaucrat. That kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic style made him a darling of the counterculture — the bearded and the Birkenstocked embraced him as a guru — but it alienated him from his colleagues in academia. To them, McLuhan was a celebrity-seeking charlatan.

Neither his fans nor his foes saw him clearly. The central fact of McLuhan’s life was his conversion, at the age of twenty-five, to Catholicism, and his subsequent devotion to the religion’s rituals and tenets. He became a daily Mass-goer. Though he never discussed it, his faith forms the moral and intellectual backdrop to all his mature work. What lay in store, McLuhan believed, was the timelessness of eternity. The earthly conceptions of past, present, and future were by comparison of little consequence. His role as a thinker was not to celebrate or denigrate the world but simply to understand it, to recognize the patterns that would unlock history’s secrets and thus provide hints of God’s design. His job was not dissimilar, as he saw it, from that of the artist.

That’s not to say that McLuhan was without secular ambition. Coming of age at the dawn of mass media, he very much wanted to be famous. “I have no affection for the world,” he wrote to his brother in the late thirties, at the start of his academic career. But in the same letter he disclosed the “large dreams” he harbored for “the bedazzlement of men.” Modern media needed its own medium, the voice that would explain its transformative power to the world, and he would be it.

The tension between McLuhan’s craving for earthly attention and his distaste for the material world would never be resolved. Even as he came to be worshipped as a techno-utopian seer in the mid-sixties, he had already, writes Coupland, lost all hope “that the world might become a better place with new technology.” He heralded the global village, and was genuinely excited by its imminence and its possibilities, but he also saw its arrival as the death knell for the literary culture he revered. The electronically connected society would be the setting not for the further flourishing of civilization but for the return of tribalism, if on a vast new scale. “And as our senses [go] outside us,” he wrote, “Big Brother goes inside.” Always on display, always broadcasting, always watched, we would become mediated, technologically and socially, as never before. The intellectual detachment that characterizes the solitary thinker — and that was the hallmark of McLuhan’s own work — would be replaced by the communal excitements, and constraints, of what we have today come to call “interactivity.”

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McLuhan also saw, with biting clarity, how all mass media are fated to become tools of commercialism and consumerism — and hence instruments of control. The more intimately we weave media into our lives, the more tightly we become locked in a corporate embrace: “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.” Has a darker vision of modern media ever been expressed?

“Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it,” McLuhan explained during an uncharacteristically candid interview in 1966. “The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I’m resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button.” Though the founders of Wired magazine would posthumously appoint McLuhan as the “patron saint” of the digital revolution, the real McLuhan was as much a Luddite as a technophile. He would have found the collective banality of Facebook abhorrent, if also fascinating.

In the fall of 1979, McLuhan suffered another major stroke, but this was one from which he would not recover. Though he regained consciousness, he remained unable to read, write, or speak until his death a little more than a year later. A lover of words — his favorite book was Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — he died in a state of wordlessness. He had fulfilled his own prophecy and become post-literary.

Nicholas Carr is author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain

Reflections of an ex-Pakistani Army Officer by Masood Ashraf Raja

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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

A Letter of Sri Aurobindo to His Brother

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A Letter of Sri Aurobindo to His Brother

Pondicherry

Date unfixable [April 1920]

Dear Barin,

I have received your three letters (and another one today), but up till now I have not managed to write a reply. That now I sit to write is itself a miracle, because I write letters once in a blue moon, especially letters in Bengali. This is something I have not done even once in the last five or six years. If I can finish the letter and post it, the miracle will be complete.

First, about your yoga. You want to give me the charge of your yoga, and I am willing to accept it. But this means giving it to Him who, openly or secretly, is moving me and you by His divine power. And you should know that the inevitable result of this will be that you will have to follow the path of yoga which He has given me. the path 1 call the Integral Yoga. This is not exactly what we did in Alipur jail, or what you did during your imprisonment in the Andamans. What I started with, what Lele gave me, what I did in jail — all that was a searching for the path, a circling around looking here and there, touching, taking up, handling, testing this and that of all the old partial yogas, getting a more or less complete experience of one and then going off in pursuit of another. Afterwards, when I came to Pondicherry, this unsteady condition ceased. The indwelling Guru of the world indicated my path to me completely, its full theory, the ten limbs of the body of the yoga. These ten years he has been making me develop it in experience; it is not yet finished. It may take another two years. And so long as it is not finished, I probably will not be able to return to Bengal. Pondicherry is the appointed place for the fulfilment of my yoga — except indeed for one part of it. that is, the work. The centre of my work is Bengal, but I hope its circumference will be the whole of India and the whole world.

Later I will write to you what my path of yoga is. Or, if you come here, I will tell you. In these matters the spoken word is better than the written. For the present I can only say that its fundamental principle is to make a synthesis and unity of integral knowledge, integral works and integral devotion, and, raising this above the mental level to the supramental level of the Vijnana, to give it a complete perfection.

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The defect of the old yoga was that, knowing the mind and reason and knowing the Spirit, it remained satisfied with spiritual experience in the mind. But the mind can grasp only the fragmentary; it cannot completely seize the infinite, the undivided. The mind’s way to seize it is through the trance of samadhi. the liberation of moksha, the extinction of nirvana, and so forth. It has no other way. Someone here or there may indeed obtain this featureless liberation, but what is the gain? The Spirit, the Self, the Divine is always there. What the Divine wants is for man to embody Him here, in the individual and in the collectivity—to realise God in life. The old system of yoga could not synthesise or unify the Spirit and life; it dismissed the world as an illusion or a transient play of God. The result has been a diminution of the power of life and the decline of India. The Gita says; utsideyur ime loka na kuryam karma ced aham, “These peoples would crumble to pieces if I did not do actions.” Verily “these peoples” of India have gone down to ruin. What kind of spiritual perfection is it if a few ascetics, renunciates, holy-men and realised beings attain liberation, if a few devotees dance in a frenzy of love, god-intoxication and bliss, and an entire race, devoid of life and intelligence, sinks to the depths of darkness and inertia? First one must have all sorts of partial experience on the mental level, flooding the mind with spiritual delight and illuminating it with spiritual light; afterwards one climbs upwards. Unless one makes this upward climb, this climb to the supramental level, it is not possible to know the ultimate secret of world-existence; the riddle of the world is not solved. There, the cosmic Ignorance which consists of the duality of Self and world, Spirit and life, is abolished. Then one need no longer look on the world as an illusion: the world is an eternal play of God, the perpetual manifestation of the Self. Then is it possible fully to know and realise God—samagram mam jnatum pravistum, “to know and enter into Me completely”, as the Gita says. The physical body, life, mind and reason, Supermind. the Bliss-existence—these are the Spirits five levels. The higher we climb, the nearer comes a state of highest perfection of man’s spiritual evolution. When we rise to the Super-mind, it becomes easy to rise to the Bliss. The status of indivisible and infinite Bliss becomes firmly established — not only in the timeless Supreme Reality, but in the body, in the world, in life. Integral existence, integral consciousness, integral bliss blossom out and take form in life. This endeavour is the central clue of my yogic path, its fundamental idea.

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But it is not an easy thing. After fifteen years I am only now rising into the lowest of the three levels of the Supermind and trying to draw up into it all the lower activities. But when the process is complete, there is not the least doubt that God through me will give this supramental perfection to others with less difficulty. Then my real work will begin. I am not impatient for the fulfilment of my work. What is to happen will happen in God’s appointed time. I am not disposed to run like a madman and plunge into the field of action on the strength of my little ego. Even if my work were not fulfilled, I would not be disturbed. This work is not mine, it is Gods. I listen to no one else’s call. When I am moved by God, I will move.

I know that Bengal is not ready. The spiritual flood which has come is for the most part a new form of the old. It is not a real change. But it too was needed. Bengal has been awakening within itself all the old yogas in order to exhaust their ingrained tendencies, extract their essence and with it fertilise the soil. First it was the turn of Vedanta: the doctrine of non-dualism, asceticism, the Illusionism of Shankara, and so forth. Now, according to your description, it is the turn of the Vaishnava religion : the divine Play, love, losing oneself in the delight of spiritual emotion. All this is very old and unsuitable for the new age. It cannot last, for such excitement has no lasting-power. But the Vaishnava way has this merit, that it keeps a certain connection between God and the world and gives a meaning to life. But because it is a partial thing, the connection and the meaning are not complete. The sectarianism you have noticed was inevitable. This is the law of the mind: to take one part and call it the whole, excluding all the other parts. The realised man who comes with an idea keeps, even if he leans on the part, some awareness of the whole — although he may not be able to give it form. But his disciples are not able to do this, because the form is lacking. They are tying up their bundles — let them. When God descends completely on the country, the bundles will open of themselves. All these things are signs of incompleteness and immaturity. I am not disturbed by them. Let the force of spirituality have its play in the country in whatever way and through as many sects as there may be. Afterwards we shall see.

 

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This is the infancy, the embryonic state, even, of the new age, just a hint, not yet the beginning.

Then about Motilal’s group.1 What Motilal got from me is the first foundation, the base of my yoga—surrender, equality etc. He has been working on these things; the work is not complete. One special feature of this yoga is that until the realisation has been raised to a somewhat elevated level, the base does not become solid. Motilal now wants to rise higher. In the beginning he had a number of old fixed notions. Some have dropped off, some still remain. At first it was the notion of asceticism — he wanted to create an Aurobindo order of monks.2 Now his mind has admitted that asceticism is not needed, but the old impression in his vital being has still not been thoroughly wiped out. This is why he advocates renunciation and asceticism while remaining a part of the life of the world. He has realised the necessity of renouncing desire, but he has not fully been able to grasp how the renunciation of desire can be reconciled with the experience of bliss. Moreover, he took to my yoga—as is natural to the Bengali nature —not so much from the side of knowledge as from the side of devotion and service. Knowledge has blossomed out a little : but much more is yet to come, and the fog of sentimentality has not been dissipated, though it is not so thick as it used to be. He has not been able to get beyond the limitations of the sattwic nature, the temperament of the moral man. The ego is still there. In a word, his development is progressing, it is not complete. But I am in no hurry. I am letting him develop according to his own nature. I do not want to fashion everybody in the same mould. The real thing will be the same in all, but it will take many aspects and many forms. Everyone grows from within; I do not wish to model from outside. Motilal has got the fundamental thing; all the rest will come.

You ask, “Why is Motilal tying up his bundle?” I will explain. First, some people have gathered round him who are in contact with him and with me. What he received from me. they too are receiving. Secondly, I wrote a small article in Prabartak3 called

 

1 The Prabartak Sangha of Chandernagore. West Bengal, founded by Motilal Roy. an early associate of Sri Aurobindo.

        2 Today I have received a letter from Motilal He writes that he never had this idea, he was misunderstood [Sri Aurobindo's note]

        3 A magazine published by Motilal Roy’s Prabartak Sangha

 

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“About Society”4 in which I spoke about the sangha or community. I do not want a community based on division. I want a community based upon the Spirit and giving form to the unity of the Spirit. This idea Motilal has taken up under the name deva-sangha (divine community). I have spoken in my English writings of the “divine life”. Nolini has translated this as deva-jivana. The community of those who want the deva-jivana is the deva-sangha. Motilal has begun an attempt to establish this kind of community in seed-form in Chander-nagore and to spread it across the country. If the shadow of the fragile ego falls upon this sort of endeavour, the community turns into a sect. The idea may easily creep in that the community which will be there in the end is this very one, that everything will be the circumference of this sole centre, that all who are outside it are not of the fold or, even if they are, that they have gone astray, because they are not in accord with our current line of thinking. If Motilal is making this mistake—he may have some tendency to make it, though I do not know whether he has done so or not —it will not do much harm, the mistake will pass. Much work has been done and continues to be done for us by Motilal and his little group —something nobody else has been able to do up till now. The divine power is working in him, there is no doubt about that.

You will perhaps ask. “What is the need of a sangha? Let me be free and fill every vessel. Let all become one. let all take place within that vast unity.” All this is true, but it is only one side of the truth. Our business is not with the formless Spirit only; we have to direct life as well. Without shape and form, life has no effective movement. It is the formless that has taken form, and that assumption of name and form is not a caprice of Maya. The positive necessity of form has brought about the assumption of form. We do not want to exclude any of the world’s activities. Politics, trade, social organisation, poetry, art, literature — all will remain. But all will be given a new life, a new form. Why did I leave politics? Because our politics is not the genuine Indian thing: it is a European import, an imitation of European ways. But it too was needed. You and 1 also engaged in politics of the European style. If we had not done so. the country would not have risen, and we would not have had the experience or obtained a full development.

 

4 Presently published under the title “The Chariot of Jagannath” (Jagannather Rath).

 

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Even now there is a need for it, not so much in Bengal as in the other provinces of India. But now the time has come to take hold of the substance instead of extending the shadow. We have to awaken the true soul of India and to do everything in accordance with it. For the last ten years I have been silently pouring my influence into this foreign political vessel, and there has been some result. I can continue to do this wherever necessary. But if I took up that work openly again, associating with the political leaders and working with them, it would be supporting an alien law of being and a false political life. People now want to spiritualise politics — Gandhi, for instance. But he can’t get hold of the right way. What is Gandhi doing? Making a hodge-podge called satyagraha out of “Ahimsa parama dharma”.5 Jainism. hartal, passive resistance, etc. ; bringing a sort of Indianised Tolstoyism into the country. The result—if there is any lasting result—will be a sort of Indianised Bolshevism. I have no objection to his work; let each one act according to his own inspiration. But it is not the real thing. If the spiritual force is poured into these impure forms — the wine of the spirit into these unbaked vessels — the imperfect things will break apart and spill and waste the wine. Or else the spiritual force will evaporate and only the impure form remain. It is the same in every field of activity. I could use my spiritual influence; it would give strength to those who received it and they would work with great energy. But the force would be expended in shaping the image of a monkey and setting it up in the temple of Shiva. If the monkey is brought to life it may grow powerful, and in the guise of the devotee Hanuman do much work for Rama — so long as the life and strength remain. But in the temple of India we want not Hanuman but the Godhead, the Avatar, Rama himself.

I can associate with everyone, but only in order to draw them all onto the true path, while keeping the spirit and form of our ideal intact. If that is not done we will lose our way and the true work will not be accomplished. If we are spread out everywhere as individuals, something no doubt will be done; if we are spread out everywhere in the form of a sangha, a hundred times more will be accomplished. But the time has not yet come for this. If we try to give it form hastily, it will not be the exact thing 1 want. The sangha will at first be in a diffused form.

 

5 “Non-violence is the highest law”

 

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Those who have accepted the ideal, although bound together, will work in different places. Afterwards, bound into a sangha with a form like a spiritual commune, they will shape all their activities according to the Self and according to the needs of the age. Not a fixed and rigid form like that of the old Aryan society, not a stagnant backwater, but a free form that can spread itself out like the sea with its multitudinous waves—engulfing this, inundating that, absorbing all—and as this continues, a spiritual community will be established. This is my present idea ; it is not yet fully developed. What is being developed is what came to me in my meditations at Alipur. I shall see what shape it finally takes later. The result is in God’s hands — let his will be done. Motilal’s little group is just one experiment. He is looking for the means to engage in trade, industry, agriculture, etc. through his sangha. I am giving force and watching. There may be some materials for the future and some useful suggestions to be found in it. Do not judge it by its current merits and demerits or its present limitations. It is now in a wholly initial and experimental stage.

Next I will discuss some of the specific points raised in your letter. I do not want to say much here about what you write as regards your yoga. It will be more convenient to do so when we meet. But there is one thing you write, that you admit no physical connection with men, that you look upon the body as a corpse. And yet your mind wants to live the worldly life. Does this condition still persist? To look upon the body as a corpse is a sign of asceticism, the path of nirvana. The worldly life does not go along with this idea. There must be delight in everything, in the body as much as in the spirit. The body is made of consciousness, the body is a form of God. I see God in everything in the world. Sarvam idam brahma, vasudevah sarvamiti (“All this here is the Brahman”, “Vasudeva, the Divine, is all”) —this vision brings the universal delight. Concrete waves of this bliss flow even through the body. In this condition, filled with spiritual feeling, one can live the worldly life, get married or do anything else. In every activity one finds a blissful self-expression of the divine. I have for a long time been transforming on the mental level all the objects and experiences of the mind and senses into delight. Now they are all taking the form of supramental delight. In this condition there is the perfect vision and experience of Sachchidananda—the divine Existence. Consciousness and Bliss.

 

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Next, in reference to the divine community, you write, “I am not a god, only some much-hammered and tempered steel.” I have already spoken about the real meaning of the divine community. No one is a god, but each man has a god within him. To manifest him is the aim of the divine life. That everyone can do. I admit that certain individuals have greater or lesser capacities. I do not, however, accept as accurate your description of yourself. But whatever the capacity, if once God places his finger upon the man and his spirit awakes, greater or lesser and all the rest make little difference. The difficulties may be more, it may take more time, what is manifested may not be the same—but even this is not certain. The god within takes no account of all these difficulties and deficiencies; he forces his way out. Were there few defects in my mind and heart and life and body? Few difficulties? Did it not take time? Did God hammer at me sparingly—day after day, moment after moment? Whether I have become a god or something else I do not know. But I have become or am becoming something—whatever God desired. This is sufficient. And it is the same with everybody; not by our own strength but by God’s strength is this yoga done.

It is good that you have taken charge of Narayan. The magazine began well, but later it drew a narrow sectarian line around itself; fostered feelings of faction and began to rot. At first Nolini wrote for Narayan, but later he was obliged to turn elsewhere, because it gave no scope to free opinion. There must be the free air of an open room, otherwise how can there be any power of life? Free light and free air are the primary nourishment of the life-force. At present it is not possible for me to contribute anything. Later I may be able to give something, but Prabartak also has its claim on me. It may at first be a little difficult to satisfy calls from both directions. We shall see when I begin to write in Bengali again. At the moment I am short of time; it is not possible for me to write for anything except the Arya. Each month I alone have to provide 64 pages; it is no small task. And then there is poetry to write; the practice of yoga takes time; time is also needed for rest. Most of “On Society”, which Saurin has with him, has probably appeared in Prabartak. The rest of what he has must be a draft; the final revision has not been done. Let me have a look at it first. We shall see then whether it can be published in Narayan.

 

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You write about Prabartak that people cannot understand it, it is misty, a riddle. I have been hearing the same complaint all along. I admit that there is not much clear-cut thinking in Motilal’s writing; he writes too densely. But he has inspiration, force, power. In the beginning Nolini and Moni wrote for Prabartak and even then people called it a riddle. But Nolini’s thinking is clear-cut, Moni’s writing direct and powerful. There is the same complaint about the Arya; people can’t understand it. Who wants to give so much thought and consideration to his reading? But in spite of this, Prabartak was doing a lot of work in Bengal, and at that time people did not have the idea that I was writing for it. If now it does not have the same effect, the reason is that now people are rushing towards activity and excitement. On one side there is the flood of devotion, on the other side the effort to make money. But during the ten-year period that Bengal was lifeless and inert, Prabartak was its only fountain of strength. It has helped a lot in changing the mood of Bengal. I do not think its work is over yet.

In this connection let me tell you briefly one or two things I have been observing for a long time. It is my belief that the main cause of India’s weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or religion, but a diminution of the power of thought, the spread of ignorance in the birthplace of knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think — incapacity of thought or “thought-phobia”. This may have been all right in the mediaeval period, but now this attitude is the sign of a great decline. The mediaeval period was a night, the day of victory for the man of ignorance; in the modern world it is the time of victory for the man of knowledge. He who can delve into and learn the truth about the world by thinking more, searching more, labouring more, gains more power. Take a look at Europe. You will see two things: a wide limitless sea of thought and the play of a huge and rapid, yet disciplined force. The whole power of Europe is here. It is by virtue of this power that she has been able to swallow the world, like our tapaswis of old, whose might held even the gods of the universe in terror, suspense, subjection. People say that Europe is rushing into the jaws of destruction. I do not think so. All these revolutions, all these upsettings are the first stages of a new creation. Now take a look at India.

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A few solitary giants aside, everywhere there is your  simple man, that is, your average man, one who will not think, cannot think, has not an ounce of strength, just a momentary excitement. India wants the easy thought, the simple word; Europe wants the deep thought, the deep word. In Europe even ordinary labourers think, want to know everything. They are not satisfied to know things halfway, but want to delve deeply into them. The difference lies here. But there is a fatal limitation to the power and thought of Europe. When she enters the field of spirituality, her thought-power stops working. There Europe sees everything as a riddle, nebulous metaphysics, yogic hallucination — “It rubs its eyes as in smoke and can see nothing clearly.” But now in Europe not a little effort is being made to surmount even this limitation. Thanks to our forefathers, we have the spiritual sense, and whoever has this sense has within his reach such knowledge, such power, as with one breath could blow all the immense strength of Europe away like a blade of grass. But power is needed to get this power. We, however, are not worshippers of power; we are worshippers of the easy way. But one cannot obtain power by the easy way. Our forefathers swam in a vast sea of thought and gained a vast knowledge; they established a vast civilisation. But as they went forward on their path they were overcome by exhaustion and weariness. The force of their thought decreased, and along with it decreased the force of their creative power. Our civilisation has become a stagnant backwater, our religion a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of intoxication. So long as this state of things lasts, any permanent resurgence of India is impossible.

It is in Bengal that this weakness has gone to the extreme. The Bengali has quickness of intellect, a capacity for feeling, intuition. In all these qualities he is the foremost in India. Each of these qualities is necessary, but they are not in themselves sufficient. If there were added to them depth of thought, manly force, heroic audacity, proficiency and delight in prolonged labour, the Bengali would become the leader not only of India, but of the world. But the Bengali does not want this; he wants to pick up things the easy way — knowledge without thought, results without labour, spiritual perfection after an easy discipline. He relies on emotional excitement, but excessive emotion devoid of knowledge is the very symptom of the disease. What has the Bengali been doing from the time of Chaitanya onwards, from long before that, in fact?

 

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Catching hold of some easy superficial aspect of spiritual truth and dancing about for a few days on waves of emotion; afterwards there is exhaustion, inertia. And at home, the gradual decline of Bengal, the ebbing away of her life-force. In the end, what has the Bengali come to in his own province? He has nothing to eat and no clothes to wear, there is wailing on every side. His wealth, his business and trade, even his agriculture begin to pass slowly into the hands of outsiders. We have abandoned the yoga of divine power and so the divine power has abandoned us. We practise the yoga of love, but where there is no knowledge or power, love does not stay. Narrowness and littleness come in. In a narrow and small mind, life and heart, love finds no room. Where is there love in Bengal? Nowhere else even in this division-ridden India is there so much quarrelling, strained relations, jealousy, hatred and factionalism as in Bengal.

In the noble heroic age of the Aryan people there was not so much shouting and gesticulation, but the endeavour they set in motion lasted many centuries. The Bengali’s endeavour lasts for a day or two. You say what is needed is emotional excitement, to fill the country with enthusiasm. We did all that in the political field during the Swadeshi period; everything we did has fallen in the dust. Will there be a more auspicious outcome in the spiritual field? I don’t say there has been no result. There has been; every movement produces some result. But it is mostly in an increase of possibilities. This is not the right way to steadily actualise the thing. Therefore I do not wish to make emotional excitement, feeling and mental enthusiasm the base any longer. I want to make a vast and strong equality the foundation of my yoga; in all the activities of the being, which will be based on that equality, I want a complete, firm and unshakable power; over that ocean of power I want the radiation of the sun of Knowledge and in that luminous vastness an established ecstasy of infinite love and bliss and oneness. I do not want tens of thousands of disciples. It will be enough if I can get as instruments of God one hundred complete men free from petty egoism. I have no confidence in guruhood of the usual type. I do not want to be a guru. What I want is for someone, awakened by my touch or by that of another, to manifest from within his sleeping divinity and to realise the divine life. Such men will uplift this country.

 

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Do not think from reading this lecture that I despair of the future of Bengal. I too hope for what they are saying — that this time a great light will manifest in Bengal. But I have tried to show the other side of the shield, where the defects, failings and deficiencies lie. If these remain, that light will not be great, nor will it endure. The saints and great men you have written about appear to me rather dubious. Somehow I do not find in them what I am looking for. Dayananda6 has all sorts of wonderful powers. Illiterate disciples of his do remarkable automatic writing. All right, but this is only a psychic faculty. What I want to know about is the real thing in them and how far it has progressed. Then there is another — he stirs a person to his depths just by touching him. Very well, but what does that thrill lead to? Does the person become by this touch the kind of man who can stand like a pillar of the new age, the divine Golden Age? This is the question. I see you have your doubts about this. I have mine too.

I laughed when I read the prophecies of those saints and holy-men — but not a laugh of scorn or disbelief. I do not know about the distant future. The light God sometimes gives me falls one step ahead of me; I move forward in that light. But I wonder what these people need me for. Where is my place in their great assembly? I am afraid they would be disappointed to see me. And as for me, would I not be a fish out of the water? I am not an ascetic, not a saint, not a holy-man — not even a religious man. I have no religion, no code of conduct, no morality. Deeply engrossed in the worldly life, I enjoy luxury, eat meat, drink wine, use obscene language, do whatever I please — a Tantrik of the left-hand path. Among all these great men and incarnations of God am I a great man or an incarnation? If they saw me they might think I was the incarnation of the Iron Age, or of the titanic and demoniac form of the goddess Kali — what the Christians call the Antichrist. I see a misconception about me has been spread. If people get disappointed, it is not my fault.

The meaning of this extraordinarily long letter is that I too am tying up my bundle. But I believe this bundle is like the net of Saint Peter, teeming with the catch of the Infinite. I am not going to open the bundle just now. If it is opened too soon, the catch may escape.

 

6 A yogi of eastern Bengal, alive when this letter was written. Not to be confused with Swami Dayananda of the Arya Samaj.

 

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Nor am I going back to Bengal just now — not because Bengal is not ready, but because I am not ready. If the unripe goes amid the unripe, what can he accomplish?

Your Sejdada7

P.S. Nolini writes that you are coming not at the end of April, but in May. Upen8 also wrote about coming. What about that? Is he staying with you or elsewhere? Mukundilal has sent me a letter to be redirected to Sarojini.9 But I don’t know where Sarojini is, so I am sending it to you. Please forward it.

I have received a letter from Motilal. I gather from it and from some other circumstances that the shadow of a misunderstanding has fallen between him and Saurin.10 This may develop into mutual dislike. It is most improper that such a thing should happen among ourselves. I shall write to Motilal about this. Tell Saurin to be careful not to give the least occasion for the opening of such a breach or rift. Somebody told Motilal that Saurin has been telling people (or giving them the impression) that Aurobindo Ghose has nothing to do with Prabartak. Saurin certainly never said anything like this, for Prabartak is our paper. Whether I write for it in my own hand or not, God through me is giving the force that enables Motilal to write. From the spiritual point of view, the writing is mine; Motilal just adds the colour of his mind. Probably what Saurin said is that Aurobindo Ghose himself does not write Prabartak’s articles. But it is not necessary to say even that. It may create a wrong impression just opposite the truth in people’s minds. I have to some extent kept it a secret who writes or does not write for Prabartak. Prabartak (“The Initiated”) itself writes Prabartak. The Power itself is the writer; it is not the creation of any particular individual. This is the truth of the matter. Devajanma11 and other publications with articles by Nolini and Moni have come out in book form and there too no names have been given. It is the same principle. Let it be like that until further order.

 

7 Elder brother.

        8 Upendranath Bannerjee. Like Barin. he was sentenced to transportation for life for his part in the Alipur Bomb Conspiracy. In 1919 or 1920 both men were granted amnesty.

        9 Sri Aurobindo’s sister.

        10 A cousin of Sri Aurobindo’s wife; he was staying with Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry. but at the time of this letter was in Bengal.

        11 A collection of essays.

Feast and Famine: India is growing, but Indians are still starving by Siddhartha Deb

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Feast and Famine: India Is Growing, But Indians Are Still Starving
by Siddhartha Deb

From: The Boston Review

In the summer of 2009, New Delhi’s Lalit hotel, a 1980s monstrosity that had recently been remodeled, hosted the “Second Food Technology Summit,” sponsored by the Ministry of Food Processing and the Confederation of Indian Industries, a powerful lobbying group. Experts and government officials sat on stage, taking questions from the audience, which included the chairman of the Indian Food Processor’s Association as well as representatives from Coca-Cola.

The questions were largely rhetorical, lamenting the obstacles to the modernization of India’s food markets. “No one cares about the sell-by dates of bread,” one man commented. “What happens when the bread gets old in the village stalls? They fry it in oil and sell it as bread pakora instead.” In the 600,000 villages and towns in non-metropolitan India, I learned, none of the teeming hundreds of millions of residents cared about the mechanized processes and international standards of hygiene that would allow India to join the industrialized nations in their eating habits.

Perhaps that is because those hundreds of millions have more fundamental concerns when it comes to food. The enthusiasm for expiration dates at the Summit must seem peculiar to the poor in a country where 43 percent of children under the age of five are malnourished. In sub-Saharan Africa, the figure is 28 percent; it’s 7 percent in China, to which India is so often compared. The Indian government’s own data show that 800 million Indians live on about twenty rupees (about $0.50) a day. Half of those are farmers who produce food that they, for the most part, cannot afford to eat thanks to the demands of speculators and affluent urban consumers. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), wheat prices reached a record high in February, and the cost of rice—which accounts for 30 percent of the typical Indian diet—hovers at around 22 rupees per kilogram even in Patna and Chennai, capitals of major rice-producing states. That’s about twice the average cost from 2000 until the middle of 2007, when prices began to rise sharply. The average Indian consumes 73 kilograms of rice per year, which means that farmers, assuming they eat at least as much rice as their non-farming countrymen, are now spending some 20 percent of their income on rice alone.

Yet dramatically rising prices and the malnutrition crisis were far from the minds of the conference-goers enjoying their luxury hotel in the heart of the New Delhi business district. Since the late ’90s, government food policy has promoted breakneck modernization, withdrawing support for local agriculture even while attempting to bring the Indian people into a more globalized food market as consumers and producers. This has involved the entire spectrum of food. Government-operated agricultural institutes emphasize patented, genetically modified crops produced by behemoths such as Monsanto and support attempts by Walmart and its Indian counterparts to take over the retail and wholesale systems. These changes have been welcomed by the 200 million members of the upper and middle classes, largely concentrated in the metropolises.


A family of farmers plows the land in West Midnapore, West Bengal.

©2007 Sudipto Das, courtesy of Photoshare.

…..

For the officials at the conference, it was a matter of faith that soon the majority of Indians would join in that welcome. India’s embrace of a “free market” in the early ’90s, its rise as an economic power, the presence of an outsourcing industry closely connected to multinational corporations in the West, and the growth of a frenetically consumerist lifestyle among the beneficiaries, seem to have led to the notion that, after long decades of Gandhian fasting, the country has woken up to a perpetual feast. The colorful crowds at the new malls, eating at local food carts, global chains such as McDonald’s, and gourmet restaurants reinforce this impression.
Until recently, the new eating habits were noted mostly with approval in the West. In 2008, however, they began to come under criticism amid the worldwide rise in food prices. Many observers have pointed to the use of agricultural land for biofuels and the growing demand for meat and dairy products as principal causes of spiking prices. Both trends apply in India, but the government’s free-market modernization scheme has exacerbated the problem further by encouraging the planting of animal feed in a country that was already struggling with the basics. Contrary to widespread stereotypes, Indians are not all vegetarians, but historically, they’ve eaten less meat than they do today. Whereas India produced just 121,000 tons of chicken meat in 1971, it produced 1.9 million tons in 2005.

A few days after the Summit, I spoke with Vijay Sardana, a food-industry consultant and poultry expert who had been in attendance. At the Lalit, Sardana seemed a symbol of India’s food markets on the move. He took calls constantly on his Blackberry or made small talk around the generously laden buffet tables. But when I spoke to him at his modest apartment in East Delhi, he told a story I didn’t hear at the Summit.

“It’s not just ignorance at the farmer level,” he said. India’s food problems included corporate lobbying, commodity trading (“all speculation,” he claimed), and government policies that were removed from the rural reality. Officials at the Summit want India to be the “food factory for the world,” but Sardana was concerned that the country may not even be able to feed itself.

• • •

The agricultural town of Armoor, in the Southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, feels like a forgotten settlement, no more than a cluster of mostly ramshackle houses and shops surrounded by a sea of rice and maize. In the summer of 2008, a riot broke out there. Around ten thousand farmers went on a rampage, setting ablaze three government jeeps and the two largest mansions in the town.
A few weeks later, the burnt carcasses of the jeeps were still visible as I walked around with a man named Devaram, who worked for a leftist party that had been instrumental in organizing the farmers. We stopped to take a look at the gutted mansions. In spite of the blackened walls and gaping door frames, the structures were imposing, standing tall amid the stunted shacks and scrubland.
India’s poor spend 20 percent of their income on rice alone.

The farmers around Armoor, Devaram said, had become heavily dependent on agricultural middlemen known as seed dealers, who buy produce from the farmers and sell it to buyers in other parts of India. The seed dealers are highly influential in determining which crops farmers grow. They anticipate demand, passing on their predictions to the farmers in the prices offered for particular crops. In the past the government offered minimum prices for staple food grains such as rice or wheat, crops that require a lot of water and are not entirely suited to the region. But the free-market approach of the ’90s led to a decrease in government support—from 1.8 percent of the national budget in 1993 to 1.3 percent ten years later—and greater uncertainty. The dealers had replaced most of the agricultural functions carried out by government agencies, giving out seeds, fertilizers, and even extremely high-interest cash loans to farmers as advances against payment for the final produce.
A few months before the riot, around 25,000 farmers in the villages surrounding Armoor had chosen to grow red sorghum for Mahipal Reddy, the biggest of the seed dealers in the area. But when the farmers finished harvesting, Reddy refused to take delivery or to pay them. The farmers found themselves without the money to buy the seeds they needed for the autumn planting season, the most important one of the year. They demonstrated outside the office of the district collector, the most senior government official in the area, and went on hunger strikes. But their agitation dragged on without any discernible response, and one June morning they converged in Armoor for a demonstration that soon became a rampage. The mansions they burned belonged to Reddy and another seed dealer.

Farmers work in a field in East Godavari District, India. / ©2007 Aravind Kumar, courtesy of Photoshare.

…..

When I asked Gopeti Rajeshwar, one of the farmers who had taken part in the riots, why he’d chosen to grow red sorghum, he replied that he had been offered a high price for it. Besides, it was easy to grow and needed less water than other commercial crops such as rice and maize. But his decision was only one small link in a chain that included the speculation of the seed dealers, the vagaries of the monsoons, the absence of government support, and the falling reserves of groundwater that he, like most farmers, exploited desperately through expensive bore wells. Three farmers had killed themselves the previous year in Rajeshwar’s village after running into debt from sinking the wells. They were part of the growing national trend of farmer suicides, with nearly 200,000 farmers killing themselves from 1997 to 2008, in the very years that the Indian economy was expanding. If Rajeshwar had stayed out of debt so far, it was thanks to his father’s two decades working in the Middle East and his own two-year stint as a construction worker in Dubai.
It was hard to meet the seed dealer at the center of the riot, but when I finally spoke to Reddy, he blamed the fiasco on rival dealers. He had offered the farmers a high price for red sorghum, he said, because there had been great demand for it in Northern and Eastern India and in Pakistan. But dealers who had formed a rival “syndicate” bought some red sorghum on the sly and sold it at a massive loss to Reddy’s buyers in an attempt to put him out of business. They nearly succeeded. The bank that agreed to finance Reddy for his red sorghum purchase backed out when it heard of the falling prices, which in turn meant that Reddy was unable to pay the farmers. The same syndicate, he said, had sent thugs to murder him and also instigated the farmers to ransack his house in Armoor.
I asked Reddy what red sorghum was, if it was something people ate. “No, no,” his hangers-on cried out. Reddy smiled. “It’s for cattle, and for chicken,” he said. “It makes them fat, makes them produce more milk, more eggs, more meat, so that people in the cities can eat them and get bigger.”

• • •

One might assume that the misfortune of the poor in the countryside would be the salvation of urban butchers, but they aren’t necessarily feeling enriched by the increased demand for meat and dairy among India’s upper classes.
The three Delhi butchers I met on a sweltering August day in 2009 were all burly men, trying to cover up their social awkwardness as they waved a folder full of documents at me. For over a century, the center of slaughtering operations in Delhi has been the Idgah, located in the old, walled part of the city. The butchers took me on a tour of the neighborhood, leading me through alleyways that ran past small stalls holding live animals, the ground beneath our feet thick with grain and droppings. The slaughterhouse was a large open shed with raised platforms on all sides. The slaughtering and skinning was done by hand, and things seemed dirty and disorganized. But it was also, as the butchers pointed out, a place that offered employment to nearly 2,000 people. Few animal parts were wasted, they said, pointing at the vendors standing outside the Idgah. They were selling goat heads and feet at twenty rupees per kilo to people who were too poor to buy meat but would use the animal parts to make stew.

‘No one cares about the sell-by dates of bread,’ a food technology summit attendee complained. The government decided to close the Idgah in 2005, and it was finally shut down a few months after my visit last year, the land earmarked for a shopping mall. All large-scale butchering was moved to a mechanized slaughterhouse in Ghazipur, across the Yamuna river. The butchers took me to see the new facility, sneaking me past the security guards employed by the company that held the operating lease. The assembly lines full of German-made equipment looked far cleaner and more efficient than what I had seen at the Idgah. In place of the chaos of the Idgah, the atmosphere at the Ghazipur slaughterhouse was one of regimentation and precision. The electric guns were, however, silent. The few workers hanging about were eager to show me around and express their discontent at suddenly having to make a twenty-kilometer commute every day. They were young, carrying cell phones and sporting stylish haircuts, but they were following a family occupation and felt bewildered at the changes enforced upon them. Even though the mechanized line was faster than the manual slaughtering they had done at the Idgah, they made less money now because animal suppliers were balking at the higher fees charged by the company running the place.

I walked out of the slaughterhouse with my guides to take a look at the surrounding neighborhood. The modern, hygienic slaughterhouse sat next to the largest landfill in the Delhi metropolitan area. There was a low range of trash being turned over with infinitesimal patience by ragpickers, mostly children. The sky above was crowded with kites and crows wheeling in urgent circles, drawn there by the landfill, the slaughterhouse, and the wholesale poultry market next door. A canal ran nearby, filled with black slush the consistency of Turkish coffee. It was crowded with feral dogs trying to stay out of the August heat.
The setting is a perfect metaphor for India’s approach to feeding itself as it grows and becomes more embedded in the global economy. Some will enjoy the fruits of that growth, and no doubt there are more Indians living lives of comfort than ever before. But a gleaming new slaughterhouse is of little benefit to those still waiting for their slice of prosperity. Under the banners of modernization and free-market economics, the better off are rigging a system that caters to their desires, while some of the world’s most desperate people are left to pick at the refuse accumulated at the edges of luxury. Many countries have high rates of inequality, but prioritizing, as a matter of official policy, high-quality meat for the rich in a nation where half of children are underweight seems especially perverse.

A farmer in Warangal District, Andhra Pradesh, South India. / Jankie, Flickr (cc).

The most comprehensive effort to address the failures of India’s food policy is the campaign to pass a right-to-food law in Parliament. The stark inequality in India when it comes to food has already resulted in a mid-day meal scheme targeted at poor, school-going children. But the impact of the subsidized meals, instituted at a national level since 1995, is hard to measure. Evidence suggests that the program has been successful in certain parts of the country, but the quality is sometimes poor, leading to outbreaks of food poisoning. Corrupt businessmen and officials siphon funds from the program, and prices are now rising too fast for the government to keep up.

The right-to-food movement asks not only that the government provide food to especially vulnerable groups such as children and pregnant women but also emphasizes the country’s larger policy, noting that “sufficient availability of food” for the hungry “requires that land and water must never be forcibly diverted away from food production for cash crops or industrial use.” The demands made by the movement are egalitarian, and because the movement is a loose coalition of organizations and individuals spread throughout the country, it seems inherently democratic.

Jean Dreze, a Belgian economist who has been in India since 1979, has been influential in framing the proposed law. He coauthored a number of books on hunger with the Harvard economist Amartya Sen and became an Indian citizen in 2002. I asked him what those pushing for the law hoped to achieve, since it was unlikely that a marginalized, impoverished majority could sue the government for not giving them food.

A right to food would bring a check to the deeply hierarchical market-driven economy. “The idea is not that everyone will rush to court, although that is an ultimate possibility,” Dreze explained. “The law would have an in-built mechanism for accountability, and we’ve seen that the government tends to become far more responsive when it can be held accountable in courts for something.” Dreze, who comes across as Gandhian in many ways, and the members of the right-to-food movement see food as part of a bigger question of what democracy might mean in India. In our conversation, Dreze expressed impatience with the Malthusian idea, floated in some Western circles after the global price rise in 2008, that India’s growing population was to blame for putting pressure on limited food resources. He noted that population growth was decelerating in many parts of the country in 2008. If people had more money and work, they could buy more food, he said, citing Sen’s work on hunger in British India, which showed that famines (the worst of which killed about 4 million people in Bengal) were a result of inadequate access to food, not inadequate supply.

“If the population needs to be well nourished, we do need to produce more food,” Dreze said. “But the present system is unsustainable and inequitable.” He argued that corporate interests manipulate the government framing the policies. “In child-nutrition programs,” he said, referring to the mid-day meal schemes, “the corporations have lobbies to push packaged food. They had pre-formatted letters sent to various members of Parliament asking them to sign these and send them on to the ministry overseeing the program. In some instances, they tried to have cooked meals replaced by packaged biscuits,” which have less nutritional value.
The government’s public-distribution system, which had provided subsidized food grains and basic cooking ingredients to everyone, has also run aground since the ’90s. The old system was inefficient and subject to corruption, but the current eviscerated version reaches only a fraction of the people most in need.

For Dreze and the other activists demanding a right to food, having enough to eat is a part of the right to life. In providing food for children, mothers, and pregnant women as well as for the rural and urban poor, the law would make India a more equitable country, bringing some kind of check to the deeply hierarchical market-driven economy that has taken hold. When I spoke to Dreze, he had seemed guardedly hopeful about the prospects for a right-to-food law. More than eighteen months later, however, the proposal in Parliament is a diluted version of the early draft, without either the accountability on the part of the government or the breadth of coverage activists hoped for.

When I visited India last December, food prices were rising once again. Onions, a staple in Indian cooking, had more than doubled in price, and the government had to resort to emergency imports from Pakistan, obtained in part with threats to withhold its own tomato exports. But it isn’t clear if there is any desire on the part of the government to address prices at a systemic level. There has been talk that the government will work with American companies on genetically modified crops to put an end to future shortfalls, which would do little to alter the distorted system in place.
There may be meat and dairy for the privileged at the moment. For the majority, though, there is not much in the way of affordable food. Just the occasional biscuit.

Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.