Public lectures, Calcutta

Two important public lectures are coming up in Calcutta.

Professor Jan Breman, of the Centre for Asian Studies, Amsterdam University, speaks on:

Labour and Globalisation

Date: 9 September 2009
Time: 5.30pm
Venue: Prabha-Batakrishna Pathagar, Sashipada Bandyopadhyay Resource Center (SBRC), 278 Jodhpur Park, Calcutta 68.

Organised by Nagarik Mancha (Citizens' Forum).


Professor David Ludden, Department of History, New York University, speaks on:

Spatial Reorganisation of North Eastern Parts of British India, 1905 to the Present

Date: 12 September 2009
Time: 4 pm
Venue: Academy of Fine Arts, 2 Cathedral Road, Calcutta 71

Organised by Calcutta Research Group.

China lecture

Public lectures can inform, enlighten and inspire citizens, and thus keep alive the intellect and conscience of the city so that it can grow and renew itself. Over the last 20 years, I have attended a number of public lectures at the Netaji Centre in Calcutta. Tony Benn, Ayesha Jalal, Yasin Malik, Pranab Bardhan, Amartya Sen have been among the speakers.

I attended the Sisir Kumar Bose Lecture, 2008, in Calcutta on 11 January 2008, by Dr Lin Chun of the London School of Economics. The lecture was on "China’s Post-Mao Economic Reforms: A Critical Assessment”.

I found Lin Chun's lecture most illuminating and exhaustive, and was struck by her quiet and modest demeanour, which evidently concealed a sharp mind and a big heart.

A published version of her lecture is accessible here.

Image: From Deng Xiaoping: Portrait of a Chinese Statesman by David L. Shambaugh (Editor), Clarendon Press, 1995.

Identity: Choice & Inheritance

The Idea of Justice, a new book by Prof Amartya Sen, economist and prolific writer, has recently been published.

Read the review of the book in The Economist.

I had attended the Netaji Oration by Prof Amartya Sen in Calcutta, on 27 December 2007, where he spoke on "Is Nationalism a Curse or a Boon?". The full-text version of the lecture is available in The Oracle, journal of the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta. (See pages 16-25 of the pdf version of the journal here).

I remember I had written a response to Prof Sen's lecture. That is reproduced below.

...

Dear Prof Sen

I am writing to you after hearing your talk at Netaji Bhavan, Calcutta, yesterday on "Nationalism".

As a student and teacher of economics from Calcutta, it was a privilege to hear you speak.

I have been working among squatters and slum-dwellers in Calcutta since 1984. In 1996, while working as a consultant on a govt of West Bengal planning project, I came upon infant mortality figures from Howrah Municipal Corporation. This showed a significant infant mortality rate differential between Hindus and Muslims. Eventually that led to my working in Priya Manna Basti, a century-old jute workers slum in the Shibpur area of Howrah. This is today home to over 40,000 people, mainly Urdu-speakin Muslims.

That work continues, in an attempt to build grassroots youth capabilities and leadership for slum community development. The work has been akin to a live laboratory, on poverty in the metropolitan Calcutta Muslim slum context. Through the work it was possible to understand that the Hindu-Muslim infant mortality rate differential was a kind of proxy indicator of slum - non-slum differentials in environmental health risks, besides indicating the existence of deep-rooted institutional barriers to securing adequate municipal services in Muslim slums. It is by looking at the disaggregated health statistics of cities that one begins to understand the nature of inequalities and inequities characterising the city, and their impact on the poor. And it is by trying to unearth the causes of differentials that one comes face to face with the meaning, forms and manifestations of prejudice.

Working with the poorest section in the slum, it was also possible to discern the crippling large-scale and long-term impact of the Urdu-medium education system in metropolitan Calcutta. One consequence of this is the phenomenon of "reverse discrimination" in schooling, where boys drop out of school after a meagre amount of schooling and begin working, while girls continue in and often finish school.

I mention all this by way of context, to touch upon the idea that nationalism can also gloss over real differences in power among different religious communities, which persist and make nationalism something devoid of any substantive meaning or even emotive power. With acute segregation of communities and the lack of substantive intercourse between them, the conditions in which the have-nots live is not part of "mainstream" consciousness. And in such a context, raising the issue of these real and persistent differences is seen as "anti-national" or even "communal", depraved and sick, especially in today's "emergent India" situation.

In your talk you spoke about chosen identity in contrast to inherited identity. That struck a very personal chord, since I have long been troubled by the inappropriateness of upholding something that happens to coincide with an identity inherited merely by chance. Professing something which is based on conscious choice always seemed stronger to me. Nationalism cannot be at the cost of anything else, it must be without prejudice to any other identification. For otherwise, it would be devoid of meaning for one possessing that identity. If one had inherited that identity by chance, then such a nationalism would have been something alien.

You must be aware of the work on "Allophilia" by your Harvard colleague Prof Todd Pittinsky. He looks at warm, exuberant feelings towards other people -national, religious, racial or social. That is something coming out of conscious choice, rather than inherited identity. One can think of the feelings towards India, the land of the Buddha, among Buddhists from Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, Japan etc. The feeling about Sri Lanka, the land of the Buddhist canon, among followers of Buddha's teachings. The feelings towards India and West Bengal among a section of people in Bangladesh. The feelings towards the people of Vietnam among people in Calcutta and West Bengal during the Vietnam war.

Perhaps this issue of "Choice & Inheritance" could be the subject of your forthcoming thinking and writing!

Here it would be germane to mention the mystic tradition. In India we have many examples like Kabir, whose own identity (religious) was ambiguous, he was non-denominational as well as multi-denominational. Rather than hold on to one identity inherited by chance, mystics talk of finding one's true identity, unobscured by the veil of illusion cast by the false notion of "self". One must choose one's true inheritance, as a human.

As someone close in so many ways to Rabindranath Tagore, you would be familiar with the name of Evelyn Underhill (with whom Tagore translated Kabir's poems), and her classic work Mysticism. In this 800th anniversary year of the great Persian mystic and poet, Jalaluddin Rumi, I look forward to reading your thinking drawing upon the mystic tradition, and bringing this to the fold of the issues and subjects of your concern.

With my best wishes and respectful regards,

Yours sincerely

Year

Its been quite a year.

In January, I travelled to Pune and then Mumbai, for public policy and academic conferences, and then to Delhi, for a business meeting.

In February I visited my son Rishiraj at the Rishi Valley School, in south India, together with my older son Rituraj.

I was unwell and convalescing during February-April. Nonetheless, I managed to complete a writing assignment, on urban protest in Calcutta. I also completed the translation into English of my colleague Amina's articles on the theme "See the City from Here", about slums.

In May, I was in the capital again, to join a friend in his business development. Having decided that I should leave Calcutta and begin a new livelihood, I corresponded with some schools. So I visited the Sahyadri School, near Pune. Shortly after that I visited the Sholai School, near Kodaikanal, in south India. Sholai had an immense impact on me. A school in a forest in a mountain. A haven of peace and solace, far away from the ugly city. The school was started about 20 years ago by an Englishman, Brian Jenkins. He was keen that I join and help to start a teacher training college there, among other things.

In June, on the invitation of a friend, I joined a rural governance study in the northern districts of West Bengal. That was indeed a strenuous and hectic affair. But also one that was very educative, rewarding and reinvigorating, as it afforded a vision of a new Bengal in the making in the grassroots.

I had to submit the manuscript of my translated stories of the Bengali writer Subimal Misra. I managed to extract the time to complete it in great haste and sent that off in early July.

Shortly after that, I travelled to Assisi in Italy. I was invited to join a week-long international children's camp there, organised by two Italian foundations, on the theme of 'Time of Rights'. I accompanied two children from our Talimi Haq School in Howrah. 28 children from India, Italy and Peru participated in the campus, together with teachers and workshop animators. That was like a continuing epiphany. I was in Ancona and Roma briefly before returning to Calcutta.

A few days latter I went to London. I stayed at the International Students House, at Regents Park, where I had lived as a student during 1982-84. I tramped through my old and favourite haunts. I spent a long time, and a small fortune, in bookshops, indulging my penchant for outstanding specimens of graphic literature, to enlarge the mental horizons of my sons.

I attended my friend Mark's wedding, at the Kings College chapel in Cambridge. I was in Cambridge again after 25 years. How I had wanted nothing more than to be immersed lifelong in study in Cambridge! But that was not to be. But now I sang at the chapel as part of Mark's wedding service. The acoustics in the chapel - quite awesome indeed. Yes, I was an a capella singer alright.

In London, I realised that this was the city I could truly and zestfully call my own, and profess love for. After all, it was where I was born again, where I came to light, where I became a man. And in London, this truly international city, I also became aware, for the first time, of the peculiar circumstance of my life, me, an Indian, in faraway Calcutta, being defined so profoundly by the English language.

I then went to Hannover, in Germany, to initiate a business collaboration with a small German electronics company. They have developed tools and technologies for early child learning and for language learning. I intend to bring that to India. I made a close new friendship, with Ralph, the CEO of the company. A powerful business opportunity, a new chapter in my life, a means for enormous wealth creation. Which would enable public good, with the Talimi Haq School as a small sapling to help grow an enormous Right to Education movement for the country's disprivileged children.

Meanwhile, in the small manufacturing enterprise which I have been managing on behalf of my family, we are at a challenging stage. Much to be done, but through that there is the strong potential of becoming a leading manufacturer in the world in the tiny niche we operate in.

Its still only August. I have some more important trips and journeys to make in the coming months. So far, and especially since June, I have been made, unmade and remade during and through the travels, leaving me feeling like a whirling dervish. Patterns and circles, cycles and symmetries, and synchronicities... life clad in epic raiment, humbling one to silent labour.