11-09-2006, 01:26 AM
http://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2004_03_28_archive.html
Books Fall Apart (E.M. Forster's biography, now in tatters)
I've been working on a chapter on E.M. Forster's attitude to Indian communalism... So earlier this week I reread A Passage to India, and today I was reading my old copy of P.N. Furbank's E.M. Forster: A Life (well-used already when I bought it).
I was happily reading away at Yale -- when the book fell totally apart! First the spine cracked, then the pages separated from the cover, and the pages of the book began to come apart in chunks. Reading from now is like eating crumb cake without a napkin... .
But at least I found some good stuff. The long and short of it is, Forster preferred Indian Muslims to Hindus. He saw Muslims as having the basic attributes of civilized social order, while Hindus were a confused muddle. So you have letters like the following one to his aunt (6 November 1921), from his second trip to India:
The more I know [about Hindus] the less I understand. With the Mohammedans it is different. When after the nightmare of Gokul Ashtami [a Hindu festival], I stood on the minaret of the Taj in Agra, and heard the evening cal to prayer from the adjacent mosque, I knew at all events where I stood and what I heard; it was a land that was not merely atmosphere but had definite outlines and horizons. So with the Mohammedan friends of Masood [Forster's Oxford friend, an aristocrat from Hyderabad] whom I am meeting now. They may not be as subtle or as suggestive as the Hindus, but I can follow what they are saying.
<b>
Did Forster have some kind of racial identification with Muslims, as fellow conquerors of India? I tend to think not. Actually he recognized and respected his distance from the Muslims he knew, and from Islam in general. I think, in contrast to Hinduism and Buddhism, which represented the muddled horizon of Orientalism for Forster, he feels more aesthetically and philosophically engaged by what he wants to identify as an "Islamic world-view." For Forster, Muslims represent architecture and order, while Hindus represent earth, mud, and muddle.</b>
- posted by Amardeep @ 3:05 PM
A Mini-Lecture on Liberalization in India and Cultural Hybridity
For the most part, before the 1990s the Indian view of the west was rather negative. If you ended up going there, life would be lonely. You would be bereft of family (family is very important in Indian culture), and western morals were thought to be very corrupting. If you look at Hindi films from the 1960s, whenever an Indian goes abroad he (it was usually he) would find himself seduced by loose western women and ruined by booze... It was an either/or proposition: you were either Indian and traditional, or you were westernized and modern. All that has changed now. After 1990, the Indian central government started a policy of economic liberalization that allowed more foreign-made products to enter the Indian marketplace. With the advent of satellite television in the mid 1990s, the average person's exposure to things outside India changed overnight.
A whole bunch of changes have happened at once. The liberalization of the media, along with the (more recent) advent of the internet as well as cheap cellular phones with cheap international calling means that it's possible for many Indians to stay directly in touch with what is happening outside of India. So instead of a huge gulf dividing east and west, the west is seen as someplace that is more or less immediately accessible. Also, the old idea of âeither/orâ is finished â what is much more prevalent now is the image of hybridity â you can have India and America at the same time. You see this in the popular music, which is often quite westernized (without giving up a distinctly Indian flavor), as well as in literature, and the movies.
Unlike in the conventional model, the pattern of borrowing in hybridity can go both ways. Indeed, one could speak of a kind of "economy of cultural influences," which has liberalized alongside the "real" economies of nation-states. The U.S. would be a net exporter in such an economy, but this is not necessarily permanent... At any rate, Indian cultural artifacts borrow from the U.S., while America borrows back. With Hindi songs that are sampled by rap producers, for instance, you often find that after a couple of months, the sampled song is remixed and re-Indianized by Indian producers! An example of this is Jyoti's âThora Resham Lagta Hai,â which was an Indian remix of the U.S. Hit by Truth Hurts, âAddictive,â which in turn sampled an old Lata Mangeshkar track.
In the recent outsourcing boom, which has created many high tech jobs in India, many Indians see the full fruition of an east-west merger fueled by technology (it is only possible because of high speed internet connections â that connect people 15,000 miles apart in real time), and of course economic globalization.
This trend has been good for India in many ways. Besides generating high-paying jobs, it has had the advantage of keeping a lot of India's high tech talent at home. Until recently, the best fate for a graduate of India's prestigious IIT colleges was a job in San Jose, California. Now it is quite possible to go to Bangalore and have access to exactly the same kinds of opportunities. This reduces the âbrain drain,â which hampered India's development so much in the 1970s and 80s.
Many of these issues are circulating in the recent Hindi film Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow Might Happen), which came out in 2003. The film was entirely shot on location in New York, and features dozens of shots of the post 9/11 New York skyline, as well as several marqee street locations â like Times Square, Union Square, and Astor Place. It's part of a new trend of high-budget, high-production value films (very modern style), but in some ways it also sticks to some of the conventional tendencies of Hindi cinema (including serious melodrama).
The tone of the movie is extremely upbeat about life for Indians living abroad, and manages to do this while also being highly nationalistic (pro-Indian culture). In a way the dominant image of the film is not that Indians adapt to New York, though that is certainly part of what the film is trying to show. But more than that, the film seems to be suggesting that Indians have colonized New York...
[After this I showed the opening of Kal Ho Naa Ho, and then the crazy song/dance sequence âPretty Womanâ]
Books Fall Apart (E.M. Forster's biography, now in tatters)
I've been working on a chapter on E.M. Forster's attitude to Indian communalism... So earlier this week I reread A Passage to India, and today I was reading my old copy of P.N. Furbank's E.M. Forster: A Life (well-used already when I bought it).
I was happily reading away at Yale -- when the book fell totally apart! First the spine cracked, then the pages separated from the cover, and the pages of the book began to come apart in chunks. Reading from now is like eating crumb cake without a napkin... .
But at least I found some good stuff. The long and short of it is, Forster preferred Indian Muslims to Hindus. He saw Muslims as having the basic attributes of civilized social order, while Hindus were a confused muddle. So you have letters like the following one to his aunt (6 November 1921), from his second trip to India:
The more I know [about Hindus] the less I understand. With the Mohammedans it is different. When after the nightmare of Gokul Ashtami [a Hindu festival], I stood on the minaret of the Taj in Agra, and heard the evening cal to prayer from the adjacent mosque, I knew at all events where I stood and what I heard; it was a land that was not merely atmosphere but had definite outlines and horizons. So with the Mohammedan friends of Masood [Forster's Oxford friend, an aristocrat from Hyderabad] whom I am meeting now. They may not be as subtle or as suggestive as the Hindus, but I can follow what they are saying.
<b>
Did Forster have some kind of racial identification with Muslims, as fellow conquerors of India? I tend to think not. Actually he recognized and respected his distance from the Muslims he knew, and from Islam in general. I think, in contrast to Hinduism and Buddhism, which represented the muddled horizon of Orientalism for Forster, he feels more aesthetically and philosophically engaged by what he wants to identify as an "Islamic world-view." For Forster, Muslims represent architecture and order, while Hindus represent earth, mud, and muddle.</b>
- posted by Amardeep @ 3:05 PM
A Mini-Lecture on Liberalization in India and Cultural Hybridity
For the most part, before the 1990s the Indian view of the west was rather negative. If you ended up going there, life would be lonely. You would be bereft of family (family is very important in Indian culture), and western morals were thought to be very corrupting. If you look at Hindi films from the 1960s, whenever an Indian goes abroad he (it was usually he) would find himself seduced by loose western women and ruined by booze... It was an either/or proposition: you were either Indian and traditional, or you were westernized and modern. All that has changed now. After 1990, the Indian central government started a policy of economic liberalization that allowed more foreign-made products to enter the Indian marketplace. With the advent of satellite television in the mid 1990s, the average person's exposure to things outside India changed overnight.
A whole bunch of changes have happened at once. The liberalization of the media, along with the (more recent) advent of the internet as well as cheap cellular phones with cheap international calling means that it's possible for many Indians to stay directly in touch with what is happening outside of India. So instead of a huge gulf dividing east and west, the west is seen as someplace that is more or less immediately accessible. Also, the old idea of âeither/orâ is finished â what is much more prevalent now is the image of hybridity â you can have India and America at the same time. You see this in the popular music, which is often quite westernized (without giving up a distinctly Indian flavor), as well as in literature, and the movies.
Unlike in the conventional model, the pattern of borrowing in hybridity can go both ways. Indeed, one could speak of a kind of "economy of cultural influences," which has liberalized alongside the "real" economies of nation-states. The U.S. would be a net exporter in such an economy, but this is not necessarily permanent... At any rate, Indian cultural artifacts borrow from the U.S., while America borrows back. With Hindi songs that are sampled by rap producers, for instance, you often find that after a couple of months, the sampled song is remixed and re-Indianized by Indian producers! An example of this is Jyoti's âThora Resham Lagta Hai,â which was an Indian remix of the U.S. Hit by Truth Hurts, âAddictive,â which in turn sampled an old Lata Mangeshkar track.
In the recent outsourcing boom, which has created many high tech jobs in India, many Indians see the full fruition of an east-west merger fueled by technology (it is only possible because of high speed internet connections â that connect people 15,000 miles apart in real time), and of course economic globalization.
This trend has been good for India in many ways. Besides generating high-paying jobs, it has had the advantage of keeping a lot of India's high tech talent at home. Until recently, the best fate for a graduate of India's prestigious IIT colleges was a job in San Jose, California. Now it is quite possible to go to Bangalore and have access to exactly the same kinds of opportunities. This reduces the âbrain drain,â which hampered India's development so much in the 1970s and 80s.
Many of these issues are circulating in the recent Hindi film Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow Might Happen), which came out in 2003. The film was entirely shot on location in New York, and features dozens of shots of the post 9/11 New York skyline, as well as several marqee street locations â like Times Square, Union Square, and Astor Place. It's part of a new trend of high-budget, high-production value films (very modern style), but in some ways it also sticks to some of the conventional tendencies of Hindi cinema (including serious melodrama).
The tone of the movie is extremely upbeat about life for Indians living abroad, and manages to do this while also being highly nationalistic (pro-Indian culture). In a way the dominant image of the film is not that Indians adapt to New York, though that is certainly part of what the film is trying to show. But more than that, the film seems to be suggesting that Indians have colonized New York...
[After this I showed the opening of Kal Ho Naa Ho, and then the crazy song/dance sequence âPretty Womanâ]