A Dominant Character - Review

“When JBS Haldane died in 1964, in Bhubaneswar, he was an Indian scientist. He had a passport, but he also had a deep and abiding love for the country’, reads the blurb in this fascinating biography.

Haldane’s move to India was an eventual act in his brisk life. A geneticist and firebrand, Haldane wrote his first scientific papers in the trenches of the First World War. A card-carrying member of the Communist Party, he went to Spain to fight the Fascists during the civil war. Haldane was under heavy suspicion of being a spy for the Soviets; courted trouble and ticked off the establishment repeatedly. All this and more have been put together in this sparkling life story. 

‘A Dominant Character – The Radical Science and Restless Politics of JBS Haldane" by Samanth Subramanian (Simon & Schuster, New Delhi) examines the radical research and writing of scientists and philosophers. Haldane’s immense contribution to genetics and Evolutional biology is legendary. He was the first to calculate the rate at which mutations accumulate in genes, and also predicted in-vitro fertilization.

Author of "Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast" and "This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War", Subramanian is a writer and journalist. His book on Sri Lanka shortlisted for Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize and Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize.

Haldane's contributions to genetics are extraordinary. In tandem with his communist beliefs, he made us think about how science and politics intersect, and how genetics continues to throw up great ethical and political posers. He was a rare breed of scientists — deeply involved in politics and deeply committed to popularizing science and opening up scientific research to the public.

In 1957, Haldane and wife Helen Spurway (his former student and biologist) moved to India permanently and took up a professorship and a readership, respectively, at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Calcutta. Haldane had visited India many times and made a number of friends in the country, including PC Mahalanobis, the director of ISI.

He was keen on researching across a range of topics, including Indian plant and animal life. He also had an abiding interest in Hinduism and its core philosophy. Hailing Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s scientific-socialist vision for India, Haldane viewed the country as “a vast experiment to see how a wise application of science could advance the lives of hundreds of millions of people”. In the backdrop of the destruction of democratic norms by Stalin in the Soviet Union, India “gave him hope” because it was a secular nation that encouraged discussion and debate. All these charming details are part of this 380- page book.

The book delves into Haldane’s communist politics and his many years spent in India, including his association with the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata and the Genetics and Biometry Laboratory in Bhubaneswar.

Scrupulously researched by means of archival material from different sources including Haldane’s own papers, made available to him by the scientist’s grand nieces and nephews, this biography charts the course of Haldane’s tumultuous life. The accounts of his formative years in the book make for interesting reading.

Haldane’s India stint was audacious and unpredictable, as the book says. The bureaucratic mechanism at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata frustrated him and he rebelled against the hierarchies put in place at ISI by PC Mahalanobis. The two friends had a falling out and Haldane quit the ISI in 1961. Subsequently he went on to join the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research at Calcutta, but red-tape stifled him there too. He eventually moved to Bhubaneswar, accepting the invitation of then Odisha chief minister Biju Patnaik to set up a new genetics laboratory. 

The biography maps one of the greatest minds of modern science and dexterously remembers the life and brilliance of Haldane and his many contributions. Subramanian’s book is an outstanding portrayal of Haldane. This hardback is a major contribution to modern intellectual history just as it is perceptive. 

Unlike previous biographers, Subramanian does an admirable job describing Haldane’s life – his daredevilry and love of throwing grenades despite abhorring war, and how his military experiences in Iraq and India shaped his worldview. 

Haldane returned from World War I and plunged into biochemistry, using mathematics to describe how enzymes worked, even writing the first textbook on enzymes. He then turned to evolutionary biology, using mathematics to reconcile it with Mendelian genetics. 

His work on how genes spread, how the peppered moth variant evolved, why harmful mutations like those underlying sickle-cell anemia persisted and in establishing genetic maps for hemophilia and color-blindness remain classics. Subramanian is also an able science communicator, especially since Haldane worked long before we had any idea what an enzyme or a gene was in physical terms. 

Aside from shedding light on Haldane’s contributions to genetics and evolutionary biology—he was the first to calculate the rate at which mutations occur and accumulate in genes—the book illuminates Haldane’s inner world—his towering intellect, his radical vision of a society, his provocative philosophy, and his attempts to wrestle with scientific progress.

 "A Dominant Character" is an enthralling biography about Haldane, whom the philosopher C.P. Snow called the “most learned scientist of his time”. What made Haldane one of the most famous scientists was his writings in science and politics. The book is eminently readable and is an incisive analysis of Haldane’s era when the realms of scientific knowledge were too little. Just as Haldane’s life was full of complexity, this biography is teeming with the varied life of a great scientist.

 

 

 

Unbecoming - A Memoir of Disobedience / Review

 

“After a lifetime of buckling to the demands of her strict Indian parents, Anuradha Bhagwati abandons grad school in the Ivy League to join the Marines—the fiercest, most violent, most masculine branch of the military—determined to prove herself there in ways, she couldn’t before. Yet once training begins, Anuradha’s G.I. Jane fantasy is punctured. As a bisexual woman of color in the military, she faces underestimation at every stage, confronting misogyny, racism, sexual violence, and astonishing injustice perpetrated by those in power; “says the blurb.

“Pushing herself beyond her limits, she also wrestles with what drove her to pursue such punishment in the first place. Once her service concludes in 2004, Anuradha courageously vows to take to task the very leaders and traditions that cast such a dark cloud over her time in the Marines. Her efforts result in historic change, including the lifting of the ban on women from pursuing combat roles in the military,”marks the blurb.

Unbecoming – A Memoir of Disobedience by Anuradha Bhagwati is a rare and indefatigable memoir by a former US Marine Captain. She chronicles her journey — from a dutiful daughter of immigrants to a radical activist affecting historic policy reforms.

New York-based Writer, yoga and meditation teacher, founder of  Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) —  which brought national attention to sexual violence in the military and helped overturn the ban on women in com­bat — Anuradha is a regular media commentator too  on issues related to national security, women’s rights, civil rights, and mental health, and is the recipient of numerous awards.

1975-born Anuradha’s parents, Jagdish Bhagwati and Padma Desai, are renowned economists. While her parents were trying to assimilate in a country where their intellect did not protect them from racism, she grew up in a predominantly white America.

Recounts Anuradha in this three-hundred -and -odd page memoir: “I had always been my parents’ little girl. Their only child, for some reason. I was shy in front of people and terrified of being in groups. I listened to Mom and Dad completely. Because they had a lot to say, I did a lot of listening. Mom met Dad in Boston when she was in graduate school at Harvard and he was teaching at MIT. They were both economists. This all meant nothing to me except that they were always going to the office or on their way to conferences.

“I remember flashes. Mom wore saris and a red powdered bindi on her forehead, and Dad made me a mug of hot chocolate with Hershey’s cocoa powder and milk for breakfast. Sometimes he and I sat together before sunrise in the quiet house while I sipped my cocoa through a plastic straw and he listened to the morning news on a tiny black-and-white television set.”

The memoir is objective: “My father was constantly being told he was brilliant, and he believed it. When we walked through airports on trips to India, random men would stop before him and bow. Dad loved these moments. Mom hated them. But for all of Dad’s fame, he never seemed settled.”

She side-splittingly writes about her father who never made it to the Nobel Prize:  “It is a testament to my family’s strange narcissism that I knew what a Nobel Prize was when I was a toddler. My parents referred to it as ‘The Nobel’, and the consensus was that Dad had been robbed. Every September I witnessed my parents’ tortured theater as they tossed the names of potential winners around the dinner table. Each year when Dad was passed over for one of his colleagues, I would ask him gingerly how he was. He delivered the only line that ever made him feel better. ‘Oh, I’m fine. Even Gandhiji didn’t win a Nobel.’”

Anuradha’s voice as an émigré and her Indian experience makes for wonderful reading. It is audacious: she writes about her own flaws and that of her parents. It is about the inevitable love for one’s parents unlaced by hero worship.

Her mother was a pioneer in her field. Her father quit his job at MIT to support his wife when she got tenure in Columbia University. “My mother had been through so much,” she says. “She was really shamed when she was in India and was in an abusive marriage that was not her fault. So, she came to the US to start a new life. She had been keeping this traumatic incident from me and (trying to) reinvent herself.”

Years later, Anuradha encountered similar systemic sexism in the Marines. It was her mother’s experience that helped her find the courage to support others. “I was in command of 400 troops at one time. It was a lot of responsibility,” she says in the book. “When there was someone who was sexually harassing the women in my unit, it was my moment of reckoning. My mother gave me the courage to stick up for myself and these women.”

The narrator is a lot frank when she says, “Every Indian family seemed to have a story about a handsy Indian uncle or neighbor. Stories about sexual violence were told in whispers if they were told at all. Without any talks about birds and bees, I had no way of knowing the difference between sex, love, and violence. I had to find out on my own.”

Reminisces Anuradha in this enthralling auto-biography about her school days: “At thirteen, Bianca was one year older than me, and very thin, with budding curves around the hips. She wore shoes that adult women wore, with tapered toes and heels. Her jeans fit closely to her legs. I could spot Bianca in a crowd of kids by her bright-red lipstick. It drew out the green in her eyes and the dark brown in her hair. Bianca was some kind of Italian goddess, and I would never look like her.

“Bianca was crying this morning, and our teachers had surrounded her. Mascara was dripping down both of her cheeks. She had a complexion that was beyond white. It was the kind of porcelain I saw in museums, where security guards warned us not to touch anything. A face like Bianca’s inspired great art, and grave concern. The news reached us like the telephone game, from one child’s seat to the next. On her way to school, a strange man attacked Bianca, touched her in some harmful way. Bianca was still crying audibly, surrounded by a ring of adults.”

The memoir is gripping and powerful for precisely two reasons: first, about growing up in America as an Indian; and second, the relationship with her parents. In a deeply conservative household, when she discovered that she was bisexual, her mother threatened to kill herself if she did not end it then.

Unbecoming addresses the proverbial dilemma of confronting traditional expectations as a South Asian daughter. The book is an insightful story about a daughter of immigrants who tries to find her place in the country of immigrants while enduring racism, homophobia, and sexism. It tells the story of how she finally finds the courage to become an activist to “change the landscape of America to make it safer for women and children.”

The memoir is a veritable account of indomitable spirit “grappling with the timely question of what, exactly, America stands for.” It is about one woman who learned to believe in herself in spite of everything. It is the kind of story that will light a fire beneath you, and inspire the next generation of doughty female heroes.

 

Flawed - Review

When the story of a fugitive diamantaire fills the pages of a book, it is bound to evince more than average interest. 'Flawed: The Rise and Fall of India's Diamond Mogul Nirav Modi'b (Hachette India/ New Delhi) does exactly that. The book written by journalist-author Pavan C Lall sheds light on one of the biggest financial scandals in India, and profiles the man allegedly behind it.

Kolkata-born and Texas –raised Pavan C. Lall is an associate editor at the Business Standard, where he writes about the automotive sector, private equity, real estate, storied conglomerates and more. A winner of the Citi Journalistic Excellence Award 2016,  Pavan -  having a soft spot for  unraveling corporate conspiracies and industry scandals and laying them bare -  does that here  with  great aplomb.

Says the blurb of the book, ‘in early 2018, the implosion of Nirav Modi's Firestar Diamond International, on its way to becoming India's first truly global luxury company, threw the country's diamond industry and its banking system into utter disarray. Allegations against Modi, of defrauding banks to the tune of US$1.8 billion, brought a whole business community under scrutiny and escalated rapidly into an international scandal.’

The book has several dimensions. One, it is based on personal encounters, incisive interviews and meticulous research. Two,The riveting narrative exposes the incredible twists and turns of the Nirav Modi story - of a third-generation diamantaire who moved from Belgium to India to apprentice with his uncle, Mehul Choksi, an established diamond merchant with extensive connections.

Writes Lall in the book, ‘with the first tier of international expansion rolled out, Modi turned his attention to sales. By then, business had started to slow down. According to widespread media reports, revenue was high with sales of Rs 12,500 crore for financial year 2016, but almost half, or Rs 7,000 crore, of that came from trading in diamonds. The private-label business in which he made jewelry for others accounted for Rs 5,500 crore and made for the majority of his revenues, while the retail business was generating only Rs 470 crore as revenue.’

The book systematically chronicles the account of an astute businessman whose firm grips over an intercontinental supply chain saw his branded jewelry stores dotting not just every Indian metropolis but also marquee locations such as London, New York, and Hong Kong. The 200-page paperback is also an account of a ‘reclusive, inscrutable man with a penchant for the high life that possibly led him to fly too close to the sun.’

Wharton School dropout, Nirav Modi landed in India in the 1990s to learn about the diamond trade and eventually moved on to establish his own brand ‘Firestar.’ Given the course  of his entrepreneurship -  from creating a global luxury brand at a scale that had never emerged from India before -  to his steep crash as the Punjab National Bank (PNB) exposed his fraud of, reportedly up to Rs 14,000 crore that embarrassed the country no end, the book is as potent as it is comprehensive.

If Modi had captured the Indian imagination at the time of the scandal, this book only takes forward that chilling story. When on 29 January 2018, PNB registered the complaint against Modi, alleging that he had led the biggest bank fraud in Indian history; the scam had a massive psychological hit on business across the country, the entire diamond industry negatively impacted.

Written in an overwhelming style, Lall recounts at length Modi’s young days, initiation into the diamond industry and his training there, the rise and lavishness of his business, its eventual fall, and aftermath. The author also drives home Modi’s edginess and his undoing.

If the PNB scandal was a big flaw, it was ordained to be that. No one could have run off a disgrace, not certainly if the amount ran into several thousand crores.

The book has also a linked  reference to the November  2016 demonetization: ‘Shortly after the ban, in early 2017, a story began doing the rounds that there was a full-scale raid in progress and that it was being conducted not just on Nirav Modi but also on his close associates. While it is not verifiable, an official with a law firm said that the rumor is that Modi converted at least Rs 300 crore in this way. A raid in Indian business parlance is essentially a search and survey operation that is conducted by the Income Tax Department when they receive a  tip-off that a person or corporation is or has been hoarding “black money”, or cash that they haven’t paid tax on.’

‘In theory, it’s a move against corruption, but in practice it’s a search-and-sweep operation that gives the officers conducting the raid almost Gestapo-like powers that include entering and searching any building or facility that is under suspicion, breaking open sealed cupboards, locks and containers, carrying out personal searches, making an inventory of valuables, taking copies of accounts and seizing items deemed illegal. Needless to say, the cell phones of those being raided are confiscated and their communication with the outside world is cut off, ‘says the book.

Then there is a throwback to the previous search operations on dubious business deals: ‘The last big raid in the jewelry world is documented as having happened some time in 2013 when the National Investigation Agency and the Income Tax Department carried out a joint operation in Mumbai. It led to a haul of diamonds, cash and bullion worth around Rs 200 crore. Those raids happened at Mumbai Central station after the authorities zeroed in on four trucks, from which over a hundred bags were seized, and the people in the vehicles, including the drivers, helpers, office peons of diamond traders and angadias, unregulated couriers who offer illegal banking services were taken into custody.’

‘Flawed’ is a book with gripping details about the rise of a global player and an equally dramatic plunge of Nirav Modi - now in custody in London.Modi - who the author calls had an “appetite for risk" - awaits an extradition trial next month. 

Fascinating and instructive, the book also raises essential questions about how one man's drive to succeed at all costs can make an entire network of banking business vulnerable.

 

 When a defense researcher and an aggressive reporter takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “Tank” in the Pentagon, and the gigantic chambers of Strategic Command to bring the myriad stories of how America’s presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and just about avoided nuclear war, it is bound to be an exceptional book.

Fred Kaplan is the national-security columnist for Slate and the author of five previous books, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestseller), 1959, Daydream Believers, and The Wizards of Armageddon.

In the present book ‘The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War’, Kaplan has come up with the story of the Bomb from the dawn of the atomic age until today. Based on exclusive interviews and previously classified documents, this is a historical research and can safely be categorized as deep reporting.

Dr. Kaplan has discussed at length theories that have dominated nightmare scenarios from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then he presents the unthinkable – in terms of mass destruction. He also demonstrates how the reality of a nuclear war will not go away, regardless of the calamitous consequences.

Examine these lines: ‘in public, over the years, officers and officials have described America’s nuclear policy as second-strike deterrence: if an enemy strikes us with nuclear weapons, we will retaliate in kind; this retaliatory power is what deters the enemy from attacking us.’

‘In reality, though, American policy has always been to strike first preemptively, or in response to a conventional invasion of allied territory, or to a biological or large-scale cyber attack: in any case, not just as an answer to a nuclear attack. All of these options envision firing nuclear weapons at military targets for military ends; they envision the bomb as a weapon of war, writ large.’

Furthermore, ‘this vision has been enshrined in the American military’s doctrines, drills, and exercises from the onset of the nuclear era through all its phases. Most presidents have been skeptical of this vision—morally, strategically, practically—but none of them have rejected it. Some have threatened to launch nuclear weapons first as a way of settling a crisis. The few who considered adopting a “no first use” policy, in the end, decided against it.’

The book is an impressive account of the various permutations of the official nuclear bomb policy of the United States. Organized into individual chapters devoted to every president – the sections take us to a coherent end.

With hindsight, if the end of the Cold War has given the incumbent president more control over the policy, Kaplan’s book says it all in splendid details: ‘For thirty years after the Cold War ended, almost no one thought, much less worried, about nuclear war. Now almost everyone is fearful. But the fear takes the form of a vaguely paralyzed anxiety. Because of the long reprieve from the bomb’s shadow, few people know how to grasp its dimensions; they’ve forgotten, if they ever knew.’

In the chapter on the present US President Kaplan is guileless: ‘The holiday from history ended on August 8, 2017, when President Donald Trump, barely six months in office, told reporters at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, that if the North Koreans kept threatening the United States with harsh rhetoric and missile tests, “they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Elsewhere he notes: ‘then, six months later, Trump signed and released his administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, a seventy-four-page document that called for building new types of nuclear weapons and integrating them with the military’s conventional war plans—in short, for treating nuclear weapons as normal. The red lights flashed the alarm bells rang furiously.’

Interestingly, there is a throwback to the times of President  Truman and how  both he and trump  used similar rhetoric: ‘Even to those who didn’t remember President Harry Truman’s similar description, seventy-two years earlier, of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima (“a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth”), it was clear that in language more bellicose than any president’s since the end of World War II, Trump was talking about launching nuclear weapons at North Korea.’

Kaplan writes rather pragmatically: ‘Understanding the nuclear era—the era of our lifetime—means understanding the rabbit hole: who dug it and how we got stuck inside. It means tracing the maze of its tunnels, which is to say, the arc of its history: a story enmeshed in secrecy, some of it still secret, much of it now illuminated—by declassified documents and interviews with key actors—though never fully told. How did we get to this second coming of nuclear panic?’

With reliable anecdotes and a wealth of historical detail, ‘The Bomb’ is like the ‘Pentagon Papers’ for the U.S. nuclear strategy. Kaplan has the ‘insider stories of an investigative journalist, the analytic rigor of a political scientist, and the longer-term perspective of a historian.’

The book is highly comprehensible and will surely make it to the permanent record of global nuclear politics. For war enthusiasts, this 375-page hardback is a must-read.

 

VP Menon -The Unsung Architect of Modern India / Review

In 1947, as the struggle for India’s freedom, was intensifying, the Indian National Congress and the Government of India had a single objective—to politically integrate the country. To accomplish this, the Department of State was established in June 1947 with two important men at the helm of affairs. One was the fearless leader who also became the first Deputy Prime Minister of India—Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Yet, the person who continued to remain unsung was Patel’s right-hand man, VP Menon.

Although it was Patel who created the original framework to influence the Indian princes to accede, it was Menon who did the actual groundwork of coaxing them. He traveled from court to court, state to state having numerous eye-to-eye discussions and negotiations. While his wit and diplomacy were able to win over several of the erstwhile maharajas, the task was arduous. It is said Menon once had a close shave with death when an angered maharaja sprung out a gun and threatened to shoot him point-blank.

When he was young, Ottapalam- born Menon on one occasion overheard his father, lamenting the lack of resources, and his inability to give his six children the life they deserved. Moved by his father’s struggle to make both ends meet, the young boy who was just a matriculate, decided to trade education for a string of menial jobs. He left his home in search of a job, intending to shoulder the financial responsibility of the big family and help his father. From being a construction worker to a coal miner, factory hand to an unsuccessful cotton broker —he did it all.Menon’s adventures and experiences are narrated in his own book: ‘The Story of the Integration of the Indian States. This book is considered to be one of the most comprehensive works on the political integration of India on the eve of independence.

The present book  ‘VP Menon -The Unsung Architect of Modern India’  ( Simon & Schuster) by Narayani Basu – she happens to be  Menon’s great-granddaughter –  throws further light on the man who changed the map of the Indian subcontinent – and the world – forever. Besides being  a historian and foreign policy analyst, Basu  writes extensively on foreign policy for international journals, while remaining involved in her core discipline — modern Indian history. The book is the result of her devotion and authenticity.

Drawing from documents — scattered, unread and un-researched so far — and with first-time access to Menon’s papers and his taped confidential and frank interviews — this the biography covers the life of this  public figure, his unconventional personal life and his private conflicts, which are said to have  made him feed his energy into public service.

Says the blurb, ‘with his initial plans for an independent India in tatters, the desperate viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, turned to his senior most Indian civil servant, Vappala Pangunni Menon—or VP—giving him a single night to devise an alternative, coherent and workable plan for independence. Menon met his stringent deadline, presenting the Menon Plan, which would change the map of the world forever.’

Menon was unarguably the architect of the modern Indian state. Yet, surprisingly little was known about this bureaucrat, patriot and visionary. Basu   ‘rectifies this travesty’ in every respect. She takes us through the highs and lows of VP’s career, from his determination to give women the right to vote; to his strategy to get the princely states to accede to India; to his decision to join forces with the Swatantra Party; to his final relegation to relative obscurity.

Merging the 554 princely states with the Indian state was one of the most structurally monumental tasks that the Indian administration faced after Independence. Menon worked closely with Sardar Patel to help amalgamate these princely states with India.

Writes Basu, ‘Mountbatten’s original plan envisaged not the cleavage of the Indian subcontinent into two countries, but its vivisection into over a dozen. Each province would have the right to secede; each princely state would have the right to become independent if it so chose. Confronted by Nehru’s incandescent rage at the prospect of fragmentation, conflict, and disorder, Mountbatten had had no choice but to call in his constitutional advisor. Menon typed up his alternative plan in the room of his modest guesthouse, in six hours flat…’

As Political Reforms Commissioner, Menon was in a unique position to witness the way the three Viceroys under whom he served – Linlithgow, Wavell, and Mountbatten – went about dismantling their cherished possession. Basu deals with the ‘different ways’ in which the Viceroys interacted to either delay or finally hastily precipitate the inevitable that led to Partition.

Divided into five painstaking sections and sixty chapters, this 450-page book has some brilliant narrative. Basu tells about how  during Menon’s first stint at the Round Table negotiations in London in 1930, the Prince of Sarila advised him never to be afraid of looking straight into the eyes of the British administrators who were in command and of speaking his mind. He also learned the importance of dressing impeccably.

Says Basu in the epilogue, ‘in real life, he was a man in the peculiar position of standing at the very forefront of history, but shadowed by the political giants of the day. Only when he spoke to Harry Hodson in 1965, that he gave free rein to his tongue allowing memories, long held to himself, to finally break free.’

A persuasive and enthralling biography on an able statesman by an equally competent historian!

 

Displacement and Citizenship - Review

Statelessness is a massive problem that affects millions of people worldwide. Those without a nationality often face difficulty participating in society and accessing a full range of privileges, together with education, health care, travel, and employment. Some are even detained because they are outlawed.

According to a 2013 UN global migration statistics, 232 million international migrants – or roughly 3 percent of the world’s population – are living out of the country, worldwide. This makes transnational migration a key feature of globalization and a central issue on the international agenda.

Migration certainly unlocks a host of opportunities for the individuals and countries involved. But at the same time, it is also marked by tremendous inequalities and serious human rights abuses. Targeted interventions are therefore crucial if the full potential of migration is to be explored and its negative aspects sufficiently addressed.

The present book ‘Displacement and Citizenship: Histories and Memories of Exclusion’ (Tulika Books, New Delhi) is a first-hand work on migration. Says the blurb: ‘the book intends to capture the crises of forced migration, internal displacement due to conflict situations, and development-induced migration. Edited by a group of academics, it examines issues of forced and development-induced migration and displacement in regions across South Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Africa.’

The twenty essays in this book chronicle the experiences of societies in South Asia (India, Bangladesh), Latin America (Peru), Europe (Germany, Austria), and Africa (Reunion Island, Namibia, Rwanda). Each of these countries has histories marked by large-scale displacement caused by colonial policies of land grab, slavery or indentured labor, or partitions and other eliminations in the very birth of the nation-state.

Edited by Vijaya Rao, professor at the Center for French & Francophone Studies, Shambhavi Prakash, assistant professor at the Center of German Studies, Papori Bora, assistant professor at the Center for Women's Studies and Mallarika Sinha Roy who teaches at the Center for Women's Studies - all from   Jawaharlal Nehru University - this book is a stupendous work for its in-depth study and widespread grasp.

Ayesha Kidwai writes in the introduction: ‘If there ever was a perfect time for this volume to appear in print, this is it, as across the world at this very moment, the challenges posed by the realities of forced migration and displacement both within and across international borders are being responded to by nation-states by the parallel creation of a global crisis of citizenship. Although much of the world continues to accord citizenship rights based on either jus soli, “right by birth on soil”, or jus sanguinis, “right by birth of blood” (in addition to marriage and naturalization by long-term residence, both of which we shall ignore here), many nation-states have accorded a crucial role in documentation to reconfigure both these definitions as neither necessary nor sufficient, and contingent on other laws that regulate documentation itself.’

She  adds: ‘The essays in this book are more than mere cautionary tales, however, as they explore the ways in which exclusion from the category of “citizen” is constructed over and above the changing legal frameworks of the state, by a society that creates the state and which is in turn formed by the policies adopted by the state. A major strand in the discussion of what value citizenship has for the individual is about whether the notion automatically entails inclusion.’

At a time when the world – counting India as well - and faces the challenges posed by the realities of involuntary migration and displacement both within and across international borders, books of this nature bring to the forefront the delinquent issue and conceivable resolutions therein.

Divided into four broad sections – cultural citizenship, displacement and refugeehood, sites of memory and gendered violence -, the approach of the book is interdisciplinary. With contributions by A Mangai, Pallavi, Arshi Javid, Pallavi Brara, Sunil Choudhary, Nazia Akhtar, Anindita Ghosal, Ekata Bakshi, Madhu Sahni​,​ Lipi Biswas Sen, Chitra Harshvardhan, and Udaya Kumar, the book has been the result of  a research project entitled ‘Traces of the Global: Memory, Displacement, and Cultural citizenship.’ 

The book   is timely in the Indian context​ (NRC, CAA, et al) ​ because it is most of all a reminder of the price that has been paid not only in India but globally, by the privations caused by the negation of citizenship based on religion, gender, ethnicity/caste and/or race.

What enhances the splendor of the title is that it places contemporary concerns against the context of colonial histories in the above-mentioned societies. The volume draws from the wide fields of literature, films, humanities, and social sciences to reflect on the questions of displacement and citizenship from different vantage points.

 ‘The world  in the twentieth century, says the concluding lines of the introduction, roiled by world wars, mass migrations, mass resistance and social and political revolutions, pointed to the importance of legal provisions of citizenship being enabling rather than restrictive. Unlearning those lessons in the twenty-first century will only take us back to a past that should be left behind.’

’

Tribal Development in India

The term tribe or tribal is not defined anywhere in the Indian Constitution. According to Article 342, Scheduled Tribes (ST) are ethnic communities that are notified by the President of India. India’s tribes are not part of the traditional Hindu caste structure. They are more similar to the “indigenous” or “native people” in other parts of the world.

Tribal communities in India aren’t the same everywhere.  Some 574 individual groups make up India’s tribal population. Different tribal groups are at different levels of social and economic development. 

Realizing that Scheduled Tribes are one of the most deprived and marginalized groups with respect to education, a host of programs and measures were initiated since independence. Despite these initiatives, tribal development – particularly tribal education has not reached the desired levels. The high dropout rate among tribal students is a glaring example of the challenges that need to be addressed urgently if we are not intent upon leaving this vast segment of the population to fend for itself.

The fact that India has the single-largest tribal population in the world, constituting 8.6% of the population makes for a solemn case of upliftment via education. Even today, a considerable proportion of tribal children remain outside the school system. 

Edited by Prof. RR Patil, ’Tribal Development in India: Challenges and Prospects in Tribal Education’ discourses all those urgent issues in a comprehensive manner.

The author is presently a Professor in the Department of Social Work, Jamia Millia Islamia, and New Delhi. An enthusiast in research and publications, he has authored/edited two more books: ‘Dalit Christians in India’ and ‘Empowering Dalits: Non-Governmental Organizations in Western India. The present book mainly deals with Ashram Schools.

As the blurb says, ‘Tribal development is one of the most important yet underperforming initiatives of the Indian government. For any effort in this direction to succeed, an effective tribal educational program is necessary. However, major gaps in the implementation of this program, along with factors such as corruption and political interference, have contributed to severe malfunctioning and ineffectiveness of the Tribal Ashram schools, a residential school system. It is essential to understand these gaps from policy, design, funding, management, monitoring, and evaluation perspectives for ensuring effective service delivery to tribal learners.

Divided into twenty chapters with contributions from across the academic world, the book meaningfully throws light on different aspects of tribal education in India and the present state of affairs. The contributors include academicians and professionals belonging to diverse domains: social work, education and administration. This makes the book exhaustive.

The chapters in the 300- plus page  book are wide-ranging : Sociological Analysis of Educational Experiences of Adivasi Children(Pradyumna Bag), Ethnocentrism in Education: Effects of Hidden Curriculum on Tribal Students(Bipin Jojo), Status of Tribal Ashram Schools in Maharashtra (Saumya Deol and R. R. Patil), Language as Instrument of Exclusion and Inclusion in Tribal Educational Development( Dhaneswar Bhoi) Living Conditions, Learning Status and Educational Performance of Tribal Students (S. N. Tripathy), Insights on High Dropout Rates among Katkari Tribal Children in Maharashtra (Chipemmi Awung Shang and R. R. Patil).

There are also topics on Education of Scheduled Tribes in Residential Schools in Manipur (Prakash Chandra Jena), Status and Functioning of Tribal Ashram Schools (R. Vasundhara Mohan), Educating Tribal Children: Issues (Noorjahan Kannanjeri and Alkha Dileep), Balancing Indigenous Culture and Formal Education: Ashram Schools in Kerala(Rajashri Tikhe and Buveneswari Suriyan), Ashram School Codebook: Framework for Qualitative Management (Saurabh Katiyar), Centralized Kitchen: Providing Nutritious and Hygienic Meals to Tribal Students (Muhammed Shafi C. T. and R. R. Patil ), Indira Gandhi Memorial Model Residential School (IGMMRS) in Malappuram, Kerala: A Case Study (Sonal Shivagunde), Revisiting Policies and Need for Reform in Tribal Education (Naresh Kumar ), Rethinking Policy Design and Reforms for Tribal Education in India (Bibekananda Nayak), Inclusive Education Policy for Tribal Ashram Schools in Odisha( Mrityunjay K. Singh), Ashram Schools and Education of Tribal Children in India: A Policy Perspective (D. K. Panmand) and  Government Ashram School: Micro Planning (Vetukuri P. S. Raju).

With a foreword by Virginius Xaxa, former director TISS, Guwahati, the book says that even as successive  governments have taken steps for the development of the STs, at the implementation level, schemes and programs pertaining to tribal development  suffer from administrative  and governance issues  thus rendering   the government’s interventions ineffective. It is the contention of the author that the role and contribution of the government, policymakers, administrators, voluntary organizations, tribal parents, and local communities are equally essential for effective implementation and sustenance of the ashram school schemes in India.

The book is an in-depth presentation of the multi-pronged effort towards the educational development of India’s tribal population. The viewpoints shared in the volume will be useful for all stakeholders involved in tribal empowerment through education.

 

 

 

The Battle of Belonging - Review

 

Four hundred plus pages of dense prose, a provocative subject like nationalism and a best-selling author in the likes of   Shashi Tharoor–that is a startling combination. ‘The Battle of Belonging–On Nationalism, Patriotism and What it Means to be Indian ’ - the latest book by Aleph–is said to be Tharoor’s magnum opus that deals with theory, evolution and practice of nationalism across the globe, but more expressly in India.

An extension of his earlier book ‘Why I Am a Hindu’, it provides the historical context to the ideas of nationalism, patriotism, humanism, democracy and their origins in the 18th and 19th centuries. The basic proposition or inquisitorial of the book is: there are over a billion Indians alive today. But are some Indians more Indian than others?

From ‘Midnight to Millennium’ to ‘The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India’, Tharoor has been writing expansively and, every so often, contraryly. Detectably, contemporary ideas of nationalism and citizenship that have occurred in the last few months have come into the scanner in the book.

Tharoor reconnoiters hotly contested ideas of citizenship and belonging. He springs a percipient view of the forces working to undermine the ‘idea of India’ (a phrase coined by Rabindranath Tagore) that has evolved through history and which, in its modern form, was enshrined in India’s Constitution by its founding fathers.

Divided into six sections and running into forty chapters, the book starts off by exploring historical and contemporary ideas of nationalism, patriotism, free-thinking, egalitarianism, and humanism, many of which emerged in the West in the eighteenth-and nineteenth centuries, and quickly spread throughout the world.

He then encapsulates India’s liberal constitutionalism, surveys the enlightened values that towering leaders and thinkers like Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, Ambedkar, Patel, Azad, and others invested the nation with. These are juxtaposed with the narrow-minded, divisive, sectarian, ‘us vs. them’ alternatives planned by Hindutva ideologues, and circulated by their supporters who are now serving.

As the blurb says, ‘Today, the battle is between these two opposing ideas of India, or what might be described as ethno-religious nationalism vs. civic nationalism. The struggle for India’s soul has heightened, deepened, and broadened, and threatens to hollow out and destroy the remarkable concepts of pluralism, secularism, and inclusive nationhood that were bestowed upon the nation at independence. The Constitution is under siege, institutions are being undermined, mythical pasts propagated, universities assailed, minorities demonized, and worse.’

 ‘Every passing month sees new attacks on the ideals that India has long been admired for, as authoritarian leaders and their bigoted supporters push the country towards a state of illiberalism and intolerance. If they succeed, millions will be stripped of their identity, and bogus theories of Indianness will take root in the soil of the subcontinent. However, all is not yet lost, and this erudite and lucid book shows us what will need to be done to win the battle of belonging and strengthen everything that is unique and valuable about India.’ 

Tharoor’s barney is that the Hindutva movement is a mirror image of the Muslim communalism of 1947. His fear is that the victory of the Hindutva movement will mark the end of Indian idea. He clarifies that “Hindutva is not Hinduism; it is a political doctrine, not a religious one”. Dealing with the political ideology which has become quite contentious in the last few years, he tries to illuminate what nationalism is and what it can be to give a clearer view of factors in play that give birth to the ‘Idea of India’.

Fiercely argued, ‘The Battle of Belonging’ unequivocally establishes what true Indianness is and what it means to be a nationalistic Indian in the twenty-first century. His standpoint is to spick-and-span on the predominant political ideology of Hindutva, which focuses on a religious-based nation-state.

Tharoor feels the nationalism being promoted in India today is a tantalizing vision that excludes citizens and those who do not subscribe to it, based on identity or immutable markers like ethnicity, religion, language and. He declares that we vary the basis of Indian nationhood and it isn’t tied to any language, or geography, or faith. Mark these lines:

“... Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of what I have dubbed an ever-ever land—emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy under the rule of law. As I never tire of pointing out, the fundamental DNA of India, then, is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may incorporate differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, conviction, consonant, costume, and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus. That consensus is around the simple principle that in a democracy under the rule of law, you don’t really need to agree all the time—except on the ground rules of how you will disagree.”

Tharoor’s deduction is that despite the ‘myriad problems,’ that India has, it is the democracy that has given Indian citizens of various caste, creed, culture, and cause the chance to break free of their age-old subsistence-level existence: “There is social oppression and caste tyranny, particularly in rural India, but democracy offers the victims a means of escape, and often—thanks to the determination with which the poor and oppressed exercise their franchise—of triumph. The various schemes established by successive governments from Independence onward

for the betterment of the rural poor result from this connection between India’s citizens and the state.”

“And yet, in the more than seven decades since we became free, democracy has failed to unify us as a people or create an undivided political community. Instead, we have become more conscious than ever of what divides us: religion, region, caste, language, and ethnicity. The political system has become looser and more fragmented. Politicians mobilize support along ever-narrower lines of political identity. It has become more important to be a ‘backward caste’, a ‘tribal’, or a religious chauvinist, than to be an Indian; and to some it is more important to be a ‘proud’ Hindu than to be an Indian,” writes Tharoor.

Tharoor goes on: 

“As I have often argued, we are all minorities in India. A typical Indian stepping off a train, say, a Hindi-speaking Hindu male from the Gangetic plain state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), might cherish the illusion that he represents the ‘majority community’, to use an expression much favored by the less industrious of our journalists. But he, literally, does not. As a Hindi-speaking Hindu he belongs to the faith adhered to by some 80 percent of the population, but a majority of the country does not speak Hindi; a majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh; and if he were visiting, say, Kerala, he would discover that a majority there is not even male. 

‘Even more tellingly, our archetypal UP Hindi-speaking Hindu has only to mingle with the polyglot, multihued crowds thronging any of India’s major railway stations to realize how much of a minority he really is. Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of majority-hood, because his caste automatically places him in a minority as well: if he is a Brahmin, 90 percent of his fellow Indians are not; if he is a Yadav, a ‘backward class’, 85 percent of Indians are not, and so on.’ 

The book has a rich potential to trigger a serious debate on many issues concerning the present day India. What Tharoor says is that we must ‘develop a comprehensive and globally shared view’ of how the current rigidity and prejudices create a division in society and how to tackle them.

A deeply researched work which delves into contemporary social, political, and cultural issues confronting India, ‘The Battle of Belonging’ hunts for a healthy and secular environment in the country.

The Brass Notebook - Review

This is an unusual memoir. Unusual because it isn’t archetypal, not old-fashioned nor even written in a sequential order. The autobiography is set apart into personal and professional years, covering all that happened in a long and distinguished career.

‘The Brass Notebook’ By Celebrated economist-writer Devaki Jain (Speaking Tiger, New Delhi) is structured in such a way that it is no-holds-barred and edifying. In the brilliant life account, she recounts her own story and also that of an entire generation and a nation coming into its own.

Born in 1933, in Mysore, Karnataka, Devaki Jain’s father was a dewan in the Princely States of Mysore and Gwalior. Student of Mysore University, where she studied Mathematics and Economics, she later studied in St Anne’s College, Oxford University and graduated in Economics and Philosophy, where she is now an Honorary Fellow.

Devaki Jain made significant contributions to feminist economics, social justice, and women’s empowerment in India. From 1963 to 69, she was a lecturer in economics at Miranda House, Delhi University. She moved on from teaching to full-time research and publication as the director of the Institute of Social Studies Trust.

Over the years, Devaki Jain founded a wide range of institutions such as the Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era (DAWN), a Third World network of women social scientists, and a research Centre in Delhi -  Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST). She has been a member of several policy-making bodies in India and abroad, including the State Planning Board of Karnataka; the erstwhile South Commission, established in 1987 under the chairmanship of Dr Julius Nyerere; the Advisory Committee for UNDP Human Development Report on Poverty (1997), and the Eminent Persons Group associated with the Graca Machel Committee (UN) on the impact on children of armed conflict.

Devaki Jain is a recipient of the Padma Bhushan (2006) and an honorary doctorate from the University of Westville, Durban, South Africa.

“It was difficult to reveal my personal life, but because I felt that my story could be a source of strength for many women, I decided to share both my political engagements and my personal adventures,” said the 87-year-old, whose earlier works include “Close Encounters of Another Kind: Women and Development Economics,” and “Harvesting Feminist Knowledge for Public Policy: Rebuilding Progress”.

With a Foreword by Amartya Sen, ‘The Brass Notebook’ has been inspired by Doris Lessing’s ‘The Golden Notebook’. Not just the title, but the idea of the book itself was suggested by Lessing when Jain first met her in 1958. It took Jain 60 years to honor that advice.

In the memoir, Devaki Jain begins with her childhood in south India - a life of comfort and ease. But there were restrictions too, that come with growing up in an orthodox Tamil Brahmin family, and the rarely spoken about dangers of predatory male relatives. 

She writes in the autobiography, “While most of the other students, largely Anglo-Indian or Goan Christians, would walk or cycle from their nearby homes, my younger sister and I came to school every day, to our great embarrassment, in a coach drawn by a beautiful chestnut brown horse. There were no buses or any form of public transport from where we lived to the Cantonment. It was like two different cities. We wore the standard school uniform: a blue serge pleated skirt with a white shirt, tucked neatly in, and a brown-and-gold tie with diagonal stripes. We all sang the school anthem–’Brown and Gold’–with great fervor, every morning at assembly.”

‘I loved the various prayers and litanies that were part of the Roman Catholic tradition of the school. I would go to the chapel, make the sign of the cross, and sing all the hymns, “do” the rosary (a friend gave me one to pray with). The rosary had to be hidden when I was at home, and my private devotions restricted to the bathroom. Like so many girls who feel the aesthetic appeal of Catholicism, I wanted more than anything to be a nun. Of course, I breathed nothing of these thoughts to my family at home, upper-caste Hindus who would have been shocked at one of their children abandoning both her family’s religion and hopes of a happy domestic life.’

“As it was, we were not allowed to enter the house proper without first shedding our uniforms, bathing and changing in the bathroom which we were to enter by the back door. We had two very orthodox grandmothers living with us who regarded close proximity to Christians as polluting.”

Elsewhere in the memoir she writes about the Gandhian way of life at Wardha Ashram: “Another experience, which took me deeply into the ethos of India’s freedom movement, while I was still cocooned in the orthodox family, was a student seminar in Bangalore in 1953. This was convened by the Quakers, in this case the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Normally I would not be allowed to go to such workshops and conferences, but as I have mentioned earlier in this memoir, my brother Sreedhar had me invited. He was studying in the US and was drawn to the spirit and culture of the Quakers.”

‘At the seminar, I was gripped by the simple attire and eclectic ideas of two young men, aged twenty-one and nineteen, who had come all the way from Gandhi’s ashram in Wardha–one British, David Hoggett, and the other Indian, Vasant Palshikar. I was fascinated by their attitude, behaviour, clothing and ideas. They were living in Wardha at the Sarva Seva Sangh Ashram. They dressed like Gandhi–that is, dhotis made of khadi, tucked high up between their legs, a light sleeveless banyan, vest, also made of khadi, and coarse handmade leather chappals. They were very calm, friendly and totally at ease with the mixed bag of people that we were.’

Ruskin College, Oxford, gave Devaki Jain her first taste of freedom in 1955, at 22. Oxford brought her a degree in philosophy and economics—and hardship, as she washed dishes in a cafe to pay her fees. It was here, too, that she had her early encounters with the sensual life. With rare candor, she writes of her romantic liaisons in Oxford and Harvard, and falling in love with her ‘unsuitable boy’—her husband, Lakshmi Chand Jain, whom she married against her father’s wishes. 

Devaki’s professional life saw her becoming deeply involved with the cause of ‘poor’ women—workers in the informal economy, for whom she strove to get a better deal. In the international arena, she joined cause with the concerns of the colonized nations of the south, as they fought to make their voices heard against the rich and powerful nations of the former colonizers. 

The book - divided into seven parts and running into a little over two hundred pages and with photographs from the album -  is as absorbing as thought-provoking. In all these encounters and anecdotes, what sparkles is Devaki Jain’s uprightness in telling the story. In the chronicle, there is a message for women across generations: one can experience the good, the bad and the ugly, and remain standing to tell the story. Honesty permeates the narrative in whatever challenges Devaki Jain has faced in her life.

An entrancing memoir, ‘The Brass Notebook’ is must-read for those women who want to know how to survive and succeed in a patriarchal society, for men to know that women are not a weaker sex but just uninformed about their inherent strength, and for policymakers to know that even seven decades after Independence, the basic flaws in their policies on women's empowerment have still not been addressed.