Few Lessons From Narcos

1. Organized crime like the drug cartels in Mexico or Colombia (or Goldman Sachs in the US) cannot function without some form of support from the state.

2. Crime lords are business entrepreneurs from the underclass. They are not, and can never be, revolutionaries.

3. Just like how big businesses have the idea of ‘corporate social responsibility’ (where in you generously return to society .0001% of what you exploit from it) criminals also do something similar for the poor in their territories by building houses, organizing festivals, donating money etc. Hence their romanticization in pop culture.

4. No criminal organization can overthrow the state. At the most, they use violence to negotiate with the state for a bigger piece of the pie.

5. The state, if it wills, can eliminate criminal organizations no matter how strong they are. It usually doesnt go all the way because crime serves a functional purpose in the state.

6. Also, the state would always prefer economically backward localities like Sinaloa, Medellin, Dharavi etc to be controlled by gangsters than by revolutionaries. Gangsters can also do the dirty work of the state in these areas by killing potential leaders of the poor.

7. Finally, Spanish is the best language to abuse someone. If you disagree with anything I said, COMA MIERDA.

If Not Now, When?

Since the beginning of 2017, I have been reading ‘Soviet dissident’ literature – fictional works critical of the Soviet Union. Beginning with Bulgakov’s classic “The Master and Margherita”, I exhausted my stock with Platonov’s “Happy Moscow” sometime back. I thought I’ll finish the year with fiction on Nazism and anti-Semitism in Europe. I finished reading Primo Levi’s novel “If Not Now, When?” yesterday. This is a remarkable story of a band of Jewish partisans who endure a cruel time. Levi not only captures the wartime brutalities of the Nazis, but also the everyday anti-Semitic prejudices of those who were fighting the Nazis, be it the Russians, the Ukranians or the Poles. It is my understanding that anti-Semitism is the most fundamental form of Western racism, because it informs all other strains of racism in the West. Try explaining the paradox of Jews getting accused by anti-Semites for being bankers and bolsheviks at the same time.

Levi also brings out the unique suffering that the Poles went through in the previous century. But suffering alone is no condition for unity and coexistence, as the tensions between the Jewish partisans and the Poles demonstrate.Yet the book is not a mere detailing of Jewish suffering, but of Jewish resistance – in a poignant sense, it captures the Zionist longing for a homeland of their own. But there are also Jews in the novel who did not buy this idea – like a French Jewish woman to whom Paris, not Israel, was homeland. Levi, I believe, was himself quite skeptical of an exclusivist Zionism. And that reflects in this novel as well.

Critical Quest

Critical Quest Books

On my recent trip to Chennai, I purchased over 20 titles of Critical Quest – 10 of which were given to me on hand by the publisher, the irreplaceable G. Aloysius. In my opinion, Critical Quest is one of the most important publications out there for a critical ‘activist pedagogy’. Their titles cut across disciplines and cover a variety of themes; the aim of the publisher, I would say, is to provide the readers a comprehensive and critical understanding of the how and why of socio-political change through concise and affordable books. Most of the books are around 40-80 pages and cost, on an average, about 50 rupees (50 pence, 70 cents). Ideology, theory, nationalism, identity, caste, gender, religion, philosophy are some of the topics covered, and you get titles of Meszaros, Fraser, Engels, Emerson, Horkheimer etc for nominal rates.

Critical Quest has an amazing selection of books by Ambedkar – my personal favorite is “Philosophy of Hinduism”, which shows the Boss at his incisive best. Some of them, like “Conversion as Emancipation”, are compilations from Ambedkar’s speeches and writings, astutely brought under an apt title. One of the first books of Critical Quest I purchased was Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste” in 2009 – priced at 40, I got it at a discount for 25!

Likewise, I would argue that Critical Quest has brought out the best translations till date of some of the works of Periyar – Women Enslaved (translation of Pen Yen Adimaiyanaal?), Periyar on Buddhism, Periyar on Islam, Periyar on Village Reconstruction etc. I do hope they bring out more and more works of Periyar in English.

Critical Quest also has published important interventions by contemporary Indian authors, key among them being the works of Aloysius himself. Apart from his writings on Brahminism, social development, regionalism etc, Aloysius’ work on Iyothee Thassar is published as three titles, and they present the crucial role the thinker played in the Dravidian imagination as well as in shaping the modern Tamil-Dalit identity.

I strongly think that an endeavor like Critical Quest must be promoted, not only through the purchase of their books, but also through citations in our articles, academic or otherwise. At a time when books concerning human emancipation are marketed at a price much beyond the affordability of most of the human population that they are meant to reach, the work that Critical Quest does is nothing short of heroic. Promoting them is not a favor – it is gratitude.

Avengers, Black Panther etc.

This was a boring weekend so I decided to write this. Dont take it too seriously. Or maybe you can. I dont know. 

When I watched Black Panther, I couldn’t help but draw real life parallels. The ‘villain’ Killmonger was Steve Biko, Thomas Sankara and Malcolm X combined. Of course he had to be killed. The ‘hero’ T’Challa on the other hand was Mohammed bin Salman, Benjamin Netanyahu and Shah Reza Pahlavi combined. Of course he had to be saved. Killmonger’s Wakanda would have been a nightmare to every imperialist power that bleeds the poor countries of the world in a thousand different ways. T’Challa’s Wakanda is a wet dream come true for the American military-industrial complex. Killmonger, who believes in a global solidarity of the oppressed, refuses to live in such a society and prefers an honorable death. “Just bury me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped from the ships. Cause they knew that death was better than bondage.” Killmonger joins other great revolutionaries who were defeated/killed by Hollywood liberalism, like Magneto in X-Men, Bane in The Dark Knight Rises and Koba in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Watching Avengers: Infinity War, it seemed fitting that Thanos should avenge Killmonger. Cannot Thanos be read as a radical person of color who is battling white superheroes and their stooges of color? And where Killmonger was motivated by fighting against global oppression, Thanos is motivated by global ecological concerns. Academic Joel Hodge correctly points out that “Thanos is selfless – he is seeking a higher good for the universe, not himself – and offering a systematic answer to the problem of sustainability.” On the other hand, western liberals, especially those suffering from an overdose of white guilt, have been thoroughly disturbed by the film. One has compared Thanos to America and complains that “America has been Thanos, and it got over the slaughter without much difficulty. America has claimed that killing thousands of people irrespective of their age, occupation, status, or personal storyline was for the greater good.”

This is blatantly untrue. America has always been selective in who it murders, who it allows to be murdered, where it promotes human rights, and where it violates it. A dictatorial North Korea and a Syria which is accused of war crimes are America’s enemies, but a Sri Lanka that committed genocide of Tamils and Turkey which indulges in ethnic cleansing of Kurds are America’s strategic partners. America has maintained its financial order by augmenting fiscal, political and ecological disorder in countries where it seeks to hold influence. Thanos, on the other hand, is truly indiscriminate in his attempts to bring balance to a world that abuses nature, technology, man and itself. His thinking and actions defeated the American warriors and their allies on screen and baffle social justice warriors who watched it. Maybe Thanos represents a posthuman politics that a few philosophers have been trying to theorize. Maybe he represents the Nietzschean overman, the one who is not afraid of the Truth in its entirety and the one who does not resent taking terrible decisions, thus casting terror in minds conditioned by a liberal human rights thinking. Maybe he just took Gandhi’s famous quote “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not every man’s greed” to heart and decided to act upon it.

A political reading of such films is not entirely fanciful. Consider Captain America: Civil War where Cap beats the daylights out of Ironman. The movie was prophetic. The good Captain is an ultra-militarist chest-thumping patriot with neanderthalic ideas of nationalism while Ironman is an ultra-militarist pro-assassination cosmopolitan patriot with deep roots in the arms industry. The political parallels are too obvious to miss. Trump defeated Clinton in the US Presidential elections a few months after the release of this film. But remember, at the end of the day, Iron Man and Captain America are on the same side. So are those like the Hulk, who represents the destructive potential of an angry white ‘involuntary celibate’ male nerd, and T’Challa who, as said before, represents a Third World monarchy that is a strategic partner for American interests. Thanos, however, is quite the outsider not just to the world, but to the hegemonic liberal democratic ideology of the West.

What is more important is that every Marvel movie till now has been about crisis, ending the crisis, and getting into a newer crisis in a loop – much like the history of capitalism. The multi-billion dollar enterprise of Tony Stark that invests so much in defense technology and not in health, education or sustainable aid to poor countries should be seen as a part of the crisis, not a solution. And including a diversity of characters changes nothing. Capitalism can function smoothly with any face and with any race. When Thanos eliminates half the world, he is not killing humanity – he is showing humanity a better path from the crisis-ridden one that capitalism has forced upon the world. The fact that he does not choose to preside over the new order, even after sacrificing family and friends to achieve it, but instead retires to solitude makes him the true heroic character of Infinity War. In the interests of the balance that he achieved, the Avengers should stay down.

That they won’t is another story.

The Young Karl Marx

Marx giving it to Wilhelm Weitling

Saw Raoul Peck’s ‘The Young Karl Marx’. An excellent film, which beautifully captures the roots of the Marx-Engels friendship. Marx admired Engels and decided to engage in a partnership with him for two reasons: Engels was empathetic towards the working class. More importantly, he understood how the industrial bourgeoisie functioned. Empathy to the bottom class, alone, does jackshit unless you understand and analyze how the top class functions. In fact, such isolated sentimentalism deprived of any critical understanding only ends up reproducing the rule of the top class.

Through this basic Marxist understanding, you can also infer why Brahmin scholars are more interested in doing/assisting/promoting Dalit studies than Brahmin studies – in fact, maintaining a focus on the former prevents an interrogation of the latter. You wont dismantle caste by empathy (academic or literary) to the cheris or by glorifying them in cinema. It is fashionable, but it is also seasonal. Caste can be understood and, hopefully, dismantled only when the critical focus is turned on the power/knowledge of the modern agraharas.

For that, we need Marx, Ambedkar and Periyar.

The Death of Stalin

Screenshot from the film

Among Western films critical of the Soviet Union, Armando Iannucci’s “The Death of Stalin” is remarkable, probably one of the best. It is also light years ahead of the usual liberal tripe (like Ivan Passer’s Stalin) in its understanding of Stalinism. Iannucci again demonstrates that organized political horror like Stalinism can be best captured through comedy than through melodrama. Gulags, executions, purges, cultural policing, the ‘Jewish Doctors’ plot, Beria’s rapist streak, the Malenkov-Khrushchev power struggle are all brought out in a humorous vein, to the point of being thoroughly hilarious at the expense of human suffering. Some fainthearted liberals have accused Iannucci of taking a flippant approach to such ‘tragedies’, but ‘tragedy’ assumes that the victims have dignity. Dignity is the first quality to be crushed in totalitarianism, especially of the progressive variety. Only a joke remains.

One insightful-comic scene showed political captives hailing Stalin just prior to being shot. You usually dont have this performance with the victims of fascism. For instance, I doubt if anyone summarily executed at Auschwitz would have shouted “Sieg Heil.” There is always some room for moral heroism under fascism. Stalinism offers no such possibility. The victim could either die for progress or die against progress, as brilliantly captured by Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon.

Yet despite its moral totalitarianism, the USSR was still an inefficient, imperfect system. Iannucci brings that out in his satire. It is not always historically accurate, but compared to “Darkest Hour”, “The Death of Stalin” is to the point.

8.5/10

Few Points on the Andal Controversy

1. Andal’s poetry is beautiful. I say this with reference – and with reverence – to the aesthetic quality of her works. But what is beautiful need not be progressive, and vice versa. What is beautiful need not even be true or good.

2. It is wrong to condemn Andal’s poetry as regressive, using modern Dravidian anti-caste ethos as a standard. You cant expect that from someone who lived in the 7th/8th century. It is equally wrong to praise Andal for being a sexual libertarian. One anachronism does not cancel out the other. Prejudice of modernity does not only affect the male gaze, but also the female gaze.

3. The addressing of god in sexually intimate terms is not unique to Andal – several others in her time, after her time, have done it. Those in the Christian mystic tradition did it in defiance of the established orthodoxy and in face of persecution.

4. If ‘radicalism’ and ‘transgressiveness’ is a criteria, then Basavanna and Akkammadevi stand way ahead. Their approach is universal and social, while Andal’s is particular and asocial. But that is a problem with Vaishnavism as such.

5. Sexual liberalism alone is a lazy standard for evaluating the progressiveness of a person or a society. Sparta had remarkable sexual freedom for its women citizens. Slaves and slave women are a different story.

6. Vaidyanathan’s apology was plain cowardice. Vairamuthu should have been more assertive in defending himself. For someone who writes so much on the Tamil martial tradition, he cuts the figure of a fresher weakly protesting against the college bully. Contrast with how boldly Thirumavalavan stands by his comments on the Hindu religion.

7. Fundamentalist groups threatening and initiating violence over academically inaccurate comments on Andal (or silly cartoons on Muhammed for that matter) are enemies of democracy, decency and sanity. The argument that the poet or the cartoonist should be more responsible so as to not provoke these groups is only a cheap defense for fundamentalism.

Some Comments on The Purananuru

1. On Amazon.in, the cheapest copy of the best English translation of The Purananuru (Trans. George L Hart and Hank Heifetz. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) available is at Rs. 1670 (last time I checked). I got my as-good-as-new copy at a second hand book store in the UK for 2.50 £, roughly Rs. 220. Lucky me!

2. This work of poetry is also a passageway into the world of the ancient Tamils, a people who celebrated war, love, meat-eating, wine, knowledge, and generosity. And the poems indicate a strong sense of ‘Tamilness’ in terms of a people and a geography.

3. Martial ferocity is praised. So is compassion, charity & righteousness. The strong and wealthy are urged to provide for the weak and needy.

4. Providing for agrarian prosperity, building dams, protecting order in trade and society and curtailing banditry are considered desirable qualities of kings. And the Sovereign is considered ‘the life of the world’.

5. The poems are thoroughly secular in nature, though there are occasional references to gods, including Brahminical ones like Rama – Ravanan is referred to as an ‘arakkan’, translated as ‘demon’. The first poem is an ode to Shiva. Murugan is the most referenced god in the poems.

6. There is clear reference to Brahmins who are learned in the Vedas, who are considered as holy as cows, and who are deserving of protection and gifts. Likewise, there are also vague references to the ‘low born’. (But a Tamil scholar recently told me that the system of caste in the Tamil land as we know it today originated only after the fall of Cholas.)

7. Chastity and purity of ‘women of the house’ is glorified. At least one poem attests to the practice of Sati.

8. Though it appears that war and wealth are praised, a closer reading also suggests a stoic asceticism of the poets.

9. The most celebrated animal in these poems is the Tiger. No wonder…

The Ainkurunuru

A fascinating work. Though the poems are concerned with the ‘interior landscape’ of individuals – love, sex, the home, the family, separation, longing, ecstasy, frustration, contentment – they also throw light on the geography of the Tamil world two millennia back. Centered around the heterosexual couple, a key character in these poems is the “thozhi”, or the female friend of the heroine, who not only acts as messenger between the couple in times of distress, but also functions as a sort of a marriage and relationship counselor. (The vulgar modern day equivalent of the thozhi of course is the “nanben da”, the duffer-friend of the hero of Tamil cinema who crudely takes on the role of the thozhi. Remember Vivek or Santhanam.)

Selby has done a brilliant translation of the Ainkurunuru. Tamils should be eternally grateful to these ‘westerners’ who have taken our classics to the wider world, and have also opened windows to the aesthetics of the ancient Tamil world to those Tamils who have lost touch with their language (I partially include myself in this list) but are keen to learn about their own culture. Anyone interested in Tamil history, anyone interested in poetry, and anyone interested in love must own a copy of this book.

Finishing Don Quixote!

Akira Kurosawa says somewhere that to have lived on the earth without having seen a Satyajit Ray movie is to have lived without seeing the sun and the moon. I would use this quite hyperbolic statement for a person who has lived a literate life without reading Cervantes’ masterpiece. I began reading Don Quixote in November 2015 – I finally finished it today! Reading this book was like working on my dissertation’s chapters, most of which I began working on just 2 weeks before the deadline. I had ample time to complete reading this classic novel. But in between, I read several other shorter books and short stories, cleared my viva and got my PhD, got my first peer-reviewed journal article published, presented at two big conferences, wrote book reviews, got a job, shifted my home to another city, and fell in love and got married!

Eventually in November this year, after only finishing about 400 pages of a 932 page book, I decided I will close this novel and get back to it later in life, having not completed it for over a year. However, when it comes to reading novels, there is nothing I detest as much as closing a book without finishing it (the only exception to this rule is James Joyce’s Ulysses – I tried reading it during the 2nd year of my PhD but decided after 30 pages that it was a novel for me when I am 40). So, in the last two weeks, I managed to finish the remainder of the book. Really, reading such a work requires commitment to continuity and discipline. And what a novel! While my general mood is misanthropic, it is works like these that makes one root for human civilization.