the burden of prints

Imprint of the Raj: The Colonial Origins of Fingerprinting and its Voyage to Britain, by Chandak Sengoopta, Macmillan February 2003. ISBN: 0333989163. Price US$26, 224 pages.

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Asia Times in July 2003).

In an obscure village in Bengal in 1858, Sir William James Herschel, then a member of the Indian civil service, experienced a momentary flash of inspiration that would revolutionize the field of criminal investigation.

In an effort to discourage a local businessman from reneging on a supply agreement by repudiating his signature, Herschel prevailed on the Bengali contractor to stamp the document with a print of his left hand. The success of the ploy - conceived as a bluff only - fired the imagination of the colonial administrator, making of him the first amateur student of fingerprinting, and, as Chandak Sengoopta argues in Imprint of the Raj, the technology's true pioneer.

In his first work of popular history, Sengoopta, who received his doctorate in the history of science from Johns Hopkins University, recounts the tortuous path fingerprinting took from colonial India to today's forensic laboratories with a fascination and thoroughness reminiscent of Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman and Dava Sobel's Longitude. Born and raised in Kolkata, where he qualified in medicine and psychiatry, Sengoopta brings a welcome breadth of knowledge and experience to his subject.

It was no accident that fingerprinting technology was first applied successfully in one of the far-flung outposts of the British Empire, and not in Britain itself, according to Sengoopta. While the science of the day remained convinced that crime was a hereditary aberration, Britain, with its belief in personal liberty, was reluctant to measure and catalogue its citizens. Not so its colonial subjects. Here, Sengoopta points to the colonial obsession with studying, documenting and measuring the darker denizens of the Empire. To begin with, this effort was simply good business. "The East India Company was not simply a trading corporation and a virtual government - it was also a full-fledged knowledge gathering enterprise staffed by active, if variably talented, learners, explorers and investigators."

But as this knowledge gathering became more academic and more closely affiliated with the budding techniques of science - then still an amateur pursuit - it also became an integral tool for the justification of the Empire. As Edward Said has argued, the Orientalists' investigation became part of the mechanism of control as they sought to "divide, deploy, schematize, tabulate, index and record everything in sight (and out of sight) ... make out of every observable detail a generalization and out of every generalization an immutable law".

After languages and geography, the natural subject for study was the people. With race the obsession of the era, it is not surprising that the first projects involved cataloguing the customs of India's many castes and seeking to separate them into races through careful use of the calipers - the physical anthropologists trusty companion. But it soon became apparent that for the businessman, the individual was of far more importance than the group. "Sciences such as ethnology or geology facilitated control only in broad economic or sociological terms," explains Sengoopta. "These forms of knowledge failed to reach that level where the day-to-day business of the empire was conducted." For that, it was necessary to be able to identify the individual.

Herschel proposed that fingerprints provided a "signature of exceeding simplicity" that even Bengalis, whom the British considered duplicitous beyond compare, could neither forge nor deny. By requiring the colonial subjects in his charge to sign documents with this method, he virtually eliminated pension fraud - a practice that he believed had been general, since the British couldn't tell one Bengali from another. He greatly reduced the conflicts over deeds, reporting that the new technique "lifted off the ugly cloud of suspiciousness which always hangs over [registration offices] in India. It put a summary and absolute stop to the very idea of either [im]personation or repudiation from the moment half a dozen men had made their marks and compared them together."

For all his pioneering work, however, Herschel was not able to convince other administrators of the value of fingerprinting or to bring the technique back to Britain. Nor did he foresee its usefulness in criminal investigation, although he urged the inspector of jails to use fingerprinting to verify the identity of prisoners. What was missing was a useful method of organizing the fingerprints on file.

For some time, therefore, fingerprints could be used once a suspect had been found, but were no help in finding an unknown culprit. It was another colonial administrator who, along with his Indian assistants, developed the method of classification that made fingerprints the cornerstone of criminal investigation they are today. As inspector general of the Bengal police, Edward Henry introduced his classification system in 1897. He brought it with him to London four years later, where he applied the innovation as assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police. There the technology was immediately instrumental in solving several high-profile murder cases, and soon entered the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Fingerprinting had arrived.

But the investigative technique retained the taint of its origin in an atmosphere of xenophobia and anxiety about the racial "other". After establishing fingerprinting technology in London, Henry was seconded to South Africa, where he implemented a new labor pass for "colored" laborers that included their fingerprints. Later, Indians, Arabs and Chinese were required to register their fingerprints and "were subject to arrest without warrant if they could not produce their registration certificate with fingerprints on demand". Mahatma Gandhi, who was then still working as a lawyer in Johannesburg, protested that documenting the identity of "non-whites" using a technique otherwise reserved for lawbreakers "reduced all 'Asiatics' into criminals".

Sadly, even if we flash forward more than a century, the same ignorant double standard prevails. Last year, the United States announced that visitors from up to 35 countries would be required to register with the government and have their fingerprints taken, implying once again that a criminal is not characterized chiefly by what he does but by who he is. What's next, measuring noses?

delhi's war on the poor

As if living in a slum isn't bad enough, Delhi's poorest residents face demolition of their homes, eviction to remote sites and resettlement on barren land. And corruption riddles the agencies charged with helping them.

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Wall Street Journal in July 2003).

EARLY ON THE MORNING of May 31, a phalanx of bulldozers, flanked by 600 policemen, rumbled into a shantytown in the West Delhi industrial district of Kirti Nagar. They had been ordered to destroy nearly 3,000 homes spread over more than four hectares. Families in the slum grimly cooked breakfast, some hoping for a last-minute reprieve, others insisting they would fight. But then the bulldozers started rolling. All thought of resistance evaporated, and everyone scrambled to save his family and meagre belongings.

"There was a lot of confusion," recalls Shalu Gupta, 22, whose home was demolished. "Then a fire started somewhere, and all I could tell my family was 'forget about collecting your things, just save yourself'." The Guptas managed to save a few electrical items--a tube light, a television, an electric fan--but almost all their household goods were lost. Worse, the forced relocation caused Shalu Gupta's father, a security guard, to miss three days of work and he was fired. The new plot they were allotted, nearly two hours away from where they once lived and worked, is much smaller than their old home. "How can a family live in one room?" Shalu Gupta asks angrily.

The Guptas' experience is typical of the cycle of demolition and resettlement that makes it nearly impossible for Delhi's slum dwellers to improve their lot. But with the Delhi assembly elections approaching in October, the slum-relocation issue--which bedevils most of India's cities--is facing renewed public scrutiny in the capital. Much of that scrutiny now focuses on the municipal departments in charge of slums and housing. Human-rights advocates, social workers and slum residents say the departments have not only failed to build affordable housing, but they are also involved in the theft of land and money intended for the poor. The past year has seen a series of corruption scandals involving the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), which is responsible for housing, and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), which handles slum removals. The very agencies tasked with alleviating the plight of the urban poor appear to be making it worse.

Meanwhile, the poor keep coming. Delhi's population increases by at least 500,000 a year, half of them migrants looking for work. But over the past 20 years, the DDA has built only a third of the homes that it estimated would be needed to house the growing population, according to an analysis of DDA statistics by Sajha Manch, a federation of organizations working for the urban poor. Of the "low-income housing" that the DDA did build, 80% was bought by middle and higher-income groups because it was too costly for the poor. Over the same 20 years, Delhi's migrant labour force has erected more than 1,000 slum colonies on public land, and the population of Delhi's slums has grown from half a million to 3.2 million.

The legal owners of the land occupied by the slums are government agencies such as the Railway Authority, the Airports Authority, or the DDA itself. Like landlords anywhere, they're unwilling to surrender their property free of charge, though in some cases the poor live on such land for decades before it becomes valuable enough to prompt the owners to throw them out. Under pressure from the legal owners, the answer that the DDA hit upon was resettlement.

The scheme seems humane enough. The land owner pays 29,000 rupees ($624) per dwelling to subsidize the relocation of the residents. The Delhi government contributes another 10,000 rupees, and the family itself pays a licence fee of 5,000-7,000 rupees that allows them use of a 12.5 to 18-square-metre resettlement plot for five to 10 years. That comes to 46,000 rupees or about $1,000 per household. The money is supposed to fund the acquisition and development of the land for resettlement. But the conditions in many resettlement camps suggest that little of this money is used effectively: They have no water, electricity, drainage or public transport, and some are as far as 50 kilometres away from the city centre.

Slum dwellers and rights workers suspect the money has gone into other projects, or even into the pockets of DDA and MCD officials. A spate of arrests suggest they have reason to be suspicious.

Last year, 56 corruption cases were lodged against various municipal agencies in Delhi. The MCD topped the list, with 10 cases registered and 15 employees arrested. In April, police raided the homes of the DDA's vice-chairman and four senior officers, who were arrested and later released on bail. The Central Bureau of Investigation says the officials are being investigated for corruption but has yet to frame final charges against them. The scandal resulted in the intervention of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who hand-picked a new leader for the DDA with a mandate to clean up the organization. Further arousing suspicions of corruption, in May the top official of the MCD slums department was arrested and charged with taking bribes from property dealers in exchange for plots intended for slum dwellers. He has yet to enter a plea. (The MCD did not respond to faxed questions or requests for an interview and the DDA would only say that the officials have been suspended pending the outcome of the case.)

Any clean-up of the DDA or MCD is unlikely to ease the plight of the city's slum population, because the resettlement policy itself "destroys lives," say activists. Explains Dunu Roy, director of the Hazards Centre, which champions slum-dwellers' rights: "If you relocate the poor 20 miles away from where they earn their living, people lose their livelihoods. Once that is lost, everything is on the line. And in the new place, all the civic services that were available in the old place are gone."

This is painfully evident in Rohini, a remote district in Delhi's northern hinterland where the Kirti Nagar slum dwellers have been forced to resettle. Under the noonday sun, families gather under a canopy, clamouring for emergency micro-loans provided by the charity Indcare. Stretched out over the seven-hectare resettlement area are more than 1,000 shanties built from materials salvaged from the demolition site. One family has heaped together a home from two doors, four corrugated-metal sheets and a now-useless refrigerator--in Kirti Nagar they had power, but Rohini Sector 27 is not connected to the electricity grid. Another family has built a shelter entirely from corrugated metal roofing. In a heat wave that pushes the temperature to 48 degrees Celsius, their home is an oven.

"I lost a house and belongings worth more than 80,000 rupees!" says Bimla Devi, a soft-spoken widow in her 60s who lived in Kirti Nagar for 12 years. A domestic servant and mother of two boys, Devi put almost every rupee she earned into her house. Her small family had slowly pulled itself up: One son ran a successful tea stall and the other had a good job in a factory. Everything they gave back to their mother was razed in under an hour. In return, she received a patch of barren earth in Rohini and a bill for 7,000 rupees.

Evicted slum dwellers receive no compensation for the loss of their homes and possessions--an investment of as much as 50,000 rupees over years for families who earn just 2,000 rupees a month--or aid to build a new home. They simply have to start again from scratch. On one plot, a displaced shop owner has already put together an open-air barber's shop--two chairs in front of a mirror and a battered wooden cabinet.

Purchasing the resettlement land costs the DDA about 7,000 rupees per plot, says Dunu Roy, citing research from the Sajha Manch. "That means that the remaining 39,000 rupees should be going into making roads, putting in electricity, water pipes, toilets, a community centre and so on. At the moment there's no real assessment of where the money is being spent." But a DDA spokeswoman says his figures are incorrect and that the DDA never resettles slum-dwellers on undeveloped land, though "maybe there is a delay in providing civic amenities in certain areas."

Activists tell a different story. They say the resettled residents have no choice but to develop the site themselves, investing their scarce savings in land they don't even own. Often they have to pay for the land to be raised above flood level with truckload after truckload of dirt. Their licence to use their new plot says nothing about what will happen when it expires in five or 10 years.

It's no surprise that resettlement has not reduced the slum areas in Delhi, according to a 2001-02 study by the Habitat International Coalition, which fights for the right to housing. Its research showed that the slums were not crammed with new migrants, but with people who had been resettled outside the city and returned. "If they can't sustain a livelihood, they will come back to [create new] slums in the city centre," says Shivani Bhardwaj, a Habitat coordinator.

According to Habitat International, forced eviction and inadequate resettlement violate several international conventions ratified by India and Article 21 of the Indian Constitution on "the right to shelter." But the courts, which view slum dwellers as illegal squatters, have defended the legal rights of property owners. The Supreme Court's order in one case in 2000 states that slums usurp large areas of public land for private use. Regarding resettlement, the order added: "Rewarding an encroacher on public land with this free alternate site is like giving a reward to a pickpocket."

"This is the mindset!" says Roy of the Hazards Centre. "Whereas all these pickpockets are sitting in the MCD and the DDA and the government! Confirmed pickpockets, who have been picking the pockets of the poor for the last 20 years!"

The democratic process has not significantly aided the slum dwellers either, even when they unite to vote in a bloc. Ranjit Choudhari, 23, a resettled slum resident studying for a master's degree in social work at Delhi University, says only when elections approach do politicians offer to install water pumps, build roads or supply buses. How do the slum dwellers know the candidates will make good on their promises? "We were cheated that way a few times," Choudhari says. "Now we don't vote for them until after they do the work."

But slum dwellers can also get caught in the political crossfire. A month before the Kirti Nagar demolition, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit and a team of activists had broken through a police cordon and led residents in an aggressive protest, winning a temporary reprieve for the slum. Critics say that Dikshit, who belongs to the Congress Party, espoused the slum dwellers' cause because Kirti Nagar is the home district of a senior official of the rival Bharatiya Janata Party. Meanwhile Congress Party workers alleged that the demolition was a brutal form of gerrymandering--eliminating opposition voters by bulldozing their homes--while the BJP accused Congress of protecting the slum only to protect its votes in the district.

The only way to get rid of slums, activists and slum dwellers say, is the creation of affordable housing near the existing slum clusters, known as "in situ upgrading." It's expensive, but it worked in Mumbai. The World Bank made the humane relocation of 20,000 families living in slums along railway tracks a condition of a 25-billion-rupee loan for Mumbai to revamp its transport system. Resettlement sites were chosen near slum dwellers' jobs, and nearly 12,000 families have been happily resettled over the past year and a half. Delhi has not carried through any in situ upgrading, even after the minister of urban development recommended in 2001 that relocations should stop and resources should go to upgrading slum areas.

Even if upgrading one day becomes a model for other Indian cities, it will be too late for Sunil Singh and his family. They lost a brick-and-mortar house in the Kirti Nagar demolition that was the product of 10 years' work. Starting over, he doesn't even have the 5,000 rupees he owes the DDA for his resettlement plot. Asked what he plans to do, he folds his hands and says with more despair than conviction: "I'll work. What else is there?"

the god in the artist

The Miniaturist by Kunal Basu. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. £12.99 ($21.84)

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in July 2003).

THE MINIATURIST, Kunal Basu's second novel, is a peculiar book--something all too rare these days.

Set in 16th-century India, it traces the career of the era's greatest artist from the imperial court of Akbar, the third Mughal ruler, into exile for an unthinkable crime.

Against the unfamiliar backdrop of the Mughal Empire, Basu writes of the struggle of the artist to burst the confines of conventional morality and contemporary aesthetics "to show what the eye cannot see." Like his artist hero, the writer does just that, unveiling a story behind the plot; the "unseen" struggle of the creative mind, its passions and almost religious ecstasy.

Toward the end of the century, India's greatest emperor, Akbar, commissioned two enormous projects. He ordered the imperial capital moved from Agra to Fatehpur Sikri, and commissioned work to begin for the illustration of his autobiography, the Akbarnama. It is the great ambition of the young artist Bihzad, the hero of The Miniaturist, to paint the emperor's life and become the master of the imperial library. But long before Bihzad can win the commission, he begins to draw portraits of the emperor. He dares to draw himself and the emperor as lovers.

Banished to the desert for that crime, Bihzad discovers the true nature of his art, creating a painting called "The Lady" that is revered as a goddess in the remote area. A string of tragedies forces Bihzad to confront the impotence of his art. He ties a blindfold over his eyes and vows never to paint again. Not until years later, when he returns to Agra as a penniless "blind" beggar does he discover that Akbar has forgiven him and recognized his genius. "You are not an artist," Akbar tells him. "You are a saint, Bihzad. Only a saint is truly blind, seeing none but the God inside him."

Bihzad's final painting of Akbar on his deathbed brings the revolutionary techniques he pioneered in the desert to light in the land's greatest court.

The Miniaturist is an excellent counterpoint to Basu's well-received first novel, The Opium Clerk. Like most fiction about India, that first effort was set during the period of history which most fascinates English readers: the time of the British Raj.

The Miniaturist is that much more intriguing because it deals neither with that pet subject, nor with contemporary India or Indians living abroad. By writing about the distant past, Basu has managed, paradoxically, to say something new. In this he has few antecedents, among them Robert Graves' wonderful I, Claudius.

Like the miniature paintings of the Mughal court, this novel deserves a careful perusal. Basu's every word is carefully chosen, and his every image resonates with meaning.

sowing the seeds of doubt

Tibet, Tibet: Dreams and Memories of a Lost Land, by Patrick French. HarperCollins. £20 ($32.65)

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in June 2003).

WRITER PATRICK FRENCH, a Tibet activist since the 1980s, set out in the summer of 1999 to see the ancient land, "unmediated by the versions or hopes of others." He travelled for nearly six months through Tibet, China and India. Afterwards, he gave up his position as a director of the Free Tibet Campaign.

"After all I had seen in the Tibet Autonomous Region and its borderlands, I could no longer view things with the necessary simplicity to be part of a political campaign," he writes. "I doubted whether a free Tibet had any meaning without a free China . . . Above all, I wanted to try to communicate something of the complex reality of Tibet's past and present, convinced that the existing approach of the Tibetophile lobby was leading nowhere."

In Tibet, Tibet, French captures that complex reality, debunking the myth of a mystical, beatific, pacifist Tibet with a comprehensive account of the region's history and a thorough examination of Tibet's long, troubled relationship with China.

The author of Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer, which many consider the definitive biography of the man who led Britain's invasion of Tibet, and Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division, French writes with a historian's concern for truth and a novelist's eye for detail. Subtitled "A Personal History" in some editions, the book is above all the story of French's wrestling with his own relationship with Tibet.

Despite his disillusionment with the freedom movement, French has scant sympathy for the Chinese forces of occupation. Drawing heavily from The Private Life of Chairman Mao, the account of Mao Zedong's personal physician, he vividly depicts the insanity of Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Though the focus of his account wrongly implies that Tibetans were the special victims of the atrocities of that time, French doesn't flinch from blasting the exile community's oft-cited estimate of the number of lives lost due directly to the Chinese occupation. The claim that 1.2 million Tibetans died as a direct result of Chinese rule "is often cited as a piece of uncontested fact," he writes. But his investigation of the source data in Dharamsala shows that number to be unreliable.

Among other distressing clues, he found that the promised list of names did not exist and that only 23,364 of the documented victims were female. He deems that "clearly impossible" as it would mean that over a million Tibetan men died out of a total male population of only 1.25 million in 1950.

With characteristic honesty, French describes his dismay upon learning that naive efforts to satisfy Western activists' desires for statistical evidence has, perhaps, jeopardised the exile community's ability to pit Tibetan truth against Chinese propaganda. His first impulse, he admits bravely, was to suppress his findings.

But, he writes, "I knew, after everything I had seen in Tibet, that truth was more important than continuing to back the cause in its present form. More realism was needed, not less, when it came to Tibet. It was a land that had suffered for too long from the well-intentioned projections of visiting foreigners."

French, nevertheless, sees no reason to doubt the general veracity of the exile community's claims. Citing historian Walter Smith, he suggests that over 200,000 Tibetans are "missing" from population figures for the Tibet Autonomous Region and posits that it is "probable that as many as half a million Tibetans" may have died as a result of the policies of the People's Republic of China.

Taking on an even thornier problem, French refuses to shy from examining a side of the history of the occupation of Tibet "that has been left to one side as unsuitable." He meets retired Chinese cadre Wang Zhanpeng in Beijing to get the account of the first, dedicated Communist Party workers who went to Tibet in the 1950s with an idealistic belief that they were there to do good. Shaken by this interview, French goes a long way toward accepting the parallels between the civilizing impulse of the British and Chinese empires, admitting that his conversation with Wang "reminded me of interviews I had done with retired officials of the British Empire."

He detects in Wang the same "dedication of purpose and commitment to the ideal . . . overlaid by an unspoken sense that he had been overtaken by history, that somehow he had let down the ideal, or maybe that the ideal had let him down." Moreover, French discovers that the benevolent, if misguided, Wang was himself the victim of Tibetan Red Guards, who charged him with "taking the capitalist road" during the Cultural Revolution. The reversal of the often-told tale strikes home.

With similar balance, French addresses the Chinese claim that communism "liberated" Tibetans from an oppressive feudal system. His cursory account of the economy of old Tibet--"most taxes were paid by . . . human labour rather than in cash. It was this system that the communists term serfdom or slavery. In practice, it was a form of bonded labour"--does not justify his wholesale dismissal of the communist argument. But he does unveil the rarely discussed Tibetan caste system through a sensitive discussion with one of the Ragyabas--Tibetans of no caste. A victim of his own culture as well as of the communists, the man "flinched, he cowered and he kept his distance, as if he expected to be struck at any moment . . . He was, I thought later, like one of the older generation of Dalits, the Hindu caste once called Untouchables."

Unfortunately, French does not always bring the same careful objectivity to his travel writing. He describes most of the Chinese people he encounters in unpleasant terms, and (with a few notable exceptions) allows the passing English remarks of louts he meets in train cars to stand against sensitive interviews with Tibetan informants conducted in their own language.

Like many foreign travellers, he sees great evil also in the encroachment of the dubious aesthetic of modern China. Of a family of nomads surviving in the Tibetan grasslands, he writes, "I had come to a place where people lived as they expected to live, defiant of external authority . . . Life was regulated, and yet, providing you avoided involvement with the authorities, and could cope with the harshness of the work and the routine and the climate . . . daily life for these Amdo nomads was good."

Apparently, the noble savages are not troubled by these hardships. In contrast, the people he encounters upon returning to China are miserable demons.

French's blurring of the distinction between Chinese people and Chinese politics and his attraction to the "idyll" of life on the grasslands prevent him from coming to grips with the unacknowledged villain of his journey: modernization.

The tension between the historian's impulse to correct and analyze and the traveller's impulse to romanticize and preserve the "real Tibet" cannot, finally, be resolved. But the struggle makes fascinating reading.

love, the mystery unsolved

Abandon by Pico Iyer, Viking, January 2003. ISBN 037541505. Price Rs 450 (US$9.50), 354 pages.

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By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Asia Times in May 2003).

Even before Islam supplanted communism as the mysterious enemy of western civilization, novels that blurred the boundaries between religion and politics had become commonplace. Most of these books, of course, were thrillers. None were about faith. Communism may be dead, but Belief still scares us. Abandon, the latest book from Pico Iyer, may be the first novel since the end of the cold war to take on the task. The result is a remarkable book, though its attempt at translating religious ecstasy is cryptic and, finally, unsuccessful.

Iyer, a writer of Indian extraction who was raised in Britain and now lives in California and Japan, is one of globalization’s first writers. Better known for his nonfiction writing--which has appeared in Time, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books and other top magazines—than for his fiction, Iyer nearly always writes from a perspective of displacement, seeking, perhaps, to explain the unfamiliar by knocking down all the usual borders. The titles of some of his books hint at what drives him: Falling Off the Map, The Global Soul, Video Nights in Kathmandu.

Abandon is thus, in some paradoxical way, familiar territory. Moving from California to Syria to Spain to England to India and to Iran as though these places were no more remote than Canada or Mexico, the novel traces the quest for understanding of John MacMillan, a British scholar of Sufism and Sufi poetry. Like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Abandon blurs the line between the detective story and literary investigation. Or, perhaps, between the mystery and the Mystery.

Sufism, or the mystical dimension of Islam, focuses on the surrender to the love of God. Unlike other Muslims, the Sufis believe that through this surrender—abandon in both senses of the word—it is possible to come close to God and experience his love while one is alive. The Sufi poets produced an immense body of literature to express the rapture of this state and guide others to achieving it. In Abandon, Iyer’s protagonist believes he has stumbled upon a lost manuscript penned by the most famous of these poets, Rumi, who wrote hundreds of poems in the 13th century and founded the Mevlevi Order of dervishes, better known as the Whirling Dervishes of Sufism. MacMillan’s detective work is both literal and literary, therefore, for he must discover not only whether the manuscript is genuine but also endeavor to understand what the poems mean.

The novel’s backdrop is intriguing. Though Iyer’s characters are scholars, this is a field where danger lurks and hidden treasures promise to resurface. Discussions of colleagues trail off into this realm… with professors who write articles under assumed names to protect their families in Iran, or students of Scientology who enter the witness protection program, an event explained dramatically (and with some unintentional comedy): “They found out about his thesis, I gather.” But the evocation of the fear and wonder that belief evokes in us is not without nuance. One professor confesses of his attraction to the study of Islam, “But I do have a regular person’s interest. It was the sixties, there was all this stuff in the air—Malcom X, Marcus Garvey, Muhammad Ali, all of that. And the Moslems were always the big bad wolf in every story. I guess I just figured we were so busy making all these jokes about how they called us ‘the Great Satan,’ we didn’t stop to think we were calling them ‘the Great Satan’ ourselves. Except we didn’t have the balls to use words like ‘Satan’ and ‘infidel.’”

In this strange academy, the engaging voice of Iyer’s nonfiction writing serves him well. “The Sufis,” MacMillan scrawls for his postgraduate seminar, “so-called for the rough woolen gown they wear, or suf—emblem of their austerity, their voluntary poverty, their anonymity—were a small group of Moslems who began to gather in groups, often secretly, at the beginning of the eighth century, soon after the Prophet’s death. Their aim, quite simply, was to find a direct path to the divine…. Their goal was not to conquer the world, but to conquer themselves.” The message is clear: Although his characters are the victims of the Iranian revolution, Iyer’s subject is not the fanaticism of persecution, torture and destruction, but the fanaticism of ecstasy, of faith. It is an almost impossible subject.

Iyer turns to the metaphor that countless poets have used to link the divine to the mundane: love. “The Sufi ideal is one of love, but it is not the love of the compassionate mother, or of Jesus, he speaks of; it is the ravenous, consuming eros of the lover inflamed,” MacMillan explains to his class. Likewise, floundering with Rumi’s poems, MacMillan discovers himself falling in love with Camilla, a woman with her own mysteries. Seemingly damaged beyond repair, Camilla cannot allow herself to plunge into love. Instead of surrendering, she does what she can to sabotage her own chances for happiness, even though (a Californian through and through) she has a psychologist’s awareness of her self-destructive impulses. Struggling to convince her to let herself go, MacMillan comes to realize the extent to which he has manacled himself against happiness.

Metaphors resonate, and instruct, by showing us in a flash how two unlike things are alike. Their lessons burn like an instant revelation. But the comparison of love and faith, neither of which we know for sure, don’t strike with the same clarity. Perhaps that is why somewhere along the way, the love story of Abandon fails. There is too little of the familiar here. MacMillan’s love for Camilla is inexplicable. She has few charms, it is all too apparent, and her capacity to repel is infinite. What could be more unattractive than someone who cannot complete a conversation without uttering something as banal as, “I disappoint myself every day, every moment. You’re the first person in a long time who’s given me a chance to show I might not be completely worthless.” That’s a line that could only be delivered by someone who owns three or four cats, and Camilla keeps serving up the same swill. That MacMillan keeps asking for more is, to be frank, more difficult to believe in than God, not less. Only the investigation of the lost Rumi manuscript and MacMillan’s engaging thoughts on the nature of Islam—which Iyer valiantly resists reducing to the specter of terrorism--can keep this battered engine clunking along.

an insider's view of india

India in Slow Motion, by Mark Tully, Gillian Wright. Viking. £17.99

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in May 2003).

IN INDIA IN SLOW MOTION, long-time BBC correspondent Mark Tully argues that the primary force holding India back is neither its history of invasions and foreign domination nor its religious fatalism and divisive caste system. The fundamental problem is "a peculiarly Indian form of bad governance.

"That observation will not come as a revelation to anyone--certainly not to Indians. But, fortunately, Tully does not waste pages cataloguing the endless train of governmental malfeasance that comprises India's recent political history. Instead, he examines a few choice examples of crusades--grass-roots or personal--to provide the safety from economic exploitation, access to water and freedom from religious persecution that are the promises of "good governance."

Although the book jacket lists Tully's partner, Gillian Wright, as co-author, Wright's role is not clear as all the essays are written in the first person from Tully's perspective. The old India hand brings an infectious love for India to the task, but his is not a blind love. Born in Calcutta and educated in England, he spent 25 years as South Asia correspondent for the BBC--getting a journalist's tour of the region's grimmest catastrophes. These experiences colour all the chapters of Slow Motion, and some of the finest writing is essentially memoir of a life covering Indian politics; of strong friendships forged with complex politicians.

The scope of the book is wide. In a chapter titled "The Water Harvesters" Tully examines how government corruption has exacerbated drought problems in Gujarat. At least one village has eliminated the drought problem with a network of water barriers that the villagers built themselves. But the government remains focused on a large infrastructure project to dam the Narmada River. The money the government has allotted to small-scale irrigation projects is often directed to contractors who build dams of mud, with a thin plating of concrete, or who don't build dams at all, except on paper.

In "Creating Cyberabad," Tully addresses an innovative programme undertaken by the chief minister of Andra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu. Naidu, who turned Hyderabad, the state capital, into an information technology centre second only to Bangalore, now seeks to bring the IT revolution to the common man by creating a system of "e-governance." The pilot programme eliminated much of the waste and frustration endemic in India's bureaucracy. Now, instead of needing six clerks, six counters and six queues to renew their driving licences, pay bills or register a birth, constituents can accomplish 18 formerly onerous tasks at one counter, with one clerk equipped with a computer. But this obvious improvement won Naidu as many enemies as friends, the writers say, because bureaucrats know that good governance is bad news for them and the Indian democracy is addicted to "leg pulling"--dragging down people doing good things.

While these two chapters (and several others) relate directly to the book's central theme, in other chapters the connections are more tenuous. Some of the essays do not seem related to bad governance at all. "Altered Altars," for example, touches on the Catholic Church of Goa's role in fighting corruption, but it is less about graft than about India's religious pluralism, a subject that Tully picks up again in "The Sufis and a Plain Faith." Certainly Indian politicians have exploited caste and religion to gain and hold power despite failing to improve the lot of their constituents--as Tully argues in his introduction and conclusion. But these essays do not advance that argument; rather they reinforce the already well-established view that India is a mix of cultures and not a Hindu state.

Unfortunately, the book's appealing discursiveness also prevents its authors from exploring either the central argument or his intriguing stories in their full complexity. For instance, a chapter that recounts a sting on the Defence Ministry conducted by the dotcom company Tehelka, relies wholly on an interview with the reporter who orchestrated the coup. Tully and Wright fail to advance the story or to investigate the reasons why the defence minister caught taking a bribe was ushered back into power less than a year after the scandal.

Tully's and Wright's characterizations are acute, their knowledge of the subject is exhaustive and their writing taut and unpretentious. The real reason to read this book, though, is for the unique insider's perspective that Tully's long tenure as the BBC's top man provides. Few writers could match nostalgia for once-peaceful Kashmir with a cogent analysis of where Farooq Abdullah's government went wrong, as Tully does in "Paradise Lost."

And no other writer could have produced "A Tale of Two Brothers," an article about the relationship of former Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh and his gossip-addicted, politically doomed brother. The chapter captures the machinations of Indian politics and the enduring, complex loyalty of Indian families. That is the Mark Tully readers have come to adore.

want to get involved? call youthreach

A catalyst NGO, Youthreach connects young professionals with organizations that need their help. Cleaning up the environment, teaching disadvantaged children, helping the disabled--you name it, Youthreach has a project in mind.

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in Span in May 2003.)

If their offices were more swank, the fourteen attractive young women who staff Youthreach could easily be mistaken for the editorial board of a fashion magazine instead of the staff of an innovative service organization. But these women are not only young and upwardly mobile, they are also women who live their lives with a sense of purpose. That’s the combination that makes Youthreach—a non-governmental organization founded to mobilize the skills and enthusiasm of New Delhi’s young middle class—a winning proposition.

In 1997, three young people came together with a common desire to contribute to the community. Uday Khemka, a non-resident Indian who splits time between London and New York, provided the seed funding for the project. But he needed dedicated partners to manage and build the organization. He teamed up with Nanni Singh, who’d started an NGO in Chandigarh when she was just 18 years old but was then working with her husband in the export business, and Nandita Kathpalia Baig, another young woman with an entrepreneurial spirit. For inspiration, they went to the wellspring of most good ideas: they thought not only about the needs of those people they wanted to help, but about what they themselves wanted to get out of the experience. They set two goals. They wanted to create a shift in consciousness, instilling a sense of responsibility in Delhi’s young, and they wanted to build a bridge that would allow other NGOs to leverage the skills of young professionals—doctors, lawyers, accountants, even CEOs.

“We founded Youthreach essentially as an organization that would look at giving young people like ourselves, who had a lot to be thankful for, a chance to really address the sense of disconnection and disempowerment from the larger reality that is India, the very immediate gaps that exist at the traffic light between [us and] a child who comes up asking for some generosity.” explains Nanni Singh, the 33-year-old director of the NGO. “Mostly, how we react to these things is a sense of apathy or disempowerment: ‘Oh God, what is it that I can do? Surely it is somebody else’s problem.’ We wanted an organization that could create a link between this sensitivity--this wanting to do something more or wanting to know more--and organizations on the ground that were really handling these issues at the grass roots.”

Today, Youthreach seeks to get people directly involved with NGOs working for children and the environment. It has partnered with around 25 groups in Delhi and 10-odd organizations outside the city that are working to protect children from exploitation and provide basic services. Youthreach also works with around 15 NGOs working to protect the environment. Youthreach interacts with the leadership of each of its partner organizations to ascertain their human resource needs and creates a master list of projects for prospective volunteers. The list can be daunting. Salaam Baalak Trust needs doctors and dentists to treat street children. The Association for Cricket for the Blind needs editors and copywriters for its publications. The children’s rights group Butterflies needs a web designer. The Hope Foundation needs gynecologists and psychologists for leprosy patients. But though Youthreach seeks to provide its partners with hard-to-find, skilled staff, not all the positions require advanced degrees. There is plenty of room for dedicated people whose hearts are in the right place to teach English or Mathematics, to read stories, to play sports and organize games, or to participate in letter-writing or poster campaigns.

“We have two categories of volunteers, and we deal with each one differently,” says Singh. “We have volunteers…like bankers who don’t want to bank and look at your financial books but who want to work directly with children, reading stories or whatever. We call them direct volunteers, persons with direct contact. Then there are volunteers who want to give inputs, professional inputs…help an organization build the east wing of a small health center, help another organization look at using their office space more effectively. Doctors, health care workers, etc.”

One volunteer who provides that professional input is Monica Kumar, one of the founders of Manas, a registered trust that provides mental health services. Already operating a clinic providing psychotherapy and special education services to individual clients and working with a dozen of Delhi’s top schools, Kumar and her associates decided after three years it was time to reach out to the community. But they didn’t know how, and they were too strapped for time themselves to do the legwork necessary to find out. That’s where Youthreach came in.

“It was always in the back of our minds that we needed to do it,” said Kumar. “Youthreach gave us that backup [of resources] without which we wouldn’t have been able to have done it. We would have had to make a fresh start, but there were already communities existing, where all we had to do was go and work.”

Manas has provided counseling services to teachers and students at three Youthreach affiliates: the Delhi chapter of the National Association for the Blind (NAB); Karm Marg, a shelter for street children; and Navjyoti, an NGO that provides education for slum children.

Neha Malik, the young woman who acts as the counselor, explained how the program works. “I conduct workshops with the children and with the teachers, basically talking about mental health issues: how to handle problematic behaviors of children, be that either emotional, behavioral or academic issues. We have a workshop once a month – we’ve had three so far. Other than that I go once a week and interact with the children over there. Basically, they have cases lined up for me, and I provide counseling.” She has already seen the benefits, and, perhaps more importantly, so have the organizations she works with. “I’ve got a very good response from NAB. They’ve really seen a lot of improvement. In fact they kept saying they want a full-time psychologist. They keep asking me, ‘Can you come twice in a week, can you come thrice in a week?’ But unfortunately because I’m also going other places, and I’m doing clinical work here, once a week is the best I can do.”

Youthreach has mobilized professionals from fields ranging from engineering to architecture to the arts. Dancer Ashley Lobo conducted a dance program for 50 street children, with the idea that he could not only give these kids a chance to earn a livelihood in the arts one day, but also give a serious boost to their self-esteem. David Mansfield, then Food and Beverage Manager at the Grand Hyatt, conducted a workshop on resume-building for 12 children from the National Association for the Blind, and he held a capacity-building workshop for the staff of Deepalaya and Salaam Baalak Trust, which work with slum children and street kids, to explain what the hotel looks for in a job applicant.

For other volunteers, Youthreach has provided a route back into working world. Gitanjali Krishnan had been a professional teacher for 18 years in Bombay, but she was a full-time homemaker when she came to Youthreach and said she wanted to volunteer three years ago. She was soon teaching class four students at the Deepalaya Ramditti School and teaching English to students of the National Open School at the Deepalaya Kalkaji School. Six months later, when the principal of the Ramditti School fell ill, Krishnan took over. She never left. Today, in addition to managing the day-to-day operations of the school, Krishnan handles all the volunteers Youthreach sends to the Deepalaya schools.
***
A key partner in the Youthreach mission is the U.S.-based International Youth Foundation, which has selected the Delhi-based NGO to manage and administer its grants locally. Established in 1990, the IYF operates in nearly 50 countries and territories and is one of the world’s largest public foundations. IYF works with hundreds of partner organizations like Youthreach to strengthen and expand programs that are helping young people. Over the last decade, IYF and its in-country partners have helped more than 26 million people gain access to life skills, education, job training and other opportunities.

Youthreach has distributed nearly Rs. 30 lakhs in IYF grants, funding the expansion of a Chandigarh-based education program for slum children, a computer training center in New Delhi, a school for 150 child beggars and casual laborers in Bangalore, and a program that provides basic services including education, healthcare and nutrition for 190 children in New Delhi.

One of these programs, New Delhi-based Ankur, provides alternative education for underprivileged children living in Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Basti. “The school doesn’t teach the regular ABCDs, it teaches children to think for themselves,” explained Shabnam Sahni Arora, who administers Youthreach’s grant-making activities. For the talented, motivated children of parents who work as daily wage laborers, vegetable sellers and housemaids, the school presents a “very different avenue” from those available to them at government schools. With seed money from Youthreach and the International Youth Foundation, Ankur was able to set up a computer lab called Compughar—complete with PCs, a digital camera, and tape recorders--that the students use to create a monthly “wall magazine” covering their community, which they post on the walls of neighborhood buildings. Student reporters and designers produce the entire publication, developing story ideas, interviewing members of their community and writing the stories themselves. The idea is part of a larger agenda to create a community archive, according to Ankur’s program coordinator, Prabhat K. Jha. “We want to redefine history,” he said, explaining that the lives of the people in India’s slum communities are virtually undocumented. “This is not a computer center. They’re using the computer as a creative tool, not to learn the skills to provide cheap labor.” For the young people of this low-income community, this was the first time anyone encouraged them to be creative or to think about what their lives mean.

“Some of them are really amazing writers,” said Shabnam. “[And] they’ve learned an incredible amount about computers.” Compughar also teaches students about responsibility. The students themselves select the writers they believe are capable of participating in the project, and now five students earn a small stipend in exchange for training eight others in the computer skills needed to produce the wall magazine and archive content. In 2002, the team produced a slick paperbound book about their neighborhood called By Lanes. More than a hundred pages long in English and Hindi, the book comprises samples of their writing and photography. The arresting passages written by these young writers are proof enough of the program’s impact:

The sound of vehicles coming and going.
The sound of someone selling something.
Peanuts. Buy peanuts. Hot and crisp peanuts. Almonds of the poor are peanuts. Buy! Buy!
After some time I was standing outside my lane, when the earring seller came. Earrings of gold for the price of pebbles, he said. The women surrounded him. Arre bhaiya, show us this one. How much is it for?
…
An elderly man is our neighbour. He is from Pakistan. His name is Mirajo. But we call him chacha… Once the boy I was just telling you about brought some more boys with him. They had two eggs in each hand. Bhai Mirajo …was sitting down to eat when those boys started pelting eggs at him and his house. Poor bhai Mirajo didn’t do anything. Yesterday, when he came to our house, he was weeping as he was saying, ‘If I do something wrong, you can all hit me. But I haven’t done anything. Why do all of you needlessly bother me?’ He had tears in his eyes. Seeing him, we also wanted to howl.

Another IYF grant helped Anubhav, an organization that works to help child ragpickers make the transition from the streets to the classroom, double its staff of outreach workers. Most of the children of New Delhi’s grim Mayapuri Industrial Estate supplement their families’ meager incomes by collecting scrap metal. All day long, they scramble through the battered landscape of junk cars, automobile parts and garbage, using magnets to attract stray bits of scrap metal to sell. Black with soot and living on the bare edge of survival, these children have no motivation to go to school and nobody to motivate them to go to school. Anubhav therefore has to go out into the community and convince children to come to the local education program—which provides a recreation center, nutritious food and medical care as an incentive to encourage attendance. “It’s a nonformal education system,” said Shabnam. “But after they get them up to a certain level and used to going to a center and sitting and listening to someone, they try to get them into a formal system of education in government schools.” Before receiving a Youthreach-IYF grant, Anubhav had two teachers canvassing the community to draw in students, neither of whom had been paid in more than eight months. The grant allowed the organization to pay those teachers and hire two more, as well as begin a nutrition program that is a major incentive for children to turn up at the school. Subhash Bose, the head of Anubhav, has also established links with local dispensaries and medical professionals to monitor the health status of the children. In 2002, Bose had more 142 children enrolled in his informal education program, and he regularly provides food for 120 kids.

For Mobile Creches, an organization that provides daycare for the children of day laborers on Delhi construction sites, a Youthreach-IYF grant made it possible to hire a fulltime person to focus on building awareness about the program, which started in 1969. She has reached out to schools, targeting class eleven students, as a way of forging a link between affluent communities and the workers who build their homes. Class eleven students volunteer to work with the Mobile Creches program, either as daycare workers or in back-office jobs. The young volunteers inject a vital dose of enthusiasm, and the stories they take home to their parents are a terrific aid to the organizations fundraising efforts.

Youthreach volunteers are vital to making these programs work. Jyoti Gupta, a freelance advertising designer, volunteered to design a brochure and fundraising bulletin for Mobile Creches. Tanisha Sangha, who writes profiles of inspiring women for Cosmopolitan and India Today, helped the NGO develop case studies to use in their newsletter and annual report. Montessori teachers Bhavna Ledlie and Pincha Singh conducted capacity-building workshops to train Mobile Creches teachers to introduce primary-level English into their curriculum, and volunteers like Amrita Bhandari and Gemma Wall signed on as teachers. Because English is a requirement for admission into Municipal Corporation of Delhi schools, the program was important for the NGO’s mission. Likewise, Martin Auer, a German writer visiting India, taught creative writing skills to the students and teachers of Ankur. Vikrant Rathore, a disc jockey, helped Anubhav with communication projects and administrative work. Another volunteer helped the organization balance its books.
***
This March, Youthreach confirmed a grant from the Ford Foundation that will allow it to expand its awareness-building activities.
Youthreach developed a three-year expansion plan that will see the organization publish pamphlets on environmental protection, conduct an outdoor advertising campaign on hoardings at bus shelters, as well as create radio spots and short promotional films to be screened in Delhi’s theaters along with the trailers aired before the feature films. The organization will also increase the scope of its workshops, which include films and discussion groups, ramping up to reach out to all of its NGO coordinators and to 20 corporations and their coordinators, volunteers and staff once every six months. The Ford Foundation will also help Youthreach improve its information technology package, enhancing tracking and communication with donors and volunteers. The NGO will link its web site with partner organizations with similar mandates and increase its e-mail database, seeking to link up with 15 partner sites and build an e-mail database of 8,000 addresses in three years.

“The Ford Foundation has really come on board with a very open mind,” said Singh. “They came to us and basically told us, whatever it is that you think is important and where you’d like to put this money. It was for us to put together a proposal.”

We’ve heard of you and are interested in what you’re doing, the Ford Foundation said. Why haven’t you ever approached us for funding? For the five-year-old NGO devoted to building bridges, this might be the longest bridge of all.

lacking an expected political bite

Tiger by the River, by Ravi Shankar Etteth. Doubleday. £12.99 ($20.45)

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in April 2003).

Fans of Ravi Shankar Etteth's biting political cartoons will be disappointed to find that the India Today satirist's first novel, Tiger by the River, contains no illustrations and little of the author's signature wit. Etteth, who is also deputy editor of India Today, has instead chosen to write a historical romance.

Tiger by the River tells the story of the parallel homecomings of long-lost cousins, both heirs to the title Raja of Panayur. When Swati Varma's pregnant wife dies in a traffic accident, he decides to scatter her ashes in the sacred Papanasini river. His journey home becomes a search for the past, as he recalls the history of his ancestors and the legendary tiger that protected them. At the same time, another heir to the now powerless throne of Panayur, Vel Kramer, discovers with the death of his surrogate grandfather that he must trace his lineage first to Berlin, where his biological grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, and then to his ancestral kingdom.

Both of these rather static stories often seem to be merely frames for the tales of the two rajas' progenitors, whose lives were packed with incident. Swati's desultory musings along the sacred river shift swiftly to the 16th century and the tale of a cruel king and his tortured queen. Vel's search for his past also works as a set-up for the story of his grandparents in Germany. Unfortunately, the complicated structure causes the book to meander along in fits and starts, interrupting itself just as it becomes interesting.

There are hints of something better to come from Etteth. The multiple stories and settings evince a fertile imagination, and he has a gift for dialogue. If he can marry his poetic impulse with the hard heart he shows in his work as a cartoonist, we could look forward to rich future work from him.

why now?

Twelve years ago, Burmese activist Soe Myint hijacked an aircraft. He was never prosecuted . . . until now.

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in April 2003).

ONE APRIL MORNING last year, police stormed the home of Soe Myint--a Burmese exile living in India--and arrested him for hijacking a flight, a charge that could lead to a life sentence.

Myint, who looks more like the president of Harvard's young Asian-Republicans' club than a terrorist, has spent the last 12 years peacefully working as a journalist in India. But it is true that in 1990, at the age of 21, he hijacked a Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Rangoon. He was "armed" with a Laughing Buddha statue, which he claimed was a bomb. En route to Calcutta, Soe Myint and his accomplice told the passengers about what had driven them to seize the aircraft.

"We wanted to explain what was really happening in Burma, because at that time all the media attention was focused on the Gulf War," Soe Myint recalls nearly 12 years later over a lunch of pizza and fried chicken in New Delhi.

Two years before the hijacking, Soe Myint had witnessed the brutality of the military at firsthand when it seized back control of Burma, killing an estimated 3,000 protesters and supporters of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. "I saw soldiers shoot down people indiscriminately." Outside Burma, the deaths were quickly forgotten.

By the time Soe Myint hijacked the flight in 1990, the situation had deteriorated. Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest, but her party had still swept that year's general election. The junta refused to hand over power. "The international community was silent," says Soe Myint. And so he hijacked an aircraft.

It's hard today to recall a time when hijackers might have been thought of as anything other than terrorists. But this was the age of Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall, not of September 11. Soe Myint believed that people might sympathize with them. "We thought: Either we will be killed, or we will be cheered."

The young men were cheered. India allowed the hijackers to hold the press conferences they requested. Charges were framed, but the men were freed on bail. More than 30 members of parliament--including the current defence minister, George Fernandes--signed petitions requesting that the charges be dropped. "We were put in jail for three months only," says Soe Myint.

DISSIDENT REPORTERS

Then, last April, the police came for Soe Myint. "It's still a mystery," he says. Fernandes has assured him that the order didn't come from the central government, and West Bengal officials say the state has no interest in prosecuting him. "Nobody is taking responsibility," Soe Myint says. At his trial, his lawyer will argue that he innocent of the charge of hijacking, because he used no weapons and the pilots willingly "diverted" the aircraft to Calcutta.

So why now? Soe Myint believes it's because of his work as a journalist for stations like Radio Free Asia and for his role in an Internet news service that allows dissident reporters within Burma to make their voices heard. "We have reporters who are exposing human-rights violations in Burma," he says. "Many of them are also close to the opposition movement, the resistance movement."

Throughout the 1990s, India supported the pro-democracy movement. But lately relations have warmed with Burma, culminating in the visit of then-Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh to Rangoon in 2002. A week later, Soe Myint was arrested. "The people who arrested me were not interested in the hijacking," he says. "They were interested in my news sources. But I cannot reveal the names of my reporters, or they will definitely be jailed." The Indian authorities have not commented officially on the timing of Soe Myint's arrest.

Calm before his trial begins on April 2, Soe Myint has few regrets. "Whatever I do, I do for a political cause. So even if India decides to put me in jail I will be ready to face it. I am proud of what I did 12 years ago, and I'm proud of what I'm doing now. I had many chances to leave India . . . but I didn't choose that way."

a cynical, idealistic melange

Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land, by Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Asia Times in March 2003).

Honesty, they say, is its own reward. And it's a good thing, too, because it rarely wins many friends. In his latest book on India, Out of God's Oven, poet and journalist Dom Moraes wields candor like a bludgeon, confessing at the outset: "In 1980, [my return to India] had sounded like a prison sentence ... I sympathized with the poor, but too many of them existed. India had the most brutally stupid middle class in the world."

Critics from that disparaged group have responded in kind, taking Moraes to task for his pessimism, his anglophilia and, generally, for writing like a foreigner. The small praise given Out of God's Oven has been parceled out to his co-writer Sarayu Srivatsa, a woman whose relationship with "home" is less ambivalent. But it is a mistake to accept either writer's pose - charitable ingenue or cantankerous snob - too readily. These are devices, and terrific ones, for examining what the writers refer to as "terrible landmarks in Indian history". The pairing of the cynic and the optimist gives these "travels in a fractured land" a dramatic urgency, as grim event after grim event threatens, by education, to make the lark more and more like the owl.

The book's title, which derives from a story Srivatsa's grandmother told her to explain India's oppressive caste system, captures the essence of that struggle between innocence and experience. The first men the gods made were burned dark brown in the gods' hot clay oven, grandmother says. They became the Shudra, the pariah. Once the gods perfected the recipe, they made the beautiful, fair Brahmin. If I am a Brahmin, the young Srivatsa asks her grandmother, then why am I so dark? Just as Moraes' brutal sincerity is a mask for a great love, as emerges in his portraits of his many friends, Srivatsa's sunny optimism is a terrific foil, also, for cutting sarcasm.

Based on six years of nearly constant travel, Out of God's Oven captures the issues gripping contemporary India more completely than recent books with comparable agendas (Mark Tully's India in Slow Motion and William Dalrymple's Age of Kali come to mind). The book neither panders to the foreigner's obsessions nor caters to his ignorance. At the same time, Moraes and Srivatsa both "write like foreigners" to the extent that - unlike too many Indian journalists - they never neglect to provide the background necessary to understand the events they describe. But where a foreign correspondent like myself might be content muckraking (India is corrupt! Hindus kill Muslims!), they have the luxury of being able to go beyond sanctimonious outrage to more complex analysis.

In a book of remarkable scope, the two writers address many of the seminal events of Indian history of the past three decades, ranging from riots by Dalits (formerly untouchables) in Bombay, to the cooperative movement that empowered village women by granting them control over the marketing of the fruit of their labors, to the battle of communist Naxalites with Bihar's upper-caste landlords, to the various tragedies caused by an enduring religious mania. Though the timing of its release prompted publishers to market Out of God's Oven as a prelude to the deadly Gujarat riots, it is far more than an investigation of the persecution of Indian Muslims or Hindu fundamentalism.

Despite those numerous strengths, however, the book suffers from an over-reliance on informants who share the sensibilities and background of the authors. These interviews - spirited exchanges between the like-minded, to be sure - generate some terrific lines: "An Indian was not part of a team; he was part of a mob"; "The greatest freedom we have received from Independence [was the] freedom to talk"; "Corruption is an offshoot of hypocrisy, the habit of lying to oneself"; "Politics is the only profession where you do not need any qualifications." But the eloquent expression of consensus does not result in many new insights about the others: the fundamentalist thugs, the devoutly religious, the desperately poor.

Nevertheless, though it's peopled with too many talkers and not enough actors, Out of God's Oven is not completely without heroes: a teacher at a convent school combating the messages of religious hatred her students absorb from their parents; a 72-year-old writer who has lived among the poorest villagers of North Bengal, fighting their causes for 25 years; a man who takes in illegitimate children, mad and destitute women. But the overall feeling is that India has just too many tragedies. "I am tired, so tired," says one of these good souls. "If I had an alternative, do you think I would be doing this? Can I just leave everything and run away? They have no one else. So I continue. I have no choice. And I am so tired."

This is not the familiar quirky, mystical India that churns along, in chaos, yes, but never in collapse. It's a vision of a lighted bomb, the fuse sputtering fast. And the writers offer no solution, which means that in its darkest moments, the book seems to echo the novelist who tells Moraes: "I couldn't help you much. I think as you ask questions about India, you will find many people like me, who will point out what is wrong. That is, of course, glaringly clear. But I don't think anybody will be able to point out a way to make it right. If he could, he would be a leader, and India's tragedy is that it has none."

the untouchables

Last October, police in India's most-populous state arrested legislator Raghuraj Pratap Singh. Was it justice at last, or just politics Uttar Pradesh-style?

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in March 2003).

"HE SHOULD BE HANGED," says Vanita Mishra. She's talking about the man she believes murdered her husband. Eighteen months ago, the 24-year-old widow first approached the police in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and told them she knew a witness who had seen the man she suspected brutally beating her husband on the day he disappeared. Not only that, the alleged killer had 30 previous criminal charges against him.

The only problem was that the man she suspected was not only an alleged gangster, but also a state legislator: Raghuraj Pratap Singh, better known as "Raja Bhaiya," or Big Brother Raja. The police refused to register a case against him, Mishra believes, because they were too frightened.

For years, the handsome young legislator and his father, Udai Pratap Singh, ruled their rural district of Kunda with absolute authority. Members of the high Rajput caste, they behaved as though they still owned the land and as if the people were still their feudal subjects. Raja Bhaiya made no apologies for his ancestry, once explaining his supposed popularity by saying simply: "I am their raja." And when he drew fire from the press for holding a weekly meeting to settle the disputes of villagers, he said the people came to him because they couldn't afford to go to court.

But in October, Raja Bhaiya's freedom to rule over Kunda came to a sudden end. He was arrested on a relatively minor charge--allegedly threatening a one-time political crony--and then, some months later, amid a spiralling list of fresh police accusations, charged under India's toughest law, the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act. So why, after failing for years to arrest Raja Bhaiya, did the police suddenly move?

Many believe it's because Raja Bhaiya made the mistake of tangling with an iron-willed woman: Mayawati, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state. A former schoolteacher born into the shoemaker caste--one of the Dalit, or "untouchables"--Mayawati made her political career by showing her low-caste supporters that she could bring their erstwhile Rajput rulers and the high-caste Brahmins alike to heel.

The clash between the high-caste legislator and the low-caste chief minister is symptomatic of politics and power in India's most populous state, whose voters play a key role in deciding the make-up of the national government.

"When this nasty game of politics is played, all the social and moral norms are kept aside," says Shriv Narayan Singh, a senior lawyer in the state and long-time political observer. Those entering politics have two objectives, he says: Either they want to do something for the country, or they want to do something for themselves. "The majority," he adds, "is interested in the game of power."

When Raja Bhaiya was on the election trail, his chosen symbol was a chair. According to local journalists, the chair implied that he would back whoever occupied the chief minister's seat. But when Mayawati became chief minister for the third time last year, Raja Bhaiya eschewed that pragmatism. Denied a ministerial position, in October 2002 he led a group of assembly members in a revolt intended to bring down Mayawati. Less than a week later, he was in jail.

That was just the beginning. In a raid on January 25, police claimed to have discovered Raja Bhaiya's father in possession of a high-powered rifle, making him liable to prosecution under the tough new Prevention of Terrorism Act. Conveniently for the police, Udai Pratap then "hinted" that he and his son had conspired to assassinate Mayawati, according to District Magistrate Mohammed Mustafa. (Both father and son are being held incommunicado and have not been able to comment publicly.) After a brief search, the police say they also discovered a skull and partial skeleton that they suspect are the remains of Vanita Mishra's missing husband in a 400-hectare lake next to Raja Bhaiya's estate. Before long, father and son were jailed under the anti-terrorism law, which shifts the burden of proof onto the accused and denies defendants bail for at least a year.

It was a remarkable reversal of fortunes. Despite the list of charges against him, Raja Bhaiya has never been convicted of a crime. And for nearly 10 years, he maintained an unshakeable hold on his state-assembly seat. In 1993, he defeated his nearest opponent by the largest margin ever. Three years later, in 1996, he did even better. Critics say he forced his constituents to vote for him with an army of thugs known as the Raja Bhaiya Youth Brigade. During elections, not a single opposing campaign poster could be found in Kunda. "It could be because the other parties realize it is a lost cause, campaigning against me here," Raja Bhaiya suggested at the time.

In the 2002 assembly elections, when the Election Commission halted the counting of votes because of alleged irregularities and ordered the poll to be repeated--this time with extra security--Raja Bhaiya took an even greater share, 85%, of the vote.

Police claim Raja Bhaiya also used his youth brigade to frighten other traders out of the local liquor trade--which the government estimates is worth about 50 million rupees ($1 million) a year. And, police add, by taking over government land and flooding it to form the lake by his estate, he built a fisheries business that generated as much as 100,000 rupees a day, tax-free.

The charges registered with the police against the legislator over the years comprise a litany of heinous crimes: rioting, extortion, robbery, assault, kidnapping, attempted murder and murder. But according to a lawyer who represents the family, in 12 of the 20 cases registered before he alienated Mayawati, Raja Bhaiya was either acquitted or the charges were dropped. In the eight others, as well as the dozen or so brought against him since he squared off with Mayawati, Raja Bhaiya's family maintains he is innocent, slandered by his political opponents. The new district magistrate of Kunda has another explanation. "People have been frightened to testify against him," says Mustafa. "He terrorized the people."

Few claim Raja Bhaiya and his father are choirboys. But, equally, few believe his arrest represents a sincere effort to rid the government of known criminals. A number of high-caste politicians--most from Mayawati's coalition partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)--vocally opposed his arrest under the anti-terrorism act, accusing Mayawati of misusing the law to dispose of her enemies. Not only was the timing of the most serious charge against Raja Bhaiya suspect, but some of Mayawati's own ministers have long charge sheets of their own, her critics say.

Crime and politics have long been locked in an unhealthy embrace in Uttar Pradesh. Criminals once relied on political patrons, says Ashish Nandi of New Delhi's Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. "Now they themselves have entered politics." Criminals can help politicians gain and retain power, Nandi explains, by capturing poll booths, organizing demonstrations or stirring up violence. In exchange, politicians can help them avoid prosecution. Criminals became even more involved in politics when they began to realize the nature of the immunity that political power granted them. In the 2002 state assembly elections, more than a sixth of the 5,539 candidates had police records.

Despite the attacks on her cabinet colleagues, Mayawati has turned the row over Raja Bhaiya's arrest to her advantage. In an official statement, she denied it had been motivated by political expediency or by caste conflict. But her more spirited remarks to the press were couched in the rhetoric of a champion of the oppressed against the oppressor. "These people have been spreading terror since ages," she told reporters. "The people of Kunda were leading a life of slavery. They did not feel they were living in a free country."

She called on the central leadership of the BJP to rein in their local representatives, whose opposition to Raja Bhaiya's arrest threatened the state's coalition government. Recognizing the importance of the Dalit chief minister as an ally in next year's general elections, the BJP's national leaders ordered their local representatives to toe the line. That made Mayawati even more popular with her supporters. Even when a video surfaced allegedly showing Mayawati exhorting party members to divert money intended for development projects to party coffers, she weathered the storm.

Vanita Mishra, a Brahmin, might be the chief minister's biggest fan. In December, she finally persuaded the police to lodge her case. "Only when I read in the paper that Mayawati was going after him did I go back to the police," she says, fighting back tears. "I only want justice for myself and my two children for what we have suffered on account of this man."

But justice is not easy to find in India's courts. A few weeks after police found the skull they say is that of Vanita Mishra's husband, the man who allegedly led them to it, their chief witness in the case, was killed. The police say the killers must have wanted to keep him from testifying; others says the police killed him to stop him from changing his story in court. The skull isn't talking.

booker choice all at sea

Life of Pi, By Yann Martel.

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared the Far Eastern Economic Review in November 2002).

LIFE OF PI, the winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize, is a delightful little book--and I mean that in the worst possible way. Author Yann Martel and the British-based committee that chose the winning book made much of the novel's supposed religious overtones. But Martel's claim that this is a book that will make you believe in God, or at least question why you don't, is a gross exaggeration.

Life of Pi is no Moby Dick. By choosing to award the Commonwealth and Ireland's highest literary prize to Life of Pi, the Man Booker committee has rewarded the most irritating characteristic of contemporary literary writing: whimsy.

The plot summary is itself discouraging. A young Indian boy, Piscine Molitor Patel--named after a Parisian swimming pool--cutely adopts Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. A shipwreck strands him on a lifeboat in the Pacific with a 205-kilogram Bengal tiger. Relying on nothing but his wits and an amusingly frank survival guidebook, "Pi" must find a way to collect water and catch fish. Pi must also tame the tiger, which has its own name to inspire a collective groan, Richard Parker (which was also the name of a victim in a notorious case of cannibalism at sea in the 1870s).

Reviewers and publicists have described this story as a boys' adventure for grown-ups and as a fable of magical realism. But it lacks the seriousness to rank among either. Because the tale is told tongue in cheek--precluding readers' suspension of disbelief--it fails as a boys' adventure story. Nor does the novel have the historical sweep and philosophical depth on which magical realism depends. Life of Pi gives you the feeling the author is just fooling around. Moreover, and this is its worst failing, Pi's sojourn in the lifeboat--with no speaking companions--feels about 50 days too long.

Nevertheless, the Booker judges' choice of a light novel was not altogether surprising. Before meeting to choose a winner from among the short-listed novels, one of the judges, comedian David Baddiel, touched off a row in literary London by bemoaning the preponderance of "pompous, portentous and pretentious fiction." Although fellow judge and critic Erica Wagner immediately came out in support of the "longer, denser read," rightly saying that "after all, it is a prize for literature," Baddiel was obviously not alone on the panel. In choosing Life of Pi, the committee awarded the Booker to perhaps the most frivolous novel ever to receive the coveted prize, which comes with a cash award of £50,000 ($79,000).

Still more disconcerting is the apparent moral blindness of the judges. In its determination to look on the bright side, Life of Pi presents us--with a wink and a nudge--the fantasy of an Indian boy who believes simultaneously in God, Allah and Vishnu. There is value in acknowledging the possibility of goodness, but a novel that turns three of India's religions into an amusing foible--not for black comedy, but for vaudeville--obscures rather than enlightens.

No murderous riots here; the reactions to Pi's trinity of religions are trivial, summed up by his brother's teasing: "So, Swami Jesus, will you go on the haj this year?" When the narrator takes on religious absolutists, he descends into platitudes. "These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart." This banality amounts to a refusal to look for the truth--surely the greatest failure for any writer. These are the homilies of Forrest Gump, not the wisdom of Ishmael.