Category Archives: India

by | 20 September 2008 · 12:31 pm

India’s Sweatshop Diamonds

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 96-97:

When India had shielded its economy behind tariff walls, its share in world trade had dwindled into insignificance. As mentioned earlier, ‘export pessimism’ was the prevailing mood at that time. It was not easy to change this mood so only new branches of export production could escape it. Nowadays three new types of commodity account for more than half of India’s total exports. Diamond processing was the first and the most unexpected success story of them all. Of course, India had been known as a source of beautiful diamonds in ancient times, but in modern times South Africa has been the leading producer of raw diamonds and the processing is done in Western Europe in places such as Antwerp. Only a few decades ago Jewish merchants controlled almost the entire diamond trade and Jewish artisans participated in the processing of these precious stones. Suddenly a community of Gujarati merchants from Palanpur cut into this trade and made use of cheap and skilled labour available to them in places such as Surat and other towns of Gujarat as well as on the outskirts of Mumbai.

India has to import the raw diamonds; the contribution of its export industry is the value added by expert processing. A breakthrough was provided to this new industry by the creative use of industrial diamonds. Only about a quarter of all diamonds mined are normally fit for jewellery; the rest are passed on to the makers of machine tools for cutting and grinding. Most industrial diamonds are small. Gujarati entrepreneurs knew how to get these tiny stones processed and adopted novel designs of jewellery which sparkled due to the collective effect of many small stones rather than the individual radiance of larger and very expensive diamonds. This created a new market of middle-class consumers who could not afford expensive jewellery. But the Gujarati entrepreneurs also ventured into the market for very precious stones. They even created new brands such as the Nakshatra diamonds endorsed by the Indian actress Aishwarya Rai, a former Miss World.

The buying of diamonds in places like Antwerp is done by the so-called ‘sightholders’, experts entitled to inspect raw diamonds and select them for their respective companies. Earlier these sightholders were a charmed circle of insiders, but the Gujarati merchants gained access to the circle and now almost dominate it. Eleven of twelve diamonds processed in the world are now processed in India. This, of course, means that the fast growth which this Indian industry registered in recent years is bound to level off. The value of Indian exports of precious stones – mostly processed diamonds – has expanded by leaps and bounds. In 1966 the value of these exports was a mere US$ 25 million; by 2004 it amounted to US$ 14 billion.

India’s greatest advantage is the low wage paid for the rather demanding job of diamond processing. The fixture in which the diamond is held during processing is called a dop. With a semi-automatic dop a worker can polish 800 to 1,000 diamonds per day. The wages of Indian workers in this line are about 10 per cent of those earned by their colleagues in Antwerp. This is why more than 800,000 workers are employed in the various workshops in Surat whereas in Antwerp there are only about 30,000 still active in this field. Surat is just one of the Indian centres of diamond processing, though perhaps the largest. The conditions of the workers are generally quite miserable and children are also recruited for this work. Large profits are reaped only by the entrepreneurs, who have now extended the scope of their work to other Asian countries and even to Russia.

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by | 20 September 2008 · 7:05 am

India’s ‘Fraternal Capital’ and Contractor Networks

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 100-101:

Tiruppur, a town near Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, has emerged as a major centre of knitwear production and Sharad Chari has made a fascinating study of the mode of production in this town. He has described the emergence of ‘fraternal capital’ as a typical form of cooperation among small-scale entrepreneurs in this field. Most of the owners of the small workshops and even a large number of their employees belong to the Gounder caste of peasants who have made a successful transition to industrial production. The Gounder peasants are used to hard work in intensive agriculture where the landholder and his labourers are working together and this style of operations has been transferred to the shop floor where the owner is always present, usually controlling the stitching table where the cloth is converted into garments. Gounders who want to emphasise the special features of their work often make it appear as a kind of ‘work ethic’. Actually it helps them to justify the control of labour in their small-scale industry. They do not strive for economies of scale as these would be diseconomies under the official rules favouring small-scale enterprises. Accordingly, successful entrepreneurs do not invest their capital in expanding their production, but in setting up ‘fraternal’ enterprises run by other members of the Gounder caste, albeit these people are not necessarily related to them in terms of family ties. Total production has thus grown very quickly and whereas earlier only men worked in this industry, more and more women have been recruited in recent years. Most workers are paid by piece rate or they work under various types of contracts rather than receiving regular wages.

When production for export increased, a new elite of export merchants arose from the ranks of these small entrepreneurs. Smart young men in business suits, wearing sunglasses, can be seen chatting with their relatives on the shop floor who provide them with the material which they market in New York or elsewhere. Many of these exporters are assemblers rather than producers. The links of fraternal capital connect all these people and make it difficult for outsiders to penetrate this business. In this way fraternal capital provides horizontal and vertical linkages which are otherwise only found in big corporations. Decentralized supervision – and exploitation – of labour is an asset in this type of business organization. Contracting in and out enables the small entrepreneurs to respond to changing demand. Such an organization helps to defend the class of entrepreneurs against labour unions, which have a strong tradition in this area.

Another interesting example of the control of labour in this region is the putting-out system practised by a producer of rag carpets in the adjacent Erode District. He uses rags from the hosiery industry and gets carpets woven for the big Swedish firm IKEA. Initially it was traditional weavers who got involved in this business, but soon the putting-out system was extended to villages whose supply of labour was of a very different kind. In a Gounder village affected by water scarcity, the peasants took up carpet weaving in order to survive. In another village inhabited by migrant construction workers, the women who had also participated in this work shifted to carpet weaving, which they could do at home. Tapping labour resources of different kinds for export production is a characteristic feature of the informal sector of India’s economy.

Similar features of decentralized production and exploitation of labour can be observed in the garment industry of Ahmadabad, a city once famous for its large composite textile mills, most of which have long since closed down or are ‘sick‘. But in the 1990s hundreds of small workshops producing ready-made garments sprang up. Their production is supplemented by home-based women who stitch garments for entrepreneurs who operate a putting-out system. These women had been used to stitching petticoats and children’s wear; they own very simple sewing machines. When they were required to stitch more complicated garments for export their skills and their machines often proved insufficient for the new tasks. They usually earn piece rates which amount to about 2 to 5 per cent of the value of the articles they produce. With such low wages they can hardly afford to invest in add-ons to their sewing machine for new lines of production. Nevertheless, they somehow managed to get on with their work. This area of Gujarat is also famous for its embroidery, which has been successfully adapted to the requirements of export production, a line of production in which India is ahead of China.

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by | 6 September 2008 · 1:59 pm

What China Taught India, 1962

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 46-48:

The big blow to [Afro-Asian] solidarity came in 1962 when China invaded India in order to settle a border dispute. Nehru had assumed that China was an anti-imperialist power just like India and that such powers would live in peace with each other. Moreover, he had supported China’s control over Tibet, which was supposed to be an autonomous region. Unfortunately, he had failed to get from China a definitive statement concerning the India-China border in return for this support. The treaty which Nehru concluded with China in 1954 only mentioned some passes through which the trade between the two countries might flow. It also contained the five principles (panchshila) relating to mutual benefit and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs which Nehru henceforth regarded as the cornerstone of his foreign policy. However, none of this could prevent a clash with China. In 1959, the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s priestly ruler, fled to India and Nehru granted asylum to him but did not permit him to establish a Tibetan government in exile. In the following months border clashes increased and notes were exchanged which Nehru did not publish until he was forced to do so by the Indian parliament. In 1961, the Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai visited India for border negotiations. Nehru had collected all relevant maps and was surprised that Chou En-lai did not wish to look at them but immediately proposed a deal: China would recognize India’s eastern border as delineated by the McMahon Line of 1914 if India would leave the Karakoram Pass and Aksai Chin (northeast Kashmir) to China. China had secretly occupied most of Aksai Chin in the 1950s, so India would simply have to acquiesce in this loss. The access to the Karakoram highway was of great strategic importance to China for the control of its western provinces. However, Nehru as head of a democratic government could not deal with national territory as easily as Chou En-lai had expected. The deal was not accepted and border clashes continued. Finally, China forced the deal on an unwilling India by means of a well-planned military offensive. When the USA and the Soviet Union were busy with the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, a division of Chinese troops crossed the McMahon Line in the east and soon reached the Assamese plains. But this was a diversionary move. These troops withdrew before their supply lines could be cut. In the meantime the Chinese also launched a massive offensive in the west to capture the Karakorum highway – and they did not withdraw as this was the area which really interested them. Subsequently, there was a conspiracy of silence between India and China as to what had happened there. India was not willing to admit its losses and China would not reveal its illegitimate gains. China has adopted an attitude of superiority ever since and sometimes this has even been expressed quite openly. When China invaded Vietnam in 1979, Deng Xiao-ping compared this to what China had done to India in 1962. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who visited China at that time as India’s Minister of External Affairs in order to ‘normalize’ relations with China, got this message and immediately returned home. ‘Normalization’ had to wait for a long time.

The clash between India and China had sounded the death knell of Afro-Asian Solidarity even before 1962, but anti-colonial solidarity still motivated Nehru, who was sensitive to appeals from leaders of countries which were involved in their freedom struggle. In September 1961, Kenneth Kaunda, the future President of Zambia who had attended the Belgrade Conference of the Nonaligned Nations, visited New Delhi and gave a lecture in which he blamed Nehru for tolerating Portuguese colonial rule in Goa. He argued that rather than setting an encouraging example which the Africans could follow Nehru obviously wanted to wait until the Africans had overcome Portuguese colonial rule, whereupon Goa would then fall into his lap like a ripe fruit. Kaunda was clearly quite right in assessing Nehru’s motives and his speech stung him into action. Goa was liberated by the Indian army in December 1961; it proved to be a walkover but this could not have been predicted. As a member of NATO, Portugal was well armed and had a strong garrison in Goa. It could also rely on support from Pakistan. If the Portuguese Governor-General had decided to defend Goa seriously, the liberation could have ended in a bloodbath. Fortunately, he only blew up a few bridges and surrendered gracefully as he was aware of the far superior power of the Indian army. This was Nehru’s last great triumph, but he experienced it with mixed feelings. He lost his reputation as an apostle of peace and was berated by every Western power. This he could live with, but the humiliating defeat he suffered at the hands of the Chinese in 1962 broke his heart. He must have felt very deeply that he had failed as architect of India’s foreign policy.

Nehru’s successors adopted a more realistic approach: India’s regional position was more important to them than its role in world affairs. The twin challenges of China and Pakistan converted India with a vengeance into a self-conscious territorial state concerned with its defence. A retired Indian general had once said that the colonial legacy of a huge army embarrassed India’s political leaders as much as inheriting a brewery would embarrass a teetotaller. Nehru did not invest much money in armaments; however, this changed after India’s defeat by the Chinese in 1962. Defence expenditure was stepped up, which alarmed Pakistan. The Chinese had shown that India could be beaten and had thus set Pakistan an example, but due to India’s rapid armament, the window of opportunity for Pakistan seemed to be closing fast. Pakistan’s military dictator Ayub Khan was pushed by his young Foreign Minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, to attack India in Kashmir. Bhutto had forged a military alliance with China in 1963 and Pakistan had yielded a large part of territory to the west of the Karakoram Pass to China at that time. Nehru’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, was considered weak and inexperienced. Pakistan tested his reaction to a border intrusion in the Rann of Katch in the summer of 1965. Shastri requested the then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to arbitrate in this matter, which only served to encourage Ayub Khan to launch his Operation Grand Slam in September 1965 and he sent his tanks to cut the only connection between India and Kashmir. If Shastri had again called for arbitration, Ayub Khan could have finished his business in Kashmir and then negotiated from a position of strength. But this time Shastri ordered his troops to launch a counter-attack on Lahore. He also refused to listen to a Chinese ultimatum which referred to their threat to cross the border of Sikkim. Pakistan had hoped that China would open a second front in the east, but the Chinese did not follow up their ultimatum and bitterly disappointed their Pakistani allies. China had encouraged Pakistan in the hope that it would do some damage to India, but it was not interested in investing anything in this war as it had reached its aims in 1962. The same Chinese stratagem was repeated in 1971 when Pakistan lost its eastern half and the Chinese supported Pakistan, but did not give the Pakistanis help when they needed it.

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by | 31 August 2008 · 10:40 am

Wordcatcher Tales: girmitya, kala pani

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), p. 1:

India is a state encompassing a civilization. It includes a multitude of ethnic and linguistic groups which share a common cultural background. Its historical continuity is amazing…. In the recent past India has also become a territorial nation state with defined borders and institutions guarding its territorial integrity. The idea of a clearly delineated territoriality was not prevalent in India in earlier times. The Himalayas in the north and the ocean encircling the country appeared to those living inside it as ‘natural’ boundaries. In fact the mountain people never conceived of the Himalayas as a boundary and they ‘transgressed’ it in many ways. Many of the coastal people, on the other hand, participated throughout the ages in maritime trade. The orthodox prejudice against crossing the kala pani (black water) was not shared by them. This aversion to seafaring was a relatively late phenomenon in an era when people in India became more introverted and defensive.

The awareness of the ‘natural’ boundaries of India did not imply a feeling of national identity in territorial terms. Nationalism first found expression among educated people and did not affect the common people for along time. The poor people from northern India who were transported to Fiji as indentured servants to work on the sugar plantations did not refer to themselves as ‘Indians’ but as girmityas. The word girmit was a Hindi neologism derived from ‘agreement’, the document which bound them to their servitude. Their identity was derived from this common fate. It was only later when emissaries of Mahatma Gandhi reached Fiji that these girmityas became Indians.

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by | 23 August 2008 · 2:09 am

India’s Rise: Sick Mills vs. Powermills

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 88-89:

In the years of the Great Depression, the Indian textile industry was partially protected under the regime of imperial preference, Production for the home market expanded, but there was hardly any investment in new machinery. Moreover, India had no textile machine industry of its own. During the Second World War, no machinery could be imported, but the mills worked around the clock under the regime of government procurement. By the end of the war, spindles and looms were worn out and mill-owners would have liked to have invested in new machinery. However, foreign exchange was scarce as India had no immediate access to its reserves accumulated in the Bank of England. At this stage something happened which had terrible consequences for the future of the Indian textile industry. Mahatma Gandhi had compelled the Indian government to abolish the food-grain controls introduced during the war. Prices fell after the controls had been abolished – as Gandhi had predicted. His followers then tried to apply the same rule to cotton texiles, which had also been subjected to controls. The mill-owners warned the government that they would not be able to cope with the rising demand with their decrepit looms. Nevertheless, the controls were abolished and prices rose. Controls were then re-imposed in August 1948. At the same time positive discrimination in favour of the products of handloom weavers was introduced. These weavers were dear to Gandhi as he regarded them as the paragon of the type of cottage industry which he preferred to the mills. The well-meaning protectors of the handloom weavers did not notice that these weavers had to a large extent been replaced by powerloom weavers, whose rise will be described below. The mills were now prevented from modernizing their equipment and expanding their production. They were turned into living fossils. The mill-owners continued production half-heartedly. There seemed no longer to be any future for this industry. Some mills were closed down as early as the 1950s and 1960s. To make matters worse, a prolonged strike of textile labour in Mumbai in the 1980s sounded the death knell for the industry in this metropolis.

It was quite natural that textile labour should be frustrated under these conditions, but resorting to a strike in an industry which was already doomed proved to be counterproductive. The workers turned to Dr Datta Samant, an independent labour leader who had organized a very succesful strike for the workers of the Premier automobile factory in Mumbai. This strike ended with a substantial increase in wages, which were tied to a productivity index. Samant was a medical doctor who knew nothing about economics and thought that his recipe would work in the textile industry just as it had done in the automobile industry. He was a charismatic leader and inspired the workers to continue their strike, which started in 1982, for eighteen months. (His life ended tragically when he was openly gunned down by gangsters in 1997.) The result of the strike which he had led was perverse: the workers shifted to the powerlooms in order to earn a living and the mill-owners procured cloth from these power looms and marketed it. By the time the strike ended the powerlooms had taken over most of the production and the mills were ‘sick’.

The phenomenon of a ‘sick mill’ can only be understood in the Indian context. Elsewhere a sick mill would go bankrupt and close down. In India, however, where there are no unemployment benefits, laid-off workers are politically dangerous and therefore the government will nurse sick mills to keep them alive even if they cease to produce anything. The mill-owners soon learned to make a profit out of being sick. The Reserve Bank of India sanctioned favourable loans for such sick mills. Clever manipulators could siphon off enough money from such loans and use it for other purposes. The production of mill-made cloth declined steeply under such conditions, from about 3.4 to 2 billion metres in the decade of the 1980s. In the same period the production of powerlooms increased from 5 to 11.4 billion metres.

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by | 3 October 2007 · 6:28 pm

Burma: Engagement Has Failed, Isolation Has Failed

I’ve posted a good bit about Burma since starting to blog almost four years ago, but I’ve been hesitant to post much now because I feel we are all little more than drive-by rubberneckers, turning our heads toward Burma just long enough to catch a glimpse of yet another passing segment in the endless video of disaster news that no one can really do much about—apart from finding a way to pin the blame on one’s favorite ideological demons, of course. Every disaster is good for blind partisans.

But a current article in Foreign Affairs seems to offer a useful retrospective on two opposing diplomatic dead-ends. Both engagement by its neighbors and isolation by more distant but powerful forces seem to have failed.

U.S. policy toward Burma is stuck. Since September 1988, the country has been run by a corrupt and repressive military junta (which renamed the country Myanmar). Soon after taking power, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), as the junta was then called, placed Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition party the National League for Democracy, under house arrest. In 1990, it allowed national elections but then ignored the National League for Democracy’s landslide victory and clung to power. Then, in the mid-1990s, amid a cresting wave of post-Cold War democratization and in response to international pressure, the SLORC released Suu Kyi. At the time, there was a sense within the country and abroad that change in Burma might be possible.

But this proved to be a false promise, and the international community could not agree on what to do next. Many Western governments, legislatures, and human rights organizations advocated applying pressure through diplomatic isolation and punitive economic sanctions. Burma’s neighbors, on the other hand, adopted a form of constructive engagement in the hope of enticing the SLORC to reform. The result was an uncoordinated array of often contradictory approaches. The United States limited its diplomatic contact with the SLORC and eventually imposed mandatory trade and investment restrictions on the regime. Europe became a vocal advocate for political reform. But most Asian states moved to expand trade, aid, and diplomatic engagement with the junta, most notably by granting Burma full membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1997.

A decade later, the verdict is in: neither sanctions nor constructive engagement has worked. If anything, Burma has evolved from being an antidemocratic embarrassment and humanitarian disaster to being a serious threat to the security of its neighbors. But despite the mounting danger, many in the United States and the international community are still mired in the old sanctions-versus-engagement battle….

If ASEAN and Japan are critical components of any international approach to Burma, China and India could be the greatest obstacles to efforts to induce reform in the country. China has many interests in Burma. Over the past 15 years, it has developed deep political and economic relations with Burma, largely through billions of dollars in trade and investment and more than a billion dollars’ worth of weapons sales. It enjoys important military benefits, including access to ports and listening posts, which allow its armed forces to monitor naval and other military activities around the Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea. To feed its insatiable appetite for energy, it also seeks preferential deals for access to Burma’s oil and gas reserves….

It will also be a challenge getting India on board. Despite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s trumpeting of democratic values, India has actually become more reticent when it comes to Burma in recent years. This is particularly regrettable considering that Congress was one of the Burmese democratic opposition’s strongest supporters during much of the 1990s and that Suu Kyi continues to cite Mohandas Gandhi as a model for nonviolent resistance. The change occurred during the past decade, after New Delhi detected that China’s political and military influence in Burma was filling the void left by the international community’s deliberate isolation of the junta. Like China, India is hungry for natural gas and other resources and is eager to build a road network through Burma that would expand its trade with ASEAN. As a result, it has attempted to match China step for step as an economic and military partner of the SPDC, providing tanks, light artillery, reconnaissance and patrol aircraft, and small arms; India is now Burma’s fourth-largest trading partner. Singh’s government has also fallen for the junta’s blackmail over cross-border drug and arms trafficking and has preferred to give it military and economic assistance rather than let Burma become a safe haven for insurgents active in India’s troubled northeastern region….

Given the differing perspectives and interests of these nations, a new multilateral initiative on Burma cannot be based on a single, uniform approach. Sanctions policies will need to coexist with various forms of engagement, and it will be necessary to coordinate all of these measures toward the common end of encouraging reform, reconciliation, and ultimately the return of democracy. To succeed, the region’s major players will need to work together.

Fat chance of that happening, I’m afraid.

As a gesture of mourning for the lives being sacrificed to ‘keep the peace’, I’ll retain one header image for the rest of the week. It’s a stupa-style memorial dedicated to Japanese war dead in Burma, which I came across in the massive Okunoin cemetery at Kōya-san, one of Japanese Buddhism’s holiest sites.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 24 March 2007 · 12:33 pm

The Race for Burma’s Natural Gas

The February issue of HIMAL SOUTHASIAN reports on the competition for Burma’s huge deposits of natural gas and what it means for human rights in one of the most oppressive regimes in Asia.

Even as Southasia’s energy-strapped, fast-growing economies have led many to wonder whether antagonistic neighbours may be pushed together into forced cooperation, on the eastern edge of the region a less optimistic dynamic is playing out. Indeed, the huge natural-gas reserves of Burma have caused many Asian governments to turn a blind eye to Rangoon’s continued oppressive and non-democratic tactics.

Burma stands on the world’s tenth largest natural-gas reserves, estimated at more than 90 trillion cubic feet (tcf) in 19 on-shore and three major offshore fields. As the economies of South, Southeast and East Asia have soared upwards in recent years, the Shwe ‘gas block’ in western Burma’s Arakan state has instigated intense competition between India, China, South Korea, Thailand, Japan and Singapore. South Korea’s Daewoo International estimates that just two blocks from the Shwe gas field together have a reserve of about 20 tcf, equivalent to about 3.5 billion barrels of oil. There are currently four stakeholders in the Shwe Gas Project – Daewoo (which controls 60 percent), KOGAS of South Korea, and two Indian interests, the Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) and the Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL)….

Burma remains one of the most repressive countries in Asia, despite promises for political reform and national reconciliation by its government, which continues to spend 40 percent of the country’s national budget on defence, and just five to ten percent on health and education. Burma’s military, the Tatmadaw, is Southeast Asia’s second largest conventional force, estimated at over 400,000 troops. The junta stands to profit by up to USD 17 billion dollars from the Shwe Gas Project over its lifespan, which could become the government’s single largest source of revenue – up to USD 825 million per year….

Meanwhile, in early January 2007, just days after China and Russia jointly blocked a proposal before the United Nations Security Council to censure Rangoon’s continued human-rights abuses, the Chinese government landed a new deal to further explore Burma’s petroleum resources. Negotiations between India and Burma over gas pricing are continuing, with an agreement expected by the middle of the year. Such is the desperation for Burmese natural gas in India, and such a fear of growing Chinese influence on Burma, that human-rights issues will cut much ice in New Delhi – particularly if the Indian civil society continues to keep mum.

via The Marmot

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by | 14 March 2007 · 9:35 pm

Naipaul on Writing Fiction and Nonfiction

In the Guardian V. S. Naipaul looks back on his evolution as a writer.

I had no great love for [Trinidad], no love for its colonial smallness. I saw myself as a castaway from the world’s old civilisations, and I wished to be part of that bigger world as soon as possible. An academic scholarship in 1950, when I was 18, enabled me to leave. I went to England to do a university course with the ambition afterwards of being a writer. I never in any real sense went back.

So my world as a writer was full of flight and unfinished experience, full of the odds and ends of cultures and migrations, from India to the New World in 1880-1900, from the New World to Europe in 1950, things that didn’t make a whole. There was nothing like the stability of the rooted societies that had produced the great fictions of the 19th century, in which, for example, even a paragraph of a fairytale or parable by Tolstoy could suggest a whole real world. And soon I saw myself at the end of the scattered island material I carried with me.

But writing was my vocation; I had never wished to be anything but a writer. My practice as a writer had deepened the fascination with people and narrative that I had always had, and increasingly now, in the larger world I had wanted to join, that fascination was turning into a wish to understand the currents of history that had created the fluidity of which I found myself a part. It was necessary for me as a writer to engage with the larger world. I didn’t know how to set about it; there was no example I could follow.

The practice of fiction couldn’t help me. Fiction is best done from within and out of great knowledge. In the larger world I was an outsider; I didn’t know enough and would never know enough. After much hesitation and uncertainty I saw that I had to deal with this world in the most direct way. I had to go against my practice as a fiction writer. To record my experience as truthfully as possible I had to use the tools I had developed. So there came this divide in my writing: free-ranging fiction and scrupulous non-fiction, one supporting and feeding the other, complementary aspects of my wish to get to grips with my world. And though I had started with the idea of the nobility of the writer of the imagination, I do not now rate one way above the other.

via Arts & Letters Daily

When I finished high school I wanted to be a writer, and I studied journalism when I first started college (before dropping out). But I had already discovered that I couldn’t write very convincing dialogue, and my journalism professor told me I wrote in a very “scientific” style. So I ended up writing analytical essays, academic arguments, and—much later—travelogues. My youngest brother is the fiction-writer in the family, as was our maternal grandmother, who alternated between school-teaching and (mostly religious) writing.

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by | 22 February 2007 · 5:44 pm

What Distinguishes Coastal Peoples?

The December 2006 issue of the Journal of World History (Project Muse subscription required) starts off with an interesting article by Michael N. Pearson on littoral society.

Who are the people who live on or near the beach, those who inhabit the coastal zone, not just the beach? They have been called the shore folk, or sea nomads, or members of a littoral society. The place of port cities in littoral society is a matter of dispute. In terms of location they may qualify, though Ashin Das Gupta in his classic book on Surat made an important distinction. “To begin with there was coastal Gujarat, marshy, irregular, often broken by estuaries of the rivers and dotted with tidal flats which were submerged at high tide…. It was peopled by the truly maritime men who fished and who sailed the vessels on which trade depended. The coastal cities usually stood back a little.” On our other two criteria, occupation and culture, definition is more difficult, and things change over time. In premodern times port cities had more of a whiff of ozone about them than is the case today. The occupations of many of the inhabitants were intricately connected to the foreland and hinterland, thus making these people truly littoral. However, their economic functions and influences extended much further than their fellows on the coast, with much more extended forelands and hinterlands. Culturally, the port cities, where populations are more concentrated, are more exposed to external influences, such as élite norms from the inland, or the attentions of seafaring scholars and religious folk. Ibn Battuta traveled around the Indian Ocean, calling at port cities and being recognized for his scholarship. In return he tried to improve the quality of Islam in these places.

One way to separate out littoral from port city is to insist that littoral people live on the coast and seldom travel. Some people in the port cities—sailors, merchants—indeed go to sea and have important maritime experiences, but my concern is with fisherfolk, or people who tend the lighters that go out to meet the big ships. These folk live on shore, but work on the sea: they are very precisely littoral.

Greg Dening wrote, “Beaches are beginnings and endings. They are frontiers and boundaries of islands. For some life forms the division between land and sea is not abrupt but for human beings beaches divide the world between here and there, us and them, good and bad, familiar and strange”—an extravagant claim indeed, even if meant metaphorically. I would argue exactly the opposite, as does Jan Heesterman. He stressed that “The littoral forms a frontier zone that is not there to separate or enclose, but which rather finds its meaning in its permeability.” Braudel wrote evocatively about coastal society, stressing that it was as much land oriented as sea oriented. The life of the coast of the Mediterranean “is linked to the land, its poetry more than half-rural, its sailors may turn peasant with the seasons; it is the sea of vineyards and olive trees just as much as the sea of the long-oared galleys and the round-ships of merchants, and its history can no more be separated from that of the lands surrounding it than the clay can be separated from the hands of the potter who shapes it.”

Several modern scholars have described the shore folk of the Indian Ocean. John Middleton focused on the east African coast. “Part of the coast is the sea: the two cannot be separated. The Swahili are a maritime people and the stretches of lagoon, creek, and open sea beyond the reefs are as much part of their environment as are the coastlands. The sea, rivers, and lagoons are not merely stretches of water but highly productive food resources, divided into territories that are owned by families and protected by spirits just as are stretches of land. The Swahili use the sea as though it were a network of roads.” The very term “Swahili” means “shore folk,” those who live on the edge of the ocean. As Randall L. Pouwels has it, Swahili culture was “a child of its human and physical environment, being neither wholly ‘African’ nor ‘Arab,’ but distinctly ‘coastal,’ the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.”…

Certain languages achieved wide currency, this providing commonality around the shores of the Indian Ocean. In the earlier centuries it was Arabic. There are some five thousand words of Arabic influence in Malay, and more than that in Swahili, and about 80 percent of these are the same in Malay and Swahili, so that we have a “corpus of travelling Arabic words.” Later, a sort of nautical Portuguese and, today, some variant of English, have achieved a quasi-universal status.

Languages know no boundaries, and this also applies to coastal people. For most of history they knew little of political borders. Smuggling was an occupation, not a crime, as was the plunder of ships driven ashore. Dian Murray, an expert on piracy, wrote of a “water world,” where boundaries were indistinct, just like Villiers’s delta region. Robert Antony recently modified Murray slightly, writing of a water world of “shared social, economic, and cultural activities, and patterns that are not easily defined and delimited by ethnic and linguistic differences or by national boundaries.” He and Murray are concerned with the southern China coast, but their findings apply precisely to other coasts.

In a water world, coastal religion is also distinctive. Littoral people, living in a more cosmopolitan environment than those inland, are more likely to convert. In the case of the Indian Ocean, the cosmopolitan, international aspect of Islam has often been cited as a prime motivation for conversion, and while this applied most strongly in the port cities, it also was evident on the coasts between them. Coastal people especially found their indigenous beliefs, localized and very specific, to be inadequate as their world expanded. When they were exposed to a universal faith—Islam as exemplified by visitors from the north—the attraction was obvious, and the results can be seen all over the Indian Ocean world from the early modern period onward. There were and are widespread Islamic religious connections around the coasts. In Zanzibar one group uses a certificate of authenticity and authority issued in Indonesia. In Mayotte, off Madagascar, South Asian Islamic reformers are active. A devotional text in Indonesia was probably originally written in Arabic, either in the Middle East or in Indonesia itself, and is now available in Javanese and Acehinese. In Zanzibar Islamic books, including Qur’ans, come from Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, and Pakistan.

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by | 19 February 2007 · 6:16 pm

Malabari’s Impressions of Englishwomen, 1893

What strikes you most about Englishwomen is their look of health, strength, elasticity, all proclaiming a freedom of mind, to begin with. How they walk, and talk, and carry themselves generally! How they rush in and out, saying good-bye with the right hand turned towards themselves, meaning what our women in India always say, “vehela aujo,” come back soon! How they kiss one another, and offer their children, even their cats and dogs to be kissed by the friends departing! Does this last ceremony show heart-hunger, or is it affectation? Here they are, half a dozen of them rushing into my omnibus (the Lord have mercy on an unprotected orphan!) squeezing themselves into their seats. I am between two of the prettiest and quietest, feeling a strange discomfort. As the bus hobbles along, I feel my fair neighbours knocking against me every moment. They do not seem to mind it at all; it is a matter of course. Why, then, should I cry out against the inevitable? Evil to him who evil thinks. We are all too busy here, reading the paper, chatting about the weather, minding our packages and our toes. Further, I find both my neighbours resting their parasols between them and me on either side. A straw shows how the breeze blows. The breeze that I have just discovered is very refreshing to my soul. I have also noted that respectable Englishwomen rather avoid entering a carriage occupied by men. It is mainly through such experience that I am learning to take a charitable view of ladies sitting on the knees of gentlemen, or gentlemen on the knees of ladies, when three of a family happen to be in one hansom, or more than ten in a railway carriage. These sights, queer as they are, do not offend me now. They would be an eyesore amongst our own people. I myself could hardly bear them at first; but that is no reason why I should judge others in such a matter, before I am well equipped to form a judgment.

I have said above that the average Englishwoman strikes me most by her healthy looks and active habits. But, as usual, there is another side to this picture. One often meets with the anaemic and the consumptive, victims of overwork, starvation, or dissipation, in themselves or their parents. How pathetic is the sight of one of these girls, moving softly like a ghost, with a frame so fragile as to be driven by the wind behind, with a transparent skin and glassy eyes, exhausted by the effort to creep on to the platform, and going directly to sleep in the carriage, with the delicate little mouth half open, as if to allow the breath of life to ebb out without a struggle! It fills me with grief to watch this fair slight being as if in the process of dissolution. And yet I sit there, fascinated by her presence, unmindful of time or distance.

SOURCE: “Malabari: A Love-Hate Affair with the British,” in Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, edited by Tabish Khair, Martin Leer, Justin D. Edwards, and Hanna Ziadesh (Indiana U. Press, 2005), pp. 374-375

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