Upper caste-lower caste

Pratiloma unions: the woman is of a higher caste than the man
Anuloma: Upper caste men are permitted sexual access to women of their own or lower castes

I read a fascinating article by Mary E. John in a question of silence? called 'Globalisation, Sexuality and the Visual Field' in which she says that pratiloma relationships tend to "be introduced through 'eve teasing' sequences, where class and gender are played off one another". About anuloma, she says "'Happy endings' demand that the heroine has learnt to subdue her 'uppity' ways, while the hero has his family and bloodline, and therefore also, fortune and respect, restored to him. In other words, if anuloma can appear as legitimate, even progressive love, pratiloma is approached through sexual harassment. Where the latter creates a certain sexual disturbance by rendering the play of power visible, the former more easily lends itself to the kind of idealisation of conjugality that is being currently promoted on a number of fronts".

one morning in knightsbridge

The Deputy High Commissioner didn't address me. It didn't occur to me, until on the way out it was pointed out to me that he actually completely ignored me.

He was amenable to speak at the Conference we were inviting him to.

He said he even had a particular background in disarmament.

He talked, man to man, with my colleague in a blue suit, about his view that other peace movements, such as the landmine one, had failed; about South Asian security being directed by a completely different set of guidelines from that of the Middle East; about being able to present his Government's views and his suggestions to build the process for dialogue on the issue of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East that we were inviting him to contribute toward.

He was courteous, self deprecating.

But he didn't address me. And what strikes me, is that I sort of took it for granted that he wouldn't. It would be a man-to-man on weapons and wars.

Often in the higher echelons of South Asian bureucracy and diplomacy, whether waiting for a journalist visa or a Ministerial interview, I find myself quickly reverting to I'm-a-little-lost-please-help mode. I did it at the Indian High Commission yesterday, for instance. The young girl in London thing. Laughing a lot, wondering look. Child-like, till I was pandered to completely. Conversed with, put through to officials in seconds, given phone numbers.

Charming.

Where is the ladies?

The Tate Modern has new displays on cities - looking at them in terms of space, density, speed and so on with statistics, photographs and films to document the dynamics of some of the world's largest cities.

What fascinated me enough to go back again was Paromita Vohra's Q2P.

The second time around, I watched bits of it with a contrarian friend (I wish he would read this blog, but he's busy scrabbling for controversy and virtual fights elsewhere in cyberspace and none of that here!) who got completely peeved with what he seemed to consider the upper caste gaze of the filmmaker and her condescending jibes at the sort of Regular Roadside Romeo figures (in caps to mark my utmost respect for this ubiquitious constituent of life on an Indian street) who were being constantly interviewed through the film.

The filmmaker is out exploring the marginalising of women in India's public spaces and the reductivist view of her (seen as an object, rather than as a real human being with bodily functions, for instance) in popular culture and in people's attitudes and then watching this translate onto the larger canvas of public planning and city growth that ignores women.

The filmmaker chooses the gendered spaces of women's toilets looking at their practicalities and realities to reflect on the space women occupy in public. She looks at where they are situated, how small they are, how much they cost to use, who else occupies them and so on. She interviews members of the Sulabh group who set up a network of public toilets, asking them questions that relate to women's use. She interviews men. The interviews with the men are what friend objected to - most interviewees produced sniggers or looks of disbelief from the audience as they offered views which suggested they could not view women as needing to perform the same functions as them or having real needs.

Friend thought this was pointless - almost as if she was using the unknown man on the street as a fall guy and poking fun at his views? Perhaps because you could argue that these men were part of a larger culture and could not be isolated from it and then ridiculed in these rarified spaces of art gallery/sensitive film audience?

Seemed to me though like she was using irony to demonstrate how institutionalised some beliefs were. Does she not have the license to do that, to make her larger point more effective?

Watch the clip, but better still watch the entire film if you can.

Shilpa Shetty and the criminal court

After all the hype preceding the entry of Shilpa Shetty onto crazed reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother, all the talk of her "reaching out to Brit Asian audiences" (film professor on BBC Radio4), clearing out misconceptions about India or just attempting to revive a flagging career, the last thing I expected would hit the headlines was alleged racism on the show.

Today, media regulator Offcom reports over 7,500 complaints and Channel 4 received 2,000. Relevantly, part of the debate asks whether the (obnoxious) three girls also in the house with Shilpa, and slandering her, are just bullying and being generally offensive or whether their behaviour and that of Jackiey Budden's constitutes racism.

Sure, you could argue that what this is, is class difference at play, but I'm distinctly uncomfortable with the inability of the perpetrators of this alleged "racism" to imagine a world outside of theirs. What's with Jackiey not even attempting to pronounce Shilpa's name in the beginning ("I can't understand it"?!), the reluctance to buy garam masala for the house? ("... as long as I can have my smoked mackerel", "can we have some fish fingers and chips?"), poking fun at her accent?

What does it take to label behaviour as racist? Does it have to be actual race-driven slander? "that ... Paki" (which apparently was never said)? I think this refusal to see behaviour/habits/mannerisms in their context (which may not be yours), to refuse to broaden your horizon a little wider than the corner pub and to be unaccepting of difference... I think these traits constitute racism just as strongly as direct race-related verbal abuse.

And the ugly saga on BB resonated, oddly enough, at a totally different setting today: a hearing at the Old Bailey, the central criminal courts for the UK and Wales. I went in to hear witnesses testifying on a torture case and caught some of the most surreal exchanges I've heard in my life. Ever.

Witness in stand - Pakistani man, unable to understand or speak English, using an interpreter and attempting to give details of incidents of torture occuring some years ago. To an all-white jury (apparently it's randomly picked? Which makes zero sense to me because, just as randomly, they could be all-BNP members?).

Mid-way through a questioning slowed down significantly by the continuous translation, prosecution asks about a crane the witness had something to do with.

(Paraphrase)
Were you hired as a construction worker?
Were you building?
Were you using the crane to build?

Repeated No's, then the witness explains he used it for agriculture.

Lawyers teams, security, judge all twitter. It's funny to them - going along an expected track and suddenly the Hindi-speaking man in the turban throws them off guard. A crane for agriculture - who'd have thought! Giggle, smirk.

Then a little questioning about a cockerel fight. Some more raised eyebrows, apparent mirth.

You drove one hour with the men yet you don't remember what they said?
I could not hear them.
They were in the same car as you but you could not hear them?
I have an old 1974 model car; it makes a very loud when I drive it.
People shout when they can't hear each other, do they not? Could you not hear their shouting?
I was concentrating on the road, I could not make out their words.

Who will explain the clatter of loud cars, the potholes and treachorous terrain of village roads to this sceptical prosecutor untangling the facts with apparent incredulity on a quiet lane off St. Paul's Cathedral? Who will magically extend his imagination to a village square where men gather around raucous cockerel fights?

Referring to an event a while ago, the defence judge helpfully explains to the jury the witness might not be able to have the "same concept of time" as them, but they should note there is an intervening gap of 18 months between the event described and the next one being recorded.

Who decides that because the witness claimed he could not remember one event because it was "so long ago" he does not have the same "concept of time" as the jury?

You were given this man's chickens and parrots to keep whilst he went away?
Yes.
For how long did he say he would be gone?
He did not say.
Did you not ask him?
No.
A man leaves his chickens and parrots with you and you do not ask him when he will return to claim them?
I knew he would take them back when he returned.

Who will explain to the amused courtroom that perhaps notions of ownership are culturally determined? Who will explain that perhaps leaving your chickens and parrots with someone in a small village near Rawalpindi is perhaps not the same as leaving your goldfish with a friend in London while you holiday in Tunis over the weekend?

Ask the witness if he understands the term "on-the-run"?
Long exhange between interpreter and witness, no doubt trying to convey the essence of what is a pithy English phrase but perhaps has no direct translation, or one that is immediately evident to the interpreter at any rate. No response.
Does he know what it means to be 'on-the-run'? I'm sorry I don't know how you would translate that? (Helpless, understanding smiles are exchanged across the court. "What a hard case to try - no communication possible. Deep sigh".)
Another long exchange as interpreter tries to translate despite the apparent stupidity of asking an interpreter to directly translate an English phrase.
Finally the answer: Yes.

Court laughs out loud in relief.
--
Was this complete disconnect between the witness and the lawyers a manifestation of racism? Their implied superiority, their open laughs at a world they could not imagine, their insinuations against a culture that might regard ownership, friendship, community different from their own?

I'm only too aware that it is the prosecution's job to rip apart a seemingly plausible testimonial, but I also had just spent the morning listening to a case related to a stabbing incident where a young, black boy from a housing estate stabbed to death another unarmed man and although the prosecution was predictably harsh, it seemed she was wilfully pasting over considerations of the general hostility of such neighbourhoods, the possibility of violence, the need to attack before you're attacked (the boy had just been punched), the likelihood that most young men carry some form of weaponry and so on to instead play up existent stereotypes and fissures in society and broaden them in order to gain credence from the jury.

Here too, by positioning the witness as the teller-of-fantastic-tales we have an argument that is built not on the "rational" principles of justice, the bare facts, the who-what-where, but, increasingly, one that plays up difference and seeks to discount the facts told by someone who has perhaps different concepts of time than you. Who says weird things. Who participates in cockerel fights. Who is so different from you, the all-white London-based jury, that you may begin to wonder how much stock you can place on this turbaned man you've all just been laughing at.

Never mind what on earth must have been going through the witness' head as he watched a bunch of white men with wigs on their head occasionally laughing at him in a strange enclosed high security room, in a new country. If that doesn't constitute abuse, and this inability to look beyond your world to embrace wider contexts, racism... I don't know what does.

Conquer on!

Would it just be cynical to think all the shmooze about a "post-colonial predicament" is a bit premature because the ex-colonies are still being "conquered" by Britain... but now through aid imperialism, not military might...? Or would I just sound like a lefty loon?!

Probably the latter!

But I did hear on the radio this morning that "the Conservatives have pledged £500 million a year to fight malaria in sub-saharan Africa if they get into government". Great!

Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne spent the weekend in Kampala with Jeffrey Sachs and is now convinced that treating malaria will lift people out of poverty. Great!

Then the hard-to-leave-behind-dream of Conquest sneaks in. Rather upfront-ly.

"If we properly monitor how the aid is spent... all of us have an interest in bringing, particularly, sub- Saharan Africa into the world economy just as... we did in Asia over the last 20 years, we have conquered, I should say we are conquering poverty in Asia".

It's cool to be messed. Really.

The song that makes you call a number you should have deleted a long time ago.

It's odd. For the most part you come to associate top-of-the-line cellphones with advertising campaigns that target the glitzy, glossy lifestyle - completely aspirational value... you want to be that thin girl with the shiny hair. And then on a long tube ride, that line above sticks in my head from the new Nokia campaign so I look it up. And find that the whole series is targeted at what a friend calls the "anti-consumer". It's about finding the flaws, the weaknesses, the frailties, the guilt in us, their potential consumers, and making that completely acceptable, even desirable.

In each of them, there's a person listening to one of the 1,500 songs on their Nokia and buffered by an evocative line.

Reassuring to know I'm not the only one who doesn't call my parents, dials a number I should have deleted, gets into trouble, calls someone oblivious of time zone difference... now if only the Nokia 5300 came free with these habits...