Tag Archives: history

Historians and Light Bulbs

01 Thu May 2014

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Question: How many historians does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: There is a great deal of debate on this issue. Up until the mid-20th century, the accepted answer was ‘one’: and this Whiggish narrative underpinned a number of works that celebrated electrification and the march of progress in light-bulb changing.

Beginning in the 1960s, however, social historians increasingly rejected the ‘Great Man’ school and produced revisionist narratives that stressed the contributions of research assistants and custodial staff.

This new consensus was challenged, in turn, by women’s historians, who criticized the social interpretation for marginalizing women, and who argued that light bulbs are actually changed by department secretaries.

Since the 1980s, however, postmodernist scholars have deconstructed what they characterize as a repressive hegemonic discourse of light-bulb changing, with its implicit binary opposition between ‘light’ and ‘darkness,’ and its phallogocentric privileging of the bulb over the socket, which they see as colonialist, sexist, and racist.

With the declassification of archives in Eastern Europe, several historians noticed that light bulbs under communism were superfluous, as electricity shortages were the norm.

A group of German historians have also argued that light bulbs in Germany followed a “special path” to the socket that was not replicated by any other European light bulbs.

Modern scholars of the Orient, however, argue that the whole discourse of bulb-changing privileges Western electricity over local customs such as candle light. Typical of such research, questions of changing light bulbs continue presenting the Orient as the savage, backward Other despite inherent inferiority in the Western concept of generating electricity at the cost of massive damage to the environment through fossil fuel burning and nuclear technology.

Latin American scholars have emphasized that light bulb production has historically been centered in the global North, while Latin America and other peripheral regions have provided raw materials like sand, tungsten, and copper. Any interpretation of light bulb changing that fails to acknowledge the structural conditions of regional inequality inherent to light bulb production risks perpetuating imperialist, capitalist relations between center and periphery.

In the Annales school of light bulb changing there are all sorts of structural forces that can’t be ignored. There is no simple accounting of the events surrounding the changing of the light bulb. Instead, there are long-term evolutionary socio-economic-cultural factors which need consideration.

All sorts of misunderstanding could have been avoided if modern scholars had maintained the distinction between the material, formal, efficient (both primary and instrumental), and final causes of light bulb changing. In this sense, the Cartesian turn really screwed up light bulb changing.

Finally, a new generation of neo-conservative historians have concluded that the light never needed changing in the first place, and have praised political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for bringing back the old bulb. Clearly, much additional research remains to be done.

The Wild Wild East

12 Wed Feb 2014

Posted by in Opinion and Response

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Last week, Penguin Books India concluded an out-of-court settlement with Dinanath Batra of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan to withdraw and destroy all paper copies of University of Chicago Indologist Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. The book, according to the plaintiffs, was derogatory to Hinduism and offensive to the religious sentiments of Hindus. To be clear, the book has not been banned but voluntarily recalled to be pulped by Penguin – it is still easily available in electronic format in India.

The news was greeting by the usual theatrics on Twitter – several ’eminent public figures’ decried censorship in India and voiced their support for freedom of expression. Hartosh Singh Bal even suggested that he would never publish with Penguin again. Others – ‘Internet Hindus’ as they have been christened – attacked Wendy Doniger’s scholarship, questioning her command over Sanskrit and the framework and context of Hindu scriptures. Doniger also responded to the hue and cry by expressing gratitude to her supporters, defending the publisher who has remained quiet so far, and condemning Indian laws that muzzle unpopular opinion.

India’s legal structure is, at best, paternalistic towards notions of freedom of expression. Article 19(2) of the constitution, amended by the First Amendment in 1951, allows the state to place “reasonable restrictions…in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.” The Indian Penal Code also has several sections that forbid the sale of “obscene” books (Sec. 292), acts prejudicial to the maintenance of religious harmony (Sec. 153A), and malicious acts intended to outrage religious sentiments (Sec 295A).

No wonder, then, that India has banned its share of books, journals, and pamphlets in several of its languages including English since the early days of the republic. In addition, the Central Board of Film Certification must certify all films produced in the country before their release.

In the zeal to vilify the other side, both Doniger’s detractors and her supporters have missed that this has nothing to do with free speech or Doniger’s scholarship but is a commentary on the sad state of law and order in India. It is a reasonable assumption that Penguin, a commercial venture, wishes to make profits for its owners. Why would it withdraw and destroy all the copies of a book it had invested in at its own cost? The likely answer is that Penguin wished to avoid its offices or outlets selling its books being vandalised by unruly mobs. Shops would not carry Doniger’s book for fear of attracting the ire of the “offended Hindus.”

The Doniger case is not an exception to India – just last month, Bloomsbury apologised to ex-Civil Aviation minister Praful Patel and withdrew Jitender Bhargava’s The Descent of Air India; Bloomsbury was probably afraid of political retribution or violence from “overzealous readers” just as Penguin is today. Interestingly, this episode did not receive the same widespread condemnation witnessed over the Doniger incident. India’s state and central governments have repeatedly ceded power to thugs acting in the name of religion, ethnicity, or a political party because of electoral calculations. Law enforcement machinery is not used to dissipate unrest and legal proceedings against the thugs, if ever attempted, are likely to be stalled in India’s infamous judicial backlog.

A quick survey of India’s free speech landscape reveals the government’s failure to stop Hindu vigilantes from attacking art galleries carrying MF Husain’s paintings; the government caved in to demands by Muslim groups to redact the film Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities; a government minister from Uttar Pradesh, Mohammad Yaqoob Qureishi, offered a $11 million bounty on Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who depicted Sunni Islam’s final prophet as a terrorist; in 2006, the Majlis-e Ittehadul Muslimeen, a political party, attacked Bangladeshi authress Taslima Nasreen’s book tour for writing a book that portrayed the treatment of women in Islam and Hindus in Bangladesh in a negative light; India became the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the author was recently deterred from attending the Jaipur Literature Festival; in Bombay, the Shiv Sena threatened to disrupt the screening of Shah Rukh Khan’s film My Name is Khan; in 2003, another mob ransacked Pune’s Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute over dissatisfaction with James Laine’s Shivaji: A Hindu King in Islamic India; in 2009, Ravindra Kumar and Anand Sinha of The Statesman were charged for merely reprinting Johann Hari’s article, Why Should I Respect Oppressive Religions?; and most recently, Muslim groups demanded a ban on Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam.

The selective paeans in defence of free speech and the failure of the central and state governments against groups – and even ministers – acting in the name of religion, ethnicity, or political parties has brought India to this juncture when corporations no longer have faith that their premises and employees will be safe after the publication of a controversial book. In contrast, despite a loud campaign by the Church against Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Doubleday kept the book on shop shelves and actually benefitted from a large bump in sales.

The brouhaha over Penguin’s withdrawal of The Hindus has, as much as some quarters would like it to be so, nothing to do with saffron radicalism or Doniger’s scholarship. It is a symptom of the development of a Wild East in India wherein policy is decided by groups with the most muscle power. The alleged intelligentsia’s double standards on criticism of threats to freedom of expression encourages more people to take matters into their own hands. Unless there is a genuine class of loud public figures who are willing to stand for principle rather than against their pet hatreds, no pressure will be brought to bear on the courts and law and order machinery to enforce the aforementioned principle.

I hope a saccharine declaration in support of freedom of expression is not required; the Brandenburg v Ohio case remains the pole star of free speech advocacy.

This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on February 12, 2014.

Holiday Reading

24 Tue Dec 2013

Posted by in Book Review

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‘Tis the holiday season, and whether you celebrate Chanukkah, Yalda, Saturnalia, Dongzhi, Modraniht, Malkh, Solis Invicti, Christmas, or are a Festivus-celebrating mutant, looks like good food, family, and free time are foretold in your near future.

For those of you yearning to get away from it all, disconnect from mobile phones and the internet (gasp!), and snuggle under a warm blanket with some cider, a ghalyoon, and a good book, here are a few suggestions. Neither serious nor trash, they have just the right amount of fluff to send you through time and space on your own private vacation!

These books are not in any order, nor is there any mystical meaning to the number of suggestions save the tyranny of a slavish obedience to base 10. Hopefully, there is something in this list for…many people – cannot cater to everyone!

Samarkand, Amin Maalouf: A historical fiction novel written in 1988, Samarkand won the Prix Maison de la Presse and is set in 11th century Persia soon after the assassination of the Seljuq king Alp Arslan and into the reign of Malik Shah I. The main characters of this rich tale that infuses mysticism, philosophy, and historical what-ifs include the great Omar Khayyam, Abu Ali al-Hasan al-Tusi (better known as Nizam al-Mulk), and Hassan al-Sabbah of the Nizari Ismailis, or more excitingly, the Ḥashshashin. Samarkand was originally written in French by the Lebanese-French author. Also recommended by this author: Bathasar’s Odyssey, The Rock of Tanios

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco: Originally written in Italian (Il nome della rosa) in 1980, translated into English three years later, and made into a movie starring Sean Connery and a young Christian Slater three years after that, The Name of the Rose is a spectacular murder mystery set in a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy 1327. The key to the murder lies in Aristotle’s book on comedy – as William of Baskerville, the protagonist, discovers, everyone who has read it has died. William brings up questions of forbidden knowledge, inquiry versus theological dogma, memory, meaning, and reality by discussing the murder through a lens of various medieval manuscripts with his understudy, Adso. In a sense, Il nome della rosa can also been seen as a bildungsroman. For the more accomplished reader, the book carries allusions to various philosophies, authors, and even fictional characters and fits them in a manner that deeply enriches the story. Also recommended by this author: Foucault’s Pendulum

The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie: This novel is one of the most sumptuously rich mixtures of history and fable in a multicultural setting ever written. The main characters in this story are none other than history’s famous rulers and politicians, the Mughal Emperor Akbar in India and the Italian diplomat and political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli, in a time when Florence as well as the Mughal Empire were in their ascendancy. Some characters are imagined by other characters in the book – Qara Köz, for example, is Akbar’s fantasy of the perfect lover – yet accepted by all as if real. Rushdie brings magic, religion, desire, and sheer imagination together in a novel that is nonetheless deeply historical and profound in its symbolism and characters if only the reader allows his/her mind to explore the fantasy world of the enchantress rather than dissect, analyse, and categorise it. Also recommended by this author: The Moor’s Last Sigh

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon: Written in 1973, the story is set in England towards the end of World War II. Admittedly a confusing plot, the story feels very much like a term paper written for a creative writing class taught by Werner von Braun by a psychology student who is a cross between Dante Alighieri and Dave Chappelle. To give you a sample of the mind-blowing jumble of high culture, low class, and technical, the protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, gets an erection every time there is a V2 rocket attack! Gravity’s Rainbow contains a bizarre diversity of themes via its characters’ interactions – rocketry, Nazi occult practices, psychology, and metaphysics; its minute historical details, such as a photograph of von Braun with his arm in a cast or a rare radio broadcast, are stunningly accurate.

Septembers of Shiraz, Dalia Sofer: Set in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, this is a tale of a well-to-do Jewish family whose world is turned upside down by the fateful events. The new Islamic government, suspicious of the Jewish heritage of the family and their slender ties to the Shah, arrest the father, Isaac Amin, and try to torture him into confessing that he is a Zionist spy. In the puritanical new theocracy, Isaac’s brother’s alcohol smuggling racket creates another pressure point as does the pre-arrest estrangement between Isaac and his wife, Farnaz. While the focus is on the adults, the nine-year-old daughter, Shirin, steals files that contain state secrets from her playmate’s house who happens to be the daughter of the man in charge of the prison Shirin’s father is in. There is a Brooklyn connection too – the non-religious son of the family struggles without money his family sends. The author was herself a refugee of Iran’s turmoil in her youth and this experience has clearly informed her writing. She weaves together questions about faith, love, and memory in the setting of political and religious oppression, and comes to a startling, perhaps naïve yet difficult to refute truth – meaning and significance in life derive not from ideas or ideologies but from shared memory and the ties that bind.

Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen: A very clever story about a middle-aged psychiatrist, Leo Liebenstein, who wakes up one day believing that his Argentine wife has been replaced by a doppelgänger, this book also spreads awareness of a rare neurological disease known as Capgrass Syndrome. Rather than take a distant narrator’s perch, Galchen dives into the story and follows Liebenstein’s thinking and efforts to track down his real wife. The result is an insightful, sensitive, and witty book that frays identity, reality, and even geography. The wife’s anguish at her husband’s condition is also shown but as far as Leo is concerned, Rema – the wife – remains a rather cool simulacrum. Liebenstein sees his wife as an impostor, all the while completely unaware that it is he who is not himself. At times touching, the novel is also a philosophical inquiry into the mind, Being, and the false authority of science.

Gate of the Sun, Elias Khoury: If the Palestinians ever wanted their own Exodus (Leon Uris) story, this book, albeit more sophisticated, is certainly one of the contenders. Set in the backdrop of the Shatila and Sabra massacres during the Lebanese civil war in 1982, Khoury unravels a powerful story via a one-sided conversation between Younis, a comatose Palestinian fighter of the previous generation, and Dr. Khaleel, a nurse in actuality who had a little training in China. The narrative depicts the sufferings of the average Palestinian in the camps trying to survive. Yet the message in this tale is to try and understand the Israeli Other. As Khoury said in an interview, the Other is usually the mirror image of the “I.” Incidents such as a checkpoint crossing or the meeting between a Palestinian and an Israeli who now lives in the former’s home record the indignities of daily life but also scoffs at the Arabs who claim to stand with Palestinians yet allow the dire state of the camps. One character tells another that Palestinians must also understand the pain of the Holocaust: “In the faces of those people being driven to slaughter, didn’t you see something resembling your own?” Gate of the Sun also looks at memory, overlaying the Lebanese experience with the Nakbah – as one character admits, we remember things we never experienced because we assume the memories of others. A powerful and nuanced snapshot of the tragedy in the Middle East.

Three Novels of Ancient Egypt, Naguib Mahfouz: These three novellas, Khufu’s Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, and Thebes at War are among Mahfouz’s earliest works and less known than his more famous Cairo Trilogy, Midaq Alley, or The Day the Leader Was Killed. Nonetheless, the three paint a scene of life in Ancient Egypt and are in many ways Greek tragedies in an Ancient Egyptian setting – the hero coming undone for just one tragic flaw. The first story is set during the construction of the Great Pyramid and about the pharaoh’s attempts to thwart his throne passing to someone not of his lineage; the second tells the tale of a kingdom neglected by a pharaoh in love with a courtesan; and the third is about an exiled son of Thebes reclaiming his kingdom from the Hyksos who had defeated the Egyptians and chased them out of their country. All three deal with fate, mortality, and morality, and have a strong cast of female characters. Perhaps not as sophisticated as the Nobel laureate’s later works, these three stories are quite enjoyable and reminiscent of Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian.

A Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood: This award-winning novel from 1985 is a work of dystopian speculative fiction based in a futuristic Christian theocratic totalitarian state. In the fictional Republic of Gilead, women’s freedom is severely restricted – they are not allowed to read, go out of the house, or have any privacy – and a class of them are kept as concubines for purely reproductive purposes in an era of increasing sterility due to sexually transmitted diseases and pollution. The protagonist, Offred, is a high-ranking official’s concubine – a Handmaid – and the tale is related from her perspective. The Handmaid’s Tale is a commentary on race, gender, and religion in a highly stratified and rigid society that designates different classes of people for various functions. Even sex is purely for reproductive purposes and not for pleasure. Even in this repressive climate, biology throws a spanner in the works and the Commander has an affair with Offred. The author has always tried to explain that her book is not science fiction but speculative fiction, meaning that it could indeed happen now. Readers must keep in mind the rise of Billy Graham and evangelicalism in the United States in this era.

In Search of King Solomon’s Mines, Tahir Shah: A light and fun read, this novel follows the author’s quest for the fabulous and unparalleled riches of the wisest king of the Bible. Sparked by coming across a bogus map in Jerusalem, Shah follows the clues in the Septuagint, the Copper Scroll (one of the Dead Sea Scrolls), the Kebra Nagast, as well as local folktales to chase down this ancient legend. The author, the reader realises, is not actually looking for the treasure but chasing down a story, from the Temple to the rock-cut churches of Lalibela and a cursed mountain. Pulling together geology, myth, and history, Shah creates his own Biblical mystery tale in the form of an Ethiopian travelogue. As such, narratives and characters remain shallow if colourful and one might not be drawn to the protagonist in any way. Yet that serves to direct attention to the story…not of King Solomon or Sheba, but to the story of the story, how it is remembered and a part of local life in various ways. Also recommended by this author: The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca

Other suggestions: Tariq Ali – A Sultan in Palermo, The Book of Saladin; VS Naipaul – A Bend in the River

So I wish you cheer, I wish you good reading, and I wish you peace to enjoy the two. Enjoy the holidays!

This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on December 28, 2013.