Samir Chopra's Blog, page 96

A Professional Businessman, Not a Professional Pakistani

Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears‘ My Beautiful Laundrette makes most of its viewers laugh a lot. My personal favorite of its many rib-ticklingly subversive moments came–as it seemingly did for many others–when the gay street punk Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) helps the Pakistani Nasser Ali  (Saeed Jaffrey) evict black West Indian tenants from his slummish property, and struck by the incongruity of a ‘colored’ immigrant evicting others of his ‘kind’ bursts out:

Doesn’t look too good, does it? Pakis doing this kind of thing.

The equally perplexed Ali retorts:

Why not?

Johnny points out the obvious:

What would your enemies have to say about this? Ain’t exactly integration is it?

At which point, Ali disabuses Johnny of any naivete he might still entertain about the society he lives in:

My dear boy, I’m a professional businessman, not a professional Pakistani.

I guffawed and chuckled loudly when I heard this line and have, over the years, repeated it with much relish to anyone whom I might subject to my usual glowing review of this modern classic. Saeed Jaffrey is a comedic genius of sorts himself, so part of the reason so  much mirth is provoked by Ali’s pronouncement is because Kureishi’s line is delivered with such pitch-perfect elan; but the rest, almost certainly, is because we recognize a very uncomfortable truth about our modern world.

In the Thatcherite England of the 1980s, it had become rapidly clear that older verities mattered for little in the reworkings that the Iron Lady and her associated ideologies sought; traditional bonds of association–between communities and their members, between citizens and the state, between members of a non-economic class like an ethnic group–were to be sundered by newer ones, not founded in family or religion, and impelled only by adherence to the unblinkingly sterile bottom-line of economic advancement.

The immigrant, always on the lookout for a leg-up that would allow him to transcend his inherited handicaps of skin color, accent, and mysterious origins in indeterminate ‘backward’ cultures, was often best placed to take advantage of these reorderings of national and cultural priorities, best positioned to become the most enthusiastic proponent of their new strategies for empowerment. He thus provided endless material for ironic takes on his experience: family-centered social groupings reveled in enthusiastic betrayals of kith and kin; brown placed itself in implacable opposition to black and vice versa; all that mattered was a demonstration that the lessons of the new times–those of non-stop hustle, the limitless and unbounded pursuit of the profit margin–had been suitably internalized.

Nasser Ali had learned those lessons well; it is tempting to view him as a mere cynic, a vulturous nihilist of sorts, picking at the carcasses of those claimed victim by Thatcherism. But Ali is much more enlightening than that. He is the modern man, one quick enough to reconfigure  himself to take profitable advantage of his changing environment and its associated moral realities; he will buy for himself the respect he had previously sought in an appreciation of his intangible qualities.

We laugh hard but ruefully. This is a man who has nimbly enriched himself in a world seemingly gone just a little nuts. Then, he was the oddity, the outlier; now, he is the norm.

The Nature Documentary and its Edifying Functions

In response to my post on nature documentaries, reader Noor Alam offered the following thoughtful comment:

How the nature documentary is made, what types of animal behavior are depicted, and how they are then interpreted, provide early and formative impressions about the world around us. Does the documentary empasize nature as a world in which life is “nasty, brutish and short” or does it choose to focus on instances of social behavior in nature, such as the social coordination prevalent amongst bees, or the seeming altruism exhibited by dolphins? Does it emphasize the similarities between humans and other animals, or does it marvel at the alien nature of those animals. With such questions in mind, the “uncontroversial” nature documentary becomes inherently political, and we as parents should have an awareness of this so that we can not only expose our children to the wonders of the world that they portray, but so that we can discuss with them the different issues which any one nature documentary may raise.

As I had perhaps only hinted at in my post, the nature documentary often emphasizes or glamorizes the predator’s work, and may provide a form of ‘predator porn’: the kill is the ‘money-shot’, leading up to which is the foreplay of the slow, drawn-out stalking and set-up. Besides being a form of catexploitation, this emphasis can valorize a crude Nietzschean view of nature: the beautiful animal is the strong, the valiant, preying on the hapless weak, the timid, the meek; the strong feed on the weak because such is their nature, the weak serve as food for the strong because, well, such is their nature. It may too, reinforce a facile social Darwinism: survival depends on feasting on others, using stealth and violence and subterfuge judiciously blended; those who are unable to resist meet their deserved fates all too quickly. These ‘nature red in tooth and claw‘ visions can be problematic sources of moral and political edification.

As Alam points out,  we need to query whether the vision of the documentary maker extends to noticing and showcasing Kropotkin would have called the mutual aid of the wild–”the social coordination prevalent amongst bees, or the seeming altruism exhibited by dolphins”? Is nature understood as continuous with human societies or is it regarded as separable from us by radical discontinuities–biological, moral, cognitive? Does nature appear as unfinished, primitive human society or does it appear as a distinctive entity in its own right?

The nature documentary has the capacity to provide intervention elsewhere. For instance, the chauvinistic vision of the Great Chain of Being–which saw all of nature through a blinkered human-serving teleology–is not an easily displaced one, and neither is the notion of the human species and its achievements as representing an onward and upward movement through an arc of moral and technical progression.  These two easily combine to provide a motive force for unthinking and rapacious  environmental degradation–the kind that threatens to render this world uninhabitable for a generation not too distant from ours.

The nature documentary–whether those who make it like it or not–is saddled with the expectation of providing an ‘appropriate’ vision of the relationship between man and the wild.

The New York State Assembly is First Amendment-Illiterate

Earlier this morning, on both my Facebook and Twitter pages, I wondered aloud

Is the Empire State particularly hostile to academic freedom? Is it particularly illiterate about the First Amendment?

The reason for this slightly despairing query? Read this and despair for free speech:

The New York State Assembly is currently considering a bill (A.8392) to prohibit colleges and universities in New York State from using State funding to support employees’ participation in academic organizations that have supported boycotts against any nation or its universities. Colleges or universities that violate this act would lose all state funding. This bill (S.6438) has already passed the State Senate, with major support from both parties.   

If you’ve been reading the news at all recently, you know this is in retaliation for the following:

The executive body of the American Studies Association (ASA), the nation’s oldest and largest association of scholars of American culture and history…endorsed a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, calling them complicit in a “multi-tiered system of oppression that has denied Palestinians their basic rights.”….

The resolution to shun Israeli academic institutions was approved unanimously by the 20-member national council, which has urged the ASA’s 5,000 members to adopt it as policy.

Unsurprisingly, the ASA resolution has sparked a great deal of commentary. For instance, Cary Nelson–former president of the American Association of University Professors–wrote a critical response, and Corey Robin has written a series of posts defending it and the associated BDS movement.

So far, so good: academics make some speech, other academics respond with more speech. But then, along comes this bill. It’s problematic in several ways, as Michelle Goldberg points out:

But if the ASA boycott might violate academic freedom, the anti-boycott law definitely does. This is the state punishing scholars for taking a political stance. It’s almost certainly unconstitutional. As Dima Khalidi of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Solidarity Legal Support writes, “Courts have been very clear that the denial of funding, where motivated by a desire to suppress speech, is prohibited by the First Amendment.”

And it is likely to be counterproductive for very interesting reasons:

Beyond the First Amendment, the bill raises another, fascinating legal issue. It includes three exceptions: boycotting a country is OK when it’s designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, when the boycott is connected to a labor dispute, or “for the purpose of protesting unlawful discriminatory practices as determined by the laws, rules or regulations of this state.” Israel, of course, engages in a number of discriminatory practices towards the Palestinians that wouldn’t pass muster with New York civil rights law. That’s why it’s being boycotted in the first place! So while the law should be tossed in its entirety, a lawsuit focused just on the third point could be immensely clarifying, essentially putting the reality of the Occupation on trial. Were that to happen, New York State would have ended up doing the BDS movement a great favor.

Who would have standing to file a lawsuit challenging the law on the grounds Goldberg suggests? As an example, Corey Robin notes:

Any faculty member at CUNY who is denied travel money to the ASA — on the grounds that it is an organization that boycotts.

A First Amendment challenge to this bill is not going to be hard to make, and what is more, no judge that has read the US Constitution should let this bill stand.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

State legislature bills are not drafted by idiots; their drafting committees almost certainly include lawyers who presumably have taken the obligatory class on the US Constitution that is required of all first-year law students. Those drafters, and the bill’s supporters in the legislative houses, must know such a bill will not pass constitutional muster. Why then, do they attempt to pass such legislation?

The answer is dispiriting. To posture, to preen and strut and show off your allegiance to a political cause–not free speech!–, to rally the faithful, to pander to those who would care little for constitutional niceties that get in the way of their political objectives.

Seeking to impress such a constituency strikes me as a depressingly low political benchmark to set for oneself.

The Coven’s Vision of Hell and ‘Repetition Compulsion’

American Horror Story‘s third season, The Coven, ended last night. The show as a whole did not quite meet my expectations–a critique echoed here and here; but still, for various reasons, I quite enjoyed the season’s finale.

Among them was it’s take on hell: each of us has our own private one. Misty, the “swamp-dwelling, resurrecting sweetheart obsessed with Stevie Nicks” ends up in a school biology lab, forced endlessly to kill and dissect a live frog at the insistent bidding of a loud, cruel, bullying teacher; Fiona meanwhile is “doomed to an eternity of being smacked around by the Axeman in the afterlife.”

This vision of hell is not new for American Horror Story; indeed, one of the most chilling twists on our understanding of a ghost’s life was provided by its first season, when we realized that being a ghost mean staying alive forever, stuck not only in a  particular place–the Murder House–but in a particular stage of psychological development, and confronted again and again by conflict with others also locked into dead-ended trajectories of mental being. A ghost is trapped for eternity in the afterlife; unable to die, unable to move on, unable to ‘get over’ anything. It turns out traipsing through haunted houses and spooking visitors is no fun at all.

So hell is other people all right–as some French dude once suggested–but it’s also you yourself, unable to snap out of a groove, a rut, a slippery well whose walls you slide back down again and again.

This kind of hell is one we actively aid in constructing; our own lives, our patterns of behavior, our responses and pathological modes of behavior slowly develop a place–in the mind–that we dread visiting; and when we do find ourselves in its environs, we are unable to escape.

All of this is–as should be obvious by now–as Freud suggested in ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through‘  a neurotic’s suffering, in which:

[A] person repeats a traumatic event or its circumstances over and over again. This includes reenacting the event or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely to happen again. This “re-living” can also take the form of dreams in which memories and feelings of what happened are repeated, and even hallucination….’repetition compulsion’…describes the pattern whereby people endlessly repeat patterns of behaviour which were difficult or distressing in earlier life.” (Jan Clark and Jim Crawley, Transference and Projection: Mirrors to the self. (Buckingham 2002) p. 38 -as cited in Wikipedia article.)

The most frightening aspect of the neurotic’s behavior–for those who observe it, and those who experience it themselves–is that it is painful and unpleasant and yet compulsive; the patient seems to experience a powerlessness to exert her will over herself, to bring to an end, by her own agency, her self-inflicted pain.

The hellish afterlife is just that slice of this life which we have found to be the most unbearably painful. It is all the more so for being of our own making.

Note: Milton too, in Paradise Lost, had noted our interactive construction of our own private circle of pain.

The Nature Documentary and the Failed Hunt

Like many middle-class children, here or elsewhere, I watched wildlife documentaries while ‘growing up.’ There was a long-running Sunday feature whose name I forget that subjected one species to its lens each week; there were the full-length movies–sometimes on the big cats (my personal favorite), sometimes on elephants, sometimes on the primates–my parents took me to see in movie-houses; and then later, in my teen years, all too inevitably, there was David Attenborough, clad in parka, his hair askew, striding purposefully along a beach, wading through mud, tramping through a rainforest, showing us the undersides of damp, mossy rocks, and pointing out, in a throwback to Aristotle, that the lower creatures were as worthy of study, as evocative of awe and admiration, as ingenious in their adaptations to their environment, as the higher ones.

A wildlife documentary was, I think, considered an essential component of a child’s education by a certain kind of parent. (As was a trip to the zoo, I suppose.) Even if you weren’t taken to the wild–to say, a national park or an animal sanctuary–viewing a documentary was de rigeur. No middle-class parent would ever be caught saying–in the right company–’Nature documentaries? What a waste of time!’ The documentary was educational, and that was it. Even if you wanted to shield your child from the gratuitous violence on television and cinema, there was no censorship of predator-on-prey slaughter, no shielding of the child’s eyes when a leopard or a lion clamped their jaws around a gazelle’s neck and slowly strangled it. (An exception to this might have been the anguished response to a recent documentary on life in the oceans in which a which a pair of adult killer whales casually and endlessly toss around, like a broken rag-doll, a baby seal that is clearly alive and remains so till they finally tire of their sport and kill it; the Netflix page for this movie features many comments from parents wishing they had been warned that such frightening acts were included on a documentary that they had unsuspectingly viewed with their children.)

I suspect I’m not alone in noting that as a child, my favorite moment in a nature documentary was invariably the big cat hunt: the stalking, the chase, the kill. But I was disappointed too, to find out that such hunts were not always successful, that those incredibly sleek and svelte felines could be outpaced by those wimpy, skittish antelopes, that on occasion, their claws didn’t find traction and simply slid off the backs of their putative meals; yet another disillusionment, yet another demonstration that in this world, never did the path of the bold run smooth.

So, interestingly enough, while the nature documentary was supposed to be a source of wonder and inspiration, of awe at the beauty of nature, and was intended, at least in part, to function as part of our societies’ syllabi in environmental and conservationist education, for at least one viewer, it also served as introduction to the notion that all was not what it seemed, that many ignoble failures could be experienced before spectacular success could be savored.

An introduction mind, not necessarily a lesson learned and internalized.

Superbowl Notes: The Great Dictator, Sorry, Sports Coach

In 1984, like a good sports fan, I paid diligent attention–as I had previously in 1976 and 1980–to the Olympics, held that year in Los Angeles. Very few events were telecast live; we had to be content with lengthy packages of highlight clips. Included in them was as the triumphant march to an eventual gold medal of the US basketball team, the last amateur U.S. team to win an Olympic gold medal in men’s basketball.   It included, among others, Patrick Ewing, Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins, Chris Mullin and Wayman Tisdale. The team’s coach was Bobby Knight.

From the first time I saw Knight’s Knights play, I was transfixed not just by their dribbling, shooting, and slam-dunking, but also by the sideline antics of their coach. That crimson-faced worthy, seemingly permanently afflicted by a combinatory species of apoplectic fit and asthma attack, raged at all and sundry, pacing up and down like an amphetamine-fueled father in a maternity ward. He did not, then, commit any acts of physical violence–as he would later–but it did not seem it was for lack of intent. To my awestruck eyes, stunned at this sight of an infant’s tantrums embodied in an adult body, it seemed that if he could have, he would have strangled someone, anyone, that had, just for a fatal instant, dared to obstruct his favored methodology of playing basketball. Those nets, ostensibly put up as targets for basketballs, would have functioned just as easily for Bobby as gallows from which he would have strung up those that defied and transgressed his rules.

As you can tell, I was impressed by Bobby Knight; he certainly left an impression. I had never seen a sports coach behave like that. I didn’t realize it then, but I was receiving a quick education in the culture of the American coach, a figure that in this Superbowl week, as is usual, will be deified and exalted by a kind of attention only rarely directed elsewhere at other central figures of American culture.

The peculiar irony of the American coach, of course, as has been obvious to all too many observers of American sports, is that in this land of the Brave and the Free, whose politicians’ speeches are all too often paeans to freedom and the rugged individuality of its citizens, he or she embodies the Grand Vizier of Authoritarianism. No one else, sometimes I think not even corporate bosses, can control an American body and soul as much. Not for nothing did William Gass write in The Tunnel: 

I suspect that the first dictator of this country will be called coach.

This thought didn’t cross my mind in 1984 when I watched young giants troop sheepishly off the floor to be berated and harangued by the livid Knight, but some form of it remained front and center as I came to observe more of Knight’s partners in the coaching enterprise. It is a cult that finds sustenance quite easily in its accumulated mythology.

This week, and this coming Sunday, we will witness its latest renewals.

Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero and the ‘Hidden Presence of Others’

Michael Ondaatje‘s Divisadero is a wise book, elliptical and allusive in his distinctive style, one replaying close, attentive reading to its many lovely, lyrical lines, too many to excerpt and note. Here is one that hones in on a truth already known to those who create:

Everything is biographical…What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

Not only are our creations the result of borrowings, imitations, outright thefts, our writings voice-overs of once-read texts, but we ourselves are composites and mosaics. We bear the impress of our encounters, the mark of those we meet; every lover, every friend, every enemy, every parent, every sibling, every teacher, leaves their stamp. Read a writer, you read everything he’s read; talk to a human, you talk to humanity.  We present a distinctive take on our encounters and our histories; we digest and assimilate and repackage–to get all industrial, just for a bit–all our inputs.  But peek around the corner of the persona presented to you and you see a long trail, stretching off into the distance, populated by people and events and markers of many kinds, literary, cultural, artistic, and sometimes even traumatic.

Sometimes these histories of ours are clearly visible; sometimes we carry them around on our sleeves, available for all to see; sometimes the scars are visible and worn with pride. But sometimes we are puzzled by the presence, within us, of something whose provenance seems mysterious. So we attempt to excavate: sometimes by writing, sometimes by looking for the nearest couch and an interpreter with a notepad.

We imagine ourselves self-made, creators of these living, walking works of art we embody. We are that to be sure. But we are aided and abetted by collaborators; those who, with their chisels, put in a touch or two here or there, or with their brushes, added a dab here, a flourish there. So there is accretion aplenty on us; layers and layers of deposited sediment, pushing down on those that came before, compressing and morphing them with their own distinctive pressures.

The texts we embody are not just read by many, they are written by many. And that couch and the interpreter can help us read it when we are confused by its contours, its plot developments; we might need a translation manual, a decrypting key. We imagine we are familiar to ourselves but precisely because of our complex histories, we might become unrecognizable in just that zone of presumed knowledge.

And thus this strangeness can be pleasurable too; we can surprise ourselves, find novelty in that which we imagined contemptuously familiar. Perhaps that is why we push ourselves into encounters with the novel, trusting that in our responses to it, we might find something else about our perfectly strange selves. 

My Imagined Interlocutors

Sometimes I find myself conducting arguments with  myself; ‘in my head’, as it were. I walk along the streets, running their premises and conclusions through my mind; I refine their rhetorical pitch, I rehearse them; sometimes, I find myself overcome by the emotion associated with their content; indeed, one of the reasons I write here is that it helps me articulate those arguments in the written word, to see if they can withstand the light of day, to get them ‘out and about.’ Sometimes they stay in my cranium, revisited time and again, perennial occupants of its discursive spaces. Embarrassingly enough, as my wife has noted, these conversations are often visible to others; I can be seen talking to myself, mumbling and shuffling down the street, perhaps causing alarmed parents pushing strollers down the street to vacate the sidewalk.

Sometimes I notice that I seem to be debating an imagined interlocutor; a contestant, a sparring partner of sorts. Who are these folk?

Some of them can be recognized quite easily.

My brother, for one, whom I grew up debating and arguing with; he and I often disagreed about what we read about in the newspapers and in the books we read together; our arguments were quite passionate. On one memorable occasion, he stormed out of a dinner at a restaurant; my mother and I finished our meal and drove home to find him waiting for us. Now that we live on separate continents, our opportunities for these encounters–in person–have grown sharply limited. Not in my mind though, where I find myself anticipating his reaction to a news item or an event in my life, and responding to it. Sometimes I even subconsciously rehearse these arguments before I travel to India; I don’t always get the time on those hectic trips to actually articulate them, of course.

And then, of course, there is my wife, my constant companion and friend and partner in life’s daily challenges. There is plenty to dispute here, much to plan, and now, as joint stakeholders in the business of raising of a child, fundamental, existential, issues to be debated and resolved. So entwined are our lives, indeed, that I would find it surprising if I did not have more of these ‘conversations’ with her. We are both busy folk, so its only natural that some of these occur with her not physically  present.

Lastly, there are ghostly, not clearly discernible or identifiable figures; perhaps social gadflies who have gotten under my skin, perhaps political figures I deem threatening, perhaps fellow academics who might dispute my writings. Sometimes, on a more benign note, there are friends and acquaintances–and even acquisitions editors of publishing houses!–subjected to a friendly persuasion of sorts. My students too, show up here; I often shape and fashion and rehearse a verbal exegesis intended for them before finally delivering it.

Without this motley crew of companions, I daresay my solitary hours would be considerably less interesting and edifying. The possibility that I might be reckoned an eccentric by those around me seems like a small price to pay.

Satadru Sen on Eagles Over Bangladesh

Satadru Sen has written a very thoughtful and engaged review of Eagles over Bangladesh: The Indian Air Force in the 1971 Liberation War. His generally positive review also strikes some critical notes in it, and I’d like to respond to those. These critical points are all largely concerned with how well the book succeeds as (generally) military history and as (particularly) a history of the 1971 Liberation War for Bangladesh, and about how the narrowness of our focus in the book detracts from that task.

A couple of preliminary remarks. My co-author, PVS Jagan Mohan, and I self-consciously restricted ourselves to documenting the air operations in our book. We chose this narrow perspective for two reasons: a) to make our task manageable and b) to not obscure the treatment of the air operations. The definitive history of the Bangladesh Liberation War and especially the conflicts that preceded it might yet have to be written, but attempts have been made and we did not intend to try doing so ourselves. There has been no history attempted though of exclusively the air component of the war. (Incidentally, our book is only the first volume of an intended two-volume project; the second will cover air operations in the Western Sector; this should give you some indication of the magnitude of the task at hand.) We took our contribution to be toward filling the gap in the aviation history literature and not necessarily to contribute to the very interesting debates that surround the genesis of the Bangladesh war, its conduct, and so on.

Now, in general, air war histories and naval warfare histories are more specialized in their focus than the conventional war history. Books on the Battle of Britain, for instance, detail the air operations–the dogfights, the bombing etc–in far more detail than anything else; what they primarily focus on, which we do as well, is the operational context: the aircraft used, the decisions that led to the planning of air campaigns as they proceeded, the technical infrastructure, some detail on combat tactics and so on. We do not expect these kinds of histories to provide the kind of political histories or context that Sen finds missing. In large part, this is because, prior to the First Gulf War and the 1999 NATO Kosovo campaign air power, despite what its most enthusiastic proponents might say, has not been the primary weapon of choice in accomplishing tactical or strategic objectives; it has supported boots on the ground. Given this, it is only natural that histories of air campaigns are largely operational histories, with some strategic and planning detail provided to make sense of operations.

Now, on to Sen’s more specific critiques.

First, Sen suggests we might have documented a little too much:

Using sources ranging from interviews and squadron logs to newspaper reports and video footage, Mohan and Chopra provide a vivid picture of the air war in November and December of 1971, from the particulars of individual missions to the processes of operational planning. That thoroughness is occasionally counterproductive. Sections of the book can be tedious: it is really not necessary to detail every mission flown in the eastern sector of the war, or to reproduce every bit of information available on the movement of squadrons from base to base. The authors seem to have proceeded under the impression that information must be included regardless of its value, without first establishing the criteria for what makes information relevant. The result is a methodological slippage: the work drifts periodically from the terrain of the historian, who must evaluate and organize material with a ‘so what’ question in mind, into that of the chronicler, who wants to catalog ‘everything that happened.’

As my co-author Jagan Mohan noted in an email conversation last night, we did indeed try to function as chroniclers and thus often erred on the side of over-inclusion:

[W]e approached this project as a book of record. Looking at the track record [of the Indian government, the Indian Air Force, and the Ministry of Defence] there is no hope of records being made available publicly in the near future the way the British do with their archives. Nor do I see any similar project being done like we did. So this turned out to be something I hope future historians will refer to when they are doing further research. For me its a case of ‘has to be done else no one will do it’.

Sen then broadens his critique:

Now for what EOB does not do, which is also a plea for a different type of Indian military history. ‘Air force history’ is by definition a troublesome concept: unless the historian is very careful, it remains airborne, abstracted from the mess on the ground….Chopra and Mohan do try to include a political narrative, especially in the introduction, but it is somewhat cursory: they are anxious to get to the real topic, which is the fighting. The war tends to get cut off from its own political context. (The exception to this is the very good discussion of Kilo Flight, the rebel air force.) This leads of unfortunate errors of omission. There is insufficient discussion of the American posture….The Blood Telegram gets no mention, and the very interesting section on Dhaka on the eve of surrender has no reference to the massacre of the city’s intellectuals on December 14….

This was indeed, our objective, as we noted in the introduction, echoing the points I made earlier:

As might be expected, our discussion of the political background to the Bengali secessionist movement, its foundations in the Partition of India, and West Pakistani–East Pakistani relations is necessarily brief; the interested reader can find a wealth of material on this subject in many other sources.

When we say ‘As might be expected..” it is because we do not expect a reader of an air operations book to find too much political context or analysis in it. Again, historians of the US Air Force’s strategic bombing campaign in WWII might note that German industrial targets were bombed without delving into the details of who was working in them (e.g., the slave labor) or that German army positions around concentration camps were being bombed without getting into details about the Holocaust. They might too, study Royal Air Force operations in WWII in South-East Asia without delving excessively into Japanese nationalism or the motivation for Japan’s need for Indonesian oil. That history might begin with noting Pearl Harbor and carrying on from there. It would not necessarily analyze at any great depth the British colonial presence in Malaysia, Burma or Singapore.

In similar fashion, Sen faults our discussion of the genocide carried out in Bangladesh by the West Pakistani Army:

In Bangladeshi discourse, 1971 was a genocide. EOB accepts that highly charged terminology at face value. This is not necessarily incorrect, but it is a missed analytical opportunity. 

This was done for two reasons: there is enough academic and historical consensus that what the West Pakistani Army did in Bangladesh was indeed a genocide and that the Indian military intervention was a just one (c.f Michael Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars), that the mass rapes of Bengali women committed by the West Pakistani Army were part of a systematic campaign (c.f Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.) To delve further into this admittedly complicated debate would have been a diversion again from our task of documenting air operations. I realize that I am not addressing Sen’s point that such diversion is necessary even in an aviation history but to this point, again, I would reiterate the claim that it would be out-of-place in a study of the military arm that is usually tertiary to the war. Indeed, I wonder if we had broadened our approach, whether we might not have committed another kind of ‘methodological slippage’ by military aviation historians; we might have been accused of casting too wide a net, of concerning ourselves with too many issues not germane to our supposed focus. Sen’s point, though, still remains an interesting one for debate among military historians.

Later, when discussing the genocide committed by the West Pakistani Army, we write:

The Pakistan Army then commenced a deliberate campaign to terrorize the Bengali populace of East Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands were massacred, raped and otherwise brutalized. Anthony Mascarenhas’ chilling recounting of the genocide that followed remains essential reading for anyone strong enough to stomach its gory details.

And we then return to the air war. So we did not elide the genocide, we merely pointed the reader to where more details could be found.

Later, Sen notes,

Mohan and Chopra don’t try to hide the contradiction[about the declared start of the war and the actual commencement of operations]; it can be discerned between the lines. But they don’t talk about it either, although these little self-deceptions are precisely what make history interesting.

But we leave very little to be ‘discerned between the lines’: we focus on the usual December 3 date because that is when offensive air operations began in earnest; there was only one aerial combat before that, on November 22nd, which we describe in detail. What Sen is looking for is perhaps a comment to the effect of ‘Therefore, while official Indian line was that war began on December 3, it will be seen that the war began on November 22nd with the Boyra aircombat.’ But this would be instance of us telling, not showing; we chose to show, not tell. We note that the Indian Army was already operating within East Pakistani territory before December 3rd, we note that the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) was attacking it, we note the Indian Air Force’s (IAF) scrambles and then the subsequent dogfight. It is clear to the reader that even if a formal declaration of war was not made, hostilities were underway. And indeed, we note:

On the evening of 3 December 1971, the piercing notes of air raid sirens signalled the ‘official’ start of the third Indo–Pakistan war.

The scare quotes around “official” above are there for a reason; they indicate our considered skepticism about this date being considered the start of the war. This is quite explicit. Indeed, the Indian Army would have very good reason to not consider December 3rd the ‘official’ date, because it was even busier than the IAF before then.

Moving along, Sen notes the civilian deaths caused by an Indian Air Force bombing raid over Dhaka and notes:

The Indian use of an extremely crude bombing technique in a populated area at night, for negligible gains, can be described only as criminally irresponsible. Mohan and Chopra, to their credit, lay this episode bare, although they also try to downplay it.

I do not think we ‘downplay’ it; indeed, we thoroughly debunk the IAF’s attempted defenses of the raid, and exonerate the PAF of any wrongdoing. Sen notes that the Pakistanis were not believed when they defended themselves against the charge they had done it themselves, but after reading our book, they should be. What Sen is looking for is a judgment harsher than the one that may be read off from our analysis of the raid. But we had little access to any of the records of the planning of the raid, other than at the squadron level. We do not know that, like Sen suggests, ‘ It was just some mid-level officer’s idea of…improvisation’. As Jagan Mohan noted,

 [W]e really don’t have any insight into what the operational plans were , what the top brass discussed , or how the station commanders approached the war.  All our interaction had been wi th officers of Squadron Commander or below with one or two exceptions. The real people who can shed light on the operational planning  - the CinCs, the SASOs, the Air1s are out of reach or did not have much to share….[W]ithout access to the official IAF records, and the complete picture, [we] cannot comment on strategy or planning or other analysis that one would expect.

(On a side note: Sen notes the pilots of the IAF Caribous not raising any objections to their operations, but the place where we note this is not for the Dhaka raid but during the first briefing, when the Caribous’ operational role was being changed from daytime supply dropping to night-time bombing; the pilots were not being asked for their assessment of the suitability of the operations but about whether they had any qualms in executing a role in wartime for which they had trained for during peace.)

Lastly, Sen notes we do not provide more context on the pilots themselves and broaden our scope into a kind of social history of the IAF:

[O]ne wishes that the authors had told us more about the pilots involved in the 1971 operations. Who were these men? What were their backgrounds, and what drove them? What role did ethnicity play – why, for instance, were there so many Anglo-Indians in the IAF (and the PAF, for that matter), and why did so many of them emigrate to Australia? These questions are vital to understanding the place of the IAF in Indian society as well as the internal culture of the air force, and those details matter enormously in military history.

We certainly could have done better in providing more background on the pilots (something we did a little of in our previous book on the 1965 air war, and which we supplemented then with a section titled ‘Where are they now’, which looked at their lives after the war.) But again, this is not a critique that is usually made of air warfare books unless it is vital to understanding the very motivations for the operations. It is necessary, for instance, that we understand the samurai and bushido codes in an exhaustive history of the kamikaze attacks but again, histories of the US Air Force in the daytime operations over Germany or the Luftwaffe over North Africa do not suffer excessively from not providing details of the pilots’ ethnicities or their class backgrounds. Pilots in the Battle of Britain must have been drawn from different classes, and squadron life must have reflected this in a very interesting way, but our understanding of the Battle of Britain as an aerial conflict does not suffer from not studying these details. (Jagan and I have sought, however, to make a start in this direction with a website we have dedicated to the history of the Indian Air Force, and which includes an extensive section on veteran’s histories. We have also encouraged many veterans to start writing autobiographies and some have so started.)

The central problem, of course, as noted indirectly by Sen, is that for nations of their size and complexity, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, have not been studied well enough by historians; many, many histories remain to be written. An accomplished academic historian like Sen can only feel this lack even more acutely than we do. Our attempt is but a small contribution to the gigantic task that lies ahead.

Combating Envy with the Quotidian

Last week, I suffered a crippling, sickening, attack of envy. For one day, soon after I had awoken and fixed myself my morning cuppa, a missive arrived, confirming for me not just someone else’s spectacular success, but also the darkest assessments I often entertain about my professional and intellectual worth. I tried to put these thoughts aside, immersing myself in the logistical routines that occupy the early part of the day: fixing breakfast, dropping off my daughter at daycare, riding the subway to the library, reading Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje. But my mind was only partially diverted.

I could, if I wanted, wallow further in the envy that had afflicted me; I could go back, again and again, to confirm for myself, the details of my diminution in the face of another’s overwhelming achievements. I hectored myself to not do so, but self-flagellation can sometimes be a hard impulse to resist. So, on arrival at the library, I sat down, logged in, stared at the screens that enabled all manners of unfavorable comparison, and completed the flogging.

Eventually, well aware I was spinning into a spiral of self-loathing, I turned to work. I wrote for most of the morning, slowly sipping on a rapidly cooling cup of coffee; later in the day, I bought myself lunch and ate it at my workstation as I continued a long editing task–whittling down a large body of text into a more manageable chunk that I could then start to rewrite into more readable form. I agonized over which chunks to excise, which sections to toss into the trash, which to retain. Because I was looking at an older piece of writing, I was occasionally brought up short by a passage that seemed particularly clunky; how had that ever gotten past me?

Later in the day, made distracted and anxious by my writing, and assailed again by the same emotions that had got my day off to such a bad start, I allowed myself yet another moment of wallow-in-the-Mire-of-Envy. But that was it. From that point onward, I grew increasingly engrossed in my word-reduction endeavors: I became increasingly ruthless, pruning with ever bolder abandon. Murdering darlings became easier as time went by and what’s more, I was quite starting to enjoy it.

And then, the close of the work day was at hand; I had written a few words; I had deleted many more. I packed up, headed for the subways, and was rewarded by its resident deities with a seat during rush hour. I returned to Divisadero. Then, once at the gym, barbells banished any remnant distractions from my mind; acute muscular exertion tends to concentrate the mind wonderfully. Finally, at home, I bade goodnight to my daughter, ate dinner, finished watching The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, and went to bed.

Nothing had changed in my resume; but somehow, as usual, an absorption in the here and now, in my daily particulars, in the things I enjoy, had managed to divert me from the emotions that had, earlier in the day, figuratively brought me to my knees.

An old lesson learned again, and no doubt, to be learned again in the future.