Khayal’s Secret History

Prof R Mahalakshmi of Centre for Historical Studies, JNU is presenting and hosting a short lecture demonstration on the Khayal by Vidushi Madhumita Ray. The programme is curated and researched by Heather House LLP. The course is free of cost with the option of appearing in an examination to obtain a certificate. The certificate can serve as a letter of recommendation for students and add to the credentials of extracurricular activities.

The format of the demonstration is in the form of questions and answers so that the participants can grasp the context of khayal, and their focus may be veered towards the underlying history and the many political contestations around music in the medieval period. The khayal was invented in the 12^th century by Amir Khusrau though it was not before 1498 or 1503, when it obtained its name from the text written by Qutban, the exiled court musician of the exiled Sultan of Jaunpur, Hussain Sharqui. Scholars have been confused over whether the khayal really existed in the 12^th century since the texts mention the term only later. Yet, the two most important elements of the khayal, the qawwal and the tarana were many creations of Amir Khusrau, often spoken of as the Da Vinci of India, but better to think of him as the Tagore of the 12^th century.

Khayal is often thought to have derived from the Sanskrit root of keli, or sex play perhaps to maintain the erotica that the genre often produces; or it has sometimes been assigned to the Arab word, khayal meaning imagination, both satisfy some of the musical appeal of the genre. Given that it started in the 12^th century from the qawwal singing, khayal may well be the distortion of the guttural “k”. The classical music that existed before the Muslim conquest was the dhrupad, sung in temples or by musicians as prayers. Sanskrit, Hindavi, and Persian texts have carefully documented the Hindu form of classical music in pre-Muslim days. The khayal came in with the Muslim conquest.

Amir Khusrau was a Persian and was the court musician, poet, philosopher, advisor of Alauddin Khilji, the latter being a Pathan. But because Persia was high culture, Turks, Arabs, Mongols and Pathans courted them to become their “Brahmins”. Khusrau sang the qawwali for Nizamuddin Auliya, the moral emperor of Islam and the taranna for Khilji, the sword wielding emperor of India. Together with the qawwal and taranna emerged the compositions of Khusrau. It was not yet called as the khayal. Khayal got its name much later in the Sultanate of Jaunpur of Hussain Shah Sharqui in 1503. The Mughals, notwithstanding the brief interlude of Sher Shah had pushed the Sultanate off limits and started towards building their own empire around Delhi. Qutban, the court musician of Jaunpur along with the Sultan in exile, documented, stamped and branded the khayal. Akbar banished khayal as being a vestige of the Sultanate and keeping in line with his sentiments, established the dhrupad, the pre-Islamic, Hindu music as central to the Mughal aesthetics.

The conflict between the khayal and the dhrupad may well be read as a contest between the Mughal and the Sultanate. As the Sultan started to lose political power, they romped back with their aural spectacle, music in the form of the khayal. As Sharqui was sharved eastwards, there emerged the Ganga Jamuna culture known as the Purbang. Hindus wrote in Persian, Persians wrote in Sanskrit and as Prof D.P Mukherjee, father of Indian sociology writes that at least in music there was no Hindustan and Pakistan. But there was a clear contestation between the dhrupad and khayal masking the competition between the Mughal and the Sultanate for legitimacy.

Out of favour from the Mughal court, khayal practioners and patrons heavily and speedily documented the genre. The documentation was also important because khayal was absorbing many genres along its course. Sharqui’s court used the chutkula into khayal; chutkula being couplets of poetry which breathed some performative aspects into the form. Documentation, diversity and loss of political power seem to be connected features.

As the film, Baiju Bawra shows clearly that musicians from the society at large were looking to some form of presence in the Mughal court, where the Ain-i-Akbari is clear the form of dhrupad was being perfected. Later Mughals from Shah Jahan opened the borders of dhrupad, and we see elements of bhajans coming in. Khayal was now becoming even more performative, promoting kathak widely in the princely domains.

Aurangzeb’s court musician Kushal Kant Kalawant and his disciples, Ras Baras Khan and later Niamat Ali Khan, or Sadarang brought the two styles close to each other and khayal adopted the dhrupadi alaap as part of its core identity.

As the Mughal court declined as did many of the princely powers of leading noblemen, power moving to Maratha princes, Ranjit Singh in Punjab and important zamindar “rajahs” in Bengal, gharana became the dominant feature. Gharana, literally means the house, house being that of the leading musician or a set of musicians. Gharanas were of guru shishya tradition, where music teaching became teacher to student under strict supervision. Due to the rise of the zamindars, we find a “market” for music, secrecy develops, networks and nepotism prevail and documentation declines.

On Women’s Day

A young and enthusiastic and empathetic feminist man congratulated women who did not need male support. He, of course put up a post saying that the woman he admired most was the protagonist of a Bengali art film shot by Buddhadev Dasgupta. The protagonist looked after her family, was a good neighbour, a loyal friend and had everything needed to have strong shoulders on which the world can lean on. I wrote out a comment on his post, asking him, “don’t you know me?” He put many question marks to convey his confusion. It is obvious that while he can relate to a character in the film, he is unable to recognize the same character in the living world. I, ofcourse put up a post mentioned the women I know who a support to their families have been, well-educated and earned well and independently, neither needing a male approbation nor social approval. While the feminist was receptive to the film, he was completely blind to the reality around him. This is exactly where my problem lies. Is human cognition through the cinematic screen obliterative of the sensibilities of the real world; or does the cinema diminish the sense of reality and real-life perceptions among humans?

Women are invisible as the post mentioned above by the feminist showed. I put up a list of women who I know have been free of men, been in the world of men because men had vacated those spaces, run away from looking after their parents, or not earned enough and so on. Women, without men are rendered invisible through the lenses created by the society and more so if they inhabit and often rule the men’s world. The social media is an interesting place to follow stuff; single women who post about sex and lust do better in terms of career opportunities than women who don’t advertise themselves. Married women do so much better when they post pictures of their spouses and children. Men do better when they post pictures of their work, women who post stuff about work are mostly ignored unless those posts contain pictures of them being in five-star hotels or with politicians and industrialists. Women in male spaces become gender neutralized, useful but unnecessary. Women, who on the other hand show off their desires in some way or the other are desired by society. This is called patriarchy.

Women do not need rights, women need their sexualities to be legitimized. That’s what women’s movements are about. This explains why there was not a single post in India on why women’s share in the workforce was declining, because women as workers are supposed to be an illegitimate category, work neutralizes the gender of women. Sex makes the woman into a woman; hence her trials and tribulations is all about desiring sex and being respected for that desire.  

The Flight of the Crane

Whie convalescing from a bad bout of dengue and unable to read anything new, I returned to some of Kavita Kane’s books to read them again. Once more I got stuck at the only book of hers which I have never been able to wade through, Saraswati’s Curse. I realized that Saraswati, despite being mentioned a few times in the Vedas and puranas have never had a consistent myth. The reason for this may be worth investigating.

Paradoxes inhere Saraswati; whether she is the daughter of Brahma, or his wife, whether she is the daughter of Durga and Shiva as she appears in the pantheon of the “children” who accompany Durga in her autumnal worship, or whether she is just another woman in the trio of Durga, Lakshmi, and her. Despite many writings on her, we are confused about her status. In Kavita Kane’s book, she is the river who leaves the earth. If Saraswati the river has fallen through the cracks of the Aravallis as have Surajkund and the Badkhal lakes in very contemporary times, then the Saraswati myth reads so much like the Sita myth, who too sinks into the earth. The death by slipping into the cracks of the earth is usually associated with a curse, as curse befell the brothers of Ram and himself so did a curse befall the inhabitants of Bharatvarsha, or whatever the land was called at that hoary past. Saraswati’s curse remains with us even today for she had forsaken us for our disdain for knowledge. She objected to the slaying of Sambuka, to the killing of Shumbha Nishumbha, the murder of King Bali for all the above mentioned attracted the jealousy of the Aryans by their knowledge. Saraswati’s disappearance as the river is a reminder of our contempt for the intellect and education. She remains more of a Dravidian lady with her white attire, white being associated with celebrations and ceremonies in the south. Worshipped in Kashmir and the south, and overwhelmingly in Bengal and Odisha, Saraswati seems to be a favourite of the cultured non-Aryans, despite her milk white complexion and sharp features. So is Kartikeya, a handsome man in terms of Aryan aesthetics, but largely worshipped in the south and east.

Perhaps because of her slight anti Aryan slant, her proclivity towards the accumulation of knowledge rather than of wealth, that has made her a kind of an independent woman, one who cannot belong to the household of a husband and children. A married woman can be of valour, as Durga, or of the accumulation of wealth as for Lakshmi, but an intellectual woman, self-reliant, self-confident, self-sufficient does not need to have any relationships. Her total autonomy due to her intellectual genius makes her the odd one out in the Puranas where stories have had to be made up about her rather than emanate from her persona.

Like all women, not married and self-contained and self-contended, vile rumours have followed Saraswati too. For the lesser minds sex is the foremost preoccupation and hence they are beyond understanding that people of high IQ may not require physical intimacy. Rumours of the dirtiest degree have invaded her; that Brahma who imagined her and thus produced her was claimed to be her father rather than a Prof Higgins to an Eliza Do Little. Across Puranas, Brahma was supposed to have been attracted to his “daughter” and his worship was banned everywhere except at Pushkar, the mountain top, which could have been associated with the disappeared river. Close to Pushkar is Fatehpur Sikri, where water resources disappeared due to geological events.

It was perhaps not before the 15^th century that Saraswati was “rescued” from oppressive myths when she was made into a daughter of Durga and a sister to Lakshmi, Kartik, and Ganesh. Such iconographic shifts happened when Durga was being discovered as the Shakti figure and hence a need for her to be represented as a mother. Like Saraswati, Kartik too is mostly worshipped in the south and east and they are placed on the right side, or Dakshin, which also means the south. Under the Durga pantheon, Saraswati got a father in Lord Shiva and a husband, Brahma, though her husband is rather tentative. Kartik, like Saraswati, is unmarried. Those on the left are Lakshmi and Ganesh, much married and happily too.

Saraswati, for the Bengali is glamorous; in the south she became a part of modernized Hinduism when Raja Ravi Varma painted her in a white sari. She remains a matephor for the perfect girl, good in studies and accomplished in arts. The refinement of human sensibilities worships her as its deity, but this intellectual and accomplished single woman fails to generate a narrative which the society can cherish and relish. This means that the intellect in our societies have narrative, this is why Saraswati cursed us before disappearing into the underground, leaving a society unable to pursue higher learning into the desert of ignorance. What is more of a problem is that Saraswati born a woman, lived autonomously, taking her own decisions, generating her own resources, and needed to interact very little with others as she was immersed in her own creativity.

Saraswati, then seems to have been adopted into the Durga family; perhaps this is why hers is the only vahana, her white swan which is a migratory bird. Every other vahana, namely Lakhsmi’s owl, Ganesh’s mouse, Kartik’s peacock, and Durga’s lion are homebred and territorial.

Rammohun Roy and Dhrupad – Whats the connection with Sati?

In the early decades of the 19th century Raja Rammohun Roy, when introducing music as part of Vedic prayers in the Brahma Sabha, that was to become the Brahmo Samaj later in 1828, he made dhrupad as the foundation of such music. During that time in Bengal, due to the rise of the zamindar as a social and economic class with significant political power, music of all hues could be heard not only in the palaces but also among theatre and drama groups in villages and cities which the landed class promoted. The kirtan, baul, bhawaiyya, khayal, tappa were heard as also were the cruder forms of folk, jhumur and gombhira. Ramprasad Sen, with his devotional songs on Kali raged through the musicscape of Bengal. It was in this dense space that Rammohun resurrected the Dhrupad from a collective amnesia, wrote songs on tunes based on this form of music and circulated printed lyrics with notations, forestalling and forbidding deviations. His purpose in Dhrupad was a continuation of his other social reforms, most importantly the abolition of Sati. The establishment of Dhrupad and his fight against Sati were part of the same process, to fight the “low and popular” culture ridden with superstitions, obscene eroticism with the “high brow culture” of the Vedas.

Rammohun Roy’s family were employed in the imperial services in the revenue departments and lived in Murshidabad. They moved away to Burdwan, present day Bardhhaman due to the “caprice of the Nawab”, possibly meaning Siraj-ud-Daulah and became part of the ever-growing powerful lot of Hindu landed gentry. Ramakanta, Rammohun’s father despite owning property worth “lakhs of rupees” suffered insecurities as all those who suffer a fall from status do. Rammohun was sent off to Patna at the age of 9 to study Persian and Arabic for a formal degree. He returned home as an argumentative teenager questioning every aspect of religion and composed while still in his teens, a slim tract called the Tuhfat ul Muwahhidin in which he attacked anything that called for faith and belief. It was only in his late teens and early twenties when he visited Varanasi, he learnt the Vedas and the Upanishads in a structured manner that religion endeared to him as the worship of physical and natural forces without ever mentioning the word God.

Rammohun Roy was born in 1772 in Radhanagar close to Arambagh and Searsole, Bengal’s most cosmopolitan areas of the times. It was also here that much of Sati was concentrated. It is possible that the horror of the clearly identifiable sounds made him scared and eventually determined to move forces to eliminate this practice. Sati was believed to convert the widows burnt alive in the pyres of their husbands into Goddesses; it is also possible that Rammohun’s allergy towards idolatry could have stemmed from this nightmare. Vedas, as he discovered could deliver religion from the pitfalls of idols; atheism was not an option in his times as being a non-believer could also cost one titles of inheritance and ancestral wealth. Vedas, then this had to be. Rammohun’s establishment of the Dhrupad as central to Brahmo Samaj’s music fought the “idolatry” of the kirtans, gombhiras, khayals and others.

Rammohun is credited with the establishment of the first newspaper. This was in Persian, called Mirat ul Aakhbaar, or newspaper of reflections. True to its name, the newspaper was less of reporting of events and more of analysis of those. Interestingly, he found that histories of the world were constituted by universal forces; peasant, land, nobility, trader, merchant, royalty, ecclesia, sects, mobs, ascetics, banditry, violence, religious intolerance, and these variously formed themselves into the French Revolution, Spanish liberalism, Italian nationalism, and the oppression of Catholic Ireland by Protestant England. The paper was terminated, and we no longer have any surviving copy but through his interpretation of politics, he disregarded identities just as he dismissed idols underlining the need to understand politics as a play of impersonal and not interpersonal forces.

He developed the Bengali language in the form as we know of it today. After Rammohun’s death in 1833, the mission for Bengali was carried on by Bankimchandra Chattpadhyay and Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and eventually found its pinnacle in Rabindranath Tagore. William Carey with his scholars in Fort William translated Sanskrit texts into Bengali and even compiled Bengali texts but the language of these texts was stiff and unformed. Rammohun’s translations, argumentative and discursive pieces on religion, philosophy and land titles raised Bengali into a rich language able to carry abstract thoughts and higher learning. When he also pioneered the teaching curriculum for schools and colleges which eliminated Sanskrit and introduced modern secular subjects albeit in the Bengali language. In his mind, Bengali was a more powerful language for carrying scientific ideals than English, which he felt often veered towards moralism!

Everywhere Rammohun can be seen to be separating the local, vernacular, “pagan” with a high culture with the ulterior aim of uprooting the belief system that held Sati, goddesses, infusing inanimate objects with sacred power. Dhrupad is part of that project, to hail the Vedas over the vernacular.

Dhrupad and the modern song perhaps would not have flooded the Bengali sensibilities if it were not for Tagore who continued in the tradition of Raja Rammohun Roy and composed some of his most elegant ones in the form of the Brahmo Sangeet. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, in his essays published in Bangadarshan continued the political and economic ideas of Rammohun while Iswarchandra Vidyasagar extended Rammohun’s battle on women’s education, rights of widows and scientific and secular education in the Bengali medium.

Hypernationalism Cost Us Our Victory

When will India realize that hypernationalism is a disease of the mind, most lethal and vicious? Its fall out can be clearly seen in the fact that no factor other than the hype created by the spectators, media, and every institution in the country around cricket had the singular and unmistaken role in the defeat of the Indian cricket team in the World Cup 2023. It was a mindless pressure to perform that took the undoubted toll on the team just as it does in students who commit suicide, employees who lose their minds, and people who sink into depression. Courts, doctors, school administrators have created a punitive framework against parents who pressurize their children to perform where putting an excess burden on children to excel in examinations is punishable by law. Yet, how could the same Indians mindlessly instigate a team to win a match of cricket?

The use of the term Bharat Army, a “sanatanized” version of a right wing ultra nationalism arouses the metaphor of war as if winning a match is not only a matter of honour but also a matter of life and death. The phenomenon of hyper nationalism has been much studied in the past century and it has been more or less agreed that it is a projection of victory onto the fetish of a nation The high decibel sound, the blue tops of the spectator, all of the hundred thousand of those who were seated as if India was in uniform shows that beneath the rosy picture, India is a defeated country filled with sad men and women, cast into inauthentic existences who find their moment of living in screaming and shouting to use the sound to manifest the Cup just as music of Tansen was believed to light a fire or to bring rain.

While the spectators screamed victory as if they were baying for blood, the leading singers of the generation were singing to the lyrics, Jeetega India. This shows the perversity of the Indian spirit. We are using cricket for glorying our lives that, must have in our minds turned into a sham and music to lend sublimity to that sham. At the commentary box, even the veteran cricketers of international standing invested their minds in speculating about the win as if they were talking about the stock exchange. No insight was provided on the game.

What was purportedly done to cheer, somewhere down the line transformed into a veritable hooting. What started off as motivation transformed into its opposite, a challenge that seemed to say, come on you will have to climb to the peak because in your natural state you cannot. The Indian team’s morale shrivelled up while the Australians’ irritation turned into aggression. That is the outcome of hypernationalism.

If Kapil Dev was not invited then it was because we were not celebrating cricket, we were also considering his achievements as a shame on the present generation. In the relentless pursuit of victory, anyone else’s victory becomes equal in every measure to our own defeat. The success of our predecessors seems to taunt us, we need to obliterate history, rewrite it many times to make it illegible. Inviting Ranvir Singh who played Kapil Dev and not Kapil Dev is an act that must be read in the same way as manipulating the history syllabus.

That hypernationalism is a perversity was best evident in the dancers; badly choreographed, poorly coordinated, messy formations, and garish unrelatable colours of costumes. A victim of right-wing politics is aesthetics, the obscene overshadows the aesthetic, beauty is hooted as lewd. Just as hypernationalism cannot tolerate victory, it cannot tolerate art. Art is a victor’s discourse, simply because it attains unity, and hence an achiever. Hypernationalism belongs to the realm of the victim, one who cannot attain authenticity.

However, the long tunic in purple and pink of two thirds of the dancers and the golden banians and knickers of a third had the only good thing about it, it indicated that in Gujarat’s subconscious lies its deep connection to Nubian Africa.

Violence Intrinsic to and Endemic in Democracies?

Madhusree and I are set to visit Dhaka and are very worried about the pre poll violence in the city. The opposition has taken to the streets burning public transport and blocking roads and, on many days, there has also been a near complete shutdown of the city.

Violence is a weapon in the hands of the opposition when the party in question is well entrenched in power while it becomes a tool in the hands of the ruling party when its chances of winning the polls seem somewhat compromised. Violence is therefore a weapon of democracy as much as it has been under autocracy. While violence is expected to be an accompaniment of autocracy where the ruler’s will stands opposed to those of the rules, a democratic state is supposed to be the embodiment of the general will and hence designed to eschew violence. Yet, violence escalates in democracies precisely to escalate the democratic process, it becomes intrinsic to elections and even necessary for the elected governments. Here is how.

Democracies are about human wills finding a home in the state; democracy is the carryover from the Hegelian absolutist state of the tradition of Idealism. It contains the assumption of a harmonious equilibrium of a supra individual social will. But objective conditions may not be conducive to such a transcendence and conflicts over resources and opportunities remain which lead to fractures in the supposed unity of purposes. Hence, unities of nations and states are fractured into groups exercising their choice of the ruler. Violence is useful in the generation, aggregation, and creation of wills.

The world-famous dog whisperer, Caesar Millan and many other animal tamers insist that animals look for pack leaders and are drawn to those who they sense has power and the force of will. The violent may appear to be a pack leader to the people whose wills are weak and may appear as a nuisance for the better poised ones. Nonetheless, violence serves as a dividing force where the choices of party are formed and hardened. Violence helps set camps and draw lines. Democracies run the risk of total consensus much more than they run the risk of hung houses; violence ensures that the contesting claimants to power have clear stands and positions. Violence is a divisive force; democracies draw more out of divides than they draw from ideological consensus.

Democracies have an innate conflict between ideology and interests. Ideology ensures consensus and moves the individual free wills towards the supra individual will of the Idealist State while interests crack up the unity into diverse groups challenging the transcendental will accusing that the State is an oligarchy if not wholly absolutist and autocratic. Interests carry with them the violence of disruption of the general will, trying to push the identity of the state from representative to dictatorship; violence is instrumental in this redefinition to open spaces and opportunities for those out of power. Violence is endemic to democracies and in fact, a part of its processes, if not a necessary one at that too.

Nonviolent mobilization of masses is only possible under great ideological transformations and upheavals. The Indian Freedom Struggle is one. While the most nonviolent resistance movements are possible under autocratic rule, as there is a total separation of ideology between the people and the government; in a democracy, ideological consensus is more likely the case. Then the competition for power is only sheer struggle for opportunities, positions, offices; corruption, for the same reason is also more possible in democracies than in autocracies for in the latter, wealth is supposed to be cornered by the ruling oligarch. Violence, born out of envy and jealousy, greed for power by sabotaging the working of the government to harass the ruling government is unique to democracies.

Sanatan Dharma

The Hindu right-wing nationalists seem to have abandoned the term Hindutva in favour of Sanatan Dharma for gearing up for the next level of esoteric and cultist politics. Hindutva was a poorly defined idea that tried to convert the precepts of Hinduism into a creed that closely resembled the Abrahamic religions. But there were far too many claimants for Hinduism against whom, Hindutva did not have an impregnable defense and hence one puts forth the Sanatan Dharma. Let us see what it means.

Sanatan means the eternal. What can be eternal unless it is some kind of naturalism, where humans are born in a state of Nature, or natural freedom, where freedom means lack of opposition from anything because s/he is fully aligned to the cosmos. In practice this can mean a set of pagan practices those which existed before any form of textually or ecclesiastically organized religion. However, the term Sanatan has been used more politically to contest something related to human will in a political outcome. Krishna uses Sanatan Dharma to ask Arjun to kill his natural relatives because he is in a war of morals. Morals, a human, and a political construct is placed as the natural value over what really is the natural, namely the family.

Sanatan Dharma was the bogey raised by Bengali Brahmins to uphold every possible heinous act against humanity. Sati, child sacrifice, human sacrifice and cults of killing were paraded as being instances of Sanatan Dharma. Here, not naturalism but Sanatan meant the eternal truth as drawn from the Goddess, usually Kali. Rammohun Roy was the first one ever to coin the term Hinduism in 1816 to contest the eternal truth justifying murder and, in some cases, even genocide. Hinduism was pitted against Sanatan Dharma. Ever since the days of the Brahmo Samaj and the slew of reforms that followed across India, Sanatan Dharma came to mean the pre-reformed Hinduism. Bankim Chandra has the Sanyasis and Fakirs say that now the Mussalman regime is over, the Company will help Indians protect the Sanatan Dharma, here he means the ascetics, who because of their asceticism claim to be purer Hindus. Louis Dumont, in his seminal essay on Renunciation echoes a similar observation that Sanatan means the open space (not liminal) of the individual and her Divine beyond the compulsive rituals of worship. In this opinion, the authentic/natural/eternal religion is only to be recognized as the eternal and intransient.

Somehow, all through the period of social and religious reform, the idea of Sanatan Dharma has resisted a reformed Hinduism. Sanatan Dharma is thus a resistance to a modernized Hinduism, or an assertion of those who have been unable to grasp modernity and have remained unadapted to the many social changes which those better adapted could make use of. Modernity has undoubtedly created inequalities, between those who could access its opportunities and those who could not. Sanatan Dharma, like the Hindutva nationalism is the assertion of losers, a search for a paradigm that would place them at an advantage over their better off fellows by undoing all the victories of a reformed religion and it adaptive powers to modernity.

No Jobs For Seekers, No Applicants for Offers – The Great Unemployment Paradox

The unemployment levels in India are naggingly high. Despite it being the third largest economy in the world, India does not seem to generate enough offers for its job seekers. On the other hand, the factories and establishments complaint that there are not enough takers for positions advertised. Yet, when we hear reports of crores of rupees being paid to bribe Ministers for government jobs, we sense both the desperation on part of the society to be employed and the ability to pay a huge sum as bribe to procure that, if the last mentioned is counted as willingness to work. How does one explain the paradox?

In the minds of humans in India, i.e., Bharat, the idea of a job is just an entitlement for a dole. Those who are in offices are looked upon as the idle class, who no longer need to work for a living as a salary is assured. This is the most crucial difference between British India and independent India. In British India, the clerk had to work very hard to levels of oppression and enslavement. In Independent India, a job makes you part of an establishment, a partaker of the ruling class and which is looked upon as being a leisure class that need not work for its living. My father tells me that when India got Independence people were elated thinking that now everything would come for free; no need to pay the tram fare or the train fare and no need to work for a living as wages would flow in automatically. My father thought that it was bizarre because how would wealth be generated without any work or exchange? He was a smart teenager at 13 years old but truly most in the streets felt that work meant only slavery, freedom, as an end to work and the start of life as leisure. The Congress made it sure, and Tagore graced it with his song, that all of us would be rulers in a sovereign state and the people took it literally to claim sovereignty for themselves by abandoning work. The common saying in Bengali, that I draw my salary if I sign attendance in office but I need to cash in overtime if I deliver my tasks. Salary and work are disconnected in the Indian mind, as work and success are disconnected too. In a strange quirk of Calvinistic predestination, you earn money for what you are, not for the work you do. It is the attitude towards work, its construction in the minds of humans that a job is an entitlement and not a responsibility to deliver that creates this paradox of people desiring a job but not wanting to provide services. As our household help fondly remembering his deceased father who held a government service, says that not a single day did he attend office and was so privileged that he died consuming too much alcohol out of his salary.

A government job is lucrative for its security and since it is seen as disconnected to performance, it is also seen as the perfect ticket for a life of leisure. Our education is thus oriented towards the acquisition of leisure; you study hard to obtain leisure by way of a secured job and a regular salary. The despicable state of India’s education standards, its inability to produce intellectuals and innovators, its need to copy and imitate rather than produce original work, the institutional intolerance for creative thinking are all parts of the single coherent whole of its attitude towards work. The Weberian thesis of calling that underlies all professional development is unearthly to the Indian. The crisis of skills is India’s next famine.

In case one must work, then Indians prefer to be on their own. The informal sector, made up mostly of delivery boys, cab drivers, maids and servants, care givers and paramedics, private tutors and dalals is not merely one of unabsorbed labour by the industry but also of the labour unwilling to be employed full time. Though one can give lakhs of rupees as bribe when, it seems unbecoming that labour would be as willing to join work for a lesser employer. It is the status of the employer, which if it is high enough will attract labour force towards it and still higher, such as the defenses that will make people willing to work for the same; in case it is a private employer, then labour supply is as scarce, if not scarcer than capital.

Individualism in India is about entitlements and not about agency. The persona is acquisitive, what one gets rather than what one delivers. Despite its poverty once upon a time, despite its ascetic aversion to consumption, sometime not long ago, India is an acquisitive society. Here, humans corner social entitlement, caste system can never go away. The acquisitive individual is the direct antagonist of the agency. The purpose of an agency is to contribute and increase the whole; the purpose of acquisitiveness is to sustain off the whole. Both may have pride in the nation, but one seeks ways to contribute towards its growth, the other finds ways and means to sponge off from the growth already attained. Liberal politics is the politics of agency; the acquisitive mind finds agency as passe, as silly people who are not smart enough to grab. Acquisitive individuals cannot grow anything; like the proverbial greedy animals, they come to partake in the cake baked, having been absent all through the process of baking it. Lack of skills, dysfunctional education, corruption in public life and the rise of totalitarian politics are connected in one straight line all of which emanate from the way work is conceptualized in India.

The City of Brass

In my long years of studying and practicing economics, I must have read at least 200 articles and books on the MSMEs. In each work, the idea presented of the MSMEs is a small unit, run by an entrepreneur with few workers and low mechanization and is taken to be a self-contained unit which procures raw materials and produces for the market. Policies have been formulated upon such erroneous assumptions, reinforcing the errors around the MSMEs. Indian industries rests heavily upon the MSMEs, most often the traditional ones, such as textiles, brass, glass, gems and jewelry and food processing. In none of the above industries, we have small self-contained units producing for an impersonal market; instead, each of the units is a branch of specialization which together form a huge supply chain for an agent or a contractor who is at the peak of this pyramid, negotiating with the market forces. This is the picture of the Moradabad brass industry in which numerous units can be considered as shops of a giant production system.

In the old part of Moradabad, typically that lies on the Rampur Road, the city divides and subdivides into narrow alleys with concrete houses that hosts a “factory” each on the ground floor with the upper floors being used as residential areas. Each of these “factories” specializes in one or more processes, namely casting, moulding, forming, stamping, extrusions, etching, wire drawing, polishing, finishing, painting, and coating and of course metal pasting. These units may be considered as being “shops” of a giant factory whose turnover is Rs 8000 – Rs 9000 crores. Such an industry is not small scale. At Rs 1000 per kg, Moradabad produces about 8000 to 9000 tonnes of brass annually.

Most of the work, even before the age of electricity in India was done by hand operated machines. Levers, wheels, axles albeit operated by hand were cleverly designed to produce high turn speeds producing therefore moulded products of impeccable quality. Clever and patient hands did the etching on heated metals. There was always a profuse use of dies for impressing designs on metals. Moradabad was named after Prince Murad, a son of Shah Jahan, also a contender for the Mughal throne and eventually slain by Aurangzeb in the war of succession. The brass units are overwhelmingly located along the Prince road, the road through which drove Prince Murad.

The health of this industry depends on the market; brass being a luxury and leisure item used mainly for decoration and for sacred rituals, domestic markets will always remain too small. Brass has always been and will forever remain, a global item depending on exports. The basic material, copper, and zinc, is found widely across the world and is also easily imported, but the organization of skilled labour willing to work seems to be the crucially decisive factor. Moradabad must count on its fortunes that it has no dearth of skilled workers willing to work in factories.

Given the dependence on exports and the shrinking demand for brass across the world, Moradabad brass industry is struggling, not with issues of scaling up but with issues of excess capacities. Mechanization is not about scaling up nor about replacing labour, because manual skills as needed to operate machines as well; it is about the need to avoid the heat of metal working and to reduce the exposure of workers to metal gases and emissions. The only problem with mechanization is the lack of space in factories; hence the metal working and finishing centres. This means that there is likely to be a lot of movement of workers across the premises from one house to another, namely where the machines are kept.

The principal materials for brass are copper and zinc. India had comfortable reserves in but these, especially of copper has depleted fast leaving the country deficit in both. Copper is imported today and whatever zinc is produced is diverted to the ever-growing stainless-steel industry. Copper too largely goes to the power sector. Whatever comes to the brass industry are the leftovers, often at a high price. Dependence on scrap has increased, which is also imported. Moradabad NGOs have developed a raw material bank to secure assured supplies of the material.

To be able to use the machines to full capacity, and to utilize skilled labour more fully, brass workers are graduating to working with aluminum and steel, coating these with gold coloured lacquer to make these appear as brass. This has changed the hues of the industry literally, expanded its scope of products. If there is a scope for expansion and hence mechanization, then it is in the metals other than brass.

Indian government has banned imports from China and it’s Made in India mission purports to build all machines in India. The Indian made machines, like the swadeshi or yore are poor and expensive; industries are suffering everywhere due to a near total ban on Chinese machinery. But the states run by the BJP governments merrily import Chinese machines; UP is no exception. Chinese machines are imported through Ghaziabad and Moradabad units import from Ghaziabad, both being in UP. Ludhiana, in Punjab the traditional hub of machinery lies vacated as there are no buyers of indigenous machinery in the country; to concentrate industries in BJP led states, only BJP ruled states are allowed imports from China; machinery, scrap, commodities. The totally unintelligent opposition has failed to see this glaring anomaly.

There was a report in Wire as to how a politics of Hindutva and banning Muslims from the economy has hurt Mordabad. Yes, it did as the Dalits were eager to takeover the jobs from the Muslim workers in the brass factories. Unfortunately, even the diehard Hindutvawadis realized that the Muslims who have been on the job for generations have genetically coded abilities not to be undone through mean politics of envy. The matter seems to rest now, the peaceful coexistence of the boisterous kanwars and the strutting Muharram processions perhaps vindicate the point.

Under the scheme of one district one cluster, Moradabad has been marked out for brass. Brass has lost its sheen, but the skills now rally behind various other kinds of metals. The cluster must be protected to protect skills, accumulated over centuries across generations, deposited in the DNA codes and so easily translated into more sophisticated metal working.

Knowledge is Not Power – Discourse Is

When we read Foucault’s set of interviews on Knowledge is Power, I think that our teachers did not understand the philosopher too well because we too held the mistaken notion for long that it is indeed that knowledge brings power. Bluntly, it does not. There is no power in knowledge and there never were great inventions which fueled the wheels of the great Industrial Revolution in the late 18^th century originated as many as six centuries before then. Knowledge did not become power until it was put into praxis, or practice with a consciousness of knowledge it carries. It is not what is known, it is important what becomes the discourse, or the generally knowable and known. When knowledge is moved through the power system, whether of institutions, groups, associations, networks, cliques, media, or individuals much in circulation, it becomes discourse. The WhatsApp University is the ultimate instance of the discourse that minimizes the knowledge component and eventually eliminates it.

The circulation of posts about Guru Purnima is one such instance. A pagan festival of the full moon near the solistice, when the moon appears to be at the closest to the earth and hence feels the heaviest, and thus “guru” means heavy and large is celebrated across India. Such celebrations are accompanied by food, almost always heavy stuff, puris are stuffed and rolled large, savouries and sweets are made heavy by adding ingredients in the dough and so on. The Shaktas appropriated the custom by spelling the ambubachi, a time when the Goddess goes into menstruation. The earth gets moist and heavy and thus an agrarian society is likely to refrain from cultivating it. The Santhals have Meena Mangal and so do many tribes in the coastal region, where spawns are released into water bodies, and one refrains from eating them. Pagans let go of killing life and follow vegetarian diets albeit heavily cooked in oil. The Shaivas prepare for their annual jatras, Amarnath, Tarakeswar and the Kanwars. The Guru Purnima, then is not a specific day, instead it is a culmination or a peaking of the solistice between the months of Ashadh and Sravaan, the monsoons, which must be managed as between the rains being too light or too heavy. The rituals are many, all magical to control and contain the rains, metaphoric and allegorical. How such an ensemble of rituals becomes the ode to one’s teacher is mysterious. Yet, everyone suddenly seems to treat the pagan cult as a teacher’s day. This is the power of discourse.

The mistaken belief that it is a teacher’s day gets reinforced with each passing year where someone claims that Shiva taught some disciples, someone says that the Buddhist monks return to school. No one fact checks. That is not the problem; the problem is that no one thinks that there is something to be checked. The principal question in the circulation of fake news is why no one doubts. Then the problematic area is doubt.

Doubt emerges from a feeling that something does not fit the picture. Only those minds which have an idea of the picture can only doubt. The trouble then is that why do most minds not have a big picture? Detectives are more intelligent than most because of the way they can process data; those brains go by facts and evidence, matching a sentence to the corresponding fact. Detectives need to see data as part of a process; hence the brain would suddenly ask that worshipping a Guru on Guru Purnima seems so unusual in India because we are not those people who would have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or a Teacher’s Day. The only day which only the Bengalis have is the Jamai Shahsthi day, the day for the sons in law, part of Shashthi celebrations, marked to the jamai in one of its months. The doubt comes from unmatched data which means that the brain must work fast in data matching. Avid reading, constant observation, sharp memory and seeing the connectedness among things is thus the way to prevent the mind from accepting fake matter.

The trouble then lies in our pedagogy; students are encouraged to cram facts and the cramming takes up so much of the time, that the mind finds no space to devote to building wholesome pictures. The students become teachers, the tradition continues and soon a mass of humans in society lose their faculties of detection. The oft repeated stories of people video shooting a fatal accident instead of trying to rescue the victim is an instance of the deep penetration of discourse in ousting knowledge. Discourse is about cramming, using sentences to support sentences while knowledge is about the matching of data to the words. Innovative societies have knowledge, insipid ones have discourses.

Discourses are manufactured consent and moves through various forms of authority, religion, family school, peers, colleges, Universities, half-baked teachers and of course the media. Popular culture is a big carrier of unquestioning suspension of disbelief; the way it achieves its purpose is the story and the emotions. Discourse based politics seeks narratives with a beginning, middle and end layered with heavy weather emotions. The acceptance of words without doubt then is also a lack of neutrality. Neither authority, emotions, nor narratives help in neutrality. Neutrality is a state of mind to accept things objectively without the judgement of what ought to be and what ought not be. As we say, science should be positive and not normative. The normative belongs to politics; for there is acceptance and rejection. Pedagogy based on ethics is bound to be normative. This happens when pedagogy emerges from politics, French Revolution, American War of Independence, American Civil War, Civil Rights Movement, Indian Freedom Struggle, People’s War in China and so on. Politics of universality guides knowledge, teaches us acceptance because of the “what a great battle it was”, the nobility, the transcendence, the sublimity, and the emotions takes knowledge out of its context and uses “power” of textbooks, school boards, teachers, peers, competitive job exams to dispense discourses.

Political upheavals where one social class of elites displace the incumbents in power, invariably advance discourses through differently plotted narratives and differently invoked emotions of nobility. They capture institutions and use the existing ones to suit their needs. Discourse is power, without the discourse that survives through the formal and institutional structures, political power is not possible. The detective remains outside of the pale, often a retired police officer, or an independent individual, unattached to a job or profession. Regimes of political uncertainty, or regimes of political contest marginalize knowledge because knowledge is useless to seek power.

Knowledge is marginalized and so is the genuine intellectual. The intellectual who stands apart from social opinion is hard to find; intellectuals shamelessly seeking approval are strewn everywhere. Hence an argument is taken to be an offence; I say, and you listen, we are becoming apostles to one another. We are supposed to only like comments and not engage because you don’t engage with saints. Very quickly thus, politics takes on the form of religion because of the apostolic nature of discourse.