Friday, January 22, 2021

The landscape of contradictory impulses

Mystics, monkeys and murders have come to be identified with parts of the Ridge. 

Delhi may have been slowly forgetting its past but the Ridge, the green lungs of the sprawling megapolis remain living fossils in the history of its making. Between its stones and soil are held the political, economic, and ecological tensions between the rulers and rebels, the orthodox and the liberated, and the civilised and the wild. Spread over 80 square kilometers of reserved forest in the city, it is as much a place for lovers, joggers and stoners as for landlords, administrators and politicians. All said, it is a blissful reality in an otherwise polluted city. 

While there is little denying that mystics, monkeys and murders have come to be identified with parts of the Ridge over the decades, such contradictory impulses nonetheless harbor crucial vantage points for understanding the interconnectedness that can help in healing its ecological scars. Thomas Crowley views the sacred and the profane with empathy to create a new vision for the Ridge, one that has something for everyone with its riches redistributed and enjoyed by all. Till it remains a contested territory with rights and obligations skewed in favour of the powerful, the future of this green zone will remain vulnerable to both manmade and cosmic challenges.   

Fractured Forest Quartzite City is an absorbing and engaging read on the subject of urban development. In the quest for international investments, most cities go for style over substance and keep a shiny surface atop a chaotic subsurface. A city as big as Delhi has slowly turned into a shadow of its glorious past. The foundations of this degeneration were laid in 1911 during the establishment of the capital by the British. Later, not only were the quartzite structures inherited, the many British laws and attitudes too became part of the legacy. The Ridge was to become its intended victim, supporting both production and consumption to sustain the city’s economic transformation.  

Like a curious child exploring the inner functioning of a mechanical toy, Crowley has not left out any detail in his investigative narrative on the Ridge. If the Tughlaqs, the Khiljis, and the British appear as part of its bloodied  history; the Rajputs, the Gujjars, and migrants contribute a socio-cultural narrative; and, the likes of the Jagmohans, Ponty Chaddhas and the monkeyman fill the political-economic perspective. It seems the  Ridge has never existed in a vacuum as many aspects of its economic, social, cultural, and political history remain entangled in its geological existence. Peeling the layers exposes the realities which have been ereased from public memory. This book is a plea to reconnect with the Ridge’s past to build a common heritage of shared responsibilities.              

Lucid and well-researched, Fractured Forest Quartzite City presents the Ridge as a living entity. The Ridge is to Delhi what lungs are to the body, pumping oxygen into its air for its inhabitants to realize their dreams, their fantasies, and their unspoken desires. Without the story of the Ridge, the history of Delhi too would be incomplete. Crowley’s painstaking efforts in recreating the legacy of the Ridge is a tribute to its geology and ecology that made many cities rise and fall around it. However, it is now up to the contemporary city to ensure that its lungs stay healthy for a vibrant engagement with its populace.  

The book helps readers discover how the Ridge and the city have shaped each other, and will continue to co-evolve. Crowley’s aim has been to broaden the scope of thinking about Delhi’s environment by reconnecting its past with the present, and exposing how consumption effects the immediate environment. Fractured Forest Quartzite City provides a comprehensive account on the evolution of the megapolis and leads the reader to understand that growth cannot be at the cost of ignoring the Ridge.  

Fractured Forest, Quartzite City
by Thomas Crowley
Sage, New Delhi
Extent: 350, Price: Rs.795.

First published in the Hindustan Times, Jan 21, 2021.

Sunday, January 10, 2021

Illusion of a makeover

That the populist image-building force has developed into an instrument of coercion isn’t the concern of the large majority. 

Francis Fukuyama had professed that the post-war evolution of mankind will spur the ideological universalization of liberal democracy. In saying so, the author of The End of History and the Last Man had assumed that the world of globalization will subsume spiritual values and national identities. However, in her innovative analysis Ravinder Kaur, an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, questions this assumption and argues instead that identity politics is being capitalized as a brand in recent times to gain greater economic value. India's recent mega-publicity campaigns aimed at transforming the nation-state into an attractive investment destination has been one such utopian vision of a twenty-first century nation building. It is built on the optimistic illusion that ‘good times’ are just round the corner, strengthened by the attention-grabbing spectacles that keep its consumers constantly hooked. 

Brand New Nation is a thoughtful enquiry into the capitalist project that has transformed the state into an authority that holds the power to brand, legislate and rearrange the nation as a market-ready investment enclosure. The populist nature of this new image building, driven by necessary infusion of global capital, has led to the fragmentation of a plural society into a polarized mass of individuals who are ready to compromise in the pursuit of self-interest. That the populist image-building force has developed into an instrument of coercion isn’t the concern of the large majority. These seeming contradictions have come to characterize the image makeover.  

It is indeed a seductively repackaged idea of image building wherein ancient cultures and modern ambitions have been made to co-exist in a democratic set-up that has majoritarian autocracy at the top. Not many seem to be complaining though as capitalist growth and hyper-nationalism has created social enclosures that have come to characterize the brand new nation. In an engaging multi-layered narrative, Kaur unravels how seemingly contradictory positions cohere in rearranging the so-called liberal political order. Where else can one find identity economy and identity politics hold joint currency in creating a populist notion of good times that harbors seeds of sectarian violence triggered by an exclusionary economic growth agenda? 

Much has been written in recent times on how India has expressed its ambitions of becoming a global power, however, the market logic of reconfiguring the nation-state as a cultural hub of profitable business enterprise of a specific kind provides fresh insights on the subject. Brand New Nation bridges the past and the present in proposing that the re-imagination of the country is rooted in its past, albeit packaged in a tech-friendly software utopia embraced by the younger generation.  "Put simply, the Brand is manufactured and marketed on a well-calibrated play of attention and diversion, of secrecy and excessive publicity that creates its own truth and public secrets that people know not to know". However, culturally troublesome fact in the new brand is the political push for the pre-Islamic imagery of the country – tactically evicting minorities and the others (the Muslims, the Dalits) from the image frame. It is here that the new image holds potential to develop serious social fissures.   

Can the country hold on to its new image beyond the current political dispensation that nurtures it? Can the brand new nation remain afloat in the permanent anticipation of good times? Can the state of optimism be sustained under falling economic growth? Unless we begin to make sense of the return of ethnonationalism with a majoritarian impulse, argues Kaur, understanding the limitations of branding the nation-state will remain incomprehensible. Outwardly attractive it may seem, but the unabashed illiberal majoritarian politics taking over the liberal democracy has yet to stand the test of time in addressing the pressing economic challenges. 

Brand New Nation makes interesting and absorbing reading but leaves the reader to draw his/her inferences on the transition that the nation-state is passing through. While the imagery of a brand new nation offers an optimistic sales pitch, the consequences of the socio-political experimentation that conveniently categorizes those who doubt or raise troubling questions has yet to be fully assessed. Whether it strengthens the political leadership or will lead to its weakening will determine the endurance of the new image. All said, a history is in the making with the promise of a new tryst with destiny. Kaur deserves appreciation for taking the reader on a tour of the changing trajectory of re-building a nation-state. .

Brand New Nation
by Ravinder Kaur
Stanford University Press, USA
Extent: 346, Price: Rs. 1,524.

First published in The Hindu, issue dated Jan 10, 2021.