The ultimate binge drinkers

Institutionalization of the bedbugs' fear in identifying other vermin in the society from the aim of social segregation and eradication is shocking!

They drink, and drink, and drink – up to three times their own body weight. No wonder, they are called the ultimate binge drinkers. At times, they are too bloated to return to their homes. Their stealthy lifestyle of drinking, and their habit of helping themselves uninvited stirs the strongest psychological fear among people. Evolved some 100,000 years ago, bedbugs’ drinking habit has sustained them as a species at the cost of humans who continue to shudder at the mere mention of these tiny blood suckers. Its influence on our lives has been unprecedented, pretty much every other bug, including the stomach bug, the computer bug, and the electronic bug carries that name tag. 

In his fifteen years of research on bedbugs, Klaus Reinhardt, a professor of applied zoology at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany, has found that only two from some one hundred odd species of the family Cimicidae are found in our beds. While Cimex hemipterus resides in the tropical regions, the other Cimex lectularius dwells in temperate zones. Although bedbug sightings may have declined in many tropical countries in the recent years, increase in bedbug infestation in the UK, US, Australia and Canada in the past fifteen years clearly indicates that bedbugs have no respect for class and prosperity. In fact, they never had given the fact that London was heaving with bedbugs in the early 19th century. 

Divided into nine profusely illustrated sections, covering aspects of bug diversity, bug sex and bug forecast, Bedbug provides intriguing, engaging and entertaining insights into the life of an insect that is as much part of science as fiction. Alexander Dumas sighted bedbugs during his travels; Shakespeare referred to bedbugs in his plays: and Queen Charlotte was not ashamed of the infested Buckingham Palace. Throughout recorded history, bedbugs have featured in literature, film, poetry and pop culture. The sci-fi musical Bedbugs!!! had a successful run Off-Broadway in 2014. The musical comedy amplified extreme fear leading to paranoia about bedbugs becoming immune to almost all forms of insecticide. In the musical, a mad-scientist Carly mutates New York City’s bedbug population with her super-insecticide to take revenge of her mother’s bedbug-related death. Through the natural history lens, Reinhardt explores how bedbugs became ‘the other’, to represent personal animosity by creating parasitical villains. 

Bedbug provides multiple perspectives on an insect that causes more mental despair than any other human parasite, and yet has interesting aspects that call for tolerance towards it. For a species to be all pervasive, it must have a distinct genetic makeup and a curious sex life. Bedbugs are indeed unique on both aspects. With 14,000 identified genes in the adult bedbug to 36,000 genes for the entire species, researchers are now looking at the genome of the bedbug that can help in the design of pesticides to get rid of these blood suckers. It is still early to suggest if such a possibility has been worked out to any degree of certainty. However, genetic research can indeed help in identifying genes that area associated with blood-sucking, or digestion, or their mating habits, or whatever. 

When it comes to the battle of sexes, male bedbugs are clear winners as it stabs knife-like copulatory organ through the skin into the female’s body. How do females survive such traumatic insemination? That they survive, and contribute to building multiple progenies must make any sane head spin with bewilderment. Have female bedbugs invented a set of extra genitalia to cope with traumatic mating? Reinhardt sets aside such bizarre exaggeration to provide a set of possible strategies that female bedbugs may have been applying to stay in the business. When it comes to issue of sex, humans may have something to reflect upon bedbugs mating encounters. 

What makes Bedbug insight-fully interesting is the manner in which scientific research has been viewed keeping in mind the journey of this insect through history, literature and culture. We may not want to be soft on bedbugs but the fact of the matter is that it costs more than it is actually worth. It has led to resistant bedbugs! According to Reinhardt, there is lot to learn about this profoundly misunderstood insect. The bizarre mating habits of bedbugs have recently led to the development of a homeopathic remedy to cure ovarian pain. It is well known that bedbug’s flatness had helped Einstein unravel the presence of infinity. 

The essential message from Bedbug relates to institutionalization of the fear of bedbugs in identifying other vermin in society from the aim of decimating them. Reinhardt hopes that pest and vermin metaphors will not be used to invite thoughts of social segregation and eradication – like the Jews annihilation in Germany and the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. Bedbug informs and entertains, suggesting tolerance as a means of controlling the bug. 

Bedbug
by Klaus Reinhardt
Reaktion Books, London
Extent: 184, Price: £12.95

First published in Current Science Vol. 117(06), dated Sep 25, 2019 

Getting away with murder

The massacre shamed Britain and helped India win independence.

It has been a century to the day since 1,650 bullets were fired non-stop on unarmed civilians at Jallianwala Bagh, a bloody result of the imperial fear of the natives. The questions of what led to the dreadful killings of hundreds of innocents and how the mass slaughter was dealt with afterwards have pushed researchers and historians to explore the colonial psyche and come up with fresh insights on understanding  the dynamics of colonial brutality.

Jallianwala Bagh by Kim Wagner
Penguin/Viking, New Delhi
Extent: 323, Price. Rs 599.

In his rigorously-researched Jallianwala Bagh, historian Kim Wagner, whose earlier work includes The Skull of Alam Begh, situates the massacre in the Empire’s mindset of retribution and the need to silence growing native discontent. The other book being reviewed here, Kishwar Desai’s Jallianwala Bagh, 1919: The Real Story wades through official and counter-narratives to provide a nuanced account of the shocking incident. Both books – among the first to be released in time for the centenary; other notable titles include a translation of Khooni Vaisakhi by Nanak Singh, Anita Anand’s The Patient Assassin and Rakshanda Jalil’s Jallianwala Bagh; Literary Responses in Prose and Poetry – help us gain a better understanding of this seminal moment in India’s history.

While Wagner maintains the historian’s carefully detached tone as he notes the unjustifiable use of brute power to stop purported sedition from spreading to the countryside, Desai provides a passionate reconstruction of the events leading to the dreadful day, including the deep-rooted racism of the rulers.

What is the value of revisiting something that happened 100 years ago other than to cause emotional discomfort leading to nationalistic posturing, the reader might ask. No amount of denouncing and condemnation of the personal idiosyncrasies of the stone-faced Brigadier General Reginald Dyer can erase this incident which continues to make little sense even in the context of the brutal violence of the imperialism prevalent today. The Lieutenant Governor of Punjab Sir Michael O’Dwyer was in favour of exemplary terror to silence discontent among the natives against the dysfunctional state and that Brigadier General Dyer deliberately picked Gurkha and Baluch soldiers to shoot into the crowd, thus demonstrating that the Empire would persist ruthlessly with its divide-and-rule policy to retain power and subjugate the colonised.

Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 by Kishwar Desai
Context/Westland, New Delhi
Extent: 257, Price. Rs 699.

It is difficult to be objective while drawing lessons from the incident. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre offers a two-way learning process, however, by promoting a profound understanding of both past and present through the interrelation between them. Following the archival grain, Wagner reconstructs events not simply as they happened, but as they were experienced by different people at that time. Jallianwala Bagh reveals how different experiences were treated differently and in the process, helps the reader to understand how violence worked, or was thought to work. In the end, it resulted in a mistrust of the colonial state.  

Desai imagines the cries of men, women and children who lay dying at the Bagh. “History belongs primarily to the victor, but only as long as we allow it,” she writes. She believes the massacre was not spontaneous as has often been made out. It was carefully planned. If this had not been the case, Miss Sherwood’s near-death experience at the hands of native rioters on April 10 would not have been brutally reprimanded, and Mrs Ratan Devi would not have had to spend the night of April 13 grieving over the dead body of her husband.

In the centenary year of the massacre, both books pay tribute to thousands of those who were humiliated, tortured and killed under the pretext of martial law. As the memories of the dastardly act are revoked, the call for a public apology by the British has resurfaced once more. Did the British do enough to detoxify the issue? Winston Churchill called it “an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation”. David Cameron, who was the first British prime minister to visit the monument, denounced the massacre and called it a deeply shameful incident in British history, as Churchill did, while shying away from apologizing for the event. He said, instead, that the UK “stands up for the right to peaceful protest around the world”.

Addressing this lingering concern, Wagner wonders if an apology will do any good as both those who suffered, and those who perpetuated the crime are no longer alive. Such a take on the massacre may not appeal to everyone but it also goes without saying that the sacrifice of thousands at Jallianwala Bagh was not a waste. The massacre shamed Britain and helped India win independence.

But the ways of colonial justice were perverted indeed: while Udham Singh was hanged for his revenge killing of the former lieutenant governor of Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, General Dyer, the chief perpetrator of the crime, was never convicted. He got away with genocide.

First published in The Hindustan Times, issue dated April 13, 2019.

Fear of an imaginary rebellion

It is still difficult to reconcile with the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and the violence unleashed by British colonialism.

Even a century after the dreadful afternoon that silenced hundreds of unaccounted innocents it is hard to reconcile any justification for the barbaric massacre that remains a red blot in the British history. Monstrous no less, the ten minutes of terror unleashed on a hapless crowd gathered in Jallianwala Bagh on the fateful afternoon of April 13, 1919 only proved that violence was a key aspect of British colonialism. General Dyer had seemingly followed the principle of exemplary violence that had justified mass slaughter of sepoys by Cooper during the 1857 mutiny, and summary execution of namdharis by Cowan in 1872. In each of these instances, fear of an imaginary rebellion had provoked violent action. In justifying his own action, Dyer had disingenuously acknowledged that ‘we cannot be brave unless we be possessed of a greater fear’.

In his painstaking reconstruction of the circumstances that led to the dastardly act, historian Kim Wagner wonders if that seminal moment in the history of India and the British Empire has been rightfully understood. In making sense of the form and function of colonial violence, he concludes that spectacular display of brute force was the most effective means of preserving control over the natives, as was evident in brutal reprisals by the British in Kenya, Egypt, and Ireland during its colonial rule. Although events of colonial violence were conveniently attributed to some rogue individuals, as Winston Churchill’s disavowal of Dyer’s action indicated, it only helped ignore the very structure of imperialism that harbored violence in its design. Else, physical and symbolic humiliation, including crawling orders and public flogging, would not have continued following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. That it did, indicate that the massacre was pre-emptive and retribution well considered.

Jallianwala Bagh is a powerful reassessment of the causes and course of the massacre, pieced together by mining facts from a variety of written sources. Like his previous works on the British imperial history which include books on Thugee and The Skull of Alum Bheg, Wagner provides an unbiased account of colonial panic and subsequent brutality. It was the growing unrest throughout the British Empire in 1919 that had made decolonization a real possibility across the colonized entities in Asia and Africa. Despite its barbaric nature, the dreadful incident at Jallianwala Bagh could well be described as the last gasp of an imperialist ideology mired in racial discrimination.

Did the British ever felt remorseful for the tragedy that befell thousands of unarmed civilians?  Despite termination of his military services, for the British public Brigadier-General Dyer was a ‘hero’ who, most believed, was the man ‘who saved India’. Through an appeal in The Morning Post newspaper, as much as £ 26,000 were raised which meant that Dyer could retire in comfort and without any financial concerns. What’s more, Dyer received a full military funeral upon his death in 1927. In his tribute, Rudyard Kipling had remarked ‘He did his duty as he saw it.’ Aren’t public sentiments reasons for the British to avoid tendering an apology for the heinous crime?

Wagner doesn’t shy away from addressing this lingering concern. Far from being apologetic, asserts Wagner, Churchill’s description of it as the ‘unprecedented monstrous episode’ was an act of deflection that only asserted the moral legitimacy of the British Empire. During his visit to the Jallianwala Bagh in 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron had persisted in denouncing the massacre but not without reclaiming the moral narrative ‘that the United Kingdom stands up for the right to peaceful protest around the world’. What will the British apology seek to serve now that both those who suffered, and those who perpetuated the crime are no more?

Will an apology heal the wounds, and should we even attempt to heal the wounds? Even if the British apologize, it would only be for one man’s actions, as isolated and unprecedented, and not for the colonial rule, that in Gandhi’s words, produced Dyer. While an apology in the centenary year will assuage pent-up emotions, it is important that the seminal event in India’s colonial history helps in reiterating the need for individual right to freedom of expression. Jallianwala Bagh is an important book on the colonial era, as much relevance for our post-colonial world.

Jallianwala Bagh
by Kim A. Wagner
Penguin/Viking, New Delhi
Extent: 323, Price: Rs 599 .

First published in The Hindu Magazine, issue dated April 7, 2019. 

Capturing water through its flowing history

Without counting cultural values and notions of justice, any attempt at re-engineering water management is bound to escalate fears about nature and climate.  

Current clamor on water scarcity is pitched around what  nature supplies through rains and what gets delivered through pipes, backed by the assumption that effective demand-side management will help counter supply-side conundrum. Far from it, a water crisis has become severe even when large parts of the country have seemingly escaped what is traditionally termed as ‘monsoon economy’. Between the extremes of a dreary winter and a blistering summer, water crises manifests itself in dried and polluted rivers; as cumulative water shortage in major reservoirs; and in unending queues of desperate people awaiting erratic supplies. This all points out towards an emerging social disruption, if it isn’t there already!

For getting a better sense of the emerging water crises in an age of climate change, Sunil Amrith, Professor of South Asian Studies at the Harvard University, suggests a nuanced understanding on how history shaped water management and use; what compelled the society to respond to new economic opportunities; and how mastering the unevenness of water and its extreme seasonality by the British shaped an economy that improved revenue flow into the treasury?  With maximizing revenue being the be-all and end-all of the British rule, every investment in infrastructure had led to expanding trade for Indian products in the markets of London, Liverpool, Hamburg, and New York. Investment in irrigation works bolstered local resilience to drought, signaling benevolence of the rulers, while ensuring that the state’s coffers remained full. The political connotation of investment in irrigation projects has persisted since then.   

In his reading of the history, Amrith finds a serious lack of realization of nature’s water endowment in expanding irrigation – exploiting economic gains from water remained bereft of social and ecological concerns. And this had continued well into the twentieth century as quick economic turnaround had propelled a large swathe of large landowners to switch to water-guzzling cash crops like cotton and sugarcane. It has only eroded deep social and historical patterns that had treated ‘the monsoon as a way of life’ in promoting crop diversity, and a culture of resilience. With farm crises at its peak, the state is now trying to restore historical sanity by promoting diversified crops a’la more crops per drop.     

Amrith mines British and Indian archives to produce a lively history that unfolds the development of modern meteorology in erasing water inequalities. That water has been a source of both social and economic power was known to the powers-that-be, it was in the disguise of democratization of irrigation expansion that the state sought to usurp power. No wonder, control over water became an engine of inequality between people, between classes and castes, between city and regions. Regional disparities have become ever more pronounced. Little has been learnt that 4 per cent of the available world’s fresh water will always be in short supply to serve 14 per cent of world’s population with competing, and increasing demands. 

Unruly Waters provides in interesting peep into the history of water development that continues to shape and reshape politics in the countries of South Asia. It captures the fears and dreams of rulers and governments in the region in laying control over its shared natural endowment through dams and rivers diversions, which has led to unleashing political tensions between neighbors. It is bound to escalate, as both China and India race to construct hundreds of dams to secure both power and water in carving an elusive water future in the age of climate change. Amrith reminds the present-day governments of both countries about what its founders had painfully remarked: “Jawaharlal Nehru had lamented the ‘disease of gigantism’ in promoting large dams whereas his compatriot Zhou En-lai had acknowledged the mistake of accumulating water by cutting forests”. It is an irony that political expediency has allowed cumulative wisdom of the past to erode. 

As the risks of climate change become increasingly evident in the region, there are essential lessons to be learnt from the shared history of miscued water development in South Asia. That many measures to secure the region against monsoon vagaries have destabilized the monsoon itself through unintended consequences leave much to be desired for sane actions in securing a safe water future. Need it be said that the idea that modern technology will fix matters is passé.   

Unruly Waters is the most comprehensive historical treatise on rains, rivers, coasts and seas, as also on weathermen, engineers, and politicians who sought to tame nature. Amrith covers a vast historical landscape on water but leaves the reader to draw his/her own conclusions. It should be essential reading for researchers and planners as it has between-the-lines lessons and messages to be captured to getting a better sense of the unruly waters. In suggesting that the task to understand the monsoons and the rivers that shape the region is far from complete, the author is emphatic in his suggestion that water management can neither be purely technical nor can it be addressed on a purely national scale. Without counting cultural values and notions of justice, any attempt at re-engineering water management is bound to escalate fears about nature and climate.  

Amrith calls for a new political imagination to view water beyond local histories and national boundaries. ‘Water, which connects Asia, cannot be allowed to divide the region’. There cannot be more compelling reason for countries in the region to cooperate in managing and sharing water then the fact that the countries in South Asia are the world most vulnerable to climate change. Unruly Waters presents all the essential elements to get back on the drawing board to plan a secure water future for the entire region amidst the most challenging times. 

Unruly Waters
by Sunil Amrith
Allen Lane, UK
Extent: 397, Price: Rs 799.

First published in the Hindu BusinessLine, issue dated April 1, 2019.