Recently in Desi Category

I'm doing my annual trip to Kolkata, India, to spend time with relatives, and attend a friend's wedding reception. A few days back, B, my aunt, and I hit Oxford Bookstore, a lovely 89-year-old bookstore in the middle of town.

I ended up buying about a dozen books. Some of the books I'll be hauling back home were already on my reading list: Aravind Adiga's White Tiger (the latest Booker winner), Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies (the latest from a fave writer), and Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape (the new novel by a smart feminist Indian SF writer I've been really enjoying). Others were from novelists I've never heard of, including Devdutt Pattnaik's The Pregnant King, Indrajit Hazra's The Bioscope Man, and Nayantara Sahgal's Mistaken Identity.

Our trip to Oxford Bookstore was full of particularly acute synchronicity:

• Earlier that day, my aunt, an Indian historian, had got the news that her latest book has gone to press, via Oxford University Press India
• While browsing, B and I ran into acquaintances we'd met at our friend's wedding reception the night before
• California Bengali scientist Mani Bhaumik (co-inventor of the laser) was sitting at the next table from us at the bookstore cafe, signing a new popular science book
• We ran into Raka Ray, from UC Berkeley's Center for South Asian Studies, as she dashed into the store looking for a book; she's someone all three of us know as a friend or colleague
• While in the checkout line, the man in front of me looked weirdly familiar; I struck up a conversation, and he turned out to be UC Berkeley economist Pranab Bardhan, in town for a few days

That Californian Bengali bibliophile connection is quite something.

I was walking near home Sunday when I saw two 25-35 year old normal-looking white guys walking by, one of them with a tattoo in Indian script on his upper left arm walking by. As we approached, I glanced at his tattoo again. Jeepers. It wasn’t Devanagari, but Bengali script. Who walks around with a Bengali tattoo?

By then, he’d walked past, but I turned around, and called out to him, “hey, excuse me, can I read your tattoo?” He smiled, extended his arm, and I read “Hare Ram Hare Ram Hare Ram” in a circle around his arm, an invocation to Rama, the mythological Hindu warrior-king. We introduced ourselves, talked for a minute. The tattoo bearer described himself as a Vaishnavite (a strain of Hinduism popularized in the west by ISKCON), and was aware of the Bengali language program at UC Berkeley.

We talked for a minute more, shook hands, walked away. How random that the first person I’d see with a Bengali tattoo would be a non-cultish-looking white Hindu guy in Berkeley.

Sanjeev on social class stigma in India, vs the US:

“You aren’t just doing a different job than your employer — many perceive you to actually be a lesser person than your employer. And unlike the United States, few in India’s upper classes would ever think of working as a waiter or waitress. The salary differences are so great, the class-based stigma so large, that it would be unthinkable to spend a summer ‘waiting tables’ to come up with some spending cash for college.”

More…

It depresses me that there exists a strong South Asian folk belief in black magic. I’ve had family members tell me about the reputed power of “tantriks,” even suggesting that my health problems may be linked to long-distance black magic caused by hostile tantriks.

Indian rationalist/humanist movements working to combat superstitious or irrational belief systems have been growing over the past several years (e.g. the Indian Rationalist Association, Science and Rationalists’ Association of India, Indian Skeptic, as well as the umbrella Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations).

I enjoyed reading about Indian skeptic Sanal Edamaruku taking on a tantrik on live TV. The challenge? “Pandit” Surinder Sharma, a high-profile tantrik, was asked to magically “destroy” Sanal on TV. Sharma apparently believed in his own powers; he made a fool of himself on TV, chanting mantras, engaging in complicated “magic” practices, utterly failing to harm his intended victim. The distressed pandit complained that the atheist Sanal must be secretly worshipping a powerful god, and suggesting that he could try using stronger magic at night. The TV station dutifully fulfilled his wishes by offering a nighttime rematch, where he failed again.

Read the whole story about the great Tantra challenge…

(via Sepia Mutiny News)

I’m reading the Sarai Reader 05 which contains a fascinating paper on the legal status of the Ahmadiyya religious community in Pakistan, and how that may have been impacted by notions of intellectual property law.

The Ahmadiyyas are a small Muslim sect who believe that a man named Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was the Islamic messiah; most Muslims reject Ahmad, so the relationship of the Ahmadiyyas to mainstream Muslims is similar to that of Mormons and mainstream Protestant Christians. Pakistani Anti-Ahmadiyya legislation prevents them from using Muslim titles, building mosques, citing the Koran, etc. (I first learned of the community through my friend Naeem’s film Muslims or Heretics, which deals with anti-Ahmadi sentiment in Pakistan and Bangladesh.)

In her paper “Trespasses of the State: Ministering to Theological Dilemmas through the Copyright/Trademark” (PDF), Johns Hopkins anthropology professor Naveeda Khan shows how courts evaluating anti-Ahmadi legislation in Pakistan were influenced by notions of copyright and trademark, as they debated how best to protect mainline Islam from what they interpreted as brand piracy:

“It may appear that in calling for a legal structure analogous to copyright or trademark laws for the protection of shia’ir-e-Allah, the Supreme Court is simply actualising a potential for the use of the copyright/trademark against Ahmadis long simmering in earlier judgments. However, this Court does something slightly but significantly different. In harnessing the language of copyright/trademark to the Ahmadi question, the Court is making much more apparent that the intent of these transgressions, that is, the unlicenced use of titles, texts, modes and spaces of worship, is that of wilful deception…Neither Muslims nor the Islamic state is affectively constituted and legally armed to provide the necessary aura of protection around such objects, such that non-Muslims may recoil from using them. The judgment, in effect, calls for a feedback loop similar to copyright/trademark law, for only then will Muslims, in general, and the Islamic state, in particular, treat shia’ir-e-Allah in the appropriate manner so as to make unthinkable its improper appropriation and use.”