Theoretical and Empirical Background

The empowerment of women especially at their most intimate site i.e the household, is perhaps the most daunting problem of Indian democracy. If poor women, the most vulnerable section of the Indian polity, cannot achieve emancipation from the rigours of domestic oppression then the very basis of democracy is weakened. In other words, if non democratic ethos prevail in the household which is the basic unit of our democracy then the democratic superstructure of our polity becomes vulnerable. Thus, this paper attempts to address the issues that are relevant for the emancipation of the poor women within the household itself.

This paper is based on the findings of a larger study. The paper, as the title indicates, concentrates on the poor maidservant or kajerlok or thika jhee. While it evaluates the socio-economic condition of the jhee on the basis of two small samples taken respectively from a South Calcutta (Kolkata) and a North Calcutta slum (Bustee), at a more fundamental level it tries to decipher whether she (jhee) continues to be discriminated against in the most important site for her – the household. The hypotheses that will be evaluated in this paper are set out later.

Hardcore feminists argue that women's discrimination in the household is because of the prevalence of patriarchy. Patriarchy, in the Max Weberian sense, is a particular form of household organization in which the father dominates over other members of the family.

Introduction: The Rights Discourse

I started this book with the debate between optimists such as Paine, Godwin and Condorcet and pessimists such as Malthus and Ricardo over the prospects for happiness and a full life, especially as it had been envisaged by Paine (1995) in his Rights of Man. While prolongevity obviously raises factual problems about the feasibility of life extension such as freezing whole bodies, it very definitely raises ethical and philosophical problems about how life extension might be justified. In this book I am claiming that there are two important frameworks for its justification. One is an aesthetic justification, which I am deriving from Nietzsche, that by making our lives into a work of art we might justify long life both to ourselves and to others. The alternative is justification in terms of rights (either human rights or the social rights of citizenship). In this rights framework, the right to long life might be developed as fundamentally an extension of a right to life as such or a right to health. Let us turn again to the question of rights.

Egalitarian concepts of social justice and human rights have been used in diverse ways in the life extension project debate. Researchers who are sympathetic to the project have both drawn upon and rejected the egalitarian approach in their argumentation. Generally speaking, they highlight the untenable position of delaying scientific progress while governments and international agencies attempt to resolve existing problems of global social inequality (Post 2004).

Macbeth's anxious question to the air-borne dagger underscores the ambivalence in the manifestations of sight in this play: the dichotomies between what he sees and what he does not see, what he ought to see and what he ought not to see. Within a theatrical text, this opens up particularly interesting possibilities because the visual is a major signifier in the theatre, expected to work in tandem with the verbal/aural signifiers in order to constitute the performance.

In Renaissance England, there seems to have been a shift from the earlier dispensation of ‘hearing’ a play to that of ‘seeing’ a play. Scholars have often regarded Renaissance drama as ‘a confluence of the classical tradition of rhetoric and the native tradition of pageantry and spectacle’. In fact, the visual seems to have been increasingly prioritized over the verbal, so much so that the Jacobean spectators at the Fortune and the Red Bull theatres, comprising ‘the Citizens and the meaner sort of people’ according to Historia Histrionica (1699), are known to have clamoured for cruder forms of spectacular entertainment. No less a personality than Ben Jonson had to submit, however grudgingly, to the growing popularity of sight over sound. The two alternative Prologues for The Staple of News are illuminating in this context. The one written for the public stage declares that ‘he'd have you wise / Much rather by your ears than by your eyes’.

This chapter examines a well-known short story ‘A Horse and Two Goats’, to address three questions regarding the art and achievement of its author, R K Narayan. The first question pertains to a reevaluation of R K Narayan's oeuvre on the occasion of his hundredth birth anniversary, which took place in 2006. Is he really a great writer? If so, how do we know it? The second question touches on the debate started by V S Naipaul about the ‘Hindu’ (non-modern, non-Western) mentality that pervades Narayan's world. Is Naipaul right? The answers to both questions are tied up with the third and chief question, which is that of language and representation in Narayan's writings and which I shall take up first.

I shall argue that Narayan, in a manner of speaking, ‘solves’ the problem of representing Indian reality in a (not entirely Indian language) English by crafting a special kind of style, which we may call an artful plainness. This strategy, which is the opposite of Raja Rao's or Salman Rushdie's, relies on a largely correct, syntactically and lexically limited, narrative technique to create an effect that exceeds its form. The key, in other words, to understanding Narayan's unique contribution to Indian English literature and to reevaluating his greatness is this question of language and representation. Narayan's achievement lies in a minimalism.

The new CIGS, Henry Wilson, was fifty-four years old and one of the most controversial officers of his era. Articulate, quick-witted, intellectually sharp and prone to expressing strong opinions on issues and individuals, he is remembered as much for his love of intrigue as for his accomplishments. He was tall, bald and thin as a reed, with a prominent nose and gothic features, and, by his own admission, was the “ugliest man in the British army.” His strength was as an administrator, not as a field general.

As head of the Imperial General Staff, Wilson had little in common with his predecessor. He was more popular with politicians that with his brother officers. He spoke French fluently, which was certainly a valuable asset in dealing with the nation's difficult ally. His expositions were lucidly expressed and he offered equally clear reasons as to why a course of action should be adopted or rejected. “It was a delight to hear him unravel and expound a military problem,” Lloyd George has written. “For that reason he was specially helpful in a council of civilians.” Yet, also in contrast to Robertson, when faced with the need to make a firm decision, one in which he would be held responsible, his nerves failed him. As Lloyd George put it, he “shrank from the responsibility of the final word, even in advice.”

This article meets the central theme of the present volume from a relatively unusual direction. Instead of focusing directly on the ‘minorities’ in Calcutta in terms of their own respective subjectivities, it explores how the notion of ‘minority’ is significantly shaped by the way in which dominant groups in the city perceive themselves as the ‘majority’. Arguably, the ‘majority's’ self-projection is as crucial in the configuration of ‘minorities’ as the relatively objective parameters of demography and statistics. Again, if the minorities in Calcutta have historically and variously asserted their cultural differences and thus inscribed their signature on the configuration of minorities, there is a sense in which this configuration has been dialectically constituted by the ‘majority's’ discourse of power. Finally, a study of the ‘majority's’ discourse on the ‘minorities’ also brings out the role of cultural essentialism in translating the bare demographic–statistical fundamentals of a minority community's existence into majority communities' construction of the ‘other’.

The boundaries of the self-perception of the ‘majority’ in Calcutta may well vary depending on what the authors of the concerned discourse of power invoke as the crucial determinant of ethnicity – religion or language or a combination of both. Though discourses claiming a Hindu ‘majority’ for the city is common, the city is often also imagined as the site of an essential Bengali-ness.

Right or wrong, I have been compelled to live under the shadow of ‘dirty’ politics in India – but neither am I capable of adopting myself to that situation nor am I competent enough to write a discourse on it. What I shall do is to look into some of the problematics of Indian politics from the viewpoint of common sense.

Common sense refers to ‘the uncritical and largely unconscious way of perceiving and understanding’ the reality that has become ‘common’ at a historical juncture. It means ‘the incoherent set of generally held assumptions and beliefs common to any given society’. Three points should be noted: First, it is fragmentary, incoherent and may appear inconsequential to some as it is linked with one's common sense or his perception of reality and depends on who he is or where he is from. In other words, ‘one's conception of the world is a response to certain specific problems posed by reality, which are quite specific and “original” in their immediate relevance’. Thirdly, when one talks about ‘commons sense’, one emphasizes on those materialistic elements which are apparently ‘immediate’, a product of ‘crude sensation’, and can be justified as ‘realistic’. The main purpose of this paper is to offer a critique of ‘common sense’, decipher it, and, if possible, supercede it.

Introduction: Types of Survival

We can now see that the controversial but simple question – can we live forever? – has a variety of answers. In retrospect, we can now distinguish three basic forms of survival (Callahan, 2009). The first is basically the status quo, which is a relatively long life in historical terms, but with all the disability and immobility that normally goes with ageing. This scenario is obviously undesirable for the individual and costly for society in terms of rising healthcare bills. The second type would be an extension of life with little disability and a quick death. In this form, medicine has successfully addressed most of the diseases of ageing without offering us immortality. From an individual perspective, this outcome is clearly desirable. Finally, we could contemplate decelerated ageing which would simply mean slowing down the ageing process, and then there might be arrested ageing in which ageing could be delayed or deferred for an indefinite period. The aim of the Immortalists is some version of arrested ageing in which morbidity could largely be eliminated and immortality could be delivered through extensive geriatric engineering. This outcome is clearly problematic from a social and economic point of view, and it may be deeply disturbing for the individual, given the problems of boredom and despair that I have tried to describe earlier.

Son of an East London insurance clerk, C.S. Jarvis achieved success as a colonial administrator in Egypt despite not coming from the usual social background and being without a public school education. When 17 he joined the merchant navy as an apprentice, fought as a trooper in the South African War between 1899 and 1902, and in the Great War served in France, Egypt and Palestine reaching the rank of major. Having acquired a good knowledge of Arabic he joined the Egyptian frontiers administration in the Western Desert and was transferred to Sinai in 1922 where he was governor until his retirement in 1936. Thereafter he made a new career for himself writing, drawing upon the knowledge and experience he had acquired during his years among the Arabs in the Egyptian deserts. The Royal Central Asian Society awarded him its Lawrence Memorial Medal in 1938, but he was not a believer in the causes Lawrence espoused. He claimed to have had ample experience of the real Bedouin character and in his books gave many instances of their factiousness, laziness and lust for money.

From:

Three Deserts (1936)

A practical administrator who contributed to desert reclamation during his fourteen years in Sinai, Jarvis argues that the Bedouin were in part responsible for reducing scrub land to desert because they allowed their animals to destroy its trees and vegetation.

The question of livelihoods in both rural and urban India has reached complexity in contemporary times when the country has taken recourse to neo-liberal policies. Livelihoods have been diverse and labour markets have been segregated. While the advent of neo-liberalism in the country meant unemployment, poverty and inequality to a large section of the population, simultaneously this has also meant creation of a new kind of job market with more flexible labour. This complexity in the labour market together with agrarian change implied changing pattern in livelihood creation in rural India. Since rural India meant more than an agrarian economy, it became crucial to study the changing pattern of rural livelihoods in the post-liberalization period in India. The paper is an attempt to explore the pattern of employment changes experienced in rural India through creation and adoption of new livelihoods by the rural population. The paper starts with a review of the question of rural livelihoods and the question of rural change in India as depicted by researchers in Section 1. It then discusses the changing pattern of rural employment in India as experienced in the last decade in section 2 followed by a conclusive section 3.

RURAL LIVELIHOODS IN THE MAKING

The question of changing rural livelihoods under the forces of neoliberalism and globalization arises due to complexity in the form of flexibilization of labour force and multiplicity of occupations. This was pointed out by Deshpande, Standing and Deshpande (1998), Ellis (1998), Carney (1998) and Scoones (1998).

The task of situating the contemporary Indian English novel will necessarily be a tentative rather than a normative one, marked perhaps by the sputtering, flickering, even involuntary exertions of the illocutionary subject. In fact, when I first wrote this Introduction. I remember starting off by admitting that it had been crosshatched between two contrary discursive impulses, or should I say, compulsions – on the one hand, the cordial and insistent invitation to embark upon such an exercise and on the other hand, my own inner reluctance to undertake the kind of ‘fixing’ that the word situating implies. On further reflection, I think that the contrary impulses were deeper and had to do with the nature of the project of situating the Indian novel itself rather than merely the tussle between having to write and needing to remain silent, vocalizing and reflecting, going out and staying at home.

The word ‘situate’, itself has an interesting etymology. It may not be out of place to mention here that the tendency to use etymology to clarify what we mean should not be alien to us in India because our learned ancestors often resorted to Nirukta to establish meanings in Vedic exegesis. Thus, the recourse to etymology and derivations is not alien to our hermeneutic traditions. As an aside, we may bear in mind that Nirukta and etymology are not the same.

Introduction: Living or Surviving?

The quest for longevity appears to have been a recurrent theme in the history of human societies, because the possibility of extending life has persistently disturbed and provoked human consciousness. Awareness of our own finitude is a defining characteristic of what it is to be human and provides much of the foundation of religion, art and morality. In both fact and fiction, humans have long been pondering questions about longevity and happiness. Shakespeare's King Lear, in which the elderly king begins somewhat hastily and naively to surrender his sovereign powers to his daughters, may be a lesson about how not to become socially and politically irrelevant. At King Lear's court, the Fool warns the King not to grow old until he has grown wise. Similarly Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, in 1726, offered a humorous if also satirical and bitter account of the disillusion and depression suffered by the Immortals of the Kingdom of Luggnagg who were condemned to live forever. They have no memories of their youth and no hopes of any future release from the treadmill of life, thereby living their lives in a state of envy and moroseness. After his initial enthusiasm for the immortal Luggnaggians, Gulliver is informed that ‘Envy and impotent Desires are their prevailing Passions’ (Swift 2003, 196). Longevity had not trained them in superior virtues, but merely added to the existing list of mortal vices, and hence their immortality was farcical and pathetic.

Traveller, journalist and sportswoman, Maillart travelled extensively in Europe and Russia in the early 1930s. In 1932 she stayed six months in Russian Turkestan living amongst Kirghiz and Kazakh tribesman who she wrote about in Turkestan Solo (1938). In 1934 she went to Manchuria as correspondent of the magazine, Petit Parisien, for which she continued to write during her travels in Iran and Afghanistan in 1937. Forbidden Journey, the account of her travels in the Gobi desert and return journey via the Hindu Kush accompanied by Peter Fleming, was published in 1937. In the early months of 1939, Maillart and her travelling companion Christina traversed Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, as the latter ‘fought a hopeless battle against her addiction to drugs’ (Russell 1986: xiii). Maillart's narrative of the journey, The Cruel Way, was published after the Second World War. She wrote both in French and English and also represented her native Switzerland at single-handed sailing in the 1924 Paris Olympics and later at ladies hockey and skiing.

From:

The Cruel Way (1947)

According to Mary Morris and Larry O'Connor, Maillart was ‘one of the first writers to consider the inner journey’; her distinctiveness as a travel writer lay in her interweaving of ‘political and historical details with the personal and the everyday’ (Morris 1996: 243).

This chapter is born out of an attempt to understand the experiences of oneself and very many similar women as part of a process – the process of ‘selfing’ the city to which we have come as outsiders. These experiences, this apparently ‘personal’ process of adjustment and negotiation is also seen as contributing to a larger process – it is difficult to call it a process of social transformation or even change, though all the signs of such a description seem implicit in understanding the material out of which the chapter is made. Hence at this stage, I shall merely provide an account of the material and attempt to connect these accounts with each other in order to construct a context. Whether this context is the result of a change or is in itself a sign of change can then be speculated upon. The project is an attempt to give meaning to memories of sharing – hostel rooms, confidences, double dates, boyfriend problems, local guardian woes and many such realities that had not existed in the sheltered lives we had left behind in order to chase a dream – the dream of the city. In later years, this was the experience of many students and friends that I could identify with – only now the scene has shifted to PG digs, shared flats, rented accommodation, and the problems could all be classified under the large, loose category of ‘staying or sticking on’.