In the spring of 1917 Lloyd George underwent a change of heart and toyed with the idea of a negotiated settlement with Germany. He could see no dramatic changes immediately ahead, nothing to stimulate hope or signal an approaching climax. Gradually, the idea took root in his mind that the defeat of the German army might be either impossible or prohibitively costly to Britain. He began to backpedal from his announced policy of continuing the war until a knockout blow had been delivered. Strangely enough, his interest in considering peace negotiations came only after the United States had entered the fray. But he was told by the experts that the United States would not be able to place significant military forces in the west for at least a year. The unfitness of the French army for further action in 1917, Britain's shrinking manpower, the deadly toll exacted by the enemy's submarine campaign and the precipitous decline of Russia all combined to make it uncertain that the Entente could hold the Germans at bay until the following year.

Anticipating that in the near future his government might be confronted with an instant demand for peace, Lloyd George felt that some attention should be given to defining the nation's war aims. Accordingly, he prepared a statement that he intended to deliver at the initial meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet.

Born in Aughrim Co. Galway the son of a former inspector of constabulary in Ireland, Bartholomew Elliot Warburton was privately educated in Yorkshire before proceeding to Eton, where he met Kinglake, and Trinity College Oxford from where he graduated in 1834. Though called to the Irish bar in 1837 he ‘abandoned the law to superintend his Irish estates, travel and write’ (DNB) adopting the soubriquet ‘Eliot Warburton’ for his works of fiction and travel. His tour of Syria, Palestine and Egypt was conducted some years after Kinglake, in 1843, but The Crescent and The Cross, or, Romance and Realities of Eastern Travel appeared only a year after Eothen, the former strongly imitating the latter as well as rivalling it in popularity during the Victorian period. Warburton died en route to South America when the steamer Amazon caught fire off Lands End.

From:

The Crescent and the Cross (1845)

Chapter VII diverges from Kinglake in its generalizing observations on Egyptian religion and society. Even though Warburton states he intends to write only about the ‘common-place’ mid-nineteenth century – ‘glimpses of men and things in our time are all I can hope to offer’ – he proceeds to reproduce many of the Orientalist and racial categorizations that become typical of much later Victorian writing on the Egyptian scene and indeed on the Middle East overall. His knowledge of Egypt comes more from Edward Lane than from his own observation.

Layard's main claim to fame was as an archaeologist, but he also had a career in public life, first as a Member of Parliament, and then as a diplomat, culminating in a period as ambassador to Turkey between 1877 and 1880. He is, however, most celebrated for his expeditions to Nineveh and the excavations he made there, described in Nineveh and its Remains (1849) and Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1851). His Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia was published in 1887, more than four decades after the journeys it describes. While a young man Layard left a career in the law to travel in the East with his friend Edward Mitford. Determining on Ceylon as their destination, they set off across Turkey and Syria to Jerusalem, where they split, Layard exploring on his own the ancient sites of Petra and Jerash. Reunited, they proceeded to Baghdad then accompanied a caravan to Kermanshah where Layard resumed his investigations of ancient inscriptions. At a time of tension between Britain and Persia over the former's campaign in Afghanistan the companions were suspected of being spies. So in Hamadan they split for the second and last time, Layard proceeding south to Isfahan and the wild areas of Luristan where the Bakhtiari tribes lived and operated beyond the control of the Persian government. There Layard ‘travelled far and wide, studying archaeological sites, copying rock-cut inscriptions, taking notes on tribal organization, exploring the possibilities of trade with India’ (Wright 1977: 160).

Born in Gloucestershire into a family with strong engineering connections (his father was director of a shipbuilding firm in Newcastle-upon-Tyne), Browne attended Eton and graduated from Cambridge in the Natural Sciences in 1882, qualifying as a practitioner of medicine in 1887. In between, he travelled briefly to Istanbul (1883) and took the Indian languages tripos at Cambridge in 1884. His background of wealth and liberal orientations gave him scope to follow a career in Oriental Studies rather than medicine, and adopt radical postures on the East. Successively the Turks and then the Iranians became objects of his ardour, and he actively promoted their cultural and political causes. He developed a particular rapport with Iranians after his visit to Iran in 1887–8; though this would be his only visit it featured in one of the best travel works of the nineteenth century, A Year Amongst the Persians, which appeared in 1893. Browne was made Sir Thomas Adam's Professor of Arabic in 1902 and spent the rest of his life as a Cambridge don. However, his bitter criticism of the foreign policy of the Liberal Government, especially its position on the Iranian constitutional revolution between 1906 and 1911, harmed his reputation among the political establishment. Independent means and a remarkable grasp of Oriental languages made Browne a formidable adversary. A love for Persian language and culture strongly informs A Year Amongst the Persians, in spite of its being the work of a young man.

The Biharis have been part of Calcutta since the last few centuries. The three states of Bihar, Orissa and Bengal comprised what was in the nineteenth century rather officiously called ‘Greater Bengal’. With both the geographical proximity and the absence of any geological barriers encouraging movement of people among these states, migration to the city of Calcutta has been a regular phenomenon. Interestingly, though the term ‘Bihari’ predates the recent division of the larger state of Bihar, the term was generally not used to refer to people from areas which today are included in the Jharkhand state. The cities and towns of the modern state of Jharkhand – Hazaribagh, Jamshedpur, Maithan, Ranchi, are viewed by most Calcuttans as being familiar enough to be mistaken for towns of Bengal. It has been the people from the districts of Monghyr, Katihar, Purnea, Bhagalpur, Saran (with its subdivision of Chhapra) who have always been identified as the ‘real’ Biharis.

Though the image of the Bihari migrant is often of one who is among the poorest, this may not always reflect reality. Much of the rural–urban migration, as other researches in South Asia and Africa has also shown, is of a circular character. Almost all the Bihari migrants continue to maintain links with their areas of origin in rural Bihar. In the southern African context, or colonial India, this has been attributed to policies that restrict the settlement of migrants with their families.

Introduction

Keeping in mind the question posed above, one can state that in an era, often called the Media Age, the basic issues that confront an analyst exploring the nature of the ‘world's largest democracy’ relate to the media power itself: how do media function in the power structure of the concerned society, and no less important, how do the media address it? The discussion on such issues is political in the broad sense of the term. It is so at least for two reasons: first, basically it is the interpretation of the narrative conventions and representations that shape the context in which politics is conceived, understood and enacted by the people; and second, it is being interpreted by a politically aware audience, composed of readers, listeners and viewers. No less important is the fact that in a democracy the audience is also supposed to be opinion-holders.

An intense focus on the mainstream media, from the vantage point being mentioned here, is bound to be critical in both content and tenor. The same holds true for what is going to be the special focus of this chapter – television and television news. However, a clarification is needed at the ver y outset: such critical analysis should not be construed as a sort of ‘anti-media’ stance. Democracy without powerful and constructive media is an impossible venture and any analyst ready to go beyond the simple causal mechanisms of media effects knows quite well that the world would be a worse place to live in if the media would disappear from the scene.

With Harold Acton, Byron was a key figure in the 1920s Oxford milieu described by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited (DNB). He began establishing a reputation as a traveller and writer on Art with Europe in the Looking-Glass (1926), a youthful record of a journey made with two Oxford friends to Germany and Italy. He found himself honoured in Greece owing to his name (he was distantly connected to the poet). To understand Greece better he went to Mt. Athos where he believed the Byzantine spirit still lived on. The Station (1928) and The Byzantine Achievement (1929, repr. 1937) were statements of his belief that, in the words of his friend Christopher Sykes, ‘the Byzantine Empire was the high noon of Hellenic greatness’ (Sykes 1946: 103). According to Sykes, Byron was a ‘fighter’ who could however carry his opinions to extremes, as he did in his condemnation of Roman Catholicism. Byron's travels to the East began with a stint in India in 1929 as a correspondent for the Daily Express. An Essay on India, which appeared in 1931, laid out his ambivalence toward empire and modernity. He criticized the British Raj for its assumption of racial superiority and bitterly attacked Churchill for his opposition to India achieving dominion status, but he also reproved Indians, while acting under an unavoidable sense of inferiority, for attempting to be modern. Byron preferred non-Europeans not to copy Western material success.

During the early months of the war, Britain employed its naval superiority to keep the sea-lanes open and impose an economic blockade of the Central Powers. The German Navy could not break the blockade, but it could damage Britain's sea-borne trade with a new weapon, the submarine, or U-boat. To cope with the growing submarine menace, the Admiralty relied on a series of countermeasures. It organized naval patrols to hunt for submarines and detailed destroyers and small craft to guard the routes used by merchant ships; it armed merchantmen, employed nets and mines, and introduced depth charges and detecting instruments known as hydrophones. But for the whole of 1916 the British navy managed to sink only 15 U-boats, small inroads into a force that had increased to 140 by year's end. At the same time, German submarines were sinking merchant ships at a rate faster than the capacity of British shipyards to provide replacements. Walter Runciman, president of the Board of Trade, warned the War Committee on November 9, 1916 that if losses continued at the present pace, there would be a complete breakdown in shipping.

The lack of success against submarines cast doubt on the whole conduct of naval affairs and led to changes at the Admiralty during the last month of the Asquith administration, with Jellicoe leaving the Grand Fleet to take over the duties of First Sea Lord.

The Russian Cinematic Search for Happiness

The search for happiness in Russian film began before the birth of the Soviet Union. Pre-Revolutionary Russian filmmakers were preoccupied with the theme, notably the preeminent Russian director Evgenii Bauer. His characters sought happiness in conventional worldly success in films such as Child of the Big City (Ditia bol'shogo goroda, 1914), but also in ecstatic delusion and selfsacrifice in two films whose titles make explicit reference to happiness, The Happiness of Eternal Night (Schast'e vechnoi nochi, 1915) and his late masterpiece In Pursuit of Happiness (Za schast'em, 1917).

The search continued after the Revolution. One of the most daring and inventive films of the Soviet 1930s bears the one word title Happiness (Schast'e). Made in 1934 by Aleksandr Medvedkin, it tells in allegorical form the tale of the Russian peasant's doomed struggle for happiness. Such is Medvedkin's sense of irony that the film did not attract official approval. Far more consonant with the ideological imperatives of the time was the representation of happiness in the musicals of Grigorii Aleksandrov and Ivan Pyr'ev, in which happiness is encapsulated in songs that are still sung today.

This paper attempts to provide an outline of the contributions of the Indian democratic socialist tradition to the expansion and radicalization of the canvas of democratic theory and practice in India. While doing so, it also briefly discusses and highlights the historical and cultural context of the emergence of democratic imagination in India. Besides, the paper also tries to grapple with certain central issues of democracy in contemporar y India, and shows how the socialist input into Indian democracy could help in overcoming some of its predicaments. This analysis is done in three sections. The first section discusses the historical and cultural context of the emergence of democracy in India in terms of the nationalist movement and the framing of the Indian constitution. The second section identifies the central issues that Indian democracy confronts today. Finally, the third section highlights the significance of Indian democratic socialist discourse both in identifying the problems of Indian democracy as well as in evolving amicable solutions to them.

Democracy as a political idea owes its origin to the west. However, the western genesis of the idea of democracy does not necessarily make it Eurocentric as different societies have different ways of articulating or rearticulating democracy in their distinctive cultural and historical pursuits. In India too, the chronicle of democratic imagination and pursuit has been historically specific and culturally distinct.

Let me begin by introducing to you Zinaida the Happy Soviet Housewife, a smiling woman in an apron, baking pies with her little girl in time for Papa to get home. This image of domestic bliss was printed in the Soviet press a day after the American National Exhibition, presenting America as a consumer paradise, opened in Moscow's Sokol'niki Park in July 1959. What is Zinaida so happy about? ‘“Our kitchen”, she says in the caption, “is as good as the American one shown at the exhibition in Sokol'niki.”’ Indeed, Zinaida's Soviet kitchen is modern and rational, if rather modest. It boasts such stepsaving conveniences as wall-mounted units and a drying rack over the sink, which is fitted into a continuous worktop and has a mixer tap, indicating both hot and cold running water supplies.

Happy housewives, showing off their modern homes and dedicated to providing a happy homecoming for their hardworking husbands, are better known, in the post-war period, as the symbol of the good life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Happy Housewife did service in the global politics of the Cold War as an advertisement for the benefits of ‘people's capitalism.’ She was particularly closely identified with the American dream, as represented in advertising images of suburban domestic bliss, although numerous examples may also be found in European and British publications from the 1950s. Surrounded by gleaming appliances, the professional western housewife reigned over her segregated domain, keeping a serene home.

In a recent essay, the Russian ethnolinguist Anna Zaliznyak claimed that the word schast'e, usually rendered in English by ‘happiness’, actually represents a quite specific emotional state. ‘Happy’ is adequately translated, she asserts, only by dovol'nyi, which suggests a comparable sense of well-anticipated and serene contentment. Schast'e, on the other hand, refers to a kind of elation that is extreme, sudden, and not to be relied on; it is a type of ‘earthly bliss’ that exists mainly in the future or in the past (i.e., is a potential force), and that cannot be attained by ‘some algorithmic means–deserved or earned’. So unusual and accidental is the feeling, that it is also ‘slightly shameful’. As always with this kind of exercise in comparative definition, one is tempted to dispute the nationally specific tenor of the analysis; the fact that ‘happiness’ is not the right translation for schast'e surely does not mean that there is no translation for schast'e (‘bliss’ would be fairly close), or that the emotional state so defined is unrecognizable to a person without that term in their linguistic range. However, there are two directions in which discussion can usefully run. One is that Zaliznyak foregrounds an association–which is indeed difficult to capture in English–between ‘happiness’ in the emotional sense and good luck (compare the Latinate term ‘fortunate’).

Whether the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound is grand finale or sublime afterthought, its internal character suggests that what urged Shelley toward its composition in the spring of 1819 was the desire to produce an appropriately magnificent celebration for all the blessings attendant on the union of Prometheus and Asia. As befits their standing as the parents and originals of all this “boundless, overflowing bursting gladness” (320), neither Asia nor Prometheus plays any role in this ceremony of praise. This play within the play is performed not by the two principals of Prometheus Unbound, but for them and their regenerative powers.

The act's opening stage direction names “a Part of the Forest near the Cave of Prometheus” as the scene for a series of performances consisting of: an introductory ensemble of choral song and dance performed by the paired “spirits of the human mind” and the new hours or seasons of human history; a masque-like pageant of Earth and Moon, coming to extended vocal life in the love duet between tenor Earth and soprano Moon; and a final valedictory from Demogorgon.

Although Lloyd George had stated publicly on many occasions that the war would not end until Germany surrendered unconditionally, he never really foreclosed the possibility of peace talks in order to avoid prolonging the horrendous slaughter. After the Kühlmann peace feeler had raised false hopes, Lloyd George told Riddell that “the time might come when they will offer terms we can consider.” His conditions for a stable peace included restitution of territory under Germany's occupation and democratization of its government. But the moment to engage in peace talks did not appear near in view of the Entente's dismal prospects.

In November 1917 President Wilson sent House overseas to urge the Allied leaders to enunciate moderate war aims so as to counteract Bolshevik propaganda and weaken public resolve in Germany. The mission arrived in London at the most inopportune moment. On November 28 the Daily Telegraph published a letter from Lord Lansdowne, a Conservative elder statesman, who made public the case for a negotiated settlement he had initially advanced in a memorandum to the Asquith cabinet a year earlier. Appalled that the flower of the country's manhood was being sacrificed in a conflict he believed was unwinnable, he pleaded with the government to revise its war aims, making it clear that the Allies did not intend to destroy Germany as a great power or ruin its commerce. Only by offering Germany acceptable terms, he asserted, would the war end by negotiation.

The title of this chapter refers to at least four texts. The first two texts are suggested by Ithaca, the city of the birth and return of the great Greek hero, Odysseus, the protagonist of the Homeric epic, Odyssey, and thus brings to mind the great classical text. It is also the title of a famous poem by C P Cavafy (1863–1933), a major Greek poet. The poem, over the years, has become a commonplace metaphor for the importance of journeys over arrivals. Especially in the Rae Delven translation, it has acquired a popular, even cultic following in the English speaking world, with celebrities such as Sean Connery reading it. It has also been quoted in full by the internationally best-selling novelist Paulo Coelho in his book The Zahir: A Novel of Obssession (2005). Coelho does not acknowledge that Anita Desai had used it earlier, in almost the same opening location of her novel, Journey to Ithaca, which is the principal concern of this chapter. But the phrase also refers to the title this very chapter in which I consider a reading of the fiction of the 1980s and 1990s (FEN) itself as a sort of journey to Ithaca, that is, an interesting expedition with a disappointing arrival.

Introduction: Vulnerability, Precariousness and the Body

In thinking about the human condition, we must keep in mind four fundamental aspects of our existence that follow from our embodiment: the vulnerability of human beings as embodied creatures, the dependency of humans (especially during their early childhood development), the general reciprocity or interconnectedness of social life and finally, the precariousness of social institutions. There is a dialectical relationship between these four components that becomes obvious when one thinks about the process of technological modernization. Within this dialectical balance between vulnerability, dependency, reciprocity and precariousness, modern technologies, especially medical technology, have powerful, unpredictable and far-reaching implications, and they are largely disruptive of the relationship between the four components. If our embodiment is the real source of our common sociability, then changes to embodiment must have significant implications for both vulnerability and interconnectedness. The new microbiological revolution in medical sciences holds out the promise of long life and rejuvenation, but the prospect of living forever is driven by a powerful commercial logic and has (largely unrecognized) military and security applications and implications that are problematic for human rights and democracy. New medical procedures such as therapeutic cloning, new reproductive technologies, rejuvenative medicine, stem cell research applications, cryonics, fetal surgery and organ transplants create the possibility of a medical utopia, but they also reinforce social divisions and inequalities, especially between rich and poor societies.

Much of the infrastructure and general atmosphere of Calcutta is heir to the colonial institutions and the mentality born out of colonial history. As a cosmopolitan city Calcutta experiences the presence of a sizeable section of people from other provinces of India. These people from other ethnolinguistic backgrounds migrated here in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This mixed composition staying away from their homelands are usually clubbed together by the Calcuttan under a common blanket term – ‘non-Bengalis’. Of these non-Bengalis, a sizeable section belongs to the different South Indian communities. To begin with, let us admit a common misnomer or a faulty identification of all South Indian people as ‘Madrasis’. E M S Nambudiripad's reaction to the use of such a loose term was:

This common mistake has a historical reason probably. The temporary or permanent migration from different South Indian provinces to different parts of Northern India began with the colonial governance. At that time, all the officials or functionaries from any of the four South Indian provinces represented the ‘Madras Presidency’. The use of such a mistaken blanket term is outdated now and it is the rather loosely-bound, though at least geographically correct term, the ‘South Indian’, which still remains in vogue.