Speaking Volumes: The F-Word, revisited

(Published in the Business Standard, June 2011)

The first issue of Granta, on New American Writing, came out in 1979. This was 11 years after Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, six years after the Boston Women’s Health Collective published Our Bodies, Ourselves and nine years after Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch challenged conventional history. (To offer a little Indian context, it would be five years later, in 1984, that Ritu Menon and Urvashi Butalia would set up India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women.)

Over the decades of the ‘80s and the ‘90s, Granta’s pages would be open to some of the strongest feminist voices of the period, and its contributors’ page reflects a reasonable degree of equality between men and women writers. Doris Lessing, Susan Sontag, Jeanette Winterson, Germaine Greer, Urvashi Butalia, Zadie Smith and a hundred other women made their presence felt, on issues that covered everything from anorexia to ambition, motherhood, war zones, climate change, work and play.

But it is, in many ways, typical of this literary magazine to explore feminism at a time when it’s become, as the title of Granta 115 indicates, the F-word. Suggestions that feminism has been dying, or should be summarily executed, have been made since the late 1980s. We’re supposed to be living in a post-feminist era, and to many, feminism is not so much a threatening idea as a musty old word, a problematic label, a relic from another time.

Or so the media would have us believe. Granta’s F-word issue is a powerful collection in part because it is a reminder of why feminism shouldn’t, and can’t, die out. Back in the 1960s, feminism in the West was fighting for financial equality, sexual and reproductive freedoms, the right to emerge from decades of invisibility, more political and cultural power. Within the feminist movement, whether this was in the West or in Africa or in India, questions of class and race often came up, causing feminists to bump into and confront their own areas of discomfort.



(Image from Granta: The F-Word. Naddy Photomaton (My grandmother)' ©Clarisse d’Arcimoles)


This might be the perfect time to take stock of feminism and its discontents. Granta 115 has a broad, and global, canvas, but there are very few pieces here that are predictable. Some are inevitable, reflecting one of the problems with feminism itself, which is that the old battles are endlessly recycled.

AS Byatt’s reflections on the old days when women academics were excluded from men’s-only clubs may seem almost archaic these days, but it is a useful reminder of a time when the barriers for women were unthinking and all-pervasive. Taiye Selasi’s short story, The Sex Lives of African Girls, updates an ongoing narrative (incest, rape, mutilation) with such sharpness that her sentences will stay branded on your mind for a while. Urvashi Butalia’s Mona’s Story updates her account of the life of Mona Ahmed, moving from her initial attempts to capture what it means to be a hijra to a meditation on the cages of gender itself.

Many pieces are unsettling. When Lana Asfour writes about the recent revolutions in Tunisia, she explores the much larger and urgent question of whether the revolutions of this summer will include women. This was one of the few instances where one felt a gap; a parallel essay on whether the focus on preserving multiculturalism in the West had led to women’s rights being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness would have been very welcome. And the fiction is often brilliant; Lydia Davis’ story, The Dreadful Mucamas, about a couple’s uneasy equation with the two sisters who work as their household help, is an examination of power and abuse that should be read by every over-privileged Indian.

Other excerpts and essays are illuminating, in the strictest sense of the word, casting light on forgotten and overlooked corners of history. Caroline Moorhead, who has explored what it means to be a refugee in the riveting Human Cargo, turns her attention to the women of the French resistance, the relationships between them, and the train that took them to the Nazi death camps. It is yet another reminder of how often, and easily, women’s histories are written out of the grand narrative, even today.

About the only glaring absence here is the energy and ferocious activism one sees among the younger feminists, especially on sites like Feministeing; a Jessica Valenti or two would have added much to this debate. But this is a thought-provoking issue despite these omissions. Beyond the impact of any individual piece, what Granta 115:
The F-Word reminds us is that feminism back in the 1960s raised some deeply uncomfortable questions, and that we don’t yet have the answers. In the intervening decades, feminism hasn’t died, or even gone underground; instead, it’s morphed into a hundred local avatars and versions of itself. Perhaps The F-Word will remind this generation yet again, as the old feminist slogan goes, that well-behaved women rarely make history.

Happiness: An Occasional User's Guide

(Published in Forbes Life India's Monsoon Edition, for their Curators of Interestingness series. I don't think I've ever enjoyed writing and researching a column more.)

For the last month, I’ve been unexpectedly contented, occasionally joyful, often outright happy, and this drove me round the bend for about two weeks. Here’s the problem with unexpected, apparently long-lasting happiness: I didn’t know why it was happening.

The closest thing humans have to a fear of happiness is cherophobia—more accurately a fear of experiencing joy—and I am, thankfully, not a sufferer. But before I diagnosed myself with Excessive Happiness Disorder (the syndrome exists), the explanation arrived. A month of reading about happiness studies, the art of happiness and happiness in general proves one of the great laws of happiness—it is, like the common cold, infectious.

There is also a second, subtler aspect to this that the positive psychology movement is only beginning to assess—happiness and neuroplasticity, or the idea, explored by the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran and others, that what you choose to pay attention to, read, or do, can rewire your brain for a variety of emotions. In other words, the brain can learn happiness, and mine was responding strongly to a steady stream of positivity.

Happiness studies has taken off in the last decade, and in just the last year, there have been a stream of books promising to teach us how to be happy, or to tell us why we’re not. But many of these attempts confirm another, and somewhat sadder, truth: the pursuit of happiness is not the same as the experience of happiness.

Lessons from a prison camp
The man who may have contributed the most to the current studies of happiness made his discoveries in circumstances that many gurus of positive psychology would consider absolutely inimical to pleasure, empathy or joy.

Viktor Frankl’s occupation in Nazi Germany was to study the minds of women who had become suicidal; he may have seen as many as 30,000 cases in the “suicide pavilion” before the brutal logic of World War Two came into play. Frankl was an Austrian Jew, and despite his work as a physician and the acclaim in which he was held, even by the Nazis, he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942. He ran a suicide watch unit at Theresienstadt, but in 1944, he was sent to first Auschwitz and then Turkheim. His wife, his father and his mother died in separate camps—his father of illness, while his wife and mother were murdered.

Liberated in 1945, returning to a home without family, Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in 1945. It was a psychiatrist’s objective account of life in the camps, but through it all ran Frankl’s three great truths. The first was that no matter what the circumstances of our lives, men and women had the power to exercise choice—in the camps, the choice came down sometimes to whether they would be good prisoners, or oppressors of other prisoners, sometimes the choice lay in how one experienced suffering. Frankl’s second sharing was that spiritual growth, a belief in one’s Maker, was something essential to the human spirit, and necessary to it—even in circumstances of extreme suffering. And his third was simple: “The salvation of man is through love and in love.” Even in the camps, the contemplation of his wife, the need to believe in love, would carry him—and others—through.

In Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy—a wonderful starting point for seekers after happiness—de Botton explores the approach made by the Greek philosophers to the experience of living. And from Socrates, whose life was lived in a constant search for what was true, rather than what could be conveniently accepted as the truth, to Epicurus, who taught the importance of living in the moment and working towards tranquil acceptance, de Botton notes that every philosopher of note advocated acceptance of the nature of life, in all its complexity and occasional sadness, as part of the key to happiness.

And perhaps it was Abraham Maslow who first proposed a 21st century understanding of the hows of happiness in his 1962 classic, Towards a Psychology of Being. He used his hierarchy of needs—first the physical, then the social, then the spiritual—to explain why humanity would always strive for transcendence. The ultimate human desire, in his view, was to “become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming”. But even as Maslow became influential in business studies and positive psychology, it was the material part of his hierarchy of needs that many of his students focused on—the needs for achievement, security, status were noted at the expense of the need for self-actualization and self-transcendence. Frankl, who lived for decades after his experiences in the camps, could have told Maslow’s disciples that they were going in the wrong direction.


Practical Magic

In 2010, Barbara Ehrenreich launched an attack on what she saw as the tyranny of the positive psychology movement, its self-absorption, the insistence among some gurus on denying negative emotions, and the growing materialism of the happiness movement. Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World was prompted by her own battle with breast cancer, and her refusal to buy into the “think positive” mantras surrounding recovery at the time, but being Ehrenreich, she moved far beyond the personal. Her attack was on what she saw as a culture of mindless positivity, which also had a more sinister undercurrent: if you were unhappy, it was your fault. Ehrenreich wasn’t having any of this.

Just four years before this, Rhonda Byrne had made a massive impact with her self-help book, The Secret, and in 2010, would follow this with The Power. Both bestselling books were built on the foundation of The Law of Attraction—the idea that you attract into your life the positive or the negative depending on your thoughts. Many critiqued Byrne: some neurologists questioned the idea that thoughts could affect events, some pointed out that the logical corollary of the premises of The Secret would be to blame tsunami survivors, for instance, for bringing a tsunami down on themselves.

Getting to the hows of happiness, though, reading The Power is illuminating. The Power advocates several exercises, from positive visualization to meditation-style work—and if you really put Byrne’s ideas into practice, you will spend an hour or three a day working on happiness. Depending on whether you believe in the “endless bounty of the universe”, the laws of attraction and the power of love, this may or may not get you the Malibu mansion with a newly-divorced Javier Bardem as your personal slave—but it will focus your mind powerfully on what does make you happy, just as an hour or two of exercise draws attention to your body’s needs.

Far more scientific than Byrne’s bestselling New Age wooliness is Sheena Iyengar’s powerful The Art of Choosing—a brilliant examination of why we make the life choices and personal choices we do, how these are culturally influenced, and how to make better choices. Iyengar eschews self-help language for incisive, thought-provoking explorations, and along with Gretchen Rubin’s mellow The Happiness Project, this is one of the two books I would pick as a practical guide to finding happiness. Rubin’s project started out as a blog, and her laws of happiness are a clear, persuasive distillation of wisdom drawn from several sources—Buddhist philosophy, Walden, The Simpsons and the joys of cleaning closets.

The true counterpoint to Byrne’s The Secret, though, is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert argues that what we think will make us happy—the new job, the perfect relationship, the fancy house—may not actually get us there; we are bad, as a species, at imagining the future accurately. If we really want to be happy, Gilbert argues, we should accept that happiness is unexpected, fleeting, but intense; we should practice self-awareness rather than projecting into an uncertain future. Martin Seligman’s equally seminal Authentic Happiness suggests that the way we choose to remember events, and to process the present, will be more conducive to lifelong happiness than the nature of the events themselves—and that wisdom is also what imbues His Holiness The Dalai Lama’s hugely influential The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living.

The gentle wisdom of the Dalai Lama says that happiness is in our own hands—but also takes this out of the personal into the wider world. If the purpose of life is to be happy, then we all have a responsibility to our environment, to contribute and to give back. He makes his point without preaching, and this is worth the price of a hundred shallow self-help books.


The garden and the battlefield

The writer Kiran Nagarkar, speaking of the Mahabharata, observed that it was an incredible feat of storytelling: which modern author would interrupt the battle that is the focus of the narrative in order to allow two characters to discuss the meaning of life? Of all the great religious texts, the Bhagavad Gita, and the conversation between a warrior and a god, captures the challenges of being happy in the middle of the vicissitudes of life perfectly. Here is what Arjuna faces: the prospect of killing those he knows well and has grown up with, of losing dear friends and family, and his question to Krishna is, very simply, why is this necessary? Krishna’s answer is, if you think about it, one of the keys to happiness: do not duck your dharma. Do what you have to do, on the battlefield, in the office, at home, and do it to the best of your ability. In that doing, you will find your answers.

But how can we be happy when life is filled with strife, death, challenges, discomfort, chaos? The Buddhist nun Pema Chodron had a quiet but powerful answer in her book, When Things Fall Apart: “We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart." This, she says, is the nature of life, and there is no easy path, only a simple one: learn the practice of letting go.

This concept is often misunderstood as abdication of responsibility, a dropping out from life; what Chodron wants us to work towards is its opposite, a deep acceptance of the unstable nature of life, and a letting go of the outcome of our actions—while continuing to do what is best for us. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche, goes even deeper, urging us to come to terms with the greatest and most pervasive fear of all—the fear of dying. Live your life as a preparation for death, see it as just another stage of life, and you will find your freedom, says Sogyal Rinpoche. And one of the best ways to deal with death lies in the cultivation of happiness.

In 1845, a man dropped out from the demands of his busy life, and set out to see whether he could create a life that was more suited to his essential nature. By living simply, in a cabin near Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau did not build a less busy life—the seasons and their ebb and flow, the necessity of tending to his garden, the presence of neighbours, all of these kept his hours and days in a constant hum of disciplined activity. As he wrote in Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

This is what often escapes many of the seekers after an easy route to happiness: Thoreau was not looking for an escape, or a retreat, but for a deeper, more meaningful life. In his pursuit of happiness, he was willing to spend time building and nurturing his dream, and he was willing to surrender completely to the reality of living out in the woods. He found his happiness the way Viktor Frankl, living in a concentration camp, did: not in escape, but in an acceptance of the burdens and small joys of every day, no matter how different the surroundings were for both men. They paid attention to themselves, and they thought deeply about their lives; and never, not for a moment, did they stop living their lives as best as they could.

Free speech: "Cannot you hold your tongue?"

(Published in Forbes India, January/ February 2011, for its Curators of Interestingness series.)


BOOKS: FREE SPEECH

“Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you?”
From Plato’s Apology, concerning the trial of Socrates.


In 399 BC, the finest and most prominent citizens of a state known for its commitment to justice and fairness gathered to decide on the fate of one of its best-known gadfly-philosophers. By the end of the meeting in Athens, Socrates had been sentenced to death, apparently for no greater crimes than “impiety” and “corrupting the youth”. He became the first free-speech martyr: his response to those who asked him to hold his tongue is often quoted.

“Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living—that you are still less likely to believe.”

These lines have formed the bedrock of the argument for free speech for centuries, along with John Stuart Mill’s 1859 pronouncement in On Liberty: “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”

The trial of Socrates, as it has been presented by Plato and Xenophon, is heartbreaking: there you have the Western world’s first free-speech martyr, put to death in the twilight of his life by a cruel state. The problem with this view, as IF Stone has pointed out, is that Athens was not a tyrannical state—it did not share the views of modern-day China, Burma or Korea on the evils of free speech and the value of censorship. The citizens of Athens acted out of character when it came to the trial of Socrates; they condemned him perhaps for political reasons (he had not spoken out against the rule of tyrants), perhaps for personal ones (the corruption of the youth previously mentioned), and only in part because his opinions made the state and its citizens uncomfortable.

The great contemporary battles over free speech are not dissimilar. We accept, in theory, that free speech is necessary for any functioning democracy; in practice, freedom of expression has never been a comfortable virtue to exercise. It’s not about what books one should be allowed to read, or about whether an author is right or wrong—free speech debates go to the heart of exploring any society’s areas of discomfort. Sometimes those have to do with sex and love; often they have to do with religion and faith; and occasionally, the discomfort comes from having one’s implicit beliefs about the society you live in challenged. Sometimes it’s the state that feels under attack, or that will work to protect itself against perceived criticism. But what we attack, as readers in India or the United States, tells us a great deal about what makes us deeply uneasy as human beings.

For two excellent primers on free speech issues, read PEN’s Freedom of Speech is No Offense—a collection of writings on free speech by authors across Britain—or Seagull India’s excellent Censorship series.

In the Germany of 1933, what we refer to now as the Nazi book-burnings began as a student protest, calling for a cleansing, a “Sauberung”. The German Student Association called for “Action against the un-German Spirit”, spoke of a need to “purify” German language and literature against the taint of Jewish intellectualism, and organized a series of book burnings across the country. The schedule was meticulously drawn up: a torchlight procession of students would arrive to parade music, the song ‘Brothers, Forward’ would be sung, and selected books and journals would be burned, followed by a group sing-a-long.

And so did Bertolt Brecht, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, among thousands of others, go to the flames. The list of authors burned is a very revealing list—from Thomas Mann to Erich Marie Remarque, Marcel Proust to Emile Zola and Upton Sinclair, what the young students in Germany were really blocking out was any kind of thought that might oppose Hitler’s doctrines. The Nazi regime depended on its existence on the idea that “pure” German thought and nationalism was under threat; and that the only way to defend the true spirit of Germany was to call for a purge.

Thirteen years later, there would be an unpleasant echo of the Nazi book-burnings, when the Allied troops decided in 1946 to purge about 30,000 books—all “undemocratic, militaristic and Nazi” literature and paintings. The principle was the same; the only difference is that the Allied armies did not continue their purges for as much time as Hitler’s youth.

In India, perhaps the most significant book ban after 1947 was the ban placed on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The ban on the Verses came into force in October 1988, and has never been lifted. The grounds for the ban were that the supposed blasphemy of the novel—where Rushdie uses the “Satanic” verses to explore and attack aspects of Islam, as part of a larger framework where he explores multiculturalism and diasporas—might cause violence in the country.

The logic of the Verses ban seems, at first glance, impeccable. An author has written a novel that is perhaps inflammatory, and that may offend many Muslims—it may even cause those offended, whether Muslim or not, to take to the streets in violence. But the deeper principle at work in the Satanic Verses case was whether India would uphold two basic and linked rights: the right of any citizen or writer to criticize faith in general and a religion in particular (the right to blaspheme, in effect), and the right of ideas that go against the flow of mainstream thought to be protected. Behind the legal ramifications of the Satanic Verses ban lies a simple question: are you free to question religion, or should religion be above question?

The Indian state, like many other democracies, has not made up its mind on the subject. In terms of offence, the rants of the Hindutva rightwing, for instance, or of hardline Muslim preachers, have been far more offensive, and urged listeners on to far more hatred than Rushdie has ever espoused. We are, as a country, sensitive on the subject of religion; in 1956, shortly after Independence, India banned Aubrey Menen’s Rama Retold. Menen’s retelling of the Ramayana was ruled to be scurrilous (it was, deliberately so) and potentially explosive. We are not yet comfortable with the idea that religion can be challenged—and mocked—in fiction.

Other Indian attempts to corral free speech have been largely political in nature. The brief ban on Taslima Nasreen’s Dwikhandito in West Bengal, the recent attempt to pillory Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and to present it as obscene and offensive, the ban on James Laine’s Shivaji—all of these were part of attempts by various political parties to gain mileage. Sometimes, it’s the state’s own broader concerns that come into play, as with Stanley Wolpert’s Nine Hours to Rama—banned because of Wolpert’s revelations about lacunae in the security given to Mahatma Gandhi.

One of the murkier areas for free speech is, for obvious reasons, sex: what is obscene to one person is another one’s liberating read. Ulysses, by James Joyce, was banned on the grounds that it might cause American readers to harbour “impure and lustful” thoughts; Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, was banned in France, and copies were seized in the UK after the Sunday Express called it “sheer unrestrained pornography”.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by DH Lawrence, became the subject of a landmark 1959 trial—against its use of “unprintable words” and the complaint that it was not the kind of book one would wish one’s “wife or servants to read”, the publishers successfully argued that it had literary merit. John Cleland’s cheerfully pornographic Fanny Hill is remarkable for having attracted obscenity suits from 1748 down to 1977, when it was proved to have sufficient “artistic value” to offset Cleland’s memoirs of a courtesan.
Closer to home, Ismat Chughtai’s Lajja (The Quilt) became the subject of an obscenity trial for its depiction of a relationship between two women—but the trial foundered on language; Chughtai had used no explicit terms. Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra was attacked for its sexual content—and for the fact that a woman was writing freely about desire—in the courts of a state known for the vast quantities of pulp Hindi porn it produced.

Perhaps the most fiercely contested areas of free speech have to do with politics. For years, Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter could not be read in South Africa, because her analysis of racial and sexual politics in the country flew in the face of the ruling regime’s lines of thought. George Orwell’s Animal Farm has always made some regimes deeply uncomfortable; countries supportive of Russia would not print it, and in Kenya, it was banned because Orwell’s animal insurrections were seen (correctly) as a criticism of corrupt leaders. In Russia, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s unsparing depiction of life in the gulags—and his extension of the metaphor of the gulag to the whole country—threatened the entire moral basis of the state. The manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago had to be typed in several friends’ houses, in hiding; and had to be smuggled out of the USSR before it could be printed.

And the most absurd instance of a free speech ban was probably the one that operated for years in China on Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll’s classic was placed on the list of dangerous books not for its incendiary content, or for its political ideas, but because “it was disastrous to put animals and human beings at the same level”. This line always calls up an image of an official in the Hunan province, deeply disturbed that Carroll’s Cheshire Cats and caterpillars have shaken up the natural order of the world!