There is a sentence in Julian Barnes’s review of two novels by Maupassant (1850-1893) that struck me with unusual force and I wish to use it to reflect on our societal values in South Asia.

Barnes is talking about four pages in one of the novels that describe Parisian salons, “the tactics of the women who run them and the talented men who frequent them.” And here is the sentence that should knock a South Asian for a six:

Maupassant discusses the pecking order of guests: musicians at the top, artists next, writers coming a close third, with other riff-raff like generals and parliamentarians occasionally tolerated.

I am not making it up – you can look up the original here. Go over the pecking order again and take a few moments to let it sink in. Who is he calling occasionally tolerated riff-raff? And who is at the top? This is like standing South Asia on its head, isn’t it?

The unanswered question is obvious. Why are the social pecking orders of late nineteenth century France and twenty-first century South Asia so entirely reversed?

I don’t have an instant answer to this and leave it for discussion for the moment. But I do have Maupassant’s reasoning for the pecking order in the France of his time:

He notes how musicians are treated like royalty and inspire a fetishistic following; artists can be a little unreliable and rough-mannered, but worth it; while writers are useful because they talk a lot. Among the latter, your poet is more idealistic, and also more trustworthy, than your novelist, who ‘loots and exploits and gnaws away at everything he sees. With him, you can never feel safe, never sure that one day he won’t lay you naked on the pages of a book.’

Note that he does not even bother about the riff-raff that is only occasionally tolerated in the salons. It is clear that it was individual achievement, the acknowledgement of distinction by one’s peers, some mark of originality, which opened the door to intellectual companionship. Authority and position were not accomplishments of a comparable order and did not count for much.

And this is how it should be, shouldn’t it? So, why is it not like that in South Asia? Or, is it?

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There has been a spirited debate triggered by Mark Slouka’s essay (Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School) and in this post I am setting down what I have taken away from the discussion.

Science and the humanities are both ancient and great traditions and I doubt if there is anyone who would set them up in an antagonistic zero-sum confrontation the way people tend to do in the case of science and religion. Both are vital and necessary elements of a balanced education. That much should be a statement of the obvious. It is only when we focus on their different strengths that we enter into an interesting discussion.

To posit their differences very starkly one can oversimplify a little and adapt the argument of a recent article on religion and science: humanities ask about the why, science explains the how; science researches matters of empirical fact, while the humanities are concerned with matters of ultimate values; scientists use empirical techniques and theories to account for the physical and material world, whereas the humanities are concerned with the non-material aspects of life. Science cannot provide the answer to our metaphysical questions and the humanities cannot explain how nature works.

The same article uses the example of the global climate crisis to show how the two are related. Human beings will only be able to respond appropriately to the crisis when the best scientific information is combined with the values and motivations that emerge out of asking what it means to be human, who we are, and how we should act in the world. Questions like these are at the heart of the humanities and in an excellent article Stanley Fish shows how just reading Milton can help us get to grips with almost all of them. (It was the inspiration for the Ghalib Project on this blog.)

An important issue in our discussion has been realization of the importance of critical thinking as a necessary condition for the achievement of a just and ethical society. While the importance of critical thinking is beyond question, its relationship to science and the humanities has not been articulated clearly. I would argue that one must differentiate between strands of critical thinking that are peculiar to the domains of science and the humanities. The critical thinking that goes with the pursuit of science has to do primarily with speculation and reasoning; in the case of the humanities the focus is on abstraction and analysis. One cannot do good science without the ability to think critically – all the great scientists were also great thinkers – but science may not be the best vehicle to teach the kind of critical thinking that was the concern of Mark Slouka, i.e., the thinking needed to investigate the nature of our humanity.

I think it is important to realize that critical thinking cannot be taught theoretically – one cannot have a Critical Thinking 101 and hope to be successful. Critical thinking is learnt by osmosis and while science and humanities nurture their own domain-specific types of critical thinking, well-rounded human beings need an exposure to both. We need to know the shortest path between two points and we also need to know where the two points ought to be located.

Some of these differences stem from the varying nature of enquiry in the sciences and the humanities. Science involves the search for truth and scientists dig deeper and deeper to uncover that truth – but there is, in general, only one true answer to a proposition in science. This is most obvious in mathematics, the purest of sciences – the answer to a math problem is either right or wrong. One speculates about the possible answers and reasons and experiments the way to the one that is true. In the humanities, on the other hand, there is no right or wrong answer – there are multiple answers, some more coherent or persuasive than others. In getting to terms with these multiple answers one learns the qualities of tolerance, detachment, openness, and equanimity, and gracefulness.

One can visualize these very different perspectives by imagining a class in mathematics and in literature. Both subjects are intrinsically beautiful but the nature of the interactions between peers is quite different. In the former one is seeking a certainty, in the latter learning to deal with doubt – what Claude Levi-Strauss terms the “philosophical attitude par excellence.” His description of the trauma of ‘anthropological doubt’ should be very familiar to those who have been part of a tutorial class having to read an essay to a half dozen peers ready to tear the argument to shreds: “This doubt consists not merely in knowing that one knows nothing but in resolutely exposing what one knows, even one’s own ignorance, to the insults and denial inflicted on one’s dearest ideas and habits by those ideas and habits which may contradict them to the highest degree.”

Needless to say, neither the creative scientific attitude nor the nurturing of open thinking in the humanities can be achieved without teaching of high quality. But one can infer from the above why the teaching of the humanities might be that much more onerous. In a class in science, one finds out sooner or later that one’s answer to a problem was wrong – and that information is enough to make one seek the source of the mistake and to correct the thinking that led to the error. Nothing like that process of self-directed learning exists in a class in the humanities – the instructor has to provide the feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the argumentation, its logic, and coherence. If the class is too large, if the teaching assistants are not sufficiently advanced, if the mid-term assignments are not returned till the final, virtually no real learning may take place in a course except a superficial familiarity with the works of a particular author.

When one combines this inherent difficulty with the fact that school teachers in the humanities are accorded a lower status than those teaching math and science, that students and parents have come to think of the humanities as of little worth in the competition for jobs, that society encourages the best and the brightest to gravitate to well-paying professions – it is only then that one realizes the gravity of the challenge that Mark Slouka highlights in his essay.

It should also be recognized that because the ability to reason and the capacity of being open minded are imbibed by osmosis, the intellectual make up of a young adult is more or less determined by the end of high school. The style, the content, and the quality of South Asian school education are all devastating in this regard – it is no surprise that we are producing excellent technicians who are quite out of their depth in fields outside their narrow specializations and that the quality of political leadership has declined rather than improved over the years.

Mark Slouka is right to raise the danger flag even though, at its best, American school education is very much structured around open enquiry and colleges ensure that every student, no matter what the final choice of major, takes enough courses across the humanities and the sciences to measure up to the needs of an educated citizenry. Slouka’s concern is that the increasing orientation of society geared to the corporate bottom line – a phenomenon very well articulated by Lewis Lapham – is ‘dumbing down’ the humanities, transforming them from the engine of subversive thinking to a toothless appendage of big business.

This may well be true. If so, America would lose its cutting edge and become more like South Asia – a huge pool of technically qualified people with diminished creativity and its democracy would begin to fray at the edges. But this drift in the orientation of society cannot be attributed to the dominance of science. It has very different causes and the causality runs in the reverse order. It is the dominance of corporate interests that is dictating the allocation of resources in education with the balance shifting away from the humanities. One only has to look at South Asia where this is already the case although for somewhat different reasons.

There is one last aspect that needs highlighting. Critical thinking, whether the variant nurtured by science or the one by the humanities, is a capability that is independent of ethics and values. It is necessary to question the greed, cruelty, injustice, and the spurious ideologies that riddle our society but it is by no means sufficient. Values and ethics belong to the realm of social conscience that has its roots in a different domain – and the search for that domain has an interesting and tortured history.

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You must have had the experience of catching just a part of an interesting conversation and wondering how it might have evolved. It happened to me today as I moved past an African and a South Asian who, the words suggested, was a Pakistani. I heard the African asking, “What do professionals like you really want to see happening in Pakistan?” And    before I could hear the answer the words were swallowed by the silence.

It was a good question at a time when Pakistanis seem to be living from day to day just hoping for the situation to stabilize. What kind of Pakistan might middle class professionals really want beyond this immediate crisis if they got around to thinking about it? I would have loved to hear but the opportunity was lost. I wondered then what I might have said had I been given that part in some role-play exercise or in a mock UN format.

Let me try and imagine the elements that might comprise a vision capable of eliciting support across the spectrum of Pakistani professionals and would-be professionals who are now in schools and colleges.

First, there might be agreement that Pakistan should make the transition that has been achieved in Latin America – from the dominance of the military to stable democratic rule with the military unambiguously answerable to the civilian leadership.

Second, that the country should have an authentic civilian leadership – not one manufactured by the military as a cover for its control or orchestrated by the American government to further its strategic interests.

Third, that this authentic democratic leadership should turn its focus inwards to address the major issues that have reached crisis proportions. For this to happen, the leadership should put aside the aggressive designs that have been pursued in foreign policy and call a truce with the country’s neighbors to create the space and release the resources needed to address domestic issues.

Fourth, that the domestic agenda should give the highest priority to amicable relations among the constituent elements of the union by giving much more autonomy to the provinces.

Fifth, that the leadership should focus first on the bottom third of the population consigned to sub-human existence for over sixty years. This would involve reallocating resources for employment, education, and basic services for the most deprived groups in the country.

Sixth, that there should be guaranteed civil rights and equal access to justice for all Pakistanis.

Seventh, that Pakistan should transition to a society based on merit with accountability to the public of all office holders and service providers.

I feel the above would constitute an agenda that could hope to command the allegiance of a majority of Pakistani professionals. Beyond this there would remain critically important issues but ones that would prove divisive. Amongst these would be issues like the separation of church and state, the end of discrimination against women, the reform of the public school curriculum, and the teaching of the performing arts in schools. These would remain partisan issues that would call for a continued struggle within Pakistani society.

Of course, the big issue would remain the achievement of the vision outlined above but articulating it as the basis for the coming together of civil society would be a necessary first step. Hearing the question framed by an outsider made me realize that perhaps Pakistanis have not given sufficient importance to this preliminary requirement for social and political mobilization. Clearly their political parties have not put forward any coherent or comprehensive or even contending visions for the future of the country.

This was a hypothetical exercise in role-play for me and I am curious to know the extent to which Pakistani professionals would agree to it. I also wonder what other South Asians would have to say – what in their view should Pakistani professionals be wanting for the Pakistan of tomorrow?

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By Anjum Altaf 

Bruised and battered as Indian women might be (psychologically, not physically as the poll on this blog suggests), there is another side to Indian femininity reflected in the myths of powerful goddesses. I came across an interesting perspective on this in David Shulman’s review (A Passion for Hindu Myths, NYRB, Nov. 19, 2009) of the new book by Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History:

Sometimes the history of India looks like a story about endless waves of virile invaders from the north-northwest – Scythians, White Huns, Afghans, Turks, and, most recently, the British – who slowly grow soft and decadent under the insidious influence of the dreamy, langorous, mystically inclined Hindus…. [But according to Doniger] India’s astonishing talent for absorbing and transforming the peoples pouring in from outside, seen through a Hindu lens, has nothing to do with any softening or melting down of a hard, preexisting monolithic culture; it is, rather an active process of selection and pragmatic recycling, with the female principle – mare, queen, dancing girl, or goddess – driving the rather helpless (often foreign) male.

I was reminded that the same process was underway with the British as documented by William Dalrymple in The White Mughals. At the beginning of the nineteenth century one in three British men were living with or married to an Indian woman and according to one English description of some, they “wear immense whiskers, and neither will eat beef or pork, being as much Hindoos as Christians, if not more; and, having come to this country early they have formed opinions and prejudices, that make them almost natives.”

Of course, as we well know, the magic of absorption failed for the first time in the case of the British and there was a decisive turning point recorded also by Dalrymple in The Last Mughal. This culminated in the revolt of 1857 followed by a growing demand for the British to quit India. Dalrymple attributes this change to two major causes: First, that in 1803 the status of the British changed from being just one of the contending powers in India to its sole rulers giving rise to the arrogance of superiority. Second, the arrival of evangelical Christian missionaries with a low opinion of Indian ‘heathens’ in need of salvation led to the growth of Indian resentment. The humiliations inherent in the ‘White Man’s Burden’ changed the dynamic from one of absorption to one of antagonism.

I suppose if I had read Dalrymple’s books earlier I might have been convinced by this explanation. But I hadn’t; instead I had read GS Cheema’s The Forgotten Mughals: A History of the Later Mughals of the House of Babur and had extracted a different explanation from it. In his book, Cheema has insightful observations about the forgotten British – the English women:

In the old days, there were very few European women and the officers of the Company rarely went ‘home’ on leave. Usually they returned only on superannuation or when compelled by ill health. In India they lived like the Indian umara, and took to wife Indian ladies who were sometimes ladies of quality. From them they learnt the language and customs of the people, and acquired a much more sympathetic understanding of the complexities of the Indian world.

The gentlemen of the old school “maintained Indian households with bibi-ghars and were perfectly at home in Persian and Hindustani.” For example, Lt-General Sir David Ochterlony, the first Resident at the court of Shah Alam II (1759-1806) lived the life of an oriental ameer “complete with hookah, oriental robes and a bibi-ghar well stocked with dusky beauties.” Ochterlony, who had been away from England for over 50 years, had thirteen Indian wives and every evening he escorted all of them around the Mughal capital, each on the back of her own elephant. Ochterlony’s assistant William Fraser had six or seven wives – the shocked remark about the men in whiskers was about Fraser and Edward Gardner, another of Ochterlony’s assistants.

Cheema depicts the Residency as an important center of social life:

Members of the imperial family… nawabs, rajas, and courtiers of the Qila-e-Mualla would be guests at entertainments which were of the traditional type… There was no attempt to replicate English garden parties or formal dinner-balls. Liquor flowed freely. In the background could be heard the gentle gurgle of the water-pipe or hookah, while the nautch girls danced to Persian or Hindostani songs.

Cheema’s explanation of the big change in India has to do with the arrival of English women:

The bibi-ghars were shut down, concubinage went into the closet, and the mem laid down the law in her house… the onset of every cold season in India brought a number of unmarried English maidens — the ‘fishing fleet’ — who would come visiting relatives in India in the hope of hooking a husband…the easy intercourse between Indian and British officers became a thing of the past.

It is important to note a fact of history – the opening of Egypt at the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. Prior to the opening, ships from England had to go around the Cape of Good Hope, a journey that consumed five to six months. Access through Egypt cut the time by more than half. One consequence was a major increase in the number of British women and missionaries traveling to India.

The timing fits both the Dalrymple and Cheema explanations. I sent a tongue-in-cheek piece I had written earlier on the subject to Dalrymple but he was not convinced writing back that the alternative explanation placed too big a burden on the English woman.

Dalrymple is the historian and I am not so I am not quarreling with him but I did confirm that his long bibliography to The White Mughal does not refer to Cheema’s book. So, it is possible that he had not given this aspect much thought. I continue to think that it is a dimension that deserves more consideration. All invaders prior to the British (post 1815) came to India with few women and it was the human need for physical companionship that provided the lubricant for social interaction and gentle absorption – what Dara Shikoh captured in the evocative title of his book Majma’ al-Bahrain (The Mingling of Oceans).

One can apply the same dynamic to all the foreign jihadis that descended much later in history in Pakistan’s tribal areas at the invitation of the Americans and the Saudis to fight the Russian invaders in Afghanistan. All of them came as single males and lived with or married local women. As a result, the local tribes are now perplexed when they are asked to throw out the foreigners or to give them up. What foreigners? One can easily imagine that the situation would have been quite different had these jihadis arrived with their families much as corporate executives do when posted abroad in the globalized economy.

There is one other implication of this line of thought that upsets Wendy Doniger’s Hindu-centric female principle as the explanation for the absorption of virile invaders into a soft Indian society. If we extract the right conclusion from Cheema’s argument, we can explain virtually everything by the fact that the invaders (and traders) were men who needed female company. Before the Muslim invasions, all the Indian women were Hindu. By the time the British arrived, there were Muslim and Sikh women as well and there is no evidence the invaders were seduced disproportionately by Hindu women. The central story in The White Mughal is in fact about a Muslim woman.

The point I had tried to make in what I had written earlier was to highlight the profound contribution of Indian women to our social history, bruised and battered as they might be in their everyday lives. Imagine the latent power that has been suppressed for all this time and what it could mean if allowed to flourish in all the other fields of life – politics, economics, science, commerce, and war.

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Mark Slouka’s essay (Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school) comes across as a persuasive argument that the humanities have lost out to math and science in American schools and that this does not bode well for the future of democracy.

The fact that the essay is persuasive should be no surprise – Slouka is a professor of English and he employs the art of rhetoric at its finest. The language is so elegant that one can read the essay just for that pleasure alone. But one should not allow the intoxication of elegant prose to overwhelm reason – as public policy, Slouka’s essay suffers from at least two major flaws.

Slouka’s main point has validity – the framework in which we reckon the value of things, the thrust of our education, our very language, has become excessively economistic. When we evaluate systems or programs or arrangements or plans, we more often than not ask whether they are efficient or cost-effective; we rarely ask whether they are just or fair. And this interpretive frame that has come to dominate our outlook does have definite negative consequences.

Others have made the point convincingly as well. Lewis Lapham, in his essay, ‘Achievetrons,’ ascribes this attitude as the reason that the ‘best and the brightest’ in America have repeatedly led it into disasters. In his talk on social democracy, historian Tony Judt identifies the same tendency for the growing disenchantment with governments and the increasing appeal of fringe movements that promise their own variants of justice.

Having made this point, Slouka then makes a leap of logic that is unwarranted – he associates the dominance of this economistic framework to the dominance of math and science and to quantification. By implication he associates the framework of qualitative values like justice and fairness and ethics to the humanities. And thus is set up a confrontation of cultures – science and maths on one side and humanities and the arts on the other. This is an ironic thought but could it be Slouka’s relative lack of exposure to math and science that has led him into this error?

In his comment, our reader Balasubramaniam has pointed out the fallacy in this formulation by Slouka. The central issue here is that a meaningful education needs to nurture the ability to think, to ask questions, and to analyze critically. There is no reason why math and science cannot be taught in ways that accomplish all these objectives. Bertrand Russell was obsessed with mathematics and at the same time was one of the most critical minds of the twentieth century.

It is equally possible that one could teach the humanities in ways that fail completely to develop the critical faculties. So the conflict is not between mathandscience (as Slouka terms it) and the humanities but between good teaching and poor teaching. And here we might have a different problem because good teachers are few and poor teachers are many.

The fact that our evaluative framework has become very economistic and bottom-line oriented has little to do with math and science. In fact many of Lapham’s ‘Achievetrons,’ including the neo-cons, must have majored in the humanities from the best schools. There are some other factors at work here that Slouka has missed out and this constitutes the second big gap in his analysis.

It seems reasonable to argue that education does not lead; it follows and adapts itself to the needs of production – in actuality to the needs of the ruling elites who control the means of production (and also the institutions of education for that matter). Therefore we have to look for what might have changed in society that was reflected in the changing focus of education. One can point immediately to the fact that the world of production at the beginning of the modern democratic era in the West was one of small firms. Universal general public education responded to the needs imposed by the societies of that period. Over time we have seen the emergence of the giant publicly owned corporations with their very different needs, both in terms of management and of performance. These needs, in turn were reflected in the changes in education with the growth of business schools with their bottom-line orientations. The impact of the military-industrial complex has been not only on education but on the very nature of democracy itself via the proliferation of lobbying by narrow but well-endowed interest groups.

But beyond economics lies the plane of politics that Slouka has not considered at all. There is no education that is independent of politics. Even creativity is a need of the political order in societies that are competing for global dominance because countries that cannot innovate inevitably fall behind. Thus critical thinking is to be nurtured – but critical thinking is a double-edged sword because it can also challenge inequities at home. It is no surprise that critical thinking is so carefully rationed and made available only to the extent it is needed – education can be made universal but not critical thinking.

This is not just the case in capitalist systems – countries that revolted against capitalism in the name of the masses were just as strategic with education using it as a means to political ends. And non-competitive countries based on oppressive systems, like most in the Islamic world, had no need to nurture any critical thought at all – all they needed were well-trained technicians or ideologically indoctrinated followers. In contrast, as Tony Judt has argued, social democracies in small homogenous societies (for example the Scandinavian countries) could afford to be much more liberal with their education because of their legitimacy and marginal role in global politics.

Slouka is right that “Education in America today is almost exclusively about the GDP. It’s about investing in our human capital” and he is just as right to desire instead a world in which we “invest our capital in what makes us human.” But Slouka errs in thinking that math and science have brought us to this pass. In fact, education was always about the GDP – it is the composition of GDP and how it is produced that have changed dramatically over time, a change that is reflected in the nature of our education.

Slouka makes the case for the humanities by quoting Epictetus – “Only the educated are free.” That, no doubt, is true but the way our societies are constituted they cannot afford everyone to be free. Even revolutions from above have not bought us that freedom. Only when we free ourselves will be able to get the education that we need and deserve.

The three essays mentioned in this post (by Slouka, Lapham and Judt) are all archived on The Best From Elsewhere page (# 28, 42 and 25, respectively). For our extension of Lapham’s theme to South Asia see Hearts and Minds. For a related essay on this blog about education in South Asia see Why is Pakistan Half Illiterate?

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Our recent poll eliciting the ten most unacceptable things in South Asia today is open to another interpretation – it tells a tale of three nested deprivations.

The first deprivation is absolute – characterized by people existing below a level that is unacceptable in any self-respecting society. We had identified the dimensions of this absolute deprivation some time back – lack of an adequate amount of food, water, hygiene, housing, and education. All these are attributes that are associated with an inadequate income.

The second deprivation pertains to the inadequacy of rights – the right to physical safety, dignity, justice, and employment based on merit. This pertains only partly to inadequate income. It is also related to the imbalance of power. Political equality (the right to vote) does not translate into civil equality – the more powerful can still trample over the rights of the less powerful. We have mentioned this a number of times in highlighting the peculiar nature of democracy in South Asia that has preceded any kind of social revolution. The power imbalance remains largely unaffected and is changing very slowly. Not being part of the network of power leaves individuals open to discrimination and abuse even when they have adequate incomes.

The third deprivation relates to the inability to realize the full potential of human capabilities. This can go beyond the lack of income and power. The clearest example of this is the discussion we have been having about the status of women in South Asian society. The message from the discussion, despite its terrible overtones, is not that women are paralyzed in South Asia – after all more and more women are entering the labor force and participating in politics. But this participation is within a space that is seriously constrained.

Women have to function in society conscious of the fact that they are vulnerable and susceptible to harassment. This feeling of vulnerability affects many decisions – where to go, how long to stay out, what to wear, etc. – that limit fulfillment in small ways. Over time this mode of existence is internalized and even the consciousness of what life could be like without such constraints is lost. A glimmer of this realization comes through in the surprise of how greatly the sense of freedom can be enhanced by the protection of a women’s-only train. It provides a hint of what life can be like when it can be experienced to the full potential of human capabilities.

These three deprivations suggest the challenges that need to be addressed – an end to absolute poverty, the equality of civil rights, and the full exercise of human capabilities. There is a very long way to go in South Asia and it starts with the realization that none of these deprivations has any kind of moral justification. And because there is no moral justification we have to ask ourselves why they are not at the top of our social and political agendas. Why have these deprivations been tolerated for so long?

While the above is a broad generalization, it is also the case that there are pockets in South Asia where there has been considerable progress along several dimensions. We need to assess the reasons that might underlie the faster progress in such pockets and would welcome feedback from readers who have more knowledge about this subject.   

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Gender discrimination (which includes harassment, abuse and violence) was at the top of our list of the most unacceptable things in South Asia. How bad is the situation?

Some time back we had mentioned the introduction of the ‘Ladies Special’ trains in major Indian cities to counteract the harassment of women using public transport. Recently there was an update to that story titled ‘Joy of India’s women-only trains’ mentioning that the service has been a big success.

In reading this update I was particularly struck by the remark of one user of the service: “We can laugh, we can sit where we want, we can do whatever we want, we feel free. We can sing a song, as loud as we want.” The sense of freedom that this conveys is almost beyond belief – women feel they cannot even laugh or sing a song in the presence of men.

There is no reason to doubt this sentiment and it raises a whole host of questions that need to be considered:

First, how did things get to be this way? Have they always been like this in India (not if one reads William Dalrymple’s account of pre-modern Hinduism that we had summarized earlier)? If not, what triggered the change? Dalrymple traces changes to sexual attitudes in India to the Victorian morality of evangelical Christian missionaries who arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, attitudes that were internalized by British-educated Hindu reformers who felt embarrassed by their own culture. If this interpretation is correct, it mirrors the perceptive observation of a Native American Indian about the encounter of his own people with Europeans: “We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.” And this would raise a further question – where else do we see the consequences of this double colonization?

Second, does anyone have an explanation for why this practice is labeled ‘Eve Teasing’ in a country in which the majority of the population does not subscribe to the story of Eve and Adam? Are there more relevant labels in use in local languages that might provide clues to the origins of the practice? How is this treatment reconciled with the powerful imagery of female goddesses in Hinduism?

Third, how widespread is this male attitude towards women? The news story suggests that men are not supportive of the ‘Ladies Specials’ and that it took a female Minister of Railways to initiate the service. We can explore this question across class and space. Is it largely a middle-class phenomenon triggered by the rapid increase of women in the labor force? And are there significant variations across states in India? If yes, what may be the reason for such variation? As an extension, what is the nature of variations across South Asia?

Fourth, as bad as the situation seems to be, one must commend the fact that a progressive measure has been chosen to enlarge the space for women as they join the workforce in India. This is far better than the retrogressive advice that would be given to women in Pakistan – to stay at home in the protection of Chadar aur Chardeevarii or to make themselves invisible under a burka.

Fifth, does this retrogressive attitude in Pakistan have anything to do with authoritarianism in society? Recall that the German slogan ‘Kinder, Kuche, Kirche’ (children, kitchen, church) is attributed to Kaiser Wilhelm II and is descriptive of the male perception of women’s role in society in the nineteenth century. But this slogan was revived by Hitler in the 1930s when he stated that for the German woman her “world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home.”

Sixth, can we conclude that the democratic space in India offers hope for a progressive decline in gender discrimination? To what extent would Indian women have to replicate the feminist struggle that was needed to overcome the most blatant forms of discriminations in the West? And how long is the struggle going to take? Gail Collins mentions in her new book that even till the early 1960s it was a great time to be an American male – harried executives could expect to return home to wives who existed solely to cook their dinners, raise their children and look stunning at parties!

It is unacceptable that women do not find it possible to be themselves in the company of men. It should be particularly unacceptable to men. Why isn’t it so?

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I checked the name index of Amartya Sen’s book (The Idea of Justice) for Foucault and found him missing. Let me explain why I found that surprising.

As mentioned earlier, Sen contrasts two approaches to social justice – the search for a perfectly just society versus the alternative of making existing society less unjust. These perspectives are given different labels – ‘arrangement-focused’ versus ‘realization focused’ or niti versus nyaya. The implication of the contrast is pithily summarized by an endorsement on the book’s back cover: “The Idea of Justice gives us a political philosophy that is dedicated to the reduction of injustice on Earth rather than to the creation of ideally just castles in the air.”

In terms of lineage, the arrangement-focused perspective is said to derive from the social contract formulation of Thomas Hobbes via Locke, Rousseau and Kant to John Rawls (A Theory of Justice) in our own times. The realization-focused perspective is traced from Adam Smith via Bentham, Marx and John Stuart Mill to Amartya Sen himself.

This would be fine if we were to accept the two perspectives as mutually exclusive and were asked to make a choice between them, especially when the choice is so starkly posed – reducing injustice on Earth versus creating ideally just castles in the air.

But what if we contend that the perspectives are not mutually exclusive – indeed that they overlap. Recall the characterization of niti and nyaya: the former relates to the institutional arrangements and behavioral norms whereas the latter is concerned with what emerges and how, and in particular the lives that people are actually able to lead. What if we ask: Do the arrangements that exist have anything to do with what emerges and the lives that people are actually able to lead? Or, how are niti and nyaya related?

This is where Foucault becomes relevant because Foucault is also the exact opposite of Hobbes but in a way quite distinct from the realization-focused perspective. The position Foucault takes is that it is not an ideal arrangement that will determine the lives that people would be able to lead. On the contrary, the causality is reversed – the lives that people are able to lead tell us something about the way the arrangements are structured. In other words, nyaya is a manifestation of niti.

This seems to take us away from the realization-focused approach back to the arrangement-focused approach except that the arrangement-focused approach originating with Hobbes is devoid of any notion of power. And this is what Foucault adds to the analysis – in his now well-known formulation what happens at the fingertips is a function of the power that is situated in the head.

One implication of this is that if we try to reduce an injustice in society without paying attention to the social or political arrangements that might be its cause, the injustice could very well emerge in a different form. This makes both realization-focused and arrangement-focused approaches relevant at the same time. If, for example, we wish to reduce the burdens of gender discrimination we would need to address existing instances of such discrimination (e.g., starting women-only trains to reduce harassment of women in public transport) while targeting the institution of patriarchy at the same time.

This is easier said than done and it is here that the real contribution of Foucault becomes relevant. Power not only determines what happens at the fingertips, it also determines how we see and interpret what happens at the fingertips – ‘power’ shapes ‘truth’ and the nature of the public discourse that we rely on to reduce injustice in society. Note how many voices rise up to defend the veiling of women as soon as attempts are made to eliminate that dimension of gender discrimination – patriarchy is accepted as normal, as part of some divinely ordained order of things.

Foucault has many examples of how power works to shape ‘truth’ and behavior. For example, he might ask how it is that in an age where so much is made of individuality, everyone rushes out to buy the same things and wear the same fashions? What kind of power does this common behavior at the fingertips reveal? Those who strive to reduce injustice have to contend with how those efforts are portrayed by the media – what really does “All the news that’s fit to print” mean and what does it reflect?

When we take Rawls, Sen and Foucault together we realize what we are up against in attempting to reduce injustice in our societies and why injustice is so persistent. Of course, this should not deter us from taking on the task we have set for ourselves in identifying what we consider the ten most unacceptable things in South Asia today.

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I started reading Amartya Sen’s latest book The Idea of Justice in which he suggests we reduce injustice in the world we live in rather than attempt to create an ideally just world – he characterizes the contrasting perspectives as ‘realization-focused’ versus ‘arrangement-focused’ approaches to justice. For South Asians, the parallels are two different concepts of justice from early Indian jurisprudence – niti and nyaya. The former relates to ‘organizational propriety as well as behavioral correctness’ whereas the latter is concerned with ‘what emerges and how, and in particular the lives that people are actually able to lead.’

The distinctions, and Professor Sen’s preference, are quite clear and one can agree or disagree with his choice. Here I am concerned with the example that Sen uses to motivate his argument and to explain why I find it puzzling. I would like readers to reflect on the example and to comment on its appropriateness.

Sen uses an illustration called ‘Three Children and a Flute’ to make the point that it is not possible to find an unambiguous principle of justice that everyone can agree upon. The illustration asks the reader to decide which of three children – Anne, Bob and Carla – should get a flute about which they are quarreling. Anne claims the flute on the ground that only she knows how to play it; Bob on the ground that he is the only one among the three who is so poor that he has no toys of his own; Carla on the ground that she has been working diligently for many months to make the flute with her own labor. None of the individual claims are contested.

The argument Sen makes is that these are competing claims for justice and that there are no obvious reasons for preferring any one over the others:

The general point here is that it is not easy to brush aside as foundationless any one of the claims based respectively on the pursuit of human fulfillment, or removal of poverty, or entitlement to enjoy the products of one’s own labor. The different resolutions all have serious arguments in support of them, and we may not be able to identify, without some arbitrariness, any of the alternative arguments as being the one that must invariably prevail.

What puzzles me is the following: Why does Sen pose this problem in terms of an issue of justice? To me it comes across much more as a problem of distribution that is made complex by the fact that we need to allocate one discrete commodity among three contenders. It is this discreteness of the commodity that turns the problem into one of choice, which then calls for a principle to govern that choice.

It is not clear to me why we should have our hands tied by the discreteness of the flute. If we relax this artificially imposed constraint we could consider a number of other solutions to the problem. For example, the flute could be sold and the proceeds distributed amongst the three claimants. This would not resolve the problem completely – Sen would surely ask for the principle that would govern the distribution of the proceeds – but it would certainly make the solution more tractable.

But even the limitation of discreteness need not preclude alternative solutions. The three contenders could agree that in the absence of any prior claims or rights, a just solution could be a fair lottery. Or they could agree on a cooperative solution in which each would get to keep the flute for a period of time with the order of the rotation determined by a fair lottery.

My argument is that this is not an issue of justice since no manifest injustice has been done to any of the three individuals. It is a simpler problem of distribution and it seems possible to find a cooperative solution if we do away with the stumbling block of the discreteness of the flute either by converting it into a divisible commodity (money) or by dividing its use over time. Once we do that we might even be able to find a single principle of fairness, e.g., egalitarianism, to govern the allocation of the divisible commodity. (This need not be the most efficient allocation. The more ambitious might try for allocations that make each claimant equally happy or maximize total happiness but these would again open up the debate over the merits of rival claims.)

I even do not see how the nature of prior claims, a dimension Professor Sen has ignored in his illustration, adds to the complexity of the problem. If Carla has made the flute and owns it, the other two have no claim to it. If Carla made the flute as a gift for the father who has left it as an inheritance, either the father’s will or the rules of inheritance would govern the allocation. Such rules vary across societies but in general have legitimacy amongst members of a society or there are accepted rules to resolve disagreements.

My question is as follows: Did Professor Sen choose a good illustration to motivate his argument? Should he have specified the source of the quarrel amongst the claimants? Is some prior information necessary to understand the context of the problem and its relevance to justice?

See Ten Unacceptable Things for our ongoing exercise based on Professor Sen’s suggestion.

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I wish to begin today a conversation about the possibility of a social movement in South Asia – not, for the moment, a social movement, just a conversation about a possible social movement.

This social movement, if we agree to it and it gets off the ground, would go by a simple name – UNACCEPTABLE.  It would identify the ten things that we agree are unambiguously morally unacceptable in South Asia today and it would start a public conversation about them. It would signal our commitment to strive and eliminate them from our societies.

Let me start with an example that illustrates the kinds of things I have in mind and what I mean by unambiguous. Take the practice of slavery in the West. There came a point in time when the first few voices began to declare it morally unacceptable, an affront to human dignity. From these few voices arose the discourse that transformed the issue first into a public debate and then into a political struggle that finally put an end to the practice.

Unfortunately, there are still many such issues in South Asia that are an affront to human dignity, that no one with a social conscience can or should accept. Let me mention just one here to start the process leaving the others to be identified by consensus during the ensuing discussion.

It is morally unacceptable that in India, emerging as a major power in the twenty-first century, 43 percent of children under age 5 are malnourished. This compares with only 7 percent in China. Even Sub-Saharan Africa, home to the poorest countries in the world, has a lower rate of 28 percent. This high prevalence has to be viewed in the context of scientific evidence that if a child is malnourished until age 3, the neural formation suffers, and most of that underdevelopment is fixed for life (see here).

One can view this from the perspective of the future burden on the Indian economy but that would be an instrumental perspective. From a human rights point of view, this kind of endemic hunger has no place in the modern world and cannot be justified or defended on any conceivable grounds. It is a total failure of justice that has to be honestly acknowledged.

Our task is to identify ten of the most egregious examples of injustice in South Asia today that as citizens we are not prepared to accept. Once we have agreed on our list, we would move to discussing why these practices continue to persist, why they are tolerated, and why there are no political parties that are willing to include their elimination as part of their agendas. Through this process we would hope to raise the profile of these issues and make them a part of the public discourse.

There is no delusion here about the effectiveness of our effort, only a conviction that every journey begins with a step and gathers momentum as people who believe in the cause join and begin to walk alongside the others. All we are doing at this stage is starting the process of agreeing on the ten things in South Asia today that as human beings we consider absolutely and totally UNACCEPTABLE.

Let us begin this journey.

Process: Please use the Comments space below to list the things you find unacceptable. You don’t need to list exactly ten, only as many as you feel passionate about. At the end of a certain period we will pick the ten that have been mentioned most. At that time we will discuss how we intend to proceed to the next stage.

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