Centre for Internet and Society

Pleasure and Pornography: Initial Encounters with the Unknown

namita — 2011-08-02T08:37:27Z

This blog entry is the first in a series by Namita Malhotra on her CIS-RAW project that is about pornography, Internet, sexuality, law, new media and technology. She aims for this to be a multi media and research project/journey which is able to cite and draw on various sources including legal studies, film studies and philosophy, academic and historical work on sexuality, art, film and pornography itself.

There are few dilemmas that one is faced with when working on the vague and over extended category of pornography. The first is the very familiar feminist dilemma over pornography, and the position of radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon--pornography is violence or sexually explicit subordination of women. This is more popularly encapsulated in Robin Morgan’s words--pornography is the theory and rape is the practice. Even if this can be collapsed into the positions of pro-sex and anti-sex feminists, it does initially haunt any research agenda on pornography, especially for a guilty quasi-feminist like myself.

However, some of my previous writings have attempted to deal with the position of the women’s movement, specifically in India, on pornography (the details are given below) and here I hope to move beyond either the moral or feminist positions on pornography, to examine what the pervasive phenomenon does. One of the strands that I hope to continue to explore is the relation of body to film. Though film studies is mostly focused on the visual sense, few scholars have looked on film as a bodily experience and attempted to understand the mimetic relation between the body of the 'viewer' and the body of the film. A more tactile understanding of the experience of film and media would be a useful place to start exploring pornography.

The second has arisen from many conversations that I have had – when I say I’m working on pornography, the response is either a withdrawal or over-enthusiasm bordering on insistence to share personal collections of erotica and pornography. Though these conversations are often insightful, I have now realized that it is hard for me to actually examine pornography in all its totality – from spliced moments in mainstream films in shady theatres to specificities of hentaii and tentacle porn. Personal tastes, preferences, and access make it hard to be able to be interested in everything. Which is precisely my fascination with pornography – that it is in fact an intensely personal relation or rather a space in which different people have kept very varied and specific material, words, and media--that it also is not entirely about the media/words themselves, but also about how and in what setting they are consumed, how they are bought, downloaded or searched for.

The third is the legal conundrum posed by pornography – that it is not recognized in Indian law as a specific category but that there exist, nonetheless, stringent conditions for obscenity. Obscenity is determined on the basis of the Hicklin test, which originated in England in 1868 and has continued as an integral part of Indian law though it has been discredited in English common law and American law. Here, the legal scholarship of Nussbaum is an interesting starting point as it sets up a useful framework that refuses to look at the law as a rational system of rules that is devoid of emotions. Nussbaum analyses the cognitive content of emotions that work within law – in the case of determining obscenity, she points to how emotions of disgust and revulsion play a significant role (the other emotions that she examines in detail are shame, fear and anger in the law). In Nussbaum’s analysis of the cognitive content of disgust, she remarks that in most cultures, disgust is about discomfort humans have with 'our own bodies and decaying selves', and concludes that disgust is an unreliable indicator for obscenity. She refers to McKinnon’s and Dworkin’s work to state that the indicator should be harm done by the material, rather than disgust. I would disagree with Nussbaum on whether harm can be a useful indicator to determine whether something is obscene, but before that it is necessary to examine whether Indian case law actually relies on the notion of disgust. Within Indian law, there seem to be other factors at work including notions of cultural purity vis-à-vis contamination from Western culture. An interesting and rather progressive judgment to look at is the recent High Court judgment on Hussain’s painting of nude Mother India that held that the painting is not obscene.

These are a few of the scattered aspects of this project and some of the strands that it will explore. I would also like to share two comics on internet pornography. The first is from the famou xkcd comic series and the second from the relatively new comic series Brown Girls. Both capture how lusty desires will find their objects anywhere – in the explosion of the polymorphous perverse on the internet or presidential debates on television.

Previous material
The World Wide Web of Desire: Content Regulation on the Internet
This article attempts to understand the dynamics of pushing the child pornography question to the forefront of any debate around censorship and pornography, especially in contexts of internet regulation, both nationally and in international forums such as the Internet Governance Forum. This is often done at the expense of a more nuanced understanding that would be possible if the focus were on issues related to gender, the prevalence of draconian censorship regimes in most countries in Asia and concerns related to free speech.

Do Not Look at Porn
This is a short video titled "Do not look at porn" which is a remix video or a collage of different materials taken from television and other videos, famous art works, photographs and books. The video is almost boringly pedagogic in its attempt to illustrate the slippery-slope argument which is that obscenity laws generally lead to the ban of progressive material rather than only offensive material. The video features Sarah Jones' song 'Your revolution will not happen between these thighs', and the popular Warcraft character based machinema video 'The internet is for porn'.

Search History: Examining Pornography on the Internet
This article explores some of the dilemmas of the women's movement in India when faced with the question of pornography. It also is a very basic historical look at the category of pornography itself, as it emerged to describe the array of objects and artefacts discovered in the ancient city of Pompeii. These finds were kept at the Secret Museum; only men of a certain upper class were allowed and ‘trusted’ to have access to these objects, and not the ‘easily corruptible rabble or women’. Such distinctions would often arise in the case of pornography and be the reasoning behind censorship and regulation of many media in the next few centuries. Whether it was the birth of photography, cinema, video, and in recent times the internet and new media (CD,VCD, DVD), each technology has been greeted with suspicion of its possible harm to society.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/xxx-files-initial-encounters-with-the-unknown

Pleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law

namita — 2011-08-02T08:37:23Z

In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity. Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, Namita Malhotra, in this second post documenting her CIS-RAW project, explores certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncovers the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.

When Justicia, blindfolded, cannot see the profane …

In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity (1). Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, I would like to explore certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncover the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.

For instance, in the case of Fatima Riswana V. Chennai & Ors. (2) both the public prosecutor and counsel for the petitioners applied to the court for transfer to another (male) judge, to save the District Lady Judge from embarrassment. The order for transfer was passed, so that the District Lady Judge does not have to view certain CDs that are part of the evidence. The justification for this is that the 'said trial would be about the exploitation of women and their use in sexual escapades by the accused, and the evidence in the case is in the form of CDs, viewing of which would be necessary in the course of the trial; therefore, for a woman Presiding Officer it would cause embarrassment'.

This is a rather obvious case, where explicit and pornographic material is made to disappear before the eyes of the law, gesturing towards the larger complicity that allows society and law to create a ruckus about Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty’s kiss, HBO's English movie channel, dance bars and other such aspects of the sleazy modernity that we inhabit (3), but simultaneously is oblivious to circulation of pornography, both online and offline.

In a rather confrontational visual juxtaposition, I place Savita Bhabhi alongside Husain’s Mother India, to be able to ask several questions, including the question of which one’s existence has been more threatened by the law. There is almost no doubt about it; Savita Bhabhi’s chequered career as a slutty housewife has been marred only by two scandals (and several almost patriotic accounts of India having finally arrived (4)) – once when a child sent an MMS about his teacher and it made references to Savita Bhabi, which led to some mention of action that might be taken against the website (5), and another time when Karan Johar (Mid Day, Delhi – 31 March 2009) remarked that one of the characters, Jeet, has a look similar to that given to Amitabh Bachchan in 'Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna', and this might be a case of copyright infringement. Neither of these have resulted in any serious charge against the alleged anonymous producers, Indian Porn Empire, or what is more probable, the blocking of the website regardless of whether the producers/creators can be found and prosecuted. However Husain’s untitled painting, which surfaced on a website for an auction for victims of a Kashmir earthquake in 2006 (two years after it was first sold by the painter), was dragged to court on serious charges of obscenity, which fortunately led to a rather progressive judgment on obscenity by the Delhi High Court.

Returning to the two images of nude women, obscenity law in India has laid down that “nudity in art and literature is not per se evidence of obscenity”. As stated in the judgment that dealt with the circulation of Hussain’s untitled painting (later titled 'Bharat Mata') 'the work as a whole must be considered, the obscene matter must be considered by itself and separately to find out whether it is so gross and its obscenity so decided that it is likely to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to influences of this sort'. What renders an object obscene is the transaction rather than the text -- a transaction involving the depiction-consumption of the female body , and the sexualisation of the viewer who in turn sexualises the object. It is not just that the painting/image may already be sexualized but also that the public is in turn sexualised by looking at it (and sexualises it with its gaze), thus making them vulnerable to the perversion that is modernity itself and the pornographic gaze (Nitya Vasudevan and Namita A. Malhotra, State of Desire - Unpublished article). To put it simply, the anxiety of the state is not just about the object, but also about its circulation in the public, and the meanings it acquires through these series of transactions.

Legal and public discourse is often obsessed with the various meanings that become possible because of the placing of this naked body - or the transactions of this naked body with the context, background, narrative that it is placed in. Though seemingly sexualised already as a naked body (this can be refuted not only by the Indian court but various examples in art, religious architecture, etc.) the meanings it may carry are further complicated when it is placed in a pornographic comic online, bearing a crown and saying 'I will be Miss India', or as a faceless hazy outline in the foreground of the map of India. Hussain’s depiction of the naked woman on the map of India, embodying India (in pain or anger) carries many jostling, conflicting meanings. Inspite of the furore over the painting, the High Court finally held that the painting was not obscene, stating that the intention of the painter was to evoke sympathy for a woman – indeed a nation – in distress (6) . However what is intriguing, is that Savita Bhabi’s body, her markings of Indian-ness, her poses and postures are not examined to that extent either by the court or the public.

Pornography, as obscenity in its aggravated form or explicit depiction of sexual acts without a relevant or coherent narrative, has been dropped from both legal discourse and academic and cultural analysis--is it possible to surmise that this has happened because it can be read as a blank slate, a place where meanings cannot be read, felt or inferred? Pornographic movies are spliced into mainstream films, circulate surreptitiously through video stores, piracy markets or though online spaces that cannot be easily accessed because of regulations and filters in most places –- colleges, homes, schools, offices, cybercafes (7) etc. Can we surmise that the transaction of the sexualized gaze with the obscene object has been, in this way, so removed from public gaze that it does not merit discomfort and anxiety for the state or public, unless it nefariously slips into public discourse (DPS MMS, Noida MMS, Mysore Mallige)? As long as it is a secretive (even if mass) consumption, it does not disturb the heternormative familiar and familial in the manner that an object whose obscenity is not quite obvious or clear does – for example, HBO's English movie channel (8).

In this context, let us look at an excerpt from the progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, which demonstrates the extent to which the court has to read the meanings of an image to determine whether it is obscene or not, but simultaneously, by not ever having to interact with a pornographic text, the court (or the public) does not have to see that there are many meanings embedded in such an image as well.

'One of the tests in relation to judging nude/semi nude pictures of women as obscene is also a particular posture or pose or the surrounding circumstances which may render it to be obscene, but in the present painting, apart from what is already stated above, the contours of the woman’s body represent nothing more than the boundaries/map of India.

Even if a different view had to be taken that if the painter wanted to depict India in human form, it may have been more appropriate to cloth the woman in some manner may be by draping a sari or by a flowing cloth etc., but that alone cannot be made a ground to prosecute the painter. There can be a numbers of postures or poses that one can think of which can really stimulate a man’s deepest hidden passions and desires. To my mind, art should not be seen in isolation without going into its onomatopoetic meaning and it is here I quote Mr. Justice Stewart of the US Supreme Court in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964) who defined ‘obscenity’ as, “I will know it when I see it”. The nude woman in the impugned painting is not shown in any peculiar kind of a pose or posture nor are her surroundings so painted which may arouse sexual feelings or that of lust in the minds of the deviants in order to call it obscene. The placement of the Ashoka Chakra or the States in the painting is also not on any particular body part of the woman which may be deemed to show disrespect to the Ashoka Chakra/States and the same was conceded by the learned counsel for the respondent during the course of the arguments advanced.

It is possible that some persons may hold a more orthodox or conservative view on the depiction of Bharat Mata as nude in the painting but that itself would not suffice to give rise to a criminal prosecution of a person like the petitioner who may have more liberal thoughts in respect of mode and manner of depiction of Bharat Mata.' (9)

A body that doesn’t carry inscriptions of cities on different body parts, but is definitely inscribed as Indian is that of Savita Bhabi – from the mangalsutra that never comes off even during doggy-style sex, the sari that slips off rather easily, the bindi, the gestures and mannerisms, to the stories that place her in sexual encounters with familiar people – the bra salesman, the old boyfriend, the cousin, the doctor, the woman colleague, the boss, the aging star and many others.

Savita Bhabhi thus carries as many confusing, jostling meanings as a pornographic text. For instance, she refers to recession and aspirations to become Miss India. She ventures into the fantasy world of her fans, since many of her stories are drawn from their stories on the Savita Bhabi website and fansite –- whether these stories are make-believe or true is irrelevant. These resonances of the text beyond mere sexual arousal are obvious. Even if one were to ignore Linda Williams (10) and inferences from Foucault that pornography becomes one of the many forms in which knowledge of pleasure is organised, it is obvious that from varied perspectives within film studies and legal studies, pornography merits examination. Williams' point also seems to provide some insight into why pornographic circulation doesn't merit much anxiety from the state or in the law; if pornography is organised in consonance with the heteronormative familiar and familial and accessible primarily by men, then maybe it is not such a big surprise that the state or the law is not really invested in controlling pornography, since pornography itself is controlling modes of sexuality and/or sexual expression.

Returning to the comparison, Hussain's untitled nude body on the map of India is literally marked. She carries these inscriptions -- Gujarat on one breast, Bangalore between her thighs, Chennai on her calves, Goa on her hip. Savita Bhabi is marked by her sari, her bindi, her blouse, her aesthetic sense, her fantasies of film stars, her stories of encounters in dressing rooms and myriad other recognizable details -- that mark her as Indian, or at least as living in India, in an Indian (albeit a privileged fair North Indian) body. However, it is Husain's untitled painting -- not called Bharat Mata (and the painting doesn't seem to signify a maternal relation but that of a wounded woman or pained woman) -- that goes to court on charges of obscenity.

Before looking at the few judgments that deal with the actual pornographic text, I take a detour to look at another iconic female figure -- that of Justice. Though clothed, she is blindfolded, so as to be able to discern even a fraction of a slip in the scales of justice; visual cognition would not be sufficient for her to recognise such a slip. As explained by Costas Douzinas, ('The Legality of the Image, lecture – December, 1999), ‘Justice must be blindfolded to avoid the temptation of facing the concrete person and putting individual characteristics before the abstract logic of the institution'. Martin Jay traces the trajectory of how justice became blindfolded through the ages, in the article 'Must Justice Be Blind' (11). Justice was initially wide-eyed and alert; she was blindfolded by the Fool in a period when corruption of the rulers was rampant; she was immortalised by Vermeer as staring at empty scales; and in a transitory state before being completely blinded she had two heads, with a pair of eyes that could see, and a pair that was blindfolded -- shielded, maybe, from the profane and from embarrassment.

I look at this blindness of the judicial system that allows pornography to circulate, while pinning down the obscene and examining minutely its various meanings. The obscene ('Satyam Shivam Sundarmam', 'Prajapati' – a Bengali magazine which carries short stories, 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover', 'Bandit Queen') is examined firstly, for whether it is so gross, though grossness or vulgarity as such is not enough to establish obscenity. And secondly, for whether it has the tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences and into whose hands -- or rather, vision -- such an object might fall (this is what allows for the circulation in limited publics -- adult audiences, time slots on television).

Hard and Near Hard Pornography: Close Encounters of the Law with the Profane

In the case of Anonymous vs. the Commissioner Of Police (12), yet another encounter takes place between the embarrassed law and the pornographic text. The excerpt below describes the encounter of two women advocates asked by the court to examine what movies are being exhibited at a specific theatre. In the peculiar clash of social mores, that ensure who has access to pornography, and the law, that ensures equal access to all legally sanctioned media to everyone, the movie theatre was held responsible for violating the fundamental right of women to have access to their premises -- and thus access to pornography.

'We approached the booking counter of Rs. 20/- and asked for tickets. The booking clerk first informed us that it is an English movie and it is not meant for ladies to view. When we insisted for tickets, he asked us to come inside the booking room from the main entrance of the theatre. When we were entering the theatre, the gate-man informed us that ladies are not permitted as it is a "SEX MOVIE".

However, we walked into the booking room. Booking clerk issued us Box-A tickets and further asked us to see the Manager before taking seats. We did not see the Manager but directly went to Box-A and took seats. Even the Box-A doorman asked us to leave the theatre advising us that we being ladies cannot see it as the movie is a "SEX MOVIE". When the movie began at 12.00 P.M. simultaneously the Manager along with two men switched on the lights in Box-A and asked us to leave the hall immediately. Since he repeatedly insisted us to leave, we both came out of Box-A. On coming out we enquired as to why we should not see the movie, to which the Manager replied that it is a "BF". On asking for further clarification of "BF", the Manager stated that it means "BLUE FILM". When we asked him to identify himself, he informed us that he is Mr. Prasad, Manager of the Theatre, as such he has every right to ask us to leave. When we asked as to how it was not advertised that the movie is meant for men only, he retorted that "It is understood that whenever English movies are played in this theatre, ladies are strictly not permitted." As such we were forced to leave the theatre immediately.'

The question before the court was whether the films exhibited in this theatre were being exhibited in accordance with the censor certificate or whether there was any tampering; whether there was any other device or contrivance to interpolate or intermingle blue films with any otherwise innocent-looking film. Here, though the court had taken it upon itself to address the pornographic text, it ran into a series of complications when merely trying to access the text or the evidence itself, as two women advocates were sent to determine if there was an illegal film exhibition taking place. Pornography seems to be continuously disappearing even on the rare occasion when it is addressed directly by the court, especially in the court's attempt to precisely locate the moment of transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object.

The court, when allowed to examine the film exhibited, found that it was 'a hotch potch of short films, advertisement films, party propaganda films, Hindi and Telugu feature film bits'. (13) The court finally located the pornographic segments (squeezing breasts in a tub, cunnilingus, brutal murder scene) and the court’s comment was that 'normal scenes were replaced by sexy scenes'. The recommendation of those who examined the films that were ostensibly being spliced into Secret Games 3 and Dark Dancers is that, 'The only course proper is not to permit entry into the country for such films which prima facie may be classified hard or near-hard'. Though the term near-hard is amusing and unique classification of pornography, maybe it's a Freudian slip by a judicial system caught between disgusted arousal and embarrassment.

Finally, in this judgment, the court had to acknowledge its own blindness -- that there is ‘some hole somewhere in the system so that even excised portions by the Censor Board of the films have found their way to the theatres’, including portions that were never passed through the censor certification process at all.

Whose Hard-On (or Near Hard-On) Are We Looking for: The Law in Its Search for the Profane

In 2005, two teenagers frolicking were captured on a mobile phone camera, and the clip circulated first through mobile phones and then subsequently on the internet. The clip sparked off a phenomenon of hidden camera and mobile phone clips -- a booming pornographic enterprise now on the internet. For a split second, it seemed as though any kind of desire could become pornographic, captured in an ubiquitous medium and transmitted throughout the country. That thrill and anxiety was possibly grasped at slightly in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D, where Chanda -- the prostitute, or the other of the good girl -- is the one depicted as the unknown girl who was part of the MMS clip. Very few films have been able to grasp the visceral embarrassment and immediacy of desire as Dev.D does, and it is possibly not the story of Chanda, but that of Paro that achieves this. Paro, who sends nude pictures of herself across continents; Paro, the cyber-sexer; Paro, the entirely relatable slut who cycles with a mattress across fields of mustard in small town Punjab because she desires sex.

After three and a half years (countless MMSs, one movie reference, and a few academic articles later) the court passes judgment in this case – of who possibly can be held liable for the circulation of the MMS clip online, and specifically its sale on Bazee.com (an eBay subsidiary) by an IIT student (Avnish Bajaj vs State on 29/5/2008 by Muralidhar J.). In this case, it is not the pornographic text that keeps slipping and eluding the grasp of the court; the problem is in the inability, especially in the age of the internet, to fix the transactions around such an object that is rapidly changing hands and circulating at an exponential speed through the internet.

The court is in a bind -- the wrong person is accused. Not the corporate body of Bazee but the CEO of Bazee himself (the boy is a juvenile so is facing lesser charges in the juvenile court). The court has the responsibility to fix the blame of the circulation of the obscene object on Avinash Bajaj, without being able to establish that there is any knowledge on his part about the existence of the clip. Though the court was able to establish that there was negligence on the part of Bazee in running the website (in spite of notification, the clip remained on sale for a whole working day after the complaint), and that the filters used by Bazee were obviously inadequate to control what is sold through the website, it was still not possible to find the CEO liable for obscenity charges. If the company had been charged, this would have been possible. Eventually, even though obscenity as a charge couldn’t stick, similar provisions in the IT Act (Section 67 read with Section 85) were used to charge Avinash Bajaj himself, as opposed to Bazee (the corporate body or the company itself).

Here again the court is forced to confront a pornographic text only in instances where there has been a public furore around it, and the eventual judgment is not likely to be able to even remotely address the phenomenon of MMS clips and hidden camera footage from cybercafes and hostels that has been spawned as a result of this incident. The slippery transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object is difficult to fix though in a different way from the earlier judgment – here the pornographic nature of the text is understood rather than examined, more for its violation of privacy than actual elements of obscenity. But it is still hard to determine for the law, especially with the internet, how and by whom has circulation of the pornographic object has taken place and to fix these transactions to ensure legal culpability.

*****
Curiously this tale of women advocates and judges as representatives of law and justice, who are averting their gaze from the pornographic text or find that the text is constantly eluding their legal stare, must deal in its closure with the figure of the male judge. Anne McClintock’s male judge in her article ‘Screwing the System’ (14) is a judge who gets a hard-on each time he sentences a prostitute -- a judge who otherwise pays to be beaten by the very same prostitutes. The Hidayatullah paradox of obscenity law is that the judge who decides on obscenity has to decide on the basis of whether he is affected, or rather aroused -- and if he is turned on, then how is he any longer the reasonable judge, or even the 'reasonable man' who can be expected to pass judgment with the dispassionate authority of law? The work of both Shrimoyee N. Ghosh (on the dance bar judgment) and Lawrence Liang (on cinema and the law) on the relation between law and affect, gestures towards an interesting puzzle for us to consider here: if we could look into the eyes of justice, if she were not blindfolded, what would we see? And is the purpose of the blindfold indeed to prevent us from observing the affective life of law itself – its arousal, disgust and embarrassment?

Endnotes:

1. Ranjit Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra. Only in the recent fairly progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, that held eventually after examining it, that it was not obscene, was there an attempt at giving some distinction to the category of pornography apart from it being an aggravated form of obscenity and to say that it, as a class of objects, images, paintings, videos, is designed for sexual arousal, while other material which may or may not be obscene is meant to have other meanings. Such reading of the author’s intentions is a convoluted way of restating Justice Potter’s statement – 'I know it (hard core), when I see it'.
2. Fatima Riswana v. State Rep. By A.C.P., Chennai & Ors.Case No.: Appeal (crl.) 61-62 of 2005
3. -'…in a clear shift of subject matter, what we are now seeing is an explicitly politicized moral censor looking at all this—looking not so much at the sex industry as at society-in-general, at society itself now theatricalised into a morbid stage of sleaze'. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his essay ‘Is Realism Pornographic?,’ which deals with the writings of Pramod Navalkar, former Minister for Culture in Maharashtra, points to how explicit or hard-core pornography does not seem to be the concern as much as a whole range of practices attached to the phenomenon of modernity
4. Anastasia Guha, The Beatitudes Of A Bountiful Bhabhi, Tehelka, Vol 5, Issue 19, Dated May 17, 2008. Available online at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=hub170508the_beatitudes.asp
5. Savitha Bhabi threatened, http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/3476748.cms
6. For instance, the court held that in Bandit Queen, the nudity during the sequence of rape and torture of Phoolan Devi is necessary in the narrative and essential for the impact and the moral that the story is trying to convey – her anger with the upper caste feudal landlords and her quest for justice become identifiable for the viewer, and hence the nudity is in fact necessary in the story, and has no ‘tendency to deprave or corrupt’.
7. The regulation of cybercafes takes place in a manner reminiscent of how cinema spaces such as movie theatres were sought to be regulated by the colonial law. Current laws demand placing of computers so monitors face outward, use of identity cards for every visit, data retention for at least a month for most users, etc.
8. Though the latter might be a valid assumption (and certainly beneficial for us) it is an assumption whose presumptuous certainties are shaken in the age of the internet, especially that primarily men access pornography and cyber sex through these newly opening up online spaces.
9. Maqbool Fida Husain v. Raj Kumar Pandey CRL. REVISION PETITION No. 114/2007. Decided on 08-05-2008

10. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989
11. Costas Douzinas, Lynda Nead (Eds), Law and the Image: the Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. University of Chicago Press, 1999
12. Anonymous Letter-Un-Signed vs The Commissioner Of Police And Others on 26 December, 1996
13. For a judicial system that is invested in narrative film or narrative structure for reasons of copyright law (see generally Anne Baron, The Legal Property of Film) or for aesthetic reasons, as is evident from the judgment in Bandit Queen (that held nudity when she was paraded naked in front of the villagers to not be obscene because those scenes are needed for a narrative impact – for people to feel moved and disgusted by Phoolan Devi’s plight) it must also be a different kind of horror to find films chopped up into twenty sundry pieces, the last piece thrown somewhere else.
14. Anne McClintock, Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race and the Law, Boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), 70-95.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography

Pleasure and Pornography: Impassioned Objects

namita — 2011-08-02T08:35:20Z

In this post, a third in the series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Pleasure and Pornography, Namita Malhotra explores the idea of fetish as examined by Anne McClintock (i) . This detour is an exploration of the notion of fetish, its histories and meanings, and how it might relate to the story of Indian porn.

The etymology of fetish derives from the word fetico (Portuguese) which means sorcery or magic arts. In 1760, it was used to refer to primitive religions, especially in relation to the growing project of imperialism. In 1867, Marx coined the term commodity fetishism – using the implied meaning of primitive magic to express the central social form of modern industrial economy, whereby the social relation between people metamorphoses into the relation between things. It was only after this, in 1905, that Freud transferred the word, with all these meanings still clinging to it, to the realm of sexuality and perversions. As Anne McClintock points out, in her useful account and re-understanding of the fetish in the book Imperial Leather (ii), psychoanalysis, philosophy, and Marxism all take shape around the invention of the primitive fetish, which conveniently displaces what the modern mind cannot accommodate onto the invented domain of the primitive. She states that the not-so-concealed rationale of imperialism is fetishism. Fetishists (racial, sexual and other) became a mode of warranting and justifying conquest and control -- whether it was the policing of sexual fetishism for control of classes in Europe and colonies, or the invention of racial fetishism central to the regime of imposing sexual surveillance in the colonies. The imperial discourse on fetishism became a discipline of containment (iii) .

On the other hand in the realm of sexuality, fetish becomes a question of male sexuality alone -- male perversion par excellence. There are no female fetishists, either for Freud or Lacan, for to speak of female fetishism would involve displacing the basic precepts of psychoanalysis -- namely the scene of castration leading to phallic fetishism. However, McClintock points to the usefulness of studying female fetishism, as it allows for certain things to happen. First, it dislodges the centrality of the phallus in this discourse, which surprisingly makes way for the presence and legitimacy of a multiplicity of pleasures, needs, and contradictions that can’t be resolved or reduced merely to the desire to preserve the phallus. Very often, feminists such as McClintock read the Lacanian insistence on the centrality of the phallus as itself a fetishistic nostalgia for a single, male myth of origins and fetishistic disavowal of difference. Such a notion of fetish, embedded in phallic theory, gets easily reduced to sexual difference and does not allow/admit race or class as crucially formative categories as well; thus, race and class remain continuously of secondary status in the primarily sexually signifying chain.

“The racist fetishizing of white skin, black fetishizing gold chains, the fetishizing of black dominatraces, lesbians, cross dressing as men the fetishizing of national flags, slave fetishism, class cross-dressing, fetishes such as nipple clips and bras in male transvestism, leather bondage, PVC fetishism, babyism and so on -- these myriad different deployments of fetishistic ambiguity cannot be categorized under a single mark of desire, without great loss of theoretical subtlety and historical complexity.” Also McClintock points to racist, nationalistic and patriotic fetishes -- such as flags, crowns, maps, swastikas (or for instance chaddis) -- that can’t be simply rendered equivalent to the disavowal of male castration anxiety.

McClintock calls for a renewed investigation of fetishism -- to open it up to a more complex and valuable history in which racial and class hierarchies would play as formative a role as sexuality. Rejecting the Lacanian and Freudian fixation on the phallus as central to psychoanalysis would call for a mutually transforming investigation into the disavowed relations of psychoanalysis and social history. In a way, it would be the bringing together of the varied ways in which fetish has been used -- by Freud (in the domain of psychoanalysis) in the realm of domesticity and the private, and by Marx (in the domain of male socio-economic history) in the realm of the market and possibly in the public. If these meanings were to speak to each other, what we discover is that fetish is in fact the historical enactment of ambiguity itself.

Fetishism involves the displacement onto an object of contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level. These contradictions could indeed be social, though lived with profound intensity in the imagination and flesh of the person. The fetish -- rather than being a merely an insignificant sexual or personal practice -- inhabits both personal and historical memory. It marks a crisis in social meaning -- the embodiment of an impossible resolution. This crisis/contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur in compulsive ways. By displacing this power onto the fetish, then manipulating or controlling the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.

The fetish then can be called an impassioned object; something that emerges from a variety of social contradictions, rather than merely from the scene of castration or phallic centric domains. Hence they are neither universal, nor are they entirely about personal histories alone, but are about personal and historical memory or a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level. “As composite symbolic objects, fetishes thus embody the traumatic coincidence not only of individual but also of historical memories held in contradiction” (McClintock). This reading of fetishism gives rise to far richer possibilities of cultural analysis.

Fetish was neither proper to African or Christian European culture, but sprang into being from an abrupt encounter between two heterogeneous worlds during an era of mercantile capitalism and slavery. At this point it clearly embodies the problem of contradictory social value -- whether it is gold as valuable, or gold as warding off bad luck. Though initially just about heathen customs and rituals, it later also becomes a marking of certain groups of people for conquest. It is from this context that Freud transports the word, laden with meanings of conquest and violence, to the realm of sexuality. Obviously these meanings stain future connotations of fetish, the word fetish itself becoming prey to contradictory meanings of race and sex and difference.

For Freud, the fetish is the embodiment in one object of two positions -- castration and its denial. Though this does capture some sense of the ambiguity that McClintock also refers to, here the meanings oscillate between two, and only two, fixed options (a recurring male economy). The fetish becomes both a permanent memorial to the horror of castration, embodied not in the male but in the female -- as well as a token of triumph, and safeguard against the threat of castration. This has, of course, been critiqued by feminists quite severely. McClintock’s basic argument is that it is indeed hard, considering the varied nature of fetish objects, to find a single originary explanation in the psychic development of the individual -- in a single originary trauma. What is important here, however is to take on this notion of the fetish as an historical enactment of ambiguity itself, and see if as a theoretical concept it has any value to the study of the loose category of Indian porn, especially MMS porn.

Soap in these strange days: fetish objects

“Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not the sight of particular fetishized objects, but sight itself as richness, as the grounds for extensive experience.”
Dana Polan (iv)

Anne McClintock’s work on fetish also looks at the seemingly ubiquitous object of soap as the carrier of many ambiguous meanings around gender, class, imperialism -- both the cult of domesticity (the running of the empire of home with servants, sweepers, cleaners, women, maids etc.) and the cult of new imperialism found in soap in its exemplary mediating form. The story of soap, for McClintock, reveals that fetishism rather than a quintessentially African propensity (belonging in the realm of lands and peoples that were being discovered through imperialism) was in fact central to industrial modernity; fetishism was not original either to industrial capitalism or precolonial economies, but was from the outset the embodiment and record of an incongruous and violent encounter (between two or more heterogenous cultures) and about rapid changes of modernity, rather than about the ‘primitive’.

Marx says that the mystique of the commodity fetish lies not in its use value, but in its exchange value and its potency as a sign: “So far as (a commodity) is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it”. This could be linked to the idea of a mobile phone that is supposed to achieve so much beyond mere communication, at least according to the advertising -- they should mend ruptured relations and homes, get all the hot chicks, grow beautiful gardens, change the boring routine of life. For some time, the Samsung mobile phone ad with Estella Warren played in India, which probably moves the mobile phone with camera out of merely its symbolic use as enhancing attractiveness, to actually ‘getting’ or rather capturing girls by clicking. Magically in the ad, the act of clicking photographs make the girl not just willing, but she also takes the phone and photographs herself. Barring one scary moment when it looks like she might turn into an avenging warrior like Xena or The Bride, but instead she simpers into a loving sexy pose, she is willing. The ad can’t be easily dismissed as misogynistic, but it does give an intriguing glimpse of the intimate pictures and moments that can be captured with a mobile phone.

That a mobile phone is fetishized as a commodity is probably evident, from the rush to get the more enhanced phone with the better camera and features, though mobile phones are also a ubiquitous element of one’s life, in some ways exactly like soap. Probably in a country like India, having a mobile phone can be read as opening up sexual possibilities in a way that wouldn’t be obvious in a more developed country. If the fetish is a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level, then the mobile phone, especially after the DPS MMS clip, is precariously located between the zones of the private and personal, and that which is entirely in the public domain beyond any control of the person(s). This ability of the mobile phone to occupy simultaneous universes because of its interconnectedness in a network, and that it is (for most people now) an entirely personal object with messages, numbers, conversations, images, videos, is what makes it unpredictable.

Looking at MMS porn
“Memories were meant to fade. They were built that way for a reason”
Mace, Strange Days

When looking at MMS porn, I’m irresistibly reminded of the movie Strange Days, in which Angela Basset’s character Mace expresses her frustration with Lenny (played by Ralph Fiennes). Lenny is obsessed with preserving memory and accessing other people’s experiences, through what in the movie are called playbacks. Playbacks are recordings of events in the brain that were fed back into brain waves to reproduce the earlier event -- the feelings, the sensations of touch, the smells and not just the visual. Playbacks haven’t been invented yet, but the obsessiveness with which Lenny wheels and deals (he’s also a dealer and collector of playbacks) gives a peculiar insight into how mobile phones are becoming fetish objects of sorts -- particularly MMSs recorded on mobile phones where other people are able to occupy the space of an unknown character that conveniently rarely ever appears on the screen. The famous pornographic ones are the DPS MMS clip and other MMS scandals, including the hidden voyeuristic ones taken without permission, and a precursor of this is Mysore Mallige where the man appears rarely on the screen and only at the end, almost like a signature. In a peculiar way MMS porn becomes like playback from Strange Days, a movie that is attempting to unravel the unknown future mired in technological changes that are messily intertwined with human desire and frailty. A future (set on the date of turning the millennium) that we’ve hopelessly gone past without even asking many of the questions that the characters in the movie pose.

Indian websites advertise MMS scandals as a specific category of pornography. This category also includes genuine MMS clips of celebrities kissing (Kareena Kapoor), wardrobe malfunctions from Fashion Week, and also fake ones with celebrity look-alikes bathing, changing, having sex (Preity Zinta, Mallika Sherawat). Mostly what is being talked about are videos made on mobile phones by men, who record themselves having sex with ‘gullible’ women. The alleged gullibility of these women is probably essential to the erotic charge of such videos. They are shaky videos, especially when sex is underway, and have a grainy quality that makes them eerily real. Their perspective is usually that of the man who is holding the phone camera and rarely enters the frame himself, whereas the woman is definitely the desirable object that is being captured. Maybe this phenomenon can be understood better if one looks at McClintock’s idea of fetish and whether MMS/images on mobile phones can be located within that category -- whether the ambiguous nature of the video or image recorded on the mobile phone and its ability to be an intensely personal and private object and also to be so easily transmitted into networks signifies a crisis in social meanings around private and public. The mobile phone then merely becomes an object onto which this anxiety is displaced, and the recording of images repeatedly (and anxieties and fears triggered when they accidentally slip into the public domain) are ways of trying to control terrifying ambiguities over the private and the public (where aspects of sexuality, family and selfhood could be calamitously disrupted by a slip between the two categories). (v)

In a strange way this is a parable for a larger phenomenon of pornographic circulation and the law, as well. The mass circulation of pornography is perceived as a private secret that is kept by all, and whenever there is slip between the two categories, the law and public discourse are barely able to deal with the furore of anxieties. And if not, then the law and public discourse proceed to deal with the banal unbuttoning of Akshay Kumar’s jeans by his wife as obscenity in courtrooms, as if we hadn’t all imagined an MMS that allowed us to be doing the same.

i. Anne Mcclintok’s work on sadomasochism illuminates some of the arguments that I make in relation to sexual subjectivity and the state’s interests and desires in policing it. (unpublished article for book on queer issues and the law). Her work borrows from notions developed by Foucault. “Sadomasochism plays social power backwards, visibly and outrageously staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy or alienation of the body, placing these ideas at the centre of western reason.” The analysis of sexual subjectivity and State’s interest in it also looks at the judgment on sadomasochism by the House of Lords, England that declares such activities that cause severe injuries and maim the body, as illegal, regardless of consent of parties.
ii. Anne Mcclintok, Imperial Leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, Routledge, 1995.
iii. Ibid
iv. Cited from Laura Mulvey, Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture, October, Vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 3-20.

v. As in the story of Chanda in Dev.d loosely inspired from the DPS MMS clip incident

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish

Privacy, pornography, sexuality (a video)

namita — 2011-08-02T08:37:19Z

The video is an attempt to use the material collected for purposes of provoking a discussion around privacy, pornography, sexuality and technology. It focuses largely on an Indian context, which most viewers would be familiar with. The video is pegged around the ban of Savita Bhabhi – a pornographic comic toon – but uses that to open up a discussion on various incidents and concepts in relation to pornography and privacy across Asia.

The project on pleasure and pornography will generate outputs in different formats, but especially since it is meant to be interdisciplinary (legal, critical, feminist, cybercultures, media and cinema studies) it would be interesting to use different ways of communicating the ideas that the project will develop. Several interviews have been conducted (ranging from length of 30 mins to 2 hours) with contemporaries in India whose work in different ways (quantitative research, historical research, filmmaking, academic writings) intersects and relates to pornography – this includes Bharat Murthy, Manjima Bhattacharjya, Nishant Shah, Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, Shohini Ghosh and others.

The video above is an attempt to use the material collected for purposes of provoking a discussion around privacy, pornography, sexuality and technology. It focuses largely on an Indian context, which most viewers would be familiar with. The video is pegged around the ban of Savita Bhabhi – a pornographic comic toon – but uses that to open up a discussion on various incidents and concepts in relation to pornography and privacy across Asia. For instance what is the role of technology and how has it altered or not altered relations between the citizen and the State, what are the stakes of the State in sexual subjectivity of the citizens and what are the relations of gender, pornography and debates around privacy in public discourse.

In this post I would gesture towards the last category that has not been touched upon earlier, in relation to countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia. It has become important during the course of this project to draw connections to work done in the global South. In legal studies, comparative work around legal concepts of obscenity, pornography, vulgarity are most often only in relation to America and United Kingdom, either for a strong tradition of free speech and expression in both countries and because of historical connections to common and legislative law in UK. However it is important to examine the trajectories of similar legal paradigms (Malaysia) and even different legal paradigms (Indonesia) across Asia to understand the mechanics of how pornography is constructed and understood in legal and possibly cultural terms as well.

Here we look at instances of material that are described as pornography in legal terms and how that legal category avoids taking onto itself what could be described as hard core pornography, and instead focuses on material that in the Indian context are described as obscene (see first blog post on Indian law). In other parts of Asia, very often laws that describe what is pornography play an important role in controlling women and reinforcing gendered modes of access to media, information or to public spaces.

The Indonesian Anti-pornography law instead of protecting the privacy of individuals, regulates and controls the ways in which women can participate in the public sphere. The law deals with appropriate garb, behaviour, forms of artistic and video practices under the broad umbrella of the term pornoaksi or pornographic action. In Indonesia as in other parts of Asia, there has been over the last 4-5 years a flood of mobile and webcam pornography uploaded by people themselves (couples and individuals), which forms a large part of the erotic consumption in the country. The sheer volume and circulation of these videos points to how technology is enmeshed in sexual practices in even in the global South, contrary to what is written about sexuality and technology that largely focuses on the phenomenon of technology-sexuality in the global North around platforms such as Second Life[i] or aspects of virtual reality. However the new law (passed in 2008) does not address this phenomenon directly even though that was the reason for promulgation of the law, but instead focuses of the dubious and vague category of pornoaksi.

The law also allows for ordinary citizens to complain about obscene behaviour. According to gender and human rights activists in Indonesia, this gives a lot of leeway to the more socially conservative elements to complain and even attack film festivals, gatherings etc. In an article (unpublished) about the anti pornography law, Julia Suryakusuma (a columnist and writer in Indonesia) says -

"But is the so-called ‘Anti-Pornography Law’ indeed aimed against ‘pornography’, or is really directed against women and the freedoms won through post-Soeharto democratization? The Law, I will argue, is, in fact, based on a social construction of ‘morality’ and womanhood that masks as religion but which is, in fact, a potent combination of social conservatism and political opportunism."

The video ends with a very moving press conference by the Malaysian State Assemblywoman offering her resignation because intimate (but not pornographic) pictures of her had been circulated without her consent by her ex-boyfriend. The incident was a transparent ploy by an opposing political party to denounce a formidable opponent and attempts to use public discourse around obscenity, vulgarity to limit the politician’s participation in the public sphere.

The video was also part of a discussion around privacy, agency and security organized at the recent Internet Governance Forum in Egypt in November, 2009[ii] and was screened at the beginning of the workshop to spear head a discussion between varied participants. The workshop was organized by Alternative Law Forum, Association for Progressive Communication - Women's Networking Support Programme and Center for Internet and Society. The IGF saw an intense focus on issues of privacy especially in relation to issues of data aggregation and control over private and public data of individuals by corporate entities. The video and the session was an attempt to bring into the focus of such discussions, issues more pertinent from a feminist, queer or theoretical perspective.

[i] Coming of age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff : An ethnography of Second Life that looks at various aspects of practices online including friendship, sexuality, marriage, aspirations and desires.

[ii] More details of this workshop (concept note, speakers) are available on the IGF website at http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=WSProposals2009View&wspid=275

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/privacy-pornography-sexuality-a-video

Wikiorientation at Dr.GR Damodaran College of Science

bhuvana — 2019-12-23T08:18:11Z

An orientation session on Wikimedia projects was held on 6-7 December 2019 at Dr. GR Damodaran College of Science. This talk was part of the “Hour of Code” event, which is an International event celebrated across the globe to encourage students to develop their knowledge on Computer Science. This event was supported by Open Knowledge movements like Wikimedia, Mozilla, etc.which would help students to share their knowledge in the form of volunteerships and contributions. The highlights of gender gap research and women based projects such as Women in Red were covered as part of a focussed group discussion.

Hour of code event

The “Hour of Code” is an International event conducted across the globe to commemorate the birthday of Grace Hopper, a computer scientist. In India 1047 events were officially registered and were conducted region-wise. In Coimbatore, Dr.G.R. Damodaran College of Science initiated the first Hour of Code event in the city. The event was attended by 400-500 students, where 50% of the participants were identified as women, from various departments and 6 Open Source and Knowledge movements’ community members were invited as speakers. Among them were Wikimedia, Mozilla, Google Developers Groups, Facebook Devcircles, Women Tech Makers and School of AI where all the community representatives pitched to the student gathering on how to contribute to these groups. The students were enthusiastic to initiate Open source clubs and also nominate a Point Of Contact with the guidance of the faculty members.

Wiki Orientation

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikiorientation_at_Dr.GR_Damodaran_college_of_arts_and_science,_Coimbatore_-6.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikiorientation_at_Dr.GR_Damodaran_college_of_arts_and_science,_Coimbatore_-7.jpg

I was invited as a Chief Guest for the event to talk to students about how they may contribute to Wikimedia and its projects. I presented to the students the various forms of Wiki which would be of interest to coders and non-coders. This also included discussions on Wikidata, Wikisource, Wikipedia, Wikimedia commons and Wikimedia in Education program. As the participants from the college were mostly from Tamil Nadu, I also emphasised how contribution in Tamil in the Wiki world will be of great help. I discussed with students how contribution to an Open Knowledge movement not only enhances their intellectual stand but also benefits the whole world. Also the founder of Koval labs, Coimbatore was the co-speaker of the day who highlighted about importance of Open source and Computer Science in today's industries.

Bridging Gender Gap

After the orientation, I invited a few participants to a focussed group discussion about my research on “Bridging the Gender gap in Indian Wikipedia languages”.A majority of the participants were women, even though the event was open to all. I discussed the research work and the necessity behind this. Apart from this I introduced the students to various women- focussed wiki-based projects such as Women In Red, WikiLoves Women, Wiki Women for Women Well Being (WWWW) etc. I also asked the attendees to express t in the open discussion session on what are the major issues faced by women in technology taking examples from their own lives.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikiorientation_at_Dr.GR_Damodaran_college_of_arts_and_science,_Coimbatore_-12.jpg

The common and major issues with pursuing a career in technology discussed were the inaccessibility to internet and infrastructure to work at home besides the other household responsibilities. Also the freedom to pursue a career in this field is less and not permissible for longer years in these women's lives.

Key observations/ learnings

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikiorientation_at_Dr.GR_Damodaran_college_of_arts_and_science,_Coimbatore_-9.jpg

The key issues of women working on technology in a structured environment (such as an educational institution in this case).
The possibilities of initiating a WikiClub at the campus.
Almost 60% was interested in non/less coding contributions/subjects.
Discussed the kinds of projects students can contribute to on Wikipedia.

Press coverage about the event can be seen at Desathin Nambikai , The Covai mail news , Prime Time Tamil , Covai news and Updatenews360.com

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiorientation-at-dr-gr-damodaran-college-of-science

Wikiorientation at Dr.GR Damodaran College of Science

bhuvana — 2020-01-18T08:11:03Z

Hour of code event

The “Hour of Code” is an International event conducted across the globe to commemorate the birthday of Grace Hopper, a computer scientist. In India 1047 events were officially registered and were conducted region-wise. In Coimbatore, Dr.G.R. Damodaran College of Science initiated the first Hour of Code event in the city. The event was attended by 350 students, where 50% of the participants were identified as women, from various departments and 6 Open Source and Knowledge movements’ community members were invited as speakers. Among them were Wikimedia, Mozilla, Google Developers Groups, Facebook Devcircles, Women Tech Makers and School of AI where all the community representatives pitched to the student gathering on how to contribute to these groups. The students were enthusiastic to initiate Open source clubs and also nominate a Point Of Contact with the guidance of the faculty members.

Wiki Orientation

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikiorientation_at_Dr.GR_Damodaran_college_of_arts_and_science,_Coimbatore_-6.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikiorientation_at_Dr.GR_Damodaran_college_of_arts_and_science,_Coimbatore_-7.jpg

Bridging Gender Gap

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikiorientation_at_Dr.GR_Damodaran_college_of_arts_and_science,_Coimbatore_-12.jpg

Key observations/ learnings

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikiorientation_at_Dr.GR_Damodaran_college_of_arts_and_science,_Coimbatore_-9.jpg

The key issues of women working on technology in a structured environment (such as an educational institution in this case).
The possibilities of initiating a WikiClub at the campus.
Almost 60% was interested in non/less coding contributions/subjects.
Discussed the kinds of projects students can contribute to on Wikipedia.

Press coverage about the event can be seen at Desathin Nambikai , The Covai mail news , Prime Time Tamil , Covai news and Updatenews360.com

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiorientation-at-dr-gr-damodaran-college-of-science-1

Preliminary research result on Wikipedia gender gap in India

ting — 2017-05-23T11:09:23Z

Since June 2016, Ting-Yi Chang from the University of Toronto has worked with the CIS-A2K team to conduct action research on the Wikipedia gender gap in India. The research aims to improve the understanding of the gender gap (imbalance) issue in the Indian Wikipedia communities while examining local interventions.

This post is an extraction from the Wikipedia Gender Gap Bridging Toolkit - South Asia Edition which will be published on Wiki (Commons and meta) in late May 2017. The toolkit is a derivative of the gender gap research initiative.

Wikipedia has a wide gender gap in participation and content coverage. The editor survey in 2011 showed that among the active editors worldwide only 9% identified themselves as female. While research and initiatives have been proposed and conducted to “bridge the gender gap,” mass majority of these studies are done in the Western context (English/European language Wikipedias and communities). The movement dynamics and situation of other Wikipedian communities are not well explored or documented. Of the few studies that did focus on non-Western contexts, this action research is one of the few to look at the issue in India.

Due to the timeline of the research and the limitation of space in this post, we will only discuss the preliminary findings of the study, specifically for the following questions:

Q1: What are existing female Wikipedians’ (regardless of one’s activeness in editing) experience in the Wikimedian communities?

Q2: What are new female Wikipedians’ (who participated in gender gap bridging events) attitude and preference toward these gender gap bridging activities?

In Q1, we used open coding to find recurring themes in the qualitative data collected through 18 semi-structured interviews with 21 female Wikipedians, and label them to find certain patterns of answers. To answer question 2, discussion and infographics will be presented to summarize the 64 survey responses we have gathered.

Q1: What are existing female Wikipedians’ experience in the Wikimedian communities?

Western-based research and survey has shown that a plausible reason behind the gender gap on Wikipedia is the discriminatory and unwelcoming environment within the editor communities. Research was much needed to explore the reasons in the Indian context as we cannot simply apply the same results or rule out the possibility of the same situation. Among the 9 reasons that Sue Gardner, the former Executive Director of WMF, had pointed out in her 2011 blog post, we deem the “misogynist atmosphere” as the most problematic - it signals an unhealthy environment and structure for diversity and long term growth.

Thus, 18 private interviews were held to understand the positive and negative experience that existing female (Indian) Wikipedians have faced in the communities. In this question we are specifically looking at the interaction and interpersonal relationship between community members (editors), hence it does not include experiences like discouragement from speedy deletion or technical difficulty in editing.

In each of the two categories (positive and negative), we use three labels to cover the recurring themes mentioned. In “positive experience,” these are (a) emotional support and respect, (b) bonding and friendship, and (c) other support. In “negative experience,” the three labels are (a) neglected or belittled, (b) sexist comments, and (c) safety concern.

It is interesting to note that although in most (Western-based) research, the positive and negative experiences were in the online context, our interviewees (Indian female Wikipedians) had mostly pointed out experiences that were either offline or in non-specified context. Comments on the online interaction dynamics were fairly rare and neutral, while negative experiences mostly occurred in the offline settings.

This can indicate that the communities’ offline interaction dynamics leaves a much more significant impression (sadly, especially when it is negative) to female Wikipedians on their overall community experience. Additionally, it seems that compared to the Western/English context, Indian Wikipedian communities are more close-knit and active offline, that is, the editors are more likely to know each other personally. This dynamic is a great plus to create positive experience such as strong bonding and emotional support. However, it may also be more toxic when the experience is negative as compared to if the experience was online and anonymous. In other words, sexist comments, deliberate neglect, and safety concerns can have an aggravated effect when faced personally.

In numbers, more positive experiences were mentioned than negative ones when a neutral question was asked (such as “How do you think about the community?” / ”what is your experience in the editor community so far?”). Most negative experience were only revealed when a negative-oriented question was asked (such as “Have you had any negative or uncomfortable experience so far?”). This may be interpreted that the interviewees’ overall experiences are positive with only occasional negative encounters. However, this interpretation can still be biased if we consider the possibility that:

There is a lack of trust between the researcher and the interviewees (i.e. Interviewees may have the intention to provide a more pleasing/non-controversial answer), or
the selection of our interviewees was already biased since “existing” female Wikipedians can be those that have not experienced much negative experience (i.e. the female editors who were upset by more negative experiences and had already quit editing were not reachable when the interviews were conducted, or they might simply be uninterested in participating in the research).

Q2: What are new female Wikipedians’ (who participated in gender gap bridging events) attitude and preference toward these gender gap bridging activities?

As indicated in our last question, the offline interaction and activities seem to be very crucial in determining a female Wikipedian’s overall experience in the community. In other questions throughout the semi-structured interview, we had asked existing female Wikipedians - who had been active in gender gap bridging event conduct - to discuss what can make an event more welcoming to women. Below are some of the answers given:

A women-only event (although some also criticized that this approach often made the gender gap a “women-only” discussion)
Female tutor’s presence
Offline events where women can meet others face to face (although some had mention that they prefer to participate online - which makes them feel safer and more comfortable)
The chance for participants to socialize and make friends
Write about women-related topics (although some had argued that a gender gap bridging event should not promote the tokenizing logic that (only) women should (only) edit on women-related topics)

As you may notice, there are divergence of ideas regarding the points A, C, and E. In order to cross-check all these ideas, a survey of 11 scale-rating questions was developed to understand the new female Wikipedians’ (who participated in a gender gap bridging event) attitude and preferences. Three clusters of questions were formed - general experience, cross-checking questions, and attitude.

Below is an infographics on the 64 responses we had collected: (You may click on the image at the top of this page (under the blog title) to zoom in)

From the infographics above we can see that event participants’ overall experience are positive. However, it may still be far from perfect as there were 2 respondents who “fully disagreed” with the statement “I find the event environment safe, friendly, and welcoming.” There are still more than 40% of the respondents who thought editing is difficult (or somewhat difficult), which means improvement is needed in our event tutorship or a re-estimation participants’ skill levels is needed. Participants’ attitude towards the events was also mostly positive as indicated in the last two questions.

Cross-checking (A): Do women prefer a women-only event?

During the events, the presenters and resource persons usually encouraged male participation in the initiatives and stressed that the gender gap bridging efforts cannot be a further segregation between men and women editors. Hence, we do expect this to influence the answers given to the statement “I still prefer a women-only event.” Still, more than one-third of the participants indicated their preference in women-only events; we expect the actual rate to be even higher if the said factor was not present.

Cross-checking (B): Is the presence of female tutor(s) important? (Does a tutor’s gender matter?)

Question 5 and 6 show very interesting results. In the offline (in real life) event context, there seem to be more disagreement on the statement “I would prefer a woman to be my tutor.” These responses can be affected by the fact that majority of the tutors in Wikipedia events were still men, and if a participant had generally positive experience throughout the event, they might not be against the idea of having a male tutor again. Nonetheless, interestingly, the answer turned the other way around when the scenario changed to an “online” setting. More respondents then agreed that they would prefer a women as their tutor. This may be a sign that women are more alert and defensive when it comes to online interaction with people in the opposite sex.

Cross-checking (C) : Do women prefer offline (in-real-life) events over online ones?

Over 50% of the respondents chose “fully agree” to the statement while only 5 respondents chose either fully or partially disagree. We can conclude that women who had experience in an offline (in-real-life) event would still prefer the same setting in the future. However, of course, we cannot be sure how many women may have turned down this first event experience because it was offline. In other words, we do not know if the preference of women who had never attended any events. However, what we know is that mass majority of those who had one offline event experience would prefer the offline setting over an online participation.

Cross-checking (D): Does socializing matter to women?

Majority of the respondents fully agreed with the statement “I would like to socialize with and know more Wikipedians.” This is one of the very few questions where no one disagreed to. Although we cannot calculate the personal utility of socializing or conclude that socializing is “necessary” to make women feel more comfortable, we can assume that it will be a positive addition to the events if women can make new friends in the communities.

Cross-checking (E): Are women interested in women-related topics? Or would they have preferred to write about their expertise areas?

From the survey, we found that more women actually showed interest in writing on women-related topics than on their domain knowledge subjects. Over 80% of the respondents agreed that they were interested in writing more about women (and related topics) while slightly fewer women said the same about their expertise knowledge. Only 8 out of 64 respondents expressed a preference for writing on their domain knowledge topics over women-related topics. Hence, it seems that women-related topics are a good place to start (for one’s first Wikipedia event experience) as most women enjoyed it. One thing we are not able to estimate is how long can this interest be sustained.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/preliminary-research-result-on-wikipedia-gender-gap-in-india

Histories of the Internet

nishant — 2015-03-30T14:15:10Z

For the first two years, the CIS-RAW Programme shall focus on producing diverse multidisciplinary histories of the internet in India.

Histories of internets in India

The CIS-RAW programme is designed around two-year thematics. Every two years, we shall, looking at our engagement and the questions that are emerging around us, come up with new themes that we would like to commission, enable and encourage research on.

The selection of the theme of the History of Internet and Society is a unanimous decision made by our researchers in-house, the members of the Society, distinguished fellows, supporters, and peers who all gathered for a launch workshop for the CIS. There is a severe dearth of material on the histories of Internet and Society in India and we find it necessary to contextualise and historicise the contemporary in order to fruitfully and critically engage with the questions and concerns we are committed to. In the first two years of its programme, the CIS-RAW hopes to come up with alternative histories of the Internet and Society, which chart a wide terrain of the field that we are engaging with and produce one of the first such resources for researchers working in this field.

Scope of the Theme:

We are looking at a wide range of accounts of the different forms, imaginations, materialities and interactions of the internets in India. As we excavate its three-decade growth in India, it becomes increasingly clear that there is no homogenised Internet that has evolved in the country; Instead, what we have is a technology, which, through its interactions and intersections with various objects, people, contexts and regulation, has emerged in many different ways. The theme of 'Histories of internets in India' hopes to address these pluralities of the internets and how they have been shaped in the unfolding of these technologies.

We have collaborated on the following histories with different researchers in India:

Rewiring Bodies - Asha Achuthan, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore.
Archive and Access - Rochelle Pinto (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; Aparna Balachandran, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; and Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for Sudies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
Porn: Law, Video & Technology - Namita Malhotra, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
Transparency and Politics - Zainab Bawa, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society
The Last Cultural Mile - Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore
Using the Net for Social Change - Anja Kovacs, (Research) Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
Queer Histories of the Internet - Nitya Vasudevan, Centre for Study of Culture and Society and Nithin Manayath, Mount Carmel College
Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities - Pratyush Shankar, Center for Environmental Planning and Technology University, Ahmedabad
Gaming and Gold - Arun Menon, Centre for Internet & Society

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/histories-of-the-internets-main

Analysis on the strategies of Mozilla and Wiki communities on gender gap aspects

bhuvana — 2019-10-03T11:56:37Z

There is a need for research on how Open Source communities are trying to balance the gender ratio and how they provide the safe space environment to its contributors. With this in mind I have come up with this blog as I am an active contributor of Mozilla since 5 years and also got myself recently introduced to Wikimedia and its sister projects, have interacted with few Indian women contributors in both of these communities and came out with a few observations on how I see them in India and what could be improved in both communities.

Opening note

Wikipedia community

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of articles where many users can edit it freely and it has become so large that you run across it all the time in Google. It is so popular that it is now one of the Top 5 websites in the world! The reason behind the growth is because the articles are simple and useful.

Wikipedians are the contributors who do a communal work to improve the content by editing bits of text and cluster them to the large database. Beyond this there are other sister projects of Wikimedia which interest the audience on whichever they are expertise about. The main motivation for these contributors is their freedom to contribute in their own native language which they are more passionate about. This is a great social cause they are contributing towards.

Mozilla community

Mozilla makes browsers, apps, code and tools that put people before profit. In fact, there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of the enterprise.Their mission is to keep the internet open and accessible to all. Hope everyone uses or had at least at some point seen Firefox browser/logo, so this is the prime product of Mozilla. There are various projects to support the Firefox browser and they are mostly Open Source.

Mozillians are the volunteers who contribute in the improvement of these projects thus helping the world to access the internet and the Open web.Mozilla Volunteers are passionate to learn,collaborate and knowledge share among a large world-wide community and the crew is a mix of coder, non-coders, policy makers and anyone who supports Open Web. The point that drives everyone to contribute is that the community creates a vibe to contribute and to create a safe and better experience in accessing the digital world.

WikiProject Women

This a group of editors who aim to improve Wikipedia's coverage of women's topics. It brings Wikipedia users of all genders, sexual orientations, geographic locations, and personal backgrounds together to discuss and collaborate on coverage of women's content across Wikipedia.There are various streams in which women can be part of the larger mission for instance:

Art and Feminism

Women in Red

Wiki loves women

Womoz

Women & Mozilla ("WoMoz") a community composed of members from different Open Source projects.It is mainly dedicated to improving women's visibility and involvement in Free/Open Source and Mozilla, and to increase the number of women contributors. Anyone can participate in this project, regardless of sex, age, job, etc. We are united by the common goal of promoting women's visibility and involvement in open source communities. They also believe that the Internet, FLOSS projects and computing must remain open and participatory. This also means accessible in the same way to all - women and men alike.

It also believe solutions should continuously be proposed in order to improve the visibility of all minorities, who for various reasons might not have equal access to computers or the Internet. This project is an example of this, as it aims at ameliorating women's presence and participation in Mozilla and open source. But currently this group is not very active, except for a few regional contributors where they find massive necessity to focus on the women participation.

Overview of the strategies used for increasing women participation

Methodologies used

Both the communities are great supporters of the Free Softwares and licenses and so the methods that is used in addressing the gender gap issues is as follows:

Conduct gender neutral events like hack-a-thons/ edit-a-thons where the tutor is a woman or there is a large ratio of under represented community in the event.
Host monthly offline/online meetups.
Work on projects which are gender neutral based.
Following up special protocols like CoCs strictly at these events.
Days like “International Women’s Day” and on similar significant occasions some unique events will be hosted and contributors will be appreciated.

Impact on Indian communities

The WikiProject woman and WoMoz programs play a very important role among the Indian communities. Although I do not see a single or uniform progress there is always a good scale-up among the regional communities. For a country like India where there is still necessity for uplifting the presence and awareness of these type of FOSS programs I feel that most of these programs are extensively hosted in urban or developed phases of the country. Recently, the internet access has spread across but then the basic knowledge of contributing to Open Source is still abandoned. The end result and the what the contributors shall get on contributing to these communities must be emphasised more.

Closing note

My study and analysis on these two communities is drawn from personal interest and engagement with these communities since I have been contributing and interacting with the contributors for the last few years. The objective of this post is basically to bring about an awareness on the accessible resources on bridging the digital divide , and how these resources can be modified and taken further for a country like India. The efforts taken to improve the gender neutrality by the above communities is laudable but more light has to be thrown on improving the measures taken to sustain women contributors

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/

http://www.womoz.org/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/analysis-on-the-strategies-of-mozilla-and-wiki-communities-on-gender-gap-aspects-1

of doctors and maps - Snippet one

asha — 2011-08-03T09:44:43Z

The clinic is not what it was. It is highly technologized, flooded with information systems. But what of the relationships it traditionally supported, between patient and doctor?

She was in the eye of technology. Cocooned in the simulator. Surrounded by the linear accelerator.

While each act of swallowing became more conscious, more painful, each act of devising mathemes became more precise, more focal.

Yes, this is mathematicized medicine. This is where she was, while re-writing technology, mathematicization, mapping. Not ‘under’ the ‘gaze’ as she understood it.

She was one with the simulator.

The doctor did not even figure; the 'godhead', the 'male knower', the butt of criticism, had become irrelevant, an anachronism.

Now what in the world does that mean?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps

of doctors and maps - Snippet two

asha — 2011-08-03T09:45:22Z

This may seem like a careless swipe at the volumes of critique of technology. And yet ... I need to know ...

Where am I with respect to technology? Represented in it? Protected from it? Accessing it? And is my doctor the knower who will use the instrument of technology to heal me?

Why then does he feel like an apologetic outsider, unnecessary to this process, merely the public relations man as I lie here, surrounded by the linear accelerator? Why do the women in the planning room, wired through their scans with the accelerator, smiling benevolently at him, seem more at home, more with me, within me?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps-snippet-two

Justice and Difference - the first talk in 'the monster album of feminist stories'

asha — 2011-08-03T09:43:24Z

CIS and 'the monster album of feminist stories', in relation to the Rewiring Bodies project by Asha Achuthan, hosted the first of a series of talks on cognizing feminism at the CIS premises on Cunningham Road on 14th November, 2008.

To give a brief introduction and explain why we call this the monster album, we could repeat the tired old truism that feminism is being crowded out, today, by ‘gender talk’, and, ironically, by the visibility now available to women. While truisms cannot be challenged, the sense of denial of space that this statement carries has today, perhaps, more to do with notions of irrelevance or the anachronistic nature of the word ‘feminism’ rather than the “backlash against women” so popularly and persuasively argued by Susan Faludi at another point in time. In response to this sense of denial, those of us who remain the irremediably converted have moved between defiance, defensiveness, apologia, and, now a decisive, if quiet, digging in of heels, based on a re-cognition of feminism itself--that is the work of the monster album.

Feminism as that liberatory, shade-giving mother, that warm place of refuge, is not a workable thesis, and the question then is – was it ever so? Or is feminism that monster, that unhappy moment of possession (not of an identity but by a vision), that grows larger and larger, demands more and more, not simply of the dominant but of the interrogator of the dominant? Does this not render unstable each time what had seemed the ultimately radical, interrupt each time a consolidation of identity under its own name, so that in response to the rhetorical question “Who’s afraid of feminism?” the feminist’s answer would be – “I am”? At such a re-cognition of feminism is where we are, with this talk as the first step in that exercise; it is perhaps a place that will host instability and unpalatable porosities between categories of “dominant” and “critical”. The monster album is related in indirect but hopefully productive ways to the work of the "Rewiring Bodies" project that is, in a nutshell, attempting to rework critical boundaries between women and the technological.

Prof Shefali Moitra's talk on “Justice and Difference” offered a reading of the mainstream monologic model of justice that follows the principle of impartiality, and that seeks to incorporate context through representation. This was followed by a discussion of the “ad-hoc” model that responds heavily to context, to the extent of rejecting the monologic model altogether. Finally Prof Moitra spoke of what she called a “hybrid model” – one that takes into account the principles of impartiality and objectivity, and yet also takes into account context. A version of the paper that formed the basis for the talk is put up here for those wish to read it.

The talk threw up a lot of speculation, particularly regarding the ‘hybrid’ model. Considering that the prevailing climate of critique – of justice, as also in other areas – seems more comfortable with versions of the ‘ad hoc’ model as alternative, and any notion of impartiality seems infected by sameness, violence, or exclusion, a model such as the hybrid was bound to throw up such speculation and some confusion as well. But it is the possibility of such a model, that continues to talk of impartiality and objectivity, but that fails the normative claims of the homogenous system, that was most interesting. We hope to hear more from philosophers-practitioners on this. As for the monster album, this could perhaps be one of the ways in which liaisons between knowledge and critique might be explored.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/justice-and-difference-the-first-talk-in-the-monster-album-of-feminist-stories

Rewiring Bodies: Technology and the Nationalist Moment [1]

asha — 2011-08-03T09:47:03Z

This is the second post in a series by Asha Achuthan on her project, Rewiring Bodies. In this blog entry, Asha looks at the trajectory of responses to technology in India to understand the genesis of the assumption that the subjects of technology are separate from the tool, machine, or instrument.

The question of technology perhaps arose in greatest relief in India in development and the responses to development. In order to understand this, we need to understand the pre-history of this activity in the nationalist moments.

A version of Marxism pervaded Nehru’s nationalism – one that espoused the 'scientific, economic sense' of progress. Some of the emphasis placed in the Indian National Congress on economic issues, particularly during the 1937 elections, was the direct result of Nehru’s urgings. This changed after 1937, but Nehruvian socialism, inasmuch as it valued a materialist conception of history, or considered the economic as important in the last instance, continued to pervade nationalist agendas. Analyses of India’s problems too were in this mode – 'Parties [in an independent India] will be formed with economic ideals. There will be socialists, anti-socialists, zamindars, kisans and other similar groups. It will be ridiculous to think of parties founded on a religious or communal basis' (Nehru 1931: 284, quoted in Seth 1995: 212).

Nehru’s stand on nationalism, by distinguishing between oppressor and oppressed nations, also legitimised certain nationalisms, while remaining critical of nationalism in general.[1] Needless to say, this vision of nationalism had as its underlying philosophy rationalist Enlightenment thought, and was also tied to internationalism[2] and progress – a progress that would bring socialism as a 'saner ordering of human affairs' rather than as a 'moral issue' (Nehru, Selected Works, 'Whither India': 8, quoted in Seth 215). To that end, the scientific temper, as Nehru reiterates again and again, is the requirement.[3] And to realise that requirement, Nehru did, apart from his policy efforts, take up the philosophical debate, pointing to 'the essential basis of Indian thought for ages past … [which] fits in with the scientific temper and approach' (Nehru 1946: 526, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 139). This temper informed, for this version of nationalism, analyses of colonialism, cultural difference, religion, and industrialisation; each of the first three were attributable to economic backwardness and disparity, and the removal of these disparities, accompanied by the development of ‘big’ science and technology, was the answer.

As far as Nehru was concerned, the colonial state was the enemy of such industrialisation, partly owing to its own selfish commercial interests, but more importantly because such interests went against the universal models of economic growth wherein developing nations also needed to grow in order to keep the rich nations healthy. For his version of scientific socialism, then, a critique of colonialism could not simultaneously be a critique of reason or modernity – colonialism was ‘wrong’ primarily because it did not fulfil the requirements of modern growth. Clearly, this also involved for Nehru certain expectations of the national bourgeoisie who would provide political leadership.

What confounded him, therefore, were the ‘spontaneous’ peasant uprisings, as also the Gandhian philosophy of development that was singularly in conflict with his own notions of progress. Both of these meant for Nehru a shift not only from reason to unreason, but, in parallel, from the political to the utopian. Chatterjee (1986) suggests that Nehru solved the problem by granting to Gandhi a stage in the ‘passive revolution’ – an intervention – where, once the stage had been set for the real political battle, the ‘masses’ could be won over to the larger nationalist cause through faith, emotion, or other such means both incomprehensible and vague of objective (to Nehru). The larger nationalist cause was the promotion of large-scale industry over small-scale or cottage industries, since 'the world and the dominating facts of the situation that confront it have decided in favour of' the former' (Nehru Discovery of India, 1946: 414, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 144). The ‘masses’, by whom Nehru usually meant the peasantry, needed to recognize, like the rest of India, that small-scale industry in these 'dominating facts of the situation' could only function as a 'colonial appendage' (413). Industrialisation and expert knowledge were what were needed for progress and a modern nation.

After independence, this project of the modern nation was taken up by planning – what Chatterjee calls the new systems-theorists’ utopia. In this scheme of things, once political independence had been achieved and independent state control set up, economic disparities would gradually disappear, for the only real problem would be one of access, a technical rather than political issue. Planning, as far as Nehru was concerned, would take care of this. Planning involved experts, and an approach to individual concrete problems at a practical level, not a political philosophy. 'Planning essentially consists in balancing ...' (Nehru 1957: 51, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 159) and 'co-operation in planning was particularly soothing ... in pleasant contrast to the squabbles and conflicts of politics' (Nehru 1946: 405, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 160). Further, '[s]cientific planning enables us to increase our production, and socialism comes in when we plan to distribute production evenly' (Nehru 1962: 151, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 159).

Socialism too, then, becomes, rather than a system of thought or a violent class struggle, the pragmatic planning of a national economy – one that, if adequately planned, would automatically produce the 'classless society with equal economic justice and opportunity for all, a society organised on a planned basis for the raising of mankind to higher material and cultured levels, to a cultivation of spiritual values … ultimately a world order' (Nehru 1936: 552, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 161). For Chatterjee, this selective appropriation of scientific Marxism was how the reason-unreason binary was precipitated, giving rise to a different politics for the elite and the subaltern in mature nationalist thought. In the next post I will try to demonstrate how this formulation of Chatterjee’s was one of the foundations from which the critiques of development too took off.[4]

My point here is to cull, from among these debates, both the routes taken in development thinking and the contexts for postcolonial approaches to the science and technology question. Marxism, in its early nationalist avatar, presented an approach to science that involved its accurate interpretation, application and access, rather than any critique. As is evident from the debates between Nehru and the CPI,[5] and Nehru’s own writing on the subject,[6] colonialism was equal to capitalism, the anti-imperialist struggle of the Indian masses was the route to independence, and the change in forces of production would needs must bring about a change in the means of production. For Nehru then, the nationalist agenda consisted at least in part of bringing to the third world access to technology and a transformation in the forces of production that would address poverty and unemployment. In the Marxist-nationalist space, the debate was about what would be the agent of change – the nationalist bourgeoisie or the working class; also whether it would be forces of production by themselves or the subjective sense of the proletariat.

But both third-worldism and Indian nationalism had other, powerful and different approaches to the same questions – the analysis of colonialism and the required response, the question of technology, the concept of the state/cultural difference. Was there then a nationalist alternative to the technology offered by the West? We will, in the next post, look at the Tagore-Gandhi debates on technology to throw some light on this question.

[1] To identify within oppressed nations overarching standpoints was also therefore, in this frame, problematic, for, '[d]o we place the masses, the peasantry and the workers first, or some other small class at the head of our list? Let us give the benefits of freedom to as many groups and classes as possible, but essentially whom do we stand for, and when a conflict arises whose side must we take?' [4-5] Nehru, Whither India 1933]

[2] 'Differences [in national realities] there are but they are chiefly due to different stages of economic growth.' [ibid, 5]

[3] 'It is better to understand a part of the truth, and apply it to our lives, than to understand nothing at all and flounder helplessly in a vain attempt to pierce the mystery of existence … It is the scientific approach, the adventurous and yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on preconceived theory … not merely for the application of science but for life itself …' (Nehru 1946: 523, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 139).

[4] Seth has concluded, differently from Chatterjee, that this was not a simple appropriation of scientific Marxism, leaving its political core alone.

[5] See Palme Dutt and his efforts to bring together the communist movement, the democratic camp and the nationalist movement. Nehru’s truck with the communists more or less dissolved around the response to the August 1942 revolution and the dissent over relations with the Muslim League.

[6] At his second Presidential address to the Indian National Congress in Lucknow on April 12, 1936, Nehru repeated some of his earlier commitment on this, 'I am convinced that the only key to the solution of the world’s problem and of India’s problem lies in socialism, and when I use the word I do so not in a vague, humanitarian way but in the scientific, economic sense.' From Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works, vol. 7, p. 180, quoted in Seth 1995: 222.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment

Rewiring Bodies: Technology and the Nationalist Moment [2]

asha — 2011-08-03T09:47:17Z

This is the third in a series of posts on Asha Achuthan's Rewiring Bodies project. In this post, Asha looks at the Tagore-Gandhi debates on technology to throw some light on the question of whether there was a nationalist alternative to the technology offered by the West.

'Pandit Nehru wants industrialization because he thinks that, if it is socialized, it would be free from the evils of capitalism. My own view is that evils are inherent in industrialism, and no amount of socialization can eradicate them.'

'Instead of welcoming machinery as a boon, we should look upon it as an evil.'

"Division of labour there will necessarily be, but it will be a division into various species of body labour and not a division into intellectual labour to be confined to one class and body labour to be confined to another class."

But where am I among the crowd, pushed from behind, pressed from all sides? And what is this noise about me? If it is a song, then my own sitar can catch the tune and I join in the chorus, for I am a singer. But if it is a shout, then my voice is wrecked and I am lost in bewilderment. I have been trying all these days to find in it a melody, straining my ear, but the idea of non-cooperation with its mighty volume of sound does not sing to me, its congregated menace of negations shouts. And I say to myself, “If you cannot keep step with your countrymen at this great crisis of their history, never say that you are right and the rest of them wrong; only give up your role as a soldier, go back to your corner as a poet, be ready to accept popular derision and disgrace.

(Tagore 1921: Chatterjee 56)

The Tagore-Gandhi debates – as a window on the contestations between the ambivalent 'modern' somewhat removed from the mainstream of nationalist politics, and the recalcitrant 'pastoral' within the same stream – perhaps give a better idea of the responses to modernity and science than the Nehru-Gandhi dialogues or the former's reading of the latter's philosophy. In a series of letters exchanged between 1929 and 1933, and earlier, in debates conducted in the pages of Young India and Modern Review, Gandhi and Tagore spoke to each other of rural reconstruction, of the possibilities and limits of handicraft industries and the charkha programme, of the discourse of science as opposed to that of religiosity. Although a lot of the dialogue between them is neither direct nor addressing the other’s concerns fully, both had blueprints for rural programmes of self-sufficiency; both were opposed to heavy technology, both were opposed to state views on education. For both thinkers, the anti-colonial struggle was symbolised in the protest against foreign cloth, heavy technology, or government-sponsored education. This protest, in the form of the call for swaraj, differed in nuance in Tagore and Gandhi, but essentially it signified a moral freedom from the West, a dignity of human labour, a protection of the intellect from colonization. Swaraj would involve, for both, a reconstruction of life – the moral as well as the material.

For both, the moral and the material were inextricably linked; the difference seems to be in the stress on attaining material freedom through the moral in Tagore, and on attaining moral freedom through material activity in Gandhi’s thought. Nowhere was this more evident than in the different systems of schooling, both outside the state-sponsored system, that Gandhi and Tagore set up, in Wardha and Santiniketan respectively. Both had different and powerful analyses of the hegemony of western science, and consequently different views on the nature of oppositional practice. A point Akeel Bilgrami has noted about Gandhi’s thought may be true of both thinkers here, namely, the integrity of their thought, the difficulty of picking strands of it regarding particular issues, or of separating their political impulses from their epistemological ones. Let us, for our purposes, however, force such an initial strand, and take up the programme/metaphor of the charkha as 'cottage machine'[1] to look at the debate around development and technology that ensued around it between the two thinkers.

For Gandhi, the charkha programme was a symbol for rural cooperation – a 'non-co-operation … neither with the English, nor with the West [but] with the system the English have established' (1921, ‘The Great Sentinel’, addressed to Tagore). That system indicated the broad sweep of Western materialism, expressed in hugely consumptive desires, and for Gandhi, the charkha stood for a rejection of this exchange value for use value – self-sufficiency. Gandhi’s early proposals around spinning the charkha offered an alternative programme of rural construction, particularly the exercise of self-sufficiency. These were followed up in 1921 in the laying down of 'indispensable conditions for swaraj' (188-9). Later, he stood firm through Tagore’s qualified scepticism and other critiques, moving from the larger programme to charkha as spiritual metaphor; 'To the perplexed', he said that 'I do regard the spinning-wheel as a gateway to my spiritual salvation, but I recommend it to others only as a powerful weapon for the attainment of swaraj and the amelioration of the economic condition of the country' (Gandhi Collected Works vol. 30, 450-1, 1958, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 108). In response to the poet’s chagrin at the requirement of all to spin, 'I do indeed ask the poet and the sage to spin the wheel as a sacrament. ... The call of the spinning wheel is the ... call of love. And love is swaraj. The spinning wheel will 'curb the mind' when the time is spent on necessary physical labour can be said to do so. ... I do want growth ... but I want all these for the soul. ... A plea for the spinning wheel is a plea for recognising the dignity of labour.' 88-9. That growth of the soul, that spiritual salvation, the actual realisation of swaraj, meant for Gandhi the rejection of the ‘system’ – the moral force that made it irrelevant. That system included the railways and hospitals, which, however, Gandhi was not 'aiming at destroying … though [he] would certainly welcome their natural destruction … Still less … [was he] trying to destroy all machinery and mills' (Gandhi Young India 26 January 1921, 33, Chatterjee).[2] For he made the conventional acknowledgement that '[m]achinery has its place; it has come to stay. But it must not be allowed to displace the necessary human labour ... I would welcome every improvement in the cottage machine but I know that it is criminal to displace the hand labour by the introduction of power-driven spindles unless one is at the same time ready to give millions of farmers some other occupation in their homes' (Gandhi 1925, 'The Poet and the charkha', Young India, 5 November, Chatterjee 125).

Was Tagore too as clearly opposed to heavy technology? The yantra danava is a recurring theme in his poetry, and even at the time of his critique of Gandhi’s charkha programme, he was writing, in plays like Mukta Dhara and Rakta Karabi, searing critiques of the effects of technology on people’s lives.[3] As far as the rejection of the West went, also, he was with Gandhi, holding him up as the 'Mahatma [who], frail in body and devoid of material resources, should call up the immense power of the meek …' ('Tagore’s reflections on non-cooperation and cooperation, Modern Review, May 1921, Chatterjee 55), and reminding his readers that 'I have seen the West; I covet not the unholy feast, in which she revels every moment, growing more and more bloated and red and dangerously delirious …' (ibid, 55-9). His was not the mode of Non-Cooperation, however, for this movement, with its 'noise', its particular strategems that instrumentalised, made 'barren and untrue' the spirit of the Mahatma’s words, failed to provide for him the ‘melody’ he needed.[4] On the yantra itself, Tagore clearly had ambivalent views, for on other occasions in his poetry he offers what might be homage – yantra namah.[5]

While the withering critique of railways, doctors and lawyers in Hind Swaraj exemplifies at least the early Gandhi’s views on these symbols of modernity and the need for their unconditional rejection,[6] Tagore reacted again and again to such a view, particularly to the moral element shoring it up, complaining, for instance, about the principles of the charkha programme - 'economics is bundled out and a fictitious moral dictum dragged in its place' (Tagore, ‘The Call of Truth’). While being opposed to heavy technology, Tagore refused to accede to the “magical formula that foreign cloth is impure” (Tagore, ‘The Call of Truth’). 'Swaraj,' he says, 'is not concerned with our apparel only - it cannot be established on cheap clothing; its foundation is in the mind ... in no country in the world is the building up of swaraj completed ... the root of such bondage is always within the mind. ... A mere statement, in lieu of argument, will never do. ... We have enough of magic in the country ... That is exactly why I am so anxious to re-instate reason on its throne.' [Chatterjee 82].

What, then, of his critique of Western materialism? 'You know that I do not believe in the material civilisation of the West just as I do not believe in the physical body to be the highest truth in man. But I still less believe in the destruction of the physical body, and the ignoring of the material necessities of life. What is needed is establishment of harmony between the physical and spiritual nature of man, maintaining of balance between the foundation and superstructure. I believe in the true meeting of the East and the West. Love is the ultimate truth of soul. We should do all we can, not to outrage that truth, to carry its banner against all opposition. The idea of non-cooperation unnecessarily hurts that truth. It is not our heart fire but the fire that burns out our hearth and home.' ('Tagore’s reflections on non-cooperation and cooperation', Modern Review, May 1921, Chatterjee 59)

In this sense, there was an affinity between Tagore and Nehru – with respect to desirable national attitudes to faith, unreason, or imperialist policy. For Tagore, swaraj was, as he wrote to Gandhi, 'maya, … like a mist, that will vanish leaving no stain on the radiance of the Eternal. However we may delude ourselves with the phrases learnt from the West, Swaraj is not our objective.' (Tagore 1921:)[7]

On the ability of the charkha to bring about rural reconstruction, Tagore avers – 'The discussion, so far, has proceeded on the assumption that the large-scale production of homespun thread and cloth will result in the alleviation of the country's poverty. ... My complaint is, that by the promulgation of this confusion between swaraj and charkha, the mind of the country is being distracted from swaraj.' [Chatterjee 118]. 'One thing is certain, that the all-embracing poverty which has overwhelmed our country cannot be removed by working with our hands to the neglect of science. … If a great union is to be achieved, its field must be great likewise ... the religion of economics is where we should above all try to bring about this union of ours.' [Chatterjee 104-6-7]. What Tagore perceived as happening in the charkha programme, on the other hand, was the 'raising of the charkha to a higher place than is its due, thereby distracting attention from other more important factors in our task of all-round reconstruction.' [Chatterjee 112].

Tagore had other problems with charkha and its being tied to swaraj. For one, the ‘cult’ of the charkha would not work for swaraj because it is an “external achievement”, apart from being a call to obedience that only recalled slavery in its worst form.[8] For another, the isolationism enshrined in the act of rejecting foreign cloth only seemed to bring back the “sin of untouchability” in the guise of the charkha versus ‘impure’ foreign cloth. Further, and here Tagore raises his most eloquent objection, his failure to see a difference between the charkha and the high machine that introduces repetitive activity, boredom, and alienation in human labour. “Humanity”, he says, “has ever been beset with the grave problem, how to rescue the large majority of the people from being reduced to the stage of machines. ...” [Chatterjee 104-5]. The discovery of the wheel signified, for Tagore, “[t]he facility of motion … given to inert matter [which] enabled it to bear much of man’s burden … [and t]his was but right, for Matter is the true shudra; while with his dual existence in body and mind, Man is a dwija. … Thus, whether in the shape of the spinning wheel, or the potter’s wheel or the wheel of a vehicle, the wheel has rescued innumerable men from the shudra’s estate …” (“The Cult of the Charkha”, Modern Review, September 1925, Chatterjee 104). In such a scenario, it may be argued that “spinning is … a creative act. But that is not so; for, by turning its wheel man merely becomes an appendage of the charkha; that is to say, he but does himself what a machine might have done: he converts his living energy into a dead turning movement. ... The machine is solitary ... likewise alone is the man ... for the thread produced by his charkha is not for him a thread of necessary relationship with others ... He becomes a machine, isolated, companionless” (ibid). And why is this? Tagore refers back, here, to the discus of Vishnu which signifies the “process of movement, the ever active power seeking fulfilment. … Man has [therefore] not yet come to the end of the power of the revolving wheel. So if we are taught that in the pristine charkha we have exhausted all the means of spinning thread, we shall not gain the favour of Vishnu … If we are wilfully blind to the grand vision of whirling forces, which science has revealed, the charkha will cease to have any message for us.” (Chatterjee 104) Therefore we must realise that “swaraj will advance, not propelled by the mechanical revolution of the charkha, but taken by the organic processes of its own living growth” [Chatterjee 121].

Tagore refers, again and again in his polemic, to the dynamicity inherent both in the truth of Vishnu, and in the progress of science, as against the dead burden of “rites and ceremonials” that have produced in “India’s people” the habit of relying on external agencies rather than on the self. The charkha embodies for Tagore such an external object, static. Is he then subsuming the wheel and its dynamicity in the discourse of science? A careful reading of Tagore’s polemic seems to suggest that his point is rather in examining the nature of material activity and making the connection, through dynamicity, without which neither science nor the charkha might have any value.

There were other differences. Tagore recognized that for Gandhi, productive manual work, such as that embodied in the charkha, was the "prime means of intellectual training" (Harijan, 18 sep 1937). The sort of oneness that such collective occupational activity may create for Gandhi, however, fails to move Tagore, for whom the act is a performance of sameness and stagnation. Charkha, he says, in one of his many tirades against the programme, is “a befogged reliance on … narrow paths as the sole means of gaining a vast realisation.” [Chatterjee 114]. As such, the philosophy of swaraj as it was being enacted, along with the programme of Non-cooperation and rejection of the West, only produced an isolation, a soliloquous discourse, a “struggle to alienate our heart and mind from those of the West … [that could only be] an attempt at spiritual suicide … India has ever declared”, he said, “that Unity is Truth, and separateness is maya. This unity … is that which comprehends all and therefore can never be reached through the path of negation … Therefore my one prayer is: let India stand for the cooperation of all peoples of the world. The spirit of rejection finds its support in the consciousness of separateness, the spirit of acceptance in the consciousness of unity” (Tagore’s reflections on non-cooperation and cooperation, Modern Review, May 1921, Chatterjee 62). More disturbing for him was the violence enshrined in the principle of Non-cooperation. “The idea of non-cooperation is political asceticism. ... It has at its back a fierce joy of annihilation which at best is asceticism, and at its worst is that orgy of frightfulness in which the human nature, losing faith in the basic reality of normal life, finds a disinterested delight in an unmeaning devastation ... [non-cooperation] in its passive moral form is asceticism and in its active moral form is violence. ... The desert is as much a form of himsa (malignance) as is the raging sea in storms, they both are against life” (Tagore’s reflections on non-cooperation and cooperation, Modern Review, May 1921, Chatterjee 57-8). Tagore was, perhaps, making a stronger critique, here, of the violence embedded in political collectivities, and the moral questions contained in non-violence as a practice.[9]

Gandhi responded to the polemic in several ways. At pains to explain to the poet the relevance of the charkha, he reminded the latter, in some exhaustion, that “I do not draw a sharp distinction ... between ethics and economics.” [Chatterjee 90]. Elsewhere he clarifies in no uncertain terms – “I am always reminded of one thing which the well-known British economist Adam Smith has said … he has described some economic laws as universal and absolute. Then he has described certain situations which may be an obstacle to the operation of these laws. These disturbing factors are the human nature, the human temperament or altruism inherent in it. Now, the economics of khadi is just opposite of it. Benevolence which is inherent in human nature is the very foundation of the economics of khadi. What Adam Smith has described as pure economic activity based merely on the calculations of profit and loss is a selfish attitude and it is an obstacle to the development of khadi; and it is the function of a champion of khadi to counteract this tendency.” (Chatterjee 81) Further, “… I have asked no one to abandon his calling, but on the contrary to adorn it by giving every day only thirty minutes to spinning as sacrifice for the whole nation. … The Poet thinks that the charkha is calculated to bring about a deathlike sameness in the nation and thus imagining he would shun it if he could. The truth is that the charkha is intended to realise the essential and living oneness of interest among India’s myriads … All I say is that there is a sameness, identity or oneness behind the multiplicity and variety. And so do I hold that behind a variety of occupations there is an indispensable sameness also of occupation” (Gandhi 1925, “The Poet and the charkha”, 124).

Does that involve a separation from the world, an isolationist discourse? Perhaps not … for “the message of Non-cooperation, Non-violence and swadeshi, is a message to the world ...[through] Non-cooperation [which] is a retirement within ourselves … [for i]n my humble opinion, rejection is as much an ideal as the acceptance of a thing. It is as necessary to reject untruth as it is to accept truth. ... I make bold to say that mukti (emancipation) is as much a negative state as nirvana. ... I therefore think that the Poet has been unnecessarily alarmed at the negative aspect of Non-cooperation. We had lost the power of saying 'no'.” [Chatterjee 66-7]. (“The Poet’s anxiety”. Young India, 1 June 1921). As to the rest of the world, “I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any ... Mine is not the religion of the prison house. It has room for the least among God’s creation. But it is proof against insolence, pride of race, religion or colour”[ Chatterjee 64]. (“The Poet’s anxiety”. Young India, 1 June 1921).

Elsewhere, in response to alternative positions like that of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, who believed the absence of cultural attributes had resulted in India’s subjugation by the British, Gandhi spoke, rather, of the disjuncture between the prevailing politics and the morality of the community that had resulted in the same. Chatterjee presents the moment of Gandhi in nationalist politics as the moment of manoeuvre, proposing that Gandhi’s critique of civil society and representative democracy emerges through his reworking of the relationship between the moral and the political. Without going in to the merits of Chatterjee’s formulation here, we could try to understand this separation that Gandhi makes, in order to better understand his accompanying take not only on the value of science, but on a necessary relationship between its use and the morality of the community.

Again and again, in response to industrialisation, in response to the work of doctors of medicine, in response to “much that goes under the name of modern civilisation” (quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 80), Gandhi reacts. “I overeat, I have indigestion, I go to the doctor, he gives me medicine, I am cured. I overeat again, I take his pills again. Had I not taken the pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishment deserved by me and I would not have overeaten again. The doctor intervened and helped me to indulge myself” (Chatterjee 84). And so with history, and so with the law, all of which are the record of visible illness rather than of the truth. In Gandhi’s world, it would seem that “[t]rue knowledge [which] gives a moral standing and moral strength” (Chatterjee 119), can be the only basis for any politics. To that extent, Non-cooperation or satyagraha, as “intense political activity” rather than passive resistance, but in the form of a negation of the existing political frameworks, was born. The “disobedience” here was not only of the British administration, but of existing modalities of resistance. The positive content of the programme was that of rural construction through khadi and the charkha programme, which for Gandhi would be the true method of non-violent swaraj. This too, however, needed the abdication of the state from responsibility. The collectivity that Tagore found so suspect in this regard was for Gandhi an experiment in the modalities of non-violent mass resistance. And to Tagore’s eloquent argument against the charkha on account of its staticity, what more eloquent answer than this – “It is a charge against India that her people are so uncivilized, ignorant and stolid, that it is not possible to induce them to adopt any changes. It is a charge really against our merit. What we have tested and found true on the anvil of experience, we dare not change” (Chatterjee 96).

How does this otherwise rich polemic help us to understand positions on science and technology? Is Gandhi a pastoral philosopher or a peasant intellectual proposing a separate epistemic realm from that of the West? Can he be labelled a Luddite? Is he caught, like the European Romantics were, in the dilemma between Reason and Morality? Or is he making a fundamental distinction between truth and the knowledge encompassed in disciplines like science and history, suggesting that truth cannot but strike elsewhere from knowledge? While the answers to each of these may be difficult, while individual examples for each of these arguments may be found in Gandhi if not seen as part of the integral picture, and while any attempt to intellectualise his thought may be doomed from the start, I might perhaps attempt to say that there is, here, a critique of existing knowledge systems, of which scientific knowledge is one, that calls for a fundamentally new theory of knowledge, a theory of knowledge inextricably linked with morality, rather than a choice of alternate system from the ‘West’ or any other.

In the next post, coming in a few days from now, we will see how a peculiar conflation of these positions alongwith shifts in Marxist thinking in India helped to produce the classical responses to technology that then pervaded feminist thinking and other paradigmatic frameworks on thinking gender and technology.

[1] (Gandhi 1925, “The Poet and the charkha”, 125).

[2] Gandhi’s critique of these articles of faith of the scientific world, then, couched as it was in moral language, was clearly outside the thematic of nationalist politics, and more an attitude of selfness. While Nehru, for different reasons, had ambivalent responses to nationalism as an ideology, his responses were within the ambit of Enlightenment critiques of nationalism – a position Gandhi was clearly out of.

[3] Mukta Dhara – Free Current – on the question of construction of a large dam as symbolizing ‘man’s’ desire to control nature, or Rakta Karabi – Red Oleander – the story of a cruel king who lives behind an iron curtain while his subjects, working under terrible conditions in underground mines, suffer untold cruelties meted out by him, speak of displacement, the facelessness of technology, of power, of dehumanizing impulses in technology.

[4] Probably the sentiment Tagore experienced when he expressed his abhorrence of an instrumentalist view of satyagraha which he felt was being used as a “political gamble [while] their minds [continued to be] corroded by untruth …” Tagore’s ‘Call of Truth’, Modern Review.

[5] I am grateful to Prasanta Chakravarty for this useful insight.

[6] So that Romain Rolland calls Hind Swaraj 'the negation of Progress and also of European science.' [Chatterjee 1986: 85]

[7] This, from a Tagore who consistently held an anti-statist position, on the grounds that unlike in Europe, the State was never a central entity in the life of the Indian nation, and that further, in the present time, i.e. in British India, the state is external to society, rather than a part of it. “Our fight” as he puts it, “is a spiritual fight … to emancipate Man from the meshes … [of] these organisations of National Egoism … We have no word for Nation in our language. When we borrow this word from other people, it never fits us. For we are to make our league with Narayan …” (Tagore’s reflections on non-cooperation and cooperation, Modern Review, May 1921).

[8] Those for whom authority is needed instead of reason, will invariably accept despotism in place of freedom. ... [Chatterjee 82].

[9] Tagore draws parallels with his reading of the negativity of Buddhism to make his point – “Brahma-vidya (the cult of Brahma, the Infinite Being) in India has for its object mukti, emancipation, while Buddhism has nirvana, extinction. It may be argued that both have the same idea in different names. But names represent attitudes of mind, emphasize particular aspects of truth. Mukti draws our attention to the positive, and nirvana to the negative side of truth.

Buddha kept silence all through his teachings about the truth of the Om, the everlasting yes, his implication being that by the negative path of destroying the self we naturally reach that truth. Therefore he emphasized the fact of dukkha (misery) which had to be avoided and the Brahma-vidya emphasized the fact of ananda, joy, which had to be attained. … Therefore, the idea of life’s training was different in the Vedic period from that of the Buddhistic. … The abnormal type of asceticism to which Buddhism gave rise in India reveled in celibacy and mutilation of life in all different forms …” (Tagore’s reflections on non-cooperation and cooperation, Modern Review, May 1921, Chatterjee 57). A significant difference in Tagore’s and Gandhi’s approach to the ‘moral’ seems to be in evidence here – while for the former it is a need for creativity that will be stifled by subjection to any constraint like collective action without the conviction of the reasoning intellect – be it ritual or any other “unreasoned creed” (The Call of Truth), for Gandhi, it was about self-denial – “Our civilization, our culture, our swaraj depend not upon multiplying our wants – self-indulgence, but upon restricting our wants – self-denial” (“The Conditions of swaraj”, Young India, 23 February 1921, Chatterjee 189). More than a simple separation of reason-unreason between the two thinkers as some commentators have made out, this may be read as a comment on the political that was reiterated by Tagore again in his repeated references to the separation between truth and the “barren stratagems of the political”, and moreover, the violence constitutive of the latter. In that respect, Gandhi’s later frustrations, and stepping away, from the movement, may suggest a greater overlap between their positions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment-2

The (Postcolonial) Marxist Shift in Response to Technology

asha — 2011-08-03T09:47:22Z

In her previous post, Asha Achuthan discussed, through the Gandhi-Tagore debates, the responses to science and technology that did not follow the dominant Marxist-nationalist positions. Later Marxist-postcolonial approaches to science and responses to technology were conflated in anti-technology arguments, particularly in development. In this post, the fifth in a series on her project, she will briefly trace the 1980s shift in Marxist thinking in India as a way of approaching the shift in the science and technology question. This exercise will reveal the ambivalence in Marxist practice toward continuing associations between the ‘rational-scientific’ on the one hand and the ‘revolutionary’ on the other.

The importance of the subaltern

Ranajit Guha, writing in 1982, was the first to consider, within Indian Marxism, the structure of subaltern consciousness. Questioning the incidental place given to the peasant in what I have called Marxist-nationalist frames, Guha proposed a re-cognition of the subaltern – here the local peasant – as political and politicised, and not merely a cog in the wheel or an included member of a revolution conceived of by the vanguard. In re-conceptualising or re-discovering (it is not clear which) the political, the Subaltern School, up until the time of Subaltern Studies IV, brought up an analysis of colonialism that challenged early and neo-colonialist historiographies, as dominance without hegemony in at least the first fifty years of its existence. This suggested that colonial power had not only not worked with the active consent of ‘the people’; it had placed everything before colonial time in the zone of non-history, and by extension, in the zone of the pre-political. Nationalist historiographies had followed the same patterns in addressing the peasant, thus leaving out the 'politics of the people' (Guha 1982). The Subaltern Studies School up until Subaltern IV, then –

1. Raised the question of subaltern consciousness.

2. Uncovered the 'role of the peasant in nationalist movements' as the subaltern domain of politics – a domain separate from the 'elite' nationalist domain – rather than an un-political 'sticks and stones' activity.

3. Re-read colonialism as a discourse of dominance without hegemony, that resulted in separate elite and subaltern domains of politics.

4. Challenged existing ‘elite historiography’ - both colonialist and nationalist.

5. Made these moves through a different mode of history-writing that took into account unconventional sources, and used different methodologies, producing, on that account, a different history.

I will not go into the two significant challenges to the Subaltern School[1] that came up with Subaltern IV. For my purposes, the early Subaltern phase, in its shifts from the Marxist-nationalist moment, is important for the ways in which it aligns with (or rather, facilitates) various critiques of technology that permeate discussions around development today, and sometimes seek alliances with Gandhian philosophies in doing so. Needless to say, all of these relied for their critique on the vantage point of the subaltern. That subaltern was an empirical category or condition as set out in Subaltern Studies.[2] I examine here two of three spaces where this shift from earlier Marxist to subaltern perspectives is visible – the popular science movements, the post-trade-union movements, and the critiques of technology available in the postcolonial school.

People’s Science Movements

The Science and Rationalists’ Association of India (name of the organization in Bengali is Bharatiya Bigyan O Yuktibadi Samiti) established on 1^st March 1985, our organization is made up of like minded people coming from different professions. We are not affiliated to any political party.

Our aim is to eradicate superstition and blind faith, which include religious fanaticism, astrology, caste-system, spiritualism and numerous other obscurantist beliefs.

Our view is that rational way of thinking shall be spread among the people as against spiritual or religious teachings, and that alone can bring about social change.

http://www.srai.org/sra.htm

The Medico Friends Circle was set up in 1974 at a national level, to critically analyse the existing health care system in India and 'to evolve an appropriate approach towards health care which is humane and which can meet the needs of the vast majority of the people in our country'. With an emphasis on the necessary role of the state in providing such health care, it demanded 'that medical and health care be available to everyone irrespective of her/his ability to pay … that medical intervention and health care be strictly guided by the needs of our people and not by commercial interests'; and asked for 'popularisation and demystification of medical science and … the establishment of an appropriate health care system in which different categories of health professional are regarded as equal members of a democratically functioning team'. Alongside, it also decided to push for 'active participation by the community in the planning and carrying out preventive and promotive measures', for 'a pattern of medical and health care adequately geared to the predominantly rural health concerns of our country … a medical curriculum and training tailored to the needs of the vast majority of the people in our country', and asked, further, that 'research on non-allopathic therapies be encouraged by allotting more funds and other resources and … that such therapies get their proper place in our health–care'. It also asked that we be attentive to the role of 'curative technology in saving a person’s life, alleviating suffering or preventing disability'.

Community Development Medicinal Unit, an independent non-profit voluntary organisation, was set up in 1984, to 'achieve the basic societal need of facilitating access to essential medicines', to 'provide unbiased drug information to health professionals and consumers, to weed out spurious and “irrational” drug combinations from the market through consumer information and pressure on government, to “negotiate with the Government to formulate people-oriented drug policies and weed out irrational and hazardous drugs from the Indian market, [and to] … conduct community-oriented research on drugs' (http://www.cdmubengal.org/aboutus.html).

These were a few of the many organisations that grew in the 70s and 80s to nurture the ‘social’, ‘civil’, ‘cultural’ space. Alongside other organisations like the Janakiya Samskarika Vedi in Kerala, these determinedly claimed an autonomous, non-profit guardianship of 'the people', reacting as much to the violence in the political life of the entrenched Left as to its vanguardism.[3] Their primary aim, therefore, was to increase access and availability not only to the fruits of scientific knowledge, namely drugs and curative technologies, but to that knowledge itself, so that programmes of ‘popularisation and demystification’, rural needs, ‘alternative system use’, were incorporated and taken up as the activities of local science clubs.

On the other hand, the stress was on 'active participation', which did not need an unpacking of knowledge systems or knowledge-making, but rather an involvement at the level of knowledge-dispensation, as also an extension of the WHO slogan '(think globally) acting locally'. But the stress itself possibly had other histories. Autonomous or otherwise, these organisations came out of what Raka Ray has called the 'hegemonic field' of the Left, in Bengal and Kerala, among other spaces. In attempting to move away from the notion of vanguard party and the ‘mass’, ‘the people’ of a democratic state became the organising metaphor for these ‘movements’ that not only 'took science to the villages', but also admonished technology for its inattentions to the people. Appropriate technology and best practices, then, were the logical next step, as also the accompanying challenge to big dams – all manifestations of technology that suppressed subaltern voice.

While the Bigyan O Yuktibadi Samiti may be the most caricatural version available today, most of the people’s science movements did rely on associations between 'rationalist' and scientific ideas, using the one to bolster the other, or, in the later turn to the PSM, accuse the one on account of the other. In this later turn, the PSM share the philosophy of the anti-development positions, in their attention to the vantage point of the subaltern as an empirical identity from which to critique the existing knowledge frames. Part of the expectation from such movements, that they would eliminate 'nativism' and challenge 'fundamentalism', then, was obviously not met in the later turn.

Why have PSMs not taken the fight to the priests and the temples?

I believe that the nativist turn by an important segment of Gandhian social activists and intellectuals made it unfashionable to question tradition and religion. It became almost obligatory to defend the 'wisdom' of the masses, as opposed to the 'violence' of modern scientific ideas themselves. This kind of thinking moved the focus to 'safer' targets, like big development projects, MNCs and such in which 'modern' technology and modern institutions were the main culprits and people's traditions the source of resistance (I am not suggesting that the left should not oppose MNCs and big development projects, as and when they need to be opposed. But they have to be opposed while defending a progressive, secular worldview; not in order to defend the 'people's wisdom' which contains many inherited prejudices and superstitions). Science movements imbibed the populism and cultural traditionalism of leading Gandhian/postcolonial intellectuals who took a highly anti-modernist position for nearly three decades, starting around late 1970s (coinciding with Indira Gandhi's emergency).

(Nanda 2005: http://www.sacw.net/index.html)

Nanda’s statement is at the cusp of the postcolonial appropriation of Marxian terminology in its anti-technology arguments. We will go into these in more detail in the next post.

[1] Spivak on subaltern agency (Can the Subaltern Speak?), and Ajit K. Chaudhury on Subaltern Studies’ dismissal of Lenin’s consciousness as ‘elite’ (In Search of a Subaltern Lenin). In effect, both moves challenged the empirical subalternity on which Subaltern Studies perspectives seemed to stand.

[2] 'The word "subaltern" … as a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way'. And the work of Subaltern Studies therefore relates to 'the history, politics, economics and sociology of subalternity as well as to the attitudes, ideologies and belief systems – in short, the culture informing that condition' (Guha 1988: 35).

[3] Another element of the organizational perspectives is a certain divide between the political and ‘other’ activities that this period saw. Paralleled by the base-superstructure divide, or the massline versus military line was this socio-cultural activity versus political activity, a debate well demonstrated in the history of the Janakiya Samskarika Vedi (Sreejith K., EPW December 10, 2005).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/the-postcolonial-marxist-shift-in-responses-to-technology