What I was thinking about a year ago

5 June 2017 - It is Monday, the day after the day after. I am alone in a gallery in the British Museum with the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II. It is late afternoon and rain is battering the glass panels in the ceiling. The fine weather of the past week is already a distant memory, but that’s how summer works in England. The cuneiform inscription around the king reads, among other things “I am important; I am magnificent” before describing how brutally he used to kill his enemies. He has the best brutality, everybody says so.

Before coming to the museum, I had spent the day up the road at the British Library reading eighteenth-century manuscripts. On Saturday night, three terrorists had driven a van into pedestrians at London Bridge and attacked people with knives at the nearby Borough Market. As I went about my day, reading in the library and meeting with colleagues also going about their day, I followed the thread updating on The Guardian’s website, learning more details as the authorities released them. Mostly though I was concerned with honing an argument about whether comical poetry written in Delhi three hundred years ago was a social critique or just harmless fun. Armed police had shot the terrorists dead in eight minutes. I am not a callow, out of touch academic. I am fighting back.

My Delhi book is out

My new book, Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History, is out from Hay House India:

The megacity that is today’s Delhi is built upon thick layers of history. For a millennium, Delhi has been at the crossroads of trade, culture, and politics. The stories of its buildings and great historical personalities have been told many times, but this book approaches the past of India’s capital through its literary culture. By focusing on writers and thinkers, we meet a colourful cast of characters only glancingly mentioned in political histories.

Many Delhiites are surprised to learn that the language of their city’s cultural heyday was Persian. Despite first being brought to India by invaders, it eventually became an authentically Indian language used in both administration and literature. Although it was cultivated by an elite, it was also a widely available language of aspiration and opportunity, like English today. It connected India to the wider world, and the Indian Subcontinent, particularly Delhi, was once a place where talented poets and scholars from the whole Persian cultural world – from Turkey to eastern China – came to make their fortunes. Its traces remain everywhere but Persian is effectively a dead language in India today.

Scroll.in ran an excerpt from chapter two on same-sex love in Persian literature.

Purchase information:

The publisher's page for the book is here. It is for sale on Amazon.in and Flipkart.com, and in some bookshops. It is not unfortunately yet available outside of India. You can now get it shipped outside of India at Abebooks.com or Abebooks.co.uk, or from DK Agencies.

Things that Only Happen to Other People

The evening we came back to Berlin from Poland, there was a new lock on the door, a no-frills standard-issue lever that no one would have chosen if given a choice. A notice from the police did its best to be warm and friendly (signed, “Ihre Berliner Polizei”—Your Berlin Police), but the fingerprinting dust smeared all over the door suggested otherwise. We walked into the apartment tracking more of the sooty dust down the hallway into the other hallway and into our room. My friend held back because while it was a given that my computer, which I had left sitting on the desk, would be gone, she could only guess at the fate of her viola. (She had taken all of her valuables—camera, computer and iPod—to Poland with her.)

Plane Language

Air travel is now unpleasant in so many ways that you can hardly list them. In economy class, the romance has been drained out of the experience by a couple of decades of cost-cutting. The horror has a precise starting date, according to The New York Times, and it’s earlier than you might think:

“Industry experts trace the problem back to 1987, when American Airlines removed a single olive from its salads to save a little money.”

I take the comedian Louis C.K.’s point that we complain too much about air travel, which is really a marvel if you think about it (“you’re sitting in a chair in the sky”). The one indignity that I’m becoming less and less tolerant of is the language of the airport and the skies. Lots of communication happens—from the fine print telling us whether our tickets are refundable to the flight attendant’s cheery “would you like a beverage, sir?”—but very little at a human level. The language used by airlines and the Transportation Security Administration is often distorted, plastic, unidiomatic, excessive and generally frustrating.

The Scourge of Internet comments

Prof Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log (one of the blogs I read the most) has a fantastic explanation of why he usually disables comments on his posts. Vogon poetry is invoked. Passive voice is explained. And so on. I don't bother closing the comments on this blog because, luckily, not enough people read it to leave soul-sappingly stupid comments.

Indian higher education

I haven't posted since January for all sorts of reasons. Anyway, I'm back, and an essay I wrote about the state of Indian higher education (and the role of the liberal arts) has been carried in Outlook, an Indian newsweekly. The editors chose the title "Beyond Techno-Coolies" (which is definitely not what I, as a White foreigner, would have called it) but I'm pleased that it will generate some controversy and hopefully some useful debate. I did get some flak for the title I didn't choose, and of course from the people for whom "Liberal Arts = Useless Nonsense" while "Engineering = All That is Good in the World". And so it goes...

In which I find myself unexpectedly proud of Delhi University's library

As a research scholar, I have to spend a lot of time in libraries. Until I tried to use  university libraries in Delhi (to study Indian history, no less), I had no idea how easy I had it back at Columbia. My success rate for finding useful books here is pretty grim, but last week I discovered Delhi University's digital books projects—and it's nothing short of amazing.

Hanging out with Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya

It was a Thursday night so I could have gone to the movies or to a nice restaurant, but instead I spent the evening with Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, the fourteenth-century Sufi saint. Every Thursday there is a performance of qawwali music in front of the dargah [shrine]. The musicians sit facing the dargah because technically they're not playing for the spectators but for the saint himself.

Hazrat Nizamuddin was the head of the Chishti order of Sufis in India and was a friend of the great poet Amir Khusrau, whose tomb is nearby in the same complex. Although in the West Islam has an aura of being against music (and against fun in general), Sufis have long embraced musical performance as part of their worship. It plays a role in zikr, the meditative remembrance of God. In South Asia, the act of remembering God often turns into a rollicking good time.

A Visit to Aligarh

One approach to knowing a country is through its major cities. For me, for example, most of France is just padding on a map of Paris. I've just never spent enough time outside the capital to know how non-Parisians live. Some people argue that you have to visit the most out of the way hamlets to know a country, but I believe that a completely urban experience is legitimate—unless I were to pass myself off as an expert on the French countryside, which I am not. Country living too involves some trompe d'oeil. Some years ago I stayed in a lovely village with a mossy graveyard and thirteenth-century church in Oxfordshire in England. I soon learned that despite the rural atmosphere, the majority of the inhabitants in fact worked in London. It's expensive to maintain a medieval cottage, after all.

But even as a committed urbanite (who occasionally needs to get out of the city), I admit there's something remarkable about small towns. Tourists often make moral judgments about the small town landscape but it seems to me that the inhabitants of the periphery are not somehow guardians of a nation's culture but rather that a lot of metropolitan distractions are stripped away. It's easier to experience a place when you're not battling with people trying to sell you things or being nearly run over every time you cross the street. In some ways small towns are like cities that are more relaxed, more manageable, but there is however a different orientation. A small town has a centre, and people from nearby areas are drawn to it. Its centripetal force is even stronger than in a big, spread-out city precisely because it is compact.

Tis the season (of Diwali)

Diwali has a nice tagline; it's the "Festival of Lights." In Hinduism, it commemorates the return of Lord Rama to his kingdom after fourteen years of exile and an epic battle with the demon Ravana. But just as Christmas as celebrated today has a tenuous connection with a guy born in a shed in ancient Palestine who may or may not have been God incarnate, Diwali, which fell on 5 November this year, is about eating good food, spending time with family and, of course, blowing stuff up.

My India is great

“Meraa bhaarat mahaan” is a patriotic phrase that you see painted everywhere, meaning “my India is great.” I don’t know where it comes from but it’s gloriously open ended. You neither have to specify that Delhi has just built itself a gleaming, world-class Metro system nor explain away the beggars and sick dogs on the streets.

As I await the arrival of American friends and family, I’m looking for a strategy to introduce them to India without recourse either to the guidebook clichés of a land of moonlit Mughal tombs or to a raft of health and safety regulations (don’t eat fruit you haven’t peeled yourself, look right then left when crossing the street, etc). Having lived here and studied Indian cultural history for my PhD, I’d like to think that for my own purposes I have a pretty good sense of the place—although admittedly I am always conscious of being an outsider. But how do I share my India with them?

The thin line between twenty-six and twenty-seven

I had to double check my age so that I wouldn't repeat the surreal few months of my life after I turned 22 and had been telling everyone I was 23. But, yes, tomorrow I celebrate 27 years. Am I being dramatic when the quote coming to mind to commemorate the occasion is from Shakespeare's Richard II?

I wasted time; now time doth waste me.

Milton in India: Poetry and Tradition

I'm taking a break from watching the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony—I can report that sports commentary is inane even with an Indian accent. Perhaps "watching" isn't the right word because the news channel NDTV was only allowed to show clips of less than thirty seconds and on a seven minute delay. There's nothing else to do because almost every business in Delhi was shut so I had a meditative day at home.

One thing I thought about was the reason I came to study India in the first place: Living tradition. When I first visited Delhi six years ago, I had a kind of conversion and realised that my degree in Classics was not my preferred way of studying literature because Indians on the whole had a much better sense of the continuity of their culture than Westerners. When we study Classics in the West, we have a tendency to forget about the most interesting aspect of the texts we study, namely their two millennia-long influence on our culture. As I read it, the rapid decline of cultural literacy in the West after the First World War made Classics departments circle the waggons around the study of antiquity and insist that anything else is Comparative Literature. We only study Greece and Rome, 400 BC to 200 AD, but you can study anything you want.

“Your mind expands when you chat with people”

That’s what Gopal, a painter working in our flat, told me as he and his partner were polishing some furniture they had finished staining. This conversation in Hindi was sort of a breakthrough for me because since arriving in India just over a week ago literally every single other person I’ve conversed with in India either preferred speaking English with me or was too stuck-up to have a conversation--and let's face it, in status-conscious Delhi that happens frequently. Gopal, on the other hand, spoke very little English so by necessity when he invited me to inspect his work and have a seat, the language of conversation was to be Hindi (since I didn't speak his native Bengali).

He apologises for his poor English but explains that people in his economic stratum in West Bengal state were educated in Bengali and Hindi, and English is an afterthought. “So for us, we can understand some English but it’s hard to speak; just like you understand Hindi, right?, but have some difficulty speaking,” he said. (I've translated our conversation from Hindi.)

It's more like reading Kafka in Delhi

As I sit here at peace with the world, Beethoven's Für Elise is wafting incongruously through the air in C-Block of Chittaranjan Park in south Delhi. This was not how I spent my morning. No, my morning was spent despairingly at the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO).

Salman Rushdie has observed that “at the frontier, our liberty is stripped away—we hope temporarily—and we enter the universe of control. Even the freest of societies are unfree at the edge…” Of course I have no reservations about the need for the Indian government to record where foreign citizens live. But the arbitrariness of the procedures I had to follow is an indictment of a country that claims to have clawed its way out of such investment-killing inefficiency.

India is great...

...but I'm trying to put together a publishable article about my arrival here and about preparations for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi next month. If that gets rejected from wherever I send it, I'll put it here instead.

Pruning the Ivy: Why I don't believe in the tyranny of elite universities

I’ve met plenty of arrogant, entitled people—and I make no apology for my cordial detestation of them—in the decade I’ve spent at two Ivy League universities (Princeton, Columbia). When people generalize about the Ivy League as an institution, it seems to me, they’re actually expressing their perceptions, right and wrong, of the people who have attended Ivy League universities. But when you consider the fact that there are nasty people in every walk of life and in every organization, blaming elite universities for having a percentage of unpleasant people is unfair. It cannot be an admissions office’s job to figure out whether someone is a nice person or not.

The conversation about the role of elite universities in American life yields no middle ground. On one side are the people who honestly believe that the universities in the Ivy League (eight old, private institutions on the East Coast that happened to have football teams in the 1930s) are the points of a golden compass keeping America on its bearings and producing the only people really worth talking to. The other side argues that the leafy campuses are bastions of privilege and represent the worst of our society, the preserve of a self-perpetuating elite that is responsible for American arrogance abroad, the collapse of our financial system at home and general mediocrity. Many of the fiercest critics themselves went to an Ivy League university and were horrified by some of their boorish classmates.

Et à l'aurore...

I'm a graduate student training to be a university professor. After a few years in the trenches, my writing now conforms to academic style. Instead of being light and playful, it has become ponderous and self-serious even when I'm not writing for other scholars. I need to get over this.