The first Sexual revolution: lust and liberty in the 18th century

Adulterers and prostitutes could be executed and women were agreed to be more libidinous than men – then in the 18th century attitudes to sex underwent an extraordinary change
Faramerz Dabhoiwala
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 January 2012 22.55 GMT
We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities' affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.
The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution
by Faramerz Dabhoiwala

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Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition.
When I stumbled on the subject, more than a decade ago, I could not believe that such a huge transformation had not been properly understood. But the more I pursued it, the more amazing material I uncovered: the first sexual revolution can be traced in some of the greatest works of literature, art and philosophy ever produced – the novels of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, the pictures of Reynolds and Hogarth, the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume and John Stuart Mill. And it was played out in the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary men and women, otherwise unnoticed by history, whose trials and punishments for illicit sex are preserved in unpublished judicial records. Most startling of all were my discoveries of private writings, such as the diary of the randy Dutch embassy clerk Lodewijk van der Saan, posted to London in the 1690s; the emotional letters sent to newspapers by countless hopeful and disappointed lovers; and the piles of manuscripts about sexual freedom composed by the great philosopher Jeremy Bentham but left unpublished, to this day, by his literary executors. Once noticed, the effects of this revolution in attitudes and behaviour can be seen everywhere when looking at the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It was one of the key shifts from the pre-modern to the modern world.
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Since the dawn of history, every civilisation had punished sexual immorality. The law codes of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England treated women as chattels, but they also forbade married men to fornicate with their slaves, and ordered that adulteresses be publicly disgraced, lose their goods and have their ears and noses cut off. Such severity reflected the Christian church's view of sex as a dangerously polluting force, as well as the patriarchal commonplace that women were more lustful than men and liable to lead them astray. By the later middle ages, it was common in places such as London, Bristol and Gloucester for convicted prostitutes, bawds, fornicators and adulterers to be subjected to elaborate ritual punishments: to have their hair shaved off or to be dressed in especially degrading outfits, severely whipped, displayed in a pillory or public cage, paraded around for public humiliation and expelled for ever from the community.
The reformation brought a further hardening of attitudes. The most fervent Protestants campaigned vigorously to reinstate the biblical death penalty for adultery and other sexual crimes. Wherever Puritan fundamentalists gained power, they pursued this goal – in Geneva and Bohemia, in Scotland, in the colonies of New England and in England itself. After the Puritans had led the parliamentary side to victory in the English civil war, executed the King and abolished the monarchy, they passed the Adultery Act of 1650. Henceforth, adulterers and incorrigible fornicators and brothel-keepers were simply to be executed, as sodomites and bigamists already were.
Of course, sexual discipline was never perfect. Men and women constantly gave way to temptation – and then had to be flogged, imprisoned, fined and shamed to reform them. Many others, especially the wealthy and powerful, escaped punishment. As was the case with other crimes, the full rigour of the law was never uniformly or consistently applied. All the same, sexual discipline was a central facet of pre-modern western society, and its unceasing promotion had a profound effect on ordinary men and women. Most people internalised its principles deeply and participated in the disciplining of others. There was no coherent philosophy of sexual liberty, no way of conceiving of a society without moral policing. It seemed obvious that illicit sex had to be combated because it angered God, prevented salvation, damaged personal relations and undermined social order. Sex was emphatically not a private affair.
So pervasive was this ideology that even those who paid with their lives for defying it could not escape its hold over their minds and actions. When the Massachusetts settler James Britton fell ill in the winter of 1644, he became gripped by a "fearful horror of conscience" that this was God's punishment on him for his past sins. So he publicly confessed that once, after a night of heavy drinking, he had tried (but failed) to have sex with a young bride, Mary Latham. Though she now lived far away, in Plymouth colony, the magistrates there were alerted. She was found, arrested and brought back, across the icy landscape, to stand trial in Boston. When, despite her denial that they had actually had sex, she was convicted of adultery, she broke down, confessed it was true, "proved very penitent, and had deep apprehension of the foulness of her sin … and was willing to die in satisfaction to justice". On 21 March, a fortnight after her sentence, she was taken to the public scaffold. Britton was executed alongside her; he, too, "died very penitently". In the shadow of the gallows, Latham addressed the assembled crowds, exhorting other young women to be warned by her example, and again proclaiming her abhorrence and penitence for her terrible crime against God and society. Then she was hanged. She was 18 years old.
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That is the world we have left behind. Over the following century and a half it was transformed by a great revolution that laid the ground for the sexual culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, and of our own day.
The most obvious change was a surge in pre- and extramarital sex. We can measure this, crudely but unmistakably, in the numbers of children conceived out of wedlock. During the 17th century this figure had been extremely low: in 1650 only about 1% of all births in England were illegitimate. But by 1800, almost 40% of brides came to the altar pregnant, and about a quarter of all first-born children were illegitimate. It was to be a permanent change in behaviour.
Just as striking was the collapse of public punishment, which made this new sexual freedom possible. By 1800, most forms of consensual sex between men and women had come to be treated as private, beyond the reach of the law. This extraordinary reversal of centuries of severity was partly the result of increasing social pressures. The traditional methods of moral policing had evolved in small, slow, rural communities in which conformity was easy to enforce. Things were different in towns, especially in London. At the end of the middle ages only about 40,000 people lived there, but by 1660 there were already 400,000; by 1800 there would be more than a million, and by 1850 most of the British population lived in towns. This extraordinary explosion created new kinds of social pressures and new ways of living, and placed the conventional machinery of sexual discipline under growing strain.
Urban living provided many more opportunities for sexual adventure. It also gave rise to new, professional systems of policing, which prioritised public order. Crime became distinguished from sin. And the fast circulation of news and ideas created a different, freer and more pluralist intellectual environment.
This was crucial to the development of the ideal of sexual freedom. By the later 18th century, for the first time, many serious observers had come to take it for granted that sex was a private matter, that men and women should be free to indulge in it irrespective of marriage, and that sexual pleasure should be celebrated as one of the purposes of life. As well as reinterpreting the Bible, they found support in new ideas about the importance of personal conscience and in the laws of nature, which were regarded as more clearly indicative of God's will than the inherited dogma of the church and the text of the scriptures. In his 1730 work, Christianity as Old as the Creation, the Oxford don Matthew Tindal ridiculed traditional sexual norms as priestly inventions, no more appropriate to a modern state than the biblical prohibitions against drinking blood or lending money: "Enjoying a woman, or lusting after her, can't be said, without considering the circumstances, to be either good or evil. That warm desire, which is implanted in human nature, can't be criminal, when perused after such a manner as tends most to promote the happiness of the parties, and to propagate and preserve the species."
In a similar vein, the Rev Robert Wallace, one of the leaders of the Church of Scotland in the mid-18th century, wrote a treatise seriously commending "a much more free commerce of the sexes". By that he meant complete liberty for people to cohabit successively with as many partners as they liked – "A woman's being enjoyed by a dozen … can never render her less fit or agreeable to a 13th". As John Wilkes's 1754 Essay on Woman put it: "Life can little more supply / Than just a few good Fucks, and then we die."
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It's no accident that all these early celebrations of the new sexual world were voiced by white, upper-class men. In practice, sexual liberty was limited in important ways. The bastardy laws continued to apply to the labouring classes: their morals remained a public matter. The new permissiveness towards "natural" freedoms also led to a sharper definition and abhorrence of supposedly "unnatural" behaviour. Homosexual acts in particular came to be persecuted with increasing violence: throughout the 18th century there were regular executions for sodomy. Even after 1830, when hanging for the offence was ended, thousands of men were publicly humiliated in the pillory, or sentenced to jail, for their unnatural perversions – Oscar Wilde's imprisonment with hard labour for two years in 1895 is only the best-known example.
Yet the general advance of sexual freedom and the expansion of urban life also fostered the development of an increasingly assertive homosexual sub-culture. Some of the most remarkable utterances of the 18th century were the first principled defences of same-sex behaviour as natural, universal and harmless. One night in 1726, William Brown, a married man, was arrested at a notorious pick-up spot with another man's hand in his breeches. When surrounded by hostile watchmen and challenged as to "why he took such indecent liberties … he was not ashamed to answer, 'I did it because I thought I knew him, and I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body'". That sodomy had been accepted by all the greatest civilisations of the world was one of the themes of the young clergyman Thomas Cannon's Ancient and Modern Pederasty (1749). "Every dabbler knows by his classics," he pointed out, "that boy-love ever was the top refinement of most enlightened ages." Arguments of the same kind were developed systematically by the Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister (1791-1840), who set down in her diaries the first full justification of lesbian love in English, and by Bentham, the most influential reformer of the age, who defended the rights of homosexuals in countless private discussions and over many hundreds of pages of notes and treatises.
Attitudes towards women's sexuality underwent similarly dramatic shifts. The idea that sexual freedom was as natural and desirable for women as for men was born in the 18th century. By the early 19th century, many feminists, socialists and other progressive thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic decried marriage and advocated free love as a means to the emancipation of women and the creation of a more just society. Among those who held such views were Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, Robert Owen and many Owenites, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the long term, this egalitarian way of thinking was to provide the intellectual foundation for women's sexual liberation more generally.
Yet more immediately the rise of sexual freedom had a much more ambiguous legacy. Women who were rich or powerful enough to escape social ostracism could take advantage of it: many female aristocrats had notoriously open marriages. But on the whole female lust now came to be ever more strongly stigmatised as "unnatural", for it threatened the basic principle that (as one of William III's bishops had put it) "Men have a property in their wives and daughters" and therefore owned their bodies too. Thus, at the same time as it was increasingly argued that sexual liberty was natural for men, renewed stress was placed, often in the same breath, on the necessity of chastity in respectable women.
The effects of this sharpened double standard can be seen everywhere in 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century culture. James Boswell's diary records the tragic story of Jean, the brilliant only daughter of Henry Home, Lord Kames, one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. In the early 1760s, when she was only 16 or 17 and already married, she embarked on a passionate affair with Boswell, arguing to him that they were doing nothing wrong:
"She was a subtle philosopher. She said, 'I love my husband as a husband, and you as a lover, each in his own sphere. I perform for him all the duties of a good wife. With you, I give myself up to delicious pleasures. We keep our secret. Nature has so made me that I shall never bear children. No one suffers because of our loves. My conscience does not reproach me, and I am sure that God cannot be offended by them.'"
A decade later, when her husband divorced her over another affair, she declared "that she hoped that God Almighty would not punish her for the only crime she could charge herself with, which was the gratification of those passions which he himself had implanted in her nature." But her father, the scholar and moral authority, took the conventional view that adultery in a man "may happen occasionally, with little or no alienation of affection", but in a woman was unpardonable. After his daughter's divorce, he and Lady Kames exiled her to France and never saw her again.
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Indeed, the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary reversal in assumptions about female sexuality. Ever since the dawn of western civilisation it had been presumed that women were the more lustful sex. As they were mentally, morally and physically weaker than males, it followed that they were less able to control their passions and thus (like Eve) more likely to tempt others into sin. Yet, by 1800, exactly the opposite idea had become entrenched. Now it was believed that men were much more naturally libidinous and liable to seduce women. Women had come to be seen as comparatively delicate and sexually defensive, needing to be constantly on their guard against male rapacity. The notion of women's relative sexual passivity became fundamental to sexual dynamics across the western world. Its effects were ubiquitous – they still are.
A crucial reason was the rise of women as public writers, which introduced into the cultural mainstream powerful new female perspectives on courtship and lust. This was an unprecedented development. In all earlier times, women's direct intervention in public discussion had been very limited. Men monopolised every medium in which male and female qualities were prescribed and reinforced – fiction, drama, poetry, sermons, journalism and so on. But from the later 17th century onwards, women emerged for the first time as a permanent part of the world of letters. As playwrights, poets, novelists and philosophers, women influenced male authors, looked to one another, and addressed themselves directly to the public. And in much female writing about sexual relations, the bottom line was, as the teenage poet Sarah Fyge explained in 1686, that men were always trying "to make a prey" of chaste women. Male bluster about female lust was but to make women "the scapegoat" – it was men who constantly pressured and ensnared women, who were insatiable in their thirst for new conquests, and shameless in their commission. As the feminist Mary Astell put it bitterly in 1700, "'Tis no great matter to them if women, who were born to be their slaves, be now and then ruined for their entertainment". No woman could ever "be too much upon her guard".
None of these ideas was entirely new, but it was only from around 1700 that they came to be put forward publicly, in a way that discernibly changed the culture of the age. Especially influential in the long term was the role of women in creating the new genre of the novel, which by the middle of the 18th century had become the most influential fictional form and become a central conduit of moral and social education. Samuel Johnson noted in 1750 that women's breaking of the male monopoly on writing, and their "stronger arguments", had overturned the ancient masculine falsehood that women were the more fickle and lecherous sex.
All this explains why the first major novelists of the English language were so obsessed with seduction. Samuel Richardson, whose Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison were the most sensationally popular and influential pieces of fiction of the 18th century, was a classic instance of the growing power of female viewpoints. For all its originality, the general approach and subject matter of his fiction owes an obvious debt to the stream of earlier novels about heroines courted, seduced, raped and oppressed, which had flowed from the pens of pioneering female writers such as Penelope Aubin, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood and Elizabeth Rowe. A wide circle of women acquaintances, readers and correspondents helped him; in turn, his work presented eyewitness perspectives of respectable women under threat from rapacious superior men. Right through the 19th century, it is hard to think of many serious novelists who did not pursue the seduction narrative.
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Equally important to modern ways of thinking was the increasing sexualisation of race and class. The presumption that lower-class and non-white women were less sexually restrained became a matter of both investigation and titillation. As sexual norms were increasingly held to vary according to race, class and sex, so the transgression of such boundaries (in reality and in fantasy) became ever more erotically charged. This was the origin of the great British obsession with sex and class, which equally affected homosexual passion. "We don't like people like ourselves," explains a middle-class character in one 1950s novel about gay lust. "We don't want anybody who shares our standards. In fact, we want the very opposite. We want the primitive, the uneducated, the tough." Even some of the most basic features of our sexual desire are therefore not natural and unchanging, but historically created. What we think of as "natural" in men and women, where the boundaries lie between the normal and the deviant, how we feel about the pursuit of pleasure and the transgression of sexual norms – all these are matters on which our current attitudes are fundamentally different from those that have prevailed for most of western history.
The new fascination with class and licentiousness helped to transform attitudes towards prostitution. The conventional view had been that prostitutes were the worst reprobates of all, deserving of the harshest punishments. But from the middle of the 18th century this perspective was matched, and often overshadowed, by the presumption that prostitutes themselves were ultimately the innocent victims of male lust and social deprivation. Vast efforts were poured into the foundation of asylums, workhouses and other charities for fallen women and girls at risk of seduction. Many contemporaries saw obvious parallels between black and white slavery. "What are the sorrows of the enslaved negro from which the outcast prostitute of London is exempted?" asked one late-Georgian activist. "A seducer or ravisher has torn them both, for ever, from the abodes of their youth … Is the bosom of the unhappy girl less tender than that of the swarthy savage?"
The rescue of fallen women, and the abolition of "white slavery", consequently became a craze to which some of the most prominent figures in public life devoted great energy. At the height of his fame, Charles Dickens threw himself into the foundation of a refuge for penitents, with the financial backing of the millionairess Angela Burdett-Coutts. His fellow novelist George Gissing tried (and failed) to redeem a young prostitute by marrying her himself. William Gladstone called the issue "the chief burden of my soul", and for decades, even while prime minister, roamed the streets at night attempting to save prostitutes.
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The final notable feature of the first sexual revolution was the birth of a new kind of media culture, in which private affairs and personal opinions were given unprecedented publicity. The explosion of publishing created a much more democratic and permanent network of public communication than had ever existed before. The mass proliferation of newspapers and magazines, and a new-found fascination with the boundaries of the private and the public, combined to produce the first age of sexual celebrity. The sayings and doings of famous courtesans now came to be routinely analysed in print, and their portraits were endlessly painted, engraved and caricatured. Many of them skilfully promoted themselves, keeping their names and faces in the public eye by publishing memoirs and publicising their image. By the middle of the 18th century, a visitor to any of London's print shops could have bought dozens of different portraits, in all shapes and sizes, of Kitty Fisher, Fanny Murray, Nancy Dawson and every other well-known lady of pleasure. Cheapest of all were tiny prints made to fit inside a gentleman's watch case or snuff-box, the mass-produced equivalent of portrait miniatures. For threepence, or sixpence "neatly coloured", a man could carry his favourite harlot around with him in perfect privacy, gazing upon her whenever he felt like it. The foundations of today's celebrity sex scandals were laid a long time ago.
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The ultimate legacy of the first sexual revolution has been far from straightforward. In place of a relatively coherent, authoritative worldview that had endured for centuries, it left a much greater confusion of moral perspectives, with irresolvable tensions between them. That has been part of our modern condition ever since. What's more, as the history of the past few decades shows, its consequences are still unfolding, in different ways across different western societies. It is equally clear that the 18th century marked the point at which the sexual culture of the west as a whole moved on to a new trajectory.
In many parts of the world, by contrast, sexual ideals and practices reminiscent of pre-modern Europe continue to be upheld. Men and (especially) women remain at risk of public prosecution for having sex outside marriage. Often, the word of God is supposed to justify this. The Ayatollah Khomeini affirmed in 1979 that the execution of prostitutes, adulterers and homosexuals was as justified in a moral society as the amputation of gangrenous flesh. In some countries, imprisonment, flogging and execution by hanging, or even by stoning, continues to be imposed on men and women convicted of extramarital or homosexual relations. Even more widespread and deep-rooted is the extra-legal persecution of men and women for such matters. These are the same practices that sustained western culture for most of its history. They rest on very similar foundations – the theocratic authority of holy texts and holy men, intolerance of religious and social pluralism, fear of sexual freedom, and the belief that men alone should govern. How they help to maintain patriarchal social order is obvious; so too is their cost to human happiness. How durable they will prove to be remains to be seen.
(Extracted from The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution by Faramerz Dabhoiwala, to be published by Allen Lane on 2 February at GBP 25.00)

Just 121m net users in India !

3 January 2012
It is estimated that as many as 121m people in India use the internet - while that's a big number it's still a relatively small proportion of the country's 1.2bn population.
The numbers using the web are predicting to rise at a fast pace in the year ahead.
So, how will people in India be logging on and what are the biggest challenges when it comes to getting the country more connected. Rajini Vaidyanathan reports for BBC

A Tale of Kashmir, War and The Elements of Business

A Tale of Kashmir, War and The Elements of Business

Riyaz Masroor

To a whistle-stop reader, Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator may appear a great throwback to The Five Find-Outers and Dog. There is passing mention of The Famous Five (that is the most popular of children’s writer Enid Blyton’s mystery series) when the nameless protagonist is reminded of his friend Ashfaq’s wish to see all the five buddies cross over to Pakistan. Hold the novel up close and the work looks lot more than the kid-stuff, as few of Kashmir’s big writers tend to view it; it appears a great beginning of Kashmir’s English fiction writing.

Mirza has doubtless indulged in extravagance of emotion, which many would find little upsetting, but this indulgence, it seems, helps the author to doubly emphasize the climax, which is the most powerful refutation of state-backed violence and state-backed counter violence: May your bones rest in peace, after they are licked dry by rabid, man-eating wolves.

For its bold indictment of ‘war’ in Kashmir, extremely graphic portrayal of tragedies, inestimable depth and a dash of literary innovation, the novel would sit comfortably amidst Earnest Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and more closely with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas. Mirza’s novel, first by any Kashmiri Muslim, seems a resounding invite that Kashmiris return to all the post-war English classics.

Captain Kadian carries a noticeable resemblance with Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz, who is a brute ivory trader on a colonial mission in the interiors of Africa. Pairing literary texts in a review is not possible but an example seems befitting. Marlow, Conrad’s narrator in Heart of Darkness, hears of the colonist’s brutal ways from a Russian admirer: ‘There was nothing on earth to prevent Mr. Kurtz killing whom he jolly well pleased.’ See how Captain Kadian echoes Kurtz when he reprimands his Collaborator over the latter’s lurking guilt for wanton killings. ‘Forget it man, this is war, and these are elements of the business here.’ (Page 278).

This ‘war’ and its ‘elements of business’ and the colossal losses accrued thereof are the main staple of Mirza’s storyline, much like fine threads that are entwined in an intricately woven Kashmiri carpet. The ‘grandest bed’ adored with a Kashmiri chain-stitch piece in Captain Kadian’s apartment is the subtle representation of these losses. One is reminded of Mr. Kurtz’s chamber where the glittering mats, woven by natives, decorate walls and windows.

These losses become even more manifest in the remark of Farooq’s father – his younger son crosses over to Pakistan and the elder one is brutally beheaded by army and the head flung into his compound – speaks to a village quorum.  ‘I had two sons, two…one ate the other, you say hai, hai…!’ (pp 199) This heart-aching statement seems to couch an unsettling question: Does revolution really eat its own children?

Set in a far-off LoC village, the novel has cast much-awaited spotlight on the life on border. Many in the world still assume LoC as a mere line on the map with no life, only skirmishes. The Collaborator tells us what life means when it is trapped in a 740 Kilometer long and 34 Kilometer wide Line of Control, where scores of villages exist, some of them divided between India and Pakistan, most of them weighed down by the ‘curfew within a curfew’. And, what it means when army is deployed to ‘cleanse this place of anti-f****** national elements’. This is valley strewn with skeletons, the Valley of death, defenselessly residing on the frills of Koh-e-Gam, the mountain of grief; or, Conrad’s Grove of Death. This, in the words of The Collaborator is a ‘no-man’s land – what happens here is off the record, means nothing to anyone.’ The Collaborator, it seems, is an attempt to unveil this invisible, off-the-record Kashmir; ‘truth stripped of its cloak of time’.

This moving story also provides greater insights into the aftermaths of an armed movement and the near-colonial response it evokes from its adversary. It depicts the desolation of a beautiful land after it gets virtually de-populated in the name of brining peace or liberation. Over a light talk between Captain Kadian and his boss ‘Mehrotra Sir’, The Collaborator’s muted response bemoans this tragic aspect: Things have improved, f****** sir. People have left. People are killed. No people, no trouble, isn’t it? A professional colonist, as was Conrad’s character Marlow, considers populated areas as ‘blank spaces’ – people don’t matter, spaces do. Blank spaces…

Through The Collaborator’s love-hate emotions for Pakistan, armed resistance and militant groups, one gets a faint sense of why the narrator is nameless. Now there is thrill being part of the movement, now the zeal begins to wear off; now he draws a distinction between ‘local’ and ‘foreign’ militants, now he is told ‘they are all the same’; now he wants to kill his tormentor , now he  learns Kadian is just a ‘blow’ of a ‘sister-f****** giant with countless limbs’.

The novel at times seems a shrill elegy punctuated with this bare sense of dilemma.  For instance, The Collaborator tells us, ‘Pakistan, that goddamn country a few kilometers across the border which is never at rest and will never let anyone else rest.’ But soon the indignation gives way to lurking prevarication, ‘I hate it when KD starts abusing Kashmir, Kashmiris or Pakistan…it’s difficult to maintain straight face when he does that.’ 

The protagonist’s flip-flopish attitude seems reflective of the constant ambivalence of Muslim Kashmiris regarding a host of issues. Are we Pakistanis? If not, why this repression by Indian forces? Besides, there are host of Should-Wes and Shouldn’t-Wes hemmed nicely between the lines. Every Kashmiri would find himself in front of a mirror or a ‘thought-sensor’ while reading these lines: Why can’t they have another war instead … a proper war …why can’t they just have proper go and finish this damned unfinished business once and for all…come, come my Pakistani brothers, come inside, come right inside and then stay, don’t you dare leave this time, stay and let me sleep.

The author seems in full control of the plot and the characters through all the chapters. While highlighting abject poverty of Khadim Hussain (the recluse recruiter for militancy who starts with his son) the author introduces a charming Sopore boy Rouf Qadri, who despite prosperous upbringing, is sucked into militancy following arson and massacre by troops.

That Hussain and Ashfaq and Muhammad and Gul would often bunk those post-prayer meetings in the newly built mosque is a nuanced projection of Kashmir’s traditional aversion to radicalism; the novel shows absence of this even among communities that live along LoC, closer to Pakistan.

 The whole point author seems to hammer is this: Pakistan, in her fatalist eagerness to ‘bleed India through Kashmir’ might have entailed a bonfire of people alaaw but the youth’s will to die owes itself to something else. Sadly, India through her ornamental peace missions has always failed, or wanted to fail, to kill this will to die in Kashmir even as this was easier than it would be in Palestine or elsewhere. Mirza has subtly reinforced this thought by pointing out the classic Bollywood numbers especially the ‘sultan of music’ Muhammad Rafi being the common favorite of both people as well as army.

Cover to cover, the novel gives out a long litany of losses and in the midst of every expression conveys, very forcefully, the dilemma of war-trapped people and their constant disdain for the ‘war’ and its ‘elements of business’. The horrid hold this war has had on the collective consciousness of Kashmir is masterfully portrayed in the sequence where Firdous Ali’s little son starts marking his sister’s throat soon after Farooq’s beheading, leaving the girl in a fit of depression. Like that ill-fated child people in Kashmir have long been living on ‘Doctor Bijli’s Calmpose pills’, which only prepare them for tragedy, tragedy, and tides of more tragedy.

The chapter dealing with the foreign militants and their wrongdoings is enough to provoke introspection among espousers of the “cause” on both sides of the LoC. But the author has steered clear of the internecine battles among Kashmiri groups and their impact on youth psyche even as the novel is set in 1993, the peak of fratricide in Kashmir.

Matching the much admired style of Hemingway and Conrad, the author has employed multiple symbols to communicate the layered messages and his artful rebuttal of violence and counter violence. Death, blood, lacerated bodies and weapons are some important symbols besides water, fire, cold and sun. ‘Wind, wind and more wind’… ‘Cold air hung like a curse’… Cloud-bothered sun’…‘The sky had turned flaming red Qayamatuk Rang’ etc. A dagger-in-chest effect of grief, and what it means when bullet-ridden bodies crowd out flowers, is created when Khadim Hussain’s dead body is described as ‘red body’. 

Whatever the scales to adjudge a pure literary work, The Collaborator appears a standard war novel much like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind that recounts the American civil war or Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, the first novel to explore the origins of the Vietnam war in the French colonial atmosphere of the 1950s – the only difference being those were written when the war was over, The Collaborator came up while the ‘war’ and its ‘elements of business’ are going on.

 

(riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com)

Woke up before dream ended? Write your own ending !

Riyaz Masroor

Almost six weeks ago, when Kashmiris were in the middle of their ‘dream’, thirty-nine lawmakers from Indian parliament visited Kashmir amid mourning and a curfew-induced calm. As if the visit was to change the DNA of cops and troopers, the cycle of killings stopped. People got awakened before their dream would lead to the long cherished ending. Now, we are divided into two sets – one set regrets over the lost ending and the other wonders how to write the ending of our own, of course without again pulling over the quilt.

          Dreaming is easy but scripting your own ending if awakened halfway is a rarity. Charles de Gaulle in Europe and Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Asia aptly represent the quality of carrying forward the incomplete dream to a real-world ending. Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) too owes his literary success to an unfinished dream, which he later devoutly completed after throwing off his bedclothes. It’s an interesting story.

Having suffered almost two decades of failure, one night Stevenson had a terrible dream. Frightened by his outcries, his wife awakened him. “Oh, why did you wake me up?” he exclaimed, “I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” He had just reached the moment of Dr. Jekyll’s first transformation and he was eager to see what manner of evil man might evolve before the sleep would be broken by his wife Fanny Osborne. But Stevenson employed his brilliant imagination and set out to write his own ending.

He wrote the first draft and threw it into fire after Fanny argued over the absence of metaphor; he began anew with appropriate allegory. Stevenson was so enthusiastic that he blended his dream with the conceived ending in next three days. The work came about as a novella, “Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. It is about a passionate, noble scientist who ventures into splitting his bad self and names it as “Mr. Hyde” but it is not long before the personality of Hyde begins to dominate Jekyll’s affairs.

This nineteenth century epic was an instant hit. The title later became part of the language, with the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” implying a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next.

How Stevenson turned a dream-without-ending into an opportunity is a food for thought. History, geography or geopolitics apart, the idea of Freedom is after all a romance, a dream. We have been having this dream ever since long. When the dream was peaking, Sheikh Abdullah awakened us. He then chose to write his own ending in 1953. Baffled, he preferred sleep in 1975 and left the job of writing the ending of the dream to the next generation. Now, people again had a dream but they were awakened and are now being led to a “proper” ending. That ending will look “appropriate” and “genuine” as long as the dreamers don’t set out, like Stevenson, to write their own ending. How profound was Wordsworth when he said, “Great is the art of beginning but greater is the art of ending”

America and Kashmir’s tea-party delusions

Riyaz Masroor 

When a frail Kashmiri, according to a local maxim, was beaten by a street goon, he shouted back: my big brother will kill you. During past six decades Kashmiris have been receiving wound after wound but every time they are deluded into believing that the ‘Big Brother’ (America) will avenge their sufferings and force the ‘street goon’ to leave them off. Curiously, the ‘Big Brother’ has often looked the other way, and many in Kashmir, chiefly the ‘Hurriyatists’ (let’s admit Hurriyatism exists), still believe that ‘India hoodwinked’ Him.

Most of the local observers shared with Hurriyat this hoodwink theory when New Delhi appointed a panel to explore new contours of its relationship with J&K. Indeed the appointment of low-key individuals to perform a bigger task appeared a non-military offensive from New Delhi. Yet, the Kashmiris lapsed into the lyricism of resistance rather than attempting to carefully understand the move. Hurriyat must remember that it cannot always hide its political incapacities behind the readymade pretext that India had played a ‘dirty trick’ to ‘hoodwink the world community’ – the world community in Hurriyat jargon is a convenient euphemism for United States. So far, the Hurriyat politics in Kashmir is defined by several such platitudes such as South Asia will burn if talks are delayed, India will break up without resolving Kashmir or the movement is at a crucial juncture. But the most clichéd of all is ‘India is hoodwinking the world’. Can India really hoodwink America on Kashmir? We need a little elaborate answer.

Rewind to 1989 when the Kashmir movement turned violent. Gun-totting boys would conduct daredevil actions against India’s ill-prepared CRPF and stage armed parades on Aug 14 to observe Pakistan’s Independence Day. India did not want to let America know how Kashmiris were defying her rule in Kashmir when William Clark took charge as U.S. ambassador to India. During the welcome briefing to Clark, Delhi chose to ‘hoodwink’ the world community by brushing aside Kashmir and projecting Punjab, where the militancy had almost died down, as India’s major worry. But, the ‘hoodwink operation’ came to a naught because Walter Anderson, head of political desk in the Embassy, had already prepared a detailed note on growing disaffection within Kashmir and predicted the dangers. Clark had gone through Anderson’s note and corroborated it with other intelligence sources before he flew from Washington. India could not hoodwink America on Kashmir militancy. Phew!

In May 1990, the U.S. dispatched an experienced intelligence officer, Robert Gates to Pakistan where he would try to convince authorities on ending the ‘Kashmir operation’ in lieu of a guarantee that India would be asked to initiate some ‘CBMs’ and an “effective intelligence support from the U.S. to monitor the LoC.” Pshaw! The ‘Big Brother’ was rather hoodwinking Pakistan.

In fact, America’s Central Intelligence Agency had started to pry intelligence from the region way back in 1970s, soon after India and Pakistan started acquiring nuclear arsenal. In July 2004 a Brazilian journalist Sao Paulo wrote in the monthly Caros Amigos (meaning Dear Friends) an exhaustive analysis on the dispute titled Kashmir: Occupied, Partitioned and Disputed. The report says, “There are as many CIA agents in Kashmir as there are Al-Qaeda members (in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan)”. 

Such suspicions were visibly corroborated by the fulltime intelligence operation of FBI in Kashmir between July 1995 and May 1996. A group of foreign tourists had been kidnapped while it was trekking at South Kashmir’s Pahalgam heights. Veteran U.S. diplomat Howard B Schaffer disclosed past year how the U.S. Army’s “Crack Delta Force” and elite British and German counterterrorism groups were mounting secret missions in Kashmir to hunt the kidnappers. The CIA papers that were declassified in 2004 have revealed that the CIA sleuths had interrogated some arrested militants of Harkat-ul-Ansar, the group they suspected had masterminded the abduction under the front name of “Al-Faran”. And, the think tanks are still debating whether CIA knew in advance what was happening on the heights of Kargil.

These references prove that the Americans don’t need Hurriyat caveats against India as they get down focusing on Kashmir? They know enough of it, more than Hurriyat and perhaps India. Before tossing up the hoodwink theory Hurriyat camp should have recalled that Loy Anderson was the first U.S. ambassador to India who visited Kashmir way back in 1950. And, a year later, Frank Graham whom the United Nations Organization had appointed as special negotiator on Kashmir, too was an American. Hurriyat expelled Shabir Shah in 1996 for lending audience to Frank Wisner, then U.S. ambassador to India.  Was it afraid India may hoodwink U.S. if Americans engaged separatist leaders? 

Howard B Schaffer was part of the state department’s South Asia mission and used to frequent Kashmir since 1960s. Writes he: “In pursuing an active U.S. role in Kashmir settlement American officials have stayed well informed about Kashmir developments. They have been in touch with all the organizations concerned with Kashmir and been privy to back-channel talks.”

In this backdrop, the platitude of ‘hoodwinking America’ appears laughable; it shows incapacity of separatist camp to tackle certain political challenges. When you dismiss a government action as something to hoodwink a superpower you absolve yourself from a desired response, a need to critically understand the move. If India needs just a retired journalist and a trendy academic or for that matter a shamelessly rigged election to hoodwink America, then better be with India to safeguard Jammu and Kashmir from any future invasion. The Brazilian monthly has also quoted some NATO policy documents which say, “After 11 September 2001, the United States does have a legal justification to invade J&K.”

When the state acknowledges only 17 out of 111 killings , that too subject to a lengthy, unending probe, Hurriyat and those peddling  its hoodwink theory, better come out of their tea-party delusions. Ever since 1995 – when the government of India chose to initiate dialogue with five militants who had shunned arms – Kashmiris have been fed on mere noise of the dialogue while the economic and political benefits have been reaped by the ruling class in the state’s neighboring regions.

In response to the four-month unrest in Kashmir that saw 111 deaths and inexplicable tragedies,  Delhi has appointed sitting executives of Planning Commission to rehabilitate the economic and social security concerns of people in Jammu and Ladakh. This implies ‘direct aid’ via Planning Commission. And for Kashmir, the government of India picked up some ‘thought engineers’. No wonder if Azadi is being subjected to rigorous debating across India because Professor Radha Kumar has enough skill to reinterpret this so far objectionable word to suit India’s foreign policy needs. And the ‘Big Brother’ will keep watching.

 This is the time to shun this India-hoodwinking-America stuff from the menu of Hurriyat politics. The ‘Big Brother’ much in the Orwellian sense has all along been around us, but “He” is already friends with the “street goon”.

(email: rmasroor@gmail.com)

A transition from rhetoric to realism

Shutdowns, processions, sit-ins, slogans, speeches, secessionist songs etc everything one could witness post 89 had actually happened between 1953 and 1975. It would not be inappropriate to say that whatever Hurriyat, except for militant outfits, did till 2008 was just a replay of PF movement.
Riyaz Masroor
Many years ago, a Kashmiri lawyer had to cut a sorry figure in a European capital where he was invited to speak on the human rights situation of J&K. It was fashionable those days to speak in ‘thousands’ and ‘lakhs’. Separatist leaders would say ‘thousands have been martyred’ without quoting figures. The lawyer followed suit and thus spoke to the learned audience: “Thousands have disappeared in Kashmir, most of them while in custody.” The participants were moved by the word ‘thousands’. At the end of the session, an HR activist approached the speaker with the request: “It’s really a grave issue, can you cite three examples so that I study the whole thing.” The lawyer, as per his own admission, had no handy references so he chose to avoid the query till next morning and forwarded three examples only after seeking them via phone from Kashmir. The lawyer returned home with his lifetime lesson: Shun rhetoric, gather realities. No wonder, the same lawyer is now Kashmir’s leading human rights defender.
In June 2008, when the Kashmiri separatists started the epic campaign against a government decision to transfer around 100 acres of land to a Hindu Shrine Board, Hurriyat Conference was reborn. Not just in the sense that it revived its lost contact with masses but in the sense that it started speaking on real issues harming Kashmiri interests. The campaign forced the government to revoke the order and the land title was restored. Bar Association and Hurriyat celebrated the revocation of order as a ‘victory for Kashmiris’. It was for the first time since 1989 that Hurriyat had opposed any government order , got it revoked through peaceful campaign and later celebrated the ‘victory’. And yes, the peaceful method cast moral isolation upon the authorities who would lob tear-smoke shells on unarmed civilians.
But for that unfortunate economic blocked forced on Kashmiris from Jammu, this small victory would have served a long way in reorganizing Kashmir’s rights movement into an orderly resistance. Nonetheless, 2008 marked a significant transition; the transition from violence to reconstruction, from rhetoric to creativity. In all these years, when had Geelani said India earns Rs 36000 Crores annually from Kashmir through taxes and food imports? When had Mirwaiz wondered over absence of water and power in rural Kashmir saying people pay taxes against no amenity? When had we experienced a different Geelani who wants to substantiate his claims of Indian occupation through figures? A Hurriyat (G) pamphlet, whose authenticity may be debatable, records the volume of land occupied by Indian army in different districts, it says more than 350,000 acres of land has been grabbed.
The issues which in yesteryears were a plain no-no for Hurriyat leaders have suddenly come alive for them. They are reacting to government decisions and processes – a decade ago such reactions were considered taboo. Hurriyat (all shades including JKLF) is increasingly becoming democratic in its conduct and response to the socio-political issues. For example, never had Hurriyat asked people to participate in a process directly controlled by New Delhi. In 2001, they called for outright boycott of census but are now urging people to stand up and be counted, though with a word of caution. It is definitely a welcome transition. By simply shutting our eyes whole world will not turn black.
It would be foolhardy to say that post 2008, Kashmiris began to hate militant violence as a means of resistance; they cannot unless the means of repression remain intact. But we cannot overlook the fact that the culture of peaceful and democratic resistance has taken root after 2008 uprising.
Many would agree that the post-89 resistance against Indian rule in J&K was clearly modeled after the legendary Tehreek Mahaz Rai Shumari (Plebiscite Front Movement). Whole architecture of Hurriyat politics could easily be gleaned from the 22-year PF movement that was spearheaded by many big names but actually inspired by then popular leader Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, who remained in jail for most of those two decades. Shutdowns, processions, sit-ins, slogans, speeches, secessionist songs etc everything one could witness post 89 had actually happened between 1953 and 1975. It would not be inappropriate to say that whatever Hurriyat, except for militant outfits, did till 2008 was just a replay of PF movement. Isn’t it a fact that while Sheikh would bask in the glory of rising popularity his detractor and then Prime Minister of J&K, Bakhshi Ghulam Muhammad was eroding the autonomous status of the state? For that matter, PF movement too was an abstract activity that kept people aloof from what was happening around them. Interestingly, if in past Sheikh’s PF movement had got consumed into rhetoric, now Hurriyat is trying to remodel itself over realities rather than rhetoric. The heightened alertness about census and the new recruitment law is a glaring proof of that. If Hurriyat has abandoned the ‘secondhand ideas’ and chosen to embark a new route of democracy and peace, shouldn’t one welcome it as a positive transition?
Mian Abdul Qayoom, President of Kashmir Bar Association, could not understand the nuances of this argument when this writer spoke to a seminar titled “Census and reservation bill – a bid to darken our future” organized by Geelani-led Hurriyat Conference on 22 May 2010. “I completely disagree,” he said and employed all his acumen to disprove the transition highlighted by this writer. Ironically, the lawyer who on his return from Europe had admitted a flaw and got down to work only to create a huge bank of realities was present in the seminar. It would, perhaps, take another session to make Mr. Qayoom understand that the transition does not necessarily mean from bad to good, it is also from good to better. Is there any harm in admitting that things have changed? Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky provides the answer: “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
Feedback: riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com

Mom Balpuri’s Cow and Demography Cry

Riyaz MasroorThe noisy Tuesday was virtually the first day of Durbar in Srinagar; Monday had gone into calm, hassle free reopening and gossip. Irked by the deafening sirens, gridlocks, flag cars and road barriers, I vomited out my anger before a friend who happens to be a police officer. “Why should large contingents escort even insignificant persons,” I asked angrily. “After all, who will take care of Mom Balpuri’s naughty cow?” the officer hurled a counter question.
The response baffled me. What the hell is some Balpuri’s cow to do with the mess the Durbar has brought out on Srinagar’s fast narrowing roads. But, as probed further, Mom Balpuri appeared a character portraying the Kashmir’s ruling class, and his cow a metaphor for the social liabilities of this class. Small wonder, these liabilities are being taken care at the cost of public convenience. Alas! Balpuri’s cow did not get enough care.
Ghulam Muhammad Ganaie was perhaps the only bet for National Conference in Budgam’s Khansahib constituency when it fought elections in 1996. He was the party’s block president and was more famous by his nick name Mom Balpuri, probably after his native village Balpur. Despite being a grass-root worker, this rustic, simpleton farmer would wonder why a bevy of gun-wielding Personal Security Officers (PSOs) would follow him like his shadow, though he later came to know that he was a ‘protected person’ after NC got the crown.
Mom Balpuri had a cow that he was very fond of. He would cherish even his cow’s naughty antics – it would cross over to neighbour’s paddy field, hit a kid or two or snap the rope and shove into some grocery shop. Youth of Balpur still remember how Mom Balpuri would struggle to prevent his pet from hurting others. After becoming the ‘protected person’ Mom Balpuri would chase the freaky cow while his PSOs would follow him, wielding guns. He would rebuff them to help him leash the cow by surrounding it rather than following him. “But how can we do that sir, we cannot move to your front, we have to be at your back and guard you.” This would put off Mom Balpuri because the cow would run even faster sensing not just Balpuri but several men with guns following it. This went on till 17 March 2001 when the assailants murdered Balpuri at his residence. His PSOs must be sad why they could not help him leash his cow, or save him from the assailants.
What Mom Balpuri in his pastorally honest sense would want his PSOs to do is being done by almost all the PSOs who are attached to VIPs and VVIPs. Then it was only the matter of comforting an ill-tamed cow, now it is about almost everything – rearing children, ferrying them to school, going shopping with the madam, mowing the garden, attending telephone calls, fixing meetings and much more.
From all ministers to lowbrow politicians, PSOs are flanking every individual who has something to do with the ruling regime. There are PSOs who go for extended leave, take vehicle from the ministerial staff and roam around in his home town, flaunting his false errrr real power across his neighbourhood. Who is paying for all this luxury? Masses.
Coming back to roads, Our VIPS travel with a false sense of being superior to the rest. Their well-guarded vehicles zoom through busy roads with frightening speed. Later in the afternoon, as I started to check the day’s happenings a citizen journalist came to me with a startling complaint.
“Please inform SP traffic that PRO of the Works Minister G M Suroori has left office with a PWD vehicle 9330 JK 02 L (Bolero). He is now enjoying in his village, patrol bills will be paid by the government,” he informed. I simply passed on the information to Police high ups, just to satisfy the citizen journalist, though I was sure the complaint will be junked. But I began wondering if the PRO was taking care of Suroori’s or his own ‘naughty cow’?
Mom Balpuri was not to blame when he saw himself in the security ring. The ruling regime wanted to leave an impression in the area that they have the ‘presence’. The PSOs would serve as an advert of POWER; people with smaller problems would be psychologically drawn to Mom Balpuri, considering the Police escort he had around him round the clock as an indication of POWER. The innocent old man, Mom Balpuri was isolated from his earthy lifestyle and squeezed into the new frame of POWER.
Fourteen years after the PSOs scared that naughty cow in Balpur, the VIP culture has spawned a new social class comprising everyone who is followed by a security van and flanked by gunmen. People belonging to this class believe they have the first right to move on the road. Policemen or Traffic Cops have no teeth to regulate their movement or discipline them.
Democracy, they say, is a great leveler. But here the democracy, believed to have returned in 1996, has further fragmented the life. There are people with LINKS to power. There are people with ACCESS to POWER. There are people with CHANNELS in bureaucracy and then there are people who have the BUSINESS with the POWERFUL. Masses are at the bottom of the pyramid.
Separatists are crying hoarse that the eight percent reservation in government jobs for scheduled caste candidates would affect the state’s demography. The chief minister has reassured them that it was not the case. But the fact is the demography has long changed. The VIPs are eating into the social space of the masses that are now worse than the underclass of a totalitarian state. A Kashmiri threatening another Kashmiris’ social identity, no hartaal for this please!

First published in Rising Kashmir 8 May 2011 (Feedback at riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com)