A recent post by Amardeep on the work of (with the related debates on) historians of, and more importantly for, the Empire, such as Niall Ferguson brought to my mind those odd statues of two Englishmen in topcoats and hats moored next to bare chested, dhoti clad, and in many case ascetic, Telugu luminaries such as Vemana, Potanna, Thygaraja, Krishnadeva Raya etc on the Tank Bund Road, which bounds that cesspool of a lake in the middle of Hyderabad, India. In a recent discussion on translating Telugu poetry, I was telling a friend how because of the vagaries of my education, the closest I have come to imbibing any of the literary output in Telugu, my mother tongue, is al most limited to reading the captions etched on the pedestals of those statues honoring those poets, writers, kings and statesmen.

As an aside, I also have a curious experience regarding the installation of these statues themselves. I remember very distinctly being stuck in a traffic jam on the Tank Bund, as I was riding in a convoy of trucks requisitioned from the Indian Army by the school for an excursion to the Hyderabad Zoo, precisely the day these statues were unveiled to the public by N.T. Rama Rao. Apart from the spillover from his highly successful movie career, another of the drivers in N.T.R's path to political power was his espousal of resurgence in Telugu pride.

Given this, the case of C.P. Brown’s induction into the “official” or state sponsored cannon (as my friend pointed out to me in that conversation) of Telugu luminaries is very curious indeed; curious because it highlights the ambiguities in the debates on empires, their evils, and most importantly their benefits. C.P. Brown, born of polyglot English missionary parents (one desirable side effect of wanting to save heathens by bringing them the Gospel, is that Christian missionaries have made important contributions to the preservation and propagation of languages; see this article detailing earliest Tamil types, circa 1578, used to print Doctrina Christam) is widely regarded as the modern day messiah who saved Telugu language from the sorry state it had fallen into by early 19th century, with the decline of Hindu kingdoms such as Vijayanagar in South India. This extensive article on Brown’s life details some sixty years of work that he put into collecting old manuscripts on palm leaves, compiling and codifying the language in the form of a Telugu-English dictionary (still considered to be a very high achievement by lexicographers and linguists), grammars, treasties on prosody such as this one, and finally translating works of poets such as this translation of epigrammatic and sonorous Vemana into English.

Then we have the case of Sir. Arthur Cotton, who can very easily be a poster boy to Ferguson’s Empire hosannas for the impact he had as he led the construction of irrigation works pretty much across every major South Indian river, starting with the Cauvery, and ending at the Godavari. Prof. Bret Wallach, whose monster geographical photo album The Great Mirror provided much enjoyment to me in the past, has written a very accessible article detailing Cotton’s work, and his Madras, or cheap, school of civil engineering. Wallach also details how mismanagement under the British causes a famine in the Godavari delta in 1842, and subsequently how Cotton hit out against the critics, notably the governor-general Lord Dalhousie, of his irrigation plans because of their seemingly large cost by writing, “"If it be asked how is this great sum of money to be obtained, the answer is simply, by converting the water of the Godavery into money instead of letting it run into the sea." You may also want to read Wallach's <a href=""ags.ou.edu">other article on British Irrigation in India as well.
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Now I could add my own hot air to the Empire debates, but since neither am I a historian nor have I read critically any of the source material driving these debates, I will desist other than adding the data points of these two Englishmen, celebrated as statues on Tank Bund, which get to breathe that noxious air and get shit upon by desi “kabootharaa” (pegions).

He comes home at midnight. He thinks he is slightly drunk, so he doesn't attempt to write anything down in his notebook. He puts on the earphones, a cocoon of sound, a wave against which his bobbing head can rest. The click of keys. The rasp of a finger running under lines in a book of poetry he had bought earlier in the evening among many other books. How many people had he met in the course of the birthday party to which he was invited to earlier read in the course of their day? And how distant are most of their lives from these necessities that bind him to the page, to the shape of alphabet, to the bars of words detailing music of another kind?

This is where he drowns, the continuous whirlpool that enables him to breathe, to mark off day after day from the calendar that is pasted over his skin. People whose birthday it was today couldn't believe he was as old, or more exactly, as young as he claimed he was. That is because he has become green, and black, and perhaps even more something undefinable from diving repeatedly into the wreck.

29th June, 2006

Dear T,

As an “American-to-be” whose descendents, if they will be any, would only be able to make a less romantic claim of a Boeing 747 arrival, I can understand your concern and distress on hearing criticism of America, which in your opinion is either mistaken or born out of ignorance. After all no one, even the people offering criticism, would like it when a central part of their strongly held identity gets criticized. I also agree with you, to a point, that the “others” (which I will, partly, always be) really “don’t get it”.

I say this, because even though I am still an “alien”, I find myself helping the others “get it” at VILLA, especially when I hear broad and general criticisms of America. The quick explanation I can come up with is that they haven’t been here long enough after all to see what it is all about. As for the rest of the “others” ( many of who would also like to be ‘we” who “hold these truths to be self-evident”) beyond the tightly guarded (except the slightly more porous Mexican) borders, America, and the ideas regarding America arrive in one of two packages: 1) culture (McDonald’s, Hollywood, CNN, consumer goods, fashion, and in less common cases such as myself, as the novels of Steinbeck, Faulkner, Mark Twain and poetry of Whitman and Dickinson) and 2) geo-politics & military interventions (cases, historically and popularly, considered good: World War II; (few) cases considered less than good: Kermit Roosevelt run CIA boondoggle in Iran in the 1960s, the still painful Vietnam war – I suppose a significant number of Vietnamese didn’t exactly see GI Bill as their best hope against Communism, and the current situation in Iraq).

Thus as I see it, the “others” view America, primarily through these twin Pavlovian lenses, desire and fear. The desire, at an individual level, to be and to do, what Americans do routinely here without a second thought (when I was a kid, and had encountered America via Archies’ comics, one of my intense desires was to taste this thing Jughead, one of the characters, routinely liked to have in his high school cafeteria: a sundae), and then the fear, at a collective level, of America’s awesome military prowess. A cruise missile sadly is indifferent to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, and resembles something that The Old Testament god might have hurled at one of those pesky tribes who chose to disobey him (or her or it), or even more heretically, chose disbelief.

Given this, my understanding of this place I have come to love (I can tell you, it is quite difficult to write ecstatic hymns in many Indian cities unlike over here at Lullwater) has become more ying-yang like, and less dualistic (darkness vs. light or good vs. evil), as the speech (or rhetoric) writers to various American politicians would like the “others” to believe. For me personally, America (for that matter any other ‘real’ country, which will be necessarily composed of multiplicities and opposites) in symbolic terms is similar to a large expanse of white with a black dot of time-variable size embedded in it. Yes, there will always be “others”, some of them quite murderous, who will choose to see this black dot as America entire, as there will be those within, who will want to superficially whitewash this black dot away.

Finally, invoking Whitman’s line “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear”, I would ask you to please take this letter, with its gentle dissent, as one of those “varied carols”, in response to your “carol”, even though for now I can only claim to be an aspiring Whitman’s “rough”.

Love, S