Hri Institute for Southasian Research and Exchange

By: Laxmi Murthy

Maybe it’s a case of “too much” history – an ancient civilization and all that. The neglect of the written word should come as no surprise, given the appalling condition of the majority of historic sites in the Subcontinent. Yet, the utter disregard for manuscripts and materials of a bygone era never fails to shock.

In a series of blog posts, the New York Times highlights the sorry state of archives in India. Research scholar Dinyar Patel laments the decline of interest in archiving among his own dwindling community, the Parsis.  In this piece Patel highlights the fact that manuscripts are literally disintegrating, due to lack of preservation. And this despite the required equipment being available – but also rotting away.

And amidst the fungus and termites nibbling away at India’s past comes a bespectacled knight in the shape of Prof Mushirul Hasan, who has taken over the National Archives since 2012.  He is the first ever scholar to be the Director General, a post normally reserved for disgruntled babus. Patel quotes Hri Adviser historian Ram Guha: “Archives are the lowest priority for any government,” said historian Ramachandra Guha. “They are staffed by government officials on punishment postings rather than trained professionals.”

Bringing to bear a contrasting view to the “Oh Indians don’t value the past” view is Murali Ranganathan, an independent researcher, based in Mumbai. He says that the pre-colonial tradition of archives and libraries was extremely strong elsewhere in India: dynasties in Maharashtra, Assam, and Mysore kept vast collections that still survive. Beginning around 1900, he argued, Indians started to become too poor to properly maintain their collections, although several institutions, such as the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna and the Saraswathi Mahal Library in Thanjavur (Tanjore), have maintained excellent traditions of preserving pre-British era books and manuscripts.

Perhaps it is time to resurrect indigenous processes of archiving, even as a new generation of archivists come to the fore, armed with new techniques of preservation and cataloguing.

[Many thanks to Amar Gurung for bringing this series to my attention]

Text and images: Sarita Manu, in Dhaka

Emotions have been running high in Bangladesh since the country’s ecstatic win over India and Sri Lanka in the Asia Cup and the tearful loss for the home team in the finals against Pakistan. With the finals played out only a few days away from Bangladesh’s 40^th Independence Day on 26 March, writer and journalist Shahriar Kabir, Executive President of Nirmul Committee, had only one pre-match message for the Tigers of the Bangladesh Cricket team: to remember the brutal genocide of Bangladeshis that began 41 years ago.

At 8:00 pm yesterday evening, the Ekatturer Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee (Forum for Secular Bangladesh and Trial of War Criminals of 1971) lit mashaals (torches) and walked in a candlelight procession in memory of those killed in 25 March, 1971. Forty mashaals were lit and people marched from the Central Shaheed Minar to the Jagannath Hall premises at Dhaka University. At midnight of 25 March 1971, 41 years ago, the Pakistani occupying forces in then East Pakistan began killing unarmed Bengalis. A nine-month long war followed, ending with the independence of Bangladesh. A prime target was also the Dhaka University: several teachers, students and staffs of Dhaka University were killed by the Pakistani army and buried at the courtyard of students’ hostel named Jagannath Hall. The Shaheed Minar was built to in remembrance of the martyrs of the historic Language Movement of 1952. Numerous students and political activists started a process on 21 February, 1952 demanding that Bengali be given the status of a national language. The protestors were fired upon and many were killed. To commemorate this movement, Shaheed Minar was built at the place of the massacre.

The evening was attended by freedom fighters, politicians, socio-cultural activists, and Bangladeshi citizens in numbers. Addressing the gather in a public speech before the march, the committee demanded the observance of 25 March as ‘International Genocide Day’ and also urged Parliamentarians to move the initiative ahead.

Please click on the thumbnail for the full picture from the evening:

Last week’s news media featured a lot of talk about being, or making, someone ‘human’. Roger Cohen of the International Herald Tribune – among various others – wrote about Anthony Shadid, foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Baghdad and Beirut, whose death on February 16 is being mourned by many. He was so important, they all said, and his work so respected, because of his ability to “humanize” a conflict. Of Shadid, Cohen wrote, “His explorations of Arab societies not static or dehumanized — freed from the distorting lens of the West — offered portraits of places and people adapting with difficulty to modernity. To reductive cradles of Islamic fanaticism, images that satisfied a Western thirst, his counterpoint was portraits of civilizations whose wounds did not efface their poetry. He relished contradiction. He abhorred the bellicosity of simplification in the angry post-9/11 age.”

Seldom, in my memory, have tributes to a journalist been so marked by that idea — their ability to understand and filter through the history and political complexity of a crisis situation to tell a more full picture of the impact on human life. In the Jakarta Globe Kamila Shamsie wrote about showing “the softer side of Pakistan“. As a counter to the “one-dimensional view” of Pakistan created largely by foreign correspondents, Shamsie called attention to cultural production — the music, art, history, and literature of a place. Highlighting such works isn’t just about showing the “softer” side of a country, she said. It is important because it draws attention to people, and to a society as more than just a site of violent destruction. It is the human – or humane – side of Pakistan that is absent from much of the current conversation.

These writings got me thinking about journalism as a medium of representation, as a tool of aggression, and as an active participant in the waging of war. As a very simple and recent example, one could look at the way the New York Times has been reporting on the so-called “nuclear crisis” in Iran. It all seems a bit like the all-too-fast escalation of emotions that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

And then I was reminded of a David Brookes piece from the end of September, also in the New York Times (“The Limits of Empathy“). Admittedly, Brookes had little research to prove his thesis, but I read it in a time of questioning, and it sent me into a little tailspin of despair. Brookes asserted that while it was all very well to try and “promote empathy”, empathy was not linked to moral action. He cited as examples “Nazi prison guards [who] sometimes wept as they moved down Jewish women and children, but they still did it. Subjects in the famous Milgram experiments [who] felt anguish as they appeared to administer electric shocks to other research subjects, but they pressed on because some guy in a lab coat told them to.”  His argument that empathy is largely overblown was a terribly depressing, if somehow still seductive, assertion.

After all, the (implicit!) mission of Hri is to do the sort of work that leads to a better understanding of the plurality that comprises Southasia, in an effort to promote pluralism as essential to sustainable peace. (A tall order, and some pretty big ideas.) But at the heart of all this is the belief that too much conflict is the result of misinformation. A recognition and understanding of diversity – in its contentious complexity – is a necessary basis for individuals to reach out to those they deem ‘different’. And at the end of the day, the actions of a society – a group, a community, a government – are determined by individuals. Isn’t this ultimately the idea behind groups such as Seeds of Peace, organizations that are usually considered successful in their ability to promote peace in conflict-ridden environments? Perhaps the security studies strategists and classical economists have it right after all – people act to promote their self-interest. Empathy cannot serve as a basis for consistent moral action, especially in times of conflicting needs.

Brooks never showed, though that active attempts to teach and promote empathy failed to reduce future incidence of conflict, whether interpersonal or group. So I decided to undertake my own casual and unscientific investigation, using the internet. It seemed that Brooks’ analysis really fell apart when one looked at the solution – or the alternative – to promoting empathy as a means of producing moral action. Brooks proposed a moral code as the way of making sure individuals were given the combination of discipline and pre-packaged thoughts that would guide them down a particular path. But then Jason Marsh, from Greater Good – a science and society research centre at Berkeley – came to my assistance. Marsh pointed out various studies that refute the idea of empathy as “useless”, particularly in guiding an individual or group’s course of action. Marsh’s most helpful take-away point is the reminder that empathy is a necessary first step, not an end.  Judging by the comments on this and other sites, however, many other readers shared my reaction to Brooks’ piece. Why was this? Why were we so willing to think that this cold rejection of empathy was somehow more valid than our belief in its power?

This brings me back, then, to Southasia. By understanding the context of another person’s beliefs and assertions, we may be less likely to react with immediate anger or defensiveness.  What would it mean to have more reporters like Shadid reporting on Southasian conflicts and political tension, within the region? Who recognize contradictions and contrasts, and can convey complexity – simply? If we can appreciate the value of pluralism, we move away from imposing a singular version of history on others.  Organizations like Seeds of Peace, and programmes like the “Teaching Tolerance” initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Centre,  work institutionally to promote empathy and understanding, especially among young people. On the other hand, the mainstream media has often functioned to incite jingoistic fervour and disparage communities and entire nations. So what is the basis – especially in Southasia – for believing in a sense of common, or shared humanity, one that could be picked up on by media, for example? And if the main work of journalism is to expose, and the task of non-governmental or community organizations to then follow up, what are some initiatives that have focussed on promoting empathy – group or individual – in the region?

-Kabita Parajuli