FACTORES DEL RENDIMIENTO ACADÉMICO

I ! Bombay

On the surface of it, understanding the city space of Bombay is made easier because of its iconic establishment in popular imagination. While some of the world’s most renowned cities (that familiar trinity, for example: London, New York and Paris) are perhaps recognised above all else for their manifest furniture (Big Ben, the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower respectively), globally, Bombay is a metropolis understood in less concrete terms. It is best known for the consternation it evokes at its sheer extraordinariness of scale and for its bewildering array of discrepant lives. Along with Delhi, too, it could be said to exist almost universally (in the developed world, at least) as a paradigm of slum living. A recent example or two of the furnishing of this popular image would be helpful. Danny Boyle’s rendering of the city in Slumdog Millionaire, the director’s 2008 adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A, contributes to the common understanding of Bombay as an ultra-competitive space (or spaces) of acute unevenness. Consider the opening sequence of the film, in which the young lead, Jamal, along with his friends, is hotly pursued over a cricket square-cum- airport runway by angry guards into the settlement that lies adjacent to it. The young boys, at first hotfooting their way across a steep pile of waste, then scurry across ramshackle tin roofs and through passages ultimately too narrow and labyrinthine for their stalkers to navigate. Everything about the arrangement – the low-angle shots of darting bare feet; the lopsided, disorienting shots (one high, one low) of the boys snaking through the alleyways; the flustered and

increasingly perspiring guards, losing both their bearings and their targets – gives a view of the slum as a space that exists beyond the governance of the city authorities. By association, it is shown to be a space largely impervious to the benefits of the adjacent (rapidly modernising) space: the runway, after all, does not for the slum dwellers provide anything more than a transient, and illegal, leisure space. One might also look towards two of the literary texts under discussion here, and in doing so observe a similar practice of representation taking place. Momentarily setting aside the cautionary axiom that one is best not to judge a book by its cover, take the book sleeves of Mehta’s Maximum City and Boo’s Beyond the Beautiful Forevers. The former, a high-angle monochrome image of two urban trains, stretching the long span of a station platform and flanked on all sides deep into the background by a toing-and-froing mass of blurred bodies (an act of photographic trickery making each member of the mass a faceless grey swoosh), substantiates the well-known image of an overcrowded, pulsating Bombay. Somewhat by contrast, the cover image of Boo’s text, an at- heel, low-angle shot (again blurred) of a barefoot and bare-chested young slum dweller dashing down a narrow passage, limbs sprawling towards the proverbial and literal light at the cover’s top, could well be a nod towards the sort of rags- to-riches narrative of Boyle’s film. And, like Boyle (and, by the same token, Swarup), the cover, in its placing centre-page the large-scale body of a slum inhabitant, ostensibly broaches the issue of documenting one of Bombay’s most under-represented lives.

Indeed, one can with a fair degree of authority stake the claim that Bombay’s standing in the global imaginary is motivated more by the magnitude of its present conditions – images of a speedily globalising metropolis and its fetid underbelly – than by the legacy of its past, colonial or otherwise. In turn, a great deal of the artistic attention paid to the city in recent times has focused on its social landscape. At one extreme, focus has fallen on the burgeoning middle classes and their increasingly decadent lifestyles while, at the other, there has been something of a fascination with the Bombayites consigned to its slums, and to a life of uncertainty. Certainly, publications such as Mehta’s and Boo’s quite neatly fall within a trajectory that has become commonly referred to as an “anthropological turn” in literature, a phenomenon by no means particular to

India, but ostensibly more prevalent in settings like it – places prone to mis- or under-representation. ‘Anthropology and literature have become mutually interdependent in hitherto unknown ways,’1

writes Jürgen Schlaeger in his introduction to The Anthropological Turn in Literary Studies (1996). And then: ‘Literature is a kind of anthropology, and anthropology that excludes literature as part of the basic needs and capacities of humans will always remain only a torso.’2

I contend here, though, that the undertakings of Mehta and Boo conform to a more nuanced anthropological charge that is not unconscious of (and at times even embraces) the shortcomings of neutral observation, opting to firmly embed the presence of the writer within the narrative. True, this results in an arguably much less authoritative anthropological account (of which the writers are aware) but which nevertheless contributes something to the Indian literary archive.3

There remains a little theoretical housekeeping to be taken care of. Debates have long been waged over the efficacy and the ethics of anthropological work, including examples such as the dispute between V.Y. Mudimbe and Peter Rigby, the former taking issue with the latter over the issue of participant observation.4 Similarly, so too has there been protracted dialogue concerning the (in)ability of the academic – the novelist, the social scientist or otherwise – to recover, and to speak on behalf of, the subaltern subject. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak poses the questions: ‘How can we touch the consciousness of people, even as we investigate their politics? With what voice-consciousness can the subaltern speak?’5

While Spivak’s seminal essay is roundly dismissive of the intellectual’s capability in this regard – ‘to confront them is not to represent them but to learn to represent ourselves,’6

she suggests – there appears to be a different

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1 _{Jürgen Schlaeger, ‘Introduction’, in The Anthropological Turn in Literary Studies (Tübingen,}

Germany: G. Narr, 1996), p.xii.

2 _ibid.

3 _{Indian non-fiction was to be the new fiction,’ Amit Chaudhuri’s agent suggests to the novelist}

during the discussion that resulted in the commissioning of Two Years in the City.

4 _{See V.Y Mudimbe, Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality and Politics in Central Africa}

(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); and Peter Rigby, Persistent Pastoralists: Nomadic Societies in Transition (London: Zed Books, 1984). In the former text, in an otherwise generally collected essay, Mudimbe asks of Rigby: ‘How can one dare to write even a paper on the basis of such limited experience?’ (p. 167).

5 _{Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’, Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial}

Theory, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), pp. 66-111 (p. 80).

responsibility adopted. For Boo, that assignment is humanitarian in nature; Mehta, meanwhile, adopts the duty of providing a brand of indiscriminate social observation. And for both writers, Spivak’s comment that attempts to represent the subaltern subject yield only lessons on self-representation, if credible, would seem actually to be beneficial. After all, their respective texts serve the twofold purpose of both illuminating untold Bombay narratives and helping their authors discover a place for themselves in the spiritual fabric of the city. That is to suggest, too, that neither text is over-encumbered by a responsibility to serve social, political (or, for that matter, postcolonial) ends. Rather, it would seem both are content it to contribute minutely but valuably to that same spiritual fabric.

II ! Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012)

It is important to acknowledge first off that Behind the Beautiful Forevers reads like a novel. It begins:

Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father. In a slum hut by the international airport, Abdul’s parents came to a decision with an uncharacteristic economy of words. The father, a sick man, would wait inside the trash-strewn, tin-roofed shack where the family of eleven resided. He’d go quietly when arrested. Abdul, the household earner, was the one who had to flee. (p. ix)

One might read the text entirely on its merits as a work of fiction, then, and find that the narrative is suitably and entertainingly marked by all of the idiosyncrasies of slum life as one may already have understood it. From its beginnings here, with Abdul desperately trying to avoid arrest following the death of a neighbour (an incident he is not responsible for, but for which he is charged), to its would-be conclusion, which finds Abdul still waiting, ‘in a suspended state between guilt and innocence’ (p. 240), for the resolution to his case, the reader is carried through moments of injustice and corruption, enterprise and social peril. That the narrative ultimately arrives at something of an impasse at its closure – Abdul still consigned to a life of purgatory – is pertinent on two counts. In the first place, it provides confirmation that the text is

not the celebratory, rags-to-riches narrative that the cover might have us believe. More importantly, the irresolution (as the reader discovers in the pages that follow the closure of the text proper) is a precise reflection of the real-life events that have given rise to the narrative. For the book is not a work of fiction: it is, as Boo reveals in her post-script, a blow-by-blow account based on the three years she spent in Annawadi. Her explanation is straightforward: ‘The events recounted in the preceding pages are real, as are all the names. From the day in November 2007 that I walked into Annawadi … until March 2011, when I completed my reporting, I documented the experiences of the residents with written notes, video recordings, audio tapes and photographs.’ (p. 249) And, as though to corroborate not only her first-hand experiences, but also the larger factuality of the book’s events (such as those surrounding Abdul’s prosecution), she explains: ‘I also used more than three thousand public records many of them obtained after years of petitioning government agencies under India’s landmark Right to Information act.’ (p. 250)

Nevertheless, with a mind towards the issue at stake in the grand scheme of this chapter, one is faced with a series of challenges. What can Behind the Beautiful Forevers contribute to anthropological work on the Indian slum when it is presented in its guise of a narrative that, it terms of the text proper, hides the narrator’s presence? By the same token, to what extent is its literariness detracted from by one’s knowledge of its production? Certainly, these are not issues only of academic concern. ‘You wonder, intermittently, about the book’s omniscient narrator,’ writes Pankaj Mishra in his review of the book in The New York Times:

Perhaps wisely, Boo has absented herself from her narrative. The story of how a white American journalist overcame the suspicion of her subjects (and the outright hostility of the police), or dealt with the many ethical conundrums created by close contact between the first and fourth worlds, belongs to another book.7

One might respond to these posed questions by firstly considering more of Boo’s framing remarks, and with her apparent motivation for writing the book. She writes:

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7 _{Pankaj Mishra, ‘Fighting for Scraps: Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers Explores a}

Mumbai Slum’, New York Times, February 9, 2012. Accessed at:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/katherine-boos-behind-the-beautiful- forevers-explores-a-mumbai-slum.html>.

I grew impatient with poignant snapshots of Indian squalor: the ribby children with flies in their eyes and other emblems of abjectness that one can’t help but see within five minutes of walking into a slum. For me – and, I would argue, for the parents of most impoverished children, in any country – the more important line of inquiry is something that takes longer to discern. What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government’s economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? By what means might that ribby child grow up to be less poor? (pp. 247-248) Boo, then, laments the lack of variety when it comes to narratives about India. More generally, she bemoans this same lack elsewhere. ‘What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too,’ (p. 237) she notes. But, if she is justified in her grievances – and I strongly contend that she is – one needs to seek out the origin of this present reality.

It does not go too far to suggest that far outweighing Boo’s concern over the very existence of poverty is a personal animosity that comes from the writer’s perceived sense that poverty itself has been commoditised. In other words, in the would-be democratic but aggressive world of liberal capitalism, the poorest of the poor cannot even lay claim to their own impoverishment. Representation of this impoverishment belongs to a higher power. At fault, as I would put it, is the continued and widespread belief, held both in the West and in the rapidly developing world, in the profitability (economically, but also socially and culturally) of Western models of modernity – and particularly in capitalist materialism. This requires elaboration. In states such as India (but one might well also include other such states: Brazil, Nigeria or Indonesia, for example), rapid development witnesses the creation of a new bourgeois class often magnetised by the acquisitive spirit of Western-style liberal capitalism – its fashionable apparel, its culinary trends and its seemed need for uninhibited gratification. What a spectacle this provides, then, for Western eyes as these new replica classes emerge; what intrigue is stirred up when the familiar commercial logos of the Western world are seen in images of Indian or Nigerian streets, or when sleek shopping centres are shown to have popped up to create entire Western enclaves; and what curiosity is roused when items of Western dress (three-striped sports jackets or crocodile emblazoned shirts perhaps8

) are seen adorning brown bodies. And yet so too is the corollary of this model – a left-behind and deprived underclass – a source of fascination also.

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8 For clarity, it might be made clear that I am referring here to the branding techniques of

Over time, then, these developing spaces become defined by narratives of polarity that mark off the powerful from the powerless, the rich from the poor and the decadent from the destitute. But not only has the glossy structure of the West long held a monopoly in just this sense. More than that, perhaps due in part to the global reach and influence of its artistic culture in the likes of Hollywood, for example, it has also something of a hold over the world’s available narratives. Willing consumers of Western modernity’s over-the-counter commodities (of whom there are many) are increasingly receptive to the narrowing repository of familiar narratives, to which the rags-to-riches plot ostensibly belongs. They might be captivated, too, by the narrative of the irretrievably destitute group in need of Western intervention (and one might consider also this particular narrative’s appeal beyond the confines of artistic culture). Boo takes issue with the reductive rendering of poverty replete with, as she points out, its own emblems: ribby children with flies in their eyes. It follows that these portrayals of abjection conceal as much as they make visible. Perhaps this helps one begin

to better understand Boo’s tack. When considering texts like Behind the

Beautiful Forevers, there would seem to emerge a need to move away from the narrative seeking to give voice, with all the problems it poses to questions of representation. Instead, the idea of occupying space again becomes important. And it is this an undertaking of this nature that I credit here to Boo. In the same review mentioned above, Mishra remarks of the book ‘fully inhabiting India’s troubled present’,9

a pertinent appraisal of the author’s project.

For the rules of the game have changed, as far as both postcolonial writing is concerned and writing more generally. Let me address these points in turn. Firstly, it goes largely without mentioning that one would find it problematic to discuss Katherine Boo as a postcolonial writer, in the sense that questions of origin, education and so on give rise to obvious quarrels. Equally, speaking to the plight of a much larger, non-nationally aligned underclass, we might make the claim that Boo’s work is at odds with the postcolony as a national space. Such has been the development of India after independence, such has been the growth

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9 _{Mishra, <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/katherine-boos-behind-the-}

of the country into a recognisable, largely functional entity,10

that the national narrative continues apace regardless of the huge number it leaves behind. This sub-stratum of subaltern subjects, aligned not with their respective nations but connected to each other as a united body of subaltern subjects, is the untethered by-product of aggressive development in the liberal capitalist mould. But, in the interests of taking action and offering a genuine challenge, it is of no use to level the blame at such an abstract monolith as, say, the West, or global capitalism. Thus, following Upstone’s call for operating within microstructures, Boo occupies (quite literally in her case) a space virtually microscopic by global standards. From here she can begin to appreciate, and to represent, the minutiae of Annawadi life. That is, the small-scale trade formations, the political power structures, the sub-social hierarchy, the second-hand energy of development creeping in from the adjacent city. True, her narrative suggests that what happens there in Annawadi ‘happens elsewhere, too’; tellingly, though, it does not take up the mantle of giving voice to those other spaces. It settles, instead, on this singular space in which her immersion in the territory is influential in every sense. We can see this in Boo’s comments that, in trying at great length to corroborate some of the accounts she writes, by requesting access to public records, she learned ‘the means by which government corruption and