Review of Mukherjee’s A Rising Man

A Rising Man

Abir Mukherjee

London: Vintage, 2017

ISBN: 9-78174-701345

386 pp.

It is 1919 and the First World War has left Captain Sam Wyndham in a problematic state – his wide has died in the global influenza pandemic and he has neither family nor business to keep him at home in Britain. He has also developed an opium habit which is only partly under control. When, therefore, he is offered a job in the Calcutta police force, it seems like a pretty good opportunity to start again somewhere else. Indeed, he is kept busy right from his arrival as the murder of a white man (a ‘sahib’) stirs up European society at a time when anti-colonial sentiment was growing – not least because of the little regard paid for the sacrifices made by the Empire in winning the war (and which has scarcely been highlighted subsequently) and the repressive measures introduced to stifle any dissent. This initial crime is the vehicle by which he enters Indian society and, in particular, the Raj and the people who sustain it. It is a good story, although not ground-breaking or even very startling. However, the plot does its job of introducing the readers to what always seems to have been intended to be a series of books with the same characters.

A Rising Man has won its fair share of awards and garnered high praise. I wonder, though, whether the praise comes as much from the setting and the recognition of potential rather than the actual achievements of the book itself. Setting a series in British India now enables much more interesting things to be said about the nature of Indian society and the impact of colonization than has often been possible before. It is clear that some essential relationships have been established which will allow Sam to enter into much deeper understanding of India and Indian people than would otherwise be the case. Yet the book itself is not without flaws – there are occasions, for example, when the dictum ‘show, don’t tell’ might have been more assiduously followed. Sam himself is not (yet) terribly interesting and some of the secondary characters lack depth. I notice from the back cover that the Daily Telegraph thinks that Calcutta is ‘convincingly evoked’ but my experience of India – admittedly mostly New Delhi rather than Kolkata – is otherwise. Where are the multitudes? Where are the street food vendors? Where are the animals? This Calcutta is, if anything, a little bit sanitized and orderly. Well, perhaps this will change in subsequent episodes in which our hero’s native assistant and Anglo-Indian love interest will help him come to a deeper appreciation of what is actually taking place around him.

I have observed before that the detective story is an excellent device to explore different societies and cultures. Police officers tend to have to go here and there finding out how people go about living their lives in, so to speak, real life. Further, since there is inevitably crime involved, then we will be spared from a wholesome but not entirely accurate tour of the interesting but safe parts of the destination. In this opening episode, Mukherjee gives us a taste of railways, racism, traffic jams and the Indian Civil Service. Let us see whether these issues are developed further and new ones added in future episodes.

John Walsh, Krirk University, May 2022

Review of Kerr’s A Short History of India

A Short History of India: From the Earliest Civilizations and Myriad Kingdoms to Today’s Economic Powerhouse

Gordon Kerr

Harpenden: Oldcastle Books, 2017

ISBN: 9-781843-449225

192 pp.

I have been fortunate enough to visit India several times and to meet people from various parts of that huge country. It is a land of incredible diversity and very rapid change. The first time I visited was shortly before the Commonwealth Games were due to be held in New Delhi and the refurbishment of the Indira Gandhi International Airport had yet to be completed. After I was picked up, it took an hour to get out of the airport car park as a seething mass of mostly motionless vehicles tried to cut each other up in every possible direction. It then took another two hours to get to the conference hotel, moving at the different speeds possible on roads which were shared with bullock carts, camels and elephants. Just a couple of years later and the entire journey, from the new multi-storey car park along the now open highway to the new five-star hotel took a little over an hour. The other road users were still there, of course, along with the wandering cows and the circling hawks and occasional vulture but they had been edged into a peripheral traffic system. Walking around even mostly gentrified neighbourhoods soon made it clear that the rich mixture of languages, cultures and castes was still to be found cheek-by-jowl. Economic development and urbanization had acted to intensify the amalgamation of people and, in some ways, to flatten the edges of apparent chaos.

Since my first visit, I have tried to read more about the country and to try to understand the situation better and, also, the role of the British Empire in shaping the history of India. I do not claim to be an expert by any means but I do at least have some awareness of the main issues involved. People have, in general, started to realise that historical change depends on a number of possible factors, including environmental change, disease, adoption of new forms of technology, the imposition of new ways of thinking and cultural practice and so on. The ‘great man’ theory of history was on its way out – this is not to say that individuals, the more inclusive term of ‘big beasts’ is now employed for this purpose – cannot change societies because it is very clear that some have. It is to say that they do not operate in a vacuum, fashioning the world around them on a whim. This understanding is rather different from that evident in Gordon Kerr’s A Short History of India, which is for most of its length a pageant of the great and the good and how they have made India and Indian society.

The clue, I suppose, is in the name – it is a short history. Another clue or clues are evident from looking a little more closely inside the book itself – the author is celebrated as being “… the author of many of our Short History titles, most recently A Short History of the Middle East” (back cover). Further, the only references are to five general histories of India, none of which was published first in India and none since 2010. None of the authors are Indian. It is not really surprising, therefore, that the result is a rapid skip through the ages, with some princes and kings being more successful than others in expanding and holding their territories. There is very little consideration of philosophy, cultural development, religion and all of that other stuff that pales in comparison with the sword and the bullet. Women exist as wives and daughters and as for the working classes, well, I am sure they must be around here somewhere but I cannot quite put my finger on where they are. Presumably there is still a market for books like this, which would certainly be a boon for people who like pub quizzes and so forth. It is, on the other hand, clear and logically organized and if this is what you are looking for, then I am glad you have found it.

John Walsh, Krirk University, April 2022

Indian Fashion Industry: Dharma Chakra

This morning I was involved with: Walsh, John, “The Fashion Industry and Economic Development,” keynote address given at the Virtual International Conference: Tracing 75 Years of Indian Fashion Post Independence (National Institute of Fashion Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, January 20^th-21^st, 2002).

Since we keynote addressers were allocated only 10 minutes each, I decided not to do a powerpoint presentation but just to make some remarks based on the relationship between fashion and economoic development in an emerging market.

Tan Long Group: Expanding Vietnam’s Lead in Cashew Nuts

Tan Long Group: Expanding Vietnam’s Lead in Cashew Nuts

Abstract: Tan Long Group has entered the Vietnamese cashew nut industry at a time when economic downturn and deglobalisation are threatening an economy which continues to rely on vulnerable manufacturing and assembly jobs. Vietnam is one of the world’s largest producers of cashew nuts and its leading exporter. Processing capacity in the country is higher than its production and so large number of nuts are imported for subsequent re-exporting. As an agricultural commodity, cashew nuts are subject to price volatility. To combat this, some companies have taken advantage of the burgeoning snack industry in the western world and, notably, China, to look create branded products with advanced flavours that can compete as value-added products in sophisticated markets. Tan Long Group seeks to participate in this market through creating multi-country supply and value chains.

Dilemma/Questions: Is it feasible for a company like Tan Long Group to establish a multi-country value chain for cashew nuts in a market which is not yet fully established and using technology it does not itself own?

Theory: This case relates to a version of the born global theory, which has in some cases superceded the existing models of internationalisation. In particular, it considers the political economy of Vietnamese companies in west Africa and Cambodia.

Basis of the Case: Event

Type of the case: Applied Decisional

Protagonist: Present

Findings or Options to resolve the dilemma: Vietnamese corporations are establishing a reputation in emerging markets as bringing new technology (e.g. 5G telecommunications) as part of government outreach and building on the attractiveness of the revolutionary tradition that persists in some quarters. This clashes with the long-term relationship with Cambodia, which is a smaller neighbour that has often felt overwhelmed by proximity. These issues should be considered in conjunction with purely business transactional issues.

Discussions for phenomenon base research case or Case questions for teaching case: Questions for discussion include: (i) to what extent, if any, should non-transactional issues be considered when making business decisions? Do history and politics matter in such cases? (ii) To what extent should production issues matter to final consumers? (iii) How quickly can shortfalls in technology be overcome when trying to move up from commodity to branded status? How important is this in an international market?

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My abstract for this year’s conference has been accepted – the full text is now needed in June. This year’s conference is due to be a virtual one owing to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic crisis. Consequently, I will be able to attend online (and maybe get a tandoori-based delivery dinner to heighten the experience).

Review of Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

Shashi Tharoor

New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2016

ISBN: 978-93-83064-65-6

333 pp.

Author Shashi Tharoor is a prominent member of the Lok Sabha, the Indian parliament, where he sits for Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala State. He was previously the Under Secretary-General of the UN and stood for the big job itself before transitioning into a political career. He has also written quite extensively, with a number of novels to his name before An Era of Darkness, which was his first venture into non-fiction. It was published in the UK under the title Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India and became something of a bestseller. I bought my copy at Indira Gandhi International Airport on my last visit to India and so have the version published there – I am not sure whether there are other changes apart from the title.

Tharoor’s intention in this book is to provide an accurate account of the British presence in India to make the case for reparations (despite being aware, I imagine that such reparations will never actually be paid). In doing so, he is also providing a corrective to the vacuum in the British secondary school history curriculum where colonialism and the British Empire should be found and the complacent but common attitude that it cannot have been too bad for India since they got the railways and cricket and, besides, look at them now. Few people know that in the first episodes of contact between Britain and India, British sailors were beggars on Indian streets without even shoes on their feet and that the wealth and achievements of the sub-continent dwarfed those of the cold, windy islands. He is educating the British more than the Indians, who are faced on a daily basis with the fruits of empire. Tharoor has become a competent enough historian in this venture, albeit that he has limited himself to assembling a range of secondary sources and drawing from them with some authority.

The sources themselves are mainstream rather than recondite and this in itself is something of a condemnation of the lack of understanding of the work of imperialism. The information is easily available and it has not required any advanced skills or knowledge to bring it to the public’s attention. Drawing it all together represents a potent examination of the past and its impact upon the present and the future.

Tharoor describes the impact of colonialism in a series of well-argued chapters. He is, in my opinion, particularly interesting on the question of caste and class, which he describes as being far more fluid and flexible in nature than the hidebound and sclerotic artefact that the British created. This was a deliberate act because an imperial bureaucracy cannot deal with ambivalence and fluidity. Instead, people must be definitively categorised and located within a defined scheme:

“Since the British came from a hierarchical society with an entrenched class system, they instinctively tended to look for a similar system in India. They began by anatomizing Indian society into ‘classes’ that they reference as being ‘primarily religious’ in nature. They then seized upon caste. But caste had not been a particularly stable social structure in the pre-British days (p.123).”

So too was it with the relative prominence of different local dignitaries, in a story that could have been extended to Myanmar, Malaysia and various parts of Africa. Where before there was the ambiguity that permitted people to get on with each other when communities of quite different a nature are in close proximity to each other, later there came ossification of supposed distinctions that enable personal foibles to be transformed into ridiculous foppery and societal shortcomings that make possible and justify intervention. The same thing can be argued for gender relations and sexual identity, which in history had been complex and largely non-judgemental but in imperial times became subject to the form of prurient puritanity that characterises the British imagination. Across the whole range of human interactions, the same story is told – the British imposed an unwanted  superstructure of rigid class and race relations upon Indian society that has hampered its progress ever since and led to a series of incidences of unfair treatment meted out to those disfavoured by the system.

Tharoor goes through the more well-known episodes with an appropriate level of detail and outrage, from the Bengal famine and Churchill’s contempt to the Jallianwala Bagh or Amritsar massacre to the mistreatment of Indian and other imperial troops during the world wars. Although I myself have become familiar with these as individual episodes, it is very helpful to have this comprehensive account of the entire phenomenon. His argument is compelling and persuasive and if he has helped to educate some people as to what really happened in the past then he has certainly done us a great service.

John Walsh, RMIT Vietnam, April 2020

Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Roy, Arundhati

London and New York, NY: Verso, 2014

ISBN: 9-781784-780319

127 pp.

In her latest collection of political writings, Arundhati Roy (whom it is obligatory to refer to as the Booker prize-winning author of The God of Small Things) describes the impact of the great transformation on Indian society. People and communities move from a situation in which many institutions play a role in their lives, including religion, social relations, recreation, work and the market, to one in which the market is the predominant institution in which they take the roles of producers and consumers. Capitalism brings all the joys of creative destruction, which many of course are unable to deal with and suffer as a result. Not the least of these is those who are displaced by the creation of the new geography of the emerging nation:

“The Dholera SIR [special investment region] is only one of the smaller Matryoshka dolls, one of the inner ones in the dystopia that is being planned. He will be connected to the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), a 1,500-km-long and 300-km-wide corridor with nine megaindustrial zones, a high-speed freight line, three seaports, six airports, a six-lane intersection-free expressway, and a 4,000-mw power plant (pp.16-7).”

I am aware of this from my own experience of visiting the Greater Noida region every year for the BIMTECH case study conference. Greater Noida incorporates a very extensive area of urbanization, in which industrial estates, residential areas, roads and educational institutions (but precious little functioning retail space) have been built on land once farmed by villagers. Those farmers were evicted and have subsequently launched a campaign of obstruction and stone-throwing that has disrupted construction over the past few years. If they have suffered from capitalism, then their situation under pre-capitalism – or feudalism – was hardly desirable either:

“In India the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post-International Monetary Fund (IMF) ‘reforms’ middle-class – the market – live side by side with spirits of the netherworld, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains, and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less than twenty Indian rupees a da (p.8).”

Roy considers a wide range of issues in this slender volume, moving from the undermining of progressive institutions by right wing money to the reasons why Afzal Guru was put to death by the state at the time he was for his supposed involvement in the Parliament Attack of 2001. He of course was from Kashmir and it is that region, which Roy describes as the most heavily militarized in the world, that stands at the centre of the book. The abuses of the state, which are well-documented, are symbolic of the relationship between it and the poor and working-class Indian people. They are treated as expendable and demonized as terrorists if they resist depredation (there is a lot of this sort of stuff about). The author is known as an activist and suffered from ill-treatment by organized mobs for protesting against abuses of power and from pointing out inconvenient truths: “India hopes to manage [Kashmir] with the usual combination of force and poisonous Machiavellian manipulation designed to pit people against one another. The war in Kashmir is presented as a battle between an inclusive secular democracy and radical Islamists (pp.90-1).” Yet, she argues, it is Saudi money going in to the madrassas and there is precious little evidence that external interventions in the Kashmir-Pakistan-Afghanistan region have resulted in positive outcomes.

The book ends with a brief speech given to the Occupy movement in the USA. As with that movement and many other progressive movements, Roy is sharp and clinical in identifying what is wrong but less forthcoming when it comes to providing a practical manifesto of actions to improve the situation. She is far from the only worker to display this lack of practicality and, in fairness, this is not a book that promises political solutions. However, while contributing to the pessimism of the intellect for which Gramsci called, it does not help much with the optimism of the spirit for which he hoped.

John Walsh, Shinawatra University

Seasonal Labour Migration from a Rural Nepalese Village

Dilip Kumar Jha and John Walsh, “Seasonal Labour Migration from a Rural Nepalese Village,” International Journal of Migration and Residential Mobility,” forthcoming article: http://www.inderscience.com/info/ingeneral/forthcoming.php?jcode=ijmrm.

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature and extent of seasonal labour migration among a sample of villagers in Janakpur province of Nepal. Personal interviewing was combined with ethnographic observation with content analysis of the database of findings subsequently conducted. The system of migration is persistent rather than stable; work is available in natural resource extraction or processing facilities and urban environments. The former is easier to plan for than the latter, which can be risky and some migrants are unable to support themselves. The research is limited in both space and time and, owing to the lack of knowledge about the working practices of people in this area, can be considered to be exploratory in nature Better networking and information provision would help migrants find regular jobs and to avoid wasting time and money. The system as it currently exists does little if anything to improve the lives of the migrants and their families overall other than to try to meet sudden unexpected expenses. Otherwise, it seems to provide very little benefit to any stakeholder. Few studies exist that help to indicate how rural Nepal is becoming linked with international markets and what the impacts of such links might be. It is shown that, under current circumstances, few benefits are yet flowing to the Nepalese village studied.
Keywords: migration; Nepal; India; seasonal work; rural

 

Review of Sanjeev Sanyal’s Land of the Seven Rivers

 

My review of Sanjeev Sanyal’s Land of the Seven Rivers has been published at the SIU Journal of Management, Vol.3, No.2 (December, 2013).

Read the full review here..

Trade Facilitation and Trading across Borders: A Case Study of India

Announcing: Surendar Singh and R.C Mishra, “Trade Facilitation and Trading across Borders: A Case Study of India,” SIU Journal of Management, Vol.3, No.2 (December, 2013).

Abstract:

Trade facilitation has been a matter of great interest among policymakers around the globe and particularly in India. Trade facilitation is broadly defined as a set of policies aiming to reduce the cost of exports and imports. It has been used as the key instrument for promoting the exports of a country. India has also taken various steps through trade facilitation programmes to promote its exports. In the light of the above, the first part of the paper reviews trade facilitation programmes initiated by India; the second part analyzes India’s performance in terms of trade facilitation vis-à-vis China, Brazil, South Africa and Russia. It further explores trading across borders at selected ports of India. The final section of the paper highlights the recent measures by various trade facilitating institutions to improve trade facilitation in India.

Keywords: export performance, trade expansion, trade facilitation, trade logistics, trade regulatory measures

Download the full paper here.

Fighting Climate Change: Dispossession of the Poor

One of the most notable features of the international economy  in recent years has been the willingness of nearly every government in the world  to embrace ‘market-friendly’ policies. This has made some people very rich, of  course and a large number of people very poor and unhappy.

Read the full article here.