Re-Reading Lewis Thomas: Obituary Lecture for Franson Manjali (Kochi Memorial Meeting organised by JosephDavis2024)

Post Covid Re-reading of Lewis Thomas Susan Visvanathan (Former Professor of Sociology,CSSS, JNU susanvisvanathan@gmail.com) That Covid left a trail of destruction is our great loss, as we co-existed with rampant death for two years(2020-2022). After that, those who suffered from long Covid left us, without saying goodbye. Lewis Thomas’ “The Youngest Science: Notes of A Medicine Watcher”(Penguin 1995) tells us beguilingly that right up till the mid 1930s, there was no cure for many diseases, such as influenza, syphilis, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, measles, chickenpox. Doctors and nurses provided palliative care, and hoped for cell regeneration given the circumstances of rest and nutrition provided to the patients. He writes that the purpose of the curriculum was primarily to diagnose and recognize the disease, to classify, list their signs, symptoms and make accurate diagnoses. There were some remedies such as aspirin, morphine, digitalis, bromides, barbiturates ( ibid 27). While the doctors counseled patients on their visits, it was the nurses who were the institutional catalysts who networked between the medics (professors and interns) other nursing staff, aids, cleaners, porters, lift operators and management. It was they who had the institutional pulse and knew each patient in terms of diagnoses and active treatment, which was in their hands. Because of their catalytic knowledge and networking abilities, they had the ability to be friends and confidants of those who were in danger by serious illness, and carry information to their family (ibid 67). Lewis Thomas thus shifts the trajectory of the nurse as having the job of carrying out doctors’ orders to one who, as a professional, lived in the intimate zone between life and death. Nurses make it their business to know everything that is going on. They spot errors before they can be laundered. They know everything written on the chart. Most of all, they know their patients as unique human beings, and they get know their families. Because of intimate knowledge, they are quick to sense warps in the system and act upon it. According to Lewis, the average sick person feels anxious most of the time because of anonymity, no identity other than the name tag, the sense of being left adrift with a plastic tag with number, and in danger of getting lost, being whisked into a wrong laboratory, to have a wrong procedure and so on. He writes, ‘The attending physician or the house officer on rounds and usually in a hurry, can murmur a few reassuring words on his way out the door, but it takes a confident, competent and cheerful nurse, there all day long and in and out of the room on one chore or another through the night, to bolster one’s confidence that the situation is indeed manageable and not about to get out of hand” (ibid 69). Lewis Thomas argues that the evolution of language is parallel in terms of its concepts like the evolution of the species itself. The question of’ when cannot be answered, he writes, because we have to think of the existence of prokaryotes which are organisms which have the appearance of bacteria. These left traces in rocks 2 to 3 billion years ago. Two and a half billion years ago they appeared as algal mats (ibid 52). A billion years ago these algae produced enough oxygen into the earth’s atmosphere to form nucleated cells. From there formed the mitochondria and chloroplasts of plant cells which coexist with us today. Similarly, the roots of language are produced perhaps twenty thousand years ago. For Thomas, the root word for doctor is leech, coming from the work laece in English, lake in Middle Dutch, in early Germanic it was lekjaz. In Indo European languages, its origin was in “leg” which meant “to collect”, with derivatives leading “to speak’ : hence lecture, logic, and logos are from leg. Lekjaz communicated magic words, leech stood for the double meaning of a worm as well as Doctor. Assimilation is the term used for the fusion of two different meanings in one term. The idea of ‘collecting’ present in ‘leg’ has persisted, as it combines the doctor’s penchant for collecting blood and fees ( ibid 53). He goes on to explain that the word Doctor comes from “dek” meaning something proper and useful. It became docere in Latin, to teach, also discere, to learn, hence disciple. In Greek it was understood to mean an acceptable kind of teaching, thus the roots for dogma and orthodox ( ibid 53) Here, I come to the work of Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romain Vanishing Voices (2002). They show how oral traditions become threatened with extinction, when languages are no longer used and are forgotten. One remembers here the encyclopaedic work of Ganesh Devy and his team where documentation of existing languages and dialects become the basis of their survival. Oral languages according to Nettle and Romaine survive through intergenerational transmission. Languages become extinct when people do not use this language any more. They prefer to educate children in commercially viable languages which help them with education and jobs. Peripheral languages become extinct, in favour of metropolitan languages. Official languages are not known by the majority of the population - these involve metalanguages and technical languages. Laboratory languages, with the creation of dictionaries and sometimes scripts try to rejuvenate oral tradition. This can end up as a form of museumisation. The will to learn a language and use a script makes a dying or dead language become reactivated. Languages are a storehouse of memories and knowledge. Levi Strauss, striving to generalize the unity of the human mind, spoke about the depth and variation of botanical classifications in South America by tribal communities and the complexity of kinship algebra in Australian tribal communities. Industrialisation depletes forms of traditional knowledges. The comparative method was used by Anthropology to collate vast literature across society. Malinowki’s intervention regarding matriliny and the place of the mother’s brother sought to critique Freud’s concept of the Oedipal complex. In the Trobriand case, the nephew felt antagonism toward the maternal uncle, not his biological father. The question of nature and nurture thus became central to Sociology. Lewis discusses the questions of neurological trajectories which define perception in the following way. In real life, research is dependent on the human capacity for making predictions that are erroneous, and in the ability that researchers have to bounce back. The predictions are pure guess work. Often they are wrong. Error is the mode. We all know this this in our bones, whether engaged in science or in the ordinary business of life. More often than not, our firmest predictions are chance-based, on what we imagine to be probability rather than certainty, and become used to blundering very early in life. Indeed, the universal experience, mandated in the development of every young child, of stumbling, dropping things, saying the words wrong, spilling oatmeal and sticking ones thumb in one’s eye are part of the preparation for adult living. A successful child is one who has learned so thoroughly about his own fallibility that he can never forget it, all the rest of his life ( ibid 82). For Lewis, research is born out of recognizing error, and re-searching again. Its root is err, which does not mean ”wrong”; the Indo_European root is ‘ers’, signifying “to be set in motion”, it comes into Latin as errare, meaning to “wonder’ but the same root emerges in Old Norse as “ras” or rushing about looking for something. The English word “race” comes from ras. In order to get something right, we must get something wrong, or to quote Lewis, “many things wrong”. Here, he turns to the term “stochastic” which communicates randomness. Stochastic is the term for pure chance. “But it started out, as happens so often in language, with precisely the opposite meaning. The original Greek root was stokahs, meaning a brick column used in a target, from this the root word meaning “to take aim” were derived. (ibid 83) We like to think that we take aim to hit targets by taking advantage of a human gift for meaning and precision. But there is this secret, embedded in the language itself: we become accurate only by trial and error, we tend to wander about, searching for targets. It is being in motion, at random (from a root meaning running) that permits us to get things done. Edward Lorenz in his book, Chaos suggests that even chaos has rules, we only need to decipher them. In the pendulum gone awry, or arrythamea the beat that is missing is calculable, just as the metaphor that a butterfly wing flapping can create tremors in the atmosphere, sufficient to create a storm (or not). This is how Lorenz moves from the idea of a rule bound universe to one of random chance. It also explains Levi Strauss preoccupation that change in any one element can change the entire structure. Jonathan Weiner’s Time, Love, Memory (1999) orchestrates an account of the mutations of fruit flies in milk bottles in the 1950s to help us understand why obsessive interest by scientists on DNA and chromosomes helped us to understand different beats and rhythms in human neurological webs. In an interesting analogy between receptors of language, and receptors of antibodies, Lewis Thomas says that antibodies are created by using certain virus loaded genes which are then spliced onto an animal. The cross channel information is received, antigens are created when the body recognizes a foreign body. Lymphocites rush to respond, and a clump of lymphocites form to hereditarily pass on this information. He writes, “When the horse serum protein appears it is not recognizable to any but a small minority of the cell population, for all the rest it is a waste of time, motion, and effort. Also, there are risks all around, chances of making major blunders, endangering the whole organism. Flawed lymphocites can turn with an inability to distinguish between self and nonself, and replication of these can bring down the entire structure with the devastating diseases of autoimmunity. Blind spots can exist, or gaps in recognition analogous to color blindness, so that certain strain of animals are genetically unable to recognize the foreignness of certain bacteria and viruses. (Thomas 1995:85) This is the reason that in the odd case, a vaccination can maim or kill. Preeti Monga, the gifted pedagogue who became blind after vaccination has written of living a normal life, dependent on the memory of the world, before sight went completely. According to Lewis, the analogy of lymphocyte selection and recognition, is being used to understand how the brain works. It is postulated that the thinking units equivalent to lymphocytes are the tiny columns of packed neurons which make up most of the substance of the cereberal cortex. These clusters are the receptors, prepared in advance for confrontation with this or that sensory stimulus, or this or that particular idea. For all the things we will ever see in the universe, including things not yet thought of, the human brain possesses one or another prepared, aware, knowledgeable cluster of connected neurons as ready to lock on to that one idea as a frog’s brain is for the movement of a fly. The recognition is amplified by synoptic alteration within the column of cells and among the other groups with which the column is connected and memory is installed (ibid 85). Thomas then goes on to say that Artificial Intelligence may one day become superior to our own. Since this essay was written at a time when its infallibility seemed appropriate, he sets up the human brain to be unique in its ability to forget and to make mistakes. Confusion is the nature of the human mind, not just as it ages, but in the everyday contexts of forgetting, remembering erroneously, and nothing can be recalled at will, since where its stored is never very clear. For him, forgetting is the act of emptying the brain and relearning are everyday pursuits. (ibid 88). He says with utmost compassion, Come to think of it, you could not run a human brain in any other way, and the clearing out of excess information must be going on, automatically, autonomically, all the time. Perhaps there are certain pieces of thought that must be classed as nonbiodegradable, like addition and one’s family’s names, and how to read a taximeter, but a great deal of material is surely disposable. And the need for a quick and ready sanitation system is real: you cannot ever be sure, from minute to minute, when you will have to find a place to put something new. At the very least, you are required to have and use, a mechanism for edging facts to one side, pushing them out of the way into something like a plastic kitchen bag. Otherwise you would run the risk of losing all good ideas. Have you noticed how often it happens that a really good idea – the kind of idea that looks as it approaches, like the explanation for everything about everything – tends to hover near at hand when you are thinking hard about something quite different. There you are, halfway into a taxi, thinking hard about the condition of the cartilage in the right knee joint, and suddenly with a whirring sound, in flies a new notion looking for a place to light. You’d better be sure you have a few bare spots, denuded of anything like thought, ready for its perching, or it will fly away into the dark (Lewis 1995:88). In an essay called “The Long Habit” in Lives of a Cell (1980) Thomas asserts that Death is a topic not discussed or raised. Large scale death viewed on the television screen hardly moves us. For ourselves during our mortal moments, we think Death will go away (Thomas 1980:55) Extending our life technologically presents the possibility of long life. In the 19th century, men died at 45 years of age, women at 40, on the average. Now the upper class think of 90 years as an average span of life extendable to 110. We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can post pone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time. Something will surely have to be found to take the place of sitting on the porch re-examining one’s watch (ibid 57)…..We don’t know much about dying, about corporality, about extinction. Cells don’t die that fast, they can regenerate in test-tubes even hours after death. “It takes hours, even days before the irreversible word finally gets around to all the provinces (ibid 58). According to Lewis Thomas, there is a switch off mechanism that allows detachment before death or atleast witnesses of near death experience have said so (ibid 59). Lewis seems to believe that the spirit returns to origins, I prefer to think of it as somehow separated at its filaments of its attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath hack into the membrane of its origin, a fresh memory for a biospherical nervous system, but I have no data on the matter (ibid 61). He sees the earth analogous to a single celled organism with its membrane of sky, piercing which creates entropy. Outside this vacuum of blue sky is the blackness of space. The color photographs of the earth are more amazing than anything outside: we live inside a blue chamber, a bubble of air blown by ourselves. The other sky beyond, absolutely black and appalling is wide open country, irresistible for exploration (ibid 50) This is the microcosm analogy of ‘life :earth :: death : outer space’. Yet we hope to encounter our loved ones again, we hope to see them in the remembrances of others, though bilateral kin linkages, through the constellation of images produced through photographs and narratives. What is a memoryscape? It is healing by its very virtue – we learn to use happy memories for recovering our past. Bad memories undergo suppression, though have recurring identity as nightmares. We learn to process these over time, crafting good memories from new landscapes, mutual recognition of pleasure principles. We use these in turn to craft new languages of desire, never forgetting the old languages of knowledge and experience. It is this relation between past and present which allows us to imagine a future. Here too is the place of language, of speech, of sharing. Human beings gather, they share ideas. Like rituals, seminars, visits to the beach or shops, language becomes the conduit of survival (ibid 73). In the midst of all this collective activity, is the autonomy of the cell – it performs, functions, dies. We must give it that autonomy (ibid 78). What makes us unique is language, human speech. It begins to look, more and more disturbingly, as if the gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life. Language is, like net building, or hive making, the universal and biologically specific activity of human being. We engage in it communally, compulsively and automatically. We cannot be human without it, if we were to be separated from it our minds would die as surely as bees lost from the hive ( ibid 105). Thomas continues We are born knowing how to use language. The capacity to recognize syntax, to organize and deploy words into intelligible sentences is innate in the human mind. We are programmed to identify patterns and generate grammar. There are invariant and variable structures in speech that are common to all of us. As chicks are endowed with an innate capacity to read information in the shapes of overhanging shadows telling hawk from other birds, we can identify the meaning of grammar in a string of words, and we are born this way. According to Chomsky, who has examined it as a biologist looks at live tissue, language must simply be a biological property of the human mind (ibid 105). The universal attributes of language are genetically set, we do not know them, or make them up as we go along (ibid 106). Yet, he acknowledges that language has a life of its own. They become instinct, new meanings and words are created. Individual languages leave their dialect forms. Separate languages can exist side by side maintaining their integrity with out permeability or compatibility. At other times languages may come together, fuse, replicate and give rise to new tongues (106). Here, he endorses the primevality of music and art, which were probably the first languages combining symbols and sounds. Silence too, has its language, as mystics know. Reading and writing are often done in solitude. Translations liberate meaning. Raimundo Pannikkar used the concepts of shruti and smriti to show how there is a shift from secrecy to shared meaning. There is a need, equally to allow the authorship of speech, to shift to interpretation rather than the idolatory of the text (Visvanathan 2022b). What is the dialectic between faith and human rights? Pursuing our rights as believers/non believers we carry on with our daily chores (ibid 147). Ascription implies closure (ibid 148). Technological change and digital resources make our understanding of the world more complex. The dispossessed, the meek inherit the earth remaining behind when all else is lost. Talking to plants- the bases of organic farming is the iconic symbol of this . We must believe that they believe, whether it is in divinity or the secret life of plants (ibid 148). Sociologists never attend to the truth value of utterances as they do to representation, or forms of disclosure ( ibid 149). Ideologies are totalitatarian. Translation, comparative religion, learning from history, from the other, opens up the texts (ibid 149). This leads to new ways of orienting ourselves to the known world. Feminists demand accountability. Love and responsibility are not enough. The concept of dhyana or concentration as Simone Weil called it is essential to the task of learning (ibid 150). As Humanities shift from the Universities to the technical colleges they are seen as the Handmaids of the Sciences. A space carefully created for the establishment brains to embellish themselves, to become cosmopolitan rather than unidirectional. And yet, we remember Bachelard who could integrate Laboratory and Poetry to unravel the world in a technical way, and with narrative virtuosity in the metalanguage of verse. How do texts correlate between canonical and the domestic? Subramanium and Velacherry Rao say that in the 16th, 17th and 18th century it (neeti shastra) was frequently read out across communities. In 1708 Ziegenbalg wrote that the St Thomas Christians knew it by heart and quoted it often (ibid 154).. This absorption in the grand traditions of Hinduism are common. We look at Clifford Geertz’s classic work Negara to understand how the Hindu Buddhist consciousness permeated the elite strata in Java. The inscriber whatever the epoch, becomes the utmost authority. Political ideologies, dramatic interpretations, details of mundane description, suppression of the problem, enhancement of the politically expedient, engineering of silences, in the passing of the text maybe noticed (ibid).In the case of religious poetry, the erotic often becomes translated into the inviolable mother’s body. Here too, there is an act of mapmaking (157). Much of the spiritual texts point to androgyny, as the devotee has to cross borders transforming his/her/their psyche in constant devotion. Those crossing borders live in osmosis. Heteroglossia is present. Sometimes untranslated mystic states are communicated through body language – tranquility, detachment, solitude, silence, revelation, dream, prayer, seeking. The physical leads to longing. Transcendence to newer states leads to what C.S Lewis called spontaneity, originality and action. In my ethnography of ashram life in Tiruvannamalai titled The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramanamaharshi , I noticed that Nature/Space and Time lie beyond the individual. There is a denial of free will. A search for symmetry follows. The paradox of hierarchy exists between the holy and the individual. Manifestations in a literary device follow, be it poetry or philosophy. The seeker who transcends is permitted to renounce. Yet there are duties, routines. These are times of meditation, community prayer, chanting, meals (both serving and eating) social interaction and silence. All are governed by clock time, and often the ringing of bells. The penultimate rules are silence, meditation and work. Ramana Mahrashi never believed idleness led to meditation (Visvanathan 2010: 231). To understand Nature in terms of the mystery whether in religion or science is the quest for solitude (ibid 232). The inalienable nature of solitude once recognized is the quest for solitude. Thomas Merton said “ We put ourselves between ourselves and things” (ibid 253). Silence has the power of love, it moves beyond classification. Silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it. Renunication has a specific attribute. Solitariness and the Here, work and community all go together. The metaphors used are of family and brethren. Normal life, such as householders live is about comfort, reassurance and diversion. Here, we are able to gather, reassure one another, we enjoy the consolation of companionship (ibid 233). To live in intimate communication with that mystery is the mystic’s sole choice, where the only goal is to be one with the godhead. Erich Fromm in Beyond the Chains of Illusion writes of the awareness of the unconscious which appears as Jung’s collective unconscious. Here, too, are found the archetypes of repression, domination and resistance, terms beloved of feminists. Challenges to revealing the unconscious remain, namely fear, hopelessness and lack of proper orientation. Fromm writes that resistance is an attempt to protect oneself from fright. People said that after the second world war, that they did not know that Jews were killed. People say today that they do not observe death, threats, or admit to selective inattention. The question of Palestine remains closed, hurtling towards extinction, a self fulfilling prophecy about a map without people. It is for this reason that war rages on the planet collectively, an enemy is sighted and the cannons and bombs go off endlessly. We know that arms, food, medicines are run by investment by known and connected oligarchies. Health and agricultural capitalist enterprises find in war machineries substantial profit-making motives. Workers receive wages and support managers. Earlier, there was a distinction between ‘doing a job’ and ‘having a vocation’. There is patriotism and love for the country, which is deeply imbued in terms of partisanship. Fromm deals with the understanding of ambivalence as a necessary part of existence. There is love, hate, contradiction, dialectic and paradoxical thought (Fromm 130). Assimilation brings profit, and no questions are asked. Learning languages become an essential part of survival strategies. Language is for communication, interaction, commercial values, increasing awareness, globalization, abbreviation (sms) and mobility. Learning languages arise from fear of isolation, ostracism, and fear of exclusion. It is a continuous interplay of new vocabularies, changing radius of power and domination, and the essential play of creativity and adaptation. In the rapidly changing world, there are acceptance of norms which are against human nature. ( ibid 138) We know that the polarization of the world today is similar to the early medieval period in Europe. The return to a world which capitalizes on autodestructive tendencies is based on the atrophy of language, where speech is monosylabillic, and renders the passivity of the governed subject as a given. Reference Fromm, Erik 1962 . Beyond The Chains of Illusion Lorenz, Edward: 1995. The Essence of Chaos. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Thomas, Lewis: 1980. The Lives of a Cell. New York: Bantam Books 1995. The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher. New York Penguin Visvanathan, Susan:2010. The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi. New Delhi: Roli .

Profiles of the Parayil Tharakans

Profiles of the Parayil Tharakans, Glimpses of the History of a Family, a Region and a Church. P.K.M Tharakan, Bloomsbury, India 2014 This is an interesting book for practitioners of Anthropology, since it delves into family history and uses of biography in social science, with a framework which is deeply entrenched in kinship history. Lay St Thomas Christians, and Keralites in general will find a very important slice of history, which is osmotic with statecraft, the rules of kings and local community leaders. We do know that in the 18th century the St Thomas Christians were still recovering from the ecclesiastical fissioning of 1664, so it’s not surprising that a hundred years later they were still dealing with the problem of pazhecoor and puthencoor, since the old liturgies and the new liturgies were still operational. The Romo Syrians who had accepted the allegiance to the Pope, to use the Roman liturgy in the language they were used to, which was Chaldean. However, the Jacobites received the liturgy from the West Syrian church in 1664, and were in a distinctly different location from the Romo Syrians. Tharakan’s books shows us that the Romo Syrians longed to return to a composite fold, which in the present day Ecumenical movement is still a strong predisposition. Since the Tharakans were the keepers of the original Varthamannam Pustukam for two hundred years, until it was lodged in the Kakanad Ernakulam museum, the history of the Tharakans is not of personal interest to the family alone. It is presented here as a case of how family histories are in Kerala, occasionally cosmopolitan in nature, and involves an old history of trading, ecclesiastical manoeuvres and neighbourhood relations and emblems of community concerns. The Tharakans were powerful traders, and as a result, close to the Kings of Thrivathamcoor and Kochi Rajas. However, their personal relations express the way in which inter lineage rivalries would be subsumed within the larger interests of the family, as mentors to priests and high placed ecclesiasts, providing the financial resources for the church quarrels that would intermittently surface among sections of the Romo Syrians, with reference to the claims to loyalty or disloyalty to the mother Church, the Papacy. The two lineages of powerful family heads clashed over property and allegiances, and were engrossed in court cases for decades. However, family lore about mutual courtesies were legion. Max Gluckman has written about the ‘peace in the feud’. In the Tharakan case, it would be the community feasting and hospitality at marriages and wonderful meals in their grand mansions fraternal tensions where sometimes, joking or great generosity would underlie the subterranean animosity of fraternal relations. The women were active players, as they supported the men in their landlordship and dealings with both local chieftains, and later, the colonial government. Their lives were often tragic, and the travails of disease and childbirth, and early deaths too frequent to be ignored. Not surprisingly, the institution of a hospital and school, as well as a newspaper (Nazrani Deepika) during the 19th century is well documented by the author as the contributions of individual Tharakans, looking after their estates. Policy matters dealing with canal construction and the measures provided to alleviate famine are also described. The section on the Varthamanam Pustukam is interesting, because it describes the journey of Thomas Paremakkal, whose sister might have married a Parayil ancestor Variath Avira, but more importantly, describes the journey to Rome by Indian priests who were looking to revolt against Portuguese ecclessiastical control. They began the journey on October 14th 1778, via Africa and Brazil to Europe. This alarming route was the result of sailors falling ill, and Portuguese sailors could next be commissioned only in Bahia, called Salvador today. The contribution of the Parayils to local community and church was so immense, that the Pope sent three members of the family Titles, with injunctions on how the paraphernalia should be worn in a ceremonial manner! The matter of their financial propriety was given the seal of authority, and both Ezhupunna Puthenveetil Parayl Avira Varkey Tharakan and his brother Ezhupunna Mangalamuttathu Parayil Hormis Tharakan received Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Sylvester and Grand Cross Knight of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great, while Ayanattu Parayil Kunjuvira Tharakan received Knight of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great. Parayil Avira Varkey Tharakan, the hero of this book was referred to as the Marquis. Working along with Nidhirickel Mani Kathanar of Kuruvillangad, substantial contributions were made by the Parayils to the establishment of a Seminary at Mangalapuzha and to the Bishop’s Residence in Ernakulam. The formation of the Catholica Mahajana Sabha (1904) in Mangadapally in Alapuzha also had their powerful backing. We must also remember that they dealt with the British with equanimity, and were able to appropriate all the privileges of a trading family, when Alapuzha became the baseline entreport for pepper contracts and trade in timber. The Parayils had a sense of worth, which was foremostly “Indian”, as the Varthamanam Pustukam proffered as its argument for staying with the ancient Chaldean liturgies. This book gives us a sense of cosmopolitanism and the wonderful energy of a family, who depended on local Rajas to support their vision. Their personal tragedies and family rivalries were bypassed to offer local communities, of which they were undisguised lords, their sense of a larger wisdom, which was fearless and erudite.

Estates: Colonial and Modern

Plantations In Colonial and Contemporary Manifestations The Opium War with China precipitated the need for establishing plantations in India. The British depended on opium sales to pay for their Chinese tea, and in providing opium, for sale in exchange for valuable and expensive Chinese tea, they had to first grow it(Lovell 2011).Plantation economies depended on indentured labour, as Amitav Ghosh (2008) has shown in his The Sea of Poppies and the traffic was an international one, till slavery was abolished. In Assam, an indigenous variety of wild tea was found which was subsequently propagated as has been described in Alastair and Iris Macfarlane’s “Green Gold: The Empire of Tea.” The use of Chinese convicts to plant tea in South India and in Assam was too obscure and difficult, so the labour from Chotta Nagpur became a safety valve for providing for the immense labour requirements in planting tea in nurseries, transplanting and nurturing them, and keeping them free from pests and fungus. The colonial system depended on the early founding of railways to the ports. (Ghosh, Amalendu 2016: 28) A matrix of lines were established to take away first the felled timber in the clearing of forests, and then the dried tea from the factories. The preoccupation from 1836 onwards was to be able to provide England with its brew, and cease the sulphurous dependence on China. The politics of labour was defined in terms of availability from given sources of workers (Amalendu Ghosh (2016), Rana Behal 2014, Prabhu Mahapatra (1992), Alan Macfarlane and Iris Macfarlane (2003) Jayeeta Sharma (2012), Virginius Xaxa, Sharat K Bhowmick and M. A Kalam (1996), Abraham Verghese (2023), Arupjyothi Saikia (2011) Shyni Danial (2014)) So political circumstances were varied. In South India IPKF presence in Sri Lanka drove many tamil labourers during the 30 years war to estates in Coonoor and its hinterlands as they were able to provide refuge to their families. In Assam, Chota Nagpur labourers were replaced by the terrible wars of self proclaimed autonomy and tea planter families had to prove their stability by holding their links with the Army, Police and Forest officers together. While there was a symbiotic relationship between these bureaucratic echelons and the multinational communities of shareholders in tea plantation estates, the choice between life and death was never clearly explained to either labourers or the managerial incumbents of the plantations. “Tea is a way of life” the young elite personnel going into the plantations was informed. They already came from families with a military or executive background, where class, status and hierarchy was a form of incipient socialization. On arrival the newly employed initiates were welcomed by the manager and his wife, who right upto the 1970s were often British with a long history of administrative duties for their company in the colonies. The novitiates were taught their duties through conversation and social intermingling. House and garden were the responsibility of the chotta membsahib, as the assistant’s wife was known. As a partner, she was an essential member of the community, and at all times had to accept the formal hierarchical system of the estate. She was in charge of the domestic staff, and learned to cook the bada khana or big feasts that was so much part of their life. Food, interaction and business dealing all went together. In this sense much work went into learning or preparing the food, as supervising cooks and asserting authority was a necessary part of ruling the kitchen and being responsible for household keys and the home economy of management of resources. In the same way, the gardens were an essential prerequisite for representing the bungalow and gardens as essentially paired. Quite often the garden would be in disrepair and the house would be liveable or it would be the other way around as gardens could turn decrepit in the absence of a managerial class tenant. So given that transfers between estates was part of the promotional attributes of climbing the occupational ladder, the wife of the manager would have to be in charge of the transfer of material goods and the the relocation to a new place. Getting to know the cook and gardeners and the household help required self confidence and emotional dexterity, gaining which was a very laborious process. The master of the house was out of the house at 5 a.m with his dogs, to supervise the plucking. He returned for a brief while to have breakfast with his wife, and then returned to office affairs and management of financial aspects. He returned home for lunch and a short nap before returning to the gardens to supervise the weighing of the leaves, and at midnight he returned to over see the drying and curing process in the factory. Returning in the early hours of morning, the assistant manager would sleep on the ground floor, instead of the master bedroom as he had to be up early to supervise the pluckers once more. Chotta memsahibs and wives of the managers had a hierarchy among themselves and were not permitted to mix with the workers in the lines. These strict rules allowed the managers to carry out their work in a way which made supervisory capacities efficient. However, the wives of the managers had a very important role in managing the estate hospital and consulting with the doctors over the condition of the patients. They also had a free run over the corporate social responsibilities enjoined in the conjugal responsibilities of the couple to the estate. Women showed rare abilities in organizing , teaching and weaving, jam making, baking, dyeing and tailoring, art and boutique extensions of the Estate. They were truly committed to these parallel structures, as it was a necessary survival strategy to their basic responsibility to managing home and garden. On having to learn these new skills, as they may have arrived with none of them, they saw it as a necessary way of providing their husbands with the wherewithal of presenting themselves as an efficient managerial couple. As Claude Levi Strauss argued for the Amazonians in South America, a bachelor was an embarrassment, and it was only through coupledom that legitimacy of work and survival could be strategized. So too, the couple here represented the powerful aspect of conjugal complementarity. The woman had to communicate that she was strong and healthy as the master of the house, and run alongside. It was this physical and mental ability to understand the significance of her husband’s work and contribute to the stability of its presentation through the symbols of a perfectly managed home and garden which was her lot. The cry that usually accompanied this call to occupational perfectionism was, “We had to send our children away. We were not permitted to have them with us. They had to go to boarding school at the age of five, and were allowed to come home for the holidays”, is a very important aspect of understanding the emotional costs of bourgeoisie lives. The normalcy of this did not lead necessarily to the alienation of children from their parents, as life on the estate was extremely hard, and given the isolation, surrounding forests, and the prevalence of raging rivers and nocturnal animals it was a fact of nature that childhood and adolescence and young adult hood was better managed in an institutional framework. The fact that tea estates were often adjacent to Reserves brings forward the juxtaposition of certain aspects of tourism which includes hunting, tourism and animal protectionism. Every estate would have dogs, cats, poultry, donkeys, horses, goats and cattle. The presence of these animals were the responsibility of the chotta memsahib who had to protect her domestic staff from snakes, wolfs, elephants and wild boars. Clearly the household staff were alert to these dangers, as the master was often away from the house. Animals like the pet dogs, were trained to provide an antenna of warning protecting the life of all those who lived in the bungalow. As the sports and athletic aspect of their conjoined life was a given, the chotta memsahib had to turn up very well dressed to the club. She was expected to play tennis or badminton, dance, provide or contribute to excellent dinners, and be hostess in whatever capacity that the Senior Managers’ wives expected. To be asked to cook 25 chickens at short notice meant that no questions were asked, chicken curry that the guests would eat would just have to be perfect. Baking was an additional skill. The head cook would usually be elderly and well versed in the art. Often the Manager’s wife would leave behind some paper trail of recipes and accurate oven heating parametres to the novice Chotta Memsahib. Bird watching, embroidery, crochet, painting, reading novels, decorating and re-decorating the house were some of the attainments expected of her. Setting the table perfectly could not be left to the domestic staff, flower arrangements for the table, and setting out the cutlery in the exact grammar of use were her responsibilities. Official guests were those who were buyers, tea tasters, or executives of the multinational company who had numerous estates in India and abroad, where parity had to be maintained. As the standardization principle was paramount, neither climate change not unseasonal rain or defective factory machine could ever be an excuse. The work was hard, and international trade being what it was limits of pesticide use had to be monitored. As one tea estate manager said “ We pay the labourers little so that tea is affordable. If we raised the labour costs we cannot keep tea prices low, and consumers get angry if they have to pay more. As for organic tea, it does not exist, since tea pestilence and fungus are common.” Labourers in tea plantations contribute to the tourism industry as much as to their allocated tasks in plucking and gathering leaves together and weighing their morning productivity according to a time schedule. Quite often, spice gardens which grow pepper, cinnamon, star anise, cloves and cardamom are in contiguity. The agent visits from the nearby town and collects the produce against a given and mutually acceptable rate. Where tea plantations are individually owned against a small acreage, new innovations in Munnar estates include an airconditioned, or fan operated van which brings the tea in a cool atmosphere, thus avoiding damage. The collation of small estates together and the rights of workers have been an interesting aspect of the Tata estate which is owned co-operatively and by the workers. It means that they have union rights, can voice their discontent, and hope for better circumstances of work. The foreman is their leader, and he gets to boss over them over the speed of plucking leaves and the quantity which is accumulated over the morning. Ofcourse, there are bonuses for increased productivity, but clearly this comes at a cost. Muscles can become stiff, neck and hands can be affected from concentrated and aggressive plucking. The mechanical scissors used to trim the three leaves required for drying, roasting and curling are a great boon, but they still require hours of labour in the early morning sun right up to mid day. Each worker is under the gaze of the foreman, who also promises commissions to the super successful and eggs them on. Other workers look at this with caution as it is understood that super efficiency can affect the body. As one worker whose responsibility is taking tourists around the plantation said, “Who will look after us in our old age?”. Since he had mobility, drove a jeep around the plantation and could speak English, Tamil and Malayalam he felt privileged to share the real conditions of work and life on the Estate. He wanted to bring his son home from boarding school, but the supervisor was not giving him any guarantee that he would be relieved from his duties to bring back the boy. “I’ll let you know what the situation is, I cannot just give you leave without looking at the roster”. The aggrieved father said that he faced the same problem when he had to get married, and till the last moment did not know whether he would be allowed to go and stand next to his wife in the village where the marriage was to be held. For three generations, as Tamil workers in Munnar, Kerala, they had consistently worked in the Estate, but for his sons he wanted a different life, and was intent on educating them. His wife was a tea plucker on the Estate, his mother was a cook in the residence that was kept as a relic of colonial days. He was guard and driver to tourists at the bungalow which was rented out to different people on a daily bases, and always booked. Friendly by nature, he takes visitors to the Lines, and shows them the variety of temples, churches, mosques which dot the landscape, as the different cults have their places of worship. He also drives them to the Boutiques and the associated workshops for dyeing and tailoring, and the bakery with its allied gardens where strawberries are grown for jam. All the workers here are children of tea pluckers, who wanted to learn different skills. The bakery in fact is well known all over the town with its residents and constant stream of visitors as the personnel were trained in Mumbai by the Taj Hotel. The children of the pluckers who were sent for training were spastics or had Down Syndrome, and after training they came back very able as astute bakers making cakes, pastries and breads of various kinds. Outside each line tenement are small manageable kitchen gardens where workers can grow their yams and papayas. While wages are low, the workers are represented through the advertising and media efforts as ever friendly and smiling, as tourists visit in a parallel economic venture to keep the tea gardens afloat. Shobhita Jain’s essay Plantation Labour in South and South East Asia (2001) is an alarming essay on the hardships of workers’ lives, and the exact description of what they own is a description of poverty and hardship. On the other hand, managers try to keep workers happy by being involved in their personal lives, and giving them a sense of belonging. One of the indexes of these is how workers may indeed save the master’s life. In one particular instance in Assam when Bodo agitation was at its highest and plantation managers were being killed by terrorists, one of the women weavers in the Corporate Social Responsibility project run by the Memsahib whispered to her to tell her husband not to take certain routes, as there was rumour that he would be murdered by hidden assailants. Not just climate change, but the daily terror of being stalked and killed was ever present. Yet, as the Manager of an estate in Assam said, not one work day was lost. So dangerous was life in those years, there was one occasion when he had to herd all the women and children in a room and guard them with the Assistant Manager’s help as the assailants had turned up on the estate and were threatening the families of the Managers. Abraham Verghese’s novel The Covenant of Water looks at the juxtaposition of a family run estate (500 acres of gravelly, near-barren land) which has to be brought to life with the help of traditionally enslaved artisanal labour. The author’s mother left a hundred page account of their family history. Verghese then fictionalizes it, but in doing so he gives us archetypical figures who over a hundred years replay the great catastrophes which beset Kerala, or rather Travancore from 1930s. Tragedy upon tragedy beset the protagonists as they deal with flood, famine and the prevalent diseases of that time. The central figure is a 12 year old girl who is given in marriage to a 40 year old man, who is left widowed with a young son, at the start of the story. He is aghast on sighting her at the church, and tries to run away, but his sister who has arranged the match brings him back and persuades him that it is for the family’s good. To the credit of this widower, he consummates the marriage only when the child is 17 years old. Accompanying them in this period of slow familiarizing with the house and environment is the presence of the ghost of the 1st wife who occupies the cellar and is also a poltergeist dropping and breaking things. The estate owner is a rugged man, silent and preoccupied, who is intent on domesticating his property, and eating his food silently when served by his child bride. The son from the first marriage who is an infant, when his step mother is 12 years old, adores his new mother, and sleeps close to her and is her constant companion. Alas the family has a history of accidental drowning, and the young bride discovers this through a short hand insignia of names with a symbol of a cross which opens up at the top like a palm leaf frond. These deaths are so frequent that her husband refuses to travel by boat walking miles to a destination rather than cross by bridge or boat. What is the cause of these frequent accidental drownings? She discovers that those who are afflicted with the curse cannot bear water falling on them, even baths frighten them. In her darkest fears she never imagines that her step son will die of drowning in a puddle, but that happens and her husband can not recover from this second loss, so his silence becomes even more deafening, and the ghost in the cellar becomes even more demanding. So given her belief in Christ (they are all biographically as a family close to a Christian Saint in Mannar) she edges past year after year, and calamity after calamity. Given the monsoon, floods, and the proximity of rivers these drownings are endemic, but the physican Abraham Verghese locates a genetic connection, a family blip in the nerves which leads to both deafness and lack of co ordination in water, as the ears are affected and motor neuron functions are blurred regarding concepts of space and boundaries. In contrast to this simple family with its 500 acres which are also parceled out to relatives to help work the land, are the fictionalized tea estate owners who come into proximity. The Estate owners are enormously wealthy and own large cars, bungalows and they too are marked by death and tragedy. As Verghese is handling questions of three generations, and the stolidity of tradition, in the face of what are endemic, the question of how children who are ‘special’ or ‘challenged’ are treated, becomes central to the analyses. The child born to the protagonists is a girl who is spastic but loved and cheerful, able to speak and laugh and dance, but never grows beyond 4 years of age mentally. Her brother is intelligent but he must die of the family illness. His wife is the survivor of a great family tragedy, which is the death of her mother at an early age. She is a gifted artist, but alas, contracts leprosy, unknown to her family. Her husband dies after impregnating her and life does go on parallel tracks but not as any of us can imagine it. These stories of such great and intense sorrow, presented as fictionalized family history is a testament to the way in which the St Thomas Christians in Kerala present themselves in terms of an ethos of survival, philanthrophy, and subject to the tropics, and all the illness associated with it which affect the body including drownings, snake bite, diphtheria, tuberculosis, cereberal stroke, cancer… the list is endless. Philanthrophy leads to the ultimate infection of leprosy, and Abraham Verghese must give the occupational details of doctors’ lives from descriptions of diphtheria, hydrocele, leprosy and stroke. People care, they deal with disease and death, they don’t push it away, they accept their fate. The Estates are remote places, and the people who live in them must eke out their life emotionally. Death is a frequent and haunting presence, the loss of children the hardest to experience and describe vicariously. How to reach the Doctor remains the perennial trouble. As a planter from Attapadi who was looking after the family legacy said to me, “My father would say that he was Doctor, Tea Planter, Police Man, Lawyer, Forest Officer, Post Man all in one, and yet, he would drive down to Kottayam to meet us at our boarding school every week end.” Babies who were sick were driven down at night through forests with elephants and leopards and monkeys and snakes. Life was always dangerous, and there was also the problem of alcoholism. When the son of the protagonists, who was slated to be a Medial Doctor, meets his wife to be, a gifted artist, he explains that he wants to be a reader of classical literature and there is a death mask which appears in their family because of frequent drownings, she says casually, words to the affect that in plantation families, it is alcoholism, her father drinks, and now her brother drinks too. Abraham Verghese takes individual lives, with individual attributes, separate contexts and life chances then weaves them in a historical skein which gives us a history of plantations which is simultaneously stereotypical and exaggerated, filling even Oprah with dread, as the tv interview with her communicates. The solution to the possibility of famine, flood and contiguity to raging rivers is migration to foreign lands. Diaspora Malayalis are haunted by the fact that they could not keep their ancestral lands, and their tiled bungalows, with their artisanal slaves. The latter, with a practiced etiquette communicate the significance of childhood friendships with the Master and their consent to bondage. This intimacy and its corresponding social distance is the stuff of everyday relations of hierarchy which continue even today. For those who could not get away from their flooded homes, or from the impact of all that Verghese describes, the tropics remains their home as statistics of death from chicanguniya, dengue, batfever, and affliction from filarisis and cereberal malaria show. The floods leave a trail of death and loss, as has been shown in the disaster footage for Kerala in 2018, 2019 and 2024. Tea stations are particularly vulnerable as their altitude and proximity to water sources makes them prey to flash floods and crumbling mountains. Seasonal variation, where there is no fixed months when monsoon appears makes growing tea. Baldeep Singh, President of the Tea Association in India, and also later in Uganda, where he managed Khaitan tea plantations, said that the problem is so acute, that he had asked for researchers’ help in the Geography department to find new areas for establishing plantations where geology and climate could coincide for growing tea. The thing about climate change is that there are no rules, the el nina and el nona effect influences climate in terms of extreme heat and drought, or extreme rain fall. In the 1960s, Loren Eiseley communicated that all events were, in Nature, arbitrary. There had to be a promise of stability, but the entrance of human beings changed everything( Eiseley 1999:123). He argues on behalf of James Hutton in the 18th century who believed that whatever erosion or change happened through geological events gathered itself elsewhere. The memory of these events are inscribed in rock (ibid 26). In his observation that land was being created while land was being worn away, that there was continental elevation as well as erosion, Hutton shows a great grasp of the earth’s interior powers. Eiseley writes, “Time and accompanying geological change are two of the necessary properties without which evolution would be unable to operate. And those two properties bring death as a third factor in their wake.” (ibid 35). Climate change as a result of human activity results in the rising of the seas from the melting of glaciers, but the earth independently has a body of its own, where changes occur, revitalize while destroying. Acknowledgements: Alka and Baldeep Singh, Susan and Anish Mathai, Zubin and Rachel Varghese, Jiju and Jeanette James, Susan and George K John, Ben and Rana P Behal, Anita Varghese, Sunetra Amarasuriya, Radhika Singha and Sucheta Mahajan and extended families and friends for conversations. References Eiseley. Loren: 1957 The Immense Journey, New York, Random House. 1999 The Firmament of Time Nebraska: Bison Books Rana P Behal and Prabhu P. Mohapatra: 2007 Tea and Money vs Human Life: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations 1840-1908 in E. Valentine Daniel, Henry Bernstein and Tom Brass (eds) Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia, London: Frank Cass pp. 142-143 Behal, Rana P: 2014 One Hundred Years of Servitude, New Delhi: Tulika Books Berger, John: 1992 Pig Earth. New York: Vintage Bhowmik, Sharit, Virginius Xaxa and M. A Kalam: 1996 Tea Plantation Labour in India. New Delhi: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung , Ghosh, Amitav: Sea of Poppies New Delhi Penguin. . Guha, Amalendu: 2016 Planter Raj to Swaraj, Guwahati: Anwesha Publications Jain, Shobhita: 2001 Plantation Labour in South and South East Asia, in Susan Visvanathan ed. Structure and Transformation. Delhi: Oxford University Press Lovell, Julia: 2011 The Opium War, London: Picador Saberwal, Vasant and Mahesh Rangarajan Ed: 2003 Battles Over Nature, Ranikhet: Permanent Black Saikia, Arupjyoti: 2011 Forests and Ecological History of Assam, New Delhi: Oxford University Press Sharma, Jayeeta: 2012 Empire’s Garden, Ranikhet: Permanent Black Verghese, Abraham: 2023 The Covenant of Water, London: Grove Press Unpublished Phd Thesis submitted (2012) to JNU, New Delhi, Shyni Danial Chapter 3 Rehabilitation as Nation Building in State and Statelessnes: The Politics of Repatriation in India and Sri Lanka 1920s to 1970s.

Mukund Padmanabhan:The Great Flap of 1942

The Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Panicked Over a Japanese Non-Invasion. Mukund Padmanabhan Vintage/ Penguin/Random House New Delhi 2024 Mukund Padmanabhan has written a nail – biting, gripping story about the 2nd World War about episodes which have been quite forgotten. Did the 2nd World War start in 1939, or is it to be placed historically with the Japanese invasion of China, Malaysia, Burma, Singapore, Andaman Islands, Ceylon? For anyone interested in island historiographies and topographies and the historical impact of colonialism and imperialism, this is a fascinating study. Japan offers Indians liberation from British colonialism, and there are takers for it, as the part played by Jagadish Chandra Bose and the INA show. The map of the ‘axis’, and the manipulation of fascist countries during World War 11, are displayed as alternatives to colonial rule. The mission of the Second World War as uniting countries against Hitler, connects Europe and its colonies and the Americans. To anyone who has visited the Andaman Islands, the prison fortress and the museumisation of the bunkers and bombing troughs and trenches used by Japanese soldiers are suddenly animated by this close and detailed history of how close the Japanese were to bombing the subcontinent of India. Ofcourse, Pablo Bartholomew’s photographic exhibition showing the villages and the Naga communities who helped his father escape from Burma is a tangible record that people did leave their homes out of fear of Japanese invasion (see A Photographer’s Journey with his Trusted ‘Aides’ To Trace His Roots www TOI February 29th 2016). What Mukund Padmanabhan offers is an understanding of the 1940s as a crucial period for reinterpreting the National Movement. His understanding of Gandhi as constantly offering ahimsa as the true response in all situations, shows us how satyagraha was viewed by the Congress leaders who were quite perplexed when Gandhi appeared dialogic with Hitler, Mussolini and the potential threat of Japanese invasion, always saying that the said enemy was human, and had to be treated as such. Gandhi strongly maintained that exploitation, whether by the British or the Japanese or the Germans remained exploitation and therefore the system had to be distinguished from the individual. In extremely interesting narratives about the threat of Japanese invasion on India in 1941 and 1942, which were accompanied by rumours, Padmanabhan looks at the effect it had on innumerable lives. The Presidency towns and the port towns emptied out, people left for the countryside as everything shut down, in the face of immediate bombardment. Bombs had fallen, true, but the argument he makes is that fear was the greater danger, and economic loss of property and occupations in these cities far exceeded the actual threat of impending danger. The statistics for the emptying out of these commercial venues was matched by the injunction that necessary services needed to continue, and the war effort and manufacture of weapons must continue without distraction. Women and children of colonial administrators and the Indian upper classes were hurried out to safety, then colonial bureaucracy, and last, the ‘useless eaters’. The colonial representation of working class self sufficiency meant that the very nature of factory production of weapons was prioritized as were sanitation, water and medical services. Local communities in the presidency towns fled because they feared the garrisons of multinational troops that began to occupy and take over the Indian cities in preparation of setting up bases for World War 11. There was in fact popular and real terror of the soldiers, for whom prostitutes had to be garnered and facilitated by the British administration. People from local communities were evacuated from their homes so that brothels could be set up in their vacated residences by the British. Rape was the word used to intimidate local residents, and prostitution considered a rehabilitation device. Even civilian English residents responded to this by asking whether people were thrown out of their homes in local towns in England to administratively pimp for soldiers in the home country. After many months, often a year later, when the danger of imminent Japanese invasion was thought to be over, people returned to their homes and streets to see that everything they owned was gone, thieves had stripped their homes not just of the furniture and objects, but had stolen every nail and plank of wood. There had not even been a war, but the damage to homes was so total that many people were reduced to circumstances of being literally homeless. Usually, studies of the National Movement concentrate on Quit India and Khilafat Movement, but what Padmanabhan has given us is an act of genius. He locates the subtle differences between Gandhi, Nehru, Azad and Rajagopalchari. He allows us glimpses into the way in which these crucial years of confrontation with British Raj is mediated by the elephant in the room, the presence of Hitler and the warriors of Japanese imperialism. They were very much present, and the role of the parallel radio, which was set up to contest British broadcasts, brings this to the fore. Totalitarianism was inviting to Indians in the 1940s as a response to Macaulayism, and its effect felt very much even today, though so many decades have past. The euphoria that the generation born in the 1950s, which carried on to their growing years in the 1960s, is captured in the effervescence of the text. Part of it is consumed by the interest in the silences in the text, as nothing was available in easy conversation over the dining table, about the 1940s. Padmanabhan gives us a multilayered account, excluding the Communist interface, of how the National Movement or Freedom Movement wove a tapestry around the presence of the impending 2nd World War and its mammoth players. The Epilogue is a fascinating account of how the fear of Japanese bombardment affected the lives of the animals in Madras Zoo who were arbitrarily shot if considered dangerous. Yet, since I recently visited Andaman Islands in February 2024, and Colombo in Sri Lanka in July 2024, (to follow up interests in island ecologies in the time of climate change and sea erosion,) I can only note that both having been bombed by the Japanese, logically, the subcontinental sea ports would have faced immense panic at the nautical closeness of the harbours of Madras, Kochi, Visakapatnam, Calcutta. Is risk measurable, can panic be post- poned? Whether its evacuation of sea side towns or riverine villages, any decision made may be regretted in hindsight. At the time, however, there is response to warning by authorities, and there is the instinctive ability to flee if there is an alternative safe place.

Near Fatal Fieldwork Flaws An Excavated Essay, Current Designation Former Professor, JNU

Fatal fieldwork flaws To be a good social anthropologist, one must be ready to live life to the extreme. I would often tell my students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, of the time that Michelle Rosaldo fell off into a ravine, and died while studying the Illongot tribes in the Phillipines. It used to distress them and me, but we understood the nature of the craft, the exacting definitions of being objective social scientists, inspite of the dangers and the risks. My own experiences in the “field” have been marked by placidity except for occasional turbulence. Physical discomfort is ofcourse a byword for the sociologist at work. Insect bites have been frequent, though I must admit it was surreal when a scorpion climbed up my leg in the vice-regal lodge, IIAS, Shimla while I was researching on Lord Dufferin. Then there were also handbells that rung all through the night without reason and I could make no sense of it, since I was the only person occupying that particular wing of the mansion that night, and pages need not be written on the matter, so long as the technical data collected in the fields or the archives is relevant. The first time I went to the “Field” I was 23 years old, and while I was quite despondent at traveling alone for the first time in my life, my uncle met me at the station. It was four a.m in the morning, it was pouring rain and my compartment was so far out from the main station hall, that all my books and my typewriter ( my father’s Remington) got soaked. The next day, I swore independence, and set out with my luggage to catch a bus by myself. The porter put my luggage in the bus, and it took off without me, while I was paying the auto driver. We chased the bus, with me yelling myself hoarse, and luckily, a police van passing by, with fiercely mustached officers, stopped the bus, and I got in. The conductor sternly castigated me for being slow. Recently while traveling in Kerala over potholes which delayed our journey by three hours, a similar conductor asked my sister and me, paternally whether we were not in the habit of reading newspapers. There were only four passenger in the Pallakad Trichur section, others not daring to go by road after the monsoon had destroyed the metalled roads!(“Paper Vayakathillae?”) We also climbed one hour up a mountain in the night and then came down for the plain reason that no passenger was waiting for the bus at the top. A huge plaster of paris imitation of Michael Angelo’s Pieta was visible from various sides of that hill. The driver was efficient and taciturn and drove at break neck speed, refusing to answer our diffident query, “How much longer?” The most startling of travel episodes was when my uncle dropped me to the station to catch a train to Katpadi in 2005. He was now twenty seven years older and so was I, since my first field trip in 1980. At that time, he had said laughingly, “You must have committed some grave sin to be caught in such a down pour at 4 o’clock in the morning!” He had, since then, spent many years in the Gulf, and was accustomed to fast cars eating up the distance, so he told my aunt and me, that we needed just six minutes to get from their home to the station. Since all my life, he had always turned up to meet the trains I was on, and had waited hours at stations for my children and me to disembark, I believed him, though I was a little anxious. However out of courtesy to my father’s brother, I waited for him to finish his phone calls. My train was at 5.40 p.m. He started the car at 5.30 p.m, and we reached the station at 5.36 p.m. He said “ I’m 70 now, so I’ll walk with your suitcase a little slowly, you climb the bridge and wait for me on the platform.” Since he is grand- patriarch to all of us since my father died, and I’ve always obeyed him, I shot up the bridge and came down in nervous haste, idly wondering how he would come. Platform ticket and a suitcase...maybe he knew some short cut. Just then a train came in, and I thought it was mine. I was carrying my handbag which had everything significant in it like tickets and money. I got into the train. The whistle blew. My uncle appeared with my suitcase. It was now 5.37 p.m. The train began to move, my uncle said, “But that’s not your train!” I can still remember the expression on his face, puzzled and annoyed just like it used to be when I was five and did not count in sequence...Ofcourse being a local resident of Alwaye, he knew that trains are usually late, and had never imagined I would jump into the first one that chugged in. The train picked up speed and kind Malayali men going to Bangalore (which was where the train was headed, not to Katpadi where I was going!) begged me not to jump off. Any way there was no point, since it was a Superfast. In minutes we had crossed the Periyar river.We could not find the chain to pull either, so I gave up, and rang my aunt,on my mobile for advice. My uncle had already told her on his mobile what to tell me if I called, which was to get off at Trichur and catch the right train this time. On my next field work trip I collected my suitcase from my aunt and uncle, remembering gratefully that the previous time, when my uncle had met me at the busstop on the road outside his house and taken my suitcase from me he had laughed and said, “Travelling Light?” That’s what I do. The sequence of events which terrify me when I think about it,( which is not often,) is the time, when I had with many professional commitments behind me, gone to a book launch and then caught the 10 o’clock train to the South. It was on Sufi Inayat Khan’s daughter, a resistance warrior in France during the second world war. I bought a copy of the book, and was looking forward to reading it on the 36 hour journey. My taxi dropped me at the station, and I sat down to wait two hours for the train, which can be so boring unless one is truly tired, like I often am, and then it is quite therapeutic.. Atlast the train trundled in. I waited for the lights to come on in the cabin. They did not. Everyone was busy putting their luggage in. So I did too, in the pitch dark, with only the station lights for illumination. My bag was next to me on the seat. I was shifting my luggage under the seat, when I felt a slight presence behind me but I thought it was someone putting his luggage on the berth above. Then suddenly I looked, and my hand bag was no longer next to me. So I leapt out of the train, and looked, sure enough there was a man running. I ran after him, and he jumped into the next compartment. There were two army jawans who barred his way as he tried to disappear into the aisle. He was holding my hand bag clutched against his chest. I took it from him, saying “Why did you steal my bag?” and he replied “I did not!” and kept repeating it in a staccato tone. I felt sorry for him, he was such a weevil, a drug addict with runny eyes and very small (generations of starvation there) and hungry and mean. Immediately people appeared from nowhere and started beating the man. I said, “Don’t beat him, call the police!” but the citizens wanted to teach New Delhi Station train- robbers a lesson, and just kept on beating him. The train attendants and the police guards and the ticket checker stood there with odd expressions on their faces. Why were the cabin lights not turned on? Why did the Railway police not act? Why did the attendants look bemused? I went back to my compartment, none of the other passengers seemed to have noticed that I had been gone ten minutes. The only time that I went by bus to Tiruvannamalai from Kerala was also very traumatic. I had longed to miss that three a.m disembarkation which is one’s lot if one goes by train from Kerala, and which is so exhausting, though I must admit that as a station Katpadi is very safe. I had presumed that the lovely tarred roads from Chennai to Thiruvannamalai would be found everywhere else. Alas the truth is that the peasantry is served awfully by the most demented pothole roads. In the next installment I will describe that journey. 11 I caught a bus from Pallakad, a lovely town on the border of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. I got to Coimbatore in comfort, in an express bus. I presumed that it would be connected to Thiruvannamalai, but I am disappointed. I must travel to Salem. In Salem the bus was rolling along well enough through the congested city, where suddenly the bus stopped. Tyre puncture. Fortuitously, or was it intentional? The bus stopped directly near a tyre puncture repair shop. The driver and conductor had been setting off on a five hour journey, without a stepney or a spare tyre apparently. So we all got off. And there we stood helplessly in the sun. Finally it was fixed and we took off again. We passed the most marvelous forests, mainly bamboo, which were dark and sullen and in some odd way, pristine and prickly. I’d never seen forests like that before and the Annamalais rolled into view with the lovely agricultural land around it. Tamil villages are verdant in winter with rice and fruit and flowers and vegetables riotous in the fields, amassed in the markets. Half the population goes to build roads in metropolitan towns, and the other half grows food. At Harur, some three hours from Tiruvannamalai, and 50 kms from Salem, the road was piled with granite, rubble and full of potholes, and the tyre which had been patched up with water and glue and spit and hope, gave up again. Once more we were close to a tyre repair shop. Clearly, punctured tyres are great business in small hamlets. Immediately a mechanic came, efficiently unplugged the huge tyre and rolled it off. We sat in front of a locked- up temple, dedicated to Durga and ate our lunches. The bus- driver put us in a country bus and with difficulty we all got into an already packed bus. I put my carry- all bag on top of a sack of rice blocking the alleyway. Two hours down the road, the rice merchant picked up his sacks, roaring at every one in the way, and in the melee, threw out my bag as well. I clambered off the bus and got it back. Frightened to death I sat quietly next to the sweet faced swami, ancient and creased in his new white clothes, going to Arunachala temple for the first time. The bus went on for hours, since country buses have no fixed route. And atlast at 6 p.m when it was night, and all the lights of the temple town were lit, we got off at Arunachala temple. All the people struggling in these over packed buses, what do they hope to achieve? The theorists of pilgrimage have always argued that the journeying is the most important ritual. To me it seemed that losing my bag was a moment of sheer fear, (loss of identity). I love carnival and market, and much of my work in the last twenty seven years has been marking these in descriptive terms, first for a Christian hamlet, and now for Hindu ones in Tiruvannamalai and Pallakad. However there are elements of this carnival space in ritual towns which can be quite disquieting. I will close this reminiscence with one such encounter. When I first visited ‘Thiru’, as it is called by frequent visitors to the town, it was a “small” town. Now it has burgeoned by the influx of pilgrims (5000 visit the temple every day, according to the local chemist who has a shop next to the Arunachala Temple ) and the numbers multiply geometrically as the years pass. It seems to have become the hub of priestly and commercial activities. Television has contributed much to the missionising appeal of Saivism. The descriptions of market, temple and pilgrims remain fairly constant in the anthropological literature whether it be Christian, Muslim or Hindu. Religion and Commerce, with the possible yeast of politics, makes a town what it is. In Tiruvannamalai, there is faith, but fortunately no communalism. To me as a theoretician of dialogue between religions, non-dualism is the answer to varieties of discord which we see as everyday occurrences in a globalised world. Non- dualism is the space in which everyday pluralism surfaces. It is an existential quality, which allows the myriad nature of the world to be ever present. As individuals we enter a space of communitas, as Victor Turner argues, and this involves both respect and sharing. On the other hand, technological imperatives (such as the megaphone) can be very rude interruptions in the quiet and sacred spaces that Nature allots us, and which is confirmed by cultural or theological formulae. Tiruvannamalai, eleven years after my first visit in 1996, provides such a sense of shock and rupture. Trucks bringing agricultural produce and other merchandise, buses bringing pilgrims by the hundreds veer through a traditional street with enormous noise in its wake. The Gods during carnival time are taken around in tractors which spew the most horrible smoke. The pollution levels, because of diesel and firecrackers during festival occasions has to be seen to be believed. In December 2006, the sound of firecrackers and megaphones disturbed ashramites so much that being present in that hallowed spot seemed to be a mistake which only says something about one’s nerves and not one’s ability to transcend or record. The woman in the room next to mine was a publisher’s wife from Germany, who had come to visit Ramanasramam in memory of her husband who had been a devotee of Ramana and whose works on Ramana were well known to the Librarian. Yet within three days, inspite of commitment to theology and her nostalgia for her first visit decades before, she left looking for a quieter room. The previous nights neither of us had slept, having been kept awake by a megaphone, where a piping child’s voice yelled continuously for hours and hours “Pathu rua Pathu rua pathu rua!!” a cry which never stopped. “What are they saying?” she asked me the next morning, looking haggard. She wanted to know if it was a political speech. “Ten rupees.” I said. It’s the cost of a packet of puffed rice and dates which the merchant wanted pilgrims to buy before setting off on the circumambulation around the Holy Hill. On the third night, my patience having worn thin, and fearing a nervous breakdown, I went downstairs at eleven O’clock. The ashram’s inner compound was dark and silent, only one pilgrim was returning from the circling of the hill. “That noise! Can’t anyone do anything?” “What to do?” I went and accosted the merchant. ”Put that off!” He nodded smilingly. He had not heard a word of what I had said. His ear was next to the megaphone. “Is money the only mantra you have?” I yelled. He still could not hear, and smilingly, serenely pointed me to his assistant who was packing the dates and puffed rice. “It’s illegal to have a megaphone in a residential street. I’ll call the police tomorrow.” The word ‘police’ seemed to penetrate, and he lowered the volume, so that he could hear me. “I’m from Delhi, and megaphones are illegal, and you must switch it off!” He smiled and nodded and agreed. It went off that night, and Beatrice was relieved, “I was praying and praying that you would go, since you know the language, and could speak to him!” she said in the morning. For her it was a miracle of Ramana Maharshi, that I had gone off, coincidentally, just then to bellow at the merchant. Next day however the megaphone was on again, and consequently Beatrice found a room far away from the main commercial road on which Ramansramam is now located. From being part of a jungle to being now in a road lined with gemshops, hippy clothes, junk and fastfood, foreign currency-changing shops, ticket offices, inter- net offices; it’s a very great change. The rustic road with its local shops of bananas and tea and newspapers has now been replaced by the kitsch and mélange of the post modern and the traditional. And every day is a festival in this ancient town, because every day is a holy day. Every day brings to pilgrims, honours and rewards, both material and spiritual. And who can be exluded? The numbers only increase. As a result there are problems of discipline and order. Residents of the Ramana asramam are forced to become aggressive bouncers who keep the crowds at bay, using only their eyes, linked arms or speech to keep the crowds from hurting each other or damaging the shrines. But I’ve resolved the dilemma about crowds by telling myself that each person in the crowd thinks the “other” makes up the crowd, but indeed, I too am part of the crowd. Susan Visvanathan Professor of Sociology, JNU

Rachel Carson The Sea and Homology with Robert Park on The City

Rachel Carson’s The Sea sets up a vast canvas where she looks at evolutionary theory in terms of geological time capsules. This is useful for us as categorization of sea creatures, birds of the air and mammals (bats can fly, so the categories are malleable in nature) provide us with a time dimension. Space and time interlock to give us geological epochs where disruption is key, but so also is abstraction and variation. Much of how we deal with the past, in Sociology, negates this huge quantam of time, and geological disruption as beyond our interest. We remain with the key categories of tribal, peasant and industrial time which are occupationally specific, but also symbiotic. By looking at cataclysm as event, Carson shows us that the very nature of geological time is beyond our immediate comprehension and left to speculation. As the ocean is dredged it provides us a glimpse of its depths, and the cycle of being rests on being ‘eaten’ or ‘escaping’ or in turn eating lesser beings, whether plankton or mammal. In this sense Carson creates a homology between the biography of fish, stories of birth, survival and death, and that of humans. Here, the school of fish provides a matrix of sociability and received practices but on their own, they must escape the angler or the octopus. There is a certain nonchalant acceptance of time as neutral to the existence of humans. Events such as geological and geomorphological structures can be read, but there is also arbitrariness to the existence of the universe. This reading of the symbolism of geomorphology is true for Octavio Paz who suggests to us that the earth appears to us in terms of images. He writes, “Geographies, too, are symbolic: physical spaces turn into geometric archetypes that are emissive forms of symbols. Plains, valleys, mountains: the accidents of terrain become meaningful as soon as they enter history. Landscape is historical, and thus becomes a document in cipher, a hieroglyphic text. The oppositions between sea and land, plain and mountain, island and continent, symbolize historical oppositions: societies, cultures, civilizations. Each land is a society: and a vision of the world and the otherworld. Each history is a geography and each geography is a geometry of symbols.” (Paz 1985:293) While Carson is concerned with the boundaries of the sea held in check by the moon tides, Paz looks at how territorial boundaries defines the existence of humans. We know that boundaries collapse with war and colonialism, so what happens to the people who flee. Who are the conquered people and where do they go? American anthropology, thanks to Robert Redfield was invested in understanding the Yukatan as a syncretistic world of adaptation, where Spanish and indigenous cultures wove their tapestry as masters and slaves. For Paz. the resilience of Mexico, to the colonial domination of Spanish and/ or American civilization. was the return to ritual, the ability to absorb victimhood through a process of translation. Interpretation and translation which are inextricably tied together. We do not understand our actions, but the past is recurrent as it surfaces in our thoughts, memories and cultural legacies (ibid 292). It is this familiarity with the past that helps us to understand the present, incomprehensible at present though it may seem.. He writes, “The masks of Hitler and Stalin are now succeeded by an incorporEal reality we cannot even name and execrate. To name it, we have to know it – and only thus can we defeat it” (ibid 281). Paz describes the usefulness of the moebius strip, where otherness is internalized. “Duality is not something which is added, artificial or exterior: it is our constituent reality. Without otherness, there is no oneness. And what is more, otherness is oneness made manifest, the way in which it reveals itself. Otherness is a projection of oneness; the shadow which we battle in our nightmares. And conversely, oneness is a moment of otherness, that moment in which we know ourselves as a body without a shadow – or as a shadow without a body. Neither within or without, neither before nor after: the past reappears” (ibid 289 To this end, he describes history writing as a combination of elements, a montage. It is similar to biological processes, and forms of representation such as family lineages, the writing of poetry, cinematic emblems and juxtaposition (ibid). Pliny the Elder (historian, naturalist and militart commander) had left evidence of the harrowing days after the eruption of Mount Vesuvious. As Rome’s naval commander he was stationed at Micenum 50 kms from Pompei. When his sister Marcella pointed out the cloud of smoke spiraling in the shape of the top of a pine tree (a mushroom cloud) into the sky, he wished to sail closer to the site for scientific purposes of validation and description. He had before being summoned by his sister, enjoyed the sun in the garden, had a cold bath and a light lunch and had gone back to his books. Marcella’s son, Pliny the Younger who was about 17 years old, was absorbed in a book, so he did not accompany his mother’s brother who was around 56 years old and a very powerful representative of the Roman Empire. The volcanic eruption took place in 79 A.D. Twenty five years later, Tacitus asked Pliny the Younger to send him an account of his uncle’s voyaging out to rescue his friends in the last days of Pompei. (These letters are reproduced in the website Pompeii,org,uk which has an archaeologist and tourist guide as administrator.) The enormous detail that Pliny the Younger brings to these two letters is evidence of the relation between the oral and literate. The relation between volcanic eruption and the tsunami that followed are graphically described. Stones, ash, smoke, pumice rubble and terror all bestow themselves on the survivors and the dead. In the case of Pliny the Elder, he had rescued his friend Rectina and her family who had asked for his help, but at Stabiae, where he went to rescue his friend Pomponianus, they were besieged by misfortune. Pliny himself had behaved very normally to comfort his friend, all his actions were without panic or anxiety, and his nephew reports that being a corpulent man with difficulty in breathing, his soldiers could hear his “heavy and sonorous breathing” when he slept at night. However, they had to wake him up, and they left with pillows tied to their heads, their only protection against the falling rocks which were being hurled from the top of the mountain. When they reached the sea, they saw that the sea was very violent and that they could not getaway by boat. Then, Pliny died because he was suffocated by the toxic fumes that surrounded them, and in death he looked like he was asleep, and he had no injuries on him. In a second letter written 25 years after the cataclysmic event, Pliny the younger describes the sea, “The sea seemed to rollback upon itself, and to be driven from the banks by the convulsive motion of the earth, it is certain atleast the shore was considerably enlarged, and several sea animals were left upon it.” This act of witnessing and the ability to reflect upon the moment of gravest danger in such a way that Pliny the younger communicates the presence of mind of his uncle, and reflects his own ability to record what he had heard in the intensity of voice, that travels through the centuries. This is what witnessing is about: the self awareness that makes the litterateur experience the moment in an inter related way, so that autobiographically speaking he/she cannot separate himself or herself from the environment that he writes about. As the keeper of Pliny the Elder’s monumental work Historia Naturalis which survived till the 16th century and beyond, though the rest of his other work did not, we see that the ordinary task of documentation and dissemination are a legacy which Pliny the Younger saw as his primary obligation to a much loved uncle. Ofcourse, in this history writing and record keeping, the distinctions between myth, legend and history were hard to distinguish. Pliny the Elder had been to India in 77 C.E and this formalizes our understanding of the monsoon winds which brought ships to India from Rome in search of spices, ivory, nard (perfumed ointment) linen, and corals and pearls. Pliny the Elder prefaces his Naturalis Historiae with a plea to his patron the Emperor Tacitus to endorse his work. Yet, he knows that he must put his case before his patron in a way by which the latter will be intrigued. “…Emperor! Why do you read these things? They are written only for the common people, for farmers or mechanics, or for those who have nothing else to do; why do you trouble yourself with them? Indeed, when I undertook this work, I did not expect that you would sit in judgement upon me. (9)”(www. Perseus Tufts Digital Library/edi Historia Naturalis.’ Further he exhorts his readers, “Most of us seek for nothing but amusement in our studies, while others are fond of subjects that are of excessive subtlety, and completely involved in obscurity. My object is to treat of all those things which the Greeks include in Encyclopedia (17) which however, are either not generally known or are rendered dubious from our ingenious conceits. And there are other matters which many writers have given so much in detail that we quite loathe them. It is indeed, no easy task to give novelty to what is old, and authority to what is new, brightness to what is tarnished, and light to what is obscure, to render what is slighted acceptable, and what is doubtful worthy of our confidences, to give to all a natural manner, to each its peculiar nature. It is sufficiently honourable and glorious to have been willing even to make the attempt, although it should prove unsuccessful.. And indeed, I am of the opinion that the strides of those are more specially worthy of our regard, who, after having overcome difficulties, prefer the useful office of assisting others to the mere gratification of giving pleasure, and this is what I have already done in some of my former works.” The pleasure of knowledge and its dissemination kept this commander of the Roman navy busy at night, and during the day, he carried out his official duties to the empire, delegating and taking decisions. 36 books with 20,000 entries and one book which forms the introduction, preface and contents have been passed on to us by the familiar routes of the “love for learning”. Detachment was one of the principles. He had been master of many occupations, and staying awake to write the Encyclopedia was subsumed in the aphorism “”for life properly consists in being awake…” This theme of curiosity about the earth, voyages made by sea, and the classification of knowledge in terms of collation, according to subject, had as its its two poles, the subjective and the objective. Methodologically these are placed in well known biographies as central to the task of collation itself. In Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E.Park and The Chicago School, Fred H Matthews says that, for Robert Park, facts and it collection were the tasks of the historian, statistics was the work of the statistican, and the search for meaning is what made the sociologists carve out a dialectic of empathy and detachment. “To Park himself, the self understanding of the individual or milieu was the first step in a two stage process of research: the student must combine empathy with ecology, and trace the evolution and significance of attitudes and values within a broader context of instititutional position and social authority”(Matthews 1978:115). As Pliny defined the purpose of conquest of peoples for the Roman Empire was for reasons of loot and trade in which knowledge production was necessary, so also Park himself saw this detachment as a methodological link between the trader and the sociologist. He felt that anonymity was integral to this transaction, essential to avoid emotional attachment, easier to be objective if one kept a distance, and the reason why being an outsider helped. He genuinely felt that objectivity was the secret of academic success, and detachment its secret (ibid 116) Any ‘compulsive’ ideology would remove the ability to view social relations or actions in a detached and empathetic view, just as ‘sympathy’ could be an obstacle to understanding reality. He did not believe that sociology was a call for crusaders, and their role as scholars was to be “the calm detached scientist who investigates race relations with the same objectivity and detachment with which the zoologist dissects the potato bug” (ibid). The passion for observation and description made litterateurs like Pliny (uncle and nephew) and Rachel Carson stand out in their preoccupation to document. In doing so they were interdisciplinary, using their skill as polyphonic interrogators to create fantastical worlds, where the preoccupation for detail was primary. Robert Park believed that in the city, the terrifying aspects of nature had recreated itself, ‘the urban jungle’ being what it is, while outside the city, nature had become domesticated. The city represented the terrifying aspects of both threat and decay, while outside the city, it became gentle, nurturing and inspiring (ibid 122). He believed that city people could organize and represent themselves, that the great crowds had an ability for mass movements and action. The human personality deftly represented itself in this mass aggregation. Here there was “ethnic diversity” and “clustering” (ibid 126). Using the detailed ethnographic work of their students, Park and Burgess wanted to explore the dynamic between the individual personality and the State, mediated by ethnicity and race (ibid 127). They used maps to show co relations between a variety of indices, attempting to bring a correspondence between time, space and human mores and values (ibid 128). Erle W Young drew huge maps to show that railways and roads criss crossed the city, connecting ware houses and industrial establishments, while residences were located around parks, fountains and boulevards, showing their elevated class and status locations (ibid 128). The ecological aspect depended on certain determined aspects, while the cultural aspects were dependent on choice and variation. The ecological aspect would highlight population segregation, and therefore occupational variation. Here lay many of the corresponding dilemmas of the relation between race, ethnicity and occupation which brought the Chicago School into tension with the later statisticians who dominated Sociology. Yet the insights of the Ecological School were varied, and centred around the place of the individual and the cultural stereotype, both being fragmented by the methods of generalization in philosophy and archetypicalisation in social psychology ( ibid 129). Film culture between 1938 and 1958 represented the many ways in which the Chicago School’s preoccupation with the Hobo, the Boss, Gambling and Saloon Culture, Workers, Police and Politicians became a type of given/ or ascribed roles to be analysed. Women were either socialites or domestic servants, or singers in cafes, or dependent on capitalists as wives or whores. The central question that Park’s students asked was, is mobility possible for these marginalized or ascending groups? As someone who had been an acolyte and collaborator of the great educationist Booker Washington, Park was able to effect potential symbiosis between the marginalized black community with its history of slavery, and the aspirations of poor whites. For him, The City, in a Simmelian methodological format became the way that the human heart could be deciphered ( ibid 30). Rachel Carson attempts to study the geomorphological structure of crustacean evolution and its remnants in the sea-bed as symbols of the long history of the microcosmic development of sea creatures and plants. The history of corals and co equivalently their death by climate change and pollution is another way of telling time. Coral reefs are resplendent in their colours when alive, they seethe with an amazing vitality. When they die their intricate structure are finger like skeletons which then have ossified and demean us with their troglodyte presence. As humans the wonder of the visuality of natural splendor becomes part of the ancient world, we are frightened by its death and the skeletal remains. Human beings then decide that they must leave the planet. Carson’s words describing the intricate relationship between infinitely tiny sea creatures and their continuously transforming environment (the sea washes them into inlets and then drives them back with the tides, and their notion of time, sustenance, neighbourhood and procreation are all instinctively defined in terms of what they must do. Describing the serpulid tube wor, she says. “The fact that the tube worms have managed to live in the intertidal zone for millions of years is evidence of a sensitive adjustment of their way of life, on the one hand to conditions with in the surrounding world of the rockweeds, on the other to vast tidal rhythms linked with the movements of earth, moon and sun (Carson:1991:458). This idea of adjustment is central to evolutionary expansion and devolution. It is this perhaps that makes us understand her work in terms of implicit homologies between fish and humans, though we might as well consider the homo;pgy between fruitflies and us. By presuming that the code of similarity is not the same as identification, or static notions of totemic identity, we can move to learning from the animal or plant world. This abstract notion of the one ness of the life force always reduced to symmetry and the concept of the One, is useful only for advancing our experience of the design of the universe. Experientially we only see multiplicity and endless grandeur and mutation, and that too is significant. We cannot count on “Fate” or Moira as the Greeks called it, when in the Anthropocene we name our culpability and delineate our future responsibility. The meteors still glance past planet earth and our destiny is writ in this ‘firmament of time’ as Loren Eiseley called it. There were so many disasters in the 19th century, including the eruption of Krakatoa, that the Comteian immutable laws of Physics became an anomaly. Yet, since ideological fetters are hard to drop, the organic metaphor for Sociologists still remained within the frame of slow evolutionary principles. How long, for instance, did it take to ‘drop the tail’ to building cities? Homologies are satisfying because we see in the instinctive response of termites, bees and ants very similar responses to calamity: they must run and hide, or they must die. So the myth of Antaeus who loses his power when he is removed from the power of Mother Earth is a very telling myth. How will we behave if we are separated from Earth, when gravity is all that we have known? The coexistence of time in the relational sense is about memory and instinct. The past conveys itself to us in our extraordinary dream life, our archetypes, and our involuntary behavior in crises. It is then we recognize our kinship with the ecological dilemma that knits the sea and shore. Like the fish who are suddenly uplifted by the tides, floating in extended marshes and then without their volition the tides throw them into the sea. They are dazzled by their fate not knowing of the presence of the sea birds that waited for them at the edge of the shore, so many thousands of these migrants never made it “past the portals of the sea” (Carson 1991:255). She describes their habitations with reference not just to time and seasons, but in relationship to levels of access to light. Predators lurk at every turn, and whether she gives them names, species identity markers. or refers to them as schools, she is engaging us to see how life in the sea, however tiny or massive is characteristically unique. With her, through dramatic prose compositions we begin to see the translucent nature of eels, their coming of age and their demise, both consequentially as life cycle moments but also of interlocked moments of concomitant variations as with old eels and newly spawned ones. “As the time approached for them to lose the leaflike form of the larva and become rounded and sinuous like their parents, the impulse to seek fresher shallowing waters grew. Now they found the latent power of unused muscles, and against the urging of the wind and current they moved shoreward. Under the blind but powerful drive of instinct, every activity of their small and glassy bodies was directed unconsciously towards the attainment of a goal unknown in their own experience – something stamped so deeply upon the memory of their race that each of them turned without hesitation towards the coast from which their parents had come” (Carson 1991 361-362). The old eels ofcourse die and become part of the sea, but more complex is her representation of the relation between river and sea in this continuous dialectic. “And as the eels lay offshore in the March sea, waiting for the time when they should enter the waters of the land, the sea, too, lay restless awaiting the time when once more it should encroach upon the coastal plain, and creep up the sides of the foothills, and lap at the bases of the mountain ranges. As the waiting of the eels off the mouth of the bay was only an interlude in a long life filled wih constant change, so the relation of sea and coast and mountain ranges was that of a moment in geologic time. For once more the mountains would be worn away by the endless erosion of water and carried in silt to the sea, and once more all the coast would be water again, and the places of the cities and towns would belong to the sea” (ibid 364). How does one study the changing landscape that comes about with floods and the calamities of war? Robert Park had a hard time decoding the pleasures of philosophy to his post war students, who didn’t want to deal with words, but preferred maps and indexes, ushering the next phase of hyper objective sociological analyses (Matthews 1977:128). Why do people live in areas which are known to be dangerous? The stockyards and factories had been replaced with the face of the gangster, the friendly shark who opened his mouth and let the fish enter his belly. Chicago was dangerous, and films and ethnographers tried to bring it into the view of the hapless resident. Born on the wrongside of the tracks meant that one could not enter the elite institutions or be part of the upper echelons of the hierarchy. Yet, Chicago had energy. Floyd Dell writing of Robert Herrick’s fiction wrote that Chicago was a ‘condition’ not a city ( 127). By looking at migrants and their life styles the Chicago school in the 1930s was preoccupied with the culture of African origin migrants, pr the Polish. the hobo and the dance hall, the ghettos and the bohemias (ibid). The visual aspect of writing and describing was typical of Park and his students, there had to be a tactile quality which was superimposed upon the writing of sociology and depended on memory and history. Park and Burgess quote from Wendelband who gave a lecture in the University of Strassburg in 1894, that the historian tires to ‘revive and call up into the present, in all its particularities an event in the past. His aim is to do for an actual event precisely what the artist seeks to do for the object of his/her imagination. It is just here that we discern the kinship between the historian and the writer of literature” ( Park and Burgess 1969:8). It seemed crucial to emphasize the abstract nature of science, and the concrete method of representation in history, literature and narrative production in social science. This is why Rachel Carson’s determination to reach out to a lay or common reader become texts of long lasting beauty. It would be centrally as texts published in newspapers and journals encouraging readers to look at the riveting beauty of the ocean. Park describes this concern with the unique, and the preoccupation with mobility, as central to the methodologies of the 1930s of which both were so much a part. “Consider how quickly our appreciation is deadened as some object is multiplied or is regarded as one case in a thousand. “She is not the first” is one of the cruel passages in Faust. It is the individuality and the uniqueness of an object that all our sense of value has its roots. It is upon this fact that Spinoza’s doctrine of the conquest of the passions by knowledge rests, since for him knowledge is the submergence of the individual in the universal, the “once for all” into the eternal”(ibid 10). The concern is for Park, the relation between criminal/civil/moral law which is an old Durkheimian preoccupation of The Division of Labour. This brings us to the rights of groups and individuals in the time of the Anthropocene. Tracey Skillington argues that rising seas, green house gases and climate change are questions of everyday concerns, and policy makers must take into account the intergenerational responsibilities of planning for the future. By focusing on questions of the youth and their right to livelihood, it is possible to think about what we leave on planet earth for generations not yet born (Skillington in Wallenhorst and Wulf 2022 :819) Hajo Eichoff, a cultural historian from Berlin argues that in the 12000 years of settlement in food gathering and growing, the word culture emerged from culturare or care of the earth. It is this earth which is now languishing as war and technology deplete resources faster than they can be rejuvenated. He takes the example of the mobile phone which combines camera, word processor and recorder and leaves behind not just images, but a trail of destruction of waste dumps which cannot be recycled, and are poison fields for later generations to handle. As there is no balance between biomass and the waste that humans leave the future is increasingly bleak (Eichoff in Wallenhorst and Wulf 2022:1133). However, human preoccupation remains with the idea of security, which word has its origins in ‘no worry’. Alejandro Cerreata in Sea Level Change shows us that 7000 years ago a certain stability allowed for humans to occupy coastal belts. Now that global warming has entered a phase which may go on for hundreds of years, leading to oceans rising and heating, the earth would not be much affected by any manoeuvre to bring down temperatures. This statistical and chronological analyses of geological phases such as ice ages due to cooling, and entropy due to heating, are understood over huge swathes of time. There are two options, one is to move from coastal areas, the other is to build architecturally adaptive structures which keep out the sea. Given the population density of coastal towns and villages, reviving the marshlands or associated rivers and canals, is one temporary solution, but finally as humans we have to accept what Eiseley showed us so magnificently that the ‘firmament of time’ is not a geological concept merely, it is how humans deal with their fate, and the aesthetics of it. References Carson, Rachel: The Sea (A Trilogy;Under The Seawind; The Sea Around Us; The Edge of the Sea.) Paladin, London, 1991 Cearetta, Alejandro: 2022 Sea Level Change in in Nathanell Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf 2022: Handbook of the Anthropocene: Humans Between Heritage and the Future Springer Nature (1124-1127) Eichof, Hajo: 2022 Security in Nathanael Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf 2022: Handbook of the Anthropocene: Humans Between Heritage and the Future Springer Nature (1128-1134) Eiseley, Loren: 1960 The Firmament of Time, Nebraska, Bison Books. Matthews, Fred H. 1977: Quest for an American Sociology:Robert E.Park and The Chicago School McGill Queen’s University Press, Montreal and London Park, Robert E and Earnest W, Burgess 1969: The Science of Sociology Chicago: Chicago University Press. Paz, Octavio: 1985, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, New York: Grove Weidenfeld Skillington, Tracey: 2022 Intergenerational Justice in Nathanael Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf 2022: Handbook of the Anthropocene: Humans Between Heritage and the Future Springer Nature pgs 819-822 Wallenhorst, Nathanel and Christoph Wulf 2022: Handbook of the Anthropocene: Humans Between Heritage and the Future Springer Nature Susan Visvanathan, Formerly Professor, CSSS/ JNU