Monday, September 28, 2009

Remembering Meenakshi Mukherjee

How do you mourn a person you have wanted to meet, because you have known her through her work, but never quite got the chance? I muse as I take a flying carpet ride uptown, expedited by the magical arrival of every train I want so that I reach the Columbia campus just in time. Somewhere near Schermerhorn, I take the wrong turn, get misguided twice, then get into the right building but onto an elevator that refuses to go up, and by the time I finally arrive, Gauri Viswanathan and Meena Alexander have already spoken. As I step into the room, Gayatri Spivak is saying a few words about Meenakshi Mukherjee. It takes me a while to realize that she means to speak later actually, and this is a little pause in between speakers, as memories seem to spill over from whatever she has planned to say when it is her turn. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Robert Young and Gayatri Spivak share their reminiscences. Spivak reads out messages from Probal Dasgupta and Supriya Chaudhuri. Mukherjee’s literary sensibility and the acuteness with which she engaged with a later generation of literary scholars who were more oriented towards theory and social science comes through in what all of them say. Taking issue with the labelling of Meenakshi Mukherjee as ‘pre-theoretical’, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan points out how Mukherjee’s reading of Jane Austen anticipates the argument about Antigua in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism.

Then everybody in the room is invited to speak in remembrance if they wish. As Rochelle Almeida and others reminisce, among them Mayurika, a former student of Meenakshi Mukherjee, now a researcher at SOAS, one gets a sense of the warmth she exuded all around her. Almeida recalls a chance meeting with Mukherjee at a conference where a long gap in the schedule threw them together, and how Mukherjee was very enthusiastic about discussing her work, while she wanted to talk about Mukherjee’s. Mukherjee had said that she thought from reading Almeida’s Originality and Imitation that it would be by a white Portuguese woman. Mukherjee, then limping badly because of an injury, required assistance in draping her heavy silk sari for the evening, and Almeida goes on to say how she came to the rescue, and how Mukherjee told everyone that she had never ever worn her sari as immaculately and that she looked like an Air India air-hostess because of Rochelle!

Mayurika is the only direct student of Meenakshi Mukherjee among those gathered, and gives us an impression of the scholar as pedagogue—hitching up her sari to sit on the teacher’s desk throughout an engaging lecture… followed by her students to her office where they were welcome at any time… caring to teach them citation styles…. Mayurika’s admiration and reverence for her professor remind me of my professor, Alo Ray’s memories of Meenakshi Mukherjee and Sujit Mukherjee as her mentors. When Mayurika talks about her teacher, it seems as though the same warmth overflows, that I could sense in Alodi towards her teachers as she spoke of them over the phone, long ago in Calcutta.

Fittingly, Spivak commences by recounting how they met for the first time in a Texas locker-room after swimming. Mukherjee recognized her as an Indian woman by the mark of the drawstring of the underskirt on her waist, and they hit it off from there. Spivak doesn't forget to add that this was after she had given Mukherjee’s first book a bad review.

I try to match the overall impression I get of a vibrant intellectual who was also very warm, gave generously of her time, and was ever appreciative of the achievements of younger scholars and her students, with my first encounter with her through her OUP edition of Pride and Prejudice that opened up questions of feminist theory for me, and later on, for my students, when I began teaching in Calcutta. I am carried back to the time when I was thrilled to watch a bunch of impressionable undergraduates getting sensitized into an understanding of the novel where the woman’s perspective was central. It was as though I had handed them a magic wand. As I get up to leave the small gathering, it seems I have come for more than myself.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Memorial Meeting for Meenakshi Mukherjee, September 25, 2009

Memorial meeting for the internationally renowned feminist scholar Meenakshi Mukherjee
Date and time: September 25 at 4 p.m.
Venue: 754 Schermerhorn Extension (Institute for Research on Women and Gender seminar room), Columbia University.


Directions: The link for the campus map is http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/

Text sent by Professor Harish Trivedi of Delhi University to the Hindustan Times:

Meenakshi Mukherjee: A Rare Human Being and an Effortless Intellect

Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, who passed away in Hyderabad on 16 September, was one of the most innovative, inspiring and widely honoured professors of English of her generation in the country. Each one of her major books charted out a fresh field and flung open new doors of academic enquiry: The Twice-Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English (1971), Realism and Reality: the Novel and Society in India (1985), and The Perishable Empire (2000). For the last-named book, she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Prize for the best book of the year in English, thus becoming one of the four or five literary critics to have won it in the last fifty years. Her latest book, an intellectual biography of Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909), was launched in Delhi yesterday, the day after she died as fate would have it. Professor Mukherjee began her teaching career in Patna where she had been a student and where she met and married Sujit Mukherjee, one of her professors who distinguished himself no less as a scholar, translator and later academic publisher. The two were perfectly matched in temperament as well as academic inclinations and wherever they lived, their home became a warm and welcoming social and intellectual adda. Meenakshi Mukherjee taught successively at the University of Poona, Lady Shriram College, New Delhi, the newly founded University of Hyderabad, and then back in Delhi as a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. In between she was also a visiting professor at Chicago, California and Texas. A whole legion of her devoted former students and colleagues are to be found all over the country as well as abroad.

Not only did her own work contribute to giving a new orientation to the discipline but she also helped build up institutions which would bring together senior and younger scholars and enable them to present their work and share ideas. For twelve years (1993-2005), she was the Chairperson of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (IACLALS) which under her leadership went from strength to strength, increasing its membership from under 50 to over 400. Of the major international conferences she was instrumental in organizing during this period, one was held in Shimla in 1994 and resulted in a book which she and I co-edited, Interrogating Postcolonialism (1996). The other was a grander conference in Hyderabad in 2004, in which some of the most distinguished literary scholars and theorists in the world participated, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and which led to the publication of as many as three books.

A defining characteristic of Meenakshi Mukherjee both as a person and as a scholar was her simplicity. In an age of increasing scholarly jargonization and even obfuscation, no one ever had any difficulty in following whatever she spoke or wrote. But such simplicity always went hand in hand with solid and substantial scholarship and a degree of persuasiveness that more complex ways of formulation would often have failed to achieve. She said the kind of simple things that clever people do not say.

As in her work so in her life, she was the most genial and forthcoming of human beings. Her modesty, affability and quiet charm were most in evidence when she was with young researchers and teachers who had most reason to be in awe of her. She could instantly establish a rapport with them which often turned into life-long friendships. She was a rare scholar and a rarer human being.
Harish Trivedi

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Hyderabad diaries

15 August
Facebook on your mobile. At Shamsabad airport I suddenly realize the length of my absence from home. Dhoni seems ubiquitous in the ad spaces in a spick and span airport. Of course, it is Mahi’s Team India now. And of course, I have been away. Anything I write here can be so aptly tagged with "displacement"! Strange how arriving at a place for the first time in my life I should get a sense of having been away. Well. Imagined communities...

Surreal drive from Shamsabad airport to Miyapur. I am beginning to get the feel of Cyberabad. As we wind down the highway, the headlights flash upon rocky remnants of the Deccan and evidence of intense ongoing construction work. What must this place look like by day?

I discover later that my belongings are soaked through courtesy IndiGo’s strange luggage handling. Among them is my copy of Midnight’s Children. Ominous?

16 August
Clad in a Fab India 4-kali skirt and top, sling bag on shoulder, my hair up in a makeshift knot that frequently metamorphoses into a ponytail, the question I elicit among the women acquaintances my mother has made in the last 7 days, is whether I am married. But they are nice on the whole, and even though I look very different from locals, I feel comfortable out on the streets. The men seem courteous.
I can’t get rid of my America-acquired habit of smiling at people (all women in this case), especially if I have spoken with once. Fortunately there are no mishaps. I wonder and wonder—I never smile enough in greeting while in the US.

17 August
Getting out of the elevator, I learn the Telugu for “open” (or so I think), when a visitor/neighbour says, “tivande”.

18 August
The dosas have a different feel—soft like tissue paper. I am getting by with my Hindi thankfully. I am amazed at how much I can explain when I don’t have the word they might understand. Though I know that a horizontal shake of the head in these parts stands for the affirmative, I am flummoxed while shopping.
My little niece seems to like payesh. I will make it again another day.

19 August
Another new Telugu word: “eynkda”. It may mean “where” or “which shop”. I learn it as the woman from whom I buy onions enquires as to where I have bought tomatoes that look fresh.

20 August
My little niece, all of 8 months, is yelling “aa…aa…aa”. I try to teach her to sing. Nice sawaal-jawaab session ensues. Once I sing a note, she mimes “aa”!

Clytemnestra... Clytemnestra... Clytemnestra...



A year since we watched the Martha Graham Company's Clytemnestra at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Here's a picture I found on the net.

Friday, September 11, 2009

Posing Beauty

Photography exhibition
Thursday September 10, 2009, 10 am - 7 pm
Gulf + Western Gallery 721 Broadway at Waverly Pl, NY 10003
Admission free


Posing Beauty explores the contested ways in which African and African American beauty has been represented in historical and contemporary contexts through a diverse range of media including photography, film, video, fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture such as music and the internet. Throughout the Western history of art and image-making, beauty as an aesthetic impulse has been simultaneously idealized and challenged, and the relationship between beauty and art by examining the representation of beauty as a racialized act fraught with meanings and attitudes about class, gender, and aesthetics. In the first of four thematic sections, Constructing a Pose, considers the interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between self-representation and imposed representation, and the relationship between subject and photographer. The second theme, Body and Image, questions the way in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been constructed and framed through the body. The last two thematic sections Objectivity vs. Subjectivity, and Codes of Beauty, invite a deeper reading of beauty, its impact on mass culture and individuals and how the display of beauty affects the ways in which we see and interpret the world and ourselves. Posing Beauty problematizes our contemporary understanding of beauty by framing the notion of aesthetics, race, class, and gender within art, popular culture, and political contexts. This exhibition features approximately 90 works drawn from public and private collections and will be accompanied by a book published by WW Norton.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Peter McDonald lectures in Calcutta

CENTRE FOR STUDIES IN SOCIAL SCIENCES,
R 1 BAISHANBGHATA PATULI,
KOLKATA 700094

GENERAL SEMINAR

Dr Peter D. McDonald
Fellow and University Lecturer, St Hugh's College Oxford,


will give a talk titled

Literature and the Social Sciences: An Awkward Alliance?

Date: Monday, 7 September, 2009
Time: 3-5 PM.
Venue: CSSSC Seminar Room, Patuli
Campus

___________________________________________________
JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Lecture on 8th September, 2009 at 4 pm
Venue: AV Room, Dept of English


Dr Peter McDonald of St Hugh's College Oxford will give a talk titled
Policing Literature in Apartheid South Africa

at the AV Room, Dept of English, on Tuesday 8th September 2009 at 4pm. Some books of interest from OUP will be on sale at the venue.

'Censorship may have to do with literature', Nadine Gordimer once said, 'but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.' As the history of many repressive regimes shows, this vital borderline has seldom been so clearly demarcated. Just how murky it can sometimes be is compellingly exemplified in the case of apartheid South Africa. For reasons that were neither obvious nor historically inevitable, the apartheid censors were not only the agents of the white minority government's repressive anxieties about the medium of print. They were also officially-certified guardians of the literary. I have examined this paradoxical situation in detail in my most recent book The Literature Police (OUP, 2009) . For the purposes of this talk, I shall set out some of the general questions it raises and consider its consequences in relation to one, internationally notorious case.