History and Identity: Some Vignettes from Africa

History and Identity : Some Vignettes from Africa


A. Srinivas Rao
31st May 2011

It was a searingly hot afternoon in 1992, in the village of Pupu somewhere in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe; as the local orderly from the Ndebele people and a member of ZAPA (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) scanned the site for the ancient ritual the Umbiyiso to be held that night under the starry awning. It was to be “Heroes day” the next day. The Mugabe government was suspicious of this spirit ancestors’ ceremony and the switching of the loyalties of the Ndebele people. Mugabe never liked the ZAPA and he had achieved notoriety by killing several of their members. Many of the non-Ndebele people of Pupu were unhappy that their nationalist struggle would be credited to Lobengula, last king of the Ndebele. The evening falls langrously, the ceremony commences and the Svikiro or medium is beginning to feel the heady punch of the local brew rapoko beer. Several beer pots dot the end of the hut, on the ceremonial table is a plate of snuff and another one of ground maize and meat (sadza nenyama) and beer that has been offered to the ancestor spirits of the realm of Amadlozi. The gathering chant “woz ekhaya”…'come come' and pour small pots of beer on the head of an ox inkomo yamadlozi. There is a silence as the medium grunted and fretted and declared his identity. The non-Ndebele seemed relieved that he was an ancient spirit Rozwi mambo a ruler of the local people even before the Ndebele. The medium then exhorted the gathering to seek to recognize the older past and heal the wounds of the violence before he broke into incoherence. It was an order to transcribe their history.

Ram Rajya and Organisational Leadership: Origins and Pathologies

A Srinivas Rao

Ram Rajya Baithe Trailoka
Harshit Bhaye Gaye Sab Shoka
Daihik Daivik bhautik Tapa
Ram Rajya Nahin Kahuhin Vyapa
Bayar Na Kar Kahu San Koi
Ram Pratap Vishamata Khoi
Nahin Daridra, Koi Dukhi Na Deena
Nahin Koi Abudha Na Lakshan Heena
Alpa Mratyu Nahi Kavaneu Peera
Sab Sunder Sab Viruj Sareera.

“When Ram Rajya was established in the three worlds, all were enveloped by happiness and sorrow disappeared. None were afflicted by pain, material, physical, and psychological, and enmity vanished. Under the influence of Ram, there were no differences. There was no poverty, misery, nor indigence, humiliation or ignorance, all were virtuous. They were blessed with longevity and were handsome and healthy.”

Such is the description of utopia (purportedly by Tulsidas-source unknown) which in India is referred to as Ram Rajya. Such a utopia is based on the residual consciousness of an unvarying, settled agrarian society which over the millennia has internalized the rhythms and imagery and their metaphors and idioms. Such a vision is based on a stable environment unperturbed by political, economic, demographic and technological turbulence. In the language of images, old Indian films would end with one huge smiling family cast in the iconic image of Rama and his large extended family marking that ‘they lived happily ever after’ (e.g. Hum Aap Ke Hai Kaun). In the absence of a history of political institutions apart from those of kingship and tribal republicanism, the idea of such a utopia still animates the consciousness of most Indians. In India the joint family is the fundamental unit and basis of institutional analysis. Often we are found to carry these same ideas within the organizations and institutions we populate despite their anachronism. This is especially true in family run businesses, political parties and other such formations. It might be of use to outline the history of this idea and tease out its implications about the values it underscores, its assumed norms of conduct and guidelines for leadership, organizational health or pathologies thereof.

MBA Curriculum: How Different is Different?

MBA Curriculum: How Different is Different?


It was rather strange to see the Economic Times "The Q to Become an MBA Just Got a Bit Longer! " 25th May 2011, make headline news about the development of emotional, spiritual and social quotients to the wards of business schools. I am sure even if the interviewees made no such claim, the reporter Kala Vijayaraghavan seemed to have had a 'gestaltic' vision of the synchronicity of multiple intelligences. She goes on to say

"Befriending and mentoring students living in slums, hardship stints in backward villages, mandatory internships with NGOs and hospitals, treasure hunts deep inside the city of Mumbai, immersions in other global cities, lectures by Aamir Khan and his 3 idiots co-star R Madhavan, compulsory lessons on ethics and environment, and even management mantras from the Bhagvad Gita it now takes a lot more than the usual dose of case studies and classroom sessions to earn an MBA. And honing social and spiritual quotient is now as important as sharpening the intelligence quotient (IQ).At the same time, the MBA is also beginning to reflect the changing world order"

Jairamji Ki

Whew....!!! what a season and as though the heat wasn't enough, the inanities just don't stop. Jairam Ramesh opens his mouth wide open and this time tells us another truism. This alumnus of IIT-B who was honoured by their faculty in 2001 as their "Distinguished Alumnus", spilled the beans, the truth about their faculty yesterday. Reputed for his loud mouth and cavalier indifference to time and circumstance (for eg. his criticism of the Indian Home Ministry and fellow Chidambaram in a public forum at Beijing as being paranoid about China) he sometimes tells us the truth that we already know.

A Contemplation on Death

Contemplation on Death

A Srinivas Rao Feb 2010

This essay was written more than a year ago in Feb 2010. I am posting it here to have some of my earlier writing in one place.
“Where o death is thy sting and where o grave is thy victory” Corinthians 15:55

She was walking in her measured pace at that evening hour when the large flocks of crows returned to roost and the fewer sparrows chirped in chorus in a nearby tree. She was treading cautiously along the beaten track on the hem of a large playground where scores of walkers, the elderly and fitness enthusiasts trod in uneven pace. Slight of frame, dressed in an earthy brown, a tiny bag slung across her shoulder like a satchel, bespectacled and greying with an air of quiet dignity she walked. Little would one suspect that she was being treated for colon cancer, and had gone through a battery of therapies over the past year that left her slightly battered and darkened and with unseen scars of suffering and possibly loneliness.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into a conversation. My MP3 player was beckoning an evening raga and the prospect of a slow paced walk didn’t seem to be an attractive physical exercise. Yet I couldn’t resist wishing her and attempted in vain a reason to depart soon at my own pace and to the refuge of my own solitary observation ‘tower’. Amiable as she usually was we kept exchanging inconsequential remarks and pleasantries. She was genial to talk to and always did intrigue me with her ways of looking at things though I at times did seem dismissive at what seemed like an NGO worldview, slightly Left, slightly anarchic, slightly confusing. As the conversation ambled we unwittingly discovered that we were discussing death. In particular her own feelings that she had been experiencing and what she called ‘lived experience’ and her narration stopped my inappropriate academic chatter around the question.

Gender Matters: Women in Leadership and Management

A. Srinivas Rao 16th May 2011

Do Amma, Didi and Behenji defy every convention we have held about women in power and is there an unconscious stereotyping of women in power, as more dominant and ruthless and generally mercurial, unpredictable and non rational than their male counterparts? Do women who storm male bastions tend to be considerably more autocratic, vindictive and less likely to share power with others Or are we more sensitive to what is un-womanly behaviour and highlight the performative spectacles of dominance/subjugation?  Does the presence of women in power make their opponents cast them as sexual objects of derision (calling them “that woman”) and find it difficult to accept their legitimate worth as equals or superiors? Are the appellations of Amma, and Didi and Bahenji rhetorically constructed sexist devices to soften their triumphal possession of male bastions of leadership (as though women can’t be seen other than as mother, sister or wife)? Does their apparent spinster status, betray the incompatibility of a balance between public and private selves and the sacrifice of a family life in the pursuit of fulfilment and power?

Let’s consider the things that have shocked us about them as examples of hubris, corruption and ruthlessness that portray them as deviant from the stereotypes of nurturing, kind, caring images we have of women. Jayalalitha has rarely hesitated to order arrests of her bete-noir Karunanidhi, journalists (even the Hindu), the Kanchi Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati, and others on various counts. She has often been found not resisting (probably encouraging) her senior ministers like O Pannerselvam and the prodigal KKSR Ramachandran prostrating to her in public. Jayalalitha was portrayed at one time as Marcoesque having 10,000 sarees and more than 700 pairs of footwear. Mayawati’s infamous garland of rupee notes valued at Rs 18 lakhs was a sign of Dalit arrival as the new power brokers and she was known to possess 72 houses, plots, shops and 54 bank accounts. Mayawati has been censured for her elephantine obsession with statues of icons including herself and notorious for her birthday bashes. DSP Padam Singh, her chief of security removed his handkerchief and bent down to clean the chappals of Mayawati while she kept talking to some officials and party workers. Mamata’s performances include dancing on the bonnet of Jayaprakash Narayan’s car, taking off her shawl and preparing a noose to kill herself when questioning Congress’s secret deals with the Marxists, hurling a sheaf of papers at the Deputy Speaker on being disallowed notice on an issue (Bangladeshi migrants) in the Lower House. Despite these, one cannot but admire and in their defence, state the insuperable obstacles and circumstances of their triumph by sheer grit, perseverance, determination and indomitable courage, virtues we usually ascribe to men. Jayalalitha had to not only overcome being a woman, but being a film star (held in contempt by the conservative Tamil society), and a Brahmin (which was against the grain of Dravidian politics). Mayawati was a Dalit and had little apart from a native intelligence and skills of a street fighter to secure more than 22% of the fractious UP vote. Mamata would have the spirit of a Bengal tigress, nay veritably be the Mahishasuramardini herself to bring down one of the longest serving Left governments on the planet since the 'fall of the wall'. Indeed some of them had powerful mentors and sponsors like MGR and Kanshi Ram, though in general women tend to have mentors but few or no sponsors.

Revelation and Reason Part III

Sabda –Revelation and the Brahmin Orthodoxy

A. Srinivas Rao

11^th May 2011

In the last of the series on the contest between revelation and reason is the small but significant tale that took place in ancient India. The reason I like to tell this tale is of course that it was in India but also that it entirely captured the debate within a branch of philosophy called epistemology or the theory of knowledge. The tale is sophisticated and also raises issues that deal with aesthetics, hermeneutics and linguistics.

It was the period 800-200 BCE. It was the age of the greatest of the titans of human thought. It was the age that forever lit the ways of thought as never before and made a divinity of being human. It was called the Axial Age. The great Zarathushtra had just died near Persia, reclusive thinkers in Indian forests were challenging the stranglehold of Brahmin orthodoxy and one of the ford makers Parshwanath had just passed away. The very heavens refused to let the grand old man Lao Tzu into their midst pleading with him to go back and be human again and show man the Way, the Tao. In China Confucius was holding forth his Analects on the good human being and a great bureaucrat. Soon Socrates would walk absentmindedly in the agoras of Athens questioning people, dutifully followed by Plato, showered with a bucketful of water by his wife, in frustration. It seemed that the very gods wanted to send Prometheus back to man, this time with the heavenly fire of Reason and it seemed around the globe several unearthly suns made a simultaneous dawn flooding the earth with a light that would never diminish.

Revelation and Reason Part II

Mutazili and Reason in Islam

A Srinivas Rao

May 8^th 2011

Lazing as a couch potato would, remote in hand I accidentally chanced upon an interesting biopic titled “Destiny” by Yousseff Chahine (NDTV Lumiere) on the life of the last of the Islamic Philosophers Averroes (Inb Rushd) (CE 1126-1198). So impressive was his life and scholarship that I thought it a pity that we haven’t been educated as legatees of the whole of human history of thought. What is more impressive, less acknowledged and ironic is that the West received Greek-Hellenic thought thanks to the legacy of Islam who had nurtured the rationalist traditions of the Greeks until the Renaissance. It was due to the great Islamic scholars Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) that the West re-discovered the legacy of Greek and Hellenic thought. What however is tragic is that Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina were denounced by their own people for using frameworks that were non-Islamic especially Greek methods of logic to clarify ideas within Islam. What is ironic is that the West celebrates their achievements. Even today in the great painting called “The School of Athens” by Raphael, Averroes has a prominent place, So also in Giorgion's painting the Three Philosophers. What follows is the context of the times of Averroes (not his biography).

In the long and tortuous history of human rationality we unwittingly promote a myth that rationality is a precious legacy of the modern West. There is a corollary to it that the non-West was utterly devoid of rationalist traditions.  The great contest in every society between faith and reason is an interesting tale to tell for ears that would care to hear. Even in Ancient India the tale unfolds as the contest between the Mimamasakaras of the Brahmin orthodoxy and the rationalist discourse of the Buddhists; but that’s a different story.

Revelation and Reason Part I

Modernisation is not Modernism

A Srinivas Rao

1^st May 2011

Sangay Lobsang of Harvard was appointed last week as the Prime Minister of the Tibetans and more than 500 years of tradition yielded to a modern view of separation of the Church ( as represented by the Dalai Lama) from the State. Somewhere along the way, the discomfiture within Islam in our times also stems from the unitary conception of Church and State and the inability to separate the two. Of course there is no hierarchically organized church in Islam (nor is there one in Vajrayana Buddhism). Yet the principle of separating the institutions of the state fashioned on reason and church founded on faith and revelation has been inexorably continuing on a secular trajectory.  All modern institutions of the state and by contagion all public institutions (except those of religion) follow this as a cardinal principle, including the separation of the domain of ethics from that of religion. Indeed the definition of modernity is often predicated on such a separation of powers; a quarantine between faith and reason. Often when as a faculty I have noticed well meaning prayer invocations in Sanskrit and celebration of religious festivals, I have felt that the school more than others must reflect on the place of religion in society and while giving it its due, keep enshrined not loyalties or traditions but reason in its prayer halls. What is the genesis of this and what are the values it assumes and makes us complicit in is what I would attempt to write.