We left Colgate via bus this morning at 9:15, on our way to JFK. First stop? A McDonalds just off Route 17. Nothing gets you ready for a trip to India like a Big Mac. Actually, I saw mostly cups of coffee in the hands of my colleagues. About two more hours and we'll be at the airport...then two long flights until arrival early Monday morning in Chennai, India.
Update: now at JFK, boarding soon. New Year celebrations somewhere high over the Atlantic...
I have to admit that I have never been comfortable doing non-academic public writing. I have never blogged before. So, with your indulgence, I am going to warm up to the enterprise of interesting and approachable traveloging by writing about Karl Marx.
Never fear, though: I have enhanced my blog entry with this endearing photo of Friedrich Engels!
There is no longer an official caste system in India. It was outlawed in the 1950 Constitution of India. Yet, the issue of caste still features prominently in the minds of many Americans, and, as a recent New York Times article reveals, it endures in subtle and surprising ways within Indian society.
As the NYT puts it, “certain cultural affinities remain” between caste and career paths in India such that it is often still difficult for people with certain surnames and/or family lineages to break into prestigious careers.
In recent years, however, capitalism has changed this. To some extent, anyway.
The NYT article quotes Chandra Bhan Prasad, an activist for members of India’s so-called “untouchable” caste: the Dalits.
“Because of the new market economy, material markers are replacing social markers. Dalits can buy rank in the market economy. India is moving from a caste-based to a class-based society, where if you have all the goodies in life and your bank account is booming, you are acceptable.”
Even if my trip to India didn’t have the Core curriculum at its center, a quote like this would inevitably bring Karl Marx to my mind. In 1848, Marx (and poor, neglected Friedrich Engels, of course) claimed that capitalism tends to eradicate traditional social stratifications. In place of the “complicated arrangement of society into various orders,” it creates “two great classes directly facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat” (Communist Manifesto, Section I).
According to the NYT, this leveling quality of the free market is an example of “the messy and maddening road to progress in India.” I doubt that anyone would dispute the felicity of the social empowerment of India’s Dalits. Who wouldn’t view such a development as “progress”?
Well, Marx and Engels, for one, couched their analysis of modern society in a recognition of the ambivalence of capitalism’s leveling logic. This logic, they observed,
has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade (Ibid).
I’m not sure how to come to terms with the tension articulated here, but I hope that this trip will afford me the opportunity to think it over in the company of some interesting people.
What do you think?
The trip to India has generated a lot of excitement on campus. Finishing grading, in particular, has opened up the doors for extensive speculation and castle-building regarding all that will happen in India. The last minute concerns seem to do with phones – where to get sim cards? Will our local phones work there? Will we have to sell our kidneys for a cell phone?
It has been difficult to be party to all this pre-travel enthusiasm owing to the sudden death of my close friend and coauthor, Jalal Alamgir. I have contemplated dropping out of the trip many a time in the last three weeks, but I will go in the name of this friend whose short life was a wonder and an inspiration. He worked on India and didn't like the place very much (mostly because of the research-restrictions that the government had imposed on him when he was writing a book), but he has always been ready for exploration and adventure. In that spirit, here I go.
 |
| This is page one of fifteen. |
