Laughter, painfully intelligent

By Swarnim Waglé

Alan Bennett is Britain’s most admired playwright. Having written and adapted plays for the National Theater, Broadway, and the BBC for over forty years, he has finally diversified his skills to write a little novel. Literally a ‘little’ novel of around 20,000 words, Bennett’s "The Clothes They Stood Up In" has been described as a novella, although I am not sure if such a word exists in proper dictionaries of the English language. Regardless of what we call what Bennett has written, what a story it is, and what a debut. The book is supposed to be funny, but not in the usual loud, ha-ha way. He expects us to quietly relish the sharp wit adorned undistorted by a beautiful prose. But beneath the humor, Bennett poses an astounding set of philosophical enquiries on contemporary Western lifestyle. Taking the themes of material possession, institutional trappings of functioning democracies, and expectations from marriages crafted to conform, perhaps never before has such a big attempt been made in such a small work to nudge readers into questioning life’s routines in a humorous guise. "The Clothes They Stood Up In" is thus a seriously funny book that is simultaneously sad, quirky, sardonic, clever, crisp, and superbly intelligent.

The basic plot begins with the protagonists, Mr. and Mrs. Ransome, returning from an opera to find their posh London apartment broken into. Except the empty space, nothing is left behind, not even a used roll of toilet paper. The first paragraph is conveniently one of the finest in the book that unambiguously sets the tone for succeeding developments: "The Ransomes had been burgled. "Robbed," Mrs. Ransome said. "Burgled", Mr. Ransome corrected. Premises were burgled; persons were robbed. Mr. Ransome was a solicitor by profession and thought words mattered. Though "burgled" was the wrong word too. Burglars select; they pick; they remove one item and ignore others. There is a limit to what burglars can take: they seldom take easy chairs, for example, and even more seldom settees. These burglars did. They took everything."

Bennett exploits this unusual situation to probe people’s attachment to material possessions. By chronicling Mrs. Ransome’s travails to re-start from scratch as her indifferent husband goes about life only visibly displeased at the loss of his Mozart CD, Bennett is asking us, do things matter? Does stuff count? How important a concept is ownership - of emotions, of things? Is it the actual loss of convenience that materialism lends that is bothersome, or is it the need to re-invent life from ground zero that is irritating; or is it perhaps that like we borrow identities through lineage, stuff and things define who we are, and once that tie is severed, we are left in a state of utter worthlessness? Bennett appreciates the perfected wonders of 20th century capitalism – the power of an ingenious instrument called insurance, for example, but by mocking mankind, and the depths we have reduced ourselves to service the markets, he is proving a larger point. Mercifully, he stops short of overreaching for the nonsensical spiritual solace that, like insurance, is traded in the bazaar of private sorrows.

The Ransomes soon discover that all their possessions have been immaculately preserved at a dreary suburban location. Bennett is asking here, how is one to deal with chaos of this kind, the emotional roller coaster of instant loss and recovery? How cruel and costly can unpredictability be? How does one manage confusion? Can confusion be managed at all? By funnily portraying snippets from the modern police force, the ridiculously overrated counseling industry, and the mind-numbing quality of American television, Bennett is transparent about his complete distaste for unintelligent indulgence; but he is wise enough not to abuse his humorous license to make indirect moral prescriptions on how individual lives should be led in open societies. After the mystery of the burglary is solved, nothing of course is the same again. Mrs. Ransome is a new woman and Mr. Ransome’s perverted bent of mind is sharpened. Under this subplot, final in the book, Bennett wants to pin down a trade-off between the risk-averse discomforts of conformity with the pleasures of enacting suppressed desires. Submerged in his dry humor, one can dig deep to infer a subset of interesting questions: Why is the notion of conforming always thought of as passé, and the pursuit of free will always interpreted as rebellious? What price do we pay for this false dichotomy? Why can’t we be inventive enough to balance cherished values with enterprising will? Why can’t we, so to speak, conform rebelliously?

I first read Bennett six years ago. His delightful essay, ‘The Lady in the Van’, made a lasting impression, and it was thus with joyous expectation that I picked up his debut novel. I am pleased to have not been let down. Unlike good music, humor unfortunately does not command universal appreciation quite as uniformly. Even acknowledging Bernard Shaw’s quip about Britain and America being the same civilization divided by the same language, it is surprising that the book did not do very well in the US, the largest English speaking market. It is well known that rich British creations are routinely neutered for the American audience. While the title of Bennett’s own play, ‘The Madness of George III’, for example, was renamed ‘The Madness of King George’, later an Oscar-nominated screenplay, to prevent confusion on the part of the average American on the number of Georges who have governed England so far, no such attempt at revision seems to have been made on this novella. Barring this caveat about the place-people-culture specificity of refined and restrained humor, I have nothing negative to say about Alan Bennett’s "The Clothes They Stood Up In". It is quite simply a most brilliant work of fiction that adds substantively to an enviable canon of meaningful, witty writing in a country where the greatest offence is to tell someone politely: "you don’t have a sense of humor."

Untangling the medical webs of Kirtipur

By Dinesh Prasain

Health and ill-health have as much to do with germs and medicine as with society and culture. In his book, Medical Anthropology of Nepal, Madhusudan Subedi successfully drives home this message.

Madhusudan Subedi draws on the theoretical insights developed in medical anthropology and the ethnographic field data gathered in 1999 to answer the following questions: "

(1) How do the people in Kirtipur understand and create meanings on their bodily afflictions?

(2) How do they relate their health problems with social and natural environments?

(3) What sort of range of therapeutic traditions are available and practised in Kirtipur?

(4) What are the main causes behind the acceptance of different medical traditions?

(5) What are the methods used by healers in their healing practices in Kirtipur, and

(6) How and why are the choices made between and within the various options?"

(p.2-3). We not only get answers to these questions in the book, but also come out with a wish that such questions were asked and answered more often by people seeking to intervene in the health care system of Nepal.

Health and ill-health in Kirtipur are associated not just with the state-sponsored modern allopathic institutions and their ideologies. People there live amidst, interpret and employ plural medical traditions in complex interaction with each other. There are medical doctors and health professionals, bokshi, dhami, jhankri, Harati ma and mediums, ayurvedic specialists and jharphuke vaidyas, and the promoters of acupuncture. Subedi does not romanticize or patronize one medical tradition at the expense of the other. Neither do the local inhabitants, it appears. For the same illness, people may employ different specialists, at different stages of the illness. Or the same person may employ the health assistant, ayurvedic doctor, and a faith healer the same day to deal with the different aspects of the same illness.

The socio-cultural context and the economic imperatives influence the way people in Kirtipur evaluate and employ these different medical traditions and institutions. In the eight out of the 12 chapters in the book, Subedi demonstrates this through case studies, in-depth interviews with key informants, observations as well as secondary data gathered from different institutions related to the health care system in Nepal in general and Kirtipur in particular. The symbolic meaning that every social institution and processes are imbued with, may be very relevant to our understanding of the health seeking behaviour of the people. The local belief that Cowliflower is cold food results in lactating mothers, who are thought to be needing hot food, avoiding it. A woman’s womb is viewed as an agricultural field, a man’s semen as seed. Like the field is soft and ready for sowing seeds after rain, a woman’s womb is thought to be ready for sowing the semen right after menstruation. After a few days of menstruation, a woman’s womb is thought to go dry, and that she will not get pregnant after a couple of weeks of menstruation. People may thus stop using contraceptives just when they need it. Without a knowledge of such local beliefs and practices, distribution of contraceptives alone would not help the family planning interventions.

This is just one example, interestingly demonstrating the practical implications of the cultural meanings people attach to different aspects of the body, its constitution and processes. Madhusudan Subedi unearths and puts into perspective, many such examples related to diarrhea, child birth, drinking water and sanitation, pregnancy and pregnancy-loss, breast-feeding, infertility, etc., where the natural and the socio-cultural world complexly interact to impact on the overall health situation of the Kirtipur Newars.

Professor Gunnar Haaland from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway concludes his Foreword to the book by saying that, "The Study will be of great interest not only for persons with a special interest in medical anthropology, but also for readers with an interest in general anthropology and Nepal ethnography, and most importantly it ought to be taken seriously by the applied worker dealing with improving the health situation in the country." I agree. But one would wish the book was proofread more carefully and the layout and design made more attractive and reader-friendly. One would also wish the book was titled more modestly, as it is a medical anthropological study of the Kirtipur Newars, and Nepal is a bit bigger place.

Gandhian Method for policy making

By Jagannath Adhikari

Inclusive Economics is an attempt to distill some useful methods from Gandhian philosophy,  which can be helpful for making policies by overcoming the limitations in theories/models based on a reductionist approach. The need for an alternative broad-based method, the inclusive method, has arisen, as the book argues, because of the end of the ideologically based policy making system and the failures of various models meant to predict future scenarios. The book takes up the case of the recent failure of Asian economies as an example to illustrate the limitations of prevailing economic models. These models were not able to predict the crises because they were not inclusive enough to accommodate various major and minor factors that could play a role in a particular circumstance. ‘When a crisis is caused by factors that are left out of the model, policy makers using that model cannot anticipate it’ argues the book. The end of the system of making policies from an ideological base has given way to a ragmatic approach in policy making which provides freedom to choose from a wide array of theories or models. But the author argues that pragmatism does not safeguard against expediency.

The major concern of the author – and the weakness of methodology in economics - is reducing reality to a single model. On the other hand, he also considers that the rigor of a model needs to be preserved. These twin objectives can be met through Gandhian method, which shifts the focus of analysis to the consequences. Therefore, instead of searching for a model that can help in explaining a situation, the need should be to identify a set of consequences that are desired. The policy maker can then take into account all the factors that influence the desired consequences.

A major feature of Gandhian method is its primacy of action – argues the book. The action that helps in achieving desired consequences is the focus of the Gandhian method. In this approach policy maker should identify a set of models, which together give a whole picture. If rigorous models are not available, then less rigorous models need to be used. Only this approach of inclusiveness would lead
to appropriate action. In Gandhian method, an action is evaluated not based on its predetermined consequences, but on the basis of all possible consequences. Therefore, there is wholeness in this method.

The focus on goodness of consequences leads to many moral questions, which are answered from Gandhian philosophy. The pertinent questions that could be asked are - what is to be considered good and how can it be judged? The Gandhian approach is that goodness is decided by morality existing at a point in time. Morality here is not considered absolute, but a relative concept. Accordingly morality can change over time and across people. The method of arriving at a relative morality is also considered a main feature of the Ghandian approach. This method is called bargained consensus, which can also be applied for managing conflicts. This concept of bargained consensus is necessary as the Gandhian approach gives emphasis to the individual. In such circumstances bargained consensus is the only way to reach to a morality for society as a whole.

The book deals in detail with the concepts of Swadeshi and Trusteeship projected by Gandhi, which the author considers as approaches to augment good consequences. The concept of Swadeshi emphasizes local development and self-rule, but its coverage depends on the level of aggregation. The concept of Trusteeship was developed to encourage individuals to move away from self-interest in running an enterprise. This might help persons responsible for running an enterprise to be non-attached to its consequences. This is considered as an ideal, and fairness would result by reaching close to that ideal. The combination of non-violence and tolerance, empowerment through options, and fairness through non-attachment and Trusteeship would speed up the process of bargained consensus among conflicting groups and individuals. This would lead to choosing the desired consequences.

The Gandhian method would differ significantly from various scientific approaches regarding the importance given to subjectivity. Ghandhian method, argues the book, makes no attempts to reduce subjectivity. On the contrary, it gives emphasis to improving the quality of subjective judgment, as it assumes that an appropriate action to achieve desired consequences cannot be based on what is objectively known at a point of time. Accordingly Gandhian method also gives importance to faith, but secondary to reason.

Gandhian philosophy was developed in response to the various ills of the western industrialization model of development and modern way of living. He, therefore, proposed rural development, small town development, environmentally friendly way of farming and living, generalization instead of specialization, wholeness in living, belief in both reason and faith, practical approach instead of following a rigid ideology, spiritual development and becoming a part of the work undertaken. Considering that these are also some of the features of the post-modernist approach, Gandhi seems to be ahead of his time. But the questions still arises as to whether his philosophy and method still attract policy makers of developing countries who must take into account the aspirations of their people for modern facilities and a modern life. The impact of globalization and mass media, influenced by global capitalists who are in turn motivated by pure self-interest, and shrinking of public sphere mean that there is little scope for Gandhian philosophy to prosper. Even now there are only some small enclaves where his ideals are implemented as a token of respect to him but not as  a practically viable alternative. But the book is useful for policy makers to understand the method that could be of some value to  reduce some of the ills in today’s methods emphasizing objectivity and abstraction.