Popular Culture and Everyday Life by Toby Miller and Alec McHoul Sage, London. Pages 224. £14.99.

Introducing Cultural Studies by Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon. Icon, Cambridge. Pages 176. £8.99.

WITH increasing interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, is it possible to speak of discrete fields of study? When one teaches "Dr Faustus", is it possible to ignore the relevance of the age of the Renaissance and the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races? Chinua Achebe’s "Arrow of God" is an anthropological study of the Ibo tribe in one of the villages in southern Nigeria and not merely a work of fiction to be handled in the traditional ways of literary criticism. Jean Rhys’ "Wide Sargasso Sea" or Saadat Hasan Monto’s "Toba Tek Singh" cannot be approached without a Foucauldian consideration of the politics of madness in the entire cultural history that goes into the construction of the discourse of insanity.

This inclusion of "cultural studies" in various disciplines suggests a collapsing of difference as well as the hybridisation and crossing over between disciplines such as linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, history, social theory, anthropology and philosophy. Recently we have seen incompatible figures like Saussure and Freud, or Marx and Heideggar come together — a theoretical linkage which is challenging and wide in scope. Violations of rigid compartmentalisation are certainly positive and must be viewed as liberating insofar as they produce theoretical advances that would become fundamental for generations to come.

Combining critical theory with cultural studies is to clearly consider the cross-section of the current "dissensus" on the shape of the post-disciplinary university, including the positive aspects of cultural studies as the new organising principle of academic work. This method offers a new understanding of the way literary studies shape and define culture as well as popular culture, and the way that teaching and research institutions are changing in response to international movements, social forces, and the increasing importance of the historical specificity and character of popular culture and everyday life. Investigating how "high" culture (literature, liberal education) and popular culture (fashion, film, advertisement and discourse analysis) are dealt with in the classroom, shows that the culture wars of the 1980s and the 1990s are by no means over; they have simply warped into new visible struggles of educational funding, curricula, academic standards, and pedagogical authority.

Toby Miller and Alec McHoul have clearly rethought the study of popular culture in their recent book "Popular Culture and Everyday Life," while also explaining key ideas in everyday practice, such as "eating" or "talking" or sports and the discourses that construct these practices; the way we dress or talk, what we eat and how we socialise, communicate things about ourselves, and thus can be studied as signs. Ideologies, for instance, are all related to class positions and therefore to the primacy of material living conditions rather than to ideas or beliefs in the life of human beings. History is the struggle for the control of material conditions on which life rests.

Therefore, when we look at a sport like golf, is it possible to see beyond the accepted or conventional attitudes and beliefs which go with the game? A determining and defining authority is created through the social discourse of this game. It is performed most effectively by making the system seem natural, God-given or ideal so that other classes accept it without asking any questions. The golfer becomes part of something larger than himself and surrenders to the power of the game, its hysteria and, to use Walter Benjamin’s negative term, its aura.

The cultural imperialism of the game is akin to baseball or cricket, which links these games to a modernist sensibility of western exceptionalism. In the world of golf the ludicrous enthusiasts experience a sense of transcendence, a trip to the realm of the timeless and universal.

The phallocentrism of the game where males dominate the different committees that run the show, is an indicator of the cultural construction of a patriarchal power which underpins the domination of one gender by the other. The links between beliefs, the pro-golf lobby’s self-image, the production of meaning and the process of constituting the so-called lovers of the game, even if they have never played another game in their lives, are not immediately apparent.

The ideology that goes with the game is essentially a contested concept, a discourse that renders it almost invulnerable and much appreciated in many circles, but there is a fundamental rejection of it by people who realise its worth and its elitist aura that suffers from inherent complexes, though there are exceptions of those who are genuinely in love with the game and play it without making a show of it.

Its popularity is based on the production and dissemination of erroneous beliefs whose inadequacies are socially engineered. The ideas that rule this game are the ideas of the ruling material forces of society. Therefore, the institution of golf is as much ideological as any other state institution.

The book thus offers a wide-ranging survey of social and cultural theory, while issuing a challenge to the emphasis on speculation rather than observation which is inherent in contemporary cultural studies. The authors try to show that everyday popular culture is too important a social phenomenon to be dealt with speculatively as the spectacular, and always as a representation of something else. Instead, they want to show how (first, using a historical or geneological approach) everyday cultural objects arise out of local conditions — conditions which are highly specific and far from spectacular. And then (second, using some variations on conversation analysis) they demonstrate what these objects actually look like in their places situated everyday.

In last few years, as is the practice in the humanities, many departments have introduced courses in both dominant and sub-cultural practices backed by a study of literary criticism and theory which takes into consideration the diversity and range of cultural studies and providing perspectives on everyday life through ethnography, textual reading, discourse analysis and political economy. For 50 years the model or paradigm of university studies has relied on an opposition between the established canon and its "other", or popular culture. The theory wars of the 1980s changed that. The canon has been overwhelmed by world literature and popular culture. As Aijaz Ahmed argues, "There is no exclusionary pleasures of dominant taste" but only an inclusive sense of heterogenity that coutners the "cultural myopia" of western humanities curriculum. No unitary idea of world literature is possible.

With the advent of post-structuralism and the decline of literature, the opposition between high and popular became untenable, transforming the concentration of inquiry from the canonical into cultural studies. This shows how we might think about the humanities — and how we might act as humanists — as the world changes around, about and under us. We have to realise that the role that theory and cultural studies has played and will play in the various conceptual mutations in contemporary times is not slight. Such developments suggest changes in teaching and the pursuit of interdisciplinary areas such an anthropology, film studies, liteature, American or African or Asian studies, and history, which range widely over a diverse terrain.

The discipline of cultural studies must have a new paradigm for the common analysis of canonical as well as non-canonical texts. Z. Sardar and Borin Van Loon in their recent book "Introducing Cultural Studies" have tried to show the presence of this exciting field of study in academic work within the arts, the humanities, the social sciences and even science and technology. They take a fleeting, though rather interesting, view of the contribution of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and E.P. Thompson to the whole enterprise of cultural studies. Interestingly all these pioneers came from a working-class background and tried to understand the role of culture at a critical point in a deeply class-ridden English society. Culture to them was more of a commodity that is constructed with the sole purpose of struggle for cultural domination, a war for legitimacy and social status waged by the elites.

Many departments have already undertaken to radically change the methodology and approach to popular culture. Through a detailed criticism of competing theories, including cultural studies, new historicism and cultural materialism, social and literary critics like Miller and McHoul in the past few years have demonstrated how this new study should — and should not — be done. We are at a juncture where it is important to alter the specialised intellectual work in the academia because, as Edward Said has also argued, it speaks increasingly to itself rather than the world of everyday life and ordinary need.

Such specialisation and methodology has a tendencey towards a doctrinaire set of assumptions and a language of professionalisation allied with cultural dogma and a "surprisingly insistent quietism". Our consistently advocated preference is for a form of criticism and a teaching methodology that dispenses with all this obscurity and instead contests at every point the confined and limited specialisation of much academic discourse. For a teacher the text must be a vast web of affiliations with the world, not simply located in a canonical line of books called "English literature" but something that has its roots and connections with many other aspects of the world — political, social, cultural — all of which go to make up its relevance to our day-to-day life.

It is well known that there is complacency in the obsession with the status quo. Academics who have devious and short-sighted agendas are not prepared to consider one of the central battlefields of the culture wars in the universities where liberals and conservatives have fought over questions of diversity, tradition, and current innovations in pedagogy. The battles have been fierce in many universities around the world, complicated by the university’s unsettled, ever-changing nature, whereas here in many of India’s so-called forward-looking universities senior faculty members feel threatened to hear or are afraid to put across radical views exploring the university’s engagement with "culture" and its vast number of different as well as competing representations.

The North West Frontier Drama 1945-1947 — A Re-assessment by Parshotam Mehra. Manohar, Delhi. Pages 262. Rs 400.

PROFESSOR Parshotam Mehra has written extensively and authoriatively on the history of India’s North-Eastern frontiers. He has now given us a meticulously researched and documented and highly readable book on the tumultuous two years in the North-West Frontier Province preceding the partition of India. He has had access to some untapped material in the UK, including the papers of two former Governors and some members of the ICS who held senior positions in the provincial administration during that critical period.

What happened in the North-West Frontier Province in 1945-47 can only be understood in a historical perspective. The province was regarded by the British as the most vulnerable part of their empire. They had constant fears of incursions not only from the unruly trans-border tribes, but from Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.

The colonial regime tried with a great measure of success to insulate the province from the nationalist ferment in the rest of India.

The political scene, however, changed almost overnight with the emergence in 1929 of a remarkable man, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who blended, like Gandhi, a charismatic leadership with a genius for organisation. He brought his Pathan (or, to be more precise, Pakhtun) followers into the forefront of Gandhi’s nonviolent satyagraha struggles which astonished friends and foes alike. His Khudai Khidmatgars (servants of God) set an example of discipline and sacrifice which put the other Indian provinces in the shade.

According to an official record of convictions for civil disobedience between January and September, 1932, the NWFP with a population of just three million accounted for 5557 convictions compared with 1620 in Punjab which had five times the population of the Frontier Province. Even Bengal, politically one of the most active provinces, recorded no more than 10,952 convictions with a population of 62 million.

In 1929 the Congress Working Committee adopted the Khudai Khidmatgars organisation and the alliance continued till the very end. In successive civil disobedience campaigns, the Khudai Khidmatgars were subjected to fierce repression, more severe than what the Congress faced in other provinces. Abdul Ghaffar Khan himself returned to NWFP in 1937 after six years of imprisonment and exile, but the Congress (read the Khudai Khidmatgars) made a good showing in the general election and a Congress Ministry was sworn in with Dr Khan Sahib as Chief Minister.

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 led to the resignation of the Congress Ministers, a clash with the British Raj and the quit India movement. The Congress and the Khudai Khidmatgars were banned and Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his followers again imprisoned. The field thus became clear during the war time for the growth of the Muslim League with the full backing of British officials. It was alleged that Abdul Ghaffar Khan was propagating nonviolence to emasculate the brave and war-like people of the Frontier and the Congress was trying to bring about a Hindu Raj in collusion with the Axis powers.

The Muslim League fought the general election in 1946 on the issue of Pakistan and tried to polarise it on communal lines, but the Congress still managed to win 21 out of 38 Muslim seats and all the non-Muslim seats. The Muslim League won 17 seats, but 11 of them were from the non-Pakhtun districts of the NWFP. The Congress again formed a ministry in March, 1946, but was not able to settle down to work.

Parshotam Mehra documents in meticulous detail the events immediately preceding and following the general election. We learn from a diary entry by Governor Cunningham on October 17 that a Sikh politician told him that no Muslim believed in Pakistan "as a dismemberment of India". On November 3 the Governor noted that a Muslim visitor, Pir Baksh, was of the view that the Pakistan cry was unreal and that for "the average Pathan villager, a suggestion of Hindu domination was only laughable".

How this unreal cry became a political reality in less than two years comes out from the narrative of events in this book: the arrival of a new Governor Olaf Caroe in March, 1946, the installation of the Congress Ministry in Peshawar, tensions between the Governor and the Congress Ministers, Nehru’s visit to the Frontier in October, 1946, demonstrations by the tribes and the fanning of religious sentiments by the Muslim League with the help of the mullahs, officials and students.

After the statement of Prime Minister Attlee in February, 1947, setting June, 1948, as the deadline for winding up of the Raj, the Muslim League decided to dislodge non-League Ministries in Punjab and the NWFPat any cost. Mehra succinctly sumns up: "A largely violent and unprincipled campaign, the so-called civil disobedience movement, enabled the League to wrest political initiative and power from a popularly elected government in the last few months preceding the birth of Pakistan."

After the arrival of Mountbatten, events moved fast; Jinnah did not budge from his demand for Pakistan. The June 3 plan, which decreed the partition of the country, was accepted by the Congress as a "lesser evil", when the alternative seemed to be a looming threat of civil war and a drift to anarchy.

Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his followers felt badly let down by the Congress. He was totally opposed to partition, but if it was inevitable, he said, he would prefer the option of an independent Pakhtun state. Nehru had rejected an earlier draft of a Mountbatten plan granting the option of independence to any province or princely state on the ground that it would lead to the balkanisation of the country. Having done that, Nehru — and the Congress — could hardly ask for an exception in the case of the NWFP.

The Congress leadership sympathised with Abdul Ghaffar Khan in his predicament but felt helpless. Abdul Ghaffar Khan sensed that a referendum in the NWFP which was imposed by the government in a surcharged communal atmosphere was not conducive to a sane verdict and he boycotted it. Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s cherished goal had always been autonomy for the NWFP, as for other Indian provinces, with freedom to manage the internal affairs of the province within the framework of a federal Indian polity.

It seems he raised the demand for Pakhtunistan as a bargaining counter in the desperate situation of 1947. However, he soon retraced his steps. Even though the Khan Sahib Ministry had been dismissed soon after the inauguration of Pakistan, while still enjoying a majority in the provincial Assembly, the Khudai Khidmatgars and their allied organisations declared that they accepted Pakistan as their country and pledged to serve it loyally.

They redefined their demand of Pakhtunistan to mean full freedom of the Pakhtuns to manage their own affairs as a unit within the Pakistan state. This was a deliberate gesture for reconciliation, but it was lost on the Pakistani leadership.

Abdul Ghaffar Khan could have remained in India but chose to stand by his people. He attended the first session of the Pakistan Parliament at Karachi in February, 1948, and took the oath of allegiance to Pakistan. In June he was arrested and charged with sedition and sentenced to three years rigorous imprisonment. Between 1948 and 1965 he spent 15 years in Pakistan jails.

In his autobiography he recounted the savage repression to which his followers were subjected. He contrasted the attitude of the government of Pakistan with that of the British rulers before 1947. "The British had never looted our homes but the Islamic government of Pakistan did. The British never stopped us from holding public meetings or publishing newspapers, but the Islamic government of Pakistan did both. The British never treated Pakhtun women disrespectfully but the Islamic government of Pakistan did."

This book deals at great length with Nehru’s visit to the NWFP as the vice-chairman of the Interim government in October, 1946, and how he and the Khan brothers met with hostile demonstrations. Nehru suspected the hand of the Governor in these demonstrations and on his insistence Caroe was sent home on leave, while the plans for the transfer of power, including a referendum in the NWFP, were under way.

Of Caroe’s hostility to the Congress, Nehru and the Khan Sahib ministry there is little doubt. In March, 1946, on the very day Khan Sahib and his colleagues were sworn in, Caroe wrote to the Viceroy complaining about the excesses of the Congress Ministers!

Mehra gives a lot of space to the laments of these retired British Governors and civil servants whose careers were suddenly cut off. Their diaries and correspondence show that they did not understand the uniqueness of the Indian revolution; if they had been in France in 1689 or in Russia in 1917, they would have lost not only their jobs but their heads also.

DNA and Destiny: Nature and Nurture in Human Behaviour by R. Grant Steen. Plenum Press, New York & London. Pages 294. Born That Way: Genes Behaviour and Personality by William Wright. Routledge, New York & London. Pages 303.

THE Human Genome Project report can be seen as a significant landmark in the rapidly advancing new field of molecular biology and biotechnology. The Human Genome Project Initiative, aimed at analysing all the codes of 50,000-70,000 different proteins of all the human genes, was based on the assumption that to know the DNA code is, at least in part, to know the bearer of the code.

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is, from a molecular biological approach to the understanding of the human condition, the blueprint of our being. The founders of the Genome Project believe that the sequencing of every human gene (the entire human complement of DNA) will enable the scientists "to identify genes for manic depression, schizophrenia, drug addiction, Alzheimer’s disease, and various other human scourges".

Without specifying the extent of the prevalent gap between knowing the sequence of the human genome and understanding the various ramification of that sequence, many scientists assure us that our future is written in our genes. Each cell of the human body is thought to contain a complete copy of the genetic information required to "construct, not just the cell, but the entire body."

As biological organisms, each one of us is a "unique collection of proteins, coded for by a unique collection of genes carried on the DNA molecule". Each cell of the human body has 23 pairs of chromosomes which together can specify the structures and functions of all the cells in our body.

Once we acquire sufficient knowledge of the ways in which genes control and determine the structure and function of our bodies, scientists are confident that a direct medical intervention will be possible to correct or eliminate the genetic flaws which cause obesity, depression, imbecility and other psychic and sexual disorders. Such claims cause both hope and concern about the future role of technology and science in the planning and controlling of human affairs.

These two books, published in 1998 and 1999 respectively, offer very comprehensive, lucid and insightful surveys of the most recent researches in molecular biology, genetics, evolutionary psychology and socio-biology. The books do not require any specialised knowledge or training in the highly technical areas of life sciences and cybernetic technologies being used in these disciplines. These books provide a detailed summary of the background of the research work relating to the findings of the Minnesota Studies on the behaviour of separated twins, the Bell Curve on the inherited intelligence and the significant statistical correlation between the genetic inheritance and the personality and behavioural traits.

R. Grant Steen is a scientist at the University of California. William Wright has been a science writer with the New York Times. It is evident from the titles that these two books deal with the polemical issues that emerge from the results of experimental investigations in the most contested frontiers of knowledge (and ignorance) about human personality and behaviour. Investigations into the determinants of human personality and behaviour have always been the most challenging, fascinating and contested areas of studies. These books show that the results of recent experimental work can be selective, depending upon the author’s orientation, for proposing mutually conflicting interpretations of human behaviour.

Wright expresses a greater confidence in the claims for the genetic determination of human traits and behaviour in comparison to Steen. Steen repeatedly cautions us about the methodological and substantive limitations of the state of research in evolutionary genetics whereas Wright is extremely critical of the exclusive emphasis on environmental determination of human behaviour as expounded by behaviourists and Marxists.

Interestingly, neither of the books expresses any reservation about the received view that each human being is a unique individual. Both authors take pains to underline that human beings share a common threshold of minimal needs and environmental background for survival and development from conception through birth till death.

Yet these two books demand from us that we focus our attention in different directions to find why we are enormously different from one another in our temperaments, attitudes, beliefs, emotions, interests, skills and goals even when we hail from the same community.

Wright places a greater emphasis on genetic inheritance whereas Steen sees neither heredity nor environment as determining factors. Steen is of the view that both genes and environment influence human personality and behaviour but do not determine our activities. Scientist Steen is more modest in making claims for modern science in comparison to journalist Wright.

Everyday life experiences repeatedly show that individuals born in the same family, brought up in similar environment and educated in the same school often differ in their personalities and behaviour. We are never exactly the same. Notwithstanding the subtle differences that characterise our being human, we are equally amazed to find unbelievable sameness in tastes, inclinations and habits with strangers whom we may have never met before. Making sense of the sources of such fine variations and incredible parallels in human behaviour has always stirred human curiosity. This enigma has fascinated and encouraged human beings to speculate, debate and investigate the human condition from diverse perspectives.

The quest for coming to terms with differences among human beings is as old as humanity itself. Living with differences, the sources of which we can neither understand nor regulate, has appeared both challenging and frightening. Placing human behaviour under some conventional and agreeable patterns, by controlling "undesirable" differences through enforced discipline, has been an integral part of socialisation of new generations in every human society, past and present. The ancient or pre-modern societies tried to achieve this goal by imparting instruction in moral norms, using the available methods of soft or hard persuasion and brutal coercion at their command. Every new generation gets its own chance to look back and draw lessons for itself from the darker or the glimmering side of our collective human past to meet its own concerns and perspectives.

With the application of modern scientific methods to the study of human affairs since mid-19th century onwards, question marks were put on the validity of traditional modes of interpretation and understanding of human behaviour, effectiveness of methods of persuasion and coercion for regulating human behaviour. The traditional methods were declared unscientific, unreliable, unwanted, and worth abandoning. A search for causal explanations, by discovering universal laws governing human behaviour and invention of new mechanisms of control based on such discoveries, became the foremost goals of the scientific investigation of human behaviour.

In such an environment, under the bewitching spell of the success of the methods of natural sciences, the dichotomy between nature and nurture, innate and acquired, heriditary and environmental factors became the major source of disagreement among scientists seeking causal explanation of differences in human traits and behaviour. A preference for explanation and regulation of differences exclusively in terms of the natural, side of this exclusionary dichotomy supported and legitimised the class biases within the modern European societies and their colonial and neo-colonial agendas in relation to the people outside the European world. The rise and popularity of eugenics and Nazi ideology can be seen in the light of such a partisan view of human nature.

Similarly, a strong support for the opposite side of the fallacious dichotomy, an exclusive emphasis on environment as the sole determining factor of human differences can be seen as rooted in a commitment for the radical egalitarian ideologies for social transformations as a solution to all human problems. Whether we like it or not, the processes which form human personality and behaviour function independently of our ideological or scientistic preferences.

The merit of these two books lies in providing very relevant and significant information about the ways in which divergent and conflicting assumptions, methods and techniques of research in contemporary human studies have gradually evolved in the western world. The authors provide vivid illustrations to caution the readers about the ways in which seemingly scientific methods of analysis have been adopted in the past to serve ideological interests and goals. However, both Steen and Wright share the confidence that it is possible to draw a sufficiently clear line of demarcation between questions of science and issues of social policy. They both share the conviction that dissemination of relevant information about ongoing scientific research is an essential condition for healthy democratic debate on policy matters and freedom of the scientists to pursue their academic research.

However, these narratives of the rise and decline of the fallacious dichotomy between nature and nurture in western culture provide a cautionary message, contrary to their optimism. Both these books, despite their serious disagreements on the determinants of human behaviour, are a testament to the fact that the shifts in research orientations and methods of analysis have not occurred in a vacuum. The problems were formulated and reformulated in response to the issues as they emerged in constant interaction between new ideas and real life situations.

In view of the growing disparities and commercialisation of the use of medical and other technologies by the MNCs in recent times, it is the responsibility of the people and the media to ensure that checks can be put on the misuse of this new technology against the underprivileged and disadvantaged people of the world.

India baiters: outsiders and insiders
Review  by Akshaya Kumar

Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay by Balachandran Rajan. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Pages 267. Rs 545.

The only fertile area that post-colonial studies can really grow is this unravelling of the complicity of the Indians in the colonial project, both before 1947 and after. Also it would have added to the cause of post-colonial studies had Rajan exposed the duplicity of some of the so-called emancipated human rights activists and Third World champions who, even in their gestures of vehement post-colonial protest, remain firmly anchored in First World capitalism.

Glory of Freedom by Osho. Diamond Books, New Delhi. Pages 205. Rs 100.

The book is compulsive reading as it provides deeper insight into the mysteries of existence and love, savouring of unique Sufi thought.