Kanishk Tharoor

An essay on the refurbished “Islamic art” galleries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (published in the National)

During the past decade of fulminating and fretting, those of us who live in Europe and North America have become quite familiar with the term “the Islamic world”. Rarely do a few words try to say so much. The phrase scrapes by as a kind of shorthand, an easy way of fusing geography and sociology.

It allows us to speak in the singular about a great profusion of peoples and places. The “Islamic world” is not simply a space where 1.5 billion Muslims happen to live, but a space that can be understood in generalisations. We hear of the Islamic world almost always in reference to its political and social problems: the plight of democracy in the Islamic world, the crisis of women’s rights in the Islamic world, the rise of extremism in the Islamic world, and so forth.

The Brookings Institution, a leading Washington think-tank, maintains a division to study the thorny subject of “US relations with the Islamic world”. This broad remit still seems logical to many politicians and commentators – never mind the diversity of Muslim communities and countries across the globe, or the vastly different levels of religiosity and freedom from Indonesia to Somalia to Morocco.

Strangely, the “Islamic world” has no real counterpart in the 21st century. It is untenable now to speak of a “Christian world”, or a “Buddhist world”, or even a “Hindu world”. In each case, the adjective proves entirely insufficient, even misleading in understanding the noun – can millions of people be distilled to their faith? And yet the “Islamic world” has proved a more resilient concept, routinely invoked by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Some institutions are wary of the vagueness of this language. Eight years ago, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art closed the galleries then known as the “Islamic Wing” for renovation. They were reopened this November under a new name. Visitors now pour into the redesigned permanent collection of “Art from the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia”.

What the galleries’ new name has lost in brevity it gains in precision. There is safety in inelegant fact. A monolithic Islam does not loom over the exhibition. The collection’s numerous books, rugs, and pots – the holy trinity of much Middle Eastern and South Asian art – appear as representatives of particular periods and places, from early medieval Spain to Mughal South Asia. As you move through the various galleries, you travel from region to region, dynasty to dynasty. The emphasis here lies in the diversity and complexity within the cultural heritage of Islam. Navina Haidar, the curator of the collection, insists that the Islamic world is “not one world, but many; not another world, but our own”.

Anybody should want to claim the exquisite world of this exhibition as their own. To roam the galleries is to drift from wonder to wonder. A 12th-century incense burner from Seljuk Iran is shaped like a lion, engraved in fine filigree. When used, it would breathe smoke through its bronze teeth. Turn the corner and you come to a cavernous room filled only with carpets, each several centuries old. They tumble from ceiling to floor like waterfalls in imperious red and gold cascades. Elsewhere, an astrolabe from medieval Yemen demonstrates both aesthetic and scientific accomplishment, with inscriptions dancing over the careful gradations of the cosmos. The viewer can easily get lost in all the shimmering ornamentation. There need be no reason to immerse yourself in the collection apart from surrendering to its undeniable beauty.

Of course, it would be silly to pretend that there is no unifying logic at work, that somehow Islam can be erased from the framework of the exhibition. The objects on display were all produced in the cultural centres of Muslim-dominated societies over a period of 1,300 years, beginning with the first caliphate. Magnificent editions of the Quran gleam in nearly every room, testament to the spread of the religion across Eurasia. One text, pinioned open in the first room of the exhibition, is the size of an adult torso. Another, embossed with gold leaf, could fit comfortably in your palm.

The written word, so central to all the Abrahamic faiths, threads through the entirety of the collection. You can follow the journey of the Arabic script over time and space, from the sturdy Kufic of 9th-century Mesopotamia, to the floating Nastaliq of medieval Persian courts, to the grace and command of the signature of the emperor Suleiman the Magnificent, who presided over the apogee of Ottoman Turk grandeur. Suleiman traced his descent to the steppes of Central Asia, ruled from the old Byzantine cosmopolis of Constantinople, and lorded over a polyglot and multi-confessional empire of Turks, Slavs, Greeks, Jews and others. And yet the imprimatur of his power lives on most vividly in the curves of the Arabic script and his dutiful invocation of the Prophet Mohammed and of God.

At the same time, many, if not most of the objects on display have little to do with Islam, piety, religious affiliation or fervour. A playful, almost secular spirit infuses much of the exhibition, its emphasis on the art’s dynamic character and openness to external influences. This is in part the deliberate choice of the curators. The renovated galleries contain only a tenth of the 12,000 objects in the possession of the museum’s department of Islamic art. Curators agonised over which pieces to include and exclude. A few different decisions could have drastically altered its vision of Islamic cultural history.

But the exhibition’s make-up also reflects how so much of the cultural production of the “Islamic world” was not self-consciously religious. One of the tricky consequences of accepting the genre of “Islamic art” is that the very category often forces us to interpret cultural objects as expressions of faith, affirmations of Islamic identity. This was evidently not always the case. Take, for instance, the collection’s preponderance of images, particularly manuscript illuminations. Thanks to recent episodes like the 2005 Danish cartoon riots and the firebombing of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo this November, Muslims are painted in the West as radically intolerant of images. More broadly, varied humanism is said to be the preserve of western art, rigid subservience that of Islamic art. The rich iconographic traditions of many Muslim societies across Eurasia belie such a simplistic notion. A stream of illuminations runs through the exhibition. For this visitor at least, they comprised the most arresting sights on display.

A range of subjects leap from the old pages. At the siege of Baghdad, Mongol archers shoot arrows at refugees trying to swim in vain across the Euphrates. From an Arab medical textbook, a long-haired doctor stirs a bubbling cauldron. A sneaky voyeur, peeking from a tower window, watches women bathe in a red Persian palace; the women tug at each other’s hair, their clothes strewn and tangled by the side of the pool. Images from various editions of the Shahnama – the Book of Kings, the Iranian national epic and a ubiquitous presence in the exhibition – chronicle the deeds of pre-Islamic warriors and wizards. Elsewhere, two Indian water buffaloes fight, heads bowed, muscles rippling. Frantic bystanders whirl around them, men in awe of the very natural world they are struggling to contain. Over the centuries, the painting lost much of its inlaid gold leaf, leaving its figures all the more beautifully rendered, their lines of movement and expression deepened in the ochre dust.

The illuminated manuscripts reveal not only carnal, historical and mythical imaginings, but a deeper world of cultural mingling and change.

During the rule of the Mongol Ilkhanids in 13th-century Iran, Chinese styles crept into Persian miniature: elongated eyes and round faces become the standard of beauty, while natural scenes take on the tremulous quality of Chinese landscapes. Another illumination shows a European-style ship, its rigging, masts and sails meticulously traced, with the biblical story of the “seven sleepers” inscribed on its hull. Moving further east, illuminated miniature reached its most sophisticated heights in the ateliers of the Mughal rulers of South Asia. Unlike the heavy profundity of Safavid Persian art, Mughal paintings tend to be lighter and airier, their figures more freely in motion, shaded with delicate textures and bolder colours. In many cases, Mughal artists were not Muslims but locals of other religious backgrounds, schooled in both Persian and indigenous traditions of painting. Their subject matter was often decidedly non-Muslim. One miniature in the collection depicts the Buddha in a moment of epiphany seated beneath a tree.

In one of the final galleries, you find an image from a Persian biography of Krishna – a central figure in Hinduism – composed and illuminated in the workshops of the 16th-century Mughal emperor Akbar. The blue-skinned Krishna holds up the mountain of Govardhan with one hand to protect human beings from the vengeful rain of the sky god Indra. It is a marvellous, uncanny scene. Deer and leopards quizzically leap up and down the ravines of the mountain. Beneath it, men, women and children of all colours, facial types, beard lengths and turban styles huddle together.

The scene is a fitting conclusion to a tour of the exhibition. Though imagining an episode from Hindu mythology, it offers an apt metaphor for the Islam the curators seek to represent; what may seem from the outside an implacable monolith actually contains a world of restless, teeming difference.

Kanishk Tharoor is a “Writer in Public Schools” fellow at New York University.

As the world watches, can the Wall Street protesters make enough noise? (Published in The Caravan, 1 November, 2011)

Most demonstrations are held with the conviction that they serve a cause far bigger than the sum of their parts. I have seen many examples of this faith in the United States: the three pro-Palestinian pensioners who every Sunday berated passers-by in my glacially indifferent college town; the meagre picket lines of union workers at a doomed New York City hospital, shivering under the nose of a giant inflatable rat. They were sustained by the hope that their demands would be met, but also by the belief that they represented something larger: that they were not a lonely few, that they stood for all colonised and oppressed peoples. Or that they went on strike to protect the dignity of all labour. Clutching worn placards and shouting tired slogans, did they ever wonder if their pious efforts had all the impact of trees falling in a silent, unknowable forest?

The current Occupy Wall Street protesters in the US have an indefatigable, brazen belief in their broad relevance. The optimism is electric, the excitement contagious in the regular assemblies, rallies, and marches that have captured public places and public attention. Occupy Wall Street activists see themselves as part of a historical moment of social unrest around the world. Themes of universality and ubiquity shade much of the movement’s rhetoric. “All day, all year, occupy everywhere,” goes one chant. “The whole world is watching,” insists another.

Somebody must be watching. Less then one month after the initial occupation of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street stirred a day of coordinated protests across continents. On 15 October, demonstrators flooded the streets of cities in the United States and Europe. In New York, they stormed the iconic Times Square. In London, they rallied in front of St Paul’s Cathedral. In cities in Spain and Greece, thousands flocked to central squares.

The protests borrow from an increasingly familiar global style of rebellion. Placards bearing the words “We are the 99%” (Occupy Wall Street’s defining slogan) appear in London, in Germany and elsewhere. Occupy Wall Street protesters compare their encampment in Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square in Cairo. Activists called 15 October a “global day of rage”, invoking a term often used during the Arab Spring. The “people’s mic” (a form of throaty Chinese whispers used to make up for the lack of a PA system, because New York City law requires a permit for “amplified sound” at demonstrations) is now a feature of gatherings in other countries, even when protesters have access to mics and loudspeakers. Methods and philosophies of organisation spread across borders. I sat in New York’s Washington Square Park in mid-October, watching protest organisers teach fresh-faced students the various protocols and hand-signals that comprise “direct democratic process”. The same gestures and procedures have been used across Europe in building ostensibly leaderless (“horizontal” and non-hierarchical” in the activist dialect) movements. Both the form and content of all these protests have gone viral, speeding around the globe in an age of hyper-communication.

But beyond talk of “memes” and “inter-connectivity”, the protesters feel tied together by shared circumstance. “The rapid spread of the protests,” Occupy Wall Street organisers announced on their website on 15 October, “is a grassroots response to the overwhelming inequalities perpetuated by the global financial system and transnational banks.” Though there are obvious differences between each national situation, many grievances are held in common: the rejection of the ideology of government austerity; the critique of the relative impunity afforded to the financial establishment; and the fatigue with sclerotic political systems.

If you go to Zuccotti Park and shuffle between the ad hoc cooking, sleeping and computing areas of the camp, you will invariably bump into a Dutch television crew or Japanese journalists or a team of Spanish radio reporters. The notion that “the whole world is watching” isn’t entirely fanciful. Such enthusiastic interest instils confidence in many activists involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their cause has huge appeal. After all, people from around the world help the occupiers of Zuccotti Park in numerous ways, including by ordering them quantities of pizzas and Mexican tacos from local restaurants. (Thanks to credit cards and the Internet, the 21st century brings us the solidarity of the dialling finger and the take-out menu.)

Of course, there are many people not persuaded by these demonstrations. The most common criticism of the uprisings is that the protesters have a tenuous interest in policy-making and don’t always seem to maintain coherent agendas. This certainly seems to be true of Occupy Wall Street, which has released a rather broad manifesto called the “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City”. But the wide range of demands included in the document is deliberate. The movement intends to remain as inclusive as possible as it builds strength, frustrating the media, but winning more supporters. Still only in its infancy, Occupy Wall Street will sharpen as it grows.

Others criticise Occupy Wall Street and their counterparts in Europe by springing to the defence of the banks and financial institutions under attack. This debate will continue to rage, with armies of statistics mobilised on either side. My general sympathy lies with the protests and the protesters: more should be done to curb the power of finance capital, to minimise spiralling inequality, to allow lives of dignity for the poorest in these societies and to disentangle money from electoral politics (particularly in the US).

At the same time, these movements—despite their global pretensions—have not grappled with the implications of major, over-arching global change. You do not have to embrace the neoliberal vision of the world to recognise that a significant shift in wealth and power is taking place in the 21st century. The only time I have heard any discussion of China or India or “outsourcing” was at a march organised by unions; other Occupy Wall Street activists have nothing to say about the changing dynamics of the international stage. Does the purported “decline of the West” and the “rise of the rest” mean anything to the protesters in Times Square in New York or Syntagma in Athens? The economist Nouriel Roubini and others have argued that growing economic inequity in Europe and North America helped cause their systemic crises. Yet countries home to even greater, more glaring inequality (like Brazil and China, not to mention India) currently sustain fairly stable economies and growth rates. From the perspective of Shanghai, Singapore or São Paulo, a rally of Occupy London activists in front of St Paul’s Cathedral may seem like little more than pointless raging at the fading of the light.

All politics, even those of a global protest, are local. The movements in Europe and America were conceived in national contexts and will only be fulfilled within them. In that narrower arena, the enemies are clearer and the battles can be fought. These protesters do not need to see the forest to make noise amid the trees.

Nearly three years ago, Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election on the back of incredible popular mobilisation. In a country often bogged down in plodding party politics, there seemed to be something transcendent and epochal about his rise. Observers suggested that Mr. Obama did more than inspire voters; he energised a generational movement. This sense was no doubt aided by Mr. Obama’s charisma and the messianic rhetoric of his campaign. He called for “the audacity of hope” and promised that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

After three years of disillusionment, a more organic movement has taken root in the United States. The “Occupy Wall Street” protests began innocuously one month ago, but now claim public space and public attention. They reached new heights of spectacle on Saturday when thousands flooded Times Square in New York City as part of a wider “global day of rage” against the West’s stuttering economic systems.

The American protesters come from many of the groups who rallied to Mr. Obama in 2008: young people, students, urban middle classes, union members, the working poor, the underemployed, and the unemployed. Yet this time they are not hitched to the ascendance of one man. They denounce the growth of stark inequality and the erosion of social mobility in America. They decry what they see as the collusion of the state with corporate and financial interests. And they tap into the widely-shared belief that the bankers, speculators, and traders responsible for the economic recession have escaped it unscathed while leaving behind a vast hinterland of despair and struggle.

Mr. Obama’s campaign hyperbole returned to life in an unexpected way. Among the many striking signs I’ve seen around these protests, one placard at Zuccotti Park (the square in downtown Manhattan “occupied” by activists for the past month) reprised his old line: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” It was a rebuke to the President, not a pledge of fealty. For the newly galvanised left, those heady days of Obama-euphoria in 2008 seem terribly remote. The President and his party are not even auxiliary to the burgeoning movement. Its impetus doesn’t spring from the imperatives of electoral politics, but from a much more inchoate and deeper well of feeling in American society.

Post-2008

We can trace this anger to the hardships that descended on many Americans following the 2008 economic collapse. The ranks of the unemployed have swollen; jobs are harder to come by for both the under- and over-educated; students graduate with unpayable debts; once free-flowing credit has dried up; prudent savers have seen their pensions vanish into thin air; government austerity measures threaten public sector jobs and what remains of America’s social safety net. Protesters can summon an army of statistics to show how inequality in America has spiralled after three decades of intensifying deregulation (for instance, according to the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, average incomes between 1979 and 2008 in the U.S. grew by over $10,000, but all that growth went to the richest 10 per cent of the country, while the incomes of the remaining 90 per cent effectively declined). Some activists replace the traditional slogans on their placards with economic charts, cluttering demonstrations with arrows and figures. It is perhaps fitting that the identity of this movement has coalesced around a number. Calling themselves the “99%,” the protesters assail a hypothetical “1%,” the rich elite that holds a country and its government in thrall.

The rawness and generality of this sentiment — aimed at financial institutions, corporations, the wealthy, and a supposedly complicit government — has convinced many critics that the protesters lack a coherent agenda: “What do these people want?” In fairness, it’s difficult to summarise the movement. I’ve heard suggestions that the U.S. is in the midst of its own “Anna Hazare moment,” but the comparison doesn’t hold water. “Occupy Wall Street” has no figurehead and only the faintest tracing of a leadership structure. Where Anna’s followers demanded concrete legislative action in the Jan Lokpal bill, “Occupy Wall Street” activists maintain a long, pious list of causes, from the reform of the financial system to stopping house foreclosures to ending U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This series of grievances in the “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City” (the closest thing to a manifesto yet to emerge from the movement) can seem exhaustively idealistic or, worse, vague and impractical. But its role is not to serve as some blueprint for actual legislative reform. Instead, it allows the movement to remain open and inclusive to its growing number of sympathisers. While they frustrate the media and resist easy definition, the “Occupy Wall Street” protests continue to hit a nerve in an uncertain and depressed nation.

At its simplest level, “Occupy Wall Street” hopes to change American discourse. The demonstrations seek to re-centre American politics after they were wrenched off-kilter by the right-wing Tea Party movement, its Republican supporters, and by a pliant and weak Democratic party. This is a battle to be waged as much in front of cameras as it is in the finer points of political debates. Events in New York’s Times Square on Saturday made for triumphant spectacle. The protesters — all critics of the current economic order — conquered the city’s most garish and iconic plaza, its every edifice smothered in flickering neon advertisements. The rally confirmed the swelling appeal of the movement. I shuffled about a packed Times Square, in awe at the size, diversity, and remarkably good humour of the crowd.

The day before, I was an observer at another victory of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests. Thousands arrived in the small hours of Friday morning to successfully prevent the New York Police Department from evicting the encampment at Zuccotti Park. As people in the park celebrated, several politicians from the Democratic party — mostly local councilmen — spoke to the crowd. Already, segments of the Democratic party have taken notice of the movement and try to exploit its momentum. Buoyed by recent successes, the protesters are here to stay. When asked for his own opinion about “Occupy Wall Street,” Mr. Obama has equivocated, stopping short of offering a full endorsement. One suspects that the longer the protests last, the more Mr. Obama will have to consider bending to its sentiments. In Zuccotti Park, I watched one Democratic party official struggle to make himself heard. His speech was swallowed in the din of a movement committed to going forward, with or without him.

(Kanishk Tharoor is a writer based in New York City.)

The rallies in New York City that hailed the killing of Osama bin Laden by American troops show how difficult it is to appropriately mark victory, writes Kanishk Tharoor (Published in the Telegraph)

The most ghostly place in New York City is its financial district. The neighbourhood empties by nightfall, drained of its grey legions of corporate workers. While the rest of Manhattan hums with activity late into the night, this district’s canyons of glass grow dark and silent. It can feel eerie walking here after hours, with the streets totally lifeless and the looming skyscrapers pressing in close. In the midst of this brooding monumentality, you find the glowing open wound of New York, a crater fenced off by cranes and tall, harsh lights: Ground Zero.

By the time I reached Ground Zero in the early hours of Monday morning, the normally empty streets echoed with raucous life. A crowd had descended on the site of the World Trade Center, jubilant with the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. Men climbed trees and lampposts, spraying those below with champagne. Others mounted the shoulders of their friends to wave American flags, sing the national anthem, proclaim the singular greatness of the US army, and lead the throngs in chants, including “Obama 1, Osama 0!” and the insistent “U-S-A! U-S-A!,” as well as other less polite slogans. There was a crowing, tribal tone to the rally, akin to the celebrations of rabid football or cricket fans.

These scenes in New York — alongside similar exultation at the gates of the White House — were broadcast around the world as examples of the rough triumphalism with which Americans greeted bin Laden’s killing. Many people, both inside and outside the United States of America, questioned the spirit of these celebrations; on Monday, I appeared on a BBC World Service discussion programme in which many expressed dismay at the chest-thumping in New York and Washington, deeming it inappropriate and inflammatory. In light of the continuing turmoil spawned by the 9/11 attacks and the US “war on terror,” the critics said, surely it was undignified and wrong to delight so crudely in bin Laden’s assassination, regardless of his numerous sins and undoubted cruelty.

Though I generally agreed with this critique, I urged listeners not to read too much into the raw and crass reactions of the crowd, which mostly consisted of young, university-age students, many of them drunk. Moreover, there were not many people at Ground Zero when I was there, only hundreds, not thousands, in a city of millions. Yet journalists and camera crews in their dozens nibbled around the edges of the clump of revellers, inflating and sensationalizing what was not really that large a rally. Sadly, pictures of New Yorkers as they celebrated death have now become defining images of the local mood.

As a New Yorker myself, I can only hope such images are not truly representative. I, too, was uncomfortable amid the celebrations at Ground Zero. In small part, this was because even though I have lived in New York most of my life and consider it my home, I am not American, and therefore I am insensible to the fervour of that bellicose flag-waving. In larger part, I simply find it difficult to see joy in the indifferent face of violence and death.

But more poignantly, the scene at Ground Zero made me think about a very different moment nearly ten years ago here in New York. In the nights after the 9/11 attacks, New Yorkers gathered in squares and public spaces across the city, lighting candles, laying wreaths, holding vigil together and finding solace in that melancholic unity created by tragedy. We had all seen the smoke and ash and ruin at the heart of our city. It was a sombre time, but I remember very few expressions of bloodlust or demands for vengeance.

Strength, graciousness and real togetherness could be found in the solidarity of New Yorkers ten years ago. By contrast, the rallies that hailed the killing of bin Laden show how difficult it is to appropriately mark victory. Hubris is easy; managing humility and reflection in a moment of triumph is much harder.

Much of the US media wrongly described the festivities at Ground Zero earlier this week in transcendent terms of “unity,” “healing,” and final “closure” after a decade of trauma. In truth, many New Yorkers, even those who almost lost their lives in the attacks, were reluctant to share in the rowdy euphoria. When asked about bin Laden’s killing by The New York Times, Harry Waizer, a man who worked in the World Trade Center and survived its collapse, explained that “if this means there is one less death in the future, then I’m glad for that. But I just can’t find it in me to be glad one more person is dead, even if it is Osama bin Laden.”

Barack Obama, the US president, plans to visit Ground Zero today in a not-so-subtle attempt to maximize the political capital of the moment. He will be appropriately sober in the ghostly shadows of Ground Zero. He will praise the work of his security and intelligence forces. And he will claim, as he already has, to have brought America’s most hated enemy to “justice.”

But the noisy celebrations that disturbed the nightly quiet of the financial district this week had less to do with justice than the grisly satisfaction of revenge. Bin Laden probably deserved his fate. But if retribution is justice, it is only the most desolate, impoverished kind of justice. In the weeks and months after 9/11, a famous quotation of Mahatma Gandhi popped up in public displays across the city: “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” New Yorkers live in an international city that is irrevocably in the world and of the world. They would do well to remember this simple wisdom which has long been theirs.

(Published in The Caravan, 1 May, 2011)

AMONG MANY CUTS FORCED by the imminent loss of government funding, the BBC World Service discontinued the weekly programme Politics UK on 25 March. It was, in fairness, a grey, fusty show whose presenters turned over the mundane and the less mundane in British politics with gravelly equanimity. Listeners around the world will have to make do with bite-sized bits of British news, but one doubts that the programme’s disappearance is much mourned in Lagos or Lucknow. The sceptred isle is now well and truly an isle, its sceptre (despite the monstrous pomp of the royal nuptials) not nearly as weighty as it once was. In an age of economising, the World Service can no longer afford the luxurious 30 minutes once allotted to parochial discussions of alternative voting reform, child tax credits, incapacity benefits and the other issues that periodically ruffle Britain’s political class.

There is a clear symbolic shift in the suspension of the programme, over and beyond the exigencies of BBC beancounters. If the World Service—the very institution meant to project Britain to the world—deems Politics UK expendable, it suggests a recognition that the UK has diminished in the eyes (and ears) of a global audience. Even executives at the BBC believe that the internal concerns of Britain are of tepid interest to those beyond its shores.

Yet it is striking that just as British politics continue to slide from view, events within the country are bringing it in line with upheaval and tumult elsewhere. On 26 March (a day after Politics UK crackled to a quiet end), the UK saw its largest demonstration in nearly a decade. In a march organised by the country’s leading unions, an estimated 500,000 people took to the streets of London to protest the severe cuts planned by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

I was with the motley horde of students, workers, artisans, parents and babies that day, though I marched (or shuffled, such was the density of the crowd) through central London more out of sociological interest than conviction. By the standards of contemporary global dissent, it was a sedate, tidy affair. But media attention invariably focused on the actions on London high streets by small groups of anarchists and activists peripheral to the march (deeds that included plopping a massive replica of a Trojan horse on the middle of Oxford Circus, a vivid, albeit ambiguous, symbolic act).

The day marked an important moment in the defence of the British public sector, marrying the defiance of the union struggle in Wisconsin in the United States to the youthful exuberance of the Arab Spring. It also fit into a wider debate about the fate of Europe’s postwar “social democratic settlement”. Similar unrest has rocked countries across the recession-hit continent, including Greece (still the scene of protests, a year after riots ground the country to a halt); France (riots and student demonstrations in 2010); and Portugal, where a combination of left agitation and centre-right chicanery forced the resignation of the socialist prime minister in March. These conflicts cannot be understood simply as the friction between forces of the left and the right in European politics, since traditionally left-wing parties are often the ones in the awkward position of forcing “austerity” on their populations. At stake, in the view of many protesters, is the very identity of the European welfare state, with its delicate balance of rights and certainties, on the one hand, and market logic, on the other.

In Britain, which has left itself far more open to international market forces than much of the rest of the European Union, the battle lines are being drawn. Prime Minister David Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, claim the cuts are necessary. They seek to trim the deficit of £150 billion and the national debt of over £1 trillion that was inherited from the former Labour government in 2010, in the wake of the deeply divisive “bailout” of Britain’s faltering banks. Cameron’s opponents condemn the cuts as “ideological”, as thrusting at the jugular of British social democracy.

The government’s policy leaves largely unscathed the banks and financial institutions that many Britons blame for plunging the country into an economic crisis. Instead, proposed cuts attack the edifice and foundations of the welfare state. They target the huge public sector (approximately onesixth of the work force), promising reductions and a drastic shakeup in the National Health Service; slashing funding to transport, education, housing and other civic infrastructure; eliminating numerous programmes for the poor; raising university fees (the spark that inflamed furious student protests last year and set in motion the broader protests this March); scaling down environmental programmes; closing libraries; privatising post offices; and axing funding for the humanities and arts at the university level. Other casualties include the august BBC World Service, once funded by the Foreign Office, now cut adrift, forcing the loss of numerous languages (such as shortwave broadcasts in Hindi) and programmes (including the aforementioned Politics UK).

Supporters of the government’s assault on spending argue that the cuts will usher in much-needed “fiscal common sense”, trimming the country’s debt while freeing the dynamism of the private sector to drive growth. Its critics claim that it will merely create unemployment, drain money from the economy and plunge the country into a recessionary spiral. They point to the uncomfortable fact that the government has already revised downward its growth estimates from last year, with the economy offering few signs of revival. In 21st-century Britain, the economics of Milton Friedman and Maynard Keynes roll up their sleeves and do battle.

The long narrative of the struggle for the welfare state was visible amid the protesting throngs. Railway workers held aloft social-realist murals of the “crows of privatisation” picking apart the angular, block-jawed corpse of “the national rail”, an image that would have seemed a relic of a bygone era were the paint not so fresh. Another species of sign merged the faces of Cameron and Margaret Thatcher, a grisly bit of Photoshop magic. Actors dressed in green hose and sporting plastic bows and arrows—a nod to Robin Hood—stalked through the column, firing pretend salvos at Parliament. Samba bands livened proceedings, a welcome change from the limited songbook of protest chants, dreary in their righteous drone. An elderly couple passed around biscuits and oranges. There was passion and mirth, and the footsore camaraderie of hundreds of thousands of people not all sure where the march was going, in several senses—Was it Hyde Park? Trafalgar Square? With Labour or without Labour? Opposition to all cuts or just the scope and pace of cuts?—but very resolved in being there.

The attention of the media has turned to upcoming local elections on 5 May, now the subject of growing anticipation. A year after their downfall, Labour stands to make significant gains in councils across the country, with the Liberal Democrats, in particular, expected to suffer.

Obscured by the plodding buildup to these elections (and the frenzied confection of the royal wedding), it may be difficult to espy the roiling currents of unrest in Britain. The anti-cuts movement does not principally aim to strengthen Labour. Its critique is too visceral and systemic to sit easily within the framework of party politics (an important contrast between the left-wing populist turn in the recession-hit UK and the right-wing populist turn, represented by the Tea Party, in the recession-hit US). Labour leader Ed Miliband did address the gathered demonstrators in Hyde Park, but his party, now in opposition, is still resented by many as responsible for the deregulation and market fundamentalism that pushed Britain to the financial precipice.

As the cuts begin to take effect this summer and workers begin to lose their jobs, the mood in the country will likely grow more sour, the movement begun by students and unions will swell in size and appeal, and a struggle with global resonances, between the imperatives of marketisation and the defence of the welfare state, will intensify. More’s the pity that Politics UK will not be there to tell us about it.

As Europe struggles to accommodate pluralist democracies, it is necessary for countries elsewhere with minority populations to adopt a liberalism based on understanding, writes Kanishk Tharoor (Published in the Telegraph)

From Paris to Berlin and now to London, a grim consensus is emerging. David Cameron spoke this past weekend in Munich about the failure of “the doctrine of state multiculturalism” in the United Kingdom, suggesting that many British Muslims lead lives dangerously removed from the rest of society. His comments echo those of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, among others. The trouble of integrating Muslims, these leaders say, has stretched European liberal pluralism to its breaking point.

British critics of multiculturalism point to homegrown radicalism and Islamist violence (as evidenced by the July 2005 bombings), and to the notion that many Muslims do not share the same “values” as other Britons. They argue that the British state has encouraged Muslims to remain aloof from the mainstream, to fortify themselves in ghettos, and to refuse to accept modern democratic principles of individual rights and freedom of speech.

These symptoms of the multicultural malaise remain hotly debated and open to question. (One can quite rightly ask: Is Muslim piety antithetical to full participation in liberal, social democracy? How real is the threat of Islamist terrorism in Europe? Are the roots of terrorism not simply in radical ideology, but also in socio-economic conditions and foreign policy? and so forth). But what I found striking in the British prime minister’s comments was the inadequacy of the diagnosis. Has “multiculturalism” in Britain failed?

Part of the problem with Cameron’s speech was its vagueness, a bilious and blustering reliance on platitudes, soft on detail. The critique of “state multiculturalism” is disingenuous because it never clearly describes what it is against. It depends on the same “muddled thinking” derided by Cameron in Munich.

There are very few policies that can be seen as forming a British “doctrine of state multiculturalism”. Some measures — for instance, making “religious” discrimination as serious an offence as “racial” discrimination — are largely uncontroversial and eminently worth keeping. Others — like the funding of Muslim state schools — cannot be undone without seeming discriminatory, since Christian, Jewish and Sikh schools, and now even one Hindu school, receive significant public resources.

The only clear reform suggested by Cameron was the cutting of support for civil society groups like the Muslim Council of Britain. But the amount of public funds given to the MCB and its equivalents is as paltry as these groups’ ability to influence and shape British society. Such a minor move should hardly merit the sweeping tone of his speech.

“Multiculturalism” and “state multiculturalism”, as such, are straw men invoked for particular political aims. The multiculturalism described in official rhetoric and in the accompanying frenzied media debates does not reflect its granular, inescapable reality.

I lived for several years in the centre of a vibrant and scruffy neighbourhood in north London, where Muslim Turks and Kurds, immigrants from West Africa and the Caribbean, South Asian, white Polish and British people all brushed up against one another. The rowdy Irish pub where I went to watch the matches of the local football team —Arsenal — sits right next to a halal butcher shop and a domed mosque. As outlandish as this contrast may seem, when you live there it is perfectly natural, another swirl in the mosaic and filigree of British life. Critics of multiculturalism would have us see the mosque and the pub as antagonistic institutions rather than what they actually are: buildings of glass, tile and brick on a shared street.

This kind of natural mixing exists in many places in the UK, the product not of short-term government actions, but of long historical processes. Multicultural Britain is the inevitable result of the crumbling of the empire, of the ebbs and flows of globalization, and of Protestant traditions of frigid tolerance that run deep in northern Europe. It has not been made and micro-managed by State policy.

For this reason, the dogged politicization of multiculturalism is troubling. Slamming “multiculturalism” is just code language for appearing to take a robust position towards Muslims. It is part of a politer vocabulary of distrust, misunderstanding and veiled Islamophobia. In an unfortunate choice of political slogans, Cameron branded his vision for British identity as “muscular liberalism.” The term evokes Victorian “muscular Christianity,” the holy bravado that so imbued English imperialists of the 19th century.

In the UK, the sole purpose of this language is to score points among the “white working class” (in my view, an impossible category, but one nonetheless accepted as real by much of the British political establishment) in the country’s mildewing suburbs and rusting industrial towns, areas that were once comfortably in the hands of the Labour Party, but now form a contested battleground. To win these dour hinterlands, both the Conservatives and their Labour counterparts believe that they must pander to visceral anxieties about Islam. As Britain slumps through a bleak economic recession, it is unsurprising and tragic that these anxieties are easier to manipulate. Labour and Tory politicians mouth the same platitudinous tough talk about a failing multicultural “doctrine” that does not really exist, and about a Muslim threat that is being made more real through irresponsible discourse.

I do not deny that there are radical, potentially violent Muslims in Europe (albeit proportionally insignificant — the last official report of the European Union on terrorist attacks in the continent, for the calendar year 2009, found that only 1 out of 294 successful and thwarted attacks was by a Muslim or a Muslim group). I also accept that the current convulsions in European societies over religion and ethnic difference are complex, and cannot simply be dismissed as the fault of a racist, intolerant Europe.

But for those of us who believe strongly in the importance of pluralist democracy, Europe’s current struggle with integration and its discontents is a warning. Since the Second World War, European countries have led the way in constructing systems that best secure the rights and the dignity of their peoples. It is now incumbent on pluralist democracies elsewhere — as in South Africa, Indonesia, and especially India, with its large minority of Muslims — to build and safeguard better models of tolerance, and commit themselves to a liberalism based on understanding, and not on the callow assertion of strength.

With the British Empire long gone and American hegemony on the wane, English still straddles the globe. But triumphant talk of a world language is still babble, Kanishk Tharoor writes. (Published in The National on 22 July 2010)

The consummate imperialist Cecil Rhodes once quipped that to be born an Englishman “is to have won first prize in the lottery of life”. From under his pith helmet, the world indeed looked rosy for the English. The British Empire provided its lucky sons with incomparable heft, access and sense of purpose (not to mention earning potential). Those heady imperial days must seem remote for any observer of modern Britain. The country’s old industries rot under veils of rust, strife and mistrust tear at its social life, and its place in world politics has shrivelled commensurate to its size as an uncertain, middling power.

But at least one strand of the old boast remains true. While the empire has long gone, its language imperiously straddles the globe. A recent article in The Times reformulated Rhodes’ line: “To be born an English-speaker is to win one of the top prizes in life’s lottery.” Beneath its odour of smugness and self-satisfaction, this claim is undeniably true. English enables a kind of global life that no other modern language can match. Indeed, no other language in any period of history has ever come close to being so fully a medium for global communication. Latin may have bound the antique Mediterranean, French laced together European aristocratic life, and Sanskrit and Persian at different times united the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean, but none enjoyed the reach of English.

Thus, the English-speaker can travel the world safe in the knowledge that wherever he or she goes, the chances are good that English signs will greet her at the airport, English-speaking guides will offer their services and a smattering of English words will be understood even in the dustiest street. The recently concluded World Cup offers another example of English’s ubiquity. Despite its French acronym and origins, football’s governing body, FIFA, requires its coterie of international referees to speak English. So in one semi-final match, an Uzbek referee harangued (and was harangued by) Uruguayan and Dutch players in the only language they shared: English.

In the wake of the British empire, and even in the ostensible twilight of American hegemony, English remains the most international language. More than any other tongue, it offers the tantalising prospect of access to the world. This can be a disconcerting and vexing truth. Young-ju, the protagonist of the Korean film Please Teach Me English(2003), agonises over her inability to learn English and to wrestle her mouth around its alien syllables and diphthongs. She bristles at having to learn the language – why is it not enough to know Korean in Korea? – before being seduced onto the path of English fluency by, among other things, a dapper young man and a piglet that recognises the English alphabet.

According to Robert McCrum’s Globish, 350 million people in China alone are studying English. It is an astronomical figure when one considers there are almost as many people in the process of learning English in China as people around the world who speak Spanish. Current students of English may not be abetted by pedantic farm animals, but they likely share Young-ju’s motivation. She and many others want to be able to function in an outward-facing language, embracing the broader possibilities of a “globalised” world knit together by commerce and information.

The shifting geopolitics of the last decade have not left English any less relevant. A lot has been made in some sectors of the introduction of Chinese classes at African schools, as if this augurs the rise of a global challenge to English. But the fact that so many Chinese citizens are learning English should point to China’s lack of faith in its own tongue as a language for the world. For all its growing currency, Chinese remains – and will likely remain – at best a regional or national language, opening only limited vistas for its international students. Much like learning other colonial languages, such as Dutch in Indonesia, French in West Africa, or indeed English in early 20th-century India, learning Chinese in, for example, Zimbabwe (where Robert Mugabe has encouraged its study) merely resembles a now-ancient form of bilateral relationship: that between a centre of political, economic and cultural power and its colonial periphery.

By contrast, what remains striking about English in the 21st century is that its continued spread is not necessarily a function of traditional state power. The truest assertion of Globish (subtitled How the English Language Became the World’s Language) is that contemporary English has taken a life of its own, one in large part untethered from the driving influence of London and Washington, Wall Street and Hollywood. Where it once helped tie the rest of the world to Anglo-Saxon Britain and North America, English is now the major language of international diplomacy, commerce and cultural exchange in almost all regions and contexts.

*****

In large part, the “story of English” has always been a global one. English emerged in its recognisable form by the 16th century, just as England began to hoist its sails and imagine a life of maritime power. It spread around the world in the wake of colonial expansion, laying firm roots particularly in the Americas. Hardening imperial ideology in the 19th century transformed English into a language of command and “civilisation” in India and elsewhere. The domineering vision behind the British “commonwealth” – an entity that survives today in form, if not substance – was one of English-speaking, English-seeming elites fixed in orbit around London.

Meanwhile, as Europe’s powers tore themselves apart in the world wars, American English muscled onto the international stage. Perhaps there was an inkling of this great future in its early days in the clanking printing presses of Boston and Philadelphia. As the future president John Adams observed in 1780: “English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age.”

The language of Hollywood celluloid and crooning pop stars spread through its own energetic appeal, aided in many places by America’s increasingly global profile. American soft and hard power buttressed the relevance of English and solidified its gains in parts of the world that were never colonised by the British. The expansion of the internet in the 1990s was rooted in America, ensuring that American English spread its tentacles even further through the reach of fibre-optic cables. English’s current standing is probably more the result of the American 20th century than it is the British 19th century.

This sprawling history of the evolution of English should be fairly familiar to readers. But now we enter the murky territory of the present. The language enjoys unparalleled global currency, even though the rising powers of the 21st century are predominantly non-English speaking (countries like China, Russia, Brazil, and to a lesser extent, in this context, India). This important change speaks to modern English’s happily neutral character, its emergence as the most practical medium for certain kinds of conversations and messages, regardless of origin. When businessmen from distant countries meet, they will most likely resort to a form of English, however slow and stumbling. When advertisers conjure slogans to build sleek, global brands, they often choose to plaster pithy English phrases (think of Adidas’s “Impossible is nothing”) on billboards around the world.

The French marketer Jean-Paul Nerriere referred to this species of English – the diluted kind spoken and recognised by non-native speakers – as “Globish”. By Globish, Nerriere only meant a pared-down form of English, a functional pidgin well-suited to facilitating the innumerable interactions of the globalised age. Such an English would be a lingua franca for the world in the truest sense. After all, the original “lingua franca” (“Frankish language”) was simply a trading language used in the ports of the Levant during the Renaissance, Italian with a drizzle of Arabic and Turkish. The lingua franca was an unpretentious creole, replacing complexity with bald utility.

In other contexts, however, modern English remains a source of division and, sometimes, stratification. This is precisely because English is not like Nerriere’s Globish or the original Levantine lingua franca. It exists around the world as a full, living language. It cannot be so neatly denuded of its frame of reference, its traditions, its style, its wealth of meanings and subtexts, its fundamental depth. A young girl from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas may not need to know much English to appreciate Lady Gaga, but she must know quite a deal more to feel at home amongst the jet-setting upper classes of Mexico City. In many parts of the world (particularly those vast expanses of the earth once under British control), knowledge of English can be a sure sign of status. In India, the children of the elites and the upper middle-class are educated in English-medium schools, while the vast majority of others are not. The latter face numerous disadvantages in the competition for place and standing in India’s “globalising” economy; one of these is the gulf between their English and the former’s innately more comfortable and worldly English.

Modern English both levels difference and is a marker of difference. English as a simple lingua franca may indeed bind the world closer together, facilitating the sorts of deals and exchanges one reads about in, for example, The Economist. But a hierarchy of sophistication persists; The Economist is written not in Nerriere’s Globish, a commercial lingua franca, but rather in English, the language of the business-class lounge and the international conference. One is the transparent vehicle for globalisation, the other is the far more opaque preserve of the globalised elite. Thus it is misleading to imagine the spread of English as a smooth wave engulfing every stubborn mountain in its path. The various “Englishes” in play point instead to the diverse and divergent ways globalisation is experienced.

From Tom Friedman to Clyde Prestowitz, the numerous heralds of the globalised age have a habit of ignoring deep contradictions and incongruences routinely produced by the very phenomenon they champion. The free movement of information and capital across the world only allows a narrative of triumph. In its attempt to explain the ascendance of English as both the enabler and inevitable outcome of globalisation, Robert McCrum’s Globish parrots a familiar line. McCrum, a British journalist who previously wrote a history of English, borrows the term Globish from Nerriere to describe modern English and its place in the world. But he loads Globish with a lot more meaning and aspiration.

Long after the death of the British empire, McCrum’s idea of Globish is the resplendent successor of the English language, heir to its fundamentally “contagious, adaptable, populist and subversive” traditions. It is energised by and emblematic of globalisation. Where this leaves Globish as a language is anybody’s guess. In a bid to make 21st-century English the vehicle of the spirit of the age, McCrum stretches Globish beyond its conceptual breaking point.

In McCrum’s account, texting shorthands – “gr8,” “lol,” “u” – are Globish. The open, democratic nature of the internet somehow epitomises Globish. Wikipedia is an example of “Globish becoming more viral than ever”, a particularly odd claim since the online encyclopaedia’s diversity of languages diminishes reliance on English. VS Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro write in Globish. The “hipster” idioms of Harlem’s jazz revolution are precursors of Globish. The appeal of Barack Obama – a “contagious, adaptable, populist and subversive” figure – is Globish. One gets the sense that everything under the sun that is new, fashionable, and vaguely international or multicultural is Globish.

At one point after a typically breathless, Tom Friedmanesque catalogue of global commercial linkages, McCrum reveals all his cards. Globish is “more than just an essential means of communication: it embodies a contemporary aspiration, one that expresses a willingness to innovate, to adapt old uses and to enfranchise new people. Language is intrinsically neutral. The history of the world’s English, however, puts it on the side of the individual.”

Full of both implication and overstatement, this claim only manages to suggest that Globish, in its many bewildering roles, cannot in all sincerity be a language.

*****

If “language is intrinsically neutral” and yet English has an “individualist” nature, then McCrum must in truth be characterising “English speakers”. He wags the dog, displacing onto language what is properly the preserve of society and politics. It is a roundabout way of updating the archaic narrative of English “genius” – another word used conspicuously often in the book – for modern times.

This tendency is flagrant in recounting the history of English, a predictable, plodding exercise that occupies the bulk of Globish. An example or two of the many dubious claims in this history will suffice. McCrum lingers on several pivotal events that seem at best tangential to a discussion of language, sometimes directly perpendicular to stressing the importance of English. As more than one critic has pointed out, McCrum should probably have thought twice before celebrating, for example, the drafting of the Magna Carta. The 13th-century document seen as the foundation of English freedoms was written in the exclusive Latin of the elite, not the “contagious, adaptable, populist and subversive” English of the people.

In a similar vein, McCrum routinely contrasts the democratic tradition of English with that of the haughty, authoritarian French. If it did not reveal glaring blind spots in his selective history, one could simply dismiss this habit as indicative of a crusty English contempt for the French. English is fundamentally “ebullient,” “raucous,” “anarchic” and “popular,” as opposed to the “sophisticated ancien regime disdain” of French. The influence of French “would always be top-down and not, like English, bottom-up”. But French, not English, was the language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the language of a revolution that beheaded monarchy and aristocracy – how much more “bottom-up” can you get? – and inspired dreamers around the world. Indeed, one could argue that while French filled the hearts of idealistic rebels, English was being carefully crafted into an idiom of control in fledgling colonies like India: the language of imperial command, not free-spirited revelry.

The lesson here is not that French is intrinsically more democratic than English. That would be a ludicrous claim. Rather, it is that forcing adjectives onto languages is at least as difficult, if not more so, than characterising national traditions. Languages are malleable: they are simply mediums of communication, and they can be made to say any number of things. Undoubtedly, English-speaking Britons and Americans played a disproportionate role in making the world as we know it. But can their contributions be adequately summed up as “contagious, adaptable, populist and subversive”, McCrum’s mantra? And can their language really bear the full weight of such an identity?

As modern English loses its shape and intellectual coherence over the course of Globish, one suspects not. This leaves the otherwise sound premise of the book – that English will remain the pre-eminent global language despite the decline of Britain and America – looking quite unremarkable. As a language, English’s current ubiquity does not reflect some intrinsic, linguistic magical superpower. Rather, its standing in the world is largely incidental, due in no small part to fortuitous timing (Anglophone pre-eminence during the telecommunications revolution) and, indeed, the deep history McCrum sketches. English, as a language, could no more be the instrumental cause for modern globalisation than ponderous German nouns could have plotted the invasion of Poland.

There may very well be some merit to McCrum’s portrayal of English as the language of global aspiration, but even this is easily overstated. India, whose call centres, techno parks, and booming, middle classes McCrum trumpets noisily, is supposedly a bastion of Globish, a dynamic, networked 21st-century English. McCrum marvels at how Indian English and certain Indian languages have thoroughly penetrated each other at a colloquial level, even though this sort of mixing is de rigueur in a country where the largest indigenous language (Hindi/Urdu) evolved as an amalgam in the multilingual army camps of the Mughal empire. He also overlooks the glaring fact that the rise of India’s “globalised middle class” has seen the explosion of “vernacular” media across the country (and the precipitous decline in quality of the English media). The circulation of Dainik Jagran, one of many Hindi-language papers, dwarfs the combined circulation of India’s major English-language publications.

Other developments suggest that the arena of globalisation is not and will not be the exclusive preserve of Globish. Long ruled by the constraints of its Roman alphabet and its “internationalised domain names”, the internet will soon be increasingly hospitable to other scripts, with the imminent launch of Chinese, Arabic, Russian and other URLs. This fundamentally “globish” innovation – inclusive, populist, etc – may result in a fragmented internet, the creation of different spheres of engagement with, and access to, information.

One of the many downfalls of McCrum’s Globish and other sweeping paeans to globalisation is its failure to pay this due deference to the complexity of the process they describe; as much as the modern swirl of capital, people, technology and information “flattens”, it also raises barriers and accentuates differences. McCrum dwells repeatedly on French resistance to Anglo-Saxon culture, to “Coca-colonisation,” as if this was the most telling example of the conflicts produced by globalisation. However anxiously defended, French culture and language are quite safe, hardly at risk from the ravages of “the world’s English”. Those languages under real threat – like Bantik in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi – will be extinguished not by the advance of English, but that of national languages (in this case, Bahasa Indonesia) that have been strengthened by the internet and the movement of labour to commercial centres. The technologies and patterns of globalisation can conspire to produce a more national – not global – world.

Language remains a wonderful prism through which to understand both historical change over time and the modern world. From Nerriere’s Globish to flavoured dialects like Singlish in Singapore to the crisp received pronunciation of aristocratic Indians, multiple registers of English brush shoulders. Each reflects different, often contradictory experiences of globalisation. There is greater truth in their divergence than in their false unity. For if we build the tower of Globish up to the heavens, it is doomed, like Babel, to tumble into incoherence.

Kanishk Tharoor is a regular contributor to The Review and an associate editor at openDemocracy

The World Cup will gather together millions of fans supporting their country’s teams, Kanishk Tharoor writes, but the true new face of global football is one of scattered supporters and competing international brands. (Published in The National)

When the World Cup begins today, remember those who are not there. Not the teams and fans of countries like Egypt and Russia, who narrowly missed out on a trip to South Africa. No, not them, but rather those poor souls who never truly entertained the possibility of qualification, for whom even hope is something of a luxury.

For countless millions of football fans, the World Cup has been – and seems destined to always be – the affair of others.

This, of course, does not necessarily prevent them from savouring the tournament.

Accustomed to the eternal mediocrity of the Indian national team, certain rival neighbourhoods in Kolkata festoon their streets with either the blue and white of Argentina or the green-and-yellow of Brazil, thus annexing themselves for one month, every four years, to the distant passions and rivalries of South America. When Argentina do well, fireworks reverberate around the city. When Brazil succeed, it is even louder. Football is a losing sport in India, so everybody knows how to like a winner.

Most remote fans will not flaunt their extra-territorial loyalties so overtly. They may even purport to be disinterested in the outcomes of the matches, to be “neutral”, an awfully rare inclination in a sport known for its passionate, often combative spectators. But they will stay up all night or set their alarms for early in the morning with the same diligence as those lucky citizens of decent footballing nations.

Spare a thought for such people, for those football orphans who experience the joy of the World Cup vicariously over satellite TVs or crackling radios or high-speed internet streams. Every tournament, they can only look forward to taking pleasure in the pleasure of other countries.

The matches of this year’s World Cup are expected to be watched by some 30 billion “non-unique” viewers; many if not most will be from neutral territories. That they are drawn to the tournament despite having no dog of their own in the fight is a testament to the World Cup’s great virtue: its unparalleled global appeal.

Football, after all, is “the world’s game.” This may be one of the platitudes about harmony and humanism that Fifa, the tournament’s organisers, are ever keen to trot out. But it is viscerally true. At the 2006 World Cup, I danced and sang (well, in so far as I can do either) in a medieval square in Cologne with Angolan, Mexican and Iranian football fans. Few other sports can bring such unexpected combinations of people together, and no other event (not even the Olympics) evokes such intense global attention, conversation and emotion.

At the same time, “countryless” fans will forego the most powerful aspect of the tournament: the fleeting but meaningful moments of national togetherness that international football contests create. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm has astutely observed, football teams have a remarkable way of sparking national identity. When one country plays another on the football pitch, he writes, “the imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people.”

We are tempted these days to distrust nationalism and its attendant chauvinist moods and fevers. But the unity promised by football is often quite benign, if not plainly a force for good. The north and the south of the Ivory Coast put their differences aside to join in support of Les Elephants, their footballers.

So too do Iraq’s Sunni, Shia and Kurds link arms – however briefly – when cheering for their national side. Even in less violent situations, football still finds a role to play. The great warmth of fellow feeling that engulfed Germany in 2006 following the strong performance of their national team was hailed by many as the first truly positive assertion of German identity in a century.

Such responsibility on the shoulders of the national team can be an overwhelming burden. After the economic crisis that decimated Argentina’s middle class in 2002, the country regrouped behind the team’s World Cup campaign. When La Albiceleste crashed out ignominiously in the first round, it was a body blow to a nation already on its knees.

Most countries participating in this year’s tournament lack desperate national crises that only football can surmount. But what the tournament offers fans of any country involved is magical and rare in increasingly fragmented times. It is the possibility of collective aspiration, collective euphoria and collective grief. Though the celebrations may be vigorous in Kolkata for every Brazilian goal, they cannot tap the experience of national joy. Any sense of connection, any attachment is inevitably ersatz.

But there is fast growing an alternative to the half-thrills of supporting a proxy World Cup team. Where national belonging may prevent the remote fan from feeling truly included in the World Cup, top European clubs now aggressively court supporters around the world. Club football dominates the global footballing calendar, and leagues in western Europe – particularly England’s Premier League – are the real bread and butter of the global football industry.

For top teams in the age of effortless information and instant communication, potential fans could be anywhere. Being an Arsenal supporter, for instance, does not require a particular passport or residence in the club’s traditional leafy North London borough. Rather, it merely demands entry, via TV and the internet, into the imagined community of Arsenal fans (“Gooners”). And it is these distant, armchair supporters in far-flung countries who are unwittingly transforming and redefining modern football.

With its great engine in western European leagues like England’s, football in the last ten years has grown into serious global business. Satellite TV brings European club football to hundreds of millions around the world, from the ever lucrative and populous markets of East and Southeast Asia to African slums like Kibera outside Nairobi, where fans congregate in TV halls named “Highbury”, “Old Trafford”, “San Siro”, and “Stamford Bridge”, after the spiritual homes of famous European teams.

Soaring commercial and advertising revenue has inflated the salaries of top players and the potential value of top teams. The purchase of clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City by foreign billionaires is indicative of how attractive such clubs have become both as investments and objects of international prestige and renown. Though European football has for decades drawn the most global interest, never before have its powerful clubs enjoyed such recognition, such enthusiasm, and such wealth.

But this rise in stature has been accompanied by the steady overturning of the relationship between clubs and their traditional, local fan bases. English domestic football is notable for its great appeal – the top division, the Premier League, is widely considered the best football league in the world – but there is also growing discontent within the game.

The “football boom” that followed the creation of the Premier League in 1992 (and the accompanying agreement of a series of lucrative TV deals between the league’s clubs and Sky) transformed the sport in England. Since then, ticket prices have climbed immensely, pricing out the traditional working-class supporters who once thronged the rowdy, smoky all-standing terraces that framed English football (these, too, have disappeared since the early 1990s, replaced by comfortable and far quieter all-seater stadia).

Nevertheless, the demographic shift within the grounds can also tell a positive tale: women and ethnic minorities are now far more numerous, while the threat of hooligan violence has greatly diminished. English football is a neater, smoother commercial product, eminently marketable to audiences abroad.

In the last few years, however, anger and organised resistance to the infusion of money in English football has finally begun to build. Fans feel rejected from their local teams, shamed by the supposed greed of the owners, and propelled into action, leading demonstrations or even forming their own clubs in a bid to return the game to its unsullied roots.

On radio talk shows and phone-ins, supporters of many teams rant bitterly about the greed of players and owners, lament the impossible cost of tickets, and remember the good old days when football was about people and not the shilling of big business. This has all transpired fairly invisibly to those outside Britain, obscured from the gaze and the concerns of the legions of fans in Nigeria or India or Malaysia.

But the uncomfortable truth for the natives is that it is upon this international audience – not its domestic fan base – that English and European football increasingly rely for TV and other commercial revenue. If Rob from Salford can no longer afford to watch his beloved Manchester United at Old Trafford or even buy the latest replica shirt, it is of little consequence; special packages allow Samar, visiting from Islamabad, to snap up the tickets, while Tan in Singapore buys official club merchandise from Manchester United’s Chinese-language website for his friends, all of whom stay up till odd hours to watch their team live and direct over satellite TV.

The top English teams have infinitely more fans around the world than at home. So we have an odd reconfiguration of the old colonial relationship: people in the “metropole” feel alienated from their teams – labours of love over many generations – as they are repackaged for the consumption of those in the “periphery”.

For fans in these margins of world football, the globalisation of the sport at club level offers access to a different kind of fan identity, one grounded not in shared geography or history, but in identification with the floating symbol of the club itself. The distinction here between club and national football is clear.

There are obvious, formal ways of establishing national affinities; it will take some suspension of disbelief for a man in Djibouti to embrace the Danish team in this World Cup as fully as a Dane can. But club football affords the possibility of seemingly real membership in a virtual collective, an imagined community of millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions (for those of you who support Manchester United).

Yet there is more at play here than the simple expansion of the traditional boundaries of club influence and appeal. The process of winning fans around the world operates according to the rules of the free market. The top European teams compete to produce the most attractive blend of on-the-pitch product and off-the-pitch style. In other words, in order to raise their global profile, the biggest clubs have long since transformed themselves into swaggering brands.

For those familiar with American spectator sports (or even contemporary Indian cricket), this may seem thoroughly unremarkable. In the context of football, it remains notable if only because of the gaping divide between the best of Europe and the rest. The vast majority of clubs from Latin America to Turkey are neglected by the international media’s disproportionate attention to western Europe. They are consigned to relative poverty and must assume a lower place in the informal food chain that drains the best talent into Europe’s rarefied elite.

These leagues in the shadow of western Europe have limited ambitions to export their product abroad, in large part because they cannot compete with the already established offerings of England, Spain and Italy. As a result, the older logic of local support, of sweaty, parochial intimacy with the collective, prevails in this vast hinterland of the footballing world. The football played in such places may not be of the highest quality. But the spectacle surrounding the game remains relatively unvarnished and raw and, in the eyes of the growing number of football nostalgics in England, true to the spirit of the game.

Albert Camus famously said: “All I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” Football taught him camaraderie, honesty, determination, and the rustic value of “sticking up for one another”. The basic civic ethos of togetherness and inclusion imbue the sport, both at the level of the player (it is the most open, the most egalitarian of all major team sports) and that of the spectator.

The manner in which football is supported around the world sets the sport apart. Though this instinct has been undermined significantly in some countries by the encroachment of the English and other European leagues, fans typically embrace their local clubs as social institutions. Here, Camus’ “morality” of loyalty and camaraderie surfaces. The club is an anchor on which to tether a sense of belonging to a collective, however inchoate and ephemeral. This is rather unique to football in its traditional milieu, and it is the source of the magical fervour that makes the game so special: the carnival of chanting, jumping, sometimes dancing that shadows the movements of 22 men in shorts across a green field.

To the uninitiated, and especially to those alien to the lure of spectator sports in general, it may very well seem a silly sight: thousands of men – yes, no matter where, it’s mostly men – many of them drunk or in the process of getting drunker, belting out songs that drone and wail above the din, urging on their side with foul-mouthed chants, fiery flares, and rolls of toilet paper tossed in great dive-bombing arcs onto the pitch. And, indeed, the behaviour of football fans can tread the border between silly and psychotic, as recurring outbreaks of football-related “hooligan” violence attest. It is, nevertheless, churlish to deny the power of the spectacle. Few sports can replicate the atmosphere of even an average football match.

One of the frequent complaints aired by disgruntled fans in England is that the atmosphere has drained out of many Premier League stadia. Contemporary football in the top European leagues (especially in England) would compel the traditional, passionate fans like those described above to sit down while watching the game, to visit concession stands, and to demand an acceptable sporting “product” on the field. But many football fans around the world (and, indeed, in the UK) are as interested in the pageantry surrounding the game as the game itself, as keen to participate in the spectacle as they are to witness it. Their mode of engagement with the sport is a reminder of how much football encourages not only a relationship between fans and their team, but between fans themselves.

International fans of club teams like Manchester United and Barcelona are denied, both by virtue of their distance and by the very nature of their connection to their team, the texture of this experience and community. Restricted to the internet and TV, their knowledge of such teams is filtered through glitz and polish. It is buttressed by the consumption of images of celebrity and individual glamour, of players who are less members of a team than representatives of a brand.

Nike’s “Write the Future” World Cup promotional video – ubiquitous on TV and available in full online, where it recently surpassed 12 million views on YouTube – is a masterful example of this way of presenting football to the world. It is lush, frenetic and totally mesmerising. Several of the world’s top stars, including Didier Drogba of the Ivory Coast, England’s Wayne Rooney, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, whiz around the football pitch, their actions on the field spliced with stylised visions of their futures should they fail or succeed. It is the consummate film of its kind. Here, we see in its perfected form contemporary football’s cult of the individual, of stars whose boots, shirts, faces, lives, even brands (in self-referential scenes, Ronaldo christens a stadium after himself, Brazil’s Ronaldinho advertises his own DVD) can be bundled into a slick, enthralling commercial package.

`In some ways, the World Cup is only an occasion for those industries around club football to flex their muscles to their fullest. It is obviously in Nike’s interest to sell its already profit-turning stars to the world (Nike made $1.7 billion in football-related revenue last year). But it is also in the interest of the top European club teams that boast such players in their ranks. In the competition for international audiences and market share, the brand power of individual players is a decisive factor. Fans are drawn to the glamour of Ronaldo, Rooney and Lionel Messi rather than their respective teams. Support for a club becomes necessarily entangled with the consumption of glistening images and calculated marketing.

The genie cannot be put back in the bottle, nor should it be returned. It is true that the internationalisation of the game has widened the gap between the best and the rest in the English and other European leagues. But there is something faintly perverse about the English longing, for example, for the grey days before the Premier League and the arrival of foreign money, attention and talent; the standard of play is scintillating now in comparison to the muddy, clogging dirge that passed for football in 1980s and early 1990s, and which was further haunted by the menace of endemic racism and violence. More generally, football as a global passtime has surely gained in popularity through the growing international appeal of high-quality leagues like the Premier League. Success at that level can inspire boys in Sierra Leone and Singapore in ways that their own trifling domestic tournaments could never hope to imitate.

The saddest result of the general trajectory of football’s global growth is not the disenfranchisement of fans in Britain and other parts of western Europe, as unfortunate as this process has been. Rather, it is the final transformation of how millions of people access the sport. This is not so much a problem in the strong footballing countries of Latin America and Europe (those countries that frequently qualify for major international tournaments), even as their domestic leagues live in the shadow of those in England, Spain and Italy. Local clubs in these regions will survive and perhaps even flourish despite lacking the same international audience. They will retain the intimacy of passionate football support, the boisterous solidarity of the terraces.

Unfortunately, in most of the world, spectatorship at the local level will wither away, if it has not already done so. What is good for football as a global business may be damaging for football’s future as a living, indigenous fixture in many countries. Kolkata, the most football-obsessed part of India, used to boast a vibrant league with several storied clubs, like the century-old Mohun Bagan, East Bengal, and Mohameddan Sporting, teams that would play each other in the mammoth Salt Lake Stadium in front of crowds approaching 120,000. With the coming of satellite TV and a steady diet of European football, a substantial portion of Kolkata’s fans (including essentially the entire middle class) were weaned off the swampy fare in their local stadia. You can’t really blame them. It’s far easier and far more comfortable to watch good football in the cool of your own home or in a tea shop than brave the summer heat in a rickety, crumbling stadium to witness footballing dross.

But just like the World Cup, the excitement of club football remains in another world, a rarefied and distant place, accessed only at arm’s length through the sparkling prism of international commerce. And it is a beautiful place, a magical far away land, full of glossy, giant-like heroes, who loom impossibly high over the ghosts of the here-and-now.

Kanishk Tharoor is a regular contributor to The Review and an associate editor at openDemocracy.

Heavy-handed it may be, but this World Cup take on God Save the Queen moves Englishness beyond Anglo-Saxon whiteness (published in the Guardian)

There are a lot of tedious hymns among the national anthems of the world, but God Save the Queen must be one of the most tiresome. In its attempt to rouse national passions, it only seems to depress. It will stumble tunelessly from the jowls of thousands of England fans this Saturday, offering its unwelcome benediction, casting a morose pall overRustenburg. And that’s all without even considering its words.

Most national anthems try to evoke some kind of narrative, some kind of heroic claim or at least endearing description of the nation. God Save the Queen does nothing of the sort. Instead, it asks a deity to ensure that those singing can live in eternal thrall to a monarch (“long to reign over us”) – a quite pathetic request in the 21st century. There is little redeeming about the song; its merciful brevity (a little over 30 seconds when sung at football matches) is its most striking virtue.

So it was with a great degree of surprise that I found myself positively stirred by a rendition of God Save the Queen. Ahead of the World Cup,Umbro released an ad featuring its official red England football top. The short TV spot dresses a range of everyday English people in the shirt, poses them in a collage of everyday English locations, and has them mouth the words to God Save the Queen – the soundtrack that builds and wanes over the course of the minute-long film – as if they were England footballers standing to attention before kick-off.

The video succeeds on a number of levels. First, it elegantly evokes the power of national-team football, of how an incoherent country can come together on the pitch, how, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote: “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 people.” Second, the video doesn’t try to glorify the singing of the anthem, but finds dignity in its choice of humble milieu and modest characters.

Last, and most important, it implicitly makes an argument about Englishness by picking half of its cast from non-white minority groups. Some would roll their eyes and dismiss this as “political correctness gone mad”. Others would say it’s heavy handed to leave the closing line to a head-scarfed Asian woman, one of the more potent icons of cultural difference and its discontents in contemporary Britain. Indeed, reactionsto the video (many of which Umbro has removed) suggest that the shriller reaches of the internet were quick to take umbrage at the ad’s racial balancing act.

The ad is heavy-handed. It may commit all the supposedly egregious sins of “political correctness” that make commenters harrumph loudly across the internet. But that is because it presents a simple but bold challenge to both the culture of support around England’s football team and, more broadly, to what it means to be English. (Before I get carried away here, I accept that the ad’s purpose first-and-foremost is to sell Umbro products, and that its message is probably part of a scrupulously researched and strategised reconfiguration of Umbro’s brand. That does not make the content of the message irrelevant.)

Despite demographic shifts in attendance across domestic English football, support for the England football team remains strikingly monochrome and prone to the uglier, irredentist passions of the land. Other trappings of Englishness like the cross of St George are increasingly seen as the preserve of the “white working class,” and, more worryingly, as the symbol of far-right groups like the EDL. At the same time, many non-white Britons living in England refuse to call themselves “English”, retaining instead the increasingly anachronistic term “British”, which to them seems like a cosier, all-encompassing refuge from the buffeting ethnic winds of Englishness.

The Umbro ad is not trying to “play it safe” in its inclusion of so many black and Asian figures. Such quantity only buttresses the ad’s unwavering assertion of multicultural English – not British – identity. This kind of claim is overdue. In an era of devolution, to be English must denote more than Anglo-Saxon whiteness; otherwise, Englishness will become a meaningless, dead category, which only racists attempt to raise ghoulishly from the earth. As one of the principal points of English solidarity, the England football team and its fans doubtless have a part to play in mirroring (if not effecting) this transformation. And if God Save the Queen must remain the glue that binds, so be it.