Category Archives: Angana Chatterji
For Immediate Release: Revoke the Barring of Professor Richard Shapiro
For Immediate Release November 5th, 2010 WHAT: Protest at the Indian Consulate: Revoke the Barring of Professor Richard Shapiro, End the Isolation of Kashmiris WHERE: 540 Arguello Boulevard, San Francisco, CA, WHEN: November 8th, 11am-12pm Organized by Students and Friends of the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir (IPTK) Press contact: Amanda McBride, ciisstudentsolidarity@gmail.com, 415.627.7675 On Monday, November 8th, at 11 am, a group of students and community members will be protesting IndiaÕs banning of Richard Shapiro, a US scholar, without any reported legal basis. The protest will take place at the San Francisco Consulate General of India, at 540 Arguello Boulevard. On November 1st, 2010, Professor Shapiro was denied entry by the Immigration Authorities in New Delhi. Professor Shapiro is a US Citizen and Chair, Anthropology Department, at California Institute of Integral Studies. Professor Shapiro traveled to India with his life partner, Professor Angana Chatterji, a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the US. Professor Chatterji, a prominent and frequent visitor to the region, was granted entry to India while Professor Shapiro was prevented from entering the country. Reports indicate that no legal basis was given for the decision to deny his entry. Professor Shapiro was in possession of a valid passport and visa. Given that Professor ShapiroÕs work focuses neither on South Asia nor India, it appears that his right to travel has been restricted in an attempt to further intimidate Professor Chatterji, and to discourage her from continuing her work as Co-Convener of the International People's Tribunal for Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir (IPTK). Since 2006, Shapiro has regularly traveled to Kashmir, and interacted with various human rights defenders, scholars, and youth to bear witness and to learn from their experiences. He helped form a Jewish-Muslim Friendship Circle. The focus of his scholarship and academic work is not India or Kashmir, but issues of race, class, gender, and alliance building in the United States, and discourses on power and subjectivity. Richard Shapiro had written an op-ed on Kashmir in 2009 and another in September 2010. These were analytical pieces based on articles and newspaper reports, and not on primary research that had been conducted by him. Any scholar can do that. This is a matter of academic freedom, and beyond the control of states and their desire to regulate thinking on the injustices they perpetrate. On November 1, when Professor Shapiro first presented his passport to the Immigration Authorities, he was stamped an entry permit. Then, they started processing Professor Chatterji's passport. She has been stopped regularly since the inception of IPTK in April 2008. As they paused over her passport, the Immigration Officer again asked Richard Shapiro for his passport. Then, he was informed that he may not enter India, and that the ban was indefinite. The Immigration Authorities refused to pay for his return airfare. He was made to leave at 11.50 am that same morning. The Immigration Authorities refused to give any reason, while stating that Professor Shapiro had not been charged with anything. This arbitrary and undemocratic act by the Indian government is an affront to academic freedom, the right of families to be together, and further isolates Kashmiris from international solidarity in their struggle for peace and justice. The barring of an international scholar to Kashmir raises serious questions into the functioning of democratic rights and human rights conditions of Kashmiris. Denying Shapiro entry without due cause impinges upon academic freedom, freedom of movement, and the right to travel with his legal partner and to visit his family in Kolkata. The Indian state has regularly targeted those that have been outspoken on injustices and military governance in Kashmir. The Indian state has targetted Professor Angana Chatterji and her colleagues in Kashmir, Parvez Imroz and Khurram Parvez, for their work defending human rights. Recently, writer Arundhati Roy was a target. When academics, writers, and journalists are banned, such actions speak to the intent of the Indian State in maintaining impunity, and in deliberately isolating Kashmiris from the world and the world from Kashmiris. We call upon the Government of India to: * Revoke the entry ban of Richard Shapiro from India. * Stop obstruction of the IPTK's work. * End barring without due cause. * Support democratic processes, the exchange of ideas. For more information on the IPTK, see www.kashmirprocess.org. For a press note by Scholars at Risk regarding Professor Shapiro, please visit: http://scholarsatrisk.nyu.edu/Events-News/Article-Detail.php?art_uid=2454 The op-eds by Richard Shapiro: Governing Kashmir (August 2010): http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2010/Aug/29/governing-kashmir-17.asp A Just Peace in Kashmir? (August 2009): http://www.zcommunications.org/a-just-peace-in-kashmir-by-richard-shapiro
Faculty Head of our department denied entry into India
Our students in the Social Cultural Anthropology (SCA) at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I received my Masters degree in 2001 and where I continue my PHD studies, has been busy the last few days as we intensify efforts to intervene in solidarity to the people of Kashmir and all those who are democratic in spirit, in a world increasingly divided along lines inherited from our nation-states and communities. Richard Shapiro, who is the department head of the SCA department, was denied entry into India at the airport, where he was to meet his partner Angana Chatterji, who is also one of our faculty at the institute and is co-convener of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir.
This situation merits attention for those who want and need more democratic processes in the world, and to acknowledge the way states work in convening monopolies on power, even where there has been no crime committed. How can he be turned away for doing nothing? Why do states have more power than the people they are supposedly serving and protecting? This is the crucial question of our historical present.
The below article from Yahoo News explains:
This coming Monday, November 8, at 11:00 in San Francisco, there will be a protest at the Indian Consulate, protesting this turn-away and the divisions and policies, actions and heritages that prop up these kinds of actions. We must demand accountability to rights granted by our constitutions in democratic states and all states.
US professor sent back from Delhi airport
Wed, Nov 3 12:18 PM
Yahoo News. India.
A prominent US academic was sent back to America from Delhi airport on Monday, allegedly because his partner is associated with a human rights group in the Kashmir Valley.
According to the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition for Civil Society (JKCCS), immigration officials at the airport initially put an entry stamp on the passport of Prof Richard Shapiro, but cancelled it after they examined the passport of his partner, Angana Chatterji.
Chatterji is co-convener of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice, a voluntary organisation investigating alleged human rights abuses in Kashmir. She is professor of social and cultural anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), where Shapiro is Chair and associate professor of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthopology.
Chatterji was allowed to enter India, and is now in Srinagar. She said the immigration officials did not give any reason for denying Shapiro entry. No government official could be reached for a comment.
“This Monday, Richard Shapiro had travelled a long way from San Francisco to be with Angana Chatterji, who was travelling to Kashmir for work. When he first presented his passport to the immigration authorities, he was stamped an entry permit. Then they started processing Angana Chatterji’s passport.
She has been stopped regularly since the inception of IPTK in April 2008. As they paused over her passport, the immigration officer again asked Richard Shapiro for his passport,” JKCCS president Parvez Imroz said in a statement.
According to Imroz, Shapiro, a US citizen, has accompanied Chatterji, an Indian citizen and a permanent resident of the US, to India about 30 times since 1997. He does not work on Kashmir, but he has, since 2006, interacted with human rights activists in the Valley. He wrote two analytical pieces in local dailies in 2009 and September 2010, the JKCCS said.
According to Imroz, the immigration officials told Shapiro that the ban on his entry into India was indefinite. “They did not deport him or cancel his visa, but insisted that he return immediately. He was made to leave at 11.50 that same morning,” he said.
Some Thoughtful Cultural Views: Royal Society of the Arts (UK)
I know that some people don’t really care for philosophy or social theory. Yet many of those people want to change society. Change society into what? Usually it’s the same thing in different forms and usually in the image of what they want themselves as an individual or group. It is not democratic and certainly without an understanding of social actions and how the world has come to be on a social level in relation to power and history. Is there an understanding of what freedom is for different people and groups; how contradictions can be worked with instead of with domination? Liberalism is sometimes convenient in its answers to contradiction and conflict. Usually the this word ‘understanding’ comes into play. This understanding is usually meant to mean not understanding of differences in history and values and economic class and the lack of mourning and healing that creates the world of nation-states and imperialism. Understanding is meant to be something that is already known and established be better and to be aligned with, it’s an obedience, often times, to a ‘humanism.’ Humanism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism is a collection of systems of thought and moral values that were born in the western nations in the beginning and through colonization. Some of its ideals are wonderful. Others, I would have to say, need questioning and critique. It needs the inclusion of ‘other.’ The universal anything, needs to be questioned. Universals are usually meant to squash difference, diversity, wonder, and benefits those that speak of it as a priority and dominant.
The RSA, or the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, based in the UK, is a centuries old society that has alternately been courted by the states and the elite, and has been an outwardly bold society that often-times challenges the status quo and ruffles feathers. It is very neo-liberal in its thought processes and ‘progressive’ as a result. However, as in all things in the world, nothing is totally one or the other. Those that dislike liberalism may run up against the problem of what my professor Angana Chatterji has proposed, mainly to ‘try to have human rights without liberalism, you won’t get very far.”
As I am an open critic of everything, I also critique instead of criticize. By this I mean that I critique in order to get to the causes of oppression and to change some string of assumptions in a thought or event or moral value or ‘truth’ and its dominant position and/or priority over other ideas and ways. But other ideas and ways are not always better. But we don’t know unless we release something that’s tight and called ‘truth’ or ‘real’ or ‘right’ from the moorings and safe haven of a conversation ending in: ‘oh okay, if it’s the truth, then there’s no argument.” Or ‘oh, if it feels good, then it must be okay.” These positions keep the colonial heritage and global dominance of liberal ideas in play. But this does not mean that I dislike liberalism. It means I wish to investigate the underpinnings of socio-economic class, race and ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual preference, size, color, ability, and other factors that have come into play for something to be dominant and made necessary for everyone else. And if it is necessary for everyone, what does that do in the real world, to those people? So in saying this, I am not ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Royal Society of the Arts and what it puts forward. I am grateful for the power it has in the world to put forward some fairly controversial concepts into the world. I am also a critic of its elitist factors and its very weak stances and convenient analysis of harsher realities of racism, for instance. However, they do some very interesting work that is worth a look and to reflect upon.
At the heart of liberal institutions is very much the notion of humanism. That underneath difference, there is the sameness and that sameness is where conversations must happen. So when critical thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas have put for the idea that if we learned to spend more time together with less differences between each other, and we spoke languages that were more similar and had good communication ,there would be less oppression and troubles. This, I’m afraid is a liberal idea that I am very critical of. I hope you know why, when reading this. It makes humanism, something elite (and mostly white Europeans) have thought of as something that is universal and supposedly underneath. In this view, then, the block towards understanding, is the messiness of ‘difference.’ It can be couched in the language in many ways. In some liberal education institutions in the US and the UK, for instance, racism is just a bad thing and as long as we’re ‘good’ people, and see everyone as equal, then racism is gone. This usually conveniently leads to denial and in some cases, cruelty disguised in nice voices and smiles. It does not acknowledge racism at that point. The other factor of humanism is that it is made individual, not historical, cultural, or communal, or national. So things such as heterosexism, racism, homophobia and other oppressions, are seen as things people perpetrate on each other, but conveniently, structural racism — what institutions and policies and laws do, are not addressed.
There are many kinds of oppression at work in the world. There is always dominance and resistance. In my life, I look at anything that moves into any sphere, through my own understanding as well as study and investigation, which can bring oppressions to light. Usually things that are progressive are suspicious. If something progresses, how is that done? What is left behind? What is silenced? What is privileged? Usually the answers point to the typical oppressions in some way, but couched in good feelings and self-congratulations for moving ‘forward’ with progress and having the others ‘catch up’ because they just haven’t gotten there yet because ‘trauma.’ They might as well just call them primitive savages, stupid, unworthy, or ‘not as smart or well-off than us.’ This dynamic can underly much of humanism and liberalism. But saying this, does not mean, as I’ve said earlier, that this is the only thing going on. There are some very useful and exciting things going on in liberal and humanist terms. These we can pay attention to, to analyze and reflect upon and use, if we need, for the justice and freedoms we need in the world.
In this video, the RSA’s media presentation presents ‘The Crisis of Capitalism.” It’s pretty insightful and has some things to say that I think we need to pay attention to. Much of what is presented is not new for many people. However, I hope that one can see the points that we need to critique, to look at. Firstly, to start us off, the question of ‘new social order.’ We need a ‘new social order?” One new social order? Who will govern? What does that depend on? Has anyone read ‘Brave New World”? There are problems with the assumptions. However, there are great perspectives on the failure of capitalism. For some, this is a new crisis. For many, capitalism has never worked and has been an oppression that has made life horrific. If we want democratic relations and communities in the future, we must acknowledge that which we haven’t thought about and to re-think. Re-thinking cannot be done completely in an interior. It has to be done in conversation with ‘other.’
The video below has left out many conversations with certain ‘others’ that must happen for a truly just future. Can we think through this together? Perhaps you have some things to say. This video is good and some things are problematic. This is true for almost everything in life so it’s not special. Because my life is about social change, I want to pay attention to these things and to organizations such as the Royal Society of the Arts, and to hear/see what is happening and the cultural flow of things and we can see how ruptures begin and new thoughts may change or entrench things in different ways for different people.
This being said, I enjoy the fact that an explicit goal of the RSA is to revive the public sphere, public participation. From what I have gathered from researching how they are with different kinds of people, I hear that most feel that the RSA people listen to the people and present interesting dialogue and reflection. But as is the case with most of these organizations, less time is spent with the lower social classes but much is said about them in their presentations. What effects are they having in society? In what ways? I find that the analysis presented here, of capitalism’s crisis, is thoughtful and presented in an interesting way.
The Youtube parent page also has a link to their website. There are some very well-known cultural workers and philosophers who work on their site and with them to present ideas about life and cultural change from the perspective of a neo-colonial, progressive institution which also has radical elements within it:
Close Watch on My Professor & the Fight For Justice in this World
Some of you were kind enough to read my post entitled ‘Angana Chatterji and the Historical Present.’ Richard Shapiro the department head of the Social Cultural Anthropology program where I received my Masters’ Degree and continue to study, and the entire anthropology department here at California Institute of Integral Studies, are on edge as the events in Kashmir have heated up since the release of the People’s Tribunal in Indian-Administered Kashmir. Professor Angana Chatterji is in Kashmir presently, as we speak, where the intensification of violence in the streets to resist state violence has escalated. Professor Chatterji has been being followed closely by men with guns, plainclothed and uniformed police and paramilitary personnel. There is curfew and the state militarized officials keep a close eye on the members of the Tribunal and their friends and supporters. Angana and the tribunal members attended a press conference in Kashmir on the recent reports and ongoing research in Kashmir for justice.
We continually pray for her safety and the safety of all of the others working for justice in Kashmir and the present moment.
For further information, see article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/06/30/international/i072931D60.DTL
and please visit the tribunal’s update page here:
Angana Chatterji and the Historical Present
I have had the honor of conducting my graduate studies in the Social Cultural Anthropology program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. There, Department head Richard Shapiro and Professor Angana Chatterji, run an intellectually/spiritually rigorous program of re-thinking our present in light of the historical past. With this, the historical future will look differently. Why does it need to look differently, some ask? This, I’m afraid, is a question spoken by the privileged or the unconcerned. Anyone who has seen that disenfranchisement, disillusionment, mass forms of escape and ignorance, despair, rage, and genocide have increased the world over. It parallels the increase in the wealth of the few and the invisibility of the wealthy from the public in general, in most of the world.
The invisibility allows for certain mechanisms to be put into place, controlling increasingly more areas of reflection, thought, and policies. The nation-state neo-liberal systems, which was invented in the resistance of peoples against primarily imperial rulerships based solely on single religions, has now become a ruling configuration that also detaches itself from humankind’s deepest issues, many of which come from the governance of nations and its tactics and priorities.
Angana Chatterji has dedicated her life to continual self-education, admonishing those she touches to re-think the present by including the multiple angles and hierarchically-organized perspectives that are laid into place by the dance of dominance and resistance, privilege and oppression. The Social Cultural anthropology program (SCA) at CIIS (California Institute of Integral Studies) challenges disciples to re-introduce intellect into the psycho-spiritual domain. The intellect, especially in the United States, but in most of the first-world nations, has been relegated to something menacing and/or useless. Today, ‘intellect’ is hardly recognized.
There is a reason for this. The academic institutions in the United States and many of the first world nations, as mentioned earlier, is more and more unconcerned with life and the people. It is more concerned about maintaining its institutions and formulations of power and legitimacy in their respective societies. When this kind of way of prioritizing things is practiced over and over, there is less and less room for adapting to things and people and situations. When there is less adaptation, as change is constant, the institutions become more irrelevant. What happens at this point, and has happened to a large extent in Europe, the United States, Australia, and Japan, is the amassing of wealth by these academic institutions in order to maintain its prestige. Prestige itself, I beg of you to understand from my perspective, is not ‘evil’ or bad. The problem is its prioritization in communities, over-taking an exacting look at the processes that create suffering and toil, vanity and genocides.
Through the work of Angana Chatterji, Richard Shapiro, and Mutombo Mpanya of the Anthropology program at CIIS, disciples (I would not say ‘students’ in the traditional sense) must grapple with re-learning, undoing, then re-thinking and learning how to think with the historical past in the now-moment. And in addition, this ‘history’ is not the traditional and mainstream ‘history’ that is often not recognized as propaganda in some ways. The dominant texts are written so that history makes the dominant groups and institutions’ versions of history ‘truth.’ Being inclusive for everyone and every community, is a liberal idea that most academic institutions attempt to practice. However, ‘including everyone’ or inclusivity, is a very tiny fraction of the issues in life. In fact, inclusivity into a system that carries oppressive norms is assimilation, an enticement. One just needs to look around. Just because we have burritos and sushi in the cafe does not make the political and historical circumstances that made our identities and fractured lives happen. Our privileges want to be maintained. We want to ignore the pain and suffering. So it isn’t learned. In the mainstream academy, everything is co-opted into the ‘feel good’ place and reconciled. Toward the neo-liberal and the maintenance of ‘good people.’ This ‘good people’ is an imagination of the moralities that propped up our histories. ‘Good’ people were smashing soap bars down Native American throats when they spoke their native language in order to civilize them. Civilization is ‘good.’ ‘Good’ people owned slaves yet treated everyone ‘well.’
These are crass, simplistic examples of things we need to , and can un-do as a single image in how to ‘take care of things’ in life that get in the way of our individual happiness. The suffering of the globe in the historical present, cannot change unless we bring ourselves into the picture. Our heritages, what has happened, what’s been done. The complexities are immense but not unfathomable. From these complexities we come to realize that everything has come about through each diverse community and tensions’ meetings and the series of events that play out.
In my studies with Angana Chatterji, there is tremendous transformation, a dropping-off of life-as-we-know-it, similar to some of my experiences in Zen training. The intellect keeps many things ‘tight’ in our minds. It is even more complex to think that in the United States, being intellectual makes us less ‘spiritual’ and ‘real’ and the intellect is relegated to something that’s ‘too much.’ Angana Chatterji and Richard Shapiro’s mission at CIIS, was to create an academy that is relevant to reality. Skill, power, depth, complexity, and attention to our ancestors and what has happened, can be included in the story of our lives. It deepens our lives to what it actually is and not what we blindly have let it become. Scholarship can become something that advocates for humanity and justice, not just something we do to get better jobs in the market-capitalist society or the socialist one.
Recently, Angana Chatterji, along with Parvez Imroz, Gautam Navlakha, Mihir Desai, and Khurram Parvez and others, have co-founded and convened the International Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in the Indian-administrated region of Kashmir (website: http://kashmirprocess.org/index.html). This has been a labor of struggle and love and commitment, attesting to Angana Chatterji’s deepest wishes in relation to her ancestors and their legacy, for an academy that works with communities and is relevant to peoples’ struggles. In today’s world, often a community’s struggle is put into the light of some sort of competition between groups. Supposedly we are in a game of winning and losing. Angana and most of the people working pro-actively with struggling communities, would say that the oppression Olympics and its race toward individual ‘rights’ is a worldview that has developed due to how these things were taught to us. At close examination and with tremendous commitment to its roots, we can see that some things need to be struggled for and it need not be a competition between those struggling for justice and others doing the same. The Indian state is being asked to act as the state it promised to be. The tribunal wishes to hold the Indian state accountable to itself and others. Co-creating the world is diversity. Diversity is not a competition. Diversity and its concommitant need for re-thinking, re-structuring, and creating new imagination and processes toward justice and peace, takes re-education and understanding along with action and community. Angana Chatterji and the Peoples’ Tribunal is one of the many works that happen in the world and we need more of it.
AI NO KO 