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+{"text":"\nImages for a Generation Doomed\nImages for a Generation Doomed\n\n_The Films and Career of  \nGregg Araki_\n\nKYLO-PATRICK R. HART\n\nPublished by Lexington Books\n\nA division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.\n\nA wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.\n\n4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706\n\nwww.lexingtonbooks.com\n\nEstover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2010 by Lexington Books\n\nFirst paperback edition 2010\n\n_All rights reserved_. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.\n\nBritish Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available\n\n**Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data**\n\nThe hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged at the Library of Congress as follows:\n\nImages for a generation doomed : the films and career of Gregg Araki \/ Kylo-Patrick R. Hart.\n\np. cm.\n\nIncludes filmography.\n\nIncludes bibliographical references and index.\n\n1. Araki, Gregg\u2014Criticism and interpretation. I. Hart, Kylo-Patrick R. II. Title.\n\nPN1998.3.A65H37 2009\n\n791.4302'33092\u2014dc22\n\n2009033981\n\nISBN: 978-0-7391-3997-4 (cloth : alk. paper)\n\nISBN: 978-0-7391-3998-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)\n\nISBN: 978-0-7391-3999-8 (electronic)\n\n  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences\u2014Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI\/NISO Z39.48-1992.\n\nPrinted in the United States of America\n**_For A, E, I, O, U, and Z 3_**\nContents\n\nPreface\n\nAcknowledgments\n\n1 Gregg Araki and the New Queer Cinema\n\n2 Queerly Making a Splash with _The Living End_\n\n3 Refining an Authorial Style with _Totally F***ed Up_ and _The Doom Generation_\n\n4 Losing Focus with _Nowhere_ and _Splendor_\n\n5 Reestablishing Relevancy with _Mysterious Skin_\n\nAfterword: _Smiley Face_ and Beyond\n\nSupplementary Chapter: Cinematic Trash or Cultural Treasure? Conflicting Viewer Reactions to the Extremely Violent World of Bisexual Men in Gregg Araki's \"Heterosexual Movie\" _The Doom Generation_\n\nFilmography\n\nBibliography\n\nIndex\n\nAbout the Author\nPreface\n\nThe first time I viewed _The Doom Generation_ , Gregg Araki's 1995 film, I absolutely hated it. I stumbled upon it during my early years of doctoral study at the University of Michigan, while supporting myself by managing a video store on the weekends, and because I found its cover-box text and images to be so intriguing, I ended up taking it home. As I watched it, I found its narrative to be a bit too fractured and surreal, its dialogue to be a bit too evidently scripted and pretentious, its characters to be a bit too lackluster and stereotypical, and its entirely unexpected, extremely brutal concluding bloodbath to be unnecessarily shocking rather than truly compelling. As its closing credits (thankfully!) started to roll, I immediately classified the work in my mind as a leading example of cinematic trash and went on with my everyday life.\n\nIn the days following that first viewing experience, however, I could not get Araki's film\u2014its sexually charged narrative developments, its most amusingly noteworthy lines of dialogue, the angst-filled interactions among its central characters, and particularly its blood-soaked ending\u2014out of my mind. As I reflected further on both its manifest and latent contents, I started to appreciate the way that the work's rawness, aggressive energy, and treatment of nihilistic plot developments and themes substantially challenge hegemonic conceptions of ideology and social order as well as repressive sexual and gender roles. I began to realize that Araki's use of film grammar to convey a \"gay sensibility\" and his reworking of established genre expectations to serve queer storytelling goals rendered the film potentially quite subversive. Less than a week after I had initially encountered the film, it dawned on me clearly that _The Doom Generation_ isn't really cinematic trash after all, even though it may look that way on its surface. Instead, it actually communicates a powerful, sobering message about the threats of religious and social conservatism to the well-being of all individuals who can be regarded as \"deviant\" in any way from the hegemonic mainstream status quo. As a result, I ended up watching the film again (and again, and then again), and it has since become one of my all-time favorite films.\n\nMy newfound enthusiasm for the cultural treasure that is _The Doom Generation_ motivated me to seek out and view Araki's other films. While writing my book _The AIDS Movie: Representing a Pandemic in Film and Television_ , I got to know the contents of Araki's AIDS road movie, _The Living End_ (1992), quite intimately, and I found it to offer a unique brand of realism with regard to the cinematic exploration of the lives of contemporary queer individuals and people with HIV\/AIDS as well as provocative onscreen images of romantic and sexual relationships that border at times on the pornographic. I appreciated the way that _Totally F***ed Up_ (1993), with its focus on the search for happiness and meaning in their everyday lives by a small group of gay and lesbian teens, continued to foreground a variety of human sexualities and sexual practices that have historically been marginalized by mainstream society and rarely encountered in U.S. cinema. I found _Nowhere_ (1997), Araki's seemingly hallucinogenic exploration into the realities of life as experienced by contemporary teens of various sexual orientations, to offer a more playful, hormonally charged, and eye-candy-filled viewing experience (even though I found its concluding sequence to be frustrating and entirely unfulfilling). I looked forward with enthusiasm to seeing what the director's future cinematic offerings would be.\n\nDuring my first year as a new assistant professor, at the start of the new millennium, I decided to teach a course on auteur film directors. Given my appreciation of his unique storytelling approaches and his penchant for exploring (potentially) controversial subject matter and non-heterosexual themes in boundary-pushing ways, I chose, in addition to Ingmar Bergman and other widely revered auteurs, to include Gregg Araki as one of our subjects of study. Because I only had enough time available for the students to view and discuss three Araki films, my plan was for them to analyze _The Living End, The Doom Generation_ , and _Nowhere_. However, just prior to the week during which we were to analyze _Nowhere_ , I learned that Araki's subsequent film, _Splendor_ (1999), about two young men and one young woman who enter into a m\u00e9nage-\u00e0-trois living arrangement, had been released on DVD. I immediately ordered a copy, which arrived on the day of our class meeting. As a result, I did not have an opportunity to view its contents in advance of walking into the classroom. I then gave my students a choice: to view and discuss _Nowhere_ as originally planned, or to instead view and discuss _Splendor_ , with the express disclaimer that I had not yet personally seen it, so I had no idea what sorts of (potentially extreme) Arakian imagery and plot developments it might contain. The students opted for _Splendor_ and I sat back, a bit apprehensively, to view it along with them, fearing what instances of explicit dialogue or violent and sexual acts it might contain. To all of our surprise (and, quite frankly, subsequent disappointment), the contents of _Splendor_ were far more tame than any of us ever imagined they would be\u2014two attractive guys and a similarly attractive young woman living together, sleeping together in the same bed, and having sex in that bed and nothing at all happens between the two guys? There's not even any romantic or sexual attraction evident between the two men at any point in the film?\n\nWhen all was said and done, _Splendor_ ended up feeling like it was made by a different director entirely, and it left my students and I wondering what we should make of a previously boundary-pushing auteur director and New Queer Cinema pioneer whose most recent cinematic offering was both the \"straightest\" and most mainstream of his career up to that point. Accordingly, this book pertaining to the films and career trajectory of Gregg Araki is intended, at least in part, to begin to answer that very important question. It is also intended to offer noteworthy insights into Araki's various cinematic offerings, from _Three Bewildered People in the Night_ (1987) to _Smiley Face_ (2007) and everything in between.\nAcknowledgments\n\nI would like to thank Mary Desjardins, J. Martin Favor, and Klaus Milich for their invaluable feedback on my early drafts of this book manuscript.\n\nI wish to acknowledge all of the smile-filled companionship and emotional support provided to me by the members of the entire Hart pack (past and present) during the various stages of this project (and beyond).\n\nI would also like to thank all of the following individuals who have, knowingly or unknowingly, contributed to the success of this project in meaningful ways: Richard Allen, Jack Beckham, Richard Benjamin, Catherine Burke, Cindy Cantrell, Richard Capone, Gregory Caybut, Ross Chambers, Donna Clapp, Lauren Clarke, Catherine DiFonso, Tangela Diggs, Robert Franks, Christine Gagne, Michelle Givertz, Patricia Gonzalez, John Head, Steve Johnson, Victoria Johnson, Dorothy Kato, Joseph Kato, Melissa Kato, Alix Kneifel, Beverly Kuo-Hamilton, Amy Lawrence, Kellie Lee, Barbara Lopez-Mayhew, David Mackey, Daryl McDaniel, Andrea Mullarkey, Wole Ojurongbe, Fawn Ouellette, Christine Pace, Brian Patrick, Donald Pease, Elizabeth Powers, Susan Raber, Timothy Roggeman, Lisa Siegler, Todd Smilovitz, Kaye Weitzman, Marla Weitzman, Brice Wheeler, Metasebia Woldemariam, S. Brandon Wu, and Amit Zohar.\n\nFinally, I wish to thank Gregg Araki for creating, over the past two decades, one of the most intriguing cumulative bodies of work ever to be captured on film.\n\n\"Cinematic Trash or Cultural Treasure? Conflicting Viewer Reactions to the Extremely Violent World of Bisexual Men in Gregg Araki's 'Heterosexual Movie' _The Doom Generation_ \" by Kylo-Patrick R. Hart was originally published in _Journal of Bisexuality_ 7.1 (January 1, 2007) and is reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd., <http:\/\/www.tandf.co.uk\/journals>).\nChapter 1\n\nGregg Araki and the New Queer Cinema\n\nTwo attractive, HIV-positive young men, feeling that they are victims of the sexual revolution, embark on an L.A. shopping spree using a stolen credit card. Walking down the street carrying a new boom box and armfuls of additional items, they stop and engage in a quick kiss. Accosted by a neo-Nazi punk who does not appreciate their public display of affection, the pair is informed what AIDS stands for: \"Adios, infected dick suckers.\" One member of the pair wants to just walk away and avoid escalation of this confrontation; the other member glares at the punk with rage in his eyes. Ultimately, the two men walk off in one direction and the punk heads in the other. Seconds later, however, one of the HIV-positive men chases the punk down the street, wielding the boom box as a weapon, and beats him repeatedly over the head with it, leaving the punk for dead.\n\nElsewhere in Los Angeles, a teenage boy adds condiments to his Quickie Mart hotdogs as his girlfriend is informed by the Korean male shopkeeper that she must extinguish her cigarette. She does so by dropping it to the floor and putting it out with her shoe. Told by the man to pick up the extinguished remains, the girl responds defiantly, \"Eat my fuck.\" From behind the counter, the shopkeeper pulls a loaded shotgun and aims it at her, motivating her to comply with his request. She places it into a garbage can located directly beneath a giant sign that reads, \"Shoplifters will be executed.\" Placing his food items on the counter, the boy discovers that his purchase total is $6.66 and that, alas, he does not have his wallet with him. He looks to his girlfriend for help; she finds that she does not have any money with her, either. The man repeats the purchase total twice, aiming his gun directly at the couple. Seemingly out of nowhere, a young male drifter the couple encountered earlier that evening rushes behind the counter, wrestles with the shopkeeper for control of the gun, and instructs the couple to flee. Suddenly, the shopkeeper's wife enters the struggle occurring behind the counter. The gun is accidentally fired, shooting the shopkeeper's head off of his body\u2014it flies through the air across the store, landing in the tray of hot-dog condiments. Unexpectedly, the eyes on the severed head open and the head itself attempts to speak, a green substance emanating from its mouth. The three young people run off into the night, taking cash from the register, packs of cigarettes, and bottles of beer with them as they depart.\n\nWaiting at an L.A. bus stop, a sexually confused teenage boy smokes a cigarette and overhears the conversation of three loudly dressed valley girls who discuss which guys and girls are sleeping with which guys and girls, either as straight or queer pairings or as part of kinky threeways, as well as one guy who has an especially \"dinky weenie.\" Out of boredom, the boy is about to extinguish his cigarette using the tip of his finger when he glimpses a green-and-yellow space creature directly across the street. Scrambling unsuccessfully with his video camera to capture an image of this alien being, the boy watches in amazement as the creature pulls out a laser gun and vaporizes the three girls, causing them to disappear. Visibly shaken, the teen looks around quickly in all directions. He soon finds that the space creature has also vanished.\n\nThe preceding three intriguing scenes can be found in the films _The Living End_ (1992), _The Doom Generation_ (1995), and _Nowhere_ (1997) respectively, all of which were directed by Gregg Araki, the subject of this study. Not only do they provide introductory insights into noteworthy moments from this director's oeuvre, but they simultaneously offer glimpses into the ways that the director's radical\/subversive potential and treatment of his subject matter underwent noticeable change over the course of the 1990s, as they became increasingly more playful and tame.\n\nAbout Gregg Araki and His Films\n\nOver the past two decades, Gregg Araki has emerged as one of the limited number of auteurs working in U.S. cinema today. Having served simultaneously as the writer, director, cinematographer, and editor of his first four feature-length films and relinquished just a bit of that control on the films that followed, he has used the plasticity of the filmic medium to consistently explore the theme of rootless young people who are desperate to connect meaningfully with others and explore their sexualities amid a culture that foregrounds sex, drugs, and (post-punk\/industrial) rock 'n' roll in a series of intriguing films aimed substantially at queer audiences. Although it is not always evident from his cinematic creations, Araki is well familiar with the works of noteworthy auteur directors from the first century of cinema, and he has repeatedly identified the French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard as being one of the most significant influences on his own moviemaking style. About his cinematic works, Araki has said that he would prefer his audience members to be enraged rather than understanding or sympathetic (Levy, _Cinema_ 469).\n\nBorn on December 17, 1959 in Los Angeles, Araki was raised in Santa Barbara, California and became an enthusiastic participant in the West Coast punk rock scene during the late 1970s and 1980s. He went on to earn a bachelor's degree in film studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a master of fine arts degree in film production at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television before making his first two feature-length films, shot and edited on incredibly low budgets (of approximately five thousand dollars each), in the late 1980s.\n\nAraki's first film, shot in black and white, was _Three Bewildered People in the Night_ (1987). It explores the emotional love triangle between three young adults: Alicia (played by Darcy Marta), a straight video artist; her live-in boyfriend, Craig (played by John Lacques), an aspiring photographer and actor who remains sexually unsatisfied by her; and David (played by Mark Howell), a performance artist and Alicia's gay best friend. The storyline focuses primarily on the trio's attempts to come to terms with their feelings and their sexualities\u2014including the mutually growing attraction between the two men\u2014amid the backdrop of Greenwich Village apartments, galleries, late-night coffee shops, and empty streets.\n\nHis second film, also shot in black and white, was _The Long Weekend (O' Despair)_ (1989), which centers on the conversations (primarily about being bored and directionless) and experiences (such as bisexual encounters, infidelity, and potential breakups) of six bewildered young people\u2014three twentysomething college friends (a heterosexual woman, a lesbian, and their gay male friend whom they visit) as well as their past or present lovers\u2014over the course of an extended holiday weekend in Los Angeles. During the three days they spend together, they come to realize that, half a decade after graduation, they remain relatively directionless, confused about life, and unable to successfully recapture the exuberance of their past. About these two early features, Araki has stated:\n\nThe world as depicted in these films may be a fluorescent shithole of AM\/PM minimarts and monolithic parking structures, and relationships themselves may be seen as confounding, confusing, and finally impossible, but the characters in both ultimately love each other and hopefully\/hopelessly cling to the possibility of romantic redemption. (Araki, \"Filmmaker's\" 4)\n\nNeither film received widespread distribution, and they have rarely been screened to date.\n\nIt was Araki's third feature film, _The Living End_ (1992), however, that caught the eye of critics and established him as one of the noteworthy directors of the so-called New Queer Cinema, which emerged in the early 1990s. Made on a twenty-thousand-dollar budget with the working title \"Fuck the World,\" this offering, which follows the reckless road-trip adventures of two HIV-positive gay men who find liberation in their newfound health status, features provocative images of bareback gay sex, blowjobs behind the steering wheel, S&M, and related phenomena not frequently seen up to that point in U.S. cinema, along with seemingly random acts of violence and an almost unwatchable male-on-male rape at gunpoint. Without question, this is the film that first began to demonstrate the effectiveness of what I have referred to elsewhere as Araki's post-punk directorial style, which contributes substantially to the radical\/subversive potential of his various cinematic creations (Hart, \"Auteur\" 30).\n\nLike punk music in its heyday, _The Living End_ and the majority of Araki's other films to date are readily identifiable by the rawness, aggressive energy, disconcerting tone, nihilistic themes, and intentional lack of commercial appeal they contain, which result in their embodiment of powerful impulses pertaining to anarchy and disorder at the same time that the films ultimately refuse to take themselves or their subject matter too seriously (Hart, \"Auteur\" 30-32). Although the punk movement was inherently homophobic despite the reality that it simultaneously and continually produced and circulated non-normative (or \"queer\") gender representations (e.g., boys and young men wearing lipstick and sporting outrageously dyed hairstyles, girls and young women regularly using vulgar language and demonstrating related forms of transgressive behavior, etc.), post-punk creative offerings tend to retain the defining hallmarks of punk offerings while embracing non-normativity and queerness in its numerous forms (including sexual orientation), rather than perpetuating homophobia. About his groundbreaking work, Araki himself has indicated:\n\n_The Living End_ is my first effort at directly addressing this subtextually submerged side of my cinematic personality. A couple-on-the-run movie in the tradition of [Fritz] Lang's _You Only Live Once_ [1937], [Nicholas] Ray's _They Live by Night_ [1949], [Jean-Luc] Godard's _Pierrot le Fou_ [1965], and [Terrence] Malick's _Badlands_ [1974], it is easily my most desperate picture to date. And as much as I loathe the pigeonholing label, it is also the most frankly \"gay.\" Reckless and extreme, the film challenges not only the conventions established by the genre but those constraints imposed by our virulently homophobic Mainstream Culture as well. . . . Formally\/aesthetically\/thematically\/politically, _The Living End_ is without a doubt the riskiest, most dangerous movie I've attempted. Which is precisely why, of course, I wanted to make it in the first place. (Araki, \"Filmmaker's\" 4)\n\nFrom there, Araki turned his attention to creating his \"teen-apocalypse trilogy,\" composed of the films _Totally F***ed Up_ (1993), _The Doom Generation_ (1995), and _Nowhere_ (1997). The first of these films follows a half dozen gay and lesbian friends as they search for happiness and meaning in their everyday L.A. existence and are sporadically captured on videotape while doing so as part of a documentary that one of them is making. The second of these films is, like _The Living End_ , a road movie; this one explores the encounters of three rootless young people\u2014a dim straight teen, his bored and drug-using girlfriend, and a bisexual drifter\u2014as they push the boundaries of sexual experimentation and explore their deepest sexual desires in the aftermath of murdering a Quickie Mart owner and several other individuals. The third and final film in the trilogy provides a day-in-the-life glimpse into the everyday realities of an eighteen-year-old L.A. teen, as he experiences romantic complications with the teenage girl he has been sleeping with (who has a girlfriend named Lucifer on the side), explores bisexual urges with another male teen, and has occasional run-ins with a space alien. Over the course of these three films, it becomes apparent that Araki has substantially toned down the extreme sexual images and storylines that garnered him widespread notoriety in the wake of _The Living End_ 's release, as both his production budgets and industry expectations for the commercial success of his cinematic offerings continued to grow.\n\n_Splendor_ (1999), Araki's seventh feature film, is a romantic comedy about an aspiring L.A. actress who becomes romantically and sexually involved with two very different types of men. Because she cannot choose between them, the three end up living together until she ultimately finds herself attracted to yet another man. Although viewers might expect some sort of romantic or sexual attraction to become evident between the two men at some point in the narrative (given the contents of Araki's preceding works), no such vibe ever materializes, and the work ends up feeling as if it were made by a different director. Lacking entirely are the director's trademark in-your-face style and extreme sexual\/violent images that his fans had come to expect. Just as the New Queer Cinema movement lost is radical\/subversive potential over the course of the 1990s, so apparently had Gregg Araki. It remained to be seen whether his filmmaking career had come to an end prior to the start of the new millennium.\n\nAbout the New Queer Cinema\n\nThe term \"New Queer Cinema\" was coined by B. Ruby Rich to characterize the growing presence of noteworthy queer films, which seized the attention of critics, on the festival circuit in the early 1990s. Such works included _Edward II_ (Derek Jarman, 1991), _The Hours and Times_ (Christopher M\u00fcnch, 1991), _My Own Private Idaho_ (Gus Van Sant, 1991), _Poison_ (Todd Haynes, 1991), _R.S.V.P_. (Laurie Lynd, 1991), _Swoon_ (Tom Kalin, 1992), and Gregg Araki's _The Living End_ (1992). Although the New Queer Cinema is sometimes also described as the \"Queer New Wave,\" in ways similar to that of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s, it is important to note that the new body of queer films demonstrated far less coherence in techniques, aesthetic approaches, narrative strategies, and concerns than that of the preceding French film movement (Beaver 259-61; Rich, \"New\" 54). What they did share in common, however, was a common style and attitude. With regard to the former, Rich referred to their common style as ' \"Homo Pomo': there are traces in all of them of appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitively breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalistic and excessive\" (\"New\" 54). With regard to the latter, Rich adds that such films are, more than anything else, \"full of pleasure\" (\"New\" 54), at least in part because they are filled with defiance.\n\nAs Michele Aaron has demonstrated, such defiance in New Queer Cinema films operates on at least five different levels. First, it gives voice to marginalized members of the LGBTQ community as well as to the various subgroups that exist within it through the existence of the films themselves (4). Second, it allows such films to eschew positive imagery, as in offerings such as _The Living End_ and _Poison_ which (homo)eroticize extreme acts of violence and beautify their criminal characters, allowing them to remain stylishly well-groomed even when they are on the run (4). Third, it motivates such films to restore evidence of non-heterosexuality to representations of historical occurrences, thereby challenging and subverting a homophobic (cinematic) past (4). Fourth, it motivates such films and their makers to defy cinematic convention with regard to content, form, genre, linearity, or even coherence (4-5). Finally, defiance in films of the New Queer Cinema enables them to (symbolically) defy death, at least in terms of how it was defined as a death sentence in the early years of the AIDS pandemic, such as when the HIV-positive characters in _The Living End_ derive a powerful liberating effect from the existence of the \"ticking time bombs\" within them, or when the first individual to die from AIDS in _Zero Patience_ (John Greyson, 1994) ends up coming back to life (5).\n\nAaron concludes this discussion by noting that such defiance, in its various forms, contributes quite substantially to making the corresponding cinematic creations \"queer.\" Accordingly, the meaning of the term \"queer,\" as it has emerged in the field of queer theory over the past two decades, requires articulation here. Taken as a whole, queer theory represents a field of gender studies that, at its core, opposes ready categorization of sexuality and gender in favor of acknowledging that most people's experiences with sexuality and gender are typically ambiguous or fluid (rather than fixed) and remain in flux, at least to some degree, over the course of a lifetime. In doing so, it embraces and celebrates human difference and diversity (with regard to sex\/sexuality and otherwise) in their myriad combinations and forms. As a result, the term \"queer,\" once a pejorative word wielded by heterosexuals to denigrate homosexuals, does not apply today solely to individuals who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. Instead, it applies as well to \"describe any sexuality not defined as heterosexual procreative monogamy (usually the presumed goal of most classical Hollywood couplings); queers are people (including homosexuals) who do not organize their sexuality according to that rubric\" (Benshoff and Griffin 1). In doing so, \"queer\" challenges patriarchal hegemony's widely shared, culturally influential notion that \"only one sexuality (married-straight-white-man-on-top-of-woman-sex-for-procreation-only) is normal and desirable\" (Benshoff and Griffin 5-6); offers new ways of thinking about what it means to be \"normal,\" \"(in)appropriate,\" or \"deviant\"; embraces a wide range of human sexualities and sexual practices that have historically been marginalized by mainstream society (including fetishism, gender bending, masochism, prostitution, and sadism, among numerous others); and offers a way of being in the world that is under continuous revision or permanent becoming. In addition, as Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin have indicated, the term \"queer\" can be used to more effectively \"define a new generation of people (and the films they make) that resist being labeled into a heterosexual\u2013homosexual binary\" (2). Summing up this important and intriguing state of affairs, Michele Aaron has written:\n\nQueer, a derogatory term leveled at the non-hetero-seeming, was reappropriated in the late 1980s, early 1990s by its victims as a defiant means of empowerment echoing black activists' use of \"nigger\" in the 1960s. . . . Queer represents the resistance to, primarily, the normative codes of gender and sexual expression\u2014that masculine men sleep with feminine women\u2014but also to the restrictive potential of gay and lesbian sexuality\u2014that only men sleep with men, and women sleep with women. In this way, queer, as a critical concept, encompasses the non-fixity of gender expression and the non-fixity of both straight and gay sexuality. . . . To be queer now, then, means to be untethered from \"conventional\" codes of behavior. At its most expansive and utopian, queer contests (hetero- and homo-) normality. . . . In order to understand [New Queer Cinema] fully, one must understand \"queer\" as critical intervention, cultural product, and political strategy\u2014and [New Queer Cinema] as an art-full manifestation of the overlap between the three. (5-6)\n\nThe defiance that is so readily identifiable in works of the New Queer Cinema is widely regarded as being grounded in the realities and context of the AIDS pandemic. As Jos\u00e9 Arroyo proclaimed in the early 1990s, \"AIDS is why there is New Queer Cinema and it is what New Queer Cinema is about\" (92). He elaborates:\n\nThe fact that HIV may take years to manifest itself and that the pandemic has hit gay communities with devastating force means that, though everyone is a possible seropositive, [queer people's] lived relation to this possibility is much more immanent. This understanding that we are at special risk has affected the construction of our communities, our views of society, sexuality, bodies, relationships, time, history, and culture. . . . [As such], AIDS has affected what amounts to an epistemic shift in gay culture. (91-92)\n\nAccording to Arroyo, therefore, the emergence of the New Queer Cinema was the direct result of this epistemic shift. Monica Pearl echoes such sentiments when she writes, \"New Queer Cinema _is_ AIDS cinema: not only because the films . . . emerge out of the time of and the preoccupations with AIDS, but because their narratives and also their formal discontinuities and disruptions are AIDS-related\" (23). By this she means that, although the films themselves do not always explicitly address the subject of AIDS, their very form has resulted from the cataclysm of AIDS in Western society, from the various ways that AIDS disrupted both individuals and communities as well as the ways that its resulting realities could be comprehended and expressed, from the disorder and chaos experienced continually by individuals living with and\/or dying from the pandemic's widespread existence (24-25). The end result is a new form of \"experimental\" cinema that substantially re-imagines the world as many people had come to know it, one that attempts to accurately reflect the shifts in individual identity that resulted from the existence and ever-lurking threat of AIDS (Schulman 228). The queerness of such films, therefore, stems not only from the subject matter they explore but also from their creative subversion of cinematic convention, narrative storytelling, and film form, as they typically cross boundaries of genre and style and simultaneously feature both excess and minimalism, elements of both Hollywood and avant-garde moviemaking (Wallenberg 140; Benshoff and Griffin 11). In the process, offerings of the New Queer Cinema regularly call into question conceptions of the past and the present with the overarching goal of expressing demand for necessary, long-overdue social change (Wallenberg 139).\n\nNaturally, the New Queer Cinema did not appear out of nowhere. Instead, its appearance was the result of efforts on various fronts, including those by critics in publications such as the _Village Voice_ , the _Los Angeles Reader_ , and the _Los Angeles Weekly_ ; grassroots marketing campaigns and word-of-mouth publicity for noteworthy queer films; and the growing popularity of gay and lesbian film festivals over the course of the 1980s (Levy, _Cinema_ 460-61). In addition, the frustration, nihilism, and violence evident in so many works of the New Queer Cinema not only resulted from the existence and realities of the AIDS crisis, but they also further influenced the conditions and trajectory of the AIDS crisis as it progressed into its second decade while at the same time possessing noteworthy linkages to artistic creations of the past. Discrimination and stigmatization, typically stemming from fears of the unknown, have been deleterious social forces throughout human history, and they have unquestionably influenced the forms, approaches, and goals of artistic production in all historical eras. By the early 1990s specifically, the visual arts were being used not only as a means of reacting to the AIDS pandemic but also of endeavoring to motivate important social changes with regard to perceptions of non-heterosexual individuals and people with HIV or AIDS in relation to matters of representation, medical science, and individual, political, and social power, utilizing strategies and approaches stemming from those found in preceding artistic creations that have explored subject matter pertaining to otherness and\/or epidemic disease. As Mikha\u00ebl Elbaz and Ruth Murbach have noted, AIDS \"brought back panic, fear, and terror of the Other, condemned and damned, at a time when our Western societies, armed with the miracle of antibiotics, sanitary hygiene, self-surveillance, and the presence of the providential state, seemed to have repressed the fear of death\" and resulted in a common cultural repertoire of responses \"which has delimited possible reactions to 'diabolical' diseases since the beginning of time: denial, escape, fear, aggression, projection, guilt designation, conspiracy theories, exclusion and stigmatization, and appeals for salvation to moralism and mysticism\" (1).\n\nIt is perhaps entirely unsurprising, therefore, as Michele Aaron has demonstrated, that films falling into the New Queer Cinema category have been highly contested from their inception, at least in part because they contained unwarranted optimism (with the hope of creating a minor representational revolution that never really materialized), promoted queer villainy (often in the form of the queer psycho-killer) in an era during which homophobic violence was quite prevalent, and suggested that the mass audience had come to embrace and exhibit queer friendliness when that was not necessarily the case (8). In addition, festival planners, theater personnel, and distributors have been criticized for devoting much more enthusiasm and attention to New Queer Cinema films that are by and\/or about males rather than those that are by and\/or about females (Rich, \"New\" 54). It is somewhat noteworthy, therefore, that Araki's films tend to oppose this trend to a degree, as he features non-heterosexual female characters in approximately half of the films he has released to date. At the same time, however, these characters are not always represented in positive ways, and they certainly remain overshadowed, and outnumbered, by their surrounding non-heterosexual males. Furthermore, New Queer Cinema offerings have been criticized for being elitist, because they address issues associated so intimately with both queer and postmodern theory (Benshoff and Griffin 12), as well as for ultimately failing to live up to their promise and potential because, over the course of the decade of the 1990s, \"a new and _enduring_ sector of popular radical work failed to materialize\" (Aaron 8). By the end of that decade, the New Queer Cinema had lost its radical impulse and was transformed into a niche market, one that most typically served up ideologically safe and unremarkable films targeted to a very narrow queer audience, including _Bar Girls_ (Marita Giovanni, 1994), _Jeffrey_ (Christopher Ashley, 1995), _The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love_ (Maria Maggenti, 1995), _Losing Chase_ (Kevin Bacon, 1996), _Hollow Reed_ (Angela Pope, 1997), _Kiss Me Guido_ (Tony Vitale, 1997), _Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss_ (Tommy O'Haver, 1998), and _High Art_ (Lisa Cholodenko, 1998) (Aaron 8). This reality led B. Ruby Rich to question, in the early years of the new millennium, whether the New Queer Cinema has disappeared or is now, in a watered-down version, simply everywhere (\"Vision\" 43).\n\nAbout this Book\n\nThis book explores the films and career trajectory to date of the noteworthy New Queer Cinema pioneer Gregg Araki. As we have already seen, in the early 1990s this independent director, with his film _The Living End_ , emerged as a leading figure in the New Queer Cinema movement. Although he continued to make noteworthy contributions with regard to representing non-heterosexual young people in the age of AIDS in his next two films, _Totally F***ed Up_ and _The Doom Generation_ , it was already becoming apparent that, as expectations for the commercial success of his offerings continued to grow, the radical\/subversive potential of Araki's cinematic creations was beginning to diminish. In fact, Araki's subsequent films, _Nowhere_ and _Splendor_ , are so toned-down with regard to the director's established in-your-face style and extreme sexual\/violent imagery that they no longer appear to contain any sort of radical\/subversive potential at all in relation to his early ideological approaches as a New Queer Cinema filmmaker. By the end of the 1990s, Araki's later works had become virtually irrelevant with regard to breaking new ground in cinematic representations of non-heterosexuals. This reality is an important one, because it provides insight into the cultural forces that contributed to the dramatic reduction in the subversive potential of the films produced by a very significant\u2014and formerly quite boundary-pushing\u2014director. In relation to this primary issue, this project will also demonstrate how Araki was, ultimately, successfully able to reestablish his cinematic and cultural relevancy with his 2004 film, _Mysterious Skin_ , which garnered him the most favorable critical acclaim of his filmmaking career.\n\nAccordingly, in chapter 2, I explore _The Living End_ as an example of influential New Queer Cinema moviemaking with regard to both its representational strengths and shortcomings and the early development of Araki's distinctive filmmaking style. In chapter 3, I examine the first two films of Araki's teen-apocalypse trilogy, _Totally F***ed Up_ and _The Doom Generation_ , with regard to how they represent both noteworthy continuations of, and deviations from, the emergent post-punk style evident in the director's breakthrough cinematic offering and the radical\/subversive potential that is enabled by that style. In chapter 4, I analyze the dramatically reduced radical\/subversive potential contained in _Nowhere_ , the final offering of the teen-apocalypse trilogy, and _Splendor_ , as compared with the director's preceding works and their on-screen representations of non-heterosexuality. In chapter 5, I explore Araki's successful attempts to reestablish his cinematic and cultural relevancy in relation to the approaches and subject matter of contemporary queer cinema with _Mysterious Skin_ , a story of self-discovery as two teenage boys deal with the reality of having been sexually abused by their Little League coach years earlier and Araki's first screenplay adaptation, from the acclaimed novel by Scott Heim. Finally, in the afterword, I briefly examine Araki's most recent film, _Smiley Face_ (2007), in relation to the contents of his preceding cinematic creations.\n\nIn offering advice to emerging filmmakers, Araki has stated, \"Don't toe the line and make movies just because you want to be a rock-star director. Make movies that are original, different, personal\u2014that are your unique vision and aren't just copies of the dreck that's already out there\" (indieWIRE, par. 11). This book, therefore, proceeds with the assumption that Araki has been following his own advice over the course of his career to date.\nChapter 2\n\nQueerly Making a Splash with _The Living End_\n\nThe sounds of an aerosol can being shaken and expressed can be heard over a black screen. Seconds later, the spray-painted words \"Fuck the World,\" in bright red letters surrounded by additional graffiti, accost the viewer, accompanied by the abrasive sounds and lyrics of an industrial-tinged song that is (presumably) playing on the nearby Walkman. Still shaking the can, an attractive young man, wearing dark sunglasses and pursing an unlit cigarette in his lips, nods his head in approval and smirks, admiring his textual creation. He then gulps down some whiskey from a bottle of Jack Daniel's and begins dancing in circles euphorically, moving across the landscape overlooking the city of Los Angeles and pausing, in his torn jeans and t-shirt with a leather jacket slung over his shoulder, to throw the can powerfully in the direction of the downtown skyline.\n\nAcross town, another attractive, sunglasses-wearing young man starts an old blue car, bearing a \"Choose Death\" bumper sticker, and proceeds down a palm-tree-lined street. As he drives, the viewer hears the words of his spoken \"journal entry for April 14th,\" which highlights his activities on this day: eating snack cakes for breakfast, buying a new compact disc, and learning the results of his first AIDS test. In flashback, the viewer sees this young man (named Jon, played by Craig Gilmore) vomiting into a public toilet after receiving the news, delivered in an extremely casual manner by a seemingly uncaring doctor, that he is HIV-positive. As he continues to drive, having no idea as to what he will now do, he passes the aforementioned spray-painter (named Luke, played by Mike Dytri), who is now shirtless and also HIV-positive, hitchhiking on the side of the road but does not stop to pick him up. Luke turns to flip Jon off as he drives by.\n\nThus begins _The Living End_ , Gregg Araki's 1992 film about two young men who end up hitting the road together, at a time when their seropositivity was widely regarded as an automatic death sentence, after Luke, the street hustler with a hair-trigger temper, (likely) ends up killing a cop. Jon, the freelance film critic, leaves behind his closest female friend, Darcy (played by Darcy Marta), to worry endlessly about him and his health status in order to travel to San Francisco, and then well beyond, with the sexy drifter he just recently met and slept with. With this film, Araki not only presents a powerful piece of social commentary pertaining to the treatment of non-heterosexuals and people with AIDS at its particular historical moment, but he also dramatically further develops his authorial filmmaking style by reworking established film (sub)genres into queer scenarios and providing an endless stream of confrontational, at-times-controversial images and representations of queer characters in its various scenes.\n\nPrior to meeting Jon, for example, Luke is threatened by two serial-killing lesbians who, after picking up the hitchhiker, intend to shoot him and leave him for dead just for kicks. Hours later, following a successful escape, Luke witnesses the fatal stabbing of a bisexual john, with whom he has just engaged in sadomasochistic acts and presumably had sex, after the john's wife returns home, discovers the two guys in bed together, remarks that her husband's \"phase\" is no longer fashionable, and decides that he must die as a result of this one-too-many queer \"relapse\"; the man's dog laps up some of the spilled blood before chasing Luke out the front door. Immediately thereafter, Luke's well-being is endangered yet again by the \"three stooges,\" a trio of baseball-bat-wielding gaybashers who look forward to rearranging his face and making him swallow his own teeth; their plan is foiled, however, when Luke pulls out a gun (which he stole earlier from the serial-killing lesbians) and shoots all three of the bashers dead in their tracks. As he flees from that encounter, Luke flags down Jon's car and lands on its hood, bringing together the two HIV-infected individuals and uniting their futures.\n\nDuring their first sexual encounter back at Jon's apartment, about an hour after their destinies collide, as Jon worries about the safety of his wallet and CD collection as well as how to tell Luke about their (potential) need to engage in safe sex, Luke allays both of his fears by pointing out that Jon is a bit too paranoid and by welcoming him to the (AIDS) club. This exchange occurs just seconds after Luke drops his pants in front of Jon to take a shower but then changes his mind, finds the bare-chested Jon in the bedroom, pins him down on the bed, and runs his finger seductively down Jon's torso from his Adam's apple to his waist.\n\nOnce they begin spending time together, and immediately following their first night of sex, Luke explains to Jon the liberating aspects of their both being HIV-positive at a time when that health status appeared inevitably to lead to a rapid demise. Over their breakfast meal of miniature donuts and Barbie cereal with beer, Luke expresses that they, and others like them, are victims of the sexual revolution, of the generation before them that got to have all of the fun and has left them with the life-threatening tab. \"Anybody who got fucked before safe sex _is_ fucked,\" Luke explains. \"I think it's all a part of the neo-Nazi Republican final solution. Germ warfare, you know? Genocide.\" This exchange explains what Luke meant the preceding day when he wrote the words \"I Blame Society\" in Magic Marker on a parking-garage pillar. Accordingly, Luke reasons that he and Jon, as individuals with finite futures, have nothing to lose, so they can say, \"Fuck work, fuck the system, fuck everything\" and do whatever they so desire. As an example, Luke whips out a credit card that he \"borrowed\" from his \"uncle\" and the two set out to indulge in an afternoon of unbridled purchasing, with the goal of maxing out the card's entire credit line.\n\nIt is during this illicit shopping spree that the pair encounter a neo-Nazi punk, unintentionally offended by Jon and Luke's quick kiss on the sidewalk, who then intentionally offends them by explaining that AIDS actually stands for \"Adios, infected dick suckers\" (as discussed at the start of chapter 1). Although Jon wishes to walk away from the heated confrontation and pretend like nothing has happened, Luke has a very different reaction\u2014he chases the punk down the street and beats him over the head repeatedly with one of their new purchases, a boom box, killing him. It is at this moment that Jon more fully glimpses the true nature of the individual with whom he has become so intimately involved so quickly, and what he discovers scares him. Fleeing to Jon's apartment without any of their purchases in hand, Luke maintains that the punk deserved what he got, and that Jon also wanted to see the guy's head split open. Although that is very likely the case, Jon is visibly unable to accept such a reality and tells Luke that he needs to leave, raising his voice to a shout when Luke hesitates. Luke reluctantly departs, leading Jon to commiserate with Darcy at a late-night diner about his destructive attraction to psychopaths and the fact that he simply can't get Luke\u2014the way he smells, how it feels to touch him\u2014out of his head. Jon concludes that he is either extremely needy at the moment or else extremely horny.\n\nLuke refuses to stay away for long, and the killing of the neo-Nazi punk is by no means his last aggressive or murderous act. As Jon sleeps in bed that night, with the sounds of a nearby search helicopter filling his room, a dark shadow moves across his face and he stirs, awakening to find Luke sitting on the mattress beside him, blood on his cheek and a loaded pistol in his mouth. Jon slowly pulls the pistol downward and comforts Luke with an embrace. Luke proceeds to explain, without providing any details at all about the circumstances of this unfortunate occurrence, that he believes he just killed a cop, and he begs Jon to help him get away. Clearly conflicted as to what he should do, Jon asks Luke why he should be the one to help him; Luke responds that Jon is the only person he knows. The helicopter sounds grow closer and intensify; the duo make off into the night.\n\nInitially, Jon and Luke are headed to San Francisco, where Luke claims he has a friend they can stay with for a while, contradicting what he has just said to Jon. Upon their arrival at the man's home, however, it turns out that he is someone Luke claims to have spent the night with a few years earlier following a gay-pride parade who does not recall that encounter; he slams the door in Luke's face. This leads the duo to simply drive toward an unknown destination, taking them on an unintended cross-country odyssey. Along the way, Luke's violent tendencies reveal themselves several more times. When Jon returns from washing up at a rest area, he finds, to his dismay, Luke lying on the top of their car, wielding his \"security blanket\"\u2014his pistol\u2014in broad daylight, despite Jon's requests that he be more discreet with it. (During this incident, Luke suggests that they drive to Washington, D.C. and \"blow Bush's brains out\u2014or, better yet, we can hold him at gunpoint [and] inject him with a syringeful of our blood\" in order to motivate the discovery of an immediate cure for AIDS.) Later, when a man accosts them in a supermarket parking lot at night, Luke instantly aims the gun at the nocturnal wanderer to make him go away. After Jon gets a parking ticket that pisses him off, Luke pulls out the gun with the intention of shooting the offending parking cop as they drive by. After Luke becomes angered by an out-of-order ATM, he returns to the car, grabs the pistol, and shoots the machine five times, causing its alarm to sound. When Jon reaches his violence-tolerance breaking point shortly thereafter, upon discovering that Luke has slit one of his own wrists in order to examine his HIV-infected blood, and declares that their vacation in the sun is now over, Luke points the gun menacingly in Jon's face, fires it just to the left of Jon's head, and, following a brief struggle between the two, uses the gun to hit Jon in the head and knock him unconscious.\n\nAs these various plot developments reveal, _The Living End_ is, in both its style and storyline, a somewhat angry, in-your-face, confrontational film. Araki, who wrote the original draft of the screenplay in 1988, says that it came \"from a very dark, personal place\" (\"Production\" 7). With regard to this point, he elaborates:\n\nThose feelings of dread and insecurity which characterized the mid-late '80s AIDS crisis pervaded the consciousness of my whole generation. Even though I am HIV-negative, the specter of the virus loomed overhead like a radioactive cloud. Suddenly, sex, love, trust, desire\u2014which are troublesome enough in themselves for gays _and_ straights\u2014were even more emotionally treacherous. What _would_ I do if I tested positive? How would I feel? What would my reaction be? Being something of a hopeless romantic, I found the concept of \"till death do us part\" more and more thematically and metaphorically pertinent. (Araki, \"Production\" 7)\n\nPerhaps this serves to explain why, in addition to being so angry and confrontational, the film is simultaneously so incredibly hot and sexy, such as when Luke gives Jon a blowjob beneath the steering wheel while the pair drive past police on the side of the road, Jon and Luke engage in bareback sex in the shower, Luke successfully persuades Jon to choke him as he begins to come, or the camera simply lingers a bit too long on one or both of their fully exposed, sinewy torsos. Araki has said that he has always viewed _The Living End_ as \"a love story calling for tolerance and compassion\" (\"Production\" 7), and that aspect of the film certainly shines through, in addition to its social commentary pertaining to HIV\/AIDS and the treatment of non-heterosexual individuals and people with AIDS. The work was intended to operate on different levels, in part as an expression of the despair, uncertainty, and \"seize-the-day urgency\" of life in the age of AIDS, and in part as a universal story about the disruptive and all-consuming nature of love and the consequences that sometimes accompany it (Araki, \"Filmmaker's\" 4).\n\nAt the start of _The Living End_ , prior to any opening credits or the film's title, on-screen text identifies this work as \"an irresponsible movie by Gregg Araki.\" After viewing the film in its entirety, the typical viewer likely concludes that this label pertains to numerous socially irresponsible aspects of the film's content, such as the bareback sex that Jon and Luke engage in during the age of AIDS, Jon consenting to choke Luke while they are having sex, the blowjob Jon receives while driving, Luke's driving without a license and swigging Jack Daniel's as he does so, the duo's L.A. shopping spree using a stolen credit card, repeated instances of public urination, Luke's decision to kill himself as soon as he experiences his first visible HIV\/AIDS symptom, Luke's continual use of violence as a means of expressing his frustration, and\/or Jon's apparent decision to remain with a psychopathic boyfriend at the film's end. The U.S. government's indifferent response to the AIDS crisis represents yet another type of irresponsibility addressed in the film, and it is reinforced at the end of the closing credits with Araki's dedication of the film to Craig Lee, a seminal figure in the L.A. punk scene with a small role in the film who passed away prior to its release and was the first person Araki knew personally who died of AIDS, as well as to \"the hundreds of thousands who've died and the hundreds of thousands more who will die because of a big white house full of Republican fuckheads.\" There is a bit more than this to the \"irresponsible movie\" label at the film's beginning, however.\n\nAccording to Araki, the phrase \"irresponsible movie\" comes from a scholarly essay he read while in film school, by film theorist Robin Wood, about the classic 1938 screwball comedy _Bringing Up Baby_ (directed by Howard Hawks), which stars Katharine Hepburn as a fun-loving, baby-leopard-owning socialite who teaches the more uptight object of her affections, a repressed paleontologist played by Cary Grant, to lighten up and begin to enjoy life more fully. In other words, as Araki explains in _The Living End_ 's DVD commentary, the reckless and wild free spirit in _Bringing Up Baby_ ends up destroying the paleontologist's everyday life as he has come to know it in order to set him free, thereby liberating him from his shortsightedness and repression.\n\nScrewball comedy is a cinematic subgenre that Araki, as a film student in the 1980s, was exposed to regularly, and it is one that he intentionally strived to incorporate, in queer ways, within _The Living End_. Screwball comedy was especially popular during the mid 1930s and early 1940s as a means of getting around some of the repressive restrictions of the Motion Picture Production Code, which prohibited various topics and phenomena, such as homosexuality, adultery, and overt sexual activity, from explicitly being portrayed on-screen. As a result, the writers and directors of these comedies regularly utilized rapid-fire dialogue and innuendo to stand in for the sexual tension evident between their protagonists that was unable to come to fruition blatantly on-screen, in ways that would evade the attention of film censors, with audience members learning to read between the lines to determine the various sexual developments that likely occurred between such characters. The resulting sexual tension was then frequently sublimated into a battle of the sexes, accomplished primarily through carefully chosen words, glances, and gestures, that presented distinct opportunities for more liberated gender and class roles, with female characters typically dominating their surrounding males and the apparent antagonism existing between them ultimately resulting in romance. As such, the creation of desire among characters that may seem initially to be mismatched, and the resulting construction of romance between them despite the numerous obstacles they must overcome, are two of the primary attributes of screwball comedies (Shumway 390). In addition, the contents of screwball comedies regularly embody noteworthy political and social concerns of their historical eras (Belton 155).\n\nAraki's decision to incorporate noteworthy aspects of screwball comedy in _The Living End_ , therefore, makes sense, as his queering of this subgenre allows him to transform its traditional focus on liberation and gender into a new focus on liberation and sexual orientation in an offering that explores the obstacle-filled construction of romance between seemingly mismatched protagonists amid the backdrop of the AIDS pandemic, certainly one of the most noteworthy political and social concerns of the era in which the film was made and released. \"The structure of [ _Bringing Up Baby_ ] is kind of the same as _The Living End_ in that it was about this spirited, free-willed character who frees this repressed, more normal-life character\" (D. Smith, par. 5), the director has stated. It is perhaps entirely unsurprising, therefore, that Jon becomes \"corrupted\" by Luke, or at the very least begins acting more and more like him as his defenses weaken, over the course of Araki's film, such as when Jon refuses to \"fondle [Luke's] crotch\" one day while he is driving, on the grounds that he is a \"responsible driver,\" but then readily accepts a blowjob from Luke while he is driving shortly thereafter, or when Jon finally resorts to violence himself\u2014first by pounding Luke repeatedly in the chest during a heated argument, and later by striking Luke across the face quite forcefully after he finds that Luke has slit his own wrist\u2014as a means of expressing his own frustration. This resulting state of affairs also serves to explain why Jon (apparently) decides to stay with Luke at the end of the film, despite all of his competing reservations and the violence that has been directed against him, because his everyday life as he had come to know it (pre-HIV-infection and pre-Luke) now ceases to exist and he, like Luke, has been set free, liberated (by HIV\/AIDS) from his previous shortsightedness and repressed way of being.\n\nPolitically Progressive Attributes and Representational Strengths\n\nAs a leading example of the New Queer Cinema, _The Living End_ is impressive for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that is was made, guerilla-style without location permits and by a skeletal crew, on a budget of approximately twenty thousand dollars, with Araki serving as the film's writer, director, camera operator, and editor. It is perhaps even more impressive, however, for its daring, unconventional representations of gay male sexuality and people with HIV\/AIDS.\n\nGiven the media-influenced socially constructed environment within which AIDS seized the anxious American imagination in the early to mid 1980s, it is not entirely surprising that the stigma of AIDS had become inextricably linked to the stigma of homosexuality by the time that the New Queer Cinema emerged, or that New Queer Cinema offerings addressing the AIDS pandemic directly typically featured gay men as their protagonists (Clark 9). Although the repeated reliance on representing gay men as the primary individuals with HIV\/AIDS in such films served, deleteriously, to perpetuate widely shared, inaccurate cultural notions of AIDS as a \"gay disease\" or \"gay plague,\" it nevertheless simultaneously provided opportunities for a larger number of gay male characters to appear on U.S. cinema screens than in the past, thereby offering \"significant possibilities for altering and expanding the commonly accepted ways by which non-gays perceive and discuss the status of gay men and their lived realities\" (Hart, _AIDS_ 49) in contemporary U.S. society and contributing potentially quite meaningfully to \"the 'coming out' of the gay community [by] . . . tear[ing] away the curtain of invisibility that had hitherto enveloped it\" (Padgug and Oppenheimer 251).\n\nIn contrast to the majority of AIDS-themed movies that were targeted to mainstream audiences during the 1980s and 1990s, which typically offer only a kid-gloves representation of gay male sexuality (if any overt representation of it at all), Araki's _The Living End_ , like other independent theatrical releases created under the guidance of queer directors and\/or targeted substantially to queer audiences, provides a much more realistic, well-rounded portrayal of the lived social and sexual realities of gay men in contemporary U.S. society. Whereas NBC's broadcast standards department was so concerned about including anything that could be regarded as condoning homosexuality in its made-for-television AIDS movie _An Early Frost_ (John Erman, 1985) that the offering does nothing at all from a representational standpoint to suggest that gay lovers Michael (played by Aidan Quinn) and Peter (played by D.W. Moffett) are actually anything more than roommates or best friends (Farber 23; Watney 112-13), and Hollywood's first all-star movie about AIDS, _Philadelphia_ (1993, Jonathan Demme), does little (beyond having the central gay couple slow dance together at a costume party alongside a married straight couple) to suggest that Andrew Beckett (played by Tom Hanks) and Miguel Alvarez (played by Antonio Banderas) are actually sexually involved life partners rather than simply close friends, such squeamish treatment of gay male sexuality is lacking entirely in _The Living End_.\n\nIn its place, the viewer is presented with a series of sexually charged, potentially shocking images of Luke pleasuring a john by beating him on his bare ass with a tennis racquet, Luke seducing Jon with some assistance from his bottle of Jack Daniel's, Jon and Luke kissing very passionately, the two having sex along the roadside in the back seat of Jon's car, Luke rubbing his naked body repeatedly against Jon's in bed at the Paradise Motel, and Jon barebacking Luke in the shower and agreeing to choke his companion when Luke starts to come, in addition to the aforementioned blowjob beneath the steering wheel as Jon drives past the police. Through all of these encounters, the camera lingers on and fetishizes the bodies of these men, emphasizing their smoldering sexuality\u2014an incredibly appealing yet atypical way of representing gay male characters who are HIV-positive on-screen, and one that has been referred to as a \"gay porn pastiche\" by at least one critic, who points out that Araki foregrounds the iconography of contemporary gay male porn in this film (Grundmann 26-27). The viewer is also presented with a series of touching, romantic moments between the two gay protagonists, such as when Luke draws a huge heart on the window of the phone booth in which Jon is talking to Darcy and writes \"Jon + Luke, till death do us part\" in the middle of it, or when Luke tells Jon that he is wild about him, or when Luke playfully moons Jon repeatedly outdoors in order to get Jon off the phone.\n\nAnother representational strength of _The Living End_ is that it rejects the notion that gay men in the age of AIDS must either conform to engaging in only the most sterile forms of safe sex or else relinquish all sexual desire. Early in the film, shortly after he has learned that he is HIV-positive and is lying bare-chested on his bed, listening to his audio journal, Jon receives a telephone call out of the blue, from a man who wants to know if he is ready to get off. Not recognizing the man's voice, Jon is at first shocked, but he soon becomes a bit amused, believing the call to be a joke, when the man tells him that he got Jon's number from a telephone bulletin board and asks what he looks like. \"Are you hard? What are you wearing? How big is your cock?\" the man inquires as Jon responds that he has to go, and that such information is none of the man's business. He hangs up the phone, bemused. Undeterred, the man calls again the next day, after Jon has just spent the night with Luke and then banned him from his apartment as a result of his killing the neo-Nazi punk. When he asks if Jon is ready to get off, Jon angrily dismisses his invitation, slamming down the phone's receiver. At a time when HIV\/AIDS was spreading rapidly, phone sex represented one of the safest (albeit simultaneously one of the most sterile) forms of safe sex. By having Jon choose to reject this sexual option, the film representationally suggests that gay male sexual desire in the age of AIDS, even among HIV-positive individuals, does not need to be reduced to such clinical forms of expression, nor does it have to be repressed entirely. Luke reinforces this same point explicitly in dialogue, during a heated moment, when he asks Jon, \"You really want to go back to your 'I'm HIV-positive and everything's normal, hunky-dory' life? Well, go fuckin' right ahead. Just don't forget to have sex in a plastic bag. . . . I say fuck that shit, man.\"\n\nYet another representational strength of _The Living End_ is that it plays with established (sub)genre conventions in order to defy death in relation to HIV\/AIDS. As an example of the road movie subgenre, which has been utilized in all sorts of films to date ranging from screwball comedies to horror films and films noir, Araki's film features protagonists who experience both the freedom and challenges of life in unfamiliar terrain and the newfound knowledge, personal awakening, and\/or tragedy that typically results (Johnson, par. 1, 3). Like the characters Wyatt\/Captain America (played by Peter Fonda) and Billy (played by Dennis Hopper) in _Easy Rider_ (Dennis Hopper, 1969), an influential film that removed women from the road trip altogether, Jon and Luke discover the various rifts that exist between the dominant culture and its various subcultures, as well as national discourses pertaining to tradition and transition, in their particular historical era as they travel America's back roads (Cohan and Hark 9; Klinger 179, 199). More specifically, however, Araki explains in his DVD commentary that he made _The Living End_ in the tradition of couple-on-the-run movies such as _Bonnie and Clyde_ (Arthur Penn, 1967), _Gun Crazy_ (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949), and _They Live by Night_ (Nicholas Ray, 1949), works that feature outlaw couples on the lam in out-of-control, hostile universes that appear intent on destroying them. The characters in these films endeavor to overcome restrictive constraints of time and place as well as powerful feelings of rage and disempowerment (Leong, Sell, and Thomas 73, 78). They also experience contradictions pertaining to domesticity, mobility, and desire while simultaneously challenging traditional conceptions of taste and proper behavior (Leong, Sell, and Thomas 85). Araki's film has also frequently been referred to by critics as a \"gay\" _Thelma and Louise_ (Ridley Scott, 1991), the film released a year prior to _The Living End_ which stars Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon as best friends who hit the road, without any specific destination, to escape from the monotony of their daily lives and unexpectedly become outlaws (Hays, _View_ 39; Kaufman 19). Given longstanding genre expectations, the presumed ending of these sorts of films is that one or more of the characters on the lam will be killed in the film's climax, with the road ultimately serving as a big dead end. Death of one or more protagonists is also the expected ending of many movies pertaining to HIV\/AIDS, especially those that were made and released during the pandemic's first decade.\n\nAs a result, given the film's storyline and the HIV-positive status of its protagonists, the presumed ending of a film like _The Living End_ would be that either Jon or Luke\u2014or both of them\u2014will perish on-screen before the closing credits begin to roll. Such an expectation is further promoted in the film itself by its repeated incorporation of attributes pertaining to death. For example, the bumper sticker on Jon's car when the viewer first meets him reads \"Choose Death.\" The compact disc that Jon purchases prior to learning of his HIV status is by the band Dead Can Dance. The article that Jon is working on at the time he meets Luke pertains to the death of cinema. Darcy, when checking on Jon's apartment, finds his goldfish outside of its bowl, dead on the floor. While they are having sex, Luke asks Jon if he would prefer to die for sex or for love. While lounging poolside with Luke, Jon discovers that the batteries in his voice recorder are dead. Luke mentions that his mother died when he was only three years old after she was hit by a garbage truck, and that he once saw a bag lady jump off the top of a skyscraper to her death, shattering every bone in her body. He also mentions that he plans to \"off himself\" the moment he notices his first symptom of HIV\/AIDS, and that he would prefer to die while having an orgasm. In addition, toward the end of the film, Jon says that he regards Luke as a vampire who is sucking the life force out of him. From a representational standpoint, therefore, it is particularly noteworthy that the viewer's generic expectation pertaining to death remains unfulfilled. Instead, the otherwise ambiguous ending of the film, with these \"outlaws\" alone together on the beach at sunset, makes it clear that the lives of these two characters will continue to go on. Theirs is, paradoxically, a \"living\" end, one that offers hope to people with HIV\/AIDS everywhere that, at least in fantasy (if not yet in reality at the time of the film's release), this medical condition can be outrun and outlived and that life for all can go on.\n\nIn summing up the various representational strengths of this noteworthy and intriguing film, Roy Grundmann has written:\n\n_The Living End_ speaks to a generation tired of rehearsing safe-sex practices like a flight attendant demonstrating safety procedures before takeoff. As a fantasy, the film is about emotions and desire; as a political project, it demonstrates that this desire does not exist in a totally separate, devious subculture but has historically been fed by and always expressed in relation to mainstream culture. . . . [N]o matter which [protagonist] the spectator identifies with or desires, he\/she always ends up in an HIV-positive position. . . . Luke infects Jon like a virus, and we are infected along with him. As infection blurs with infatuation, disease becomes a metaphor for accumulating rage and impetus for social change. (26-27)\n\nStereotypes, (Potential) Misogyny, and Representational Shortcomings\n\nDespite the noteworthy representational strengths of _The Living End_ , the film simultaneously contains some equally noteworthy representational shortcomings that detract from its overall appeal. Throughout cinema history, there has been a recurring over-reliance on representing non-heterosexual characters as psychopaths, murderers, and mentally unstable misfits (Bryant 60-61; Benshoff and Griffin 8-10; Russo 181-245). Although this has particularly been true in works geared primarily to mainstream audiences, offerings of the New Queer Cinema have similarly been accused of \"recirculating negative stereotypes such as the queer psycho-killer\" (Benshoff and Griffin 12). This is certainly the case with _The Living End_. For example, even though the character of Luke is intended to embody the anger and frustration associated with the AIDS crisis and to \"show how social forces and\/or sexual repression can and do cause violence\" (Benshoff and Griffin 12), the fact that he is yet another queer psychopath, rather than a more restrained sort of individual demonstrating less extreme reactions to the circumstances within which he finds himself, is nevertheless problematic from a representational standpoint. The same is true of the serial-killing lesbians in the red convertible bearing an \"I love Jesus\" bumper sticker, Daisy (played by Mary Woronov) and Fern (played by Johanna Went), who pick up the hitchhiking Luke at the start of the film. In that scene, the two women revel in belittling Luke by referring to him sarcastically as \"a nomadic drifter,\" \"a lonesome cowboy hitching across the country like Jack Kerouac,\" and an individual with only a \"petite little taste of Vienna sausage\" (to ensure that the viewer grasps that they are referring to a small penis, the women mention all of the following synonyms for that male appendage during this encounter: baloney pony, dingus, hotdog, love gun, pecker, peter, poker, prick, pussy plunger, smiling meat puppet, and wang). Aiming a gun at his face\u2014which they vow to blow to smithereens\u2014they also take pleasure in tormenting Luke with the possible ways they might kill him simply to get their kicks. Daisy informs Luke that the last guy Fern killed was shot in the \"cock\" but that she herself couldn't stand all of his bleeding, squealing, and whimpering during the twelve hours it took him to die. Prior to that, Fern shoved a huge ice pick up another guy's asshole in order to kill him, but that incident was a bit more tolerable because the man was bound and gagged, so he did not make quite as much noise. Fortunately for Luke, he is able to make a safe escape, stealing the convertible, when Fern steps out of the vehicle to urinate outdoors prior to murdering him and she screams (for some unknown reason), which motivates Daisy to run after her.\n\nThat representation of the serial-murdering Daisy and Fern is linked further to another representational shortcoming of _The Living End:_ its negative representation of women in general. Like those two lesbian characters, the wife who walks in on her bisexual husband in bed resorts immediately to murderous tendencies. Apparently having promised the woman that he would swear off men for good, the husband admits to having had a \"relapse\" and apologizes for his indiscretion. Nevertheless, feeling that she can no longer forgive his behavior and appearing quite emotionally fragile, the wife readily removes a huge kitchen knife from the purse she is carrying and stabs her husband with it, killing him.\n\nJust when it seems that the representation of women in the film cannot get much less flattering, things take yet another turn for the worse. For despite those extreme plot developments involving its female characters, the most negative representation of women in _The Living End_ actually occurs with regard to the character of Darcy, Jon's obsessively devoted fag-hag friend.\n\nWhen Jon first visits Darcy, an artist and painter, to inform her of the distressing medical news he has received, she appears to be in shock, embracing him tightly and verbally expressing her disbelief. As their exchange continues, Darcy refuses to release Jon entirely from her hold, and she strokes his chest repeatedly to comfort him, fulfilling a physically and psychologically nurturing role. She reassures him that she will always be there for him, whenever he needs her. Never has a more true statement been uttered on film. Despite the fact that she has a live-in boyfriend, Peter (played by Scot Goetz), who feels increasingly ignored and neglected, Darcy begins to spend her every waking moment obsessing about Jon and his health status, especially once he is on the road with Luke and can only contact her occasionally, consistently reversing the charges, by telephone.\n\nAfter Jon kicks Luke out of his apartment in the wake of the (likely) neo-Nazi punk killing, Darcy rushes to meet and comfort him at a late-night restaurant. Afterward, as they prepare to go their separate ways, Darcy invites Jon to sleep over at her place (even though her boyfriend is there) so that they can talk all night and go out for breakfast together in the morning, and she asks if he blames her for worrying about him. Jon's reply suggests that even _he_ feels her caring is becoming a bit overbearing: \"Darce, really, it's getting to be like 'rally around the fag.' \" Nonetheless, his words do not deter her. She merely tousles his hair affectionately and reluctantly returns home alone, where she discovers Peter waiting up for her and announces that she likely won't be able to sleep again that night. Sexily clad in a nightshirt with black underwear beneath it, Peter follows Darcy to the kitchen and asks if she wants to have sex. She responds that she is far too worried about Jon because he has never seemed so lost before, which causes Peter to sigh. Peter then attempts a second time, in vain, to persuade Darcy to go to bed with him.\n\nDarcy's simultaneous obsession with Jon and neglect of Peter only intensifies from there. When Jon calls her for the first time from the road, it is clear that Darcy's endless concern for him has resulted in artist's block\u2014as her telephone begins to ring, she is shown staring blankly at the canvas in front of her, upon which she is trying unsuccessfully to paint. Hearing Jon's voice on the line, however, perks her back up instantly. Although Jon announces that he can't talk for long, he takes a few moments to inform Darcy that he and Luke are in a \"shitload of trouble,\" that he has certainly \"bitten off more than [he] can gag on, that's for sure,\" and that he needs her to attend to several errands for him: call his editor and get him a deadline extension on his death-of-cinema article, pay his rent (which was due last week), bring in his mail, and feed his goldfish. He hangs up abruptly to be with Luke, who is attempting to pry Jon's hands from the receiver. Naturally, given her extreme level of devotion to Jon, Darcy drops everything and rushes directly over to his apartment, where she carries in his mail, listens to his answering-machine messages, waters his plants, and even discards a plateful of old food that he was snacking on before he departed. By the time Jon calls again the next day, Darcy has already been reduced to a torpid individual who appears capable only of smoking while sitting next to her telephone. She tells him that she has been worried sick about him, to the extent that she has been unable to eat or sleep, her face has broken out, and she is driving Peter crazy. Jon implores Darcy to stop worrying about him. \"The whole world's spiraling out of control,\" she melodramatically concludes, as Jon promises to call again in a few days.\n\nNot hearing from Jon more frequently takes a very heavy toll on Darcy. She once again rejects Peter sexually\u2014this time pushing him off of her body in bed\u2014because she has too many things on her mind. \"Unless you want me to lie here with my legs spread, taking it, can we just give it up already?\" Darcy quips. Reminding her that it's been far too long since they've had sex, Peter insightfully tells Darcy that she needs to relax and stop letting a virus in somebody else's bloodstream ruin _her_ life. \"Jon is hardly what I would call 'somebody else,' \" she snaps back. Darcy then apologizes to Peter for being such a \"bitch\" lately because Jon's circumstances have her so \"fucked up,\" but her words fall on deaf ears. Peter informs Darcy that he has started seeing someone else; Darcy gives him two minutes to pack up his things and get out.\n\nWith Peter out of her life, apparently for good, Darcy devotes her every waking moment to obsessing further about her HIV-positive gay friend. With the telephone right beside her, she spends her day sitting on the stairs in her apartment, smoking cigarettes, drinking Diet Coke, and playing with a mechanical toy fish that, when she claps her hands loudly, flops around and falls down to the step below. Finding herself in need of more cigarettes, she reluctantly steps away from the phone to rush out and buy some. Upon her return, she finds that her telephone is ringing. Although she stumbles up the indoor staircase frantically, she does not answer it in time, and she concludes that she has just missed the latest call from Jon (which, the viewer learns, is indeed the case). At this moment, Darcy has reached her breaking point. She slams down the receiver and clutches the telephone to her bosom, gasping and sighing, on the verge of tears. She then carries the telephone with her downstairs, places it on the floor, and squats down beside it, visibly distraught; the camera shoots downward at her from an extremely high angle in order to emphasize her extreme sense of isolation and emotional desperation. Twenty seconds later, she picks up a huge box filled with Styrofoam packing peanuts, crashes it down repeatedly upon a nearby designer's mannequin, and collapses to the floor, crying, burying her face in her hands. Although the rest of the world appears to be functioning quite regularly, it is certainly the case that, because of her unhealthy devotion to Jon, Darcy's whole world has indeed spiraled completely out of control. Her life only appears to regain a glint of purpose when the telephone starts to ring again seconds later and Jon informs her that he has decided to come home.\n\nClearly, from beginning to end in this film, Darcy is portrayed as an overly devoted fag hag who takes the nurturing maternal role that is expected by the heterosexist patriarchy to new extremes, with her telephone cord serving as Darcy's symbolic umbilical cord to Jon. As a result, she readily sacrifices happiness and success in her own professional and personal lives, as well as her own emotional needs, in order to devote all of her attention to caring for and about the (albeit gay) man whom she loves most deeply, further strengthening her devotion whenever Jon pushes her away, discouraging her clingy and smothering ways. This sort of retrograde representation, coupled with the negative representations of the other female characters in the film, in an otherwise groundbreaking work is both disconcerting and disappointing. Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that Araki's representations of women in _The Living End_ are, in fact, misogynistic, but the director himself has refuted the veracity of such claims, explaining (on the DVD commentary track) that the work is neither anti-lesbian nor anti-female but rather intended to show how a positive HIV diagnosis affects, and has repercussions for, everyone who cares about the infected individual.\n\nDespite their aforementioned noteworthy attributes, Araki's representations of the gay male protagonists in _The Living End_ are simultaneously somewhat problematic, as well. From the boyfriend in _An Early Frost_ who conceals the fact that he regularly trolls local gay bars and bathhouses to have unprotected sex with promiscuous men because his partner has become too busy with work to immediately gratify his sexual needs to the gay male members of the self-proclaimed gang of \"raging, atheist, meat-eating, HIV-positive terrorists\" in _Chocolate Babies_ (Stephen Winter, 1996) who enjoy barebacking on a regular basis as well as cutting their hands and smearing inflected blood on politicians whom they feel are not doing enough to assist people with AIDS, one of the most common representations of gay men in fictional movies addressing the AIDS pandemic to date has involved portraying them as sexually promiscuous individuals who irresponsibly endanger the health and well-being of their surrounding others, either by placing them at increased risk of contracting HIV\/AIDS or by endangering them in sexually violent or aggressive ways (Hart, _AIDS_ 52). Whenever this occurs, it harmfully reinforces the stereotype, so widely shared in U.S. society from the advent of the AIDS pandemic, that gay men are somehow \"guilty villains\" in the AIDS crisis, in dramatic contrast to the pandemic's so-called \"innocent victims\" (such as blood-transfusion recipients and infants born to infected mothers) or its \"relatively innocent victims\" (generally monogamous, relatively non-promiscuous heterosexuals who nevertheless contract HIV\/AIDS as a result of \"non-deviant\" forms of heterosexual sexual activity) (Hart, _AIDS_ 40). In a subtle way, Araki perpetuates this sort of deleterious stereotype in _The Living End_ by showing the HIV-positive Luke engaging in kinky, (apparently) unprotected sex with the bisexual john who picks him up on the side of an L.A. roadway and then seducing Jon just a few hours later, after the hustler-drifter abandons his plan to take a shower in between those sexual encounters (Hart, _AIDS_ 52). Far more blatantly, however, the director perpetuates the stereotype of queer villainy by having Luke rape Jon during the film's powerful yet extremely disturbing concluding sequence, in addition to all of the other increasingly violent acts he has carried out over the course of the film's narrative.\n\nDuring this concluding encounter, after Luke has knocked Jon unconscious with his pistol to prevent him from leaving, Luke licks some of Jon's infected blood from the side of his head and then drags Jon's shirtless body toward the car. When Jon comes to, coughing, he finds that he and Luke are on a deserted beach; Luke has already bound his wrists behind him and is beginning to undress him. When Jon asks what he is doing, Luke climbs atop Jon, pushing his back to the ground, and, with his lips just inches away from Jon's, responds intensely, \"Can't you see? I love you more than life.\" Jon declares that Luke is crazy; Luke pulls down Jon's jeans and underwear, takes out his own penis, spits in his hand to provide a bit of lubrication, pulls the pistol from his pocket and cocks it in his own mouth, and then initiates his sexual assault. Jon's clenched eyes and lips register the pain he is experiencing as Luke repeatedly thrusts into him, increasing the tempo as the rape progresses. As Luke approaches his climax, Jon defiantly and repeatedly commands him to pull the trigger so that Luke can have the \"ultimate orgasm\" he has been desiring for so long and Jon can be done with him, once and for all. When Luke actually pulls the trigger, however, the pistol does not fire, because it is out of bullets. This unexpected development motivates the disappointed Luke to remove the gun from his mouth, sit up, throw the gun away forcefully in the direction of the ocean, and untie Jon's hands. Jon immediately pulls his pants and underwear back up, sits up, links eyes with Luke for several seconds\u2014and punches Luke hard in the face. He then rises, buttons his jeans, and walks off, leaving Luke alone on the beach with the sound of its loudly crashing waves. This, I believe, is where many first-time viewers of the film believe the story is ending. Twenty seconds later, however, Jon slowly returns, hesitates, and plops down in the sand beside Luke, looking emotionally and physically drained. He takes Luke's arm in his hands and rests his head on Luke's leather-jacketed shoulder. They sit there, together alone, in silence at sunset.\n\nAbout this concluding sequence, Araki himself has stated, \"When Jon announces that he's had enough of living out a romantic fantasy and is returning home, he finds himself held at gunpoint, at the mercy of the unstable, unpredictable Luke. During an intense, sexual and emotional showdown on a deserted beach, their twisted relationship comes to an unnerving climax and an inevitable resolution\" (Araki, \"Synopsis\" 5). After viewing it, an insightful viewer will likely conclude that the reason Jon returns to be with Luke at the film's end, despite having just been sexually violated by him, is that the world as he has known it now ceases to exist, so he does not know what else to do. From a representational standpoint, however, a more superficial reading of this closing sequence might suggest that Jon, as an HIV-positive gay male in the age of AIDS, must simply settle for whatever sort of close friendly or romantic companionship that he can get, even if it comes from a psychopath who has just raped him. In a world that tends to embrace victim-blaming strategies with regard to non-heterosexual individuals and \"diabolical\" diseases and pandemics, this latter sort of reading of the sequence is certainly socially and stereotypically troublesome. In dramatic contrast, even Jon's heterosexual, HIV-negative fag hag, Darcy, who presumably has many more companionship options according to this line of reasoning, had the good sense to tell her boyfriend to get lost\u2014and simply because he had cheated on her.\n\nConcluding Observations\n\nAraki, as a self-described \"film school brat,\" is proud of his extensive knowledge of cinematic (sub)genres and auteurs, and he regularly combines various aspects of them in his own creations, typically defying genre expectations by utilizing such elements in unique ways to communicate unexpected ideological messages and putting a queer spin on them in the process (D'Arcy, par. 49). For example, in _The Living End_ , Araki's incorporation and subsequent intentional rejection of the trope of sterile safe sex from numerous AIDS movies ends up producing a unique representation of gay male sexual expression in the age of AIDS, even among HIV-positive individuals. In addition, Araki's incorporation of noteworthy aspects of couple-on-the-run road movies and subsequent rejection of the presumed ending of those sorts of films ends up offering hope to individuals with HIV\/AIDS that their medical condition may ultimately be outrun, rather than resulting in near-certain death. As such, the director's commitment to genre in _The Living End_ works effectively to produce several of his radical film's most noteworthy representational strengths.\n\nAt the same time, however, Araki's penchant for referencing well-known films and (sub)genres simultaneously serves as a stumbling block that produces several of his film's representational shortcomings. His problematic representations of the murderous Luke and the serial-killing lesbians he encounters early in _The Living End_ , for example, are clearly inspired by the representations found commonly in the grindhouse films of the late 1960s and 1970s. These types of exploitation films, named after the kinds of theaters in which they typically were shown (former burlesque theaters that historically featured \"bump and grind\" dancing), regularly explored cultural taboos by featuring suggestive or explicit sexual acts, bizarre acts of visceral violence, blood and gore, and over-the-top instances of mayhem and rebellion in works that eschewed traditional conceptions of artistic merit and quality. Although such films were readily dismissed by most critics during their heyday, they have since been acknowledged as containing solid doses of social and political commentary, even if many of their viewers failed to notice. Daisy and Fern in Araki's film are clearly a contemporary version of the murderous sports-car-driving go-go dancers who serve as the central characters of the grindhouse classic _Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!_ (Russ Meyer, 1965), individuals who thrive on the thrills provided by sex, violence, speed, and power, and Luke is a contemporary male version of them (Stringer 176).\n\nBy incorporating these types of characters in order to produce a more titillating viewing experience, however, Araki inadvertently and problematically perpetuates the longstanding cinematic stereotype of queer psychopaths, a reality that is all the more troubling in a historical era during which anti-queer sentiment was on the rise as a result of the AIDS pandemic. Similarly, by incorporating and queering noteworthy aspects of screwball comedy in order to transform the subgenre's traditional focus on liberation and gender into a new focus on liberation and sexual orientation in _The Living End_ , Araki ends up producing a representation, if analyzed superficially, of a young, gay, HIV-positive man who is forced to settle for whatever sort of romantic and sexual companionship he can find\u2014even if it is provided by another HIV-positive man who has sexually violated him\u2014as these seemingly mismatched protagonists and the apparent antagonism that exists between them ultimately results in romance, despite the numerous obstacles (including rape) that they encounter along the way. As such, Araki's vision of what it meant to be a filmmaker in the early 1990s, at a time when he was endeavoring to make provocative films pertaining to non-heterosexuality and HIV\/AIDS by regularly referencing well-known works created by the various auteurs who came before him and engaging in generic hybridization with a queer twist, was both a blessing and a curse when it came to creating the New Queer Cinema offering that launched him to international prominence.\n\nWith this groundbreaking film, Araki has created, despite its representational shortcomings, an important offering of the New Queer Cinema that powerfully communicates the anger and frustration experienced by gay men and others during the first decade of the AIDS crisis (and beyond). \"It was raw and provocative and challenging, and it really pushed people's buttons,\" the director has stated, in response to an interviewer's characterization of the film as being \"angry, it was punk rock, it was 'Fuck you, I'm gay. Fuck your world' \" (D. Smith, par. 8-9). \"People were getting so passionate and crazy, which to me as a filmmaker was exciting, that something I had done created such a strong response\" (D. Smith, par. 9), Araki continued. \"[W]hen we started making this movie, it was just this little tiny art project, [one that ultimately] . . . created this sort of global stir that we never really anticipated. So it was kind of an amazing experience\" (D. Smith, par. 9).\n\nWhat is evident from this film is that a truly unique, innovative, and boundary-pushing director was emerging on the international scene in relation to the New Queer Cinema phenomenon. Perhaps even more importantly, Araki's trademark in-your-face style as an auteur director was also beginning to crystallize, one possessing a confrontational aesthetic that regularly reworks established film (sub)genres\u2014such as the couple-on-the-run movie, the road movie, and even the juvenile delinquency movie\u2014in queer ways, most notably by festishizing the bodies and erotically charged interactions of non-heterosexual characters; exploring shocking, frequently taboo subject matter and romantic and sexual scenarios on-screen; serving up plenty of extreme(ly) sexual and\/or violent images; trapping alienated, conflicted, and\/or isolated characters tightly within the confines of the frame; favoring somewhat lengthy scenes that play out in real time; giving voice to marginalized members of the LGBTQ community and its various subgroups; demonstrating an intentional lack of traditional commercial appeal; and refusing to take each film and its subject matter entirely seriously. With regard to this style, which he has described as containing an \"outsider sensibility\" (D. Smith, par. 17), Araki has proudly stated that his \"movies on homosexuality and bisexuality can turn straight men into gays because of their eroticism\" (Ehrenstein 70) and that he \"couldn't make movies like this if [he] started to worry about what Jerry Falwell is going to have to say about it\" (\"Biography,\" par. 10). In addition, the contents of _The Living End_ reveal the recurring attributes, approaches, and themes that Araki has continued to exploit throughout his entire body of cinematic work, which contribute so substantially to the successful execution of his style: alienated, bored, nihilistic, rootless young people who are desperate to make meaningful connections with others; exploration of sexualities amid a cultural backdrop of sex, drugs, and (post-punk\/industrial) rock 'n' roll; complex romantic\/sexual pairings and love triangles; bizarre street people and other marginal characters who populate an at-times-surrealistic Los Angeles; and recurring elements of mise-en-sc\u00e8ne including loudly decorated apartments, endless freeways, claustrophobic mini-marts, gaudy motel rooms, and expansive parking lots.\n\nIn summing up his own breakthrough creation, Araki has described _The Living End_ as \"an 'irresponsible' rant that was equal parts personal protest, Godard-influenced art film, and couple-on-the-run genre romance,\" one that inherently possesses \"raw, rough-and-tumble 'guerilla' charm\" and serves as a \"time capsule\" of a time when AIDS was \"robbing the world of an entire generation\" (Araki, \"Spring\" 2), \"when people were dying every day all around you and it felt like a war zone\" (Duralde 65). He has also emphasized that, with regard to positioning him as a leading director of the emergent New Queer Cinema, such status was entirely unexpected, catching him entirely by surprise. \"The impact and hubbub surrounding _The Living End_ was totally an accident. The film just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It became the eye of this storm that no one expected,\" he has noted (Hays, _View_ 38).\n\nNevertheless, to the director's surprise and delight, _The Living End_ had garnered him international recognition at a time when he was still defining himself as a distinctive director with a unique authorial style. At the end of 1992, during the height of his newfound cinematic notoriety, the directions he would choose to go with his subsequent films remained anybody's guess.\nChapter 3\n\nRefining an Authorial Style with _Totally F***ed Up_ and _The Doom Generation_\n\nIn an L.A. apartment, a teenage lesbian is throwing a birthday party for her teenage partner, with whom she wishes to have a baby. The couple's four closest gay male friends are in attendance. One of the friends reads aloud from a personal ad placed by a \"very oral butt-eater\" who seeks a \"face-sitter for regular sessions,\" as well as from an ad placed by a \"horny, hairy top\" who seeks a \"slave\/son\/pet into B&D, . . . shaving, toys, enemas, water sports, [and] diapers,\" as a pot pipe is passed around. Another of the friends emerges from a back room, carrying a pornographic magazine and a condom filled with his ejaculate. He hands the used condom to one of the girls, who empties its contents into a large stainless steel bowl and, using a turkey baster, mixes it in with the rest of the bowl's contents. \"You know mine are gonna swim the fastest,\" the boy says with confidence. The girls attempt to pressure another friend into contributing his sperm next, reminding him that everyone is expected to make a contribution, especially since they ate their snacks and drank their booze, but he insists that someone else go before him. Two of his companions oblige. An intertitle accompanying these on-screen developments reads, \"It's my party and I'll inseminate if I want to.\"\n\nThe above scene appears in _Totally F***ed Up_ (1993), Gregg Araki's follow-up release to _The Living End_ and the first offering in what he has referred to as his \"teen-apocalypse trilogy\" (\"Spring\" 12). It demonstrates clearly how, with his next film, Araki continued intentionally to explore controversial, potentially taboo topics and offer provocative, potentially shocking images that had not previously been captured on film with any regularity, ones that are presented from an LGBTQ \"insider\" rather than an \"outsider\" point of view. In the aftermath of the media circus that nearly consumed him following _The Living End_ 's identification as an important offering, and he as a noteworthy director, of the emergent New Queer Cinema, Araki set out next to create a series of three films that explore teen angst in its numerous dimensions, with a continued emphasis on providing noteworthy representations of non-heterosexual individuals in a world that frequently treats them as outsiders. The subsequent offerings of the trilogy are _The Doom Generation_ (1995) and _Nowhere_ (1997).\n\nThis chapter examines the first two films of Araki's teen-apocalypse trilogy, _Totally F***ed Up_ and _The Doom Generation_ , with regard to how they represent both noteworthy continuations of, and deviations from, the emergent post-punk authorial style evident in the director's breakthrough cinematic offering and the radical\/subversive potential that is enabled by that style. (For reasons that will gradually become evident, _Nowhere_ is explored at length in the next chapter of this project, along with Araki's 1999 film, _Splendor_.) The discussion that follows is intended to demonstrate the process by which the director refined his trademark authorial style, which has its roots in his earliest two feature-length films and began to crystallize more completely in _The Living End_ , through the process of creating his fourth and fifth features.\n\nGetting a Bit Too Heavy-handed with _Totally F***ed Up_\n\nOnce again, Araki served simultaneously as the writer, director, cinematographer, and editor of _Totally F***ed Up_ , which follows the interconnected actions and interactions of a close-knit, racially diverse group of six non-heterosexual L.A. teens (four gay males and two lesbians) as they search for happiness and meaning in their everyday existence. As they go about their daily lives, occasionally smoking pot or taking Ecstasy to make them a bit more bearable, they are frequently interviewed on videotape by Steven (played by Gilbert Luna), the aspiring filmmaker in their group, who queries them about various topics of relevance to being young and queer in the (at-times-homophobic) big city as part of a documentary he is making. The subjects of his interviews, in addition to himself (which he shoots holding the camera in front of his face or with the assistance of a nearby tripod), are Andy (played by James Duval), the brooding member of the group who questions whether love actually exists, believes he might possibly be bisexual, and describes himself as being \"totally fucked up,\" even though he seems to have things pretty much together; Tommy (played by Roko Belic), the promiscuous member of the group who is known to engage in a rapid series of anonymous sexual encounters, as if he were still living in the 1970s; Deric (played by Lance May), an artist, and Steven's boyfriend until he learns of his partner's clandestine sexual encounters with another young man; and Michele and Patricia (played by Susan Behshid and Jenee Gill, respectively), the lesbian couple in the film that viewers get to know primarily as relatively indistinguishable individuals (aside from their differing physical statures and hair colors) who are remarkably like-minded and completely in love. Araki has summarized the overall contents and style of this film by stating that this \"honest, open-structured look into the lives of gay\/lesbian teens . . . explores the very serious problems confronting young homos today\u2014AIDS, alienation, suicide, drugs, fagbashing violence, and not having a date on Saturday night\" and is a \"kinda twisted cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick\" (\"Totally\" 6).\n\nAraki's latter comment is particularly intriguing, given the range of content that this film unabashedly and unapologetically addresses about contemporary (queer) teen life that is lacking entirely from Hughes' films of a few years earlier, such as _Sixteen Candles_ (1984), _The Breakfast Club_ (1985), and _Ferris Bueller's Day Off_ (1986). Accordingly, Araki once again is intentionally reworking the conventions of an established film subgenre\u2014in this case, the teen movie\u2014into queer scenarios, with queer characters decidedly in the forefront rather than on the margins, in order to utilize his outsider sensibility to give voice to the marginalized members of the teen community who are typically represented only minimally and stereotypically on film (if at all) and to create a powerful work pertaining to queer identity politics. About this topic, Araki has expressed:\n\n[T]he essential impetus behind the film was the desire to portray a way of life, a sub-subculture which is totally ignored by both the mainstream and the conventional gay media\u2014to represent the unrepresented. I would venture to say that queer teenagers\u2014with all their lovable confusions and complexities\u2014have never before been depicted as they are in this movie. There is a tendency to sanitize, to gloss over, to moralize when dealing with the subject of young gays which I consciously avoided in the development of this project. (\"Filmmaker's\" 7)\n\nIn his attempts to distinguish this work still further from Hollywood's far more sanitized cinematic representations of contemporary teenagers, Araki intentionally cast actual teenagers to star in _Totally F***ed Up_ , in dramatic contrast to the older actors who have typically been hired to play teenage characters in films such as _Fast Times at Ridgemont High_ (Amy Heckerling, 1982) and _Heathers_ (Michael Lehmann, 1989) (Araki, \"Production\" 8).\n\nThe realities of teenage life in the age of AIDS are presented clearly and candidly in _Totally F***ed Up_ , perhaps most efficiently through the characters' videotaped interview responses which are intercut with the film's narrative in a manner reminiscent of the highly influential, voyeuristic independent film _sex, lies, and videotape_ (Steven Soderbergh, 1989). When asked to share their personal views about sex, for example, Deric responds that it tends to be overrated, Tommy says that it is an intense release akin to a dam breaking, and Andy acknowledges that, while he is still trying to figure out what he likes, he finds \"buttfucking\" to be repulsive. (Pornographic images of one man engaging in anal intercourse with another immediately follow Andy's assessment, as Tommy and a blonde male teen he has just met are shown masturbating together while viewing them.) When asked to share his views about safe sex, Deric comments that it is better than in the good old days, when guys were getting fisted in slings, having sex in the bushes, and drinking each other's urine. (Images of him and Steven, naked and fooling around in bed, follow this interview segment, along with a shot of Michele and Patricia being intimate together in a bubble bath.) With regard to the topic of AIDS, Michele states that AIDS is biological warfare and government-sponsored genocide, and Patricia notes that it is a government-endorsed holocaust, both echoing the sentiments expressed equally as blatantly in _The Living End_. (These remarks are immediately preceded by excerpts from a haunting \"AIDS Kills\" public service announcement.) With regard to their (superficial) personal views about love, Michele characterizes it as something to cling to other than television, Andy states that it is a huge load of bullshit that individuals are trained to desire from birth in fairytales, movies, pop songs, and lite-beer commercials, and Tommy says that he falls in love constantly but it lasts only \"as long as a squirt in the dark.\" (These comments are followed by shots of the six friends playing Heartthrob, a board game about heterosexual love, which they spruce up by introducing queer scenarios to make it a bit more relevant and interesting.) On the topic of their preferred euphemisms for masturbation, Tommy reveals that he prefers the phrase \"polishing the trophy,\" whereas Deric prefers \"stroking the dolphin,\" Andy prefers \"shooting tadpoles at the moon,\" Michele prefers \"making oyster soup,\" and Patricia prefers \"doing the two-finger tango.\" (These interview excerpts immediately follow a sequence in which the four gay male teens discuss which presumably heterosexual male celebrities they prefer to jack off to, which include Matt Dillon, Mel Gibson, and Tom Cruise, as well as graphic images of a large, erect male penis being roughly manipulated by its possessor.)\n\nThe realities of teenage life in the age of AIDS are also communicated clearly through the film's narrative developments, which focus primarily on Andy's attempts at finding true love with Ian (played by Alan Boyce), a UCLA sophomore who approaches him outside of a Laundromat (located beside a sex club) one night, as an S&M couple passes by, its submissive member wearing a dog collar and leash and crawling on all fours down the sidewalk. As they begin to walk together through the streets of Los Angeles, Andy admits that he is a bit shy, and Ian shocks him when he asks if Andy is into whips, like so many of the other people at the club. As their walk continues through a huge, deserted, fluorescent-lit parking structure, Ian pauses suddenly and asks if he can kiss Andy. Feeling a bit self-conscious, Andy takes a drag of his cigarette. Ian, not waiting for a formal response, leans in and kisses Andy tenderly on the lips, before Andy releases the puff of smoke he had inhaled. Ian then kisses Andy far more sensually before asking him out on a date, stating how physically attracted he is to him. They agree to see the Kamikaze Dildoes playing at the Hellhole on Friday night.\n\nFollowing that show, Andy and Ian decide to get high together before returning to Ian's apartment, where they end up naked in bed together. Andy asks what Ian would like to do, and he is taken slightly aback at Ian's response: \"Everything.\" Keeping in mind his personal aversion to anal intercourse, Andy asks for clarification of what Ian means by this but the young man remains vague, explaining that he plans to start by licking the tip of Andy's penis and to allow nature to take its course from there. The next day, during a conversation with Tommy, Andy reveals that he actually allowed Ian to \"stuff\" him, which Tommy takes as an indication that Andy is in love. That evening, however, as they continue to wander the L.A. streets trying to find something to do on a Saturday night, Andy and Ian seem to be a bit bored being together. They continue to spend time (and presumably to sleep together) over the next few days nevertheless. Then, one morning after Ian emerges from his shower to greet Andy at the nearby bathroom mirror, they hear the telephone ringing in the adjacent room and Ian rushes to answer it. Speaking in hushed tones, he tells the individual on the other end of the line that he is about to head out the door and will return the call that evening. When Andy asks who was on the phone, Ian lies by claiming it was his mother, who was calling to remind him to eat right, study hard, and that the check is in the mail.\n\nAs Andy's relationship with Ian blossoms and begins to unfold, his closest male friends are experiencing equally as emotional developments in their own lives. Tommy, for example, panics when he discovers that he has a fever and is sweating profusely, jumping to the conclusion that he is likely infected with AIDS rather than the flu, but he then engages in a very casual sexual encounter with a slightly older man in a car shortly thereafter, before being kicked out of his home by his parents when they discover that he is gay. Steven begins cheating on Deric by having an affair\u2014and extremely hot sex\u2014with a handsome young man who is a regular customer at the video store where he works. Deric breaks up with Steven after learning of his partner's infidelity when he watches Steven's confessional video footage while waiting for Steven in his editing room, and he ends up being bashed in an alley by a group of three golf-club-wielding thugs while walking home alone one evening, which lands him in the emergency room. In contrast, life for Andy's closest female friends, Michele and Patricia, remains entirely unchanged, with the exception that Michele begins providing continual nurturing and emotional support to Steven following his breakup with Deric, and Patricia does the same for Deric.\n\nWhen Andy joins his group of queer friends at the hospital to check on Deric's condition, although he is relieved to learn that Deric will be fine, he is nevertheless quite shaken by the intensity of what has occurred. Seeking comfort himself, he heads to Ian's apartment in the middle of the night, despite the reality that Ian had stood him up earlier that evening when they were supposed to go out. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that the bare-chested Ian informs Andy that he cannot come in because he is not alone. When Ian asks if it will be okay if he calls Andy the next day, Andy makes it clear that it is _not_ okay. A brokenhearted Andy then rides his bicycle furiously into the night. He resurfaces a short time later, after crossing Ian's name off of his telephone's speed-dial list, where he is seen wandering through sleazy L.A. shops and grimy alleyways and going home with an anonymous stranger, whom he allows to anally penetrate him.\n\nGiven everything that has been described of the film's contents up to this point, if this were where _Totally F***ed Up_ actually ends, then Araki's trademark style as an auteur director would be remarkably similar in this film as in its predecessor, _The Living End_. In both of these films, for example, Araki prominently features provocative images of non-heterosexual sexual activity and features seemingly random acts of violence (such as Deric's bashing incident, or a scene in which Andy informs Ian of a serial killer who is murdering Hollywood's hustlers, cutting off their penises, and stuffing their penises in their mouths for others to discover). In addition, he continues to defy cinematic convention with regard to content, form, (sub)genre, and linearity in this film; embraces a variety of human sexualities and sexual practices that have historically been marginalized by mainstream society (although, alas, he still does not do very much with his non-heterosexual female characters here in comparison to his non-heterosexual male characters: \"It's annoying to introduce two gay women and then use them strictly for shoulders to cry on and bitchy punch lines,\" one critic laments [Whitty, par. 15]); favors somewhat lengthy scenes that play out in real time (most notably with Andy and Ian's walking-and-talking sequences); includes regular doses of bizarre street people and other marginal characters who populate a seemingly surrealistic Los Angeles (such as the aforementioned S&M couple featuring a dog-slave who crawls along the sidewalk, or an enraged woman standing beneath a huge billboard for Las Vegas' Excalibur hotel and casino who is screaming to absolutely nobody, or a crazed, blood-soaked woman, being chased by a hospital orderly, who crashes through the core group of central characters as they are standing outside the hospital in the aftermath of Deric's attack); and demonstrates an intentional lack of traditional commercial appeal. Where _Totally F***ed Up_ differs substantially from _The Living End_ and the films that come after it, however, with regard to Araki's trademark authorial style, is that, with _Totally F***ed Up_ , the director takes the subject matter of his film a bit too seriously, to the extent that his treatment of it ultimately comes across as being just a bit too heavy-handed.\n\nIn the concluding sequence to _Totally F***ed Up_ , seemingly out of nowhere, Andy suddenly commits suicide. Although it is clear that he is disappointed about his failed relationship with Ian, Andy nevertheless manages to bring a red rose to the recovering Deric to make him feel better about the violent incident he has experienced (as well as his recent breakup with Steven), and he does not appear to be visibly upset at all when he informs Deric that his relationship with Ian has come to an end. Nevertheless, after allowing himself to be \"buttfucked\" by the anonymous stranger who picks him up, Andy is shown looking a bit stressed out for a few seconds in the light of day, and he returns home in an inexplicably anxious and agitated state. There is no answer when he phones Steven, who has just stepped into the shower. He gets a busy signal when he calls both Deric and Michele, who are already engaged in a telephone conversation of their own. For no apparent reason whatsoever, Andy then walks into the kitchen of his home, where he pours himself a huge glass of whiskey, chugs some down, and adds Mop & Glo as well as a variety of additional household cleaning products to the portion that remains. After staring at the resulting concoction for a few seconds, Andy raises the glass to his lips with both hands, drinks it, and stumbles outside to his backyard, where he spits up some blood, plunges into the in-ground swimming pool, and drowns. The film concludes with Steven, Michele, Patricia, Deric, and Tommy watching video footage of Andy, in which he explains that all he has ever wanted is to be happy in life, even for one second, and to enjoy life while is he still young enough to fully appreciate it. Immediately thereafter, Steven walks over to the monitor, turns it off, and the entire screen goes black.\n\nIt is clear, from the opening seconds of _Totally F***ed Up_ , that Araki intends to make a film about queer teen suicide, as the film's opening image is the text of a newspaper article titled \"Suicide Rate High Among Gay Teens,\" which goes on to explain how 30 percent of teenagers who kill themselves are queer, and that they frequently do so after becoming despondent over their failure to succeed in life according to heterosexual expectations. The article concludes by citing the example of two teenage male lovers in Wisconsin who engaged in a double suicide after their families decided to move apart. For viewers who may have overlooked the significance of this article to the film's narrative, Ian reiterates the boys' story to Andy, as they walk through a gas station, by stating that the two fifteen-year-old \"secret lovers\" blew each other's brains out using their fathers' hunting rifles because they could not stand the thought of being separated, which Andy acknowledges is sad but also very romantic. So perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that one of the central characters in _Totally F***ed Up_ ends up committing suicide by the time the closing credits begin to roll. This sort of heavy-handed approach to the film's overall contents, however, is quite atypical for Araki, especially given his more open-ended treatment of the subject matter and far more ambiguous ending of _The Living End_ , and it does not make a great deal of sense given everything else that occurs in this film.\n\nExamination of Araki's original screenplay for _Totally F***ed Up_ reveals that the writer-director initially planned to be even _more_ heavy-handed with his treatment of this film's subject matter, as the script was originally intended to serve, like _The Living End_ , as yet another story about AIDS specifically. This reality serves to explain the inclusion of the aforementioned scene from the final film in which a disturbing AIDS public service announcement fills the screen, as well as the one in which the highly promiscuous Tommy, suffering from a high fever and sweating profusely, fears that he has likely contracted HIV\/AIDS as a result of his sexual ways. It also serves to explain why Andy, when encountering a young panhandler with AIDS on an L.A. sidewalk while wandering with Ian, demonstrates compassion for the man by providing him with a dollar while Ian claims that he personally has no spare change at all to contribute.\n\nIn Araki's original screenplay, while sharing their views of safe sex, Steven expresses hope that scientists will one day find the \"magic cure\" that will eliminate the need for people to engage in it (Araki, _Totally_ Screenplay 19), Deric explains that AIDS has made gay men more respectful because they can now treat one another like human beings (rather than simply \"stiff cocks frantically trying to get off and move on to the next conquest\") and avoid \"feeling the need to go to a bathhouse every Saturday night to buttfuck some stranger\" (Araki, _Totally_ Screenplay 20), Tommy admits that he is careful _most_ of the time but does not want to spend his entire life worrying about his T-cell count (Araki, _Totally_ Screenplay, 21-22), and Andy expresses that he has never been tested for AIDS\u2014and never will be (Araki, _Totally_ Screenplay 22). Also in Araki's original screenplay, Deric's bashers, as they begin to assault him, refer to him as \"faggot\" and ask if he has AIDS yet (Araki, _Totally_ Screenplay 87).\n\nMost notably of all in the original screenplay, however, Araki has Andy emerging from a sterile office building, with a sign over his head reading \"Confidential Testing\" (Araki, _Totally_ Screenplay 97). (This appears to be the aforementioned scene that actually appears in the final film, minus the overhead sign, during which Andy is shown looking a bit stressed out for a few seconds in the light of day.) A bit later in the screenplay, Andy is shown chain-smoking and checking his watch, taking a deep breath, grabbing the telephone receiver, and punching the numbers contained on the piece of paper in his hands (Araki, _Totally_ Screenplay 100). His pale face and blank expression as he hangs up the phone, coupled with the description that he is now \"like someone facing a firing squad,\" indicate that he is either HIV positive or has developed full-blown AIDS (Araki, _Totally_ Screenplay 101). This (deleted) plot development explains why he frantically begins telephoning his various friends in an anxious and agitated state, as well as why he ends up committing suicide so readily when he is unable to reach them. It appears, therefore, that Araki himself realized that he was being a bit too heavy-handed with his initially intended treatment of the subject matter of _Totally F***ed Up_ , to the extent that he eliminated these various AIDS-related scenes in a conscious effort to be a bit less \"preachy\" and tactless in communicating the film's intended messages. In doing so, however, he actually ended up creating a narrative that does not fully add up when all is said and done, and one that appears to be even a bit _more_ \"preachy\" and tactless with regard to the message about queer teenage suicide that it ultimately delivers as a result. (Even the casting of Alan Boyce in this film, who had previously played a high school student who commits suicide in _Permanent Record_ [Marisa Silver, 1988], contributes further to this unfortunate state of affairs.) In short, Araki ends up beating the viewer over the head with the film's primary message pertaining to queer teen suicide, in an off-putting way, in much the same way that Deric is beaten over the head with golf clubs by the group of gaybashers who assault him.\n\nDespite this glaring misstep in the film with regard to the ongoing development of Araki's authorial style, _Totally F***ed Up_ nevertheless offers a unique brand of realism with regard to the cinematic exploration of the lives of contemporary (queer) teens, one that has rarely been captured on film. To increase the verisimilitude of this offering, Araki based many of the film's key plot points on real-life happenings that he had heard about. As he explains:\n\nOne of the initial sparks was the article about the disproportionate percentage of gay teen suicides which begins the film. Another was a small news item I read about a troubled gay boy who killed himself by drinking Drano and drowning in his family's swimming pool. Then there was the lesbian acquaintance who told me about the turkey-baster insemination party she had attended. And I felt a need to respond to the unrelenting barrage of institutionalized homophobia\u2014from the media, from ignorant politicians, from rabid cultural \"watchdogs.\" (Araki, \"Filmmaker's\" 7)\n\nPerhaps the reason that this film appears to represent a minor setback in the refinement of the director's authorial style, as compared to _The Living End_ , is that Araki wrote both scripts during the same time period and _Totally F***ed Up_ actually ended up being shot first; it was uncertain for a while which of the two would ultimately become his third feature (Araki, \"Production\" 8; Chang 50). Whatever the case, Araki's trademark style as an auteur director continued to evolve in meaningful ways in _Totally F***ed Up_ , and it achieved its ideal state of development in his subsequent feature, _The Doom Generation_.\n\nPerfecting an Authorial Style with _The Doom Generation_\n\n_The Doom Generation_ begins with bodies slam-dancing in a dark, rave-like environment, adjacent to the words \"Welcome to hell,\" the letters of which have been cut out and are backlit by raging flames. A bored teenage girl, whom the viewer soon learns is Amy (played by Rose McGowan), is joined by her teenage boyfriend, Jordan (played by James Duval, the actor who played Andy in _Totally F***ed Up_ ), as he stops dancing and emerges from the darkness. Wanting to please the object of his affection, who clearly wants to leave, Jordan asks if Amy wants to go to \"heaven.\" Once they are there, \"heaven\" is revealed to be a nearly vacant drive-in movie theater parking lot where, on this evening, the couple parks to have sex for the first time, as several other young people hang out skateboarding and drinking alcoholic beverages nearby. As their sexual encounter begins to heat up, Amy demands that Jordan put his dick in her immediately. He refuses to do so, however, because he is afraid of contracting HIV\/AIDS. Amy's reassurance that they are both virgins, so that is highly unlikely to happen, falls on deaf ears. Sitting back up, Jordan comments that he feels very strange on this evening, as if something substantial is about to happen.\n\nAs their conversation continues, Amy expresses that the city of Los Angeles, in which they both live, is sucking away at her soul. Jordan responds that he feels the same way, as if he has become akin to a \"gerbil smothering in Richard Gere's butthole.\" They begin to kiss tenderly, acknowledging that there is just no place for them in this world. Their moment of intimacy is immediately interrupted, however, as the attractive face of a young male drifter named Xavier (played by Johnathon Schaech) is forced violently against the windshield of Amy's car by a group of four males who are attacking him. The leader of this gang, who calls Xavier a \"cocksucker\" and informs him that his time has come to die, begins to strangle the young drifter, but Xavier successfully fights back, first delivering a powerful punch and then stabbing the man with a knife. As the other attackers back away momentarily, Xavier jumps in the back seat of Amy's car and orders her to make a fast escape. She does, but as they speed away Amy becomes increasingly concerned that Xavier is getting blood all over her vehicle's upholstery, so Jordan gives Xavier permission to use his shirt to absorb the red fluid as it pours from his leg.\n\nWith this intriguing opening sequence, Araki effectively introduces the viewer to the repressive, alienating world of these three rootless young people in the age of AIDS as well as Amy and Jordan to the bisexual drifter who will ultimately accompany them on a road trip to nowhere, in the aftermath of their (unintentionally) murdering a Quickie Mart owner and several additional individuals who disapprove of their lifestyle and intend to do them personal harm. As Amy and Jordan quickly learn, Xavier, despite being of a comparable age to them, is far more worldly and sexually experienced than they are. Shortly after they kill the Korean Quickie Mart owner who aimed a rifle at Amy and Jordan when they discovered that they did not have cash with them to pay for their desired food items (in the scene described at length at the start of chapter 1), the trio take shelter in a hotel room that is entirely red, which signifies not only the blood that they have caused to spill but also the passion among them that is percolating beneath the surface. After Xavier attempts (for the first time) to subtly seduce Jordan, while Amy takes a bath, the clueless boy fails to pick up on Xavier's intentions and proceeds to the bathroom, where he first urinates and then has sex with his girlfriend in the tub. Xavier, watching them (and focusing his gaze primarily on Jordan) through the door that is slightly ajar, masturbates the entire time and, upon shooting his load, proceeds to lick the resulting pool of ejaculate from his hand.\n\nAs the film progresses, Xavier begins to have increasingly kinky sex with Amy in order ultimately to lure her boyfriend into bed. For example, he teaches Amy to insert her finger gently into a man's anus in order to increase his sexual pleasure during intercourse; when she tries this move with Jordan, he protests, indicating that there is no way he is going to like her finger being shoved up his \"shit chute,\" but he soon begins to enjoy the sensation. It is not long before Jordan himself assumes the role of voyeur, watching Xavier and Amy engage in a round of animalistic sex from outside a hotel window, taking out his penis and masturbating all the while. It is also not long before Xavier successfully lands Jordan in bed, at first during a sexual three-way with Amy, and then individually when she steps away from that encounter. Clearly, just as Luke \"corrupts\" Jon in _The Living End_ and leads the young man to behave increasingly like him, Xavier has a very similar effect on Jordan, leading him to engage in more risqu\u00e9 forms of sexual activity and to explore the possibility of claiming a bisexual sexual orientation as his own.\n\nAs in _The Living End_ , Araki once again places his young sexual adventurers on the road, playing with generic conventions and expectations by prominently featuring the theme of bisexuality in a road movie but then, on the surface at least, appearing to downplay that reality by subtitling this film, in its opening credits, as \"a heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki.\" By freeing these characters from the confinement of their everyday locales, Araki effectively creates a utopic space within which they are able to freely explore their most intimate desires, both sexual and otherwise, in scenes that tend to border on the pornographic. Xavier appears to be the most comfortable in this sort of unstable setting, which is unsurprising given that he is a drifter whose typical relationships last three days, and sometimes only three hours. Amid his various travels he has gotten a tattoo of Jesus on his penis (so that the individuals he is fucking can say they've got Jesus inside them) and killed an annoying female parking cop (among various other individuals), and prior to those journeys he had sex with his family's dog, which he describes as having been a consenting adult. In contrast, Amy, who refers to their new traveling companion as a \"life support system for a cock,\" initially feels a bit guilty about having wild sex outside of her relationship with Jordan but draws the line at participating in a golden shower, and Jordan takes the longest of the three to embrace new kinds of sexual experiences, not knowing that Xavier has pumped Amy for all of the intimate details about the size and shape of his cock and how he prefers to use it, but feeling reassured that Xavier, too, gets an erection when slam-dancing with other men.\n\nMuch of the violence in _The Doom Generation_ is handled in a humorous way, such as when the decapitated head of the Korean Quickie Mart owner, which has flown halfway across the store to land in a tray of hotdog condiments, unexpectedly comes back to life and tries to speak, a green substance emanating from its mouth, or when Xavier hops into the back seat of Amy's car still carrying another victim's severed arm, which he eventually throws at its original possessor, hitting the man in the head with it. Although somewhat disconcerting, these violent episodes are carried out in such over-the-top ways that it is impossible for the viewer to take them very seriously. In dramatic contrast to them, however, is the extremely violent episode that composes the film's powerful concluding sequence, which certainly tests the gag reflexes of its viewers. Araki sets up the viewer to expect comedic violence throughout this offering and then, without warning, serves up startling visceral violence in its place.\n\nDuring this climactic sequence, the trio discover an abandoned warehouse (which conveniently has a sheet-covered mattress on the floor) and decide to spend the night. Amy tosses a coin to determine whether she will have sex first with Xavier or Jordan on this evening. Losing the coin toss, Jordan heads outside to the car to await his turn. When Xavier eventually joins him there, the drifter once again attempts to seduce Jordan by placing their faces side by side, close enough for them to kiss, but Jordan, feeling a bit self-conscious, rises and heads back inside to have sex with Amy. As he builds toward his orgasm, Jordan is at first startled when the naked Xavier returns and climbs atop him, but the three begin to have sex together. Amy interrupts the action because she feels the urgent need to urinate; she heads outside to relieve herself, leaving the two young men in bed together, alone.\n\nXavier makes it clear that he is in absolutely no danger of losing his erection in Amy's absence, and he moves in once again to kiss Jordan, in the utopic setting within which they may finally consummate their growing sexual attraction. Just then, an unexpected development occurs: an as-yet-unseen intruder extinguishes their fire with a bucket of water. As they now sit together in total darkness, not knowing what has become of Amy, they listen as an as-yet-unidentified male voice recites a \"mature\" nursery rhyme that doubles as a serious threat to their well-being: \"Two little faggots sittin' in a bed \/ One eatin' ass and the other givin' head \/ Dirty, perverted scum make me see red \/ World'll be a purer place when they're both dead.\" A powerful punch is landed somewhere nearby; the sound of tape being torn is heard. A strobe light begins to blink on and off, providing only brief glimpses into what is happening in the warehouse before everything goes dark again (this is the same strobe-light effect that Araki uses in _Totally F***ed Up_ to heighten the emotionality of Deric's bashing at the hands of his three homophobic attackers).\n\nAs Jordan sits in a terrified, frozen position, noticing that Xavier has been knocked unconscious nearby, two neo-Nazi male thugs, sporting tube socks over their genitals and spray-painted red swastikas on their chests, grab him from behind, as their similarly attired leader dramatically unfolds an American flag on the floor. Ordering one of his fellow attackers to begin playing their favorite song, \"The Star-Spangled Banner,\" on a boom box they have brought with them, the leader throws Amy down onto the flag and begins to rape her, while he loudly recites \"The Pledge of Allegiance.\" Unwilling to be on the receiving end of yet another violent or aggressive act, Amy knees her attacker in the groin, infuriating him still further, which motivates him to pull out a sizable porcelain figurine of the Virgin Mary and threaten to insert it inside of her. Jordan, still being held in place by the other two assailants, verbally expresses his objections to what he is witnessing; to distract Amy's rapist, Jordan makes a lewd comment about the young man's mother. The offended thug then walks over to Jordan menacingly, punches him repeatedly in his stomach, tells him that his time has come to die, and pulls out a large pair of gardening shears, which he intends to use to cut off Jordan's \"puny, worthless cock.\" The fear in Jordan's eyes is palpable as the thug runs the shears threateningly down his torso before, as promised, he uses them to cut off Jordan's penis, which he then inserts into Xavier's mouth (in a manner akin to that mentioned in _Totally F***ed Up_ , when Andy informs Ian of the actions of the serial killer who is preying on Hollywood hustlers). This extreme, entirely unexpected bloodbath continues as Amy uses the same pair of gardening shears to kill Jordan's attacker, and Xavier assists her in killing the other two thugs.\n\nThis powerful concluding sequence typically leaves first-time viewers of _The Doom Generation_ in a mild state of shock, many of whom are unable to make sense of its significance and are turned off to the film in its entirety as a result, if they did not already feel that way prior to its occurrence (Hart, \"Cinematic\" 53-69). Numerous critics share this reaction to the film. For example, the group of reviewers known collectively as the Mutant Reviewers from Hell, who are typically quite open-minded to unique and unconventional approaches to filmmaking, capture the negative reactions of their various counterparts in their series of reviews of this film. Mutant Reviewer Clare writes, \"So is _The Doom Generation_ supposed to be a cheeky comedy that just fails miserably or is it supposed to be a serious look at the tangled web we weave when at first we practice to explore our sexuality while simultaneously killing bystanders indiscriminately? My quick and dirty answer? Who cares?\" (par. 1). Mutant Reviewer Justin states:\n\nSometimes you see such an awful movie that you need to tell people about it to purge the memory from your system. Sometimes you see such a horribly awful movie that you would like to find the makers of the film and do mean things to their pets. Sometimes you see such a piece of crap that you yank off your clothes, cover yourself with ashes, and go out onto the street with a sandwich board proclaiming that the end of the world is coming, because movies this horribly putridly awful are being made. (par. 1)\n\nMutant Reviewer Kyle expresses, \"This film hurts you. It ruined my day when I rented it, just because it did succeed in catching the events in depressing lives of people scraped from the bottom of the scum barrel. Gross people doing gross things, conceived by people who should never have made a film in the first place\" (par. 2).\n\nOther critics have referred to _The Doom Generation_ as \"a difficult film to consume, even by those who proclaim themselves to be the kings and\/or queens of ultra-bizarre underground cinema . . . and [those] who would like nothing more than to burn every single copy they can get their self-important little hands on\" (Film Fiend, par. 2), \"hands-down one of the most horrid examples of filmmaking I've seen in ages\" (Null, par. 1), and \"the kind of movie where the filmmaker hopes to shock you with sickening carnage and violent amorality\" (Ebert, par. 1). When reviewing this film in the _Chicago Sun-Times_ shortly after its initial release, critic Roger Ebert refused to award it any stars whatsoever.\n\nWhat is likely evident from those reviews, and so many others like them, is that Araki's impeccable application of his trademark in-your-face authorial style in _The Doom Generation_ , which he has perfected with this offering, is off-putting to many viewers and critics. At the same time, that is what makes his directorial style so radical and potentially subversive. Viewers and critics who take the time to reflect carefully on the contents of this film (and, in particular, its highly disturbing concluding sequence) and refuse to readily dismiss it as a leading example of cinematic trash will discover an intelligent, carefully crafted, and fulfilling cinematic offering that communicates an incredibly powerful message about the highly \"repressive nature of hegemonic ideology in the United States in relation to bisexual men and other non-heterosexual individuals\" (Hart, \"Cinematic\" 55). Film critics Matthew Severson and Robin Wood are among the comparatively much smaller number of individuals who apparently achieve such a level of insight as they have written, respectively, that with this film \"Araki has made a more radical personal and political film than the bombastic [Oliver] Stone, [the director of _Natural Born Killers_ (1994)], could have managed in his wettest of wet dreams, and he has captured the cultural apathy and violent dissolution of the present in a manner unseen since _A Clockwork Orange_ [Stanley Kubrick, 1971]\" (Severson, par. 1) and that \" _The Doom Generation_ is a powerfully political film . . . [with] the film's culmination represent[ing] one of the most radical political statements in American cinema\" (Wood 339).\n\nViewers who like to sit through a film's closing credits learn that the characters' last names in _The Doom Generation_ are (Xavier) Red, (Jordan) White, and (Amy) Blue. This reality, coupled with the startling use of the American flag, \"The Star-Spangled Banner,\" and \"The Pledge of Allegiance,\" strongly suggests that Araki's film is consciously intended to serve as a condemning commentary on the repressive nature of U.S. ideology in relation to sexual \"outlaws.\" Although a surface-level reading of the film's narrative suggests that diversity in the form of non-heterosexual sexual orientations and\/or non-monogamous (threesome) relationships is what endangers the well-being of individuals in U.S. society, careful consideration of the work's latent content indicates that it is actually social and religious conservatism that most greatly endangers such well-being, and that there are people in this world, such as the trio's attackers at the film's end who are acting on the behalf of such conservatism, who are the real \"outlaws\" that must be feared. As film scholar James Moran has noted:\n\nAlthough fierce in its implicit attack upon a conservative American society condoning only heterosexuality at the violent expense of all other unconventional unions (thus explaining the irreverent irony of _Doom_ 's subtitle), the film's politics function primarily as subtext, averting an explicit confrontation of the causes of institutionalized homophobia by hyper-dramatizing its hideous effects in an over-the-top display of savagery. (23)\n\nBy vividly and unconventionally revealing the progress that remains to be made with regard to the true acceptance of non-heterosexual identities, _The Doom Generation_ simultaneously offers hope for a very different sort of future in which alienation, discrimination, and condemnation will become phenomena of the past as Amy and Xavier, in the aftermath of Jordan's murder, drive off toward a destination yet unknown.\n\nConcluding Observations\n\nWithout question, _The Doom Generation_ , which Araki intended to be \"as far out and surreal as possible, like a bad drug trip\" (\"Interview,\" par. 11), maximizes the effectiveness of the director's trademark post-punk style, as developed in his earlier films and perfected in this offering. This style serves simultaneously as the \"essence\" of Araki's filmmaking as well as the source of its radical\/subversive potential. As summarized a bit earlier in this chapter, during the analysis of _Totally F***ed Up_ , the hallmarks of Araki's authorial style include provocative images of non-heterosexual sexual activity and seemingly random acts of violence; defiance of cinematic convention with regard to content, form, (sub)genre, and linearity; the foregrounding of a variety of human sexualities and sexual practices that have historically been marginalized by mainstream society; lengthy scenes that play out in real time to heighten their emotionality; the regular inclusion of bizarre street people and other marginal characters who populate a seemingly surrealistic Los Angeles; an intentional lack of traditional commercial appeal; and the unabashed refusal to take the films and their subject matter entirely seriously. This latter attribute serves to explain why, despite the severity of its concluding sequence and the sobering message about U.S. society that it is attempting to communicate, _The Doom Generation_ is peppered with repeated references to the number \"666\" (which is the total of virtually everything the trio buys, the street address of one of their hotels, and Amy's cumulative SAT score), apocalyptic signs everywhere (which read \"The rapture is coming,\" \"Prepare for the apocalypse,\" \"Pray for your lost soul,\" and the like), random nursery rhymes (including \"Row, Row, Row Your Boat\" and \"Itsy Bitsy Spider\"), and playful cameo appearances (by numerous cultural icons including Amanda Bearse, Margaret Cho, Perry Farrell, Heidi Fleiss, Christopher Knight, and Parker Posey).\n\nNaturally, Araki's authorial style did not evolve in a creative vacuum. Although it is not always readily evident when viewing his films, he is quite familiar with the works and careers of auteur directors from the early years of cinema to the present, and he has repeatedly identified Jean-Luc Godard of the French New Wave in particular as one of the greatest influences on his own filmmaking style. Araki has indicated that he intentionally patterned _Totally F***ed Up_ after Godard's _Masculine-Feminine_ (1966) in order to pay tribute to that masterpiece by making his own kind of _Masculine-Feminine_ about gay teens\u2014in fact, he cut his original screenplay from twenty-one \"random celluloid fragments\" down to only fifteen, at least in part, because _Masculine-Feminine_ contains only fifteen segments\u2014and there are clear parallels in _The Doom Generation_ to Godard's demented road-movie approach in _Weekend_ (1967) (Severson, par. 21-22; Hart, \"Auteur\" 32-33). In addition, instances of Godard-inspired lighting, editing, jumpcuts, intertitles, direct address, free-associative narrative, nonlinearity, and related attributes abound in Araki's various films. In recognition of Godard's substantial influence on Araki's filmmaking style, James Moran has emphasized:\n\nGodard, in fact, is perhaps the figure most representative of Araki's conception of the independent who can work within the institution of cinema in order to change it. The disjointed techniques of Godard's early work, in particular _Breathless_ [1959] and _Weekend_ , are evident in Araki's films, as is the interminable banality of faceless locales pocked with strip malls, fast-food joints, and deserted parking lots, disturbed only by the aimless wanderings of anomic urban neurotics. Together, the protagonists' names in _The Living End_ are Jon Luke, and if that weren't enough, a \"Made in U.S.A.\" poster adorns Jon's bedroom. While these Godardian touches are at times more precocious than provocative, Araki's narrative experiments do find fruition in _Totally F***ed Up_ , a diary-like compendium that records the everyday hopes and frustrations of a close circle of gay and lesbian teens, as well as their somewhat jaundiced views of the culture on whose margins they find themselves surviving. (20)\n\nAraki's filmmaking style has been described by one critic as \"marrying Godardian cinematic style with industrial music\" (\"Designed, par. 2), and that appears to be an accurate assessment of key components of the director's post-punk style. Like punk musical offerings in their heyday, with which he is quite familiar as a result of his enthusiastic participation in the West Coast punk-rock scene during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Araki's films are readily identifiable by their rawness, aggressive energy, nihilistic themes, disconcerting tone, and potent spirit of anarchy and disorder, which is intended to challenge influential hegemonic conceptions pertaining to ideology and social order as well as repressive social expectations and gender\/sex roles. They regularly subvert genre conventions and expectations in order to subvert their established meanings and significance, and they do so in order to create groundbreaking representations of non-heterosexual individuals and subcultures. They are not particularly concerned with political correctness, commercial viability, or conventional mainstream appeal.\n\nAs Araki, a self-described \"black sheep, punk-rock, artistic kid\" (Asch, par. 10), himself has stated, \"The more radical and subversive elements of my movies are kind of like the punk rock music of the late '70s and early '80s, [when] punk was viewed as being very far out of the mainstream\" (Asch, par. 16). He elaborates: \"My whole thing, all my life, was 'march to your own drummer'. . . . I was always very much an individual, and that's why I was so deeply influenced by punk-rock culture and post-punk culture, because there's that whole DIY thing, the go-against-the-corporate-mentality sort of approach. I think that's probably my major influence in terms of my sensibility\" (D. Smith, par. 21).\n\nThe radical\/subversive potential of Araki's post-punk filmmaking approach is perhaps best summed up by James Duval, who played both Andy in _Totally F***ed Up_ and Jordan in _The Doom Generation_ , with regard to the latter film: \"[I]t's mixed with a lot of socially conscious issues and brings them into light. It really challenges the way people think and feel and see certain situations. It's interesting because I think _Doom_ is full of social issues but you don't really see 'em; they're beneath the surface and subtle\" (\"Interview,\" par. 9). That reality stands in stark contrast to Araki's treatment of his subject matter in _Totally F***ed Up_ , which ends up being far less effective and intriguing because it is so heavy-handed.\n\nArmed with the distinctive, in-your-face, post-punk authorial style that he continued to refine in _Totally F***ed Up_ and perfected in _The Doom Generation_ , Araki appeared poised to create his most effective teen-apocalypse feature yet as he began work in earnest on _Nowhere_ , the final film in his planned trilogy. It would be two years before his fans would learn whether his next creation would live up to that potential.\nChapter 4\n\nLosing Focus with _Nowhere_ and _Splendor_\n\nFollowing the release of _The Doom Generation_ , loyal Gregg Araki fans likely believed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that they knew exactly what they could expect from any forthcoming Araki film: provocative images of non-heterosexual sexual activity and acts of visceral violence; defiance of cinematic convention; unapologetic foregrounding of a range of human sexualities and sexual practices that have historically been marginalized by mainstream society; lengthy scenes that play out in real time to heighten their emotionality; regular inclusion of bizarre, marginal characters who populate a seemingly surrealistic Los Angeles; intentional lack of traditional commercial appeal; and intentional refusal to take the films and their subject matter too seriously\u2014all of which are utilized skillfully to make a powerful statement about non-heterosexuality and non-heterosexual individuals living in the age of AIDS. Unfortunately, those who held such a belief were also very likely disappointed by the overall contents of the director's next two films: _Nowhere_ (1997), the final offering of Araki's teen-apocalypse trilogy, and _Splendor_ (1999), a romantic comedy about three creative, heterosexual young adults (one woman and two men) who enter into an unconventional familial and romantic relationship.\n\nWithout question, _The Doom Generation_ was a transitional work for Araki, primarily because it was his first film made with a sizable budget (of approximately one million dollars, from French investors), which enabled him to work with a professional cinematographer, a production designer, and SAG actors for the first time as well as to give up many of his guerilla-filmmaking ways (Chang 47; Cooper 22; Moran 20; Severson, par. 3). It was also a film that was off-putting to critics, many of whom walked out of its initial press screening, where the work played to an almost entirely silent audience (Severson, par. 5). At the time, film scholar James Moran argued that such realities would not result in a newfound aesthetic for Araki, but rather that they would simply enable the auteur director to realize his post-punk \"sensibility at a greater level of ambition\" (Moran 20). Araki himself echoed such sentiments, in 1995, when he stated, \"Even if I were to make a fifty-million-dollar movie, because my personality is very strong, it would be a high-budget Gregg Araki film. I'm not too concerned about being sucked up into making faceless movies\" (qtd. in Moran 20). Araki further emphasized that his films would continue to differ substantially from mainstream Hollywood offerings, because \"any 'independent' film that reinforces and buys into the values of the mainstream is an opportunity wasted\" (qtd. in Moran 20).\n\nDespite such claims and assurances, however, the contents of Araki's next two films differed substantially from those that came before them. Perhaps most notably, although _Nowhere_ contains many elements of Araki's trademark post-punk authorial style and _Splendor_ far fewer of those elements, both of these films nevertheless possess a dramatically reduced radical\/subversive potential as compared with Araki's preceding films and their unapologetic representations of non-heterosexuality. These works represent the \"straightest\" creations of Araki's career up to the times of their release, even though they retain faint glimpses of the director's established queer sensibility, and it is evident that their character types and on-screen actions became more tame as investor expectations for their financial returns continued to grow.\n\nTaming (Teen) Queerness with _Nowhere_\n\nWith _Nowhere_ , as he had done with both _Totally F***ed Up_ and _The Doom Generation_ , Araki set out to create a romantic film, with a \"weird surrealistic tinge, buffered with real-world reality and serious spasms of ultra-violence,\" that focuses primarily on generational confusion and the possibility of love and is experienced like a crazy roller-coaster ride (\"Gregg's,\" par. 6, 16). This time around, however, he intentionally wrote the script in the form of a television pilot: \" _Nowhere_ , my next movie, is going to be my version of _Beverly Hills 90210_ , that whole idea of the interrelationships between beautiful L.A. youth. It's a mainstream movie with mainstream content, but totally tweaked and totally twisted and totally me,\" Araki explained in a 1994 interview (Chang 53). The fact that Araki admitted to intentionally creating a \"mainstream movie with mainstream content\" must not be overlooked, as this offering represents a substantial turning point in his filmmaking career that reached its apex with _Splendor_ just a few years later. Whereas Araki's preceding films appeared intentionally to attract controversy as a result of their unapologetic, in-your-face representations of non-heterosexual sexual orientations and forms of sexual expression, _Nowhere_ and _Splendor_ instead appeared to endeavor intentionally to downplay the risks of attracting such controversy while at the same time remaining just a bit beyond the mainstream.\n\n_Nowhere_ provides a (presumably typical) day-in-the-life glimpse into the everyday realities of a large group of racially and ethnically diverse L.A. adolescents and the feelings of alienation and insecurity that they regularly experience. As he did in both of the preceding offerings of Araki's teen-apocalypse trilogy, actor James Duval once again stars in the central role of this film as Dark, an attractive eighteen year old who believes that he and the other members of his generation were born to witness the end of the world and hopes, as a result, to find his one true love before the apocalypse occurs. Although he is romantically and sexually involved with Mel (played by Rachel True), she nevertheless has a purple-haired girlfriend on the side, named Lucifer (played by Kathleen Robertson), and believes in sleeping around with numerous others, of both sexes, while she is still young and attractive enough to do so. From the film's opening scene, as Dark masturbates in the shower while thinking about being alone with another bare-chested guy in a locker room, it becomes evident that he is experiencing bisexual urges of his own for Montgomery (played by Nathan Bexton), with whom he ends up in bed during the film's concluding scene.\n\nPromoted by Fine Line Features, its distributor, as being \"like a _Beverly Hills 90210_ episode on acid\" (\"About,\" par. 2), _Nowhere_ contains \"enough characters to fill two Robert Altman movies\" (Satuloff 92)\u2014a total of nineteen central characters and approximately two dozen peripheral ones\u2014as well as a fractured, web-like narrative that is not especially viewer-friendly. Dark's best friend, Cowboy (played by Guillermo Diaz), is experiencing difficulties with his boyfriend and fellow band member Bart (played by Jeremy Jordan), who, immersed in a self-destructive downward spiral, is becoming increasingly addicted to the substances sold to him by Handjob (played by Alan Boyce), a local drug dealer, as well as to his S&M-tinged sexual interactions with Kriss and Kozy (played by Chiara Mastroianni and Debi Mazar, respectively), the dominatrix duo who spend all of their time by the dealer's side. Montgomery requests some tutoring assistance from the brainy, brace-faced Dingbat (played by Christina Applegate), who has a major crush on Ducky (played by Scott Caan), who only has eyes for Alyssa (played by Jordan Ladd), who is sleeping with the well-endowed biker Elvis (played by Thyme Lewis). Ducky's sister, Egg (played by Sarah Lassez), is spending the day with The Teen Idol (played by Jaason Simmons) from _Baywatch_ , who walked in on her while she was urinating in a coffeehouse bathroom that morning. Rounding out the film's main characters are Alyssa's twin brother, Shad (played by Ryan Phillippe), who spends all of his time engaging in kinky sex acts with his girlfriend, Lilith (played by Heather Graham)\u2014such as inserting chocolate into her vagina and then eating out the melted remains\u2014and Mel's younger brother, Zero (played by Joshua Gibran Mayweather), who is in puppy love with Zoe (played by Mena Suvari). _Nowhere_ also features cameo appearances by Beverly D'Angelo, Shannen Doherty, Christopher Knight, David Leisure, Traci Lords, Rose McGowan, Eve Plumb, Charlotte Rae, John Ritter, and Lauren Tewes, among others, which Araki scatters throughout the film in order to reinforce its cumulative hallucinogenic quality (\"About,\" par. 12).\n\nBecause Dark is convinced that he will die soon, he takes his video camera with him everywhere, in order to document his impending doom. While he awaits the end of the world, he and Lucifer squabble incessantly, like little children, as a result of their ongoing competition for Mel's affection (e.g., Lucifer: \"Lick my box, Rover.\" Dark, in response: \"Clean the maggots out of it first, you stinky oyster\"), and he and his friends enjoy hanging out and taking hallucinogenic drugs together, such as when they play a game of \"kick the can\" while on Ecstasy. Occasional acts of visceral violence emerge suddenly in the film, without any foreshadowing whatsoever, such as when Egg's seeming storybook romance with The Teen Idol comes to an abrupt end when he violently rapes her after having convinced her that she is truly someone very special and getting her drunk, or when Elvis gleefully (and dementedly) beats Handjob to death with a Campbell's Tomato Soup can (an apparent homage to Andy Warhol) at a party because the dealer recently sold him some bad drugs. In addition to these unexpected plot developments, Egg suddenly commits suicide when she returns home, with dried blood covering her face, following her abuse at the hands of The Teen Idol, and Bart does the same after he returns home, feeling a bit disillusioned and alone, following a kinky sexual encounter during which Kriss and Kozy tear out both of his nipple rings, one using her teeth and the other using a pair of pliers.\n\nPerhaps the most unexpected developments of all in the film, however, involve the green-and-yellow, Godzilla-like space alien that is roaming Los Angeles which only Dark apparently sees. He first glimpses the alien while he is waiting at a bus stop, smoking a cigarette and listening to the sex-themed conversation of three ostentatiously dressed valley girls. As he fumbles (unsuccessfully) with his video camera to capture an image of this alien being, Dark is startled to witness the creature pulling out a laser gun and vaporizing the three girls, who vanish instantly, along with the alien. That evening, during the kick-the-can-on-Ecstasy game, Dark suspects that Montgomery has also been vaporized by the alien when he finds Montgomery's crucifix necklace on the floor in a seemingly otherwise empty locker room and then, moments later, is saluted by the alien before it once again disappears. Finally, during the big party being hosted by Jujyfruit (played by Gibby Haynes) at the night's end, Dark glimpses the space alien for the final time, as it drinks a beer in the kitchen. Surprisingly, Dark mentions his various encounters with the space alien only to Handjob\u2014casually mentioning that, in the past eighteen hours, he has witnessed four people being abducted by a space alien, a friend attempting to drown himself (in reference to Ducky's extreme reaction to the news of his sister's suicide), and nearly four hundred dollars leaving his wallet to pay for compact discs, with Handjob's response asking only about what sorts of CDs he purchased\u2014just prior to the drug dealer being murdered by Elvis.\n\nAlone in his bedroom at the end of the long day, during which it has become clear that Mel does not really care about him and is certainly not interested in a monogamous relationship, Dark remarks in his video-diary entry that all he wants out of life is one person who will hold him tight and reassure him that everything is going to be alright. Moments after he turns off the video camera, strips off his clothes, and switches off his bedroom light, he suddenly hears a faint tapping. Rising, he discovers the naked Montgomery, who removes a suction cup from his own forehead, at his window. After inviting him in and lending him a pair of his (dirty) underwear, Dark listens intently as Montgomery explains that he was kidnapped by space aliens, who experimented on him and talked of their intentions to take over the Earth before he was able to escape. Noting that he feels tired and a bit strange, as if catching a cold, Montgomery asks if he can rest awhile in Dark's bed. Lying down, he invites Dark to join him; Dark readily complies. Lying face-to-face with Dark, Montgomery acknowledges Dark's recent romantic relationship with Mel and then, gazing directly into Dark's eyes, emphasizes that he is not gay while simultaneously revealing his attraction toward his newfound friend. It is evident that the attraction is mutual. Montgomery proceeds to explain that he likes Dark a great deal, and that he thinks about him when they are apart; Dark responds that he feels the same way about Montgomery. When Montgomery adds that he has been searching his entire life for the one person he can love who simultaneously loves him for who he is, Dark is clearly smitten, as he leans in and kisses Montgomery on the forehead. Montgomery requests permission to spend the night, because he very much wants to sleep next to Dark. Dark grants his request based on one condition, to which Montgomery assents: that Montgomery will never, ever leave him. With their noses practically touching and their lips poised for a kiss, Dark delicately caresses Montgomery's cheek, and they close their eyes in preparation for a good night's sleep. Without question, this is the most touching scene in the film, and it is the only one that is developed in adequate depth, with Araki allowing it, in his expected trademark fashion, to play out in real time in order to emphasize its significance and heighten its emotionality. In fact, as Gavin Smith noted in _Film Comment_ , this \"final scene, in which [the] two boys profess their love for each other, manages to be the most heartfelt and tender moment in [Araki's] oeuvre . . .\" (\"Sundance 97\" 55).\n\nUnfortunately, however, this concluding scene, like so many others in the film, takes an immediate, entirely unexpected turn for the worse. Smith's comment, in its entirety, actually reads: \"The final scene, in which [the] two boys profess their love for each other, manages to be the most heartfelt and tender moment in [Araki's] oeuvre\u2014and, in its outrageous payoff, the most disillusioned\" (\"Sundance 97\" 55). As the scene continues, Montgomery begins to cough lightly; he soon begins to cough far more violently and incessantly, as though he is in danger of gagging or choking. Dark, visibly concerned, attempts to comfort him, but to no avail\u2014as Montgomery's entire body convulses, the boy explodes, showering Dark and the surrounding room with blood. Where an attractive male body once lay, Dark now discovers a huge cockroach-like space alien who announces \"I'm outta here\" and climbs out the window. A close-up of Dark's blood-covered face fills the screen as it fades to black, and the closing credits begin to roll.\n\nOn its surface, _Nowhere_ is certainly a Gregg Araki film containing key elements of the director's post-punk filmmaking style\u2014for example, it features two characters who engage in bisexual romantic and sexual relationships as well as random acts of visceral violence, defies mainstream approaches to teen films, and contains several scenes foregrounding S&M activity (including those with the dominatrix duo Kriss and Kozy as well as one in which Elvis commands Alyssa to tie him up and spank him as hard as possible) and a few foregrounding transvestitism. From start to finish, it also certainly embraces an intentional lack of traditional commercial appeal and refuses to take itself and its subject matter too seriously. A primary shortcoming of the film, however, is that it refuses to take itself and its subject matter seriously _at all_ , as a result of transforming the director's trademark bizarre, marginal characters who populate a seemingly surrealistic Los Angeles from interesting backdrop to comparatively uninteresting primary focus. With so many (superficial) characters to follow and the narrative jumping continually, and quite rapidly, from one character to the next, the viewer ends up caring about none of these young people at all (with the possible exception of Dark, yet far less so here than for the characters Duval played in both _Totally F***ed Up_ and _The Doom Generation)_ , a reality that results from the film's virtual abandonment (with the exception of its concluding scene, which ultimately goes awry) of Araki's penchant for including lengthy scenes that play out in real time to heighten their emotionality. Another glaring shortcoming of this film is that, as a result of these various factors and unlike the director's preceding works, it fails to make any sort of compelling statement about non-heterosexuality and\/or non-heterosexual individuals living in the age of AIDS that Araki's fans had come to expect. When Montgomery's body explodes at the film's end, Araki ends up making only a very superficial, tongue-in-cheek, and ultimately unfulfilling statement about \"alien-ation\" in relation to contemporary teens. Perhaps that is all that can be expected of a film that endeavors intentionally, in both its storyline and visual style, to emulate a hallucinogenic drug trip; however, there is no denying that the work's extreme emphasis on style over substance leaves a tremendous amount to be desired by its viewer.\n\nAbout this film, Araki has stated:\n\nI wanted to portray the world from a messed-up eighteen year old's perspective, a world within which anything can happen. When you're that age, everything is life or death, everything is hyper-accentuated. The film attempts to capture those extreme highs and lows. . . . It's about what it really feels like to be confused, to be in love, to watch your girlfriend leave the party with some other guy. (\"About,\" par. 5, 14)\n\nIn those (somewhat simplistic) regards, _Nowhere_ certainly accomplishes what its writer-director set out to do. The film's representation of teen life is entirely \"messed up,\" and it is one that repeatedly vacillates from one extreme to the next, creating a world in which practically anything at all\u2014including an alien invasion\u2014can occur without warning. The problem is that, when all is said and done, the film ends up feeling inauthentic\u2014it is clear that Araki has included all of the key components of his trademark post-punk filmmaking style here, as if he were checking them off of a comprehensive list, but the expected radical\/subversive payoff fails to materialize. Critic Bob Satuloff has characterized _Nowhere_ as being \"like a crazy quilt into which anything can be sewn\" (92); in addition, Araki himself has admitted that, with the exception of the James Duval character, _Nowhere_ \"really is just this bunch of crazy shit going on, with no emotional center\" (Hundley, par. 12). As a result, the film ends up representing a very different\u2014and ultimately quite disappointing\u2014sort of creation from this formerly intriguing and quite groundbreaking director.\n\nFollowing the release of _Nowhere_ , numerous critics noted that it is a very different sort of Gregg Araki movie. For example, reviewing the film for _Variety_ , Emanuel Levy wrote, \"Though not his best, Araki's sixth feature is without a doubt his most accessible . . . and superficially entertaining movie to date\" and that, as a result, the film should end up attracting a larger audience than the director's preceding offerings (\"Nowhere\" 66). In the same review, Levy also pointed out that \"thematically, [this] film has nothing new to offer\" (\"Nowhere\" 66). Reviewing the film for _Artforum_ , Dennis Cooper stated that Araki's career \"takes a sharp turn\" with _Nowhere_ , a \"bratty and hyperactive\" offering that is filled with \"phantasmagoric shallowness\" as well as a \"virtually interchangeable\" cast of characters that \"you're not supposed to give a toss about\u2014just pick out a cutie, track him or her through the labyrinth plot, and hope he or she eventually gets naked\" (22). With regard to the film's ultimate (and quite minimal) impact on the viewer, Cooper adds, \"When _Nowhere_ is over, it's so over that you half-wonder if Araki has invented a way to induce amnesia aesthetically\" (22). Similarly, the reviewer for Film.com characterized the work as \"a lighter, quicker movie than the first two-thirds of the triad [that] feels much slighter than its predecessors\" and noted that, because \"Araki has made the film in emulation of those hormonal hothouse TV dramas _Beverly Hills 90210_ and _Melrose Place_ , it veers closer to parody than the unsettling horror-slasher-comedy of _The Doom Generation_ \" (par. 1, 2). Reviewing the film for _Entertainment Weekly_ , Lisa Schwarzbaum noted that, along with its superficial storyline, _Nowhere_ features a \"visual and aural overload that ultimately tires rather than conveys a feeling of f***ed up-ness\" (46). Most directly of all, reviewer Jason Katzman emphasized that _Nowhere_ is the type of film \"jeered at not only just by critics, but also by drunken teenagers, prison inmates, and medicated zoo animals\" (qtd. in Hershenson, par. 9).\n\nDuring one of his heartfelt discussions with Mel, Dark states that he feels old-fashioned, as if he is from another planet, because he feels like he is only half a person without her. In another, Dark expresses to Mel that he wishes he could leave this entire planet behind in order to find true love. Such sentiments of isolation and alienation potentially lend themselves quite effectively to the creation of a science fiction narrative in which aliens from another planet begin to roam the Earth and perform experiments on humans whom they abduct, especially because science fiction works have historically devoted themselves to exploring as-yet-unknown worlds and social conditions that lie beyond known boundaries and emphasize potentially threatening deviations from the mainstream status quo (Lopez 267; Parish and Pitts vii; Shapiro 111). Accordingly, otherness in various forms is an essential component of science fiction narratives. Sometimes, such otherness results from viewer comparisons between present-day, real-world conditions and those provided in the science fiction work itself, with the aim of determining what one day might be experienced if current practices or deleterious trends are allowed to continue unabated (Hart, _AIDS_ 17-18). At other times, a far more straightforward and readily identifiable incarnation of such otherness assumes the form of \"the other,\" whether this be a physical being (e.g., alien, monster, threatening life form, etc.) or some social phenomenon (e.g., a disease, some condition that endangers human life, etc.) that deviates substantially from the mainstream status quo (Hart, _AIDS_ 19). As a result, especially for a director such as Araki who is known for engaging effectively in genre modification and defiance of cinematic convention, the potentialities of incorporating elements of science fiction offerings in a teen film, with the aim of creating a particularly compelling statement about alienation and social otherness in relation to contemporary teens, cannot be overstated. Unfortunately, Araki did not adequately avail himself of these potentialities when writing and directing _Nowhere_. Instead, his incorporation of the Godzilla-like space alien in this film serves primarily to make the daily world of its far-too-numerous teen characters seem just a bit more strange and surreal and to hint at the (presumably forthcoming) apocalypse, rather than to make any sort of more complex, more intelligent statement about otherness in relation to contemporary young people. In the end, and as a result, _Nowhere_ leaves many viewers desiring their money back, or at least the eighty minutes of their lives that they have devoted to the viewing experience. Even the significance of the film's title is neither particularly fulfilling nor deep: As Dark explains during the opening seconds, \"L.A. is, like, nowhere\u2014everybody who lives here is lost.\"\n\nIn his review of the film, Emanuel Levy concluded, \" _Nowhere_ is the kind of expressionistic movie that Araki had to make, though now that it's out of his system, perhaps he can move on to newer subjects\u2014and more resonant films\" (\"Nowhere\" 66). A similar sentiment was expressed by critic Lawrie Zion, who noted that, in this final installment of his teen-apocalypse trilogy, Araki \"wallowed in pretension that . . . lacked dramatic focus\" and \"continued to trade on shock value, but with diminishing artistic returns\" (\"Truth\" F14). Accordingly, in the months following _Nowhere_ 's release, the director's remaining devoted fans waited with bated breath to see if Araki would redeem himself, and get his filmmaking career back on (its original) track, with the release of his next feature film.\n\nGoing Mainstream with _Splendor_\n\nAraki had initially announced that his next film following _Nowhere_ would be _The Separation of the Earth from its Axis_ , the story of a gay male teen who ends up falling in love with a single father (\"Personnel\" 11; _Totally_ Screenplay). However, by the time _Nowhere_ was released, the assumedly gay director had apparently (and quite unexpectedly) become romantically involved with Kathleen Robertson, who played Lucifer in the concluding offering of his teen-apocalypse trilogy (which he dedicated to her in the closing credits with the words \"I love you, honey 4ever.xxx\") and who starred in what ultimately became his seventh feature instead of _The Separation of the Earth from its Axis_ , the romantic comedy _Splendor_ (which he also dedicated to Robertson in the closing credits: \"For my baby, my one and only\"). Araki's romantic relationship with a woman certainly \"set tongues wagging\" (Brodie 11), especially after he walked all around the Sundance Film Festival with Robertson on his arm (Hays, \"Make,\" par. 7). It also ended up further alienating several of his earliest fans while simultaneously leading his filmmaking style and creative choices in new, far less controversial, and increasingly heterosexual directions.\n\nTake, for example, the following scene from _Splendor_ , written and directed by Araki, which is actually one of the film's most erotic. In an L.A. apartment, Veronica (played by Robertson), a heterosexual aspiring actress, invites the two men she has been dating simultaneously for several months to dinner and, after plying each with numerous drinks, initiates a game of Truth or Dare. She asks the first guy, the brooding novelist and music critic Abel (played by Johnathon Schaech), if he has ever had sex with a guy; he replies that he has not. She asks the second guy, the punk-rock drummer with perfect abs Zed (played by Matt Keeslar), the same question; \"Define sex,\" he replies. Next, she dares Abel to remove his shirt and Zed to remove his pants. As the game progresses, the woman dares Abel to kiss Zed. He instantly refuses. Veronica expresses her disappointment, cautioning that Abel's refusal is turning her off and adding that a kiss between the two men would be incredibly hot. Reluctantly, Abel plants a quick peck on Zed's cheek. \"No, you have to do it on the lips,\" Veronica protests, once again revealing her disappointment. Minutes later, after she has stripped naked and danced around the room on a dare, Veronica dares Zed to kiss Abel \"full on.\" An initially tight-lipped, entirely tongue-less and passion-free kiss, lasting fewer then ten seconds, results.\n\nIf the above scene had appeared in _The Living End, Totally F***ed Up_ , or _The Doom Generation_ , the resulting kiss between these two attractive young men would have been much hotter, and they likely would have been fondling each other's package before progressing to have sex with each other, as well as with Veronica. In _Splendor_ , however, that is where the scene draws to an abrupt close. The following day, during a conversation with her lesbian best friend, Mike (played by Kelly Macdonald), Veronica reveals that the three did indeed end up in bed together the previous evening; however, Veronica emphasizes that, to the best of her knowledge, nothing at all happened sexually between the two guys. Such elusive treatment of such a sexually charged situation is extremely atypical for Araki, who set out with this film to make a relatively wholesome romantic comedy focusing on a threesome relationship between a heterosexual woman and two heterosexual\u2014not even _bisexual_ \u2014men. The main idea behind the storyline is that, when Veronica finds herself unable to choose between the two men\u2014both of whom she met at the same Halloween party; one of whom offers intellectual stimulation and the other who provides animalistic sexuality\u2014she decides to keep them both.\n\nAs the film continues, both men end up moving into Veronica's apartment after Zed is thrown out by his roommates for not paying the rent and Abel becomes jealous when Veronica takes him in. By summer, the three young people are, in Veronica's words, \"living in sin together\" as \"one happy, kooky family,\" as if \"the rules everybody else [lives] by didn't apply to [them].\" Abel articulates that he doesn't care if others end up regarding them as deviant freaks because they sleep in the same bed and have sex together on a regular basis. Their biggest problem, in fact, appears to be that the guys frequently leave the toilet seat up. Such tranquility disappears quickly, however, after Veronica becomes pregnant and begins dating Ernest (played by Eric Mabius), a successful television producer and new suitor who, unlike her own parents, will be able to provide her unborn child with an affluent and stable home environment. Abel and Zed are devastated when Veronica moves out to stay with Mike for a while, in order to weigh her options and pursue her emergent romantic relationship with Ernest, which blossoms more fully during a vacation getaway to Maui. When they learn, at the last minute, that Veronica is planning to marry Ernest on New Year's Eve, however, they snap out of their depressed, inebriated states and stop the wedding, in a sequence that is clearly an homage to the interrupted wedding sequence in _The Graduate_ (Mike Nichols, 1967). Thereafter, Veronica ultimately gives birth to twin girls, and she emphasizes, in response to the guys' repeated inquiries, that the daughters are neither Abel's nor Zed's. Instead, she says, \"They're ours.\"\n\nIn reviewing the film for _Variety_ , Emanuel Levy referred to _Splendor_ as an \"upbeat, visually stunning but inconsequential picture which holds limited commercial appeal in today's market\" and noted that, \"having lost his core gay audience with his teen-apocalypse trilogy ( _Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation_ , and _Nowhere_ ), all of which failed commercially, Araki [was] forced to return to the creative well and come up with a different kind of film\" (62). The end result? As critic Jan Stuart explained in _The Advocate_ , \"Lube your gag reflex, dudes, but he's gone and made a screwball comedy. I know, I know, but give him some slack, people. Even totally rad directors get old\" (63). Succinctly summarizing the film's storyline, Stuart continues:\n\nYou _Nowhere_ fans will recognize Kathleen Robertson (Araki's real-life girlfriend) looking very Melanie Griffith in blonde hair as Veronica, this ex-good girl from suburbia who escapes to Los Angeles to be an actress. She meets two guys when she goes to a club with her token lesbian buddy. . . . She can't decide between them, so before long they're shopping and f***ing and living as a threesome. Like great, more Araki outlaws, right? Yeah, except they behave in all these bourgeois ways. The guys get into this boring hetero antagonistic thing with each other, and Veronica gets all freaked that they won't be able to support her when she gets pregnant. When she runs off to Maui with some earnest [television] movie director named Ernest, you can just hear the queer guys in the audience yellin', \"Do it! Do it!\" at Abel and Zed as they sit alone together on the couch. But they only hug. Like, hello? (63)\n\nCritics Owen Gleiberman and Emanuel Levy expressed similar disappointment with the film's overall contents. In his _Entertainment Weekly_ review, Gleiberman concluded, \"Since the movie is actually quite coy about revealing any bedroom details, it gradually loses wattage\" (47). Elaborating on such notions, Levy expressed in _Variety_ , \"What's disappointing about _Splendor_ is that Araki shows [no] courage . . . in delineating the kind of relationship that prevails between Abel and Zed when Veronica walks out on them\u2014and they continue to share a household together\" (62). Even during the brief scene in which Abel and Zed end up naked in the shower together, everything remains entirely platonic as Abel simply attempts to sober his buddy up so that they can head out to stop Veronica's midnight wedding ceremony.\n\nWith _Splendor_ , Araki is attempting to rework the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s with which he is so smitten. His resulting creation, for example, contains substantial intertextual references to _Design for Living_ (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933), a film about two male American artists, one a playwright (played by Fredric March) and the other a painter (played by Gary Cooper), who fall for the same free-spirited woman (played by Miriam Hopkins) and, after she finds herself unable to choose between them, she ends up living with both of them to serve as a critic of their work. It simultaneously contains evidence of intertextual influences from _His Girl Friday_ (Howard Hawks, 1940), about a war between the sexes that erupts when a newspaper editor (played by Cary Grant) convinces his star reporter\/ex-wife (played by Rosalind Russell) to postpone her marriage to another man in order to cover a big story pertaining to political corruption, as well as _The Philadelphia Story_ (George Cukor, 1940), about how a divorced woman who is preparing to remarry (played by Katharine Hepburn) is unexpectedly confronted with having to choose between her past, present, and emergent romantic partners. _Splendor_ also contains noteworthy intertextual references to _A Woman Is a Woman_ (1961), director Jean-Luc Godard's send-up of Hollywood musical comedies which focuses on an exotic dancer (played by Anna Karina) who very much wishes to have a baby and, after her boyfriend (played by Jean-Claude Brialy) balks at the idea, turns to his best friend (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) for assistance in the matter, ultimately ending up sleeping with them both.\n\nIn interviews, Araki has stated that, with _Splendor_ , he intentionally set out to create a _Design for Living_ -type of an offering that would end on an optimistic note, serving as his first film with a clearly happy ending (\"Designed,\" par. 12). Because screwball comedy is one of his favorite genres that he learned about in film school, he wanted to create a movie that, like _Bringing Up Baby_ and related offerings, explored the deconstruction of manners and social expectations (\"Designed,\" par. 16, 18). He decided to embrace the threeway structure of the film because, as he explains, \"In the threeway there is confusion and the element of unpredictability. The dynamic is much more interesting because it is just not a part of what we perceive as Western civilization. . . . Together there are a sort of rules, which they need to figure out. And to some extent that is what the film is about\u2014figuring out how they are going to live\" (\"Designed,\" par. 9, 11).\n\nUnlike conventional screwball comedies, which typically end in marriage in order to restore some semblance of the patriarchal social order, Araki's film ends with an ongoing m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois, which is quite atypical in Western society. This is, perhaps, the only innovative or intriguing aspect of his entire creation, however. What Araki seems to have overlooked when deciding to make a screwball comedy in the late 1990s is that screwball comedies in their heyday obtained much of their appeal from the reality that their contents were subject to the repressive restrictions of the Motion Picture Production Code, so they had to covertly communicate controversial romantic and sexual messages in ways that would not be readily identified by film censors. The resulting films, for example, were typically quite adept at utilizing \"denial mechanisms\" that created ambiguity around potentially transgressive occurrences, suggesting that something transgressive (such as an act of premarital sex) had occurred while providing alternative narrative details or logic that could be utilized simultaneously to deny it (Greene 9; Jacobs 113). The goal of including such mechanisms was to increase the ambiguity as to whether or not taboo actions had actually occurred (Greene 14). Double-meaning gags and instances of double-entendre in dialogue were also utilized commonly in screwball comedies to provide for two or more possible interpretations of identical character actions, one of which was innocent and the other(s) far more risqu\u00e9 (Greene 17-18). _Splendor_ contains none of these devices, most likely because it had no need to\u2014in the late 1990s, the sorts of content restrictions common to screwball comedies decades earlier no longer existed; Araki was free to explicitly represent taboo and transgressive narrative developments on-screen to as great an extent as he desired. The fact that he chose not to, especially given the sorts of daring, unapologetic representations of sexual couplings and forms of sexual expression featured in his proceeding films which his fans had come to expect, is one of _Splendor_ 's most substantial shortcomings. It results in the film being quite tame and somewhat boring to watch. In addition, as Jan Stuart emphasizes in her _Splendor_ review, Araki's film is more a \"conventional comedy about unconventional behavior\" than a true screwball comedy, because the lovers in screwball comedies historically \"wreak havoc without heed or thought to society's mores. They have no choice; it's who they are\" (62). In contrast, Araki's central characters in _Splendor_ , as Stuart notes, are well aware of the social boundaries they are crossing, and they do so in such subtle, non-threatening ways that they only quite minimally pose any risks at all to society's mores.\n\nReviewing the film for _The Austin Chronicle_ , Marc Savlov referred to it as a \"kinder, gentler Gregg Araki film\" and noted:\n\nIn fact, almost every aspect of Araki's previous work is missing from _Splendor. . . . Splendor_ 's dirty little secret? It's _sweet_. In fact, if this movie were any more charming, you'd have to mop the treacle from the floor after each and every screening. . . . The whole project, indeed, is shot through with a giddy, love-puppy sensibility that's wholly unexpected from Araki. No misplaced jism, no beheadings, no penile defenestrations. Araki appears to have traded in his black-clad pop sensibility for a lighter shade of love. (par. 1)\n\nAraki's decidedly uncontroversial, mainstream treatment of _Splendor_ 's potentially shocking subject matter ultimately leads the film to become a disappointing, compromised version of _Jules and Jim_ (Francois Truffaut, 1962) meets _Three's Company_. At one point in the film, after Mike points out to Veronica that her life with Abel and Zed has indeed become similar to a _Three's Company_ rerun, Veronica comments that she found that particular situation comedy, about two single young women and a single young man who end up living together in a Santa Monica apartment in order to make ends meet, to be fairly progressive for its time. It is true that _Three's Company_ was relatively progressive on U.S. television in the late 1970s. It is also true that screwball comedies were relatively progressive on the cinematic landscape in the 1930s and 1940s. However, what Araki appears to have failed to recognize is that there is nothing particularly progressive nor interesting about combining their approaches in a film that was made and released in the late 1990s, especially if he did not simultaneously engage in the sorts of genre modification and defiance of cinematic convention for which he had, by then, become well-known. Lacking entirely in _Splendor_ are the hallmarks of Araki's trademark post-punk style\u2014for example, there are no provocative images of non-heterosexual sexual activity, there are no acts of visceral violence, there is no defiance of cinematic convention (with the possible exception of the film's m\u00e9nage-\u00e0-trois ending), and there is no unapologetic foregrounding of a range of human sexualities and sexual practices that have historically been marginalized by mainstream society. Also missing are Araki's expected inclusion of bizarre, marginal characters who populate a seemingly surrealistic Los Angeles (despite the reality that all three of the film's central characters derive their somewhat limited incomes by working in different aspects of the Hollywood entertainment industry), the intentional lack of traditional commercial appeal, the intentional refusal to take the film and its subject matter too seriously, and the utilization of such cinematic attributes to make a powerful statement about non-heterosexuality and\/or non-heterosexual individuals living in the age of AIDS. As a result, _Splendor_ ends up feeling like an unnecessarily mainstream film that has been made by an entirely different director.\n\nConcluding Observations\n\nWhen punk music emerged in Britain and the United States in the mid 1970s, it represented a distinct form of cultural production that encouraged a potent spirit of anarchy and disorder and challenged hegemonic social expectations. Within just a few years, however, the punk aesthetic had been substantially incorporated into mainstream culture, stripping it of the majority of its subversive potential and contributing significantly to its rapid demise (Hebdige 94-96). A similar phenomenon occurred with regard to Gregg Araki and his post-punk filmmaking style over the decade of the 1990s, as his various character types and their on-screen actions became far more tame as investor expectations for the financial returns of his films continued to grow. In a (largely failed) attempt to attract a larger audience and generate more impressive box-office returns, the director began to tone down the extreme visuals and storylines that were so essential to the effective application of his post-punk authorial style. About this process of incorporation into the mainstream, which he realizes is frequently essential to achieving commercial success, Araki has utilized the metaphor of an amoeba spreading wildly and absorbing everything around it, pushing further and further toward the margins and steadily drifting toward him (Chang 50).\n\nFollowing the releases of both _Nowhere_ and _Splendor_ , numerous fans and critics alike believed that Araki's career, if he would actually continue to have one, had entered a state of terminal decline (Zion, \"Truth\" F14). The director who, just a few years earlier, was characterized as \"an anarchic filmmaker in the tradition of Vigo and Pasolini, showing us areas of human behavior and transgression that test our limits as an audience\" (Severson, par. 4), had apparently disappeared, being replaced by a far more tame and uninteresting filmmaker with decidedly mainstream aspirations. When asked, shortly after _Splendor_ was released, about the types of films he would like to make in the future, Araki responded that he would enjoy making either a musical or a fifty-million-dollar action film (\"Designed,\" par. 24). This reality is particularly distressing because it pertains to a formerly intriguing independent director who personally stated, after being catapulted to New Queer Cinema notoriety following the release of _The Living End_ in 1992, \"It's really important that my films go way out there. One of the things that really bothers me about a lot of independent films is that they don't take any chances formally, politically, or in choice of content\" (\"Rebellious,\" par. 9).\n\nBy the end of the 1990s, it had become quite clear that Araki had lost focus of his original filmmaking goals as well as the hallmarks of his post-punk authorial style. Perhaps the most positive thing that could be said about the resulting state of his filmmaking career at that point was several critics had noted that _Nowhere_ and _Splendor_ continued to develop the distinctive visual style of his films, even if their contents were no longer particularly groundbreaking, culturally relevant, nor inherently interesting (Levi, \"Nowhere\" 66; Satuloff 92).\nChapter 5\n\nReestablishing Relevancy with _Mysterious Skin_\n\nAt the start of the new millennium, Gregg Araki's filmmaking career appeared to be in shambles. As one critic noted, toward the end of the 1990s, the director \"continued to trade on shock value, but with diminishing artistic returns\" (Zion, \"Truth\" F14). Another critic stated that, over time, many individuals were likely \"put off by something else that does, admittedly, have the potential to hurt ticket sales: the fact that [a] film was made by Gregg Araki\" (Porter F15). Yet another critic emphasized that Araki's \"highly publicized off-screen romance with [Kathleen Robertson] strained the GLBT community's acceptance of the auteur as a 'serious filmmaker' of gay-themed films\" (Dossi 65).\n\nCertainly, in the aftermath of the release of _Splendor_ , Araki's filmmaking career had, to say the least, become a bit enigmatic. Accordingly, it raised noteworthy questions about what loyal fans should make of an auteur director whose most recent offering differed so substantially from his preceding body of cinematic work. Because he was widely regarded as a noteworthy auteur during the decade of the 1990s, Araki was expected by his fans to continue to explore in his later films the same types of themes he had consistently explored in his preceding ones for, as Jean Renoir once noted, the most noteworthy auteur directors typically spend their entire lives making just one film\u2014as in the same basic film over and over again\u2014with certain variations and permutations that become evident through the process of viewing their entire oeuvre (Wollen 575). Andrew Sarris echoed that same notion, in his early articulation of auteur theory, when he emphasized that an auteur director is most readily identifiable by the consistency of interior meaning that exists within his or her various creations, which becomes evident through the pattern that is established over the course of several films (563). As such, Araki's auteurist status became endangered when he turned his back almost entirely on the thematic preoccupations of his preceding works, in an attempt to lure a larger audience, with _Splendor_.\n\nWhen an auteur director with an \"outsider sensibility,\" such as Araki, makes a substantial narrative and representational shift toward the \"mainstream,\" he or she risks alienating his or her entire core following, especially when that director's resulting cinematic creations become virtually unrecognizable by the largely queer audience that embraced them from the beginning. Admittedly, the outrage surrounding the AIDS pandemic mellowed substantially over the decade of the 1990s, and acceptance of non-heterosexual sexual identities continued to grow during that same period, both of which naturally had at least some impact on Araki's filmmaking choices as his career progressed. The director's romantic relationship with a woman, who performed in _Nowhere_ and became the star of _Splendor_ , also played a role. Nevertheless, given Araki's prior status as a leading director of the New Queer Cinema, his remaining loyal fans reasonably still expected the auteur, at a minimum, to embrace controversial subject matter and non-heterosexual themes in his films\u2014both of which were lacking in his seventh feature\u2014and to continue to incorporate his post-punk authorial style. If Araki wished to redeem himself and reestablish his cultural relevancy in the eyes of his fans, it appeared that he would have to return to his filmmaking roots in whatever offering became his eighth feature film, if indeed there would ever be one. The years went by without a new Araki film. Then, in late 2004, _Mysterious Skin_ , a story of self-discovery as two teenage boys come to terms with the reality of having been sexually abused by their Little League coach years earlier and its psychological aftermath, premiered at the Venice Film Festival before going on to impress fans and critics across the globe.\n\nEliminating the Enigma by Embracing the Mysterious\n\n_Mysterious Skin_ , Araki's first screenplay adaptation (from the acclaimed novel by Scott Heim), represented the auteur director's successful attempts to reestablish his cinematic and cultural relevancy in relation to the expectations of his core audience as well as the approaches and subject matter of contemporary queer cinema. It unflinchingly deals with the subject matter of pedophilia, prostitution, and rape as it presents the stories of Kansas residents Neil McCormick (played by Chase Ellison as a child and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a teenager) and Brian Lackey (played by George Webster as a child and Brady Corbet as a teenager), whose lives are inherently intertwined as a result of the sexual abuse they encountered at the hands of their Little League coach (played by Bill Sage) when they were both only eight years old, over the course of a decade (from 1981 to 1991). As he matures, the cocky Neil becomes a hustler who, by having sex with older gay men, seeks the same sense of comfort and status of being special that he derived from his consensual (or so he maintains throughout the film) sexual encounters with the coach years earlier. In contrast, the shy and reclusive Brian has blocked out his memories of such encounters entirely and has replaced them with the belief that he has experienced firsthand encounters with space aliens, instead.\n\nFollowing his first sexual encounter with the coach, Brian blacks out for several hours, ultimately waking up, with a nosebleed, in the crawl space of his family's home. In the weeks (and ultimately years) that follow, he wets his bed occasionally, and he regularly experiences nightmares and nosebleeds. Following another sexual encounter with the coach on Halloween night a few years later, Brian blacks out again. Over time, he ends up convincing himself that he must have been abducted by aliens during those missing hours of his life, which helps to explain the dreams he continues to have about being \"probed\" by another being. Neil, on the other hand, apparently realized that he was gay at the age of eight, and as a result he welcomed the predatory sexual encounters with the coach, whom he found to be quite attractive, similar to the images of naked lifeguards, cowboys, and firemen he had secretly viewed in issues of his mother's _Playgirl_ magazines. At that same age, Neil also watched his mother having sex with her Marlboro-Man-looking boyfriend\u2014which later became \"his type\"\u2014on the swing set in their yard, masturbating all the while. Having been the star of the team and the coach's favorite player, Neil felt honored that the coach picked him to be with on a recurring basis, even if the two of them occasionally involved other teammates in their sexual activities. A decade later, Neil still romanticizes his encounters with the coach and recalls them with a combined aura of childhood innocence and nostalgia. Their competing realities are summarized quite succinctly in the film's tagline, which states, \"Two boys. One can't remember. The other can't forget.\"\n\nFor much of the film, Brian and Neil's stories run parallel to each other; it is not until the closing sequence that they intersect and Neil helps Brian to remember what actually occurred between the two boys and Coach one night so long ago. Before that intersection occurs, Neil begins hustling at a park in his hometown of Hutchinson and eventually continues that \"profession,\" during some of the darkest days of the AIDS pandemic, in New York City, where he joins his childhood friend and soul mate Wendy (played by Riley McGuire as a child and Michelle Trachtenberg as a teenager), who moved there a year earlier. Once Neil joins Wendy in the city and begins to turn tricks, she reminds him that they're not in Kansas anymore, referring at once to the reality that he needs to engage in safe sex and grow up. In contrast, Brian continues to live at home with his mother, jotting down recollections of his recurring dreams and beginning classes at the local community college. While watching a television special pertaining to UFO abductions, he learns of Avalyn Friesen (played by Mary Lynn Rajskub), a thirty-two-year-old, unmarried secretary who lives with her farmer father in a town located just half an hour away. Avalyn claims to have discovered, through the process of hypnotic regression, that she was abducted by aliens nearly two dozen times, beginning at the age of six. Naturally, the woman's experiences and close proximity intrigue Brian, who writes her a letter and ultimately befriends her. Together, Avalyn attempts to help Brian make sense of what likely happened to him on the nights that he experienced missing time while a child. She shows him a scar on her thigh, where she believes that aliens have implanted a tracking device, and she adds that Brian's nosebleeds suggest that is where his own tracking device was implanted, in order to avoid a scar. She listens to the details of his dreams, like a detective following the clues. She attempts to assist Brian in his pursuit of sexual discovery (although he rejects her advances, because they unknowingly remind him of his experiences with the coach). She also discovers the name \"N. McCormick\" on the back of a framed photograph of Brian's Little League team, which takes him in search of the other boy who appears regularly in his dreams. His efforts lead him to the McCormick home on the day that Neil has departed for New York City, where Brian ends up befriending Neil's closest male friend, Eric (played by Jeff Licon), who clearly has an unrequited crush on Neil and is saddened when he is left behind in Kansas. Brian and Eric then begin spending increasing amounts of time together, both in and out of their community college classes. Eric informs Neil of their interactions by postcard, describing Brian as strangely asexual and noting that Brian and Neil once played in Little League together. Eric adds that Brian believes he and Neil were once abducted by space aliens together.\n\nUltimately, Neil and Brian's defensive fantasies are abolished when Eric introduces them to one another upon Neil's holiday return to Kansas and he drives them to Coach's old house. As he approaches the front door, Brian is struck by the blue light on the porch, which matches the shade that he has been associating in his memories and dreams for years with the interior of an alien spaceship. Left alone by Eric, Neil and Brian enter the home on Christmas Eve through an unlocked window, directly into Coach's old bedroom (which is now another family's nursery), as carolers can be heard singing down the street. In the kitchen, Neil is disappointed to find that the cabinets are no longer stocked with snacks, so he devours a cookie from a snowman cookie jar. Settling on the living room sofa, Brian informs Neil that he has sought him out because he would like to dream about something different for a change. Accordingly, Neil begins to tell him about his own experiences that summer with Coach, and he proceeds to share the details about the night that Coach, following a rained-out baseball game, brought Brian back to the house with them. As on the other occasions when Coach brought home another boy, Neil was used by him as a prop, to convince the onlooker that the sexual acts being initiated were a type of fun game. Neil explains that he kissed Brian first, to get his mouth all shiny and wet for Coach, who kissed him next. Then, Coach and Neil removed Brian's clothes. Neil went down on Brian briefly, followed by Coach. Afterwards, the boys played the \"five-dollar game.\" On that evening, it required Neil, and then Brian, to fist Coach, all the way up to their elbows, in order to receive a five-dollar bill. Immediately thereafter, as Coach and Neil were getting Brian dressed, Brian fell face first to the floor, which caused his nose to start bleeding. Then, they drove Brian home and left him in his driveway. By the time Neil finishes revealing the details of that abusive evening, Brian once again has a bloody nose on the sofa, and he begins to shake uncontrollably. Neil holds him tight in their womb-like setting, attempting to comfort him. The film concludes with carolers at the door singing \"Silent Night,\" overshadowed by a voiceover from Neil explaining how he wanted to tell Brian that everything would now be alright (but he knew that wasn't true, and he found himself unable to speak anyway), that he wished there was a way they could go back and undo what had happened to them in the past, and that, like two angels, they could both simply leave this world behind at that moment and magically disappear.\n\nClearly, with _Mysterious Skin_ , Araki once again embraced his penchant for exploring controversial subject matter in boundary-pushing ways. In part, his representation of pedophilia in this film is off-putting to many viewers because it blatantly portrays Neil, at the very early age of eight, as being a decidedly (homo)sexual being (Ide F9). At the same time, his approach is further noteworthy because, unlike other films such as _Happiness_ (Todd Solondz, 1998) and _The Woodsman_ (Nicole Kassell, 2004) that take viewers into the minds of the abusers, Araki's offering takes viewers on a decade-long, psychologically complex and devastating journey into the lives and minds of the abused individuals themselves, in addition to portraying their victimizer relatively sympathetically (Dossi 65; Ide F9) as \"at once the predator who stole Neil's innocence, the father he never had, and the great love of his life\" (Green and Goode 82). As James Christopher emphasized in his discussion of the film, based on his interview with the director:\n\nIn short, Neil is not the tabloid image of an abused child, and the coach \"is not this weird evil man who pitches up in a van out of nowhere. He's your next-door neighbor,\" Araki says, \"the most normal guy in the world. It's in the story that Neil is gay at an early age and attracted to the coach, but I feel he is the most damaged individual in the film. Yes, there are some things in the movie that open your eyes, that shed light on something so taboo that people don't want to talk about it. But if people don't want to acknowledge uncomfortable truths then abuse will always happen.\" (F14)\n\nPerhaps surprisingly, given the unapologetic representations of Araki's preceding offerings, there are no actual scenes of childhood sexual abuse in this work; the sexual scenes featuring Coach and the young boys have been carefully storyboarded and edited to suggest what has occurred while protecting the child actors from experiencing anything inappropriate, with the end result of making their implied actions all the more haunting and provocative because they are mentally rather than visually graphic (Esther 44; LaSalle E5; Lee, par. 8; Seguin F17). Nevertheless, as Michael Koresky points out in his _Film Comment_ review, in typical Araki fashion, \"there's still enough aggressive sex to scare off the straights\" (73).\n\nFrom Page to Screen: Reflections on the Adaptation Process\n\nGiven the film's subject matter and representational approaches, Araki, like many other people, was surprised to find that _Mysterious Skin_ was embraced as a critical success and ended up being included on several critics' lists of the top-ten films of 2004 (Christopher F14; Hays, _View_ 37; Zion, \"Child\" L4). In addition, numerous critics regard _Mysterious Skin_ as being the best film of his career (Chonin El), at least in part because its transgressive nature enables it very effectively to \"question the unquestionable\" by showing, in the words of Araki, \"hidden territory that happens every day in our society, but that society tries to pretend doesn't happen\" (Seguin F17). He should not have been so surprised. In large part, the success of the film is bolstered by the source material upon which it is based\u2014Heim's semiauto-biographical novel is quite powerful and engaging, to the extent that it brought Araki to tears the first time he read it (Christopher F14). The director has said that, because the novel had such a tremendous emotional impact on him and its contents haunted him for several years, he knew that _Mysterious Skin_ would likely one day become his first film based on another person's material if he ever decided to move in that direction (Esther 44; Lee, par. 5).\n\nAraki's decision to adapt Heim's novel for the screen was somewhat unexpected, most notably because all of his preceding feature films had been the products of his own imagination. By the time he released _Nowhere_ and _Splendor_ , however, it was becoming increasingly clear that Araki was running low on personal creativity, to the extent that he had begun to release increasingly tame and comparatively uninteresting cinematic works that appealed neither to mainstream audiences nor his remaining core of New Queer Cinema fans. On the surface, his decision to base his next film on another author's work would appear to call Araki's status as an auteur into question, because it is commonly assumed that each film released by an auteur director is primarily the result of that individual's own creative processes, with the director serving as \"the dominant personality who has made that effort cohere and whose force and creative vision have chiefly shaped the finished film\" (Bywater and Sobchack 53). Nevertheless, because Araki personally served as the adaptor of Heim's novel in his role as screenwriter on this project, he retained a substantial degree of agency as a primary creative force who shaped the finished film, making complex decisions about which narrative developments to feature or eliminate, and how to treat those that made the cut, in his efforts to reduce a nearly three-hundred-page book into an approximately one-hundred-minute film. In addition, he took comfort in the fact that he and Heim are similar in noteworthy ways\u2014for example, they are both gay, they are the same age, they like the same types of music, and they are creative individuals with an interest in telling stories about outsiders (Esther 45)\u2014and he has indicated that he loved Heim's source material as much as he loves entities that are entirely of his own creation (Hays, _View_ 42). In a very real sense, then, _Mysterious Skin_ , in both its subject matter and its treatment of that subject matter, is a Gregg Araki story through and through.\n\nAbout the process of adapting Heim's novel for the screen, Araki has stated, \"When I was doing the adaptation, it was important to me that the film be very faithful to the book because I love the story so much, and I thought it was such a powerful story and such a beautiful story. . . . I had the book with me the whole time I was writing\" (Lee, par. 21). It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that Araki's resulting screenplay does indeed remain quite faithful to its original source material in numerous ways.\n\nFor example, one very noteworthy aspect that stands out from the first few chapters of Heim's novel is the degree to which Coach's apartment is designed to serve as a child magnet, replete with casual furnishings (e.g., beanbag chairs), tempting treats (e.g., snack foods of all kinds), and appealing diversions (e.g., all of the latest Atari video games). It is also a welcoming, laid-back environment in which nothing that grown-ups typically frown upon\u2014including the occasional food fight\u2014appears to be off limits. Araki's film captures these same elements and their various appeals, from the viewpoint of a child, perfectly, which enables Coach to seduce Neil rather efficiently. To get Neil alone for the first time, the coach informs Neil's mother (played by Elisabeth Shue), after his team's first win, that he is taking his players out to celebrate. Instead, he picks up only Neil and they spend the day together in a simulated date, complete with a movie (an R-rated slasher flick that Neil chooses) and dinner (pizza, which they pick up and take back to the coach's home). Immediately thereafter, while they play Atari video games together, the coach inadvertently distracts Neil, which causes the boy to mess up; Neil utters a profane word as a result. This appears to turn the coach on, as he grabs a nearby tape recorder, encourages Neil to belch into its microphone loudly, and asks him to repeat the same profane word several times. Seconds later, the coach grabs a Polaroid camera and encourages Neil to strike a variety of playful poses; as he does so, he instructs Neil to open his mouth very wide, inserts his thumb (as a penis symbol) atop the boy's tongue, and snaps the picture to serve later as a fantasy device. It is not until their next night alone together at Coach's home, however, that anything explicitly sexual occurs between the two. During that encounter, Coach shows Neil the photo album containing all of the Polaroids he shot of him and then, when Neil indicates that he is hungry, he leads the boy to the kitchen and opens a cabinet, which is extremely well stocked with snacks. Neil is drawn to the cabinet's assortment of miniature boxes of cereal, at least in part because his mother refuses to buy them, claiming that they are a waste of money. He becomes upset when he spills his box of Corn Pops accidentally while opening it, but, rather than getting angry as Neil expected, Coach appears to be amused. The two proceed to open several of the additional small boxes and toss their contents into the air as well, creating a rainbow of cereal bits on the floor. It is then that Coach makes his move. Pushing Neil gently down to the floor, Coach rests his head on Neil's chest and then moves in for a kiss. What follows remains concealed from the viewer; however, when the encounter has concluded, Coach reassures Neil that he liked it and that it is okay that he did so. Araki's dialogue and visuals (especially the image of colorful cereal bits falling down endlessly upon Neil from above, which he recalls in brief flashbacks elsewhere in the film) effectively convey both the substance and mood of Heim's descriptions of these same events, making their effect on the viewer all the more disconcerting as he or she vicariously experiences everything that the young victim of pedophilia is experiencing.\n\nNeil's close relationship with Wendy is another important aspect of Heim's novel that Araki captures quite effectively on film, albeit with a tremendous amount of compression. To do so, the director vividly brings to life the novel's sequence from Halloween 1983, when Neil was ten years old and Wendy was eleven, during which their bond became solidified. In Araki's film, the pair \"kidnap\" a mentally handicapped boy while he is trick-or-treating, force him to lie on the ground and hold bottle rockets in his lips, ignite the fireworks, and launch them into the night sky. Immediately thereafter, upon discovering their victim's bloody mouth and splintered lips, Wendy panics, fearing that the boy is going to tell on them. Neil responds that there are things they can do to get him on their side. He then proceeds to masturbate the boy before progressing to give him a blowjob. Wendy looks on in shock, realizing simultaneously that Neil is gay and that he has also been the victim of childhood sexual abuse. In voiceover, as the sequence draws to a close, Neil emphasizes that the evening's events bound him and Wendy together forever. Araki's decision to focus on this particular scene, for the sake of efficiency, was quite insightful. In the novel, Heim is able to reveal the bonds of their relationship far more gradually, as Wendy discovers that her initial crush on Neil is doomed to failure because he is queer, which he reveals one day during their middle school recess by hypnotizing a straight male student, lying on top of him, and kissing him before the boy snaps out of his trance, to the shock of everyone else around them. Thereafter, Wendy remained impressed with her newfound friend's willingness to stick out as an outsider\u2014such as when he pointed out, during a sex-ed presentation of a penis entering a vagina, that not everyone fucks like that\u2014because her association with Neil made her appear all the more interesting and alternative to others. Although these sorts of additional compelling details are glossed over entirely in Araki's film, the screenwriter-director ended up featuring the most ideal sequence contained in Heim's novel that conveys the depth and foundation of Neil and Wendy's relationship in the most efficient possible way.\n\nYet another very noteworthy way that Araki's film remains faithful to Heim's source material is in its representation of Neil's need to remain in control, once he begins hustling, whenever he is with his various johns. While hustling in Kansas, Neil consistently takes great pride in retaining a high degree of control with the older men who pay for his services, making it very clear what he is, and is not, willing to do for cash. His level of confidence in this regard similarly extends to his first hustling experience in New York City, during which he is further pleased to discover that the going rate for his services is one hundred twenty dollars an hour, up from just fifty in Kansas. His sense of control is reduced just a bit during this scene, however, in an effective example of subtle foreshadowing of what will follow for Neil in this \"profession,\" when the man commands him to fuck him up the ass but insists that he wear a condom while doing so. When Neil, who has not been engaging regularly in safe sex and recently recovered from a case of crabs, appears shocked as well as entirely uncertain how to put one on, the man does so for him.\n\nHis second sexual encounter for pay in the big city goes quite differently, however. As his customer undresses, Neil becomes disconcerted when he notices that the man's entire torso is covered with KS lesions. Although all the john requires is that the naked Neil rub his back (because he needs to be touched) and later masturbate while he watches, the encounter leaves Neil in a disillusioned state, as he runs through the city streets back to Wendy's apartment. Once there, he explains that this was the first time in his entire life that he was bothered by the act of hustling, in which he has been engaging in a failed attempt to feel the special way that he felt when he was eight years old and (according to his recollection at least) Coach truly loved him.\n\nIt is Neil's next sexual encounter for pay that causes him to dangerously lose all control. Just hours before he is to head home to Kansas for Christmas, using the plane ticket sent to him by his mother, Neil is picked up by a gruff man while he is walking down the street. Once inside the man's Brighton Beach bedroom, the man orders Neil to snort cocaine and, after snorting the rest himself, commands Neil to strip while he does the same. When Neil moves a bit too slowly, the man pushes him down on the bed and tears off his pants. Referring to Neil repeatedly as \"slut,\" he then orders Neil to open wide and suck his dick. When Neil hesitates, the man slaps him hard across the face, grabs him by the head, forces him to his knees, and again orders him to suck him. Moments later, as Neil is complying, the man looks down at him and spits in his face. Throwing Neil onto the bed, he announces that \"slut\" knows what's coming next. Neil protests, saying that there are some things he doesn't do and that he needs to take a piss; he slides out from under the john and seeks refuge in the nearby bathroom, locking its door with an old-fashioned hook-shaped latch that fits into a mounted eyehole. Seconds later, he watches in horror as the man uses a butter knife to unlock the door and, after a moment of silence, bursts into the room and uses the knife to hit Neil squarely in the face, knocking him into the bathtub. He then lifts Neil's legs in the air and rapes him brutally, calling him a \"slut\" with every thrust and beating Neil in the face nearly a dozen times with a bottle of baby shampoo as Neil's blood runs down the drain, in a manner reminiscent of the extremely violent beating of the drug dealer with a Campbell's Tomato Soup can in Araki's _Nowhere_. The significance of the baby shampoo must not be overlooked, as this scene represents the turning point in Neil's life when his childhood innocence is finally shattered and he stops romanticizing his sexual interactions with Coach from a decade earlier, beginning to see them as abusive rather than loving for the first time. Emotionally, this scene is at least as brutal as the one in _Twist_ (Jacob Tierney, 2003), a queer retelling of the Dickens classic, in which a young man refers to his own hustler brother (played by Nick Stahl) as a \"whore\" and forces the boy to give him a blowjob in exchange for much-needed cash. Both physically and emotionally, it is nearly as brutal as the concluding sequence of _Skin and Bone_ (Everett Lewis, 1996), during which a bound-and-gagged hustler (played by B. Wyatt), who has just had a huge nightstick shoved violently up his anus, is unwittingly murdered by a fellow hustler (played by Alan Boyce) with whom he is engaged in a cop fantasy for a client after their pimp replaces a fake gun filled with blanks with a real one filled with bullets, and the bound hustler witnesses that exchange but is unable to adequately communicate in time what he has just seen. Although these scenes with the various New York City johns are directly inspired by the pages of Heim's novel, it is nevertheless quite a feat for Araki to vividly and so convincingly capture on-screen all of the conflicting emotions, disconcerting locations, and compelling character types that had previously been communicated solely in words on a page.\n\nIn adapting Heim's novel to create this intriguing film, Araki hoped to show that children everywhere, even in the seemingly more innocent Midwest, experience feelings of vulnerability and insecurity and, as a result, can fall prey to the dangers that lurk in today's world (\"Outspoken,\" par. 6). He also hoped to show the complex emotional journeys that are typically experienced by victims of pedophilia as well as by their abusers. As Araki explains, \"This is not a black-and-white narrative. Scott [Heim] was very adept at crafting human and nuanced characters. Even in the scenes of abuse, the coach and johns have human frailties and flaws. That makes the story more disturbing and truthful. I wanted to tell what was an uncompromising book in an uncompromising way. I did not want it to be a TV movie of the week\" (Teeman F19).\n\nIn his quest to translate an uncompromising book into his uncompromising film, however, Araki nevertheless made certain decisions during the adaptation process that diverge substantially from Heim's source material, which enabled him to put his own spin on the narrative that ultimately unfolds on-screen. One of the most readily identifiable examples of such differences occurs early in the film, as the eight-year-old Brian, his sister, and his mother unquestionably glimpse a huge blue spaceship in the night sky. In contrast, Heim's novel intentionally leaves doubt as to whether the group of blue lights these three individuals (along with a male work associate of Brian's mother, whose presence suggests that she may actually be involved in an extramarital romantic relationship) witnessed hovering in the night sky actually were a UFO. Although the change may not appear to be especially significant (and Araki's version admittedly is far more intriguing to view onscreen), it strongly lends credence to the possibility that Brian may indeed have been abducted by space aliens when he was quite young, throwing the viewer further off the track of what actually has occurred in his past. For what transpires between Brian and the coach when Brian is just eight years old, as well as on Halloween two years later, remains concealed from the viewer (who only learns the distressing details as Brian simultaneously discovers them when he is a teenager), and Araki is a big fan of using aliens metaphorically to make provocative statements about conditions that are commonly experienced in our everyday world (Esther 45).\n\nAnother substantial difference between the contents of Heim's novel and Araki's film involves the degree to which Brian's close relationships with both his mother and his sister get lost in the translation from page to screen. In Heim's novel, Brian's mother is the individual who provided great comfort to him by bathing him tenderly on the night he blacked out for several hours before waking up in the crawl space of his family's home. Despite her busy work schedule, she also carved out plenty of time to spend with her son and provide emotional support to him, such as by taking him out for ice cream, accompanying him on a daylong mother\u2013son fishing excursion, listening to his theory of how he had been abducted by aliens, and surprising him with a special journal in which to record the details of his memories and dreams. In addition, Brian's sister, Deborah, is the individual who helped Brian to come to terms with the reality of his blackouts when he was young, spent countless hours hanging out and playing games with him on the roof of their home, sold watermelons with him at a roadside stand, attended church with him each week, occasionally allowed him to hang out with her female friends, danced with him joyfully on the night that their father left their mother for good, and regarded herself as one of Brian's closest friends. In Araki's film, however, these close bonds are largely nonexistent. Although Brian's mother (played by Lisa Long) appears regularly throughout the film, with the exception of the early scene in which she bathes her eight-year-old son at the end of his traumatic evening, she comes across primarily as a somewhat distant and sarcastic individual, rather than the nurturer of Heim's novel. For example, she makes fun of the televised UFO special that Brian invites her to watch with him, and she constantly rolls her eyes and utters derogatory comments whenever Avalyn telephones Brian. Deborah (played by Rachael Kraft as a child and Kelly Kruger as a college student) is barely in the film at all\u2014she is a minor part of the familial backdrop when Brian is a child and briefly returns home from college for Christmas a decade later, when she hugs her brother and affectionately rubs his neck to indicate that there is some sort of warm bond between them. The end result of these changes is that Brian comes across as being a far more isolated and marginalized individual in Araki's film, which solidifies his \"outsider\" status (an attribute common in all of Araki's films) and serves to explain the strength of the bond that he ultimately forms with Avalyn.\n\nNeil's relationship with Eric is quite different in the novel and the film, as well. In Heim's novel, during the months before Neil departed Kansas for New York, it is clear that he and Eric made out and had sex together on several occasions\u2014and that it was actually Neil who initiated their first sexual encounter\u2014which helps to explain the resulting degree of Eric's romantic longing for Neil. It is primarily because Neil's Coach-fixation has led him to be attracted most substantially to older men that their potential romantic relationship never fully materializes. In contrast, in Araki's film, Eric is portrayed as a lovesick puppy following endlessly on the heels of Neil, who seems to callously take advantage of his companion's unspoken affection (of which he is evidently aware). Neil insensitively allows Eric to pick him up at the park each day upon the conclusion of his hustling activities, and he openly discusses his attraction to, and sexual exploits with, other men in front of him. On one occasion, as Eric pulls into Neil's driveway, Neil gazes deeply into Eric's eyes and smiles coyly, as if a kiss is about to occur, but then abruptly exits the vehicle. On another occasion, after a night of heavy drinking, Neil brings Eric back to his bedroom, throws himself down spread eagle on the bed\u2014and then informs Eric that there is a gay porn video in the VCR if he wants to jack off. As a result of these differences, the Neil of Araki's movie comes across as being a far more heartless and highly insensitive individual than the Neil of Heim's novel, which causes Eric to come across as a bit more pathetic as a result of his devotion to such an individual. These changes cause audience members to feel a bit less compassion for Araki's Neil as he pursues his self-destructive path by positioning him even more strongly as an aloof and detached outsider. They also make the scene in which Neil pulls out his penis and implores Eric to kneel down and take a close look at it\u2014during which Eric discovers that Neil is suffering from a bad case of crabs\u2014seem all the more callous and cruel.\n\nAccordingly, while Araki's treatment and compression of Heim's source material is extremely effective at capturing the novel's overall essence and translating it to the screen, it simultaneously enabled the screenwriter-director to make a number of significant modifications that helped to make the resulting story his own, and another clear example of a \"Gregg Araki movie.\" The end result is a compelling work that maximizes the outsider status of both central characters in relation to their ever-present feelings of teenage alienation and resulting emotional needs. As one critic remarked:\n\nFrom the hyperbolic, pop saturation of its images to its theme of pretty young things wrestling with their place in the world, it's an Araki film through and through, but the story\u2014adapted from Scott Heim's 1996 book of the same name\u2014is tightly wound and has a stabilizing effect on Araki's typically erratic and high-strung visual style, which tends to flail around aimlessly when it has no narrative momentum to hold on to. . . . For Araki, then, _Mysterious Skin_ spells progress. (Gonzalez, par. 1)\n\nSimilarly, another critic noted, \"It's certainly not going to sit well with some audiences, but to my mind Araki's unflinching approach to taboo subjects has never worked better than it does in this excellent film\" (Zion, \"Child\" L4).\n\nPerhaps even more importantly with regard to the critical success of the film, however, _Mysterious Skin_ represents the return of this auteur director to embracing controversial subject matter and non-heterosexual themes and exploring them using his post-punk authorial style. The hallmarks of Araki's signature style are, to the delight of the director's loyal fans, once again readily evident in _Mysterious Skin_. The various scenes featuring Neil's sexual interactions with Coach as well as his various johns, both in Kansas and New York City, provide provocative images of non-heterosexual sexual activity. An incident during which a redneck in a pickup truck aims a loaded shotgun at Neil and Eric, calls them \"faggots,\" and prepares to shoot them for being queer, coupled with Neil's unexpected rape in Brighton Beach, provide the seemingly random acts of violence common to Araki's films. With this film, although Araki returns to foregrounding outsiders as well as space aliens in a story pertaining to teen alienation during the age of AIDS (as he had with _Nowhere_ ), he simultaneously defies cinematic convention with regard to both the content and form of the subgenre of the teen film, and also with regard to linearity as _Mysterious Skin_ features two seemingly isolated storylines that run parallel for the majority of the film before intersecting to achieve an especially powerful climax. By exploring the phenomenon of man\u2013boy love (as Neil regards his interactions with Coach), gay prostitution, as well as the sexual act of fisting in relation to two gay male characters, the film foregrounds various human sexualities and sexual practices that have historically been marginalized by mainstream society. Like most other Araki films, this one includes lengthy scenes that play out in real time in order to heighten their emotionality, most notably the concluding scene in which Neil informs Brian of the missing details from his memories. Although this film does not feature the inclusion of bizarre street people and other marginal characters who populate a seemingly surrealistic Los Angeles (because it is set in Kansas and New York City), it nevertheless features the equivalent of them in the form of the potentially marginal characters of Brian and Avalyn\u2014who might come across as somewhat pathetic misfits rather than well-rounded and compelling individuals in the hands of another director\u2014as well as the various johns that Neil tricks with throughout the film. Without question, given that it is a film about pedophilia and its psychological ramifications, _Mysterious Skin_ inherently contains an intentional lack of traditional commercial appeal; as one film buyer stated in the presence of Araki, \"I think it's a tough film . . . from a commercial point of view. . . . For commercial terms, I just think it's too tough\" (Pomeranz, par. 3). Finally, despite the film's extremely serious subject matter, it nevertheless refuses to take itself and its subject matter entirely seriously, such as by featuring a campy haunted house scene, a fantasy-like scene in an abandoned drive-in theater parking lot during which Neil and Wendy hear the \"voice of God\" through a speaker as snow begins to fall seemingly magically all around them, a playful scene during which Neil receives a blowjob from a john while he is working as a sportscaster during a baseball game, and the presence of the character of Eric, who adds levity to the surrounding on-screen developments with his consistently upbeat personality and ever-changing hair color and makeup.\n\n\"My movies are always about outsiders and amorphous sexuality,\" Araki has stated, \"so [ _Mysterious Skin_ ] was an ideal film for me\" (Chonin E1). With the release of this offering, therefore, Gregg Araki's filmmaking career no longer appeared to be enigmatic. In fact, and instead, it appeared to have come full circle, with _Mysterious Skin_ representing the impressive \"maturation of the director's storytelling abilities\" (Dossi 65) as well as the most emotionally involving film of his entire career.\n\nConcluding Observations\n\nSurprisingly, despite its controversial and potentially taboo subject matter which one critic characterized as \"not for the fainthearted, the squeamish, or the inflexibly decent\" (Thomson WE34), _Mysterious Skin_ went on to become a hit with both alternative and mainstream audiences alike. \"The last thing I thought about in making it was that it would be my most accessible or commercial movie,\" Araki has said, \"yet of all my films, it's had the most mainstream embrace. Even _People_ magazine liked it. That's kind of strange for me\" (Chonin El). A big part of the film's widespread appeal is that it addresses the topic of pedophilia, a deleterious phenomenon that is quite common\u2014affecting approximately one out of every four children around the world (Esther 45)\u2014yet rarely blatantly spoken about, while at the same time acknowledging the \"reality of sexual self-awareness in children\" (Zion, \"Truth\" F14). As critic Desson Thomson explained in _The Washington Post_ , \"In the context of Araki's film, something else is happening. The eight-year-old Neil, who has a big crush on his coach, has partly engineered this seduction, and he's perhaps even more lost in the passionate moment than [Coach] Heider\" (WE34). Araki himself echoed such notions when he stated:\n\nThe fact that Neil is a very young age and is gay and has desires made the story more realistic, because to me, people who have had this experience in their life come up to me after the movie and tell me it's really, really truthful. And that is what makes _Mysterious Skin_ so unsettling. It's much more reassuring to watch a movie where your innocent kid is out playing in the playground and is whisked away in a van and it's all black-and-white and terrible. (Zion, \"Truth\" F14)\n\nAs demonstrated in the preceding chapter, by the end of the 1990s, Araki's post-punk authorial style appeared to be at risk of disappearing entirely as the director sought out larger audiences and more mainstream acceptance and began to embrace less daring subject matter and representational approaches as a result. If that had indeed become the case, and Araki had not reversed those trends with the release of _Mysterious Skin_ , it would have been quite difficult to know what to make of such developments or, perhaps even more importantly, how they would affect his remaining queer audience. The reality that Araki instead utilized his post-punk authorial style to create the most mature offering of his entire career, one that once again embraced controversial subject matter and non-heterosexual themes, proved to be a refreshing move in his efforts to reestablish cinematic and cultural relevancy in relation to the expectations of his core audience as well as the approaches and subject matter of contemporary queer cinema.\n\nBy returning to the hallmarks of his filmmaking approach, Araki was successfully able to remain faithful to his auteurist status while simultaneously avoiding the ever-enlarging \"amoeba\" of mainstream incorporation. The fact that his resulting creation ended up appealing to large numbers of alternative and mainstream audience members alike is a triumph for this auteur director. It is also a testament to the overall appeals of his distinctive cinematic vision, with its emphasis on alienation and consistent \"outsider\" point of view, when he remains faithful to it and employs it in relation to compelling (and queer) subject matter.\nAfterword\n\n_Smiley Face_ and Beyond\n\nFrom _Three Bewildered People in the Night_ to _Mysterious Skin_ , Araki's various films, like the cultural project of queer theory more generally, consistently challenged patriarchal hegemony's culturally influential notion that \"only one sexuality (married-straight-white-man-on-top-of-woman-for-procreation-only) is normal and desirable\" (Benshoff and Griffin 5-6) as well as what it means to be \"normal,\" \"(in)appropriate,\" or \"deviant.\" Although the offerings he released in the late 1990s were not as groundbreaking as the ones that came before or after them, his cumulative body of work, through and including _Mysterious Skin_ , nevertheless demonstrates that Araki consistently used the plasticity of the filmic medium, in new and unique ways, to explore the phenomenon of non-heterosexual lifestyles and sexual practices in the age of AIDS.\n\nAll of that changed considerably in 2007 with the release of Araki's ninth feature film, _Smiley Face_ , a work that has nothing to do with non-heterosexual lifestyles or sexual practices in the age of AIDS whatsoever. Instead, it is a relatively stereotypical stoner comedy about an aspiring actress (with very limited aspirations) who experiences a daylong series of misadventures after she eats more than a dozen pot-laced cupcakes that she finds in the refrigerator she shares with her male roommate. Because _Smiley Face_ is Araki's first film shot entirely from somebody else's screenplay, it represents a very different sort of offering than the other films analyzed at length as part of this project, all of which were written for the screen and directed by Araki himself and focused, at least in part, on either various forms of non-heterosexuality or at least atypical sexual and romantic relationships. As such, in-depth analysis of its contents and filmmaking approaches is not forthcoming here; however, a brief discussion of this film and its relation to Araki's prior works is provided.\n\nTotally F***ed Up: _Smiley Face_\n\n_Smiley Face_ provides a day-in-the-life glimpse into the L.A. existence of Jane F. (played by Anna Faris), who, experiencing the munchies following her early morning bong hits, unwittingly becomes totally fucked up after she eats the aforementioned cupcakes that she discovers alongside a note from her roommate (played by Danny Masterson), who gives her the creeps, warning her not to consume them. As a result, over the course of the next several hours, she needs to purchase more pot to replace the brownies she ate, attend a late-morning acting audition, pay her apartment's electricity bill in person in order to keep the power on (or else suffer the repercussions of her roommate, whom she fears might be a skull-fucker), and repay her dope dealer (played by Adam Brody) the funds she owes him at the hemp festival taking place in Venice in order to stop him from stealing her furniture, including her beloved thousand-dollar bed. As can be expected, nothing goes smoothly for Jane in her attempts to accomplish these goals. Along the way, she inadvertently accepts a ride from a lovesick admirer, evades the police, makes off with an original copy of _The Communist Manifesto_ , escapes in the back of a sausage truck, runs into both Carrot Top and Jesus, and finds herself stranded in midair on a Ferris wheel, all the while with her mouth hanging wide open. The overall contents of this film are perhaps best summed up in its review from _Cinema de Merde_ :\n\nIt's one-note and it's so far over the top, so obvious, that it all just sits there on the screen. [Jane] stares transfixed at a plastic volcano. She thinks things are taking longer than they are. She gets dry mouth. She gets the munchies. She brings up unrelated information in inappropriate settings. She gets paranoid. The best example of how not funny this movie is has Faris in a waiting room, reading a magazine upside-down. (par. 6)\n\nAnother critic similarly summarized the film's greatest flaw when he wrote, \"Araki and screenwriter Dylan Haggerty beat a very simple premise\u2014that this chick is baked out of her gourd\u2014into the ground over and over again\" (Antani, par. 2). Quite likely as a result, the film received extremely limited theatrical runs in Los Angeles and New York before being released quickly on DVD.\n\nAlthough Araki admits that _Smiley Face_ was a huge departure for him as a filmmaker, its screenplay by Haggerty possesses several noteworthy attributes that serve to explain why he would nevertheless find it to be an appealing project (D. Smith, par. 13). For starters, Jane's status as a hardcore pothead represents potentially controversial subject matter, at least for some audience members, as well as a variation on the theme of alternative lifestyles. In addition, throughout the film, Jane is presented as an outsider, a character type common in all of the director's films, who consistently makes poor decisions. The film's plot ultimately assumes the form of a road movie (similar to the plots of _The Living End_ and _The Doom Generation_ ), as Jane must find a way to make it all the way from her nondescript L.A. neighborhood to Venice by her dealer's 3 p.m. deadline. The film's explicit incorporation of drug use makes it similar to Araki's storytelling approaches in _Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere_ , and _Mysterious Skin_. By focusing primarily on the lived experiences of an aspiring L.A. actress, the film's approach is reminiscent of that of _Splendor_. The scene in which Brevin Ericson (played by John Krasinski) masturbates in the shower while fantasizing about Jane is reminiscent of the scene in _Nowhere_ during which Dark masturbates in the shower while fantasizing about his girlfriend, his potential boyfriend, and the local dominatrix duo. As Jane devours Doritos in the home of her former professor, the loyal Araki fan very likely recalls the Doritos being consumed by Xavier during the closing scene of _The Doom Generation_. The film's overarching day-in-the-life format is certainly similar to Araki's approaches with _Totally F***ed Up_ and _Nowhere_. Yet another substantial appeal of Haggerty's screenplay was that, after he made _Mysterious Skin_ , which he regards as his most serious and darkest film to date, Araki wanted to do something entirely different and much lighter, and he recalled finding Haggerty's script to be hilarious when he read it years earlier; in fact, he regarded it as one of the funniest screenplays he had ever read (D'Arcy, par. 11; Kotek, par. 3; McKinley, par. 9). In numerous ways, therefore, it makes sense that Araki was attracted to Haggerty's screenplay, as it resonates with noteworthy aspects of his preceding cinematic offerings and allowed him to lighten up in terms of the subject matter of his next feature film.\n\nAt the same time, however, what is missing in _Smiley Face_ , and what was so essential to all of his earlier works, is an emphasis on incorporating themes pertaining to non-heterosexuality, or at the very least atypical sexual and romantic relationships, which the director's fans had come to expect. Also missing in this film are the rawness, aggressive energy, disconcerting tone, and nihilistic themes common to Araki's preceding films, as well as many of the expected hallmarks of Araki's post-punk filmmaking style, including the incorporation of provocative images of non-heterosexual sexual activity and seemingly random acts of violence, defiance of cinematic convention, foregrounding of various human sexualities and sexual practices that have historically been marginalized by mainstream society, inclusion of bizarre street people and other marginal characters who populate a seemingly surrealistic Los Angeles, and an intentional lack of commercial appeal. Without these various attributes, the film ends up feeling as if it were made by an entirely different director, and its contents are quite disappointing to Araki's remaining loyal fans as a result.\n\n_Smiley Face_ is not a bad film per se. Anna Faris, for example, does a wonderful job of playing the hardcore stoner who is in every scene of this slapstick farce; her overall likeability keeps audience members rooting for her despite her character's numerous poor decisions, and her performance and comedic timing in this film have been likened to those of Buster Keaton, Carole Lombard, and Lucille Ball (D'Arcy, par. 13, 43; Lim, Halley, par. 9; Lim, par. 6). There are also a handful of truly humorous moments in the film, such as when Jane announces \"I'm taking a shit!\" and \"Hold on\u2014I'm shitting!\" as she flushes pot down a public toilet, falsely believing that the cops are right on her tail, or when she appears to deliver an extremely eloquent Marxist rant while visiting a sausage factory, before the viewer is shown what Jane _actually_ said in her extremely altered state. In fact, the offering is most noteworthy for Faris' skillful portrayal of non-normative (adult) femininity, which ultimately renders her character childlike and seemingly quite innocent despite all of the more vulgar aspects of her performance. Perhaps if Araki had put more of his own personal (and queer) touches on Haggerty's screenplay, rather than filming it primarily as Haggerty had written it, _Smiley Face_ would feel more like a \"Gregg Araki movie,\" and it would seem more worthy of extended analysis as yet another noteworthy expression of its director-(Araki)-as-auteur rather than, in this particular case, a noteworthy expression of its star-(Faris)-as-auteur. In its present incarnation, however, _Smiley Face_ appears primarily to be yet another of Araki's failed, seemingly desperate attempts to attract larger, more mainstream audiences to view his various films. For as James Snyder noted in his _New York Sun_ review of the film, \"If this is meant as a lighthearted change of pace for Mr. Araki after _Mysterious Skin_ , then perhaps he took things too far in the opposite direction. This isn't just light and fluffy; it floats away\" (par. 1).\n\nA Rocky Araki Future?\n\nAt the start of the third decade of his filmmaking career, Gregg Araki finds himself in a complex predicament. When he remains faithful to the original filmmaking goals and approaches that made him a leading figure of the New Queer Cinema, he ends up pleasing his loyal (and largely queer) audience and frequently ends up receiving substantial critical praise; however, the size of this audience is not substantial enough to deliver the sorts of profits that he needs to generate continual funding for future projects, and even the most generous critical praise does not typically end up paying the bills. When he deviates substantially from those filmmaking goals and approaches in an attempt to lure larger, more mainstream audiences to view his films, as he did most notably with _Splendor_ and _Smiley Face_ , he typically ends up alienating his core audience substantially while simultaneously failing to attract large numbers of new devotees. The question thus arises: What's a formerly boundary-pushing auteur director of the New Queer Cinema movement supposed to do?\n\nAt this particular historical moment, the future of Araki's filmmaking career remains murky and uncertain. When he rose to international cinematic prominence in the early 1990s, Araki self-identified (albeit somewhat reluctantly, as he does not appreciate simplistic and limiting categorization) as a queer filmmaker who makes queer films, and his earliest fans eagerly embraced him as such. Although, deep down, nobody really wants to restrict him to creating the same type of content time and time again, the expectation of this New Queer Cinema pioneer remains that he will continue to explore queer themes in his various offerings, despite the reality that the New Queer Cinema movement disintegrated more than a decade ago. The films that made Araki famous prominently featured the director's established in-your-face, post-punk authorial style, themes pertaining to non-heterosexual lifestyles and sexual practices in the age of AIDS, and extreme violent\/sexual imagery, and they contained substantial radical\/subversive potential as a result. At a minimum, therefore, Araki's remaining devoted fans expect these same attributes to be evident in the auteur director's various creations. When they are not, such as when he intentionally veers toward the mainstream, his resulting creations are widely regarded as being no longer particularly groundbreaking, culturally relevant, nor inherently interesting.\n\nIt has become clear in recent years that Araki feels somewhat trapped within his initial New Queer Cinema success. On the one hand, when asked in 2008 about the need to incorporate a queer sensibility in his various films, Araki stated, \"I do think that definitely, for filmmakers like myself, Tom Kalin, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, obviously the late Derek Jarman, our sexual identity definitely has a deep influence on our aesthetic and on the themes we deal with, and the kind of projects we're attracted to\" (D. Smith, par. 17). On the other hand, when asked the same year about his filmmaking approaches and goals, Araki expressed, \"As a filmmaker, I want to continually evolve and grow and challenge myself and do all kinds of different movies and work in a variety of genres\u2014not just make the same film over and over again\" (Halley, par. 21), and, when asked in 2009 about the New Queer Cinema label and its resulting expectations, Araki remarked, \"Nobody ever attached that to Spike Lee. Oh, New Black Cinema! There's this weird need to categorize and put it in a box. I'm just interested in making movies that compel me\" (\"Outspoken,\" par. 19). During this latter interview, Araki also predicted that, two decades from now, both he and _Far From Heaven_ director Todd Haynes will still be asked questions about the gay new wave, even if they are no longer making films pertaining to queer culture (\"Outspoken,\" par. 18). Perhaps this is the burden that must be borne by an auteur director who, early in his filmmaking career, embraced the cachet of being a groundbreaking queer director at a particular historical moment when embodying such a status was trendy and cinematically welcomed. Perhaps this is a burden that is a bit too extreme and limiting for a director who self-identified as a gay man before becoming romantically involved with a woman for several years before pursuing romantic relationships with men once again.\n\nAs Araki stated in 1995, the year of _The Doom Generation_ 's release, about the need for a new generation of innovative filmmakers who address contemporary concerns in original ways, \"What The Movement (which, again, does not exist) really needs are those formal\/political\/thematic challengers of the Status Quo. . . . I'm talking about the next generation of Godards, Fassbinders, Derek Jarmans who push the envelope, who are not satisfied with the \"Good Story Well Told\" Bullshit that Mainstreams of all stripes and colors unabashedly endorse\" (Moran 20). Given those noteworthy sentiments, it was quite disappointing to his fans when the auteur director went so extremely mainstream with _Splendor_ before redeeming himself in their eyes with _Mysterious Skin_ , especially because, early in his filmmaking career, Araki emphasized the \"genuine need for the under- and misrepresented to identify themselves via the cinema machine\" (qtd. in Moran 24). He disappointed them once again still further when he went even more mainstream with the release of _Smiley Face_ in 2007.\n\nWith his various films from _Three Bewildered People in the Night_ to _Mysterious Skin_ , Araki, a self-proclaimed individual with a very strong personality who marches to the beat of his own drummer, established an especially intriguing (if not especially profitable) career breaking numerous cinematic taboos (D. Smith, par. 15; Halley, par. 26). About those works he has explained:\n\nI've always said that all my movies reflect many parts of my life, though none of them are straightforward autobiography. They express my world-view and serve as a Polaroid snapshot of where my head is at a particular time in my life. . . . Every film is three years out of my life and I will not be able to make that many while I'm on this planet, so it's not worth it for me to do anything I am not truly passionate about. . . . As a filmmaker, I just make the movie. People will interpret or misinterpret it however they see fit. That's the beauty of cinema: one person can see black, one can see white, and they can argue about it till the cows come home. (Hays, _View_ 37, 39)\n\nAccordingly, it is now up to all of his films' viewers\u2014past, present, and future\u2014to reflect on the contents of his various offerings\u2014past, present, and (hopefully) future\u2014and argue about them intelligently until those cattle arrive, which has been the primary objective of this particular project from its inception.\nSupplementary Chapter\n\nCinematic Trash or Cultural Treasure? Conflicting Viewer Reactions to the Extremely Violent World of Bisexual Men in Gregg Araki's \"Heterosexual Movie\" _The Doom Generation_\n\nThe apparent status of Gregg Araki's _The Doom Generation_ as cinematic trash was strongly suggested when critic Roger Ebert, reviewing the work in the _Chicago Sun-Times_ shortly after its release in 1995, refused to award it any stars. In that review, Ebert dismissed the idea that the film contained any cultural value whatsoever by labeling it \"the kind of movie where the filmmaker hopes to shock you with sickening carnage and violent amorality, while at the same time holding himself carefully aloof from it with his style\" (par. 1). He continued:\n\nThis is a road picture about Amy and Jordan, young druggies who get involved with a [bisexual] drifter named Xavier who challenges their ideas about sex, both gay and straight, while involving them on a blood-soaked cross-country odyssey. The movie opens as the drifter \"inadvertently\" (Araki's word, in the press kit) blows off the head of a Korean convenience store owner. The head lands in the hotdog relish and keeps right on screaming. Ho, ho. . . . Wait, there's more: \"As the youthful band of outsiders continues their travels through the wasteland of America, Amy finds herself [having sex with] both Jordan and Xavier, forging a triangle of love, sex, and desperation too pure for this world. . . .\" Further reading from the [press] kit: \" _The Doom Generation_ is the Alienated Teen Pic to End All Alienated Teen Pics\u2014and, oh yeah, it's a comedy and a love story, too.\" Oh, yeah. (Ebert, par. 4, 9)\n\nSince then, countless additional film critics have agreed with Ebert's assessment. For example, writing in _Film Comment_ , Gavin Smith observed that, with _The Doom Generation_ , \"Araki goes gross-out with a vengeance: the film is a gleeful panic of severed heads, spurting arteries, rape, and castration\" (\"Sundance 'Kids' \" 9). In his _Entertainment Weekly_ review, Steve Daly wrote, \"For those who haven't walked out before the closing credits, good luck searching for meaning\u2014you'll find mostly blood and epithets\" (40). The online critics who refer to themselves collectively as the Mutant Reviewers From Hell have concluded, in a series of individual reviews, that \" _[The] Doom Generation_ is just a piece of trash, and there is no debate about it\u2014none\" (Justin, par. 4); \"The socially redeeming value is in the negative numbers\" (PoolMan, par. 5); \"This film hurts you. It ruined my day when I rented it, just because it did succeed in catching the events in depressing lives of people scraped from the bottom of the scum barrel. Gross people doing gross things, conceived by people who should have never made a film in the first place\" (Kyle, par. 2); and \"This movie is a cinematic masterpiece\u2014master piece of CRAP!\" (Clare, par. 1). But are all of these critics, and so many others like them, actually missing the entire point of the film?\n\nI have long maintained that _The Doom Generation_ is a cultural treasure, rather than a piece of cinematic trash. In fact, I find it to be such a powerful and culturally significant film that I have exposed students to it in the various film courses I have taught, at three colleges and universities, from the year of its release to the present. As I have argued elsewhere (Hart, \"Auteur\" 30-38), in my view, by placing three young people on the road after they unwittingly commit a series of murders, Araki creates a utopic setting in this film within which two attractive young men, Xavier Red (played by Johnathon Schaech) and Jordan White (played by James Duval), can explore their growing mutual sexual attraction and most intimate sexual desires. At the same time, while they are both becoming more comfortable with the idea of sleeping together, they both repeatedly sleep with Jordan's girlfriend, Amy Blue (played by Rose McGowan), until the three end up having sex together. Unfortunately, just before Xavier and Jordan are about to consummate their sexual relationship without Amy being present, an especially brutal climax prevents that act from occurring: a trio of gaybashing neo-Nazi thugs\u2014who in an earlier scene perceived Xavier's non-heterosexual \"otherness\" when they encountered him in a record store, commented on his \"pretty earrings\" and \"hot, tight bubble butt,\" and referred to him as a \"shy, sensitive flower\"\u2014discover Xavier and Jordan naked and alone in bed together, conclude that the \"world'll be a purer place\" when the \"two little faggots\" are both dead, and proceed to chop off Jordan's \"puny, worthless cock\" using gardening shears; he dies almost immediately. Although this unexpected, remarkably brutal bloodbath at the film's end leaves many viewers in a mild state of shock when they initially encounter it, I have always felt that it effectively represents Araki's way of making an incredibly powerful statement about the repressive nature of hegemonic ideology in the United States in relation to bisexual men and other non-heterosexual individuals. As such, I have continually maintained that this film contains substantial cultural value, even though it may not seem to on its surface.\n\nOccasionally, I stumble upon an analysis of _The Doom Generation_ that agrees with my perspective. For example, writing in _Film Quarterly_ , James Moran noted, \"For despite the polish of its imagery and its apparent focus upon straight sexuality, _The Doom Generation_ , in both its form and its content, continued to develop Araki's unique aesthetic vision and critical gay voice, which together bind each of his films into a unified body of work\" (18-19). In addition, film critic Robin Wood concluded that \"No film more precisely captures my own sense of where we are and where we are going\" (336). The clear majority of reviews and analyses of this film that I have read to date, however, condemn this cinematic offering as pointless rubbish. In part, this may be because Araki\u2014such as by giving his characters in this work the last names of Red, White, and Blue, something noted by several critics but never adequately elaborated upon thereafter\u2014appears to be dealing with his subject matter in over-the-top and seemingly superficial ways (whether or not this is actually the case), in a manner that is immediately off-putting to the majority of popular critics. Such sentiments likely led an _Entertainment Weekly_ critic to state, \"Not for everyone, the film should give fans of _Natural Born Killers_ an even more rewarding demonstration of the aesthetics of willful incoherence\" (Kenny 68), or an _Artforum_ critic to conclude, \"Araki's script fills characters' mouths with ridiculously tweaked youthspeak . . . at once too clever to seem spontaneous and too lame to signify anything but authorial condescension toward his unlikable protagonists\" (Cooper 22).\n\nAs a result of these various observations and reviews, I have begun in recent years to wonder whether I am forcing my own analysis on the film, rather than identifying cultural meaning that is viably contained in, and\/or produced through viewing, the film itself. To explore this issue, I recently asked a group of undergraduate students, enrolled in an upper-division film and television studies course at a small liberal arts college, to view _The Doom Generation_ during the first class meeting of a new semester (as I have done regularly on the first day of this particular course each semester) and to document their reactions (positive and\/or negative) to it in written form, working individually and without access to any textual or online materials about the film that have been written by others. Upon their completion of that task, I invited these students, on a voluntary basis and with informed consent, to authorize me (in writing) to analyze, summarize, and directly quote their written reactions to the film, anonymously, in this essay. The students were assured that their decision of whether or not to provide such authorization would have no impact whatsoever on their course grades or my perceptions of them as students, and they were informed that any authorized responses would be identified only by gender (rather than first name, etc.) in any research essay I ultimately composed. All fifteen students (eight males and seven females) enrolled in the course opted to participate in this study.\n\nThis process differed somewhat from the way that I usually introduce students to Araki's film. I screen the film the same way each semester during our first class meeting, but then I typically ask students to offer their reactions (positive and\/or negative) in verbal, rather than written, form as part of an entire-group discussion. I next lead the students, using the various points they raised as well as my personal insights, in a thorough analysis of the film's contents to show how all of the various elements of _The Doom Generation_ (i.e., plot, dialogue, lighting, symbolism, elements of mise-en-sc\u00e8ne, etc.) can be perceived as potentially adding up to a coherent and compelling statement about American ideology in relation to bisexual men and other non-heterosexual individuals, in order to demonstrate the various ways that viewers can make meaning from a cinematic text. This time around, however, the students were asked to provide and submit their individual reactions to the film in written form first, so that they would not be influenced by the views and opinions of their peers, before an entire-group discussion and analysis of the film occurred. Furthermore, I did not share any of my own impressions of the film with the students until after all written reactions had formally been submitted for analysis. What follows is a summary of what I learned from this process.\n\nThe Distinction Between Message and Meaning\n\nCultural studies scholarship over the past three decades has continuously revealed that there is a vast difference between the \"message\" that a filmmaker or other media professional intends to communicate with a specific media offering and the actual \"meaning\" that is derived by audience members as they encounter that same offering. In other words, the distinction between \"message\" and \"meaning\" in relation to a media offering is quite significant because, whereas the manifest content of a media message (in print, sounds, visuals, etc.) can be observed directly and potentially identically by all of its audience members and is largely \"fixed,\" the range of viable meanings derived from identical media content by different individuals is variable, not entirely self-evident, and relatively \"unfixed\" (McQuail 304).\n\nWhereas early mass communication theorists conceptualized the process of communication in terms of a top-down, linear model of message dissemination proceeding quite efficiently from sender to receiver\u2014in which a message created by a sender gets interpreted by all of its receivers precisely as the sender intended\u2014cultural studies scholars have consistently maintained and demonstrated that there are noteworthy differences in the ways that media messages are actually \"read\" (or \"decoded\") by the individuals who receive them, despite the sender's original intentions. With his influential essay \"Encoding\/Decoding,\" for example, Stuart Hall was among the first cultural studies scholars to introduce the idea that various forms of media content do not contain a single meaning that is decoded efficiently by all receivers, but rather are typically read in somewhat different ways by different individuals (or even by the same individuals in different contexts or at different times in their lives). Hall argues that, rather than interpreting a media message precisely as it was intended by its sender, or reacting to a media message in exactly the opposite way as the sender would expect, most receivers regularly decode media messages in the form of a \"negotiated reading,\" which means they perceive and\/or accept some aspects of the message as the sender intended, and they simultaneously overlook and\/or reject other aspects of that same message (136-38). In the field of literary studies, this phenomenon has been referred to as representing the \"death of the author,\" in recognition of the reality that the ultimate creation of any \"author\" (or sender of a media offering) does not contain only a single \"message\" or \"meaning\" that may be communicated to and derived by audience members but is, rather, multi-dimensional; as such, the \"reader\" (or receiver) of that media offering actually determines the \"meaning\" of the work by reacting to the various dimensions of its contents in relation to his or her own biography, history, psychology, and previous interactions with a wide range of related media offerings, despite what the author may have initially intended (Barthes 146, 148).\n\nIn relation to gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders, these noteworthy theoretical concepts have been expanded upon in recent years to demonstrate how possessing a non-heterosexual social identity represents, in the words of Brett Farmer, a \"difference that makes a difference\" (6), one that frequently results in different ways of \"seeing\" and \"decoding\" media offerings than heterosexual individuals typically utilize. In part, such decoding differences stem frequently from \"strategies that reveal subtexts and subversive readings in a more complex system than the patriarchal heterosexual system assumes\" (Straayer 2); in addition, they often result from the various character behaviors, contradictions, gestures, images, narrative ambiguities, subplots, themes, and related attributes of a film or other media offering that non-heterosexual audience members choose to foreground during the viewing experience, ones that the majority of \"heterosexual audience members tend to overlook or repress, either because they are oblivious to them or frightened by them\" (Hart, \"Gay\" 3). Such differences are effective at explaining how, historically, non-heterosexual audience members have derived unique types of viewing pleasure from Hollywood films and other media offerings that exclusively feature overtly heterosexual narratives and characters, as well as how they may derive unique sorts of meanings (as compared to those derived by heterosexual audience members) from viewing films explicitly featuring gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender narratives, themes, and characters today. At the same time, as cultural studies scholars Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman have so insightfully pointed out, the type of individuals one chooses to sleep with (with regard to his or her sexual orientation) does not absolutely determine how one decodes media messages (40).\n\nAs such, it is important to note that, as with all other types of individuals who possess a range of important demographic characteristics (in terms of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc.), and in accordance with the findings of cultural studies theorists, it certainly cannot be assumed that all non-heterosexual audience members who view the same film or other media offering will necessarily decode the work in similar ways; instead, because they (like all other types of viewers) will naturally foreground different aspects of the work during the viewing experience, their decodings of the work's contents will typically contain noteworthy variations. This important reality helps to explain why the majority of heterosexual audience members, as well as many non-heterosexual audience members, who view a film such as _From Here to Eternity_ (Fred Zinnemann, 1953) do not detect that it contains a substantial bisexual subtext pertaining to a love story between Warden (played by Burt Lancaster), a man's man who is respected both by his superiors and the G.I.'s he leads, and Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt (played by Montgomery Clift), a skilled bugler and former boxer, both of whom simultaneously pursue romantic and sexual relationships with women to some degree over the course of its narrative, or that, rather than offering a straightforward narrative about a heterosexual FBI agent (played by Keanu Reeves) who seeks a romantic relationship with an attractive female surfer (played by Lori Petty), the film _Point Break_ (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991) may actually be primarily about the agent's bisexual attraction to and relationship with the woman's former boyfriend (played by Patrick Swayze), the leader of the bank robbers in the film, instead (Hart, \"Gay\" 16). The goal of the present study pertaining to _The Doom Generation_ , therefore, was to determine what sorts of noteworthy meanings (if any) are produced by various individuals through the experience of viewing the film, a complex work exploring bisexuality and bisexual desires that was intentionally promoted (as well as identified during the work's opening title sequence) as \"a heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki\" in order to appeal to a wider range of audience members than the director's earlier New Queer Cinema offerings (such as 1992's _The Living End_ and 1993's _Totally F***ed Up_ ).\n\n_The Doom Generation_ as Cinematic Trash\n\nAs previously stated, _The Doom Generation_ features the road-trip (mis)adventures of three rootless young people who, in the wake of murdering a Korean Quickie Mart owner and others, push the boundaries of sexual pleasure and experimentation: Xavier, an attractive, bisexual drifter; Jordan, a dim and seemingly innocent teen; and Amy, Jordan's caustic, drug-using girlfriend and Xavier's occasional sex partner. With this film, Araki has effectively created a \"road movie in which the characters never actually seem to go anywhere\" (Kenny 68); as such, the film shares with its contents feelings of boredom, futility, and pointlessness. The most attention-grabbing narrative developments feature Xavier having increasingly kinky sex with Amy in order to entice Jordan into bed with him\u2014resulting in numerous sex scenes that border on the pornographic\u2014as well as extreme instances of visceral violence that leave a severed head talking in a pool of relish and onions, a severed arm spurting blood all over a car's interior, and Jordan's severed penis being inserted into Xavier's mouth by their group of assailants during the film's climax.\n\nIt is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that all fifteen students who viewed and wrote about their reactions to _The Doom Generation_ identified a range of potentially harmful elements in the film. One student was concerned about the abrasive dialogue in the film\u2014including lines spoken by Amy such as \"Eat my fuck\" and \"Kindly pull your head out of your rectal region\"\u2014and felt the film had no plot aside from presenting the main characters' ongoing experimentations with sex, drugs, and murder. Another felt that the graphic penis-chopping scene during the film's climax might lead many viewers to regard such violence as justified when it is directed toward bisexual men or other non-heterosexual individuals. Others were concerned that the lack of consequences for the trio's acts of violence, as well as the lack of remorse they felt after committing them, might lead to real-life instances of copycat crimes (one student even referred to the April 1999 shootings at Colorado's Columbine High School in this regard), or that the developments in the film would lead some young viewers to conclude that people in American society can no longer live together in harmony, potentially resulting in the self-fulfilling prophecy that already-violent conditions in U.S. society will only continue to worsen over time.\n\nSeveral students offered generalized assessments of the film that revealed they regarded it to be cinematic trash, pure and simple. For example, one female student stated, \" _The Doom Generation_ is an aspect of life I disagree with. . . . The film left me feeling angry [and] disturbed. . . . I could only imagine the images that would run through my dreams at night.\" Echoing such sentiments in greater depth, a male student explained, \"After watching _The Doom Generation_ , I was certainly shocked. I can honestly say that I hated the movie [from start] to [finish]. It's a disgusting, immoral, unnecessary movie filled with content that does not need to be shown in a film. . . . All around, this movie sets as bad of an example as you can. . . . I personally don't understand why this movie was made.\"\n\nMost students articulated their concerns with regard to specific aspects of the film. Several were concerned about the effects that viewing the uncontrolled lifestyle of these three rootless young people might have on the film's audience members. A male student wrote, \"The movie shows its main characters doing drugs, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, eating junk food, and, of course, killing the people that were trying to kill them. All of these things are bad for you and could cause social chaos.\" Similarly, a female student cautioned, \"This movie contradicts everything that a parent would probably say. These reckless teens had no curfews, no rules, and no limits. If every young person were like that, our society would be chaotic.\"\n\nThe unconventional sexual situations portrayed in _The Doom Generation_ also generated criticism. As one male student stated, \"Both X [as Xavier is often referred to in the film] and Jordan masturbate while watching the other engage in sexual activity; it seems to bother neither. Parents might be shocked to find voyeurism and autoeroticism displayed so bluntly. When thrown into the mix of other sexual themes, this is probably the least of their concerns.\" Another male student elaborated on such concerns:\n\nAmy and Jordan are a couple, and they say that they are in love with each other. They seem to be a healthy pair until Amy goes behind Jordan's back and sleeps with Xavier. Personally, I don't like cheating, I don't cheat myself, and I look down on it very much. I believe that this is a common viewpoint [held] by many other people, as well. This scene made me feel bad for Jordan, as well as a little sick; it was only the beginning of that, though. The next time that Amy and Xavier slept together, Jordan watched from outside the hotel window. More and more casual sexual behavior kept going throughout the movie, until the end where all three of them were [in bed] together. That lifestyle seemed unhealthy and awkward to me; I certainly can't appreciate it. I couldn't understand why Jordan seemed okay with it, either.\n\nTo varying degrees, all fifteen students who viewed and shared their reactions to _The Doom Generation_ felt that it contained negative, potentially harmful attributes of various kinds. Their comments clearly pertain to the concept of dystopian fears associated with cinematic reception, which regard exposure to film images as a potentially evil force that might ultimately produce social chaos or, at the very least, a range of negative social effects. A primary concern historically in this regard, as relevant to the contents of _The Doom Generation_ , is that cinematic images might ultimately encourage viewers to indulge regularly in \"curiositas,\" which involves the attraction to unbeautiful, extreme, or even morbid sights simply to satisfy one's curiosity or \"lust of the eyes\" (Gunning 871). Does this mean, therefore, that the students' responses confirmed that _The Doom Generation_ is undeniably a prime example of cinematic trash? Not necessarily.\n\n_The Doom Generation_ as Cultural Treasure\n\nLike the majority of film critics who have written about _The Doom Generation_ to date, there are many individuals who are unable to find any socially redeeming value in this cinematic offering. For example, one female student who visited my campus office nearly a week after viewing Araki's film explained that, after devoting several days to considering what good could possibly come from making or viewing such a film, she stood firm in her initial belief that nothing positive could ever come from it.\n\nDespite that conclusion, seven of the fifteen students (four males and three females) who shared their reactions to _The Doom Generation_ in this study were indeed able to find significant degrees of cultural value in the film, even if they simultaneously held some concerns about its contents. As one male student accurately pointed out, \"The way the film is interpreted will vary from person to person. More pleasure will be derived from those who accept the film as art. . . . It is important to remember that there is a second side to every story. Films like [ _The Doom Generation_ ] can bring about social change by those intellectuals (both young and old) who see beyond Rose McGowan's bare breasts and see a generation of youth crying out for help.\" I couldn't have said it better myself.\n\nOne female student viewed _The Doom Generation_ as a cautionary tale, warning about the need to intervene in the lives of modern young people and ensure that they feel valued and loved. She wrote:\n\nI see the movie being positive in showing how people in our society\u2014even young, innocent people\u2014can turn out, all starting with a sense of not belonging. In the beginning of the movie, Amy said [to Jordan], \"There's no place for us in this world.\" Just that comment says a lot about what the movie is trying to [say]. They don't fit in. The movie was an extreme way of showing what those feelings of being \"different\" can lead to. . . . It subtly goes deep into how and why people would live this way. If you can't see the inside of a life like that, it is easy to judge. It is really easy for society to look at people like Amy, Jordan, and Xavier and look down upon them, rather than finding out what went wrong, and what could have been done to avoid it. . . . I think it would be easy for somebody to just look at this film negatively, but I don't think that the filmmaker wanted that. I don't think that he is some deranged person; I think he had a great point.\n\nOther students felt that the extreme acts of violence in the film were not really a cause for concern. As a male student explained:\n\nThe three main characters in _The Doom Generation_ represent three different stereotypical personalities in society. Amy is a headstrong, dirty-mouthed, self-[absorbed], individualistic girl who becomes the sex slave [of] the other two characters. Jordan, Amy's boyfriend, is a passive, non-aggressive, dependent type who is not phased by the fact that his girlfriend is sleeping with some guy they picked up on the road. Xavier\u2014or as he is referred to in the movie, X\u2014is an aggressive, sadistic, controlling, heartless murderer who was picked up by Amy and Jordan at the beginning of the movie. The personalities were too extreme to be taken seriously. . . . It is obvious [from] watching these characters that they are very unrealistic and that the acts they participated in would not be reenacted by most levelheaded members of society. . . .\n\nThe director made a point of producing each violent sequence so over-the-top that it was humorous. A key reason for creating such scenes is to attack society's preconceived ideas of teenagers and what they do. The film makes a point of showing such extreme characters that they mock the members of society who think that teenagers are a source of chaos in themselves. . . . It's basically showing lots of negative things but then saying, \"Hey, relax, don't take this so seriously\u2014it's entertainment.\"\n\nThe majority of students who identified cultural value in the film, however, tended to point out that _The Doom Generation_ can, ultimately, bring about positive social change in U.S. society because it addresses and attacks the concept of discrimination in relation to bisexuals and others. For example, a male student stated:\n\nThe theme of evil is demonstrated throughout the film from the \"666\" plastered on all the [cash] registers to the signs on the motels and stores proclaiming [that] the end is near. In this movie, these characters are seen as evil mainly because they are different. After the first murder is committed by Xavier, the news broadcast states that the earring found at the murder scene belonged to a Satanist, homosexual, or punk kid, implying that all of [them] are evil because they are different. . . . By watching this film, I think the audience will see that everyone is unique in their own way and that [just] because someone is different it doesn't mean they are evil. . . . In the case of this film, it isn't just displaying how to murder, abuse drugs, and have sex. It is giving us something to think about regarding today's society and the feeling of alienation.\n\nExpanding upon such notions, another male student noted:\n\nIt has opened a door for people that are either gay or bisexual or even interested in the gothic style of clothing. . . . Throughout the film, we see things that society has told us are bad. . . . As the film goes on, we see Amy and X have sex, we see Jordan masturbate as X and Amy have sex, and we even see the three characters have a threesome. These things could be bad for society, but isn't that just what society says? Who says it is bad to have a threesome? Do we not live in a society that believes in individual freedom of expression and, for the most part, in a society where sex is not a taboo?\n\nOne of the strongest points made was at the end of the film when, [as Xavier and Jordan are alone in bed together, three] of the guys who thought they knew Amy earlier in the film rape her on an American flag and cut Jordan's penis off. I thought this was a strong point for Araki because I believe he was trying to say that there are worse people out in this world than Amy, X, and Jordan. He had the flag and the national anthem playing, I think, to show what idiots racist people [are] and how uneducated they are. The movie works in a unique way of trying to tell the viewers of it not to pick on people different from yourself because you are afraid of the unknown, and I think that is a great social benefactor. . . . I let the film sink in and realized that all Araki was trying to do was to say we should not judge people so quickly, and it is okay to be who we are. In that aspect, I think it sends a [positive] message.\n\nSimilarly, a female student explained that discriminatory views end up being reduced by the film's end as a result of viewers' vicarious participation in the lives of the film's three main characters:\n\nThroughout the film, the audience experiences [a] life different from their own, which causes some viewers [to] question their own values and beliefs. . . . There were several times when I looked away, covering my eyes and ears, but that did not stop me from wanting to watch more. I wanted to explore the rest of the movie; I was curious about what was going to happen. . . . I asked myself, \"Were Xavier and Jordan going to have sexual relations?\" \"Why would anyone have Jesus tattooed on [his] penis?\"\n\nI was so involved in the film that these controversial images did not bother me. This is how this film brings about change for social good. I am a heterosexual female [who is] not exactly comfortable with even watching men and women have sex, let alone two men or two women, but during this film it did not matter. I was able to explore a world that was so different from my own. I accepted what was going on throughout the film because I wanted to see more. The power that this film had was so great because it allowed the viewer to put down their conscience and explore new concepts that are usually unmentionable. . . . We experience different lifestyles in movies that allow the viewers to possibly change their opinion on homosexuality or men being closer than just friends.\n\nFinally, another female student captured the essence of all of these preceding arguments when she so articulately concluded:\n\nThe utopian feeling that I received from watching this film was about how, after a certain amount of time, the three teenagers were able to accept [bisexuality] within a group, together. Xavier was already open to having sex with both males and females and brought forth new ideas into Amy's and Jordan's minds. Amy was a little hesitant about the idea at the beginning, and Jordan had never experienced anything like it, [but] soon they grew to accept the idea. Xavier brought many new ideas into this couple's minds and opened their eyes to a different meaning of existence. At the beginning of the movie, Amy only thought about death and how \"there was no place in the world\" for them; as the film progressed, it helped to show that there was a meaning to life and ways of being happy. . . .\n\nThis film truly opened my eyes to the way our American culture really is. We think we are such a free country, but when you really think about it, we are one of the most hypocritical countries out there. We say we have freedom of speech, but when you speak the words [that] people don't want to hear, somebody always has something critical to say and harasses you about decisions that you make in life. It is difficult to be accepted in our country unless you are \"normal\" and try to be the \"perfect\" person but, in reality, who is perfect? Whose right is it to say [that] what you do is right or wrong?\n\nAfter reading all of these additional reactions to _The Doom Generation_ , I was impressed with the insights and conviction they contained, especially upon acknowledging that most of these students were discussing a film that they did not particularly like nor enjoy in the first place.\n\nConcluding Observations\n\nUntil relatively recently, Hollywood's powers-that-be have long regarded topics such as adultery and impotence as providing perfectly acceptable cinematic fare, whereas bisexuality and other forms of non-heterosexuality have been their _b\u00eate noire_ (Custen 128). When bisexuality did appear on film, it was typically used to \"disguise or legitimize homosexuality\" because bisexuality itself has historically been viewed as being \"freaky,\" and bisexual characters have been disparaged for being \"half faggot\" (Russo 230-31). Accordingly, as activist Wayne Bryant explains in the preface to his book _Bisexual Characters in Film: From Ana\u00efs to Zee_ :\n\nAnyone with a passing interest in the subject can probably name a dozen or more movies with gay and lesbian characters. The same is not true for bisexual characters in film. Experts may be hard-pressed to cite more than two or three examples, even though many films with homosexuality as a central theme have bisexual protagonists. The invisibility of bisexual characters in film is compounded by the dearth of writing on the topic. (ix)\n\nBoth Gregg Araki's film _The Doom Generation_ , as well as this essay, are intended to begin to rectify this quite problematic state of affairs.\n\nThe defiant, subversive essence of the various films created as part of the New Queer Cinema phenomenon of the 1990s was directed both toward mainstream homophobic individuals in U.S. society and the \"tasteful and tolerated\" non-heterosexuals who cohabit with them virtually invisibly (Aaron 7). A primary goal of New Queer Cinema filmmakers (including Araki) was to give voice to marginalized members of the LGBT community, as well as to members of its various subgroups (e.g., black gay men, Hispanic bisexual women, etc.), in order to enlighten all people about the realities of forging a non-heterosexual existence in a heterocentric\u2014and frequently blatantly homophobic\u2014world (Aaron 3-4). As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that common themes in Araki's various films (including _The Doom Generation_ ) involve alienation, betrayal, detachment, emptiness, and \"a present that's really fucked up\" (Chang 49), or that typical scenarios in them involve intense romantic and sexual pairings between gay and bisexual men as well as complex love triangles involving two (bisexual or heterosexual) men and a (bisexual or heterosexual) woman (Hart, \"Auteur\" 35). It is perhaps further unsurprising that, during the decade of the 1990s, Araki succeeded in substantially reworking several popular Hollywood subgenres (e.g., buddy films, juvenile delinquency films, and road movies) into non-heterosexual variations, using his directorial \"gay sensibility\" to present even apparently \"straight material\" in homoerotic ways, such as by eroticizing attractive male torsos (by forcing the camera to linger on them and shoot them from low angles) or by focusing intentionally on extended, intense eye contact between two sexually charged, breathtaking young men (Chang 50; Grundmann 25; Moran 19). Openly acknowledging this reality, Araki himself has called _The Doom Generation_ \"the gayest 'heterosexual movie' ever made\" (G. Smith, \"Sundance 'Kids' \" 9).\n\nWhen I first began incorporating _The Doom Generation_ in the various film courses I teach, more than a decade ago, I did so enthusiastically because I realized that, upon conclusion of the initial viewing experience, most viewers are tempted to dismiss it immediately as cinematic trash. In fact, that was even my own immediate reaction to the film when I first experienced it. I recognized that it would be difficult for many of my students\u2014who typically have been raised on a steady diet of mainstream Hollywood movies from an early age\u2014to decide what to make of this complex and challenging work, but that is what has been so fun about exposing them to this film all of these years. In my experience to date, far too many viewers wish to instantly dismiss _The Doom Generation_ and other of Araki's films as the kinds of offerings \"jeered at not only just by critics, but also by drunken teenagers, prison inmates, and medicated zoo animals\" (qtd. in Hershenson, par. 9), as critic Jason Katzman has done, rather than to wrestle with their complex and challenging contents in the more intellectually informed and enlightened ways they appear to require.\n\nIt is perhaps especially noteworthy, therefore, that so few of the students who participated in this study made note of the various ways that _The Doom Generation_ can be regarded as an \"art film,\" rather than simply a film containing political themes and messages. In my earlier essay \"Auteur\/Bricoleur\/Provocateur: Gregg Araki and Post-punk Style in _The Doom Generation_ ,\" I demonstrate at length how this director's post-punk filmmaking style contributes substantially, at the intersection of the artistic and the political, to this film's radical\/subversive potential with regard to cinematic representations and social constructions of bisexual men and other non-heterosexual individuals (30-38). What many of the critics who immediately dismiss _The Doom Generation_ as cinematic trash appear to overlook is that Araki, as a graduate of the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television, is well familiar with film history and theory and various influential works of cinematic auteurs from previous decades, including those of Jean-Luc Godard, who has had a substantial influence on Araki's own creations. For example:\n\nAraki regularly incorporates the disjointed narrative techniques (jumpcuts, handheld cameras, nonlinearity, etc.) of Godard's films, and he agrees with Godard that outsiders can indeed reject traditional conceptions of film realism yet still work within the cinema industry in order to change it. If a key component of a post-punk style is bricolage, Araki functions as bricoleur in the way that he modifies Godard's techniques in order to produce films of even greater subversive potential. His post-punk bricolage is seen even more clearly in the way he plays with the conventions of various genres in order to make them serve new and radical purposes. (Hart, \"Auteur\" 32-33)\n\nDespite the aesthetic complexity of Araki's film, I suspect that it is this director's embracing and foregrounding of a \"schizophrenic\" visual style\u2014one that is based on the \"fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents\" (Jameson 125)\u2014that causes many viewers and critics to tend to overlook its noteworthy artistic attributes which, on the surface, appear primarily to offer a \"seemingly disconnected, discontinuous stringing together of narrative images that [seem to] fail to offer a coherent global meaning\" (Hart, \"Auteur\" 34), rather than to pack an even more powerful representational and political punch. As a result, viewers who perceive this film to be \"trash\" rather than \"art\" most likely let their guard down substantially while viewing it, thereby potentially leaving them more vulnerable to being influenced by its politically charged messages, themes, and representations than they otherwise might be because they are far less likely to reflect thoughtfully upon, and\/or argue actively against, them during the viewing experience.\n\nIt has long been said that one person's (cinematic) trash is another person's (cultural) treasure. This appears to hold true with regard to Gregg Araki's 1995 film, _The Doom Generation_. As the responses documented in this study show, approximately half of the students who viewed this film derived meanings from it that offered them new insights into the conditions experienced regularly by bisexual men and other non-heterosexual individuals in modern U.S. society, including various forms of discrimination and recurring feelings of otherness and alienation that derive from constantly being judged by conservative hegemonic social standards. When all was said and done, the results of this research project convinced me that cultural value lies in the eye of the beholder and that there is indeed a great deal of cultural value that can be derived from viewing this intriguing film, even if the majority of its viewers fail\u2014or perhaps simply refuse\u2014to recognize it. Paradoxically speaking, even cinematic works that appear on their surface to be trash can contain substantial cultural value as they lead their viewers to stretch beyond their comfort zones and vicariously experience circumstances, events, and lifestyles to which they are not especially accustomed.\n\nLike punk musical offerings in their heyday, _The Doom Generation_ and other of Araki's films are readily recognizable by their intentionally raw depictions of extreme aggression, angst, nihilism, and sexuality that lack conventional commercial appeal, in narratives pertaining to dysfunctional young people striving desperately to forge any sort of meaningful relationship with another. In my opinion, those attributes are what make them so intriguing, as well as so culturally threatening to many. In short, Araki's various films vividly and powerfully embody the very undercurrents of anarchy, disorder, and (sexual) otherness that civilized societies of all kinds have, for generations, been striving to repress at virtually any cost, yet which nevertheless may be quite necessary in order to further the progress that remains to be made toward the acceptance of bisexuality and other non-heterosexual identities today (Arnold 11).\n\nSummarizing his reactions to _The Doom Generation_ , one of my students stated, \"The movie takes everything that critics would hate about a movie and brings them out for the viewer. To me, that [represents] Araki, in essence, giving the critics the middle finger and making the film that he wanted to.\" I suspect that was Araki's intention\u2014and main point\u2014all along.\nFilmography\n\n1987\n\n**_Three Bewildered People in the Night_**\n\nCinematography: Gregg Araki. Director: Gregg Araki. Film Editing: Gregg Araki. Producer: Gregg Araki. Screenwriter: Gregg Araki. U.S. Release Date: Did not receive widespread distribution. With Mark Howell (David), John Lacques (Craig), Darcy Marta (Alicia). Currently unavailable on DVD.\n\n1989\n\n**_The Long Weekend (O' Despair)_**\n\nCinematography: Gregg Araki. Director: Gregg Araki. Film Editing: Gregg Araki. Producer: Gregg Araki. Screenwriter: Gregg Araki. U.S. Release Date: May 17, 1991 (limited). With Andrea Beane (Leah), Marcus D'Amico (Greg), Nicole Dillenberg (Sara), Maureen Dondanville (Rachel), Bretton Vail (Michael), Lance Woods (Alex). Currently unavailable on DVD.\n\n1992\n\n**_The Living End_**\n\nCinematography: Gregg Araki. Director: Gregg Araki. Film Editing: Gregg Araki. Producers: Jon Gerrans, Marcus Hu. Screenwriter: Gregg Araki. U.S. Release Date: August 21, 1992. With Mike Dytri (Luke), Craig Gilmore (Jon), Darcy Marta (Darcy), Scot Goetz (Peter), Johanna Went (Fern), Mary Woronov (Daisy), Christopher Mabli (NeoNazi). Currently available on DVD from Strand Releasing.\n\n1993\n\n**_Totally F***ed Up_**\n\nCinematography: Gregg Araki. Director: Gregg Araki. Film Editing: Gregg Araki. Producers: Gregg Araki, Andrea Sperling. Screenwriter: Gregg Araki. U.S. Release Date: October 10, 1993. With James Duval (Andy), Susan Behshid (Michele), Roko Belic (Tommy), Jenee Gill (Patricia), Gilbert Luna (Steven), Lance May (Deric), Alan Boyce (Ian). Currently available on DVD from Strand Releasing.\n\n1995\n\n**_The Doom Generation_**\n\nCinematography: Jim Fealy. Director: Gregg Araki. Film Editing: Gregg Araki, Jennifer Gentile, Karen Kennedy, Kate McGowan. Producers: Gregg Araki, Yves Marmion, Andrea Sperling. Screenwriter: Gregg Araki. U.S. Release Date: October 27, 1995. With Johnathon Schaech (Xavier Red), James Duval (Jordan White), Rose McGowan (Amy Blue), Dustin Nguyen (Quickiemart Clerk), Margaret Cho (Clerk's Wife), Christopher Knight (TV Anchorman), Lauren Tewes (TV Anchorwoman), Parker Posey (Brandi). Currently available on DVD from Lions Gate Home Entertainment.\n\n1997\n\n**_Nowhere_**\n\nCinematography: Arturo Smith. Director: Gregg Araki. Film Editing: Gregg Araki, Jennifer Gentile, Jeff Malmberg, Anthony Santiago. Producers: Gregg Araki, Andrea Sperling. Screenwriter: Gregg Araki. U.S. Release Date: May 9, 1997. With James Duval (Dark), Nathan Bexton (Montgomery), Rachel True (Mel), Kathleen Robertson (Lucifer), Alan Boyce (Handjob), Chiara Mastroianni (Kriss), Debi Mazar (Kozy), Jeremy Jordan (Bart), Guillermo Diaz (Cowboy), Jordan Ladd (Alyssa), Christina Applegate (Dingbat), Sarah Lassez (Egg\/Polly), Jaason Simmons (The Teen Idol), Ryan Phillippe (Shad), Heather Graham (Lilith), Scott Caan (Ducky), Thyme Lewis (Elvis), Joshua Gibran Mayweather (Zero), Mena Suvari (Zoe), Gibby Haynes (Jujyfruit), Beverly D'Angelo (Dark's Mom), John Ritter (Moses Helper), Traci Lords (Val-Chick #1), Shannen Doherty (Val-Chick #2), Rose McGowan (Val-Chick #3), Keith Brewer (Surf), Derek Brewer (Ski), Roscoe (The Alien). Currently unavailable on DVD.\n\n1999\n\n**_Splendor_**\n\nCinematography: Jim Fealy. Director: Gregg Araki. Film Editing: Gregg Araki, Tatiana Riegel. Producers: Gregg Araki, Graham Broadbent, Damian Jones. Screenwriters: Gregg Araki, Jill Cargerman (additional voiceover). U.S. Release Dates: September 17, 1999 (New York City), October 1, 1999 (Los Angeles). With Kathleen Robertson (Veronica), Johnathon Schaech (Abel), Matt Keeslar (Zed), Kelly Macdonald (Mike), Eric Mabius (Ernest). Currently unavailable on DVD (previously released by Columbia TriStar).\n\n2004\n\n**_Mysterious Skin_**\n\nCinematography: Steve Gainer. Director: Gregg Araki. Film Editing: Gregg Araki. Producers: Gregg Araki, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, Mary Jane Skalski. Screenwriter: Gregg Araki, based on the novel by Scott Heim. U.S. Release Date: May 6, 2005 (limited). With Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Neil McCormick), Brady Corbet (Brian Lackey), Bill Sage (Coach), Michelle Trachtenberg (Wendy), Jeff Licon (Eric), Mary Lynn Rajskub (Avalyn Friesen), Elisabeth Shue (Mrs. McCormick), Lisa Long (Mrs. Lackey), Chris Mulkey (Mr. Lackey), Ryan Stenzel (Stephen Zepherelli). Currently available on DVD from Strand Releasing.\n\n2007\n\n**_Smiley Face_**\n\nCinematography: Shawn Kim. Director: Gregg Araki. Film Editing: Gregg Araki, Alex Blatt. Producers: Gregg Araki, Steve Golin, Alix Madigan-Yorkin, Kevin Turen, Henry Winterstern. Screenwriter: Dylan Haggerty. U.S. Release Date: November 16, 2007 (limited). With Anna Faris (Jane F.), John Krasinski (Brevin), Danny Masterson (Steve the Roommate), Adam Brody (Steve the Dealer), Marion Ross (Shirley), John Cho (Mikey), Danny Trejo (Albert), Jane Lynch (Casting Director), Dylan Haggerty (Ferris Wheel Attendant), Scott 'Carrot Top' Thompson (Himself), Roscoe Lee Browne (Himself). Currently available on DVD from First Look Studios.\nBibliography\n\nAaron, Michele. \"New Queer Cinema: An Introduction.\" _New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader_. Ed. Michele Aaron. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004. 3-14.\n\n\"About the Production: _Nowhere.\"_ Fine Line Features. 9 May 1997. 23 Aug. 1997 <<http:\/\/www.flf.com\/nowhere\/notes\/main.htm>>.\n\nAntani, Jay. Rev. of _Smiley Face_ , dir. Gregg Araki. Filmcritic.com. 2007. 19 Mar. 2009 <<http:\/\/www.filmcritic.com\/misc\/emporium.nsf\/reviews\/Smiley-Face>>.\n\nAraki, Gregg. \"Filmmaker's Statement.\" _Totally F***ed Up DVD Insert_. New York: Strand Releasing, 2005. 7.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Filmmaker's Statement.\" _The Living End: An Irresponsible Movie by Gregg Araki DVD Insert_. New York: Strand Releasing, 2008. 4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Production Notes.\" _Totally F***ed Up DVD Insert_. New York: Strand Releasing, 2005. 8-9.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Production Notes.\" _The Living End: An Irresponsible Movie by Gregg Araki DVD Insert_. New York: Strand Releasing, 2008. 7.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Spring 2005.\" _Totally F***ed Up DVD Insert_. New York: Strand Releasing, 2005. 12.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Spring 2008.\" _The Living End: An Irresponsible Movie by Gregg Araki DVD Insert_. New York: Strand Releasing, 2008. 2.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Synopsis.\" _The Living End: An Irresponsible Movie by Gregg Araki DVD Insert_. New York: Strand Releasing, 2008. 5.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Totally F***ed Up.\" _Totally F***ed Up DVD Insert_. New York: Strand Releasing, 2005. 6.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. _\"Totally F***ed Up_ : A Screenplay by Gregg Araki.\" New York: William Morrow, 1994.\n\nArnold, Matthew. \"Culture and Anarchy.\" _Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader_. 2nd ed. Ed. John Storey. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1998. 7-12.\n\nArroyo, Jos\u00e9. \"Death, Desire, and Identity: The Political Unconscious of 'New Queer Cinema.' \" _Activating Theory: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Politics_. Ed. Joseph Bristow and Angelia R. Wilson. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. 70-96.\n\nAsch, Andrew. \"Teen Issues Meet Aliens in Director Gregg Araki's Mind.\" Knight-Ridder\/Tribune News Service. 10 July 1997. 8 June 2000 <<http:\/\/web2.infotrac.galegroup.com\/itw\/informark\/715\/229\/65614186w3>>.\n\nBarthes, Roland, _Image, Music, Text_. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.\n\nBeaver, Frank. _Dictionary of Film Terms: The Aesthetic Companion to Film Analysis_. New York: Twayne, 1994.\n\nBelton, John. _American Cinema\/American Culture_. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.\n\nBenshoff, Harry, and Sean Griffin. \"Queer Cinema, the _Film_ Reader: General Introduction.\" _Queer Cinema: The_ Film _Reader_. Ed. Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin. New York: Routledge, 2004. 1-15.\n\n\"Biography for Gregg Araki.\" Internet Movie Database. 2 Oct. 2008 <<http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0000777\/bio>>.\n\nBrodie, John. \"Surprises Goose Sundance.\" _Variety_ 13 Jan. 1997: 11.\n\nBryant, Wayne M. _Bisexual Characters in Film: From Ana\u00efs to Zee_. Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park P, 1997.\n\nBywater, Tim, and Thomas Sobchack. _Introduction to Film Criticism: Major Critical Approaches to Narrative Film_. New York: Longman, 1989.\n\nChang, Chris. \"Absorbing Alternative.\" _Film Comment_ Sept.-Oct. 1994: 47-53.\n\nChonin, Neva. \"Gregg Araki's Films Focus on Taboos, but His New One's Getting Mainstream Praise.\" _San Francisco Chronicle_ 26 May 2005: El.\n\nChristopher, James. \"Haunted by the Past.\" _The Times_ 21 Oct. 2004: F14.\n\n_Cinema de Merde_. Rev. of _Smiley Face_ , dir. Gregg Araki. 11 Jan. 2007. 19 March 2009 <<http:\/\/www\/cinemademerde.com\/Smiley_Face.shtml>>.\n\nClare. Rev. of _The Doom Generation_ , dir. Gregg Araki. 23 Dec. 2008 <<http:\/\/www.mutantreviewers.com\/rdoom.html>>.\n\nClark, Kevin A. \"Pink Water: The Archetype of Blood and the Pool of Infinite Contagion.\" _Power in the Blood: A Handbook on AIDS, Politics, and Communication_. Ed. William N. Elwood. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999. 9-24.\n\nCooper, Dennis. \"Baby Talky.\" _Artforum_ May 1997: 22.\n\nCusten, George F. \"Strange Brew: Hollywood and the Fabrication of Homosexuality in _Tea and Sympathy.\" Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures_. Ed. Martin Duberman. New York: New York UP, 1997. 116-38.\n\nDaly, Steve. Rev. of _The Doom Generation_ , dir. Gregg Araki. _Entertainment Weekly_ 10 Nov. 1995: 40.\n\nD'Arcy, David. \"Gregg Araki's Stoner Comedy.\" Greencine.com. 30 Dec. 2007. 19 Mar. 2009 <<http:\/\/www.greencine.com\/central.greggaraki>>.\n\n\"Designed for Living.\" _Filmmaker Magazine_. Summer 1999. 30 June 2008 <<http:\/\/www.filmmakermagazine.com\/summer1999\/splendor.php>>.\n\nDossi, Joel. Rev. of _Mysterious Skin_ , dir. Gregg Araki. _Cineaste_ Summer 2005: 65-66.\n\nDuralde, Alonso. \" _The Living End_ Lives Again: Gregg Araki's Sexy and Angry AIDS Road Movie Hits DVD in a Revamped New Edition.\" _Advocate_ 6 May 2008: 65.\n\nEbert, Roger. Rev. of _The Doom Generation_ , dir. Gregg Araki. Nov. 1995. 31 Jan. 2003 <<http:\/\/www.suntimes.com\/ebert\/ebert_reviews\/l995\/11\/1006063.html>>.\n\nEhrenstein, David. \"Gay Film's Bad Boy.\" _Advocate_ 8 Sept. 2008: 70.\n\nElbaz, Mikha\u00ebl, and Ruth Murbach. \"Fear of the Other, Condemned and Damned: AIDS, Epidemics, and Exclusions.\" _A Leap in the Dark: AIDS, Art, and Contemporary Cultures_. Ed. Allan Klusacek and Ken Morrison. Montreal: V\u00e9hicule P, 1993. 1-9.\n\nEsther, John. \"Gregg Araki: Tackling the Tough Ones on Film.\" _Gay and Lesbian Review_ Sept.-Oct. 2005: 44-45.\n\nEvans, Caroline, and Lorraine Gamman. \"The Gaze Revisited, or Reviewing Queer Viewing.\" _A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Popular Culture_. Ed. Paul Burston and Colin Richardson. New York: Routledge, 1995. 13-56.\n\nFarber, Stephen. \"A Drama of Family Loyalty, Acceptance\u2014and AIDS.\" _New York Times_ 18 Aug. 1985: 23+.\n\nFarmer, Brett. _Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships_. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000.\n\nFilm.com. Rev. of _Nowhere_ , dir. Gregg Araki. 1996. 23 Aug. 1997 <<http:\/\/www.film.com\/filma\/reviews\/ad_revw.idc?rev=1732>>.\n\nFilm Fiend. Rev. of _The Doom Generation_ , dir. Gregg Araki. 13 Aug. 2007. 23 Dec. 2008 <<http:\/\/www\/thefilmfiend.com\/2007\/08\/doom-generation.html>>.\n\nGleiberman, Owen. Rev. of _Splendor_ , dir. Gregg Araki. _Entertainment Weekly_ 8 Oct. 1999: 47.\n\nGonzalez, Ed. Rev. of _Mysterious Skin_ , dir. Gregg Araki. _Slant_ 3 May 2005. 26 Feb. 2009 <<http:\/\/www.slantmagazine.com\/film\/film_review.asp?ID=1579>>.\n\nGreen, Leila, and Sarah Goode. \"The 'Hollywood' Treatment of Paedophilia.\" _Australian Journal of Communication_ 35.2 (2008): 71-85.\n\nGreene, Jane M. \"Rethinking Screwball Comedy.\" _Film and Sexual Politics_. Ed. Kylo-Patrick R. Hart. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars P, 2006. 7-27.\n\n\"Gregg's Going Somewhere.\" 30 May 1997. 23 Dec. 2008 <<http:\/\/www.roughcut.com\/main\/drive1_97may5.html>>.\n\nGrundmann, Roy. \"The Fantasies We Live By: Bad Boys in _Swoon_ and _The Living End.\" Cineaste_ 19.4 (1993): 25-29.\n\nGunning, Tom. \"An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.\" _Film Theory and Criticism_. 6th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 862-76.\n\nHall, Stuart. \"Encoding\/Decoding.\" _Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79_. Ed. Stuart Hall and Dorothy Hobson. London: Unwin Hyman, 1980. 128-38.\n\nHalley, Stefan. \"AFI Fest: Gregg Araki Puts on a Smiley Face.\" PopSyndicate.com. 2008. 19 Mar. 2009 <[http:\/\/www.popsyndicate.com\/archive\/story\/afi_fest_gregg_araki_puts_on  \n_a_smiley_face](http:\/\/www.popsyndicate.com\/archive\/story\/afi_fest_gregg_araki_puts_on_a_smiley_face)>.\n\nHart, Kylo-Patrick R. _The AIDS Movie: Representing a Pandemic in Film and Television_. Binghamton, NY: Haworth P, 2000.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Gay Male Spectatorship, Textual Flexibility, and Mainstream American Cinema.\" _Iowa Journal of Communication_ 34.1 (2002): 1-26.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Auteur\/Bricoleur\/Provocateur: Gregg Araki and Post-punk Style in _The Doom Generation.\" Journal of Film and Video_ 55.1 (2003): 30-38.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Cinematic Trash or Cultural Treasure? Conflicting Viewer Reactions to the Extremely Violent World of Bisexual Men in Gregg Araki's 'Heterosexual Movie' _The Doom Generation.\" Journal of Bisexuality_ 7.1-2 (2007): 53-69.\n\nHays, Matthew. \"Make Art, Not Politics.\" _Montreal Mirror_. 17 July 1997. 13 Feb. 2009 <<http:\/\/www.montrealmirror.com\/archives\/1997\/071797\/film1.html>>.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. _The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers_. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp P, 2007.\n\nHebdige, Dick. _Subculture: The Meaning of Style_. London: Routledge, 1991.\n\nHeim, Scott. _Mysterious Skin_. New York: Harper, 1995.\n\nHershenson, Karen. \"Bombs Away! Film Critic Hurls Invective across the Internet.\" Knight-Ridder\/Tribune News Service. 1 Aug. 1997. 8 June 2000 <<http:\/\/web2.infotrac.galegroup.com\/itw\/infomark\/715\/229\/65614186w3>>.\n\nHundley, Jessica. \"Apocalyptic Pop.\" Phoenix Media\/Communications Group. June 1997. 13 Feb. 2009 <<http:\/\/www.geocities.com\/SoHo\/Cafe\/5214\/araki.htm?200913>>.\n\nIde, Wendy. \"Gregg Araki Pulls No Punches with _Mysterious Skin_.\" _The Times_ 21 May 2005: F9.\n\nindieWIRE. \"Interview: 'Smiley Face' Director Gregg Araki.\" 16 Nov. 2007. 2 Oct. 2008 <<http:\/\/www.indiewire.com\/people\/2007\/11\/indiewire_inter_125.html>>.\n\n\"An Interview with James Duval.\" _The iMagazine_. 23 Jan. 1998 <<http:\/\/www.eden.com\/~soma\/interview.html>>.\n\nJacobs, Lea. _Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942_. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.\n\nJameson, Fredric. \"Postmodernism and Consumer Society.\" _The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture_. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay P, 1983. 111-25.\n\nJohnson, Heather. \"Road Movies.\" GreenCine. 2006. 19 Mar. 2009 <<http:\/\/www.greencine.com\/static\/primers\/road.jsp>>.\n\nJustin. Rev. of _The Doom Generation_ , dir. Gregg Araki. 23 Dec. 2008 <<http:\/\/www.mutantreviewers.com\/rdoom.html>>.\n\nKaufman, Joanne. Rev. of _The Living End_ , dir. Gregg Araki. _People_ 9 Nov. 1992: 19.\n\nKenny, Glenn. Rev. of _The Doom Generation_ , dir. Gregg Araki. _Entertainment Weekly_ 31 May 1996: 68.\n\nKlinger, Barbara. \"The Road to Dystopia: Landscaping the Nation in _Easy Rider_.\" _The Road Movie Book_. Ed. Steven Cohan and Ina R. Hark. New York: Routledge, 1997. 179-203.\n\nKoresky, Michael. Rev. of _Mysterious Skin_ , dir. Gregg Araki. _Film Comment_ May-June 2005: 73-74.\n\nKotek, Elliot V. \" _Smiley Face_ . . . and Gregg Araki.\" _Moving Pictures_. 2007. 19 Mar. 2009 <<http:\/\/www.movingpicturesmagazine.com\/festivities\/articles\/greggaraki>>.\n\nKyle. Rev. of _The Doom Generation_ , dir. Gregg Araki. 23 Dec. 2008 <<http:\/\/www.mutantreviewers.com\/rdoom.html>>.\n\nLaSalle, Mick. \"Pedophile's Acts Beget Long Arc of Suffering.\" _San Francisco Chronicle_ 27 May 2005: E5.\n\nLee, Michael J. \"Gregg Araki and Scott Heim.\" _Radio Free Entertainment_. 24 May 2005. 26 Feb. 2009 <[http:\/\/movies.radiofree.com\/interviews  \n\/mysterio_gregg_araki_scott_heim.shtml](http:\/\/movies.radiofree.com\/interviews\/mysterio_gregg_araki_scott_heim.shtml)>.\n\nLeong, Ian, Mike Sell, and Kelly Thomas. \"Mad Love, Mobile Homes, and Dysfunctional Dicks: On the Road with Bonnie and Clyde.\" _The Road Movie Book_. Ed. Steven Cohan and Ina R. Hark. New York: Routledge, 1997. 70-89.\n\nLevy, Emanuel. \"Nowhere.\" Rev. of _Nowhere_ , dir. Gregg Araki. _Variety_ 10 Feb. 1997: 66.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Splendor.\" Rev. of _Splendor_ , dir. Gregg Araki. _Variety_ 15 Feb. 1999: 62.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. _Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film_. New York: New York UP, 1999.\n\nLim, Dennis. \"AFI Fest: Zonked Out of Her Mind.\" _Los Angeles Times_ 9 Nov. 2007. 19 Mar. 2009 <<http:\/\/articles.latimes.com\/2007\/nov\/09\/entertainment\/et-smiley9>>.\n\nLopez, Daniel. _Films by Genre_. London: McFarland, 1993.\n\nMcKinley, Will. \"Put on a 'Smiley Face.' \" _The Villager_ 2-8 Jan. 2008. 19 Mar. 2009 <<http:\/\/www.thevillager.com\/villager_244\/putasmiley.html>>.\n\nMcQuail, Denis. _McQuail's Mass Communication Theory_. 4th ed. London: Sage, 2000.\n\nMoran, James M. \"Gregg Araki: Guerrilla Film-maker for a Queer Generation.\" _Film Quarterly_ 50.1 (1996): 18-26.\n\nNull, Christopher. Rev. of _The Doom Generation_ , dir. Gregg Araki. 1999. 23 Dec. 2008 <<http:\/\/www.filmcritic.com\/misc\/emporium.nsf\/reviews\/The-Doom-Generation>>.\n\n\"Outspoken: Gregg Araki.\" _OutUK_. 26 Feb. 2009 <<http:\/\/www.outuk.com\/content\/features\/araki\/index.html>>.\n\nPadgug, Robert A., and Gerald M. Oppenheimer. \"Riding the Tiger: AIDS and the Gay Community.\" _AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease_. Ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. 245-78.\n\nParish, James R., and Michael R. Pitts. _The Great Science Fiction Pictures_. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1977.\n\nPearl, Monica B. \"AIDS and New Queer Cinema.\" _New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader_. Ed. Michele Aaron. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004. 23-35.\n\n\"Personnel Bios.\" _Totally F***ed Up DVD Insert_. New York: Strand Releasing, 2005. 10-11.\n\nPomeranz, Margaret. \"At the Movies: _Mysterious Skin.\"_ 2005. 26 Feb. 2009 <<http:\/\/www.abc.net.au\/atthemovies\/txt\/s1198828.htm>>.\n\nPoolMan. Rev. of _The Doom Generation_ , dir. Gregg Araki. 23 Dec. 2008 <<http:\/\/www.mutantreviewers.com\/rdoom.html>>.\n\nPorter, Edward. \"Sensitive Skin.\" _Sunday Times_ 22 May 2005: F15.\n\n\"Rebellious Love in the Age of AIDS.\" Rev. of _The Living End_ , dir. Gregg Araki. Aug. 2008. 4 Dec. 2008 <<http:\/\/gayinterestfilms.blogspot.com\/2008\/08\/living-end-1992-usa-gregg-araki.html>>.\n\nRich, B. Ruby. \"The New Queer Cinema.\" _Sight and Sound_ 2.5 (1992). Rpt. in _Queer Cinema: The_ Film _Reader_. Ed. Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin. New York: Routledge, 2004. 53-59.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Vision Quest: Searching for Diamonds in the Rough.\" _Village Voice_ 26 Mar. 2002: 43.\n\nRusso, Vito. _The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies_. Revised ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.\n\nSarris, Andrew. \"Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.\" _Film Theory and Criticism_. 6th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 561-64.\n\nSatuloff, Bob. Rev. of _Nowhere_ , dir. Gregg Araki. _Advocate_ 27 May 1997: 92.\n\nSavlov, Marc. Rev. of _Splendor_ , dir. Gregg Araki. _Austin Chronicle_ 22 Nov. 1999. 13 Feb. 2009 <<http:\/\/www.filmvault.com\/filmvault\/austin\/s\/splendor1.html>>.\n\nSchulman, Sarah. \"Fame, Shame, and Kaposi's Sarcoma: New Themes in Lesbian and Gay Film.\" _My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan\/Bush Years_. New York: Routledge, 1994. 228-32.\n\nSchwarzbaum, Lisa. Rev. of _Nowhere_ , dir. Gregg Araki. _Entertainment Weekly_ 23 May 1997: 46.\n\nSeguin, Denis. \"Taboo or Not Taboo . . .\" _The Times_ 16 Oct. 2004: F17.\n\nSeverson, Matthew L. \"Young, Beautiful, and F***ed.\" _Bright Lights Film Journal_ 46(1995). 23 Dec. 2008 <<http:\/\/www.brightlightsfilm.com\/15\/araki.html>>.\n\nShapiro, Benjamin. \"Universal Truths: Cultural Myths and Generic Adaptation in 1950s Science Fiction Films.\" _Journal of Popular Film and Television_ 18.3 (1990): 103-11.\n\nShumway, David R. \"Screwball Comedies: Constructing Romance, Mystifying Marriage.\" _Film Genre Reader II_. Ed. Barry K. Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 1995. 381-401.\n\nSmith, Damon. \"Rebel, Rebel.\" _Bright Lights Film Journal_ 59 (2008). 4 Dec. 2008 <<http:\/\/www.brightlightsfilm.com\/59\/59arakiiv.html>>.\n\nSmith, Gavin. \"Sundance 'Kids.' \" _Film Comment_ Mar.-Apr. 1995: 8-9.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Sundance 97: Digging for Gold.\" _Film Comment_ Mar.-Apr. 1997: 55+.\n\nSnyder, S. James. \"This is Your Movie on Drugs.\" _New York Sun_ 26 Dec. 2007. 19 Mar. 2009 <<http:\/\/www.nysun.com\/arts\/this-is-your-movie-on-drugs\/68563\/>>.\n\nStraayer, Chris. _Deviant Eves, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientation in Film and Video_. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.\n\nStringer, Julian. \"Exposing Intimacy in Russ Meyer's _Motorpsycho!_ and _Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!_ \" _The Road Movie Book_. Ed. Steven Cohan and Ina R. Hark. New York: Routledge, 1997. 165-78.\n\nStuart, Jan. \"Araki and a Hard Place.\" _Advocate_ 12 Oct. 1999: 63.\n\nTeeman, Tim. \"Boys' Own Stories.\" _The Times_ 19 May 2005: F19.\n\nThomson, Desson. \"'Skin': Fearlessly Revealing.\" _Washington Post_ 24 June 2005: WE34.\n\nWallenberg, Louise. \"New Black Queer Cinema.\" _New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader_. Ed. Michele Aaron. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004. 128-43.\n\nWatney, Simon. _Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media_. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.\n\nWhitty, Stephen. \"Totally F***ed Up.\" Knight-Ridder\/Tribune News Service. 18 Aug. 1994. 8 June 2000 <<http:\/\/web2.infotrac.galegroup.com\/itw\/infomark\/715\/229\/65614186w3>>.\n\nWollen, Peter. \"The Auteur Theory.\" _Film Theory and Criticism_. 6th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 565-80.\n\nWood, Robin. _Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond_. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.\n\nZion, Lawrie. \"Child-abuse Film Faces Ban after Rating Dispute.\" _The Australian_ 19 July 2005: L4.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"Truth Lies Under the Skin.\" _The Australian_ 3 Aug. 2005: F14.\nIndex\n\nThe index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below\n\nAaron, Michele\n\nabuse\n\nabuser\n\naccessibility\n\nacid\n\naction film\n\nactivism\n\nadaptation\n\nadultery\n\n_The Advocate_\n\naesthetic complexity\n\naffection\n\nagency\n\nAIDS movie\n\nAIDS pandemic\n\nacronym and\n\nas death sentence\n\nand New Queer Cinema\n\noutrage and\n\npromiscuity and\n\nAIDS test\n\nalien abduction\n\nalienation\n\nhegemony and\n\nand science fiction\n\namong teenagers\n\nalien invasion\n\nAltman, Robert\n\nambiguity\n\nAmerican flag\n\namnesia\n\namoeba\n\namorality\n\namorphous sexuality\n\nanal intercourse\n\nanarchy\n\nangel\n\nangst\n\nanimalistic sexuality\n\napathy\n\napocalypse\n\nteen trilogy and\n\nApplegate, Christina\n\nArroyo, Jos\u00e9\n\nart film\n\n_Artforum_\n\nartist's block\n\nasexuality\n\nAshley, Christopher\n\nAtari\n\n_The Austin Chronicle_\n\nauteur\n\nfirst century of cinema and\n\nintertextuality and\n\nstar as\n\nstylistic evolution and\n\ntheory\n\nauteurist status\n\nauthorial style\n\ndeviation from\n\nerratic nature of\n\nevolution of\n\nmainstream incorporation and\n\nrecurring elements of\n\nas trademark\n\nautoasphyxiation\n\nautobiography\n\nautoeroticism\n\navant-garde\n\nbaby shampoo\n\nBacon, Kevin\n\n_Badlands_\n\nBall, Lucille\n\nBanderas, Antonio\n\n_Bar Girls_\n\nBarbie\n\nbareback sex\n\nbathhouse\n\nbattle of the sexes\n\n_Baywatch_\n\nbeach\n\nbeanbag chair\n\nBeane, Andrea\n\nBearse, Amanda\n\nbeating\n\nbed-wetting\n\nbeer\n\nBehshid, Susan\n\nBelic, Roko\n\nBelmondo, Jean-Paul\n\nBenshoff, Harry\n\nBergman, Ingmar\n\nbestiality\n\nbetrayal\n\n_Beverly Hills 90210_\n\nBexton, Nathan\n\nBigelow, Kathryn\n\n_Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss_\n\nbiography\n\nbiological warfare\n\nbisexuality\n\nand decoding strategies\n\ndiscrimination and\n\neroticism and\n\nhegemonic ideology and\n\nhustling and\n\nas inappropriate cinematic fare\n\nrelapse and\n\nand self-discovery\n\nand social constructionism\n\nblackout\n\nblack sheep\n\nBlatt, Alex\n\nblood\n\nbrutality and\n\nand HIV\n\nspace aliens and\n\nblood transfusion\n\nblowjob\n\nbondage\n\n_Bonnie and Clyde_\n\nboredom\n\nbottle rocket\n\nBoyce, Alan\n\n_The Breakfast Club_\n\nbreaking point\n\n_Breathless_\n\nBrewer, Derek\n\nBrewer, Keith\n\nBrialy, Jean-Claude\n\nbricolage\n\nBrighton Beach\n\n_Bringing Up Baby_\n\nBroadbent, Graham\n\nBrody, Adam\n\nBrowne, Roscoe Lee\n\nbrutality\n\nBryant, Wayne\n\nbubble butt\n\nbuddy film\n\nBush, George\n\nCaan, Scott\n\ncameo appearance\n\ncamera angle\n\ncamp\n\nCampbell's Tomato Soup\n\nCargerman, Jill\n\ncarnage\n\ncaroler\n\nCarrot Top\n\ncastration\n\ncategorization\n\ncensorship\n\ncereal\n\nchaos\n\n_Chicago Sun-Times_\n\nchildhood innocence\n\nchildlike innocence\n\nCho, John\n\nCho, Margaret\n\n_Chocolate Babies_\n\nchoking\n\nCholodenko, Lisa\n\nChristmas\n\nChristopher, James\n\nchurch\n\n_Cinema de Merde_\n\ncinematic vision\n\ncinematic trash\n\nclass\n\nClift, Montgomery\n\n_A Clockwork Orange_\n\ncocaine\n\ncockiness\n\ncockroach\n\ncoffeehouse\n\nColorado\n\nColumbia TriStar\n\nColumbine High School\n\ncomedic timing\n\ncomfort zone\n\ncoming out\n\ncommercial appeal\n\nintentional lack of\n\ncommercial failure\n\ncommercial success\n\ncommercial viability\n\n_The Communist Manifesto_\n\ncommunity college\n\ncompassion\n\ncompression\n\ncondemnation\n\ncondescension\n\ncondom\n\nconservatism\n\ncontrol\n\nCooper, Dennis\n\nCooper, Gary\n\ncopycat crime\n\nCorbet, Brady\n\nCorn Pops\n\ncorporate mentality\n\ncouple-on-the-run movie\n\ncowboy\n\ncrabs\n\ncrap\n\ncritical praise\n\ncritical success\n\nCruise, Tom\n\ncrush\n\nCukor, George\n\ncultural studies\n\ncultural value\n\ncupcake\n\ncurfew\n\ncuriositas\n\nDaly, Steve\n\nD'Amico, Marcus\n\nD'Angelo, Beverly\n\nDavis, Geena\n\nDead Can Dance\n\ndeath of the author\n\ndeath of cinema\n\ndecapitation\n\ndecoding\n\ndeconstruction\n\ndefiance\n\nDemme, Jonathan\n\ndenial mechanism\n\ndepression\n\nderangement\n\n_Design for Living_\n\ndesperation\n\ndetachment\n\ndeviancy\n\nDiaz, Guillermo\n\nDickens, Charles\n\nDiet Coke\n\nDillenberg, Nicole\n\nDillon, Matt\n\ndiscrimination\n\ndisease\n\ndisempowerment\n\ndisguise\n\ndisillusionment\n\ndisparagement\n\ndocumentary\n\nDoherty, Shannen\n\ndomesticity\n\ndomination\n\ndominatrix\n\nDondanville, Maureen\n\n_The Doom Generation_\n\nas art film\n\nbrutality in\n\nas cautionary tale\n\nas cinematic trash\n\nas cultural treasure\n\ngenerational confusion in\n\nintertextuality and\n\nreception analysis and\n\nsexual experimentation in\n\nsocial issues in\n\nsubversive potential and\n\ntransitional nature of\n\nultra-violence in\n\nDoritos\n\ndouble-entendre\n\ndouble-meaning gag\n\ndownward spiral\n\nDrano\n\ndrifter\n\ndrive-in theater\n\ndrug dealer\n\ndry mouth\n\nDuval, James\n\ndysfunction\n\ndystopia\n\nDytri, Mike\n\n_An Early Frost_\n\nearring\n\n_Easy Rider_\n\nEbert, Roger\n\nEcstasy\n\n_Edward II_\n\nElbaz, Mikha\u00ebl\n\nEllison, Chase\n\nemptiness\n\nencoding\n\nenema\n\nenigma\n\n_Entertainment Weekly_\n\nepithet\n\nerection\n\nErman, John\n\neroticism\n\nethnicity\n\nEvans, Caroline\n\nevil\n\nExcalibur\n\nexistence, meaning of\n\nexotic dancer\n\nexperimental cinema\n\nexplosion\n\nexpression, freedom of\n\nexpressionism\n\neye contact\n\nfag hag\n\nfairytale\n\nFalwell, Jerry\n\nfamilial backdrop\n\nfantasy\n\n_Far From Heaven_\n\nfarce\n\nFaris, Anna\n\nFarmer, Brett\n\nFarrell, Perry\n\nFassbinder, Rainer Werner\n\n_Fast Times as Ridgemont High_\n\n_Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!_\n\nFealy, Jim\n\nfemininity\n\n_Ferris Bueller's Day Off_\n\nFerris wheel\n\nfetishism\n\n_Film Comment_\n\nfilm festival\n\nfilm grammar\n\nfilm noir\n\n_Film Quarterly_\n\nFine Line Features\n\nfireman\n\nfireworks\n\nFirst Look Studios\n\nfishing\n\nfisting\n\nfixation\n\nflag\n\nflashback\n\nFleiss, Heidi\n\nFonda, Peter\n\nfood fight\n\nforeshadowing\n\nfragmentation\n\nfree-associative narrative\n\nfreedom of expression\n\nfreedom of speech\n\nFrench New Wave\n\nfright\n\n_From Here to Eternity_\n\nfutility\n\nfuture\n\ngagging\n\ngag reflex\n\nGainer, Steve\n\nGamman, Lorraine\n\ngardening shears\n\ngaybashing\n\nHIV\/AIDS and\n\nutopic setting and\n\ngay children\n\ngay males\n\nand decoding strategies\n\nhegemonic ideology and\n\nhustling and\n\npromiscuity and\n\nand rape\n\nrepresentation of\n\n\"gay plague\"\n\ngay sensibility\n\ngay voice\n\ngender\n\ngender bending\n\ngender roles\n\ngender studies\n\ngenerational confusion\n\ngenocide\n\ngenre expectations\n\ndefiance of\n\nand queer scenarios\n\ngenre modification\n\nGentile, Jennifer\n\ngerbil\n\nGere, Richard\n\ngerm warfare\n\nGerrans, Jon\n\nGibson, Mel\n\nGill, Jenee\n\nGilmore, Craig\n\nGiovanni, Marita\n\nGleiberman, Owen\n\nGod\n\nGodard, Jean-Luc\n\nGodzilla\n\nGoetz, Scot\n\ngo-go dancer\n\ngolden shower\n\nGolin, Steve\n\nGordon-Levitt, Joseph\n\n_The Graduate_\n\nGraham, Heather\n\nGrant, Cary\n\nGreenwich Village\n\nGreyson, John\n\nGriffin, Sean\n\nGriffith, Melanie\n\ngrindhouse cinema\n\nGrundmann, Roy\n\n_Gun Crazy_\n\nHaggerty, Dylan\n\nHall, Stuart\n\nHalloween\n\nhallucinogenic drugs\n\nhandicap\n\nHanks, Tom\n\n_Happiness_\n\nhappy ending\n\nharassment\n\nhaunted house\n\nHawks, Howard\n\nHaynes, Gibby\n\nHaynes, Todd\n\nHeartthrob\n\n_Heathers_\n\nheaven\n\nHeckerling, Amy\n\nhegemony\n\nHeim, Scott\n\nhell\n\nHepburn, Katharine\n\nheterocentrism\n\nheterosexism\n\nheterosexual-homosexual binary\n\nheterosexuality\n\n_High Art_\n\n_His Girl Friday_\n\nhitchhiker\n\nHIV\/AIDS\n\nacronym and\n\nand anti-queer sentiment\n\ndeath from\n\nindividuals living with\n\nand liberation\n\nand New Queer Cinema emergence\n\noutrage and\n\npromiscuity and\n\nrepresentation of\n\nand suicide\n\nand terrorism\n\nvictim-blaming and\n\n_Hollow Reed_\n\nHollywood\n\ncinematic convention and\n\nhegemonic ideology and\n\nheterocentrism and\n\nmainstream audience and\n\nholocaust\n\nhomage\n\nhomeless people\n\nhomicide\n\nhomoeroticism\n\nhomophobia\n\n\"Homo Pomo\"\n\nhomosexuality\n\nHopkins, Miriam\n\nHopper, Dennis\n\nhorror\n\n_The Hours and Times_\n\nHowell, Mark\n\nHu, Marcus\n\nHughes, John\n\nhustler\n\nhustling\n\nhyperactivity\n\nhypnotism\n\nhypocrisy\n\nice cream\n\nice pick\n\nidentity politics\n\nideology\n\nimmorality\n\n_The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love_\n\nindependent cinema\n\nindustrial music\n\ninebriation\n\ninfatuation\n\ninfected blood\n\ninfidelity\n\nimagery\n\nimagination\n\nimpotence\n\nincoherence\n\ninnocence\n\nchildhood and\n\nchildlike\n\n\"innocent victim\"\n\ninnuendo\n\ninsecurity\n\ninsemination\n\ninsensitivity\n\nintellectual stimulation\n\ninterior meaning\n\nintertextuality\n\nintertitle\n\ninvestor\n\ninvisibility\n\nirony\n\n\"irresponsible movie\"\n\nisolation\n\n\"Itsy Bitsy Spider\"\n\nJack Daniel's\n\nJarman, Derek\n\n_Jeffrey_\n\nJesus Christ\n\nJones, Damian\n\nJordan, Jeremy\n\n_Jules and Jim_\n\njumpcut\n\njunk food\n\njuvenile delinquency\n\nKalin, Tom\n\nKansas\n\nKarina, Anna\n\nKassell, Nicole\n\nKatzman, Jason\n\nKeaton, Buster\n\nKeeslar, Matt\n\nKennedy, Karen\n\nKerouac, Jack\n\nkidnapping\n\nKim, Shawn\n\nkinky sex\n\n_Kiss Me Guido_\n\nKnight, Christopher\n\nKoresky, Michael\n\nKraft, Rachael\n\nKrasinski, John\n\nKruger, Kelly\n\nKS lesion\n\nKubrick, Stanley\n\nLacques, John\n\nLadd, Jordan\n\nLancaster, Burt\n\nLang, Fritz\n\nLassez, Sarah\n\nLas Vegas\n\nLee, Craig\n\nLee, Spike\n\nlegitimization\n\nLehmann, Michael\n\nLeisure, David\n\nlesbians\n\nand decoding strategies\n\nand insemination party\n\nand murderous tendencies\n\nrepresentation of\n\nlevity\n\nLevy, Emanuel\n\nLevy-Hinte, Jeffrey\n\nLewis, Everett\n\nLewis, Joseph H.\n\nLewis, Thyme\n\nLGBTQ community\n\nliberation\n\nLicon, Jeff\n\nlifeguard\n\nlifestyle\n\nlikeability\n\nlinearity\n\nLions Gate Home Entertainment\n\nlite-beer commercial\n\nliterary studies\n\nLittle League\n\n_The Living End_\n\nas AIDS movie\n\nand New Queer Cinema emergence\n\nsubversive potential and\n\ntreatment of subject matter in\n\nultra-violence in\n\nlocker room\n\nLombard, Carole\n\nLong, Lisa\n\n_The Long Weekend (O' Despair)_\n\nLords, Traci\n\nLos Angeles\n\nalienation and\n\nhomelessness and\n\nhustling and\n\nsurrealism and\n\n_Los Angeles Reader_\n\n_Los Angeles Weekly_\n\n_Losing Chase_\n\nLubitsch, Ernst\n\nLuna, Gilbert\n\nlust of the eyes\n\nLynch, Jane\n\nLynd, Laurie\n\nMabius, Eric\n\nMabli, Christopher\n\nMacdonald, Kelly\n\nMadigan-Yorkin, Alix\n\nMaggenti, Maria\n\nmainstream embrace\n\nmakeup\n\nMalick, Terrence\n\nMalmberg, Jeff\n\nman\u2013boy love\n\nmanners\n\nMarch, Fredric\n\nmarginalization\n\nof LGBTQ community\n\nof sexual practices\n\nof teenagers\n\nmarijuana\n\nMarlboro Man\n\nMarmion, Yves\n\nmarriage\n\nMarta, Darcy\n\nMarxism\n\n_Masculine-Feminine_\n\nmasochism\n\nmass communication\n\nmasterpiece\n\nMasterson, Danny\n\nMastroianni, Chiara\n\nmasturbation\n\nmaturation\n\nMaui\n\nMay, Lance\n\nMayweather, Joshua Gibran\n\nMazar, Debi\n\nMcGowan, Kate\n\nMcGowan, Rose\n\nMcGuire, Riley\n\nmeaning-making\n\n_Melrose Place_\n\nm\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois\n\nmental handicap\n\nmessage vs. meaning\n\nmetaphor\n\nMeyer, Russ\n\nmiddle finger\n\nmiddle school\n\nMidwest\n\nmise-en-sc\u00e8ne\n\nmisfit\n\nmisogyny\n\nMoffett, D.W.\n\nmonogamy\n\nmonotony\n\nmonster\n\nMop & Glo\n\nMoran, James\n\nmorbidity\n\nmores\n\nMotion Picture Production Code\n\nmovie of the week\n\nMulkey, Chris\n\nmulti-dimensionality\n\nM\u00fcnch, Christopher\n\nmunchies\n\nMurbach, Ruth\n\nmurder\n\nmurderer\n\nmusical\n\nmusical comedy\n\nMutant Reviewers from Hell\n\n_My Own Private Idaho_\n\n_Mysterious Skin_\n\nnational anthem\n\n_Natural Born Killers_\n\nNBC\n\nnegotiated reading\n\nneo-Nazi\n\nNew Queer Cinema\n\ndecline of\n\ndefiance in\n\nemergence of\n\nHIV\/AIDS and\n\nmale bias in\n\nstereotyping in\n\nNew Year's Eve\n\nNew York City\n\n_New York Sun_\n\nNguyen, Dustin\n\nNichols, Mike\n\nnightmare\n\nnihilism\n\nnonlinearity\n\nnon-normative femininity\n\nnormalcy\n\nnosebleed\n\nnostalgia\n\nnotoriety\n\n_Nowhere_\n\nbrutality in\n\ncritical reaction to\n\ngenerational confusion in\n\nmainstream content and\n\nspace alien in\n\nsubversive potential and\n\nultra-violence in\n\nnursery rhyme\n\nnurturance\n\nobsession\n\noeuvre\n\nO'Haver, Tommy\n\noptimism\n\noral sex\n\norgasm\n\notherness\n\noutlaw\n\noutsider\n\nnon-heterosexuality and\n\npoint of view of\n\noutsider sensibility\n\npanhandler\n\npanic\n\nparadox\n\nparanoia\n\nPasolini, Pier Paolo\n\npassion\n\npastiche\n\npatriarchy\n\nPearl, Monica\n\npedophilia\n\npenis\n\nseverance of\n\nand sexually transmitted disease\n\nsymbolic\n\nsynonyms for\n\ntattoo on\n\nPenn, Arthur\n\n_People_\n\npeople with AIDS\n\n_Permanent Record_\n\npersonal ad\n\nPetty, Lori\n\n_Philadelphia_\n\n_The Philadelphia Story_\n\nPhillippe, Ryan\n\nphone sex\n\n_Pierrot le Fou_\n\npimp\n\npizza\n\n_Playgirl_\n\n\"The Pledge of Allegiance\"\n\nPlumb, Eve\n\n_Point Break_\n\npointlessness\n\n_Poison_\n\nPolaroid\n\npolice\n\npolitical correctness\n\npolitical corruption\n\nPope, Angela\n\npornography\n\nPosey, Parker\n\npostcard\n\npostmodernism\n\npost-punk culture\n\npost-punk style\n\ncomponents of\n\ndeviation from\n\nevolution of\n\nintertextuality and\n\nmainstream incorporation and\n\nsubversive potential and\n\npothead\n\npregnancy\n\npress kit\n\npretension\n\nprison inmate\n\nprofanity\n\npromiscuity\n\nprostitution\n\nbrutality and\n\nhomicide and\n\nqueer theory and\n\nprovocateur\n\npsychological complexity\n\npsychology\n\npsychopath\n\npublic service announcement\n\npublic urination\n\npunk aesthetic\n\npunk rock\n\npuppy love\n\nqueer culture\n\nqueer psycho-killer\n\nqueer sensibility\n\nqueer theory\n\nqueer villainy\n\nQuinn, Aidan\n\nrace\n\nracism\n\nRae, Charlotte\n\nrage\n\nRajskub, Mary Lynn\n\nrape\n\nbeating and\n\nat gunpoint\n\ninebriation and\n\nand suicide\n\nrapture\n\nRay, Nicholas\n\nrealism\n\nrebellion\n\nreceiver\n\nreception analysis\n\nrecklessness\n\nReeves, Keanu\n\nreligious conservatism\n\nRenoir, Jean\n\nrepresentation\n\nadolescents and\n\nin AIDS movies\n\nand borderline pornography\n\ngay men and\n\nand misogyny\n\npedophilia and\n\npolitical impact of\n\nand social constructionism\n\nof a sub-subculture\n\nvisual arts and\n\nwomen and\n\nrepression\n\nideology and\n\nliberation from\n\nMotion Picture Production Code and\n\nof sexual desire\n\nRepublican\n\nresonance\n\nRich, B. Ruby\n\nRiegel, Tatiana\n\nrimming\n\nRitter, John\n\nroad movie\n\nHIV\/AIDS and\n\npersonal awakening in\n\nsexual experimentation in\n\nRobertson, Kathleen\n\nromantic comedy\n\nromanticization\n\nRoss, Marion\n\n\"Row, Row, Row Your Boat\"\n\n_R.S.V.P_.\n\nRussell, Rosalind\n\nsadism\n\nsadomasochism\n\nsafe sex\n\nSage, Bill\n\nSan Francisco\n\nSanta Barbara\n\nSanta Monica\n\nSantiago, Anthony\n\nSarandon, Susan\n\nsarcasm\n\nSarris, Andrew\n\nSatanism\n\nSAT score\n\nSatuloff, Bob\n\nsausage\n\nsavagery\n\nSavlov, Marc\n\nscar\n\nSchaech, Johnathon\n\nschizophrenia\n\nSchwarzbaum, Lisa\n\nscience fiction\n\nScott, Ridley\n\nscrewball comedy\n\nseduction\n\nself-absorption\n\nself-destruction\n\nself-discovery\n\nself-fulfilling prophecy\n\nsender\n\nsensitivity\n\n_The Separation of the Earth from its Axis_\n\nserial killer\n\nseropositivity\n\nas death sentence\n\neffect on others of\n\nand suicide\n\nand (un)safe sex\n\nand victim blaming\n\nSeverson, Matthew\n\nsex education\n\n_sex, lies, and videotape_\n\nsex slave\n\nsexual abuse\n\nsexual discovery\n\nsexual experimentation\n\nsexual identity\n\nsexual orientation\n\nsexual revolution\n\nsexual self-awareness\n\nshallowness\n\nshock\n\nshock value\n\nshotgun\n\nShue, Elisabeth\n\nshyness\n\n\"Silent Night\"\n\nSilver, Marisa\n\nSimmons, Jaason\n\nsituation comedy\n\n_Sixteen Candles_\n\nSkalski, Mary Jane\n\nskateboarding\n\n_Skin and Bone_\n\nskull-fucker\n\nslam-dancing\n\nslapstick comedy\n\nslasher-comedy\n\nslasher film\n\nslut\n\n_Smiley Face_\n\nSmith, Arturo\n\nSmith, Gavin\n\nsnow\n\nSnyder, James\n\nsocial change\n\nsocial commentary\n\nsocial constructionism\n\nsocial expectation\n\nsocial identity\n\nsocial order\n\nSoderbergh, Steven\n\nSolondz, Todd\n\nsoul mate\n\nsource material\n\nspace alien\n\nas metaphor\n\nand otherness in science fiction\n\nspaceship\n\nspeech, freedom of\n\nSperling, Andrea\n\nsperm\n\nspit\n\n_Splendor_\n\ncritical reaction to\n\nintertextuality and\n\nmainstream content and\n\nm\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois in\n\nromantic comedy and\n\nscrewball comedy and\n\nthreesome in\n\ntransitional nature of\n\nsportscaster\n\nspread eagle\n\nstar-as-auteur\n\n\"The Star-Spangled Banner\"\n\nstatus quo\n\nStenzel, Ryan\n\nstereotyping\n\nstigmatization\n\nStone, Oliver\n\nstoner comedy\n\nstoryboard\n\nstorytelling\n\nStrand Releasing\n\nstrobe-light effect\n\nStuart, Jan\n\nstyle over substance\n\nsubculture\n\nsubplot\n\nsubtext\n\nsuburbia\n\nsuicide\n\nSundance Film Festival\n\nsuperficiality\n\nsurrealism\n\nSuvari, Mena\n\nswastika\n\nSwayze, Patrick\n\nswimming pool\n\n_Swoon_\n\nsymbolism\n\ntabloid\n\ntaboo\n\ntagline\n\ntattoo\n\nteen-apocalypse trilogy\n\nteen movie\n\nterrorist\n\nTewes, Lauren\n\n_Thelma and Louise_\n\n_They Live by Night_\n\nThompson, Scott\n\nThomson, Desson\n\n_Three Bewildered People in the Night_\n\n_Three's Company_\n\nthreesome\n\ndeviancy and\n\nand freedom\n\npedophilia and\n\nromantic comedy and\n\nas threat to social well-being\n\nthreeway structure\n\nticket sales\n\nTierney, Jacob\n\ntolerance\n\n_Totally F_ *** _ed Up_\n\ngenerational confusion in\n\nHIV\/AIDS in\n\ninsider point of view in\n\nintertextuality and\n\nand marginalization\n\nsubversive potential and\n\nsuicide in\n\ntreatment of subject matter in\n\nand verisimilitude\n\nultra-violence in\n\nTrachtenberg, Michelle\n\ntracking device\n\ntranquility\n\ntransgenderism\n\ntransgressive behavior\n\ntranslation\n\ntransvestitism\n\ntrash\n\ntreacle\n\nTrejo, Danny\n\ntrick-or-treating\n\ntrope\n\nTrue, Rachel\n\nTruffaut, Francois\n\nTruth or Dare\n\nTuren, Kevin\n\n_Twist_\n\nUFO\n\nultra-violence\n\numbilical cord\n\nunderground cinema\n\nunderwear\n\nUniversity of California, Los Angeles\n\nUniversity of California, Santa Barbara\n\nUniversity of Southern California\n\nunpredictability\n\nurination\n\nU.S. government\n\nutopia\n\nvagina\n\nVail, Bretton\n\nvalley girl\n\nvalues\n\nVan Sant, Gus\n\n_Variety_\n\nVenice\n\nVenice Film Festival\n\nverisimilitude\n\nvicarious participation\n\nvictim blaming\n\nvictimizer\n\nvideo diary\n\nvideo game\n\nVigo, Jean\n\n_Village Voice_\n\nvirginity\n\nVirgin Mary\n\nvision\n\nVitale, Tony\n\nvoiceover\n\nvolcano\n\nvoyeurism\n\nvulgarity\n\nvulnerability\n\nWarhol, Andy\n\nWashington, D.C.\n\n_The Washington Post_\n\nwatermelon\n\nwater sports\n\nWebster, George\n\n_Weekend_\n\nWent, Johanna\n\nWest Coast\n\nWestern civilization\n\nwet dream\n\nwhiskey\n\nwholesomeness\n\nwhore\n\nWinter, Stephen\n\nWinterstern, Henry\n\nWisconsin\n\n_A Woman Is a Woman_\n\nWood, Robin\n\nWoods, Lance\n\n_The Woodsman_\n\nworldview\n\nWoronov, Mary\n\nWyatt, B.\n\n_You Only Live Once_\n\nyouthspeak\n\n_Zero Patience_\n\nZinnemann, Fred\n\nZion, Lawrie\n\nzoo animal\nAbout the Author\n\n**Kylo-Patrick R. Hart** (PhD, University of Michigan) is associate professor and chair of the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at Texas Christian University. He is the author or editor of several books about media, including _The AIDS Movie: Representing a Pandemic in Film and Television, Film and Sexual Politics, Film and Television Stardom_ , and _Mediated Deviance and Social Otherness: Interrogating Influential Representations_ , as well as coeditor of _Media and the Apocalypse_.\n\nPreviously, Professor Hart was chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Plymouth State University, where he was honored by being named the first-ever recipient of the Plymouth State University Award for Distinguished Scholarship. He values the opportunity to complete original research projects and remains quite active in this regard. His numerous research essays pertaining to film and television topics have appeared in various academic journals (including _Journal of Film and Video, The Journal of Men's Studies, Popular Culture Review_ , and _Quarterly Review of Film and Video_ ) and media anthologies (including _Bang Bang, Shoot Shoot: Essays on Guns and Popular Culture_ ; _Common Sense: Intelligence as Presented on Popular Television_ ; _Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text-Reader_ ; _Men and Masculinities: Critical Concepts in Sociology_ ; and _Television: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies_ ). He is an enthusiastic member of the American Culture Association, the American Men's Studies Association, the National Communication Association, the Popular Culture Association, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the University Film and Video Association, and several additional academic and professional organizations.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nIn Memory of Julia Keay\nContents\n\nCover\n\nTitle Page\n\nDedication\n\nList of Illustrations\n\nList of Maps and Charts\n\nAuthor's Note\n\nIntroduction\n\n1. Casting the Die\n\n2. Counting the Cost\n\n3. Who Has Not Heard of the Vale of Cashmere?\n\n4. Past Conditional\n\n5. Reality Check\n\n6. Power to the People\n\n7. An Ill-Starred Conjunction\n\n8. Two-Way Tickets, Double Standards\n\n9. Things Fall Apart\n\n10. Outside the Gates\n\n11. India Astir\n\nEpilogue\n\nPicture Section\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\nIndex\n\nBy the same author\n\nCopyright\n\nAbout the Publisher\n\n## Illustrations\n\n. Wavell greets Jinnah prior to the 1946 Cabinet Mission talks. _(Press Information Bureau\/British Library)_\n\n. Gandhi with Pethick-Lawrence during the talks. _(akg-images\/Archiv Peter R\u00fche)_\n\n. Police use teargas to disperse a crowd in Calcutta. _(\u00a9 Hulton-Deutsch Collection\/CORBIS)_\n\n. The aftermath of the Calcutta killings of August 1946. _(\u00a9 Bettmann\/CORBIS)_\n\n. Lord and Lady Mountbatten's carriage swamped by the crowd during India's Independence Day celebrations. _(Topham Picturepoint)_\n\n. Nehru addresses a crowd of over a million on Independence Day. _(Topham Picturepoint)_\n\n. Trains packed with fleeing refugees at Amritsar. _(\u00a9 Illustrated London News Ltd\/Mary Evans)_\n\n. The refugee caravans were easy prey. Hundreds of thousands were massacred. _(\u00a9 Illustrated London News Ltd\/Mary Evans)_\n\n. Female students protest against the adoption of Urdu as Pakistan's official language in Dhaka in 1953. _(Rafiqul Islam)_\n\n. Demonstrators in Bombay burn an effigy of Nehru in January 1956. _(AP\/Press Association Images)_\n\n. Tenzing Norgay at the summit of Everest. _(Getty Images)_\n\n. Indian patrol in eastern Ladakh in 1960. _(Topfoto)_\n\n. Indian women preparing to defend the nation during the 1962 Sino\u2013Indian war. _(Topfoto)_\n\n. A village in Jammu and Kashmir during the 1965 Indo\u2013Pakistan war. _(\u00a9Hulton-Deutsch Collection\/CORBIS)_\n\n. A Pakistani liaison officer shakes the hand of an Indian army officer after the announcement of a ceasefire in the Indo\u2013Pakistan war. _(Topfoto)_\n\n. Indian troops advancing into East Pakistan in December 1971. _(Getty Images)_\n\n. Pakistan's General Niazi signs the document of surrender at the end of the Bangladesh Independence War. _(\u00a9Bettmann\/CORBIS)_\n\n. The _Indian Herald_ 's supplement on Mrs Gandhi's declaration of the Emergency. _(Courtesy of the_ Indian Herald _)_\n\n. Indira Gandhi campaigning in Calcutta for the 1977 elections. _(EE\/AP\/Press Association Images)_\n\n. Sri Lankan Tamils training in southern India in 1986. _(Topfoto\/AP)_\n\n. Young recruits undergoing training by the Tamil Tigers. _(Topfoto\/AP)_\n\n. Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. _(AP\/Sondeep Shankar\/AP\/Press Association Images)_\n\n. The Golden Temple of Amritsar during 'Operation Bluestar'. _(Topfoto\/AP)_\n\n. Kashmiris burn the Indian flag in March 1990. _(Ajit Kumar\/AP\/Press Association Images)_\n\n. Protesters against the Indian army's presence in Srinagar. _(Barbara Walton\/AP\/Press Association Images)_\n\n. Militant VHP _kar sevaks_ attack the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. _(AFP\/Getty Images)_\n\n. Hindu youths clamber onto the domes of the Babri mosque. _(AFP\/Getty Images)_\n\n. Mumbai under attack by _jihadist_ gunmen in November 2008. _(Punit Paranjpe\/Reuters\/Corbis)_\n\n. The Golden Quadrilateral highway under construction near Kanpur. _(Ed Kashi\/VII\/Corbis)_\n\n. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. _(Mary Evans\/SZ Photo\/Scherl)_\n\n. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. _(AP\/Topfoto)_\n\n. General Ziaul Haq. _(AP\/Topham)_\n\n. Benazir Bhutto. _(PA\/Topfoto)_\n\n. Atul Behari Vajpayee. _(Topham Picturepoint)_\n\n## Maps and Charts\n\n. South Asia \u2013 physical\n\n. South Asia today\n\n. British India and the Princely States in 1947\n\n. North-East India and Bangladesh\n\n. Kashmir and Punjab\n\n. Political succession in South Asia, 1947\u20132014\n\n## Author's Note\n\nI was six years old in 1947 when what was then British India won its independence. I vaguely recall the pomp and ceremony of the Delhi celebrations as filmed for Path\u00e9 News but have no recollection of seeing any coverage of the horrors of the Great Partition that followed. Pakistan I came across only in the classroom; it was not till nineteen years after Independence that I first visited what is now called South Asia.\n\n_Midnight's Descendants_ is nevertheless a contemporary history. It spans my lifetime and has revived as many memories as questions. Since that first visit in 1966 I have been returning almost annually \u2013 as a journalist, documentary-maker, lecturer, writer of many books and taker of many holidays. In the process I have learned enough to know just how presumptuous this book is.\n\nContemporary history is itself fraught with pitfalls. It is, of course, a contradiction in terms: by definition, what is contemporary can't be history. No record of the current can aspire to the detachment expected when writing of the past. Memory proves dangerously unreliable; impressions muddy the facts. A ready-made consensus does not exist in respect of many crucial developments, and access to the documentation on which later histories may be based is still embargoed. This book will probably be challenged and will certainly be superseded.\n\nSo why write it? The answer is simply that \u2013 both despite Partition and because of it \u2013 South Asia remains as distinct and crisis-prone a global entity as the Middle East (or 'West Asia', to South Asians). With a population greater than China's, it is already the world's largest market, and it may well host the world's next superpower. In the past sixty-five years it has also staged at least five nasty wars and has more than once taken the world to the brink of nuclear conflagration. Yet its problems remain poorly understood, and its influence easily underrated. Studies of the region as a whole are surprisingly few. Visa restrictions limit travel and inhibit mutual exchange, much as prejudice limits mutual understanding. The outsider has a slight advantage here, which is my excuse for undertaking the book.\n\nOver the years literally hundreds of friends and contacts have contributed to what follows. It would be invidious to attempt to list them; but one and all, I thank them. Sam Miller in Delhi and Philip Bowring in Hong Kong kindly read an early draft of the book. For their comments and encouragement I am enormously grateful, and I have enjoyed returning the compliment in respect of their own books. More immediately I want to record my debt to editors Lara Heimert and Sue Warga at Basic Books and Robert Lacey and Martin Redfern at William Collins. This is not by way of an authorial convention. Creative editors are a rare breed; so are patient ones. I have been blessed with four of the finest and most forbearing, and I thank them all most sincerely. For her still greater patience and unstinting support, and for her love, I am indebted to Amanda. But in her case thanks would be inappropriate and hopelessly inadequate. So I say no more.\n\n_John Keay_\n\n_Argyll, 2013_\n\n## Introduction\n\nApproaching Bengal from opposite directions, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra shy away from a head-on collision and veer south, their braided channels fraying and criss-crossing in a tangle of waterways that rob the parent rivers of their identities. Long before reaching the sea the Ganges has split into the Hooghly and the Pabna, among others, and the Brahmaputra into the Padma and the Meghna. Known as 'distributaries', these sub-rivers then fork some more, creating a maze of broad brown bayous whose combined seaward meanderings define the area known as the Sundarbans. Here, in the world's largest estuarine wilderness, expanses of glossy mangrove and thick muddy water cover an area as big as Belgium. Islands are indistinguishable from mainland; promising channels expire in stagnant creeks. In the several designated wildlife sanctuaries, amphibious adaptation proves the key to survival. Crocodiles loll along the tideline close-packed like sunbathers. Mudhoppers gawp and glisten in the slime and the local tigers swim as readily as they prowl.\n\nWith roads a rarity, the best way to get around the Sundarbans is by boat, perhaps with a bike aboard for excursions on _terra firma_. A guide is essential, the trails being few and the landmarks fewer. The rivers tug one way, the incoming tide another. Neither is consistent: salt water comes down on the ebb, fresh water is backed up by the flow. The logic of the currents is as hard to fathom as that of the international border which here separates India and Bangladesh. Maps show the border as a confident line bisecting islands and slicing through peninsulas as it ricochets from side to side down the broad Raimangal waterway. Its trajectory provides the region with its one feature of human geography. But on the ground \u2013 where there is ground \u2013 the border is scarcely to be seen. Shifting mudbanks and encroaching mangroves are no more conducive to frontier formalities than they are to cartographic precision. Apportioning the Sundarbans between India and what was then part of Pakistan must have been like trying to carve the gravy.\n\nA game warden announces a sighting: 'Changeable hawk-eagle.' He points to a large raptor lodged in a dead tree.\n\n'It's a darker version of the one in peninsular India.'\n\nThe bird is rooted to its perch and motionless. It could be stuffed, its taloned feet nailed to the branch, except that every now and then it moves its head ever so slightly, as if troubled by indecision. Choosing the behaviour appropriate to its species is problematic for a changeable hawk-eagle. Should it quarter low over India's chunk of the Sundarbans or soar high above Bangladesh's? Is this a hawk day or an eagle day? Or just another changeable day? The options make for great uncertainty.\n\n'So is that bit over there India or Bangladesh?' I'm asking. Nothing seems one thing or another in this gooey wilderness.\n\n'Oh, that's India. Bangladesh is over there. See? But it should be India. Khulna, that whole district, should have come to India at Partition. It had a Hindu majority.'\n\nKhulna was not awarded to India because Murshidabad, a Muslim district to the north of Calcutta that straddles the Hooghly river, was preferred by Delhi on the grounds of strategic contiguity and economic convenience. Eastern Pakistan, as Bangladesh then was, got Khulna by way of exchange. Hence mainly Muslim Murshidabad went to mainly Hindu India, and mainly Hindu Khulna went to mainly Muslim Pakistan. So much for the fundamental principle on which British India was divided by 1947's Great Partition \u2013 that contiguous areas where Indian Muslims were in a majority were to constitute Pakistan, and that areas where they were not in a majority were to constitute the new India.\n\nDividing the subcontinent had itself been a compromise, and proved a heavy price to pay for independence. Flying in the face of fifty years' struggle for a single India and of a shared cultural and historical awareness that stretched back centuries, it had been dictated by three recent developments: most Indian Muslims had come round to the idea of a Muslim homeland of their own; most Indian nationalists were insisting on a successor state that was strong enough to resist such demands; and the British were desperate for a fast-track exit. Adopted only as a last-minute expedient, Partition was widely regretted at the time. And by all who hold life, livelihood and peace to be dear, it has been rued ever since.\n\n'These people here must be Indian then,' I venture. Fishing boats and a gaggle of schoolchildren hint at a nearby village, but there is no mains electricity, no road and no phone line \u2013 and all this despite being within 150 kilometres of downtown Calcutta.\n\n'Well yes, now they're mostly Indian. But many of them are actually from Bangladesh, some Hindu, some Muslim.'\n\nIn the Sundarbans the rivers and raptors are not the only changeable things. Decades after British-ruled India was partitioned into the republics of India, Pakistan and later Bangladesh, national identities in this part of the subcontinent remain as fluid as the wind-ruffled soup that passes for water. So, too, do patterns of migration and the terminology applied to them. Immediately after the Great Partition of 1947, people who crossed the border were known as 'refugees'. In the 1960s they became 'evacuees', in the 1970s either 'optees' or 'oustees', in the 1980s 'illegal immigrants', and now 'potential terrorists'. Like the reception afforded them in their chosen destination, their status has been declining. Not, though, their numbers. The exodus into India from that part of Pakistan which in 1971 became Bangladesh has always been difficult to quantify. Some say hundreds of thousands have crossed the border, some say millions. Urban India's twenty-first-century construction boom draws heavily on Bangladeshi labour, much of it illegal. Locally there are migrants who traipse back and forth for seasonal work or even a daily wage. No one is sure who is a migrant worker and who a cross-border commuter. Throughout the delta, people still come and go largely undetected, like the tides and the tigers.\n\nA thousand kilometres to the north, where the Bangladesh border squeezes the Indian state of West Bengal up against the Himalayas, the situation is further complicated by what must be the most eccentric frontier conformation on earth. Here territorial logic veers to the opposite extreme, that of over-definition. Communities lie trapped in time-warped pockets, their national identity determined by arcane landholding patterns and the inflexible notions of sovereignty so jealously entertained by modern nation states. With little regard to the religious affinities of the inhabitants, Partition here simply appropriated the piecemeal patterns of cultivation and proprietorship found in the extant land registers and then upgraded them into international borders.\n\nOutside his house a man poses for the camera. His back is to the wall in the photo and his legs apart. He looks rather pleased with himself. The caption explains that he is standing with one foot in Bangladesh and the other in India, and that the wall behind him is part of an extension tacked onto his house so that it too straddles the international border. With a spare room in India he qualifies as an Indian resident and can avail himself of a connection to the Indian electricity grid. No one else in this bit of Bangladesh has electricity. Providing any social amenities here is problematic because the village is in fact a sovereign 'enclave'.\n\nAn enclave is any atoll of territory wholly surrounded by the territory of another sovereign state, in this case India. Elsewhere there are bits of India stranded in Bangladesh. The border picks its way between these enclaves, and such is their complexity that most maps despair of showing them at all. But on the ground the formalities of international transfer are faithfully observed. Checkpoints bar the tiniest roads; flags are raised and lowered; papers are stamped, currency changed, sim cards traded and bribes disbursed. Cultivators setting off for their fields clutch passports; cross-border shopping trips may be construed as smuggling operations.\n\nWillem van Schendel, Professor of Modern Asian History in the Netherlands (a country which has enclaves of its own in Belgian territory), estimates that there are 197 such sovereign pockets along this short section of the Indo\u2013Bangladesh border west of the Tista river. Perhaps 100,000 people live in the enclaves, which cover a total area of about 120 square kilometres. It's hard to be more precise, because enclaves may themselves have enclaves. The latter are known as 'counter-enclaves' and are, in effect, bits of India that lie within bits of Bangladesh that are themselves within India \u2013 or vice versa. In the Bhalapura Khagrabari complex of enclaves, the largest archipelago of Indian territory in Bangladesh, one such Bangladeshi counter-enclave contains a smaller counter-enclave of Indian territory. This is Dahala Khagrabari, which van Schendel calls 'the world's only counter-counter-enclave'. From here an Indian citizen wishing to reach India proper, a distance of around ten kilometres, has to cross the frontier four times \u2013 from India to Bangladesh, Bangladesh to India, India to Bangladesh and finally Bangladesh to the Indian 'mainland'. Luckily Dahala Khagrabari comprises just 6.9 hectares and is currently uninhabited, being mostly jute fields. But envy not its farmer.\n\nWith their promise of sanctuary, enclaves have attracted unsavoury elements. Criminal gangs have tended to take up residence, and smuggling has become a way of life. Under cover of darkness or along paths tunnelled through the three-metre-high jute crop, everything from armaments to cattle, pharmaceuticals and people is channelled through the enclaves. In recent years criminal activity has reportedly been on the decline; life, though, remains 'insecure' and social amenities non-existent. The only obvious advantage of being an enclave-dweller is said to be 'the absence of tax'.\n\nSomething similar could be said of another anomaly of the Indo\u2013Bangladesh border, namely the _chars._ These are mid-river mudbanks deposited principally by the flood-prone waters of the wide Brahmaputra. A quarter of a million people live on _chars_ ; the riverine soil can be very fertile and the river itself is rich in fish. But they do so at the risk not only of inundation but of involuntary migration; for such is the landscaping power of the monsoon-swollen flood that _chars_ may shift. If the centre of the current happens to be the recognised border \u2013 as it is for several hundred kilometres \u2013 a _char_ that was in Bangladesh one year may well end up in India the next (or vice versa).\n\n'[M]ost of the islands vehemently either move forward or backward across the international riverine border,' complains an observer concerned with the problems of policing these errant landmasses. Though still at the same address, several thousand people may suddenly find themselves unaccredited immigrants in a different country. Border markers get washed away, rivers change course. In some areas the painful business of border negotiation and demarcation, a process that was supposedly concluded soon after Partition in the late 1940s, is still being repeated every year.\n\nIn 2006 the Indian authorities, spurred on by the prospect of cross-border infiltrators bent on terrorism, began ring-fencing Bangladesh (not forgetting its enclaves). The new fence has steel stanchions and razor wire and is actually two fences, so creating a caged corridor along which laundry can be hung out to dry. The fence stands three metres high, and when completed will be around 2,500 kilometres long. But its march is halted by every river and, as per a previous agreement not to construct contentious facilities on the border itself, it runs a hundred to a thousand metres behind the actual line of demarcation. Thus 'a huge quantum of precious Indian land is becoming a no-man's land', complains one politician. Within this strip lie villages, farmland and uncounted residents. One quite short stretch of the fence is reported as having alienated, or 'practically disowned', 149 villages and 90,000 people. Indian citizens are being rendered stateless and their property worthless. The issue has been raised in the Indian Parliament and aired in the press, but without eliciting any promise of compensation or resettlement.\n\nAll this is in striking contrast to the nearby border between India and Nepal. Here there are no fences, no patrols and minimal formalities. It is an 'open border'. Although Nepal never came under direct British rule \u2013 and was therefore unaffected by Partition \u2013 an agreement had been reached whereby people and goods might cross at will. This still stands, albeit often amended. Immigrants from India already make up a substantial percentage of Nepal's population, while Nepalis settled in India constitute an overall majority in parts of the Indian state of West Bengal. A Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) represents the latter's interests. Demanding the recognition of Gorkhali, Nepal's main language, as one of India's official languages \u2013 and so qualifying its speakers for the educational and job opportunities that go with recognition \u2013 the GNLF strives, not without occasional violence, for an autonomous enclave within West Bengal or even a separate Nepali state within the Republic of India. Migration, in other words, is here an accepted phenomenon. National identity ('Nepali-ness') is being officially downgraded to a linguistic identity ('Gorkhali-ness'), which is something that can be accommodated within the accepted limits of protest and concession afforded to India's other language groups.\n\nLanguage remains a contentious issue throughout polyglot South Asia, but in modern India its explosive potential has been steadily tamed by concessions and circumstance. It plays no part in the plight of the enclave-dwellers and the migrants along the Indo\u2013Bangladesh border; all of them speak Bengali, whether Indians, Bangladeshis or not exactly either. The same goes for Tamil-speakers flitting between Sri Lanka and south India. In both cases a shared language in fact serves as a camouflage, making the detection of illegal or undesirable incomers that much more difficult.\n\nOther markers of identity prove less amenable. Beyond the Nepali concentrations in northern West Bengal, and beyond the enclaves and _chars a_ long the Indo\u2013Bangladesh border, a tendon of Indian territory tugs at a knotted fist of mainly ethnic discontent in the remote hills along the Burmese border. By one reckoning India's cluster of states in the far 'north-east' is plagued by over a hundred insurgency groups, most of them pressing their grievances on the grounds of disadvantaged ethnicity: 'Manipur tops the list [for the number] of militias with 35, Assam is second with 34 and Tripura has 30; Nagaland has four and Meghalaya checks in with three militias.' At any given moment these groups vary greatly in terms of support, objectives and militancy. But with India, Bangladesh, Burma (now Myanmar) and China all interested parties in the political jigsaw of South Asia's north-eastern extremity, ethnic grievances invariably involve territorial disputes, and these readily translate into war-worthy issues involving international sovereignty.\n\nNational identities cannot here be taken for granted. Even where the borders are not themselves in dispute, the loyalties of those living on either side of them may be. Like the fickle 'distributaries' of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the very idea of the nation state is dissipated and frayed into complex strands of competing allegiances. A Naga, for instance, may subscribe to half a dozen identities.\n\nI am from Khonoma village of the Angami tribe... Now within the village I belong to the Iralu clan. The Iralu clan belongs in turn to the Meyasetsu clan. The Meyasetsu clan in turn belongs to the still wider and larger clan called the Merhuma Khel. The Merhuma Khel is in turn one of three major Khels that make up Khonoma village. The Khonoma village in turn belongs to the Angami tribe and the Angami tribe belongs in turn to the Naga nation... [T]hese ethnic and national identities are precious to me. They in fact define my political existence as a man with a country to call his own. As such, I can never surrender this birthright to India or any other nation on earth.\n\nStatements like this from a Naga nationalist are dismissed by the Indian authorities as secessionist and totally unacceptable. The Bangladeshi authorities take exactly the same line with their own disaffected Chakma peoples. Both governments classify such communities as 'tribal' and attribute their recalcitrance to poor education, misguided leadership, discriminatory policies and foreign interference. Yet Mahatma Gandhi himself once assured the Nagas that if they did not wish to be part of India they would not be compelled to integrate with it; India would recognise their independence. To the apostle of non-violence, forcibly incorporating any disaffected group contradicted the whole idea of free association on which the modern Indian nation was founded.\n\nThis all raises a more fundamental question about whether the correlation between a nation and a state is not itself the problem. In South Asia as a whole, and particularly in the chaotic circumstances of the north-east, other cherished affiliations \u2013 of kinship, creed, locality, language, tribe, clan, profession and caste \u2013 may need to be factored into considerations of identity. The twinning of sovereignty with territory may need to be 'unbundled', and the very notions of political authority and territorial integrity may need re-examination.\n\nBy dividing British-ruled South Asia into a mainly Muslim Pakistan and a mainly Hindu India, the Great Partition of 1947 severed \u2013 and sometimes pocked \u2013 not just the landmass of South Asia but its society, economy and infrastructure, and above all its two main religious communities. Religion was indeed the mentor of Partition. It provided the motivation for division, dictated the criteria for realising it and underwrote the zealotry that accompanied it. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that Partition was principally about separating two competing belief systems. Doctrinal differences rarely entered into the debate at the time: religious parties, like the Jamaat-e-Islami of many orthodox Muslims or the Mahasabha of many nationalistic Hindus, in fact opposed territorial division. Even the prophets of Pakistan, like the pragmatists of a truncated India, anticipated the presence of religious minorities within the partitioned states. Indeed they competed in offering guarantees of citizenship and fair treatment to all such 'confessional enclaves'.\n\nWhen a community is under stress, its sense of itself frequently transcends its attachment to specific tenets. Diversity in matters of faith is trumped by an insistence on communal solidarity that may ignore lesser doctrinal and devotional distinctions. Thus the different traditions of Islam represented by Sunni, Shi'ite and Sufi practice were no more evident in the rhetoric of Partition than was the rivalry among those cults, disciplines and doctrines that go to make up 'Hinduism'.\n\nRather was it \u2013 and is it \u2013 conduct, culture and kinship that comprise the markers of confessional identity and constitute the bonds that bind a community together. These may include things like where and to whom one was born; how one washes and dresses; what one eats and when one fasts; what work one does; when, where and how (not to mention whom) one worships; who one consorts with and marries; to what or to whom one looks for justice and redress; whom one idolises and whom one demonises; and what songs, verses and aphorisms one carries around in one's head. Like that tribal layering of Naga identity, all these things define one's existence as a member of a community \u2013 though not necessarily of a community with a country to call its own.\n\nIn the 1940s the desire to protect these markers from the perceived threat of Hindu rule on the part of Muslims, and of a privileged Muslim separatism on the part of Hindus, buoyed demands for communal autonomy. The hope was that autonomy would reassure all parties by 'ring-fencing' their interests and preserving their integrity. But in line with the contemporary partition in Palestine, and with almost no debate on the matter, the objective soon underwent a sea-change. Areas, not individuals, became the currency of partition, districts rather than households the unit of exchange. As per the last British Viceroy's June 1947 partition plan, 'the parties appear to have accepted that communal autonomy was to be realized by the creation of separate territorial sovereignties', writes Joya Chatterji.\n\nThere are subtle but significant differences between the notions of communal autonomy and territorial sovereignty. The first emphasizes the rights of the people of a community to self-determination, rights which could in theory be achieved within a single state. The second stresses the bounded space within which a community is sovereign and could be realized only by a territorial separation.\n\nIn the last hectic months of British rule, when parts of the country were already beset by sectarian massacres, sovereignty alone seemed to safeguard communal autonomy, with fixed frontiers being its surest guarantee. Yet sixty-five years later, communal discord within and between the post-Partition states of South Asia is more acute than ever. 'Whenever there is a riot in India, we suffer here,' says a spokesperson for the Hindu minority in Bangladesh. Whenever a Pakistan-trained terrorist opens fire in India, India's Muslims come under suspicion; and whenever India's Hindu nationalists vent their spleen on the internet, more Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims sign up for _jihad_. Just as the tides, the migrants and the hawk-eagles come and go unchecked across the Sundarbans, so the tit-for-tat of outrage and retaliation ricochets along the 7,000-kilometre length of those brave new frontiers ordained by Partition's insistence on a territorial separation.\n\nOver the last half-century the shadows of Partition's brutal dislocation have grown ever longer. They slant across the whole course of events in post-Independence South Asia. Some observers liken Partition to a nuclear explosion whose lethal fallout will go on being felt for generations to come. Others see it as a recurring natural phenomenon that, having severed the subcontinent, then ( _de facto_ ) __ the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, and then the two-part Pakistan, is ever-ready to strike again. Nearly all see it as unfinished business. Every war, near-war and insurgency fought in the subcontinent since the end of British rule owes something to the legacy of Partition. And so long as this sore festers, any 'normalising' of relations between the partitioned states proves elusive.\n\nElsewhere in the world various political unions, defence pacts, free-trade associations and hegemonic doctrines (Monroe, Brezhnev, etc.) have lent some coherence to the conduct of international relations. In South Asia, a region where geography, history, economics and culture all argue strongly in favour of the closest possible association, even modest attempts at regional cooperation flounder. The subcontinent continues to be defined not in terms of shared interests but of past traumas, contested loyalties and irreconcilable ambitions. Encouraged by governments of every hue, national identity still owes much to an obsessive awareness of the hostile 'other' just across the border. Antagonism reigns, officially.\n\nThis 'othering' extends even to ideology. Each successor nation presents a political profile that seems to challenge that of its neighbour. The Republic of India is secular, democratic, internationally respected and increasingly regarded as an economic success. Pakistan and Bangladesh, on the other hand, are determinedly Islamic, susceptible to military rule, internationally disparaged and economically struggling. (Nepal and Sri Lanka, the other sizeable components of what scholars now prefer to call 'South Asia' rather than 'the Indian subcontinent', are currently too traumatised by recent civil wars to be easily categorised.) Partition did not just divide most of the region: it launched the successor states on such diametrically opposed trajectories that to this day South Asians commonly prioritise 'Partition' over 'Independence'. The second half of the twentieth century is not the 'post-Independence era'; it is the 'post-Partition era'. The euphoria of freedom has been silenced by the shock of division.\n\nThe consequences of this division are critical, and not just for South Asia. By 2020 India will have the largest population in the world, and South Asians as a whole will comprise a quarter of the people on the planet. Nor, on the grounds of negligible disposable income, can these numbers any longer be discounted as a statistical irrelevance. Already India's middle class is one of the world's most numerous, and its corporate sector includes more multinationals and generates more billionaires than anywhere else in Asia except China. The world's largest market and its largest pool of unskilled labour is rapidly becoming its largest reservoir of innovation and expertise. South Asian excellence now extends to everything from pharmaceuticals and telecoms to finance, info-technology and prize-winning literature.\n\nIt also includes rocketry and a terrifying military capability. With both India and Pakistan in possession of nuclear weapons, with neither eager to submit to international controls and with China's nearby arsenal dwarfing both, the potential for a nuclear conflagration is here all too real. What may be the most promising zone in terms of the world economy is located in what US analysts have dubbed the most dangerous arena on earth.\n\nWorldwide, South Asians account for two out of every five Muslims; and of these nearly as many have their roots in India as in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Through them, Islam's international grievances (over Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else within range of a drone) get internalised in South Asia; and through them and other disaffected parties, South Asian grievances (over Balochistan, Nagaland, numerous other hotspots and above all Kashmir) get externalised in the West. The blood-letting occasioned by a dispute about a mosque in Uttar Pradesh can surface in the British House of Commons. Confrontations in the high Himalayas can bring the world to the brink of armageddon.\n\nYet to the outside observer South Asia's peoples seem to have a lot more in common than not. In the world's departure lounges they are as ubiquitous and just as hard to allocate to a particular part of the subcontinent as the Chinese. Regardless of nationality, they look not unalike, they often wear loose, baggy attire, and they travel with too much luggage. They are also rather particular about their dietary preferences. They converse in languages (including English) some of which are mutually comprehensible. They enjoy the same movies and opt for the same music channels. Nearly all admit to regularly engaging in some form of devotional activity, nearly all marry within approved circles, and nearly all take pride in their familial, communal and regional identities.\n\nDown on the ground, were it not for the border fence, you could still pass from India's West Bengal into Bangladesh without realising you had changed countries; likewise from the Indian states of Rajasthan and Punjab to the Pakistani provinces of Sind and Punjab (each country has a Punjab, because the British province of that name was itself partitioned). The differences between one country and another are much less obvious than those between most adjacent European states. Non-Islamic India is still home to nearly as many Muslims as either Pakistan or Bangladesh. Hindu women may cover their faces like their Muslim sisters; and Pakistani men may wear pyjamas like their Indian brothers. Despite its newly trumpeted affluence, India still has more of the malnourished, the unlettered and the socially deprived than Pakistan and Bangladesh combined. Even the excitement over its growth rate may be deceptive. Only twenty years ago it was Pakistan that was slated to join the Asian periphery's 'tiger economies'. Thirty years ago it was Sri Lanka. What one economist has called 'persistent orderly hunger' is one of the region's shared and all-too-enduring characteristics.\n\nSo too is the confidence born of a deep and incredibly rich matrix of tradition and devotion. Here globalisation comes wreathed in garlands and incense. A podgy Ganesh presides in the boardroom; temple and waqf are quoted on the Mumbai stock exchange. In Muslim areas night turns to day during Ramadan. Everywhere matrimonial expenditure chomps into GDP. Pride in the past, an unshakeable sense of one's community and a dazzling array of cultural references are not peculiar to the region. But in South Asia their resilience and centrality is second to none.\n\nEven the constitutional tags are not quite as irreconcilable as they seem. Once in power, democratically chosen leaders have frequently displayed authoritarian tendencies, while autocrats invariably pine for popular endorsement. Military coups have often proved less bloody than elections; and avowedly secular regimes may harbour as much fanaticism and discrimination as avowedly sectarian ones.\n\nDespite Partition and all that followed, South Asians have more in common than they may care to acknowledge. Indeed, Partition itself needs to be seen as a shared experience. By devastating whole provinces, displacing perhaps fifteen million people and leaving as many again feeling unwelcome in the land of their birth, it everywhere loosened some of those non-doctrinal bonds of community and encouraged a new mobility.\n\nIn 1947 the majority of refugees headed for the nearest of the new borders. If they made it to the other side \u2013 a big 'if' in the Punjab \u2013 they settled down among their co-religionists in India or Pakistan. Some were allocated land that had been vacated by refugees moving in the opposite direction; others swelled the populations of the cities and thereby transformed the parent state's demography. Karachi, the interim capital of Pakistan, attracted so many displaced Muslims from India that these _muhajirs_ soon outnumbered the city's native Sindhis. Delhi, if judged by its taxi-drivers, became a city of Sikhs, mostly refugees from Lahore; Lahore became a city of Muslims with scarcely a beturbanned Sikh to be seen; and Calcutta lost its public spaces when parks, gardens, railway stations and even cricket pitches were turned into makeshift dormitories by the displaced from all over eastern Bengal.\n\nA few migrants quickly changed their minds and went back, some doing so several times. Others had their minds changed for them. When in 1971 East Pakistan became Bangladesh, refugees from India who had been welcomed into East Pakistan as Muslims in 1947 found themselves interned as non-Bengalis in a now proudly Bengali Bangladesh. Perhaps 100,000 of these so-called 'Biharis' are still there, eking out a pitiful existence in Bangladesh's refugee camps; others have been shunted across India to Pakistan; and a lucky few have since obtained visas to reside overseas.\n\nIn this they are not alone. Emigration was as much a by-product of Partition as urbanisation. Over the three decades immediately after 1947 an estimated two million South Asians, many of them already displaced by Partition, exited the subcontinent altogether. Better prospects and wages undoubtedly tempted them, but it was the push-factor of dislocation and enforced mobility that proved crucial. Thanks to Partition, what might have been a modest trickle of economic migrants turned into that flood of expatriates, now over twenty million strong, known as 'the South Asian diaspora'.\n\nApplying the term 'diaspora' to the South Asian exodus remains controversial, although reasonable enough. South Asia's Partition and the Nazi Holocaust have also been bracketed together, with comparisons being drawn between the apparently chaotic and unpremeditated nature of the one and the systematic, state-directed nature of the other. But more to the point, just as in some unspeakable way the Holocaust made the need for a Jewish homeland manifest and thus reversed one diaspora, just so did Partition yank at those bonds of kinship, locality and community, and unleash another great exodus of peoples.\n\nAt the time, the 1950s and '60s, few In India or Pakistan considered the spectacle of mass emigration as grounds for congratulation. Plucked from villages in unfancied districts like Sylhet (east Pakistan), Mirpur (Azad Kashmir) and Jalandhar (India), then penned, tagged and bussed to an international airport, the huddles of all-male migrants hunkered down beside the check-in desks seemed a sad commentary on the lofty hopes of Independence. Their minders brandished wads of tickets and newly minted documentation. For the passport-holders themselves, holding their passports was seldom an option; most could barely sign their name or pronounce their destination; their identities, like their paycheques, were in hock to their gang-masters.\n\nIn the 1960s these emigrants were destined principally for low-paid jobs in the UK and North America, thereafter and more substantially for the Gulf states. Others followed well-trodden trails to east and south Africa, the Caribbean, South-East Asia and the Pacific. These were the destinations to which bonded workers recruited for labouring elsewhere in the British Empire had traditionally been despatched. The new migrants looked no more go-getting or better prepared than their nineteenth-century antecedents. A hookah might be passed among them in the airport forecourt; betel-stained saliva betrayed their sojourn in the departure lounge. The white-shirted businessmen and briefcase-clutching bureaucrats brushed past with eyes averted.\n\nYet in retrospect this unpromising stream of exiles heralded a new respect for the region's international profile and added an important new dimension to the fraught relationships between its post-Partition states. By the 1980s cash remittances sent home from places as far apart as Dubai and British Columbia were critical in sustaining the economies of all the South Asian states. They also transformed the built landscape in the emigrants' Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani areas of origin. At about the same time, second-generation South Asians in the West were being joined by a second wave of emigrants from the subcontinent. Young and ambitious, both were more interested in professional qualifications and internships than hourly rates. History sanctioned their quest for advancement. Without exception, all the architects of Independence, from Gandhi to Nehru, Jinnah, Ambedkar and Patel, had acquired their lawyers' training in Britain. Political freedom had come courtesy of diasporic passport-holders; economic betterment would follow suit.\n\nFor now it was US degrees, corporate experience, entrepreneurial skills and silicon technology that were the attractions. And unlike bus-conducting, curry-cookery or courtroom rhetoric, these were qualifications in high demand back in South Asia. The massive back-transfer of skills, and then investment, that resulted would dramatically empower the Republic of India and to a lesser extent its neighbours. From it sprang that great transnational community of South Asian origin that would be so ideally placed to prosper in a globalised century. The despised diaspora was metamorphosing itself into the most desirable of elites. In short, and by some delicious quirk of fate, peoples so keen to equate community with nation, nation with state, and to identify with a 'bounded territory', were proving the most adept at transcending such obstacles.\n\nRegrettably, this also has a downside. Ensconced nowadays in the airport's premium business lounges, the Asian knights of the global economy are not encouraged to transcend the febrile frontiers of South Asia itself. Once reviled as deserters by patriotic nationalists, those emigrants who return are now embraced and f\u00eated. 'Non-Resident Indian' (NRI), from being a term of contempt, has become an accolade. New Delhi \u2013 and Islamabad and Dhaka in respect of their Pakistani and Bangladeshi equivalents \u2013 not only woos its NRIs but most emphatically claims them. Their US, Canadian and EU passports carry Delhi's endorsement of their status as 'Persons of Indian Origin' (PIOs) or 'Overseas Citizens of India' (OCIs). Residential options, fiscal breaks and investment incentives await the prodigals; receptions and conferences are organised specifically for them; whole government ministries pander to their needs; homegrown CEOs and rupee billionaires flock to join them.\n\nThe diaspora's inward investment has powered up domestic economies throughout South Asia. But the start-ups and the statistics are not the only things to benefit from diasporic largesse. Numerous non-governmental agencies and charities, among them organisations commonly blamed for the abiding level of communal strife, are also handsomely supported by this overseas citizenry. A classic example was provided by Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), otherwise known as the 'Tamil Tigers'. For thirty years the LTTE obtained arms and training in India and found sanctuary there while being heavily bankrolled by the donations of Tamils and Tamil sympathisers resident in the West. Kashmiris, principally in Britain, funded the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front; Sikhs, many in Canada, helped sustain the Khalistan movement for an independent Sikh state. Likewise, Saudi dinars are channelled through diasporic Muslims to the Islamist madrassahs of Pakistan; and US dollars raised by diasporic Hindus finance the temple-building and the social and educational programmes of extremist outfits like the Shiv Sena and the RSS. For longer than anyone can remember, Naga nationalists have been funding their open insurgency from overseas.\n\nWhere funds can be transferred, often undeclared and undetected, so can ideas. Through social networks, blogs and SMS, and through the distribution of CDs, DVDs and print, the diaspora exerts an influence on opinion in South Asia that is commensurate with its hefty financial donations. For the bonds of kinship and community, however attenuated, still apply. The status of diasporic families in the land of their settlement often depends on the approval of their caste or community back home; so do their chances of extending their family landholdings in South Asia and of securing suitable brides. By supporting communal interests and disseminating exclusionist views, the diaspora validates both itself and its affiliates in South Asia. Diasporic endorsement of, say, the 1992 demolition of Ayodhya's Babri mosque emboldened the zealots responsible and lent a veneer of international respectability to the interminable debate that followed.\n\nActivists sustained by diasporic support are carried along on the ebb and flow of migration. A.Z. Phizo, for many years the charismatic leader of the Naga National Council, directed operations almost entirely from the safety of a UK residence. So did, and do, the leaderships of the MQM (representing the voluble _muhajir_ community in southern Pakistan), of the Sikh separatist Khalistan movement, the Kashmir 'government-in-exile' and the Baloch separatists of Pakistan's western extremity. They are in good company. At one time or another sanctuary in the West has been the choice of many of Pakistan's and Bangladesh's political leaders, including several Bhuttos. A host of lesser dissidents at odds with the regimes of South Asia also avails itself of the immunity of exile. And in the opposite direction come diasporic 'tourists', sometimes with misguided convictions and terrorist assignments.\n\nThe globalisation of protest is not a peculiarly Muslim phenomenon. Worldwide, the first to blow up a jumbo jet in mid-flight were not Palestinian activists but members of a Sikh separatist group; they then took the life of an Indian prime minister. Tamils took the life of the next prime minister, and made suicide bombing their speciality. Earlier it had been a Hindu supremacist who gunned down Mahatma Gandhi. More recently Indian Maoist ('Naxalite') revolutionaries have blown up nearly as many policemen as the Pakistan Taliban.\n\nIn what follows, the notice taken of the influence and agency of the diaspora may seem disproportionate. It can, for instance, hardly compare with the death and dislocation that were directly occasioned by Partition, nor with the decades of mutual hostility and misery inflicted by the unending strife over Kashmir. The story of post-colonial South Asia is seldom inspirational. Among Midnight's Descendants the body count of those who have succumbed to wars, civil strife, natural disasters and unalleviated poverty has yet to be exceeded by the number of those so enriched as to qualify as 'middle-class'.\n\nOther regional commonalities are more striking. For the first decade and a half after Partition, both India and Pakistan concentrated on nation-building. Constitutions were drafted, dissent confronted and sovereignty asserted. India absorbed its princely states, snapped up the colonial enclaves of Pondicherry and Goa, 'smashed and grabbed' the kingdom of Sikkim and received a bloody nose from the Chinese in the Himalayas. In like manner Pakistan cowed its separatists in Balochistan, wrestled with dissent in East Bengal and in the North-West Frontier Province's Tribal Areas, and snapped up what it could of Jammu and Kashmir state.\n\nThis nation-building phase was followed in the 1970s by a wave of rank populism. Indira Gandhi in India, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan and Mujibur Rahman in Bangladesh chalked up massive electoral victories. With the exception of Nepal, all of South Asia basked under democratic rule. But it was short-lived. Economic woes and popular adulation tempted all three leaders into autocratic ways, which were then emphatically rejected. Mrs Gandhi was toppled by the electorate that had empowered her, Bhutto and Mujib were overthrown and eliminated by the military. A people-powered era subsided into one of edgy accommodation in which confessional values thrived.\n\nThe 1980s marked the rise of the religious right. Pakistan and Bangladesh, each under a General Zia, warmed to their Islamic brethren in the Gulf and conciliated Islamic opinion at home. For Pakistan, 'liberating' Kashmir still topped the agenda, but the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan ensured sympathy, support and a steady militarisation of Islamic sentiment. In India, on the other hand, it was among 'right-wing' Hindu and Sikh parties that zealotry prospered. A series of devotional spectaculars saw the 'Hindu nationalist' Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) garnering ever more support. To meet this long-term challenge, the Nehru\u2013Gandhi Congress tarnished its own secular credentials and paid a heavy price. Sikhs, Assamese, Sri Lankans and Kashmiris were fatally antagonised. Two Gandhis were assassinated.\n\nOn this fraught scenario dawned the era of globalisation in the 1990s. India, and to a lesser extent all the other countries of South Asia, have undoubtedly benefited. Democracy has been given a second chance in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Pluralist politics and coalition governments have become the norm in India. Despite glaring examples of neglect in educational and health provision, living standards are rising. But these economic and political dividends have been offset by a challenging level of expectation, appalling examples of corruption and little in the way of normalised state-to-state relations. The globalisation of protest, militancy and criminality has yet to be successfully addressed by any South Asian state.\n\nThere are, of course, other ways of periodising the post-Partition era. It could, for instance, be characterised in international terms. The first generation of Midnight's Descendants were born in awe of British rule. The second looked to Moscow or Washington (or both), and the third looks increasingly to Beijing. In varying degrees Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh now see China as their best safeguard against India's perceived 'bullying', otherwise its regional hegemonism. India is more ambivalent. Respect for the post-Mao achievements of the People's Republic is there tempered with suspicion of China's authoritarianism and apprehension over its intentions along the Himalayan frontier and in the Indian Ocean.\n\nTo many Indians, China is the superpower that India might have become but for Partition. When in the late 1940s South Asians were opting for the division of their subcontinent, China's leadership brusquely demolished the divisions within its own subcontinent. Manchuria and Tibet were reclaimed, central Asian borders reaffirmed, Hong Kong put on notice and Taiwan's defection vigorously contested. The indivisible nature of the People's Republic has since come to be seen as one of its strengths, while the fissiparous nature of South Asia's republics remains their greatest weakness. Yet Partition, by sundering the region and dictating so much of what followed, lends to their story an essential cohesion of its own. United in ferment, Midnight's Descendants have no difficulty with such contradictions. And of all these paradoxes, not the least \u2013 and a good place to begin \u2013 is surely the most easily forgotten: that given cooler heads and a bit more time, Partition might well have been avoided altogether.\n\n##\n\n## Casting the Die\n\nIn the early afternoon of 24 March 1946 three members of the British Cabinet, plus their staff, were driven from Delhi's makeshift airport to the monumental residence built for the Viceroy of what was still British India. The traffic was light \u2013 it was a Sunday \u2013 and along the capital's leafy avenues the cars were outnumbered by carts, some of them high-sided haywains drawn by enormous white oxen, others rubber-tyred flatbeds hauled by wispy-haired water-buffalo whose languid pace allowed for a snatched bite at the herbaceous bounty provided by the municipal groundsmen.\n\nNew Delhi, the garden city laid out as the capital of British India only twenty years earlier, dozed in the afternoon heat, unroused by the visiting Cabinet Ministers, untrodden by policemen or postmen \u2013 both were on strike \u2013 and unbothered by the post-war turmoil beyond India's distant frontiers. It was just eight months since the British Labour Party had taken office in London, and seven since Japan's surrender had brought an end to the Second World War. Half the world was still in uniform. A blitzed and rationed Britain faced the biggest reconstruction crisis in its history. Yet in London Prime Minister Clement Attlee had reconciled himself to dispensing with three of his most senior colleagues for what would turn out to be a hundred-day absence. Their mission was that important.\n\nOf the three Cabinet Ministers, Lord Pethick-Lawrence was there as of right: as Secretary of State for India he headed a branch of the London government whose personnel and budget exceeded those of both the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office. Another of the delegates, Albert Victor Alexander, later Earl Alexander, had responsibility for safeguarding the British Empire's maritime links as First Lord of the Admiralty; and the third, Sir Stafford Cripps, had led an earlier mission to India, was the prime mover in the present one, and was currently President of the Board of Trade. All were men of high principle. Pethick-Lawrence had once received a custodial sentence for encouraging suffragette defiance; Cripps, a vegetarian and a teetotaller, had once been expelled from the Labour Party as too left-wing; and Alexander, a blacksmith's son, had been known to double as a lay preacher. All sympathised with India's national aspirations and shared its leadership's socialist values. Their integrity, their seniority and their extended leave from Cabinet duties bespoke their government's intent. Britain's Labour Party had already committed itself to 'freedom and self-determination' for the peoples of India; now it must deliver. As per its instructions, the delegation's task was 'to work out in cooperation [with India's political leaders] the means by which Indians can themselves decide the form of their new institutions with the minimum of disturbance and the maximum of speed'. Thus would be consummated what the mission's statement called 'the transfer of responsibility' and what the delegates themselves called 'the transfer of power'.\n\nThe Cabinet delegates, all of them aged around sixty, reeking of tobacco and unaccustomed to the ease of light linen suiting, were immediately dubbed 'the Magi' by Lord Wavell, the current Viceroy. The Indian press preferred to call them 'the Three Wise Men'. They might have come from the West and arrived by plane, but the treasure they bore was indeed priceless. India was at last being proffered the means of securing full and unconditional independence. After decades of sacrifice and disappointment, of repression and obfuscation, protest and imprisonment, _azadi_ ('freedom', 'independence') was within the grasp of the subcontinent's four hundred millions.\n\nIn the history books this first post-war initiative in the endgame of British rule is known simply as 'the 1946 Cabinet Mission', an impersonal phrasing that has deterred scrutiny and obscured its importance. Within a year the new Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, would steamroller through a very different handover of power that would relegate the Cabinet Mission and all its doings to the India Office's bulging archive of begrudged concessions and aborted proposals. Yet, for all this, the Mission deserves recognition as one of the twentieth century's milestones. It marked the beginning of the end for the British Empire in India; it was the first such overture to offer independence on a plate \u2013 to India or anywhere else. And it was the last to provide any real hope of staving off a division of the South Asian subcontinent.\n\nOnly in retrospect was it a failure. Both of the main contenders for power in India \u2013 the Indian National Congress guided by Jawaharlal Nehru and the Muslim League headed by Mohamed Ali Jinnah \u2013 would in fact accept a Mission proposal that emphatically rejected any division of the country; the demand for a sovereign state of Pakistan was so hopelessly impractical, declared the proposal, as 'not to be an acceptable solution'. Even Jinnah, the man who epitomised the demand for a separate Muslim homeland called Pakistan, would not demur over what he called merely these 'injudicious words'. Fitfully and faintly, a hint of consensus arced across India's dark horizon of sectarian rivalry. The rainbow would soon fade, but throughout 1946 the country lay within a whisker of attaining full independence as a single sovereign state. Partition, in other words, was no more a foregone conclusion in the run-up to Independence than was the genocidal mayhem of its aftermath.\n\nRolling up their shirtsleeves of sea-island cotton, the Cabinet Ministers got down to work in the hermetically air-conditioned offices of a wing of the viceregal palace ('one of the biggest residential buildings in the world', it is now Rashtrapati Bhawan, the official home of the Republic of India's President). For two weeks they listened \u2013 to the views of the Viceroy and his Executive Council, to the Governors of British India's fourteen constituent provinces, the representatives of its several hundred quasi-sovereign princely states and the spokesmen of its main political parties and communal groupings; in all they would interview '472 people on 181 separate occasions'. Then for four weeks they drafted \u2013 first an outline of the likely constitutional options (a large two-tier federal India versus two or more smaller one-tier Indias) \u2013 followed, when the Muslim League rejected both, by a statement of their own that proposed a large three-tier federal India. This too was unacceptable; but hoping that common ground would emerge through direct Congress\u2013League contact, the Cabinet Mission invited the interested parties to send representatives to a conference.\n\nBy now it was early May. The thermometer on the terrace outside the viceregal palace hovered in the upper thirties centigrade. Tarmac bubbled like porridge, and it was the turn of the railways to be paralysed by strike action. A suggestion that the delegates repair to Simla, 350 kilometres to the north and 2,000 metres higher, promised some welcome relief plus a tantalising glimpse of the Himalayan snowline. It was approved in a rare show of unanimity; elevation was just what the discussions needed. With the railways at a standstill, the Mission flew to Simla's nearest airstrip at Ambala before addressing the hairpin bends of the near-perpendicular ascent to the town by car.\n\nBut 'the Queen of Hill Stations', as so often, disappointed. The change of scene brought no change of heart. Simla's pine-scented zephyrs neither cooled heads nor cleared the air. The conference lasted over a week and served only to highlight League\u2013Congress differences. Consultation degenerated into altercation. By 13 May the delegates were trailing back empty-handed to the inferno that was Delhi. Pethick-Lawrence was getting tetchy, Cripps, the Mission's intellectual heavyweight, was wilting with diarrhoea which might have been dysentery, and Alexander had discovered an urgent need to visit a British naval base in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon).\n\nNevertheless, three days later, the Mission came up with its own solution. All its 'proposals' having been shot down by either Congress, the League or both, the Mission had decided to stop inviting comment and instead to table a 'recommendation'. This favoured another three-tier, one-state constitution. Of the three tiers, the first would be comprised of British India's fourteen directly administered provinces. Their recently elected legislatures would then take their provinces into three predetermined regional 'groupings' roughly corresponding to the north-west, the north-east and the remainder of the country, this being the second tier. And the groups would then arrogate to the central government \u2013 the topmost tier \u2013 certain all-India responsibilities like foreign affairs, defence, communications and some revenue-raising powers. The groups might award to the centre other responsibilities. They might also determine their own constitutions. Although a cumbersome device, the importance of the groups lay in the fact that two of them, those in the north-west and north-east, corresponded to the Muslim-majority regions earmarked by the Muslim League for its putative 'Pakistan'. The League could thus reassure itself that the substance of a Muslim homeland had not been entirely precluded, while the Congress could reassure itself that the principle of an undivided India remained intact.\n\nOverall the structure was essentially a graduated federal pyramid, with the fourteen provinces tapering to the three groups and then the one centre. Residual sovereignty would lie with the provinces and the groups, while the central government was comparatively weak. But provision was also made for an all-India constitution-making body, or Constituent Assembly, to give effect to the whole plan. The Constituent Assembly's members would be selected by the provincial legislatures on a religious basis: Muslims would choose Muslim members, Sikhs Sikh members, and the great majority would choose 'general members', a term designed to avoid identifying the supporters of the determinedly secular Congress as overwhelmingly Hindus.\n\nAll the recommendations contained in this 16 May statement had been pre-agreed with London and anticipated by some of the earlier proposals. It was a longish document, and a particularly taxing one, with more than the odd devil in its considerable detail. In fact the detail was so complicated that it required weeks of clarification by the Mission, then exhaustive debate within the two main parties. Yet, not without grave misgivings and reservations, on 6 June Jinnah and the Muslim League accepted it; and so too, though anxious over the interpretation of some clauses and in the face of disapproval of the confessionally based groups from Mahatma Gandhi himself, did Congress on 25 June.\n\nFor the moment Partition was ruled out, as was a sovereign Pakistan; from Afghanistan to Burma an independent India would have the same dimensions as British India. On this happy note the members of the Cabinet Mission began packing their bags. Exhausted, they flew back to London on 29 June.\n\nWe ask the Indian people to give this statement calm and careful consideration [Cripps had pleaded at a press conference]. I believe that the happiness of their future depends on what they do now... But if the plan is not accepted, no one can say how great will be the disturbance, or how acute and long the suffering that will be self-inflicted by the Indian people.\n\n*\n\nThe disturbance and suffering began within a matter of weeks. For the Cabinet Mission, despite its apparent success on the constitutional front, had inadvertently made things worse. A constitutional framework had been agreed, but an actual constitution would have to wait on the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly. These could take months \u2013 as indeed they would (or, as in the eventual case of Pakistan, decades). In the meantime, Congress insisted that an interim government composed of Indian nationals should take over the reins of power. In Nehru's view and in that of Gandhi, a constitution must be the product of an independent nation; freedom, if it meant anything, must include the freedom to formulate one's own institutions; _de facto_ independence must therefore precede the constitution-making process. The League took the opposite view: as Jinnah saw it, an interim government that inherited the paramount powers and patronage of the British Raj would be at liberty to influence the Constituent Assembly's interpretation of the 16 May statement, even overrule it. If there had to be an interim government, therefore, Jinnah demanded a safeguard: half the interim government's members must be Muslims nominated by his Muslim League, so negating any hostile intervention by the other half consisting mainly of Congress 'general members'.\n\n'Now happened one of those unfortunate events which change the course of history,' noted Maulana Azad, a scholarly and emollient Muslim who, unlike Jinnah, rejected the idea of Pakistan and was at the time President of the Congress Party. At a press conference Nehru was asked whether Congress accepted the 16 May plan _in toto_. Off the cuff Nehru replied that Congress would indeed enter the Constituent Assembly, but then added that it would do so 'completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise'. In effect, concluded Maulana Azad, Nehru was claiming for Congress the right to 'change or modify the Cabinet Mission Plan as it thought best'. This 'astonishing statement' called into question the good faith of one of the main signatories and so undermined the whole agreement. Maulana Azad, as a Congress Muslim from a Muslim minority province that was never likely to be part of any Pakistan, had a vested interest in an undivided India; he was horrified. Jinnah was perhaps less so; in Nehru's casual admission that he did not consider the agreement binding, Jinnah saw his often-aired fears confirmed. If the other signatory reserved the right to change or modify the agreement 'as it thought best', the League wanted nothing to do with it. It therefore withdrew its earlier acceptance.\n\nMeanwhile Congress had decided to withhold support for the proposed interim government. This time it was not Nehru who was responsible but Gandhi; for if Nehru had put his foot in it over the Constituent Assembly, Gandhi put his foot down over the interim government. No longer a Congress office-holder but still very much the party's conscience, the seventy-six-year-old Mahatma baulked at that parity between Muslims (comprising roughly 30 per cent of India's population) and non-Muslims (comprising 70 per cent) implied by the proposed make-up of the interim government, and he took particular exception to Jinnah's insistence that only the Muslim League was entitled to nominate Muslim members.\n\nThus, within days of the Cabinet Mission emplaning for London, the Constituent Assembly was being boycotted by the League while the interim government was being boycotted by the Congress. Of the two representative institutions set up under the Mission's plan to expedite the handover of power, neither was left with more than a single rickety leg to stand on.\n\nLanded with this tottering structure, Wavell, the Viceroy, would do his best. Nehru would revise his position and Jinnah would be credited, wrongly, with second thoughts; a Constituent Assembly would indeed assemble and an interim government would be formed. Though the transactions of neither would induce a spirit of collaboration, well into 1947 all the interested parties remained engaged in a constitution-making process based on the Cabinet Mission's recommendations \u2013 including its insistence that the territories comprising British India should continue as a single sovereign state.\n\nIt was events rather than debates that poisoned this uncertain process, then rendered it redundant. Back in 1942 Congress had severely embarrassed the British with a mass movement designed to sabotage their war effort and persuade them to 'Quit India' immediately. The movement had been suppressed, but only with great violence and thanks to some draconian wartime regulations. Now, according to the League, in the dog days of 1946, the British were fearful of a new wave of Congress non-cooperation that would be impossible to contain without the troop levels that had pertained in war and must therefore lead to the ignominy of forced eviction. It was this consideration that had led the Cabinet Mission to overlook Nehru's ambivalence about constitution-making and to indulge Gandhi's intransigence over Muslim representation in the interim government. In other words, the Muslim community was being 'betrayed', as Jinnah put it, by a British government reluctant to risk Congress retaliation. A record of mass menace was evidently more persuasive than one of reasoned argument; and taking this lesson to heart, on 29 July Jinnah announced that 'this day we bid goodbye to constitutional methods'. In the first all-India protest it had ever organised, the Muslim League called on its supporters to stage their own brand of 'direct action'. It also named the day \u2013 Friday (the Muslim day of prayer), 16 August.\n\nThe League's protest was to be framed as a demand for 'Pakistan', a term that was already understood to mean an independent homeland for the League's Muslim constituency \u2013 or what Jinnah called the 'Muslim nation'. But what this 'Pakistan' would actually mean in respect of territory, population transfers and relations with the rest of India was far from clear. Jinnah preferred it that way: the vaguer the term, the more elastic its scope and the more electric its appeal. Yet despite the 'Pakistan' banners and posters (there was as yet no Pakistan flag or anthem), and despite the vast crowds of demonstrators and the usual scuffles, 'Direct Action Day' on 16 August occasioned no major confrontations in the great north-western centres of Muslim India \u2013 Delhi, Lahore, the Punjab \u2013 that would witness the worst atrocities of an eventual Partition. Instead it was Calcutta, then India's largest conurbation and business capital, that exploded.\n\nAs in Dhaka, where lesser disturbances had been ongoing for weeks, the explosion was triggered by a minor local issue which, magnified in a prism of economic grievances, industrial disputes and confrontational party politics, assumed the black-and-white, them-or-us terms of the city's already endemic Hindu\u2013Muslim animosity. In the gory press reports of 'the Great Calcutta Killing' that ensued, the word 'Pakistan' received scarcely a mention; nor was it prominent among the declared demands and anxieties of the combatants. Partition, and its implications for Calcutta, a city with a Hindu majority but which was the capital of a province (Bengal) with a Muslim majority, was little understood; likewise the niceties of constitution-making and government-formation in far-off Delhi were irrelevant. Rather, the spark that ignited the explosion of violence was an innocuous and apparently commendable resolution of Bengal's provincial assembly. Passed on a show of hands by its incumbent Muslim League ministry, it simply ordained that, to minimise the inevitable friction if non-Muslims worked while Muslims marched, 'Direct Action Day' should be observed by all as a public holiday.\n\n'CALCUTTA IN GRIP OF INSANE LUST FOR FRATRICIDAL BLOOD' ran the 17 August 1946 headline in the _People's Age_ , __ the nation's Communist (and so confessionally neutral) mouthpiece. The riots amounted to 'a communal orgy the like of which had never been seen before'. Indeed, the Muslim League's 'Direct Action Day' on the 16th had 'turned into an open civil war between Hindus and Muslims'. Thousands were being killed, the streets were strewn with corpses, the hospitals were overflowing with the wounded, fires raged unchecked, and whole districts were being looted. One witness told of corpses being roped together like sporting trophies, another of babies being hurled from balconies, children clubbed to death, and mothers and daughters abused and butchered. Only the British, usually the butt of Bengali protests, had been left unmolested; and only the police had been minded to observe the declared holiday.\n\nThe politicians of both sides had to bear much of the responsibility. Congress members, after walking out of the Bengal Assembly in protest over the holiday resolution, had publicly denounced the League in the most intemperate terms. The League had responded with equally inflammatory sentiments. Both had welcomed the support of known criminal elements whose actions they had subsequently declined to condemn. The League government had at first delayed recalling the police and had then deployed them less than even-handedly; and when the situation was clearly beyond its control, it had failed to call on Bengal's British Governor to send in the army. The Governor, in turn, should have acted sooner, whether asked to or not. As it was, the killing went on unopposed for two days and unquelled for four. Four thousand died, 11,000 survived serious injuries.\n\nIn retrospect, 'the Great Calcutta Killing' would come to be seen as the turning point, 'the watershed', in South Asian relations. For decades nationalists of every hue had concentrated their fire on British imperialism; a common enemy cemented a common sense of purpose. Now, with independence as good as won, nationalists turned on nationalists in a 'civil war' between the country's two main communities. It was Gandhi's worst nightmare, Nehru's idea of madness; and it seemed unstoppable. Rightly or wrongly, the outbreak in Calcutta would be construed as the first eruption in a chain reaction of communal atrocities that, spreading erratically, gained in intensity until a year later they climaxed in the mass genocide of Partition.\n\nCalcutta certainly set the pattern of savagery. No one knew who started the killing. Rumour raced ahead of verifiable report. The gangs responsible, whether Hindu or Muslim, invariably claimed to be avenging prior atrocities or acting in self-defence. Street talk of 'massacres' no more captured the full horror than the official designation of the disturbances as 'riots'. Even 'civil war' was something of a misnomer. Some parts of the city were unaffected, with the Communist _People's Age_ smugly noting that 'reports from the working-class belt indicate that the hysterical frenzy has not contaminated the workers' _._ The combatants were divided along purely communal lines, their object being not to expel or detain their opponents but to terrorise, desecrate and exterminate them. Age went unrespected and innocence unacknowledged; just to be of the wrong community was provocation enough. Votive objects \u2013 a domestic deity here, a treasured Quran there \u2013 were trashed and fouled. Mosques were defaced, shrines burned. Women, the embodiment of every community's exclusivity, were a particular target. Of those 'lucky' to be still alive, some had been raped or abducted, while the dead had been physically incised with the religious hallmarks of their murderers. Either way, the objective was the appropriation of all that the other community held sacred.\n\nAs with the later massacres, the scale and the intensity of the Calcutta killings took both British and Indians by surprise. 'No Indian political leader... neither the [Bengal] government, the opposition nor the press anticipated the magnitude of the tragedy.' As later too, the national politicians in Delhi seemed more obsessed with the squabble for power than with its consequences for the febrile communities they represented. Like the frailest of firefighters, Gandhi alone would track the flames of violence, touring the stricken areas \u2013 Dhaka, then Noakhali (both in eastern Bengal) and then Bihar, all before the end of 1946 \u2013 as he fasted, marched and painfully practised the communal harmony that he so tirelessly preached. His colleagues preferred to accuse their political opponents either of starting the troubles or failing to suppress them, both of which only stoked the fires of hatred for the next round of atrocities. No one seemed capable of comprehending the scale and obscenity of the killing. In the midst of forming the interim government, Nehru breezily declared that his arrangements must 'not be upset because a few persons misbehave in Calcutta'; Jinnah similarly refused to believe that any member of the Muslim League 'would have taken part in using any violence'. A joint inquiry might have cleared the air. Neither party would agree to it. Instead both conducted their own inquiries. Each duly found against the other.\n\nIronically, the effect on the British was wholly counter-productive. 'Direct Action Day', though conceived by Jinnah as a way of demonstrating that the League could bite as well as bark and must therefore be taken seriously, merely impressed the British with the urgency of disengaging. The Viceroy and his advisers were convinced that the situation was getting out of control. An all-India civil war seemed imminent, with the British ill-equipped to prevent it and in danger of being caught in the crossfire. Not for the first time, Wavell wavered over the prospects for a peaceful transfer of power and began drawing up a plan B. The 'B' stood for 'Breakdown' \u2013 a breakdown in the constitutional process and a breakdown in law and order. To a military man who had presided over the Allies' wartime retreats in both North Africa and South-East Asia, a carefully phased withdrawal was the obvious answer, first from the comparatively peaceful south of India to the Gangetic plain, then to the strategic redoubt of the Punjab and the north-west. In this scenario, Jinnah's Pakistan, if it ever materialised, would come piecemeal, later rather than sooner, and by agreement with Westminster regardless of Congress. The Calcutta Killings had neither advanced the League's cause nor made Pakistan inevitable. What they did make inevitable was an early British departure and the near certainty of constitution-making being sacrificed to the exigencies of the moment, while the apprehensions of undivided India's four hundred million citizens were left to fester.\n\n*\n\n'Pakistan? What good is that to us? We want oil, cloth, sugar, wheat. And we want justice \u2013 that is all.'\n\nSuch were the sentiments expressed by a couple of Qureshi Muslims when, in March 1947, they were asked how they felt about a Pakistan that was looming larger with every communal massacre and constitutional impasse. Qureshis claim descent from the Arab invaders who first brought Islam to India in the eighth century; these ones had bicycles and were heading for a building site near the Narmada river in what is now Madhya Pradesh. Famed for speaking their mind, Qureshis might have been expected to welcome the idea of Pakistan. But in this case their response was wholly negative, and it was not untypical. It echoed that of sundry Pathans, Punjabis, Jats, Mewatis and Rajputs \u2013 Muslims and Sikhs as well as Hindus \u2013 whose opinions had been quietly canvassed over the previous four months by the inquisitive Malcolm Lyall Darling.\n\nAn ageing Quixote on a small grey horse, Darling had ridden out of Peshawar one raw November morning in 1946. From a start within sight of the Khyber Pass, he had been ambling east and south ever since. By March 1947 he was nearing the end of his epic ride in what was roughly the centre of India. Dressed in creaky leather boots, tweeds of many pockets and an outsize sola topi to protect his hairless pate, he looked exactly what he was: ex-Eton, ex-Cambridge and ex-ICS (Britain's elite Indian Civil Service). But not for him the face-saving constitutional conundrums of Delhi or the peacekeeping anxieties of Calcutta. Darling was controversial. A gentle critic of many aspects of British policy, he had turned to Nehru when planning his itinerary, and would report to Gandhi on the findings of his trip. During thirty-six years' service his speciality had been setting up agricultural cooperatives and encouraging 'the Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt' (as per the title of one of his books). Rural life remained his passion. An hour or two spent chatting with agriculturalists under the village pipal tree he accounted well spent and entirely pleasurable. The diary of his 3,000-kilometre ride from the Indus to the Narmada during what would be north India's last winter as an undivided land affords the most comprehensive investigation on record of rural opinion at this critical moment. Ministers in limousines might be deciding the subcontinent's future, but it was the threadbare figures aboard the oxcarts, whether in the boulevards of New Delhi or in the back of beyond, who would have to live with the consequences \u2013 or die because of them.\n\nOddly, Partition and Pakistan, though hotly debated and now only a matter of months away, were not yet, according to Darling, at the top of the villager's agenda. Mention of _azadi_ did occasion excitement \u2013 and more especially so after February 1947, when the British finally announced a deadline for their departure. At the time Darling was trotting through a yellow sea of oil-seed rape between Gwalior and Jhansi. He approved the deadline. He had in fact been urging commitment to a cut-off date for years, if only to concentrate the minds of the constitution-makers. Now, though, the announcement hinted as much at necessity as tactics. Despairing of the Congress\u2013League negotiations \u2013 or the lack of them \u2013 desperate to depart ahead of any communal bloodbath and highly doubtful of Wavell's step-by-step 'Breakdown Plan', the London government had decreed that, agreement or not, it would pull out of India by June 1948.\n\nYet however imminent, even _azadi_ was seen by the toiling masses less as a national triumph than as an economic panacea; for with self-government there would surely come the 'oil, cloth, sugar, wheat and justice' that were everywhere in such desperately short supply. Oil for lamps and cooking, cotton cloth for clothing (a single outfit of turban, trousers, shirt and shawl took twenty yards, 'and women require considerably more'), sugar for sweets and treacly tea, and wheat (or rice) as the staple of subsistence \u2013 without these things life was barely supportable. Yet rationing, a wartime necessity in India as in Britain, had slashed their availability, while the combination of inflation and distributive corruption had pushed the prices of the little that was available way beyond the set rates. Incomes had roughly doubled in the previous five years, but 'even the controlled price [of wheat] \u2013 Rs 10 a maund \u2013 is four times what it was before the war, and \"in the black\" [i.e. on the black market] it is Rs 14 to 16', reported Darling.\n\nAs we rode, we were waylaid again and again by officers, other ranks, headmen and peasants, drawn up by the roadside in long lines headed by some medalled veteran. They all had the same complaint \u2013 the complaint that has run like a telegraph wire all along our road for the last sixty or seventy miles. 'We have nothing to eat, we are dying of hunger, there is no sugar, no cloth, no matches. Look at our children, how ragged they are! Our lot is unbearable!' No one of course was dying of hunger, and many were tolerably well dressed. But... in ten to fifteen days 80 per cent of the people... [will] have to buy their food and most of them will have to do this 'in the black'... All agree that, if sufficient grain is not imported in the course of the next fortnight, there will be sheer starvation.\n\nThis was the situation in the extreme west of the Punjab, a province which was generally reckoned the most productive in the country. Darling found the same in what is now Haryana, and the refrain, echoed by those Qureshi contractors, continued right down into Madhya Pradesh. Even in the cities, where the fixed-rate allowances of cloth and foodstuffs were on a more generous scale, the poor were feeling the bite. The widespread protests \u2013 the endless strikes, shut-ins, shut-outs and often bloody confrontations \u2013 were more about the cost of living than the iniquities of foreign rule. 'It was a time,' notes the editor of a recent collection of contemporary reports, 'of remarkable, indeed unprecedented, labour unrest and it saw the beginnings of several powerful peasant movements.' If Calcutta's 'working class belt' had really resisted the frenzy of the August killings, it may have been because, while celebrating solidarity with the striking postal workers, the labouring classes were readying themselves for upcoming strikes in the docks and on the tramways. 'The range of participation [in the unrest]... extend[ed] from sweepers through miners and railwaymen to white collar employees in post offices, banks and military establishments. Even policemen [were] affected, and that across several provinces... Taken together these [outbreaks] illuminate certain alternative possibilities that have been almost forgotten today.'\n\nRather more than a 'possibility' is the inference that sectarian bigotry was by no means the only cause of civil strife in 1946\u201347. The Communists were as active as the 'communalists' (India-speak for religious zealots). The waves of protest that had until lately buffeted British imperialism now pounded the ramparts of capitalism just as much as they undermined the breakwaters of secularism. A strike in a railway workshop in far-off Madras province had turned violent almost as readily, and at about the same time, as had 'Direct Action Day' in Calcutta. Nehru and Jinnah might paint glossy word-pictures of 'the great future that beckons us', but their roseate visions were often lost on a hungry and fearful public. In rural areas, starvation was no idle threat. Only three years earlier millions had died in the great Bengal famine of 1943. Though blamed primarily on the British and their World War, it was common knowledge that the famine had been exacerbated by the inadequate relief effort of Bengal's government and by the hoarding and profiteering of Bengal's grain contractors. The Bengal government had been that of the Muslim League, giving Congress a ready scapegoat; and the contractors were mostly Hindus, giving the Muslim League a ready scapegoat. All too easily distress of any sort could be translated into the confrontational rhetoric of Congress\u2013League rivalry and so, by extension, into the incendiary terms of sectarian hatred.\n\nDarling found the same thing happening along the line of his epic ride across north-west India. Power and responsibility in the provinces had been handed over to elected governments back in 1937. It was they \u2013 Congress-run in most provinces, League-run in a few \u2013 who had imposed the rationing, who had lately tightened it, and who were responsible for administering it. Hence, just as the incumbent League ministry in Bengal bore the brunt of the blame for the Calcutta Killings, so the Congress ministries in three of the five provinces through which Darling rode were being blamed for the economic hardship. The accolade of 'most corrupt [department] in a very corrupt province... is now universally accorded to the Food Supply [Civil Supplies] Department and its satellite traders who, controlling the very basis of life, exploit their neighbours to the full, as they once did with their money-lending'. This was _\u00e0 propos_ the North-West Frontier Province, where a Congress ministry presided over a largely Muslim population; but it applied equally to the Punjab and the United Provinces (UP). Congress governments stood accused of rewarding their supporters with lucrative posts in the Food Supply Department, from where, abetted by Hindu contractors and moneylenders, their largesse was channelled exclusively to Hindu recipients and Congress voters. According to one of Darling's informants, it was this situation rather than the prospect of Pakistan that accounted for the growing popularity of the League among Punjabi Muslims.\n\nThe chief spur is the fear of Hindu domination, deriving from the domination of the Hindu money-lender and trader which... has taken a new lease of life with the control of supplies. The fear is widespread and the bloody doings in Bengal [the killings in Calcutta and Noakhali] and Bihar have created, to quote the Assistant Registrar, some hatred in their hearts...\n\nAs yet the hatred was only a presentiment, continued Darling's informant; the relationship between the different communities in this particular Punjabi village was 'still a happy one'. But by March, when Darling was reaching the end of his ride, it was not at all happy. From Calcutta and Bihar the inter-communal killing had spread to Garhmukteshwar in UP, then to the villages of western Punjab. As Darling closed his diary on the Narmada, his first informants back beside the Indus were already succumbing to the madness. As victims, perpetrators or both, many more would follow them before his diary was published in 1949.\n\n*\n\nWhen traversing the north-west, including its several princely states, it was impossible for the wayfarer not to be reminded of the complexity of the subcontinent. Preserving the unity that both British administrators and Indian nationalists so cherished was all very well on government-headed paper; but on the ground, amid the heat and the dust, an undivided India ( _bharat akhand_ ) could look to be wishful thinking. The four hundred millions now hammering 'at Freedom's Door', as Darling put it, were converging from all points of a finely calibrated social, religious and political compass. Beneath the village pipal tree literally dozens of conflicting identities awaited the visitor, some so subtle as to be scarcely discernible, others starkly distinct. Counterposing just Muslims and Hindus \u2013 a practice long favoured by the British and now championed by Jinnah, endorsed by the Cabinet Mission Plan and fitfully contested by Congress \u2013 woefully oversimplified the situation.\n\nFor one thing, it ignored the Sikhs. Though statistically irrelevant in the rest of India, in the Punjab the followers of the ten Gurus and the Granth Sahib made up around a quarter of the population and were, reported Darling, as evenly distributed about the province's Muslim and Hindu majority areas 'as the ingredients of a well-made pilau'. This was the problem. Muslims and Hindus enjoyed majority status in numerous provinces; if sovereignty was to reside in the provinces and groups as per the Cabinet Mission Plan, each was assured of a share of power. But it was not so with the Sikhs. A minority in their Punjab homeland, they were, like the titbits of mutton in the pilau, so nicely spread about the plate as to be minorities even in most of that province's districts and sub-districts.\n\nThe Cabinet Mission had been made aware of this problem. Sikh spokesmen had lobbied for a settlement that would afford them some guarantee of local autonomy and religious freedom, and that would not further fragment them by dividing the pilau \u2013 the Punjab \u2013 between a Muslim Pakistan and a non-Muslim 'Hindustan'. (At the time it was assumed that an India without its Muslim majority areas would call itself 'Hindustan', the land of the Hindu, rather than lay claim to the term 'India'.) Partition would, of course, produce precisely this disastrous bisection of the Sikh community. But the Cabinet Mission's masterplan for a united India was equally objectionable, in that it consigned the Sikhs to demographic inconsequence within a Muslim-dominated Punjab that would itself be attached to the Muslim-dominated north-western 'group' of provinces. 'We have been thrown into a pit,' moaned a young Sikh to Darling.\n\nIn making almost no provision for the Sikhs, the Plan ignored a community that was arguably the most distinctive and assertive in the whole country. Uncut hair, billowing beards and tightly tied turbans positively trumpeted the identity of all Sikh Sardars; their neat fields and thriving agricultural cooperatives brought a special glow to Darling's heart; and their disproportionate representation in British India's regiments, not to mention their familiarity with firearms and their attachment to costume weaponry (dirks and swords), left little doubt that they would defend their interests. These interests were not purely doctrinal. Muslims were sometimes accused of embracing independence as a chance to put the clock back to a pre-British India when the Muslim Mughals ruled most of the subcontinent. Sikhs felt somewhat the same about their province. The Punjab had been British for less than a hundred years. Before the 1840s it had been the heart of an independent Sikh kingdom \u2013 or sometimes 'empire' \u2013 extending from the Khyber Pass to Tibet. As champions of the Punjabi language and as the region's erstwhile rulers, the Sikhs effectively defined the province. Their 'empire's' political capital of Lahore was still the administrative capital, and their spiritual capital of Amritsar was still its only rival. Sites associated with the triumphs and tribulations of early Sikhism were scattered right across the province, as were Sikh shrines, places of pilgrimage and centres of worship. Whatever the electoral mathematics, the Sardars felt entitled to special consideration. Their dream of an independent 'Khalistan', like the Muslims' dream of 'Pakistan', was as yet more a battle-cry than a realistic proposition, but as the Punjab began to shatter along its Hindu\u2013Muslim faultline, the idea of an autonomous Sikh homeland was becoming ever more attractive.\n\nAnother casualty of the constitution-makers' tendency to polarise Hindus and Muslims (and indeed Sikhs) was the rich matrix of customs and values that both communities shared. In the villages of central Punjab even the experienced Darling sometimes had difficulty telling who was a Muslim and who a Hindu. They were hard to distinguish because Muslims (and Sikhs) were often descended from converts whose caste or tribe was still that of their Hindu neighbours. There were thus Hindu Gujars and Muslim Gujars, and Hindu Jats, Muslim Jats and Sikh Jats. It was the same with Rajputs.\n\nRiding along this morning, I asked a Muslim Inspector [or Zaildar]..., whether Muslims ever have their horoscopes read. 'Yes,' he replied, and added, 'all Bhatti Rajput Muslims have this done by the family Brahmin.' The Naib-Tehsildar [Deputy Officer], a Hindu, joining in, said: 'The Zaildar and I are of the same tribe. He is a [Muslim] Bhatti and I am a [Hindu] Bhatia; our origin is the same.'\n\nFurther on, Darling heard tell of some fifty Rajput villages that had converted to Islam in around 1700. Recently they had offered to 'return to the Hindu fold on the one condition that their Hindu kinsfolk would give them their daughters in marriage'. This was refused and they remained Muslims; 'but they still interchange civilities at marriage, inviting mullah or Brahmin, as the case may be, to share in the feasting'. Such communal harmony was by no means unusual. Oral testimony has amply confirmed that even in Bengal and Bihar, the scene of the first great killings, Muslims commonly participated in Hindu festivals and Hindus in Muslim festivals. Each might also consult the other's holy men, share their myths, mimic their greetings and in some cases partake of their food. Conduct might be no more reliable in deciding who was a Hindu or a Muslim than ethnicity.\n\nSouth of Delhi, Darling's route lay among the Meos of a region known as Mewat. 'Clanny and feckless', he thought, the Meos were once reputed a criminal tribe who lived by highway robbery. Few outsiders entered their often scruffy villages (one of which, Gurgaon, now challenges Delhi with its shopping malls and call centres), and here, for a change, Darling found the tables turned: it was the villagers who were quizzing him about his own caste. ('No, I am not a Muslim.' 'Then are you a Hindu?') The Meos had a particular interest in the matter because their own identity was problematic. Officially they were regarded as Muslims and, according to Darling, they already favoured the League. But fellow Muslims were not always anxious to acknowledge them as such, nor to intermarry with them. This was because they combined irregular attendance at the mosque and erratic performance of _namaz_ (the Muslim prayers) with a passionate devotion to Lords Krishna and Rama.\n\nSadly, according to Shail Mayaram, a latterday champion of the Meos, such bi-confessionalism was being eroded from two sides. On the one hand, the tract-distributing Tablighi 'mission' was actively promoting Islamic orthodoxy among the Meos; and on the other, zealots of the Mahasabha, the Hindu triumphalist party, were actively promoting anti-Muslim sentiment among the Meos' Hindu neighbours. Willy-nilly, the Meos were coming to think of themselves as Muslim because that was how others saw them. In an increasingly polarised society there was no place for a cross-communal community. Come Partition, the Meos would pay dearly for their heterodoxy, experiencing death and dispossession at the hands of their Hindu neighbours, then rebuffs and rejection at the hands of their Muslim 'brethren'.\n\nMost of the Meos' neighbours in that part of the Punjab that is now the Indian state of Haryana were Hindu Jats. Relations between the two communities had been cordial until the 1930s. Then population pressures had led to a period of agrarian unrest as the Jats coveted the Meos' land. There were armed affrays and the troops had to be called in. But religion had not been an issue at the time. It only became so when Congress and the League squared up to one another in the 1940s. And in the country south of Delhi, all the way to Agra and Jaipur in fact, this politicisation of communal sentiment had especially dire consequences. For here agrarian, ethnic and religious tension was exacerbated by what was undoubtedly the greatest anomaly of all in a supposedly 'united India' \u2013 namely that much of it was far from united in that it was not actually ruled by the British. Indeed it never had been, for this was princely India.\n\nLong before he reached Mewat, Darling's equestrian odyssey had repeatedly taken him into territories whose administration owed nothing to his former fellows in the Indian Civil Service and everything to the good sense or otherwise of one of India's innumerable princes. In the Punjab the princely states of Patiala and Nabha, both ruled by Sikh Maharajahs, had yielded a rather frosty welcome, and Bahawalpur state, ruled by a Muslim Nawab, was beset by poor harvests. Villages in the princely states were less likely to have a school than in British-ruled India, noted Darling, and the people were therefore less well informed.\n\nThere was, though, he thought, something to be said for princely rule. Justice \u2013 a commodity that his Qureshi informants found as scarce as cloth, sugar and wheat \u2013 tended to be abundant there. It was swifter, cheaper and more effective than under the British dispensation. As a result, crime was rarer and the roads safer. The classic case was Swat, a long sub-Himalayan valley that debouched into the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and which Darling had skirted in the first week of his ride. In Swat's alpine setting, holidaymakers pitched their tents and anglers cast their lines without a care for the notoriously unruly Pathan clans of the valley. It was all thanks, explained one of Darling's informants, to the Wali (or ruler) of Swat rigidly enforcing 'the _Shariat_ , the Law of God'. '[In Swat] a man commits a murder and in twelve hours he will be arrested, tried and shot. Here [i.e. in the British-run NWFP] it may take a year or two and as likely as not, when tried, he will get off, and then a blood feud starts.' On the whole, Darling thought this 'a sad reflexion on our [i.e. British] rule'.\n\nSixty-three years later, when _sharia_ law was reintroduced into Swat by Taliban zealots, it would receive no such endorsement. The government in Islamabad at first prevaricated, then panicked. Mobile-phone footage of a convicted adulteress being publicly flogged brought howls of protest from Benazir Bhutto's Western backers and prompted a massive military intervention by the Pakistan army. Thousands died; and in scenes reminiscent of Partition's aftermath, hundreds of thousands streamed out of the valley to avoid the carnage. Almost no one recalled that _sharia_ law had a long pedigree in Swat and might not be entirely distasteful to the Swatis. Though rough and gender-biased, it slashed the crime rate, ensured the security of property and persons, and was a more effective deterrent than the slow, corrupt and painfully overloaded judicial system operating in the rest of Pakistan.\n\nIn 1947, along the sandy trails south of Delhi, Darling found justice less of an issue than religion. Mewat \u2013 it simply means 'the Meo country' \u2013 extended from British-administered Gurgaon deep into the territories of three princely states, two of which (Bharatpur and Dholpur) had Hindu Jat Maharajahs. Entering Bharatpur, Darling noted how the traffic tailed off and the wayside murmurings became a veritable 'cataract of complaints'. Here the export of grain was forbidden, that of cattle taxed, the land revenue was higher, the corruption worse, 'and of course no one had any sugar or cloth'. The Meos were reduced to rags, with not a garment that was free of holes. (Darling suggested darning, then remembered the state of his socks.)\n\nFor these woes, Meos and Jats were united in blaming the Maharajah of Bharatpur's administration; but they did so for different reasons. 'There is a good deal of political agitation going on in the State,' explained Darling, 'sponsored, if not engineered, by supporters of Congress, and doubtless this [cataract of complaints] was an echo of it.' But while the Meos blamed the Congress agitators for turning the administration against them as Muslims, the Jats took exception to the Congress agitators as godless secularists who were indifferent to Hindu rights and were anti-monarchist republicans to boot. Their Maharajah Brijendra Singh was himself in no way to blame. On the contrary, the Jats looked to him as their saviour. They saw no contradiction between nationalism and princely absolutism because the nation to which by preference they subscribed was Jat, not Indian, and their Maharajah epitomised it.\n\nA 'Jatistan' along the lines of the Muslim 'Pakistan' or the Sikh 'Khalistan' was already being bandied about. Just six weeks after Darling passed through the Jat country, it would surface in a pithy slogan: 'With _biri_ in hand and _pan_ in mouth we are busy making Jatistan.' _Biri_ , __ the peasant's smoke, and _pan_ , __ his betel-leaf _digestif_ , __ were markers of Hindu identity. The Jat's sub-nationalism thus announced its Hindu credentials. In this it had the full backing of the Maharajah. As a patron of the ultra-Hindu Mahasabha, His Highness's Hindu supremacism was as far to the right in terms of India's religious spectrum as his monarchist convictions were in terms of its constitutional spectrum.\n\nFatally, if rather desperately, in the spring of 1947 the Meos met this Jat challenge with calls for their own 'Meoistan'. While accommodating their unorthodox beliefs, Meoistan was to be an agrarian republic informed by both the Communist class struggle and consensual village custom. It was thus 'both a radical and a traditional [alternative] based on a vision of intercommunal solidarity and a decentring of power'. But come the summer, continues Shail Mayaram, 'what it elicited was a mass extermination campaign' \u2013 one in which the campaigning was done mainly by the Bharatpur Jats and the extermination was suffered mainly by the luckless Meos. Many thousands would be massacred, many thousands more 'converted', and many hundreds of thousands would swell the flood of refugees. Within the context of Partition all of them would be seen, and counted, simply as casualties of the great Hindu\u2013Muslim conflagration. As elsewhere, their sub-national agrarian, economic and governmental anxieties went largely unrecorded.\n\nThose know-alls in the newsrooms and the corridors of power who simply counterposed Hindu and Muslim when agonising over the partition of a 'united India' ignored a host of other identities and relevant factors. In reality the rising tide of communalism was obliterating existing communities as readily as it fashioned new ones. The polarisation of Muslim and Hindu, while providing the impetus for the Pakistan movement, was also the product of that movement.\n\n*\n\nAlthough the Cabinet Mission Plan took no account of all these sub-national identities, its failure to clarify the future status of the princely states themselves was surprising. By leaving open the question of what was to become of the states, the Plan not only generated unrealistic expectations (like that for 'Jatistan') but also ensured that the princely issue would loom large in the final run-up to Independence. Thereafter it would dog Indo\u2013Pakistan relations, and in the case of Kashmir rankle to this day. All of which was also somewhat ironic, in fact doubly so. For while the existence of the princely states belied the notion of pre-Independence India being a single entity, it was the terms of their accession that would ensure that post-Independence India was not a single entity either. Indeed, the new 'India' would remain pretty much the same size as the old, since 'the combined area and population [of the princely states] nearly matched that of the districts claimed by the [Muslim] League for Pakistan'.\n\nIn total, the princely states accounted for about 40 per cent of India's territory and 25 per cent of its population. Their number is usually put at around six hundred, though most were quite insignificant, being little more than fragmented landholdings, perhaps embracing a village or two. In Saurashtra (now in Gujarat but then an intricate tapestry of mini states), the nicely named principality of Veja-no-ness extended to under an acre 'and had a population, in 1921, of 184'. Another was apparently little more than a well. Once traded as _jagirs \u2013_ revenue-yielding fiefs \u2013 among rulers and their allies, such holdings had been frozen in time at the moment of British conquest. Their incumbents, assuming they had either assisted the British or not opposed them, had been recognised as rightful rulers in return for their own recognition of the British Crown as the paramount power. This involved surrendering the right to conduct their external relations and accepting a degree of British supervision in respect of their internal affairs.\n\nBut in practice such arrangements involved all manner of different relationships. Smaller states like Veja-no-ness had no jurisdictional powers and could scarcely claim even a residual sovereignty; the larger ones were effectively self-governing, maintained their own forces and jealously clung to all the trappings of a sovereignty that was freely acknowledged by the paramount power.\n\nOf these larger princely states, over a hundred were accounted 'salute states', their rulers being entitled to proclaim their sovereignty on ceremonial occasions with a gun salute of up to twenty-one salvos. About a dozen of them were vast, their territories, populations or both exceeding those of most member states in the newly founded United Nations. The composite state of Jammu and Kashmir, a Himalayan spin-off of the former Sikh 'empire', claimed a land area bigger than France; Hyderabad in the south had a population equivalent to that of Italy. Nor were they all cesspits of reaction and feudal privilege. Travancore on the Kerala coast boasted a literacy rate far above that of directly ruled India; others had developed an industrial capacity or were richly endowed with mineral resources; and several had endorsed some form of popular representation and set up consultative or legislative bodies.\n\nAlthough many of the smallest states were concentrated in western India, the rest were scattered fairly evenly about the subcontinent and were not often contiguous. Maps thus gave the impression of British India's fabric being as perilously holed as a Meo's outworn kurta. Yet this was only half the story. Their variety was as challenging as their distribution. Some were ruled by Muslim Nawabs (including Hyderabad's Nizam and Swat's Wali), others by Maharajahs, Rajahs or lesser variants of the same who might be either Hindu or Sikh; and whatever the ruler's faith, it was not uncommon for the faith of the majority of his subjects to be different. Famously, the greatest princes commanded immense wealth and built ever more fanciful palaces; less famously, the least were hopelessly in debt and lived in shabby obscurity. And not even the mapmakers of the Survey of India had been able to do justice to the unconsolidated nature of princely holdings. Erratic boundaries and isolated enclaves and counter-enclaves abounded. Communications suffered accordingly. As Darling had discovered, road transport was stifled by innumerable state customs barriers where duties were levied, bribes extorted, and some goods could not pass at all. It was the same with the railways and the postal service. Fifty years later Indian Railways would still be grappling with the illogic of state-centred networks and the numerous different rail gauges bequeathed by princely whim.\n\nAll this rendered the states highly vulnerable. Making a case for hereditary monarchy in the mid-twentieth century was difficult enough, and it was not helped by the reluctance of many rulers to welcome reform. Inevitably it was the princes' outrageous eccentricities and their lavish expenditure on foreign travel, luxury cars and well-stocked _zenanas_ that made the headlines. All, great or small, recognised that their best chance of retaining their rights lay in presenting a united front, yet their wildly different circumstances seldom admitted of their sustaining it. The smaller states resisted federating with the larger; and the larger resented their claims to special treatment being muddied by the unrealistic expectations of the smaller.\n\nOf course national sentiment, not to mention common sense, demanded that they throw in their lot with either Congress or the League. It would dispel the suspicion that they were British puppets, be welcomed by most of their subjects, and deserve a generous response from the political parties. For Congress and the League badly needed the states. Without them, an independent India would be denied the territorial uniformity expected of a modern nation state and be incapable of planning an integrated economy. And the same went for a possible Pakistan: without the states and some semi-autonomous tribal areas, its territory would be even more perforated than the 'moth-eaten' periphery for which Jinnah would eventually have to settle.\n\nOn the other hand, and much to British relief, individually the states were still less viable. All of them depended to some extent on the directly administered provinces not just for 'oil, cloth, sugar and wheat' but also coal, power and even water. Moreover, not one of them was readily defensible. A few had written treaties that obliged the British to afford them indefinite protection; but in the absence of British troops this would scarcely be practicable, and Westminster therefore had no intention of honouring the treaties. According to Cripps, 'the efflux of time and change of circumstances' had rendered the treaties no longer 'appropriate to the conditions of the modern world'. With the departure of the paramount power, 'paramountcy' \u2013 one of those barely definable terms, like 'suzerainty' and 'dependency', with which empires disguise their dominion \u2013 would lapse. Although Congress demanded that all such obligations pass to the new paramount power as part of the 'transfer of responsibility', the Cabinet Mission had demurred. In a rare reference to the matter, it reiterated the British contention that 'all rights surrendered... to the paramount power will return to the states'. At a press conference Cripps went even further, opining that the states would thus 'become wholly independent'.\n\nThis was music to princely ears. Hyderabad and Travancore immediately gave serious thought to joining the world's concourse of sovereign nations by despatching ambassadors and applying for UN membership. They and many other states expected to retain their links with the British Crown by negotiating their individual or collective entry into the British Commonwealth. And all recognised that the retraction of paramountcy did at least improve their bargaining position _vis-\u00e0-vis_ the new political leadership represented by Congress and the League.\n\nThe League was generally supportive of the states; its desired Pakistan would contain comparatively few, of which only Kashmir was a possible contender for independence. But it was otherwise with Congress. As the voice of all India's peoples it claimed to represent the subjects of the princely states as well as those of British India. In the Chamber of Princes (the princely forum), Congress was thus confronted by a second grouping of potential secessionists who, though less vociferous than the League, could be just as unaccommodating.\n\nWhile insisting that paramountcy must lapse, the British government had urged the princes to negotiate their future status with the nationalist leadership. Indeed, the Cabinet Mission Plan had envisaged the princes participating in both the Constituent Assembly and the interim government. But, like the League, the Chamber of Princes had prevaricated. It too insisted on disproportionate representation in the Constituent Assembly, while demanding numerous concessions in respect of the legitimacy of monarchical government and a large measure of autonomy in the states' internal affairs. In early 1947 Nehru, whose centrist, socialist and democratic sentiments were no secret, steeled himself to offer sufficient safeguards to split the princely Chamber into pro- and anti-accessionists. But there still remained the problem of how to win over the latter, and anyway the Constituent Assembly had been prorogued in the face of Jinnah's refusal to participate. Meanwhile the British government's February announcement of a deadline for independence had left the future status of the princes unchanged.\n\nWhat did change was the Viceroy. In March 1947, just as Malcolm Darling was completing his long ride, Lord Louis Mountbatten arrived as Wavell's replacement. Unlike Wavell, the new Viceroy enjoyed Whitehall's utmost confidence plus the luxury of having drafted his own brief. With numerous other advantages \u2013 a royal connection, an open mind, an attractive wife and an infectious sense of urgency \u2013 Mountbatten would plunge straight into the constitutional impasse between Congress and the League. The princes would therefore have to wait.\n\nIn May 1947, a year after it had been tabled, the Cabinet Mission Plan was finally ditched along with the all-party Constituent Assembly. The demands of Congress and the League remained irreconcilable, but an uneasy lull in the massacres in the Punjab offered some hope. June brought the critical turnaround, when Mountbatten endorsed Partition and quickly followed this by announcing an earlier deadline for its enaction. Only in July, as the days ticked away and Congress agonised over the loss of Pakistan, did it dawn on Mountbatten that it was the princely states that 'held the key to a negotiated settlement...'\n\nV.P. Menon, Mountbatten's 'political reforms commissioner' and the unofficial intermediary between Congress and the Viceroy, has been credited with coming up with the terms of the deal. These had something for everyone. Mountbatten would dragoon the states into signing Instruments of Accession to the new India (and in a few cases to Pakistan); Congress, in return, would accept Partition and the loss of Pakistan; and the princes would be mollified by having to hand over their powers only in respect of defence, foreign affairs and communications \u2013 in effect no more than they had surrendered under the system of paramountcy. Moreover, by way of further reassuring them with a residual British connection, India and Pakistan would join the British Commonwealth, so giving Mountbatten something to crow about and saving British blushes with a face-saving formula that was of some strategic value in an increasingly bipolar world.\n\nGiven the urgency of the situation, it was a persuasive package. But as with Partition itself, the self-imposed haste so concentrated ministerial minds that the wider issues of implementation received little attention. The princes would not all sign on the dotted line, Congress would honour the terms of their Instruments of Accession only for a matter of weeks, the Muslim League would do its utmost to render India as 'moth-eaten' as Pakistan by encouraging princely defections, and Mountbatten would wash his hands of the whole business as quickly as he could. In short, the power-brokers seemed oblivious to the anxious faces under the countless village pipal trees in the back of beyond. Chauffeur-driven negotiators sped down the Delhi boulevards without sparing a thought for the dark moustachioed drivers in undarned cotton rags atop their creaking bullock carts.\n\n##\n\n## Counting the Cost\n\nIt has often been asked why no one seems to have foreseen the hell that Partition was about to unleash. The Calcutta killings of 1946 and those elsewhere in Bengal and Bihar gave ample warning, as did the atrocities perpetrated in western Punjab in early 1947. A few officials, both Indian and British, did anticipate trouble and called for reinforcements. But in Delhi the excitement over independence claimed the moment to the exclusion of all else. Victory in the freedom struggle was not to be gainsaid. It was assumed that the entire nation shared in the rejoicings and that, in the prevailing spirit of goodwill, Partition could be effected without bloodshed. The haste with which it had been adopted might actually help. Instead of laborious consultations and the tensions that must result from them, most of the people affected were to be presented with a _fait accompli._ Territory would be allocated to India or Pakistan on the basis of the majority community; minorities, Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, were to be reassured with soothing words and the glorious prospect of freedom.\n\nAside from an arrogance born of bureaucratic habit and indifference to the plight of the lower castes, this attitude overlooked the considerable novelty of communities being equated with territories and nations with sovereign states. It also ignored the fact that a British India riddled with princely states had never been the uniform entity that partitioning implied. And it took no account of South Asia's prior acquaintance with political division and the concept of sovereignty as something layered rather than absolute. Nehru insisted that a sense of all-Indian nationhood could be traced back into the mists of antiquity; but for most of its interminable past the Indian subcontinent had not been governed as one. Fragmentation was in fact the norm, and a strong, centralised polity as championed by Congress very much the exception. Despite claims to the contrary, history was on the side of Partition.\n\nIn yet another paradox, it has been argued that it was not Jinnah but Nehru himself who was ultimately responsible for Partition and so, indirectly, for the imminent holocaust. The demand for Pakistan, say the protagonists of this view, need not have meant separation. Jinnah wanted guarantees for his 'Muslim nation' in the form of a 'Pakistan' composed of all the existing Muslim-majority provinces of British India \u2013 so including the whole of Bengal (with Calcutta) and the whole of the Punjab (possibly with Delhi). The result in terms of population would have been something much nearer parity between this so-called 'Greater Pakistan' and a rump India composed solely of the non-Muslim-majority provinces. Such an arrangement should have sufficed to preclude mass migration and the killings that would accompany it, because Muslim opinion within the unpartitioned subcontinent would be well represented in the Constituent Assembly and could be decisive in the formation of a central government. Nothing if not consistent, in 1946 Jinnah had demanded a similar parity in respect of the interim government; indeed the Cabinet Mission's 'grouping' of provinces could be read as foreshadowing this 'Greater Pakistan'.\n\nJinnah's somewhat excessive demands were informed by past experience. In the 1930s, Congress ministries in provinces with a vociferous Muslim minority, notably UP, had been accused of ignoring the sensibilities of Muslim constituents and shunning the claims to office of the Muslim League. Arguably, this could now be prevented; the League had emerged from recent elections much stronger, and the possibility of its retaliating in its own Muslim-majority provinces could be expected to act as a deterrent to Congress exclusivity.\n\nMoreover, a Pakistan within India might be more manageable than one outside it. The anomalies and inconveniences of Pakistan's two halves being themselves partitioned by a thousand kilometres of potentially hostile territory would be largely negated; a Pakistan within India might be less vulnerable to internal ethnic and linguistic contradictions than if left to its own devices; and the League would be well-placed to forge alliances with other non-Congress parties, like those representing the lower-caste and no-caste communities or lesser minorities like the mixed-race Anglo-Indians. Such an alliance might even contest power with Congress in the central government. Thus Jinnah, provided his 'Greater Pakistan' was forthcoming, had much to gain by not insisting on Partition. Some loose form of federation, or just a treaty that preserved a fa\u00e7ade of unity, might suffice. It would be a small price to pay in terms of diminished sovereignty, and the arrangement was anyway to be subject to revision after ten years.\n\nBut if this was indeed what Jinnah wanted, he never actually said so. Adamant about what he would reject, he could be remarkably reticent about what he would accept. Nor was it what he was offered. For to Nehru, an India hobbled by a subordinate Pakistan had begun to look a worse option than an India relieved of a sovereign Pakistan. Only a strong central government could tackle India's massive social problems, oversee the incorporation of the princely states, root out feudal and colonial attitudes, plan the framework of a modern economy, and set the world a proud example. A weak federal centre as posited by Jinnah would paralyse the state-building process and play into the hands of other possible separatists, for instance in the north-east and the south of the country. New Delhi would therefore be better writing off Pakistan completely and bidding good riddance to the unbending adversary who claimed to be its 'sole spokesman'.\n\nThis did not, though, mean giving Jinnah the Greater Pakistan he wanted. The _quid pro quo_ of conceding sovereignty was that the new Pakistan must be pared down to its Islamic heartland. With non-Muslims (Sikhs and Hindus) outnumbering Muslims in both the eastern half of the Punjab and the western half of Bengal, there was some logic to these two great provinces being themselves partitioned. In effect, instead of a Greater Pakistan albeit within India, Jinnah must be obliged to settle for a lesser Pakistan albeit outside India. 'Maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten' was his own description of the new construct; he would never accept it, he had declared. But in 1947, with his supposed bluff over separation called, that was precisely what he did have to accept. And hence, as the countdown to Independence proceeded, it was Nehru who readily endorsed Mountbatten's Partition plan and Jinnah who, when asked to do so, merely hung his head. The gesture seemed to signify despair as much as assent.\n\n*\n\nAugust, though mid-monsoon, is not an unpleasant month in Delhi. Cloudbursts douse the heat and clearing skies excite the vegetation. Trees erupt into flower, puddles shrink into sward. Were the subcontinent's New Year timed for the growth cycle instead of the daylight cycle, it would surely fall in August. In 1947, as mid-month approached, there was much optimism and some understandable self-congratulation. Mountbatten had chosen the date for the handover of power: 15 August. He thought it propitious as being the second anniversary of Japan's surrender at the end of World War II, an event in which his own part as commander of Allied forces in South-East Asia would of course be noted. India's astrologers also deemed it propitious, and Pakistan's leadership contented itself with insisting on just a twenty-four-hour precedence. By opting for 14 August, Pakistan would be winning independence ahead of India, and so from the hands of the British government in London rather than from the Congress government in Delhi.\n\nIncredibly, as it now seemed, both nations had wrested their freedom through largely non-violent pressure; and although the final round of negotiations had been conducted at breakneck speed, relations with London had never been better. In fact, the restraint shown by both sides had set a valuable precedent for future decolonisations elsewhere. The majority of erstwhile India remained intact. And even Pakistan, the two-part exception, looked to have secured the resources \u2013 military, diplomatic and economic \u2013 to defy the odds stacked against it. Bisection, though regrettable, had to be better than dissection; and if that was the price of liberation, then so be it. The delights of Independence would quickly allay the pangs of Partition.\n\nYet when addressing New Delhi's Constituent Assembly on the eve of Independence, Nehru invited the people to reflect as much as to celebrate. The tone of his famous oration was more messianic than triumphant, its twin themes of redemption and destiny sounding positively Churchillian.\n\nLong years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially... [The] future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges... The day has come \u2013 the day appointed by destiny \u2013 and India stands forth again... We have much to do before we redeem the pledges... no resting for any one of us until we redeem our pledge in full.\n\nThe rhetoric lost nothing by repetition; a moment so 'solemn' positively invited a rambling retrospective. The 'pledge' was to 'the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity', while that quaint idea of a 'tryst', a prearranged meeting at an appointed hour, was intended to evoke a sense of common progression. History had ordained it, struggle had confirmed it. For Nehru, a formidable intellect and an ardent socialist whose moods could be attributed to his excessive workload, 15 August 1947 marked the nation's longed-for epiphany. 'At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,' he intoned. Out with the Old; in with the New.\n\nJinnah, a minaret of a man compared to Nehru, erect and impeccable with corbel-like cheekbones and a coiffed cupola of silver hair, was both more cautious and more cautionary. Addressing Pakistan's Constituent Assembly in Karachi on 11 August, he seemed scarcely able to believe that his call for a sovereign Muslim nation was being realised. Only what he called 'an unprecedented cyclonic revolution' could have brought about the birth of Pakistan; it was the consummation of a scheme so 'titanic', so 'unknown', that it had 'no parallel in the history of the world'. Yet for Pakistan to function, grievances like those voiced by Malcolm Darling's anxious informants must be quickly addressed. Bribery and corruption would be put down 'with an iron hand', he warned, jobbery and nepotism would never be tolerated, and 'black-marketing' in foodstuffs was the greatest crime of all.\n\nNo less important was the suppression of what Jinnah now called 'the angularities of the majority and minority communities'. In an outspoken assertion of cross-communal equality \u2013 one that would come to haunt the new nation \u2013 the man already hailed as _Quaid-i-Azam_ ('Supreme Leader') announced to the Pakistan Assembly that:\n\nYou are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed; that has nothing to do with the business of the State... We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another... [If] we keep that in front of us as our ideal... you will find that in the course of time Hindus... cease to be Hindus, and Muslims... cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.\n\nNehru, the champion of secularism, could not have put it better. For Jinnah too, freedom meant casting off not just the bonds of foreign rule but those of communal rivalry. The 'Muslim nation' must be all-inclusive. To a state predicated and won on the uncompromising basis of a shared religion he now offered as its guiding principles 'justice and complete impartiality'. The success of the Pakistan movement was down to 'an evolution of the greatest possible character', plus those vaguely 'cyclonic' forces. In keeping with this unspecified agency, Pakistan might 'become one of the greatest nations of the world', provided it demonstrated neither 'prejudice or ill will', neither 'partiality or favouritism'. Islam received not a single mention in the speech. Its unacknowledged presence was like that of a no-longer-welcome guest. Evidently the advent of nationhood heralded a new departure in national definition.\n\nMountbatten, too, milked the moment for all it was worth. Where so many of his countrymen had floundered over the last three decades, he had triumphed in a matter of weeks. The nettle of Congress\u2013League distrust had been grasped, the Gordian knot of irreconcilable claims and counter-claims summarily severed. Not a single British life had been lost in the act of disengagement; and though about to be anything but peaceful, the bisection of the subcontinent was deemed to be unmarred by actual war. In British eyes, Mountbatten made the loss of empire almost palatable. The manner of its surrender was portrayed as a credit to all concerned, and the abiding friendship of the successor states was construed as a benediction on the whole two-hundred-year Raj. Individually, each of the successor states had opted to join the British Commonwealth; each was pledged to liberal values and democratic government; neither felt inclined to humiliate the ex-imperialists; and both retained the services of some senior British personnel. It was a more amicable parting of the ways than had seemed possible during the previous decades of acrimonious struggle.\n\nLike the monsoonal cloudbursts, the plaudits rained down on the beaming Mountbatten from all sides. New Delhi invited him to stay on as Governor-General. Prime Minister Attlee noted that 'broadly speaking the thing went off well', and 'we left behind so much good will'. Churchill, defender of the empire and inveterate opponent of Indian independence, was greatly reassured by India's and Pakistan's willingness to join the Commonwealth. And to the already impressive royal connections of his last ever Viceroy, King George VI added an earldom. While modestly deflecting the praise, Mountbatten yet lapped it up. His showmanship had paid off; a career that might so easily have been tarnished by failure or tarred by the shame of retreat had in fact been burnished. Yet, looking back many years later, he would be less sanguine about his achievement and a lot less delicate. 'I fucked it up,' he told John Osman, a BBC journalist, in 1965.\n\nWrong-footing critics with outrageous _volte-faces_ was all part of the famous Mountbatten charm, yet this disclaimer was not insincere. At the time his main regret had been his failure to secure an invitation to become Governor-General of Pakistan as well as India; for, much to his fury, Jinnah insisted that he himself would be Governor-General of Pakistan. Jinnah was deeply suspicious of the cosy relationship between Nehru and the Mountbattens \u2013 especially that between Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten \u2013 and he didn't trust the ex-Viceroy to act as an impartial arbitrator in the division of the spoils between the two dominions, principal among these being the army. Nor, unlike Nehru, could Jinnah afford to relinquish even the trappings of his authority to a post-imperial pawnbroker. From the Chittagong Hills to the North-West Frontier fissiparous tendencies already menaced the bipolar Pakistan. The new India could be expected to exploit them.\n\nTo share a common Governor-General with Hindustan [i.e. the new India] would have given Congress an excuse to use this joint office to make terms separately with the Muslim areas [i.e. Pakistan] in the event that the Pakistan constituent assembly fell to pieces. It was to avoid this disaster, that Jinnah had to exercise the powers of a Governor-General himself and in the process consolidate the [Muslim] League's authority over the Muslim [majority] areas.\n\nMountbatten blamed himself for not having secured a prior understanding. As he told his daughter at the time, 'Your poor Daddy has finally and irretrievably \"boobed\"... made a mess of things through overconfidence and overtiredness.' He ought to have foreseen Jinnah's move and, but for the pressure of his own deadline, he thought he would have. But much later he seems to have had second thoughts not about the governor-generalship but about the deadline itself. In retrospect it was this more than anything that had 'fucked it up'.\n\nBringing forward Attlee's cut-off date of June 1948 to his own of August 1947 has often been supposed Mountbatten's masterstroke. Yet at the time it had appalled his staff and confounded those who had habitually complained of Britain's procrastination. Nehru had thought the new timetable 'too much of a rush', the princes needed all the time \u2013 and more \u2013 that they could possibly get, and the Muslim League doubted whether such a schedule, however agreeable to the prospects of Pakistan, was actually feasible. Announcing his plan on 3 June 1947, Mountbatten had allowed just over ten weeks for its implementation. There was to be no time for second thoughts, and precious little for negotiation. That was the point. As he advised London, speed \u2013 one might almost say panic \u2013 was of the essence.\n\nFor Mountbatten this urgency was tactical: it would concentrate minds, demonstrate good faith, and narrow the options. It was not a _sine qua non_ of the terms of transfer. It was not even an immediate imperative. The threat of civil war had in fact receded. Calcutta still simmered, but since April the communal outbreaks in the Punjab had subsided and, but for the plight of the Meos in and around the princely states south of Delhi, there had been nothing on a comparable scale elsewhere. Those, therefore, who professed to hold the unity of India so dear, like Nehru, might reasonably have challenged a deadline which, while making Partition virtually inevitable, allowed almost no time to prepare for it. That they did not object was significant. Gandhi had famously declared, 'You shall have to divide my body before you divide India.' But Gandhi, now seventy-seven and sidelined by Congress, was devoting his remaining energies to dousing the embers of communal violence wherever they smouldered. Jinnah continued adamant for a Pakistan of some sort; and Nehru did nothing. Persuaded by the realisation that India would be stronger without Pakistan, and mindful of that viceregal promise to stampede the princely states into accession, he let it stand. Thus the responsibility for Partition may be said to have itself been partitioned \u2013 not perhaps 'equally or in full measure but very substantially'.\n\n*\n\nDividing the assets of an empire between two deeply suspicious heritors called for wisdom and an ongoing spirit of compromise. Neither was much in evidence. Nehru had brains and breadth of vision, Jinnah tenacity and stature, and Mountbatten bravado plus breeding. But none had the time, the inclination or the skills needed to apportion sundry budgets, deconstruct entire ministries, allocate all manner of weaponry and aircraft, number-crunch everything from pipe bands to pencil sharpeners, manage the logistics of cross-border transfer, and delineate the actual frontier. Carving up the turkey was down to the attributes of their lieutenants \u2013 the hard-nosed pragmatism of the burly Sardar Patel plus the mandarin-mind of V.P. Menon (for India), and the resourcefulness of the dependable Liaquat Ali Khan (for Pakistan).\n\nIn this exercise India had a head start. Not least, this was because it was still 'India'. The new Union of India, which was celebrating its independence in 1947, would become the Republic of India after the adoption of the Constituent Assembly's new Constitution in 1950; but either way, India stayed 'India'. The term 'Hindustan' ('Hindu-land'), as hitherto applied to an India minus the Muslim-majority provinces, and as preferred by many Pakistanis to this day, was allowed to lapse. 'It is nevertheless significant that until the bitter end the [Muslim] League continued to protest against Hindustan adopting the title \"Union of India\",' reports Ayesha Jalal. Jinnah objected to both the 'Union' and the 'India', and is said to have seen the rebuff of his protest as further evidence of collusion between Mountbatten and the Congress leadership.\n\nEtymologically, the 'India' word might actually have suited Pakistan better: it derives from 'Indus', and originally indicated just those lands beside the Indus river that today constitute Pakistan. But 'Pakistan' had been preferred by the Muslim League ever since the 1930s, when the term had been coined in Cambridge as an undergraduate acronym for the Muslim-majority regions of the north-west: thus 'P' for the Punjab, 'A' for Afghania (a contentious name for the North-West Frontier), 'K' for Kashmir, 'S' for Sind, and an unconvincing 'TAN' for Balochistan. (There was no 'B' for Bengal, a telling omission at the time and one fraught with the potential for further partition, notably in 1971.) By a happy coincidence, another reading of 'Pak-istan' had it to mean the 'Land of the Pure'. Either reading would do. Jinnah relished it, and had no designs on the 'India' word himself. But he had sound reasons for objecting to New Delhi's coopting it. On the strength of it, the new India would claim the old India's seat at the United Nations. It also arrogated to the new India what Jinnah regarded as a spurious continuity and a provocative precedence.\n\nOthers objected on the grounds that the 'India' word did not convey enough continuity and precedence \u2013 indeed, that it was tainted as being of foreign origin. Ceylon, a British colony but never a part of British India, would gain its independence in 1948 and redesignate itself as Sri Lanka in 1972, so reviving an ancient indigenous name, shedding a Graeco-Roman and colonial one, and appeasing nationalist sentiment. India nearly did the same. The term 'Bharata-varsha', or simply 'Bharat', figured in the Sanskrit epics and was strongly urged by those who thought a primordial name hallowed by Hindu tradition more appropriate. Although Nehru, the arch secularist, would have none of it, 'Bharat' still features in the writings of Sanskrit-minded apologists for Hindu nationalism. It appears on numerous maps, occasionally resurfaces in national debate and could yet be officially preferred.\n\nIf antiquity was ambivalent about India's identity, recent history offered ample compensation. New Delhi's Congress government had the advantage of stepping into the capacious shoes of the British Raj. The ruddy imperial edifices that reared above the capital's leafy canopy needed only to be renamed. The rotunda that had been the Legislative Assembly building became the Parliament building, and the monumental Government House (the residence of the Viceroys) became Rashtrapati Bhawan (the residence of the Presidents). Kingsway was renamed Rajpath (Government's Way), and Queensway Janpath (People's Way). Within the colonnades of the central government's sandstone secretariat buildings the peons and the pigeons were joined by flocks of _khadi_ -clad freedom fighters, now with ministerial portfolios. What with inheriting the lion's share of the erstwhile Indian Civil Service (soon renamed the Indian Administrative Service) along with the archives, the high court, various other national institutions and surveys, and an abundance of both state offices and office stationery \u2013 including the pins used as paperclips \u2013 India's new government took possession of a capital already equipped with all the paraphernalia of power.\n\nPakistan came off less well. Entire ministries had to be improvised in tin sheds, and quite senior clerks took up residence in a railway station. Packing cases were converted into desks, meals were often served in alfresco canteens, and long thorns were gathered from the roadside shrubbery because the supply of paper pins had failed to arrive. Lahore, the Mughal city that had been the capital of the undivided Punjab province, would have been the obvious choice as the home of the new government, but it was ruled out on the grounds that it was too close for strategic comfort to the new border with India. A safer haven might have been afforded by Dhaka (then spelled 'Dacca') in East Bengal. As the one-time capital of Bengal's Nawabs it had some fine buildings and lay at the heart of what was now Pakistan's most populous province. Yet such was the bias \u2013 social, linguistic, cultural, military and strategic \u2013 in favour of Pakistan's western provinces that Dhaka's claims were barely entertained. Instead Karachi, a foetid port-city near the mouth of the Indus that doubled as the administrative headquarters of the lately formed province of Sind, had been chosen.\n\nKarachi was declared merely the interim capital. Like much else in Pakistan, it was a makeshift arrangement. For while the new India inherited a functioning state, plus its majestic capital, the new Pakistan was having to improvise everything from scratch \u2013 and to do so under the direst national emergency imaginable. Already thousands, rising to millions, were on the move. Already the chain reaction of atrocities had resumed. Ahead loomed a crescendo of killing unlike anything ever witnessed elsewhere in so-called peacetime. Pakistan, which was itself in Jinnah's words the product of an 'unprecedented cyclonic revolution', was about to occasion a second 'titanic' convulsion 'with no parallel in the history of the world'.\n\n*\n\nWar, even civil war, might have been more manageable than the internecine strife that engulfed large parts of both India and Pakistan in the latter half of 1947. It had begun in early August in the Amritsar district of east Punjab, when gangs of armed Sikhs started exacting revenge for the atrocities of the previous March in west Punjab. Muslims were massacred and their villages set on fire. The pogrom then spread to Lahore, as Muslims retaliated against both Hindus and Sikhs. Gurdwaras (Sikh temples) were trashed, Hindu temples desecrated, infidels butchered. And the mayhem continued, fiercer than ever, even as, far away in Delhi and Karachi, the high-flown rhetoric poured forth and the two nations deliriously hailed their independence. 'Rejoicings; Happy Augury for the Future' read a headline in the _Times of India_ on 18 August. 'The Jeremiahs who foresaw trouble' had been utterly confounded, it reported. In doing so, the newspaper not only belied the idea that 'trouble' of some sort was wholly unexpected, but lulled its readership into a dangerously blinkered complacency about the conflagration in the neighbouring Punjab.\n\nThere, dawn on 15 August \u2013 Independence Day in Delhi, but the day after in Pakistan \u2013 found a memorably named British official, one Penderel Moon, being driven into Lahore from his post as Minister and adviser to the Nawab of Bahawalpur. A Muslim princely state contiguous to Muslim west Punjab, Bahawalpur was about to join Pakistan. Confident that the transition would be peaceful, the Nawab was sojourning comfortably in Surrey, and Moon was heading for the hills and a fortnight's holiday. Bahawalpur itself was quiet. The Punjab, give or take a few roadblocks, seemed much as usual. Not until Moon reached Lahore itself did he notice anything untoward.\n\nAs we approached the built-up area, we overtook a military lorry in the back of which there was a soldier with a rifle and two or three bloodstained corpses bouncing about on the floor. A little farther on five or six men were lined up along the side of the road with their hands up and a soldier covering them with his rifle. Two hundred yards beyond there was a corpse lying on a charpoy... and to the left, from the city proper, numerous dense columns of smoke were rising into the air.\n\nLahore, in short, was not celebrating. It was burning. Over lunch at Faletti's Hotel, Moon learned that the city's largely Muslim police, in a pattern that would be emulated by both sides, were siding with the killers and even affording them covering fire. Under the circumstances he was strongly discouraged from proceeding to Simla by car. Instead he sallied forth for the railway station and a non-existent train.\n\nAt exactly the same time, Nehru and the Mountbattens were forcing their way through the flag-waving crowds along Delhi's Rajpath. They had just attended the Independence Day ceremonies at India Gate. King George VI had assured India that freedom-loving people everywhere would want to share in their celebrations, but such was the press of freedom-savouring Indians that the formalities had had to be curtailed. Mountbatten could barely salute the Indian tricolour from the safety of his carriage. His daughter had managed to reach the podium only after removing her high heels and clambering over the densely packed masses, helped by, among others, Nehru. 'An enormous picnic of almost a million people, all of them having more fun than they'd ever had in their lives' was how Mountbatten described the gathering. It was fun all round. The bandsmen couldn't reach their bandstand, and the gun salutes were drowned out by the cheering. Nehru found himself thrust into the viceregal carriage by well-wishers, there to be joined by some sari-ed matrons scooped up by Lady Edwina Mountbatten lest they be trampled underfoot. 'The rest of the day was taken up with parties, speeches and almost impossible progressions through the undiminishing throngs in the streets.'\n\nLahore, on the other hand, was silent. Even the railway station, reportedly 'a veritable death trap' at the time, indeed 'a scene of wholesale carnage... under a continuous rain of bullets', was in fact almost deserted. Penderel Moon found only twenty Sikh policemen, all cowering behind a barbed-wire barricade for their own protection, plus a displaced and distraught stationmaster. The stationmaster had just arrived, having escaped from his charge at the nearby Mughalpura depot by requisitioning a locomotive. Two days previously forty-three non-Muslims, many of them Sikhs, had been massacred there; now their brethren were retaliating. 'We were attacked by 8,000 Sikhs,' he reported. 'They have killed several hundred. I have been telephoning for help for thirteen hours.'\n\nMoon, a goggle-eyed administrator with progressive views, supposed this estimate of the carnage an exaggeration, but he admitted that cross-border trains were already being targeted. A week earlier one carrying Muslim clerks to staff the new Pakistan government in Karachi had been scheduled to pass through Bahawalpur en route from Delhi. It never arrived; a bomb had derailed it near Ferozepur, leaving three dead and numerous wounded. 'This was one of the first train outrages and the first incident to make any noticeable impression on the Muslims of Bahawalpur.' In the same week several hundred terrified refugees had detrained in the state unannounced. They claimed to have been driven out of their homes in the Indian princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur (near Delhi). Lucky to be escaping imminent genocide, they were in fact the first of a mass migration of Meos. But as refugees they were no more welcome in Bahawalpur than in Bharatpur. The authorities 'told them that if they were seeking the promised land of Pakistan they had come to the wrong place and better go on to Punjab or Sind. Gradually they drifted away.' Educated Muslims were badly needed in Pakistan; threadbare peasants with lax ideas about Islam it could do without.\n\nGiving up on the trains, Moon travelled on to Simla in a military convoy that was escorting members of the British administration in the Punjab on the first leg of their long journey home. They were leaving the province, he noted, in much the same state as they had found it a hundred years earlier, blood-soaked and in chaos. Yet this was only the beginning. Within hours the situation would dramatically worsen. Partition, in principle so reasonable, was in practice anything but.\n\nAt the time, much of the precise border between the two new nations was still uncertain. While the flags of the successor states were being saluted all over the subcontinent, in the vicinity of the expected border it was unclear which flag should be flying. The broad terms of one partition, that of India and Pakistan, had been agreed, but the precise alignment of the subsidiary partitions in Bengal and the Punjab had been entrusted to a third party and then kept under wraps. Several millions thus greeted Independence, if they greeted it at all, not knowing for sure to which country they belonged. Only when the boundary award was announced and published would they discover their fate, make plans accordingly, and so open the floodgates to the twentieth century's greatest transfer of population.\n\nIn the hectic last days of British rule, boundary commissions for both Bengal and the Punjab had been set up. Maps had been hastily consulted, opinions sought and red lines drawn. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British judge who had never before visited the subcontinent, had been entrusted with this heavy responsibility and assured of complete independence. He had also been told to finish his work ahead of the transfer of power. This he did, but without the luxury of being able to inspect the actual terrain, acquaint himself with its peculiarities (like those errant rivers in Bengal) or derive much support from his commissioners: two Muslim League and two Congress nominees, these commissioners invariably upheld the interests of their political patrons and divided accordingly. It was Radcliffe's casting vote that was decisive.\n\n'Nobody in India will love me for my award,' he wrote. They would not. The sealed documents were delivered to Mountbatten two days before Independence, but were only made public two days after. By then Radcliffe had emplaned for London, never to set foot in South Asia again. All parties had agreed to respect his findings, and it was accepted that implementation would be the responsibility of the successor governments. Mountbatten, heading for the hills like Moon, considered his work done. British hands, already washed and ready for congratulatory shaking, were not to be soiled by any last-minute bloodletting.\n\nThe only exception was a British-commanded Boundary Force, supposedly 50,000 strong, that was to keep the peace in the Punjab and oversee its partition. Though active enough, it failed to do either. No more than about 25,000 troops materialised; 'this meant there were fewer than two men to a square mile'. And instead of operating under a unified command, the Force was itself quickly partitioned. Suspicious of its impartiality, on 29 August, at the height of the massacres, the successor governments opted to exercise distinct commands, disband the Force and deploy the troops intended for peacekeeping to protect and succour their co-religionists.\n\nThe mutual suspicion was made worse by the terms of Radcliffe's actual award. Dividing erstwhile India into its Muslim- and non-Muslim-majority provinces had been comparatively straightforward, but the lesser territorial units to be parcelled out when dividing up the Punjab and Bengal posed a trickier challenge. These lesser elements had been specified merely as 'areas'; they might be districts, sub-districts or even smaller units. And although the twin principles of partition \u2013 division on the basis of the religious majority plus contiguity to 'areas' of a like complexion \u2013 were generally paramount, 'other factors' (like local traditions, irrigation networks and strategic necessity) might be taken into account. There was thus scope for exceptions, and still greater scope for suspicions about exceptions. Well-founded rumours would circulate that Radcliffe had indeed been 'influenced'. India's expectations in respect of the Punjab border, especially where it afforded an access route to Kashmir, seem to have found favour with him. So did Indian demands in respect of a northern corridor, or 'chicken-neck', linking West Bengal and Assam; concessions to Pakistan in the Chittagong and Khulna areas of East Bengal were supposedly made in return.\n\nIn Karachi and New Delhi these matters were warmly debated. But to the toiling masses for whom the border's various 'corridors', 'salients', 'irrigation headworks' and 'enclaves' were home \u2013 and had been since time immemorial \u2013 the announcement of the new border was positively incendiary. Being 'awarded' to what was considered a hostile state, or excluded from what was considered a supportive one, amounted to an existential threat. As Indian Muslims seeking Pakistan, and Pakistani Sikhs and Hindus fleeing from it, began pouring across the border, Punjabis on either side of the delimited but still undemarcated line were swept along by the tide.\n\nWhole villages, clans, sub-castes and kinship groups upped sticks, sometimes literally as they detached the roof joists of their homes to cart them away in the hope of re-using them. In early September, Penderel Moon, back in Bahawalpur after curtailing his holiday, recorded the arrival there of a dishevelled and unwashed gentleman called Bagh Ali. 'He arrived on foot... along with 5,000 members of the Sakhera tribe, many of whom were his tenants'; after a week on the road 'one could hardly imagine that he was a wealthy Muslim landowner and a MLA [Member of the Punjab Legislative Assembly]', recalled Moon. Bagh Ali and his people hailed from Ferozepur, a place expected to go to Pakistan but which had in fact been awarded to India. But what most distressed Moon was the news that this throng, along with their bullocks, carts and farm implements, had been officially ordered to migrate. It was not the feared Sikh paramilitaries who had forced them out, but a government directive from Ferozepur's Sub-Divisional Officer. Unbeknown to Moon, Delhi and Karachi had just agreed on an exchange of population between the two halves of the partitioned Punjab. The arrangement was intended to reduce the violence, which both governments roundly condemned. But forcible migration was a different matter. In the Punjab it was state-sponsored.\n\nOver the long border between western India and the western wing of Pakistan some ten to twenty million people are thought to have crossed, some going east, others west, during the months of August, September and October. Additionally, anything between 200,000 and one million were massacred \u2013 in their homes, in their fields, on the road, in the trains \u2013 or left to die by the wayside. In a sandy tract near Fazilpur in Bahawalpur, Penderel Moon spied what he thought were some piles of manure. Closer inspection revealed them as heaps of bodies.\n\nIn two and threes and sixes and tens, more and more came into view as we rounded the curve of the village... till they lay 'Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the vale of Vallambrosa'. Men, women and children, there they all were jumbled up together, their arms and legs akimbo in all sorts of attitudes and postures, some of them so life-like that one could hardly believe that they were really dead.\n\nIt reminded Moon of pictures he remembered from his childhood of the Napoleonic battlefields. Three hundred and fifty Hindus had been mown down by Pathan rifle fire in this one incident.\n\nHundreds of thousands more were plundered of their chattels, a term that was taken to include their womenfolk and children. Girls and young mothers were perceived as embodiments of all that the other community held most sacred and were picked off accordingly. Abducted, exposed, traded, raped, mutilated or forcibly appropriated, most would never know justice and many would prefer suicide. Those who would later be 'recovered' and repatriated fared little better. Dishonoured, they might find themselves unwanted by their former loved ones; traumatised or not, they might be locked away by them.\n\nThe horror lay as much in the obscenity of the atrocities as the scale; and to these atrocities, as to all the other massacres and burnings, there was often a pattern. Though characterised as 'lunacy', the mayhem was a madness with method. On both sides the perpetrators were invariably male, well armed and often ex-soldiers or paramilitaries. Incitement came in the form of pamphlets, partisan press reports and pronouncements from political and religious leaders; premeditation was evident in both the planning and the execution of the attacks; and guns as much as knives were the weapons of choice.\n\nThis was not haphazard, frantic killing but, at its worst, routine, timetabled and systematic ethnic cleansing. Large groups of men, with their own codes of honour and often with a sense of warlike righteousness, set out day after day in August and September to eliminate the other.\n\nOf the few things that disqualified the conflict as 'war', the near absence of battles was the most obvious; for the aggressors, instead of engaging one another \u2013 something which respect for the border largely precluded \u2013 directed their attacks exclusively at the innocent and the defenceless. Conversion was occasionally an option for the victims, mere surrender rarely so. For the assailants, the objectives were simply expropriation and maximum slaughter.\n\nMost refugees travelled on foot, with or without livestock and sometimes accompanied by wagons bearing their possessions. The caravans stretched as far as the eye could see where they converged at river crossings. An airborne Nehru following the line of a cross-border road in east Punjab would recall overflying the same massed column for all of sixteen kilometres. He put its human component at over 100,000 souls. Another caravan, tracked in west Punjab, was thought to number 400,000. In September Penderel Moon recorded an influx into Bahawalpur of 40,000\u201350,000 Muslims from Rohtak and Hissar (west of Delhi); they were so severely undernourished that 'some two thousand of them died within a few days of their arrival'. As late as November an official from the British High Commission in Delhi, while driving through Mewat, encountered a ten-mile column of Meos still on the move.\n\nExposure, debilitation, dehydration, starvation, disease and drownings (the monsoon had returned with a fury in September) may have claimed as many fatalities as the knife and the bullet. Yet the subsequent figures would seldom distinguish deaths from natural causes, nor would they attempt to define what causes might be considered 'natural'. All that can be said with confidence is that the scale of the tragedy was such as to frustrate accurate assessment at the time \u2013 and ever since.\n\n'Estimates of casualties are largely a matter of guesswork,' noted Moon, who nevertheless gave his own calculation of the number killed: it was 'unlikely to have been more than two hundred thousand', and was probably rather less. This was based on 'fairly precise figures for about half the districts of West Punjab and... intelligent guesses regarding the remainder'; in this total, on the basis of reports from across the border, he had included twice as many fatalities for India's east Punjab, plus much fewer for the neighbouring states of Rajasthan, Sind and Balochistan. Moon was writing only of the border between India and West Pakistan; he did not include fatalities in Bengal or elsewhere in India, nor apparently those in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. But his 'guesswork' deserves some respect. As a one-time member of the British Indian Civil Service, a current member of the Pakistan Administrative Service (Bahawalpur formally joined Pakistan in early October) and a soon-to-be member of the Indian Administrative Service, he straddled the divide and had no particular axe to grind.\n\nNor, having witnessed some of the attacks and collected descriptions of many more \u2013 indeed having accepted responsibility for not having prevented some of them \u2013 could Moon be accused of generalising about them. It has been suggested that any consensus around higher estimates of half a million to a million, or even two million, fatalities may be a means of 'distancing ourselves from the specificity and details of those killings even as we seek to underline their enormity and consequence'. This recourse to rounded-up figures is thought to be especially common practice in respect of the atrocities suffered by those classed as 'others' rather than 'ours'; 'their' losses could be approximately quantified, 'ours' tended to be recorded in gruesome and specific detail.\n\nInto this error falls the account produced by Gopal Das Khosla in 1989. An avuncular figure, Cambridge-educated, Justice Khosla was much respected in Indian government circles as 'a safe pair of hands', and would head several government-sponsored investigations. By the 1980s he was semi-retired and often in Manali (Himachal Pradesh), there with walking stick to pace the hill paths and write his _Stern Reckoning._ Using the records of a 1948 Government of India 'Fact Finding Organisation', he came up with a total for non-Muslim fatalities of 'between 200,000 and 250,000', to which he 'believed' that an equal number of Muslims who 'perished in the riots in India' might be added. Hence the 'half a million', a figure which more than doubled that given by Moon. Khosla further ignored Moon's careful calculation of the fatalities in Pakistan's west Punjab (Moon had given 60,000 instead of Khosla's 200,000\u2013250,000); and he contradicted Moon's contention that the killings in India's east Punjab might be twice as many. Yet by combining these two assessments \u2013 Khosla's 200,000\u2013250,000 in the west and Moon's 'twice as many' in the east \u2013 the total could be, and was, further conflated to three-quarters of a million.\n\nTo substantiate his findings, Khosla compiled a tabulated appendix listing over five hundred places where mass killings, conversions and conflagrations had taken place. Each entry included a note on the nature of the atrocities ('Murder, arson, mass conversion and loot', 'Murder, rape, loot and abduction' etc.) together with an estimate of the numbers killed, injured, forcibly converted or expelled. Yet on examination, all his listed incidents occurred in Pakistan, the victims being Sikhs and Hindus, as were Khosla's informants. Of the Muslims who died in the massacres in the new India \u2013 or 'the riots' as he preferred to call them in this case \u2013 there is no listing at all. Nor does it appear that the figures given for any of the listed incidents were corroborated by Pakistani witnesses. Yet this was crucial, as a relief worker at the time discovered. In the Sialkot district of Pakistan, Richard Symonds was informed by the Indian Liaison Officer that in a recent assault '1,500 were killed'; yet 'the Pakistan account said only thirty'. Or again, two weeks after an attack at Mianwali, 'estimates of the number of Hindus killed varied between 400 and 2,000'. In the face of such flagrant misrepresentation, probably by both parties, extreme caution is in order. Without it, 'otherising' becomes just as partial as the blatant propaganda that has marred \u2013 indeed 'dis-figured' \u2013 nearly all such later calculations.\n\nA further explanation for the wildly divergent assessments of Partition's casualties lies in the uncertainty over the figures for the other province to be partitioned, namely Bengal. While some calculations, Moon's and Khosla's for example, ignore Bengal altogether, a few go to the opposite extreme and infer a casualty rate comparable with that in the Punjab. This is absurdly pessimistic, and the 'guesswork' here is even more conjectural. Much depends on how 'Partition', a flimsy term when stripped of its more horrific associations, is defined and on what is taken to be its timeframe.\n\nWith over sixty million inhabitants, Bengal had been easily British India's most populous province (pre-Partition Punjab had about twenty-eight million). It was also its most volatile. The potential for sectarian strife had already been demonstrated in the Calcutta Killings of August 1946 and in the subsequent massacres in Noakhali and Tripura (Tipperah). Violence like that which seems to have taken so many by surprise in the Punjab was here expected. In anticipation of it, Gandhi had already re-established himself in Noakhali, from where he transferred to Calcutta two days ahead of Independence. He needed to be at the likely epicentre when the seismic shift of 15 August occurred.\n\nNow frailer and seemingly smaller than ever, the Mahatma was trundled round the city in an ancient Chevrolet. As he toured the trouble spots and drew massive crowds to his evening prayer meetings, his reputation transcended the religious divide. He talked up a spirit of mutual regard and inspired a sense of brotherly achievement in maintaining the peace. Mountbatten called him his 'One Man Boundary Force'. For three critical weeks he remained there, preaching communal harmony, praying for it and fasting to exact pledges of it. He also promoted it by example, cohabiting with Husayn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the _bon-viveur_ barrister 'with a nimble brain but an irritating habit' who led the Muslim League in Bengal. Lately Chief Minister of the province, it was Suhrawardy whose incitement had been widely blamed for the earlier killings.\n\nNotwithstanding their incompatibility, such was the influence of the two men \u2013 the stick-like Mahatma and the 'rotund' Muslim Leaguer \u2013 and such the military presence prompted by fear of another bloodbath, that the tactic worked. Observing the near absence of sectarian massacres in the subcontinent's greatest metropolis, first Gandhi and then the press dubbed it 'the miracle of Calcutta'. Optimists noted 'a spectacle of friendship and fraternity between Hindus and Muslims'; Communists detected a comradeship born of working-class solidarity; and intellectuals rejoiced in what they took to be evidence of the Bengalis' cultural superiority. The normally dyspeptic general who headed Eastern Command went further. 'The love in Calcutta was impressive above all other places,' he recalled. But he ascribed it less to Gandhi's non-violence than to a combination of the Muslim community's 'depression', the non-Muslim community's exultation and his own increased troop levels.\n\nThe euphoria in Calcutta lasted throughout the crisis months immediately after Independence, and dissolved only when the city reverted to its usual levels of industrial strife, social upheaval and chronic politicisation in 1948. Overall, when compared to Lahore and the Punjab, Calcutta and Bengal seemed to have got off lightly. The death toll could almost be described as bearable, while the atrocities were largely localised. On the other hand, the population transfer was here more destabilising than in the Punjab, much more protracted and ultimately perhaps greater.\n\nDispersal being a lesser evil than death, this raises the question of why the Partition experience in Bengal differed so from that in the Punjab, and whether the precautions taken in Bengal could have proved equally effective in the Punjab. The answer to the last is probably no. In the Punjab there were more guns, for one thing. There, and in the neighbouring North-West Frontier Province, society prided itself on its decidedly military ethos. The north-west had long been the British Indian army's main recruiting ground, and accounted for around half its intake; service families, military colonies and paramilitary fraternities abounded. Come the end of the war, many thousands of Punjabi Sikh, Muslim, Hindu (Dogra and Jat) and Pathan servicemen had been demobilised; but not all surrendered their arms, and of those who did, many were emboldened to reacquire them or obtain equivalents of local manufacture. In championing the anxieties of their co-religionists and avenging the massacres reported from across the border, Punjabi ex-servicemen of every persuasion found employment in a cause that was lucrative, congenial to their traditions and applauded by their kinsmen.\n\nThis was not the case in Bengal. Generally Bengalis, whether Hindu or Muslim, were supposed to disdain the military arts. The province was thus under-represented in the army's ranks and almost devoid of officers. When he arrived in Dhaka as East Bengal's first General Officer Commanding in late 1947, the then Brigadier Ayub Khan, Pakistan's future ruler, found 'there was no army', just two half-battalions, and 'no office, no table, no chair, no stationery \u2013 virtually nothing at all'. Firepower had played little part in the earlier 'riots' in Bengal, and there had been even less evidence of tactical planning. The killing sprees had often seemed spontaneous and unpredictable; and in West Bengal the heavy, and usually heavy-handed, presence of the largely Muslim police had already been depleted by migration. In short, Gandhian pressure, plus greater official awareness here stood a chance. Conversely, against the professionals orchestrating the carnage in the Punjab such intervention would probably have failed.\n\nOther factors were also important. Given the deltaic terrain, communications in Bengal were notoriously slow and depended more on waterborne transport than on roads and railways. In the monsoon conditions of August and September whole districts were temporarily submerged, so distracting the inhabitants from mutual hostilities and severely restricting their mobility. In addition, the governments of India and Pakistan, though in the Punjab officially sponsoring an exchange of population, here actively discouraged it. It was supposed that mass migrations might destabilise the delicate political arithmetic on which both the Congress in West Bengal and the League in East Bengal based their prospects of retaining power. If conducted on any scale, migration could easily deplete one half of the province while overwhelming the other; and both Prime Ministers, Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan, were dead against it. 'I have been quite certain, right from the beginning,' Nehru wrote, 'that everything should be done to prevent Hindus in East Bengal from migrating to West Bengal... even if there is a war.' Throughout the period 1949\u201352, when a further two million Hindus from East Bengal joined the million or so who had migrated in 1947\u201348, Nehru remained firm. But twenty years later Indira Gandhi, when faced with precisely the war scenario that her father had envisaged, would take a very different line. East Pakistan's Bengalis, now calling themselves Bangladeshis, would be admitted to India whatever their religion, so furnishing the justification for another Partition, this time of Pakistan.\n\nDiscouraging migration did not, of course, prevent it. In 1947 the new border had yet to be marked, and was impossible to police since it wandered across existing roads and railways as capriciously as the annual floods. Wags quipped that Radcliffe could not have been sober when he wielded his red marker. Until new roads and rail tracks could be laid, India's West Bengal was cut in two, and its north-eastern extremity in Assam (and beyond) was little better than an enclave, reachable only by air or by obtaining authorisation to cross Pakistani territory. Such authorisation was not impossible to obtain, and refugee trains continued to operate between Dhaka and Calcutta until 1965. Calcutta's Sealdah station turned into a vast dormitory for displaced persons; public spaces throughout the city, and even private gardens, were similarly commandeered. Yet to many Bengalis this may not have been entirely alarming. Refugees often considered their displacement temporary, and expected to return to the homes and lands they had left behind as soon as circumstances permitted. At the time it seemed quite inconceivable that the economic, cultural and social links that bound the commercial and manufacturing centre of Calcutta to its productive eastern hinterland could simply be severed by constitutional diktat.\n\nHence, instead of the fraught and one-off mass migrations typical of the Punjab, in Bengal in 1947 'there was no immediate interchange of population, nor even panic'. In fact in India's West Bengal 'it was not till December 1949 that it became obvious that an influx of refugees from East Pakistan had started'. Thereafter the millions of comings and goings, sometimes by the same people, would extend over a period of years and eventually decades. How many crossed or recrossed, whether permanently or temporarily and whether coerced or voluntarily, it is impossible to say. In India such 'refugees' were quickly downgraded as 'evacuees' or 'optees'. They might thereby be entitled to some minimal relief but they were not, as in the Punjab, afforded compensation in the form of land grants or rehabilitation expenses; such favourable treatment might have acted as an incentive and increased the flow. As a result, many incomers went unrecorded and the surviving tallies are far from complete.\n\nYet they kept on coming. A million or so Muslims crossed out of West Bengal and Assam to East Bengal in the first five years, many being originally from Bihar, from where they had earlier fled to Calcutta during the 1946\u201347 massacre in their homeland. It was thus their second such migration, though by no means their last; in the case of these Muslim Biharis the nightmare of dispossession would continue on down the generations. In the same period anything from four to ten million Hindus from East Bengal crossed into the Indian states of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura. The largest of these migrations took place in the 1950s and '60s, prompted by the persecution of Hindus in East Bengal (early 1950s) and Muslim outrage over events in Kashmir (1963\u201365). Later disturbances, like the birth pangs of Bangladesh in 1971, that country's first military coup in 1975, and the communal disturbances in India after the 1992 demolition of Ayodhya's Babri mosque, would precipitate still other dramatic exoduses.\n\nThe introduction of frontier formalities to some extent regulated this ebb and flow. Passports became mandatory in 1952, immigration certificates in 1956 and visas after 1965. Yet such obstacles also served to divert the tide of migrants away from the regulated crossing points to the 2,700 kilometres of poorly patrolled frontier in between. The real number of migrants thus became more incalculable than ever. Pocked with enclaves and punctured by waterways, the border in the east remained decidedly 'soft' and, in the eyes of many, only quasi-legitimate. As late as 1950 no less a figure than ex-Chief Minister Husayn Shaheed Suhrawardy saw nothing odd about attending Pakistan's Constituent Assembly in Karachi while continuing to make his main place of residence in India's West Bengal, in fact in a salubrious part of Calcutta. Similarly Nurul Amin, the then Chief Minister of East Bengal, continued to rely on his old physician in West Bengal for medicine. The latter was none other than Dr B.C. Roy, the Congress Chief Minister of West Bengal; 'and would you believe it, when Nurul Amin's gout was very bad, he came to Calcutta just for an hour by plane for a consultation', reported an East Bengali informant. 'Despite the riots [of 1950], the two are still good friends.'\n\nIf 'Partition is both ever-present in South Asia's public, political terrain and continually evaded,' this may in part be because, in the east as in Kashmir, it is still being enacted. Indeed in Bengal a degree of population movement appears to be endemic. Once somewhat unfairly described as 'a rural slum', East Bengal in 1947 had no industrial base; even its cash crop of jute was dependent on West Bengal's processing mills. Its population stood at around forty-two million, of whom about eleven million (i.e. 26 per cent) were Hindus, mostly lower-caste agriculturalists and artisans but with an influential landowning and commercial elite. On the other hand, across the border, India's West Bengal, along with Assam, had just six million Muslims, about 16 per cent of their total population, most of these being landless labourers or urban poor. Additionally, West Bengal embraced Calcutta, India's largest industrial and commercial centre, while the tea plantations in the Darjeeling hills and Assam afforded a further source of employment. In Bengal as a whole, therefore, the post-1947 movement of peoples was overwhelmingly one-way, from east to west, Pakistan to India; and although triggered by sectarian killings or the fear of such violence, it was often lubricated by more practical considerations such as economic advancement, employment opportunities, educational advantage or marital ties.\n\nThis was nothing new. The east\u2013west flow, the rural\u2013urban drift, and the quest for improved livelihoods may be rated permanent features of the Bengali economy. As a result of the 1943 famine, Calcutta already hosted a large refugee population before Partition. Floods and agrarian distress in East Bengal\/Bangladesh would replenish the resettlement camps of both Calcutta and Dhaka with depressing regularity. Distinguishing between political refugees and economic migrants is here problematic.\n\nHow to cope with the influx of often destitute and traumatised millions taxed both successor governments, so detracting from their ability to conduct the business of administration. In the Punjab, on both sides of the border, the problem had been somewhat eased by the availability of land. Since most migrants were agriculturalists, landholdings vacated by uprooted Punjabi emigrants were hastily re-allocated to grateful Punjabi immigrants. This ensured continuity of food production and warded off famine. It also created tenacious settler communities whose intransigent attitudes towards their former country of residence would bedevil future Indo\u2013Pak relations and be compared to those of Israeli settlers on the West Bank. But in West Bengal it was different. There was almost no available land. The smallest of the new India's provinces, West Bengal was also much the most densely populated and had the highest rate of unemployment. Prospects for the incoming flood of refugees were grim.\n\nIn the immediate aftermath of Partition it was Delhi that had been convulsed by the levels of violence and displacement expected of Calcutta. Refugees from Lahore and other cities in West Pakistan, many of them Sikhs, poured into the capital, there to spread horrific tales of the violence they had either suffered or witnessed at the hands of Muslims in what was now Pakistan. Naturally this excited hostility towards the city's large Muslim community and brought calls for revenge. The patriotic crowds that had hailed Independence on 15 August were baying for blood by the end of the month. Muslims, regardless of whether they supported Pakistan or had any intention of moving there, found themselves liable to be massacred in the streets; their homes were appropriated, their womenfolk molested, their businesses plundered and torched.\n\nAs the mayhem extended from Old Delhi to New, some 60,000 Muslims sought refuge behind the high walls of the Purana Qila, a craggy 'old fort' that supposedly complemented Rashtrapati Bhawan at the opposite extremity of Rajpath; others encamped round the Taj-like tomb of the Mughal emperor Humayun or barricaded themselves in quarries on the ridge to the north-west of the city. Until mid-September 'the Indian government regarded these camps as the responsibility of the Pakistan High Commissioner'. He, however, was 'hardly in a position to move out of his house', noted the relief worker Richard Symonds. In 'places that could not properly be called camps but rather areas in which humanity was dumped' eminent families squatted side by side with once-prosperous shopkeepers from Old Delhi and never-rich Meos from nearby villages like Gurgaon. There was no sanitation, few tents, little food and only a skeleton guard to man the gates.\n\nYou might meet anyone from a nawab to a professor. Rich men offered thousands of rupees if we could hire them an aeroplane to Karachi. It seemed possible to buy anything from a taxi to a hawker's box of matches.\n\nTaxis did change hands. As of September 1947 beturbanned Sikhs replaced henna-ed Muslims at the wheel of most of the capital's public conveyances. The burning, looting and lynching lasted the best part of a month; and as with the next pogrom to overtake the capital \u2013 that of 1984, in which Sikhs would be the target \u2013 some officials were accused of connivance and numerous political hotheads of incitement. On both occasions, adequate troops failed to materialise, with the peacekeeping burden in 1947 being assumed by a variety of volunteer organisations.\n\nOn one occasion Nehru himself joined the volunteers. Leaping from his official car, he laid into a Hindu trundling a handcart piled high with stolen goods. He demanded that they be returned. The man refused, whereupon the Prime Minister seized him by the throat and shook him. The offender did not strike back. 'If I must die, it is an honour to do so at your hands,' he croaked. Nehru then relented.\n\n*\n\nIn the camp at Humayun's Tomb, which backs onto railway tracks, Taya Zinkin, a young volunteer and later a reporter, welcomed the news that some of the refugees were to be moved out by train to Pakistan. They, however, refused to budge without a military escort and an assurance that she would personally hold herself responsible for their safety. Both safeguards were forthcoming, and '7,500 men, women and children piled into the train, onto it, under it and in between it'.\n\nIt was an incredible sight. They were riding to safety and a new life. In the setting sun they waved at me from the roofs, the windows, the footboards. I stood on the platform waving back... My train was the biggest train to Pakistan. For a long time it would be the last. It was ambushed in Patiala by the Sikhs. The military escort did its duty to the last man; not one survived; they were Gurkhas. Five hundred refugees reached Lahore safely but as the train pulled up in the Lahore station there were 3,000 dead and 4,000 so severely wounded as to be left for dead.\n\nBy the time calm had been restored in Delhi, the city could no longer be described as having India's largest urban concentration of Muslims. Not all were evacuated to Pakistan, but the incoming tide of Hindus and Sikhs so swamped their numbers as to transform the city's demography and geography and launch its population's inexorable growth from around a million in 1950 to nearly twenty million by the century's end. The same tragic scenes and the same dramatic growth were witnessed in Lahore, which became a wholly Muslim city when its sizeable Hindu-Sikh population virtually disappeared overnight. Other cities on both sides of the new border were similarly affected. Karachi, though comparatively calm, lost its large Hindu mercantile community to Bombay. In their stead, it absorbed the bulk of those Muslims from cities in central and northern India (principally Lucknow, Allahabad, Bhopal, etc.) who had opted for Pakistan. Mostly Urdu-speakers and once prime movers in the demand for a Muslim homeland, these _muhajirs_ (a term cognate with _haj\/hijra_ that sanctified their 'flight' from India by associating it with that of the Prophet from Mecca) would jealously retain their identity in their promised land and contribute a clamorous new element to Pakistan's ethnic mix. As _muhajirs_ competed with Sindhis, Pathans and Balochis for jobs and housing in what was Pakistan's commercial as well as its administrative capital, Karachi underwent a transformation into Pakistan's Calcutta.\n\nEven places in the extreme south of the subcontinent were affected when the Indian government in Delhi urged constituent provinces\/states, like Madras, to take such refugees as they could handle. But the response was not always favourable, mainly because it was unclear whether the control and expense of relief and rehabilitation should be borne by the states affected or by the central government. Friction and delays resulted. Nor were the refugees themselves always keen on resettlement in distant lands. The rains there might fall at the wrong time of year, the crops might be new to them and the language unknown to them. Just as Punjabis preferred to be accommodated in the Punjab, Bengalis expressed a preference for staying in Bengal.\n\nThis was bad news for Calcutta. As East Bengali refugees poured into the city after 1948, the numbers living on the streets or sleeping on the railway platforms could be counted in the hundreds of thousands, and those corralled into shanty towns and squatter camps in the millions. The camps spread to the west bank of the river Hooghly and to all the city's surrounding districts: 'what was once a rural hinterland was transformed in less than two decades into a huge urban sprawl'. By the 1990s it was estimated that there were 2,000 bustees, or shanty slums, on the east bank of the river and a further 1,500 on the west bank. Three million people lived in them, representing 49 per cent of the city's total population; and of these, 87 per cent were classed as immigrants, mostly from East Bengal.\n\nAmongst the immigrants themselves there was a sense that they were in Calcutta as of right. Mostly Hindus and all Bengali-speakers, they felt safe among other Hindu Bengalis and, though now in India, were consoled to be still in their native Bengal. Conditions might be appalling but they were reluctant to embrace onward resettlement in some totally alien corner of the subcontinent. A few lucky thousands were squeezed into vacant lands either within West Bengal itself or in neighbouring Bihar. And some of the urban colonies actually prospered as employment initiatives blossomed and the tents gave way to mud and thatch, then clapboard, corrugated iron and a semblance of permanence. For most, though, a sheet offered the only shelter and minimal government relief the only sustenance. Laid out like sardines on roadsides and railway platforms, they blocked the thoroughfares and fouled the amenities. Cholera became rife. The city was choking to death on a surfeit of people.\n\nTo address the situation, an ambitious scheme was launched in the late 1950s. A substantial part of West Bengal's East Bengali intake was to be resettled five hundred kilometres away in sparsely populated forest uplands along the borders of Orissa and what is now Chattisgarh. The 200,000 square kilometres allocated for this exercise in pioneering was known as Dandakaranya, a term that translates as either 'the forest of Dandak' or 'the forest of punishment'. Trees and scrub were cleared, plots laid out, loans offered, wells dug, roads cut, and by 1973 some 25,000 families had removed there. But they had often done so reluctantly, and already they were drifting back to Bengal. By 1979 nearly half had left. To riverine rice-farmers, getting crops to grow in the thin and moisture-unretentive soil was worse than punishment; dams had failed to materialise, crop yields were dismal, there was no alternative employment and the indigenous tribal people deeply resented the newcomers. The settlers, in short, were far from settled. 'They say that their love for West Bengal is alive as their hope about Dandakaranya is dead,' ran a 1978 news report of the new exodus, 'that all their Dandakaranya days were dark and dreary... \"because of the humiliating conditions in which they lived\".'\n\nBut returning to Bengal was not that easy. By now the whole issue of the East Bengali refugees had been heavily politicised. To the astute politicians of West Bengal the grievances of a vast and heavily concentrated community had initially represented a desirable vote bank. Leftist parties, especially the Communist Party of India, had espoused the refugee cause and had duly fought the Dandakaranya plan on their behalf. Congress, happy to see the Communist vote depleted, had supported it. But by the time the Dandakaranya settlers began drifting back, the Communists were in power in West Bengal as part of a Left Front government. The votes of the returnees were no longer a priority. Re-rehabilitating them could only alienate existing supporters and damage the prospects of reconstruction. Tens of thousands were therefore turned back. Thousands more were forcibly evicted from an island they had nevertheless illegally occupied amid the mangroves of the Sundarbans.\n\nExiles four times over \u2013 from East Bengal, West Bengal, Dandakaranya and then the Sundarbans \u2013 this pathetic band typified the tragedy of Bengal's 'long Partition'. What became of them is unclear, but it may be no coincidence that in the wake of their wanderings there would spread what in 2010 Manmohan Singh, India's Prime Minister, would call the nation's 'gravest internal security challenge'. He was referring to the so-called 'Naxalite' or 'Maoist' revolutionaries whose armed insurrection was terrorising large parts of eastern and central India. In one of several attacks, seventy-six members of the Central Reserve Police Force had just been ambushed and killed by a Naxalite group calling itself the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee. Dandakaranya itself, according to the _Times of India_ , __ was now 'the den' of the Naxalites; and their supporters, many of them indigenous tribal people, candidly traced both their grievances and their political indoctrination to the unwelcome influx of Bengali settlers in the wake of Partition.\n\nSixty-five years after the event, the impact of the Great Partition is still being felt \u2013 and not just in Bengal and the Punjab. In Karachi the influx of Muslim _muhajirs_ from India was on a scale comparable with that of East Bengalis into Calcutta. Literate and industrious, the _muhajirs_ would stay put and through their MQM party become a thorn in the flesh of successive regimes in Islamabad. Not without bloodshed, they still control much of Pakistan's largest metropolis. Parts of Hyderabad, the south Indian city that was the scene of another Partition-related crisis, are periodically devastated by motorbike bombers keen to incite their large Muslim component. Markets in Delhi and suburban trains in Bombay have also been targeted.\n\nBut, sporadic and essentially domestic, these outrages pale into insignificance compared to the horrors witnessed in Kashmir. In this former princely state, Partition's business has yet to be concluded. Compounded by the excesses of the military and paramilitaries, the same atrocities prevailed at the end of the century as in 1947. The same arguments over the state's status were being replayed and the same colossal troop levels maintained. More than anywhere else in South Asia, Kashmir was set to ensure that the legacy of Partition would not be forgotten.\n\n##\n\n## Who Has Not Heard of the Vale of Cashmere?\n\n'But Sahib, we are Kashmiris, see. We are not Indians.'\n\nThe year was 1967 but the sentiments were those of 1947. My question to Ghulam Mohamed, a houseboat proprietor, had been why was he refusing to take bookings from Indians? His answer came from twenty years back. To a young would-be correspondent with not much to report, Kashmir seemed trapped in a time warp. On the leaf-strewn terrace outside Ahdoo's bakery in Srinagar the cups were chipped, the coffee came in electroplated pots and the conversation was thick with dogma. Two decades of what Ghulam Mohamed called 'Indian occupation' had changed very little. Removing his lambskin fez, from which most of the wool had long since been rubbed, Ghulam Mohamed would listen, scratch his head with long bony fingers, then puckering his eyes, grin mischievously.\n\n'See, Kashmir. Kashmir is not India. India begins at Jammu \u2013 over there, across the Bannihal Pass. Here, this is not India.'\n\nHis English was excellent, though marred by a delivery as monotonous as that of a bumblebee, and whatever the subject it invariably cued a litany of complaints. These ranged from the price of mutton to Hindu toilet habits, bad manners in general, the iniquities of the British Labour Party and the supposed plight of the tourist trade. In Ghulam Mohamed's conversational repertoire, bemoaning the ways of the world served as the default setting. It was how many Kashmiris dealt with their unhappy situation as South Asia's bloodiest bone of contention.\n\nBy 1967 most of the Kashmir Valley had been under New Delhi's rule for nineteen summers. Another Pakistani attempt to wrest it from India had just failed, and the Bannihal Pass, beneath whose summit the only access road now burrowed through a dripping tunnel, had been reopened. The tourists were returning; the political mud-slinging had resumed. Ahead loomed a spell of what Kashmiris liked best: business as usual. An engineering college was under construction, new emporia were opening and the powder-blue berets of UNMOGIP (the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan) offered some assurance that Kashmir's problems had not been forgotten by the world at large. Natives of the valley, like Ghulam Mohamed, might be loath to admit it, but there was much to be said for Indian rule.\n\nAnd yet the place remained palpably un-Indian. Uniquely, here English and Urdu were the official languages, with Hindi not much heard or written. Islam was the prevailing faith, tweed the preferred textile, and shawls and carpets the main trade. Instead of the shady banyan and mango of the plains, sprightly willow and poplar lined the roadsides. The year had recognisable seasons; they came in the right order; and judging by the umbrellas and the galvanised roofing, rain could be expected in all of them. The tea was sometimes pink; the meat was cooked in milk. Kingfishers piped among the sedge; dahlias and marigolds bedecked the gardens; and timbered bridges cantilevered crazily over the waterways. In Srinagar, the capital, the puddled alleyways and the higgledy-piggledy houses with their latticed shutters reminded V.S. Naipaul, then writing his _An Area of Darkness_ , of a dank medieval Europe. Instead of India's heat and dust, here there was water everywhere, snow on the peaks and scarcely a sari to be seen. Of all the erstwhile princely states, Kashmir alone neither fitted the image of India nor felt like India.\n\nBack in July 1947, when Mountbatten had undertaken to dragoon the princely states of British India into joining the new India, he had cavilled over their exact number. Likening the possibly 565 states to apples, he had enquired whether having, say, 560 'in the basket' by the time of Independence would be good enough. Sardar Patel, the Congress leader who was Home Minister in the interim government with responsibility for the princely states, acquiesced. With less than a month in which to fill the basket, Patel and the ubiquitous V.P. Menon did the arm-twisting, Mountbatten turned on the charm, and the signed Instruments of Accession came rolling in.\n\nAlthough historians, both South Asian and British, have found much to criticise in Mountbatten's viceroyalty, his handling of the princely states, with the possible exception of Kashmir, has scarcely been faulted. The integration of the states has been called 'a revolutionary, watershed event', even 'the world's biggest bloodless revolution'. Mountbatten himself reckoned that by sweet-talking the princes into acceding to India he had 'brought off a coup second only to the 3rd June plan [i.e. his masterplan for Independence-cum-Partition]'.\n\nMountbatten's talk to the Chamber of Princes [of 25 July 1947] was a _tour de force_ [writes Ramachandra Guha]. In my opinion it ranks as the most significant of all his acts in India. It finally persuaded the princes that the British would no longer protect or patronise them and that independence for them was a mirage.\n\nAsked merely to relinquish responsibility for the defence, foreign relations and cross-border communications of their states, the princes were surrendering nothing they had not previously surrendered to the British; and in return they were being offered generous pensions, tax concessions, official postings and many lifetime privileges (like immunity from private prosecution, free electricity and medical care, exemption from customs duties, and a state funeral at the end). Mountbatten's imprimatur merely added further reassurance by giving some imperial respectability to the horse-trading. His task was not onerous and he conducted it with his customary conviction.\n\nYet by 15 August considerably more than five of the pro-forma Instruments of Accession remained unsigned. Indore and Jodhpur were engaging in brinkmanship, Bhopal was prevaricating, some minor states in Saurashtra (Gujarat) were toying with accession to Pakistan, and on the distant border with Burma, Manipur was holding out for an independence that, if secured, would gouge a substantial chunk out of India's already eccentric eastern profile.\n\nMuch more ominous, though, was the obduracy of Hyderabad state in peninsular India and of Jammu and Kashmir state in the extreme north. Together these two accounted for around half the total territory of princely India and about a third of its population. Additionally both were considered of enormous strategic and psychological value. Hyderabad had been negotiating for a lease of lands which would give it access to the west coast, so almost cutting off the extreme south of India from the rest of the country. And the composite state of Jammu and Kashmir not only adjoined both Pakistan and India but shared a long and mostly undemarcated frontier with Chinese-claimed Tibet and Soviet-friendly Afghanistan; the possibility of its making common cause with either of these formidable neighbours was viewed with alarm. Without Hyderabad, the new India would look nearly as 'maimed and moth-eaten' as Pakistan, and without the lake-strewn 'vale of Cashmere' it would be shorn of what, by common consent, was reckoned the subcontinent's outstanding natural attraction. Moreover, the Nehru family originally hailed from the Kashmir Valley. '[It] affects me in a peculiar way,' the Indian Prime Minister would confess. Like 'a mild kind of intoxication... the very air of Kashmir has something mysterious and compelling about it'. The Nehrus holidayed there, considered the place as peculiarly their own and would make it a point of honour to claim it for India.\n\n*\n\nSardar Patel and V.P. Menon felt just as proprietorial about the princely states in general. What Menon embarrassingly termed 'the final solution' to the princely problem was regarded as a purely Indian affair and of no concern to anyone else. Others begged to differ. In particular, the Pakistan government in Karachi would follow events in Hyderabad and Kashmir with mounting alarm. Many in India, including Nehru, still regarded Pakistan as an experiment that could well be doomed to failure. Possibly to them, and certainly to most Pakistanis, India's speedy absorption of the otherwise independent princely states looked to be the prelude to a bid to reclaim parts, if not all, of Pakistan itself.\n\nThe British, too, retained an interest in the matter through the Commonwealth. Mountbatten had assured one reluctant princeling that 'if you accede now [i.e. before 15 August] you will be joining a Dominion [i.e. India] with the King as Head... [and] if they change the Constitution to a republic and leave the Commonwealth, the Instrument of Accession does not bind you in any way to remain with the republic'. By implication, if the Indian government reneged on the terms of princely accession by abolishing hereditary rights, the princes might expect London's moral support in any bid to reassert their sovereignty.\n\nOther interested parties included those European powers, notably Portugal and France, which still clung to colonial toeholds on the subcontinent, the Portuguese principally in Goa, the French in Pondicherry. The Portuguese had been around since before the Mughals, and the French were entertaining the possibility of supporting Hyderabad's claim to independence. Both could expect a rough ride from a Congress government that was sworn to eradicate all colonialisms, claimed to represent India's peoples _en masse_ and insisted on the integration of their territories _in toto_.\n\nSimilar concerns troubled the Himalayan kingdoms of Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal. Technically sovereign states, none of these had been numbered among the princely states of British India, although each had entered into treaty arrangements with the British. Now feeling exposed by the British withdrawal, their monarchs were wary of New Delhi's offers to reinstate the treaties and were especially sensitive to the anti-monarchist policies being promoted by India's democratic and determinedly populist Congress.\n\nNor were any of these concerned parties much reassured by the tactics on display. In Travancore (Kerala) the state's respected _Dewan_ (Chief Minister) resisted Mountbatten's blandishments, asserted his Maharajah's right to independence, and was waylaid in the street and severely stabbed for doing so. After hospitalisation he survived, though not so his state: Travancore's cowed Maharajah promptly signed on the dotted line. The Nawab of Bhopal, a personal friend of Mountbatten's, preferred exile to the ignominy of puppet status. The ruler of Manipur was reportedly locked in a Shillong hotel until such time as he would sign away his inheritance.\n\nMost of these incidents occurred prior to the handover of power. Afterwards, as the blood-letting of Partition subsided in October 1947, attention switched to the fate of the three princely states whose future was still contested. In the case of one, Junagadh in what is now Gujarat, its Nawab had already pronounced in favour of Pakistan; but Junagadh was not contiguous to Pakistan, and New Delhi had objected. In all three cases a much greater anomaly underlay the indecision; for in Junagadh and Hyderabad, a Muslim ruler presided over a largely Hindu population, while in Jammu and Kashmir it was the other way round: a Hindu Maharajah ruled over a Muslim majority. Each was thus impaled on the horns of a dilemma: the ruler's personal preference was likely to be at variance with that of his subjects, as well as being inconsistent with the twin principles of Partition \u2013 the religion of the majority and contiguity to territory of a similar complexion.\n\nAll that could be said for sure was that, whatever the requirements for princely accession \u2013 whether a decision by the ruler, a preference clearly expressed by his subjects or a combination of both \u2013 it stood to reason that the Muslim-ruled states of Junagadh and Hyderabad would join one successor nation, and that Hindu-ruled Jammu and Kashmir would join the other. The possibility that all three might end up in the same successor state could logically be discounted \u2013 or so it seemed. With the three coming under pressure at the same time, it could scarcely be argued that circumstances had changed; and likewise, with princely independence having been declared an unacceptable 'mirage' by Mountbatten, fudging the issue by going it alone seemed out of the question.\n\nIn August all three had signed standstill agreements pending further negotiation. Though Delhi declined signing in respect of Kashmir, it was generally understood that India and Pakistan would refrain from active interference, while the states themselves were supposed to make no unilateral moves. But the standstill quickly broke down in Junagadh. Encouraged by Sardar Patel, two of Junagadh's subsidiary statelets disavowed the Nawab and opted for India. Although the legality of this move was questionable, the Nawab could hardly be described as popular. 'At the time an estimated 11 per cent of Junagadh's revenues were earmarked for the upkeep of the royal kennels, where around 800 canine pensioners lived in a luxury denied to most of Junagadh's other subjects.' In support of Junagadh's dissident statelets a Junagadh government-in-exile headed by a nephew of Mahatma Gandhi was set up in Bombay. Pro-India troops massed along the state's uncertain borders and Congress-supported rabble-rousers were busy within. In late October, under considerable pressure, the Nawab took fright. He boarded a plane and fled to Karachi 'along with four wives and a like number of wagging companions'.\n\nThat left his _Dewan_ , one Shah Nawaz Bhutto, to pick up the pieces. _Dewan_ Bhutto had originally encouraged the Nawab to join Pakistan. As one of Sind's great feudal landowners \u2013 and as the founder of Pakistan's best-known political dynasty \u2013 he had nothing against hereditary rule. But as a scion of the Muslim League, Bhutto deferred to Jinnah, who read the situation differently.\n\nFor it so happened that just as the Nawab and his entourage were decamping from Junagadh, Jammu and Kashmir's Maharajah, along with an impressive convoy of motor vehicles, was decamping over the Bannihal Pass from Srinagar. The two crises, hitherto unrelated, had coincided, and therein lay Pakistan's great opportunity. For like a chessboard pawn, Junagadh might be sacrificed provided that, come the next move, Kashmir could be taken. Jinnah, and now _Dewan_ Bhutto, therefore backtracked. By accepting an Indian proposal that in Junagadh the Nawab's decision should be contingent on the outcome of a popular vote, they were establishing a precedent of vital relevance to the future of the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir.\n\nThough not mandatory, the idea that a prince's accession should be endorsed by his subjects had been urged by both Mountbatten and the Congress leadership. Outside of princely India, referenda on whether to join India or Pakistan had already been held in the North-West Frontier Province and in the Sylhet district of Assam. In both cases the vote had gone in favour of Pakistan. Sylhet had been detached from Indian Assam and awarded to neighbouring East Pakistan; the North-West Frontier Province had been confirmed as a constituent part of West Pakistan. Though the Muslim League, unlike Congress, did not concede the need for popular endorsement, it soon came to recognise its value.\n\nIn Junagadh such a plebiscite was sure to overturn the Nawab's earlier decision in favour of Pakistan \u2013 as it overwhelmingly would in February 1948; Bhutto would follow the Nawab and his dogs to Pakistan, and despite further objections from Karachi, the state was taken to have allocated itself to India. But by extension, applying the same principle to Jammu and Kashmir must mean there was every chance that it would fall on Pakistan's side of the fence. In Kashmir too, the ruler was unpopular, both as a feudal autocrat and as a non-Muslim presiding over a Muslim majority. A plebiscite would therefore probably go against him. Indeed, the mere threat of it should be enough to dissuade him from opting for India. In short, by effectively abandoning Junagadh, Pakistan sought to secure Jammu and Kashmir.\n\n*\n\nBut for the Kashmiris themselves it was not quite as straightforward as that.\n\n'See, Pakistan is just like India. But Kashmir is not Pakistan and it is not India. We are neither, see.'\n\nTwenty years later, a self-appointed spokesman like Ghulam Mohamed could still be decidedly ambivalent about whether the state should have joined Pakistan in 1947 \u2013 or whether, then or since, it would have so voted. By 1967 Pakistan had been exposed as a poor advertisement for democratic sovereignty, while Kashmir's predicament never lent itself to simple solutions. There had, too, been other considerations back in 1947. For one thing, the situation had already deteriorated into the first Indo\u2013Pakistan war; and for another, there was Hyderabad. The war betrayed the depth of feeling over Kashmir in both India and Pakistan, while Hyderabad was relevant because it hinted at the possibility of Kashmir scorning both suitors and going it alone.\n\nAs Pakistani eyes were being lifted unto the hills, India had kept one eye fixed firmly on the peninsula. There Hyderabad's situation was directly analogous to that of Junagadh: a Muslim ruler, the immensely rich Nizam Mir Usman Ali, lorded it over a vast population, four-fifths of which was non-Muslim. His sprawling state was around fifty times the size of Junagadh, and about as far from Pakistan as could be. It was contiguous only with India, indeed surrounded by it. But to the Nizam this was neither here nor there. A miserly skinflint where most princes were conspicuous spendthrifts, he was no keener on conferring his state on Pakistan than he was on India. His preference was for playing off one nation against the other while cultivating his British and European contacts and hoarding his sovereignty as jealously as he did his diamonds. In effect he would prefer to sign, if he had to, not an Instrument of Accession to either state but sovereign treaties with both.\n\nAn autonomous 'Usmanistan' (a more nation-like name for Hyderabad) had been touted in some of the Muslim League's pre-Partition propaganda. With a population of sixteen million \u2013 so about the same as that of Sri Lanka and Nepal combined \u2013 with a division-sized army and an illustrious history dating back to Mughal times, Hyderabad had as good a claim to independence as anywhere. To realise it, the Nizam was prepared to defy New Delhi and even dip into his bottomless coffers. At great expense he enlisted the legal services of a King's Counsel from the English Bar, plus that Bar's favourite tactic of aggressive procrastination.\n\nIn Hyderabad, however, as in Kashmir, the ruler's authority was already being challenged. Hyderabad was no peripheral backwater like Junagadh. A local Congress-affiliated party was demanding full democratic representation plus an end to hereditary rule; a socialist party chimed in by urging outright accession to India; Communist cadres were dismantling the larger landholdings in the turbulent Telengana region of the state; and in the main cities Islamist paramilitaries (Razakars), with or without the tacit support of the Nizam's government, were terrorising pro-India communities, most of them Hindu. Thus while, in the aftermath of Partition, Muslim refugees poured into the state from central India, Hindu refugees poured out into the neighbouring Madras and Bombay provinces. As in the Punjab and Bengal, though on a smaller scale, powerful constituencies were being created by the crude expedient of repositioning people.\n\nIn this exercise, time might be thought to favour the Nizam. Accordingly, in October 1947 the Nizam's legal counsel, backed by Mountbatten, began to lobby Nehru and Patel for a one-year extension of Hyderabad's standstill agreement. The Congress leaders reluctantly concurred, and Mountbatten chalked up another triumph. No longer Viceroy but a decidedly hands-on Governor-General, in the same month Mountbatten enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing his nephew and prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Philip of Greece, preparing to wed Princess Elizabeth, the heir presumptive to the British throne. As one who was about to be even more closely related to the House of Windsor, Mountbatten was confident that by playing on the Nizam's regard for the British monarchy he could get him to sign a document which, though neither an Instrument of Accession nor a treaty, yet combined enough of both to satisfy all parties.\n\nThere matters stood \u2013 with the Indian and Hyderabadi governments supposedly sworn to avoid provoking one another, the Nizam and his supporters still nursing hopes of independence, and Mountbatten as buoyant as ever \u2013 when, in late October, reports came from the other end of India that up through the apple-laden orchards on the hillsides of the outer Himalayas lorryloads of ragtag soldiery were advancing with the intention of taking a large bite out of the juiciest fruit of all. Kashmir, it seemed, was being invaded. Homesteads were aflame, villages were being pillaged and bridges captured. In less than a week, with his outposts fallen, his army on the run and his state in peril, the Maharajah of Kashmir would be propelled into India's arms. And so, as if from nowhere, there began a conflict that would rumble on into the next century and comfortably outlast even Ghulam Mohamed's drone of woe.\n\n'It was a case of retaliation,' Ghulam Mohamed always claimed. 'See, Kashmiris had nothing to do with it. These people with guns, they were Pathans from Yaghistan. We were the victims.'\n\nLaunched on 22 October 1947, what Indians regard as an unprovoked Pakistani-backed invasion of the Kashmir Valley and what Pakistanis regard as a spontaneous expression of Muslim solidarity in the face of the Maharajah's oppression, rapidly escalated into open warfare. The invaders would overrun about a third of the entire state, threaten Srinagar itself and bring India's army and air force rushing to the rescue. Thousands died, tens of thousands were displaced, and for generations to come millions would pay the price. Because of Kashmir, Indo\u2013Pakistan hostility would become the defining motif in South Asian relations. A new generation, 'Midnight's Children', and then another, 'Midnight's Grandchildren', would imbibe the mythologies constructed around the Kashmir crisis and grow up in its atmosphere of irreconcilable claims and counter-claims. This near-existential enmity would spawn its own national heroes in succession to the freedom fighters of old and induce a myopia that is as puzzling to foreigners as it is troubling to neighbours. The policies subsequently pursued by India and Pakistan in respect of Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and especially Afghanistan were, and still are, heavily influenced by the unfinished business over Kashmir.\n\nThe so-called 'Kashmir problem' also necessitated massive troop deployments, hasty weapons purchases and an incipient arms race. Defence spending would in turn devour slender budgets, frustrate much-needed social reform programmes, stunt economic growth and alike discredit the Mahatma's non-violent legacy, Nehru's lofty boast of international non-alignment and Jinnah's pledge of sectarian inclusiveness. As if the post-Partition slaughter of the previous two months had not been enough, in late 1947 India and Pakistan hovered so close to all-out war as to put Partition itself in jeopardy. But whether this opened a new chapter in South Asian relations, or simply prolonged an old one, is open to debate.\n\n*\n\nThe British-drawn maps must bear some of the responsibility. Jammu and Kashmir state was not, and never had been, the confident entity that it appeared on paper. It was a more arbitrary, complex and disparate creation even than its composite name suggests. Most of the state was within, and much of it beyond, the high Himalayas, and so arguably not part of the South Asian subcontinent at all. Nor was it simply a combination of mountain valley (Kashmir) and submontane glacis (Jammu). Scholars tend to divide the state into four or five distinct socio-geographic regions, each having little in common with one another, other than the Maharajah's overarching claim to sovereignty.\n\nJammu, in the plains, is indistinguishable from the neighbouring Punjab. At the time its considerable population included slightly more Hindus and Sikhs than Muslims, and had it not been part of a princely state, Radcliffe's red pen would surely have awarded it to New Delhi. Yet Jammu was not just some appendage of the Jammu and Kashmir state that could be quietly lopped off. It was in fact integral to it. The Hindu Dogra Maharajahs originally hailed from Jammu, and Jammu city still served them as the state's winter capital.\n\nThe more populous Kashmir Valley, on the other hand, lies 2,000 metres higher, is hemmed in by snow-capped mountains and feels a world away from the Punjab and the Indian subcontinent. Though largely Muslim, it had seldom been aggressively so. Indeed, it accommodated an influential class of Brahmin landowners and intellectuals, otherwise known as _pandits_ (like the Nehrus' ancestors), who had prospered under Dogra rule. With its own language, cuisine and costume, plus a reputation for fine crafts and outrageous salesmanship, the Valley boasted a distinctive culture ( _Kashmiriyat_ ) and an enviable tradition of communal harmony.\n\nBefore its incorporation into the Mughal empire in the late seventeenth century the Valley had often been an independent kingdom. It had come under the rule of its Hindu Dogra Maharajahs only in the 1840s when the British, in cynical mode, had chosen not to administer directly such a far-flung and indeterminate territory. Instead, and in return for their allegiance and a large cash indemnity, the Dogra Maharajahs had been confirmed in their lately-won inheritance. Their often unsavoury rule was thus prolonged; and though the British frequently had occasion to regret Dogra excesses, they found compensation in adopting the Valley as a holiday-home-from-home where, sallying forth from Henley-style houseboats, they might embrace the alpine scenery with rods, guns, cameras and picnic baskets.\n\nTo the south of the Valley, and to the west of the Bannihal Pass and Jammu, lesser valleys and pine-clad ridges border the plains of what is now Pakistan. Comprised of several one-time fiefs, this third segment of Jammu and Kashmir state was loosely referred to as Poonch (or sometimes 'Punch'), that being the main administrative centre. Comparatively well populated and, like the Valley, largely Muslim, Poonch had a claim to autonomy under a related Dogra dynasty, plus a history of resistance to rule from Srinagar\/Jammu. Notoriously turbulent, and an important recruiting ground for the British Indian army, it was in Poonch that the trouble started.\n\nSuch were the three core regions of the state \u2013 Jammu, the Kashmir Valley and Poonch. But north and north-west of the Valley, among and beyond the glaciers of the Karakorum range, there nestled and perched numerous lesser chiefdoms and statelets. These had been lumped together by the British as the Gilgit Agency, and had even less in common with the Valley and its Dogra rulers, who were here heartily detested. Sparsely populated and again Muslim, though more Shi'i than Sunni, the Gilgit region had been attached to Jammu and Kashmir state purely for British strategic convenience. In 1935, for the same reason, much of it had been leased back by the British. Accessible from the Valley for only part of the year \u2013 and then not without considerable effort \u2013 the Gilgit region's status in the wake of the British withdrawal could best be described as uncertain.\n\nFinally, to the north-east and east of the Kashmir Valley, beyond even snowier passes, the valley of the upper Indus opened out into the arid wastes of Baltistan and Ladakh. The former was once Buddhist, the latter still so, and both were more Tibetan in aspect than Indian. But they had been under Dogra rule for over a century, and although they contained a negligible fraction of the state's population, they accounted for about three-quarters of its land area, as well as almost its entire border with Tibet and Chinese Xinjiang. The social, cultural and commercial ties of Ladakh were as much with this Inner Asian world as with South Asia, and prior to the Chinese intervention in Tibet in 1950, Ladakh showed more interest in an association with Lhasa than with New Delhi or Karachi.\n\nIn sum, here was a highly artificial state but one which, when taken as a whole, was of great geo-strategic interest to both India and Pakistan and which, fringing the two, might go either way. Its religious complexion argued for its joining Pakistan; New Delhi had expectations that its Maharajah, the sole embodiment of its tenuous unity, would prefer India; yet its composition lent itself to dismemberment; and its history and general ambivalence, no less than its contested status, argued for some form of autonomy, particularly in respect of its core southern regions.\n\nTwo other factors were relevant. In the Valley, the Maharajah's authority had long been under threat from populist political parties; and in Poonch it was contested by a junior claimant to the Maharajah's throne backed by one or more of Poonch's militaristic clans. Among the Valley's several political parties, the most effective was the National Conference under the leadership of Sheikh Mohamed Abdullah. The term 'Sheikh' was in this case one of popular respect rather than religious orthodoxy. A commanding figure, son of a shawl merchant and educated at the prestigious Muslim university of Aligarh (in UP), the Sheikh espoused a socialism that was radical, not an Islamism. His National Conference had been so named when in 1938 it had broken with its parent Muslim Conference, a party that subsequently allied itself with Jinnah's Muslim League and was generally in favour of Pakistan. In contrast, the Sheikh's National Conference, while spearheading the grievances of the Valley's Muslims against their Dogra rulers, adopted a less sectarian stance more in tune with that of India's Congress Party.\n\n'They say that Sheikh Sahib [this being a doubly respectful moniker for Abdullah] was Nehru's friend. What kind of friend? What did Nehru do for Kashmir? Nothing, see, nothing.'\n\nWith the passage of time Kashmiris like Ghulam Mohamed had conveniently forgotten that in 1947 Sheikh Abdullah had owed his pivotal role, indeed his lionisation ('the Lion of Kashmir' being another of his sobriquets), almost entirely to Nehru. In fact it was his regard for Nehru, and Nehru's for the Sheikh, that would undermine any chance of the state going it alone. The two men had much in common. 'There can be no doubt that Jawaharlal Nehru saw Sheikh Abdullah as his political twin,' writes Alastair Lamb, an authority on Kashmir, adding cryptically that the relationship 'may well have involved more than shared political opinions'. With the six-foot-four Sheikh towering over his Indian counterpart they made an ill-assorted pair; but, secular in outlook, socialists and democrats by conviction, they were both immensely proud of their Kashmiri heritage, and had nothing but contempt for the blatantly discriminatory regime of the thoroughbred-loving Maharajah in his Savile Row suits.\n\nIn May 1946, not for the first time, the Sheikh had faced trial for sedition. He had demanded that the Maharajah 'Quit Kashmir', and followed this up by advocating a redistribution of landholdings and more jobs for Muslims. Riots had followed, protesters had been killed and Srinagar put under curfew. Greatly alarmed for his friend, Nehru had absented himself from the Cabinet Mission's deliberations and rushed up to Kashmir to defend the Sheikh in court. On this occasion he was turned back at the border (on a later occasion he was hauled back by Mountbatten and Patel). The Sheikh had been duly convicted and imprisoned; and there he still was, in Srinagar's gaol, when in 1947 the momentous events of 14 and 15 August came and went. In the Valley the Pakistan flag was raised, then hastily removed; in parts of Poonch it flew for longer, as did the Indian flag in Jammu.\n\nWith Maharajah Hari Singh apparently following the Nizam of Hyderabad's lead and holding out for some form of independence, Nehru looked to his old friend for a more pro-India pronouncement. Sheikh Abdullah obliged. At the time he said nothing about autonomy or independence but was adamant about 'freedom'. This he defined as freedom from Dogra rule, freedom for himself and his followers from their Srinagar detention, and the freedom for the Kashmiri people, rather than the Maharajah, to decide between India and Pakistan. Abdullah's 'Quit Kashmir' call echoed that of the 1942 'Quit India' movement and, just so, his freedom struggle against the Maharajah mimicked that of the Congress leadership against the British. In Kashmir too, detention merely increased the detainees' popularity and raised the stakes. Nehru was probably right in supposing the Sheikh the nearest thing to the voice of the Kashmiri people, although the Sheikh's popularity scarcely extended beyond the Valley into Jammu and Poonch, let alone Gilgit or Ladakh. Nehru was also confident that the Sheikh's inclinations \u2013 democratic, socially radical, confessionally neutral and distinctly personal _vis-\u00e0-vis_ the pro-Pakistan Muslim Conference \u2013 would be best served by opting for India.\n\nMeanwhile the Punjab erupted in the horrors of Partition. In east Punjab, and throughout the rest of India, Muslims who were reluctant to decamp to Pakistan lived in fear for their livelihoods if not their lives. They badly needed reassurance about their future prospects in India, and to Nehru's way of thinking, nothing would more comfort them than the spectacle of a Muslim-majority state like Jammu and Kashmir endorsing New Delhi's non-communal stance by freely acceding to India. It would bolster India's secular credentials while, according to Nehru, 'any weakening in Kashmir by us would create a far more difficult communal situation'.\n\nUnfortunately, this far more difficult communal situation was already evident in Jammu and Poonch. In Jammu, hard by the blood-soaked Punjab, some sectarian contagion was probably inevitable. The resultant killings and expulsions replicated those in the Punjab, with the Maharajah's Dogra troops here participating in the atrocities committed by Jammu's non-Muslim majority on its Muslim minority. As reported by Richard Symonds, whose role as a refugee monitor now took him from the Punjab to Kashmir, the Jammu killings preceded the 22 October 'invasion' of Kashmir and were partly responsible for it.\n\nFrom about 17 October, Muslims in villages near Jammu were rounded up [by the Maharajah's officials], told that Pakistan had asked them to leave, and sent on foot towards the Pakistan border. On the way they were slaughtered by civilian Sikhs and the Dogra Kashmir troops, sometimes assisted by some Rajputs and depressed classes.\n\nAs news of these killings, plus a trickle of survivors, reached Poonch, they greatly inflamed an already volatile situation there. According to Symonds, ongoing resistance to some punitive taxes levied by the Maharajah on the Muslims of Poonch had already provoked open rebellion; and it was these rebellious and now confessionally incensed anti-Dogra Muslims of Poonch who turned increasingly to their co-religionists in neighbouring Pakistan for arms and assistance.\n\nIn other words \u2013 and most notably those preferred by Pakistanis \u2013 the ragtag invaders who were about to enter Kashmir territory were merely responding to a call for help from fellow Muslims under threat from their Hindu overlord. The incursion was therefore spontaneous; it owed nothing to the government of Pakistan and had no designs on the Kashmir Valley itself. All of which would appear somewhat implausible in the light of subsequent events \u2013 although no more so than India's adamant disclaimers of the prior support afforded to the Maharajah by elements of the government in New Delhi.\n\nSuch Indian support was needed because the Maharajah's forces were no match for the Poonch rebels, most of whom had battlefield experience. 'Of the 71,667 citizens of the state of Jammu and Kashmir who served in the British Indian forces during World War II, 60,402 were Muslims from the traditional recruiting ground of Poonch and Mirpur [i.e. southern Poonch],' notes Victoria Schofield. Like the Muslim, Sikh and Dogra ex-servicemen who were responsible for the worst killings in the Punjab, Poonch's military veterans were a force to be reckoned with. They so tested the Maharajah's troops that, according to sources cited by Alastair Lamb, well before the 'Pakistani' incursion into Kashmir the Maharajah was receiving covert logistical and technical assistance from India plus the services of 'at least one infantry battalion and a battery of mountain artillery'. Both of the latter were drawn from what had been the army of the Sikh state of Patiala but which was now, since Patiala's accession to India, part of India's forces.\n\nThere was nothing particularly sinister about this. The Patiala auxiliaries were not intended for deployment against Pakistan but to uphold the Maharajah's authority within his own state. Their presence nevertheless represented, if not a prior incursion, then certainly a provocative escalation. The uprising within the Poonch district of the still technically independent state of Jammu and Kashmir was being surreptitiously internationalised; and by the same logic that prompted the Maharajah to look to India, the Poonchi rebels looked to Pakistan.\n\nFor rifles, mortars and explosives, the Poonchis \u2013 or 'Azad Kashmiris' ['Free Kashmiris'] as they now preferred \u2013 sought out Pakistani intermediaries willing to supply their needs from official arsenals and from the roadside showrooms of the Pathan (Pashtun) gunsmiths of the North-West Frontier Province. Additionally, several thousand Pathans volunteered their services as fighters. Most came from the tribal areas of Hazara, Dir, Bajaur and Kurram which, though attached to the Frontier Province, had been largely abandoned to their own devices following the British withdrawal. It was these redoubtable warriors from the Frontier's tribal areas whom Ghulam Mohamed always called 'Yaghis', 'Yaghistan' being a pejorative term for anywhere that was habitually ungovernable.\n\nPathans also provided the necessary transport and fuel: their hauliers, then as now, had a monopoly of the cross-border trucking business between Afghanistan and the plains. And as was ever the case in Frontier affairs, the tribesmen's Islamic zealotry barely disguised an inveterate rapacity. To the irregulars who headed off into the Hazara hills en route for Kashmir, the news of Muslims being massacred in Jammu excited calls for revenge and promised the sanction of _jihad_. But no less enticing was the promise of plunder afforded by Kashmir's abiding reputation as a terrestrial paradise of pulchritude and plenty.\n\nTo what extent the Pakistan government was aware of all this activity is unclear. Intelligence was scarce and there was as yet no such thing as an Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate. The obvious parallels with Pakistani disclaimers of official support for subsequent cross-border interventions \u2013 whether in Kashmir or Afghanistan \u2013 are nevertheless striking. Then as later, Pakistani officials cited tribal autonomy as an excuse for their impotence, and then as later they nevertheless cultivated a nexus of informal contacts with both the tribes and their Poonchi\/Azad Kashmiri sponsors.\n\nRetired and absconding officers from the Pakistan army were certainly involved in the Kashmir incursion, although not at first regular troops. And while Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister, seems to have had some early knowledge of what was going on, Jinnah himself may have been kept in ignorance of it; either he did not wish to be informed or, already suffering from the ill-health that would soon end his life, it was thought best not to inform him. Government ministers in Karachi may also have been poorly apprised of the situation. Still living out of packing cases as they grappled with the refugee problem and the mechanics of government, they had little time for studying conditions on the far northern frontier, and were in no position to influence them.\n\nPakistan's acting Commander-in-Chief in Rawalpindi, along with the Governor of the North-West Frontier Province in Peshawar, were better placed. Both were British, and both nursed some sympathy for Pakistan's claim to Kashmir. But under orders from their British superiors to resign rather than become involved in hostilities, they trod carefully and urged caution. Pakistan's army was still being pieced together from elements of that of undivided India; indeed, its share of the latter's military hardware had yet to materialise. It was in no position to mount its own invasion of Kashmir. Nor, since this could well lead to a disastrous civil war, was it keen to oppose those tribesmen intent on such an invasion. Thus the most that can be said with any confidence is that the Pakistan authorities, while not entirely ignorant of the Kashmir adventure, declined publicly to authorise it and failed signally to impede it.\n\n*\n\nOnce across the Pakistan\u2013Kashmir border, the first wave of eighty-odd trucks crammed with tribesmen and their Azad Kashmiri sponsors found their progress up the Jhelum valley eased by the desertion of Muslim troops within the Maharajah's forces. Bridges had been left unblown, towns undefended. Muzaffarabad fell and was looted, then Uri. From there a side road led over the hills to Poonch, while ahead lay the Valley itself. The greater prize proved the stronger temptation: instead of heading off to eject the Maharajah's forces from Poonch, the raiders pushed on for Baramula, gateway to 'the Vale of Cashmere'. Nearing that town, the brigadier commanding the Maharajah's retreating forces was badly wounded. Having vowed that the enemy would enter the Valley over his dead body, he was as good as his word, and took his own life. His forces looked to be in hopeless disarray. An ill-organised incursion in support of an obscure rebellion suddenly had the Valley at its mercy.\n\nBaramula is only sixty kilometres from Srinagar. From there an attack on the capital itself was clearly on the cards; but this being manifest to the panic-stricken Maharajah, he too changed tack. On 24 October he sent an urgent appeal for military assistance to New Delhi. He was aware that the _quid pro quo_ might be that he sign a pro-forma Instrument of Accession, and he indicated his willingness to do so, 'subject to the condition that the terms of accession will be the same as would be settled with H[is] E[xalted] H[ighness] The Nizam of Hyderabad'. An airlift of Indian troops followed on 27 October. Srinagar airport was secured, and from there Indian Air Force planes launched sorties down the Valley, strafing the invaders, attacking their transport and bombing their supply lines. Although Baramula was put to the sword in a final act of wanton attrition, the main enemy advance was there halted. Meanwhile the Maharajah had duly signed the Instrument of Accession.\n\nDespite sharing a religion with the invaders, the Valley's civilian population had shown themselves largely indifferent to the incursion. They welcomed neither their Azad brethren nor their Pathan colleagues, and often suffered from their depredations. As yet they showed no inclination to fight for the right to decide their future, and they were soon sceptical about the invaders' claim to be doing it for them.\n\nFor if the invaders' intent was to pre-empt India's designs on the state, it had spectacularly misfired. Instead, it was precipitating the Indian action. New Delhi had prepared the ground well. Both Gandhi and more recently Mountbatten had paid personal visits to Srinagar. At the time they had failed to get a pro-India decision out of the Maharajah, but they had at least prevailed on him to sack his independence-minded Prime Minister and release Sheikh Abdullah from detention; in fact the Sheikh was now rallying his Srinagar supporters to resist the invaders.\n\nOn 25 October, within hours of the Maharajah's appeal to India, V.P. Menon arrived in the Valley. He clarified the terms of Indian military intervention, namely temporary accession of the state pending confirmation by a plebiscite, plus the installation of Sheikh Abdullah as a Minister in the Maharajah's government. He also persuaded the Maharajah and his family to leave Srinagar immediately. They did so in convoy soon after midnight on 26 October, heading over the Bannihal Pass for Jammu. Ostensibly this was for the Maharajah's safety. From an Indian point of view it would also ensure that, should the city fall to the raiders, its ruler would not. But in Pakistani eyes the Maharajah's departure contravened the standstill agreement, was tantamount to flight and so constituted an abrogation of his authority; whatever he signed thereafter was therefore deemed irrelevant.\n\nIt has also been questioned whether the signing of the Instrument of Accession took place before the airlift of Indian troops began, or whether the official record was simply doctored to make it seem so. Mountbatten, as India's Governor-General, had been invited to chair the top-level Defence Committee that considered the Maharajah's appeal. Eager to include Jammu and Kashmir in his 'basket' of princely states and so notch up another triumph before his governor-generalship ended, Mountbatten had supported the Indian action, although with reservations. It was he who insisted that the act of accession must precede the movement of troops, and that a plebiscite must follow it. With British army officers still serving in both Pakistan and India, '[his] major concern was to prevent an inter-Dominion war'. The legal niceties were therefore critical; India's case for intervention had to be cast-iron. Yet even Mountbatten's official biographer concedes that attaching so much importance to the accession was a grave mistake.\n\nIf there had been no accession, the Indian presence in Kashmir would have been more evidently temporary, the possibility of a properly constituted referendum have become more real. By exaggerated legalism the Governor-General helped bring about the result he most feared: the protracted occupation of Kashmir by India with no attempt to show that it enjoyed popular support.\n\nCritics of hereditary rule like Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah also accepted that some form of popular endorsement was desirable. The problem was, and would long remain, how to make it convincing. That a formal plebiscite would, in fact, never be held was less because New Delhi resisted it than because, with its troops in permanent occupation, no such vote would be deemed free and fair. In effect Mountbatten's insistence on formal accession as a prerequisite for intervention precluded his other condition of a democratic vote to endorse accession.\n\nTwenty years later, even Ghulam Mohamed could see little merit in the idea of a plebiscite. Sucking smoke from a clenched fist out of which protruded a perpendicular cigarette \u2013 he claimed it made it more like a hookah \u2013 he tended to see things in personal terms.\n\n'We trust Sheikh Sahib, see. He is Kashmiri. We vote for him, not for India or Pakistan. Kashmir is for Kashmiris. What need to vote for someone else?'\n\nAt the time Sheikh Abdullah welcomed the Indian intervention. As the state's Emergency Administrator, and soon Prime Minister, he would bestride the Valley's politics and waste no time in introducing a radical redistribution of landholdings and other populist reforms. Given his appeal, his apparent approval of the accession could be taken to signify that of most Kashmiris. What need, then, for a plebiscite? Nehru's confidence in the Sheikh seemed to have paid off. Delhi had cause to rejoice.\n\n*\n\nKarachi, of course, did not rejoice. News of the Indian airlift and of the state's official accession brought howls of protest plus a demand from Jinnah for the Pakistan army to be immediately sent into the Kashmir Valley. Seemingly Pakistan was no sooner born than it was confronted with the prospect of a lobotomy. For if Nehru valued Jammu and Kashmir's accession as corroboration of India's secular stance, no less did Jinnah contest that same accession as contravening the two-nation principle on which Partition had been based. Moreover, without the 'k' of 'Kashmir', 'Pakistan' would be not just unpronounceable but indefensible. Its claim to be a homeland for all South Asia's Muslim majorities lay in tatters. Worse still, the addition of Jammu and Kashmir so expanded India's territory that on paper it now encircled northern Pakistan and abutted both the unruly tribal areas and an unpredictable Afghanistan. Pakistan's security was hopelessly compromised. In the face of what amounted to an existential threat, Jinnah had had little choice but to order out the army.\n\nBut his British Commander-in-Chief objected. The army wasn't ready, he claimed, and anyway all those British officers on whom its formation depended would have to stand down if Pakistan invaded what India now held to be its own territory. War was risky, and it was potentially prejudicial to any favourable settlement. Under the circumstances, therefore, the most that could be done was to consolidate the gains already made by the Azad Kashmiris and their Pathan accomplices. Arms, ammunition, supplies and advisers would be made available to them and reinforcements allowed to reach them; meanwhile the government in Karachi would explore a variety of diplomatic options on their behalf.\n\nSix months later, in May 1948, by which time the Pakistan army was in better shape, the C-in-C did authorise a deployment of forces. But it was on the understanding that they were to avoid direct contact with Indian troops and simply deter any Indian encroachments into Pakistan itself. That might still involve their entering Kashmir territory, and it gave them no immunity from Indian air attack. Willy-nilly, India and Pakistan were now engaged in mutual hostilities that amounted to war in all but name.\n\nTo Pakistan's frustration over the uncooperative attitude of its British officers there was one notable exception. High in the valleys of the far north-west of Jammu and Kashmir, in what had been the British-leased Gilgit Agency, news of the state's accession to India had gone down badly. The Gilgit Scouts, a British-officered frontier corps of battalion strength and mostly Pathan in composition, had already shown itself averse to being transferred from British command to that of the Dogra Maharajah. The threat that, following the Maharajah's accession to India, it might now be incorporated into the Indian army, was the final straw. Having ascertained that both the local population and the assorted Mirs (rulers) of the neighbouring statelets (Hunza, Nagar, etc.) felt much the same way about Indian rule, the Scouts resolved to take matters into their own hands.\n\nWith the active encouragement of their twenty-four-year-old commanding officer, a lanky Scots major called William Brown, on the night of 31 October they staged what Brown called a coup d'\u00e9tat. Claiming the support of all the region's scattered peoples, the Scouts relieved Gilgit's Dogra Governor of his authority, cut the telephone line to Srinagar, picketed all the main passes, found safekeeping for the region's few non-Muslims and announced the formation of a provisional government. In a breathless telegram to the Chief Minister of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, Brown relayed the news: 'Entire pro-Pakistan populace have overthrown Dogra regime.' But this was misleading: according to the historian of the Scouts, Brown himself was 'the only person in authority who had unequivocally declared in favour of Pakistan'. Others were toying with the idea of an independent confederation of Karakorum states; most were just happy to have cast off the Maharajah's claim to sovereignty and forestalled that of India.\n\nFor two weeks the fate of the region hung in the balance. Hunza and Nagar (north of Gilgit on the Chinese border) offered to accede to Pakistan, while Brown doggedly prepared the ground for the accession of Gilgit itself. India naturally suspected premeditation; it was claimed that, using Pakistan as a proxy, the British were up to their old game of geo-strategic management by reserving for themselves a vantage point on the so-called 'Roof of the World'. But this scarcely tallied with Pakistan's dilatory response to Brown's appeals. Karachi was in a quandary. It was one thing to lend support to native Kashmiris in their struggle for a 'Free\/Azad Kashmir', quite another to endorse an outright renunciation of Jammu and Kashmir's integrity and accept the cession of a vast chunk of what was widely supposed to be its territory. The Gilgit populace might indeed be 'pro-Pakistan', but Karachi based its case on a still intact and unoccupied Jammu and Kashmir exercising its right, free of outside interference, to decide its future. A Pakistani acceptance of the cession of the Gilgit region would seem to undermine this. It would look as much like a piecemeal grab at the Dogra state as the Indian occupation of the Valley which Karachi was so bitterly contesting.\n\nOn 16 November a Pakistani representative finally flew into Gilgit to oversee the administration; two months later Brown was replaced in command of the Gilgit Scouts by an Azad Kashmiri major. The status of the region continued unclear. Its peoples, having rejected Kashmir's rule, were not willing to be tucked under the wing of the fledgling Azad Kashmir state (i.e. the 'liberated' areas of Poonch, Muzaffarabad and the eastern end of the Valley). They preferred Pakistan, and would accept whatever temporary tutelage it felt able to offer pending a general settlement of Jammu and Kashmir's future. Winter was anyway closing the passes, and military operations were being wound down. According to Alastair Lamb, the forensic champion of the Pakistan case and _b\u00eate noire_ of the Indian defence establishment, 'The nature of the Kashmir war had, however, been changed fundamentally... it was impossible now to deny with any conviction that Pakistan had a legitimate interest in the Kashmir conflict which directly involved sectors of its sovereign territory.'\n\nMore obviously, a new and extremely challenging northern front had been opened in the Indo\u2013Pak 'war'; no longer was the conflict confined to just Poonch and the Valley. In May 1948, as the snows receded, the Scouts marched out of Gilgit and, joining with Azad Kashmiri and tribal forces, turned left up the Indus river. Baltistan was taken, and the only road from Srinagar to the Ladakhi capital of Leh was severed. Ladakh itself looked doomed. Its monastic authorities, horrified at the prospect of being 'liberated' by fanatically Muslim Pathans, consulted their oracles but were ill-equipped to offer other than token resistance.\n\nHappily the lamas' resolve went untested. In the nick of time Ladakh was reinforced by another airlift of Indian troops, many of them Nepali Gurkhas. The conflict was taking on a pan-Himalayan complexion. After further heroics and heavy losses, in October\/November 1948 Indian forces reclaimed the road from Leh down to the Valley, although not Baltistan nor an inhospitable corner of northern Ladakh. These remained outside Indian control and, posing an ongoing threat to Ladakh's lifeline with the outside world, necessitated a heavy Indian troop presence along the length of the optimistically named 'Srinagar\u2013Leh Highway'.\n\nBy the end of 1948 an estimated 90,000 Indian troops were stationed in Jammu and Kashmir. The numbers opposing them must also have been in five figures. And already the climate was taking as heavy a toll as the fighting. Scaling altitudes of 3\u20134,000 metres, with all-year-round temperatures that plunged below \u201320\u00b0C, and over a distance in excess of five hundred kilometres, the new front taxed the stamina and resources of both sides. Their respective tasks had become both harder and less certain. No longer was it just a question of expelling 'raiders' from the Valley or abetting 'freedom fighters' in Poonch. The defection of the Gilgit region \u2013 or what Pakistan was now vaguely calling 'the Northern Areas' (of Pakistan? of Kashmir?) \u2013 had effectively split the state. It was not exactly a stalemate. The fighting continued throughout 1948; the pro-Pakistan forces, augmented by regular troops, planned an offensive into Jammu; the Indians hammered away at Poonch and reclaimed the road to Leh. But neither side was prepared for the massive offensive now needed to dislodge the other completely. It was time, high time, to talk.\n\n*\n\nBack in October 1947, when news of India's intervention had first broken, not the least of Jinnah's complaints had centred on New Delhi's reluctance to communicate. It had failed to inform Pakistan of the Maharajah's accession until after it had been accepted, and it had failed to give warning of the airlift of Indian troops until after it was under way. Both accession and intervention contravened the terms of Pakistan's standstill agreement with the Maharajah; and neglecting to inform Pakistan of its proposed action was not how a fellow member of the Commonwealth was supposed to behave. Moreover, India's silence looked to Pakistan like duplicity. For if New Delhi was so certain that Pakistan was responsible for the tribal incursion \u2013 the reason given for both the accession and the intervention \u2013 why had it not cautioned Pakistan that intervention was imminent unless the 'raiders' were recalled? Why too, after the intervention, was Nehru so reluctant to accept the advice of those who urged him to meet with Liaquat Ali Khan, his opposite number, and explain India's position and bring an end to the fighting?\n\nWith Nehru unwilling to make a move, it had fallen to India's Governor-General to break the ice. On 1 November 1947 Mountbatten had flown to Lahore for talks with Jinnah. Mountbatten explained that the Maharajah's appeal and India's lightning response had constituted an emergency situation. Srinagar had been under threat; its airport might at any minute have fallen to the 'raiders'; the airlift of troops had therefore to go ahead immediately; there had been no time for consultation with Pakistan. Nehru had, though, found the time to alert the Prime Minister of Britain. In a communication dated 25 October (so after the Maharajah's appeal but before the airlift) he had told Attlee that India was actively considering military intervention but that such a move was not 'designed in any way to influence the state to accede to India'. Evidently the accession, far from being a prerequisite for intervention as Mountbatten maintained, was for Nehru just the icing on the cake. It could, then, have been deferred, and Pakistan could have been alerted.\n\nJinnah did not mince his words. He called the Indian _fait accompli_ a clear case of 'fraud and violence', and insisted that only a complete withdrawal of Indian troops could now redeem the situation. Citing the case of Junagadh, he also indicated that Pakistan would not object to a referendum in Junagadh if a similar poll could be held throughout Jammu and Kashmir \u2013 but not while Indian forces were in occupation of the Valley and not while Sheikh Abdullah, supposedly India's 'quisling', was in government. Only if both were removed would a free and fair plebiscite be possible.\n\nJinnah also objected to Mountbatten's suggestion that the whole matter be referred to the United Nations Organisation. The UN was something of an unknown quantity at the time. It was barely two years old (it had celebrated its second anniversary on the day the Maharajah issued his appeal to Delhi). It had no permanent headquarters and no track record in such disputes. Mountbatten nevertheless persevered. With neither India nor Pakistan prepared to compromise, a third party's involvement seemed to offer the only hope. Over several meetings in December 1947 he formulated an ingenious \u2013 possibly too ingenious \u2013 plan whereby both sides would embrace UN involvement, although for quite different reasons.\n\nHe convinced Liaquat Ali Khan that a plebiscite might indeed be the only way forward and that some form of UN supervision would be the best guarantee of its being conducted fairly. In assessing the prospects for such a plebiscite it was also likely that the UN would look into the status of Kashmir, the validity of the accession and the role of the Indian military. Meanwhile he encouraged Nehru to undertake the actual reference to the UN. This was to take the congenial (to India) form of a complaint about Pakistan's support for the 'tribal invasion', and would be submitted under the terms of Article 35 of the UN's charter. The article entitled members to alert the Security Council to any situation 'likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace'; yet it gave the Council no right to impose a solution, merely to examine the situation and make suggestions for defusing it. India might thus register its plight as the injured party without exposing itself to any mandatory directives and with a fair chance that its complaint would be upheld. Hopefully this would also deflect attention from the disputed nature of the accession, the proportionality or otherwise of India's intervention, and any other contentious matters that Pakistan might introduce.\n\nIf this was indeed the gist of Mountbatten's scheme, it was well received. Alastair Lamb has likened it to the sort of arrangement sometimes favoured by divorcing couples when, to satisfy the requirements of the law, one party agrees to be portrayed as the transgressor and the other as the aggrieved. It was therefore not without an element of collusion that on 1 January 1948 an India seeking condemnation of Pakistan plus the withdrawal of its surrogate troops made a submission to the UN; and a Pakistan seeking the withdrawal of Indian troops as the prerequisite for a plebiscite coyly concurred.\n\nEach side duly presented its case before the Security Council later in January 1948. But there events took an unexpected turn. The indictment of Pakistan's interference as delivered by India's spokesman was politely received, but elicited no demand for a Pakistani withdrawal until three months later. On the other hand, with Britain and the US as suspicious of Nehru's relations with the Soviets as of his actions in Kashmir, the Pakistani spokesman's five-hour denunciation of the Maharajah's rule and of India's perfidy was received more favourably. A Commission of Inquiry (UNCIP) was quickly set up and immediately got down to work. It would spend the next six months touring the region, verifying the facts of the dispute, offering advice and exploring a variety of possible solutions. 'Not only has the dispute been prolonged,' complained India's Sardar Patel, 'but the merits of our case have been completely lost in the interaction of power politics.'\n\nIt was not just the Cold War that was responsible for the frosty attitude towards New Delhi's case. In the course of 1948 events in Delhi had a significant bearing on international attitudes. On 13 January, in the midst of the discussions at the UN, the ailing Mahatma Gandhi embarked on another fast. This, his last great protest, had nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the Kashmir situation, but everything to do with the ongoing plight of Muslims in India and of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan. For with the two countries now as near to war as made no difference, the loyalties of these minorities looked to rabid nationalists more suspect than ever. In India, and especially Delhi, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a youth 'army' with a Hindu-supremacist agenda and operating on what Nehru called 'the strictest Nazi lines', denounced the Muslim 'enemy within' and found enthusiastic support among the more embittered of the city's post-Partition refugees.\n\nThe Congress Party responded with a resolution in which it reaffirmed its commitment to a secular India of 'many religions and many races'. But its current hostility towards Pakistan did not exactly bear this out. In retaliation for the Kashmir incursion, India was currently withholding Karachi's share of undivided India's military hardware plus some half a billion rupees owing to Pakistan from undivided India's 'sterling balance' (funds, that is, accumulated by India in the UK for services rendered during the World War). Feelings ran high, and the RSS zealots were placated neither by the anti-Pakistan statements of a Muslim like Sheikh Abdullah nor the lofty talk of Kashmir as an exemplar of India's multi-faith credentials from secularists like Nehru. In Delhi, Ajmer and elsewhere, Muslims continued to be attacked, their mosques trashed and their property appropriated. The Mahatma's fast was thus a plea for religious tolerance, for an end to the victimisation of Muslims in India and for fair treatment in respect of the resources owing to Pakistan.\n\nIf Nehru's secularism was of the head, Gandhi's was of the heart. The non-religious Nehru opposed sectarian sentiment on principle; the intensely devout Gandhi condemned it by example as incompatible with that spirit of humanity he believed common to all faiths. And as usual Gandhi's tactic worked; the frail embodiment of India's freedom struggle got his way. Already perilously weak, after just five days he extracted the reassurances needed to end his fast; neither the government nor the nation could risk having the death of the country's redeemer on its hands. The government capitulated over the sterling funds owed to Pakistan; and even the RSS signed the all-party declaration promising that Muslims and their property would henceforth be respected.\n\nNot everyone, though, was reconciled. Rogue elements connected to the RSS made no secret of their belief that Gandhi had 'blackmailed' the government into 'pandering to Muslims' and so betrayed the nation. By 'nation' they actually meant the Hindu nation, and this at a time of war with the Muslim Pakistan. Such evident 'treachery' could not go unavenged. Within hours of ending his fast the apostle of non-violence narrowly escaped the attentions of an inept bomber; and within days he was dead, shot at point-blank range by a Brahmin assassin called Nathuram Godse. A one-time member of the RSS, Godse was neither an impressionable underling nor a crazed maverick. Until the day of his execution he would insist that by his 'patriotic' action he had rid the nation of a dangerous traitor.\n\nThe death of the Mahatma on 30 January 1948 shocked the world. When over the radio Nehru noted how 'the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere', he seemed to speak for all humanity. In the twentieth century perhaps only the shooting of President John F. Kennedy would attract more universal condemnation. In both cases, tributes to the man and grief at his loss were matched by horror over his death at the hands of a fellow countryman. Independence was supposed to consolidate nations; democratic accountability and liberal values were supposed to forestall violence. How could it have happened?\n\nAs the subcontinent's first post-colonial political assassination \u2013 the first in what would become a dismal record of such outrages \u2013 it particularly appalled South Asians. Pakistanis, though noting how the 'Hindu nation' rhetoric of the RSS echoed the Muslim-nation thesis beloved of the Muslim League, regretted the loss of Gandhi's bridge-building efforts and drew their own conclusions about India's commitment to sectarian equality. Indian revulsion went deeper. It reunited both government and people in condemnation, and brought a strong reassertion of secular values. The RSS was banned, its leadership arrested; political parties that were sympathetic to it like the Hindu Mahasabha were discredited; and Nehru and Patel, whose differences over policy and tactics often mirrored those of Congress and the Mahasabha, were reconciled.\n\nBut the triumph of moderation was short-lived. A year later the ban on the RSS was lifted, its leaders released and its political affiliates eagerly re-entered the electoral fray. Meanwhile in Kashmir the fighting had resumed. At the UN the point-scoring went on; and in the far-off but not forgotten princely state of Hyderabad matters edged towards a new crisis.\n\nThere the Islamist paramilitary Razakars on the one hand, and the Indian government on the other, ratcheted up the pressure on the reclusive Nizam. His existing standstill agreement with Delhi was little respected. The Nizam's advisers toyed with referring the matter to the UN; Indians blockaded the delivery of essential supplies to the state; arms were nevertheless supposed to be reaching it.\n\nPerhaps more crucially, in June 1948 Mountbatten stood down as India's Governor-General. With both Kashmir and Hyderabad in turmoil, he departed the scene of his earlier triumphs with a brace of resounding failures and a sense of good-riddance; the fate of the two most hotly contested of the princely states still rested in the balance. But as a result of Mountbatten's resignation, New Delhi was relieved of the cautionary counsels of another respected architect of independence; and by the same token the Nizam's hopes of sympathy and support from Windsor, if not Whitehall, were effectively dashed. 'With Mountbatten gone, it became easier for [Sardar] Patel to take decisive action,' notes Ramachandra Guha. This Patel did on 13 September 1948. Following violent Congress-led demonstrations within the state and a draconian crackdown by the Nizam's security forces, regular units of the Indian army rolled across the border heading for Hyderabad city. Euphemised as 'a police action', the Indian offensive lasted just four days and was accounted a total success: the Razakars were routed and the Nizam acceded to India. Several thousand, both combatants and non-combatants, lost their lives in the fighting, though far worse was the sectarian violence that followed. According to the official but never publicised Sunderlal Report, in scenes reminiscent of the worst excessed in the Punjab, somewhere between 27,000 and 40,000 Muslims were massacred by their Hindu neighbours in retaliation for the earlier excesses of the Razakars.\n\nPakistan, though ignorant of these atrocities, would of course protest against the accesion. It claimed, not unreasonably, that the Nizam had signed the Instrument of Accession under duress; the document was therefore invalid, just like that signed by the Maharajah of Kashmir; and lest anyone think differently, for decades thereafter maps printed in Pakistan would show a gaping hole in the middle of peninsular India where the erstwhile state had been. But in reality the Nizam had been no more enthusiastic about joining Pakistan than had Kashmir's Maharajah. Indian spokesmen had magnified Hyderabad's contacts with Karachi for their own purposes; and Jinnah had unwisely responded with occasional overtures designed principally to antagonise India. On one occasion he had famously declared that, should Congress lay hands on the state, one hundred million Muslims 'would rise as one man to defend the oldest Muslim dynasty in India'. It was more bluster than threat; they had no interest in doing so and they didn't.\n\nNor, as it happened, was Jinnah able to raise his own howl of protest over the 'police action' in Hyderabad. Indeed the Pakistani reaction in general was muted, the whole nation being plunged in mourning. This was not because of Hyderabad's fall, but because of a far greater loss. For even as Indian troops crossed the border into Hyderabad, the _Quaid-i-Azam_ lay dead in his Karachi residence. A combination of cancer, pneumonia and nicotine had finally felled him.\n\nA Pakistan without its 'sole spokesman' was even more bereft than an India without its _mahatma_. Jinnah's reputation was unassailable, though his legacy was far from certain. While credited with having fathered a nation, created a state and carved out a country, 'the Great Leader' had exercised control of its affairs for little over a year. A constitution had still to be drawn up, a capital chosen, and policy directives determined. He can scarcely be blamed if the nation he fathered proved so prone to fragmentation, if the state he founded would so nearly fail, and if the country he carved out would so soon be carved up.\n\nJinnah had died in the night of 11 September 1948, less than two days before the Indian assault on Hyderabad began. Insofar as Karachi's incontrovertible tragedy deflected attention from New Delhi's controversial triumph, the news was not unwelcome in India. But whether the near coincidence of the two events was in fact pure chance has yet to be revealed. India's contingency plans for a military intervention in Hyderabad had been hatched as early as the previous March, although it seems unlikely that the actual invasion could have been mounted at just thirty-six hours' notice. On the other hand, Jinnah's worsening condition had been public knowledge since 1 September, on which day he had been rushed from his hill-station retreat to the gubernatorial residence in Karachi. This news of an impending crisis in Pakistan, if not the crisis itself, may well have triggered the build-up to the Indian takeover of Hyderabad.\n\n*\n\nThe move on Hyderabad, though immensely popular in India, did nothing to bolster New Delhi's international _bona fides_ in respect of Kashmir. UNCIP, the UN Commission for India and Pakistan, had now completed its enquiries and was flitting back and forth across the Atlantic while drawing up its proposals. A ceasefire being the obvious priority, a resolution to that effect was adopted in August 1948. But with both sides intent on last-minute gains in the field, Liaquat Ali Khan prevaricated over guarantees in respect of the plebiscite while Nehru toyed with the idea of partitioning the state. Not until 1 January 1949 did the ceasefire become operative. A UN Military Observer Group (UNMOGIP) was set up to monitor it and the plebiscite was supposed to follow, although no date was set and no agreement reached about the removal of troops prior to its implementation.\n\nMeanwhile, in Indian parlance the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir became the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (or 'J and K'), with Azad Kashmir and the Pakistan-controlled Northern Areas being treated merely as temporarily alienated territories. All the former princely states that had opted for India were now being absorbed into the constituent provinces (now known as 'states') of the Indian Union. J and K's status was thus brought into conformity with them, despite the fact that its accession had yet to be endorsed by the plebiscite to which all were supposedly committed.\n\nNehru was still counting on the Sheikh's popularity as India's best guarantee of a plebiscite proving favourable. He therefore stood by the Sheikh when the latter's radical land reforms alienated Hindu opinion, especially in Jammu, and when his populist rhetoric further riled the Maharajah. Though named _sadr-i-riyasat_ (nominal head of state), Maharajah Hari Singh was being so blatantly sidelined by both Nehru and the Sheikh that he was beginning to regret his hasty accession. He therefore reminded Patel that the accession had in fact been provisional, and that it was high time to negotiate a permanent settlement with all options on the table, including that of independence. This threatened the entire Indian position in Kashmir and at the UN; it was quite unacceptable; the Maharajah must go. In May 1949 Sardar Patel advised him to take a holiday and, while away, to relinquish his role as Kashmir's head of state in favour of his eighteen-year-old son. Hari Singh took the hint and never again set foot in the state. His son, Karan Singh, also got the message. Thereafter he would prefer life as a Congress stalwart and avid student of Hindu scripture to that of a gadfly in Kashmir's constitutional ointment.\n\nNo sooner, though, was one 'separatist' tendency silenced than another piped up in the formidable shape of Sheikh Sahib. To Nehru's dismay the Sheikh too seemed to be having second thoughts, and this despite recent concessions. For without giving an inch on the legitimacy of the Maharajah's accession (and therefore India's sovereignty in Jammu and Kashmir), Nehru had accepted the Sheikh's contention that Kashmiri opinion must be mollified by some recognition of the state's special status. Article 370 of India's 1950 Constitution did just that. J and K being as yet 'not in a position to merge with India' (as the proposer of the article put it), the state was to have its own constituent assembly, its own flag, its own Prime Minister (other states had only Chief Ministers) and its own commercial tariffs. And though its people were to enjoy the rights of Indian citizens, it was not necessarily to be subject to the jurisdiction of India's Supreme Court. In effect, the state was being granted semi-autonomy. Its Prime Minister, the redoubtable Sheikh himself as of 1949, had a free hand, and he had begun to play it.\n\nIn October 1951 the Sheikh's popularity won him a thumping majority in elections to the state's constituent assembly. This should have been gratifying to Nehru as vindicating his longstanding confidence in his 'twin'. But it was not. For already the Sheikh was, as Nehru saw it, 'behaving in a most irresponsible manner'. In fact the Indian Prime Minister was becoming so exasperated with his Kashmiri counterpart as to complain that 'The most difficult thing in life is what to do with one's friends.' While on a visit to Washington back in 1948 the Sheikh had apparently sounded out US representatives as to a possible declaration of Kashmiri independence. Nothing had come of this, nor of some desultory contacts with the leadership of Azad Kashmir. But, when addressing the state's new constituent assembly, the Sheikh revived these options, declaring that it was the assembly alone \u2013 not New Delhi \u2013 that would determine J and K's relationships, whether with India, Pakistan, or neither. On the whole he still favoured India, he said, but only if it remained true to Gandhi's legacy of sectarian harmony and the even-handed treatment of India's Muslims.\n\nThis emphasis on non-discrimination was in part prompted by divisions within J and K state. In Jammu the Praja Parishad, a party representing Jammu's Hindu majority, opposed the Sheikh's socialist policies as much as it distrusted his Muslim sympathies. It looked back to the good old days of its Dogra rulers and, finding no champion in young Karan Singh, turned increasingly to Hindu sympathisers in the rest of India. Foremost among these was the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, an emphatically Hindu party newly formed by Dr Shyama Prasad Mookherjee in the wake of Gandhi's assassination and the disgrace of the RSS. Mookherjee, a venerable Bengali and once of the Hindu Mahasabha, needed an emotive issue over which to improve his party's electoral standing. Kashmir provided it. He took Nehru to task over the Indian military's failure to secure all of Jammu and Kashmir state and over the constitutional indulgence that left J and K virtually autonomous under Sheikh Abdullah as its 'King of kings'. Jammu wanted only to be integrated with the rest of India. How could any Indian patriot not sympathise?\n\nRising to his theme, and with his supporters now taking to the streets in Delhi as well as Jammu, Mookherjee visited the state in 1952 and then again in 1953. On the first occasion he condemned the Sheikh's National Conference, praised the loyalty of the Praja Parishad and vowed to secure the release of those of its activists who had been arrested. On the second visit he was himself arrested and detained in Srinagar gaol. There, not helped by the conditions, he died of a heart attack and pleurisy. The Hindu cause had its first distinguished martyr. Vast processions accompanied his obsequies. Threats like those levelled at Gandhi during his final fast were made against both the Sheikh and Nehru. Clearly the non-communal India that Abdullah had made a prerequisite of J and K's full accession had yet to materialise.\n\nCoincidentally, in April 1953 the Sheikh welcomed to the Valley Mr Adlai Stevenson, Governor of Illinois and US presidential candidate. Stevenson was on holiday, but nevertheless spent several hours closeted with the Sheikh. It was assumed that Kashmir's future was discussed, though no explanation was forthcoming. Nehru again wrung his hands and wished himself rid of his troublesome friend.\n\nRelief came three months later, when the post-Mookherjee disturbances were at their peak. On 8 August the Sheikh was ousted, apparently by a pro-India faction within his own party, and then immediately arrested. Nehru claimed to know nothing about it, but neither did he this time go rushing to his old friend's rescue. Save for brief tastes of freedom in 1958 and 1964, the Sheikh would remain in detention for the next twenty-two years. And though the charges against him varied, none was ever proven.\n\nTo Kashmiris, the plight of the Sheikh seemed analogous to their own. They too were India's captives, and the Valley was their prison. Makeshift arguments advanced by Indian spokesmen were treated with scorn. With the Maharajah now _persona non grata_ and the Sheikh behind bars, the twin pillars on which the Indian case for incorporation rested lay at the bottom of Srinagar's Dal Lake. The contention that the need for a plebiscite had been eliminated by a subsequent vote of the J and K constituent assembly in favour of integration was laughable. In Kashmiri eyes its supporters were little better than traitors. The occupying Indian troops remained in the Valley, Pakistan clung on to Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas, the imprisoned Sheikh was as popular as ever, the UN proposals lay gathering dust, and UNMOGIP merely monitored violations of the Ceasefire Line. 'Few UN forces can have spent so much effort over so many years to so little purpose.' Even as the tourists kept coming and investment trickled in, Kashmir festered.\n\nIn India and Pakistan the issue refused to go away. But with both countries facing formidable obstacles to national integration elsewhere, efforts to resolve the conflict were sporadic and often hostage to domestic affairs. From the nation-building of the 1950s and early '60s India and Pakistan would emerge as two very different states; and it was these differences \u2013 constitutional, international and psychological \u2013 that would propel Kashmir back to the top of the South Asian agenda and set both nations on a new collision course.\n\n##\n\n## Past Conditional\n\nHistorical judgements are notoriously unreliable; often they say more about the present than the past. By the 1980s the period in India known as the Nehru years (1947\u201364) was reckoned to have been a nation-building success, while the Ayub Khan years in Pakistan (1958\u201369) were accounted a calamitous precedent. Yet by the end of the century it was the other way round: Nehru's 'Years of Hope and Achievement' were being portrayed as 'wasted years' and the Ayub Khan era was hailed as Pakistan's 'golden decade'. A 'Shining India' poised to dazzle the world with its economic performance was wondering why it had taken half a century to get there, while a guttering Pakistan looked back with near nostalgia to the promise and comparative prosperity that had illuminated its adolescence.\n\nContemporary history, with its reliance on prolific comment but restricted-access documentation, can be made to say pretty much what one wants. All that can be safely ventured in respect of the Nehru and Ayub years is that, at the time, it is likely that neither matched up to any of the above characterisations. Wafts of doubt obscured their wider import. Images of the period convey as much uncertainty as confidence; their never-bright shades of Pakistani green and Indian vermillion have been touched up by posterity's preference for hard acrylic glosses.\n\nIn Pakistan, despite the fervour engendered by statehood, there were grounds for gloom right from the start. In fact the country's first crisis of confidence came almost immediately and, by furnishing a pretext for the Ayub era, contributed to the later contest over that era's significance. Few if any new nations can have found the odds so heavily stacked against them. To the obvious challenges \u2013 those of agreeing a constitution, forging an administration, accommodating a deluge of refugees, bridging the 1,500 kilometres that divided the two halves of the country, integrating peoples sharing neither ethnicity nor language, conciliating elites unaccustomed to accountability, planning a modern economy, balancing a hopelessly lopsided budget and conducting a war with India \u2013 to all of these was added the still greater conundrum of defining what the new nation actually stood for.\n\nEven Jinnah seems to have had no clear vision of what sort of state Pakistan should aspire to be. Proclaimed as a haven and homeland for South Asia's 'Muslim nation', the country would have been swamped had all sixty million of India's Muslims moved there. Hence no appeal for such an exodus had been issued. On the contrary, in 1950 a pact with India was belatedly signed that discouraged migration, both of Muslims into Pakistan and of non-Muslims out of Pakistan. Luckily, in the immediate aftermath of Partition only a fraction of India's Muslims had actually crossed the border. But of Pakistan's slightly smaller non-Muslim community nearly all of those in its western wing had removed to India.\n\nSince its eastern wing (in which Hindus still made up around 18 per cent of the population) was habitually discounted by Pakistan's leadership, this rather upset the equilibrium whereby one country would treat its main minority \u2013 Muslims in India, Hindus in Pakistan \u2013 as 'hostages' for the fair treatment of its outnumbered brethren in the other. It also raised a question mark over what Jinnah had intended in his much-quoted speech on the eve of Independence about religion being 'nothing to do with the business of the state' ('You are free to go to your temples... your mosques or to any other place of worship... we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State'). Was he indicating that an inclusive Pakistan was to be as doctrinally neutral as Nehru's India? Or was he simply responding to the needs of the moment by reassuring the Hindu community that there was no need for them to leave? In later speeches he took a more partisan line, praising the Quran as a comprehensive guide to all human activity and referring to Pakistan's future as that of 'a truly great Islamic state'. He may have experienced a change of heart; more probably he was just glossing the obvious \u2013 that Pakistanis being mostly Muslims, the Quran must be honoured, and that the state could be described as Islamic in the general sense in which the British Isles, say, were Christian. And even supposing he had finally come round to the idea that the state must actually privilege Islam, what form should an Islam-based state take?\n\nJinnah himself, a Shi'i by birth but decidedly Westernised in his tastes and 'famously ambivalent about his understanding of the relationship between Islam and politics', offered no answer to this question. Nor seemingly did anyone else. According to Mazar Ali Khan, a distinguished Pakistani journalist (and the father of another, Tariq Ali), sometime in the late 1960s the question received a public airing. A.K. Brohi, the lawyer who would become 'the midnight counsellor' to President Ziaul Haq, placed an advertisement in the Pakistan press.\n\nTo anyone who could derive from the teachings of Quran a pattern for a constitution for Pakistan he would give a prize of rupees 5,000. This was when 5,000 meant something \u2013 that is before heroin [fuelled inflation]. But nobody did. I'm no scholar of Islam but this much I know: Islamic teachings offer nothing which could be read as a constitutional blueprint or a pattern for the government of a country.\n\nIf anything, Quranic exegesis suggests that an Islamic nation state is a contradiction in terms. Sovereignty lies with Allah; laws are preordained by the _sharia_ , whose interpretation rests with the scholarly _ulama._ 'A role for the masses and their legislating representatives depends on the questionable assumption that this sovereignty has been devolved to the people by some divine dispensation.' Even then the recipient of this sovereignty is said to be the _umma_ of _dar-ul-Islam_ , __ or the worldwide Muslim community, a supranational entity that transcends all lesser ethnic, territorial and political loyalties. '[The] uncertainties that stemmed from conflicting perceptions of Pakistan's identity as a nation-state defined by territorial borders and as a Muslim state created in opposition to territorial nationalism' were not about to go away. Islam, instead of cementing Pakistan's integration, would prove highly divisive.\n\nJinnah and the Muslim League had certainly established a state for over half of British India's Muslims; yet Muslim doctrine, when not undermining that state's legitimacy, directed its subjects to look beyond national frontiers and in a spirit of brotherhood to engage in the struggles of the wider _dar-ul-Islam_. Hence intervention in Kashmir, whether by warlike volunteers or the government, was as much about fulfilling a religious duty as securing more territory for Pakistan, and similarly in respect of confrontation with India over any perceived injustices inflicted on its Muslim minority. It is such contradictions between the universal Islam of Quranic orthodoxy and the Islamic nationalism of the Muslim League that led Farzana Shaikh, writing in 2009, to identify the search for a consensus about the meaning of Islam as 'the cancer that threatens Pakistan's body politic'.\n\nThe problem had surfaced within weeks of Partition when in 1947 Pakistan's Constituent Assembly had met to formulate a Constitution. Quranic reasoning, with its emphasis on the influential role of the scholarly _ulama_ and its ambivalence about democratic sovereignty, had previously persuaded doctrinally-based parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami to oppose the League's demand for a sovereign Pakistan. They were nevertheless keen to be consulted now that Pakistan was a reality. Well represented within the provincial assemblies and the Constituent Assembly, they would press hard for constitutional acknowledgement of Islam's role and for the _ulama_ 's right to advise on government policy.\n\nThe Muslim League, on the other hand, was at a considerable disadvantage. Unlike the Congress Party in India, it lacked organisational and ideological cohesion, and had been an effective force for barely a decade. At the provincial level, it had swept to power only in 1946 when the prospect of imminent independence had brought well-entrenched power-brokers in Punjab, Sind, the NWFP and East Bengal flocking to its standard. To them, the League was essentially a single-issue party; and once that issue \u2013 i.e. Pakistan \u2013 had been won, there was little to hold them together. Particularisms of language, ethnicity and social organisation, plus competition for jobs and investment, reasserted themselves. The League found itself with formidable opponents within its own ranks.\n\nThe League's national leadership was at a further disadvantage in that it lacked an obvious power base in Pakistan. The arena in which Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan and most of the League's other leading lights had come to prominence had been the All-India Muslim League, whose roots lay not in those regions in the north-west and Bengal that now comprised Pakistan but in India itself, especially UP, the Central Provinces, Bombay and Calcutta. To command support within Pakistan's Constituent Assembly and the administration, the League's central leadership was therefore obliged to conciliate not only the Islamic parties and various regional parties but also its own provincial leaderships.\n\nHad Jinnah lived, his vision for Pakistan might have crystallised. His stature might then have ensured nationwide acceptance for whatever he ordained. As it was, his legacy was sufficiently ambiguous merely to fuel contention. As Prime Minister and, after Jinnah's death, in effect President, Liaquat Ali Khan assumed the reins of power and the role of executor for the _Quaid-i-Azam_ 's legacy. He too, while acknowledging the supremacy of Islam, continued to insist that the Constitution be based on sovereignty having been delegated to the people. This 'naturally eliminates any danger of the establishment of a theocracy', according to the Basic Objectives Resolution adopted in 1949 as a framework document for the Constitution. But the Objectives included no mention of secularism as such, and declared that the state should be Islamic, democratic and federal (the last being a reassertion of Jinnah's pre-Partition preference for provincial autonomy). The secular-minded therefore saw the Objectives as a victory for the Islamic parties, and the Resolution was passed only on the understanding that new elections to the provincial assemblies would be held. These took place in 1952 and, though based on a restricted franchise, did nothing either to ease the central government's worries or to diminish the legitimacy of the new provincial assemblies as against that of the unchanged national Constituent Assembly.\n\nIn succession to Pakistan's last British Commander-in-Chief, Liaquat appointed a like-minded general, the pipe-smoking Ayub Khan. Both men cultivated friendly relations with the US whose interest in Pakistan as a front-line state on the periphery of the Soviet Union promised more substantial dividends than anything on offer from the cash-strapped UK. Washington, though, was slow to respond; and barely two years into his rule, on 16 October 1951, while addressing a public meeting in Rawalpindi, Liaquat Ali Khan, like Jinnah, was lost to the cause. He was assassinated by a hired gunman who was himself killed in the hail of bullets that followed. 'The nation's martyr' duly joined 'the great leader' in Pakistan's founding mythology, but it was a measure of the country's insecurity that the assassin's paymasters were never identified. Possibly they objected to Liaquat's US bias, possibly they feared that he was about to reverse it, or just as possibly they were serving some domestic interest that no one cared to probe too deeply.\n\nTwice orphaned, still without a constitution, still without most of Jammu and Kashmir, and with trouble already brewing in its eastern wing, by 1952 the infant dominion looked doomed to the disillusionment predicted for it by India's sceptics. In New Delhi, Nehru's Congress, buoyed by a resounding victory in the first national elections, ruled unchallenged; but in Karachi factionalism and corruption discredited the League's leadership and undermined the administration. 'It is not surprising that Pakistan had six prime ministers and one commander-in-chief in eight years (1950\u201358) whereas in the same period India had one prime minister and six commanders-in-chief.' The institutional balance of power was already shifting decisively north, away from the political manoeuvring in Karachi to the shady swards of the military cantonments in Rawalpindi. In 1951 a bureaucrat with military connections took over as Governor-General, and in 1953 another, the ex-Ambassador to the USA, was installed as Prime Minister. Although neither had ever stood for election, their representative credentials were not that much worse than those of Constituent Assembly members who had been indirectly chosen by the provincial assemblies, themselves elected on a limited franchise back in 1946 when Pakistan was just an exciting slogan. 'No more representative than it was sovereign, the Constituent Assembly was thus doubly vulnerable.'\n\nDemocratic representation, however tenuous, nevertheless offered the best avenue for the redress of regional disputes. These were many, and ranged from open revolt in Balochistan and resentment of the immigrant _muhajirs_ from India who were swamping Sind to a mischievous pogrom in Punjab (it was directed at members of the Ahmadi community, followers of a nineteenth-century quasi-prophet whom the orthodox regarded as heretical). No grievances, though, were more acute than those being voiced amid the tangled rivers and teeming fields of distant East Bengal.\n\n*\n\nWith a population equal to that of all Pakistan's other provinces combined, East Bengal ought to have been calling the shots. Additionally, its jute industry was Pakistan's main source of foreign earnings; indeed in the early 1950s the industry was enjoying something of a bonanza thanks to the high demand for hessian by the Western allies fighting in Korea (it was used, among other things, for sandbags). Yet East Bengalis were enjoying none of the benefits. They barely figured in Pakistan's armed forces or its civil service; and in the administration and judiciary they were represented by Westernised luminaries like the mercurial Calcutta politician Husayn Shaheed Suhrawardy, or Khwaja Nazimuddin, a member of the former Nawab of Dhaka's family who had succeeded Jinnah as Governor-General. Public services were almost non-existent, and any investment, notably in jute processing, came in the form of concessions to foreign firms. The typically poor farmers and sharecroppers of the province were no better off under West Pakistan's colonial-style rule than they had been in their 'rural slum' under the British. Their only strength lay in their superior numbers and their marked politicisation, which various parties, Islamist, peasant and Communist, strove to mobilise.\n\nIn 1950 this simmering resentment found a soft target in East Bengal's still substantial Hindu community. As landowners, shopkeepers, money-lenders and professionals, some Hindus had decided to stay put in 1947; and their example had been followed by the larger and more widely dispersed underclass of low-caste and casteless Hindus. Heightened in part by communal tension over Kashmir, popular hostility towards the Hindu elite now turned into resentment of all Hindus. East Bengali Hindus of any class were seen as scapegoats for the province's essentially social and industrial grievances. Official sanction for this anti-Hindu sentiment came in the form of legislation over the size of landholdings and the criteria for public employment, both of which discriminated against Hindus. Harassment and the looting of Hindu properties followed, engendering widespread fear and the first major exodus across the still ill-defined frontier into India.\n\nThe effect was instantly apparent in Calcutta.\n\nSuddenly, inexplicably, at the beginning of 1950, what had been a slow and steady trickle of refugees from East Bengal began to swell into a stream. They were coming from Khulna across the delta, a district in East Bengal with a Hindu majority, only 25 miles from Calcutta and as difficult to cordon off as one Berlin from another.\n\nTaya Zinkin, now a reporter working for the _Manchester Guardian_ , watched as the stream of humanity swelled into a tide that overwhelmed India's largest city. The Indian sense of outrage was heightened when a visit to East Bengal by the Chief Minister of West Bengal prompted a general riot in Dhaka. More Hindu properties were ransacked, and some four hundred lost their lives. Retribution came swiftly. In West Bengal several thousand Muslim men, women and children, many of whom had fled to Calcutta from riot-torn Bihar in 1946, were massacred by Mahasabha-led zealots. 'I had seen horror in plenty, in Spain at the beginning of the civil war, above all in Delhi at Partition, but never before had I seen such bestiality,' wrote Zinkin after picking her way through the mangled corpses in the killing yards of Howrah. It was Partition's 'madness' all over again. So much for 'the hostage theory', whereby fair treatment of one nation's minority would be seen as a safeguard for fair treatment of the other nation's minority. On both sides of the border, the vernacular press carried demands for war. United in shock, Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan promised inquiries and confidence-building measures.\n\nSuch conciliatory gestures from Pakistan's power-brokers in Karachi did nothing to endear them to their East Bengali subjects. Nor did their centralising tendencies, as displayed over the matter of a national language. More than relations with India or contortions over Islam, it was this purely domestic issue that would expose the fragility of Pakistan. Bengalis spoke Bengali, a medium with a cultural pedigree second to none and which, given East Bengal's numerical superiority, was spoken by more Pakistanis than any other language. It was, though, incomprehensible to speakers of Punjabi, Sindi, Pashtu and the other tongues of West Pakistan. It was therefore deemed unsuitable as the national language. Jinnah had said as much himself when in 1948 he had decreed that Pakistan's official language must be Urdu. Protesters had immediately taken to the streets in Dhaka; for once the _Quaid-i-Azam_ had been happy to leave the final decision to the deadlocked Constituent Assembly.\n\nUrdu was scarcely any more popular in the provinces of Pakistan's western wing. Originally the hybrid lingua franca of the Mughal army, it was written in a suitably Islamic script and had since been enriched by writers and poets. But in pre-Partition India it had been the native tongue principally of the urban Muslim elite. Its adoption for national purposes of education and administration would therefore empower those _muhajirs_ who had migrated from such rarefied milieux and who included most of the League's leadership.\n\nBeloved of the Karachi bureaucrats, Urdu was further resented in East Bengal on account of its association with the court of Dhaka's erstwhile Nawabs. Typical of this conservative East Bengali elite was the urbane Khwaja Nazimuddin who, having swapped the governor-generalship for the prime ministership, in 1952 confirmed in Dhaka that Urdu was indeed to be the national language. The news sparked a furore. Dhaka's students called a general strike, which was supported by various popular groups including the newly formed Awami League. When the demonstrations threatened to get out of hand, the government panicked and the police were ordered to open fire. Four students were killed in the fracas, many injured, and the army had to be called in to restore normality. It was a harbinger of things to come. 'The Dhaka killings', a phrase denied to the earlier slaughter of Hindus and reserved exclusively for this comparatively modest affair involving Bengali nationalism, 'sealed the League's fate in East Bengal'. The killings also signalled the beginning of the province's second freedom struggle and would provide the future Bangladesh with its first martyrs.\n\nProvincial elections in East Bengal, postponed in 1952 because of the language riots, were eventually held in 1954. The results were no less dramatic for being wholly predictable. A variety of left-leaning parties dominated by the Awami League swept to power, while the Muslim League limped away with just ten seats out of over three hundred. Among the losers were the entire Bengali contingent in the Constituent Assembly in Karachi. The victors then formed a United Front government and immediately demanded the resignation of these Constituent Assembly members, a move which would end the League's dominance in the highest institution in the land.\n\nIf a state without a constitution can be said to face a constitutional crisis, this was it. East Bengal was finally throwing its demographic weight into the scales. 'Over half of Pakistan's citizens, all resident in its most inaccessible... province, were opposed to the priorities, policies and constitutional proposals being pursued by the central government. Dhaka and Karachi were on a collision course.'\n\nThe collision was averted only by the suspension of East Bengal's new government and the imposition of direct rule. Serious ethnic conflict in the jute mills provided a pretext, as did the indiscreet comments of Fazul Huq, the United Front's octogenarian leader; to eager Indian listeners he had confided his regrets over the partition of Bengal and his hopes for East Bengal's 'independence'. This was treason in Pakistani eyes. With the approval of Commander-in-Chief Ayub Khan, General Iskander Mirza, a hardline ex-army Defence Secretary, was despatched to Dhaka as Governor. Mirza immediately prorogued the new assembly and placed the province under Governor's rule, an expedient available under the British-legislated Government of India Act of 1935 which, in the absence of a new constitution, still applied. Over a thousand people were arrested, including the young Awami League activist Mujibur Rahman. Public debate was quashed. What Bengalis ridiculed as West Pakistan's 'chocolate raj' was adopting the strong-arm tactics of its pale-skinned predecessor.\n\nIn the light of these events, politicians of every hue began to fear for their authority, and none more so than those in the Constituent Assembly in Karachi. Exposed as less representative than ever, the Assembly sought to forestall its own suspension by reining in the powers of the Governor-General. This merely precipitated the inevitable. Plotted in a London hotel room, the decisive coup of October 1954 was consummated in another bedroom, that of the ailing Governor-General Ghulam Mohamed. Apparently in an agony of backache at the time, the Governor-General lay wrapped in a sheet and rolling on the floor. 'He was bursting with rage, emitting volleys of abuse, which, luckily, no one understood.' Generals Mirza and Ayub Khan, acting in consort, urged a reconciliation between the Governor-General on the one hand and the fearful Prime Minister on the other. But this, it transpired, could be achieved only by the dissolution of the Assembly. According to Ayub Khan, he was himself then invited to take over the reins of state. He refused. The Assembly was dissolved regardless. An emergency government was formed with both Mirza and Ayub Khan in its Cabinet; and a new Constituent Assembly was swiftly selected by the lately installed provincial assemblies. Under orders to expedite the long-awaited Constitution, it got down to business immediately.\n\nIn 1955 Mirza, who had by now relinquished the governorship of East Bengal, himself replaced the ailing Governor-General. To accommodate the demands of the East Bengalis he announced the formation of a bipartite Pakistan: East Bengal would constitute one unit as 'East Pakistan', and all the remaining provinces would be grouped together in another unit as 'West Pakistan'. Known as the One-Unit scheme, it won the support of influential Bengalis like Suhrawardy, who in 1956 served as Prime Minister, but it encountered strong opposition from the downgraded provinces of West Pakistan, and in particular from Punjab, which was much the largest and most assertive of these.\n\n*\n\nMeanwhile, goaded into action by the junta of bureaucrats and generals, the new Constituent Assembly produced in nine months what its predecessor had failed to deliver in nine years. The country's first Constitution, promulgated in 1956, declared Pakistan 'an Islamic republic' yet did little to substantiate its Islamic credentials. The Governor-General was replaced by a president, which meant Mirza changing his ceremonial dress. National elections were promised, though never held. And the Constituent Assembly simply became the National Assembly. Prime ministers appointed by it came and went. There were four in as many years, most of them nominees of President Mirza and his associates. 'The whole situation was becoming curiouser and curiouser,' recalled an Ayub Khan pretending to be as bemused as Alice in Wonderland.\n\nIn West Pakistan, squabbles between remnants of the Muslim League and various other parties over control of their 'one unit' turned first vicious, then violent as each formed their own militias. In Karachi the cavalcade of prime ministers meant that a third of the Assembly's members now held Cabinet rank, And in Dhaka, governors were being dismissed and administrations toppled with a rapidity that even contemporaries found confusing. Matters there reached a climax when in September 1958, during\n\na second brawl in the East Bengal provincial assembly, the Deputy Speaker was felled by a missile, said to have been either a desktop or a chair. He died as a result. The province's military authorities thereupon recommended armed intervention; otherwise, it was claimed, the province would dissolve into chaos. Meanwhile, a similar request had come from Balochistan, at the opposite extremity of the country, where the Khan of Kalat, a hereditary leader, had hoisted his ancestral standard in an apparent bid for autonomy. 'The hour had struck,' recalled C-in-C Ayub Khan. 'The responsibility could no longer be put off.' It was time for what he liked to call 'The Revolution'.\n\nWhen the trouble erupted, the C-in-C happened to be enjoying a spot of fishing in Nagar, one of the mountain statelets that comprised the Northern Areas. He returned to Rawalpindi and then took the train for Karachi. President General Mirza, he would later claim, had already decided that the political chaos must be ended. Pakistan was demonstrably unready for democracy. Assailed from within and without, and with even the armed forces in danger of being infected by the strife, the country's very survival was in jeopardy. A period of stability was needed, and the army alone could guarantee it. Of all the institutions of state only the army had emerged from the aftermath of Partition in a functional form. It was a source of stability and pride in the western provinces from where it was recruited, and it was as yet untainted by the political chaos. To many it seemed more responsible and no less representative than the politicians.\n\nOn 7 October 1958, after another round of ministerial musical chairs in Karachi, it was not the hour that struck, as per Ayub Khan's diagnosis, but the generals. President Mirza and C-in-C Ayub Khan abrogated the two-year-old Constitution, proclaimed martial law throughout both units of the country, dismissed all the assemblies, and named Ayub himself as Chief Martial Law Administrator (CMLA). Troops moved into Balochistan. More took over the nation's ports and airports, radio and telegraph stations. Political parties were banned, the press was muzzled, and the judiciary washed its hands of responsibility under a recently formulated doctrine of necessity \u2013 'That which otherwise is not lawful, necessity makes lawful,' according to the courts. There was almost no opposition. Relief was more in evidence than outrage. The country's first flirtation with representative government was over; 'and thus began [its] long experiment with autocracy and oligarchy, with democratic tendencies bursting through from time to time'.\n\nIn a matter of weeks it appeared that 'the responsibility that could no longer be put off' could not amicably be shared either: the hatchet-faced Mirza was put on a plane to London for a long and comfortable retirement. To this happy dumping ground, others \u2013 presidents, prime ministers, generals and dissidents \u2013 would follow him over the years. According to Ayub, Mirza had been intriguing behind his back and had 'got cold feet'; he favoured a speedier return to civilian rule than Ayub thought advisable. 'One man was thinking days, the other years. The years won.' Surrounded by a group of more amenable associates, among them a still floppy-haired Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (the son of Junagadh's last _Dewan_ ), __ Ayub Khan began his controversial decade in power.\n\n*\n\nCome the fiftieth anniversary of Independence in 1997, the Indian political scientist Sunil Khilnani would mark the occasion with an incisive retrospective entitled _The Idea of India._ Seven years later Stephen Philip Cohen, an American specialist, followed suit with _The Idea of Pakistan._ Both works re-examine the formative eras of, respectively, Nehru and Ayub Khan, and both have been highly acclaimed. Neither is a comparative study, but they may perhaps be juxtaposed. It might, for instance, be thought significant that, while an Indian academic took on India, it fell to an American academic to dissect Pakistan. Of more immediate relevance is the revisionist rigour of the India book compared to the alarmist tone of the Pakistan book. Khilnani kicks off with fifty pages on the novelty and importance of Indian democracy, followed by chapters on the economy, urbanisation and Indian identity. The nature of this Indian identity is found to be contentious, but there is no doubting its centrality; nor that of the state as the keel of India's stability. The country's trajectory is revealed as a steady, if ponderous, progression.\n\nCohen is much more cautious. His chapter headings \u2013 'The Army's Pakistan', 'Political Pakistan', 'Islamic Pakistan', 'Regionalism and Separatism' \u2013 read like a checklist of unresolved issues. They hint at repetitious crises and profound uncertainty about the very concept of Pakistan. Though no doom-saying Jeremiah, Cohen addresses the proposition that Pakistan, 'the first post-World War II state to break up', is slated to become the next 'failed state'. Five types of failure are offered; Pakistan is found to conform to four of them. Even as Cohen was writing, 'it was thought to be on the verge of collapse or rogue status...' Thus, while India's ailments invite forensic diagnosis, Pakistan's plight cries out for the defibrillator. It was ever so. Beset by a bipartite configuration, an assertive military tradition, ambivalence over the role of Islam and a persecution complex in respect of its Indian sibling, Karachi was struggling from infancy. Partition had been no more even-handed in doling out the prospective health risks than it had in divvying up the princely states.\n\nBack in 1958, nowhere was Pakistan's conspicuous failure as an operational democracy more cruelly exposed than in neighbouring India. Both new nations had had to face identical challenges. Constitutions had to be drawn up, social injustices of caste\/class and gender redressed, nationwide elections held on a universal franchise, economic plans formulated, international postures adopted and fissiparous tendencies contained. Yet while Pakistan had failed on nearly all counts, India, despite its far more daunting scale, could claim a reasonable degree of success.\n\nThe credit for this is rightly given to the vision, energy and political skills of the Westernised intellectual in the long coat and tight cotton leggings that was Jawaharlal Nehru. Pakistan had lost both Jinnah and Liaquat in its first five years. India, too, had lost Gandhi and then Sardar Patel (to natural causes in 1950). Nehru alone remained. An unassailable symbol of the freedom struggle, he came to embody the Indian nation's ambitious transformation. Unlike Jinnah, from both instinct and study he knew the sort of country he wanted, and insisted that it was this 'idea of India' that would prevail. The _mahatma_ and the _sardar_ were widely mourned, but their deaths had simplified matters by removing two focal figures whose visions had often conflicted with Nehru's. Gandhi's utopian dream of a self-sufficient village-based economy had led him to suggest dispensing with all instruments of state power and disbanding even the Congress Party. Conversely, Patel had had little patience with particularist sensibilities, and seemed to favour an India that was authoritarian, conservative and unapologetically Hindu, in fact not far removed from that promoted by the ultra-nationalists of the Mahasabha and Jana Sangh. Neither man was without disciples; their legacies would linger on; but they would have to contend within Nehru's vision of a centralised, egalitarian, secular and socialist republic.\n\nThese properties were enshrined in the Indian Constitution, which Ramachandra Guha, in his own chapter entitled 'Ideas of India', reckons 'probably the longest in the world'. Drafted by numerous committees, and debated at length in a Constituent Assembly that was no more representative than that in Pakistan, the Constitution's 395 articles and eight schedules passed into law on 26 January 1950. Nehru's championship, Patel's negotiating skills and the well-drilled Congress majority in the Assembly had ensured a smooth passage. The Indian Union had become the Republic of India, and the princely states had been swept under its multi-coloured carpet.\n\nIn a land with little in the way of indigenous constitutional precedents such an elaborate document was both a novelty and a source of pride. It was not, though, without inconsistency. 'Democracy in India is only a top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic,' warned Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the leader of India's Dalits (then known as Untouchables or _Harijans_ ), who was also the legal brain that had undertaken much of the Constitution's actual drafting. Drawing on the constitutions of Western Europe and North America, it guaranteed equal rights to every individual \u2013 but this in a society that traditionally discounted individualism and was about as unequal as could be.\n\nOther contradictions followed from this. Khilnani notes two. One was a 'tension over citizenship'. All Indians were equal in theory, but because in practice so many were victims of the rankest discrimination, a special schedule stipulated affirmative action for the most disadvantaged castes and communities. This was entirely laudable, yet by reserving a quota of educational places and public service jobs exclusively for, say, Dalits, the Constitution empowered an entire community rather than its individual members. To qualify, therefore, communities were well advised to stress their solidarity, which led to fierce inter-community competition and block votes being traded for promises of 'scheduled status'. 'The Constitution, and the politics it sanctioned, thus reinforced community identities rather than sustaining a sense of common citizenship based on individual rights.'\n\nThe other 'line of tension' noted by Khilnani was that between the powers awarded to the central government and those awarded to the provincial, or now 'state', governments. Naturally, certain specified subjects were reserved to each: defence, for instance, was the responsibility of the centre and sales taxes of the states. A few areas, like education, agriculture and land redistribution, were shared, the centre having directive powers but the states being responsible for implementation; this led to the well-founded suspicion that land-owning interests might piously uphold redistributive measures in Parliament confident in the knowledge that they would be diluted or deferred at the state level.\n\nBut more so than in other federal constitutions, the authority of the centre was to be paramount. Tucked away as Article 365, the central government reserved to itself in the person of the republic's President the right to suspend any state government on the advice of its Governor, himself a central appointee. This decidedly authoritarian provision, though appropriate enough to the British raj that had formulated it, would be much resented when invoked to browbeat or topple democratically mandated state governments that declined to toe the central government's line. In practice federalism seemed more a sop to regional sentiment than a brake on the exercise of central authority.\n\nArming the state with more powers than seemed strictly necessary was thought essential if the redress of inequalities and the radical reform of the economy were not to be stalled. It was no less vital in terms of containing dissent and promoting the integration of what was surely the world's most excessively compartmentalised nation. Such was the agglomeration of different religions, castes, tribes, cultures, language groups and colonial enclaves that many international observers doubted the feasibility of an Indian nation. The franchise gave all a say; but to very few did it give a taste of power. The recalcitrant and the disenchanted would readily resort to force, and the government would respond in kind. More political strife was experienced, and far more lives lost, in Nehru's India than in Ayub's Pakistan. Integration was not for the faint-hearted.\n\nIn the case of religion, divisive rivalries were supposed to have been blunted by Nehru's insistence on 'secularism'. The state was not anti-religion, but doctrinally neutral. Sikhs, Muslims, animists, Christians, Parsees, Jews, etc. were to enjoy the same religious freedoms as the over 80 per cent of the population who considered themselves Hindus. But with Hindus and Muslims on both sides of the Bengal border massacring one another even as the Constitution came into force in 1950, and with the Kashmir issue still far from resolved, many non-Muslims demanded a more partisan attitude from their leaders. Parties like the (Hindu) Jan Sangh and the (Sikh) Akali Dal would pander to such sentiments and show scant respect for the secular sensibilities of Nehru's Congress. From Kashmir to Kerala, Bengal to Gujarat, outbreaks of so-called 'communal' violence would be a constant.\n\nDealing with the princely states was less controversial. If Sardar Patel's greatest service had been that of securing their accession, his last had been that of integrating them. Riding roughshod over previous pledges about non-interference in the states' internal affairs, he pressured all but the largest states (e.g. Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir) into forming confederations. Such confederations were then either incorporated into India's existing provinces\/states or \u2013 as in the case of Rajasthan \u2013 made provinces\/states in their own right. Either way, any notion of the princes continuing to exercise their sovereign rights as per Mountbatten's reassurances was summarily dismissed.\n\nEven shorter shrift was given to non-princely opponents of national integration. Glorying in the nation's diversity \u2013 New Delhi's default position whenever separatists reared their heads \u2013 assumed a uniform acquiescence by all of India's peoples. The British raj had been characterised by gradations in rule that took account of local circumstance, historical happenstance and imperial convenience. Such inconsistency was anathema in a modern nation state. When in 1947 Gandhi had told a deputation from the Naga peoples of the far north-east that, if they preferred to be independent, 'no one can force you [to be part of India]', they had taken him at his word. But Nehru and Patel would have none of it. The Nagas' demands were 'absurd', according to Nehru; their mist-shrouded hills were as much part of Mother India as neighbouring Assam. In recognition of their distinctive ethnicity (Mongoloid), social configuration (clan-based) and confessional allegiance (largely Christian), the most the Nagas could hope for was a degree of preferential autonomy within the Indian republic.\n\nThis, however, was unacceptable to those in the Naga National Council who were already pledged to secure full independence. Though they had taken no part in India's long freedom struggle, many Nagas were quite prepared to die in their own. Incidents of violence quickly multiplied, much of the Naga country became a no-go area, and by 1954 the longest-running of all India's 'forgotten wars' was under way. It went largely unreported in the rest of India, and was little noticed outside. International goodwill towards the subcontinent's newly enfranchised millions discouraged scrutiny of an obscure conflict in its remotest extremity. Meanwhile, Indians tended to dismiss the Nagas as feather-wearing primitives with a propensity for headhunting and heavy drinking. They were, in short, 'tribals', just like the various _adivasi_ (or 'aboriginal') peoples who eked out a slash-and-burn existence in the less favoured margins of Bihar, Orissa and peninsular India. The Constitution afforded to these other 'tribals' various safeguards and integrational incentives, to which they responded by forming political parties and participating in the electoral process. Eventually some would win federal status for areas in which they were concentrated, like Jharkhand and Chattisgarh.\n\nThe Nagas, though suspect on account of their nostalgia for British rule and their attachment to the American-run Baptist missions, could have had a similar deal. In fact in the early 1960s they got one: Nehru responded to approaches from a moderate section of the Naga National Council by declaring 'Nagaland' the latest and smallest of India's constituent states. But it made little difference. Against the elusive 'insurgents' New Delhi had already seen fit to deploy 'one regiment of mountain artillery, seventeen battalions of infantry and fifty platoons of Assam Rifles'. Villages had been burned and atrocities committed by both sides. Meanwhile Angami Zapu Phizo, the Nagas' inspirational but intractable leader, had escaped into East Pakistan. From there he travelled to London, and finally won some press coverage for what he called 'the racial extermination' to which his 'Christian nation' was being subjected. A ceasefire in 1964 was at last followed by peace talks. Phizo seemed willing to settle for the sovereignty and qualified independence claimed by nearby Bhutan and Sikkim. Delhi would have none of it. By 1966 the killing, burning and abductions had resumed.\n\nNaga intransigence was sustained by a sense of ethnic, confessional and social distinction. Language was not a major bone of contention, partly because many Nagas had been schooled by the Baptist missionaries and spoke English. But elsewhere language \u2013 and the role, if any, to be awarded to English \u2013 was highly divisive. The Constitution was itself a battlefield. It recognised sixteen major languages in India and acknowledged several hundred others; but since many of the concepts it aired could not easily be expressed in any of them, it was actually written in English. This was regretted. English was not considered an Indian language and was tainted with imperialist associations. As in Pakistan, administrative convenience plus the need for democratic transparency demanded that there be one officially sanctioned national language; and patriotic sentiment demanded that it be an Indian one.\n\nNehru favoured Hindustani. As a hybrid of Hindi and Urdu it was confessionally neutral and widely understood in the north, although it was the first language of few and was not richly endowed with abstract nouns. Hindi itself had no subtler a vocabulary, but its deficiencies could be rectified. The philologists got to work, and soon Nehru was complaining that All India Radio had introduced so many Sanskritic neologisms that he couldn't recognise reports of his own speeches. Hindi was nevertheless spoken by more Indians than any other language. The 'Hindi belt' stretched right across northern and central India, from Rajasthan to Bengal. It was therefore the obvious choice as the official link language, and the Constitution did indeed say as much. But not unequivocally. There was first to be an official inquiry and a fifteen-year moratorium while Hindi won wider acceptance and refined its vocabulary of legal, constitutional and scientific terms. And during this switchover period English might continue to be used as an alternative official language.\n\nThis reprieve owed as much to politics as to linguistics. In the non-Hindi-speaking south, the elevation of Hindi was encountering intense hostility. Hindi and most other north Indian languages derive from Sanskrit; but in what would emerge as the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, the languages (respectively Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu) were of Dravidian origin. With their own scripts and grammatical structures, they differed as much from Hindi as did Japanese. Those who spoke them would thus be at a major disadvantage when Hindi became the language of government, administration and higher education. Ready access to qualifications, government service and public sector jobs, plus a sense of privileged identity, awaited the chosen language group; 'hard study, perpetual disparagement and a marginalised heritage would be the lot of the unchosen. Careers were at stake, vast communities affected.'\n\nThe south's preference was for English. It was already more widely used there than in the north and, as an alien tongue, posed a lesser threat to the primacy of the native languages. 'Hindi never; English ever' became the popular chant as Tamils took to the streets. Delhi's committee of inquiry upheld the decision in favour of Hindi, so further offending the south; but Nehru pledged that English would be retained for as long as the south insisted, so greatly upsetting the north. As the fifteen-year deadline of 1965 approached, feelings ran high. Hindi-speakers, championed by the Jana Sangh and other parties, defaced English signs, burnt vehicles with numberplates in English and terrorised tourist cities like Varanasi (Benares). It was worse in the south. There the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (DMK), a Dravidian party that was pledged to all things Tamil, happily added the language issue to its secessionist portfolio of grievances. Strikes crippled the Congress-led administration. From books to billboards and timetables, everything in Hindi was torched. When Tamil youths, four of them students, publicly torched themselves, the scenario closely resembled that of the 1952 language riots in East Bengal. The police opened fire; over sixty were killed.\n\nWith the death of Nehru in May 1964 it would be left to his successors to quell the troubles and reappraise the policy. In 1967 what Guha calls 'a virtual indefinite policy of bilingualism' was adopted. Hindi was confirmed as India's official language, but English was to be retained as an 'associate official language' for as long as the non-Hindi-speaking states cared to exercise a veto over its phasing out. In respect of education the package was presented as a 'three-language formula': schools were to teach a regional language (say, Tamil), the official language (Hindi), plus one other (almost invariably English). Thus was calm restored at the cost of a formula that bore rather heavily on young minds.\n\nHappily, though, childhood dedication would be vindicated. As Nehru had foreseen, the retention of English would bequeath to India a new generation of educated English-speakers well placed to cash in on the intellectual and scientific advances of an increasingly anglophone world. In the turn-of-century silicon economies, attracting inward talent, no less than outsourcing helplines, swept Indians into the global economy. English made all things possible, easing the path of emigrating Indians and reassuring incoming tourists. The literary heights were there to be stormed and the multinational corporations to be wooed. Midnight's business-class offspring would owe a rarely acknowledged debt to the 'Tamil martyrs' and the linguistic fudging of Nehru's 'wasted years'.\n\n*\n\nWhile the Nehru government agonised over the official language, another language-related issue of equally explosive potential had somewhat confusingly interposed itself. The provinces of British India had developed from the so-called presidencies of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. Often they embraced more than one main language group, and just as often their geographical boundaries bisected language groups. Congress, on the other hand, had long since opted to base its regional organisation on the country's linguistic divisions. This proclaimed respect for local cultures, made them easier to mobilise and, come Independence, would facilitate the imposition of this linguistic geography on the political geography of the British. Thus, for example, instead of a vast polyglot Bombay province, there might be two smaller states corresponding to its main ethno-linguistic components, notably Gujarati-speakers in the north and Marathi-speakers in the south. (Sind, now in Pakistan, had been detached from Bombay on the grounds of both religion and language in the 1930s.)\n\nThere was no question that this linguistic 'states reorganisation' would be implemented. All parties were in favour. It was just a question of when. Nehru was in no hurry. After the upheavals of Independence, a wholesale reorganisation of the country's constituent states could hardly be considered a high priority; nor, in the fallout from Partition, could the creation of a host of new and potentially disruptive regional entities. He therefore temporised; the Constitution ignored the question and Congress consigned its consideration to a committee. This, by endorsing both the principle and the need for patience, merely fired up linguistic nationalists throughout the country. In the north, Sikhs demanded the division of India's slice of the Punjab into Punjabi-speaking and Hindi-speaking states; it was no coincidence that the former would for once give the Sikhs a narrow majority. In the west, both Gujarati- and Marathi-speakers laid voluble claim not just to their majority areas but to Bombay itself. And in the south, speakers of all four Dravidian languages sallied forth in support of their prospective states, with none mobilising more energetically than the speakers of Telugu.\n\nSecond only to Hindi in numerical terms, Telugu-speakers were divided between Hyderabad state and the northern part of Madras province. Their identity was thus imperilled and their voting strength split by the Tamil majority in Madras and by minorities speaking Urdu and other languages in Hyderabad. A Telugu state, which was to be named Andhra after an ancient Telugu dynasty, would rectify this. And its champions were not prepared to wait. Backed by parties ranging from the Mahasabha to the Communists, Telugu leaders organised strikes and fasts and rattled even Congress by enticing defectors from its ranks. The final straw came in 1952 when the fifty-eight-day fast of a Telugu-speaking Gandhian called Potti Sriramulu ended in his death. Incensed supporters brought the state to a standstill and clashed with police. Several were killed, government buildings were attacked, trains and buses halted. Though painfully aware that conceding one linguistic state would only encourage other demands, Nehru capitulated. A Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh came into being in October 1953.\n\nThe clamour for further adjustments elsewhere was met by the setting up of a States' Reorganisation Committee. Reporting in 1955, this recommended various changes: the remaining three language groups in the south were to be given their own states \u2013 Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala \u2013 and several changes were made to the Hindi-belt states. But the Sikh demand in the Punjab was put on hold, and a suggestion that an inland Marathi-speaking state be carved from Bombay, leaving the rest of the state bilingual, satisfied no one. There the report was met with massive riots and more deaths, as were several attempts to revise it. The trouble rumbled on till 1960. By then the electoral consequences of alienating such an important Congress stronghold had become as apparent as the discontent. Once again it was time to bow to popular pressure and the constraints of the ballot box. Bombay was divided into Gujarat and Maharashtra, the former being augmented with the addition of the princely states of Saurashtra (Junagadh among them) and the latter being awarded the prize of metropolitan Bombay. Once again pragmatism had come to the rescue of principle.\n\nIn retrospect, the linguistic reorganisation would be reckoned a success. Far from encouraging separatist tendencies it removed a major source of conflict and 'resulted in rationalising the political map of India without weakening its unity'. But in the state capitals it did encourage a more assertive federalism. The fourteen linguistically constituted states of 1960 would soon double in number as more groups adopted similar tactics. State governments would grow more confident in taking on the central government; and by the 1980s state parties based on particular language or caste groups would be well enough represented in the Delhi Parliament to be critical components in the coalitions that increasingly held power at the national level.\n\n*\n\nIf Tamil Nadu had led the agitation against Hindi as the official language and Andhra the demand for the linguistic reorganisation of the states, it was another southern state, Kerala, that posed the nearest thing to an ideological challenge. More to the international community's surprise than India's, in 1957 Kerala's voters returned to the state assembly the world's first-ever freely elected Communist government. At the same elections (state and national elections were being held simultaneously) the Communist Party won twenty-seven seats in the Lok Sabha, the national Parliament's lower house, so consolidating its nationwide position as the largest opposition party. These gains were thought highly significant at the time. The Cold War was at its height; the Hungarian uprising had just been ruthlessly suppressed and Maoist China was gearing up for its 'great leap forward'. In the previous months China's Zhou Enlai had twice been to India, while Russia's Bulganin and Khrushchev had just been rapturously f\u00eated during a state visit.\n\nNehru himself, though critical of Stalinist methods, greatly admired the social and industrial achievements of the Soviet bloc. To emulate them, he personally chaired the influential National Planning Commission which in 1956 rolled out the second and most ambitious of India's Five-Year Plans. Modelled on Soviet practice, this committed the government to a socialist pattern of development that prioritised the creation of an industrial base and insisted that strategic industries must be under state ownership. Manufacturing capacity backed by a revamped infrastructure would also reduce the country's dependence on imports, so reinforcing political sovereignty with the steel mesh of economic self-sufficiency. Expectations duly soared. Economists were consulted and foreign experts, many of them from Eastern Europe, abandoned their wives to the tropical sun and the hotel poolside as they fanned out across the country. Technical appraisals were drawn up for everything from engineering colleges to steel mills and hydro-electric dams.\n\n'India in the 1950s fell in love with the idea of concrete,' as Khilnani puts it. Liquid mix was apparently poured at the rate of ten tons a minute, sixteen hours a day for three years, just for the Bhakra-Nangal dam on the Beas river. Producing more coal, more power, more fertiliser, more steel sheet and tube became a national obsession. The front pages were an inky blur of production graphs and statistics, while what remained of the day's heavily rationed newsprint seemed reserved for government tenders. Research institutes and technical colleges proliferated. Between 1950 and 1965 the number of students studying engineering and technology at diploma or degree level shot up by 750 per cent. In every railway compartment there lurked an inquisitive M.Sc. Industry, science and technology were hailed as the new temples of progress, with proficiency in English as the key to admittance. 'That India can even think of participating in the globalisation process in today's [1999's] world of high technology,' declares a standard text, '... is largely due to the spadework done since Independence, particularly the great emphasis laid on human resource development in the sphere of science and technology.' Intended to provide India with the wherewithal for instant Soviet-style lift-off as one of Asia's industrial giants, this massive investment would take three decades to manifest a return, and then in the form of a joyful embrace of global capitalism.\n\nBut none of this was enough for the Communists of Kerala. With no industry to speak of, only glaring inequalities and high unemployment, Keralans were more concerned about workers' rights, agricultural incentives and the promised redistribution of landholdings. Unfortunately it was these that were being starved of funding and commitment by the planners' preference for rapid industrialisation. Thus the Communist Party of India, though lately a champion of armed insurrection and still suspected of taking its orders from Moscow, could honestly agree to work within the Constitution. The reforms it desired to enact were already national policy; they just weren't being effectively enforced. Kerala would show the way.\n\nTo win power in a state with a mind-boggling mix of castes and religions, the Party needed first to cultivate its own constituency. This it did with conspicuous success by becoming the mouthpiece and tool of the Ezhava caste. Originally tappers of the toddy palm, on which Kerala's connoisseurs depend for their hooch, the low-caste Ezhavas were no exception to the state's high rate of literacy. They were readily politicised. 'The Christians tend to vote for Congress,' reported Taya Zinkin on one of several visits, 'the Muslims usually vote for the (Indian) Muslim League, the [Ezhava] Toddy tappers are the heart of the Communist Party, and the [upper-caste] Nairs are split...'\n\nThere was nothing exceptional in all this. Its assertive castes and large Christian and Muslim minorities made Kerala something of a maverick state, but the affiliation of political parties with particular communities was standard practice. It was how democracy in India (and sporadically Pakistan) worked. Electoral politics were played out on a board whose counters represented entire communities. A party's job was simply to advance the interests of the community that had endorsed it \u2013 or forfeit that community's support. Communists, no less than Congress, had to play by these rules. As events would demonstrate, it was not India's susceptibility to Communist ideology that was being tested in Kerala, but the subordination of ideological principle to the exigencies of Indian electoral practice.\n\nThe Communist Party's 1957 victory was followed by a brief honeymoon. Death sentences were commuted, cases against political sympathisers were dismissed and a modest land reform was introduced to give tenants security of tenure. But the state's large tea and coffee plantations were not nationalised, nor was private enterprise penalised. The new government showed a marked respect for the Constitution, with E.M.S. Namboodiripad, its diminutive Chief Minister (a Stalinist with 'a dash of Khrushchevian common sense'), doing nothing to incur New Delhi's wrath. The criticism, muted at first but soon deafening, came from opposition parties within the state; and it focused less on policy than on moves they would themselves expect to take when in power, namely advancing issues dear to their main supporters.\n\nOf these, the most critical touched on the matter of education. Far more children, both male and female, attended school in Kerala than in any other state. Indeed, so great was the consequent appetite for reading material that some 140 Malayalam newspaper titles were published daily to assuage it. Many of the schools were denominational, and naturally they served to induct children into the traditions of their particular communities. The Nair Service Society was no different in this respect from the Catholic Church or the Muslim educational foundations. All received state grants, appointed and dismissed their own teachers and, within the constraints of national policy, chose their own curricula. Unwisely, the Communist government sought to change this by introducing an Education Bill. The Bill, which was supposed to improve the security of teaching jobs, would oblige schools to select their teachers from a list drawn up by the Public Service Commission; and such a list must, of course, conform to constitutional principle, with at least half its named teachers being drawn from those Backward Castes entitled to preferential public service access.\n\nThat meant prestigious jobs for the toddy-tapping Ezhavas and, through them, a chance to insinuate Communist-written textbooks. But as Zinkin put it, 'non-Toddy Tapper parents in Kerala did not want Toddy Tapper Communists to teach their children'. On this most sensitive issue, Christians and Muslims of every persuasion, plus most Hindus who were not of Scheduled Caste status, were as one. The government had foolishly stumbled on the single issue around which all its opponents could unite.\n\nThroughout 1958 the tension mounted. While in Pakistan the parliamentary brickbats were flying and Generals Mirza and Ayub Khan were readying themselves for 'The Revolution', in Kerala the revolutionaries were already on the run. The state's Congress Party led the charge, cynically savaging the Communist government for implementing reforms approved by Congress's own national leadership. Strikes were orchestrated and demonstrations held. In one such protest the demoralised police shot dead six Congress Party members, so adding misuse of power to an anti-Communist charge sheet that already included corruption, incompetence, maladministration and intimidation.\n\nMeanwhile the Supreme Court in Delhi was considering an appeal that had been lodged against the Education Bill as unconstitutional. The appeal was rejected; the Bill became law in early 1959. This brought forth Mannathu Padmanabhan, a Nair leader and revered disciple of the Mahatma whose eighty-one years had been spent in exemplary service to the community. Stomping the state in the best Gandhian tradition, the untouchable Padmanabhan (he was actually a Brahmin) urged mass civil disobedience and ensured that the schools remained closed for business. Pickets blocked the roads and strikers shut down all manner of public buildings; massive protest marches demanded the government's resignation. When the police broke up the demonstrations, more died and the gaols overflowed.\n\nWere the government to resign, it would mean another election; and against a united opposition, the Communists could only lose \u2013 lose office and lose face. Accordingly, in an unlikely move for a party dedicated to overthrowing the bourgeois Congress, they turned to New Delhi. Nehru had been partly responsible for legalising the Communist Party. He had just entertained the Soviet leadership, and was known to disapprove of the tactics employed by the Kerala Congress Party. He was now invited to visit Kerala and did so in June 1959, so pre-empting a massive march on Trivandrum, the capital. But he could neither persuade the Communists to resign nor convince himself to recommend their dismissal. In a taste of things to come, it was his daughter Indira, the then President of the Congress Party, who made his mind up for him. The big march had been rescheduled for early August. Even as it converged on Trivandrum, word came that the government had been dismissed and the assembly dissolved under Article 365. President's rule, administered by a directly appointed Governor, would take over until such time as new elections could be held.\n\nIn early 1960, the new elections duly returned to power the Congress-led coalition of non-Communist parties. But it was not the end of the road for Communism in Kerala. Though split by the rift between Moscow and Beijing, the Communists would be back in power after the following election, and thereafter Communist coalitions would continue to alternate with Congress coalitions indefinitely. The Party's Secretary had complained in 1957 that 'Communism within a democratic constitution is like capitalism without private enterprise.' But it was not the democratic provisions of the Constitution that were the Party's biggest problem. Rather was it the Constitution's interventionist provisions, plus the community-based peculiarities of Indian electoral practice. The Communists had learned their lesson. 'Twenty-eight months of rule in Kerala has made them a party like any other,' concluded Taya Zinkin.\n\nTaming ideological tigers was as integral to the process of nation-building as accommodating South Asia's many ethnic, linguistic and confessional separatisms. In general India was far more successful at this than its neighbours. Sri Lanka would be crippled by both ethno-linguistic and ideological challenges. So would Nepal. And Pakistan's failure to assuage mainly regional dissent, most notably in Bengal, would prove fatal. But India too had its failures.\n\nWhen in 1967 the Communist Party (Marxist) came to power in a United Front coalition in West Bengal, many feared the worst. They need not have worried. West Bengal's Communists took to electoral politics as readily as Kerala's. For the next thirty years, under the frequent leadership of the CPM's charismatic Jyoti Basu, the most volatile of India's states enjoyed a consistency of redistributive radicalism, if not much stability. But it came at a price. Just as the CPM had splintered from the CPI (Communist Party of India) over the latter's allegiance to Moscow, so a CPM-L (Communist Party Marxist-Leninist) had splintered from the CPM over its willingness to accept office. Instead, the CPM-L tore a leaf out of Chairman Mao's _Little Red Book_ and withdrew from democratic politics to concentrate on grassroots revolution.\n\nThe Party's baptism of blood came in Naxalbari, in the north of the state: lands were grabbed, landlords were beheaded and the police retaliated. Now known as 'Maoists' or 'Naxalites', the revolutionaries found support wherever social iniquities were most acute. Although eventually contained in West Bengal, the movement thrived in other deprived areas and, come the end of the century, would resurface with a vengeance. Vast tracts of Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Orissa (including Dandakaranya) became no-go areas for the security forces. Meanwhile, just across the border from Naxalbari, a Maoist sister movement would bring the troubled kingdom of Nepal to its knees.\n\n##\n\n## Reality Check\n\nBreaking records became a competitive obsession in the 1950s and '60s. In 1961 the Russian Yuri Gagarin was the first man into space, and eight years after that the Americans Armstrong and Aldrin first walked on the moon. But _The Guinness Book of Records_ , issued annually from 1955 and itself a publication that broke all records, featured a photograph of an earlier record-breaking feat that set the standard. Against a cobalt sky it showed a hooded figure in heroic pose scaling a hump of snow while brandishing aloft an ice-axe tied with flags. Unrecognisable behind snow goggles and oxygen mask, this was Tenzing Norgay, a resident of Darjeeling in West Bengal. Along with the New Zealander Edmund Hillary (who took the photo), on 29 May 1953 Tenzing became the first man to bestride the top of the world. The achievement had no political relevance, which made it all the more psychologically uplifting. India had something to crow about.\n\nThe conquest of Everest was as proudly claimed by Nehru's India as it was by the expedition's British organisers. From Tenzing's ice-axe there fluttered, between the ensigns of Britain, Nepal and the UN, a just-visible Indian tricolour; and much as in the United Kingdom the feat was taken as a benediction on the coronation of Elizabeth II, so in the Republic of India it was seen as complementing what empire diehards like Winston Churchill had pooh-poohed as impossible \u2013 the successful conduct of an all-India general election. In 1952, on a universal franchise, a creditable 60 per cent of the 176 million Indians entitled to vote had gone to the polls, setting a world record. With another 'world first' coming so soon after, independent India was standing tall.\n\nYet it could have been very different. Prior to Partition, Tenzing Norgay had been living in Chitral, a princely state in the skirts of the Hindu Kush on Pakistan's side of the border between the Northern Areas and Afghanistan. Of the maybe seven million non-Muslims who had opted to leave Pakistan and make the dangerous journey into India, Tenzing had been one; otherwise it might have been Pakistan that was celebrating in 1953.\n\nIndia, however, was not alone in claiming Tenzing's feat as its own. The mountain itself, though named and trigonometrically measured by surveyors operating from the Indian foothills, stands far beyond the Indian frontier \u2013 not to mention above it. It is in fact in the Great Himalaya range that constitutes the borderland between Nepal and Tibet. But the mountains here being over a hundred kilometres deep and the watershed by no means corresponding to the main range, it was as yet unclear in whose territory Everest actually stood. The Chinese said Tibet's, and so China's; the Nepalis said Nepal's. Everest was thus of interest to others; and so, in the same straddling way, was Tenzing. As a Sherpa who was supposedly born in Tibet, he could be regarded as Tibetan, and hence an adoptive Chinese. And following a childhood spent mainly in Nepal, that country too laid claim to his achievement. Moreover, it was from Nepal that the successful 1953 expedition had been launched; it relied heavily on Nepali support and porters and could not have been undertaken without Katmandu's permission.\n\nThis was a new development. Before World War II all attempts to climb Everest had been launched from Tibet, with the sometimes reluctant blessing of Lhasa's Dalai Lama. Meanwhile the kingdom of Nepal had remained firmly closed to climbers, as it had to most other visitors for over a century. It was Indian independence, followed two years later by the proclamation of the People's Republic of China, that isolated Tibet from its southern neighbours, opened up Nepal, and so ushered in a new era in sub-Himalayan relationships. Additionally it would be as a spin-off of these events that the Nepal\u2013Tibet border was settled and the ownership of Mount Everest finally clarified.\n\nIn November 1950, a month after Maoist China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) moved in to reclaim (or 'liberate') Tibet, King Tribhuvan of Nepal had deserted his capital of Katmandu and fled to India. The King was little more than a figurehead; power in Nepal had long rested with the Rana family of hereditary prime ministers. But the Ranas now faced serious opposition. In imitation of Congress in India, popular movements were challenging Rana rule and demanding a more representative form of government. Parties like the Nepali Congress (founded in India in 1947) derived their ideas and much support from Indian sympathisers, while Nepalis whose political horizons had been broadened by service in the India-based Gurkha regiments of the British Indian army gave to the struggle something of a diasporic dimension.\n\nIndeed the Gurkhas might be claimed as the first of South Asia's transnational communities. Defeated in the Anglo\u2013Nepal war of 1814\u201316, the Gurkha kingdom had been effectively partitioned by British retention of its western districts (Garhwal, Kumaon, Dehra Dun, etc.). At the same time the Gurkhas' aptitude for warfare, their limited domestic prospects and their flexibility in respect of caste (though Hindus, they were agreeable to service overseas) had recommended their recruitment into British India's forces. In the first half of the twentieth century around 200,000 had served with distinction in various theatres of World War I, and over quarter of a million in World War II. But as in the Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, demobilisation saw many returning to their hills with poor prospects of employment allied to a sense of entitlement and notions of popular sovereignty. At the time of India's independence, many Gurkhas transferred to the British army, and some would eventually secure residence rights in the UK. But more than half of the Gurkha regiments that remained under arms opted to join India. In Kashmir and elsewhere along India's mountain frontier their altitude abilities proved invaluable, and their loyalty to India went unquestioned. Not surprisingly, many Gurkhas reasoned that if a Congress government could unite the Indian nation, then so it could the Nepali nation.\n\nWhen in 1950 the popular unrest within Nepal turned to revolt, the King had seen his chance. Instead of opposing demands for representative government like the Nizam of Hyderabad, he aligned himself with them, hoping thereby to discredit the Ranas and regain some vestige of his dynasty's lost authority. King Tribhuvan's exile, a ploy therefore to distance himself from the Ranas, was short; he stayed in India for only three months. But it was long enough for the insurgents in Nepal, aided by some volunteers from India and Burma, to force the Ranas to compromise. Under a power-sharing agreement between them and the Nepali Congress, the King returned.\n\nNine months later the Ranas were elbowed aside, so ushering in a decade of parliamentary-style government under a constitutional monarchy. New Delhi applauded, most Nepalis celebrated, and so did the mountaineering fraternity. Nepal's relations with India had just been regularised under a 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship. This confirmed landlocked Nepal's border with India as open to both trade and unregulated migration; in an arrangement fraught with difficulties for the future, Indians might settle in Nepal and Nepalis in India without let or hindrance. Under the new dispensation foreigners might also seek entry, and their diplomatic representatives might apply for climbing permits. The race for Everest, stalled by World War II, resumed.\n\nPossibly influenced by the King of Nepal's flight, just a month later, in December 1950, the fifteen-year-old Dalai Lama also fled his capital, in this case before the advancing troops of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. From Lhasa he too headed south for the Indian border. But he was there persuaded to turn back. India, in the person of Nehru, though sympathetic to the democratic forces in Nepal, was not prepared to uphold an obscurantist theocracy in Tibet. Moreover, any condemnation of Chinese aggression in Tibet would prejudice India's fraternal relations with the new Communist regime in Beijing. Commitments to Tibetan autonomy inherited from the British were accordingly downplayed, and India declined to support a Tibetan appeal to the UN. Under the circumstances His Holiness had little choice but to turn around and make the best terms he could with Beijing. These meant abandoning any notion of Tibetan sovereignty, 'returning to the big family of the Motherland \u2013 the People's Republic of China', and cooperating to 'drive out imperialist aggressive forces'. The chances of imperialist mountaineers being admitted to Tibet were now zero. In effect, Tibet's Himalayan portal had slammed shut just as Nepal's swung ajar.\n\nAn approach route to Mount Everest from the Nepal side had been reconnoitred in 1951. Then in 1952 two Swiss expeditions nearly made it. Tenzing Norgay accompanied both of them as _sirdar_ in charge of the other Sherpas and as a full member of the assault team. In the same dual role he was recruited by the British-led expedition of 1953. He was emphatically not a mere support member. His experience by then was second to none and it was wholly appropriate that he shared the ultimate prize.\n\nEverest put Nepal on the international map. Expeditions to the mountain itself and to other peaks in the Nepal Himalaya became an annual event. By 1960 four Swiss climbers had also attained Everest's summit and three Chinese climbers had made the ascent from Tibet. Tourists and trekkers followed in ever greater numbers, providing a much-needed boost to the Nepali economy and taking a heavy toll of the mountain environment. By the end of the century an average year saw several hundred thousand backpackers streaming through Katmandu, several thousand attempts on Everest itself, and several hundred breathless pioneers actually jostling for position on the icy hump where Tenzing and Hillary had first stood.\n\nBut down in Katmandu, Nepal's new age of international engagement was doing nothing for the political process. As in Pakistan, the politicians struggled to meet the expectations of a widely dispersed and extremely diverse population, and were sorely challenged by autocratic tendencies, here represented principally by the monarchy. King Tribhuvan's death in 1955 brought his son, King Mahendra, to the throne. An interim Constitution, the second of many, had already been fatally diluted by amendments, and the promised elections had failed to materialise. In 1959 Mahendra promulgated a new Constitution, albeit one that reserved considerable powers to the monarchy. He then called the first national elections. These were conducted successfully and were handsomely won by the Nepali Congress under B.P. Koirala.\n\nEducated in India during his family's long exile there, indeed a one-time member of the Indian Congress, B.P. Koirala was the second of several brothers, three of whom would occupy the Prime Minister's office. But BP's tenure lasted less than a year. Like Sheikh Abdullah in Jammu and Kashmir, he introduced radical land reforms that excited popular expectations but encountered strong opposition from vested interests. In 1960 King Mahendra broke the resultant stalemate by staging what was becoming a Nepali speciality \u2013 a royal coup. He repealed his own Constitution, arrested B.P. Koirala, banned all political parties and declared directly elected parliaments unsuited to Nepal's barely literate peoples. A new Constitution better suited to such conditions was proclaimed in 1962.\n\nThis introduced a party-less system based on elected village councils (or _panchayats_ ). The _panchayats_ in turn elected district councils, which in turn chose representatives for the National Panchayat or Parliament. _Panchayati raj_ , with its 'bottom-up' structure and its supposedly ancient credentials, carried the imprimatur of India's revered Mahatma; but it also bore a close resemblance to the system then being pioneered in Pakistan under the banner of 'Basic Democracy'. And like 'Basic Democracy' it left ample scope at every level of the electoral hierarchy for the exercise of the prerogative and influence reserved to the sovereign\/President. With amendments, the system would nevertheless survive the release of B. P. Koirala in 1968, the death of King Mahendra in 1972, the succession of King Birendra, and a somewhat dubious referendum on its retention in 1980.\n\nOnly in the course of the 1980s would it come under heavy fire, as Koirala's successors in the Nepali Congress Party secured positions in the National Panchayat. King Birendra offered a concession in the form of direct elections to the national body. Yet the protests continued. Finally Birendra relented. The Panchayat Constitution of 1962 was abrogated; and after countless false starts, in 1990 Nepal got yet another Constitution. This restored parliamentary democracy, but again it would not last. In remote parts of the country Naxalite Maoists were already offering a radical alternative.\n\nMore even than Pakistan, Nepal was handicapped by an identity defined by its relationship with India. Pinioned against the Great Himalaya, with Indian territory on its other three sides, it had little choice. The country was one of the least developed in the world. Overland transport between its extremities involved loops into India. Though imports came mostly from India, and exports went mostly to India, all other trade must also pass through Indian territory. And the Gross National Product relied heavily on remittances from Nepalis employed in India (including Gurkha servicemen). An outreach of the Indian economy, then, Nepal's political options were few.\n\nIt nevertheless did its utmost to assert its individuality. Proclaimed as the world's only Hindu kingdom, it adopted the world's only five-sided flag (an elision of two triangular pennons) and set its clocks for the world's only quarter-hour time-zone (fifteen minutes behind Indian Standard Time). Heedless of visitor convenience, the value of its rupee also lagged behind that of India. UN membership and obligations to international donors and aid agencies afforded some leverage in relationships with Delhi; so did Nepal's command of the hydro-electric and irrigational potential of several major tributaries of the Ganges. But it was China-in-Tibet, its only other neighbour, that was of most concern to India.\n\nHistorically, Nepal and Tibet had enjoyed a chequered relationship marked by incursions and counter-incursions interspersed with tributary exchanges. That a now Communist China might renew its interest in Nepal seemed unlikely so long as New Delhi and Beijing were on the best of terms. But as of the late 1950s this changed. In 1960 Katmandu, having previously had diplomatic relations only with Delhi, exchanged representatives with Beijing. Tension between its two colossal neighbours was introducing Nepal to the gentle art of playing one off against the other. It made good sense, but only so long as the possibility of India and China actually coming to blows over their Himalayan hinterland could be discounted.\n\n*\n\nIndia's supposedly 'wasted years' under Nehru are usually taken to refer to the patchy performance of the economy rather than the conduct of external affairs. Between 1950 and 1965 the country's GNP grew by a respectable, if not sensational, 4 per cent a year, thanks largely to the Planning Commission's prioritisation of heavy industries and power generation. But even these favoured sectors seldom realised their forecast potential: siltation choked the turbines and the big new steel plants proved woefully inefficient. Elsewhere the main blockage was bureaucratic. A labyrinth of licences and quotas ('the permit raj'), which was designed to protect indigenous production, so hobbled the private sector that basic industries like textiles, consumer goods and agriculture languished. In a nation proudly committed to self-sufficiency through 'import substitution', the ability to feed itself was an obvious priority. Yet, though agricultural yields did increase, they failed to keep pace with the growth in population. Despite more irrigation, ambitious agrarian development schemes and some land redistribution, by 1965 cereal imports from the USA under a Public Loan programme would top forty million tonnes a year. Begging bowls, even when cast in an Indian blast furnace, were still begging bowls.\n\nExternal affairs, on the other hand, looked to be a much less controversial field. Handled with intellectual panache by Nehru himself, by the late 1950s India's standing with the rest of the world could hardly have been higher. Having dedicated his country to the 'still larger cause of humanity' in his Independence oration, Nehru had wasted no time in championing the freedom struggles of other peoples suffering under colonial rule. Already, in early 1947, an Asian Relations Conference had brought to Delhi representatives from all over South and South-East Asia including Nepal, Tibet, Ceylon and Afghanistan. The Asian continent was awakening, Nehru declared; India stood ready to listen and help.\n\nBy 1954 it was prepared to lead. In talks with China designed to normalise relations following the Chinese retrieval of Tibet, Nehru and Zhou Enlai jointly invoked the hallowed 'Five Principles [or _panchsila_ ] of Peaceful Co-existence' \u2013 namely equality, non-aggression, non-interference in one another's internal affairs, and mutual respect for one another's borders and one another's sovereignty. Soon after, at a meeting of Asian heads of government in Colombo, Nehru boldly insisted that universal acceptance of these principles would ensure that 'there would hardly be any conflict and certainly not war'.\n\nThe 'hardly any conflict' might have been a reference to Pondicherry. In this still French enclave south of Madras, demonstrators backed by most of India's political parties were demanding an end to French rule and integration with India. Non-interference notwithstanding, Nehru too pressed their cause throughout 1954. His timing was impeccable. With France reeling from defeat at Dien Bien Phu, then smarting over the Geneva partition of Vietnam and facing another colonial revolt in Algeria, capitulation over Pondicherry was a near certainty. Better, reasoned Paris, to sell Mirage fighter-jets to India than to deploy them in defence of a worthless outpost. Without as much as a show of force by either side, the seafront colony and its satellite enclaves were duly handed over in November 1954. From the colonial past, that left just Goa and its Portuguese satellites. Abetted by New Delhi, Goans too were agitating for an end to colonial rule. But Lisbon under the dictatorial rule of President Antonio Salazar stood firm.\n\nThe Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence resurfaced at the epochal Asia\u2013Africa Conference convened in Bandung by President Sukarno of Indonesia in the following year. Here Nehru, long a champion of Indonesian independence, positioned himself at the helm of what was becoming the Non-Aligned Movement. Heads of state and senior representatives from twenty-nine anti-imperialist and recently independent nations attended the conference, including Egypt's Colonel Nasser, Cyprus's Archbishop Makarios, Zhou Enlai from China, Pham Van Dong from North Vietnam, U Nu from Burma and Prince Sihanouk from Cambodia. South Asia was well represented, with deputations from Pakistan, Nepal and Ceylon. But in this galaxy of mid-century luminaries, it was Pandit __ Nehru, accompanied by his daughter Indira, who made the running. The Five Principles, fleshed out into twelve, were duly adopted in the final communiqu\u00e9 and incorporated into the charter of the budding Non-Aligned Movement.\n\nNon-alignment as between the superpowers \u2013 the capitalist West and the Communist Soviet bloc \u2013 meant being open to both, yet dependent on neither. The Movement was presented as a haven of consensus in an otherwise bipolar world of nuclear-armed and ideologically confrontational power blocs. That was the theory \u2013 a peace-loving third bloc dedicated to challenging all forms of imperialism and defusing Cold War tensions. No doubt it appealed to Nehru's superior intellect in the same way as did neutrality in the choice of a national language, a mixed economy with both public and private ownership, and a lofty secularism as between competing belief systems.\n\nBut if non-alignment meant anything, it ought also to have meant that the subscribers were themselves unaligned. This was not the case. At the time China, for instance, a key member of the Movement, was still bound to the Soviet bloc in ideological comradeship, and to the USSR by a 1949 treaty of 'Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance'. Others, like Pakistan, were already incorporated into the Anglo-American framework of Communist 'containment' as members of the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) and\/or its Middle Eastern counterpart, the Baghdad Pact (later the Central Treaty Organisation or CENTO). As critics gleefully noted, the Movement's neutrality was compromised from birth.\n\nNehru preferred to overlook such inconsistency, and to talk up the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence. They too, though, were not without flaws. Pledging non-interference and respect for one another's sovereignty presumed that the signatories' sovereignty enjoyed popular legitimacy, as evidenced by respect for human rights, the rule of law and accountable government; yet all too often these safeguards were being flouted, while the parliamentary democracy so dear to Nehru and so central to India's self-image was notably absent. Similarly, respect for one another's borders rested on the assumption that they were not in dispute. Yet as creations of the discredited colonial powers, many international borders were little better than the optimistic projections of imperial strategists. They might ignore social factors, historical precedents and natural features, and they seldom conformed to the highest standards of international jurisprudence. As India was about to discover, endorsing such frontiers could prove just as contentious as contesting them.\n\nAmong the frigid passes of the Himalayas, almost no section of international frontier had been approved and ratified (let alone demarcated) by all those parties whose authorisation was deemed essential by the present regimes. Strung along the mountain glacis, Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan had been preserved by the British to form a defensive buffer zone between their jealously ruled Indian raj and the sometimes expansive empires of the Russian Tsars and the (Manchu) Qing Emperors. The Republic of India inherited these arrangements and gratefully adopted them. But the borders of the buffer states were themselves open to question: there were gaps between these states, and beyond them in the east there was a long tail of hitherto unadministered and largely unpenetrated territory. (In India it was designated the North-East Frontier Agency \u2013 NEFA \u2013 and later Arunachal Pradesh.) Moreover, with Jammu and Kashmir now subject to a _de facto_ division, the Ladakh region's inhospitable borderland with western Tibet had become an Indian responsibility, while the glacier-choked declivities of the Northern Areas' border with Chinese Xinjiang now pertained to Pakistan.\n\nAlmost none of these borderlands was of any value. Extremely remote, rising from 4,000 to 8,000 metres above sea level, seldom frost-free and largely uninhabited, they were strategically more a liability than an asset. The maps, although far from consistent, nonetheless showed them as someone's sovereign territory, and as such they could not easily be relinquished. 'The first and almost instinctive reaction of every new government was to hold fast to the territory bequeathed to it,' noted Gunnar Myrdal. 'What the colonial power had ruled, the new power must rule' \u2013 and especially so if, for any failure on this score, it was answerable to a chamber of disputatious parliamentarians and a nationalistic press.\n\nThus the news, confirmed in Delhi in 1958, that across 180 kilometres of howling wilderness in what Indian maps showed as eastern Ladakh the Chinese had unilaterally constructed a motorable road, did not go down well. Known as the Aksai Chin, the region was in fact a salient of high-altitude desert to which the British had once laid claim as a possible trade corridor and bargaining counter but had never actually used for either purpose. The area was, however, vital to the Chinese as offering the most practicable alignment for a direct road link between their Xinjiang province and the western end of a reclaimed Tibet. Several thousand workers had toiled for nineteen months in appalling conditions to build the road, and not once had they come across any evidence of an Indian interest in the region.\n\nThat of course proved nothing. The maps told their own stories, and Beijing seems to have been as aware of the Indian claim as Delhi was of the Chinese counter-claim. But opportunities to discuss this discrepancy were let slip, most notably in 1954 when Sino\u2013Indian talks had amicably confirmed the Chinese reclamation of Tibet. A complacent Nehru accepted without question the wishful British incorporation of the Aksai Chin and insisted that there was nothing to discuss. Conversely, a confident Zhou Enlai took the lack of any Indian presence there as evidence of Delhi's having written off what all peace-loving anti-colonialists must consider an imperialist impertinence.\n\nIndian protests and Chinese repudiations followed \u2013 then Chinese protests and Indian repudiations when an Indian patrol, belatedly directed to the area, was detected by the Chinese and detained. Meanwhile within Tibet the Chinese were ruthlessly suppressing a revolt spearheaded by the Khampa people in the east of the country. The PLA's brutality amounted to genocide, and prompted some Khampas to flee to India. Others extended their resistance west. By March 1959 Lhasa itself was in turmoil. Outraged by the treatment of the Khampas, the Tibetan government was defying its Chinese mentors, and the PLA was preparing to bombard the city. Partly to save Lhasa, partly to keep alive the spirit of resistance, it was agreed that the Dalai Lama should again be smuggled out of the country. Travelling this time under the protection of the Khampa guerrillas, the fugitive party headed for Tawang, a monastic complex east of Bhutan in what had been a Tibetan salient but was now claimed by India. Over the next few years 100,000 Tibetan refugees would follow their leader's example and flee south. The long exile had begun.\n\nUnder pressure \u2013 from right-wing elements in India, from the international outcry and from his own conscience \u2013 Nehru offered the Dalai Lama political asylum. Beijing did not object, provided India and its guest did nothing to inflame the situation. But in fact His Holiness spoke out about conditions in Tibet. His utterances were relayed by the Indian press, so exciting anti-Chinese demonstrations in many Indian cities. Moreover, 'It [was] evident that support and direction for the Tibetan rebels came through Kalimpong [a West Bengal 'nest of spies', according to Nehru], and that the Government of India connived at this.'\n\nSo much for non-aggression, non-interference, and mutual respect for one another's borders. In the space of just four years, Sino\u2013Indian talk of non-alignment and peaceful co-existence had been horribly compromised. The Indian crowds that had hailed the post-Bandung era of Asian solidarity with the slogan ' _Hindi\u2013Chini bhai bhai_ ' ('India and China are brothers') now hurled abuse at Beijing and aimed rotten eggs at Chairman Mao's portrait. Nehru, acting as his own Foreign Minister throughout, bore the main responsibility and valiantly tried to reconcile his internationalist principles with the hardline nationalism expected of a leader defending his people's homeland and dignity. But as the diplomatic exchanges were overtaken by more deadly exchanges along the disputed frontier itself, it was his defence chiefs, and especially their Minister, the waspish Krishna Menon, who would be found lacking.\n\n*\n\nThe first major incident came late in 1959, and not in Ladakh, but at Longju at the other end of the Himalayas in NEFA. In this remote sector India insisted that a 1914 boundary alignment proposed by Henry McMahon (the British diplomat better known for the series of contentious letters that would trigger the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule in Arabia) enjoyed the same map-delineated and so unchallengeable authority as that which included the Aksai Chin. By way of substantiating this claim, outposts were being established along the supposed line, one of which at Longju came under heavy fire and had to be withdrawn; it was unclear whether it was on the Indian side of McMahon's Line or not. But here in the east the Chinese had earlier indicated a willingness to consider the Indian contention and to accept the McMahon Line, at least temporarily. They continued to hint as much until 1961, the implied _quid pro quo_ being that India should relinquish its claim to the Aksai Chin.\n\nSuch a straight swap had everything to recommend it, except the strength of Indian public opinion against any territorial derogation anywhere. Things like official transparency, accountable government and a written Constitution had their drawbacks. The Chinese leadership might be unfamiliar with, say, freedom of expression, but Nehru endeavoured to explain. Additionally, his hands appeared tied by a preamble to the Constitution that made any surrender of India's presumed territory problematic. The issue had first surfaced over a possible exchange between New Delhi and Karachi of some of those anomalous enclaves and counter-enclaves on either side of the line of Partition in Bengal. With implications for Kashmir as much as for the McMahon Line or the enclaves, in 1960 the Supreme Court ruled that, for any alienation of Indian territory, an amendment to the Constitution would be required. This would not have been impossible (it required a two-thirds majority), and anyway the ruling was subsequently challenged; but at the time it served to bolster Nehru's case for intransigence. Zhou Enlai, of course, wrote it off as eyewash.\n\nLater in 1959 a more serious clash occurred at the Kongka Pass in Ladakh. An Indian patrol exchanged fire with a Chinese unit and suffered nine fatalities. The pass was on the southern approaches to the Aksai Chin, suggesting further forward movement from the Chinese side. Coming soon after Longju, this 'brutal massacre of an Indian policy party', as the _Times of India_ put it, prompted a redeployment of Indian firepower. From the dusty and tank-friendly plains of Punjab an ill-prepared division was transferred to the leech-infested ravines of NEFA.\n\nAgainst a background of acrimonious talks and increasingly bellicose threats, the military build-up on both sides continued through 1960 and accelerated in 1961. So did the stand-off in Ladakh and NEFA as India attempted to effect occupation of the territory it claimed. Defence Minister Krishna Menon, a prickly leftist who had spent more of his life in Bloomsbury than along the Himalayas, quarrelled with his defence chief, alienated most of his Congress colleagues and seemed unwilling to credit his Chinese comrades with hostile intent. Nehru stood by him for old times' sake. Rattled and now looking all of his seventy-one years, the Prime Minister derided his critics as 'infantile and childish'. He treated Parliament to rambling discourses on China's impropriety and stressed his own willingness nevertheless to discuss the geographical minutiae:\n\nWhether this hill is there, or whether this little bit is on this side or that side, on the facts, on the maps, on the evidence available \u2013 that I am prepared to discuss... But the broad McMahon Line has to be accepted and so far as we are concerned, it is there and we accept it.\n\nIn early 1960 Zhou Enlai reiterated his offer to discuss the crisis in person. Nehru, despite reservations and widespread accusations of appeasement from parliamentary critics and the press, finally agreed. In April the Chinese Prime Minister flew in to a frigid reception. Arriving by way of Burma, he returned by way of Nepal. In Rangoon and Katmandu, Zhou was notably reasonable. Treaties of friendship were signed with both countries. Subject to minor adjustments, China also accepted a section of the McMahon Line that affected Burma and agreed on a joint demarcation of the Nepal\u2013Tibet frontier. The alignment of the latter finally settled the status of Mount Everest: it was agreed that the frontier bisected the summit, so permitting access from both Nepal and Tibet.\n\nAll this Delhi took to be an elaborate charm offensive aimed at demonstrating Chinese flexibility and so exposing Indian intransigence. For at the Delhi talks nothing at all was achieved. Zhou, from a position of strength in the Aksai Chin, wanted to negotiate. Nehru, from one of weakness, would only discuss. As over Kashmir, he insisted that negotiations could be opened only after all foreign \u2013 in this case Chinese \u2013 troops had been withdrawn from within what India considered its frontiers. This meant the Chinese pulling out of the Aksai Chin altogether and abandoning their new road. Loss of face, no less than loss of access to western Tibet, made it unthinkable.\n\nThe Chinese nevertheless proposed a temporary withdrawal by both sides from the actual lines of occupation. India rejected it, preferring low-level discussions that bought time for a glacial build-up of its forces and for the edging forward of its outposts. Critics, within the army as well as in Parliament, remained unconvinced. A more forceful approach was urged. Yet the army was ill-equipped to take on the battle-hardened PLA and its supply chains were hopelessly overstretched.\n\nMoreover, the country's third general election was imminent. Due in early 1962, it could not be coming at a worse moment. Assailed by deepening economic difficulties, the Congress government was also facing riots in Bombay over the bifurcation of Maharashtra state, ongoing troubles in Punjab and Nagaland, and above all doubts over its Defence Minister at a time when the loss of Himalayan chunks of the motherland remained unredressed. A distraction was badly needed, and preferably one that would unite the nation behind Congress. It was thus hardly coincidental that in late 1961, after over a decade of restraint and with the army already overstretched, a division of troops was somehow found for an irresistible three-pronged advance not across the treeless wastes of the Aksai Chin but into the sleepy backwater of rustling palms and bell-ringing churches that was Portuguese Goa.\n\nThe Portuguese authorities offered protests but put up no resistance. The capital of their once mighty _estado da India_ fell with scarcely a shot being fired. New Delhi's intention of absorbing all of Portugal's enclaves had long been taken for granted, and Goans for the most part welcomed the intervention. The Indian public was ecstatic. 'Our Finest Hour', trilled a headline in one English-language daily. Absurdly, it was supposed that the victorious 'commandos' who could so easily terminate a colonial anachronism in peninsular India could surely tackle a Himalayan intrusion. Krishna Menon was forgiven. Docile as a dove in the face of the Chinese, he had swooped like a hawk on the Portuguese. He had ignored Nehru's misgivings about the use of force, and without in any way embarrassing his Chinese friends, had sent Beijing a powerful message.\n\nNaturally, there was some international disquiet. Pakistan ridiculed India's oft-avowed renunciation of force in the settling of international disputes, as did many in the West. Fifteen years later, for an almost identical swoop on the Portuguese colony of East Timor, the Indonesia of General Suharto would be internationally pilloried and its troops ejected by a UN force. The difference lay in the principals rather than the principle. In Goa it was the dictatorial rule of Salazar that was ousted, while Nehru's impeccably democratic credentials triumphed. Conversely, in East Timor the aggression came from an Indonesian dictator, and it was the aggrieved East Timorese who espoused democracy. India, as a flag bearer in the East for Western-style democracy, could count on a degree of indulgence from 'the free world', plus the gratitude of the Goan people who had at last been given a say in their future.\n\nAs an electoral ploy, the seizure of Goa had the desired effect. Criticism of Indian inaction in the Himalayas was suddenly muffled, Menon's failings were forgiven, opinions on the unpreparedness of the army were revised, and in the elections of early 1962 Congress romped home with another massive majority. Emboldened by Goa, the strategists now turned to a 'forward policy' in respect of the Aksai Chin and the McMahon Line. Patrols were stepped up and pickets established deeper inside the disputed territories. By the summer they overlapped those of the enemy on the Ladakh front. From PLA posts, loudspeaker appeals were directed at the Indian army's Gurkhas, reminding them of the new Sino\u2013Nepal alliance. The Gurkhas stood firm, and to New Delhi's pleasant surprise it was the Chinese who backed off.\n\nThe same forward policy in NEFA had less happy results. On the Thag-la ridge east of Tawang, which the Chinese took to be on their side of McMahon's rather thick Line, the eyeballing continued for weeks, and the PLA's loudspeaker offensive grew ever shriller. A change of command on the Indian side brought up two new battalions on 9 September, plus orders for another strategic advance prior to removing a Chinese redoubt on the ridge. Better armed and acclimatised, the Chinese anticipated this move; next day they attacked the advance post in force. Both sides suffered some twenty to thirty casualties, but the PLA prevailed. The Indians pulled back.\n\nThis incident was either the final blow in the crescendo of Indian provocation or the opening salvo of the Chinese offensive. 'For the first time the Chinese had forcefully resisted an Indian forward move,' writes the China-sympathetic Neville Maxwell, then of the London _Times._ __ 'In the event,' glosses Ramachandra Guha for the Indian side, 'it was the enemy who acted first.' Neither side did anything immediately. The Chinese did not follow up their success by crossing what they took to be the McMahon Line, and the Indians did not withdraw from behind it. Rather did Nehru make it clear that, despite the obvious supply difficulties faced by the Indians, force would, if necessary, again be applied to reverse the setback and 'regain' the Thag-la ridge; talks were out of the question, he said, until such time as 'instructions to free our territory' were satisfactorily met. Meant to quell the domestic outcry, this was taken by the international press as tantamount to an ultimatum, if not a declaration of war. The Chinese, too, read it as such and made no secret of their preparations for a pre-emptive strike.\n\nOn 20 October, six weeks after the earlier affray, Chinese mortars opened fire on the Indian positions and the PLA advanced in both NEFA and Ladakh. What Indians dubbed China's 'blitzkrieg' of aggression met stiff yet ill-prepared and hopelessly outgunned resistance. One after another the Indian positions fell like dominoes.\n\nFour days into the war, Zhou again offered talks. Nehru's response combined pain with defiance. Nothing in his long political career had hurt him more than China's perfidy, he claimed; but India would talk only when 'the Chinese invasion' had been reversed and the PLA was back behind the McMahon Line and beyond the Aksai Chin. Gagging on a lifetime of non-aligned rhetoric, he meanwhile leapt at offers of arms from the UK and the US. Within a week the Kennedy administration, despite its preoccupation with the Cuban Missile Crisis, was sending up to eight flights a day laden with ordnance and ammunition. Meanwhile the Indian Parliament approved a state of emergency, and for days its members vied with one another in talking up India's prospects. Patriotic gestures were all the rage. Recruitment offices were besieged and bloodbanks overwhelmed. Even the Communists rallied behind Congress. The nation was as one.\n\nAfter a three-week lull, during which the Chinese built roads and the Indians juggled personnel (Menon was finally replaced, as were nearly all the field commanders), the Chinese offensive resumed. In NEFA the Indians opened a new front in the far east of the Agency; it was promptly rolled back with heavy losses. Meanwhile from Tawang the main Chinese advance continued, as did the catalogue of Indian defeats. By 20 November 'no organised Indian military force was left in NEFA or in the territory claimed by China in the western [Ladakh] sector'. The advance in Ladakh had halted at the line claimed by the Chinese. But in NEFA the invaders were about two hundred kilometres inside the McMahon Line; the last mountain passes had been taken; 'the famous Fourth Division was cut to pieces, the humiliation of the Indian army... complete'.\n\nAhead stretched the broad Brahmaputra plain of Assam. Tezpur, the nearest administrative centre, was evacuated; further downstream the Assamese capital of Gauhati looked doomed. _\u00c0 propos_ the Assamese, Nehru announced in a broadcast that 'We feel very much for them and we shall help them to the utmost of our ability.' It sounded more like a valediction than a pledge.\n\nIn a final throw of the dice, Nehru now appealed for direct US intervention. No US air strikes were forthcoming, but transport aircraft were supplied and the aircraft carrier USS _Enterprise_ was diverted to the Bay of Bengal. Bombing raids on Calcutta were anticipated. 'THIS IS TOTAL WAR', declared a Bombay weekly.\n\nBut even as these plans were being laid, they were becoming redundant. For on 21 November 1962 the Chinese again took New Delhi by surprise. Instead of pushing down into Assam, let alone bombing Calcutta, they announced a unilateral ceasefire, to be followed by an unconditional Chinese withdrawal to the positions occupied in 1959. In other words they would pull back to the McMahon Line in the east while hanging on to the Aksai Chin in the west.\n\nThough this was precisely what Beijing had been hinting at from the start, it was all so unexpected in India that Nehru scarcely knew how to respond. Instead he asked for clarification while he played for time and juggled with platitudes. The US and the Soviets urged acceptance. So, given the state of his forces, did India's Chief of Staff. The ceasefire was therefore tacitly observed and the Chinese duly pulled back.\n\nBut public opinion as represented in Parliament and the press detected just another humiliation. Indian-claimed territory, although regained in NEFA, was being surrendered in Ladakh, as was any chance of avenging the recent string of defeats and so redeeming the nation's honour. Nehru had promised that a peace-loving India, once aroused, would surprise its foes and that 'the war with China will be a long-drawn-out affair [and] may take years'. But the balloon of war hysteria had no sooner been launched than it was being burst. With the enemy contemptuously turning its back, a deflated India was left to lick its wounds and rue its loss of reputation. What had been billed as a 'Chinese invasion' had turned out to be merely a punitive exercise. Prisoners of war taken by the Chinese were swiftly repatriated, and captured vehicles were first cleaned and then left parked in line to await their Indian drivers. The war had impinged on no centres of population. It had, if anything, improved the local infrastructure. And it had lasted just thirty days.\n\nTo explain the Chinese retraction, it was suggested that with the onset of winter the Chinese high command had become mindful of the logistical problems posed by trans-Himalayan supply lines. Or perhaps it was the threat of US intervention that had done the trick. Perhaps, too, Moscow had mended its crumbling fences with Beijing long enough to exert pressure on behalf of its Indian acolyte. Even more improbably, perhaps the strength of Indian resistance and the spectacle of national mobilisation had prompted second thoughts in Beijing. Anything was better than the admission that around 3,000 Indian lives (and possibly as many Chinese) had been lost, and the nation humbled, all because New Delhi had consistently misread Chinese intentions.\n\nNehru never fully recovered from the shock and 'hurt' of the war. A year later he suffered a stroke, and in May 1964 he would die. 'Wasted' or not, the Nehru years ended on a sour note. While in effect accepting the terms of the Chinese withdrawal \u2013 including a twenty-mile exclusion zone either side of the 1959 lines of occupation \u2013 India had continued to decline any talks that might lead to recognition of the _de facto_ frontier or to its demarcation. Subsequent governments would follow this example. Any agreement that implied the concession of Indian territory would remain anathema. Indian maps still showed the Aksai Chin as Indian territory, just as they showed Azad Kashmir and Pakistan's Northern Areas as Indian territory. But the Chinese retained control. In 2011 their Xinjiang\u2013Tibet road was being upgraded, and in 2012 they announced plans for a space observatory in the Aksai Chin.\n\n*\n\nIronically, in the same way as a sharp reality check in the form of military defeat heralded the end of the Nehru era in India, so would a similar defeat signal the end of the Ayub Khan era in Pakistan. The wildly divergent trajectories of the two nations often obscure an underlying parallelism. But in Pakistan's case the consequences of a battlefield reverse, while dire for President Ayub Khan, would be even worse for Pakistan as a whole. India had rallied as one in the face of an external threat; as a result of another, Pakistan would be slowly sundered in two. A second partition loomed, and the very existence of 'Pakistan as a whole' was about to be challenged.\n\nIn Pakistani eyes the culprit, inevitably, was India. Yet if any Pakistani leader appreciated the need for d\u00e9tente with India, it was Ayub Khan. Head of state in his role of Chief Martial Law Administrator, and head of the armed forces in his assumed rank of Field Marshal, Ayub was virtually unchallenged during his first four years in power (1958\u201362). Without prejudice to Pakistan's stance on Kashmir, he could \u2013 and did \u2013 attempt to normalise relations with India. In 1959, as China's Aksai Chin road became common knowledge, he proposed a joint Indo\u2013Pak defence pact against external aggression. 'Of course I wanted the future of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to be decided according to their wishes,' he would later recall, 'but I was... also working for co-existence, for relaxation, and for understanding.' It came to nothing. Despite the Chinese threat, Nehru chose to interpret the offer of a joint defence arrangement as a bid to undermine his non-alignment and even to insinuate Pakistani troops into India. Instead, New Delhi offered a no-war pact. But at the time this was unacceptable in Pakistan: it would preclude the freedom of action deemed essential by the more vulnerable of the two nations, and it might be interpreted as a weakening of Karachi's support for the Kashmiris.\n\nFour years later, in 1962\u201364, a resolution of the Kashmir issue itself looked within reach. The initiative had come from the US and the UK as a direct result of the Sino\u2013Indian war. In return for supplying India with arms, and with a view to a united Indo\u2013Pak front against the Chinese, the Western powers encouraged Nehru to enter into negotiations with Pakistan. This meant, above all, revisiting the question of Kashmir. Indeed, it was 'one of the rare occasions when [the Indians] were obliged to depart from their established position over Kashmir', this being 'that any discussions in some way implied that the status of Jammu and Kashmir was in doubt'. Six rounds of talks at ministerial level aired the options. They included some form of shared sovereignty over the whole state (which appealed to neither India nor Pakistan) and some form of partition (India would settle for the existing ceasefire line, Pakistan for nothing less than the whole of the Valley). The gap was as wide as ever. None proved acceptable.\n\nMeanwhile Ayub Khan and the young Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, his Foreign Minister as of 1963, had followed Nepal's example by normalising relations with China in respect of their shared border. As inaccessible as any in the Himalayas, the border in question was of course that of the Northern Areas, a region which India still regarded as part of its J and K state, and which even Pakistan regarded as subject to whatever settlement might eventually be agreed for the state as a whole. According to India, the new Sino\u2013Pak agreement involved bartering away 7,000 square kilometres of Indian territory in return for Chinese support of Pakistan's claim to Jammu and Kashmir. According to Pakistan, India's notions of the state's extent were as excessive in the north as in the Aksai Chin: no territory had been ceded and some had in fact been gained. The spat did nothing to improve the chances of agreement over Kashmir, nor to reassure the Western powers.\n\nIt did, though, confirm that the Karakorums were south of the border, and that the world's second highest mountain was therefore within the Northern Areas. But because the Northern Areas were themselves contentious, any attempt to give the mountain a name was rejected as premature. It remained just 'K2', the designation given it by the surveyor who first plotted its position in the 1860s.\n\nWithin Kashmir nothing much changed until, in the winter of 1963\u201364, a treasured Muslim relic, a hair from the Prophet's beard, disappeared from its eponymous Hazratbal, a mosque just outside Srinagar. It was assumed it had been stolen, and Kashmiri Muslims readily accused Hindu zealots of being responsible. Angry crowds took to the streets throughout the Valley. Government forces responded with teargas and bullets. Although the relic mysteriously reappeared, Kashmiri lives had been lost to Indian firepower, and for once Kashmiris had spoken out: evidently they were no longer under any illusions about the shortcomings of Indian secularism. Nor were their Muslim co-religionists in Pakistan. Even in East Pakistan, a province so remote from Kashmir that it seldom shared in the national obsession with that state, Muslims were so incensed by the relic's theft and by India's heavy-handed treatment of the protesters that they turned on Hindus in Khulna and Jessore. Some hundreds of thousands duly fled towards the porous border into India as another wave of Bengali migration got under way. This was greeted by another outpouring of anti-Muslim communalism in India itself.\n\nPartly to placate Kashmiri opinion, partly to right an old wrong, a Nehru chastened by the Chinese incursion had now agreed to the release of Sheikh Abdullah. During his six years behind bars the 'Lion of Kashmir' had been convicted of no crime; indeed, vindicated by his acquittal, he was now more respected than ever. He returned to the fray determined to convince his one-time friend Nehru to review what he called the 'Kashmir problem'. In Delhi he was Nehru's guest, and according to the Sheikh, the suggestion that he visit Pakistan to convince Ayub Khan to open negotiations came from Nehru. According to others, 'it was Bhutto who stole a lead on the Indian leaders' by issuing the invitation. Just back from New York, where, in the course of the UN's 110th debate on the issue, he had excoriated the West for its inaction in Kashmir, Bhutto was now making the running on Kashmir; but Ayub Khan approved. In May 1964 the Sheikh flew to Rawalpindi and duly received a tumultuous welcome on what was his first and only visit to his Pakistani neighbour.\n\nIn amicable exchanges lasting a week, Sheikh Abdullah hinted at Nehru's more open-minded stance while registering his own opposition to any division of the state. Rather did he propose demilitarising Jammu and Kashmir and restoring its integrity within a tripartite confederal arrangement consisting of India, Pakistan and Jammu and Kashmir. This was thought impractical by Ayub, as well as being detrimental to Pakistan's sovereignty. But a proposal for the first ever heads-of-government talks on Kashmir was agreed: Ayub in person would go to New Delhi to consult with Nehru. It was the most promising development in sixteen years of confrontation.\n\nTragically, it came too late. Before the month was out, Nehru suffered a second stroke and died within days. Bhutto and the Sheikh did meet up in Delhi, but it was for the Indian Prime Minister's obsequies. The initiative then lapsed. Nehru's successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, lacked the stature or the commitment to pursue it. Indeed, he approved further moves to integrate J and K state into the Indian republic, and in 1965 authorised the re-arrest of the Sheikh. Foreign Minister Bhutto responded by threatening 'retaliatory steps'. The year thus ended not with rapprochement but with the Sheikh facing further detention, India and Pakistan more suspicious of one another than ever, and Bhutto promising 'a thousand-year war' to 'liberate' the Kashmiris.\n\nYet Ayub's Pakistan and Nehru's India were not incapable of mutual accommodation. A no less vital and contentious issue had already been partially settled. This concerned the flow of water to the irrigation-dependent farmlands on either side of Radcliffe's Partition line in the Punjab and Bengal. In essence the new frontier sliced through the Indus river and its tributaries in the west, just as it did the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers in the east, so giving upriver India a stranglehold on the lifeblood of Pakistani agriculture. The problem had been recognised in 1947. Minor adjustments had been made by Radcliffe to ensure that the headworks of some of the affected canal schemes stayed within the territory of those dependent on them; and an arrangement based on previous usage plus an annual subvention from Pakistan had been accepted as a temporary expedient. Pakistan was happy to extend the principle of previous usage, provided that the supply could be guaranteed. But India, anticipating heavier demand from the extension of irrigation to the dry regions of south-eastern Punjab (Haryana) and Rajasthan, preferred a straight division of the waters: of the six main Indus basin feeders, the three more westerly rivers (Indus, Jhelum and Chenab) might go to Pakistan, but the three more easterly (Ravi, Beas and Sutlej) must go to India.\n\nDiscussions had opened in 1949, but in countries where around 80 per cent of the population depended on agriculture, the issue became heavily politicised. No government could afford to alienate rural voters by making concessions perceived as prejudicial to their crops. On the other hand, Pakistan clearly needed some guarantee that it would not be held to ransom by India, while India was understandably reluctant to surrender so obvious a bargaining counter. The talks dragged on until 1951, with much acrimony and minimal progress.\n\nIn 1952 they were revived on the initiative of the World Bank. Again agreement proved elusive until, in 1954, the Bank came up with its own proposal. Pakistan, already the recipient of much US aid and weaponry, had just officially aligned itself with Washington by signing a treaty of friendship and joining SEATO; the Bank's deeper involvement, not to mention its funding, could therefore be read as a _quid pro quo_. But India continued to insist on a division of the main feeder rivers, and Pakistan on its prior right to water from all of them. After several more years of argument, it was the engineers who came up with a compromise, and it was Ayub Khan's dictatorial rule that silenced the usual political opposition to it in Pakistan.\n\nIn signing the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960, Ayub and Nehru endorsed one of the very few international water agreements to be reckoned an abiding success. Neither two wars nor later near-wars, and neither the continued tension over Kashmir nor sundry terrorist outrages, would interrupt the operation of the treaty. To those who supposed India and Pakistan incapable of sharing anything, the slosh of the sluices was a salutary reminder that enmity need not inhibit development.\n\nThe treaty conceded India's argument for exclusive rights to the three eastern rivers. On the other hand it also awarded to Pakistan a one-off payment for relinquishing them, plus an elaborate system of canals, dams and reservoirs designed to offset the loss of the eastern rivers by diverting water from its western rivers to the areas affected. More important still, it set up a permanent commission to monitor the agreement, and procedures for the settling of disputes. Both have been sorely tested over the years. Moreover, the treaty applied only to the Indus basin; in the east there was no such agreement on apportioning the waters of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra between India and Pakistan. There India's construction of, for example, the Farakka barrage (to divert the main flow of the Ganges down the Hooghly river to Calcutta), would antagonise East Pakistanis and then Bangladeshis. In fact, Karachi's failure to defend the water rights of its eastern province with anything like the energy devoted to those of its Punjab province rated highly among the grievances being vehemently aired in Dhaka.\n\nThe Indus Waters Treaty would serve its purpose well, and would have interesting side effects. Central to Pakistan's acceptance of it was the construction of the Mangla dam across the Jhelum at a point where that river emerges from Azad Kashmir into Punjab province. Three kilometres long and thirty-eight metres high, with a hydro-electric capacity of 1,000 megawatts, the dam was inaugurated in 1967 and was one of the largest then built. The World Bank and the international community shouldered the brunt of the expense, leaving Pakistan to bear the human cost, which was considerable. The Mangla reservoir flooded an area of around 250 square kilometres, most of it in Azad Kashmir. The important town of Mirpur was completely inundated as were countless villages. In all some 100,000 people were displaced, most of whom either moved to the cities of the Punjab or emigrated, their principal destination being Britain.\n\nUnder a work-voucher scheme, admission to the UK of Commonwealth citizens was comparatively unrestricted in the early 1960s. Moreover, Mirpuris had already established some links with the country through pre-war employment in shipping and wartime service in British India's armed forces. Partition and the 1947\u201349 war in Kashmir had led others to migrate, and the Pakistani government now endorsed further migration as a solution to the displacement caused by the dam. There ensued a rapidly growing exodus from the affected Mirpur area to Pakistan's Punjab and to the cities and mill towns of northern Britain. The scale of this migration could hardly compare with the upheavals occasioned by Partition, yet its narrow focus and international character highlighted certain specifics of the post-Partition diaspora, and had a notable impact in parts of the UK.\n\nWith the addition of spouses and dependants, migrants of 'Pakistani' origin would come to constitute the UK's largest South Asian community; and of these so-called British Pakistanis, 'somewhere in the region of two-thirds [were] in fact of Azad Kashmir origin', mostly from Mirpur. The majority of the UK's South Asian intake thus came to consist not, as commonly supposed, of Pakistani Punjabis, but rather of Mirpuri Kashmiris, people who, though seldom Kashmiri-speakers, hailed from what was once part of the troubled Poonch region of Jammu and Kashmir state and was now Azad Kashmir.\n\nSimilar source-specific and destination-specific flows of migration would characterise the whole diaspora. In the UK, Sikh immigrants, many from Jalandar, would make for west London while East Bengalis would concentrate in parts of east London. Among the latter, whether known as East Bengalis, East Pakistanis or Bangladeshis, over 95 per cent originated from Sylhet, a district of Assam during British rule but which had been detached in 1947, when its Muslim-majority areas voted to join Pakistan. Like Mirpur and like the Gurkha recruiting districts in Nepal, Sylhet was an agriculturally marginal region with a large percentage of owner-cultivators and a tradition of work-seeking away from home. But while Mirpuris and Gurkhas had often enlisted in the British Indian army, Sylhetis had invariably opted for the navy and especially the merchant navy. Arriving in London's dockland, some had jumped ship and settled there. The skills learned at sea in engine rooms or galleys enabled them to find work in the engineering and catering industries.\n\nPost-Partition Sylhetis followed in the footsteps of these pioneers. Often indebted to them for arranging work-vouchers, they also relied on them as contacts and employment agents. Catering proved especially popular, and led to the UK's proliferation of curry houses and 'balti' takeaways. By the 1970s almost every 'Indian' restaurant in the UK was in fact Sylheti-operated, though the food was not obviously Indian, Bangladeshi or Sylheti.\n\nThe migrants' objective was invariably to improve the social and financial status of their kin and community back home. Initially this meant they were overwhelmingly male, and were intent on amassing savings to remit home for investment in land, housing and marital alliances. By the 1970s more than half of Pakistan's foreign earnings, and nearly all of Azad Kashmir's, came in the form of migrants' remittances. Many migrants planned to return, and often did so more than once. Emigration conferred status and influence back in Pakistan. It also afforded a notable outlet for the expression of South Asian grievances through access to the press and parliamentarians in the UK. Mirpuris, for instance, took to airing their dissatisfaction with Pakistan's dismal record in restoring communications after the construction of the Mangla dam. Blaming Karachi for treating Azad Kashmir as a colony, they veered away from favouring Kashmir's integration with Pakistan and became 'enthusiastic supporters of a Kashmiri entity which would be entirely independent of both India and Pakistan'. The 1977 formation of a Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front dedicated to achieving this independent Kashmir would be announced in Birmingham and promoted largely by British Mirpuris.\n\nIn Pakistan, as in India, the construction of massive dams (another at Tarbela on the Indus would be begun in the late 1960s) served the crying need for power generation, irrigation and flood control while proclaiming the ambitious intent of Ayub's newly relaunched nation. In similar spirit, the Field Marshal in 1960 announced the relocation of Pakistan's capital. From its interim home in overcrowded Karachi it was to be removed to an airy Gotham purpose-built on scrubland near Rawalpindi in Punjab province. There was much to recommend the change. To be known as Islamabad, the site was more centrally located, albeit purely in terms of West Pakistan. Punjab was West Pakistan's most populous and assertive province, while Rawalpindi was the headquarters of the military. Indeed its firing ranges abutted the new city. Bureaucrats, politicians and foreign diplomats would be more secure there \u2013 as well as more readily secured. Construction got under way immediately; occupation followed in stages throughout the early 1960s.\n\nAyub's model was Ankara and the Turkish national revival engineered by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the 1930s. Whether Pakistan could afford such extravagances was debatable, although the economy suggested it could. In a market less restricted than that of India's 'permit raj', manufacturing output grew by over 11 per cent annually in 1960\u201365, and the economy as a whole by around 5\u20136 per cent. While India struggled to produce a trickle of outdated European vehicles indifferently made under licence, nifty Japanese saloons began to replace Pakistan's clapped-out Fiats and Morris Minors. Hilton, Marriott and Pearl tendered for high-rise hotels to upstage the British-era watering holes of Faletti's in Lahore, Flashman's in 'Pindi and Dean's in Peshawar. Peeling posters and unsightly graffiti \u2013 a downside of democracy \u2013 were removed; everything that could be whitewashed, was. Travellers braving the formalities of the only frontier crossing from India's Punjab to Pakistan's Punjab encountered smoother roads, more familiar billboards, fewer beerless bars and almost no beggars. The country seemed to be touched by a recognisable modernity. There was no sign of a personality cult. Ayub's dictatorship looked to err on the side of leniency.\n\nYet, though per capita incomes were rising by around 3 per cent per annum, 'this was mostly because the rich got richer. The poor just got more.' Some 220,000 people a year dropped below the poverty line, the majority being in East Pakistan. Meanwhile a mere twenty-two families, largely from the mercantile Muslim community once of Bombay but now of West Pakistan, were said to control an estimated 65\u201375 per cent of the country's banking, insurance and industrial assets. Such evidence of private enterprise reassured Pakistan's US backers, as did its excessive spending on defence. With the armed forces accounting for the lion's share of the budget, social services like education and public health languished.\n\nAyub, the first soldier to exercise power in South Asia since Wavell had made way for Mountbatten, preferred the decencies of discipline and loyalty to the cerebral dictates of ideology. Beginning with a flurry of restrictions on everything from commodity hoarding to public urination, his corrective measures were directed especially at lax bureaucrats, corrupt businessmen and venal politicians. Yet though named, shamed and if necessary arraigned, few of them received heavy sentences, and most of these were anyway commuted. Supremely confident in his own notion of authority, Ayub was neither brutal nor vindictive. His land reforms, though relevant only in West Pakistan and scarcely more effective than Nehru's, were a genuine attempt to reduce the larger holdings and endow the landless. Initiatives in favour of family planning and the reform of Muslim Family Law addressed discriminatory practices of gender and inheritance but were bitterly, and often successfully, opposed by conservative opinion. And in respect of education, though schooling was starved of funds, Ayub claimed that educating the nation was precisely what his 'Basic Democracy' was all about.\n\nThe centrepiece of his innovations, 'Basic Democracy' introduced electoral practices and some local accountability within a hierarchical framework that was probably modelled on the military's chain of command. The intent 'was pure Ayub Khan': to induct the largely uneducated masses into the political process, so encouraging a sense of national responsibility while creating a popular base for the regime. All adults were given the vote, but they might exercise it to choose only the 80,000\u2013120,000 'basic democrats' in the lowest tier of the hierarchy. Each of these basic democrats represented about 1,500 voters and, political parties being banned, the first intake was comprised largely of newcomers. In 1960 they obliged their patron by overwhelmingly confirming him as President.\n\nTen to fifteen basic democrats comprised a 'union council' (in rural areas) or a town council; each was responsible for local amenities and for electing one of its members to the next tier. This was the _tehsil_ council, at which level unelected administrators might comprise up to half the membership. _Tehsil_ councils oversaw the work of their subordinate councils, distributed resources among them and chose a representative for the next tier, that of district councils. These followed the same pattern \u2013 and so on up the chain of command. The higher the tier, the less the elected element and the greater the administrative presence, not to mention the more pronounced the directive input. It was basic, certainly, but it was not democracy. Though Hindu-ised as _panchayati raj_ by Nepal's King Mahendra, and later Bengali-ised __ by Bangladesh's leadership, __ it failed to win lasting acceptance anywhere.\n\nIn Pakistan it survived for nearly a decade, mainly because Ayub's political opponents found easier targets. In 1962 the now President Ayub Khan gave Pakistan its second Constitution. Based on his own ideas, drafted under the constraints of martial law and rubber-stamped by a Legislative Assembly chosen by his basic democrats, it reserved sweeping powers to the President and was unmistakably the product of the military. Though it signalled the end of martial rule, only bureaucrats and generals, the mainstay of the regime, welcomed it. The urban intelligentsia were embarrassed by it, East Pakistanis burnt it, and politicians, whether feudalist, federalist, Islamist or Marxist, contested it. Under pressure from within the Assembly and without, amendments were hastily made. As a concession to the religious establishment 'The Republic of Pakistan' was changed back to 'The Islamic Republic of Pakistan', and as a sop to the politicians the ban on political parties was lifted. Ayub knew when to give way and when not to. Because reinstating direct elections would have undermined the legitimacy of the regime, a proposal to that effect was shot down.\n\nThe re-emergence of the old political parties and their combative leaders nevertheless obliged him to seek his own civilian constituency. 'Basic Democracy' having as yet failed to yield the desired base of support, he accepted the leadership of a faction of the revived Muslim League, and in 1965 mobilised it in support of his campaign for another five-year term as President. In a face-off with the combined opposition parties led by Jinnah's aged sister Fatima, Ayub triumphed. But it was a pyrrhic victory. 'He may have won the election, but he lost the people.' Despite the advantage of having devised the electoral system, and despite all the resources of incumbency, only 62 per cent of his basic democrats voted for him. Dictators expected better; to unite the nation behind him, an increasingly defensive Ayub needed a more emotive cause.\n\nThe contentious nature of the new Constitution was not the only target of the regime's critics. Ayub's subservience to Washington and his failure to get India to relinquish Kashmir were also held against him. Even as the Constitution was being promulgated, New Delhi chose to flex its military muscle in Goa; then within a year India was reeling under the Chinese assault. To Pakistanis the invasion of Goa was bad enough; it was all of a pattern with Nagaland and Kashmir, and further evidence of India's irredentist ambitions in respect of the whole subcontinent.\n\nMuch worse, though, was the wave of Western sympathy that greeted the otherwise pleasing spectacle of India's Himalayan d\u00e9b\u00e2cle. For at least a decade Pakistan had enjoyed preferential access to US weaponry and training, while India relied on purchases from the Soviet bloc and Western Europe. Ayub had once told the US Congress that America had no greater friend in Asia than Pakistan. Hobnobbing with senior Americans, cultivating US aid donors, locking into SEATO and CENTO, and providing air bases for CIA spy planes (one of which, a U-2 flown by Gary Powers, was famously shot down over Sverdlovsk in 1960) was Ayub's way of redressing Pakistan's physical and military vulnerability to India's supposed aggression. But Washington cared little about Indo\u2013Pak relations, and was wary of taking sides over Kashmir. Its prime concern was containing Communism. With its troops already engaged in Vietnam, it had met the news of a Chinese breakout along the Himalayas with alarm, then alacrity. As C-30 transports began disgorging state-of-the-art ordnance at Indian airports, Pakistanis felt betrayed. They were no longer America's only arms-favoured nation in South Asia. A decade of kowtowing to Washington had got them nowhere. Resentful mobs stormed through Karachi and sent foreigners scattering for cover at Flashman's in Rawalpindi.\n\nBy settling Pakistan's Himalayan frontier with China, Ayub too signalled his disquiet with Washington. But he was still seen as the architect and champion of the US relationship, and was thus tainted by what Pakistanis called the American 'betrayal'. Bhutto, his fiery Foreign Minister, had a better record in this respect. Berating India for its occupation of Kashmir, and the West for failing to condemn it, Bhutto welcomed Zhou Enlai to Pakistan and portrayed an India-hostile Beijing as a more sympathetic ally than Washington. Meanwhile Kashmir was convulsed by the mysterious affair of the Prophet's hair; Sheikh Abdullah's olive-branch visit came and went; Nehru died; and Shastri provocatively pruned back J and K's special status, then re-arrested the Sheikh. To Bhutto it was self-evident that neither diplomacy nor defeat had softened Indian intransigence over Kashmir. Moreover, there was no guarantee that India's newly supplied US arms would not be employed there. On the other hand, the untried Shastri was no Nehru; the Indian army had lately been exposed as incompetent; and nothing was better calculated to disarm criticism of the Ayub regime than a call to arms over Kashmir. Bhutto saw his moment.\n\nCampaigning for Ayub during the 1965 presidential election, he savaged New Delhi's determination to 'merge the occupied part of Kashmir with India', and vowed retaliation. 'You will see better results in the very near future,' he declared. Then, the election out of the way, he delivered. In April 1965, while Ayub was in Washington, Pakistani armoured vehicles advanced across the Rann of Kutch, the tidal expanse of salt flats where West Pakistan's long Indian border uncertainly dips its toe in the Indian Ocean. It was about as far from Kashmir as could be, but it was poorly defended and a good place for tanks.\n\nMore a skirmish over debatable frontier markers than a battle, the Rann of Kutch affair was hailed as a triumph in Pakistan. It might actually have become so had Ayub not intervened. Returning from Washington, the President restrained his gung-ho commanders, alerted his Foreign Minister to the danger of a counter-strike 'at a time and place of India's choosing', as Shastri put it, and accepted a ceasefire pending negotiations. If the negotiations failed, India agreed to international arbitration \u2013 something it steadfastly rejected in the case of Kashmir. Ayub felt that a point had been made. His opponents felt that an opportunity had been wasted. In '62 he had refrained from intervention in Kashmir when India was reeling under the Chinese assault; now he refused to move when Indian tanks were smouldering in the Rann of Kutch.\n\nUndeterred, through the summer of 1965 Bhutto kept up the pressure. Lending credence to reports of widespread unrest in Kashmir itself, he informed the Cabinet that, as in 1947, tribal volunteers were being recruited as 'freedom fighters' to liberate Kashmir, and that he had hatched a plan with the army to support them by infiltrating regular troops. He had no doubt both the troops and the irregulars would be welcomed by Kashmir's restless masses. He was also convinced that, after its mauling in the Himalayas and the Rann, India would not dare to escalate the conflict by deploying troops outside Kashmir. On all counts he was wrong; but, recognising the popular demand for action, Ayub gave the go-ahead. Thereupon the infiltrators were quickly captured, the Kashmiris proved indifferent, and in answer to a Pakistani incursion into Jammu, Indian motorised units cruised across the frontier in the Punjab and threatened Lahore. Far from scaring off the Indian tiger, tweaking its tail in Kashmir had merely led to its sinking its claws into Pakistan's vitals.\n\nThe '65 war lasted only seventeen days, by the end of which India had lost slightly more men and Pakistan slightly more tanks. Aircraft losses were about equal but the territorial advantage lay with India. Both sides were short of munitions, spare parts and fuel, the US having imposed an instant embargo; and both were under enormous international pressure to desist, Moscow being as adamant as Washington. Bhutto canvassed allies elsewhere, most notably Indonesia; but it was Beijing's response that was crucial. Its offer of 'unconditional support' had delighted Bhutto and had possibly deterred India from attacking Pakistan's almost undefended eastern wing. But the Chinese offer was in fact far from unconditional; for Pakistan must first commit itself to a Vietcong-type 'people's war of resistance' in which 'cities like Lahore might be lost'. Rightly concluding that the nation would split, if not fragment, in such a struggle, Ayub opted for the UN's ceasefire and an offer of talks with Shastri to be chaired by the Soviets. Held in Tashkent in early 1966, they restored the pre-war status quo.\n\nThe difficulty now was persuading Pakistanis to accept the outcome. The relentlessly upbeat news coverage provided by the government had led the nation to believe the war was being won and that the ceasefire was India's way of signalling a climbdown, at least in respect of Kashmir's status. Hence, when nothing of the sort emerged in the final declaration, indeed Kashmir was not even mentioned, riots broke out in Lahore and politicians united in decrying the 'sell-out'. The President brazened it out; but 'the Tashkent Declaration dealt a mortal blow to Ayub's reputation'. Like Nehru after India's China war, he lingered on, his health declining, until forced to resign in 1969.\n\nMeanwhile Bhutto completed his political somersault. Disclaiming responsibility not for the war but for its untimely conclusion, he dissociated himself from Ayub, blamed him for the Tashkent sell-out (though he had himself been party to the talks), and six months later resigned. By joining the agitation against Ayub's personal rule and forming his own Pakistan People's Party (PPP), he showed a nice awareness of the times. China was now convulsed by the Cultural Revolution, Paris was brought to a standstill by the _\u00e9v\u00e9nements de '68_ and Washington was besieged by anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. Popular protest was all the rage. Bhutto, as much demagogue as democrat, endorsed even the strident demands for autonomy emanating from East Pakistan. Promising to outlaw dictatorship, reclaim Kashmir and bring the economy into public ownership, he positioned himself for Pakistan's next flirtation with electoral democracy. But if the intent was to redeem the nation, the effect would be to rend it.\n\n##\n\n## Power to the People\n\nZulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan was not the only one advocating a populist agenda that would prove divisive. By the early 1970s a Nehru-less India was also confusing politics with personality, principle with slogans. Hunched on a wooden chest, Raj Narain leant towards me and thumped the hut's floor of hard-packed mud with his stick.\n\n'Madam is breaking the rules,' he said as he surveyed the makeshift hustings outside. 'These jeeps and pandals [electioneering platforms] are being paid for by the state. She has no right.'\n\nHis stick jerked up and down in time with his words. Though he could barely walk without it, it was less a cane than a cudgel. Stout and steel-tipped, it was identical to the police _lathi_ which had lamed him in the first place, he said. But that was long ago, and in another cause; during a lifetime of obstreperous protest Raj Narain would claim to have been arrested over eighty times. Now, in January 1971, he was standing for the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, as the Socialist Party's candidate for Rae Bareilly. A rural constituency in UP, Rae Bareilly conformed well to the description given by V.S. Naipaul of his own ancestral homeland elsewhere in the Gangetic plain: 'Wherever you looked there was a village, low, dust-blurred, part of the earth and barely rising out of it.'\n\nBut unlike the fastidious Naipaul, Raj Narain was quite at home here. He boasted never to have owned a suit, and often covered his head with a bandana-like turban. Stubbled and stocky, in dirty white kurta and pyjamas, the fifty-three-year-old was dressed for the campaign trail. To win the villagers' votes he must remind them he was one of them. In an electoral battle with the incumbent Prime Minister, that should count.\n\nFour weeks later, stick and stubble proved to have been of no avail. On polling day Raj Narain lost to Indira Gandhi by a crushing 100,000 votes. Yet, never one to be easily cowed, he would contest the result. He took his grouse about his opponent's misuse of government facilities to the Electoral Commission and then the courts. Four and a half years later, the case would reach the highest court in the state. It decided in his favour. The Rae Bareilly result would be annulled, the Prime Minister disqualified from office, and India plunged into 'the Emergency', its greatest ever constitutional crisis. Narain felt vindicated. Better still, when after 'the Emergency' he again challenged his old adversary in Rae Bareilly, he would win.\n\nThe 1971 election thus had a sting in its tail. At the time it promised to be momentous, not least because it was unexpected. Given the standard five-year term, it was not actually due till 1972. That meant that for the first time India's parliamentary elections were not coinciding with elections to the state assemblies. As Raj Narain saw it, national issues were taking pride of place, principal among them being Mrs Gandhi's claim to the legacy of Congress. Though already in her fifth year as Prime Minister, she had called the election a year early in a bid to confound her opponents and ratify her leadership. She herself put it even more bluntly. When a _Newsweek_ reporter had enquired what issues were at stake, 'she answered without a pause: \"I am the issue.\" '\n\nNehru's immediate successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, had never had to fight an election. As the world's most vertically challenged Prime Minister, he had enjoyed a suitably short tenure of just eighteen months. In 1966, within hours of signing the Tashkent agreement that ended the 1965 Indo\u2013Pak war ('Bhutto's War'), he had died of a massive heart attack. Once again the Congress Party's regional bosses, collectively known as the Syndicate, had put their heads together, and this time they had chosen Nehru's daughter. Born in 1917, the same year as Raj Narain, Indira Gandhi was not inexperienced. She had long acted as hostess for her father, and had sometimes accompanied him on foreign trips. She had also involved herself in politics, serving as President of Congress under Nehru and as a Minister under Shastri. More obviously, to an electorate primed on the heroics of the freedom struggle she sounded perfect. A Nehru by birth, she had become a Gandhi by marriage (that her now deceased husband was unrelated to the Mahatma was no secret, though neither was it a handicap). Yet she was a generation younger than most of the Syndicate bosses, added to which she suffered from the considerable handicap of being a woman. While recognising her appeal to the electorate, the kingmakers felt reassured by this. Once in office she should pose no challenge to their authority over the party or the government.\n\nIn an age when women leaders were as much a novelty in Asia as anywhere, only Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Prime Minister of Ceylon from 1960, had preceded her. The Syndicate might usefully have studied this precedent. For 'Mrs B', herself the widow of one premier and the mother of another, was proving a doughty operator in her own right. She had championed a programme of nationalisation and antagonised the Western powers much as would Mrs Gandhi. More ominously she had curried favour with Ceylon's Sinhala-speaking Buddhist majority by promoting a nationalism that discriminated against the country's Tamil minority, most of them Hindus and originally wage-migrants from south India. Naturally the DMK, the Tamil party in India's Tamil Nadu, had taken a dim view of this; and so, perforce, had the Indian government. Already under severe pressure from the DMK over the question of Hindi versus English as India's official language (in Ceylon Mrs Bandaranaike had outlawed the use of English despite Tamil protests), New Delhi had felt obliged to reach an agreement with Colombo: 375,000 Sri Lankan Tamils were to be given Ceylonese citizenship in return for India repatriating another 600,000. Thus began a staged migration of Ceylon's 'Estate Tamils' not only to India but beyond. For once it had nothing to do with Partition, although the Ceylonese Tamils and their diaspora would continue to set a dire precedent for the subcontinent as a whole.\n\nIn 1967, less than a year into her first prime ministership, Mrs Gandhi had had to fight her first election. She had won it comfortably, if not convincingly. Congress's share of the vote had slumped from around 45 per cent to 40 per cent, and its seat tally from around 360 to 280. A Communist-led coalition had recaptured Kerala, another edged out its rivals in West Bengal, and the DMK stormed to power in Tamil Nadu. Elsewhere, slender majorities won by patronage and bribes were soon eroded by patronage and bribes. Seemingly the broad church that was once Congress could no longer take the strain of a myriad of assertive interest groups based on caste, religion, ethnicity, language or ideological conviction. Politics were getting dirtier. Patriots with a social conscience, a decent education and a law degree had once filled the ranks of Congress. Now few wanted any part in it.\n\nNeville Maxwell, then of the London _Times_ , __ reported the future for democracy in India as 'dark' and 'the crisis' as imminent. Popular works like Ronald Segal's _The Crisis of India_ (1965) __ and Naipaul's _An Area of Darkness_ (1967) faithfully echoed these sentiments amid a wrinkling of noses over 'the dirt and the submission, the superstition and apathy, the greed and the corruption and the endless, astonishing and affronting poverty'. Over half of all Indians earned less than a living wage, and of these most habitually went hungry. A succession of poor harvests coupled with a hike in defence spending as a result of the China and Pakistan wars had just obliged Mrs Gandhi to devalue the rupee by half and to negotiate another massive food-aid package from the US. Later assertions that famine in India had 'disappeared abruptly with the establishment of a multi-party democracy' somehow overlooked the thousands starving in Bihar in 1966\u201367 \u2013 just as they would overlook the estimated 1.5 million who would die for lack of food and adequate relief in a democratic Bangladesh seven years later. Arguably, if India was indeed experiencing fewer in the way of newsworthy famines, it had less to do with democracy and more with Partition having relieved New Delhi of responsibility for disaster-prone East Bengal.\n\nWith Congress heavily implicated in this catalogue of woe, Mrs Gandhi needed to connect with the people by distancing herself from the party's 'old guard' Syndicate and charting a new direction. Though usually diffident about her own beliefs, 'she suddenly discovered a deep affinity for the poor and downtrodden, plus an unexpectedly dictatorial streak'. A programme of radical reforms was announced. Banks and insurance companies were to be nationalised, a minimum wage introduced, and the ex-rulers of the princely states deprived of their 'privy purses' (the privileges and annual state pensions awarded them in return for their accession). The plight of the nation's poorest demanded that India embrace more obviously socialist policies; or as the Prime Minister's principal adviser put it, 'the best way to vanquish the Syndicate would be to convert the struggle for personal power into an ideological one'. Nehru had embraced socialism as a matter of principle; his daughter seemed to be doing so as a matter of expediency.\n\nThough agreeable to radical young Congress activists, the programme met with stiff resistance from the Syndicate, and especially from Morarji Desai, Mrs Gandhi's deputy and Finance Minister. She simply relieved Desai of the finance portfolio and nationalised the banks anyway. Her confidence grew even as her 'old guard' sponsors fumed. Matters had come to a head in early 1969 over the choice of the Republic's next President. For an office which, though largely ceremonial, came with some constitutional powers as well as New Delhi's massive viceregal residence, the Syndicate nominated one of their own as Congress's official candidate. But Mrs Gandhi declined to endorse the Syndicate's man. Instead she finally broke ranks by lending her support to a more obliging rival. The predicted crisis had arrived.\n\nIn what amounted to a parliamentary vote of confidence in herself, the Prime Minister's candidate narrowly won the contest for the presidency. But the party retaliated by expelling her; she then formed her own breakaway Congress; and thus by 1970 there were two Congress parties. The Prime Minister's was known as Congress [R] \u2013 initially for 'Requisitionist' (an earlier attempt to 'requisition' a special session of the party having failed) and then 'Reform' \u2013 but was later changed to Congress [I] \u2013 for Indira. The Syndicate's party was always Congress [O] \u2013 for 'Organisation', then 'Old' and ultimately 'Obsolete'. Like the Muslim League in the early days of Pakistan, the mighty Congress, the juggernaut of the freedom struggle and the embodiment of the national consensus, had fractured.\n\nMrs Gandhi preferred to think of it as purged. She soldiered on, having cobbled together a parliamentary alliance with the less radical of the two Communist parties. But with both bank nationalisation and her assault on the princes stalled on constitutional grounds by the Supreme Court, and with other reforms opposed on principle by Congress [O], in late 1970 she took her opponents by surprise and announced the snap election of 1971. Both her future and the country's direction were in the balance. The upcoming election, and particularly the result in Rae Bareilly, could hardly have been more critical.\n\n' _Indira hatao_ , __ Out with Indira,' __ croaked Raj Narain. It was by way of a farewell as he hobbled away to find his lift into town. Coined by himself, the slogan had been adopted by the Congress [O] diehards with whom his Socialist Party was aligned.\n\n' _Gharibi Hatao_ , __ Out with Poverty,' countered the Prime Minister's supporters as their flag-waving motorcade trundled off into the dead-flat distance and the dust slowly settled.\n\nThanks to Mrs Gandhi's indefatigable campaigning, her catchier slogan and her relentless assault on 'the forces of reaction', even the pollsters were confounded. In 1971 the number of seats won by her Congress [R] was much the same as that chalked up by the undivided Congress under Nehru in 1962. It was an essentially personal triumph, and it heralded an increasingly personal rule.\n\nNever much of a performer in the Lok Sabha, she could now afford to take her party's support for granted. Her mandate was from the people, not Parliament, while her policies emanated from an inner circle of advisers, not the Cabinet. In a spate of constitutional amendments, she reined in the Supreme Court's powers to interpret the Constitution by arguing that the fundamental rights accorded to the individual must be subordinated to those of society as a whole if India was to become more egalitarian. Nehru might have approved; a radical redistribution of wealth and influence to those who could only dream of such things looked possible. But it was for the state to determine what society needed; and since 'Indira is India and India is Indira', as one of her supporters would put it, the state had got a lot more personal. It could be caring and responsive; it could also be detached and vindictive. A rush of power to the head was no guarantee against the misuse of all that power.\n\nThus armed, Mrs Gandhi pushed through the takeover of the banks, then the insurance and the coal industries. Likewise, the ex-princes lost their stipends. The judiciary was encouraged to be more committed, which could mean less impartial, and the bureaucracy to be more engaged, which could mean less principled. Meanwhile hostile or non-compliant state governments were being toppled like ninepins. At the national level, participatory democracy was being corralled into the twice-a-decade vote-bazaars that heralded an election. 'The drift was unmistakably towards a Jacobin conception of popular sovereignty,' according to Sunil Khilnani. In her new avatar as a many-armed deity, Mrs Gandhi bestrode the barricades, ballot box in one hand, progressive directives in all the others. Rae Bareilly was remembered only for her reincarnation. The skeleton in the cupboard that was Raj Narain's obsessive concern for the niceties of electoral practice looked destined to stay there, amid a whiff of sour grapes.\n\n*\n\nAcross the border in Pakistan, Mrs Gandhi's triumph went largely unremarked. Islamabad's future _b\u00eate noire_ was as yet rated no more highly than the geriatric leadership of the Syndicate she had toppled. Pakistan anyway faced a test of its own. In view of that country's erratic acquaintance with democracy, the chances of a Pakistani election coinciding with an Indian one were slim. But in 1970\u201371 they fell within a few weeks of one another. Both polls were reckoned fair and highly significant. And while in Indira's India the election proved satisfactorily decisive, in bipartite Pakistan it merely highlighted the division. 'People power', as yet so affirmative for New Delhi, was already proving calamitous for Islamabad.\n\nAfter the fiasco of the 1965 war with India, President Ayub Khan had met the protests against his perceived 'sell-out' in Tashkent with firmness. Colleges and universities had been closed and efforts to restore the army's morale got under way. A national conference staged by the leaders of the political parties became a pretext for their arrest and 'revealed more about the divisions within the opposition than their capacity for unity'. Among those detained was Mujibur Rahman, the heavily bespectacled and moustachioed leader of the Awami League. An East Bengali party formed by H.S. Suhrawardy and others in 1949\u201350, the Awami League had just committed itself to a six-point programme demanding for East Pakistan the fullest possible autonomy short of independence. As well as insisting on a parliamentary representation commensurate with its population, the province was to exercise its own fiscal powers, mint its own currency, manage its own trade and economy and raise its own militia; only foreign affairs, defence and certain coordinating responsibilities were to be delegated to the central government in Islamabad.\n\nPresident Ayub Khan regarded Mujib's Six Points as tantamount to a demand for outright secession, and he was not alone: most of West Pakistan's politicians agreed. Yet attributing the Awami League's challenge to the repression of military rule, they accorded a higher priority to things like the restoration of democratic rights, the revival of the provincial legislatures (i.e. an end to the 'one-unit' amalgamation of West Pakistan) and the removal of Ayub himself. In effect, opinion in West Pakistan favoured political participation as the prerequisite to addressing provincial grievances, while opinion in East Pakistan would not even consider participation until provincial autonomy was conceded. Faced with this conundrum, the now ailing Ayub responded with a mixture of overtures and threats: if the parties would work with him, he would lift the state of emergency imposed during the war; if not, he would reintroduce martial law.\n\nNeither option held much appeal for Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League. Throughout East Pakistan, intermittent protest was turning to sustained violence. An observer in 1968 found Dhaka's students and teachers 'readily admitting... that many student leaders carry knives and guns and use them frequently to settle political disputes'. Alongside the campus rabble-rousers, 'workers and street mobs' were now joining in the movement, attacking police stations, banks and government buildings. Arms were being looted and 'disagreements... increasingly settled by terrorist methods'.\n\nThe demonstrators demanded implementation of the Six Points as a guarantee against cultural disparagement and ethnic discrimination in the regime's allocation of government jobs, investment and social programmes. 'As the riots spread and intensified, the years of martial law, political restrictions, press controls, educational neglect, static wages, escalating inflation, a self-serving entrepreneurial elite, and a callous bureaucracy spurred the anger.'\n\nA further dimension was added by the so-called Agartala Conspiracy. In January 1968 Mujibur Rahman and thirty-five others were brought to trial for making treasonable contact with officers of India's army. A plan to do away with Ayub and declare East Pakistan independent had allegedly been hatched, and talks had certainly taken place, notably at Agartala, just across the East Pakistan border in the Indian state of Tripura. But they dated back to 1962, so before the Indo\u2013Pak war, and it was unclear to what extent senior figures on either side were involved. Ayub still felt that a state trial was essential. Well publicised, it would discredit the Awami League and bring home to his countrymen the seriousness of the situation in the eastern wing. In the event, though, it simply backfired. The prosecution faltered when it emerged that one of the accused had died in custody and that others had apparently been tortured; Mujib and his defence found the dock a congenial platform from which to proclaim their grievances; and East Pakistan celebrated its latest 'martyrs to the cause' with more massive demonstrations. 'Before the trial few in Pakistan dared to discuss secession in public. But as the newspapers printed more and more details of the proceedings, debate about breaking away became a normal part of public discourse.' In Dhaka the trial itself came to be seen as the conspiracy, the prosecutor being Mujib, the accused Ayub, and his treachery that of blackening East Bengalis as India-loving traitors to Islam.\n\nRecognising that the whole exercise was becoming hopelessly counter-productive, Ayub called it off, released Mujib and made a final attempt at conciliation. It took the form of round-table talks held in March 1969. Ayub had already announced that on health grounds he would not contest the presidential election to be held under his 'Basic Democracy' rules in 1970. He hoped that this news would concentrate minds. It did, but not the right minds. The top brass, including army Chief of Staff General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, began planning for the succession. Meanwhile Mujib, having been denied his Six Points, walked out of the talks. More crucially, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan People's Party boycotted them altogether.\n\nOver the previous months Bhutto, once Ayub's most trusted adviser, had emerged as his most outspoken critic. Riding a wave of hostility directed partly at the Ayub regime which Bhutto had once upheld, partly at the war which he had promoted, and partly at the Tashkent talks which he had attended, he now discovered his vocation as the voice of the people. Morarji Desai had once described Mrs Gandhi as 'a dumb slip of a girl'; supporters flocked to her because of who she was and what she stood for, not what she said. Bhutto was the opposite. He told his supporters what they wanted to hear. His histrionic oratory laced with cleverly marshalled arguments convinced even himself. Indira Gandhi's 'Out with Poverty' might be a well-intentioned slogan, but Zulfi Bhutto's cry for 'Bread, Cloth and Housing' addressed the needs of the masses. Backed by his demands for social justice and the nationalisation of all the most remunerative sectors of the economy, it carried conviction.\n\nSo did his heavily publicised meetings with China's leadership. While Ayub sucked his pipe and cast a fly like the Sandhurst product that he was, Bhutto sported a Chairman Mao forage-cap and looked to Beijing for the arms shipments still denied to Pakistan by the US embargo imposed during the '65 war. Of the great powers, China alone supported Pakistan's position over Kashmir, which was reason enough for a Sino\u2013Pak alignment. Bhutto's own belligerent stance on Kashmir was not forgotten either. It played especially well in the Kashmir-adjacent Punjab and NWFP; it also served to deflect attention away from the secessionist province in the east to the one in the north that had yet to accede. In an essay published in 1969 Bhutto argued that India's continued occupation of most of Kashmir lay at the core of all Pakistan's problems.\n\nWhy does India want Jammu and Kashmir? She holds them because their valley is the handsome head of the body of Pakistan. Its possession enables [India] to cripple the economy of West Pakistan and, militarily, to dominate the country... If a Muslim majority area can remain a part of India, then the _raison d'\u00eatre_ of Pakistan collapses. Pakistan is incomplete without Jammu and Kashmir both territorially and ideologically. Recovering them, she would recover her head and be made whole, stronger, and more viable.\n\nTo that end he revived the promise of 'a thousand-year war' and taunted Ayub with having betrayed the Kashmiris in the Tashkent agreement. The people loved it. In mass rallies he lambasted the regime, castigated the US and savaged an economic system that enriched the few and did nothing for the many. Students, labour unions and the intelligentsia responded with enthusiasm. Of all the parties, only Bhutto's PPP reached out across West Pakistan's ethnic, social and linguistic divides. Even among the military his commitment to the country's defence and to the nation's integrity won respect and allies.\n\nIt was thus inevitable that, without Bhutto or Mujib, Ayub's last attempt at conciliation would collapse. At the instigation of General Yahya Khan, martial law was reimposed and, as Ayub's authority drained away, on 25 March 1969 he resigned. In defiance of his own Constitution he nominated Yahya Khan as Chief Martial Law Administrator and his successor as President. Two years later, it would be Yahya Khan's regime that initiated the crackdown in East Pakistan which precipitated that province's rebirth as independent Bangladesh.\n\nLike Ayub ten years earlier, Yahya immediately clamped down on various corrupt practices and promised a new Constitution plus early elections at both provincial and national level followed by a return to parliamentary government. But this time the elections were to be on the basis of 'direct adult franchise' and, unlike Ayub, Yahya was as good as his word. New constituency boundaries were drawn, electoral rolls prepared and a date for the poll set in late 1970. Meanwhile a Legal Framework Order was promulgated, within whose guidelines the soon-to-be elected members of the National Assembly were to agree what would be Pakistan's third Constitution. The 1956 Ayub\u2013Mirza Constitution was therefore abrogated, Ayub's elaborate 'Basic Democracy' was allowed to lapse, and his 'one-unit' West Pakistan was rescinded in favour of West Pakistan's reinstated provinces.\n\nThe Legal Framework Order stipulated that the new Constitution would be subject to presidential approval, but was otherwise surprisingly inclusive. Islam was to be respected, elections were to be based on universal adult franchise, provincial autonomy was to be guaranteed save in respect of the central government's conduct of external and certain internal affairs, and the economic and employment disparities between the provinces were to be removed. Against considerable opposition from his supporters within the military, Yahya's advisers had come up with a formula that might just have worked.\n\nEven Mujibur Rahman could live with it. Of the 326 seats in the new Assembly, 169 would be filled by members from East Bengal, so finally reflecting that province's numerical superiority and giving it a majority over the combined membership from all the other provinces; the Awami League duly put up candidates for all of the East Bengal seats. But Mujib, under pressure from his extreme supporters, kept his distance from the Yahya regime. He preferred to conduct the election as if it were a referendum on the Six Points and let it be known that secession was still a possibility. Bhutto, on the other hand, though a one-time supporter of Mujib's Six Points, now vehemently rejected them and, strengthening his links with the military, posed as the saviour of the undivided nation.\n\nThus twenty-three years after its creation, while India geared up for its fifth round of direct national elections, Pakistan launched into its first. Since 'the activities and electioneering of the participants were nothing like anything yet experienced in the history of Pakistan', predictions about the outcome were understandably tentative. In West Pakistan, against a kaleidoscope of parties representing purely provincial interests plus various shades of Islamic orthodoxy, ideological preference and Muslim League tradition, Bhutto was expected to be a major contender; in Sind, feudal landowners should secure the vote for Bhutto as one of their own; and in Punjab, whose eighty-one seats comfortably exceeded the combined total for the other West Pakistan provinces, Bhutto could expect to carry the urban vote and, by dint of hard bargaining with landed interests and Sufi divines, make inroads into the rural vote.\n\nMujib's task in a heavily politicised East Bengal looked more daunting. In addition to the Islamic parties and the Muslim League factions, his Awami League was there in danger of being upstaged by the quasi-Maoist and outright secessionist National Awami Party led by the eighty-nine-year-old 'Red Maulana', Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani. Maulana Bhashani, however, was a man of inflexible principle. He would have nothing to do with Yahya's Legal Framework Order. Despite the boost to Mujib's prospects (or possibly to ensure it), he therefore instructed his supporters to boycott the elections. That cleared the way for Mujib's Awami League to make an exclusive claim to the votes of all those who increasingly called themselves 'Bangla-desh' ('Bengali-land') patriots.\n\nAs so often in ill-starred Bengal, it was a natural disaster that had the final say. First, monsoon flooding necessitated a postponement of the vote from October to December. Then in November a cyclone named Bhola moved slowly up the Bay of Bengal. It struck the coastal districts of East Bengal on the evening of 12 November. Coinciding with the high tide, a storm surge up to ten metres high tore across the offshore islands and swept inland up the low-lying delta. Tens of thousands of villages were erased, fields, fishing fleets and livestock carried away. Around half a million people are known to have lost their lives, and over three million to have been left homeless and destitute. In all probability what is widely recognised as 'the deadliest cyclone ever recorded' accounted for more fatalities than the combined toll for the massacres of Partition, the '47\u201348 Kashmir war, the '62 India\u2013China war and the '65 Indo\u2013Pak war.\n\nThe elections nevertheless went ahead as rescheduled; it was thought that another postponement might attract accusations of bad faith. But such accusations could hardly have compared with those of complacency and incompetence levelled at Islamabad over the relief effort. The regime appeared not to take the disaster seriously, then to skimp on assistance when belatedly shamed into action by the international community. Eighteen helicopters were rushed to the scene by the US and the UK; Islamabad managed just one. It blamed India for refusing transit rights; India denied this and blamed Pakistan for not allowing it to fly its own considerable relief effort into East Bengal. Red tape and the misappropriation of resources further angered the survivors. Whatever their voting intentions might have been, East Bengalis now united in protest against a criminal indifference that seemed to epitomise West Pakistan's two decades of neglect in the province. Maulana Bhashani turned out before a crowd of 50,000 to excoriate the regime's response. Mujib noted wryly that 'We have a large army but it is left to the British marines to bury our dead.'\n\nThe cyclone effect, allied to Bhashani's boycott, carried the elections. Mujib's Awami League won an astonishing 160 of East Bengal's 162 seats (a further seven being reserved for women). Even Mrs Gandhi would never achieve such a result. It was the most impressive performance ever recorded in a free election of comparable magnitude. Mujib was assured of an overall majority in Pakistan's National Assembly whatever the outcome in the provinces of West Pakistan. Yet there Bhutto too did better than expected, his PPP capturing eighty-one of a possible 138 seats. There were thus two clear winners. And just as Mujib had won not a single seat in the west, so Bhutto had won not a single seat in the east. Pakistan's first proper election had exposed the structural fault that decades of constitutional wallpaper and military whitewash had failed to obscure, let alone rectify.\n\nThe nightmare scenario foreseen by many, including Ayub and Yahya, had now materialised. 'Bengali supremacy was no more acceptable to Punjabis [or Pathans, Sindis, etc.] than Punjabi supremacy had been to Bengalis. Compromising on Mujib's Six Points would induce a revolution in the East; denying Bhutto a share of power would trigger a revolution in the West.'\n\nAny chance of a political settlement now depended on negotiations between Mujib, Bhutto and Yahya Khan. None of them was a free agent. Yahya had to contend with a military junta deeply suspicious of his intentions, Mujib with zealous supporters whose expectations no longer stopped at autonomy, and Bhutto with importunate power-brokers in the West Pakistan provinces. All three were guilty of inconsistent statements tailored to circumstance. Their motivations and strategies are thus hard to discern. Yahya strove for a peaceful accommodation while his junta busied itself with plans for military intervention; Mujib hinted at compromise on his Six Points while publicly ruling out anything of the sort; and Bhutto posed as a mediator while nursing designs as a principal.\n\nYahya's first response to the result was conciliatory. He accepted Mujib's claim to the prime ministership of all Pakistan, and agreed that the National Assembly convene in Dhaka rather than Islamabad. Mujib took this as a commitment, and expected to hold Yahya to it. Bhutto objected. Since Mujib insisted on making his Six Points the basis of the new Constitution, Bhutto demanded that the Constitution be settled before the Assembly met. Otherwise the PPP would not participate, which would be 'like staging _Hamlet_ without the Prince of Denmark', said Bhutto. Yahya thus had both a good reason (i.e. Mujib's recalcitrance) and a handy excuse (i.e. Bhutto's boycott) for postponing the Assembly.\n\nBut on 1 March 1971 an announcement to that effect just two days before the Assembly was due to convene was the last straw for Mujib and his supporters. 'It struck the Bengalis with the force of an atomic bomb,' according to one observer. An indefinite general strike was called; millions took to the streets and widespread fighting was reported. Pakistani flags were burnt and replaced by ones displaying a golden outline of East Bengal\/Bangladesh within a blood-red disk against a lush green surround. The police were overwhelmed; the army opened fire. West Pakistan in the persons of Yahya and Bhutto had betrayed the Bengalis once too often. 'The struggle now is the struggle for our independence,' Mujib told a mass rally on 7 March. 'Turn every house into a fort. Fight with whatever you have.'\n\nWhile in India Mrs Gandhi was savouring her electoral triumph, in Pakistan Yahya was presiding over an electoral disaster. He named a new date for the opening of the Assembly, but it was only by way of playing for time. Echoing Bhutto, he now referred to Mujib as a 'bastard' and 'traitor', while his generals pressed ahead with plans for a military solution.\n\nBut this too proved to be far from straightforward, for mounting what they called 'Operation Searchlight' had just got a whole lot harder thanks to a seemingly unrelated incident. On 30 January an antiquated Fokker Friendship belonging to India's state airline had been hijacked to Pakistan's Lahore while on an internal hop from Srinagar to Jammu. There were no casualties; crew and passengers had been released; and the hijackers, being Kashmiris, had been f\u00eated. But the plane itself had been deliberately burnt, and in protest India hastily placed a ban on all Pakistani overflights of its territory. Though it would later be claimed that the whole affair was in fact the work of RAW, the Research and Analysis Wing of Indian Intelligence, the ban on overflights stood. For Pakistan, ferrying men, munitions and supplies from west to east now involved an eight-hour flight with a refuelling stop in what was still Ceylon.\n\nBy this roundabout route Yahya and Bhutto headed to Dhaka for last-minute negotiations in mid-March. The negotiations turned out to be little more than window-dressing. In the East Bengal capital the visitors were made to feel like unwelcome foreigners, mobbed by black-flag-waving crowds and heavily guarded for their own security. Meanwhile Mujib took the salute from student militias parading under the colourful new ensign of Bangladesh. An eleventh-hour compromise was rumoured, but was overtaken by events. Yahya flew home empty-handed on the 24th, Bhutto following within hours. When the PPP leader landed in Karachi, the Pakistan army's genocidal 'Operation Searchlight' had already begun. Knowing this full well, Bhutto issued another of his rhetorical clangers. 'By the grace of God, Pakistan has been saved,' he announced.\n\n*\n\nThe war in East Bengal began on 25 March 1971, two years to the day after Ayub Khan had stepped down as President. Yet despite the election results and the frantic attempts at negotiation, it took the world by surprise. Foreign correspondents leisurely dissecting the outcome of the Indian election in Delhi were summoned to the telex and reassigned to Dhaka. A scramble for airline seats ensued, only to be aborted by the cancellation of all East Bengal-bound flights. Dhaka's airport had been closed. The land which the journalists were starting to call 'Bangla Desh' was already under lockdown.\n\nIn what would prove to be a two-part war, the first phase from March to June pitched regular Pakistani forces against Bangladeshi irregulars and brought a quick but uneasy victory for the former. The Awami League's ill-prepared and uncoordinated militias were no match for the armour and superior firepower of the Pakistan army's 'Operation Searchlight'. By May all the main cities had fallen, the last being Chittagong, from where a weak signal from a radio station had carried a declaration of Bangladesh's independence. It was read by the then little-known Ziaur Rahman, a major in the Pakistan army's East Bengal regiment who had thrown in his lot with the resistance.\n\nMujib himself had been quickly arrested and taken to West Pakistan for trial. Other Awami League leaders had made their escape across the ever permeable border into India, there to be joined by thousands, then millions, of fleeing Bangladeshis. The Pakistan army had locked down the cities, but it had done nothing to win over their teeming populations; nor did it control the countryside and the rural masses. Instead of pacifying the population it seemed bent on decimating it. Hearts and minds were ignored, intimidation and vengeance prevailed. The despised Bengalis had challenged the two-nation theory, and hence the very existence of Pakistan; now they must pay the price.\n\nThe atrocities were not peculiar to the Pakistan army. They had begun even before the war. As law and order collapsed, Awami League activists had retaliated against the shooting of demonstrators by lynching West Pakistani officials and anyone seen as collaborating with them. The violence \u2013 killings, burnings and rapes \u2013 partook of the horrors of Partition and targeted Partition's most vulnerable groups, including East Bengal's still large community of Hindus (the whipping boys of both sides), along with its smaller community of 'Bihari' Muslim migrants (the already twice-over victims of Partition) and the predominantly Buddhist 'tribal' peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.\n\nWith the launching of 'Operation Searchlight', the Pakistan army had responded in kind and on a much more ambitious scale. Disaffected units of locally recruited regiments that had not already deserted to the enemy were ruthlessly purged. So were suspect Bengali members of the administration. Students and intellectuals being in the forefront of the movement, Dhaka University was an early target. Its halls of residence were shelled, hundreds killed and hundreds more, both students and academics, bussed away to be later exhumed from mass graves. With official sanction, killer squads prolonged the carnage in the cities; sweeps into the countryside left a swathe of burnt-out villages and a trail of raped and mutilated victims. Those on the run dodged between aerial bombings and overland raids.\n\nWe spent a night in a village but next mornng we heard that the [Pakistani] troops were headed for that village. Again we left along with the owner of the house. After a couple of days when we returned, we found the whole village burnt to ashes. Many of the people who could not escape were killed. The carcases of livestock were strewn all over. The stench was unbearable. It was hell\n\nOnce again Hindus, seen by the Pakistan army as India's fifth columnists, suffered disproportionately. Muslim Biharis, whose pre-Partition roots in India were no different from those of _muhajir_ elements in the Pakistan army, fared better. A few were transported to West Pakistan for their own safety; others were recruited as informants and auxiliaries, for which services they would pay dearly when the tide of war turned.\n\nAs usual, the actual figures are disputed. Pakistan admitted to substantial military losses; Bangladesh claimed civilian losses of up to three million. It was the same with the refugee exodus across the border into the neighbouring states of India. Islamabad sanctioned a final figure of two to three million refugees, New Delhi one of eight to ten million. Either way, observers again noted Partition similarities, this time with the mass migrations witnessed in the Punjab in 1947\u201348. Less remarked, though, was the similarity in the confessional allegiance of the refugees. Whatever the total, as many as 90 per cent of the migrating refugees were not in fact Awami League sympathisers from East Bengal's Muslim majority but members of East Bengal's embattled Hindu community, many of them low-caste cultivators and menials. To West Pakistanis, the ten-million-strong Hindu community was the canker at the heart of the problem. Regarded as a subversive element whose real loyalties lay with India, East Bengal's Hindus stood accused of undermining Muslim solidarity and instigating secession. Targeted accordingly, their flight replicated that of other East Bengalis in the 1950s and '60s and was seen by many of the migrants as a prelude to permanent settlement in India.\n\nIn this they were disappointed: New Delhi was adamant that all must eventually return. While shouldering the burden of relief, it therefore detained the refugees in temporary encampments, most of which were dotted along the border and soon fell prone to cholera. The sheer scale of the exodus was said to preclude the possibility of rehabilitation elsewhere in India. Additionally, the plight of the massed refugees was a powerful weapon in India's management of international opinion.\n\nIn a major diplomatic offensive of April 1971, Indian officials set out to alert world leaders to the humanitarian crisis and to press them into prevailing on Islamabad for a settlement with the Awami League that would enable the displaced to return. Sympathy and pledges of aid were forthcoming; but no government relished the consequences of intervening in what was regarded as a purely Indo\u2013Pakistan affair. In Washington, President Nixon thought too well of Yahya Khan, whose good offices were essential to Henry Kissinger in arranging his groundbreaking visit to Beijing that summer.\n\nThe one exception was Moscow. There India's Foreign Minister reaped the benefit of earlier overtures and returned with a draft agreement. Under the new Indo\u2013Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Co-operation signed in August 1971, the pretence of Indian non-alignment was finally laid to rest. To offset China's budding relationship with Pakistan and to cut off a trickle of Soviet aid and arms to Pakistan, India subscribed to a version of the Brezhnev Doctrine. Under it, each country undertook to consult and assist the other in the event of either of them being attacked or coming under the threat of attack. In effect, should India feel so menaced by the situation in East Bengal as to contemplate intervention, it could count on the support of an ally powerful enough to discourage China or the US from intervening on behalf of Islamabad.\n\nThat India was indeed an interested party in the possible break-up of Pakistan was taken for granted. But, aside from the question of who had been responsible for the timely hijacking that had closed Indian airspace to Pakistani flights, it seemed as if Pakistan was imploding of its own accord. Restraint rather than intervention looked to be New Delhi's best option. When, therefore, the Director of its Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses saw in the breakdown of negotiations in Dhaka 'an opportunity the like of which will never come again', he was silenced. Yet six weeks later Indira Gandhi was coming round to the same opinion. Events in East Bengal were running contrary to all that India stood for. A democratic mandate was being flouted, Hindus were being massacred, and the Pakistan army was now massed in force along India's porous and hitherto unmilitarised eastern border. Moreover, according to Mrs Gandhi, the growing number of refugees was evidence of Islamabad pursuing a solution 'at the expense of India and on Indian soil'. This, according to her advisers, constituted 'indirect aggression'.\n\nFurther evidence of active Indian interest came with New Delhi's decision to host the activities of a Bangladesh government-in-exile. Formed by Awami League officials loyal to Mujib who had escaped to India, the interim government was installed at 'Mujibnagar' ('Mujib Town'). This was a moveable venue which was initially a property in Calcutta but was later shifted to a disputed sector of the nearby border so that it could claim to be operating from Bangladeshi soil. In the same mischievous spirit, the Indian army was instructed to equip and train those Bangladeshi guerrilla units known collectively as the _Mukti Bahini_ who were conducting sabotaging raids into East Bengal from Indian territory. Both initiatives were in marked contrast to Delhi's hands-off attitude to the Tibetan refugees a decade earlier. Then, in deference to Beijing, Nehru had refused to countenance a Tibetan government-in-exile and had denied support to those Khampas and others who were actively engaged in opposing the Chinese. Now, in deference to no one, Mrs Gandhi took it upon herself to arm and actively support East Bengal's 'freedom fighters', sponsor their self-declared government and protest to Colombo over Ceylon's airports being used to refuel Pakistan's Dhaka-bound airlift of munitions and troops (the troops slipped into civilian clothes for the Colombo stopover). India's earlier restraint in respect of what was still part of Pakistan was giving way to hostile engagement. Critics saw parallels with the last days of Goa, Hyderabad and Kashmir. Evidently neighbourly non-interference was on a shorter fuse within the confines of what had been pre-Partition India.\n\nWithin East Bengal\/Bangladesh, Pakistan's military lockdown was followed by the monsoon shutdown. From June till August the rivers flooded and the countryside became impassable; supplies for the Pakistani forces ran short, and for the general population even shorter. Across the border in India the refugee camps turned into quagmires. The number of cholera cases there rose to 46,000. Both sides became dependent on international food aid. Meanwhile another source of Indian concern brought the prospect of intervention still closer.\n\nQuite apart from the strain of the refugees, Mrs Gandhi and her advisers were increasingly alert to the impact of East Bengal's defiance of Islamabad on disaffected peoples within India itself. In Tamil Nadu the DMK Chief Minister had pointedly warned that, in India too, excessively centralised rule would only encourage autonomous tendencies. These tendencies were already evident in J and K, and more especially in the north-eastern states that actually fringed East Bengal \u2013 namely in a Communist-inclined West Bengal, an exploited and ethnically divided Assam, and a next-to no-go Nagaland. From across the unpoliceable border, the unrest and lawlessness in East Bengal must spread to these states and further destabilise them. There was much to be said, then, for a show of force on foreign territory to forestall trouble on the home front.\n\nOn the understanding that it was still the refugee burden that was exercising Delhi, in July the Secretary-General of the UN suggested that the office of its High Commissioner for Refugees should step in. UNHCR representatives could be stationed on either side of the border to facilitate the return of the displaced and as a guarantee of their security once returned. But Mrs Gandhi, notwithstanding her complaints about the migrants' presence being 'indirect aggression', would have none of it. As over Kashmir, India objected on principle to any international presence; it might circumscribe its freedom of action or, worse still, expose its existing involvement with the _Mukti Bahini_. Even international aid workers in the camps were being expelled. Mrs Gandhi therefore declared herself to be 'totally opposed' to UN observers being posted on Indian territory, and opined that they could serve no useful purpose in East Bengal either, until such time as Islamabad backed down and accepted the Awami League's mandate. 'India opposed almost everything the UN secretary-general sought to do' right up to the last minute. In October, by when the military build-up on both sides of the border was well under way, Yahya Khan expressed a willingness to accept a UN plan for withdrawing his troops from border areas; but again Mrs Gandhi declined to reciprocate in respect of India's forces.\n\nThis last proposal about troop withdrawals resurfaced in November during a famously frosty encounter in Washington between the Indian Prime Minister and President Nixon. Kissinger would call it 'a classic dialogue of the deaf', with the perspiring Nixon and the bristling Mrs Gandhi 'not intended by fate to be personally congenial to one another'. By now Yahya was willing to withdraw his forces from the border unilaterally. Nixon called it 'a capitulation', and looked to Mrs Gandhi for a reciprocal gesture. None came until, back in Delhi, she made the call for Pakistan's unilateral withdrawal her own and simultaneously 'authorized the Indian military to cross the border as far as necessary to counter Pakistani shelling'. According to the academics Richard Sisson and L.E. Rose, it was the resultant digging-in of Indian forces within East Bengali territory on 21 November that turned Pakistan's civil war into the third Indo\u2013Pak war.\n\nIndian apologists dispute this. They point out that cross-border shelling in both directions had started in October, and that for months before that, the _Mukti Bahini_ had been operating inside the country with Indian support. Nothing much therefore changed on 21 November. It was not until 3 December that the war actually began, according to New Delhi. On that day, without further provocation or warning, and all of 1,500 kilometres from East Bengal, the Pakistan air force launched bombing raids on nine local airports in western India, while the Pakistan army probed western India's land frontier in Sind and Kashmir.\n\nLess debatably, two weeks later the war would be over. On the western front, Indian forces rolled back the Pakistan advance and overran a few Pakistani positions in Kashmir. In the east an already well-planned Indian offensive was simply brought forward. An immediate bombing raid on Dhaka airport prevented Pakistan from deploying its US-supplied fighter-jets. It also ended the shuttle of supplies via Colombo and gave India complete air superiority. The Indian navy cut off Chittagong, and by also threatening Karachi ended any chance of maritime reinforcements. And on the ground India's half a million troops, aided by 100,000 _Mukti Bahini_ , outnumbered the Pakistan forces by perhaps eight to one.\n\nIn desperation, Yahya Khan turned to China and the US. Nixon, busy with his own China initiative, offered only diplomatic support. Beijing followed suit; the Himalayan passes were anyway becoming snowbound. With East Bengal's civilian population overwhelmingly hostile, the Pakistan forces could neither manoeuvre nor withdraw. 'Military situation desperate,' wired the province's Governor on 9 December. 'The front in Eastern and Western sectors has collapsed... Food and other supplies running short... Millions of non-Bengalis and loyal elements are awaiting death... If no help is expected I beseech you to negotiate... Is it worth sacrificing so much when the end seems inevitable?' The appeal brought authorisation for a surrender, and a week later India announced a unilateral ceasefire.\n\nFrom Delhi's perspective it was perhaps the perfect war \u2013 short, morally defensible, not excessively bloody, largely fought on foreign soil, domestically popular, and above all devastatingly conclusive. Previous Indo\u2013Pak wars had invariably been aborted under international pressure. At thirteen days long, this one was over before the olive-branch emissaries could get airborne. As the many-pronged Indian offensive homed in on Dhaka, all the niceties of victory were observed. The Mujibnagar government-in-exile was officially recognised as 'The Provisional Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh'. On 16 December the surrender of Pakistan's 93,000 troops in Bangladesh was formally staged at the Ramna racecourse stadium in Dhaka. The stadium was where Mujib had been wont to address his supporters, but this time the victory was essentially India's. The surrender was taken by the Indian top brass along with a single Bangladeshi representative in doubtful attendance.\n\nYahya had responded with his own ceasefire. Having presided over the catastrophic loss of half the nation, his position was now untenable. On 20 December, amid widespread unrest throughout West Pakistan, Yahya was persuaded to hand over the presidency and the Martial Law administration to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.\n\nBhutto's first act was to release the imprisoned Mujibur Rahman, who immediately departed for Dhaka. Flying via London, where he arranged for himself to be sworn in as Bangladesh's first President, then Delhi, where amid mutual congratulations Mrs Gandhi updated him on conditions in Bangladesh, Mujib arrived in Dhaka to a tumultuous reception in January 1972. Within the year most of the refugees had returned, an interim government was in operation and Mujib had relinquished the presidency to become the first Prime Minister of a newly independent Bangladesh.\n\nAnother partition had resolved the absurdity of a bipartite Pakistan; instead of two successor states there were now three. Many South Asians supposed that that was it. The unfinished business of the Great Partition had finally been concluded. India had assumed the role of the region's policeman. Bangladesh and the residual Pakistan had emerged as manageable entities. Expectations ran high.\n\n##\n\n## An Ill-Starred Conjunction\n\nThe installation of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan and of Mujibur Rahman in Bangladesh signalled another sea-change in South Asia: for the first time ever, all of the subcontinent's now three principal states were under directly elected civilian governments. All three were committed to socialist policies aimed at removing inequalities and boosting living standards. All three were led by outstanding figures. And of this revered triumvirate, all three commanded unassailable majorities and were committed to the democratic process.\n\nThe wounds of war were quickly staunched. When in March 1972 Mrs Gandhi paid her first visit to Bangladesh, crowds of 100,000 f\u00eated her and Mujib, and applauded the inevitable treaty of Indo\u2013Bangladeshi friendship. A year later, the last Indian troops left Bangladesh. A year after that \u2013 so just two years after being released from detention \u2013 Mujibur Rahman revisited Pakistan at Bhutto's invitation. He came to attend the Lahore summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, following which the 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war taken in Bangladesh were repatriated.\n\nThough most Pakistanis would always hold New Delhi responsible for the loss of Bangladesh, even Bhutto was now talking of 'an entirely new relationship with India'. Meeting with Indira Gandhi at Simla in June 1972, he signed an agreement in which both parties renounced the use of force and agreed to settle their outstanding differences 'by peaceful means'. Territory taken by India on the western front was evacuated and, with minor adjustments and a name-change, the old Kashmir ceasefire line was reinstated as the 'Line of Control'. Notable, too, was the fact that the more contentious question of Kashmir's status and the promised plebiscite, though discussed at Simla, did not figure in the final agreement. Instead, the now sixty-six-year-old Sheikh Abdullah was released from his latest detention and allowed to make a triumphant return to Kashmir. Following talks with Indira Gandhi, it was understood that though the Sheikh would again seek \u2013 and in 1975 secure \u2013 the chief ministership of J and K, he would do so without challenging the state's incorporation into India. Everywhere, peace was being 'given a chance'. The fortuity of three popularly elected governments happening to coincide was paying a dividend.\n\nBut this favourable conjuncture would last barely three years; and after that it would not come around again for a couple of decades. As if 'predestined to commit the same follies', the populist trio of Indira, Bhutto and Mujib followed parallel paths to a common nemesis. All would succumb to the delusions of power, all would fall from grace, and all would be brutally eliminated. Additionally, all would leave offspring to reclaim their prime ministerial mantles, perpetuate 'the same follies' and court a similar fate. The legacy of the people-powered 1970s would linger on. Pakistan and Bangladesh would continue to be convulsed by the fallout from the Bhutto and Mujib governments well into the twenty-first century. India too was scarred. The war had fostered a hegemonic mind-set that would dog future relations with its neighbours. And in Mrs Gandhi it had bred the authoritarian tendencies that led to her imminent 'Emergency' and the severest test yet of India's commitment to democracy and secularism.\n\nMujib was the first to go. Apparently the least vulnerable of the three, he faced much the most formidable task and brought to it the least experience of government. Bangladesh in 1972 was more desperately disadvantaged even than Pakistan in 1947. To the challenges of turning a nation into a state, improvising a government, reconstructing an economy, restoring law and order and resettling several million refugees, there had been added the physical and psychological devastation caused by the war and typhoon Bhola. Reconstruction required time and purpose along with inclusive policies, massive investment and inspired leadership. None were forthcoming.\n\nLike the Muslim League of 1947, the Awami League of 1972, once it had achieved its primary goal of independence, had no ready-made programme to deal with the situation. Members of the government-in-exile, themselves representing different interests and shades of opinion, clashed with those who had opposed the Islamabad regime from within the country, those who had fought against it from India, and those who had been stranded in (West) Pakistan. Radical parties, some of which had boycotted the 1970 election, lobbied for the formation of a national coalition. Mujib rejected the idea. His mandate still stood and his role as _Banglabandhu_ , __ 'Bengal's Big Brother' and founder of the nation, was universally acknowledged. Years in opposition and detention had equipped him more for confrontation than consensus. 'Conciliation was not part of his repertoire.'\n\nThere was a wider human deficit too. With the departure of West Pakistan's detested business elite, the expectations of Bangladesh's indigenous entrepreneurs, labour leaders and surplus farmers soared. 'Each expected that their support for the Awami League would translate into greatly expanded economic opportunities' \u2013 and some were not disappointed. The government acquired the assets of all Pakistani firms, nationalised even Bengali-owned banks and businesses and was, in addition, in receipt of substantial aid. It had the wherewithal to reward supporters and did not hesitate to use it. In a display of what has been called 'the politics of patronage', important enterprises were placed under the direction of favoured clients who lacked competence, experience and often probity. A Five-Year Plan was trotted out but indifferently implemented. The money supply was increased substantially. Inflation raged and GDP nosedived. 'By 1973 agricultural production was 84 per cent lower than it had been just before the war, and industrial production had fallen by 66 per cent.'\n\nWorse followed. As of the 1973 Arab\u2013Israeli war, world oil prices began rising, and with them the cost of manufactured goods and most other commodities. Bangladesh's under-mechanised economy was less affected than some, but the price of imported goods shot up, and the cross-border smuggling of everything from pharmaceuticals to rice, cattle and consumer durables became a national pastime. Elsewhere floods, poor harvests and the misappropriation and erratic distribution of aid led to scarcity, then famine. Most acute in the still lawless northern provinces of Rangpur and Mymensingh, the effects spread to Dhaka, where by mid-1974 thousands of famine victims were invading the city. Others drifted over the border in another wave of migration into India.\n\nMujib would concede a death toll of 30,000 from the famine; international agencies put it at fifty times that. With India and the Soviet Union unable to help, Mujib suddenly reversed his previous insistence on accepting only bilateral aid from friendly nations and went cap-in-hand to the UN and Washington. A World Bank-led consortium duly came to the country's rescue, though not before Mujib had been persuaded to ditch his command economy. Tajuddin Ahmed, his socialist Finance Minister and previously Prime-Minister-in-exile of the Mujibnagar government, was sacked, the currency devalued, state industries denationalised, and reforms favourable to the private sector and foreign investment introduced. 'Critics of the new aid consortium argue that Bangladesh has had to barter away the last vestiges of its original commitment to the ideals of \"socialist planning\" in return for short-term relief,' noted the _Far Eastern Economic Review_.\n\nOther critics vented their disillusionment in less measured terms. Never an organised force, the _Mukti Bahini_ had been only partially absorbed into the army. Bands of still armed fighters infested the countryside and, losing all confidence in Mujib, increasingly turned on members of his government and party. Mujib responded by raising his own vigilantes, the _Lal Bahini_ and then the _Rakhi Bahini._ But these, too, rapidly got out of hand and began selecting their own targets. A reign of ill-directed terror began. 'By the end of 1974 four thousand Awami Leaguers were reported murdered, including five members of parliament.'\n\nDistancing himself from all these paramilitaries, Mujib now performed another about-turn. He called in the army, ostensibly to suppress the smuggling that financed the insurgents; then in December 1974 he effectively abrogated his own two-year-old Constitution by declaring a state of emergency. His well-drilled National Assembly endorsed it, so ending all further pretence of parliamentary government. Mujib declared himself President indefinitely, the press was muzzled, political parties banned and the rights of protest and assembly suspended. After just three years, Bangladesh was not only in deep trouble but back under one-man rule.\n\nBhutto, when he took up the reins of power from Yahya Khan in January 1972, was described as the first-ever civilian to be a Chief Martial Law Administrator; Mujib now had a good claim to being the second. In imposing a state of emergency he had also reversed his pupil\u2013mentor relationship with Mrs Gandhi in that his own 'Emergency' anticipated by six months Indira's identical response to 'disruption and collapse' in India.\n\nBut it was in Bangladesh itself that the betrayal was most sorely felt. For a politician whose entire career had been built on electoral arithmetic, and for a nation that owed its statehood to democratic consensus, the lurch towards authoritarian rule was unforgivable. In a vain attempt to revive his moribund reputation, Mujib formed a new national party which rejoiced in the acronym of BAKSAL. It stood for the 'Bangladesh Peasants and Workers Awami League' and heralded another about-turn, this time back to the left in an attempt to enlist the support of those worst affected by the failure of his earlier economic policies. But by now Mujib had taken a turning too many. He had lost touch with reality. 'In a country overrun by self-styled enforcers, gouged by profiteers, and raped by government officials... [he] presided over a court corrupted by power.' Once the symbol of the nation's hopes, Mujib was now the horn-rimmed butt of its own failure, a Groucho Marx lookalike floundering amid his own delusions.\n\nWith all other opposition stifled or divided, only the army saw itself as capable of challenging his all-powerful BAKSAL. By mid-1975 it was not so much a case of whether it would intervene but of how, when and in whose name. The last question has yet to be conclusively answered; but of the 'how' and 'when' there is a grim certainty. On the night of 15 August tanks rolled up before the Rahman residence in Dhaka. Troops then stormed the building. Mujib was gunned down on the stairs; his family \u2013 some twenty persons, mostly women and children \u2013 died along with him. Only two daughters, both of whom were in Europe at the time, survived, one being Hasina, a future Awami League Prime Minister and redoubtable champion of her father's reputation.\n\nThat the bloodbath had the backing of senior military figures was self-evident. The trigger-happy majors responsible for it were promoted, granted immunity from prosecution and given a safe passage into exile. But so convoluted was the 1975 power struggle, and so partisan the testimony of the participants, that the spate of attempted coups and counter-coups that followed has yet to be satisfactorily unravelled. Suffice it to say that by the end of 1975 the now army Chief of Staff General Ziaur Rahman \u2013 he who had first broadcast the news of Bangladesh's independence in 1971 \u2013 had commandeered a rank-and-file army mutiny and, tearing a leaf out of Ayub Khan's book, declared himself Bangladesh's first official Chief Martial Law Administrator.\n\n*\n\nThus, within four years, Bangladesh had succumbed to military rule under a General called Zia. If the Awami League could so traduce its mandate as to endorse autocratic government and invite military intervention, then so could the PPP in what remained of Pakistan. Bhutto should have been warned. Yet eighteen months later, he too stood accused of so prostituting the apparatus of power as to trigger a coup which was conducted under the glassy-eyed stare of another General Zia.\n\nAs with Mujib in Bangladesh, much had been expected of Bhutto in his truncated Pakistan. 'If ever a Pakistani ruler wielded absolute power, it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto following the 1971 war with India,' writes Lawrence Ziring. Unlike Pakistan's later prime ministers he was unbeholden to the army, which was anyway discredited and maimed by the defeat in Bangladesh. More experienced and more intellectually formidable than Mujib, the urbane Bhutto looked equal to any occasion. He delighted the international community with his literary quips, commanded the adulation of his followers with earthy jibes, and silenced rivals with biting sarcasm. Appreciating the need for a reappraisal of Pakistan's purpose and convinced that he personally embodied that purpose, he articulated it much more confidently than Mujib.\n\nIn a Pakistan minus its eastern wing, the doubtful parity implicit in the original idea of the subcontinent's 'two nations' was no longer sustainable. There were as many Muslims in India as in what now constituted Pakistan (or indeed Bangladesh). While mindful of its origins as a homeland and haven for the subcontinent's Muslims, post-1971 Pakistan must face about. Its destiny now lay as a compact nation state astride the crossroads between an Islamic West Asia, a still Soviet Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.\n\nSuch repositioning called for some historical revisionism. Aitzaz Ahsan, a stylish lawyer and leading light in the PPP, would argue that contrary to received opinion the new Pakistan, however fortuitous, was anything but artificial. As a distinct socio-political entity cradled by the Indus river rather than the Ganges, 'Pakistan had existed for five and a half of the last six thousand years'. According to Ahsan, only in the last half-millennium had its identity been obscured by a succession of outside rulers and the constant passage of arms. Islam had provided solace and a wider sense of community, but it was not the Indus peoples' only distinguishing trait. A predilection for clannish fraternities based on kinship and convenience, a preference for ostentatious consumption over thrift and capital accumulation, a high tolerance of exploitative rulers, a readiness to switch allegiances, and a tendency to blame any but themselves represented the characteristic response of the Indus peoples to constant pillaging and subjection. Fashioned by adversity, 'Indus man' was a tough nut, parochial, resilient, intemperate and largely impervious.\n\nAhsan would write his _The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan_ during several long spells of post-Bhutto detention. He lacked the resources of the historian, but as a persuasive advocate he made a noteworthy case for not judging Pakistan by the standards applicable to less troubled regions. An elite long inured to authority, indeed 'conditioned to brutality', could take in its stride the brickbats of repressive fortune and the comings and goings of regimes. 'The Bengalis did not have the same tolerance threshold as [the] Indus [peoples]. And so they separated.' Without them, Pakistan could again become its robust old self.\n\nWhether Bhutto was aware of Ahsan's thinking is uncertain. But he acted as if he was, pushing the Indus persona to its limits. While protesting his democratic credentials and endearing himself to the masses with a flurry of nationalisations (heavy industries, insurance, cooking oil, rice husking, banking, etc.) he tightened his iron grip on party, patronage and power. Martial law was terminated, and in 1973 Pakistan's third and most enduring Constitution ushered in a genuinely parliamentary form of government. This transferred all executive authority from the President to the Prime Minister, in which office Bhutto, as Chairman of the PPP, was duly confirmed by a National Assembly composed of the victors of the 1970 poll.\n\nOn paper the new Constitution was unexceptionable. Orthodox opinion was assuaged by the designation of Pakistan as an Islamic state, by the promotion of Quranic teaching and by the creation of an advisory council to ensure legislation conformed with Islamic precept. Yet initially Bhutto, a Shi'i by birth and a libertine by inclination, shunned the Sunni Islamic parties and made no adjustments to his decidedly secular lifestyle. In similar vein, the Constitution awarded more autonomy to the provinces by specifying the responsibilities reserved to their governments. But as in India, the list of 'concurrent subjects' (i.e. those for which the federal centre and the provinces shared responsibility) was long and contentious. In effect 'Bhutto, despite his often expressed sentiments in favour of federalism, was no more willing to shift power from the centre to the provinces than any of his predecessors.' Constitutional concessions extracted by the opposition parties were swiftly negated by prime ministerial ordinances which, though couched in terms of the national interest, were deployed in the interests of the PPP.\n\nThe party itself was regularly purged and just as often diluted by the induction of sycophantic allies. Instead of shoring up its grassroots support by establishing a structure of representative local committees, Bhutto took it upon himself to select the party's functionaries and dictate its policies. Intolerant of even the mildest criticism, he relied on his own undoubted charisma, plus the services of the newly raised FSF. The initials stood for the 'Federal Security Force' \u2013 or to those singled out for its thuggish attention, the 'Fascist Security Force'. Recruited from unsavoury elements, the FSF was outside the purview of the armed forces, more amenable than Mujib's _Rakhi Bahini_ and answerable only to Chairman Bhutto.\n\nHistory might have forgiven Bhutto his authoritarianism had he lived up to his egalitarian principles. In a society with more bastions of privilege than even caste-ridden India, targets were plentiful. The twenty-two familial conglomerates that supposedly controlled most of the economy were scattered by his nationalisation programme, many preferring to take themselves and their capital overseas. As in Bangladesh, the economy then contracted and the growth rate slowed. Private investors took fright while the public sector was hamstrung by the 'politics of patronage'. It was the same with the bureaucracy. The elite Civil Service of Pakistan was dissolved in favour of a graded and more accessible administrative structure. But in practice many former bureaucrats simply resurfaced as born-again 'Bhuttocrats'; and it was not talent that enjoyed easier access but influence. Likewise the great landowning baronies of Punjab, though subject to two attempts at radical land redistribution, remained substantially intact thanks to favours rendered to the PPP and the usual cut-and-paste ploy of dividing holdings among relatives and dependants.\n\nMost important of all, the army's presumed role as the saviour of the nation cried out for curtailment. As well as awarding some peacekeeping responsibilities to the FSF, Bhutto worked to dilute the armed forces' monopoly of national defence and to influence the selection of their most senior personnel. But again all three moves backfired. The FSF became more detested than the miscreants it was supposed to control. Moreover it proved no match for the army when it came to containing mass insurgency. From 1973 to 1976 some 80,000 regular troops were engaged in ruthlessly suppressing a secessionist movement in Balochistan; it was nearly as many as had been deployed in Bangladesh in 1971. And as early as 1972 the military had been called to Sind province when the Urdu-speaking _muhajir_ community rioted against Bhutto's privileging of the native Sindi-speakers. Both interventions 'carried echoes of Yahya's ill-conceived actions in East Pakistan and depressingly repeated the pattern of the state hampering national integration by provoking regional opposition through its violent suppression of legitimate demands'.\n\nAnother way to reduce the army's influence was to upstage its monopoly of firepower. At the time of the 1965 Indo\u2013Pak war, Bhutto had famously vowed that, were India ever to develop a nuclear bomb, 'then we should have to eat grass and get one, or buy one of our own'. Buying in the technology and eating grass to pay for it came a lot nearer when in May 1974 Indira Gandhi opted to test-fire India's first 'nuclear device'. Allegedly developed to deter further aggression from China, and then fired for domestic reasons, it lacked the warhead of a nuclear bomb and there was as yet no means of delivering it. But the explosion beneath the Rajasthan desert clearly advertised both intent and capability.\n\nPakistan, too, had a small nuclear programme. A plutonium power station had been supplied by Canada, and France had signed an agreement for a reprocessing plant. Reprocessed plutonium could be used for weapons. But under pressure from the anti-proliferation lobby and the US, in the mid-1970s Canada halted fuel supplies and the French contract was put on hold. Bhutto, who had already urged the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission to achieve 'fission in three years', would persevere with plutonium; but he also let it be known he was open to alternatives.\n\nThis news reached the ears of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, a senior nuclear physicist then working at a uranium-processing facility in the Netherlands. Born in Bhopal in India, from where his family had removed to Pakistan at the time of Partition, A.Q. Khan was a leading expert in the design and engineering of centrifuges suitable for uranium enrichment. He had a wide understanding of the whole process, and access to international suppliers and scientists. With Bhutto's backing, in 1976 Khan and his assets were transferred to a new research centre at Kahuta near Rawalpindi. He would remain there for a quarter of a century, being credited with Pakistan's first nuclear tests in 1998 and becoming a national hero, the country's most decorated scientist and the world's most notorious purveyor of nuclear knowhow and materials.\n\nBhutto would rate his own role in the development of what he called 'the Islamic bomb' a greater achievement than his masterminding of the strategic alliance with Communist China. 'I put my entire vitality behind the task,' he would write, '... [and] due to my singular efforts Pakistan acquired the intra-structure [ _sic_ ] __ and the potential of nuclear capability.' Thanks to Bhutto, the nation would finally possess a credible deterrent against Indian aggression. It would also have a useful bargaining counter in negotiations with Washington; for discontinuing nuclear development \u2013 or pretending to \u2013 could be traded for aid packages and conventional weapons. Better still, with the programme and its control under civilian direction, the government could boast a defence capability that upstaged the heavy armour on offer from the armed forces.\n\nHaving rescued the nation after the Bangladesh d\u00e9b\u00e2cle, Bhutto would now claim to have underwritten its security for generations to come. But the bomb would take time to develop, and there was no guarantee that the nuclear programme would remain under civilian control. Fatally, in May 1976 he took another swipe at the military by picking as the army Chief of Staff an unknown, unregarded and supposedly amenable General called Ziaul Haq. Then eight months later he called for elections. Although due within five years of the new Constitution having been approved, Bhutto gave minimal notice of the poll, and was confident of sweeping the board.\n\n'Perhaps I have embedded myself too deep in the poor of this land,' he wrote. 'I am a household word in every home and under every roof that leaks in rain... I have an eternal bond with the people which armies cannot break.' Anything other than a vote for Bhutto would therefore be treachery, and anything less than a clean sweep unthinkable. The opposition parties nevertheless cobbled together a grand Pakistan National Alliance and went down fighting. The PPP won the 1977 election handsomely; but it was amid such widespread accusations of having disqualified potential opponents, rigged the vote and tampered with the ballot boxes that the real cut-and-thrust only got under way after the results were declared.\n\nAs in East Bengal when Yahya Khan had postponed the 1971 National Assembly, protesters took to the streets while a succession of general strikes paralysed the economy. In Lahore and Karachi martial law was imposed. In Sind, _muhajir_ students, among them Altaf Hussein, the future leader of the formidable MQM party, __ were still agitating against the reservation of educational places and jobs to Sindi-speakers. At least in Sind, Bhutto was on home territory. In the NWFP he barely dared show his face. There Khan Abdul Wali Khan, the six-foot-something Pathan patriarch who led the main opposition party and should have been heading the Pakistan National Alliance, had been arrested on a trumped-up charge and consigned to gaol. Nationwide, in a matter of weeks in the early summer of 1977, more than two hundred protesters died in armed clashes involving either the FSF, the police or the army. Students and small traders, once the backbone of the PPP's support but now alienated by rising prices, rampant corruption and lack of jobs, rallied to the opposition's Pakistan National Alliance and backed its demand for a rerun of the elections.\n\nBhutto, with his mandate sullied and the army increasingly reluctant to gun down his opponents, had no choice but to backtrack. 'Too clever by half' (and more questionably the man who 'gave political opportunism a bad name in Pakistan'), he indicated that there might indeed have been improprieties in the recent election, and offered the National Alliance a dubious compromise. Simultaneously, he tried to detach the Islamic parties from the Alliance by volunteering to ban gambling, close nightclubs and restrict the sale of alcohol. Coming from the clean-shaven and cigar-smoking Bhutto, it was a blatantly cynical attempt to cling to power. By pandering to the intolerant sentiments of religious radicals, it also set a dangerous precedent.\n\nBut none of these concessions brought an agreement on rerunning the elections. Nor did they reassure those several brigadiers whose troops were trying to reimpose order in the streets. It was seemingly on the insistence of the latter that General Ziaul Haq, fearful of the army itself being divided by the ferment, staged his coup of 5 July 1977.\n\nAt the time the coup seemed even more benign than Ayub Khan's in 1956. There was no bloodshed, no overt protest. The 1973 Constitution was not abrogated, merely suspended pending arrangements for new elections; Zia promised they would be held within ninety days, after which he would stand down. Meanwhile martial law was reimposed, political life ceased, and the nation went back to work \u2013 all, that is, except the FSF, which was disbanded and its leaders arrested. Under interrogation they confessed to numerous crimes and evinced a willingness, as suspicious as it was plausible, to implicate Bhutto. But Bhutto himself was treated with caution. Whisked off to the cool comforts of a hill-station, he and his party henchmen enjoyed a spell under holiday-cottage arrest; the arrangement was temporary and supposedly for their own safety.\n\nA month later they were duly released; elections held while the principal contender was still under restraint would have been a farce. But if Zia was counting on Bhutto's followers having by now despaired of him, he was mistaken. Massive crowds welcomed back the self-proclaimed 'Leader of the People' in Karachi, Lahore and his native Sind. As so often, disgrace and detention had done his reputation no harm whatsoever. Though unforgiven by many, he was unforgotten by none.\n\nIt was this outpouring of support that seems to have decided his fate. In early September, little more than a month after his release, he was re-arrested, charged with murder, bailed, and then re-re-arrested, this time for good. It is not clear whether Zia had been nudged into action by the officers who had urged the July coup or whether he was now more mindful of his own vulnerability; for if the PPP were to win the promised election, it would be the General who would have to stand trial. To scotch any such possibility, on 1 October Zia announced that the elections would have to be postponed for ninety days. More postponements would follow as the ninety days stretched to ninety months and beyond.\n\nBhutto lived to witness only eighteen of them. For high-profile prisoners in South Asia, detention was not necessarily a hardship. Often it was served under house arrest; even in gaol the prisoner might enjoy access to creature comforts plus the services of a retainer or two. Sentences might be commuted for those willing to embrace exile; judicial executions were comparatively rare (and still are), even in the case of convicted terrorists. Mustafa Khar, Governor of Punjab province as Bhutto's strongman and then Punjabi gaolbird as his deadly rival, would set up his own poultry farm while in prison and, having taken his gaolers onto his payroll, would want for nothing. 'He had been allocated seven rooms... his cell was air-conditioned. He had a fridge and a deep freezer...' noted Tehmina, the latest of his glamorous wives. On prison visits, she was hard pressed to think of any little luxury to take him.\n\nBut Bhutto's incarceration was different. During more than a year, while his case was decided and an appeal rejected, he languished in the solitary confinement of a cramped death cell, 'hemmed in by its sordidness and stink throughout the heat and rain of the long hot summer'. Few visitors were allowed; his eyesight deteriorated and his gums rotted. For although the most political of political prisoners, he was not being treated as a political prisoner.\n\nAccused, tried and convicted of instigating the FSF's elimination of an opponent, he was sentenced to death as a common criminal. The appeal against the sentence was rejected by a four-to-three majority of the doubtfully constituted Supreme Court. International pleas for clemency from the Western powers and the Arab world also fell on deaf ears. After a farewell visit from his wife Nusrat and his daughter Benazir, both of whom would succeed him as leader of the PPP, he was led from his cell in the early hours of 4 April 1979 and hanged until dead.\n\nMujib had been assassinated, and Indira too would die in a hail of bullets; only Bhutto was judicially executed. Throughout his prison ordeal he had remained defiant. He allegedly refused the options of exile or retiring from politics ('It was like asking a human being to live, but without oxygen'). He refused even to lodge his own appeal lest it lend legitimacy to the proceedings. The Bhutto legend would owe much to the manner of his death and the courage with which he met it, more perhaps than to his rhetoric or his tarnished record in government.\n\nZia's refusal to commute the death sentence was nevertheless curious. There were ample grounds for clemency: the conviction was shaky, the appeal had been rejected by just a single vote, and world opinion was unanimously in favour of a reprieve. Bhutto himself, and later Benazir, sensed a conspiracy. Zia, they argued, stood firm on the instructions of Washington. Often the target of Bhutto's jibes, the US had come to regard him as a dangerous demagogue and the last person to be trusted with a nuclear capability. In other words, Bhutto died because of the bomb; cherishing martyrdom, he had sacrificed his own future for that of his country. But although Zia would indeed enjoy close relations with Washington, they dated from later in 1979, by when the Shah of Iran had been overthrown and Russian troops had begun rolling into Afghanistan. At the time, Zia was more concerned with strengthening his hold on power and ridding himself of the turbulent premier who was sworn to contest it.\n\n*\n\nIn line with titles like Bhutto's _Quaid-i-Awa_ ('Leader of the People') and Mujib's _Banglabandhu_ ('Bengal's Big Brother'), the London _Economist_ had capped its coverage of the Bangladesh war by declaring Indira Gandhi 'Empress of India'. No longer just any old avatar, villagers joined the national press in hailing her as a reincarnation of the goddess Durga, the all-conquering manifestation of the wife of Lord Shiva. The victory in Bangladesh had been her apotheosis.\n\nApart from Pakistan's poorly executed bombing of some small airports in Punjab and J and K, Indian territory had scarcely been affected by the war. The population, though, had been affected. In anticipation of further air raids, security had everywhere been tightened and the major cities put on high alert. Civil-defence drills disrupted the working day; sirens were tested at night. Even distant Bombay was subject to a city-wide blackout. This made after-dark excursions along pavements that habitually doubled as dormitories so perilous that Christmas shopping had to be curtailed. Out at the airport, fighter pilots had rigged canvas awnings from the wings of their jets beneath which they ate and dozed while waiting for the order to scramble.\n\nIt was, of course, a false alarm, and lasted less than a fortnight. But such precautions ensured maximum awareness of the war and then universal delight at its outcome. The delirious crowds could hardly believe it: Pakistan had finally got its come-uppance. After centuries of humiliation at the hands of Muslim and British invaders, India had a battlefield triumph to celebrate. The nationalist greeting of _Jai Hind \u2013_ as much 'Victory to India' as 'Hail India' \u2013 was no longer a pious hope; it was a joyous statement of fact. The army had redeemed its failures of 1962 and 1965; and the Prime Minister, who had assumed personal responsibility for the conduct of the war, had emerged as a master strategist. Outwitting Pakistan's moustachioed generals while deftly deflecting Washington's disapproval, the leader once dismissed by Morarji Desai as a 'dumb slip of a girl' now deserved every encomium that was going. She could do no wrong, and had she chosen the moment to call another snap election, she might well have whitewashed the opposition as comprehensively as Mujib in 1970. As it was, in March 1972 Congress won 70 per cent of the seats contested in the state elections.\n\nBut the trouble with such a soaring approval rating lay in the near impossibility of sustaining it. Though gratified by all the plaudits, Indira urged the nation to put the Bangladesh war behind it and concentrate on the war against poverty. It was a timely reminder. With over 40 per cent of the rapidly growing population still below the poverty line, there were far more poor Indians than in 1960. As in Pakistan, the 'Green Revolution' (affording higher crop yields through the use of hybrid seed, better irrigation and more fertiliser) had substantially increased wheat production in the northern states. Self-sufficiency in cereals was at last within reach. But when the monsoons of 1972 and 1973 both failed in large parts of the country, grain prices shot up and food riots followed.\n\nIn the economy as a whole the growth rate remained stuck at 3\u20134 per cent per annum. The earlier investment in infrastructure and heavy industries had stalled. Inflation was in double figures even before the 1973 oil-price hike sent it up to over 20 per cent. Like her father, Indira Gandhi claimed to be running an economy that combined socialist upliftment with capitalist incentive. But according to one economist, it had failed on both counts. 'It had grown too slowly to qualify as a capitalist economy, and by its failure to eradicate illiteracy or reduce inequalities had forfeited any claims to be \"socialist\".'\n\nThroughout South Asia, nationalisation was seen as the touchstone of a socialist economy. Taking ever more industries into the state sector (Mrs Gandhi now added coal, then oil and gas to her government's portfolio) was supposed to ensure that they were run for the national benefit, that prices were not inflated by profit-taking and that workers enjoyed some security of employment. But in practice what endeared nationalisation to the populist governments of the day was the inviting reservoir of desirable posts and perquisites that it made available. In return for awarding to an applicant a directorship in a state-owned bank, for instance, the government could expect cheaper loans for its favoured projects, plus a substantial donation to party funds. The operation of the permit raj __ in the private sector had much the same effect. Well-meant policies aimed at social betterment were being commandeered by the 'politics of patronage'.\n\nCronyism and nepotism thrived as a result. The most high-profile case was provided by Sanjay Gandhi, the younger of the Prime Minister's two sons. Despite a doltish reputation and a dismal school record, on the strength of an apprenticeship with Rolls-Royce in England the twenty-five-year-old Sanjay tendered for a coveted licence to set up India's first indigenous automotive plant. Government-backed, it was to mass-produce an affordable 'People's Car' at the rate of 50,000 vehicles per year to challenge the Fiats, Morrises and Triumphs built to outdated designs from Europe. The newspapers were full of it, dealerships were sought, orders pledged. With little discussion and despite a total lack of managerial experience, Sanjay was awarded the contract ahead of eighteen other applicants. He was then practically gifted the site for his 'Maruti' factory by a Chief Minister keen to ingratiate himself. Eyebrows were raised, and the misgivings of Mrs Gandhi's principal adviser were noted. But such was her national stature and her command of both party and Parliament that few dared openly object.\n\nMaruti's promise of 'horsepower to the people' became a bad joke. During its ten years under Sanjay's stewardship the company produced not a single production-line vehicle and only a handful of barely driveable prototypes. It did, though, alert Sanjay to the ways of patronage and the political possibilities afforded by his birth and his mother's confidence in him. Though without either a seat in Parliament or an office within the party, he increasingly acted as a political troubleshooter and a gateway to the Prime Minister's office.\n\nEgged on by Sanjay and her all-powerful secretariat, in 1973 Indira resumed her vendetta against the Supreme Court and its reluctance to sanction constitutional amendments. She did so by setting aside both seniority and tradition to appoint a little-known but pliable Chief Justice to head the Court. 'The choice was politically motivated, a manifestation of the government's increasing desire to control the judiciary.' Many senior figures remonstrated, though to little immediate effect, prominent among them being the revered Gandhian and socialist Jayaprakash (or J.P.) Narayan. In the same year a petition citing serious irregularities in the 1971 Rae Bareilly election was lodged with the UP High Court in Allahabad. The stick-waving Raj Narain was still on the warpath. With the parliamentary opposition ineffective, resentment over corruption and the high-handedness of the Prime Minister's secretariat was finding extra-parliamentary expression. In a two-pronged assault, Narayan publicly championed growing disgust over the venality and exploitation at every level of government while Narain doggedly pursued the Prime Minister herself through the courts.\n\nEarly in 1974 remonstrations gave way to demonstrations. In the state of Gujarat students took to the streets to protest against rising commodity prices and the blatant corruption of the Congress-run state government. Bihar, J.P. Narayan's home ground, followed suit; similar demonstrations involving organised labour as well as students brought the entire state to a standstill. And to cap it all, in May the socialist-led railway workers' union called a national rail strike.\n\nThe government responded with force rather than concessions. In Gujarat over a hundred protesters died in confrontations with the police before Mrs Gandhi suspended the state government. The train strike was also ruthlessly suppressed, some 20,000 rail workers being imprisoned without trial under a draconian new Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA \u2013 otherwise the 'Maintenance of Indira and Sanjay Act'). Only in Bihar were the protests left to run their course. This was largely due to the unassailable reputation of J.P. Narayan. The seventy-two-year-old 'conscience of the nation', who rather than seeking office had devoted his life to a variety of noble causes, now lent his name and his leadership to the whole protest movement (henceforth the 'JP Movement'). Calling for a non-violent 'total revolution' ('political, economic, social, educational, moral and cultural'), he toured Bihar addressing massive crowds and promising 'a real people's government' within one year.\n\nSuddenly Mrs Gandhi seemed to have lost her touch. The Bangladesh 'bounce' had subsided. A new distraction was needed, and like a conjuror pulling rabbits from under her sari, she came up with two, one explosive, the other acquisitive. In May, in the midst of the rail strike, she gave the go-ahead for that test-firing of India's first nuclear device. Though the test had been on the cards for months, the timing was entirely of her own choosing. Euphemistically billed as a 'Peaceful Nuclear Experiment' (and known accordingly as PNE), it was hailed as an important step in 'building up a better future for the people'. It was also hailed as a triumph for the nation's scientists, and was accompanied by fulsome disclaimers of any weaponising intent. Nevertheless, a national outburst of unseemly chauvinism followed, then an international outburst of hypocritical condemnation. The existing nuclear powers deplored proliferation, as did India's South Asian neighbours, none more so than the incensed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan.\n\nFour months later, with the JP Movement spreading beyond Bihar and a mass march on Delhi in the offing, the second rabbit was revealed. It took the form of a carefully engineered and decidedly brazen assault on Sikkim, the smallest of the sovereign states along the Himalayan glacis. Nehru would have been appalled. While keen to claim Kashmir and gobble up the colonial enclaves of Pondicherry and Goa, he had always acknowledged Sikkim as a sovereign kingdom, just like Nepal and Bhutan. Its historical and religious ties were with Tibet. It had long commanded the main trade route with Tibet and had once been on a territorial par with Bhutan. It was not, and never had been, part of political India.\n\nTrue, like Bhutan, it was otherwise wholly dependent on India and had long since assigned to Delhi its defence and the conduct of its external affairs. Yet the sovereignty of the kingdom, as enshrined in its _Chogyal_ ('righteous king'), was uncontested. It flew its own flag, minted its own currency, communicated direct with its Himalayan neighbours and maintained its own small corps of national guards. Though for convenience the British had sometimes grouped it with the princely states of India proper, it had not been considered one of them. Hence in 1947 the _Chogyal_ had not been among those princes from whom Mountbatten extracted Instruments of Accession. Instead, in 1950 there was a new 'treaty' \u2013 the term itself being indicative of the equal status of the signatories \u2013 whereby Sikkim now accorded to India as the new protecting power responsibility for its defence, foreign affairs and communications.\n\nThere matters might have stood, but for three countervailing factors. One was the strategic location of Sikkim. Squeezed between Nepal and Bhutan, its southern border abutted the narrow corridor that linked Assam to the rest of India, while its northern border marched with Chinese Tibet. As India's relations with China soured in the late 1950s, the latter border had looked as vulnerable as Ladakh's or that of the North-East Frontier Agency. Beijing not only disputed its precise alignment but, courtesy of its position in Tibet, could claim an ill-defined suzerainty over the _Chogyal_ and his kingdom. By way of a reminder, in 1963 Chinese Communist Party Chairman Liu Shaoqi had sent direct to Gangtok, the Sikkimese capital, a telegram of condolence on the death of one _Chogyal_ and in 1965 another of felicitations to his successor. New Delhi immediately protested over these infringements of its monopoly of Sikkim's external relations, and suspected some Sino\u2013Sikkimese intrigue. If for no other reason than to pre-empt Chinese influence in the state, any assertion of Sikkimese independence had to be resisted, and any opportunity for closer Sikkimese association with India welcomed. Meanwhile, in the wake of the Sino\u2013Indian war, the Indian military presence along the Sino\u2013Sikkim border was so increased that Sikkim began to feel like an occupied land.\n\nThe second factor was the steady influx of settlers from neighbouring Nepal. By the 1970s, of Sikkim's 200,000 population, its native component of Buddhist Lepchas and Bhutiyas was outnumbered three to one by Hindu Nepalis. Hungry for employment and land, and unconstrained by border controls, the Nepali diaspora also poured into Bhutan and the neighbouring districts of West Bengal. In time the Bhutanese would try forced repatriation, and the Indian authorities would be obliged to offer incentives to assimilation. Sikkim, and especially its fragile Buddhist monarchy, was more vulnerable to the Nepali influx; for the _Chogyal_ , however anxious to conform to India's democratic principles, was constrained by the near certainty that Nepalis would dominate any representative bodies. They could then be expected to use them to dismantle the traditional patterns of land ownership, hereditary authority and even the monarchy that upheld them. It was by exploiting this politico-ethnic imbalance that successive Indian representatives in Gangtok, whether as Political Officers, _Dewans_ , __ Chief Executives or Chief Ministers, __ were able to manipulate the situation and steadily extend their influence at the expense of the _Chogyal_ 's prerogatives.\n\nFinally, and much to New Delhi's annoyance, Sikkim's endangered existence was suddenly exposed to international scrutiny by the new _Chogyal_ 's __ infatuation with a long-haired American girl, seventeen years his junior, called Hope Cooke. Sensationalised by the world's press, their royal wedding in 1963 became 'the catalyst that completely changed the situation'. Sunanda Datta-Ray, the Bengali responsible for the most authoritative, if highly critical, account of Sikkim's last days, knew Hope Cooke well. She was 'a strange unhappy woman, unable to reciprocate her husband's doting love [and] neurotically conscious of her loneliness in a court that found her faintly ridiculous'; yet she gamely championed all things Sikkimese, insisted on the titles and trappings of monarchy, and unwittingly isolated her husband from many of his traditional supporters. With 'Queen Hope' as hostess, ambassadors and other distinguished visitors to Gangtok flocked to the palace, leaving New Delhi's Political Officer glaring in disgust from the trellised verandah of his India House. It was unfortunate that the designation of the state as a 'protectorate' left the Republic of India looking like an imperialist suzerain, and worse still that the protocol of this relationship was being casually ignored.\n\nWhen in the late '60s the _Chogyal_ had requested a revision of the 1950 treaty, New Delhi had been almost accommodating. In return for closer control of the state, various inducements had been offered, including a 'permanent association' instead of a protectorate, plus qualified 'autonomy in regard to internal affairs'. But this conciliatory approach found no favour in the following decade. Mrs Gandhi's electoral triumph in 1971, followed by victory in Bangladesh and then the 'Peaceful Nuclear Experiment', heralded a more assertive role for India in South Asia. In respect of Sikkim 'there was no longer any question of accommodation'.\n\nThe _Chogyal_ would later describe the annexation of his kingdom as a case of 'smash and grab'. This suggests more haste and less premeditated guile than was the case. But he was right in that first his own authority was smashed, then the state grabbed. The smashing involved discrediting the ruler by masterminding the anti-monarchist challenge of a scruple-free opponent, then flooding Gangtok with this pretender's unruly supporters. 'Police stations were burned down, loyal officials beaten up, the country's few armouries were looted and wireless equipment and petrol were seized.' With the _Chogyal_ a prisoner in his own palace, an Indian army division was given the responsibility of restoring order. Thus isolated and powerless, in April 1973 the _Chogyal_ was prevailed on to hand over administrative control to India's Political Officer. The latter then became Chief Executive and Speaker following elections and the formation of a national assembly. With the ruler sidelined, it remained only to annex, or 'grab', his kingdom.\n\nIn 1974, amid further attempts to bully the _Chogyal_ into cooperating in the liquidation of his kingdom, 'Queen Hope' took off back to America. It was said to be for a holiday but she never returned, and the royal couple were later divorced. A Bill, drafted for the new Sikkim Assembly by the Indian Chief Executive, was supposed to define Sikkim's Constitution, but that too ran into trouble when both the _Chogyal_ and the Assembly tried to introduce amendments. The _impasse_ brought the _Chogyal_ to Delhi for his last encounter with Mrs Gandhi. It was time for what he called a 'final and frank talk'. But 'it was never Mrs Gandhi's style to face unpleasant truths or attempt an honest answer', says Datta-Ray. On the contrary, her long silences and 'drawing-room duplicity' suggest that the die was already cast. The _Chogyal_ returned to Gangtok empty-handed. Mrs Gandhi bided her time and awaited the moment to strike.\n\nIn India the year 1974 ended with the JP Movement apparently running out of momentum. New elections were promised in Bihar; the universities reopened and students returned to class. JP was still bent on toppling Mrs Gandhi as part of his 'total revolution'. Moreover, his movement could now count on the support and crowd-management skills of most of the opposition parties. But it lacked any clear ideological focus, and had made little headway in Bombay and the south. With national elections due within eighteen months, it looked possible that the inevitable trial of strength would be left for the voters to decide.\n\nAll this changed when in March 1975 both Narayan and Narain upped the stakes. Calling on all government servants, including the army and the police, to defy orders that ran contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, JP staged a march to Parliament in Delhi and then addressed a crowd estimated at three-quarters of a million. It was probably the largest gathering since the Independence Day celebrations in 1947. Simultaneously Mrs Gandhi received a summons to appear before the Allahabad High Court in connection with Raj Narain's interminable petition about the Rae Bareilly election of 1971. This was the first time an Indian Prime Minister had been called on to testify in court, and it was not a good sign. Judge Jagmohan Lal Sinha was evidently as much a stickler for electoral niceties as the stick-waving plaintiff. Meanwhile Morarji Desai, Indira's one-time challenger for the leadership of Congress, was poised to undertake a hunger strike in protest over the delay in calling elections in his home state of Gujarat. The public was getting restive again; it was time to release the remaining rabbit.\n\nUp in Sikkim there had been no shortage of pretexts for levelling accusations of treason at the wretched _Chogyal._ In February 1975 he had accepted an invitation to attend the coronation of King Birendra of Nepal in Katmandu. There his brief encounters with a US Senator, a Chinese Vice-Premier and an ageing Mountbatten sparked 'wild charges of conspiracy' and some avid speculation in the Indian press. Rumours that the _Chogyal_ was seeking sanctuary overseas proved wrong; he headed back to Sikkim 'to live and die there', as he put it. But approaching Gangtok, his motorcade was halted by Nepali protesters, one of whom was wounded in the ensuing fracas by a member of the royal escort. To the possible accusation of treason was now added that of attempted murder.\n\nA similar string of trumped-up charges was laid against Sikkim's heir apparent. But more spirited than his father, Prince Tenzing struck back by circulating a written demand aimed at reining in Indian interference and clawing back powers already ceded. More controversially still, the demand appeared to have the backing of those Sikkimese and Nepalis who had hitherto been foremost in obliging India by opposing the _Chogyal_ and who now constituted Sikkim's puppet Assembly. For New Delhi, this was the final straw; and for an embattled Mrs Gandhi it was perfect timing. While the Assembly's turncoats were being made to recant, plans were laid for an outright takeover of the state.\n\nOn 9 April, in a scenario that could have been borrowed from Rawalpindi's military handbook, Indian troops took up positions throughout Gangtok. Phones went dead, roadblocks went up and Assembly members were plucked from their homes for an Extraordinary Session. On the agenda were two motions. One abolished 'the institution of the _Chogyal_ ' and declared Sikkim 'a constituent of India'; the other announced a referendum authorising India to implement these changes. Both motions were passed unanimously.\n\nThe referendum was conducted just three days later and under Indian supervision. Regardless of the absurd schedule, despite widespread disorder, and in defiance of legal opinion to the effect that the whole procedure was unconstitutional, 63 per cent of the electorate was said to have voted; and of this improbable turnout, an even more improbable 97 per cent supposedly supported the motion. Delhi's _Hindustan Times_ was one of several papers to express acute embarrassment. It called Sikkim's vote for constitutional suicide a 'mockery', adding, 'And this in the India of [Mahatma] Gandhi and Nehru.'\n\nWith more unseemly haste a Constitutional Bill was rushed through the Indian Parliament. As the 35th Amendment for 'the Association of Sikkim with the Union of India', it was ratified on 26 April. 'Not a voice was raised in the Parliament, no political party questioned the legality of the measure. The curtain had finally come down on the once sovereign kingdom of Sikkim.'\n\n*\n\nThe final act in the Sikkim drama had lasted little longer than the Bangladesh war: from armed intervention to constitutional extinction had taken just seventeen days. Another high-speed triumph brought another burst of applause, most of it from irredentist nationalists on the right wing of Congress. But the sheer speed of Mrs Gandhi's legerdemain left others bewildered. If Sikkim was so keen on union, why had the exercise not been conducted with greater transparency and decorum? Likewise, if the _Chogyal_ was such a villain, why was he still in his palace? The _Hindustan Times_ was not alone in its scepticism. A later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court found the whole legal process to have been riddled with constitutional anomalies.\n\nOutside India it attracted mixed attention. A Bangladesh convulsed by the last days of Mujib paid little heed, but in Pakistan protesters took to the streets and Bhutto slated the annexation as further evidence of India's expansionist intent. The same fears were expressed in Nepal. Mobs there set light to Indian buildings and vehicles. Even B.P. Koirala, the former Prime Minister and leader of the Nepali Congress who was now in exile in India, noted that the Sikkim referendum had been a sham.\n\nIn India it was perhaps fortunate that more momentous events quickly swept the whole affair under the carpet. On 12 June Mrs Gandhi learned that she had lost the state election in Gujarat. In what had been a direct challenge to her leadership, the Janata Front, a combination of opposition parties led by Morarji Desai and J.P. Narayan, had edged Congress out of one of its traditional strongholds. Then, later the same day, there came news from Allahabad: Chief Justice Sinha of the UP High Court had upheld two of Raj Narain's complaints about the 1971 Rae Bareilly election. Though mere 'technicalities' according to the Prime Minister's supporters, the two infringements sufficed to overturn the result and disqualify her from holding office for six years; she was given twenty days to appeal to the Supreme Court. She in turn appealed against the twenty days. The term was extended, but only on condition that she refrain from voting in Parliament. Given her majority, this in itself scarcely mattered. But it left her in a legal limbo, at the mercy of the Court and her opponents.\n\nThere ensued an exercise in mobilising mass support on the streets of New Delhi. As JP's followers besieged Rashtrapati Bhawan in an attempt to force the President to dismiss Mrs Gandhi, Sanjay and her other lieutenants bussed in hundreds of thousands of her own supporters to protest on her behalf. It was the middle of June, that hottest of months; tempers frayed and reason wilted; the political mercury soared. Sanjay and his associates drew up lists of those they hoped to see arrested; Mrs Gandhi explored the Constitution for legal options. In the end it was the threat of JP renewing his call for non-cooperation that carried the day; such a call, when directed at the police and the security forces, amounted to incitement to mutiny. Citing all the usual culprits \u2013 'communal passions', 'forces of disintegration', 'a widespread conspiracy' and 'a foreign hand' \u2013 the Prime Minister saw it as her duty to take control. Hence the declaration of a state of emergency. 'What else could I have done except stay?' she later claimed. '... I was the only person who could [lead the country].'\n\nIn the early hours of 26 June, in what anywhere else in South Asia would have been accounted a civil coup, all the main opposition leaders \u2013 J.P. Narayan, Morarji Desai and Raj Narain among them \u2013 were arrested. Hundreds, then thousands, of others including Members of Parliament and of the state legislatures, student leaders, journalists, academics and union bosses followed them into gaol under the MISA provisions for detention without trial. The newspaper presses were halted by turning off the power; a rigorous censorship was imposed. The cut and thrust of political life ceased; the elections due in 1976 were postponed. 'And this,' as the papers might have put it if they could, 'in the India of Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru.'\n\nThe wider world was aghast. Obituaries for Indian democracy, both tearful and patronising, featured prominently in the Western press. Bhutto, on the other hand, was unusually reticent. He noted only that 'gloating' was inappropriate, and warned Mrs Gandhi not to 'seek to extricate herself from this mess by embarking on an adventurist course against Pakistan'. Elsewhere, while India's friends wrung their hands and volunteered their services, India's critics preferred 'I told you sos'. V.S. Naipaul characterised the JP Movement as retrogressive, a throwback to Mahatma Gandhi's vision of an apolitical India comprised of village republics. The Emergency was a requiem for Western-style democracy and also a long-overdue wake-up call. By 'dramatiz[ing] India's creative incapacity, its intellectual depletion, its defencelessness, the inadequacy of every Indian's idea of India', it would finally dispel Gandhian complacency. Naipaul expected the crackdown to last, and noted that by 1976 the JP Movement was already 'evaporating'.\n\n'Condensing' would have been better than 'evaporating'. In late 1975 J.P. Narayan's precarious health had taken a turn for the worse. To forestall the explosive potential of his dying in detention, he was rushed to hospital in Bombay and there 'chained to a dialysis machine'. According to Ramachandra Guha, there were now 'an estimated 36,000... in jail under MISA'. A constitutional amendment deprived them of any legal redress; other amendments, all rubber-stamped by the Supreme Court, prevented any judicial review of the Emergency, quashed Raj Narain's action, allowed Parliament to extend its own life and make its own changes to the Constitution, and gave the central government new powers to suspend or dismiss state governments. The murder of Mujibur Rahman in Dhaka in August only made matters worse. Mrs Gandhi interpreted the assassination of her friend and ally 'as an omen of what could happen to her and her own family'. Surveillance was increased and more suspects were hauled in. As ever, paranoia stalked autocracy.\n\nThere was, though, an upside to the Emergency. Even critics recognised it. Like dictators elsewhere, Mrs Gandhi made much of the need for discipline. Among those rounded up, the tax evaders, black-marketeers, smugglers and bribe-takers greatly outnumbered the political detainees. As demonstrators trooped back to work aboard buses customised with slogans like 'Talk Less, Work More' and 'Efficiency is our Watchword', industrial strife subsided. The crime rate plummeted, so did the rate of inflation, and the trains kept better time. Denied the usual scandals, those journalists who were at liberty to file reports found there was disappointingly little to write about. Beggars betook themselves elsewhere; taxi meters sometimes worked; and big business generally approved.\n\nWhile Mrs Gandhi adopted a twenty-point programme full of rehashed socialist pieties, Sanjay Gandhi hobnobbed with multinational corporations and diverted funds from his Maruti car company into a variety of dubious enterprises. Instead of land reform and debt relief, he spoke out in favour of enterprise and efficiency. Decrying nationalisation, in one interview he looked forward to a liberal economic regime in which the public sector would die 'a natural death'. In this he was, of course, well ahead of his time. Not for another fifteen years would such radical rethinking about the economy be officially contemplated; indeed, so objectionable were Sanjay's methods that his advocacy probably hampered liberalisation rather than hastened it.\n\nHis mother, though disapproving, seemed incapable of censuring him. Instead she encouraged him to concentrate on his political future. By shoehorning him onto the executive committee of the Congress Party's Youth Wing, she effectively anointed him as her preferred successor. Packed with his minions, the Youth Wing would become Sanjay's power base and a rival to the party itself. He was already ensconced in the Prime Minister's residence at the head of a 'kitchen cabinet' that short-circuited both the official Cabinet and the Prime Minister's secretariat. In what the wags called 'the Land of the Rising Son', it was Sanjay who called the shots. The Emergency seemed as much his creation as his mother's.\n\nTo kickstart the modernisation of the country, he came up with a five-point programme of his own. A mixture of the worthy and the quixotic, it prioritised family planning, slum clearance, mass literacy, afforestation and the abolition of bride dowries. The last three being the least susceptible to speedy implementation, they had to wait. That left the slums and the birthrate; it was for bulldozers and vasectomies that Sanjay would be remembered.\n\nThe slums he targeted were principally the shanty townships in Delhi. Sanjay had already adopted the city as a trial ground for his rough-and-ready brand of enforcement, and had there found an able collaborator in the person of Jagmohan Malhotra, Vice-Chairman of the Delhi Development Authority and later a controversial Governor of Kashmir. While Sanjay provided political cover plus police backup, and with the Emergency regulations ensuring a publicity blackout, Jagmohan ordered in the bulldozers. Sometimes the residents received ample warning; sometimes they were directed to remote alternative sites; sometimes neither. In the space of eighteen months around 150,000 families had their homes demolished, and since most of these were rented and had been illegally constructed in the first place, there was little prospect of compensation. Resistance was met by baton charges, teargas and occasionally live rounds. The numbers wounded or killed went largely unreported, like the action itself. No doubt the slum settlements were an eyesore and a health risk. But this most undemocratic method of dealing with them belied Mrs Gandhi's claim that her Emergency was in defence of democracy.\n\nMuch the same could be said of Sanjay's efforts at population control. These had a far wider effect, and just as much to recommend them. The population had doubled in the last half century. Reducing the birthrate had long been government policy; the planners regarded it as essential, and with life expectancy increasing and infant mortality falling, it was the obvious way to reduce the poverty statistics. But this was less obvious to labouring families who regarded every infant as a potential source of earnings. Moreover, condoms were unpopular and contraceptive pills in short supply. Easier to quantify and much more effective was the 'snip'. Mass vasectomising could be conducted in roadside tents and mobile clinics. Like immunisation, it could also be incentivised.\n\nThis was Sanjay's brainwave. From attracting individual volunteers with promises of cash or a radio, he began setting targets for the number of vasectomies to be performed by each state. Passed on down to the districts and sub-districts, the targets introduced a competitive element. To meet or exceed them, and so impress 'the Rising Son', officials vied with one another and resorted to methods that might be both discriminatory and coercive. In some areas the clinics directed their attentions disproportionately to the homeless, Muslims, tribal peoples and _Harijans_. Elsewhere, the entitlement to benefits, jobs and licences might be made contingent on the production of certificates of vasectomisation. The results were impressive. 'In the six months between April and September 1976, two million Indians were sterilized,' with as many as 6,000 per day in Delhi alone. But resistance was widespread and visceral. Nothing in the entire Emergency was as much resented as Sanjay's clumsy assault on the masculinity of the nation.\n\nIsolated among the obsequious members of her kitchen cabinet and lulled by her compliant press, Mrs Gandhi was apparently unaware of the worst excesses. When they were finally brought to her attention, she called a halt to them, though without censuring Sanjay or appreciating the scale of the damage. Just how out of touch she had grown became clearer in January 1977. Taking both friend and foe by surprise, she blithely announced that elections were to be held. They were to take place in March, allowing just eight weeks for the campaign. Most of the political detainees were released; censorship was lifted and campaigning began immediately. Like Bhutto in Pakistan, indeed possibly prompted by his announcement of elections there a few days earlier, she supposed her opponents were in disarray, and was confident of victory.\n\nBhutto's reading of his own electoral prospects would prove right; his mistake lay in over-egging his victory. Mrs Gandhi's reading was hopelessly wrong; her mistake lay in trusting her own propaganda machine. Both had become dangerously isolated from the realities of life \u2013 and not just in South Asia. For as of 1973 an economic tsunami had been racing out of the Arabian Gulf and across the world's oceans. Nowhere was spared. Currency markets shook and stock markets crumbled. In what might well qualify as the late twentieth century's first wave of globalisation, the price of oil had gone through the roof. Buffeted by the shock, Mujib in Bangladesh, Bhutto in Pakistan and Indira in India might console themselves with the thought that their woes were not entirely of their own making. Yet the long-term effects for South Asia would prove far more complex, indeed a blessing, albeit mixed and in disguise.\n\n##\n\n## Two-Way Tickets, Double Standards\n\nThe hike in oil prices hit hardest in 1973\u201374, when in a matter of weeks the price of crude shot up from $3 a barrel to $12. Though in part a response to the devaluation of oil assets occasioned by Nixon's detaching the dollar from the gold standard, Arab producers insisted they were raising prices and cutting back on production in retaliation for Washington's rearmament of Israel after the 1973 October\/Yom Kippur war. In other words, the dreaded 'oil weapon' had finally been unsheathed. Motorists panicked and manufacturers hastily rewrote their price lists. Since practically everything depended on oil, practically everything was affected, from steel output to textile and fertiliser production. In Japan the panic extended even to toilet paper.\n\nThen in 1979\u201380 the same thing happened all over again. The crude price soared to $40 a barrel. This time it was supposedly because of uncertainties over supply following the fall of the Shah of Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of the Iran\u2013Iraq War. But an element of panic was noted, and some corporate manipulation was suspected. Throughout a rapidly industrialising world, the dangers of depending on any globally traded commodity that was in limited supply were becoming painfully manifest.\n\nHigher oil prices were not always bad news, though. As well as bringing untold spending power and an almighty construction boom to the otherwise impoverished Gulf region, price hikes quite suited the industrialised countries. Those with their own reserves could charge more for them, while to those without reserves, higher prices provided an incentive for developing alternative sources of energy. South Asia was badly placed in both respects: its known oil reserves were limited to a few wells in Assam, and in respect of alternatives like gas and nuclear energy, its technical expertise was limited.\n\nHere too, though, ill winds and silver linings worked their proverbial magic. For on balance the bonanza in the Gulf opened up other reserves \u2013 of employment, foreign exchange and cross-border investment \u2013 which would offset the region's exposure to the rising cost of imports and substantially boost GNPs. Though unforeseen at the time, indeed a mild source of embarrassment, such spin-off opportunities would buoy all the economies of South Asia well into the twenty-first century.\n\nV.S. Naipaul had noted the relevance of the Gulf as early as 1976. Rattling round Delhi during Mrs Gandhi's Emergency, he had been surprised to learn that his Sikh taxi driver was planning to emigrate.\n\nHe wanted to go to one of the Arab Gulf states. He had paid a large sum of money to a middleman, a 'contractor'. His papers were almost in order now, he said; all he was waiting for, from the contractor, was his 'no objection' certificate.\n\n'No objection' pretty much characterised the official attitude towards emigration at the time. It was neither promoted nor prevented; as yet irrelevant to the generality of South Asians, its appeal was limited. Naipaul reckoned his Sikh driver to be someone who was 'better off than most people in India'. He spoke excellent English, his taxi was his own, and it occupied a sought-after station in the rank outside Naipaul's no-doubt comfortable hotel. Post-colonial emigration, whether to the West or the Gulf, seldom benefited the poorest classes or the lowest castes. Far from being an option of last resort it was seen as a promising investment, the capital outlay required having the potential to transform not just the life of the migrant but the prospects of those he left behind.\n\nSikhs had been wise to the advantages of foreign earnings since long before Partition uprooted many from their homelands in what was now Pakistan. Untroubled by the caste-conscious Hindu's need to undergo expensive post-travel purification ceremonies, they had acted as diasporic pioneers, establishing communities in parts of California, British Columbia, East Africa and the UK even before World War I. The beturbanned journeymen who in the 1970s were still selling dusters and detergents out of battered suitcases in places as remote as Orkney and New Zealand were often second- or third-generation migrants.\n\nThe new wave of migration differed in that the Gulf offered fewer incentives for permanent settlement. On the other hand, it was nearer and cheaper in respect of home visits. Most migrant workers were destined for the construction or service industries and went on fixed contracts, typically of two years. Although these might be extended or repeated, the conditions, both contractual and physical, were seldom such as to encourage workers to summon their families and so make the transition from 'sojourners' to settlers. Instead, like the earlier wave of South Asian migrants to the UK and North America, they saved up to 50 per cent of their earnings and remitted these sums by various means to kin and sponsors back home.\n\nThe economic impact of such transactions would be enormous, but so too would the social consequences. According to one study, albeit based on the expectations not of sojourners in the Gulf but of settlers in California, remittances were employed 'to enhance status; gain philanthropic prestige; maintain _izzat_ or honor; improve marriage potentials family-wide; acquire political power or influence: demonstrate religious devotion; increase the potential for the education of siblings or more distant kinsmen; and, of course, finance additional migration'. Very few first-generation migrants, and not many of the second or third generation, severed their links with their kinsmen back home. If anything, South Asians abroad clung to family and community even more tenaciously than they did at home. Empowering his brethren back in South Asia validated the migrant's experience and enhanced his standing among them. They in turn might defer to his suggestions on the use of his remittances and heed his advice in other matters of community interest, including those of doctrinal and political allegiance.\n\nInitially it was not India but Pakistan that benefited most from the Gulf's appetite for labour. Being for the most part Muslims, Pakistanis were already welcome in the Arabian peninsula. There were ancient commercial and trading links between Sind and the Gulf ports, and many thousands of Pakistanis headed to Mecca on the annual pilgrimage. _Haj_ organisers were trusted figures and were acceptable to all parties as labour contractors. Though in India migration to the Gulf was principally from Kerala \u2013 and though in Pakistan migration streams to countries other than those of the Gulf were also origin-specific (e.g. Azad Kashmiris to the UK) \u2013 the Gulf appealed across the board, attracting unskilled and semi-skilled manual workers from all over Pakistan. Pathans and Punjabis flocked through emigration control at Islamabad airport as readily as did Sindis and _muhajirs_ at Karachi airport. Unusually for Pakistan, here was an enterprise in which all the nation's fretful ethnic groups might jointly participate and profit.\n\nIt was therefore somewhat ironic that the PPP, the main political party with an all-Pakistan appeal, was unable to reap the rewards of Gulf migration. Bhutto had been in dire need of good economic news, but when his government had been ousted by the military, the exodus to the Gulf was still a trickle. Only thereafter did it become a flood. From perhaps 300,000 Pakistanis working in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states when Bhutto was arrested in '77, the figure quickly increased sixfold, so that by the time he was executed in '79 it stood at around 1.8 million. It would remain at this level until 1983, then fall away, only to surge again as oil prices soared further in the late '80s. The principal beneficiary was thus the eleven-year regime of General Ziaul Haq.\n\nThe same poor timing did Bangladesh's Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League no favours either. Augmented by remittances from the Sylheti community in the UK, the earnings of Bangladeshis in the Gulf would come to constitute the country's main source of foreign exchange. But the outflow of migrant labour to the Gulf only reached appreciable dimensions three-to-four years after Mujib's death. Once again it was the military regimes, first that of General Ziaur Rahman and then of General Mohamed Ershad, that benefited.\n\nAlthough available statistics on the scale of remittances are reckoned inadequate (because they generally fail to distinguish between different streams of migration) and unreliable (because they mostly ignore informal money transfers), it seems that the value of foreign exchange reaching Pakistan in the form of recorded remittances from the Middle East rose 'from $434 million in 1976\u201377 to a peak of $2,403 million in 1982\u201383'. By then Gulf earnings covered nearly 75 per cent of Pakistan's trade deficit and were bringing in more foreign exchange than either exports or American aid packages. Averaged out, the World Bank calculated this to mean that in the decade 1977\u201386 Pakistan profited from Gulf migration to the tune of nearly $16 billion.\n\nIn reality it was probably more. Cash transferred not through banks but through the informal _hundi_ system of brokers \u2013 or indeed stashed about the returning migrant's luggage and person \u2013 is thought to have added another 50 per cent. Moreover, the Pakistani economy profited indirectly too. Lower deficits meant less borrowing costs; siphoning off excess labour to the Gulf may have reduced domestic tensions; and the demand for Pakistani produce from the roughly 10 per cent of the country's male labour force who were now working in the Gulf saw exports to that region double.\n\nNor was this a flash in the pan. As of 1983 Pakistan's participation in the Gulf bonanza showed a slight decline. Oil prices were slipping and the resultant belt-tightening in the Gulf reduced the demand for labour. Meanwhile migrants from India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka who were either more amenable to lower pay rates or better equipped in terms of skills provided stiff competition. Yet the reduction in remittances to Pakistan was nicely offset by the lower cost of oil imports, and when oil prices again surged, so did the flow of migrants and the value of their remittances. After several more such seesaws, by 2012 the value of all foreign remittances reaching Pakistan (so from Europe and North America as well as the Gulf) was estimated at a mighty $13.5 billion a year.\n\nHow much of this was being put to productive use \u2013 indeed what constitutes productive use \u2013 has been much debated. A survey published in 1987 by the Asian Employment Programme of the International Labour Organisation indicated that in Pakistan around 50 per cent of remittance funds were spent on 'recurring consumption plus [consumer] durables', with another 10 per cent going to marriage and _haj_ costs and 17 per cent to acquiring land and property. That left around 20 per cent for 'other investment'. Some of this 20 per cent 'was directed towards commercial avenues such as trade and [the] restaurants business', but only 7 per cent of it went to 'agricultural and industrial machinery and commercial vehicles'. Greater spending power obviously benefited the wider economy and boosted GDP; but the government-sponsored savings schemes and investment incentives that might have generated long-term productivity were scorned. 'Indus man's abiding preference for ostentatious consumption over thrift and capital accumulation' was still in evidence.\n\nSomething similar was true of Kerala. Though one of India's smaller states, Kerala \u2013 densely populated, well educated and with a substantial Muslim minority \u2013 accounted for half of the nation's annual migrant outflow to the Gulf of around 200,000. The stream of remittances into the state was thus considerable; yet 'it does not seem to have made any impact on the economic growth rate of the state economy', nor to have had any substantial effect on the employment rate, agricultural development or industrialisation. Instead Keralans ploughed their earnings into day-to-day necessities, consumer goods and construction materials for new-build housing.\n\nBut just across the border from Pakistan in the Indian state of Punjab the situation was rather different. In Jandiali, a Sikh village with a long tradition of migration, Arthur Helweg's research in the 1980s found that investment from remittances had overtaken the needs of production.\n\nEmigrants sent back much money which enabled farmers to mechanize and invest heavily in machinery and technology... To illustrate, Jandiali had 22 tractors to till her 646 acres. Tractors in Jandiali did hire out, but the figure is indicative of an investment above that warranted by the output, possibly 20 times the amount. Part of the reason for excessive tractors is that they are a prestige item.\n\nJandiali was an extreme example. Located in Jalandar district, long an area of high emigration, by the 1980s more than half of the village's natural population was living abroad; and since earlier patterns of migration had established Jalandar's Sikhs in the UK, Canada and the US, it was from these places rather than the Gulf that the bulk of the remittances were coming.\n\nPunjab itself was not exactly typical either. The tractor-cluttered roads and the thump of newly sunk tube-wells advertised its pre-eminence as the most agriculturally productive state in India. In fact, by 1985 India's Punjab seemed no longer to belong to the Third World, and to have left the rest of India behind. Bullock carts were being forced off the roads by combine harvesters. The shops had plate glass and the Yamaha had ousted the bicycle. 'There were no mud huts in the villages; it was all brick and stone... If any one part of the country could be called a success story, this was it.'\n\nBut the good news had a downside: Punjab was in danger of becoming the victim of its own success story. Mechanisation had reduced the demand for labour, while inflation plus greater productivity had pushed up the price of land. Those not in receipt of foreign earnings were having to sell up and join the ranks of the landless. In what was acclaimed 'India's breadbasket', some 40 per cent lived on or below the breadline. Meanwhile the prosperity generated by the combination of 'green revolution' technology and 'greenback' remittances had so roused the envy of other states that Mrs Gandhi felt justified in discouraging industrial development in Punjab and directing it elsewhere. Thus the easiest means of taking up the slack in the labour market was ruled out. According to Helweg, 'disparity between the rich and poor' was becoming engrained. Only those with emigrant connections 'could buy land, invest and maintain a good standard of living; others could not'.\n\nFrom competition for land and jobs, the growing tension between the 'remittance haves' and the 'remittance have-nots' spread to issues of local leadership. In affairs of common interest the haves expected a say commensurate with their newfound status; the have-nots resented this and were inclined to see the emigrant as 'the scapegoat for India's ills'. Such factionalism was not unusual and anywhere else might have been ignored. But Punjab in the 1980s was a special case in more respects than one. The most progressive state, it was also one of the most assertive and distinctive. Claims that it was Punjabi farmers who fed the nation and Punjabi soldiers who defended it were no doubt an exaggeration, although not groundless. Punjabis were as pre-eminent and over-represented in the armed forces as they were in cereal production. But above all, and as a result of some opportunist redrawing of federal boundaries, Punjabis were now deemed synonymous with Sikhs.\n\nOstensibly this was the outcome of the belated reorganisation into language-based states of India's post-Partition half of the British Punjab province. Back in the 1950s Jawaharlal Nehru, though accepting the principle of linguistic states in the south, had resisted it in the case of Punjab. He reasoned that, since all Sikhs spoke Punjabi, partitioning what remained of the already partitioned province into Hindi-speaking and Punjabi-speaking units would make the latter in effect a Sikh state. This would undermine the nation's secularism and encourage divisive sentiments elsewhere. But in 1966, shortly after her selection as Prime Minister, Mrs Gandhi had decided otherwise. Anxious to win support wherever she could in her battle with the Congress Party's Syndicate, she had acceded to demands for the Punjab's trifurcation. Its hill districts, many of them once princely states, were grouped together as Himachal Pradesh (the state capital being Simla); its mainly Hindi-speaking southern and eastern districts (around Delhi) were detached to form the new state of Haryana; and its now mainly Punjabi-speaking heartland continued as Punjab.\n\nStrategically crucial as bordering both Pakistan and Kashmir, it was this last creation that had become such a success story. The agreement with Pakistan over the sharing of the Indus waters, the higher productivity associated with the Green Revolution, and the boom in migration and remittances were all working in favour of the mini-Punjab. Additionally, apart from the trouble spots of Kashmir and Nagaland, Punjab was as yet the only state in India with a non-Hindu majority; for as Nehru had foreseen, those who claimed Punjabi as their first language (and the Gurmukhi script as its written expression) were overwhelmingly Sikhs. More important still, the state embraced the Sikh holy city of Amritsar along with its Golden Temple complex, the revered Mecca-cum-Vatican of the Sikh religion.\n\nNot surprisingly Sikhs, both in India and abroad, came to regard their new Punjab more as a hallowed homeland than an administrative division of the Indian republic. Though far from united, all Sikhs subscribed to a tradition which, like that of Islam, stressed the relevance of doctrine to every aspect of life, politics included. At the time of Partition they had been promised the freedom to exercise their faith plus such autonomy as this required. The main Sikh political party, the Akali Dal, was pledged to realising this autonomy, and in 1973, at a place sacred to the memory of the last Guru, it had adopted a radical Resolution to that effect.\n\nKnown as the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, it advanced forty-five demands, some essentially parochial or economic, others distinctly incendiary. One revived the British Cabinet Mission's proposal that what the Akali Dal called 'interference' by New Delhi in the governance of the states should be limited to defence, foreign affairs, currency and 'general administration'. In this it also echoed the six-point programme of Mujibur Rahman's Awami League; and just as the latter had led to the break-up of Pakistan, so the Akali demand could be seen as threatening the integrity of India.\n\nOther demands in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution referred to the Sikhs as a _qaum_ , __ an Urdu word that could be understood as meaning 'community' (which was acceptable) or 'nation' (which echoed the 'two-nation theory' of Pakistan's founders and was quite unacceptable). Additionally, the Akali Dal insisted that Chandigarh, the bleakly futuristic city designed by Le Corbusier as the capital of India's pre-1966 Punjab, should be awarded to their own truncated Punjab. This was anathema to Hindi-speaking Haryana, and had already provoked riots and rival fasts-unto-death. Solomon-like, Mrs Gandhi decreed that both states should share Chandigarh's capacious facilities. Under further pressure, she then changed her mind and awarded the city to Punjab. But there was a _quid pro quo_. Punjab would have to relinquish two districts by way of compensation to Haryana. This suited neither state, and provoked trouble in both. It remained unimplemented until, in 1984, renewed Punjabi demands for Chandigarh would goad Mrs Gandhi into waging her 'Last Battle'. Otherwise known as 'Operation Blue Star', this Indian army assault on Amritsar's Golden Temple would be regarded by many as the century's greatest sacrilege.\n\n*\n\nIf a rampant populism had typified the whole South Asian political scene in the 1970s, a rabid communalism was more in evidence in the two following decades. Earlier, the importance attached to nation-building had encouraged Nehru, and to a lesser extent Jinnah and Mujib, to play down confessional identities and promote a supposedly inclusive secularism. But such neutrality in matters of religion antagonised those who favoured a more public role for their preferred belief system, and was often belied in electoral practice by confessional communities voting _en bloc_ for parties pledged to defend their interests. Protestations of secularism notwithstanding, religious identities were far from dormant and were eminently susceptible to new stimuli.\n\nOne such stimulus was another by-product of emigration. In respect of Islam, migrants coming and going to the Arabian peninsula often brought home a sounder notion of their faith's supra-national profile and a new regard for the fundamentalist tenets and uncompromising attitudes of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi elite. Likewise remittances, whether they originated from sojourners in the Gulf or settlers in the West, often came with doctrinal strings attached. So of course did the devotional and educational endowments that were increasingly directed at South Asia by charitable foundations in the Middle East and the West. Moreover, such patronage could prove provocative. Being funded to speak out on matters of faith and promote a particular doctrine could amount to proselytisation. When in 1981 several thousand _Dalits_ (' _Harijans_ ', 'Untouchables') in Tamil Nadu opted to mass-convert to Islam, it was widely reported that Muslim inducements, including Gulf cash, had played a greater part in their decision than the discriminatory practices to which they had previously been exposed as _Dalits_. By the adherents of other cults and creeds, among them India's vast Hindu majority, such conversions were seen both as a threat and a challenge. To meet it they would mobilise their own resources \u2013 financial, organisational and agitational.\n\nAffirming a national religious identity could also pay political dividends. In both Pakistan and Bangladesh the Generals Zia cultivated support for their military regimes at home and abroad by stressing their Muslim credentials and appeasing their countries' Islamic leaderships. Thus in the late 1970s Ziaur Rahman scrapped all reference to secularism in the Bangladesh Constitution, and in the late 1980s General Ershad finally decreed that Bangladesh should call itself an 'Islamic state'. Meanwhile Ziaul Haq in Pakistan had given statutory expression to what this vexed concept might mean in practice. All were no doubt sincere believers; yet they were also aware that 'to generals badly in need of legitimacy the approval of Muslim ideologues was the next best thing to democratic endorsement'.\n\nIndia remained avowedly secular. Indeed, a new clause to this effect was written into the Constitution by Mrs Gandhi during her Emergency. But secularism meant different things to different people. For the agnostic Nehru it had been an intellectually persuasive proposition; for his daughter it was a shibboleth to be trotted forth when required; and for J.P. Narayan it was something of a religion in itself. As a one-time colleague and disciple of the Mahatma, JP was convinced not that religious belief should be denied a role in public life, but that public life, once it had been cleansed and devolved to the village level, would no longer provide a congenial arena for the universalist claims of competing belief systems.\n\nAs someone who had once acted as a government go-between with both Kashmir's Sheikh Abdullah and the Naga leader Angami Zapu Phizo, JP brought a similarly eclectic vision to matters of political allegiance. In fact his 'total revolution', after restoring power to the people, was supposed to usher in a homespun utopia that would be as devoid of politics as it was of religious bigotry. This conviction, plus his untainted reputation, enabled him to command the loyalties of a decidedly kaleidoscopic coalition. To Mrs Gandhi the sight of diametrically opposed ideologues marching shoulder-to-shoulder under the JP umbrella seemed a travesty of electoral democracy, indeed evidence of some kind of conspiracy. But JP's unlikely coalition held together; and come the Emergency detentions, it was actually strengthened. Scions of the ex-princely families found themselves sharing cell space with revolutionaries of Marxist-Leninist persuasion, one-nation Hindu fanatics bedded down beside bearded Jamaati mullahs, and socialist mavericks like Raj Narain bandied anti-Indira slogans with business-friendly Congress stalwarts like Morarji Desai.\n\nWeirdest of all, and yet crucial to the success of the JP Movement, was the coming together of non-violent disciples of the Mahatma, like JP himself, with the successors of Nathuram Godse, the man who had assassinated the Mahatma. After Gandhi's 1948 shooting, Godse had quickly been disowned by the ultra-Hindu RSS (the extra-parliamentary organisation that Nehru believed to be 'in the nature of a private army... proceeding on the strictest Nazi lines'). Yet there was no denying that Godse had once belonged to the RSS, and that he had been swayed by its outspoken attacks on the Mahatma's even-handed stance towards Muslims. Following Godse's conviction, the RSS had been banned and thousands of its activists arrested. Although the ban had soon been lifted, the Jana Sangh, the political wing of the RSS, had since been treated as a pariah by the more secular political parties, and had struggled to make an electoral impression. Its decision to join the JP Movement, and even 'assimilate' with it, represented an important change of tactics. Still the voice of a patriotic and determinedly one-nation Hinduism, the Jana Sangh was bidding to enter the mainstream of Indian politics.\n\nIn return the Sangh made available to the JP Movement a nationwide structure and organising capacity which the Movement otherwise lacked. Derived from the party's association with the well-drilled cadres of the RSS, these assets had proved crucial to mounting the Movement's massive pre-Emergency demonstrations in Delhi, and had become even more germane in the politicking that went on inside prison. In fact, by January 1977, when Mrs Gandhi lifted the Emergency, announced elections and released those still in detention, the JP Movement had metamorphosed into a formidable electoral contestant. Comprised of the Jana Sangh, the Socialists, Congress (O) and a powerful farming caucus, it emerged into the light of day as the newly fledged Janata Party.\n\nBy giving just a few weeks' notice of the 1977 election Mrs Gandhi had again counted on taking her opponents by surprise. But this time she had miscalculated. Whatever credit she claimed for her Emergency was more than offset by popular outrage over its excesses. Janata was ready to take up the cudgels, and had merely to stress the obvious. Savaging Sanjay's slum clearances and forced-sterilisation programmes, and decrying the arrests and the press censorship, it promised an immediate return to constitutional integrity, democratic normality and Gandhian values. Important figures in Indira's Congress sympathised and defected to it; meanwhile seat-sharing arrangements with regional parties like the Tamil AIADMK (like other parties, the original DMK had split) and the Sikh Akali Dal ensured that the anti-Indira vote was not fragmented.\n\nThe result was a sweeping Janata victory. In the national parliament the new party won 295 of the 542 seats, and performed equally well in most of the states. Indira's Congress slumped to 154 seats, at the time its lowest ever representation. In Rae Bareilly the Prime Minister herself was roundly defeated by Raj Narain; in a neighbouring constituency Sanjay's attempt to win a seat bombed. For the first time ever India had a non-Congress government. The Emergency had been discredited, and with it the lurch towards authoritarian rule. Portraying the result as less a critique of Mrs Gandhi's constitutional tinkering and more a test of the nation's commitment to democracy, a standard history of the period reassures its readers that there was 'no doubt that the Indian people passed the test with distinction if not full marks'.\n\nBut while the Janata Party had triumphed in the polls, it was ex-Jana Sangh members who had triumphed in the party. Their tally of ninety-three seats was twice that achieved by ex-members of any of the other Janata components. After much jockeying for position, J.P. Narayan was asked to arbitrate over the choice of a leader, and installed the octogenarian Morarji Desai as Prime Minister. But Jana Sanghis also got portfolios, among them the party's President Atul Behari Vajpayee as Minister for External Affairs. In this role Vajpayee belied his party's reputation for intransigent Hindu triumphalism by visiting Beijing and Islamabad. Fences were mended with both; and while good terms with Moscow were maintained, a new relationship with Washington was signalled when in 1978 President Jimmy Carter paid an official visit to India. Carter gratified his hosts by likening the shock of Delhi's recent Emergency to that of Washington's recent Watergate. Clearly Hindu nationalists, once in power, were not necessarily a liability and could act as responsibly as any Congress Minister.\n\nThe same could hardly be said of the Janata Party's non-Jana Sangh membership, nor of its domestic policies. _Jana_ means 'people', with _janata_ being __ its adjectival form \u2013 so 'people's'. __ Under the influence of Nehru's social levelling policies, so-called _janata_ amenities had been popping up everywhere. There were _janata_ banks and _janata_ housing schemes, and in the railway timetables a number of trains were billed as 'Janata Expresses'. These connected the country's main cities and were to be avoided if at all possible; for a 'People's Express', though certainly popular, was not express-like in terms of luxury or speed. Comprised entirely of non-AC third-class carriages, it stopped at every station (plus points in between), was jam-packed even by Indian standards, lacked adequate toilet facilities and invariably arrived late. On the railways as elsewhere, 'Janata' represented the lowest common denominator with its combination of universal access and rock-bottom standards. As a brand, it was one to avoid; it was not __ a promising name for a political party.\n\nIn so far as the excesses of the Emergency were quickly addressed, the Janata government may be said to have got off to a good start. Mrs Gandhi's constitutional amendments were reversed, and a legal minefield was laid down to prevent any repeat of the Emergency. The ex-Prime Minister herself was humbled with a flurry of judicial inquiries into her conduct in office. Additionally, in deference to JP's Gandhianism and Janata's farming lobby, the government nudged economic policy away from centrally planned industrialisation and towards rural development and small-scale manufacturing. Ironically, it also improved conditions on the railways, including the dreaded Janata Expresses. A quasi-computerised system of seat reservations was introduced, along with what Guha calls a 'far-reaching measure' to pad the hard wooden berths of second-class sleepers with three centimetres of foam rubber. But more village crafts, less central planning and a squidgy berth covered in plastic rep was not a lot to show for a government with such an overwhelming majority.\n\nIn fact, the majority was proving to be the problem; for the solidarity that had carried the Janata Party to power instantly deserted it in office. Its ex-Jana Sangh members refused to forswear their allegiance to the RSS, and insisted on a nationalist agenda in respect of such things as the rewriting of school textbooks. Neither of these reassured their associates in office, who favoured preferential treatment for farmers, 'money for work' schemes, and extending the educational and job opportunities reserved for the 'scheduled' tribes and lowest castes to those belonging to other backward castes. However well-intentioned, all this merely stirred up caste conflict, leading to violent clashes and some notable atrocities. Thus 'the political momentum of the regime was lost by the end of 1977 [so within just nine months] and the uneasy coalition that was the Janata Party began to disintegrate'. A Janata government lingered on until 1979, but it was amid bitter internal struggles plus growing unrest in the country as the second round of oil-price hikes sent inflation back up to 20 per cent.\n\nMrs Gandhi had only to bide her time. The Jana Sangh's obsession with 'Mother India' (or _Bharat Mata_ , __ a supposedly indivisible and primordially Hindu personification of the nation) was countered by the nation's rediscovered affection for 'Mother Indira' (or _Indira Amma_ ). Her star rose with every move to impeach her or impede her rehabilitation. Janata's pursuit of justice began to look like a vendetta; Sanjay's strong-arm tactics were forgotten. Re-elected to Parliament in a 1978 by-election in Karnataka, Mrs Gandhi once again purged her party, then mobilised it to support a breakaway Janata coalition. This arrangement lasted but a matter of weeks. JP was now a dying man, and with him was expiring all hope of his Janata being reconstituted. When in August 1979 Mrs Gandhi's Congress withdrew its support of the breakaway coalition, the government lost its fragile majority. New elections were called for early 1980. India's first ever non-Congress government had lasted less than three years.\n\nConsidering how effectively she and Sanjay had masterminded her return to power, and how she then swept the polls to win a majority comparable to that of 1971, the reinstated Mrs Gandhi appeared as formidable as ever. She was isolated, certainly. She trusted no one save Sanjay, surrounded herself with sycophants, supposed herself the embodiment of the nation and took all expressions of dissent as personal affronts. '\"Paranoia\" may be the most appropriate word here,' says Guha. But a rival suggestion that 'she no longer had a firm grasp over politics and administration... [and] showed signs of being a tired person' was not borne out by events. Still in her early sixties, she enjoyed reasonable health, the close support of her family and the conviction that only she could hold the nation together.\n\nArguably, the initiatives of her last four years in power were no more ill-conceived than those of her first four. But whereas in the late 1960s she had embraced leftist policies to discomfit her opponents, in the early 1980s and for the same reason she wheeled to the right. Reasoning that Janata had owed its short-lived success entirely to the Jana Sangh and its emphasis on Hindu nationalism, she tailored her public conduct to the new communalism. A Hindu holy man took up residence in the prime ministerial home, and in the weeks immediately after her return to power she made a point of being photographed at temples all over India.\n\nA more communalist approach was also evident in her ritual toppling of non-Congress governments in the states. Though formerly a supporter of Sheikh Abdullah's National Conference in J and K, she now championed the sense of alienation felt by Hindus in that state's Jammu region and accused the National Conference of 'anti-nationalism'. Apparently Farooq Abdullah, the Conference's leader since the death of his father, the Sheikh, in 1982, had sought 'Gulf money for the development of the state' in a bid to 'place Kashmir on the international map'. This was neither particularly sinister nor well substantiated; but it gave Mrs Gandhi a pretext for changing tack. Moreover, her ploy to outbid rightist opponents paid off. In the 1983 state elections her Congress comfortably upstaged the challenge of the Hindu right in Jammu as now represented by the Bharatiya Janata Party (or BJP), a reincarnation of the Jana Sangh in the wake of the Janata Party's collapse. Mrs Gandhi's ploy was nevertheless questionable, in that it ran contrary to Nehru's insistence on secular neutrality. Indeed, though most of the BJP's candidates had lost, Mrs Gandhi's showing in Jammu could be construed as an endorsement of their platform. As a contributor to the BJP's official organ consoled its readership, 'ideas are more important than seats'. The ploy also failed in its primary objective of toppling the Abdullahs' National Conference. In what was widely regarded as the state's fairest poll to date, Farooq Abdullah brushed off his rejection in Jammu and was returned to power thanks to the overwhelming support of the Muslim vote in the Kashmir Valley.\n\nNo less mischievous interventions in Assam and Punjab were equally counter-productive and would ultimately prove much more disastrous. But it was not just in the centre's relationship with the states that Mrs Gandhi's cavalier attitude to her father's principles was evident. Regional relations also suffered, most notably in respect of Sri Lanka.\n\nIn that troubled island, as in Bangladesh, an upsurge of violence in the 1970s was already concerning New Delhi. A combination of India's ethnic links to the island's Tamil-speaking minority, growing anxiety over possible superpower involvement in resolving the violence, and resentment over the transit facilities afforded to Pakistan in the Bangladesh crisis argued strongly for another assertion of India's regional responsibilities. Additionally, a prime ministerial reputation already built on popular success beyond India's northern borders in Bangladesh and Sikkim might well be reinvigorated by timely engagement with an unhappy island just off the country's southern seaboard.\n\n*\n\nIn a city notably short of landmark buildings, Colombo's Galle Face Hotel stands out as much by reason of its prime location as of its teak and stone colonnades. To the west the Arabian Sea pounds the hotel's open terraces; east runs the city's main traffic axis; south lie the Indian High Commission and the US Embassy; and north, facing the hotel's palm-fringed entrance, stretches a broad, grassy esplanade from which strolling couples can watch the sun set. On this breezy sward on the morning of 5 June 1956 some two hundred Sri Lankan Tamil parliamentarians and supporters had assembled in silence. Primed on Gandhian tactics, they sat down and they stayed there, saying nothing, offering no resistance, while organised mobs converged on the park and set about them with sticks and stones. The police were under orders not to intervene. In the nearby Parliament Building the debate on the Official Language Act went on regardless.\n\n'Miraculously', according to later reports, no one was killed. One protester had an ear bitten off, another was thrown into a lake and dozens were so badly beaten as to need hospitalisation. But it was not a massacre, and it was all over by 1 p.m. That evening guests at the Galle Face Hotel might sally forth to take the ocean breeze as usual. Yet Sri Lanka would never be quite the same again. 'The riots that erupted on this occasion and spread to many parts of the country brought an end to... 40 years of communal peace... The rancour and the bitterness they left behind did not augur well for the governance of the country.' The island's fifty-year agony had begun.\n\nA vast nation like India, if ringed by lesser entities, is bound to regard them as its legitimate concern; no less certainly, it is bound to be regarded by them with deep suspicion. In 1956 Sri Lanka's population stood at around ten million. This was under a fifth of Pakistan's or Bangladesh's, and around a thirty-third of India's. Most of India's constituent states are in fact larger and more populous than Sri Lanka. The equality implicit in Sri Lanka's sovereign status and UN membership could thus be deceptive. Likewise, the bullying hegemonism of which New Delhi is habitually accused should occasion no surprise. Both are par for the course. In Sri Lanka, as in Nepal, physical proximity to India, historical links, population exchange, a shared cultural matrix and a considerable degree of economic dependency have long limited the exercise of sovereign prerogatives.\n\nColonial rule had done nothing to change this. Acquiring Sri Lanka in 1796 on the whim of an enterprising academic called Cleghorn, the British government had not regarded 'the island of Ceylon' as pertaining to India or to the East India Company. In time it was run by Britain's Colonial Office rather than the India Office; and it took no part in either the great Indian Rebellion\/Mutiny of 1856\u201357 or in India's protracted freedom struggle. On the other hand, links with India were if anything strengthened. Under British rule, business houses and the administration relied less on the island's Sinhala-speaking Buddhist majority than on its long-established Tamil-speaking and mainly Hindu minority. Meanwhile more Tamils were recruited from the Indian mainland as bonded labour to work the island's new tea and rubber plantations.\n\nOf these two Tamil-speaking communities \u2013 the semi-indigenous 'Sri Lankan Tamils' and the less favoured and more transient 'Estate [or Indian] Tamils' \u2013 the first were concentrated in the north and east of the island and the second throughout the interior. When Sri Lanka attained its independence in 1948, each group represented around 12 per cent of the island's total population.\n\nIn the 1950s and '60s Indian concern focused mainly on the fate of the Estate Tamils. Nearly two decades ahead of India, Sri Lanka had adopted a system of universal franchise which effectively defined who was a Sri Lankan citizen. 'Estate Tamils' qualified only if they could prove five years' residence. This excluded many, some of whom migrated back to India during the Depression years of the 1930s or moved overseas. More followed when in 1948 independent Sri Lanka's first government redefined citizenship in such a way as to disenfranchise most of the remaining Estate Tamils. The move also incensed the much larger Tamil community in mainland India, prompting Nehru, Shastri and then Mrs Gandhi to intervene on behalf of these now stateless (and often Estate-less) Tamils. In 1964 and again in 1974 pacts were signed to resolve the problem. India would ultimately repatriate about half of the one million remaining Estate Tamils; Sri Lanka extended citizenship to slightly fewer; others swelled the ranks of the Tamil diaspora, mostly in Canada and the UK.\n\nBy contrast, the long-resident Tamil community in the north and east of the island was at first little affected by these arrangements. Better-educated but much divided by caste and profession, these 'Sri Lankan Tamils' did qualify as Sri Lankan citizens. They participated in the political process, and in the Jaffna peninsula (just across the Palk Strait from India) they actually constituted a majority. They were also well represented in the offices and bazaars of Colombo and other cities. But post-Independence, such prominence came to be resented by the island's non-Tamil majority. Though riven by divisions of its own, this Sinhalese majority began asserting a national identity based on its own shared allegiance to Buddhism and the Sinhala language. As a result, constitutional provisions originally conceived as necessary for the protection of minorities like the Sri Lankan Tamils were increasingly portrayed as discriminating against the Sinhalese majority. To redress the situation, successive governments embarked on a programme of affirmative action, albeit with the unusual object of empowering not a minority but the vast majority.\n\nAccess to the country's sole university and schemes for the development of new lands proved especially contentious. Tamils objected to Sinhalese being settled on reclaimed tracts in the north and east, so diluting the Tamils' numerical strength in the provinces they considered their homeland. They also, and especially their youth, took strong exception to a weighted system of admission requirements for the Colombo Schools of Medicine and Engineering; for to reduce the disproportionate imbalance between Tamil-speakers and Sinhala-speakers in these cherished professions, Sinhala-speakers were to be admitted with a lower mark than that required of their Tamil-speaking peers.\n\nBut it was the issue of language itself which, in Sri Lanka as in Indian Tamil Nadu, provoked the greatest outcry. At the time of Independence, Sinhala, Tamil and English served as the official languages. English was soon to be phased out; and so, it seemed, was Tamil when in 1956 the 'Sinhala-only' or Official Language Act was passed: under it Sinhala was to become the sole national language within five years.\n\nThe main Tamil political party countered with demands for Tamil's reinstatement and for greater autonomy for the northern and eastern provinces. The first demonstration in support of these demands was the non-violent protest mounted on the breezy sward outside Colombo's Galle Face Hotel on 5 June. Following the rout of the protesters, the attackers turned their attention to Tamils in other areas of the city. Elsewhere in the country '150 people died' in related incidents before the situation was brought under control.\n\nWorse followed when in 1958 the government of Mr S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, under pressure from members of the Buddhist monastic community, reneged on a later compromise permitting the official use of Tamil in the northern and eastern provinces. Tamils again protested, and the attacks this time spread to the north, where Tamils responded in kind.\n\nAll this coincided with the rise to power in India's Madras province of the Tamil DMK, followed by the creation of the Tamil-speaking state of Tamil Nadu and the eventually successful protests there against the adoption of Hindi as India's official\/national language. Delhi seemed a lot more responsive to Tamil concerns than Colombo; and this would remain the case when the ruling Congress in New Delhi habitually sought the support of the ruling DMK (or its breakaway AIADMK) in Tamil Nadu. Sri Lankan Tamils took heart from this example. Their main political mouthpiece called itself the 'Federal' Party, and increasingly presented its linguistic grievances in terms of a demand for the island's northern and eastern provinces to be granted the autonomous powers enjoyed by the Indian states.\n\nThe Sinhala-only Act duly came into effect in 1961. But with the Tamils' Federal Party holding the balance of power in Parliament, the implementation of the Act was again diluted by concessions to the Tamils \u2013 concessions which were again withdrawn under pressure from Sinhala nationalists. In 1970 the electoral triumph of Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike at the head of a left-supported United Front government ended this stop\u2013start shuffle. A new Constitution awarded the Prime Minister and Parliament additional powers, enshrined Sinhala as the official language, favoured Buddhism as the majority faith, and effectively ruled out any further concessions. The die was cast. Feeling excluded from power, constitutionally hobbled and educationally disadvantaged, Sri Lankan Tamils of different castes, age groups and ideological persuasions drew closer together. The leader of the Federal Party, a mild-mannered Christian called Chelvanayakam, resigned his parliamentary seat; and in 1973 the party 'adopted a new and uncompromising line: separatism'.\n\nIn the north and east of the island many Tamils now regarded the army and the police as 'hostile forces of occupation' to be resisted and targeted as the agents of Sinhala supremacism. Throughout the 1970s murders and other acts of violence increased. They included the assassination of an MP by radical Tamil youths answering to the twenty-three-year-old Velupillai Prabhakaran. As of 1975 Prabhakaran's militant Tamil Students' Federation adopted the name the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Other militant groups proliferated, among them the ill-named EROS (the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students), founded in London in the same year. Soon after, in 1976, a national convention of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), a constitutionally minded grouping rather than a militant one, resolved on a 'sacred fight for freedom... [for] the goal of a sovereign socialist state of Tamil Eelam'. The rhetoric, no less than the reality, was threatening war. Another South Asian partition looked to be on the cards.\n\nWith the example of Bangladesh fresh in Tamil minds, 'the hope and assumption was that what India had done for the people of East Pakistan it could be persuaded to do for the Tamils of Sri Lanka', writes the historian K.M. de Silva. Nor would the Tamil secessionists be disappointed. The expansion and progress of their struggle 'would have been impossible without the support and encouragement of the political parties of Tamil Nadu and... the more calculating, self-serving, and yet vital assistance of the Indian government to Tamil separatism in the 1980s'.\n\nIn 1977, the year in which Mrs Gandhi was defeated in the polls by the Janata Party, Mrs Bandaranaike shared a similar fate. With the election of J.R. Jayawardene as Sri Lanka's premier, another Constitution ushered in a presidential form of government and proportional representation. TULF, campaigning on the platform of a separate Tamil state, won the second most seats and headed the parliamentary opposition. But these developments, while insufficient to reassure the separatists, more than sufficed to alarm Sinhala opinion. Riots and reprisals followed in 1978. The LTTE was banned, a state of emergency was declared in Jaffna, and vigorous counter-insurgency operations by the security forces triggered another Tamil exodus. Militant Tamil groups began to withdraw across the Palk Strait to Tamil Nadu; sympathisers \u2013 plus many Tamils who simply despaired of their future in Sri Lanka \u2013 either followed them or joined the wider diaspora.\n\nIn Indian Tamil Nadu an AIADMK government headed by M.G. Ramachandran, the corpulent but quasi-divine hero of innumerable Tamil films, was decidedly sympathetic to the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils. Accommodation was found for the incomers and funds provided for them. But no clear distinction was made between refugees and those whom the Sri Lankan government regarded as terrorists. Nor was it easy to distinguish the role played by the government in New Delhi from that of its AIADMK ally in Madras. From later report it appears that 'India's covert training of Tamil militant groups in Tamil Nadu may have started as early as May 1982'.\n\nIndia's diplomatic involvement in attempts to mediate a settlement between the militants and the Jayawardene government also dates from this period. But it assumed much greater urgency as of July 1983. In that month an LTTE ambush in which thirteen Sinhalese soldiers were killed sparked island-wide attacks on Tamils. The violence was communal but otherwise indiscriminate. Sinhalese mobs turned on Tamil neighbours regardless of whether they were in sympathy with the separatist movement; the same innocent parties might be targeted by Tamil militants as suspected traitors to the separatist cause. Though officially classed as 'riots', the killings and burnings reminded observers of the 'madness' that had overtaken Calcutta in 1946 and the Punjab in 1947. Again the government was slow to intervene, leading to suspicions of complicity. Again the death toll is disputed: estimates range from three hundred to 3,000. And again there was a massive movement of population. Up to 200,000 Sri Lankan Tamils were displaced, many of them preferring exile in India or the West. The only big difference was that whereas in India and Pakistan the killing had been stopped in a matter of weeks, in Sri Lanka it marked the beginning of the twenty-six-year war.\n\nThe Jayawardene government's barely-disguised sympathy for the Sinhala nationalists continued to make matters worse. By rushing through a constitutional amendment that obliged all parliamentarians to forswear separatism, it gave TULF MPs little option but to resign. The consequences proved fatal. 'Their departure from politics created the vacuum that was filled by Velupillai Prabhakaran and his Tamil Liberation Tigers [LTTE].' In the north and east, LTTE attacks kept pace with the increased deployment of Sri Lankan police and troops. Soon the Jaffna peninsula was effectively under guerrilla control. Funds raised by the diaspora were now channelled principally to the militant groups, and it was their recruits who were despatched to training camps in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere in India. 'The events of 1983 [had] made them \"terrorists\".'\n\nWhile the LTTE waged a war of attrition against the Sri Lankan forces plus a no less bloody vendetta against its own guerrilla rivals, Indian concern mounted. The Tamil Nadu factor was probably uppermost. 'Seldom has a constituent unit of one country influenced the relationship between it and a neighbouring country with the same intensity, persistence, and to the same extent that Tamil Nadu does in the case of India's relation with Sri Lanka,' writes de Silva. The prospects no less than the instincts of Tamil Nadu's AIADMK government demanded that it act as the protector of Sri Lanka's Tamils. As well as providing the guerrillas with support and sanctuary it facilitated their acquisition of arms and urged New Delhi to deploy its international clout on their behalf.\n\nMrs Gandhi in New Delhi obliged because she had an agenda of her own. The Jayawardene government in Colombo, which had toppled the United Front of her friend Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, was already looking beyond India for assistance. For help in containing the Tamil challenge and mediating a settlement, Colombo openly approached neighbours other than India, including Pakistan, and further afield, the UK and the US. Much to Mrs Gandhi's fury, Washington was already arming and bankrolling Zia's Pakistan in response to events in Afghanistan. The prospect of her least favourite superpower acquiring yet another role in the region alarmed Indian policy-makers. To safeguard its own regional superiority, New Delhi badly needed to assert an exclusive interest in Sri Lanka.\n\nThe Tamil Nadu dimension lent further cogency to this analysis, as did reports that some Indian citizens had already fallen victim to the strife. India could not therefore remain indifferent. Yet critics noted only the parallels with the run-up to the Bangladesh intervention. Now as then, the Indian government emphasised its humanitarian concern for the refugees, denied any involvement in the training and funding of the guerrillas, and eagerly embraced the chance to act as arbitrator. This has led one scholar to note 'a new Monroe doctrine in Indian foreign policy after 1983'. Another explains the reference by insisting 'that India had to manage the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka itself, in order to both maintain its hegemonic role and keep external powers out of its \"backyard\" '.\n\nIn mid-to-late 1983 senior Indian emissaries were twice despatched to Colombo, and Jayawardene visited India. It was believed that plans for an armed Indian intervention had already been drawn up, to forestall which Jayawardene welcomed the diplomatic initiative. TULF, the LTTE and other militant Tamil groups also endorsed the talks, in the hopes of winning some recognition for their separatist agendas. But at the time Mrs Gandhi was preoccupied with more pressing separatist challenges closer to home. When in late 1984 one of these claimed her life, it fell to her son and successor to resume the search for a role in Sri Lanka. This Rajiv Gandhi would do, bringing the Sri Lankan parties together, then edging them towards the ill-fated 1987 Accord under which Indian troops were finally despatched to the island. Proudly deployed as a guarantor of the peace, the Indian Peace-Keeping Force would quickly become fair game when the Accord unravelled.\n\nIndian involvement in the Sri Lankan war officially internationalised the conflict; yet it had in fact long been so. The Tamil diaspora in the UK, the US, the Gulf and especially Canada (where Toronto soon hosted 150,000 Sri Lankan 'asylum seekers') had been funding the militant groups for years, and now managed procurement agencies for weaponry, communications equipment and bomb-making materials, plus the shipping to deliver them. The diaspora also lobbied foreign governments on behalf of these groups, with New Delhi's diplomatic representatives reportedly offering their support. In a decade when India's own integrity was coming under greater threat than at any time since Partition, some saw this as hypocritical.\n\nThe irony was not lost on President Jayawardene. When the weekly _India Today_ had __ published the first hard evidence of direct Indian government involvement in supplying and training Tamil guerrillas, the Sri Lankan premier had been incensed. 'This is not a friendly act at all,' he had declared. Nor was it one that he had brought on himself; for as he pointedly added, 'I am not harbouring the people who want to separate Punjab and Assam from India.'\n\n##\n\n## Things Fall Apart\n\nCome, come,\n\nCome out of your homes.\n\nChase, chase,\n\nChase the foreigner away.\n\nThis 1980s chant \u2013 'the rallying point of every meeting, the call to arms of every procession and protest' \u2013 could well have been that of Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority baying for the suppression of the Tamil guerrillas. It, too, was inspired by what has been called the 'politics of citizenship', and it was providing Mrs Gandhi with another stern test of her commitment to the secular and non-interventionist principles bequeathed by her father. But the chant in its pithier original was in fact in the Assamese language; and the 'foreigners' whom Assam's activists wished to expel were largely Muslim Bengalis from across India's soft and ever problematic border with Bangladesh.\n\nAssam, in India's far north-east, had long been noted for an exceptional rate of population increase: through the first half of the twentieth century 'it was the second-highest in the world (137.80 per cent), exceeded only by Brazil (204 per cent)'. In the census period 1961\u201371 it had continued to grow by around 35 per cent; hence the 1961 total was expected to have doubled by 1991. This was not because the indigenous people \u2013 a mixture of Assamese and numerous smaller groupings \u2013 were exceptionally fertile. Rather was it mostly down to massive inward migration.\n\nLike the Lepchas and Bhutiyas in Sikkim, though on a much larger scale, those who considered themselves natives of Assam were in imminent danger of being outnumbered in their own state. The same phenomenon was notable in neighbouring states like Tripura and Nagaland. And everywhere the ill-regulated immigration brought increased pressure on resources, especially land and jobs, leading to fierce competition over the conventional means of redress, the ballot box.\n\nThe Assamese, like the Sinhala majority in Sri Lanka, had begun protesting against this 'foreign' presence soon after Independence. Riots followed in the 1950s and '60s. The immigrants demanded parity for their own Bengali language with that of the Assamese; the Assamese retorted with demands for the immigrants to be sent home to what was then East Bengal\/East Pakistan. But it seems to have been the mass movement of refugees from East Bengal\/Bangladesh during the 1971 war that elevated the sporadic native protests into a sustained assertion of Assamese subnationalism.\n\nSpearheaded by the All-Assam Students' Union (AASU), by 1979 a campaign of civil disobedience had brought the local economy to a standstill and was holding the state government in Gauhati to ransom. Tea plantations and oil installations were targeted, both of them vital to India as a whole and neither of them controlled by the Assamese themselves; additionally, government offices were picketed, roads and railways blocked, schools and colleges closed. In a bid to reclaim the state for its indigenous people, the AASU insisted on its 'three \"D\"s': Detection (of the immigrants), Deletion (of their names from the electoral registers), and Deportation (back to Bangladesh).\n\nOf these, 'Deletion' was the most controversial. The state had been something of a Congress stronghold, yet on good evidence many Assamese attributed this to immigrants being permitted to cross the border and register as citizens in return for their voting for Congress. Partition's least convincing border, ill-defined, traversed by countless rivers, straddled by island _chars_ and pocked by enclaves, was a valuable asset. It kept the smugglers in business, the border guards in pocket money and the Congress in power.\n\nSince most Assamese are Hindus and most of the immigrants were Muslims, the conflict inevitably took on a communal character. Those indigenous Muslims who for generations had supplied Assam with clerks and professionals found themselves classed with the later waves of wretchedly poor and landless Bangladeshis. Conversely, many of the state's native but barely Hinduised tribal peoples aligned themselves with the disgruntled Assamese. The BJP and its RSS allies, the champions of _Hindutwa_ ('Hindu-ness'), also sided with the Assamese, while Mrs Gandhi's Congress here preferred to stress its secular traditions; anxious about its electoral prospects, it upheld the rights of the immigrants and called the AASU's leaders communalist agitators.\n\nNegotiations in 1980\u201382 got nowhere. The government offered to examine the electoral rolls and weed out the names of those who had entered the state illegally since 1971. The AASU preferred a cut-off date of 1951. There was talk of a compromise on 1961, but this too was unacceptable to the government, although nearly a million of the 1961\u201371 immigrants had in fact been Hindus. Fleeing what was then East Pakistan in the wake of the anti-Hindu riots triggered by the 1965 war and events in Kashmir, these Bengali Hindus might have been expected to vote against the Muslim-inclined Congress and for the AASU's agenda. Yet, fearing the opposite, the government resisted the chance of disenfranchising them.\n\nThe state being unable either to quell the troubles or to reach a settlement with the AASU, its ruling ministry was dismissed in 1982. Delhi, in the person of Mrs Gandhi, now called the shots. Ably assisted by local Congress boss Hiteswar Saikia, 'a stocky politician with the guile of a fox and the organising skills of an army general', she plumped for fresh elections as the only way forward. Arguing that she had no choice in the matter since it was a constitutional obligation, she dismissed objections from many senior figures that the state was too disturbed for a meaningful contest and that the vote was sure to provoke violence. She nevertheless poured in more security units.\n\nIn the run-up to the poll in February 1983, the communal situation rapidly deteriorated. The AASU declared a boycott of the election, and did its best to interrupt preparations and discourage intending voters. Shootings and bombings became a daily occurrence, with some five hundred related deaths, many at the hands of law-enforcers. Strikes were met with curfews; the formalities of electioneering were being conducted amid the security trappings of a military crackdown. In the end, though few voted, they were deemed enough for Congress to declare victory.\n\nOn the morning of 18 February, four days after the main poll, the residents of a cluster of fourteen villages near the town of Nellie, about fifty kilometres north-east of Gauhati, received some welcome reassurance. Mostly non-Assamese and all Muslims, the villagers had, as 'rightful citizens of a democratic country' (in the words of one of them), cast their votes. Now all they wanted was to get back to their rice fields. News that it was at last safe to do so was confirmed by a local official apparently ignorant of a military despatch warning of trouble.\n\nThe villagers sallied forth soon after sunrise, men, women and children straggling companionably from their homes in the slanting light. As they reached their fields, smoke was seen coming from their villages. Then the surrounding scrub erupted. Dressed in white kurtas and dhotis, an estimated one thousand ambushers fell upon them. The attack had been well prepared, and the attackers set about their work with whatever implements they had been able to lay their hands on \u2013 machetes, spears, pitchforks, bows and arrows and the odd gun. According to one survivor, the massacre lasted six hours. But by the time the police appeared it was over. The attackers had fled, the villages were smouldering and the gruesome evidence of the worst single atrocity in post-Partition South Asia lay strewn across the glistening padi fields.\n\nPhotos showed the mutilated bodies of toddlers and children laid out in rows on the bare earth like something from the killing fields of Cambodia. Even the government put the fatalities in this one 'incident' at well over 1,800; most independent sources say over 3,000. The living wounded numbered less, the escapees less still. Of their assailants it was said that many were from the local Liwa tribe, that AASU activists accompanied them and that the RSS had approved the attack. But apart from the appalling death toll, little is known for sure. Though criminal actions were subsequently brought, none was ever heard. A six-hundred-page government report was compiled but never made public.\n\nTwenty-three years later Teresa Rehman, a reporter from the crusading weekly _Tehelka_ , __ visited Nellie. She found the survivors still resentful and their villages little changed. Most had accepted the compensation on offer \u2013 'Rs2,000 [about \u00a3100] and three bundles of tin to build a new house... [and] for every person who died Rs5,000 and every wounded person Rs1,500'. But they had had to wait many months in resettlement camps. Even then the pay-outs had been subject to peculation, and their new homes were no better than the ones they had lost. Mrs Gandhi, visibly moved during a whistle-stop visit soon after the massacre, had 'promised us everything, right from a lamp to light our houses', said a survivor, 'but we have been waiting and waiting'. In 2006 there was still no electricity. Many of the fourteen villages had no road, and only four of them had primary schools, often without teachers.\n\nThe Nellie survivors wage a daily fight to numb their senses and their pain... The grim reality that is their present does not offer much succour as they grapple with the demons of the past.\n\nThroughout the state thousands more had died as a consequence of Mrs Gandhi's insistence on holding the elections. Nor did her victory do anything to stem the violence or to reassure the Assamese. The AASU grew into a political party, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP); and following an Accord with the government, the AGP did contest new elections in 1985. It won handsomely. But like the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) in Sri Lanka, the AGP would soon be upstaged by a United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). Composed of radical separatists, ULFA drew its inspiration from 'that mother of all revolutions', the national struggle still being waged in nearby Nagaland.\n\nAnd all the while the immigrants kept coming. Some would see the border's double-wired fence, if and when completed, as more a sop to Assamese sensibilities than an effective means of ending illegal transit. As in the case of Nagaland, Assam and its myriad grievances would remain a running sore well into the twenty-first century.\n\n*\n\nIndia has one of the freest and liveliest presses in the world. The newspapers and news magazines invariably reported on Mrs Gandhi's ill-fated interventions and often commented on them unfavourably. But to Indians who were neither Tamils, Kashmiris nor living in Assam, these obscure affairs seemed exceptional and peripheral. Sri Lanka was another land, Kashmir a matter of national security. As for Assam, it was a victim of the north-east's unfathomable ethnic complexity. The casualties there were often tribal people or poor immigrants from Bangladesh, legal or otherwise. They scarcely counted in the great scheme of things. Painful memories like those of Nellie were best forgotten.\n\nAnd there was a more obvious reason for downplaying them. Much nearer to Delhi, closer to the corridors of power and more subversive of the Indian consensus, another separatist gauntlet was being thrown down almost simultaneously. In tractor-rich, remittance-fed Punjab fanatical Sikhs were on the warpath.\n\nExcept that it was anything but peripheral, the Sikh challenge had much in common with the others. As with the Sri Lankan Tamils and the Assamese activists, many Sikhs had long felt that their identity was under threat and their particularist interests were being ignored in a majoritarian nation state. Grievances were voiced; demands for greater recognition and more autonomy followed. When these too were shunned, groups with more radical agendas vied with one another to raise the stakes: more autonomy became outright secession, civil disobedience gave way to acts of violence. Meanwhile cynical interventions by the central government only compounded the activists' sense of injustice and brought conflict nearer. Mrs Gandhi never doubted that she was serving the wider national cause; but whereas in Assam and Sri Lanka a case could be made for her having acted in the best interests of party and country, this would be harder to sustain in respect of Punjab.\n\nFollowing the 1977 elections \u2013 those which, in the aftermath of the Emergency, had brought the ill-fated Janata Party to power in Delhi \u2013 the pre-eminent Sikh 'nationalist' party, the Akali Dal, had formed a government in Punjab. But once in power the Akalis had made little progress with implementing the devolutionary demands of their Anandpur Sahib Resolution. Like other non-Congress state governments, theirs was then dismissed on doubtful grounds by Mrs Gandhi following her return to power; and in 1980 Congress duly won back Punjab in a state election.\n\nIn the same year, and by way of response, a Sikh student body, disillusioned by the gradualist approach of the Akali Dal, revived the pre-Partition demand for an independent Sikh state. It was to be known as Khalistan (like 'Pakistan' it means 'Land of the Pure'), and it was being heavily promoted by Dr Jagjit Singh Chauhan, once an Akali Dal Minister and now a medical practitioner in the UK. A Bangladesh-like breakaway was being urged as part of yet another partition.\n\nThe Khalistan movement has been described as 'primarily an emigrant endeavour'. Dr Chauhan, like Velupillai Prabhakaran of the Tamil Tigers, drew most of his support from extremist elements of the diaspora in the UK, the US and Canada. In Canada the large Sikh community in British Columbia nursed a tradition of militancy reaching back to World War I, when Canadian Sikhs had organised a return to India to foment an anti-British 'revolution' (or _Ghadr_ , __ as per the title of their weekly newsletter). On that occasion the revolutionaries had been rounded up as soon as their ship docked in Calcutta; but as early martyrs in the freedom struggle their sacrifice was respected both in India and among the diaspora. Drawing on such traditions, in the 1970s Dr Chauhan and a 'National Council of Khalistan' drafted territorial claims, planned diplomatic representation, printed passports, banknotes and postage stamps, and lobbied the UN for counsellor status. But the revoking of Chauhan's Indian passport curtailed his direct involvement in Punjab. There, although his 'Khalistan' excited Sikh youths fearful of their career prospects or with diasporic connections, the impact of his movement remained marginal.\n\nThis changed somewhat in the early 1980s. With the Akali Dal now out of office, some of its leaders rediscovered an appetite for inflammatory rhetoric and extra-parliamentary tactics. The Anandpur Sahib demands were rejigged, with greater emphasis being given to that for Chandigarh plus another in favour of the cancellation of plans to divert excess water from Punjabi agriculture to other, drier states. An agitational Front was formed; mass demonstrations and religious stunts mobilised support. The Congress leadership, fearing defeat in Punjab in the next nationwide election, cast about for a response that would undermine the Akali threat.\n\nSince discrediting the Akali Dal had been a Congress priority ever since 1977, Sanjay Gandhi had already hit on an answer. Fresh from his vasectomy crusade and even less wary of betraying his party's secularist credentials than his mother, he had opted for the tactics that had succeeded against the BJP in Jammu, namely outbidding the agitators by stealing their thunder. Thus to expose the Akalis as tepid opportunists, he gave free rein to a formidable stalking horse in the shape of the ferociously doctrinaire Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.\n\nHow much actual contact Sanjay and his mother had with Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale is unclear. Sanjay seems to have been the prime mover in the original plan, but he died in October 1980. While pulling another stunt, this time an aerobatic one in the skies over Delhi, he had looped-the-loop once too often and crashed to the ground within a short stroll of the prime ministerial residence. His masterplan for the Sikhs, though, had acquired a life of its own. Mark Tully, doyen of the Delhi press corps and voice of the BBC in India for as long as anyone can remember, identifies none other than the Home Minister and soon-to-be President of India, Zail Singh, himself a Sikh, as Bhindranwale's co-handler. Together, says Tully, it had been Zail Singh and Sanjay who chose Bhindranwale and then 'found for him a cause which was both political and religious'.\n\nAt the time the youthful and generously bearded Bhindranwale enjoyed only a modest reputation as an effective rural preacher and a stern champion of Sikh orthodoxy. Posthumous portrayals of him as 'bin Dranwale', a prototype bin Laden, owe much to a physical resemblance but belie his modest origins. His new role required him to adopt a much higher profile: he was to take on the Akali Dal in their religious citadel of Amritsar.\n\nIt so happened that the Akali Dal leadership had authorised members of the Nirankari sect to hold a convention in Amritsar. Though claiming to be good Sikhs, the Nirankaris controversially revered a twentieth-century Guru, rather as the persecuted Ahmedis in Pakistan revered a nineteenth-century Prophet. Bhindranwale's not uncongenial job was to protest against such heresy in the name of Sikh orthodoxy. He duly did so, but in such inflammatory terms that a fracas broke out in which three Nirankaris and twelve of his own supporters died. Bhindranwale thus acquired the first martyrs to his cause; and the Akalis had been exposed as less than zealous in their commitment to the doctrines of purist Sikhism.\n\nThis was in 1978. In the 1980 elections Bhindranwale campaigned actively for the Congress while stirring up more hatred of the Nirankaris. But when the Nirankaris' leader was murdered, there began a catalogue of unexplained shootings in which the targets were all too frequently Bhindranwale's opponents and critics. In 1981 the gunning down of a respected newspaper owner in his own home finally produced a warrant for Bhindranwale's arrest. Yet he still somehow evaded capture, then coolly negotiated for his voluntary surrender in front of massed supporters at a time and place of his own choosing. A firefight ensued at this custodial rally, quickly followed by a string of terror attacks including train derailments, a skyjacking and numerous motorcycle pillion shootings. Innocent parties, Hindus as much as Nirankaris, were now being killed, and the perpetrators rarely captured. Evidently some of Punjab's largely Sikh police sympathised with Bhindranwale; other policemen seemed either intimidated by him or under highly ambivalent direction.\n\nArrested at his own convenience, Bhindranwale was detained on his own terms, then released without trial in less than a month. The release order reportedly came from either Home Minister Zail Singh or the Prime Minister herself. Bhindranwale celebrated his charmed existence with a victory parade of heavily armed followers through the heart of Delhi. Sikhs sympathetic to his call for a rejuvenated Punjab now hailed him as 'a hero who had challenged and defeated the Indian government'. The stalking horse, in other words, was breaking its traces and running amok, its handlers floundering in its wake, carrots outstretched, sticks out of sight. 'By surrendering justice to petty political gains the government itself created the ogre who was to dominate the last years of Mrs Gandhi and to shadow her until her death,' says Tully.\n\nAs in Assam, on\u2013off negotiations throughout 1982\u201383 got nowhere. The Akali leadership was both divided as to its objectives and apprehensive about Bhindranwale; at one moment they welcomed him into their Front, at the next they disclaimed him. He, as was his way, favoured invective over discussion; though his student affiliates continued to promote the idea of an independent Khalistan, he merely taunted the government and incited the Sikhs to fight for an undefined 'liberation from Hindu enslavement'.\n\nMeanwhile Mrs Gandhi and her go-betweens waxed hot and cold. Aided by her elder son Rajiv, lately an Indian Airlines pilot but now reluctantly shoehorned into Sanjay's seat as co-pilot of the Congress Party, they offered concessions which were promptly withdrawn, plus threats which were not carried out.\n\nThe 1982 Asian Games in Delhi came and went without incident. Rajiv surprised everyone by getting the stadia built on time; Bhindranwale's call for Sikhs to disrupt the Games was frustrated by highly intrusive security checks on all transport links between Punjab and the capital. He nevertheless contended that Sikhs had been humiliatingly excluded from the Games, a claim that joined the string of others in his long cartridge-belt of grievances.\n\nFor greater security he was now occupying part of a large hostel complex immediately adjacent to the Golden Temple in Amritsar. When Tully interviewed him there in early 1983,\n\nhe was sitting on a string bed... surrounded by young men, some armed with automatic weapons, some with old-fashioned Lee-Enfield rifles... and some with traditional spears. His answers to my questions could best be described as enigmatic.\n\nAlthough the hostel did not partake of the Golden Temple's status as a recognised place of sanctuary, the authorities found it convenient to pretend that it did. Here, safe from arrest, Bhindranwale held court, directed operations, amassed a formidable armoury and afforded safe haven to various wanted persons, among them bank robbers, Marxist revolutionaries ('Naxalites'), people-traffickers and even some smuggled Bihari Muslims trying to make their way across India from the refugee camps of Bangladesh to a new life in Pakistan.\n\nIn April 1983 they were all joined by a man who, in the main entrance to the Temple, had just shot dead the state's Deputy Inspector-General of Police. Despite a national outcry \u2013 one in which most Sikhs joined \u2013 no one came to arrest the murderer. Bhindranwale and his people appeared immune, their reign of terror unstoppable. Besides working their way through a hit-list of enemies, his killing squads began waylaying interstate buses, segregating the Hindus on board and massacring them by the roadside. Separatism seemed not just about seceding from India, but separating Sikhs from non-Sikhs in a communal bloodbath. Hindus in neighbouring Haryana duly retaliated.\n\nUnder growing pressure to act, Mrs Gandhi at last did so. She dismissed her own Congress government in Punjab by imposing President's rule. The President in question was now Zail Singh, he who with Sanjay Gandhi had sponsored Bhindranwale in the first place.\n\nMeantime the Akali Dal, still trying to recapture the radical agenda, raised its own game. With Harcharan Singh Longowal, the most consistent of the Akali leaders, already holed up in a nearby hostel, fights broke out between the two factions, and Bhindranwale's men faced the threat of expulsion. Their leader responded by shifting his headquarters across the road \u2013 from the hostel to the sacred precincts of the Golden Temple itself. Neither the Akalis nor the police saw fit to prevent this move, although its enormous religious and tactical significance was known to all.\n\nFor Bhindranwale had chosen as his new quarters the Akhal Takht. A large and ornate four-storey building with a golden dome, the Akhal Takht overlooked the rectangular Holy Pool in the midst of which stood the Harmandir Sahib, the gilded _sanctum sanctorum_ of the whole Temple complex _._ It also commanded the _parikrama_ , __ the marble-paved walkway that surrounded the Pool, along with most of the Temple's other buildings. Second in sanctity only to the Harmandir Sahib itself, it was from the Akhal Takht that directives were issued to the Sikh faithful and that war parties had anciently been despatched. Its symbolism was as unassailable as its position; desecrating it was unthinkable.\n\nRegardless, Bhindranwale turned the Akhal Takht into his command-and-control centre. The Akali Dal responded by calling a Temple rally of Sikh ex-servicemen. This backfired when several of the veterans offered their services to Bhindranwale. Among them was Major-General Shahbeg (Shubeg) Singh, a hero of the Bangladesh war who had trained the _Mukti Bahini._ The deficit of military experience in the Akhal Takht was remedied. The command centre had acquired a commander.\n\nDuring April and May 1984 the death squads issuing from the Temple upped their strike rate. Terror atrocities multiplied, and some eighty killings claimed increasingly high-profile figures. The ineffectual state police had to be augmented by units from the more disciplined Central Police Reserve Force; and it was this Force's efforts to waylay the terrorists that led to the first rooftop exchanges of fire. Bhindranwale and General Shahbeg Singh had by now seen fit to fortify the Akhal Takht with sandbags and slit apertures. They had also established sniper positions in vantage points in and beyond the Temple. Resistance was becoming open defiance. As well as introducing more police, Mrs Gandhi alerted the army.\n\nLast-minute talks might yet have averted catastrophe. Despite the flying of the odd Khalistan flag, Bhindranwale continued to deny that he had any political ambitions, and to scout round the issue of secession. The government was now offering concessions on Chandigarh and most of the other Anandpur Sahib demands. It insisted only that the awards be made by a specially appointed commission. Bhindranwale seemed tempted, yet baulked at the fig-leaf of a commission. He wanted a public climbdown by 'the Pandit's daughter' herself. Failing that, he welcomed the prospect of a long siege, in the expectation that it would bring the Sikh faithful rushing from all over Punjab to the defence of their spiritual capital.\n\nIn response the Akali Dal also sought to widen the struggle. With immaculate ill-timing, in May 1984 its leaders announced that all grain shipments from the Punjab's 'breadbasket' would be halted as of 3 June. This was the final straw for the government. Bhindranwale's defiance affected only Punjab; a stoppage of cereals threatened the entire nation. Next day police marksmen took up positions around the Temple. Then on 2 June, the day before the grain stoppage was due to come into effect, 'Operation Blue Star' got the go-ahead. Mrs Gandhi went on the radio; the army advanced on the Temple.\n\nThe next day was for Sikhs the anniversary of the martyrdom of their fifth Guru. Pilgrims piled into the Golden Temple to commemorate the event even as the military opened up with machine-gun, mortar and rifle fire. The significance of the day was not lost on the martyrs-in-the-making either. Bhindranwale's arsenal responded with deadly effect, and the disposition of Shahbeg Singh's sharpshooters convinced India's General Brar that a surrender was unlikely. The Temple would have to be cleared by force. Storming it under cover of darkness was the only solution; and this might mean bringing in heavy artillery.\n\nOperation Blue Star was supposed to avoid damage to the Temple, and to be all over within forty-eight hours. It failed on both counts. Not until the stiflingly hot night of 5 June did the big guns open fire and the tanks begin forcing a way in. And not until 7 June were the defenders silenced and the bodies of Bhindranwale and Shahbeg Singh found among the dead in the ruins of the Akhal Takht.\n\nBy then the Temple looked as if it had been struck by an earthquake. Tank tracks had chewed up the marble _parikrama_ , __ shells had demolished a whole frontage of the Akhal Takht, and bullets had pocked even the isled jewel that was the Harmandir Sahib. The military claimed to have killed around five hundred 'terrorists' for the loss of eighty-three men. As usual, unofficial calculations suggest otherwise. The troop losses were almost certainly higher, as were those of the 'terrorists', including an unspecified number of non-combatant pilgrims.\n\n*\n\nOperation Blue Star had done its job: the Golden Temple had been cleared of 'terrorists', Bhindranwale killed and the Akali leaders taken into custody. The army had shown, in the words of one account, 'that the Indian state was strong enough to deal with secession and terrorism'. But in many eyes the appalling destruction and desecration within the Temple bore greater testimony to the courage of the defenders. Many Sikhs who had been horrified by Bhindranwale's previous antics now applauded his 'martyrdom'. His defence of their holiest shrine atoned for his past; the army's sacrilegious assault ranked as a greater outrage. Bhindranwale, who in life had become a liability, in death became a legend.\n\nIt was said he had somehow survived and would rise again. Journalists in Punjab found 'Khalistan' flags much in evidence, and the people 'sullen and alienated'. Heavy-handed 'mopping up' operations by the military didn't help. Of the 5,000 arrested over the following weeks, many had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Delhi President Zail Singh, who had been kept in ignorance of the attack on the Temple till the last minute, threatened to resign.\n\nThe tension was augmented by rumours, soon confirmed, that some Sikh units within the Indian army had mutinied in sympathy with their brethren in the Temple. This was the nightmare feared by every South Asian ruler to this day \u2013 that of intercommunal conflict infecting the nation's defence agencies. Sikhs constituted some 10 per cent of the Indian army, and formed the entire complement of two regiments. Worst affected was the Sikh Regiment itself. On the day after the Golden Temple fell, men of the regiment's 10th Battalion stationed on the Pakistan border rose up. Following the example of the Indian mutineers of 1857, they first raided the regimental armoury, then 'drove through the streets of Ganganagar shouting \"Long Live Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale\" and firing indiscriminately. A policeman was killed and another injured.' The mutineers then split up, half heading for Delhi, the others for Pakistan.\n\nMark Tully filed a report on this incident for the BBC. It was heard in India, and four days later sparked a copy-cat insurrection at the regimental depot in distant Bihar. Again the mutineers, this time 1,500 strong, helped themselves to arms and ammunition, killing their brigadier in the process. They then set off in convoy for Amritsar, over 1,200 kilometres away. Helicopters scoured the highway, but it was the roadblocks that halted them. In the final shoot-out near Varanasi some thirty-five were killed. The rest were rounded up, as were the earlier mutineers; and later outbreaks in Jammu and Pune (Poona) came to nothing. 'The most serious crisis of discipline the Indian army had faced since Independence' fizzled out in dissension over whether or not it would be wise to court-martial the offenders. But at least the nightmare scenario had been pre-empted. India was not about to experience the military in-fighting that racked Bangladesh.\n\nFurther afield, the Sikh diaspora responded to events in Amritsar with less fear of the consequences. In Vancouver the 'We Love Bhindranwale' bumper stickers were replaced by 'Death to Indira' ones. Five thousand Sikhs demonstrated in Toronto, 3,000 in New York's Madison Square Garden and 30,000 in the UK's Birmingham. From London Dr Jagjit Singh Chauhan renewed the diaspora's financial support for Bhindranwale's pro-Khalistan students and announced the formation of a Khalistan government-in-exile. He also informed one of the BBC's domestic channels that Mrs Gandhi's life would be forfeit. She and her family might expect to 'be beheaded... in a few days', he said, adding, 'That is what the Sikhs will do.' The Thatcher government reprimanded him for incitement.\n\nSimilar threats reverberated in certain Sikh circles in India. Privately Mrs Gandhi heeded them: in a handwritten testament she mused about dying the 'violent death... some fear and a few are plotting'. But publicly she dismissed such thoughts. 'I do not care if I live or die,' she told a rally in Orissa. When advised to replace Sikh members of her personal bodyguard with non-Sikhs, she retorted, 'Aren't we secular?' The putdown was delivered without a hint of sarcasm.\n\nA political animal to the last, she promptly picked another fight with Sikh orthodoxy over the repairs to the damage in the Golden Temple. Its management insisted that on religious grounds the work must be done by Sikh volunteers; she insisted it be performed by the government, which might then claim the credit for it. It was business as usual, in other words. Within a month of Operation Blue Star she was engineering the downfall of another state government.\n\nThe victim this time was the administration of Dr Farooq Abdullah in Jammu and Kashmir. Relations between the Abdullah family and the Nehrus merit a book of their own. Both were proud to call themselves Kashmiris, yet neither did much to resolve the ambiguities of Kashmir's status. Just as Pandit Nehru had valued Sheikh Sahib's friendship yet kept him in detention, so Indira had engineered his National Conference's return to power only to turn against it.\n\nThe reason given for this last twist was that Farooq Abdullah, though the state's Chief Minister, was flirting with dissident Kashmiris whom the Indian government believed to be backed by Pakistan. Similar accusations of accepting Pakistani support had been levelled at Bhindranwale but were never substantiated. In reality the Prime Minister's hostility to Farooq seems to have been more personal. Primed on a lifetime of electoral triumphs, she took defeat as an affront to her authority. The affront had to be repaid, her authority reasserted. Like the 1980 electoral victory of the Akali Dal in Punjab, that in 1983 of Farooq's National Conference in Kashmir could not be allowed to stand. Farooq was also throwing his weight behind a group of opposition parties elsewhere in India who were minded to fight the imminent national elections as a coalition. This recalled the Janata Party's ganging up on her. He had to go.\n\nAdvised by a crisis-management team that now included Rajiv instead of Sanjay, Indira picked the amenable Ghulam Mohammad Shah, Farooq's brother-in-law, as her candidate to replace Farooq. Since the Governor of Kashmir \u2013 the man who would have to handle the switch \u2013 was her own cousin B.K. Nehru, it looked straightforward. The battle lines were drawn for another round in the inter-family feud. But when instructed to dismiss Farooq, B.K. Nehru put his foot down. A distinguished and impartial diplomat who had once dared to criticise Sanjay Gandhi's forced sterilisations, BK declared any such move purely vindictive and wholly unconstitutional. Thus it was he who had to be removed first. He was replaced as Governor by Jagmohan Malhotra, once Sanjay's right-hand man in clearing Delhi's mostly Muslim slum-dwellers and later a member of the BJP. Millions of rupees were then bagged and despatched to Srinagar, there to be disbursed to enough National Conference members of the state legislative assembly to erode Farooq's majority. He was then summoned by the new Governor and without so much as a vote of no confidence relieved of the chief ministership. The unctuous Ghulam Mohammad Shah took over at the head of a coalition formed between his breakaway Awami National Conference and Congress.\n\nHappily. G.M. Shah was never likely to turn into another Bhindranwale. But Mrs Gandhi's penchant for disastrous interventions seemed undiminished. The installation of Governor Jagmohan, a Hindu with an anti-Muslim record, boded ill for communal relations in Kashmir. Likewise, the toppling of another Abdullah was seen by Kashmiris as yet further evidence of Delhi's bad faith. This alienation of the Valley's Muslims led inexorably to their radicalisation. Some looked abroad: a Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front had been founded in the UK by Amanullah Khan, a Pakistani citizen born in the Northern Areas who in 1984 had been held responsible for the kidnapping and murder of India's Assistant High Commissioner in the UK. Others looked nearer to home, and to parties with an Islamist agenda like the Jamaat-e-Islami. When five years later a veritable intifada plunged J and K state into its bloodiest crisis yet, this last of Indira Gandhi's ill-judged interventions would be remembered as the turning point.\n\nAs if to set the seal on her Kashmiri handiwork, on 27 October 1984 Mrs Gandhi paid a flying visit to Srinagar. It was four months since Operation Blue Star, but two weeks since Margaret Thatcher, a friend and fellow Prime Minister, had narrowly escaped death from an IRA bomb in a Brighton hotel. Mrs Gandhi caught the Valley at its autumnal best: the lakeside willows wept with gold, and each giant plane tree stood rooted in a carpet of ruby-red leaves. Between briefings with Governor Jagmohan on the worsening security situation, she visited temples and consulted a holy man. The holy man sized up the moment. 'He felt death very close to her,' remembered one of her acolytes, not without the benefit of hindsight.\n\nFour days later, back in Delhi, Indira Gandhi bustled past the bougainvillea along the garden path between her residence and her office. It was just after nine on the morning of Halloween. At the garden gate she joined her hands in a _namaste_ greeting to the duty guard. He too raised his hands, but to aim a revolver. Five shots rang out, followed by a stutter of machine-gun fire from another bodyguard. The Prime Minister slumped to the ground bleeding heavily. Despite the rush-hour traffic, she was bundled into a car and taken to hospital. Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv's Italian-born wife, nursed her on the back seat. But she never recovered consciousness. That afternoon the doctors declared her dead.\n\nBoth the assassins were Sikhs, and both had lately returned from Punjab. The job complete, they downed their weapons and accepted arrest. 'I have done what I had to,' said one. Whether or not they acted on their own account, there was no question that it was in retribution for Blue Star. Many in Punjab were already celebrating. In New York some wealthy Sikhs were filmed toasting the killers in champagne; 'in Vancouver, it was a party... with Halloween firecrackers, bhangra dances [and] sweets distribution'. When one of the assassins was shot in custody and the other hanged, they, like Bhindranwale, were hailed as 'martyrs' by many Sikhs. And their dependants being obvious vote-winners in Punjab, more than one of them was fast-tracked to electoral success and a seat in the Punjab state assembly.\n\nIf this was predictable then so was the reaction of many non-Sikhs. Within minutes, grief over Indira's death found expression in a blood-hunt for anyone with a beard and a tightly-tied turban. The anti-Sikh pogrom swept through several cities, but nowhere did it rage more violently than in the capital itself. While Congress met in conclave to coopt Rajiv as its leader and install him as Indira's uncontested successor, across town Hindus baying for revenge torched Sikh homes and businesses, massacred their inmates and desecrated Sikh shrines and gurdwaras. For three days the mobs raged unchecked by the authorities, indeed encouraged by them.\n\nOften they were led and directed by Congress politicians: metropolitan councillors, members of parliament, even Union [government] ministers. The Congress leaders promised money and liquor to those willing to do the job; this in addition to whatever goods they could loot. The police looked on or actively aided the looting and murder.\n\nBy the time a belated deployment of regular troops brought the situation under control, either 2,733 (the official figure) or 3,870 (that of the victims' legal team) men, women and children of Delhi's Sikh community had perished horribly at the hands of their fellow citizens. Thousands more had found refuge in makeshift camps or fled the city. Yet in the midst of this mayhem, just twenty-six people had been arrested \u2013 and all of them were Sikhs. Worse still, a quarter of a century later and despite interminable enquiries, those officials who were allegedly responsible for inciting and directing the mobs had yet to be prosecuted. Instead, like the families of the Prime Minister's assassins, three of the four officials named as complicit in the atrocities were selected by Congress to contest the upcoming elections. All won handsome majorities.\n\nOfficial connivance in sectarian violence was nothing new. Like the massacres themselves, it stirred memories of Partition and horrified not just Sikhs. But the government's reluctance to pass a vote of condolence for the victims, and its failure to bring the culprits to justice rankled no less. The violence in Punjab was not about to end.\n\n*\n\nIn the December 1984 national elections Congress again swept the board. Not even Nehru or Indira had won over four hundred seats in the Lok Sabha. A combination of sympathy for Indira's family and deep concern over the plight of the nation had brought a closing of ranks. To some minds Congress still represented the democratic commitment and confessional neutrality of Pandit Nehru; to others its appeal lay in its recent stand against separatist dissent, especially in Punjab. Either way, it posed as the only party whose nationwide roots could hold the country together. As its posters reminded the voter, his or her mark could make the difference between 'unity and separation'. Now led by the young and presentable Rajiv at the head of a team of managerially-minded associates, it promised less confrontational tactics and more inclusive decision-making.\n\nTrue to this billing, within three years Rajiv had signed a string of conciliatory agreements, or 'Accords'. One was with the Asom Gana Parishad, the political wing and successor of the All Assam Students' Union which in the elections had bucked the national trend and won a majority in the Assam state assembly. Among the issues addressed in the Accord was the critical question of the cut-off date in the registration of immigrants, after which their status could be challenged. Both sides settled on 1986. But the scrutiny process would prove a farce, the troubles were far from over, and the Accord, signed in 1985, could just as well have been reached in 1982. Nellie need never have happened.\n\nAnother of the Accords, signed in 1986, was with the warring parties in Sri Lanka. In addition to some constitutional concessions to the Tamils, Colombo accepted the offer of an Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) to monitor a ceasefire agreement with the Tamil guerrillas. Since the guerrillas' stronghold in the north was currently under pressure from government forces, the Accord pleased Tamils in India and was generally welcomed by both sides in Sri Lanka. Initially the peacekeepers numbered under 7,000. Two years later they had grown to 100,000, which was around half the size of the force that had liberated Bangladesh. Sucked into hostilities with the LTTE (Tamil Tigers), the IPKF had then fallen out with the government and was suffering heavy casualties. It was withdrawn amid much head-shaking in 1990. Fighting between the Colombo government and the Tamil guerrillas resumed almost immediately.\n\nJust as promising and ultimately just as counter-productive was the Kashmir Accord. Rajiv had no personal animosity towards Farooq Abdullah. Both in their forties and both keen to make a new start, they thought they could work together. An opportunity arose in early 1986 when Mrs Gandhi's unpopular G.M. Shah ministry was dismissed after the army had to be called in to quell communal rioting. An interlude of direct rule under the hardline Governor Jagmohan proved even more divisive, and was ended by the Accord. It provided for the installation of a coalition Congress\u2013National Conference government with Farooq back as Chief Minister.\n\nBut this went down badly in Kashmir. Once again the state government had been changed without the electorate being consulted; it was a turnaround too many for most of the Valley's Muslims. 'Overnight, Farooq was transformed from hero to traitor,' according to the journalist Tavleen Singh. 'People could not understand how a man who had been treated the way he had by Delhi... could now be crawling to it for accords and alliances.' In 1987 the new coalition did win a popular mandate, but the poll was marred by widespread accusations of vote-rigging. 'Voters were intimidated, opposition politicians were harassed, and ballot boxes were tampered [with].' Incensed by the result, a Muslim United Front which had been formed to contest the election quickly disintegrated into warring factions, some demanding self-determination, others secession, and nearly all in favour of a more central role for Islam.\n\nBy now Amanullah Khan, the UK-based leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), was back in South Asia. Though acquitted of murdering the Indian diplomat in the UK, he had nevertheless been deported to his native Pakistan. There as of 1987 his JKLF began training militant young Kashmiris and despatching them across the Line of Control into Indian-held Kashmir. India accused General Ziaul Haq's regime of arming and supporting them; Pakistan denied this and contended that such rumours were planted by RAW, the Indian intelligence agency.\n\nBoth sides had good reason to ratchet up the tension. India, anxious to demonstrate that the situation in Punjab had not left it vulnerable to a Pakistan attack, conducted manoeuvres along the Pakistani border in 1986. Pakistan then over-responded with a show of force of its own. Meanwhile, along an undemarcated section at the eastern extremity of the Kashmir Line of Control (the former 'Ceasefire Line'), troops from both sides exchanged fire whenever visibility permitted. This followed the pre-emptive Indian occupation of the Siachen Glacier in 1984. Seventy-five kilometres of moraine and ice at a mean altitude of around 6,500 metres, the Siachen Glacier was surely the most inhospitable and worthless battlefield ever contested. Yet the dispute over its status, like the glacier itself, would groan on indefinitely. Further icy skirmishes were recorded in 1990, 1995, 1996 and 1999. By the time a ceasefire was agreed in 2003, an estimated 2,000 lives had been lost in the contest for this 'third Pole', mostly from frostbite, pulmonary oedema and climbing accidents. Avalanches also took a heavy toll, one in 2012 burying 120 Pakistanis.\n\nAgainst this background of hostilities in the mountains and manoeuvres in the plains, the situation in the Kashmir Valley steadily worsened. Farooq Abdullah's motorcade was attacked in 1987, and the following year bombers targeted first Srinagar's combined telegraph and television station, and then its police chief. Tourist numbers, a fair barometer of Kashmiri confidence, plummeted. 'Anti-Indian feeling within the Valley was mirrored by a surge of support for Pakistan.' Instead of celebrating India's Independence Day on 15 August, thousands turned out a day early, in other words on Pakistan's Independence Day. The fortieth anniversary of the Indian takeover of the state on 27 October was mourned as 'Occupation Day'. Demonstrators carried Pakistan flags; vehicles were burnt and police attacked.\n\nIndia blamed the JKLF and its presumed Pakistani backers. The possibility that poor employment prospects, heavy-handed policing, widespread disillusionment with the democratic process and its own obduracy had alienated a new generation of Kashmiris was loftily discounted. But the JKLF also faced competition from its supposed constituency. Its violent but essentially secular agenda of 'liberating' the whole of what had once been the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was in danger of being upstaged by a bewildering array of locally-based groupings, many of them armed and abetted by elements of the radical Islamist resistance to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan.\n\nThe JKLF was therefore happy to claim responsibility for the most high-profile outrage to date: in December 1989, within days of a general election that would oust Rajiv Gandhi's Congress government, the daughter of the newly appointed Home Minister was kidnapped. A twenty-three-year-old Muslim, Rubaiya Sayeed had somewhat unwisely been serving her medical internship at a Srinagar hospital. Returning home after a shift, she was snatched from a vehicle and disappeared.\n\nHer captors immediately let it be known that they would negotiate: they would trade her freedom for that of five imprisoned JKLF militants; and since this demand was phoned to a local newspaper, the press were onto it from the start. For days Rubaiya's fate was headlines throughout India. While a refusal to negotiate would please hard-line Hindu opinion yet antagonise many Muslims and inflame the situation in Kashmir, capitulation would discredit the new government and also inflame the situation in Kashmir. Farooq advised against any deal; but by now confidence in his handling of the troubles was as rock-bottom as his popularity. After five days the new government in Delhi caved in. The militants were released to a hero's reception, and two hours later Rubaiya Sayeed was freed.\n\nThis affair had unexpected consequences. The government responsible was that of Vishwanath Pratap Singh, formerly Rajiv's high-minded Finance Minister. To win the 1989 elections, V.P. Singh had formed a Janata-like 'National Front' that relied on the support of the resurgent BJP. After the Rubaiya fiasco, this new administration urgently needed to redeem its reputation and placate its BJP partner. To that end, in early 1990 'it made the worst mistake it could have' by sending ex-Governor Jagmohan back to Kashmir. There were to be no more deals with the terrorists, no more concessions to Kashmiri exceptionalism. As of 1990, Rajiv's Accord was a dead letter. Farooq resigned immediately. 'The attempt to find a political solution to Kashmir's problem was put aside in favour of a policy of repression.'\n\nWithin a couple of weeks, Governor Jagmohan's house-to-house searches and mass arrests had provoked the action that would define the Kashmir conflict for the next decade. In the heart of Srinagar a large unarmed demonstration against Jagmohan's crackdown converged on one of several bridges over the Jhelum river. When the crowd pushed forward onto the bridge, the police opened fire from all sides. Maybe a hundred died, some by drowning in the river, some from gunshot wounds.\n\nThe worst massacre in Kashmir's unhappy relationship with India brought thousands more onto the streets. Whatever support India still enjoyed in the Valley was now lost. From the minarets the cry of 'Allahu Akbar' was bracketed with shouts of ' _Azadi... Azadi_ ': 'Freedom... Freedom'. Jagmohan replied with a curfew, the expulsion of foreign correspondents and blithe indifference to appeals for an inquiry. The kidnappings, killings and bombings resumed. So did the arrests, the 'encounters' (often a euphemism for unprovoked killings by the police) and the interrogations (often under torture). The vast encampments of the Central Police Reserve Force (CPRF) and the army, the latter's presence being in part a reaction to increased tension with Pakistan, left the visitor in no doubt that Kashmir was under occupation. 'By the end of 1990 there were as many as 80,000 Indians in uniform in the Valley.' While rarely described as a war, the new Kashmiri intifada would rank as one of the dirtiest non-wars on record.\n\n*\n\nAnd then there was the Punjab Accord. Back in 1985, this had been Rajiv's topmost priority, more urgent than Kashmir and much more menacing than Assam. The high-voltage tit-for-tat of the previous year \u2013 Bhindranwale's terror reign, Operation Blue Star, the army mutinies, Indira's assassination and the Delhi massacres \u2013 had left the dangling wires of separatist sentiment in Punjab arcing against Hindu resentment elsewhere. Rajiv moved swiftly to defuse them. The restoration of the Golden Temple was meticulously conducted, the Akali Dal's leaders were released from detention, and the stalled talks on vexed issues like Chandigarh were resumed.\n\nThese were nearing conclusion when on 23 June 1985 someone's suitcase exploded at Tokyo's international airport: two baggage handlers were killed and others injured. Fifty-five minutes earlier, on the other side of the world and as yet unreported, Air India Flight 182, a Boeing Jumbo jet with 307 passengers and twenty-two crew, had disappeared off the radar as it entered Irish airspace in the eastern Atlantic. The two incidents were not immediately connected. Though hijackings were commonplace, the world was as yet unaccustomed to airliners being blown up in mid-air. No Jumbo had been targeted in this way. Multi-pronged terrorist attacks that were globally coordinated were unknown.\n\nAI 182 had been en route from Montreal to London and Delhi. When it emerged that it had most likely been downed by the detonation of an onboard bomb, suspicion attached to Khalistan militants in Canada. Canada's police and intelligence had earlier been alerted to bomb-making activity by British Columbia's Bhindranwale sympathisers; indeed, several Sikh activists were under observation. But the enormity of what had been planned only emerged later. Baggage on the Montreal\u2013Delhi flight was traced back to connecting flights from Toronto and Vancouver. And the exploding suitcase in Tokyo had also come off a flight originating in Vancouver. Moreover, the suitcase had blown up when being transferred from its incoming Canadian Pacific flight to another Air India flight, this time to Bangkok. Thus a second and simultaneous mid-air tragedy involving an Air India airliner had only narrowly been avoided when the bomb detonated prematurely in Tokyo.\n\nCuriously, these appalling acts provoked less outrage in India than might have been expected. Of the 329 lives lost on AI 182, only twenty-four had been those of Indian citizens though the 268 Canadians included many of Indian descent. It was left to the Canadian authorities to investigate the crime and bring to justice those responsible for 'the worst mass murder in Canadian history'. The investigation extended over many years. No group claimed responsibility, and the main culprits \u2013 those who had bought the tickets, checked in the bags and _not_ boarded the flights \u2013 were never certainly identified. Only the bomb-maker was tried and convicted. But the passenger rosters showed the no-shows on both flights as called 'Singh', and the bookings had been made by other Singhs. Since nearly all Sikhs have the name Singh, this was taken as evidence that all those responsible were Sikhs, and that they were not averse to being recognised as such. The likely organiser was thought to be a cousin of Bhindranwale; and the main operative was supposedly Talwinder Singh Parmar of the Babbar Khalsa, a militant group linked to the pro-Khalistan Sikh Students' Association that had been responsible for several bombings in Punjab. Though a Canadian citizen, Talwinder Singh had been born in Punjab, and soon died there. Taken into police custody in 1992, he would allegedly confess to his part in the bombing and then be shot in a police 'encounter'.\n\nCoordinated attacks on prestigious civilian targets would soon come to be reckoned the prerogative of well-financed Islamist groups like al-Qaeda. That it was in fact diasporic Sikh militants who pioneered this form of horror has been largely forgotten. The protracted nature of the Canadian investigation left some uncertainty about the identity and motivation of the culprits until well into the 1990s. Meanwhile the Indian government was determined nothing should be allowed to derail its search for a lasting Punjab Accord.\n\nNor was it. Some of those arrested after Operation Blue Star were released, the military were partially withdrawn from Punjab, and to address the state's employment shortage Rajiv announced the setting up of a railway-carriage production facility with the promise of 20,000 jobs. In July 1985, a month after the downing of AI 182, Harcharan Singh Longowal, the Akali Dal leader who had been Bhindranwale's neighbour in the Golden Temple hostel, finally came to Delhi. There he signed up to the Accord's eleven-point Memorandum of Understanding. Chandigarh was to go to Punjab in return for just one district being handed over to Haryana; the water dispute and other matters were to be referred to independent commissions. Once again the terms scarcely differed from those offered by Mrs Gandhi in 1984.\n\nThis should have been the end of the matter. But a month later, while announcing the Punjab Accord, Harcharan Singh Longowal was shot dead. His killers claimed the agreement betrayed the Sikh nation. In another sympathy vote, this time for Longowal, the Akali Dal was returned to power in state elections in September. Some of the party's divided leadership then reneged on the terms of the Accord and renewed contacts with the Khalistan militants. The eminent Sikh writer and historian Khushwant Singh bemoaned the decline of a revered party into 'a bunch of bearded buffoons bereft of the power of thinking and vision'. Terrorist attacks in 1986 were said to have claimed more lives than in 1984, and they spread beyond Punjab, with bombs in Delhi and elsewhere.\n\nIn 1986 and in 1988 Khalistan militants had once again to be flushed out of Amritsar's Golden Temple. Code-named 'Black Thunder', these two operations were conducted with a sensitivity that had been lacking in Blue Star, and were reckoned a qualified success. Heavy policing, sterner direction and more international cooperation in counter-terrorism were finally paying off. With no thanks to the Akali Dal, which had been relieved of power in 1987, and at enormous cost in military deployment and lives lost (including those of 'over 1,550 policemen' in 1988\u201392), 'by 1993, Punjab had been virtually freed of terrorism'. Give or take the conflict in Kashmir, India had emerged intact from its worst decade to date. The economy was in tatters, and Congress could no longer command an overall majority. Yet separatist dissent had been channelled back into the ballot box, and a plethora of local parties with caste-based agendas were breathing new life into the nation's electoral arithmetic. Above all, the democratic consensus had held. This was not something that could be said of the rest of South Asia. Indeed, India's abiding commitment to electoral accountability was setting a norm for which the peoples of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal could not but be grateful. A hegemonist tendency, when wreathed in smiles of popular endorsement, was almost acceptable.\n\n##\n\n## Outside the Gates\n\nPadding round one of Asia's most notorious slums in pyjamas and an old pair of trainers was no guarantee of anonymity for Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan. He was too well-known, for one thing; for another, however attired, his patrician stature and air of bespectacled purpose betrayed his Cambridge degree and one-time membership of the vaunted Indian Civil Service. Born in Agra in 1914, Khan had served under the British before opting for Pakistan in 1950, and had then been posted to Comilla in East Pakistan. There in the 1960s he had devised a model of rural development which, while based on the cooperatives championed by the pony-riding Malcolm Darling in the 1940s, carried an additional incentive: the provision of small loans to those, especially women, whose income-generating prospects were insufficiently credit-worthy to interest the banks.\n\nKnown as micro-finance or micro-credit, this pioneering initiative had far-reaching consequences. In the aftermath of the Bangladesh War the practice of micro-credit was adopted by BRAC. Originally the 'Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee', BRAC was soon to outgrow its acronym to become 'the world's largest non-governmental development agency'. Then in the 1980s the principle of small-scale lending to community-supported individuals was formally institutionalised with the foundation in Chittagong by Professor Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank. Grameen provided the blueprint for a host of other community-based credit agencies right across the developing world, and in 2006 was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize \u2013 the only financial institution ever to have been so honoured. 'By 2010 Grameen had eight million borrowers and was active in every village.' Together, BRAC and Grameen gained for unfancied Bangladesh the respect of international finance. More than any official initiatives, such self-help organisations contributed to that country's gradual shedding of its 'basket-case' image.\n\nYet little of all this acclaim went to Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan. In 1971, just ahead of the Bangladesh War, he had returned to (West) Pakistan. An inspirational figure, bony, balding, and disarmingly modest, he held a succession of academic posts both there and in the US before again deploying his community expertise, this time on behalf of the urban poor of Karachi. In what was to be as much a research project as a developmental offensive, Khan chose Orangi, Asia's most lawless _bustee_ and the largest of the several hundred _katchi abadis_ , or self-built slum townships, on the then outskirts of Karachi. To Orangi's million-strong population of struggling squatters \u2013 _muhajirs_ from India, Bihari refugees from Bangladesh, and Pathans, Balochis, Punjabis and Sindis from the rest of Pakistan \u2013 Khan devoted the remainder of his life, living and working there from 1980 onwards. As founder and director of the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP), he possibly did more for the alleviation of urban distress than any contemporary.\n\nFrom a pioneering scheme to educate, organise and support Orangi's residents in their efforts to lay sewerage systems, the OPP branched out into self-help programmes for house construction, health facilities, family planning, employment cooperatives and of course micro-credit. By the time Khan died in 1999 the community-led principles of his OPP were being adopted throughout Pakistan and beyond. Deployed in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake in Azad Kashmir and then of the 2010 Indus river floods, they lent to the task of rehabilitation a self-help dimension that was in marked contrast to the top-down interventions of government, international aid agencies and religious charities.\n\nKhan had no illusions about Karachi. From a pre-Partition total of about 400,000, the city's population soared towards ten\u2013twelve million by the end of the century. The OPP had not only to contend with appalling levels of deprivation and corruption; it had to do so under conditions tantamount to urban warfare as the different ethnic and religious groups competed for living space, jobs and a tenuous security. Quoting the British socialist Harold Laski, Khan saw the city as an arena in which the political process, 'the counting of heads', was so discredited that 'the cutting of heads' had come to represent the preferred means of communal assertion. The OPP was therefore as much about introducing some sense of shared purpose into the warring lanes of Orangi as it was about improving their sanitation and services. It could, however, scarcely redeem the city as a whole. 'I fear terrible consequences within the next twenty years,' said Khan in 1988.\n\nInitially the main conflict in Karachi had been between the incoming _muhajirs_ and the native Sindis. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's preferential treatment of his fellow Sindis had antagonised the Urdu-speaking _muhajirs_ , __ who saw themselves as Jinnah's chosen people and the rightful heirs to his one-nation Pakistan. They looked to the political and military establishment in Pakistan's Punjab province to uphold their claim, and they had few regrets when Bhutto was toppled. Conversely, in the post-Bhutto era of General Ziaul Haq it was the Sindis who felt alienated and marginalised. In the early 1980s Sindi nationalists, with or without encouragement from India, mounted a campaign of lawlessness and secessionism throughout Sind. Three army divisions plus helicopter gunships were deployed to suppress it, yet the fighting spread to Karachi itself. There both sides fielded their own armed vigilantes and laid claim to large areas of the city.\n\nThis situation rapidly deteriorated \u2013 and was vastly complicated \u2013 as a result of the war in Afghanistan. Arms shipments to the US-backed _mujahidin_ (who were contesting the post-1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan) passed through Karachi's docks in one direction; heroin from the poppy fields of Afghanistan and the NWFP passed through in the other. Consignments of both were easily sidetracked. According to Akhtar Hameed Khan, 'half the arms that were supposed to go to the Afghan _mujahidin_ were distributed in Pakistan'. The profits to be made from the transport and distribution of such spoils spawned a black economy that allegedly dwarfed the official one. Meanwhile, triggered by the influx of some three million Afghan refugees, a population drift from the north and west of Pakistan augmented Karachi's ethnic mix with a sizeable new infusion of Pathans and Balochis.\n\nIn 1984, second-generation _muhajirs_ , __ many of them ex-students of Karachi University, met this new challenge to their job prospects and their community's demographic superiority by launching their own political organisation, the Muttahida (originally Muhajir) Qaumi Mahaz ('United National Movement'), or MQM. Claiming to represent Pakistan's 'fifth nationality', and with an eye to the creation of a _muhajir_ 'province' based on Karachi, the MQM demanded for _muhajirs_ the same sub-national status as Punjabis, Sindis, Pathans or Balochis. By contesting elections the MQM sought the same consideration from the central government, and by enforcing rigid discipline it imposed a comparable solidarity on its members. When in 1985 a _muhajir_ student was run over by a Pathan truck driver, inter-communal warfare brought the city to a standstill. Fifty-three died, a figure which was more than doubled a year later when Pathans armed with AK47s gunned down _muhajirs_ and were slaughtered in their turn. 'Mohajirs tied the hands of [Pathans] behind their backs and burnt them alive... at least 70 people died on the 15th [of December 1986]. There was so much arson that a pall of thick black smoke covered the city.' 'In scenes reminiscent of the [anti-Sikh] Delhi riots of 1984', non-Pathan homes and businesses were specifically targeted.\n\nBy the 1990s it was estimated that between 400 and 600 political murders a year were being committed in the city. Altaf Hussein, the leader of the main MQM faction, dodged the bullets plus a string of criminal charges only by emigrating to north London. From there, funded and abetted by _muhajir_ sympathisers, he continued to direct operations in Pakistan while rallying supporters with a deluge of inflammatory audio and video cassettes, satellite TV appearances and internet appeals. Once again, diasporic connections and the globalisation of communications were facilitating the transnational assertion of an essentially sub-national identity.\n\nGeneral Ziaul Haq's 1985 restoration of civilian rule, albeit within the constraints of military supervision and an emasculated Constitution, should have given the MQM its big chance. In the 1988 elections that followed Zia's unexplained death, the MQM won thirteen of Karachi's fifteen National Assembly seats, to emerge as the country's third largest party. It continued to repeat this feat in the 1990s, though to little effect. Pacts promising the redress of _muhajir_ grievances, first with Benazir Bhutto's PPP, then with Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League group, failed to deliver. Holding the balance of power in a hopelessly flawed democracy proved no guarantee of concessions. Rather did a demand for the admission of more Bihari refugees from Bangladesh \u2013 who could be expected to swell the ranks of the _muhajirs_ \u2013 antagonise the Sindis and serve to revive the earlier _muhajir_ \u2013Sindi __ hostilities. The shutdowns and the communal killings continued, discrediting elected governments and providing a constant pretext for curfews and military interventions. As a byword for a metropolis in the final stages of self-destruction, Karachi came to outrank Calcutta and trail only Beirut.\n\nMazar Ali Khan, the respected editor of the leftist journal _Viewpoint_ , __ blamed the generals and the politicians.\n\nOur rulers presented a parade of incompetence and dishonesty \u2013 a gallery of quick-change artists, pompous buffoons, na\u00efve imbeciles, clever ignoramuses, and occasionally gangsters capable of every known crime. Whatever our people's sins, these governments they did not deserve.\n\nBut in Orangi, Akhtar Hameed Khan detected an even more worrying trend. Pakistan had been predicated on the idea of a Muslim nation; yet Islam, instead of underwriting the nation's cohesion, was now tearing it apart. The call to arms was coming from the mosques; weapons were being stockpiled there and death squads trained there. Though a ritual bond still existed among all Muslims, ethnic and doctrinal differences were being exaggerated and exploited by sectarian bigotry. Khan blamed 'the religious schools which are being established with the help of [the Iranian Ayatollah] Khomeini's funds or Saudi Arabian funds and the literature that's being taught there, most of it produced in the eighth and ninth centuries which in Islamic history were periods of civil war and great violence'. The effect of this teaching on young and impressionable minds was what left Dr Khan in fear of the future. His foreboding was justified. Through the madrassahs of Orangi and elsewhere were passing recruits for the Afghan Taliban, and from the same madrassahs would come the Pakistani Taliban and their suicide-belted footsoldiers.\n\nThis was all somewhat ironic, given that Pakistan post-1977 had at last begun to live up to its billing as an Islamic state. No government had been more committed to Islamising the nation than the eleven-year regime of Ziaul Haq. Moreover none of his elected successors would dare openly to reverse his ordinances. Personally devout, the General-cum-President had sincerely believed that Islamic rectitude held the key to Pakistan's problems. He even had some experience of Islamic polities, having previously been seconded to the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan in the wake of the 'Black September' expulsion of its Palestinian refugees. As Zia saw it, privileging Islam would 'set Pakistan \"straight\" '. It would reorientate the nation's political _qibla_ (literally 'direction of prayer') towards Mecca, so firmly aligning it with Muslim West Asia. In the eyes of the faithful, promoting Islamic values would also afford his unelected regime some much-needed validation.\n\nBetter still, events had obligingly played into Zia's hands; for Washington's determination to contain and contest the Soviet presence in Afghanistan had restored Pakistan to front-line status in what would prove to be the final phase of the Cold War. To ensure the flow of arms to the Afghan resistance and to provide its fighters with safe havens, training facilities and funds, the Reagan administration had had to look no further than Zia's Pakistan. Human rights questions over the execution of Bhutto were brushed aside. So were anti-proliferation concerns over Pakistan's nuclear programme. To sustain the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, Reagan was happy to direct aid and investment Pakistan's way, re-equip the country's armed forces and give Zia _carte blanche_ in his efforts to contain dissent by promoting Islam.\n\nWith everything to gain, Ziaul Haq had consulted Islamic ideologues associated with the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami and launched a programme of what many regarded as regressive Islamisation. Foreign-funded madrassahs were encouraged, as a means of educating a new generation of Pakistanis in Quranic teaching. These schools demonstrated in miniature 'what an Islamic government is like', according to one _maulana_ , and supplemented the pitiful education budget of the state. More generally the sale of alcohol was banned, all public performances required a licence, strict blasphemy laws bore heavily on the heterodox, and donations to religious welfare organisations became obligatory. The financial system was purged in accordance with Islamic strictures against interest payments; ordinances other than those imposed by the military were subject to scrutiny by Islamic scholars; and, most notoriously, elements of _sharia_ law were enshrined in the legal system. 'Provided the evidence conformed to the rather elevated standards of proof required by the _sharia_ , __ religious courts were obliged to convict in accord with archaic notions of criminality, then mete __ out the draconian and gender-repugnant sentences \u2013 including floggings, stonings and amputations \u2013 appropriate to the Middle Ages.'\n\nBut much judicial confusion over the validity and implementation of these reforms somewhat blunted their impact. As the federal and lower _sharia_ courts jostled with the civil and military tribunals, 'there were many courts but there was little justice'. Some laws were contested; others, like those concerning the observance of _namaz_ (daily prayers), _purdah_ and the Ramadan fast, were never fully enforced. Pakistan did not undergo an Islamic revolution like that in Iran. Instead, the piecemeal and contested nature of the reforms stirred up a hornets' nest of self-righteous acrimony. Constitutional diehards, women's groups and liberals in general joined the Western-educated elite in trying to alleviate the impact of Zia's programme. More crucially, many devout Muslims also found fault with it. Privileging the Jamaat-e-Islami's brand of orthodoxy alienated Sufi devotees, antagonised the large Shi'ite minority and seldom satisfied all shades even of Sunni opinion. Seemingly the most that these groups could agree on was another wave of persecution directed at the supposedly heretical Ahmadis. In the absence of a universally relevant and accepted authority on the _sunnah_ (relating the deeds and practices of the Prophet and the early caliphs), there was no consensus on the precepts to be adopted, let alone on how they could be turned into workable laws.\n\nGeneral Zia, with the smarmed-down hair and waxen moustache of a matinee magician, waved his swagger stick like a magic wand; but what he conjured up was not Islamic solidarity but cut-throat Islamic contention. Akhtar Hameed Khan saw it as a reversion to medieval thuggery rather than an assertion of Islamic brotherhood. The failure of the political process and the licence afforded to sectarian demagogues radicalised discontent, turning whole congregations into warring zealots. 'People have come to believe that problems can only be solved by the gun, the junta of the gun; and from 1979 we have had no lack of guns,' moaned Khan. The 'Kalashnikov culture' was transforming sectarian militants into sectarian paramilitaries. The result was what has been called 'the Islamisation of criminal activity and the criminalisation of segments of Islamism'.\n\nNor, in so far as martial law permitted, was there any lack of political activity. Like the various ethnic groups, the different shades of Islamic opinion were represented by a kaleidoscope of political groupings. Come elections, Pakistan's secularists would take heart from the poor showing of these _jamaats_ (literally 'gatherings' rather than political parties), and see it as evidence of Islamisation's limited appeal. Perhaps they should have taken more account of the estimated one million who turned out to mourn the Islamising Zia's death \u2013 and this despite his latterday backtracking on the more divisive of his reforms. Electoral returns could anyway be deceptive. The Islamist vote was fragmented among numerous Sunni and Shi'ite parties; ethnic organisations like the MQM siphoned off many potential _jamaatis_ ; and religious opinion was further divided over whether political parties, or even democracy itself, were Quranically legitimate.\n\nGiven the constraints on Pakistan's post-Zia democracy, these doubters had a point. The military retained oversight of the political process: the defence budget was ring-fenced and the conduct of foreign affairs was reserved to the generals and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Meanwhile the army's bureaucratic siblings pulled the electoral strings, stifled legislative initiatives and clung to Zia's Eighth Amendment empowering the President summarily to dismiss any ministry. In short, mandated governments enjoyed little more freedom of movement after Zia than they had under him.\n\nThe problem was compounded by the fragile parliamentary majorities of the post-Zia decade. A veritable musical chairs saw Benazir Bhutto (1988\u201390), Nawaz Sharif (1990\u201393), then Benazir again (1993\u201396) and Sharif again (1996\u201399) trooping through the prime ministerial residence. Both premiers were constrained by the need to form coalitions with minor parties; both failed to adjust to the idea of legitimate opposition; and both struggled with the weakening economy and the closer international scrutiny that followed Washington's loss of interest in Afghanistan after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal. Fending off one another's accusations of corruption was perhaps their most notable achievement. Benazir championed populist causes and invoked the legacy of her father; Sharif favoured Islam and fielded among his sponsors the wife and son of the dead Zia. But when in 1999 General Pervez Musharraf, the army's Chief of Staff, survived Sharif's quixotic attempt to replace him and then hit back by restoring martial rule, the game was over. Benazir (and, after a spell in detention, her husband) bolted back to London; Sharif set up home in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan entered its third decade under military rule. And once again, according to the BBC's correspondent, 'most Pakistanis were delighted'.\n\n*\n\nThe pattern of Pakistani politics under Ziaul Haq and his successors so nicely mirrors that of Bangladesh under Ziaur Rahman and his successors that collusion might be suspected. Both Generals Zia had been brought up in what was now India (Haq in Punjab, Rahman in Calcutta); both when rising through the ranks of the Pakistani army had imbibed its authoritarian contempt for politicians; and both when in power turned to Islam to redefine their respective nations. Just as Ziaul Haq favoured the ultra-orthodox Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, so did Ziaur Rahman favour its namesake in Bangladesh; as well as rehabilitating the Jamaat's leaders after their near-fatal support for Pakistan in the 1971 war, he introduced the use of religious phrasing in official parlance. In a further bid for legitimacy, both Generals also strove to civilianise their regimes. In Zia's Bangladesh, as in the other Zia's Pakistan, elections were promised, political parties sponsored, referenda conducted, national assemblies reinstated, and polls eventually held \u2013 which in both cases yielded suspiciously large majorities for the Zia-backed contenders.\n\nPersonally, the two Zias were reckoned courteous, dedicated and untainted by corruption. Each esteemed the example of Ayub Khan, and genuinely believed that only a disciplined military could fend off national chaos. Despite taking thousands of political prisoners, neither was universally detested; and if Ziaul Haq's demise in a still unexplained plane crash brought a million mourners onto the streets of Lahore, just so did Ziaur Rahman's death in a botched coup attempt bring as many onto the streets of Dhaka.\n\nThere were of course differences. The beady-eyed Ziaul Haq managed a decade in power (1978\u201388), while the sunglasses-wearing Ziaur Rahman survived for little more than half as long (1975\u201381). But when the latter was gunned down in what was supposedly the twenty-first attempt on his life, it was not the end of military rule. In General Mohamed Ershad he left a second-in-command who reimposed martial law within a matter of months, and then clung to office for a further eight years (1982\u201390). Ershad's greatest compliment to his predecessor's example was to follow it to the letter. He too favoured a more central role for religion; indeed, he finally declared Islam the state creed and labelled Bangladesh an Islamic republic. Like the Zias, Ershad also formed his own political party, and claimed to be readying the nation for a return to civilian rule that was repeatedly postponed. Though lacking Ziaur Rahman's charismatic record as a battlefield commander and as the voice of Bangladeshi independence, the uninspiring Ershad was 'something less than a villain', and according to Lawrence Ziring, 'his rule was more benign than ruthless'.\n\nErshad still dealt firmly with opponents, whether military rivals or civilian politicians. The latter he so antagonised that to Ershad belongs the distinction of driving Khaleda Zia (the widow of Ziaur Rahman and leader of his Bangladesh National Party) into a short-lived pro-democracy alliance with Shaikh Hasina Wajed (the daughter of _Banglabandhu_ Mujibur Rahman and leader of Mujib's Awami League). Never again would the 'two begums' make common cause. Rather, it was their detestation of one another that would dominate the Bangladesh political scene for the next quarter of a century.\n\nLike Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, both begums had challenged martial law and been detained under it. They too considered themselves champions of democracy and, like Benazir, each claimed to be the sole legitimate heir to the foundational legacy of her 'martyred' father or husband. Each thus felt uniquely qualified to speak for the people. But there the similarities ended. Hasina promoted the secular, socialist and India-friendly policies associated with Mujib; Khaleda favoured the more Islam-inclusive, free-market and India-cautious policies associated with Zia. More fatally, each bore a personal grudge against the other. Hasina held Zia, and so his widow, guilty if not for the 1975 murder of her father and family, then for failing to prosecute those responsible; and Khaleda retaliated by blaming Hasina for ambivalence over attempts to reinvestigate the 1981 murder of her own husband. This bitter personal vendetta cut to the heart of Bangladeshi identity. The bereaved's demand for justice crowded out the normal business of government, and would ensure that recriminatory moves over the events of 1971\u201381 remained front-page news for as long as the begums lasted.\n\nIn 1990 Ershad finally capitulated to a show of 'people power' like those which four years earlier had toppled Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and were now convulsing the erstwhile Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe. Elections were duly called, in which an alliance headed by Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh National Party confronted another headed by Hasina Wajed's Awami League. Both won around 30 per cent of the vote, and thus began a ding-dong struggle very like that between Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Khaleda formed the first government (1991\u201396), Hasina the second (1996\u20132001), Khaleda the third (2001\u201306), and after a two-year interlude of army-backed rule, Hasina the fourth (2009\u2013). All lasted their full five-year term; democracy of a sort seemed to be taking root. But so slim were the begums' majorities, so disruptive their tactics, so confrontational their policies, and so negligible their achievements that many observers began to see either government as an irrelevance.\n\nInstead, the business of actually running the country, of evaluating needs, providing services, disbursing funds, protecting the vulnerable, engaging the masses and managing the country's perennial natural disasters was increasingly being shouldered by a concourse of over 20,000 non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These included not only indigenous giants like BRAC and the Grameen Bank, but a host of foreign or international aid and development agencies, plus innumerable community-led local ventures, dozens of religious and charitable foundations, and not a few well-camouflaged scams. Many of them relied on foreign or government funding, though others aimed to be self-financing. According to a World Bank report of 2006, 'some 20 per cent to 35 per cent of the country's population is believed to receive some services, usually credit, health or education, from an NGO'. Micro-credit was the developmentalists' panacea, although it came with interest rates that were neither Islamic nor particularly cheap. Education ranged from universities like that founded by BRAC to rural programmes designed to increase civic awareness that might verge on the politically partisan. Even health was not wholly uncontroversial. A clash with the pharmaceutical giants resulted when an NGO called the 'People's Health Centre' won the Ershad government's support for the domestic production of cheaper generic alternatives to some essential branded medicines.\n\nThe NGO trend was never without its critics. While some observers hailed it as evidence of an emerging 'civil society', others detected the incubation of a 'parallel state'. They winced at the ranks of Land Rovers and Land Cruisers parked outside the expat watering holes of north Dhaka and wondered whether the NGO presence, in relieving the begums' elected governments of so many present responsibilities, was not in fact contributing to their obsession with past injustices. 'NGOs compete with government for donor resources and for wider legitimacy because successful NGO work can easily be perceived as governmental \"failure\".' Conversely, military rulers had looked on the NGOs more benignly. As politically neutral organisations, they could be useful allies in a dictator's quest for credibility. Moreover, their achievements served to stifle the criticism of opponents.\n\nIn Bangladesh, voluntary grassroots organisations already had a respectable pedigree. Among the new NGOs, indigenous initiative continued to play a major role, and was widely applauded. Although hard to quantify, NGO activities appeared to raise educational and health standards, boost employment and land use, and improve the quality of the workforce. Women in particular benefited. Female literacy came to exceed that among males, while female participation in, for instance, the garments industry helped to transform the economy. The impact of environmental disasters, especially of inundation, may have been blunted by NGO initiatives. Poverty in general, if not alleviated, was at least made more bearable.\n\nBut if the product of all this outsourcing to NGOs was an inert and paranoid government in Dhaka, it was a high price to pay. Grassroots activity was no substitute for state-level undertakings. Sweatshops went woefully unregulated; roads, bridges and other essential infrastructure were slow to materialise. Bangladesh took thirty years to come to terms with the Farakka dam (a barrage built by India across the Ganges on its own side of the border), and twenty years to begin similar negotiations over water-sharing of the Tista river following construction of another Indian dam. A third, at Tipaimukh in the Indian state of Manipur, was commenced in the 1980s but halted in the 1990s by a combination of environmental concerns and official objections. In 2012 work remained at a standstill. All these projects certainly had implications for downstream Bangladesh, and merited careful study. But in a floodplain subject to often catastrophic inundation, the opportunity of managing the rivers and obtaining a share of their hydro-electric potential ought to have been accorded the highest priority.\n\nOther opportunities were also let slip. In 2004 the Bombay- (now Mumbai-) based Tata group of companies announced discussions that would make Bangladesh the largest ever recipient of overseas Indian investment. Two and a half billion dollars were to be spent there constructing an industrial complex that included a colossal steel mill, a thermal power plant, an open-cast coalmine and a urea fertiliser plant. Together they would have represented much the biggest direct foreign investment made in Bangladesh, doubling its industrial capacity overnight and creating some 24,000 jobs. But they never materialised. The negotiations dragged on until 2007. Dhaka recognised the value of the project, and accepted the _quid pro quo_ of giving India access to the gas expected from the offshore waters of the Bay of Bengal. But actually signing up to the project was more than successive Bangladeshi governments could agree on. Despite the obvious benefits, the politicians seem to have backed down lest they expose themselves to accusations of betraying the nation's sovereignty by kowtowing to Delhi and trading away a national asset. Delhi's patience was sorely tested.\n\n*\n\nSimilar concerns dogged relations between the kingdom of Nepal and India, and for similar reasons. Impoverished countries with weak governments and a heavy dependency on foreign aid are not the easiest to deal with. In Nepal's case, the difficulty of exercising any kind of administrative control was down to the switchback Himalayan terrain plus the ethnic, linguistic and caste fragmentation of the population. _Panchayati raj_ , a variant of Ayub Khan's bottom-up 'Basic Democracy', was supposed to chime with this situation. _Panchayats_ , being __ village-based or district-based councils, were meant to encourage grassroots consensus by reflecting particularist interests and being locally accountable. But as in Bangladesh \u2013 where both Zia and Ershad introduced their own versions of decentralised government \u2013 devolving power proved in practice to be more about creating a personal constituency for an otherwise unrepresentative regime and so giving it a veneer of democratic legitimacy.\n\nIn the Nepal of the 1980s the regime had been that of King Birendra, whose officials had managed the _panchayat_ system as a projection of his authority and patronage. The main beneficiaries were the landed local elites rather than the actual cultivators. But for the support of these middlemen, the court had to compete with politicians promising reform and still greater perks. In particular, leaders of the Nepali Congress Party 'heartily embraced these local power brokers... [and] tried their level best to recruit former members of the monarchical _panchayat_ system at the grassroots level'. Come the restoration of parliamentary democracy, this policy would bear fruit. But in the process the politicians 'unwittingly intervene[d] in favour of rural elites [and] against the rural poor, who had suffered under the same elites during the _panchayat_ period'. Thus would be perpetuated that governmental indifference to the removal of social iniquities, like forced labour and various forms of caste and ethnic discrimination, which bore most heavily on the poorest minorities, This was especially true in the remote and sparsely administered mid-western districts of the country. There exploitation and neglect created a fertile ground for popular insurgency. It awaited only the dibbling-in of revolutionary dogma by bandana-ed Maoists.\n\nAs in both Pakistan and Bangladesh, so in Nepal, 1990 brought long-awaited change. Here too democracy was restored, which meant reinstating the multi-party format that had been jettisoned back in 1951. Elsewhere in the world the wind of _glasnost_ was fanning anti-authoritarian protest from Berlin to Beijing, and had already ruffled Katmandu. But the country also faced a crisis of its own. The King had recently brokered an arms purchase from China. India had objected, and had retaliated by terminating the preferential trade and transit arrangements along the Indo\u2013Nepali border. Hardship and shortages resulted, against which Nepali students and politicians protested with strikes, mass demonstrations, and a violence that was amply repaid by the police. For fifty days Katmandu had been paralysed.\n\nWith the protesters focusing their ire not just on India but on the _panchayat_ system and its royal sponsor, Birendra had opted for damage limitation. He re-authorised political parties and offered constitutional talks. These talks, though protracted enough, short-circuited the usually contentious workings of a Constituent Assembly. Instead, the participants simply agreed a Constitution in which Nepal was declared 'a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, democratic, independent, indivisible, sovereign, Hindu, constitutional monarchical kingdom'. The catch-all phrasing pointed up the deep divisions it was designed to accommodate. A parliamentary system was reinstated and elections scheduled, whereupon the short-lived consensus of protest dissolved into a seething mass of 'multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, independent etc.' contenders. Democratic freedoms did encourage wider participation in the political process, and produced healthy election turnouts. But this was largely thanks to the politicising of tribal and low-caste minorities who held the 'Hindu monarchical kingdom' and its upper-caste bureaucracy responsible for their plight.\n\nOver the next twelve years Nepal had twelve governments. A Nepali Congress ministry led by Girija Prasad Koirala managed three and a half turbulent years (1991\u201394), but at the cost of abandoning its more radical policies and operating within 'the politics of patronage'; all the other ministries came and went in a matter of months. They included several coalitions led by the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist), itself an amalgam of numerous ultra-left splinter groups. At a moment in history when the hammers and sickles were being binned just about everywhere else, the ballot-box victory of Marxist-Leninists under a monarchical dispensation looked to be another Himalayan anomaly.\n\nIt was also self-defeating. In power the Communists, too, 'came to be viewed as the party of the establishment', and quickly alienated some of their grassroots cadres. Nor did they fare much better out of power. Brutal police repression of revolutionary communes by the Nepal Congress government in 1995 further divided the Communist faithful, and provoked much heart-searching as to the ideologically correct response. Some Communist groups stepped up their efforts to present a credible parliamentary challenge; others, led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal, alias 'Comrade Prachanda', turned their backs on Katmandu and opted for a 'people's war' under the banner of the 'Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)'. Weapons were acquired, study groups set up, and social betterment programmes promoted. Among the minority peoples of the Rukun and Rolpa districts in the mid-west, the insurgency took root.\n\nThe war began in earnest when in early 1996 a forty-point memorandum of Communist demands went unanswered by the government. The demands were designed to be as inclusive as possible. They called for a revision of the Indo\u2013Nepal treaties by way of curtailing 'Indian expansionism', the creation of a Constituent Assembly, and a radical redistribution of power aimed at ending royal control of the army, replacing the specifically Hindu complexion of the state with secular ideals, ensuring local autonomy, and introducing a predictable package of land reforms and social provisions. Nothing was said about overthrowing the monarchy. The revolutionary tactics that the Maoists were already employing in their 'liberated areas' were barely mentioned, nor was the mix of indoctrination and intimidation that accompanied them.\n\nFrom 1996 till 2001 the insurgents concentrated on eliminating such vestiges of the central administration as remained in these 'liberated' districts \u2013 police posts were especially targeted \u2013 and on replacing them with the apparatus of 'people's governments'. Operating through an elaborate chain of local cells, district politbureaux and standing committees, the new governments were designed to widen support for the Party by educating and empowering _Dalits_ ('Untouchables'), tribal groups, bonded labourers, women in general and other marginalised elements in society. Skills were taught, public health and education promoted, land redistributed. Female participation was especially impressive at every level, including the military. And though discipline was strict and taxation common, such things seemed a small price to pay for dedicated service to the common good.\n\nIn effect, the Maoists were constructing a 'parallel state' of their own; and they were doing so partly by addressing grievances and promoting causes that elsewhere in Nepal were becoming the preserve of NGOs. Until the restoration of democracy in 1990, NGO activity had been restricted. Royal approval had been needed to set up any voluntary scheme, and had mostly been withheld lest such schemes unsettle the _panchayat_ system. Post-1990, these constraints no longer applied. In fact, something of a free-for-all ensued. Government supervision now being minimal, competition between NGOs was fierce, and coordination suffered. Although the definition of an NGO was problematic \u2013 in Nepal it could be anything from a sports club to Oxfam \u2013 the number operating in the country suddenly grew from a few hundred to tens of thousands.\n\nTo cynics it looked like another case of the flies finding the sugar \u2013 of non-governmental agencies being drawn to un-governmental nations. But NGO activity could also be seen as a useful antidote to Maoist contagion. With aid accounting for around 20 per cent of the nation's GDP, most NGOs relied on foreign or international funding. The preferred arrangement saw foreign donors, typically US-, UK- or India-based, working in tandem with Nepali-run NGOs and channelling funds through them. Thus NGO activity, besides redressing many social ills and filling the void left by government, served to alert the international community to the Maoist threat, and to afford some reassurance to the Nepal government.\n\nAll of which was of course grist to the Maoists' mill. The government was blamed for betraying the people's trust by outsourcing its responsibilities to unaccountable foreign enterprises, many supposedly with neo-colonial or 'neo-con' agendas. Aid workers were said to be overpaid parasites; official misappropriation was said to account for up to 90 per cent of their funds. In particular, India and the US were accused of using NGOs to subvert Nepali sovereignty.\n\nBut the Maoist propaganda was not indiscriminate; it seldom targeted individual aid workers and it held the government to account rather than the sovereign. Indeed, the King, who had yet to be reconciled to his supposedly constitutional role, appeared just as keen to discredit the elected governments as were the Maoists. Hence the abolition of the monarchy and the creation of a republic, which should have been fundamental to the Maoist manifesto, were not pressed. Instead, all such constitutional issues were subsumed in the demand for a Constituent Assembly.\n\nThere is even evidence of an unholy alliance between the politbureaux and the palace. By 2001 the Maoists controlled about a quarter of the countryside. But the government, which was again that of the Nepal Congress, could tackle the insurgents only by deploying the police. For despite repeated requests, the Royal Nepalese Army remained in barracks on the orders of its royal Commander-in-Chief. In other words, while castigating the government's failure to roll back the insurgency, King Birendra steadfastly declined to engage his own troops. Comrade Prachanda would himself later acknowledge his movement's gratitude for this forbearance. He applauded what he dubbed the King's 'soft policy toward the Maoist People's War', and recalled Maoist hopes 'that Birendra would play the role of [Prince] Sihanouk' (he being the Cambodian monarch who had thrown in his lot with the Khmer Rouge).\n\nIt seems, then, highly improbable that the Maoists played any part in the imminent mass murder of Nepal's royal family. Nor does the Maoist charge that it was India and the US that were behind the regicide seem any more probable. Around that scene of carnage, which would define Nepal's crisis to the wider world, conspiracy theories abound as wantonly as they do around the horrors, three months later, of 9\/11. The more improbable the outrage, the more outrageous the conjecture \u2013 indeed, so much so that the originally improbable becomes plausible.\n\nThe Katmandu massacre occurred within the King's residence in the grounds of the Narayanhithi Palace. On the warm summer's evening of 1 June 2001 the royals had gathered for the customary monthly audience. Greetings were exchanged and drinks served as the formally attired guests emerged from the adjoining billiard room. According to later testimony, the proceedings were then interrupted when the Crown Prince Dipendra made his entry dressed in military fatigues. Heavily armed, certainly drunk and possibly drugged, the Prince began shooting immediately. He then withdrew, only to return for more of the same. By the time he reportedly turned one of his guns on himself, King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya lay dead, as did seven other princes and princesses. The survivors were few. They included the dead King's unpopular brother Gyanendra, who happened to be absent that day, Gyanendra's even more unloved son, who was only slightly wounded, and the demented Crown Prince Dipendra, whose attempt at suicide had left him in a deep coma but still breathing.\n\nHitherto an uncontroversial figure, the burly Dipendra is supposed to have been mentally deranged by his mother's refusal to let him marry the girl he loved. But assuming that he was indeed solely responsible for the massacre, it is hard to understand the sequence of events that followed. At first it was claimed that the whole affair had been accidental: a gun had gone off by mistake. Then, after several eyewitnesses had pinned the blame squarely on Dipendra, it emerged that none of them had actually seen the Prince shooting himself. Moreover, next day, while the regicidal Dipendra still lay comatose, he was officially recognised as King, with his uncle Gyanendra being appointed as temporary Regent. Only when, three days later, the now King Dipendra did indeed expire, presumably of his wounds, was Gyanendra elevated to the throne.\n\nMeanwhile, the bodies of all the slain were cremated before autopsies could be conducted; King Gyanendra somehow failed to attend the obsequies; and a later inquiry, whose impartiality was itself questionable, only fuelled the uncertainty by presenting self-contradictory findings. So much confusion argues strongly against the idea of premeditation. On the other hand, suspicion would inevitably attach to Gyanendra and his son \u2013 for surviving as much as anything. More certainly, after three kings in four days, Nepal's monarchy was looking decidedly shaky.\n\nGyanendra, a stern-faced sixty-three-year-old, was not one to shirk his new responsibilities. 'The days of the monarchy being seen... but not heard' were, he declared, over. Prime Minister G.P. Koirala promptly resigned. His replacement opened talks with the Maoists, and when these failed, the new King suspended the political process and declared a state of emergency. Parliament was dismissed, the army finally emerged from barracks, and on doubtful legal grounds Gyanendra formed a ministry of his own. A new crackdown backed by powers of summary arrest was justified on the grounds of combating terrorism, although the shootings and bombings continued. In the country at large the Maoists now fielded some 15,000 troops, and the total death toll was approaching 10,000.\n\nIn this worsening situation, yet another ceasefire and more talks lasted through the first half of 2003. Gyanendra, though under both international and donor pressure to settle with the Maoists, first baulked at their demand for an elected Constituent Assembly, which he rightly feared would lead to the abolition of the monarchy, then scuppered the ceasefire with an army operation in which 'nearly nineteen Maoists' lost their lives.\n\nMass protests by the political parties brought a short-lived restoration of democracy in 2004. Long-overdue elections were promised, although without Maoist approval they could scarcely be held. The politicians fell an easy prey to palace intrigue; and the stalemate, combined with the war's mounting death toll, emboldened Gyanendra to take a second bite at the cherry. In yet another royal coup, on 1 February 2005 a new state of emergency was declared. The King usurped all executive powers, imprisoned or detained many parliamentarians and clamped down hard on the press. He also predicted defeat for the Maoists within six months. In what would prove to be the endgame for Nepal's embattled monarchy, Gyanendra had embraced the post-9\/11 'war on terror'.\n\nAs with General Musharraf in Pakistan, the conventional wisdom about failed states providing a haven-cum-breeding-ground for cross-national terrorists persuaded some foreign governments to overlook Gyanendra's constitutional shortcomings. The George W. Bush administration in the US was at first sympathetic. So was a now notably un-Maoist China. And the Indian government, confronted by a revival of Maoist (or Naxalite) insurgency within its own borders, was positively supportive. But as the strength of Nepali opposition to the crackdown became clear, such sentiments cooled. Gyanendra's six months came and went with no let-up in the war. The country teetered on the edge of complete collapse. Aid receipts fell, and some NGOs pulled out. 'Tourism, the second largest foreign-exchange earner, on which 100,000 Nepalese depend, has dropped by 40 per cent,' reported the _Guardian_ in early 2006, __ 'and the economy \u2013 one of the poorest in Asia \u2013 is sinking under the weight of diminished revenues and increased military spending.'\n\nMeanwhile the political parties, with their backs against the wall, had rediscovered a common purpose in resisting the King's authoritarian rule. A Seven Party Alliance was formed to fight for a revival of Parliament, and an appeal was issued to the Maoists to join it. This they did, but only after another ceasefire had come to nothing, and only on the understanding that a revived Parliament would convene a Constituent Assembly whose deliberations would result in a Constitution that put an end to royal interventions. Evidently the new King's aggressive tactics had snuffed out Comrade Prachanda's soft spot for the monarchy.\n\nGyanendra responded to the multi-party challenge by announcing elections for February 2006. But the elections were to be at the municipal level only, and were to be conducted under his emergency regime. This meant that the palace would have a veto on the candidates, and an excellent chance of managing the result in its favour. Presumably Gyanendra reasoned that if the Maoists let the poll go ahead, he would be credited with having won a mandate, and if they prevented it, he would be credited with having given democracy a try. What he didn't reckon on was universal condemnation. As never before, all sections of Nepali society \u2013 rural Maoists, urbane Congress-men, students, intellectuals, traders and minorities \u2013 united in decrying the elections as the cynical ploy they undoubtedly were. In a land where kings staged coups and Maoists made common cause with monarchists, a spokesman for the European Union detected a new anomaly: elections would be 'a backward step for democracy'. The Indian government agreed. Despite its distaste for the Maoist presence at the barricades, it threw its weight behind the democratic movement and looked to its erstwhile allies in the Nepal Congress.\n\nIn Katmandu the multi-party alliance called a general strike. It was met with erratic curfews and indiscriminate shooting by the army. When this claimed at least thirteen civilian lives, the whole country erupted in the greatest mass uprising in its history. 'Hordes of Nepalese defy shoot-on-sight curfew orders and have brought the capital to a virtual standstill,' reported a _New York Times_ correspondent. As transport backed up at the border, fuel supplies ran low and the price of tomatoes trebled. But the strike went on. The Maoists held their fire and the multi-party alliance held together. The __ King's __ ploy had spectacularly misfired. On 22 April 2006, faced with a threatened occupation of the capital's governmental district, an 'ashen-faced' Gyanendra went on television to concede demands for the reinstatement of Parliament. 'Within minutes of his appearance the streets of Katmandu exploded in jubilation.'\n\nIt was not the end of the monarchy. That took another two years, during which the King was progressively stripped of his powers, his perquisites and his palaces. He nevertheless stayed on as a private citizen with extensive business interests. Indeed, in 2012 he made it clear that he was still available. Claiming that the abolition of the monarchy had been unconstitutional, he pretended that his status as a constitutional ruler was still valid, and might yet be reactivated.\n\nNor was this the end of the interminable search for political stability in the now 'Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal'. With the Maoists having aligned themselves with the Seven Party Alliance in the mass uprising and agreed to participate in the subsequent political process, the ten-year war had effectively ended. An immediate ceasefire was followed by a peace agreement in late 2006. But contentious issues like the disbandment of the people's governments, the disarmament of the Maoist guerrillas and the release of prisoners had yet to be addressed. There was also the outstanding matter of a Constituent Assembly and the new Constitution it would draft.\n\nFollowing Gyanendra's climbdown, G.P. Koirala had for the umpteenth time shouldered the burden of Prime Minister in the recalled lower house of Parliament. Under his stewardship, and with the help of UNMIN (a United Nations Mission in Nepal), disarmament made some progress and a Constituent Assembly was elected. The election unexpectedly gave the Maoists a slim majority. Accordingly, in 2008 the new Assembly formally abolished the monarchy and installed a President, to whom the now eighty-three-year-old Koirala tendered his resignation. Comrade Prachanda succeeded him. But Prachanda's term of office lasted only a year. He resigned in 2009, when the President countermanded his dismissal of the army Chief of Staff. The latter, supposedly with encouragement from New Delhi, had refused to incorporate the Maoists' 18,000 fighters into the regular army.\n\nThis question of accommodating the guerrillas topped a growing agenda of contentious issues that soon threatened both the peace and the constitutional process. The setting up of a 'truth and reconciliation' commission was repeatedly postponed; so was the deadline for agreement on the new Constitution. Meanwhile parliamentary business ground to a standstill as the Maoists backed up their demands by orchestrating strikes and walk-outs. Disaffection and factionalism within both the main political parties further complicated matters.\n\nA resolution of these problems looked no nearer in 2014 than it had six years earlier. Elections due in 2012 had twice been postponed. The Maoist guerrillas were still awaiting rehabilitation; human rights abuses dating back to the war had yet to be investigated, and likewise the scale of compensation to be offered for the Maoists' land grabs. The new republic remained without a Constitution, and for all practical purposes the country remained without a government. The best that could be said was that all parties, including the Maoists, professed a commitment to the democratic process and were still gearing up for elections.\n\nIn a sign of more hopeful times, tourism \u2013 'the second biggest income-earner after remittances from Nepalese abroad' according to the BBC \u2013 began to pick up. No doubt it was boosted by the introduction in 2012 of the first 'Guerrilla Treks'. Offering twenty-one days among the erstwhile cadres and their collectivised holdings in Rolpa and Rukun, these looked like Nepal's way of consigning the war to history.\n\nThe tourists themselves were another sign of the changing times. Once mostly backpacking Westerners, they were now overwhelmingly free-spending Indians. From an airport enlivened by the liveries of Indian-owned budget airlines, the visitors were being bussed into town in Indian-built vehicles past billboards advertising Indian-made furnishings. Katmandu can have seemed no more exotic than Gangtok. Indeed to outsiders, especially Pakistanis or Bangladeshis, Nepal appeared to be showcasing Indianisation as the twenty-first century's riposte to Partition.\n\nJust as sharing a subcontinent with the world's largest democracy enhanced the prospects of electoral accountability elsewhere in South Asia, so sharing it with one of the most dynamic of the world's emerging economies promised dividends of a different sort. Hitherto, 'dynamic' had been a word not readily associated with the Indian economy. The economic miracle had been a long time coming; it took many by surprise and was already faltering. But there was no doubt that, in the space of a couple of decades, India's prospects had been transformed. Rising living standards, however unevenly distributed, plus a more aspirational environment also served to quell dissent and draw the sting of protest. Communists could become IT entrepreneurs, 'slumdogs' become millionaires. For South Asia as a whole there was much to be learned from a suddenly 'Shining India'.\n\n##\n\n## India Astir\n\nBy common consent the 1980s had been India's worst decade to date. Predictions of an imminent economic lift-off had again proved hopelessly misplaced. By the end of the decade the national debt had risen to an unsustainable $70 billion; the growth rate was sluggish, investment likewise, under-employment endemic and reserves of foreign currency perilously low. Once projected as 'the Japan of the 1980s', the country felt more like the China of the 1930s. Navigating it meant dodging sudden curfews and endless demonstrations. The roads were not for the faint-hearted, and the extremities of the country were virtually no-go areas. Trains got blown up, rivers either stank or flooded. Although television had already reached some villages, audiences for the nation's state-run network were subject to the vagaries of the state-run power supply. Making a telephone call could take a morning, buying an airline ticket or cashing a cheque took all day. Always unwieldy, India in the 1980s was feeling increasingly unmanageable.\n\nRajiv Gandhi's big idea as Prime Minister (1984\u201389) had been to wean the people off their reliance on the state and get them to take responsibility for their own lives. He liked computers and believed in self-empowerment. A paperless desk matched his peerless complexion, and when a lamp needed fixing he dug out a screwdriver. Instead of fielding endless petitions he pleaded for local initiative. 'If a road needs ditching, why don't they organise it themselves?' he said. 'The people have become too dependent on the state providing everything.' He too favoured bottom-upwards regeneration; but not because, as in Bangladesh and Nepal, there was a governmental vacuum, but because there was a governmental overload.\n\nFor in India it was decision-making that had been moving upwards. With the democratic process reduced to an electoral bunfight, parliamentarians looked on office more as a reward than a responsibility. Between repeated adjournments for unruly conduct, the Lok Sabha continued to function; but it legislated little. State governments were no better: when not actually suspended, they lived in constant fear of being so. The courts, on the other hand, were busy: their backlog of cases stretched back a decade or more. Seemingly, litigation led where legislation feared to tread. Willy-nilly everything non-actionable, from protest to dissent, found its way into the Prime Minister's office, and from there onto the national agenda.\n\nIt was depressing fodder. In 1988, for a published collection of his recent journalism, the respected editor M.J. Akbar chose the title _Riot After Riot._ Two years later V.S. Naipaul subtitled the last of his three India books _A Million Mutinies_ _Now_. The Jeremiahs were having a field day. Ramachandra Guha quotes from a 1985 edition of the Calcutta weekly _Sunday_ , __ to which numerous distinguished journalists contributed gloom-laden observations: 'tension and frustration everywhere \u2013 social, economic and political... Acts of sabotage, arson, killings and destruction are breaking out all over India like an ugly rash... [F]ear is growing that we are moving beyond the point of no return... discontent seems to have reached a bursting point... India finds itself at a crucial point in its history.' Guha added the caveat that 'every decade since Independence had been designated the \"most dangerous\" ', but there was clearly not much to celebrate. Hostilities of caste, class, creed and ethnicity hogged the headlines. Forty years after Independence, Indians were more divided among themselves \u2013 and more violently divided \u2013 than ever before. If the nation was going anywhere, it was not upwards but backwards.\n\nPakistan, on the other hand, was receiving comparatively favourable ratings. Moderately progressive in 1967, by 1987 some found it even more so. Here was 'a fast-moving country', according to _The_ _Economist_ 's special report of that year. Pakistanis could look back on their first four decades with some satisfaction. Starting out with little in the way of industry or infrastructure, the economy was now powering ahead of India's. Cotton production had made up for the loss of East Bengal's jute. GDP per head stood at $390 compared with India's $260, and growth under Ziaul Haq was averaging 7 per cent against India's 4 per cent.\n\nIt has better road, transport and telephone services than India. It has 450,000 cars compared with 1.5 m in India, which has eight times as many people. Colour television is common in areas called slums. The people are bigger and healthier looking. You do not find the hopeless poverty of lethargic, underfed people that is still so common in India's backward areas.\n\n_The_ _Economist_ had its reservations, as always. The prosperity was down to 'foreign money', notably the diaspora's remittances ($2\u20133 billion a year in the mid-1980s), US aid ($0.6 billion a year and rising) and profits from the arms-and-heroin trade ('incalculable millions'). Businessmen were not complaining; but then, neither were they investing. The political future was too uncertain. 'A psychoanalyst would tell Pakistan that it... was stuck in a crisis-ridden adolescence.' Democracy had stalled, and dictatorship was becoming addictive. Only 24 per cent of the adult population was literate, because education received a pitiful 1.5 per cent of budgeted expenditure compared with the around 40 per cent earmarked for the defence establishment. General Zia conjured up plenty of resentment. But compared with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, _The_ _Economist_ reckoned his repression less arbitrary and less offensive. As of 1985, in which year Zia's regime had acquired a civilian veneer with the appointment of the mild-mannered Mohamed Khan Junejo as Prime Minister, 'Pakistan was freer than it ever was under Bhutto.'\n\nSuch comparisons only contributed to the gloom that enveloped India. Nor were reports from Karachi of the ethno-sectarian carnage there much consolation. For if the Islamising of an avowedly Muslim Pakistan was proving highly divisive, then just so was the Hinduising of a proudly secular India. Nehru had embedded religious neutrality in the nationalist prospectus; his daughter Indira had pruned it back for electoral advantage; and then, for similar reasons, her son Rajiv seemed to have wrenched at its roots.\n\nRajiv was not alone in this, nor was he perhaps fully alert to its consequences. Nevertheless, when an excruciating legal issue had floated up to the prime ministerial desk in July 1985, his vacillation had done much to light the fuse of confessional strife. Known as the 'Shah Bano affair', the case caused acute embarrassment at the time. Liberals wrung their hands in anguish and huddled in corners whispering over their whiskies late into the night. Foreign observers struggled to follow the intricacies of the case. Often they failed to appreciate its significance; it made for laboured copy. But the profound discomfort was real enough.\n\nThe issue at stake concerned the relationship between Indian civil law and Muslim customary law. A petition from an organisation called the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) had urged the Prime Minister to amend an Article in the Directive Principles of the Constitution which foresaw a uniform civil code applying to all Indian citizens, regardless of their faith. In particular, the Prime Minister was asked to overrule a decision of the Supreme Court which, anticipating this universal civil code, had just found against a plaintiff in the sensitive matter of a Muslim divorce settlement.\n\nAt the centre of the affair was Shah Bano, a seventy-five-year-old Muslim lady from Indore in Madhya Pradesh. Divorced six years previously by her lawyer husband, Shah Bano had taken her case for indefinite maintenance as per the Indian Code of Criminal Procedure to a local court; and she had won. But her ex-husband had then contested this in the Supreme Court, on the basis that Muslim personal law obliged him to pay maintenance for only three months. Thus, in rejecting the appeal, the Supreme Court had found in favour of Shah Bano and the civil code. The Court also somewhat gratuitously backed up its judgement by offering the view that Quranic jurisprudence could in fact be taken to favour maintenance payments for as long as the divorced wife's circumstances required.\n\nIn effect, the Supreme Court had not only upheld the primacy of the secular civil code, but had presumed to interpret Muslim family law. Orthodox Islamic opinion was incensed: vast Muslim crowds \u2013 one supposedly of '400,000 people in Bihar and one of 300,000 in Bombay' \u2013 demanded greater protection for Muslim rights. Conversely, Hindu supremacists, already smarting over the erection of Saudi-funded mosques and a wave of _Dalit_ conversions to Islam, heartily approved.\n\nAll of which was too much for the AIMPLB, which redoubled its lobbying of the Prime Minister; and it was too much for Shah Bano, who, vilified by fellow Muslims, eventually disclaimed her victory and announced that her ex-husband's princely allowance of 179 rupees a month (about $6) would be donated to charity. It was also too much for Rajiv Gandhi. Having just defeated a private member's Bill to exempt Muslims from the offending section of the Criminal Procedures Code, in early 1986 he performed a political somersault. Muslim voters appeared to have deserted Congress in recent by-elections; to win them back, therefore, the Code must after all be amended: Muslim practice would be excluded from its purview, and a Muslim Women's Bill would be introduced to 'protect' (i.e. enshrine) Muslim 'rights' on divorce \u2013 including the husband's option of terminating maintenance payments after three months. Congress MPs, who had just been whipped through the lobbies to vote down the private member's Bill exempting Muslims, were now whipped through the lobbies in support of the Muslim exemption.\n\nNaturally this about-turn provoked varied reactions. Orthodox Muslims celebrated; their mass demonstrations had paid off, and they had repelled an assault on their religious autonomy. Liberal secularists, on the other hand, along with those Muslims anxious to shed their faith's reputation for gender discrimination, were acutely embarrassed. The exemption seemed to conflict with the equality of rights guaranteed in the Constitution, and worse still, it meant that enlightened members of the intelligentsia now found themselves lining up alongside the enraged champions of Hindu supremacism.\n\nFor to the BJP, the RSS and their saffron-shirted associates on the Hindu right, the decision was a clear case of the government capitulating to 'Muslim fundamentalism'. 'From now on, the underlying theme of all discussions among militant Hindus was that of \"Hindu society under siege\".' Yet while stigmatising Islam as an obscurantist and proselytising menace, militant Hindus also saw fit to learn from it. They urged their co-religionists to rediscover their own culture, to promote it with pride and to unite _en masse_ for the purposes of political action. A Hindu backlash was looming. Meanwhile 'Rajiv's reputation as a peace-maker \u2013 won in brokering accords in Kashmir and Assam as well as Punjab \u2013 was shattered, his political honeymoon over.'\n\nAlong with the BJP as its main political wing and with the RSS providing a disciplined and motivated all-India network of activist volunteers, the so-called Sangh Parivar (the 'Family Association' of patriotic Hindu organisations) comprised a host of other political, religious and social groups. Among them was the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or 'World Hindu Council'. This body had long been engaged in trying to get the different sects within 'the Hindu communion' to coalesce. Common objectives, like cow-protection and the abolition of 'untouchability', were promoted; and all manner of revered holy men ( _acharyas_ , _saddhus_ , _mahants_ , _sants_ , _pujaris_ , _gurus_ , etc.) were encouraged to sink their sectarian differences in support of a 'Faith Council'. In effect, through a nationwide programme of conferences an attempt was being made to endow Hinduism with the authoritative guidance of what amounted to a clerical establishment, indeed an 'ecclesiastical hierarchy'.\n\nSuch moves appealed strongly to those devout Hindus who were aware of their religion's doctrinal and organisational deficiencies when compared to other faiths. In particular the VHP's Hindu ecumenism found influential supporters and donors among some of India's industrialists and mercantile magnates, and among the Hindu diaspora in the US and Western Europe. The movement would not be short of funds.\n\nTo promote this Hindu 'reformation', in 1983 the VHP had hit on the idea of organising a nationwide _Ekatmata Yatra_ , or 'unity pilgrimage'. Images of 'Mother India' and 'Mother Ganga', both of whom were more national divinities than sect-specific ones, were mounted on trailers for motorised processions that converged on sites rich in Hindu associations. Water from India's holiest rivers was collected and distributed along the way, and devotions to the deities were performed before massive crowds led by distinguished Hindu leaders. As an exercise in 'ethno-religious mobilisation', the _yatra_ 'introduced a new ideological devotionalism' and was reckoned a sensational success. A repetition of its explosive combination of ecstatic worship, mass organisation and political activism promised much to the Sangh Parivar. All that was lacking was the tighter focus which a single symbolic issue or a single emotive location would confer.\n\n*\n\nAyodhya is a small, unfashionable city in western UP. Many Hindus believe it to be _Ramjanmabhoomi_ , or 'the birthplace of Lord Ram', himself a reincarnation of Lord Vishnu and the hero of the _Ramayana_ epic. Whether Lord Ram was in fact born in Ayodhya, indeed whether he was born at all, is debatable. Some historians bow to tradition in the matter, others dismiss it; archaeologists too are divided. More certainly, a mosque was built there in the sixteenth century during the reign of the Mughal Emperor Babur. In the belief that this three-domed Bab[u]ri Masjid __ was erected on the very spot where a temple commemorating Lord Ram's birth had once stood, some devout Hindus had been laying sporadic claim to the site ever since.\n\nIn 1949 a recitation of the _Ramayana_ outside the mosque had attracted large crowds. It also occasioned visible hostility towards the Muslim community, plus a minor miracle: a tinseltown image of the baby Ram materialised inside the mosque. Though the state authorities and then Nehru himself ordered the removal of the image, their instructions were stymied by the courts. Instead the whole site was fenced off and its gate locked. 'In effect, the mosque was shut down.' Muslim plans for its restoration were put on hold; so were Hindu plans for replacing it with a temple. The only concession to Hindu opinion was occasional admission, plus permission to construct a platform outside the fence from which Hindu worship of the Ram image could be performed, albeit at long range.\n\nNo one was happy with this arrangement. Muslim groups formed a committee for the defence of the mosque even as Hindu groups agitated for its demolition. In the _Ramayana_ Lord Ram, a quintessential god-child, grows up to become the epitome of Hindu kingship; thus the idea of his 'miraculous' image being imprisoned within a mosque was deeply offensive to devout opinion. Posters and wheeled floats depicting the young god encaged behind bars also served as a powerful metaphor for the supposed plight of contemporary Hindus. The message was obvious. A 'pseudo-secular' state intent on appeasing its Muslim minority was forcibly constraining its Hindu majority and depriving them of their rights.\n\nAlthough 'liberating' Ayodhya's _Ramjanmabhoomi_ had earlier featured among the VHP's demands, as of 1985 it became the central plank. New processional cavalcades began converging on the city from different parts of the country; overseas Hindus were alerted to the need for funds and endorsement through conferences and the formation of local chapters; and a petition was filed with the district court for the (re-)opening of the site for Hindu worship.\n\nWhen the petition was unexpectedly granted, it was assumed that this could only have been the result of prime ministerial intervention. 'It was said that Rajiv Gandhi opened the locks on the advice of his colleague Arun Nehru, who thought the Congress now needed to compensate the [Hindu] chauvinists [for defeat in the Shah Bano affair].' To Rajiv the gesture may have been one of even-handedness. But to the extended Sangh Parivar it was the green light: the VHP took it as vindication of its efforts to unite Hindus; the RSS saw it as evidence of its long-sought awakening of Hindu national pride; the BJP scented a substantial electoral dividend; and although implementation of the order was again frustrated by the courts, all saw it as proof that no vote-conscious government cared to defy such a display of concerted action.\n\nAt this point, as if to fan the sparks of Hindu resurgence, in January 1987 all India plunged into a prolonged orgy of Rama-mania. Sunday after Sunday for eighteen months the nation immersed itself in the televisual screening of a spectacular seventy-eight-episode dramatisation of the _Ramayana_. For an hour each week the traffic fell silent and the streets emptied. The audience figures were among the highest ever recorded. Commissioned by the state network at enormous expense \u2013 and apparently without any ulterior prompting \u2013 it was certainly a triumph for television. Set-ownership rocketed; the small screen had stolen a march on Bollywood and the channel responsible basked in unwonted applause. A ninety-one-episode version of the _Mahabharata_ , __ the other great Hindu epic, was immediately commissioned, and proved equally popular. For all of four years, two of which included national elections, Indians wallowed in the high-minded sentiments, the low intrigues and the convoluted storylines of divine soap-opera.\n\nIn some households the act of watching became one of worship. For the appointed hour, sets were garlanded, lamps lit and incense burned. Family and friends gathered; refreshments might follow. With an estimated 91 per cent of the nation's televisions tuning in, any load-shedding of the power supply was out of the question. The gods took priority. Although there exist numerous different recensions of the _Ramayana_ , the one favoured by the TV producers was naturally that richest in heroic endeavour and romantic entanglements. Lord Ram was promoted as pre-eminent among all India's deities, 'co-extensive with all beliefs' and epitomising everything that was noblest and most admirable in Hinduism. Bolstered by the viewing figures, this tele-version won universal acceptance and was accorded near-canonical status. For once, Hindus of whatever sect sank their differences and subscribed to a single glamorised presentation of the epic. Moreover, in immersing themselves in it simultaneously, they experienced a new sense of congregation that was both compelling and quasi-national. Thanks to the TV schedulers, India's confessional majority emerged from each Sunday screening as charged and uplifted as church-goers from a Sunday service.\n\nHow this devotional confidence would play out at the polling booths was uncertain. But already the elections due in 1989 \u2013 five years after Rajiv had won a massive mandate in the aftermath of his mother's assassination \u2013 did not bode well for Congress. Naipaul's 'million mutinies' were happening 'now'. As noted, the accords brokered over Kashmir, Punjab and Assam had unravelled; violence in all three states had revived, and in none could a Congress or Congress-friendly majority be confidently expected. Other insurgencies troubled the north-eastern states in particular. The continued influx of immigrants and settlers from Bangladesh had sparked a reign of terror by 'nationalists' in the state of Tripura and another by the indigenous Bodo people of Assam. Meanwhile the Nagas' irredentist struggle was affecting not just Nagaland but neighbouring states like Manipur with a large Naga minority. Even West Bengal only remained intact thanks to concessions to a Gorkha National Liberation Front demanding greater autonomy for Nepali settlers in the state's hill districts.\n\nElsewhere in the country the catastrophic harvests of 1985 and '87 had reawakened the spectre of famine. Five in every ten Indians still lived below what most indices considered the poverty line. Additionally, the government was mired in a scandal over the payment of bribes by the Swedish Bofors company in connection with a Defence Ministry arms purchase. Rajiv's reputation as 'Mr Clean' was as tarnished as his standing as 'Mr Peace-Maker'.\n\nThe d\u00e9b\u00e2cle in Sri Lanka looked like the final straw. Some now spoke of that island as 'India's Vietnam'. A thousand members of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force had been killed there, yet a settlement was more remote than ever. In retrospect, the situation looked like an early case of what Afghanistan-watchers would call 'blowback'. New Delhi's attempt to relieve the Tigers (LTTE) of the arms and safe havens that it had once made freely available to them had backfired. Instead of bolstering the Sri Lankan Tamils' prospects of autonomy, the Indian troops found themselves targeted by the Tigers, and so fighting Colombo's war against Tamil autonomy. This suited the Sri Lankan government, which could deploy its own forces against an uprising in the south of the island. But once that was taken care of, growing Sinhala resentment of the Indian presence was, if anything, gratified by the vicious Tamil attacks on the Indians. Unpopular with all Sri Lankans, whether Tamil-speaking or Sinhala-speaking, by 1989 the Indian Peace-Keeping Force was in the early stages of an ignominious withdrawal.\n\nFor the most part these setbacks affected India's peripheral states. But it was in the populous core regions of north, central and western India that elections were traditionally decided; and it was there that the Sangh Parivar was most active. In the run-up to the 1989 elections, the VHP organised a repeat of its _Ekatmata Yatra_ , this time with the focus on Ayodhya. To build a massive new temple at what some were now calling 'the Hindu Bethlehem', the faithful were urged to bake bricks. These were then consecrated in elaborate ceremonies before being taken on the road in mobile tableaux accompanied by armies of slogan-chanting followers. Violence often marked their progress. Muslim districts responded to the challenge of anti-Islamic taunts with brickbats; police roadblocks were attacked. In the communal riots that accompanied the _Ram shila pujans_ (Ram brick ceremonies) hundreds died and property was looted or burnt from Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh to UP and Bihar. The death toll in the Ganges town of Bhagalpur alone was officially put at 538 and unofficially at over a thousand.\n\nThe victims being disproportionately Muslims, newspapers in Bangladesh and Pakistan afforded generous coverage of the mayhem. In a rare show of unanimity, Pakistanis met every twist in the Ayodhya assault on Muslim sensibilities by taking to the streets to demand vengeance. Muslim Bangladeshis simply turned again on Hindu Bangladeshis. Thousands of the latter, who had somehow weathered the Partition of 1947, the anti-Hindu 'riots' of the '50s and '60s and the birth pangs of Bangladesh in the '70s, finally gave up. They trailed across the unpoliceable border into Indian territory.\n\nIn October 1989 the VHP tested its strength by issuing a directive to Hindus worldwide. At precisely 1.35 p.m. on 10 November all were enjoined to down tools, face in the direction of Ayodhya and make an offering of flowers. That was the moment at which, on a piece of disputed ground near the Babri Masjid, __ the foundation-laying ceremonies for the new temple would be reaching their climax. 'There the principal symbol was the heap of 167,093 _Ram Shilas_ [Ram bricks] collected throughout India and in the Hindu diaspora, which had then been transported to Ayodhya.' Despite the vast crowds, prominent among whom were many of the BJP's electoral candidates, these ceremonies passed off peacefully. The government made no attempt to interfere, for fear of a threatened backlash. Instead Rajiv Gandhi 'expressed satisfaction' over their orderly conduct.\n\nThe elections that followed later the same month were arguably the most significant in India's history. Rajiv's Congress was humiliated. It lost more than two hundred seats and could no longer claim a majority. In fact, for the first time ever, no single party had a majority. A new pattern was being set in which cross-party alliances would be crucial and coalition governments would become the norm. More obviously, the BJP had made its long-awaited breakthrough as a power-broker. From just two seats in the previous Lok Sabha, its tally had shot up to eighty-six, mostly from constituencies that had witnessed Ayodhya-related activity. With BJP support and that of the Communist Party (Marxist), a government was formed. It was headed by Vishwanath Pratap Singh, Rajiv's former Finance Minister and an ex-Rajah of doughty integrity. Based on a left-leaning coalition of anti-Congress interests, Singh's National Front government had much in common with the Janata government cobbled together under J.P. Narayan's banner in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's Emergency.\n\nNor did the new National Front government fare any better or last any longer than its Janata predecessor. Within eighteen months it had lost the support of the BJP, lost the leadership of the respected V.P. Singh and lost its parliamentary majority. Like his mother in 1981, Rajiv thus found himself making a swift return to the hustings at the head of a resurgent Congress. While campaigning for these second elections in two years, in May 1991 he went to Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu. There, as with his mother seven years earlier, nemesis caught up with him. He too was assassinated, in this case blown to bits along with eighteen others by a woman who wore a belt of explosives beneath her sari.\n\nSuicide bombings, although not unknown in the Middle East, had by now become the hallmark of the Tamil Tigers. Though conspiracy theorists would have a heyday, there seems no reason to doubt the findings of two subsequent inquiries that Rajiv's assassin and her accomplices were part of a well-planned LTTE plot. But while the LTTE's involvement seems certain, its motivation is less so. Possibly it was in revenge for Rajiv's role in sending the IPKF to Sri Lanka in the first place; possibly it was to pre-empt his recent threat to do the same again; and just possibly Indian Tamil militants were somehow complicit. 'Blowback' is of its nature imprecise.\n\nCome polling day a sympathy vote, this time for Rajiv's widow Sonia and their children, again proved decisive. It helped return another Congress government, albeit after heavy losses in the northern states and in alliance with lesser parties to make up a majority. Sonia Gandhi, handicapped by her Italian birth, her poor Hindi and her inexperience, declined the prime ministership. She did, though, lend her name and image to Congress publicity, and would later be persuaded to take on the leadership of the party. Instead the prime ministerial office went to Narasimha Rao, a fragile-looking but experienced Congress Minister with an unexpectedly open mind on the economy.\n\nBut the BJP had done well too, increasing its representation from eighty-six MPs to 120. An 'also ran' in 1984, in 1991 the political wing of the Sangh Parivar was now second only to Congress in the Lok Sabha, and controlled several states, including the largest, UP. And again it had done so on the back of one of the Sangh Parivar's Ayodhya spectaculars.\n\nHaving got the bricks for the new temple, the VHP had still faced the problem of how to secure possession of the site. Various legal approaches were explored; but as these failed, the idea of simply commandeering the site and then removing the mosque found much support. If allowed to go ahead, this would be a blatant sacrilege in Muslim eyes, as well as the most flagrant betrayal imaginable of India's secular pretensions.\n\nUndeterred, in 1990 the VHP had launched another _yatra._ The centrepiece this time was a _rath_ (or temple chariot) like those familiar to viewers of the TV epics \u2013 and like them in fact a Toyota pick-up suitably customised, bedecked in saffron, and adorned with Hindu symbols, including the lotus of the BJP. In its air-conditioned cab rode Lal Krishna Advani. A former member of the RSS and now the fiery-tongued and silver-moustached President of the BJP, Advani was f\u00eated by relays of party activists, some wearing monkey masks to identify them as followers of Lord Hanuman, the leader of Lord Ram's simian army in the _Ramayana_. Setting off from Somnath, a place on the Gujarat coast where a gleaming new temple had already replaced one destroyed by Muslims in the eleventh century, the cavalcade had for weeks wound its way east and south as far as Hyderabad. Then it headed north for Delhi and Ayodhya.\n\nThe _rath yatra_ had a dual purpose, which was often summed up as 'Mandal and Mandir'. On the one hand it was undertaken as a protest against Prime Minister V.P. Singh's adoption of the so-called Mandal Report. This had been prepared ten years earlier at the request of the Janata government. Justice B.P. Mandal had been asked to look into the question of whether those affirmative-action opportunities \u2013 principally in terms of reserved educational places and government jobs \u2013 that were already available to the lowest so-called Scheduled Castes (SCs) should be extended to castes equally disadvantaged but not quite so low in the pecking order. Mandal thought it should. In fact, since these Other Backward Castes (OBCs) accounted for around half the total population, he recommended even more reserved places for OBCs than for SCs. But the report had found no favour with the subsequent Congress governments, and had been shelved.\n\nWhen resurrected by V.P. Singh in 1990, it met with the condemnation that Congress had feared. This came from the higher castes. Mindful of their own chances in a careers market drastically reduced by the reservation of over 50 per cent of all educational and governmental places, the less well-off members of the upper castes protested vehemently. Some schools and colleges were forced to close, sixty protesters were killed in battles with the police, and hundreds of Brahmin youths set fire to themselves. Implementing a report aimed at redressing one example of social inequality simply stirred up another. Although supposedly anathema in independent India, caste was in effect being written into law. Moreover, inter-caste competition would intensify as a result: decidedly un-backward castes would begin mobilising to have themselves downgraded, so qualifying for OBC status and the opportunities it promised.\n\nAll of which posed a quandary for the BJP. The party was dominated by the higher castes; moreover, the Mandal recommendations were clearly divisive, and therefore objectionable to anyone committed to uniting 'the Hindu nation'. Yet the BJP could hardly risk alienating that half of the entire nation that stood to gain as OBCs. The trick in 1990 had therefore been to disguise the party's opposition to Mandal by a dramatic reassertion of its commitment to Mandir. 'Mandir' is the Hindi word for 'temple', the mandir in question being of course that planned for Ayodhya. As the _rath yatra_ sped north, Advani appealed for _kar sevaks_ , __ or _'_ volunteers', with the strength and dedication to throw down the Babri Masjid and begin the erection of a Ram Mandir worthy of what some now saw as the future 'Hindu Vatican'.\n\nAccordingly, once arrived in Delhi, Advani had challenged V.P. Singh to put aside the contentious Mandal and concentrate on the glorious Mandir. The suggestion had been declined, which was the signal for the BJP to withdraw its support for the Singh government. The 1991 mid-term elections \u2013 those that proved so fatal to Rajiv \u2013 followed in May; and the hot potato that was Mandal thus passed to Narasimha Rao's Congress ministry. Since Congress had fared dismally in states like UP where the anti-Mandal agitation was most intense, Rao jumped at a chance to re-establish his party's fortunes by endorsing Mandal. With a few amendments, the report finally passed into law.\n\nMeanwhile, the _rath yatra_ had run into trouble. Entering UP in October 1990, it had been stopped by the state government, whose ruling party was part of the National Front coalition in Delhi, and whose Chief Minister was himself an OBC member. Advani was arrested along with 30,000 supporters, whereupon 'violence affected most of the country'. The nationwide demonstrations led to Hindu\u2013Muslim riots as far away as Karnataka. Hundreds of deaths were reported, and in UP, to keep Ayodhya volunteers at bay, whole trains were turned back at the state border. The final total of those detained within this one state was reported by the _Indian Express_ to be __ around 150,000.\n\nSome 40,000 _kar sevaks_ nevertheless reached Ayodhya; and of these a hardcore forced their way through to the Babri Masjid _._ The gates were broken open, the mosque stormed and a saffron flag raised above it. Further damage was prevented by the police, whose tactics resulted in the deaths of dozens more. Like Mother Ganga's holy water and Lord Ram's bricks, the ashes of these 'martyrs' were then trundled round the countryside for mass veneration, The new temple remained unbuilt, and the old mosque still stood; but the VHP and its allies in the Sangh Parivar were far from cowed.\n\n*\n\nJust over a year later, at a dinner in New Delhi's embassy quarter early in 1993, the UK's High Commissioner (i.e. ambassador) rose from his seat at the head of the table, prayed silence with a ringing tap on a wine glass, and announced that he was about to break with diplomatic protocol. The situation was so 'concerning', he said, that he was sure the assembled company of some twenty mainly Indian luminaries would understand. Starting on his left, then, he would ask each guest in turn to share his or her thoughts on the crisis. The speakers could be as candid as they liked. Their impromptu contributions were to follow the port decanter round the table.\n\nNo one demurred; no one even disputed that there was a crisis. Sadly, and with little in the way of after-dinner pleasantries, each held forth on what one described as 'the greatest threat to the nation since Independence'. Memories of Partition were dredged up. Scenarios dire and less dire were painted. For once the perennial platitudes about 'tolerant India', 'unity in diversity' and 'this non-violent nation' went unmentioned. Instead someone suggested that an India now so catastrophically divided might be described as tolerant only of a quite appalling level of violence. The usual reference to 'a foreign hand' behind the recent 'troubles' was also missing; and no one thought to reflect on how these 'troubles' might appear to India's neighbours. As if faced with a purely personal tragedy, grief and shame made the usually ebullient company look inward.\n\nElsewhere in the subcontinent, the democrats \u2013 Benazir Bhutto in Islamabad, Girija Prasad Koirala in Katmandu and Khaleda Zia in Dhaka \u2013 were currently in the ascendant. Moreover, for once no superpower was exercising undue pressure in the region. Washington's interest in South Asia had cooled following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan; Moscow was no longer a global contender; and Beijing was busy trumpeting growth rates to drown out the memories of Tiananmen Square. Why then was it New Delhi, with the proudest of democratic records and a natural preference for an unaligned South Asia, that found itself plunged into an existential crisis? No one round the table asked this. No one reflected on how Mandal and Mandir had impeccably Indian pedigrees; and though both demands enjoyed enormous popular support, no one suggested that democracy itself might in some way be to blame. Perhaps the pain of the moment was too great, the prognoses of what might follow too grim.\n\nThe televised news footage had been showing scenes that did indeed recall the Great Partition. In the space of a week (6\u201313 December 1992), at least 1,200 Indian citizens had been horribly slaughtered by their fellow countrymen. As many again were now dying in Hindu\u2013Muslim battles in Mumbai and elsewhere. Tens of thousands had lost their homes; girls were being raped and babies butchered. Advani and the other leaders in the Sangh Parivar were not directly involved. They were anyway in gaol, and the UP government had been dismissed. But it was all too little too late. As in 1947, the pogroms had acquired a momentum of their own. 'Like the three domes that crowned the 464-year-old Babri mosque,' ran an apocalyptic piece in _Time_ magazine, 'the three pillars of the Indian state \u2013 democracy, secularism and the rule of law \u2013 are now at risk from the fury of religious nationalism.' In short, Ayodhya had finally erupted. Though democracy and the rule of law would eventually prove robust enough, India's cherished reputation for religious neutrality lay strewn among the ruins of Babur's mosque.\n\nThe decisive factor had been the victory of the BJP in the 1991 state elections in UP. State governments had extensive powers within their own borders, and could exercise considerable discretion in implementing directives from Delhi. With the new BJP government in UP committed to the Sangh Parivar's policies on promoting _Hindutva_ ('Hindu-ness), the opportunity of pressing ahead with the Ayodhya temple had seemed too good to miss. On the other hand, state governments were also responsible for law and order, and could be dismissed for not enforcing them. The BJP government in the state capital of Lucknow had therefore to tread carefully. Hot-heads who saw Ayodhya as just the prelude to reclaiming sites in Mathura and Varanasi, both also in UP and both with mosques built on what may have been temple foundations, were brushed aside. In power, a government had to act responsibly. Even in the case of Ayodhya, legal sanction was desirable, failing which any impromptu action must not be seen as directly attributable to the government.\n\nThis official ambivalence in Lucknow had partially reassured Narasimha Rao's government in New Delhi. But it antagonised gung-ho members of the Sangh Parivar and brought a challenge from the VHP. To revive the momentum of the _rath yatra_ , __ the VHP had declared 6 December 1992 to be the astrologically ordained day for recommencing construction of the Ram Mandir _._\n\nOnce again thousands of volunteers __ ( _kar sevaks_ ) immediately headed for Ayodhya. Far from being stopped, this time they were fed and welcomed by the state government. Advani set off to join them. He left Delhi, where he was now leader of the parliamentary opposition, with an ominous 'All I know is that we are going to perform _kar seva_.' __ Literally the term meant 'work-service', but figuratively something more like 'physical labour'. As a precaution the Rao government ordered out 20,000 paramilitaries. But the number of _kar sevaks_ now in the vicinity of Ayodhya was put at over 100,000. Some had brought along archaic tridents and bows and arrows, the accoutrements of the Hindu heroes on television; others had obtained access to pickaxes, sledgehammers and crowbars.\n\nIf, as they claimed, the BJP leaders were unaware that the _kar sevaks_ intended to demolish the mosque, on the night of 5 December they appear to have been alerted. At a top-level meeting in Lucknow, plans were concerted and objections overcome. From there Atul Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP's political supremo, headed straight for Delhi, while Advani drove through the night to Ayodhya. 'Something wasn't as they had expected,' noted Prashant Panjiar. A photographer working for _India Today_ , __ Panjiar wondered whether Advani was in control of the situation. The BJP leader had even mistaken Panjiar for a member of his own press corps, and he now gave him a ride to Ayodhya.\n\nNext morning the Sangh's leaders, plus Panjiar, assembled on an illegally erected dais to watch the dedication ceremonies ( _pujas_ ) for the new temple.\n\nAdvani and Seshadri [of the RSS] looked nervous. The pujas began; so did the speeches. At around 11.30 some _kar sevaks_ started climbing the domes [of the mosque]... Through the [camera] lens I could see men with iron rods... There was laughter on the stage. Suddenly a larger group appeared on top of the dome and it looked like the beginnings of a serious attack.\n\nAdvani now evinced \u2013 or possibly feigned \u2013 a look of horror. His companions ignored his protests and egged on the demolition squads. One by one the domes of the mosque crashed to the floor.\n\nA cloud of dust rose to fill the air. The sight of [the last] dome, tilted in mid-air, about to fall, remains a striking image. There was complete jubilation on the stage. Soon I saw the city's horizon pierced with spirals of smoke. An _acharya_ said into the mike, 'Look at these Muslims. They are burning their own homes to malign us.' The _kar sevaks_ went berserk. The killing began. __ The sky was all on fire.\n\nMuslims in Ayodhya, and then across India, vented their anger by attacking Hindus, but they were just as often attacked, and surely never resorted to self-inflicted incendiarism. Meanwhile the police stood by, and the state government signally failed to authorise the intervention of the waiting troops. In the weeks and months of communal killings, burnings and bombings that followed, this pattern would be repeated; and of the many thousands who died, often unspeakably, the majority were Muslims. Later, isolated Christian communities and missionaries would be picked off by elements of the Sangh Parivar; but it was against the 10 per cent of all Indians who adhered to Islam that the Sangh directed its venom.\n\nNor was this venom easily contained or assuaged. In January 1993, at the height of the Ayodhya 'riots', Indian troops in Kashmir launched 'the largest reprisal attack by the security forces' in the whole ongoing insurgency there. The town of Sopore was set alight by members of the Border Security Force, who then allegedly 'prevented fire fighters from putting out the blaze'. Around fifty civilians, all Muslims, were burned to death in their homes. In the preceding years virtually all of Kashmir's Hindu community had fled the Valley following targeted attacks of the utmost ferocity by the Pakistan-backed Hizbul Mujahidin. The Sangh Parivar had __ rushed to condemn this 'Islamic terrorism', and may in fact have encouraged the exodus for its own purposes. Kashmir's agony was being compounded by the Hindu\u2013Muslim hostility generated by Ayodhya.\n\nAnd so it went on. In 2001, thirty-eight people died when the state assembly building in Srinagar was attacked. In December of the same year the Parliament building in New Delhi was stormed. The latter assault was as surprising as it was murky. Just the day before, the Prime Minister himself had warned that Parliament might be attacked. Yet a group of armed men dressed in military fatigues \u2013 there were either four, five or six of them \u2013 were able to drive unchecked through the gates in a white Ambassador car packed with explosives and attempt 'what looked like an astonishingly incompetent terrorist strike'. Most of the explosives were never detonated, and the assailants all perished in a firefight with the police. The government blamed the usual suspects: the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohamed. But apart from a confession to that effect by Mohamed Afzal, a one-time terrorist who had turned counter-intelligence informant, the evidence was circumstantial. Afzal's statement would anyway be rejected by the Supreme Court. His involvement in organising the attack was not disputed, but it remained far from clear on whose behalf he acted, and whether or not he had done so under compulsion. In 2013, when he was finally hanged after twelve years on death row, these questions remained unanswered.\n\nA year after the 2001 attacks, flames tore through a railway carriage near Godhra in Gujarat. It was full of _kar sevaks_ returning to their home state after yet more dedication rituals for the still unbuilt _Ramjanmabhoomi_ temple. Fifty-eight died, all of them Hindus. Though the cause of the fire was uncertain, the blame for it readily attached to some Muslim platform vendors at Godhra station who had been reviled by the _kar sevaks._\n\nIn retaliation for this train burning, Hindu mobs ran riot throughout Gujarat. For days the two main cities of Ahmedabad and Vadodara (Baroda) witnessed scenes of destruction and carnage 'unprecedented in their savagery'. 'More than 2,000 Muslims were killed and at least fifty times that number rendered homeless.' The police and even some Ministers in the state government \u2013 it was another BJP government, led in this case by Narendra Modi, another former RSS commander \u2013 were accused of failing to protect the victims, and even of colluding with the perpetrators. Modi was unmoved. He would never admit any responsibility or express any regret. Actions brought against the officials responsible got nowhere; Gujarat continued as a BJP stronghold.\n\nSix years on, in a state room of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay\/Mumbai, one of several bandana-ed gunmen was asked by one of his hostages why he wanted to kill them. According to the filmed testimony of a survivor, 'He replied, \"Have you not heard of Babri Masjid? __ Have you not heard of Vadodara?\" Then he opened fire.' This 2008 commando-style attack on several of Bombay's landmarks claimed 164 lives, and was watched live on television across the world. It followed a 2006 bombing of the city's suburban railway that claimed around two hundred lives. Both attacks were attributed to Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the several militant Islamic organisations based in Pakistan, all of them subject to frequent name changes and all with close links to Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Islamic zealotry, however divisive within Pakistan itself, became Islamic solidarity when it straddled borders. Every Hindu assault on Muslims, whether in Kashmir, Assam, Ayodhya or Mumbai, inflamed opinion in both Bangladesh and Pakistan, and swelled the ranks of the _jihadist_ Lashkars.\n\nAfter the Ayodhya massacres of 1992\u201393, as after those in Gujarat of 2002, the need in India was for rehabilitation and trust-building initiatives. Some voluntary bodies rose to the challenge but there was no official 'truth and reconciliation' programme. Many Indian Muslim communities continued to live in fear for their livelihoods and lives; many Hindus, when pressed, evinced either indifference to the Muslims' plight or a quiet sense of satisfaction. The baleful catalogue of transnational atrocities by militant Islamic terror groups in the Middle East, East Africa, Afghanistan and the West merely reinforced such attitudes.\n\nAs for the Sangh Parivar, far from being disgraced by Ayodhya and its aftermath, its saffron star shone more brightly than ever. Four years later, in the general election of 1996, the BJP increased its tally of seats yet again. With 161 MPs to Congress's 140, it was now the largest party in the Lok Sabha, and duly set about forming a national government. It proved a false start. Atul Behari Vajpayee's first tenure as Prime Minister lasted just a fortnight, after which a Congress-backed coalition took over for the rest of 1996, and was followed by another in 1997. Still inching its way to power, in the elections called for 1998 the BJP hit back by taking 183 seats. It now formed a new ruling coalition, 'the National Democratic Alliance'. This NDA increased its tally further in 1999. The BJP would remain in power for the next five years.\n\n'It appears,' bemoaned the pro-Congress authors of an end-of-century account of _India After Independence_ , __ 'that the millennium will be ushered in by a government led by a party that for years seemed to be more interested in reviving and avenging the past than in heralding the future;... the indomitable Indian people deserve better.' Others put it more bluntly. One scholar drew parallels with Germany in the 1930s: the Sangh Parivar was orchestrating 'a multiplicity of localised _Kristallnachts_ ' prior to a quasi-fascist takeover. Another analyst foresaw an exodus of persecuted Muslims to Pakistan and of disaffected Hindus to the US. The former never materialised; and the exodus of mainly Hindu Indians to the US had more to do with career advancement than with dodging bigotry. Many headed for Silicon Valley, among them both supporters and opponents of the Sangh.\n\nThe fact was that in the late 1990s the BJP was the party that 'the indomitable Indian people' did deserve. It best articulated the national mood, and it therefore attracted the most votes. Rao's Congress government had turned the economy around; but it was the BJP's promise to make India a 'great power' that resonated with the nation.\n\nTo this end, within a few weeks of assuming office, the government of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance ordered a Richter-scale explosion in the Rajasthan desert. Known as Pokharan II (Pokharan I being Mrs Gandhi's 'peaceful' nuclear test of 1974), it announced in unambiguous terms that India was now a member of the nuclear-armed fraternity. Three devices had been detonated, a temperature about that of the sun had been generated and an area the size of a football pitch had been gouged out of the desert. Anti-proliferationists, headed by the US and including most of the international community, were aghast. As one, they condemned the test in the strongest possible terms and imposed debilitating sanctions.\n\nIn India the response was equally unconstrained. Thousands celebrated in the streets. One paper called the test an 'Explosion of Self Esteem', another a 'Moment of Pride'. Congress being the party responsible for the bomb's development, it too jumped aboard the bandwagon; so did most of the other opposition parties. The BJP government called for a programme of national celebrations, and the VHP promised to build a new temple at the test site; by way of preparation, its followers were invited to scoop up handfuls of sand from the vicinity and have them blessed for nationwide distribution. Acquiring the ability to incinerate millions seemed to count as a greater national triumph than conquering Everest, winning a Test match or doubling the growth rate.\n\nIn testing its 'bomb', India was giving notice not just to old enemies like Pakistan and China but to the US. Without formally committing itself to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, it now angled for recognition of its 'great power' status in the form of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and, once the sanctions and the sniping had subsided, a closer relationship with the world's one remaining superpower. This looked a tall order, especially for a government headed by 'sectarian chauvinists' with neo-Nazi supporters. Yet it turned out quite otherwise. Circumstances would play into India's hands; and the BJP, once in power, would prove a lot more pragmatic and conciliatory than either its critics or its supporters had expected.\n\nThe chances of India reaping a reward for flouting international conventions became somewhat less improbable within a matter of weeks. For in May 1998 Pakistan responded to Pokharan II by test-firing its own nuclear deterrent in the Balochistan desert. India consoled itself by claiming that this 'Islamic bomb' vindicated the apprehensions that had prompted its own test; Pakistan, amidst more delirious celebrations, claimed that the threat of the 'Hindu bomb' had been neutralised and a parity of sorts restored. Intense US pressure, sweetened in this case with offers of conventional weaponry, debt write-offs and new borrowing, had failed to dissuade Nawaz Sharif's administration from going ahead with the test. Washington, though mortified, was not surprised. Once India had publicly gone nuclear, it was 'a certainty' that Pakistan would follow suit.\n\nMore worrying were the circumstances surrounding the Pakistan tests. (Both countries had immediately followed their first tests with a second.) Unlike the Rajasthan tests, those in Balochistan had supposedly been prompted by reports of an imminent attack. A strike-force of Indian and Israeli aircraft was said to be preparing to enter Pakistan air space, its mission being a pre-emptive bombing of Dr Khan's nuclear research facility at Kahuta and of the Balochistan test site. This story was almost certainly a fabrication; the Israelis had been implicated simply because they had once dealt in similar fashion with a nuclear facility in Baghdad. But it raised the question of who had concocted the story and why. A likely answer was that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had dreamt it up in order to persuade Nawaz Sharif and reluctant elements in the military of the necessity of an immediate response. But if the bomb could be tested on such spurious grounds, many outside Pakistan worried that it might be delivered on spurious grounds. They wondered who precisely was in control of 'Bhutto's Bomb' in a now 'military democracy', and what safeguards were in place to protect it from dissident attack or unauthorised use.\n\nConcerns about an incidental armageddon were matched by those about an accidental armageddon. In early December 1984, soon after Mrs Gandhi's assassination, a greater tragedy than the subsequent Sikh massacres in Delhi had struck the Madhya Pradesh capital of Bhopal. Following an escape of highly toxic gas from Union Carbide's ill-maintained and possibly sabotaged pesticide plant, Bhopal city had awoken to scenes of human devastation not witnessed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Eight thousand either lay dead or would die within the first seventy-two hours. As many as another 12,000 would later succumb to the effects of contamination. 'Miscarriages, abnormal births and deformed babies would continue down the generations. It was \u2013 and still is \u2013 the worst industrial accident ever recorded.' Thirty years later, responsibility for the leakage was still being disputed and the survivors were still seeking justice.\n\nPakistan suffered something similar in April 1988. At a place called Ojhri an underground arsenal in which US ordnance was being stored prior to shipment to Afghanistan exploded. As the bombs blew up, as the missiles rained down and the fires raged out of control, residents in the nearby cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi supposed they were under attack, presumably by India. Hundreds were killed, thousands wounded. Like General Ziaul Haq's death in an air crash four months later, it could have been an accident or it could have been sabotage. Either way, Bhopal and then Ojhri had raised serious questions about the competence of South Asian governments in ensuring the security, supervision and regulation of volatile technologies, whether conventional or nuclear.\n\nWith such concerns in mind, US condemnation of the Indian and Pakistani tests soon gave way to engagement. The priority was to get the nuclear newcomers to sign up to President Clinton's Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and submit to its regime of self-denial, international monitoring and regional peace-building. Neither New Delhi nor Islamabad was enthusiastic. Both played for time, and demanded the prior lifting of sanctions. In the case of New Delhi, crucial support came from the diaspora in the US. In the previous twenty years the number of Indians resident in North America had soared to over 1.2 million. Most were highly qualified, and many 'had formed professional associations and political organisations that wielded impressive clout'. During the 1990s the Indian community's financial contributions to US Congressional candidates had doubled to the point where 'more than a quarter of the entire House of Representatives' belonged to a pro-India caucus. Thanks in large part to this constituency, in the end it was the US Congress that failed to approve Clinton's Test Ban Treaty, so letting India off the hook.\n\nPerhaps a greater surprise was the willingness of the BJP-led government to accommodate American concerns. Instead of pitching India into another military confrontation with its neighbour, as was generally feared, Prime Minister Vajpayee responded to US promptings for a normalisation of Indo\u2013Pak relations with a veritable charm offensive. Specifically, he made the first symbolic overture in over a decade to mend \u2013 or in this case, open \u2013 fences with Pakistan.\n\nThe gesture took the form of a coach ride. Following amicable encounters with Nawaz Sharif in Colombo and New York, in February 1999 Vajpayee boarded the inaugural run of a cross-border bus service, the first in the living memory of most South Asians. In Lahore, Sharif was on hand to greet and host the visit. It included an improbable excursion to the Eiffel-esque Pakistan Tower. There, at the spot on which Jinnah had first voiced the demand for a Muslim homeland, respects were paid by the champion of a Hindu homeland. Fifty years after Partition, an Indian Prime Minister was endorsing the 'two-nation' theory. Memoranda were signed about closer consultation over nuclear security, communications and other 'confidence-building' matters. And both leaders pledged to increase their efforts to resolve outstanding differences, 'including the issue of Jammu and Kashmir'. Optimists might reasonably have concluded that where all else had failed, the bomb was succeeding.\n\nThe euphoria lasted barely two months. In early May 1999, reports reached New Delhi from Kashmir of an infiltration from the Pakistan side of the Line of Control (formerly the Ceasefire Line). Numerous Indian positions in the mountains overlooking Kargil, which had been vacated for the Himalayan winter, had been captured. A pit-stop town of diesel spillages and tyre vulcanising, Kargil straddled the vital Srinagar\u2013Leh highway to Ladakh. The highway itself was coming under attack; the 'Kargil War' had begun.\n\nPakistan claimed that the infiltrators were Kashmiri 'freedom fighters', though it later conceded that regular troops and artillery were also involved. To dislodge them, India sent in the air force and ordered up reinforcements. As per Bhutto's war of 1965, an Indian diversionary advance looked likely, either elsewhere across the Line of Control or across the Indo\u2013Pak frontier in the Punjab. In preparation for just such a development, Pakistan was reported to be deploying missiles with nuclear warheads. By June, an obscure cross-border incursion was being portrayed as the greatest current threat to world peace.\n\nYet by mid-July the crisis was over. Indian forces had retaken their lost eyries. Meanwhile Washington, in no doubt as to Pakistani responsibility, had been pressing Nawaz Sharif to withdraw and Vajpayee to withstand demands for escalation. Each leader also faced domestic criticism. There had been failures of intelligence on both sides, and around a thousand lives had been lost with little to show for them. Benazir Bhutto called the whole affair 'the worst blunder in Pakistan's history'. For Vajpayee there was at least the consolation of having restored the status quo. Less plausibly, Sharif claimed ignorance. When the pretence that the infiltrators were Kashmiri dissidents fell through, he accused his new Chief of Staff, Pervez Musharraf, of authorising the infiltration without consulting him. Musharraf denied this, and it was this blame game that led to Sharif's cack-handed attempt to replace his Chief of Staff, followed by the retaliatory military coup that brought Musharraf to power for the next eight years (1999\u20132007).\n\nAnother military, and possibly nuclear, confrontation loomed following the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament. Occurring within weeks of America's 9\/11, it brought an Indian endorsement of the 'war on terror', calls for instant retaliation and a massive build-up of troops along the Line of Control and the Indo\u2013Pak frontier. The danger of an international conflagration was likened by US analysts to that over Cuba in 1962. In Nepal, a country that was itself reeling from the mass assassination of its royal family, all South Asia was described as 'poised on the cusp of war'.\n\nHappily, the BJP-led government in Delhi did nothing rash. State elections due in Kashmir in 2002 went ahead as planned, and saw a gratifying turnout. There the tit-for-tat of outrage and retaliation continued, as did governmental threats and counter-threats. But the security forces in Kashmir showed a little more restraint, tourists trickled back to the Valley, and in Pakistan the now President Musharraf responded to international pressure; Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohamed were banned (albeit temporarily), and Pakistani backing for Islamist fighters in Kashmir was curtailed. When in 2003 Musharraf survived a couple of assassination attempts, he was reportedly 'appalled to discover that some of those responsible belonged to Pakistan-based Kashmiri militant organisations'. The Kashmiris themselves also seemed to have had enough of the Islamist militants. Twelve years of brutal strife had brought a solution no nearer, and the attractions of joining Pakistan had waned. A glance at the economic indicators left no doubt that Kashmir was potentially far better off under India than under Pakistan.\n\nWith these considerations in mind, dialogue between Islamabad and New Delhi resumed. The cross-border bus and train links were reinstated. Indeed, in 2005 another was added \u2013 a carefully monitored bus shuttle across the Line of Control between Srinagar in Indian Kashmir and Muzaffarabad in Azad Kashmir. Trade links, an important consideration for both governments, followed. At the Wagah checkpoint on the Punjab border, queues of 'Jai Hind'-emblazoned carriers from Haryana jousted with garishly painted hauliers from the Mecca of 'truck art' in Peshawar. By 2006 this bilateral trade was valued at $1 billion a year.\n\nMeanwhile Musharraf had announced a unilateral ceasefire along the Line of Control, which Vajpayee had reciprocated. In 2004 the two leaders met once again in Islamabad. An agreement on further 'confidence-building measures' was signed; and though Vajpayee's National Democratic Alliance was promptly defeated at the polls, its successor, a Congress-led United Progressive Alliance led by Manmohan Singh, continued the so-called 'composite dialogue'. Musharraf now seemed willing to go the distance in seeking a Kashmir solution. Kashmiri training camps in Pakistan were being turned into resettlement camps; instead of being armed and funded to fight, the militants received cash payments not to fight: 'they got $800 for stopping their fight and another $800 for settling into civilian life by getting married'.\n\nA long-term settlement of the Kashmir dispute was still long-term. But by 2007 Musharraf was airing the possibility that Pakistan might abandon its preference for UN involvement, along with its concomitant insistence on a plebiscite. Instead, a bilateral programme of demilitarisation, abolition of the Line of Control, joint administration in some areas, and greater autonomy overall was discussed. This looked promising. Reconciling public opinion to it, however, did not. The UPA government in Delhi seemed to get cold feet, and in 2008 Musharraf himself was forced into exile following elections marred by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. In Pakistan no government, least of all a PPP one led by Benazir's husband, could afford to be seen abandoning a sixty-year claim to a state without which, in Bhutto senior's words, Pakistan remained 'head-less'.\n\nEven if Benazir, and then her husband Asif Ali Zardari, personally favoured pursuing the negotiations, neither could count on the support of the military or the ISI, let alone the Islamists, any or all of whom would construe such a move as justifying extra-constitutional intervention. In Pakistan, as in India, movement on Kashmir remained hostage to the dictates of electocratic politics and the irredentism of the bureaucratic-military establishments.\n\n*\n\nAs well as some progress on Kashmir, in 2003 Vajpayee made a week-long visit to China. It was the first by an Indian Prime Minister in a decade. Contentious issues, like the still disputed boundaries in Ladakh and the north-east, were left open; but bilateral trade was promoted, and Indian recognition of Chinese sovereignty in Tibet was reaffirmed in return for _de facto_ Chinese recognition of Indian sovereignty in Sikkim. The veneer of accord between the world's two most populous nations was reassuring.\n\nDomestically too, the BJP-led government picked its way with caution. To scholarly disapproval, India's schoolroom histories were radically rewritten to reflect Hindu nationalist contentions. On the other hand, the Sangh Parivar's temple-building expectations at Ayodhya and elsewhere were judged too provocative to be championed. Besides triggering further communal unrest, they would alienate the BJP's partners in government, many of whom had local caste or ethnic affiliations that conflicted with the Sangh's prioritising of an all-embracing Hindu-ness. The moderating influence exercised by these lesser parties and their so-called 'identity agendas' would prove as inimical to ideological rigidity as to dictatorial leadership. Coalition politics in India, far from 'ushering in an era of instability', could be seen as evidence of a new maturity.\n\nThis did not, though, make for electoral certainty. With no party likely to command an overall majority, and in the absence of an incumbent scion of the Nehru\u2013Gandhi dynasty, the composition of upcoming governments could be hard to predict. The Congress-led UPA government, which won India's 2004 elections and then repeated the feat in 2009, was a case in point. A victory for the BJP had been confidently predicted in 2004. Instead, Congress surprised itself and was able to form a ruling coalition with help from caste-based parties in UP and Bihar, and leftist parties elsewhere. No less surprisingly, the new government was for the first time headed by a technocrat. Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv's Italian-born widow, had again declined the post, only to award it to someone who was almost as much an outsider as she.\n\nThough already in his seventies, Dr Manmohan Singh was seen as a political neophyte. He had been plucked from the upper house of the Indian Parliament, and had never contested an election; indeed, after a distinguished career as an academic and bureaucrat, he had entered the political fray at an age when his contemporaries were retiring. He had no obvious base of support within the party and little experience of the horse-trading necessary to acquire one. He was also a Sikh, a stranger to charisma, soft-spoken, self-effacing and apparently incorruptible. Indian politics had rarely seen his like.\n\nHis one claim to fame and preferment rested on a stint as Finance Minister in the Narasimha Rao government of the early 1990s. When invited to join that ministry, he had been as surprised as anyone. 'I didn't take it seriously,' he told the BBC's Mark Tully. Rao, however, had persisted, and Singh had eventually obliged. He donned a high-collared suit, wrapped on his turban, and 'that's how I got started in politics'.\n\nThe summer of 1991 had not been a good moment to be taking charge of the nation's finances. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait had again inflated the price of oil, leaving India's national debt at an unprecedented $70 billion. The fiscal deficit stood at 8 per cent of GDP and revenue from direct taxes contributed only a pitiful 19 per cent. Foreign currency reserves had dwindled till they sufficed for just two weeks' imports. An IMF loan was unavoidable, for which part of the nation's gold reserves would have to be pledged as collateral.\n\nNone of this was popular. The crisis might well have brought down the government before it had even started. But Narasimha Rao admired Singh's writings on the drawbacks of statist regulation, and shared his faith in the power of the markets. Where Thatcher, Reagan and the 'tiger economies' of South-East and East Asia had led, India would follow. Four decades of centralised economic management would be reversed in twenty-four months. It had been a case of back to square one for the Indian economy, then forward into the global unknown.\n\nThe rupee had promptly been devalued by 20 per cent, so encouraging exports and negating the need for export subsidies. Import quotas and licences were likewise eased, customs duties reduced, and foreign direct investment welcomed. Instead of erecting a protectionist wall designed to support indigenous production and repel the hostile forces of capitalist imperialism, India's doors had suddenly opened for business. Internally, the 'permit raj' and the state purchasing agencies were steadily dismantled. Markets in almost everything from cars to cough mixture were thrown open to all. Privately owned industries could expand without restriction, while state-owned industries, though not privatised, had their spending curbed. Competition in the service and construction industries followed, with easier entry into banking, insurance, aviation, roadbuilding and telecommunications.\n\nTax rates came down in expectation of overall receipts rising, which they did. Within two years the fiscal deficit had fallen substantially, and the foreign exchange reserve had 'shot up to $20 billion from $1 billion in 1991'. Inflation had halved, foreign investment was doubling every year and the economy began growing by 6\u20138 per cent. Rao's gamble and Dr Singh's arithmetic had paid off. Indians would toast the new millennium as the new 'billennium'. In 2000 the country's population passed the billion mark just as the number of rupee billionaires passed the hundred mark. With occasional setbacks and a lot of grousing over the protection extended to still reserved sectors of the economy, the growth continued. It peaked in 2010 at around 10 per cent, by when the billionaires numbered in their thousands.\n\nManmohan Singh deserved much of the credit for all this, and would eventually receive it. But in the early 1990s his bombshell had barely registered outside financial circles. Even there it encountered opposition. A group of major industrialists formed a 'Bombay Club' to plead for caution in exposing them to global competition. 'Thankfully the government of the day did not respond to all that high-powered and slightly hysterical lobbying.'\n\nThe reforms had not been entirely new, either. In the 1980s, while fighting shy of opening domestic markets to competition \u2013 let alone to foreign competition \u2013 both Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi had made it slightly easier for existing businesses to expand. Dhirubhai Ambani, founder of Reliance Industries, had progressed from trading in synthetic fabrics to producing the polymers for them in the 1980s. Come the 1990s, Reliance turned to petrochemicals and by 2010 was one of the largest conglomerates in India, with over 2.5 million satisfied shareholders. Other companies were less successful. Vayudoot, the first low-cost domestic airline, had taken to the skies in 1981. It was to serve routes that its state-owned parent companies regarded as hazardous or commercially unattractive. So they proved: Vayudoot had lost both money and friends before civil aviation was deregulated and a host of brightly coloured competitors made off with its passengers.\n\nRajiv had overseen other changes. The success of domestically produced pharmaceuticals had been acknowledged and encouraged in the 1980s. Also in that decade, every roadside village had acquired, among the mud huts and the haystacks, a bright-yellow booth advertising STD, ISO and fax services. Thanks to new switch-gear, fibre-optic cables, meterised handsets and a pioneering entrepreneur called Sam Pitroda, India was suddenly swamped with telephones that actually worked. But Rajiv's greatest contribution had probably been his advocacy of digital technology. From 135 per cent, import duties on computer hardware had been reduced to 60 per cent. Then in 1987 a Texas Instruments experiment in outsourcing chip design to Bangalore had led to the first direct satellite link with the US. This 'changed the rules of the game'. Instead of migrating to Silicon Valley, computer-savvy Indians found opportunities at home. Companies like Infosys thrived as much because of the revolution in globalised IT as because of the 1990s' economic liberalisation. 'Started with a capital of $600 [in 1981]..., Infosys was worth $15 billion by February 2000.'\n\nYet, overshadowed by Ayodhya and its aftermath, the reforms introduced by Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh in the early 1990s had not proved sufficiently popular to ensure re-election. Defeated in 1996, Rao's government had made way for the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in 1998. Prime Minister Atul Behari Vajpayee had then conducted Pokharan II and made his bid for 'great power' status. To the confidence and excitement generated by the bomb was added that of the take-off in the economy. Sacrificing such tangible gains for confessional extravaganzas was not in the interests of the BJP and its business supporters. The Mandir __ would have to wait, and the Ram bricks take their chance in the Indian climate. The BJP and its National Democratic Alliance stuck with liberalisation.\n\nIn fact it was Vajpayee who highlighted the crying need for better infrastructure if Indian production was to compete internationally. Specifically, he focused on the atrocious state of India's road network, by launching in 1999 construction of a 6,000-kilometre 'Golden Quadrilateral'. A multi-lane highway, the Quadrilateral linked Delhi, Calcutta (Kolkata), Madras (Chennai) and Bombay (Mumbai), plus numerous cities in between (e.g. Bangalore, Pune). Completed on time and under budget in 2012\u201313, the network was a revelation. Freight logjams were eased, and Indians explored the culture, if not the driving conventions, of life in the fast lane. No one wanted to be reminded that the $12 billion spent over eight years on the Quadrilateral was in China being spent on new roads every year.\n\nReturning to power in 2004, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance under Manmohan Singh progressed less certainly. Growth remained buoyant, but telecom scandals revealed the seedier side of private enterprise, while sectors like retailing and finance were still subject to some protection. Walmart and Ikea, for instance, were kept waiting while the government endeavoured to convince its coalition partners that votes lost by endangering the livelihoods of shopkeeping supporters could be replaced by those of the grateful shelf-stackers signed up by the multinationals.\n\nThe debate, as so often, was conducted in the context of the growing and largely urban middle classes. It was of no relevance to the rural poor who still made up the majority of the population. Their share of every scheme designed to improve their lot was probably no better than the 15 per cent allowed by Rajiv Gandhi's estimate that 85 per cent of all development funds was pocketed by corrupt officials.\n\nA Unique Identification Scheme launched by Manmohan Singh in 2009 is designed to eliminate this 'wastage'. Every one of India's 1.2 billion citizens is being issued with a biometric ID card to ensure that any benefits to which he or she is entitled actually reach them. The scheme, though fraught with teething problems, is not beyond the number-crunching capacity of an IT-confident people accustomed to conducting the world's largest electoral count. And by reducing administrative costs and distributive 'wastage', it could make existing programmes for poverty alleviation much more cost-effective.\n\nOne such programme guarantees to every person of working age a hundred days' paid employment per year; another provides heavily subsidised foodstuffs to the poorest. A new version of this latter is intended to benefit over two-thirds of the entire population. Rolled out in 2013, it is not without its citics. Some see the cheap food as a vote-catching ploy ahead of the 2014 elections; others think its cost of 1.3 trillion rupees (about \u00a316 billion) an extravagance that India's no-longer-buoyant economy can ill afford; and all anticipate a bonanza for the wholesalers and retailers who, in time-honoured fashion, will sell top-quality subsidised cereals on the open market while so adulterating the sub-standard remainder as to make much of it inedible. But if the ID cards help in tracking this munificence through the dealers and the 'fair price' shops to the shopping bags of the eight hundred million entitled to it, a mighty obstacle to all schemes of relief and betterment will have been overcome. Armed with their unique ID cards, the next generation of Midnight's Descendants should be in line for all the maternity, health, educational and training opportunities on offer. Such levelling-up might have reconciled even Pandit Nehru to the rampant consumerism of 'Shining India'.\n\nBetter still, the ID scheme strikes at that most basic of contradictions identified by the Constitution-drafting Dr Ambedkar and the political scientist Sunil Khilnani: that the Indian Constitution and the bloc voting it encourages reinforces community solidarity to the detriment of individual rights and a sense of shared citizenship based on them.\n\nOn the face of it, community identities seem more entrenched than ever. In 2012 Ms Mayawati, a fifty-six-year-old _Dalit_ teacher who had become leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), completed five years in office as Chief Minister of the largest state in India. _Bahujan_ being another euphemism for _Dalit_ , __ the BSP relies entirely on Uttar Pradesh's _Dalit_ vote. Mayawati repays this loyalty by combining a relentless promotion of _Dalit_ identity with dazzling displays of personal wealth and a passion for _Dalit-_ related __ statuary and public spectacles. The effect is to promote individual empowerment as much as community betterment. According to her biographer, Mayawati is revered above all as 'a woman belonging to the most crushed community known to mankind [who] has risen through the heat and dust of elections to rule two hundred million people'. The message is obvious: even for a _Dalit_ , __ anything is possible in today's India. The public celebrity of the few \u2013 in politics as in sport, business or the movies \u2013 nurtures personal aspirations among the many. By enshrining the entitlement rights of each and every citizen regardless of age, gender, family or community, the ID card should confirm this growing sense of individual identity.\n\nAs a result, the pattern of Indian politics could become even more fragmented and parochial. That may not be a bad thing. The pattern of politics over the last six decades has not endeared itself to everyone. Many in India now argue that domestic instability could best be contained by constitutional reform at the top; and many outside India argue that regional stability could usefully be promoted by some genuine engagement among all the states of South Asia. New, even hopeful, perspectives are opening up.\n\n## Epilogue\n\nIn June 2013 the _Katmandu Post_ carried a report about Nepal's Ministry of Foreign Affairs placing an order for assorted vehicles: 'twenty-one Mercedes including eight super-luxury bullet-proof ones... eight medium luxurious cars, ten small cars and seven vans'. What made the matter newsworthy was not the purchase but its purpose; for according to the paper, such an order could only mean that the country's interim government had 'seriously started preparing' for the eighteenth Summit Conference of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC). Already much-postponed by Nepal's delayed elections and constitutional uncertainties, the conference would 'likely be held' in February 2014, that month's 'pleasant weather' being an important consideration, said the paper. A venue for the heads of state to meet in had already been chosen, and plans would soon be unveiled for 'a trade fair, a junket for spouses of VVIPs and VIPs, and SAARC-related exhibitions and promotions'. The total cost was put at 750 million rupees, a third of which would be needed to buy the cars.\n\nSo far, so good. By the time this book is published, the twenty-one Mercedes should be gliding around Katmandu's much-contested thoroughfares. Nepal's delayed elections should have been held, a new Constitution should be in the offing, and the eighteenth SAARC Summit Conference should be getting under way. Alternatively none of these things will have come to pass, in which case the least regretted is likely to be the SAARC Summit.\n\nRegional cooperation has a rather depressing record in South Asia. In a subcontinent with so much in the way of shared culture, common history, mutual traditions of exchange and matching experience of poverty and displacement, the logic of collaboration has long been recognised. SAARC was officially set up on the initiative of President Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh in 1985. As well as recognising the potential for developmental cooperation, Zia saw the organisation as a way of offsetting the influential role accorded to India by his predecessor Mujibur Rahman. Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal sympathised; and so for similar reasons did Bhutan and the Maldives. Not without misgivings, India also went along with the idea, and thus came into being the seven-member SAARC (later increased to eight members with the admission of Afghanistan; hence the eight bulletproof limousines).\n\nThe Association was \u2013 and nearly thirty years later, still is \u2013 sometimes hailed as a potential counterpart of ASEAN, or even the EU. Joint initiatives on everything from tourism and counter-terrorism to TB prevention and visa exemption have been explored. Scrupulously fair in distributing its favours, SAARC has awarded its Chamber of Commerce to Islamabad, its Cultural Centre to Colombo, its Meteorological Centre to Dhaka, and its Disaster Management Centre to Delhi. The Secretariat is in Katmandu. Film and literary festivals are held, various awards doled out. Under SAARC's auspices a South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) was launched in 2006, and a South Asian University in 2010. Although the Association has no political role, informal contact among SAARC members is credited with providing a channel for feelers over contentious issues like Kashmir; similarly, summits help break the ice between hostile heads of state. On the face of it, SAARC is doing more to heal the divisions created by Partition and half a century of mutual suspicion than any other organisation.\n\nYet much of this is often written off as the window-dressing to be expected of a talking shop. Mutual distrust, along with instability in one or more of the member states, cripples almost every initiative. Laudable in its intent, the visa exemption scheme applies to such a privileged few, and is so bureaucratically encumbered, that the vast majority of cross-border travel remains of the illegal variety. Likewise SAFTA, once seen as the preliminary to a South Asian customs union and a single common currency, has become bogged down in tariff reduction targets and interminable lists of the items to be excluded from them. The festivals are often a farce, and the summits notoriously unproductive. SAARC remains a good idea whose moment is still to come.\n\nThe second decade of the twenty-first century could prove to be just such a moment. At last the guns have mostly fallen silent, and accountable government prevails. As of 2006 Katmandu ceased to be engaged in war with the Maoists, and as of 2009 Colombo could claim to have defeated the Tamil Tigers. The fallout from these conflicts continues. Nepal awaits a settlement that will permit elections and the formation of a government; and the Sri Lankan regime of President Mahinda Rajapakse and his family has yet to deal convincingly with accusations of war crimes, let alone the roots of Tamil alienation. Nevertheless, normality of a sort has been restored. The integrity of Nepal and Sri Lanka are no longer under threat. Tourism and inward investment, much of it from China, are picking up in both countries. Relations with India are generally good.\n\nSo too is the outlook for democracy in the region. Barring postponements, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, the Maldives and even Afghanistan will all have newly elected governments by the end of 2014. Meanwhile the only coup of recent date, that in the Maldives in 2012, is said not to have been a coup at all, just a temporary emergency. Given a choice between protest and progress, South Asians seem increasingly inclined to put their own interests ahead of those of the communal hotheads. In cities heaving under the weight of ten to twenty million people, more take the metro to the local mall than take to the streets with sticks. Bombings \u2013 dare one say it? \u2013 are rarer; they may have peaked even in Pakistan. Outside Pakistan the same holds good for communal massacres. Shoot-outs along the Line of Control in Kashmir, which might once have threatened all-out war, are now played down by both Delhi and Islamabad as the work of extremist elements keen to derail any Indo\u2013Pak rapprochement. By mutual agreement the gladiatorial choreography of the daily flag-lowering ceremony at the Wagah border crossing on the Indo\u2013Pak frontier has been toned down; the partisan crowds bussed in by both sides to abet the nonsense no longer rate the spectacle worth the journey. In the east, a train a day links Calcutta and Dhaka, as do several bus services and airlines. Visitors are at last being freely admitted to India's north-eastern states, and newsrooms are no longer taxed by that area's proliferation of 'National\/United Liberation Fronts'. Everywhere cross-border trade has increased dramatically, although still representing only a fraction of its potential.\n\nIt all amounts to what could be the most significant lull yet in the fraught affairs of Midnight's Descendants. After a decade and a half of nation-building, followed by similar periods of populist posturing, assertive confessionalism and then frantic globalisation, the region has a chance to draw breath and take stock. For SAARC, the eighteenth Summit could be a turning point. With US and NATO forces poised to withdraw from Afghanistan, superpower involvement in South Asia's constituent states has reached a low ebb, and the region has an unusually free hand in determining its future. The worldwide recession may actually have helped. A relapse in India's growth rate from around 10 per cent in 2010 to under 5 per cent in 2013 has had a sobering effect. The 'miracle' of the previous decade may, it is said, have been just a 'spurt', a 'bubble' even. Bullish projections about India as an emerging rival to China have been revised, and the disparity between Delhi's economic performance and that of its immediate neighbours looks less unbridgeable. As salaries rise in Bangalore and Gurgaon, outsourcing by international companies is increasingly benefiting Dhaka and Colombo. Incredibly, in 2013 Mumbai's stock exchange was being outperformed by Karachi's. Inflation in India remained in double digits, and the value of its rupee had slipped by 27 per cent in as many months. Another spike in oil prices, plus South Asians' traditional recourse of buying gold in uncertain times, was creating havoc with the balance of trade. Meanwhile inward foreign investment was declining as outward Indian investment to tax-low destinations like Dubai, Singapore and Mauritius was increasing. Global collaboration at the corporate level, having long sidelined regional cooperation at the governmental level, could yet give SAARC a new relevance.\n\nBreathing life into the bodies politic may be more problematic. The shortcomings of Westminster-style democracy as practised in South Asia have long been conceded; yet incumbent governments, having successfully mastered its dark arts, are not keen to change it. Given constituencies containing up to a quarter of a million voters, many of them illiterate and readily swayed by modest inducements, the trade in block votes is probably inevitable. Likewise, personal attributes like caste, wealth and popular image will continue to count for more when choosing candidates than policies, principles or even party allegiance. The calibre of those elected suffers as a result. Many assembly members aspire merely to retain their seats while angling for lucrative governmental posts that they are often unqualified to hold. Government MPs see their primary task as providing loyal lobby fodder; 'Opposition members feel that the best way to show the strength of their feelings is to disrupt the law-making rather than debate the law.' In this endeavour fists may fly as freely as insults and missiles. On one occasion a vituperative but stickless Raj Narain \u2013 he who dogged Mrs Gandhi's first decade in power \u2013 had to be bodily uplifted and borne shouting from the chamber.\n\nLegislative business suffers accordingly. In its 2010\u201311 sitting the Indian Lok Sabha was so often adjourned, usually as the result of unparliamentary behaviour, that it sat for little over half its allotted hours; two-thirds of Bills pending at the beginning of the year were still pending at the end of the year. The legislatures of Bangladesh and Nepal have an even worse record; boycotts and suspensions are there the norm, with sittings being the exception. In a three-year period in the early 1990s, Bangladesh's opposition parties 'walked out of parliament or boycotted its sessions on fifty-seven occasions'. When an assembly is actually sitting, procedural wrangles often edge out constructive debate, which may be as poorly attended as it is infrequent. Little wonder, then, that governments throughout the region, however ostensibly 'democratic', often feel obliged to bypass Parliament and legislate by presidential ordinance.\n\nIn India it has been suggested that a solution to this state of affairs may lie in the adoption of a formally presidential Constitution. Naturally the preferred models are said to be those of France or the USA rather than Sri Lanka or Pakistan. Under such a dispensation, Parliament's democratic credentials as a directly elected assembly would not be affected. They would simply be counterbalanced by a directly elected President whose equally democratic credentials would be rewarded with supreme executive power plus the option of choosing his Ministers from outside Parliament. Thus law-making and policy-making would be disentangled, the legislature and the executive separated. Presidents accountable to the nation rather than to Parliament would enjoy guaranteed terms of office, during which they should be able to provide the stable direction and speedy execution that necessarily eludes prime ministers beholden to some unwieldy coalition of disparate parties. China's rapid transformation into a superpower has often been linked to the discipline imposed by an authoritarian Communist Party at the helm of a command economy. It is supposed that a presidential Constitution in India, while retaining democratic accountability, might have something of the same effect.\n\nNone of this, though, is likely to happen. Thanks as much to Mrs Gandhi's Emergency as to the dictatorial examples of Pakistan and Bangladesh, any constitutional add-on within which might lurk the germs of autocratic rule is out of the question. But the existing machinery could be reconditioned. In the 1960s, state governments in India were commonly formed or felled by assembly members being bribed to change their party allegiance. This floor-crossing reached epidemic proportions, with at least one politician changing sides nine times in a couple of decades. The practice infected the national Parliament in the 1970s, and was in part responsible for the quick collapse of the post-Emergency Janata government. But in 1985, amid the closing of ranks that followed Mrs Gandhi's assassination, an anti-defection Bill finally made it onto the statute book. Individuals defecting from one party to another could now expect disqualification.\n\nUnfortunately nothing at the time was said about whole parties defecting, a threat which in the context of today's coalition governments is all too common, and makes for inertia and instability. But, like the endless parliamentary adjournments and the unseemly conduct of members, this too could surely be rectified, if not by Parliament itself then by the existing provision for presidential ordinances.\n\nGiven the current lull in protest and dissent, another long-overdue reform might also be undertaken. On 3 November 2000, Ms Sharmila Irom, a young would-be poet and activist from Manipur in India's far north-east, ate her last meal. Twelve and a half years later, when flown from hospital detention in Manipur to appear before a Delhi magistrate on a charge of attempted suicide (an offence under India's Civil Code), Ms Irom had still not taken either food or drink. A feeding tube trailed from her nose as she was helped into court, and her hair looked in need of a brush. Some 4,500 days of forced feeding had also taken a toll of her constitution. Not, though, of her resolve. She duly denied the accusation of suicide, as she has at countless other hearings, and said she wanted to live. As to her fast, which by any standards is 'the longest hunger strike anywhere by anyone', she said she would happily end it there and then; all she asked was that the Indian government first repeal 'AFSPA'.\n\nOtherwise the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, AFSPA dates from 1958, and affords legal immunity to members of the Indian security forces operating within areas that have first been designated as 'disturbed'. Troops in such areas may, on suspicion of hostile intent, detain or shoot any persons and enter, search and destroy any premises, all without risk of prosecution. Imposed in the face of the Naga insurgency and originally applicable only in the north-eastern states, the Act was subsequently extended to Punjab in the 1980s and to Kashmir in 1990.\n\nSharmila Irom became aware of it when in 2000 a local newspaper printed photographs of ten Manipuri civilians, one of them an elderly woman, who had been shot dead at a bus stop in a place called Malom. The killers were members of the paramilitary Assam Rifles, and they presumably had their reasons. But because AFSPA affords them blanket protection, the circumstances can never be known for sure. No case can be brought, and no impartial investigation undertaken. Such, it is said, is the price that a liberal democracy must pay to guarantee the security of its citizens.\n\nMs Irom disagreed, and she still does. So do many other Indians and countless human rights organisations, including that of the UN. AFSPA's condoning of state violence may have served a purpose at the height of the Naga revolt, but it is now wholly counter-productive. Instead of deterring insurgents, it induces the climate of fear and resentment that sustains them. Without it, the north-east might be claimed as a success story. In 2013 Nagaland, along with other north-eastern states, held elections. Turnouts were high and disruption minimal. Nagas and Manipuris have done well out of 'Shining India'. Subsidies have poured into the region and educated young people have poured out. Their missionary-taught English is put to remunerative effect in the call centres of Bangalore and the cabin-crew training schools of Mumbai. Give or take occasional resentment of these un-Indian-looking and largely Christian 'north-easterners', integration is working. The fragmentation of the north-east's insurgent militias is a sign not of escalating violence but of the militants' frustration and disarray. AFSPA has become an anachronism that the army could manage without. To end it, and with it Ms Irom's long agony, all that is required is a little common sense and some legislative compassion.\n\nThe same could be said in respect of Kashmir. There AFSPA is still being readily invoked, and is even more resented. Under its provisions supposed militants are shot on sight, while suspects emerge from summary detention, if they emerge at all, with gruesome evidence of mistreatment and torture. The army claims that AFSPA is essential to dealing with a situation in which Pakistan-backed guerrillas expect sanctuary from a sullen population. They eagerly credit the Act with having reduced the number of 'terrorist incidents', while citing any new incidents, including those directly attributable to AFSPA, as proof that it nevertheless remains indispensable. Others argue that its draconian provisions and the injustices it condones discredit the liberal, secular values that India stands for. Kashmir, they claim, can never be reconciled to Indian rule while it remains in force. Repeal is urged and revision discussed; but the solution of simply declaring all but the immediate border region as no longer a 'disturbed area' seems a step too far.\n\nFor at least twenty years New Delhi and Islamabad have professedly been committed to normalising their relationship. By easing contacts, building confidence and sharing concerns, bilateral tensions have been reduced and the Kashmir issue temporarily sidelined. But tacitly it is agreed that resolving the Kashmir conundrum remains the key to Indo\u2013Pak rapprochement.\n\nThe current lull affords an opportunity to reconsider this assumption. Instead of deeming the normalisation of Indo\u2013Pak relations as hostage to a solution of the Kashmir issue, the equation might be reversed: Kashmir might be seen as hostage to the abnormality of Indo\u2013Pak relations. Kashmiris have long been saying as much, and they may be right. Afghans, too, are becoming aware of their exposure to this regional rivalry. The plight of Kashmir, and arguably of Afghanistan, is symptomatic of the hostility between their nuclear neighbours; it is not, though, the cause of it. That lies far from dormant in the legacy of Partition and the troubled adolescence of both of South Asia's sibling states, especially Pakistan.\n\nJudged by its appalling record of sectarian bombings, Islamist outrages and political murders, today's Pakistan has earned its pariah status. In Akhtar Hameed Khan's phrasing, 'the cutting of heads' still rivals 'the counting of heads' as a means of expressing dissent. In 2013 the security forces were grappling with a new wave of insurgency in Balochistan, ongoing ethno-sectarian strife in Karachi, an indigenous Taliban based in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), numerous militias and terror cells in Punjab and the Frontier Province, and the devastating spillover from the war in Afghanistan. And all this in an Islamic republic buffeted by the wider Muslim world's expectations of its second most populous nation, and the only one with a proven nuclear capability.\n\nData compiled by a Delhi-based 'Pakistan Terrorism Portal' indicates that in the two-year period 2011\u201312 some 12,500 civilians, insurgents and security personnel lost their lives, as against over 19,000 in the period 2009\u201310. Catastrophic flooding by the Indus river as a result of 2010's excessive rains claimed another 18,000 lives and displaced an estimated fourteen million people \u2013 nearly as many as the Great Partition of 1947. The UN estimated the humanitarian crisis occasioned by the floods as worse than the combined effects of the 2002 Asian tsunami, the 2005 earthquake in Azad Kashmir and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. In devising a tragedy commensurate with those already afflicting Pakistan, fate had shown the country no favours.\n\nYet contrary to expectations, South Asia's already 'failing state' resolutely fails to fail. In May 2011 the most wanted man in the universe was found to have spent the past five years living with his extended family in a large and conspicuously cloistered residence within a short stroll of Pakistan's premier military academy. The government had claimed that Usama bin Laden was still in Afghanistan; the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, elements of which may have known otherwise, were wise neither to the CIA's ploy to locate him nor to the US special forces' plan to get rid of him; and a surveillance-conscious military somehow failed to detect, let alone intercept, the airborne raid that duly did so. For a nation shamed on all fronts by its superpower ally, this fiasco could have been the last straw. Azif Ali Zardari's PPP government might reasonably have leaped at the opportunity to discredit the generals and rein in the intelligence service. The generals must have been tempted to get rid of a civilian government which, already mired in scandal and at loggerheads with the judiciary, was now revealed as the dupe of its US backers. And the Islamist militiamen must have stroked their beards and thanked Allah for a wave of anti-American sentiment beyond their wildest dreams.\n\nBut in fact, though accusations flew, nothing untoward followed. The Zardari government served out its term of office; then in 2013 Pakistan went to the polls. By targeting candidates tainted with secularist sympathies, the Pakistan Taliban threatened to dictate the result. Yet the PPP would probably have lost anyway, and the most high-profile casualty proved to be Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician whose party was one of those approved by the Taliban. Khan's injuries were accidental: he toppled backwards off a fork-lift truck while being raised to a rostrum, then conducted the rest of his campaign from a hospital bed, and still did creditably. Victory nevertheless went to Nawaz Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League-N. With an overall majority and a new line in conciliation \u2013 of militant Islamists, ISI mavericks and the military's top brass (excluding his _b\u00eate noire_ , ex-President Pervez Musharraf) \u2013 Sharif embarked on his third term. The only thing abnormal about the change-over was that, for the first time ever and without any obvious military interference, an elected Pakistani government had lasted its full term, honoured the result of the subsequent election and ceded power to another elected government.\n\nThis was no small achievement. Zardari and Sharif, both of them businessmen whose managerial skills have attracted a string of corruption charges, deserve full credit. Nor was the transfer of power their only achievement. In a vital move to underpin democratic practice, Zardari, while in temporary alliance with Sharif's PML-N in 2010, had repealed Ziaul Haq's Thirty-Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, under which the President might arbitrarily dismiss the Prime Minister and dissolve the National Assembly. Zardari also mollified ethnic sentiment by endorsing a move to rename the North-West Frontier Province as 'Khyber-Pakhtunwa Province', and by according to the once Kashmir-controlled Northern Areas a _de facto_ provincial status as 'Gilgit-Baltistan'.\n\nSharif's credentials are more pro-Islamic and economic. His government offers to talk with the Pakistan Taliban instead of fighting them, and to end collusion with the US over cross-border drone attacks. With the benefit of hindsight he claims that it was his efforts to open up Pakistan's economy in the 1990s and attract foreign investment that alerted India to the benefits of liberalisation. He promises the same again. The parlous state of the Pakistan economy is to be redeemed by securing international loans, reassuring investors and addressing the chronic power shortages that condemn Pakistanis to an un-air-conditioned hell for much of every summer.\n\nNone of this will solve the country's long-term problems. With a population fast approaching two hundred million, and with literacy and female empowerment lagging well behind even those in Bangladesh, the state needs to slash military expenditure, create a tax base to which more than the current 0.57 per cent of the population contributes, and pour more funds into education, health and job creation. Politics needs to rid itself of its patriarchal traditions and open up to more newcomers like Imran Khan. Infrastructure, too, cries out for investment, and the environment, both urban and riparian, for regeneration and safeguards. Corruption, as ever, needs to be contained. And perhaps that most contentious question about the nature of Pakistani identity needs to be left unaddressed. Academia may agonise over it, but an answer is best consigned to the benign passage of time.\n\nLess remarked than the smoothness of the governmental change-over in 2013 was the near absence of India and Kashmir as electoral issues. Instead of talking up the threat from across the border in time-honoured fashion, both Zardari and Sharif pledged themselves to improving Indo\u2013Pak relations and seeking a peaceful solution in Kashmir \u2013 in that order. The latter is no longer necessarily contingent on the former.\n\nIndia should be reassured. Pakistani incursions across the Kashmir Line of Control nowadays bring condemnation from Islamabad as well as Delhi. Suspicions of Indian support for Balochistan's separatists receive scant publicity; and the Pakistani nightmare of India being accorded a prominent role in Afghanistan will surely be discounted once the Taliban secure a share in that country's government.\n\nIf Sharif's prime ministership lasts as long as Zardari's, and if the 2014 government in India proves as pragmatic as Atul Behari Vajpayee's at the turn of the century, real progress could be made in repairing the divisive legacy of Partition. The sibling rivalry could be subdued, and the most estranged of Midnight's Descendants sufficiently reconciled to direct their genius for global engagement to improving the lot of a fifth of mankind.\n\n_November 2013_\n\n## Picture Section\n\nLord Wavell, the British Viceroy, greets Mohamed Ali Jinnah prior to round-table talks with the 1946 Cabinet Mission. Left to right: Pethick-Lawrence, Jinnah, Alexander, Wavell, Cripps.\n\nAll smiles, but not for long. M.K. ('Mahatma') Gandhi with Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the British Secretary of State for India, during the 1946 Cabinet Mission talks that rejected the idea of Partition.\n\nThe Muslim League's 1946 call for 'Direct Action' gave Calcutta a foretaste of the horrors of Partition. Here police use teargas to disperse a crowd bent on destroying a Hindu temple.\n\nThe aftermath of the Calcutta killings of August 1946. Thousands, both Hindu and Muslim, perished in the worst outbreak of sectarian violence the city had ever seen.\n\nDespite Partition, Britain's last Viceroy was acclaimed as one of the architects of independence. Lord and Lady Mountbatten found their carriage swamped by the crowd during India's Independence Day celebrations on 15 August 1947.\n\nPandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, addresses a crowd of over a million during the Independence Day celebrations in New Delhi.\n\nIn the greatest exodus ever recorded, as many as fifteen million people fled the horrors of Partition. Here trains packed with refugees wait at Amritsar, close to the new India\u2013Pakistan border.\n\nWhether travelling by road or rail, those displaced by Partition faced a dangerous trek. The refugee caravans stretched for up to twenty miles, and were easy prey. Hundreds of thousands were massacred before they reached safety.\n\nFemale students process through the streets of Dhaka in 1953 to protest against the adoption of Urdu as Pakistan's official language. Riots over the choice of a national language beset both India and Pakistan. Those in Dhaka would give the future Bangladesh its first martyrs.\n\nDemonstrators in Bombay burn an effigy of Pandit Nehru in January 1956 while agitating against the proposed bifurcation of Bombay state into Maharashtra and Gujarat.\n\nIndia found something to celebrate when in April 1953 Tenzing Norgay was one of the first two climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Unlike most previous expeditions, this one had been launched from Nepal, so announcing that country's emergence from a century's isolation.\n\nAn Indian patrol passes the Panggong Lake in eastern Ladakh in 1960. The discovery that the Chinese had built a road across the nearby Aksai Chin prompted the first exchanges that led to the 1962 Sino\u2013Indian war.\n\nPreparing to defend the nation. A series of Indian defeats in the 1962 Sino\u2013Indian war brought a rush of gifts for the war effort, donors to the bloodbanks, and patriots to the recruiting stations.\n\nA village in Jammu and Kashmir destroyed by shellfire during the 1965 Indo\u2013Pakistan war. The war marked the end of an era, being preceded by the death of Nehru and followed by the collapse of Ayub Khan's autocratic rule in Pakistan.\n\nBack to square one. A Pakistani liaison officer shakes the hand of an Indian army officer near the Wagah border crossing after the announcement of a ceasefire in the short Indo\u2013Pakistan war of 1965.\n\nIndian troops advancing into East Pakistan in December 1971 overtake a returning refugee. Several million mainly Hindu refugees had fled to India to escape the Pakistan army's ruthless repression of the separatist movement that led to the creation of Bangladesh.\n\nThe end of what became known as the Bangladesh Independence War. On behalf of his 90,000 Pakistani troops General Niazi signs the document of surrender beside General Aurora, the Sikh commander of the victorious Indian troops.\n\nHyderabad, Thursday, 26 June 1975. The _Indian Herald_ defies Mrs Gandhi's clampdown on the press to print a special supplement on her declaration of the Emergency. In effect a civil coup, the Emergency's suppression of democratic freedoms lasted until 1977.\n\nIndira Gandhi campaigning at Diamond Harbour, Calcutta, for the 1977 elections that marked the end of the Emergency. Despite describing herself as the servant of the people, she and her Congress Party sustained their first ever loss.\n\nMilitant Sri Lankan Tamils undergoing training at a guerrilla camp in southern India in 1986. At this time, India was in denial over providing Tamil militants with sanctuary, and was preparing to send a peacekeeping force to Sri Lanka.\n\nYoung recruits, some little more than children, undergoing basic training in Sri Lanka by a member of the LTTE, or Tamil Tigers. By 2004 the Indian peacekeeping force had been withdrawn, and the Sri Lanka war was edging towards its cataclysmic conclusion in 2009.\n\nOnce New Delhi's prot\u00e9g\u00e9, the Sikh leader Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (seated, with bodyguard) found sanctuary within the sacred precincts of Amritsar's Golden Temple. His reign of terror was brought to an end in June 1984, when the Indian army launched 'Operation Bluestar'.\n\nOne of the Golden Temple's towers pitted by shelling and machine-gun fire during 'Operation Bluestar'. At the revered Akhal Takht the destruction was much worse. In the ruins were found the bodies of Bhindranwale and his closest associates.\n\nKashmiris burn the Indian flag in March 1990. Mounting unrest over the Indian military presence and the heavy-handed manipulation of the state government was about to climax in a decade of confrontation.\n\nOne of many protests against the Indian army's presence in Srinagar. To contain the _intifada_ -like insurgency and track down infiltrators from Pakistan, up to 400,000 regular troops and paramilitaries were deployed in Kashmir in the late 1990s.\n\n6 December 1992. Militant _kar sevaks_ of the ultra-Hindu VHP attack the walls of the sixteenth-century Babri mosque in the UP city of Ayodhya.\n\nIn the ultimate challenge to India's secular credentials, Hindu youths clamber onto the domes of Ayodhya's Babri mosque. Five hours later the mosque lay in ruins, and the most serious sectarian massacres since Partition swept the country.\n\nSmoke and pigeons billow from the famous Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay (Mumbai) when in November 2008 the city was terrorised by _jihadist_ gunmen from Pakistan. Some 164 people, mostly civilians, died in a succession of attacks on high-profile targets.\n\nA section of the Golden Quadrilateral under construction near Kanpur in UP. A multi-lane highway, the Quadrilateral links Delhi to the renamed cities of Kolkata (Calcutta), Chennai (Madras), Bengaluru (Bangalore), Pune (Poona) and Mumbai (Bombay).\n\nSheikh Mujibur Rahman shortly before his assassination in 1975. Known as ' _Banglabandhu_ ', Mujib is revered as the founder of Bangladesh, although his rule proved short and contentious.\n\n'I belong to the sweat and sorrow of this land. I have an eternal bond with the people which armies cannot break.' Zulfikar Ali Bhutto addresses his followers shortly before Ziaul Haq's coup that led to his arrest, doubtful conviction and execution.\n\nAs Chief Martial Law Administrator and President of Pakistan from 1977 to 1988, General Ziaul Haq lent substance to Pakistan's claim to be an Islamic state. He died in a still unexplained plane crash.\n\nBenazir Bhutto, the daughter of Z.A. Bhutto, inherited her father's leadership of the Pakistan People's Party and was elected Prime Minister in 1988 and 1993. Seeking a third term, she was assassinated in 2007.\n\nAs leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BHP), Atul Behari Vajpayee led a National Democratic Alliance as Prime Minister of India from 1997 to 2003.\n\n## Notes\n\n#### Introduction\n\n. Van Schendel, Willem, 'Stateless in South Asia: The Making of the India\u2013Bangladesh Enclaves' in _Journal of Asian Studies_ , __ Vol 61, No 1 (Feb 2002), pp.115\u201347\n\n. Chatterjee, Shib Shankar, 10 Jan 2009 www.assamchronicle.com\/mode\/142\n\n. _Hindustan Times_ , 31 Jan 2010\n\n. Baruah, Sanjib, _Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India_ , OUP, p.5\n\n. Kaku Iralu to National Seminar on Resolving Ethnic Conflicts, Guwahati, 2002, quoted in Glancey, Jonathan, _Nagaland: A Journey to India's Forgotten Frontier_ , __ Faber, London 2011, pp.96\u20137\n\n. Van Schendel, Willem, _The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia_ , Anthem, London 2005, p.4\n\n. Chatterji, Joya, 'The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal's Border Landscape' in _Modern Asian Studies,_ 33, I, CUP, Cambridge 1999\n\n. Sinha-Kerkhoff, Kathinka, _The Tyranny of Partition: Hindus in Bangladesh and Muslims in India_ , __ Gyan, New Delhi 2006, p.135\n\n#### Chapter 1 \u2013 Casting the Die\n\n. Mansergh, Nicholas and Penderel Moon (eds), _The Transfer of Power_ , __ Vol VII, 'The Cabinet Mission 23 March\u201329 June 1946', pp.582\u20135\n\n. Peck, Lucy, _Delhi: A Thousand Years of Building_ , p.274\n\n. Moore, R.J., _Escape From Empire: The Attlee Government and the Indian Problem_ , p.78\n\n. Mansergh and Moon, op. cit., pp.598\u20139\n\n. Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam, _India Wins Freedom: The Complete Version_ , pp.164\u20135\n\n. Jinnah, quoted in Moon, Penderel, _Divide and Quit_ , p.57\n\n. _People's Age_ , __ 26 Aug 1946, reproduced in Sumit Sarkar (ed.), _Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for Independence in India,1946_ , part 1, pp.676\u201380\n\n. Dalton, D.G., 'Gandhi During Partition', in Philips, C.H. and D. Wainwright (eds), _The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives 1935\u201347_ , pp.227\u201330\n\n. Darling, Malcolm Lyall, _At Freedom's Door_ , p.55\n\n. Sarkar (ed.), _Towards Freedom_ , pp.423\u20134\n\n. Darling, op. cit., pp.56\u20137\n\n. Ibid., p.86\n\n. Ibid., p.302\n\n. Ibid., pp.76\u20137\n\n. Mayaram, Shail, _Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity_\n\n. Darling, op. cit., pp.11, 22\n\n. Ibid., p.200\n\n. Mayaram, op. cit., pp.172\u20135\n\n. Copland, Ian, _The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917\u20131947_ , p.354\n\n. Ibid., p.8\n\n#### Chapter 2 \u2013 Counting the Cost\n\n. See especially Jalal, Ayesha, _The Sole Spokesman_ , __ CUP 1985\n\n. Nehru, J., 'Speech on the Granting of Independence, 14 August 1947', reprinted in Brian MacArthur, _The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Speeches_ , London 1992, pp.234\u20137\n\n. Jinnah, M.A., 'Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan', 11 Aug 1947, reproduced in _Dawn_ , __ 'Independence Day Supplement', 14 Aug 1999\n\n. Osman, John, 'The Viceroy's Verdict', letter to _The Spectator_ , __ 4 Sept 2004\n\n. Jalal, Ayesha, _The Sole Spokesman_ , p.292\n\n. Quoted in Chopra, Subhash, _Partition, Jihad and Peace: South Asia After Bin Laden_ , __ 2009, p.166\n\n. Nehru, J., _Selected Works (2)_ , Vol 2, p.140, quoted in von Tunzelmann, A., _Indian Summer_ , p.165\n\n. Jalal, Ayesha, _The Sole Spokesman_ , pp.292\u20133\n\n. Moon, Penderel, _Divide and Quit_ , pp.114\u201315\n\n. Quoted in Collins, L. and D. Lapierre, _Freedom at Midnight_ , p.278\n\n. Von Tunzelmann, A., _Indian Summer_ , p.209\n\n. Aiyar, Swarna, '\"August Anarchy\": The Partition Massacres in Punjab, 1947' in Low, D.A. and Howard Brasted (eds), _Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence_ , pp.18\u201319\n\n. Moon, _Divide and Quit_ , p.116\n\n. Ibid., pp.110\u201311\n\n. Khan, Yasmin, _The Great Partition_ , p.129\n\n. Moon, _Divide and Quit_ , pp.134\u20135\n\n. Khan, Yasmin, _The Great Partition_ , __ p.131\n\n. Moon, _Divide and Quit_ , p.248\n\n. Pandey, Gyanendra, _Remembering Partition_ , p.36\n\n. Moon, _Divide and Quit_ , pp.269, 233\n\n. Pandey, Gyanendra, 'India and Pakistan, 1947\u20132002' in _Economic and Political Weekly_ , __ 16 Mar 2002, p.8\n\n. Symonds, Richard, _In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in India and Pakistan (1942\u20131949)_ , pp.52, 56\n\n. Khosla, Gopal Das, _Stern Reckoning: A Survey of Events Leading up to and Following the Partition of India_ , __ repr in _The Partition Omnibus_ , pp.322\u201349\n\n. Tuker, Francis, _While Memory Serves_ , p.121\n\n. Ibid., p.415\n\n. Ayub Khan, Mohammad, _Friends Not Masters: A Political Biography_ , p.22\n\n. Quoted in Chatterji, Joya, _The Spoils of Partition_ , p.130, fn 71\n\n. Roy, Renuka, 'And Still They Come' in _The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India_ , __ ed. Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, pp.80\u20131\n\n. Zinkin, Taya, _Reporting India_ , p.47\n\n. Khan, Yasmin, _The Great Partition_ , p.130\n\n. Zakir Hussain, quoted in ibid., p.144\n\n. Symonds, Richard, op. cit., p.34\n\n. Ibid., pp.33\u20134\n\n. Kudaisya, Gyanesh, 'Divided Landscapes, Fragmented Identities: East Bengal Refugees and their Rehabilitation in India, 1947\u201379' in Low, D.A. and Howard Brasted (eds), _Freedom, Trauma, Continuities_ , p.114\n\n. Ibid., p.122\n\n#### Chapter 3 \u2013 Who Has Not Heard of the Vale of Cashmere?\n\n. Copland, Ian, 'The Integration of the Princely States: A Bloodless Revolution' in Low, D.A. and Howard Brasted, _Freedom, Trauma, Continuities_ , p.154\n\n. Ziegler, Philip, _Mountbatten: The Official Biography_ , p.410\n\n. Guha, Ramachandra, _India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy_ , p.42\n\n. Quoted in Ziegler, op. cit., p.445\n\n. Quoted in ibid., p.409\n\n. Keay, John, _India: A History_ (2010 edn), p.512\n\n. Lamb, Alastair, _Incomplete Partition: The Genesis of the Kashmir Dispute 1947\u20138_ , __ pp.98, 101\n\n. Nehru, letter to Sri Prakasa, 25 Nov 1947, quoted in Brown, Judith M., _Nehru: A Political Life_ , p.178\n\n. Symonds, Richard, _In the Margins of Independence_ , p.68\n\n. Schofield, Victoria, _Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unfinished War_ , p.41\n\n. Lamb, Alastair, _Incomplete Partition_ , pp.130\u20131\n\n. Quoted in Whitehead, Andrew, _A Mission in Kashmir_ , p.102\n\n. See especially Lamb, Alastair, op. cit., pp.150\u201360\n\n. Schofield, Victoria, op. cit., p.60\n\n. Ziegler, Philip, op. cit., p.446\n\n. Trench, Charles Chenevix, _The Frontier Scouts_ , pp.275\u20136\n\n. Lamb, Alastair, _Incomplete Partition_ , p.194\n\n. Quoted in ibid., p.202\n\n. Ibid., p.227\n\n. Quoted in Schofield, Victoria, op. cit., p.68\n\n. Quoted in Chandra, Bipan, Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, _India After Independence 1947\u20132000_ , p.79\n\n. Whitehead, Andrew, _A Mission in Kashmir_ , __ p.208\n\n#### Chapter 4 \u2013 Past Conditional\n\n. Shaikh, Farzana, _Making Sense of Pakistan_ , p.5\n\n. Mazar Ali Khan, interviewed in 1988\n\n. Keay, John, _India: A History_ , __ p.519\n\n. Shaikh, Farzana, _Making Sense_ , p.6\n\n. Ibid., pp. 8,12\n\n. Malik, Iftikhar H., _State and Civil Society in Pakistan_ , p.27\n\n. Keay, op. cit., p.539\n\n. Zinkin, Taya, _Reporting India_ , p.29\n\n. Ibid., p.37\n\n. Jalal, Ayesha, _The State of Martial Rule_ , p.159\n\n. Keay, op. cit., pp.541\u20132\n\n. Ayub Khan, M., _Friends Not Masters_ , p.52\n\n. Ibid., p.54\n\n. Cohen, Stephen Philip, _The Idea of Pakistan_ , p.60\n\n. Keay, op. cit., p.544\n\n. Cohen, Stephen Philip, op. cit., p.2\n\n. Ibid., p.296\n\n. Guha, Ramachandra, _India After Gandhi_ , p.103\n\n. Quoted in ibid., p.103\n\n. Khilnani, _The Idea of India_ , p.37\n\n. Guha, op. cit., p.273\n\n. Keay, op. cit., p.527\n\n. Kothari, Rajni, _Politics in India_ , p.114\n\n. Chandra, Bipan et al., _India After Independence 1947\u20132000_ , pp.348\u20139\n\n. Zinkin, Taya, op. cit., p.150\n\n. Ibid., p.167\n\n. Ibid., p.171\n\n#### Chapter 5 \u2013 Reality Check\n\n. Quoted in Avedon, _In Exile from the Land of Snows_ , p.36\n\n. Myrdal, Gunnar, _Asian Drama: An Enquiry into the Poverty of Nations_ , p.185\n\n. Maxwell, Neville, _India's China War_ , p.104\n\n. _Times of India_ , 31 Aug 1959, quoted in ibid., p.111\n\n. Prime Minister on Sino\u2013Indian Relations, quoted in ibid., p.118\n\n. Ibid., p.340\n\n. Guha, Ramachandra, _India After Gandhi_ , p.332\n\n. Naipaul, V.S., _An Area of Darkness_ , p.248\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ayub Khan, M., _Friends Not Masters_ , p.128\n\n. Schofield, Victoria, _Kashmir in Conflict_ , p.102\n\n. Ziring, L., _Pakistan in the Twentieth Century_ , pp.280\u20131\n\n. Ballard, Roger, 'Kashmir Crisis; View from Mirpur' in _Economic and Political Weekly_ , Vol 26, 9\/10, 2\u20139 Mar 1991\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Keay, op. cit., p.545\n\n. Ziring, _Pakistan in the Twentieth Century_ , p.254\n\n. Talbot, Ian, _Pakistan: A Modern History_ , __ p.161\n\n. Quoted in Ziring, p.281\n\n. Talbot, Ian, op. cit., p.179\n\n#### Chapter 6 \u2013 Power to the People\n\n. Naipaul, V.S., _An Area of Darkness_ , p.266\n\n. Frank, Katherine, _Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi_ , p.324\n\n. Quoted in Guha, Ramachandra, _India After Gandhi_ , pp.416\u201317\n\n. Segal, Ronald, _The Crisis of India_ , p.14\n\n. Keay, op. cit., p.551\n\n. P.N. Haksar, quoted in Guha, p.437\n\n. Khilnani, S., _The Idea of India_ , p.48\n\n. Ziring, _Pakistan in the Twentieth Century_ , p.308\n\n. Jahan, Rounaq, _Pakistan: Failure in National Integration_ , pp.168\u20139\n\n. Ziring, L., _Bangladesh: From Mujib to Ershad_ , p.50\n\n. Jones, Owen Bennett, _Pakistan: Eye of the Storm_ , p.152\n\n. Bhutto, Z.A., _The Myth of Independence_ , pp.180\u20131\n\n. Ziring, _Pakistan in the Twentieth Century_ , p.329\n\n. Keay, op. cit., p.555\n\n. Mascarenhas, A., _The Rape of Bangladesh_ , p.91\n\n. Imam, Jahanara, _Of Blood and Fire: The Untold Story of Bangladesh's War of Independence,_ quoted in Van Schendel, Willem, _A History of Bangladesh,_ p.163\n\n. Sisson, Richard and L.E. Rose, _War and Secession: Pakistan, India and the Creation of Bangladesh_ , pp.148, 152\n\n. Ibid., pp.189\u201390\n\n. Frank, Katherine, _Indira_ , pp.335\u20136\n\n. Sisson and Rose, _passim_\n\n. A.M. Malik to Yahya Khan, 7\u20139 Dec 1971, quoted in Ali, S. Mahmud, _Understanding Bangladesh_ , __ Hurst, London 2010, pp.85\u20136\n\n#### Chapter 7 \u2013 An Ill-Starred Conjunction\n\n. Ziring, L., _Bangladesh_ , p.94\n\n. Ibid., p.83\n\n. Van Schendel, _A History of Bangladesh_ , __ p.178\n\n. Lewis, David, _Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society_ , p.80\n\n. Quoted in Lifschultz, Lawrence, _Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution_ , p.141\n\n. Ziring, _Bangladesh_ , pp.102\u20133\n\n. Ziring, _Pakistan in the Twentieth Century_ , p.377\n\n. Ahsan, Aitzaz, _The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan_ , p.xv\n\n. Ibid., p.136\n\n. Talbot, Ian, _Pakistan: A Modern History_ , p.229\n\n. Ibid., p.224\n\n. Quoted in Perkovich, George, _India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation_ , p.108, quoted in O.B. Jones, p.338\n\n. Bhutto, Z.A., _If I am Assassinated..._ , p.137\n\n. Ibid., p.25\n\n. Cohen, S.P., _The Idea of Pakistan_ , p.140\n\n. Durrani, Tehmina, _My Feudal Lord_ , pp.6\u20137\n\n. Bhutto, _If I am Assassinated..._ , __ p.193\n\n. Durrani, _My Feudal Lord_ , p.243\n\n. Jagdish Bhagwati, quoted in Guha, R., _India After Gandhi_ , p.469\n\n. Ibid., p.473\n\n. Datta-Ray, Sunanda K., _Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim_ , __ p.71\n\n. Ibid., p.73\n\n. Ibid., p.149\n\n. Singh, Amar Kaur Jasbir, _Himalayan Triangle_ , p.271\n\n. Datta-Ray, p.230\n\n. 'A Merger is Arranged' in _Hindustan Times_ , 10 Apr 1975, quoted in ibid., p.309\n\n. Singh, _Himalayan Triangle_ , p.276\n\n. Quoted in Moraes, Dom, _Indira Gandhi_ , __ p.220\n\n. Quoted in Wolpert, S., _Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan_ , p.254\n\n. Naipaul, V.S., _India: A Wounded Civilization_ , p.134\n\n. Frank, Katherine, _Indira_ , p.389\n\n. Ibid., p.406\n\n#### Chapter 8 \u2013Two-Way Tickets, Double Standards\n\n. Naipaul, V.S., _India: A Wounded Civilization_ , p.140\n\n. La Brack, Bruce, 'The New Patrons: Sikhs Overseas' in Barrier, N. Gerald and V.A. Dusenberry, _The Sikh Diaspora: Migration and the Experience Beyond Punjab_ , p.263\n\n. Kazi, Shahnaz, 'The Domestic Impact of Overseas Migration: Pakistan' in Amjad, Rashid (ed.), _To the Gulf and Back: Studies on the Economic Impact of Asian Labour Migration_ , pp.181\u20132\n\n. Ibid., pp.193\u20134\n\n. Nair, Gopinath, 'Incidence, Impact and Implications of Migration to the Middle East from Kerala' in _To the Gulf and Back_ , __ op. cit., p.344\n\n. Helweg, Arthur W., 'Sikh Politics in India; The Emigrant Factor' in Barrier and Dusenberry, op. cit., p.310\n\n. Akbar, M.J., _India: The Siege Within_ , p.103\n\n. Helweg, A., op. cit., p.309\n\n. Keay, op. cit., p.589\n\n. Jaffrelot, Christophe, _The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics_ , pp.255\u201381\n\n. Chandra, Bipan et al., _India After Independence_ , p.260\n\n. Guha, Ramachandra, _India After Gandhi_ , p.527\n\n. Chandra et al., _India After Independence_ , p.262\n\n. Guha, _India After Gandhi_ , p.548\n\n. Chandra et al., _India After Independence_ , p.266\n\n. Jaffrelot, Christophe, _The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics_ , p.330\n\n. De Silva, K.M., _Sri Lanka's Troubled Inheritance_ , p.228\n\n. Wickramasinghe, Nira, _Sri Lanka in the Modern Age_ , p.272\n\n. Ibid., p.279\n\n. Quoted in ibid., p.280\n\n. De Silva, p.247\n\n. Bullion, Alan J., _India, Sri Lanka and the Tamil Crisis 1976\u20131994: An International Perspective_ , p.51\n\n. Wickramasinghe, p.287\n\n. De Silva, p.253\n\n. Bullion, pp.50\u20131\n\n. Quoted in ibid., p.53\n\n#### Chapter 9 \u2013 Things Fall Apart\n\n. Hazarika, Sanjoy, _Rites of Passage: Border Crossings, Imagined Homelands. India's East and Bangladesh_ , p.29\n\n. Hussain, Wasbir, 'Bangladeshi Migrants in India; Towards a Practical Solution \u2013 A View from the North-Eastern Frontier' in _Missing Boundaries: Refugees, Migrants, Stateless and Internally Displaced Persons in South Asia_ , __ ed. Chari, P.R. et al., p.128\n\n. Hazarika, op. cit., p.31\n\n. Rehman, Teresa, 'Nellie Revisited: The Horror's Nagging Shadow' in _Tehelka_ , __ 30 Sep 2006\n\n. Helweg, Arthur W., op. cit., p.317\n\n. Tully, Mark and Satish Jacob, _Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi's Last Battle_ , p.58\n\n. Ibid., p.71\n\n. Ibid., p.91\n\n. Chandra, Bipan et al., _India After Independence_ , p.334\n\n. Tully and Jacob, p.194\n\n. Quoted in Frank, Katherine, _Indira_ , pp.487, 490\n\n. Guha, Ramachandra, _India After Gandhi_ , p.570\n\n. Helweg, Arthur W., 'Sikh Politics in India; The Emigrant Factor' in _The Sikh Diaspora_ , __ Barrier and Dusenberry (eds), p.318\n\n. Guha, Ramachandra, p.571\n\n. Keay, op. cit., p.580\n\n. Singh, Tavleen, _Kashmir, a Tragedy of Errors_ , p.98, quoted in Schofield, Victoria, p.136\n\n. Ganguly, Sumit, _Conflict Unending: India\u2013Pakistan Tensions Since 1947_ , p.90\n\n. Schofield, Victoria, _Kashmir in Conflict_ , p.140\n\n. Singh, Tavleen, _Kashmir_ , p.131\n\n. Schofield, Victoria, op. cit., p.147\n\n. Guha, Ramachandra, _India After Gandhi_ , p.623\n\n. Singh, Khushwant, _Truth, Love and a Little Malice: An Autobiography_ , p.345\n\n. Chandra, Bipan et al., _India After Independence_ , p.337\n\n#### Chapter 10 \u2013 Outside the Gates\n\n. Muhammad Yunus quoted in Lewis, David, _Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society_ , p.115\n\n. Author interview, Feb 1988\n\n. Author interview, Feb 1988\n\n. Jones, Owen Bennett, _Pakistan: Eye of the Storm_ , p.58\n\n. Talbot, Ian, _Pakistan: A Modern History_ , p.265\n\n. Cohen, Stephen Philip, _The Idea of Pakistan_ , p.208\n\n. Khan, Mazar Ali, in _Viewpoint_ , __ 13 Aug 1981, repr in _Pakistan: The Barren Years 1975\u20131992_ , p.26\n\n. Maulana Rafi Usmani, quoted in Shaikh, Farzana, _Making Sense of Pakistan_ , pp.140\u20131\n\n. Keay, op. cit., pp.590\u20131\n\n. Talbot, Ian, op. cit., p.274\n\n. Author interview, Feb 1988\n\n. Ahmed Rashid, _Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords_ , p.186, quoted in Shaikh, Farzana, _Making Sense of Pakistan_ , p.173\n\n. Jones, Owen Bennett, op. cit., __ p.297\n\n. Ziring, _Bangladesh_ , p.171\n\n. Quoted in Lewis, David, _Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society_ , p.110\n\n. Ibid., p.121\n\n. Riaz, Ali and Subho Basu, _Paradise Lost? State Failure in Nepal_ , p.130\n\n. Ibid., p.126\n\n. Ibid., __ pp.150\u20131\n\n. 'Profile: Nepal's Ex-King Gyanendra' at http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/world\/\u200bsouth_asia\/4225171.stm, accessed 1 Apr 2013\n\n. Riaz and Basu, p.63\n\n. Isobel Hilton, 'When a King's Looking-Glass World is Paid for in Blood' at http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/world\/\u200b2006\/feb\/02\/china.eu, accessed 2 Apr 2013\n\n. Somini Sengupta, 'In a retreat, Nepal's King says he will reinstate Parliament' at http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/04\/25\/\u200bworld\/asia\/25nepal.html?\u200bhp&ex=1146024000&en=8fe71bf94d2a73c8&\u200bei=5094&partner=homepage&_r=0, accessed 2 Apr 2013\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Anbaras Ethirajan, 'Nepal seeks to attract more tourists from Asian nations' at http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/business\u200b-21826181, accessed 3 April 2013\n\n#### Chapter 11 \u2013 India Astir\n\n. Rajiv Gandhi, author interview, Apr 1985\n\n. _Sunday_ , 16\u201322 Jun 1985, quoted in Guha, Ramachandra, _India After Gandhi_ , pp.599\u2013601\n\n. Emma Duncan in _The_ _Economist_ Special Report on Pakistan, 17 Jan 1987, p.3\n\n. Jaffrelot, C., _The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics_ , p.335\n\n. Ibid., p.342\n\n. Keay, op. cit., p.589\n\n. Jaffrelot, p.361\n\n. Chandhoke, Neera, 'The Tragedy of Ayodhya' at www.frontlineonnet.com\/fl11713\/17130170.htm accessed 4 Apr 2013\n\n. Guha, Ramachandra, _India After Gandhi_ , p.583\n\n. Jaffrelot, C., op. cit., p.390\n\n. Ibid., pp.399\u2013400\n\n. Ibid., p.420\n\n. Serill, Michael S., 'India: The Holy War' in _Time_ , 21 Dec 1992\n\n. Quoted in Guha, Ramachandra, _India_ , p.638\n\n. Panjiar, Prashant, 'Advani Looked Disturbed... Mouth Gaping Open' at www.tehelka.com\/story_main42.asp?\u200bfilename+Ne110709ad vani_looked.asp, accessed 6 Jul 2009\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Schofield, Victoria, _Kashmir in Conflict_ , p.158\n\n. Roy, Arundhati, 'Introduction: Breaking the News' in _13 December: A Reader_ , p.ix\n\n. Guha, Ramachandra, op. cit., __ pp.656\u20137\n\n. Keay, op. cit., pp.599\u2013600\n\n. Chandra, Bipan, Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, _India After Independence 1947\u20132000_ , p.292\n\n. Paul R. Brass, quoted in Guha, op. cit., p.659\n\n. Talbott, Strobe, _Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb_ , p.70\n\n. Keay, op. cit., p.584\n\n. Talbott, Strobe, _Engaging India_ , p.16\n\n. Guha, Ramachandra, op. cit., p.679\n\n. Jones, Owen Bennett, _Pakistan: Eye of the Storm_ , p.132\n\n. Ibid., p.135\n\n. Tully, Mark, 'Architect of the New India' in _Cambridge Alumni Magazine_ , __ Michaelmas 2005\n\n. Das, Gurcharan, _India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age_ , p.220\n\n. Rajadhyaksha, Niranjan, _The Rise of India: Its Transformation from Poverty to Prosperity_ , p.92\n\n. Ibid., p.75\n\n. Das, Gurcharan, op. cit., p.246\n\n. Bose, Ajoy, _Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati_ , pp.11\u201312\n\n#### Epilogue\n\n. http:\/\/www.ekantipur.com\/the-kathmandu\u200b-post\/2013\/06\/03\/top-story\/saarc\u200b-summit-preparations\/249519.html, accessed 18 Aug 2013\n\n. Tharoor, Shashi, 'Shall We Call the President?' in _Tehelka_ , __ No 50, Vol 8, 17 Dec 2011\n\n. Ali, S. 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You can use your ebook reader's search tool to find a specific word or passage.\n\nAASU (All-Assam Students' Union) 220\u20133, 235\n\nAbdullah, Farooq 209\u201310, 232\u20133, 236, 238\n\nAbdullah, Sheikh Mohamed 'the Lion of Kashmir' 205: background 70; political outlook 70\u20131; friendship with Nehru 70\u20131; 'Quit Kashmir' stance 71; installed as Emergency Administrator 76\u20137; as India's 'quisling' 81; anti-Pakistan sentiments 83; arrested and placed in detention 89; as guest of Nehru and Ayub Khan 136\u20137; released from detention 169\u201370\n\nAdvani, Lal Krishna 276, 280\n\nAfghanistan xxxiii, 60, 67, 73\u20134, 117, 123, 125, 216, 245, 247\u201350, 286, 300\u20131, 306\n\nAfzal, Mohamed 282\n\nAgartala Conspiracy (1968) 155\n\nAgra 18\n\nAhmadi community 96\n\nAhmed, Tajuddin 171\u20132\n\nAhmedabad 282\n\nAhsan, Aitzaz 174\u20135\n\nAIADMK (Tamil party) 206, 213, 215\n\nAir India Flight 182 bombing 239\u201341\n\nAkali Dal (Sikh party) 105, 203, 206, 224\u201330, 232, 241\n\nAkbar, M.J. 266\n\nAksai Chin 126, 128\u201334\n\nal-Qaeda 240\n\nAldrin, 'Buzz' 117\n\nAlexander, Albert Victor, Lord 1\u20132, 4\n\nAli, Nizam Mir Usman 65\u20136\n\nAli, Tariq 93\n\nAli Khan, Liaquat: and division of territory 35; against migration 48; knowledge of Kashmir incursion 74; Nehru's unwillingness to meet 81; persuaded of need for Kashmir plebiscite 82; prevaricates over ceasefire 87; assumes power 94; US bias 95; reaction to Hindu massacre 97; death 95, 103\n\nAli Khan, Mazar 92\u20133\n\nAligarh 70\n\nAll-India Muslim League 94\n\nAll India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) 267\u20138\n\nAll India Radio 107\n\nAllahabad 54, 190\n\nAlwar state 40\n\nAmbani, Dhirubhai 294\n\nAmbedkar, Dr 296\n\nAmin, Nurul 50\n\nAmritsar 16, 38, 202, 226\u201331\n\nAnandpur Sahib Resolution (1973) 203, 224\u20135, 229\n\nAndhra Pradesh 110\u201311, 116\n\nAnglo\u2013Nepal war (1814\u201316) 119\n\nAnkara 141\n\nArab\u2013Israeli war (1973) 171\n\nArmed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) (1958) 304\u20135\n\nArmstrong, Neil 117\n\nArunachal Pradesh 126\n\nAsia\u2013Africa Conference (Bandung 1955) 124\n\nAsian Employment Programme survey (1987) 200\n\nAsian Games (Delhi, 1982) 227\n\nAsian Relations Conference (1947) 123\n\nAsom Gana Parishad (AGP) 223, 235\n\nAssam 272: insurgency groups in xxii; population interchange 42, 49\u201350, 219\u201320; Sylhet awarded to East Pakistan 64; Chinese incursions nearby 133; Hindu\u2013Muslim conflict 166, 220\u20133; population growth 219\u201320; elections 221\u20132; massacre at Nellie 221\u20133; remains contentious 223\n\nAtaturk, Mustafa Kemal 141\n\nAttlee, Clement 1\n\nAwami League 98\u20139, 154, 157\u20139, 162, 164, 171, 203\n\nAwami National Conference 233\n\nAyodhya 270\u20131, 273\u201383, 295\n\nAyub Khan, Muhammad: on the army 48; changing views on 91; friendly relations with US 95; sends Mirza to Dhaka as Governor 99\u2013100; as part of emergency government 100; proclaims martial law 101; takes over control of Pakistan 102; relations with China 135\u20136; and Kashmir 135\u20137, 156; introduces 'Basic Democracy' 142\u20134, 157, 254; attempts to introduce new Constitution 143\u20134; and East Pakistan 154\u20135; resigns 157\n\nAzad Kashmir xxix, 134, 139\u201341, 290, 306\n\nAzad Kashmiris (Free Kashmiris) 73\u20135, 78\u201380, 88\n\nAzad, Maulana 6\n\nBabbar Khalsa (militant Sikh group) 240\n\nBabri mosque, Ayodhya xxxii, 50\n\nBagh Ali 42\n\nBaghdad Pact 125\n\nBahawalpur state 19, 38, 40, 42, 44\u20135\n\nBahujan Samaj Party (BSP) 296\u20137\n\nBajaur 73\n\nBAKSAL (Bangladesh Peasants and Workers Awami League) 172\u20133\n\nBaloch separatists xxxii\n\nBalochistan xxvii, xxxiii, 96, 101, 176, 285, 306, 308\n\nBaltistan 69\n\nBandaranaike, Sirimavo 150, 214\u201316\n\nBangalore 294\u20135, 302\n\nBangladesh 143: creation of (1971) xxix, 50; fluidity of borders xix\u2013xx, xxii, xxvii; ring-fencing of xxi; _chars_ in xxi, xxiii; migration, diaspora and remittances xxxii, 51, 200; identity in xxiii; religion in xxxiii, 204\u20135; politics and democracy in xxxiii, 251\u20135; view of China xxxiv; communal discord in xxv; as Islamic state xxvi, 251; and Kashmir 67; and Pakistan elections 158; war leading up to birth of 161\u20138; reconstruction in 170\u20131; famine 171\u20132; reign of terror in 172\u20133; Constitution 204; self-help organisations in 243; refugees from 246, 272, 274; elections 252; importance of NGOs in 252\u20134; infrastructure 253\u20134; water-sharing with India 254; violence in 274; _see also_ East Pakistan (East Bengal)\n\nBannihal Pass 58, 64, 69\n\nBaramula 75\n\nBasic Objectives Resolution 94\u20135\n\nBasu, Jyoti 116\n\nBay of Bengal 133\n\nBengal xvii, xxviii, 10, 17, 36, 46\u201353, 55\u20137, 128\n\nBengal Assembly 9\n\nBengal famine (1943) 14\n\nBhagalpur 273\n\nBhakra-Nangal dam 112\n\nBhalapura Khagrabari enclave xx\n\nBharat 36\n\nBharatpur 19, 20\n\nBhashani, Abdul Hamid Khan 'Red Maulana' 158\n\nBhindranwale, Jarnail Singh 225\u201331, 240\n\nBhopal 54, 60, 63, 177, 285\u20136\n\nBhutan 61, 125, 185, 300\n\nBhutto, Benazir 19, 180, 246, 250\u20131, 278, 291\n\nBhutto, Shah Nawaz 64\u20135\n\nBhutto, Zulfikar Ali xxxiii, 102, 158, 172: as Foreign Minister 135; suggests Sheikh Abdullah visits Pakistan 136\u20137; and Indo\u2013Pakistan war 146\u20137; boycotts round-table talks 155; meets China's leadership 156; and Kashmir 156, 169\u201370; as voice of the people 156\u20137; post-election negotiations 160; and 'Operation Searchlight' 161; takes over presidency from Yahya 168; authoritarian rule 175\u20139; nuclear programme 177\u20138; reaction to Indian nuclear experiment 185; objects to annexation of Sikkim by India 190; preferential treatment of Sindis 245; imprisonment and death 179\u201381\n\nBihar 10, 15, 17, 55, 97, 106, 151, 184, 231, 273\n\nbin Laden, Usama 306\u20137\n\nBirendra, King 121\u20132, 188, 255\u20136, 258\u201360\n\nBJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) xxxiii, 209\u201310, 220, 233, 238, 269, 274\u20136, 279\u201380, 282\u20134, 286, 290, 292, 295\n\nBlack September 247\n\nBlack Thunder operations (1986, 1988) 241\n\nBombay (Mumbai) 54, 64, 66, 94, 109, 130, 181, 254, 282\n\nBombay Club 294\n\nBRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) 243, 252\n\nBrahmaputra river xvii, xxi, 133\n\nBrar, General 229\n\nBrezhnev Doctrine 164\n\nBritish Commonwealth 24\n\nBrohi, A.K. 93\n\nBrown, Major William 9\n\nBulganin, Nikolai 111\n\nBurma (Myanmar) xxii, 60, 124, 129\n\nBush, George W. 260\n\nCabinet Mission (1946) 203: members of 1\u20132; importance of 2; first draft outline for constitutional options 3; discussions and recommendations 3\u20135; undermined by Nehru and Gandhi 6\u20137; aftermath of inter-communal killing 7\u201310, 13\u201315; and Wavell's Plan B 10\u201311; and Darling's opinion-seeking quest 11\u201320, 25; failure to understand sub-national identities 15\u201321; failure to clarify status of princely states 21\u20135; abandonment of Plan 25; Mountbatten and acceptance of Partition 25\u20136\n\nCalcutta xviii\u2013xix, xxviii, 35, 47, 49\u201351, 55\u20136, 94, 97, 133, 165, 224, 301\n\nCalcutta Killings (1946) 8\u201311, 13\u201314, 46\n\nCambodia 124, 258\n\nCanada, Canadians xxxi, 177, 201, 212, 217, 224, 240\n\nCarter, Jimmy 207\n\nCentral Police Reserve Force (CPRF) 57, 239\n\nCentral Provinces 94\n\nCentral Treaty Organisation (CENTO) 125, 144\n\nCeylon _see_ Sri Lanka\n\nChamber of Princes 24\n\nChandigarh 203, 225, 229, 241\n\nChatterji, Joya xxv\n\nChattisgarh 56, 106, 116\n\nChauhan, Dr Jagjit Singh 224, 231\n\nChelvanayakam, S.J.V. 214\n\nChina xxii, xxxiv, 111, 115, 118, 120, 146, 167, 207, 255, 278, 303: relations with India 122\u201334, 291\u20132; relations with Pakistan 135\u20136, 151, 164\n\nChitral 117\n\nChittagong 42, 162, 243\n\nChurchill, Winston 33, 117\n\nClinton, Bill 286\n\nCohen, Stephen Philip 102\n\nCold War 83, 111, 124, 247\n\nColombo 165, 167, 210, 287, 300, 302\n\nCommunism, Communists 13, 47, 111\u201315, 125, 132, 150, 256, 303\n\nCommunist Party of India 56, 112\u201313, 115\u201316, 152\n\nCommunist Party Marxist-Leninist (CPM-L) 116, 152, 274\n\nCommunist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) 256\u201360\n\nComprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) 286\n\nCongress [O] 151, 206\n\nCongress Party 83, 114, 149\u201351, 190, 202, 233\u20135, 274, 292; _see also_ Indian National Congress\n\nCongress [R] (later Congress [I]) 151\n\nConstituent Assembly 4\u20138, 24, 28, 31, 35, 94\u20136, 99\n\nCooke, Hope 186\u20137\n\nCripps, Sir Stafford 1\u20132, 4, 23\n\nDahal, Pushpa Kamal 256\n\nDahala Khagrabari enclave xx\n\nDalai Lama 118, 120, 127\n\nDandakaranya 56, 116\n\nDandakaranya Special Zonal Committee 57\n\nDarjeeling 117\n\nDarling, Malcolm Lyall 11\u201320\n\nDatta-Ray, Sunanda 186\u20138\n\nDelhi xxviii, 8, 18, 40, 42, 53\u20134, 166, 246\n\nDelhi Development Authority 193\n\nDesai, Morarji 151, 188, 190\u20131, 205, 207\n\nDhaka xxxi, 10, 37, 48\u20139, 51, 97\u20139, 154, 160\u20131, 168, 171, 253\u20134, 301\u20132\n\nDhaka University 162\n\nDholpur 19\n\nDien Bien Phu 124\n\nDipendra, Prince 259\n\nDir 73\n\nDirect Action Day (16 August 1946) 7\u201311, 14\n\nDMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazagham) 108, 150, 213\n\nDogra Maharajahs of Jammu and Kashmir 69\u201370, 72, 78\n\nEast Pakistan (East Bengal) 37, 136, 151: dissension in xxxiii; and regional similarities xxvii\u2013xxviii, xxxii\u2013xxxiii; becomes Bangladesh xxix, 49, 168; and Indian demands for northern corridor 42; refugees and migrants 48\u201351, 55, 97; described as 'rural slum' 51; given Sylhet 64; discounted by Pakistan leadership 92; supports Muslim League 94; protest and violence in 96\u20137, 154\u20135, 160, 178; conciliatory gestures 97\u20138; language riots 98; provincial elections 98\u20139; direct rule imposed on 99; emergency government formed 100; becomes known as East Pakistan 100; Deputy Speaker killed 102; poverty in 142; Six Point plan for 154\u20135, 158\u201360; and Agartala Conspiracy 155; events leading up to 'Operation Searchlight' 155\u201361; majority representation in Assembly 157\u20138; monsoon flooding in 158\u20139; struggle over 160\u20131; war leading up to birth of Bangladesh 161\u20138; emergence as Bangladesh 168; _see also_ Bangladesh; Pakistan\n\nEast Timor 131\n\n_The Economist_ 266\u20137\n\nEducation Act (1959) 114\n\n_Ekatmata Yatra_ (unity pilgrimage) 270\n\nElizabeth, Princess (later Queen Elizabeth II) 66, 117\n\nEROS (Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students) 214\n\nErshad, Mohamed 199, 204, 251\u20132\n\n_Far Eastern Economic Review_ 172\n\nFarakka barrage 139, 254\n\nFederal Security Force (FSF) 175\u20136, 178\n\nFederally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) 306\n\nFerozepur 40, 42\n\nFive Principles of Peaceful Co-existence (1947) 123\u20135\n\nFrance, French 61, 124, 177\n\nFriendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance treaty (1949) 125\n\nGagarin, Yuri 117\n\nGandhi, M.K. ('Mahatma') xxiii, xxxii, 68, 75, 205: and independence talks 5\u20136; visits trouble spots 10, 46\u20137; on division of India 35; and Nagas 106; and Muslims 205\u20136; embarks on final fast 83\u20134; death 84, 103\n\nGandhi, Indira xxxiii, 49, 124, 172, 294: birth and background 149; election victories 148\u201350, 152; and the 'Emergency' 149, 191\u20134, 205\u20136, 303; politics and economy under 150\u20133, 182\u201394, 205\u201310; sets up Congress [R] 152; introduces constitutional amendments 153; reaction to Pakistan war 164\u20136; war with Pakistan 166\u20138; visits Bangladesh 169; nuclear intentions 177, 185; and assault on Sikkim 185\u201390; and Punjab 201, 224, 226\u201330; and 'Operation Blue Star' (1984) 203, 227\u201330; return to power 208\u201310, 232; and Sri Lanka 216\u201318; orders elections in Assam 221, 223; life threatened 231; and Kashmir 232\u20133; assassination 217, 233\u20134\n\nGandhi, Rajiv 217: and Kashmir 232; coopted as leader 234; signs conciliatory Accords 235\u20136, 238\u20139; and local initiatives 265; amends Criminal Procedures Code 268\u20139; and Ayodhya 271; electoral defeat 274; economic reforms 294\u20135; assassination 275\n\nGandhi, Sanjay: and Maruti factory 183; economic methods 192\u20134; electoral defeat 206; and mother's return to power 209; and Punjab 225, 228; death 225\n\nGandhi, Sonia 234, 292\n\nGanganagar 231\n\nGanges river xvii, 122, 139\n\nGangtok 186\u20137, 189, 263\n\nGarhmukteshwar 15\n\nGeorge VI, King 33, 39\n\nGilgit Agency 69, 71, 78\u20139\n\nGilgit Scouts 78\u20139\n\nGoa xxxii, 61, 124, 130\u20131, 144\n\nGodhra 282\n\nGodse, Nathuram 84, 205\u20136\n\nGolden Temple (Amritsar) 241: attack on 203, 227\u201335; restoration 232, 239; Khalistan militants in 241\n\nGorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) xxii, 272\n\nGovernment of India Act (1935) 99\n\nGrameen Bank 243, 252\n\nGuha, Ramachandra 85, 103, 108\u20139, 131, 192, 266\n\nGujarat 21, 184, 188, 190, 282\n\nGulf states 194\u2013200\n\nGunnar Myrdal, Karl 126\n\nGurgaon 18\u201319, 53, 302\n\nGurkhas 80, 119, 122, 131, 140\n\nGyanendra, King 259\u201362\n\nHaryana state 13, 18, 202\n\nHasina Wajed, Shaikh 173, 251\u20132\n\nHazara 73\n\nHelweg, Arthur 200\u20131\n\nHillary, Edmund 117, 121\n\nHimachal Pradesh 202\n\nHindu Kush 117\n\nHindus, Hinduism xviii, xxiii\u2013xxiv, 103: in Khulna xviii; and Muslims xxiv, 8\u20139, 14\u201315, 17, 21, 38, 84, 136, 163\u20134, 166, 220\u20133, 226, 228, 274, 277, 279\u201383; and communal autonomy xxiv; in Bangladesh xxv; similarities with Muslims xxvii, 17; migration and remittances xxxi, 270\u20131, 283; zealotry xxxiii, 293; and Constituency Assembly members 5; and the Meos 18; in Jat country 20; in Pakistan 30, 83, 92; nationalism 36; casualties of Partition 43\u20136, 105; fraternity with Muslims in Calcutta 47; internal migration 49\u201350, 54\u20135, 66, 163, 186 in East Bengal 51, 96\u20138, 162\u20134; in princely states 63; in Jammu and Kashmir 68\u20139, 72, 87\u20139, 136, 281; and education 114; and Gurkhas 119; in Nepal 122, 143, 256\u20137; in Sri Lanka 150, 211; political engagement 204\u20137, 209\u201310, 267\u201377; in Assam 220; Sikhs massacred by 234\n\nHindustan 16, 35\u20136\n\n_Hindustan Times_ 189\u201390\n\nHissar 44\n\nHizbul Mujahidin 281\n\nHong Kong xxxiv\n\nHooghly river xvii, 139\n\nHunza 78\u20139\n\nHuq, Fazul 99\n\nHussein, Altaf 178, 246\n\nHyderabad 22, 60\u20131, 63, 65\u20137, 85\u20136, 105, 110, 276\n\n**INDIA** : fluidity of borders xix\u2013xx; military capability xxvi\u2013xxvii; and regional similarities xxvii\u2013xxviii, xxxii\u2013xxxiii; complexity 15\u201321; naming of 35\u20137; intellectual and scientific advances 109, 112\n\nintercommunal relations 9\u201311, 15, 17\u201318, 105, 107\u20138, 230\u20135, 265\u201383: population xxvi, 123, 193\u20134, 293\u20134; internal migration 40\u20132, 49\u201351, 53\u20137, 6; citizenship and identity 104, 296\u20137; central\u2013regional tensions 104\u20135; religions and castes 105, 276\u201383; and language 107\u201311, 213; unrest and violence 182, 184\u20135, 190\u20132, 230\u20135, 272\u20134, 277\u201383, 304\u20135; assault on Golden Temple 203; new communalism in 208\u201310; Shah Bano affair 267\u201370; Hindu resurgence 267\u201372\n\neconomy: migration, diaspora and remittances xxx\u2013xxxii; effect of globalisation xxxiii\u2013xxxiv, 195, 294\u20135, 302; Five-Year Plans 112; success 115\u201316; famine and poverty 151; economy and nationalisation 182\u20133, 192, 208, 292\u20137, 302\n\nexternal relations: relations with China 123\u201334, 185\u20136, 291\u20132; external affairs 123\u20135; borders of buffer states 125\u20136; relations with Soviet Union 164; assault on Sikkim 185\u201390; relations with US 207; and Sri Lanka 216\u201318; Accords signed and broken 235\u201342, 272; water-sharing with Bangladesh 254; and SAARC 300\n\nIndependence and Partition: as compromise xviii; absorbs princely states xxxii, 30, 59, 61, 87, 104\u20137; initial talks 1\u20138; allocation of territory 27\u20138, 30, 35\u20138, 40\u20132\n\npolitics and administration 36\u20137, 302\u20135: nation-building xxxii\u2013xxxiii; democracy xxxiii, 104\u20135, 153, 207, 302\u20135; Nehru years (1947\u201364) 91, 95, 103\u201316; Communist influence 111\u201315; education in 113\u201314; nuclear programme 177, 185, 284\u20135, 295; elections 148\u201350, 152, 161, 235, 272, 274\u20135, 295; and the 'Emergency' 149, 191\u20134, 205\u20138, 303; Supreme Court 183\u20134, 268, 282; cronyism and nepotism 183\u20134; lull in protest and dissent 198, 200\u20133, 283; ideology and politics in 205\u201310; as secular state 205; Janata victory 206\u20139; in 1980s 265\u20136; setbacks 272\u20133; in 1990s 278\u201383; increased stability and reform in 292\u20137, 300\u20136; infrastructure 295; Unique Identification Scheme 296\u20137; humanitarian crisis in 306\n\nrelations with Pakistan: and Kashmir 76\u20138, 80, 237\u20139, 287\u2013916; d\u00e9tente 134\u20135, 169\u201370, 286\u20137, 305\u20139; water-sharing 137\u20139; bans Pakistani overflights 161; Pakistani refugees in 163\u20134, 171\n\n_India Today_ 217\n\nIndian Administrative Service 45\n\nIndian Air Force 75\n\nIndian Army 78, 230\u20131\n\nIndian Civil Service 11, 37, 45\n\nIndian Constitution 103\u20134, 106, 110, 113\n\n_Indian Express_ 277\n\nIndian National Congress: and Cabinet Mission proposals 3, 4\u20138; and Muslim League 3, 4\u20138, 10, 12, 14\u201315, 24\u20136, 28; and Direct Action Day protests 9; blamed for economic hardship 14; and princely states 23\u20134; supports Dandakaranya plan 56; anti-monarchist policies 61; language and nationalism 110\u201311; problems facing 130; decline in 150\u20131; _see also_ Congress\n\nIndian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) (in Sri Lanka) 235\u20136, 273, 275\n\nIndian Railways 23\n\nIndo\u2013Bangladesh border: migration and identity xx; enclaves xx\u2013xxi; _chars_ xxi; ring-fenced xxi\n\nIndo\u2013Burmese border xxii\n\nIndo\u2013Nepal border xxi\u2013xxii, 119\u201320, 122, 255\n\nIndo\u2013Pakistan war (1965) ('Bhutto's War') 145\u20136, 149, 153, 159, 177\n\nIndo\u2013Pakistan war (1971) (Bangladesh war) 166\u20138, 181\u20132\n\nIndonesia 124, 131\n\nIndore 60\n\nIndus Waters Treaty (1960) 137\u20139\n\nInfosys 295\n\nInstruments of Accession 25, 59\u201361, 66, 75\u20136, 85\n\nInter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency 249, 282, 307\n\nInternational Labour Organisation (ILO) 200\n\nIrom, Sharmila 304\u20135\n\nIslam 247\u201350: traditions xxiv; attitude towards Hindus xxiv, 8\u20139, 14\u201315, 17, 21, 38, 84, 136, 163\u20134, 166, 220\u20133, 226, 228, 274, 277, 279\u201383; and communal autonomy xxiv; in Pakistan xxvi, 30, 32\u20133, 40, 66, 92\u20135, 98, 100, 102\u20133, 143, 155, 157\u20138, 174\u20135, 179, 204\u20135, 247\u201350, 267, 282\u20133, 306\u20138; in India xxvi, 11, 96, 268\u20139, 273, 281; in Bangladesh xxvi, 204\u20135, 250\u20132; similarities with Hindus xxvii; grievances xxvii; and madrassahs xxxi; militarisation xxxiii, 66, 85, 283; and Constituency Assembly members 5; and Meos 18; casualties of Partition 43\u20136; fraternity with Hindus in Calcutta 47; in Jammu and Kashmir 59, 70, 73\u20134, 85, 236, 238, 281, 290; in princely states 63; migrations and remittances 66, 204; conversions in Tamil Nadu 204; and Mahatma Gandhi 205\u20136; and attacks on civilian targets 240\n\nIslamabad xxxi, 141, 153\u20134, 163, 207, 286\n\nJaipur 18\n\nJaish-e-Mohamed 282, 290\n\nJalandhar (India) xxix, 140, 201\n\nJamaat-e-Islami xxiv, 94, 233, 248\u201350\n\nJammu 68, 71\u20133, 76, 161, 231\n\nJammu and Kashmir xxv, 22, 44, 60, 63\u20134, 68\u20139, 78\u20139, 87\u201390, 95, 105, 125, 135, 137, 165, 209, 237; _see also_ Kashmir\n\nJammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) xxxi, 141, 236\u20138\n\nJana Sangh (Hindu party) 88\u20139, 103, 105, 108, 206\u20139\n\nJanata Party 206\u201310, 224, 232, 304\n\nJandiali 201\n\nJapan 239\u201340\n\nJatistan 20\u20131\n\nJayawardene, J.R. 215\u201318\n\nJessore 136\n\nJharkhand 106\n\nJhelum river 139, 238\u20139\n\nJhelum valley 75\n\n_jihad_ , _jihadists_ xxv, 283\n\nJinnah, Mohamed Ali 245: problems concerning independence 3, 5\u20137, 24; and direct action protest 7, 10; reaction to violence and massacres 10, 14; demands for Pakistan 28, 30, 35; and Mountbatten's Partition plan 30; eve of Independence speech 32, 92; becomes Governor-General of Pakistan 34; objects to naming of 'India' 36; and Junagadh 64; and Kashmir incursion 74; orders army to Kashmir 77; death 86, 103\n\nJodhpur 60\n\nJordan 247\n\nJP Movement 184\u20135, 205\u20136; _see also_ Narayan, Jayaprakash\n\nJunagadh 63\u20135, 81\n\nJunejo, Mohamed Khan 267\n\nKahuta 177, 285\n\nKarachi xxviii, 40, 42, 54\u20135, 57, 61, 64\u20135, 70, 77\u20139, 83, 95, 97, 99\u2013100, 103, 128, 139, 144, 167, 178, 244\u20137, 267, 302\n\nKarakorum states 79\n\nKarakorums 136\n\nKargil War (1999) 287\n\nKarnataka 110, 277\n\nKashmir xxv, xxvii, xxxii, xxxiii, 21, 24, 50, 57, 76, 144, 304: not considered 'India' or 'Pakistan' 58\u20139, 65; description 59, 68; strategic importance of 60, 63\u20135, 70; Nehru family from 60\u20131; Pakistani interest in and incursions into 61, 65, 67\u20138, 72\u20136, 136\u20137, 144\u20137, 167, 287\u201391; location 68\u201370; historical background 68\u20139; politics 70\u20131; India's involvement in 76\u20138, 80, 237\u20139, 290\u20131; Gilgit Scouts coup 78\u201380; Mountbatten's scheme for 81\u20134; resumption of fighting in 85\u20136, 236\u20139; ceasefire 87; Indian incorporation of 87\u201390; as site of contention 90, 287, 306; options discussed 135\u20137; and disappearance of Muslim relic 136; war casualties 159; Line of Control 169, 236\u20137, 287\u201391, 301; Indo\u2013Pakistan agreement over 169\u201370; and Mrs Gandhi 232\u20133; signs Accord with New Delhi 236; reprisal attacks on Muslims 281; elections 290; trade with India 290\u20131; reduction in violence 301; AFSPA in 305; _see also_ Jammu and Kashmir\n\nKashmir Valley 68\u201372, 75, 79\u201380, 90, 135, 233\n\nKatmandu 118, 120\u20131, 129, 255, 261\u20132, 299, 300\n\n_Katmandu Post_ 299\n\nKennedy, John F. 84\n\nKerala 110\u201315, 150, 200\n\nKhalistan 17, 224, 231, 240\u20131\n\nKhalistan movement xxxi\u2013xxxii, 224\u201330\n\nKhan, Abdul Qadeer 177\n\nKhan, Akhtar Hameed 243\u20135, 247, 249, 285, 306\n\nKhan, Amanullah 233, 236\n\nKhan, Imran 307\n\nKhan, Khan Abdul Wali 178\n\nKhar, Mustafa 180\n\nKhilnani, Sunil 102, 112, 153, 296\n\nKhosla, Gopal Das 45\u20136\n\nKhrushchev, Nikita 111\n\nKhulna xviii, 42, 136\n\nKhyber Pass 16\n\nKhyber-Pakhtunwa Province 308\n\nKissinger, Henry 164, 166\n\nKoirala, B.P. 121\u20132, 190\n\nKoirala, Girija Prasad 256, 260, 262, 278\n\nKongka Pass (Ladakh) 128\u20139\n\nKurram 73\n\nLadakh 69\u201371, 80, 126, 129, 132\u20133, 186, 291\n\nLahore xxviii, 8, 16, 37\u20139, 53\u20134, 141, 146, 161, 178, 287\n\n_Lal Bahini_ 172\n\nLamb, Alastair 70, 73, 79, 82\n\nlanguage xxii, 98\u20139, 107\u201311, 125, 150, 202\u20133\n\nLashkar-e-Taiba 282, 290\n\nLaski, Harold 244\n\nLe Corbusier 203\n\nLhasa 70\n\nLiberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) (Tamil Tigers) xxxi, 214\u201316, 236, 273, 275, 300\n\nLiu Shaoqi 186\n\nLok Sabha 148, 235, 274, 283, 302\u20133\n\nLongju 128\u20139\n\nLongowal, Harcharan Singh 228, 241\n\nLucknow 54, 279\n\nMcMahon, Henry 128\n\nMcMahon Line 128\u20139, 131\u20133\n\nMadhya Pradesh 11, 13, 268, 273, 285\n\nMadras (Chennai) 13\u201314, 66, 110\n\nmadrassahs xxxi, 247\n\n_Mahabharata_ 272\n\nMaharashtra state 112, 130\n\nMahasabha xxiv, 84, 103\n\nMahendra, King 121, 143\n\nMaintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) (India 1974) 184\n\nMakarios, Archbishop 124\n\nMaldives 300\u20131\n\nMalhotra, Jagmohan 193, 232\u20133, 238\n\nMalom 304\n\nManali (Himachal Pradesh) 45\n\nManchuria xxxiv\n\nMandal, B.P. 276\u20138\n\nMandal and Mandir 276\u20139\n\nMandal Report (1980) 276\n\nMangla Dam 139\n\nManipur xxii, 60, 63\n\nMao Zedong 127\n\nMarcos, Ferdinand 252\n\nmassacres and atrocities: 'Great Calcutta Killing' (1946) 8\u201310, 13\u201314; in run-up to Partition 11, 15, 21; in aftermath of Partition 38\u201340, 43\u20137, 159; in Bengal (1950) 97\u20138, 105; in Nagaland 107\u20138; in Kashmir (1963\u201364) 136; in East Bengal (1971) 162\u20134; in Assam (1983) 221\u20133 226; in Punjab (1984) 228\u201330; in aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination (1984) 234\u20135; in run-up to 1989 elections 273\u20134; Hindu\u2013Muslim riots (1990) 277, 279\u201383\n\nMathura 279\n\nMaxwell, Neville 131, 150\n\nMayaram, Shail 18, 20\n\nMayawati, Ms 296\u20137\n\nMeghalaya xxii\n\nMeghna river xvii\n\nMenon, Krishna 128\u201332\n\nMenon, V.P. 25, 35, 59, 61\n\nMeoistan 20\u20131\n\nMewat (Meo country) 17\u201322, 35, 44\n\nMianwali 46\n\nmigration and diaspora xix, xxviii\u2013xxxii, 197: support for home communities xxx\u2013xxxii, 198\u2013202, 224, 231, 246; to the UK 139\u201341, 201, 212, 217, 224; to the Gulf 197\u2013200, 217; to Canada 201, 212, 217, 224, 240; to the US 201, 217, 224\n\nMirpur (Azad Kashmir) xxix, 139\u201341\n\nMirza, General Iskander 99\u2013102\n\nModi, Narendra 282\n\nMohamed, Ghulam 58, 65, 67, 70, 73, 77, 99\u2013100\n\nMookherjee, Dr Shyama Prasad 89\n\nMoon, Penderel 38\u201340, 42, 44\u20135\n\nMount Everest 117\u201318, 120\u20131, 129\n\nMountbatten, Lady Edwina 39\n\nMountbatten, Lord Louis 189: and handover of power 2, 25\u20136, 30, 33\u20135; replaces Wavell as Viceroy 25; second thoughts on Partition 33\u20134; at Independence Day ceremonies 39; and princely states 59\u201360, 63, 66\u20137, 106, 185; visits Srinagar 75; chairs Defence Committee 76; and Kashmir 76\u20137, 81\u20132; stands down as Governor-General 85\n\nMQM party (Muttahida Qaumi Mahaz, United National Movement) xxxii, 57, 178, 245\u20136, 249\n\n_muhajirs_ 54\u20135, 57, 96, 178, 244\u20136\n\n_Mukti Bahini_ (Bangladesh guerrillas) 165\u20137\n\nMurshidabad xviii\n\nMusharraf, Pervez 250, 290\u20131\n\nMuslim Conference 70\u20131\n\nMuslim Family Law 142\n\nMuslim League 47, 84, 246: and Cabinet Mission proposals 3\u20137; and Indian National Congress 3\u20138, 10, 12, 14\u201315, 24\u20136, 28; and direct action protest 7\u201311; growing popularity 14; and princely states 23\u20134; and possibility of Pakistan within India 28; and naming of 'Pakistan' 36; establishes Muslim state in Pakistan 93; problems with 94; loses seats in East Bengal 98\u20139; and elections 158\n\nMuslim Women's Bill 268\n\nMuzaffarabad 75, 79, 290\n\nMyanmar _see_ Burma\n\nMymensingh province 171\n\nNabha state 19\n\nNagaland xxii, xxvii, 130, 144, 166, 223, 305\n\nNagar 78\u20139\n\nNagas xxiii\u2013xxiv, xxxi, 106\u20137, 272, 304\n\nNaipaul, V.S. 59, 148, 150, 191, 197, 266, 272\n\nNair Service Society 114\n\nNamboodiripad, E.M.S. 113\n\nNarain, Raj 148\u20139, 152\u20133, 184, 188, 191, 302\n\nNarayan, J.P. 184, 188, 190\u20132, 205, 207\u20138, 274\n\nNarayanhithi Palace (Katmandu) 259\n\nNarmada 15\n\nNational Awami Party 158\n\nNational Conference 70, 89, 209\u201310, 232\u20133\n\nNational Council of Khalistan 224\n\nNational Democratic Alliance (NDA) 283\u20134, 291, 295\n\nNational Front 274\u20135, 277\n\nNational Planning Commission 112\n\nNaxalbari 116\n\nNaxalite revolutionaries xxxii, 57, 116, 227\n\nNazimuddin, Khwaja 96, 98\n\nNehru, Arun 271\n\nNehru, B.K. 232\n\nNehru, Jawaharlal 54, 68, 202: problems concerning independence 3, 5\u20137; and violence 10, 14, 97; and all-Indian nationhood 27; responsibility for Partition 27\u20138; on Greater Pakistan 30; endorses Mountbatten's Partition plan 30, 35; eve of Independence speech 31; at Independence Day ceremonies 39; views refugee column 44; and Hindu migration 48\u20139; and non-alignment 68, 124\u20135, 127, 132, 135; supports Sheikh Abdullah 70\u20131, 77, 88; and Jammu and Kashmir 77, 81; relations with USSR 82; secularism 83\u20134; influence 103\u201316; and Nagaland 106\u20137; admires Soviet bloc 111\u201312; relations with China 123\u201334; releases Sheikh Abdullah 136; death 134\n\nNehru family 60\u20131\n\nNellie massacre (1983) 221\u20133, 235\n\nNepal xxi\u2013xxii, xxxiii, 61, 67, 116, 125, 129, 185, 301: and conquest of Everest 118, 120\u20131; Rana rule 118\u201319; and India 119\u201320, 122\u20133; international engagement 120\u20131; democracy in 121; monarchy 121\u20132, 259\u201362; description of 122; relations with Tibet and China 122\u20133, 255, 260; migration, diaspora and remittances 200; politics 254\u20136, 260\u20133; relations with India 254\u20136, 261, 262\u20133; protests and violence 255\u20137, 260, 262; Maoist control in 256\u201360; NGO activity in 257\u20138, 261; murder of royal family 259\u201360; elections 261\u20133, 299; Seven Party Alliance 261\u20132; tourism 261, 263\u20134; preparations for SAARC Summit 299\n\nNepal\u2013Tibet border 118, 122\u20133, 129\n\nNepali Congress Party 118\u201319, 121, 190, 255\n\nNew Delhi xxxi, 1, 30, 36\u20137, 58, 61, 70, 72, 75, 80\u20131, 83, 95, 128, 131, 133\u20134, 150, 163, 203, 216, 281, 286\n\nNew York 231, 234, 287\n\nNirankari sect 226\n\nNixon, Richard 164, 166, 167\n\nNoakhali 10, 46\n\nNon-Aligned Movement 68, 124\u20135, 127, 164\n\nnon-governmental organisations (NGOs) 252\u20134, 257\u20138\n\nNon-Resident Indians (NRIs) xxxi\n\nNorgay, Tenzing 117\u201318, 120\u20131\n\nNorth Vietnam 124\n\nNorth-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) 126, 128\u20139, 132\u20133, 186; _see also_ Arunachal Pradesh\n\nNorth-West Frontier Province (NWFP) 14, 19, 47\u20138, 64\u20135, 73, 178, 308; _see also_ Khyber-Paktunwha\n\nNorthern Areas 117, 134, 136, 233, 308\n\noil 195\u20136, 200, 293\n\nOjhri 286\n\n'Operation Blue Star' (1984) 203, 227\u201330, 241: aftermath 230\u20135\n\n'Operation Searchlight' (1971) 161\u20138\n\nOrangi (slum township) 244, 247\n\nOrangi Pilot Project (OPP) 244\n\nOrganisation of the Islamic Conference 169\n\nOrissa 56, 106, 116, 231\n\nOsman, John 33\n\nOther Backward Castes (OBCs) 276\u20137\n\nOverseas Citizens of India (OCIs) xxxi\n\nPabna river xvii\n\nPadmanabhan, Mannathu 114\u201315\n\n**PAKISTAN** xviii, xxiii, xxiv, 16: and regional similarities xxvii\u2013xxviii, xxxii\u2013xxxiii; eastern wing 92; borderlands 126, 135; division of 134; nuclear programme 177\u20138, 285; humanitarian crisis 306; bin Laden in 306\u20137; population 308; _see also_ East Pakistan (East Bengal)\n\nintercommunal relations: religion in xxxiii, 175, 204\u20135, 247\u20139; reaction to _sharia_ law 19; fissiparous tendencies in 34; internal migration 38\u201357, 66, 116, 178\u20139; conflicting identity 93; atrocities in 162\u20133; refugees 163\u20134; as Islamist state 245\u201350, 267\n\neconomy: migration, diaspora and remittances xxxii, 139\u201341, 198\u2013200, 246, 267; per capita income 142; black economy 245\n\nexternal relations: relations with US 95, 144\u20135, 216; relations with China 135\u20136, 151, 164; as member of SAARC 300; relations with Afghanistan 245, 247\u20138, 250\n\nIndependence and Partition: nation-building xxxii\u2013xxxiii, 91\u20136; initial talks concerning 3\u20135; opinions concerning possibility of 11\u201315; allocation of territory 27\u20138, 30, 35\u20138, 40\u20132; and idea of Greater Pakistan 28, 30; Jinnah's eve of Independence speech 32\u20133; naming of 36; Jinnah's vision for 92\u20135\n\npolitics and administration 37\u20138, 176: Basic Democracy in xxxiii, 142\u20134, 153, 155, 254; and Direct Action Day 8; Ayub Khan years (1958\u201369) 91, 95, 134\u201347, 254; factionalism and corruption 95\u20136; declared Islamist state 100; One-Unit scheme 100, 154; political activity in 100\u20132, 249\u201350; failure of 102\u20133; relocation of capital 141; infrastructure 141\u20132, 308; elections 153, 158\u201361, 246, 250\u20131, 307; and Six-Point programme 154\u20135, 159\u201360; Martial Law 157; Legal Framework Order 157\u20138; struggle over East Pakistan 160\u20131; repositioning of 174\u20135; new Constitutions 175\u20136; secessionist movements 176; army's role in 176\u20137; Zia's coup 179\u201381; self-help schemes 244; in 1980s 266\u20137\n\nrelations with India: and Kashmir 61, 65, 67\u20138, 72\u20136, 136\u20137, 144\u20137, 237, 287\u201391, 308; ridicules India 130; d\u00e9tente 134\u20135, 169\u201370; and water-sharing treaty 137\u20139, 141; Agartala Conspiracy 155; and 'Operation Searchlight' 161\u20138; Indo\u2013Pakistan war (1971) 166\u20138; blamed for unrest in India 282\u20133; attempts to normalise relations 286\u20137, 305\u20139\n\nPakistan Administrative Service 45\n\nPakistan Assembly 32\n\nPakistan Atomic Energy Commission 177\n\nPakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) 307\n\nPakistan National Alliance 178\u20139\n\nPakistan People's Party (PPP) 159\u201360, 175, 178, 198, 246, 291\n\nPanjiar, Prashant 280\n\nParmar, Talwinder Singh 240\n\nPartition (1947) xxxiii\u2013xxxiv,102, 104, 111, 118, 128: regrets concerning xviii, 99; and identity xix, 15\u201321; fluidity of borders xix\u2013xxi; migration and diaspora xix, xxviii\u2013xxxii; and religion xxiv\u2013xxv, 15\u201320, 83, 92\u20134; discord as result of xxv\u2013xxvii; as shared experience xxviii; events leading up to 1\u201326; Darling's mission 11\u201320; allocation of territory 27\u20138, 30, 35\u20138; Jinnah and Nehru's speeches on eve of 30\u20133; Mountbatten's involvement in 33\u20135; atrocities 38\u201340, 43\u20137, 68, 71, 97; and interchange of population 40\u20132, 49\u201351, 53\u20137, 66; modern impact of 57; two-nation principle 77, 287; and language 98; and water-sharing treaty 137\u20139\n\nPatel, Sardar 35, 59, 61, 64, 85, 103, 106\n\nPathans 19, 48, 55, 67, 75, 78, 80, 159, 244\u20136\n\nPatiala state 19\n\n_People's Age_ 8, 9\n\nPeople's Health Centre (NGO) 253\n\nPeople's Liberation Army (PLA) 118, 130\u20132\n\nPersons of Indian Origin (PIOs) xxxi\n\nPeshawar 141, 290\n\nPethick-Lawrence, Lord Frederick 1\u20132, 4\n\nPham Van Dong 124\n\nPhilip of Greece (Prince Philip) 66\n\nPhilippines 252\n\nPhizo, Angami Zapu xxxii, 205\n\nPondicherry xxxii, 61, 124\n\nPoonch 70\u20133, 75, 79\u201380: _see also_ Jammu and Kashmir\n\nPortugal, Portuguese 61, 124, 130\n\nPowers, Gary 144\n\nPrabhakaran, Velupillai 214, 216\n\nPrachanda, Comrade 262\u20133\n\nPraja Parishad 88\u20139\n\nprincely states 27, 103, 118, 185, 202: absorbed into India xxxii, 30, 59, 61, 87, 104\u20137; and Cabinet Mission plan 3; Darling's passage through 11\u201315, 16\u201320; description 21\u20135; plight of Meos in 35, 40; joined to Pakistan 38; Mountbatten's handling of 59\u201360, 63, 66\u20137, 85, 106; diverse interests concerning 61; contested 63\u20134, 68, 85; formed into confederations 105\u20137; _see also_ Hyderabad; Jammu and Kashmir; Kashmir\n\nPune (Poona) 231\n\nPunjab (India) xxvii, 8, 40, 304: economic situation 13; as heart of Sikh kingdom 16; British departure from 40; boundary lines drawn 40\u20131; population interchange 42, 49\u201350; military ethos 47\u20138; tensions in 71\u20132, 130, 201\u20132; infrastructure 141\u20132; migration, diaspora and remittances 200\u20133; Sikh unrest in 223\u201330; attack on Golden Temple 227\u201330; and 'Operation Blue Star' 230\u20135; Accord with India 239\u201342\n\nPunjab (Pakistan) xxvii, 18, 42, 141\u20132, 158\u20139\n\nPurana Qila fort 53\n\nQuit India movement 7, 71\n\nQuit Kashmir movement 71\n\nQureshis 11\n\nRadcliffe, Sir Cyril 40\u20132, 49, 137\n\nRae Bareilly 148\u20139, 152\u20133, 184, 206\n\nRahman, Mujibur 300: electoral victory xxxiii, 157\u20138; arrested and tried 99, 155, 162; and Six Point plan 154, 158\u201361, 203; recognition of government-in-exile 167\u20138; revisits Pakistan 169; government of 170\u20133; assassination 173\n\nRahman, Ziaur 199: issues declaration of Bangladesh independence 162; as Chief Martial Law Administrator 173; and migration to Gulf states 199; stresses Muslim credentials 204; military rule 250\u20131; sets up SAARC 299\u2013300; assassination 251\n\nRajapakse, Mahinda 301\n\nRajasthan xxvii, 177, 284\n\n_Rakhi Bahini_ 172\n\nRamachandran, M.G. 215\n\n_Ramayana_ 270\u20132, 276\n\nRangoon 129\n\nRangpur province 171\n\nRann of Kutch 145\n\nRao, Narasimha 277, 279\u201380, 284, 292\u20133, 295\n\nRashtrapati Bhawan 3, 37, 53\n\n_rath yatra_ 276\u201380\n\nRawalpindi 74, 95, 137, 141, 177, 286\n\nRazakars 85\n\nReagan, Ronald 293\n\nRehman, Teresa 222\n\nReliance Industries 294\n\nResearch and Analysis Wing (RAW), Indian Intelligence 161, 237\n\nRohtak 44\n\nRoy, Dr B.C. 50\n\nRoyal Nepalese Army 258\n\nRSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) xxxi, 83\u20135, 89, 205\u20136, 220, 222, 269, 276, 280, 282\n\nSaikia, Hiteswar 221\n\nSalazar, Antonio 124, 131\n\nSangh Parivar (Family Association of patriotic Hindu organisations) 269\u201370, 273, 278\u20139, 281, 283\n\nSaudi Arabia 199\n\nSaurashtra (Gujarat) 21, 60\n\nSayeed, Rubaiya 238\n\nScheduled Castes (SCs) 276\n\nSchofield, Victoria 73\n\nSegal, Ronald 150\n\nShah Bano affair (1985) 267\u201370\n\nShah, Ghulam Mohammad 232\u20133, 236\n\nShaikh, Farzana 93\n\n_sharia_ law 19, 248\n\nSharif, Nawaz 246, 250, 285, 287\u201390, 307\u20139\n\nShastri, Lal Bahadur 137, 149\n\nShiv Sena xxxi\n\nSihanouk, Prince Norodom 124, 258\n\nSikh Regiment 230\u20131\n\nSikh Students' Association 240\n\nSikhs 15\u201317, 197, 202\u20133, 223\u201335, 240\n\nSikkim xxxiii, 61, 125, 185\u201390\n\nSilva, K.M. de 214, 216\n\nSimla 3\u20134, 169, 202\n\nSind xxvii, 64, 94, 109, 158, 167, 176, 178\n\nSindis 245\u20136\n\nSingh, Maharajah Hari 71\u20136, 80\u20131, 83, 87\u20139\n\nSingh, Karan 88\n\nSingh, Khushwant 241\n\nSingh, Manmohan 57, 291\u20135\n\nSingh, Shahbeg (Shubeg) 228\u201330\n\nSingh, Vishwanath Pratap 238, 274\u20136\n\nSingh, Zail 225, 228\n\nSinha, Chief Justice 190\n\nSinhala-only Act (Sri Lanka 1961) 214\n\nSino\u2013Indian war (1962) 131\u20135, 144, 159\n\nSino\u2013Nepal alliance (1962) 131\n\nSino\u2013Pak agreement (1963\u201364) 135\u20136\n\nSocialist Party 148\n\nSouth Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) 300\n\nSouth Asian University 300\n\nSouth-East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) 125, 138, 144\n\nSoviet Union 95, 116, 125, 133\u20134, 146, 164\n\nSri Lanka: migration, diaspora and remittances xxii, xxxi, 150, 200, 215\u201317; and China xxxi; independence (1948) 36; and India 67, 215\u201318; ethno-linguistic and ideological challenges 116; hosts Asian heads of government (1954) 123; and Pakistan 165; Tamil war and unrest 210\u201318, 236; historical background 211; citizenship in 212; language and identity in 212\u201313; accepts Indian peacekeeping force 235\u20136, 273; war crimes in 301\n\nSrinagar 58\u20139, 71, 75\u20136, 80, 90, 161, 233, 281, 290\n\nStates' Reorganisation Committee 110\n\nStevenson, Adlai 89\n\nSuharto, President 131\n\nSuhrawardy, Husayn Shaheed 47, 50, 96, 154\n\nSukarno, President 124\n\nSummit Conference of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC) 299\u2013302\n\nSundarbans xvii\u2013xx, 56\n\n_Sunday_ (newspaper) 266\n\nSwat 19, 22\n\nSylhet (East Pakistan) xxix, 64, 140, 199\n\nSymonds, Richard 46, 53, 72\n\nSyndicate, the 149, 151, 153, 202\n\nTaiwan xxxiv\n\nTaj Mahal Hotel (Bombay\/Mumbai) 282\n\nTaliban xxxii, 19, 306\u20138\n\nTamil Nadu 110\u201311, 150, 204, 213, 215\u201317\n\nTamils, Sri Lankan: Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) xxxi, 214\u201316, 236, 273, 275, 300; diaspora 150; Tamil Students' Federation 214; Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) 214\u201315, 223; war and unrest 210\u201318, 236\n\nTashkent Declaration (1966) 146, 149\n\nTawang 132\n\nTenzing, Prince 189\n\nterrorism, terrorists xix, xxi, xxxii, 9, 57, 66, 138, 154, 172, 180, 215\u201316, 226\u201330, 238\u20139, 241, 260, 281\u20133, 290, 300, 305\u20136\n\nTexas Instruments 294\u20135\n\nTezpur 133\n\nThatcher, Margaret 233, 293\n\nTibet xxxiv, 16, 60, 69\u201370, 118, 120, 122\u20133, 126\u20138, 165, 185, 292\n\n_Times of India_ 38, 57, 129\n\nTipaimukh 254\n\nTista river xx, 254\n\nTravancore (Kerala) 22, 63\n\nTreaty of Peace and Friendship (Nepal\u2013India 1950) 119\u201320\n\nTreaty of Peace, Friendship and Co-operation (Indo\u2013Soviet 1971) 164\n\nTribhuvan, King 119, 121\n\nTripura (Tipperah) xxii, 46, 155, 272\n\nTrivandrum 115\n\nTully, Mark 225\u20136, 231, 293\n\nU Nu 124\n\nULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam) 223\n\nUnion Carbide 285\u20136\n\nUnited Front 99, 216\n\nUnited Nations 81\u20133, 85, 90, 120, 131, 146, 166, 171: UN Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) 83, 87; UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) 59, 87, 90; UN Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) 262; UN Security Council 82\n\nUnited Progressive Alliance (UPA) 291, 292, 295\n\nUnited Provinces (UP) 14\u201315, 28, 70, 94, 190, 273, 277\n\nUnited States 95, 133, 135, 142, 144\u20135, 177, 181, 201, 216, 278, 285\n\nUSS _Enterprise_ 133\n\nUttar Pradesh xxvii, 297\n\nVadodara (Baroda) 282\n\nVajpayee, Atul Behari 207, 280, 283, 286\u201391, 295, 309\n\nVan Schendel, William xx\n\nVancouver 231, 234\n\nVaranasi (Benares) 108, 231, 279\n\nVayudoot (low-cost airline) 294\n\nVeja-no-ness 21\u20132\n\nVHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) 269\u201371, 273\u20134, 278\u201380\n\nVietnam 124, 144\n\n_Viewpoint_ 246\n\nWavell, Lord 2, 7, 10\u201311\n\nWest Bengal xix, xxii, xxvii, 42, 48\u2013 51, 55\u20136, 97, 116, 150, 186, 272\n\nWest Pakistan 44, 53, 64, 96, 99\u2013100, 141\u20132, 145, 158\u201360; _see also_ Pakistan\n\nWorld Bank 138\u20139, 171, 199\n\nXinjiang 69, 126\n\nYaghistan 67, 73\n\nYahya Khan, General Agha Muhammad: at round-table talks 155; imposes martial law 157; sets up Legal Framework Order 157\u20138; post-election negotiations 160\u20131; and 'Operation Searchlight' 161; relations with US 164; and war with India 167; c edes presidency to Ali Bhutto 168\n\nYunus, Muhammad 243\n\nZardari, Asif Ali 291, 307\u20139\n\nZhou Enlai 111, 123\u20134, 126\u20137, 129, 132\n\nZia, Khaleda 251\u20132, 278\n\nZiaul Haq, General Mohammed xxxiii, 93, 216, 236: coup (1977) 179\u201381; and migration to Gulf states 199; and Muslim ideology 204; and Sindi nationalists 245; achievements 266\u20137; and Pakistan as Islamist state 245\u201351; death 286\n\nZinkin, Taya 54, 97, 114\n\nZiring, Lawrence 174\n\n### By the same author\n\n_Into India_\n\n_When Men and Mountains Meet_\n\n_The Gilgit Game_\n\n_Eccentric Travellers_\n\n_Explorers Extraordinary_\n\n_Highland Drove_\n\n_The Royal Geographical Society's History of World Exploration_ (general editor)\n\n_India Discovered: The Rediscovery of a Lost Civilization_\n\n_The Honourable Company: A History of the East India Company_\n\n_The Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland_ (co-editor with Julia Keay)\n\n_Indonesia: From Sabang to Merauke_\n\n_Last Post: The End of Empire in the Far East_\n\n_India: A History_\n\n_The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India was Mapped and Everest was Named_\n\n_Sowing the Wind: The Mismanagement of the Middle East 1900\u20131960_\n\n_Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South-East Asia_\n\n_The Spice Route: A History_\n\n_The London Encyclopedia (3rd edn)_ (co-editor with Julia Keay)\n\n_China: A History_\n\n### Copyright\n\nWilliam Collins   \nAn imprint of HarperCollins _Publishers_\n\n77\u201385 Fulham Palace Road,\n\nHammersmith, London W6 8JB\n\nWilliamCollinsBooks.com\n\nFirst published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014\n\nCopyright \u00a9 John Keay 2014\n\nJohn Keay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.\n\nA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.\n\nAll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.\n\nSource ISBN: 9780007326570 (HB), 9780007480036 (TPB)\n\nEbook Edition \u00a9 January 2014 ISBN: 9780007468775\n\nVersion: 2013-11-23\n\n### About the Publisher\n\n**Australia**\n\nHarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. 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+{"text":"\nThe Beatles\n\nEditor: Ben Nussbaum\n\nChief Content Officer: June Kikuchi\n\nManaging Editor: Jennifer Taylor\n\nArt Director: Jerome Callens\n\nAssociate Art Director: Terri Blake\n\nContributing Editors: Roger Sipe, Karen Julian\n\nMultimedia Production Coordinator: Leah Rosalez\n\nChief Executive Officer:Mark Harris\n\nChief Financial Officer: Nicole Fabian\n\nChief Sales Officer: Jeff Scharf\n\nVP, Consumer Marketing: Beth Freeman Reynolds\n\nDigital General Manager: Melissa Kauffman\n\nMarketing Director: Lisa MacDonald\n\nMultimedia Production Director: Laurie Panaggio\n\nBook Devision General Manager: Christopher Reggio\n\nController Craig Wisda\n\nEditorial, Production and Corporate Office\n\n3 Burroughs, Irvine, CA 92618\n\n(949) 855-8822\n\nThe Beatles is published by i-5 Publishing, LLC, 3 Burroughs, Irvine, CA 92618-2804.\n\n\u00a9 2014 by i-5 Publishing, LLC.\n\neBook ISBN: 9781620081747\n\nAll rights reserved. Reproduction of any material from this issue in whole of in part is strictly prohibited.\n\nRegistration No. R126851765\nThe Toppermost of the Poppermost\n\nThe year 1963 saw the Beatles take over the U.K. and lay the groundwork for Beatlemania in America.\n\nby Ian Inglis\n\nThe only topic of conversation in Britain at the start of 1963 was the weather. Snow had started to fall in the last week of December and continued to do so for much of the next three months. January was the coldest month since 1814. Schools closed, lakes and rivers froze, transport networks came to a halt.\n\n\"When the Beatles were depressed, thinking that the group was going nowhere and this is a [bad] deal and we're in a [bad] dressing room, I'd say, 'Where are we going fellows?' and they'd go, 'To the top, Johnny.' And I'd say, 'Where's that fellows?' and they'd say, 'To the toppermost of the poppermost.' And I say, 'right,' and we'd all sort of cheer up.\"\n\n\u2014 John Lennon The dialogue is a play on the 1953 Marlon Brando movie The Wild One.\n\n1963: Another Year\n\nWhen John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr flew into London on New Year's Day 1963 after completing a third and final season at Manfred Weissleder's Star-Club in Hamburg, they were scheduled to begin a five-date tour of small venues across the Highlands of Scotland that had been arranged two months earlier. Many roads were impassable. The first show (in Keith) had to be canceled, the remaining four suffered from poor attendance, and promoter Albert Bonici lost money.\n\nIt was an inauspicious start for the Beatles, who were hoping that the recent chart entry of their first single, \"Love Me Do,\" and the imminent release of the follow-up, \"Please Please Me,\" might bring them a measure of recognition beyond the local followings they had built over the previous few years in Liverpool and Hamburg.\n\nThe group's optimism, manager Brian Epstein's determination and producer George Martin's enthusiastic appraisal of the group's commercial potential were not widely shared.\n\nScreaming Beatles fans in Manchester, England force a young police cadet to plug his ears.\n\nThe control of popular music in Britain remained, as it had throughout the 1950s, in the hands of a small number of agents, promoters and record labels (Decca, EMI, Philips and Pye), all of whom maintained a strong preference for -London-based performers, an acceptance that musical trends in the U.K. were inevitably dictated by U.S. styles, a preference for the solo singer (or lead singer and backing group), a reluctance to depart from a musical policy characterized by familiarity and predictability, and an unquestioned assumption that the performer and the songwriter should be two separate people. The cozy lack of ambition that these beliefs created was seen in the persistent popularity of British pop stars such as Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, The Shadows, Craig Douglas, Billy Fury and Helen Shapiro, who happily met all the criteria demanded of them. (The Beatles toured with Shapiro, a prim teenager with a beehive hairdo, in February and March of 1963 as one of her opening acts.)\n\nThe notion that a group of four youngsters from deprived and distant Liverpool, that possessed no identifiable lead singer, that wrote and recorded its own songs, and that were managed by a local businessman with no experience in the entertainment industry might enjoy any meaningful success seemed absurd. The Beatles had been rejected out-of-hand by record companies Philips and Pye. Decca's blunt refusal to sign the group after its studio audition in January 1962, with the advice that guitar groups were \"on the way out,\" typified the condescending and complacent attitudes faced by the band. Everywhere he turned, Epstein faced the same message: \"The boys won't go, Mr. Epstein. We know these things. You have a good business in Liverpool. Stick to that.\"\n\nAlthough the group had built up pockets of popularity, each success had come through slow and steady effort. The group's history dated back to 1956, when 16-year-old John Lennon, inspired by the sounds of Elvis Presley and Lonnie Donegan, persuaded a group of schoolfriends to join him in the formation of The Quarrymen skiffle group. By 1963, of the original line-up, only Lennon remained. As other members drifted away, pursued alternative ambitions or were fired, the arrivals of McCartney (1957), Harrison (1958) and Starr (1962) completed the group, which took the Beatles name in 1960.\n\nAt the start of 1963, it looked like John, Paul, George and Ringo would spend another year developing their craft and hoping for a big break.\n\nPaul McCartney joined up with John Lennon in 1957, followed by George Harrison a year later and Ringo Starr in 1962.\n\nBeatlemania in the U.K.\n\nBy the end of 1963, the Beatles were a phenomenon. They had accumulated four No. 1 singles (\"Please Please Me,\" \"From Me To You,\" \"She Loves You\" and \"I Want To Hold Your Hand\") and two No. 1 albums (Please Please Me and With the Beatles). They had completed four nationwide tours. They had hosted their own 15-part weekly BBC radio series (Pop Goes the Beatles), topped the bill on ITV's flagship entertainment program Sunday Night at the London Palladium and appeared before the royal family in the annual Royal Variety Performance. They had sanctioned the creation of a nationwide fan club, approved the publication of an associated monthly magazine, The Beatles Book, whose circulation quickly reached 300,000, and established their own music publishing company. They had written chart hits for the Rolling Stones, Cilla Black, The Fourmost and Billy J. Kramer. To top it off, they had negotiated a three-picture film contract with United Artists. It was, by any standards, an astonishing and dramatic story.\n\nAcross the U.K., the unprecedented scenes of fan hysteria that surrounded the Beatles \u2014 dubbed Beatlemania by the press \u2014 quickly became the year's major news story, surpassing coverage of the Profumo scandal, in which a government minister was forced to resign after lying to Parliament about his relationship with a prostitute, and the Great Train Robbery, in which the equivalent of $73 million was stolen from the overnight mail train from Glasgow to London.\n\nAuthorship of the term Beatlemania was variously claimed by the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and Melody Maker, all of whom pinpointed its first usage to October 1963, after the group's televised appearance on Sunday Night at the London Palladium.\n\nBut the phenomenon itself began to take shape long before that. On the Beatles' second U.K. tour of the year, when they were ostensibly supporting American pop stars Tommy Roe and Chris Montez, the volume of screams during their performance and the swarm of fans at the end of every show were becoming increasingly apparent.\n\nThe Beatles rehearse for their appearance on the 1963 Royal Variety Performance in London.\n\nA Recipe for Mania\n\nWhat could account for the Beatles' impact in a country where previous British performers had, at best, short-lived success? A managerial strategy that combined confidence and caution, a substantial promotional budget, the presence of two (later three) outstanding songwriters, and, of course, the music itself \u2014 simple, joyous, unadorned and uncomplicated, containing influences drawn from rock 'n' roll, pop, country and rhythm and blues traditions \u2014 were all factors that set up the Beatles for a magical run, but other elements added to the explosion that was Beatlemania.\n\nThe Beatles' visual imagery \u2014 the hair and the clothes \u2014 distanced the Fab Four from many of their competitors and allowed them to have a distinctive, unique identity. That identity was projected with great relish at the group's press conferences, where their spontaneous humor and self-deprecation stood in sharp contrast to other celebrities.\n\nAmerican fans, like their British counterparts, quickly formed ideas about the personalities of the four Beatles. They were incomplete and simplistic, but the conventional estimations of John (the cynical leader), Paul (the romantic charmer), George (the boy next door) and Ringo (the lovable clown) made the members of the band seem instantly familiar. The four distinct personalities allowed fans to enjoy multiple points of contact with the group in a way that had not been seen before in popular music.\n\nAn equally important part of Beatlemania was the United States itself. Specifically, three separate circumstances primed the U.S. for Beatlemania. First, the country's perception of itself had been fractured by the shock of John Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. The U.S. was desperately searching for ways in which a collective sense of identity might be restored. Second, 17-year-olds had become the largest single age group in the country, and they possessed a spending power not previously enjoyed by earlier generations. Third, rock 'n' roll had been largely replaced by inoffensive, middle-of-the-road music. (One of the acts that topped the singles charts in the months leading up to Beatlemania was the Singing Nun, who performed her hit \"Dominique\" in French. When \"I Want to Hold Your Hand\" reached No. 1, it deposed crooner Bobby Vinton's \"There! I Said It Again,\" a song written in 1945.)\n\nDuring their third tour, in May, the Beatles were elevated from supporting American crooner Roy Orbison to sharing top billing with him and closing the show. Scenes of besieged theaters, overwhelmed police lines and fleets of waiting ambulances were supplemented by puzzling accounts of fan behavior. Jelly Babies bombarded the stage because George was said to like them (in the U.S., these would be replaced with much harder jelly beans). Most bizarre were the reports of pools of urine soaking into the floor of the auditorium; crazed fans, it seemed, could not control their bladders.\n\nHowever, the definitive moment in the birth of Beatlemania followed the release of \"She Loves You\" in August. Not only was it the first of the group's singles to sell more than 1 million copies in the U.K., but its \"yeah, yeah, yeah\" chorus and distinctive falsetto screams immediately became iconic shorthand indicators of the group and its music. As TV and radio appearances multiplied in the wake of the record's success, it was forcefully apparent that popular music had been dramatically disrupted.\n\nThe well-publicized scenes outside the London Palladium several weeks later were merely the capital's formal introduction to something that the rest of the country had known about for months. John Lennon's perennial encouragement to his fellow Beatles that they were destined for \"the toppermost of the poppermost\" had been emphatically vindicated.\n\nThe only topic of conversation in Britain at the end of 1963 was the Beatles.\n\nThe Beatles were everywhere in the U.K. in 1963, even guest starring on Morecambe and Wise, a popular variety show, in December.\n\nTaking America\n\nIn the United States, the Beatles were more of a rumor than a band. Three Beatles' singles (\"Please Please Me,\" \"From Me To You\" and \"She Loves You\") had been released on minor labels without success. The group's first U.K. album, Please Please Me, had been released as Introducing the Beatles and had suffered the same fate.\n\nDespite these setbacks, a gradual awareness of the young band was beginning to develop: In May, Roy Orbison told Britain's New Musical Express that \"the Beatles could be tops in America... but it will need careful handling.\" In June, Del Shannon's version of \"From Me To You,\" the first American cover of a Beatles song, reached No. 77 on the Billboard singles chart.\n\nIn America\n\nGeorge Harrison was the only Beatle to have visited the U.S. before the Beatles flew to New York. In September 1963, he had paid a brief visit to his sister, Louise, who lived in St. Louis with her American husband. Two years earlier, Ringo Starr had visited the U.S. Consulate in Liverpool to discuss a possible emigration to Houston but had been deterred by the length and complexity of the formal application process.\n\nIn November, Time carried a story presenting British Beatlemania as \"the new madness caused by a wild rhythm-and-blues quartet called the Beatles.\" In December, the New York Times reported the sensational, if misleading, news that \"they are fighting all over Britain. Often there is a pitched battle, with broken legs, cracked ribs and bloody noses... the cause of this shattering of the English peace is a phenomenon called the Beatles.\" Also in December, CBS Evening News contained a brief item about Beatlemania in Britain.\n\nFrom Epstein's perspective, a hit single remained the essential ingredient in conquering America. In November, under pressure from its parent company EMI, Capitol Records decided to distribute \"I Want To Hold Your Hand\" and to back its release with an unprecedented $50,000 promotional program. The label's executives approved the budget after learning that the single was the first in U.K. history to have advance sales of more than 1 million copies. Even in the vastly larger U.S. market, only one record \u2014 Elvis Presley's \"Hound Dog\" \/ \"Don't Be Cruel\" \u2014 had ever managed the same feat.\n\nThe sense of rolling momentum gathered pace: Buoyed by the promise of three consecutive appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show and two concerts at New York's prestigious Carnegie Hall, invigorated by the news that \"I Want To Hold Your Hand\" (released Dec. 26, 1963) had climbed to the top of the U.S. singles charts, and assisted by a relentless publicity campaign on New York's WABC, WINS and WMCA radio stations, the Beatles flew into New York's Kennedy International Airport on Feb. 7, 1964. (The airport had been renamed after the slain president just a month and a half earlier.)\n\nTchotchke-mania\n\nAmong the Beatles merchandise and memorabilia marketed in 1964 were inflatable dolls, canned breath, masks, wigs, pillows, nighties, bubble bath, table lamps, perfume, egg cups and wallpaper. Among the products rejected were sanitary towels and knives.\n\nApart from their time in Hamburg, the group's only previous foreign visits had been to Sweden and France, where reaction to the Beatles was generally positive but restrained. From the outset, America was different: Ringo Starr wryly observed that their reception was \"just like Britain \u2014 only ten times bigger.\" He later expanded: \"You all seem crazy here.\"\n\nPrevious demonstrations of adulation, such as those directed at Frank Sinatra in the 1940s and Presley in the 1950s, were dwarfed by a phenomenon that was built upon the premise and promise of fun. And the evident fact that the Beatles themselves shared in the fun increased its potency. The appeal of Sinatra and Presley reflected, in part, the glamorous and exclusive lives they led and the celebrity status they jealously guarded. In contrast, the Beatles were presented as familiar and likable youngsters who came from unremarkable backgrounds, who enjoyed what they were doing, and who shared the same interests and ambitions as their audiences.\n\nGiven the irresistible force with which the Beatles had dismantled and rebuilt perceptions of popular music in Britain, it seems \u2014 from a distance of 50 years \u2014 surprising that there were some who failed to recognize the immediate significance of their arrival in America or the lasting implications of their music. Newsweek declared that \"musically, they are a near-disaster... their lyrics are a catastrophe.\" However, such dissenting voices were rare. Bob Dylan had no hesitation in nominating the Beatles as the biggest single influence in his own transition from folk to rock: \"I knew they were pointing the direction where music had to go.\" For their part, the Beatles were captivated by the brash consumerism and the unflagging pace of daily activities in America.\n\nThe Fab Four read fan mail in a Paris hotel room in 1964.\n\nA Band Apart\n\nThe Beatles' career was, of course, grounded in their music. But in many ways, the personality and look of the Beatles was as important \u2014 and, in 1964, as memorable \u2014 as their sound. At Epstein's first meeting with them at Liverpool's Cavern Club, he noted their \"very considerable magnetism and indefinable charm,\" and although Martin was intrigued by the group's audition tapes, it was not until he met the Beatles in Abbey Road Studios that he decided to offer them a recording contract: \"They did not come alive until you saw them.\"\n\nIn an era when long hair on men was widely seen as a sign of delinquency or homosexuality, the Beatles' casual, fringed hairstyles and collarless jackets attracted as much attention as their songs. In Britain and America, their idiosyncrasies of appearance and demeanor were, as Epstein had foreseen, a key element in making the Beatles as recognizable to those with no interest in their music as they were to their most devoted fans. Some commentators suspected that such \"gimmickry\" would limit the Beatles' ability to enjoy anything more than a temporary popularity. In the Saturday Evening Post, Vance Packard wrote, \"The Beatles are so dependent upon their visual appeal that there is a question whether they can sustain the craze... crazes tend to die a horribly abrupt death.\"\n\nThe Beatles' first visit was limited to two weeks on the East Coast, a blitz of photo opportunities, personal appearances, media interviews and live performances. Fewer than 15,000 fans saw the band perform. Nevertheless, by the time the Beatles returned to the U.K., America had succumbed, and with even greater speed than Britain the previous year. The re--released \"She Loves You\" was at No. 2 in the singles chart behind \"I Want To Hold Your Hand.\" The following week, these songs were joined in the top 10 by \"Please Please Me.\" In early April, Beatles songs occupied the top five positions in the top 100, plus another seven positions lower on the chart.\n\nTo the Toppermost and Beyond\n\nRecording commitments, the filming of their first movie and concert dates in Europe, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand prevented the Beatles from returning to the U.S. until mid--August 1964, when they embarked on their first nationwide tour. Despite the group's six-month absence, Beatlemania had only expanded.\n\nThe unparalleled sales of their singles and albums, the release in more than 500 theaters of A Hard Day's Night, the countless serializations of their life stories in newspapers and magazines and the flood of associated merchandise had primed audience anticipation to an almost unbearable level. The explosion of excitement ignited by their return ensured that the 27 concerts in five weeks across the U.S. and Canada was not simply a musical tour but a triumphant victory parade.\n\nThe Beatles toured the U.S. again in 1965, and then again in 1966. At the end of their third North American tour, mired in controversy over Lennon's comment that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ, they resolved to abandon live performance and focus their creative energies on recording in the studio. Doubts about the wisdom of their decision disappeared the following year when they released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. When Epstein died in 1967, they established Apple, their own management company, in an attempt to fill the void his absence had created. They dabbled in film, Apple foundered, they argued, they continued to record, they sought enlightenment with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, they argued again, they spoke openly about their use of drugs. The familiar Fab Four vanished in a psychedelic swirl of beards, mustaches, glasses, beads and kaftans. Ringo acted. John met Yoko. Paul met Linda. George forged new musical friendships with Ravi Shankar, Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan.\n\nIn 1969, during rehearsals for Let It Be, the Beatles gave a final impromptu concert on the rooftop of the Apple offices in London and, still arguing, they decided to call it a day. They took American wives, bought American homes, worked with American producers and musicians and embarked on solo careers, coming together only occasionally. In 1980, Lennon was murdered in New York. In 2001, Harrison died in Los Angeles.\n\nFifty years after Pan Am Flight 101 brought the Beatles to America, the reverberations from their arrival are still sounding. Forever associated with the century's most beguiling decade, the Beatles transcended popular music to become historical in their own right. Like Picasso in modern art or Shakespeare in classical theater, their importance and influence in popular music is unique. In 1970, in the bitter aftermath of the Beatles' disintegration, John Lennon claimed that \"the dream is over.\" For once he was wrong.\n\nOn Feb. 9, 1964, Americans watched the Beatles perform five songs live on the Ed Sullivan Show, sparking Beatlemania in the United States.\n\nIan Inglis is a Visiting Fellow at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K. His three books on the Beatles include The Beatles in Hamburg. His favorite Beatles' song is \"Girl,\" an overlooked masterpiece.\nThe Beginning\n\nOn Feb. 9, 1964, music in America changed forever when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.\n\nby Glenn Gass\n\nThe Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show... 50 years ago. That milestone is hard to grasp for those of us who remember it \u2014 not exactly like yesterday, but certainly not like a half-century ago.\n\nFor those too young to remember, it's probably hard to even imagine a time when an entire generation watched the same live television show and was changed by the same thing at the same time. No repeat broadcasts later in the week, no DVR, no Facebook, no YouTube... one big moment, and you didn't dare miss it.\n\nYou would likely have seen the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show even if you didn't know it was coming (though we all did).\n\nMore than 73 million television viewers watched the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, the largest TV audience ever recorded by Nielson.\n\nSullivan and the Beatles\n\nThe Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show four times. They appeared on three consecutive Sundays in February 1964 and again in August 1965:\n\n\u2022On Feb. 9, the band performed \"All My Loving,\" \"Till There Was You,\" \"She Loves You,\" \"I Saw Her Standing There\" and \"I Want to Hold Your Hand.\"\n\n\u2022On Feb. 16, the show was broadcast from Miami Beach. The Beatles opened with \"She Loves You,\" \"This Boy\" and \"All My Loving.\" The show closed with \"I Saw Her Standing There,\" \"From Me to You\" and \"I Want to Hold Your Hand.\"\n\n\u2022The Beatles' Feb. 23 appearance was on tape (from two weeks earlier before the live television show). They performed three songs: \"Twist and Shout,\" \"Please Please Me\" and \"I Want to Hold Your Hand.\"\n\n\u2022On Aug. 14, 1965, the Beatles performed \"I Feel Fine,\" \"I'm Down,\" \"Act Naturally,\" \"Ticket to Ride,\" \"Yesterday\" and \"Help!\"\n\nIn subsequent years, the Beatles gave Sullivan exclusive clips of the band performing songs, including \"Paperback Writer,\" \"Rain,\" \"Penny Lane\" and \"Strawberry Fields Forever.\"\n\nStar Maker\n\nThe Ed Sullivan Show was a variety show that aired on CBS from 1948 to 1971. Although the show featured acts of all kinds, it is credited with airing breakthrough performances by musical legends before they were stars. Most notable are Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Supremes, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Jackson 5, Janis Joplin and The Doors.\n\nElvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show Sept. 9, 1956\n\nSunday Nights with Ed Sullivan\n\nThe Ed Sullivan Show was a Sunday night family ritual long before the Beatles came along, a vaudeville-style variety show featuring comedy acts, classical pianists, trapeze artists, exotic dancers, singers, movie stars, magicians, musical theater troupes (including, immediately following the Beatles, future Monkee Davy Jones and the cast of \"Oliver\" and Topo Gigio, the talking mouse \u2014 you had to be there).\n\nSullivan introduced each act with a flat deadpan delivery more in keeping with a high-school talent show than a major television network. In his attempt to have something for everyone, the range of acts he booked was ludicrously varied. Luckily for us, he included acts for \"the youngsters,\" as Sullivan put it, and the Beatles could not have hoped for a bigger boost to their American ambitions. The Ed Sullivan Show was the most important show on television for an aspiring act of any kind. The exposure it offered could ignite a career and, as with the Beatles, turn a performance into a cultural event, thanks to the sheer enormity of the audience.\n\nSullivan was always on the prowl for talent, and we were always watching to see what gems he might come up with between the dancing elephants and Anacin commercials.\n\nIn late 1963 when Sullivan signed the group, still completely unknown in America, to an unprecedented three-week run the following February, he forced Capitol Records to end a year of foot-dragging in America and get behind the Beatles' next single, \"I Want To Hold Your Hand.\" The record went to No. 1 in January 1964, just in time to whip up excitement for the Sullivan appearance.\n\nAll four Beatles' appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show were in black and white. The show switched to color the week after the band's last appearance.\n\nPhotographers surround the Fab Four as they rehearse at CBS' Studio 50.\n\nNothing Else Mattered\n\nAnd what excitement. That name! That hair! Those accents! Strange as it now seems, the music was not really much of an issue, beyond the climactic head-and-hair-shaking \"woos\" (cue screaming girls) and Paul's octave leap on the word \"hand,\" which jumped out like a jack-in-the-box no longer able to contain its excitement. No one considered the music to have any real depth or, Lord knows, lasting value.\n\nAll around the country kids sat awkwardly by their parents that Sunday night watching their world change while the adults rolled their eyes and made derisive comments. (\"How long do you think they will last?\") Yes, there was a time when parents hated the Beatles, or were bemused at best, as if the Beatles were just a long-haired sideshow routine.\n\nOur parents' cluelessness only made the Beatles more special, more wholly ours. The next day at school all anyone had to say was \"Well?\" and the conversation immediately turned to the Beatles: What did you think? Which one was which? Was that hair real? Which one was the leader? Could you understand a word they said? Liverpool?\n\nNothing but the Beatles seemed to matter or even exist. It was a new world, and we knew it \u2014 not in retrospect, but right then. The world had shifted on its axis, and our time had begun. A New York fan held up a sign reading, \"Elvis is dead! Long Live the Beatles!\" And it was true: The '50s and rock's first era were over. The king was dead. Long live the new kings, the Beatles.\n\nThe Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, 1964 was one of the great television moments of all time, a one-two punch of aural and visual exhilaration that catapulted the Beatles directly into orbit. It also marked the true arrival of the '60s, as the baby boomers rumbled to life and began the transformation into the Woodstock Nation. That journey was driven in no small part by our emulation of the Beatles, beginning with hairstyles and ending with a nonconformist worldview in complete opposition to the values of our parents, our government and most other symbols of authority.\n\nThe Beatles, on that Sunday night, were the first thing that truly united us \u2014 the first thing that gave \"us\" meaning \u2014 and they remained a constant through the ever-changing '60s, the beating heart of the counter-culture. They were like everyone's incredibly cool older brothers, telling us not to worry about mom and dad and bringing us to each new experience, each new reality, with the reassuring message that there was room enough for all. It was thrilling, joyful and oddly comforting: You knew the Beatles would never let you down or lead you astray, and they never did.\n\nThe timing of the Beatles' invasion of America couldn't have been better, between the enduring doldrums of the Kennedy assassination and a musical culture stuck in reverse. It seemed like only an invasion of aliens from outer space could possibly make things exciting again.\n\nSpeed skater Terry McDermott, a barber by trade, pretends to lop off Paul's locks as his bandmates and Sullivan look on in mock horror.\n\nA New Kind of Rock 'n' Roll\n\nAnd they came! The Beatles, with that impossibly long hair (Were they wigs? Could male hair actually grow that long?) and those indecipherable accents, seemed like a new breed of young people full of life and energy. The music they made sounded sleek, new and immediately right. It was rock 'n' roll but in a brand-new guise.\n\nAnd they were a group without a leader, a group of equals. It seemed strange indeed, as we struggled to figure out which one to watch, before we realized they were four parts of a whole (the \"four-headed monster,\" as Mick Jagger put it).\n\nThe lead guitar player was elevated to a starring role, standing in the middle, but he didn't have a microphone, forcing him to roam over to join one of the other singers to add his harmonies. It was a true joy to watch George on \"All My Loving,\" the first song they played on the show, as he joined John for harmony \"oohs\" then played a wonderfully concise guitar solo before joining Paul to sing lead harmonies on the verse \u2014 the ultimate swingman on the ultimate team.\n\nMeanwhile, the two main singers were on opposite sides, beautifully symmetrical thanks to Paul's left-handed bass playing. And the drummer \u2014 Ringo! At least we knew which one he was, thanks to his name and nose. Yes, he was in the back, as usual for drummers, but on a riser and always visible.\n\nThey looked stunning, perfect, like a whole world compressed into all that mattered. \"I Want To Hold Your Hand\" was already a No. 1 hit, but seeing the Beatles fired our collective imaginations in a way that a mere record never could (until Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, anyway, three insanely long years later).\n\nThey seemed to love singing together and seemed to love each other in a joyous, natural way without a trace of show business phoniness. They were the very image of youth and fun, and we all desperately wanted to be a part of it. We ditched our acoustic folk guitars and formed bands if we could. If not, we just yanked on our hair to get it to grow faster and strummed badminton racquets as we sang along to those amazing records.\n\nSullivan's set added to the image of a perfect, seamless whole, surrounding the Beatles with a circle of huge arrows pointing inward as if ready to set off a nuclear implosion. Something even bigger detonated that February night. We couldn't have imagined the Beatles in our wildest dreams, and then we took one look and shouted a collective, \"Yeah, yeah, yeah!\".\n\nGlenn Gass is a professor at Indiana University, where he teaches courses that he developed on the history of rock music, including a course on the Beatles that he has offered since 1982, the longest-running course on the Beatles in existence. His favorite Beatles song is whichever one he's listening to at the moment, although if he had to pick, it would be \"In My Life.\"\nTwist & Shout\n\nThe Beatles' U.S. tours went from triumphant to frustrating \u2014 and then were done.\n\nby Gillian G. Gaar\n\nThe Beatles took America by storm with multi-city tours in the summers of 1964, 1965 and 1966. At far left, the band arrives at Kennedy International Airport in New York to play at Shea Stadium.\n\nSixty-six shows. That's how many opportunities fans had to see the Beatles live in North America. Those 66 shows (which included nine shows in Canada) were played in just 33 cities over the course of three summers \u2014 1964 to 1966. Anyone who can lay claim to having seen a Beatles show in North America is very lucky indeed.\n\nBy the time the Beatles reached these shores, their live show was tailored for maximum impact. The days of sweating through six-hour sets in the clubs of Hamburg were long gone. The shows during the Beatles' North American tours lasted barely 30 minutes \u2014 even less if they played faster. Their amps (a then-hefty 100 watts) were hopelessly inadequate to overcome the screams that erupted while the group was playing. And though the band's music progressed fantastically in the studio during those three years, that wasn't the case with their live shows. Claiming that their songs had become too complex to perform live, the Beatles didn't feature a single track from their most recent album, Revolver, during their 1966 tour.\n\nNights to Remember\n\nFor all their inadequacies, the shows were nonetheless monumental occasions in the lives of those fortunate enough to see them. \"You were there, in the same room, hearing them in person, in all their greatness,\" recalls fan Judie Sims, who saw the group in both 1964 and 1966. \"It was awesome!\" And for the Beatles, the tours provided a welcome infusion of energy, at least initially. \"When the Beatles played in America for the first time, they were already old hands,\" John Lennon recalled in 1980. \"It was pure craftsmanship. Only the excitement of the American kids, the American scene, made it come alive.\"\n\nPart of the excitement came from the huge crowds the band played to. In England and Europe, the Beatles played theaters and concert halls. On their North American tours, they played stadiums and ballparks, most with a capacity of 10,000-plus. They were the first band that showed a rock act could consistently draw a stadium-sized crowd. And their success opened the doors for the future stadium acts that followed: the Rolling Stones, The Who and Led Zeppelin. Beyond the Beatles' music, their tours helped change the music industry forever.\n\nThe trade-off was that it was impossible to maintain the kind of intimacy the Beatles had previously enjoyed with their audiences when they played clubs. Over time, the shows became less about the music and more about being there, less of a musical experience and more of a ritual (\"bloody tribal rites,\" in Lennon's words). The fans came, screamed and waved in the frantic hope that their favorite Beatle would somehow see them from the stage. \"George looked right at me,\" Sims says about her first Beatles concert in Philadelphia in 1964. \"I will never forget that. My cousin and I cried after it was over.\"\n\nA Fan's Eye View\n\nPat Mancuso was 15 years old when she first saw a film clip of the Beatles on The Jack Paar Show in December 1963, dismissing them as \"funny looking.\" She changed her mind the following month while attending the last taping of American Bandstand in Philadelphia prior to the show moving to Los Angeles. Dick Clark spun \"She Loves You\" and \"I Want to Hold Your Hand.\" Mancuso recalls that, \"Something clicked inside me. I think it was the excitement. They were different.\"\n\nSeven months later, Mancuso was in the audience when the Beatles played Atlantic City. \"I sat in row 125 or something,\" she says. \"The only time I saw them was if I jumped up and down on my chair at the right time. I remember thinking 'Who cares if I can see them? I'm breathing the same air.' I screamed so much that I didn't have a voice the next morning.\"\n\nThe following year, Mancuso became president of the Official George Harrison Fan Club. She and her friends proudly sported homemade \"I Love George\" buttons when they attended the Shea Stadium show.\n\n\"The Shea 1965 concert was amazing,\" she says. \"I had never been in a baseball stadium before, so I was in awe over the size of it. The fans were fainting like flies and cops were carrying them away. One girl escaped the stands and ran toward the Beatles and then the cops ran after her; when they caught her, everybody booed. My father took pictures of me and my friends freaking out. I remember crying hysterically when the show was over.\"\n\nMancuso also attended the '66 Shea performance, sternly telling her friends they could only scream between the songs. \"I don't think anybody listened \u2014 including me!\" At the show in Philadelphia, she and her friend wore blue business suits with an embroidered Harrison fan club \"GHFC\" emblem on the sleeves; \"It didn't really get us backstage, but I met [Beatles road manager] Mal Evans!\"\n\nMancuso later met Harrison in England and wrote the book Do You Want to Know a Secret? The Story of the Official George Harrison Fan Club. And she has vivid memories of what made the live experience different from watching archive footage: \"The excitement. The sweat. The smell of popcorn. All the teenage drama \u2014 hysterical, fainting people! All you know is that 'Oh my God, the Beatles are right there!' And you want your favorite Beatle to look at you.\"\n\n1964: Beatlemania, American Style\n\nThe Beatles eventually tired of what George Harrison liked to call \"the mania\" surrounding the group's tours. But when they arrived for their first North American tour in August 1964, they were still enthusiastic, riding the giddy heights of the first flush of Beatlemania, American style. They had the No. 1 album in the country with A Hard Day's Night, while the album's title track had just left the top spot in the singles chart. Ahead of them lay their most extensive North American tour. From August 19 to September 20, they played a total of 32 shows.\n\nThe Beatles were the hottest showbiz act in the world, and everybody wanted a piece of the action. San Francisco hoped to throw a ticker-tape parade for the band to mark the tour's beginning, but Harrison was quick to demur, not wanting to make himself a target in a country whose president had been gunned down by a sniper's rifle less than a year earlier. It wasn't an unfounded fear; during the tour, bomb threats were made in Las Vegas and Dallas. Ringo received a death threat when the group played Montreal (a police officer was enlisted to sit by his side during the shows to protect him).\n\nFootage of the tour shows that when the Beatles weren't on stage, they were constantly under siege, from fans trying to touch them (\"I'd like to get a piece of the Beatles, at least!\" an outraged male fan howled to one reporter), dignitaries vying for access to them, and reporters trying to squeeze in one more question (\"Leonard Bern-stein likes your music. How do you like him?\" Paul: \"Very good. He's, you know, great\"). Being constantly pushed, as a character in A Hard Day's Night memorably put it, between \"a train and a room, a car and a room, and a room and a room.\"\n\n\"It was just one long hustle,\" Starr recalled to biographer Hunter Davies. \"You could see [people] thinking... what's the matter with you, you've only worked half an hour today. But we'd probably traveled 2,000 miles since the last half and not eaten or slept properly for two weeks.\"\n\nAnd that half hour contained the same 12 songs night after night, the band buzzing through them at high speed, hyped up on adrenaline. Ironically, what was arguably the tour's most important moment would turn out to a non-musical one. On Aug. 28, after playing the first of two shows at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York, the Beatles invited Bob Dylan to visit them at the Delmonico Hotel. When Dylan arrived, he produced marijuana and suggested they all light up.\n\nThough it's been said Dylan thus \"introduced\" the Beatles to pot, Harrison later admitted they had actually smoked it before in Liverpool. But this time was different. It was the moment pot became their recreational drug of choice, an influence that would soon make itself felt in the band's music. The evening was also a rare opportunity for the Beatles to meet someone who was a genuine musical peer (they'd also met Fats Domino when they played New Orleans) and marked the beginning of their longstanding friendship with Dylan.\n\nIn 1964, the Beatles performed in huge venues in front of massive crowds like the Memorial Coliseum in Dallas.\n\nThe Las Vegas Convention Center\n\nThe Coliseum in Washington, D.C.\n\n1964 Setlist\n\n\u2022Twist and Shout\n\n\u2022You Can't Do That\n\n\u2022All My Loving\n\n\u2022She Loves You\n\n\u2022Things We Said Today\n\n\u2022Roll Over Beethoven\n\n\u2022Can't Buy Me Love\n\n\u2022If I Fell\n\n\u2022I Want to Hold Your Hand\n\n\u2022Boys\n\n\u2022A Hard Day's Night\n\n\u2022Long Tall Sally\n\nHollywood Bowl, Los Angeles \u2014 Aug. 29\n\n1965: The High Water Mark\n\nThe Beatles' 1965 North American tour was their shortest on the continent, just 15 shows in 20 days. And it began with one of the most memorable dates in their career: an Aug. 15 concert at Shea Stadium in Queens before a record audience of 55,600. The show's promoter, Sid Bernstein (who had booked the Beatles' Carnegie Hall concerts in February 1964), boasted that he didn't even have a written contract for the momentous gig.\n\n\"There were no lawyers involved,\" he said. \"It was just Brian [Epstein] and I on the phone making the deal. You know what I would get for a contract, if I'd ever had a copy of it? Probably $100,000 at Sotheby's.\"\n\nTwelve cameras were on hand to capture the show for the TV documentary The Beatles at Shea Stadium. It remains the best film record of the Beatles' live act, despite the fact that the band rerecorded most of the soundtrack later in the studio. The 55,000 fans in attendance formed the largest audience a rock band had ever drawn up to that point. The Beatles' sense of wonder as they first took the stage was clear as they looked around wide-eyed while hundreds of flashbulbs popped futilely in the distance (the stage was set up at second base, with the audience kept safely in the stands). By the set's end, the Beatles were dripping with sweat, stomping through the closing number, \"I'm Down,\" before leaping into the getaway car parked at the side of the stage and driving off into the night.\n\nThe 1965 Shea Stadium concert was undeniably the high water mark of their touring years. \"Fantastic, the most exciting [show] we've done,\" as John later recalled, adding, \"they could almost hear us as well.\"\n\nBut their set lists were stuck in a rut; only three of the 12 songs they played each night were from 1965, and there was a surprisingly high number of cover songs in the set (three). The Beatles did not make any effort to perform anything that wasn't a rock 'n' roller. Their stage act was still for teenyboppers even though their music was leaving that era behind.\n\nTwo key events happened when the tour touched down in Los Angeles. While tripping on LSD around the pool on a rare day off, Lennon was sufficiently unnerved by actor Peter Fonda's stoned ramblings that \"I know what it's like to be dead\" that Lennon filed away the remark for use in a future song (\"She Said, She Said\"). And on the night of Aug. 27, they were ushered into the presence of the man who had so influenced them, Elvis Presley. The Beatles were so nervous they smoked pot beforehand, then loosened up enough to ask Presley, in a nice bit of foreshadowing, why he had stopped giving concerts. (Presley replied that he was too tied up with his film career.)\n\nAt the time, the Beatles couldn't imagine being a viable act without performing live. \"We couldn't stand not doing personal appearances; we'd get bored,\" Lennon said. Yet they found that touring also hampered their studio work. After the 1964 North American tour, the Beatles went straight into a U.K. tour. With little spare time left in which to craft an album of original material, they fell back on cover songs when they recorded their next album, Beatles For Sale (the songs were spread over the albums Beatles '65 and Beatles VI in the U.S.). The shorter tours in 1965 allowed the band to more fully engage in writing and recording new music, and Rubber Soul was the happy result, followed by \"Paperback Writer\" and the masterful album Revolver.\n\nMore than 55,000 people saw the Beatles perform 12 songs at Shea Stadium in 1965.\n\n1965 Setlist\n\n\u2022Twist and Shout\n\n\u2022She's a Woman\n\n\u2022I Feel Fine\n\n\u2022Dizzy Miss Lizzy\n\n\u2022Ticket to Ride\n\n\u2022Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby\n\n\u2022 Can't Buy Me Love\n\n\u2022Baby's in Black\n\n\u2022Act Naturally\n\n\u2022A Hard Day's Night\n\n\u2022Help\n\n\u2022I'm Down\n\nShea stadium, New York City \u2014 Aug. 15\n\n1966: The Grind\n\nBy 1966 there was little incentive to do an extensive tour; between Aug. 12 and 29, the Beatles performed 19 shows. And they arrived embroiled in controversy, due to Lennon's remarks to a British journalist about Christianity earlier in the year (\"It will vanish and shrink... We're more popular than Jesus now\"). He apologized at the tour's first press conference, but questions about his comments dogged the rest of the tour, and death threats were made as well. When a firecracker exploded during the group's second show in Memphis, each Beatle instantly looked at the others, fearful that one of them had been shot.\n\nThe tensions cast a pall over the tour, and it was noted that ticket sales were also down. A return engagement at Shea Stadium failed to sell out; promoter Bernstein told The New York Times that it was a disappointment, \"but I think I knew it was coming.\" Grinding through the same 12 songs that no one could hear had become tiresome. \"We got worse as musicians, playing the same old junk every day,\" Harrison told Hunter Davies. \"There was no satisfaction at all.\" Bootleg recordings of the Beatles' shows that year confirm that their playing was lackluster.\n\nEven McCartney, the Beatle most devoted to touring, said, \"Now even America was beginning to pall because of the conditions of touring and because we'd done it so many times.\" So the band decided that their last ever show would be at the tour's end, Aug. 29 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. After McCartney wailed through \"Long Tall Sally,\" the band put down their instruments. The Beatles' touring days were over. Harrison later recalled thinking, \"This is going to be such a relief \u2014 not to have to go through that madness anymore.\"\n\nThe summer of 1966 was the last time the Beatles toured in America. They wave to fans as they leave London for the U.S.\n\nThey arrive at San Francisco to perform at Candlestick Park on Aug. 29, their final U.S. concert.\n\n1966 Setlist\n\n\u2022Rock & Roll Music\n\n\u2022She's a Woman\n\n\u2022If I Needed Someone\n\n\u2022Day Tripper\n\n\u2022Baby's in Black\n\n\u2022I Feel Fine\n\n\u2022Yesterday\n\n\u2022I Wanna Be Your Man\n\n\u2022Nowhere Man\n\n\u2022Paperback Writer\n\n\u2022Long Tall Sally\n\nCandlestick Park, San Francisco \u2014 Aug. 29\n\nJust Another Memory\n\nThe Beatles' touring years live on in official releases like The Beatles Anthology DVDs. Still, for an act of the Beatles' stature, it's odd that they have yet to release an album or DVD of a complete show (several performances circulate as bootleg recordings). But the Beatles never looked back on their touring days with much fondness; when they spoke of their best years as live performers, they always looked back to their pre-fame period. \"We always missed the club dates 'cause that's when we were playing music,\" Lennon told Rolling Stone, \"but as soon as we made it, the edges were knocked off... the Beatles' music died then, as musicians.\"\n\nStill, those who saw the band can't forget the sheer joy they experienced. And touring was a large part of what took the Beatles from regional fame in Britain to international stardom. Their explosive success also singlehandedly saved rock music, which had been on the wane in the U.S. in favor of surf music or dance fads like The Twist. After the Beatles, rock was never again regarded as a flash-in-the-pan novelty. During their turn on the world's stages, they transformed rock from a teen craze to big business. Beatles concerts weren't just shows, they were bona fide events. And as a song on a future album would put it, a splendid time was guaranteed for all.\n\nThe Lost Live Album\n\nIf Capitol Records had had their way, the Beatles' Aug. 23, 1964 show at Hollywood Bowl would have been their first live album. A mobile three-track unit recorded the entire 12-song set. In a year which saw Capitol release five Beatles albums, a live album would have put a final touch on a year of unprecedented success.\n\nAcetates of the show were made for the Beatles to listen to, but the group, and producer George Martin, felt the sound was abysmal compared to what they could achieve in the studio. A brief excerpt of \"Twist and Shout\" ended up being included on the 1964 documentary album The Beatles' Story, which mainly consisted of interviews and clips from press conferences.\n\nCapitol tried again the following year, recording the two shows the Beatles played at the Hollywood Bowl on Aug. 29 and 30, 1965. But the band was no more amenable to the idea of releasing a live album than it had been before, though the Aug. 30 performance of \"Twist and Shout\" was used in The Beatles at Shea Stadium television special. Capitol also pushed the idea of a live album in both 1966 and in 1971, but still met with refusals.\n\nWhen the Beatles' contract with the label expired in 1976, Capitol was free to release the band's music however it wanted and plans for a live album finally went ahead. George Martin was brought in to produce, and a composite performance of 13 songs, drawn from all three shows, was released in May 1977 as The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. The album reached the No. 2 spot on the charts in the U.S. and remains the only official live album released by the group \u2014 though it has yet to appear on CD.\n\nGillian G. Gaar is the author of 100 Things Beatles Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die. Her favorite Beatles' song? It's a tie between \"She Loves You\" and \"Eleanor Rigby.\"\nThe Beatles: Facts & Figures\n\nThe Great Invasion\n\nThe Beatles kicked off a conquering wave of bands from Britain.\n\nby James E. Perone\n\nHair stylists fix the boys' hair on the set of A Hard Day's Night. George's stylist, Pattie Boyd, later becomes his wife.\n\nReporter Ed Rudy interviewed the band before their 1964 concert at Carnegie Hall. John Lennon said about their popularity, \"We don't think we're gonna last forever. We just gonna have a good time while we last.\"\n\nThe British Invasion started with a German assault. Britain suffered enormous devastation as a result of the German bombing campaigns during World War II. The relentless German Luftwaffe bombarded the major cities of Britain, destroying more than 1 million homes in London alone and killing upwards of 40,000 people.\n\nEspecially hard hit were industrial and shipping centers in the country's major cities. After London, the city that was the most often targeted by the Luftwaffe was an important port city where raw materials to support the war effort poured in through the docks. Its name: Liverpool.\n\nThe destruction of heavy industry and working-class neighborhoods and the massive loss of jobs created economic difficulties well into the 1950s. As George Harrison put it, \"You couldn't get a cup of sugar, never mind a rock 'n' roll record.\"\n\nThe economic struggles heightened the country's long-standing social and economic class distinctions. It was in this environment that many of the musicians who played active roles in the British Invasion of 1964 grew up.\n\nThe German Luftwaffe nearly destroyed the Beatles' hometown of Liverpool during WWII.\n\nSkiffle Influence\n\nIt's no surprise that young Brits, needing an escape from the recovery around them, turned to American music. But the kind of music that eventually ignited the British Invasion was an unlikely one: skiffle, an early 20th-century, rural, African-American music associated with the banjo, acoustic guitar and inexpensive homemade instruments, such as the washboard (for rhythm) and single-string washtub or tea-chest bass. Acoustic blues, and eventually electric blues, supplanted skiffle before it had a chance to penetrate the larger musical culture in the United States.\n\nIn Britain, skiffle burst into widespread popularity in the early 1950s, primarily through the success of a Scottish singer-guitarist-banjoist named Lonnie Donegan, who was known for recordings such as \"Rock Island Line,\" \"John Henry\" and \"Wabash Cannonball.\" For working-class British youths who could not afford expensive musical instruments, skiffle clearly had an economic attraction. Not only that, but the American songs that skiffle bands performed often required only two or three chords.\n\nSkiffle was easy to play; featured easy-to-remember, singable tunes; used inexpensive, homemade instruments; and emphasized bright tempos and rhythm \u2014 what more could you ask for? Not much, according to The Who's lead singer, Roger Daltrey, who suggested that Lonnie Donegan and the skiffle style was the one thing that convinced him as a youth that he, too, could become a musician.\n\nAccording to veteran British musician Ron Ryan, formerly a member of The Walkers and a songwriter for The Dave Clark Five, \"every street in London had a skiffle band\" between about 1955 and 1957. Ultimately, nearly every member of nearly every band that made an impact as part of the British Invasion performed in a skiffle band at some point in the late 1950s, including Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Van Morrison, Mick Jagger and all four members of the Beatles.\n\nThe tunes that skiffle bands performed were largely drawn from American folk, country and rural African-American traditions. As a result, skiffle introduced Britain to musical forms and cultures that fundamentally differed from those favored by their parents. As working-class British youths delved more and more into these American forms, they began to identify not just with the music, but also with the white country musicians and black folk and blues musicians who had invented the genres. This was particularly true as the young Brits learned about the plight of blacks in the U.S. The disenfranchised British youths developed an affinity with American blacks in part because they, too, felt that they were members of an oppressed and marginalized group within their own society.\n\nFor some young working-class British musicians, the natural connection with African-American blues and R&B was so strong that by the end of the 1950s, some young Brits jumped directly into blues and R&B, bypassing skiffle as a gateway. By the early 1960s, the live and recorded repertoire of numerous British rock 'n' roll bands was heavily blues and R&B based, especially compared to white American rock 'n' roll bands. The Beatles performed and recorded Motown songs, 1950s rock 'n' rolls songs by black singer-songwriters such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard, and tunes written for black female vocal groups such as The Cookies.\n\nAfter the war, skiffle became popular. Lonnie Donegan, the \"King of Skiffle,\" inspired bands like the Rolling Stones and The Who.\n\nThe Rolling Stones\n\nShakin' All Over\n\nOne British band that is little known in the United States anticipated the integration of R&B and rock 'n' roll that marked the British Invasion of 1964 and 1965. This group was Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, and it shaped many of the bands that emerged in the mid-'60s.\n\nIn 1959, Freddie Heath and the Nutters recorded Heath's song \"Please Don't Touch.\" At the recording session, their record company told them that they would now be known as Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. As Kidd, Heath donned an eye patch and the band wore stylized pirate uniforms on stage and in their publicity photos.\n\nJohnny Kidd and the Pirates' second single, \"Shakin' All Over,\" cemented the importance of the band. This 1960 Kidd-penned song was the first British-composed rock song that was widely covered by bands around the world. From its melody, harmonic patterns and vocal and instrumental performance style, the original Johnny Kidd and the Pirates version of the song is a quintessential British take on American R&B.\n\nThe song became a hit in the United States in 1965 when it was covered by a Canadian band called Chad Allan and The Expressions. The record label, however, released it as a track by The Guess Who \u2014 hoping to create some buzz that maybe it was an anonymous release by one of the British Invasion bands, maybe even the Beatles themselves. Chad Allan and The Expressions were no more but still tour today as The Guess Who.\n\nActual British Invasion band The Who included \"Shakin' All Over\" in their classic 1970 album Live at Leeds. Legend has it that The Who added the song to their live shows because fans would confuse The Who and The Guess Who and expected to hear the song.\n\nThe Who covered \"Shakin' All Over\" on their 1970 album, Live at Leeds.\n\nThe 1964 Explosion\n\nThe sense of loss that followed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, the Beatles' national television exposure on the Ed Sullivan Show and the hype heaped upon the Beatles by radio personalities such as New York's Murray the K all played a role in starting what became the British Invasion. But the importance of the music itself cannot be ignored. White American rock bands of the time simply had not integrated R&B, Motown and electric blues into their sound to the extent that the Beatles and other British bands had. The bands of the British Invasion were a sonic sea change from the crooners and folk singers that preceded them. Americans had few acts that could compete on these new terms.\n\nTo top it off, Paul McCartney and John Lennon, in particular, were writing songs that integrated the influences of R&B, folk revival, country and 1950s-style rock 'n' roll, along with their own personal touches. In addition, the Beatles had the audacity to cover songs from Broadway musicals and middle-of-the-road pop tunes. All the influences in the Beatles package made the group stand out musically from not just their American counterparts but also from a fair number of their British peers.\n\nJust how great an impact did the Beatles and their counterparts make? In 1960 and 1961, no British artist hit No. 1 in the American pop charts. In 1962, two British instrumentals, \"Stranger on the Shore\" and \"Telstar,\" made it to the top of the U.S. charts. Fast forward to 1964: In the first year of the British Invasion, nine of the 23 songs that topped the U.S. charts were by British artists, and six of those were Lennon-McCartney compositions recorded by the Beatles. By 1965, Peter and Gordon, Manfred Mann, Herman's Hermits, the Rolling Stones, The Dave Clark Five, Petula Clark, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, the Animals, and Freddie and the Dreamers had all topped the U.S. record charts. In fact, in 1965, 12 of the year's 25 chart-toppers were by British artists, with the Beatles owning four of them.\n\nAmerican blues musician Chuck Berry was a major influence on the British Invasion, with many bands covering his songs, such as \"Beautiful Delilah\" by The Kinks and \"Reelin' and Rockin'\" by The Dave Clark Five.\n\nThe Kinks\n\nThe Dave Clark Five.\n\nThe English band Freddie and the Dreamers had a few hits in America in the mid 1960s.\n\nThe Wanna-Beatles\n\nIn the wake of the initial wave of Beatlemania, many other performers either sought to imitate the Beatles or were overtly assisted by them. In all sorts of ways \u2014 directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously \u2014 groups on both sides of the Atlantic betrayed the influence of the group from Liverpool.\n\nFor a while, the Beatles' mop-top haircut, or a close approximation of it, was an obligatory accessory for aspiring young British groups. The Beatles' success also confirmed the performance lineup of lead guitar, bass guitar, rhythm guitar and drums that was automatically adopted by the vast majority of musicians in Britain and America. And while few groups went to the lengths of the Grasshoppers or Erkey Grant & the Eerwigs in using a name that so closely echoed the insect connotations of the Beatles, there were many others who used names drawn from the animal kingdom \u2014 the Byrds, the Monkees, the Turtles.\n\nAcross the United States, the Beatles' distinctive Englishness was increasingly copied in the presentation of groups such as the Beau Brummels from San Francisco, the Knickerbockers from New Jersey and the Buckinghams from Chicago. The inclusion of Manchester-born Davy Jones in the Monkees was an astute move by the group's creators that gave their deliberate reproduction of the Beatles' individual personalities \u2014 John Lennon\/Micky Dolenz, George Harrison\/Mike Nesmith, Ringo Starr\/Peter Tork, Paul McCartney\/Davy Jones \u2014 an even greater commercial impact.\n\nOn occasion, the Beatles would willingly go out of their way to help the careers of some of their fellow musicians. In the mid-1960s, McCartney gave the song \"World Without Love\" to students Peter Asher (the brother of his girlfriend Jane Asher) and Gordon Waller. This signaled the start of a hugely successful recording career. As Peter and Gordon, the duo enjoyed a string of hit singles that included the Lennon-McCartney compositions \"Nobody I Know,\" \"I Don't Want To See You Again\" and \"Woman.\"\n\nThe Beatles' efforts to launch the career of Liverpool singer Tommy Quickly proved less successful. After his version of their song \"Tip of My Tongue\" unexpectedly failed to enter the charts, the group included him in several of their U.K. tours and contributed to his unreleased recording of \"No Reply.\" An extensive campaign to promote the singer in Britain and America came to nothing, and Quickly soon became the forgotten man of Brian Epstein's stable. The same fate awaited The Strangers with Mike Shannon, who in addition to routinely appearing in the same collarless jackets worn by the Beatles, released Lennon-McCartney's \"One and One Is Two,\" only to see it slip into obscurity.\n\nOthers, including Marmalade, Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, the Overlanders, and David and Jonathan, propelled themselves into the U.K. singles charts by releasing near-identical versions of Beatles' album tracks. And some established solo singers underwent abrupt changes of style. In the U.K., Adam Faith departed from the light, Buddy Holly-tinged pop that had brought him more than a dozen consecutive chart hits to record \"The First Time\" \u2014 a startlingly accurate reproduction of the Beatles' vocal and instrumental mannerisms. In America, Bobby Vee abandoned the double-tracked, orchestrally accompanied songs on which his career had been built to release an entire album called, unashamedly, Bobby Vee Sings The New Sound From England. Tracks such as \"She's Sorry\" and \"I'll Make You Mine\" came complete with falsetto screams, \"yeah, yeah\" choruses and descending guitar chords.\n\nAt first, the Beatles were largely ambivalent about those who sought to copy them \u2014 as in any creative endeavor, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But as the size, scale and detail of the duplications expanded, their indifference turned into irritation. \"It annoys me a lot... why can't these copyists make their own styles like we did?\" asked John Lennon in 1964.\n\n\u2014 Ian Inglis\n\nThe U.K. duo Peter and Gordon recorded a few hit singles written and composed by Lennon and McCartney.\n\nJames E. Perone is a professor of music at the University of Mount Union in Ohio. He is the author of several books, including Mods, Rockers, and the Music of the British Invasion. Because it sums up the band's philosophy and gives John, Paul, George and Ringo the chance to show off their instrumental chops, his favorite Beatles' track is \"The End.\"\nCome Together\n\nJohn Lennon and Paul McCartney created the most successful songwriting partnership in history.\n\nby Gillian G. Gaar\n\nIn the great John Lennon vs. Paul McCartney debate, views usually split along stereotypical lines. John was the aggressive rocker; Paul the lightweight milquetoast. John was progressive; Paul was conventional. John bared his soul; Paul wrote silly love songs. The debate also has an underlying subtext: John, being dead, can be eulogized as a hero and martyr. Paul, still alive, can more easily serve as a guilt-free punching bag.\n\nThis latter attitude was especially prevalent in the first years after Lennon's murder; people praising Lennon used that as an opportunity to knock McCartney. Whereas the question that should be asked is: why does it have to be John vs. Paul at all? It surely misses the point that the Beatles' success was due to it being John and Paul, each man as essential to the songwriting team as the other.\n\nThe polarized view of the two (John the hard man and Paul the softy) does have elements of truth, but it would be more accurate to characterize Lennon as being more impulsive and McCartney more cautious. McCartney made this assessment himself, telling Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, \"I do stand back at times, unlike John... I don't like being the careful one. I'd rather be immediate like John. He was all action.\"\n\nLennon also agreed with this view of their relationship, pointing to how the lyrics of \"We Can Work It Out\" revealed their personalities: \"You've got Paul writing 'we can work it out' \u2014 y'know, real optimistic, and me, impatient: 'life is very short \/ and there's no time \/ for fussing and fighting my friend.'\"\n\nComplementary and Competitive\n\nHowever, what's often overlooked in the debate is that Lennon and McCartney's differences complemented each other; it's what made them such an unbeatable songwriting team in the first place. The natural push-pull of their relationship bolstered their strengths, and helped to check their weaknesses. It's also why their work in the Beatles is consistently stronger than their work as solo artists. The arc from \"Love Me Do\" in 1962 to \"Strawberry Fields Forever\" in 1966 is breathtaking; neither Lennon or McCartney made such a progression in their solo work.\n\nThe other key element is that the partnership was a highly competitive one. Though the two enjoyed working together (Paul: \"Collaborating with another writer makes it twice as easy... The ricochet is a great thing\"), the partnership wasn't always 50\/50. Usually, one writer composed most of a song, taking it to his partner to help finish it; a general rule of thumb is that the lead singer is the dominant writer.\n\nAnd despite the fact that the songwriting royalties were split 50\/50, Lennon and McCartney would nonetheless vie to get their song as the A-side of the Beatles' singles, an indication of how important it was for each to be seen taking the lead.\n\nThis (mostly) friendly determination to one-up the other also meant that the Beatles' music was always progressing; neither Lennon or McCartney was interested in doing what they'd successfully accomplished before. And the pace at which Lennon and McCartney had to write (during 1963 alone, the Beatles released 19 Lennon-McCartney songs; seven other Lennon-McCartney songs that weren't recorded by the Beatles were also released by other artists) meant they spent a lot of time together perfecting their craft.\n\n\"They grew like hothouse plants,\" George Martin recalled. \"They'd suddenly sprung up into writers of stature.\"\n\nPaul McCartney, his girlfriend Jane Asher and John Lennon arrive in Greece in 1967. Paul is holding the hand of John's son, Julian.\n\nInfluence on Each Other's Songs\n\nMartin, who worked with the Beatles more than any other producer, was well placed to assess the Lennon-McCartney partnership. \"Paul had a stronger sense of melody and harmony that appealed to the main mass of the public more,\" he told author Peter Du Noyer, \"and John had a kookier way of dealing with lyrics, but they did influence each other enormously.\" Indeed, Lennon's love of word play attracted McCartney from the beginning; on first seeing Lennon perform live, he was amazed at how he sang the Del-Vikings' \"Come and Go With Me\" making up words on the spot, as he didn't know the lyrics.\n\nIt was Lennon's lyrical suggestion that gave McCartney's \"I Saw Her Standing There\" a more knowing edge. McCartney's opening couplet was \"She was just 17 \/ She'd never been a beauty queen.\" Lennon suggested changing the second line to the more suggestive \"You know what I mean.\"\n\nWhat one might call his darker worldview also gave a different musical flavoring to \"Michelle,\" when Lennon suggested the \"I love you, I love you\" passage for the bridge, inspired by Nina Simone's cover of Screaming Jay Hawkins' \"I Put A Spell On You.\" \"My contribution to Paul's songs was always to add a little bluesy edge to them,\" he explained. \"Otherwise, y'know, 'Michelle' is a straight ballad, right? He provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes.\"\n\nBut McCartney could supply a bit of bite as well, not only suggesting the lines about \"Norwegian Wood\" in the song of the same name, but also providing the idea for the song's ending, where the protagonist burns down the house of the woman who spurned it, giving the number \"a little sting in the tail,\" as McCartney put it. Always a more meticulous musician, Paul knew how to bring disparate song fragments together, as when he added the \"Woke up \/ fell out of bed\" sequence to Lennon's \"A Day in the Life\" or masterminded the medleys on side two of Abbey Road.\n\nDuring the Beatles' later years, the two wrote together less frequently, as their songwriting styles began to diverge. The balance had also shifted; while John's was the dominant voice on the Beatles' pre-1966 singles, McCartney came to the fore post-1966. There were still occasional collaborations \u2014 as when McCartney's verses in \"I've Got a Feeling\" were nicely counterpointed by Lennon's \"Everybody had a hard time\" sequence during the song's bridge \u2014 but each man was now more inclined to go his own way.\n\nBut what a rich and varied body of work Lennon and McCartney left behind. And so committed were they to the songwriting partnership that they credited each other on every song they wrote no matter how much either had contributed to it \u2014 John even used the credit Lennon-McCartney on his first solo single, \"Give Peace a Chance\" (though Paul would later have an issue with the name order of \"Lennon-McCartney\"). That each man could fully appreciate what the other brought to the table helped make John Lennon and Paul McCartney an unbeatable songwriting team.\n\nLet Me Take You Down\n\nJohn Lennon and \"Strawberry Fields Forever\" showcase how art was born from crisis.\n\nby Walter Everett\n\nIn 1966, Beatles fans protested over Lennon's remark that the band was more popular than Jesus.\n\nThe Beatles produced some of their most adventurous work in 1966. The year also marked the greatest crisis they had experienced since skulking away from Hamburg in late 1960. The band's meteoric rise had plateaued in early '66 when hopes for a third feature film and a companion recording project in the U.S. were abandoned. Revolver \u2014 rated by many as the greatest pop album of all time \u2014 put them back on track, but devastating new lows arrived with the year's world tour.\n\n\u2022John Lennon opened the U.S. leg of the tour with a confused and humiliating apology for statements he had made comparing the Beatles to Christ. This was just seven weeks after an American album cover was declared tasteless by retailers and withdrawn in an unprecedented retreat. (Known now as the \"butcher\" cover, the Yesterday and Today album featured the Beatles in white smocks holding pieces of meat and doll parts.)\n\n\u2022Rigid confinement by armed guards over three full days in Tokyo was followed by a capricious and dangerous lack of security in Manila.\n\n\u2022Appearances in the American South were occasions for record burnings, Klan protests and death threats.\n\nThese hardships and backlashes punctuated a dismal tour. The band's under-rehearsed approach to complex music, that remained inaudible anyway, rendered performances profoundly dissatisfying, and the stadiums were undersold, to boot. After the last concert on Aug. 29, 1966, George Harrison proclaimed, \"Well, that's it; I'm not a Beatle anymore.\"\n\nIn New York's Central Park, a 2.5-acre section of the park was named \"Strawberry Fields\" on Oct. 9, 1985 (on what would have been Lennon's 45th birthday) and features the Imagine memorial..\n\nJohn spent that fall in Europe (he and wife Cynthia return to London from Spain) where he wrote \"Strawberry Fields Forever.\"\n\nSeparation in the Fall of 1966\n\nInstead of regrouping in London to record an album for the Christmas market, as they had done every year after 1962, the four Beatles dispersed to the world's four corners. Paul McCartney spent the fall of '66 on safari in Kenya and wrote the soundtrack for The Family Way \u2014 the first music to be credited to a solo Beatle. Lennon had a film role, acting in How I Won the War, which was shot in Germany and Spain that September through November. Harrison studied sitar under Ravi Shankar in Bombay and toured the subcontinent. Ringo Starr caught up with family at home in Surrey.\n\nLennon was particularly at odds with himself as he sat in Spain, dreaming of his material and spiritual home, contemplating how his defining traits were perceived by himself, by his suddenly distant partners and by others.\n\nBecause Lennon used his art as an emotional release \u2014 as he acknowledged doing in \"I'm a Loser\" and \"Help!\" for instance \u2014 we can imagine that the deep identity crisis that overtook him in the fall of 1966 brought him to a similarly productive catharsis as he picked up a nylon-string classical guitar in seaside Almer\u00eda, considered some of the emotional trials he had endured at different points in his life and began composing \"Strawberry Fields Forever.\" As Lennon said, \"'Strawberry Fields' was psychoanalysis set to music, really.\"\n\nWhen this song was released with \"Penny Lane\" in February 1967 as a double A-side single, Beatles' fans were mystified. They were slow to accept the band's radical facial hair and unconventional clothing, an inscrutable baroque surface under which peculiar fantasies played.\n\nThe films promoting the two sides of the new single were bizarre. Other puzzles surrounded whatever meanings might lie behind the four toddlers' snapshots (the Beatles' own) on the single's picture sleeve and the perplexing aerial photo of the suburban Penny Lane district of Liverpool that appeared in teaser ads for the new disc. The listening public struggled to understand that the Beatles were attempting new poetic expressions of a return to blissful innocence.\n\nWe don't know what led Paul to create a companion piece to John's new offering, but we are given two Liverpool odes that complement each other well. McCartney's Edenic \"Penny Lane\" is graced with direct, representational lyrics featuring quaint characters who played within a clearly drawn picture: the barber, the banker, the fireman and the nurse all make sense to the listener.\n\nAmid protests over his comments about Jesus, John Lennon went to Germany in 1966 to film the movie How I Won the War which was directed by John Lester.\n\nJohn Lester with Lennon.\n\nThe Meaning Behind Strawberry Fields\n\n\"Strawberry Fields Forever,\" on the other hand, is an indecipherable, impressionistic jumble of images vaguely evocative of misunderstanding, insecurities and indifference \u2014 all somehow tied to a land of trees and fields.\n\nIt's partly the indirect mode with which Lennon recalls his childhood and considers a lifelong otherness that plants his fantasy at artistic depths. \"Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about \/ it's getting hard to be someone \/ it doesn't matter much to me \/ that is, you can't, you know, tune in but it's all right\" \u2014 these and other lines express a fluid identity, an insecurity in one's surroundings, an inability to make himself understood by others and a detachment from the everyday.\n\n\"The second line goes, 'No one I think is in my tree.' Well, what I was trying to say... in my insecure way, is 'Nobody seems to understand where I'm coming from.' \"\n\n\u2014 Interview with Playboy, 1980\n\nThe words are intentionally loose, controversial and anti-poetic. They speak directly but resist clarity. The song's complexity and its indirectness suggest a defensive mechanism that buffers the pain brought by eruptions of lifelong negative memories.\n\nThe song's musical factors, like its lyrics, convey a vague and wondrous misfittedness. Paul's Mellotron intro articulates flute samples made alien by trimming away their sonic attacks and decays. Lennon's ambivalent chords portray the elusiveness of goals through pitch alterations and motions forward then backward in relation to stable tonal reference points. An abrupt jump from guitars and keyboards to cellos and trumpets thwarts the listener's attempt to find secure grounding. Timbre-distorting tape speeds and intermittent backward percussion transport the singer and listener deep into the past, perhaps to a time preceding exile.\n\n\"Strawberry Fields Forever\" was released to waves of misunderstanding and awe, the composer's psyche center stage but buried under cryptic armor \u2014 a pose revisited in \"I Am the Walrus,\" \"Glass Onion\" and \"Come Together.\"\n\nIn the years since John died, the song's reputation has grown. It's a shining example of the Beatles' artistry and their commitment to searching for human understanding and transcendence.\n\nStrawberry Field\n\nStrawberry Field was a Salvation Army home right around the corner from where John lived with his Aunt Mimi. Abandoned by both parents when he was very young, John could identify with the neighborhood orphans as he attended their annual summer fundraising fair or played in their trees just a leap over the wall.\n\nThe orphanage is now long gone, but Yoko's Strawberry Fields memorial to John sits in Central Park in New York, directly across from the Dakota building where John and Yoko lived for his final seven years. The Dakota's tall, carved-stone gables and arched window surrounds are eerily reminiscent of the building that housed Strawberry Field.\n\nWalter Everett is a professor at the University of Michigan and the author of the two-volume set The Beatles as Musicians. He is unable to name a single favorite Beatles song, but believes that \"Strawberry Fields Forever\" may be their most significant recording.\nBreaching the Iron Curtain\n\nThe Beatles were the ultimate symbol of freedom in communist countries.\n\nby Ali Littman\n\nIn 1962, Nikita Khrushchev declared the electric guitar an \"enemy of the people.\" Two years later, teenagers in the U.S.S.R. were secretly making their own electric guitars to impersonate a new, beloved band \u2014 the Beatles. The Fab Four captivated young people behind the Iron Curtain, but it wasn't easy to love the fun-loving band. The Beatles were banned in the U.S.S.R., and it wouldn't be until 1986 that a complete Beatles album would be released there. Despite efforts to eradicate Beatlemania, the government was no match for the ardent Beatles fans in the Soviet Union.\n\nWhile the Beatles weren't the first rock band whose music had reached the Soviet Union, they gripped young people's hearts like no other band had before. Beatles music contained everything young people felt was lacking \u2014 joy, spontaneity, beauty and rhythm, according to Art Troitsky, one of the most prominent rock journalists in Russia, in an interview in Leslie Woodhead's How The Beatles Rocked The Kremlin.\n\nThe Beatles Black Market\n\nBeatles' music made its way into the U.S.S.R. through albums smuggled in from abroad or music played on foreign radio stations with powerful enough signals to beam into the Soviet Union. When Soviet authorities noticed the Beatles' burgeoning popularity, they jammed foreign radio stations, instructed censors to destroy any Beatles' records, and spread anti-Beatles propaganda.\n\nOne cartoon published in the Soviet Union called the Beatles \"The Bugs\" and depicted insect poison being poured over the scuttling Beatles. An article in the Soviet newspaper Pravda said the Beatles sat on the toilet in their raincoats to perform. A bizarre propaganda film claimed that the Beatles got their start performing in swimming trunks with toilet seats around their necks.\n\nThe government had reason to put down the Beatles. Soviet youth had been raised to view the West as their enemy. When the Beatles showed up, young people realized that something wasn't quite right about that viewpoint, according to Sasha Lipnitsky of the Russian rock band Zvuki Mu.\n\nIn order to foster their love for the forbidden band, Beatles fans resorted to developing a network of underground markets, bands and concerts. The black market boasted an array of Beatles paraphernalia, including albums made out of discarded X-ray plates. Known as \"ribs,\" these albums were widely available and could be bought for practically nothing. Fans and entrepreneurs made the X-ray discs by cutting a hole in the middle of the image, rounding the sides with scissors, and recording music onto the X-ray with a modified record player. These improvised records were flexible, meaning they could be hidden up a coat sleeve. The fact that the latest Beatles record was embossed on an X-ray of a skull or femur did nothing to diminish its appeal.\n\nIn its attempts to stop the spread of these records, the government flooded the streets with counterfeit copies that spit insults at the listeners, calling them anti-Soviet slime. When tape recorders became widely available, fans recorded LPs on tapes, selling them on the black market, too. Fans also took pictures of photos of the band to sell at underground markets. Some photos were even rented out so fans could enjoy them for a short period of time. Another pastime, according to Woodhead, included swapping Beatles memorabilia.\n\nStrange Rumors and Beatles Sightings\n\nAt the height of Beatlemania, fans behind the Iron Curtain were starved for information on their favorite band. According to authors Art Troitsky and Leslie Woodhead, rumors about the Beatles soon spread. They included:\n\n\u2022The Beatles loved Soviet pop music. They would get together in John Lennon's attic and listen to the radio, hoping to hear Time Machine and other Soviet rock groups.\n\n\u2022The Beatles clandes-tinely recorded Russian pop songs on X-ray films.\n\n\u2022The Beatles played a concert at the Moscow airport during a layover on their way home from Japan. It was this event that inspired \"Back in the U.S.S.R.\"\n\n\u2022A bizarre propaganda film claimed that the Beatles got their start performing in swimming trunks with toilet seats around their necks.\n\nImitators Great and Small\n\nBeatles' fans knew it would be a long time, if ever, before they saw the Beatles perform live. So, they created the next best thing \u2014 cover bands. According to Woodhead, \"There was not a band anywhere in the Soviet Union that did not start life as a Beatles tribute band.\"\n\nAndrew Makarevich, founder of the famous Russian rock band Time Machine, says that from the moment he heard the Beatles he knew he wanted to be like them. First, however, he had to find a suitable electric guitar, which at the time, wasn't for sale in the U.S.S.R. Buying a piece of wood and painting it red, Makarevich tried to recreate Lennon's guitar. But, he was stuck when he realized he needed a pickup, a device that converts guitar strums into electrical signals. When Makarevich heard that a pickup could be made from public telephone handsets, he stole the necessary parts and made his first electric guitar.\n\nMakarevich's band began playing in underground concerts. The only way to find out about an underground concert was by word of mouth because the venues were absolutely secret. A concert organizer could be arrested for \"breaching social order,\" especially if tickets were sold \u2014 which would mean the organizer was working on the black market.\n\nTime Machine soon turned into a full-fledged rock band, writing and performing its own songs for its own fan base. The story is the same for hundreds of bands across the U.S.S.R. that all got their starts as Beatles impersonators.\n\nRealizing they were fighting a losing battle, the state published its first positive article on the Beatles in 1968 in the magazine, Musical Life. The government even created its own robotic-sounding rock band known as the Happy Guys. They played Beatles songs, including \"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.\" The Happy Guys' other songs praised socialism and encouraged young people to look forward to a socialist future.\n\nThe Communist Bloc and Beyond\n\nIn Soviet satellite countries outside the U.S.S.R., official policies toward rock music and the Beatles varied, while fans possessed the same fervent love for the band. In 1964 a local Czech journalist (as described in Sabrina Ramet's book Rocking the State) reported on Beatlemania there: \"They wriggled, they fell off the platform and crawled back onto it, they gasped for air hysterically. I expected them to bite each other any minute. And then the destruction began.\" Fans rushed the stage, seizing chairs, chucking them across the room and breaking windows. Beatlemania \u2014 even with Beatles cover bands \u2014 had spread, striking fear in satellite governments as it had in the U.S.S.R.\n\nRingo Starr was the first Beatle to visit the U.S.S.R. in 1998. He played there again in 2011.\n\nIn 1979, Elton John made headlines when he played nine concerts in the U.S.S.R. At left, he tours the Krelim with his mother and stepfather, Sheila and Fred Farebrother.\n\nIn East Germany, concerts, discos, radio stations and television stations were mandated to maintain a 60:40 ratio in which 60 percent of music had to be from socialist countries while 40 percent could be from other countries. When John Lennon died, a newspaper in East Germany saw it as an opportunity to spread anti-American propaganda, printing the headline \"Singer John Lennon Just One of 21,000 Murder Victims Annually (in the U.S.).\"\n\nMeanwhile, fans behind the Iron Curtain mourned with the rest of the world. Radio Sofia in Bulgaria saluted Lennon's death in a two-hour tribute. In Czechoslovakia, fans erected shrines for Lennon and decorated a wall next to the Charles Bridge in honor of the fallen Beatle. The wall still stands today.\n\nBy the mid-1970s in the U.S.S.R., rules on rock music relaxed slightly as relations between the East and West improved. In 1977, the government allowed state record stores to sell Band on the Run by Wings, though it would still be nine years until a complete Beatles' album would be sold in the U.S.S.R.\n\nIn 1979, Elton John was permitted to perform a series of nine concerts in the U.S.S.R. By no means was John to play \"Back in the U.S.S.R.,\" the government instructed. Officials deemed the song too sensitive, and for the first eight concerts, John abided by their wishes. On the ninth concert, however, John jammed out to the forbidden song, \"Back in the U.S.S.R.\" Young people attending the concert, who had been forced to sit in the very back of the hall, burst forward cheering, stomping past Soviet officials.\n\nIt would only be a matter of time before a Beatles' fan would come to power in the U.S.S.R. That person was Mikhail Gorbachev. Under his leadership, the first full Beatles' album, A Hard Day's Night, was finally released in the U.S.S.R. in 1986. A year later, Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, received Yoko Ono in Moscow.\n\nThe first Beatle stepped foot in the U.S.S.R. in 1998 when Ringo Starr played to a packed hall in Moscow. \"It would have been nice if we could have come a bit earlier, but I tell you it's better late than never,\" Starr told the crowd.\n\nPaul McCartney finally made his way to the U.S.S.R. in 2003, playing a legendary concert in Red Square to 20,000 people, including Vladimir Putin. As McCartney sang \"Back in the U.S.S.R.,\" people cheered, danced, laughed, cried and sang along to that Beatles' anthem, forbidden in the U.S.S.R. for more than 30 years.\n\nIn 2003, Paul McCartney performed at Red Square to 20,000 screaming fans.\n\n1986\n\nIn Paul McCartney's book, Each One Believing: On Stage, Off Stage, and Backstage, he recalls meeting former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who told him through a translator that \"the Beatles' music has taught the young people of the Soviet Union that there is another life. That there is freedom elsewhere, and, of course, this feeling has pushed them toward perestroika, toward the dialogue with the outside world.\"\n\nPresident Vladimir Putin, who attended McCartney's 2003 concert, told him that the Beatles' music \"was like a gulp of freedom\" when he was young.\n\nAli Littman is an author living in Washington, D.C. She is currently working on her first novel. Her favorite Beatles' song is \"Hey Jude.\"\nDebate:The Fab Four's Fab 5\n\nTwo music critics try to find the Beatles top five songs.\n\nby Patrick Foster and Tim Riley\n\nLet us proclaim first off what an arbitrary and pleasantly unpredictable process picking 20 Beatles favorites proves, never mind a top five. It makes for a fiendishly tempting way to argue about things. Ask us next year \u2014 or even next month \u2014 and this list might wind up composed of entirely different songs, such is the grandeur of this catalog. Our only goal was to spread selections across the Beatles' early, middle and late years.\n\n\u2014 5 \u2014\n\nTim: \"Revolution No. 9\" from The Beatles (The White Album)\n\nI pick this song both for its disorienting contours as music concr\u00e8te (found sound alongside melody and harmony) and alien status as a Lennon-McCartney non-sing-along. Like \"A Day In the Life\" and \"Tomorrow Never Knows,\" it casts a long shadow across its album, and its perversity gives everything else poise \u2014 as if \"Cry Baby Cry\" had gently hypnotized side four of The White Album off into dreamland. Inside this experimental track's meandering compartments, the radio wonderland of Lennon's deep psyche peeks through. Feint cries of Beatlemania echo in its chambers. With hindsight, you have to wonder why Lennon had to fight for its inclusion while McCartney didn't have to mount any argument for \"Honey Pie.\"\n\nPatrick: \"She Said, She Said\" from Revolver\n\nI won't be able to get \"number nine, number nine\" out of my head for a week (but I appreciate the choice). I'm going with the final track on side one of Revolver (I have a theory about the best song on any album being the last song on side one, but that's another topic).\n\nWhile the band had been heavy and powerful before, nothing they had committed to tape was as lush, powerful and as lyrically mind-slapping as this otherworldly Lennon track. There are lots of stories about the origins of its lyrics (\"She said, I know what it likes to be dead\" was supposedly inspired by Peter Fonda's stoned musings), but it's velvety hammer bass, gut-grabbing guitar and drums that toss you around like a dinghy on a stormy sea are what really matter. Lennon's talismanic vocal \u2014 which floats above and around and across and really seems like it has seen the other side (and been spooked by it) \u2014 ices this delicious 2:37 slice of cake.\n\n\u2014 4 \u2014\n\nTim: \"That Means A Lot\" from Anthology 2\n\nPatrick, you stole my track!\n\nFor me the best tracks gravitate toward the end of side two, so I like the way you turn album sequences inside out.\n\nI first heard \"That Means a Lot\" on a bootleg in the late 1980s, and it rang out like the ultimate throwaway only a great band might have the confidence to discard (it finally appeared on Anthology 2).\n\nTo my ear, McCartney the musician ranks as follows: He's first a bassist (\"Rain,\" \"Don't Let Me Down,\" \"Something\"), then a singer (\"Long Tall Sally,\" \"I'm Down,\" \"Got To Get You Into My Life\") and then a songwriter, with pros and cons that rub hard against one another. His melodies can soar even when cloyingly sung (\"Eleanor Rigby,\" \"Here, There and Everywhere\"), and his coyness annoys even when framed by tart arrangements (\"For No One,\" \"When I'm Sixty Four,\" \"Martha My Dear\").\n\nThis early 1965 track (left off the Help! soundtrack) finds his sweet spot, alongside \"You Won't See Me,\" \"For No One,\" \"Penny Lane,\" and \"Get Back.\" Screaming \"Can't you see?!\" into the fadeout, he sounds like he's warming up for \"Hey Jude.\" The Spector-esque production veils but doesn't mask a deeply erotic anger. And the lyric resists romantic clich\u00e9 by circling that rarest of McCartney themes: humility.\n\nPatrick: \"Everybody's Got Something to Hide (Except for Me and My Monkey)\" from The Beatles (The White Album)\n\nTim, that's a great choice \u2014 Beatles fans who haven't heard it should find it right now!\n\nThe first few times I heard The White Album, I wasn't particularly impressed. (I'll admit I was much more into The Clash and Black Flag at the time). One evening about a few years later, I was at a friend's house and he was playing an old Warner Brother's compilation record that contained Fats Domino covering \"Everybody's Got Something to Hide.\" I was surprised and delighted by his loosely swinging version and made a note to go back and listen to the original a little more closely.\n\nNot only did this cause me to reevaluate my stance on The White Album, but it sparked a personal Beatles revival. And it was this frantic, scrambling track that led the way. (That enigmatic indie rockers The Feelies covered it on their debut album didn't hurt, either.)\n\nWith its emphasis on stereo separation and stutter-step intro that lurches forward into a headlong charge, this Lennon-penned rocker emphasizes feel over message and impact over everything else. The bell that rings incessantly in the left channel adds an element of hysteria that is whipped into shape by the lacerating guitar breaks in the chorus. And so what if the words are basically nonsense? The \"whooooo!\" that erupts at :39 is, in my view, the skin-tingling moment of the band's late-period.\n\n\u2014 3 \u2014\n\nTim: \"Happiness is a Warm Gun\" from The Beatles (The White Album)\n\nPatrick, you stole my track again! Literally next up on my list was the thunderous \"Monkey,\" so you force my hand: I choose \"Happiness is a Warm Gun,\" its tricky cousin, which falls... at the end of side one (dun dun DUN).\n\n\"Monkey\" is a tart, mangled, screwball farce. Having been maneuvered into this corner, I choose its polar opposite, the maniacal rant of a lecherous junkie in his \"multi-colored mirrors on his hobnail boots,\" whose \"hands are busy working overtime,\" who climaxes with a magnificent doo-wop coda as the junk hits his veins. Those \"Mother superiors\" are a nice touch!\n\nThis song finds Lennon rediscovering the blues after jumping off experimental ledges with \"Tomorrow Never Knows,\" \"A Day in the Life\" and \"I Am the Walrus.\" The track sits alongside other late songs with stabbing vocals inside traditional frames like \"Yer Blues,\" \"I Want You (She's So Heavy)\" and \"Don't Let Me Down.\"\n\nLike \"Monkey,\" \"Happiness\" reaches extreme ensemble funk: As the band falls apart, it still summons intricacy and precise timing around sharp rhythmic curves. Inside a narrative of stray insights, acute observations and lickety-split reversals, comes a mangy guitar solo, spewing degenerate glamor to embarrass the candid junkie lyrics.\n\nWhoops, that makes two on my list off the overrated The White Album. What can I say? You inspire me.\n\nPatrick: \"Please Please Me\" from Please Please Me\n\nOne of the great things about the Beatles is the incredibly rich amount of historical material available to fans. And I must admit, I absolutely love being able to re-live, through reading and listening, the magic of Beatlemania.\n\nI'm especially enamored of the moment when, after the band completed the final take of this song on Nov. 26, 1962, producer George Martin pressed the control room intercom and calmly announced, \"Congratulations, gentlemen, you've just made your first No. 1.\" (And he was right, sort of \u2014 the single peaked at No. 2.)\n\nThe record's steady march up the U.K. charts unleashed the first wave of Beatles' adulation across England and prompted Martin to call the band off of a tour to record their first full-length album. Which they did... in one day, before heading back out on the road.\n\nAside from its historical significance, the song itself is a raw, refreshing blast of unvarnished guitar \u2014 including a memorable, ringing figure played by George Harrison \u2014 and thrilling harmonies.\n\nAs has been pointed out by astute critics (most notably Ian MacDonald in his seminal Revolution in the Head), the record's main influence is the Everly Brothers' 1960 hit \"Cathy's Clown,\" one of the very best records ever made by anyone anywhere.\n\nUSA Today's Elysa Gardner chose \"Ticket to Ride\" as the Beatles' best song: \"No single better reflects the mix of ambition, tension and pure pop genius that made the Beatles unique.\"\n\n\u2014 2 \u2014\n\nTim: \"If I Fell\" from A Hard Day's Night\n\nLennon sings the preamble, peering over a ledge between commitment and reluctance, and the song spins out indecision through intricate vocal harmonies. For the verses, McCartney's upper line ducks and glides with geometric lyricism, often in the opposite direction to Lennon's vocals. Each individual line would have made a sturdy melody on its own; combined they trace a poetry of uncertainty. The lyrics describe love's oscillating, intemperate swells, seeking comfort and reassurance where only risk abides.\n\nWas a ballad ever so fluid yet tough-minded? Would two writers harmonizing ever sound as timidly poised?\n\nPatrick: \"Come Together\" from Abbey Road\n\nThe opening salvo on Abbey Road was one of Lennon's two \u2014 with the grimy, addictive \"I Want You (She's So Heavy)\" \u2014 counterweights to McCartney's majestic swan-song medley on side two.\n\nThe world of indie rock in the mid-1980s to early 1990s was a wonderful place. We valued (okay, worshipped) strange strings of words, subversive little verbal tricks and raw, authentic sounding drums and guitars. \"Come Together\" overflows with all of those attributes and then some \u2014 from the unsettling and evocative images (\"spinal cracker,\" \"mojo filter,\" \"joo-joo eyeball,\" and how the heck do you \"shoot Coca-Cola?\") to the warming-up-to-stomp-your-head-in drumming and paint-scraper guitar.\n\nBest of all of course, is Lennon's whispered\/shouted \"Shoot me!\" \u2014 which was mixed to lessen the shock into something that sounds like \"shooook!\" \u2014 that punctuates each creeping figure. In many ways, \"Come Together\" is a perfect indie-rock song.\n\nThat \"Come Together\" foreshadows Lennon's first wave of solo hits \u2014 \"Power to the People\" and others \u2014 is icing on the cake. And years later, when I actually listened closely to Chuck Berry's \"You Can't Catch Me,\" the tune that is kissing cousins with \"Come Together?\" Chills, man.\n\nNot only did the look of the Fab Four evolve, their music did, too. The Beatles went from young lads (above in 1964) singing \"yeah, yeah, yeah\" to hippies (below in 1969) writing about angst and playing more complex arrangements.\n\n\u2014 1 \u2014\n\nTim: \"Don't Let Me Down,\" the B-side to \"Get Back\"\n\nOkay, confession: It fell down to a very hard choice between \"Don't Let Me Down\" and \"A Day in the Life.\" Both have that collaborative spark and are duets. But \"A Day in the Life\" seems so obvious, right? That track still works its voodoo on classic rock radio, and in a weird way has aged less ironically than its themes deserve.\n\nPerched on the tipping point of the Lennon- McCartney feud, this tune finds them sounding more like brothers than they have since \"If I Fell\" and climaxes a series of musical farewells they offered up in their final months together (\"Two of Us,\" \"I've Got a Feeling\" and \"I Dig a Pony\").\n\nAmid so many great late Lennon vocals, this exasperated exhortation still rings out as poetically as anything he ever did, including much of his work with the Plastic Ono Band. It's the one Beatles track where McCartney's upper harmony floats invisibly \u2014 most listeners don't even hear it as a duet. At the same time, McCartney's bass line descends stepwise beneath the bridge (\"I'm in love for the first time...\") for an exquisite counterpoint. McCartney literally coddles Lennon from above and below.\n\nThe more you know about Beatles history, the more confounding \"Don't Let Me Down\" gets. Just who is Lennon addressing in this first-person narrative: Yoko Ono? Paul McCartney? The band dissolving beneath his yowls? Apple Corps on whose rooftop he sang the song for the Let It Be film? The rest of us?\n\nIn the weeks after his assassination in 1980, this track became as hard to listen to as that line in \"The Ballad of John and Yoko\" \u2014 \"The way things are going \/ They're gonna crucify me.\"\n\nPatrick: \"Rain,\" the B-side to \"Paperback Writer\"\n\nI was certain that we would land on the same top pick, Tim, but you went for their beautiful, bittersweet swan song. You are a true Beatles scholar. With my No. 1, I went for sheer sonic weight, sensory impact and personal connection \u2014 along with a bit of record-collector geekiness.\n\n\"Rain\" is simply the Beatles song that hits me hardest, sonically and personally. Anyone who has ever been in a band (no matter how good or bad) gets a special thrill when playing a cover version of a song from a band they love, especially when it sounds at least halfway passable. Strumming the alternating C and G majors in \"Rain\" \u2014 drums crashing and bass rising and falling around you \u2014 is an incredibly empowering feeling. In the tiniest way, you feel more connected to your heroes.\n\nThe rush and buzz of something so simple but powerful inspires the urge to write and create and release records in a mad rush. That, for me, is what rock music is really about.\n\nLennon, of course, knew all those feelings by the time \"Rain\" was written and recorded. But he was also in the grip of something else.\n\nMuch has been written about \"Rain\" as a metaphor for (and attempt to express the sheer brain- and chest-pressing weight of) an LSD trip. And while the record itself is brilliantly recorded, taking the band into luminous sonic territory where every sound does indeed seem to glow from the inside, \"Rain\" also captures the band's musicianship at an absolute peak.\n\nStarr has never been more rhythmically perfect, Harrison's leads whoosh, and McCartney is brilliant beyond comprehension \u2014 one could make an argument that his bassline here is the greatest in rock 'n' roll history. The harmonies show how closely the group was paying attention to the Beach Boys, while Lennon's keening, sneering vocal leaps out at the listener and asks, \"Are you with us, brother?\"\n\nAs a lifelong recording-collecting nerd, how could I not choose a B-side as my No. 1 song from the greatest rock band of all time?\n\nThe trend-setting Beatles \u2014 performing in 1966.\n\nAttending a lecture by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1967.\n\nIn 2004 Rolling Stone declared \"A Day in the Life\" from Sgt. Pepper's the Beatles' top song, writing, \"In truth, the song was far too intense musically and emotionally for regular radio play. It wasn't really until the '80s, after Lennon's murder, that 'A Day in the Life' became recognized as theband's masterwork. In this song, as in so many other ways, the Beatles were way ahead of everyone else.\"\n\nTim's Top 20\n\n1.Don't Let Me Down\n\n2.If I Fell\n\n3.Happiness Is A Warm Gun\n\n4.That Means a Lot\n\n5.Revolution #9\n\n6.You Won't See Me\n\n7.I Saw Her Standing There\n\n8.Rain\n\n9.Dr. Robert\n\n10.And Your Bird Can Sing\n\n11.Strawberry Fields Forever\n\n12.Penny Lane\n\n13.Hey Jude\n\n14.Revolution\n\n15.I Should Have Known Better\n\n16.Dear Prudence\n\n17.Everybody's Got Something to Hide\n\n(Except for Me and My Monkey)\n\n18.I Call Your Name\n\n19.Sexy Sadie\n\n20.You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)\n\nTim Riley has written Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary and Lennon: Man, Myth, Music, among other books. He teaches journalism at Emerson College in Boston.\n\nPatrick's Top 20\n\n1.Rain\n\n2.Come Together\n\n3.Please Please Me\n\n4.Everybody's Got Something to Hide\n\n(Except for Me and My Monkey)\n\n5.She Said, She Said\n\n6.Dr. Robert\n\n7.Twist and Shout\n\n8.Paperback Writer\n\n9.I Want to Hold Your Hand\n\n10.I've Just Seen a Face\n\n11.Happiness Is A Warm Gun\n\n12.Taxman\n\n13.Sun King\/Mean Mr. Mustard\n\n14.I Am the Walrus\n\n15.Tomorrow Never Knows\n\n16.Strawberry Fields Forever\n\n17.Don't Let Me Down\n\n18.A Hard Day's Night\n\n19.The Ballad of John and Yoko\n\n20.Back In the USSR\n\nPatrick Foster works on digital media projects for USA Today and writes about music for a variety of publications. He sometimes plays guitar and yells for a band called Wingtip Sloat.\nWe Can't Work it Out\n\nAs ex-Beatles, John, Paul, George and Ringo saw their careers soar, stall and take strange turns.\n\nby Arwen Bicknell\n\nIn 1967, the Beatles had enjoyed three years of widespread popularity in the U.S. It would be another three years before the band broke up, with the Fab Four pursuing solo careers.\n\nThe Beatles' breakup didn't happen overnight. The four Beatles grew apart personally and musically over a period of several years. The closest thing to an official announcement occurred on April 10, 1970, when Paul McCartney, promoting his first solo album, said that he did not foresee writing with John Lennon again. By then each had a distinct musical identity. Still young men \u2014 the Beatles were in their late 20s at the time of Paul's statement \u2014 they proceeded to create solo albums at a blistering pace. By the end of 1973, the ex-Beatles had accounted for 14 studio albums since the band's breakup. As the years passed and their output slowed, the ex-Beatles found other interests in art, politics and business. A reunion never appeared to have been seriously considered. John died in 1980; George in 2001.\n\nJohn Lennon\n\nAfter the breakup of the band, Lennon was the Beatle most associated with political and lifestyle activism. \"Give Peace a Chance\" \u2014 released before the breakup \u2014 became an anthem of the anti-war movement, and John, in his lyrics and actions, seemed intent on finding boundaries to push.\n\nBetween 1970 and 1975, Lennon released an album every year. He then spent five years on musical hiatus, focusing on his young son, Sean, and wife Yoko Ono. Lennon returned to the musical scene with Double Fatasy, an album alternating between songs performed by Lennon and by Ono. The album was falling after only three weeks on the U.K. charts, and critics disdained it as a self-indulgent portrait of marriage that might or might not have reflected their domestic reality.\n\nBut Lennon wasn't particularly interested in critical acclaim, as he made clear in his 1980 Rolling Stone interview: \"These critics, with the illusions they've created about artists \u2014 it's like idol worship. They only like people when they're on their way up... I cannot be on the way up again.... What they want is dead heroes, like Sid Vicious and James Dean. I'm not interesting in being a dead [expletive] hero.... So forget 'em, forget 'em.\"\n\nHe may have had a point: When he was murdered, sales of Double Fantasy went through the roof and criticism was muted \u2014 in some cases, even withdrawn from publication.\n\nLennon and Ono's 1969 wedding at the Rock of Gibralter.\n\nJohn in 1980, one month before his murder.\n\nJohn's Highlight\n\nFew would argue that the high point of Lennon's solo career \u2014 and his most lasting legacy \u2014 is the song \"Imagine.\" It's his best-selling, best-remembered single, named by BMI as one of the 100 most-performed songs of the 20th century. Lennon himself mentioned it as one of the songs he was proudest of in a 1980 Playboy interview: \"'Imagine,' 'Love' and those Plastic Ono Band songs stand up to any song that was written when I was a Beatle. Now, it may take you 20 or 30 years to appreciate that, but the fact is, if you check those songs out, you will see that it is as good as any [expletive] stuff that was ever done.\" While there is something a tad hypocritical about \"a millionaire who said 'Imagine no possessions,'\" as Elvis Costello pointed out in \"The Other Side of Summer,\" it has nonetheless become a revered anthem of world unity for three generations.\n\nJohn's Lowlight\n\nSome Time in New York City, Lennon's 1972 album, marked an artistic low point \u2014 Rolling Stone said, \"The tunes are shallow and derivative and the words little more than sloppy nursery rhymes\" \u2014 but Lennon's ugly attacks on Paul McCartney are the most noteworthy low. McCartney was hardly blameless, attacking his ex-partner in his own lyrics, but Lennon responded with twice the vitriol. In \"How Do You Sleep?\" Lennon sang, \"The only thing you done was yesterday,\" and \"The sound you make is muzak to my ears.\" Ironically, this track was on Lennon's Imagine album \u2014 proving that \"a brotherhood of man\" is no easy thing.\n\nYoko Ono told Esquire in 2011 that Lennon's legacy is what's really important. \"His words and his music are still here. It will still affect people. And that's the only thing they knew, anyway, when he was alive. So that's the fate of an artist. It's not a bad one. As long as you are what you have created,and what you wanted to share with the world, it's still there.\"\n\nPaul McCartney\n\nIt's impossible to sum up Paul McCartney's post-Beatles accomplishments in anything shorter than a book. After all, he has spent more than 40 years as an ex-Beatle. Along with fronting the band Wings, many solo outings and a couple of film projects, he also dipped his toe in the classical scene and collaborated anonymously on electronic music experiments.\n\n\"I never thought that I'd particularly be doing anything,\" he told NPR in 2000. \"I'm not one of these people who has a vision or has a plan of what I'm doing. I'm just letting it unfold. What I'm lucky enough to be part of, and what leads me into something, I'm quite receptive to. Sometimes people would say too receptive 'cause I accept things like the Liverpool Oratorio... I was just asked... would I do anything for the Liverpool Orchestra? I said, 'Yeah! Sure!' without really realizing... how much work was involved.\"\n\nPaul in 2013.\n\nPaul's Highlight\n\nIt's difficult to pick a high point for a legendary career spanning four decades. Perhaps 1979, when the Guinness Book of Records declared Paul the most successful popular music composer ever, or 1997, when he was knighted for his musical contributions. But the ultimate tribute to Paul is where he is right now. At age 71, he has released New, his 16th studio album, to acclaim. The album is a blend of reminiscence and rebirth; one song focuses on his pre-Beatles days, another on his new wife, Nancy Shevell. One of the four producers who worked on the records was Giles Martin, the son of George Martin.\n\nPitchfork writes, \"it's gratifying and inspiring to see the pop musician who arguably most deserves to rest on his laurels steadfastly refuse to do so. But even more remarkable than his work ethic is the fact that he's still trying to improve himself as an artist.\"\n\nPaul's Lowlight\n\nEven geniuses hit sour notes, and McCartney's came with Press to Play in 1986. Angling for a modern sound, he selected wunderkind producer Hugh Padgham, who had worked with The Police and Peter Gabriel, and he pulled in big-name guests like Eric Stewart and Pete Townshend. But work on the album dragged out for an agonizing 18 months, and everything went badly. Padgham and Stewart competed over producing duties and had even more trouble trying to tell McCartney the material was weak.\n\n\"It's difficult to tell Paul McCartney, isn't it?\" Stewart said. \"He's a great singer, he's written the greatest songs of all time, and you're saying, 'That's not good enough.'\"\n\nPadgham's memories were even less pleasant: \"There was this conflict there. And that was something that Paul could do. He could actually wither you with a sentence if he didn't like what you said.\" When the album was finally released, the producers' worst fears were realized, and the effort marked McCartney's first studio collection ever to fall short of the U.S. top 20.\n\nMcCartney has suffered a lot of abuse for gravitating toward the schmaltzy (\"My Love\") and the silly (\"Let 'Em In\"). The criticism isn't entirely undeserved (if you've never seen Dana Carvey's sendups of McCartney specifically and of vapid pop music generally as Derek Stevens, check him out on YouTube). McCartney seems to take it in stride, living well with his best revenge in \"Silly Love Songs,\" a No. 1 hit in the U.S.\n\nPaul and Linda McCartney harmonize during a Wings concert in 1976.\n\nGeorge Harrison\n\nBefore the Beatles' breakup, Harrison had already recorded and released two solo albums and was probably the Beatle best positioned for a solo career. In 1970, he released the highly regarded album, All Things Must Pass, and the following year, he organized a charity event, the Concert for Bangladesh, that led to the release of a live triple album and, in 1972, a concert film. The event would go on to form the template for Live Aid, Farm Aid and pretty much every other musical charity event since.\n\nHarrison continued to release new albums through the 1970s, but with waning commercial and critical success. In the early 1980s he stepped away almost entirely, taking a five-year break from recording. In 1987, he got back in the game, working with Jeff Lynne on a new album and collaborating with Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and Elton John. The result was Cloud Nine, which included Harrison's rendition of James Ray's catchy, if repetitive \"Got My Mind Set on You,\" which would be Harrison's biggest solo hit since \"My Sweet Lord.\"\n\nGeorge with Ravi Shankar in 1970.\n\nGeorge's Highlight\n\nBuoyed by the success of Cloud Nine, Harrison formed the Traveling Wilburys, a band of sorts that featured Harrison, Lynne, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison. \"He just said he had a lot of fun with the Wilburys, and he had a lot of fun with the Beatles,\" Harrison's widow, Olivia, told Spinner.com in 2012. \"I don't think there's anything you can compare to being in a band like the Beatles, is there? But he really had fun with Bob and Roy and Tom and Jeff. He loved being a collaborator and loved not having to do all the work himself. I think that was the main thing. And he could hang out; he liked to hang out. He didn't always have guys and musicians to hang out with. He missed that.\" The Wilburys released two albums, Volume 1 in 1988 and Volume 3 in 1990.\n\nGeorge's Lowlight\n\n\"My Sweet Lord\" was the biggest-selling single of 1971 in Britain. But it was also at the center of a high-profile plagiarism suit for its similarity to the 1963 Chiffons hit \"He's So Fine.\" It became a sordid episode. The Beatles' business manager, Allen Klein, entered into negotiations with Bright Tunes, the owner of the track, to resolve the issue on Harrison's behalf by offering to buy the financially ailing publisher's entire catalog, but no settlement could be reached before the company was forced into receivership. While that was going on, Harrison, Lennon and Starr all cut ties with Klein in 1973, which led to more lawsuits. Harrison offered to settle with Bright Tunes but was rejected; as it turned out, Klein was still trying to purchase the company and was supplying it with financial details in Harrison's suit.\n\nThe case reached district court in 1976, and Harrison was found to have \"subconsciously\" plagiarized the earlier tune, but the legal machinations and repercussions would continue for years afterward. Litigation between Klein and Harrison lasted into the 1990s.\n\nHumor fans owe a debt of gratitude to Harrison for mortgaging his home to finance production of Monty Python's Life of Brian. Harrison founded the movie company HandMade Films to finance the film and went on to serve as executive producer for 23 more films with HandMade. Here he poses with Madonna, the star of HandMade's Shanghai Surprise, released in 1986.\n\nRingo Starr\n\nThe least musically successful of the Beatles post-breakup, Starr has hardly been idle and can claim notable accomplishments in painting \u2014 he recently had an exhibit of works he made with the software MS Paint \u2014 film and music.\n\nDespite being the oldest Beatle, he also has the most childlike reputation, so it's fitting that he was the original narrator for the preschooler show Thomas the Tank Engine, released an Octopus Garden children's book, and served as an honorary Santa Tracker and voice-over personality in 2003 and 2004 during the annual NORAD Tracks Santa program.\n\nStarr is still recording and touring with various iterations of an All Starr Band, as he has done since 1989. \"I am making records,\" he told CNN in 2012. \"I am going on tour, and then I am off to do whatever else I want to do. So I have a very good life.\"\n\nRingo became a children's book author in 2013.\n\nRingo's Highlight\n\nMusically, Starr peaked early. His most successful singles were \"Photograph\" from 1973 and \"You're Sixteen\" from 1974, both of which reached No. 1 in the United States. In 1972, he released his most successful U.K. single, \"Back Off Boogaloo,\" which peaked at No. 2.\n\nRingo's Lowlight\n\nAs with his former bandmates, the early 1980s were unkind to Starr, starting with his 1981 album Stop and Smell the Roses. An interview with Merv Griffin hints at the chaos of the recording sessions: \"It's interesting for me, when you don't have a band, you work with a lot of different musicians, and you work with guys who have bands. I just get on the kit to give the drummer a drink. I've been in three bands on this album and never seen the drummer.\" The album tanked, leading RCA to drop his contract. No major U.S. or U.K. label showed any interest in picking up his 1983 follow-up, Old Wave. RCA Canada finally released that album, which did poorly in all markets. It would be almost a decade before Starr would go back into the studio.\n\nIn 1981, Starr played the lead role in the hilariously bad movie Caveman. \"What we needed was a charming, romantic star who was short and unprepossessing,\" writer-director Carl Gottleib told an interviewer in 1981. \"After Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman and Dudley Moore, who is there? The casting chief Lynn Stallmaster suggested Ringo Starr, and I said, 'Right!'\" The movie is so awful that it essentially ended Starr's career in movies, but it also is notable for another reasons: Starr met and married Bond girl Barbara Bach during production.\nThe Beatles' U.S. Collection\n\nThe Beatles released 20 studio albums in North America between 1964 and 1970. The band also released several live albums and compilations.\n\nFive Fifth Beatles\n\nThe Fab Four had more than a little help from their friends along the way.\n\nBy Arwen Bicknell\n\nGeorge Harrison observed at one point that \"there are supposed to have been 5,000 Fifth Beatles.\" That may be a conservative estimate.\n\nThere may be no more coveted title in the world of music, or one that's been more widely handed out by journalists and fans. Candidates range across time and place \u2014 from the band's earliest influences to its inner circle of longtime confidants, from ex-girlfriends to widows, from solitary DJs in the U.S. to the entire town of Liverpool. It's an honorific equally revered and ubiquitous.\n\nHere are the top contenders for the title.\n\n\u2014 5 \u2014\n\nNeil Aspinall\n\nNeil Aspinall was a childhood friend of Paul McCartney and George Harrison. He became the Beatles' road manager and personal assistant, and then later the manager of Apple Corps.\n\nIn Beatles' lore, Aspinall is known for the affair he had with Pete Best's mother, Mona. They had a son in July 1962; a month later, Pete Best was cut from the band. Aspinall worked closely with manager Brian Epstein, stood in for an ill George Harrison during rehearsals for the Ed Sullivan Show (pictured above), and signed sets of Beatles' autographs for thousands of unsuspecting fans. He was charged with sourcing photographs for all the people shown on the Sgt. Pepper's cover and was asked to manage Apple Corps, founded in April 1968. In the early 1990s he was appointed executive producer of The Beatles Anthology project, which had its roots in the 1970s as a film called The Long And Winding Road. Producer George Martin once said Aspinall was the true Fifth Beatle.\n\n\"Maybe Neil Aspinall said 'No' too many times, but his overriding thought was always to protect the four Beatles in the frenzy that he had to deal with. No one can imagine the stress of handling the group, for everyone in the world wanted them. His business decisions were sound, and the fact that the Beatles are acknowledged to be the greatest of our stars is his legacy.\"\n\n\u2014 George Martin\n\n\"Neil was a great man who I knew even before I met any of the guys in the Beatles. I met him at school when we were both 11 and we remained friends ever since.\"\n\n\u2014 Paul McCartney\n\n\"There are supposed to be about 5,000 Fifth Beatles. But really there were only two: Derek Taylor and Neil Aspinall.\"\n\n\u2014 George Harrison\n\nFrom a 1996 interview with Aspinall in MOJO:\n\nQ: Even George Martin describes you as the Fifth Beatle. How do you feel about that?\n\nA: Oh, I keep trying to lay that on George! There is no Fifth Beatle. I think if there was such a thing, it would be Pete Best or Stu Sutcliffe, not some outsider who wasn't in the band. A ridiculous suggestion.\n\n\u2014 4 \u2014\n\nPete Best\n\nTechnically, the argument could be made that Ringo Starr became the Fifth Beatle (maybe the sixth, if you count Stuart Sutcliffe) upon replacing Pete Best as drummer. Best met the band because his mother, Mona, owned the Casbah, where they performed, and he joined the group at the invitation of Paul McCartney in 1960, a day before the Beatles' first trip to Hamburg.\n\nBest's quiet personality and aloofness from the rest of the group meant he tended not to participate in their banter, and he was the only member not to get what would later be known as a Beatle haircut. When the band auditioned for George Martin in 1962, Martin felt Best's drumming was substandard, and the group cut him. There was speculation later that his standoffish attitude was also a factor, or even that he was cut from the band because the other members were jealous of the attention he received from female fans.\n\n\"We were cowards. We got Epstein to do the dirty work for us.\"\n\n\u2014 John Lennon\n\n\"It was a big issue at the time, how we dumped Pete. And I do feel sorry for him, because of what he could have been on to, but as far as we were concerned, it was strictly a professional decision. If he wasn't up to the mark \u2014 slightly in our eyes, and definitely in the producer's eyes \u2014 then there was no choice. But it was still very difficult. It is one of the most difficult things we ever had to do.\"\n\n\u2014 Paul McCartney\n\n\"Some people expect me to be bitter and twisted, but I'm not. I feel very fortunate in my life. God knows what strains and stresses the Beatles must have been under. They became a public commodity. John paid for that with his life.\"\n\n\u2014 Pete Best\n\n\u2014 3 \u2014\n\nStuart Sutcliffe\n\nStuart Sutcliffe was an artist and the band's original bassist in Liverpool and Hamburg. In addition to performing with the group, he also arranged bookings for them and occasionally allowed them to rehearse in his flat.\n\nDespite Lennon's claim that the Beatles' name came in a dream when a man on a flaming pie gave him the idea, it was actually Lennon and Sutcliffe's combined idea to change the band's name from The Quarrymen. The name Beatles was a pun inspired by Buddy Holly's group, The Crickets, and it went through a number of variations: the Silver Beatles, Silver Beats, Silver Beetles, and Silver Beatles once more before settling in as just the Beatles in August 1960.\n\nIn July 1961, Sutcliffe decided to leave the group to focus on painting (some of his artwork is pictured here). The band attempted to add a new bass player before handing over bass duties to McCartney, who had previously played piano and guitar. Sutcliffe died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1962 at the age of 21.\n\n\"I looked up to Stu. I depended on him to tell me the truth. Stu would tell me if something was good and I'd believe him.\"\n\n\u2014 John Lennon\n\n\"The Beatles were best when Stuart was still in the band. To me it had more balls, it was even more rock 'n' roll when Stuart was playing the bass and Paul was playing piano or another guitar. The band was, somehow, as a rock 'n' roll band, more complete.\"\n\n\u2014 Klaus Voorman, who played bass with the band during the early days\n\n\"Stu had won a painting competition. The prize was 75 quid (about $150). We said to him, 'That's exactly the price of a Hofner bass!' He said, 'It's supposed to be for painting materials,' but we managed to persuade him.\"\n\n\u2014 Paul McCartney\n\n\u2014 2 \u2014\n\nBrian Epstein\n\nFrom the Beatles' first success until his death of a drug overdose in August 1967, Brian Epstein took care of every aspect of the Beatles' career. He discovered the Beatles and guided the band to stardom. He cleaned up their image, coaxing them from blue jeans and leather jackets to matching suits. He even paid for them to record a demo with Decca.\n\nAfter the band had been rejected by nearly all the major recording studios in London, he secured their contract with producer George Martin at EMI and took on the unpleasant task of firing Pete Best as drummer. He was an ardent supporter of their writing in a time when a group writing all of their music and lyrics themselves was nearly unheard of, and he took the concept of rock promotion to new limits with stadium concerts and world tours.\n\nOn a personal basis, Epstein suffered the same sort of abuse and insults from the band as many other members of the inner circle; in his case, being Jewish and gay made him an easy target. Upon his death, things slowly unraveled until the group's dissolution three years later.\n\n\"Brian Epstein had a big posh car. Early on it was great because Paul and I had learnt how to drive and we always wanted to drive his car. That's one of the reasons we signed up with him \u2014 because he had a good car.\"\n\n\u2014 George Harrison\n\n\"If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian. People talked about George Martin as being the Fifth Beatle because of his musical involvement but, particularly in the early days, Brian was very much part of the group.\"\n\n\u2014 Paul McCartney\n\n\"After Brian died, we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us, when we went round in circles? We broke up then. That was the disintegration.\"\n\n\u2014 John Lennon\n\nThe Fifth Beetle?\n\nThe Beatles strolling across the street on the album cover of Abbey Road is one of the most iconic images in music history. It has inspired countless imitations and spawned a mass of conspiracy theories. Some of these theories centered around the so-called fifth Beetle \u2014 a white Volkswagen Beetle on the left-hand side of the image. The car's license plate reads LMW 28IF; 28 was the age conspiracy theorists said Paul would have been if he hadn't \"died.\" It was also said that LMW stands for \"Linda McCartney Weeps.\" On a more mundane note, the owners reported their license plate being stolen countless times after the album's release.\n\n\u2014 1 \u2014\n\nGeorge Martin\n\nIf there is any one person who deserves to be called the Fifth Beatle, it's George Martin. Except for some post-production work by Phil Spector on Let It Be, Martin produced every Beatles recording from start to finish. He gave the group its first recording contract and his talent as a producer and arranger made him a key contributor to the group's sound in the studio.\n\nMartin wrote many orchestral arrangements with the band. His effect can be identified in the string quartet on \"Yesterday\" and the symphony work on \"A Day in the Life.\" He performed the harpsichord solo on \"In My Life,\" while \"Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!\" showcases his work on the organ. He oversaw post-production on 1995's The Beatles Anthology (pictured above with Ringo, Paul and George), although he turned over production of the two new singles (\"Free as a Bird\" and \"Real Love\") to Jeff Lynne.\n\nWith all that, it was often a thankless job. He met with resistance from McCartney on many arranging ideas, and Lennon was positively vicious toward him in letters and interviews around the time of the band's breakup.\n\n\"If Paul wanted to use violins, [Martin] would translate it for him. Like 'In My Life,' there is an Elizabethan piano solo in it, so he would do things like that. We would say, 'Play like Bach,' or something, so he would put 12 bars in there. He helped us develop a language, to talk to musicians.\"\n\n\u2014 John Lennon\n\n\"George Martin [was] quite experimental for who he was, a grown-up.\"\n\n\u2014 Paul McCartney\n\n\"George was the only person who took a chance on us to make a record. Every other label turned us down.\"\n\n\u2014 Ringo Starr\n\n10 Honorable Mentions\n\nDerek Taylor: The band's publicist and a member of its inner circle, Taylor started working for the group in 1963 and worked with the band and Apple Corps for over 30 years.\n\nMal Evans: The Beatles' road manager and personal assistant, Evans joined the band in 1963 as a security guard. He and Neil Aspinall collaborated closely to protect the Beatles' privacy and cope with public demand.\n\nAstrid Kirchherr\/Klaus Voormann\/Jurgen Vollmer: This trio connected with the band during the Beatles' Hamburg days. Voormann played bass for a handful of Hamburg gigs after Stuart Sutcliffe quit the band, and he also designed the album cover for Revolver, which netted him a Grammy. Vollmer and Kirchherr, both artists, shared credit for overhauling the Beatles' style, including their haircuts, and are noted for their photos of the band taken at this time. Sutcliffe and Kirchherr were engaged when Sutcliffe died.\n\nBilly Preston: Keyboardist Preston played on the Let It Be and Abbey Road albums. His contribution was acknowledged when the Beatles issued \"Get Back\" as \"The Beatles with Billy Preston.\" Preston also performed with Lennon, Harrison and Starr after the Beatles broke up.\n\nMurray the K: Disc jockey Murray Kaufman reached his peak of popularity in the mid-1960s when, as the top-rated radio host in New York, he became an early and ardent supporter and friend of the band. He gave himself the moniker of the \"Fifth Beatle,\" and Ringo and Paul laughingly endorsed his claim to the title in Anthology interviews. He was the first DJ the Beatles welcomed into their circle, and they often called his show to give exclusive interviews.\n\nJeff Lynne: Electric Light Orchestra frontman Lynne worked with McCartney, Harrison, and Starr on solo projects, becoming especially close with Harrison, who invited him to join the Traveling Wilburys. Lynne produced the two reunion singles that resulted from The Beatles Anthology project (\"Free as a Bird\" and \"Real Love\").\n\nEric Clapton: Clapton performed lead guitar on \"While My Guitar Gently Weeps\" and is one of the few musicians who appeared on solo recordings by each of the four Beatles after the band broke up.\n\nYoko Ono: Often blamed for the band's breakup, Ono was a presence in the recording studio after 1968. Her voice can be heard on \"The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,\" \"Birthday\" and \"Revolution 9.\" She had a strong voice in Beatles-related decisions when Lennon was alive, and since his death, she has wielded enormous influence over the band's legacy.\n\nAndy White\/Jimmie Nicol: White was the professional drummer hired for \"Love Me Do\" when producer George Martin was unhappy with the work of both Pete Best and Ringo Starr. When Starr became ill during the band's 1964 tour, Nicol filled in as drummer for the Dutch and Danish legs of the tour.\n\nLittle Richard: An early influence for the band, Little Richard has occasionally claimed the Fifth Beatle title for his own. At the Beatles' induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Harrison backed him up: \"It's all his fault, really.\"\n\nArwen Bicknell works as an editor at the RAND Corporation, and lives in Virginia. At her wedding, she walked down the aisle to \"In My Life,\" which is her favorite Beatles' song.\nThe Man Who Hit Pause\n\nThroughout 1963, the fate of the Beatles rested in the hands of one man: Dave Dexter.\n\nby Kenneth Womack\n\nIn 1962 and 1963, despite the Beatles' popularity in the U.K., they were ignored in the United States. Capitol Records' Dave Dexter repeatedly rejected the Fab Four's records until he was forced to release \"I Want to Hold Your Hand\" in December 1963.\n\nIn 1975, the Beatles' first manager, Allan Williams, titled his autobiography The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away. In so doing, he recognized his own complicity in failing to capitalize on the band's budding musical genius \u2014 a role that fell in November 1961 to Brian Epstein, the band's second manager and the eventual architect of Beatlemania.\n\nWilliams was only the first in a long line of gatekeepers who failed to recognize the Beatles' greatness. Take Dick Rowe, for example. As the head A&R man for Decca Records, Rowe notoriously passed on signing the Beatles after their January 1962 audition, infamously remarking that \"groups with guitars are on the way out.\"\n\nIn terms of neglecting to appreciate the group's early potential, Williams and Rowe are rivaled only by Dave E. Dexter Jr., the longtime Capitol Records employee who steadfastly refused to release the Beatles' runaway British hits stateside. When American Beatlemania reached its apex, Dexter was instrumental in repackaging the Beatles for the American marketplace, cannibalizing their original U.K. releases and adding echo and reverb to alter their sound.\n\nDave Dexter was a jazz man and worked with some of the best jazz musicians and bandleaders of the 1940s and 1950s, including Benny Goodman, the \"King of Swing\" and the incomparable Count Basie (center with Dexter and Glenn Wallichs, one of the founders of Capitol Records).\n\nBenny Goodman, the \"King of Swing\"\n\nA Great Jazz Man\n\nBorn in Kansas City, Mo., in 1915, Dexter began his career as a music journalist in the 1930s and 1940s with the Kansas City Journal Post and later with Down Beat magazine. A jazz aficionado with a well-honed ear, Dexter produced an album titled Kansas City Jazz that traced the history of the Kansas City jazz scene through the work of such artists as Count Basie and Big Joe Turner.\n\nIn 1943, Dexter joined fledgling Capitol Records as a publicity officer, eventually becoming the company's influential international A&R representative. During this period, he attracted a number of celebrated artists to Capitol, including Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Stan Kenton, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington and Woody Herman. Dexter also achieved considerable renown for his efforts producing the Duke Ellington jazz standard \"Satin Doll.\"\n\nIn 1944, Dexter produced The History of Jazz, a series of four albums. According to jazz historian Floyd Levin, Dexter \"conceived the idea, assembled the impressive array of musicians and personally supervised the entire project. To this day, those great recordings remain among the most ambitious anthologies of jazz history.\"\n\nDexter was a legitimate jazz guru \u2014 he understood the music, both how to create it and how to package it. But by the 1950s, Dexter was deriding changes in popular music, particularly the rise of rock 'n' roll artists such as Elvis Presley, whom he described as \"juvenile and maddeningly repetitive.\"\n\nDiffering Discographies\n\nThese examples illustrate how different Beatles albums were in the U.S. and U.K.\n\n\u2022The Beatles' second album in the U.K. was With the Beatles. Released in November 1963, its 14 songs include \"All My Loving,\" \"Roll Over Beethoven\" and \"Money.\" Nine of the 14 songs were included in the U.S. release Meet the Beatles, Capitol's first Beatles album. Meet the Beatles also included one track from the Beatles' first U.K. album and two B-sides.\n\n\u2022The U.S. release The Beatles' Second Album used the rest of the five songs from the U.K.'s With the Beatles but also picked up Beatles songs from singles and two other U.K. albums.\n\n\u2022Help! was released in August 1965 in both the U.S. and U.K. In the U.S. it included seven Beatles' songs and padded out with orchestral arrangements from the movie. In the U.K. it had 14 Beatles' songs and no orchestral arrangements.\n\n\u2022The masterpiece Revolver contained 14 songs in its U.K. version. In the U.S. three of these songs \u2014 \"I'm Only Sleeping,\" \"And Your Bird Can Sing\" and \"Doctor Robert\" \u2014 were simply lopped off because they had been included in an earlier U.S. release.\n\n\u2022It wasn't until Sgt. Pepper's in 1967 that U.S. fans would experience an album the way the Beatles had intended it to be heard.\n\n\"The Worst Thing I'd Ever Heard\"\n\nIn the early 1960s, Dexter's influence at Capitol Records had become so significant that company president Alan W. Livingston authored a June 1962 memo in which he instructed his colleagues to submit all albums from outside the U.S. to Dexter for his consideration and approval.\n\nCapitol could choose to release albums in the U.S. that had been released internationally by Capitol's parent company, the EMI Group. EMI was the Beatles' record company in Britain. That meant it fell to Dave Dexter to decide whether the Beatles would make it in America.\n\nIn October 1962, Dexter opted not to release the Beatles' \"Love Me Do\" single. He followed suit in early 1963 and rejected \"Please Please Me\" and \"From Me to You,\" which were subsequently released by Vee-Jay Records. Soon thereafter, Dexter passed on the option to release \"She Loves You,\" which had emerged as the U.K.'s best-selling single of all time at that juncture.\n\n\"She Loves You\" was subsequently optioned by Philadelphia's Swan Records. Vee-Jay and Swan were small companies that lacked promotional muscle. Those early stateside efforts by the Beatles went largely unnoticed.\n\nIn a 1988 interview, Dexter recalled the first time that he heard \"Please Please Me:\" \"The British companies \u2014 they wanted us to issue as many of their records over here as possible because [the U.S.] was the biggest record market in the world. And I can only remember when I heard Lennon playing the harmonica on this record, I thought it was the worst thing I'd ever heard.\"\n\nEMI racked up nearly 300,000 advance orders in Britain for With the Beatles in the fall of 1963. EMI could no longer wait for its American subsidiary \u2014 meaning Dexter \u2014 to come around. Capitol was ordered by EMI's managing director, L.G. Wood, to release the Beatles' next single without delay. Having originally planned to press a mere 5,000 copies of \"I Want to Hold Your Hand,\" Capitol earmarked the impressive $50,000 to promote the single in the United States. The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, and American Beatlemania was born.\n\nThings We Said Today\n\nIn a memo he sent Feb. 20, 1964, Dexter defended himself to Livingston, writing that \"Alan, I make errors in judgment as does everyone else, but when you consider the enormous amount of singles and albums sent to my desk every month... I am frankly amazed that we do not miss out on more hits as the months and years go by.\"\n\nSubsequently asked by Livingston to write a detailed report about the records that he had passed on during the previous year, specifically the Beatles, Dexter wrote in an Oct. 1, 1964, memo: \"In a carton containing 17 other singles, I received 'Love Me Do' and 'P.S. I Love You'; [I] was not impressed, and so informed Tony Palmer [Dexter's EMI counterpart] by checking a 6x4 form and airmailing it back to him that same day.\"\n\nAs he notes in the memo, Dexter changed his tune in late summer, writing that \"by the time I returned from England in August of 1963, it was apparent that the Beatles were the hottest thing England had ever encountered, and when I learned that Swan had waived on the group, I then somewhat hysterically started urging Livingston, Gilmore and Dunn to exert every possible pressure on EMI and Epstein.\"\n\nDexter's efforts to defend himself paid off. Despite failing repeatedly to see the band's commercial possibilities, Dexter was now responsible for overseeing their U.S. promotion. In this role, he remixed their songs, adding reverb and echo, thinking that his tinkering would give the music more of a \"live\" feel and make it more palatable for the American audience.\n\nIn so doing, Dexter affected considerable sonic changes on Beatles' records for their American release, a process that many Beatles fans and historians refer to as \"Dexterization.\" Although there are fans of the Dexter versions \u2014 and Dexter's tinkering clearly did not stand in the way of the Beatles' success \u2014 overall, they lack the balance, warmth and sense of clarity that the band's U.K. releases enjoyed.\n\nFor rock critic Dave Marsh, \"The real question is: How did Dave Dexter retain such control over the fate of the Beatles' American record releases? His tenure, from 1963 to 1966, covers by far the most important part of the Beatles' career. He not only delayed their appearance on a major label in this country for more than a year, he then proceeded to fiddle with every product that the Beatles sent to the States, not only making weird and inexcusable judgments about song choices and sequences but also doing a very bad job of getting the music he was sent mixed and mastered for final release.\"\n\nIn addition to manipulating the Beatles' sound, Dexter rejected both the cover art and the track listings for the band's original U.K. album releases, opting instead to revamp them for stateside consumption. In many ways, Dexter's decisions to alter the Beatles' cover artwork was a matter of subjective taste.\n\nAs Dexter wrote in a Sept. 2, 1965, memo to Livingston: \"We consider our artwork in virtually every case superior to the English front cover art, artistically as well as commercially. Ours is slanted more to the merchandising end; we also use more color than EMI.\" In that same memo, Dexter defended his effort to reduce the number of tracks on the band's American releases, writing that \"no Capitol LP is ever identical in repertoire to the British LP... Because EMI persists in the 14-track package, we will never be in position to release them simultaneously.\"\n\nAfter the release of Revolver in 1966, Dexter was no longer in a position to manipulate the Beatles' sound, although the damage had already been done. American fans would be subject almost exclusively to Dexterized versions of the band's pre-1967 releases until the release of the Beatles on CD in 1987. The Dexter versions are now available in two boxed sets, The Capitol Albums, Volume 1 and Volume 2, but have otherwise been replaced by the music the Beatles intended to release.\n\nLater Years\n\nBy 1966, Dexter had been demoted from his influential post as A&R representative. In the 1970s, Dexter left Capitol altogether, eventually landing an editorial position with Billboard magazine. Following Lennon's assassination on Dec. 8, 1980, Dexter became a flashpoint for Beatles fans yet again, writing a notorious article in Billboard in which he criticized the recently fallen Beatle. Dexter's article, published 12 days after Lennon's murder, was titled \"Nobody's Perfect: Lennon's Ego and Intransigence Irritated Those Who Knew Him.\"\n\nIn his diatribe, Dexter wrote that \"no pop artist since the early 1960s was more musically gifted than John Lennon. And of the four Beatles, Lennon was \u2014 among those in the industry who worked with him \u2014 the most disliked.\" Remarkably, Dexter goes on to recount Lennon and the Beatles' various failures, including the fact that they broke up when there was a financial bonanza to be had by staying together.\n\nDexter concluded that \"Lennon will be remembered well for his musical contributions. Unlike himself, there was nothing eccentric or unlikable about John's artistry. And that's what all of us will remember.\" Not surprisingly, Dexter's tasteless article raised the ire of Billboard's sponsors, forcing the magazine to publish a hasty apology.\n\nIn subsequent years, Dexter rounded out his career with additional music journalism and production efforts, while never really shaking his reputation as the man who got in the Beatles' way. Dexter passed away from complications from a stroke in April 1990 when he was 74.\n\nAs important as his contributions to American jazz truly were, Dexter will always be remembered as the record executive who passed, time and time again, on the early opportunity to release the Beatles' music stateside. As history has so resoundingly shown, he should've known better.\n\nFromWeak to Wow\n\nPrior to the Beatles, Capitol Records had a dismal track record releasing U.K. singles in the United States. Here are the numbers from 1961 to 1963, according to a memo Dave Dexter\n\n1961\n\nArtist| Sales  \n---|---  \nMichael Hill| 1,418  \nNelson Keene| 65  \nCliff Bennett| 156  \nPeter Sellers and Sophia Loren| 186  \nAlma Cogan| 154  \nHelen Shapiro release no. 1:| 3,365  \nHelen Shapiro release no. 2:| 101  \nHelen Shapiro release no. 3:| 18,919\n\n1962\n\nArtist| Sales  \n---|---  \nRicky Stevens| 125  \nHelen Shapiro| 4,149  \nJohnny De Little| 403  \nFreddy Gardner| 3,693  \nMrs. Mills| 72\n\n1963\n\nArtist| Sales  \n---|---  \nGrazina| 446  \nDick Kallman| 1,370  \nJohnny Kid| 96  \nFreddie & the Dreamers| 105  \nMrs. Mills| 72  \nFrank Ifield release no. 1:| 54,716  \nFrank Ifield release no. 2:| 71,666  \nThe Beatles| 2,967,422\n\nKenneth Womack teaches English and Integrative Arts at Penn State Altoona. He is the author or editor of four books devoted to the Beatles, including the forthcoming Beatles Encyclopedia: Everything Fab Four. His favorite Beatles' song is \"Happiness Is a Warm Gun.\"\nHere Come the Sons\n\nThe Beatles have inspired many musicians \u2014 including their sons.\n\nBy Mike Shellans\n\nJohn with Julian\n\nAll of the Beatles have sons who have pursued music professionally. Perhaps that's not so weird. But now consider this: All of the Beatles' sons have pursued musical careers.\n\nFor these men, being the son of a Beatle has been a double-edged sword. They attract attention and listeners just for being who they are. But the inevitable comparisons to their fathers raise the question: How can anyone stack up to a Beatle?\n\nJulian Lennon\n\nJulian Lennon was tied to pop music and the Beatles even as a child, having inspired John to compose \"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds\" when he presented his dad with a drawing of a school friend. Paul McCartney composed \"Hey Jude\" (originally titled \"Hey Jules\") out of empathy for Julian during his parents' divorce.\n\nJulian explored guitar, piano and drums growing up, playing drums on John's song \"Ya Ya\" from his Walls and Bridges album. He turned really serious about music after his father's death. Julian has released six albums to date: Valotte (1984), The Secret Value of Daydreaming (1986), Mr. Jordan (1989), Help Yourself (1991), Photograph Smile (1998) and Everything Changes (2011).\n\nJulian looks like his father, and his sound and style do closely resemble John's, but his song writing reflects his own personality and perspective. He is a true talent. Julian's debut single, \"Valotte,\" for example, released when he was just 21 years old, is a well-crafted, original pop song that showed Julian's emerging singing and piano skills. \"Too Late for Goodbyes\" has an engaging up-tempo reggae groove. Nods to John abound \u2014 the lyrics, vocal tricks such as bending the high notes, and the strong harmonica playing all bring to mind the senior Lennon. \"Stick Around,\" from Julian's second album, offers us a maturing Julian, with richer lower register vocals than John and a 1980s synth-pop beat with a hard edge.\n\nJulian has a gift for harmonizing, and this adds just the right musical icing to his songs. On his strong Mr. Jordan album, Julian teams up with guitarist John McCurry, an ironic progression from Lennon and McCartney in the '60s to Lennon and McCurry in the '80s. \"Now You're in Heaven\" is one of several standout pieces from Mr. Jordan, with Julian exploring both ends of his singing range over a heavy drum beat, synthesizers and exciting electric guitars.\n\nJulian's Help Yourself album brought us the gorgeous \"Saltwater,\" while \"Day After Day\" from Photograph Smile is a Beatles-esque love song complete with acoustic piano, string orchestra and George Harrison-style slide electric guitar.\n\nDownload\n\n\"Saltwater\" off the 1991 album Help Yourself. The strings and keyboard are reminiscent of \"Strawberry Fields Forever\" and the chords seem fresh yet familiar as Julian sings harmony with himself during the wonderfully contrasting bridge section. Steve Hunter's Beatles-style guitar solo brings together Julian's original ideas with riffs George Harrison sent to Julian when he was unable to make the recording session.\n\nJulian Lennon\n\nSean Lennon\n\nSean Lennon was born on John's 35th birthday, Oct. 9, 1975, and is the only child of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. John said of Sean: \"He didn't come out of my belly but, by God, I made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and to how he sleeps, and to the fact that he swims like a fish.\"\n\nSean was a celebrity from birth, and he took up bass and sang at an early age. He first sang on Yoko's 1984 album Every Man Has a Woman. Unlike his half-brother Julian, Sean delved into the more experimental side of pop music, signing with Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys at the age of 23 and releasing Into the Sun in 1998.\n\nOne writer says of the album, \"It has unexpectedly eclectic roots and a laid-back vibe.\" But songs such as \"Queue\" sound somewhat amateurish and undeveloped, borrowing at times from the Beach Boys and placing Sean's much-thinner-than-John's voice over inexpensive sounding synthesizers and off-the-cuff harmonies.\n\nAfter touring as guest bassist with Cibo Matto, an electronic pop rock duo from Japan, Sean released Half Horse Half Musician in 1999. \"Heart and Lung\" from that album showed Sean's voice maturing, but he tries too hard to project. The song has cute elements, with a synth clarinet melody, bells and percussion over '50s-style strummed acoustic guitars, but the best part occurs near the end, when Sean sings nonsense words very reminiscent of John's vocal ad-libs. His next album, Friendly Fire, didn't appear until 2006, and according to Allmusic.com, \"As it stands, Sean's career is starting to seem like a rich kid's holiday, and Friendly Fire has the same feel as Into the Sun: namely, it's a pleasant but forgettable arty pop record made by a guy who has some promise but little discipline.\"\n\nThe title track for Friendly Fire, with its lovely strummed acoustic guitars and melodic electric bass, is a high point. The song is well-constructed, but even here it is clear that Sean simply wasn't born with a great natural singing voice, and his intonation can wander at times. He does stretch his range a bit at the song's end, with his voice's reedy quality working better at the upper end of his register.\n\nIn 2009, Sean composed the score for the film Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead, and bits such as \"Elsinore Reprise\" are delightful and right in his musical wheelhouse.\n\nJohn with Sean\n\nDownload\n\n\"Dead Meat\" from the 2006 album Friendly Fire. This track has a \"You've Got to Hide Your Love Away\" feel, with Sean's voice supported by acoustic guitars and strings. Lush harmonies and a gorgeous chord progression elevate the bridge section, and the string interlude takes us back to the Beatles' songs under George Martin. Sean's solid work on the rhythm guitar and purposeful vocals make this a top-notch cut.\n\nSean Lennon\n\nZak Starkey\n\nIt seems only natural that Zak would take up drums, with father Ringo Starr (whose real name is Richard Starkey) holding down that chair with the Beatles. But Ringo said early on, \"I won't let Zak be a drummer!\"\n\nWhen Zak was 9, Ringo said, \"We've got a piano at home and he bashes it, I show him a chord. I think he will be a musician, in fact.\"\n\nBut Zak seemed destined to sit behind the kit. After one drum lesson from his dad, Zak taught himself, bashing away to records. Zak was performing by age 12, joining the garage band The Next as a teen and leaving home to work with the Spencer Davis group. The Who bassist John Entwistle produced Zak's next band, Nightfly, and Zak's '80s project with Eddie Hardin, Wind in the Willows, was a joint venture featuring Donovan, Jon Lord, Denny Laine and Billy Ocean.\n\nBy the mid 1980s, Zak had played with Roger Daltry and John Entwistle, and he shared the stage for a 1987 Aids Day benefit concert with rock luminaries Elton John, George Michael and Boy George, as well as jazz giant Herbie Hancock. In 1987, the band Musty Jack Sponge & The Exploding Nudists featured brothers Zak on guitar and Jason on drums. Zak spent the 1990s playing with artists like Joe Walsh in Ringo's All-Starr touring band.\n\nAfter drumming for the short-lived band Face, Zak joined forces with The Who, starting with 1996's Quadrophenia Tour. Zak's first drum set was a gift from The Who's Keith Moon. No one could predict at that time that Ringo's son would eventually be Moon's replacement.\n\nThe Who guitarist Pete Townshend has said, \"We're really pleased to have him in the band. He's just stunning. He's very easy to play with. Mind you, I'm very spoiled with drummers. Zak has a lot of karmic Keith Moon about him, which is wonderful. It's easy to make too much of that \u2014 he really is his own drummer. He has his own style. But he's very intelligent. What he did was adapt his own style as an imitator of Keith Moon, but he's modified that, moderated it, in a very intelligent and musical way so that he won't be directly compared.\"\n\nZak spent time drumming for the band Oasis, a Beatles-influenced band, in the early and mid-part of the millennium, but his commitments with The Who, including their spectacular half-time show at the 2010 Super Bowl, continue to keep him busy.\n\nListening to Zak's interpretation of The Who classics is like a live drum lesson. Zak seems to be the logical next step forward from Ringo, as he not only has his dad's attention to song form, tempo and musical detail, but also more drive and fire in his belly behind the kit. Zak is the genuine article as a drummer.\n\nRingo and Maureen with their first baby, Zak.\n\nDownload\n\n\"Overture\" from 1998's Who's Serious album. Zak is the unmistakable center of musical attention in this cut from an album showcasing The Who working with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Zak's  \nenergetic, driving beat gives the track life, and his precision is offset by a bit of wild abandon perhaps inherited from mentor Keith Moon. Listen as Zak makes every fill, kick and tempo change  \nseamless and decidedly musical.\n\nIn 2010, The Who, including Zak Starkey on drums, performed at the Super Bowl in Florida.\n\nJason Starkey\n\nRingo's second son, Jason Starkey, once exclaimed, \"Being Ringo Starr's son is the biggest drag of my life. It's a total pain.\" Yet Jason has explored music like his brother and father, playing drums and working as a road manager for such bands as Buddy Curtis and the Grasshoppers, the People's Friends, and with his brother in Musty Jack Sponge & The Exploding Nudists. Unfortunately, Jason's arrest for theft and problems with drugs have slowed his career, but he continues to drum with various groups.\n\nDhani Harrison\n\nGeorge Harrison and second wife Olivia's only son was by his father's side during the production of his last album, Brainwashed (2001), and he sang and played guitar at the Concert for George on the first anniversary of his father's death. Dhani (pronounced Danny) earned this comment from Paul at the Concert for George: \"Olivia said that with Dhani up on stage, it looks like George stayed young, and we all got old.\"\n\nDhani sings and plays lead guitar in a band he formed in 2006 called thenewno2 (pronounced \"the new number two\"). He says of the unusual name, which is a reference to the 1960s British television show The Prisoner, \"I wanted it to be a faceless entity, because I didn't want to be Dhani Harrison and the Uncles, or whatever. There was just too much flak around the name Harrison at the time. I started the band so I could send anyone to a meeting, and when they were asked who they were, they could simply say 'The New No. 2.'\"\n\nYou Are Here, thenewno2's debut album, was released in 2009. Allmusic.com writer Tom Forget comments, \"George Harrison's son Dhani obviously has some of the biggest shoes imaginable to fill (second only maybe to poor Sean Lennon), and he's wisely decided to avoid the whole problem by following his own modern muse. The skittering beats and synths owe more to English trip-hop acts and electronic pioneers than to classic rock.\" Indeed, songs like \"Shelter\" combine electronic and rock sounds in a fresh, relaxed, inventive way, and Dhani's vocal texture is much like his father's. This is a well-rehearsed, very musical band, doing everything right, and both Spin and Rolling Stone have given the band positive reviews.\n\nDhani was also critical in the development of The Beatles: Rock Band game, getting Paul and Ringo's participation and striving for accuracy. Dhani said of the project, \"We've been working on it for the past two years. This is the first one that is going to be totally historically accurate. It's been a real headache, but it's been the most enjoyable work I've done in my life.\"\n\nIn August 2010, Dhani joined with Ben Harper to form Fistful of Mercy; the band released As I Call You Down later that year. In 2012 thenewno2 released their second album, thefearofmissingout. Recently thenewno2 composed and performed the score for the film Beautiful Creatures.\n\nDhani and Olivia Harrison\n\nDownload\n\n\"Chose What You're Watching,\" a single from 2008. This is a great cut, featuring confident vocals by Dhani, hard rocking double-time drums, and catchy vocal harmonies. The bridge section has a harder edge, and the ska backbeat chorus provides an effective contrast to the earlier groove.\n\nJames McCartney\n\nThe U.K.'s Telegraph says of Paul McCartney's son James: \"He is never likely to challenge his dad as a pop pin-up: he looks like a slightly plumper, sadder and balder ginger Paul.\" Beyond the remarkable facial similarity to his father, James has a similar, if thinner, vocal quality. James' first musical appearances included Paul's albums Flaming Pie (1997) and Driving Rain (2001). After his mother's death in 1998, James appeared on Linda's posthumous album Wide Prairie. Some of his youth was spent on the road with his parents and their band, Wings.\n\nJames emerged as a musician in his own right in 2009 using the name Light. Paul produced James's album Available Light (2010), released under James' name. His follow-up album Close at Hand was in stores the next year. Writers had mixed opinions about James' music. One writer said, \"James has released a couple of pleasant EPs that reference sixties beat music, although more the kind of jangly rock of the Byrds and Searchers than the muscular pop of the Beatles.\"\n\nJames released his debut, full-length album in 2013, simply titled Me. Allmusic.com commented, \"The melodies are direct, not elliptical, the feel is warm and enveloping \u2014 but it's the craftsmanship of Me that resonates, as it takes skill to create a set of songs this subtle and strong.\" Songs like \"Wisteria\" suffer some from unsure delivery and inaccurate intonation, showing James to be a hard worker musically but perhaps not gifted with a natural singing talent.\n\nPaul, Linda and James McCartney.\n\nDownload\n\n\"Old Man\" from the 2011 album Available Light. This version of Neil Young's classic shows James to be a more-than-competent acoustic guitarist, and he delivers a heartfelt vocal.\n\nJames McCartney.\n\nStella McCartney\n\nAll of the Beatles's boys entered the music business, but the girls, for the most part, have steered clear of their father's profession, choosing quieter lives away from the media.\n\nOne noteworthy exception is fashion designer Stella McCartney, who is probably the best known of all the Beatles offspring. Bursting to prominence shortly after her fashion design studies were completed, Stella was named a creative director for Chloe in 1997. In 2001, she launched her own fashion house. She collaborates with Adidas on a line of sportswear and was the creative director for the British Olympic team in 2012. Like her dad, Stella balances her work with her family, and is the mother of four children.\n\nMike Shellans has been on the music faculty at Arizona State University since 1985. Among his classes are Music of the Beatles and Beatles After the Beatles. His favorite Bealtes' song is \"Dear Prudence.\"\nAcross the Universe\n\nSince their February 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles have influenced the world with more than just their music.\n\nby Larry Weisman\n\nIn 1963 and 1964, the Beatles' popularity grew to a frenzy.\n\nHere the Fab Four wave to adoring fans after they climbed up the diving board at a Stockholm hotel pool.\n\nThey made \"wooo\" a lyric. They turned \"yeah, yeah, yeah\" into acceptable English. Meet the Beatles? I believe you're already acquainted. And of all these friends and lovers, none compare. The Beatles entered our lives and lit them up. Kids engulfed hotels that housed the Fab Four, filled arenas, appeared wild-eyed and bursting with furious passion in TV accounts of Beatles sightings. And so Beatlemania began on this side of the pond. A European madness ripped across our shores.\n\nBoys grew their hair out and walked saucily with bangs shading foreheads previously exposed by styles such as Elvis's pompadour. The tailoring of suits grew narrower as our eyes grew wider. Girls swooned, sighed and overlaid the cheeky lads from Liverpool with personalities and attributes they desired.\n\nIn 1965, the Beatles showed more maturity and complexity in their music, especially with the album Rubber Soul.\n\nBeatles Domination\n\nThe Fab Four put Liverpool on the map and began the British Invasion, altering the music scene and culture forever. The Rolling Stones, The Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Peter and Gordon, Herman's Hermits, The Who, all surfed a Beatles-inspired wave that roiled the Atlantic Ocean. Rock 'n' roll, which had its roots in American rhythm and blues, bowed to the Union Jack.\n\nThe Beatles dominated radio, with 27 No. 1 hits in the U.S. and U.K., and many of those were not even their most critically acclaimed works. Meanwhile, their worldwide travels and travails made news... and television ate it up.\n\nFrom modest beginnings are such events born. I sat transfixed in 1964, focused furiously on the tiny television screen in front of me, as Ed Sullivan, the preposterously stiff talent impresario who owned Sunday nights, introduced the Beatles to America before a live, screaming audience. They played, they sang, and the world changed.\n\nWell, most of it. My father wasn't buying whatever the \"mop tops\" were selling, and I became a rarity in my elementary school \u2014 a kid who still had a parentally mandated crewcut. I only amplified this apparent sense of obtuseness by sticking with clarinet lessons, instead of switching, as so many of my friends did, to guitar.\n\nI never mastered the clarinet. I ultimately learned the guitar. I will not be releasing any recordings of my performances with either instrument. But learning to play \"Blackbird\" on my Gibson sunburst acoustic (a 1969 model that is still in my possession) was one of my proudest moments.\n\nEverything went Beatles. Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets, became the site of an extraordinarily short concert in which the band found itself unable to hear its music due to the noise from the crowd. They never again played before as many as the 55,000 who packed Shea. New York went Beatles, with a disk jockey named Murray the K (Kaufman) styling himself as the Fifth Beatle. There were Beatles trading cards, pins, wigs, a cartoon series, manic and madcap movies. There were manufactured imitators who were made for TV (The Monkees) and moral opposites (the bad-boy Rolling Stones, of course).\n\nChanging Times\n\nAs the Beatles grew and matured (they were really just teenagers when the craziness hit), their work mapped the pattern of a generation's development. Goofy, mushy teen love (\"I Wanna Hold Your Hand\"). A little deeper passion (\"P.S. I Love You\"). Introspection (\"Yesterday\"). The weird, vague sense that life might not be a cheery bounce free of misery and loneliness (\"Eleanor Rigby\"). Hazy, trippy mental gymnastics (\"Within You and Without You\").\n\nThey brought us the sitar and Ravi Shankar (who bequeathed us Norah Jones, bless him). They introduced us to religions and philosophies we'd never experienced when they traveled to India to study transcendental meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They irritated Christians worldwide with John Lennon's proclamation that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. They preached love but sometimes, in the case of nut jobs like the murderous Charles Manson (\"Helter Skelter\"), they got blamed for violence. The Beatles could be whatever you thought they were, and sometimes whatever they thought they were (alternative personalities in Sgt. Pepper's, cartoon characters in Yellow Submarine).\n\nDid we mention drugs? Mind expansion, LSD (\"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds\"), other forms of substance abuse? The times practically demanded it, but the Beatles helped foment it.\n\nThe Beatles introduced in-fighting due to a celebrity marriage (Lennon and Yoko Ono). The band broke up. The Fab Four went their separate ways, got back together for a rooftop farewell concert, and again went their own ways. In a sense, they led us through our adolescence, our marriages, divorces and journeys to self-discovery. They were political (John and Yoko's Bed-In for Peace in 1969 in Amsterdam and Montreal) and anti-political (Revolution).\n\nIt's been 50 years since the Beatles shook those mod haircuts on American TV and set off their own revolution. Now they're scenery, background music heard in elevators, the soundtrack of our lives. The smart one, John Lennon, was shot and killed by a crazed fan in 1980. The cute one, Sir Paul McCartney, thrives in his 70s and still makes music. The quiet one, George Harrison, died of cancer in 2001. Ringo Starr, the funny one, received the French Medal of Honor in September 2013 and continues to play music and indulge a passion for photography.\n\nTwo are gone, but they, as the Beatles, endure.\n\nTry this exercise. Ask someone to name his or her favorite Beatles' song. Now ask someone else. See how long it takes before the same song is mentioned twice.\n\n\"Michelle.\" \"Penny Lane.\" \"Hey Jude.\" \"Eleanor Rigby.\" \"Here Comes the Sun.\" \"Something.\" \"A Day in the Life.\" \"Here, There and Everywhere.\" \"Let It Be.\" \"Ticket to Ride.\" The canon goes on and on. The Beatles go on and on.\n\nAs for me, I believe in \"Yesterday.\"\n\nThe Fab Four donned animal costumes for their 1967 television fantasy show, \"Magical Mystery Tour.\"\n\nJournalist and author Larry Weisman has listened to the Beatles on vinyl, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, CDs and via streaming audio. His favorite of the Fab Four was George Harrison. \nFacts about John Lennon\n\nBorn: Oct. 9, 1940\n\nDied: Dec. 8, 1980 (age 40), murdered in New York\n\nMarriages: Cynthia Powell, Aug. 23, 1962-1968; Yoko Ono, March 20, 1969-Dec. 8, 1980 (John's death)\n\nChildren: Julian Lennon, born April 8, 1963; Sean Lennon, born Oct. 9, 1975 (on John's 35th birthday)\n\n\u2022John was on the cover of the premiere issue of Rolling Stone in November 1967.\n\n\u2022Lennon's murder was first announced to the world by sportscaster Howard Cosell during Monday Night Football.\n\n\u2022John was cremated the day after his death. Yoko Ono has never revealed the whereabouts of his ashes. In lieu of a funeral, Ono asked for 10 minutes of silence and prayer at 2 p.m. on Dec. 14, 1980, a week after John's death. She also encouraged the public to donate to charities in his memory.\n\n\u2022More than 140 artists have recorded cover versions of \"Imagine.\"\n\n\u2022The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein was Julian Lennon's godfather. Elton John is Sean Lennon's godfather.\n\n\u2022In 2001, the Liverpool Airport was renamed the Liverpool John Lennon Airport.\n\n\u2022The iconic Rolling Stone's cover featuring a nude Lennon hugging and kissing a fully clothed Ono was taken by photographer Annie Leibovitz on the day that Lennon died.\n\nFacts about Paul McCartney\n\nBorn: June 18, 1942\n\nMarriages: Linda Eastman, March 12, 1969-April 17,1998 (Linda's death from cancer), Heather Mills, June 11, 2002-2008, Nancy Shevall, Oct. 9, 2011-present (wedding was on John's 71st birthday)\n\nChildren: Heather McCartney, born Dec. 31, 1962 (adopted by Paul); Mary McCartney, born Aug. 28, 1969; Stella McCartney, born Sept. 13, 1971; James McCartney, born Sept. 12, 1977; Beatrice McCartney, born Oct. 28, 2003\n\n\u2022As a boy, Paul enjoyed birdwatching, which later inspired him to write the song \"Blackbird.\"\n\n\u2022Paul met George Harrison on a bus to school when they were in their early teens.\n\n\u2022Paul was one of the first and last musicians to perform at Shea Stadium in New York. The Beatles performed there in August 1965, and 43 years later, on July 18, 2008, Paul performed \"Let It Be,\" the closing number at Billy Joel's concert at Shea \u2014 the last concert before the stadium was torn down in 2009.\n\n\u2022Paul was only 16 years old when he wrote \"When I'm 64.\" The song was released in 1966, the year his father, Jim, turned 64.\n\n\u2022In 2008, Paul was granted an honorary Doctorate of Music degree from Yale University.\n\n\u2022Paul is the tallest member of The Beatles \u2014 an inch shy of 6 feet.\n\n\u2022On the famous Abbey Road album cover, McCartney is barefoot.\n\n\u2022The 1982 song \"Here Today\" is about Paul's relationship with and love for John Lennon. Paul said the song is an imaginary conversation the two might have had.\n\nFacts about George Harrison\n\nBorn: Feb. 25, 1943\n\nDied: Nov. 29, 2001 (age 58), from cancer\n\nMarriages: Pattie Boyd, Jan. 21, 1966-1977 (Paul McCartney was best man), Olivia Trinidad Arias, Sept. 2, 1978-Nov. 29, 2001 (George's death)\n\nChildren: Dhani Harrison, born Aug. 1, 1978\n\n\u2022The Harrison-written \"Here Comes the Sun\" is the most downloaded Beatles song on iTunes.\n\n\u2022George played 26 instruments, including the guitar, sitar, violin, piano, harmonica, autoharp, glockenspiel, African drum, ukulele and mandolin.\n\n\u2022George suffered injuries in December 1999 when an intruder broke into his home and stabbed him more than 40 times.\n\n\u2022George wrote \"All Those Years Ago\" as a tribute to John after Lennon's murder in 1980. The song featured vocal contributions from Paul and Linda McCartney and a drum part from Ringo.\n\n\u2022In 1978, Harrison formed HandMade Films. The most notable HandMade movies are the Monty Python films, 127 Hours and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.\n\n\u2022Two and a half weeks before his death, George had lunch with Paul and Ringo.\n\n\u2022Eric Clapton fell in love with George's first wife, Pattie Boyd, in the early 1970s and wrote \"Layla\" about her. Pattie eventually married Clapton in 1979 (although they divorced in 1989). Through it all, George and Clapton remained friends and jokingly called each other \"husbands-in-law.\"\n\nFacts about Ringo Starr\n\nBorn: July 7, 1940 as Richard Starkey\n\nMarriages: Maureen Cox, 1965-1975; Barbara Bach, April 27, 1981-present\n\nChildren: Zak Starkey, born Sept. 13, 1965; Jason Starkey, born Aug. 18, 1967; Lee Starkey, born Nov. 11, 1970\n\n\u2022The name \"Ringo\" was chosen because he liked to wear rings on all of his fingers. \"Starr\" came from his birth name, Starkey.\n\n\u2022Ringo is three months older than John Lennon, making him the oldest Beatle.\n\n\u2022Starr unintentionally inspired songs with his witty off-the-cuff remarks. For example, after a long session on the Beatles' first film, he was heard to say, \"It's been a hard day's night.\" John Lennon said in a 1980 Playboy interview that \"Ringo-isms\" had supplied the titles of \"A Hard Day's Night\" (at left, Ringo on the set of A Hard Day's Night) and \"Tomorrow Never Knows.\"\n\n\u2022His stepfather introduced Ringo to big band music and gave Ringo a second-hand drum set as a Christmas present in 1957.\n\n\u2022\n\n\u2022As a child, Ringo spent two years in a hospital recovering from tuberculosis. All the patients were encouraged to join the hospital band to stimulate motor activity. Ringo played what could be called the drums \u2014 he would hit the cabinets next to his bed with a small mallet.\n\n\u2022Ringo and Eagles' guitarist Joe Walsh (right) are brothers-in-law. Walsh married Barbara Bach's sister, Marjorie, in 2008.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nHEROIC POETS, POETIC HEROES\n\nThe Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition\n\nDWIGHT FLETCHER REYNOLDS\n\nCORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS\n\nITHACA AND LONDON\nTo Kathryn Lee Gill Reynolds  \nand Edd Van Ness Stockton\n\n## Contents\n\n  1. List of Illustrations\n  2. Foreword\n  3. Preface\n  4. Notes on Transcription and Transliteration\n  5. Introduction: The Tradition\n  6. Part One: The Ethnography of a Poetic Tradition\n  7. 1. The Village\n  8. 2. Poets Inside and Outside the Epic\n  9. 3. The Economy of Poetic Style\n  10. Part Two: Textual and Performance Strategies in the Sahra\n  11. 4. The Interplay of Genres\n  12. 5. The Sahra as Social Interaction\n  13. Conclusion: Epic Text and Context\n  14. Appendix: Texts in Transliteration\n  15. Works Cited\n  16. Index\n\n## Illustrations\n\n### FIGURES\n\n1. Evidence from the oral tradition (map of Middle East)\n\n2. Poet families of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh\n\n3. Residence patterns in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh\n\n4. Bifurcation of the epic hero\n\n5. Performance collusions\n\n6. Thematic movement in \u1e24itat Balad\u012b performance\n\n### PHOTOGRAPHS\n\n1. Shaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b\n\n2. Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b\n\n3. Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd\n\n4. Shaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd Tawf\u012bq\n\n## Foreword\n\nby Gregory Nagy\n\n_Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition,_ by Dwight Fletcher Reynolds, introduces an important new perspective into the Myth and Poetics series. An intensive study of heroic poetry (the _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ epic) in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, the Nile Delta \"village of the poets,\" this book concretely illustrates the centrality of performance in the very process of composition or recomposition in oral traditions. Or, to put it in Saussure's terms, we see how the element of _parole_ is key to understanding the _langue_ of the poetic process. Reynolds's emphasis on the performative dimension of oral poetics gives the reader a chance to observe how an oral tradition works in its own social framework. The author explains the tradition itself, not just a given text sample of the tradition.\n\nAnother highlight of the book is its emphasis on a poetic mentality that assumes a dialogue linking poet and audience with the characters in the story being told. Such a mentality has been investigated in the case of Homeric poetry by classicists such as Joseph Russo and Bennett Simon, but here we see, for the very first time, a detailed demonstration on the basis of a living tradition, and the result is a quantum leap in our understanding of oral epic. Reynolds isolates those tenuous moments of performance when poets and audience members alike expect to find reflections, or interactions, between their reality and the reality of the epic heroes. The poetic tradition of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ struggles to reconcile and even unite the worlds of poets and heroes, men of words and men of deeds. The heroes may be long dead, but they become ever-present each time the epic performance gets under way.\n\nThis book brings another new perspective to the Myth and Poetics series. Unlike most ethnographers of today, Reynolds has taken with him into his fieldwork the questions classicists and other literary critics ask about the very nature of epic as genre. His research in a living oral epic tradition corroborates, and has in fact been strongly influenced by, Richard Martin's work on speech acts in Homer, _The Language of Heroes_ (1989), the very first book in this series.\n\n_Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes_ addresses the performative realities of a living epic tradition. It accounts for the economic forces that shape the dynamics of performance, the individual poet's personal ambition to be popular, and the artistic choices necessitated by the immediacy of interaction with the audience. It demonstrates that epic can represent very different things to audiences of different social and educational backgrounds. Refuting the stereotypical image of a static \"folk\" poem, supposedly immutable from time immemorial, Reynolds's book reveals an epic tradition open to constant reshaping and reinterpretation, even within its conservative rural setting. In its performative context, epic is revealed as an ongoing interaction of poet, audience, and the heroes that it glorifies.\n\n## Preface\n\n_S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l,_ the epic history of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l Bedouin tribe, is an astonishingly rich and varied oral tradition. Its roots lie in historic events that took place between the tenth and twelfth centuries C.E. in the Arabian peninsula and North Africa. The exploits and fatal weaknesses of the heroes of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe have been recounted in Arabic oral tradition for nearly a thousand years, and traces of the tradition are found throughout the Arab world from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the shores of the Indian Ocean. In different regions and over different historical periods the epic has been performed as a complex tale cycle narrated entirely in prose, as a prose narrative embellished with lengthy poems, as a narrative recited in rhymed verse, and as narrative sung in rhymed verse to the accompaniment of various musical instruments. In some areas, several styles of performance coexist and may be patronized by different social groups. In many regions, verses from the _sira_ also circulate widely as proverbs and riddles. The main characters of the story have become folk archetypes of the courageous warrior, the cunning schemer, the irresistibly beautiful maiden, and the stranger-in-a-strange-land; as such they are often utilized by modern Arab writers and poets as deeply resonant social symbols.\n\nThis work treats the _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ tradition as it is found in a single village in northern Egypt, a village known throughout the Nile Delta as the \"village of the poets,\" owing to the large community of hereditary epic-singers resident there. These fourteen households of professional poets all perform in the same basic style: to the accompaniment of the Egyptian two-stringed spike-fiddle, the _rab\u0101b,_ they sing the immense tale of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l heroes in measured, rhymed verse with only occasional intervening prose passages to set the scene or gloss the main action. The most accomplished poets in the village may take well over one hundred hours to sing the entire story. As we shall see, however, there is no such thing as a complete rendition, for there exists a virtually unlimited body of subtales, historical background, and possible descriptive expansions, passed down from master poet to apprentice. These tools and techniques of the trade are many; thus some but never all are deployed in a given performance.\n\nThe focus of this book is the intense tripartite relationship that obtains between the poets, their listeners, and the heroes of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l narrative. In examining the tradition from several different angles, I demonstrate that poets, heroes, and audience members perceive one another, interact with one another, and even rely on one another as social allies (or adversaries) in fascinating and highly significant ways, all of which contribute to the continual re-creation and propagation of the epic tradition. Furthermore, this process is not necessarily restricted to moments that we outsiders would recognize as moments of epic performance, but rather is one that takes place both inside and outside of the epic \"text.\" Though it might at first seem surprising to consider the epic heroes as active participants in this exchange, they are deployed both by poets when singing and by audience members in the ensuing discussions, so that their characters as conceived and constructed by participants invariably leave their mark on the personal relationships and social tensions that are played out during epic performances. Major issues, including ethnic identification, Arabness, religious orientation, traditional codes of behavior, manhood, womanhood, and the hierarchi-zation of social power, are woven into the texture of any modern performance of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l._ The tradition of performing the epic poem in this region is to a great extent kept alive by its role as catalyst for such significant social concerns. While outside researchers approach the epic seeking tradition and cultural continuity, the actual participants in the epic tradition are often present for entirely different reasons.\n\nThis book thus offers an ethnographic portrait of a tradition that is definable by its central text, the oral folk epic of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l, but that is by no means restricted to the boundaries of that text. The Introduction provides a brief historical and geographical survey of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l epic. Part 1, \"The Ethnography of a Poetic Tradition,\" presents a general ethnographic portrait of the village, followed by a detailed examination of the epic poets' community and their relationship to the larger society in which they live. The implications of this relationship are traced through various traditional contexts for epic singing, the story of the epic itself, and the recurring structures of social interaction observed in epic performances. In Part 2, \"Textual and Performance Strategies in the Sahra,\" I examine the epic as a context for social interaction and criticism through the analysis of performance texts from a single milieu, the _sahra,_ or private evening gathering. The (living) epic poets and (fictional) epic heroes are seen as figures engaged in an ongoing dialogue with audience members concerning honor, social status, and manhood, represented not only through the narrative of the epic but also in the parallel \"ways of speaking\" deployed by both poets and heroes.\n\nThree topics that have come to play central roles in contemporary oral epic research are only briefly touched upon in this volume: (I) the process of transmission and composition, that is, the issues of \"oral-formulaic composition\" and \"composition in performance\" such as delineated in the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord; (2) the musical dimensions of the epic performance; and (3) detailed analysis of the poems as literary texts divorced from specific performance events. I have set these issues aside for the moment, to be taken up, I hope, in a companion volume in the near future. The present work, which struggles to bring into sharp focus the types of contextual and interactive processes that shape epic performances, and thus epic texts, has seemed to me a necessary foundation for any satisfactory understanding of renditions of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l epic from northern Egypt. Whatever its faults, I hope it will be of use to many.\n\nI wish to express my thanks first and foremost to the poets and other residents of the village of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh who so graciously allowed me to live among them as guest and friend, and who so patiently endured my questions and unbounded curiosity. I sincerely hope they will see this and other works resulting from this project as fitting tributes to the poetic tradition of which they have been patrons and performers for so many years and to their own hospitality. I am grateful to all the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and their families, but in particular to the late Shaykhs \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd and 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b, and also to Shaykhs Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b and 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd Tawf\u012bq. Special thanks to my research assistants 'Abd al-Q\u0101dir \u1e62ub\u1e25 and \u1e24amd\u012b Jalama, and to my close companions who made certain that I always felt welcome in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, among them \u1e6dulba 'Abd al-La\u1e6d\u012bf al-Dis\u016bq\u012b, M\u0101hir Mu\u1e25ammad Sulaym\u0101n, Ibr\u0101h\u012bm al-Kha\u1e6d\u012bb, A\u1e25mad 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd ab\u016b l-'Awn, \u1e24amd\u012b 'Abd al-Satt\u0101r, and al-h\u0101fi'\u012b 'Abd All\u0101h. My most deeply felt appreciation, however, goes to Sa'\u012bd 'Abd al-Q\u0101dir \u1e24aydar and his family, who acted as my family away from home during my sojourns in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and without whose support this project could not have been completed.\n\nMany thanks to Dell Hymes, Roger Allen, and Dan Ben-Amos, for their comments, instruction, support, and guidance.\n\nI also thank those who have assisted me in this research at various points in its development with their suggestions, criticisms, and discussions: Abderrahman Ayoub ['Abd al-Ra\u1e25m\u0101n Ayy\u016bb], 'Abd al-Ra\u1e25m\u0101n al-Abn\u016bd\u012b, Pierre Cachia, Giovanni Canova, Micheline Galley, 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd \u1e24aww\u0101s, Scott Marcus, H. T. Norris, Susan Slyomovics, Abbas El-Tonsi ['Abb\u0101s al-T\u016bnis\u012b], and Mu\u1e25ammad 'Umr\u0101n; George Makdisi and Margaret Mills at the University of Pennsylvania; Joseph Harris, Gregory Nagy, and Jeffrey Wills at Harvard University; and Juliet Fleming, Robin Fleming, Joseph Koerner, Leslie Kurke, and Seth Schwartz at the Harvard Society of Fellows (1986\u201390). I am grateful also to the late Albert Lord, whose work inspired much of my own enthusiasm for studying oral epic traditions.\n\nIf I have received professional guidance from many sources, my prime source of inspiration and enthusiasm has been the members of R.R.A.L.L. (Radical Reassessments of Arabic Language and Literature): Kristen Brustad, Michael Cooperson, Jamal Elias, Nuha Khoury, Joseph Lowry, Nasser Rabbat, Devin Stewart, and Shawkat Toorawa. Their energy and excitement have always been contagious, and the level of creative thinking and intellectual inquiry I have encountered in the many meetings and conferences of this research group remains unmatched by those of any other organization I have known\u2014many thanks.\n\nFunding was provided by the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad I and II (1980\u201381, 1982\u201383) and a Fulbright-Hays research grant (1986\u201387). My appointment to the Harvard Society of Fellows (1986\u201390) provided the extended period of time necessary to inventory, catalog, and analyze many, many hours of field recordings, which greatly contributed to the quality of the final product. Portions of the section on _maww\u0101l_ have appeared in the essay \"The Interplay of Genres: Differentially Marked Discourse in a Northern Egyptian Tradition,\" in _The Ballad and Oral Literature,_ edited by Joseph Harris (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), reprinted here with permission. The section \"Construction of Commercial Images\" in Chapter 2 is based on an article published in _Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology_ (1989), used with permission of University of California Press. A portion of the Introduction appeared in an article in the journal _Oral Tradition_ (1989).\n\nCopies of the tapes cited in this study are on deposit at the Center for the Folk Arts (Markaz al-fun\u016bn al-ha'biyya), 18 al-Bur\u1e63a al-Qad\u012bma Street, Tawf\u012bqiyya, Cairo, Egypt, and in the Milman Parry Collections of Oral Literature, Widener Library C, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.\n\nDWIGHT FLETCHER REYNOLDS\n\n_Santa Barbara, California_\n\n## Notes on Transcription and Transliteration\n\nI have used two transliteration systems to represent standard Arabic (SA) and colloquial Egyptian Arabic (EA):\n\n1. Written sources in standard literary Arabic are cited according to the _International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES)_ transliteration system with the additional underlining of bigraphic symbols that reflect a single phoneme (kh, rather than kh as in _IJMES_ , for example, so that the latter is not left undifferentiated from the sequential occurrence of k and h). Standard Arabic forms of some colloquial lexical items have been adopted in the English passages of the text with minimal diacritic markings (thus, throughout the English text, Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l, Shaykh, and Ab\u016b Zayd rather than Ben\u012b Hil\u0101l, haykh, Ab\u016b Z\u0113d or Zeyd, etc.). In addition, a number of the most commonly recurring place-names such as al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and Kafr al-Shaykh are left without diacritics in the English text. Transliterations have not been used for proper names and terms that have accepted English forms such as Mecca, Islam, and Sufi.\n\n2. In transliterating colloquial Egyptian dialect, I have adopted the basics of the _IJMES_ transcription system with the addition of several vowels to accommodate Egyptian colloquial Arabic forms:\n\nIn addition, certain modifications have been adopted for transliterating Egyptian colloquial Arabic consonants in order to preserve key features that mark code-shifting between colloquial Arabic, \"elevated\" colloquial, and standard Arabic, a process common in _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performances. This modified system represents an attempt to provide a broadly phonemic transcription of colloquial texts in a manner that reflects both the occurrence of significant phonological shifts and the commonly understood cognate standard Arabic forms.\n\nFor Arab scholars who have published in languages other than Arabic, I have, for the most part, both cited their chosen spelling in European languages and provided a transliteration of the original Arabic form.\n\n* * *\n\n1. The bracketed standard Arabic allophones are transcribed as such where they occur in the texts.\n\n2. - _at_ form in construct state.\n\n3. The definite article has been transcribed in the body of the text ( _al_ -) as per _IJMES_ , without assimilation, except in direct quotations from actual performances: thus al-hams rather than ih-hams in the body of the text, but _al-, il-, el-, and ul-_ with assimilation where it occurs, in quotations from performances.\n\n4. The local dialect of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, and _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ texts in general in this region, makes use of _j\/g_ alternation for the phoneme [ ] as well as three forms of the phoneme [ ]: \/ _q_ \/, \/glottal stop\/, and _\/g\/_ , which have been rendered as follows:\n\nQ = _\/q\/,_ voiceless uvular stop, as in standard Arabic _al-Q\u0101hira_ 'Cairo'\n\nq' = \/'\/, glottal stop, as in the Cairene pronunciation of ' _\u0101l l\u012b_ 'he said to me'\n\nq = _\/g\/_ , voiced velar stop, as in Upper Egyptian dialect _gall\u012b_ 'he said to me'\n\nSince the latter form is by far the most common in texts from this region, this system has the advantage of leaving most occurrences of the phoneme unmarked, while distinguishing only the less common, variant allophones. N.B. In these transcriptions, _q_ and _g_ represent the same spoken sound, though they reflect two distinct Standard Arabic phonemes.\n\nIn addition, numerous forms occur in _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performances from the region of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh which appear to reflect case endings similar to those of standard written Arabic; these have been superscripted: _ru\u1e25t-I bil\u0101d an tirkab il-afy\u0101l_ 'I have gone to countries where elephants are ridden'.\n\n## INTRODUCTION\n\n## The Tradition\n\nThen he remembers how he used to like to go out of the house at sunset when people were having their evening meal, and used to lean against the maize fence pondering deep in thought, until he was recalled to his surroundings by the voice of a poet who was sitting at some distance to his left, with his audience round him. Then the poet would begin to recite in a wonderfully sweet tone the doings of Ab\u016b Zayd, Khal\u012bfa and Diy\u0101b, and his hearers would remain silent except when ecstasy enlivened them or desire startled them. Then they would demand a repetition and argue and dispute. And so the poet would be silent until they ceased their clamour after a period which might be short or long. Then he would continue his sweet recitation in a monotone.\n\n\u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 \u1e24usayn, _al-Ayy\u0101m_\n\nThis poetic tradition which Egypt's preeminent literary scholar, \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 \u1e24usayn, recalls at the outset of his autobiography is one familiar throughout most of the Arab world\u2014the _s\u012bra_ , or epic history, of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe, which chronicles the tribe's massive migration out of their homeland in the Arabian peninsula, their passage through Egypt, their subsequent conquest of North Africa, and their final defeat one hundred years later. The migration, the conquest, and the defeat are historical events that occurred between the tenth and twelfth centuries C.E. From this skein of actual events, Arabic oral tradition has woven a rich and complex narrative centered on a cluster of heroic characters. Time and again Bedouin warriors and heroines are pitted against the kings and princes of towns and cities. The individual destinies of the main actors are constantly placed in a fragile balance with the fate of the tribe itself as they seek pasturage, safe passage, and a new homeland. With the conquest of North Africa, the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l nomads themselves become rulers of cities, a situation that leads to the internal fragmentation of the tribe, internecine wars, and the tribe's eventual demise.\n\nAcross the breadth of the Arab world, narratives about the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe have been set down in written form from the oral tradition since the fourteenth century: from Morocco, on the shores of the Atlantic, to the sultanate of Oman, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, from the Mediterranean in the north, and as far south into Africa as Nigeria, Chad, and the Sudan (see fig. 1).\n\n_S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is the single most widespread and best-documented narrative tradition of Arabic oral literature. Far more is known about the historical development, the geographical distribution, and the living oral tradition of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ than the stories that to most Western readers exemplify the Arabic folk tale, the _Thousand and One Nights._ The latter owes its fame and survival not to its position in the Arab world, but to the enormous amount of attention it received in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe.1 Though _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is now seldom heard in the urban centers of the Arab world, in rural areas it continues to be performed in prose, in poetry, and in song. The most famous versions are those sung in Egypt by epic singers who perform their versified narrative for nights at a time while accompanying themselves on the _rab\u0101b_ 'spike-fiddle', _\u1e6d\u0101r_ 'large frame-drum', or _kamanja_ 'Western violin'.\n\n_Figure 1._ Evidence from the oral tradition\n\nThe folk s\u012bra tradition is familiar to most scholars of Arabic literature, but it has, for the most part, escaped the notice of epic scholars, folklorists, and anthropologists in the West, due primarily to the dearth of translations into European languages, and, in particular, into English. Since the 1970s, however, _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ has sparked new academic interest and even a few translations.\n\n#### The Question of Genre\n\nEpic as a literary genre has acquired strong associations with high culture, civilization, and nationalism. These cultural and political associations have to a great extent muddied the waters in defining the genre (or genres) of European epic poetry and in promoting or discouraging comparisons to similar but distinct genres from other cultures. Quite simply, epic is a literary genre with high status; scholars and researchers of different cultures have had good reason, and clear political agendas, for claiming the existence of an indigenous \"national\" epic. These high literary overtones, however, often hinder the exploration of actual similarities and divergences.2\n\n_S\u012brat Bam Hil\u0101l_ has been referred to by Western scholars as epic, saga, romance, tale cycle, legend, and geste.3 A great deal of the confusion stems from the wide variation in modes of performance across the Arab world, but the gist of the problem arises from the fact that sira is an indigenous Arabic genre with no exact parallel in European literatures. A s\u012bra is literally a traveling, a journeying, or a path\u2014the nominal form of the verb _sdra_ 'to travel, to journey, to move (on)'. It is used to designate a history, a biography, or even a mode of behavior or conduct. The term was first applied within Arabic written literature to the biography of the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad, _S\u012brat ras\u016bl all\u0101h_ , specifically that by Ibn Is\u1e25\u0101q (d. 768 C.E.) in the recension of Ibn Hih\u0101m (d. 833 C.E.).4 Though in the early centuries the term _s\u012bra_ had been used with several different meanings, the literary genre of s\u012bra later grew to be more and more closely associated with the idea of biography.\n\nThe evolution of the folk genre of s\u012bra (the oral folk epics) is cloudy at best, but it did not parallel the development of the literary genre of the same name. The earliest surviving extracts of the folk _siyar_ (pi. of _s\u012bra_ ) date from the late medieval period, though references to them are found as early as the twelfth century. They most probably have roots in a still earlier oral tradition. These lengthy narratives, told in alternating sequences of prose and poetry, appeared in manuscripts over many centuries, until the nineteenth century. With the arrival of printing, they reappeared in a new form as cheaply printed chapbooks, which are found throughout the Arab world in prodigious numbers. The relationship between the oral and written traditions of the folk _siyar_ is complex: some of the _siyar_ developed entirely within the oral tradition and were only at a very late date committed to writing, but there is also good reason to suspect that a few of them were literary creations by later authors imitating the oral folk genre for consumption by a popular readership. The _siyar_ for which we have manuscript and\/or chapbook texts all share key stylistic features, and, at least in their written form, clearly make up a cohesive and identifiable genre: _S\u012brat ' Antar ibn hadd\u0101d_5 (the s\u012bra of the pre-Islamic black poet-knight, 'Antara son of hadd\u0101d); _S\u012brat al-\u1e92\u0101hir Baybars_ 6 (the s\u012bra of the thirteenth-century Egyptian ruler and folk hero, al-\u1e92\u0101hir Baybars); _S\u012brat al-am\u012br \u1e24amza al-Bahlaw\u0101n_ 7 (the s\u012bra of \u1e24amza, uncle of the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad); _S\u012brat Dh\u0101t al-Himma_8 (the s\u012bra of the heroine Dh\u0101t al-Himma and her wars against the Byzantines); _S\u012brat al-malik Sayf ibn Dh\u012b Yazan_9 (the s\u012bra of the Himyarite king, Sayf ibn dh\u012b Yazan, and his wars against the Abyssinians); _S\u012brat al-Z\u012br S\u0101lim_ 10 (the _s\u012bra_ of the Bedouin warrior al-Z\u012br S\u0101lim); and of course, _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l._ All except for _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ have now disappeared from oral tradition, though performances from the other siyar were observed as late as the nineteenth century.11\n\nThe language of the written versions of these prose\/verse narratives of battles, adventures, and romance fluctuates between the spoken colloquial and a stilted \"classicized\" vernacular; nowhere do they reach a level recognized as true _fu\u1e63\u1e25\u0101_ (the classical, literary form of Arabic).12 Oral renditions, sometimes over one hundred hours in length, range from performances narrated entirely in prose to renditions sung entirely in poetry; but they are always performed in colloquial dialect, often in a rhetorically embellished register of the colloquial which includes many words and phrases usually associated with the classical language. As \"impure\" Arabic, the written texts of the folk siyar were, and often still are, shunned by many Arab and Western scholars; the oral tradition, in local dialects, is usually considered even further beyond the pale.\n\nThe folk siyar have thus left a fragmentary but intriguing historical trail behind them through the centuries; they have been both derided as bad literature and occasionally attacked by religious authorities as frivolous works which lead their auditors away from more meritorious study and devotional activities. The following two opinions are typical\u2014the first is couched as moral advice to scribes and copyists, while the second is from an exegetical commentary on a verse from the Qur'\u0101n:\n\nIt is best for [the copyist] not to copy anything from those books which lead [their readers] astray, such as the books of heretics or sectarians. Likewise he should not copy those books in which there is no benefit for God, such as the s\u012bra of 'Antar and other diverse subjects which waste time and in which there is nothing of religion, and also those books written by practitioners of wantonness, [including] what they have written about the types of sexual intercourse and descriptions of wines and other things which incite forbidden acts.13\n\nIn reference to Qur'\u0101n 31:5: \"When they hear idle talk [ _laghw_ ], they turn away from it,\" which had usually been interpreted as an injunction against listening to singing, the scholar Ibn 'Abd Rabbihi (d. 328 A.H.\/929 C.E.) wrote that the verse referred instead to fictional narratives (siyar), not to music and song (which Ibn 'Abd Rabbihi was at great pains to defend):\n\nThis verse was revealed only about people who were purchasing story books of biographies [siyar] and tales of the ancients, and compared these with the Qur'an and said that they were better than it.14\n\nFor both stylistic and religious reasons the folk siyar have thus been excluded from literary canon and research.15\n\nThough some aspects of the development of the folk siyar remain uncertain, the texts that have come down to us clearly constitute a distinct genre: found in both oral and written form, the folk siyar are distinguished by their lengthy narratives (chapbook editions sometimes run upward of forty volumes), usually told in alternating sections of prose and poetry (the latter most often the speeches of the main characters), in colloquial or \"pseudo-classical\" Arabic, focusing on themes of heroism, battle, romance, chivalry, and often including encounters with supernatural beings such as angels, ghouls, and jinn.\n\n_S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is the last of the folk siyar to survive in oral tradition. Though references and even descriptions of performances of other folk siyar indicate their survival into the early part of the twentieth century, only _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is observable today as an oral folk epic tradition. _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is thus the last survivor of an Arabic oral epic tradition which at one time included well over a dozen exemplars. Traces of all of these are found in the written record as brief mentions within other works, or in more complete form as manuscripts or chapbooks. The latter provide a detailed idea of the story line of various of these epics, but unfortunately they give us little of the richness of the oral performance tradition. Careful study of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performances, however, may allow us to rekindle some of the performative aspects of kindred examples from the Arabic epic tradition.\n\n#### History\n\nSeveral of the folk siyar have as their central character a hero plucked from the pages of history: 'Antara ibn hadd\u0101d was a poet of the pre-Islamic era; \u1e24amza was indeed the uncle of the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad; and al-\u1e92\u0101hir Baybars ruled Egypt from 1260 to 1277 C.E. Most of these historical figures, however, share little but their names with the corresponding folk heroes and their exploits. _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ , on the other hand, has a more intimate relationship with historical events. Though the main characters appear fictitious, the frame of the s\u012bra is historically correct.16 The existence of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribal confederation (literally \"sons of Hil\u0101l,\" or even more literally, \"sons of the crescent moon\") in the Arabian peninsula is documented back to the pre-Islamic period. Throughout the first centuries after the appearance of Islam in seventh century C.E., the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l continued to reside primarily in the Najd region of central Arabia, not participating to any major degree in the rapid centrifugal expansion of many of the other Bedouin tribes during the early Islamic conquests. In the tenth century, however, the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l began to leave Arabia in large numbers. No doubt some waves of this migration were voluntary, but a substantial number of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l were deported to Upper Egypt by the Fatimid Caliph of Cairo, al-'Az\u012bz ibn al-Mu'izz, as punishment for participating in the Qarmatian rebellion and the sacking of the city of Medina.17 To this day there are populations in Upper Egypt and the Sudan who claim descent from the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l, and some of the most significant modern field recordings of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ have come from this region.18\n\nIn the middle of the eleventh century, al-Mu'izz ibn B\u0101d\u012bs, a vassal of the Fatimids then governing the province of Ifr\u012bqiya (modern Tunisia and contiguous territories), shifted his allegiance from the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo to the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. The Fatimid Caliph, al-Mustan\u1e63ir, then supposedly handed over Ifr\u012bqiya to the rapacious Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l nomads both to punish his wayward vassal and simply to rid himself of their troublesome presence in Egypt. Whether at the instigation of the caliph or in less organized fashion, the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l traversed the Libyan desert and invaded Tunisia. In 1051\u201352 they captured the city of Gab\u00e8s; on November 1, 1057, they sacked Qayraw\u0101n and thus completed their conquest. There they ruled for almost exactly one hundred years; during this period, however, the victorious confederation of tribal groups apparently splintered and fragmented. In their divided state, the eastward-moving Moroccan dynasty, the Almohads ( _al-muwa\u1e25\u1e25id\u016bn_ ), found the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l easy prey. The Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l were defeated in two large battles in 1153 and 1160 C.E. Thereafter, small groups from the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l confederation are mentioned sporadically in historical accounts from Morocco and Andalusian Spain for about a century, where they appear as mercenary soldiers; they then disappear entirely. In several regions of North Africa, groups trace their ancestry to this final dispersion of the once mighty Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l nomadic tribes.19\n\n#### The Growth of the Poetic Tradition\n\nOur first evidence of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ as a developing poetic tradition appears two hundred years after the final defeat and dissolution of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe. The famous fourteenth-century Arab historiographer Ibn Khald\u016bn, toward the end of his three-volume _Muqaddima_ (Introduction), embarks on a spirited defense of vernacular poetry.20 His viewpoint is unique for his era, for he argues that oral vernacular poetry, which is not composed in _Ju\u1e63\u1e25\u0101_ (the classical\/literary form of Arabic), is not only beautiful but must also be considered true poetry in that it possesses its own rules and constraints (i.e., meter and rhyme). These, he points out, are different from those governing classical poetry, yet since these rules are discernible, oral vernacular poetry must be accepted as true poetry and not derided as doggerel. The poems he cites as examples, as proof of the artistic merit of colloquial verse, are short poems recounting episodes from _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ which he collected from Bedouins living in the deserts of Ifr\u012bqiya. Several of these fragments are parallels of texts recorded in the field in twentieth-century Tunisia and Egypt, six hundred years later.\n\nLittle is known of the development of the s\u012bra between the time of the writings of Ibn Khald\u016bn and the late eighteenth century. At that point, however, the historical record comes alive. Over a period of sixty years, from 1785 to 1845, a series of manuscripts were penned in colloquial Arabic (that they are written in colloquial Arabic marks them as a rare find). The highly colloquial tone and irregular orthography of these texts suggest that they may even have been taken down from oral performances, virtual transcriptions of what was heard. Several of the manuscripts, now housed in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, contain colophons that appear to indicate the names of both scribe and poet. The collection totals more than eight thousand pages of poetry and prose from _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ , and clearly indicates a fertile and vibrant oral tradition.21 Smaller collections are found in several other European librairies.22\n\nToward the end of this same period, in 1836, the British Arabist Edward W. Lane first published his ethnographic description of Egypt, titled _The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians,_ three chapters of which are devoted to the \"Public Recitations of Romances.\"23 The first, concerning _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ , includes a six-page summary of the opening episodes of the s\u012bra, the birth of the hero Ab\u016b Zayd. Lane attests to the great popularity of the folk siyar among Cairenes, and estimates that fifty professional poets in Cairo were engaged exclusively in the performance of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l,_ thirty more performed _S\u012brat al-\u1e92\u0101hir Baybars,_ and six performed _S\u012brat 'Antar ibn hadd\u0101d_. He also noted that _S\u012brat Dh\u0101t al-Himma_ and _S\u012brat Sayf ibn dh\u012b Yazan_ had apparently been performed up until the period just prior to his own sojourn in Egypt. The performance styles for these siyar in Lane's time showed considerable divergence: only _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ was a musical tradition, sung to the accompaniment of the rab\u0101b 'spike-fiddle', and, although performers of both _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ and _S\u012brat al-\u1e92\u0101hir Baybars_ performed without written texts, reciters of _S\u012brat 'Antar ibn hadd\u0101d_ read aloud from books.\n\nThroughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, accounts of the _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ tradition have been written by travelers, historians, ethnographers, and even journalists. Most are but brief mentions of performances; a few, however, contain valuable details on performance styles, and some include brief extracts from oral or written texts.24\n\n### Modes of Performance\n\nThe composite portrait of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ which grows out of these many scattered accounts is a surprising one, for while key elements of the story line remain constant across geographic and historical separation, the modes of performance and the choice of poetic forms are quite diverse. Some performances are in prose, others are in various types of poetry, still others approach cante-fable with alternating sequences of poetry and prose. Some performances are entirely sung, some entirely spoken, and some move quickly to and from spoken prose, rhymed prose ( _saj_ '), and sung poetry.\n\n_S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ can perhaps be most clearly conceptualized as an enormous narrative, truly epic in length, possessing a set of central plot elements and key characters known by performers who render it in widely diverse genres of oral literature in different geographical regions. In Egypt, for example, there are nonprofessional storytellers who perform the sira in prose as a cycle of tales, occasionally embellished with short bits of poetry. There are also a handful of public reciters who read aloud from the printed chapbook editions; these, however, are almost completely overshadowed by the professional epic-singers, for whom Egypt is famous, who versify the narrative in sung, improvised poetry in a manner similar to the epic traditions of Yugoslavia studied by Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord.25 This sung, versified performance style is currently unique to Egypt, though it may have been more widespread in the past.\n\nWithin the epic-singing tradition of Egypt the musical styles display an intriguing amount of variety, mirroring in some ways the diversity of verbal forms.26 A large number of melodies are pressed into service as vehicles for epic singing, occasionally even including modern songs from the popular urban milieu. Some epic poets perform as soloists while others are accompanied by ensembles of up to eight or ten musicians on rab\u0101bs and\/or violins, reed flutes, and a variety of percussion instruments. Some poets pace their singing with extensive choral refrains sung by other musicians, and some use no refrains at all. _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is, in short, an oral tradition that thrives on variation in style while maintaining a clear unifying bond in the story itself. And all of these many \"sounds\" of the s\u012bra have their own appreciative audiences or they simply would not continue to exist.\n\nHowever fascinating this panoply of musical styles and poetic forms, in this volume I deal exclusively with the sung, versified renditions found in the Nile Delta region of Egypt, renditions which are performed on the rab\u0101b by hereditary, professional epic-singers. These singers perform as soloists or with one other poet; their renditions are comparable in form, content, process of composition, and performance style to that body of works from around the world which scholars have come to refer to as oral epics or folk epics.\n\n#### The Story\n\nWithin the essentially historical framework of the migrations and conquests of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe, the s\u012bra has evolved into a series of intricate tales built on tensions among a constellation of central characters. In this it may be differentiated from the other Arabic folk siyar, which all dealt primarily with a single heroic character. _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ may be compared more easily with, say, the King Arthur cycles or the _Iliad_ , while the other, now defunct, siyar more closely resemble, in this aspect, _Beowulf,_ the _Chanson de Roland,_ or _El Cid._ The basic cast of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ consists of several key male characters playing opposite a single female lead:\n\n_Ab\u016b Zayd_ , in Egypt at least, is usually portrayed as the central hero of the s\u012bra.27 He is the primary hero of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe; he is not, however, their greatest warrior. Crafty and cunning, \"father of ruses\" ( _ab\u016b \u1e25iyal_ ), he often prefers, through stratagems and trickery, to avoid battle. This aspect of his character leads to varying interpretations from poet to poet and region to region, for his deceptions frequently skirt the border between honorable and dishonorable conduct. Furthermore, Ab\u016b Zayd is black, owing to the extraordinary circumstances of his birth, and is often mistaken by outsiders for a mere slave, which allows him at many points to travel disguised as an epic poet into enemy territory. In Egypt it is not uncommon to see an Egyptian audience sitting and listening to an epic poet while he sings about Ab\u016b Zayd _disguised_ as an epic poet singing to an Egyptian audience sitting round him.\n\nDiy\u0101b (also Dhiy\u0101b), leader of the Zughba (or Zagh\u0101ba) clan, is the most powerful warrior of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l confederation, and it is by his hand that the tribe's ultimate foe, al-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa, is fated to die. However, he is hot-blooded, easily slighted, and very touchy on points of honor\u2014characteristics that often set him in conflict with Ab\u016b Zayd. Time and again, after some perceived slight from other members of the tribal council, Diy\u0101b leads his clan out of the confederation, only to return in the final desperate hour of battle to save the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l from total destruction. Though he is rash and often a source of internecine conflict, the tribe must endure his unpredictable behavior, for only he can slay al-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa.\n\nSultan \u1e24asan, the dignified arbitrator, is the mediator of tribal tensions among the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l and the moderating force which often holds the clans together despite the rivalries and conflicts of their leaders. More devout than the other heroes, he is their statesman and chief representative of the tribe in dealings with outsiders.\n\nAl-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa was historically the leader of the Berbers of North Africa, and in North African versions of the s\u012bra he remains so. In Egypt, however, Berbers are virtually unknown, and he is portrayed simply as an Arab chieftain along with all the other central characters. Everywhere, however, he is the principal enemy whom the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l must defeat in order to rule Ifr\u012bqiya. In Egypt, an episode is often sung early in the story of the s\u012bra in which al-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa murders seventy descendants of the Prophet Muhammad in a mosque while they are at prayer, clearly marking him as a villain beyond redemption. In other regions, poets at times transpose him into a nearly tragic figure struggling against his predestined demise at the hand of Diy\u0101b.\n\nAgainst these four versions of manhood\u2014brains, brawn, moderation, and evil\u2014stands one idealized vision of womanhood, al-J\u0101zya, who is, quite simply, the most beautiful and wisest woman in the world. She sits with the shaykhs in the tribal council and shares in their decisions. She at times rides into battle, and several times carries the fate of the entire tribe in her hands when she is married off to various opponents (inevitably smitten with her beauty) in order to gain pasturage and safe passage for the tribe in difficult terrain. She is then left to her own devices to find some means of escape or an honorable deception by which to break off her marriage so that she may rejoin the tribe on their westward journey.\n\n_S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is often divided into three parts. The first recounts the history of the tribe, the birth of the main heroes, their adventures as youths, and their marriages. Then a severe drought strikes their homeland in the Najd, and the tribal council decides new pasturage must be sought if the tribe is to survive. A scouting party is formed consisting of Ab\u016b Zayd and his three nephews.28\n\nThe second section of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ , \"The Reconnaissance\" (al-Riy\u0101da), tells the adventures of these four young heroes as they travel, eventually to Tunisia, seeking a new homeland for their tribe. Disaster strikes three times: the first nephew, Y\u016bnus, is held captive by the princess 'Az\u012bza after she falls madly in love with him. With Y\u016bnus her prisoner, she attempts to seduce him (a favorite episode in more than one quarter), while he, as did his predecessor, the biblical and Qur'\u0101nic figure of Joseph (Arabic: Y\u016bsuf), stoically resists her charms. The second nephew is killed in battle; the third dies from a snake bite.29 Ab\u016b Zayd returns to the tribe alone, stirring up great anger and suspicion among Diy\u0101b and his men. The situation, however, forces them to cooperate. The Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l depart westward toward \"Tun\u012bs the Verdant\" in search of grazing lands, to rescue Y\u016bnus, and to avenge the murder of the seventy descendants of the prophet killed by al-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa.\n\nThe third section of the s\u012bra is \"The Westward Journey\" (al-Taghr\u012bba), an elaborate series of battle cycles and romances which takes the tribe on a not-very-direct route through Iraq, Syria, Cyprus, Jerusalem, Gaza, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Libya before they arrive in Tunisia. There the final battles are fought against the forces of al-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa, and the unavoidable destiny of the tribe is played out. Al-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa, though forewarned by his daughter, Su'ada, who has seen a vision of his death in a dream, rides into battle and is killed by Diy\u0101b. The death of al-Zan\u0101t\u012b marks the end of many versions of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l._ At the close of the final battle, most of the great heroes lie dead and the tribe has completed its conquest and realized its search for a homeland.\n\nA fourth section, though, is found in some regions: \"The T\u00f4me of the Orphans\" (D\u012bw\u0101n al-ayt\u0101m). The Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l who were united in victory are divided in the ensuing peace. The rivalries between Diy\u0101b and Ab\u016b Zayd sunder the bonds that held the clans together as they argue over the division of land and wealth. Sultan \u1e24asan dies, and Diy\u0101b is accused of his murder. Ab\u016b Zayd, from the intensity of his weeping and mourning over Sultan \u1e24asan's death, goes blind. The final fratricidal battle is fought between Diy\u0101b and his forces and an army of orphans led by al-J\u0101zya and the blind Ab\u016b Zayd. At the battle's end all the heroes are dead; the clans are decimated and are then dispersed as stragglers and refugees over the face of the earth.30 The Moroccan Almohad dynasty, which historically destroyed the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l confederation, is thus not present in the final scenes of the epic as it exists in the Egyptian oral tradition. Instead, in perhaps an even more moving denouement, the tribe tragically destroys itself.\n\nGiven the enormous diversity demonstrated by texts collected in different parts of the Arab world, it is not possible to generalize about smaller structural divisions within the epic. The following description of versions collected in the Nile Delta from the village of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, however, illustrates one regional tradition and provides the material and impetus for future comparisons.\n\nThe al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poets divide the Hil\u0101l\u012b epic into some thirty episodes, each referred to as a tale (qi\u1e63\u1e63a), and understood to be a narrative unit with a beginning and end which would constitute at least a full evening's performance. Several of these are thought to require at least two nights for a proper performance. In addition, there exists a great deal of marginal material which takes place in between the individual tales; it only emerges when a sequence of more than one episode is being sung, such as at a large harvest celebration or a wedding. The order of the tales is generally agreed upon among the poets, with a certain amount of variation found within some subsections such as the wedding tale cycle, when each of the major heroes goes out and wins one or more maidens as wives, and the first tales of the \"Westward Migration\" (before the arrival in Tunisia). Curiously enough, although the \"Reconnaissance\" and the \"Westward Migration,\" the second and third major sections of the epic, both possess well-established names, the first section of the epic does not. I refer to it as \"The Births and Marriages\":\n\n  1. The Births and Marriages \n    1. The Birth of Ab\u016b Zayd\n    2. Muhrif al-'Uqayl\u012b, the Seventh King\n    3. \u1e24an\u1e0dal al-'Uqayl\u012b\n    4. The Marriage Tales\n\n\u2014The Maiden Badr al-Na'\u0101m (Full moon of the graceful ones)\n\n\u2014The Maiden Badr al-\u1e62ab\u0101\u1e25 (Full moon of the morning)\n\n\u2014The Maiden N\u0101'isat al-Ajf\u0101n (Languorous eyes)\n\n\u2014The Bejeweled Garment of the Daughter of Nu'm\u0101n\n\n\u2014The Maiden Fullat al-Nad\u0101 (Jasmine bud of the dew)\n\n\u2014The Lady Sh\u0101ma (Beauty mark) Queen of Yemen\n\n  2. The Reconnaissance (al-Riy\u0101da) \n    1. The Departure and Journey\n    2. 'Az\u012bza and Y\u016bnus\n    3. The Battle in the Garden\n    4. The Return of Ab\u016b Zayd\n  3. The Westward Journey (al-Taghr\u012bba) \n    1. 'Amir al-Khaf\u0101j\u012b\n    2. Al-Harr\u0101s, Malik Qubru\u1e63 (king of Cyprus)\n    3. The Passage through Egypt\n    4. Man\u1e63\u016br al-\u1e24abah\u012b\n    5. The Arrival in T\u016bnis\n    6. Al-J\u0101zy\u0101 at the Wall of T\u016bnis\n    7. The Rescue of the Nephews\n    8. The Daughters of the Ahr\u0101f (descendants of the Prophet)\n    9. The Maiden Diy\u0101' al-'uy\u016bn wa-n\u016brh\u0101 (Sparkle and light of all eyes)\n    10. The Battles at T\u016bnis\n    11. Death of 'Amir al-Khaf\u0101j\u012b\n    12. Death of al-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa\n    13. The Maiden \u1e24usna bint N\u0101\u1e63ir al-Tuwayrd\u012b (Beautiful, daughter of N\u0101\u1e63ir al-Tuwayrd\u012b)\n\nThe question then arises whether these tales represent a unified narrative tradition. Is _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l,_ as it is found in the Nile Delta, a narrative with variations commensurate with those of a single unified oral epic, or is it rather a cycle of tales held together by a loosely organized traditional frame, something that we might better conceive of as \"Tales of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l\"? Once again, given the diversity of the regional performance traditions, it seems imperative to establish with care the parameters of each local tradition both as conceived by the performers and audience members, and as indicated by analysis of the texts themselves.\n\n#### Textual Evidence\n\nAt many points in the narratives recorded in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, the overarching plot of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ dictates clear chronological progression. The births of the heroes obviously take place prior to their exploits. The youthful adventures that lead to their respective marriages also clearly precede the drought that forces the tribe from the Arabian peninsula. Then follows the reconnaissance journey of Ab\u016b Zayd and his three nephews, followed by Ab\u016b Zayd's solitary return to the tribe. Ab\u016b Zayd's return subsequently motivates the westward journey of the tribe, the conquest of Tunis, and the death of the major heroes. In terms of large structures, then, it is possible to order the sequence of the tales by the central moves of the epic's plot. However, epics such as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ do not unfold according to chronological sequence, and we must be wary of any attempt to impose such an order upon a tradition without evidence substantiating that step.\n\nWithin the three large units of the epic\u2014(i) \"The Births and Weddings,\" (2) \"The Reconnaissance,\" and (3) \"The Westward Migration\"\u2014 two subunits possess only sparing internal evidence that might dictate a specific order to the episodes. Based on textual evidence, the wooing and marriage tales, and the stops on the westward journey could be construed as nearly independent stories which could be arranged in several different sequences. Thus, one might perceive the overall plot as dictating a strict chronology of large parts and admitting of certain ambiguities within two of those large units. When examined closely, however, small indications are usually embedded within the rendition of each poet which betray his sense of ordering, though these are not always the same from poet to poet. The tale of Sh\u0101ma, for example, usually begins with an assembly scene where al-J\u0101zya, the Hil\u0101l\u012b heroine, praises all the warriors for their exploits and for the women they have brought in marriage to the tribe. All of the previous marriage tales are listed. The sole warrior who has not won himself a bride provides the impetus for the tale. Angry at his lack of heroic exploits, he sets out to win Sh\u0101ma, the queen of Yemen. Sh\u0101ma, then must be seen as the last of the wedding tales. Likewise, the tale of the _badla_ 'a bejeweled suit of clothes' is in essence the second half of the tale of the Maiden of the Languorous Eyes, though it may be sung separately. (The poets usually sing them together as one long episode\u2014five and a half, six, and eleven hours in the three versions I recorded\u2014particularly suitable to a two-night engagement.)\n\n#### Performance Evidence\n\nAlthough in living memory no poet of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh had ever undertaken to sing the epic from \"beginning to end,\" I initiated my fieldwork by requesting a poet to do so (see Chap. 1). Neither the performing poet nor the other poets in the village found this request unreasonable. Indeed, they easily listed which poets would be capable of giving a full rendition and which were not, based on their knowledge of each other's repertory. In all subsequent discussions it became clear that all of the poets conceived of the s\u012bra as a single narrative and could, with little variation, list the order of the episodes. That first recording of the epic resulted in a sparsely sung but linear rendition of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l._ The poet later recalled episodes that he had forgotten, which he then proceeded to perform for me so they could be added to the version he had sung months earlier. While he had forgotten certain episodes during this first series of performances, he supplied a great deal of narrative, linking the episodes with segues or bridges. After recording for several months, I realized I had not heard these sequences performed again, so I asked other poets about these portions of the story. They responded that although as young men they had learned these sections, they were only actually performed when two or more episodes were performed in sequence, a rare event in recent years. In essence, recording all of the individual episodes known to a particular singer would only bring to light a portion of his knowledge of the tradition, for the remaining narrative material exists in the interstices of the episodes, material that emerges only in the sequential performance of more than one episode.\n\nWithin the context of the epic-singing community of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, the evidence for approaching _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ as a single unit, as a cohesive epic, thus seems fairly conclusive: (1) the poets perceive it to be a single narrative and speak of it as such; (2) the better poets in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh are capable of singing the epic as a whole, even when they have never before done so; (3) the ordering imposed by different poets, whether in performance or in conversation, is the same, with some minor exceptions in the ordering of the wedding tales and the westward journey tales; and (4) the texts themselves contain internal evidence indicating a specific and cohesive sequence.\n\nOur conclusion, then, concerning the unity of the epic narrative is somewhat paradoxical. Though _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is conceptually a single, cohesive narrative for the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, it exists only as individual episodes each performed in appropriate contexts. And, as we have seen briefly in reference to narrative \"bridges,\" the traditional episodes do not include the entire epic as the poets know it. Remarkably enough, some of these narrative bridges, which in the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh repertory are told in laconic prose form, have been found to exist in other regions of the Arab Middle East as full, versified episodes, providing evidence that even the oral tradition with all of its regional variations may prove more cohesive at some levels than researchers have yet imagined.\n\n* * *\n\n1. The collection of tales known in the West as the _Thousand and One Nights_ or the _Arabian Nights_ bears only a tenuous relation to its Arabic original, which may in fact never have been in oral tradition. The title and famous frame-tale were translated into Arabic, probably as early as the ninth century C.E., from a Middle Persian work that has not come down to us. The multiply-framed stories, which have made the collection famous, are nowhere found in Arabic oral folk tradition and appear to be a device developed solely by redactors and anthologiz-ers within the written tradition.\n\nAntoine Galland, who completed the first \"translation\" of the Arabic _Alf layla wa-layla_ , freehandedly expurgated, retold, and rearranged the tales of his Arabic sources. To these original tales his editor added tales from other sources, and Galland himself filled out nearly one-third of the collection with stories he heard at dinner parties in Paris from a visiting Aleppan Maronite. Later translators padded even this debased collection with ethnographic detail (Edward W. Lane) and Victorian erotica (Richard Burton), or completely falsified insertions (Mardrus). The hundreds of versions and editions of the _Nights_ published in Europe remain a monument to the West's fantasies about the Middle East rather than examples of Arabic folk literature.\n\nThe extreme popularity of the work in Europe eventually motivated Arabic editions, which appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Previous to these reintroduced editions, the popularity of the _Nights_ in the Middle East had been limited. Each of the major European translators (Galland, Lane, Burton, Payne, and others) complained of the extreme difficulty of obtaining the few extant manuscripts of the _Nights_ , but then triumphantly presented the work to Western readers as a recognized classic of Arabic literature (quite the opposite of its actual status in the Arab world).\n\nFor a general if somewhat dated introduction, see E. Littman, \"Alf laylah wa-laylah,\" in _Encyclopedia of Islam_ , 2d ed. (Hereafter the _Encyclopedia of Islam_ is referred to as _El_ , with _EI_ 1 or _El_ 2 indicating edition.) Duncan B. MacDonald, \"A Bibliographical and Literary Study of the First Appearance of the Arabian Nights in Europe\" (1932), provides a detailed account of the compilation of the early European editions. The most important recent academic work on the _Nights_ has been Muhsin Mahdi's edition of a fourteenth-century manuscript, Kit\u0101b alf laylah wa-laylah min u\u1e63\u016blihi al-'arabiyyah al-\u016bl\u0101 (The book of the thousand nights and a night from its earliest Arabic sources) (1984), an English translation of which is available as _The Arabian Nights,_ trans. Husain Haddawy (1990).\n\n2. These issues are explored in Gilbert M. Cuthbertson, _Political Myth and Epic_ (1975); see also Felix Oinas, ed., _Heroic Epic and Saga_ (1978), and Arthur T. Hatto, ed., _Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry_ (1980), among others.\n\n3. See, for example, Susan Slyomovics, _The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Oral Epic Poet in Performance_ (1987); Cathryn Anita Baker, \"The Hilali Saga in the Tunisian South,\" (1978); Edward Lane, _An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians,_ chaps. 21\u201323 (1895); J. R. Patterson, trans., _Stories of Abu Zeid the Hilali in Shuwa Arabic_ (1930); Abderrahman al-Abnoudy, _La geste hilalienne_ (1978).\n\n4. G. Levi Della Vida, \"S\u012bra,\" _El_ 1. 'Abd al-Malik, Ibn Hish\u0101m, _The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ish\u0101q's \"S\u012brat Ras\u016bl All\u0101h_ \" (1955). For an intriguing analysis of parallels between the life story of the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad in relation to the revelation of the Qur'\u0101n, and the life story of an Egyptian epic-singer in relation to the acquisition of the ability to sing epic poetry, see Slyomovics, _Merchant,_ 11\u201313.\n\n5. See Cedric Dover, \"The Black Knight\" (1954); Peter Heath, \"A Critical Review of Modern Scholarship on S\u012brat 'Antar ibn Shadd\u0101d and the Popular S\u012bra\" (1984); Martin Hartmann, \"The Romance of Antar,\" _EI_ 1; B. Heller, \"The Romance of Antar,\" _El_ 2; also idem, _Die Bedeutung des arabischen ' Antarromans J\u00fcr die vergleichende Litteraturkunde_ (1931). For texts in translation see Terrick Hamilton, _Antar: A Bedoueen Romance_ (1819); H. T. Norris, _The Adventures of Antar_ (1980); L. Marcel Devie, _Les aventures d'Antar, fils de Cheddad_ (1878); Gustave Rouger, _Le roman d'Antar_ (1923); Diana Richmond, 'Antar and' Abla, a Bedouin Romance (1978).\n\n6. See Duncan B. MacDonald, \"The Romance of Baibars,\" _EI_ 1; R. Paret, \"S\u012brat Baybars,\" _EI_ 2; Helmut Wangelin, _Das arabische Volksbuch vom K\u00f6nig az-Zahir Baibars_ (1936). For texts in translation, see the ongoing translations of Georges Bohas and Jean-Patrick Guillaume, _Roman de Ba\u00efbars,_ vols. 1\u20135 (1985\u2013).\n\n7. See H. Lammens, \"\u1e24amza,\" _EI_ 1; G. M. Meredith-Owens, \"\u1e24amza b. 'Abd al-Mu\u1e6d\u1e6dalib,\" _EI_ 2; S. van Ronkel, _De rjoman van Amir Hamza_ (1895); C. Virolleaud, \"Le roman de l'\u00e9mir Hamza, oncle de Mahomet\" (1958\u201359); and most importantly, Frances Pritchett, _The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamza_ (1991). _S\u012brat \u1e24amza_ has wandered far and wide across the Middle East and South Asia; its origins probably lie in Iran, but versions are found in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Malay, and Sundanese. In most of these regions the story has acquired layers of local features and provides a fine example of assimilation into extant systems of folk aesthetics.\n\n8. Also known as \"Dh\u016b 'l-Himma,\" \"Dalhamma,\" and \"Delhamma.\" See M. Canard, \"Dh\u016b 'l-Himma or Dh\u0101t al-Himma,\" _EI_ 2; idem, \"Delhemma, \u00e9pop\u00e9e arabe des guerres arabo-byzantines\" (1935); idem, \"Les principaux personnages du roman de chevalrie arabe _Dh\u0101t al-Himma wa-l-Ba\u1e6d\u1e6d\u0101l_ \" (1961); Udo Steinbach, _Dhat al-Himma: Kuturgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu einem arabischen Volksroman_ (1972).\n\n9. See R. Paret, \"Saif b. Dh\u012b Yazan,\" _EI_ 1; idem, _S\u012brat Saif ibn Dh\u012b-Jazan_ (1924).\n\n10. G. Canova, \"Qi\u1e63\u1e63at al-z\u012br s\u0101lim wa-a\u1e63l al-bahlaw\u0101n\" [in Arabie] (in press); A\u1e25mad hams al-D\u012bn al-\u1e24ij\u0101j\u012b, \"al-Z\u012br s\u0101lim bayn al-s\u012bra wa-l-ma\u1e63ra\u1e25\" (1968).\n\n11. Lane, _Manners_ (1895), 386\u2013419. Also H. T. Norris, \"Western Travellers and Arab Storytellers of the Nineteenth Century\" (1991).\n\n12. For a critical introduction to the wide-ranging debates on the nature of _fu\u1e63\u1e25\u0101_ , see Michael Zwettler, _The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry_ , chap. 3 (1978). The issues of literacy and diglossia are dealt with further in Chapter 1.\n\n13. Taq\u012b al-D\u012bn al-Subk\u012b, _Mu '\u012bd al-ni'am_ (1908), 186; as cited in Muhammad Zaghl\u016bl Sal\u0101m, al-Adab f\u012b l-'a\u1e63r al-maml\u016bk\u012b (1971), 121. All translations included in the text are my own unless otherwise noted.\n\n14. Ibn 'Abd Rabbihi, _al- 'Iqd al-far\u012bd_ (1968), 6:9. Cited in Kristina Nelson, _The Art of Reciting the Quran_ (1985), 40. In some sources the term _a khb\u0101r al-samar_ 'narratives from evening entertainments' appears in lieu of _siyar._\n\n15. For social attitudes toward the colloquial and literary languages, see \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 \u1e24usayn, _Mustaqbal al- thaq\u0101fa f\u012b mi\u1e63r_ (1938), translated as _The Future of Culture in Egypt_ , by Sidney Glazer, (1954).\n\n16. J. Schleifer notes that the character Dhiy\u0101b was a historical, though minor, figure. See \"The Saga of the Ban\u016b Hil\u0101l,\" _EI_ 2, 387.\n\n17. See H. R. Idris, \"Hil\u0101l,\" _EI_ 2; 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd Y\u016bnus, al-Hil\u0101liyya f\u012b l-ta'r\u012bkh wa-l-adab al-sha'ab\u012b (1968); J. Berque, \"De nouveau sur les Ben\u012b Hil\u0101l?\" (1972).\n\n18. See, for example, the various tribes cited as descendants of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l in H. A. MacMichael, _A History of the Arabs in the Sudan_ (1922): _F\u016br,_ 1:91ff.; _Bani Hil\u0101l_ and _Bani Sulaym,_ 1:145\u201351; Ruf\u0101'a, 1:239\u201344; _Bakk\u0101ra,_ 1:271\u201376. For the role of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l legends in regional history, see idem, _The Tribes of Northern and Central Kordof\u0101n_ (1912), chap. 2; Appendix 3 in the same volume includes summaries of six tales told of Ab\u016b Zayd the Hil\u0101l\u012b.\n\n19. This demographic dispersion may account for many of the sub-Saharan versions of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l,_ such as those found in Nigeria and published by J. R. Patterson (see below).\n\n20. Ibn Khald\u016bn, _The Muqaddimah_ (1967), 3:412\u201340.\n\n21. The most complete description of these mss. is A. Ayoub's update and correction of the Ahlwardt catalogue, \"A propos des manuscrits de la geste des Ban\u016b Hil\u0101l conserv\u00e9s \u00e0 Berlin\" (1978).\n\n22. See M. Galley, \"Manuscrits et documents relatifs \u00e0 la geste hilalienne dans les biblioth\u00e8ques anglaises\" (1981), and Svetoz\u00e1r Pantucek, _Das Epos \u016bber den Westzug der Ban\u016b Hil\u0101l_ (1970), 10\u201312.\n\n23. Lane, _Manners_ , chaps. 21\u201323 (1895).\n\n24. An excellent summary of many of these references is found in C. Breteau, M. Galley, and A. Roth, \"T\u00e9moinages de la 'longue marche' hilalienne\" (1978). This article restricts itself, however, to North Africa and does not give sources from the Arabian peninsula or the Levant. An evocative description of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performance in Upper Egypt can be found in Richard Critchfield, _Shahhat, an Egyptian_ (1978), 48\u201357; see, however, the extensive criticisms of this work by Timothy Mitchell, \"The Invention and Reinvention of the Egyptian Peasant\" (1990).\n\n25. See Adam Parry, ed., _The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry_ (1971), and Albert B. Lord, _The Singer of Tales_ (1960).\n\n26. 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd \u1e24aww\u0101s, \"Mad\u0101ris riw\u0101yat al-s\u012bra al-hil\u0101liyya f\u012b Mi\u1e63r,\" and Mu\u1e25ammad 'Umr\u0101n, \"al-Kha\u1e63\u0101'i al-m\u016bs\u012bqiyya li-riw\u0101yat al-s\u012bra al-hil\u0101liyya f\u012b Mi\u1e63r,\" in Ayoub, _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ (1990), have identified over a dozen differentiable musical styles used in Egypt in the performance of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l._\n\n27. With increasing numbers of texts now available to researchers, it is growing clearer that one of the main regional differences among local Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l traditions is the comparative weight or focus given to the different characters. Libyan texts are reported to focus on the character of Diy\u0101b, son of Gh\u0101nim (A. Ayoub, personal communication), North African texts highlight al-J\u0101zya and\/or Diy\u0101b, while Egyptian and Jordanian performances most often place Ab\u016b Zayd center stage. Curiously, the Saudi Arabian texts presented by Lerrick, which originate from the region where the _early_ part of the epic is to have taken place, focus almost entirely on the _latter_ part of the story, that is, on those sections that take place in Egypt and North Africa.\n\n28. The Qarmatian rebellion ( _al-qar\u0101mi\u1e6da_ ), a major factor in the historical migration of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe, is never mentioned in the epic tradition. In the versions collected by Susan Slyomovics in southern Egypt from the poet 'Awa\u1e0dall\u0101h, the main motivation for the scouting party and later migration of the tribe is evil behavior by the rulers of Ifr\u012bqiya. The drought is apparently not foregrounded, though it is mentioned. See Slyomovics, _Merchant,_ 52\u201353.\n\n29. An alternate and common variant in Egypt is that the second and third nephews, Ya\u1e25y\u0101 and Mar'\u012b, are thrown in al-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa's prison, whence they are rescued years later during the conquest of T\u016bnis. See Abnoudy, _Geste,_ 25\u201326, for the deaths of the nephews as cited earlier, and see below for an account of the imprisonment variant.\n\nLerrick reports that a similar two-variant oral tradition exists in the Najd region of Saudi Arabia concerning precisely this point in the epic narrative. See Lerrick, \"Taghribat,\" 15.\n\n30. Abderrahman al-Abnoudy ('Abd al-Ra\u1e25m\u0101n al-Abn\u016bd\u012b) prefers to divide the s\u012bra into four parts: (1) the birth and youth of the heroes; (2) the reconnaissance; (3) the westward journey; and (4) the seven kingdoms (i.e., of the divided Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l clans once they have conquered Tunisia). See _Geste,_ 22\u201328. 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd Y\u016bnus has suggested a tripartite division by generation: (1) the generation of the fathers, Rizq, Sar\u1e25\u0101n, and Gh\u0101nim; (2) the generation of the central heroes, Ab\u016b Zayd, Diy\u0101b, and \u1e24asan; and (3) the generation of their sons who fight the final fratricidal battles. See _Dif\u0101 ' 'an al-julkl\u016br_ (1973), 185. The chapbooks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries commonly label the second and third sections \"The Reconnaissance\" and \"The Westward Journey\"; they have, however, a number of different titles for the first and final sections of the s\u012bra. In oral tradition, since the episodes are rarely recited \"in order,\" the divisions play little role; they are, however, referred to by poets of the Nile Delta region as (1) \"The Birth of Ab\u016b Zayd\" (M\u012bl\u0101d ab\u016b z\u0113d), (2) \"The Reconnaissance\" (al-Riy\u0101da), and (3) \"The Journey\" or \"The Westward Journey\" (al-Ri\u1e25la, al-Taghr\u012bba).\n\n# PART ONE\n\n# THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF A POETIC TRADITION\n\n## CHAPTER 1\n\n## The Village\n\nHis father and a group of his friends had a particular liking for storytelling. When they had prayed their afternoon prayers, they would gather round one of their cronies who would recite for them tales of ancient raids and the early conquests, tales of 'Antara and al-Z\u0101hir Baybars, tales of the prophets, the ascetics, and other pious figures, or read to them from books of sermons and from the traditions of the Prophet. . . .\n\nWhen the sun had set, people would head off to supper, but as soon as they had said their evening prayers they would gather once again to chat for part of the evening. Then the poet would arrive and begin to intone tales of the Hil\u0101l\u012b and the Zan\u0101t\u012b tribes, and our friend would sit listening during the early part of the night just as he had at the end of the day.\n\n\u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 \u1e24usayn, _al-Ayy\u0101m_\n\nAl-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh strikes the ears of Cairene Egyptians as an improbable name, quite peculiar, a cause even for smiles and laughter. The name, however, is an ancient one, bearing the traces of centuries of linguistic and demographic change. It is attested in Arabic, in various spellings, as far back as the twelfth century, but it is most probably Coptic or even Pharaonic in origin.1 The inhabitants of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, though, have their own explanation for the name, a simple story, part history, part humorous tale, usually recounted tongue-in-cheek to the few visitors who should happen to find the village in their path: \"There was once a foreigner [ _kh aw\u0101ja_] named T\u016bh who owned all the lands around here. When they came and took away his lands, he wept [ _bak\u0101_ ]. So they called it al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh 'where T\u016bh wept.'\n\nWhen pressed about who came and took the land from T\u016bh, some of the younger men of the village might impetuously burst out, \"In the time of Gam\u00e0l 'Abd al-N\u0101\u1e63ir [Nasser],\" but then quickly realize that the name even in living memory clearly predates the great land reforms of the 1950s. The event is then hurled backward into history, in such street-corner historical discussions, to another point of time of great significance for the Nile Delta peasantry, the time of Mu\u1e25ammad 'Al\u012b, who ruled Egypt in the first half of the nineteenth century and who first essayed to modernize Egypt's agricultural system and establish Egypt's independence from the Ottoman Empire.\n\nMy presence in the village of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh derived from its byname, a local blazon known throughout the province of Kafr al-Shaykh and surrounding areas\u2014al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh: Village of the Poets.2 For the village is home to a community of partially itinerant epic-singers who sing the Arab folk epic _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l._ Before introducing the poets and focusing on their position within this village, I examine the village as a community and prepare a canvas upon which I later sketch individual portraits and histories.\n\n#### The Village\n\n##### _Economic and Commercial Life_\n\nAl-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh is a large village, with well over ten thousand inhabitants. It is so large that \"village\" ( _qarya_ ) might at first seem an inappropriate term.3 The local division of human settlements into categories of hamlet (' _izba_ ), village ( _qarya_ ), town ( _bandar_ ), and city ( _mad\u012bna_ ) has a clear logic, however. Al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh might be large, but in the 1980s it did not possess those key features which distinguish town from village: al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh had only a weekly market, not a daily market; it had no commercial street or centrally located group of shops, but rather a handful of scattered shops which sold candy, tea, sugar, thread, lamp wicks, soda pop, and other sundries; it had no telephone exchange, no bus or train station, no major mosque. In short, other than the Tuesday market (which rotates from village to village on the remaining days of the week) there is little commercial or business activity aimed at a market broader than the immediate population, and thus few reasons for a stranger to come to al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh.4\n\nAl-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh is the main village in a region of several square miles, and the \"mother village\" of eight hamlets, all located at a distance of from one to five kilometers. Al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh is located only a kilometer away from the railway line, and until the 1950s and the construction of paved roads, residents of most of these hamlets had to pass through the village on their way to and from the train stop. Even now that the advent of paved roads, minibuses, and local taxis has diminished the village's role as gateway to the outside world, al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh continues to maintain its dominant position by dint of its larger population and the fact that it is the site of the local elementary and intermediate schools, a small medical clinic, and a government social services office, all of which serve the adjacent settlements as well.\n\nStill a great deal of commercial activity takes place within the confines of the community. The village possesses three small mills which in different seasons grind wheat and corn into flour and also polish rice, although many households still possess a stone handmill for grinding small amounts of grain when the need arises. There are, as well, nearly twenty tailors, an equal number of barbers, several carpentry workshops, three caf\u00e9s, a post office, and a half dozen or so shops which sell appliances ranging from clocks, lamps, and fans to washers and televisions.\n\nAll of these small commercial interests are part-time ventures. Their owners derive only a portion of their income from such trades, and almost all of these services are operated from a room in the family home. Opening hours are irregular, but one can simply call out a greeting from the street and someone in the family will rush to open the \"shop\" or usher the customer directly into the men's sitting room ( _mandara_ ), where business will be conducted. It is typical for a family to derive income from several different sources simultaneously: a landholding which they may farm themselves or hold jointly with other family members under several different types of agreement, or which they may rent out to tenant-farmers in return for a portion of the harvest or a fixed sum; a government salary, for members of the village council, the regional council, local schoolteachers, or one of several different government offices such as the agricultural cooperative; a small business of the type mentioned earlier run part time out of the family home, or a business such as the buying and selling of goods from town in the rotating village markets; certain family members with occupational skills and specialized services, such as Qur'\u0101n reciters who perform at funerals and memorial day ceremonies, or family members who are camel drivers (camels are the major means of transporting harvested crops from the fields into the village). Though the village as a whole is directly dependent on agriculture, only a fraction of the families in the village derive their sole livelihood from the land.\n\nEach of the trades and skills found in the village is rich with traditions and social implications, and though this study deals with only one such craft, that of epic poet, let me offer an additional example here, the village barbers, to demonstrate some of the complexities of a matter as seemingly straightforward as drawing a general socioeconomic portrait of the village.\n\nThere were, in 1986\u201387, between fifteen and twenty barbers in the village, most of whom also had some sort of landholding and\/or additional sources of income. Most barbers do not have a full-fledged shop; there are only two in the village, and at these two locations one may find as many as four barbers working in rotation. Other barbers go to their customers' homes or use a room in their own home as a part-time shop. Traditionally barbers are responsible for providing regular haircuts and shaves for the male population; in addition they often perform circumcisions and prepare the bridegroom on the Night of Henna ( _laylat al-\u1e25inn\u0101_ '), the night before his wedding (see Chap. 2). Payment for regular haircuts and shaves are made by household; all the males of a household, men and boys, are serviced by the same barber throughout the year. The grown men may choose to go to the barber's shop or house, but the barber may also routinely service his customers in their own homes. In return, twice during the year the family pays an agreed upon amount\u2014first of wheat, and then later of corn or rice, in accordance with the seasonal harvests. In the family with whom I lived during my 1986\u201387 fieldwork, the father and the two young sons paid three _k\u012bla_ (one k\u012bla = approximately 15 kilograms = 33 pounds), twice a year. Many village barbers spend one or two days during the week visiting customers out in the hamlets, but they all invariably work in the village on Fridays, when people traditionally desire to look their best for communal prayers.\n\nFor circumcisions, the family barber comes to the house to carry out the operation (a function at which they are being supplanted by employees of the local clinic in many cases), for which he receives payment, in accord with the family's economic and social status, of five to fifteen Egyptian pounds (in 1987, 1 pound = approximately $.50 US). But he is also the recipient of _nuqa\u1e6d_ or _nuq\u016b\u1e6d_ (literally 'drops,' as in drops of water), that is, he receives small payments of 10, 1$, 20, and even 50 piasters (100 piastres = 1 pound) from relatives and other guests, who thereby express their participation in the celebration.\n\nThe financial and ceremonial culmination of the barber's relationship with a family occurs with the marriage of one of the sons whom he has circumcised as well as groomed and shaved over the years. On the Night of Henna, when bride and bridegroom are respectively washed, dressed, and prepared for the ensuing ceremonies, the barber comes to the groom's house to cut his hair and shave him. Close male friends and relatives are also usually present and participate in washing and dressing the groom. The activities surrounding the bride's preparations are held indoors, hidden from male eyes, but once the groom is fully dressed, he is brought outside with much ado to where the public celebrations will take place and seated on an elevated platform. Throughout the evening he clenches two fistfuls of henna which will dye his palms bright orange (brides are decorated in much more elaborate patterns, according to local custom, but usually on both hands and feet). To one side of the groom, also on the raised platform, sits his barber, who receives nuq\u016bt, along with the singer(s) and poet(s), throughout the evening. Depending on the status of the family and the size of the celebration, a barber may earn 20, 50, and even 100 to 200 Egyptian pounds (monthly government salaries range from 45 to 90 pounds) during a wedding.\n\nThough the occupation of barber is surrounded by a rich web of ceremonial and ritual aspects, it is not restricted socially to any specific group of people in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, nor does it seem, at least in modern times, to pass primarily from generation to generation of the same family. The majority of the barbers in the village have chosen the trade as one of several alternatives for supplementing their income. Each of the various livelihoods practiced in the community implies a complex body of social relationships with customers, noncustomers, and rival practitioners. Each of the livelihoods is also marked by a rich set of folk occupational stereotypes expressed in proverbs, jokes, and songs.\n\nThe heart of the village, however, lies in the agricultural lands which surround it, and the pace of life for nearly everyone is dominated by the agricultural activities of the season. Wheat is planted in November\/ December and harvested in May\/June, and for weeks after the harvest, sheaves of wheat transported by camels arrive in the village to be threshed and winnowed. The number of sheaves is so great they seem to inundate the village. Clover is planted beginning in January, cropped forty days later, and then as many as three more times before it is left to go to seed. Along with shepherding the grazing of the household's animals, many young villagers perform the daily chore of cutting clover for fodder. Fava beans, planted in the fall and winter, are harvested in the spring. Cotton is planted by the end of March, though water shortages may delay this until April, and then picked by hand in August. In between planting and picking, however, during the month of June, cotton is once again the focus of village life, especially for the children of the village, for as soon as the school year has ended, they go out into the fields to help fight the cotton worm, the most damaging of the indigenous agricultural pests. Each day for a month they go out to examine the plants leaf by leaf, removing the worms and placing them carefully in a small cloth sack each child wears around his or her neck. Also in June the rice is planted, then harvested in October, and once again the streets and alleys of the village are filled with sheaves waiting to be threshed and winnowed. Corn (maize) is planted throughout the spring and summer according to the availablity of land, but the largest amounts are planted in May\/June and then harvested three months later in late August or early September. Additional vegetables such as onions, eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and various greens are planted in small plots and consumed locally rather than grown as cash crops.\n\nThe great turning point in the modern history of the village was the advent of the government land reforms of the 1950s under the presidency of Gam\u0101l 'Abd al-N\u0101\u1e63ir (Nasser). The royal family's holdings, as well as many of the large landholdings ( _iq\u1e6d\u0101_ ', pl. _iq\u1e6d\u0101 '\u0101t_) of the upper classes, were broken up and redistributed among peasant families. These lands were at first awarded outright or sold to peasant families; later a system of perpetual leasing was established. The lands of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh are currently equally divided between private (800 _fadd\u0101ns_ ) and government-leased lands (800 _fadd\u0101ns_ ) (a _fadd\u0101n_ is slightly larger than an acre). The neighboring village of al-Minshal\u012bn, as a counterexample, had all of its lands redistributed during the early reforms; it encompasses 1,531 fadd\u0101ns of private land and no government-leased lands.\n\n##### _Social Structures_\n\nThe village is divided into large extended families of varying wealth and power. Membership in one of these families is a decisive criterion in one's social status in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. Last names represent a smaller genealogical division, that is, one's last name usually reflects membership in an immediate family of siblings, cousins, and their respective nuclear families. The extended family organization is a much larger unit usually including hundreds of members. The extended family of the ' _umda_ (village mayor or headman) constitutes over one-fourth the population of the village; less than a half dozen other extended families account for another half of the population, while the remaining familes are all significantly smaller in number and social status. Though there is little doubt as to the current prestige and material power of the large families, several of the smaller families maintain a contestatory tradition of prestige through their claims of belonging to one of the \"original\" families of the village, or from houses that were great and powerful at some point in the past. These competing claims focus on the concept of _a\u1e63l_ 'origin' and the derived adjective _asil_ 'original, noble, of good lineage.' As we shall see, local epic-poets easily deploy and manipulate these contestatory views of social power in the village to stir up or rebuke an audience or audience member.\n\n##### _Education and Literacy_\n\nAl-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh's first public school was established in the late 1950s; an intermediate school was added several years later. Egyptian law currently makes elementary and intermediate education compulsory, though enforcement is at times spotty. The Egyptian secondary system offers several different types of postintermediate education, including academic institutions that are preparatory schools for the universities, technical schools, and vocational schools. Depending on the institution, the students from al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh who attend postintermediate schools may travel from ten to eighty kilometers round-trip on a daily basis. Just over forty students from the village were attending university in 1986\u201387.\n\nIn general, literacy rates vary with age groups and gender. Males over forty-five who are literate tend to be from the wealthiest and most powerful families in the village; the illiteracy rate among older men is otherwise quite high. None of the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh are literate. For males under forty-five, the literacy rate climbs dramatically, especially as one moves downward into the thirty-and-under age group. Most males, literate or not, have had some exposure to the _kutt\u0101b_ 'Qu'\u0101nic school', where they memorize passages from the Qur'\u0101n and are given a rudimentary religious education, which may or may not involve an introduction to the alphabet.5 A handful of men in the village have pursued higher studies in religion at urban schools, including al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt's preeminent religious institution, and are, as a result, recognized in the village as authorities on religious subjects.\n\nI have no reliable data on literacy among females, but rates are most certainly significantly lower among women of all ages and probably approach ioo percent in the higher age groups.\n\nLiteracy in the Arab world is not the direct equivalent of literacy in other areas of the world, however, for the diglossic (two-tongued) nature of Arabic culture forces the student who wishes to learn to read and write to learn a new form of the language along with the writing system.6 One restricted domain of discourse in Arab culture is conducted in various forms of the written language, _fu\u1e63\u1e25\u0101_ , referred to in Western scholarly literature variously as classical Arabic, modern standard Arabic, standard written Arabic, and literary Arabic, while all remaining domains of discourse are conducted in various forms of colloquial Arabic, commonly differentiated regionally into dialects (Egyptian colloquial Arabic, Palestinian colloquial Arabic, etc.) and, by scholars and researchers, even further into various sociolects such as educated-Cairene colloquial. (Standard written Arabic and Egyptian colloquial Arabic are henceforth abbreviated as SA and EA respectively.)7\n\nStandard written Arabic, as the literary language of the Arab world, is essentially the language of nearly all written communication as well as of formal speech acts such as religious and political addresses, and television news broadcasts. SA is a second language for all those who use it: there are no native speakers of standard Arabic. The colloquial dialects are the medium of all other types of spoken communication as well as of a limited amount of written communication such as scripts for plays, a small number of published collections of colloquial poetry, and (in Egypt at least) personal correspondance. Every Arab, no matter how educated or how accomplished he or she may be in the use of fu\u1e63\u1e25\u0101, speaks a colloquial dialect as mother tongue.\n\nFor the speaker of any given colloquial dialect, there exists a large body of lexical items in standard written Arabic which are immediately recognizable from cognate colloquial forms. This body of cognate materials is, for nearly all speakers, further enhanced by some basic contact with the literary language, and with classical texts, through religious schooling and ritual, as well as, in recent times, through the mass media. The stylistic and grammatical differences, however, along with the extensive body of vocabulary not cognate with colloquial forms or usages, render much communication in standard written Arabic almost incomprehensible for speakers of colloquial Arabic unschooled in the literary language.\n\n##### _Technological Change_\n\nIn the mid-1970s electricity arrived in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, setting off the most rapid sequence of technological and social changes the village had yet undergone. The traditional configurations of socializing and visiting were transformed by the availability of electric lighting, and the arrival of televisions irrevocably altered earlier patterns of evening pastimes and entertainments. At the time of my fieldwork in 1986\u201387, virtually every extended household in the village possessed a television. Two television channels are received from Cairo, one broadcasting Arabic programs and the other for the most part broadcasting foreign programs with Arabic subtitles. The latter is viewed only by a small audience in the village since few are literate enough to read the rapid subtitling in standard written Arabic. Electricity is available only a few hours each day, however, and the timing of the commencement and termination of electric current can be capricious, so all households continue to possess and maintain traditional forms of lighting such as kerosene lamps and candles.\n\nIn 1979, another current of social transformation began: two young men from al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh traveled to Iraq to labor as guest workers. The next year perhaps two dozen followed, and the year after that over one hundred. In 1987, several hundred young men in the village were working abroad, primarily in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and the first groups had returned to settle again in the village. Their return has physically, economically, and socially reshaped the village. These young men returned with large amounts of capital, capital with no predetermined relationship to the previous distribution of wealth among the powerful versus weaker families of the village.\n\nVirtually every returning worker began establishing his new status in the village by knocking down the family home of locally produced sun-baked brick and rebuilding with commercially baked \"red brick.\"8 The new home includes an apartment or apartments in which the returning son (and perhaps his younger brothers) can wed and raise families. Between my initial fieldwork in 1983 and my return in late 1986, a major portion of the village had been rebuilt in red brick.\n\nThis rebuilding is rapidly reshaping social norms, for the new houses are built on models quite different from the traditional mud-brick homes. Social spaces, the divisions into public and private, male and female, the relationship between head-of-household fathers and their sons who now control the largest quantity of economic resources within the family, are all in the process of redefinition.9\n\n##### _Religious Life_\n\nReligious life in the village takes place along a rich spectrum of competing interpretations and orientations. One end of this spectrum is occupied by the five Sufi mystical brotherhoods which are active in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. At the other end is found a small, but visible, group of educated young men who embrace the new reinterpretations of Islam which are so poorly termed in the Western media \"fundamentalism,\" a term for which there exists no single Arabic word or direct equivalent.10 Somewhere between the two, a majoritarian\/urban model derived from central institutions such as the al-Azhar Islamic University also exists in various forms. Though these different currents can be identified and perhaps even labeled (\"folk-Sufi,\" \"mainstream-urban,\" \"politico-revisionist\"), they exist separately for only a small percentage of the population. For most of the inhabitants of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, aspects of one trend interact freely with aspects of another, and there is little attempt to delineate or define. I return to the religious background(s) of the village when I address the question of audiences and the social significance of the epic, for _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is marked in several ways in terms of religious and social alliances.\n\n##### _The Context of Verbal Art_\n\nOne further aspect of the general culture of the village is worthy of note here, for it is one not immediately apparent to outsiders. Oral communication in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh takes place in an environment that recognizes and praises skilled use of verbal art, and that is densely populated by references and allusions to exterior \"texts.\" The citation of classical Arabic texts is among the most commonly deployed public signals indicating education and its accompanying status. Conversation and discussions are punctuated by allusions to or actual citations of Qur'\u0101nic verses, sayings of the Prophet Muhammad ( _\u1e25ad\u012b th_), habits and actions of the Prophet ( _sunna_ ), and sometimes classical poetry, as well as colloquial proverbs, song lyrics, and poetry. This practice of alluding to outside \"texts\" is equally true among literate and illiterate social strata, the main difference lying in the deployment of memorized classical Arabic poetry and a more rigorous concern for authenticity in citations (particularly in reference to religious sources) among the literate, and a more extensive use of colloquial proverbs and song lyrics among more traditional groups. In short, oral communication takes place here in a highly \"inter-textual\" environment.\n\nMy research focused on performances of the _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ epic and those genres of poetry, song, and narrative commonly performed in conjunction with the epic. Though I noted as often as possible the communicative life of other forms of verbal art, I was usually prevented from recording these directly. The study of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ opens onto but one of many realms of verbal art in the village.\n\nThe attention and care paid to the aesthetic forms of daily interaction become most obvious to an outsider in the patterns of greetings and salutations. Throughout the Arab world there exist eloquent and elegant greetings for a multitude of occasions. \"Morning of Goodness,\" \"Morning of Light,\" \"Morning of Jasmine,\" \"Morning of Roses,\" and so on are sequences learned by all foreign students of Arabic at some point in their studies.11 But the application of such greetings to living situations is governed by a set of rules nearly as elegant as the greetings themselves. For example, in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh I was often instructed concerning the rules of who should initiate a greeting sequence: He who is riding greets him who is walking; he who is walking greets him who is sitting; he who enters greets those already present; a smaller group greets a larger group; a stranger greets the \"son of the village\" (i.e., local inhabitant).\n\nThe rationale is simple: one initiates greetings with \"Peace be upon you\" (al-sal\u0101mu 'alaykum), to which the response should be, \"And upon you be peace\u2014welcome!\" (wa-'alaykum al-sal\u0101m, tafa\u1e0d\u1e0dal). \"Welcome\" here indicates an invitation to eat, drink, sit, or rest, in which the speaker essentially assumes the role of host. The stranger must greet first so that he may be transformed into a guest, and each of the listed priorities exist so that whoever is more likely to be near home, or have resources for hospitality most readily available, must be given the opportunity both to respond to the initial greeting and offer hospitality. This behavior is seen to conform to the Qur'\u0101nic injunction to return a greeting with its like or with a better one; the offer of hospitality fulfills this latter function.12 The rider, the walker, the entering person, the small group, and the stranger are all presumed to be at a disadvantage in offering hospitality.\n\nFinally, the most obvious yet perhaps most significant factor conditioning my personal impressions and experiences in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh is that I lived in a world that was almost entirely male. Though I knew the women and girls of a handful of households where I was a frequent guest, I moved in only one-half of the society of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. Furthermore, the specific focus of this research, epic singing in private evening gatherings, occurs in an entirely male world. As a result, all that I presume to report and record here reflects primarily male, and to a great extent public, social patterns and interpretations.\n\n#### Fieldwork\n\nI first visited the village of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh in 1983 during my second year-long period of study in Egypt. Under the tutelage of several of Egypt's finest folklore researchers, 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd \u1e24aww\u0101s, Mu\u1e25ammad 'Umr\u0101n, and 'Abd al-Ra\u1e25m\u0101n al-Abn\u016bd\u012b, I had begun to survey the Nile Delta region, concentrating on locating singers and _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ poets. The methodology (if it may be called such) was primitive. I simply took buses and local taxis from village to village. At each stop I would locate, then sit in, the local caf\u00e9 until I had struck up a conversation, which usually occurred with startling rapidity and great ease since my height (6'5\") and my accent immediately made me an object of curiosity. The \"folk arts\" ( _al-fun\u016bn al- ha'biyya_) have become, through the intervention of the mass media and various government programs, a recognized entity even outside of urban centers and constitute an easily comprehensible object of study. I had no difficulty ascertaining what types of singers were available where, who were the most popular performers at local weddings, and a broad spectrum of general information about commercial \"folk\" stars and other topics. At the same time, I interviewed cassette-tape store owners about their inventories and what types of music were most popular; often these shop owners were extremely helpful in locating local performers.\n\nAs I began working in the area contiguous to the province of Kafr al-Shaykh, I began to hear repeated references to al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh\u2014Village of the Poets. At one point I simply cut short other work to travel directly to al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. My first visit was quite simple and matter-of-fact: I experienced no anthropological angst of arrival for I had been in dozens of villages similar in nearly every way to al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, and I had as yet little idea that I would later come to spend many months there. I simply asked someone whether there were indeed epic poets living in the village; he responded affirmatively and offered to guide me to the home of whichever poet I desired. We chatted briefly about which poets were good; I was soon ushered into someone's home for tea and a poet was sent for. Within a few minutes I had met Shaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b and over a second cup of tea had arranged to record a half-hour sample from the epic. After nightfall I left to return to the nearby city of Dis\u016bq, where I was staying in a hotel, having determined that there were a dozen or more poets in the village: al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh was indeed the village of the poets. On my second visit I met Sa'\u012bd 'Abd al-Q\u0101dir \u1e24aydar and his family, who lodged me and ever after took on the role of my patrons and protectors in the village. Without their continued support and friendship, none of my later research could have taken place.\n\nI traveled many times from Cairo to al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh in that spring of 1983 and quickly met most of the other poets in the village. I taped brief samples of their singing and conducted very basic interviews about their repertories\u2014how they had learned to sing the epic and other such topics. My formal academic background, up to this point, had been restricted to Arabic language and literature studies, and these haphazard attempts represented my first folkloristic fieldwork. I had been informally introduced to folklore research and fieldwork methodologies by a group of friends and colleagues in the United States\u2014'Abd al-Ra\u1e25m\u0101n Ayy\u016bb, Susan Slyomovics, and Bridget Connelly\u2014and was also being guided by the Egyptian folklorists mentioned earlier.\n\nIt soon became apparent that the village of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh was a rich and fascinating fieldwork site. The community of epic poets there turned out to be the largest single community of epic poets in Egypt, and no one had previously conducted research there. More important from my point of view was the fact that none of these poets had been swept up in the studio production of commercial cassette tapes of the epic, which was occurring in nearby towns. In addition to the community of epic poets, al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh proved to possess a rich heritage of folk arts and traditions rapidly disappearing in many other areas. In 1983, before even commencing my graduate studies, I resolved to do my doctoral fieldwork in this village. Though I explained this decision to friends in the village, I doubt anyone gave credence to a young American's flight of fantasy.\n\nI did return to live in the village for ten months in 1986\u201387 and returned again in 1988 for a brief visit. During the intervening three years I had studied toward a doctoral degree in folklore and folklife at the University of Pennsylvania and had encountered a completely new set of issues and concerns. I returned to ask very different questions and to pursue very different goals than I had during my first visits.\n\nI was welcomed with the extreme generosity and open hospitality for which the Egyptian countryside is rightly famous, but arranging a living (and livable) situation for an extended period of time did not prove easy. There is no extra or vacant housing available in an Egyptian village; residency patterns and population pressures have in most areas rendered housing quite scarce and problematic. New housing is built only when needed\u2014at the marriage of a son, for example. With the help of my \"patron family,\" however, a solution was finally arranged. \"Solution\" is surely the term, for I was indeed a \"problem.\" As a young and unmarried man, I could only be housed in a situation that provided the proper distance between myself and any unmarried girls. Also, though one could probably have rented a whole house if one paid a high enough price, owing to restrictions in grant monies and by choice I lived in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh on a monthly budget of \u00a3100 Egyptian (which equals $50 US, or double a typical monthly government salary), not including the money I paid to poets at those performances for which I was primary patron.\n\nA place was found for me in the home of Ahmad Bakh\u0101t\u012b, whose family acted not only as my landlords but as my closest contacts after my patron family, that of Sa'\u012bd 'Abd al-Q\u0101dir \u1e24aydar. I lived in what would otherwise have been the Bakh\u0101t\u012b mandara, or men's sitting room, to which function it reverted upon the arrival of any guests, and ate all of my meals with the family throughout my stay. Previous to my arrival, they had rented the room for a year to a schoolteacher who had taught at the local elementary school before being transferred, so the family had had some experience dealing with an outsider. Also, since A\u1e25mad Bakh\u0101t\u012b is a policeman in the provincial capital of Kafr al-Shaykh, it was hoped his position would alleviate some of the suspicions that would inevitably follow upon my arrival in the village.\n\nAs a guest in the village, as a foreigner, and perhaps particularly as an American, I was the beneficiary of rich and enthusiastic hospitality. I was showered with invitations to eat with different households, and I was included in the activities of many different male social groups, ranging from evening gatherings of village elders to the spontaneous escapades of the younger men. It is extremely important, however, to balance this portrait of village hospitality and the access I was permitted to village life with the undercurrent of unease that also accompanied my presence.\n\nI never encountered difficulties with people who actually knew me and with whom I socialized regularly. For many people in the area, however, I was merely a figure who passed by, often carrying notebook or camera, about whom they heard anecdotes and rumors many times removed from their source. The suspicions that accompanied my presence and my work did not surprise me. In fact, the tightness of social alliances and the bitterness of rivalries in the village were so strong, the monitoring of people's whereabouts, purchases, and diet so intense, that I could hardly feel I was being accorded special treatment.\n\nEach time I left the three-room house where I lived with the Bakh\u0101t\u012b family, the mother of the household would invariably check to make sure that anything I was carrying was well concealed and out of sight. On one occasion when I had purchased material at the weekly market for a new _galabiyya_ (the nightshirt-like apparel worn by men) and was on my way to the tailor's, she seized the clear plastic bag in which I was carrying the cloth, took out the cloth, wrapped it in newspaper, and returned it to the bag. She chided me for giving people something to talk about. I protested that everyone already knew I had bought cloth at the market (at least a half dozen people had offered opinions as to color and quality), and in a few days everyone would see the new galabiyya. No change\u2014avoid the evil eye and don't give people a chance to talk; wrap it up!\n\nAnother example: one late afternoon I was sitting with friends on their _ma\u1e63\u1e6daba_ , the brick bench attached to the front of the house where much of the neighborhood's socializing takes place. As usual, our conversation was sometimes quiet, held just between the three of us, and sometimes loud, including small groups on similar mastabas in both directions down the alley. A man passed us, greeted us, then turned down a small alleyway. Conversation stopped. Everyone in the alley was perturbed and people began to whisper: \"Allah! Allah! what is this?\" Finally the commotion grew to a high pitch and a man opposite us stood up, walked to the corner and took a long look down the alleyway. He returned and announced to the whole alley, \"He's borrowing a sickle from so-and-so.\" Everyone relaxed and conversations began to flow again. The problem? This man had no known reason for being down that alleyway: he had no relatives there, and there were no shops, no tailor, no other plausible reason for his presence. In the late afternoon, most men are still out in their fields, so the presence of a man wandering about the village was a source of consternation. Once his purpose was made public, the vigilant eyes of the neighborhood could relax.\n\nFor the first few months of my stay, every few weeks was marked by some encounter that seemed to belie the hospitality and friendliness I encountered face to face. The first month it was the issue of maps: So as not to get lost on my late afternoon walks through the fields and neighboring villages, I had drawn in my notebook a map of the major paths that link the dozen nearest settlements to al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. Once while I was out, a guest started rifling through my notes and translations and found the map (written in Arabic). By the time I had returned from my walk the village was awash in rumors about the \"American spy.\"13 In the second month I began taking pictures, usually at the behest of the people I was photographing. Someone, however, thought I was photographing too much, for the news soon reached the district police station, where I was invited to make an appearance. A few weeks later a Muslim-Christian riot broke out in the town next to us, and the village felt a resurgence of tension about my presence. A month later, while I was walking through the village, a man pulled me into his doorway and whispered to me, \"I want you to know that I don't believe the things they are saying about you. If you need help, you can come to me.\" I was shaken by the encounter, and it took several days of discreet questioning to find out what the problem was. This time word was being spread that I had come to convert the young men of the village to Christianity, to lure them away from Islam.\n\nEach of these incidents, and a dozen or so smaller ones, were handled the same way. My friends in the village (and I, on their instructions) would loudly and at every opportunity, such as in the caf\u00e9s, at evening gatherings, and in private conversations, explain what I was doing and why. It was a constant public relations campaign.\n\nSuddenly, after five months, the difficulties ceased. At the time I assumed the village had finally grown used to my presence, that some critical threshold had been reached; I was after all really interested in poetry and folk music. In the late summer I contracted hepatitis and had to move to Cairo for several weeks while I recuperated. Delegations arrived from the village every few days to check on my health and to bring news. When I returned to the village there was no trace of tension. People told me again and again how sorry they were that I had taken ill while in their village.\n\nAfter my year of research, when my final departure drew close, I again moved to Cairo for a couple weeks. During the last visit I received from friends from al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, we stayed up nearly till dawn talking and reminiscing. Before we fell asleep my closest friend and staunchest defender in the village asked if I knew a certain man. I recognized the family name and said so, but did not know the man in question. Everyone laughed and asked me, \"Are you sure?\" They then described him to me and mentioned that he was one of the village guards. I could just barely conjure up the man's face. They laughed some more and finally explained.\n\nMonths earlier, someone had seen me coming home late at night from some gathering or another and apparently coming out of an alley-way where they could not imagine my having any legitimate business. They reported it to the village \"mayor\" (' _umda_ ) with the result that this man from the village guard had been assigned to follow me around the village for the ensuing months. When I went into a house, he would sit at a nearby caf\u00e9; when I left, he would follow. Just at the point when I had imagined my relations with the village to be relaxing and everyone's suspicions to have been allayed, I had in fact been placed under fulltime surveillance. My friends were tickled that even after months I had not noticed. I, however, felt as if someone had kicked a chair out from under me. My feelings of having crossed immense cultural distances and achieved some personal understanding were being put in question. That sense of ambiguity was to linger for a long time.\n\nI was lucky enough to have another opportunity to visit al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh a year later in 1988. There were no small incidents this time to mar what was, on the surface at least, essentially a reunion of friends. Letters and photographs that I had sent, articles and photos of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh that had been published as a result of my work, had strengthened the friendships that had begun the previous year. All this bolstered the romantic interpretation of fieldwork as human contact and the search for understanding. Recollection of that one moment of discovery, however, always throws into doubt all I think I understood and all I encountered. It is, I believe, a productive state of doubt.\n\n##### _Remuneration_\n\nAt the outset of my 1986\u201487 stay in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, I was forced to make a number of decisions that had significant ramifications for my subsequent research. These decisions included how I was to remunerate poets for performances, interviews, and later, lessons; how I would begin to record the sira, what types of performances I would accept as \"authentic\"; and how I would then transcribe and translate the texts I recorded. Each of these issues required compromises between ideal methodologies and the realities presented to me in the field.\n\nSince there were fourteen poets in the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh community when I began my work, all of whom were accorded different status by audiences and the poets themselves, I avoided a potential quagmire of negotiations and rivalries by seeking agreement from the poets upon a single rate of payment for all. Eventually we arrived at the figure of \u00a32.50 Egyptian (approx. $1.25 US) per hour of recording. I, along with the poets, at first did not disclose to other villagers the amount the poets were being paid for their work with me. However, rumors began to circulate quickly in the village that they were receiving as much as \u00a310 an hour (approx. $5.00 US), and the voices criticizing the poets for exploiting me grew so vehement that the poets were forced to request that I announce publicly in a number of different contexts the fees they were receiving. Still, a few of the villagers found even \u00a32.50 to be extravagant and warned that the poets would pad their singing with \"empty talk\" to earn more money. I, on the other hand, stressed that the poets were being paid this sum not only for actual performance time but for all the hours they spent with me in interviews, answering my endless questions and discussing points of transcription and translation. The poets did indeed offer hundreds of hours of their time toward \"the thesis\" ( _al-ris\u0101la_ ), for which they refused remuneration. Eventually the majority of the villagers declared the deal a fair one.\n\nClearly a single rate of payment carried the danger of encouraging lengthy performances. Several factors negated much of this influence, however. First, I paid this fee only for recording which was conducted specifically for my research at evening gatherings which I hosted, and of which I was thus the primary patron. In all other contexts I paid poets only as other audience members did, that is, in small gifts of ten or twenty piastres and in cigarettes offered during breaks in the performance. This meant I had a body of comparative material with which to judge those performances I had personally solicited. Also, all solicited recordings (outside of my lessons) were conducted with audiences just as in other evening gatherings, or _sahras_ , which provided a further obstacle (the audience's patience) to unnatural lengthening of the texts. Finally, the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh with whom I worked closely were all concerned that the performances I take back to America be good ones. I was instructed several times by poets that I should not use a particular section because it had not been sung well, and received offers to record a second time passages with which the poet was not satisfied. (Needless to say, these unsatisfactory segments often proved far more informative for my research purposes than the \"good\" performances.)\n\n##### _Recording Conditions_\n\nI chose to record under two different sets of circumstances. First, particularly during the early part of my fieldwork, I solicited and recorded performances held in the Bakh\u0101t\u012b home where I lived. Here I could request specific portions of the epic, and although an audience was always present, it was understood that I might ask to have a section sung over again or otherwise alter the course of the performance (though in fact I rarely did so). Second, I recorded in a variety of other contexts where performances were being held independent of my presence in the village. I also attended performances that I did not record, in an effort to judge the effect of the tape recorder. I concluded that although performances I solicited were in a number of ways different from \"natural\" performances, I could detect no major differences between the natural performances I recorded and those I did not. Quite simply, the poet was concerned with the response of his patron and audience in these situations, and had little time to worry about the presence of the tape recorder.\n\nThe most important step I took in soliciting performances was to request, at the outset of my fieldwork, a complete performance of the epic in sequential order from Shaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b. Though he had never before done so, Shaykh Biyal\u012b readily agreed to make the attempt, which resulted in a thirty-two-hour version of the epic recorded over eleven nights. During my stay, however, we discovered a number of sections which were part of his repertory but had not been included in this first chain of performances. The missing sections brought the total to about thirty-seven hours.14 When I compared this complete performance to his performances in other contexts, I realized I had received a clear, but starkly unembellished version. The episodes I listened to in other contexts were on the average a third longer than my recordings. Far from having lengthened the stories, Shaykh Biyal\u012b, under the constraint of singing the stories \"from beginning to end,\" had truncated them. After this first recording of Shaykh Biyalfs beginning-to-end version, I recorded other poets, only occasionally requesting specific episodes.\n\n##### _Apprenticeship as Methodology_\n\nThe recording of performances and variants, and the interviewing of performers and audience members are all standard folkloristic research methods, to the extent that we can speak of a standard methodology in our field. I chose al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh as a research site, however, in hopes of combining standard research procedures with a technique that is common in ethnomusicology, and to some extent in anthropology, but which appears only infrequently in folkloristic fieldwork: I hoped to apprentice myself to a master poet to acquire a more detailed understanding of the poets' conceptualizations of their craft, the process of tranmis-sion, and the process of composition in performance. This is not a case of the researcher utilizing himself or herself as informant, but rather of placing himself or herself in a recognized social relationship for the transmission of knowledge about a craft or skill. As we all know from personal experience, to explain a process to an outsider is a very different thing from showing the outsider how to actually do that process. Teaching allows a performer or artist to remain within the medium and the tradition he or she knows. It also provides a laboratory for experimentation, purposeful or inadvertant, on the part of the field researcher.15\n\nI was concerned that the selection of a master poet and the initiation of a student relationship would prove difficult and, furthermore, might limit my access thereafter to other poets and performances. The process began, however, with little effort on my part.\n\nWhen I had been in the village about three months, at the end of an evening performance, everyone went home except for two poets, Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b and Shaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd, and 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd's son, Ragab. These conversations, late at night, when I was the only nonpoet present, were some of the most rewarding moments of my fieldwork. I kept the tea and cigarettes flowing and was regaled in turn with tales of great poets and performances of the past. Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b, however, always made a great deal of the fact that he never drank tea, only coffee. So I brought out the kerosene stove, and he instructed Rajab and me in the fine art of coffee-making.\n\nWhile Ragab and I struggled to get the coffee just right, a conversation began between the two elder poets about what type of wood one should use in the making of a rab\u0101b\u2014ebony or ash. They then moved on to whether or not it was good to have mother-of-pearl inlay on the instrument. They then spoke of rab\u00e0bs that had been played by famous poets of the past. I was rapidly drifting out of the conversation, for it was three o'clock in the morning, but a new tack in the conversation brought me back to a full state of wakefulness. Rajab turned and said to me: \"You know, when you get back to America you could perform this poetry on the lute [' _\u016bd_ ].\" (The fact that I could play Arab lute was always a thing of great interest, for it is an urban instrument and nobody in the village played or owned one.)\n\nI responded, \"But what I'd really like to do is learn to sing it on the rab\u0101b.\"\n\nFor a moment they just stared at me. Then Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u00e0b chuckled, \"I'll get you a rab\u0101b and put you to work here beside me\" [an\u0101 hah\u016bf lak rab\u0101b wi-ahaghghalak hin\u0101 jamb\u012b].\n\n\"By God I'd love to!\" [wall\u0101hi y\u0101r\u0113t!] I replied.\n\nThen Ragab chimed in, \"Why didn't you tell us you wanted to do this. We'll get you a rab\u0101b and you can go sit with Uncle 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b an hour every day and he'll show you how to place your fingers.\"\n\nIt would be nice, I suppose, to be able to say one had had deep and theoretically earth-shattering statements flash through one's mind at the key turning points in one's fieldwork. Instead I could only think of Mickey Rooney turning to Judy Garland, saying, \"I've got an idea. Let's put on a show! We'll use old MacGregor's bam for a stage and . . . and ...\"\n\nIn two minutes my apprenticeship had been secured, though we talked on excitedly about it for another half hour before everyone went home to bed. What I had feared would be the most difficult transition of my fieldwork had taken place with no effort or planning on my part. Not only was my apprenticeship launched with full approval of the poets' community, but there was never any question of my loyalty to my poet-teacher, even though I recorded and worked with many other poets.\n\n##### _Language_\n\nPerhaps the most difficult aspect of fieldwork for a researcher to assess, yet one of the most crucial, is his or her own linguistic competency. And one of the most rarely discussed aspects offolkloristic and anthropological fieldwork, at least when it reaches published (i.e., public) form, is the process by which primary textual data move from collection to transcription, to translation, and finally to publication, and what role the \"author\" does or does not play in that process.\n\nMy training in Arabic language and literature as an undergraduate at UCLA had been supplemented by two year-long periods of study in Egypt before I undertook the fieldwork that constitutes the core of this work. As a result, my comprehension of and ability to communicate in the Cairene dialect of Egyptian colloquial Arabic was fairly fluent by the time I arrived in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh in 1986 for an extended stay. The local rural dialect posed a number of problems, however; some were rooted in actual dialectal differences, some in my lack of knowledge about the material realia of daily life in rural areas, and some in my general lack of social and personal knowledge about this particular community.\n\nThe dialectal differences proved minimal and, after I had become accustomed to some of the basic sound changes, posed few problems. Friends in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh quickly seized on the project of teaching me the vocabulary of everyday life, and of teaching me to speak less _fa\u1e63\u012b\u1e25_ 'classically'. Time and again I was asked to recite strings of new words I had been taught, such as the parts of the waterwheel and its fittings ( _s\u0101qiya: mad\u0101r, n\u0101f, hudya, \u1e6d\u0101ra, tirs, ghum\u0101, bakhnaqa, qunn\u0101fa_), or types of water vessels ( _qulla, ball\u0101\u1e63, z\u012br, saf\u012b\u1e25a_ ), or types of bread ( _bakk\u014dna, mira\u1e25ra\u1e25, qarq\u016b ha, h\u0101m\u012b_, etc.); in this way I was rapidly equipped to deal with most topics of daily conversation.\n\nLingering problems in spoken communication comprehension had much more to do with local knowledge of history, genealogies, and social relations, which often eluded me. The simplest example is found in the practice, in conversation, of referring to men by their given names, or as \"father of X\" with reference to their son's name, by one or more nicknames, or as \"son of X\" with reference to their father's name. An even more confusing variation is found in the practice of referring to a man as \"father of X,\" where X is his father's name, not his son's.16 At times the significance of entire narratives, where I easily understood the sequence of events, completely escaped me because I did not know that Mu\u1e25ammad, Ab\u016b 'Al\u012b 'Father of 'Al\u012b', and al-Gamal 'the Camel' were all the same person. Most problems at this level of comprehension could, however, be rectified in later discussions with friends\n\nMore disconcerting were my long-term problems in understanding female speech. Women and girls regularly utilize demonstrably different sentence contours than males do, as well as using certain differences in pronunciation and choices in vocabulary. A single, easily identified example is their dropping of word-final consonants, accompanied by lengthening of the preceding vowel in certain environments. Since one type of utterance I most frequently overheard was that of adults calling their children, differentiating male versus female vocatives proved to be a simple, verifiable example: female _y\u0101 mu\u1e25amm\u0101_ versus male _y\u0101 mu\u1e25ammad._ The pattern of dropping word-final consonants carries across a number of different environments and for me at least, particularly in rapid conversation, required a period of adjustment. Obviously my difficulties learning to understand female speech arose directly from the limited opportunities to actively carry on conversations that involved female speakers. A female researcher would not have encountered this problem to the same degree or at least not for any significant period of time.\n\nIn addition, the language of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performances constitutes a subdialect of its own, distinct from both standard Arabic and colloquial Arabic at nearly at levels. It possesses a distinctive lexicon, which includes a rich terminology for weapons, armor, types of horses and camels, a vocabulary concerning the practice of geomancy (a method of reading the future involving lines drawn on the ground or the reading of the position of tossed bones, shells, or other items), and a plethora of terms for desert landscape features and other topics rarely brought up in daily communication. At the phonological level, phonemes that have differing pronunciations in colloquial Arabic and standard Arabic (such as SA _\/th\/_ versus EA \/ _s_ \/, and SA _\/dh\/_ versus EA \/z\/) as well as phonemes that have differing colloquial dialect pronunciations in the region (such as SA _\/q\/_ versus EA \/'\/ or _\/g\/_ , and SA _\/j\/_ versus EA _\/j\/_ or _\/g\/_ ) often alternate between the various possible pronunciations during performances. Such alternation is at times deployed to heighten poetic or comic characteriza-tional impulses by the poets (such as occurs in the portrayal of foreign versus Arab characters, slaves versus nobles, female characters, religious figures, etc.)17 and at times appears to play only a clarifactory role (as when a line is repeated in performance rendered in a different dialect pronunciation). The language of the s\u012bra even possesses a few syntactic features of its own, such as the negation of the simple past tense with _lam_ when governed by _y\u0101r\u0113t_ or _y\u0101 layta_. (See, for example, _y\u0101r\u0113tuh lam \u1e0darab,_ for, \"If only he had not struck!\" where the particle _lam_ does not exist in spoken colloquial Egyptian Arabic at all, and yet in standard Arabic cannot be used to negate a past tense such as _\u1e0darab_.)\n\nAlthough these features have usually been addressed by Western and Arab scholars alike as failed attempts on the part of poets to \"classicize\" their poetry (a linguistic incarnation of the \"gesunkenes Kulturgut\" argument), a much sounder approach would be to recognize this hybridization as a natural register of colloquial Arabic, which might be termed \"artistic\" or \"elevated\" colloquial, and to study its features and functions within Arab society. This \"artistic colloquial\" might also be approached, given its intriguing blend of dialectal and classical features, as a true poetic koin\u00e9 similar to the language of the Homeric poems.\n\n##### _Transcription and Translation_\n\nI was fortunate during my 1986\u201387 fieldwork to be both befriended and assisted by two enthusiastic and highly competent \"sons of the village,\" without whom my work would have been far more difficult. Shaykh 'Abd al-Q\u0101dir \u1e62ub\u1e25 and Ust\u0101dh \u1e24amd\u012b Jalama undertook the task of writing out preliminary, longhand transcriptions of over one hundred and fifty hours of _Sirat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performance. Both men are college-educated; they not only assisted with the work of transcription but they also proved to be interested and interesting discussants for my on-going work and ideas.\n\nMuch ado is often made of the difficulty of writing colloquial Arabic in Arabic script, for in many cases the script cannot portray the sounds of the colloquial without so altering the standard form as to make the words nearly unrecognizable. And yet, based on only a handful of examples supplied by myself and the reading of a few collections of colloquial poetry I brought with me to the village, these two young men immediately commenced writing out complete colloquial transcriptions from audio recordings\u2014a fact that should give us pause when assessing the supposed difficulties of learning to write colloquial Arabic. In addition, I transcribed approximately one-fifth of the materials independently, but soon found it easier to revise, where necessary, the transcriptions 'Abd al-Q\u0101dir \u1e62ub\u1e25 and \u1e24amd\u012b Jalama produced. The final result was that at the time of my departure from al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, all of my field recordings had been transcribed once, and a good portion of them had been independently transcribed a second time.\n\nThe work of translation was, at one and the same time, a more solitary and a more communal pursuit. It was a communal venture at heart, I think, and by this I refer to the thousands of questions I directed to poets, friends, and members of my host families concerning the meaning of specific words and phrases. By the end of my fieldwork, however, I had rough translations for only one-tenth of the performances I had recorded. A portion of these were later reviewed by researchers and friends in Cairo. Still the responsibility for poor, clumsy, and even incorrect translations rests firmly with me. The fragments of the _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ epic which appear in this work have passed through the helping hands and minds of many people. Though great care has been exerted to reproduce them meticulously and accurately, I hope they will be experienced in their new and highly constraining written form as artistic and carefully crafted voices.\n\n* * *\n\n1. The Arabic form al-Baqat\u016bh is found in the _Qaw\u0101n\u012bn al-daw\u0101w\u012bn_ of Ibn al-Mam\u0101t\u012b (d. 606 A.H.\/1209 C.E.) and in _Tuhfat al-irsh\u0101d min a 'm\u0101l al-gharbiyya_, anonymous ms. in the Al-Azhar Library, No. 6539 Ab\u0101za; the form al-Bakat\u016bh appears in _al-Tuhfa al-sanniyya_ by Ibn al-J\u012b'\u0101n (d. 885 A.H.). The lengthened second vowel is a relatively new spelling. If the name is Coptic in origin it may be derived from a combination of _ba_ (def. article) _ke_ (other, another), _tosh_ (border, limit, nome, frontier, province), in which case, \"the village at the other [side of?] the boundary.\" The Pharaonic possibilities are vaguer, but might include a connection to K D H the Levantine goddess, in which case, \"the village of Kadesh,\" or more remotely, \"the holy village.\" Cf. J. Cerny, _Coptic Etymological Dictionary_ (1976) for Coptic, and Adolph Erman and Hermann Grapow, _W\u00f6rterbuch der Aegyptischen Sprache_ (1926\u201363) for Pharaonic. My thanks to Ann Roth and Ren\u00e9e Friedman for assistance on the Coptic and Ancient Egyptian constructions.\n\n2. al-Bak\u0101t\u016bh balad al-h'ar\u0101'.\n\n3. _Balad,_ as in the sobriquet _balad al- h'ara,_ can refer to one's home village, town, or even country, while _qarya_ refers to a specific size and type of settlement.\n\nArriving at even an approximate figure for the population of the village and the surrounding hamlets is a precarious undertaking. Residents offered me figures varying from 10,000 for the village itself and 15,000 for the village with tributary hamlets, to 18,000 for the village and 28,000 for the greater community. Even the few \"hard and fast\" statistics to be found are open to divergent interpretations. There were, for example, just over 850 electricity accounts in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh in 1986; however, in many cases one account may represent several households where families have run lines to the homes of relatives or married children rather than opening a new account. An electricity account might thus represent a household of eight, or an extended family of more than thirty living in several adjoining homes.\n\n4. Although still referred to by residents as a village, al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh began to acquire some of the trappings of a town ( _bandar_ ) by the early 1990s. Telephone lines had reached the village, and a handful of shops near the center of the village began to emerge as a commercial center.\n\n5. For a romanticized but detailed description, see Mu\u1e25ammad 'Abd al-Jaww\u0101d, _F\u012b kutt\u0101b al-qarya_ (In the village school) (1939).\n\n6. The term \"diglossia\" was originally coined in French ( _la diglossie_ ) by William Mar\u00e7ais to describe the language situation in Arab North Africa, in a series of three articles which appeared in _L'Enseignement Public_ (1930\u201331). Charles Ferguson later adopted the term to describe language situations in the Arab world, modern Greece, Haiti, and German-speaking Switzerland, in a seminal article, \"Diglossia\" (1959). The term has generated an entire literature of criticism as well as two-level, three-level, five-level, and even eight-level models for describing the interaction of the many forms of written\/oral, formal\/informal, and standard\/regional varieties of Arabic.\n\nAlthough the original concept of diglossia was certainly a step forward in understanding the sociolinguistic diversity of the Arab world, the subsequent focus on distinct codes, such as written and spoken, has recently come under a great deal of critical scrutiny and at this point may serve more to obfuscate than to clarify the complexity of language use in Arabic-speaking communities.\n\n7. A valid case can be made that in some areas of the Arab world, the colloquial dialects have achieved some currency as written languages (particularly in Egypt and Lebanon), and that standard written Arabic is not, in fact, particularly standardized across time or geographical distribution, nor does it exist only as a written code (though it clearly derives its existence and perpetuation through use of the written code). In the present work, however, the distinction between SA and EA is used almost entirely to mark differing transliteration systems between spoken Nile Delta-region colloquial Egyptian dialect and standard written forms which are more widely known and recognized, without implying any definite characteristics (social or formal) to either as a language. The term \"classical\" is applied only to modify texts from the early centuries of Islamic civilization (c. seventh to thirteenth centuries C.E.).\n\n8. Sun-baked brick is produced in the village itself and resembles adobe (the word \"adobe\" derives from the Arabic word for brick, _al-\u1e6d\u016bb._ Building with \"raw brick\" (\u1e6d\u016bb nay y), as it is called, does not require outside labor. Red brick is the brick familiar to Europeans and North Americans and requires that bricklayers and builders from town be hired. In early 1987, one thousand red bricks cost \u00a3120 Egyptian (approx. $60 US); the price thereafter increased rapidly throughout that year.\n\n9. See Dwight Reynolds, \"Feathered Brides and Bridled Fertility: Architecture, Ritual, and Change in a Northern Egyptian Village\" (1994).\n\n10. In Arabic one may refer to various religious groups by their individual names: the Muslim Brotherhood ( _i khw\u0101n al-muslim\u012bn_), or \u1e24am\u0101s in the Gaza Strip, or the Salafiyya movement; or one can use the blanket term \"the Islamic groups\" ( _al-jam\u0101 '\u0101t al-isl\u0101miyya_) which would include a number of groups whom scarcely anyone could characterize as \"fundamentalist.\" There is no term for those groups, and only those groups, which Westerners refer to and study as \"fundamentalist.\" The term always has been and remains a borrowed analogy from Christianity, which inaccurately characterizes the diversity of the phenomena it is used to describe in the Islamic world. The closest term to the English is a neologism which has apppeared in some Arabic newspapers over the past two or three years, _u\u1e63\u016bl\u012by\u016bn_ , from the Arabic word for \"origin,\" _a\u1e63l_.\n\n11. See Charles A. Ferguson, \"Root-Echo Responses in Syrian Arabic Politeness Formulas,\" in _Linguistic Studies in Memory of Richard Slade Harrell_ (1967), and idem, \"The Structure and Use of Politeness Formulas\" (1976).\n\n12. Such greetings are considered a religious obligation, based on the following Quranic verses:\n\nAnd when those who believe in Our revelations come unto thee, say: Peace be upon you! (6:54)\n\nWhen ye are greeted with a greeting greet ye with [one] better than it or return it. Lo! Allah taketh count of all things. (4:86)\n\nBut when ye enter houses, salute one another with a greeting from Allah, blessed and sweet. (24:61)\n\nQuotations from Muhammad M. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Qur'an: Text and Explanatory Translation (1977).\n\n13. It must be remembered that Egypt has been at war four times in the past forty years with a nation that derives its existence from American support. I was treated hospitably and generously even by families who had lost sons to American bullets wielded by American-financed soldiers.\n\n14. Each of the missing sections were tales I recorded first from other poets. When Shaykh Biyal\u012b heard I had recorded them elsewhere, he immediately insisted on singing them himself, with apologies for having left them out of his original version.\n\n15. For extensive discussion of apprenticeship as methodology, see Michael W. Coy, ed., _Apprenticeship: From Theory to Method and Back Again_ (1989); also Mantle Hood, _The Ethnomusicologist_ (1971).\n\n16. This latter occurs most often when a man has not yet fathered a son or has had a son die; the assumption is that he will, as is customary, name his son after his own father, thus \"Y, father of X\" refers not so much to Y's father (X), but to an as yet unborn son to be named X. The female pattern is parallel, \"mother of X,\" though I do not know of any case of a woman being called by the name of an unborn son or daughter.\n\n17. I have elsewhere touched on the sociolinguistic portrayal of women in _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performances. See Dwight Reynolds, \"The Interplay of Genres in Oral Epic Performance: Differentially Marked Discourse in a Northern Egyptian Tradition,\" in _The Ballad and Oral Tradition_ (1991).\n\n## CHAPTER 2\n\n## Poets Inside and Outside the Epic\n\nThen the sun set, and the full moon sat cross-legged on his throne, the air became pure and sweet, time grew serene, the pinnacle of happiness and joy was reached, the lights of the quarter glowed, and the circle of dancers at the big tree by the waterfall in the center of the village grew crowded. The sounds of the great wedding exploded from beneath the feet of the dancers, from between the palms of those clapping, from the throats of the singers, from the drums and the tambourines, from the roofs of the houses, from among the openings of the huts, from the enclosures and the courtyards, from the lanes and the stables. Tonight every graybeard is in love, every youth yearns, every woman is womanly, and every man is Ab\u016b Zayd al-Hil\u0101l\u012b.\n\nal-\u1e6cayyib \u1e62\u0101li\u1e25, _\u1e0caw_ ' _al-bayt_\n\nThe poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and their families exist in the village as neither complete insiders nor complete outsiders\u2014not truly strangers, yet not truly friends of the villagers. Both villagers and poets are quick to note that they are separate groups coexisting, though villagers are perhaps quicker to point this out than poets. The mere existence of such an extensive group of poets, a community of fourteen households and nearly eighty members, set within the larger community of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, poses a riddle. This group is the largest community of epic poets known in Egypt, in fact, in the entire Arab Middle East; in the rest of the Nile Delta region, all the other related communities of poets are composed of groups of two, three, or at most four households. Economically it makes little sense for performers of the same tradition to group together, providing stiff competition in a diminishing market. Several preliminary questions then must be posed concerning the community of poets in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh: Who are these poets historically and ethnically? How did such a large community come to exist? How does the community of poets interact with the village at large?\n\nBeyond detailing these basic ethnographic concerns, I pose a further set of questions, for my focus is the _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ tradition within a specific social context: How do the sociological realities and interactions of these two communities affect the performance tradition? In what ways does this tradition reflect, provoke, counteract, or provide space for the negotiation of its cultural circumstances (for along with the differentiation of a socially distinct group within a society, as performers of a specific artistic tradition, follows an imposed complex of roles, economic relationships, concepts of identity, and perceptions of power)? The artistic tradition I am examining takes shape within an intricate environment of social ties and tensions. Yet studies of artistic traditions often provide ethnographic information about social context primarily as a backdrop to textual analyses, which draw few, if any, conclusions regarding the dynamic relationship between the two domains. Rather than leave this social background undifferentiated, with the semblance of univalency, in the following two chapters I draw specific correlations between social realities outside and inside the \"text\" of the epic.\n\n#### Origins, Ethnicity, Identity\n\n##### _Poets as Gypsies_\n\nThe identity and historical origins of the epic poets of the Nile Delta involve complex, sensitive, and often highly ambiguous issues. The villagers refer to the poets simply as _h 'ara_,1 lit. 'poets', sometimes as ' _arab_ 'Arabs', and far more rarely as _gh ajar_ 'Gypsies', as the latter term possesses strong pejorative connotations. The poets use the first two terms but consciously avoid the latter. In utilizing these terms, villagers and poets map different perceived relationships between the two communities and thereby codify different sets of attributed characteristics. In a society where names and naming directly reflect origins and identity, the repertory of terms for defining and referring to subgroups is highly significant. \/\n\nThe poets and the members of their families refer to themselves in public as shu'ara and as 'arab, as do the villagers, but in private the poets call themselves halab (sometimes _\u1e25alaba_ or _wil\u0101d \u1e25alab_ ), a term whose literal derivation means \"Aleppans,\" that is, people from the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. The term _\u1e25alab_ in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh is an in-group term and occurs only in very specific contexts. Though some villagers know the term, they do not refer to the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh as halab, nor have I ever heard a member of the poet community mention the term in front of non-halab other than myself. This label, along with other means of identification discussed below, is perceived by the poets as a powerful marker delimiting the boundary between their community and that of the village at large.\n\nThe term \u1e24alab is a bit of a puzzle, for the poets have maintained no traditional explanation tracing their history to the city of Aleppo, nor do they have any traditional explanation of this geographic nomenclature.2 Possibly the \u1e24alab did indeed come to Egypt via the city of Aleppo, but it is unlikely they were originally from there. Their migration to Egypt in any case took place several centuries ago.\n\nIn general the \u1e24alab are recognized as one of several groups in Egypt which share the status of ghajar, or Gypsies, along with the Jam\u0101sa, the Nawar, the Tatar, the Ghaw\u0101z\u012b, the Ma\u1e63l\u016bb (or Masl\u016bb), and others. The divisions between the groups are none too clear and often vary from informant to informant (along with information about the traditional occupations of each group) and clearly vary from region to region. A further complication springs up among informants and in sociological research where the term _gh ajar_ is sometimes used not only to denote Gypsies in general but also a specific group, separate from the others listed above.3 In most areas of Egypt the \u1e24alab are best known as blacksmiths rather than as poets. The poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh acknowledge this, but claim that certain branches of the \u1e24alab have always been epic singers. The two groups, blacksmiths and poets, have little to do with one another in the Nile Delta region at least. They are not found in the same communities, they do not commonly intermarry, and I was unable to uncover any less formal social ties. Still, the possibility of a historical link between these two groups is highly suggestive, for the connection between blacksmiths and bards has been noted and studied in several other parts of the world.4\n\nWithin the Arab world there are indications of the marginal and lowly status of itinerant blacksmiths, and even a handful of clues, for the most part still unexplored, about their relationship to poets of various sorts. In the Darf\u016br region of Sudan, for example, a region where _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is known and recited, H. A. MacMichael notes that \"Iron-workers, as usual throughout Darf\u016br, are held in detestation, but both the Zagh\u0101wa and the Berti [tribes] harbour small colonies of servile iron-workers from the west.\"5 The blacksmiths, he goes on to explain, do not intermarry with the rest of the population and constitute a virtual hereditary caste. Curiously, it is not their association with iron that appears to incite the contempt of the Zagh\u0101wa, but their use of fire in metalworking.6\n\nA possible link between blacksmiths and epic poets can be found in the name used for itinerant metalworkers in the Arabian peninsula variously referred to as the \u1e62leyb, \u1e62lubbah, or \u1e62olubba, and a clan of epic singers in southern Egypt, known as the Ma\u1e63l\u016bb, documented by Slyomovics.7 Alison Lerrick writes that the solitary Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l epic reciter she encountered in the Arabian peninsula from the \u1e62lubbah tribe had a unique performance style:\n\nI mention this particular transmitter because, of all the sources used in establishing the corpus, this transmitter was the only one who might be qualified as a \"performer.\" (Note that the Slubbah are an \"inferior\" tribe, which in the past lived from hunting game and performed menial tasks such as smithing and leather-working.) It may therefore be of significance that only a member of the Slubbah \"performed\" the poems. Although this transmitter did not know an inordinate number of the poems I was looking for, his delivery was most striking. Unlike the other transmitters, he delivered the poems slowly, pausing at intervals for emphasis and making wide gestures with his arms to illustrate the poems. For example, he would mime the raising of a spear or make other expressive gestures with his hands and fingers. He thus resembled, to a certain extent, a professional minstrel.8\n\nThe similarity of the names of the Arabian \u1e62lubbah and the southern Egyptian Ma\u1e63l\u016bb, both possibly derived from the root _\u1e62 L B_ , and the similar itinerant, outcast status of the groups suggests the possibility of historical links.9 Neither group, however, is represented in the Nile Delta region studied here. Furthermore, nowhere in Egypt is a direct connection made between metalworking and epic-singing groups such as has been studied in West Africa, nor is there a commonly held belief system that links the powers of these two crafts.\n\n##### _Arrival in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh_\n\nAccording to information given to me by the poets about the history of their families, the family of Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b10 was the first family of poets to settle in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh.\n\nShaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b was born in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh in 1919; his father, Shaykh Gh\u0101z\u012b, was also a native of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, born sometime in the mid-i890s. His grandfather, however, was born in al-Bu\u1e25ayra Province, west of the Nile. Though no one knows how long the family had been living in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh before the birth of Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u00e0b's father, he was not the eldest child, so it is possible the family had been in the village for several years. Thus the family's arrival seems to have occurred sometime during the decade prior to 1890.\n\nThe family of Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd arrived in the same generation, though the dating of births here is slightly less precise. Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 was by his own account \"around seventy\" in 1987; his father had been born in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, but his grandfather came originally from the eastern province of al-harqiyya before settling in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. Neither family has preserved any explanation for their settling in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh other than their ancestors found it to be a village of \"good people\" ( _n\u0101s kwayyis\u012bn_ ). Both villagers and poets recount that the poets' families had attempted to settle in several locations in the region, but until their arrival in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, they had only been permitted to stay for short periods of time. All evidence points to a significant shift among the poets over the past seventy-five years from a highly itinerant to a more settled lifestyle.\n\nFrom these two original groups, the arrivals of all the other poets can be traced to familial and marital ties: Shaykh 'Antar 'Abd al-'\u0101\u1e6d\u012b was born in the province of al-Bu\u1e25ayra, but when he was eleven years old, his father divorced his mother. He, his mother, and his two sisters then came to live with maternal relatives in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. He grew up supporting this female household, eventually marrying off his two sisters to poets of the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh community; then he himself married the daughter of an al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poet.\n\nIn a similar way, Shaykh Mu\u1e25ammad A\u1e25mad's father was invited to come and live in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh after the death of his own father (Mu\u1e25ammad's grandfather). The invitation came from his paternal relative, Shaykh Gh\u0101z\u012b (father of Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b). When Shaykh Muhammad A\u1e25mad's father died, leaving his son still a teenager and unmarried, the young Shaykh Mu\u1e25ammad was taken in by Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b's family and later married to one of Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b's daughters.\n\nAnother poet, Shaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd Tawf\u012bq, grew up in a family that traveled great distances. His grandfather was born in the eastern province of al-harqiyya and eventually settled in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. The father, Shaykh Tawf\u012bq, continued to travel with his young family until his death, at which point his son, 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd Tawf\u012bq (born in the province of al-Minya, south of Cairo), came to live with his grandfather in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, from whom he learned to sing _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ and with whom he traveled as a young apprentice.\n\nOf the fourteen households of poets in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, all but two have come to the village from the province of al-Bu\u1e25ayra, west of the Nile. Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101's family came directly from the eastern province of al-harqiyya, and Shaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd's family came from al-harqiyya via the southern provinces.\n\nSimilar accounts of marriages, untimely deaths, and divorces account for the arrival of the other family units. (See fig. 2 for a schematized presentation of the male lines of descent in the poet community.)\n\nThe growth of the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh community of poets seems to have been a natural accrual of familial and marital ties. Just as there is a history of family units moving into al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, however, there is also a history of individuals leaving the community by marriage (usually, though not always, women), as well as whole family units leaving to settle in new locations. Two such departures occurred in recent years when families left al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and moved north to the village of Sadd al-Kham\u012bs in the _markaz_ 'district' of S\u012bd\u012b S\u0101lim, where previously there had been no poets residing; the move, therefore, was seen as auspicious.\n\nIn addition, during the second period of my research, 1986\u201387, a further departure took place, one that resulted in tragedy. The family of Shaykh Mu\u1e25ammad A\u1e25mad bought a house in a hamlet about one hour east of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, sold their home in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, and moved. Two weeks later, while riding his donkey on the side of the road, Shaykh Mu\u1e25ammad A\u1e25mad was struck and killed by a passing taxi; he was survived by his wife and four young children. The young widow and her children chose stay in their new home and not to return to al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh.\n\nDepartures from the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh community have been motivated almost entirely by economic pressures. The existence of more than two or three poets in the same location places a greater economic burden on all concerned. With such a high concentration, poets must travel farther, acquire secondary sources of income, and eventually even separate. All of these conditions are found in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. Female members of the poet community have probably always contributed a significant portion to the household income; in recent years, however, income earned by wives and daughters, as well as by younger men in the community who are working at outside jobs, has surpassed the income brought in by the poet heads of households. Poets who have left al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh with their families have all moved to outlying areas such as S\u012bd\u012b S\u0101lim, or to areas in the province of al-Bu\u1e25ayra which are considered more rural, further removed from urban influences, and consequently where a greater audience for _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is still to be found. These poets spoke openly about both the economic advantages to be gained in more rural areas and the social disadvantages they experienced in not having a community of their own with whom to socialize in their new locations.\n\n_Figure 2._ Poet families of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh\n\nFor the poets and their families, relations within their community are determined by many overlapping layers of familial and marital ties. Everyone is related, usually by blood and marriage, and all are related to at least eleven other smaller communities of poets in the Nile Delta as well as more loosely related to other communities in urban areas and farther south in Upper Egypt.11 Despite the strong ties that bind them to other poets' communities, the poets all stress their roots in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh.\n\n#### Interaction with the Village at Large\n\n##### _Poets as Outsiders: \"Looking In\"_\n\nThe phrases \"they are not from among us\" ( _humum mi h minen\u0101_) and \"they are not originally from here\" ( _humum mi h a\u1e63lan min hin\u0101_) followed me about like an endless litany for the first few months of my stay in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. Only when the villagers were entirely convinced that I fully understood this distinction did they cease to remind me of this invisible boundary. Such is the sense of the poets as outsiders and newcomers in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh that young men of the village in their twenties often told me that the poets had arrived, or had been brought in, sometime immediately preceding the young men's births or when they had been very young children. Invariably they were startled when older men would explain that some of the poets' families had been in the village for several generations.\n\nTime and again I encountered a sequence of questions which occurred whenever anyone asked publicly about the origins of the poets. The interlocutor would ask, \"Where are you [pi.] originally from?\" The poet would respond, often somewhat gruffly, \"From al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh.\" Then the question would be recast as \"Where were you [sing.] born?\" And many villagers, particularly the young, would be surprised to learn that not only were poets in their late sixties and early seventies such as Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd and Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b born in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, but that their fathers before them had been as well. Often this information stopped the line of questioning, but occasionally someone would persist to the grandfather's generation and receive what they had expected all along, the name of a different region or province.\n\nMany accounts of the arrival of the poets in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh were proffered me by villagers, all of which probably contain some nuggets of historical truth. One typical version is recounted here:\n\nDwight: Does anyone know anything about their origins?\n\nhaml\u012b: A long time ago there was a a big open area near Dis\u016bq . . . and the ghajar [Gypsies] came and started living there, _bad\u016b_ [Bedouin] from the desert, in tents.12 Eventually one poet and his wife came to al-Minhal\u012bn [village near al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh], but they would not let them live there; they came to al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and settled. And then they brought relatives and married off their children and their number grew. They used to live in tents at the edges of the village, when the area you [to me] live in wasn't built on at all.\n\nDwight: When it was still the fish pond?\n\nhaml\u012b: Right. God was generous to them, and they started building small huts; then that one bought a little land for a house, and now they all live in houses.\n\n(hamil \u1e24arf\u016bh, 5\/9\/87)\n\nThe poets did in fact first live in tents at the edge of the village. Where they first began to build houses is now known as \"the poets' alley\" ( _\u1e25\u1e0dret al- h'ara_), although not all the residents of the alley are poets. It is still only a few yards removed from the open fields. Seven of the fourteen households are in this alleyway, five others are in adjoining alleys, and two (Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b and Shaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, the two most popular performers) have relocated to other areas of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. (See fig. 3 for a map of the village and the locations of the poets' houses.)\n\nThough nearly two-thirds of the houses in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh have been rebuilt in red brick over the past decade as a result of money earned by family members working abroad, all of the houses in the poets' alley are mud brick, and in 1988 all but one of the poets' households still lived in mud-brick homes. Furthermore, none of the poets own agricultural land of any sort, though they do own the plots their houses stand on. The poet community taken as a whole constitutes the lowest economic stratum of the village.\n\n_Figure 3._ Residence patterns in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh\n\nOther than the poets' lack of landownership, the mark of separation between the two commmunities most often cited by villagers and poets is the fact that the two groups do not intermarry. Villagers marry other villagers, and poets marry from other poets' families. As one \u1e24alab\u012b woman put it: \"We don't marry peasants [ _fell\u0101\u1e25\u012bn_ ] and they don't marry us. The \u1e24alab marry each other. We have our own customs\u2014we don't marry except with each other. That way no one can say 'You're the daughter of a such-and-such' [ _bint k\u0101z\u0101 wa-k\u0101z\u0101_ ]\" (wife of Shaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd, 6\/3\/87).\n\nDespite this often-repeated stricture against mixed marriages, two have taken place in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh in living memory. One was successful: it has lasted many years and represents the only poet household living in a red-brick house; the two sons have work abroad, and the father no longer performs _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l._ Though this man was very forthcoming in interviews and clearly at one point in his life possessed an extensive repertory (he was often cited by the oldest men in the village as one of the top three poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh), he refused to perform or be recorded throughout my stay. The other marriage lasted only a few years and then ended in divorce.\n\nA further, and curious, indication of the separation of the two communities involves the issue of family names. As we saw in Chapter 1, the social power structure of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh is built on the interaction of large clans of interrelated families. These clans are perceived as \"powerful\" versus \"weak,\" and \"original\" versus \"newcomers.\" Within the clans a secondary level of identification of families corresponds to some extent to the use in the West of family names. It is this name which appears on one's personal identification carnet, the official papers that must be carried by all Egyptians which state their name, address, occupation, and military service (if any). The name on the identification carnet is only rarely that of the larger clan, or extended family, to which one belongs. Thus to identify a person in conversation in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, or to distinguish between persons who have the same given name, one says So-and-so al-Najjj\u0101r, or al-h\u016bra, or \u1e24aydar, or Jalama, that is, using \"family names.\" To understand the implications of this information, however, one must often also be aware that these are members of the extended families, or clans, of \u1e24arf\u016bh, Jan\u0101\u1e25, Kurd\u012b, or Sir\u1e25\u0101n.13\n\nTo the villagers of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, the poets have no family or clan names. They are known and referred to only as Shaykh\u2014 \u2014 _al-sh\u0101 'ir_ (lit. the Poet), using their given name and then father's name before the title \"the Poet.\" This title is applied to all members of the poets' families, whether or not they are poets in the usual sense of the term. Young men who have never played rab\u0101b and never sung, who are in the army, or work as builders, apprentice carpenters, or traders, are still So-and-so \"the Poet.\" This is the only means the larger community has for identifying them. It is also the only means the government has for identifying them. The word _al-sh\u0101 'ir_ appears as their \"name\" on the poets' identity cards and even the passports of the few who possess them.\n\nMost villagers simply denied that poets possess family or clan names. In fact, many expressed surprise that I knew the first names of all the poets individually, and would even laugh and ask for a physical description to see if they could place the poet of whom I was speaking (and this in a community where great pride is taken in being able to identify all members by name and ancestry). To identify any villager, they would ask for the father's name and family name. For them, the poets' families did not participate in the larger, on-going genealogy of the village; they were not locatable on the intricate map of blood, conjugal, and marital ties in which all other residents of the village were presumed part.\n\nOne intense encounter in the early part of my fieldwork proved this common notion that poets do not possess family names wrong and led to a rapid change in my status vis-\u00e0-vis the poet community. I was spending an evening with a group of young men from the poets' families, none of whom themselves were performing poets, and we began to discuss disagreements that had occurred recently between the fathers of several of the young men present. The tensions were easy to understand: here were men in their late teens and early twenties who as yet had little independence from their fathers, and when disagreements arose, these often affected their close friendships within this small community. One young man made an offhand remark: \"It's just the old story of the X's versus the Y's again\" (using collective noun forms usually reserved for extended-family names). I immediately asked what he meant, and, after hesitating a moment, he explained which of the fourteen households belonged to which of three extended clans. This new information in fact explained a great deal about who performed with whom when there were big jobs such as weddings which require two poets, and about internal relations within the poets' community. I was not, however, aware of how sensitive this information would prove to be.\n\nLater in the week I began to record from a poet with whom I had not previously worked. The sahra\/recording session was to be at the home of my host family, A\u1e25mad Bakh\u0101t\u012b. After the poet arrived and had settled in the mandara, the men's sitting room, we were immediately served a pot of tea and began to talk. One other villager joined us (most people would not actually enter until they heard the music begin). I asked a number of my usual questions about repertory, family history, and so forth, and then, in an attempt to verify the information I had received about family names, I asked the poet, \"So, are you from the clan of X or Y?\"\n\nThe poet looked quite shocked, and his face immediately displayed his displeasure. He leaned over to me and, with a sharp glance at the villager, who, thank heavens, seemed to be occupied with his own thoughts, whispered angrily, \"Where did you learn those names?\" I covered my blunder as best I could, but other guests began to arrive and we had to rise to greet them. I was given no opportunity to undo my faux pas during the evening.\n\nThe following afternoon I went to visit a poet whom I had already recorded. I recounted the incident quite openly, holding back only the circumstances in which I had originally learned these names. This poet assessed the situation as grave and stated that if the poet I had spoken with chose to tell other poets in the village about it, my position in the community could become quite strained. He and his wife grilled me about who had mentioned these names to me. I put them off, but they basically made up their own minds about who it must have been. I explained many times over that I was not there to divulge secrets, but had indeed been unaware that these names were not commonly used. I had thought they were used like everyone else's names. The poet's wife argued on my behalf: \"He understands now [ _huwwa w\u0101 khud b\u0101luh dilwaqt_], and there was no real harm done.\"\n\nA plan was laid out. My friend was to go visit the other poet and explain the situation. In an hour I was to drop by the other poet's house \"by chance\" for tea. This I did. When I arrived it was clear that all was settled. We talked the situation over, and, though the hour was early, dinner was brought out and served. There was clearly no possibility of refusing this invitation, though I had already accepted a dinner invitation elsewhere, for it was my first invitation to eat a meal in a poet's home; it was only one of many times I was forced by circumstances to eat a meal twice over to meet the demands of village etiquette. As we drank tea after the meal, my friend stated once again for everyone's benefit, \"He didn't know it was any different from other names in the village.\" Our host looked at me and smiled, \"But now he knows.\" I never learned anything more about the subject. One happy result, however, was that within days I had received invitations to eat at nearly all of the poets' homes. One barrier had been set up, but another had been removed.\n\nThe inhabitants of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh hold various attitudes about the regional nickname for their village\u2014the Village of the Poets ( _balad al- h'ara_). On the one hand, the nickname represents part of the village's fame and status in the region; on the other, this aspect is often referred to sarcastically and even used directly to insult the inhabitants. A significant emblem of this ambiguity occurs whenever reference is made to al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh in conversation, for it is likely to be accompanied by a hand gesture intimately associated with the village: holding the left arm straight down, the right arm saws across it horizontally in imitation of a poet holding and playing a rab\u0101b (the right arm figures as the bow, the left as the instrument). Reactions to this gesture range from overt anger and demands for an apology to good-humored laughter and halfhearted attempts to ignore it.\n\nThe following short incidents outline some of the tensions and contradictory feelings the villagers associate with the presence of the poets, after which I examine how the poets view their relationship to the larger community:\n\nIn a long interview conducted with an inhabitant of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh who works as an elementary school teacher, the conversation wove back and forth between aesthetic evaluations of different poets and performances, and the embarrassment and confusion he felt as a young man going to school in town, where everyone teased him about the reputation of the village. He recounted that one day he walked into his high school classroom to find that someone had written his name in chalk on the board and under it the words \"Village of the Poets.\" The teacher entered soon afterward and, not noticing the writing, began to teach class. The epithet remained on the board all during the first part of class till the teacher finally turned to write something on the board and, of course, erased it.\n\nThis man, now in his early forties, described how painful that jibe had been and how even now he grows angry thinking about it. With some clear consternation about my possible reaction, he went on to explain how he and his classmates, when they found a poet performing on the train, for example, would rough the poet up and force him off the train at the next stop, wherever that might be. Apologetically he noted that he now thinks of this with shame, but not with as much shame, he added, as he used to feel at school when other students would shout \"Village of the Poets\" after him on the way to and from school.14\n\nDuring my stay in the village in 1986\u201387, one of the poets traveled to Saudi Arabia on pilgrimage, after years of painstaking saving. Two younger villagers who openly sympathized with the new revivalist interpretations of Islam remarked to me that this pilgrimage would surely not be accepted by God. Among the reasons they cited were that (1) poets lived off vagrancy ( _tasawwul_ ); (2) their livelihood was really only a form of begging; (3) acquiring enough money for the pilgrimage through begging must be considered wrong or forbidden (\u1e25ar\u0101m); and (4) the epic itself is un-Islamic ignorance, for it represents frivolity and licentiousness ( _lahw_ ).\n\nThey believed that \"there is something of the _\u1e25ar\u0101m_ [wrong, forbidden] in this [pilgrimage], because that is money he got from begging. One shouldn't go around wearing old, torn clothes and then go off on pilgrimage\u2014and then he'll come back and continue begging. One should go on pilgrimage with money one has earned from _working_! That is why his ' _umra_ 15 won't be accepted [ _maqb\u016bla_ ] [i.e., by God]\" (5\/10\/87).\n\nI conducted no systematic survey of villagers' attitudes toward the poets as I attempted to do about their attitudes toward the epic (see Chap. 3). Though discussion of the epic embarrassed no one, discussion of the poets and their role in village society was clearly more sensitive, if only because the poets themselves, whom I most closely befriended and wished to portray sympathetically, would have suffered embarrassment at any continuous or obviously systematic investigation of their presence and history. Though I had many discussions with people about the relations between the poet and nonpoet communities, these were usually the result of opportunities I exploited in daily conversations, not preplanned schedules of questions.\n\nSome basic patterns, however, are readily apparent: tolerance, or the lack of it, toward the presence of the poets in the village modulates in tandem with people's attitudes toward the epic itself. Groups who still patronize the epic, though they may not consider the poets their social equals, openly defend their presence in the village. This defense is usually couched in religious or aphoristic sentiments dealing with the equality of men before God, the idea that we shall all encounter the same final judgment, or that God created men in different ranks (a reference to two verses from the Qur'\u0101n usually taken to refer to social and economic differences between classes).16 In addition, villagers who are positively disposed toward the poets often state simply that the poets are poor ( _gh alb\u0101n\u012bn_) and should therefore be treated with sympathy.\n\nGroups who disdain the epic are equally likely to object to the presence of the poets in the village on social or moral grounds. Slyomovies, conducting work in Upper Egypt, encountered a society where the epic itself was apparently still nearly universally respected, yet even then the person of the poet was not respected.17 In al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh the situation is far more complex, with diverse educational and age groups expressing widely differing opinions about both the epic and its performers.\n\nIn the context of the tight social bonds of village life, the poets and their families exist in a slightly dislocated world. Although visiting, drinking tea, and sharing meals are major pastimes in village social life, I encountered villagers in poets' homes less than a dozen times\u2014and I _never_ encountered a poet on a social visit in a villager's home. There is no apparent social division in public places; in caf\u00e9s, in the groups seated on the bridge at dusk, and at public celebrations, no overt separation occurs. But privately, the poets' community socializes in its own restricted circles.\n\nThe definiteness of these social boundaries was forcefully brought home to me at the very end of my stay with the death of the poet Shaykh Muhammad Ahmad. At the death of a villager, every household must send a male member to visit the family during the first week following the death. These mourning visitors are received in the men's guest room, or outside if the weather permits, where benches are set up for this purpose. The visitors are offered something to drink and cigarettes by relatives of the deceased. The proper duration of the visit is held to be in proportion to the closeness of one's relationship to the deceased. Every household must send a representative; failure to do so constitutes a breach of etiquette which signals enmity. When such a breach occurs, the incident is cause for lengthy discussion by adult members of the community.\n\nDuring the period of mourning after the death of Shaykh Mu\u1e25ammad A\u1e25mad the Poet, no villagers were in attendance other than those who accompanied me on my visits. Rather than spilling out into public space, filling the open areas, the threshing floors, and the alleyways themselves, the funeral of the poet occupied a single, small room in the home of another poet.\n\nTo sum up then, the poets' community exists in many ways as a marginalized and peripheralized social group. Though not precisely a distinct ethnic group, the members are perceived by other villagers as possessing origins and identities different from their own. The poets are marked and perceived by villagers as accepted outsiders, but still outsiders. They are separated by residential patterns, lack of land ownership, and special economic status. The poets are excluded from the marriage ties, patterns of social exchange and obligation, and access to power which are normal to other villagers. Their social roles are defined by their status as outsiders.\n\n##### _Villagers as Outsiders: \"Looking Out\"_\n\nPublicly, the poets stress their roots in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh; in the privacy of their homes, however, they discuss relations with the community at large in different terms\u2014terms of opposition and differentiation. Villagers are referred to as _fell\u0101\u1e25\u012bn_ (SA _fall\u0101\u1e25\u016bn_ ), that is, farmers or peasants, or, in poets' slang, as the ' _ashtr._ The first term is normally a term of pride in rural areas. It derives from a verb meaning \"to till, cultivate, and farm.\" The derived form, _fell\u0101\u1e25,_ renders the doer of the action, that is, the farmer. Another derived form, _fal\u0101\u1e25_ , gives an abstraction signifying success, prosperity, well-being. This second nominal form occurs in the daily call to prayers and is thus very much an active derivation of this root.18 In political discourse, the term _fell\u0101\u1e25_ is coded to refer to \"real Egyptians,\" people who own and farm the land, the backbone of Egypt, Egypt's greatest resource. In an urban milieu the term may be used derogatorily to indicate lack of education, provincialism, naivet\u00e9, even stubbornness. In the village setting, however, even those who are educated, who hold government posts, and who represent the elite of village society do not often use the term pejoratively, for it strikes too close to home.\n\nThe second term for villagers, ' _a h\u012br_, derives from the concept of companionship and time spent living in proximity to someone. ' _I hra_ is what one develops with neighbors who are not related by blood or marriage; it is the friendship and loyalty that arises from propinquity. The term ' _a h\u012br_ is rare in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, however, for one does not say that so-and-so is my 'ah\u012br,19 though if one asks how and why two people are friends, the response might well be simply: 'ihra.20\n\nIn private discussions among the poets these terms take on new meanings, for they codify those characteristics that in the poets' perceptions are not shared between the two communities. They contrast the terms _fell\u0101\u1e25_ and ' _a h\u012br_ with the terms ' _arab_ 'Arabs' and _h \u0101'ir_ 'poet'.21 To themselves they relegate the qualities of eloquence and cleverness, and the status of bearers of, and participants in, ancient Arab customs and traditions. They represent an \"Arabness\" that predates and is purer than that of cultivators and tillers of the soil.\n\nThe evenings I spent in the homes of the poets were often filled with displays of verbal art; folktales, proverbs, riddles, and improvisatory poetry were the most common genres. After a particularly well-told tale, one poet's son leaned over to me and said, \"You'd never hear anything like that in a fell\u0101\u1e25's home; all he has to talk about is his water buffalo and his clover harvest!\" This comment sums up quite well the tone with which tales and poetry were performed: this is what separates and defines us. Though never bitter or vindictive in their criticism, the poets constantly contrasted the eloquence of their conversation with the mundane realities of the fell\u0101\u1e25's world. My own ability to recite poetry by heart, to play lute ('\u016bd) and rab\u00e0b, and to sing were often cited by the poets as evidence that I was somehow closer to them than to the fell\u0101\u1e25\u012bn, though I had many times recounted that my maternal grandfather and grandmother grew up on a farm and a sheep ranch respectively.\n\nIt is in this capacity as preservers of eloquence and beautiful expression ( _fa\u1e63\u0101\u1e25a wa-bal\u0101 gha_) that the poets referred to themselves as _h 'ara._ Another of their roles is symbolized by use of the term ' _arab._ In this capacity, the poets view themselves as true Arabs, maintaining customs and traditions that either never existed among the fell\u0101\u1e25\u012bn or have now died out.\n\nIn Egypt, several specific groups are referred to as Arabs. The desert Bedouin are called Arabs, as are persons from the Arabian peninsula. Egyptians usually refer to themselves as Arabs only in the context of Pan-Arab nationalism and in terms of international politics, a reference to the Nasserite ideal of a single Arab nation encompassing all Arabic speakers. Finally, however, \"Arab\" is also a term used in referring to marginal social groups within Egypt and functions as a systematic indicator of the Other within Egyptian society. Thus, the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh are addressed and referred to in the village as Arabs because they are Gypsies. The heroes of the epic are also referred to as Arabs, for they are Bedouin heroes. The poets, however, inside and outside their performances stress that they are Arabs just like the heroes of whom they sing. In reality, no known historical link exists between the Bedouin and the epic poets. The epic heroes are Arabs because they were Bedouin; the epic poets are Arabs because polite consensus allows speakers to substitute \"Arab\" for \"Gypsy.\" The only time I heard this appellation challenged, by a young man who stated that the poets were not Arabs like the desert Arabs, an older man cut him off by jumping into the larger, political frame and declaring, \"We're all Arabs, aren't we?\"\n\nThus:\n\nBedouins = Arabs _and_ Poets = Arabs\n\nOne of the most popular types of folktales told in evening gatherings in the poets' homes clearly portrays the poets' sense of differentiation from the villagers and of their own distinct identity. Tales of this type further substantiate the asserted ties with desert Arabs.\n\nOne tale opens with a king and his _waz\u012br_ 'vizier' deciding to disguise themselves and go out into the world to see and understand the condition of the people.22 They wander in the desert and encounter a Bedouin encampment. The husband, the shaykh of the Arabs, is not present, but his wife greets them and invites them in: \"Greetings, O Princes!\" (ahlan y\u0101 umar\u0101'). Later she greets them again: \"You have honored us, O Captives!\" (harraft\u016bn\u0101 y\u0101 usar\u0101'). Still later she calls out: \"O welcome, O Poets!\" (y\u0101 mar\u1e25ab y\u0101 h'ar\u0101').\n\nWhen the shaykh of the Arabs returns, the king and the waz\u012br tell him angrily, if somewhat perplexedly, that his wife greeted them once with due respect but then twice insulted them. The shaykh asks what his wife said and they tell him. He responds that her greetings were all respectful. They ask how can it be respectful to address guests first as princes, then as captives, and finally as poets. The shaykh responds: \"As our guests, are you not our captives? If we spread out rugs on the left, will you not come and sit on the left, and if we spread out rugs on the right will you not come sit on the right (i.e., you will do as we say). And after you leave us, if we have been generous will you not 'poetize' to your neighbors of our generosity, and if we are stingy, will you not 'poetize' to your neighbors of our stinginess?\"\n\nThe king and wazlr agree and are mollified. They then continue on their way and meet an old man, a fisherman, walking with a cane. They greet him and he returns their greeting but then adds: \"What was two has become three; what was far has become near.\"\n\nThe king and wazlr are so puzzled by his response that they offer the old man ten pounds for an explanation: \"I was young and have become old, I used to walk on two legs and now walk on three, and the city I used to be able to see from far away, I can now only see when near.\"23\n\nA number of these tales share a characteristic demonstrated in the tale summarized above. After the main encounter with the Bedouin (' _arab)_ which forms the bulk of the story, the narrative moves on to a secondary, and briefer, encounter with a non-Bedouin. In some tales this move clearly demonstrates the difference between the 'arab and other groups, for where the former were generous, the latter prove stingy and mean, where the Bedouin seems to have insulted his guests, his words turn out to be both proper and wise, and in the second encounter the king often encounters men whose words appear to be compliments but are meant as sarcasms or insults. In the tale presented above and several others, the secondary move appears not to be presented as a direct contrast, but rather as a commentary. Another tale moves in slightly different fashion.\n\nThere was once an Arab who lived in a tent in the desert. One day a king and his wazlr decided to go out to see the state of the world. They wore green upon green. They arrived at the tent and the king clapped his hands. The woman saw that they were guests and immediately prepared room for them to sit. They drank tea, and the Arab slaughtered a she-camel for them and fed them (still not knowing who they were). As the king left, he slipped sixty dinars into a handkerchief and left it beneath one of the cushions. The woman found it and called to her husband to run after the guests because one of them had accidentally left his money there. He ran after them and caught up with them. But the king said no, that was money for the meal they ate. The Arab refused it. So the king, in order to do something for the Arab, explained that he was a king and invited the Arab to come visit in the city.\n\nThere the Arab stayed as a guest in the palace and wei^t with the king to mosque. He saw the king after prayers asking God, _y\u0101 rabb_ (O Lord!) with his palms outstretched, as if asking for wealth. When the Arab returned to his tent in the desert, he decided to do the same thing. But when he said \"Y\u0101 rabb,\" a wind lifted his tent from over his head and blew it away. When he and his wife set up the tent in the spot where the tent had landed, they found a treasure.\n\nTime passed and the Arab built a beautiful palace and garden. The king decided to visit the generous Arab who had befriended them. To their surprise they found he now had a palace and garden. The wazir began to suggest to the king that they kill the Arab to gain his money. At first the king was quite opposed, but \"Much speech affects the mind\" (kathr al-kal\u0101m yu'aththir f\u012b l-dim\u0101gh), and he was eventually convinced to pretend to have dreamed a dream and to ask the Arab to interpret it. The waz\u012br suggested that the king tell the Arab that in his dream he heard three times the sound \"how\" ( _hawhaw_ is the Egyptian Colloquial Arabic verb for a dog's barking), the idea being that the Arab would say it was only the barking of a dog, which the king would take as an insult and use as a pretext for killing him.\n\nInstead, the Arab responded that this dream is one seen only by the mighty and high-born and presented his explanation in a poem:\n\nawwal haw r\u0101ziq i\u1e6d-\u1e6d\u012br f\u012b j-jaw\n\n\u1e6d\u0101n\u012b haw r\u0101ziq il-'ib\u0101d taw bi-taw\n\nt\u0101lit haw nadm\u0101n f\u012b '\u0101r is-saw\n\nwi-bn\u012b f\u012b milkak wi-gh\u0113r milkak law\n\nThe poem is built on reinterpreting the sound _haw_ as the masculine singular pronoun _huwa_ 'he', particularly in the specialized form _h\u016b_ used during the Sufi _dh ikr_ ritual (extended recitation of the name of God). Thus the first two verses refer to God as Sustainer of the birds and the beasts, and to God as Sustainer of all true worshipers, while the third and fourth verses refer to Man, who should eschew evil and should not covet the wealth of others, and here, of course, specifically to the wicked waz\u012br.\n\nThe first _haw_ is He who gives sustenance to the birds of the air;\n\nThe second _haw_ is He who gives sustenance to His worshipers immediately and always;\n\nThe third _haw_ is he that (should) repent of evil-doing,\n\nAnd of coveting your wealth, even if it be the wealth of others.\n\nAfter hearing these words, the king drew his sword and killed the waz\u012br, and instated the Arab as his new waz\u012br. Once again the honesty and virtue of the word-wielding Arab triumphed through his display of poetic prowess. The vast majority of these tales concern cleverness, propriety, eloquence, and virtue. In each tale the Bedouin (that is, the 'arab, for the term \"Bedouin\" [ _bad\u016b_ ] occurs only rarely in the epic or these folktales) are those most skilled in courtoisie and etiquette. Just as the king and other characters within the tales learn to appreciate these special qualitites of the \"Arabs,\" so the families of the poets are inculcated with an appreciation of their own identifying characteristics during these domestic performances. The connection between epic poets and the 'arab is, furthermore, often made entirely overt when these tales are told in the presence of children, for it is not uncommon for adults to comment afterward to the children that their fathers\/uncles\/grandfathers are just as eloquent as the characters of the story. These are in fact tales that set in direct confrontation the idealized self-image of the Poet against the outer world's derogatory portrayal of his craft and community.\n\nAs members of the category \"Arabs,\" the poets also conceive of themselves as having a special relationship with other groups designated as Arabs. The Nile Delta poets particularly feel this way toward a group known as the ' _arab al- ghin\u0101ma_ or the 'herding Arabs.' These are not desert Bedouin, at least not in modern times, in the full sense of the term, but rather tribal groups who spend most of the year in the eastern province of al-Sharqiyya where they own land and maintain permanent residences. Following the seasons, they drive their herds across the delta into the province of Kafr al-Shaykh and other areas, where they graze their animals on the stubble left in the fields after the harvests. At this time the open areas between al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and the provincial capital, Kafr al-Shaykh, are thickly dotted with black tents and grazing herds.24 Weddings among the \"herding Arabs\" are celebrated with epic performances and with _\u1e0dark al-kaff_ (lit. the striking of the palms), that is, traditional Bedouin-style dancing accompanied by a line of men singing and clapping.25 Since \u1e0darb al-kaff is the preferred evening activity and often lasts all night long, epic performances must take place during the day. The al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poets state incontrovertibly that the \"herding Arabs\" are the only group for whom they are willing to sing during the daytime, \"while the sun is in the sky.\" The 'arab al-ghin\u0101ma are also known as supporters of the Zagh\u0101ba clan in the epic (the clan of Diy\u0101b rather than the clan of Ab\u016b Zayd), and the poets tell many anecdotes about angry audience members from the \"herding Arabs\" causing trouble owing to a perceived slight against \"their\" hero, Diy\u0101b.26\n\nAmong the domestic customs which the poets believe mark them as true Arabs is the absolute obligation of serving two rounds of drink, whether this be tea, coffee, hibiscus infusion, fenugreek infusion, cinnamon infusion, or other fare, to any male who enters the house as a guest. Though offering drinks and refreshments to guests is common in many contexts in Egypt, the poets hold to this more rigidly than other villagers and cite the serving of two rather than only one round as a distinguishing characteristic. One poet in the village constantly drank coffee rather than the usual tea. In private he cited this to me and to his children and grandchildren as an Arab custom; in public he stated that he drank coffee for health reasons, that his stomach could not handle tea.\n\nIn the poets' community, younger children and even young adults will, when greeting an older male (particularly a relative), bend down and kiss the back of his hand. Though this custom was apparently widespread in Egyptian society until the early twentieth century, villagers who accompanied me on visits to the poets' homes expressed shock and surprise at this behavior, and on several occasions wrested their hands away before the greeting was completed.\n\nAnother custom perceived by the poets as essentially Arab is that men and women socialize and talk much more easily within the poets' community than in the larger community, and children are more easily included in adult conversation. I rapidly grew to know almost all of the female members of the poets' community, while even after several years of contact I have met the womenfolk of only a handful of nonpoet households in the village. Again, this behavior is attributed to pure Arab tradition, in opposition to the traditions of the villagers. The villagers, however, maintain a diametrically opposed interpretation: these customs mark the typical \"Gypsy\" lack of manners and propriety and are in no way associated with Arab (Bedouin) heritage. The behavior of the women, in particular, is attributed to the general looseness and flirtatiousness of Gypsy women.\n\nMany of the features from which villagers construct the negative \"Gypsy-poet\" image are thus redeployed within the poets' community as part of their subversive counterimage. For villagers, the poets' lack of land marks their lack of origin, but for the poets this feature marks their affinity to the true Arabs, the Bedouin; living by words rather than by physical labor makes poets (in villagers' eyes) resemble beggars, but for poets, this is the mark of their Arab eloquence ( _fa\u1e63\u0101\u1e25a);_ their unusual domestic customs render the poets and their families suspect to the villagers, but these same customs constitute signs of enduring identity for the poets. The same characteristics are again and again given two opposing interpretations, interpretations that never come into direct conflict due to the social distance between the two groups\u2014except at the moment of epic performance.\n\n#### The Poet and the Poem\n\n##### _External Links_\n\nThe concept of the poet as eloquent, gracious, well mannered, clever, and truly Arab is an in-group ideal to which the poets cannot stake claim publicly; after all, these characteristics are claimed in contrast to the villagers' supposed lack of them. They constitute a private, subversive source of pride and identity. In public, the poets have but one source from which they may derive a sense of respectability vis-\u00e0-vis the villagers\u2014the epic itself, the artistic tradition they perform which is in demand by the society around them. The poets stress their identification with the epic in various ways, and they do so with some success, for the villagers indeed associate the poets with a number of internal aspects of the epic. As noted earlier, an initial association is based on the idea that both poets and epic heroes are \"Arabs.\" Though the claim may be denied by some, the fact remains that poets and epic heroes are linked by accepted social nomenclature.\n\nA second element that links the poet to the epic, and specifically to the epic heroes, is that many heroes within the epic are portrayed as rab\u0101b-poets, and it is certainly no surprise that epic poets _within_ the epic are universally eloquent, generous, and courteous (see below, \"Reflections within the Epic\"). In fact, a constant commentary is constructed about relations between poets and the larger world when epic heroes within the poem disguise themselves as poets and are badly treated by the characters they meet. In the end, of course, those characters learn that the form of the humble poet conceals not only a master of history and of eloquence, but a brave and chivalrous hero.\n\nTime and again throughout the epic, the epic-hero-cum-poet sings within the epic. At the moment of performance these sections provide a unique mirroring of \"narrated\" and \"narrative\" event: a modern epic poet playing rab\u00e0b in front of an Egyptian audience sings of one of the epic heroes disguised as an epic poet playing the rab\u00e0b singing in front of an Egyptian audience.27\n\nFurther mirroring occurs at times because the poets of the Nile Delta are often named for heroes in the epic. Thus we may have a living poet Ab\u016b Zayd singing in the voice of the epic character Ab\u016b Zayd, or a living poet Bad\u012br singing in the voice of the epic character Bad\u012br. Two poets and several children in the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh community bear the names of heroes from the epic, as do several other poets throughout the Delta. Daughters may be named for female characters or linked directly to the poets' metier through the girl's name Rab\u00e0b. One poet, Shaykh Biyal\u012b, achieves even an iconic identification with the epic through his locally celebrated walrus mustache (see photographs in Chap. 3) which parallels the famous mustache of the epic hero Diy\u00e0b. In performance, whenever the hero is said to have \"twisted his mustache and laughed\" (barram haw\u0101ribuh wi-\u1e0di\u1e25ik), Shaykh Biyall also does so in a gesture that invariably elicits laughter and even cheers.\n\nOne final connection can be made from the fact that the poets, as do many Gypsy groups, possess a secret language, which they call _ra\u1e6d\u0101na_ , attested to by foreign researchers over the past 150 years.28 The heroes of the epic also possess a secret language (their local \u1e24ij\u0101z\u012b dialect) which plays a key role in several episodes. For the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, the existence and use of ra\u1e6d\u0101na constitutes another body of secret knowledge, along with their geographical origins, family names, and their verbal art.\n\nTo return momentarily then to the appellations used in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh to refer to poets:\n\nWe see now that the shared terms are those that function as publicly acknowledged links between the poets and their poetry, that is, their public source of respectability. The term _gh ajar_ is used in contrast to express the villagers' feeling of social superiority and their ambiguity toward the presence of the poets, while the term _\u1e25alab,_ unknown and unused among most villagers, can be read as emblematic of the poet community's efforts to maintain a restricted body of knowledge, power through secrecy, with which to offset the pejorative images held up by the larger society.\n\n##### _Reflections within the Epic_\n\nThe external links forged between poets and the epic tradition through use of the term \"Arab,\" the names they share with epic heroes, their domestic customs, and their use of a secret language are all found in reflected form within the epic poem. An examination of recorded texts from live performances reveals key moments at which the relationship between the poet inside and outside the poem is held up for scrutiny and then commented upon by performing poets.\n\nThe storyline of the episode titled \"The Maiden of the Languorous Eyes\" (N\u0101'isat al-ajf\u0101n), for example, is motivated entirely by a poet's performance, and during the subsequent events of the tale, the hero Ab\u016b Zayd travels several times disguised as a poet. His resulting heroic adventures and exploits unfold against the background of this disguise-identity of a rab\u0101b-poet:29\n\nAt the beginning of the episode, the famed poet Jam\u012bl 'Beautiful', son of R\u0101hid 'the Rightly Guided', and his three companions arrive at the Hil\u0101l\u012b camp. He is presented to Sultan \u1e24asan who asks the Poet Jam\u012bl to sing for the men gathered in his pavilion. The poet begins with praise for the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad, and then praises the heroes of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe for their bravery and generosity. The Poet Jamil sings for a number of nights and then announces his impending departure. The Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l assemble gifts for the poet and his companions; some give one camel, some give two, and some give ten. Sultan \u1e24asan reckons the worth of the Arabs' gifts and then adds their equal, doubling the poet's payment. But \u1e24asan grows proud ( _yifia khar_) upon seeing the wealth offered by his tribe and asks the poet if any of the kings and warriors who have hosted him have ever given him such a large gift. The poet evades the question the first time by thanking Sultan \u1e24asan profusely and wishing God's blessings upon him. Sultan \u1e24asan persists, however, and asks again. Finally, the poet grows angry and rebukes his patron, adding that in truth, \u1e24asan's gifts are the least he has received among the Arabs. He picks up his rab\u0101b and sings a long ode telling the tale of his life, a veritable oral autobiography, recounting how he became a poet, and describing all the kings and heroes for whom he has sung and, in particular, what their gifts to him were. His ode closes with the following phrases:30\n\n_Text 2.1_\n\nI have wandered the lands of Sind, and Hind (=India), and Yemen,\n\nI have gone to lands where elephants are ridden,\n\nBut I have not encountered fiercer than al-Zan\u0101t\u012b (of Tunisia) with his zeal,\n\nnor more generous than (King) Zayd al-'Aj\u0101j among men.\n\nAnd there are none more noble than this one and that one but our Prophet,\n\nthe Hashemite; for the weak (before God) He pleads.\"\n\n\u1e24asan is angered by this and accuses the poet of falsehood, but the poet retorts that King Zayd bestowed upon him a necklace whose jewels are as large as a dove's eggs the like of which has never been seen, which he then draws from his blouse as proof. Sultan \u1e24asan relents and asks the Poet Jamil to sing to him on the rab\u0101b the praises of this King Zayd. The poet sings praises of his past patron and in so doing mentions that King Zayd has no son, but only a daughter, the Maiden of the Languorous Eyes. She has been taught horsemanship and rides into battle, she has been taught the sciences and the recitation of the Qur'\u0101n, and she is without doubt the most beautiful woman alive. These words once again anger Hasan, for his sister, the heroine of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe, al-J\u00e0zya, is renowned for her beauty, wisdom, and horsemanship. He threatens to hang the poet. Ab\u016b Zayd (who has not been present until this point) hears of this travesty and reaches a compromise with \u1e24asan. He will personally travel to the kingdom of Zayd al-'Aj\u0101j to test the king's generosity and to discern if the daughter is as beautiful as she has been described. This willingness to suffer the hardships of the journey provokes laughter in most performances, for those listeners who know the tradition well sense that once again Ab\u016b Zayd's weakness for the ladies has got the best of him, and he intends nothing short of wooing and winning this maiden, whereupon follows the main story of \"The Maiden of the Languorous Eyes.\"\n\nA critical point about this scene is that the tale itself constructs a dialogue about the relationship between poet and patron which forms both the beginning and the ending of the tale. The Poet Jam\u012bl's autobiographical ode, inserted into this dialogue, begins with an account of his youth in Yemen and how he studied Qur'\u0101n, the religious sciences, prosody, and grammar, but then forsook all these pursuits once he \"tested\" ( _jarrab_ ) his voice on the rab\u0101b and found it \"full\" ( _maly\u0101n_ ). The art of poetry (and its power) is set in direct contrast to the worthy, but more common arts of a traditional religious education.\n\nJam\u012bl then departed, according to his song, with three of his relatives and traveled the world for forty years. His travels in fact foreshadow the coming reconnaissance trip of Ab\u016b Zayd and his three nephews (al-Riy\u0101da, part 2 of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ ), as well as the westward migration of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe as a whole ( _al-Taghr\u012bba,_ part 3). Jam\u012bl's lifestory recounts in miniature the journey that is told in more detail during the reconnaissance and in greatly expanded form during the tribe's migration. All of the future adversaries and allies of the tribe are listed and attributed with varying degrees of hospitality, sagacity, and generosity.31 Of all these princes, chiefs, and kings, the only patron who proved stingy was al-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa; on the other hand, he proved to be the fiercest warrior the poet ever encountered in his travels.\n\nAs Jam\u012bl reproaches \u1e24asan in song and lectures him on the proper behavior of patrons, it becomes difficult indeed to separate the voices of the poet inside and outside the epic; _we_ now sit in \u1e24asan's place as patrons of the epic. Differentiation of voice and addressee becomes even more difficult in the performing poet's explanatory prose asides to the audience, which comment directly on poets, patrons, and performances, as in this prose excursus from a performance of this scene by Shaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b (2\/14\/87). At several points the Arabic allows for either a present- or past-tense reading, both of which are indicated:\n\n_Text 2.2_\n\n_Narrative:_\n\nSo (\u1e24asan) said to him, \"O Poet Jam\u012bl.\"\n\nHe said to him, \"Yes, O Father of 'Al\u012b [=\u1e24asan].\"\n\nHe said to him, \"You have journeyed among many people, the great ones among the noble Arabs\u2014has anyone bestowed gifts upon you and treated you as generously as have I and my Arabs?\"\n\n_Excursus:_\n\nNow the poet was [is] of great politesse32. The poet was [is] of great politesse, for every poet who picks up the rab\u0101b is of great politesse. Why? Because he sits with good people [ _n\u0101s \u1e6dayyib\u012bn_ ]. Because a poet never possesses bad manners. He travels with his rab\u0101b. I do not laud poets merely because I am a poet! [laughter from audience]\u2014it is because the histories [ _riw\u0101y\u0101t_ ] tell us so! The poet was [is] of great politesse. Were he not of great politesse, he would never pick up the rab\u00e0b and sit with good people. How could he be a poet of kings and Arabs and be impolite? He was [is] of great politesse. And the audience [al-qa'da], as well, when they listenfed] to a poet, they were [are], as well, the pinnacle of respectfulness.\n\n_Narrative:_\n\nSo \u1e24asan looked at him like this, and said to him, \"O Poet Jam\u012bl.\"\n\nHe said to him, \"Yes.\"\n\nHe said to him, \"You have journeyed among many people, the great ones among the noble Arabs\u2014has anyone bestowed gifts upon you and treated you as generously as I and my Arabs have?\"\n\nThe Poet Jam\u012bl looked at him.\n\nWe said that the poet was of great politesse, that is, polite.\n\nHe said to him, \"O Father of 'Al\u012b, you are like the river Nile, and the nobles among whom we have traveled are like Nile rivers. And the river, in it is regular water [ _miy\u0101h_ ] and pure water [ _zul\u0101l_ ], but one [part of the] river cannot be preferred over the next [part].\"\n\nIf only he had cut short his talk and fallen silent, that \u1e24asan . . . the poet had given him a beautiful answer with good judgment.\n\nBut with \u1e24asan's insistence, as we have seen, the poet must finally drop his courteous evasions and tell the truth, which brings about the rest of the tale. Sultan \u1e24asan is a character normally marked by his evenhandedness in dispensing justice, his skill as an arbitrator, his authority, honor, and religious devotion. Yet as patron, he falls easily into the trap of overestimating his own generosity, of underestimating the worth of the poet, and of denigrating the poet's social status and position. Though this tale is basically one of the tales of courtship and marriage (there are a half dozen such episodes in which each of the great heroes ventures forth and wins himself a bride), the frame of this episode places the relationship between poet and patron at issue; though Ab\u016b Zayd eventually returns with a new bride, he also returns to castigate Sultan Hasan and exonerate the Poet Jam\u012bl.\n\nOf course not all performances of this scene contain such explicit commentaries by the performing poet; they are scarcely needed at this point, for the narrative itself overtly juxtaposes good and bad patrons, and the poet is eventually proven to be a man of honor and veracity.\n\nA little later in the same story, Ab\u016b Zayd travels disguised as an epic poet to visit King Zayd al-'Aj\u0101j. On his way he meets and joins a caravan of merchants, who welcome the new member of their group and ask that he entertain them. They drink heavily and fall asleep while Ab\u016b Zayd is singing. Suddenly they are attacked by a lion larger than a bull; the merchants flee, yelling, \"Run, poet, run for your life!\" Ab\u016b Zayd, however, draws his sword, kills the lion, slits open its belly, and eats its liver. The merchants and their brave \"poet\" continue on their route. They soon come to the land of Marw\u0101n al-'Uqayl\u012b, cousin to the seven kings of the 'Uqayla tribe whom Ab\u016b Zayd killed earlier in the epic. Marw\u0101n has been warned by a geomancer that Ab\u016b Zayd the Hil\u0101l\u012b will cross his kingdom and so blocks the road. He demands that the merchants identify Ab\u016b Zayd, but they explain that their only traveling companion is nothing but a rab\u0101b-poet. Marw\u0101n guesses that the poet is Ab\u016b Zayd and attacks him. Ab\u016b Zayd seizes a horse, rides against Marw\u0101n, and eventually kills him. The merchants are now terrified of Ab\u016b Zayd and apologize for their earlier disrespectful behavior, for which Ab\u016b Zayd graciously forgives them. The \"poet\" is revealed to be a hero, and those who felt themselves his social superiors are recast as characters indebted to the hero for their very safety and well-being. It takes little imagination to see that the constant narrative equation of hero and poet implies the reverse as well: as heroes are also poets, so poets are also somehow heroes. _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l,_ at this level, is a continuous discourse of heroic poets and poetic heroes.\n\nThe opening scene of \"The Maiden of the Langourous Eyes\" thus sets up a commentary on the relationship between poet and patron through the characters of the Poet Jam\u012bl and Sultan \u1e24asan the Hil\u0101l\u012b. This commentary lies not only within the narrative, but is regularly exteriorized by performing epic poets in their prose asides to the audience. In the subsequent events of the tale, when Ab\u016b Zayd travels with the merchants disguised as a poet, the action of the narrative projects a reciprocal correlation between poet and hero, representative of a larger equation of poets and heroes that is maintained not only in the epic narrative, but also in the exterior world of village social life.\n\n##### _Poet, Patron, and Sexual Taboo_\n\nAnother episode of the epic provides an even more complex negotiation of relationships between the figures of poet, hero, and patron within a frame of honor, shame, and sexual taboo. This scene also normally meets with a great deal of response from male audience members; they laugh, shout comments, and even make overtly sexual remarks and jokes.\n\nIn the \"Tale of \u1e24an\u1e0dal the 'Uqayl\u012b,\" King \u1e24an\u1e0dal treacherously attacks the camp of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l at night while it is defended only by the elder heroes of the tribe (the younger heroes are in Mecca fighting a war against \u1e24arqal\u012b, son of Dayh\u0101n). \u1e24an\u1e0dal kills off one by one, in battle, the generation of the fathers, pillages the camp, and seizes eighty maidens of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe as captives. The maidens are held in the 'Uqayl\u012b camp, where they are forced to wear camel-hair shirts, are beaten morning and night, made to carry waterskins during the day, and forced to dance in \u1e24an\u1e0dal's pavilion in the evening as entertainment for his men. When the young heroes return from Mecca, they find they are now the leaders of the tribe, the camps of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l have been decimated, and, worst of all, the honor of the tribe is at stake, for the maidens of the tribe are captives in \u1e24an\u1e0dal's court. This episode is thus a major turning point in the epic, as the narrative focus passes from the initial generation of heroes to their children, who will occupy center stage until the final episodes of the epic.\n\nRather than declare war immediately, which \u1e24an\u1e0dal surely expects, Ab\u016b Zayd decides to travel to \u1e24an\u1e0dal's realm, disguised once again as a poet, to discover the whereabouts of the Hil\u0101l\u012b maidens and to reconnoiter. As he nears \u1e24an\u1e0dal's pavilion he sees the maidens carrying waterskins, signals his identity to them, and speaks to them in their secret tongue. Ab\u016b Zayd then enters the pavilion, presents himself, and is received as a wandering poet. Handal asks the visiting poet if he is adept at describing women and proposes that the poet describe the captive maidens in verse. He orders the maidens brought before him and commands them to dance. Upon seeing the maidens, Ab\u016b Zayd begins to weep, and Handal asks him why. Ab\u016b Zayd responds that he weeps at Handal's dim-wittedness: how can he ask a poet to describe maidens dressed in camel-hair shirts? Handal orders the maidens bathed and dressed in the finest of silks. They reenter the pavilion, and Ab\u016b Zayd sings their description:33\n\n_Text 2.3_\n\n\"You have, O \u1e24an\u1e0dal, eighty maidens, 1\n\nEach maiden more resplendent than the moon in (the month of) ha'b\u0101n.\n\n\"O their heads are the dainty heads of doves, 2\n\nAnd their hair flows down their shirts.\n\n\"Their arms are like silvery swords 3\n\nIn the hand of a warrior descending to the field.\n\n\"Their cheeks are rose petals, exalted be He who fashioned them! 4\n\nThe fashioning of the Master, the One, the Glorious!\n\n\"If they walked on the sea the very fish would chirp; 5\n\nIf a shaykh saw them his saintliness would fly.\n\nIf a learned man saw them he would forget the Qur'\u0101n;\n\n\"If the cloth-vendor saw them (May he be recompensed!) 6\n\nHe would reckon fine wool as plain calico!\n\n\"We are sitting here in the pavilion of prosperity, O King \u1e24an\u1e0dal; 7\n\nMay God assist you! A well-built pavilion,\n\na well-built pavilion, O your Excellency the Sultan,\n\n(with) marvelous furnishings!\n\n\"In it are water-pitchers of crystal, beautiful to the thirsty one; 8\n\n(And) faucets of silver (from which) a river of pure water flows.\n\n\"We are sitting in your pavilion, 9\n\nMay God improve your state, \u1e24an\u1e0dal, O Sultan.\"\n\nKing \u1e24an\u1e0dal looked at Ab\u016b Zayd and said to him, 10\n\n\"Welcome, O Poet of the Arabs.\n\n\"You will have from us silver, you will have from us gold, 11\n\nYou will have from us horses, along with camels.\n\n\"The land is your land, O Poet of the Arabs, 12\n\nThe land is your land and the country is your country.\n\nAnd we are for you, sir, servants and slaves.\"\n\n_Spoken:_\n\nAb\u016b Zayd said, \"Many thanks, O King \u1e24an\u1e0dal, 13\n\n(but) why do you give me silver, why do you give me gold?\n\n_Sung:_\n\n\"Let my gift be one of these maidens of heavenly features, 14\n\nTo serve your grandfather the poet an elderly, worn-out man.\"\n\n\u1e24an\u1e0dal answered Ab\u016b Zayd and said to him: 15\n\n\"Take Rayya, Daughter of Ab\u016b Zayd, O Poet of the Arabs.\"\n\n_Spoken aside to audience:_\n\n(We said that Ab\u016b Zayd had married Butayma, the sister of Diy\u0101b, after he married 'Alya the Za\u1e25laniyya who had been with him since long ago, and he had with her three boys and a girl: \u1e62abra, and Mukhaymar, and 'Akrama, and Rayya.)\n\n_Sung:_\n\n\"Please take Rayya, Daughter of Ab\u016b Zayd, from me as a gift, 16\n\nAnd may she live with you, O Prince, throughout time.\n\n\"Please take Rayya, Daughter of Ab\u016b Zayd, from me as a gift, 17\n\nAnd may she live with you, by God, O Prince, throughout time.\n\n\"Heavens! When you take Rayya, O Poet of the Arabs, 18\n\nYour gray hair and your years will disappear!\n\nYou will be once again a youth like long ago!\"\n\nAb\u016b Zayd gave a signal to Rayya, 19\n\nShe came forward.\n\n_Spoken:_\n\n\u1e24an\u1e0dal went over and grabbed Rayya by her arms, 20\n\nAnd said, \"Take her for yourself, O Poet of the Arabs!\n\n_Sung:_\n\n\"And may she live with you, O Prince, in peace. 21\n\nAnd may she live with you, by God, O Prince, in peace.\"  \n[Music]\n\nRayya, daughter of Ab\u016b Zayd, came forward and clinched the trick: 22\n\nShe said to him, \"Shut up, O Coward! It never was and will not be!\n\nO \u1e24an\u1e0dal, O Treacherous One!\n\n\"I am the daughter of Ab\u016b Zayd, Shaykh of the Arabs, 23\n\nThe daughter of the Shaykh of the Arabs, Ab\u016b Zayd!\n\nYou'd give me to a rab\u012bb-poet who wanders among the Arabs?\n\n\"I am the daughter of Ab\u016b Zayd, Shaykh of the Arabs, 24\n\nPossessor of heroism (lit. father of heroism) from long ago.\n\n\"When my father Ab\u016b Zayd the Hil\u0101l\u012b learns of this, 25\n\nHe'll cause your blood on the ground in floods [to flow]!\"\n\nAb\u016b Zayd initiates this poem by describing the Hil\u0101l\u012b maidens in a \"blazon,\" a list of bodily parts each of which is described by simile or metaphor.34 He then suggests that their beauty is so great that all natural boundaries of propriety would vanish at their sight\u2014a foreshadowing of the unnatural and improper suggestions which follow. He concludes, after having also briefly described the king's pavilion, by wishing God's blessings on his patron, Handal the 'Uqayl\u012b.\n\n\u1e24an\u1e0dal is well pleased and offers the poet rich gifts: silver and gold, horses and camels. Ab\u016b Zayd, however, puts forward the slightly scandalous suggestion that he instead be awarded one of the maidens of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l as a gift. \u1e24an\u1e0dal then unwittingly proposes the unthinkable in offering Rayya to her own father, and then, in not very elliptical terms, further suggests their sexual union. Rayya immediately rejects the proposed coupling, not on the basis that the poet is her father (which she presumably cannot reveal), but on the basis that she is the daughter of a hero and therefore cannot be given to a mere poet.\n\nAb\u016b Zayd appears in this narrative, as in many episodes of the epic, as an ambiguous, bifaceted figure who unites both poet and hero in a single character. In this scene, however, the \"real\" Ab\u016b Zayd (i.e., the epic hero publicly recognized as Ab\u016b Zayd) is absent, and this basic duality is represented in two characters: the poet element of his persona is present in the form of the disguised Ab\u016b Zayd, while his daughter, Rayya, lays public claim to his heroic aspect.\n\nAb\u016b Zayd in disguise here is reduced to playing only \"the poet\" and not the unified hero\/poet. This idea is supported by the subsequent events of the tale in which the poet's true identity is discovered, but rather than emerging immediately as the hero Ab\u016b Zayd as is his wont, he is promptly tossed into \u1e24an\u1e0dal's prison. That is, he is _not_ unveiled as a poet and revealed as a hero (as when Ab\u016b Zayd in the \"The Maiden of the Languorous Eyes\" leaps up to fight the lion, or seizes a horse and rides into battle against Marw\u0101n the 'Uqayl\u012b), but rather is unveiled as a poet and proves curiously unable to demonstrate heroism; he is instead led impotently off to a prison cell.\n\nRayya, as Ab\u016b Zayd's daughter, lays genetic claim to Ab\u016b Zayd's heroic aspect by citing her father as \"possessor of heroism,\" quite literally in the Arabic, \"father of heroism\" ( _ab\u016b ba\u1e6d\u016bla_ ). Thus she genealogically designates herself as the daughter of the father of heroism, a displacement in which she overtly equates herself with heroic action, an equation acted out in her defiance of King \u1e24an\u1e0dal.\n\nAs the hero's maiden daughter, Rayya is futhermore a primary conventional locus for her father's honor in quite ordinary, quotidian social terms. For though a man may achieve honor through his own heroic actions in raids and battles, his paramount social duty and function is to defend that honor which is physically resident in the women of his household, most particularly in the persons of unmarried women such as younger sisters and daughters.\n\nAs shown in figure 4, Rayya and the poet, sundered aspects of the hero\/poet Ab\u016b Zayd, are repositioned as emblems of the complementary aspects of heroic honor: Rayya physically personifies her father's honor, both in conventional social terms and through her genealogical descent from his heroism; the poet is the disseminator of that honor, honor that cannot spring independently from heroic deeds but must be given voice and form by the poet. \u1e24an\u1e0dal's proposition is thus unthinkable on several levels:\n\n_Figure 4._ Bifurcation of the epic hero\n\n(1) Quite obviously Rayya cannot be joined with the poet, for he is in fact her father; the tensions created by \u1e24an\u1e0dal's incestuous suggestions are clear.\n\n(2) This basic sexual taboo is furthermore overlaid with, and thus reinforces, Rayya's claim that she cannot bejoined to the poet because she is the daughter of a \"father of heroism.\" The father\/daughter opposition therefore suggests a second antithesis, that of poet and hero who cannot bejoined (incestuous union?) except in the original space created by the character of the epic hero.\n\n(3) Poet and hero are joined in the figure of Ab\u016b Zayd; however, the union of Heroism (via Rayya) and Poesis (via the Poet) at the instigation of the Patron (Handal) is rejected and held up as an object of comic parody. \u1e24an\u1e0dal is a villain, a man without honor, and his attempt at largesse and generosity as patron cannot, in fact, bring about the desired union of heroism and poesis: he cannot create honor where none exists, even when fulfilling, at least in form, the obligations of patron. He only believes himself to possess the marks of honor, which we, the audience, recognize as stolen (the captured maidens) or counterfeit (a court poet who is an enemy in disguise); inducing the poet to describe that captured prize produces a mocking, not a laudatory, poem. Ab\u016b Zayd literally sings and describes his own honor (his daughter), not that of the credulous patron.\n\nOn another level, however, the impossibility of this union also suggests that Ray y a and the poet are two like forces. For the poet is to some degree a feminized male; he complements the hero (as do the hero's female dependents), and, although he is a necessary part of the hero's honor (as are wives and daughters), he is in fact dependent\u2014on both hero and patron. He is a man dependent on men. He is a man who does not ride into battle where independent honor may be achieved, but rather carries his \"weapon\" (the ra\u0101b), which is precisely _not_ a sword, into the arena where such honor is vicariously celebrated. Such is the ambiguity of the panegyric poet: a figure with no heroic deeds on which to base his own honor, yet indispensable for the process of propagating the honor of heroes. He is both powerful and powerless. A union between two forces which are both essential complements to the male hero (female dependent and male dependent) is posed here as impossible, unmergable.\n\nThe act of publicly describing the maidens in poetry here represents a highly significant moment. Such descriptions occur fairly frequently within the epic, but they are usually presented to us in the voice of the performing poet, that is, in the narrator's voice, as background material presented for the benefit, or titillation, of the male audience. Such descriptions of women are only placed in the mouth of a character within the epic and sung publicly during scenes of humiliation such as the one we are examining. The poet in the scene has thus usurped our own poet's role; he is playing to \u1e24an\u1e0dal and his men as our own poet usually plays to his patron and audience. We may therefore reread the poetic description of the maidens in still another manner, as an indication of an act of male alliance and bonding which takes place between the Poet, the Patron, and the Audience, a collusive bonding which excludes females and asserts the masculinity of the epic project. Poet and Patron conspire to dismember and assert power over the possessed women for their mutual entertainment; an act produced within the story for \u1e24an\u1e0dal and his men, and reproduced by our poet for the men of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and their visiting male ethnographer. Though the act of describing beautiful maidens through poetic \"blazon\" is one that recurs with great regularity throughout the epic, no similar description of males, even when they are portrayed as devastatingly handsome (as in \"Tale of 'Az\u012bza and Y\u016bnus,\" for example), ever occurs.\n\nFrom the audience's point of view, \u1e24an\u1e0dal's proposal is framed, of course, as comic, a parody, for not only do we, the audience, and the maidens already know the true identity of the \"poet,\" but Ab\u016b Zayd in addition signals to Rayya before she comes forward to sing her response. We are told that Rayya steps forward to \"clinch the trick.\" This sham is being played out for King \u1e24an\u1e0dal, and we are privy to it; we in the audience are led to understand that the scene is one of mockery\u2014not, as \u1e24an\u1e0dal intends, humiliation of the captive maidens and indirectly of their menfolk, but rather of the patron himself.\n\nThe dynamic is one of collusion, not only a collusion of males encircling possessed female objects, but also a complex maneuver in which the roles of poet, hero, and patron are being played out at several levels, for there are two poets here, one inside and one outside the narrative, and likewise two patrons and two audiences\u2014a moment of complete duplication.\n\nAb\u016b Zayd and Rayya are in collusion within the tale, which produces the comic aspect of this scene and consistently focuses its impact on the patron, the butt of the joke. But the performing poet and the audience of this performance event in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh are also positioned in parallel collusion against \u1e24an\u1e0dal, the unworthy patron, whom we understand to be mocked.\n\nThe parallel collusions in figure 5 between Rayya and Ab\u016b Zayd, and the performing poet and his present audience, are placed in opposition to the performance \u1e24an\u1e0dal believes he is presenting as entertainment to his male companions within the narrative. The father\/daughter, poesis\/heroism, and female dependent\/male dependent oppositions, outlined earlier, all underline the impossibility of \u1e24an\u1e0dal's desires to be a real patron and to have his honor publicly lauded. The result is a parody of the noble and meritorious act of patronizing poets with public displays of generosity.\n\n_S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ , as it is currently performed in the region of the Nile Delta, achieves a great deal of its force and popularity by commenting upon, and negotiating, the very situations, characters, behaviors, and morals that create it. The implications of this negotation are most sharply seen in the ambiguities that surround the public persona of the poet in the larger community, and the gap that exists between that persona and the private persona nurtured within the poets' smaller community. Although all representations may to some degree comment on themselves, as all narratives may at some level be read as autobiography, the intensity and form of the relationship(s) that obtain between the poet inside and outside the epic in this tradition suggest a particularly rich domain for examining and questioning our current conceptualization of the boundaries between \"text\" and \"context.\"\n\n_Figure 5_. Performance Collusions\n\nEach of the elements cited earlier serve to link the poet to his poem; they do not, however, successfully counter all of the factors that constitute the mistrusted persona of the epic poet. The epic singer is usually a Gypsy with no known asl or origin. He owns no agricultural land, he is itinerant, he has specific customs which differ from those of the fell\u0101\u1e25\u012bn, yet he bears a tradition the villagers claim as their own and he also wields power in performance by commenting on village affairs while singing the epic (as we shall see in later chapters), which makes him all the more a source of tension.35\n\nThough music's position vis-\u00e0-vis official Islam has always been ambiguous, in the context of the village the poets' connection to music does not appear to contribute to the forces that set them apart.36 Two family groups of professional musicians in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh are from ordinary villager families rather than \u1e24alab-poet families. One is a family of instrumentalists who perform at saints' festivals and other occasions; the other consists of a father-and-son team of singers who perform at local weddings. The members of these families are not perceived as outsiders (their extended families all live in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh), nor are the performers ostracized because of their chosen profession. For them, music is a profession rather than an identity.\n\nGiven the socially negative connotations of being an epic poet, and the diminishing contexts for performance which we examine in Chapter 3, it is not surprising to find that the men of the youngest generation in the poets' community have abandoned the poet's profession and are openly seeking to assimilate. The youngest performing poets (with one exception) are in their late forties and early fifties. The next generation, that is, men in their thirties and early forties, were trained as poets in their youth but have taken up new occupations. For example, during my first period of fieldwork in 1983 \u1e62al\u0101\u1e25 'Abd al-Sal\u0101m the Poet was still a performing poet. By the time I returned in 1986, he had given up the poet's trade to go work in construction and would no longer play or record. Men in their twenties, such as \u1e62al\u0101\u1e25's younger brother, have never learned the epic and cannot even play the rab\u0101b. They spoke to me with pride of their lack of knowledge of the epic tradition and often added that they had hardly ever even heard their fathers perform. Nearly all of the male children and teenagers of the poets' community are currently enrolled in school. It is hoped that these young men will be able to provide for the others when _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ ceases to provide an income for the community.\n\nThough I spoke many times with older poets about the disappearance of the epic and the abandonment of the poets' calling, their reactions were usually pragmatic: _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is no longer in great demand and no longer provides enough money to feed a family. Thus it is considered a good thing that the young men are finding other jobs, and even better that the children are going to school (all of the performing poets are illiterate and never acquired any schooling other than rote memorization of sections from the Qur'\u0101n). Only rarely were comments made expressing regret over this development. The fear lurking behind the disappearance of the epic lies much more with the possible complete dissolution of their community. As Shaykh Mu\u1e25ammad A\u1e25mad said to me a few weeks before his death, \"When no one is singing the s\u012bra any longer, what will become of the 'children of \u1e24alab' [ _wil\u0101d \u1e25alab_ ]?\n\n##### _Social Context and the Performance Tradition_\n\nThe most fundamental questions that remain to be asked about the relationship between greater and smaller communities in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh are why social outsiders such as the \u1e24alab have come to bear a narrative tradition that is seen as the history and property of the larger community and how their social role has affected that narrative tradition.\n\nIn many societies around the world, performers of various sorts are socially marginalized. As purveyors of music, theater, or dance, as itinerant elements in an otherwise fixed social pattern, they are often unofficially, sometimes even officially, disenfranchised. In some cases the performer may achieve some measure of respectability through association with a respected art form; in other cases a particularly interesting social tension arises from social sanctioning of the art form but not of the performer. The performance of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ in Egypt is clearly a case of the latter situation.\n\nWe have no reliable data about the origins of the \u1e24alab poets of the Nile Delta, nor about the date of their arrival in Egypt.37 Given the strong parallels between the epic singers of northern Egypt and socially marginalized performers elsewhere, however, some speculation about the epic singers' situation seems possible.\n\nJozsef Vekerdi, examining the case of Gypsies in Hungary, has drawn some basic conclusions:\n\n[The Gypsies] live in less developed social and cultural conditions than their actual non-Gypsy environment. When they were settled in the neighbourhood of the villages or when their wandering groups came into contact with the peasantry of country, the contact being indispensable for their livelihood, they commonly adopted elements of the folk-culture of the non-Gypsy community. In the course of time the economic and social life of the village developed and the old traditions sank into oblivion. However, [they] . . . rarely participated in the overall social economic development experienced by the non-Gypsy community. They continued to live in the old manner and continued to preserve the peasant folklore which they had borrowed when arriving at the village. This creates a paradoxical situation in which the Gypsy groups ultimately become the conservators of non-Gypsy traditions.38\n\nHere Vekerdi essentially expresses the argument of marginal preservation. He is particularly concerned with folk music and folktales; he is not, for the most part, dealing with genres that involve professional or semiprofessional performers. His writing is also marked by a strong desire to see all good examples of ballads and folk music as originally Hungarian, and he unfortunately couples his actual data with strongly negative views about the role of Gypsy tradition-bearers and more than a little romanticism about non-Gypsy transmission. Despite this marked bias, the concept of marginal preservation among Gypsy groups must be set forth and evaluated. In the case of the epic singers of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, however, the tradition appears to function within a different dynamic. Their attachment to specific customs and traditions seems to be involved in the poets' sense of separateness from the larger society, that is, an aspect of differential identity, and seems to be specifically engaged with the Arabic concept of asl, or origin, through the establishment of a persona that is more Arab than that of neighboring social groups.39\n\nMarginal preservation, however, also does not fully explicate the development of a professional group for the performance of a single specific tradition, and there is little evidence for assuming that the performance of the folk siyar in Egypt was ever common among nonmarginal social groups. Margaret Beissinger has examined the marginality of performers of epic and heroic poetry in a number of Balkan and central Asian societies and argues that this very marginality, the liminality of the performer, is what enables him or her to guide the audience into the liminal world of the past, the underworld, or the fantasy world of acknowledged fictional tales.40\n\nThis argument strikes me as tenable within the context of the Nile Delta epic-singing tradition as well, for the _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performance tradition clearly thrives on the symbiotic relationship that exists between the poet and the poem. The singer is perceived as a direct link to the tale he narrates; in a vague, undefined way he is somehow an extension of the very characters of whom he sings. The constant insertion of scenes where singer and hero conflate into a single performing poet continually strengthens this perception. Who better to narrate the world of rab\u0101b-wielding poets and Arab heroes than an \"Arab\" poet wielding his rab\u0101b?\n\nThere can be little doubt that the sociological interaction of these two communities, one essentially a community of purveyors of a tradition, the other essentially consumers of that tradition, has contributed greatly to the shaping and formation of the performance tradition itself.\n\nTo begin with, the moment of performance must be a moment of power reversal, for the outcast is now center stage and the dominant force in this social setting. In recent years this role reversal has become even stronger, for the performance, particularly the sahra, or evening gathering, realigns the roles of many audience members as well. Underlying the entire performance situation is a network of relationships created in the social environment of daily life, relationships of power and identity most visible in the reversals wrought upon them in the performance situation. The poet, in daily life an outsider, becomes central and powerful in performance. Though the poet is respectful to high-status or wealthy villagers as patrons or potential patrons, he may, as performing poet, cut off someone who is speaking (unacceptable in daily life) or wield poetry to comment on those present or current conditions in the village or elsewhere. The poet literally obtains a voice in performance which he is denied in daily life.\n\nA similar reversal of status and power takes place within the audience. In ordinary life the middle-aged educated and young highly educated villagers have seized status and power from more traditional groups. In a sahra of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ , the lowest of the low, the poets, emerge on top, followed by their coteries of traditional-minded listeners\u2014older men with little or no education, who are given outward respect but do not wield power in the village, men who practice traditional folk forms of Islam (confreres in the Sufi brotherhoods, kutt\u0101b-educated men, etc.). Educated audience members are welcome, but their criticism, if voiced, is refuted through one or more channels during the performance (see Chap. 5). Though in an earlier period this might not have been true (that is, it does not appear that in the past the upper class of the village denigrated the epic but rather patronized it), the sahra of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ currently is framed as a gathering of conservative, traditionally minded members of the community. To listen to the epic in a public recitation such as a wedding is a very different thing from organizing or attending a private performance (sahra).\n\nThis perception of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ as ally to conservative and traditionalist forces in Arab society has been most poignantly expressed in the final line of one of the most famous poems of modern Arabic literature, Niz\u0101r Qabb\u0101n\u012b's \"Bread, Hashish, and Moon\" (Khubz, \u1e25ah\u012bh waqamar). The poet muses ironically on the power of the moon, here reminiscent of the floriated style of classical Arabic odes composed and addressed to the poet's Beloved, and the numbing force of hashish, traditional music, and fatalism, while misery and the daily search for bread occupy the lives of millions. The poem in full is a powerful statement about the modern Arab world's relationship to the Arabic artistic tradition, and its final passage (quoted here) exemplifies why the s\u012bra is often regarded with suspicion and even disdain among intellectuals and in urban areas:\n\nIn my country\n\nWhere fools weep\n\nAnd die weeping\n\nWhenever the face of the crescent moon rises over them . . .\n\nAnd their weeping increases\n\nWhenever the sound of some lowly lute moves them . . .\n\nor a voice intoning, \"O Night!\"\n\n\u2014that death we call in the East\n\n_Lay\u0101l\u012b_ \u2014or the sound of song . . .\n\nIn my country . . .\n\nIn my country of simple people\n\nWhere we mull over our unending _taw\u0101sh\u012b\u1e25_ chants\n\n\u2014that consumption which ravages the East,\n\nthose lengthy refrains of the _taw\u0101sh\u012b\u1e25_ \u2014\n\nOur East that mulls over its history\n\nLethargic dreams\n\nAnd empty legends\n\nOur East that seeks all of its heroism\n\nIn Ab\u016b-Zayd al-Hil\u0101l\u012b41\n\nI posited earlier that the retention by the poets' families of certain dying domestic customs and traditions has more to with establishing a sense of asl than with mere marginal preservation. Another performance phenomenon may also be attributed to this same motivation. The poets do not publicly participate in the genealogical history of the village, that is, the villagers do not locate the poets within the on-going system of marital and blood relations. A poet is identified merely as a poet, not as an individual member of a larger family and clan. The older poets, however, are experts on the subject of the genealogical warp and weave of the village. Tea breaks during sahra-performances are often filled with detailed accounts of the families of every listener present. Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b, in particular, is able to amaze audience members with his knowledge of their relations once he has placed them, for he often does not recognize the younger men right away. When the sahra includes a group of older men, the conversation may fill an hour before there is any pause in the proceedings. This material is never requested by the audience and does not constitute a recognizable, named genre for either audience members or poets. It occurs with such regularity, however, that it must be accounted for as part of the overall performance tradition. Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b usually starts by asking some newcomer who he is: \"Whose son are you?\" And, after the initial response, the poet launches into the show.\n\nIsn't your grandfather so-and-so, and your grandmother so-and-so? And your father's the youngest of the bunch, his brothers\u2014\u2014, \u2014\u2014, and\u2014\u2014are all older, right? You're too young to have known your oldest uncle, eh? Well, I'll tell you, he was a fine man. The whole village wept when he died. And _your_ grandfather [pointing to somebody else], he died the next day. That week we went to the cemetery four times, and each time for a fine man. Are you married yet? Whose daughter have you taken? She's your cousin that one, right?\n\nMoving from one listener to the next he very often succeeds in linking every person present into his patter. There is no formalized tradition of reciting genealogy in Egypt; there are no griots or other figures who specialize in family lines or history. These displays of genealogical virtuosity are the only performances of their kind in this society.\n\nBeyond its entertainment value, there are certain pragmatic reasons for the poets to possess this extensive genealogical knowledge. Listeners are pleased and complimented to find out that they and their families are known, and perhaps even more pleased to have this knowledge recited in public (usually with many compliments about deceased members of the clan). Also, this data is the raw material for a key genre of entertainment, _\u1e25itat balad\u012b_ 'bits of country stuff or 'local color' (see Chap. 4). But the immense amount of detail and the enthusiasm with which this information is performed support the argument that this knowledge of village genealogy and history is also a vicarious participation in asl, a sense of roots and origins which, though not theirs in the eyes of the world, allows the poets to participate in and associate with the communal history and cohesion of the village. When the poet achieves his voice in performance, he often uses it to establish the idea that he belongs to, is a member of, this community.\n\nAnother common theme for tea break conversations is the narration of triumphal performances of the past, the poet's own heroic exploits, as it were. Several stories were well enough known that audience members would request them during tea and cigarette breaks. Common motifs are found in all the poets' repertories of such performance tales: audiences that refused to let them stop singing well past the dawn call to prayer; villages they visited where the audiences refused to let them move on and insisted that they stay on, performing every night for weeks on end; strange and unusual events that took place during performances such as deaths and omens; performances where other poets were performing nearby but the audience members refused to leave the narrator's performance. These and many other short narratives lasting from a few minutes to half an hour are told and retold between sections of the epic.\n\nOne such tale told by Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b (and summarized from two tellings) is about the curious death of one of his patrons:\n\nShaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b used to perform for a very rich Christian land-owner\u2014he owned nine hundred fadd\u0101ns (one fadd\u0101n equals approximately one acre), his sister seven hundred, and his other sister seven hundred. Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b used to go to him every year during the cotton harvest; they would set up a _\u1e63\u012bw\u0101n_ 'pavilion', and Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b would play. This Christian had built a mosque for the Muslims where the coffee was free, and the tea was free, and the food and whatever one wanted. See how generous he was ( _h \u016bf il-karam_)! One year Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b did not come, but the patron sent a letter for him saying, \"Why hasn't Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b come? Where is he?\" And when Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b arrived, the patron met him with hugs and asked, \"So where have you been?\"\n\nThe government took all of the patron's land except for two hundred fadd\u0101ns (in the land reforms of the 1950s) and his station in life changed ( _\u1e25\u0101luh it ghayyar_). When Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b went to him he still set up a \u1e63\u012bw\u0101n and everything, but not like the other years. There came a time (everyone was eating and listening and enjoying themselves), and he said, \"Tonight I shall die.\" He told his servants, \"Go tell the people who are outside.\" And he went to sleep and died. May God have mercy on him!\n\nHis wife was in Cairo, with the children. He had five sons\u2014that's not counting the daughters. They loaded his body into a car and took him to Cairo. As soon as they arrived at the house the wife came out and she screamed, \"My son, my son, they've brought your father dead! Your father has died!\" She knew even before they told her.\n\nAnother such tale (summarized from numerous tellings) presents the encounter of Shaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd Tawf\u012bq with the famous Cairene composer, singer, and musician Muhammad 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b:\n\nShaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd was down in Cairo, and Mu\u1e25ammad 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b's chauffeur was sitting in a caf\u00e9 and heard the Shaykh performing outside in the street. The driver called him over and asked if he knew any music by Mu\u1e25ammad 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b. He knew a bit. The driver took him (around midnight) to Mu\u1e25ammad 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b's house in Zamalek, where there was a large circular stairway in a big building. When they arrived, Mu\u1e25ammad 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b was entertaining guests, so the driver sat him on a chair in the entryway. When they brought him into the room people laughed. Mu\u1e25ammad 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b came over and frankly laughed, then asked Shaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd to play, but just music, not singing. Shaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd played and eventually squeezed in a melody by Muhammad 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b, who laughed again and said, \"What is this, have you stolen my music?\" Shaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd replied, \"We are honored by it.\" Mu\u1e25ammad 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b gave him a large sum (large, that is, to Shaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd), and asked if he had eaten. He took him aside and had him served supper: \"a big piece of fish with no skin and no bones [ _h \u014dk_]\u2014like a piece of meat!\" Then he left. But it was now two o'clock in the morning and the last trains had already gone. So he went and spent the night in a _\u1e25amm\u0101m_ 'a Turkish bath'. He bathed in hot and cold water and slept, all for five ta'rifa (2\u00bd piastres, which is about one-fourth of a U.S. cent)!42\n\nIn recent decades a much larger portion of the population of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh has been out and about in the world\u2014to Alexandria, Cairo, the Sinai, Yemen, the Gulf, and other places, for work, military service, or just travel. But it is easy to imagine that, only decades ago, the tales poets told of performances in strange parts of the country, and of strange sights seen and heard about, were part of the overall appeal of poets' performances. Such tales also clearly establish the credentials of the performing poet and serve as a form of self-aggrandizement\u2014the norm in a performance situation where listeners only pay what they wish as they exit.\n\nAnother remnant of this role is found in the poets' expertise in local dialects. When the topic comes up in conversation, they often present a string of dozens of examples and usually remain unchallenged by other participants. Several of the poets have a habit of repeating verses that contain problematic vocabulary, offering different pronunciations and even complete substitutions in each repetition. Originally I took this clarification to be for my own benefit but soon came to realize that it was an integral part of the performance technique of the older poets.\n\nThere are many levels then at which the social role of the poet, outside the performance, shapes not only the text but the entire performance situation. Each of these informal genres of performed materials which fill the breaks between sections of the epic are tied intimately to social needs and realities outside the performance. This link becomes clearer later in the volume when I expand my analysis from the epic text to the entire sahra performance.\n\n##### _The Construction of Commercial Images_\n\nWe can learn a great deal about the social role of the traditional poets by examining a small group of singers who managed to turn the epic into a commercial success precisely by distancing themselves from the mistrusted qualities of the traditional poets. Turning briefly to these commercial stars, we see how they have chosen to distance themselves from these suspect qualities and construct a commercially palatable image for _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ epic singing. Here I contrast such traditional performers of the s\u012bra as the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh with the small number of singers who were able, from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, to disassociate themselves from the public persona of the traditional epic-singer and become commercial stars in the booming cassette industry, achieving a highly ambiguous role as epic singers who were not \"really\" epic singers.\n\nThe most famous of these singers in the western Nile Delta was Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s, who died in the late 1970s. He was very successful commercially and commanded fees up to fifty times higher than did traditional poets for his live appearances. If one asks about the epic _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ in this region, the name Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s is the first name on everyone's lips. Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s was not of Gypsy origin, but rather from a peasant background, and nearly everyone agrees that he was literate, unlike the traditional poets. The following account is of Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s's early relationship with the epic, as told by a \u1e24alab\u012b poet from al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh:\n\nSayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s was a great poet, but not from a poet's family. His family owned land\u2014fifty fadd\u0101ns! But when he was young he fell in love with the epic. He used to sit in a caf\u00e9 and listen to the poets. He heard it from another great poet, Shaykh Sib\u0101'\u012b from Kafr Ibra [Minufiyya Province], who was educated, an Azhari, who had left his studies to become a poet. Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s's father used to beat him for listening to poets, because he was neglecting his studies to go listen at the caf\u00e9. He fashioned himself a crude rab\u0101b but his father broke it. Still he persisted. (Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b, 3\/17\/87)\n\nThe poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh emphasize in the story of Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s's life the great power of the epic itself, that it caused a wealthy, literate man to leave all those things behind to become a poet. The villagers, however, emphasize the idea that Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s was literate and cultured and that therefore his renditions were better\u2014for his versions were in fact radically different from those of the traditional poets.\n\nA brief list of these differences includes his use of large ensembles of up to eight musicians, his use of amplifiers and loudspeakers, his use of a completely different poetic structure, his reliance on sources other than the oral tradition, and his use of different costume. He also performed the epic on the Western violin (kamanja) rather than the traditional rab\u00e0b, which is the archetypal instrument of the epic. So strong is the presence of the rab\u0101b in the poetic tradition, in fact, that Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s retained it in his performance texts, often singing lines such as, \"I will sing to you on the rab\u00e0b and entertain you,\" while in fact holding a violin in his hands.\n\nThe issue of poetic structure and the content of the stories is an important one. The traditional poets of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ in the Nile Delta use a single end-rhyme, medial caesura form with long verses (up to twenty-six and even thirty syllables in length); they often maintain the same rhyme for upward of a hundred verses. This poetic form is used throughout most of Arabic literary history and is the form of the earliest-known Arabic poetry dating to the sixth century C.E. Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s used short verses in varying rhyme schemes, most often in quatrains, though with constantly varying patterns more typical of southern Egyptian folk songs. With some justification, the traditional poets look down on \u1e24aww\u0101s's poetry as mere ditties or jingles. It seems clear that \u1e24aww\u0101s's short verses and ever-changing rhyme scheme appeal to new audiences no longer well acquainted with the epic stories and poetic form. His verses are simple, easy to listen to, and the rhyme scheme is readily apparent.\n\nTraditional end-rhyme schema  \n\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014A  \n\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014A  \n\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014A\n\nQuatrain schema used by \u1e24aww\u0101s  \n\u2014\u2014A \u2014\u2014A  \n\u2014\u2014A \u2014\u2014B  \n\u2014\u2014C \u2014\u2014C  \n\u2014\u2014C \u2014\u2014B\n\nThe importance of the costume adopted by Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s becomes evident in testimonies from villagers and others about the difference between the traditonal singers and Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s. One of the first elements used in making the distinction is that Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s was _bit\u0101 ' a\u1e6d-\u1e6darb\u016bsh_ and the Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poets are _bit\u016b ' ul-'imma_, that is, Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s wore the tarboosh, the red felt hat often known as a fez in English, whereas the traditional poets wear turbans, which are lower class, rural. A similar observation is often made in testimonies where people point out that the traditional poets are not _bit\u016b ' ul-mikrofon\u0101t_: they are not \"microphone poets,\" while Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s was.\n\nOne of the key associations of the _\u1e6darb\u016bsh_ headdress and the amplified ensemble style for villagers of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh is with religious singers known as _munshids_ ,43 When asked if \u1e24aww\u0101s was a _munshid_ , villagers invariably answered no, for, it would be explained, he did not sing the religious repertory of the munshids. On further questioning, however, people readily agreed that he \"looked like a munshid\" ( _h akluh k\u0101n hakl munhid_) and that he sounded \"like the munshids\" ( _zayy il-mun hid\u012bn_).\n\nWhat is clear is that these deviations from the traditional performance style were not random. The changes \u1e24aww\u0101s effected were explicitly aimed at distancing himself from the low-status, \"Gypsy-poet\" associations of the epic and at rendering the performer of the epic respectable. Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s, consciously or unconsciously, patterned his performances and his public persona after the religious singers who occupy such a strong role in Egyptian folk culture, the _munshid\u012bn._ These shaykhs, by virtue of the religious material they perform, and by virtue of the education and erudition attributed to them (often falsely) by their audiences, are eminently respectable. In patterning his performances on those of the munshid\u012bn by adopting their musical idiom and costume, Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s succeeded in creating a new style of epic performance which allowed the performer as well as the material performed some degree of respectability.\n\nVisually and musically, \u1e24aww\u0101s's performances are distinct from those of the traditional poets. This new performance style, however, was not viewed by audience members in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh as a break in the tradition. All of the various elements used by \u1e24aww\u0101s are part of the greater musical environment of the region: the music, the instruments and orchestration, the rhyme schemes, the costume\u2014all are familiar to the audiences, albeit from other genres of folk music. Since the essential aspect of the epic\u2014that is, the story, the plot itself\u2014remained virtually unchanged, audiences in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and elsewhere readily accepted the new patina of respectability and modernity.\n\nOne can validate these ideas by examining the careers of other poets who attempted to model themselves on Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s. One such poet, Sa'd Mu\u1e63\u1e6daf\u00e0, succeeded; many others did not. Sa'd Mu\u1e63\u1e6daf\u00e0 was in fact of Gypsy origin; there were no other epic singers in his immediate family, and I was unable to determine whether there had ever been any epic singers in his extended family. By performing on violin instead of rab\u0101b, by adopting the ensemble-style performance used by Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s and the musical idiom of the munshid\u012bn as \u1e24aww\u0101s had done, and by adopting the \u1e6darb\u016bsh as headdress, Sa'd managed to create an ambiguous public persona. Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s was known as a non-Gypsy epic singer; Sa'd performed in the same style as Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s. As one might expect, confusion regarding Sa'd's origins resulted. I encountered many different opinions about Sa'd Mu\u1e63\u1e6daf\u00e0; the pattern basically broke down to a division between people who lived geographically close to Sa'd's home near al-Man\u1e63\u016bra who knew that he was of Gypsy origin, and those who lived farther away who held the opinion that he was not, because he did not perform in the traditional style. In any case, alongside Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s, he remains the most famous and most popular of the epic singers in the Nile Delta.\n\nTwo of the fourteen poets in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh own Western violins and occasionally play them. When asked how and why they came to buy violins, each confessed that he had dreamt of becoming a commercial star like Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s, and a person could only do that if he played violin instead of rab\u0101b. Asked why they did not continue attempting to perform like \u1e24aww\u0101s had done, each responded with mustered pride: _kal\u0101muh mi h kal\u0101mn\u0101_ 'his words are not our words'. The villagers, however, responded that the poets could not become famous like Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s because they were 'arab.\n\nIn brief, because of the mistrusted persona of the Gypsy poet, we encounter in the Nile Delta tradition of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ epic-singing a case where the art form has been respected (albeit by specific groups) and the performer has been endowed with little of the respect given his art. A small group of performers were able to shake off this handicap and become commercial successes by adapting elements of the performance style and the musical idiom of a known and respected folk music form. Since all of these elements are recognized and known, the audiences do not perceive this new combination of elements to be a break in the tradition. What, from our point of view, is clearly radical change is, for the audience, unremarkable continuity, since the essential thread\u2014the story, the plot\u2014has remained unchanged.\n\n##### _Conclusion_\n\nThe preceding description of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ epic-singers in the context of the village of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh has sought to reveal the relationship between the performers, their artistic tradition, and their audience's reception and understanding of that tradition. Many factors within texts and performances of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ are conditioned by who the performers are, or at least by who the performers are perceived to be. The poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh are outsiders: perhaps performers because they are outsiders, perhaps outsiders because they are performers. They are marked most strongly by their Gypsy ethnicity, an ethnicity they themselves do not emphasize; rather, they seek identity and community in their formulation of the \"poet\" persona, a persona that embodies eloquence, graciousness, acumen, and an ancient \"ur-Arabness.\" This image, however, finds only limited acceptance among the villagers.\n\nThe boundaries between the two groups, villagers and poets, are maintained and supported on both sides: on the side of the villagers most strongly by their social attitudes toward the poets; on the side of the poets by the preservation of certain customs, an identity closely linked to the epic itself, and a body of secret knowledge which includes powerful resources such as names and their own language.\n\nOf the many social factors at play, it is perhaps the forged link of identity between poet and poem which most clearly shapes the textual and performance traditions. The poets inside and outside the epic are kin; the poet outside fashions a continuing commentary about his world by manipulating the poet within the epic. All artists speak to some degree through the characters and products they create, and to some degree there is an \"I\" embedded in any narrative. Here that voice is marked by direct mimesis\u2014a poet creating the image of a poet.\n\nIn the performance situation, this set of social factors motivates the telling of tales of poetic prowess in between sections of the epic; the feats of the poet in past performances are recounted to add an aura of grandeur to the present performance. In addition, the poet's unusual knowledge of other places, other dialects, as well as his knowledge of the details of the village's own history and genealogy set him apart from other men. With this special status comes a certain form of respect from the villagers\u2014the poet is accorded a liminality, an \"otherness,\" which adds potency to his ability to narrate and continually re-create a nonexistent world of past heroes and their antagonists.\n\nIn the most recent past, the traditional poet has also stood in contrast to the commercial stars of the cassette studios, performers who distanced themselves from precisely these suspect qualities of the Gypsy epic-singer. Also in recent years, the small groups of devotees who still listen to _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ in private gatherings have emerged as a socially conservative and socially disenfranchised group, often with the poet at their center, a catalyst for their assemblies. The entire tradition, the epic itself, is perceived as partaking of the disappearing traditionalism represented by the members of its audience. This recent social realignment, more than any aesthetic or artistic criticism from other groups, may well augur the end of the _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performance tradition in the Nile Delta.\n\n* * *\n\n1. The villagers make a clear distinction between the classical Arabic word _h 'ara_' (accent on the final syllable, with long _\/\u0101\/_ and final glottal stop) and the vernacular _h 'ara_ (accent on the first syllable, short final _\/a\/_ with no glottal stop). For example, several times I was asked, \"Of course you have _h 'ar\u0101_' in America, but do you have _h 'ara_?' The questionner meant approximately, \"Of course you have literary poets in America, but do you have epic-singing\/Gypsy\/rab\u0101b poets?\"\n\n2. Other researchers over the past hundred and fifty years have also found the \u1e24alab to possess no etiological account of their name, or at least none they were willing to share with outsiders. See, for example, F. R. S. Newbold, \"The Gypsies of Egypt\" (1856), 291.\n\nIt has been suggested that the term _\u1e25alab_ may derive from the verb _\u1e25alaba_ 'to milk' and may be the remnant of a pastoral or nomadic origin. There appears to be no historical evidence for either the \"Aleppan\" or the \"milkers\" argument other than the posited etymologies themselves; in addition, none of the Gypsy groups of the Arab Middle East are closely associated with either herding or husbandry, but rather tend to be bound to such low-status, often itinerant, professions as tinkering, blacksmithing, dancing, and so forth. The noun _\u1e25alba_ in colloquial Egyptian Arabic (see Martin Hinds and El-Said Badawi, _A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic_ [1986]) denotes a ring or arena in which an artists performs; thus the term _wil\u0101d \u1e25alab_ might be a derogatory name meaning approximately \"sons of the circle\" in reference to the circle of viewers who gather around street performers. (My thanks to Nabil Azzam for this possible derivation.) Finally, the verb _\u1e25aliba_ in classical Arabic meant \"to be dark or black\" most often in reference to hair (see Edward Lane, _Arabic-English Lexicon_ [1984]) and the adjectival form _\u1e25ulub_ could denote either \"black\" or \"intelligent\" (see A. Kazimirski, _Dictionnaire Arabe-Fran\u00e7ais_ [i860]). The term may have become attached to these itinerant musicians due to both their dark skin coloring and their reputation for cunning. Given the lack of other evidence, this latter possibility strikes me as the most plausible.\n\n3. The most recent attempt to clarify the relationships between various \"gypsy\" groups in Egypt is by Nabil Subhi Hanna [Nab\u012bl \u1e62ub\u1e25\u012b \u1e24ann\u0101], _Ghajar of Sett Guiranha: A Study of a Gypsy Community in Egypt_ (1982), and his more extensive _al-Bin\u0101 ' al-ijtim\u1e0d'\u012b wa-l-thaq\u0101fa f\u012b mujtama' al-ghajar_ (Social structure and culture in Ghajar society) (1983). Hanna prefers to classify these groups into three main categories: Ghajar, \u1e24alab, and Nawar ( _al-Bin\u0101_ ', 105\u201310), with numerous secondary names applied regionally or to specific subgroups: \u1e24aj\u0101la, \u1e6daw\u0101yifa, hah\u0101niyya, Tatar, \u1e62u'\u0101yda, Qar\u0101datiyya, and Tahw\u0101jiyya, as well as a distinct division of pseudo-Ghajar groups, such as the Ghaw\u0101z\u012b, Mah\u0101'ila, Ram\u0101diyya and Sam\u0101'ina or Sam\u0101'iniyya (pp. 110\u201328).\n\nHanna also includes, however, a caveat that there is a great deal of mixing between the groups (p. 105) and openly admits that his tripartite division is unclear to both the Egyptians and the Ghajar themselves (p. 115). Although Hanna at points mentions musicians and singers among the Ghajar, he at no point identifies them with epic singers of the _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ tradition. Slyomovics, in her recent work on a _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ reciter in southern Egypt, after a discussion of Gypsy identity and social role in Egypt, leaves the question of her informant's background unresolved (see Slyomovics, _Merchant,_ 13\u201318). It is beyond the scope of this study to attempt any general survey of these groups, but the bibliography surveys the most readily available materials on the Ghajar of Egypt.\n\n4. See, for example, Patrick R. MacNaughton, _The Mande Blacksmith_ (1988); also idem, \"Nyamakalaw: The Mande Bards and Blacksmiths\" (1987).\n\n5. MacMichael, _A History_ 1: 65, also p. 89.\n\n6. Ibid., 89; also n. 2, same page.\n\n7. Charles M. Doughty, _Travels in Arabia Deserta_ (1936), 1: 323\u201328. Note references to rock carvings of Ab\u016b Zayd and his wife, 'Aliya, in 1: 348\u201350, and to the grave-heap of Ab\u016b Zayd's mother, 1: 479. Slyomovics, _Merchant,_ 14; Michael Meeker, _Literature and Violence in North Arabia_ (1979), 21\u201322; Robert Montagne, _La civilisation du d\u00e9sert_ (1947), 67\u201369. Note photograph, p. 128, of a \u1e62leyb poet playing the rab\u0101b.\n\n8. Lerrick, \"Taghribat,\" 12.\n\n9. An argument against any historical links between the two groups has been raised by Giovanni Canova: though the term _ma\u1e63l\u016bb_ is usually pronounced with velarized _\/\u1e63\/,_ its plural, mas\u0101l\u012bb is usually not, making it seem more likely that the Egyptian group derives its name from a separate, distinct root \/s l b\/.\n\n10. It is common practice to refer to men by their given name, then the name of their father, sometimes adding even their grandfather's name, and finally their \"family name,\" this latter being to some extent a convention instituted in the twentieth century. Thus Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b is 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b, son of Gh\u0101z\u012b. The term _shaykh_ , from which English \"sheik,\" is an honorific of address and reference; I have used an anglicized form closer to the original haykh, though without the diacritics. For the family names of the poets, see below.\n\n11. The communities recognized by the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poets include families in Basy\u016bn (Gharbiyya), Sadd al-Kham\u012bs\/S\u012bd\u012b S\u0101lim (Kafr al-haykh), Farask\u016br (Damy\u0101\u1e6d), Z\u0101wiyat Ab\u016b h\u016bha\/Dilinj\u0101t (Bu\u1e25ayra), Nakhlat al-Ba\u1e25ariyya\/Ab\u016b \u1e24ummus (Bu\u1e25ayra), K\u016bm \u1e24am\u0101da\/Dilinj\u0101t (Bu\u1e25ayra), Z\u0101wiyat Qaraw\u0101n\/hib\u012bn (Gharbiyya), Kafr Ibr\u0101h\/Maht\u016bl al-S\u016bq (harqiyya), as well as the (unrelated) family of Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s in Sandabast\/Zift\u0101 (Gharbiyya) and several nonperforming households in the greater Cairo area and in the southern province of al-Minya.\n\n12. This conflation of poets\/Gypsies\/Bedouin is quite common. See discussion below of the term ' _arab_ in this chapter.\n\n13. These forms are those used when citing a specific name; in reference to the extended families, collective noun formations are used so that, for example, one refers to the \u1e24arf\u016bh extended family as the \u1e24arafha, the Sir\u1e25\u0101n family as the Sarahna. Some short extended-family names, such as Jan\u0101\u1e25, do not take this collective nominal form and remain unchanged.\n\nFor an examination of differing levels of household and family organization, and their respective roles in village power structures, see Jacques Berque, \"Sur la structure sociale de quelques villages \u00e9gyptiens\" (1955).\n\n14. The name of this informant has been omitted at his own request.\n\n15. ' _Umra_ is pilgrimage effected at any time other than the annual month of pilgrimage; it is usually considered to count as only one-half of a full pilgrimage.\n\n16. \"He it is who hath placed you as viceroys of the earth and hath exalted some of you in rank above others, that He may try you by [the test of] that which He hath given you. Lo! Thy Lord is swift in prosecution, and lo! He is Forgiving, Merciful\" (Qur'\u0101n 6:165).\n\n\"We have apportioned among them their livelihood in the life of the world, and raised some of them above others in rank that some of them may take labour from others; and the mercy of thy Lord is better than (the wealth) that they amass\" (Qur'\u0101n 43:32).\n\nBoth quotes from Pickthall, Glorious Qur'an.\n\n17. Slyomovics, _Merchant_ , 13\u201318.\n\n18. That these two ideas, \"farmer\" and \"prosperity,\" are commonly linked is clear from a recurring children's joke that plays on the mixing up of the two words and has the muezzin calling \"\u1e25ayy 'al\u0101 l-\u1e63al\u0101, \u1e25ayy 'al\u0101 l-\u1e63al\u0101, \u1e25ayy 'al\u0101 l-fell\u0101\u1e25\" (instead of _fal\u0101\u1e25_ ), \"Come to Prayer! Come to Prayer! Come to the Farmer!\" rather than \"Come to Success!\"\n\n19. This form, for example, does not appear in either Socrates Spiro, _Arabic-English Dictionary of the Colloquial Arabic of Egypt_ (1980), or in Hinds and Badawi, _A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic._\n\n20. A similar concept lies in the phrase ' _\u0113sh wi-mal\u1e25_ (lit. bread and salt), i.e., \"we have broken bread together\"\u2014a \"companion\" in the literal sense of the word. For an extensive discussion of these terms, also in an Egyptian context, see Lila Abu-Lughod, _Veiled Sentiments_ (1986), chap. 2, particularly pp. 63\u201365.\n\n21. Despite the simple metathetical relation between the opposing terms ' _a h\u012br_ and _h \u0101'ir_ (' _\/ h\/R_ and _h \/'\/R_), I never heard the two used as puns in wordplay or in poetry.\n\n22. This motif is one of the most common in Middle Eastern folk literatures. Not only does it occur many times in collections such as the _Alflayla wa-layla_ (The thousand and one nights), but is also attributed to innumerable rulers in historical chronicles and probably has some basis in fact. In al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, stories are also told of Jam\u0101l 'Abd al-N\u0101\u1e63ir (Nasser) coming to nearby villages and staying several days, often doing many good deeds such as helping widows. Despite the fact that Nasser's photograph was displayed everywhere, in these anecdotes the villagers never realize their guest's identity until after he leaves. At least three quite different narratives of this genre concerning Nasser are currently in circulation in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh.\n\n23. Texts of stories in this chapter are paraphrased from handwritten notes of various performances; none are from audio-recorded or directly transcribed versions.\n\n24. An account of the ethnic makeup of the population of Sharqiyya Province in the midtwentieth century can be found in 'Abb\u0101s M. 'Ammar, _The People of the Sharqiyah: Their Racial History, Serology, Physical Characters, Demography and Conditions of Life_ (1944), 1: 1\u201343.\n\n25. The distinctive clapping style of this activity gives it its name. The left palm is held face up, fingers pointing away from the body; the right hand then claps downward and outward onto the left hand in a thrusting movement so that both swing out and away from the body.\n\n26. In this sense, audiences who support Diy\u0101b against Ab\u016b Zayd are well known for precisely the same qualities as their hero: temperamentalness and hypersensitivity in all matters touching upon honor and reputation.\n\n27. For explorations of the relationship between narrated events and narrative events see Richard Bauman, _Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative_ (1986). See also Natalie Moyle, \"The Image of the \u0100\u015f\u0131k in Turkish Halk Hik\u0101yeleri\" (1986).\n\n28. My exploration of this aspect of the community was cut off abruptly when an elder poet found out that the younger men were teaching me words from this argot. I did learn enough, however, to posit a few general statements about its nature. Several classes of words can be quickly identified: (1) Arabic words, or Arabic-derived words: such as ' _a h\u012br_ cited earlier, or _karasa_ 'to sit' (derived from Ar. _kurs\u012b_ 'chair'; this is also apparently in use in Upper Egypt though with slightly different implications). (2) Onomatopoetic words: such as _taft\u016bfa_ 'cigarette' (some of these items are also found in the slangs of other social groups). And (3) completely non-Arabic vocabulary items: such as _lamg\u016bn_ 'boy' (see Newbold _lamb\u016bn), kah\u0101n_ 'food', or _konta_ 'village, people, atmosphere, or surroundings'. This final category appears to constitute the largest body of lexical items.\n\nI did not, however, encounter many words with standard prefix-suffix combinations such as \u1e24ann\u0101 describes (see \u1e24ann\u0101, _al-Bin\u0101_ ', 155\u201374). Standard verbal, substantive, adjectival, and adverbial categories are represented, though Arabic pronouns are used even when the remainder of the utterance is in ra\u1e6d\u0101na.\n\nPerhaps the most curious aspect of this argot is that of all of the Gypsy groups of Egypt, the \u1e24alab argot alone appears unrelated to European Romany. Everett Rowson, in an as yet unpublished study of Cairene urban argots, has found that the \u1e25alab argot is in use among lower-class musicians in Cairo.\n\n29. Many other sections, such as \"The Tale of \u1e24an\u1e0dal [SA \u1e24an\u1e93al]\" and the tales of \"The Reconnaissance,\" contain similar passages.\n\n30. Complete transliterations for all numbered texts are found in the Appendix.\n\n31. An interesting point in this summary of the lands and rulers that the tribe will later encounter is that Jam\u012bl's ode as it is sung in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh contains the names of cities and rulers that do not appear in the Bak\u0101t\u016bsh repertory as full episodes, but are full episodes in some of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscripts housed in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek; see Ayoub, \"A propos.\"\n\n32. The Arabic term _ad\u016bb_ is an intensive form formed from the word _adab_ 'politeness', hence my paraphrase, \"of great politesse.\" Later in the text the poet glosses the meaning with the more common word, mu'addab, which I have translated simply as \"polite.\"\n\n33. The compactness of Arabic script often means that what is expressed easily in two hemistichs across a single printed line in Arabic may necessitate two or more lines in English translation. Also, poets occasionally miss a rhyme and sing three, or even four, hemistichs before \"closing\" the verse with the appropriate end-rhyme. In general, each line of English here represents one hemistich (one half-verse) in the Arabic.\n\n34. See Nancy Vickers, \"The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best: Shakespeare's Lucrece,\" in _Shakespeare and the Question of Theory,_ ed. Patrica Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (1985); and idem, \"This Heraldry in Lucrece's Face,\" in _The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives,_ ed. Susan Suleiman (1986).\n\n35. An example of this power to publicly criticize is examined in Slyomovics, _Merchant_ , 110\u201311, 137\u201339. Several such incidents are also examined in this volume, Chapters 4 and 5.\n\n36. See, for example, Lois al-Faruqi on the disenfranchisement of musicians in Islamic society: \"The Status of Music in Muslim Nations: Evidence from the Arab World\" (1981); and idem, \"The Shari'ah on Music and Musicians,\" in _Islamic Thought and Culture_ (1982). See also _Asian Music_ 17, 1 (1985), a special issue on music and musicians in the Islamic world.\n\n37. The lack of early references to Gypsies of any sort in Egypt prior to the late Middle Ages has prompted some scholars to posit a fourteenth-century, or later, migration. See, however, Paul Kahle, \"A Gypsy Woman in Egypt in the Thirteenth Century\" (1950).\n\n38. Jozsef Vekerdi, \"The Gypsy's Role in the Preservation of Non-Gypsy Folklore\" (1976), 80.\n\n39. See Abu-Lughod, _Veiled Sentiments_ , 41ff.\n\n40. Margaret Beissinger, \"Balkan Traditional Singers and Non-Mainstream Figures\" (1988).\n\n41. My translation. Other English translations are available in Ben Bennani, ed. and trans., _Bread, Hashish and Moon: Four Modern Arab Poets_ (1982), 5\u20137; Mounah A. Khouri and Hamid Algar, eds. and trans., _An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry_ (1974), 174\u201379; Issa J. Boullata, trans., _Modern Arab Poets, 1950\u20131975_ (1976), 55\u201457.\n\n_Lay\u0101l\u012b_ literally means \"nights,\" but also refers specifically to evening gatherings that feature music (similar to sahr\u0101t) and to an improvised song-form in which the singer uses only a few words such as \"O night!\" ( _y\u0101 l\u0113l_ ) while demonstrating vocal virtuosity. The _taw\u0101 h\u012b\u1e25_ is another song form, with roots in Islamic Spain, which usually deals with love or religious sentiments.\n\n42. Each time I heard this tale, the ensuing discussion inevitably focused on the large boneless piece of fish, with some people asking for clarification. Others offered descriptions of similar dishes served in Alexandria, Iraq, or elsewhere. I was intrigued with this encounter between a _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ poet and the most famous composer of Arab music in the twentieth century; the audience never questioned the authenticity of this account, and I never heard anyone ask for further details except about the food.\n\n43. From the form IV verb _anshada_ 'to chant or sing religious verse'. See Earle Waugh, _The Munshidin of Egypt: Their World and Their Song_ (1989); however, see also my review (1989) for a number of reservations concerning translations and other aspects of that work.\n\n## CHAPTER 3\n\n## The Economy of Poetic Style\n\nThe caf\u00e9 owner shouted in angry exasperation:\n\n\"Are you going to force your recitations on us? That's the end\u2014the end! Didn't I warn you last week? ...\"\n\nThe old poet sweetened his tone a little as he tried to soothe the angry man and said:\n\n\"This is my caf\u00e9 too. Haven't I been reciting here for the last twenty years?\"\n\nThe caf\u00e9 owner took his usual seat behind the till and replied:\n\n\"We know all the stories you tell by heart and we don't need to run through them again. People today don't want a poet. They keep asking me for a radio and there's one over there being installed now. So go away and leave us alone and may God provide for you\"\n\nNaguib Mahfouz, _Midaq Alley_\n\nIn Chapter 2 we examined a few of the many relationships which obtain between epic poets and the epic poem they perform. We now turn our focus to audiences and performance situations in order to examine the social economy of poetry and poetic style: Why do audiences patronize the poem (and by extension the poets)? How do they do so? How does the performance emerge from the poet's interaction with differing audiences and differing patronage structures? And finally, how do audiences, patronage, and performance situations affect the stylistic choices of the poet, the tone of the performance itself?\n\nI use the term \"social economy of poetic style\" here as an image of my own understanding of the interaction of these disparate elements\u2014that is, an economy consisting of the on-going interaction of multiple forces that translate the material power of wealth (patronage) through markets (audiences) via products (epic poetry) that possess aesthetic characteristics (style) that are in great part determined by the financial and market pressures that help create them. Poetry, power, social allegiances, and money are all part of the traditional performance process, though Western researchers often choose to divorce the \"real\" world of money and patronage from the \"higher\" realm of poetic form and artistic tradition. In this regard, that Western view of art and poetry which privileges certain forms of expression and distances them from their economic and sociopolitical dimensions is poorly adapted for the analysis of expressive culture in traditional societies. No epic singer in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh would deny the direct influence of patronage and payment upon his performances; it is an accepted part of the profession. The difficulty in analyzing the interaction of money, power, and poetry lies primarily in the lack of a beginning or an end to the process; no a priori precedence exists for any one element over the others, for we are not examining a chain of causal relationships but rather an interacting whole. Any starting point must therefore be somewhat arbitrary, and though the relationships we highlight may be consistent, they cannot be exclusionary.\n\nIn this volume I focus on one specific performance context, the sahra, or private evening gathering, and on audiences drawn from a limited population (the inhabitants of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and their occasional guests). In order to achieve a fuller understanding of the role and characteristics of the sahra context, however, I map out the social implications of the context itself through comparison with other performance situations. Each of these contexts, I argue, represents a separate complex of interacting factors that influence both performer and listener. Expectations, behaviors, and evaluative frameworks all coalesce into definable and describable performance environments.\n\nThe problem of unraveling a complex set of interactions such as is presented to us in performances of traditional texts is not only one of identifying what actually takes place in a specific performance or even repeatedly within a specific performance context, but also in understanding what does not, that is, in understanding how each performance or context differs from other performances in other contexts. Performances and performance situations resonate with and against each other, and what is, by comparison, absent in a particular performance may be as eloquent and as significant as what is present.\n\nThe performances we study as folklorists possess a quality that, for lack of a better term, we choose to call \"traditional.\" The term comes to us loaded with ideological baggage, but part of its connotative meaning is highly significant here. These performances invoke performances of the past, performances of identifiable and nameable texts of the past, and therefore they create a constant chorus of voices, a multivocality dependent upon re-iteration. As a methodology, then, it would be folly for a folklorist to examine a single avatar of a traditional text if other examples were also available. The comparison of different renditions of the same material by the same poet, and by different poets, becomes essential for understanding the \"absences,\" the mute voices, of the epic within a given performance.\n\nThis chapter therefore first treats, as distinctly as possible, a series of contexts for _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performances. By understanding the normative forms of performances in different contexts, we can come to a rough understanding of when and why the norms are broken, that is, how such \"presences\" or \"absences\" communicate in performance.\n\nNext, focusing specifically on the sahra, we turn to audiences in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and assess their attitudes toward, and participation in, the _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ tradition in an attempt to flesh out as completely as possible the social background for the performance processes examined in the concluding part of this study. The differing tastes of various social groups within the village have engendered different acceptable performance styles; as a result, individual poets in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh have established their own coteries of listeners. Four of these poets and their individual performance styles are introduced at the end of this chapter. These four were chosen as representative of the capacities and performance styles of the entire al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh epic-poet community. All of the texts in the remainder of this work are drawn from performances by these four artists so that the reader can acquire a sense of the interplay between the performers' personalities and their performance styles.\n\n#### Traditional Performance Contexts\n\nBefore examining in some detail the contexts for professional performance of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ , that is, performance by the epic singers, it is worth noting that the epic both exists and is transmitted in many nonprofessional contexts as well. Within the community of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh there are adults who narrate portions of the epic as prose tales; these are often directed, at least superficially, to children. There are also a number of connoisseurs in the village, and even more in the surrounding hamlets, who can narrate extensively from the epic tales with varying amounts of intermittent poetry; these \"reciters\" narrate principally for informal gatherings of adult male companions. At least one older man in the region is capable of sustained poetic narration which he delivers in a high declamatory style, though he does not sing or use any musical accompaniment. Furthermore, at least two chapbooks, each representing only a fragment of the epic, have circulated in the village in recent years.1\n\nIn this one location and time period then, the epic of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l is found in verse, cante-fable, and prose renditions, and in both written and oral forms; there is no evidence that this was ever _not_ the case. We must assume that a researcher passing through this region doing primarily collection or survey work might well have encountered the epic in any of its various forms and then continued on unaware of its cognate performance forms. With this in mind, we must address with care not only the map of literary forms and performance modes which emerges from our sketchy data from most regions (see the Introduction), but also theories such as those advanced by Men\u00e9ndez Pidal and others concerning the historical \"breakdown\" of epic into balladic and other simpler forms.2\n\nEpic poets in the Nile Delta region have traditionally performed at nearly all local celebrations: at weddings, local saints' festivals, circumcisions, and at private evening gatherings ( _sahr\u0101t or lay\u0101l\u012b_ ). They have also maintained itinerant circuits of caf\u00e9s and patron families over a wide geographic area through contacts built up over generations. For poets who are not gifted enough to attract significant patronage, or for any poet when economic needs dictate, there are less respected forms of income: playing in town squares (usually praise songs to the Prophet Muhammad rather than epic) for whatever pennies are given by pas-sersby, riding trains and singing for similar pittances, even sitting at the edges of fields to entertain villagers as they harvest or plant in return for a meal and some small payment. These latter activities are often viewed as \"beggary\" or \"vagrancy\" ( _tasawwul_ ) by villagers. They are admitted to reluctanctly by the poets and referred to pejoratively by others. The poets, as might be expected, are pragmatic about this distinction: invited appearances are fine when they are plentiful and generate sufficient income, otherwise, poets, like everyone else, must seek God's bounty wherever they can find it.\n\nA number of the traditional contexts for the performance of epic poetry, however, are rapidly disappearing or undergoing radical transformation. Urban areas rejected the epic tradition some time ago as rural, \"hick,\" and provincial. Though performances in Cairo were common until the late nineteenth century, in the twentieth century performances of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ have been primarily a rural phenomenon.3 Now, even in the countryside, things are changing.\n\nAccording to the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, the caf\u00e9s were the first site to change. The arrival of battery-powered radios, later cassette recorders, and now television has pushed out the poets and their stories.4 At weddings it is no longer considered chic to bring in a poet or poets. As recently as the 1970s, villagers recount, a wedding was hardly a wedding if there was no poet to sing the deeds of the heroes of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe after the traditional wedding songs and rituals had taken place\u2014and the performance had to go on till the dawn call to prayer to be a good one. Now many villagers prefer to hire a singer with an amplified band who sings a mixture of traditional rural wedding and religious songs along with renditions of songs by famous urban singers such as Umm Kulth\u016bm and 'Abd al-\u1e24al\u012bm \u1e24\u0101fi\u1e93. Private parties featuring poets are becoming rarer and rarer as the elder generation, those who still most appreciate the epic, passes on. The poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh currently live mostly from their circuits of patrons, a few weddings, private gatherings, and \"vagrancy.\"\n\nThe following discussion of performance contexts concentrates on three sets of features: ( _a_ ) economic structures, that is, means of payment, patronage structures, ( _b_ ) customary performance characterstics\u2014choice of repertoire, use of auxiliary genres, and so forth, and ( _c_ ) the attitudes of villagers and poets toward the context itself.\n\n##### _Weddings_\n\nThe process of engagement and marriage in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, as in most of Egypt and the Arab world, unfolds in a sequence of ceremonial stages, often spread out over several months or even years. These include the Reading of the _f\u0101ti\u1e25a_ ( _al-f\u0101ti\u1e25a_ ), the Writing of the Wedding Contract ( _katab al-kit\u0101b_ ), the Presentation of the Dowry ( _h abka_),5 the Night of Henna ( _laylat al-\u1e25inna, SA \u1e25inn\u0101 '_), the Carrying ( _al- hayla_), the Procession ( _al-zaffa_ ), the Consummation, literally, 'the Entrance' ( _al-du khla_), and the Morning Visit ( _al-\u1e63ub\u1e25iyya_ ).6 Each of these takes place on a separate occasion and is marked by traditions and ceremonies, several of which include music in the form of traditional songs or professional entertainment. The prime context for the performance of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ occurs on the Night of Henna, which is usually the largest of the public celebrations, but on occasion poets may be called in for the Presentation of the Dowry and the nights leading up to the Night of Henna by families who wish to make a particularly notable event of the occasion.\n\nOn the Night of Henna the bride and groom are separately prepared for the wedding's culminating ceremonies, which take place the following day. In their respective groups of relatives and friends, they are bathed, their hair is trimmed and coiffed, they are dressed, and each is physically adorned with henna. In the case of the groom in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, the latter is usually decorated only on the palms\u2014in each hand he holds a lump of henna mixture which will dye his palms bright orange. Once the groom has been bathed and freshly attired, he is led outside with much festivity and seated on a chair on a platform, while relatives and friends celebrate around him. A parallel celebration takes place around the bride, though this is held indoors.\n\nThe traditional songs sung at this point of the wedding reflect not only the activities that are being carried out at that moment but the entire complex of behaviors linked with marriage. Perhaps the most common wedding song in all of Egypt, with its myriad of different verses, is \"The Henna, the Henna\" ( _al-\u1e25inna, al-\u1e25inna_ ). It is most commonly sung by women as they dress and coif the bride, though it is heard and well known by the men as well. The recurring interjection \"O my eye!\" (y\u0101 'ayh\u012b) is a reference to the eye as the seat of emotion and love in Arabic poetry (along with the heart, the soul, and the liver):\n\nThe henna, O the henna, O drop of dew,\n\nO the window of my beloved, O my eye, brings [a breeze] or [love].7\n\nO how I fear your mother when she asks me about you,\n\nI'll hide you in my eyes, O my soul, and put kohl over you.\n\nO how I fear your sister when she comes looking for you,\n\nI'll hide you in my hair, O my eye, and pleat it over you.\n\nAnd if evil-speakers come to me and ask me about you,\n\nI'll put you in my breast, O my soul, and cover you with pearls.\"8\n\nal-\u1e25inna [SA hinn\u0101'] y\u0101 l-\u1e25inna y\u0101 qa\u1e6dr al-nad\u0101,\n\ny\u0101 hubb\u0101k \u1e25ab\u012bb\u012b, y\u0101 'ayn\u012b jall\u0101b al-haw\u00e0\n\ny\u0101 khawf\u012b min ummak lamm\u0101 tas'aln\u012b 'alayk,\n\nla-a\u1e25u\u1e6d\u1e6dak f\u012b 'ayn\u012b, y\u0101 r\u016b\u1e25\u012b, wa-uka\u1e25\u1e25il 'alayk\n\ny\u0101 khawf\u012b min ukhtak lamm\u0101 tudawwir 'alayk,\n\nla-a\u1e25u\u1e6d\u1e6dak f\u012b _sha_ 'r\u012b, y\u0101 'ayn\u012b, wa-uddaffir 'alayk.\n\nwa-in ja'atn\u012b al-'aw\u0101zil [SA 'aw\u0101dhil] tas'aln\u012b 'alayk\n\nla-a\u1e25u\u1e6d\u1e6dak f\u012b \u1e63adr\u012b, y\u0101 r\u016b\u1e25\u012b, wa-l-l\u016bl\u012b [SA lu'lu'] 'alayk9\n\nThe song refers not only to the activities of the night of henna (putting on kohl makeup, braiding the bride's hair, putting on jewelry) but also to the behavior demanded from the bride\u2014that she display no emotional involvement in the proceedings. The bride must traditionally appear distant and even morose; her muted emotions must display sadness at her departure from her family home, and she must show no happiness or joy that might be construed as anticipation of the sexual act which will initiate her into womanhood. She must conceal her emotions, metaphorically described in the song as hiding her beloved.\n\nThe song also refers to traditional village ideas about public relations between men and women before marriage. If a woman does indeed love her future husband, no one must know, for it may lead to accusations of misbehavior. In front of the groom's mother and sister she should appear indifferent, hence her fears about successfully hiding her emotions. In addition, she must fear the ' _aw\u0101zil_ (sing. ' _az\u016bl_ ), who are a major concept in Egyptian folk poetry, translated here as \"evil speakers.\"10 They are people who strive to separate couples in love by creating rumors and gossip which effectively doom their chances of getting married. They do so out of jealousy, envy, and pure maliciousness. In a tightly knit society such as the village, \"people's talk\" ( _kal\u0101m al-n\u0101s_ ) is a powerful social force and one to be reckoned with.\n\nThe imagery of the song thus indexes (1) the intimacy and possessiveness of young love, (2) the activities involved in preparing the bride, (3) the bride's struggle to conceal her feelings and emotions and to maintain the expected passive demeanor, and (4) the necessity of publicly dissembling any affection or desire she may feel for the bridegroom.\n\nAs the culminating portion of this celebration, when all the other ceremonies have been completed, poets are brought out to entertain the guests. It is a clich\u00e9 in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh that they should sing \"until the dawn call to prayer.\"\n\nFor the poets, weddings constitute the most respected context for their art. Private gatherings of aficionados might be more challenging and more rewarding in personal ways, but it is at weddings that the poets reach their largest audiences and most strongly establish their public reputations. Wedding performances almost invariably take place out of doors, with the poet often performing on a rough platform or stage, and sometimes beneath a canvas pavilion. At weddings, poets almost always perform in pairs, for the audience demands constant entertainment. Usually only one poet will sing the epic itself while the second accompanies him on the rab\u0101b and periodically sings other types of material so the lead singer may rest.\n\nA poet may earn more at a single wedding than several weeks, perhaps even months, of other types of performances, for not only is he paid by the family involved, but he receives gifts of money ( _nuqa\u1e6d_ or _nuq\u016b\u1e6d)_ during his performance commensurate with the audience's appreciation and approval.\n\n_Nuq\u016b\u1e6d_ (sing, _nuq\u1e6da_ ) are literally \"drops,\" as of water. The term refers to small gifts of money given to the bride and groom at weddings, to children at births or circumcisions, and to musicians at performances, particularly in return for public greetings or salutations. On the Night of Henna the groom's barber is also present, usually seated next to but lower than the groom, and receives nuq\u016bt as well. Though barbers receive semiannual payments from families in return for cutting hair and shaving the male members of the family, their largest profit is derived from wedding payments which accumulate into a considerable sum by village standards.\n\nNuq\u016b\u1e6d paid to the bride and groom are carefully recorded in a register, for they must be paid back in equal amounts at future weddings involving members of the giver's family. The entire system is a complicated economy of exchange which may provide newlyweds with several hundred dollars worth of gifts with which to begin their domestic life, all of which is then paid back in reciprocal gifts over the years.\n\nPoets' families do not ordinarily give nuq\u016b\u1e6d at villagers' weddings, nor do villagers offer nuq\u016b\u1e6d at poets' weddings. Poets do, however, as mentioned earlier, receive nuq\u016b\u1e6d as performers. Audience members are at times moved purely by the excellence of certain moments in the performance to approach the poet and offer him a small amount of money or cigarettes, which is almost always acknowledged verbally by the poet, often in verse. More often, however, audience members hand small amounts to poets in return for public salutations to the bride and groom and their respective families, or to notable guests in the audience. The poet in this way acts as the official mouthpiece for public greetings and compliments paid back and forth between families and friends. These salutations are a means of calling attention to one's attendance at the celebration, an act that is an acknowledged duty ( _w\u0101jib_ ) in village society, and a means of negotiating relationships among individuals, families, and clans in a public forum. The outsider status of the poet, the neutral intermediary, greatly facilitates such social negotiation. Traditional weddings thus act as moments for the transference of sizable economic resources from the larger community to (i) newlyweds, (2) poets, and (3) barbers.\n\nThough the epic singer may always function to some extent as a crowd-pleaser and as a reflection of his audience's tastes and preferences, different contexts do, in fact, engender different critical relationships between the performer and his listeners. These relationships are ones the poets openly acknowledge and discuss among themselves. Such private discussion is often couched in the form of advice presented to younger performers and constituted one of the richest veins I was able to tap during my \"apprenticeship.\" I consistently found that although I could never act as a true apprentice in many respects (particularly as a nonnative speaker of Arabic and as someone who had not absorbed the complex narrative elements of the epic in childhood), I could act successfully as a catalyst for discussions about the ways of dealing with different types of audiences in different contexts, the sorts of episodes to perform when, the preferences of different social groups for sad versus comic sections of the epic, and so on. In such discussions the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh stressed the following characteristics of wedding performances:\n\n* The episode chosen should be a light and happy one from the epic, preferably one that ends in a wedding (examples include \"The Tale of h\u0101ma, Queen of Yemen\" and \"The Tale of the Maiden Badr al-\u1e62ab\u0101\u1e25\"). At weddings the poets are rarely asked to perform a specific episode and thus are usually free to present a story they feel is appropriate for the celebration. Should a patron request a certain section of the epic, however, poets almost always acquiesce. The final wedding scenes within such episodes can be elaborated and manipulated so as to include blessings and best wishes for the bride and groom and their families. The same scenes when performed in private sahras rarely take more than a few verses to describe.\n\n* At a wedding performance one should not begin singing the epic until at least midnight, when all the other singing and dancing has died down. In this manner, whoever wants to listen can listen, and the others can go home. Several times I was told that the commercial star, Sayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s, never sang from the epic before one o'clock in the morning, after his son had already played for an hour or so to warm up the audience.\n\n* The poet should intersperse the performance regularly with praise songs to the Prophet ( _mad\u012b\u1e25_ ), comedy routines ( _\u1e25itat balad\u012b_ ), lyric pieces ( _maw\u0101w\u012bl,_ sing. _maww\u0101l_ ); and ( _adw\u0101r, sing, d\u014dr_ ), and the like. People at weddings want to be entertained, \"and that is what is required of us\" (wi-d\u0101 huwwa l-ma\u1e6dl\u016bb minn\u0101.)11\n\nI might add one further element to this list based on my own observations rather than on specific statements by poets. At wedding performances, poets usually do not argue with audience members about details of the story or any other disputed aspect of the performance; if an audience member disagrees with him, the poet often cedes the point in the greater interests of the celebration. If there are requests for other materials such as maw\u0101w\u012bl or \u1e25itat balad\u012b, the poet will generally comply. Since the story of the epic, particularly in the early part of the performance, is often interrupted by the presentation of nuq\u016b\u1e6d and accompanying salutations, there is little objection to further interruption for the performance of other materials. Whatever sense of authenticity the poet may evince in other contexts, whatever personal sense of loyalty he may posses to the tradition as he has learned it, this is usually suppressed in wedding performances so as to avoid conflict.12\n\nWedding performances possess an additional feature which strongly marks them: they represent one of the few contexts which female listeners and children may attend freely and openly. Although the listeners seated immediately in front of performing poets are almost invariably adult and male, on the edges of this central group, on porches, balconies, rooftops, and other marginal spaces, female listeners also assemble. Children at weddings are often running about and playing, but performances of epic are primarily late at night when the number of children still energetic enough to cause a disturbance is small. The children are, in any case, kept out of the area occupied by the adult men.\n\nOne result of this heterogeneous audience is that certain highly erotic sections of the epic are avoided or toned down during wedding performances (such as \"al-J\u0101zya at the Wall of T\u016bnis\"; see Chap. 5), or are performed, at minimum, with heavy censorship and repression of certain lines and jokes. This suppression of erotic themes is in direct contrast to some of the other elements of the celebration. The songs sung by the young, for the most part unmarried, men at weddings are almost all highly erotic and bawdy in nature.13 (I have no parallel knowledge of the songs sung by the women celebrating round the bride.) The comic potential of the epic, on the other hand, seems to be routinely highlighted and emphasized at such large, outdoor performances.\n\nDespite the increasing popularity of urban-style music at village weddings, an interesting set of circumstances can conspire to promote epic poets at weddings, at least temporarily. When there has been a recent death in the village where a wedding is planned, and family members are still sitting the first seven days of mourning, it is considered disrespectful and inappropriate to have loud amplified music. In this case people often bring in the epic poets as a substitute form of entertainment. Even if they are less chic, they are traditional, and since they can perform without loudspeakers, the wedding may take place as planned.\n\nA special atmosphere thus pervades the wedding context, one that demands light-heartedness ( _kh iffat datum,_ lit. 'lightness of blood') and joy ( _fara\u1e25_ ). The most common word in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh for wedding is in fact _fara\u1e25_ 'joy'.14 This does not mean there will be no drama or tragedy in the performance. On the contrary, almost all episodes from the epic contain deaths of heroes and painful reversals of fate. A number of episodes, in fact, deal almost exclusively with the death of a major hero. The requirement is only that the tale resolve happily, preferably with a wedding scene. The \"The Tale of \u1e24an\u1e0dal al-'Uqayl\u012b,\" for example, is considered a light ( _kh af\u012bf_) tale for it resolves happily and is easy to sing, though it also contains the deaths of the fathers of the main heroes at the hand of \u1e24an\u1e0dal during his treacherous night-raid on the Hil\u0101l\u012b camp. It is not, however, considered particularly appropriate for a wedding for it does not end with a great wedding scene.15 Such wedding episodes are considered preferable for they have numerous comic sections and conclude with the desired wedding motif.\n\nOne wedding occasion outshines all others as a context for _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l:_ the wedding of a poet's son, when epic singers from all over the Nile Delta come together to celebrate. Traditionally on these occasions there are no recitations of complete episodes, but rather, poets take turns performing highlights from the epic, striving to outdo each other in humor, pathos, or eloquence. The accounts of several famous weddings of poets figure prominently when the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poets discuss great poets and performances of the past.\n\nClearly no other desired experience could have figured higher in my hopes during fieldwork than to attend such a wedding. Two in fact took place during my 1986\u201387 stay and I was invited to each. The first was to take place in al-Bu\u1e25ayra Province, west of the Nile. Three weeks before it occurred, however, another poet's family in the same community celebrated their son's circumcision with a large celebration. At this celebration a fight broke out which rapidly degenerated into a grand melee; shots were fired, the police were called, and several participants landed in jail. As a result, the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh community decided not to attend the wedding en masse, but rather to send a single male representative from each household. I was asked not to attend.\n\nThe second wedding took place in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh itself, and, as it fell toward the very end of my stay in the village, it seemed the perfect culmination to a year of fieldwork. To my initial surprise, however, the groom's uncle insisted that the entertainment be an amplified band from the provincial capital of Kafr al-Shaykh. Though everyone enjoyed the modern glow of the celebration, at the wedding meal a heated argument broke out about the use of a band rather than epic singers for entertainment. The dispute wove back and forth between the desire to show the larger community that they were not backward or too poor to have city-style music and the desire to maintain the tradition of a large gathering of singers to mark a poet's wedding. Emotions ran high, and eventually several men who most strongly supported the traditional wedding stood up and left.16\n\nA wedding still constitutes the most respected context for the performance of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. As a performance context it has intrinsic constraints, and it dictates a specific performative framework. Furthermore, weddings represent a major financial resource for the poet community and also embody a specific style or mode of performance which every successful poet must master.\n\n##### _Circumcision Ceremonies_\n\nGrand, public celebrations of a son's circumcision\u2014celebrations large enough to merit the hiring of a poet\u2014are rare and restricted to families of considerable financial means. (Traditionally circumcision ceremonies were carried out when the son was anywhere between a few months to nine years old, but in recent years they have been held most often well before the son reaches the age of five or six.) The performance setting is quite similar to that of a wedding in that the occasion is large, public, and held outdoors, and payment is received from both the host family and from listeners. The latter contribute in the form of nuq\u016b\u1e6d. Again, auxiliary genres are frequently used to liven up the festivities, and similar constraints of propriety are maintained in view of the mixed audience.\n\nNo episodes in the epic recount the circumcision of young heroes or their sons, so the poets' preferred choice of scenes for a circumcision is to sing an episode or sequence containing acts of heroism by one of the main heroes or one of their sons. Their motivation for singing about acts of heroism as part of a ceremony marking a boy's symbolic entrance to manhood and to fuller participation in the religion of Islam seems clear: the poets consciously sing about heroes in order that young people may learn by example. This idea is also reflected in testimonies by audience members about the importance of the epic.\n\n##### _Caf\u00e9s_\n\nThe epigraph at the beginning of this chapter exemplifies the disappearance of the caf\u00e9 or coffeehouse as a context for _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performance. Although that scene was set in Cairo in the early 1940s, similar scenes, according to the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, were occurring in their region by the late 1960s. Prior to that period poets could depend upon a warm reception and an opportunity to sing for an evening or more at caf\u00e9s that regularly attracted epic poets. Poets would set out from their home villages on circuitous routes through the Nile Delta region, stopping at caf\u00e9s, at the villages of known patrons, and exploiting whatever other opportunities turned up.\n\nUpon a poet's arrival in a village, his rab\u0101b would be hung on two nails over or near the door to the caf\u00e9 to indicate that there would be epic singing that evening. Though the caf\u00e9 owner might pay the poet a small fee, more often he only fed him, supplied him with tea and cigarettes, and sometimes housed him during his stay. Either listeners handed the poet small gifts during the performance or a small bowl or other container was set up near the door and patrons dropped in a few coins as they came or left.\n\nThe following description, given by Edward Lane of coffee-shop performances of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ and other siyar in Cairo during the 1830s, is echoed by descriptions given me in the 1980s by al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poets:\n\nReciters of romances frequent the principal kahwehs (or coffee-shops) of Cairo and other towns, particularly on the evenings of religious festivals, and afford attractive and rational entertainments. The reciter generally seats himself upon a small stool on the mastab'ah, or raised seat, which is built against the front of the coffee-shop; some of his auditors occupy the rest of that seat . . . most of them with the pipe in hand, some sipping their coffee, and all highly amused, not only with the story, but also with the lively and dramatic manner of the narrator. The reciter receives a trifling sum of money from the keeper of the coffee-shop, for attracting customers; his hearers are not obliged to contribute anything for his remuneration; many of them give nothing, and few give more than five or ten faddahs.17\n\nOne interesting aspect shared by both coffeehouses and patronage circuits is that audiences in particular locales apparently often ask the visiting poet for the same episode, year after year\u2014perhaps owing to the pleasure of knowing and anticipating the story, perhaps owing to an association built up between certain poets and certain tales. Several of the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poets mentioned this phenomenon, which they chalk up as one of the quirks of the _fell\u0101\u1e25s_ 'peasants', 'villagers'. Another characteristic attributed by poets to the fell\u0101\u1e25s is their supposed inability to remember the names of characters other than the main heroes. Poets often joke about the villagers' manner of asking for a particular episode (\"Sing the story where Ab\u016b Zayd's son goes out to fight and then doesn't obey his father and he sends him on a journey to punish him,\") rather than referring to the main character or to the \"title,\" such as \"The Story of Badr al-\u1e62ab\u0101\u1e25,\" as the poets do.\n\nOne key characteristic of the caf\u00e9 context which is now only extant in the sahra, which we examine in some detail when considering audience\/ performer interactions, is a sense of defending the integrity of the epic tradition. In most performance contexts, poets, when challenged about some aspect of their performance, will accommodate the audience's point of view to some extent, though they may comment on it and even laugh and joke about it afterward. In the sahra, and this was apparently true of the caf\u00e9 as well, the poet assumes he is addressing a knowledgeable audience, \"those who have an understanding of the epic\" ( _ill\u012b biyijham\u016b f\u012b l-s\u012bra_ ), which sets up a markedly different dynamic between poet and audience, one which supports and even thrives on criticism and discussion.\n\n##### _Patronage Circuits_\n\nDuring my fieldwork (1983, 1986\u201387, 1988), patronage circuits still represented the largest single source of performance income for the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. In a number of poet families, income from the activities of wives, daughters, and nonperforming sons has equaled or surpassed that brought in by the poet head of household. This was apparently not true in the past, though these additional sources of income may always have been essential. Commercial activities of other family members currently include buying and selling vegetables in the local markets and trading odds and ends such as plastic kitchenware and inexpensive t-shirts and socks. Various labor arrangements involving sons range from apprenticeships in nonpoet crafts to full-time employment in such occupations as carpentry, construction, plumbing, and even the police force. Such alternative employment for sons has only existed as a major factor in the economic life of the community for the past ten to fifteen years, according to the poets.\n\nRelationships with patron families whom the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh visit have for the most part been maintained over several generations. As mentioned earlier, patron families are usually visited twice a year during the periods immediately following the major harvests. The poet's role of entertainer at the harvest festivities was probably at the heart of the patronage system of which we can observe only sparse remains today. Many narratives of past performances recounted by the poets (such as those presented in Chapter 2) include descriptions of poets arriving in time for the end of harvest celebrations at which they would then perform. These descriptions, however, are of the period before the Nasserite land reforms of the 1950s, which broke up major landholdings and redistributed them to the fell\u0101\u1e25s. There are no longer estates of hundreds and thousands of acres which require small armies of workers, and thus there are no longer enormous celebrations to which the poets are summoned to perform. Here, by contrast, is the summary of an account of a contemporary visit:\n\nShaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 and his eldest son, al-Sayyid, went on a four-day trip to an area near S\u012bd\u012b S\u0101lim to visit _n\u0101s \u1e25ab\u0101yib_ (literally 'people who are loved ones', that is, patrons). Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 recounts that they arrived about ten in the morning and the men were out planting rice, but the women greeted him by name and told him to come in and sit, telling him, \"You're not a stranger! The house is your house! Come in and sit!\" They sang for two nights and received six _k\u012bla_ of wheat18 and four packs of cigarettes (above and beyond what they were given during the two nights and smoked there). During the two nights they performed they also received nuq\u016bt (i.e., from the audience). The family slaughtered chickens and ducks for them. They have been going to this family since before Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101's father's time.19\n\nAs with narratives of past performances, these accounts of recent travels consistently reiterate several key motifs:20 first, the poet and his son were going to visit \"loved ones\" or \"friends\"; second, these people knew their visitors by name; third, they were welcome (so welcome and trusted in this case that they were ushered into the house, even though the menfolk are not present); and fourth, their patrons were generous. These recurring motifs all seek to preserve the same essential distinction\u2014the difference between visiting a patron's family and begging or vagrancy.\n\nThe \"greeted-me-by-name\" motif in particular is extremely common, for it is by this particular topos that the poets distinguish in their narratives between traveling done on their patronage circuit from traveling done in search of any opportunity to sing. The first is totally respectable; the latter smacks of vagrancy.\n\nThe lack of harvest celebrations is not the only aspect of the patronage circuits which has changed. One poet confessed that in recent years, his patrons have asked him to sing less and less often. Nowadays, he said, he ended up watching television with them as often as he sang\u2014but they still give him remuneration as before.\n\nI was never able to speak with the head of a family that was currently patronizing one of the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poets, though I was three times able to speak with sons of men who had or still did patronize epic poets. The first felt that his father genuinely loved to listen to _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ , though he, the son, did not care for it much and usually left the house when the poet began to sing. The second, however, felt that his father continued to patronize the epic poet who visited them once or twice a year out of a feeling of duty: it was something that his father before him had done, and the poets are, after all, needy ( _gh alb\u0101n\u012bn_).21\n\nThis second viewpoint was upheld and clarified by a folklore researcher in Cairo whose father had patronized not only poets but dervishes and sufis. The researchers felt his father did not do so out of any real interest in poetry, yet he put aside a portion of his crops every year for these groups. The reseacher felt his father's desire had been to preserve somehow the \"balance\" of society, that these marginal groups represented something that should continue, a tradition to be preserved.22\n\nIn a hamlet about an hour's walk from al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, a friend recounted that a long time ago his father had patronized a poet for several years. This relationship grew not only from the father's love of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ but from an incident in his life. When the son was still very young, the father fell ill and was bedridden for several months. During that time he sent for a poet to come and live with the family, and to play for him in the early morning when he first woke up and late at night as he went to sleep. At other times of the day the poet would sing and entertain, but in the morning and late at night he was asked just to play the rab\u00e0b. In 1987, nearly thirty years later, the father, now in his eighties, could still recite for me lengthy sections of the epic from memory.23\n\nThough the demand for actual performances is dwindling, the income the poets derive from this system does not seem to have dropped off drastically. Some of the patron families seem to share a will to secure for these traditional artists a basic livelihood with a certain amount of dignity, even when the art form they purvey is less and less in demand. The patronage circuits are a respected context for performance of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l,_ with one drawback: they must be carefully distinguished from \"vagrancy,\" for a poet leaving the village with his rab\u00e0b on his shoulder to visit a patron looks exactly like a poet going to the nearest town to play in the marketplace. The motifs of being greeted by name and being ushered into homes as honored guests serve not only to build the image of the poet as respected artisan, but also to differentiate between what the poets know in the outside world are judged to be licit versus illicit sources of income.\n\n##### _Saints' Festivals_\n\nThe poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh attest that there is no longer an audience for _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ recitation at the saints' festivals ( _maw\u0101lid_ ; SA sing. _mawlid_ , EA _m\u016blid_ ) of the Nile Delta region. At first this seems surprising, for the festivals attract to a great degree the same traditionally oriented social groups who constitute the most enthusiastic patrons of the epic. Furthermore, the festivals occupy a focal role in the religious life of the rural areas of the Delta. Al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh is within an hour's drive of the two largest festivals in northern Egypt, that of al-Sayyid al-Badaw\u012b in \u1e6dan\u1e6da, and that of Ibr\u0101h\u012bm al-Dis\u016bq\u012b in Dis\u016bq, and there are practicing Sufi brotherhoods in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh from the orders of both al-Badaw\u012b (the Badawiyya order) and al-Dis\u016bq\u012b (the Brahimiyya or Burh\u0101niyya order).24\n\nThe festivals are now dominated, however, by performers using ur-ban-influenced performance styles\u2014singers with large ensembles and loudspeakers. Instruments present at a m\u016blid currently include violin, lute ('\u016bd), electric keyboard, and accordion, none of which exist commonly at the village level of \"folk\" music. Performers include shaykhs ( _ma h\u0101yikh_) who sing moral song-tales, munshids who sing praise songs to the Prophet Muhammad ( _mad\u1e25 al-nab\u012b or mad\u012b\u1e25_ ), and accounts of the lives of the Sufi saints, as well as singers (who may also be called munshids) attached to local Sufi brotherhoods who exclusively lead _dh ikrs_ (the musically accompanied repetition of one of the names of God or other short phrases which forms the heart of Sufi worship) and do not sing any of the longer narrative genres.25\n\nSaints' festival celebrations have over the past few decades evolved toward a more modern, amplified, louder, soundscape. The traditional poet, singing solo or with a single accompanist, would undoubtedly sound thin and out of place. Although Edward Lane, in his description of Cairo in the 1830s, states that during the nights of religious festivals, epic singers performing at coffeehouses were particularly common, he does not mention epic singers performing out in the squares, the streets, and the open spaces that form the heart of the festival. It appears that even at that time, epic singing may have taken place on the margins of the overall celebrations, in smaller, enclosed spaces rather than in central, open spaces.\n\nThough performances of this kind may still occur in other areas of Egypt, and there is some evidence that this context may still be alive in Upper Egypt, in the Nile Delta _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ appears to have irrevocably lost its place in the celebration of saints' festivals.\n\n##### _\"Vagrancy\": Squares, Trains, Fields, Marketplaces_\n\nFrom the viewpoint of the most villagers, the presence of the poets in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh is uncomfortable because of their Gypsy origins and because of their association with _tasawwul_ \u2014vagrancy and begging. Indeed, all of the images and stereotypes propagated about the poets by the outside world relate to these two central issues. The villagers consider any uninvited performance \"vagrancy.\" And this in turn means that the poets' income is always suspect, for it is always tainted with the possiblity of illicit provenance.\n\nTrains, marketplaces, town squares, the edges of fields, and numerous other locations are all possible sites for performances. The income derived from these performances is minimal; however, it tides the poets over between other performances and as such plays a critical role. This type of performance, since the disappearance of the caf\u00e9 circuits, is the only performance context fully controlled by the poet; all other contexts are contingent upon either the time of year (for visits to patrons) or an invitation to perform. This issue of control may in fact be the underlying cause of the deep-rooted antipathy villagers feel for these performances.\n\nSuch performances are marked by a strong reliance on the religious portions of the poets' repertory; rarely do they sing from the epic in these performances. There is no question of maintaining the integrity of the epic tradition here; these activities are undertaken with a single purpose\u2014to earn money. The performances carry great psychological weight with the other inhabitants of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh: The shame of the \"beggar\" poet is the counterweight to the fame of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh as residence of the region's best singers of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l._\n\n##### _The Sahra: Private Evening Gatherings_\n\nThe sahra or _l\u0113la_ 26 is one of the fundamental evening pastimes of village men, from adolescence onward. It connotes time spent with companions in the evening or nighttime, usually with some diversion or pastime as a focal point. The verb _Sahara_ 27 may be used to designate time spent in caf\u00e9s or other public places playing backgammon, listening to the radio, watching television, conversing, smoking on the _g\u014dza_ 'waterpipe', or simply staying awake late. _Saharn\u0101 saw\u0101_ means \"we spent time together in the evening\/night.\" But the noun, _sahra,_ refers to a gathering that has been organized to some extent, for which there is a host and a venue. In the context of the village, this term invariably refers to a gathering held in someone's home. The same activities may take place (backgammon, television, etc.), but drinks such as tea, juice, hibiscus infusion ( _karkad\u0113_ ), or sweetened salep drink ( _sa\u1e25lab_ ), and possibly food, are offered throughout the evening by the host. In addition, the host may provide entertainment in the form of a poet singing an episode from _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l._ The host may pay a flat fee to the poet, or it may be understood that the guests are to contribute nuq\u016b\u1e6d as in other performance contexts. In any case the poet is offered numerous cigarettes by audience members, who place them directly in front of the poet or off to one side.\n\nOnly a handful of men in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh now host such performances of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ with any regularity. The friends they gather round them at these parties are almost always fellow enthusiasts of the epic tradition, though there are usually a few men in any such gathering who are not as well acquainted with the epic as the core group. These latter tend to take little part in the debates and discussions that break out frequently\u2014this is not their bailiwick, and they usually defer to the acknowledged devotees in conversations about the performance.\n\nThe sahra represents the one contemporary context where the poets feel they are performing for aficionados of the tradition, although this is not always true, for the group may be constituted primarily of young men who are seeking more entertainment and pleasure than \"authenticity.\" But at a sahra, even a lighthearted and convivial one, a listener may challenge the poet for having left out an important element, for having forgotten a certain passage, for having made a mistake, and the poet in this context (depending on whether he deems the point valid or not) will counter with a defense of his version, or amend it in light of a correction he thinks sound.\n\nThe performance structure of the sahra is quite stable.28 After initial greetings, a glass of tea, and a cigarette, the poet unwraps his rab\u0101b and begins to warm up by playing short instrumental passages. He then opens the performance with a praise song to the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad ( _mad\u012b\u1e25_ ), usually one that recounts an event from his life such as \"The Prophet and the Gazelle,\" in which the Prophet saves a mother gazelle from a hunter by offering himself as ransom; this acts so moves the hunter that he converts to Islam.29 The poet then stops playing the rab\u0101b and in rhymed prose rapidly sets the scene for the episode the audience is about to hear. He might explain where in the epic this episode occurs and which adventures have already taken place; sometimes he introduces the main characters. He breaks off the rhymed prose at a point when one of the characters is about to speak; then the poet admonishes his listeners to harken carefully to his words, and, after all have wished God's blessings on the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad, the character begins to speak. This speech is the speech of heroes\u2014rhymed epic verse, sung to the accompaniment of the rab\u0101b.\n\nAt this point we have moved fully into the domain of epic-singing proper. Once there, the narrative voice, characters' voices, and asides to the audience are nearly always in sung, rhymed verse. At intervals the poet stops and narrates a brief section in rhymed, spoken prose (with no musical accompaniment), usually so that he may smoke a cigarette or rest his voice, and then continues on in sung poetry. Also at intervals of a half hour to one and a half hours, the poet stops entirely, enjoining the listeners to wish God's blessing on the Prophet again, and takes a full break\u2014long enough to sip a glass of tea, smoke a cigarette, and let the audience discuss and evaluate the performance so far.\n\nThe transition back into the epic is accomplished in the same manner each time, though the prefatory sections will now be quite brief: praise to the Prophet, rhymed prose scene-setting, then the movement into the sung, epic voice. Throughout the evening, as guests come and go, as listeners offer cigarettes, as the host offers refreshments, the poet also composes rhymed greetings and compliments to the audience members. Several other auxiliary genres often play a role in the sahra (see Chap. 4).\n\nThe sahra thus presented itself to me as an excellent context for study. It is the most common of the performance contexts actually taking place in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. It is also a context to which it was relatively easy for me as researcher to gain access. I could also, and did at times, host my own sahr\u0101t to repay the generosity of friends, and, as host, I earned the right to determine which episode we were to hear. Finally, the relationships between the poet and his listeners in the sahra are intensified and made accessible to scrutiny by an outsider in the discussions and conversations that frame and fill the gaps in each performance. The poets' conceptualizations of the tradition, the listeners' conceptualizations, competing concepts of \"authenticity,\" the boundaries of acceptable variation\u2014all these were far more observable in the sahra than elsewhere. We must bear in mind, however, that this is but one of many different contexts for the performance of this tradition; the connoisseurship we encounter in our analyses of poet\/audience interactions and other topics is, at least in present days, found almost exclusively within the frame of the sahra.\n\n#### Audiences of the Sahra\n\nWithin the population of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, only a small percentage of people ever listen to performances of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ in any context other than the large public performances given at weddings and other celebrations. Though I recorded seventy-six sahr\u0101t over the course of my 1986\u201387 fieldwork, in the presence of audiences that ranged from six to twenty listeners, these were attended primarily by the same core group of less than fifty listeners.\n\nEven within the small group of people who do regularly listen to _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performances in private evening gatherings, a variety of attitudes can be found regarding the value of the epic and its importance or lack thereof. These attitudes tend to vary with two main factors: age and level of education.30 In many cases these two factors function in tandem and together define fairly distinct social groups within the village population. Until the 1960s, reading and writing in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh were taught primarily in the kutt\u0101b, the traditional Qur'\u0101nic schools in which the alphabet, memorization of portions of the Qur'\u0101n, and some other basic religious texts are taught by religious shaykhs.31 Men who received their entire education in this system differ markedly in attitudes toward many aspects of village life from younger men who were educated in government schools. Only a handful of men over the age of sixty in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh are literate, but these few share an essentially traditionalist viewpoint that was reinforced rather than contested by their education.\n\nMen in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh over sixty years of age are the strongest public supporters and patrons of the tradition, and several of the educated men of this generation are among the most active public patrons of the tradition. These men grew up in a society where the epic played a highly visible and respected role. In discussions with me, they approached the value and worth of the epic primarily as history, history they considered both ancient and veracious. They also lauded the heroes as models of manly virtue and honor, explained that the epic contains \"big ideas\" ( _ajk\u0101r kab\u012bra_ ), and contended that although the poets embellish and take liberties with the story in order to make the poetry entertaining, the epic is indeed the history of the Arabs.\n\nAnother primarily age-generated set of attitudes is found in the testimonies of men aged thirty to sixty or so. In this group, also largely illiterate though literacy is more common among men forty years old and younger, the epic is viewed with a certain amount of respect, but it is approached and patronized for the most part as entertainment. In conversation, educated men of this age group often at least initially derided the epic as it exists now as fabulous history with little connection to the events it describes. They often blamed the element of exaggeration and fantasy directly on recent generations of poets (including present-day poets). Several times I was told that if I had come fifty years ago, I would have heard the \"real story\" ( _al-qi\u1e63\u1e63a al-\u1e25aq\u012bqiyya_ ) of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l. The s\u012bra as it is told now, I was informed, is not \"history\" ( _t\u0101r\u012b kh_). The predominant opinion among literate men of this age group is that real history underlies the epic; but that the facts have had been warped into fantastic form by generations of poets, who added to and embellished the tales. The educated men of this age group rarely initiate performances of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ , though they may regularly attend such gatherings. In contrast, less educated men of this group still occasionally host sahras and actively patronize the poets. Several men of this group told me, however, that they did so as an act of charity toward the poets who are poor and needy ( _gh alb\u0101n\u012bn_). A characteristic that these men cited several times in favor of listening to the epic was that it is \"useful talk\" ( _kal\u0101m muf\u012bd_ ), that is, one benefits and is improved by the examples of the heroes who possessed \"high morals and manners\" ( _a khl\u0101q_) and were of noble character ( _a\u1e63\u012bl_ ). Active patronage of private evening gatherings for this age group seemed to vary more with factors of education than economic factors, though I do not have anything near a complete economic portrait of audience members.\n\nFinally, I encountered only a handful of men under thirty who had ever attended a private performance of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l. A_ large number had never even heard a public performance, though an equal number had on one or more occasions heard at least a portion of a wedding performance. Almost all members of this age group in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh have attended several years of government schooling. Many young men of this group attended performances out of curiosity during my stay in the village. Though some found it interesting, when I returned briefly in 1988, none of these young men had attended further performances in the intervening eleven months. For most of these men, the epic evokes images of provinciality, illiteracy, and lack of sophistication.\n\nFurthermore, those who favor contemporary revisionist and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, almost all of whom are from this youngest age bracket, reject the epic as part of the matrix of folk or uneducated practices that they view as basically un-Islamic. These practices include the veneration of saints, the celebration of saints' festivals, the Sufi mystic brotherhoods, women's lamentations at funerals, the use of magic in any form, and other aspects of folk belief systems common in rural areas and in certain classes of urban society as well. Though outsiders may find little in the epic texts themselves which would seem objectionable (though saints and supernatural characters do appear in the stories), the epic is at present patronized almost entirely by those social groups against whom these young men have set themselves in opposition. In current social terms, the epic is strongly associated with traditionalist forces. The entire epic tradition is viewed by some groups as intrinsically bound up with the religious, social, and political views of its main body of appreciators.\n\nThese differing attitudes toward the epic are often discussed by poets in the privacy of their own homes. Cast in terms of advice to younger performers, their comments contain views such as the following: For old men, sing of the deaths of heroes; they like the sad parts, they like to hear _h akwa_ [complaints sung about the vissicitudes of fate]. For the younger men sing light stories with lots of funny parts; entertain them. For the _h ab\u0101b_ [young men in their late teens and twenties] sing love stories with beautiful women.32\n\nThe poets speak in particular of the younger men's lack of understanding and lack of patience with the serious parts of the epic. But this disinterest is not attributed to any lack of character among the young, nor do the poets often relate it to social changes; rather they simply remark that the epic is a taste one acquires with years. According to Shaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, \"They are not yet 'up to the epic'\" (mih 'al\u0101 qadd is-s\u012bra). And Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b tells us, \"This type of talk is strange to them; their age is not yet up to its age\" (ikkal\u0101m d\u0101 ghar\u012bb lahum; sinnihum mih 'al\u0101 sinnuh).\n\nLater we examine in detail aspects of texts that have been manipulated by poets to fit their audiences. No example could be clearer though than the following brief descriptions of a young maiden, as sung by the same poet to three different groups.33 In the first instance the poet was singing to a mixed audience of men, women, and children. The maiden in question had a head as small and delicate as that of a dove, eyes like almonds, cheeks like roses, lips like cherries, and a neck as fine as that of a silver chalice (ka's)34 in the hand of a sultan.\n\nThe second time I heard this section I was in a group of young men: the description now began with the maiden's feet, which were as small as those of a dove, and then climbed to her legs which were like pillars of marble. Her thighs were smooth as silk and on them you could see the veins as in the finest Italian marble; these two pillars supported a lush garden in which there was a fountain, above which her belly pleated like a fold in a length of silk. In the midst was her navel, like a fine silver cup out of which a sultan might drink. This description was performed to whoops from the young men and cries for more.35\n\nThe final time I heard this description from the same poet, he was performing for a group of elderly men and I was the youngest person present. Gone were the romantic images and the eroticism; now all was sarcastic\u2014her eyes struck him like two arrows, little did he know she would soon be striking him with her two slippers!\n\nThe concept of differing audiences within the village context, then, reveals itself not only in the larger artistic choices but also in the finest of details. The poets speak not only of the difficulties they experience in playing to different audiences, but they recognize and discuss which members of their community are most talented at dealing with various age groups.\n\n#### Individual Performance Styles\n\nVarying audience attitudes toward the epic have helped differentiate the styles of the poets performing in the community of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh; all of these styles, however, are part of the tradition. Although each poet has an individual repertory of devices for dramatizing or enlivening a performance (as I discuss in more detail in the ensuing chapters), each poet also leans toward a general style of performance and toward certain audiences with whom he is most comfortable. The following briefly describes the styles of four al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poets as they perform in the sahra context:\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b is a showman par excellence. Heavyset, gregarious, sporting a black walrus mustache, and still in his fifties during my fieldwork (b. 1931), he is the preferred poet of the young men ( _h ab\u0101b_) of the village. In performance he sways back and forth, waves his rab\u0101b in the air, employs a wide repertory of facial gestures and humorous voices for such characters as old women, religious judges, Christians\/Jews, and villains; the punch lines of his jokes are accompanied by a loud snap of the bow on the neck of the rab\u0101b, a shout, or a deep-throated, hearty laugh. He has a powerful voice, clear enunciation, and is capable of singing, unamplified, for a large crowd. Shaykh Biyal\u012b's performance style is one of rapidly changing textures: volume, melodies, gestures, facial expressions, quick switches from poetry to rhymed prose ( _saj_ ') to unrhymed prose, all conspiring to form a lively, highly entertaining kaleidoscope. His rhymes are ragged, his verses vary widely in length; he often misses a rhyme two and three times in a row before catching it again in a new sequence. Transcribing his texts proves difficult: his many digressions and excursions into jokes with the audience and commentaries leave many verses unfinished, and therefore much is left unsaid. I find it a formidable task to portray here the frenetic activity of these performances. He performs the complete _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ repertory as it is known in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, but his renditions often lack the detail found in the older poets' versions. When he first recorded the s\u012bra for me, it ran thirty-seven hours, with two episodes from his repertory not recorded. When I heard him in unrecorded gatherings, several of his episodes nearly doubled in length.\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b (shown performing on Western violin)\n\nShaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b is considered the doyen of the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poets. Small, thin, frail-looking but spry, he was nearly seventy (b. 1919) when I recorded his repertory. Though he walks with a cane, his energy belies his years. He is lively in performance and also uses comic effects, though perhaps less often than Shaykh Biyal\u012b. He is the preferred poet of the older men of the village, among whom he has a staunch and loyal following. His stage presence bespeaks more dignity than a \"showman\" partially owing to his age and partially to his great store of knowledge about the history and genealogy of the village. During pauses in performances for tea and cigarettes, he entertains as much as while he is singing the epic; one way or another the audience is rarely disappointed. His repertory of facial expressions is more comic though perhaps more limited than Shaykh Biyalf s, and he is famous for his \"shout\" ( _h akh\u1e6da_) which he utilizes several times in a given performance, an effect anticipated by his listeners, something like the \"surprise\" in Haydn's Surprise Symphony. Two major problems, however, affect Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b's performance style: the loss of many teeth has resulted in often unclear pronunciation, and with age his voice has lost much of its power\u2014it is often difficult to hear him over the sound of the rab\u0101b. As a result he can now only effectively perform in small groups, and these are often made up of people who have been listening to him and his renditions of the epic for years and even decades. When recording his performance I was able to ameliorate this condition by placing a microphone directly in front of him aimed to capture his voice rather than the rab\u0101b. His poetry and rhymes are more regularly structured than Shaykh Biyal\u012b's. I recorded only about two-thirds of his repertory from the s\u012bra (fifty-six hours); however, I also played with him in \"lessons\" (where we both played while he sang) for many additional hours and thus know his repertory better than that of most of the other poets except Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd. I never observed him in an unrecorded performance situation, however.\n\nShaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd, previous to my arrival, had not played in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh itself for many years, preferring to play only on his extensive patronage circuit and at invited performances; he therefore had no following to speak of within the village. He is well over seventy (his date of birth is uncertain) but has a strong, sweet voice; his rab\u0101b playing is considerably more controlled and coordinated with his singing than either of the poets described earlier. When, at my request, Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 performed in a series of sahras, he surprised all present. His rhymes fell into place like clockwork, and his vocabulary was poetic, with more \"borrowings\" from standard Arabic than the other poets use. His performance style is stark and even severe, for he employs virtually no facial expression, no gestures, no voice changes, and even eschews rapid melodic changes. He prefers not to \"clutter\" his performances with the other smaller genres usually used to fill out an evening: he never added a maww\u0101l, hitat baladi, or more than a couple of lines of praise poetry to Muhammad except at the direct request of an audience member. His performance style might be termed monotonous, but mesmerizing would certainly be a better characterization. I recorded what he described as his complete repertory from the epic (fifty-three hours), though he acknowledged that he could expand any of the episodes upon request. Once, in a discussion between Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101, his son-in-law, and myself about adding detail or summarizing, he stated, \"I can kill off the seven kings of the 'Uqayla tribe in thirty minutes or I can take three hours doing it!\" (6\/22\/87). Some listeners were very impressed with Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101's renditions; others found his performance style too unchanging in delivery. My two college-educated assistants who helped with the transcribing of tapes both preferred Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101's texts to those of all other poets.36\n\nShaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b\n\nShaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd\n\nShaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd Tawf\u012bq is the youngest of these four poets (b. 1935); he has a fine voice and is a good rab\u0101b player. He uses little facial expression, no body movement, and little variation in tone, volume, or tempo. The result in this case, however, _is_ monotonous, for he is generally unable to create any interactive relationship with his audience: his performances are completely devoid of jokes or commentary; when disturbances occur, he plods on with his singing, rather than incorporate the disturbance with a comment as other poets are wont to do. His repertory is limited: he knows only three episodes from the epic (\u1e24andal al-'Uqayl\u012b, the Daughters of the Ahr\u0101f, and Man\u1e63\u016br al-\u1e24abah\u012b), which together total just under ten hours of performance. This repertory is virtually memorized; recordings from 1983 and 1987 show less variation than similar recordings from the older poets completed only a few minutes or days apart.\n\nOf the fourteen poets who were living in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh in 1983, five can be ranked as having full command of the entire epic as it is known in local repertory. Seven have much smaller personal repertories ranging from eight down to two episodes. Three of these lesser poets whom I had the opportunity of working with have died since I began my work in 1983. In addition, Shaykh T\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd, my primary teacher and colleague in this research, suffered a stroke in 1988 and then died just before I completed this work. He was an extraordinary human being and a gifted poet. His modesty, despite his truly prodigious poetic abilities, is perhaps best summed up in my last conversation with him before leaving al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh after my 1986\u201387 fieldwork. Shaykh T\u00e0ha remonstrated me for paying so much attention to the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh rather than just the poems and asked that I not make \"a big deal\" of them in my book in America. There were far better poets a generation ago, and no one from his generation could compare to them, he said. I countered that the poetry they sang had been around for centuries and was rapidly disappearing, and that it is beautiful poetry of \"big ideas.\" Besides, I told him, there is not a single poet in America who can sing even a few hours of poetry, let alone night after night for a month or more! \"Not one?\" he asked. \"Not one.\" \"Okay, well then go ahead and write what you have to write and God grant you success\" (\u1e6dabb iktib baqa ill\u012b 'andak w-all\u0101h yinajja\u1e25ak). I have been unable to bring myself to rewrite into the past tense the passages in this work which concern Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd.\n\nShaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd Tawf\u012bq\n\nThere exists among the poets of al-Bakat\u016bsh, and has probably always existed, a spectrum of differing abilities and of plain versus dramatic performance styles which includes a wealth of individual techniques such as the use of different voices for characters within the narrative, use of key melodies to mark joyful, tragic, or suspenseful scenes, facial expressions, hand and arm gestures, sudden shifts in volume, use of different \"modes\" of speech (prose, rhymed prose, and verse), and so on. Several researchers have been tempted to postulate that the plain, unadorned performance style is the oldest and most authentic manner of Arabic oral epic-singing and that the embellishing dramatic effects are modern accruals and basically compensatory techniques used by epic singers who cannot achieve high levels of eloquence.\n\nThough this hypothesis initially sounds tenable, Lane, one of the earliest Western documenters of this performance tradition, clearly speaks of an animated performance style when he records that audiences are all \"highly amused, not only with the story, but also with _the lively and dramatic manner of the narrator_.\"37 This description is from the 1830s. Another early description, from \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Hu\u1e63ayn's autobiography referring to the 1890s, seems to evoke just the opposite style. Here the poet performs calmly and staidly, though the listeners (as today in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh) clearly have their own opinions to express: \"the poet would begin to recite in a wonderfully sweet tone the doings of Abu Zaid, Khalifa and Diab, and his hearers would remain silent except when ecstay enlivened them or desire startled them. Then they would demand a repetition and argue and dispute. And so the poet would be silent until they ceased their clamour after a period which might short or long. Then _he would continue his sweet recitation in a monotone_.\"38\n\nThese accounts and other evidence of pre-twentieth century performances do not clearly indicate that either one of the two ends of the spectrum are older or more authentic. A spectrum of styles has existed for at least the past 150 years and probably much, much longer.\n\nIn this chapter I have linked traditional contexts, patronage structures, typical audience composition and attitudes, and individual poets' styles into some semblance of a larger interacting whole\u2014a performance tradition. The challenge in analyzing specific performance texts now lies not merely in assimilating and including these domains as raw information, but also in delineating the balance and the relationships which concatenate among these various factors, neither shunting them aside as mere background description nor leaving them undifferentiated and univalent in their relationship to specific processes in actual performances.\n\n* * *\n\n1. I obtained and then xeroxed these two chapbooks. They were both incomplete, undated copies of the same edition of \"S\u012brat ban\u012b hil\u0101l f\u012b qi\u1e63\u1e63at ab\u016b zayd al-hil\u0101l\u012b wa-l-n\u0101'isa wa-zayd al-'aj\u0101j\" from the Maktabat al-jumh\u016briyya al-'arabiyya publisher in Cairo. Several poets and villagers stated that a number of chapbooks of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ had been present in the village years ago; many of these were said to have been destroyed by the dampness that accompanies the annual winter rains.\n\n2. \"Briefly stated, Men\u00e9ndez Pidal's theory of 'fragmentation' posits that as the old epic fell upon hard times, juglares found that their audiences displayed an affinity for hearing certain favorite parts of the old cantares, usually brief narrative episodes or dramatic exchanges of dialogues that marked moments of high tension in the tradtional epic songs, and that these sections lifted from the longer poems came to be sung independently.\" Merle E. Simmons, \"The Spanish Epic,\" in Oinas, _Heroic Epic and Saga_ , 229.\n\nThe most useful of Pidal's many presentations of these ideas is found in Ram\u00f3n Men\u00e9ndez Pidal, _Poesia juglaresca y origenes de las literaturas rom\u00e1nicas,_ vol. 3 (1957), and idem, _Romancero hispanico_ (1953).\n\n3. For nineteenth-century sources on performance of Arabic oral epics see Lane, _Manners_ (1895); Y\u016bnus, _al-Hil\u0101liyya_ ; and Breteau, \"T\u00e9moinages.\"\n\n4. For an evocative description of the transformation of a caf\u00e9 from a site for epic performance to a media-dominated context, see Naguib Mahfouz, _Zuq\u0101q al-mid\u0101qq_ (1947), 7\u201312; idem, _Midaq Alley,_ trans. Trevor LeGassick (1981), 3\u20137; part of this translation is quoted at the opening of this chapter.\n\n5. Western terminology of dower, dowry, and brideprice does not often clearly distinguish between payments made from the groom to the bride and payments made from the bride to the groom. In the Egyptian case, substantial payments are made to the bride by the groom in the form of gold jewelry, which becomes the bride's private property and remains hers even if she is widowed or divorced. It could be considered a form of social insurance. The groom also provides housing and basic furniture; the bride brings into the marriage her personal belongings and all the household effects necessary for the beginning of their domestic life (linens, kitchen utensils, etc.).\n\n6. The various rituals and traditions surrounding engagements and weddings differ in detail from region to region, though most follow this general pattern. A mark of both the diversity of these ceremonies and the importance attributed to them may be seen in a weekly radio program that has run for several years on the Voice of Cairo (\u1e62aw\u1e6d al-q\u0101hirah) radio station. The program discusses wedding rites and customs from around Egypt and the Arab world. Several of my close friends in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh avidly followed this program throughout my stay.\n\n7. The colloquial Egyptian word _haw\u0101_ conflates the classical Arabic words for both \"love\" ( _haw\u00e0_ ) and \"air\" or \"breeze\" ( _haw\u0101_ '). See Hinds and Badawi, _Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic._\n\n8. Text adapted from Baheega Sidky Rasheed, _Egyptian Folk Songs_ (1964), 8 (my translation). There are literally hundreds of verses to this song, many of which are made up spontaneously at weddings and are then passed from wedding to wedding and region to region. A similar pattern for improvisatory singing is found in the song \"'A\u1e6dh\u0101n y\u0101 \u1e63ab\u0101y\u0101\" 'I am thirsty, O maidens', which is used in many different contexts and to which famous poets and singers have created versions ranging from the highly political to sarcastic parodies of the original.\n\n9. This transcription presents standardized vocalizations and spellings consonant with Modern Standard Arabic, with the exception of those lexical items glossed in the text.\n\n10. From classical Arabic ' _a dh\u016bl_ 'rebuker' or 'critic'. Hinds and Badawi, _Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic,_ 576: \"jealous person who attempts to interfere between intimates or lovers.\" The role of the slanderer\/reproacher who seeks the rupture of a love affair has been part of the Arabic tradition of love poetry since the earliest periods. It has been suggested that this figure is one of many motifs associated with \"courtly love\" which passed into European tradition during the seven hundred years of contact with Arabic literature and culture in medieval Arab Spain, Arab Sicily, and during the Crusades.\n\nFor the history of the ' _a dh\u016bl_ and other features of Arab \"courtly love,\" see Alois Richard Nykl, _Hispano-Arabic Poetry and Its Relations with the Old Proven\u00e7al Troubadours_ (1946); Lois Anita Giffen, _Theory of Profane Love among the Arabs_ (1971); Linda Fish Compton, _Andalusian Lyrical Poetry and Old Spanish Love Songs_ (1976); A. Kh. Kinany, _The Development of \u0120azai in Arabic Literature_ (1951); and for criticism of studies concerning literary contact between Arab Spain and medieval Europe, see Maria Rosa Menocal, _The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History_ (1987).\n\n11. Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b, 3\/18\/87.\n\n12. For references to the critical discussions within epic performances, see Taha Hussein, _An Egyptian Childhood_ (1982), 2; and Slyomovics, _Merchant_ , 110\u201311.\n\n13. Typical songs sung by the young men include \"Why Have All the Girls Gotten Married?\" (Kull il-ban\u0101t itgawwiz\u016b l\u0113h?), \"What Is This Boy Scared Of?\" (Il-w\u0101d d\u0101 kh\u0101yif l\u0113h?), \"I'm Thirsty, O Maidens\" ('a\u1e6dh\u0101n, y\u0101 \u1e63ab\u0101y\u0101), and others.\n\n14. The term may refer to either the _h abka_ or _laylat al-\u1e25inna_ (the two large festivities) and is thus tied to the idea of the public celebration of nuptial rites.\n\n15. Two characters do in fact get married at the end of the tale, but they are very minor figures; the celebration at the end of the tale is for the return of the hero, Ab\u016b Zayd, who had been thought dead, not for the acquisition of a new bride by a Hil\u0101l\u012b hero or for the reunion of two separated lovers as in the other typical wedding episodes.\n\n16. In the period between my departure in 1987 and a later visit in 1988, no poet weddings had taken place, so it remains uncertain how the community will choose to celebrate these occasions in the future. It is possible that the wedding described here marked the loss of a major performance context, particularly since the sons of poets whose weddings are now being celebrated are not themselves performing poets. These young men have much more tenuous attachments to the epic singing tradition, and a number of them regard it as a disreputable aspect of their families' past which they would prefer to ignore completely.\n\n17. Lane, _Manners,_ 386.\n\n18. One _k\u012bla_ = 1\/12 _ardabb_ 1 ardabb = 5.45 bushels; thus, 6 k\u012bla = approximately \u00be bushels.\n\n19. Summarized from Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101's account, 7\/9\/87.\n\n20. I elicited these accounts. They are not an acknowledged genre, although they turn up regularly in narratives of \"past performances\" recounted commonly during breaks in sahra performances.\n\n21. The term ghalb\u0101n\u012bn is used to express a spectrum of ideas ranging from wretched and poor (in worldly terms) to unfortunate or miserable (in emotional terms).\n\n22. Conversation with 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd \u1e24aww\u0101s of the Folklore Institute in Cairo, 7\/5\/87.\n\n23. Father of 'I\u1e63\u0101m Ab\u016b \u1e24umayd, hamlet of Ab\u016b \u1e24umayd.\n\n24. For descriptions of the Sufi brotherhoods and their festivals seej. Spencer Trimingham, _The Sufi Orders of Islam_ (1971); Joseph W. McPherson, _The Moulids of Egypt_ (1941); Annemarie Schimmel, _Mystical Dimensions of Islam_ (1975). For a fictional and moving account of the al-Sayyid al-Badawi festival, see the novel _Ayy\u0101m al-ins\u0101n al-sab 'a_ (The seven days of man), by 'Abd al-\u1e24ak\u012bm Q\u0101sim (n.d.); a summary and analysis of this work in English can be found in Roger Allen, _The Arabic Novel_ (1982), 120\u201331.\n\n25. These categories are not mutually exclusive; they are, however, the common terms and associated repertories used by the inhabitants of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. Much work is still to be done on the various genres associated with folk Islamic practice in living tradition. The moral song-tales of the shaykhs ( _qi\u1e63a\u1e63 al-ma h\u0101yikh_], for example, are perhaps the single most common genre of musical entertainment at festivals and celebrations but have received little attention from Western or Arab scholars. For the munhid tradition, see Waugh, _Mun hid\u012bn_ (1989). Although this work is marred by numerous errors, it is at least a sympathetic introduction to the practitioners of modern Sufism and their art forms.\n\nAn additional category, not fully separable from either the mah\u0101yikh or the muhid\u012bn, is that of _madd\u0101\u1e25,_ literally 'one who sings _mad\u012b\u1e25_. In the region of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, this seems to imply a less accomplished singer, usually performing alone, who cannot lay claim either to a particular level of religious education or to the level of musicianship associated with singers who perform with full ensembles.\n\n26. The word _l\u0113la_ (SA _layla_ ) literally means \"night,\" and the two terms are used interchangeably in the sense of an evening gathering; however, since _l\u0113la_ denotes a number of different things as well (night, Fate, a girl's name, etc.), the unambiguous term _sahra_ is used throughout this work. A third though less common term used in the village is _\u1e25aflit samra_ 'an entertainment party', which usually implies a larger, more organized activity than just a sahra of friends.\n\n27. Not to be confused with the root _\/\u1e63 \u1e25 r\/_ with emphatic _\/\u1e63\/_ and pharyngeal _\/\u1e25\/_ which generates the word \"desert\" ( _\u1e63a\u1e25r\u0101_ ', pl. _\u1e63a\u1e25\u0101r\u0101_ ), the origin of English \"Sahara.\"\n\n28. The description which follows and numerous references over the next chapters are culled from seventy-six recorded sahr\u0101t and several unrecorded performances, all from my 1986\u201387 stay in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. Performances from 1983 or 1988 are specifically cited as such.\n\n29. Texts of this and other examples of mad\u012b\u1e25 are given in Chapter 4.\n\n30. The generalizations that follow are derived from an informal survey I conducted over several months which eventually included responses from nearly 150 individuals. My aim was to determine basic attitudes concerning the epic and to determine roughly the frequency of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performances in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh over the past few years. I posed a series of questions, usually within conversations; only with close friends did I ask the questions overtly as a survey. For this reason, many responses were incomplete, when conversations were interrupted or took different turns, when the setting was not appropriate for asking questions about education and personal background, and so forth. The basic format is as follows: What is your (1) name\/age\/occupation\/education? (2) Did you listen to _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ before I arrived in the village? A lot? A little? (3) Which poets have you actually seen perform? (4) Has a poet performed at any weddings or other occasions in your family recently? Which occasions? Who performed? (5) Have you ever seen poets performing elsewhere?\n\nPositive responses were followed up with a series of secondary questions about the evaluation of poets, the importance, if any, of the epic, and personal reasons for listening to the epic.\n\n31. For a detailed narrative account of this education system see Hussein, _Egyptian Childhood_ (1982); also Sayyid Qutb, _\u1e6difl min al-qarya_ (A child from the village) (1945); see also the detailed descriptions given in Mu\u1e25ammad 'Abd al-Jaww\u0101d, _F\u012b kutt\u0101b al-qarya_ (In the village school) (1939).\n\n32. Paraphrased from views expressed many times by Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b and Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd.\n\n33. I paraphrase these versions because only one was recorded on tape, unlike the examples presented in detail in Chapters 4 and $. When I discussed with the poet all three descriptions, he readily acknowledged they were tailored to fit his listeners.\n\n34. The standard word for \"cup\" in Egyptian Arabic is _kubb\u0101ya_ , but I use the more poetic term \"chalice\" to communicate a similar feeling of archaism.\n\n35. Even from this paraphrase the stability of certain elements can be perceived: we begin each time with something small which is likened to that of a dove, and we end with the image of the cup.\n\n36. Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101's unusual phraseology and style can probably be traced to the fact that he is, both in clan affiliation and geographical origin, distinct from the other poets. His is the only family to have come to al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, albeit nearly one hundred years ago, from the eastern province of al-Sharqiyya. The others came either from the south or west.\n\n37. Lane, _Manners,_ 386 (emphasis added).\n\n38. Hussein, _Egyptian Childhood_ , 2 (emphasis added).\n\n# PART TWO\n\n# TEXTUAL AND PERFORMANCE STRATEGIES IN THE SAHRA\n\nDifferent performance situations in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh draw different audiences. Large public performances such as weddings create mixed, complex groups which poets attempt to satisfy, and to some extent control, as best they can. Audience expectations are dictated to a great degree by the air of festivity and celebration inherent in such situations; consequently, the poet's choice of text, his manner of performance, and the balance between segments of the epic and auxiliary genres are usually keyed toward the successful realization of these expectations. Financial arrangements with patron families are usually completed previous to such performances; however, a potentially large amount of additional income resides in pleasing specific, usually high-status, members of the audience, or in creating a lively performance atmosphere in which listeners begin to vie with each other in offering nuq\u016bt. Poets rarely dispute audience input in such public performances unless they deem it disruptive and inappropriate; such occasions, moreover, are minimally exploited for direct social or political criticism.\n\nThe sahra, or evening gathering, offers a counterpoise to this situation in several respects: First, the audience is likely to be more homogeneous and cohesive. Although listeners may come and go during a performance, and men of different age groups may join the gathering for all or part of the evening, there is almost inevitably a core group attached in some way to the host. A sahra is essentially a \"private\" gathering, though in terms of village mores and hospitality, once the sahra is under way, virtually any adult male may enter as a guest. The audience is also more likely to be more focused in their desire to listen specifically to _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ as a primary activity, though their reasons for doing so may differ, for different social groups in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh approach the epic with different basic expectations.\n\nSecond, poets generally feel that in the sahra setting they are addressing the aficionados of the tradition, their own most loyal supporters. In contingent discussions during the evening, poets vigorously defend their interpretations and their performances of the s\u012bra; listeners, particularly older men, regularly evaluate the performance and draw parallels from the s\u012bra to everyday life. In the sahra, the epic is a contested tradition, a text open to interpretation and negotiation, and therefore, also to conflict.\n\nThird, the sahra juxtaposes a series of genres of verbal art which differs substantially from those performed regularly in other contexts. Though all of the performance events cited in Chapter 3 feature performances from _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ , the epic is in each case set within a different sequence of verbal art. It thus becomes necessary to recognize that a complex of interacting genres may form a larger whole, the individual parts of which may be understood more fully in light of each other, as an interacting dynamic. For this reason in part 2 I gradually broaden my focus, step by step, so as eventually to include the entire sahra as the basic unit of analysis, rather than restricting us to the performance of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ texts, or even only to those genres of verbal art culturally recognized and labeled \"performances.\" It is my basic contention here that, despite the possibilities for examining the various segments of the sahra in isolation as independent texts, an understanding of the sahra as social action (the \"why\" rather than the \"how\" of social participation in, and support of, these events) must lie in a broad-based analysis of the multivocal, interacting, and conflicting aspects of the event.\n\n## CHAPTER 4\n\n## The Interplay of Genres\n\n\"Tell him how the people inside are suffering. Tell him how Israel's blown up twenty thousand homes and four whole villages. Tell him how the detention camps are as full of young men as a cheap public bath's full of cockroaches. Tell him what happened to al-Bahsh's son and to al-Shakhshir and to al-Huwari's daughters. But the worst thing is that all of us, every last one of us, are forced to work in their brothels just in order to live!\"\n\nUsama stood up abruptly: \"Goodbye all!\" he said.\n\nAdil didn't move. Zuhdi got up and put out his hand: \"Where are you off to, my grumpy sir? Why such a rush? We haven't finished. ...\"\n\n\"Well, why did he get so upset?\"\n\n\"He just doesn't want to hear it.\"\n\nAbu Sabir smiled wanly: \"I get it. He only wants to hear nice Abu Zayd stories.\"\n\nSahar Khalifeh, _Wild Thorns_\n\nA sahra in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh begins in a very basic sense with the arrival of the poet at the home of the sahra's patron. The patron and some of his guests may already be present, but many people will not enter until they hear the music begin, that is, until the performance has begun. The poet may be served tea and cigarettes before he begins to sing, and the host may spend quite a bit of time in extended greetings, salutations, and conversation with the poet and his guests. After tea and cigarettes, the poet begins to unwrap and ready his rab\u00e0b, an act often drawn out for several minutes: he carefully folds and sets aside the cloth cover, adjusts the fit between the body of the rab\u0101b and the neck, applies rosin to the bow and then directly onto the strings, and finally tunes the instrument.\n\nAt some point the poet utters the _basmalah_ (\"In the name of God, the All-Merciful, the Compassionate\"), puts bow to string, and commences playing. Conversation at this point often continues unabated, the musical introduction serving only marginally to attract the attention of the listeners. Over the next few minutes, guests who have been lingering outside awaiting the start of the performance enter, passing in turn around the entire room to greet and shake hands with all present. If the entering guest is a person of rank and status, the host and other guests (except for the most elderly) rise to greet him and wait till he is seated to resume their places.\n\n#### Mad\u012b\u1e25 (Praise to the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad)\n\nWhen most of the hubbub has died down, the poet begins to sing his \"Praise to the Prophet\" ( _mad\u012b\u1e25_ or _mad\u1e25 al-nab\u012b_ ). If the praise song is to be short, it consists entirely of laudatory epithets and brief allusions to well-known tales; if it is to be long, it moves rapidly from a chain of epithets to a full narrative or a chain of narratives from the life and works of the Prophet and\/or his companions. The mad\u012b\u1e25 poems are usually constructed on various quatrain patterns (aaab cccb etc. being the most common), though repetitions in actual performance often obscure to some extent the four-line structure. The following examples demonstrate both narrative and nonnarrative types. All repetitions have been retained.\n\n_Text 4.1_ Brief Mad\u012b\u1e25\n\nShaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd Tawf\u012bq, tape 83\u2013718 (4\/28\/83)\n\n\u1e25ab\u012bb il-\u1e25ab\u012bb ill\u012b yi\u1e63all\u012b 'al\u0101 n-nab\u012b 1\n\nnab\u012b 'arab\u012b ahhar lin\u0101 l-ady\u0101n\n\nlaw-l\u0101 n-nab\u012b wa-l\u0101 k\u0101n hamsin wa-l\u0101 q'amar 2\n\nwa-l\u0101 k\u0101n khul\u016bq ganna ganna wa-l\u0101 nayr\u0101n\n\nBeloved of the Beloved is he who wishes blessings upon the Prophet\u2014 1\n\nAn Arab Prophet who made known to us the religions.\n\nWere it not for the Prophet there would be no sun or moon\u2014 2\n\nNor would there have been created a paradise, [neither] paradise nor [hell]fires.\n\nIn the tale of the Prophet and the Gazelle, the Prophet offers to be held captive in place of a gazelle who has been trapped by a Jewish hunter so that she may return to her children and feed them one last time before she is killed.1 Released from her shackles, she rushes to her young, only to find that they refuse her milk and urge her instead to return to the hunter so that the Prophet may be released (and thereafter intercede for them on the Day of Judgment). When the hunter sees that the gazelle has kept her word and returned so the Prophet might go free, he is convinced of the Prophet's calling and converts to Islam. This version is in quatrain form (aaab cccb etc.), though the poet has missed several rhymes and has inserted a pseudo-refrain which recurs three times (\"Said the Prophet, 'You hear these words, O Gazelle'\"). The poet alludes briefly to two other narratives about the Prophet (\"for whom the rose did open,\" line 7) and (\"the camel came to Him and spoke,\" line 9), before actually recounting the tale of the gazelle:\n\n_Text 4.2_ Narrative Mad\u012b\u1e25 \"The Prophet and the Gazelle\"\n\nShaykh 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd Tawf\u012bq, tape 87\u2013035 (3\/2\/87)\n\nan\u0101 abtad\u012b amda\u1e25 f\u012b mu\u1e25ammad 1\n\nan-nab\u012b l-'arab\u012b l-mumaggad\n\nkhayru khalQ all\u0101h huwa a\u1e25mad\n\nan-nab\u012b badr il-tam\u0101m\n\nI begin by praising the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad, 1\n\nThe Arab Prophet, the Revered,\n\nThe best of God's creation is A\u1e25mad,\n\nThe Prophet, the Perfect Full Moon.\n\nman yiz\u016br in-nab\u012b yas'ud 5\n\nibn zamzam wi-l-maQ\u0101m-I\n\nman lahu al-ward-I fatta\u1e25\n\nman 'al\u0113hi rabbuh sallam\n\nHe who visits the Prophet is made joyful, 5\n\nSon of Zamzam2 and the Ka'ba,3\n\nFor whom the rose did open,\n\nAnd upon whom the Lord granted peace.\n\nwi-l-ba'\u012br g\u0101 luh wa-takallim\n\nwi-stami' y\u0101 khill\u012b wa-fham 10\n\nwi-l-ma'\u0101n\u012b wa-l-ni\u1e93\u0101m\u012b\n\nAnd the camel came to Him and spoke.\n\nSo listen, my friend, and understand, 10\n\nThe meanings and the compositions.\n\ng\u0101t ghaz\u0101lt il-barr-I tahk\u012b\n\ng\u0101t ghaz\u0101lt il-barr-I tahk\u012b\n\nbi-n-nab\u012b \u1e25akam wa-tabk\u012b\n\nwa-tiq\u016bl luh inta makk\u012b 15\n\nkun haf\u012b'\u012b y\u0101 tuh\u0101m\u012b\n\nThe gazelle of the desert came to complain,\n\nThe gazelle of the desert came to complain,\n\nTo the Prophet, an arbitrator, and she cried.\n\nAnd she said to Him, \"You are Meccan, 15\n\nBe my intercessor, O Tuh\u0101m\u012b.4\n\ny\u0101 nab\u012b i\u1e63-\u1e63ayy\u0101d \u1e63adn\u012b\n\nba-l-Qiy\u016bd wi-k\u0101n raba\u1e6dn\u012b\n\nwi-l-mad\u0101mi' s\u0101lit minn\u012b\n\n'alah\u0101n awl\u0101d\u012b l-yat\u0101ma 20\n\n'alah\u0101n awl\u0101d\u012b l-yat\u0101ma\n\n\"O Prophet, the hunter hunted me,\n\nWith shackles he did bind me,\n\nAnd the tears did pour forth from me,\n\nFor the sake of my children, the orphans, 20\n\nFor the sake of my children, the orphans.\n\nk\u0101n mur\u0101d\u012b ar\u016b\u1e25 wi-as'ud\n\nna\u1e25wihum wi-rja' bi-sur'a\n\nasQ\u012bhum law k\u0101n gar'a\n\nq'abl-I m\u016bt\u012b wi-n'id\u0101m\u012b 25\n\n\"It was my wish to go and take heart,\n\nNear them and then return quickly,\n\nTo suckle them if but a mouthful,\n\nBefore my death and my annihilation.\" 25\n\nQ\u0101l il-yah\u016bd\u012b m\u0101-as\u012bbh\u0101h\n\nQ\u0101l il-yah\u016bd\u012b m\u0101-as\u012bbh\u0101h\n\niz\u0101 l-ghaz\u0101la m\u0101-tg\u012bn\u0101h\n\nyibq\u0101 kal\u0101mh\u0101 'al\u0113n\u0101 ma\u1e25\u0101la5\n\nSaid the Jew, \"I'll not let her go.\"\n\nSaid the Jew, \"I'll not let her go.\n\nIf the gazelle does not come back to us,\n\nHer words to us will have been but a trick.\"\n\nQ\u0101l in-nab\u012b s\u0101m'a l-q\u014d'l y\u0101 ghaz\u0101la 30\n\ns\u0101m'a l-kal\u0101m wiyy\u0101 l-ma\u1e25\u0101la\n\nSaid the Prophet, \"You've heard his talk, O Gazelle, 30\n\nYou've heard the words and the condition.\"\n\nlakin ta'\u0101l\u0101 y\u0101 nab\u012bn\u0101\n\n'ind il-y\u014dm an\u0101 rah\u012bnh\u0101\n\nlamm\u0101 nh\u016bf il-ghaz\u0101la lam tij\u012bn\u0101\n\nyibq'\u0101 kal\u0101mh\u0101 'al\u0113n\u0101 ma\u1e25\u0101la 35\n\n(But corne, O our Prophet!)\n\n\"For this day I am a hostage in her stead.\"\n\n\"If we see that the gazelle doesn't return to us,\n\nHer words to us will have been but a trick! \" 35\n\nq'\u0101l in-nab\u012b s\u0101m'a l-q'\u014dl y\u0101 ghaz\u0101la\n\ns\u0101m'a l-kal\u0101m wiyy\u0101 l-ma\u1e25\u0101la\n\nSaid the Prophet, \"You've heard his talk, O Gazelle,\n\nYou've heard the words and the condition.\"\n\n\u1e25allih\u0101 min da l-Quy\u016bd\u012b\n\n\u1e25allih\u0101 min da l-Quy\u016bd\u012b\n\ns\u0101rit il-ghaz\u0101la f\u012b l-barr-I tanh\u0101 40\n\nna\u1e25w awl\u0101dh\u0101 al-yat\u0101ma\n\nHe released her from the shackles,\n\nHe released her from the shackles,\n\nThe gazelle went off into the desert heading 40\n\nToward her children, the orphans.\n\nlamm\u0101 l-ghaz\u0101la \u1e25a\u1e63alithum\n\ntaltaq\u012b l-g\u016b' q'\u0101tilhum\n\nbakit wi-dam' il-'\u0113n sij\u0101m\u012b\n\nWhen the gazelle did reach them,\n\nShe found that hunger was killing them,\n\nShe cried and the tears of her eyes were streams.\n\nQ\u0101l in-nab\u012b s\u0101m'a l-q'\u014dl y\u0101 ghaz\u0101la 45\n\ns\u0101m'a l-kal\u0101m wayy\u0101 l-ma\u1e25\u0101la\n\nSaid the Prophet, \"You've heard his talk, O Gazelle, 45\n\nYou've heard the words, O Gazelle, and the condition.\"\n\nlakin ta'\u0101l\u0101 y\u0101 nab\u012bn\u0101\n\nq'\u0101l il-awl\u0101d y\u0101 umma\n\nkittim d\u0101r\u012b m\u0101 b\u012bn\u0101\n\ny\u014dm il-q'iy\u0101ma m\u012bn yahfa' f\u012bn\u0101 50\n\n(But corne, O our Prophet!)\n\nSaid the children, \"O Mother,\n\nKeep quiet, conceal our condition,\n\n[Else] on the Day of Resurrection who will intercede for us?\" 50\n\nman Q\u0101lh\u0101 \u1e25urum labanki\n\nQ\u0101lh\u0101 \u1e25urum labank\u012b\n\nwa-\u1e25urum ah-hurb-I mink\u012b\n\nwa-rja'\u012b li-ll\u012b \u1e0damank\u012b\n\nballagh\u012b minn\u0101 s-sal\u0101m\u012b 55\n\n[One of them] said to her,\n\n\"Your milk has been forbidden [to us],\n\nHe said to her, \"Your milk has been forbidden [to us],\n\nAnd forbidden it is to suckle from you,\n\nSo return to Him who vouched for you,\n\nAnd extend to Him our greetings.\" 55\n\nraga'it il-ghaz\u0101la il\u0113h\n\ntiltaq\u012b l-anw\u0101r 'al\u0113h\n\ntaq'addamit b\u0101sit \u012bd\u0113h\n\ntaq'addamit b\u0101sit \u012bd\u0113h\n\nh\u0101fh\u0101 l-yah\u016bd\u012b hamm\n\nThe gazelle returned to Him,\n\nShe found there were lights upon Him,\n\nShe advanced and kissed His hands,\n\nShe advanced and kissed His hands.\n\nThe Jew saw her and grew uneasy.\n\nh\u0101fh\u0101 \u1e63-\u1e63ayy\u0101d\u012b. 60\n\nlamm\u0101 sh\u0101fh\u0101 s-sayy\u0101d\u012b al-yah\u016bd\u012b\n\nq\u0101l y\u0101 muhammad inta a'zam\n\ninn\u012b amint-I bak y\u0101 tuh\u0101m\u012b\n\nwi-\u0101min bi-n-nab\u012b 'al\u0113h is-sal\u0101m\n\nThe hunter saw her. 60\n\nWhen the Jewish hunter saw her,\n\nHe said, \"O Muhammad, you are mighty!\n\nI believe in You, O Tuh\u0101m\u012b.\"\n\nAnd he believed in the Prophet, Upon Him be Peace.\n\nThere is nothing surprising about the religious frame invoked with both the uttering of the basmalah at the very beginning of the evening and the deployment of the mad\u012bh as the first genre in the performance. The basmalah is commonly repeated by many observant Muslims at the outset of any action no matter how small or quotidian (eating, getting into a car, getting up to leave, etc.). The mobilization of the religious figuration, in the form of the mad\u012b\u1e25, is also noteworthy in that it foreshadows some of the religious overtones of epic performance in what might otherwise be perceived as an essentially secular heroic narrative.\n\nIn pragmatic terms, the mad\u012b\u1e25 assists in unifying the attention of the listeners and effectively brings an end to other on-going activities through the repeated references to the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad, to which the listeners respond with one or another form of the nearly obligatory traditional blessings, \"May God bless and preserve Him\" (\u1e63all\u0101 ll\u0101hu 'alayhi wa-sallam) or \"Upon Him be God's blessings and peace\" ('alayhi al-\u1e63al\u0101t wa-l-sal\u0101m). Such socially approbated group responses also move the audience for the first time in the evening into the participatory role of providing the expected verbal responses and other vocal forms of encouragement which are an integral part of the sahra. The attention and emotional involvement of the audience members at this point are usually still limited, betraying the auxiliary nature of the mad\u012b\u1e25 in this setting. A similar performance of mad\u012b\u1e25 at a saint's festival (m\u016blid; SA mawlid), for example, would typically evoke a much stronger and energetic reaction; here, however, the mad\u012b\u1e25 is a prefatory genre and not the emotional highpoint of the performance.\n\nThe mad\u012b\u1e25, in addition, reemphasizes the conceptual bond noted in Chapter 2 between the performing poet and the hero-poets within the epic, for the most commonly mentioned repertory of the poets within the epic is precisely praise poetry to the Prophet. However, the vision of Islam propagated in these performances of mad\u012b\u1e25, and further supported by narrative elements within the epic, is decidedly anti-institu-tional and is informed by the various beliefs and practices of folk Islam. This vision of Islam is strongly focused on the person of the Prophet as perfect model for human existence, in a world peopled by the interceding figures of Sufi dervishes and shaykhs, al-Khi\u1e0dr, al-Qu\u1e6db, and other figures.6 Institutionally oriented Islam is represented within the epic only by figures such as the teachers in the kutt\u0101b (Qur'\u0101nic school), referred to as fiq\u012bhs, whom Ab\u016b Zayd kills as a young boy when subjected to their cruelty, and the _q\u0101\u1e0d\u012b_ 'religious judge', Bad\u012br of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe, who is distinguished by his physical cowardice in battle and his ofttimes pretentious mannerisms in speech and dress.\n\nThe transition from the mad\u012b\u1e25 to the epic can be direct and even abrupt. When the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh perform in the _sahra_ setting, however, they are more likely to precede the movement into the epic narrative itself with a maww\u0101l or even a series of maww\u0101ls.\n\n#### Maww\u0101l\n\nThe Egyptian folk maww\u0101l is the genre of poetry most often performed in conjunction with the s\u012bra by the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh. The term is slightly confusing in that in Egypt it is used to refer at times to the poetic form of the maww\u0101l, at times to the singing style used in performing maww\u0101ls, and at times in reference to the typically sad and aphoristic content of the folk maww\u0101l. In the realm of classical Arab music, for example, the term most often refers to a specific style of singing in which the text is fixed, but in which the singer takes greatn liberties in modifying the melody, rhythm, and vocal embellishments\u2014 in essence, freesong\u2014whether or not the text in question has the poetic form of a maww\u0101l. This performance style is in fact used by the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh when singing maww\u0101ls. In literary usage, however, _maww\u0101l_ refers to a specific polyrhymed form of colloquial poetry, usually in five, seven, or nine lines, though sometimes the lines are \"chained\" together to create long narrative poems. Even at the folk and popular levels there exist conflicting ideas about the identification of a maww\u0101l; many of the texts and statements recorded from literate authors of popular chapbooks of maww\u0101ls, for example, are not applicable to the conceptualizations expressed by the epic singers or the audience members in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh.7\n\nThe most common theme of the folk maww\u0101l, and perhaps the most ubiquitous and enduring theme in all of Egyptian folk poetry, is that of _h akw\u00e0_, literally 'complaint.'8 hakwa, however, is specifically a complaint that addresses the forces of the world: Time ( _al-zaman_ ), the Days ( _al-ayy\u0101m_ ), the Nights ( _al-lay\u0101l\u012b_ ), the Era ( _al-aw\u0101n_ ), Fate ( _al-dahr_ ), Destiny ( _qadar_ ), the World ( _al-duny\u0101_ ), and Separation ( _al-b\u0113n_ ; SA _al-bayn_ ). hakwa is not addressed directly to the Almighty; that is rather the domain of prayers, supplications, and pleas. It would, in any case, be sacrilegious to complain to God, for all matters in the world move only by His will. For the pious, the relationship between worshiper, worldly states, and God, may be summed up in the common expression _na hkur li-kull-I \u1e25\u0101l_ 'We give thanks for every state (or condition).' The cause of troubles (and therewith the focus of \"complaint\") is thus displaced onto Time, Fate, and Destiny, and it is these forces which are to be endured.\n\n_Text 4.4_ Maww\u0101l I\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b (2\/11\/87)\u2014Pattern aa b aa\n\ni\u1e63-\u1e63abr 'uqbuh farag li-ll\u012b nhaghil b\u0101luh 1\n\nPatience\u2014its result is release for he whose mind is occupied (with cares and troubles),\n\na\u1e25san min ill\u012b yifa\u1e6dfa\u1e6d9 yi\u1e25u\u1e6d\u1e6d il-fikr f\u012b b\u0101luh 2\n\n(Which is) better than he who grumbles and puts thoughts in his mind.\n\nm\u0101 f\u012bh a\u1e25san min ill\u012b yi\u1e63bur 3\n\nThere is nothing better that he who is patient\n\nli-\u1e25ikam iz-zaman wi-aw\u0101nuh 4\n\n(and endures) the judgments of Fate and his Era;\n\nmin \u1e25usn 'aql il-gad' biyi'dil a\u1e25m\u0101luh 5\n\nFrom the good sense of the stalwart fellow he is able to balance his loads.10\n\nThough the singer of a maww\u0101l may be moved to sing by specific trials and tribulations, in poetic form these must be expressed in the abstracted imagistic world of folk symbols: the camel ( _Jamal_ ) is a stalwart man; the crow ( _gh ur\u0101b_) is an omen of death and separation; the eye ( _al- '\u0113n_; CA ' _ayn_ ) is the soul; the doctor ( _\u1e6dab\u012bb_ ) is the source of spiritual cures or the Beloved who alone can cure the yearning lover; the camel's burdens ( _a\u1e25m\u0101l_ , sing, _\u1e25iml_ ) and wounds ( _ajr\u0101\u1e25_ , sing, _jar\u1e25_ ) are human troubles and woes; the lion ( _asad,_ also _sah_ ') is a figure of authority; mosquitoes ( _n\u0101m\u016bs_ ) are petty interlopers. The foregrounded virtues in both the real and poetic world are patience and endurance ( _\u1e63abr_ ); the ability to be someone who conceals ( _mu gha\u1e6d\u1e6d\u012b_) one's worries and troubles, one who does not babble ( _halwas_ ), grumble ( _fatfa\u1e6d_ , also _fadfa\u1e0d_ ); who empties his mind of whisperings ( _wisw\u0101s_ ) and thought or brooding ( _taj\u0101k\u012br_ ); and who, above all, submits to the will of God ( _\u1e25ukm all\u0101h):_\n\n_Text 4.5_ Maww\u0101l 2\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b (2\/11\/87)\u2014Pattern aa bbb a\n\ny\u0101 qalb\u012b fi\u1e0d\u1e0dak min il-wisw\u0101s wi-t-taf\u0101k\u012br [2x]11 1\n\nO my heart, empty yourself of whisperings and thoughts;\n\ni\u1e63bir li-\u1e25ukm iz-zaman il-ayy\u0101m tiwarr\u012b kt\u012br 2\n\nBe patient with the judgment of Fate, the days reveal much;\n\ni\u1e63bir y\u0101 q'alb\u012b bass-I m\u0101 tihimh-I [2x] 3\n\nBe patient, O my heart, but do not Go Astray12  \nWorry Yourself\n\nall\u0101h khalaq lak na\u1e93ar [2x] b\u012bh i\u1e6d-\u1e6dar\u012bq timh\u012b 4\n\nGod gave you sight [2x] with which to walk the path\n\ngher \u1e25ikam il-il\u0101h y\u0101 'ub\u0113d m\u0101 tiqdar all\u0101 tmahsh\u012b 5\n\nWithout the judgments [wisdom] of God, O little slave, you couldn't even make your way,\n\nwi-\u0113h yi'mil il-'abd law k\u0101n luh jin\u0101\u1e25 wi-yi\u1e6d\u012br 6\n\nSo what would the slave do if he had wings and could fly?\n\nThe hakwa theme represents a poetic discourse in which one may express feelings and emotions which it would be dishonorable to express in action or in everyday speech. It is a poetry that constructs a world of un-acted-upon impulses, unspoken voices, unrealized desires. The poetic form, by social convention, allows the speaker to disavow actual responsiblity for the contents expressed; the process of symbolization within the tradition allows statements to be couched in a language at once one level removed from the real world and yet completely comprehensible. This distance lies at the heart of the tradition, for the texts of these \"complaints\" admonish us, in fact, not to complain; these complaints are rhetorically structured so that they in fact _avoid_ the direct expression of personal complaint. This rhetoric is part of the general tenor of Egyptian folk poetry and extends far beyond the maww\u0101l and even into the epic.13 When Kha\u1e0dra al-har\u012bfa is cast out of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe in the episode of the Birth of Ab\u016b Zayd, for example, she sings the following:\n\n_Text 4.6_ hakwa from within the Epic\n\nShaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd, tape 87\u2013101 (6\/1\/87)\n\nan\u0101 in hak\u0113t wall\u0101h\u012b rub' m\u0101 biyy 1\n\nwi-l-ba\u1e25r il-j\u0101r\u012b yinhif m\u0101h\n\nan\u0101 in hak\u0113t wall\u0101h\u012b rub' m\u0101 biyy 2\n\nil-\u1e25ajar il-jalm\u016bd yi\u1e6d\u012br hat\u0101h [2x]\n\nan\u0101 in hak\u0113t wall\u0101h\u012b rub' m\u0101 biyy 3\n\nil-jabal il-'\u0101l\u012b yihidd-I 'ul\u0101h\n\nI, if I complained, by God, of even a quarter of my situation, 1\n\nThe flowing sea, its waters would dry up.\n\nI, if I complained, by God, of even a quarter of my situation, 2\n\nThe solid stone, its splinters would fly. [2x]\n\nAnd I, if I complained, by God, of even a quarter of my situation, 3\n\nThe high mountain, its heights would crash down.\n\nTo complain, and yet not complain, is the paradoxical situation of all honorable characters within the epic\u2014and in real life.\n\nThe maww\u0101l is constructed most often on a five-, seven-, or nine-line pattern involving at least two different rhymes, and often three or more. It is quite distinct from the rhyme structure of epic verse:\n\n_Epic Verse_  \n\u2014\u2014\u2014 \u2014\u2014\u2014A  \n\u2014\u2014\u2014 \u2014\u2014\u2014A  \n\u2014\u2014\u2014 \u2014\u2014\u2014A  \n\u2014\u2014\u2014 \u2014\u2014\u2014A  \n(etc.)\n\n_Seven-Line Mawwal_  \n\u2014\u2014\u2014A  \n\u2014\u2014\u2014A  \n\u2014\u2014\u2014A  \n\u2014\u2014B  \n\u2014\u2014B  \n\u2014\u2014B  \n\u2014\u2014\u2014A\n\nIn musical terms the two genres are equally distinct; the maww\u0101l possesses a sound and ethos quite separate from that of epic verse. Epic verse is in general mesmerizingly rhythmic, the same melody often being used for dozens of lines before a change occurs. Although the poet may throw in a large number of devices such as extending certain notes, accenting the melodic line differently, adding musical embellishments, and such, these rarely become the focus of the audience's attention. The overall effect is one of regularity. The maww\u0101l, on the other hand, is a genre used to demonstrate vocal virtuosity. It has no regular rhythm and is often sung with a great deal of melisma, heavy rubato, and in an emotionally heightened style.\n\nThe maww\u0101l often displays an additional feature that distinguishes it from other forms of Arabic folk poetry: an extremely artful and complex technique of paronomasia and double entendre. Briefly, the final words of all the lines that share a common rhyme are pronounced almost exactly alike in performance, though they would be quite distinct in conversational speech. This leaves to the listener the activity of choosing between the various similar-sounding possibilities and the selection of those meanings foregrounded by the poet.14 Providing a written transcription of a maww\u0101l often conceals much of the artistry of the genre. In the text below, for example, the final words in lines 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 are close puns, not only because the words themselves are similar (i.e., standard puns) but because the poet has deliberately obscured differences in pronunciation, \"leveling\" the differences to a single pronunciation in his performance.\n\n_Text 4.7_ Maww\u0101l 3\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b (2\/11\/87)\u2014Pattern aaaa bb a\n\nq\u0101l: il-'ajab 'al\u0101 jamal majr\u016b\u1e25 wi-migha\u1e6d\u1e6d\u012b 1\n\nHe said: What a wonder is the camel who is wounded but CONCEALS IT!\n\nyif\u016bt 'al\u0101 l-i'\u0101d mi\u1e25ammil ghulb wi-migha\u1e6d\u1e6d\u012b 2\n\nHe passes by his enemies bearing misfortune and is COVERED BY IT.\n\nyiq\u016bl: an\u0101 f\u012b zam\u0101n\u012b kunt ah\u012bl a\u1e25m\u0101l wi-akh\u0101\u1e6d\u012b 3\n\nHe says: \"I in my time used to bear burdens and TRAVEL ON.\"\n\ny\u0101 '\u0113n\u012b _khud\u012b_ lik raf \u012bq z\u0113n min khiy\u0101r il-n\u0101s wi-law khadt\u012b 4\n\nO my eye, take for yourself a fine companion from the best of people, if you must TAKE ONE.\n\nyibq\u0101 d\u0101 kh\u0113ra wi-law 5\n\nThis will be good and if\n\n\u1e25akam il-zaman wi-m\u0101l 6\n\nFate judges and \"leans,\"\n\nyuq'ud yidamdim 'al\u0101 l-'ib\u0101d wi-yigha\u1e6d\u1e6d\u012b 7\n\nHe will sit with you and say only \"hmmmm\" and \"HURRUMPH\"15 to others (concealing your troubles).\n\nThis example encapsulates much of the worldview and style of the maww\u0101l complaint. The voices are detached, nameless; we must fill in the unspecified subject of the third-person verb (\"he said,\"; \"he says,\") that introduces the first and third lines. Even when a direct address, to the \"eye\" (= soul) is introduced in line 4, we remain but eavesdroppers to the internal dialogue of an unknown speaker. The ideas are expressed in depersonalized symbols, terms with no specific antecedents. The virtue extolled is that of concealing pain and worries in the presence of enemies and rivals. If possible, troubles and concerns should not be expressed to anyone; failing that, the maww\u0101l exhorts us to choose a companion to confide in only with great care, someone who will conceal our secrets from others. The result of a bad choice is in fact another major theme of the folk maww\u0101l\u2014deception and betrayal by friends and trusted companions.\n\nIn the following example, the final word of lines 1, 2, 3, and 9 (all pronounced _kh a\u1e6d\u0101b\u012b_ or _\u1e25a\u1e6d\u0101b\u012b_ in this performance) can be broken down into a number of possibilities:\n\nIn performance the poet can sing [kh] and [\u1e25] so that they are nearly indistinguishable, which means that in theory all of the listed translations are possible interpretations for each of the lines. In the translation that follows, when more than one possibility functions with ease in a line, they have been capitalized and retained.\n\n_Text 4.8_ Maww\u0101l 4\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b (2\/11\/87)\u2014Pattern aaa bbb a\n\nwi-yik\u016bn jamal\u012b 'ind h\u0113l il-\u1e25iml kha\u1e6d\u0101b\u012b 1\n\nAnd my camel at the carrying of the burden WRONGED ME CARRIED ME\n\nm\u0101 k\u0101n ghur\u0101b il-naya h\u0101ln\u012b wa-kha\u1e6d\u0101b\u012b 2\n\nIn spite of the Raven of Separation, [Fate] bore me and CARRIED ME ACROSS TROD ON ME\n\ny\u0101 n\u0101r qalb\u012b 'al\u0113hum qid\u012bn\u012b \u1e25a\u1e6d\u0101b\u012b 3\n\nO Fire of my heart, against them light MY KINDLING.\n\nan\u0101 as'alak y\u0101 rabb [2x] y\u0101 mugr\u012b l-laban f\u012b l-bizz 4\n\nI ask you O Lord, O you who cause milk to flow in the BREAST!\n\ntita'ta' il-bakr min ta\u1e25t il-\u1e25im\u016bl wi-yifizz 5\n\nYou stir the young camel 'neath his loads and he SPRINGS UP!\n\nwi-tisal\u1e6dan il-'izz 6\n\nAnd you have authority over all PROSPERITY!\n\nwi-lay\u0101l\u012b il-'izz bitd\u016bm l\u012b lakin il-lay\u0101l\u012b ma'a l-ayy\u0101m \u1e25a\u1e6d\u0101b\u012b 7\n\nLet the nights of prosperity continue for me; But the nights, along with the days, PUSH DOWN ON ME  \n(HUMBLE ME)\n\nParaphrase:\n\n  1. 1) Asa strong man, when the time comes, I should shoulder life's burdens,\n  2. 2) Yet Fate seized me, despite my intentions, and bore me away from what I had hoped my life would be.\n  3. 3) O my heart, strengthen yourself against the difficulties of life [or: against your enemies],\n  4. 4) I ask you, O Lord, I ask you, O Lord, You who cause milk to flow in the breast,\n  5. 5) You who give the young hope despite their troubles,\n  6. 6) You have the power to grant me prosperity,\n  7. 7) Let me continue to prosper. Yet all the forces of the world are trying to overcome me!\n\nThe hakwa theme whether expressed in the form of a maww\u0101l, such as above, or in epic verse, such as in Kha\u1e0dra's hakwa also above, is one that attempts to conceal what it in fact actively reveals: the subject's discontent and lack of _sabr_ 'patience, endurance'. Though maww\u0101ls are composed about many different subjects, the examples interpolated into performances of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ by the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh almost all deal with hakwa; as a body they may be taken to consititute a subgenre of sorts, intimately associated with the epic. As the examples above demonstrate, at the level of basic imagery the motif of \"concealment\" is a common one in the genre. The technique of paranomasia within the maww\u0101l differs, furthermore, from other types of punning, and may be read as a formal extension of the strategy of \"concealment.\" Puns are at times used by the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poets within the body of the epic; however, in these cases they rely upon the closeness of the common pronunciation of words to indicate the pun, which furthermore may be located anywhere in the verse. In short, in this form of wordplay it is up to the listener to create the link between two or more terms based on the similarity of pronunciation (though poets often mark the pun as well with paralinguisitic cues such as musical marking with sudden pause, accentuation, sudden change in volume or tempo, etc.). In the maww\u0101l, the normally different pronunciations of the verse-final words are deformed and suppressed: they are pronounced the same and are all located in the verse-final rhyme, and nearly every rhyme is a pun. In the maww\u0101l then, the listener knows that there are puns structuring the poem, knows where they are to be found, and most significantly, must wrest the \"words\" from within the \"pronunciation.\"\n\nIn the first form of punning, the listener supplies the connection between two signifieds because of the relation she or he perceives between two signifiers (similarity of pronunciation), while in the second, the listener must forcibly bifurcate a single signifier (based on its structural location) into two or more separate signifiers and then connect the possible signifieds.\n\nThe basic strategy of concealment within the maww\u0101l thus emerges at several different levels through (1) use of a timeless and spaceless rhetoric (distanced from singer and listeners); (2) suppression of any specific identity for the \"speaker\" within the poem; (3) expression of ideas in nonhuman images and abstractions which are nonetheless easily understood (displacement, for example, onto animal imagery) and; (4) concealment of key words within the poem through the deformation of normal pronunciation.\n\nAt all levels then (speaker, time, images, puns, rhymes) the hakwa-maww\u0101l asks its listeners to comprehend what it pretends to conceal\u2014 a strategy directly rooted in the social norms which have created a genre of poetry, the \"complaint,\" which bears the message that the greatest fault in a human being is to complain. To sing a maww\u0101l is thus precisely to complain without complaining, an extended use of _praeteritio,_ to reveal emotions in a form that pretends to conceal them, to seek release ( _faraj_ ) while still laying claim to endurance\/patience ( _\u1e63abr_ ).\n\nThe location of the maww\u0101l at the transition point of the sahra performance between the opening praise to the Prophet Muhammad and the epic narrative fundamentally rearranges the axis of identification of the listeners. First of all, the maww\u0101l itself marks an increased attention within the performance to poetic form and likewise demands from its listeners an increased level of concentration if they are to grasp the various implications of the poem, particularly the punned rhymes. Perhaps more significant, however, is the shift away from the _ideal_ (embodied in the person of the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad) toward the level of _identification_ with the human heroes of the epic, heroes who are as torn as we are between suppression and expression of troubles and emotions, but in order to be human heroes they must have faults: one cannot become a prophet; one can, however, aspire to the heroic.\n\nThese two common auxiliary genres of epic performance, mad\u012b\u1e25 and maww\u0101l, should in any case attract our attention by dint of their constant proximity to the epic; their significance becomes even more telling as we become aware that both genres are constantly replicated in miniature _within_ the epic as well, at particularly crucial junctures.\n\n#### S\u012bra\n\nAt the end of the mad\u012b\u1e25-maww\u0101l sequence, a new sequence is set into motion, one repeated by the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh whenever they begin to sing the epic itself, whether this be at the beginning of an evening or after an interruption, however lengthy or brief. A musical interlude is presented first, followed by a spoken passage in rhymed prose ( _saj_ '). This spoken prose section, known among the poets as _kal\u0101m al-r\u0101w\u012b_ 'the words of the reciter', or as the qa'da the 'base' or 'foundation', provides either introductory information regarding the scene-setting (such as introducing characters or alerting listeners to which episode or which part of an episode is about to be sung) or actual narrative material which carries the story forward. The subsequent poetry at times represents narrative material from the prose passage; at other times the story continues forward with no substantial repetition of material.16\n\nThe critical juncture between prose and poetry is always effected in the same manner: a character within the epic must be emotionally moved to speak. Situations and emotions must reach a confluence that impels a character to stand up and sing: \"and he sang, saying verses which you shall hear, and all who love the beauty of the Prophet, wish God's blessings upon Him,\" or, \"he rose and gestured, saying words, and all who love the beauty of the Prophet wish God's blessings upon Him.\" Alternatively, the poet entreats the audience to harken to what a character is about to say: \"and he wept: Listen to what he shall say, and all who love the beauty of the Prophet, wish God's blessings upon Him.\" The moment of transition is one of highly charged emotions, and each time a poet moves back into the epic, he must do so in the same manner, through the vehicle of a character within the epic who is _moved_ to speak. Once the transition has been accomplished, once the epic-verse mode has been broached, various voices may be deployed, including extensive sequences in third-person narrative voice. The actual transition, however, is effected with the introduction of first-person voice, and this first-person utterance is usually motivated by emotional conditions. Thus typical transitions occur at moments of grief, joy, fear, anxiety, or in formal, public speech-acts:\n\nMusic \u2192 Rhymed Prose \u2192 Emotional Crisis \u2192 Verse\n\nThe final line of the rhymed prose section is invariably an invocation of God's blessings on the Prophet. As audience members whisper one of the appropriate responsary blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad, the poet plays another brief musical interlude, tunes the rab\u0101b if necessary, and selects his recitation melody. The very first verse is accorded a great deal of importance by the poets, for it \"sets\" ( _tabbit;_ SA _th abbata_) the rhyme; the words are not hard to find, however, for this introit is one of the most formulaic of sequences in the epic. The poet's first line of sung verse ( _kal\u0101m al- h\u0101'ir_ 'words of the poet') will once again be a mention of the Prophet, often couched in the poet's own first-person voice:\n\n  1. an\u0101 'abd-I m\u012bn ya'haQ jam\u0101l-I mu\u1e25ammad\n\n\u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 l-l\u0101z\u012b \u1e25ajj il-\u1e25aj\u012bj wi-j\u0101h\n\nI am the servant of he who adores the beauty of Mu\u1e25ammad,\n\n\u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 for whom the pilgrims pelerinated and came.\n\n  2. an\u0101 'abd-I m\u012bn ya'haQ jam\u0101l-I mu\u1e25ammad\n\nnab\u012bn\u0101 l-hud\u0101 sayyid wil\u0101d 'adn\u0101n\n\nI am the servant of he who adores the beauty of Mu\u1e25ammad,\n\nOur Prophet of True Guidance, Lord of the Sons of 'Adn\u0101n.\n\n  3. awwil kal\u0101m\u012b f\u012b mad\u012b\u1e25 il-mu\u1e63\u1e6daf\u0101\n\nil-h\u0101him\u012b m\u0101 lin\u0101h haf \u012b' siw\u0101h\n\nThe first of my words are in praise of the Chosen One,\n\nThe Hashimite. We have no intercessor save He.\n\nThis brief panegyrical opening is at times expanded to two or even three lines, but rarely further. The next line invariably includes one of several formulae for announcing the speaker whose words we are about to hear, usually coupled with another formula indicating his or her charged emotional state:\n\n  1. D. q\u0101l il-am\u012br barak\u0101t wi-l-qalb-I f\u012b l-wajal\n\nwi-n\u0101r-I qalbuh f\u012b l-fu'\u0101d yikaw\u016bh\n\nSaid Prince Barak\u0101t, and his heart was in dread,\n\nAnd the fire of his heart in his soul did sear him.\n\n  2. E. q\u0101lat kha\u1e0dra 'indim\u0101 m\u0101l bih\u0101 z-zaman\n\nwi-\u1e25ay\u0101t-I rabb\u012b, l\u0101 il\u0101ha siw\u0101h\n\nSaid Kha\u1e0dra when Fate leaned upon her,\n\n\"By the life of my Lord [God], there is no god but He.\"\n\n  3. F. q\u0101l il-malik fa\u1e0dl-I min m\u0101 a\u1e63\u0101bahu\n\nduny\u0101 daniyya amm\u0101 z-zaman jabb\u0101r\n\nSaid King Fa\u1e0dl from what befell him,\n\n\"[It's] a wretched world and Fate is a tyrant.\"\n\nAfter this verbalized quotation marker, and the commonly attached expression of strong emotionality, comes the hakwa sequence or a sequence of aphorisms, sung directly by the epic character or in an unattributed voice. This aphoristic preface to epic narration has a number of parallels in other epic traditions. A suggestive parallel can be found, for example, in the heroic songs of the Mande hunters which Charles Bird breaks down into three separate modes: proverb-praise mode, narrative mode, and song mode. The proverb-praise mode acts as an introduction, establishes the veracity and authenticity of the singer's performance, and is often found at all major divisions in the story.17 An additional, and even closer, parallel is found in the opening passage to \"The Wedding of Smailagi\u0107 Meho\" as sung by Abdo Me\u0111edovi\u0107. The epic poet, a Muslim, first invokes God's assistance, then sings a series of aphoristic sentiments (\"Rain will fall and the year will bear its fruits, and the debtor will free himself of his debt, but never of a bad friend, nor yet at home of a bad wife. . . . Roof over your house and it will not leak. Strike your wife and she will not scold.\"), then addresses his listeners, sets the scene, and finally begins the narrative itself.18\n\nFinally, at the conclusion of the hakwa passage, the epic narrative is engaged.\n\nOne variation on this sequence is common among some of the poets: a maww\u0101l may be sung between the rhymed prose passage and the beginning of the sung epic verse. Since the maww\u0101ls used at this point in the performance invariably deal with the hakwa theme, no hakwa passage is then heard between the announcement of the speaker and the commencement of the story itself. (The maww\u0101l, once again, is a poetic form based on a poly-rhymed sequence of verses in which most verses end with a particular form of paronomasia, sung in a very distinct manner; the hakwa is a theme that can be couched either in the form of epic verse or in that of a maww\u0101l.)\n\nPaired below are parallel passages taken from Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 and Shaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b which demonstrate these two typical transitions (with and without maww\u0101l).\n\n_Text 4.9_ Transition into Epic Verse 1\n\nShaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd, tape 87\u2013101 (6\/1\/87)\n\n_Spoken:_\n\n. . . q\u0101m 'usarat 'al\u0113h nafsuh min 'adam zikrat i\u1e63-\u1e63uby\u0101n, fa-qa'ad Rizq yinhid 'al\u0101 'adam zikrit i\u1e63-\u1e63ab\u012b kal\u0101m tisma' il\u0113h wi-'\u0101hiq jam\u0101l in-nab\u012b yikattarum i\u1e63-\u1e63al\u0101tu 'al\u0113h:\n\n[Music]\n\n_Sung_ :\n\nan\u0101 'abd-I m\u012bn ya'haq jam\u0101l-I mu\u1e25ammad, 1\n\n\u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 l-l\u0101z\u012b yaht\u0101q lahu kull-I r\u0101yi\u1e25.\n\nisma' m\u0101 q\u0101l rizq ih-haj\u012b' ibnu n\u0101yil, 2\n\ndam'in jar\u0101 min muqlit il-'\u0113n s\u0101yi\u1e25.\n\n\u0101h\u0113n min id-duny\u0101 wi-d-dahr wi-z-zaman, 3\n\nkull-I m\u0101 huftuh bi-l-'\u0113n r\u0101yi\u1e25.\n\nm\u0101 mda\u1e25h f\u012b l-ayy\u0101m yawman yisirran\u012b, 4\n\nill\u0101 yij\u012b 'uqbuh nak\u0101d wi-ha\u1e25\u0101yi\u1e25.\n\ny\u0101 b\u0113n \u1e63ali\u1e25n\u012b kif\u0101 m\u0101 fa'alta biyy,\n\narm\u0113t sil\u0101\u1e25\u012b il\u0113k wa-bi-l-'uzr w\u0101\u1e0di\u1e25.\n\nm\u0101l\u012b kit\u012br y\u0101 rij\u0101l\u012b min gh\u0113r zikr\u0101, 6\n\nm\u0101lin bal\u0101 zikr\u0101 ba'd il-'umru r\u0101yi\u1e25.\n\n_Spoken_ :\n\n. . . His soul grew greatly troubled over the lack of an heir, so Rizq sat and sang, of the lack of a male heir, words which you shall hear, and he who loves the beauty of the Prophet wishes God's blessings upon Him:\n\n[Music]\n\n_Sung_ :\n\nI am the servant of all who adore the beauty of Mu\u1e25ammad, 1\n\n\u1e6c\u0101h\u0101, for whom every pilgrim yearns.\n\nListen to what said Rizq the Valiant, son of N\u0101yil, 2\n\nA tear from the orb of his eye did flow.\n\n\"Ah! Ah! the World and Fate and Destiny! 3\n\nAnd all I have seen with my eyes shall disappear.\n\nI do not praise among the days one which pleases me, 4\n\nBut that its successor comes along stingy and mean.\n\nO Fate make peace with me, 'tis enough what you've done to me, 5\n\nI cast my weapons at you [but] my excuse is clear.\n\nMy wealth is great, O men, but [I am] without an heir 6\n\nWealth without an heir after a lifetime disappears.\"\n\nShaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101, in his opening transition into the epic-verse mode, moves, as we have detailed above, at a moment of emotional duress from spoken prose to sung verse, commencing with his own statement that he is a servant to all who adore the Prophet. He then marks the following utterance as that of Rizq the Valiant, son of N\u0101yil, and portrays Rizq's emotional state with the description of his tears. Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 rarely interpolates a maww\u0101l at the juncture between prose and poetry, a habit he attributes to personal taste. The hakwa theme in his rendition is placed directly in the mouth of the speaking hero. Shaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, in contrast, nearly always inserts a maww\u0101l in his transitions. It is clear from his own statements that he feels he possesses a good singing voice and that audience members are pleased when he takes these opportunities to demonstrate it. The flowing, freesong style of the maww\u0101l allows much more room for the demonstration of vocal skill than does the more rhythmically restricted epic verse:\n\n_Text 4.10_ Transition into Epic Verse 2\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, Tape 87\u2013003 (2\/11\/87)\n\n_Spoken:_\n\n. . . \u1e63\u0101r Rizq ibn-I n\u0101yil yan'\u012b 'al\u0101 nafsuh wi-'al\u0101 qillit wi-khilifit i\u1e63-\u1e63uby\u0101n bi-h\u0101z\u0101 l-aby\u0101t. an\u0101 wi-antum nu\u1e63all\u012b 'al\u0101 n-nabiyy sayyid il-karam\u0101t:\n\n[Music]\n\n_Maww\u0101l_ (sung):\n\nMaww\u0101l 4 (text 4.8 above)\n\n_Epic Verse_ (sung):\n\ntu\u1e25iy\u0101 l-lay\u0101l\u012b bi-\u1e63-\u1e63al\u0101tu 'al\u0101 n-nab\u012b 1\n\nnab\u012bn\u0101 il-hud\u0101 n\u016bruh min il-Qabr l\u0101yi\u1e25\n\nwi-sma' m\u0101 ghann\u0101 rizq ibn-I n\u0101yil 2\n\ny\u0101llah sal\u0101ma wi-mi-z-zaman il-mak\u0101fi\u1e25\n\ntizawwijt-I min in-nisw\u0101n y\u0101 '\u0113n\u012b tamanya: 3\n\nkhallift-I minhum \u1e25id\u0101hir \u1e63abiyya\n\nabadan m\u0101 nabn\u012b min war\u0101 l-\u1e25ar\u012bm rab\u0101y\u012b\u1e25\n\n_Spoken:_\n\n. . . Rizq, son of N\u0101yil, began to lament his state and the lack of siring boys, in these verses. I and you, we wish God's blessings on the Prophet, Lord of Miracles:\n\n_Maww\u0101l_ (sung):\n\nAnd my camel at the carrying of the burden wronged me,\n\nIn spite of the Raven of Separation, [Fate] bore me and carried me off;\n\nO Fire of my heart, against them light my kindling,\n\nI ask you O Lord, I ask you O Lord,\n\nO you who cause milk to flow in the breast!\n\nYou stir the young camel 'neath his loads and he springs up!\n\nAnd you have authority over all prosperity!\n\nLet the nights of prosperity continue for me;\n\nBut the nights, along with the days, humble me.\n\n_Epic Verse_ (sung):\n\nThe nights are greeted with our wishes for God's blessings on the Prophet! 1\n\nOur Prophet of True Guidance, His light from the Tomb shines forth.\n\nNow listen to what sang Rizq the Valiant, son of N\u0101yil, 2\n\nCome now Sal\u0101ma [=Rizq], time only brings struggles!\n\n\"I have married of women, O my Eye, eight: 3\n\nI sired with them eleven maidens,\n\nNo profit comes from siring only daughters.\"19\n\nSuch is the association between the transition from prose to poetry and deep-felt emotions that at times the poets must supply a passionate impulse where the narrative provides only sparse emotional motivation. In Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101's performance cited earlier, the second shift from the prose \"words of the reciter\" to the verse \"words of the poet\" occurs when the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe has arrived in Mecca, after Rizq has announced his desire to marry the daughter of the shar\u012bf of Mecca. The q\u0101\u1e0d\u012b (religious judge) of the tribe, F\u0101yid, stands and faces the Meccans to declare what the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l are willing to give as a brideprice. This clearly constitutes a formal speech-act: The emotions described by the poet, however, seem completely overblown given the situation in the narrative; they should be read as part of the intensified framing that surrounds the transition from prose to verse, speech to song, from performance to \"performance within the performance.\"\n\n_Text 4.11_ Transition into Epic Verse 3\n\nShaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd, tape 87\u2013101 (6\/1\/87)\n\n_Spoken:_\n\n. . . wi-\u1e25a\u1e0dar il-q\u0101\u1e0d\u012b, f\u0101yid ill\u012b huwa ab\u016b bed\u012br. fa-q\u0101l luh tikallim y\u0101 q\u0101\u1e0d\u012b wi-tkallim 'an \u1e63iy\u0101q i\u1e63-\u1e63abiyya (i\u1e63-\u1e63iy\u0101q d\u0101 ya'n\u012b il-mahr). h\u016bf il-q\u0101\u1e0d\u012b hayiq\u016bl \u0113h, wi-'\u0101hiq jam\u0101l in-nab\u012b yi\u1e63all\u012b 'al\u0113h:\n\n[Music]\n\n_Sung:_\n\nan\u0101 'abd-I m\u012bn ya'haq jam\u0101la mu\u1e25ammad 1\n\n\u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 l-l\u0101z\u012b \u1e6dalib ih-hif\u0101'a wi-n\u0101lh\u0101\n\nisma' m\u0101 q\u0101l il-q\u0101\u1e0d\u012b f\u0101yid wi-m\u0101 nihid 2\n\nma\u1e6dr\u016bfatan wa-l\u0101 ya'lif in-n\u014dm \u1e25\u0101lh\u0101\n\ntib\u0101t 'al\u0101 niyya wi-ti\u1e63ba\u1e25 'al\u0101 \u1e25azir 3\n\nka-m\u0101 in kal\u0101l\u012bb il-'amar f\u012b maj\u0101lh\u0101\n\nwi-in m\u0101lit il-a\u1e25m\u0101l bi-yad\u012b 'idiltih\u0101 4\n\nwi-in m\u0101lit id-duny\u0101 'al\u0101 ll\u0101h i'tid\u0101lh\u0101\n\nhan\u012b'an bi-'\u0113nin tin'is il-l\u0113l k\u0101milan 5\n\ntib\u0101t mastir\u012b\u1e25a m\u0101 'al\u0113h\u0101 wa-l\u0101mh\u0101\n\nwi-'\u0113n\u012b waj\u012b'a tishar il-l\u0113l k\u0101milan 6\n\ntib\u0101t tisall\u012bn\u012b 'al\u0101 ll\u012b jar\u0101 lh\u0101\n\nisma' li-q\u014dl\u012b \u0101h y\u0101 Qir\u1e0da wi-iftaham 7\n\nkal\u0101m am\u0101ra \u0101h m\u0101 hum 'ayy\u0101lh\u0101\n\nni'\u016bz minnak \u1e63abiyya munassiba 8\n\na\u1e63\u012blit il-jadd\u0113n 'ammin wi-kh\u0101lh\u0101\n\n_Spoken:_\n\n. . . And the Q\u0101\u1e0d\u012b F\u0101yid, father of Bad\u012br, came forth. So [the har\u012bf of Mecca] said to him, \"Speak, Q\u0101\u1e0d\u012b, and speak of the brideprice for the maiden.\" ( _Poet's aside_ : The brideprice, that is, the dowry.) Listen to what the Q\u0101\u1e0d\u012b will say, and he who loves the beauty of the Prophet wishes God's blessings upon Him:\n\n[Music]\n\n_Sung:_\n\nI am the servant of all who adore the beauty of Mu\u1e25ammad, 1\n\n\u1e6c\u0101h\u0101, who asked for [the power of] intercession and obtained it.\n\nListen to what the Q\u0101\u1e0d\u012b F\u0101yid said and what he sang: 2\n\n\"[My eye] is pained and sleep frequents it not in this state.\n\nIt goes to sleep with [good] intention, but awakes filled with caution, 3\n\nAs if the [all the] hooks [?] of life were in its [sleep's] domain.\n\nIf my burdens lean, with my own hand I set them straight, 4\n\nBut if the world leans, only God can set it straight.\n\nHappy is the eye which sleeps the whole night through, 5\n\nIt passes the night in comfort, no blame is upon it.\n\nBut my eye is in pain, it keeps vigil the whole night through, 6\n\nIt passes the night troubling me with all that has befallen it.\n\nListen to my words, O Qirda, and comprehend, 7\n\nThese are the words of princes, Ah! they are not [mere] children.\n\nWe wish from you a maiden high-born and of noble ancestry, 8\n\nFrom both grandfathers, paternal and maternal uncles [too].\"\n\nIf my conjecture that the emotional core of the epic tradition lies in the speeches of its heroes is true, then the intensified framing that accompanies the \"breakthrough into performance\" of these speeches seems comprehensible.20 The obligatory hakwa seems equally comprehensible when we read it as establishing the emotional space within which characters are moved to speak or, more properly, moved to _sing_ their words.\n\nWe can approach this sequence of minute genres in a different manner, however, if we focus upon the formal features of each. This general sequence from the real world into the world of the epic is accomplished through the step-by-step accrual of formal features, features that set epic verse ( _h i'r_) apart from normal \"talk\" ( _kal\u0101m_ ). As we move from \"talk\" into the epic, we encounter first music alone, and then rhymed prose ( _saj_ ') without music, which introduces the feature of rhyme as well as the narrative element; the maww\u0101l then combines instrumental music, vocal singing, and rhyme but is neither narrative nor rhythmically regular; the brief lines of mad\u012bh at the beginning of each \"speech\" set into motion the regular rhythm of the general recitation but does not yet integrate the narrative thread; and finally as we hear the character speak and begin to tell his or her story, we have entered fully into the epic world where utterances are musical, sung, rhymed, rhythmically measured, and narrative. The following chart illustrates this progression of formal features.\n\nEach of these genres, or modes of presentation, thus marks a transitional set of formal features which eventually move us into the world of epic utterances, a poetically differentiated world. If, as the Formalists would have it, the poetic function emerges as the conscious marking of language with features deployed to distinguish it from other, more ordinary, language use, then this tradition displays great concern not only to mark the utterances and narratives of heroes, but also to provide carefully organized transitions from the world of \"unmarked\" language use to the \"marked\" world of epic song.\n\nOur deductions in this case can be partially substantiated by the poets' habit of using this same pattern to reenter the epic after all interruptions. In many instances the poet is forced to rework the material in order to deploy this traditional sequence of genres and formal features when reentering the sung, epic-verse mode. If interrupted at an inconvenient point, the poet may have to resort to a lengthy prose introduction until he arrives at a moment in the narrative with enough emotional impact to trigger the movement into song, covering ground in the story which is, in uninterrupted performances, usually performed in sung poetry.\n\nThis traditional sequencing of formal features carries additional significance beyond the general increase in complexity of the formal marking: such marking is also used to indicate allusion to a variety of speech-acts and to other local genres of verbal art exterior to the epic. Scholars of a number of cultures have remarked that some epic traditions tend to assimilate and absorb other genres of verbal art found in their proximity. I have argued elsewhere that this phenomenon is true of the _S\u012brat Ban\u012bHil\u0101l_ epic-singing tradition of northern Egypt.22 A close study of these features, the genres of verbal art alluded to within the epic itself, and the import of the various means poets utilize for marking speech-acts within the epic would help us understand the _how_ involved in the process of signification\u2014how various figurations are deployed and interpreted in epic performance.\n\nOne final general observation worth exploring concerns the short transitional sequences we have examined above: these sequences frame the utterances of epic heroes precisely as the sahra itself is framed. As the sahra progresses from (1) the opening mention of the Prophet to (2) praise of the Prophet to (3) a lyrical interlude on the vicissitudes of Fate and Destiny, and only then to (4) the narrative element of the s\u012bra, so within the s\u012bra, heroes' speeches progress in the same way from an initial mention of the Prophet, to words in His praise, to hakwa, and finally to the narrative. This observation is further supported by noting that poets who regularly sing maww\u0101ls in their epic performances do so _both_ in the initial sequence of the evening and at the juncture between rhymed prose and epic verse, while poets such as Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101, who generally prefer not to include maww\u0101ls within the epic, also do not perform them at the beginning of the evening. Whichever sequence the poet observes, the progression is parallel.\n\nThe heroes' words are thus marked in the same manner as the poets' words. Both the mad\u012b\u1e25 and the theme of hakwa (in the form of the maww\u0101l) which opened the greater sahra performance reappear in miniature within the s\u012bra when heroes speak. The speech of heroes and the speech of poets are once again equated by a tradition that has clearly evolved in a social context where poets over generations have bound their profession, and with it themselves, to the fictional characters who are accorded the respect which the poets in real life are consistently denied; in this sense, the sahra performance replicates itself over and over again within the s\u012bra.\n\n#### Other Genres\n\nThe three genres we have examined\u2014the s\u012bra, maww\u0101l, and mad\u012bh\u2014 constitute the three most clearly recognized genres of performance within the sahra. As alluded to in Chapters 2 and 3, however, poets do not confine themselves to these three genres, although the three are performed only by poets. Though the audience may have a great deal of input, the genres are not primarily dialogic forms. In the sahra two other recognized genres occur repeatedly which we can examine together in that they appear to share a single function in incorporating audience members directly into the \"text\" of the performance. They are (i) \"greetings and salutations\" ( _ta\u1e25\u012by\u0101t wa-sal\u0101m\u0101t_ ) and (2) \"bits of country stuff' or \"local color\" ( _\u1e25itat balad\u012b_ ). The first is a genre that plays a much greater role in large public performances where listeners offer small payments (nuq\u016b\u1e6d) to have themselves, friends, or family members mentioned by the poet in a sequence of traditional greetings and well-wishing. In the sahra, these greetings are usually reserved for guests as they arrive or depart from the gathering and are usually restricted to one or two verses. The second genre, the \"bits of country stuff,\" is a sahra genre par excellence in that the poet must possess detailed knowledge of the social life of his listeners.\n\nThe following example of \u1e25itat balad\u012b was performed at the request of an audience member, Ust\u0101dh Bakr, who possesses a great deal of personal and family-based status. As a government employee in the provincial capital, he commands an observable degree of respect from other inhabitants of the village; in the sahra context he is a listener who receives attention from the poets through greetings and salutations as well as other references to his presence during the performance. This request for \"a bit of country stuff' was made during an intermission in which cigarettes were offered around but tea was not served; the not very veiled comments that surface in this text concerning hospitality and the offering of food and drink helped successfully initiate a substantial round of tea at the next break in the performance. In this case the poet chose a basic traditional pattern that contrasts good and bad fortune; in particular he amplified and emphasized the role of the wife in the presentation of hospitality to guests (directed at the \"missing\" tea in this gathering). Within the treatment of this motif, he embedded several further cutting remarks aimed at the shortage of flour in the village and the evils of hoarding food.\n\nAudience members burst out with applause and laughter at many points, but the strongest response occurred after the poet's criticism of the supervisor of the government-subsidized food outlet (line 28), a criticism he picks up again (line 32) in more allegorical terms with references to the timing of the Nile flood (before the building of the Aswan High Dam): if the flood came too late, it did no good, for the cotton was already dead; likewise hoarded food does no one any good if it is stored and not used.\n\nThe primary qualities of this form of entertainment are (1) the pervasive comic tone, (2) the mention within the text of members of the audience, either directly by name or obliquely through land they own or other well-known attributes, and (3) an intersticial social commentary concerning either the immediate performance situation or the general sociopolitical situation of the village at large. Clearly there is an element of excitement and tension situated in any performance of this type, for no one knows who or what will be the target of the poet's wit. To attend such performances and participate in them is a form of social roulette: the entertainment gained at the expense of others may well be at the cost of one's own public embarrassment.\n\nThere is little or no adherence to a strict verse form in this performance genre, though a single end-rhyme is used to mark each cluster of phrases. The poet even overtly mentions his use of rhyme when he turns to me to explain (line 30) why he is using the far less common word _za 'b\u016bt_ instead of the usual word for men's apparel, _galabiyya._ (I did not know the word at the time, and my confusion doubtless registered in my expression.) Although one might line out this text in many ways so as to highlight differing formal features, here I address only the techniques by which the poet involves and implicates the audience members into the text. I have therefore chosen to group the phrases into \"clusters\" based on the occurrence of the end rhyme. Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahhab in this performance jumped rapidly from full singing voice, to speaking voice, and from shouts to whispers; he imitated the \"bad wife's\" voice with a deep threatening growl and mimicked the \"good wife\" in soft, sweet tones.\n\nThere are, however, many features that link together various portions of this text and provide a certain cohesion to some units as well as a sense of balance to the overall development, despite the rapid-fire shift from topic to topic. The most obvious pattern is the juxtapositioning of positive versus negative images. These oppositions at first occupy the space of a single line (2, 5), then a pair of lines (3\u20134), and are then expanded to occupy much larger segments (the \"good son\" in 6 and 7 versus the \"bad son\" in 8\u201310; the \"good wife\" in 11\u201316 versus the \"bad wife\" in 17\u201331). As the size of the oppositions increase from line, to couplet, to larger segments, so the \"lines\" themselves become looser and looser clusters of phrases sung or spoken very rapidly with only occasional punctuation from the rab\u0101b rather than full musical accompaniment. The poet returns to measured, rhythmical verses only at the close of the performance.\n\nThe section most clearly developed here, concerning the \"bad wife,\" takes up a full half of the performance; there is within it a consistent movement back and forth from the image of the \"bad wife\" to the poet's other concerns, as shown in figure 6.\n\nFigure 6. Thematic movement in \u1e24itat Balad\u012b performance\n\n_Text 4.12 Example of \u1e24itat Balad\u012b_\n\nShaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b, tape 87\u2013044 (3\/15\/87)23\n\n_Sung:_\n\nHe whose goal is heaven wishes God's blessings on the Prophet; 1\n\nAn Arab Prophet, He has a permanent sanctuary.\n\nAnd sustenance from God is sometimes [good] fortune\n\nand sometimes [bad] fortune [lit. fortunes and fortunes].\n\nAnd there is he who is given, yes, generosity and nobility, 2\n\nand there is he who is given stinginess till he dies.\n\nAnd there is he who is given ornamented gardens, 3\n\nand in them are mangoes, and in them are pears,\n\nand in them are grapes, and in them are dates,\n\nand in them are pomegranates,\n\nglorious fruits, O my brother;\n\nAnd sustenance from Our Lord is sometimes [good]\n\nfortune and sometimes [bad] fortune.\n\nAnd there is he who is given a single acacia tree, 4\n\nby God, O my eye, or a male mulberry tree.\n\nAnd there is he who is given caftan and broadcloth, 5\n\nand there is he who is given a rag of a garment.\n\nAnd there is he who is given a son, 6\n\nclever, polite, a well-bred son;\n\nWhen the boy is mentioned in conversation in the gathering,\n\nit pleases his father;\n\nO my brother, he holds his head high [lit. his neck is long]\n\nand he sits contented.\n\nThis is a son who takes after his maternal uncle; 7\n\nThe boy's maternal uncle is a man from the noblest of houses.\n\nAnd there is he who is given a son who is a 8\n\ndisappointment and a good-for-nothing;\n\nYes, O my eye, foul-mouthed [and] rude.\n\nHe brings his father problems and misdoings; 9\n\nAnd the stores and the caf\u00e9s and the fields\n\nand the buses and the train, yes, and all the houses.\n\nBecause his father is a man of reputation and well-meaning, 10\n\nthey all come back to the father to collect the money and the bills;\n\nO my brother, a son who grew up a good-for-nothing,\n\ntaking after his maternal uncle,\n\nfor his maternal uncle is a worthless man.\n\nAnd there is he who is given a beautiful, comely marriage; 11\n\nVery pretty, O my brother, comely, beautiful,\n\nnoble, from the noblest of houses.\n\nAnd her face is fair and her cheek glistens like a jewel [i.e., a ruby]. 12\n\nWhen he has guests who are friendly with him [lit. who lean toward him], 13\n\nall \"requests\" come to the guests while\n\nher husband remains seated (with them),\n\nwithout him sensing it or knowing it;\n\nHe doesn't have to say,\n\n\"O my daughter, bring this, pass that.\"\n\nAll the \"requests\" come to the guests\n\nwhile her husband sits among the guests contented.\n\nPickled dishes and rice dishes. 14\n\nA noble [woman], beautiful, very pretty,\n\nfrom the noblest of houses,\n\nher husband sits among the guests contented.\n\nHe calls for something: \"Yes, right away\" 15\n\n[Whispers:] \"Yes, right away, yes, right away.\"\n\nAnd her teeth laugh from her fair face like jewels.\n\nHer husband, if he lives with her eighty years, 16\n\nninety years, or completes one hundred,\n\n(and all lifespans are in the hand of God!)\n\nhe will live and die in happiness, yes, contented.\n\nAnd there is he who is given a marriage, O my brother, 17\n\nOur Lord does not grant it success, nor grant success\n\nto those who bore her or sired her or recommended her\n\nA marriage which has become today a destructive affliction;\n\nLazy! Stingy! Lazy! Stingy!\n\nFrom the laziest of houses,\n\nshe has a neck that resembles a catfish!\n\nGod is great! God is great! 18\n\nAnd when a guest goes near their house,\n\nshe gets up, O my brother, clutching a wooden club!\n\n\"I was coming [to visit] Uncle So-and-so.\" 19\n\nShe says, \"He's at the doctor, O brother.\n\nHe's dying, he's dying, he's dying, he's dying\"\n\n[i.e., she lies so as not to offer hospitality].\n\nI asked about him as I was coming along 20\n\nthe Salam\u014dniyya [irrigation canal] from the East;\n\nthat is, over by the contractor's from the north,\n\nalong the path from that train station of ours.\n\nThis is a very good year,\n\nand the cotton is producing twelve qin\u1e6d\u0101rs this year,\n\nand that's in the rented lands,\n\nand in the reform lands,\n\nand in the private lands it's at nine and a half or ten or so,\n\nand the credit and the agriculture are good,\n\nand they filled up the goverment subsidy store\u2014\n\nBoy, was I content!\n\n[The wife says:] \"O if only, O my father\u2014 21\n\nFive minutes before you came the car came and took him off,\n\nhe's going to die, he's going to die.\"\n\nI asked about him as I was coming from near the 22\n\nFaz\u0101'iyya over in the West;\n\nSira\u1e25na village, from the house of Ab\u016b \u1e62u\u1e25b,\n\npaternal uncle of al-\u1e24\u0101jj Mu\u1e25ammad,\n\na prince of a man, people of nobility,\n\nnobility and \"contentedness\" [= here \"well-off'].\n\nI asked about him at A\u1e25mad Mu\u1e63\u1e6daf\u00e0's place, 23\n\na good man, and at al-\u1e24\u0101jj K\u0101mil's, as well,\n\n[I asked about] my Uncle So-and-So;\n\nThey said, \"It's a very good year.\"\n\nThe woman says, \"He's dying, he's dying.\"\n\nI wish he would, I wish he would:\n\n\"He's going to die!\"\n\nShe's just the daughter of misers!\n\nThe man is sitting in the guest room!\n\nLike this one of A\u1e25mad Bakh\u0101t\u012b's that we are all\n\nsitting in this evening for a happy gathering!\n\nIf God wills, let it be a gathering for good purposes\n\nwishing God's blessings on the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad,\n\nthe Light of the Prophet, yes, fills the crypt!\n\nIf he [the husband] is worried about his reputation 24\n\nhe runs out the back door which faces east,\n\nand around to meet the guests:\n\n\"O welcome! One thousand million welcomes! O welcome!\n\nPlease, come in, come in, please!\"\n\nHe shakes out the couch, and the cushions,\n\nand the pillows, and arm-rests, and bolsters.\n\nThe story, praise be to God,\n\nhas become good, all over!\n\nLots of cushions, lots of armrests,\n\nand beautiful houses!\n\nAbsolute satisfaction! Praise be to God!\n\nHe said, \"Praise be to God!\"\n\nHe's become the richest of people,\n\nthose who live contented.\n\nSo he sits and greets them, 25\n\nand he sprinkles on them a few cigarettes,\n\na few drinks, a few sweets,\n\nand then afterward, when he gets alone with the evil, hairy one,\n\nthat daughter of disasters says to him:\n\nO such hostility! O such hostility!\n\n\"Whadya want?\" \"A bite for these guests to eat,\n\nthey've been two hours sitting here.\"\n\n\"I was going to go to the clinic today,\n\nbut when I saw them from the eastern door,\n\nI went quickly [to invite them].\"\n\nHe even goes along with what she said,\n\nthe words of the evil-tempered one; what does she say?\n\n\"I have a postponement for the clinic,\"\n\n(that is, he goes along with what she said,\n\nthat is, so he can live contented).\n\nWe are their children, O my brother, \u0101h\u2014 26\n\n\"I had a check-up appointment today,\n\nbut when I saw these guests,\n\nmy health got better, praise be to God, much better.\n\nBring us some lunch.\"\n\nTwo hours pass, I don't know, perhaps three ...\n\nFood in a rush!\n\nShe goes to bring out the food, O my brother,\n\nand she places it in front of him, and lets loose in a very loud voice;\n\nOh what great news, she's brought them bitterness!\n\nSo she's even managed to ruin this, what will they eat?\n\nThey leave the food, it's become a funeral,\n\nand he who seeks refuge in God . . .24 his friends.\n\nBecause she is miserly and the daughter of misers,\n\nfrom the laziest of houses.\n\nThe guests leave, and the man, O my eye, 27\n\nis not feeling good,\n\nafterward he is not content.\n\nHe goes back and says to her: 28\n\n\"Why, O why! Why, O why!\n\nYou've ruined my reputation,\n\nand the reputation of my grandfathers!\n\nThe generous man is never treated unfairly.\n\nThe generous man is never treated unfairly.\n\nAnd these people have been in the habit of coming to\n\nus since the days of our fathers and our grandfathers.\n\nAnd this house has been open [to guests] from long, long ago.\n\nShe says to him: \"It's none of your business!\n\nShut up! So you've opened the main door?\n\nSit down, sit down and keep quiet.\"\n\nAnd Our Lord's munificence is great,\n\nand the guest, before he comes, his sustenance comes before him;25\n\nAnd she hoards and conceals so!\n\nAll day long I've been looking for flour in the shops,\n\nI went to Ab\u016b Sul\u0113m\u0101n's [private shop]\n\nand to Ust\u0101z Jal\u0101l [manager of the government store].\n\nI found all their flour was locked up tight!\n\n\"Okay, so here's a little bread, take it!\" 29\n\n\"Quiet! Am I a baker? Do I pat out the loaves?\n\nAnd my arm is tired\u2014I sit down and\u2014\n\nGet away, get away!\n\nAnd a word from her,\n\nAnd a word from her husband and she starts a quarrel.\n\nShe tears his za'b\u016b\u1e6d [men's outer garment].\n\n[ _Aside to me:_ That is, you say _galabiyya_ from 30\n\nbeginning to end, but za'b\u016b\u1e6d is for the rhyme!]\n\nShe tears up his za'b\u016b\u1e6d, she shreds his za'b\u016b\u1e6d. 31\n\n\"O woman, leave me, go back to your people's house!\"\n\n\"By God, I'll never leave you, I'll be here till you die!\"\n\nAnd when the Nile would come to us in [the month of] _misr\u0101_ 26 32\n\nWhen the Nile used to come to us in [the month of] misr\u0101,\n\nAnd there is no good in the Nile if it comes in t\u016bt.27\n\nThe planting, it's life would already have passed, 33\n\nafter twenty-five days the water would come,\n\nall the cotton would have died, and all of it gone.\n\nAnd when the Nile would come in misr\u0101,\n\nthere is no good in the Nile which comes in t\u016bt.\n\nThe _fatta_ and bread were no more expensive than zucchini. 34\n\nAnd there is no good in provisions that are hoarded.\n\nAnd he who dies, yes, whence does he pass. 35\n\nAnd sustenance from God, yes, is sometimes [good]\n\nfortune and sometimes [bad] fortune.\n\nAnd there is he who is given generosity and nobility, 36\n\nand there is he who lives in stinginess till he dies.\n\nYes, and there is he who is given of life his fill, 37\n\nand there is he who is given a year and then dies.\n\nAnd sustenance from God, yes, is sometimes [good] 38\n\nfortune and sometimes [bad] fortune.\n\nAnd the best of these words are 39\n\n(I and you together, O listeners to these words)\n\nWish God's blessings on the Presence of the Prophet,\n\nan Arab Prophet, He has an enduring sanctuary.\n\nThis is a \"high-context\" performance.28 It is densely contextualized, an insider's text, and a text that \"alludes to\" far more that it \"indicates\" or \"states,\" a text that does not create a narrative \"story world.\" To achieve even the most basic understanding of this performance we would be forced to discuss the following:\n\nImplications of landownership, the fact that only a few powerful families in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh own gardens with fruit trees, and which of these families were represented in this audience;\n\nStereotypes of close emotional relationships between boys and maternal uncles versus more severe, disciplinarian-style relationships between boys and paternal uncles;\n\nThe performing poet's middle son, who has been a constant disappointment to him and caused a great deal of trouble in the village, and who is particularly known for his misbehavior at gatherings;\n\nThe reputation of the house where the performance was taking place, which was one distinctly lacking in hospitality;\n\nThe topography of the village, which lands are owned by members of this audience, and the relationships between those mentioned by name and those not;\n\nBasic tensions common in village households which arise from the wife's responsiblity for domestic expenditures and the husband's desire to display public hospitality (which can result in effective female control of certain types of male displays of honor); and\n\nThe role of government-subsidized foods, the distribution system by monthly ration booklets, and the way this system functions within the local political and social context.\n\nA full explanation of this brief text would, in short, lead to a detailed ethnographic portrait of the community. If this be a \"text,\" then it is a text that imitates the relationships it portrays. There is of course a narrative thread, but it is scarcely more than a thread: the narrative proceeds in leaps and bounds, and what holds it together is not an internal narrative logic, but the external structure of the performance. The poet moves rhythmically back and forth between the \"narrative structure\" and his poetic forays out into the audience and their reality.\n\nThe epic poem is certainly open to contextualized interpretation (and I argue below that it in fact necessitates such interpretation); there is a level, however, at which the epic is consciously performed as a \"complete\" text, a separate world, one in which the tradition itself does not recognize or perpetuate interpretation according to performance context. The \u1e25itat balad\u012b, however, displays a marked contrast in its relation to the world: it makes no pretense of \"completeness,\" it is woven directly out of the performance context, and its story world exists only as a mechanism by which to implicate the audience directly into the performance.\n\nIn Chapter 2, we briefly examined a series of typical \"conversational genres\" that are commonly deployed by epic poets in the sahra context: (1) narratives of past performances, (2) discussions of village history and genealogies, and (3) dialect stories. I have suggested that beyond their basic function as entertainment, these genres represent negotiations of social status by the poet vis-\u0101-vis his listeners. His recitations of village history and genealogies, in much the same manner we have just observed with the \u1e25itat balad\u012b are a maneuver of inclusion. In the historical and genealogical performances, one does move not between a story world and the real world, but rather is firmly situated spatially in \"real life.\" Such a pendular movement is, however, inherent in these performances: rather than implicating his listeners into his text, the poet in a display of genealogical or historical mastery, insinuates himself into the village community and identity, a role he is in other contexts denied.\n\nNarratives of past performances and the dialect tales do not serve quite this same purpose of allowing the poet to impinge upon village history and identity but serve to differentiate his m\u00e9tier from that of beggary or vagrancy. And of course they also bolster the image of the poet as a respected and accomplished performer.\n\nThe performance activities of a poet during a typical sahra might include any or all of the following:\n\nThis tripartite division is empirically justifiable only from the performer's point of view: the poets recognize the \"formal\" genres as those one learns through apprenticeship, they are all \"arts\" ( _fun\u016bn,_ sing _farm_ ). The \"informal\" genres are accepted as part of the craft ( _il-mihna_ ) of being a poet but are not among the accepted fun\u016bn and are thought to be acquired through experience ( _kh ibra_) rather than training. When pressed, poets were willing to label these \"informal\" genres as \u1e25ahw 'filling,' though this term was elicited in response to my questions and is probably not otherwise an operative conceptual category. The final category of \"conversational\" genres is not accepted as part of the poet's craft at all, and any of these \"genres\" might be performed by audience members as well. Only poets can perform genres from the first two categories.\n\nOur examination of the typical content and formal features of these genres provides us with a working model of the interactions of \"texts\" within the sahra; it remains now to expand our examination of these genres into performances which implicate and necessitate the participation of an audience.\n\n* * *\n\n1. See G. Canova, \" 'Muhammad, 1'ebreo e la gazzella': Canto di un _maddah_ egiziano\" (1981).\n\n2. Zamzam is the name of a well in Mecca, the waters of which are believed to possess great powers of healing; in certain folk traditions it is with the waters of Zamzam that the Prophet is purified during a visitation by three heavenly figures. See Annemarie Schimmel, _And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety_ (1985).\n\n3. In the Arabic, _maq\u0101m_ , literally 'site, location, or erected building' such as the tomb of a saint; here it is used in reference to the Ka'ba.\n\n4. One of the common epithets of the Prophet, literally 'from the region of the Tih\u0101ma', the coastal plain along the southwestern edge of the Arabian peninsula.\n\n5. The term _ma\u1e25\u0101la_ is used here with several different connotations: an impossible thing ( _musta\u1e25\u012bl\/isti\u1e25\u0101la_ ), a trick ( _\u1e25\u012bla_ ), a condition or obligation ( _\u1e25\u0101la\/ma\u1e25\u0101la_ ).\n\n6. For further information on the role of these interceding figures see F. de Jong, \"al-\u1e32u\u1e6db,\" EI2, and A. J. Wensinck, \"al-Kha\u1e0dir (al-Khi\u1e0dr),\" EI2.\n\n7. The most thorough examination of the maww\u0101l's various forms and roles in Egypt is Pierre Cachia, \"The Egyptian Maww\u0101l\" (1977). For additional information, see Serafin Fanjul, _El maww\u0101l egipcio: Expresi\u00f3n literaria popular_ (1976); idem, \"Le mawwal blanc,\" (1977); idem, \"The Erotic Maww\u0101l in Egypt\" (1977); Sami A. Hanna, \"The Maww\u0101l in Egyptian Folklore\" (1967); A\u1e25mad Al\u012b Murs\u012b, al-Ughniyya al-sha'biyya: Madkhal il\u0101 dir\u0101satih\u0101 (The folk song: An introduction to its study) (1983); Nada Tomiche, \"Le maww\u0101l \u00e9gyptien\" (1970).\n\n8. The maww\u0101l form has become so irrevocably associated with the theme of hakwa 'complaint' that for many people it can refer to any type of sad song. The term has become nearly proverbial in this sense in phrases such as _bal\u0101sh kull il-maww\u0101l d\u0101_ , which, loosely translated, means, \"Don't give me a song and dance about it!\" or \"Don't make a big fuss about it,\" or _aqallih\u0101 maww\u0101l yinizzih \u1e63\u0101\u1e25buh,_ \"The smallest maww\u0101l [= ditty] gives its composer pleasure.\"\n\n9. _Fa\u1e6dfa\u1e6d,_ also _fa\u1e0dfa\u1e0d_ 'to sit and brood, then complain and talk about one's troubles', to get something off one's chest (usually derogatory)'.\n\n10. Literally 'to balance loads as on a beast of burden, so as to make them easier to bear'.\n\n11. The repetitions of the first and third lines once again display alternation between differing dialectal pronunciations: _y\u0101 qalb\u012b_ becomes _y\u0101 q'alb\u012b_ in the repetition of line 1, and in line 3 the process is reversed, _q'alb\u012b_ becoming _qalb\u012b_ the second time.\n\n12. Double entendre formed from the verbs _h\u0101m_ 'to wander, go astray', and _hamm_ 'to worry, be anxious'.\n\n13. See Abu-Lughod, _Veiled Sentiments,_ for an analysis of a body of women's poetry ( _gh inn\u0101wa_) as a discourse which allows expression in artistic forms of thoughts and feelings that it would be wholly unacceptable to act upon in real life. Her insightful examples provoked my own thoughts about the functioning of the maww\u0101l, and of hakwa in general, in Egyptian folk poetry.\n\n14. Pierre Cachia (in \"The Egyptian Maww\u0101l\") has found that although a single term in a maww\u0101l may suggest many different interpretations, composers of maww\u0101ls and some of the more literate singers focus on a single specific meaning in each line. In addition, it appears that although a rhyme _word_ may appear more than once in the same poem, traditionally it should never refer to the same _meaning_ twice. This is quite probably true of the maww\u0101l as a literary genre; audiences and epic poets in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, however, do not always seize upon some of the more recherch\u00e9 wordplays and often interpret the poem using the same meaning for more than one line.\n\n15. From gha\u1e6d\u1e6d, yighu\u1e6d\u1e6d, literally 'to snort', which I have tried to capture with the translation \"Hurrumph.\" My thanks to Pierre Cachia for this explanation.\n\n16. In some older manuscripts of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ , the poetry consistently re-presents in dialogue the plot material summarized in third-person voice in the prose sections. See Anne Blunt and Wilfred Blunt, _Stealing of the Mare_ (1892), for an example of this style translated into English.\n\n17. See Charles Bird, \"Heroic Songs of the Mande Hunters,\" in _African Folklore_ , ed. Richard Dorson (1972).\n\n18. _Serbo-Croatian Heroic Songs Collected by Milman Parry, Volume Three: The Wedding of Smailagi\u0107 Meho_ , trans. Albert B. Lord (1974), 79. My thanks to Albert Lord for directing me to this parallel.\n\n19. Literally, 'we can never build profits behind females'.\n\n20. See Dell Hymes, \"Breakthrough into Performance,\" and \"Breakthrough into Performance Revisited,\" in _\"In Vain I Tried to Tell YouEssays in Native American Ethnopoetics_ (1981).\n\n21. Any given sequence includes either a maww\u0101l or a hakwa section, but not both.\n\n22. See Reynolds, \"Interplay.\"\n\n23. The rhyme is -\u016b\u1e6d\/-\u016bt. Transliterated Arabic text is found in the Appendix.\n\n24. Unclear on recording.\n\n25. That is, God provides the wherewithal to feed guests, for all guests are foremost \"guests of God\" ( _i\u1e0d-\u1e0d\u0113f \u1e0d\u0113f all\u0101h_ ).\n\n26. Twelfth month of the Coptic year.\n\n27. First month of the Coptic year.\n\n28. See Edward Hall, _Beyond Culture_ (1976), chap. 7, \"Contexts, High and Low.\"\n\n## CHAPTER 5\n\n## The Sahra as Social Interaction\n\nThe people listened to the storytellers in the caf\u00e9s; they heard about Sayf ibn Dhi Yazin, who left no stone unturned all over the world looking for the _Book of the Nile._ Their hearts were aflutter with love for the Princess Dh\u0101t al-Himma. They followed the stories of the Barmacides with the Abbasids, Ab\u016b Zayd and Diy\u0101b and Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa, Solomon and how he controlled the jinn, the martyrdom of the dearly beloved Husayn at Karbala. Nobody knew that one thread ran through what all the professional singers, chanters, and storytellers in Egypt did.\n\nGamal al-Ghitani, _Al-Zayni Barakat_\n\n_S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is not merely a textual tradition; it is also a performance tradition. The genres of verbal art which we examined in Chapter 4 are not only formally, that is, textually, marked as different genres, they also motivate markedly different processes of interaction between performer, audience, and text. During a sahra, audience members are at times implicated directly into the performance; at times they respond to and fuel the performance with their comments and interjections; at times they are completely silent while an aesthetic space is created for displays of vocal or instrumental artistry; and in the interstices of the poet's professional performances, audience members may take the floor with evaluative and interpretive discussions as well as with their own performances of various conversational genres of verbal art.\n\nWe have expanded our examination of the sahra from the confines of its major performance genre, _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ , toward the inclusion of a wide variety of genres, and have laid the groundwork for the examination of these elements as a dialogue of forms that contribute to a larger interacting whole. We have so far examined each of these forms as a unidirectional presentation; now we address them as multivocal, interactive performances created through the participation of poets and audience members.\n\nIn expanding our analysis to include the interactive processes of performance, we must first examine the audience's role in the performance of those genres which we have just discussed before turning to audience activities more independent of the poet's professional role as performer.\n\n#### Audience Reactions and Participation\n\nThe opening mad\u012b\u1e25 of a sahra typically provokes affirmatory and responsory reactions from listeners. We have already noted that the mad\u012b\u1e25 obliges the audience to move into an active mode of listening with multiple mentions of the Prophet by name or epithet, each of which is acknowledged by listeners with one of a limited number of traditional blessings. Little if any direct appreciation of the aesthetics of the performance is overtly evident from audience reactions; poet and listeners generally appear equally focused upon the content of the poetry, the evocative and emotional images of Mu\u1e25ammad and His companions, the Prophet's beauty, His generosity, and overall perfection as a human being. When interjections from the audience do well up and seize the attention of those present, they are expressions of the emotional impact these reflections on the Prophet have had upon the speaker, usually evinced in supplications to God or invocations of one of the saints or of the Prophet Himself.\n\nThe maww\u0101l is, in contrast, the most highly compacted and cohesive aesthetic form of the evening's activities: it is a space for displays of vocal artistry. Its imagery, complex rhyme schemes, intricate wordplay, and general rhetoric of abstracted truths demand immediate and active interpretation by listeners. Appropriately enough, maww\u0101ls are often listened to in nearly complete silence with a minimum of affirmatory backchanneling. Comments and responses are delayed until the maww\u0101l's conclusion; it is responded to as a single unit\u2014a short but complete whole\u2014a fact further indicated by the frequent calls to hear a maww\u0101l again ( _t\u0101n\u012b_ ) or for an additional maww\u0101l to be sung ( _kam\u0101n_ ). Comments about maww\u0101ls, unlike those about mad\u012b\u1e25, are most often directed toward the poet as artist and toward the aesthetic qualities of the performance (\"Your voice is golden!\"; \"May God lengthen your life for our sakes!\" etc.) and only secondarily to the content of the song (\"Ah yes,\" \"So true,\" etc.).\n\nBoth mad\u012b\u1e25 and maww\u0101l, however, are performances that explicitly state that the text is relevant to our daily lives, the first through the life of Mu\u1e25ammad and the Companions as a guiding example of human perfection ( _qudwa_ ), and the second through a rhetoric of proverbial, enduring truths. Their constant propinquity to the epic further provides an invitation to approach the epic in a similar manner, as a text that possesses significance beyond its perceivable boundaries. This relationship is confirmed in audience discussions of the s\u012bra and in their reactions and interjections during performances of the s\u012bra.\n\nA transcribed performance of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ does not resemble the orderly, neat lines we are accustomed to seeing on the pages of the _Iliad_ or _Beowulf._ Instead, audience members voice approval or disapproval, take advantage of the brief pauses between lines to shout compliments and exclamations, at times even compete with the poet for attention with jokes and witty remarks. Text 5.1 illustrates some of the simplest and most common forms of vocal interaction between poet and audience members.\n\nThe example is taken from the epic's opening episode, \"the Birth of Ab\u016b Zayd,\" the hero. Rizq, son of N\u0101yil, has been married to nine different women and has fathered twelve daughters. After an omen from God, he marries Kha\u1e0dra al-har\u012bfa, daughter of the shar\u012bf of Mecca, hoping at last to sire a male heir. Seven years pass, however, and Kha\u1e0dra does not give birth to any children, male or female. Rizq and Kha\u1e0dra quarrel, and Kha\u1e0dra, seeking solace, goes to visit hamma, another barren woman in the tribe. The two women and the servant Sa'\u012bda go into the desert where they make special requests to God for sons; each woman requests that she bear a son with specific qualities. Meanwhile, King Sar\u1e25\u0101n convinces Rizq to seek reconciliation with his wife after their quarrel. Rizq's willingness to be reconciled and Kha\u1e0dra's fervent prayers result that night in the conception of a son, the future hero of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe, Ab\u016b Zayd. Due to the nature of Kha\u1e0dra's request, however, her son is born black, though his parents are both white, which later causes the expulsion of Kha\u1e0dra (who is accused of adultery) and her son from the tribe. Eventually, Ab\u016b Zayd, raised in another tribe and ignorant of his true origins, faces his father in battle. The two fight for thirty days, neither able to best the other, for the hand of God deflects their spears and swords. Finally, Ab\u016b Zayd's sister discovers the truth of the matter and manages to negotiate a truce. At the end of the episode, Ab\u016b Zayd and his mother return in triumph to the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l and those who had falsely accused her of adultery lie dead on the battlefield. The scene we examine here, Kha\u1e0dra's request for a son, is a pivotal moment for the epic as a whole, for it is because of the wording of her request that Ab\u016b Zayd is born black and suffers the expulsion that leads to his later prowess and adventures.\n\nAt this early point in the performance the audience was still quite small: two men over fifty years old (among the staunchest devotees of the epic in the village; one of them, Shaykh Im\u0101m, attended nearly seventy performances during my ten-month stay), one highly educated young man in his twenties (a medical student), the two young men in their twenties who acted as my assistants for part of my stay (one a high school English teacher and the other a government employee), and myself (I was, at this point, in my fifth month in the village and had already recorded extensively with three other poets). It is precisely because of the limited size of this audience that so many of the comments are easily decipherable in the audio recording, yet at least one-quarter of the comments remain unclear, and most of the generalized sounds (ah, y\u0101, hmmm, etc.) have been omitted from this transcription. Even this \"expanded text\" thus represents but a fraction of the average vocalized interaction:\n\n_Text 5.1_ Audience Participation1\n\nShaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd, tape 87\u2013101 (6\/1\/87)\n\nIt was Friday morning, Wish God's Blessings on the Prophet! 1\n\n[All: _May God Bless and Preserve Him!_ ]\n\nThe oppressed one, My Lord [God] hears his prayers.\n\n[hamma] said to [Kha\u1e0dra], 2\n\n\"Let us go, you and I, down to the sea in the openlands,\n\nLet us go calm our blood in its emptiness.2\n\n\"And when you gaze at the salty [sea] you shall encounter wonders, 3\n\nYou shall encounter wonders, by the will of God.\"\n\nThey set out, the two of them, and the slave Sa'\u012bda, 4\n\nWife of Najj\u0101\u1e25, oh so beautiful.\n\nSuddenly a white bird 5\n\n[Voice: _Yes_!]\n\nfrom the distance came to them,\n\nA white bird, beautiful to behold.\n\nHe landed and did not take flight, the bird in the wastelands, 6\n\nAll the other birds flocked round him.\n\nSaid hamma, \"O Lord, the One, the Everlasting, 7\n\n[Voices: _Allah_!]\n\nGlory to God, there is no god but He.\n\n\"Pray grant me a son like unto this bird, 8\n\nAnd may he be handsome and the Arabs obey his [every word].\"\n\nHer request was completed, O Nobles, and the bird rose up, 9\n\nThe bird took flight, Ah!, and climbed to the heights.\n\nSuddenly a dark bird from the distance 10\n\n[ _Laughter_ ]\n\n[Voice: _This is Ab\u016b Zaydl_ ]\n\ncame to them,\n\nA dark bird\n\n[Voice: _Yes_!]\n\nfrightful to behold!\n\n[Voice: _Heavens_!]\n\nHe beat his wings at the other birds, 11\n\nAnd each one he struck with his wings did not [live to] smell his supper!\n\n[ _Laughter_ ]\n\nSaid Kha\u1e0dra 12\n\n[Voice: _Yes_!]\n\n\"O how beautiful you are, O bird, and how beautiful your darkness,\n\n[Voice: _Allah_!]\n\nLike the palmdate when it ripens to perfection.\n\n\"O Lord, O All-Merciful, O One, O Everlasting, 13\n\n[Voice: _God is Great_!]\n\n[Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 to audience member: _May God reward you_!]\n\nGlory to God, Veiled in His Heaven!\n\n[Audience member places cigarettes in front of Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101]\n\n[Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101: _May you always have plenty!_\n\n_May you always have plenty, we wish you_!]\n\n\"Pray grant me a son, like unto this bird, 14\n\nMay each one he strikes with his sword not [live to] smell his supper.\"\n\n[Voice: _My goodness_!]\n\n[Voice shouting: _Ab\u016b Zayd_!]\n\nThey made their requests, the two of them [hamma and Kha\u1e0dra]; 15\n\n[Then] Sa'\u012bda said, \"O Lord, pray grant me a son like my mistresses,\n\nHe fears nought, he whose fulfillment is from the Most Generous.\"\n\nThey went home, O Nobles, Wish God's Blessings on the Prophet! 16\n\n[All: _May God bless and preserve Him_ ]\n\nO fortunate is he who makes a request and the Most Generous [grants] its fulfillment.\n\nSaid King Sar\u1e25\u0101n to Rizq the Hero, 17\n\n\"O cousin, listen to my words and their meanings,\n\n\"Make peace with har\u012bfa, Rizq, O Kindest of the Arabs, 18\n\nHonor her for she is of the line of Messenger of God.\n\n[All: _May God bless and preserve Him_ ]\n\n\"Honor her, O Rizq, or escort her back to her people, 19\n\nFor honor is like tilled land, honor is dear,\n\nHonor is dear and the Arabs know this.\"\n\n[Voice: _Allah_!]\n\nHe made peace with her and escorted her to his pavilion, 20\n\nAnd the Most Generous willed that he be rightly guided O how beautiful!\n\nOn this night the three became pregnant, 21\n\n[Voice: _Allah_!]\n\nO fortunate is he who makes a request and the Most Generous [grants] its fulfillment.\n\nHer months passed, [and] hamma the Noble gave birth to a son, O Nobles, of rare qualities,\n\nA boy handsome of face, O so beautiful!\n\n* Wish God's Blessings on the Prophet! *\n\n[All: _May God bless and preserve Him_!]\n\n[Voice: _May God provide for you_!]\n\n[Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101: _May God reward you_!]\n\n[Voice: _Listen_ . . . ]\n\n[Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101: _May God bless you_!]\n\nThe most basic and characteristic levels of poet\/audience interaction are found in this short example. Audience responses build with the story to an emotional highpoint with the arrival of the dark bird, the omen of the hero Ab\u016b Zayd's birth, and from verses 11 to 15 nearly every phrase sung by the poet is met with a response from some member of the audience.\n\nIn the text we find an ongoing set of noninterruptive, nondemarcative exclamations similar to what researchers of conversational interaction term \"backchanneling.\"3 These short interjections (All\u0101h! my goodness! yes! hmmm, \u0101h, etc.) do not stop the flow of the singing, but in some sense, as in conversation, signal that the listener is interested and is following the story. There are also some remarks meant to evoke a reaction from the addressee, be it audience member or poet. Each mention of the Prophet Muhammad provokes traditional responses, and references to God or to actions attributed directly to God are often followed with the phrase \"God is Great\" (Allahu akbar). In addition, many greetings and compliments in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, as in many other Arabic dialects, also require cognate responses in a form parallel to the original remark (i.e., \"May God preserve you!\" \"May God reward you!\").4 In example 5.1, the poet responds to compliments from audience members at line 13 and after line 23. Another typical interaction shown here is anticipation on the part of audience members (see lines 10 and 14), who often shout out the name of a character entering the story or a plot element about to occur (i.e., \"He'll kill him on the third stroke!\" \"Here comes Ab\u016b Zayd\"). Poets often acknowledge correct anticipations with a nod and a smile, and will set straight incorrect comments with a line of poetry. In midperformance poets may test the audience with quick questions: \"Who's saying this?\" (d\u0101 huwwa m\u012bn biyiq\u016bl kida?), \"And who does he meet?\" (hayiq\u0101bil m\u012bn?), for example.\n\nThese interactions appear simple, yet they provide an intricate key to the pacing and mood of the performance. Poets demand a certain amount of backchanneling to verify that the audience is following the story and is still entertained. Withholding that basic feedback is the audience's primary method for communicating boredom or lack of interest. Review of performances lasting several hours almost always reveals segments where the backchanneling has died down and the poet subsequently turns to one of several techniques to reintegrate the audience by stimulating vocal participation.\n\nReferences to the Prophet or to God are one such move, for they require the appropriate responses, as we saw in the mad\u012b\u1e25 genre. Though the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh never speak directly of using this technique to spur audiences within the epic narrative, they do speak openly of using praise poetry of Mu\u1e25ammad at the beginning of a performance to gather in the audience and to calm them down in preparation for recitation of the epic. The use of the required response mechanism to calm or focus a group has numerous parallels in daily life, where public quarrels are often tempered with religious formulas which require responses from all present, diffusing tensions and at the same time incorporating into the situation bystanders who have remained outside the dispute and who then function as arbitrators.\n\nIn a similar move, poets directly question the audience. They may ask, \"Who is saying this?\"\u2014which again forces direct vocal participation.\n\nIn another, more subtle change, the poets alter the tone of the performance by inserting jokes or erotic descriptions, or switching to an auxiliary genre (particularly one such as the hitat baladl which draws the listeners directly into the focus of the performance). When audience members begin to react, the poet follows that lead. Every poet has a repertory of devices from dramatic hand and facial gestures, sudden shouts or changes of tempo, comic musical effects (glissandos or raps of the bow on the neck of the instrument), to swinging the instrument through the air while playing and swaying back and forth while singing.\n\nThis sense of dialogue and interactive process is apparent in the poets' own evaluations of their performances. Typically in their discussions, their initial comments always concern the _audience_ of a particular performance and whether or not they were knowledgeable, lively, serious, and so forth.\n\nVocal participation by listeners, however, is but the simplest form of social interaction involved in a sahra performance. Sahras tend to promote another type of performance behavior apart from that of the poets; in the breaks and intermissions of the poets' performances, audience members regularly offer performances of a number of genres of verbal art such as (1) memorates (brief, first-person narratives), (2) proverbs, (3) quotations from Qur'\u0101n, hadith, songs, poetry, (4) jokes, (5) elaborated greetings and salutations, and (6) historical narratives. In short, all of the conversational genres of verbal art found in village life are likely to pop up during a sahra.\n\nThere is one major difference, however, between the fine art of daily conversation and the currents of performance within the sahra: conversational genres within the sahra tend to spring from the formal performance of the epic poet and likewise tend to develop threads of cohesion throughout an evening in interaction with the poet's performance. These linking themes and motifs initiated in less formal fashion by audience members are often later reappropriated by the poet and caused to echo within the epic. Part of the dynamic of the sahra context is the weaving of elements from the performance situation first into the performance text and then back into the sahra setting. Over and over again an evening gathering develops around an idea or a mood that is reiterated in different forms. To some extent this quality is found in any human dialogue or conversation, but the sahra context seems to invite such participation in a more formalized, more performance-oriented manner.\n\nA simple example is found in performances in which an element of the epic is first commented upon by audience members during a tea break, which then leads to the presentation of full narratives by audience members, and then to the reincorporation of elements from their narratives into the epic. In the tale of \u1e24an\u1e0dal the 'Uqayl\u012b, for example, in a scene in which Gh\u0101nim is sent as a messenger to \u1e24an\u1e0dal's pavilion with a threatening letter from the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe, Gh\u0101nim is terrified of delivering the letter for fear \u1e24an\u1e0dal will have him executed in his anger over the contents of the letter. Gh\u0101nim, who is known for both his physical cowardice and his gluttony, arrives just as a large meal is being served. In a performance by Shaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b (2\/13\/87), Gh\u0101nim ate, among other things, _fat\u0113ta._ The scene was well embellished with comic touches, particularly when Gh\u0101nim tries again and again to stop eating: he was rabid ( _sa 'r\u0101n_), the piece of meat he was gnawing on was as big as his own leg up to his knee ( _y\u0101 luqmituh qadd-I ruqbituh_!), and his stomach kept crying out \"I want more, I want more\" (ana '\u0101wiz kam\u0101n, ana '\u0101wiz kam\u0101n!). His eyes glistened and gleamed with tears (tilamma' wi-tidamma'), and his throat was bursting (tifarqa'), his hand kept shoveling, and his stomach kept crying out, \"I want more, I want more.\"\n\nAt the next break I asked what fat\u0113ta was and learned that it is simply the local variation of a well-known dish, _fatta,_ made with broth and crumbled bread. My inquiry sparked a series of short tales of good fattas and bad fattas, and soon I was quizzed about other regional specialties such as _wi h_ and _fas\u012b kh_.5 When we returned to the epic, the hero Gh\u0101nim had acquired the new epithets \"father of the fat\u0113ta\" ( _ab\u016b l-fat\u0113ta_ ) and \"the one of the fat\u0113ta\" ( _bit\u0101 ' il-fat\u0113ta_), which stuck with him for the remaining twenty-five hours of Shaykh Biyal\u012b's rendition of the s\u012bra. Each iteration of the epithet provoked a round of laughter, and over a number of evenings the incident was recounted many times so that new listeners would understand. Although this instance was provoked by my own question, it proved a simple example of a process common in sahra performances, the constant movement of themes and other elements through various forms and genres during an evening gathering.\n\nMore interesting for our purposes than the creation of a simple epithet such as \"father of the fat\u0113\u1e6da\" are sequences of lengthy narratives which occasionally push even the epic out of the spotlight for a portion of an evening. One evening when Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 was performing a segment from \"The Wars of T\u016bnis\" (6\/24\/87), audience members began to comment upon the name of the hero Diy\u0101b (lit. wolves). The topic shifted to how times had changed, and people began listing the technological changes that they had personally lived through. The example of the shift from the _n\u014dr\u0101j_ 'threshing floor,' which used horses or water buffalo driven round and round in a circle, to the modern gasoline-engine threshing machines was brought up. Then the discussion shifted to the subject of the hand-powered _\u1e6damb\u016br_ 'Archimedean water-screw' to the proliferation of livestock-driven waterwheels, to modern gasoline-powered pumps. Suddenly a young man named Mu\u1e63\u1e6dafa launched into a narrative that linked the two topics of wolves and technological change, a story of how his grandfather had spent an entire night turning a \u1e6damb\u016br while fending off a wolf by tossing it scraps of his own food. Mu\u1e63\u1e6daf added that he himself had only seen a wolf once, but that he would never forget it though it occurred when he was quite young and working as a camel driver (as he still does).\n\nMustaf\u00e0 recounted: \"One night during cotton harvest, the landowner I was working for insisted I take one last load of cotton into [the town of] Qall\u012bn, though it was nearly 2:00 A.M. I said no at first, that it was too late, and besides I couldn't go alone. But the overseer insisted. He said he would ride with me. Once we'd loaded and I was setting out, the man said he would go back and get the donkey, and then catch up with me on the way. I walked and walked and kept saying to myself, 'Any moment he'll catch up with me, any moment now.' I shouted and shouted but there was no answer\u2014the man had lied and gone home.\n\nI arrived in Qall\u012bn and the people there said, 'Boy, are you crazy? It's 2:00 A.M., couldn't it wait till morning?' I told them the overseer would be along soon, so they weighed in the cotton and all. I waited and waited but the man didn't come. So I said to myself, 'I'll go home.' So I was riding the camel\u2014perhaps 3:30 at night\u2014to where the bridge is now\u2014 and there was the wolf. I scarcely knew it was a wolf\u2014dog, wolf, I was young and had never seen one. But when I tried to pass, it would growl [Mu\u1e63\u1e6daf\u00e0 growls], and if I tried to pass it on the side, the wolf would herd the camel back to the path. I didn't know what to do. I was afraid to get down, I couldn't get by, I thought to myself, \"I could take off the camel's _kim\u0101m_ [muzzle] and let it fight off the wolf\u2014but it might turn around and bite me.\"\n\nShaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 interrupted: \"A fasting camel?\" ( _jamal \u1e63\u0101yim_ 'hadn't been fed'].\n\n\"Yes. And he could well turn around and bite me rather than the wolf. I thought and thought and decided: Better to be bit by the camel than eaten by the wolf! So I decided to unfasten the kim\u0101m, saying to myself, 'Don't worry about the wolf, just watch out for the camel and be ready with the stick!' So I unfastened the kim\u0101m. The wolf growled and the camel seized it in its mouth and threw it in the air higher than me. I screamed. I thought the wolf was going to land on me. When it hit the ground the camel held it, excuse me, with its feet and began to eat it [ _bada yinissir jth_ \u2014lit. 'eat and tear at it as a hawk eats its prey,' Mu\u1e63\u1e6daf\u00e0 imitates the camel tossing its head from side to side]. It chewed on one piece all the way back to the village.\n\n\"I arrived at the house but I was afraid to get down in case the camel bit me\u2014it's mind was 'changed' [ _k\u0101n dim\u0101 ghuh mitghayyar_]\u2014it might do anything. So I knocked on the door and finally my father (May he rest in peace!) answered, saying, 'Where have you been?' So I told him that this and that had happened. He said that son of a bitch had come home long ago. He said, 'Stay where you are\u2014don't get down.' And he left me on the camel. It was time for dawn prayers and every time I saw someone enter our alley I'd shout at him to go back [ _rudd! rudd!_ ] and tell him that the camel would bite him. I thought, 'Am I going to the spend the night on this camel?' But my father appeared on the roof with a wooden ladder and a rope. He lowered the ladder on the rope and said, 'Jump and climb as fast as you can.' So I did, and he also pulled up on the rope at the same time. The camel turned to bite me but it missed. Can you imagine? That camel was tired out [ _ta 'b\u0101n_] for two months.\"\n\nListeners: \"Of course, of course!\"\n\n\"And I was too\u2014I kept seeing the wolf flying through the air. I'd point up in the air and shout, 'There's the wolf!' [ _id-d\u012bb ah\u014d_ ]. They even had a doctor examine me\u2014I told him too\u2014'There's the wolf [cringing and pointing up to the corner of the room].\n\n\"My father said, 'I'll have my rights from that landowner.' He complained to the village headman [' _umda],_ and the headman said the man must be punished and informed the district police. My father said, 'I don't want 20 \u00a3E or 50 \u00a3E or 100 \u00a3E, I want my rights from that man.' And didn't he get a year in jail?\"\n\nThe listeners nodded.\n\nOne listener: \"That was during the days when 'Abd al-Sal\u0101m was village headman.\"\n\nMu\u1e63\u1e6dafa: \"Yes, now that was when a headman was a headman!\"\n\nThe listeners nodded.\n\nMu\u1e63\u1e6dafa's tale sparked a number of comments. More notably for our purposes here, however, it refocused the evening's performance on the hero Diy\u0101b. Later discussions all dealt with Diy\u0101b's character and his role in the epic, and when Diy\u0101b was mentioned during the performance, Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 lingered over the name and nodded to Mu\u1e63\u1e6dafa as did other listeners. Several times when Diy\u0101b made an appearance in battle, audience members called out, \"There's the wolf.\" Conversation during each of the tea breaks that evening drifted back to the wolf story; a few similar incidents were recounted, though none was as dramatic as Mu\u1e63\u1e6dafa's tale.\n\nDuring another evening's performance by Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b (3\/16\/87), the evening following his hitat baladi performance that we examined earlier, the event of a character within the epic falling asleep provoked a sequence of a half dozen tales of sleeping: tales of prodigious sleeps while home on leave from the army, tales of falling asleep while riding donkeys home at night (in one the rider supposedly fell off but continued to sleep on the ground undisturbed till morning; in the second the rider slept soundly till dawn, slumped forward on his donkey for hours after they had reached home, while the donkey patiently waited for someone to open the stable door). The last of these tales concerned a train ride back from the city of \u1e6dan\u1e6da during which five friends all fell asleep, missed their stop, and awoke to find themselves in the next province. But with incredible luck, as they exited the station they spied a long-distance taxi ( _serfs_ ) driver from a village next to al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, and after recounting their story and having a good laugh, they were offered a ride home.\n\nClearly the effective study of such threads of cohesion, particularly on a level more sophisticated than the rough observations cited above, would necessarily be rooted in numerous recordings of entire sahras from beginning to end. I do not possess such data. Though on numerous occasions I was able to record examples of these various narrative genres, at different points in the evening I was invariably requested to turn off the tape recorder. Thus as evidence for the development of narrative themes over an evening-long performance I have only my handwritten field notes. The categories of \"formal\" and \"informal\" genres performed by the poets (listed in Chap. 4) were accepted by almost all participants as verbal art worthy of being recorded (though some listeners objected to my recording even \u1e25itat balad\u012b passages). Those genres performed by poets which I have listed as \"conversational\" and all genres performed by audience members, however, were deemed by audience members to be outside the proper sphere of my research, primarily because many of the erotic, political, and personal matters brought up, mostly in jest, could in fact cause difficult social situations if circulated.\n\nSuch evenings of performance suggest an interesting connection to the structure of literary creations such as the _Thousand and One Nights._ It is an enduring paradox that this most famous example of Arabic literature should be best known for a narrative technique entirely untypical of Arabic literature, oral or written\u2014the frame-tale. The historical explanation, of course, is that the work originated in Indian and Persian forms and was then translated into Arabic and stocked with further tales from Arabic oral tradition. (Still later, the collection was entirely transformed by European translators and editors, who quadrupled the number of stories by borrowing from many different sources, though they continued to purvey the product as \"Arabic\" to an unsuspecting Western audience.) This strategy of appropriation appears to be most directly linked to the formation of a \"popular\" literature as a distinct, and perhaps a distinctly written, discourse. The structure of such performance events as the sahra, in which one major genre provides the backdrop and even the instigating factor for sequences of \"embedded\" tales, suggests, however, a rough oral counterpart to the literary frame-tale. The rich analyses of the relationships obtaining between the frame-tale and the embedded tales and among sequences of tales, which have been developed in interpreting the _Nights_ and other examples of genre, should provide valuable precedents for the examination of the dynamics inherent in the sahra when addressed as an interacting whole.6\n\n#### Situational Interactions\n\nUltimately most of the aesthetic decisions made during a sahra performance are in the hands of the poet, the primary performer. In our examination of the \u1e25itat balad\u012b we noted the existence and common deployment of an auxiliary genre specifically designed to incorporate audience members directly into the performance. (Poets' genealogical discussions appear to be a less formally marked genre based upon similar intent.) The \u1e25itat balad\u012b is but the most formally framed space within the sahra for this process, for such incorporation occurs with some regularity throughout the performance. One mark of the virtuosity of a poet in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh is his ability to to cope with developing situations in the gathering without completely breaking the frame or form of whatever genre he is performing at that moment; there are, however, many levels of such situational interactions.\n\nThe simplest form may be that of embedding extranarrative commentary within the story while maintaining the exigencies of the poetic form, though without manipulating the story itself. Toward the very end of the second night of the performance of \"The Birth of Ab\u016b Zayd\" by Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd mentioned earlier, the host at one point gestured to the poet that it was growing quite late. The poet, knowing that he was only minutes from the concluding scene of the episode, sang his response in verse without breaking stride (lines 6\u20137 below). In this scene Ab\u016b Zayd has for days unknowingly been fighting his father in battle, neither able to best the other. Returning from battle, Ab\u016b Zayd meets a maiden in his path (his sister, h\u012b\u1e25a) who first tests him, then insults him, and finally mysteriously tells him to go ask his mother who his real father is. Ab\u016b Zayd confronts his mother several times before she relents and tells him the truth:\n\n_Text 5.2_ Interjected Comments by Poet\n\nShaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd, tape 87\u2013104 (6\/2\/87)\n\nab\u016bk baq\u0101 y\u0101 bn\u012b rizq ibnu n\u0101yil, 1\n\nill\u012b inta Qab\u0101luh f\u012b ma'rak al-m\u012bd\u0101n.\n\nwi-d\u014dla rij\u0101lak wi-ahlak wi-lammitak, 2\n\nwi-ll\u012b i\u1e25na 'anduh fa\u1e0dl iz-zi\u1e25l\u0101n.\n\n\u1e25\u0101m\u0101 'iru\u1e0dn\u0101 y\u0101 qirm b\u0113n il-'arab, 3\n\ntitQ\u0101m luh ir-ray\u0101t il-b\u0113\u1e0d f\u014dq r\u0101yiq il-buny\u0101n. \u00bb\n\nq\u0101l \u00aby\u0101 mma l\u0113h l\u0113h l\u0113h l\u0113h lamm\u0101 ab\u016by\u0101, 4\n\nl\u0113 tikhbir\u012bn\u012b y\u0101 \u1e25ilwit il-a'y\u0101n.\n\ninn\u012b baq\u0101 ri\u1e0da il-w\u0101lid\u0113n y\u0101 ni'me waldit\u012b, 5\n\ninn-I ri\u1e0d\u0101hum min ri\u1e0d\u0101 r-ra\u1e25m\u0101n. \u00bb\n\n_To Host_ : \u1e6dawwil l\u012b b\u0101lak 6\n\ny\u0101 b\u016b bakh\u0101t\u012b lam tik\u016bn qalq\u0101n!\n\n[Laughter\u2014voice: y\u0101 sal\u0101m!]\n\nwi-kull-I '\u0101m wa-ntum f\u012b l-'izz-I wa-l-hane, 7\n\nti'\u016bd lay\u0101l\u012bkum f\u012b kull-I aw\u0101n.\n\nyith\u0101rij\u016b l-isn\u0113n ill\u0101 wa-h\u012b\u1e25a aQbalat, 8\n\nukht-I sal\u0101me wi-d\u0101 muQdim il-firs\u0101n . . .\n\n\"Your father, O my son, is Rizq, son of N\u0101yil, 1\n\nWhom you are facing in battle on the field.\n\nAnd these are your men, your people, and your clan, 2\n\nAnd the one we are staying with is Fa\u1e0dl of the Za\u1e25l\u0101n.\n\nHe defended our honor, O Courageous One, among the Arabs, 3\n\nMay white banners be raised for him atop the finest of buildings.\"\n\nHe said, \"O mother, why, why, why, why, of my father, 4\n\nWhy do you inform me [only now], O Most Beautiful of the Nobles?\n\nSo I am the contentment of my two parents, O Bounteous Mother, 5\n\nMay their contentment be from the contentment of the All-Merciful.\"\n\n_To Host_ : Lengthen your patience for me, 6\n\nO Ab\u016b Bakh\u0101t\u012b, don't grow uneasy!\n\n[Laughter\u2014voice: Well done!]\n\nMay all of you each year find prosperity and happiness, 7\n\nMay your evening gatherings return time and again.\n\nThe two were arguing when suddenly h\u012b\u1e25a approached, 8\n\nThe sister of Sal\u0101ma, and he was the champion of the warriors.\n\nTextually and musically the poet remains within the frame of epic verse, though in this example he breaks with the story world of the epic to direct a comment outward to a named addressee in the audience. The two interjected verses (6\u20137) are not tied in any way to the narrative material that immediately proceeds and follows them.\n\nAnother common technique used by poets to maneuver through and negotiate developing situations involves maintaining the story world of the epic as well as the formal features of the genre by changing an aspect of the story so as to comment on the present situation. Small instances of this technique are relatively common in sahra performances and are particularly well applauded and are often commented upon afterward. A typical example of this process is a poet's reaction to an audience member who has, or is about to, fall asleep during a performance (which, given the long hours of agricultural labor and the late hours of the sahra performances, is understandably a common occurrence). Sometimes a poet gestures with his eyes, head, or the rab\u0101b at the dozing listener, at the same time alerting the other audience members to some upcoming twist in the tale. Then, at the beginning of the next battle scene or scene with people arguing, for example, the poet lets out a great yell (placed in the mouth of one of the epic characters) while everyone observes, usually with great laughter and much teasing, the effect on their sleeping companion. This shout ( _h akh\u1e6da_) is even a point of pride with several poets: after Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b had woken a dozing participant in precisely this manner, several listeners offered testimonies to the fact that when he was younger, Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b's hakh\u1e6da could startle people as far away as the village of Minyat Qallln, two kilometers distant.\n\nA poet may choose to manipulate the narrative even further by introducing, for example, a character with the name of the sleeping listener, who then in the story falls asleep and is awoken by one of the regular epic heroes. Or, the poet may cause one of the regular characters in the story to fall asleep, usually in comic circumstances, only to be awoken by another character with a similar shout. In the former instance the audience is made aware of the joke by the name of the newly interjected character; in the latter, audience members who know the tradition well will begin looking around at the other listeners as soon as they detect such an insertion, trying to discern who is most likely the target of the poet's wit.\n\nThis process of response to the performance situation can also, of course, lead to the suppression of materials rather than the interjection of exterior elements. Perhaps the most common example is the suppression of certain incidents, anecdotes, and jokes when female listeners are present (as in any public, outdoor performance such as a wedding) or known to be within hearing distance (as in a private home).7 Certain scenes from the epic are structured almost entirely around erotic humor and ordinarily must be dropped out of a performance or radically censored in the presence of female listeners.\n\nIn the early period of my research in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh I contracted with Shaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b to sing the epic from beginning to end. As a result of my request, much of the flexibility inherent in this performance tradition and many of Shaykh Biyal\u012b's skills as a performer were rendered unavailable to him. Only later, by observing his work in other contexts, did I grow to realize the dimensions of the problem. The choice of which episode to sing was taken from him, along with much of the freedom usually involved in moving back and forth through the various other genres of sahra performances; he was further constrained by the sense that these performances were \"official\" ones. Occasionally these competing forces within an artifically constructed context produced informative mishaps, such as the following in which Shaykh Biyal\u012b was forced to suppress one set of images in deference to the women of the household who were listening from the next room.\n\nOur recording project had advanced as far as the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l's arrival in the region of T\u016bnis, and this evening's performance started in quite ordinary fashion. A new element was introduced, however, when the women in the back of the house asked permission to leave the door to the men's sitting room ajar so that they might listen. They sat quietly in the portion of the room behind the door, so that they were not visible to anyone in the sitting room, and conversed only in whispers. Within half an hour, however, Shaykh Biyal\u012b was faced with a difficult situation, for he had arrived at a very comic, highly erotic scene. The Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l, in an attempt to free three young men of the tribe held in prison inside the city of T\u016bnis, had sent the maidens of the tribe to the city gate, accompanied by Ab\u016b Zayd whom they conceal in their midst. The maidens flirt with the gatekeeper (who is described as an eighty-year-old, ugly, hunchbacked, Negro slave from Africa) so that he will open the gate, supposedly so that they may sell their perfumes in the marketplace. Al-Jazya has just avowed that she is madly in love with the gatekeeper; he, however, is recalcitrant and still trying to get rid of them when he proposes a singing contest:\n\n_Text 3.3:_ Suppression of Materials for Female Listeners8\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, tape 87\u2013029 (2\/25\/87)\n\n_Spoken:_\n\nShe said to him: \"Aren't you going to open up, Man\u1e63\u016br?\" [He said:] \"You sing, then I'll sing after you, and if you best me in the saying [of poetry], I'll marry four of the women and you'll be at the top of the list. If I best you in the saying [of poetry], then you'll take the women and get out of here, and we'll call our love quits, and praise be to God!\" Al-J\u0101zya said to him: \"You spread out the bedding and I'll put on the cover.\" He said to her: \"You've made a mistake\u2014the holy law that Our Lord has established [says] that women spread out the bedding for men, for men are preferred over women, and women spread out the bedding for men, so who will 'spread the bedding' in words?\" He said to her: \"You 'spread out the bedding' with words! And I will 'lay the cover over you' with words.\" So al-J\u0101zya \"spread out the bedding,\" what does she say?\u2014 he who loves the Prophet surpasses us in wishing God's blessings upon Him:\n\n_Sung:_\n\nI praise Muhammad, the stones spoke to Him,\n\nThe stones spoke to Him\n\n[Tunes _rab\u0101b_ ]\n\nI praise Muhammad, the stones spoke to Him, 1\n\nO Lord let us visit Him and rejoice in His light,\n\nSo we can rejoice in His light and achieve the visit, and achieve the visit.\n\n_Sung in a rapid singsong manner_ :\n\nThe Daughter of Sar\u1e25\u0101n, 2\n\nSpoke in rhymes and meters,\n\nImmediately poetry was at hand,\n\nAnd in it we have matters.\n\n\"Open, O Man\u1e63\u016br, 3\n\nOpen the gate of the wall,\n\nSo we can enter properly,\n\nAnd go sell our perfumes.\n\n\"Open and don't be a 'fraidy, 4\n\nIf you've any spittle in you,\n\nThere is jet-dark henna\n\nOn the hands of these virgins.\n\n\"Open, O my Beloved, 5\n\nO my musk and my scent,\n\nI'll take you as my husband,\n\nO strapping young gatekeeper.\" (2x)\n\nThe gatekeeper Man\u1e63\u016br answered al-J\u0101zya thus. What did he say\n\n\"I will not open my gate 6\n\nTo anyone I don't know,\n\nAnd you are stingy Arabs,\n\nTo open to you is a waste.\"\n\n\"O Gatekeeper, open your armored gate, 7\n\nO Gatekeeper, open your armored gate,\n\nIf they enter they will profits gain,\n\nFrom the sale of their perfumes.\n\n\"Oh don't be afraid, oh don't be afraid, 8\n\nI will show you all my features,\n\nAnd then we'll play at try sting,\n\nAnd then we'll play at trysting.\"\n\nWhat did the gatekeeper Mans\u016br say to her?:\n\n\"That's all well, O maiden, 9\n\nBut let's cut short the discussion,\n\nHave you come to the gatekeeper with disaster,\n\nTo crack his head open while raidin'?\n\n\"I'll never open the door, 10\n\nI'll never open the door,\n\nEven to the strokes of lances\n\nFrom inebriated [enraged] soldiers.\n\n\"Get along pretty one, get along pretty one, 11\n\nYou should the Khal\u012bfa [king of T\u016bnis] fear,\n\nIn his hand is a sharpened spear,\n\nWhich passes with ease through stones.\"\n\n\"Open, O Mans\u016br, 12\n\nOpen the gate of the wall,\n\nGive us your permission.\n\nO Face of Loss,\n\nCome on, Gatekeeper Mans\u016br,\n\nYour face is the face of loss.\n\n\"Open and I will show you 13\n\nThe features of the virgins,\n\n( _Aside:_ The virgins, that is, the girls)\n\nOpen and I will show you\n\nThe features of the virgins.\n\n\"We have with us 'Alya of the 'Uqayla, 14\n\nAnd 'Alya of the Za\u1e25l\u0101n,\n\nAnd we have with us Lady Wa\u1e6dfa of the Zagh\u0101ba,\n\nWe have with us Lady S\u0101ra.\n\n\"Sa'diyya and Rasmiyya, 15\n\nSa'diyya and Rasmiyya,\n\nAnd al-J\u0101zya of the Arabs,\n\nAnd al-J\u0101zya of the Arabs,\n\nThe 'administration' all desire her,\n\nThe 'administration' all desire her.\"\n\nHe slammed the door and was leaving 16\n\nThe beautiful faces behind,\n\n[But] the finest musk wafted up\n\nFrom 'Alya and from S\u0101ra.\n\nThe gatekeeper he was moved, 17\n\nHe took his key and rose,\n\nHe took his key and rose,\n\nAnd opened wide the door.\n\nHe spread out his reed matting, 18\n\nAnd then took off his sandals,\n\nAnd he took off his sandals\n\nAnd made a rush at the virgins!\n\nThe gatekeeper spread out his reed matting 19\n\nAnd he took off his sandals\n\nAnd\u2014his health!\u2014he untied his underwear!\n\nAnd he obtained disaster! yes, he obtained disaster!\n\nAb\u016b Zayd the Dark One 20\n\nCame to him riding like 'Antar,\n\nIn his hand a cutting sword,\n\nHe struck Mans\u016br the rude,\n\nHe caused his \"head\" to roll\n\nLike a single cucumber!\n\nAnd this was the opening of the Gates of T\u016bnis, 21\n\nFor [the rescue of] Ya\u1e25y\u0101 and Mar'\u012b and Y\u016bnis,\n\nAnd this was the opening of the Gates of T\u016bnis,\n\nFor [the rescue of] Ya\u1e25y\u0101 and of Y\u016bnis,\n\nAnd Y\u016bnis was sitting in prison and heard all the commotion.\n\nMan\u1e63\u016br the gatekeeeper fell, 22\n\nThey buried him by the wall,\n\nAnd they dumped upon his skull,\n\nThe eighty bushel baskets!\n\nWish God's Blessings on the Prophet!\n\nUpon finishing this scene to much laughter and applause, Shaykh Biyal\u012b turned to me and added sotto voce that this is not how the end of the scene went, but that there were women in the next room, and he would explain later. Specifically, Biyal\u012b had changed the target of Ab\u016b Zayd's swordstroke, and it's clear even from the \"expurgated\" text that Man\u1e63\u016br's head is probably not what bounced down the road like a cucumber ( _zirr-I khiy\u0101ra_ is literally a _single_ cucumber): Mansur's head was substituted at the last minute. A more typical rendering for an all male audience is that Ab\u016b Zayd came to him sword in hand and \"slashed open the rude one's underwear [ _fakk-I lib\u0101suh_ ], and caused his cock to bounce about like a single cucumber.\"\n\nAs with many types of erotic humor, the act of concealment (of body parts, vocabulary, gestures, etc.) in the presence of the opposite sex often does more to reveal tensions than hide them, resulting in moments of sexually charged humor. Shaykh Biyal\u012b's attempt to hide the \"male\" punch line fooled few in this audience (male or female) and generated more laughter and attention than the \"male\" verse ever does under normal circumstances.\n\nThe analysis of more pervasive transformations of traditional materials from performance to performance poses a more complex set of problems, involving far more subtle shifts in degrees of emphasis and focus. As an example we examine a sahra riddled with tension because of the presence of eight educated young men (ages nineteen to twenty-five), all of whom openly leaned toward modern reinterpretations of Islam (what the Western press terms \"fundamentalism\"). Shaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b is usually a favorite poet of the younger crowd in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh for he is a lively performer who tends toward humorous and melodramatic presentation; for these reasons he claims fewer of the older, more traditional aficionados as loyal supporters. On this particular evening, however, he found himself caught in the generational clash.\n\nThe sahra had already gotten under way when these young men arrived with a guest from town, a high school English teacher, whom they wished to introduce to me. Until their arrival, the audience had consisted entirely of older men and myself. Their presence initiated a certain amount of tension, for, more than any other social group within the village, they represented the breakdown of the old order. By dint of their university educations, in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh they are accorded social status and authority far in excess of what traditional social structures would normally grant them according to their age and unmarried status. Also, the new Islamic movements have of necessity made spokespersons of young men who possess no accepted religious authority either in the institutional sense (having studied at a religious institution, for example, to become a government-appointed im\u0101m) or in the traditional sense (being a Qur'\u0101n reciter or a confrere in a Sufi brotherhood). They are, in social terms, at the other end of nearly every social axis from the usual audiences of _S\u012brat Ban\u012bHil\u0101l_ gatherings. Their presence in the sahra was registered within the story of the epic within minutes of their arrival. As Shaykh Biyal\u012b sang of the escalating confrontation between the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l tribe and Khal\u012bfa Zan\u0101t\u012b, the ruler of T\u016bnis, he began to portray the fight as one between the older and younger generations. At this point in the story several skirmishes had already taken place between the opposing forces; however, the two Hil\u0101l\u012b heroes Ab\u016b Zayd and Hasan are struggling to avoid all-out war with the city of T\u016bnis because Diy\u0101b, the strongest of the Hil\u0101l\u012b warriors, has quarreled with them and absented himself from camp. Badr, son of Gh\u0101nim and brother of Diy\u0101b, elects to ride into battle against Khal\u012bfa, though he knows he is certain to die, for all know that the death of Khal\u012bfa Zan\u0101t\u012b has been foretold to be at the hand of Diy\u0101b. Badr is killed and another young man named Badr takes his place, and so on till eighty young men, all named Badr (=Full Moon) have been killed. Finally the Q\u0101\u1e0d\u012b Bad\u012br, the religious judge of the tribe, rides against Khal\u012bfa Zan\u0101t\u012b and is also killed. The Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l have no choice but to declare full-scale war. They call for all four clans of the confederation to ride into battle, and a message is sent to Diy\u0101b.\n\nThe killing of the eighty Badrs is an integral part of the traditional story line; the crystallization of the confrontation as one of generations is, however, unique to this particular performance. After the opening skirmish with the first Badr, al-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa sings to the defeated Hil\u0101l\u012b horsemen:\n\n_Text 5.4_ Interaction with Young Men, Part 1\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, tape 87\u2013032 (2\/26\/87)\n\n\u1e63arakh 'al\u0101 \u1e63-\u1e63aff\u0113n: h\u012bl\u016b Qat\u012blakum 1\n\ny\u0101 man bad\u0101luh yinzil il-m\u012bd\u0101n\n\nf\u0101ris li-f\u0101ris y\u0101 'arab la-tih\u0101wir\u016b 2\n\nwall\u0101h in nazalt\u016b il-kull-I aq'bil \u1e25ur\u016bbikum\n\nan\u0101 khal\u012bfa ab\u016b sa'da mur'ib ih-huga'\u0101n\n\nil-hilayla g\u016bm yi\u1e25\u0101rib\u016b khal\u012bfa 3\n\nwi-huwa f\u012b sinn il-khamsa wi-sitt\u012bn sana;\n\nwall\u0101h\u012b law g\u0113t\u016bn\u012b wa-n\u0101 lissa hubb\u0101n,\n\nm\u0101 khall\u0113t mink\u016b wa-l\u0101 f\u0101ris, yisra\u1e25 wa-bi-l-aghn\u0101m 4\n\nan\u0101 khus\u0101ra g\u0113t\u016bn\u012b wa-n\u0101 mitQaddim f\u012b-sinn-I ba\u1e6dl\u0101n\n\nwa-n\u0101 zam\u0101n\u012b h\u0113b 5\n\nwall\u0101h zam\u0101n ih-h\u0113b l\u0101 yi'\u016bd li-\u1e63ib\u0101\n\nm\u0101-l-laban ir-r\u0101yib yi'\u016bd \u1e25ulb\u0101n\n\nwi-n s\u0101bin\u012b il-g\u012bl la-n\u0101 mitrabb\u012b mi'\u0101hum 6\n\n\u1e63aba\u1e25t-I min b\u0113n ig-g\u012bl il-ghalb\u0101n\n\n\u1e25agam badr. 7\n\nHe shouted to the two ranks, \"Carry off your dead! 1\n\nAnd now who will descend into battle in his stead?\n\n\"Warrior to warrior, O Arabs, indicate [an opponent], 2\n\nBy God, if you all descended together I'd meet your fighting!\n\nI am Khal\u012bfa, father of Sa'da, Terrifier of Valiant Men!\"\n\nThe Hil\u0101l\u012bs came to fight Khal\u012bfa when he was in his sixty-fifth year; 3\n\n\"By God, if you had come to me while I was still a young man!\n\n\"I would not have left among you a single warrior to graze your livestock; 4\n\nWhat a pity you've come to me now that I am advanced in years and worn out.\n\n\"I long ago turned gray-haired, by God, gray hair never returns again to youth, 5\n\nCurdled milk never again becomes fresh.\n\n\"And the generation I was raised with have all left me, 6\n\nI have awoken midst this worthless generation!\"\n\nBadr attacked. 7\n\nThe battle lines have been clearly drawn, inside and outside the story; the aging Khal\u012bfa Zan\u0101t\u012b proceeds to kill the young Badr al-Majn\u016bn (Badr the Crazy), then a second young man named Badr al-Shaj\u012b' (Badr the Valiant), and continues on to kill the eighty young men all by the name of Badr.9\n\nAt the next break in the performance, the young men presented their guest and, primarily because of their numbers and enthusiasm, soon began to dominate the discussion. Their conversation quickly drifted toward politics, and the dozen or so older men present were displeased with what they interpreted as disrespectful behavior on the part of the young men and in particular with this new turn in the conversation; they were, however, constrained by the presence of an outside, educated guest. Shaykh Biyal\u012b tried to steer the conversation in a new direction, but one young man inadvertently cut him off. \"Don't you know the meaning of the word 'Excuse me' [ _la mu '\u0101khiza_],\" the poet erupted; \"Sit quietly!\" The high school teacher intervened to calm Shaykh Biyal\u012b, but the poet grew suspicious of what he took to be the teacher's ingratiating tone and his overly formal terms of respect. The young men, however, continued to converse quietly and whisper their irritation. Shaykh Biyal\u012b picked up his rab\u0101b and put an end to the matter by starting to play.\n\nSuddenly Biyall threw in a scene I had never heard before. The setting was the battle in T\u016bnis where the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l desperately needed the aid of their temperamental warrior, Diy\u0101b, in the face of al-Zan\u0101t\u012b's recent slaughter of the young men of the tribe. Somehow Diy\u0101b, usually the fiercest and most battle-loving member of the tribe, had lost his characteristic valor and was reluctant to fight. Finally, his mother and father are sent to persuade him to ride into battle \"for a son should feel shame before his father\" (il-walad yikhtah\u012b min ab\u016bh). They are guided into his tent, but Gh\u0101nim fails to convince his son. Suddenly he removes the veil from Bazla, mother of Diy\u0101b; since our hero has not seen his mother unveiled since he was a child, he is horrified to discover that she is incredibly ugly\u2014which (as happens every few minutes with Arab epic heroes) prompts him to sing an ode:\n\n_Text_ 5.5 Interaction with Young Men, Part 2\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, tape 87\u2013032 (2\/26\/87)\n\nfa-k\u0101nit umm-I diy\u0101b wi\u1e25ha, k\u0101n haklah\u0101 h\u0113n, wi\u1e25ih. k\u0101n 'al\u0113h\u0101 \u1e0dabb '\u0101lya. in-nisw\u0101n il-\u1e25ilw\u012bn yij\u012bb\u016b ir-rij\u0101l il-wi\u1e25h\u012bn. wi-j-jam\u0101'a il-wi\u1e25h\u012bn s\u0101'\u0101t yij\u012bb\u016b l-\u1e25ilw\u012bn, wi-s\u0101'\u0101t \u1e25ilw yikhallif \u1e25ilw.\n\n[Loud laughter]\n\nPoet: umm\u0101l mih binq\u016blak yi\u1e6drid mi-d-d\u0101r f\u012b was\u1e6d il-'\u0101lam?\n\nVoice: l\u0101 y\u0101 kh\u0101l\n\nPoet: ikh 'al\u0113h\n\nVoice: \u0101h\n\n[Music]\n\nfa-'al\u0101 m\u0101 nisma' f\u012b aQw\u0101l il-ah'\u0101r bi-inn-I k\u0101n Diy\u0101b m\u0101 'umr\u016bh h\u0101f \u1e25anak ummuh abadan\u0101\u2014m\u0101 h\u0101fh fammah\u0101 abadan. \u1e6dab'an il-'arab bit\u016b' zam\u0101n k\u0101nit il-w\u0101\u1e25da mindir\u012b yibq'\u0101 'al\u0101 wajh\u0101 birqa' yid\u0101ri wajih\u0101. fa-l-am\u012br gh\u0101nim sh\u0101l il-burqa' min 'al\u0101 wajh bazla, umm-I diy\u0101b. fa-diy\u0101b laq\u0101 ummuh haklah\u0101 wi\u1e25ih wi-\u1e0d-\u1e0dabb bit\u0101'h\u0101 '\u0101l\u012b kib\u012br kida. fa-diy\u0101b ya'n\u012b ta'ajjib 'al\u0101 manar ummuh, q\u0101l y\u0101 sal\u0101m, fa-diy\u0101b baq\u0101 ghann\u0101 qa\u1e63\u012bda, yiq\u016bl \u0113h?\n\nNow Diy\u0101b's mother was ugly, her face was really unattractive, ugly. She had long buckteeth. Beautiful women bear ugly men, and ugly people sometimes bear beautiful people, and sometimes a beautiful person gives birth to another beautiful person.\n\n[Loud laughter from one of the young men which angers the poet] Poet: Well, didn't I tell you we'd have to throw them out in front of everyone?\n\nVoice: No, O maternal uncle.\n\nPoet: Shame on him.\n\nVoice: Yes.\n\n[Music]\n\n[The poet is persuaded to continue]\n\nNow from what we have heard from the words of the poems, Diy\u0101b had never seen his mother's \"mug\"\u2014he'd never seen her mouth ever. Of course, among the Arabs of long ago, a woman was hidden, for she had a veil on her face which hid it. So Prince Gh\u0101nim lifted the veil from the face of Bazla, mother of Diy\u0101b. And Diy\u0101b found out that her face was ugly, and that her buckteeth were really big and long. And Diy\u0101b, that is, he was amazed at the sight of his mother. He said, \"Heavens!\" And Diy\u0101b sang an ode, what does he say?\n\nThe poem begins with words of praise for the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad; the audience responded, wishing God's blessings upon Him, and fell quiet. Then the poet gave us a sequence filled with aphorisms of how some are given great wealth by God and some are given none, how some are given good fortune and some are jinxed, how some are given polite, hardworking wives and others ugly, rude ones. It is precisely the sequence of good and bad fortune which Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b used in the hitat balad\u012b segment we examined in Chapter 4:\n\n_Text 5.6_ Interaction with Young Men, Part 3\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, tape 87\u2013032 (2\/26\/87)\n\nawwil m\u0101 nibd\u0101 nu\u1e63all\u012b 'al\u0101 n-nab\u012b 1\n\nnab\u012bn\u0101 il-hud\u0101 il-'arab\u012b wa-lih \u1e25aram masb\u016bt\n\nnab\u012bn\u0101 il-hud\u0101 il-'arab\u012b wa-lih \u1e25aram masb\u016bt.\n\nyiq\u016bl il-amir diy\u0101b 'ala m\u0101 gar\u0101 luh 2\n\nwi-r-rizq min 'and il-il\u0101h bikh\u016bt\n\nf\u012bh ill\u012b yu'\u1e6d\u012bh rabbak j\u016bda ma'a karam 3\n\nwi-f\u012bh ill\u012b yidd\u012b luh bukhl-I lamm\u0101 yim\u016bt\n\nwi-f\u012bh ill\u012b yi'\u1e6d\u012b luh \u1e25aw\u0101\u1e63il mal\u0101na 4\n\nwi-f\u012bh ill\u012b rabbak yidd\u012b luh rizq-I q\u016bt bi-q\u016bt\n\nWe begin by wishing God's blessings on the Prophet, 1\n\nOur Prophet of True Guidance, He has a permanent sanctuary,\n\nOur Prophet of True Guidance, He has a permanent sanctuary.\n\nSays Prince Diy\u0101b from what had happened to him, 2\n\nSustenance from God is [good and bad] fortunes.\n\nThere is he whom Your Lord grants generosity along with honor, 3\n\nAnd there is he who is given stinginess till he dies.\n\nAnd there is he who is granted full harvests, 4\n\nAnd there is he whom Your Lord gives sustenance bit by bit.\n\nThe subsequent verses about good sons versus bad provoked a reaction among the young men, some of whom laughed and some of whom interpreted this verse as a commentary on their own conduct and scowled. The ambiguity between humor and social commentary was made even sharper when the next verse turned on a reference to a young donkey:\n\n_Text 5.7_ Interaction with Young Men, Part 4\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, tape 87\u2013032 (2\/26\/87)\n\nwi-f\u012bh ill\u012b yi'\u1e6d\u012b luh rabbak walad am\u012br biyinfa'uh\n\nwi-f\u012bh ill\u012b yi'\u1e6d\u012b luh walad\n\nbass-I yi\u1e6dla' b\u0101yi\u1e93 wi-half\u016bt\n\nf\u012bh ill\u012b yidd\u012b luh\n\nwi-f\u012bh ill\u012b yidd\u012b luh ja\u1e25sh-I l\u0101 mu'akhza\n\nmin su' bakhtuh il-\u1e25az\u012bn yim\u016bt\n\n_Spoken:_\n\n(ya'n\u012b m\u0101 yik\u016bnh \u1e25idda law ij-ja\u1e25h j\u0113 luh wi-d\u0101 \u1e25a\u1e93\u1e93uh yim\u016bt)\n\nAnd there is he whom Your Lord gives a princely son who serves him,\n\nAnd there is he who is given a son,\n\nBut he turns out rotten and useless.\n\nThere is he who is given,\n\nThere is he who is given a young donkey, if you'll excuse me,\n\nBut with his bad luck the wretched thing up and dies.\n\n_Spoken:_\n\n(That is, no sooner does he get him, if he gets a young donkey, than with his luck it up and dies.)\n\nThese verses produced a clear response among the listeners, but Shaykh Biyal\u012b shifted quickly first to humor and then on to women. As Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b did, Shaykh Biyal\u012b enumerated the blessings of he who has a good wife and gave a comic rendition of the plight of the husband who has an ugly, domineering, miserly wife. Nearly every verse was followed by a burst of laughter. The description of the bad wife was met with guffaws: \"with her legs and her neck she resembles a catfish!\" (lih\u0101 rigl\u0113n wi-z\u014drh\u0101 tihbih il-qarm\u016b\u1e6d).\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b then shifted the tone of the performance drastically. Though he retained the ongoing tempo and melody, he switched to another rhyme ( _-\u0101yil_ ) and started the entire sequence over again from the beginning with verses of praise to the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad. Whereas the preceding verses had been met with loud laughter from the young men (they laughed partly at the comic verses and partly at the poet himself), the verses of mad\u012b\u1e25 brought a sudden silence followed by muted responses of \"May God bless and preserve Him.\"\n\n_Text 5.8_ Interaction with Young Men, Part 5\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, tape 87\u2013032 (2\/26\/87)\n\nnab\u012bn\u0101 il-hud\u0101 il-'arab\u012b\n\ng\u0101 n\u0101 bi-kull ir-ras\u0101'il\n\nnab\u012bn\u0101 il-hud\u0101 il-'arab\u012b\n\naw\u1e0da' lin\u0101 kull ir-ras\u0101yil\n\nOur Arab Prophet of True Guidance,\n\nHe came to us with all the Messages (i.e., Scriptures).\n\nOur Arab Prophet of True Guidance,\n\nHe set out for us all the Messages.\n\nThen Diy\u0101b was suddenly singing once again of sons, good and bad:\n\nyaQ\u016bl all\u0101 z-zughb\u012b diy\u0101b ibn-I gh\u0101nim\n\nlaw k\u0101n il-kh\u0101l \u1e6dayyib 'al\u0101 naq\u0101\n\nwi-l-wad wi-kh\u0101luh il-itn\u0113n yiz\u012bn\u016b il-qab\u0101yil\n\nin il-walad ya\u1e6dla' li-kh\u0101luh\n\nka-l-khayla ta\u1e6dla' min duh\u016br is-sal\u0101yil\n\nSays the Zughb\u012b, Diy\u0101b, son of Gh\u0101nim,\n\n\"If the maternal uncle is good, well-chosen,\n\nThen the boy and his uncle both embellish the tribe.\n\n\"For the boy takes after his maternal uncle,\n\nAs the thoroughbred mare takes after generations of breeding.\"\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b then again returned to a sequence on maidens and how to select a good bride, and finally closed the poem with words of advice sung as an extended maww\u0101l:\n\n_Text_ 5.9 Interaction with Young Men, Part 6\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, tape 87\u2013032 (2\/26\/87)\n\n\u0101h li-ll\u012b yu\u1e63bur li-l-z\u0113n wi-h-sh\u0113n ma'a \u1e63abr\n\nil-'aql-I \u1e6dama' in-nif\u016bs zayyin\u0101\n\nwi-d\u014dq il-\u1e25ar\u012br ma'a r-ram\u0101yil\n\n\u0101h ma tuQ\u1e63ud in-nadl il-bakh\u012bl f\u012b \u1e25\u0101ga\n\nm\u0101 tuQ\u1e63ud in-nadl il-bakh\u012bl f\u012b \u1e25\u0101ja\n\nwa-l\u0101 tuQ\u1e63ud ah\u0101l\u012b il-'uq\u016bl i\u1e0d-\u1e0dal\u0101yil\n\nwa-l\u0101 tuQ\u1e63ud all\u0101 ahl il-karam f\u012b buy\u016bthum\n\ntil\u0101q\u012b 'al\u0101 wuj\u016bh in-n\u0101s i\u1e6d-\u1e6dayyib\u012bn il-'al\u0101yim\n\ny\u0101 'amm-I wa-rja' aq\u016blak il-j\u016bd wi-l-karam\n\nil-j\u016bd wi-l-karam wi-l-'aTf wi-l-a\u1e63l\n\nl\u0101 huwa bi-kutr il-ghin\u012b\n\nwa-l\u0101 bi-z\u0113nat libs il-'am\u0101yim\n\nwa-l\u0101 bi-z\u0113nat libs il-'am\u0101yim\n\ni\u1e63-\u1e63aqr law bal\u0101 r\u012bh 'a\u1e0dmatuh hud\u0101d il-'az\u0101yim\n\n\u1e63allum 'al\u0101 n-nab\u012b\n\nAh! He who endures the beautiful and the ugly both with patience!\n\nThe mind hopes for souls such as ours,\n\nAnd the touch of silk as well as sand.\n\nAh, don't go to the lowly miserly one for anything,\n\nAh, don't go to the lowly miserly one for anything,\n\nAnd don't go to people with wrongdoing in their minds.\n\nDon't go to any save people of honor in their houses,\n\nYou will find on the faces of good people signs.\n\nO paternal uncle, I will tell you again: Generosity and Honor,\n\nGenerosity, and Honor, and Compassion, and Nobility,\n\nThese do not come from great wealth,\n\nNor from the wearing of beautiful turbans,\n\nNor from the wearing of beautiful turbans.\n\nThe eagle even were he without feathers,\n\nHis very bones possess courageous determination!\n\n* Wish God's Blessings on the Prophet! *\n\nA number of the young men and nearly all of the other listeners understood many of these verses as public criticism of the young men's behavior; at several points they had begun to squirm and whisper uneasily. When this sequence was over, Biyal\u012b stopped abruptly for a break and put down his rab\u0101b (though we had just taken a break and been served tea a few minutes earlier). The young men and their guest stood up precipitously and departed, with only the curtest of farewells.\n\nThe remaining listeners, all over forty-five or so, proceeded to congratulate and applaud Biyal\u012b on his handling of the situation; then, without having drunk tea, Biyall seized his rab\u0101b and, in an atmosphere of high spirits, we began again. However, when we returned to the battle scene, Diy\u0101b was no longer in his strangely timorous mood, and the comic element had been dropped entirely. The mood in fact shifted to the opposite emotional pole, for this episode was the last of the epic as it is known in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, \"The Killing of al-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa.\" This was also the tenth and final sahra in a series of sahr\u0101t held over a two-week period during which Shaykh Biyal\u012b had sung the epic beginning to end, an event that had attracted many listeners night after night. This was the end of the epic and the death of the villain\u2014a villain, however, who had that evening been recast as the representative of a disappearing older generation, a villain struggling against his preordained demise at the hands of a younger generation whom he characterized as worthless and disappointing. I think that, after the fracas with the young men and their evident lack of respect for the s\u012bra tradition, many of us, as we listened to the death of al-Zan\u0101t\u012b, were reflecting upon the changing times; perhaps some even felt, as I did, that we were listening to the end of an era.\n\n* * *\n\n1. Transliterated Arabic text is found in the Appendix.\n\n2. A double entendre is created between two possible readings: _fa\u1e0d\u0101_ 'openlands' and fad\u0101h 'its emptiness', which are easily distinguished in speech as the first word is accented on the first syllable, the second word on the second syllable, but are rendered indistinguishable in song.\n\n3. As an introduction to some of the categories and methodologies developing in the analysis of conversational interaction, see, for example, Starkey Duncan, Jr., \"On the Structure of Speaker-Auditor Interaction during Speaking Turns\" (1974); S. Duncan, Jr., and D. W. Fiske, _Face-to-Face Interaction: Research, Methods, and Theory_ (1977); Charles Goodwin, \"Restarts, Pauses, and the Achievement of a State of Mutual Gaze at Turn-Beginning\" (1980); Michael Moerman, _Talking Culture: Ethnography and Conversation Analysis_ (1988); G. Psathas, ed., _Everyday Language_ (1979); Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and G. Jefferson, \"A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation\" (1974); and Jim Schenkein, ed., _Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction_ (1978).\n\n4. See Ferguson, \"Root-Echo Responses.\"\n\n5. _Mi h_ is a rural cheese which is placed in earthenware jars until it has gone sour or \"rotted\"; it is infamous because it is often served with worms in it. _Fas\u012b kh_ is raw, salted fish served whole which one slices open and eats from the inside, peeling the pinkish flesh away from the skin with one's teeth.\n\n6. See Ferial Ghazoul, _The Arabian Nights: A Structural Analysis_ (1980); Mia Gerhardt, _The Art of Storytelling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights_ (1963); see also T. Todorov, _Grammaire du \"D\u00e9cameron\"_ (1969).\n\n7. When I first arrived in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and asked Shaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b to sing a version of the epic from beginning to end, he omitted the tale of Badr al-Na'\u0101m, which he only performed after another poet had sung it for me. The main villains of this tale are Christians, and Shaykh Biyal\u012b did not wish to sing it for fear the anti-Christian jokes might offend me. I later discovered that the poet who first sang it for me did not know at the time that I was not Muslim. Without that slip, I might never have known about the episode's existence. As to whether there are other episodes in the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh repertory whose existence I am unaware of, I believe not, but _all\u0101hu a 'lam_ 'God only knows'!\n\n8. Transliterated Arabic text in the Appendix.\n\n9. This slaughter of the eighty Backs evokes echoes from other sections of the epic: the capture of the eighty maidens of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l by \u1e24an\u1e0dal the 'Uqayl\u012b; the slaughter of the seventy (somtimes eighty) descendants of the Prophet while they were at prayer, by this same Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa in an earlier episode of the epic. In addition, Badr 'Full Moon' is a common epithet of the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad.\n\n## CONCLUSION\n\n## Epic Text and Context\n\nRichard Martin, in his analysis of the act of speaking within the _Iliad,_ says:\n\nMy central conclusion is that the _Iliad_ takes shape as a poetic composition in precisely the same \"speaking culture\" that we see foregrounded in the stylized words of the poem's heroic speakers, especially those speeches designated as _muthos_ , a word I redefine as \"authoritative speech-act.\" The poet and hero are both \"performers\" in a traditional medium. The genre of _muthos_ composing requires that its practitioners improve on previous performances and surpass them, by artfully manipulating traditional material in new combinations. In other words, within the speeches of the poem, we see that it is traditional to be spontaneous: no hero ever merely repeats; each recomposes the traditional text he performs, be it a boast, threat, command or story, in order to project his individual personality in the most convincing manner. I suggest that the \"voice\" of the poet is the product of the same traditional performance technique.1\n\nIn the _S\u012brat Bam Hil\u0101l_ epic-singing tradition, no specific term such as _muthos_ guides us to such an analysis, and the specific features of muthos composing are not those of \"authoritative speech-acts\" within the Arabic tradition. Yet our conclusions are remarkably similar. The clues in our analysis of Arabic oral epic performances have been rather a host of parallel frames, markers, and narrative devices which constantly correlate and negotiate the relationship between poets and heroes, often through the intermediary presence of a patron. The interpretation of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performances which we have built up through extended description of the tradition as it is found within a single village demonstrates the existence of a relationship, significantly similar to what Martin has proposed, between the speech of heroes within the epic and the speech of epic poets. Within the Hil\u0101l\u012b tradition, however, we have the additional opportunity of observing the social reality of the _S\u012brat Bau\u012b Hil\u0101l_ epic singers and thence drawing further conclusions. As we have seen, the social reality of the al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh poets involves a distinctly negative position for the epic singer within the greater social hierarchy; in marked contrast to the poet's marginalized status in village society, however, are the moments of centrality, power, and \"voice\" he achieves in epic performance. This disjunctive persona has produced not only a fascinating process of deep self-identification with the epic tradition on the part of the poets, but has clearly, over generations, shaped and indeed constituted many aspects of the content of the epic itself\u2014an epic tradition, as I have termed it, of heroic poets and poetic heroes.\n\nThe poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, however, possess an articulated counteridentity which they maintain in opposition to the negative stereotype of the Gypsy rab\u0101b-poet held by the larger society. This subversive image of the poet as the eloquent, sharp-witted, and gracious \"ur-Arab\" is not, however, projected outward as a public expression of identity; it is an in-group ideal. In formulating this ideal the poets redeploy to their own ends many of the key features of the negative \"Gypsy-poet\" image: the suspect quality of the poet's glibness and his social criticisms in poetic performance become the most prized characteristics of the _fa\u1e63\u012b\u1e25_ (eloquent) \"Arab\"; the easy commingling of men and women in the poets' community becomes not the mark of \"loose\" morals but rather of ancient Arab custom and independence; the rab\u0101b which signifies the \"beggar-poets\" to the larger society (it is the decisive marker of the professional poet in contrast to the nonprofessional reciter of Hil\u0101l\u012b tales) becomes instead the respected tool of the epic-poet profession, one wielded proudly even by the famous heroes and warriors of old. The meeting point of the derogatory stereotype and this counteridentity is situated in the act of epic performance.\n\nOne distinctive narrative structure which reflects this meeting point involves the duplication of the epic performance within the epic: the creation of a complete parallel event of poet, patron, and participants. Here the poets of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh habitually address issues of concern to them and to their audiences, issues at times as large as the status of poets in the world or the recent political problems in the village, at times as innocuous as the need for another round of tea or a few cigarettes for the guests. In their odes, and even more so in their prose asides to listeners, the poets deploy the ambiguity of the duplicated voice to comment upon and manipulate their own performance events.\n\nThe transition from the realm of ordinary talk to that of epic discourse is accomplished in performance through a gradated process involving not only the gradual accrual of formal markings (rhyme, musical accompaniment, measured rhythm, regular verse length, and song) but the narrative necessity of intense emotional motivation on the part of the epic character. Moreover, each movement into the world of the epic echoes the frames of the sahra performance event as a whole\u2014instrumental introduction, mad\u00efh, maww\u00e0l, spoken rhymed-prose preamble, blessings upon the Prophet, and finally, full arrival into the sira; the performance replicates itself over and over again in miniature. As a \"way of speaking,\" the performances of heroes and of poets are constantly equated through the use of parallel frames and markers in an ultimately self-referential system.\n\nThe epic singers of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh perform in a number of different contexts, each of which entails a different relationship between the performer, the patron of the event, other participants, and the content of the performance. Economic exigencies affect style, tone, and manner of performance; the setting is also a key to what degree of flexibility the poet displays toward the criticisms and comments of other participants. Villagers display overt antagonism to performances that they label \"begging\" or \"vagrancy\"; these are, however, precisely the performances that are fully under the control of the poet, performances where no patron is present and which may be initiated by the poet himself. The issue of control over the performances, and by extension over the tradition as a whole, appears to underlie villagers' attitudes in this domain. Within the seemingly paradoxical arrangement of having a marginal social group responsible for the performance of a tradition deemed of historical relevance and value to the whole community, the issue of when and for whom the poets are to speak is a contested one.\n\nThe epic sahra, a single context among many, is a social event that involves many different types of performance by both poet and other participants. Some forms of performance are conceptualized as such and formally labeled as genres; others are perceived by participants as informal activities unworthy of notice or of being recorded; all, however, act as conduits for social interaction within the event. Different forms of verbal art engage or disengage the participants in different ways, genres with varying degrees of \"openness\" or \"closedness.\" The sira is presented as an independent story world, but one which audience members expect the poet to modulate in performance so as to comment upon the present; the \u1e25itat balad\u012b on the other hand is created out of the very \"stuff' of the present, using only the frame and some motifs of more independent material.\n\nQuite often, threads of thought or sequences of associations develop out of the epic singing and the accompanying (often argumentative) evaluations of the performance: a wolf in the tale provokes the tale of a wolf, and from there we enter a discussion of wolves or other wild animals, then on to a debate about the personality of the epic character Diy\u0101b 'Wolves'; later the poet picks up on our comments and returns them to us in narrative allusions within the epic.\n\nTransformations, additions, and commentaries such as we examined in the last two chapters operate continually within _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ performances. Dramatic catalytic moments of interaction, however, occur less frequently\u2014a few times an evening at most. These moments, though, are singled out by poets and audience members as particularly memorable, and they are retold and recalled far longer than any other aspect of the performance. I observed many times that once a performance had ended, listeners would discuss and comment upon many aspects of what they had just heard: the story, the characters, the poet's voice, his playing, his jokes, and so forth. Within a few hours, however, and certainly within a day or two, such commentaries had faded and participants no longer retained the aesthetic criticisms they had offered earlier. Instead, they remembered and discussed the social interaction within the performance, that is, the interplay that had taken place between the poet and the audience, or among members of the audience, especially those sparked by, or reflected in, the performed \"text.\"2 If they could recite any of the poetry they had heard that night, it was most often the improvised asides and jokes, not passages from the epic! A single quatrain of improvised poetry sung in the village by Sayyid Haww\u00e2s nearly twenty years earlier was still in circulation in caf\u00e9 conversations during my stay; only a fraction of those who quoted the lines could remember even which episode the poet had been singing on that occasion. Any single telling of a portion of the epic melted into previous tellings; the social events of a performance stood out as the individualizing, and thus the discussable, factors.\n\nIn al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh one attends a performance of epic first of all to participate in and share a social experience and only secondarily to attend to the \"text.\" In essence, the social action within the event is, in this indigenous \"reading,\" the _text;_ the epic performance is but one of many possible contexts or backgrounds for the enactment and interaction of characters and personalities from daily life in the village. The sahra is a stage for social interaction; though epic singing may form the focus of an evening's activities, the accompanying discussions, evaluations, arguments, and storytelling constitute, in a very real sense, the heart of the event. Here is a reading, then, in which the general terms of my research were reversed: the audience's text was my context, their context my text. In lengthy discussions, their \"oral literary criticism\" constantly slipped away from my own projected focus on the epic poem, to a viewpoint from which the location of the epic as the absolute center of the social \"context\" could no longer be maintained. As a researcher interested in the processes of performance, I could well locate my \"text\" within the boundaries of the epic poem, and for historical and literary purposes might continue to do so; were I, however, concerned also to understand how that \"text\" signifies, how it is received by its patrons and audiences as meaningful, I should also have to reverse my analysis and explore the performance of epic poetry as a \"context,\" allowing for social meanings not \"present\" within the epic. The act of locating and defining \"text,\" choosing a focus, thus becomes the crucial analytic act, yet the more we press the boundaries, the more fluid they appear to become.\n\nIn seeking reactions to and interpretations of the epic, I found again and again that I was listening to evaluations not of an individual performance or event, but of larger social patterns and of the epic as a symbolic catalyst. To a great extent, evaluations of the epic were only extensions of the speaker's position vis-\u00e0-vis the social forces he or she saw the epic as representing. Only an outsider could conceive of asking for a reaction to a performance of _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ without understanding that the response would in fact index a set of attitudes toward social values relating to folk Islamic practice, institutional Islam, and the current revisionist movements as well as to age groups, literacy, education levels, and a host of other conflicted social issues. To understand the accrual of significance of a specific episode, or of the larger tradition, to participants, would be to understand a lengthy and complex process of lamination, layer upon layer of tales retold.\n\n_S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ is a vast narrative tradition. It is found in many different regions of the Arab world in oral tradition and is known in its written forms even in those areas where an oral tradition does not exist or has died out. At any one site, the story of the Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l is likely to exist simultaneously in many different forms. In the region of al-Bak\u0101-t\u016bsh itself, as I have pointed out, there are men and women who tell stories of Ab\u016b Zayd, Diy\u0101b, and al-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa as folktales; others in the vicinity can narrate in prose with some verse passages (recited, not sung); others read cheap \"yellow-book\" versions, and a handful even recite publicly from these chapbook editions; and finally, of course, there are the hereditary, professional epic-singers whom we have examined in some detail.\n\nThe epic has also become a potent symbol in modern Arabic (written) literature, yet it is deployed as a symbol for many different ideas. In Tayeb Salih's _The Light of the House_ , Ab\u016b Zayd is cited as a traditional representative of manhood and virility; in Niz\u0101r al-Qabb\u0101n\u012b's _Bread, Hashish and Moon_ , he lingers in the reader's mind as the closing image of the poem, a symbol of anachronistic heroism and outdated codes of honor and chivalry; in Naguib Mahfouz's _Midaq Alley,_ the rab\u0101b poet and his epic tales are a sign of an older order displaced by modernity as he is pushed out of the caf\u00e9 and replaced by a radio in one of the opening scenes of the novel. In Mahfouz's later work, _Children of Gebelawi,_ an allegorical novel based upon the lives of the Prophets Adam, Moses, Jesus, and Muammad, the author uses the rab\u0101b-poet as the thread of continuity and tradition who reappears in each generation.\n\nIn Sahar Khalifeh's poignant but angry novel _Wild Thorns_ , about life in the Occupied West Bank of Palestine, the wounded Abu Sabir begs someone to tell him an Ab\u016b Zayd story to lift his spirits as he faces the possibility of bleeding to death, but no one present can remember one; sitting at home after having lost his fingers and his livelihood, he again asks for an Ab\u016b Zayd story, but his friends cannot remember any. Finally, when Usama, recently returned from several years abroad, refuses to listen to the West Bankers' explanations of their precarious coexistence with the Israeli state, Abu Sabir concludes that Usama cannot bear to hear the truth, and bitterly adds that Usama only wants to hear nice Ab\u016b Zayd stories.\n\nIn Gamal al-Ghitani's brooding and foreboding novel about the destructive effects of absolute power, _Al-Zeini Barakat,_ the rab\u0101b-poets are portrayed as an extension of the Internal Security's propaganda machine; the leader of the poets' guild secretly reports to the head spy for orders about which stories to sing and how to portray the heroes\u2014the voice of authoritarianism couched as tradition.\n\nOur path has led from a description of the village of al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh and of the community of poets within al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh to an exploration of how those social realities occasion and help constitute the epic performance tradition. The very content of the epic reflects generations of negotiations of social status, patronage, the role of poet in the world, and images of manhood, womanhood, and honor as expressed in the portrayal of heroes and heroines, villains and saints. Finally, the examining the interactive activity of performance has led us back outward to the listeners, and to the overarching social stances and views with which they approach, evaluate, patronize, and participate in the _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l_ tradition.\n\n* * *\n\n1. Richard P. Martin, _The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the \"Iliad\"_ (1989), xiv.\n\n2. This example of aesthetic criticism fading after a brief period of time while socially based recollections remain intact should cause us to reexamine Richard Bauman's claims, using historical reconstruction of performances that had taken place _three decades_ earlier, that at the La Have Island general store, aesthetic criticism of storytelling did not exist, but only a general enjoyment of the social atmosphere. Bauman, \"The La Have Island General Store: Sociability and Verbal Art in a Nova Scotia Community\" (1972).\n\n## APPENDIX\n\n## Texts in Transliteration\n\n### Chapter 2. Poets Inside and Outside the Epic\n\nText 2.1\n\nShaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd, tape 87\u2013115\/6 (6\/13\/87)\n\nlaff\u0113t bil\u0101d is-sind-I wi-l-hind-I wi-l-yaman\n\nru\u1e25tan bil\u0101dan tirkab il-afy\u0101l\n\nm\u0101 laq\u0113t-I afras mi-z-zan\u0101t\u012b bi-himmatuh\n\nwa-la jwad min z\u0113d il-'aj\u0101j-I rij\u0101l\n\nwa-la jwad min haz\u0101 wa-haz\u0101 ill\u0101 nab\u012byana\n\nil-h\u0101shim\u012b li-l-mu'g\u016bz\u012bn-I ms\u0101l\n\nText 2.2\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, tape 87\u2013012\/12 (2\/14\/87)\n\nfa-q\u0101l luh \u00aby\u0101 h\u0101'ir jam\u012bl\u00bb\n\nq'\u0101l luh \u00abna'am y\u0101 b\u016b 'al\u012b\u00bb\n\nq\u0101l luh \u00abdurt 'al\u0101 n\u0101s ma'd\u016bda, wa-ak\u0101bir 'arab mans\u016bba\u2014 \u1e25addih 'a\u1e6d\u0101k il-'a\u1e6d\u0101 wi-jabarak qadd\u012b an\u0101 wi-'arab\u012b?\u00bb\n\nih-h\u0101'ir ad\u016bb. ih-h\u0101'ir ad\u016bb, m\u0101 kull-I h\u0101'ir yimsik ir-rab\u0101ba yibq'\u0101 ad\u016bb. l\u0113h, a\u1e63luh yuq'ud ma'a n\u0101s \u1e6dayyib\u012bn. li'inn-I ih-h\u0101'ir m\u0101 yi\u1e25\u016bzih-I qillit il-adab abadan. biyimh\u012b 'al\u0101 r-rab\u0101ba. . . . an\u0101 m\u0101 bamgadh-I fi h-h'ara li'nn-I an\u0101 h\u0101'ir! da a\u1e63l ir-riw\u0101y\u0101t bitq\u016bl kida! ih-h\u0101'ir ad\u016bb. wi-lawl\u0101 ad\u016bb, m\u0101 k\u0101nh-I yimsik ir-rab\u0101ba wi-yuq'ud wus\u1e6d n\u0101s \u1e6dayyib\u012bn. iz-zayy yibq'\u0101 h\u0101'ir il-mul\u016bk wi-l-'arab wi-yibq'\u0101 qal\u012bl il-adab?! yibq'\u0101 mu'addab. wi-l-qa'da bar\u1e0du yisma' ih-h\u0101'ir, yibq'\u0101 bar\u1e0du f\u012b gh\u0101yit il-i\u1e25tir\u0101m. fa-inn\u012b. . . .\n\nba\u1e63\u1e63-I-luh \u1e25asan kida wi-q\u0101l luh, \u00aby\u0101 h\u0101'ir jam\u012bl\u00bb\n\nq\u0101l luh \u00abna'am\u00bb\n\nq\u0101l luh \u00abinta durt 'al\u0101 n\u0101s ma'd\u016bda, wa-ak\u0101bir 'arab mans\u016bba\u2014\u1e25addih 'a\u1e6d\u0101k 'a\u1e6d\u0101 wi-jabarak qadd\u012b an\u0101 wi-'arab\u012b?\u00bb\n\nba\u1e63\u1e63-I-luh ih-h\u0101'ir jam\u012bl.\n\ni\u1e25na quln\u0101 ih-h\u0101'ir ad\u016bb, ya'n\u012b mu'addab.\n\nq\u0101l luh \u00aby\u0101 b\u016b 'al\u012b, inta ka-ba\u1e25r in-n\u012bl, wi-l-aj\u0101w\u012bd ill\u012b i\u1e25na binliff-I 'al\u0113hum il-'arab, ka-bu\u1e25\u016br in-n\u012bl. fa-l-ba\u1e25r, f\u012bh miy\u0101 wa-zal\u0101l, fa-l-ba\u1e25r m\u0101 yitfa\u1e0d\u1e0dalh 'an ba'\u1e0d.\n\nyiqa\u1e63\u1e63arh wi-yiskut \u1e25asan baq\u0101 . . . ih-h\u0101'ir 'a\u1e6d\u0101h ij\u0101ba \u1e25ilwa ma'a l-'aql ik-kwayyis.\n\nText 2.3\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, tape 87\u2013009\/1 (2\/13\/87)\n\n'andak y\u0101 \u1e25an\u1e0dal taman\u012bn \u1e63abiyya 1\n\nwi-kull-I \u1e63abiyya abhar min q'amar ha'b\u0101n\n\ny\u0101 ra'sah\u0101 ras il-yam\u0101ma \u1e63ughayyara 2\n\nwi-h-ha'r s\u0101bil 'al\u0101 l-Qum\u1e63\u0101n\n\nwi-l-idir\u0101' zayy is-suy\u016bf il-mifa\u1e0d\u1e0da\u1e0da 3\n\nwi-f\u012b yad-I '\u0101yid n\u0101zil il-m\u012bd\u0101n\n\nwi-l-khadd \u1e6dabaq' il-ward gall al-l\u0101z\u012b \u1e63ana' 4\n\n\u1e63ana'it muhaymin w\u0101\u1e25idan dayy\u0101n\n\nkha\u1e6darum 'al\u0101 il-ba\u1e25r wi-zaqzaq is-samak 5\n\nin h\u0101fihum ih-h\u0113kh \u1e6d\u0101rit wil\u0101ytuh\n\nin h\u0101fhum il-'\u0101lim nas\u0101 l-Qur'\u0101n\n\nin h\u0101fhum il-qamm\u0101h ('al\u0113hi il-'awa\u1e0d!) 6\n\nyi\u1e25sib i\u1e63-\u1e63\u016bf dabal\u0101n\n\nq'\u0101'id\u012bn f\u012b d\u012bw\u0101n il-'izz y\u0101 malik \u1e25an\u1e0dal 7\n\nall\u0101h yi'\u012bnak d\u012bw\u0101n mushayyid d\u012bw\u0101n muhayyid\n\ny\u0101 \u1e25a\u1e0drit il-sul[\u1e6d\u0101n] . . . 'id\u0101d h\u0101yil q'aw[\u012b]\n\nf\u012bh q'ulal bann\u016br \u1e25ilwa li-l-'a\u1e6dh\u0101n 8\n\n\u1e25anafiyy\u0101t fi\u1e0d\u1e0da, \u1e25anafiyy\u0101t fi\u1e0d\u1e0da\n\ntinazzil nahr-I zal\u0101l\n\nq'\u0101'id\u012bn f\u012b d\u012bw\u0101nak yall\u0101h yi\u1e63li\u1e25 \u1e25\u0101lak 9\n\n\u1e25an\u1e0dal y\u0101 sul\u1e6d\u0101n\n\nna\u1e93ar il-malik \u1e25an\u1e0dal l-ab\u016b z\u0113d wi-q'\u0101l luh 10\n\nahlan wi-sahlan y\u0101 h\u0101'ir il-'urb\u0101n\n\nl\u012bk 'andin\u0101 fi\u1e0d\u1e0da l\u012bk 'andin\u0101 dahab 11\n\nl\u012bk 'andin\u0101 kh\u0113l wayya gim\u0101l\n\nil-ar\u1e0d ar\u1e0dak y\u0101 h\u0101'ir il-'arab 12\n\nil-ar\u1e0d ar\u1e0dak wi-l-bil\u0101d d\u012b bl\u0101dak\n\nwi-\u1e25na y\u0101 s\u012bd wi-l\u012bk 'ab\u012bd khudd\u0101m\n\nSpoken:\n\nq\u0101l ab\u016b z\u0113d muthakkir\u012bn y\u0101 malik \u1e25an\u1e0dal 13\n\ntidd\u012bn\u012b fa\u1e0d\u1e0da li-m\u012bn aw dahab li-m\u012bn\n\nSung:\n\n'a\u1e6d\u0101y\u0101 min d\u014dl \u1e63abiyya aw\u1e63\u0101fh\u0101 raw\u1e25iyya 14\n\ntikhdim jaddak ih-h\u0101'ir r\u0101gil kib\u012br ba\u1e6dl\u0101n\n\nradda lahu \u1e25an\u1e0dal l-ab\u016b z\u0113d wi-q'\u0101l luh 15\n\nkhud rayya bint ab\u016b z\u0113d y\u0101 h\u0101'ir il-'arab\n\nSpoken aside:\n\n[q'uln\u0101 ab\u016b z\u0113d itjawwiz but\u0113ma ukht-I diy\u0101b, f\u014dq 'alya iz-zi\u1e25l\u0101niyya ill\u012b k\u0101nit min qad\u012bm khallif minh\u0101 tal\u0101ta \u1e63uby\u0101n wa-unsa: khallif \u1e63abra, wi-mikh\u0113mar, wi-'akrama, wi-rayya]\n\nSung:\n\nitfa\u1e0d\u1e0dal rayya bint ab\u016b z\u0113d minn\u012b qab\u0101lak 16\n\nwi-ti'\u012bh ma'\u0101k y\u0101 'am\u012br ma\u1e0d\u0101 l-azm\u0101n\n\nkhud rayya bint ab\u016b z\u0113d minn\u012b qab\u0101lak 17\n\nwi-ti'\u012bh ma'\u0101k y\u0101 'am\u012br wall\u0101h ma\u1e0d\u0101 l-azm\u0101n\n\ny\u0101 sal\u0101m lamm\u0101 t\u0101khud rayya y\u0101 h\u0101'ir il-'arab 18\n\nyir\u016b\u1e25 ih-h\u0113b wi-l-kibar tirja' hubb\u0101n zayy zam\u0101n\n\nab\u016b z\u0113d 'a\u1e6d\u0101 r-rim\u016bz li-rayya itqaddimit ... 19\n\n\u1e25an\u1e0dal r\u0101\u1e25 masak rayya min dir\u0101'\u0113h\u0101 20\n\nwi-q'\u0101l khud d\u012b l\u012bk y\u0101 h\u0101'ir il-'arab\n\nwi-t'\u012bsh mac\u0101k y\u0101 'am\u012br bi-kull-I '\u0101m\u0101n 21\n\nwi-t'\u012bh ma'\u0101k y\u0101 'am\u012br wall\u0101h bi-kull-I 'am\u0101n\n\nrayya bint ab\u016b z\u0113d j\u0101t sabbit il-\u1e25\u0113la 22\n\nq'\u0101lit luh ukhra\u1e63 y\u0101 gab\u0101n\n\nl\u0101 kunt-I wal\u0101 k\u0101n y\u0101 \u1e25an\u1e0dal y\u0101 khaww\u0101n\n\nd\u0101 n\u0101 bint ab\u016b z\u0113d h\u0113kh il-'arab 23\n\nbint-I h\u0113kh il-'arab ab\u016b z\u0113d\n\ntidd\u012bn\u012b li-h\u0101'ir bi-r-rab\u0101ba yiliff 'a l-'urb\u0101n?\n\nd\u0101 'an\u0101 bint ab\u016b z\u0113d h\u0113kh il-'arab 24\n\nab\u016b l-bu\u1e6d\u016bla min zam\u0101n\n\nya'lam bi-z\u0101lik ab\u016by\u0101 ab\u016b z\u0113d il-hil\u0101l\u012b 25\n\nla-yikhall\u012b dammak 'a l-ar\u1e0d \u1e6d\u016bf\u0101n\n\n### Chapter 4. The Interplay of Genres\n\nText 4.12. Example of \u1e24itat Balad\u012b\n\nShaykh 'Abd al-Wahh\u0101b Gh\u0101z\u012b, tape 87\u2013044 (3\/15\/87)\n\nm\u012bn maq\u1e63uduh l-janna yi\u1e63all\u012b 'al\u0101 n-nab\u012b\n\nnab\u012b 'arab\u012b luh \u1e25aram masb\u016bt\n\nwi-r-rizq min 'and ill\u0101h bikh\u016bt wi-bikh\u016bt\n\nwa-f\u012bh man ya'\u1e6d\u012bh 2\n\naywa j\u016bda ma'a karam\n\nwa-f\u012bh m\u012bn yu'\u1e6d\u012bh bukhl-I lamm\u0101 yim\u016bt\n\nwa-f\u012bh m\u012bn yu'\u1e6d\u012bh jan\u0101yin muzaghrafa 3\n\nwi-f\u012bh\u0101 manje wi-f\u012bh\u0101 kummitre\n\nf\u012bh\u0101 '\u0113nab f\u012bh\u0101 bala\u1e25\n\nf\u012bh\u0101 rumm\u0101n faw\u0101kih y\u0101 kh\u016by\u0101 'a\u1e93\u012bma\n\nir-rizq min 'ind-I rabbun\u0101 bikh\u016bt wi-bikh\u016bt\n\nwi-f\u012bh m\u012bn yu'\u1e6d\u012bhi hagara san\u1e6d-I 4\n\nwall\u0101h y\u0101 '\u0113n\u012b aw dakar t\u016bt\n\nwa-f\u012bhi m\u012bn yu'\u1e6d\u012bhi quf\u1e6d\u0101n wi-j\u016bkha 5\n\nwa-f\u012bh m\u012bn yu'\u1e6d\u012bh khalaq za'b\u016b\u1e6d\n\nwa-f\u012bhi m\u012bn yu'\u1e6d\u012bh walad 6\n\nwi-z\u0101k\u012b mu'addab walad mitrabb\u012b\n\nt\u012bg\u012b s\u012brt il-walad yir\u1e0d\u0101 ab\u016bh f\u012b j-jalsa\n\ny\u0101 kh\u016by\u0101 raqabtuh \u1e6daw\u012bla ay q\u0101'id mabs\u016b\u1e6d\n\n\u0101d\u012b l-walad \u1e6d\u0101li' li-kh\u0101luh 7\n\nkh\u0101l il-walad r\u0101gil min u\u1e63\u016bl il-buy\u016bt\n\nwa-f\u012bh m\u012bn yu'\u1e6d\u012bh walad wi-kh\u0101yib wi-h\u0101yif 8\n\naywa y\u0101 '\u0113n\u012b qab\u012b\u1e25 harm\u016b\u1e6d\n\nyig\u012bb li-ab\u016bh il-mah\u0101kil wi-l-jar\u0101yir 9\n\nwi-d-dak\u0101k\u012bn wi-l-qah\u0101w\u012b wi-l-gh\u0113\u1e6d\u0101n\n\nwi-l-\u014dt\u014db\u012bs\u0101t wi-l-qa\u1e6dr ayy wi-kull-I buy\u016bt\n\n'alah\u0101n ab\u016bhu r\u0101gil masm\u016b' wi-\u1e6dayyib 10\n\nyir\u016b\u1e25\u016b yirudd\u016b 'al\u0101 ab\u016bh f\u012b fil\u016bs wi-mi'\u0101d\u0101t\n\ny\u0101 kh\u016by\u0101 walad \u1e6d\u0101li' h\u0101yif li-kh\u0101luh\n\na\u1e63l-I kh\u0101luh r\u0101jil half\u016bt\n\nwa-f\u012bh m\u012bn yu'\u1e6d\u012bh jaww\u0101za \u1e25as\u012bna jam\u012bla 11\n\n\u1e25ilwa qaw\u012b y\u0101 kh\u016by\u0101 jam\u012bla \u1e25as\u012bna\n\na\u1e63\u012bla min u\u1e63\u016bl il-buy\u016bt\n\nwi-l-wajh-I abya\u1e0d w-il-khadd-I yilma' 12\n\nyihbah il-y\u0101Q\u016bt\n\n'anduh \u1e0d\u016by\u016bf m\u0101yil luh 13\n\nkull-I i\u1e6d-\u1e6dalab\u0101t t\u012bj\u012b li-\u1e0d-\u1e0duy\u016bf wi-zawjih\u0101 q\u0101'id\n\nmin d\u016bn m\u0101 yuh'ur wal\u0101 ya'lim\n\nwa-l\u0101 yiq\u016bl y\u0101 bint\u012b h\u0101t\u012b wal\u0101 w-idd\u012b\n\ni\u1e6d-\u1e6dalab\u0101t t\u012bj\u012b li-\u1e0d-\u1e0duy\u016bf\n\nwi-zawjih\u0101 q\u0101'id wayy\u0101 \u1e0d-\u1e0duy\u016bf mabs\u016b\u1e6d\n\n\u1e25adqiy\u0101t wa-ruzziy\u0101t 14\n\nwa\u1e25da a\u1e63\u012bla jam\u012bla \u1e25ilwa qaw\u012b\n\nmin u\u1e63\u016bl il-buy\u016bt zawjih\u0101 q\u0101'id ma'a \u1e0d-\u1e0duy\u016bf mabs\u016b\u1e6d\n\nyin\u0101d\u012b '\u0101 \u1e6d-\u1e6dalab\u2014na'am wi-\u1e25\u0101\u1e0dir 15\n\nna'am wi-\u1e25\u0101\u1e0dir na'am wi-\u1e25\u0101\u1e0dir\n\nwi-s-sinn-I yi\u1e0d\u1e25ak min wajh\u0101 abya\u1e0d yihbah il-y\u0101Q\u016bt\n\nzawjih\u0101 in '\u0101h mi'h\u0101 tam\u0101n\u012bn sana tisa'\u012bn sana 16\n\nkammil il-miya\n\n(wi-l-a'm\u0101r bi-yad ill\u0101h)\n\nh\u0101yi'\u012bh wi-yim\u016bt f\u012b far\u1e25-I baq'\u0101 mabs\u016b\u1e6d\n\nwa-f\u012bh m\u012bn yu'\u1e6d\u012bh jaww\u0101za y\u0101 kh\u016by\u0101 17\n\nrabbun\u0101 l\u0101 yikassibh\u0101 wa-l\u0101 yikassib ill\u012b g\u0101b\u016bh\u0101\n\nwi-ll\u012b khallif\u016bh\u0101 wi-ll\u012b h\u0101r\u016b bih\u0101\n\njaww\u0101za baq\u0101 il-y\u014dm wi-balwa musayya\u1e25a\n\n'aw\u012bla bakh\u012bla 'aw\u012bla bakh\u012bla\n\nmin a'wal buy\u016bt lih\u0101 l-z\u014dr tihbih il-qarm\u016b\u1e6d\n\nall\u0101hu akbar all\u0101hu akbar 18\n\namm\u0101 \u1e0d-\u1e0d\u0113f yir\u016b\u1e25 yam-I d\u0101rhum\n\ntiq\u016bm y\u0101 kh\u016by\u0101 sa\u1e25iba n-nabb\u016bt\n\nan\u0101 j\u0101yy li-'amm-I ful\u0101n 19\n\ntiq\u016bl 'and id-dakt\u014dr y\u0101 akh\n\nbiyim\u016bt biyim\u016bt biyim\u016bt biyim\u016bt\n\nd\u0101-n\u0101 s\u0101yil 'al\u0113h wa-n\u0101 j\u0101yy 'al\u0101 s-salam\u014dniyya 20\n\nkid\u0101 mi h-harq aw min 'al\u0101 l-miq\u0101wila min ba\u1e25r\u012b\n\nmin sikka il-ma\u1e25a\u1e6d\u1e6da bit\u0101'n\u0101 il-qa\u1e6dr\n\nd\u0101 sana \u1e25ilwa qaw\u012b\n\nwi-l-qu\u1e6dn-I j\u0101wib itn\u0101hir qin\u1e6d\u0101r is-sana\n\nd\u012b f\u012b t-ta'm\u012bn\u0101t wa-f\u012b l-i\u1e63l\u0101\u1e25\n\nwi-f\u012b l-mull\u0101k d\u0101 bi-tis'a wi-nu\u1e63\u1e63-I aw 'ahara kid\u0101\n\nwi-l-ittim\u0101n wi-z-zir\u0101'a \u1e25ilwa wi-sadd\u016b l-jama'iyya\n\nwa-baq\u0113t mabs\u016b\u1e6d\n\ny\u0101r\u0113t y\u0101 b\u016byy qabl-I m\u0101 tij\u012b bi-khamsa daq\u0101yiq 21\n\nil-'arabiyya j\u0101'at khaduh h\u0101yim\u016bt h\u0101yim\u016bt\n\ns\u0101yil 'al\u0113h wa-n\u0101 j\u0101yy 22\n\nmin yam il-faz\u0101'iya 'a l-gharb-I kid\u0101\n\nkafr is-sira\u1e25na 'ind ab\u016b \u1e63ub\u1e25 'amm il-\u1e25\u0101jj mu\u1e25ammad\n\nr\u0101gil am\u012br ahl il-karam il-karam mabs\u016b\u1e6d\n\ns\u0101'il 'al\u0113h 'ind mad mu\u1e63\u1e6daf\u0101 r\u0101gil \u1e6dayyib 23\n\nwi-l-\u1e25\u0101jj k\u0101mil ay\u1e0dan\n\n'amm\u012b f\u016bl\u0101n q\u0101l\u016b d\u0101 s-sana \u1e25ilwa qaw\u012b\n\nil-mara tiq\u016bl biyim\u016bt biyim\u016bt\n\ny\u0101r\u0113t y\u0101r\u0113t y\u0101 kh\u016by\u0101 biyim\u016bt\n\nm\u0101 hiya bint-I bukhal\u0101!\n\nir-r\u0101gil q\u0101'id f\u012b l-mandara\n\nzayy bit\u0101'it a\u1e25mad bakh\u0101t\u012b\n\nill\u012b i\u1e25n\u0101 \u1e25\u0101dritn\u0101 j\u0101lis\u012bn f\u012bh\u0101\n\nl-l\u0113la d\u012b li-jam' sa'\u012bd\n\nin sh\u0101' all\u0101h jam'\u012bn kh\u0113r\n\nbi-\u1e63-\u1e63al\u0101 'al\u0101 n-nab\u012b mu\u1e25ammad\n\nn\u016br in-nab\u012b ayy mil\u0101 t-tab\u016bt\n\nill\u012b yikh\u0101f 'al\u0101 sum'ituh yi\u1e6dla' mi l-b\u0101b il-qibl\u012b 24\n\nmin ij-jiha ih-harqiyya ill\u012b yarn il-mahr\u016b' da\n\nwi-yitlaff-I wi-yiq\u0101bil i\u1e0d-\u1e0diy\u016bf\n\ny\u0101 mar\u1e25aba alf-I maly\u014dn\u012b mar\u1e25aban y\u0101 mar\u1e25aba\n\nitfa\u1e0d\u1e0dalum ta'\u0101l\u016b ta'\u0101l\u016b\n\nitfa\u1e0d\u1e0dalum nafa\u1e0d ik-kanab wi-s-saf \u012bnj\u012b wi-mukhadd\u0101t\n\nwi-takk\u0101y\u0101t wi-layyin\u0101t\n\nil-\u1e25ik\u0101ya il-\u1e25amdu li-ll\u0101h\n\nbaqat \u1e25ilwa f\u012b kull id-duny\u0101\n\nsaf\u012bnj\u012b y\u0101m\u0101 tak\u0101y\u0101t y\u0101m\u0101 wi-mab\u0101n\u012b \u1e25ilwa\n\n\u0101khir ri\u1e0d\u0101 l-\u1e25amdu li-ll\u0101h\n\nq\u0101l il-\u1e25amdu li-ll\u0101h\n\nbaq\u0101 aghn\u0101 in-n\u0101s ill\u012b yi'\u012bh mabs\u016b\u1e6d\n\nwi-yuq'ud yi\u1e25ayyihum 25\n\nwi-yiruhsh 'al\u0113hum hwayyit sag\u0101yir\n\nwi-hwayyit mahr\u016bbiy\u0101t wi-hwayyit \u1e25al\u0101wiy\u0101t\n\nwi-ba'd\u0113n lamm\u0101 yi\u1e25t\u0101d il-manh\u016bba il-hal\u012bba\n\nbint il-ma\u1e63\u0101yib d\u012b tiq\u016bl \u0113h:\n\ny\u0101 d\u0101 l-'ad\u0101 y\u0101 d\u0101 l-'ad\u0101\n\n'\u0101wiz \u0113h?! luqma li-\u1e0d-\u1e0duy\u016bf d\u014dl yak\u016blum\n\nbaq\u0101 lhum s\u0101'it\u0113n q\u0101'id\u012bn 'andin\u0101\n\nan\u0101 kunt-I h\u0101'\u012bd il-kahf in-nih\u0101rda\n\namm\u0101 lamm\u0101 huftuhum min il-b\u0101b ih-harq\u012b\n\nan\u0101 ru\u1e25t-I bi-sur'a bar\u1e0du biyi'\u0101min 'al\u0101 kal\u0101mh\u0101\n\nkal\u0101m il-manh\u016bba tiq\u016bl \u0113h:\n\nan\u0101 'ind\u012b 'iy\u0101dit ik-kahf ya'n\u012b biyi'\u0101min 'al\u0101\n\nkal\u0101mh\u0101 bar\u1e0du 'alah\u0101n yi'\u012bh mabs\u016b\u1e6d\n\ni\u1e25n\u0101 wil\u0101dhum y\u0101 kh\u016by\u0101 \u0101h minnuh 26\n\n'ind\u012b 'iy\u0101d kahf in-nih\u0101rda\n\nlakin lamm\u0101 h\u016bft i\u1e0d-\u1e0duy\u016bf \u0101hum\n\ni\u1e63-\u1e63i\u1e25\u1e25a baqat \u1e25ilwa il-\u1e25amdu li-ll\u0101h qaw\u012b\n\nh\u0101t lin\u0101 l-ghad\u0101 tim\u1e0d\u012b' baq'\u0101 s\u0101'it\u0113n m\u0101 adr\u012b tal\u0101ta\n\nakl bi-l-'agal tir\u016b\u1e25 tij\u012bb il-akl y\u0101 kh\u016by\u0101\n\nwi-twa\u1e0d\u1e0da'u qud\u0101muh wa-ti\u1e0drab bi-\u1e63\u014dt qaw\u012b \u0113h\n\ny\u0101 dd\u012b l-khabar abya\u1e0d y\u0101 tij\u012bb lihum il-murr\n\nbar\u1e0du 'aqarit 'al\u0113hum, h\u0101yakl\u016b \u0113h?\n\nyis\u012bb\u016b l-akl baqat jan\u0101za wi-ill\u012b yi'\u016bz\u016b bi-ll\u0101h . . . a\u1e63\u1e25\u0101bum\n\na\u1e63lih\u0101 bakh\u012bla wi-bint-I bukhala min a'wal buy\u016bt\n\nyimahsh\u016b \u1e0d-\u1e0diy\u016bf wi-r-r\u0101gil y\u0101 '\u0113n\u012b 27\n\n'al\u0101 gh\u0113r kh\u0101\u1e6diruh\n\nba'd\u0113n m\u0101h\u016bh mabs\u016b\u1e6d\n\nyirja' yiq\u016bl lih\u0101 28\n\nl\u0113h kid\u0101 l\u0113h, l\u0113h kid\u0101 l\u0113h\n\n\u1e0dayya't\u012b sum'it\u012b wi-sum'it jud\u016bd\u012b\n\ninn il-kar\u012bm l\u0101 yin\u1e0d\u0101m, il-kar\u012bm l\u0101 yin\u1e0d\u0101m\n\nwa-n-n\u0101s d\u014dl mu't\u0101d\u012bn yig\u016b 'indin\u0101\n\nayy\u0101m ab\u0101h\u0101tn\u0101 wi-jud\u016bdn\u0101\n\nwi-l-b\u0113t d\u0101 maft\u016b\u1e25 min zaman q'aw\u012b\n\ntiq\u016bl luh: mih hughulak uskut\n\nya'n\u012b inta f\u0101ti\u1e25 al-ba\u1e25r\u012b\n\nuq'ud uq'ud s\u0101kit\n\nwi-kh\u0113r rabbun\u0101 y\u0101m\u0101\n\nwi-\u1e0d-\u1e0d\u0113f qabl-I m\u0101 ya't\u012b ya't\u012b bi-rizquh qud\u0101muh\n\nwi-tlamm-I wi-nd\u0101ra kid\u0101\n\nd\u0101-n\u0101 \u1e6d\u016bl in-nih\u0101r adawwar 'al\u0101 daq\u012bq f\u012b d-dak\u0101k\u012bn\n\nru\u1e25t-I li-ab\u016b sul\u0113m\u0101n wi-li-ust\u0101z jal\u0101l\n\nlaq\u0113t id-daq\u012bq 'andihum mah\u1e25\u016b\u1e6d\n\n\u1e6dayyib wi-hin\u0101 hwayyit '\u012bh ahom 29\n\nuskut! m\u0101 huwa an\u0101 ill\u012b bakhabbiz\n\nan\u0101 ill\u012b baba\u1e6d\u1e6di\u1e6d wi-dira't\u012b yitwaga'n\u012b\n\naq'ud mih . . . \u016b'\u0101 \u016b'\u0101!\n\nwi-kilma minh\u0101\n\nwi-kilma min zawjih\u0101 timsik khin\u0101qa\n\ntiharma\u1e6d il-za'b\u016b\u1e6d\n\n[ya'n\u012b tig\u012bb ig-galabiyya mi-l-bid\u0101ya li-n-nih\u0101ya 30\n\ninnam\u0101 iz-za'b\u016b\u1e6d 'alah\u0101n il-Q\u0101fiy\u0101t]\n\ntiqa\u1e6d\u1e6da' iz-za'b\u016b\u1e6d tiharma\u1e6d iz-za'b\u016b\u1e6d 31\n\ny\u0101 wiliyya f\u0101riq\u012bn\u012b r\u016b\u1e25\u012b d\u0101r ahlik\n\nwall\u0101h m\u0101 f\u0101rqak li-ak\u016bn 'andak lamm\u0101 tim\u016bt\n\nwa-m\u0101 k\u0101n in-n\u012bl yig\u012bn\u0101 f\u012b misr\u0101, 32\n\namm\u0101 k\u0101n in-n\u012bl yij\u012bn\u0101 f\u012b misr\u0101\n\nwa-l\u0101 kh\u0113r f\u012b n\u012bl tij\u012bn\u0101 f\u012b t\u016bt\n\nyibq'\u0101 iz-zar'a 'add\u0101 'umruh baq\u0101 33\n\nba'd khamsa wi-tal\u0101t\u012bn y\u014dm baq\u0101 tij\u012b il-mayya\n\nkull il-qu\u1e6dn-I m\u0101t wi-r\u0101\u1e25 li-\u1e25\u0101luh\n\nwi-lamm\u0101 k\u0101n in-n\u012bl yij\u012bn\u0101 f\u012b misr\u0101\n\nl\u0101 kh\u0113r f\u012b n\u012bl tij\u012bn\u0101 f\u012b t\u016bt\n\nwa-m\u0101 k\u0101n il-fatta wi-l-'\u012bh 34\n\nbi-ziy\u0101da 'an il-k\u014dsa\n\nwa-l\u0101 kh\u0113r f\u012b z\u0101d yij\u012b mah\u1e25\u016b\u1e6d\n\nwi-ll\u012b m\u0101 yim\u016bt ayy min\u0113n-I yif\u012bit 35\n\nwi-r-rizq min 'and-I rabbun\u0101 ayy bikh\u016bt wi-bikh\u016bt\n\nwa-f\u012bh m\u012bn yu'\u1e6dih j\u016bda wa-karam 36\n\nwa-f\u012bh m\u012bn yi'\u012bh f\u012b l-bukhl ayy wa-lamm\u0101 yim\u016bt\n\nayy wa-f\u012bh m\u012bn yu'\u1e6d\u012bh 'umr-I kif\u0101yituh 37\n\nwa-f\u012bh m\u012bn yu'\u1e6d\u012bh sana wi-yim\u016bt\n\nwi-r-rizq min 'and-I il-kar\u012bm rabbun\u0101 38\n\nayy bikh\u016bt wi-bikh\u016bt\n\nwi-'af\u1e0dal-I min d\u0101 l-Q\u014dl 39\n\nan\u0101 wa-intum jam\u012b'an y\u0101 s\u0101mi'\u012bn il-Q\u014dl\n\n\u1e63allum 'al\u0101 \u1e25a\u1e0drit in-nab\u012b\n\nnab\u012b 'arab\u012b wi-luh \u1e25aram masb\u016bt\n\n### Chapter 5. The Sahra as Social Interaction\n\nText 5.1. Audience Participation (Birth of Ah\u016b Zayd)\n\nShaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd, tape 87\u2013101 (6\/1\/87)\n\nwa-k\u0101n \u1e63\u0101bi\u1e25 jim'a \u1e63allum 'al\u0101 n-nab\u012b, 1\n\n[All: 'al\u0113h i\u1e63-\u1e63al\u0101t wi-s-sal\u0101m]\n\nwa-li-l-ma\u1e93l\u016bm rabb\u012b s\u0101mi' li-d-du'\u0101h.\n\nq\u0101lit lih\u0101: 2\n\n\u00abyall\u0101h an\u0101 wi-nt\u012b 'a l-ba\u1e25r-I f\u012b l-fa\u1e0d\u0101,\n\nyall\u0101h nirawwaq dammin\u0101 f\u012b fa\u1e0d\u0101h.\n\nwa-tin\u1e93ur\u012b l-m\u0101li\u1e25 til\u0101q\u012b l-'aj\u0101yib, 3\n\ntil\u0101q\u012b l-'aj\u0101yib bi-ar\u0101dt ill\u0101h. \u00bb\n\n\u1e6dala'um baq\u0101 l-itn\u0113n wa-l-'abd-I sa'\u012bde, 4\n\nzawjit najj\u0101\u1e25 ay\u0101 ma\u1e25l\u0101h.\n\n[Voice: ay]\n\nill\u0101 wa-\u1e6d\u012br 5\n\n[Voice: aywa!]\n\nabya\u1e0d min il-bu'd-I j\u0101 lahum,\n\nd\u0101 \u1e6dir abya\u1e0d \u1e25ilw-I f\u012b ru'y\u0101h.\n\nin\u1e25a\u1e6d\u1e6d-I wa-l\u0101 h\u0101l i\u1e6d-\u1e6d\u012br f\u012b l-khale, 6\n\nkull i\u1e6d-\u1e6diy\u016br aywa l\u012bh tir'\u0101h.\n\nq\u0101lit hamma \u00aby\u0101 rabb y\u0101 fard-I y\u0101 \u1e63amad, 7\n\n[Voice: all\u0101h]\n\nill\u0101hin ta'\u0101l\u0101 l\u0101 il\u0101ha siw\u0101h.\n\ntirzuqn\u012b bi-w\u0101d an\u0101 misl-I i\u1e6d-\u1e6d\u012br h\u0101z\u012b, 8\n\nwi-yak\u016bn \u1e25isin tik\u016bn il-'arab \u1e6d\u0101yi'\u0101h. \u00bb\n\ntammit baq\u0101 l-\u1e6dulbe y\u0101-j\u0101w\u012bd wi-\u1e6d-\u1e6d\u012br irtafa', 9\n\nwi-\u1e6d-\u1e6d\u012br h\u0101l \u0101h wi-z\u0101d f\u012b 'ul\u0101h.\n\nill\u0101 wa-\u1e6d\u012br asmar min il-bu'd-I j\u0101 lahum, 10\n\n[Laughter\u2014Voice: Ab\u016b Zayd!]\n\nd\u0101 \u1e6d\u012br asmar\n\n[Voice: aywa!]\n\nbihi\u1e25 f\u012b ru'y\u0101h.\n\n[Voice: y\u0101 sal\u0101m!]\n\nyufrud gin\u0101\u1e25uh 'al\u0101 \u1e6d-\u1e6diy\u016br, 11\n\nkull-I man \u1e0darabuh bi-gin\u0101\u1e25uh la yihimm-I 'ah\u0101h . . .\n\n[Side Two]\n\nkull-I man \u1e0darabuh bi-gin\u0101\u1e25uh lam yihimm-I 'ah\u0101h\n\nq\u0101lit-I Kha\u1e0dra: 12\n\n[Voice: aywa]\n\n\u00aby\u0101 ma\u1e25l\u0101k-I y\u0101d\u012b i\u1e6d-\u1e6d\u012br wi-ma\u1e25l\u0101\n\nsam\u0101rak,\n\n[Voice: all\u0101h!]\n\nzayy il-bala\u1e25 amm\u0101 yi\u1e6d\u012bb bi-ri\u1e0d\u0101h.\n\nay\u0101 rabb-I y\u0101 ra\u1e25m\u0101n-I y\u0101 fard-I y\u0101 \u1e63amad, 13\n\n[Voice: all\u0101h yifta\u1e25 'al\u0113k!]\n\n[Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101: all\u0101h yikrimak!]\n\nil\u0101hin ta'\u0101la mu\u1e25tajab bi-sam\u0101h.\n\n[Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101: yid\u016bm 'izzak, yid\u016bm 'izzak 'al\u0113n\u0101!]\n\ntirzuqn\u012b bi-w\u0101d an\u0101 misl-I i\u1e6d-\u1e6d\u012br h\u0101za, 14\n\nwi-kull-I min \u1e0darabuh bi-s\u0113fuh lam yahimm-I\n\n'ah\u0101h. \u00bb\n\n[Voice: y\u0101 sal\u0101m! d\u0101 ab\u016b z\u0113d!]\n\n\u1e6dalabum il-isn\u0113n: 15\n\nq\u0101lit sa'\u012bda \u00aby\u0101 rabb tirzuqn\u012b misl-I asy\u0101d\u012b\n\nm\u0101-khafh-I m\u012bn k\u0101n f\u012b l-kar\u012bm ar\u1e0d\u0101h. \u00bb\n\nd\u014dl rawwa\u1e25um y\u0101 aj\u0101w\u012bd \u1e63allum 'al\u0101 n-nab\u012b,\n\n[Ail: 'al\u0113h i\u1e63-\u1e63al\u0101t wi-s-sal\u0101m]\n\nay\u0101 bakht-I min \u1e6dalab wa-l-kar\u012bm ar\u1e0d\u0101h.\n\nQ\u0101l il-malik sar\u1e25\u0101n li-rizq-I il-ba\u1e6dal, 17\n\n\u00aby\u0101 ibn-I 'amm\u012b sma' kal\u0101m\u012b wi-l-mu'n\u0101.\n\n\u1e63\u0101li\u1e25 ih-har\u012bfa rizq ay\u0101 \u1e6dayyib il-'arab,\n\nikrimh\u0101 ba-innih\u0101 min sil\u0101lit ras\u016bl ill\u0101h.\n\ny\u0101 tikrimh\u0101 y\u0101 rizq y\u0101 tiwadd\u012bh\u0101 li-ahlih\u0101, 19\n\nwi-l-'ar\u1e0d-I zayy iz-zir' wi-l-'ar\u1e0d-I gh\u0101l\u012b,\n\nwi-l-'ar\u1e0d-I gh\u0101l\u012b wi-l-'arab 'arf\u0101h.\u00bb\n\n[Voice: all\u0101h!]\n\n\u1e63\u0101li\u1e25h\u0101 y\u0101 aj\u0101w\u012bd wi-wadd\u012bh\u0101 li-\u1e63\u012bw\u0101nuh, 20\n\nwa-ar\u0101d il-kar\u012bm al\u0101 bi-l-hud\u0101 y\u0101 ma\u1e25l\u0101.\n\nf\u012b h\u0101z\u012b l-l\u0113la \u1e25amal\u016b s-sal\u0101sa, 21\n\ny\u0101 bakht-I min \u1e6dalab wi-l-kar\u012bm ar\u1e0d\u0101h.\n\nwafit huh\u016brh\u0101 hamma l-a\u1e63\u012bla; 22\n\nwa\u1e0da'it ghul\u0101m y\u0101 aj\u0101w\u012bd Qal\u012blan sif\u0101tuh,\n\nwalad sam\u012b\u1e25 il-wajh-I y\u0101 ma\u1e25l\u0101.\n\n* \u1e63allum 'al\u0101 n-nab\u012b *  \n[All: 'al\u0113hi \u1e63-\u1e63al\u0101t wi-s-sal\u0101m]  \n[Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101: all\u0101hum yi\u1e63all\u012b 'al\u0113h]  \n[Voice: y\u0101 sal\u0101m . . . isma' . . . ]  \n[Shaykh \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101: all\u0101h yikrimak! all\u0101h yib\u0101rik f\u012bkum!]\n\nText 5.3. Suppression of Materials for Female Listeners\n\nShaykh Biyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b, tape 87\u2013029 (2\/25\/87)\n\n. . . q\u0101lit luh: m\u0101-ntih f\u0101ti\u1e25, y\u0101 Man\u1e63\u016br? q\u0101l: int\u012b tighann\u012b wa-n\u0101 ghann\u012b 'ub\u0101lik, in zidt\u012b 'ann\u012b f\u012b l-q\u014dl, atjawwiz arba' nisw\u0101n wi-tibq\u012b int\u012b awwil il-q\u0101yma, wi-in zidt-I 'annik f\u012b l-q\u014dl t\u0101khd\u012b in-nisw\u0101n wi-timahsh\u012b min hin\u0101 wi-i\u1e25n\u0101 ba\u1e6d\u1e6daln\u0101 il-\u1e25ubb-I wa-l-\u1e25amdu li-ll\u0101h. q\u0101lit luh ij-j\u0101zya: ifrah wa-n\u0101 agha\u1e6d\u1e6d\u012b. q\u0101l lih\u0101: int\u012b ghala\u1e6dt\u012b\u2014ih-har\u012b'a ill\u012b rabbun\u0101 mi\u1e25allilh\u0101 bi-inn-I in-nis\u0101' furr\u0101h ir-rij\u0101l, li'in ir-rij\u0101l mitfa\u1e0d\u1e0dal\u012bn 'al\u0101 n-nis\u0101', wa-n-nis\u0101' furr\u0101h ir-rij\u0101l, ya'n\u012b ill\u012b yifrih m\u012bn bi-l-kal\u0101m? q\u0101lh\u0101: int\u012b tifrih\u012b bi-l-kal\u0101m wa-n\u0101 agha\u1e6d\u1e6d\u012b 'al\u0113k\u012b bi-l-kal\u0101m. fa-j-j\u0101zya tifrih tiq\u016bl \u0113h? '\u0101hiq in-nab\u012b yaz\u012bdn\u0101 mi-\u1e63-\u1e63al\u0101tu 'al\u0113h:\n\nSung:\n\nan\u012b amda\u1e25 mu\u1e25ammad na\u1e6daQit luh l-\u1e25ig\u0101ra 1\n\nna\u1e6daQit luh l-\u1e25ig\u0101ra\n\n[Tunes rab\u0101b]\n\nan\u012b amda\u1e25 mu\u1e25ammad na\u1e6daqit luh l-\u1e25ig\u0101ra\n\ny\u0101 rabb\u012b niz\u016bruh nistamta' bi-n\u016bruh\n\nnistamta' bi-n\u016bruh wa-nin\u016bl iz-ziy\u0101ra, wa-nn\u016bl iz-ziy\u0101ra\n\nq\u0101lit bint-I sar\u1e25\u0101n-\u012b 2\n\nqaw\u0101ff' wi-awz\u0101n-\u012b\n\ntaww ih-hi'r b\u0101n-\u012b\n\nwi-baq\u0101 l\u012b f\u012bh am\u0101ra\n\nifta\u1e25 y\u0101 man\u1e63\u016br 3\n\nift\u0101\u1e25 b\u0101b is-s\u016br\n\nnudkhul\u016b bi-dast\u016br\n\nwi-nib\u012b'\u016b l-'i\u1e6d\u0101ra\n\nifta\u1e25 m\u0101 takhafh-\u012b 4\n\nwa-law r\u012bQa lakh-\u012b\n\nil-\u1e25inna l-balakhsh\u012b\n\nf\u012b \u012bd\u0113n il-'ad\u0101r\u0101\n\nifta\u1e25 y\u0101 \u1e25ab\u012bb\u012b 4\n\ny\u0101 miskan wa-\u1e6d\u012bb\u012b\n\nh\u0101khudak min nas\u012bb\u012b\n\ny\u0101 baww\u0101b na\u1e0d\u0101r, y\u0101 baww\u0101b na\u1e0d\u0101r\n\nradd-I il-baww\u0101b man\u1e63\u016br '\u0101 g-g\u0101zya kida; wi-q\u0101l \u0113h?\n\nan\u0101 b\u0101b\u012b m\u0101 fta\u1e25\u016bh-\u012b 6\n\nli-ll\u012b m\u0101 ba'raf\u016bh-\u012b\n\nwa-ntum 'arab \u1e6dum\u016bh-\u012b\n\nfat\u1e25 il-b\u0101b l\u012bkum 'al\u0101 khas\u0101ra\n\ny\u0101 baww\u0101b\u012b ifta\u1e25 b\u0101bak il-mi\u1e63affa\u1e25 7\n\ny\u0101 baww\u0101b\u012b ifta\u1e25 b\u0101bak il-mi\u1e63affa\u1e25\n\nwi-in dakhalu biyirba\u1e25\n\nwi-biyib\u012b' il-'i\u1e6d\u0101ra\n\nah m\u0101 tik\u016bnh-\u012b kh\u0101yif 8\n\nah m\u0101 tik\u016bnsh-\u012b kh\u0101yif\n\nawarr\u012bk il-wa\u1e63\u0101yif\n\nwi-nil'ab y\u0101 wi\u1e63\u0101la, nil'ab y\u0101 wi\u1e63\u0101la\n\nil-baww\u0101b man\u1e63\u016br q\u0101l lih\u0101 \u0113h:\n\nmahsh\u012b y\u0101 \u1e63abiyy 9\n\nbal\u0101h man\u0101\u1e25iyya\n\ntig\u012b li-l-baww\u0101b raziyya\n\nwa-l\u0101 tiduqq f\u014dq r\u0101suh gh\u0101ra\n\nabadan mih f\u0101t\u1e25 il-b\u0101b 10\n\nabadan mih f\u0101t\u1e25 il-b\u0101b\n\nwall\u0101h bi-\u1e0darb-I \u1e25ir\u0101b\n\nmin 'askar sak\u0101ra\n\nr\u016b\u1e25\u012b y\u0101 \u1e93ar\u012bfa 11\n\nr\u016b\u1e25\u012b y\u0101 \u1e93ar\u012bfa\n\nkh\u016bf\u012b min khal\u012bfa\n\nbi-\u012bduh \u1e25arba rah\u012bfa\n\nbitf\u016bt min il-\u1e25ig\u0101ra\n\nifta\u1e25 y\u0101 man\u1e63\u016br 12\n\nifta\u1e25 b\u0101b is-s\u016br\n\ndast\u016br\u012b bi-dast\u016br\n\ny\u0101 wih il-khus\u0101ra\n\nay\u0101 baww\u0101b man\u1e63\u016br wihak wih il-khus\u0101ra\n\nifta\u1e25 wa-n\u0101 awarr\u012bk 13\n\naw\u1e63\u0101f al-'ad\u0101r\u0101\n\n(il-'ad\u0101r\u0101 ya'n\u012b il-ban\u0101t)\n\nifta\u1e25 wa-n\u0101 awarr\u012bk\n\naw\u1e63\u0101f al-'ad\u0101r\u0101\n\n'indin\u0101 '\u0101lya il-'uq\u0113liyya 14\n\nwi-'\u0101lya iz-zi\u1e25l\u0101niyya\n\nwi-'indin\u0101 is-sitt-I wa\u1e6dfa iz-zughbiyya\n\n'indin\u0101 is-sitt-I s\u0101ra\n\nsa'diyya wi-r-rasmiyya 15\n\nsa'diyya wi-r-rasmiyya\n\nwi-j-j\u0101zya il-'arabiyya\n\nil-j\u0101zya il-'arabiyya\n\n\u1e6dama'\u0101n lih\u0101 l-id\u0101ra, \u1e6dama'\u0101n lih\u0101 l-id\u0101ra\n\nzaqq il-b\u0101b wi-r\u0101yi\u1e25 16\n\nil-wuj\u016bh is-sam\u0101yi\u1e25\n\n\u1e63af\u012b il-misk f\u0101yi\u1e25\n\nmin '\u0101lya wi-s\u0101ra\n\nwi-l-baww\u0101b-I h\u0101m 17\n\nkhad il-muft\u0101\u1e25 wi-q\u0101m\n\nkhad il-muft\u0101\u1e25 wi-q\u0101m\n\nfata\u1e25 il-b\u0101b jih\u0101ra\n\nil-baww\u0101b firih giy\u0101suh 18\n\nwi-qala' mad\u0101suh\n\nwi-qala' mad\u0101suh\n\nwi-hijim '\u0101 l-'ad\u0101ra\n\nil-baww\u0101b firih giy\u0101suh 19\n\nwi-qala' mad\u0101suh\n\nwi-sal\u0101mtuh wi-\u1e25all-I lib\u0101suh\n\nwi-nawwil '\u0101 l-khus\u0101ra, wi-nawwil '\u0101 l-khus\u0101ra\n\nj\u0101 luh ab\u016b z\u0113d il-asmar 20\n\nr\u0101kib zayy-I 'antar\n\nf\u012b-\u012bduh is-s\u0113f il-abtar\n\n\u1e0darab man\u1e63\u016br il-a'gar\n\nkhall\u0101 r\u0101suh tida'war\n\nzayy-I zirr-I khiy\u0101ra\n\nwi-\u0101d\u012b fat\u1e25-I b\u0101b-I t\u016bnis 21\n\nli-ya\u1e25iya wi-mar'\u012b wi-y\u016bnis\n\nwi-\u0101d\u012b fat\u1e25-I b\u0101b-I t\u016bnis li-ya\u1e25iya wi-y\u016bnis\n\nwi-y\u016bnis q\u0101'id f\u012b s-sign wi-s\u0101mi' il-'ib\u0101ra\n\nwaqa' il-baww\u0101b man\u1e63\u016br 22\n\ndifin\u016bh janb-I is-s\u016br\n\nqilib\u016b f\u014dq dim\u0101ghuh\n\nit-taman\u012bn huk\u0101ra\n\n\u1e63allum 'al\u0101 n-nab\u012b\n\n## Works Cited\n\n'Abd al-Jaww\u0101d, Mu\u1e25ammad. _F\u012b kutt\u0101b al-qarya_ (In the village school). Cairo: Ma\u1e6dba'at al-ma'\u0101rif, 1939.\n\nal-Abnoudy, Abderrahman ['Abd al-Ra\u1e25m\u0101n al-Abn\u016bd\u012b]. La geste hilalienne. Trans. Tahar Guiga [al-\u1e6d\u0101hir Q\u012bqa]. Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 1978.\n\n\u2014\u2014. _al-S\u012bra al-hil\u0101liyya_. 3 vols. Cairo: Ma\u1e6d\u0101bi' al-akhb\u0101r, 1988. Vol. 1, _Kha\u1e0dra al-shar\u012bfa_ ; vol. 2, _Ab\u016b zayd fi ar\u1e0d al- 'all\u0101m\u0101t_; vol. 3, _Maqtal al-sul\u1e6d\u0101n sar\u1e25\u0101n_.\n\nAbu-Lughod, Lila. _Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society_. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.\n\nAhlwardt, Wilhelm. \"Verzeichniss der arabischen Handscriften.\" In _Die Handscrijtenverzeichnisse der k\u00f6niglichen Bibliotek zu Berlin_. Vol. 8, book 19. Berlin: A. Asher, 1896.\n\nAllen, Roger. _The Arabic Novel_. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1982.\n\n'Ammar, 'Abb\u0101s M. _The People of the Sharqiyah: Their Racial History, Serology, Physical Characteristics, Demography and Conditions of Life_. 2 vols. Cairo: Institut Fran\u00e7ais d'Arch\u00e9ologie Orientale, 1944.\n\nAnastas (Father). \"The Nawar or Gypsies of the East.\" _Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society_ (n.s.), pt. 1, vol. 7, no. 4 (1913\u201314): 298\u2013319; p. 2, vol. 8, no. 2 (1914\u201315): 140\u201353; part 3, vol. 8, no. 4 (1914\u201315): 266\u201380.\n\n_Asian Music_ 17, 1 (1985). Special issue on music and musicians in the Islamic world.\n\nAyoub, Abderrahman ['Abd al-Ra\u1e25m\u0101n Ayy\u016bb]. \"Approches de la po\u00e8sie bedouine hilalienne chez Ibn Khaldoune.\" In Actes du Colloque international sur Ibn Khaldoun, 21\u201326 June 1978, 321\u201345. Algiers: Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Nationale d'Edition et Diffusion, 1982.\n\n\u2014\u2014. \"A propos des manuscrits de la geste des Ban\u016b Hil\u0101l conserv\u00e9s \u00e0 Berlin.\" In _Association international d'\u00e9tude des civilisations m\u00e9diterran\u00e9enwes: Actes du IIi\u00e8me congr\u00e8s_ , ed. M. Galley, 347\u201363. Algiers: Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Nationale d'Edition et Diffusion, 1978.\n\n\u2014\u2014. \"The Hilali Epic: Material and Memory.\" _Revue d'histoire maghr\u00e9bine_ 35\u201336 (1984): 189\u2013217.\n\n\u2014\u2014. \"Po\u00e8me hilalien de Dyab le Libyen.\" In _Majallat kulliyat al-tarbiyya_. Tripoli, 1979.\n\n\u2014\u2014. \"Quelques aspects \u00e9volutifs dans les versions hilaliennes de Jordanie.\" In _S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l: A 'm\u0101l al-nadwa al-'\u0101lamiyya al-\u016bl\u0101 \u1e25awla al-s\u012bra al-hil\u0101liyya_, Actes de la 1\u00e8re table ronde internationale sur la geste des B\u00e9ni Hil\u0101l, 26\u201329 June 1980, al-\u1e24amm\u0101m\u0101t, Tunisia. Ed. A. Ayoub, 59\u201383. Tunis: al-D\u0101r al-t\u016bnisiyya li-l-nahr and al-Ma'had al-qawm\u012b li-l-ath\u0101r wa-l-fun\u016bn, 1990.\n\nAyoub, Abderrrahman, and M. Galley. _Images de Dj\u0101zya: \u00c0 propos d'une peinture sous verre de Tunisie_. 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Egyptian poet), , \u2013, , \u2013, \u2013; family of, ; performance style, , ; photograph, ; tales of past performances of, \u2013\n\nal-Abnoudi, Abderrahman ['Abd al-Ra\u1e25-m\u0101n al-Abn\u016bd\u012b], , , ,\n\nAbu-Lughod, Lila, , ,\n\nAb\u016b Zayd, \u2013, ; battles with father, \u2013; bifurcation of, \u2013; birth of, , , \u2013, \u2013, \u2013; children of, ; disguised as poet, \u2013, \u2013; kills Man\u1e63\u016br the gatekeeper, ; kills Qur'\u0101n teacher, ; in modern literature, , ; ode describing captive maidens, \u2013, \u2013; rivalry with Diy\u0101b,\n\nAbyssinians,\n\nAccordion,\n\nAhlwardt, W.,\n\nAleppo,\n\nAlgeria,\n\nAllen, Roger,\n\nAlmohads. _See_ al-Muwa\u1e25\u1e25id\u016bn\n\n'Antar 'Abd al-'\u0101\u1e6d\u012b (N. Egyptian poet),\n\n'Antar ibn hadd\u0101d, \u2013, , ,\n\nApprenticeship, \u2013,\n\n'Arab, customs of, ; al-ghin\u0101ma \u2013; usages of term, \u2013, \u2013\n\nArabia, , ,\n\nArabian Nights. _See_ Thousand and One Nights\n\nArthur, King,\n\n'Ah\u012br, \u2013\n\nA\u1e63l (a\u1e63\u012bl), ; concept of, ; as derivation of u\u1e63\u016bliy\u016bn,\n\nAssistants, research, \u2013\n\nAudiences, of epic, \u2013; participation in performance, \u2013, \u2013\n\n'Awa\u1e0dall\u0101h 'Abd al-Jal\u012bl (S. Egyptian poet),\n\n'Aw\u0101zil. _See_ 'Az\u016bl\n\nAyoub, Abderrahman ['Abd al-Ra\u1e25m\u0101n Ayy\u016bb], , , , ,\n\nal-Azhar,\n\nal-'Az\u012bz ibn al-Mu'izz,\n\n'Az\u012bza, and Y\u016bnus, ,\n\n'Az\u016bl, \u2013\n\nBackchanneling,\n\nal-Badaw\u012b, al-Sayyid, \u2013\n\nBadawiyya Sufi order,\n\nBad\u012br, al-Q\u0101\u1e0d\u012b,\n\nBadr, al-Na'\u0101m, ,\n\nBadr al-\u1e62ab\u0101\u1e25, ,\n\nBad\u016b (Bedouin), , \u2013, \u2013\n\nBaghdad,\n\nBaker, Cathryn, A., ,\n\nBakh\u0101t\u012b, A\u1e25mad, family of, , , ,\n\nBan\u0101t al-Ahr\u0101f, ,\n\nBandar, \u2013\n\nBarbers, \u2013,\n\nBarmicides,\n\nBasmalah, ,\n\nBauman, Richard, ,\n\nBaybars. _See_ al-\u1e92\u0101hir Baybars\n\nBazla, mother of Diy\u0101b, \u2013\n\nBedouin. _See_ Bad\u016b\n\nBegging. _See_ Tasawwul\n\nBeissinger, Margaret,\n\nBel, Alfred,\n\nBen Rahhal, M.,\n\nBeowulf, ,\n\nBerbers,\n\nBerque, Jacques, ,\n\nBerti,\n\nBird, Charles,\n\nBiyal\u012b Ab\u016b Fahm\u012b (N. Egyptian poet), , \u2013, , \u2013, \u2013, \u2013, \u2013; first meeting with, \u2013; first recording of epic, ; performance style, \u2013; photograph,\n\nBlacksmiths, \u2013\n\nBlunt, Lady Anne,\n\nBrahimiyya Sufi order,\n\nBread, types of,\n\nBreteau, Claude, ,\n\nal-Buhayra, \u2013,\n\nBurh\u0101niyya Sufi order,\n\nBurton, Richard,\n\nByzantines,\n\nCachia, Pierre, , \u2013\n\nCaf\u00e9s, , , ; as performance context, \u2013, \u2013\n\nCanova, Giovanni, , , ,\n\nCarbou, H.,\n\nChad,\n\nChanson de Roland,\n\nChapbooks, , , ,\n\nCircumcisions, , \u2013\n\nClassical Arabic. _See_ Fu\u1e63\u1e25\u0101\n\nColloquial Arabic, , , , \u2013, , \u2013; transcription of,\n\nCommunities, poet,\n\nComposition in performance, xv\n\nConder, C.,\n\nConnelly, Bridget, ,\n\nCoptic calendar,\n\nCritchfield, Michael, ,\n\nCyprus,\n\n\u1e0carb al-kaff, \u2013\n\nDaughters of the Ahr\u0101f. _See_ Ban\u0101t al-Ahr\u0101f\n\nDesparmet, J.,\n\nDh\u0101t al-Himma, , ,\n\nDhikr, ,\n\nDialects, poets' knowledge of, , , \u2013\n\nDiglossia, ,\n\nDis\u016bq,\n\nal-Dis\u016bq\u012b, Ibr\u0101h\u012bm, \u2013\n\nD\u012bw\u0101n al-ayt\u0101m, \u2013\n\n\u1e0ciy\u0101' al-'uy\u016bn wa-n\u016brh\u0101,\n\nDiy\u0101b, \u2013, , , \u2013; battles al-Zan\u0101t\u012b, , \u2013; ode to his mother, \u2013\n\nD\u014dr,\n\nDoughty, C.,\n\nDover, Cedric,\n\nDowry, , \u2013\n\nDrums. _See_ \u1e6d\u0101r\n\nal-Dukhla,\n\nEducation, \u2013,\n\nEl Cid,\n\nEpic, as genre, \u2013\n\nEthiopia,\n\nEvil eye,\n\nFanjul, Serafin,\n\nFas\u012bkh,\n\nFat\u0113ta,\n\nF\u0101ti\u1e25a, reading of,\n\nFatimids,\n\nFatta,\n\nF\u0101yid, father of Bad\u012br, \u2013\n\nFell\u0101\u1e25\u012bn, as non-poets, , \u2013,\n\nF\u00e9raud, L.,\n\nFerguson, Charles, ,\n\nFiq\u012bh, Ab\u016b Zayd's killing of,\n\nFlutes,\n\nFolksongs, ; at weddings, \u2013,\n\nFolktales, told by poets, \u2013\n\nFrame-tale,\n\nFullat al-Nada,\n\nFundamentalism, , ,\n\nal-Fun\u016bn al-ha'biyya,\n\nFu\u1e63\u1e25\u0101, , , , \u2013,\n\nGab\u00e8s,\n\nGal\u0101biyya, ,\n\nGalland, Antoine,\n\nGalley, Micheline, ,\n\nGaza,\n\nGenealogies, performances of, \u2013, , \u2013\n\nGhajar. _See_ Gypsies\n\nGh\u0101nim, father of Diy\u0101b, , \u2013,\n\nGhaw\u0101z\u012b,\n\nal-Ghitani, Gamal [Jam\u0101l al-Gh\u012b\u1e6d\u0101n\u012b], ,\n\nGreetings and salutations, \u2013, \u2013, ,\n\nGuiga, Tahar,\n\nGuin, M. L.,\n\nGypsies, \u2013, , , \u2013, , , \u2013, ; arrival in Egypt, ; in Hungary,\n\n\u1e24ad\u012bth, ,\n\n\u1e24alab, \u2013, , , ; origin of,\n\nHall, Edward,\n\nHamilton, Terrick,\n\n\u1e24amza, uncle of Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad, ,\n\n\u1e24an\u1e0dal al-'Uqayl\u012b, tale of , , \u2013, , , \u2013, \u2013\n\nHanna, Nabil, ,\n\nHanna, Sami,\n\n\u1e24\u0101ret al-h'ara,\n\n\u1e24arqal\u012b, son of Dayh\u0101n,\n\nal-Harr\u0101s, king of Cyprus,\n\nHartmann, Martin, ,\n\n\u1e24asan, Sultan, , \u2013; birth of, \u2013; death of,\n\n\u1e24ahw,\n\n\u1e24aww\u0101s, 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd, , ,\n\n\u1e24aww\u0101s, Sayyid, \u2013,\n\n\u1e24aydar, Sa'\u012bd 'Abd al-Q\u0101dir,\n\nHeath, Peter,\n\nHeller, B.,\n\nHenna. _See_ Laylat al-\u1e25inn\u0101\n\n\u1e24itat balad\u012b, , \u2013, , \u2013, \u2013; listeners' objections to recording of, ; thematic movement in,\n\nHood, Mantle,\n\nHurreiz, Seyyid,\n\n\u1e24usayn, at Karbala,\n\n\u1e24usayn, \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101, , , , , , \u2013\n\n\u1e24usna bint N\u0101\u1e63ir al-Tuwayrd\u012b,\n\nHussein, Taha. _See_ \u1e24usayn, \u1e6c\u0101h\u0101\n\nHymes, Dell,\n\nIbn 'Abd Rabbihi, \u2013\n\nIbn Hih\u0101m,\n\nIbn I\u1e63\u1e25\u0101q,\n\nIbn Khald\u016bn, ,\n\n_Iliad_ , , , ,\n\nIngham, Bruce,\n\nIq\u1e6d\u0101',\n\nIraq, ,\n\n'Ihra,\n\n'Izba,\n\nJalama, \u1e24amd\u012b, \u2013\n\nJam\u0101sa,\n\nJam\u012bl son of R\u0101hid (epic poet), \u2013, \u2013\n\nal-J\u0101zya, \u2013, , ; at the Walls of T\u016bnis, , , \u2013, \u2013\n\nJerusalem,\n\nJohnstone, T.,\n\nJordan, ,\n\nJoseph (biblical),\n\nKa'ba,\n\nKafr al-Shaykh, , , ,\n\nKal\u0101m, versus hi'r,\n\nKal\u0101m al-r\u0101w\u012b, ,\n\nKal\u0101m al-h\u0101'ir, ,\n\nKamanja. _See_ Violin\n\nKatb al-kit\u0101b,\n\nKha\u1e0dra al-har\u012bfa, \u2013, \u2013, \u2013; expulsion from tribe, ; hakwa of, \u2013\n\nal-Khaf\u0101j\u012b, '\u0100mir,\n\nKhal\u012bfa Zan\u0101t\u012b. _See_ al-Zan\u0101t\u012b\n\nKhalifeh, Sahar, ,\n\nal-Khi\u1e0dr,\n\nKutt\u0101b, , , ,\n\nLane, Edward, , , , , , ,\n\nLargeau, V.,\n\nLatrigue, R.,\n\nLaylat al-\u1e25inn\u0101, \u2013, \u2013\n\nLerrick, Alison, , , ,\n\nLibya, , , ,\n\nLiteracy, \u2013, , ; of poets, ,\n\nLord, Albert B., xv, ,\n\nLoubignac, V.,\n\nLute. _See_ '\u016ad\n\nMacMichael, H. A., , ,\n\nMacNaughton, P.,\n\nMad\u012b\u1e25, , , , , \u2013, , ; audience reactions to,\n\nMad\u012bna,\n\nMahfouz, Naguib, , ,\n\nMali,\n\nMandara,\n\nMande, ,\n\nMan\u1e63\u016br, the gatekeeper, \u2013, \u2013\n\nMan\u1e63\u016br al-\u1e24abah\u012b, ,\n\nManuscripts,\n\nMar\u00e7ais, William,\n\nMare, Romance of the Stealing of,\n\nMartin, Richard,\n\nMarw\u0101n al-'Uqayl\u012b,\n\nMa\u1e63l\u016bb (masl\u016bb), ,\n\nMa\u1e63\u1e6daba, ,\n\nMaww\u0101l, \u2013, , \u2013, , ; form of, ; paranomasia in, \u2013\n\nal-Mihna,\n\nMinhal\u012bn,\n\nMinyat Qall\u012bn,\n\nMih (country cheese),\n\nMitchell, Timothy,\n\nMontagne, Robert,\n\nMorocco, ,\n\nMoyle, Natalie,\n\nMu\u1e25ammad, Prophet, , , , , , , , \u2013, , ; audience responses to mention of, \u2013, ; tale of Prophet and the Gazelle, \u2013\n\nMu\u1e25ammad A\u1e25mad (N. Egyptian poet), , ; death of ,\n\nal-Mu'izz ibn B\u0101d\u012bs,\n\nM\u016blids. _See_ Saints' festivals\n\nMunhids, \u2013,\n\nMuqaddima, of Ibn Khald\u016bn,\n\nMurabba' (quatrains),\n\nMurs\u012b, A\u1e25mad,\n\nMusic, , \u2013; in epic performance, xv, , \u2013, \u2013, , \u2013, \u2013; at saints' festivals, ; at weddings,\n\nal-Mustan\u1e63ir,\n\nal-Muwa\u1e25\u1e25id\u016bn, ,\n\nN\u0101'isat al-Ajf\u0101n, , \u2013\n\nNajd, ,\n\nNaming practices, , , ; poets named for heroes, ; poets' names, , \u2013, ; poets' supposed lack of family names,\n\nNasser. _See_ 'Abd al-N\u0101\u1e63ir\n\nNawar,\n\nNelson, Kristina,\n\nNewbold, F.R.S.,\n\nNiger,\n\nNigeria, ,\n\nNight of Henna. _See_ Laylat al-\u1e25inn\u0101\n\nN\u014dr\u0101j,\n\nNorris, H. T., , ,\n\nNorth Africa, , , , \u2013\n\nNu'm\u0101n, tale of the Daughter of,\n\nNuq\u016b\u1e6d (also nuqat), , \u2013, ,\n\n_Odyssey_ ,\n\nOman,\n\nPalestine,\n\nPantucek, Svetoz\u0101r,\n\nParonomasia, in maww\u0101l, \u2013\n\nParry, Milman, xv,\n\nPatronage circuits, , \u2013\n\nPatterson, J. R., , ,\n\nPennsylvania, University of,\n\nPerformance, tales of past performances as genre, \u2013, \u2013\n\nPidal, Men\u00e9ndez,\n\nPilgrimage,\n\nPraetoritio, maww\u0101l as,\n\nPraise poetry. _See_ Mad\u012b\u1e25\n\nPritchett, Frances,\n\nProverbs, xiii, ,\n\nProvotelle, P.,\n\nPunning. _See_ Paranomasia\n\nQabb\u0101n\u012b, Niz\u0101r, \u2013,\n\nQa'da,\n\nQarmatians,\n\nQarya,\n\nQayraw\u0101n,\n\nQuatrains. _See_ Murabba'\n\nQur'\u0101n, , \u2013, , ; memorization of, ,\n\nQu\u1e6db, Sayyid,\n\nQu\u1e6db (al-rij\u0101l),\n\nRab\u0101b, , \u2013, , , , \u2013, \u2013, , \u2013, , , , , , , ; as sign of poet performing in caf\u00e9,\n\nRa\u1e6d\u0101na, \u2013,\n\nRayya, with King \u1e24an\u1e0dal, \u2013,\n\nReciters, in contrast to poets, , ,\n\nReconnaissance. _See_ al-Riy\u0101da\n\nRecording situations, \u2013\n\nRichmond, Diana,\n\nRiddles, xiii\n\nal-Riy\u0101da, \u2013, ,\n\nRizq, father of Ab\u016b Zayd, , \u2013, \u2013; battles with son, \u2013, \u2013\n\nRosenhouse, J.,\n\nRosenthal, Franz,\n\nRoth, Arlette, ,\n\nRowson, Everett,\n\nSadd al-kham\u012bs,\n\nSa'd Mu\u1e63\u1e6daf\u00e0, \u2013\n\nSahra, , , \u2013, , 121 ff.; as social interaction, \u2013; structure of, \u2013\n\nSa'\u012bd \u1e24aydar. _See_ \u1e24aydar\n\nSaints' festivals, \u2013,\n\nSaj', , , ; role of, \u2013\n\nSal\u0101\u1e25 'Abd al-Sal\u0101m (N. Egyptian poet),\n\nSalih, Tayeb [al-\u1e6dayyib \u1e62\u0101li\u1e25], ,\n\nSar\u1e25\u0101n, father of Sultan \u1e24asan, ,\n\nSaudi Arabia, , , , ,\n\nSayf ibn dh\u012b Yazin, , ,\n\nSayyid \u1e24aww\u0101s. _See_ \u1e24aww\u0101s\n\nSchimmel, Annemarie,\n\nSerjeant, R. J.,\n\nhabka,\n\nh\u0101'ir (poet), usages of term, \u2013, , ,\n\nhakh\u1e6da, ,\n\nhakw\u0101, , \u2013,\n\nhamma, Queen of Yemen, ,\n\nhamma, wife of Sar\u1e25\u0101n, \u2013, \u2013\n\nal-harqiyya, \u2013 \u2013,\n\nal-hayla,\n\nh\u012b\u1e25a, \u2013\n\nhi'r, versus kal\u0101m,\n\nh'ara [SA h'ar\u0101']. _See_ h\u0101'ir\n\nShuwa Arabic, , ,\n\nS\u012bd\u012b S\u0101lim, ,\n\nS\u012bra, as genre, \u2013; as part of sahra, \u2013\n\nS\u012brat al-am\u012br \u1e25amza al-bahlaw\u0101n,\n\nS\u012brat 'antar ibn hadd\u0101d, , ,\n\nS\u012brat ban\u012b hil\u0101l, divisions of, \u2013\n\nS\u012brat dh\u0101t al-himma, ,\n\nS\u012brat ras\u016bl all\u0101h,\n\nS\u012brat sayf ibn dh\u012b yazan, ,\n\nS\u012brat al-\u1e93\u0101hir baybars, ,\n\nS\u012brat al-z\u012br s\u0101lim,\n\n\u1e62leyb. _See_ \u1e62lubbah\n\n\u1e62lubbah,\n\nSlyomovics, Susan, , , , , \u2013,\n\nSolomon,\n\n\u1e62olubba. _See_ \u1e62lubbah\n\nSpain, ,\n\nSpike-fiddle. _See_ Rab\u0101b\n\nStumme, H.,\n\nSu'ada, daughter of al-Zan\u0101t\u012b, ,\n\n\u1e62ub\u1e25, 'Abd al-Q\u0101dir, \u2013\n\nal-\u1e62ub\u1e25iyya,\n\nSudan, , ,\n\nSufism, , , ; in al-Bak\u0101t\u016bsh, \u2013, , \u2013, ,\n\nSult\u0101n \u1e24asan. _See_ \u1e24asan\n\nSyria, ,\n\nal-Taghr\u012bba, \u2013,\n\n\u1e6c\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd (N. Egyptian poet), , \u2013, \u2013, \u2013; account of patronage circuit, \u2013; death of, ; family of, ; performance style, \u2013; photograph,\n\n\u1e6damb\u016br (\"Archimedean water-screw\"),\n\n\u1e6dan\u1e6da,\n\n\u1e6d\u0101r, ,\n\n\u1e6darb\u016bh, \u2013\n\nTasawwul, , ,\n\nTatar,\n\n_Thousand and One Nights_ , , , ,\n\nT\u00f4me of the Orphans, \u2013\n\nTranscription (of performances), \u2013\n\nTranslation (of performances), \u2013\n\nTransmission, xv\n\nTunis, \u2013, \u2013; battle of \u2013\n\nTunisia, , , ,\n\n'\u016ad, ,\n\n'Umda, ,\n\nUmm Kulth\u016bm,\n\n'Umra,\n\n'Umr\u0101n, Muhammad, ,\n\nVagrancy. _See_ Tasawwul\n\nVaissi\u00e8re, A.,\n\nViolin, , , ; as mark of non-Gypsy poets, \u2013; photograph,\n\nWater vessels, types of,\n\nWaterwheel, parts of,\n\nWaugh, Earle, ,\n\nWeddings, \u2013,\n\nWestward Journey. _See_ al-Taghr\u012bba\n\nWolf, Mu\u1e63\u1e6daf\u00e0's tale of the, \u2013\n\nVekerdi, Joseph, \u2013\n\nYemen, ,\n\nY\u016bnus, ,\n\nY\u016bnus, 'Abd al-\u1e24am\u012bd, ,\n\nZa'b\u016b\u1e6d, ,\n\nZagh\u0101ba, ; supporters of,\n\nal-\u1e92\u0101hir Baybars, , , ,\n\nZamzam,\n\nal-Zan\u0101t\u012b Khal\u012bfa, , , ; killing of, , , \u2013; tribe of,\n\nZayd il-'Aj\u0101j, King, \u2013\n\nal-Z\u012br S\u0101lim,\n\nZughba. _See_ Zagh\u0101ba\n\nZwettler, Michael, \nMYTH AND POETICS\n\nA series edited by\n\nGREGORY NAGY\n\n_Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom_\n\nby Norman Austin\n\n_The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece_\n\nby Claude Calame\n\ntranslated by Janice Orion\n\n_Masks of Dionysus_\n\nedited by Thomas W. Carpenter and Christopher A. Faraone\n\n_The Poetics of Supplication: Homer's_ Iliad _and_ Odyssey\n\nby Kevin Crotty\n\n_Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings_\n\nby Olga M. Davidson\n\n_The Ravenous Hyenas and the Wounded Sun: Myth and Ritual in Ancient India_\n\nby Stephanie W. Jamison\n\n_Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition_\n\nedited by James Kugel\n\n_The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy_\n\nby Leslie Kurke\n\n_Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland_\n\nby Artemis Leontis\n\n_Epic Singers and Oral Tradition_\n\nby Albert Bates Lord\n\n_The Singer Resumes the Tale_\n\nby Albert Bates Lord, edited by Mary Louise Lord\n\n_The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the_ Iliad\n\nby Richard P. Martin\n\n_Heroic Sagas and Ballads_\n\nby Stephen A. Mitchell\n\n_Greek Mythology and Poetics_\n\nby Gregory Nagy\n\n_Myth and the Polis_\n\nedited by Dora C. Pozzi and John M.Wickersham\n\n_Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece_\n\nby Lisa Raphals\n\n_Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition_\n\nby Dwight Fletcher Reynolds\n\n_Homer and the Sacred City_\n\nby Stephen Scully\n\n_Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the_ Odyssey\n\nby Charles Segal\n\n_The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual_\n\nby Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych\n\n_Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece_\n\nby Jesper Svenbro\n\ntranslated by Janet E. Lloyd\n\n_The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World_\n\nby Lawrence M. Wills\n_Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities\/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program_.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 1995 by Cornell University\n\nAll rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.\n\nFirst published 1995 by Cornell University Press\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nReynolds, Dwight Fletcher, b. 1956\n\nHeroic poets, poetic heroes : the ethnography of performance in an Arabic oral epic tradition \/ Dwight Fletcher Reynolds.\n\np. cm. \u2014 (Myth and poetics)\n\nIncludes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.\n\nISBN-13: 978-0-8014-3174-6 (cloth) \u2014 ISBN-13: 978-1-5017-2321-6 (pbk.)\n\n1. Ethnology\u2014Egypt\u2014Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l. 2. S\u012brat Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l. 3. Epic poetry, Arabic\u2014Egypt\u2014Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l. 4. Folklore\u2014Egypt\u2014Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l\u2014Performance. 5. Oral tradition\u2014Egypt\u2014Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l. 6. Rites and ceremonies\u2014Egypt\u2014Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l. 7. Ban\u012b Hil\u0101l (Egypt)\u2014Social life and customs. I. Title. II. Series.  \nGN648.R49 1995  \n398'.0962\u2014dc200 94-44173\n\nThe text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: <https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/4.0\/>\n\nPhoto of Shaykh T\u0101h\u0101 Ab\u016b Zayd by Dwight Fletcher Reynolds\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n**CONTE NTS**\n\n | INTRODUCTION  \n---|---  \nCHAPTER ONE | AN AMAZING EVENT  \nCHAPTER TWO | WOMEN GET THE VOTE  \nCHAPTER THREE | THE RED SUMMER  \nCHAPTER FOUR | THE RED SCARE  \nCHAPTER FIVE | STRIKES AND MORE STRIKES  \nCHAPTER SIX | A NOBLE EXPERIMENT  \n | A YEAR THAT CHANGED AMERICA  \n | FURTHER READING AND SURFING  \n | SOURCES  \n | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  \n | PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS  \n | INDEX\n**INTRO DUCTION**\n\n**THE BOOK YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ** tells the story of one of the most remarkable and important years in the history of the United States. It was 1919, and it has been called \"the year our world began.\"\n\nIn 1919, after years of struggle, women's dream of getting the vote finally came within reach after the Nineteenth Amendment was passed by both houses of Congress. It was the year the nation, still shaken by the events of World War I and haunted by the specter of the Communists having taken over Russia, suffered through the fear that the same threat to democracy was about to take place in the United States. At the same time, more racially motivated riots and lynchings occurred than at any time in the country's history. But, in what historian Cameron McWhirter has called \"the awakening of black America,\" it was also the year in which African Americans mobilized and organized in new ways to fight the systemic racism of their times and, in doing so, changed America forever by setting the stage for the civil rights movement to follow.\n\nThere was more\u2014much more. In 1919, advancing technologies changed the nature of labor and encouraged bold innovations such as when two heroic pioneer aviators, John Alcock and Arthur Brown, became the first to fly nonstop across the Atlantic, accomplishing the feat eight years before Charles Lindbergh made his historic flight. This was also the year in which more labor unrest took place than ever before, as workers sought to improve their lives along with a changing world.\n\nIt was in this same extraordinary year that the heavily favored Chicago White Sox \"threw\" the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, changing the world of sports forever; that more than 195,000 Americans died from a mysterious influenza epidemic, which would kill more people than any other illness in recorded history; and that the Great Molasses Flood, one of the most bizarre disasters in the American experience, took place.\n\nEvery year in history is, of course, important. Every year has its own events and developments that affect the lives of those living then and perhaps those of future generations. But every so often there is a year when events converge in surprising ways. And there was never anything quite like 1919.\n\nIt is a fact of history that we often don't realize how important or transformative certain events or developments are until well afterward and enough time has passed to allow us to reflect upon them. It is then that important issues gain attention and progress\u2014often not enough, but progress all the same\u2014is made.\n\nDid people back in 1919 think the issues of their times would be so relevant one hundred years later? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. But we can study these happenings to discover how they are as fascinating as they are informative, filled with triumph and tragedy, featuring some of the most essential political and social issues any society would need to cope with. Most important, they teach us that the current events holding our attention right now are always preceded by history, that every year is filled with good and bad happenings, and that learning from important events in our past leads not only to an understanding of where we are today, but also to an appreciation of how much progress is yet to be made to ensure all people can fully embrace the benefits of equal justice and democratic ideals that America has always sought to espouse and protect.\n\nThe extraordinary number of important events and developments that took place in 1919 occurred against the backdrop of World War I coming to an end. Millions of returning servicemen, like those shown here, would become participants in happenings that changed America forever.\n\nTaken from a nearby building, this photograph shows the massive damage caused by the molasses flood. The molasses tank was located in the center of the picture.\n\n  CHAPTER ONE\n\n**AS THE YEAR 1919 BEGAN,** the United States was a nation filled with a spirit of relief and hope for the future. Two months earlier, the long, tragic Great War ended and hundreds of thousands of American servicemen were at last coming home from the battlefields of Europe. Almost 53,500 of their comrades had been killed in action, more than 63,100 of them had died from disease and other causes, and some 205,000 had been wounded.\n\nThose who survived were returning to a nation different from the one they had departed, to make, in the words of their president, the world \"safe for democracy.\" When the war began in July 1914, the United States was on the verge of changing dramatically to a more modern society. Great advancements in communication, transportation, and science were about to take place. The country\u2014primarily a nation of farmers since its beginnings\u2014was moving away from the agrarian way of life and shifting toward a reliance on manufacturing and mass production as innovators like Henry Ford and George Westinghouse revolutionized industry. Now that the war was over, after some two years of intense productivity focused mainly on supporting the war effort, the people of the United States eagerly anticipated a return to normalcy, and a calm, peaceful year.\n\nThroughout the first half of 1919 with World War I recently ended, major American cities witnessed the return of millions of servicemen from the battlefields of Europe. Here, the 369th Infantry, made up mostly of African Americans, marches down New York City's Fifth Avenue.\n\nIt was not to be\u20141919 would be one of the most tumultuous and event-filled years in the nation's history. It would also be one of the most unique, and no event in American history would be more unique than what took place only fifteen days after the year began: the Great Molasses Flood.\n\nAs author Stephen Puleo has written, \"to understand the [molasses] flood is to understand America of the early twentieth century.\" He is right. Almost every major issue the United States would deal with in 1919\u2014immigration, Prohibition, women battling to gain the vote, anarchists, the relationship between business and the government and between the people and the government\u2014would be, in one way or another, part of the story of the Great Molasses Flood.\n\nThe setting for one of our strangest disasters in history was a section of Boston known as the North End. In 1919, it was the most crowded, most colorful, and most historic neighborhood in the city.\n\nIn the country's earliest years, the North End was home to the city's colonial governor, Thomas Hutchinson, and to a well-known silversmith named Paul Revere, destined to become famous for a different reason. During those revolutionary years, Boston was the springboard of the rebellion against Great Britain, and the center of activity was the North End.\n\nThe neighborhood experienced a dramatic population influx in the 1840s, when the Irish potato famine led to a great migration to America, as tens of thousands of Irish immigrants landed in Boston. By 1880, some twenty-six thousand people lived in the neighborhood, and sixteen thousand of them were Irish. There was yet another dramatic influx between 1880 and 1910, when more than four million Italians made the long, dangerous Atlantic crossing. By 1910, of the thirty thousand people dwelling in Boston's North End, more than twenty-eight thousand were Italians. Although demographic shifts were a normal part of life in America at the time, the population swell experienced by the North End made it one of the busiest and liveliest places in the nation.\n\nMost newcomers to the North End lived in crowded multistory buildings called tenements, which landlords\u2014eager to make as much money as possible\u2014had hastily erected. These structures were mixed in among buildings that dated back to the American Revolution, most notably Paul Revere's house, a dwelling that was already almost one hundred years old when Revere made it his home. The Old North Church, in whose bell tower Revere famously asked a congregant to illuminate two lanterns as a signal that the British were crossing Boston Harbor and heading toward Lexington and Concord, was as it is today, a major North End landmark.\n\nWith its bustling markets and shops, Commercial Street was not only one of the busiest places in the North End but in all of Boston. The towering structure at the end of the street was Boston's custom house.\n\nA NATION OF NEWCOMERS\n\nBy 1919, tens of millions of immigrants had poured into the United States. New York City's Mulberry Street, like Boston's North End, became home to an ever-increasing number of newcomers from Italy.\n\n**HISTORIAN OSCAR HANDLIN WROTE,** \"Once I thought to write a history of the immigrant in America . . . then I discovered that the immigrants _were_ American history.\" The greatest wave of immigration the world has ever known engulfed America between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. In that relatively short period, more than twenty-five million newcomers poured into the United States. Most of them came from Europe, to escape intolerable conditions in their homeland. In Ireland, for example, a fungus in the soil devastated the potato crop, the nation's main source of food, causing more than a million people to die of starvation, leading to almost 20 percent of that country's population to immigrate to the United States. Nations such as Russia, Poland, and Finland also experienced disastrous economic times and suffered from oppressive governments, leading many to risk the long, treacherous ocean voyage to America.\n\nPerhaps the harshest conditions of all were faced by the millions of Jewish people who lived in Eastern Europe. Victims of vicious anti-Semitism, thousands of Jews were slaughtered in massacres called pogroms. More than 2.5 million Jews fled for their lives to the United States.\n\nBut not all who came to the United States were \"pushed\" out of Europe; many were \"pulled\" to America, a country seen by many as the golden land, offering freedom and opportunity to all. European newspapers, letters from earlier immigrants, and advertisements from steamship companies were filled with accounts of tables groaning with food in a country where everyone could get rich. Not all immigrants believed that was true, but as one historian has written, \"Whenever life could hardly be worse at home, they came to believe that life was better in America.\"\n\nIn 1960, a full 75 percent of the foreign-born population residing in the United States was from Europe. In 2015, only 11.1 percent was born in Europe, contributing to the creation of a new face of America. Of the approximately 43.3 million foreign-born people who live in the United States today, 11.6 million are from Mexico; 2.4 million from India; 2.7 million from China; 2 million from the Philippines; 1.4 million from El Salvador; 1.3 million from Vietnam; 1.2 million from Cuba; and 1.1 million each from the Dominican Republic and South Korea.\n\nThis dramatic change in the roster of nations making up the new America is yet another stage in the saga of this country as a melting pot of cultures and experience. Yet one thing remains the same: Like the four million Italians who came to America in the years before World War I, tens of thousands of whom settled in Boston's North End, the latest arrivals have risked all to build new lives for themselves and their families in what is still regarded as the great land of freedom and opportunity.\n\nHands raised, men and women in Miami, Florida, take the oath of allegiance, making them citizens of the United States. Unlike earlier people who came to America primarily from Europe, most of today's immigrants come from very different places.\n\nStanding on Copp's Hill\u2014the highest point in the North End neighborhood\u2014one could look down on hectic streets where hundreds of people wended their way with pushcarts and horse-drawn wagons. One could also see the tracks and towering structure of the relatively new elevated railway, plus the busy freight yard and sheds of Boston's growing railroad system and the buildings of the paving division of the Boston Public Works Department. Toward the waterfront, one could gaze upon the firehouse of Fire Boat 31, docked in one of the busiest wharves in America.\n\nThe bustle of the North End was an arresting sight, and in the middle of it all, dwarfing almost every other building around it, stood an enormous structure that seemed completely out of place. It was a colossal storage tank owned by a private company named the United States Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA). Built four years earlier in 1915, the tank stood fifty feet high and ninety feet wide. It had giant curved sides, was set into a concrete base, and was held together with long rows of rivets.\n\nInside the tank was 2.3 million gallons of molasses, the product that had been a vital part of the slave trade of the 1600s and 1700s. The slave trade had long been outlawed, but molasses was still an important product in the early twentieth century, especially during World War I. The most efficient and effective way of making explosives was mixing molasses and water with ammonium nitrate, and there had been an enormous worldwide demand for the sticky substance. Now that the war was over, the demand for molasses for making munitions had plummeted. But something else was taking place.\n\nThe US Congress was close to enacting a law that would prohibit the manufacture, sale, and distribution of alcoholic beverages. The country was about to go \"dry,\" and that included the manufacture and sale of rum, one of whose main ingredients was molasses. Realizing that there would be only about a year between the imminent passage of the Prohibition Act and the beginning of its enforcement, USIA was determined to sell as much rum as possible before it became illegal to do so. That meant storing as much molasses as possible.\n\nOld North Church: the most famous landmark in Boston's North End. It was from this church's steeple that the lanterns were lit as a signal, sending Paul Revere off on the most famous horseback ride in history.\n\nIt also made sense to locate the giant storage tank in the North End, near the freight yards and wharves where the molasses could be poured into barrels and shipped to various distilleries. But there was a major problem that few people knew about. The tank had been built hastily and carelessly. Its construction had been overseen by an accountant, not an engineer, who did not know how to read a blueprint. He had not even taken the most basic of steps to test the construction: filling the tank with water to check for leaks. As a result, the tank leaked so badly neighborhood children gathered molasses in cans and buckets. When a concerned company worker complained of the leaks, the company addressed the problem by painting the tank brown so the leaks wouldn't be easily noticed.\n\nHad North Enders taken more time to ponder the fact that the tank was so obviously leaking, perhaps they would have shown more concern. But in January 1919, there were many other things to occupy their attention. Men, women, and children throughout the neighborhood were still celebrating their beloved Boston Red Sox, who, led by Babe Ruth, had won the World Series on October 14, 1918. Then, the very next month, the armistice ending World War I had been signed on November 11. The troops, including dozens of North End men and boys, were coming home.\n\nThe specter of Prohibition also loomed large. As in many neighborhoods throughout the nation, North Enders were divided in their support of what now seemed to be the inevitable development. Many supported the act's main goal: to eliminate the drunkenness that had become a national problem and was destroying many families. But there were probably more North Enders who could not imagine an existence without beer or wine or hard liquor, or the economic benefits of its sale.\n\nThe view from the top of Copp's Hill shows the molasses tank.\n\nThere was one other issue that no one could avoid discussing or worrying about. Starting the previous year, the worst influenza epidemic in history had struck the nation. The most devastating medical catastrophe in recorded history\u2014killing some fifty million people worldwide\u2014the disease was so infectious that by the end of the year, Boston's mayor had closed the city's schools, churches, and dance halls to keep the deadly illness from spreading. Almost every family in the North End was, in one way or another, affected by the flu. Not a family didn't fear its return.\n\nAs these larger factors dominated the thoughts and energy of the population of the North End\u2014and the rest of America\u2014the molasses tank continued to leak. As the noon hour approached on January 15, 1919, there was one thing of which every North Ender was aware. The weather that day, given the time of year and the fact that the temperature only two days earlier had been two degrees above zero, was remarkable. It was January 15 and the thermometer read 41 degrees F. There was no snow on the ground. The freight handlers in the railroad yards had shed their overcoats, and sailors from a training ship docked at the wharf carried their naval jackets as they walked along the streets.\n\nBy twelve thirty, the streets were jam-packed as people took advantage of the unusual weather. Suddenly, a deep rumble shook the earth. Workers in the freight yard were thrown off their feet. The rumble was followed by a loud roar that shook the entire neighborhood. Accompanying the roar was a sound that reminded many of the recently returned soldiers of machine-gun fire. The molasses tank had exploded. The \"machine-gun fire\" was the popping sound of hundreds of steel rivets as the structure blew apart.\n\nAs the enormous container burst, fourteen thousand tons of raw molasses poured out, moving in waves as high as thirty feet and at a speed later estimated to have been at least thirty-five miles per hour, destroying everything that stood before it.\n\nOne of the most vivid descriptions of the Great Molasses Flood would be written by the _Boston Post_. \"A rumble, a hiss\u2014some say a boom and a swish\u2014and the wave of molasses swept out,\" the newspaper proclaimed. \"It smote the huge steel girders of the [elevated railroad] structure and bent, twisted, and snapped them, as if by the smash of a giant's fist. Across the street, down the street, it rolled like a two-sided breaker at the seashore. Thirty feet high, it smashed against tenements on the edge of Copp's Hill. Swirling back it sucked a modest frame dwelling from where it nestled beside the three-story brick tenements and threw it, a mass of wreckage, under the [elevated railroad] structure.\n\n\"Then, balked by the staunch brick walls of the houses at the foot of the hill, the death-dealing mass swept back towards the water. Like eggshells it crushed the buildings of the North End yard of the city's paving division. . . . To the north it swirled and wiped out practically all of Boston's only electric freight terminal. Big steel trolley freight cars were crushed as if eggshells and their piled-up cargo of boxes and merchandise minced like so much sandwich meat.\n\nFOURTEEN THOUSAND TONS OF RAW MOLASSES POURED OUT, MOVING IN WAVES AS HIGH AS THIRTY FEET.\n\n\"Molasses, waist deep, covered the street,\" the _Post_ reporter continued, \"and swirled and bubbled above the wreckage. Here and there struggled a form\u2014whether it was an animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mess showed where any life was . . . horses died like so many flies on sticky paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings suffered likewise.\"\n\nDevastating as the destruction was, it would be the human stories and the human suffering that would best define what would become known as the Great Molasses Flood. When the gigantic wave of molasses hit, Boston Police patrolman Frank McManus was at a call box getting ready to make a routine report.\n\nThe patrolman, who often complained about the difficulty of walking the North End waterfront beat during the cold, damp, often snowy days of January, had been thrilled with the unseasonably warm weather of the past two days. What had been troubling him, however, was the increase in bomb threats the police had been receiving from anarchist groups. Many government officials believed that the anarchists were sympathetic to the Communists who had taken over the Russian government and were determined to make the United States their next target.\n\nMcManus had just begun speaking into the phone when right in front of his eyes the top of the molasses tank blew straight into the air, then fell with a roar to the ground. An enormous wave of molasses began flowing toward the elevated railroad. Right after that, a second wave appeared and headed straight for him. At first too stunned to move, he recovered in time to shout into the phone, \"Send all available rescue vehicles and personnel immediately\u2014there's a wave of molasses coming down Commercial Street!\"\n\nMeanwhile, the first wave that the patrolman had seen continued heading directly for the elevated line. At that very moment, the 12:35 train out of South Station and en route to North Station was rounding a curve near where the tank had burst open. As brakeman Royal Albert Leeman stood and looked out the train's windows, he heard a huge noise that sounded like metal tearing apart. Seconds later, he saw an enormous black mass coming at him and the train. Behind him he heard another horrendous noise as the wave of molasses hit the elevated tracks. A huge section of the rails over which Leeman's train had passed only seconds before began to buckle and fall toward the street below.\n\nThe force of the wave of molasses was tremendous. This section of the elevated train line was turned into a twisted mass of metal.\n\nQuickly, Leeman pulled the emergency brake, halting the train. Then he jumped off. He was aware that another train would soon follow his. If the next train was not stopped, it and all its passengers would fall off the elevated rails. He raced back down the unbroken section of the tracks and stood in the middle, waiting for the second train to approach. As soon as it came into sight, he began waving his arms wildly, screaming, \"Stop\u2014the track is down! The track is down!\" Just as it appeared certain that Leeman's warning had been too late, there was a tremendous shriek and the second train came to a halt.\n\nFirefighters worked for hours attempting to free colleagues who were trapped inside this firehouse. Before their work was done, they had rescued two of their companions and stonecutter John Barry.\n\nShaken to his core, Leeman sat down on the tracks, overwhelmed by his narrow escape and by the realization that he had just saved an entire train and scores of passengers. But as he looked down, he saw a wave of molasses heading directly for a house that stood in its path.\n\nInside the house, Martin Clougherty was fast asleep. He had come home after working until four a.m. at the Pen and Pencil Club, the North End bar he owned. This was to be an important day for Martin. He was planning to meet with his accountant to verify that he had made enough money in the bar to be able to purchase a nicer house for himself and his family in one of the quieter, more elegant Boston suburbs. He was preparing to close the Pen and Pencil Club once Prohibition took effect.\n\nMartin lived with his mother, Bridget; his brother, Stephen; and his sister, Teresa, who was now shaking him awake. It was time to get ready for his meeting.\n\nHe was just rolling over to get out of bed when suddenly Teresa let out a frightening scream. \"Something awful has happened to the tank!\" she shouted. Jumping out of bed, Martin pulled the curtains apart and was startled to see that the house was surrounded by dark liquid that kept rising. Telling Teresa to stay where she was, he went to aid his mother, who was yelling for help from the kitchen. He never got there.\n\nWithout warning, a wave of molasses lifted Martin's house completely off its foundation and carried it across Commercial Street, toward the elevated railway, where it crashed and splintered against the thick columns holding up the tracks. Dazed by the collision, he found himself floating in a sea of molasses so thick he could not stand up. Afraid he was going to drown, he searched desperately for something to grab on to and spotted a bed floating nearby. Still in his pajamas, he managed to climb up on it but was hardly settled when he saw a hand sticking up out of the molasses. With every ounce of energy he had left, he grabbed the hand and pulled the person attached to it up onto the bed. Amazingly, it was his sister, Teresa, and miraculously she was alive!\n\nWiping molasses from her eyes and ears, he hugged her and told her she'd be all right. \"Stay here,\" he said, \"you'll be safe on the bed. I'm going to look for Ma and Stephen.\" With that, he lowered himself into the ooze and, pushing heavy debris aside with every labored step, searched frantically for his mother and brother.\n\nWhile Martin Clougherty had been catching up on his sleep, the train yard that stood between Clougherty's house and the molasses tank had, as usual, been a beehive of activity. Twenty-year-old Walter Merrithew was at the building nearest the wharf called Number 3 freight house, helping one of the wagon drivers load goods for delivery. Nearby, a man known only as Ryan\u2014who had been born without the ability to hear or speak\u2014was stacking crates, getting them ready to be shipped out. Barrel-maker John Flynn was also working in the building and had just stepped out on the platform for a breath of air when he was startled by a tremendous noise behind him. As he turned, it seemed that everything in the freight yard\u2014horses, wagons, automobiles, railroad cars\u2014was coming right at him on a wave of molasses.\n\nOne of the autos flew right into the building and crashed through the back wall, leaving a gaping hole. The next thing Flynn knew, he had flown through the hole and was now lying in the harbor, with his feet tangled in a pile of wreckage. Somehow he was able to free himself from the debris but was now in danger of drowning. He spotted a huge bale of cotton floating close by. \"Get up on the bale!\" he heard a voice shout. It belonged to one of his fellow workers who had been able to get up on the roof of Number 3 freight house to escape the flood. It was a great suggestion, but the bale was much too big for Flynn to climb up on. He had no idea what he could do next to save himself.\n\nWalter Merrithew was not much better off. When the molasses bore down on Number 3 freight house, he heard one of the most terrifying sounds he had ever encountered. It was not coming from the tank but from coworker Ryan, who, although he could not speak, let out an enormous screech, the first sound anyone at the railroad had ever heard from him.\n\nUnlike John Flynn, Merrithew had not been carried through the building and into the harbor. Instead he was stuck, helplessly pinned against one of the walls of the building by a mound of freight cars, lumber, automobiles, and even a horse who had been caught up in the tangle of debris and molasses.\n\nOut in the railroad yard, eleven-year-old Maria DiStasio and her nine-year-old brother, Antonio, along with two young brothers, Pasquale and Vincenzo Iantosca, had been enjoying their favorite pastime: scraping molasses off the side of the tank with sticks and then licking it off. Like all their neighbors, Maria's family heated their house by burning wood, and she was gathering scraps that were lying around the yard. The men had shouted at her to leave, screaming that a railroad yard was not a safe place for children.\n\nHORSES, WAGONS, AUTOMOBILES, RAILROAD CARS WERE COMING RIGHT AT HIM ON A WAVE OF MOLASSES.\n\nBut the men's voices, loud as they were, were completely drowned out by the deafening roar of the tank tearing apart. As a wave of molasses poured out of the tank toward Antonio DiStasio, he ran faster than he had ever run in his life. But he could not outrun the wave. First it threw him against a curb. Then it picked him up and carried him toward the harbor. Although he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life, he could not help but think of his sister. Where was Maria? Could anyone save them?\n\nThe same question would soon be asked by the men who manned the North End's wooden firehouse. Their fire engine, Number 31, was unique. It was neither horse-drawn nor powered by a combustible engine. Docked at the North End waterfront, it was a fireboat, ready to spray tons of ocean water on the many fires that often took place on the wharfs that extended out into the harbor.\n\nWord of the disaster brought every available rescue agency to the scene. They were joined by private citizens determined to help in the effort.\n\nDuring lunch hour, if they were not off fighting a blaze, the men attached to the firehouse played cards. They were regularly joined by a stonecutter from the city's paving yard named John Barry, who enjoyed their company. At lunchtime on January 15, fireman George Layhe had decided not to join the game and instead had gone up to the sleeping room on the third floor to take a short nap. Fellow firefighter William Gillespie was already there, retrieving something from his locker.\n\nOne of the firemen sitting at the card table had just finished dealing a hand when that thunderous noise John Barry later described as a \"roaring surf\" filled the room. A firefighter named Driscoll jumped up from his chair, ran to the window, and saw what looked like a dark wall. But this was a very different kind of wall. It was moving, and it was moving directly toward the firehouse. \"Oh my God,\" Driscoll cried. \"Run!\"\n\nThat's just what the card players did, hoping to get out the double doors, jump on their fireboat, and steam off to safety. But they were too late. The wall of molasses crashed into the firehouse, knocking it completely off its foundation. The ceiling collapsed, and the second floor fell into the first. Most of those who had been on the first floor were trapped under debris. John Barry lay imprisoned by both a heavy beam and a water heater. George Layhe, who had gone up to the third floor, was in the most desperate situation of all, lying flat with both a large piano and a huge pool table on top of him.\n\nWithin minutes of the disaster, hundreds of rescue workers poured into the North End from everywhere in the area. Some 120 sailors from the USS _Nantucket_ , docked at the North End Wharf, raced across the pier and waded through the thick molasses, looking for survivors buried in the wreckage. Red Cross volunteers, many of them from Boston's wealthiest families, arrived in their immaculate white-and-gray uniforms, which immediately turned brown once they stepped into the deep sea of molasses.\n\nThe ordinarily bustling, noisy North End became noisier than ever, filled with the shouts of frantic rescuers and the almost continuous clanging of ambulance bells from Boston's police department, the firehouses, local hospitals, and the army and navy.\n\nIt was a grisly scene: crushed buildings; a collapsed elevated railway; smashed wagons, automobiles, and trucks; and in some ways most pathetic of all, hundreds of dead and dying horses.\n\nFire Captain Krake of Boston's Engine 7 was one of the rescuers. Tearing through wreckage near the collapsed \"El,\" he suddenly spotted a mass of yellow hair floating in a pool of molasses. Reaching down inside the sticky mess, he pulled out the body of Maria DiStasio, the young girl who had been collecting firewood in the freight yard. Her brother, Antonio, was more fortunate. The wave of molasses had deposited him in the harbor, where a fireman spotted him, stretched out a long pole, and pulled him to safety. His ordeal was still not over, however. As an ambulance raced him to a hospital, he lost consciousness, and nurses, thinking him dead on arrival, placed a sheet over him. They nearly fainted themselves when Antonio regained consciousness, sat up, and asked where he was. Later it was discovered that Pasquale Iantosca, Maria and Antonio's ten-year-old friend who had been there in the railroad yard, had drowned in the molasses. Somehow his younger brother, Vincenzo, had managed to outrun the deadly wave and survive.\n\nLike the DiStasios, the Clougherty family experienced both good fortune and bad. After bringing his sister, Teresa, to safety, Martin went off in search of his mother, Bridget, and his brother, Stephen. To his relief, he learned that sailors had rescued his brother and that he had been taken to a neighborhood hospital. But the news about his mother was very different. Led by Patrolman McManus, rescuers had dug through the splintered Clougherty house, and there, amid a pile of broken furniture and bedding, they had found the body of Bridget Clougherty. An examination would reveal that she died immediately in the collapse of the building.\n\nIn what was one of the most unique aspects of the Great Molasses Flood, two individuals who were victims in real danger of losing their own lives also became two of the most heroic rescuers. One of them was the young man known only as Ryan, who, along with Walter Merrithew, had been trapped inside the demolished Number 3 freight house. Somehow Ryan had managed to free himself from a pile of debris that had almost buried him when the molasses wave struck. But even though his deafness prevented him from hearing Merrithew crying out for help, he knew his coworker and friend was in the building and in serious trouble.\n\nActually, \"serious trouble\" may have been an understatement. Merrithew could feel the wall he was pinned against gradually giving way. Soon, he was sure, it would collapse, and still pinned by the heavy wreckage, he would be hurled into the harbor, where he would certainly drown.\n\n\"SERIOUS TROUBLE\" MAY HAVE BEEN AN UNDERSTATEMENT. MERRITHEW COULD FEEL THE WALL HE WAS PINNED AGAINST GRADUALLY GIVING WAY.\n\nJust as Merrithew was beginning to lose all hope, he was aware of movement coming toward him. Through a small opening in the debris and the molasses that pinned him, he saw Ryan working his way through heavy piles of wreckage.\n\nRyan's Herculean effort continued until he was able to remove enough wreckage for Merrithew to wiggle free. Taken to Boston City Hospital, it was determined that he had survived his near-death experience with only a bruised leg.\n\nThe other victim-turned-rescuer was William Gillespie, the fireman, who, just before the molasses wave hit his firehouse, had gone upstairs to get something out of his locker. He had just reached the third floor when he was knocked off his feet. Trying to regain his footing, he realized that the firehouse had been pushed from its foundation and was actually moving. Despite feeling terribly dizzy, he managed to find four of his fellow firefighters trapped almost out of sight under parts of the second-floor ceiling that had collapsed into the first floor. Even if he wasn't suffering from severe dizziness, Gillespie knew there was no way he could free the men from the debris by himself. He needed help and he needed it fast.\n\nSeeing that the large doors to the firehouse were totally blocked by wreckage, Gillespie made his way to a window and jumped out. Now so dizzy he could barely stand, he was about to ask the first person he encountered for help when he literally bumped into his superior, the lieutenant in charge of the firehouse. The lieutenant immediately set off an alarm. Within minutes, some twenty-five firemen arrived and, using axes and other tools, cut their way into the firehouse. It took them more than four hours to free the four men who had been trapped in debris, including John Barry, who had come close to dying of suffocation before the rescuers arrived. But the heroic firemen had been unable to save George Layhe. When they finally removed the piano and pool table that lay on top of him, it was all too clear he was dead.\n\nIt would take days to complete the rescue efforts. More bodies would be discovered; more rescues would be accomplished. Five of the six workers who had been eating lunch in one of the sheds in the North End Paving Yard would be found dead. The sixth man, Samuel Blair, who had been carried out of the shed by the molasses wave, had ended up on the beach close to North End Park. Covered with so much molasses that he was unrecognizable, he was discovered by six sailors who got him to a hospital, where he survived. John Flynn, the barrel-maker who had been blown clear through Number 3 freight house into the harbor, was also one of the lucky ones. Close to freezing to death in the frigid water, he was hauled out by a man in a small boat who happened to notice him.\n\nMOLASSES\n\n**BY THE TIME THE USIA** built its mammoth tank in Boston's North End, molasses had become one of the most important products in the history of the United States. Produced by boiling juice extracted from sugarcane, it has long been used in making rum, as a major ingredient in making explosives, and as a sweetener.\n\nDuring the time before the Revolution, the American colonies received molasses, which was produced in the Caribbean islands, and then distilled it into rum. The rum was then taken by ship to the west coast of Africa, where, as part of the infamous triangle trade, it was traded for slaves.\n\nAmerican colonists used molasses not only to produce rum but to make beer as well. In New England it was used to make baked beans, brown bread, and pumpkin pie. In the German-speaking communities in Pennsylvania, it was essential for a spiced baked apple dish called pandowdy. And in the Carolina colony, where molasses was called \"long sugar,\" it served as a substitute for sugar. According to most estimates, by the mid-1770s, the average American colonist consumed more than three quarts of molasses a year\u2014making it an irreplaceable part of the colonial economy. It was to become a key factor in the American Revolution.\n\nIn March 1733, as the British government attempted to bring its American colonies under stricter control, the English parliament passed the Molasses Act, aiming to force the colonies to buy molasses only from plantation owners in the British West Indies by imposing a tax of six pence per gallon on imports of molasses from non-British colonies.\n\nThe passage of the Molasses Act so infuriated the American colonists that for the first time the phrase \"no taxation without representation\" became a rallying cry. Later, in 1764, as tensions between Great Britain and the American colonists increased to an even greater degree, the English parliament passed the Sugar Act. The Sugar Act actually reduced the Molasses Act tax by half, but this time the British government intended to strongly enforce the new measure. The result was bold, widespread resistance by the colonists, a protest that could well be regarded as a prelude to revolution. No wonder that patriot leader and future American president John Adams would, in later years, write to a friend, \"I know not why we should blush to confess that Molasses was an essential Ingredient in American independence. Many great Events have proceeded from much smaller causes.\"\n\nIn the decades following the War for Independence, up to the North End's molasses tank disaster, molasses never lost its importance in American life, first in its prime role in the trading of human cargo that led to the establishment of slavery in the United States and then as a key ingredient in the millions of tons of explosives that were used in World War I. What no one could have predicted was that, in 1919, the rush to store as much molasses as possible before the manufacture of rum became illegal would lead to one of the strangest disasters in history.\n\nSlaves on a plantation in the West Indies boil down sugarcane, which will result in sugar and its important by-product molasses.\n\nThe size and weight of the sections of the molasses tank trapped many victims and caused tremendous damage. Here a welder cuts through a section of the destroyed tank so that he can search for survivors.\n\nEven while rescuers were still searching through collapsed buildings for possible survivors, one huge question was on everyone's mind. What caused such death and destruction? Among those seeking answers was the city's new mayor, Andrew Peters. Standing ankle-deep in molasses and surrounded by reporters, he declared, \"Boston is appalled at the terrible accident . . . an occurrence of this kind must not and cannot pass without a rigid investigation to determine the cause of the explosion\u2014not only to prevent a recurrence of such a frightful accident\u2014but also to place the responsibility where it belongs.\"\n\nMany investigations were launched to determine the cause of the flood. Experts in explosives and engineering would determine that the tons of molasses in the tank had fermented and produced a gas. That, plus the structural weakness of the tank, had caused the structure to explode.\n\nStudies done years later using modern technology have confirmed that the Great Molasses Flood was caused by the outrageously shoddy construction of a tank required to hold 2.5 million gallons of heavy, sticky liquid. Any tank built to safely contain that load would have needed to be an engineering marvel of its time. But USIA's tank was an engineering disgrace. Its walls were too thin and were made of a type of steel much too brittle to hold so much molasses. Stated simply, USIA had built an enormous tank as quickly and as inexpensively as possible without conducting inspections and safety tests, then hoped it would all work out.\n\nUnsurprisingly USIA did not agree with these findings. Time and again, the company's lawyer argued that the molasses tank had been structurally sound and that there was no doubt in his mind that it had been blown up by anarchists, individuals who were opposed to any form of government and who often rebelled against authority. He was suggesting that the tank had been deliberately destroyed by anarchists, foreigners who were probably part of a Russian-inspired Communist plot to raise havoc in the United States. It was USIA's attempt to avoid taking blame for the disaster, but the notion of a Communist plot against the United States was one that would become a huge and serious issue in the country in 1919.\n\nDespite the USIA's denials, it was now up to the legal system to review the investigations into the disaster. As the time for the trial approached, the Massachusetts Superior Court appointed one of Boston's most distinguished citizens, Colonel Hugh Ogden, to serve as the auditor who would read the investigators' reports, hear evidence from witnesses, and issue a final verdict as to whether USIA or any other company or individuals were to be charged with a crime.\n\nEarly on, Ogden ruled that what he termed \"the factor of safety\" in both the tank's construction and its inspection had been almost nonexistent and those elements had caused the disaster. Despite this decision, Ogden also decreed that no criminal charges would be brought against the USIA or any individuals. However, he also ruled that victims of the flood could sue USIA to receive monetary compensation for the losses they suffered.\n\nNO CRIMINAL CHARGES WOULD BE BROUGHT AGAINST THE USIA.\n\nWhat followed was the longest trial in the history of the Massachusetts courts, a trial almost as unique as the catastrophe that had caused it. Over 125 individuals and companies filed lawsuits against USIA. It took five years to hear the testimony of some one thousand experts and witnesses. One expert, an authority on how much structural strain a steel tank could bear before breaking apart, was on the witness stand for more than three weeks. So many lawyers were involved that they all couldn't fit in the courtroom, and Ogden finally ruled that two were to be chosen to represent all the rest.\n\nBefore the trial was finally over, some 45,000 pages of testimony and arguments were recorded. As for USIA, it maintained that the tank had not come apart because of any negligence on its part, but rather was destroyed by villainous Communists.\n\nNeither Ogden nor any of his advisors placed any credence in USIA's arguments. Instead, when he finally issued his verdict, Ogden stuck to his \"factor of safety\" ruling and ordered USIA to pay the Boston Elevated Railroad Company a large sum (the amount of which was kept secret) for the damage the molasses flood caused and to pay about $90,000 in today's money to each family victimized by the flood.\n\nTHE TRAGEDY . . . LED MASSACHUSETTS TO ADOPT THE MOST STRINGENT REGULATIONS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF BUILDINGS.\n\nThe lessons learned from the Great Molasses Flood would last long after it had taken place. Some believed the blame fell squarely on the citizens of Boston for continually failing to vote enough funds for the city's building department to adequately carry out its responsibility of making certain that every building and structure in the city was structurally sound and safe. In the years immediately following the flood, Boston's citizens, most of whom were determined that such a tragedy never take place again, voted overwhelmingly to increase the budget of the city's building department substantially.\n\nThe molasses wave caused destruction that turned Commercial Street into what resembled a battle zone. The mass of debris in the center of the picture was all that was left of what had been the Clougherty house.\n\nThe tragedy and long hearings that followed led Massachusetts to adopt the most stringent regulations for the construction of buildings and other types of structures ever enacted, which would serve as a model for other states throughout the nation. For the first time, states would be forced to require that engineers and architects inspect and approve all plans for major construction projects and that proper state and local authorities inspect and approve those projects once completed.\n\nThe verdict handed down by Hugh Ogden also had a major and lasting impact on the public's relationship with big business. For the first time in the nation's history, a corporation was made to pay for its negligence, such as USIA had demonstrated in causing death and destruction by failing to construct its molasses tank in a safe and proper manner.\n\nThe lessons learned from the Great Molasses Flood give it an importance that goes well beyond its mark as a strange beginning to one of the most momentous years in the nation's history.\n\n_A Year of Turmoil and Triumph_\n\n_Nearly every month in 1919 included events that would resonate beyond that one year, bringing changes that echo into our own time._\n\nJANUARY 16 | The Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, authorizing Prohibition, is ratified.  \n---|---  \nFEBRUARY 6 | The Seattle General Strike begins.  \nFEBRUARY 11 | The Seattle General Strike ends when federal troops are summoned by the mayor of Seattle and the state's attorney general.  \nMARCH | The Red Scare begins when Vladimir Lenin starts a revolution in Russia that changes the Russian government to Communism.  \nMARCH 5 | A. Mitchell Palmer becomes attorney general of the United States.  \nAPRIL 30 | Several bombs are intercepted in the first wave of the 1919 anarchist bombings in the United States.  \nMAY 8 | A US Navy seaplane begins the first transatlantic flight, making stops in Newfoundland and the Azores before touching ground in continental Europe in Lisbon, Portugal, on May 27.  \nMAY 10 | The first race riot of what will become known as the Red Summer takes place in Charleston, South Carolina. Before the summer is over, twenty-six riots take place, most notably in Chicago; Washington, DC; and Elaine, Arkansas.  \nJUNE 2 | In seven US cities, anarchists send mail bombs to prominent figures. All the bombs explode within approximately ninety minutes of one another, rocking some of the biggest urban areas in America, including New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia.  \n---|---  \nJUNE 4 | The US Congress approves the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which would guarantee suffrage to women, and sends it to all the states for ratification.  \nJUNE 14\u201315 | John Alcock and Arthur Brown become the first to fly nonstop across the Atlantic.  \nJULY 27 | The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 begins.  \nSEPTEMBER 21 | The Steel Strike of 1919 begins.  \nOCTOBER 1 | The Elaine Race Riot breaks out in Arkansas.  \nOCTOBER 9 | The Black Sox Scandal begins.  \nOCTOBER 28 | The US Congress passes the Volstead Act and Prohibition begins.  \nNOVEMBER 7 | The first Palmer raids are carried out in twenty-three American cities.  \nDECEMBER 21 | The United States deports 249 people that it has accused of being anarchists.\n\nSuffragists picket the White House. Of all the strategies used by women in their long battle for the vote, picketing the Executive Mansion proved to be one of the most effective tactics.\n\n  CHAPTER TWO\n\n**OF ALL THE DEVELOPMENTS** and events that made 1919 the year that changed America, none was more important than the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment by the US Congress, setting the stage for women to gain the right to vote.\n\nIt had been a long and difficult journey. In the years when women first began campaigning for the ballot, a married woman had no identity separate from her husband. Her role, pure and simple, was to obey him and make his life easier. The man was the head of the household, and his wife, along with everything she possessed, was his property. If a woman suddenly came into an inheritance, it immediately became her husband's property. The inequalities were so great that if a man chose to put his children up for adoption, his wife was legally defenseless to object.\n\nAll women, married or single, lacked most of the rights that men could claim as their birthright. Women were denied access to many occupations. They were prevented from even applying to many colleges and universities. They could not serve as clergy in many churches. Most unjust of all, they could not have a voice in deciding their futures by casting a vote in a federal election.\n\nThere are two important things about women's struggle to gain the ballot that are not generally known. One is that the battle was waged for more than seventy years. The beginning of this struggle can be traced to the famous Seneca Falls Convention, which was held from July 19 to July 20, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York. Advertised as \"a convention to discuss the civil and religious condition and rights of women,\" it was organized by women Quakers along with pioneering women's rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.\n\nThe convention consisted of six sessions, including several discussions of the role of women in society. Although it was not on the agenda, a heated debate erupted on women's right to vote and whether a resolution demanding that right should be drafted and sent to the US Congress. Many of the women thought the subject too controversial to be dealt with, but African American leader Frederick Douglass, the only African American present at the convention, argued heatedly and eloquently for its inclusion, and a suffrage (meaning the right to vote) resolution was written.\n\nAnother vital early development in women's long road to the ballot took place in 1851, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton met antislavery and women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony. Together, the two women founded several African American and women's rights organizations, culminating in 1869 with the creation of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), with Anthony as its main driving force. In 1890, NWSA merged with the American Woman Suffrage Association, thereby creating the powerful National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).\n\nREINTRODUCED IN 1914, IN 1915, IN 1918, AND IN FEBRUARY 1919, THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT WAS VOTED DOWN EACH TIME.\n\nBy traveling almost endlessly on behalf of women's suffrage, delivering as many as one hundred speeches a year, and working in many state campaigns, Susan B. Anthony became the best known of all the early suffragists. In 1878, she and Stanton arranged for Senator Aaron A. Sargent to present Congress with a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. Appropriately, it was called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. The history of the proposed amendment in Congress would be indicative of how difficult it would be to get it passed into law. Proposed in 1848, it was rejected in 1887. Reintroduced in 1914, in 1915, in 1918, and in February 1919, it was voted down each time.\n\nThe second important factor about women's struggle to gain the vote is that it was first won in an area of the country that, in the middle of the 1800s, was regarded by many as \"no place for a woman\"\u2014the West. Despite the enormous struggles women in the East would have in gaining the ballot, women in the West were so successful in campaigning for the vote that by the time a national women's suffrage law was passed, fourteen western states had already granted women the right to vote.\n\nElizabeth Cady Stanton (seated) and Susan B. Anthony. Early champions of a variety of women's causes, the two seemingly tireless leaders served as role models for generations of women to come.\n\nWhy did women in the West win the vote so far in advance of those in the rest of the nation? One of the reasons is that women played a much larger role in whites settling in the American West than the history books have led us to believe. As journalist Tracy Thomas has written, \"In pop culture, the American West belongs to rugged cowboys and macho gunslingers. Left out of those depictions are the women . . . who also made homes on the range. Far from just the wives, mothers, daughters . . . of frontiersmen as portrayed in books and films, women arrived in the West, single or with their families, for the same reasons men did\u2014for adventure, for livelihood or to escape the oppressive social mores that dominated the eastern United States.\"\n\nAs men worked side by side with women to build new lives in a new land, men respected the courage and determination of these women, and most had no doubts about women's ability to cast their ballots wisely and responsibly.\n\nIn the drawing titled _The Awakening_ , a torch-bearing woman, symbolizing the successful campaign in the West to give females the right to vote, beckons to vote-seeking women in the rest of the country, urging them to join in the campaign to gain the ballot.\n\nLeft out of these depictions in the history books, though, are the many Native Americans who were losing land and rights just as settler women were gaining them. Native American men and women were both largely excluded from voting in settlers' elections because settlers didn't recognize them as citizens.\n\nWinning the vote for settler women in the West was one thing; winning it for women in the rest of the nation was something else again. Leaders in the tradition of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton emerged to head what, at many times, seemed an unwinnable fight, and involvement of women of all stripes, across the country, continued to grow.\n\nA significant number of these women were African American, and, beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, some of them, in various sections of the country, began to form women's clubs that included suffrage as one of their main agendas. Many African American women joined these widespread clubs and participated in what amounted to a grassroots campaign to gain the vote.\n\nUnfortunately, not all these clubs and those who belonged to them were in favor of granting the vote to _all_ women. In the American South, racism was so strong that many women who worked hard to gain women the ballot were campaigning for white women only and were convinced that black women should be denied the vote. In recent times, legendary suffragist pioneers Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Carrie Chapman Catt have come under criticism for what journalist Evette Dionne has called, \"Their failure to check what many perceive as their racism . . .\"\n\nThese special challenges served to make African American women leaders more determined than ever to pursue their cause. In 1896 a major development took place at the national level when, led by one of the most effective of all black women leaders, Mary Church Terrell, the National Federation of African American Women merged with the National League of Colored Women to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) with Terrell as president. The NACW, along with its publication _Woman's Era_ , the first periodical published in the United States by black women, became a powerful force in the fight for the ballot.\n\nJust as the clubs and other groups of African American women who campaigned for the vote represented a grassroots movement, so too would hundreds of thousands of other women who would come together to battle for the vote. Many of these women were already involved in the temperance movement\u2014the campaign to rid the nation of intoxicating liquor\u2014which would also culminate in 1919. Many were aware that in applying the tactics they used in both campaigns, including civil disobedience, they were acting in the tradition of those women before them who had been abolitionists and who had played a major part in the abolishment of slavery.\n\nMary Church Terrell was a true trailblazer for women's rights. She was one of the first African American women to earn a college degree and was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.\n\nOn November 12, 1912, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) held its annual convention in Philadelphia. Although both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were deceased, other leaders were ready to step forward.\n\nOne of them was a twenty-eight-year-old Quaker from New Jersey named Alice Paul, who had just returned from England where she had worked closely with several of the most militant leaders of the British suffrage movement. Paul arrived at the NAWSA convention filled with ideas for how to make the American suffrage movement more effective. At the top of her list was staging a suffrage parade in Washington at the same time as the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson, a move she was sure would guarantee huge attention from the press. NAWSA officials wholeheartedly endorsed Paul's idea and named her Chairman of the Congressional Committee.\n\nAlice Paul dedicated her life to the single cause of securing equal rights for women. Few females had as great an impact on American history as she did.\n\nPaul's idea for a Washington march came at the most propitious of times. The suffrage movement, while having made great progress at the state level, badly needed a dramatic happening at the national level if it was to succeed. Actually, the march would not be the first suffrage parade. That event had taken place in February 1908, when a small group of twenty-three women had marched up Broadway in New York to a meeting hall. Several months later, three hundred suffragists in Oakland, California, marched to a state political convention demanding the right to vote. The largest suffrage parade took place in New York City in November 1912, when some twenty thousand women participated. Alice Paul's Woman Suffrage Parade, however, would be the first national effort calling for a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote.\n\nImmediately after 1913 began, Paul began raising money to finance the parade. As one of the many workers she recruited observed, it was very difficult to refuse Alice Paul, and by the beginning of March, enough money had been raised for a major parade with floats, tableaus, banners, speakers, and a twenty-page official program.\n\nFrom its New York headquarters, NAWSA launched a large campaign, urging suffrage groups from everywhere to gather in Washington and take part in the parade that was to take place on March 3, 1913. Under the title \"Why You Must March,\" the organization's newsletter explained, in two sentences, why participation in the parade was so important. \"Because,\" the publication stated, \"this is the most conspicuous and important demonstration that has ever been attempted by suffragists in this country. Because this parade will be taken to indicate the importance of the suffrage movement by the press of the country and the thousands of spectators from all over the United States gathered in Washington for the Inauguration.\"\n\nTHE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT . . . BADLY NEEDED A DRAMATIC HAPPENING AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL.\n\nCommenting on why the date March 3 was chosen for the parade and how she and her recruits had made it happen, Alice Paul later stated, \"That was the only day you could have if you were trying to impress the new President. The marchers came from all over the country at their own expense. We just sent letters everywhere, to every name we could find. And then we had a hospitality committee headed by Mrs. Harvey Wiley, the wife of the man who put through the first pure-food law in America. Mrs. Wiley canvassed all her friends in Washington and came up with a tremendous list of people who were willing to entertain the visiting marchers for a day or two. I mention these names to show what a wonderful group of people we had . . .\"\n\nOf all the groups from all the different states who made the trek to Washington for the march, one of the most interesting stories came out of the journey that began with sixteen women from New York who called themselves \"suffrage pilgrims.\" These sixteen dedicated souls were determined to walk all the way from New York to the nation's capital, and that is exactly what they did, picking up many other hikers along the way. One of their main reasons for choosing to walk to the parade site was their belief that it would capture considerable publicity for the suffragists' cause. And it did. \"No propaganda work undertaken by the State Association and Party has ever achieved such publicity,\" bragged the New York State Woman Suffrage Association's official journal. Most of the stories written about the hike were about one of the participants, Elizabeth Freeman, who made the journey while driving a yellow horse-drawn wagon toting prosuffrage literature and decorated with Votes for Women signs and symbols.\n\nTHOSE OPPOSED\n\nMany of those opposed to women voting were as vehement in their beliefs as the suffragists were in theirs. Here, men standing in front of the national headquarters of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage read the organization's latest bulletins posted in the headquarters' front window.\n\n**GIVEN HOW HEATED** and how controversial women's battle for the right to vote was, it was not surprising that it was accompanied by impassioned opposition from men who felt threatened by the prospect of sharing the vote with women. What surprises many of us today is the fact that so many women were opposed to women gaining the ballot.\n\nThe first instance of organized resistance to the suffragist movement took place in 1871 when _Godey's Lady's Book_ published a petition to the US Congress opposing votes for women. Between that petition and the early 1900s, there were a significant number of antisuffrage movements and activities in many states, but the first national organization to challenge women's right to the ballot was the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS), which was formed in 1911. By 1916 that organization had grown to a membership of more than 350,000.\n\nOne of the most common arguments espoused by the antisuffrage forces was that women were not emotionally strong enough to handle the responsibility of voting and were thus incapable of making sound political decisions. Some antisuffrage newspapers actually warned that many women, when faced with making a voting decision, would actually faint in the voting booth.\n\nAnother popular antisuffrage argument stated that giving women the right to vote would threaten the family structure. Presenting them with public duties, those opponents stated, would prevent women from carrying out their all-important responsibilities in the home. African American leader Booker T. Washington shared this view, opposing suffrage on the grounds that giving women the vote would undermine their moral and domestic influence.\n\nThere were many other arguments as well. Popular opinion held that if women were allowed to enter the political arena by being given the vote, they would be corrupted by the process, would lose the respect of men, and chivalry would die out. That notion was often accompanied by the argument that women didn't need the vote at all, since their interests were perfectly safe in the hands of men.\n\nAlthough many of these antisuffrage sentiments may seem ludicrous to us today, they were taken seriously by those who felt threatened by the prospect of women attaining the ballot. Yet, as historian Edwin Rozwenc wrote, \"It does stagger the imagination to realize that there were those who claimed that [if] women got the vote and thus became involved in politics, they would stop marrying and having children and the human race would become extinct.\"\n\nThe New York group also carried a letter to deliver to new president Woodrow Wilson as they passed through Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. The letter expressed the hope that women's right to vote would be passed during Wilson's presidency. In an extremely bold statement, it also warned that the women of the United States \"will watch your administration with an intense interest such as has never before been focused on any of your predecessors.\" The group also requested \"an audience for not more than two minutes in Washington as soon after your arrival as possible.\"\n\nBy the night of March 2, because of both President Wilson's inauguration on the fourth and the suffragist parade the next day, hundreds of thousands of people had gathered in the nation's capital. Some of NAWSA's officials began to worry that the Washington police had badly underestimated how many people would be lining the city's streets the next day, watching the parade. There was real concern, particularly among Alice Paul's committee members, that the police would not be able to practice adequate crowd control. Determined to take every precaution possible, one of the committee members, whose brother-in-law was Henry A. Stinson, the secretary of war, went to see him and elicit a promise that if the suffragists encountered any trouble during the march, he would send over the cavalry from nearby Fort Myer. It would prove to be a wise move.\n\nOn Monday, March 3, 1913, attorney Inez Milholland Boissevain, sporting a white cape and perched atop a white horse, led the women's suffrage parade down Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue. Behind her followed nine bands, four mounted brigades, more than twenty floats, and more than five thousand marchers. Paul and Lucy Burns, a key suffragist who had worked alongside Paul, encouraged women to wear white dresses adorned with colorful sashes. Many also carried banners explaining why the women were marching.\n\nFrom the very beginning of the suffragist movement, marches staged to call attention to the cause were one of the most effective tactics used. Intent on gaining as much attention as possible, the marchers often included young children in their parades.\n\nThe line of marchers had been carefully organized. First came a huge delegation of women from countries that had already granted women the right to vote. Then came those whom Paul's committee had labeled \"pioneers\"\u2014women who had battled for decades to gain the ballot. Following them came long sections honoring working women. They were grouped by occupation and wore identifying clothing\u2014doctors, nurses, farmers, pharmacists, housemakers, actresses, librarians, college students in academic gowns. Then came the state delegations, which, for fear of upsetting the white majority, did not include African American members. The National Association of Colored Women was forced to march separately at the rear of the parade, followed only by a section of men who supported the cause. Some members of the NACW refused to participate under this discriminatory arrangement, but leader Mary Church Terrell felt that their presence would prevent white suffragists from leaving African American women out of the amendment entirely.\n\nFor the first few blocks, the march went well, but then many of the men in the crowds that lined the parade route began surging into the streets, attempting to block the marchers' progress, all the while hurling insults and indecent remarks at the women. Soon it got even worse. Many of the marchers were grabbed, shoved, and knocked down while the Washington police stood by and did nothing. Some of the policemen, rather than helping women who had been assaulted, shouted at them that they should have stayed home where they belonged.\n\nPUBLIC OUTRAGE OVER THE ABUSE THE WOMEN TOOK DURING THEIR MARCH GAINED THEM TREMENDOUS SUPPORT.\n\nFinally, Secretary Stinson was contacted and made good on his word by quickly dispatching troops to clear the parade route. But not before over one hundred marchers had to be taken to Washington's Emergency Hospital.\n\nTo their enormous credit, despite the terrible ordeal they were put through, most of the marchers completed the route. And for reasons far different than Alice Paul or her committee could have imagined, the parade advanced the cause of the suffragists enormously. Public outrage over the abuse the women took during their march gained them tremendous support. \"Parade Struggles to Victory Despite Disgraceful Scenes; Nation Aroused by Open Insults to Women\u2014Cause Wins Popular Sympathy,\" declared _The Woman's Journal_.\n\nNow that they had the attention and the sympathy of the nation, the suffrage movement couldn't afford to lose any momentum. In 1913, Alice Paul, with the invaluable aid of fellow suffragist Lucy Burns, formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. Three years later they founded the National Woman's Party (NWP), an organization destined to become the most effective of all the women's groups committed to doing whatever was necessary to gain the vote.\n\nIn order to come up with the most effective tactics it could employ in pursuing its goals, the NWP adopted strategies used successfully by a number of sources, including American labor organizations, temperance and antislavery movements, and British suffrage campaigns. Specific tactics included motorcades, parades, banners, billboards, transcontinental automobile trips, and speaking tours\u2014all designed to educate the public about why women deserved the vote. One of the NWP's main strategies was that of lobbying\u2014exerting pressure on national and state office holders to change laws that were discriminatory toward women and to vote for laws that would lead women to the ballot box.\n\nThe NWP's lobbying efforts also included petitioning, which involved gathering as many signatures as possible in support of resolutions favorable to women's attaining the vote and presenting these signatures to members of Congress to demonstrate that the public was in support of the suffragists' cause. In order to identify which congressional officials were most likely to respond positively to their petitions, suffragist leaders created a congressional card index, which contained information about every member of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The cards indicated how the person was likely to vote on certain issues, what his basic values were, and what past indications he had given about his feelings toward women attaining the vote. Long after the suffragists' goals had been met, many of them credited the index cards with having helped them immeasurably in convincing certain congressmen to support their cause.\n\nYet another common suffragist strategy was the presentation of pageants, which the dictionary defines as \"an elaborate public dramatic presentation that usually depicts a historical or traditional event.\" Pageants were extremely popular in the early 1900s and commonly drew huge audiences. Suffragist leaders hired Hazel MacKaye, the best-known pageant designer and producer in the country, to create four pageants for them, believing along with Mrs. MacKaye that nothing was better than pageants \"for the purpose of propaganda,\" specifically for converting followers, raising money, and lifting the morale of suffragist workers.\n\nThese were all effective tactics and without question advanced the cause of the suffragists in their campaign to win the ballot. But it would be two strategies in particular that Alice Paul made central to the NWP's agenda, which made the campaign so powerful and ultimately so successful. One was the manner in which Paul and the other leaders shifted attention away from state-level voting rights toward a constitutional amendment granting women the national right to vote. The other was the militancy the suffragists injected into their campaign. And by 1917, Alice Paul was ready to take this militancy to a new level.\n\nPaul was aware of the building sympathy for the suffragists' cause garnered by the Washington parade and other NWP tactics and that as a result, the goal of achieving the vote was closer than ever before. But she also knew that a final dramatic development was needed if that goal was to become a reality: gaining the support of President Woodrow Wilson for the passage of a constitutional amendment.\n\nBased on past experience, Paul knew all too well that this would be difficult. Shortly after the Washington parade and Wilson's inauguration, Paul arranged a meeting with the new president. \"Four of us went to see him,\" Paul later wrote. \"And the President, of course, was polite and as much of a gentleman as he always was. He told of his own support, when he had been governor of New Jersey, of a state referendum on suffrage, which had failed. He said that he thought this was the way suffrage should come, through state referendums, not through Congress. That's all we accomplished. We said we were going to try and get it through Congress, that we would like to have his help and needed his support very much. And then we sent him another delegation and another and another and another and another and another and another\u2014every type of women's group we could get. We did this until 1917, when the war started and the President said he couldn't see any more delegations.\"\n\nPresident Wilson's reluctance to lend suffragist leaders his support caused them to take a new look at what they needed to do. \"We can't organize bigger and more influential deputations,\" stated Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughter of suffrage pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. \"We can't organize bigger processions. . . . We have got to take a new departure.\"\n\nThe \"departure\" that Blatch, other suffragist leaders, and particularly Alice Paul came up with was picketing, a tactic that Blatch and Paul had seen used effectively when they had aided British suffragists. The new plan involved not simply picketing, but picketing in front of the White House in demonstrations aimed directly at President Woodrow Wilson.\n\nAnxious to gain the support of Congress and of President Woodrow Wilson, suffragists staged a number of their parades in Washington, DC. Almost all these parades were led by both flag bearers and women on horseback.\n\nIt was a bold, even radical strategy. No one had ever dared to picket the White House. No protest group had ever challenged an American president so defiantly. But Paul was more convinced than ever that only the president had enough power and influence to move the Susan B. Anthony Amendment out of the congressional committee where it had remained unacted upon since 1876.\n\nPaul's plan involved having a continual lineup of women stand directly in front of the White House, holding placards containing messages demanding the vote\u2014for President Wilson to see. Paul stated, \"We said we would have a perpetual delegation right in front of the White House, so he wouldn't forget.\"\n\nThe suffragists' picketing of the White House began on January 11, 1917. The picketers, whom the suffragists proudly regarded as \"silent sentinels,\" remained at their posts through snow, rain, sleet, and all other types of adverse weather. More than a thousand women journeyed from thirty states to take their turn on the picket line. Special days were set aside for suffragists who represented specific states, organizations, occupations, or schools.\n\nMORE THAN A THOUSAND WOMEN JOURNEYED FROM THIRTY STATES TO TAKE THEIR TURN ON THE PICKET LINE.\n\nFor hours on end, the women held up their placards with messages such as, \"Mr. Wilson: You Promise Democracy For the World and Half the Population of the United States Cannot Vote, America is Not a Democracy,\" or \"Mr. President, What Will You Do For Woman's Suffrage?\"\n\nThe women who picketed were committed to the cause and proud of what they were doing. But it was far from easy. Later, many would remember how as they held up their placards, the \"sockets of their arms ache[d] from the strain.\" One suffragist spoke for many when she later explained how tedious the long hours on the picket line often were. \"Anything but standing at the President's gate would be more diverting,\" she wrote while also commenting on how she and many of the other \"silent sentinels\" spent much of their time while picketing wondering \"when will that woman come to relieve me?\"\n\nThe women who picketed the White House came from every state of the nation. Each had been specially trained to endure the verbal abuse that their leaders knew they were bound to experience from those opposed to their cause.\n\nUnfortunately, it was more than tedium the picketers had to worry about. The suffragists grew accustomed to opposition to their goals and tactics from both men and women, but soon crowds gathered to oppose women picketing the White House. Suffragist Inez Haynes Irwin wrote about this special and frightening ordeal, describing the \"slow growth of the crowds; the circle of little boys who gathered about . . . first, spitting at them, calling them names, making personal comments; then the gathering of gangs of young hoodlums who encourage the boys to further insults . . . Sometimes the crowd would edge nearer and nearer, until there was but a foot of smothering, terror-fraught space between them and the pickets.\"\n\nDespite the abuse, the White House picketing went on relentlessly. In the first weeks of the demonstrations, Woodrow Wilson actually nodded and tipped his hat to the women as his chauffeur drove him through the White House gates on his way to play golf. But as the picketing showed no signs of stopping and as the messages on the placards grew more militant, the president became increasingly irritated.\n\nAs the campaign for the vote grew more intense, suffragists became increasingly open in their criticism of President Woodrow Wilson for not supporting their cause.\n\nFinally, he could no longer stand the personal demonstrations against him. He ordered that the picketers be arrested for blocking traffic. More than sixty of the suffragists, most of them middle-aged or older, chose to go to jail rather than pay a fine. Most of the women who were imprisoned came from sheltered, privileged backgrounds. Under any circumstances, being in jail would have been a shock. But conditions in the two prisons into which the women were placed were deplorable. Cells were filthy, bedding was unwashed, the food often contained worms and insects. To emphasize the fact that suffragists were to be regarded as common criminals, the wardens at the two facilities put them in the same cells with women who had been convicted of committing serious crimes.\n\nBeginning in the fall of 1917, after more picketers had chosen jail over fines, the imprisoned women, led by Paul and Burns, began a campaign of passive resistance, refusing to do the sweatshop sewing and other manual labor they had been forced to do while in prison. Then, again led by Paul and Burns, they went on a hunger strike, a strategy designed to attract public attention to what the denial of women's right to vote had led to. Although the women paid a huge price, the hunger strike and the treatment the women received during the action became national news, particularly the stories of how Alice Paul came close to being placed in a hospital for mentally disturbed patients and how, still refusing to eat, she was force-fed through a tube.\n\nTHE WOMEN WERE BEATEN AND THEN THROWN BODILY INTO CELLS, WHERE THEY WERE BEATEN AGAIN.\n\nThe horrendous situation in the jails reached a peak in November 1917, in what became known as the \"Night of Terror.\" Frustrated at his inability to weaken the resolve of his suffragist prisoners, Raymond Whittaker, the superintendent of one of the prisons, threatened that he would get them to stop picketing even if it cost some of them their lives. On November 15, 1917, he ordered the use of force against a group of picketers who had just become imprisoned. The women were beaten and then thrown bodily into cells, where they were beaten again.\n\nHere picketers display a sign highly critical of the president while copies of his speech burn in what became known as a \"suffragette bonfire.\"\n\nThese events were seized upon by the press, and their vivid accounts of what had taken place shocked the country and led to a public outcry for the suffragists. Bowing to the pressure, President Wilson ordered their release.\n\nWhen the prisoners were released, the NWP staged a huge mass meeting in Washington, DC, to honor the women who had served time in jail. As a badge of honor, formerly imprisoned suffragists were given a \"Jailed for Freedom\" pin. But as the picketing continued at the White House and was initiated in front of the congressional office building and at the US Capitol, more arrests were made.\n\nIn January 1919, with public sentiment now stronger than ever in support of women's right to the ballot, the NWP stepped up the pressure by introducing a new tactic it named \"Watchfires of Freedom.\" Large kettles were set up outside the White House and in nearby Lafayette Park. The kettles were then filled with copies of President Wilson's speeches and were kept burning day and night.\n\nTHE DOUBLY DISENFRANCHISED\n\n**AT THE SAME TIME** women were uniting in great numbers to gain the vote, a huge segment of them were facing another challenge, one that history books have often overlooked.\n\nFor black activists like Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, and many others, it was impossible to separate one's status as a woman from one's status as an African American. Although African American men were granted the right to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified after the Civil War in 1870, many states passed laws that prevented black men from exercising their right to cast a ballot. African American women faced an even tougher road to equality. They were doubly disenfranchised by their race and their sex.\n\nFocused so intently on gaining long-denied rights and opportunities for their gender, most white suffragists were unwilling to confront their own acceptance of white supremacy. They excluded African American women from their efforts to secure the vote, fearing that it would be more difficult to gain favor for the cause among the powerful white male populace. It was for this reason that Alice Paul insisted that the National Association of Colored Women march separately in the 1913 demonstration in Washington, DC, behind all the state delegations.\n\nAFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN FACED AN EVEN TOUGHER ROAD TO EQUALITY.\n\nProminent black journalist and activist Ida B. Wells was a vocal critic of the suffragist movement's racism. She famously refused to participate in the 1913 march unless she could walk under the Illinois banner\u2014and she did so, defying the organizers' plans. Members of the newly formed all-black Delta Sigma Theta sorority of Howard College also joined the procession, knowing that if they didn't stand up for their rights, African American women would undoubtedly be left behind.\n\nAfter the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, black women were still prevented from voting in many states because of white supremacist laws already in place. It would be nearly fifty years before their rights were fully protected by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To this day, activists continue fighting new laws that seek to disenfranchise voters of color.\n\nInvestigative journalist Ida B. Wells exposed the racism, sexism, and violence experienced by black Americans. She was often shunned by women's suffrage organizations for calling attention to these issues.\n\nThe biggest publicity gainer of all came one month later in February 1919. In an all-out campaign to push the Susan B. Anthony Amendment through Congress, a \"Prison Special\" tour began with former prisoners traveling throughout the country on a train named the _Democracy Limited_. Everywhere the train stopped\u2014Charleston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, and many other places, ending in New York\u2014enormous rallies were held, featuring speeches by veteran suffragist activists, each one dressed in prison garb. The tour, which drew enormous audiences, was a huge success and was, in the opinion of many political experts, one of the final determining factors in the passage by Congress of the Nineteenth Amendment.\n\nAnother critical factor was that it was not only the Alice Pauls and other upper-middle-class women who were instrumental in women gaining the ballot. Females of all classes and races were part of the movement that made millions of Americans receptive to the idea of women voting. They included the tens of thousands of female factory workers who filled jobs vacated by the men who went off to war, and who proved that women were capable of working at challenging jobs and were strong enough to vote.\n\nSuffragists came from all walks of life. Here, women from farm families pose with tools of their trade before taking off in their automobile to campaign for the vote.\n\nA proud moment. In a scene for which generations of women (and many male supporters) had worked and sacrificed, newly enfranchised women cast their ballots.\n\nOn June 4, 1919, Congress passed the long-sought-after amendment. Although the Nineteenth Amendment wouldn't be ratified until August 1920, it was obvious that, at long last, American women would have the vote. The final vote occasioned great celebration among those who had worked so hard to bring it to fruition. But not all were elated. There was still no specific mention of African American women, who, along with African American men, would continue to be disenfranchised by state laws, especially in the South. The summer of 1919 would see a rise in action by African Americans, fighting for equality in the face of widespread racism.\n\nAlice Paul was also reluctant to declare victory. In statements that did not surprise those who knew her well, she said, \"It is incredible to me that any woman should consider the fight for full equality won. It has just begun.\"\n\n**ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER**\n\n**ONE HUNDRED YEARS** after Alice Paul offered her warning to American women, there is no question her words were taken seriously by generations of women who followed her. At no time was that more evident than in 1992, when the face of the US Congress was changed as the number of women elected to the senate doubled, and female representation in the house rose from twenty-eight to forty-seven. Included in the historic development was the election of Carol Mosely Braun, the first African American woman US senator in history.\n\n\"This is the first significant breakthrough for women in the history of Congress,\" Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, said at the time. Former congresswoman Constance A. Morella recalled, \"That glass ceiling is being shattered.\"\n\nUnfortunately, the gains achieved in 1992 represented a high-water mark. While women continue to make significant strides in the political arena, most notably with the nomination of Hillary Rodham Clinton as the Democratic Party's candidate for president of the United States in 2016, they are still dramatically outnumbered by men. In 2017, for example, 430 of the 535 members of the US Congress were men. Forty-four of the nation's governors were also male.\n\nThe same inequality holds true for women in business. According to the American Association of University Women (AAUW), females working full time in the United States in 2017 typically were paid just 80 percent of what men earned. The pay gap is often even greater when broken down by race, with Latinas making 54 percent and black women making 63 percent of what white men make.\n\nAs evidenced from the very beginning of the suffragist movement, women, despite their sacrifices, their ambition, their abilities, and the extraordinary contributions to American life they continue to make, will always face a special challenge, once articulated by Elizabeth Genovese. \"Americans,\" she wrote, \"seem to be groping for a vision in which women have as much opportunity as men to develop their talents and reap the rewards of their labor and still remain women.\" Perhaps Massachusetts senator Linda Dorcena Forry has said it best. \"We've come a long way,\" she has exclaimed. \"But we still have so much more work to do.\"\n\n_A Journey of Persistence and Pushback_\n\n_The women's journey toward equality with men in both rights and opportunities has been a long and winding path. The following are major events and developments that have taken place on that route._\n\n1769 | The colonies adopt the English system decreeing women cannot own property in their own name or keep their own earnings.  \n---|---  \n1777 | All states pass laws that take away women's right to vote.  \n1839 | The first state (Mississippi) grants women the right to hold property in their own names\u2014with permission from their husbands.  \n1848 | At Seneca Falls, New York, three hundred men and women sign the Declaration of Sentiments, a plea for the end of discrimination against women.  \n1868 | The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, with \"citizens\" and \"voters\" defined as \"male\" in the Constitution.  \n1872 | Victoria Claflin Woodhull becomes the first female presidential candidate in the United States, nominated by the National Radical Reformers.  \n| Susan B. Anthony casts her first vote to test whether the Fourteenth Amendment would be interpreted broadly to guarantee the right to vote. She is convicted of \"unlawful voting.\"  \n1873 | The Supreme Court rules that a state has the right to exclude a married woman from practicing law.  \n1890 | The first state (Wyoming) grants settler women the right to vote in all elections.  \n1916 | Jeannette Rankin of Montana is the first woman elected to the US House of Representatives.  \n1919 | The federal woman suffrage amendment, originally written by Susan B. Anthony and introduced in Congress in 1878, is passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate. It is then sent to the states for ratification.  \n1920 | The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, ensuring the right of women to vote.  \n1923 | The first version of an Equal Rights Amendment is introduced. It says, \"Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.\"  \n1933 | Frances Perkins becomes the first female cabinet member, appointed secretary of labor by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  \n1942\u20131945 | Women enter the workforce in great numbers as World War II is waged and millions of men become part of the armed forces.  \n1947 | The US Supreme Court rules that women are equally qualified as men to serve on juries.  \n1961 | President John F. Kennedy establishes the President's Commission on the Status of Women and appoints Eleanor Roosevelt as a chairperson.  \n1963 | The Equal Pay Act is passed by Congress, promising equitable wages for the same work, regardless of the race, color, religion, national origin, or sex of the worker.  \n1964 | Title VII of the Civil Rights Act passes, prohibiting sex discrimination in employment. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is created.  \n1966 | Betty Friedan and twenty-eight other women found the National Organization for Women (NOW).  \n1968 | President Lyndon B. Johnson signs an executive order prohibiting sex discrimination by government contractors and requiring affirmative action plans for hiring women.  \n1972 | Title IX of the Education Amendments prohibits sex discrimination in all aspects of education programs that receive federal support.  \n1973 | Landmark Supreme Court ruling _Roe v. Wade_ makes abortion legal. In a separate ruling, the Supreme Court bans sex-segregated Help Wanted ads.  \n1975 | The Supreme Court denies states' rights to exclude women from juries.  \n1981 | Sandra Day O'Connor becomes the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court.  \n1982 | The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a proposed amendment to the Constitution designed to guarantee equal rights for all citizens regardless of sex, falls short of ratification.  \n1984 | Geraldine Ferraro becomes the first woman to be nominated to be vice president on a major party ticket.  \n2013 | The ban against women in military combat positions is removed, overturning a 1994 Pentagon decision restricting women from combat roles.  \n2016 | Hillary Rodham Clinton secures the Democratic presidential nomination, becoming the first US woman to lead the ticket of a major party. She loses to Republican Donald Trump in the fall.  \n2017 | Congress has a record number of women, with 104 female House members and 21 female senators, including the chamber's first Latina, Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto.\n\nThe Chicago race riot of 1919 was one of the most devastating events in the nation's history. Here, an African American man races to escape a white mob.\n\n  CHAPTER THREE\n\n**DURING THE UNITED STATES'** participation in World War I, some 370,000 African American men served in the armed forces. Included among their ranks were all-black units such as the Harlem Hellfighters and the Eighth Illinois National Guard that fought with extraordinary courage and great distinction. Hundreds of thousands of African American men and women worked long hours in defense factories throughout the nation to supply the military with arms, provisions, and more. When the war came to a close in November 1918, the distinguished black author and activist James Weldon Johnson raised the question that was on the minds of millions of black Americans who, for almost three hundred years, had been denied equal rights and equal opportunities. Would African Americans' support for the war effort on the battlefields of Europe and in the factories of the United States bring about improvements in what Johnson termed the \"status of the Negro as an American citizen\"? \"Now,\" declared Johnson, \"comes the test.\"\n\nHowever, instead of rewarding African Americans for their military service or for their patriotic home front activities, white Americans resolved to deny blacks their civil rights as completely as they had before World War I began. The result was that from April to November 1919, turmoil and riots caused by deep-rooted prejudice on the part of many white Americans, and by their determination to deny African Americans equal rights and opportunities, rocked the United States.\n\nThe African American military units that served in Europe in World War I performed with great distinction. These black infantry troops were approaching Verdun, scene of one of the deadliest and most violent battles of the war.\n\n\"Though no complete and accurate records on the eight months of violence were [ever] compiled,\" author Cameron McWhirter has written, \"at least 25 major riots erupted and at least 52 black people were lynched. Millions of Americans had their lives disrupted. Hundreds of people\u2014most of them black\u2014were killed and thousands more were injured. Tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes.\" No wonder James Weldon Johnson labeled the period the \"Red Summer.\" No wonder it was a name that stuck.\n\nIt was a unique eight months in American history, and before it was over, it was made even more historic by an unprecedented development. It was during this Red Summer that black Americans, for the first time, mounted armed resistance against mobs of whites who were determined to oppress them and deny them their rights. Many of these people, whether they had fought in the war or not, had been inspired by the words of black writer and leader W. E. B. Du Bois, who, as shiploads of black soldiers returned from the battlefields, had proclaimed, \"We _return from fighting_. We _return fighting_. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.\"\n\nIt was a bold statement made in the face of antiblack prejudices that, by 1919, had become an ingrained part of the American culture. It was also made at a time when significant changes were about to take place in the physical landscape of the United States, changes that would have great bearing on the Red Summer.\n\nWhen the United States entered World War I, some 2.7 million men were drafted into the army, and more than 300,000 volunteered for duty. At the same time, the US government halted all immigration from Europe. Because of this, factories in the North and the Midwest suffered an immediate and extreme labor shortage. Desperate for workers, the owners of these factories sent agents into the South, enticing African American men and women to move to the North by offering to cover their travel expenses and to pay them higher wages than they could earn by staying home.\n\nThe result was what is historically referred to as the Great Migration. Actually, migration within the black community was nothing new. Most of this movement had taken place inside the South, as blacks, since the end of slavery, moved from place to place, attempting to make a living in a post-slavery sharecropping system that denied them fair wages and continued to threaten their safety. But never had there been movement of African Americans on so enormous a scale.\n\nThere were other reasons for the massive migration as well. Beginning in the spring of 1919, the insect known as the boll weevil had destroyed entire cotton crops, throwing thousands of black agricultural workers out of work. Looking beyond the South, toward job shortages caused by World War I, more than five hundred thousand blacks moved to the North and Midwest, most to urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Many uprooted themselves not only to find employment, but to escape the prejudice, discrimination, and abuse that had always been part of their life in the South.\n\nThe photographer who took this picture titled it _Gallant 15th Infantry Fighters Home with War [Medals]._ Black troops like these returned expecting that they would encounter much less prejudice and discrimination than they had encountered before the conflict.\n\nAlong with promises made by the agents of the northern factory owners, thousands of African Americans were influenced in their decision to migrate by the black press. African American newspapers such as the _Chicago Defender_ , the most widely read black publication, and the _Pittsburgh Courier_ continually published editorials and cartoons showing the great advantages of moving from the South to the North. These advantages included the right to vote, better housing conditions, far better schools, and access to different types of employment.\n\nSome blacks even saw the chance to migrate as a gift from God. \"We feel and believe,\" preached a Birmingham, Alabama, minister to his congregation, \"that the great Exodus is in God's hand and plan. In a mysterious way God is moving upon the hearts of our people to go where He has prepared for them.\"\n\nAlong with all these motivations, perhaps the most deeply felt reason why more than half a million black Americans migrated northward was articulated by Richard Wright, a young black man destined to become an internationally acclaimed author. \"The North,\" he wrote, \"symbolized to me all that I had not felt or seen; it had no relation to what actually existed. Yet by imagining a place where everything is possible, it kept hope alive inside of me.\"\n\nIn the meantime, those millions of African Americans who had not migrated became subject to increased discrimination and acts of terror on the part of white southerners. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, granting African American men the right to vote. By 1919, however, one southern state legislature after another had passed laws preventing these men from exercising this right.\n\nDuring this same period, the Ku Klux Klan made its presence in the South stronger than ever, demonstrating with increased violence its belief that only white Christians were entitled to civil rights in the United States. Along with other white supremacist groups, the Klan began murdering African American men, women, and children by setting fire to homes, bombing churches, and lynching blacks on a scale never before witnessed.\n\nOf all the actions taken by white mobs to maintain white supremacy, to terrorize as many African Americans as possible, and to deliver immediate punishment to anyone who was even suspected of challenging the system, nothing was more horrendous or unjust than the lynchings that took place in the United States following the Civil War and well beyond. Of the hundreds of black people lynched, nearly all were killed without being charged with a crime, let alone being legally convicted. Just as outrageous, the vast majority of those lynched were murdered for what amounted to the most minor offenses against white supremacy. Jeff Brown was lynched in Cedar-bluff, Mississippi, for accidentally bumping into a white girl while he was running to catch a train. A white mob lynched Private Charles Lewis in Hickman, Kentucky, when he refused to empty his pockets while wearing his army uniform.\n\nTHE VAST MAJORITY OF THOSE LYNCHED WERE MURDERED FOR WHAT AMOUNTED TO THE MOST MINOR OFFENSES AGAINST WHITE SUPREMACY.\n\nExamples of these fatal injustices were seemingly endless. Thomas Miles was lynched for allegedly inviting a white woman to have a cold drink with him. A black man named General Lee was hanged by a white mob in Reevesville, South Carolina, for simply knocking on the door of a white woman's house, and in Aberdeen, Mississippi, Keith Bowen was killed by lynching after allegedly trying to enter a room where three white women were sitting.\n\nEvery black person in the South lived with the knowledge that he or she could be lynched by intentionally or accidentally violating the sensibilities of any white person with whom they came into contact. Among those lynched were individuals who had committed the \"crime\" of refusing to yield their vehicle on a road; neglecting to use a proper form of address; refusing to step off a sidewalk; using profane language; using an improper title for, arguing with, insulting, or otherwise not showing deference to a white person.\n\nBY THE END OF 1919, SO MANY BLACK FAMILIES HAD FLED THAT ONE AREA'S BLACK POPULATION HAD DROPPED FROM ELEVEN HUNDRED TO THIRTY.\n\nThose who carried out the lynchings made certain that, whenever possible, they were a public spectacle. Huge crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands and including young children, public officials, and leading citizens, came from miles away to witness killings that often included torture, mutilation, and burning of the victim. In what amounted to a carnival-like atmosphere, vendors sold all types of food, printers sold postcards of the lynching and the corpse, and photographers took souvenir pictures of the smiling eyewitnesses.\n\nWhite activists also used lynching for a purpose other than applying their own form of \"justice.\" Some lynch mobs actually forced an entire black community to attend a lynching as a means of instilling fear in their hearts or making members of that community leave the region. It was a tactic that often worked. After a lynching in Forsythe County, Georgia, white supremacists passed out sheets of paper demanding that all the blacks in the area leave the region or suffer the same fate as the person they had just seen lynched. By the end of 1919, so many black families had fled that the area's black population had dropped from eleven hundred to thirty.\n\nA large crowd gathers to witness the lynching of an African American named Jesse Washington. Sadly, lynchings like this one became public spectacles.\n\nIt will never be known exactly how many African Americans were lynched in 1919 or in the years preceding or following that pivotal year. What is known is the truth about the barbaric practice of lynching has, in many ways, been suppressed and that this form of racial torture and murder left deep scars that remain with us today. As Bryan Stevenson, director of Equal Justice Initiative, stated, \"We cannot heal the deep wounds inflicted during the era of racial terrorism until we tell the truth about it. The geographic, political, economic, and social consequences of . . . terror lynchings can still be seen in many communities today and the damage created by lynching needs to be confronted and discussed. Only then can we meaningfully address the contemporary problems that are lynching's legacy.\"\n\nAlong with the lynchings, the Red Summer would be characterized by the race riots that erupted in some thirty cities in the United States. The first of these acts of violence took place on May 8, 1919, in Charleston, South Carolina, after a fight between local blacks and sailors stationed at a nearby naval training station erupted. For several hours, mobs made up of sailors and white civilians roamed Charleston's streets, terrorizing any black residents they encountered. Before Marines were finally called in to restore order, two black men had been killed and seventeen people had been injured.\n\nFor the next six months, race riots took place throughout the United States, breaking out in small southern towns such as Jenkins, Georgia, and Hobson City, Alabama, and in large northern cities such as Omaha, Nebraska; Scranton, Pennsylvania; and Syracuse, New York. The largest and most devastating riots of all, however, took place in Washington, DC; Chicago, Illinois; and Elaine, Arkansas.\n\nAs World War I came to an end, Washington, DC, which was about 75 percent white, was a racial tinderbox, an explosion waiting to happen. Housing conditions were so bad it was almost impossible to find a home or an apartment, and there were so few jobs available that soldiers just back from the war found themselves begging on the streets. Unemployed whites bitterly resented those blacks who had managed to find jobs. And there was white resentment also over the fact that a significant number of African Americans had moved into previously segregated white neighborhoods.\n\nThere was bitterness on the part of blacks as well. DC's black community was the largest and wealthiest in the nation and included businessmen, lawyers, teachers, and ministers. But these black Washingtonians were angered and deeply disturbed by the discriminatory laws the city's government was intent on passing.\n\nWashington's white press made the situation much worse. Day after day the newspapers increased the tension by printing frightening, exaggerated, and mostly false stories of crimes committed by blacks on whites. The papers' headlines were incendiary: \"13 SUSPECTS ARRESTED IN NEGRO HUNT\"; \"POSSES KEEP UP HUNT FOR NEGRO\"; \"HUNT COLORED ASSAILANT\"; \"NEGRO FIEND SOUGHT ANEW.\" Alarmed at what they feared was about to happen, Washington's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sent a letter to the city's four daily newspapers warning them that they were \"sowing the seeds of a race riot by their inflammatory headlines.\"\n\nAS WORLD WAR I CAME TO AN END, WASHINGTON, DC, WHICH WAS ABOUT 75 PERCENT WHITE, WAS A RACIAL TINDERBOX, AN EXPLOSION WAITING TO HAPPEN.\n\nThe NAACP was right. The evening of Saturday, July 19, 1919, was terribly hot in Washington, DC, and the city was filled with hordes of sailors and soldiers enjoying weekend passes, having just returned from the battlefields of Europe. Suddenly, throughout the pool halls and saloons, a rumor began to spread. A black man suspected of assaulting a white woman had been released without charges by the Washington police. And, according to the story, the woman was the wife of a navy man.\n\nDuring the Washington race riots, Carter G. Woodson barely escaped with his life. As this illustration shows, he would go on to become the most important early historian of blacks in America.\n\nBy late that evening a mob of more than four hundred whites began moving toward the poor black section of southwest Washington. Coming upon a black man out walking with his wife, they pursued him and beat him unconscious. Encountering a second black man, who was making his way home with a bag of groceries, they beat him also, fracturing his skull with a brick.\n\nThe Washington police force was nowhere to be seen. When a large force of officers finally arrived, they arrested more blacks than whites, leaving no doubt as to what side they were on.\n\nUnfortunately, the situation was far from over. It was only beginning. During the next two days, white mobs went on a rampage the likes of which had never been seen in the nation's capital. Thirty-nine people were killed in the street fighting that went on throughout the city. More than 150 men, women, and children were shot or beaten by white or black mobs.\n\nA seventeen-year-old black man named Francis Thomas was one of the victims. \"A mob of sailors and soldiers jumped on the [street]car and pulled me off, beating me unmercifully from head to foot, leaving me in such a condition that I could hardly crawl back home,\" he later recounted. Stating that he witnessed three other black people, including two women, also beaten, Francis said, \"Before I became unconscious, I could hear them pleading with the Lord to keep them from being killed.\"\n\nBad as conditions were on July 19, they became even worse the next night. More blacks were pulled off streetcars and beaten; even larger mobs of whites roamed the streets, searching for victims. Beatings took place even in front of the White House. One of the worst incidents was witnessed by the distinguished black author and historian Carter G. Woodson, as he hid in the shadows of a storefront to avoid an approaching white mob. \"They had caught a Negro and deliberately held him as one would a beef for slaughter,\" he remembered, \"and when they had conveniently adjusted him for lynching, they shot him. I heard him groaning in his struggle as I hurried away as fast as I could without running, expecting every moment to be lynched myself.\"\n\nAs the third day of the riots began, some leaders, black and white, horrified by what had taken place thus far, began to seek ways to bring the mayhem and slaughter to an end. But then the _Washington Post_ escalated the situation. Without any facts to back up the story, the _Post_ printed a large front-page article stating that all available soldiers and sailors in the Washington area had been ordered to report for duty to round up whatever black men, women, and children they could get their hands on.\n\nIt was a totally false story, one that veteran _Post_ reporter Chalmers Roberts would call \"shamefully irresponsible,\" but thousands of whites believed it and took to the streets, ready to join the white troops they thought were on their way. More alarmed than ever, Washington's black citizens began to retaliate. For the first time, white mobs were met by black mobs as they patrolled the streets. Black leaders stationed sharpshooters on the roofs of buildings, and, in a reversal of what had been taking place for four days, blacks began pulling whites off streetcars and assaulting them. At the same time, scores of black men began driving around the city, firing at any whites they encountered.\n\nFinally, on Tuesday, July 22, President Woodrow Wilson, who had been reluctant to intervene in what he chose to regard as a local matter, decided he needed to take action. He ordered more than two thousand federal troops into the streets of DC to quell the riots. Even that did not stop white mobs from gathering to challenge the troops' authority. But then nature intervened. The heaviest rains of the summer suddenly poured. They strengthened throughout the night, literally dampening the spirits of the mob, putting an end to the Washington Riots of 1919.\n\nThe bloodshed and mayhem in the nation's capital caused shockwaves throughout the country. But less than a week later, riots in Chicago erupted that made what happened in Washington seem mild in comparison.\n\nIn 1919, Chicago was regarded as the crime capital of the United States. The following year, it even became home to the nation's most notorious gangster, Al Capone. The city was, in the words of famed poet Carl Sandburg, \"fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action.\"\n\nDuring the continuing Great Migration of African Americans from the South, Chicago had already received more blacks than any other northern city, a total that would grow to more than twenty-five thousand. White resentment against the African American newcomers was present from the start, and tensions continued to mount.\n\nThe troubles began in 1917, when blacks began moving into white neighborhoods. During the next two years, vigilante groups of whites had responded violently, bombing twenty-six homes and killing twenty-seven blacks. It was all a prelude to what began on July 27, 1919.\n\nOn that hot, beautiful Sunday afternoon, a seventeen-year-old black teenager named Eugene Williams was swimming at the 29th Street Beach on the shores of Lake Michigan. For years, the beach had been divided into black and white sections. Williams was well aware of this, but as he paddled along holding on to a railroad tie, he inadvertently floated across the \"line.\" Whites sitting on the beach began bombarding Williams with stones. One of them found its mark, and Williams let go of the tie. According to eyewitnesses, he swam for a few feet before he suddenly sank and drowned.\n\nAfrican Americans and whites hastily leave the public beach in Chicago where a black swimmer had just been killed by whites.\n\nA white policeman who was on duty at the beach saw the entire event. But instead of arresting the white boy who threw the stone, he arrested a black man. It was an injustice too great for the African American witnesses to ignore. For them, white hatred and the grossly unfair nature of the legal system had become too much to take. They left their section of the beach and brawled with the whites they encountered. It was the beginning of the deadliest period of racial violence in Chicago history.\n\nBy the next day, news of what had taken place at the beach spread throughout the city, setting off a firestorm of violence. Black neighborhoods became battlegrounds as whites and blacks attacked each other with guns, knives, razors, and clubs. In the very same Chicago block, a white man was dragged from a truck and killed, and a black chauffeur was hauled from his car and murdered. The worst violence took place at dusk, when the city's thousands of black factory workers were attacked as they walked home from work. In some parts of the city, black and white women were seen battling each other with brooms and stones.\n\nThe Chicago riots involved people of all ages. Here, young whites pose at the house of an African American family after having caused great damage while forcing the family to flee.\n\nIt was serious and it was deadly, but it was nothing compared to what took place the next day, particularly during the evening. All through the daylight hours, mobs of whites and blacks engaged in pitched battles throughout the city. The fighting even spread to the holding areas at the city jails, where black and white detainees attacked each other viciously. That evening, white gangs assaulted black stockyard workers as they headed home. And throughout the night, white and black mobs invaded each other's neighborhoods, attempting to burn the other out. By the time the evening ended, 150 people had been stabbed, beaten, or shot. Amazingly, Chicago's acting chief of police continued to insist that he was \"very well pleased with conditions.\" But the governor was far more realistic. Alarmed at the deteriorating conditions, he called in the six-thousand-member Fourth Regiment of the Illinois Militia to bring things back under control.\n\nWith the heavily armed troops patrolling the streets, the bloodshed and mayhem began to abate. But not entirely. For the next ten days, Chicago would remain a battle zone, with sporadic incidents of violence taking place throughout the city. At one point, city leaders started sending food and other supplies into the black districts, whose residents, after days of burnings, lootings, and shootings, were in a state of near starvation.\n\nWhen the riot finally ended, Chicagoans were left in a state of shock. And no wonder. Although the exact toll of death and destruction would never be known, at least 50 people were killed; more than 540 men, women, and children were injured; and more than 1,000 black families were left homeless.\n\nJust two months later in Arkansas, 1919's most murderous acts of violence took place.\n\nIn 1867, Andrew Johnson, the nation's first post\u2013Civil War president and a former slaveholder, advocated a new practice that quickly replaced slavery as a main source of agricultural labor in the South. It was called sharecropping, and it involved black families raising and harvesting crops for white landowners in exchange for a humble place to live and a meager share of the crops. In many ways, it was a system barely distinguishable from the slavery it replaced.\n\nThe number of casualties, dead and injured, caused by the Chicago riots shocked the nation. Here, a badly injured African American man is helped into an ambulance that will take him to a hospital.\n\nDuring much of the Chicago race riots, mobs raced through the streets uncontrolled. Here, brick-carrying white men search for African Americans to attack.\n\nOutsiders brought in to attack African American sharecroppers turned the events in Elaine, Arkansas, into a major race riot. Here, a posse searches through a field of sugarcane for victims.\n\nOn the night of September 30, 1919, some one hundred African American sharecroppers attended a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America at a black church three miles north of Elaine, Arkansas. They hoped that by joining the union, they would receive better pay for the cotton they raised for their white landlords. Aware of the racial violence taking place throughout the nation, the union had posted armed guards around the church to prevent the meeting from being disrupted.\n\nWhen three white law-enforcement officers pulled up to the front of the church and attempted to enter it, shots were fired. In the exchange, one white officer was killed, and the county's white deputy sheriff was wounded. As word of the shootings spread, the local sheriff sent out a call for men \"to hunt Mr. [black man] in his lair.\" He then set up headquarters in the county's courthouse, where he mobilized his army of recruits. Hundreds of white veterans, recently returned from fighting in Europe, having been told that a conspiracy to murder white planters had begun, joined the posse.\n\nAt the same time, the call went out to neighboring Mississippi for white men to come to the aid of their fellow whites in Phillips County. Hundreds of armed whites poured into cars, trucks, and trains and crossed into Arkansas. It was the beginning of what one observer would call a massacre and what the _Chicago Tribune_ would term \"a crusade of death.\" As the white Mississippians advanced on Arkansas in their various vehicles, they fired out of windows at every African American they saw. \"The whites,\" sharecropper Frank Moore would later recount, \"sent word that they was coming down here and kill every [black] they found. There were 300 or 400 more white men with guns, shooting and killing women and children.\"\n\nWhen they reached Phillips County, the Mississippians joined the local posse and continued their rampage. According to an eyewitness, they \"shot and killed men, women and children without regard to whether they were guilty or innocent of any connection with the killing of anybody, or whether members of the union or not.\"\n\nAs the killings continued and the situation got worse, Arkansas's governor asked the War Department to send in infantry units. Some one hundred white soldiers and officers arrived from Camp Pike and through a show of force were able to bring the carnage to an end. But not before a significant number of the soldiers had joined with the Mississippi vigilantes and the local posse in hunting down blacks.\n\nEven when the killing stopped, the gross injustices continued. Although not a single white person was ever taken into custody for crimes related to the rioting, 122 blacks were arrested and scheduled for trial. Their court-appointed lawyers did little to help them. As a result, the first twelve blacks who were tried were found guilty of murder and executed. Terrified that the same thing would happen to them, sixty-five others entered plea bargains and were given sentences for up to twenty-one years in prison. Various civil rights groups, including the NAACP, immediately began working for their release and succeeded in having them all set free by the middle of January 1925.\n\nTHE HARLEM RENAISSANCE\n\n**DURING THE GREAT MIGRATION,** many African Americans settled in a section of New York City called Harlem. Among them were highly talented black writers, artists, photographers, musicians, poets, and scholars, many of whom had been profoundly influenced by how African Americans, for the first time, stood up against the violence and outrages that were hurled against them throughout that tumultuous summer.\n\nIn Harlem, these creative men and women, a number of whom would gain worldwide recognition, found a place where they could freely express their talents. In return, they created a cultural, social, and artistic explosion that spread a new black cultural identity that became known as the Harlem Renaissance. These artists included poet, novelist, and playwright Langston Hughes; author and songwriter James Weldon Johnson; novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston; poet and novelist Arna Bontemps; writer and poet Claude McKay; and poet, author, and scholar Countee Cullen, among many others.\n\nMany of these artists had been encouraged to leave the South by pioneer civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, who was also the editor of _The Crisis_ magazine, the journal of the NAACP. It was in _The Crisis_ that many of the stories, poems, and visual creations of those who were at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance were published.\n\nIn producing writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, the Harlem Renaissance was one of the most significant literary movements ever to take place in the United States. But it was much more. It was a movement in which African Americans seized upon their first chances for group expression and self-determination.\n\nIt was writer and philosopher Alain Locke who coined the term \"New Negro\" to describe the pride-filled African Americans who emerged from the Harlem Renaissance. \"New Negro\" quickly came to mean an African American who refused to obey the discriminatory laws under which pre\u2013World War I blacks were forced to live. It also described that black person who would settle for nothing less than equality in all areas of life, including politics and education, and who, in particular, demanded stronger desegregation efforts from all levels of government.\n\nA street scene in Harlem. By 1919 the home of the Harlem Renaissance had become a vibrant, exciting community.\n\nBlack sharecroppers, arrested and being marched off to jail. In what amounted to a gross injustice, many more sharecroppers than whites were arrested during the Arkansas riots.\n\nAs NAACP official Walter White stated in 1919, \"The number of Negroes killed during the riot is unknown and probably never will be known.\" One of the most recent calculations of the African American death toll was compiled after much investigation by the prestigious Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). According to the EJI, 237 blacks were killed, making the Elaine riots by far the bloodiest outbreak of antiblack violence in the history of the United States.\n\nThere is no question that the Red Summer was one of the most shameful periods in the nation's history. It is a story of violence, death, and destruction. But as author Cameron McWhirter has written, \"In 1919, blacks began to broadly challenge the long-held premise that they must exist in this country as inferiors.\"\n\nIt began with the Washington riots, an experience that, according to sociologist Arthur Waskow, gave African Americans \"a readiness to face white society as equals. . . . The Washington riot,\" Waskow wrote, \"demonstrated that neither the silent mass of [poor] Negroes nor the articulate leaders of the Negro community could be counted on to knuckle under.\" In Washington, whites had been astounded that blacks had dared to fight back. And it brought a newfound sense of pride to black Americans. \"The Washington riot gave me a thrill that comes once in a lifetime . . . ,\" a black woman wrote to the newspaper, _The Crisis_. \"[A]t last our men had stood up like men . . . I stood up alone in my room . . . and exclaimed aloud, 'Oh, I thank God, thank God.' The pent up horror, grief and humiliation of a lifetime\u2014half a century\u2014was being stripped from me.\"\n\nMost important of all, the resistance that African Americans demonstrated during the riots in Washington, Chicago, Elaine, and elsewhere were the first stirrings of what would develop into a movement that would change America forever. It could be clearly seen in the writings of African American leaders such as Richard R. Wright, a minister and editor of a black church newspaper in Philadelphia. \"Do not be afraid or lose heart because of these riots,\" he wrote. \"They are merely symptoms of the protest of your entrance into a higher sphere of American citizenship. They are the dark hours before morning which have always come just before the burst of a new civil light. . . . Things will be better for the Negro. We want full citizenship ballot, equal school facilities and everything else. We fought for them. We will have them: we must not yield.\"\n\nIn the years immediately following the events in Washington, Chicago, and Elaine, it became increasingly clear that, rather than be diminished by the riots, African Americans were emboldened by them. Although progress would never be as rapid as black leaders would have liked, genuine strides were made. In the immediate post-1919 years, blacks began to join political organizations and to campaign for candidates who would aid their cause. Tens of thousands joined the NAACP.\n\nTHERE IS NO QUESTION THAT THE RED SUMMER WAS ONE OF THE MOST SHAMEFUL PERIODS IN THE NATION'S HISTORY.\n\nWhat is ironic is that despite how important the Red Summer is to our nation's history, few Americans are aware that it ever took place. This despite how important these five months were in shaping race relations to the present day. There is no question that the historic civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s owed its existence to the summer of 1919, when organized black resistance to white abuse first became a reality.\n\n**ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER**\n\n**ONE HUNDRED YEARS** after the Red Summer, and despite significant gains made by African Americans in the past century, serious racial issues continue to plague the United States. High among them is voter suppression.\n\nIn the 1960s, African American leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., made the right to vote, the most fundamental right in any democracy, their highest priority.\n\nToday, voting rights for blacks and other minorities are once again under attack and imperiled. Although courts have found such measures to be discriminatory, several states have passed laws requiring voters to present a government-issued ID in order to vote. In some states, Department of Motor Vehicles offices in minority neighborhoods have been shut down as well, making it even more difficult to obtain appropriate ID.\n\nVoter suppression measures have also included efforts to prohibit people who need to vote early from doing so by requiring people to live in a precinct for at least twenty-eight days before voting and prohibiting emailing absentee ballots to voters.\n\nAs the Voter Participation Center has declared, \"Over the last decade, many states have passed and implemented laws that make it harder for Americans to vote\u2014restrictions that are often tailor-made to disenfranchise people of color and low-income voters. These voter suppression efforts have had a massive effect, depressing turnout in the elections of 2014 and 2016.\" The American Civil Liberties Union, the Voter Participation Center, and other organizations have become actively involved in litigation and other activities aimed at ridding the nation of these voter suppression measures. But it is a daunting task; the _Washington Post_ has called voter suppression \"the civil rights issue of this era.\"\n\nIt was during the Red Summer that African Americans began to organize and fight back against white violence and oppression. Today, the fight goes on, and at the forefront of this struggle is a movement known as Black Lives Matter.\n\nBlack Lives Matter (BLM) was founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi. It is an international activist movement that began in the African American community and campaigns against oppression and systemic violence against black people. The movement regularly holds protests against police killings of African Americans and against such issues as racial profiling, police brutality, and racial inequality in the United States criminal justice system.\n\nBLM began with the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African American teenager Trayvon Martin. On the night of February 26, 2012, Martin had engaged in an altercation with Zimmerman, who was the neighborhood watch coordinator for the Sanford, Florida, gated community in which the confrontation took place. The acquittal of Zimmerman after having fatally shot the unarmed Martin without what appeared to be just cause and for allegedly racial motives captured national attention, caused widespread outrage, and occasioned the earliest of the Black Lives Matter street demonstrations for which the movement has become known.\n\nBut it would be an event that took place on August 9, 2014, that would catapult the movement into the international spotlight. On that day in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, an eighteen-year-old unarmed black man named Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer named Darren Wilson after Brown had reportedly robbed a grocery store. When, on November 24, 2014, it was announced that the St. Louis County Grand Jury had decided not to indict Wilson for the fatal shooting, Ferguson became the source of mass protests.\n\nAlmost immediately after the shooting, Black Lives Matter arranged a \"Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride\" to Ferguson, involving some five hundred demonstrators. Of the many protest groups that eventually descended upon Ferguson, it would be BLM that would emerge as the best organized and the most effective. Typical of Black Lives Matter individuals who participated in the Ferguson demonstrations is activist and educator Brittany Packnett, who states that the death of Michael Brown deepened her commitment to social justice. \"I think,\" she says, \"the most significant thing that has changed is that people can see this isn't just about Mike Brown. . . . It is about defending the humanity and the dignity of all people in this country and of people of color in particular.\"\n\nSince the Ferguson protests, participants in the Black Lives Matter movement have demonstrated against the deaths of many other African Americans killed by police actions or while in police custody. They do so with an awareness that their task is far from over. A recent poll conducted by the Associated Press\u2013NORC Center for Public Affairs Research disclosed that one year after Michael Brown's death, more than three out of five African Americans stated that they or a family member have personal experience with being treated unfairly by the police\u2014and that their race is the reason.\n\nStill, the Black Lives Matter movement has taken pride in what it has accomplished. An Associated Press report released in July 2017 disclosed that twenty-five states have passed new measures including instituting officer-worn cameras, initiating officer training regarding racial bias, and conducting independent investigations when police force has been used.\n\nTaking part in the Black Lives Matter movement has not been easy. Almost every demonstration has been accompanied by protests and even confrontations staged by those opposed to the movement. But, as one of today's most inspirational African American leaders, Bryan Stevenson, has declared, \"Somebody has to stand when other people are sitting. Somebody has to speak when others are quiet.\"\n\n_A Journey of Justice and Injustice_\n\n_From the earliest days of colonial settlement and black slavery, African Americans have faced violence and setbacks even as progress has been made. The following are major events and developments in the African American experience during the 1900s and the 2000s._\n\n1900 | Twelve African Americans and four whites are killed in a race riot in New Orleans.  \n---|---  \n| The National Negro Business League is established by Booker T. Washington.  \n1904 | Mary McLeod Bethune establishes the all-black college Bethune-Cookman in Daytona Beach, Florida.  \n1905 | The African American newspaper _The Chicago Defender_ is first published by Robert Abbott.  \n| W. E. B. Du Bois and William Trotter found the Niagara Movement, the forerunner to the NAACP.  \n1906 | Black troops in Brownsville, Texas, riot against segregation.  \n1908 | AUGUST 14\u201319: Although no accurate count is taken, many blacks are killed in a race riot in Springfield, Illinois.  \n1909 | The NAACP is formed.  \n1910 | The first issue of _The Crisis,_ sponsored by the NAACP, appears.  \n1911 | The National Urban League, formed to help African Americans secure equal employment, begins operations.  \n1913 | The Wilson administration begins government-wide segregation of workplaces, restrooms, and lunch rooms.  \n1917 | JULY 1\u20133: One of the bloodiest race riots in the nation's history takes place in East St. Louis, Illinois, where some two hundred people are killed.  \n1919 | Between April and October, twenty-six race riots take place. Most notably:  \n| MAY 10: Charleston, South Carolina  \n| JULY 13: Gregg and Longview Counties, Texas  \n| JULY 19\u201323: Washington, DC  \n| JULY 27: Chicago, Illinois  \n| OCTOBER 1\u20133: Elaine, Arkansas  \n1920s | The Harlem Renaissance becomes a remarkable period of creativity for African American writers, poets, and artists.  \n1931 | In Scottsboro, Alabama, despite little evidence, nine black youths are found guilty of raping a white woman.  \n1947 | Jackie Robinson breaks Major League Baseball's color line when he is signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers.  \n1948 | President Harry S. Truman integrates the United States armed forces.  \n1954 | The U.S. Supreme Court, through _Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka_ , declares that racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional.  \n1955 | In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. In response to her arrest, Montgomery's black community launches a successful year-long bus boycott. Montgomery's buses are desegregated on December 21, 1956.  \n1960 | The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded, providing young blacks with a place in the civil rights movement.  \n1962 | James Meredith becomes the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.  \n1963 | The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is attended by an estimated 250,000 people, making it the largest demonstration held in the nation's capital to that date. It is there that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his \"I Have a Dream\" speech.  \n1965 | Congress passes the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making it easier for southern blacks to register and vote.  \n1966 | The Black Panther Party, a revolutionary socialist organization, is founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.  \n1968 | Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated.  \n1992 | Race riots take place in Los Angeles after a jury acquits four white police officers of the videotaped beating of African American Rodney King.  \n2001 | Colin Powell becomes the first African American US secretary of state.  \n2008 | Barack Obama becomes the first African American to be elected president of the United States.  \n2018 | The Equal Justice Initiative opens the National Memorial to Peace and Justice, the first major memorial to lynchings in America.\n\nPolice around the country conducted raids to seize allegedly Communist literature. Here are police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a haul.\n\n  CHAPTER FOUR\n\n**ONE OF THE MOST IRONIC** aspects of post\u2013World War I America was that millions of soldiers who had just fought a bitter war came home to a country not content with the achieved military victory, but to a nation fearful that it was becoming the victim of a great conspiracy. \"No one who was in the United States as I chanced to be . . . ,\" wrote a British journalist, \"will forget the feverish condition of the public mind at the time.\"\n\nThis \"feverish condition\" was ignited in 1917 when a well-organized and militant political party known as the Bolsheviks staged a successful revolution in Russia and took over the government. Along with removing Russia\u2014an ally of the United States, England, and France\u2014from the Great War, the Bolsheviks established a Communist dictatorship, killing the monarchy and doing away with private ownership of property; opposition parties; free elections; and freedom of the press, speech, and religion. The Bolsheviks also made it clear that one of their main goals was to spread Communism throughout the world, including the United States. Since Communists rallied around a red flag, the nickname \"Reds\" became attached to them, and the Red Scare got its name.\n\nCOMMUNISM\n\n**WHEN, IN 1917, THE BOLSHEVIKS** gained control of the Russian government, they installed a Communist form of government. Unlike the United States' economic system of capitalism in which the country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, Communism is based on a system in which the government owns everything and is responsible for distributing resources to every citizen.\n\nRussian revolutionary soldiers attack a building held by government troops. The so-called Bolshevik Revolution had an enormous impact on countries throughout the world, including the United States.\n\nIn theory, Communism appealed to many people. But when it was put into practice, particularly when it was placed in the hands of corrupt leaders, it became a much different system from that which was originally espoused. Russia is a prime example.\n\nThe leader of the Bolshevik Revolution was Vladimir Lenin, who served as head of Russia from 1917 to 1922 and as head of the newly formed Soviet Union (a confederation of Communist nations including Russia) from 1922 to 1924.\n\nLenin's death in 1924 initiated a power struggle that ended when Joseph Stalin seized power. Stalin, who led the Soviet Union until 1953, was a cruel dictator who ruled by terror. During his brutal reign, the Russian people were denied basic liberties, including freedom of speech and religion, and millions of Soviet citizens were killed in what has been called the Great Purge.\n\nWhen Stalin died in 1953, he was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who held power during the most intense time of the Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States and their allies. During his time in office, which ended in 1964, Khrushchev attempted to improve the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens, but with little success. He was followed in power by a succession of other leaders, none of whom instituted policies aimed at bringing about meaningful change.\n\nIn 1985, however, things took a dramatic turn when Mikhail Gorbachev became head of the Soviet Union. Along with reducing Cold War tensions and improving relations with the United States and other western nations, Gorbachev granted the Soviet people freedoms that they had never experienced.\n\nOn December 26, 1991, Gorbachev took his final, dramatic step when he resigned and declared that the Soviet Union was dissolved and that the countries within its umbrella, including Russia, were now independent.\n\nThe patriotic fervor that had engulfed the nation during World War I fueled the Red Scare. Anyone seen as being less patriotic than expected was suspected of being a Communist, a Communist sympathizer, or a Socialist\u2014a slight ideological variation of Communism. Immigrants were especially targeted by this suspicion. Compounding these sentiments was resentment felt by the nine million Americans who had been working in war industries and the more than four million members of the armed forces who suddenly found themselves competing for jobs once the war ended in November 1918.\n\nThis fervor was also brought about by the many labor strikes that were taking place throughout the nation. As far as thousands of private citizens and a large number of government officials were concerned, these strikes were fostered by Communist agitators, eager to throw the United States into turmoil.\n\nON JUNE 1, 1919, SEVEN EXPLOSIVES IN FIVE EASTERN CITIES TORE APART HOMES AND PUBLIC BUILDINGS.\n\nEven the highly regarded _Literary Digest_ got caught up in the panic, warning its readers that, \"Outside of Russia, the storm center of Bolshevism is in the United States.\" Actually, a \"storm\" had already arrived. On April 20, 1919, Seattle's mayor Ole Hanson received a package in the mail containing a bomb described as being \"big enough to blow out the side of the County-City Building.\" Fortunately for Hanson the bomb failed to detonate. Only a few days later, however, a similar package arrived at the Atlanta, Georgia, home of US senator Thomas W. Hardwick. This time the device exploded as intended, severely wounding the senator's maid when she unwrapped the package.\n\nDetails of the attempt on Senator Hardwick's life made the front pages of the nation's major newspapers, including those in New York, where an alert postal clerk remembered seeing sixteen similarly wrapped packages on the shelf of the post office where he worked. The clerk raced to the post office and found the packages. They were addressed to government officials: the attorney general and the secretary of labor of the United States; a Supreme Court justice; and two of the nation's leading financiers.\n\nAbout one month later, the terrorism continued. On June 1, 1919, seven explosives in five eastern cities tore apart homes and public buildings. Then the next night, in Washington, DC, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer became a target. He and his wife had just gone to bed in their upstairs bedroom when they heard a violent explosion that not only destroyed the front of their home, it shattered windows throughout the neighborhood. Neither of the Palmers was injured nor was the man living across the street, who happened to be future president of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt. There was, however, one fatality. Close examination of the scene revealed the blown-apart body of the terrorist, who had evidently tripped and fallen upon the bomb just as it went off. Scattered over lawns throughout the neighborhood were dozens of copies of an anarchist pamphlet that advocated death to all government officials.\n\nThe wave of anarchist bombings that took place in 1919 caused great alarm in every area of the United States. Here, government officials inspect the damage after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's home was bombed.\n\nAlthough it was never fully determined that the dead bomber belonged to the Communist Party, a shaken Attorney General Palmer was convinced that the attack on him and all the other recent bombings throughout the country were part of a Red conspiracy. And he was determined to do whatever it took to destroy it.\n\nJ. Edgar Hoover. After serving as Attorney General Palmer's chief investigator, Hoover would go on to become the longtime controversial head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.\n\nEndowed with enormous energy and ambition, Palmer was tall and handsome, completely self-assured, and had a quick, inquisitive mind. He had risen from lawyer to US congressman to secretary of war to his appointment in March 1919 as US attorney general. His ultimate aspiration was to be president of the United States, which meant his approach to solving the threat would require precision and shrewd calculation.\n\nBut his sense of caution did not prevent him from making immediate and dramatic changes to combat the Red Scare. By August 1919 he had created a new bureau within the Department of Justice named the General Intelligence Division. To head the Communist-seeking group, he selected a young lawyer fresh out of law school named J. Edgar Hoover. Warming to his task, Hoover created a filing system of over two hundred thousand cross-indexed cards containing detailed information on sixty thousand individuals, several hundred newspapers, and scores of organizations, all of which he considered to be potential enemies.\n\nAs rumors continued to spread that labor unions, churches, and organizations such as the League of Women Voters were under Communist control, the American public became increasingly alarmed. In many parts of the country, hysteria took hold. \"Red hunting\" became an obsession. Many colleges came under attack as centers of Bolshevism. A number of professors, accused of being \"Communist sympathizers,\" were fired.\n\nIt wasn't long before the anti-Red hysteria seeped into everyday life. Since the 1890s, the first of May, known as May Day, had been celebrated with parades, many of them organized by the labor movement. The parades had always been completely peaceful. But on May 1, 1919, with a number of the marchers carrying red flags, violence marked the parades in New York, in Cleveland, and in Boston, where a policeman was stabbed and killed.\n\nMay Day parades, organized by various unions, drew enormous crowds. Union officials in New York City brought in busloads of child marchers to gain sympathy for their cause.\n\nThe May Day parade in Cleveland spawned even greater violence, where mounted police and soldiers in trucks and tanks clashed with Socialist marchers who were sympathetic to the Communist cause. In the Cleveland confrontation, 2 people died, 40 were injured, and 116 were arrested. Cleveland's newspapers made a strong point of declaring that only eight of those arrested had been born in the United States.\n\nCleveland's newspapers were not alone in striking fear into the hearts of native-born Americans. Questioning the right of Communists, Socialists, and anarchists of every persuasion to assemble or to promote their cause either by writing or speaking\u2014sacred freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights\u2014the _Salt Lake City Tribune_ proclaimed that \"Free speech has been carried to the point where it is an unrestrained menace.\"\n\nPerhaps most revealing of all the hysteria propelling the Red Scare were laws passed by local and state governments throughout the nation that restricted parades and what they termed \"radical activity.\" Thirty-two states made it illegal to fly a red flag. The New York legislature, without trial or warning, expelled five of its Socialist Party members even though they had been freely elected.\n\nThrough it all, Attorney General Palmer continued to practice restraint, and soon he paid the price for it. \"I was shouted at from every editorial sanctum in America from sea to sea,\" he later lamented. \"I was preached upon from every pulpit; I was urged to do something and do it now, and do it quick and do it in a way that would bring results.\"\n\nTHIRTY-TWO STATES MADE IT ILLEGAL TO FLY A RED FLAG.\n\nThe pressure on Palmer got even worse in the middle of October 1919, when the US Senate demanded to know why Palmer had not acted more aggressively to put an end to the Communist threat. The Senate made it clear that if he did not move boldly against the Red menace, he faced the possibility of being removed from office.\n\nFor a man whose burning ambition was to win the presidency, the Senate's criticism and threat was a bitter blow. Now thoroughly convinced that the American way of life was truly being jeopardized, Palmer warned in an article he wrote for _Forum_ magazine, \"Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every institution of law and order. . . . It was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, traveling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with [immoral] law, burning up the foundations of society.\"\n\nAs the Red Scare engulfed the United States, cartoons such as this one warning of the threat of a Bolshevist takeover of the country appeared more frequently in American newspapers and magazines.\n\nStrong words, but, as Palmer knew, words alone were not what the public wanted. They craved action. And he was ready to give it to them. During the war the government had established a new immigration code that made any form of anarchism a crime. The law stated that any alien who violated the code in any way, even by only reading anarchist newspapers or magazines, could be arrested, and if found guilty be sent back to his or her native country.\n\nOn the night of November 7, 1919, Palmer launched his campaign of rounding up suspected anarchists and Communist agitators for the purpose of deporting them from the United States. Agents from the Bureau of Investigation, accompanied by New York City policemen, surrounded the Russian People's House on New York's East Fifteenth Street. That night the house, which was used as a meeting place and recreation center by Russian immigrants, was filled with more than two hundred men and boys attending night school.\n\nEmma Goldman was one of the world's best-known anarchists. The lectures she delivered in the United States attracted enormous audiences.\n\nLike Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman was born in Europe, immigrated to America, and became a leading anarchist voice in the United States. He and Goldman were the most famous of the people who were deported to Europe as a result of the Palmer Raids.\n\nAt exactly nine p.m., Palmer's agents burst into the building, shouting that everyone inside was under arrest. When a teacher asked why this was happening, he was struck brutally in the face. Then, while some agents and policemen searched the suspects for weapons, others ransacked the premises, overturning desks, tearing pictures from the walls, prying open locked files, and rolling up rugs in an attempt to find incriminating evidence. When all this had been completed, the prisoners were forced to descend a staircase where, as they made their way down, they were beaten so severely that thirty-three of them had to be taken to the hospital for treatment. Their injuries, the _New York Times_ reported, were \"souvenirs of the new attitude of aggressiveness which has been assumed by the Federal agents against Reds or suspected Reds.\"\n\nThe raid on the Russian People's House was not the only anti-Red activity that took place on November 9, 1919. While that assault was carried out, federal agents arrested 450 suspected anarchists and Communists in raids staged in nine other eastern American cities. A. Mitchell Palmer's open war against Reds had begun.\n\nBy the next day, Palmer, who only a week before had been vilified by the press and had several members of Congress demand his resignation, had become a national hero, \"a tower of strength to his countrymen,\" according to one newspaper. Taking advantage of this huge new support, Palmer obtained a deportation order for 199 of the Russians, most of whom were not even given a hearing. On December 21, 1919, the Russians, together with fifty other people who had been sentenced to deportation, were herded together on an ancient army transport ship named the _Buford_. As soon as all the deportees were aboard, the ship, soon nicknamed the \"Soviet Ark,\" set off for Russia.\n\nAboard the vessel were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, two of the most famous and influential of all the anarchists who had been charged with inciting revolution in America. Almost as soon as the ship left the dock, Goldman shouted, \"This is the beginning of the end of the United States. I shall be back in America. We shall all be back. I am proud to be among the first deported.\" Equally defiant, Berkman growled, \"We're coming back and we'll get you.\"\n\nAlmost as soon as the \"Soviet Ark\" had departed, the US State Department released its official explanation of why these 249 people had been deported. It read, \"These persons, while enjoying the hospitality of this country, have conducted themselves in a most obnoxious manner; and while enjoying the benefits and living under the protection of this Government have plotted its overthrow. They are a menace to law and order. They hold theories which are antagonistic to the orderly processes of modern civilization. . . . They are arrayed in opposition to government, to decency, to justice. They plan to apply their destructive theories by violence in derogation of law. They are anarchists. They are persons of such character as to be undesirable in the United States of America and are being sent back whence they came.\"\n\nThe ship named the _Buford_ spent most of its existence as a US Army transport vessel. It gained fame, however, when, under the nickname the \"Soviet Ark,\" it was used to deport aliens to Russia.\n\nThe state department's words were cheered throughout the country. But Palmer was hardly done. He was already planning another roundup. And this one, he was certain, would result in the capture of thousands, not hundreds, of those he suspected of being Reds.\n\nTHE SECOND RED SCARE\n\nSenator Joseph McCarthy holds up a document as he speaks to a crowd. The accusatory documents he was fond of displaying often contained false claims.\n\n**LESS THAN THIRTY YEARS** after the United States experienced the first fears of a Communist takeover, the spread of Communism in Eastern Europe and China following World War II and the fact that the Soviet Union had become a world superpower that possessed nuclear weapons triggered a second Red Scare. While the first Red Scare was fueled by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the second was brought to its height by the actions of US senator Joseph McCarthy.\n\nMcCarthy was an egotistical man who regarded the fear of Communism that arose in the late 1940s and 1950s as the opportunity to gain what he most desperately wanted: power and publicity. He began his crusade in February 1950, with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he waved a sheet of paper in the air, claiming it contained a list of 205 known Communists working in the US State Department. Unknown to the audience, the paper was blank. McCarthy had no proof of the existence of any Communists in the state department.\n\nIt didn't matter. McCarthy became an overnight sensation. At the height of his popularity, some 70 percent of the American public believed he was doing an outstanding job of rooting out secret Communists. All of which prompted him to begin, also without any evidence, to start publicly announcing the names of individuals he claimed were Communists. Many of those whom he falsely accused had their careers permanently destroyed and their lives shattered.\n\nThe atmosphere of fear, even terror, that McCarthy created inspired other organizations to conduct similar witch hunts. Most notable was Congress's House Un-American Activities Committee. It turned its attention on Hollywood, where it ordered famous actors, actresses, screenwriters, producers, and directors to testify and to declare under oath whether they were or had ever been members of the Communist Party. Those who refused to answer were automatically regarded as guilty and were blacklisted, meaning that they were not able to find work for the duration of the second Red Scare.\n\nIt seemed that nothing could keep Joseph McCarthy from acquiring more power and destroying more lives. Then, brimming with confidence, he overreached by taking on both the US Army and the most popular television news anchorman in the country, Edward R. Murrow. After being denounced by McCarthy, the highly respected Murrow responded with a profile of the senator that showed him to be the unjust bully and coward that he was. McCarthy's charges that top army officials were Communists or Communist sympathizers led to a long series of televised hearings, watched by tens of millions of people, in which the army's chief lawyer James Welch exposed McCarthy as rude, irresponsible, and dangerous.\n\nSoon after the Army-McCarthy hearings were over, the US Senate voted to censure McCarthy for having charged so many people falsely. Three years later, he died of medical complications associated with alcoholism. His lasting legacy was one he would never have wished for. Today, the term \"McCarthyism\" is commonly used to describe accusing someone of a wrongdoing without having any evidence.\n\nEager to launch the assault as quickly as possible, Palmer asked the secretary of labor, who in 1919 had much broader powers than he or she would have today, to change the part of the deportation rules that allowed aliens to obtain legal help. He also asked the secretary to give him a warrant that would let him arrest any alien he wished to once a raid began, even if he had no proof that person had done anything wrong. The secretary, however, convinced that both requests were violations of the nation's Bill of Rights, to whose protection even aliens were entitled, refused to grant Palmer's requests.\n\nFurious at the secretary, Palmer began seeking ways to get around the denial. Then fortune smiled on him. In mid-December the secretary became ill and was forced to go on sick leave. His replacement, a man in tune with Palmer's beliefs, wasted no time in granting him a warrant for the arrest of three thousand aliens, most of whom Palmer suspected of being Communists.\n\nOn January 2, 1920, Palmer authorized raids across the country in which over four thousand people were arrested. In the same raid, more than two thousand other persons were taken into custody and held for a period of time without any charges being filed against them.\n\nAs far as public opinion was concerned, the result of the raids was far more positive than even Palmer could have hoped for. Praised throughout the country, particularly in the nation's newspapers, his approval rating reached an all-time high. The _Washington Post_ , which had been highly critical of the November raids, called for the deportation of the new suspects as quickly as possible, stating, \"There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberty.\" The _Philadelphia Inquirer_ agreed, endowing one of its editions with the headline, \"ALL ABOARD FOR THE NEXT SOVIET ARK.\"\n\nSuspected Communists, many of whom had been rounded up in the Palmer Raids, arrive at the Ellis Island immigration center from which they will be deported. Later it would be proven that most of them had been marked for deportation under false charges.\n\nWhat no one, most of all Palmer, could have realized at the time was that the accolades the raids received would soon be replaced by pointed criticism. Within days of the raids, widespread reports of serious abuses that had taken place during the January 2 raids began to surface. Scores of eyewitnesses revealed that prisoners had been denied food and had been forced to sleep in filthy, dangerously unsanitary cells and hallways. As days went by, the charges became even more serious. Four hundred men had been packed into an unheated and terribly overcrowded prison at Deer Island in Boston Harbor. Over the next weeks, the treatment of these prisoners, almost all of whom were innocent, was so brutal that one prisoner went insane, another leaped to his death from the building's fifth floor, and several others attempted suicide.\n\nTHE ACLU\n\n**THE ABUSE OF CIVIL LIBERTIES** brought about by the Palmer Raids ultimately shocked fair-minded citizens. One group in particular decided to take action. On January 19, 1920, they formed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), whose stated mission was \"to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.\"\n\nFrom the beginning, the ACLU established itself as the most powerful and effective defender of personal liberties the nation has ever known. One of its earliest battles took place in 1925, with what became known as the Scopes Trial. When the state of Tennessee passed a law banning the teaching of evolution in its schools, the ACLU recruited biology teacher John T. Scopes to challenge the law by teaching the subject in his class. When Scopes was brought to trial, the ACLU persuaded Clarence Darrow, one of the nation's most celebrated lawyers, to defend him. The trial captured national attention and helped convince the public of the importance of academic freedom.\n\nFollowing the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, some 120,000 people of Japanese descent, almost all of whom were loyal American citizens, were placed in \"war relocation camps.\" Their internment starting in 1942 and spanning the war represented one of the darkest periods in American history. Through it all, the ACLU stood almost alone in denouncing this gross injustice.\n\nOne of the ACLU's greatest victories came in 1954, when it joined forces with the NAACP to challenge another major injustice\u2014racial segregation in public schools. The resulting Supreme Court decision in the landmark _Brown v. the Board of Education_ case, which declared that segregated schools were in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, was a major achievement in the battle for racial equality.\n\nAmong the most important characteristics of the ACLU is the way the organization has stood up for individuals and groups whose cause is unpopular. Perhaps the best example of this trait occurred in 1978, when the ACLU took a highly controversial stand for free speech by defending a Nazi group that intended to march through Skokie, Illinois, where many Holocaust victims lived. The ACLU paid a heavy price for its actions when a significant number of its members resigned in protest. But, as the group explains its mission, \"We do not defend [people] because we agree with them; rather we defend their right to free expression and free assembly . . . we work to stop the erosion of civil liberties before it's too late.\"\n\nToday, the ACLU is an organization with more than 1.6 million members, some three hundred staff attorneys, thousands of volunteer attorneys, and offices throughout the country. Its current positions include eliminating discrimination against women, supporting the rights of prisoners and opposing torture, opposing the death penalty, supporting same-sex marriage and the right of LGBTQ people to adopt children, and protecting the rights of refugees and immigrants to enter the country legally. As the ACLU has stated, \"The work of defending freedom never ends, and in our vibrant and passionate society, difficult struggles over individual rights and liberties aren't likely to disappear anytime soon. . . . We look forward to protecting constitutional rights for generations to come.\"\n\nTo the nation's horror, the evidence of outrageous abuses kept mounting. In Detroit, eight hundred suspects had been held in an unventilated corridor of a US Post Office building, where they had no beds or blankets and only one toilet for the entire group. Also in Detroit, Palmer's agents, operating without warrants, had arrested every diner in a foreign restaurant and had imprisoned an entire orchestra.\n\nAs stories of the physical abuses that had accompanied the Palmer Raids continued to grow, several investigating committees were formed, including one made up of the nation's most respected lawyers. After weeks of hearing testimony concerning the raids, the committee issued what it titled \"A Report on the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice.\" In it, the committee decried the fact that the abuses of the Palmer Raids went well beyond physical mistreatment. Evidence proved conclusively, the report stated, that only three thousand warrants had been obtained for the more than five thousand people detained, and that the vast majority of the warrants either were unsigned or contained no evidence that a crime had been committed. The report also cited case after case in which prisoners who spoke no English were denied the aid of interpreters, confessions had been obtained through physical abuse, or bail had been set at an outrageously high figure.\n\nAs Palmer's anti-Red crusade steadily fell apart, he refused to admit that he and his agents had done anything wrong. Called before a congressional committee to answer charges that he had misused his office, Palmer stated, \"I apologize for nothing . . . I point with pride and enthusiasm to the results of that work. . . . [If my agents] were a little rough and unkind, or short and curt, with those alien agitators . . . I think it might well be overlooked in the general good to the country which has come from it.\"\n\nBy this time, however, it had become increasingly clear that the \"general good\" had not been served and that the wholesale violation of civil liberties that had taken place during the Palmer Raids was a far greater threat to the nation's well-being than any perceived Communist takeover.\n\nEIGHT HUNDRED SUSPECTS HAD BEEN HELD IN AN UNVENTILATED CORRIDOR. . .WHERE THEY HAD NO BEDS OR BLANKETS AND ONLY ONE TOILET.\n\nDespite having lost favor with the public (particularly after it was revealed that four thousand of those arrested in the January raids had to be released through lack of evidence), the resilient Palmer was still not finished. First in May 1920, and then again two months later, he boldly and unequivocally predicted that a serious Communist revolt was about to take place throughout the country. When nothing happened, the newspapers, for the first time, began accusing him of being obsessed with an enemy that did not exist. Even that did not stop him from attempting to gain the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. But with his reputation in shambles, he failed. Retiring from politics, he entered private law practice, which he pursued until his death in 1936.\n\nThe man who would be president, the man who dedicated himself to fighting what he believed was an enormous threat to American freedom, would be best remembered as the man who carried out a series of discredited raids that jeopardized that very freedom. \"Perhaps,\" as historian Allan L. Damon has written, \"that is the way it should be. For . . . [A. Mitchell Palmer] very nearly gave it all away in succumbing to the hysteria of the great Red Scare.\"\n\n**ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER**\n\n**THE DICTIONARY DEFINES \"NATIVISM\"** as a policy of favoring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants. It was this nativist philosophy, bolstered by his fear and distrust of foreigners, that prompted Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to pursue policies that brought the Red Scare in America to a head in 1919. Almost one hundred years later, during the presidential election of 2016, Republican Party candidate Donald Trump espoused similar anti-immigrant sentiments.\n\nAfter his election to the White House, President Trump limited the influx of refugees, increased immigration arrests, and pressed to build a wall along the United States' border with Mexico. Most dramatically, building on the anger and fear engendered by terrorist attacks attributed to the militant extremist group ISIS, he issued an executive order denying entrance to refugees and people from seven Muslim-majority countries\u2014Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen\u2014who didn't have close family or business relationships.\n\nThe anti-immigrant nativist sentiment that has pervaded the United States in recent years is reflected in statistics kept by organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. According to the center, in 2016 the number of hate groups in the United States increased from 892 to 917. The number of anti-Muslim hate groups tripled from 34 to 101. \"The country,\" states the center, \"saw a resurgence of white nationalism that imperils the racial progress we've made.\"\n\nOf all the domestic extremist groups active in the United States today, the most troubling are those affiliated with the white supremacist movement. They are also the most violent, so much so that between 2000 and 2015, according to the Anti-Defamation League, about 83 percent of the extremist-related murders in America were committed by white supremacists. In addition, more than 52 percent of the shootouts between extremists and police now involve white extremists.\n\nThe white supremacist movement has a number of different components, including neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, the historically familiar white supremacists, and white supremacist prison gangs, which are growing faster than any other group. At the heart of these groups' beliefs is the conviction that unless action is taken now, whites are doomed to extinction by an ever-growing number of nonwhites. This belief is articulated in the slogan, \"We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.\"\n\nIn recent years, two violent events have brought attention to the white supremacists and their goals. On June 17, 2015, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist murdered nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. The horrific incident sent a shockwave through the nation.\n\nThen in August 2017, white supremacists staged a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which they advertised as \"Unite the Right.\" The white supremacist marchers chanted racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant slogans; they carried swastikas, Confederate flags, and anti-Muslim banners. On the day of August 12, 2017, a member of one of the white supremacist groups deliberately rammed his car into a group of people protesting the rally, killing one person and injuring nineteen and prompting Virginia's governor to declare a state of emergency.\n\nOnce again worldwide attention was drawn to violence in the United States being carried out in the name of white supremacy. And once again it became clear that one hundred years after the first Red Scare and some sixty-five after a second, nativism and a mistrust of foreigners are still very much with us.\n\n_A Journey of Inclusion and Exclusion_\n\n_The following is a timeline of events and developments connected with major examples of nativism and\/or mistrust of immigrants that have been part of the American experience._\n\n1880s | A large wave of immigration to the United States from present-day Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Yemen takes place. Many Muslims are included in this wave of immigration.  \n---|---  \n1938 | The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) is established.  \n1941 | DECEMBER 7: Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. The FBI begins to round up members of the Japanese American communities on the West Coast.  \n1942 | FEBRUARY 19: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs executive order 9066, which encouraged voluntary relocation and eventually led to the forced removal and internment of Japanese Americans living on the US West Coast. In the months that would follow, 120,000 Japanese American men, women, and children would arrive at assembly centers throughout the West Coast and then be transferred to \"relocation centers\" for the duration of the war.  \n| OCTOBER: At a press conference, President Roosevelt calls the relocation centers concentration camps.  \n1947 | President Harry Truman signed an executive order authorizing loyalty checks for federal government employees.  \n1948 | A federal grand jury indicts twelve American Communist Party leaders for conspiracy to overthrow the government.  \n1950 | FEBRUARY 9: Senator Joseph McCarthy begins his Communist witch hunt with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia.  \n1954 | MARCH 9: In one of the most famous and effective journalistic attacks, Edward R. Murrow delivers a devastating rebuke of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his methods.  \n1954 | APRIL 22 to JUNE 17: The televised Army-McCarthy hearings take place.  \n---|---  \n| DECEMBER: The US Senate censures Joseph McCarthy for his conduct.  \n1988 | AUGUST 10: President Ronald Reagan signs the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Its provisions include a formal apology to the Japanese American internees. The act also provides for a $20,000 reparation payment to be given to each person who was interned as well as others of Japanese ancestry who had lost property or freedoms at that time as a result of Roosevelt's order.  \n1995 | The Counterterrorism Act is signed into law. The act legalizes the deportation of people suspected of having \"ties to terrorism.\" Critics claimed that the act's wording targeted Muslim communities.  \n2001 | SEPTEMBER 11: The 9\/11 attacks heighten anti-Muslim sentiments.  \n| SEPTEMBER 20: President George W. Bush invokes the phrase \"war on terror,\" which leads to the targeting of Muslim communities.  \n2013 | APRIL 15: The Boston Marathon bombing contributes to an increase in suspicion and distrust of Muslim Americans.  \n2017 | A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that the number of anti-Muslim hate groups in America has tripled in one year, which coincides with a 67 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes.  \n| JANUARY 27: President Donald Trump's executive order bans people from seven Muslim-majority countries\u2014Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen\u2014from entering the United States.  \n2018 | APRIL 6: Attorney General Jeff Sessions enacts a zero-tolerance policy for undocumented immigrations along the southwest border of the United States. This policy results in more than 2,300 migrant children being separated from their families.  \n| APRIL 25: The US Supreme Court begins hearing arguments to determine the legality of President Trump's executive order.  \n| JUNE 20: President Trump rescinds his administration's earlier policy by signing an executive order stating that migrant families should be detained together.\n\nThe strikes that rocked the United States in 1919 included work stoppages in almost every field of endeavor. Here, New York City actors gather together after having gone out on strike.\n\n  CHAPTER FIVE\n\n**IN 1919, THE RED SCARE** permeated almost every area of American life, especially the efforts of the labor movement, where even before most Americans had ever heard the term \"Bolshevism,\" workers had become increasingly vocal in demanding higher wages and better working conditions.\n\nThe United States' entry into World War I, however, put a temporary halt to those demands. During the war, workers throughout the nation, no matter how dissatisfied they had become, demonstrated their patriotism by staying on the job and working harder than ever. When the conflict ended, they expected company owners to reward them with better pay, shorter working hours, and safer conditions. When it became clear that the owners had no intention of doing so, workers began organizing strikes. Before 1919 was over, in an unprecedented demonstration of labor unrest, there would be thirty-six hundred work stoppages involving four million workers or one-fifth of the nation's labor force.\n\nAs far as tens of thousands of private citizens and many government officials were concerned, these strikes were not simply motivated by hopes for higher wages. They were, many believed, an extension of the Communist activities that sought to upend American democracy and disrupt capitalism as they knew it.\n\nThe first great strike of 1919 began on January 21, when thirty-five thousand Seattle, Washington, shipyard workers walked off their jobs, demanding higher wages and shorter working hours. Almost as soon as the strike began, the Seattle Central Labor Council called for a general strike of _all_ workers throughout the city\u2014an unheard-of act. At ten a.m. on February 6, 1919, sixty-five thousand people from scores of occupations went on strike in sympathy with the dockworkers, including truck drivers, streetcar men, barbers, school janitors, elevator operators, newsboys, longshoremen, and theatrical workers. This was the first general strike in the nation's history. \"We are undertaking,\" stated the _Seattle Union Record_ , a newspaper that supported the strikers, \"the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country.\"\n\nEmployees of the Skinner and Eddy shipyard stage a walkout during the Seattle General Strike. Skinner and Eddy employed a majority of the nearly 30,000 shipyard workers in Seattle.\n\nThe result was an almost complete shutdown of the city. Schools closed, newspapers stopped publishing, restaurants were empty. Theaters went dark, streetcars never left their barns, and almost no automobiles were on the streets. Significantly, however, the strikers were well behaved. Not a single incident of violence was reported.\n\nThe Seattle General Strike brought the city virtually to a halt. But, unlike many other strikes that took place in 1919, it was without violence.\n\nSeattle's officials and leading citizens, however, were convinced that the city was about to explode. The city's mayor, Ole Hanson, declared that the walkout was not really a strike at all but a Communist plot to change the very fabric of America. The _Los Angeles Times_ proclaimed that the majority of the strike's leaders were \"Bolsheviki of the most radical Russian type.\" One of the most frightening assessments came from the _Baltimore Sun_ , which called the strike \"an attempted Bolshevik revolution\u2014an attempt to start a conflagration which . . . could bring the United States to the condition of Russia where anarchy, assassination, starvation, and every calamity that can oppress a people is [taking place].\"\n\nDetermined to take action, Mayor Hanson requested the support of the US Army, and before the strike was a day old, eight hundred troops had arrived in downtown Seattle and taken up positions. Two additional battalions of soldiers plus a machine-gun company stood in readiness outside the city.\n\nThe Seattle strike took place when, for many American workers, joining a union was becoming increasingly important. But Hanson was determined to prevent the unions from moving the strike forward. After mobilizing the soldiers, he then hired one thousand extra police, proclaimed he was ready to hire ten thousand more, and warned the unions that \"any man who attempts to take over control of municipal government functions here will be shot on sight.\"\n\nBEFORE THE STRIKE WAS A DAY OLD, EIGHT HUNDRED TROOPS HAD ARRIVED IN DOWNTOWN SEATTLE AND TAKEN UP POSITIONS.\n\nHanson's aggressive actions made him an overnight hero, hailed by newspapers across the country as \"the man of the hour.\" Basking in his newfound glory, he told the national press that what he regarded as a revolution \"never got to first base, and it never will if the men in control of affairs will tell all traitors and anarchists that death will be their portion if they start anything.\"\n\nAcknowledging defeat, thousands of the strikers, whose ranks at one point had swollen to more than seventy-five thousand, returned to work. On February 11, five days after the walkout had begun, the strike committee voted to end it. In what had been organized labor's first test of how much power it would yield in the wake of World War I, it had come up woefully short.\n\nThe Seattle General Strike was the first major labor walkout in a year that would see an almost continuous stream of labor disputes. Among them would be one strike that would gain more national attention than even the Seattle walkout\u2014a strike that would bring a vital issue to the forefront: the right of public servants to strike against the government that employed them. It was called the Boston Police Strike.\n\nIn September 1919, members of the Boston Police Department had many reasons to be unhappy with their working conditions. Almost all the members of the force were earning less than half of what many workers had been paid for their labor in the war factories. Out of these meager salaries, they had to buy their own uniforms.\n\nTo make matters worse, every officer and patrolman was assigned to work a twelve-hour shift. The fact that all the Boston police stations were crowded and filthy added to the discontent. To most of the policemen, there was only one way to solve their problems. They needed to join a union.\n\nBoston's police commissioner was fifty-eight-year-old Edwin Curtis. Twenty-four years earlier, he had been the youngest mayor the city had ever elected. A member of a long-established, wealthy family, he viewed the police department as his personal domain, and he was determined to keep it tightly under his control.\n\nDuring June and July 1919, the Boston policemen began organizing themselves into an unofficial union they named the Boston Social Club, a move that outraged Commissioner Curtis. On more than one occasion he issued a general order reminding his police of the departmental rule that stated, \"No members of the force shall join or belong to any organization, club or body outside the department.\" Despite this warning, the policemen took their unionization efforts a giant step further by having their Boston Social Club apply for membership in the American Federation of Labor (AFL).\n\nOn August 11, 1919, the AFL granted a charter to the Boston Social Club, designating it as Boston Police Union No. 16,807. An outraged Curtis wasted no time in charging the eight new officers heading up the union with insubordination. He then ordered that they be placed on departmental trial.\n\nThe police force responded by declaring that the regulation banning them from forming a union was \"invalid, unreasonable and contrary to the express law of Massachusetts.\" They let it be known that if their new union's leaders were disciplined they would go out on strike.\n\nNo one was more upset at the prospect of a police strike than Boston's mayor, Andrew J. Peters. Peters was a much more even-tempered man than Commissioner Curtis. He was, in fact, much more interested in playing golf or sailing on his yacht than running the city.\n\nAs it became increasingly possible that there could indeed be a police strike, Peters, who shuddered at the thought of having to deal with it, took what he regarded as the easy way out. He appointed a Citizens' Committee of Thirty-Four, headed by leading Boston businessman James J. Storrow, to look into the situation and make recommendations for what action should be taken.\n\nThe committee, aware of the chaos that a police strike would bring about, felt strongly that a compromise could and should be worked out. As they met daily with the leaders of the new union, it seemed that this solution might be possible. But Commissioner Curtis refused to compromise, making the police even more determined to strike.\n\nMeantime, the governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, refused to broker a compromise. In fact, as the probability of a strike grew larger and larger, he left Boston without telling anyone where he was going.\n\nThe reconciliation that the Committee of Thirty-Four suggested would have allowed the police to organize and stated that if the police called off the strike, there would be no disciplinary action taken against their leaders. Finally, the compromise called for a special impartial committee to be created to hear the policemen's grievances. But Curtis refused to even listen to their offer, stating that he would not accept any plan \"that might be construed as a pardon of the men on trial.\"\n\nOn Monday afternoon, September 8, 1919, Governor Coolidge suddenly returned to his office. Although he didn't know it, he arrived at almost exactly the same time that Boston's police were voting 1,134 to 2 to go out on strike at five o'clock the next day. Coolidge had no interest in hearing suggestions that might have avoided such a strike or putting plans in place to patrol the city should it be without police protection. For some reason, despite the demonstrable support of the strike vote among the force, he was absolutely certain that most of the police would remain loyal to him and stay on the job.\n\nAt five o'clock the next day, 1,117 of the 1,544 men on the Boston police force went out on strike. For weeks preceding the walkout, citizen volunteers had been offering their services to protect the city in the event the police left their posts. Curtis was still convinced that neither the city nor any of its citizens was in danger.\n\nAlmost as soon as the walkout began, something that today would probably seem strange began to happen. Gambling by rolling dice was illegal, but now throughout the city\u2014in the parks, on street corners, in front of the statehouse\u2014men began to openly gather together, roll dice, and bet loudly on every roll. It was their way of defying authority and demonstrating that with almost no police on duty, they knew they could get away with it.\n\nDuring the Boston Police Strike, Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge often failed to act in a forceful manner. Yet one public statement he made helped get him elected president of the United States.\n\nAs darkness set in, crowds began to grow and mill about, many people curious to see what the city would be like with almost no police presence. At first, whatever lawlessness took place was relatively harmless. Pedestrians had their hats knocked off by passing \"roughs.\" Boys pulled down some trolley wires, stole spare tires from the rear of parked automobiles, and threw stones at the empty police stations.\n\nThen it happened. Someone threw a brick through the large plate glass window of a cigar store. It was like a signal for the mayhem to begin. Scores of people climbed into the store through the broken windows. Others broke down the locked front door and joined them. Within minutes, the entire store was completely looted. This was just the beginning.\n\nBostonians intent on looting, vandalism, and troublemaking proved to be no match for the well-trained and highly organized Massachusetts state guard. Here, guardsmen march some of those they have taken into custody off to where they can be charged by authorities for their actions.\n\nBefore the night was over, hardly one storefront window was left intact. Merchandise\u2014coats, shirts, neckties, shoes, hardware\u2014lay strewn along the streets where it had fallen out of the arms of looters already loaded down with more than they could carry. Throughout the city, fights broke out between looters trying to steal one another's booty.\n\nAmong the rowdiest people of all were gangs of boys, teenaged and younger, who at last had their chance to defy authority. In one section of the city, a gang piled mattresses, barrels, and boxes on the trolley car tracks and set them afire. In another commercial neighborhood, gangs ransacked every grocery store, littering the streets with squashed fruit, flour, eggs, and sugar and turning the neighborhood into what resembled one giant dump.\n\nWorst of all was the violence that took place simply for violence's sake. At a sports arena where a boxing match was taking place, a mob broke through the doors and physically attacked the spectators. In one coffee shop, when the owner presented a group of customers with their bills, they knocked him out and ransacked the place.\n\nSuperintendent Michael Crowley was one of the few members of the Boston police force who not only refused to take part in the strike, but tried to bring order once the chaos began. During his continued trips around the city, he saw cars set afire, buggies overturned and their horses lashed, women assaulted, sailors fighting with civilians, and rocks and eggs thrown at innocent bystanders. Standing at one of Boston's main intersections with debris all around him and the sounds of breaking glass and even an occasional pistol shot ringing in his ears, he could only turn to the man standing next to him, shake his head, and say, \"I never would have believed it.\"\n\nBy two o'clock in the morning, most likely thanks to a combination of rainy weather and people getting tired, the city was quieting down. At the _Herald_ , Boston's second-largest newspaper, its chief editorial writer was preparing what hundreds of thousands would read the next morning. \"A night of disgrace,\" his editorial would read. \"Somebody blundered. Boston should not have been left defenseless last night . . . it was a sickening scene and no hand was available to arrest the unlawfulness.\"\n\nIt was then Mayor Peters somehow received an infusion of courage to use the power he had been assiduously neglecting. First he called out the state guard, ordering them to patrol Boston's streets the next day. Then he issued a statement to the press complaining about how he had \"received no co-operation from the Police Commissioner and no help or practical suggestions from the Governor.\" Finally, he fired Commissioner Curtis and began recruiting volunteers to help get the city back under control.\n\nThe most obvious place to recruit able-bodied volunteers was nearby Harvard University, which in 1919 admitted only male students. Soon every student found a message slid under his door, containing an appeal from Harvard's president, Abbott Lowell, for men to volunteer to help ease the crisis brought about by the police strike.\n\nHE SAW CARS SET AFIRE, BUGGIES OVERTURNED AND THEIR HORSES LASHED, WOMEN ASSAULTED, SAILORS FIGHTING WITH CIVILIANS, AND ROCKS AND EGGS THROWN AT INNOCENT BYSTANDERS.\n\nBy midnight on Tuesday evening, more than fifty undergraduates had volunteered. The next morning, Harvard's football coach dismissed his 125-man team, telling them that protecting Boston was more important than football. By noon on Wednesday more than 150 Harvard men had arrived at Boston's Chamber of Commerce Building, eager to protect the city. Commenting on their arrival, the _Boston Globe_ remarked, \"Some of the students in times past had considerable experience with the police but until now few of them had experience as policemen.\"\n\nAs news of the strike and the chaotic night in Boston dominated the front pages of newspapers from New York to Los Angeles, Boston remained calm on Wednesday. But once night began to fall, the mobs that gathered on Wednesday night were even larger and more menacing than Tuesday night's hordes had been. The situation was immediately made worse by certain members of the striking police force, who circulated through the crowds, encouraging them to create even larger disturbances. Boston now resembled a war zone. All the banks and department stores were surrounded by barbed wire. Behind their closed doors, employees stood on guard with rifles and pistols. State guardsmen were pelted with rocks, bottles, and bricks as they patrolled the streets.\n\nTHE MOBS THAT GATHERED ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT WERE EVEN LARGER AND MORE MENACING THAN TUESDAY NIGHT'S HORDES HAD BEEN.\n\nViolence occurred in all directions. Near the site of where the Boston Massacre had taken place almost 150 years earlier, some of the guardsmen opened fire on the mob, killing three people. Guardsmen in another unit patrolling South Boston also opened fire, killing two people who had been tormenting them. And on Boston Common, a sailor was killed as an attempt was made to remove a mob from that historic site.\n\nMeanwhile, the Harvard volunteers were finding that their Boston experience was not turning into the exciting adventure many of them had envisioned. Far from it! When they arrived on the streets, they were greeted by angry crowds who yelled \"Scab!\" and spat at them. In the city's Scollay Square, a group of the Harvard volunteers were set upon by a gang of toughs who had broken off from the more than five thousand troublemakers gathered there. The Harvard men beat a hasty retreat, but two of them were knocked down in a doorway and then stomped on, and two others were trapped against a wall and beaten viciously.\n\nDespite his initial reluctance to act, Wednesday night's widespread destruction and bloodshed finally got to Governor Coolidge. Realizing that he now had to take a stand, he did what many thought he should have done at the beginning of the strike. He called out the entire state guard. And in defiance of Mayor Peters, he reinstated Police Commissioner Curtis and ordered him back on the job immediately.\n\nWhether it was because the crowds had finally worn themselves out or because they were intimidated by the presence of the entire state guard, numbering almost seven thousand men, and the sight of batteries of machine guns mounted and manned throughout the city, by midday Thursday, the citizens' committee was able to report that \"order had generally been restored.\"\n\nState guard troops arrive in downtown Boston. Their presence was a major factor in bringing the violence of the Boston Police Strike to a halt.\n\nThe Boston police had hoped that by going out on strike they would gain the public's sympathy and would force the city to give in to their demands for better wages and working conditions. But with the strike now the nation's biggest story, things were not turning the policemen's way. One of the first blows came from the highest level, the president of the United States. President Wilson left no doubt as to how he regarded the Boston police.\n\n\"I want to say . . . ,\" Wilson declared to an audience in Helena, Montana, \"that a strike of the policemen of a great city, leaving that city at the mercy of an army of thugs, is a crime against civilization. In my judgment the obligation of a policeman is as sacred and direct as the obligation of a soldier. He is a public servant, not a private employee, and the whole honor of the community is in his hands. He has no right to prefer any private advantage to the public safety.\"\n\nFIRST ACROSS THE ATLANTIC\n\n**OF ALL THE DEVELOPMENTS** that contributed to shaping the United States in the years prior to 1919, nothing was more important than the almost continual advance of technology, a positive development for much of the labor force as machines made easy work of typically difficult manual labor. And of all the remarkable events that occurred in 1919, one historic aeronautic achievement in particular held the attention of people across the country.\n\nIn the years prior to 1919, extraordinary advances were made in the field of aviation. In December 1903, the Wright Brothers had barely gotten off the ground and had flown shakily for 120 feet. Within six years, biplanes were flying for more than an hour and climbing to heights of one thousand feet. By 1914, an altitude record of over eleven hundred feet had been achieved and flight would provide a whole new frontier for people around the world.\n\nThe greatest test of the airplane's new prowess\u2014a nonstop flight through the turbulent skies over the Atlantic Ocean\u2014remained to be achieved, though. As in so many other ways, 1919 would be a pivotal year in aeronautics, too.\n\nIt seemed an impossible challenge. But when British newspaper _The Daily Mail_ offered what in today's money would be a $500,000 prize for the first person or persons to fly nonstop across the Atlantic, several contenders took the bait. Among them were two men, John Alcock and Arthur Brown, former British Airmen who had both been shot down and captured during the Great War. Both had spent their time in prison camp thinking of ways the Atlantic might be crossed nonstop by air.\n\nBy the spring of 1919, Alcock and Brown gathered with their plane, a Vickers Vimy _,_ in Newfoundland, the most advantageous place in North America from which to attempt a nonstop flight across the Atlantic to Europe. Of the four two-man teams who would attempt the journey, three didn't make it past the initial shores of the Atlantic. Alcock and Brown would begin their attempt on June 14, 1919.\n\nIt would be the most harrowing flight imaginable for the two airmen. Flying in an open cockpit with the wind continually pounding against them, they immediately encountered dense fog that stayed with them for almost their entire flight.\n\nOnly a few miles out the radio went dead, and they lost all chance of communicating with anyone. Almost as soon as that happened, they flew directly into the most vicious storm that either Alcock, the pilot, or Brown, the navigator, had ever encountered. Turbulence tugged the Vimy around like a toy. Then true disaster struck. The Vimy stalled out completely and went into a steep dive, heading directly for the Atlantic. It was not until the plane was less than ten feet from the ocean that, miraculously, Alcock was able to pull the aircraft out of the stall and avert certain death.\n\nTheir challenges were far from over. As temperatures dropped, snow and ice appeared and began clogging the air intakes of the Vimy's two engines. Five times, Brown had to climb out on the wing to chip away the ice before the engines stalled while Alcock fought desperately to keep the plane on an even keel.\n\nLate in the afternoon of June 15, as if to reward the two men for all they had overcome, the skies cleared for the first time, and at 4:28 p.m., they spotted the coast of Ireland. Although they mistook a water-filled bog for a smooth green field and landed in it nose down, tail up, they had done it. In flying 1,890 miles, the farthest anyone had ever flown, in 15 hours and 57 minutes, they had become the first to conquer the Atlantic nonstop.\n\nAround the world, Alcock and Brown were hailed as the heroes they truly were. Back in America, a seventeen-year-old boy told his friends that the flight had inspired him to put all his efforts into accomplishing something similar. His name was Charles Lindbergh.\n\nAlthough Alcock and Brown's flight ended on a less than glorious note when they landed nose down, tail up in a bog, theirs was one of aviation's greatest early achievements.\n\nCalvin Coolidge echoed the president's sentiments and expressed them even more directly. Speaking out more boldly than he had during the entire strike, he made a statement that would bring him national attention and acclaim. \"There is no right,\" he exclaimed, \"to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.\"\n\nThroughout the nation, the press left no doubt that they agreed with Wilson and Coolidge. \"TROOPS TURN MACHINE GUNS ON BOSTON MOBS\" and \"TERROR REIGNS IN CITY\" were two of the headlines most commonly seen. The _Los Angeles Times_ declared that \"no man's house, no man's wife, no man's children, will be safe if the police force is unionized and made subject to the orders of Red Unionite bosses.\" Under the headline \"RIOTS IN BOSTON,\" the _San Francisco Examiner_ described Boston as a place where \"Gangs Range Streets, Women Are Attacked, Stores Are Robbed, Shots Are Fired.\" The _New York World_ expressed how it felt in two words: \"CIVIC TREASON,\" it exclaimed.\n\nAs had happened in Seattle, many newspapers, a significant number of congressmen, and tens of thousands of citizens were convinced that the strike had been part of a Soviet Bolshevik plot to take over the country. US senator Henry Myers of Montana agreed with those of his colleagues who believed that with the Boston Police Strike, \"the effort to Sovietize the Government [had] started.\" Speaking on the floor of the Senate, he declared the Boston Police Strike was \"one of the most dastardly acts of infamy that has ever occurred in this country since the act of Benedict Arnold.\"\n\nWith the tide of public opinion having turned so completely against the police, Samuel Gompers, the head of the AFL, urged them to end their strike. On Friday, the policemen voted to return to work under the same conditions that existed before their walkout. But the newly reinstated Commissioner Curtis would not even talk with them. Declaring that he would never take back the strikers, he raised the minimum wage for a police officer and set about recruiting an entire new police force.\n\nBy the end of 1919, Curtis had fired the entire striking police force and, as he said he would, hired a whole new one. The state guardsmen, after continuing to patrol the streets for weeks, were finally gone. It was the close of an era and the beginning of a brand-new one\u2014and this updated force would be tasked with upholding a whole new federally dictated way of life called Prohibition.\n\nThe Boston Police Strike caused shock waves across the nation. Yet the country barely had time to catch its breath when, less than two weeks later, the largest strike that had ever taken place in the United States began. Even though the nation's steel companies were enormously profitable, their workers were paid wages so low they could barely afford to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their families. The factories in which they worked inhumanely long hours were extremely dangerous. Many of the workers were so bad off financially they were forced to send their children to work rather than allow them to attend school.\n\nTHE COUNTRY BARELY HAD TIME TO CATCH ITS BREATH WHEN, LESS THAN TWO WEEKS LATER, THE LARGEST STRIKE IN THE UNITED STATES BEGAN.\n\nLike so many workers in so many different crafts and industries throughout the country, the nation's steel workers had expected that their wages and working conditions would improve once the Great War was over. When, by August 1919, it became clear that was not going to happen, discontent within the various steel worker unions reached an all-time high. So much so that when union leaders conducted a poll, they found that 98 percent of the men were in favor of \"stopping work should the companies refuse to concede . . . higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions.\"\n\nAs it became increasingly apparent that a steel workers strike was a real possibility, particularly a strike against the United States Steel Corporation, the largest company in the world, the AFL saw an opportunity to bolster its strength. It encouraged the leaders of twenty-four separate steel worker craft unions to come together under the banner of the AFL and stage a national work stoppage.\n\nSeeking a last-gasp way to avoid a strike and bring US Steel to the bargaining table, a committee made up of officials of the craft unions attempted to open up negotiations with US Steel chairman Elbert Gary. But despite many telegrams and letters sent to him, Gary refused to bargain. The craft union officials also sought the help of the president of the United States. But Woodrow Wilson, on a nationwide tour to gain support for the League of Nations, failed to give it his full attention.\n\nOn September 22, 1919, 275,000 steelworkers across America went on strike. Within four days, their ranks had swelled to more than 365,000, the largest walkout that had ever taken place in the United States. By the end of the month, half the steel industry, including almost all the mills in Chicago, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio; Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Wheeling, West Virginia; Lackawanna, New York; and Youngstown, Ohio, had shut down.\n\nMany of the strikers were men recently returned from the battlefields of Europe. \"We are all on the firing line once more,\" declared one striker, \"and we are going over the top as we did in 1918 over there. . . . For we are determined to lick the steel barons . . . of this country as we were to lick the German Kaiser.\" By \"steel barons,\" the strikers meant the owners and top executives of the steel companies, many of whom were among the richest men in America. Their opulent homes (most of them had more than one), their luxurious automobiles and yachts, and their extravagant lifestyles were in sharp contrast to that of their workers, whose demands for at least a living wage were met with deaf ears.\n\nFrom the beginning, it became obvious that what would become known as the Great Steel Strike of 1919 was much more than simply a labor dispute between workers and owners. Given the climate that had produced the Red Scare, it was not surprising that many company owners and legions of American citizens regarded the strike as yet another attempt by the Bolsheviks to launch a social revolution in the United States. US Steel's chairman Gary certainly agreed. \"[I]f the strike succeeds,\" he proclaimed, \"it might and probably would be the beginning of an upheaval which might bring on all of us grave and serious consequences.\"\n\nIt did not take long for the nation's leading newspapers to weigh in. The strike, the _New York Tribune_ warned, was \"another experiment in the way of Bolshevizing American industry.\" The _Chicago Tribune_ put it simply. \"[T]he decision [to support the owners or the steelworkers] means a choice between the American system and the Russian\u2014individual liberty or . . . dictatorship.\"\n\nMany of the steel strikers were foreigners, and most had never been involved in a walkout before. Here, a strike leader in Gary, Indiana, advises those engaged in the work stoppage on strike tactics to be used.\n\nThe fact that so many of the striking steelworkers were foreigners added fuel to the fire, something that the steel companies were quick to capitalize upon. And it soon became clear where the federal government stood. Shortly after the strike began, the US Senate Committee on Education and Labor began to investigate the walkout by holding public hearings. Typical of the testimony that the committee heard was that from steelworker John J. Martin, who swore under oath that the AFL had asked only its immigrant members to strike and that \"the foreigners brought the strike on.\" Even more damaging was the testimony of W. M. Mink, the superintendent at the Homestead Steel Works. Asked to state what he believed caused the strike, Mink \"testified that the cause . . . was simple\u2014the infection of 'the Bolshevik spirit' among the 'foreigners.'\"\n\nThroughout the Great Steel Strike there was never a doubt as to what side the nation's police were on. Here, a battered striker is taken into custody by members of the Philadelphia Police Department.\n\nBuoyed by national polls that showed an increasing number of government officials and private citizens believed the walkout was Communist inspired, and confident that should there be confrontation between them and the workers they would be backed up by state and local authorities, the steel companies felt free to put down the strike in any manner they saw fit. In Pennsylvania and Delaware, state police attacked picketers with clubs, dragged strikers from their houses, and threw thousands in jail on false charges. In Gary and Indian Harbor, Indiana, US Army troops and National Guardsmen attacked strikers and drove them off the picket lines. In many places, huge numbers of strikers were jailed and then promised they would be released if they went back to work.\n\nFor the nation's newspapers, the Great Steel Strike was front-page news. The headline that accompanied this photograph read, \"Latest news from the steel district\u2014State troopers ready for a hurry call at Farrell, Pa.\"\n\nAside from these brutal tactics, the steel companies also used another strikebreaking strategy. They hired more than thirty-five thousand unskilled African Americans and Mexicans to work in the mills. Playing on the racism of many of the striking white steelworkers, company officials made sure that they let the strikers know how happy the black and Hispanic replacement workers were now that they had \"white\" jobs.\n\nLike the Seattle General Strike, the Great Steel Strike of 1919 ended with the complete defeat of the unions. For tens of thousands of workers, particularly those who had risked their lives by fighting to save democracy in the Great War, it was a bitter blow. Never, as they were making such huge sacrifices in the trenches or on the battlegrounds, could they have imagined that once they returned home their future bosses would refuse to even talk to them about the better working conditions they sought. Certainly they never could have envisioned that the same type of machine guns they faced in battle would be aimed at them as they stood on picket lines seeking a better way of life for themselves and their children. As one immigrant steelworker put it, \"For why this war? For why we buy Liberty Bonds? For [the steel] mills? No, for freedom and America\u2014for everybody. No more [work like] horse and wagon. For eight-hour day.\"\n\nAs one of the greatest steel-producing cities in the nation, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was also at the center of strike activities. Here, mounted police pick out a particular striker to arrest.\n\nEach of the major strikes that took place in 1919 ended in defeat for the workers. Governments across America at the time, including state legislatures and the US Congress, were too much under the influence of big business for the workers to gain the benefits they hoped the strikes would bring. But thanks to the strikes, there was a positive outcome for the labor movement as well. The strikes would open the public's and the press's eyes to the plight of America's laborers.\n\nAlthough it would take another decade, real changes would take place, and between the 1930s and the 1960s, labor unions would not only gain recognition but would become a powerful presence, at last gaining better wages and better working conditions for their millions of members.\n\n**ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER**\n\n**THE MANY STRIKES** that characterized the year 1919 came at a time when American industry stood at the threshold of a long period of unprecedented growth and prosperity. Much of the growth came at the expense of the workers, who were victimized by greedy owners much more interested in profits than the welfare of the labor force.\n\nToday, both business owners and the public are far more aware of the necessity of protecting the worker. However, the American worker now faces a much different challenge than that of abuse from greedy owners. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared in a dramatic fashion.\n\nOne of the many reasons for this decline is the replacement of workers through the use of robots and other forms of automation that require fewer workers, even those with advanced skills. The numbers tell the story. In 1980 in the United States, it took twenty-five jobs to generate one million dollars in manufacturing output. Today, thanks to automation, it takes five jobs.\n\nThere is another reason why manufacturing jobs have declined, one that has to do with the nature of the US economy itself. A huge percent of the wealth created in America today comes not from manufacturing, but from providing services. And this shift from goods to services shows every indication of continuing. As Mark Munro of the _MIT Technology Review_ has written, \"Our future prosperity is not going to come from buying more stuff, but from doing more for each other.\"\n\n\"OUR FUTURE PROSPERITY IS NOT GOING TO COME FROM BUYING MORE STUFF, BUT FROM DOING MORE FOR EACH OTHER.\"\n\nAlthough there are many doubters and naysayers, today there is widespread agreement among scientists that the environmental crises threatening the planet are climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, and degraded water quality. And there is broad consensus that the greatest of these threats is climate change, or, more specifically, global warming. As former US vice president Al Gore has stated, \"The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more . . . the future of human civilization is at stake.\"\n\nThe ecological and social effects of climate change are already being seen and felt, and, according to many experts, the projected impact of climate change could result in profound changes in surface temperatures throughout the world, sea levels, ocean circulation, precipitation patterns, climatic zones, species distribution, and ecosystem function. As former US president Barack Obama has warned, \"Climate change is no longer some far-off problem. It is happening here. It is happening now.\"\n\nJust as the experts are almost unanimous in their assessment of today's environmental crisis, so too are they almost fully in agreement that the only solution, the one way to save the planet, is once again innovation. The United States and the rest of the world must turn to renewable energy, also called green energy. That means turning to wind, solar, and hydroelectric systems for power instead of coal, oil, and natural gas.\n\nUnlike fossil fuels, wind, solar, and hydroelectric systems generate electricity with no associated air pollution emissions. And wind and solar require almost no water to operate and thus do not pollute water resources or further deplete the water supply by competing with agriculture, drinking water systems, or other water needs.\n\nThe hopeful news is these sources of renewable energy, including to a lesser degree biomass (burning wood and other organic matter) and geothermal (tapping into underground sources of heat), have the potential to provide all the electricity the United States needs many times over. In a major study, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that renewable energy sources have the potential to supply the United States with 482,247 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year. That's almost 120 times the amount of electricity the nation currently uses.\n\nThe big questions are: Why has it taken so long for us to recognize the danger we face? And will we act in time to save the planet for those who come after us? Fortunately, there are positive signs that these questions are, at last, being heard and, in many places, are being acted upon. One of the most encouraging developments has come out of Australia, where renewable energy now generates enough power to run 70 percent of Australian homes. Even more heartening is the fact that once the wind and solar energy projects that were begun in Australia in 2017 are completed, 90 percent of the homes in the country will be run by renewable energy. Dozens of cities in the United States are now following suit, pledging to use 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 or sooner. With Governor Jerry Brown as a driving force, California, home to one out of every eight Americans, has been leading the way and is considering passing laws that would require all the state's power to come from sources such as wind and solar by 2045.\n\nIn one of the most encouraging developments yet, the US Department of Energy has reported that, at the end of 2017, some 374,000 men and women were employed by the solar industry in the United States. That's more people than work in coal, oil, and natural gas combined. In another report, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) verified that approximately 810,000 people in the United States work in renewable energy jobs, with twice as many Americans now working in the wind industry as in coal mining.\n\nThese rising renewable energy employment figures, along with accomplishments such as those in Australia, are truly encouraging. But if the planet is to be saved for future generations, much more needs to be done. This is particularly true in the United States, where a number of officials at the highest levels of the government have made it clear that not only are they not committed to green energy, but they do not believe the environment, and thus the planet, is at risk.\n\nAll of which makes it even more important that those who _are_ committed know that pleas for what we today call green energy are almost as old as the United States itself, and that no matter what opposition these advocates encounter, the stakes are too high for them not to stay the course. More than 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln stated, \"The wind is an untamed, and unharnessed force; and quite possibly one of the greatest discoveries hereafter to be made, will be the taming, and harnessing of the wind.\"\n\nFor too many years, Americans and the rest of the world have let such wise words about all aspects of renewable energy go unheard. The time to correct that potentially disastrous mistake is now. Making this happen will involve taking risks, particularly a willingness to change our attitudes and actions. But, as _Forbes_ magazine has stated, \"America's culture, which fosters entrepreneurship and risk-taking, is the key ingredient that allows it to be one of the most innovative nations on earth.\" As several of those leading the way in renewable energy have reminded us, this willingness to take risks and to commit ourselves to change are, in themselves, renewable resources.\n\n_A Journey of Exploitation and Protection_\n\n_In US labor history, major events date back to 1619, when, in the first English colony in America at Jamestown, Virginia, Polish craftsmen staged a strike in an attempt to gain the right to vote in colony elections._\n\n_Exactly three hundred years later, in 1919, the United States experienced more labor strikes in one year than in any other year in its history._\n\n_In the last hundred years, there has been a steady series of events on the labor front._\n\n1919 | The Fall River, Massachusetts, textile strike takes place.  \n---|---  \n| Farmer-Labor Party is founded.  \n| The Actors' Equity strike shuts down theaters.  \n| Massachusetts telephone operators strike against the New England Telephone Company.  \n| The Seattle Strike, the first general strike in the United States, takes place.  \n| The Boston Police Strike occurs.  \n| The Great Steel Strike takes place.  \n1926 | The Railway Labor Act is passed, making it illegal for employers to bar their workers from joining a union.  \n1935 | The National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act, is passed, establishing the right of all workers to organize.  \n1936 | The General Motors sit-down strike takes place.  \n---|---  \n1938 | The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) holds its first convention.  \n1939 | The Supreme Court rules that sit-down strikes are illegal.  \n1941 | The Ford Motor strike at the River Rouge plant occurs. Ford autoworkers would be the last among the major automakers to have their union rights recognized.  \n1942 | United Steelworkers of America is founded.  \n1946 | General Motors strike ends. Begun in 1945, the 113-day strike ensured paid vacation and overtime pay.  \n1947 | The Taft-Hartley Act, formally known as the Labor-Management Relations Act, curtailing labor organizing and bargaining rights as well as the right to strike, is vetoed by President Harry Truman. Congress overrides the veto.  \n1950 | To avoid a system-wide railroad strike, President Truman issues an executive order to put the nation's railroads under US Army authority. Control of the railroads is not returned to their owners until two years later.  \n1955 | The two largest US labor organizations, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, merge to form the AFL-CIO.  \n1959 | The Taft-Hartley Act is invoked to break a steel strike.  \n1960 | The Negro American Labor Council is founded.  \n| General Electric strike takes place.  \n1962 | The New York City newspaper strike begins in December. The strike, in which all seven major newspapers in New York City cease publication, will last 114 days, making it the longest newspaper strike in US history.  \n---|---  \n1970 | The first work stoppage in the 195-year history of the United States Post Office takes place.  \n1974 | Coalition of Labor Union Women is formed.  \n1981 | Federal air traffic controllers stage a nationwide strike. When they defy President Reagan's back-to-work order, he fires them all. In protest, the largest labor rally in US history takes place.  \n1986 | Female flight attendants win an eighteen-year-long lawsuit against United Airlines, which had fired them when they married.  \n1993 | The Family and Medical Leave Act is passed.  \n1997 | United Parcel Service (UPS) strike takes place.  \n| Pride at Work, a national coalition of gay, bisexual, and transgender workers, becomes an AFL-CIO constituency.  \n2003 | Workers in forty-eight factories in thirty-three states stage a strike against General Electric.  \n2009 | President Obama signs the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which restores the right of working women to sue over pay discrimination.  \n2017 | The #MeToo movement spreads across the globe, drawing attention to sexual harassment and assault, especially as both occur in the workplace.\n\nIn a scene duplicated throughout the United States, patrons crowd into a New York City bar to have their last legal drink before Prohibition goes into effect.\n\n  CHAPTER SIX\n\n**TOWARD THE END** of the day on January 16, 1919, as police, firemen, and other rescue workers continued to dig feverishly through the wreckage caused by the Great Molasses Flood, searching for survivors, church bells rang throughout the city of Boston. It certainly seemed like an inappropriate time for the bells to be ringing, some in celebratory fashion. But their pealing had nothing to do with the disaster that had taken place the day before. The bells were actually tolling in recognition of Nebraska's ratifying the Eighteenth Amendment. The Volstead Act, which banned the manufacture, sale, and transfer of alcoholic beverages, was now the law of the land.\n\nFor millions of Americans, concerned that excess drinking of alcoholic beverages had become a national epidemic destroying thousands of families, it was indeed a cause for celebration.\n\nFor millions of others, about to lose one of their greatest enjoyments, it was hardly something to cheer about.\n\n\"America,\" historian Daniel Okrent has stated, \"had been awash in drink almost from the start\u2014wading hip-deep in it, swimming in it, at various times in its history nearly drowning in it.\" _Arabella_ , the ship that brought John Winthrop and his fellow Puritans to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, had more than ten thousand gallons of wine in its hold, along with three times more beer than water.\n\nBy 1763, some 160 distilleries in New England alone were kept busy producing rum, and by the 1820s, there was so much liquor available in the region that it was less expensive than tea. Throughout all the colonies and most of the early United States, one of the most common drinks was hard cider made from fermented apples. As food historian Michael Pollan has written, \"Virtually every homestead in America had an orchard from which literally thousands of gallons of cider were made every year.\"\n\nBy 1839, Americans' reliance on liquor had become such a national trait that an English visitor to America named Frederick Marryat wrote, \"I am sure that Americans can fix nothing without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make up with a drink. They drink because it is hot; they drink because it is cold. If successful in elections, they drink and rejoice; if not, they drink and swear; they begin to drink early . . . in life, and they continue it, until they soon drop into the grave.\"\n\nMore than just drinking establishments, bars were gathering places, akin to social clubs, for their all-male customers.\n\nIn the years following the Civil War, alcohol drinking in America took on a whole new look. A huge wave of immigrants came to the United States, many of them Germans who had either worked in or even owned breweries back home. Instead of taverns and lodges, a whole new type of establishment, called a saloon, sprang up in towns and cities throughout the nation. Unlike taverns and lodges, which were hotels and restaurants as well as bars, saloons were primarily places to drink.\n\nIN LEADVILLE, SOUTH DAKOTA, THERE WAS A SALOON FOR EVERY ONE HUNDRED RESIDENTS.\n\nBy the 1800s, hundreds of thousands of saloons had sprung up throughout the country. In Leadville, South Dakota, there was a saloon for every one hundred residents. In San Francisco, there was one for every ninety-six. A few of the saloons were elegant establishments, but most were dirty, boisterous, rowdy places that became extraordinarily popular, meeting the need, as one group of Washington State citizens put it, \"for fellowship, or amusement and recreation.\"\n\nThe saloons began offering more and more services to their customers. Saloon keepers cashed paychecks, supplied a mailing address for immigrants who had not yet found a permanent home, and, in many places, provided a place to sleep for five dollars a night. Many saloons also had the only washing facilities or public toilets in the neighborhood. But the biggest amenity of all was the free lunch that almost every saloon offered in order to lure customers and increase the sale of beer. The typical lunch menu varied, but all had one thing in common: whatever the bill of fare, it was dominated by foods salty enough to make customers as thirsty as possible for another beer.\n\nMany saloons extended their influence beyond their doors by offering beer for sale that could be taken home in metal pails. The pail, called a growler, had its inside smeared with lard to keep down the foam, allowing more room for the beer. In many families, it was young children who were sent to the saloon for the takeout beer, a practice that particularly outraged those who regarded the saloon as a den of evil. \"I doubt,\" wrote reformer and photographer Jacob Riis, \"if one child in a thousand, who brings his growler to be filled at the average New York [saloon], is sent away empty-handed.\"\n\nThe rise of the American saloon was the most visible symbol of what was becoming a greater national problem than ever. The abuse of alcohol, mostly by men, was wreaking havoc, particularly on families and on women who, at a time when they had few legal rights, were totally dependent on their husbands for support. Sadly, on payday many men took their paychecks directly to the saloon instead of to their wives and families.\n\nWorries about the evils of alcohol were as old as the birth of the nation. In 1784, Benjamin Rush, the most respected doctor of his day and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, published a widely read pamphlet that warned of the serious problems caused by the consumption of hard liquor. \"I do not think it extravagant . . . ,\" Rush wrote, \"to repeat here what has been often said, that spirituous liquors destroy more lives than the sword. War has its intervals of destruction\u2014but spirits operate at all times and seasons upon human life.\"\n\nBy the 1820s, concerns about the effects of alcohol abuse on families and individuals led to the formation of temperance societies, many of which asked their members to sign pledges promising to drink only in moderation. The first temperance newspaper began publication in Boston in 1826. By 1829, there were a thousand temperance societies throughout America. Many of them had succeeded in eliciting pledges from liquor dealers to stop selling hard liquor, and from individuals with a drinking problem who promised to no longer drink not only hard liquor but beer and wine as well.\n\nBy 1831, the temperance movement had made such strides that Lewis Cass, the US secretary of war, put an end to all liquor rations given to America's troops and prohibited the sale of all \"ardent spirits\" on all of the nation's military bases. Eight years later, Abraham Lincoln joined in the movement. \"Let us,\" Lincoln declared, \"make it as unfashionable to withhold our names from the temperance pledge as for husbands to wear their wives' bonnets to church.\" How happy it will be, he continued, \"when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth.\"\n\nThe temperance organizations used a variety of tactics to publicize the benefits of refraining from drinking alcoholic beverages. Typical of the drawings these groups distributed was this one showing a happy husband and father, appropriately titled _Our Fruits of Temperance._\n\nIn their almost frantic desire to put an end to the drinking problem, temperance advocates embraced some truly odd justifications for banning hard liquor, beer, and wine. Most notable is physicians' declaration that drinking in excess could cause a person's body to explode suddenly. Not only was this believed by thousands of people, but American, British, and French medical journals became filled with supposed cases in which individuals who drank excessively suddenly burst into flames or had their insides transformed into fiery furnaces after coming into close contact with a candle or other source of heat. This myth about spontaneous combustion would be accepted as scientific fact far longer than might be imagined.\n\nA conviction that never came into dispute was the universally held belief that the saloon was at the root of the nation's serious drinking problem. The Reverend Mark Matthews of Seattle's First Presbyterian Church spoke for millions of what were becoming known as Prohibitionists when he exclaimed, \"The saloon is the most fiendish, corrupt, hell-soaked institution that ever crawled out of the slime of the eternal pit. . . . It is the open sore of the land.\"\n\nOf all the elements that would distinguish the long and extraordinary movement known as Prohibition, there would be nothing more significant or more important than the role played by women.\n\nBILLY SUNDAY\n\n**OF ALL THE MANY COLORFUL** and unique characters associated with the era of Prohibition, few were more charismatic or more unforgettable than Billy Sunday\u2014one of the nation's most passionate champions of the temperance movement.\n\nSunday actually began his adult life as a professional baseball player. During an eight-year career playing for seven major league teams, he became known as one of the greatest base stealers the game had yet seen. In one year alone he stole ninety-two bases, a record topped only by the immortal Ty Cobb, who had stolen ninety-six.\n\nSurprisingly, for a man involved in the rough-and-tumble world of professional baseball, Sunday was very religious. In 1891, Sunday shocked both his teammates and fans by quitting baseball to become a preacher. He wanted to use his pulpit to wage a war against drunkenness and the use of alcohol. At the time, he was earning about nine times more than the average American industrial worker's wages, but he was ready to devote his life to battling sin and alcohol.\n\nBilly Sunday became the most popular preacher in America. His impassioned so-called fire-and-brimstone sermons became a model for generations of preachers who followed him.\n\nOver the next forty years, giving as many as 250 speeches a year, speaking to more than one million people, he did just that, holding his audiences spellbound with his fire-and-brimstone style of preaching. The liquor interests hated him. And with good reason. Regarding alcohol as \"God's worst enemy\" and \"hell's best friend,\" he vowed to defeat anyone who manufactured, sold, or distributed it. Speaking at a rally at the University of Michigan, where he pleaded with over a thousand students to join in the fight for a state Prohibition law, he declared, \"I will fight [the liquor interests] till hell freezes over. Then I'll buy a pair of skates and fight 'em on the ice.\" No wonder an Anti-Saloon League (ASL) publication stated that, \"The liquor interests hate Billy Sunday as they hate no other man.\"\n\nWhen the constitutional amendment establishing Prohibition was passed in 1919, no one was happier than Billy Sunday. Acting in his usual showman style, he staged a mock funeral for John Barleycorn (a nickname for liquor), complete with actors impersonating drunkards and devils accompanying the coffin to the grave. Then, predicting many of the ways that the country would improve thanks to Prohibition, he declared, \"The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.\"\n\nAlthough Prohibition ultimately failed and was repealed, Sunday refused to give up the fight against alcohol, calling for the reintroduction of the Prohibition amendment. \"I am the sworn, eternal and uncompromising enemy of the liquor traffic,\" he exclaimed. \"I have been, and will go on, fighting that damnable, dirty, rotten business with all the power at my command.\"\n\nTrue to his word, Sunday continued to preach against both the manufacture and the use of alcohol until his death in November 1935. Soon after he passed away, a magazine poll taken to determine who \"was the greatest man in the United States\" placed Billy Sunday eighth, tied with the legendary philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.\n\nSome of the temperance societies urged the families of drunken husbands and fathers to seek solace in the Bible. In this drawing, a minister reads to a family from the Holy Book as the husband and father sleeps off a long bout of drinking.\n\nThe roots of this historic crusade took place in the fall of 1874, when representatives from seventeen states met in Cleveland, Ohio, and formed the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Soon after the organization was established, it formed important alliances with legendary women's rights leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women battling to gain the right to vote.\n\nFortunately for the WCTU, it elected Frances Willard as its president. A former teacher, journalist, and dean of women at Northwestern University, Willard was both a visionary and a powerful reformer. Along with devoting herself to campaigning for a ban on alcoholic beverages, Willard was also a strong advocate of women's right to vote and an eight-hour workday.\n\nUnder Willard's forceful leadership, the WCTU soon had chapters in every state, and within five years had developed into an organization with more than 250,000 members. Among its most effective programs was an anti-alcohol education campaign that reached into nearly every school in the nation. By the 1880s, Willard would become the most famous woman in America, and the WCTU would be the nation's most effective political action group.\n\nWillard's success was unquestionable, but for many years she shared the limelight with one of the most eccentric, unforgettable characters in the entire American experience.\n\nHer name was Carrie Nation, and although she was a member of the WCTU, she spent years staging a one-woman crusade against liquor and those who sold it and drank it. As the historians of the Library of Congress have stated, \"[O]f all the liquor haters stationed along the steep and twisting path from temperance to Prohibition, none quite hated it with Carrie Nation's vigor or attacked it with her rapturous glee.\"\n\nStanding over six feet tall, Nation called herself \"a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what he doesn't like.\" Convinced that Jesus had spoken to her directly, she devoted her days to battling the evils of drink. Nation began her crusade at the age of fifty-three, when she loaded up a buggy with hammers and rocks and drove to Kiowa, Kansas, a town notorious for its wild behavior in its many saloons. Arriving there, she staged hit-and-run raids on three of the saloons, tossing billiard balls into huge, expensive mirrors and plate glass windows. Bartenders and waiters could only stand by in complete shock as Nation splintered whatever furniture, kegs, and bottles she encountered.\n\nFrances Willard was not only the highly effective leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, she was also an inspirational recruiter for her organization. She is shown at the center of this poster with members of the WCTU of Illinois.\n\nShe began traveling with what would become her emblem\u2014a long-handled hatchet she would use to destroy saloons through what she called \"hatchetation.\" Often accompanied by hymn-singing women, she conducted raids throughout Kansas, \"hatchetizing\" furniture and destroying paintings and kegs of whisky and rum.\n\nShe soon shifted her attention to even bigger saloons in larger cities such as Cincinnati and St. Louis. When news spread that Carrie Nation had arrived in a community, saloon owners locked up their establishments until they were certain the one-woman wrecking ball had left town.\n\nAs Nation's fame spread, songs were written about her and reporters vied with one another to interview her. A vivid account of her typical method was widely published: \"I ran behind the bar,\" she explained, \"smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it; picked up the cash register, threw it down; then broke the faucets of the refrigerator, opened the door and cut the rubber tubes that conducted the beer. Of course it began to fly all over the house. I threw over the slot machine, breaking it up and I got from it a sharp piece of iron with which I opened the bungs of the beer kegs, and opened the faucets of the barrels, and then the beer flew in every direction and I was completely saturated. A policeman came in and very good-naturedly arrested me.\"\n\nSALOON OWNERS LOCKED UP THEIR ESTABLISHMENTS UNTIL THEY WERE CERTAIN THE ONE-WOMAN WRECKING BALL HAD LEFT TOWN.\n\nBy this time, getting arrested was routine for Nation, who never remained in jail long after regaling her keepers with stories of her wild escapades. But eventually her wild antics brought her at odds with the WCTU, which had been providing her with financial and legal help. No longer able to afford her \"hatchetation\" raids, she instead took to the stage, where she entertained audiences by reenacting some of her most spectacular saloon-destroying accomplishments.\n\nNation's later years were not kind to her. After a series of mental breakdowns, she died in a mental institution at the age of sixty-five. In a final twist, when federal agents later raided her family farm, they discovered a huge still, which was producing gallons of illegal whiskey.\n\nDespite the impact of the WCTU throughout the 1880s, the organization's ultimate goal of achieving a constitutional amendment to ban the sale or manufacture of liquor seemed impossible to attain.\n\nThe Anti-Saloon League (ASL) emerged in 1893 under the wise and sometimes ruthless leadership of Wayne Wheeler and became the most successful single-issue lobbying organization in the nation's history. The ASL at first concentrated on having local churches carry its anti-alcohol message to its parishioners. Once this proved successful and churches across the country were preaching the ASL's message, the organization turned its main efforts to getting politicians elected to support its cause.\n\nAt the same time, the ASL continued to increase both its membership and its influence by demonstrating its willingness to form an alliance with any organization that shared its one goal. This led to a surprising array of organizations and groups working together\u2014organizations that in all other ways were opposed to one another, such as the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan; labor unions, including the gigantic International Workers of the World; and the nation's largest business owners, including Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Andrew Carnegie.\n\nBecause of her highly unorthodox tactics, Carrie Nation became a legendary figure. There were arguably more songs, poems, and articles written about her than any other person involved in the temperance movement.\n\nArguably the most effective strategy of all that the ASL employed was its publishing campaign, which allowed the league to spread the message of temperance to millions of people through hundreds of thousands of pamphlets, flyers, cartoons, songs, stories, magazines, and newspapers.\n\nBy 1919, the ASL and other antiliquor organizations had achieved their goal. On January 6, Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment, making it illegal to manufacture, sell, or transport liquor. The amendment became the law of the land. Another important outcome of the extraordinarily vigorous and unrelenting campaign by both the WCTU and the ASL was the simultaneous progress made for other important social causes at the turn of the twentieth century. Their battle to rid the nation of alcohol launched women into politics and, importantly, aided them in their fight for the right to vote.\n\nTo enforce the Eighteenth Amendment, the Volstead Act\u2014named for the congressman who introduced it\u2014was passed on October 28, 1919. Although it officially became law in 1919, Prohibition was not scheduled to be enforced until the following year, on January 17, 1920. In the weeks between these two dates, frenzied Americans went to great lengths to obtain as much liquor as possible before the act went into effect. Hundreds of thousands of people rented space in warehouses and other storage facilities, attempting to stock up, until a judge ruled that all liquor stored outside the home broke the law. Those who had stored their supplies carted their haul into private residences in any conveyance they could. There was, reported the _New York Evening Post_ , \"a frenzy to hire trucks or baby carriages or anything else on wheels.\"\n\nFrom coast to coast, restaurants and bars marked the end of legal drinking by giving customers free glasses of whiskey and other alcoholic beverages. In some bars and restaurants, funeral music was played; in others, the walls were hung with black crepe. The _Boston Globe_ reported that in the city, \"[The] population appeared to join in one wild scramble . . . to get its alcohol possessions under cover before the fatal hour. All day long,\" the paper stated, \"automobiles, taxicabs, trucks, and vehicles of all descriptions were in the greatest demand, while pedestrians and homeward-bound suburbanites were loaded with bottles.\" In San Francisco, the sidewalks were crowded with men and women hauling boxes and suitcases filled with \"booze.\"\n\nFew laws or acts of Congress have ever been so unpopular with so many people as the Eighteenth Amendment. It was so despised that Americans broke new ground in finding imaginative ways to get around it.\n\nIn order to get their liquor, men and women took advantage of every loophole in the law. Doctors, dentists, and pharmacists were allowed to write prescriptions for liquor for medicinal purposes, and throughout the country many spent almost as much time doing that as examining their patients. Before Prohibition was even one month old, more than fifty-seven thousand druggists had applied for permits to prescribe liquor, and within six months, fifteen thousand doctors had done the same. In the following year, Nevada's ninety thousand residents alone obtained more than ten thousand prescriptions for \"medicinal alcohol\" from the state's physicians.\n\nIN ORDER TO GET THEIR LIQUOR, MEN AND WOMEN TOOK ADVANTAGE OF EVERY LOOPHOLE IN THE LAW.\n\nIn one of the most bizarre aspects of the Volstead Act, veterinarians were also permitted to write out prescriptions for their four-legged patients. No one had any doubt that it was not the animals but their owners who were benefiting from the law.\n\nAlthough the Prohibition movement was rooted in religious communities, the law allowed Americans to obtain wine for religious purposes, with priests and rabbis able to buy wine for their congregants and then sell it to them. Enrollment at churches and synagogues rose as never before, the requests for wine overwhelming some priests and rabbis. Los Angeles rabbi B. Gardner simply quit after the members of his congregation placed constant demands on him for wine. As his synagogue grew from 180 members to nearly 1,200 wine-seeking members in a year, Gardner exclaimed, \"They kept calling for wine, wine, and more wine. I refused to violate the law to please them.\"\n\n\"THE LAW THAT WAS MEANT TO STOP AMERICANS FROM DRINKING WAS INSTEAD TURNING MANY OF THEM INTO EXPERTS ON HOW TO MAKE ALCOHOL.\"\n\nDespite Prohibition's clear intent, the drinking of alcoholic beverages did not cease or even diminish. Instead, drinking transferred from the restaurants, bars, and saloons to the home and places hidden away from Prohibition agents.\n\nStills for making the illegal alcoholic brew called moonshine had been part of the southern scene for centuries. Now, with Prohibition in place, more stills than ever appeared. New technologies were developed, making it possible for a single still to create as many as 130 gallons of whiskey a day. Proud owners of these new, improved stills endowed them with special names. In Georgia there was the Double-Stacked Mash Barrel Still, and in Virginia the Blackpot Still. Alabama introduced the Barrel-Capped Box Still, while still makers in North Carolina came up with the most advanced whiskey-making mechanism of all\u2014a still fueled by propane instead of wood, which produced no telltale plume of smoke to alert lawmen.\n\nAmericans soon discovered that stills were no longer confined to the South. Home stills were as illegal as the southern moonshine-making devices, but Americans everywhere found that they could buy them in many hardware stores. Stores that sold kettles, yeasts, grains, and other supplies that permitted a person to distill his own liquor or brew his own beer sprang up in every town and city. And they also discovered that distilling instructions, published by the US Department of Agriculture, were available in almost every public library. As historian Michael Lerner has observed, \"The law that was meant to stop Americans from drinking was instead turning many of them into experts on how to make it.\"\n\nMaking alcohol from scratch was a time-consuming and messy business. But it was one of the clearest indicators that, during Prohibition, people would go to any length to get their wine, beer, or liquor. And the different ways in which illegal liquor was smuggled into people's houses and illegal drinking establishments were positively ingenious.\n\nMen and women smuggled liquor in baby carriages with babies perched above the hidden goods. A group of men were caught bringing liquor in over the Canadian border in cartons of eggs. They had drained the eggs and refilled the eggshells with liquor. Other favorite smugglers' hiding places for booze included fake floorboards and hidden second gas tanks in automobiles, false-bottomed shopping baskets and suitcases, and hot water bottles.\n\nThey were all ingenious strategies, but they were also small-potatoes methods of smuggling. In typical American fashion, bold innovations and clever ideas to meet the demand for illegal alcohol would ultimately impact American life forever.\n\nOne of the results of Prohibition was that stills, previously found mostly in the rural South, began to appear in city houses and apartments. Here, a federal agent tests the quality of liquor brewed in a recently confiscated still.\n\nNot nearly enough, but every once in a while, understaffed prohibition agents were able to halt the flow of illegal liquor. Here, armed agents hold a rumrunner at bay before taking him and his boat into custody.\n\nIn the Northeast, smuggling in whiskey, rum, and other hard liquor became far more profitable than catching cod or lobsters. \"You knew right away when a man stopped fishing and started running rum,\" a Massachusetts woman later recounted. \"In the first place, his family began to eat proper.\"\n\nAs fishermen became more and more adept at bringing illegal liquor ashore, the Coast Guard patrols also became more experienced and began using faster engines on their boats. It seemed that the fishermen's lucrative bootlegging activities might be in jeopardy, until a mechanic named Jimmy McGhee, who lived near Southampton, New York, saved the day for the smugglers. He created a brand-new type of boat that featured a slick design and was powered by two water-cooled airplane engines. McGhee's vessel could reach speeds up to sixty-five miles an hour, which was much faster than any Coast Guard patrol boat could travel. McGhee had not only rescued the situation for the fishermen\/bootleggers, he had created what today, with some modification, is one of the most popular of all vessels\u2014the speedboat.\n\nAnother phenomenon of Prohibition was the \"booze cruise,\" which would take passengers just beyond territorial waters, where they were out of reach of the law. Along with allowing passengers to flout Prohibition and drink to their heart's content, the \"booze cruises\" were the precursors of the luxury cruise business. The largest liners actually had their own shipboard brewery, which they put into operation during those times when, instead of engaging in a transatlantic voyage, they were engaged in a four-day \"cruise to nowhere.\" For many of the lines, these short trips were even more profitable than their ocean crossings.\n\nFurther inland, where southern distilleries were churning out moonshine to meet demand, drivers fitted their cars with special shocks and roomy compartments that allowed them to safely transport bottles of liquor throughout the Appalachian states. Traveling at high speeds, often in the dead of night, to evade authorities, drivers became adept at navigating winding roads and making hairpin turns. The love of fast driving lasted long after the end of Prohibition\u2014leading to the popular sport of NASCAR, which is beloved in many parts of the country.\n\nHad the champions of Prohibition been able to foresee the extraordinary number of ways Americans would continue to get their liquor after the act was passed, they would have understood why the law was a mistake and doomed to failure. Of all these ways, none came to symbolize this national evasion of the anti-drinking laws more dramatically than a brand-new and illegal type of drinking establishment that replaced the closed-down once-legal saloons. These illegal bars, nightclubs, and cabarets were most commonly called speakeasies, deriving their name from an old Irish term for illegal bars where customers were told to speak easy to avoid attracting the attention of the authorities.\n\nOne of the most amazing things about the speakeasies was how quickly and how spectacularly they grew in number. In 1922 there were some five thousand of the illegal establishments. By 1927 there were, in some estimations, at least a hundred thousand. In Boston, four speakeasies were located on the same block as police headquarters. Of the 113 establishments that had licenses to sell soft drinks in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the two that stuck to the law and did not become speakeasies went out of business.\n\nWhile speakeasies became enormously popular everywhere, nowhere did they spread in more profusion than in New York City. By the mid-1920s, according to the city's police commissioner, New York had thirty-two thousand of the illegal drinking spots. The most famous of them all was the 21 Club. It had hidden switches that would be used during a police raid to lock all the building's doors and to lock and hide all cupboards and closets in which liquor was stored.\n\nYOU NEVER USED THE WORD \"LIQUOR.\" INSTEAD YOU USED A CODE WORD SUCH AS \"COFFEE VARNISH\" OR \"WHITE MULE\" OR \"HORSE LINIMENT\" OR \"MONKEY RUM.\"\n\nAdding to the intrigue of the illegal speakeasies were the rituals that were part of their way of operating. You never simply went up to a speakeasy's entrance and walked in. Rather, you needed to say a password to the person tending the door so they could be certain you were not a prohibition agent. In order to confuse any agents that might be inside, you never used the word \"liquor.\" Instead you used a code word such as \"coffee varnish\" or \"white mule\" or \"horse liniment\" or \"monkey rum\" or \"panther sweat\" or \"rot gut\" or \"tarantula juice\" when ordering your drink.\n\nThe peephole allowed those inside the speakeasy to make sure the person knocking on the door was a patron and not a federal agent.\n\nThe speakeasies did far more than provide a place for thirsty Americans to obtain and drink their illegal liquor. They were responsible for social changes that not only revolutionized life in America when they took place but are very much with us today. Before Prohibition, the nation's main drinking places, the saloons, had been almost exclusively a male domain.\n\nThe speakeasies, however, welcomed women. And as more and more women stopped drinking secretly at home and took to drinking openly in speakeasies, the \"speaks,\" as they were sometimes called, underwent changes. Table service allowed women to avoid sitting on a bar stool or placing a foot up on a brass rail. To attract women, speakeasies began featuring jazz bands, torch singers, and other forms of entertainment along with their booze and food. The speaks also introduced fancy lavatories for women, which quickly became known as \"powder rooms.\"\n\nIn many ways speakeasies became the very symbols of the Prohibition era. Among the most notable things about these drinking establishments was the number of women who frequented them.\n\nONE THING WAS CRYSTAL CLEAR: IF YOU WANTED A DRINK, YOU COULD GET ONE.\n\nArguably the greatest social change that the speakeasies brought about was the way that so many of them welcomed both black and white clientele. Detroit, for example, witnessed its first stirrings of integration in a speakeasy named Cozy Corner. Club Ebony in New York City was a shining example of the biracially attended speakeasies that came to be known as \"black and tans.\"\n\nThe African American magazine _The Messenger_ described the racially mixed speakeasy as \"America's most democratic institution . . . [where] we see white and colored people mix freely. They dance together not only in the sense of both races being on the floor at the same time, but in the still more poignant and significant sense of white and colored people dancing as respective partners.\" New York's African American newspaper, the _Amsterdam News_ , proclaimed that \"the [speakeasies] have done more to improve race relations . . . than the churches, white and black, have done in ten decades.\"\n\nDoctors, pharmacists, rabbis, and priests dispensing liquor by the hundreds of thousands of gallons, smugglers of every variety bringing in even larger quantities of booze, speakeasies providing an exciting place in which to flout the law\u2014within weeks of Prohibition's having gone into effect, one thing was crystal clear: if you wanted a drink, you could get one. It became common to state that it was easier to get booze under Prohibition than it was before 1919 when the Volstead Act was passed.\n\nThe natural question was: How did that happen? The answer was not complicated. With so many people desperate to obtain liquor and so much money to be made in smuggling and other illegal activities related to making liquor available, it should have been no surprise that corruption on the part of officials at the federal, state, and local levels throughout the era of Prohibition was common and widespread. Examples of this corruption were everywhere.\n\nWhen the Michigan state police raided an illegal Detroit bar, they discovered the local congressman, the local sheriff, and the city's mayor all having a drink. Much to his chagrin, it was discovered that the speaker of the United States House of Representatives owned and operated an illegal still. On the same day that Ohio's Prohibition director was telling a church group that \"we are now engaged in a struggle with the forces of lawlessness in an effort to maintain the majesty of the law,\" he and one of his aides were in the midst of having 22,416 gallons of alcohol removed from an Ohio distillery so they could illegally sell it. On a congressman's yearly salary of $7,500, Representative John Langley, in a three-year period, deposited $115,000 in his bank account. He obtained the windfall by arranging the release of a million gallons of liquor to bootleggers in New York.\n\nLocal authorities as well as federal agents were called upon to enforce the Prohibition laws. Here, a New York City deputy police commissioner looks on as liquor is poured down a city sewer.\n\nTHE BLACK SOX SCANDAL\n\n**AS THE LATE FALL OF 1919 APPROACHED,** the people of the United States could certainly have been excused for hoping that the end of the year would be far less traumatic than the previous eight months had been. And there was good reason for optimism, good reason to look forward to that one event that every year took people's minds off their troubles and let them focus on the joys and thrills of the climax of America's national pastime\u2014the World Series. But in a nation where the organized crime that impending Prohibition had spawned had inserted itself into almost every area of American life, even baseball would not be spared. And a year that had begun with one of the weirdest disasters in history would end with the nation's greatest sports scandal.\n\nThe 1919 World Series featured the Chicago White Sox against the Cincinnati Reds. In the minds of almost all sports experts and most fans, it should have been no contest. The White Sox were simply one of the greatest baseball teams ever assembled. With all-stars at nearly every position, their greatest player was left fielder Shoeless Joe Jackson, a country boy from South Carolina who could neither read nor write but who, with a ten-year batting average of .356, was regarded by many as \"the greatest natural batsman that ever played.\"\n\nIt should have been a runaway. But even before the first pitch was thrown, there were strong indications that all was not right. Rumors surfaced that the series had been fixed, rumors that gained credence when just before the first game, the betting odds that had overwhelmingly favored the White Sox dropped to even.\n\nSadly, it was true. The World Series had been \"fixed.\" Although the full facts would never be known of just how several of the White Sox's best players arranged with gangsters to \"throw\" the series, the arrangements had been made. Among the key figures in the dealings was Arnold Rothstein, who would become further notorious as arguably the chief financier of the smuggling operations that took place during Prohibition.\n\nThe 1919 World Series was already scheduled to be unique. The fall classic was typically a best-of-seven series, but because of enormous post\u2013World War I interest, baseball's commissioner had extended it to the best of nine. Although, according to most accounts, the Reds never suspected the White Sox were throwing the series, the Sox, beginning with Game 1, played well below their usual standard, with pitchers known for their control walking batters at key times, fielders celebrated for their defensive skills making errors when they counted the most, and some of the leading hitters in all of baseball mired in batting slumps. Still, in an effort to avoid suspicion, the White Sox made it close, and in the end lost the series five games to four.\n\nShoeless Joe Jackson was one of baseball's greatest stars. His admitted participation in the Black Sox scandal broke the hearts of his many fans.\n\nBy the time it was over, the owner of the White Sox was fully convinced that his players had thrown the series. Some of the White Sox players actually admitted to taking part in the fix. But amazingly, after a lengthy investigation was held, the players were acquitted. That may have been sufficient for the court, but not for baseball. The first Major League commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, would be elected in January 1921. He banned for life all the players involved in the fix because of their undeniable dealings with gamblers.\n\nOut of Major League Baseball's greatest scandal would come one incident that would be remembered long after almost all the facts and details of the tainted affair had faded from memory. According to the _Chicago Herald_ , after Shoeless Joe Jackson confessed to taking part in the fix, a young boy, heartbroken over the downfall of his hero, came up to his idol and in plaintive tones pleaded, \"It ain't so, Joe, is it?\" According to the _Herald_ , Jackson's reply was a simple, \"Yes, kid, I'm afraid it is.\"\n\nThe corruption took place at every level. \"A lot of the time, when we had seized some liquor,\" reported a sailor aboard one of the Coast Guard vessels charged with preventing smuggling, \"we didn't bring it into the customs house during the daytime because we didn't want any contact with the customs men. They wore great big brown overalls and they would stash bottles of liquor in them as they carried the stuff into their trucks, as many as they could\u2014they would keep it for their own purposes, or to sell.\"\n\nThere were some cases of corruption that could only be regarded as humorous. In Los Angeles, a jury that had been hearing a bootlegging case was itself put on trial after having been observed drinking the evidence. Because there was no evidence remaining, the bootleggers had to be set free.\n\nMOST NOTABLE ABOUT PROHIBITION WAS HOW QUICKLY THE CRIMINALS TOOK ADVANTAGE OF IT.\n\nBy 1926 it was estimated that the annual sale of bootleg liquor had reached $3.6 billion. That was about the same figure that comprised the entire federal budget. No wonder the roots of organized crime and criminal organizations such as the American Mafia were tied directly to Prohibition.\n\nThe result was the emergence of a new, larger-than-life character who, beginning in 1919, would not only begin to fill the front pages of the nation's newspapers, but would become the subject of countless books, movies, television programs, and every other form of media\u2014the American gangster. Before 1919, organized crime in the United States was a small-stakes affair. But when, beginning with the passage of the Volstead Act, criminals realized that most Americans would pay whatever it took to get around Prohibition, everything changed. As author Thomas Reppetto has noted, bootlegging was \"a quick and equal opportunity pathway to the American dream.\" No other generation of criminals had ever been presented with such an enormous opportunity to make so much money or to gain so much status among other criminals. As one crime writer would note, \"Nothing like it had happened before. An entire industry [the liquor industry]\u2014one of the most important in the country\u2014had been gifted by the government to gangsters.\"\n\nThe American gangster was a new type of criminal character, one who developed a whole new image of himself and his fellow mobsters. It could be seen in the clothing they wore. Some of them, particularly those who rose to the top, were flashy dressers like Al Capone, who sported a fifty-thousand-dollar ring and a diamond-studded belt buckle. Others, like New York gangster Lucky Luciano, dressed far more conservatively, favoring gray suits and cashmere topcoats. Prohibition-era gangsters also became known for the cars they drove or were driven in. Almost all were modified, with engines souped up to outrun police cars and secret compartments big enough to carry large amounts of hidden alcoholic beverages.\n\nMost notable about Prohibition was how quickly the criminals took advantage of it. Minutes after it began, six armed, masked bandits robbed two freight cars full of liquor from a rail yard in Chicago. At exactly the same time, another group of criminals stole four casks of grain alcohol from a government warehouse. While both of these acts took place, another gang hijacked a truck carrying whiskey.\n\nNo one died or was even injured in these escapades, but it was the beginning of the most crime-ridden period in American history. The high financial stakes would spawn intense and often vicious competition between gangsters, and many would die. The newsmen loved that it sold newspapers.\n\nIn the entire history of the United States, no amendment to the US Constitution had ever been repealed. But on December 5, 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment was passed and Prohibition came to an end. Which raises the biggest question of all: Why did it fail?\n\nAs is the case with all major failures, or successes for that matter, there were many reasons. One of the main reasons it failed was because the federal government never allotted anywhere near enough resources to make it work. Only fifteen hundred field federal agents were assigned the enormous task of enforcing Prohibition. That amounted to about thirty agents for each state. A number twenty times that size still would have been woefully insufficient. Aside from field agents, the other main component of the government's Prohibition enforcement effort was the Coast Guard. If the number of field agents expected to see that the law was carried out was pitifully small, the resources devoted to patrolling the nation's 4,993 miles of coastline were pathetic. In 1919, the entire Coast Guard fleet was made up of twenty-six inshore vessels, a few converted tugboats, and twenty-nine small cruisers. To make matters worse, despite the amount of smuggling that took place almost from the day Prohibition began, Congress did not add any meaningful appropriations to the Coast Guard's budget for the first five years that Prohibition was in effect.\n\nAnother reason why Prohibition never met the expectation of its proponents was that, from the beginning, those in charge of prosecuting offenders of the act were overwhelmed by the number of cases they were forced to handle. The courts were finally forced to offer \"bargain days\" on which those accused of violating the act could plead guilty in return for an exceedingly low fine. The sheriff in one Arizona county found himself in the same situation as his counterparts across the nation. In just a three-month period, he seized 152 stills and arrested 183 people for violating federal alcohol laws and 80 others for breaking state Prohibition regulations.\n\nThere were many other reasons for the colossal failure as well. The closing of breweries, distilleries, and saloons led to the eliminations of tens of thousands of jobs, including those formerly held by barrel makers, waiters, and truck drivers. Before Prohibition, many states relied heavily on taxes from liquor sales to help fund their programs and expenses. New York, where almost 75 percent of the state's revenue had come from liquor taxes, was particularly hard hit. All this says nothing of the fact that Prohibition was directly responsible for the birth of organized crime in America and the introduction of the American gangster.\n\n\"THERE IS NOT LESS DRUNKENNESS IN THE REPUBLIC, BUT MORE. THERE IS NOT LESS CRIME, BUT MORE. THERE IS NOT LESS INSANITY, BUT MORE.\"\n\nIn the end it can be said with some degree of certainty that Prohibition failed for two overriding reasons. It was the first instance in the history of the United States when the US Constitution actually denied rights instead of granting them. Second, and perhaps most important of all, Prohibition failed because tens of millions of people refused to give up drinking and would do anything to get their hard liquor, beer, or wine. In the greatest irony of all, because of the many loopholes contained in the law and because of Americans' ingenuity in taking advantage of them, in many parts of the country more people drank, and drank more, than before Prohibition was enacted.\n\nIt was perhaps best summarized by one of America's most popular journalists, H. L. Mencken, who, five years into the act, wrote, \"Five years of [P]rohibition have had, at least, this . . . effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and [benefits] that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for the law has not increased, but diminished.\"\n\nOn December 5, 1933, the state of Utah, by voting to approve the Twenty-First Amendment to the US Constitution, calling for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, provided the majority necessary to confine Prohibition to the history books. As the news of the repeal was broadcast over the radio, stores like New York's Gimbels and Bloomingdale's immediately opened their liquor departments. Hotels and restaurants became mobbed with patrons enjoying the first legal drink they had had in what seemed ages. The lights in New York's Times Square spelled out the message \"Prohibition is dead!\"\n\nIn the days, weeks, months, and even years that followed, millions of words would be written about the causes of Prohibition, the reasons for its failure, and its effects on the nation. Perhaps no one summarized it better than author Daniel Okrent. \"It was a failure by any measurement,\" he wrote, \"but positive in its failure. We learn from our failures. We learn, 'Let's not try this again.'\"\n\n**ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER**\n\n**BY MAKING IT ILLEGAL** for US citizens to buy, make, or sell liquor, Prohibition was a classic example of the government's restricting the liberties of its citizens in order to serve what it perceived as the common good. This issue of the common good versus personal liberty was hardly new when Prohibition was enacted, and one hundred years later, it is still very much with us today.\n\nThe oldest and most consistent topic that has provoked this personal liberty\/common good issue is that of public health, an issue that first arose in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the battle against such deadly infectious diseases as smallpox and tuberculosis.\n\nThe medical discoveries made by such brilliant scientists as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch led to procedures such as vaccination and measures such as quarantines that, when mandated by the government, saved millions of lives. Yet there were those who, from the beginning, felt that vaccination might itself cause serious illness and others who felt that by imposing quarantines, the government was causing great harm to society by interrupting the free movement of people and goods. Most significantly, there are many who are still willing to risk whatever medical consequences might occur by refusing to be vaccinated in order to preserve their personal liberty.\n\nThe issue of individual rights versus the common good resurfaced in a major way in the 1980s with the devastating HIV\/AIDS epidemic. At first, fierce arguments and confrontations arose between gay rights activists and public officials when proposals were made to make it compulsory for the names of all persons infected with HIV to be reported to public health registries and for all those suspected of having AIDS to be tested for the disease. But the HIV\/AIDS epidemic was so serious and so frightening that both civil liberties activists and government and public health officials were motivated to reach compromises that protected individuals' privacy as much as possible while making certain that the common good was served.\n\nOne of the most unquestionably hot-button issues dealing with the balance of common good and personal freedom in America is gun control. That it is a monumental issue is evidenced by the fact that more people have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than soldiers have been killed in all of the wars combined in American history.\n\nIt's shocking, but true. And it's also true that the mass shootings that have occurred in recent years in places such as Las Vegas, Nevada; Orlando, Florida; Blacksburg, Virginia; Sandy Hook, Connecticut; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and Parkland, Florida, rank as the largest gun massacres in American history. The statistics are staggering. On an average day in the United States, 320 people are shot with a firearm and some 90 people die from a gunshot wound. Yet similar to the divided opinions on the role of alcohol in American life back at the turn of the twentieth century, gun control remains the most heated and most divisive of all the common good versus individual liberty issues.\n\nThose opposed to gun control base their beliefs and arguments on the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which reads, \"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.\" Anti\u2013gun control advocates are firm in their convictions that this amendment protects an individual's right to own guns; that guns are needed for self-defense from threats ranging from criminals to foreign invaders; and that rather than cause crime, gun ownership deters it.\n\nLAWS CAN ONLY BE AS EFFECTIVE AS THE ORGANIZATIONS THAT ENFORCE THEM.\n\nSince 1871, those opposed to gun control have been strongly supported by the National Rifle Association (NRA). Millions of members strong, the NRA is the most powerful lobbying organization in the nation.\n\nThose who staunchly advocate gun control believe that the Second Amendment was intended for militias, and that gun violence would be greatly reduced if there were more stringent background checks designed to make it as difficult as possible for unsavory individuals to purchase guns and that weapons capable of firing thousands of rounds of bullets in an incredibly short period of time should be banned from the public. But again, similar to Prohibition, gun control laws can only be as effective as the organizations that enforce them\u2014another lesson to be learned from the past.\n\nAt the heart of almost all the common-good versus personal-liberty debates is the very American desire for constant progress. The problem is that what some people regard as a positive or even essential change, others perceive as being a step backward. Prohibition was certainly a case in point. Perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned from all these issues is that as a nation we must make certain that in our desire for progress, personal rights and liberties are not denied.\n\n_Health Protections for the Common Good_\n\n_Matters affecting the nation's health have long been a most vital area in which legislation has been passed in the interest of serving the public good. The following is a timeline of major acts that have been passed for this purpose._\n\n1906 | JUNE 30: President Theodore Roosevelt signed both the Meat Inspection Act, ensuring that meat and meat products are slaughtered and processed under sanitary conditions, and the Pure Food and Drug Act, banning the production, sale, or trafficking of adulterated or mislabeled food and drug products.  \n---|---  \n1935 | AUGUST 14: President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, creating the social security system in the United States.  \n1938 | JUNE 25: President Roosevelt signs the Fair Labor Standards Act. Among its provisions are establishing a forty-hour work week and a national minimum wage as well as prohibiting oppressive child labor and most employment of minors.  \n| JUNE 25: President Roosevelt signs the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act, which gave the US Food and Drug Administration authority to oversee the safety of food, drugs, and cosmetics.  \n1963 | DECEMBER 17: President Lyndon Johnson signs the Clear Air Act, requiring the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop and enforce regulations to protect the public from airborne contaminants known to be hazardous to human health.  \n1972 | OCTOBER 18: The Clean Water Act becomes law after both the House and the Senate override President Richard Nixon's attempts to veto. The act aims to preserve and restore the country's water quality.  \n1988 | NOVEMBER 18: President Ronald Reagan signed the Drug-Free Workplace Act. This meant that some federal contractors and all federal employees had to commit to drug-free workplaces.  \n1993 | FEBRUARY 5: President Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act. This said that employers had to grant employees unpaid leave while ensuring their job security for an amount of time in the event of qualified family and medical emergencies.  \n1996 | AUGUST 3: President Bill Clinton signs the Food Quality Protection Act, which provides a health-based standard for all pesticides in all foods and provides special protections for infants and children.  \n2005 | AUGUST 8: President George W. Bush signs the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which provides tax incentives and loan guarantees to companies to encourage the development of alternative energy sources.  \n2016 | JUNE 22: President Barack Obama signs the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, which updated existing standards by increasing regulations on toxic chemicals as well as transparency to consumers regarding these regulations.\n\n**A YEAR THAT CHANGED AMERICA**\n\n**THE TWELVE MONTHS** that comprised 1919 were extraordinary. One year made momentous not only by the number of vital and transformative events and developments that took place, but by the fact that almost all of them were inexorably connected. The Red Scare and the unprecedented array of labor strikes; the temperance movement and the women's battle for the vote; the race riots of the Red Summer and the beginning of the civil rights movement; and Prohibition, the birth of organized crime, a flood of molasses, and the greatest of all sports scandals were each linked. What may have looked like separate events were all evidence of seismic and systemic social change.\n\nDespite the inevitable setbacks, 1919 would be a year of incredible progress. Out of the horrific tragedies of lynchings and race riots would come an awakening of black America. The record number of strikes would lead to an awareness of the plight of the American worker and to union recognition. The effectiveness of the suffragist and temperance movements would endow American women with more power than they had ever known. The triumph of Alcock and Brown would inspire a whole new world of innovation. And the failure of Prohibition would provide the nation with a powerful lesson in the pitfalls of attempting to legislate morality.\n\nWe can look back at these moments and track these movements as they evolved during the following one hundred years to learn that the arc of history is long and varied and gives the trials and triumphs of our own time some added perspective.\n**FURTHER READING AND SURFING**\n\n**BOOKS**\n\nBehr, Edward. _Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America_. London: BBC Books, 1997.\n\nBlumenthal, Karen _. Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition_. New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2011.\n\nFountain, Charles. _The Betrayal: The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.\n\nGluck, Sherna Berger. _From Parlor to Prison: Five American Suffragists Talk about Their Lives_. New York: Vintage, 1976.\n\nKops, Deborah. _The Great Molasses Flood: Boston, 1919_. Watertown, Massachusetts: Charlesbridge, 2012.\n\n**SELECTED WEBSITES**\n\nTHE GREAT MOLASSES FLOOD OF 1919\n\n<https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=okIkxYgfSzY>\n\nTHE GREAT WAR: ALICE PAUL AND WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE\n\n<https:\/\/www.pbslearningmedia.org\/resource\/amex29gw-soc-alicepaul\/the-great-war-alice-paul-and-womens-suffrage-american-experience\/#.Wk55iEtG2XQ>\n\nTHE RED SUMMER: THE CHICAGO RACE RIOTS OF 1919\n\n<https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Gvoq7oWkqRg>\n\nTHE RED SCARE: AN IMAGE DATABASE\n\n<https:\/\/www.baruch.cuny.edu\/library\/alumni\/online_exhibits\/digital\/redscare\/default.htm>\n\nPROHIBITION\n\n<http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/kenburns\/prohibition\/>\n\nTHE GREAT INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC\n\n<http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/americanexperience\/films\/influenza\/>\n\nALCOCK AND BROWN\n\n<https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UJODr3XTj_E>\n**SOURCES**\n\n**THE FOLLOWING SOURCES HAVE BEEN PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT IN PRESENTING KEY CONCEPTS IN THIS BOOK**\n\n\u2726Two books especially, Ann Hagedorn's _Savage Peace_ and William Klingaman's _1919_ , provided the most complete insight into the extraordinary twelve months that were 1919.\n\n\u2726Stephen Puleo's _Dark Tide_ was valuable in conveying an understanding of the Great Molasses Flood.\n\n\u2726 _With Courage and Cloth_ by Ann Bausum was important for its chronicle of the trials and triumphs of the suffragist movement as well as for its introduction of some of the most vibrant characters in the American experience.\n\n\u2726Cameron McWhirter's _Red Summer_ was most valuable in its vivid accounts of the riots that marked that unprecedented summer and the first stirrings of the modern civil rights movement. No adequate treatment of the lynchings that took place during that time would be possible if not for the Equal Justice Initiative's _Lynching in America_.\n\n\u2726The lengthy article titled \"The Great Red Scare\" in the February 1968 issue of _American Heritage Magazine_ by the historian Allan L. Damon offers the clearest understanding of the nature of the hysteria that struck a nation fearful it was about to be taken over by an alien form of government.\n\n\u2726The book _A City in Terror_ by Francis Russell supplies an excellent explanation of the causes and results of the unprecedented labor unrest that struck America in 1919.\n\n\u2726For a full understanding of the road to Prohibition, what it spawned, and why it failed, there is no better source than Daniel Okrent's _Last Call_.\n\n**BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT SOURCES I USED IN MY RESEARCH**\n\nBausum, Ann. _With Courage and Cloth: Winning the Fight for a Woman's Right to Vote_. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2004.\n\nEqual Justice Initiative. _Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror._ Montgomery, Alabama: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015.\n\nHagedorn, Ann. _Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919_. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007.\n\nKent, Susan Kingsley. _The Influenza Pandemic of 1918\u20131919_. Boston: Bedford\/St. Martin's, 2013.\n\nKlingaman, William K. _1919_ : _The Year Our World Began_. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.\n\nKrugler, David F. _1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back_. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.\n\nMappen, Marc. _Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation_. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2013.\n\nMcWhirter, Cameron. _Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America_. New York: Henry Holt, 2011.\n\nMurray, Robert K. _Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919\u20131920_. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955.\n\nOkrent, Daniel. _Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibiti_ on. New York: Scribner, 2010.\n\nPuleo, Stephen. _Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919_. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.\n\nRussell, Francis. _A City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike_. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.\n\nWallace, Graham. _The Flight of Alcock and Brown_. London: Putnam, 1955.\n**ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**\n\nI am most appreciative of the contributions that Rebecca Demont, Linda Rizkallh, and Carol Sandler made to this book. A large debt of gratitude is owed to Patrick and Diane M. Collins and Donna Mark for an inspired design, and to Sandra Smith and Diane Aronson for so thoroughly checking the accuracy of every statement. Many thanks to Bill Barrow, Nicolette Bromberg, Elizabeth Freeman, Ellen Sandberg, and Karen Schaff for their photographic assistance. Finally, if I have accomplished what I set out to do in this book it is due in great measure to Mary Kate Castellani and Susan Dobinick. Their contributions in shaping this volume, their editing skills, and their encouragement have been invaluable and I am most grateful to them both.\n**PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS**\n\nCourtesy of Library of Congress: Here (background), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here\u2013here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (top and bottom), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Cincinnati Museum Center\/Getty Images: Here (left); courtesy of Chicago Tribune historical photo: Here (second from left); _Boston Globe_ \/Getty Images: Here (right), here, here, here, here; courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection: Here; courtesy of Wikimedia commons: Here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Roberto Schmidt\/AFP\/Getty Images: Here; Bettmann\/Getty Images: Here (second from right), here, here; Niday Picture Library\/Alamy Stock Photo: Here, here; Heritage Image Partnership Ltd\/Alamy Stock Photo: Here; Chicago History Museum: Here, here\u2013here; Arkansas History Commission: Here, here; Science History Images\/Alamy Stock Photo: Here\u2013here, here; Granger Collection: Here, here; Sarin Images\/Granger Collection: Here; University of Washington Libraries Special Collections: Here, here; Everett Collection Historical\/Alamy Stock Photo: Here\u2013here; World History Archive\/Alamy Stock Photo: Here; Rue des Archives\/Granger: Here\u2013here.\n**INDEX**\n\nPage numbers in _italics_ indicate photos.\n\nAAUW. _See_ American Association of University Women\n\nAbbott, Robert,\n\nACLU. _See_ American Civil Liberties Union\n\nAdams, John,\n\nAFL. _See_ American Federation of Labor\n\nAfrican Americans\n\nGreat Migration of, 67\u2013, ,\n\nin Harlem Renaissance, 84\u2013\n\nlynchings of, , 69\u2013, __\n\nand pay gap,\n\npolice brutality against, 89\u2013\n\nin race riots ( _See_ Red Summer)\n\nas sharecroppers, , _, _\n\nat speakeasies,\n\ntimeline of experience of, 91\u2013\n\nvoter suppression measures against, 88\u2013\n\nvoting rights of, 68\u2013\n\nin women's suffrage movement, 38\u2013, __\n\nas World War I veterans, _,_ 65\u2013, _, _\n\nAgrarian economy,\n\nAgriculture, Department of,\n\nAir traffic control strike,\n\nAlabama, moonshine in,\n\nAlcock, John, , , 132\u2013,\n\nAlcohol. _See also_ Prohibition\n\neducation campaign about,\n\nmyths about,\n\nobtaining, during Prohibition, 161\u2013\n\nsmuggling, during Prohibition, 163\u2013, __\n\nstockpiling, before Prohibition, _,_\n\ntaxes from sales of,\n\nAlcohol production\n\nby immigrants,\n\nmolasses in, ,\n\nduring Prohibition, 162\u2013, _,_\n\nAlcoholism,\n\nAmerican Association of University Women (AAUW),\n\nAmerican Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), , 110\u2013\n\nAmerican Communist Party,\n\nAmerican Federation of Labor (AFL), , ,\n\nAmerican Woman Suffrage Association,\n\n_Amsterdam News_ (newspaper),\n\nAnarchist groups\n\nbomb threats by,\n\nbombings by, , 98\u2013, __\n\nand Great Molasses Flood,\n\nmail bombs sent by,\n\nAnarchists\n\ndeportation of accused, , 104\u2013, __\n\nfree speech of,\n\nAnthony, Susan B., , __, , ,\n\nAnti-alcohol education campaign,\n\nAnti-Defamation League,\n\nAnti-immigration nativist movement,\n\nAnti-Muslim hate groups,\n\nAnti-Saloon League (ASL), , 159\u2013\n\nAntisuffrage movement,\n\n_Arabella_ (ship),\n\nAssociated Press\u2013NORC Center for Public Affairs Research,\n\nAustralia, renewable energy in,\n\nAviation, , , 132\u2013\n\n_The Awakening_ (drawing),\n\n_Baltimore Sun_ (newspaper),\n\nBarrel-Capped Box Still,\n\nBarry, John, __, ,\n\nBars, __,\n\nBaseball, 172\u2013\n\nBeer\n\nmolasses in production of,\n\nin saloons, 151\u2013\n\nBerkman, Alexander, __,\n\nBethune, Mary McLeod,\n\nBiomass energy,\n\nBlack Lives Matter (BLM), 89\u2013\n\nBlack Panther Party,\n\nBlack Sox Scandal, , 172\u2013\n\nBlackpot Still,\n\nBlair, Samuel,\n\nBlatch, Harriot Stanton, 49\u2013\n\nBoissevain, Inez Milholland, 44\u2013\n\nBoll weevil,\n\nBolsheviks\n\nin labor movement, , , , ,\n\nin Russia, , , _,_\n\nBontemps, Arna,\n\nBootleggers, 164\u2013, ,\n\n\"Booze cruise,\"\n\nBoston. _See also_ Great Molasses Flood\n\nbuilding department of, 30\u2013\n\nimmigrants in, ,\n\nMay Day parade in,\n\nNorth End in ( _See_ North End)\n\nPalmer Raids in,\n\npolice union in, ,\n\nspeakeasies in,\n\nBoston Elevated Railroad Company,\n\n_Boston Globe_ (newspaper), ,\n\n_Boston Herald_ (newspaper),\n\nBoston Marathon bombing (2013),\n\nBoston Police Strike, 123\u2013,\n\naftermath of, 134\u2013\n\ncitizen volunteers in, , ,\n\nevents in, 125\u2013\n\nevents leading to, 123\u2013\n\nnewspapers on, 129\u2013,\n\npublic opinion on,\n\nreaction to, 131\u2013\n\nstate guard in, _126\u2013127_, 129\u2013, __\n\nviolence in, 125\u2013, _126\u2013127_, ,\n\nworking conditions and,\n\n_Boston Post_ (newspaper),\n\nBoston Red Sox,\n\nBoston Social Club,\n\nBowen, Keith, 69\u2013\n\nBraun, Carol Mosely,\n\nBreweries, ,\n\nBrooklyn Dodgers,\n\nBrown, Arthur, , , 132\u2013, __\n\nBrown, Jeff,\n\nBrown, Jerry,\n\nBrown, Michael, ,\n\n_Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka_ , ,\n\nBrownsville riot (1908),\n\n_Buford_ (ship), ,\n\nBureau of Investigation,\n\nBurns, Lucy, , ,\n\nBush, George W., ,\n\nBusiness, women in,\n\nCanada, alcohol smuggling from,\n\nCapitalism,\n\nCapone, Al, ,\n\nCarnegie, Andrew, ,\n\nCass, Lewis, 152\u2013\n\nCatt, Carrie Chapman,\n\nCharleston (South Carolina)\n\nchurch shooting in,\n\nrace riot in, , ,\n\nCharlottesville rally,\n\nChicago\n\nrace riot in, , __, 76\u2013, _77\u201381_,\n\nsteel strike in,\n\n_Chicago Defender_ (newspaper), ,\n\n_Chicago Herald_ (newspaper),\n\n_Chicago Tribune_ (newspaper), , 137\u2013\n\nChicago White Sox, 172\u2013\n\nChina, immigrants from,\n\nCider,\n\nCincinnati Reds, 172\u2013\n\nCIO. _See_ Congress of Industrial Organizations\n\nCitizens' Committee of Thirty-Four,\n\nCivil disobedience,\n\nCivil liberties, denial of, ,\n\nCivil Liberties Act (1988),\n\nCivil Rights Act (1964), Title VII of,\n\nCivil rights movement, ,\n\nClean Water Act (1972),\n\nClear Air Act (1963),\n\nCleveland (Ohio)\n\nMay Day parade in, ,\n\nsteel strike in,\n\nClimate change,\n\nClinton, Bill,\n\nClinton, Hillary Rodham, ,\n\nClougherty, Bridget, ,\n\nClougherty, Martin, 19\u2013, 23\u2013\n\nClougherty, Stephen, 23\u2013\n\nClougherty, Teresa, 19\u2013,\n\nClub Ebony,\n\nCoalition of Labor Union Women,\n\nCoast Guard patrols, 164\u2013, ,\n\nCobb, Ty,\n\nCold War,\n\nCommercial Street (Boston), __, , , __\n\nCommon good\n\n_vs._ individual rights, 178\u2013\n\ntimeline of protection of, 181\u2013\n\nCommunism. _See also_ Red Scare\n\neconomic system of, 96\u2013\n\nin Russia, , , , _,_\n\nand strikes, , , ,\n\nafter World War II,\n\nCommunist material, police seizure of, __\n\nCommunist sympathizers\n\narrest of, 103\u2013\n\ndeportation of, 104\u2013, , __\n\nfree speech of,\n\nimmigrants characterized as, , 103\u2013, 108\u2013,\n\nprofessors described as,\n\nCongress of Industrial Organizations (CIO),\n\nCongressional Union for Woman Suffrage,\n\nCoolidge, Calvin, 124\u2013, __, ,\n\nCopp's Hill (Boston),\n\nCorruption, 171\u2013\n\nCotton, ,\n\nCounterterrorism Act (1995),\n\n_The Crisis_ (magazine), , ,\n\nCrowley, Michael,\n\nCuba, immigrants from,\n\nCullen, Countee,\n\nCurtis, Edwin, , , , , 134\u2013\n\n_Daily Mail_ (newspaper),\n\nDamon, Allan L.,\n\nDarrow, Clarence,\n\nDelta Sigma Theta,\n\n_Democracy Limited_ (train),\n\nDepartment of Agriculture,\n\nDepartment of Energy, 143\u2013\n\nDepartment of Justice,\n\nDepartment of State, ,\n\nDeportation\n\nof immigrants, , 104\u2013, , __\n\nof people with \"ties to terrorism,\"\n\nDetroit (Michigan)\n\nPalmer Raids in,\n\nspeakeasies in, ,\n\nDionne, Evette,\n\nDiStasio, Antonio, ,\n\nDiStasio, Maria, ,\n\nDoctors, alcohol prescriptions by, ,\n\nDominican Republic, immigrants from,\n\nDouble-Stacked Mash Barrel Still,\n\nDouglass, Frederick,\n\nDrinking. _See also_ Alcohol; Prohibition\n\neducation campaign about,\n\nexcessive, 149\u2013\n\nmen, _,_ , , __\n\nmyths about,\n\nDriscoll (firefighter),\n\nDrug-Free Workplace Act (1988),\n\nDu Bois, W. E. B., , ,\n\nEast, women's suffrage in,\n\nEastern Europe, immigrants from, ,\n\nEconomic system\n\ncapitalist,\n\ncommunist, 96\u2013\n\nEducation, sex discrimination in,\n\nEducation Amendments (1972), Title IX of,\n\nEighteenth Amendment\n\nratification of, , ,\n\nrepeal of, ,\n\nEl Salvador, immigrants from,\n\nElaine race riot, , 79\u2013, __, , __\n\nEnergy, Department of, 143\u2013\n\nEnergy, green, 143\u2013\n\nEnergy Policy Act (2005),\n\nEnvironmental Protection Agency (EPA),\n\nEqual Employment Opportunity Commission,\n\nEqual Justice Initiative (EJI), , ,\n\nEqual Pay Act (1963),\n\nEqual Rights Amendment (1923),\n\nEqual Rights Amendment (1982),\n\nEurope, immigrants from, 10\u2013\n\nEvolution, teaching of,\n\nExplosives, production of, ,\n\nFactories, during World War I, ,\n\nFair Labor Standards Act (1938),\n\nFall River (Massachusetts), textile strike in,\n\nFamily and Medical Leave Act (1993),\n\nFeminist Majority Foundation,\n\nFerguson (Missouri), protests in, 89\u2013\n\nFerraro, Geraldine,\n\nFifteenth Amendment, , 68\u2013\n\nFinland, immigrants from,\n\nFire-and-brimstone sermons, __\n\nFirefighters, in Great Molasses Flood, __, 21\u2013, 24\u2013\n\nFishermen, alcohol smuggled by, __, 164\u2013\n\nFlight, transatlantic, , , 132\u2013\n\nFlight attendants,\n\nFlynn, John, ,\n\nFood, Drug, and Cosmetics Act (1938),\n\nFood and Drug Administration (FDA),\n\nFood Quality Protection Act (1996),\n\n_Forbes_ (magazine),\n\nFord, Henry, ,\n\nFord Motor strike,\n\nForry, Linda Dorcena,\n\n_Forum_ (magazine),\n\nFossil fuels,\n\nFourteenth Amendment,\n\nFrank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act (2016),\n\nFree speech,\n\nFreeman, Elizabeth,\n\nFriedan, Betty,\n\nGambling,\n\nGangsters, , 174\u2013,\n\nGardner, B., 161\u2013\n\nGary, Elbert, ,\n\nGary (Indiana), steel strike in, __,\n\nGarza, Alicia,\n\nGender pay gap, ,\n\nGender roles,\n\nGeneral Electric strike,\n\nGeneral Intelligence Division (Department of Justice),\n\nGeneral Motors strike,\n\nGenovese, Elizabeth,\n\nGeorgia, moonshine in,\n\nGeothermal energy,\n\nGerman immigrants,\n\nGillespie, William, ,\n\nGlobal warming,\n\n_Godey's Lady's Book_ , 42\u2013\n\nGoldman, Emma, __,\n\nGompers, Samuel,\n\nGorbachev, Mikhail,\n\nGore, Al,\n\nGreat Migration, 67\u2013, ,\n\nGreat Molasses Flood, 8\u2013\n\naftermath of, 30\u2013\n\ncauses of, 28\u2013\n\ndestruction caused by, 15\u2013\n\nevents leading to, 14\u2013\n\nhuman stories of, 16\u2013\n\nneighborhood of, 8\u2013, __,\n\nphotos of, __, __, __, __, __ , __\n\nrescue in, __, __, 22\u2013, __\n\nsounds of,\n\nand trial against USIA, 29\u2013\n\nweather on day of,\n\nGreat Purge (Soviet Union),\n\nGreat Steel Strike, 135\u2013, __,\n\naftermath of, 140\u2013\n\nevents in, 136\u2013\n\nevents leading to, 135\u2013\n\npolice force used in, _138\u2013140_,\n\npublic hearings after, 138\u2013\n\nworking conditions and,\n\nGreen energy, 143\u2013\n\nGrowler,\n\nGun control, 179\u2013\n\nHandlin, Oscar,\n\nHanson, Ole, , 121\u2013\n\nHarbor (Indiana), steel strike in,\n\nHardwick, Thomas W.,\n\nHarlem Renaissance, 84\u2013,\n\nHarvard University, ,\n\n\"Hatchetation,\" 157\u2013\n\nHIV\/AIDS epidemic,\n\nHobson City (Alabama), race riot in,\n\nHoover, J. Edgar, , __\n\nHouse Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), ,\n\nHousing, in Boston,\n\nHughes, Langston,\n\nHunger strikes, in women's suffrage movement,\n\nHurston, Zora Neale,\n\nHutchinson, Thomas,\n\n\"I Have a Dream\" (King),\n\nIantosca, Pasquale, ,\n\nIantosca, Vincenzo, ,\n\nImmigrants\n\nalcohol production by,\n\nbecoming citizens, __\n\nin Boston, ,\n\ndeportation of, , 104\u2013, , __\n\ndistrust of, , 116\u2013\n\non strike, __, 138\u2013\n\nsuspected as Communists, , 103\u2013, 108\u2013,\n\nTrump (Donald) on, ,\n\nwaves of, 10\u2013\n\nzero-tolerance policy for undocumented,\n\nImmigration\n\nhalted, during World War I,\n\nRed Scare and, 103\u2013\n\nIndividual rights, _vs._ common good, 178\u2013\n\nIndustrial economy,\n\nInfluenza epidemic,\n\nInnovation, need for, 142\u2013\n\nInternational Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA),\n\nInternational Workers of the World,\n\nInternment camps, ,\n\nIrish immigrants\n\nin Boston,\n\npotato famine and,\n\nIrwin, Inez Haynes,\n\nItalian immigrants\n\nin Boston, ,\n\nin New York City, __\n\nJackson, Shoeless Joe, , , __\n\n\"Jailed for Freedom\" pin,\n\nJapanese Americans, internment of, ,\n\nJenkins (Georgia), race riot in,\n\nJewish immigrants,\n\nJohnson, Andrew, 79\u2013\n\nJohnson, James Weldon, , ,\n\nJohnson, Lyndon B., ,\n\nJohnstown (Pennsylvania), steel strike in,\n\nJuries,\n\nJustice, Department of,\n\nKennedy, John F.,\n\nKhan-Cullors, Patrisse,\n\nKhrushchev, Nikita,\n\nKing, Martin Luther, Jr., ,\n\nKing, Rodney,\n\nKoch, Robert,\n\nKrake (fire captain),\n\nKu Klux Klan, ,\n\nLabor movement. _See also_ Strikes\n\ntimeline of, 145\u2013\n\nLabor-Management Relations Act (1947),\n\nLackawanna (New York), steel strike in,\n\nLandis, Kenesaw Mountain,\n\nLandlords,\n\nLangley, John,\n\nLatinas, and pay gap,\n\nLautenberg Chemical Safety for the st Century Act (2016),\n\nLayhe, George, ,\n\nLee, General,\n\nLeeman, Royal Albert, 18\u2013\n\nLenin, Vladimir, ,\n\nLerner, Michael,\n\nLewis, Charles,\n\nLilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (2009),\n\nLincoln, Abraham, ,\n\nLindbergh, Charles, ,\n\nLiquor. _See_ Alcohol; Prohibition\n\n_Literary Digest_ (magazine),\n\nLiterary movement,\n\nLobbying,\n\nLocke, Alain, 84\u2013\n\nLodges,\n\nLooting, _126\u2013127_,\n\nLos Angeles (California)\n\nbootlegging case in,\n\nrace riot in,\n\n_Los Angeles Times_ (newspaper), ,\n\nLowell, Abbott,\n\nLuciano, Lucky,\n\nLynchings, 69\u2013,\n\ncasualties of,\n\nexamples of, 69\u2013\n\nlegacy of,\n\nmemorial to victims of,\n\npurpose of,\n\nMacKaye, Hazel,\n\nMafia, 174\u2013\n\nManufacturing\n\nagrarian economy moving toward,\n\ndecline of, 141\u2013\n\nMarch on Washington (1963),\n\nMarryat, Frederick, 150\u2013\n\nMartin, John J.,\n\nMartin, Trayvon,\n\nMass shootings, 179\u2013\n\nMasto, Catherine Cortez,\n\nMatthews, Mark,\n\nMay Day parades, , __\n\nMcCarthy, Joseph, __, 106\u2013, 116\u2013\n\nMcGhee, Jimmy,\n\nMcKay, Claude,\n\nMcManus, Frank, ,\n\nMcWhirter, Cameron, , ,\n\nMeat Inspection Act (1906),\n\nMelting pot,\n\nMencken, H. L., 177\u2013\n\nMeredith, James,\n\nMerrithew, Walter, 20\u2013, 24\u2013\n\n_The Messenger_ (magazine),\n\n#MeToo movement,\n\nMexico, immigrants from,\n\nMiles, Thomas,\n\nMilitary\n\nCommunist sympathizers in, ,\n\nliquor rations in, 152\u2013\n\nwomen in,\n\nMink, W. M., 138\u2013\n\n_MIT Technology Review_ (magazine),\n\nMolasses, 26\u2013. _See also_ Great Molasses Flood\n\ndecrease in demand for,\n\nand slave trade, , , , __\n\nstorage of, , , __, 28\u2013\n\nuses of, ,\n\nMolasses Act (1733),\n\nMontgomery bus boycott,\n\nMoonshine, 162\u2013, __,\n\nMoore, Frank,\n\nMorella, Constance A.,\n\nMunro, Mark,\n\nMurrow, Edward R., ,\n\nMuslim immigrants\n\nfirst wave of,\n\nhate groups targeting, ,\n\nTrump (Donald) on,\n\nMyers, Henry,\n\nNation, Carrie, 157\u2013, __\n\nNational American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), , 39\u2013\n\nNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)\n\non African American death toll in race riots,\n\nformation of,\n\nmagazine of, ,\n\nnew members of,\n\non racial segregation in schools,\n\nin temperance movement,\n\nwarning about Washington race riot by,\n\nNational Association of Colored Women (NACW), ,\n\nNational Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS), __,\n\nNational Federation of African American Women,\n\nNational Labor Relations Act (1935),\n\nNational League of Colored Women,\n\nNational Memorial to Peace and Justice,\n\nNational Negro Business League,\n\nNational Organization for Women (NOW),\n\nNational Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL),\n\nNational Rifle Association (NRA),\n\nNational Urban League,\n\nNational Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA),\n\nNational Woman's Party (NWP), , ,\n\nNative Americans, voting rights of,\n\nNativism, , 116\u2013\n\nNegro American Labor Council,\n\nNeo-Nazis,\n\n\"New Negro,\"\n\nNew Orleans race riot (1900),\n\nNew York City\n\nAfrican Americans in, 84\u2013\n\nimmigrants in, __\n\nMay Day parade in, , __\n\nnewspaper strike in,\n\nraid on Russian People's House in, 103\u2013\n\nspeakeasies in, ,\n\n_New York Evening Post_ (newspaper),\n\n_New York Times_ (newspaper),\n\n_New York Tribune_ (newspaper),\n\n_New York World_ (newspaper),\n\nNewspapers\n\non anarchist bombings, 98\u2013\n\non Black Sox Scandal,\n\non Boston Police Strike, 129\u2013,\n\non Communist sympathizers, ,\n\non Elaine race riot,\n\non gangsters, ,\n\non Great Migration,\n\non Great Molasses Flood,\n\non Great Steel Strike, 137\u2013\n\nprize for transatlantic flight by,\n\non Prohibition,\n\non Red Scare, , 108\u2013,\n\non Seattle General Strike,\n\non speakeasies,\n\nstrike organized by,\n\non voter suppression measures,\n\non Washington race riot, ,\n\non women's suffrage movement, ,\n\nNewton, Huey P.,\n\nNiagara Movement,\n\n\"Night of Terror\" (November , 1917), 54\u2013\n\n9\/11 terrorist attack,\n\nNineteenth Amendment\n\napproval of, , , , ,\n\nrejection of,\n\nroad to, 48\u2013,\n\nNixon, Richard,\n\nNorth Carolina, moonshine in,\n\nNorth End (Boston), 8\u2013, __, __. _See also_ Great Molasses Flood\n\ndescription of,\n\nhousing in,\n\nimmigrants in, ,\n\ninfluenza epidemic in,\n\nmolasses tank in, , , __\n\nNOW. _See_ National Organization for Women\n\nNRA. _See_ National Rifle Association\n\nNREL. _See_ National Renewable Energy Laboratory\n\nNWP. _See_ National Woman's Party\n\nNWSA. _See_ National Woman Suffrage Association\n\nOath of allegiance, __\n\nObama, Barack, , , ,\n\nO'Connor, Sandra Day,\n\nOgden, Hugh, 29\u2013,\n\nOkrent, Daniel, ,\n\nOld North Church (Boston), __\n\nOmaha (Nebraska), race riot in,\n\nOrganized crime, 174\u2013,\n\n_Our Fruits of Temperance_ (drawing), __\n\nPacknett, Brittany,\n\nPageants, in women's suffrage movement, 47\u2013,\n\nPalmer, A. Mitchell\n\nas anarchist bombing target, __, 99\u2013\n\nas attorney general,\n\nand Red Scare, 102\u2013\n\nPalmer Raids, , 108\u2013, __,\n\nPandowdy,\n\nParades\n\nfor May Day, , __\n\nin women's suffrage movement, __\n\nParks, Rosa,\n\nPassive resistance, in women's suffrage movement,\n\nPasteur, Louis,\n\nPaul, Alice, __\n\non hunger strike,\n\nmilitancy of,\n\norganizations formed by,\n\npicketing organized by,\n\nWashington suffrage parade organized by, 40\u2013, , ,\n\nPay gap\n\nEqual Pay Act and,\n\ngender, ,\n\nracial,\n\nPerkins, Frances,\n\nPersonal liberty, _vs._ common good, 178\u2013\n\nPeters, Andrew J., , , ,\n\nPharmacists, alcohol prescriptions by, ,\n\n_Philadelphia Inquirer_ (newspaper),\n\nPhilippines, immigrants from,\n\nPicketing, in women's suffrage movement, 50\u2013, _51\u201353_, __\n\n_Pittsburgh Courier_ (newspaper),\n\nPlane, for transatlantic flight, 132\u2013, __\n\nPogroms,\n\nPoland, immigrants from,\n\nPolice, corruption of, 171\u2013\n\nPolice brutality\n\nagainst African Americans, 89\u2013\n\nagainst strikers, _138\u2013140_,\n\nPoliticians, corruption of, 171\u2013\n\nPolitics, women in, , , ,\n\nPollan, Michael,\n\nPost Office strike,\n\n\"Powder rooms,\"\n\nPowell, Colin,\n\nPresident's Commission on the Status of Women,\n\nPride at Work,\n\nPrison\n\nrioters in,\n\nstrikers in,\n\nsuffragettes in, 54\u2013\n\nsuspected Communists in,\n\n\"Prison Special\" tour,\n\nProgressive Farmers and Household Union of America,\n\nProhibition, 149\u2013. _See also_ Eighteenth Amendment\n\nbackground of, 149\u2013\n\nand corruption, 171\u2013\n\nend of, ,\n\nfailure of, 176\u2013\n\ngetting alcohol during, 161\u2013\n\nNorth Enders on, 14\u2013\n\nand organized crime, 174\u2013,\n\nstockpiling alcohol before, __,\n\ntemperance societies and, 152\u2013\n\nunpopularity of,\n\nVolstead Act and, , ,\n\nProhibition agents, __, __, , __,\n\nProperty rights, of women,\n\nPublic good. _See_ Common good\n\nPuleo, Stephen,\n\nPure Food and Drug Act (1906),\n\nQuakers,\n\nQuarantine,\n\nRace riots. _See_ Red Summer\n\nRacial discrimination\n\nongoing, 88\u2013\n\nand police brutality, 89\u2013\n\nafter World War I, 65\u2013, __\n\nRacial pay gap,\n\nRacial segregation\n\nin public transportation,\n\nin schools, ,\n\nWilson administration and,\n\nRacism, in South, , , 68\u2013\n\nRailway Labor Act (1926),\n\nRankin, Jeannette,\n\nReagan, Ronald, , ,\n\n\"Red hunting,\"\n\nRed Scare, , 95\u2013\n\nanarchist bombings and, 98\u2013, __\n\nbackground of, 95\u2013\n\ncartoon about, __\n\nHoover (J. Edgar) and,\n\nnewspapers on, , 108\u2013,\n\nPalmer (A. Mitchell) and, 102\u2013\n\nPalmer Raids in, , 108\u2013, __,\n\nsecond wave of, 106\u2013, 116\u2013\n\nRed Summer, , 65\u2013\n\nCharleston race riot, , ,\n\nChicago race riot, __, __, 76\u2013, _77\u201381_,\n\nElaine race riot, , 79\u2013, __, __,\n\nevents leading to, 65\u2013\n\nWashington race riot, 72\u2013, __, 86\u2013,\n\nReligion, and temperance movement, 154\u2013,\n\nReligious communities, alcohol bought by, during Prohibition, 161\u2013,\n\nRenewable energy, 143\u2013\n\nReppetto, Thomas,\n\nRevere, Paul, , , __\n\nRights. _See also_ Suffrage\n\ndenial of, ,\n\nto property, of women,\n\nRiis, Jacob,\n\nRoberts, Chalmers,\n\nRobinson, Jackie,\n\nRockefeller, John D., Jr.,\n\n_Roe v. Wade_ ,\n\nRoosevelt, Eleanor,\n\nRoosevelt, Franklin D., , ,\n\nRoosevelt, Theodore,\n\nRothstein, Arnold,\n\nRozwenc, Edwin,\n\nRum production\n\nmolasses in, ,\n\nin New England,\n\nRush, Benjamin,\n\nRussia\n\nimmigrants from,\n\nrevolution in, , , , __,\n\nRussian People's House (New York City), 103\u2013\n\nRuth, Babe,\n\nRyan (man known only as), , , 24\u2013\n\nSaloons, 151\u2013, 157\u2013,\n\n_Salt Lake City Tribune_ (newspaper),\n\n_San Francisco Examiner_ (newspaper),\n\nSargent, Aaron A., 36\u2013\n\nSchools\n\nanti-alcohol education campaign in,\n\nracial segregation in, ,\n\nScopes, John T.,\n\nScopes Trial (1925),\n\nScottsboro Boys,\n\nScranton (Pennsylvania), race riot in,\n\nSeale, Bobby,\n\nSeattle (Washington), anarchist bomb in,\n\nSeattle Central Labor Council, 120\u2013\n\nSeattle General Strike, , __, 120\u2013, __,\n\n_Seattle Union Record_ (newspaper),\n\nSecond Amendment,\n\nSeneca Falls Convention (1848), ,\n\nSeptember th terrorist attack,\n\nService industry,\n\nSessions, Jeff,\n\nSex discrimination, ,\n\nSexual harassment,\n\nSharecropping, , __, __\n\nShipyard workers, on strike, __, 120\u2013, __\n\n\"Silent sentinels,\" 50\u2013\n\nSkinheads,\n\nSkinner and Eddy Corporation, __\n\nSlave trade, , , , __\n\nSmallpox, 178\u2013\n\nSmeal, Eleanor,\n\nSmuggling, alcohol, during Prohibition, 163\u2013, __\n\nSocial Security Act (1935),\n\nSolar industry,\n\nSouth\n\nGreat Migration from, 67\u2013, ,\n\nlynchings in, 69\u2013\n\nmoonshine in,\n\nrace riots in, , 79\u2013\n\nracism in, , , 68\u2013\n\nsharecropping in, , __, __\n\nwomen's suffrage in,\n\nSouth Korea, immigrants from,\n\nSouthern Poverty Law Center, ,\n\n\"Soviet Ark\" (ship), , __\n\nSoviet Union,\n\nSpeakeasies, 166\u2013, _167\u2013169_\n\nSpeedboat,\n\nSt. Louis race riot (1917),\n\nStalin, Joseph,\n\nStanton, Elizabeth Cady, , __, ,\n\nState, Department of, ,\n\nState guard, in Boston Police Strike, _126\u2013127_, 129\u2013, __\n\nSteel Strike,\n\nStevenson, Bryan, ,\n\nStinson, Henry A., ,\n\nStorrow, James J.,\n\nStrikes, 119\u2013. _See also_ Boston Police Strike; Great Steel Strike\n\naftermath of, 140\u2013\n\ndemands of, ,\n\nimmigrants on, __, 138\u2013\n\nand Red Scare,\n\nSeattle General Strike, , __, 120\u2013, __,\n\ntimeline of, 145\u2013\n\nStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),\n\nSuffrage\n\nAfrican American, 68\u2013\n\nNative American,\n\nwomen's ( _See_ Women's suffrage\/women's suffrage movement)\n\n\"Suffrage pilgrims,\" 41\u2013\n\n\"Suffragette bonfire,\" ,\n\nSugar Act (1764),\n\nSunday, Billy, __, 154\u2013\n\nSupreme Court, women on,\n\nSusan B. Anthony Amendment, ,\n\nSyracuse (New York), race riot in,\n\nTaft-Hartley Act (1947),\n\nTaverns,\n\nTemperance movement\n\nSunday (Billy) in, __, 154\u2013\n\nwomen in, , 156\u2013\n\nTemperance societies\n\ndrawings used by, __\n\nand Prohibition, 152\u2013\n\nTenements,\n\nTerrell, Mary Church, , __,\n\nTerrorism, people suspected of,\n\nThomas, Francis,\n\nThomas, Tracy,\n\nTitle VII of Civil Rights Act (1964),\n\nTitle IX of Education Amendments (1972),\n\nTometi, Opal,\n\nTransatlantic flight, , , 132\u2013\n\nTrotter, William,\n\nTruman, Harry S., , ,\n\nTrump, Donald, , ,\n\nTuberculosis, 178\u2013\n\nTwenty-First Amendment, ,\n\n21 Club,\n\n\"Unite the Right\" rally,\n\nUnited Airlines,\n\nUnited Parcel Service (UPS) strike,\n\nUnited States Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA), , 29\u2013,\n\nUnited States Post Office strike,\n\nUnited States Steel Corporation,\n\nU.S. Department of Agriculture,\n\nU.S. Department of Energy, 143\u2013\n\nU.S. Department of Justice,\n\nU.S. Department of State, ,\n\nU.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA),\n\nU.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor,\n\nUnited Steelworkers of America,\n\nUPS strike,\n\nVaccination,\n\nVeterinarians, alcohol prescriptions by,\n\nVickers Vimy (plane), 132\u2013, __\n\nVietnam, immigrants from,\n\nViolence\n\nin Boston Police Strike, 125\u2013, _126\u2013127_, ,\n\nin Chicago race riot, 78\u2013\n\nin Elaine race riot,\n\nin Great Steel Strike, __,\n\nlynchings, , 69\u2013, __\n\nmass shootings, 179\u2013\n\nin Palmer Raids, ,\n\nin Washington race riot, 74\u2013\n\nin women's suffrage movement, ,\n\nVolstead Act (1919), , ,\n\nVoter Participation Center,\n\nVoter suppression measures, 88\u2013\n\nVoting rights. _See_ Suffrage\n\nVoting Rights Act (1965), ,\n\nWage gap. _See_ Pay gap\n\nWagner Act (1935),\n\nWalkout. _See_ Strikes\n\n\"War on terror,\"\n\nWashington, Booker T., ,\n\nWashington, D.C.\n\nanarchist bombing in, , __\n\nmarch on,\n\nrace riot in, 72\u2013, __, 86\u2013,\n\nsuffrage parade in, 40\u2013, __, __\n\nWashington, Jesse, __\n\n_Washington Post_ (newspaper), , ,\n\nWaskow, Arthur,\n\n\"Watchfires of Freedom,\" , __\n\nWCTU. _See_ Woman's Christian Temperance Union\n\nWelch, James,\n\nWells, Ida B., __, 56\n\nWest\n\nrole of women in,\n\nwomen's suffrage in, ,\n\nWestinghouse, George,\n\nWheeler, Wayne,\n\nWheeling (West Virginia), steel strike in,\n\nWhiskey, ,\n\nWhite, Walter,\n\nWhite House, picketing in front of, 50\u2013, _51\u201353_, __\n\nWhite supremacist movement, 114\u2013\n\nWhittaker, Raymond, 54\u2013\n\nWiley, Mrs. Harvey,\n\nWillard, Frances, 156\u2013, __\n\nWilliams, Eugene, 76\u2013\n\nWilson, Darren,\n\nWilson, Woodrow\n\non Boston Police Strike, 131\u2013\n\nand Great Steel Strike,\n\ninauguration of, ,\n\nand segregation,\n\nand Washington race riot,\n\nand women's suffrage, , 48\u2013, 50\u2013\n\nWind industry,\n\nWinthrop, John,\n\nWoman Suffrage Parade, 40\u2013, __, __\n\nWoman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 156\u2013,\n\n_Woman's Era_ (periodical),\n\nWomen\n\nin business,\n\ngender role of,\n\nlack of rights of, ,\n\nin military,\n\nand pay gap, ,\n\nin politics, , , ,\n\nproperty rights of,\n\nsexual harassment of,\n\nat speakeasies, 167\u2013, _168\u2013169_\n\non Supreme Court,\n\nin temperance movement, , 156\u2013\n\nin West, 37\u2013, __\n\nin workforce, during World War II,\n\nWomen's rights\n\nlack of, ,\n\ntimeline of, 61\u2013\n\nWomen's suffrage\/women's suffrage movement, 35\u2013\n\nabuse suffered in, , , 54\u2013\n\nAfrican Americans in, 38\u2013, __, 56\u2013,\n\nbonfires used in, , __\n\nin East,\n\nhunger strikes in,\n\nimprisonment in, 54\u2013\n\nkey figures in, 36\u2013, __,\n\nNineteenth Amendment granting, ,\n\nopposition to, 42\u2013,\n\npageants used in, 47\u2013, __\n\npassive resistance in,\n\npicketing used in, 50\u2013, _51\u201353_, __\n\nin South,\n\nsympathy for, , , ,\n\nWashington march in, 40\u2013, __, __\n\nin West, 37\u2013, __,\n\nwomen of all classes in, __,\n\nWoodhull, Victoria Claflin,\n\nWoodson, Carter G., __,\n\nWorkers\n\ndissatisfied, after World War I, ,\n\nreplaced by machines,\n\nduring World War I, ,\n\nWorking conditions, , ,\n\nWorld War I\n\nAfrican American soldiers in, , __\n\ncasualties in,\n\nnumber of soldiers in,\n\nworkers during, ,\n\nWorld War I veterans\n\nAfrican American, __, 65\u2013, __, __\n\nas factory workers, , , ,\n\nreturn of, __, , __\n\nwhite, in riots, 72\u2013, ,\n\nWorld War II\n\nCommunism after,\n\nJapanese American internment in, ,\n\nwomen in workforce during,\n\nWright, Richard, ,\n\nWright Brothers,\n\nYoungstown (Ohio), steel strike in,\n\nZimmerman, George,\n\n_To Carol_\nBLOOMSBURY CHILDREN'S BOOKS\n\nBloomsbury Publishing Inc., part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018\n\nThis electronic edition published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc\n\nBLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CHILDREN'S BOOKS, and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc\n\nFirst published in the United States of America in January 2019 by Bloomsbury Children's Books\n\nText copyright \u00a9 2019 by Martin W. Sandler\n\nAll rights reserved  \nYou may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.\n\nBloomsbury books may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at specialmarkets@macmillan.com\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nNames: Sandler, Martin W., author.\n\nTitle: 1919 the year that changed America \/ by Martin W. Sandler.\n\nOther titles: Nineteen-nineteen the year that changed America\n\nDescription: New York : Bloomsbury Children's Books, 2019.\n\nIdentifiers: LCCN 2018012754\n\nISBN: 978-1-6811-9801-9 (HB)  \nISBN: 978-1-5476-0576-7 (eBook)  \nISBN: 978-1-5476-0577-4 (ePDF)\n\nSubjects: LCSH: United States\u2014History\u20141919\u20131933\u2014Juvenile literature. | United States\u2014Social conditions\u20141918\u20131932\u2014Juvenile literature. | Social movements\u2014United States\u2014History\u201420th century\u2014Juvenile literature. | Nineteen nineteen, A.D.\u2014Juvenile literature. Classification: LCC E784 .S25 2019 | DDC 973.91\/3\u2014dc23 LC record available at <https:\/\/lccn.loc.gov\/2018012754>\n\nBook design by Patrick and Diane M. Collins\n\nTo find out more about our authors and their books please visit www.bloomsbury.com where you will find extracts, author interviews and details of forthcoming events, and to be the first to hear about latest releases and special offers, sign up for our newsletter.\n\n#\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Title Page\n  3. CONTENTS\n  4. INTRODUCTION\n  5. CHAPTER ONE: AN AMAZING EVENT\n  6. CHAPTER TWO: WOMEN GET THE VOTE\n  7. CHAPTER THREE: THE RED SUMMER\n  8. CHAPTER FOUR: THE RED SCARE\n  9. CHAPTER FIVE: STRIKES AND MORE STRIKES\n  10. CHAPTER SIX: A NOBLE EXPERIMENT\n  11. A YEAR THAT CHANGED AMERICA\n  12. FURTHER READING AND SURFING\n  13. SOURCES\n  14. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n  15. PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS\n  16. INDEX\n  17. Dedication\n  18. eCopyright\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}