In his introduction to Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century, subtitled ‘Filling the Blanks Spaces’, Tim Youngs states that the motivation for travel in places like Africa and South America was to fill the blank spaces on the map and ‘once “discovered”, many of those places would be exploited for their commercial potential’; (Youngs 2006:2). To the imaginative draw of the blank spaces and the desire to exploit them economically should be added the urge to establish political control over them, directly or indirectly. The entire process is of course comprehended in the terms imperialism and colonization. Nineteenth century travel writing – especially in a region like the Middle East – is inextricably linked to the spread of European power, although that does not mean every traveller in this period set out on their journey with the express intention of building or adding to the British Empire. Nevertheless, the geographical and chronological divisions adopted in this volume largely conform to political realities. Britain's progressive entrenchment in India focalized the Middle East for her politicians. The Ottoman Empire, which comprised the lands known to European travellers as the Near East, included Egypt and the Holy Land as well as many of the sites of classical antiquity, but became as a result of Britain's imperial interests in India the nexus of her foreign policy.

Introduction: The Reward-Punishment Model

In traditional societies (by which I mean preindustrial societies in which religious notions were still authoritative, dominant cultural forms and where customary behaviour or ‘morals’ contained a strong component of psychological and social threat), good conduct on this earth was to be rewarded either by some form of life after death or by a beneficial release from the suffering of this world. By contrast, transgression of customary norms was threatened by eternal punishment, damnation or a miserable and indeterminate existence as a ghost or, literally, as a lost soul. There was a strong element of resentment in these conformity–reward moral systems in which the rich, who were seen to be proud and haughty, would suffer extreme miseries cheered on by the erstwhile poor. This spiritual resentment was expressed in the biblical maxim that it is more difficult for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

This paper offers a reading of Joseph Hall's The Art of Divine Meditation as a Ramist treatise, analysing his rhetorical and stylistic practice. But it might be appropriate to begin with a general comment on the meditational exercise as a genre. Louis L Martz has demonstrated how the Protestant arts of meditation came into being in reaction to an intellectual movement fostered by the Catholic Reformation, and particularly by the Jesuit fathers. One of the best fruits of this movement was the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. Its impact was felt all over Europe through a number of Jesuit treatises and manuals that followed in its wake, St François de Sales's Introduction à la vie dévote being a particularly influential one.

In a manual published in the nineteenth century, we are given in simple terms the procedure involved in an Ignatian meditation:

The immediate preparation consists in

1. Placing ourselves in a special way in the presence of God. St. Ignatius recommends that we stand for the space of an Our Father.

2. In a prayer to ask grace to make the meditation well, and in this prayer to make a little act of self-humiliation, and be sure to invoke our Lady and St Joseph.

3. Then follow the preludes and the points of meditation. After reading each point we should reflect.

Glance, stare, really see!

In fact, the logocentric era (in any case, as far as the transmission of news is concerned) waned long before the advent of the period that we now call the ‘audiovisual’ age. From the moment that Daguerre and Niépce observed the effect of a ray of light on silver, mankind (without yet realising it) began to prefer image over text. Newspapers still had priority, but illustrated journals, according to the authoritative evidence of Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, had already learned to make use of two advantages: their news could reach ‘the sticks’ via the traveling salesman's baggage and, even more, they could make ‘national advertising coverage’ a reality.

The illustrated journals of the times when the transmission of news over distance was still in an infantile state in fact fulfilled the role of the future small screen and were its direct predecessors. They delivered viewable news to the home and made it a part of familial and societal customs.

Our topic is a comparison of two 1930s journals: the Soviet Ogonek (‘Little Fire’) and the German Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (‘BIZ’). This will be a comparison on a basic thematic level, although this is not the only possible approach, and maybe not even the most interesting.

PORTRAITS OF SAKHALIN

It was 16 April. The piercing northwest wind was cold and gusty as the steamer lolled from side to side. I stood on the top deck and watched as the bleak, inhospitable rocky shoreline, still covered in snow, came into view. This first impression was gloomy, heavy and oppressive. The island stretched out like some kind of monster, dead and awaiting disposal, with ridges covering its back.

“This is where the Kostroma went down,” the captain told me.

I descended to the lower deck. Prisoners' faces crowded the deck's portholes as they gazed intently at the shoreline of the island where their lives would end. They gloomily muttered: “Sakalin!”

“It's still winter!”

“Let me see!”

“There's nothing to see. Everything's covered in snow.”

The steamer began to rock more violently. We were entering the La Perouse Straits. To the left was the Krilovsky lighthouse; to the right the roiling and frothing boulders of the submerged “Calamity Rock.” Straight ahead and drawing near, an ice floe. More ice floes obscured the horizon.

Here indeed was some bitter mockery: to transport people nearly around the globe, to show them a small corner of earthly paradise (magnificent blooming Ceylon), to give them “but a glance” of Singapore, that luxurious, divine, fantastic blooming garden a degree-and-a-half from the equator, to allow—near the entrance to Nagasaki—just a glimpse of Japan's magical and picturesque coast (a coastline you cannot tear your eyes away from), only to deliver them, after all this, to bleak rocky shores still covered in snow as of mid-April, to this land of blizzards, storms, fogs and ice floes—and then to say: “Thrive!”

Believing his son's lungs should not be exposed to English winters, Mark Sykes' father took him with him on journeys through the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and America in the 1880s and 1890s. These early travels may have contributed to Sykes' distaste for modernity and helped form the essentializing statements about the East we frequently find in his travel writings. In the late 1890s he traversed Palestine, Syria and Iraq and Through Five Turkish Provinces, a write-up of these journeys, appeared in 1899. Returning to Syria and eastern Turkey in 1903, he published Dar-ul-Islam the following year. Sykes had by now acquired a mannered jokey style à la Kinglake, with burlesque passages of dialogue that look forward to Robert Byron. To this he added an opinionated array of pseudo-authoritative observations on the racial characteristics of the diverse peoples of the eastern Ottoman lands. Strongly pro-Turk, he disparaged their subject races, especially the Armenians and Jews. The Caliphs' Last Heritage (1915) mixes an extensive history of the Ottomans with narrative of journeys through Ottoman territory made from 1906 almost yearly until 1913. As the title implies, Sykes saw the current Near East in terms of a noble but dying civilization; but not content with decrepitude ‘instead of respecting their own traditions, Easterners had caught the Western contagion of progress’ (Adelson 1975: 101).

In the spring of 1917 Lloyd George underwent a change of heart and toyed with the idea of a negotiated settlement with Germany. He could see no dramatic changes immediately ahead, nothing to stimulate hope or signal an approaching climax. Gradually, the idea took root in his mind that the defeat of the German army might be either impossible or prohibitively costly to Britain. He began to backpedal from his announced policy of continuing the war until a knockout blow had been delivered. Strangely enough, his interest in considering peace negotiations came only after the United States had entered the fray. But he was told by the experts that the United States would not be able to place significant military forces in the west for at least a year. The unfitness of the French army for further action in 1917, Britain's shrinking manpower, the deadly toll exacted by the enemy's submarine campaign and the precipitous decline of Russia all combined to make it uncertain that the Entente could hold the Germans at bay until the following year.

Anticipating that in the near future his government might be confronted with an instant demand for peace, Lloyd George felt that some attention should be given to defining the nation's war aims. Accordingly, he prepared a statement that he intended to deliver at the initial meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet.

Born in Aughrim Co. Galway the son of a former inspector of constabulary in Ireland, Bartholomew Elliot Warburton was privately educated in Yorkshire before proceeding to Eton, where he met Kinglake, and Trinity College Oxford from where he graduated in 1834. Though called to the Irish bar in 1837 he ‘abandoned the law to superintend his Irish estates, travel and write’ (DNB) adopting the soubriquet ‘Eliot Warburton’ for his works of fiction and travel. His tour of Syria, Palestine and Egypt was conducted some years after Kinglake, in 1843, but The Crescent and The Cross, or, Romance and Realities of Eastern Travel appeared only a year after Eothen, the former strongly imitating the latter as well as rivalling it in popularity during the Victorian period. Warburton died en route to South America when the steamer Amazon caught fire off Lands End.

From:

The Crescent and the Cross (1845)

Chapter VII diverges from Kinglake in its generalizing observations on Egyptian religion and society. Even though Warburton states he intends to write only about the ‘common-place’ mid-nineteenth century – ‘glimpses of men and things in our time are all I can hope to offer’ – he proceeds to reproduce many of the Orientalist and racial categorizations that become typical of much later Victorian writing on the Egyptian scene and indeed on the Middle East overall. His knowledge of Egypt comes more from Edward Lane than from his own observation.

Layard's main claim to fame was as an archaeologist, but he also had a career in public life, first as a Member of Parliament, and then as a diplomat, culminating in a period as ambassador to Turkey between 1877 and 1880. He is, however, most celebrated for his expeditions to Nineveh and the excavations he made there, described in Nineveh and its Remains (1849) and Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1851). His Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia was published in 1887, more than four decades after the journeys it describes. While a young man Layard left a career in the law to travel in the East with his friend Edward Mitford. Determining on Ceylon as their destination, they set off across Turkey and Syria to Jerusalem, where they split, Layard exploring on his own the ancient sites of Petra and Jerash. Reunited, they proceeded to Baghdad then accompanied a caravan to Kermanshah where Layard resumed his investigations of ancient inscriptions. At a time of tension between Britain and Persia over the former's campaign in Afghanistan the companions were suspected of being spies. So in Hamadan they split for the second and last time, Layard proceeding south to Isfahan and the wild areas of Luristan where the Bakhtiari tribes lived and operated beyond the control of the Persian government. There Layard ‘travelled far and wide, studying archaeological sites, copying rock-cut inscriptions, taking notes on tribal organization, exploring the possibilities of trade with India’ (Wright 1977: 160).

Born in Gloucestershire into a family with strong engineering connections (his father was director of a shipbuilding firm in Newcastle-upon-Tyne), Browne attended Eton and graduated from Cambridge in the Natural Sciences in 1882, qualifying as a practitioner of medicine in 1887. In between, he travelled briefly to Istanbul (1883) and took the Indian languages tripos at Cambridge in 1884. His background of wealth and liberal orientations gave him scope to follow a career in Oriental Studies rather than medicine, and adopt radical postures on the East. Successively the Turks and then the Iranians became objects of his ardour, and he actively promoted their cultural and political causes. He developed a particular rapport with Iranians after his visit to Iran in 1887–8; though this would be his only visit it featured in one of the best travel works of the nineteenth century, A Year Amongst the Persians, which appeared in 1893. Browne was made Sir Thomas Adam's Professor of Arabic in 1902 and spent the rest of his life as a Cambridge don. However, his bitter criticism of the foreign policy of the Liberal Government, especially its position on the Iranian constitutional revolution between 1906 and 1911, harmed his reputation among the political establishment. Independent means and a remarkable grasp of Oriental languages made Browne a formidable adversary. A love for Persian language and culture strongly informs A Year Amongst the Persians, in spite of its being the work of a young man.

The Biharis have been part of Calcutta since the last few centuries. The three states of Bihar, Orissa and Bengal comprised what was in the nineteenth century rather officiously called ‘Greater Bengal’. With both the geographical proximity and the absence of any geological barriers encouraging movement of people among these states, migration to the city of Calcutta has been a regular phenomenon. Interestingly, though the term ‘Bihari’ predates the recent division of the larger state of Bihar, the term was generally not used to refer to people from areas which today are included in the Jharkhand state. The cities and towns of the modern state of Jharkhand – Hazaribagh, Jamshedpur, Maithan, Ranchi, are viewed by most Calcuttans as being familiar enough to be mistaken for towns of Bengal. It has been the people from the districts of Monghyr, Katihar, Purnea, Bhagalpur, Saran (with its subdivision of Chhapra) who have always been identified as the ‘real’ Biharis.

Though the image of the Bihari migrant is often of one who is among the poorest, this may not always reflect reality. Much of the rural–urban migration, as other researches in South Asia and Africa has also shown, is of a circular character. Almost all the Bihari migrants continue to maintain links with their areas of origin in rural Bihar. In the southern African context, or colonial India, this has been attributed to policies that restrict the settlement of migrants with their families.

Introduction

Keeping in mind the question posed above, one can state that in an era, often called the Media Age, the basic issues that confront an analyst exploring the nature of the ‘world's largest democracy’ relate to the media power itself: how do media function in the power structure of the concerned society, and no less important, how do the media address it? The discussion on such issues is political in the broad sense of the term. It is so at least for two reasons: first, basically it is the interpretation of the narrative conventions and representations that shape the context in which politics is conceived, understood and enacted by the people; and second, it is being interpreted by a politically aware audience, composed of readers, listeners and viewers. No less important is the fact that in a democracy the audience is also supposed to be opinion-holders.

An intense focus on the mainstream media, from the vantage point being mentioned here, is bound to be critical in both content and tenor. The same holds true for what is going to be the special focus of this chapter – television and television news. However, a clarification is needed at the ver y outset: such critical analysis should not be construed as a sort of ‘anti-media’ stance. Democracy without powerful and constructive media is an impossible venture and any analyst ready to go beyond the simple causal mechanisms of media effects knows quite well that the world would be a worse place to live in if the media would disappear from the scene.

With Harold Acton, Byron was a key figure in the 1920s Oxford milieu described by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited (DNB). He began establishing a reputation as a traveller and writer on Art with Europe in the Looking-Glass (1926), a youthful record of a journey made with two Oxford friends to Germany and Italy. He found himself honoured in Greece owing to his name (he was distantly connected to the poet). To understand Greece better he went to Mt. Athos where he believed the Byzantine spirit still lived on. The Station (1928) and The Byzantine Achievement (1929, repr. 1937) were statements of his belief that, in the words of his friend Christopher Sykes, ‘the Byzantine Empire was the high noon of Hellenic greatness’ (Sykes 1946: 103). According to Sykes, Byron was a ‘fighter’ who could however carry his opinions to extremes, as he did in his condemnation of Roman Catholicism. Byron's travels to the East began with a stint in India in 1929 as a correspondent for the Daily Express. An Essay on India, which appeared in 1931, laid out his ambivalence toward empire and modernity. He criticized the British Raj for its assumption of racial superiority and bitterly attacked Churchill for his opposition to India achieving dominion status, but he also reproved Indians, while acting under an unavoidable sense of inferiority, for attempting to be modern. Byron preferred non-Europeans not to copy Western material success.

During the early months of the war, Britain employed its naval superiority to keep the sea-lanes open and impose an economic blockade of the Central Powers. The German Navy could not break the blockade, but it could damage Britain's sea-borne trade with a new weapon, the submarine, or U-boat. To cope with the growing submarine menace, the Admiralty relied on a series of countermeasures. It organized naval patrols to hunt for submarines and detailed destroyers and small craft to guard the routes used by merchant ships; it armed merchantmen, employed nets and mines, and introduced depth charges and detecting instruments known as hydrophones. But for the whole of 1916 the British navy managed to sink only 15 U-boats, small inroads into a force that had increased to 140 by year's end. At the same time, German submarines were sinking merchant ships at a rate faster than the capacity of British shipyards to provide replacements. Walter Runciman, president of the Board of Trade, warned the War Committee on November 9, 1916 that if losses continued at the present pace, there would be a complete breakdown in shipping.

The lack of success against submarines cast doubt on the whole conduct of naval affairs and led to changes at the Admiralty during the last month of the Asquith administration, with Jellicoe leaving the Grand Fleet to take over the duties of First Sea Lord.

The Russian Cinematic Search for Happiness

The search for happiness in Russian film began before the birth of the Soviet Union. Pre-Revolutionary Russian filmmakers were preoccupied with the theme, notably the preeminent Russian director Evgenii Bauer. His characters sought happiness in conventional worldly success in films such as Child of the Big City (Ditia bol'shogo goroda, 1914), but also in ecstatic delusion and selfsacrifice in two films whose titles make explicit reference to happiness, The Happiness of Eternal Night (Schast'e vechnoi nochi, 1915) and his late masterpiece In Pursuit of Happiness (Za schast'em, 1917).

The search continued after the Revolution. One of the most daring and inventive films of the Soviet 1930s bears the one word title Happiness (Schast'e). Made in 1934 by Aleksandr Medvedkin, it tells in allegorical form the tale of the Russian peasant's doomed struggle for happiness. Such is Medvedkin's sense of irony that the film did not attract official approval. Far more consonant with the ideological imperatives of the time was the representation of happiness in the musicals of Grigorii Aleksandrov and Ivan Pyr'ev, in which happiness is encapsulated in songs that are still sung today.

This paper attempts to provide an outline of the contributions of the Indian democratic socialist tradition to the expansion and radicalization of the canvas of democratic theory and practice in India. While doing so, it also briefly discusses and highlights the historical and cultural context of the emergence of democratic imagination in India. Besides, the paper also tries to grapple with certain central issues of democracy in contemporar y India, and shows how the socialist input into Indian democracy could help in overcoming some of its predicaments. This analysis is done in three sections. The first section discusses the historical and cultural context of the emergence of democracy in India in terms of the nationalist movement and the framing of the Indian constitution. The second section identifies the central issues that Indian democracy confronts today. Finally, the third section highlights the significance of Indian democratic socialist discourse both in identifying the problems of Indian democracy as well as in evolving amicable solutions to them.

Democracy as a political idea owes its origin to the west. However, the western genesis of the idea of democracy does not necessarily make it Eurocentric as different societies have different ways of articulating or rearticulating democracy in their distinctive cultural and historical pursuits. In India too, the chronicle of democratic imagination and pursuit has been historically specific and culturally distinct.