The events of September 11th and its aftermath dominated this semester, beginning as they did during my second lecture hour. From the moment that I walked back into my office and heard, they have been a part of almost every conversation, every consideration. One of my first thoughts was, "Oh my god, my work actually has salience in the real world." Thus disturbed, my sanguine assurance that no one bothers with what I say or write, never returned. Like many of my (academic) tribe, I was thus left open to endless introspection about my work, my choices and my commitments.

For those of us who have always pretended to have the spirit of the activist, who declaim the importance of public engagement, a response external to one's thoughts is imperative. In the way I construct the narrative of why I do what I do, 1971 is an important year. In 1971, my parents took me with them on a sightseeing trip through Europe and the United States. We took a tour of the United Nations headquarters that following my mother's stories about the freedom movement, ahimsa, Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru and exotic-sounding words like 'Bandung Conference' and 'Suez Canal' captured my imagination completely. I have never lost my fascination with international relations since. Later that year, India and Pakistan went to war. I went to a school located near an Indian naval base and in the army cantonment. I have never lost my deep conviction that war is a bad thing. Between the two, these events are the foundation of a commitment I feel, a promise I have made to myself, that I would remain engaged with issues of war and peace, security and international relations, in every way I can. This fall, I have constantly been reminded of that childish commitment and I have become aware of how easy it would be to forget about it. I also know that if I did ignore it, I would find it hard to respect myself. I must struggle with these questions, difficult as they are.

September 11th made it impossible to speak of engagement without actually being actively involved. What has taken all my energy and creativity has been this question of trying to figure out what I am supposed to do. Beyond the not-this, not-this, what?

September 11th, 11 a.m. was certainly not a moment for teaching about international relations. It was about grief, shock, disbelief. The first engagement would have to be with that. In our classes, in vigils, on street corner and even in office conversations, in student meetings, many of us sought to provide spaces where grief could be expressed. This was an essential prelude to the teaching moment in the making. The next stage would be the teach-ins, panel discussions, public lectures and op-eds. We chose what came our way. We chose what we could do.

For me, helping with grief meant biting back the thoughts that did come to my head. That there are places in the world where everyday is September 11th. That other cities had coped, in spirit, if not logistically, as well as New York. That some lives seem more important than others in international relations. I also wanted to point out that the attack could have been carried out by anybody-not just 'Middle Eastern terrorists'. Thankfully, the impulse to discuss 'blowback' was simply not very strong in me, although like so many who study things like this, I could see where these atrocities were coming from.

As the anthrax scare has complicated the grief of September 11th, I have begun to wonder about fear. There are, as I said, places where survival is an everyday anxiety, but people do find a way to get out of bed every morning. They do not stay home because the market place will be bombed. They do not give up on eating and sleeping because their homes may be razed to the ground. I wanted to say to people, "Life is uncertain, and death is inevitable. But we still have to live." I wanted to say, "Fear feeds on itself. Don't indulge it." "Consider the odds that you will be affected by this." But I really tried hard not to. The expression of fear seemed to help. If others had to learn lessons in history and international relations, I had to learn lessons in self-control and tact.

In a way, I was moved by the fear and grief-they were felt and expressed in a manner that exemplified the loss of innocence we had all talked about. After all, bereavement is an integral part of individual and collective human histories, but each time we do react to it as though it is without precedent. There seemed to be something missing. If I knew people had coped with these things in the past and that the human spirit is as resilient as the human capacity for cruelty and violence is profound, why was I unable to communicate this in a manner that would be useful and meaningful? This was partly because I too had not experienced that uncertainty first-hand-like the people about whom I was concerned, I too had been fortunate to have been spared that. The difference between us was that I made it my business, my career, to study other contexts and so I could say it was possible. I still could not describe how. An attempt to bring together people who would be able to fill in those details was stillborn. New to town, I lacked the relationships that would make that sharing possible. How can we bring the everyday detail of other lives to bear usefully on our own?

Having volunteered to do a teach-in that metamorphosed into a panel on the impact of September 11th on South Asia, I found myself struggling with other issues. The difference in claims between a teach-in and a panel is great. At a teach-in, one marshals a certain amount of information, provides a framework in which it can be (rightly) understood and makes no claims to inside information. Call the same event a panel, and the 'talking-head' imperative appears. By virtue of being on a panel, one must be an expert of some sort. At a panel on September 11th and after, this suggested one knew what the US President was thinking, what Bin Laden had just said to Mullah Omar and what General Musharraf's innermost motivations are. Or so it seemed to me. Well, I simply don't know these things.

And why was it that I did not know? After all, anyone making the claim that their specialization was South Asian security issues should be able to answer these questions. Always shaky, my professional self-esteem rocked like one of the World Trade Center towers as I faced this gross inadequacy of mine. For one, I did not know, because I am in New Haven, and even were I to be in Washington DC, or Kabul, or Islamabad, the probability that I would be privy to anything more than a rumour four times removed on any of these questions, is slim. Being a scholar requires being honest, and this is the truth. For another, while it is true that I did train to study security and I am a South Asianist, I did not study Afghanistan. I did study Pakistan, but the fact that I did not do fieldwork in Pakistan meant that over the years, I had been losing interest in the case. I have to confess that when September 11th and the war happened, I had to re-tool as much as anyone else, and on the double. Further, my own loss of interest in this part of the subcontinent had been reinforced by the exigencies of life as a junior academic, where you are required to keep writing and publishing in order to show signs of continuing intellectual life, rather than reading widely and around your narrow publishing area. If I am not going to write articles on Afghanistan, why read about it? Reading is not activity that you can list on curriculum vitae! Finally, even as I had been writing in job applications and stating in conversations that it was important for academics to stay involved in policy debates, with great sincerity, I had lost the habit of political engagement-whether through participating in political discussions, articulating political opinions and arguing them, taking political initiative (hard anyway in a foreign country) or writing about politics for a public beyond academia. Even if I knew what I needed to know, I no longer know how to use it effectively. September 11th made me acutely aware of my own intellectual shortcomings.

It also underscored other things about me. I am both cautious and impatient about certain common types of political action. I almost never sign petitions, for instance. One reason is that I don't know who generated them. Simply naming the group is not enough. I want to know of their antecedents, their funding, their politics. I have become cautious to the point of paranoia about the adjectives ("progressive" for instance), the rhetoric with which I will let myself be associated. I am aware that a petition originating in France uses words in a certain way, but by the time it is emailed around the world a few times, it has been understood in many others, and so unsure of who else has signed and what they stand for, I pass on almost every petition that comes my way. Signing petitions is the simplest form of political engagement, and I do not engage in it.

I also am not a joiner. I never was, not as a child, not as a teenager, and now, not as an adult. If I will not affix my name and signature to petitions that ultimately are almost anonymous acts as they gain signatures in the millions, then joining obviously calls for even more caution. As I write this, the faces of college friends flash by and I must state honestly, that for all that I flirted with student political organizations, civil rights and even, feminist groups, I never joined. The only group I joined and stuck with was the Movement in India for Nuclear Disarmament, and then, in that particular incarnation, the group did not survive too long. So it is not a surprising trait in me now.

To balance my reluctance to sign petitions and join groups, I must express another conviction: protest is not enough. I want, at this stage of my life, to be involved in the exploration, development and articulation of alternatives. I want to build for the future, not just to respond to any given set of events. This too became very clear to me with the panel business. Apart from my lacking the confidence to present myself as an expert, the other issue for me has been, how will this prepare us to deal with the next crisis and the situation after that? Okay, if this is broken, how do we fix it? If this is wrong, what is the right way to deal with it?

Complicating the question of right and wrong is the recognition of the middle ground that age and the academic habit both bring. Well, this is right from this point of view and that is right from that point of view. To which it is entirely appropriate to reply, "Yes, but what is YOUR point of view?" And I can answer that question, but I cannot insist any more that my point of view has any superior claim politically or ethically. Further, in any situation, I have internalized the habit of observing structural constraints to every agent's choices and actions, and sparks of agency defying every set of structural constraints. When questions of culpability and ultimate responsibility arise, I have therefore, no definitive verdict to deliver. Nor do I wish to deliver such a verdict, because at the end of the day, it makes no difference. What is lost is lost, and nothing is ever gained from certain categories of action-violence, injustice, and exclusion. History tells us this. What intrinsic virtue all this has is off-set by its rendering me politically ineffective, I think.

One by-product of my preparation for the panel I mentioned earlier was an online resource page I maintained for two months after September 11th that brought together relevant news, opinions and information gathered in a random fashion from around the world. I thought, here is something I can do. For those who don't know where to look, and for those who don't have time to look widely, I can gather this information. I heard from a few people that it was useful, and I did that for a couple of months. As events unfolded, and the demands of my own schedule took over, the routine of updating the page fell by the wayside. But I know that this is a useful thing that I can do in the future too. It may be small and it may replicate what others are doing much better than I could, but it is engagement of a sort that I find useful.

"Each one teach one," my great-grandfather used to say. In looking for ways to be engaged politically, I have come back to this again and again. For me, teaching is the easiest way to be engaged. To answer questions, to provide information, and more importantly, to provide safe spaces for people to struggle through hard ideas and insights and to express their feelings, is what I can do, I think. I have realized all over again that this does not have to be in the classroom alone.

I attended a symposium on women and conflict this semester where we all agreed that conflict was terrible, that women needed to be involved and pro-active in their contexts and in particular, that we were terribly concerned with the events of this autumn. But as the weekend progressed, I also heard ambivalence about different kinds of engagement ("should good women enter entrenched bureaucracies to work for them on schemes that would never be implemented?"). I listened and heard the reluctance of people to listen to other points of view. I heard varying interpretations of what was important and what was necessary but lacking.

As I heard women talk about skills they lacked as they entered government and had to work on defence-related policies, I got to thinking about my own choices as a scholar. There is an unofficial, gendered taxonomy of issues that describes arms control, proliferation and conventional security matters as 'hardware' and ethnic conflict, migration, environmental and other non-conventional security matters as 'software.' Although I had plenty of opportunity to work on 'hardware' issues, I have let my discomfort in those predominantly male circles lead me away to the 'soft' side. I work on identity politics, on governance and other things. I say, and there is some truth to this, that I find these more interesting. However, I must confess that it is not entirely tedium or disinterest that keeps me from the other side. It is the unwillingness (and inability?) to follow and participate in a discourse that is very masculine. The issue here is not the nature of the discourse: it is my willingness to abdicate my responsibility, to abandon that commitment of which I wrote earlier, in order to indulge my own idiosyncratic dislike of a certain style. As I defended the women who worked with the establishment, I thought, "And what about me? Does my training not make it incumbent upon me that I should at least follow discussions on the CTBT and missile defence?"

Topsy-turvy. September 11th pulled the rug out from under my professional feet and threw me into a semester-long introspection about who I am, why I do what I do, what it is in fact that I do and what meaning, what shape I want to give to my life. When I answer questions about this semester, I have a nagging feeling of guilt that I perhaps dissemble. Have I made important contacts professionally? Yes. And no. Have I got some writing done? Not really. But I had not planned to be writing much this year. This is a reading year for me. Oh, that's good. Have I got a lot of reading done? Yes (mostly on current events). No (not on the new project, not as much as one would like). How is the job search? Inconclusive. What have I been doing? Thinking about my life and what would give it utility.

What have I learned? I have realized that I have responsibilities and cannot abandon areas of inquiry because I find them tedious. Everybody has something to contribute and the purpose of my keeping up with such questions as missile defence might simply be to provide a resource to other women who have to work on them. I have realized that political engagement can take many forms. Each of us must look for the ways we want to work, which take into account our situations, our shortcomings and our temperaments. But perhaps more importantly, each of us must optimally use our talents and our training, without flinching. I have finally begun to understand what I learned in college about satyagraha. The point of departure for any political undertaking must be personal introspection and honesty. I can neither recognize my strengths nor weaknesses without it. For instance, to me, political engagement seems truly to mean doing what I can, where I can, without regard to its consequence or lack thereof. I must face the possibility that it is the timorous part of my nature that dictates this rather than genuine detachment. Perhaps I shy away from very public postures because I am afraid of being wrong or being mocked. I have to face this. I realize that political engagement is discipline. It means never stopping, never giving up, never postponing what you need to do: reading today's news, writing to people, teaching. Most important of all, I have rediscovered the motivation for every single apparently futile academic undertaking of mine: I read, think, teach, write and speak about certain questions because I care passionately about them and because this feels today like my most effective way to act on them. The only thing that matters is to do what I can, ethically and with heart.

Swarna Rajagopalan
December 8th, 2001
New Haven