Is Sanjay Subhramanyam the ghost of Vasco da Gama?

Like me, Sanjay Subhramanyam, the author of ‘Is Indian Civilization a Myth?- is a middle aged Tam Bram of repellent aspect and ludicrously half-baked views . Still, notwithstanding such epigenetic drawbacks, his ancestral heritage also included an evolving, Neurath’s raft type, concept of territories where it was permissible to sojourn or settle without loss of caste- i.e. injury to the Manes & thus hysteresis related harm to the commonweal- as opposed to other territories where the matter was either doubtful or definitely reckless. The same was true for Kashmiri Kauls, Bengali Babus, Jalandhari Joshis and so on. Essentially, India has developed immunity to the idiocy of hereditary Brahmins & aleatory Shramans. We are welcome to emigrate- Mother Ind will thank us for it- but forbidden to appease the Ancestors solely by recycling witless shite in our new abode because to do so would be to become a Mephistophelian Cross Roads demon offering Faustian pacts to that new Oikumene’s  Credentialist Academy or crapulous Shatter zone.

Taken together, Bhraminical notions of permissible settlement areas and peripatetic fora for prattling shite, generated a ‘ship of Theseus’ like notion of Indian Civilization that a plurality of Pan Indian Castes autonomously subscribed to and sustained for millennia.

Unfortunately, Sanju Baba doesn’t believe that Civilizations can be like the ship of Theseus- i.e. something which abides though all its components are swapped out and replaced- rather he is the Vasco da Gama of a very different type of Ship- something which passes for Scholarship but which is actually a ghostly caravel out of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ or some other such Disneyland attraction, by a meretricious recourse to which, History professors discharge their child-minding duties at American Colleges.
The shameful aspect of it is that Sanju isn’t actually a proper, Kal Penn type, stoner American Sophomore but a P.G. Woodhouse reading desi transplant. In other words, the fellow started off as a feeble & four eyed Gussie Fink-Nottle same as the rest of us.
Suppose Sanju Baba had asked his granny- ‘Pati, what is Indian Civilization? Is it a myth? Did the British invent it? Or was it the Turukas? Kindly enlighten me due to I iz writing a book on the topic.’

 What would Sanju’s granny have replied?

I don’t know but my guess is something like- ‘Shave your face you disgusting little poddiyan! Only 5 years old but already putting on such airs and graces is it? Remember the song ‘not everybody with mustache is Bharati, not every beardie is Tagore.’ As for your question re. Indian civilization- it is not a Myth, or Noble Lie, but a Convention- i.e. a David Lewis type solution to a Co-ordination problem which has persisted and been propagated by our own ancestors for about 2000 years- give or take.’

Sanju Baba, no doubt, would have replied ‘It is not convincing to speak of an Indian Civilization that had been perfected by the Gupta era. Clearly something which hasn’t been perfected can’t be a Schelling focal point because …urm… well I’m actually an Economist so I know about these things.’

Granny’s riposte would be- ‘Fuck you know from Econ you worthless bearded retard? It’s when things aren’t ‘perfect, homeostatic, closed systems’ that Co-ordination problems gain salience in a manner which generates the notion of a broader mechanism design univocity- i.e. a reverse ‘Zomia’ of ‘Governability’ –  or Civilizational unity, underlying what is local and particular. Since you are Indian, belong to the Brahmin caste, and are emic to Indian Civilization, it follows that it would be a singular act of filial impiety, a nihilistic act of epistemic vandalism, to pretend that Indian civilization is a myth invented by acharabrashta Nehruvians or anti-casteist Nativist nut-jobs and that India is merely a collection of demon haunted cross-roads, from which all purely primrose paths lead to Hell, and not at all the cohesive ‘karma bhumi’ where the fire walk of rituals faithfully performed- a duty owed your Manes- repairs a collective Ethos and restores the possibility of Cosmic apocatastasis.’

Sanju replies- ‘But, Granny, some White people who have said the same thing! So they must be wrong coz they iz White and don’t take oil bath or eat thairr shadam.’

Granny- ‘Nonsense. White people don’t say anything sensible at all. Even if they do- you just kindly ignore them & wobble your head & say ‘India phery hot!’ till they go away. All Whiteys are either demons or Mleccha evil-doers- for whose destruction Vishnu takes misleading incarnations like Vamana, Buddha, Gandhi etc- and, unless deluded by the Kalki of Eco-Feminism- they will try to entice you either  to become a Christian and eat beef or else to grow a stinking great beard and smoke beedis and pretend to be some horrible sort of JNU jhollawallah constantly eating Gobi Manchurian at some foul smelling dhaba rather than properly tucking into thairr shadam. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.’

Sanju- ‘But, Pati, my own researches have revealed that several centuries after the arrival of Vasco da Gama on Indian shores, there was no single dominant idea of India in writings by Westerners: several contradictory views existed depending on whether one wrote from Madurai or Agra, whether one was Protestant or Catholic, whether one knew Persian or Sanskrit, and so on. However, by the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a new homogeneity can be found in views of what India was. This picture, produced by Western Orientalists and their Indian assistants, tended to focus on Sanskrit as the true source of Indian culture (demoting Persian in the process), and there was also a search for an Indian Golden Age. Minority voices contested this view, but they were few and far between. Indian popular culture was also largely set aside in favor of an obsession with high culture.’

Granny- ‘What did you expect? Ignorant White people talked different types of ignorant nonsense about India. Once some money was spent on finding out the truth- well, if not the truth, then formulating a colligationally coherent Research Program- then, naturally, by reason of a textual availability bias, Sanskrit learning and ‘Margi’ High Culture predominated in shaping their idea of India, the same way that the Renaissance restored Greek learning as the fountainhead of their idea of European Christendom. 
BTW, Persian was on its way out already because the meta-metaphorhicity of sabak-e-hindi shite exponentially increased semiotic slippage away from both Sanity and Islam’s Arabic roots.
 ‘The bottom line is nothing sinister or indeed surprising happened to the idea of India whether emic or etic. Textual availability bias created Schelling focal points for the underlying colligational Co-ordination problem and so capacitance diversity got Canalised in a convergently Baldwinian manner.
‘Still, that’s not to say White people aint totally shit- don’t marry a fucking Mleccha Mem Sahib, hear me, boy? She might mistake you for a rational human being rather than a typical Tambram idiot who requires being whacked on the head with a rolling pin from time to time. Anyway, we’ve got a great big, bearded, bharat natyam dancing, Sumo wrestler of a Freak Show attraction already lined up for you to marry- provided you settle down to writing Code- but, okay, re. White historians- sure, they may have improved a bit once they got Indian assistants. BUT what’s important is NOBODY FUCKING CARED! Historians are shit, have zero power and also they are shit and did I mention they were totally fucking shit? I did? Well then. 
‘Anyway, the British Queen- Mountbatten as he was known- slyly fucked off back to Blighty long before you were born. So just ignore them stupid cunt-face White Historians and concentrate on writing Code. Have regular oil bath. Eat only thairr shadam. & shave your fucking face you fucking retard! You think they’ll give you a Green Card to Yemrika if you look like Osama fucking Laden you worthless shithead? ‘

Sanju- ‘But, Pati, isn’t it It is remarkable that both Indian reformers and neo-traditionalists of the 19th century bought into this view, and a strange complicity came to exist between these two apparently opposed strands?’
Granny- ‘Nonsense. It isn’t remarkable at all. What you say is true of all colligational availability cascades which yield Credentialist rents.’
Sanju- ‘But isn’t it a fact that the epoch from the 12th to the 18th centuries was portrayed in dark hues, and if some felt Westernisation was the antidote to the malady, others proposed a return to the real roots of Indian civilisation?
Granny- You stupid fuckwit, don’t you understand that between the 12th and 18th Century Islam was burgeoning on the sub-continent? What did you expect rent-seeking Christian & Hindu writers to do? Say “Islam is way cool. Let’s all convert?’ How could they say that and still draw a rent as exponents of their own Religion with a claim to obligatory passage point status within the State’s interessement mechanism for Soft Power? Don’t forget, this was before the Saudis got all them petro-dollars.
Sanju- Still, Pati, you have to admit, something very sinister was going on. What was this pristine culture to which a return was proposed? Carnatic music played on the violin (an 18th-century import from Europe), or dances performed to the texts of Kshetrayya that came precisely from this period!
Granny- ‘Fuck off. Kindly read the Jaimini Mimamsa Sutra you fucking acharabrashta Smarta poddiyan. Substitutability is constructive of Essence. Without it, there is no Intentionality- i.e. no Yagnya, no Apurvata, no karma kanda.
‘Culture can not have the quality of being ‘pristine’ without there having been extensive Ship of Theseus style substitution. Otherwise it is not Culture but Noumenal Nature- a totally different bag, you worthless jhollawallah cunt. 
‘BTW Kshetrayya- whose biopic you watched on Doordarshan in the Seventies- died in the Seventeenth Century. How fucking ignorant and deracinated are you actually?’
Sanju- But, Pati, in north India, ultra-purists insisted that Dhrupad should be favoured over Khayal, and invented a bogus Vedic genealogy for the former, forgetting that it was heavily influenced by Mughal court culture.
Granny- Really? The Dagars forgot Mughal court culture? Suck my dick you worthless piece of shit!
Sanju- ‘ As for devotional religion such as we know it today in India, most of it is the product of the period from the 14th century onwards, whether in Maharashtra, Punjab or Bengal.’

Granny, ‘OMG! Do you really not understand that stuff from the 15th century is gonna be based on stuff from the 14th and so on? Okay, you iz a Tambram- i.e. a fuckwit by definition. But even the stupidest drunkard of a Tambram retard knows that Tamils didn’t invent Bhakti and then export it to the Bhaiyyas up North.. It’s there in the Rg Veda. North Indian Riti poetry goes to a whole heap of trouble integrating Bhakti with Purva Mimamsa & Sankhya & so on. Read Tulsi you worthless shit. He’s got a better sense of humor than P.G. Woodhouse- God of the Indglish speaking Tambram- keep that in mind and, babe, that fucking two lota maryada bhakta U.P bhaiyya, like he will jus’ blow your mind- no kidding. Aiyayo’.
Sanju- ‘Yes, well, the truth is horrible British Whiteys only got to rule over India and make us wear chaddi rather than go commando due to some White historian wrote a book which showed that Brits were so nice and Indians really liked them and I wanna be a White man, Pati! Do you think if I just let my beard overgrown my face and body and, like, it turns white, people will take me for a white Dorai?’
Granny- ‘Taking the last part of your question first- the beard don’t fool nobody. Talcum powder is the way to go. As for that shite about British historians forcing us to wear chaddi- Fuck off. White historians wrote shite which nobody read. They had no power.  Some Brits in India made money and used that money in a corrupt manner to get the British Navy and Army and so on to make them yet richer.  So long as the money train kept rolling- India was British. When it stopped the Brits did a corrupt deal with the Indian power elite and slyly fucked off.  What some fuckwit wrote, whether or not it was published or found its way into some dusty archive, is fucking irrelevant.
‘The truth is, Sanju Baba, you’re just as fucking stupid as Ranajit Guha! You think there was some big conspiracy just coz some White shitheads wrote some crap and some Indian shitheads, mainly Bongs, wrote similar shite. I told you already. Fuck history- only shitheads write it and fucking Right Wing Hindutva nutjob bloggers get worked up over it- just concentrate on writing Computer Code and get a proper job with INFOSYS. Don’t let them fob you off with a Professorship or a History Prize or a Beard Support Grant or something of that sort. Incidentally, your notion of what ‘pristine culture’ ought to look like is totally fucked in the head. Don’t you understand, the fact that proto-R.S.S types were peeing upstream from your own fucking bathing ghat means that you have been doing tarpana with their urine? All that time spent wanking in the library book-stacks and the Carnatic violin is all you could come up with? Fuck is wrong with you?’

Sanju- ‘R.S.S Svayamsevaks are oppressing me!  I wanted to dedicate myself to English only and write Cricket stories like P.G. Woodhouse. By their occult practices, the khaki- knickerwallahs made me learn Hindi and Urdu and Persian and Arabic and other such Mleccha languages! All them fucking Chitpavans are just a bunch of crypto-Turukas, if not half-caste Whiteys! 
‘I have been grossly polluted, Aiyayo! Gimme my oil bath and thairr shadam! I must perform prayaschitam! : if cultural cleansing is to start in India, we might begin by returning the khaki shorts of the R.S.S to their place of origin.’

Granny- ‘But khaki shorts were invented in India. What? You think the Europeans wore khaki shorts previously? In any case, last thing we need is them RSS gerontocrats parading around in the nuddy. Chee, chee dirty boy kindly evict that owl which has taken up residence in your beard. OMG! It isn’t an owl at all! It’s Teesta Setalvad! Heeeeeelp!’ 

Sanjay Subhramanyam- ‘Ha ha ha ha! I yam the ghost of Vasco da Gama. Ha ha ha ha! I will eat the brains of Pres. Obama! Ha ha ha ha!’

Boring Road- Amitava Kumar revisits Bihar

Amitava Kumar has written a line worthy of Naipaul-
‘In conversation, Leela would speak of herself as a journalist and an actress. I felt that she mistook ambition for achievement, and I began to like her less.’ 
But Naipaul wrote as a foreigner, a journalist; Kumar & Mishra et al, aren’t foreigners, they are Biharis. Amitava was just a few years older than Leela, he probably had relatives or colleagues who had been ‘Communist Party workers’ and thus it was perfectly natural for Leela to ask him for help in getting a scholarship to train as an actress. What possible ‘achievement’ as opposed to ‘ambition’ could Leela  have had as a recently married woman in her early 20’s?
When Naipaul writes of ‘mistaking ambition for achievement’ it is within a larger framework of passing judgment on a Development model of a specific Rostovian ‘Nation Building’ kind. What wider framework underpins Kumar or Mishra’s Naipaulian cadence? Is it the reflection that jhollawallah types in Patna are somehow even more pathetic and ludicrous than jhollawallah types at J.N.U or Ivy League?
Kumar invokes Rashomon. Why? Has this something to do with Kurosawa’s own political beliefs? Or is it just that a b&w film from 1950 is the proper lens through which to view Patna because…urm… well, Bihar is just so damn backward yaar. They have just this one mall and it’s located on Boring Road. Seriously. That’s the name of the road. Every other alleyway and cul de sac gets renamed M.G. marg or J.P chowk, but when you have an actual great big thoroughfare called Boring road, the Biharis refuse to change its name to something more boring yet. Is it just me or do other people think mebbe them dehati bhaiyyas, with their exquisitely Buddhist sense of humor, have been laughing at us all these years?

U.R. Ananthamurthy interview.

U.R Ananathamurthy explains how even ordinary women without a PhD from Birmingham and who haven’t read Foucault can stop swinging from trees for a moment or two and make various gestures and guttural noises which are way more…urm…  like full of that thing which is also the subject matter of semantics?… than those fucking Marxist bastards whose PhDs are from Cambridge.

This is him talking about an acclaimed fellow author- Vaidehi– who is also present and talking for herself-

Interviewer- But would she still be able to swing from tree to tree?
Ananthamurthy- Not if that cunt Bhyrappa gets his way and turns Karnataka into another Hindutva laboratory a la Modi’s Gujerat!  I tell you, if it hadn’t been for Tipu Sultan, ordinary women like her who haven’t even read Foucault would be denied opportunities even to eat Gunter Grass let alone swing from tree to tree! BTW did they give me the Mann Booker pize yet?
Interviewer- No.
Ananthamurthy- Fucking Islamaphobes!  The guy chairing the selection committee was obviously gay- even wearing a skirt and lip-stick!
Interviewer- I think that was a woman.
Ananthamurthy- Nonsense. He wasn’t swinging from tree to tree at all. Get your facts straight.

Why Anantamurthy failed to win Man Booker prize.

The fix was in. A gang of Bangalore based bookies had bribed the Judges to secure the Man Booker trophy for our home boy. But when the Judges asked, ‘Are you Anantamurthy?’ he replied- ‘No. You are.’- which they thought rude.
Same thing happened with the Nobel.
Ironically, Lydia Davis actually wrote a story about this but tl;dr.
Personally, I blame David Cameron.
That boy aint right.

Vikram Seth’s ‘A suitable girl’- first review

In keeping with this blog’s long-standing commitment to passing judgement on tomes it hasn’t read, we take pleasure in bringing you our review of Vikram Seth’s latest book fresh from the redoubtable pen of Prof. Vagina Dentata Choothopadhayay, dipped, we need hardly add, in her own copious menstrual blood.

In consideration of our readers’ tender sensibilities, we have taken the liberty of excising certain four letter words and acrimonious references to the size of our genitals from Prof. Choothopahdyay’s article. Since nothing was then left to publish, our Senior Editor has very kindly supplied the following.

Vikram Seth, like Jane Austen, takes his subject matter from the Sense vs. Sensibility dilemma facing Female Mate Choice. He gives a sort of Feminist tinge to his project by forbidding his Heroines the right to sacrifice themselves so as to keep an otherwise Unsuitable Boy functional as opposed to turning into a monumental  fuck-up. However, in so doing, he cuts off his project from ‘Greatness’ because though a Utilitarian ‘Heart vs Head’ dilemma is Universal, it is not Fundamental and carries no Soteriological or Existential flavor in the manner that the subject matter of truly Great Literature does.
True, Jane Austen doesn’t deal with the case of women sacrificing themselves for their Mates- but it is very evident that they sacrifice their own prejudices or proclivities in the interest of Marriage-as-partnership- albeit Sleeping Partnership because women in her age were second class citizens to start off with. Married women had no rights over their own property. She herself, for Socio-Economic reasons was doomed to Spinsterhood. Rudyard Kipling’s ‘the Janeites’, which only makes us cringe because we have not tears enough to cry, offers a collective act of reparation such that our tears wipe away the ink of a hundred years of English Literature and Jane marries her suitor up in Heaven with Sir Walter Scott doing the honors. In other words, there is something outside Austen’s texts which makes them Great- there is a vishodhana purgation whereby, at least for Kipling’s readers- the Literature to which Austen so signally contributed, or which she incarnated, precisely by a consideration of what both elide, gains the Jordan of our heart-felt tears from which to arise in the bridal vestments of a Gangetic dawn. At least, hopeless and hereditary Babu that I am, such is my Babuish judgement.
For Seth’s heroines, Self-sacrifice isn’t on the menu. Thus, the arena in which they judiciously exercise Mate Choice is one from which any higher type of Love than can be captured by Revealed Preference is rigorously ruled out. Thus, though ‘Universal’, this Mate-Choice remains confined to the trivial plane and can give rise to no tragedy save adventitiously or under the rubric of ‘there but for the Grace of God.’
Seth’s subject matter and style are not deficient- the milieus he describes and the powers of language that he commands militate rather for than against the invocation of the grand literary precursors of amor fati or doomed romance to whom he, in the very same texts, pays tribute. Nor is it the case that by forbidding a particular type of sacrifice- that of a woman for a man- is its theo-ontic Terror and/or Necessity axiomatically excluded from the scope of a text, yet for Seth, this is what transpires.
Why?
Jealousy is so like not cool dude.
True, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Sacrifice is linked to Jealousy- Jehovah is a jealous God, Cain is jealous of Abel, Caiaphas is pissed off coz Judas got a bigger dick (what? Ask your Rabbi why don’t you?)- and, at the heart of things, Rene Girard tells us, is the drama of mimetic desire- envy and the necessity of a scapegoat, a pharmakos, a korban, to inoculate Society against internecine Violence.
But, Seth isn’t Jewish, he isn’t Christian. His is an Indo-Islamic culture to which has been grafted on a Victorian belief in Progress. His ‘A suitable boy’ may be dismissed as wishful thinking in that he shows India in 1951 as being the same as in 1991. All that is needed is a bit of ‘know-how’ and bilateral good will for all the  problems bequeathed by History to simply disappear. The fact is Kabir or Amit or even Haresh won’t lose anything very substantial if Lata turns them down. Their ‘transfer earnings’ are zero. Lata possesses no Economic Rent. Thus Choice is benign simply. There are no Essences- Strategic or otherwise- there is no hysteresis- Historicist or otherwise- and since nothing matters very much, fine, let there be free Choice because after all only Matter exists, nothing immaterial supervenes, the very notion of Sacrifice is otiose.
I haven’t read ‘A suitable girl’- I’ve no doubt it will be readable enough and present some points of interest or virtuoso passages which more than justify the price of the book. However, what it will lack is a sense of the Fundamental, as opposed to merely Universal, Horizon of Human Life, which is Death, which is Sacrifice, which, in so far as it is chosen, is the after-Life of Love nobody chooses and of which we can only despairing say, Yea, at the limit, such becomes the Choice of God.

Kalidasa as critic

King Bhoja Vikramaditya had just completed writing the Champu Ramayana. Wishing to have it corrected, prior to publication, by his Court poet, Kalidasa- who was hiding from his munificent patron in the boudoir of some slut- he composed the following line- ‘What flower can yet flower upon a blossom fair?‘- and promised half of his Kingdom to whoever could best complete the couplet.
The prostitute, in whose garret Kalidasa was evading his Royal pain-in-the-ass patron, having somehow divined the identity of the old lecher she was harboring, wrote the couplet on her wall and the poet, thinking it her own composition, completed the verse with ‘Her cauliflower ears in the weeds of her hair’- except he didn’t actually write that but something stupid like ‘girl, the lotus of your eyes in the lotus of your face’
The ho-bag promptly dropped Kalidas down an elevator shaft and like pushed a big piano down on him or something and, not even stopping to check he was dead, rushed off to the King to claim her half of the Kingdom.
The King asked her (I’m not making this up) if she’d personally verified the death of her patron. The slattern admitted she’d been in too much of a hurry to personally stave in his skull or batter out his brains. The King hastened to Kalidasa’s side, but it was too late, the Archpoet was on the point of death. The poet tells his glorious patron that he had now realized the impermanence and vanity of human life and would like to spend his last moments in Religious meditation. The King promptly reads out his Champu Ramayana. However, since Kalidasa did not survive long enough to hear and comment on its concluding Yuddha and Uttara Kanda chapters, the great King tore them out of his masterwork.
The moral of this story is that if you find a great poet half dead down an elevator shaft, don’t miss the opportunity to read out your poetry to him. His cries of pain will be ‘like nectar poured into your ears’
In this way Kalidas, as critic, gave more pleasure than ever he had as poet- at least to his Royal patron.
There is a lesson here which, as Gandhi used to say, all who run may read.
Mind it kindly.

Zulfikar Ghose & Sir Wilson Harris

I recall, as a teenager, coming across the name of Zulfikar Ghose in a textbook on English literature. Apparently he was a rising star and I wondered why I’d never heard of him. I continued wondering, on an active basis, such, at that time, being my zeal for literary culture, till,  at some point during the 80’s, I read his books- or rather didn’t read his books but paid the over-due fine and forlornly returned them to the library.

Later, in the 90’s, Ghose featured as a figure of fun for me. I firmly believed him to be a precursor of Rushdie who, with plodding Punjabi logic, sought to become the Magic Realist Marquez of the sub-continent by siting his novels in Brazil. 
More recently Zulfikar Ghose’s stock has shot up- not because his books have suddenly become more readable or because he actually has anything to say- but because of the universal obloquy attaching to the credentialist ‘Post Colonial’ Academic Availability Cascade from which he’d had the good taste to stay fastidiously aloof.
Though committed to an elitist, Flaubertian, Art-for-Art’s sake banality, Ghose is a shrewd and surprisingly funny guy- funny in quite a robust, almost Punjabi, sort of way- and that’s what makes this is a must watch video-

There have been some attempts to rescue Ghose’s old comrade-in-arms B.S. Johnson– also unreadable but quite mad and thus of possible interest- from oblivion but it is Sir Wilson Harris (he was knighted in 2010), the great Guyanese novelist, whose work commands most respect.

Sir Wilson had worked in Guyana as a land surveyor. He had met the sort of people, he had traversed the sorts of terrain, Evelyn Waugh found so fascinating and depicted as the polar opposite of his own pre-War London, centered on White’s gentleman’s club.

Sir Wilson- settling in a post-War London which, though disfigured by hooliganism and color prejudice, still had a gemutlich ‘We’re all in this together, Blitz-type, spirit’- became the Chief Surveyor of a Jungian Amazonia of the Unconscious which, to my mind, justified the Catholic, that is the optimistic, aspect of Waugh. Though he himself considered the fate of a member of White’s forced to read Dickens aloud in a clearing in the Guyanese Jungle to be an intimation of the horrors of Hell, Sir Wilson proved Waugh was wrong. What Waugh had described were not the two opposite poles of English’s Lebenswelt but centers of the same circle- whose circumference is nowhere.
As far as I know, Sir Wilson wasn’t much read by the colored people of my generation- or those who came after us. We could only see racism and narratives about the exploitation of indigenous people and in any case wasn’t Jung some sort of Nazi?
Who reads books anyway? If Sir Wilson wants to catch our attention he should go into Television. That’s what the British Black Panthers did- think Dacus Howe & Farrukh Dhondy.
Basically writing books is elitist or Uncle Tom behavior- unless you’re real cute like Zadie Smith- and so Sir Wilson is probably just another, Sir V.S Naipaul type, sneering patrician.

Prof. Ghose pays eloquent tribute to his old friend, Sir Wilson, and hopefully this will encourage young people of South Asian backgrounds to explore the marvels his works uncover. A word of caution- in Jungian thought, the Anima can lead you to Wisdom but can’t be forced to take you by a short-cut.
 Rushdie forced his Anima to give him a shortcut to Wealth and Fame but the price he paid was prancing ninnydom.

I notice Prof. Ghose is welcomed and honored by young Pakistanis and that his novels are being issued as textbooks. This confirms my suspicion that young people nowadays are all bum-boys and transvestites and useless completely. Back in the Fifties, Shantiniketan students beat up and chased away, the great Indo-Anglian novelist, Prof Ghose- Sudhin Ghose not Zulfiqar Ghose- thus setting a high standard to which we must all aspire. I’m not saying beat up Prof. Zulfiqar Ghose- those elderly Sialkotis are bloody strong. Still at least you can taunt him a little and run away. Tagore set up Shantiniketan to show how genuine students (not those motivated by the desire for a Diploma and a cushy job) should treat professors and novelists and other such rascals. If you can’t imitate them, at least honor them in your heart.
Mind it kindly.

Kaushik’s Basu’s ‘Crossings at Benares Junction’

Funniest line ever in an Indglish play-
Mr. Gosh- ‘National bard of India is not Rabindranath Tagore. Peacock is the correct answer.”

Prof Kaushik Basu, the contriver of the ‘Traveler’s dilemma’ as a critique of ‘backwards induction’ in Game theory has also written a hilarious little  play  – Crossings at Benares Junction’ which combines old fashioned romanticism with game theoretic insights into intentionality and ethics.

Basu’s protagonist is a 39 year old bachelor, Siddharta, a professor of philosophy, who has just won an  International prize  and, as such, for complex socio-biological reasons, has suddenly become the ultimate matrimonial trophy for brainy women on the prowl for- I will not say Bengali beefcake, as that would be culturally insensitive- but a slippery, cerebral, hilsa like husband from the right side of the Hoogly.

In the first scene, the improbably named Melba Iyengar- an ambitious philosophy lecturer/documentary film-maker, who combines the emotional crassness of her generation (she is in her late 20’s) with the cultural illiteracy and naked careerism of the bien pensant N.G.O do-goodniks- makes indelicate advances to our blushing Bengali boy.
(En passant– I may note the curious attribution of sexual aggression to Iyengar females in Indglish fiction- vide Shoba De, Mukul Kesavan but not, I hasten to add, my own ‘Samlee’s daughter’)

Miss Iyengar presses her suit on Siddhart using two powerful arguments.  Firstly, the fact that if he proposes she is sure to say yes- thus greatly increasing the expected value of proposing.  Secondly, three other people are competing for her hand. By delaying proposing, Siddharta keeps three others waiting in limbo. 


Hence, altruism would dictate proposing sooner rather than later so that three other men can get on with their lives.

Siddharta has till now played a stoic’s part- as indicated by his choice of Hindi song to play on the stereo.

Mai.N Zi.Ndagii Kaa Saath Nibhaataa Chalaa Gayaa
Har Fikr Ko Dhu.Ne.N Me.N U.Daataa Chalaa Gayaa

Barabaadiyo.N Kaa Soz Manaanaa Fizuul Thaa \- 2
Barabaadiyo.N Kaa Jashn Manaataa Chalaa Gayaa
Mai.N Zi.Ndagii…

Jo Mil Gayaa Usii Ko Muqaddar Samajh Liyaa \- 2
Jo Kho Gayaa Mai.N Usako Bhulaataa Chalaa Gayaa
Mai.N Zi.Ndagii…

Gam Aur Khushii Me.N Fark Na Mahasuus Ho Jahaa.N \- 2
Mai.N Dil Ko Us Muqaam Pe Laataa Chalaa Gayaa
Mai.N Zi.Ndagii…

I went on my way keeping faith with Life

Blowing away anxieties like smoke from a cigarette

Grief over disasters is a futile thing

I celebrated my calamities along life’s way

Whatever I received, I considered my fated portion

Whatever I lost, I resolved to forget and move on

I move my heart towards that (mystic) station where sorrow and joy are indistinguishable

He parries Melba’s crass attempt at seduction by claiming, firstly, that he is not at all sure that she will not reject him if he proposes and, secondly, that her mention of three other suitors is ‘double counting’ since only one of them could have her. This is a disingenuous argument, since Melba’s point was about a duty to minimize the total waiting time of the other suitors- that being the only opportunity cost that arises where a woman is determined to marry a particular man and the fellow is dragging his heels.
 Siddharta, clearly, is either really stupid or clever enough to appear so when his happiness is at stake- in other words, the man is a born philosopher.

Fortunately, the arrival of other guests prevents Melba from raping the hero, thus ‘ruining’ him and leaving him no option but marriage to his assailant- so backward is Bharat, such things happening all the time, I yam telling you- simply to save his family’s izzat.

In the next Act, we meet Siddharta’s lost love- June. Or so we conclude from Siddharta’s choice of song. 

June points out, she was almost ten years older than him and did the right thing in marrying a pompous ass of an academic closer to herself in age. She counsels Siddharta to marry, to trust in God, and keep promises. 

‘Nibhana’- to abide by a commitment- is a key value expressed in the two songs- from the Dev Anand vehicle ‘Hum Donon’- Siddharta has played so far. Since the lyricist was Sahir Ludhianvi we see that both faithfulness in love and integrity in political engagement are meant. In this case, resistance to Right Wing Hindutva hooliganism is the righteous path.

Siddharta had promised God that he would give thanks in a temple if he gets the prize, but he is agnostic not only about God but also about the value of Prizes and- more to the point- the incentive compatibility of Marriage as an institution. Yet he is lonely. He has to ‘go out into the dark night’ not from fear of God but because fear is the biggest sin.

Here the text is a little unclear- is there a temple in ‘Plaza gardens’ or is there to be a political demonstration there, or is it a place to meet girls?- so we can’t be sure exactly what June is counseling Siddharta to do.

Siddharta announces that he is not a coward. He will walk out into the dark night. He is prepared to take the risk.

Siddharta’s dilemma is the classic Romantic dilemma- most fully realized in Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa- whereby ‘a boy loves with his full heart, a man loves with a full stomach’ (Kipling). However, the boy with the full heart can’t feed the beloved. She marries the fat older guy. But what happens when, a few years down the line, the boy wins a big prize and becomes an attractive prospect? How can he get a bride after his own heart rather than the full wallet that nestles against it? 

The problematic that where meaning is gamed, where emotions are strategic, where the subject matter of both epistemology and Aristotelian ethics- in other words both Knowledge and ‘Character’- are in flux for defined, as it were, by backward induction from the reference point of a mercenary, memoryless, game- then it is not only the fraudulent ‘businessman’ but also the scholar, the lover, the spouse, everybody in every relationship, who keeps going only by introducing more and more chaos into the system- but that system itself a Ponzi scheme that feeds off its own ever widening circle of ruination to make itself the only game in town…


The one rather artificial assumption in the above is that modern life is a memoryless- i.e  hysteresis free- game. Siddharta is worried by what happens if things suddenly stop- how can the world suddenly start up again.

Siddharth: I have not thought it through well enough to know the answer myself. But see, if everything stops, the earth, you, the protons and atoms inside you and inside me…   everything. It does seem obvious, right? That things cannot re-start again?

One way to reason is that whatever happens at any time is caused by the state of the world just before that. Now, if the world is motionless for some time, no matter how brief, there is a time when the world is motionless and just before that the world was motionless. Hence, motionlessness causes motionlessness. Hence, once there is no motion, there cannot be any motion.

This has lots of interesting implications. It means that we can never invent a TV set that can switch itself on. If it does, it is because we have programmed that in and there are small actions occurring inside it all the time. (Pause) What I wonder is, are we reaching this conclusion purely by deduction, or is this just a fact of life — that motion cannot come out of motionlessness.

Kavita: The fact that you reach this conclusion without ever having experienced the stoppage of everything suggests, doesn’t it, that you come to this conclusion by deduction.

Siddharth stares at her in disbelief.

Siddharth: Are you a philosopher? I am sorry to inflict this trivia on you…

Kavita: No, but I was taught philosophy. In fact, by you — at NDU.

Siddharth: Really?

More generally, from chemical clocks & Conway’s game of life and so on, we are thoroughly familiar with the notion that ‘everything can stop’- or more precisely ‘nothing happening’ occurs for any given number of time periods before novelty starts to appear or things to start up again. In other words, for any given specifiable world state there is a cellular automata model such that everything stops at time t and everything starts up again at time t+i.

Thus, Siddharta’s puzzling over this is either the author justifying an implausible assumption- viz. the trope of a memoryless game- or else it is a pointer to the protagonist’s emotional state. Well, d’uh, it is both- so that’s okay.

Basu’s delightful, Shavian, jeu d’esprit has a happy ending and will be appreciated by all who read it. Except, of course, it would be even more fun to watch in an auditorium. And if anyone asks-
‘Enjoying?’
‘Simply!”
– will be my reply.

Yeats & Tagore

There’s an excellent article on Tagore, by Seamus Perry, in the TLS here. When I say excellent, I don’t, of course, mean it’s any good but it is in the TLS and that’s excellent.  I mean it would have looked decidedly odd in the pages of Viz magazine and I’d have kittens if it suddenly started streaming onto the roll of luminous toilet paper I’ve recently invested in.

The points Perry Sahib fails to mention are-
1) Tagore’s dad was the head of a High Victorian Hindu sect. Thus, Tagore had a great big beard and wore robes and affected a sort of Christ-like absence of brains and bollocks.  But, Tagore only did this out of filial piety. He wasn’t an authentic nut-job.
2) Tagore didn’t want to be a land-lord. He liked travelling about by river-boat but he’d have preferred doing it as a beggarly and minstrel baul, rather than in the unholy guise of a glorified Rent-collector. His one small rebellion- but a rebellion sanctioned by his father’s own example- was to reject the sort of education which would have enforced baristari or magistari (being a Barrister or Magistrate) upon him- as had happened to others of his family before he was born.
3) Tagore wasn’t quite as well up on European literature as a lot of the other Bengalis back home. In a sense he was going against the grain by pretending to be a sort of rustic baul singer- but without the earthy humour, the not-shite metaphysics, the actual as opposed to ersatz poetry of even imported bauls like Anthony Firinghee. Still, as a family man, he had the sense of social responsibility to point young Bengal in a less pestilential direction than that taken previously by Michael Madhusudhan Dutt or, later, by Aurobindo. The fact is mythologies are immiscible save graphically by working class lads like Alan Moore. Otherwise, they’re just nasty Nazi posturing- like Yeats’s gyres or Pound’s paranoid Cantos- or else the sort of idealistic cult of assassination which drove Gayatri Spivak’s great-aunt (vide ‘Can the subaltern speak‘) to hang herself while menstruating.
4) Tagore knew a lot about actual people. He knew servants were tyrants, teachers witless bullies, culture vultures worthless sociopaths, the British middle class stupid and provincial in England and brutal, cynical and provincial while serving in India, the poorer class of peasants pathetically credulous and helpless to fend off exploitation by the slightly better off of their bretheren, the Revolutionaries criminal psychopaths, the Loyalists self-deluding bores, the… etc.  But Tagore couldn’t denounce the confederacy of dunces he saw all around him. His social position forbade it. So he wrote what he did- his diffuse lacrimae rerum sentiment arising from not the memory of a Trojan War but yearning across incompossible identity classes (kids and grown ups, husbands and wives, little peasant girls and ill paid Post Masters) as its Timeo Danaos Wooden horse- and left it to posterity to read between the lines.
5) Seamus Perry writes- ‘Far from the exquisitely lapidary mode of the English Gitanjali, “I Won’t Let You Go!” tells a largely aimless story: as he is leaving home on a business trip one day, Tagore hears his four-year-old daughter assert, “I won’t let you go”, “As if only saying / ‘I won’t let you go’ was enough”. It is a moment of no great consequence, but Tagore unwinds the story of the rest of his day, throughout which he fondly and sadly remembers his little girl’s protest – a lengthening poem which could have gone on yet longer, part of the amused poignancy of which is its own reluctance to bid a more timely farewell.’
What Perry doesn’t say is that, notwithstanding the splendid physique and spotless character that was his genetic and properly entailed inheritance, Tagore’s family was much besieged by death. No descendants in the direct line much survived my dawning day. It is the very muscular longevity of the father, not the frailness of the child, which, not nihilates, but abnegates the Universe by the quoted- ‘I won’t let you go’.  But abnegates it in a nice manner, the Gentleman-Babu has retired from the feast, he had no appetite for it in any case, but he does so with a seemly show of boneless haut embourgeoisement, lest the swinish poetasters (shitheads like me) too lose their zest for an envious and parasitical punishing of his stock of  butter and honey mead. 




Now, let us look at Yeats. He wasn’t really a Celtic genius at all. His ancestors were English and priggishly English they remained till plundering Ireland rendered them at last merely aesthetic and shabby genteel. The last of the Aisling poets, having built the Hammersmith line- you can still hear a sort of banshee wail as the train pulls into Earls Court- was perishing in the Halford Road, Poor House, the place where the Primary School now stands, while Yeats, at Edith Villas, was taking his first baby steps in literary London. Thus Yeats’s Cuchulain and Countess Cathleen and so on were about as authentic as Tom Moore’s ‘Lalla Rookh’. Tagore on the other hand, despite being born a Brahmo, could easily have become a baul. If Anthony Firingee could go from Portuguese Catholicism to composing Agamani verse, Tagore could have done more. Bengali was his mother’s milk. Unfortunately, Tagore couldn’t simply use Vaishnav or Sakta imagery in a straightforward way without people saying that his Dad and his Grand Dad, ‘Prince’ Dwarkanath, and so on all the way back to his ‘Pir Ali’ ancestors, were simply time-serving heretics and whited sepulchres and probably lechers and panders into the bargain.

So Tagore is vague in his imagery and veiled in his criticisms of the political currents of his time and comes across as bit of an old woman. But he was actually no such thing. Thomas Mann was agreeably surprised that Tagore’s son was a strapping young fellow. Tagore himself was got up in robes- because he felt he owed it to his own dear departed Dad, the Maharishi. But he didn’t impose that sort of nonsense on his sons or the young people at Shantiniketan. My feeling is, he worked things so his family, or the class he represented, could make the psychological break from financial dependence on rack rented country estates for their sense of identity and amour propre.

Whereas Yeats- the landless landlord told off by Joyce, the shiftless tenant- turns, from a sham presentment of Irishry, to elitism and occultism and monkey glands and being a fucking Senator; Tagore’s trajectory was minimally mischievous.

I remember, many years ago, reading an anthology of Chinese poetry leant me by a colleague.
I was entranced by a poem by Li Chin Fa and asked my friend about it. He grimaced. Apparently friendship was impossible between us, because the poem in question had been written under the influence of Tagore. That’s why I’d liked it.
I thought this remarkable because my love for Chinese poetry sprang from the belief that it was solely concerned with failing one’s exams and drinking alone- two themes which featured prominently in both our then careers in the City of London- but in Li Chin Fa, alas!, not at all.

Ultimately, Yeats is a poet I still read, Tagore a bore who proves Spinoza’s lemma that to feel pity is unethical. This is because I’m a shit-head. For the best of reasons, Tagore tries hard to pretend he’s stupid and self-involved and under-educated, but in the end he fails. Yeats tries hard to pretend he’s an adept of something immeasurably larger and cosmic and universal and…also fails. But since we’re trying to be Yeats- coz we aren’t Tagore- Yeats is our man and, pace William Radice, his Gitanjali Tagore’s.

Racial coding in Amitav Ghosh.

Annotating a superb account of a Tamil family’s escape from the Japanese invasion of Burma- the setting of H.E. Bates’ ‘the Jacaranda Tree’ but also a theme in Karunanidhi’s greatest hit’Parashakti’- Prof Ghosh notes w.r.t exit permits  ‘These permits, and the routes they provided access to, were also racially coded. The ‘White’ routes were generally shorter and easier and were largely reserved for retreating soldiers and European and Eurasian civilians; the ‘Black’ routes were longer and much more arduous – Asians were generally allowed to use only these routes. Another account in my possession, written by an Indian, provides a harrowing account of the writer’s attempts to acquire ‘White route’ permits for his wife and young children.’


This clearly shows the greatness of Ghosh Babu as anthropologist and popular author. He tells us something nobody ever guessed- viz. the British were Racist, the British Empire instrumentalized Race for Service Provision discrimination- but does so in a context which, perhaps uniquely, utterly nullifies and renders ludicrous, the illocutionary force of his claim. 


In Burma, at that time, some Whites didn’t get exit permits at all but were ordered to stay back by their employers. Some Blacks did, that too by the easiest route and, what’s more managed to bring back their teak furniture and Lars et penates etc. all on the Govt’s dime.


 All soldiers and similar strategically valuable personnel, no matter how Black, were given  priority over Civilians, no matter how White. 


Thus, contra Ghosh, the retreat from Burma- at a time when a lot of Indians had gone over to the enemy- provides, not material for a thesis about ‘racial coding’, but a sui generis instance of the utility of ‘Racial profiling’ because no White in the area was assiduously, or at all, the object of recruitment by the Axis powers or their compradors.


Indeed,  Ghosh himself does not contradict the notion that Indians, in general, would have been better off staying in Burma under the Japs. Why does Ghosh bring ‘racial coding’ into this when it makes him  look a facile Politically correct Professorial shithead?


The answer is- he has coded himself as such in order to cipher his middle brow oeuvre. Amitav does  a fair bit of research but, by a failure of digestion, can’t rise to the level  of a James Michener because he insists on making everything boring and stupid by continually discovering fascinating facts like White slavers were racist to black  slaves. Women were sometimes discriminated against coz some people thought they were weak or stupid or something. Also there was once this Muslim guy or Mulatto or whatever who didn’t actually bugger all the bhadralok Bongs in the vicinity before cutting their throat while saying snide things about their Doctoral theses- which is like real important coz…urm… the Media dun bin turning us all into so many Anders Behring Breiviks due to, urm, Gucci.. sorry, I mean Gramsci’s…concept of, like, hegemony and and …globalisation? yeah throw that in and can the subaltern speak and Ranajit Guha is not actually turning tricks, even as you read this now, spreading Red Light in Vienna’s Gurtel road.


Which aint to say our author is intellectually facile. Not at all. It is merely to build a bridge to his readership that, from start to finish, Amitav concerns himself with things like racial coding of the most witless sort.  

Which us guys think cool coz we are boring, stupid and massively fucked in the head.


Who reads novels? Really really stupid and boring people. Why do cunts like us read novels? Coz, in our bones, we know everybody is stupid and boring. Amitav reads like- and hence writes for- us.


For which, personally, I blame David Cameron- that boy aint right.