Odcombe's Urs

Dom Moraes, at the Hungarian border, turning back

Reverses Coryate, in Surat, who drinking sack

Attained, for Odcombe, a Sufi Urs

Indglish the Saqi of stupid hoors.

Envoi- 

Of what's effable in Language- Hlaford hwaet!

No affable manner is a fungible twat.

Apurvata, Antarabhava & Backus Naur Part II

Backus Naur Form (BNF) is a notation for Chomsky's context-free grammars which in turn depend on a distinction between 'I' internal (or intensional) Language in the mind of a 'fluent' speaker and 'E' external or extensional Language.

For BNF to eliminate the need for natural language for purposes of unification it would need a second level of syntactic restrictions. However, this could make it too strong- i.e. Turing complete. Similarly, I-language can't be univocal with E-language otherwise it would face a halting problem.

Thus, contra Homi Bhabha, 'newness enters the world' anytime an imperative character string encounters an intensional receiver. This is the 'apurvata' of the Mimamsika- that novel or unprecedented (we might say high entropy) thing encountered in the text which determines its i-language meaning.

Apurva has another meaning- it is what is unexpended in karma whose seed has not yet come to fruition. It links to antarabhava as 'birth determining jati' and, more especially in Buddhism, with the Gandharvas who act as the efficient cause in karmic transmigration.
This idea is an old one present even in the Avesta's Ram Yasht. As for the antarabhava, it is better known nowadays as the Tibetan 'bardo' or, for Sufis, Ibn Arabi's barzakh.
That last, 'as a limit which unites what it otherwise divides'- or more simply a membrane- at one time, looked a promising method of ridding philosophy of false binaries and sorites type problems and Derrida/Deleuze type diarrhea about 'difference'.
That promise hasn't been kept because 'limits' aren't particularly interesting if they arise out of sequences of already existing but unknowable objects. Overlapping choice sequences, however, can define a co-evolutionary finitary fitness landscape corresponding to approximable reals.
Thus, Hindus are perfectly at liberty to think of antarabhava as not so much a limit, but a membrane, damming up and releasing capacitance diversity according to embedded triggers for which it has a co-evolved receptor. Thus the lyric, Vak's love child by the Gandharvas, can lead us back to the Vedas to discover

So rich and strange it each moment reappears

True Beauty's tribute is ever in arrears!

Apurvata, Antarabhava & Backus Naur Part I

I am writing this as an initial response to the following comment on my previous blog entry-

Could you kindly post about the relationship between Panini's grammar and the Backus–Naur Form? Cheers.


Every language, at some time or another, has claimed supremacy on the grounds of some supposedly unique quality it possesses.

My ancestors certainly thought Sanskrit and Tamil were special but, since they admitted that deaf people could gain Gnosis, they did not develop a chauvinistic mentality like that of the Nazi, Heidegger, who claimed that German was the language in which Being thinks itself.

Over the last four or five decades, the great expansion of job opportunities in Software engineering has meant that particularly risible claims have been made regarding Paninian Sanskrit.

This extract from a Time of India article is by no means the worst offender-

 The human-programmable computer languages that exist today, say C++ or Java or Ruby, can be described precisely in a few hundred rules. This precision allows these languages (and Paninian Sanskrit) to be lexically analyzed by a parser, which can then create a semantic tree structure that encodes the underlying 'meaning' of the statement (or program). That semantic tree can then be translated precisely into machine code (binary, ie 0 and 1, or hexadecimal, ie 16 characters, 0123456789ABCDEF) which will then run on the machine.The above is what compilers do – the programs that translate human-readable languages into the incomprehensible machine code (or slightly less obscure Assembly Language) that machines can understand. I worked on compiler construction for several years, and they are among the most sophisticated software in regular use.

'So what exactly does "context-free" mean? It means that the meaning doesn’t depend on contextual knowledge or common sense. Obviously human languages are context-sensitive: you just have to know certain things as a user of the language or else you will be confused. Here is an example of two sentences in English:

1. Fruit flies like an apple
2. Time flies like an arrow

'The two sentences are lexically identical, but to the human reader, based on contextual knowledge, they are vastly different. But to a computer, which has no context, they are identical. If the computer is fed the first and told that fruit flies are a kind of fly and that apples are fruits, it will create certain semantic model. Then, when given the second sentence, it will conclude that 'time flies' are a kind of fly and that arrows are fruits!

'It is essentially impossible to write such ambiguous sentences in Paninian Sanskrit. That is one of the reasons why word order doesn't matter in Paninian Sanskrit, as it does in English (imagine "Rama killed Ravana" and "Ravana killed Rama" as examples).

'That someone millennia ago was able to conceptualize, and even more astonishingly, create a Grand Unified Theory of Language is simply stunning. Let us note that even a widely acknowledged genius like Albert Einsten failed to come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Physics, even though he tried hard. Arguably, Panini’s successful effort then was the greatest accomplishment of a single mind in all of recorded history: creating something so advanced that it took 2500 years to figure out how to use it!'

Older languages- like Latin 0r Old English- tend to be highly inflected and thus word-order doesn't matter. However the corruption of a single morpheme radically changes meaning so, in practice, both increased redundancy and loss of inflection feature in the evolution of Language.
Paninian Sanskrit wasn't different from other Synthetic languages. However, it evolved on a less synoecist fitness landscape and empowered intellectuals irrespective of their geographic location. Sill, there were 'collocational availability cascades' based on superior aesthetic status accorded certain paradigmatic works. Thus, in practice, Sanskrit literature appears as if it it were the univocal expression of a single, timeless, Imperium or Oikumene. Some learned authors continued to exploit its infinite semantic potential- by devices like  vakrokti (indirect expression) or slesha (double meaning) - for example by writing texts which carry forward two wholly unconnected narratives (bahurasyakavya). However, this has tended to be seen as a blameworthy departure from the simplicity and naturalness of true poetry.

In other words, Sanskrit- thanks to Panini- is much more ambiguous, at least potentially, not less so, than other synthetic languages.

Ambiguity means that there is more than one possible meaning. Human beings can't communicate without ambiguity. Why? They have intentionality. In other words, they intend something not present which, on analysis, is fuzzy even to themselves.

If I say- 'My hand is on fire.' I might mean that I have got a good set of cards, or that I am painting really well today or that  I feel a burning sensation in one of my limbs.
Things become more clear cut, unless I am being rhetorical, if I add the following three sentences, 'Pick up the fire extinguisher. Direct the nozzle at my hand. Release the foam by pulling the trigger.'
Is there any ambiguity left in the string of sentences I have uttered? Wouldn't every ambiguity be cleared up if enough supplementary sentences were added?
Surely, Language is just a tool and, as the more extreme of the Logical Positivists suggested, any statement that isn't purely factual (e.g. my hand is on fire) or imperative (e.g. pick up the fire extinguisher) or mixed ('Release the foam by pulling the trigger' isn't wholly false just because the trigger is actually released by squeezing not pulling) is simply poetic nonsense or mystical mumbojumbo?

The answer, I am afraid, is that everything depends not just on my intentions and what I assume to be your intentions and to a possible contract curve between us, but also to a possible 'overlapping consensus' between us regarding both Facts and Values in possible future states of the World. However, if Knightian Uncertainty obtains, future states of the world can't be differentiated without ambiguity.

Why is it that, in the real world, we say things like 'Fuck, my hand's on fire, get the fire extinguisher for God's sake'. The obvious answer is-the word 'Fuck' conveys urgency as well as sense of camaraderie. 'God's sake' implies that you have a duty to the Creator to protect the life of one of His Creatures. However, using words whose meaning is essentially ambiguous or even omnivalent, signals something else- viz. we are not sending a coherent message at all because we can't currently afford the computational cost of clarifying it. In this case our utterance points to, without naming, the default focal point for communication's co-ordination game.

What if we were robots without any theory of mind? What happens when our sensor picks up a character string? 

There are 2 possibilities. Either the character string is noise in which case it is disregarded, or it satisfies a certain protocol in which case further protocols regarding authorization, priority, feasibility etc. have to be fulfilled before anything happens.

Notice that at each stage the signal is ambiguous w.r.t. reception- either it is noise or it is not noise, either it is authorized or it is unauthorized etc. This ambiguity can be reduced by devoting more Computing power to the signal. Even if computing bore zero cost, ambiguity would not disappear because- by a corollary of Razbarov-Rudich- there is no way of distinguishing pseudo-random from truly random stings (unless P=NP has a proof using current methods). 

As a matter of fact, computing is costly and, what's more, the type of  Concurrency and Race Hazard problems specific to this field soon become intractable.  But this is what we would expect to happen if Life evolved. Individual brains exist because Ambiguity is everywhere and so heterogenous trade-offs must be made at the individual level so that there is an Evolutionarily Stable Equilibrium on a higher scale.

Let us drop the supposedly simplifying assumption that we are 'basically' mindless robots because it involves an Open Question for Maths. What happens when we make the opposite assumption- viz. that that, for a philosophically advanced enough member of our species, unambiguous Reception is possible? This is equivalent to the claim that some human mind can have certainty re. what he knows and/or how he came to know it. In Sanskrit, this is covered under the rubric of Prakaasha and Praamaanya respectively.

The claim that sentences in Paninian Sanskrit are unambiguous implies that they can be 'svatograhya'- i.e something empirically received (because it is heard)  yet apprehended as intrinsically true at the same time as it is cognized.  This is a much more reasonable claim than that any sentence in any language could have this property. After all, back then, a guy who was speaking to you in Classical Sanskrit probably wasn't an idiot or a babbling drunkard but a respectable person careful with his words. Still, no Indian thinker was so foolish as to say that anything said in proper Skt. must be true. On the contrary, Religions like Jainism and Buddhism used Paninian Skt. to guard against commentary being taken for Revealed Text. In other words, Prakaasha/Praamaanya theory promotes the notion that Language is not just instrumental but strategically so- it is gamed as part of a wider lila- or sportive play of Gnosis.

Interestingly, there is a convergence between Sanskrit Literary Theory and the modern study of 'formal languages' in certain respects. In the former, aporias regarding Prakasha/Praamaanya gave salience to 'Dhvani' theory which highlights the freedom and creativity of the receiver, not the sender, of the signal. In the latter, Turing, on Bearnay's suggestion, had to take recourse to Brouwer 'over-lapping choice sequences' to get to something we might term 'context free'- i.e 'absolute'- with respect to its representation in this or that formal system.

Brouwer's constructivism, like Abhinavagupta's Dhvani, which gives rise to 'apurvata'- 'newness' in Reception- is of an intuitionistic, non-deterministic, type and exceeds computability or purely algorithmic methods.
I will argue, in my next post, that overlapping choice sequences naturally describe what is essentially a co-evolutionary fitness landscape and that the concepts of  apurvata and antarabhava gains salience in that context. My contention is that Paninian Sanskrit, yoked to the apophatic project of Gnosis, does indeed merit comparison, if not emulation, by current Research Programs in 'context free' formal languages.

To a nice White Professor who likes Manto & Mahashweta

Mahashweta Devi writes of a gang-raped tribal women but not of her own more or less distant relatives being butchered, violated, and ethnically cleansed on a far wider scale and in a more systematic manner in her own ancestral homeland.

Why?

Is it that her tribals-Dravidians like me, not Aryans, like her- could, still, at that time, be presented as 'uneducated', while her own vehicle to Class Power- and claim to authorial auctoritas as a 'Progressive' even 'Post Modern' intellectual- arose wholly out of such impotent Intellectual Credentials as can only be acquired by aborting a Civilisational, that is genuine for actually and empirically socio-geographical, computationally viable Schelling focal, solution to the Co-ordination problem for- as Prof Ken Binmore might say if I got him real drunk and held a gun to his head- the de-Kanted Carafe of the House Wine of the Folk Theorem's inter-subjective, Aesthetic?

Why does dusky 'Dopti' (Draupati, in the Mahabharata, had black skin- which is why she was named 'Krishna'- i.e. Black skinned), in 'Perfectly White' Mahashweta's short story, reveal her ravaged, bleeding, nakedness to the Culture-Vulture, albeit nominally Dravidanized and Imperialistic, Counter-Insurgency Chief, Senanayak? By doing so, she is breaking a cardinal rule of the hard core Naxal- she is revealing she is either already or potentially a leader.  Obviously, the thing for  Senanayak to do is to act out a pretense of shame, quote  a densely allusive, or Hunkadori, verse from a Hungrealist poet, get some NGO do-goodnik involved, release her and then keep tabs on her contacts or simply use her nakedly as an unwitting agent provocateur of Terrorism's self destructive stupidity.

Saadat Hasan Manto, in 'khol do', has a more sensible heroine. Hearing the words 'open it'- referring to the car window in which her rescuers are conveying her- she obediently starts unknotting the draw strings of her pajamas. This battered Sakina, oozing blood and pus, is nevertheless the Ousia of the true Shekinah- it makes the (presumably atheistical) Doctor's blood run cold; it overturns her father's attachment to Patriarchal sittlichkeit in howsoever bien pensant a form.

Manto, unlike Mahashweta, dies a drunken cadger, but only because his eyes have seen the glory- it seems his filmi P.W.A,  Bombay friends had urged their own too well-paid blinkers on him in vain-but the scandal here is not that the fucker's script for Ghalib didn't contain apocryphal shite like-

ḳhudā ke vāst̤e pardah nah kaʿbah se uṭhā vāʿiz̤
kahīñ aisā nah ho yāñ bhī vuhī kāfir ṣanam nikle!

Seek not, Simoniac, by lifting our  Cybele's veil, thy sin to atone

Lest El is revealed there eating out Porn Hub's Sunny Leone!

but, rather, that a drunken descendant of Abhinvagupta's votaries, showed himself, in articulo mortis, no stranger to shame- that is Nirlajjishvara.

The Shekinah's veils are God's mercy on us Mortals.
Ponder Abihu's fate, rather than place your faith in Progressivist Pinchas' halachah vein morin kein.

I recall an incident from about twenty years back.

A middle aged Pakistani gentleman- quite pukka, Aitchison College and all that- had graced our exiguous Iftar and regaled us with the story of his father, a General, who had been accorded every courtesy by the Saudis and given special access to 'kiss the Black Stone'.

After he left, a young Bangladeshi- good East London family, but a recovering addict- asked me to come outside because he wanted to say something to me in private. I was reluctant to go. The fact is, recovering British drug addicts make free of one's ciggies and I'm miserly in small matters.

Still, such was the fire in his eyes, I went. 

'The lips of a pig have touched the Ka'ba! Find out when the General is next visiting his son. That is all I ask. You do know, don't you, he told his troops to make sure to rape and kill every single one of your people whom they rounded up?'

I said- listen mate, I'm Dravidian. Fuck I care what you Aryans cunts do to each other? You guys ever give a shit what your Sinhala cousins been doin' to my Tamil peeps? As for pig lips and the Ka'bah- not my concern at all. There are people staying here whose Asylum Claim is going through. You bring down the Police on us, we'll gut you like a hilsa.

I'm lying. I didn't say any such thing. The truth is, though six foot and weighing 14 stone, I was probably frightened of this thin little recovering addict. What I actually said was something like-

'Ka'bah can never be desecrated. Like the Church, which is 'Bride of Christ', it is, as John Donne said, 'most pleasing to Thee then/ when most embraced and open to most men'.

Meanwhile, coz back then I was the Daily Mail's Black neighbor from Hell, Sabri Bros. had started blaring out 'shab ko mera janaza' from the Tape Deck-

Only Prayer & Fasting perfected our parting from Mother's pillowy breast

 Till baby Sakina elected to sleep on Husayn's battle hardened chest!

Not Drink, nor Death, has been, to this Dervish, a Saqi true

But, niece,- thy 'Al Atash ya Ammahu!'

Fuck is wrong with me? Time was when Poverty obliged me to keep fasts, Ugliness to observe continence, Stupidity to yield some Socially Utile species of heteroclite Obedience.

A Devdas manque, I couldn't even drink myself to death, like Majaz or Manto- but that was cool coz my poems and stories were too obviously, even to my own eyes, shite fed on shite. 

Tacitus, my first instructor in Ars Moriendi, recommended the 'gentle and unforcible' method of self-starvation- Jain Sallekhana- but then an aleatory act of what is unceasing in Jain generosity revealed even that horizon to be a but faltu or filmi Fata Morgana.

Fuck am I supposed to do, this drear Ramadan dusk without darkness, with Manto's Sakina as my only Saqi?

Seriously, I'm asking you, Prof,- fuck, I'm supposed to do?

Homi Bhaba and Para Vak

What happens when we read a passage from Homi Bhaba while holding to the belief that he has actually 'gone “outside the sentence” in a movement beyond any possible logocentrism... opening up the debate about representation into an unforeseen hybridity.. thus trying to cancel out any possibility of falling into the trap of the politics of binaries, that he felt had considerably weakened Edward Said’s argument'?

Let us try the experiment-
'European imperialism took various forms in different times and places and proceeded both through conscious planning and contingent occurrences;.
European is a false binary associated with the indefinable notion of the non-European. Imperialism too is a false binary. It implies that there is some form of political power wholly different from Imperial power. Conscious planning and contingent occurrences are also a false binary. Either one can have confidence in a conscious plan under conditions of Knightian Uncertainty, in which case no clear cut distinction can be made between endogenous and contingent triggers- i.e they are fuzzy- or some 'animal spirit' supervenes such that planning has no salience in a world which has evolved by natural selection.
Having cancelled out all the false binaries is there anything left to Bhaba's sentence or has he truly gone beyond it?
A naive answer would be- yes, Bhaba says European Imperialism existed though it may or may not have had anything to do with either conscious planning or with reactions to contingent occurrences.
However, if we substitute the word 'Colostomy' or 'Sadducee' for 'European' no great epistemic loss or gain would be sustained. People affected by Colostomy or who have an interest in the Sadducees would recognize it as an perfectly conventional opening remark of the sort routinely made pseudo-intellectual gobshites among their own number.
Thus Bhaba hasn't really gone beyond the sentence- Bhartrihari's sphota- to achieve 'para Vak'- an utterance worthy of omniscient God.
Unless, that is, he goes on to say something not as shite as his first sentence. Does he? Let us see.

'As a result of this complex development something occurred for which the plan of imperial expansion had not bargained: the immensely prestigious and powerful imperial culture found itself appropriated in projects of counter-colonial resistance which drew upon the many different indigenous local and hybrid processes of self-determination to defy, erode and sometimes supplant the prodigious power of imperial cultural knowledge'.

Once again cancelling out binaries- like complex/ simple, development/retrogression etc- we are still left with sentences of the following sort (where X can stand for Western or Colostomy or Sadducee etc)
1) X underwent a process resulting in increased Kolmogorov complexity.
2) This increase in complexity caused X to fail to predict that a particular type of not-X would challenge or supplant it.
3) The reason for this strange turn of events is that the non-X was a hybrid of X and fed upon its own drive to complexity
These 3 sentences make sense in speaking of Systems incapable of mounting a Red Queen defense to Trojans.  These are  Systems which crash very quickly and leave no progeny, let alone hybrids precisely because they have mounted a complexity gradient without first investing in defenses that co-evolve with Trojan threats. This is not to say that epigenetic effects are ruled out, just that progeny and hybrids are not viable because the System was too fundamentally flawed. 
What if a System is artificially shielded from Trojans? Then we get Spiegelman monsters- complexity declines.
What Bhaba is describing can be said with equal truth about Colostomy imperialism- i.e the fucking NHS's attempt to make all us Hindutva intellectuals wear colostomy bags when we visit India coz Narendra Modi has done a deal with David Cameron in the name of 'Svaccha Bharat' and is determined to prevent us N.R.Is from crapping all along Raj Path next time he invites Obama over for the Independence Day parade.
The problem here is the N.H.S can't distinguish- because Medical Science can't distinguish- between a full colostomy bag and us N.R.I bags of shite. Thus Colostomy Imperialism is not a real threat and scarcely worth talking about.
What about Western Imperialism? Surely that existed? Yes, it did indeed exist but only because it had very good Red Queen defenses against Trojans. The Brits learnt a lesson from 1776 as did the French from Haiti and so on. Gandhi and others may have become barristers and bought themselves top hats but no one was fooled. The Bar Association had no difficulty spotting a nigger and expelled first Savarkar and then Gandhi.

Has Bhaba 'gone beyond the sentence', and awoken the para Vak laughter of the Olympian Gods, by his delicious suggestion that Western Imperialism became so complex that it couldn't differentiate between Whites and Coloreds?
No. He hasn't gone far enough. He ought to have suggested that monkeys overthrew the British Raj by stealing the King Emperor's crown or the Chief Justice's wig and ordering the Red Coats back on their boats with the providential help of a parrot or two.
The truth is, the Raj could always tell even the difference between an argument written by a Ben-golliwog barrister, secretly representing pukka Scottish indigo planters and another, equally well argued screed, penned by a Bihari barrister with political ambitions.
The 'immensely powerful and prestigious' Imperial episteme only became so by squeezing dry 'indigenous local and hybrid processes of self-determination'- like the Munshis and Court Pundits and so on- before heartlessly abandoning them as heteronomous husks of humanity.
What about the Japanese? Surely they imitated the Europeans- they still wear top hats and tail coats on formal occasions- surely, that's a good example of 'hybridity'?
Nope. Japan was never colonized. They relied on their own native bakufu episteme- as exemplified by people like Ninomiya- to mobilize their own resources to their own sovereign ends.

But, perhaps Bhaba is aware of all this and will make some caveat in what follows. Let us read him and see-
'Post-colonial literatures are a result of this interaction between imperial culture and the complex of indigenous cultural practices. As a consequence, ‘post-colonial theory’ has existed for a long time before that particular name was used to describe it. Once colonised peoples had cause to reflect on and express the tension which ensued from this problematic and contested, but eventually vibrant and powerful mixture of imperial language and local experience, post-colonial ‘theory’ came into being.'
Saiichi Maruya writes a novel at the same time as people like Chinua Achebe or Abdullah Hussein which treats of what Alok Rai calls 'damaged modernity'. But Japan was never colonized. Clearly, what matters is that one culture- that which produced the modern novel- interacts with another culture- Igbo or Japanese or Tamil, it doesn't matter- and the same theme of relative heteronomy (by reason of hysteresis) will be highlighted.

Post colonial literatures aren't the result of Vulgar Marxian super-structure/sub-structure interactions- because as Stalin pointed out Language is relatively autonomous. Of course, there may be an artificial market for shite and that market may indeed be characterized by sly subversion and hybridity but that market really doesn't matter at all. It was always wholly meretricious. When the stick or carrot is taken away, it collapses on its own much to the chagrin of worthless Credentialist hacks who still have their PhD's to get or quota of gesture political papers to write.

Thus Bhaba, far from 'going beyond the sentence', is a prison sentence in a windowless cell fabricated from stupidity and lies.

Homi Bhabha, Sir Edward Cust & the prancing nigger

Sir Edward Cust was a Victorian era soldier and politician. He made a tour of the West Indies after the Emancipation of the Slaves and, as a partisan, if not paid agent, of the White planters there, reported on the supposed negative consequences of that humane Act.
Briefly, the points he raised were
1) That, not withstanding the appearance of self-government,  the truth was that the Colonial Office (which Cust castigates as too pro-Black!) had all the power (since the settlers needed the Royal Navy to keep the Blacks subject to themselves) but was dilatory or negligent in its exercise thus creating confusion and uncertainty on the ground, more especially because Emancipation had been pushed through entirely by the British Parliament and had little indigenous support in the, all White, West Indian Legislatures.

2) The newly liberated 'negroes' were smart, hungry for education but loathe to see their children engaged in field labour and thus eager to take up a trade in the Towns. Cust testified that the 'negroes' were making progress from generation to generation and paid lip service to the notion that proper Christian instruction by the ministers of his own sect would, by some magic, content them to remain in the fields. Since no one in England believed that the Established Church had any such magical power, Cust was strengthening the argument for, or the fait accompli of, the importation of indentured Asiatic labor whose hereditary stupidity fitted them to be hewers of wood and drawers of water from generation to generation to the end of time. (Cust had a poor opinion of the physique of the 'Hill coolie' but owned that they were patient and dutiful. His own proposal- viz. transport captives liberated from intercepted slave-ships to the West Indies- was too obviously flawed being but a hypocritical continuation of the detestable trade compounded by the scandal of legalized piracy.)

3) The pretensions to Westminster like status for the West Indian Legislatures should be quietly abandoned because the Colonial Office had all the power and nothing on Earth could change that brute fact. Instead, these legislatures should function like municipal authorities. However, to protect the interests of white West Indians- more particularly the planters and other men of substance- and put them at parity with members of their own class in England, a Colonial Convention should be convened, as the Superior Legislature under the Crown for the constituent colonies, as a countervailing power to keep in check the excessively pro-Black (!) Colonial Office.

Homi Bhaba, mimicking the soi disant Savants at the University of the Soviet Republic of Sussex- - but mimicking them only, as he, quoting Lacan, hints to us, for a purpose of self-protective camouflage- fastened on a passage in Baronet Cust to make it appear to his increasingly American, that is to say ignorant, audience that, centuries ago, Britain had given its West African colonies miniature Westminsters, complete with be-wigged Speakers and ceremonial maces borne by Serjeants-at-Arms farcically clad in seductive fishnet stockings and stiletto heels- in other words, he conjures up, with the brush of a Fragonard, a Firbankian tableau of hefty West African Chieftains getting gay with each other in-between raising points of order and sipping tea from Dresden china cups with their little pinky fingers daintily stretched out.

From "Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse," in The Location of Culture, pp.85-92.

 It is out of season to question at this time of day, the original policy of a conferring on every colony of the British Empire a mimic representation of the British Constitution. But if the creature so endowed has sometimes forgotten its real significance and under the fancied importance of speakers and maces, and all the paraphernalia and ceremonies of the imperial legislature, has dared to defy the mother country, she has to thank herself for the folly of conferring such privileges on a condition of society that has no earthly claim to so exalted a position. A fundamental principle appears to have been forgotten or overlooked in our system of colonial policy - that of colonial dependence. To give to a colony the forms of independence is a mockery; she would not be a colony for a single hour if she could maintain an independent station.

Sir Edward Cust, 'Reflections on West African affairs ... addressed to the Colonial Office', Hatchard, London 1839

The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce. For the epic intention of the civilizing mission, 'human and not wholly human' in the famous words of Lord Rosebery, 'writ by the finger of the Divine' often produces a text rich in the traditions of trompe-l'oeil, irony, mimicry and repetition. In this comic turn from the high ideals of the colonial imagination to its low mimetic literary effects Mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge.

Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination - the demand for identity, stasis - and the counterpressure of the diachrony of history - change, difference - mimicry represents an ironic compromise. If I may adapt Samuel Weber's formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration, then colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which 'appropriates' the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both 'normalized' knowledges and disciplinary powers.

Bhaba's blathering, as given above, would be justified if it was true that Africans and Indians and Papua New Guineans had really pranced around in miniature Parliaments all through the duration of the Britain's suzerainty over them. Nothing was further from the truth.
Nor, I hasten to add, was it the case that Nehru and Nkrumah and Nyrere got to prance around in nativist garb, only because the Royal Navy was ready to steam in and get them out of a jam. There may be a Francophone neo-colonialism of this type but nothing of the sort obtains for the protection of supercilious Oxbridge sand niggers of Bhabha's ilk or, indeed, us more straight forwardly ooga-booga LSE alumni with darker skin tones.

The West Indian planter was wholly British and, more often than not, an absentee landlord. Like Alderman Beckford- the father of the author of Vathek- he might own a couple of pocket Boroughs, and himself sit in the House of Commons. This wasn't mimicry, it was univocity. After all, the British had learnt the lesson of the Boston Tea Party all too well. Second or third generation Colonialists, who haven't traveled back to the mother country for their education and who own no Estates there nor command any Parliamentary influence by reason of the purchase of pocket Boroughs, don't mimic the mother country to assert their own commercial interests; no, they dress up in the feathers and deer-skin of the indigenous people they have decimated and displaced and, seizing up tomahawks and uttering war-whoops, they attack the corrupt Mercantilist institutions by which the Metropolitan power unjustly enriches itself.

Why is Bhaba pretending that the modern history of people colonized by the British is nothing but a Firbankian farce featuring prancing niggers got up in horse-hair wigs, scarlet ermine and black silk stockings?

Does he not get that Indians are only funny when they say 'Goodness gracious me!' and wobble their heads?

Also, Homo baba, how come your own protective mimicry of Campus Lefties,  is not 'continually producing its own slippage- as in your balls slipping out of your bikini bottom- its own excess- as evidenced by a prolapsed rectum- and difference- as in complaints that your arse burns people's dick off coz u dine only on vindaloo or phal curry?

Mimicry is not about negotiation or subversion or polysemy or semantic slippage. Its about the cost of the information processing involved in finding substantive solutions to co-ordination problems. Mimetic effects are 'small, cheap and out of control'- that's why evolution gave us mirror neurons. Hysteresis still obtains but cashes out as noise because nothing is genealogical, i.e. 'baked in'.

Is Homi Bhaba genuinely stupid?

Homi Bhaba was born in an independent country. Granted, it was a country that told itself stupid lies about how it had become independent but that was only because the truth was too obvious and shaming.
 Bhaba's mother tongue was Gujerati. One particularly stupid lie, still repeated, about how India became independent goes like this. Once upon a time, there was this Gujerati dude- called, not Holy Baba, but Mahatma Gandhi- who sat down and started spinning yarn and this produced Swaraj which means self-rule. He also got a bunch of guys to go down to the beach to make salt. They were beaten by policemen but didn't fight back. Clearly, being beaten while trying to make salt produces something called saytagraha- Truthful Struggle. 

So there you have it- India became independent because Gandhi taught it to produce Swaraj- the inner precondition for self-rule-  by spinning cotton and then to produce Satyagraha- that type of outward struggle in which the inner Truth of Swaraj would neccessarily triumph over what went before.

Everybody said it. Nobody believed it.

If spinning cotton and getting beaten on the head while trying to make salt produced Indian  independence, then the British must have done something to produce its enslavement. 

What precisely?

Bhaba says- 'The exercise of colonialist authority... requires the production of differentiations, individuations, identity effects through which discriminatory practices can map out subject populations that are tarred with the visible and transparent mark of power. Such a mode of subjection is distinct from what Foucault describes as 'power through transparency': the reign of opinion, after the late eighteenth century, which could not tolerate areas of darkness and sought to exercise power through the mere fact of things being known and people seen in an immediate, collective gaze. What radically differentiates the exercise of colonial power is the unsuitability of the enlightenment assumption of collectivity and the eye that beholds it. For Jeremy Bentham (as Michel Perrot points out), the small group is representative of the whole society - the part is already the whole." Colonial authority requires modes of discrimination (cultural, racial, administrative ... ) that disallow a stable unitary assumption of collectivity. The 'part' (which must be the colonialist foreign body) must be representative of the 'whole' (conquered country), but the right of representation is based on its radical difference. Such doublethink is made viable only through the strategy of disavowal just described, which requires a theory of the 'hybridization' of discourse and power that is ignored by theorists who engage in the battle for 'power' but do so only as the purists of difference.

'The discriminatory effects of the discourse of cultural colonialism, for instance, do not simply or singly refer to a 'person', or a dialectical power struggle between self and other, or to a discrimination between mother culture and alien cultures. Produced through the strategy of disavowal, the reference of discrimination is always to a process of splitting as the condition of subjection: a discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards, the self and its doubles, where the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different - a mutation, a hybrid. It is such a partial and double force that is more than the mimetic but less than the symbolic, that disturbs the visibility of the colonial presence and makes the recognition of its authority problematic. To be authoritative, its rules of recognition must reflect consensual knowledge or opinion; to be powerful, these rules of recognition must be reached in order to represent the exorbitant objects of discrimination that he beyond its purview. Consequently, if the unitary (and essentialist) reference to race, nation or cultural tradition is essential to preserve the presence of authority as an immediate mimetic effect, such essentialism must be exceeded in the articulation of 'differentiatory', discriminatory identities.'

The standard Econ theory of price and wage discrimination applies also to tax and service provision discrimination- i.e. the economic foundations of the State, which are, at the margin, under scarcity and regime contestation, also its only relevant foundations. 

Just as a monopolist can increase his profits by charging different prices, and a monopsonist (single buyer) can do the same by offering different wages to different types of workers, so too can the provider of a service (like Justice, or Defense) maximize his own gains by giving more to some and less to others. To do so, the only power that is required is that which makes one a monopolist or monopsonist in the first place provided the market is segmented along lines that it is cheap to identify but expensive to evade.

Now, it may be thought, if one had infinite Power relative to any other player, then one could be a perfect price/wage/service provision discriminator. However, this is only true if it is not costly to acquire information about agents and if it is not costly to enforce barriers preventing re-sale between agents.

Economists long ago came to the conclusion that, in the real world, it is just too expensive and dynamically inefficient (i.e. you lose out more and more over time) to commit to any type of discrimination which doesn't reflect some current informational asymmetry in the market. Since such asymmetries are transitory, there are sound dynamic reasons not to go in for discrimination in the first place.

Thus, though black people are cheap to differentiate from white people, as are women from men, and it is expensive to change one's color or gender, still Wage/Price/Service Provision discrimination along color or gender lines can't be cost effectively enforced absent the subsistence of hysteresis free informational asymmetry. 

Why? 

Well, either it is competed away, or imposes a 'signal extraction' deadweight loss, or, in the case of a certain sort of 'natural' monopoly, where competition is unviable and regulation unenforceable, the problem of the 'efficiency wage' arises. Those discriminated against receive less economic rent and have correspondingly less incentive to perform for fear of the sack (unless there is information asymmetry such that they don't know the Marginal Cost schedule facing the employer). This militates for falling productivity.

What about consumers? Well, since the discriminated against receive less consumer surplus, they have an incentive to switch providers even for small volatility in price or service provision. Moreover, the less people have, the more mobility they can display in terms of geographic location, occupation, and life style. For this reason, countries with a lot of poor people can experience a very rapid change in cultural regime. What we have here is not 'hybridization' but a discontinuous saltation caused by the release of evolutionary capacitance. The maths of this is complex, but it involves no Derridaesque aporias, just Mathematics's Open Problems which save Philosophy from futility by- and this is the apurvata in Collingwood- providing a temporary topos for its 'distinctions without a difference'.
The same is true for genuinely creative artists but, precisely for that reason, such saltations create a problem for the credentialized artist because a lot of his Bourdieusian capital, sometimes even his language, suddenly ceases to have salience. Since crap artists like whining about being neglected, there is a hysteresis effect such that a formalized art-form may appear to never more bravely bloom than when it knows it is doomed, and though the bird is dead, its plumage yet desiccates to a richer hue. Since ideologues are a type of talentless artist, it follows that the demise of a regime may render exponents of its legitimating ideology all the more rabid though they now bite at air. 
If, for purposes of Ackerloff signalling, students are forced to study such shit- though, clearly, their meretricious availability for any corporate purpose of sycophancy or chicanery is successfully advertised- still, in dolefulness, their thoughts will turn upon a Dies Irae requiring a collective act of apocatastasis. 

Muddle headed people may be taken in by the worthless verbiage of Pundits. But those pundits only believe themselves to be wise because they programmatically confuse something cosmetic or conventional with what is mission-critical to an enterprise. 
There is a story of a Soviet delegation visiting an English Mill town. As soon as the factory Siren sounds, workers start hurrying towards their workplace and flooding through its gates. The Communists are impressed. They ask to buy the Siren, thinking that it has some magic power such that workers who hear it immediately become mindful of their duties. What they don't understand is that the workers only show up for work because they are being paid. 

Take another example. On boarding a train, we find the rich travel first class while the rest travel second class. 

Does the ticket inspector create this division in Society?

No. 

But he wears a uniform and the Gestapo wore uniforms, and is carrying out a type of 'surveillance', so surely we are living in a Fascist country run for the benefit of the rich?

Rubbish.

If the cost of segmenting the market can't be justified by extracting sufficient consumer surplus, this form of price/service provision discrimination will end.

There is one proviso I must make. I'm assuming information asymmetry isn't pathological. Suppose an identifiable  section of the population are highly suggestible and ready to believe stupid lies. Then, sure, Power can say to people- be thus and thus they will be.

But there is a good reason I make my assumption. In the history of the world, no counter example has ever been found able to withstand scrutiny.

Bhaba, of course, isn't an economist. Apparently, he's into litterchur.

My thesis is, he isn't utterly stupid, he's just pretending. So are his acolytes.

Take the first sentence from the extract quoted above.

'The exercise of colonialist authority... requires the production of differentiations, individuations, identity effects through which discriminatory practices can map out subject populations that are tarred with the visible and transparent mark of power.'

Suppose this to be true. In that case, 'the production of differentiation, individuations, identity effects' occurs at the same time and at the same pace as effective conquest. Moreover, it doesn't matter who is doing the conquering or what is being conquered, this type of production always magically manages to operate in a hysteresis free manner.

Suppose this 'production' Bhaba speaks of, uses up scarce resources (if it doesn't it can't exist in our Universe). Then it will feature in an audit of any particular conquest. Military accountants would be able to confirm that the same proportion of expenditure on any conquest was indeed used up for this type of 'production'. However, looking at any campaign resulting in the gain of colonial territory at any time in history, we find that administrative costs of establishing control aren't a fixed fraction at all. Yet within those costs must lurk a dummy variable for this supposed production Bhaba babbles about.
Clearly, no such variable exists and this is what Economic Theory would have us expect. Segmenting the market, save along lines of existing informational asymmetry, is unpredictably costly, hysteresis ridden, and ultimately dynamically inefficient. That's why Colonialism fails and everyone born after 1945 knows it. Literature, if it pretends otherwise, is the Philosophy of the fool, the Science of the stupid, the Art of the insane.

Are Post Colonial Literary Theorists really fucked in the head?

No.

They're just pretending.

Why?

Money. 

My guess is they are rent seekers pure and simple.

Still, one puzzle remains. We can guess why they tell stupid lies. But why do they do so in such baroque fashion as to exhaust the possibilities of satire?

Bhaba doesn't just say the exercise of colonial (as opposed to Nation State) power requires something very costly- viz. the 'production', not identification, of individuations- he tells us that this production process manages to mark each and every subject with a tar that is both visible and transparent! Thus, when Indonesia went to colonise Irian Jaya, it had to wrap all the autocthones in a different sorts of cling film. 
Why is Bhaba making such a ludicrous claim? The answer is he's been reading a fuckwit called Foucault. 'Such a mode of subjection is distinct from what Foucault describes as 'power through transparency': the reign of opinion, after the late eighteenth century, which could not tolerate areas of darkness and sought to exercise power through the mere fact of things being known and people seen in an immediate, collective gaze.' Did Foucault really say that, after the late eighteenth century, no distinction of class, gender, creed, colour, occupation or education remained as opaque striations in a pure social transparency immediately available to a collective gaze? If so, he was fucked in the head. Nothing of the sort happened in France nor has it happened anywhere else.

In any case, even suppose Foucault said such a thing and Bhaba, poor booby, believed him, still nothing would warrant Bhaba's distinction between the exercise of Colonial power and that of the Nation State except the premise that things like Marxism, Feminism, Queer Theory etc. are not merely utter rubbish but also that the working class has no legitimate collective interest, nor do women have any grievance, nor have homosexuals faced any injustice in the history of any modern State.

If Colonial Power can, by some special dispensation known to Bhaba alone, discriminate between people in a way that the Power of the modern Nation State is ab ovo unable, then Post Colonial theory is not just empty, even the demand for something like it is mischievous.

How does Bhaba justify his stupidity? Well, it all comes down to a bit of word play, a bait and switch that wouldn't take in a baby- he uses the word 'represent' in 2 wholly unconnected ways. In Econ we speak of 'representative agent theory'- i.e. first you let a sample stand for the whole population. Then you divide the sample into different types and try to get information out of that which you can feed into your models. This is all just heuristics without foundational significance. No great methodenstreit is involved. This is one meaning of the word 'represent' and Bhaba admits that Colonial Power- like all Power based on tax / service-provision discrimination- does use representative agent theory.

A completely different meaning of 'represent' is that which relates to someone you elect or otherwise engage to act as your agent. Bhaba, in a childish manner, plays on this difference in meaning. He says Colonial Power constructs 'representations' of its subjects (i.e. has a representative agent heuristic) but, when it comes to 'representing' those subjects in the Political sense, doesn't do so by transparently democratic means.

However, because of information asymmetry, agent-principal hazard and rent seeking behaviour, even elected representatives to the National Assembly may fuck over their fellow citizens. 

If you think I'm lying, look again at what Bhaba wrote- 'What radically differentiates the exercise of colonial power is the unsuitability of the enlightenment assumption of collectivity and the eye that beholds it. For Jeremy Bentham (as Michel Perrot points out), the small group is representative of the whole society - the part is already the whole." Colonial authority requires modes of discrimination (cultural, racial, administrative ... ) that disallow a stable unitary assumption of collectivity. The 'part' (which must be the colonialist foreign body) must be representative of the 'whole' (conquered country), but the right of representation is based on its radical difference.'

Why is this fucked? Well, when it comes to representation, the reason I use a lawyer is because he is radically differentiated from me by reason of being a fucking lawyer and thus able to take on the equally loathsome hell-hound the ex-wife sicced on me. Similarly, I vote for a fucking politician so he can take on the other fucking politicians in that snake-pit they call Parliament and get me mebbe a little value for my tax dollars.

If a population is homogenous in endowments and no information asymmetry obtains fuck would we need representation?

Bhaba has a theory

'Such doublethink is made viable only through the strategy of disavowal just described, which requires a theory of the 'hybridization' of discourse and power that is ignored by theorists who engage in the battle for 'power' but do so only as the purists of difference.'

Bhaba has coined a theory called 'hybridization'. It is shite. He says 'hang on a fookin fart, dude. You do too need my theory coz u know how there's this like doublethink going on about representation yeah? Well, it's only made viable through a particular strategy, called 'disavowal' which can only be combated by my theory of hybridization.'

We answer, 'Fuck off. There is no 'double-think' going on when we represent you to ourselves a guy who is just crying out for a beating and then act as your representative to give you the hiding you were begging for. Kindly now pay this invoice for $5,000 in consideration of the beating we have so kindly given you. No, we won't take it out of your ass in trade.'

Bhaba may say, 'But guys, don't you see, it's like this beating I just received was negotiated. What's happened is something of me has grafted on to you and something of yours has grafted onto me- we're like hybridized donchasee. So let me lecture you about my theory coz you are too suffering from double-think because you genuinely believe I relish being beaten by you.'

At this point, we kick his head in and steal his Rolex.

If we get away with the crime and go on to become 'Stationary Bandits' levying a protection tax on everybody, then we have achieved power of a Political, rather than purely Criminal, sort. If we need to rely on goons from our own natal 'hood to get us out of a jam, what we have established is analogous to a colony. If on the other hand, we are home-boys expanding our turf, we are building an Empire.

  What Foucault said, or Derrida wrote or Bhaba mumbled into his beard are irrelevant.

Still, this is a car-crash we can't look away from-

''The discriminatory effects of the discourse of cultural colonialism, for instance, do not simply or singly refer to a 'person', or a dialectical power struggle between self and other, or to a discrimination between mother culture and alien cultures.' Cultural Colonialism means guys from a particular culture reproduce it elsewhere such that the people of that place are either coerced or enticed to become increasingly indistinguishable from the 'mother country'. Does such colonialism need to have a separate 'discourse' to succeed? Nope. Cultural Colonialism has deep history. Discourse doesn't.

But, surely, under modern conditions, Discourse is needed to back up Cultural Colonialism, or at least make it more effective?

Rubbish. The reverse is the case. Such discourse is a waste of resources- like Napoleon taking savants with him to an Egypt he fails to conquer- and only shit-heads like Bhaba can be found in its pig-sty.

'Produced through the strategy of disavowal, the reference of discrimination is always to a process of splitting as the condition of subjection: a discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards, the self and its doubles, where the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different - a mutation, a hybrid.'

Fathers may have bastards under Patriarchy. Mothers don't- unless they were raped, in which case the country, far from seeding colonies, has itself been colonised. Canada is called the eldest daughter of the Commonwealth, not its eldest bastard. What fucking strategy of disavowal is Bhaba blathering about? Why disavow a colony unless it isn't paying for itself, or- like Rhodesia- is behaving badly? But that's not a question of strategy, but deontology or, in plain words, good fucking house-keeping & Old Fashioned Morality. The only tactical reason to disavow a colony is if you are trying to fool a militarily superior hegemon.

Bhaba could have given himself a get-out clause but, instead, carried away by his own eagerness to display an undigested erudition, he forecloses that option by saying no Hegelian struggle for Recognition can arise in what he describes. I suppose, a tough love, 'strategy of disavowal' might have salience in Milner's Imperial kindergarden- but that project failed spectacularly and we all know why.

Mutations only arise if there is a change in the genotype. Hybrids only if there is an exchange of genetic information. What occult process of the phenomenological equivalent of sex is getting Bhaba to beat his meat so pathetically?

 'It is such a partial and double force that is more than the mimetic but less than the symbolic, that disturbs the visibility of the colonial presence and makes the recognition of its authority problematic. 

Problematic to whom? Some guy in a colonised country who wants to improve his position? Fuck we care about such a guy? Colonialism ends when it ceases to be financially and or militarily viable. That happened once and for all a while back. Everyone saw that this was a Pareto improvement. No one wants to go back to the bad old days. 

'To be authoritative, its rules of recognition must reflect consensual knowledge or opinion; yes, baba, but that consensus was reached before I was born to be powerful, these rules of recognition must be reached in order to represent the exorbitant objects of discrimination that lie beyond its purview. Nonsense. Even if I come up with rules of recognition, for colonizing Sloane Square, that represent the exorbitant objects of discrimination (Sloane Ranger MILFs who drive fucking SUVs down Fulham's narrow streets whom I'd like to discriminate against with my dick) those rules of representation wouldn't have any power. Money or helicopter gunships might help. Rules of Representation can kiss my black ass. Consequently, if the unitary (and essentialist) reference to race, nation or cultural tradition is essential to preserve the presence of authority as an immediate mimetic effect, such essentialism must be exceeded in the articulation of 'differentiatory', discriminatory identities.' No unitary or essentialist reference to race, nation or cultural tradition is essential for anything at all. People who have authority don't know what is meant by unitary or essentialist references to x or y nor, in most situations, can any such reference be discovered by even the most diligent of researchers. Mimetic effects exist because we have mirror neurons. Authority can be the solution to a co-ordination problem or concurrency deadlock. The articulation of 'differentiatory' discriminatory identities may occur but isn't a necessary or sufficient condition for anything at all.

Bhaba, mate, you aint stupid.

You've done well for yourself.

But you sure do talk bollocks.

2 ways of reading Niradh Chaudhri.

How should we read this purple passage from Niradh Chaudhri?

The emic Indglish way
Since Niradh Chaudhri read the same books as I did as an adolescent (I inherited them from my Grandmother who was self-educated in English) I can easily 'deconstruct' the 'dhvani' allusions in the above.
1) The dictionary of Quotations, Indian students used to memorize so as to variegate their exam answer-sheets and secure jobs in the Civil Service, had, under Immanuel Kant, this- '"Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." For a Tamil Sama Vedic Brahmin, like me, it was usual to pair this quotation with one from the Chandogya. Thus mention of oneself as a child gazing at the Night Sky had as dhvani, not the Pleiades suckling Murugan with star-light, but devotion to Murugan-as-Subhramanyam such that materialistic, that is ritualistic- for nothing mental is otherwise material merely- Purva Mimamsaka heteronomy is overcome.
Niradh, however, was a Sakta Kayastha with Brahmo leanings for whom, since Vaishnavism was declasse in Bengal, the occluded planet referred to was that Vaikunta where his Mom wasn't mentally ill and for which he remained home-sick.
2) Unlike me, Niradh was a scholar and naturally identified with prodigies like Bhratrhari. Furthermore, it was his education which increasingly took him away from his mother. Though not 'the axe that laid waste the forest of his mother's youth'- in the sense that she didn't have to work long hours to support his studies- nevertheless mental illness in Indian women at that time was linked to their feeling of loss of control because their children, from an early age, were under pressure to do well in a wholly alien educational system.
The scholar's lament that all his achievements are unreal, the world is unreal, because Mom isn't here to witness my success, translates well into the Bengali Sakta tradition- perhaps it is because theirs is a nation of scholars that feeling for the Mother is so highly developed in them- but, in Ramprasad Sen, that tradition, fuelled by Nabadwipa's Navya-Nyaya anticipations of modern set theory, had achieved, not what Godel sought in Bernay's Reflection Principle- but the Grothendieckian scandal by which, seeing Mother kick God in the chest, showing stony heartedness to the concreteness of the linga,  Faith stumbles over the Threshold of Dream into Incarnate Being-in-the-World.
Except that couldn't happen for Niradh coz he was a bit Brahmo- i.e. a Unitittyarian (nipples are many, titty is one)- shite at Maths and had seen Tagore, his Parmahans Swann, not frozen in a Mallarmean lake, but captivated and vulgarized and finally and very respectably outlived by that worthless Odette we call Shantiniketan.
Thus all that was left to him was
3) Chapter 5 of Browne's Urn Burial- a set-text for Matric back when that exam would have been impossible to pass for many a modern day Professor of English
Niradh aspired to be a historian, but in the meretricious mold of Hipplolyte Taine, and thus race, milieu, et moment- which, when doubled in every Mother tongue's Aagamani Mirror are Hermeneutics' six feet of ground- cashed him out as a gibbering Bangla gibbon berating Ghotis for ignoring their own imaginary 'moles of Adrianus'.
Of course, by an Indglish convention then current, mention of a 'Niti' text, like that of Browne, more especially because of its euphuistic 'Riti' texture, must immediately be followed by the striking of a Cyrenaic note- Nehru does this quite elegantly- before, of course, the obligatory 'mujhse pehle se mohabat, mahboob, na maang' stern Socialistic disavowal of availability for any tryst save with that Destiny which Marx, in Heaven, has already thoroughly debauched.
In the passage quoted above, Niradh, sadly, couldn't make that final and conventionally required presentment of Indglishry. Why? Well, he swotted too hard, as opposed to crammed simply, and so hadn't passed his M.A and gone on to Cambridge and the LSE and so on. Instead he had become a clerk in the Military Accounts Dept and had he stayed there, his hobby of military history- he corresponded with Capt. Liddel Hart- and love of French would have attracted attention. Moonje would have tried to recruit him. Bose, the younger, would have employed him as something more than a secretary. Some 'big gun' Maharaja would have sought him as a tutor for his son or lecturer for his putative Staff College.
But Niradh didn't stay the course in the Bureaucracy. True, he was picked up by All India Radio and, during the war, was paid to say things like- 'Pardon me, the correct pronunciation of 'Wipers' is 'Ypres' not 'that stinky French shithole'. What's more the Duke of Marlborough, the ancestor of our new Prime Minister, won a battle against General Faux pas Bidet at that very spot a couple of hundred years ago.' Well, that's not what he actually said- but Niradh was Bengali and, more inexcusably, he knew French so that's what listeners would have heard no matter what he actually said. Provided, that is, Hippolyte Taine's hermeneutic theory is correct and Niradh's own project not ludicrous ab ovo.

What was Niradh's 'dark abyss'? For Indglish readers, it was obviously the Secular consequence of a Satanic non serviam. Niradh wrote his auto-biography to refute the charge that he was a slacker and a wastrel who gave up a good job in Military Accounts to become a soi disant Gypsy Scholar. Again and again he insists that he ended up financially better off, or at least not greatly disadvantaged, by his refusal to don the blinkers of 'Service' and trudge an accustomed groove.

What about non-Indglish readers? Would they find something different in this extract from Niradh? If so, would it be funny? After all, if Indglish Punditry, like mine, e'en aleatorily. attains virtuosity in being shite, it is only because English Punditry has always confused Virtue with possessing shite for brains.
Globalised Academia's etic way
This was written by a pukka English Prof.

Mindlessly repeating the cliche 'that puts itself in the abyss', is of course, as Hilary Putnam pointed out, what meat-headed post-grads thought doing Derrida meant. Niradh wasn't an academic, thus he'd been forced to write well. His Taineism was stupid but not opportunistic, unlike Spivak's Derridacoity.
Why the fuck would Niradh buy into so obviously false a notion as 'the ineluctable materiality of signs'? Linga means sign. Kali kicks it not because it is material and she is stony hearted but because it isn't and she is not. Ramprasad Sen sings about it and his song was on the lips of every Mother, every Aunt, every Ayah, every baul. Niradh wasn't 'caught between 2 language games'. He wrote 'Riti' Indglish same as wot I do. Okay he knew from Spelling and Sanskrit and Shit but then he hadn't the advantage of attending a Russel Group Uni.
Yet, at the end of the day, at least in Academia, it is this young Professor's reading which will prevail.Why? Because the same paragraph, only slightly rewritten, could cover any Third World writer of the previous century. This has obvious utility. Education isn't paideia, it is repeating the same shite regardless of alteration of circumstances. A Credentialized Higher Education system feeds an increasingly deracinated and transnational Bureaucracy which, so as to be ineffective in posing a check upon rootless oligarchs gaming the system, is both boundlessly stupid and utterly predictable.

Indglish, like sabak-e-hindi, or Riti, only flourished when bureaucracies were National in character and recruited, at the lower ranks, from the local bildungsburgertum.
Now that everybody and her cat has a PhD from Amrika, Indglish is doomed.
What for you getting so happy, I say?
Henceforth I will write only Urdu verse.
Mind it kindly.
Aiyayo.

Iqbal, Tagore & Possible Worlds

Iqbal- ..so then I said to the Shah of Iran, 'Majesty, I've got more literary genius in my little finger than that bearded fucktard Tagore whom you and King Feisal keep feting and fawning over.'
Interviewer (Sarojini Naidu)- What if your little finger was up Rabi Da's butt hole?
Iqbal- LOLWAT? Why would my finger be up that Bengali fucktard's butt hole? You calling me a fag? Look at my tache. This the tache of a fucking gay boy?
Interviewer- I just assumed. Anyway, the point about genius is that it is not something contingent but rather is an essence and therefore exists in all possible worlds including ones in which your little finger is up the Sage of Shantiniketan's butt hole.
Iqbal- Fair point, Sarojini. Anyway, like I was saying, I've got more literary genius in my little finger that than bearded fucktard Tagore, unless, obviously, my little finger happens to be up his butt hole.
Interviewer- Why is it obvious that your little finger would happen to be up his butt hole?
Iqbal- Because Islam is in danger.

T.S Eliot vs Tagore

Edit- apparently this old ignoramus is wholly wrong about Eliot's Anglicanism. He was close to the great and good Bishop Bell not Cosmo Lang.

This is one of the best articles in the Guardian I've ever read.
Slowly, in between my domestic chores and dutiful visit to the gym, I've been looking up some of the poets mentioned by this marvelously erudite and engaged author.
This is one book I'll buy in Hardback.
Still, in all candor, the more I look things up the more I'm confirmed in my middle-aged certainty that modern poetry is an oxymoron.
The author says Eliot became a global presence quite quickly. Compared to Tagore- post Gitanjali- this is scarcely true. Nishiwaki was an eccentric egghead- an academics' academics. His volume of English verse (unlike Tagore's own Gitanjali) sank without trace. By contrast, Tagore influenced popular Japanese and Chinese poets and song writers- indeed, he still does. I recall reading a poem by Li Chin Fa in an anthology and asking my learned Chinese friend to transcribe the original for me. He shook his head sadly and said 'the original is Tagore. ' I was amazed. I thought of Tagore, much as I think of Eliot now, as a sexless bore who dabbled in Soteriology coz it was a shameful, but ancestral, vocation.
Both Eliot and Tagore were of Unitarian/Brahmo stock. (Emerson was a Unitarian. Recall his 'Brahma'? He'd been reading Raja Ramohan Roy- an Islamicized polyglot scholar and deeply boring Benthamite of the sententious, Amartya Sen sort) Indeed, it was an elder brother of Tagore, a Science guy who regrettably died early, who prevented a crazy (literally) American Unitarian (Charles Dall- look him up and laugh your head off) unifying those two virulently vacuous Victorian sects by, quite properly, expelling non-Brahmins from his Daddy's new Adi ('primeval', therefore pre-Casteist) Brahmo sect.
Eliot, by birth, a Boston Brahmin, soon turned Episcopalian and became the Chesterton of Cosmo Lang's wholly corrupt High Church.
Tagore, however, had moved in the opposite direction. He transcended that bogus 'Brahmin' label. Muslim Bangladesh reveres him. He has written the National Anthem of 2 nations- though Hindutva India hates his wholly secular 'Jana Gana Mana', preferring instead Bankim's 'Hail to the Mother'.

Tagore could become a global poet much more quickly than Eliot because his culture was already global- not the special pleading of diverse sects of precociously drivelling autochthones inhabiting the unlovely littoral of that most atrocious of Oceans- the ungovernable Atlantic.

By contrast to such uncouth, storm tossed, 'Jahilliyat', China and Japan and South East Asia had assimilated Sanskrit and Pali fifteen hundred years previously. Latin America, through 'Krausismo' (Krause actually knew Skt. and tried to teach Schopenhauer a little bit)- not to mention Jesuit scholarship- was already fertile soil.
Indeed, they had easy access to the Sufi-Bhakti synthesis through notions like 'saudosismo'- which is the Sufi 'sauda' or 'suvaida'- so there was nothing surprising about Tagore, himself the student of a Peruvian monk, being so well received on that continent.
The connection between Greece and India, of course, is 2500 years old. Anglo-American pedants say 'Dharma' is untranslatable. Ashoka translated it as Eusebia and Greek people living in India said 'fair dinkum, mate.' (What? Ancient Greeks had Australian accents and were sun-tanned and had washboard stomachs and lived in the vicinity of Earls Court as I still shudderingly recall)
In any case, for purely commercial or geographical reasons, Tagore was far closer, culturally, to China and Japan than Eliot. His family, like Titsingh, had grown rich in Calcutta and it is a fact that many cultivated Indians, like that Dutchman (who had a Bengali son) showed themselves prepared to ' willingly exchange their residence for Japan,' if not to 'sneer at all Indian greatness' (though that greatness departed even before Victoria became Empress) and like Titsingh (but not promiscuously or for sensual pleasure) espoused Japanese wives than whom, indeed, none better exemplify 'pativrata' Beauty, Grace and Fidelity.
Tagore and Aurobindo, briefly, were paired as the poet-prophets of Revolution in India. M.N Roy was the Comintern's man in China, tasked with fomenting an Agrarian Revolution. Young Sarojini Naidu, who sold better than her elders, Eliot & Pound, in England, gave Fenellossa's m/s to Pound to trans-create. Her brother 'Chatto' was a Comintern agent killed during one of Stalin's purge. All the people I mention had imbibed Tagore with their mother's milk.
By contrast, though Auden and Isherwood translated Hindu Scriptures at the behest of Hindu Swamis- Yeats started this horrible trend- they neither inspired nor were connected with any great Revolutionaries.
The Academy claimed Auden. Bengalis chant his verse, but they are all queuing for tenure in some particularly insalubrious 'Social Science'.

Eliot may have studied under Paul Elmer More- whose leonine, Landor like, heroic couplets translating Bhratrihari remain till today of the sort, Richard Rorty, in articulo mortis, found salvific to recall- but it is noteworthy that Crawford's vaunted scholar, who, he quite ludicrously claims 'engaged with Advanced Mathematics'- remained indifferent to Brouwerian 'Vakyapadiya'- in other words, this shmuck could have anticipated the 'linguistic turn', but didn't, preferring to stick with a but Bradleyian foreskin while throwing away his manhood.
Tagore, Thomas Mann says, came across as an old woman- unlike his muscular son. But filial piety constrained Tagore. He was the son of a self proclaimed 'Maharishi' and had to swan around in a Christ-like kaftan because his faux Pundit of a Pater Pantocrator had done so even into his own youngest son's Forties.
In any case, Rabi wasn't the Science guy in his family. Nevertheless, later, after meeting Einstein, he wrote a popular book for kids about Science. He wasn't a high I.Q guy but, with every decade, he got closer to the people- i.e. became less and less of a holier-than-thou Brahmin c-word.

Robert Graves, by contrast, was a genius. Crazy? No- just a case of genus irritabile vatum. I can't re-read Eliot without sneering a little. I know so much more than him. So do we all, thanks to Google Search. But Graves? Take his 'love without hope as when the young bird catcher'- okay, I get the 'Celtic' reference and thus could have secured a pass-mark in the Indian U.P.S.C Eng Lit paper- which would have translated into a safe job as a clerk, supposing a question had been posed on that topic, BUT Graves wrote so lucidly, so much for the common man, I'd  have read his 'White Goddess' gratuitously. Even if I got my Govt. job and was kept busy collecting bribes, I'd always be haunted by the knowledge that the forest is a text in the only language of my salvation. English forests,  Greek forests- such Holwege as arise in Hindustani Forests- but are birds which escape and fly, though 'tis but a SUV which drives by.
Eliot, as neutered by Pound, but natal to School Marmish/Social Workerish American Browningian Femininity- his Mum's 'Savanorola' could scarcely be more hilarious than his own sophomoric detournement on the 'smara- mara' syzygy- represents not Modernism but the Credentialized Academy's rodeo which features only its own gelding.
Tagore can't be taught. Bengali kids memorise him coz Mum croons his verses in the kitchen when Granny condemns her cooking.
In that vast, salt pillared, masturbatory desert of my adolescence- where, not Christ was betrayed but barely tempted- Eliot whispered to me. But whispered to me of a career as a Casteist, Credentialized, poseur or pundit.
Eliot indeed is that Buddha of the elite whose 'Fire sermon' distinguishes between Brahmins- who tend a sacred fire to glorify their own genealogy- and Sati, the Fisherman's son, who obviously is just an idiot and thus to be ostracized, unlike, Upali, the barber, who is properly obsequious and parrots what you say.
Eliot has 'taste'. I don't. I'm now a Curry & Chips Cockney. I relish conversations in pubs which turn on obscure gynaecological problems amongst the older of my neighbours. Me being very black and wearing glasses- it's like these Mothers of the Community are able to say what they can't in the G.P's surgery or the underfunded NHS Hospital.
Okay, I just heard myself there. T.S. Eliot is great coz he helped this 'bullshitting' immigrant to turn into a real Londoner over the course of 30 years.
I now love him unreservedly and will definitely buy the hardback edition of this book. As for understanding its contents- why not? That could happen. It's like David Cameron said to me- well, if it wasn't him it was some other French Cambodian lady boy such as abound in these parts- should of gone to Specsavers innit?