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.

Why Vivek Chibber is both Right & Shite.

Vivek Chibber is right about Subaltern Studies. It genuinely was shit. But, look at the thing in context. To get ahead in Indian Academia from the late Sixties onwards one needed to either
1) kill and rape random dudes while embezzling as much money as possible.
2) pretend to be a Revolutionary of some sort so if anyone gang-raped you or beat you to death with a hockey stick then like these real mean Naxal dudes or KGB dudes or the ghost of Gramsci would turn up and take a fitting revenge.
Subaltern Studies was the coward's way out but, at one time, it appeared as remunerative a route to a Green Card as being a Code Monkey.
Its great utility to the Indian Disapora was that
1) it was a way of whining about being Brown that didn't get you lumped with the Blacks or Blue Collar proles or Tamale eaters or Chinky chopstick users.
2) it permitted one to make ridiculous claims about one's own parochial, deeply ignorant, sub-culture- like Guha's claim that Ramram Basu was actually a great historian rather than a Kayastha scoundrel of a scribbler, who procured abortions for the girls he seduced, and whose titanic contribution to Indian historigoraphy was written to order for an English Baptist Missionary who held his nose but paid the worthless hack so as to turn a profit on his Printing Press.
This was important because the old White professors who were heads of Area Studies Departments tended to be awfully patronizing coz they knew your Grandfather's Boss or Clan Chief or Maharaja or whatever. Subaltern Studies was about pretending that there was stuff in some vernacular which had never been written down, but which you knew and the Professor didn't, which showed that Grand-dad was actually the Lenin of the Latrine Inspection Dept. in Ludhiana,  or that Granny was like the Rosa Luxembourg of  the Lady's Knitting Circle in Coimbatore.
As such, Subaltern Studies was shite, but it was deeply Indian shite and, okay, it passed its sell-by date round about the time the diaspora could point to genuine Porn Stars and Professional Wrestlers of its own, still, it's scarcely nice of Chibber - a Punjabi- to point this out to the Bongs coz Bengal has scored no similar success since Niradh Chaudhri's infamous nude one-man show 'O! Calcutta!'.

Homework assignment in Indglish Ars dictaminis- the case of the buggered goat

In 1922, a trooper of the Bengal lancers sodomized a goat in Waziristan.  To avoid a vendetta, the Colonel of the regiment authorized a sizable cash payment to the clan whose pet had suffered the indignity and then indented for reimbursement from the Dept. of Military Accounts in Calcutta under the rubric of 'livestock- sundries'.


Clearly this was very wrong of him. It was more a case of 'livestock- sundaris" as Assistant Head Clerk Harish Babu joked. 'Do not joke,'  Head Clerk Mukherjee admonished him, 'the goat was of masculine gender- not a beautiful sundari as you maintain- in any case the point at issue here is just a goat- at most it can be treated as sheep and reimbursed at that rate- however, what is happening here is that the sum demanded is more than that for a camel! There is an important precedent involved.'
'But what can we do?" Harish Babu asked, 'Colonel Sahib has already spent the money. God knows, those Afridis on the Frontier are quick to anger.  It's a cheap price to pay for peace. The Director is sure to pass the file if we attach a note.'
'Oho? We are just to pass all the indents of these military Johnnies are we?' Mukherjee was a slight man, but he had fighting spirit, 'We are simply eunuchs sitting here, are we? Tell you what, call Niradh Babu- M.A first class first from Calcutta University- he will know how to deal with the Colonel."

Director of Military Accounts, Cedric Cubbon ordered a pink gin but the bearer continued to hover at his elbow. 'Pink Gin- fut a fut!' Cedric said starting to get annoyed. 'Huzoor, me bring just now only- but, one thing to present for attention?'
'What?' 
'Sahib, one Colonel Sahib is here. Drinking all day. Shouting your name. Saying 'buggered goat, buggered goat, I'll give that damn competition wallah buggered goat!' Sahib, better you should know.'
Cedric stiffened. He was a small man and wore thick glasses. He'd gotten into Military Accounts after failing to make the cut for H.M Customs & Excise. He had spent ten years in Aden- a punishment posting- before finally getting this promotion. Though he looked unimpressive, he was a brave man. Had it not been for a large family back home in Liverpool, who depended on his remittances, he'd have volunteered for the Irish Guard in 1914.

Still, it wouldn't do to confront the drunken Colonel right now. Cedric returned to his office, called for the relevant file and prepared to send a note over to the Colonel- perhaps with an invitation to luncheon at Flury's, or something of that sort.

But, any notion of offering hospitality to the Colonel was swiftly banished from his mind once he started reading the file.
The new Babu on his staff- what was his name?- Aradh? Niradh?- weedy little chap- had written a very cogent memo. The rules, for Military Accounts, governing compensation for sodomized animals were pretty clear. Precedents stretched back to Agincourt.
As Niradh pointed out- buggered goats are classed as 'deodand' everywhere east of Adelaide-  they are considered as having caused death or mortal sin and thus are confiscated to the Crown. No question of compensation arises.
The Colonel's response, if one filtered out the flippancy and ill tempered sarcasm, amounted to the bald unsubstantiated assertion that the goat had wandered over the Durand line and thus the law of deodand did not not apply to it because, in the Islamic Emirate, a buggered animal might be eaten by anyone other than its violator.
There were two grave objections to the Colonel's memorandum. First, it amounted to a topographically conservative interpretation of the Durand line which undermined Imperial security. Secondly, it conceded the very point it sought to dispute- viz. that compensation could only be paid on the per pound weight mutton scale- not the much larger sum actually indented for.

Your homework assignment for today is
1) Write a note from Niradh Babu, observing all the conventions of Indglish ars dictaminis, addressed to the goat (assume it is a British subject for the purposes of this exercise).
2) Write an open letter from the goat (in the style of Zaid Hamid) to Niradh Chaudhri for publication in the Dawn newspaper.
For higher marks you may also
3) Write a poem, in the style of J.H. Prynne, capturing Cedric Cubbon's stream of consciousness as he resolves to fight the Colonel himself rather than permit him to sodomize the equestrian statute of Sir Mark Cubbon as an act of vengeance upon his namesake.
For lower marks
4) rewrite 'the Critique of Post-Colonial reason' using only such vocables as might issue from the throat of a buggered goat.






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