Ghalib's suvaida & Pascoaes Saudosismo

The word Melancholia derives from the Greek melaina chole- black bile.
Rufus of Ephesus, two millennia ago, explained that there were 2 types of black bile- one which is natural and present as a sort of sediment in the blood and which only becomes harmful if stirred up- as by Spring, which is why April is the cruelest month- and another sort which is yellow bile which has either been burnt and which gives rise to a violent raving madness, or else yellow bile which has been frozen (afsurdagi) and which yields depression and abulia.
With the advent of Islam, this Greek doctrine of the humours was adopted by the Arabs who termed black bile 'sauda' and poetically linked it to the pupil of the beloved's eye- vide Mohr Siebeck's monograph.

the theory of black bile as causing madness.
Ghalib has a couplet linking the Sufi suvaida (a small black spot on the heart) with the pupil of the eye-

مت مردمکِ دیدہ میں سمجھو یہ نگاہیں
ہیں جمع سویداۓ دلِ چشم میں آہیں

These are not enchantment's rays that enter my eyes 

But smoke from my charred heart escaping as sighs.

Ironically, the Arabic word 'sauda'- which means both 'blessed', 'joyous', 'profitable' as well as 'black- may, because of its medical usage,  have influenced the Portuguese 'Saudades' associated with melancholic yearning for every Sonnet's Shulamith or Kleinian 'dark lady' who yet is fair, & for such our Black Sun, all Despair, for all that has been loved & lost to sight, yet lies at the back of blind Belisarius' obol of Light.

Fuck me, I jus' realized this theme, or 'mazmun', is tailored made for Post Colonial pricks and Subaltern Studies shitheads & Eco Feminist fuckwits to vomit all over. Iyer, they will say, is a Hindutva fanatic. He is referencing the Chandogya Upanishad's Black Sun- the light beyond the heavens, beyond the realm of transmigration, that apocatastatic light behind Love's blighting light which illuminates how all things end. Why? Coz this worthless Mayavadi cunt wants to restore the Manuvadi caste system. As for Pascoaes' Saudosismo- fuck is it but a proto-Fascist Sebastanismo?- a harking back to a golden age when Christian Portugal was on an almost victorious warpath against Moors, Marranos,  Malabaris and other such dusky what have you. Thus, in Arabic, the word 'black' also means 'happiness', 'joy', etc. because black people were a source of profit for slave traders. Similarly, Krishna means both 'black' and that God who takes on the sins of the 'ujali paraj' lighter colored oppressors.
Yet, there is another way to read Ghalib's sauda & Pascoaes Saudosismo,-one that evokes Hindu/Buddhist 'antarabhava' (which carries an erotic charge) Tibetan 'baro thodol' (which is permeated with a mono no aware sentiment) & Ibn Arabi's barzakh (which is a philosophical solution to the problem of genidentity).
According to this reading, Love, as Jagganath Pundit realized, is in truth a Second Creation, but its God is Grief. Why? Because to fall in Love is to seek to create a World in which there is nothing but yourself and the beloved. Too late you see it is a gas-chamber to whose noxious vapors only you are immune.

The Pinchas paradox

Abihu and Nabadh, the two eldest sons of Aaron, the brother of Moses, offered an improper sacrifice to the Lord and were themselves consumed in the flame. They left no offspring.
Pinchas was a grandson of Aaron, but he was not a 'Kohain' (part of the hereditary priesthood, because his father was elevated to the Priesthood after he was born). However, he was raised to the Priesthood by the Lord after he killed Prince Zimri who was co-habiting with the beautiful Kosbi.
Pinchas' action was correct because the Lord approved it even though the Law did not. In other words, by reading the Bible we know that it is algorithmically verifiable that Pinchas acted correctly- because that is what the Text says- yet his action is not algorithmically computable by the Laws revealed in that same text- i.e. there is no process of halachic reasoning that can arrive at the same conclusion.
Thus, at least on one interpretation, it is a paradoxical sort of action- a halachah vein morin kein- a teaching which, if known, prohibits the very action it would otherwise enjoin.
When Pinchas realized the terrible nature of what he had done, according to a mystical interpretation of the Bible, his soul fled him in fear. The Lord then caused the ibbur (entry into his body) of the souls of Nabadh and Abihu who thus became the spiritual progenitors of the Kohain- or Cohens.
Interestingly Pinchas is said to lose this ibbur at a later time for somehow failing to avert the tragedy of Jephthah sacrificing his own daughter as a holocaust to the Lord as a result of a rash vow. In other  words, the Hassidic commentators are making clear that Jephthah's fire sacrifice was not legitimate or ordained by God, just as Abihu and Nabadh had made an improper sacrifice.
The interpretation given by the Zohar, or other mystical sources, may seem bizarre or superstitious to a lot of ordinary Christian people. However there can be no doubt as to the humane message of the Rabbis which we can summarize thus
1) Yes, Abihu and Nabadh did something improper from the ritual point of view. Maybe they'd had too much wine. But their intentions were good and so though they perished in the flesh yet the Lord's mercy was upon their Spirit. They could still serve the Lord- which was their only desire.
Thus, on this interpretation, from the Spiritual point of view, the Cohens- who are their descendants in the direct male line- need not fear that the Lord will judge them too harshly for some small ritual mistake or over hasty halachic decision- i.e. there is no grounds to hold Judaism to be a 'fossil' religion inculcating Kantian 'heteronomy'. On the contrary, the teaching of the Hassidic Sages is that Autonomy, Creativity, unremitting Zeal for Universal Welfare is what is pleasing to the Lord. The nightmare vision of a capricious God who punishes you for an unknown or unintentional crime has no place in our reading of the Old Testament because the keepers and transmitters of that text- who surely know more about it than ordinary people like you and me- have given a far more closely reasoned and hermeneutically rich interpretation which we can all feel to be more in consonance with the promptings of our own humble and heartfelt Faith in our Creator.
2) Political assassination, or Religious persecution or whatever it was that motivated the slaying of Zimri and Kosbi- though perhaps 'necessary' in some sense, is nevertheless very strictly forbidden precisely to those who know of this legal precedent and who might use it to justify fanatical persecution, or even genocide, of other peoples.
The paradoxical halachah here does not have the effect of crashing the whole deontic system, rather it enables it to evolve in a more humane manner. Yet, from the logical point of view, this is a very difficult problem. After all, the Rabbis say if we break one law we break all laws. If we slay one person we slay all humanity. Furthermore, though ignorance of the law can be an excuse, surely knowledge of it can never be so. Yet, there are situations where something which is enjoined is forbidden because it is known to be enjoined. This paradox resolves itself under the gentle guidance of the Rabbis who show that the only way to escape from the quicksand of Legalism is through moral and spiritual evolution- by opening oneself to the ibbur of the self-less tzadikkim. I have written more about this here.
3) The concern shown for the daughter of Jephtah indicates that the truly enlightened person- even if born in barbarous times, when the weaker was enslaved by the stronger- rejects the creed of Male supremacy. It has no place in Religion and Spirituality.

One interesting aspect of the manner in which the Hassidic Sages enrich our reading of the Bible is that, like Umaswati, they formulate the problematic of 'incarnation' (ibbur is actually more like partial incarnation as found in the Mahabharata) as a 'matching problem'. Essentially, a resource is cached in a liminal state- like the Bardo of the Tibetans or the Barzakh of Ibn Arabi- so that it can be drawn upon to resolve paradoxes in a manner that 'climbs the local hill', on the relevant Hermeneutic landscape, so as to grant the reader an expanded Moral and Spiritual horizon.

Barzakh, Bibliothetic Order & Borges's Library in Babel

Note- this has been edited on the basis of a negative comment.

The books in Borges's Library of Babel are a random distribution of unique character strings of equal length. One way to generate the Library would be to start with the book that consists entirely of the letter a, then the one which is entirely a except that its last letter is b and so forth. This would generate the lexical ordering of the Library in a time factorial to that of producing one book. The actual order of books is random and we don't know where the Library starts and finishes. Still, we can just arbitrarily choose an anchor book and say, this is in the right place and every other book must be moved to correspond to the lexical ordering. More generally, for any bibliothetic ordering, two variables arise for any given book- first, its vector distance from the anchor book, and second its vector distance from its assigned place- both of which have polynomial form.
Thus catalogs of the Library have existential Second Order Complexity which,by Fagin's theorem, is non deterministically computable. But, since we know the books have a lexical ordering such that there is a least fixed point, it follows that algorithmic orderings are deterministically computable in exponential time. Moreover, if the catalog of the Library must also be a book in the Library then, since we know that there is no 'sparse language' in the one case which is not in the other we have no grounds for hoping that some non deterministic computation would be shorter than exponential time.

This is one approach, a pessimistic one, to answering the question-

'Could there be a specified bibliothetic order for Borges's library that you or I could create and describe in, say, a 100-page document? Not a complete cataloguing, obviously, but an algorithm that sensibly placed the books in an order explainable to a bright and interested human? I don't think so—at least I wasn't able to dream anything up!—but nor did I see any path to a proof that no such ordering could be possible. And maybe I'm being redundant, but it wouldn't need to specify hexagon and shelf for each possible book, but rather a compelling way that set the books so that were you to find yourself in a particular hexagon, you'd have a good sense of what might be in nearby hexagons. I got nuthin'.'

What happens if we abandon the idea of a universal descriptive language and replace it by something arising out of the theory of co-evolution? Do we thereby escape the tyranny of Time hierarchy theorems?

One reason to hope so is that co-evolution is stochastic, not deterministic, and generates 'advice strings'.- i.e. an extra input becomes available- in a particularly useful manner. The Red Queen, in Lewis Caroll's 'Through the looking glass', manages to run just as fast as the scenery- which is in 'state space explosion'- thus staying in the same place. 

How might this work in practice?

Suppose 'interesting books' in the Library of Babel are traded and used as a store of value and suppose preferences are epigenetically canalized to not-too-much, not-too-little diversity (Graciella Chichilnisky- an Argentine Mathematical Economist- did path-breaking work on this in the Seventies) then over infinite time we are likely to see all sorts of bibliothetic orderings corresponding to all possible Wealth distributions which would exhaust polynomial complexity. Now, if a steady state obtains at any point, then we know from a result by Axtell, that this is also a Walrasian equilibrium- which is an exponential time algorithm for fixed points. Under certain conditions- e.g. if we assume that the race of Librarians have homothetic preferences and thus the same satiation point- this corresponds to the notion that a bibliothetic ordering has been implemented.

My feeling, however, is that there is more to this. Essentially, the Economic evolution of biblothetic ordering itself adds meaning and, what's more, the fitness landscape (assume guys more successful in the book trade live longer or have more progeny) for hermeneutics now has a sort of built in 'Red Queen' predator-prey type driver for complexity. I think this means that though any given bilateral trade is still only of complexity class P, the co-evolved complexity of the system is much greater. Indeed, Borges-the-writer-who-was-also-a-librarian's own sequential bibliothetic orderings of the books that simultaneously created his precursors - which corresponds to a non computable real- could have a representation. (This is because a few typos don't make much difference, so there can be a lot of book sequences corresponding to how specific works stood in relation to each other on Borges's mental book-case at different points of time)

Elsewhere in the library, variorum editions of Schelling focal 'interesting books' might themselves end up with higher prices because of baked in hysteresis effects. Parallel to this is that 'important' book dealers have epigenetic canalisation- i.e. they behave like each other even though they have different origins and preferences. I think this means that a lot of the time we are going to see fractal patterns with provincial 'collections' mimicking (mutatis mutandis) those of the 'metropolitan' Merchant Princes. My guess, or particular brand of Economic Romanticism, is that this still wouldn't give us a substantive 'catalog' except as a degenerate state.

Still the co-evolved descriptive complexity I am attributing to the librarians could, of course, be a property of a discrete math simulation. We just need to tinker with the rules of the game till we get a sufficiently rich steady state fractal. But would the result be something we would find humanly cognizable or intuitive? 

The problem is that, whereas librarians can have a canalised tropism to value 'interesting' books- a guy running a simulation doesn't have that ability to pick out 'interesting books' in the same way. I suppose one could breed genetic algorithms to do something which looks like Librarian Economics but the only way of knowing if what they produce is something interesting is to look inside the thing. But that's clearly illegitimate. I mean why not just put in a predator which goes through the lexical order and either quarantines or eats anything that looks meaningless when compared to the Google Books database? 

Another approach, of whose legitimacy I'm not sure, is to appeal to Intutitionistic mathematics.

Suppose there is an ideal ordering such that the Expected value of the sum of randomly teleported visitor bewilderment is minimized (i.e. some visitors, by reason of their lucky location, can quickly work out the ideal order while some, who are stuck in low structure stacks, take a very long but finite time to do so). Suppose further that the visitors are of a specific mathematical race such that Total bewilderment is a function of the spread of choice sequences they construct in comparing adjacent books. Muth rationality is the notion that one's choices or expectations conform to the prediction of the correct theory. Since the best thing for the visitor race as a whole is that the library be ordered to minimize total bewilderment, it makes sense if their choice functions reflect this (i.e. they choose to be bewildered by any empirical deviation from the ideal order). So we know there is an ideal ordering (albeit only for ideal visitors). 

We also know there are better than random orderings- e.g. the lexical.

I am tempted to say that by the Brouwer's continuity principle (an illegitimate use in this context?) this means there is a canonical bibliothetic ordering for all visitors who are the product of natural selection. In other words, there is some way to extract phenomenological information about us- on the assumption that we have evolved in a Darwinian manner- and make it available to Mathematics in the same way that the Anthropic principle might yield information for Physics.

I also think, because of the nature of choice sequences, one can keep changing the genotype of the visitors so that there is a trade-off between Total bewilderment minimization and other things we value- e.g. the chance for a lucky few to quickly get to a 'good' book-stack. 

But, can Brouwer's principle be used in this way?

Neither books nor information about ordering poses a difficulty. Everything is well defined and therefore continuous. But is it legitimate to stipulate that choice sequences be constructively Muth rational?- doesn't that make them impredicative?
On one horn of the dilemma- the Kantian horn- we can have a priori Muth rationality but no intuitive idea of how the choice sequence is constructed, on the other horn- the Darwinian horn- we know that choices are epigenetically canalised and thus something like ex poste Muth rationality obtains only we can never be sure it is optimal, and therefore really 'rational', in any sense.
One way to resolve the dilemma is to embrace a peculiar sort of monadology in which whatever is interstital is constantly populated by virtual particles which themselves spontaneously create choice sequence bridges. This, I suppose, is the Ibn Arabi's concept of the barzakh- the incompossible, phantasmal Limbo which unites what it separates- the world of the 'command', i.e. what is possible, and the world of 'creation'- i.e. what exists- which is also the pure virtuality represented by the 'superficies of the Mirror' in the Library of Babel of which Khwaja Mir Dard was surely speaking when he wrote-

Barzakh in the Mahabharata

Women are Water tho' into the World they bring

Vedic Earth, Fire & an heir to the King.

 No Bhishma, I, tho' my head's uncrowned

My Ganga is but babies drowned

Beowulf & barzakh- the Babu version

All who kill are Cain save their Loaf-Lord live

& to Murder's Mummy, Blood Money give

Or, patripassian son, by beot's lofgeornost

Tread the barzakh wyrd of Tiamat lost

Poetry's Wine is its own Klein bottle

  Why might a poet, even a crap poet like me, feel a need to believe his oeuvre has, at least potentially, properties we might call closure and connectivity? In other words, why might a poet want everything he writes to be mutually contiguous or inter-navigable? 
   A reporter does not have any such desire or expectation of his body of work. Today, he is covering a gangland killing, tomorrow it's a fashion show, the day after a Party Political Conference, and finally he might end his days running a Trade Magazine for Chemical Engineers or Pigeon fanciers or whatever it is that pays enough to keep him out of jail for defaulting on alimony or child support from his string of failed marriages.
   Why can't poets be like reporters?
 Why do they instead insist on aping that most contemptible type of journalist who begins with gossamer jeu d' esprits then graduates to spinning out eccentric feuilletons before- now firmly stuck to the auriferous thread connecting every Beaverbrook's ring of bright water to Shebol & Sauron's eye of blazing fire- finally settling down to a Midas like senescence of Inedia recycling the same old bromide or jeremiad for the Op Ed columns while still believing it to be gold not dross?
One answer is that perhaps poets see themselves as 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world' and therefore are committed to knitting everything together according to a principle of harmonious construction made prescriptive by the lyric beauty of its 'bright line' aesthetic judgements.
   If this is the case, can neglect, as opposed to obloquy,  ever really constitute a sufficiently condign sanction against the  unimpeded practice of the poet's vocation? Masturbation, at least on this side of the North Sea, is still stigmatized, yet to be called a versifier no longer carries the same freight of opprobrium as the ubiquitous 'Wanker!' with which not just our elderly Mums, or the avuncular  Emeritus Professors we've kept in touch with, but virtually everybody we turn to hoping to discuss the finer things in life, greets our effusions and either slams down the phone or unfriends us on Face Book.
  One important reason for the de-stigmatisation, if not rise in status, of the practice of writing verse has to do with the wide-spread belief that it is now confined to menstruating women of mean intelligence, recovering alcoholics of extreme belligerence and such moralising lunatics and inept terrorists as harbor a malice against the common weal not even its own all too dramatic, or democratic, self-destruction can blunt.
  Another, perhaps actually intimately related, point has to do with the manner that the persona of the poet has been individuated and abstracted out of both the craft of poetry and that which it navigates.This means that any two poets can constitute a barzakh- an isthmus between two bodies of water, one salt, one sweet- and writing poetry becomes the project of populating that imaginal limbo. However, something topologically more complicated- like the Hopf fibration pictured above-  obtains when a poet identifies more than two poets as providing a 'covering set' for his poetic universe.

   For example, the American poet, Jessica Greenbaum, writes-

'Here is the handful of poems that cover the thought-world particular to me:

“Poem Without an End,” by Yehuda Amichai

“Under One Small Star,” by Wisława Szymborska

“The World Is Too Much With Us,” by William Wordsworth

“Adam’s Curse,” by W.B. Yeats

“Brief for the Defense,” by Jack Gilbert (this can alternate with “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” by Adam Zagajewski)

“One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop'

   The problem here is that though the resultant covering militates for closed paths,  orientability- think  of the Klein bottle- is going to be a much taller order because the fiber bundle constituted by the covering poets is going to generate holes and toruses and Moebius strip like weirdness and, for some cardinalities, Strangeness so beautiful it must be true.
  Now, the older notion of poetry as something impersonal, like Math, meant that you could simply turn poets into ideal types, or make them synonymous with specific lemmas or Research Programs so that the covering space defined by a list of poets is orientable and has a canonical or high salience Schelling type solution- so partial ordering comes as standard. Here, just as in the barzakh of the ghazal- or the type of poetry that arises from the conjunction of two poets- e.g. Dante and Laforgue for early Eliot- the task of populating the isthmus or limbo between them can proceed with high orientability and algorithmic or zairja like fecundity. Milton is into both the Bible and boring epics- no problem, Satan can soliloquise and Angels fire canons. Michael Madhusudhan likes both Valmiki and Tasso- no problem, we get the interminable Meghnad Bodh Kavya.

  Those were the good old days. Greenbaum, naming her covering set of poets, asks  'Is there any blank space left for a new poem, old subjects? 
  My concern is less noble

Not that Heaven we blame that our throats are dry

Nor our drunken Mullah's obscene reply

But that all these years we've of the Saqi thought ill

When Poetry's Wine is its own Klein bottle

Barzakh & the Avestan Ram Yasht

Salman H.Bashier has suggested that the Quranic 'barzakh'- that isthmus between two bodies of water, one salt, one sweet- derives ultimately from the Persian 'purdah'. The importance of the 'rending of the veil- or apocalypse'- in Christianity makes this poetically interesting. However, I still couldn't see any really fundamental connection between barzakh and purdah till I read the Ram Yasht- the 15th chapter of the Avesta- i.e. the Zoroastrian Scripture-

42.

I will sacrifice to the Waters and to Him who divides them....
To this Vayu do we sacrifice, this Vayu do we invoke....
We sacrifice to that Vayu that belongs to the Good Spirit, the bright and glorious Vayu.

It has been suggested that the parting of the Red Sea by Moses is related to a still observable phenomenon somewhere in that region whereby the wind, from time to time, rises up to divide the freshwater of the Marshes from the salt water of the sea and maybe this was confused with the isthmus at Lake Mareotis or something of that sort.

For the Indians, the equivalent of 'barzakh' is 'antarabhava' which is associated with the Gandharvas whose Iranian form is highly suggestive-

aom jaidhyat,
avat âyaptem dazdi-mê
vayush ýô uparô-kairyô
ýat kaêna nijasâni
azem brâthrô urvâxshaya
ýat janâni hitâspem
raithe paiti vazaidhyâi,
uiti asti gafyô âhûirish uiti aêvô gafyô paitish uiti gañdarewô upâpô.

26.

I will sacrifice to the Waters and to Him who divides them....
To this Vayu do we sacrifice, this Vayu do we invoke....

27.

To him did the manly-hearted Keresaspa offer up a sacrifice by the Gudha, a channel of the Rangha, made by Mazda, upon a golden throne, under golden beams and a golden canopy, with bundles of baresma and offerings of full-boiling [milk].

28.

He begged of him a boon, saying: 'Grant me this, O Vayu! who dost work highly, that I may succeed in avenging my brother Urvakhshaya, that I may smite Hitaspa and yoke him to my chariot.'
The Gandarewa, who lives beneath the waters, is the son of Ahura in the deep, he is the only master of the deep.

29.

Vayu, who works highly, granted him that boon, as the Maker, Ahura Mazda, did pursue it.
We sacrifice to the holy Vayu....
For his brightness and glory, I will offer unto him a sacrifice worth being heard....

In Ram Yasht 7.28- asuiti asti gafyô âhûirish uiti aêvô gafyô paitish uiti gañdarewô upâpô- the Gandharva is described as the son of Ahura and master of the deep- nevertheless the hero is able to avenge his brother's death on it.

However, a brother is also a double, like a reflection in water. Without playing up a Rene Girardian notion of 'mimetic desire' and the sacrifice of the twin (Gemini obviously relates to King Jam- i.e. Yama though, actually, it is the Ashwins who are more profitably invoked in this context) it is enough to mention 'Adi Vigyan' (the original science- of casting off illness or blemish onto one's reflection) to realize that it is the esoteric aspect of a ritual, rather than a clear cut mythology, which underlies this.

Buddhist 'bardo' (unlike its Vedantic equivalent which just concentrates on erotic 'karmic residues' impelling to further re-birth) is as richly suggestive as Sufi barzakh.

Interestingly, the Zoraostrian 'Ilm e Khushnoom' school synthesizes Sufism and Zorastrian ideas in a suggestive manner.

Indeed, there are plenty of Sufi Buddhists of Iranian origin and, perhaps, Central Asian culture can only be understood from this perspective.

Returning to classical Buddhist understanding of the Gandharva, it might be worth our while to look again at the strange role they play in the Mahabharata.

The Kuru war only happened because a Gandharva resented the rightful heir possessing the same name as himself. Apparently, Gandharvas have to change their name if defeated in battle. This happens when Arjuna defeats a Gandharva. The upshot is that Arjuna gains 'caksuchi vidya'- the ability to see anything he wants in the form he desires, this is a type of omniscience but one that only grants you the knowledge you actually desire. The Bhagvad Gita gains poignancy because Arjuna has this gift. He can see that he will prevail even over his 'chiranjeevi' (unkillable) foes but can't see that his enemy is his eldest brother (because Karna does not want him to see this and Arjuna, after all, is a good younger brother who wants to obey his eldest brother).

As everybody knows, the Gita ends with a theophany and the proclamation of a pure Occassionalist metaphysics (like that of Ghazzali and the Sufis). However, both the Sufis and the Buddhists have a doctrine of momentariness such that Occassionalism is empty. Vedanta too embraces 'Mayavadi' doctrine such that all that exists is a Gandharva dream- much music and drama and superb poetry and powerful incense but it is all a shadow play, that is all.

I may mention that Jainism, thanks to Umaswati (who started off as a Mathematician) becomes 'observationally indistinguishable' from Nagarjuna's Buddhism or Sankara's Vedanta because of a subtle property of the sort of maths used in 'matching problems'- essentially this links to entropy.

'Karmic-obstructors' (i.e the matching problem for the writer of an Epic- or indeed a Kabbalistic interpretation of Scripture) run out of steam because though the sort of Maths used in Combinatorics soon yields very very big numbers, still those numbers are infinitely small relative to the decimal expansion of the vast majority of 'real' numbers.  

The sort of 'discrete maths' used by ancient tax gatherers and Monastery bursars meant that 'state space explosion' was as familiar to the literati back then as it is to us now. What was aberrant was the brief period when calculus flourished and intellectuals believed in a Laplacian universe.

The koranic term barzakh, of Persian provenance (presumably from *burz-axw "high existence"), was also used in the Islamic tradition in a similar sense. The term has not survived in extant Persian sources (cf. also Bölken, pp. 57 ff.). 

I mention all this because, it seems to me, something new comes into the poetic reception of the Ramayana- that is Riti type poetry- at about the time when Akbar, or perhaps his mother, ordered the translation of the Ramayana into Persian.

Abu Fazl tells us that the Emperor wanted to end the hatred between Hindu and Muslim by dispelling their mutual ignorance but, it seems, the barzakh between them was one that Vayu had made to go through and overtake both.

As to Ayodhya's Apocalypse, for us contemporary poets, what is it if not this?

vyagatha, vyatirekha & meta-metamorphocity

In writing about Ghalib, I've located the topos of his meta-metaphoricity in Ibn Arabi's concept of barzakh which in turn has obvious similarities with the Tibetan 'bardo' or Skt 'antarabhaava'.  I believe the Tibetan bardo lasts 49 days whereas the barzakh, as for example in the story of the Prophet Khaled- who defeated the terrible Fire which was causing some Arabs to embrace the Magian Religion- lasts 40 days.
It is notable that though Adi Sankara is familiar with the concept earlier explicated, in the Buddhist context, by Vasubandhu- for example in Verse7 of the Annapurnashtakam- he makes no use of it similar to that of the Great Sheikh.
I suppose, antarabhava's intermediate position between Thantos & Eros- the 'maranabhava' experience of Death and the 'upapatibhava' revival of Erotic appetency- thus defining itself as pure disembodied craving- trishna for saguna Krishna- already signifies 'meaning creation's' poetic certitude of Maternally sublated viyogini yoga, yielding the surety of alms.
Thus my own instinct is to go no further but just stop here and simply link meta-metaphoricity, via artha-alamkara (poetic conceits) like vyagatha- where the effect or object achieved is undone by its own cause- or the 'inverted simile' of vyatirekha- where the lower usurps the place of the higher- to the vyatiharadhikaranam counselled by Brahma Sutra 3.3.37.
व्यतिहारो विशिंषन्ति हीतरवत्

I wonder whether the fact that the great Advaitic scholars operated under the sufferance or patronage of Royal lineages tracing their way back to Bharadwaja by way of Ashwathama meant that the Gita's 'upside down banyan' (Ashvathama) which Krishna counsels us to cut-down had the slesha property of theosis by vyatirekha such that the ritualist's methexis was sublated.

A little thought will show that the property Salman H.Bashier claims for barzakh- viz. being a 'limit' which unites what it divides- cashes out, simply as a vyagatha based vyatirekha within the shloka- i.e. meta-metamorphocity is ontologically empty- surely a good thing.

The pure nominalism of Shingon or Tulsi still lay in the future- i.e at the source- so that too is all right and tickety boo.

The other way to go- viz. following Ramanujan and letting Darpan act as the 'limit', has an attraction in terms of squaring with Adi Vigyan as throwing your evils onto your reflection in the mirror- aint so bad either not being Ontologically inflationist and giving room for such fuckwits as we will always have with us coz as Pascal said there will always be more monks than Reason.

Ghalib ghazal 83

'Ind is an Eden with no Adam in it'

  That my Death deflower me in a garden strange

Shunned orphans', All-father, Shame arrange

& that my blush for Thee never quite fade

Coiff coquette curls in ambuscade

{83,1}*

mujh ko diyaar-e ;Gair me;N maaraa va:tan se duur
rakh lii mire ;xudaa ne mirii bekasii kii sharm

1) [you/they/he/she/it] killed me in an alien/other country/region, far from the homeland
2) my Lord upheld the pride/shame of my helplessness/friendlessness

vuh ḥalqah'hā-e zulf kamīñ meñ haiñ yā ḳhudā
rakh lījo mere daʿv;ā-e vā-rastagī ki sharm

1) those circles of curls are in ambush, oh Lord--
2) may one uphold the honor/shame of my claim of liberation

Prof Pritchett's opens her comments on this ghazal as follows-

'The first line sounds entirely like a complaint or lament. Some person or persons or thing or things-- which remain, thanks to the grammar of the ergative, entirely unspecified-- killed me, and added insult to injury by killing me in a foreign land, far from my homeland. What could be a more heartless deed? What could be a sadder fate? The dead lover himself seems to lament it from beyond the grave; for more examples of the dead-lover-speaks situation, see {57,1}.'

My reading differs by placing the poet in Ibn Arabi's barzakh which is the proper place for 'khayal'. 

Turning to the second couplet, Prof. Pritchett says- 'This is a verse in which those who maintain that the beloved can always be taken as God find the going somewhat awkward. Clearly the lover is asking God for help with the beloved; it's hard to make sense of the verse in any other way. It would really be an extraordinary casuistry that could make the lover ask God to help the lover escape His own curly tresses.'

As a matter of fact, no such infirmity obtains. Translate 'curly tresses' as prosopa and the conceit is one, if not Petrarch, then Barlaam of Calabria would have been familiar with. In any case, it is only by the blessing of the beloved that one ever finds her lips rather than falling into the Babylonian well of her dimples or getting tied up in knots by her uncoiffed hair.

We don't have to say Ghalib was 'vataniya' rather than 'Islam pasand' because, for the purpose of this ghazal, he presents as already dead and in barzakh, that eroding isthmus or bi-directional limit of both 'vatan' and 'Islam'.

Farsi doesn't have gender so I suppose the gender driven 'split egrativity' in Ghalib's rekhta makes a particular point- one connected with his return from the East.

The Monist meaning, it seems to me is cast in decidedly 'Purabi' dress.

Meta Metaphoricity, Zero derivation and Null morphemes

  A metaphor is a type of figurative language intended to aid the understanding or to give an added visceral or prescriptive force to a proposition.
  ' Love- True Love-  is an Eden whose abundance is predicated on the export of all its apples' is an example of figurative language in which two separate metaphors are employed in what I think is a meaningful way. A plain way of saying the same thing is, 'If you really love that old whore you've married, then, believe me mate, ignorance is bliss'

   A meta-metaphor is the figurative use of figurative language such that the speaker's own intentionality or epistemic status is either enhanced or rendered amphibolous. 'I am the apple our Eden exports' is a meta-metaphor based on taking the previous metaphor for a fact, indeed as something more real than that which ordinary Reality discloses as being the case, and deriving another metaphor, itself to be taken as even more real, on its basis. Notice there is now no single plain way of saying the same thing. All of the logically incompossible meanings listed below simultaneously coexist in my statement-
1) My 'I'- i.e. my ego-consciousness- that which outlives orgasmic death- presents a threat to our mutual Love. Fortunately, it has been taken out of the equation- i.e. our Love is safe. This is because our Love for each other is not based on ego but goes much deeper. Still, when I think about our perfect union I feel jealous of my own felicity because I am thinking with my ego-consciousness which has been excluded from the consummate and immaculate nature of our mutual love. This also means that though I may continue to  have many bad habits and faults- i.e. though your love does not seem to have made me a better man- this does not prove our love isn't perfect but just that my ego has been excluded from the Earthly Paradise we have found in each other.
2) Sex with you is great but you sure are one stupid broad. That's why I keep hitting on your ugly sister and alcoholic Mom and toothless old Gran. Live with it.
3) I'm Gay.
4) No! Your buying a bigger strap-on won't help.

  Meta-metaphors are useful, indeed vital, in a sort of ruminative speech or writing directed at oneself. They enable the entertainment of incompossible intentionalities and represent a sort of 'bracketing' or epoche such that- at least, the appearance of- paradigm busting thought becomes possible. Smoking dope achieves the same end but it makes me vomit.

 What does all this have to with Paninini's adarshanam lopah- i.e.  the null morpheme?

The Italian Philosopher/Indologist, Dr. Elisa Freschi- surely a winsome fanciulli rendering fragrant Mimamsa's Jurassic Park- whose book on Tantra is coming out next month, has this to say on her excellent blog.

Zero in Indian philosophy

Grammarians and linguists are familiar with the idea of a function of the ‘absence’ of morphemes which is currently called “zero”. Western linguists beginning with de Saussure's work of 1879 have often postulated the existence of the so-called zero-morphemes where the actual perceptible linguistic form does not match its relevant semantic and syntactic content (see T. Pontillo 2002, p.559ff.). They resorted to this device on the basis of a significant opposition pointed out between comparable morphological structures.
As focused by Al-George (Al-George 1967, p.121), on the other hand, the Indian linguistic zero is not a mere device, adopted for a descriptive purpose. It rather seems to represent “the consequence of a definite philosophy of form”, namely “the category which exists though not embodied in a concrete form, suspended as a pure virtuality at the border between existence and non-existence”.

Dunno 'bout you, but doesn't that sound a bit like Ibn Arabi's barzakh, if not the Tibetan bardo? But, before we develop that idea, let us define a notion of 'Zero derivation' as what happens, from the morphological p.o.v, when a word shifts from one category (e.g. noun, verb, adjective etc) to another without any apparent change in form. The null morpheme is invoked here, by formalists, as a sort of invisible affix permitting a word's conversion from one category to another. This poses the problem of polysemy for word-formation theory- which emphasizes connection between form and meaning- because visible affixes have a limited set of meanings whereas zero-morphemes are not limited in this way. For this reason, generative linguistics of the Panini/Chomsky type might appear to be of limited use. Perhaps language is just an extension of general cognition rather than syntax being an independent cognitive system autonomous from general cognition. Under this view, semantics takes center stage whereas for generative linguistics it is syntax which is the star of the show. However, the more inflectional endings a language retains, the bigger the constraint on run-away Congitivist metonymy and the greater the canalisation towards Generative null-morpheme polysemy. However what can be said about words- viz zero-derivation based on null morphemes- can be said of larger collocational units. In other words, we have a route from null morphemes, to metonymy via zero derivation, to meta-metaphoricity all of which occurs 'at the border between existence and non-existence'- i.e. in barzakh. Perhaps this answers the question with which Dr. Freschi concludes her post- 

A more general problem is: How can an absent element perform a function notwithstanding its absence? How comes that an effect can be grasped in absence of its cause? 

On the latter problem, see here (on tantra and prasaṅga as a possible answer).

Her book on Tantra is coming out next month (November 2012)- so that's one for the Christmas stockings sho' nuff.

Prashant Keshavmurthy & the Gadamerian Gestapo

N.B- this post has been revised on the basis of a negative comment.

Sanskrit poetry came into existence, so the story goes, when the Sage Valmiki witnessed the slaying of one of a pair of love birds amorously conjoined and spontaneously uttered a metrical couplet (shloka) in expression of his woe (shoka). The Grammarians maintain that this couplet is also an epitome of the Ramayana and, as such, could be said to call the events of that Epic into Being. Similarly, there is an Islamic tradition that when God asked 'am I not your Lord?', Adam and the sons of Adam replied 'Bala' which means both 'Yea!' and 'Woe' which is why Existence is full of sorrow.

Abu Mansur Maturidi, a tenth Century Turkish theologian, familiar with the doctrines of the Brahmins, passed on a story to the effect that Adam's grief at, his son, Abel's slaying- which apparently took place in India- first unsealed the fountainhead of Arabic poetry. A couple of centuries later, Awfi, perhaps the first literary theorist of Persian poetry, though residing in what is now Pakistan, mentions this legend and Dr. Prashant Keshavmurthy of McGill University has drawn our attention to it in a very well written essay-

Click here for the rest of Dr. Keshavmurthy's essay.
One passage I would like to highlight is that in which Awfi interrogates the nightingale & the rose-

   The problem here is that it is a fact of nature, not convention, that the mystic rose, so worthy of the rhapsodies of that winged and pious preacher, the nightingale must, in bloom of riper day, tear its skirts and not from wantoness for though that masculine music has stopped the ballet has still not reached its denouement.

The rose's full blossoming falls in a season when the nightingale- which was believed to be a purely male species- has fallen silent. This conforms to that silence beyond the music of the spheres where the mystic rose unfolds itself to itself.
The Iranian Encyclopedia has this to say-  It is only during the mating season that male bolbols sing; then they become silent, though roses may continue to bloom for some time, which provides an answer to a question posed by Ḥāfeẓ (p. 160): “O Ḥāfeẓ, who can be told about this strange circumstance that we are bolbols silent at the time of roses?” Bolbols are “physically and behaviori­ally very unobtrusive birds, thus often going unnoticed; their presence is betrayed only by their singing”; furthermore, the male and female are alike (Hüe and Étchécopar, loc. cit.). These features seem to have led Persian poets and others to consider bolbols a species without females, so that the males direct their sexual desires toward roses. Persian mystical lore thus has developed around the gol o bolbol “rose and nightin­gale” motif, comparable to thešamʿ o parvāna “candle and moth” theme. The bolbol as bīdel (a disheartened lover), ʿāšeq-e zār (a miserable lover), šeydā (maddened by love), and the like was supposed neither to sleep nor to eat. In one metaphor the bird has “in his beak a rose petal of a lovely color;” Ḥāfeẓ, p. 290); sometimes, however, he is mast“drunk” (cf. ʿAṭṭār, p. 42, “the bolbol entered [the birds’ assembly] mast-e mast(com­pletely inebriated),” not with wine but with love of the gol. In fact, according to ornithologists, bolbols do feed on insects, worms, and berries; white-eared bulbuls also eat dates, causing serious damage to the crop in southern Iran (Hüe and Étchécopar, loc. cit.). Their supposed “drunkenness” can be explained by their amatory behavior during the mating season (note that mast also means “rutting” in modern Persian).
Dr.Keshavmurthy suggests that Awfi is grounding 'an account of the psychological origin of poetic fiction' in the trope of 'hairat' (astonishment, amazement, being arrested) as arising from a simulated naivety.

Yet, this is far from naive and is actually quite witty and satirical. The mystic rose is doomed to  wither in the vase of literature except of course it is not longer that which it signifies. The 'diegetic world of the ghazal' simply does not have the property of being outside Time or free of Autumn's blighting touch or disconnected from the rhythms of the natural world or 'its burgeoning polysemy which human senses can't cope with'. The reverse is the case.
Keshavmurty thinks Awfi is 'performing or siting the psychological origin of poetry in a failed mimesis of Nature's cycle of season'. But this is patently absurd! It is the Persian carpet, not the Persian poem, whose 'diegetic universe' is outside Time and the change in the Seasons. Time is the ineluctably modality of the audible as Space is of the visible. To confuse a ghazal for a kilm is as serious an error as taking the marble of Praxiteles for the methexis of Plato

My own feeling is that the material he so ably presents is best, that is most economically, approached from the, for poetry, eternally poignant, Rose & Nightingale, tashbih/tanzih antinomy rather than the chrematistic productivity of Gadamerian 'temporal distance' as a Credentializing availability cascade in which actual living traditions are the one thing not used for 'filling in the yawning abyss' between the text and ourselves because no such gulf exists- it is a modish mise en abyme merely, unless Hermeneutics really is Hell, nor we out of it.
Indeed, what can we say about our learned hermeneut's tashbih to the texts he permits us to cherish when what comes to pass thereby is not an epistemic break- all such rupture being our rasika rapture- but an impassable tanzih with respect to himself? How else are we to read in Maturidi's knowledge of Brahmanism or speculate, in the mirroir sans tain of Keshavmurthy's text, on the similarity of Maturidi's origin story for Arab metrical verse and that of its Sanskrit counterpart which, of course, Keshavmurthy must have imbibed with his mother's milk?
Instead what we get is all the obligatory, apple polishing, linguistically tortuous and literally meaningless, genuflections to gadarening Gadamer and other such swine-  even Judith Butler gets a Hosanna!- while no attempt is made to address the blindingly obvious question that has popped into the reader's mind viz. how come this Hindu guy reading Awfi doesn't think- 'well, Valmiki's couplet is also supposed to be a sort of prophesy- it encodes the whole Ramayana- so that has bearing on the question of whether prophets are prohibited poetry, indeed this fact might have been quoted, sub rosa, to support an esoteric hermeneutic, such that a passionate or figurative tashbih type utterance itself has alethic or even self-punitive force resolving the Nightingale & the Rose tashbih/tanzih antinomy re. univocity- such as is suggested by the Adamic  'bala!'- or else pointing to its bracketing in a barzakh of the Ibn Arabi type, and all this can happen within orthodox Hanafi tradition- which is all like way cool!- so lets see if Mutaridi's kitab al Tawhid itself can be mined for anything suggestive in this context coz that's the guy famous for knowing from Brahmanism'.
  In other words, why isn't Keshavmurthy doing a, Leo Strauss, 'persecution and the art of writing' kinda Catskill shtick instead of touching base with the gormless vacuity of goddam Gadamer?
  I dunno. I'll ask him. But he's scarcely likely to confess that people with PhD's gotta watch out for the Gadamerian Gestapo otherwise they get rounded up and cattle trucked to gas chambers. You remember the Bhopal disaster? It was a cover up. Fact is the victims weren't slum dwellers at all but actually posh JNU trained Professors who forgot to quote Gadamer every second sentence.
For which I personally blame David Cameron. That boy aint right.

Keshavdas & Abu'l Fazl

Keshavdas was the court poet of Raja Bir Singh Deo of Orcha, the usurper infamous for murdering Abu Fazl to earn a huge reward from Akbar's rebellious son- later the Emperor Jehangir. I have read that this Raja built a temple in Mathura which Aurangazeb later destroyed prompting, the poet, Chandrabhan 'Brahman' to write
Bibin karamat-i-butkhanah-i'i mara ay shaykh
Kih chun kharab shavad khanah-i' Khuda gardad
(Look at the miracle of my idol-house, o Sheikh
That when it was ruined, it became the house of God!)

Interestingly, Keshavdas's poem on his patron contains high praise for Abu Fazl.
Allison Busch, a scholar of Braj at Columbia, writes 'Abu’lFazl’s death is treated with a narrative generosity that approaches reverence: his body is said to have emitted a miraculous fragrance at death, indicative of his spiritual power. Emphasized in a string of eulogizing verses are Abu’l Fazl’s nobility; his intrepidness on the battlefield; even his support for Brahmans – all high terms of praise in the classical Hindu literary imagination.'

Dr. Busch highlights the word-play in this verse of Keshavdas-

The question that arises in my mind, in connection with Dr. Busch's theory that Keshavdas moved from a position of hostility to the Turkish invaders to one of conciliation, is whether riti (court) poetry was ever really wholly divorced from bhakti poetry- as the school of Sheldon Pollock might hold. The opposite view enriches our reception of both types of poetry- it reconciles maryada & virodha bhakti- but this raises the possibility that Indian people weren't stupid brutes at some point in their history. Clearly, this is Hindutva gone mad and so Keshavdas really was just a moronic sycophant utterly without morals or character.

Pico Iyer, Graham Greene & the Malgudi Blues

N.B- In view of negative comments received, I have substantially revised this blog-post.

   Pico isn't from Malgudi. Nor was his dad- the late Raghavan Iyer. But, back then, Bombay, at least for  our clannish Iyerarchy, was still a small place and so my father, being a couple of years younger than Pico's dad, had to hear much kolaveri paternal palaver about  the latter's slimness, scholastic achievements and his not needing specs.
  However, it was Raghavan's self-confidence- there being no Iyer prodigy higher than himself- which set him apart. Few Indian origin Scholarship winners failed to be overawed or feel uncomfortable when translated to Oxbridge. Even Ramanujan, who was a genius, came to see the shortcomings of his methods and adapted himself to Western Mathematics on the urging of his Guru, Prof. Hardy. On the other hand, it was  Chandrashekar's Guru bhakti for Sir Arthur Eddington which placed a restriction on the development of his own theory. Similarly, under the blazing Eye of Tolkein, Naipaul was left blighted by the Shires' dreaming Spires, while Amartya Sen, according to Bhagwati, was intimidated away from his own, presumably Pigouvian proclivities, by Leftist harridans like, the blonde bombshell, Joan Robinson and the bald blancmange, the gorgeous, pouting, Nikki Kaldor.

  Raghavan Iyer, however, seemingly effortlessly, gathered up all the glittering prizes, save an All Souls fellowship, without compromising his own atavistic, Adyar, beliefs. Perhaps, the cult of Radhakrishnan in the 1930's, when he was the Spalding Professor at Oxford, boosted Raghavan's self confidence. Equally likely, Raghavan's faith in Theosophy- which found Universal Messiahs in the unlikely shape of Tamil Brahmin shitheads like the two Krishnamurtis- instilled in him a sense of a World Historical Mission. Annie Beasant, after all, had wanted Jeddu Krishnamurti to attend Eton & Oxford- but the boy was too dim. Raghavan, like his son Pico, had no such problem. Indeed, not Oxford, it was New Delhi which posed the difficulty. The India to which he returned had rendered marginal the verbose Theosophical/Servants of India Society Liberalism to which he had pledged an early and spontaneous allegiance.
   Later on, Raghavan's move to America might have seemed a flight from, rather than an expression of faith in, his boyhood creed. Even in Careerist terms it seemed retrograde; had he remained in India he might have become Manmohan Singh's boss or, if he'd settled in England, gained a seat in the House of Lords and become a household name as a BBC 'talking head'. But Raghavan had correctly identified California as the happening place and got there as the Sixties began to swing.
 The question is whether he had escaped Malgudi or actually, and atavistically, returned to that imaginary and geometrically frustrated topos by way of having failed Bombay, at least the Bombay of the Bombay Plan, by his 'contribution to democratic planning' while Research Chief to the Planning Commission. The reason I say this is because the very year that Raghavan and Nandhini settle in California is also the year Hollywood fucks up, Malgudi's Guide, Raju's metamorphosis into a Mahatma, not to mention, the Mem Sahib, Rosie's, metamorphosis into the bayadère, Nalini-  whereas Bombay redeems both R.K Narayan's novel as well as his Swedenborgian barzakh by concretizing it as Limdi- the little town that pioneered Women's education and which set Vivekananda on the path to World fame- and where Chetan Anand had once taught English. In other words, Bombay- I will not say put Malgudi on the map, it was there already, Narayan's talent is unquestionable- Bombay connected Malgudi to everything else on every map of India- Rosie to Gulab (that was name of Waheeda Rehman's character in the immortal 'Pyaasa'), Rosie/Nalini to Rukmuni Arundale, Scripture to Forgery, India's good behavior in the British Prison to its early release from the sort of famine Pearl S Buck chronicled (well, except for that experienced during the tenure of Muslim League Govts in Bengal and Punjab- the food surplus state refusing to sell grain to the food deficit province- the Muslim League having disdained both British Prison and good behavior), and finally early release from this Earthly Prison to the release of waters from clouds of Krishna hue which, verily to view, is the darshan of all release.
 What of the Hollywood version?
I found this on the web-  'Whereas the backdrop is authentic, the romance of a provincial Indian tourist guide with the dancing-girl-wife of an older merchant seems partly artificial and contrived, much more in the Hollywood spirit than in that of, let us say, Bombay. And the development of the narrative continuity is so erratic and frequently slurred—so clumsy and artless, to be plain-spoken—that both story and emotion are vague.'
  This is the problem with both Raghavan and Pico. When Nandhini Nanak Mehta/Iyer writes something she may get her facts wrong or her judgement may be faulty but what she says is meaningful precisely because it isn't vague, if not vacuous.
 Her husband and son, on the other hand, though not charlatans- 'the background is authentic'- yet make the romance of dialogue- and travel is a dialogue, dialogue is travel- seem 'artificial and contrived'- something much more in the Hollywood spirit than in that, certainly, of Bombay. It is the deficit in continuity, of connectivity, which mars their Art- I will not say Thought for neither has had an original thought- it is not that they do not subscribe to a Grand, or merely garrulous, Narrative, nor that their emotions remain unengaged - it is that both are nebulous and therefore without nuance.
   This is Pico writing about R.K Narayan-

Writing in English, perhaps, allowed Narayan to step just an inch outside his territory. Is this true? Surely, the opposite is the case. Writing in English allowed Narayan access to a collocational English availability cascade, which secured him an imaginary appellational terroir as a sort of after dinner Tamil Tokai, something sui generis- the highly acid and accidental product of a 'noble rot', or gangrene, disconnecting it with its natal sub-continent

 'The other thing that strikes you, within three pages of the beginning of The Man-Eater, is how you can hear the jingling ox-bells, smell the spices, see the humble scene with “appetizing eatable on a banana leaf and coffee in a little brass cup.”

It is perfectly natural to read books in line with stereotyped perceptions. Pico, like R.K. Narayan is a professional writer, who has trained himself to notice things. The jarring note enters when Pico says 'see the humble scene...'. Why humble? Does Pico really not know that Maharajas, that too from 21 gun Salute States, relished 'appetizing eatables served on a banana leaf' and drank coffee 'in little brass cups'? They may have also eaten of Sevres china when hosting the Viceroy, but that entailed ritual purification and besides, made everything taste less nice.
The odd thing here is that an English, Anglican, author, like Robert Wood, with a PhD from Oxford in Nuclear Physics, understood Narayan differently even before he first set foot in India. Why? In the English language, the very word Brahmin denotes something that is not humble for the same reason that it is the reverse of luxurious. 

'There are snake-charmers and swamis and elephant-doctors here-  but none of them are seen as more unusual than a knife-sharpener or a seller of “coloured drinks”;  everything is regarded with the unflappable good nature of a man just looking in on his neighbors. In that way, the exoticism of India is never Narayan’s selling-point or his interest; he writes of–and seemingly for–his associates as Isaac Bashevis Singer might of the Upper West Side or Alice Munro of rural Ontario. 
Pico's comparison of Narayan to Singer is interesting- psychologically, it might be illuminating, but what it highlights here is Narayan's deracination, he did not write in Tamil or Kannada, and the fact that whereas Singer's Yiddish readers- survivors like himself- demanded he continue with his writing against the judgement of his editor, Narayan might never have been published but for the accident of his catching Graham Greene's editorial eye.
Pico confuses a very English Pooterishness with Iyer authenticity.
 'Again, I can hear my South Indian uncles speakingly fondly of their wives as “The President of the Union” (or “The Speaker of the House”) - but so did suburban Solicitors in Slough back in the 70's- and catch all- all? All!-that is engaging and heartfelt in India when I read of the tough guy devouring a hundred almonds every day to train to become a taxidermist, the poet trying to write the entire life of Krishna (the completion of even a part of which causes mayhem), the forestry officer making up a collection of “Golden Thoughts,” arranged alphabetically. The textures and flavors and cadences are as Indian as palaver or hugger-mugger; the dramas and hopes and vexations belong to us all.'

Surely, all the things Pico highlights are what makes R.K a second rate writer- his Theophrastian cartoons advance no Aristotelian agenda. Kipling, the consummate journalist, had great powers of observation. He never resorted to cliches. There is always some new fact of sociology or ethology that re-reading his work yields up.  He shows more than he knows and, in consequence, everything he writes about becomes more interesting not less so.  Malgudi is almost infinitely less interesting than Mysore. It contains no intelligent or cultured people. It has no Balzacian depth. It is as fucking stupid and worthless and utterly and deracinatedly shite as Raghavan and Pico's own oeuvre. R.K was a Tamil speaker. For us, Kannada is a treasure trove. Ours is 'vanilla' Hinduism.  Kannada literature is inexpressibly rich and complex to us precisely because we are its Levinasian alterity- its material, that is Expressive, needs match exactly with our Spiritual ones. Neither R.K Narayan nor A.K Ramanujan make this explicit. Their homage, alas, is too humble, too Iyer Tamil. Kannada, like the God of the Vaishnavas, the Arhat of the Jains, is not content that merely the perfume of its incense settle on us from a distance. No. Something more is called for.

   Pico, of course, is deaf even to Iyer Tamil. He thinks the edible on the banana leaf humble. Chief Justice Anantanarayanan- Updike made a poem of his name- also has banana leaves and brass cups but the quality of his language, his poems, his scholarship is such that an enchanting image is created. Had Kipling himself gained employment in Madras, rather than Lahore, he could not have penned a more eloquent tribute to Tamil womanhood or, more to the point, avvial and applam- the both to be served upon banana leaf only, just mind it kindly I say

   In a sense- the sense in which Narayan speaks to Pico- Malgudi's idiolect is palaver- that last not being an Indian word, not even an Indglish word, though it does sound a bit Tamil, if you don't actually know Tamil- in other words, it is a sort of facetious literary pidgin from the Slave Coast- India no longer being a country of slaves though, perhaps, this Iyer at Eton didn't get the memo.
Similarly, hugger mugger is an old English word- meaning something done secretly or in a muddled manner- but the secret to this muddled thinking is that there is no secret, it's all just a facile availability cascade. Narayan believed in the silly American Spiritism dating back to the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Raghavan Iyer subscribed to Col. Olcott's generous but gullible Theosophy and speculated about whose reincarnation Eisenhower represented.

  Pico, like his Dad, is self-evidently a very bright guy- a person of good character, he attended Eton and Oxford in reverse order because of some administrative mix-up but was a good sport about it. Nor is his essay on Narayan a sloppy piece of work. Read the whole thing for yourself. Essentially an academically stupid guy with bad Tamil is being valorized by an academcally smart guy with no Tamil because that's how academic availability cascades in Literature operate. The joke here is that Narayan expresses India's disenchantment with Education. The heroes of K.S Venkatramani's novels- Murugan the tiller, Kandan the Patriot- only succeed when they turn their backs on passing exams and gaining Bureaucratic promotion. It was the pallidty of this world view- a future Chief Minister of Madras Presidency would advocate the destruction of factories, another would recommend that Schools teach lower caste students only their traditional skills- its futile gestures towards retrogression, which enabled Tamil- like that of Karunanidhi, but also the Kannada of Veerappa Moily- to rise up and displace the stupidity of English, the envenomed stasis it bequeathed Lawley extension. For Pico, Narayan is a high priest. Yes, but only because the Temple has been abandoned. India- of which Victor Hugo said 'India ended up becoming Germany'- had been downgraded by the Global Credit Rating Agencies of Credentialist Enlightenment and Education. All it was permissible to believe about India was that nothing happened there, nothing could happen, it was a Club of Rome basket case, R.K. Narayan the Virgil chronicling its transformation not from brick to marble but marble to mud.

'Reading Narayan, you soon see, is a little like sitting on a rocking-chair in a steadily churning train; the story is always pushing forwards, with not a wasted sentence or detail, and yet its theme and often its characters are all about going nowhere and getting nothing done.'
  Why is this so? Pico, son of Raghavan, though a Classical Scholar, doesn't answer quod nescis quo modo fiat, non facis- R.K's Occasionalist humility in denying any programmatic understanding of how or why he writes, extends also to his characters. Instead, Pico turns Narayan into Malgudi's malign Mayin- a feckless and effete Demiurge- orchestrating futility in a manner Bureaucratic and dilatory.

'There is a kind of ambling inevitability to the rhythm of a Narayan story, sleepy but intensifying, that at once evokes a leisurely and mischievous master-plotter and puts you inside the frenzied, but changeless, world of India right now. The fortune-tellers and astrologers who are such a staple of this world are always figures of gentle fun because no one can begin to predict what’s going to happen next. People learn to rue their acts of kindness and are constantly urged, for the good of all, to be cruel. No good deed goes uncomplicated, and no sin is ever overlooked.'

  In the light of the above, Raghavan Iyer must actually have been, to his son, a particularly cancerous hypertrophy of a R.K. Narayan character.

  He did unexpected things- he became a lion-tamer and married a tightrope walker- or, no, he became a Rhodes Scholar and married a Gujerati- same difference really- but the fact remains that his inner life retained the sort of synoecist legibility, or collocational familiarity, of a Malgudi character and, as such, ought to have interested- by being the reverse of interesting- Graham Greene in the sense of affording him a dimly nitid cameo for one of his dingily gaudy Entertainments- like the Indian 'Mass Observation' volunteer in 'the Confidential Agent'.
   Pico, of course, is the opposite of a 'Mass Observation' volunteer- having successfully fed a Mass Market taste for vicarious explorations of Observation's vacuity- and he takes Greene as a sort of literary father figure because he wishes to affirm the Theosophical, or, Obeyesekere 'Small-scale Society', truth that reincarnation means one becomes one's own Dad and so- since R.K Narayan's dad too was a Headmaster, and since all Iyers are R.K Narayan characters, and since Character and Inwardness and Thought and other such shite is merely Samskara, and since only pi jaw is eternal- it therefore follows that everybody is everybody and has a Global Soul and it turns out Greene was just the timid son of a Tamil headmaster who became a lion-tamer or trapeze artist in Lawley Extension and so, obviously, his books are all about fathers and sons and how- ever since the Brits chivied the Iyers out of their village agraharams- where, like Bihari Brahmins of the best stripe, they had previously spent their time cracking each other's skulls open with farm implements- it's like there's this hiatus valde deflendus between them if, but only if, both son and sire are the sort of little shits who get scholarships and publish worthless books because otherwise they could spend their time taunting each other for not getting scholarships or not securing Publishing deals for their worthless books.
  For Greene, for Waugh, Catholicism meant the World mattered because, as do families in the father, the World can find a Center, and since their travels in the wastes and the wilds had shown them that that Center was Everywhere, it therefore followed that the Father has a Son whose Passion is unspent and so writing is the ongoing project of inventing everybody's lost childhood for it is only in the concurrency of that alterity, as of Judas's lost boyhood, that Christ, that is everybody, has already been betrayed.
  For Raghavan and Pico, nothing has a Center because Eternal Recurrence makes everything the same. Pi jaw's Palingenesia ensures that samskars remain merely samskars, they never become stigmata, and are thus unconnected to Grace. At least, this is true with respect to the sort of samskar we term literary writing- which of course is only reading. Here, it makes for a facility without felicity, a yeasting without yearning, Polonius's Annunciation as opposed to Hamlet's Himmelfart.

And, no, since you ask, I haven't read Pico's book. Silly question. But I did read this-

'the father's last phone call to the son consisted of an answering-machine message racked with sobs, left in response to 'Sleeping with the Enemy'- an essay by Iyer on Greene. Greene's great gift and his fount of despair, Iyer had written in that piece, was his ability to "see the folly and frailty of everyone around him"- 

and this-

'and then his voice gave out and he began to sob. I couldn’t ever remember hearing him sob before, least of all over an answering machine. It was a shocking thing, to hear a man famous for his fluency and authority lose all words.”

Father and son had one brief subsequent meeting. “Ten days later, he was dead, at sixty-five, and the last real time I’d heard from him was the gasping call about Graham Greene.”

As he was finishing his non-memoir, Iyer found himself unable to explain to his wife, Hiroko, which man within his head he was addressing. He concludes that he knew — or knows — Greene better than his own father and that Greene knows Iyer better than Iyer knows himself.

That reads a bit too neatly.

What resonates is Iyer’s response when asked to cite a Greene passage that stays with him, emotionally.

His choice: the last line from A Quiet American: “Everything had gone right for me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.”

   It's an odd choice or a clever-too-clever one. For Greene, for Graves, for Le Carre's 'Naive and Sentimental Lover', the elimination of the sexual rival is the collapse of Adultery's trisexual house of cards- every arrested adolescences's last defence against prospering in Realty's Potter's field- but there's always someone you can drunk dial and say you are sorry to- well, at any rate, Raghavan managed it because by a splendidly Iyeronic atavism he had Theosophised his wife into the Goddess- Gandhism having foreclosed that possibility for his own Mum- and thus reverse Oedipalized Pico's conception.

'A couple of days before I began reading The Man Within My Head, a friend told me she had met the author’s father, Raghavan N Iyer, many years ago. At that first and only meeting, the celebrated philosopher, Oxford University professor and theosophist told my friend that he had abstained from sex until his wife was ready to conceive. He wanted to ensure that the product of their union would be exceptional, he said. The result was their only child, Pico Iyer.' In every act of abstention or indulgence, there is a man within us that is angry with us. Perhaps,  a Divine satire upon a diabolical satyriasis, Graham Greene- who feared his Anglo-Indian doppleganger, a vulgar con-man named Meredith de Varg, because to meet your double is to die- doubles for Pico as the unquiet ghost in the geometrically frustrated triangle between this chaste-all-too-chaste Iyer father and son.