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?

Gayatri Spivak as Europeanist.

Gayatri Spivak describes herself as a 'Europeanist' i.e. an adept of such metaphysical arcana as feature in Derrida, Deleuze and 'Slap her; she's French'.

But (spoiler alert) the Nietzchean Fata Morgana- i.e. that sinister, all synthesizing, synaesthetic Wagnerian Ousia or World Historical spectacle which, if it doesn't kill you with boredom, only makes you wronger- the three aforementioned all reference, albeit under the sign of catachrestic difference, isn't actually European- i.e. Americanism's mimetic rival- but simply an equally manipulative, Small Town, wannabe TV News anchor type, Cheerleader/Sociopath who, back in Third Grade, got her tongue stuck to the backside of the Harvest Festival's giant ice sculpture of a cow. Her family fled across the Atlantic to fromage their heads in shame, but a decade later the girl returns, pretending to be an Overseas Exchange Student, to revenge herself on the fellow contestant in the Child Beauty Pageant who, faking friendly concern, advised her to French kiss that ice cow's ass for good luck.

Which, I suppose, is an elaborate way of saying that if Americanism is a metaphysical dogma, it is one of multiple realizability such that mimetic desire, and the pharmakon that requires, is depassed.

By contrast, Europeanism- by which I mean provincial Continental types having to make do with Phenomenology because only England, by reason of its doubling as New England, was so blessed by Providence that its every Political concurrency deadlock always ended up cashing out as but the inertial buffering ordained by Newton's Substantivist God-  Europeanism could never, by reason of Phenomenology's status as being totally fucked in the head, decompose any Theory of Mind type canalisation from its own Red Queen epigenetic landscape and thus, for never having a double, remaindered ever amongst Reason's doomed dialects.

Which is not to say Europeanism, like Indology, is wholly inutile but rather that it clusters not with the Humanities but the sub-Humanities. Thus, with Kant we have an Ethics fit for autistic Asimov robots, with Hegel a Theory of History for brain dead Bodice Ripper beefcakes & with Marx a Political Economics for the baby born of the joyless buggery between beefcake and robot- for only thus can a truly Proletarian caste be conceived- babies born any other way serving the state in  more ways than the simply reproductive.

Europeanism, as practiced by Spivak, is a convenient catch-all for stupid dirigiste ideas Europeans only had because they were too aware of an inferiority with respect to Information aggregation mechanism design compared to sea girt Anglo-America.
However, as the paleo-Leftist Terry Eagleton pointed out long ago, Spivak isn't really a Europeanist at all but just a Narcissistic corn fed American cheerleader for a vulgar eclecticism- the 'gaudy supermarket' is his lapidary phrase- whose major malfunction is her own pink and greedy little tongue stuck to the magisterial butt of Europeanism's ice cow.
Take a shufty at this-
'It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English.'
What is Spivak saying? When a Mongolian kid reads Sherlock Holmes or Dracula or Oliver Twist , translated into his own language,  it is certainly possible for him not to know and have no reason to remember that the country he is reading about had a Empire or needed reminding of that fact.
  Indeed, if nineteenth century English literature is worth reading, it must be possible to read it without remembering something bleeding obvious- viz that a country's literature presents its culture to itself- as well as something utterly false- viz. that Imperialism was understood as England's Social Mission by any actual Nineteenth Century Englishman or Englishwoman whatsoever.
This is because people can only have a Social mission to people in the Society they themselves inhabit. They can have a Military mission, a Trade mission, a Humanitarian mission, a mission of Enlightenment etc to people in another land. What they can't have is a Social Mission to them. As a matter of fact, a large number of English people believed that England had a Social Mission to its poor and vulnerable. Some still do.
Now it may be that there was some nut-job who thought that England should order its entire Society so as to be the best possible Imperial power ever. Thus, the Established Church should decide all issues of dogma only in the light of what is best for the Imperial project- perhaps incorporating Islamic and Hindu and Voodoo elements into the liturgy. The City of London, rather than pursuing private profits, should only back investments which make the Empire as viable as possible. The Schools- not just Halieybury, but also Harrow not to speak of establishments more hooligan or humbler yet- should teach Oriental and African languages, not Latin and French.
Did anyone actually suggest anything of this sort?
No.
Joseph Chamberlain started off as a Republican but became an Imperialist. Surely he came to believe that 'Imperialism was England's Social Mission?'. Nope. He just wanted Imperial Preference- i.e. Protection for Plutocrats.
The truth is, Empires don't greatly matter. Naval supremacy does. British rule in India succeeded because it first removed as much 'loot' (the fruits of centuries of primitive accumulation) as possible, thus reducing the incentive for indigenous military formations, and then devised ways by which India could run a purely agricultural trade surplus sufficient to pay an extortionate 'home charge'.
This was only possible because, more by luck than cunning, British naval supremacy wouldn't be seriously challenged for the whole of the century.
What was not a matter of luck, but cunning 'mechanism design', was the increasing soundness of British finances. However, here, the relevant political battles had already been won in the previous two centuries. Once again, this had nothing to do with Imperialism. Indeed, Burke, as much as Paine, welcomed Washington's victory over booted Hessians while the former castigated the corrupt 'Indianism' of John Company as a greater threat to the Polity than the Jacobins.
Spivak, of course, is blissfully ignorant of all this.
She has something stupid and false to say so she tells us we really ought to read English literature only in the stupid and false way she requires.
But let her speak for herself-
'The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious "facts" continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms. '
Literature itself is Cultural representation. This is not a 'fact' but a tautology because Literature is something cultural which represents. Its role in the production of cultural representation is the same as the role of cultural representation in its own production.
Suppose this is not the case. Suppose there is a convention whereby Literature- like the sahitya for a kirtan, or libretto for an opera- is never encountered alone but only as a factor of production in something else which qualifies as  'Cultural representation'. In this case, Spivak is not talking nonsense.
However, as a matter of fact, not abstract speculation, no such convention as mentioned above arose in connection with Nineteenth Century English literature. Spivak is talking shite.
Worse, it is paranoid shite- she thinks British Imperialism is some sort of malign force which continues to operate not by oppressing or exploiting people but by getting readers of Nineteenth Century English Literature to continue to ignore two supposedly 'obvious' facts which are a priori and empirically false and all this happens only coz that fucking Imperialism is being like a total bitch, dude, and once again refusing to change the laws of logic or the historical record so as to render Spivak's thesis less utterly shite.

Apart from the notion that the World is full of incompossible Ousias which have never actually existed but are Paranoid Political ideations simply- what is that thesis?
'If these "facts" were remembered, not only in the study of British literature but in the study of the literatures of the European colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the "worlding" of what is now called "the Third World."
Does this vaunted 'Europeanist' really think Maeterlink produced a 'cultural representation' of Belgium's 'Social Mission' to King Leopold's Congo? Was Buddenbrooks a 'cultural representation' of Germany's Social Mission to the Tanganikans or the Boxers in China?
What 'Worlding'- that is Heideggerian 'being-in-the-world'- as opposed to mindless atrocity, occurred  when the Germans suppressed the Maji Maji Rebellion or carried out atrocities in Tianjin?
Nothing interesting, it turns out. Spivak has some trivial  academic grudge to work off and History and Literature and Philosophy only exist for her massive misrepresentation so as to provide her a means to vent her spleen in the most grandiloquent terms possible.
'To consider the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation fosters the emergence of "the Third World" as a signifier that allows us to forget that "worlding," even as it expands the empire of the literary discipline.'
In other words, this 'Europeanist' is peeved because non-European literatures are getting translated and taught and she's too fucking stupid and ignorant to get in on the act even though, lest we forget, she be a nigger from some Third World shit-hole herself and thus got that 'Worlding'- univocal between Tanganika and Tianjin- down pat.
This is not to say Spivak is wholly wrong about translations. Take a gander at this-
'When Chotti was fifteen. He looked and looked and found Dhani in the depths of the forest. Dhani sat on a stone beside a spring. He lifted his eyes when he saw Chotti. Chotti held his feet. Why grab me feet? Teach me ta shoot an arrer. Me? Yes. Ye are t’ god Haramdeo of archers. Why d’ye want ta learn? All Mundas shoot, no? What new skill will I teach ye? I want to win at Chotti fair. Oh, for that? Is that a nothin’ goal? Suddenly Dhani laughed at the sight of Chotti’s glowing face. How shall I teach ye, he said. If I hold an arrer the polis’ll again lock me up.'
'Teach me ta shoot an arrer.'  If a White had indeed put these words into the mouth of an Indian tribal, Spivak might have a point. But this is her own translation of the disgustingly patronizing Mahashweta- Ritwick Ghatak's idiot niece- and so Spivak's 'Worlding' turns out to feature not just infantilizing the tribal but also making him talk like Dick Van Dyck playing a Cockney Chimney Sweep.

Spivak thinks 'nineteenth-century feminist individualism could conceive of a "greater" project than access to the closed circle of the nuclear family.' Previous scholars had pointed out that women were not permitted access to the closed circle of the nuclear family in England. Men fucked other men and had babies. Women were kept in a kennel outside. Mary Woolstoncraft conceived of the project of feminist individualism at last gaining access to the closed circle of the nuclear family. Instead of men fucking men, to make babies, they would be taught to fuck women who, in consequence, would be let out of the kennel and into the bedroom. Spivak's great discovery is that nineteenth century feminist individualism could conceive an even greater project. Was it stuff like a married woman's right to dispose of her own property or a young woman's right to take up a learned profession? Don't be silly. Of course not.
But let Spivak tell you herself-
'This is the project of soul making beyond "mere" sexual reproduction. Here the native "subject" is not almost an animal but rather the object of what might be termed the terrorism of the categorical imperative.'
So there you have it. George Eliot read Kant and took the next boat to Heathendom to terrorize the natives, by gassing on about the categorical imperative instead of 'teachin'  'em ta shoot an arrer'  at each other.
Except nothing of the sort actually happened at all. Dickens' Mrs Jellyby owes something to the Clapham Sect but nothing to Kant. Women did campaign for things beneficial both to themselves and Society at large. Some, like Florence Nightingale, took an interest in colonial conditions by supporting organizations like the Indian National Congress. Annie Beasant, the champion of the Byrant & May matchgirls, set off for India after a conversion to Theosophy.
Not a single woman who took an interest in Colonial affairs did so only because she had read Kant or Bentham or any other such fuckwit.
But that doesn't matter to Spivak. (my remarks are in bold)
'I am using "Kant" in this essay as a metonym for the most flexible ethical moment in the European eighteenth century. Kant is a more flexible ethical moment than Rousseau? Seriously? The guy who says its wrong to have a wank is more flexible than the guy who gave himself a hernia jerking off?
 Kant words the categorical imperative, conceived as the universal moral law given by pure reason, in this way: "In all creation every thing one chooses and over which one has any power, may be used merely as means; man alone, and with him every rational creature, is an end in himself." It is thus a moving displacement of Christian ethics from religion to philosophy. Hamann, De Maistre, Hegel, practically everybody who was anybody didn't think any such displacement as Spivak suggests actually occurred.  Why is she being so stupid? As Kant writes: "With this agrees very well the possibility of such a command as: Love God above everything, and thy neighbor as thyself. For as a command it requires respect for a law which commands love and does not leave it to our own arbitrary choice to make this our principle."'
The "categorical" in Kant cannot be adequately represented in determinately grounded action. The dangerous transformative power of philosophy, however, is that its formal subtlety can be travestied in the service of the state. Such a travesty in the case of the categorical imperative can justify the imperialist project by producing the following formula:make the heathen into a human so that he can be treated as an end in himself'
This, then, is Spivak's great discovery- much parroted in subsequent 'Po-Co' screeds- a non-sequitur deduced from a string of non-sequiturs. 
It turns out philosophy isn't worthless shite but has a 'dangerous transformative power'. Not a power to actually do anything, you understand- i.e. in itself it remains worthless shite- however it is nevertheless a power that can be travestied in the service of the State because....urm...well, it just can, okay?
It's like how an onion farmer justifies his raping the land by saying ''The maxim- 'Make the onion into a human being so the onion can be treated as an end in itself' is indeed the basis of an universal moral law.' 
Why is Spivak telling us this silly story? Well, it turns out she's read Jane Eyre and Wild Sargasso Sea and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and come to a remarkable conclusion. Books written by White women which garner praise can only be read in one legitimate way because what they are all actually saying is- 'We are worthless gobshites. There is only one non-worthless gobshite in the Universe- viz. Gayatri Spivak. We too attain an aleatory non-shiteness in so far as we point to our 'Social Mission' to celebrate that worthless fuckwit.
'What? This isn't nonsense at all. It's all there in Derrida. Crack a book sometime, Terry Eagleton, you great big beardie you.'

Envoi-
Spivak says- 'In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Narcissus' madness is disclosed when he recognizes his Other as his self: "Iste ego sum."

Not Madness, but the Death Tiresisas foretold, supervenes on that 'Iste ego sum'. 

Gayatri babe, you fed on gesture political Leftism's Narcissism of small differences but were too stupid to go Mad and too brain dead to require a costly disconnection from the Teaching Machine so your bogus Third 'Worlding' is simply a case of 'Slap her, she's French' because slapping people feels good though, as the credits roll, we are left with this deflationary revelation- no actual French people were hurt in the making of making the movie of your getting your tongue stuck to the butt of Europeanism's ice cow.

Native informants and Post Colonial Theory.

India has an official name not generally known in the West.

It is 'Bharat'.

Gayatri Spivak, in a book where she speaks of the 'native informant' as 'the name for that mark of expulsion from the name of man', also tells us that the name Bharat derives from the younger brother of Lord Rama. She is wrong. Bharat, famous in poetry as the son of Shakuntala, was a remote ancestor and already a legend in the earliest texts connected to Indian soil.

Why did Spivak say something most school-kids in India know to be false?

Well, her book came out a few years after the Babri Masjid episode.

It was a fixed meme of the Left that the Hindus were trying to invent a vengeful Father God.

Spivak was doing her job as a native informant.

She was saying- 'I'm a Brahmin. I know Sanskrit. I can confirm that the Indians have indeed named their country after the younger brother of their Warrior God because some White guy said so in his silly article.'

The trouble with this view is that the West no longer gave a fuck what the Indians called themselves.

They didn't want to rule India or meddle much with its politics.

Sure, there were some worthless academics in some prestigious Universities who pretended to care deeply about the Babri Masjid, but they had no power, their books were derided as empty verbiage, and the job prospects for their students were dwindling.

Spivak is an example of a person willing to tell stupid lies to anyone who wants to hear stupid lies.

Why?

She wants to market her worthless scribbling.

Her students too have to publish some worthless shite to get a Credential.

Shite feeding on shite without any pause for digestion.

Everything I'm saying would be true even if the 'native informant' comes from an imaginary country or planet.

Suppose, there was an item on the news about Middle aged Ruritanian bachelors being trafficked to service Gokturkistan's randy goat population. Publishers would be inundated with harrowing accounts of trauma and recovery from people claiming to be just such Ruritarian Pankaj Mishra look-alikes who, quite naturally, excite the lust of Gokturkistani goats.
 Spivak's magpie mind, attracted by this new bandwagon, would be quick to make some throwaway obiter dicta- like 'the Gokturkistani goat's invagination of the (dis)catachresis under the sign of Globalization rea(ffirm)s only to pro(blame)atize Marx's diuretics in the Grundisse'- and a hundred dissertations featuring Gokturkistani native informants would be launched.

Still, it must be said, self-identifying bhadralok Bengalis remain fascinated by the possibility of advancing themselves as 'native informants' but only because they are conscious of such great personal inferiority to their ancestors that their services are bound to prove utterly disastrous to the new Herrenvolk. 
Take Niradh Chaudhri. While the British were around he piped small. He knew that any attempt to pose as an authority on native culture or mores would be very quickly detected as a brazen fraud. Once the Brits left, Nirad Babu thought to himself that perhaps the Americans, still deeply racist at that time, might take over the British Empire and come back to India as conquerors. So he wrote a long memoir proving that Hindus are utterly shit and can't manage on their own. Nehru might be okay but only because he dressed like a Muslim. But most Indians were Hindus and, like the Bengalis, wore a dhoti. Thus, they were fucked.

Nirad personally did well out of this book.The Fifties was a good time for a brown man to come out as a worshiper of Whitey. After all, Independence had created losers as well as winners. The losers were credible witnesses of such aleatory virtues as Empire might, to a nostalgic eye, be thought to possess.
Soon, even the Indians began to warm to him. After all, the West was taking a beating in every corner of the globe. Nirad Babu's vapourings could scarcely tempt them back to the thankless task of draining Bengal's miasmal swamp teeming with such sub-human mosquitoes.
Niradh wasn't a Mir Jafar, he was literally a nobody. Bengal had once possessed human capital- its high value-to-weight export industries were Knowledge based. But the Bengali Bhadralok- whoring after false Gods- had fucked over their own people big time. Human mosquitoes such as these could only be exploited as vectors of some more virulent Malaria or Brain Fever. Thus, not the West of Adam Smith, but Maoist or Franz Fanon type shitheads posed the only threat. They alone might covet Mastery over this human mosquito horde.
This being the case, the sort of Credentialized cretins who get top marks in their M.A exams, unlike Nirad who failed, should spend their time sucking up to soixante huitard or Fanon type fucktards by pretending to be their native informants (this is not just the Subaltern School whose doyen emigrated to Blighty before Nirad, but also the gorgeous pouting Spivak who, singularly, is a worse Europeanist because she embraced that very Phenomenologym or narcissism of small differences, Europe had to abandon to stop tearing itself to pieces) while more readable, for less Credentialized, shitheads like Naipaul and Nirad concentrated on presenting their arses to their impotent former masters.

Ultimately, of course, thanks to demographic changes potentially favorable for Muslim nations, the two projects coalesced. Trotskyites had to turn neo-con to fulfill their potential for mischief. Old fashioned Racists, to keep faith with their visceral project, had to present themselves as quivering with compassion for every malnourished dusky child. Hypocrisy and Dissimulation had hypertrophied on a seemingly Global scale. Everyone felt that they had a secret alterity of victimhood festering inside themselves.  Like Rachel Dolezal, they sought a new identity as part of some vast global diaspora of an enslaved and brutalized race subjected to thought control and body fascism and Mom not letting me play with my own shit.
The native informant was now everybody who enjoyed the sound of her own voice. Indeed, my repeated exposure of David Cameron as a French Cambodian lady-boy, wot don't even speak English and has never been further West than Bangkok, has ended up contributing to his election victory because people I've talked to about this while knocking on doors canvassing for the Labor Party, have recovered memories of being married to him. 'Good on yer, Dave mate,' is what they say to themselves- 'Sorry about stealing the money you'd saved up for the boob-job. Good to hear you're doing well for yourself. Illegitimi non carborundum. Well, not your bollocks of course. Those did have to be ground down and a sweet job them Bangkok bastards did of it too. Ah to be 15 again and on one's first School Trip as a drug mule from the Golden Triangle!'

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.

Ranajit Guha & the barzakh of Bliss

Okay, I was wrong to write disrespectfully of Ranajit Sir. He's 90 and a sweet guy with a lovely wife and still drinks a glass of red wine now and then and, what's more, has gone back to writing in Bengali which, gotta say, is an absolute rasgulla of a language.
Still, because of the Zizekian Aufhebungsverstag of the Hegelian Sorites of the Gramscian deconstruction of the Post Kristevan Chora- like d'uh! as if you didn't know- I am obliged to insist that it is only my own fond re-imagining of him as the Blue Angel of Vienna's Gurtel Road Red Light District which, like, totally sublates any 'empirico-critical' (i.e. relationist rather than privilegedly substantivist) depiction of him coz the only possible merit of that stripe of shite is that it might militate against some Univocal, Pedantic, and utterly rent arbitraging Bourgeois, conception of  a Static, Parmenidian, 'inter-subjective Reality'.

Anyroad, just thought I'd get that of my chest 'fore chowing down, or vomiting over, the subject of this post- viz. how the Akhbari conception of barzakh, as an isthmus which unites what it divides, radically changes our reception of Guha's latest book- in which the Hegelian 'limit' is all that stands in the way of Ranajit's becoming unanimous with, his hero, Ramram Basu and, Ramram Basu with Ramram's hero, Bharatchandra Ray and how, like, the true, prayerful, Bliss of dynamic Anandamangalam is revealed to be Universal History's playing holi or rasa lila with Ind's peasantry, which- to fuckwit ex-pats, like yours truly- is as the Goddess Annapurna, whose rice we still relish more than caviare or truffles.

Guha commences his short book by rehearsing the utterly egregious argument that, by Hegel's efforts-
'World-history became synonymous with “Reason in History.” This is a view of history that allows all the concreteness to be drained out of the phenomena which constitute the world and its historicality. How such abstraction is brought about by the logic of Aufhebung, that is, “the act of superseding” whereby “denial and preservation, i.e., affirmation, are bound together,” has been demonstrated by Marx in some of his commentaries on Hegelian texts.
'He shows, for instance, that, in Hegel's 'Elements of the Philosophy of Right', the superseding of Civil law  equals Morality,  the superseding of Morality equals the Family, the superseding of Family equals Civil Society, the superseding of Civil society equals the State, the the superseding of the State equals World History.'
At this point, let us pause and ask whether to our modern understanding, this view of Hegel has any utility. Yes, you might answer. It adds to a data-set confirming our apriori intuition that Continental fuckwit Professors have always been fuckwits and fucking unclean Continental types to boot. But, what if Hegel was just a Careerist who would have said anything to fill up his lecture hall? In that case Hegel is the solution of a co-ordination problem for the shitheads of his time. That's interesting because we have a lot of information about shit-headery on the Continent at precisely Hegel's time, so there's a big data set going begging here which is gonna help us with our theory of Schelling focal point selection- which is undoubtedly really really important to Econ, Linguistics, Math, Philosophy (think Lewis on Conventions), etc
My own take on Hegel, based on a salutary and impartial ignorance of his writings and milieu, is that it's a blind- i.e. avaricious- groping towards what we would now call a Homotopy Type theory and gained salience for that reason- i.e. its a dark Heraclitean fire prefiguring the glint in the eye of a Research Program still far from puberty.
Another way of approaching Hegel is to think of Reception as Canalisation and Expression as Capacitance diversity such that the guy is really speaking about a theory of where to site Waterwheels and turbines so they generate the most 'profit'.
On neither view- which cash out as each other by cellular automata theory- does Hegel, to our present understanding, throw away information (if he did, fuck him, move on) and present us with a view of history that 'allows all the concreteness to be drained out of the phenomena which constitute the world and its historicality'- as Guha says. The fact is one type of Hegelianism, Muller's for example, is a sort of slingshot argument that only one big (I think, non-cognitivist) fact exists. Marx's 'humbug of a Baronised Yankee', Benjamin Thompson a.k.a  Count Rumford, whose experimental work helped the theory of thermodynamics, actually, albeit indirectly, contributes a non-mischievous sort of neo-Hegelianism which resurfaces in Lefty discourse despite the best efforts of Marx and Engels and other such Frost Giants committed to freezing up the Social Landscape.
For India, of course, Marx did what Manu no longer could. But don't blame the fucking White Man for it.  Boulding, Haldane- lots of smart people came to India and were blown away by the beauty and human potential of our Poor. They knew the Math and tried to warn us against our own Gandhian or Gramscian or Guhaian fuckwits. Like we'd listen to Mlecchas when we have Marxists of our own!

Anyroad, getting back to Guha, he continues-
'The outcome of this serial Aufhebung is to displace these entities from “their actual existence” and transform each of them into a philosophical concept so that, says Marx, my true religious existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion; my true political existence is my existence in the philosophy of law; my true natural existence, my existence in the philosophy of nature; my true artistic existence, existence in the philosophy of art; my true human existence, my existence in philosophy. Likewise the true existence of religion, the state, nature, art, is the philosophy of religion, of nature, of the state and of art. By the same token, historicality as the true historical existence of man in the world is converted by the act of superseding into philosophy of history and the concreteness of the human past made to yield to the concept of World-history. Which is why that concept and the uses to which it has been put in Hegel’s philosophy of history will engage us in the argument developed in these pages.'

So, Guha is not writing about Hegel as yielding information on focal point evolution w.r.t the notion of World-History as the limit of a Research Program in Ethics- no! not at all! why should he? He emigrated from India in 1959, dude. Indians, Hindus- take me for example- are forbidden to continue thinking or reading the moment they 'cross the black water', else they lose caste. Indeed, their thinking must become a caricature of the stupid availability cascades prevalent in their grand-father's time.
Thus, Guha isn't interested in Hegel but in the shite written by a slanderous fuck-wit of a drunken journalist and failed Economist- i.e. someone scarcely less scurrilous or more sober than yours truly- who fucking died forty years before he was born (I'm still alive- physically, that is. Morally- not so much.)

'Aufhebung amounts to the “transcending of a conceptual entity,” as Marx points out in his reading of a parallel series from the Encyclopaedia where each term transcends the one that has gone before.
“Thus, private property as a concept is transcended in the concept of morality,” and so forth, until the last term, absolute knowledge, emerges hierarchically as the highest in which all the others are dissolved and affirmed at the same time.'
Is Guha right? Well, sure, why not? It may be that a Research Program in History or Philosophy or Logic or whatever the fuck it was Hegel was up to, always has the terminus that its first promoter or auteur, wants it to have. So Hilbert's program must have the terminus Hilbert thought it would. I suppose there's a way to save this notion. My own R.P of meta-metaphoricity & ontological dysphoria might, for all I know, militate to that same end. But if I knew, I wouldn't do it. Why run a program if you already know the output? What's the fucking point? Why not just say 'Hegel was a fucking racist cunt' and be done with it?
Maybe that's what Guha is doing, but in an ultra-polite Bhadralok manner-
'In much the same way, the order of supersession in the aforementioned series taken from the Philosophy of Right culminates in the transcendence of World-history by the concept of God or Geist, as it is made clear not only in that text but in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History as well. Transcendence entails, in this last instance, a claim to superior morality in favor of World-history. The latter, constructed transcendentally into a providential design, “can be seen as a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God,” according to Hegel himself. And “what we call God” is, to put it in his own words, “goodness, not just as a general idea but also as an effective force.” Thus World-history, “the plan of providence,” acquires an aura of moral sanctity by definition, while the state, a key link in the chain of supersessions and the agency that promotes such a plan as the “concrete manifestation” of “the ethical whole,” comes to “constitute ethical life” itself. It is in this way that World-history managed to reach the high moral ground climbing on the back of philosophy. The latter, for its part, has proved itself truly to be a child of the Age of Imperialism. Going by Plutarch’s story about that meeting between Diogenes and Alexander in Corinth, there was a time when philosophers were eager to keep their distance from world conquerors. Not so in the post-Columbian
era when it would be possible for one of its most distinguished thinkers (sic!)to write 'world history moves on a higher plane than that to which morality properly belongs. . . . The deeds of the great men who are the individuals of world history . . . appear justified not only in their inner significance . . . but also in a secular sense. But from this latter point of view, no representations should be made against world-historical deeds and those who perform them by moral circles to which such individuals do not belong.'"
Guha, Sir, if Hegel is 'one of the most distinguished thinkers' in this field and he is a stupid racist cunt then why are we fucking still talking about this field? The Berlin Wall fell. Nobody is interested in fucking Hegel or Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao. Fuck 'em- they're as dead as Queen Anne . Why critique them? What's the point?
Guha answers-
'Our critique, which stands at the limit of World-history, has no compunction whatsoever in ignoring this advice (i.e. the Great Man theory of History) . From the point of view of those left out of World-history this advice amounts to condoning precisely such “world-historical deeds”—the rape of continents, the destruction of cultures, the poisoning of the environment—as helped “the great men who [were] the individuals of world history” to build empires and trap their subject populations in what the pseudo-historical language of imperialism could describe as Prehistory.'
Fuck me, Guha Sahib! That's the point of your critique? You're really saying that your worthless books help us do something we can do for ourselves far more easily- viz. saying rape is bad, o.k? genocide is real bad, o.k? fucking up the environment really aint cool, o.k? Fuck is wrong with you, Guha Sahib?
How fucking stupid do you think we are actually? If we don't read your shite we won't know that genocide is bad? Really? Go fuck yourself you worthless cunt. Or sodomize Amartya Sen. Same difference really.
What is wrong with you Bengali mules?
My guess is that you people stopped going, as kids, to the village Mullah, to learn Persian and Arabic. But that immediately cuts you off from the demotic, that is democratic, Baul, minstrel tradition. Thus your 'Romantic' rebellion wasn't Romantic at all but a forced retreat to a blinkered Scholasticism upon which European Theory could engraft itself in a manner doubly mischievous.
To see why, think for a moment of the Hegelian 'limit' as Ibn Arabi's barzakh or Abhinava's Antarabhaava- this immediately changes your reception of Riti poetry and thus Ramram Basu.
So what if doing so doesn't profit you in terms of providing a recipe for yet another worthless book?
 'Chetana ham bhikkhave kamam vadami. ' Only intentions matter for all that matters is matters 
of the heart- whether you call it History or Hysteresis or, as Tagore tells us, Death's cardiac diastole and casual-all-too-casual healing touch


What concerned you was 'the representation of the colonial past held in thrall by a narrowly defined politics of Statism' and thus the inadequacy of your brand of historiography.
The good news is that you were and are a shit-head. Your brand of historiography is just a wank. Nobody cares about it- at least nobody who matters, i.e. nobody with a heart.
Pace in Requiem, goo-ha, write more of your shite. Leave it to people like me to actually take the trouble to go and take a dump on the doorstep of every Louvre (what? It sounds like 'loo')  and fart in the crowded lift of...urm...can't think what, but I sure can describe my fart. Which, ultimately, is all the historiographer can do.


You write- If limit, as defined by Aristotle, is “the first thing outside which there is nothing to be found and the first thing inside which everything is to be found,” its function in the title may be understood as a signal of our attempt to explore the space beyond World-history.'
Urm, no. You are talking shite. Nobody, in Europe, since Cauchy, defines Limit like that. It's stupid to do so. 
In Islam, the concept of barzakh- but also a pervasive, 'Sufi',  relationist soteriology- think Ahmed Ghazzali's love dialectic between the 'master and slave', Mahmud & Ayaz- fucking gets rid of sorites type problems in a thoroughly modern manner.
Why write shite of this stripe?-
'In other words, we shall try and think World-history in  Historicality and the Prose of the World terms of what is unthinkable within its boundaries. '
Something is unthinkable within some boundary? Says who? Bhratrhari? No. Vasubandhu? No. Kumarajiva? Nope.  Uttara Mimamsa shitheads like Kumarila or Prabhakara? Fuck no. Some navya nyaya shithead from Nabadwip? Not likely mate. Fuck is wrong with you?

'In this attempt to probe the limit of historical thinking we follow Wittgenstein. Why? He was a shithead.  Brouwer, Kleene, Heytig etc. contributed to Math. Fuck,Witless-stein ever did? 'To draw a limit to thought, he says, “we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought"). Fuck off! To fence off my garden, I've got to stand in your garden? An Astronaut travelling at the speed of light who returns to his starting point has to have known what lay outside Einstein's universe? We can't have a quantitative prediction of dark matter coz we can't interact with it? These are well known results from the time, Goo-ha, when you were in your prime- i.e. younger, more sober, less ignorant, than I am now. Why do you write this impredicative shite? Humility a la Godel's theorem? But, Kripke gave the workaround for that when you were 40. Why follow Witless-stein when you have Kripkenstein?
'Accordingly, in our move towards a thinking of historicality as what cannot be thought, we shall set out from that side of World-history “inside which everything is to be found,” taking the concept of “people without history” for our point of departure.
So, there we have it. First you define World History as that which no actual concrete being or collective of beings can belong to- i.e. all people are outside History- then you say there is a concept of some peoples as 'without history' in the sense of not having been already fulminated by 'World-History', and then say you are going to think what you have already unilaterally decided can't be thunk.
Why, Guha, why?
You don't think English speaking Bengalis aren't worthless enough as it is? You think your entire class should meet the fate of H.N.Ghoshal in Burma? Was that why you thought Charu Mazumdar was a Messiah, you worthless Nihil-bari, not even Naxalbari, cunt?
It is you, goo-ha, who says India hasn't a history- not fucking Hegel who was simply ignorant.
Why?
So you and your ilk could pretend to be Commies and gain kudos in the West while getting laid and getting paid by pretending to be something cool like Black Panthers, though actually Brown Pandas fattening on the exorcism of the very evils you incarnate.

Let us now turn to the way you vomit on Ramram Basu- a Persianized, Brahmin hating Kayastha - whose great achievements you ignore choosing instead to concentrate on that one work of his which alone exposes him to criticism by reason of his  execrable prose style.
However, Ramram only wrote that terrible book because he was paid to do so by William Carey- the 'cobbler-savant'- a Missionary who had to pretend to be an indigo manufacturing businessman, otherwise John Company would have deported him. Incidentally, Carey was a Dissenter. There is no Historical Evidence that John Company harbored enemies of the Established Church.
J'accuse, you Guha Sabib of belittling the great Ramram under pretense of praising him. Instead of putting forth evidence that Ramram wasn't just a great Historiographer but a man of truly Secular and Feminist views (interesting himself in the plight of child widows), you chose to emphasise his servitude to some low caste mochee from Blighty who wrote this about our hero-

Carey is clearly stating here that not only was Ramram  a true SECULARIST converting to  any and every Religion as occasion required, he also held MARXIST views re. free distribution of his semen to young widows as well as militantly championing advanced an FEMINIST program as is shown by his procuring abortions for young widows he had seduced. 
Yet you ignore this glowing testimonial from Dr. Carey in favor of this-
'I got Ram Boshu [Ramram Basu] to compose a history of one of their kings, the first prose book ever written in the Bengali language; which we are . . . printing.'
In other words, Carey had become a publisher and like all publishers was talking up his product.
'Here, according to Carey, was a double first for an Indian language—the very first instance of its historiography and that of its prose—both Historicality and the Prose of the World achieved under the aegis of colonialism, for it was the missionary acting for the Company’s government who “got” the native to write the book that he did'.
Are you fucking illiterate as well as mental Guha you cunt? Please explain to me how a guy who quit the Anglican Church- a fucking Dissenter- could be a "Missionary acting for the Company's Govt' ? if there is any proof of this, you worthless cunt, you should have published it and gained acclaim not as a fucking Subaltern but a Field Marshall of English Historiography.

You are lying and you know you are lying. Amartya Sen, like you, when caught out in a lie by a White Man, takes the same suave Babu recourse to meiosis.
"However, the claim is somewhat exaggerated. (what a reasonable little Babu it is!) He (that is Rev. William Carey) was right to speak of Basu’s work as the first Western-style historical narrative in Bangla, but not as “the first prose book ever written in the Bengali language.”
Guha is wrong.  If Ramram is writing history so is Bharatchandra, so is Hemachandra- the fact that there are poetic interpolations doesn't change anything. Macaulay's oeuvre includes the (not actually pornographic) 'Great Lays of Ancient Rome'- so what? His book still qualify as belles lettres, as does Ghalib's Mihr-e-Nimroz.
Why does Guha say something so fucking stupid? The answer is he is hypontized by the poetic, not alethic, phrase 'the prose of this world.' Does he have a theory demarcating prose and poetry? Nope. He is a Babu shithead as egregious as Aurobindo.
Guha continues-
'Yet the importance of this error is hard to overestimate.' Guha, you cunt, the error is yours entirely. But why speak of 'overestimating' it?  It is beyond Human Capacity to overestimate your Babu fuckwittery.
'It illustrates the connection between history and prose (what? the notion that History is Carmen solutum? But, you cunt, Carmen Solutum is still poetry, even in Bangla, as Madhusudhan proved) that had come to be taken for granted, by that time, in the West (really? Did the Irish Aisling poets really take it for granted? Maybe they weren't truly 'Western'. You worthless fuck, you talk of the 'subaltern' and you write in English- a country you fucking immigrated to in 1959- and yet you think the vast majority of the peoples of these islands are just 'not Western'?. You must know the story of Dwarkanath & the Welsh Eistedfodd- so why, goo-ha why?)
'Indeed, we have in Carey’s description not only a record of what he found so exciting about the work commissioned by him. A publisher pretends to be excited about his shite product- really? That's what your fucking 'Historiography' takes as primary Evidence? You are shit, goo-ha, and ha ha you fucking piece of goo.
 'More important, it allows us to see how by the end of the Age of Enlightenment two of the most powerful movements of contemporary Europe—one in politics and the other in thought, that is, the drive for overseas expansion and the passion for history—happened to intersect in an apparently small detail of South Asian life. How fucking stupid are you goo-ha ha? Portugal gets global 'at the end of the Age of Enlightenment?'  That's how you read Camoens? Fuck off, Bengali mule!
 Long before the first modernist historian of Bengal was to sit down to write his narrative in prose, the latter had already been assimilated to a global process of historicization. For, since Columbus, Europe had been obsessively engaged (really? Since Columbus was it? Fuck off you stupid fuckwit- Columbus really does not represent any fucking epistemic trauma and dawning of a intellectual Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. How fucking ignorant are you actually- you worthless Bengali cunt?) voyages of self-discovery (sic!) requiring it to try and match the coordinates of intercontinental space by those of universal time—geography by history. This exercise relied on a new mathesis of comparison. A new mathesis, that too of comparison? Come on, goo-ha ha, don't be shy tell us what that old mathesis of comparison was why don't you?
'Climates and habitats, customs and polities, belief systems and phonic systems of the most diverse kinds were all collected and displayed side by side on epistemic spreadsheets to be measured and calculated for their worth on a civilizational scale standardized in the West.
Nonsense. If this were true there would have been no debate re. whether Confucian China was not naturaliter Christian. Fuck off, you lying hypocritical cunt who pretends to be more ignorant than you undoubtedly are by reason of your ability to play the 'Me just a poor Nigger' card in the West.
'Since civilization stood for progress in time, the scale itself was identified with history enriching its concept with discriminations and differentials it had not known before. Really? Whites didn't think Blacks scary before or, indeed, vice versa? Exactly how fucking stupid are you, worthless cunt?
Language was one of those spreadsheets of knowledge at which European science and imagination were incessantly at work for four hundred years between the Discovery of America and the Scramble
for Africa. Now you're just making things up to show you aint senile. Spreadsheets indeed! But even before the formation of comparative linguistics as a special field of studies a delicate but clear distinction between poetry and prose had emerged from this exercise. Poetry was assigned
priority on the temporal scale. For fucking ontogenetic reasons you big baby. Correspondingly, the status it gained on the scale of values was that of the originary and the primordial'. How did it do that?Surely you must know- big fat liar? Why dont you tell us goo-ha ha?
'Neither the sanctity associated with the former nor the mystic (sic) of the latter applied to prose. Subsequent and younger, its time was regarded as that of the everyday world and its values as mundane and modern.'

So, to sum up, goo ha ha believes that Prose is like the younger brother of Poetry and it got weighed in the scales of Values held by some Mermaid or Norn and other such witless worthless shite.

Goo ha ha and his subaltern shit-eaters do interpolate a little History into their mythological fantasies and poetastering flights. But, goo ha ha and the rest of you goo-khavan worthless shit eating cunts, what you do aint Historiography. It's just passing the begging bowl round coz you is so fucking and unfortunately 'subaltern'- i.e. not White, not Worthwhile, and but Brown in the sense of being Shite.

Guha says, about Ramram Bose- a guy paid by a White Man to NOT write poetry-
'To put it another way, a particular manner of thinking about the past has perhaps been inflated into a genre—vyakti into jati.Vyakti into Jati? Fuck is wrong with you, worthless Bengalis cunt? Are you really so fucking ignorant as to think 'vyakti' means 'individual' and 'jati' means Universal in the manner you suggest? Perhaps you really think that what the West always regarded as Shite- viz Scholastic cunt-queefery- is actually some sort of Universal Law of Cognition.  Okay, from Russell there is a direct line to Homotopy Type Theory. But, there is nothing else. In particular, there is as nothing to your invocation of a vakti/jati syzygy anymore than there is anything to Amartya Sen's nyaya/niti syzygy. You fuckwit ignorant Careetist expats are just making things up out of whole cloth. This is what you write, worthless cunt-
'The work of Ramram Basu, mere gravel that stops World-history in its globalizing track, incites us to break out of this generic containment and join historicality on the other side of the border '
Really? Gravel stops anything in its tracks? No. Gravel is used to pave permanent ways- Autobahns,  Guha you fucking worthless cunt. You say a great working class English dude, William Carey, was actually a  secret agent of fucking Imperialism avant la lettre.  You say the book he commissioned from Ramram, which he stipulated ought to be in prose, caused him to gush a little.  Yet, this Ramram, a Hindu like me, is supposed to... what? 'stop World-history in its globalizing tracks? How? Why?
Goo-ha ha, this sort of rhetoric is cool if you are a chauvinist Missionary or corrupt Godman- you are now posing as both- worthless cunt- saying the equivalent of 'When our sister Dorcas held fast against the temptation of Satan to, like, buy her baby some milk rather than give me all her earnings- Globalized Evil was stopped in its tracks!' 
Fuck is wrong with you goo-ha ha? Being the son of a fucking zamindar? Fuck off. 

'In order to do so (i.e. 'join historicality on the other side of the border' coz like you're pregnant with its baby and, I dunno, David Cameron & Obama & Manmohan are all actually ADOLF HITLER) it will help, first, to inquire what kind of containment it is and how it works. But you already told us it is generic so why would it help to first inquire what kind of containment it is? As for the question of how containment works... urm... it's containment right? So it works like all containment does- i.e. by creating barriers. If it does not, it aint containment. It is written large over Hegel’s texts- nonsense, you read it into Hegel's texts because you are a worthless, deeply ignorant, fuckwit- paradoxically, by the liberal use made of two of the most inclusive phrases one can think of namely, prose of the world and prose of history. —these are the most inclusive phrases you can think of? Really? You aint really thinking very hard are you, cunt? Worthless Bengali Mule. Prose of the World- that sound inclusive to anybody? Prose of History- that sound inclusive? No. History is shite spouted by cunt faced Teachers and dickhead Professors. History aint inclusive. It's boring shite. That's why nobody knows it- including gu-ha ha.
 World and history: taken together, they add up to a space big enough, one would have thought, to house all of historicality. Oh! So that is the sort of thought you have is it? World and History together adding up to something real big? What then do Apples and Oranges add up to you worthless Bengali cunt? Fruit salad? No. It's got to be something way more meaningless than that coz u r shite u worthless Bong.
'But that did not happen: several continents and their populations were still left out of history. Very careless of History, I'm sure, but does that prove malice?.  To understand why, let us consider how in this usage prose relates to world and history. Linked by a semblance of uniformity, prose here stands both for a condition of language and a condition of being. WOW! YOU ARE TOTALLY BLOWING MY MIND!  Do you actually believe that language began in song and that everybody talked blank verse in Miltonic times? Fuck is wrong with you worthless Bengali shithead? The frequent and surprisingly fluid traffic  (why surprising? when is communication a traffic other than fluid?) between the two is characteristic of much of Hegel’s writings on history and accounts, to an extent, for some of their turns and twists. Rubbish. The guy was an ignorant cunt- just like you goo ha ha.
Why don't you, fucking Bengali Mule that you are, just give up the pretense of having a brain and just go back to your true status as a 'sugar loving parrot' squawking  this sort of shite?-

'The twofold prose (i.e. as representing a condition of language and being) belongs to a hierarchy of stages in Spirit’s progress towards self-realization in history. No it doesn't. You know it doesn't Why are you telling such stupid lies? You are Bengali. You must know some Math, some fucking Phil. What is the fibration here such that, out of a dialethia, a fucking partial ordering neverhteless arises?Guha, you cunt, either you know more than any fucking living Math maven or YOU ARE A CORRUPT, MERETRICIOUS, SOCIO-FUCKING-PATHIC, LYING SHITHEAD MORE VIRULENT IN WITLESS ALETHIC VANDALISM THAN ANY SHAMAN OR BRAHMIN OR MISSIONARY OR MARXIST OR WHATEVER THE FUCK BHADRALOK CUNTS LIKE YOU NOW CALL YOURSEVELVES.
'To start, in ascending order, with the prose of the world, it signals the end of the primordial unity celebrated by poetry since the beginning of time. In that undifferentiated universe nature had been conspicuously lacking in mediation between “life in general” and the living individual. The division
of genus into species and of species into individuals made no difference in this regard. Unable to break away from their originary bonding with the earth and its environment, all such “moments of simple
determinateness” would be absorbed in “the process of Becoming merely as a contingent movement.” For, as Hegel reminds us, “organic Nature has no history.” By contrast, “Spirit is time,” and the
prose of the world heralds the advent of consciousness—“the middle term between universal Spirit and its individuality or sense-consciousness.”
The latter mediated in its own turn by the “structured shapes”that consciousness assumes as “a self-systematizing whole of the life of the Spirit,” realizes “its objective existence as world-history.”
'The twofold prose belongs to a hierarchy of stages in Spirit’s progress towards self-realization in history. To start, in ascending order, with the prose of the world, it signals the end of the primordial unity celebrated by poetry since the beginning of time. In that undifferentiated universe nature had been conspicuously lacking in media Historicality and the Prose of the World tion between “life in general” and the living individual. The division of genus into species and of species into individuals made no difference in this regard. Unable to break away from their originary bonding with the earth and its environment, all such “moments of simple determinateness” would be absorbed in “the process of Becoming merely as a contingent movement.” For, as Hegel reminds us, “organic Nature has no history.” By contrast, “Spirit is time,” and the prose of the world heralds the advent of consciousness—“the middle term between universal Spirit and its individuality or sense-consciousness.”
The latter mediated in its own turn by the “structured shapes” that consciousness assumes as “a self-systematizing whole of the life of the Spirit,” realizes “its objective existence as world-history.”

I'm not kidding. The fuckwit really wrote this shite.
Siddhanta- Guha is a guy with a nice wife and he's fucking 90 for fuck's sake. He writes shit BUT only because HIS SUBJECT IS SHIT.
 He don't need a relationist barzakh of bliss. He's got something better. Munafiqat. Hypocrisy.
Telling stupid lies over a very long period pays off.
Mind it kindly.

Ranajit Guha & the praxis of stupidity

Ranajit Guha is an historian. He is over 90 years old. He was born in India and only emigrated some 12 years after Independence. Thus he must have known that the vast majority of Indian peasants under the Raj
1) couldn't read or write any language, let alone lawyerly English, and literary Persian and scholarly Sanskrit and so on.
2) didn't know the 'series of codes which defined his very existence'- because some of those codes were written in lawyerly English and very very few of the people who knew lawyerly English also knew precisely what 'series of codes' obtained and how they related to each other. The Viceroy didn't know-he'd ask his Principal Secretary. The Principal Secretary didn't know but thought he might know someone at the Club willing to chance his arm and venture a guess. This guess if sufficiently canvassed and contested by vested interests might call forth a countervailing guess and mark the beginnings of a debate which might trundle on noiselessly, decade after decade, in dry-as-dust academic circles such as those in which the 'Subaltern' school of Indian historians displayed their Revolutionary credentials to each other as part of a Crendentialist Ponzi scheme.
Why does Guha tell us such absurd lies about the Indian peasant?
Well, he wants to prove that-
1) Peasants who rebelled under the Raj did not do so because they were at the end of their tether. Not at all. You see they were all, each and everyone of them, expert philosophical hermeneuts with plenty of leisure and cognitive capacity to just go on 'manipulating the familiar symbols they saw around them'- as in a Lullian zairja, or Glass Bead game,  so as to 'extract a meaning out of the harsh world around him and live with it'.
In other words, peasants under the Raj- though underfed, overworked, suffering from chronic and debilitating ailments, subject to corporal punishment and so on- nevertheless burnt up precious calories, not learning to read and write, but reading 'the familiar signs around them' so as to 'manipulate them and extract meaning'. Why? Well it's coz if they didn't undertake this very complicated hermeneutic task then their life would be unbearable and they'd rebel but do so in absence of mind.
I mean, suppose you took Heidegger and Gadamer and Ricouer and you beat them and starved them and forced them to work in the fields, what would happen? Would they 'manipulate the familiar symbols' of your whip and your cane and your gun so as to 'extract meanings' of the sort that can be found in the books they wrote while living comfortably off their Professor's salaries? Certainly not. They'd either rebel or die or get real depressed. Indian peasants, under the Raj, however were quite a different breed of men. Even when they did rebel it was simply part of this exhausting and exhaustive process of 'manipulating familiar symbols to extract meaning'.  That's why real history, genuine historiography, aint about how and why and when people at the end of their tether can and do rebel, nor is it about studying how those rebellions can succeed in making things better- no, perish the thought!, what a vulgar suggestion! you see, real history, real historiography- at least when we speak of Indian peasants under the Raj- is actually something highly cerebral and baroque- like sabak-e-hindi mystic poetry, where wine doesn't mean wine, it means mystic illumination, or Sanskrit verse, where 'the laundress with big breasts' doesn't mean a hot chick with big bazoongas but mystic illumination, or Aurobindo's verse where mystic illumination doesn't mean mystic illumination but 'T.S. Eliot is shite at Greek and fucks up soooo bad in Latin it aint even funny.'

2) if the Raj disappeared or went into occultation or suspended its operations- as in fact constantly happened at the margin and on a wider scale from time to time- the the peasant could afford to rebel in a state of absent mindedness. Since it is only safe to rebel absent mindedly when no serious sanction attaches to so doing, it follows that Ranajit Guha believes that there was some magic punitive power invested in those codes maintained by the Raj which alone posed an existential threat to the peasant. In other words, suppose Lord Curzon got drunk and said to the Imperial Code Conservator-in-Chief 'Tell you what, old boy, just you suspend them codes for the weekend. Don't tell anybody. It will be our little secret.'-what would then happen is the peasants would rebel. Kitchener would get the fright of his life and his moustache would uncurl completely. Of course, on the Monday, the Rebellion would collapse on its own because the Codes would be back in place and so the Indian peasant would have to go back to his drudgery of reading the familiar signs around him and manipulating them and extracting a meaning from them and that would keep him busy.

Why does Guha want to make such an absurd claim? Well, it is because he wants to show that Indian peasants weren't ordinary human beings. They didn't act or react like ordinary human who have been pushed too far or have had enough and decide to rebel. You see, these expert hermeneuts were actually doing something quite different and magical called the praxis of rebellion. 

Prior to Guha, Historiography was very nasty and mean to the Indian peasants. It said stuff like- 'they were angry about x and so they rebelled' or 'they scented an opportunity to throw off their shackles and so they rebelled' or 'believing such and such rumors, they rebelled'- which is tooootally unfair and diabolical and Racist and Eurocentric and Bourgeois and like CULTURAL RAPE AND GENOCIDE SAME AS McDONALDS & COCA COLA!
Now, while we can all agree that Historiography is fucked because people who get PhDs in History have shit for brains, it does not follow that Indian peasants, under the Raj or otherwise, have been fucked over by Historiography. This is because peasants know that who owns what and who owes what is determined by dominant coalitions- indeed, as I have written elsewhere, village politics is much more sensitive to barometric shifts in Shapley values and shadow prices (indeed, this has a seasonal aspect) arising from the underlying core stability dynamics than are our psephological computer models- and, moreover, unlike the proletariat, peasants can change both their class and inter-class status through rebellion- something Indian vernacular history amply testifies to. What militates against this is not Manu, or the Manchester School of Econ,  but Marx- at least the corrupt, Credentialist, Marxist Historiography which valorizes peasant rebellion as having a deep hermeneutics of an Idealist type rather than representing an instrumentalisable  pragmatics from which the body politic can benefit Economically.
Indeed, the Developmental State in its take-off phase is nothing but a series of bloodless insurrections of this type. Read Vishvevaraiah's Plan from the 30's. He wanted 10 per cent growth. The Industrialists behind the Bombay Plan settled for 7.5 per cent because they were frightened by the Marxists. Once the Leftists gained ascendancy this was scaled back more and more.
Guha emigrated to the U.K in 1959. He currently lives in Vienna.
The odd thing is that he rose to fame in India at precisely the time when the true desires and potential of the Indian peasantry were becoming apparent. Historiography, it seems, only fucks up its own. For which, I need hardly add, I personally blame David Cameron.
That boy aint right.

Derrida's letter to a Japanese friend.

 Octopus traps! Ink's synoglyph hordes in which I, Derrida, dream Izutsu
As Friendship's Timeless Sea Roads flee Holzwege's Eternal Rome

Hélas! Fart and the French Academy farts flatteringly with you

Shit yourself and stink forlorn all the long hayride home.

Notes
1)
'Modern scholarship has shown us that in a region of the timeless East, a language reaching its own state of perfection is deconstructed [s'est deconstruite] and altered from within itself according to the single law of change, natural to the human mind,' Villemain, *Preface du Dictionaire de l'Academie*."
(Derrida- letter to a Japanese friend)
2)

(See Basho's poetry. Apparently, Japanese fishermen lowered an array of clay pots into the water and then tipped them over on their side. Small octopoi crawled into these pots, thinking them safe shelter in the coral reef, during the bright carnivorous moonlit nights of Summer. Before daybreak, the fishermen reversed the orientation of the pots, probably by tapping an ipad app for switching from Landscape to Portrait, and then them octopoi were Sushi.)

Spivak on the clitoris.

Prof. Vagina Dentata Choothopadhyay has, once again, critiqued Gayatri Spivak's old fashioned, unreconstructed, Nineteenth Century, Ecologically unenlightened, focus on Production and Practice- as evidenced by her infamous apophthegm "the clitoris is a shorthand for women's excess in all areas of production and practice"- by pointing to the far greater value added by the incompossible cold chain of Homi Bhaba's Waitrose-grade radish up-the-butt. It is in the latter context that Manmohan Singh's sponsorship of f.d.i in Retail should be understood.
And, no, pace Spivak, the clitoris is not a small penis otherwise I'd be knee deep in Lesbian muff.

Ipseity, Alterity & the conjuration of the Subaltern.

Can Critical  Philosophy, post Godhra, still be considered a Baudelairian exorcism of ipseity, rather than a Baudrillardian ethic of alterity, when answers randomly canvassed, from the most ideologically diverse theorists of the Subaltern, to the question 'where is the toilet?' all so consistently cash out as 'my mouth'?
 Take Sumit Sarkar- outside and shoot him- no, I jest, I jest- that's the job of the Naxalites- but, seriously folks, he was right to point out that Subaltern Studies stopped being about really marginalized folk- tribals and manual scavengers and so on- and turned into Foucaldian whining about Eurocentrism- so his approach to answering the question 'where is the toilet?' begins with a recognition that the disposal of 'number two' is a subaltern form of WORK. Since Subaltern studies gobshiterry should be about genuine subalterns, like manual scavengers (bhangis), the mouth of a Subaltern Studies savant is indeed the nearest toilet.
Ranajit Guha's approach is more 'roundabout' (as the Austrian Economists would say) and Spivak's is more Literary Capital intensive but both reach the same conclusion because Guha lectures in Vienna and  the word toilet comes from the French toilette and Spivak can speak French, so basically, yes, the nearest toilet is her mouth.

No change there then.
Personally, I blame David Cameron.
That boy aint right.