Friends/Circles

1. "Who cares about a novel or a critic" which is fine but quite sad, I think.
2. Who cares about "Understanding": meaning one shld/must say SOMETHING,whether he understands or not, which is not only sad but dangerous.
Whatever you do - cultural criticism, political activism, ideological analysis, one ought to understand first. Or does American academia
function without "understanding" anything.
3.Who cares about "understanding a novel or critic" meaning there's nothing to be understood in the worst post structuralist sense, everything is semantic slippage and constructionist which I think is not only so
anti-humane (to be diff. from lib. humanism) but frankly, quite boring.

But I'm sure you've none of these three in your mind, so do enlighten me.
Santanu.

Prasanta: Thu Nov 22, 2001 1:45 am

S. ,
Your queries are interesting and go into the heart of the matter. I shall go pointwise, as formulated by you:

1. My statement,which you picked up, was a knee jerk,reaction. But the real basis is this: I do care about literary artifacts and critics (although 'critics'might not be just literary). But what I meant was that at this stage--all of us can 'DO' literature'THROUGH'the different 'TOOLS' that we have acquired through 'LIT. TRAINING'. So for a Marxist, it might be
finding realism in lit, for a Neitzchean/Foucauldian,genealogy and power, for a pyschoanyalist the domain of the 'real' and 'symbolic', for a new historicist--a mix of the above three, for a Kantian
--to find 'aesthetics', for an old fashoined New Critic--closed reading of the textual 'icons'--so on and so forth. Obviously, I am grossly simplifying things but to drive home the main point--we DISSECT LITERATURE (even if we go beyond all these and find new -often new wine in old bottles-MODELS). And here I feel (have always felt) that there is an overarching
FORMALISM working as a basis of our training as lit crits. This I do not like anymore. (not to be confused with my liking of the latest novel on the rack or a lovely old poem). I like to read literature the way I read before I was introduced to the first critical tool during my undergrad days. Obviously, you and many lit crits may decide to love lit in a thousand
different ways. Fair enough. Does that mean I have gone uncritical? Emphatically NO. What I have come to love more is to 'play' (I do not claim any primacy for that sort of thing too)with distilled 'concepts'.

2. I am sure you know the word 'Understanding' has a long and tortuous tradition. When I said I do not care about 'understanding', I did not mean 'saying something for the sake of saying' or 'saying uncritically'. One does not anymore UNDERSTAND simply by 'pure reason', even those of us (and I am with you here) think that 'unreason' is dangerous, have come to accept a critical and more 'bounded' defintion of reason and understanding. If this is the price to be paid for getting more philosophical (and historical!)clarity (at the cost of being naively 'understanding'in the old sense of the term) than the American academia (and surprise, surprise--many in the liberal Indian tradition too--I hope you call Uday Kumar, Mushirul Hassan or Dipesh Chakravarty some sort of

liberals!!) is ready to pay that price.

3. Frankly, I think we must 'understand' the
relationship between post-structuralism and liberal humanism much more critically before jumping to the conclusion that they the former is so anti-humane and the latter so much faithfully following the Athenian/Florentine route via Locke,Hobbes,Tocquville, Rawls and their followers (never mind the blatent Racism and Eurocentricm from Nicomachean Ethics to Grundrisse and farther!). One must first
read the critics of the liberal humanism(I mean the whole baggage-Platonism, Aristolelianism, Florentine Republicanism,liberalism,

libertanism, even Marxism)from within those traditions even before going to the post-structuralist/textualists. I am sorry -but you
must read , to chose randomly, the critique of
liberalism from the LIBERAL (AND NOT POST-STRUCTURAL)feminists (Susan Okin, for example) or the critique of market-economy (I hope you agree that 'property'is one of THE issues in most forms of liberal-humanism)by the communitarians. To cut along story short, do you also find BORING the critiques of liberal humanism from the INSIDERS?

Now to the post-structuralists: a certain brand of post-structuralism does find historicism/analytical
philosophy/reason etc BORING just as a certain brand of liberal humanism (who do not have the inclination or acumen) to understand the
finer points of the Husserl-Heidegger-Neitzche project BORING. I am niether of them. As a detached student-I think both have good and valid points in their favour. I also do not think that they are so divided that there can be no DIALOGUE between the two. Such a conclusion or stage, I would find truly dangerous!

Hope that clarifies three of your queries. Thanks for the questions.If you are still confused, it would be wonderful on my part to reply to more such questions(to the best of my ability). It improves dailogue and helps my thought process too. Those of you who are
getting bored to death--please , please delete my mails.

Best,
Prasanta

Hello darlings!!!
This is just to say that I am truly humbled by your discourse.Just one question, P, with reference to your "random" imperative:"you must read ...." As you know, i'm working on 17th c religious literature. The subject overlaps considerably with your own research topic, and, as I'm sure you're aware, involves a considerable amount of 'reading' which has nothing whatsoever to do with the "Husserl-Heidegger-Nietzche project", but requires
some degree of "acumen" and enthusiasm nevertheless. I'm afraid I am one of 'those' without the "inclination" to understand the "finer points" of the aforementioned project (the name is too long to type out all over again),and YET I do not consider myself ENTIRELY lacking in "acumen"! I am perfectly content with the infinite volumes of 16th and 17th c sermons that I have to plough through, and indescribably happy in the act of ploughing. Is this mere folly? wishful thinking? pure stupidity? or hard-headed
conformity with the even-more-conservative-english-faculty-at-oxford? or perhaps, a useless love for my chosen area of study?

best,

Ayesha

A,
could not have agreed farther with you. me and S were talking about things which have nothing to do with my research area. those are my collateral interests-and i guess his too.i too am 'indescribably happy' to plough through those early modern pamphlets and scores of
microfilms that i am working on for a while now. i would be truly happy to receive valuable suggestions and advice from you(since our areas overlap to a certain extent). but i shall get back to you with specific requests after I come back from Cal because right now i am in a holiday mood. and i love that'useless love' bit--i guess that is one of the finest
incentives to do all sorts of nice things!

_P

theoretical approaches being exciting but not strictly essential (as long as you areaware of your own stance). But Proshanto might differ: so how do we understand what Ayesha wrote:
1. Marxist: P, wld you say that Ayesha is grossly privileged in having access to 16thC manuscripts, so her aesthetic pleasure is the product of academic elitism that is premised on English class structures through a conjunction of money and power that Blair is trying to dismantle
2.Post-structuralist: Do you think that the "S" you miss out on in your "Nietz(s)che" results in a radical semantic slippage which might have
induced in Ayesha a conceptual block to the"finer points" of the theoretical superstructure that you erect (where names and spellings are so important), esp. when Roland Barthes has warned us about the dangers
of slippery "S" in S/Z which you must have read.
3.Foucault: Do you think Ayesha is proposing a hegemony of an archaeology of knowledge based on "acumen" and "enthusiasm" which are not personal responses at all but subtly cloaked transfer points of pedagogic power in an academic discourse which you so radically transgress, and backdated literary critics construe as a travesty?
4.Phenomenology (Heidegger): Since to Heidegger, as I'm sure you know,hands reveal the structure of being, do you think there is a visceral exchange of epistemology when she handles the actual manuscripts, a new

phenomenology of reading which you might like to add to your theoretical paradigms.
5. Psychanalysis: But why does Ayesha use the word "plough": is there a textual unconscious which resonates with Shakespeare's sonnets where the word appears a lot, and which she has read as an adolescent; or is there a fierce phallocentrism which she has internalised and is projecting onto a text which is constructed as feminine.

Do tell me Proshanto what you "understand" from Ayesha's text? Only, I can add in a very boring way that may be Latin rather than Lyotard can help Ayesha better to "understand" her texts.
I'm **really** sorry to be so boring to

Thank you so much, P and S, for glossing my response!!! As for 'understanding' my texts, all I can say is "Dominus Illuminatio Mea"!
And, P, I am deeply impressed by your "collateral interests". And so is Dominus, i'm sure! with lots of "useless love",
Ayesha

Please find a piece by Barnita on her recent visit to Gujarat appended to this message.

I have not seen another city in India as prosperous-looking as Ahmedabad.Never seen such a plethora of shopping malls, jeweller shops, boutiques,ice-cream parlours-you name any indicator of wealth and purchasing power,and Ahmedabad has it all. It is in the heartland of the successful co-operative movement of the seventies, of the famed national dairy cooperative Amul, it is home to some of the most renowned rural development centres in India,and even its mundane architecture shows that the National Institute of Design is located in the city.
But in this tale of two cities, a completely different picture emerges in the majority of areas in the walled city. Here, there are as many as 61 relief camps inside which Muslim men, women, and children huddle. The overwhelming majority
of them can no longer return to their homes. Working people, the vast majority of them, they no longer have a viable source of livelihood. They face  an
economic boycott. They are governed by rulers who had actively planned the carnage of their friends and families, and which now considers that episode
a salve to Gujarati pride and honour, wounded by the killing of 54 Hindu karsevaks in a train in Godhra. Having killed approximately 800 Muslims in revenge,
honour is still not satisfied. I heard six people tell me of hearing from shopowners and passers by, 'Let the outsider Gill leave the state; in two months you'll be dead'. (Supercop KPS Gill of Punjab is now on special duty in Gujarat). I spent all of last week in Ahmedabad, as a volunteer sent by the legal aid and cultural centre 'Majlis' of Bombay, who in turn deputed myself and team-members to two Ahmedabad field-based organizations,'Sanchetana' and 'Vikas Adhyayan Kendra'.  The courtesy, good, cheer, and hospitality we received from the inhabitants of Dariya Khan, Shah e Alam, and Bapunagar camps is mind-boggling. Anywhere we went and stopped, the first remark was 'Please drink some water',
and clean water would be poured out of each family's precious and scarce supply of water, got after queuing up for long periods of time in front of
makeshift taps. Any family which would be eating would press us to share their meal. Every
mid-day, when we would leave the camp to eat outside, we would be asked to stay and queue up for the lunch provided in camp. These things sound sentimental, but they are not. They are the warp and weft of daily life, and need to be posited
again and again and again against the absolute demonization and otherization of non-Hindus that is happening presently in India. The jingoistic mood prevailing currently is exacerbating matters, and
one shudders to think of what will happen to Ahmedabad's Muslims if India declares war on Pakistan. Muslim women are of course burqa-clad, uneducated, passive creatures. We are fed this line by the Hindu right 'common sense' every day. The very first person I had a conversation with in the camps was Shabnam, on the first floor of Dariya Khan camp. She had a sheaf of papers in her hand. Curiosity led me to ask what they were. Shabnam, a twenty-year-old skilled tailor who used to help
support her family along with her mother, also a tailor, now works as an 'Aman Pathik', a 'treader of the path of peace'. 'Aman Samuday', or 'Peace Collective', was formed by several Gujarat-based civil society organizations for post-violence
rehabilitation. Shabnam collects statistics about her camp, and also does indepth trauma research. She says that this work has succeeded in making her
feel alive again. For the first two weeks after they left their house, she was in a stupor. Her family has lost all their movable goods. The princely,
fixed sum of government compensation for such loss is Rs 1, 250. What will they do with such largesse, one wonders-they might even be able to afford one substantial meal for the whole family for all of two weeks on the strength of that. Aren't they lucky?
We were taken around Bapunagar by yet another 'cowed, passive' Muslim woman. Nafisaben has been a working woman since she was seventeen, when she didn't get on with her husband, and came home again to live with her father and brothers. She too was a tailor originally. Then she became a grassroots works with an organization called Awaaz, which runs a training and livelihood centre for women. Her sister now works for Awaaz, but Nafisaben got a better job. Or so she thought. She worked as a supervisor in a jeans factory. She had responsibility, was on cordial terms with her employer, ate with them regularly, and was a friend as well as an employee. Reality has changed starkly since the carnage.She has been asked not to tread in the area of her Hindu-owned factory. She obviously has no job. The factory area is Naroda, where 91 Muslims, minorities in a locality surrounded by Hindus, were trapped with the help of the police,
and shot or torched alive. She is outraged by the sudden disappearance of cordiality and affection. She took us to her brother's house,where we were sat down, given cold water and tea, our water-bottles were filled with ice-cold water. She had no need to do all this for visitors who would spend three hours with her. But she did. And her employers? Sophia, the activist who runs Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, is having trouble getting one of their vans repaired. Most of the mechanics are Muslims, and are not
coming to work, having been threatened. At Bapunagar, three auto-rickshaw owners, also Muslims, tried to ply their trade, and were turned back by
local youth who appeared to know them, but who wore bandannas covering their faces.When the organization Awaaz tried to get a neighbouring Hindu trader to help them with donations of raw materials so that women from Bapunagar camp could make incense sticks, they were told that they had been asked not to have
relations with 'miyaon', or Muslims. Such stories are some of many. A team-mate and I went to Shah-e-Alam camp, housed inside a beautiful dargah, in
order to accompany the police when they would collect testimonies for a particular set of complaints in a particular area. The police never turned up.This had happened with some other team-mates a couple of days back too.Instead, we had the privilege of talking to Salma, yet another field-worker with another organization working among local women. She told us about some of the trades which men and women of the area would ply before the violence. They conjured up images of a world of leisure, fostered by such Muslim working people. They made kites. They made 'rakhis', symbols of fraternity and sorority. They were skilled workers with gold. And now? Shireen came as a law student from Pune. She now more or less  lives inside Dariya Khan camp. She collects details of victims and those denied compensation, she dances at the weddings that are now taking place there, this being peak wedding season, she is stampeded everywhere by the children. She had beautiful mehndi applied to her hands. She had 'awesome mutton gosht' in a house outside the camp, and was told to bring her friends next time. I regret not having had time to go. I also regret having begun to teach, and then having to leave. The kids sing 'Hum honge kaamyaab', Hindi of 'We shall overcome' (yes, I know even Reagan sings that, but it's still a great song), brilliantly. They wanted to learn a 'Bangaali gaana', so I taught them the fifties folksy lefty song 'dhitang dhitang bole'. They had more trouble with the unfamiliar language,
but by the end of the second day were cool with it. Khurshida, Shabana, Parveen,Norrjehan, the camp volunteers will teach from next week, helped by some of the cards and teaching aids that have come from a
community education centre in Bangalore.But no one is willing to come forward as witnesses for the rapes and murders they had confessed to seeing earlier. Why will they? What guarantee can us
do-gooders give them? A widow in her seventies articulately summed up the Hindu right's plan to cleanse India of Muslims. Angry and embarrassed, I said,'yeh koi baat hui?' 'That's empty rhetoric',sort of thing. And she said, 'Kyon
nahi? Yeh to hua HAI hamare saath.' 'It HAS happened to us.'The only pressure on the Hindu right in Gujarat is from civil society organizations, the media, and left political parties. Please keep that
pressure on. Please go to sites like www.riotinfo.com, and check what's happening.
Please keep on bombarding the state and central governments with letters of protest. Please support initiatives that help the violence-affected people earn their living, rather than making them passive recipients of charity.  It's not true that the situation is normal and peaceful in Gujarat. A community is in danger of slowly dying, after living in pretty inhuman conditions, in the camps. The
Nazification of Gujarat continues apace.

Some of the names have been changed for obvious reasons.

Barnita Bagchi

DC, All of us have been reading such articles everywhere for the past few weeks.I have the highest respect for people like Barnita who are actually in the scene (unlike Tormujs)--I only wish they would give us a fuller picture. What is happening now in India is sinister but the nazification cannot be averted by shunning and staving off issues and incidents. Barnita's using the phrase "folksy lefty song" to describe 'dhitang dhitang bole' reminded me how often (and how unsparingly)have the word 'folk' (remember Herder's Volk!) been used by proponents of the 'good society' on both sides of the political spectrum. But then, all this is so tormujish...

Dear P., A couple of quick pts about yr response to B. 1. At least I hadnt been reading such articles everywhere 2. If you want to know more, you can email Barnita at barnita@mailcity.com. 3. I didnt quite understand your niggle with folksy lefty song nor do I see any need to invoke Herder. Folksy in the basic sense we understand it, as opposed to the classical, in its simple, swinging, swaying rhythm, its capacity to move. It is a bit sad that theoretical/postmodern crammings obfuscate the SIMPLE understanding of SIMPLE things. (Didnt some French postmodernist say that the Gulf War didnt happen.) 4. B.'s piece I found moving, honest, heartfelt, and theoretical bickerings are a bit rich when people are living in terror and many of us are cocooned in the West, darling.

Dear S, 1. You can go ahead and search archives in the English dailies that are published from India. Hindi dailies are more divided on the issue, I think. 3/4.I completely agree that "theoretical bickerings are a bit rich when people are living in terror and many of us are cocooned in the West". In fact that was my first point in the last mail. When I use Herder, I do not mean his influence on a bunch of classicists. I think of SIMPLE neo-nazis who use the word 'folk' to inflame jingoism: populists like Goebbles and Vinay Kathihar use that rhetoric, that very "swinging, swaying rhythm", for precisely "its capacity to move" a people. It is simply that on the Right,the lilt of that music, the sway of the rythm comes more from religion,language and race. I think you wold agree that there cannot be anything more 'folksy' than Tulsidas' Ramcharitmanas in the whole of north india but its tremendous power has been/is being actively harnessed for political reasons. S, my father is an active RSS guy and I know how much the hierarchy (Hedgewar, Golwalker onwards) have been influenced by the likes of Hamann, Herder, Mazzini...even Rousseau (for a certain reading). On the other hand, 'folk' has been used more by the Left the way you describe. The sway now comes from harvesting and industrial working perhaps: small producers singing to invoke a sense of genteel community. It is a pity the men who used to oversee the Gulags did not see that simplicity. They used this simplicity for their ends.IPTA used 'Dhitang dhitang bole' (and many more numbers/plays) for that very purpose till Salil Chaudhury was humiliated bitterly by the Left Intelligentia in W. Bengal. I hope Barnita knows that sad history when she sings IPTA numbers in solidarity. It was a partial reason for Salil Chaudhury to look for other pastures and eventually led to his migration to Bombay. My point is that the Left/ Secular can be as obtuse and as politicaly driven as the Right. I have no doubts about the moving and heartfelt bit about Barnita's piece. I am not so sure about her honesty... Santanu:

Dear Proshanto, Thank you for your engaged and illuminating email which I just read out to Subha: I didnt know the "sad history", as you say,nor did Subha, so thank you. I completely take your point about music being appropriated as an emotive medium for advancing political ideologies: in fact, I had group and mob psychology in mind when I used "swinging, swaying", working, as I'm at the moment, on songs like "A long Way to Tiperary" to rouse soldiers. But at the same time may be, that Wagner was appropriated by Fascists and might have led the way to Auschiwz, doesnt prevent *The Ring* from being sublime, grand or classical, though each of these elements were twisted for political gains. In other words,art can be appropriated and (re)appropriated: one shld be aware of the political undertones, but may be it's not the only approach: folksy can also be subjected to a rigorous formalistic and generic analysis. I'm very curious to know what exactly you mean by Barnita's piece being less than honest. Prasanta:

Dear Santanu, Yes, you are absolutely right! Folksy can definitely have other implications and usages, especially formalistic. And I meant that Barnita's piece probably does not cover a broader gamut given the reports that I have read about the incidents in Gujrat.(Though this is a hunch, since everything that comes to us here is via media, and hence cannot always be taken at face value). Anyone else? Debanjan:

Agree with P that similar stories were splattered all across the "secular" press in India, duly picked up by the right wing or conservative papers in the UK (e.g. The Times). Interesting if you think about it - the staple fare of secular/Left journals and periodicals in India becomes the picking for the Conservative or the outright Right wing of the West in its unending agenda of demonising India. I have NO sympathy for the Hindu jingoists - RSS, Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena and the BJP. But what I find plain unacceptable is the way the secular Left (or secular/Left) elides over incidents like Godhra which sparked the carnage (Barnita mentions it rather squeamishly, more like a hushed aside she'd rather not mention ), or the slovenly butchery of Kashmiri Pandits. I have no words to condemn the role of the Gujarat government in the whole affair. Two wrongs do not make a right. Disagree with P's comment that BB is being less than honest her views, though. There ain't no such thing as an honest opinion, baby! Besides, I find in accusations like these the seeds of discord, the germ of our inability or unwillingness to look at the other side of the argument. Much as I do not doubt the veracity of what she states, I am intrigued by what she doesn't. I read the silences and the elisions in her piece as acute signs of her discomfort, of making visible that which is not written. Virulently disgree with S for his inclusivist phrase "many of us cocooned in the West." Cocooned I am not; marooned, yes. I am now more aware than ever what it feels to be a minority in a culture or a nation. Living in the West as a minority in every sense of the term has made me acutely sensitive to the need for the rights and privileges of the minority to be aggressively safeguarded in any culture, nation, civilisation. That this is not the case in India shames me as no other "fact" about India does (poverty, Mother Teresa etc). In the same breath - and drawing once again on my experience of being a un-cocooned minority - I like to add that just as I do not have the right to be obnoxious, abusive or flagrantly disrespectful towards the majority's faith and set of beliefs, by the same token I do not expect the minority in India to carry on activities that hurt the majority or the nation's interest. Personally, I find all this hullabaloo about a dotty old woman's dodgy "reign" of fifty years a tad stupid, I find the average Brit's fascination for football and all the hooliganism that go with it utterly insane. But I do not say so in the face of my British friends or acquaintances, I do not try and start a movement to oppose the Queen or ban football just because my historical and cultural upbringing has not taught me to appreciate these things. I found Kajol's jibes against her white neighbour in KABHIE KHUSHI KAHBHIE GHAM not just in poor taste but outright offensive, just as I would be offended if a minority character clowned majority practices in a Hindi movie. I am also perturbed by the assumption of the metropolitan secular Press in India that just because we are a poor country religion is a dispensible luxury, an assumption made in the face of overwhelming odds. I am wary of the Hindu fanatic but equally suspicious of the elite metropolitan secular fundamentalist. It is interesting to note from BB's piece that one of the worst offenders of human rights in India, and a sexist to boot - KPS Gill - has re-invented himself as a secular, albeit sexy, Rambo. The secular Left was his most rabid critic when he was in Assam (he kicked Mahanta unconscious when he was a student leader) or worse still, when he was in charge of anti-insurgency operations in Punjab. The Roopan Deol Bajaj case I treat as a minor glitch in Mr Gill's otherwise glittering career. Mr Gill must be secretly celebrating the cult of ethico-political (sorry to slip into a bit of Leavisite jargon here - it's just me being myself) double standards that makes him alternately a hero and a Hannibal. Hope I have made the point in a manner sufficiently thick that'll not be misread as theoretical bickering. If you think it "rich", I recommend you have an Hajmola after this.