Scopophilia and Neoorientalism in the Work of Mayank Austen `Sufi’

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. With the rather misleading moniker `Sufi’, social media celebrity and Arundhati Roy groupie, Mayank Austen Soofi ambles around Delhi, chronicling the lives of the apparently destitute. This has earned him accolades in the form of invitations to the `Serendipity Arts Festival’ in Goa and other events in European metropolitan locations. His modus operandi is that of an urban flaneur whose prime target is the Nizamuddin Basti. When one of his photographs had to be pulled owing to some restrictions imposed by the curator of the art show, he replaced it with one of the Nizamuddin Dargah. The Dargah and its accompanying space of beggars, medieval mendicants, sweetmeat-sellers, hawkers, destitute women, religious men, devotees from the orchestra that `Sufi’ deftly manipulates to create his Neo-Orientalist corpus under the altruistic garb of charitable art. This often takes the form of extended descriptions, a mode he has adopted after his visit to Paris under the tutelage of the ‘elitist’ photographer Dayanita Singh. The earlier terse descriptions were replaced by more detailed descriptions and a backstory, much in the style of `Humans of New York’ started by Brandon Stanton.

Sarnath Banerjee in his graphic novel `Corridor’ quips that `One needs the soul of Chenghiz Khan to survive the Delhi summer’. `Sufi’ has set out to attain this mantle and to heal what he calls the `bandaged heart of Delhi’. As a groupie of Arundhati Roy, who has taken him under her wing, and the cover photograph of whose lukewarmly received novel he is credited with, `Sufi’ has also leaked anti-Roy e-mail correspondence online. It requires what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called `willing suspension of disbelief’ to go along with the narrative created by the likes of Roy and `Sufi’ who follow elitist `holier than thou’ paradigms from their abodes in Jor Bagh and Hauz Khas Village.

The destitution of the Indian Muslim is particularly a favourite trope with `Sufi’ who takes much glee in publishing photos that appear to celebrate the lifestyles of indigent Muslims, but rather only serve to exacerbate the Islamophobia rampant in the Indian public sphere. He is allowed into the homes of the intelligentsia as well as those of middle-class Muslims whose domestic tableaux he is a past master in chronicling. The vanity of the photographic scopophilia in the age of post-truth and the death of the author is one that deserves cautious treatment. In his exploration of the dark underbelly of Delhi, `Sufi’ weaves up a dreamlike structure surrounding Muslims and their habitus that in no way helps to secure them or to politically enfranchise them by transferring photographic agency to them.

When Rick Hoffman and Zana Briski made their Oscar-winning documentary `Born into Brothels’, they accorded photographic agency to their subjects, by handing cameras to the children who were the subjects of their documentary, which was an ameliorating element in this otherwise exploitative enterprise. Even though there has been no major follow up to this, such compunctions are welcome. There is no such relief when it comes to Mayank Austen `Sufi’ and his photographic flaneurdom along the galis of old Delhi. He seldom accords narrative space to his subjects. Operating mainly among those who are outside the ambit of state protection, he occasionally soars into the gala events of the hoi polloi. These parties and their diplomatic glamour are also carefully chronicled. Humour, especially visual humour, serves as the glue that holds together this dubious ethical enterprise.

The consumers of these snaps are also the middle-class elites of Delhi and abroad. As for the literary and liberal elite, and their progeny who happen to be Delhi university students of English literature, `Sufi’ is the apple of their eye. `Sufi’ seldom has any compunctions about pandering to such a public. He particularly dabbles in images of extreme destitution, such as those of the homeless subalterns, that inure the viewers in their web in a manner that, in the course of time, any sort of sympathy for these subjects is washed away into the visual scopophilic matrix of social media platforms. Even when some of the viewers express any sort of empathy for these victims, they are mostly ignored and any sort of social action is blocked. `Sufi’ also has an avid middle-class following that would not be averse to a bit of cyber-lynching should someone rub their hero the wrong way.

Despite the moniker `Sufi’, he has no more interest in Islamic mysticism than the muscle-flexing caretakers of these tombs. The pandering narrative of visual pleasure that `Sufi’ magically weaves has a journalistic element that allows him to hobnob with other savarna journalists and editors from newspapers including the Hindustan Times, where he has been a columnist of some infamy. The detached, disenchanted, gleeful way in which `Sufi’ enters the intimate spaces of the destitute sans charitable intentions renders his subjects vulnerable to the elitist gaze. That the power of the scopophilic gaze is garbed in a cloak of charity is at best a red herring that serves to mislead his audience.

ORACLE OF THE DOG: COMMUNALISM AND HUMAN-ANIMAL INTERACTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA

Father Brown, GK Chesterton’s indefatigable clergyman sleuth says in one of his romps,`G.O.D spelt backwards becomes D.O.G’. In the recent Iranian movie Kupal (2017, Kazem Mollaie) winner at the Bogota Film Festival, which is about a taxidermist who finds himself locked inside a safe chamber by himself, having to kill and disembowel his dog to retrieve the key, the director makes his animal friendly stand clear by quoting the lines from the surah Al-Kahf, in which the men who seek refuge inside a cave  are accompanied by a dog. The May 10, 2018 attack on a Kashmiri family in South Delhi’s middle class Siddharth Extension DDA flat complex, was attempted to be  justified by the culprits on grounds that the victims were habitually feeding stray dogs in the vicinity of their house. This resulted in People For Animals(PFA) posting a video of the assault online and jumping into the fray. What is ironic is that the majority community in India is often stereotyped as lovers of fauna, based on their belief in metempsychosis and Muslims, from the quinquagenarian Salman Khan down to the local butcher, are caricatured as blood thirsty villains thirsting for animal sacrifice on a daily basis.

Animal-human interactions in India are fraught with economic, religious, political, cultural and communal issues, protection of the cow being the major bone of contention. Sovereignty of life in the form of the cow, led to fatal assaults on innocents like Akhlaq. All of these bovine inspired acts of violets were also carefully projected into the digital public sphere so as to create an aura of organic communitarian life  built around an animal friendly Hindutva. Cow protection vigilantes with the abetment of the powers that be unleashed a nationwide reign of terror. Rigil Makkutty, the Kerala Youth Congress Leader who protested the prospective beef ban was suspended by his party. Bovine-human, elephant-human, ursine-human, equine-human equations have turned complex with emerging new paradigms in the anthropocene era where man has stamped his hegemony over other life forms. So do the fascistic powers. Elephants are frequently mistreated in South Indian religious rituals of all persuasions. The threat on a UP groom who dared to ride horsed prior to their wedding ceremonies, which made it necessary for the police to draw up a map of the horse’s route,  is a case in point. The baraat horse, a north Indian custom has been now copied in Dravidian lands also. In the southern state of Tamilnadu, the popular village sport of `jallikettu’ which has been exoticized by foreigners and Indians alike, comparing it to the bull run in Pamplona in Spain, also became a flashpoint owing to its cruel treatment of oxen and bovine animals.  Leopards are haunting Powai near Mumbai, and tigers are threatening farmers and foragers in Bengal. The energy of these interactions is tapped into the wider narrative of fascism, where they speak on both sides, and thus becomes an organic force representing our `blood and soil’.

The dog has been an exception since in popular Indian conception, it is an animal abhorrent to Muslims (that is how dogs in petit bourgeois households come to be called `Tipu’ `Sultan’ etc) and hence the recent attack on a Muslim family on the pretext of a campaign against feeding stray dogs assumes significance. The grammar of communal violence has become so warped that even the feeding of dogs can be the pretext of a communal attack. The People for Animals posted on their facebook page on May11, 2018 as follows:

https://www.facebook.com/people4animals/?hc_ref=ARRWDtIFzgQ1lGNOtU5gSxomEKDQhKO-Vwqk25u0l09O2x6KDKTSMcwNGb7Vn183HiE&fref=nf

An animal lover and her brother and sister has (sic) been brutally beaten by society people yesterday in Siddhartha Extension pocket C, Delhi. She looks after the dogs in the colony and for a long time society people have been planning to kill dogs and animal lovers.
President S N Pandey has issued a letter where he stated that he and other residents will unite together and take action in their “Self Defence”.
Just because they are muslims, they have been harassed and molested for a long time. They have torned their clothes.
I request you all to help this lady.
**** and her sister and brother are in a shock, they have got fractures and injuries. MLC was done yesterday.
Please call and message these “Society People” who thinks that they can harass people in the name of Dogs. And who thinks that they are who can beat anyone they feel like.
After yesterday’s incident, now they have approached South Delhi Municipal Corporation to remove all the dogs.

In the pictures posted  along with this write up, respectable looking elderly middle class men from the locality can be seen holding hockey sticks venturing to attack a hapless woman. The comments section has many people asking why bring religion into such a heinous act, prompting one to question PFA’s equivocal stand on the issue. Communal agenda of fascistic forces, who daily hold a flag meeting in the ironically named Siddharth Extension- DDA flat colony- Pocket C (this is a detail none of the news media that covered the incident have found worthy of reporting. The daily flag meetings have reportedly been put on hold for now, apparently owing to instructions from above) is clearly visible in this entire narrative of crass communalism and inhuman mob mentality.

Comprador media carries anthropomorphosed new reports of feral dogs to make humans seem feral. Those who legally consume meat are attacked. Ironically, those who nurture animals also face the same forces. Thus marginalized groups are attacked no matter whether their relationship vis-a-vis animals is that of nurturing or otherwise, because the crux of the problem is that of the relation of the human being to his/her religious and personal self and dignity.

 

Lefebvre and the non-space of space

Lefebvre says, in his seminal The Production of Space' that sociality, mind, politics, ideology, psyche, sex, labour, linguistics, art, language, miracles, religion, time, permutations, lexicon, ephemerality, time, God, ennui, rage, ocean, desire, alchemy, relationships, love, craft, mercy, famines, hunger, taste, sensuality, emmensity, adjectives, arduour and space itself, everything is about SPACE> 

“A code of this kind must be correlated with a system of knowledge.
It brings an alphabet, a lexicon and a grammar together with i n an
overa ll framework; and it situates i tself – though not in such a way as
to excl ude it – vis-a-vis non-knowledge ( ignorance or misunderstanding) ;
in other words, vis-a-vis the lived and the perceived. Such a knowledge
is conscious of its own approximativeness: it is at once certain and
uncerta in. It announces its own rel ativity a t each step, undertaking (or
at least seeking to undertake) self-criticism, yet never allowing itsel f to
become dissipated in apologias for non-knowledge, absolute sponta neity
or ‘pure’ violence. This knowledge must find a middle path between
dogmatism on the one hand and the abdication of understanding on the
other.”-Lefebvre, Henri. `The Production of Space.

He adopts a regressive progressive attitude /methodology …“the exposition i n Capital by no means
follows exactly the method set forth in the Grundrisse; Marx’s great
doctrinal dissertation starts off from a form, that of exchange value,
and not from the concepts brought to the fore in the earlier work, namely
production and labour.”–Lefebvre, Henri. `The Production of Space.

Space is a multiplicity, an eternity of singularities which encompasses the absolute, the relative, the ethical, the rational , the mystical, the acme and the depths of pity, the revelation and the obscurantism of it….

“Th ink now o f a flower. ‘A rose does not know that it is a rose.’3
Obviously, a city does not p resent itself in the same way as a flower,
ignorant o f its own beauty. It has, after a l l , been ‘composed’ by people,
by well-defined groups. All the same, it has none o f the intentional
character o f a n ‘art object’ . For many people, to describe someth ing as
a work o f art is simply the highest praise imaginable. And yet, what a
distance there is between a work of nature and a rt’s i ntentional ity ! What
exactly were the great cathedrals? The answer is that they were political
acts. The ancient function o f statues was to immortalize the dead so
that they would not harm the living. Fabrics or v ases served a purpose.
One i s tempted to say, in fact, that the appearance of art, a short time
prior to the appearance of its concept, implies the degeneration of
works: that no work has ever been created as a work of art, and h ence
that a rt – especially the art of writing, or l iterature – merely heralds
tha t decl ine. Cou l d it be that a rt, as a specialized activity, has destroyed
works and replaced them, slowly but implacably, by products destined
to be exch anged, traded and reproduced ad infinitum ? Coul d it be that
the space o f the fi nest cities came into being after the fashion o f plants
and flowers in a garden – a fter the fashion, in other words, of works
of nature, j ust as unique as they, al beit fashioned by h ighly civilized
peopl e ?”-Lefebvre, Henri. `The Production of Space.

 

“In order to arrive at an inversion and revol ution o f meaning that
would reveal authentic meaning, Marx had to overth row the certainties
of an epoch ; the nineteen th century’s confident faith in things, in reality,
had to go by the board. The ‘positive’ and the ‘real’ have never lacked
for j ustifications or for strong supporting arguments from the standpoin t
of common sense and of everyday life, s o Marx had his work c u t o u t
when it fel l t o him to demolish such claims. Admittedly, a fair part of
the job had a l ready been done by the philosophers, who had considerably
eroded the calm sel f-assu rance of common sense. But it was still up
to Marx to smash such philosophical abstractions as the appeal to
transcendence, to conscience, to Mind or to Man : he still had to transcend
philosophy and preserve the truth at the same time.”-

-Lefebvre, Henri. `The Production of Space.

 

one is reminded of Blake’s lines:“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,Infinite. For man has closed … to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees allthings thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”-William Blake

 

 

Essai sur la indological, (ed.) Satya Ranjan Banerjee and Manabendu Banerjee

In this edited volume, VN Jha explores the Nyaya-Vaisesika Mode; of Understanding consciousness. Jha says that “while the idealists of the type of Sankara and Dinanagar beleieved that the ultimate reality is beyond the reach of language and hence language is a liar, the Nyaya Vaisesika system holds that language can very well express reality. While Sankara had to create (vyavaharika-Satya) just to explain human behaviour with this mundane world which is going to disappear after the Individual attains  Brahman-hood, the nyaya vaisesikas (popularly called Indian logicians) refused to accept any temporary reality. For them f x has existence x must be real and ultimately real. There is no need for postulating any degree of reality. The whole world of plurality is therefore ultimately real. It is knowable and nameable.”

 

the universal set of entities or padarthas were divided into Bhava padartha and Abhava padartha.

Visesha is according to this doctrine, the ultimate distinguishing feature of substance.

“The ground for postulating an entity called internal sense organ mind is non-occurrence of simultaneous perceptual cognition through various external sense-organs.”

but this system uses some unfortunate metaphors like the mind is a chariot self is a charioteer and the self is a blacksmith and a puppet player and a room with many windows.

Prasastapda suggests that the self is different from body.

“self  is not only durable throughout one’s present life. But it is also external because there is re-birth. A new-born baby is seen to perform a skilled act of taking milk from the mother which tooo should be preceded by the three internal psychological acts like Jnana, iChat and Kriti.”

 

“sankhya  holds that the self is sentient by nature. The Indian logicians have accepted soul to be non-sentient by nature. The bhatta school of purvamimasa too holds that the self is sentient although although they categorise the self as a substance. Excepting the nyaya vaisesika school no other school has posited self as substance which is although devoid of consciousness, can alone be the material cause of (samavayi karana) of the consciousness. ”

Self is many. Consciousness is knowledge. Although they claim self is omnipresent cognition and knowledge can arise in it only when body delimits mind.

VEDANTA PERSPECTIVE ON DISAMBIGUATION.

 

KARUNASINDHU DAS says that “sentence meaning in both its cognition and interpretation levels has been a congenial study in diverse streams of Indian thought. “The Prabhakaran school of miasma upholds denotation of relational meaning by each part of speech in a sentence so much so that a finite verb alone by dint of its reference to person, number,voice,action and tense may well be called a sentence by itself.”

monistic Vedanta takes sentences as meanings and constitute the parts?No .it is one.

mimosa calls Vedic utterance similar to a parrot’s having no intention. This is occult territory.

“the question is one of fitting the conventional meaning of a word in a given environment viz. association of a particular word, context or so. The word sat means Brahman because observation is mentioned as an attribute to it. It is also called atman which undergoes liberation. The word Akash means Brahman and not the ethereal atmosphere for there is reference to it as the cause of creation..that there must be thematic unity between beginning and end must be emphasised. ..sometimes a secondary meaning may appear to be primary, because of very frequent use but even then the basis from which it springs is not altogether lost. ”

Can Brahman be the base for primary meaning.??

Nabanarayan Bandopadhyay says that Onomastics is an emerging subject of study in respect of names. be emeneau drew our attention towards an onomastics of South Asia in 1979. He expressed his view that “personal names of South Asia are still unexplored.””p109s

 

 

 

Poetry and Parochialism in Kerala

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in his customary impish fashion rephrases Heidegger’s oft-quoted dictum that ‘language is the house of being’ as ‘language is the torture-house of being.’ For him there is no genocide without poetry. Sugathakumari, a major Malayalam poet, and winner of Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award, Ezhuthachan Puraskaram, and the Padma Shri, has been known for her support for extreme formations of all hues, including the RSS. Recently, a newspaper carried in its weekly roundup of quotable quips, one of hers, which was: ”the biggest problem Kerala faces today is perhaps the excessive migration of workers from other states. It will lead us to a cultural disaster. We can in no way form a cultural rapport with these people who come here to work. Most of them are not just from educationally backward backgrounds, but also from criminal ones. They may eventually turn locals by marrying and settling down here.” The quote originally occurred in an interview with the poet carried by the Onam-special issue of the right-wing affiliated daily ‘Janmabhoomi,’ where she discusses various social ills plaguing Kerala, with Leela Menon, the editor of ‘Janmabhoomi.’

This has led to outrage in the social media sphere and elsewhere with Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan himself taking up cudgels, suggesting in a Facebook post that the number of Keralites who work abroad is almost commensurate with the number of non-Keralite workers in Kerala and hence a little understanding would go a long way. He also cited a statistic released by Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation(GIFT) which says that in 2013 there were 25 lakh non-Keralites working in Kerala in various capacities. He goes on to cite health and housing schemes that state and union governments have undertaken for the welfare of migrant labourers. But that was the dry statement of facts by a dogmatic communist. What irked many, and rightly so, was Sugathakumari’s stature as one of the most celebrated Malayalam poets of all time.

Perhaps less well known outside Kerala, Sugathakumari, like Kamala Das, also comes from a lineage of poets and academics. Her father Bodheswaran was a celebrated poet. Her sister Hridayakumari was a revered critic and academic. Affectionately called ‘teacher,’ Sugathakumari’s environmental activism (including the Save Silent Valley movement ) earned her detractors and admirers. But what was never in question is her rightful claim as one of the greatest Malayalam poets of all time. Her poem, Rathrimazha (Night Rain) has the lines:

”Night rain, like
A Youthful mad woman
Endlessly wailing, whimpering,
murmuring and laughing,
spinning out her long hair…”
-Sugathakumari, Night Rain

What is significant is that Sugathakumari’s environmentalism and her public stances are derived from her deeply committed Gandhism. She perhaps is the last surviving major Gandhian public figure in the Malayali public sphere. This has led her into a public spat with the poet and Novelist Meena Kandasamy over certain comments on the Father of the Nation that Kandasami had made, as in the poem, ‘Mohandas Karamchand’:

”Who? Who? Who?
Mahatma. Sorry no.
Truth. Non-violence.
Stop it. Enough taboo.”
-Meena Kandaswamy, Mohandas Karamchand

One has to travel as far as the freedom struggle to understand these two conflicting strands of ‘Nationalism.’ G.Aloysius says that ‘the welling up of anti-British sentiments among the Brahminical was indeed a reaction to the former’s efforts (it could be read even as ‘pretensions’) to take marginal measures in support of mass emergence.’
– G.Aloysius, The Brahminical Inscribed in Body-Politic, Critical Quest, New Delhi.

Sometimes Sugathakumari slips from the Gandhi of Noakhali to the Gandhi who wrote about ‘kaffirs.’ In the interview given to the right-wing affiliated ‘Janmabhoomi’ the poet also shares her anguish over the possibility of migrant workers forming a vote bank and politicians exploiting them.

While Gandhians from Khan Abdul Gaffer Khan to Anna Hazare have stood up for the rights of ‘common men,’ the elitist strand inherent therein was waiting to be exploited. It starts with the assassination of Gandhi, the impact of the original trauma which, Makarand Paranjpe in his book ‘The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi’ terms ‘My Death is My Message.’ In ‘Hind Swaraj’ Gandhi speaks via a character named ‘Editor’:

”Machinery is like a snake-hole which may contain from one to a hundred snakes. Where there is machinery, there are large cities, there are tram-cars and railways; and there only does one see electric light. English villages do not boast of any of these things. Honest physicians will tell you that, where means of artificial locomotion have increased, the health of the people have suffered.” -Gandhi, MK, Indian Home Rule, Madras: Ganesh & CO(Nationalist Press), 1919.

Gandhi hardly was the naïve luddite figure which he is sometimes painted to be. He was a master manipulator and polemicist and propagandist who had the pulse of his people and his times. It is vital that he is not lionized in a jingoist fashion so that people feel like pulling down his statues, but that his legacy is redeemed in the way it deserves to be.

Zizek again says :”Plato’s reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city — rather sensible advice, judging from this post-Yugoslav experience, where ethnic cleansing was prepared by poets’ dangerous dreams….Instead of the industrial-military complex, we in post-Yugoslavia had the poetic-military complex, personified in the twin figures of Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić.”

-Zizek, Slavoj, Poetry Magazine, 2013

Karadžić in his infinite wisdom also wrote the following untitled poem:

Convert to my new faith crowd
I offer you what no one has had before
I offer you inclemency and wine
The one who won’t have bread will be fed by the light of my sun
People nothing is forbidden in my faith
There is loving and drinking
And looking at the Sun for as long as you want
And this godhead forbids you nothing
Oh obey my call brethren people crowd.
– Radovan Karadžić, untitled poem

Recently another young Malayalam poet Sam Mathew had in a televised program with anchor and Kairali TV honcho John Brittas recited a poem, ‘Padarppu’ in which a rape victim speaks lovingly of the rapist:”bearing the moonlight that you bestowed/ I traverse alone the nights/crawling through the wild creeper/the kama that vigorously entwined me..”Meanwhile, poetry has been democratised in the sense that there is a proliferation of online poetry magazines, poetry groups, and poetry contests and readings and festivals as never before. The members are often exhorted to start poetry reading groups in every residential (read ‘middle-class’) colony. But there are hardly any takers for poetry slams.

It would be too far-fetched to compare Sugathakumari to Karadžić, but it won’t be Cassandra-like to predict that her efforts will bear fruit in similar direction.

The Fish-milk of Kindness

In the mess bill that is religiously brought out every month by JNU’s Jhelum hostel, there is an outstanding amount of Rs.5200 against the name of J.Muthukrishanan. This is the sum that he owes the ‘nation.’ It is a bad education loan, given in kind, and extracted pitilessly. The research scholar’s relationship to the university is one of debt.

Every day at noon this mess hall is the site of a display of abundance. Lines of vessels bearing mounds of rice and dal decorate the dining tables like some dietary solar system. This is shock and awe, of the pettiest kind. Food is regimented. Food is something to be hoarded in ‘bhandars.’ Famine lurks around the corner. There is thunder in the distance. Everything, from food to its end-product must be harnessed in the service of a rigid social hierarchy. Arguments about food have to be subtle, and nuanced. Blunt force might cause trauma. Of course, rules are meant to be broken. But there are strict rules regarding that too, on who can eat and by how much.

Ananta-Das says that Kabir decided to hold a public feast for the devotees, presumably with the bullock-load of food left by Hari. Kabir gives everything away. This angers the Brahmins and Sannyasis who complain that ‘Kabir has given everything to the Shudras.’ The Brahmins and Sannyasis go to Kabir and demand to be fed. Kabir says he has nothing to offer them but agrees to go and purchase some food for them. Kabir leaves again and hides himself somewhere. Then Hari himself assumes the task of feeding the Brahmins, he again appears in human disguise, this time as Kabir himself and gives rice, flour, sugar, and ghee to the Brahmans. Each is then given a rolled pan. At least for the time being, they go away pleased with Kabir.

~ Lorenzen, David N. Kabir Legends and Ananta-Das’s Kabir Parachai. SUNY Press: Albany. Pp28-29.

According to hierarchical strictures, there are four kinds of Rin (debt): Pitra-Rin (parental debt), Brahma Rin (Debt to God), Deva Rin (Debt to deities), and Guru/Rishi Rin (debt to teachers). There could also a fifth kind of Rin, viz. Mess Rin. This is the worst kind of debt. The surfeit of spirituality segues into a scarcity of food.

In a Facebook post titled ‘Eating My Cat Food,’ dated June 29.2016  (https://www.facebook.com/muthukrishanan.jeevanantham/posts/1815904641965986) Rajini Krish (moniker of J. Muthukrishanan) wrote about the NRS Mess at the University of Hyderabad, his alma mater:

EATING MY OWN CAT FOOD #

I washed my hand, and enter inside the Mess. I got my mess card from the counter. From last month there had been a “Rose colour” mess card, nobody knows the reason why?. I got my mess card, and went towards the food counter. Due to the rain, the Mess floor was very slushy, if you not aware on your foot step, you will be skating through. Carefully I reached the food counter,the floor and Mess plate has all the similarities. Because after they washed the plate, there will be some water dancing over the plate, it will be calm down after the “chappathi” took place in the plate.Because the Chappathi is sharper than Topaz shaving blade, oh sorry! I could not able to find it any “Make in India” Blades’. Sometimes I used to think,” I should preserve this chappathi, and give it to the shop com “Saloon shop”, it will be useful for shaving purpose, by doing that I can get free hair cut also!. Finally I got one of that kind, but I took only one Chappathi, throw it one to the nearest plate.

Let us go to the Daal section. The Daal basin is very huge, even two person can swim inside the basin. But many time we used to hear, the annoying stir up sound with tiny spoon, while searching the Daal on the basin, which filled with yellow color water. While looking at the Daal basin, I always remember my brother tushar, because he used to like Daal very much, and in a unique way he used to take the Daal in plate. After seeing him I too used take Daal regularly. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen today. Because the Daal already got over. I looked at the wall clock it was showing 8.10P.m. Now I have only one option. I have to get the special/Non-Veg, before it get finished. I asked the Mess card giver by nodding my head, “is there any special available?”. Form his table he shouted that, “Bhai last token for Mutton, if you want please come fast”, he said. I ran to the table. With my wet hand, I wrote my name and mess card number. Though the coupon buyers were making noise and disturbing the card giver, within a minute I got the token stamped as “MUTTON. NRS. in the light green chart paper.

I got the Mutton curry, and came back to my usual seat. I was so excited to eat the Mutton pieces,and hungry too. Yes mouth watering kind of. But before that I have to take the rice, which is almost going get over. Tonight there is only one rice basin in my table, surrounded by one group, we used to call them “coupon fellows” they all taken the rice, after them I got a little. Somehow, With that rice I started to eat.Near by me one fellow from “H” hostel, told me that, “Bro, How you eating here everyday?, the rice did not boil well, and the broth, Rasam are very spicy. In this “mess food”, nothing is good and tasty.

I told him that,” what should I do, I do not have any other options. Three days before also, I found stones in the Daal. I complained many times, even I shouted at them inside the Kitchen, when I got long hair in the rice. But nothing will change here”. After him another fellow was eating straight opposite to me, from him I heard the stone grinding sound. We both looked each other, and he started to scold the mess secretary in bad words. I do not want to hear them. I moved little away from him.

I was searching the mutton pieces, thereby I found only two meat pieces among the full plate of bones mixed with black colour broth. I put away the bones with paper plate. Thereafter I planned to eat with “Rasam”. In the meantime the rice got over. I was worrying, not because I did not get rice, but “The “bald head man” (used to be chatting in Shop com stationery shop, often wears Red T – shirt) not going to eat tonight. He used to eat in the big rice basin.

While attending conferences, at lunch time, students are sometimes physically pushed back, since the meagre supplies are to be rationed and the delegates have to be served first. If you are used to seeing Chomsky and the like waiting in line for their grub, or baguette lunches, this could be an amusing predicament. But here the logic is that of Arathamma Pillai Thankachi, a character in CV Raman Pillai’s Malayalam novel ‘Dharmaraja’ who says: ”if you want to consume food by the granary, your uncles must have amassed land by the acre.”

JNU’s GSCASH (Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment) has meanwhile clarified that it had received no complaints against the deceased. Most things that hold true for food, also hold true for love, especially in India.

Rohingyas and the origins of the caste system

How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called ‘reality’. We can destroy it only as creators.
-Nietzche, ‘Gay Science

If you are seeking origins of the caste system, then well, it lies in the large intestine. Slavoj Žižek has an infamous joke where he compares the lavatories of Germany, France and England with the respective philosophical traditions of those nations (Thus German lavatories are idealistic, French ones revolutionary and English ones utilitarian). This also prompts one to ponder about Indian philosophy and dry toilets.

Slavoj Žižek has just as infamously referred to Gandhi, as being more violent than Hitler. Here Žižek in typical rabble-rousing fashion was trying to be polemical. There are two aspects to this polemic. The first is the apparently obvious one which casts Gandhi in a negative light by bringing his name into proximity with that of someone as odious as Hitler. The second is the more subtle point, that Gandhi was more violent in dismantling the system that existed in British India, and Hitler in Germany was not so thorough as Gandhi,. The first polemical point has more force and is in consonance with Žižek’s publicly stated stand where he sides with Amdedkar against Gandhi. There is no love lost between the Mahatma and the ‘Elvis of Cultural Theory’.

The Government of India was so agitated by Slavoj Žižek’s pronouncements against the father of the nation (that he made while on a tour of India to deliver a lecture at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi, in 2009) that the Slovenian embassy was sent a missive inquiring whether Zizek’s (a former Slovenian presidential candidate) stand on Gandhi was the European nation’s official position. Žižek, when contacted by the Slovenian apparatchiks allegedly told them to respond that ‘it was not the Slovenian Government’s official position at the moment, but only gradually becoming so’.

Žižek, in a public lecture on ‘The Need to Censor Our Dreams’, delivered at the London School of Economics (which he calls the Libyan School of Economics owing to the fact that Gaddafi Jr. was an alumnus of that institute, and that there were allegations of it receiving Libyan Government funding), in 2014, derides the ‘Brahmin’ cultural studies theorists of India. Žižek says elsewhere that, ” I have troubles with Gandhi. He was a great guy, he did many great things, but his attitude towards caste was what I’m tempted to call ‘proto-fascist’. He was not for the abolition of castes, his motto was, ‘every caste is divine and they have their own role to play‘(Slavoj Žižek).

Caste as an ether envelopes India, and externalises its unconscious, like the planet Solaris in Stanislaw Lem’s eponymous science fiction novel, which turns the innermost and hidden thoughts of humans into material reality. The putrefaction slides out and mingles with the earth, where it becomes hierarchy.

I was not visualizing the nauseating mud-eruption which had swallowed up the gold-rimmed spectacles and carefully brushed moustache. I was seeing the engraving on the title-page of his classic work, and the close-hatched strokes against which the artist had made his head stand out — so like my father’s, that head, not in its I features but in its expression of old-fashioned wisdom and honesty, that I was finally no longer able to tell which of them was looking at me, my father or Giese. They were dead, and neither of them buried, but then deaths without burial are not uncommon in our time. The image of Giese vanished, and I momentarily forgot the Station, the experiment, Rheya and the ocean. Recent memories were obliterated by the overwhelming conviction that these two men, my father and Giese, nothing but ashes now, had once faced up to the totality of their existence, and this conviction afforded a profound calm which annihilated the formless assembly clustered around the grey arena in the expectation of my defeat.
-Lem, Stanislaw. ‘Solaris’

In Kerala, when Dr. Palpu, (1863 – 1950), bacteriologist, fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in London, and one of the earliest social reformers and a comrade of Sree Naryana Guru, sent a job application to the local ruler, he received in return a hubristic response that cited caste rules mandating the following of one’s ancestral trade. The letter has become legendary, and so has the insult, even in contemporary times, forgetting the fact that the King was an anal retentive who had sent similar letters, to follow their respective ancestral professions, to upper caste job-seekers as well. Thus even the repudiation of caste takes on the hues of caste, which thus clouds the vision and overpowers the olfactory sense with its stench. It is like the euphemistic chewing gum that sticks to your footwear. There is no getting good riddance of it, outside of radical modes of transformation. (Ralph Ellison in his immortal work ‘The Invisible Man’ suggests that racism is not a visual thing, but anti-visual. It is not sensorial, but anti-sensorial )

The plight of the Rohingya is a case in point. In Myanmar, the Rakhine have been violently attacked, and displaced and also made to flee, which are acts of unspeakable violence and cruelty. But if you turn the objective, cold blooded lens of history inwards, India, where 40,000 or so of the Rohingyas have been living has been even more cruel to them. Their humanity has been denied, and even worse, their status as refugees is being debated in the media. They are a proud people, and in this spirit a couple of Rohingya gentlemen in Delhi, arranged to slaughter a buffalo for their Eid festivities and were promptly beaten up by goons for this importunate seeming act. They had been deprived of their homeland and their livelihoods, but not their humanity, which they only lost in their exodus to India and Bangladesh. Myanmar had a system of exclusion which was extremely brutal and unjustifiable. But their status as a ‘form of life’ was questioned only in India, where they became the excreta, the purged shadow people. An entire millennia-old history is repeating itself again before our eyes, this time as farce. It involves no large-scale violence, murder or subjugation, but only casual indifference, minor cruelty and Vedic genius.

Some scientists adopted a position at the other extreme, and agitated for more vigorous steps to be taken. The administrative director of the Universal Cosmological Institute ventured to assert that the living ocean did not despise men in the least, but had not noticed them, as an elephant neither feels nor sees the ants crawling on its back.

–Lem, Stanislaw. ‘Solaris’

The Curious Case of Indian Psychoanalysis

Marxism has been critiqued variously for its occasional elitism and casteism. But the Freudian establishment in India, a flourishing one at that, has escaped criticism. Ashis Nandy, has so far been Indian psychoanalysis’ fall guy. He has managed to create controversies in virtually every public platform that was given to him. His antics at the annual Jaipur Literary Festival were the stuff of primetime television. Sanjay Subrahmanyam has taken him to task for mistakenly using the term ‘convivencia.’

”When pressed, he [Nandy] refers to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, as if these were the sum total of India’s past. His own knowledge of colonial history is essentially limited to the British, and to Bengali authors under the colonial rule. What sort of intellectual resources are these, if not those of the ‘dominant, colonial culture of India’s knowledge industry’?”
– Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. ‘The Myth of Indian Civilization.’

The other star in the celestial firmament of Indian psychoanalysis is Sudhir Kakar, who currently resides in Goa with his wife. He apparently is the father figure of Indian psychoanalysis. His suzerainty has never been questioned. Every psychotherapist worth his/her certificate from Rehabilitation Commission of India, keeps a few of his tomes in the consulting room. Another luminary, Salman Akhtar confines himself to libertarian quips such as ‘poetry is one person therapy and therapy is two person poetry.’

But what the psychotherapists are ‘collectively’ doing is the destruction of the individual subject. Under the gaze of the psychotherapist, the patient, seated in the chair withers into a non-entity. The analysand, not looked at, and etherized on the couch suffers a meltdown. This happens at a moment when the subaltern movements in India have gained momentum and are on the verge of attaining much denied agency for themselves.

The Jewish filmmaker Woody Allen once when asked about God replied: ‘try getting a plumber on Sundays!’ The same could be said of therapists. It is a seller’s market. There is a thriving sub-culture in the metros where the moneyed elite throng the chambers of therapists old and young, experienced and novice. The consulting fees start from Rs.1000 charged by newly qualified therapists for a 45 minute session to upwards of Rs. 4000 for more qualified and experienced practitioners. There are multiple modes as well of which the dominant one is the psychodynamic therapy. Dance movement therapy and art-based therapies are more creative and respectful of the individual self.

Not only is psychotherapy an elitist and expensive mode of treatment in India, it is also closed to the realities of Indian life. The elephant in the room is caste, which is the source of traumatic experiences across all caste groups in India. But this is treated as a swamp into which the psychotherapist is loath to enter for fear that it would pollute him/her and result in both therapist and patient sinking together into its muddy depths. It takes one back to a Heideggerian luddite anti-modern Utopia not much different from that of the sangh brigade, though psychoanalytic conferences are never complete without profusions of inter-faith camaraderie and dramatics. The autonomy of the individual consciousness is systematically undermined by the so-called caste elite.

Psychoanalysts like Slavoj Zizek (who once infamously said that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler) are anathema to Indian Psychoanalysis and is seldom studied outside philosophy and literature departments. Empirical subjectivity comes down the hierarchy in the chain of psychoanalytic being which is dominated by the theoreticians.

Religious and caste violence are rarely touched upon, either in therapy or in the training of therapists. Gender violence thankfully is broached upon in some curricula and practices at least. The old caste formula that only collectives exist, and the individual does not exist are put into practice.

The central problem is that the Indian psychoanalytic movement has transplanted the western human into India without realising the caste and hierarchical nature of Indian psyche and society. It is as if every Indian would turn into the homo equalis at the very mention of the psychoanalytic deities. The model of pathologisation of African Americans in the United States by white therapists, is replicated here by Indian therapists.

What happens between therapist and patient in India is not an empirical tension of the wills, but a normativization of hierarchy. In couch therapy also, the visibility is denied to the analysand. Politics, as Jacques Ranciere says, is a field of visibility where everybody becomes visible to everybody else in action and utterance (Ranciere, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’). Psychoanalysis makes this impossible. It practices an ‘unseeability’ (metaphorical and otherwise) where the face of the other is simply not the Levinasian face of God.

Ashis Nandy once declared on the pages of the Outlook Magazine that the system in India will never allow Modi to become PM. But the very establishment has welcomed Modi in as the embodiment of the spirit of the times riding on his baarat horseback. The discourse of psychoanalysis has not permeated the Indian public sphere yet (Nandy’s frequent gaffes in public could be because of a limited acceptance of psychology). But once it does, it will be irreversible.

TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR (Žižek’S OEDIPUS COMPLEX) or `A real translation, like Alexander before Diogenes, `doesn’t block the light’

We are all kin, as `ABCD’ would vouch for. The limits of translation are the limits of human communication, and the inability of homo sapiens to communicate. Translation and treason are the same, tradition too, from Arabic to Hebrew, from Hindi to Urdu, from German to French, from Sanskrit to Tamil, from Quran to Bible, from Gita to Gandhi, from machine to man…

An instant and final rather than a temporary and provisional solution to this foreignness remains out of the reach of mankind; at any rate, it eludes any direct attempt. Indirectly, however, the growth of religions ripens the hidden seed into a higher development of language.

-Walter Benjamin, Task of the Translator

 

It is not all about fidelity versus licence. The translator is an echo locator, and language, his chamber.

A literal rendering of the syntax casts the reproduction of meaning entirely to the winds and threatens to lead directly to incomprehensibility. The nineteenth century considered Holderlin’s translations of Sophocles monstrous examples of such literalness. Finally, it is self-evident how greatly fidelity in reproducing the form impedes the rendering of the sense. Thus, no case for literalness can be based on an interest in retaining the meaning. The preservation of meaning is served far better-and literature and language far worse-by the unrestrained license of bad translators. Of necessity, therefore, the demand for literalness, whose justification is obvious but whose basis is deeply hidden, must be understood in a more cogent context. Fragments of a vessel that are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of imitating the sense of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. For this very reason translation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate something, from rendering the sense, and in this the original is important to it only insofar as it has already relieved the translator and his translation of the effort of assembling and expressing what is to be conveyed. In the realm of translation, too, the words En archei en ho logos [“In the beginning was the word”] apply. On the other hand, as regards the meaning, the language of a translation can-in fact, must-let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio. Therefore, it is not the highest praise of a translation, particularly in the age of its origin, to say that it reads as if it had originally been written in that language. Rather, the significance of fidelity as ensured by literalness is that the work reflects the great longing for linguistic complementation.

-Walter Benjamin, Task of the Translator

 

`Task of the translator’ is the quintessential European text, in an age  when the survival of the Union remains perilous and the unity limply hangs on to the carapace of old fractiousness just as meaning does to the words of the translated text-from German to French and then to English and then to Magyar and Spanish and Albanian and Croat. The originary lodes of Greek and Latin are lost or remainbad imitations of their past glory much like Schliemann’s necklace of Helen. Where does liberty begin, or end? Does it begin with a girl standing up for the right of her compatriots to education, or does it end at one’s whim to wear a cross in Paris? Does it stop at the tip of your nose or in the lurchings of my intemperate soul? Does anyone still bet everything on the other’s right to free speech while differing? What else is freedom but the allegiance to quality, and integrity? Freedom is in the reproduction of sense, meaning, feeling and reason. It is not just a wavy romantic fantasy, but also neo-classical recapitulation, cascading over each other. A real translation, like Alexander before Diogenes, `doesn’t block the light’.

Fidelity and freedom in translation have traditionally been regarded as conflicting tendencies. This deeper interpretation of the one apparently does not serve to reconcile the two; in fact, it seems to deny the other all justification. For what does freedom refer to, if not to the reproduction of the sense, which must thereby give up its lawgiving role?

-Walter Benjamin, Task of the Translator

Though in typical romantic fashion, WB argues for greater fragmentation, the unpacking he intends occurs holistically rather than in bits and pieces.

“Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manque Ia supreme: penser etant ecrire sans accessoires, ni chuchotement mais tacite encore l’immo~telle parole, Ia diversite, sur terre, des idiomes empeche personne de proferer les mots qui, sinon se trouveraient, par une frappe unique, elle-meme materiellement Ia verite. ” 1 If what Mallarme evokes here is fully fathomable to a philosopher, translation, with its rudiments of such a language, is midway between poetry and theory. Its work is less sharply defined than either of these, but it leaves no less of a mark on history.

–Walter Benjamin, Task of the Translator

Benjamin famously says that the original is not faithful to the translation.

In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by the standpoint of history rather than that of nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul. The philosopher’s task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history. And indeed, isn’t the afterlife of works of art far easier to recognize than that of living creatures? The history of the great works of art tells us about their descent from prior models, their realization in the age of the artist, and what in principle should be their eternal afterlife in succeeding generations. Where this last manifests itself, it is called fame. Translations that are more than transmissions of subject matter come into being when a work, in the course of its survival, has reached the age of its fame. Contrary, therefore, to the claims of bad translators, such translations do not so much serve the works as owe their existence to it. In them the life of the originals attains its latest, continually renewed, and most complete unfolding.

–Walter Benjamin, Task of the Translator

 

A translation is not intended just for those who do not understand the source language, it is a torsion, it creates a whorl in space-time, edges forward surreptitiously and then closes in on you. That is the craft of the translator, for whom alone, and not to anyone else, not even to the text per se, the translateability of a text makes sense.

Humboldt’s Gift

It is seldom that one encounters candour of the order that Wilhelm von H displays in his autobiographical writings.
He belonged to that section of 19th c allemagn intelligentsia that withdrew from th world in favour of contemplation etc and not in a dolce stil novo kind of kink. haha
He was the other of Nietzch so to say. The introverts were either thinking up utopias or dividing themselves up into appolonians and dionysians.

the other group were the titans major among whom was Marx who reputdly said that the history of all hitherto existing society is that of class struggle. he suspended th world.
ie alienation. the alienated shall inherit the heaven .Amen.
Suspension of the world was hallmark of titanism.hence Coleridge