Witlesstein & Shakespeare.

Language is game theoretic. It isn't about following rules in a mechanical manner. Witlesstein didn't understand game theory. Instead he wrote nonsense about 'language games'. 

 William Day a Professor of Philosophy, writes- 

Ludwig Wittgenstein may have had a fraught relationship with the English language, his adopted tongue.

Most important English books had been translated into German.  

But his animosity towards Shakespeare can't be explained by the foreignness of Elizabethan English.

What does explain it? The answer is that Witless didn't understand that drama is created when we see people engaging in strategic behaviour.  

His remarks on Shakespeare aren't much to look at: they occupy two brief moments in his notebooks, amounting to no more than a handful of pages that can be read in about five minutes.

His remarks were always stupid. He had fallen behind developments in his field and thus was writing retarded shite.  

Yet they fascinate by offering an engagement with Shakespeare’s language

Nonsense! He doesn't engage with Shakespeare's language at all. He just says he doesn't like the plays because they don't conform to Aristotelian 'unities' or some such shite.  

different in kind from the excursions through philosophical temptations and their diagnoses that are the work of his Philosophical Investigations.

The philosophical temptation is to think philosophy isn't stupid shite.  

Consider the following summary remark on Shakespeare that Wittgenstein wrote in 1950:

The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry.

We all do find that symmetry. Why? What Shakespeare creates is 'non-dissipative'. Continuous symmetries have corresponding conserved properties or conservation laws. If Harry changes, Falstaff must remain the same precisely because Harry hasn't changed. Falstaff has. Age will do that to you. Still, Shakespeare has endowed them with an imperishable haecceity.  

It seems to me as though his pieces are, as it were, enormous sketches, not paintings; as though they were dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything, so to speak.

He wasn't German. 'Rules are for fools' as Ophelia said to Macbeth. 

And I understand how someone may admire this & call it supreme art, but I don't like it.

To appreciate Shakespeare, try rewriting his lines or changing what a character does or says. You soon realize why Nahum Tate's Lear was shit compared to Shakespeare's even though the former was more popular for 150 years.  

– So I can understand someone who stands before those pieces speechless;

You aren't supposed to talk while watching a play. Indeed, even farting is discouraged.  

but someone who admires him as one admires Beethoven, say, seems to me to misunderstand Shakespeare.

And someone who hears the String Quartet Op. 18, No. 1, without thinking of the tomb scene in Romeo & Juliet hasn't understood Beethoven. Apparently, his music wasn't commissioned by the hotdog industry. Fidelio, on the other hand, is about the need to put mustard, not ketchup on your hotdog. No. By hotdog I don't mean penis. 

It's hard to explain away the brashness of this appraisal.

It is easy. The man was stupid. Game theory was taking off but he didn't get the memo.  

Even if it were defensible as a thesis about Shakespeare, Wittgenstein doesn't present it as part of a thesis.

Because he wasn't angling for a job as a Professor of Literature.  

He doesn't do more with his few remarks, and their aim is not to present a conclusion of criticism so much as to articulate a feeling or intuition.

Poor chap, he probably didn't think his notebooks would be published. He hoped what would make him famous would be the posthumous discovery of his laundry list nachlass.  

I think they spring not from a philosophical disagreement with Shakespeare – let alone from a sense that Shakespeare lacks philosophical weight – but from a difference in philosophical temperament, the nature of which marks two distinct possibilities in responding to the threat of skepticism

e.g. saying ghosts don't exist- even if they keep telling you to kill Uncle.  

and to the naturalness and inevitability of tragedy.

Death is natural and inevitable. Tragedy really isn't. Nor is comedy. My farts are funny because they are so exquisitely well-timed.  

The most striking assertion in Wittgenstein's critique of Shakespeare may be this, written in 1946: "Shakespeare's similes are, in the ordinary sense, bad.

They were so good, he made a lot of money.  

So if they are nevertheless good – & I don't know whether they are or not – they must be a law to themselves."

Germans are totes into laws and rules and everything which is not forbidden being compulsory. True, Witless was Austrian but he attended the same school as Hitler who was his age.  

What makes Wittgenstein think he can lay claim to such a judgment?

Anyone can lay claim to any judgment whatsoever. Witless's problem was that his judgment on Godel was wrong. Gentzen's work was useful and could be used to make out that Witless too had something interesting to say. But neither knew of each other.  

Part of the answer may lie in Wittgenstein's own remarkable talent for similes and figures of comparison.

They were stupid. The ineluctable modality of language is Time. For Pictures, it is Space. Language can't be compared to a picture.  

Given their importance to his way of doing philosophy,

i.e. writing gibberish 

it shouldn't surprise that he was good at making them, and knew he was good.

Sraffa kept telling him to fuck off anytime he sidled up to him for a chat. Apparently, GE Moore did the same to Bertrand Russell. But Russell, at that time, had very bad breath. Still, there's a pattern here is all I am saying.  

Here is one example, drawn from a remark he thought to include in the Foreword to the Investigations: "Only every so often does one of the sentences I am writing here make a step forward; the rest are like the snipping of the barber's scissors, which he has to keep in motion so as to be able to make a cut with them at the right moment."

Gentzen's 'cut elimination theorem' was useful. But so is every snip that the barber makes. There is no 'right moment' to make a snip. It doesn't matter if you do one side of the head first and then the other or if you alternate your snipping while keeping up a lively conversation.  

Compare this marvelous image – revelatory both of its author and of the process of writing,

shite. If you are writing something useful or interesting every sentence pushes forward the thesis.  

so often felt as a movement without forward motion

loose motion is the mot juste for Witless's work.  

– to a Shakespearean metaphor that Wittgenstein once mentioned to a friend, from Richard II. There Mowbray says, "Within my mouth you have engaol'd my tongue / Doubly portcullis'd with my teeth and lips."

Natural Justice requires hearing the defendant's side of the story. The King had undermined the rule of law and would pay for it with his life. I suppose there were prisoners in the Tower of London whom contemporaries felt had been denied justice in a like manner. 

Part of Wittgenstein's critique of Shakespeare's figures might be the obviousness of such an image as the teeth and lips as a gate for the tongue,

That isn't the image. We picture a man clenching his teeth and tightening his lips. This is an angry man. He will seek vengeance. Kill him, if you must. Don't exile him. The next two lines reveal the source of the problem-  And dull unfeeling barren ignorance / Is made my gaoler to attend on me. England is a jail. The turnkey is the King who is ignorant and lacking in empathy- i.e. imagination. This is a state of affairs which can't endure. 

even when one acknowledges that here it is closed to keep something in rather than to keep something out.

The Professor has noticed that, if he doesn't close his mouth, his tongue escapes and takes up a career in Media Sales or Business Process Outsourcing. 

See whether you think Shakespeare's portcullis'd tongue is as striking as the similative tongue in the following, from Wittgenstein's so-called "Big Typescript": "The philosopher strives to find the liberating word,

No. He tries to find the accurate word unless he is writing utter shite.  

and that is the word that finally permits us to grasp what until then had constantly and intangibly weighed on our consciousness.

Witless is thinking of the 'mot juste'. Aesthetes may have gone in for it. Philosophers were expected to be accurate.  

(It's like having a hair on one's tongue; one feels it, but can't get hold of it, and therefore can't get rid of it.)"

It is easy to get rid of a hair on your tongue even if you eat a lot of pussy. It's when a hair entwines itself around your epiglottis that you may need medical help.  

In these examples at least, it seems fair to say that Wittgenstein could hold his own against Shakespeare.

No. Shakespeare's similes push the action forward. There is an element of 'foreshadowing'. Witless tells us stupid lies about barbers and how difficult it is to get rid of a hair on your tongue.  

So when Wittgenstein says that Shakespeare's similes "must be a law to themselves"

there is no law relating to similes. You can compare anything to anything though your g.f might punch you if you compare her to a Summer's day if both of you happen to live in Delhi.  

(because he was a "creator of language" who "could permit himself anything"), he’s disagreeing with the conventional wisdom that Shakespeare's writing exhibits his linguistic mastery.

Suppose I had made myself a master of the law and thus was appointed Chief Justice. I could be said to be creating new law by my judgments. I might even be said to be a 'law unto myself' because the Supreme Court is not bound by stare decisis (or even Res Judicata, in India). Shakespeare may indeed be said to be a master of the English language.  A usage only found in his work would nevertheless pass muster. The sternest critic would be obliged to admit that it is permissible.  

Wittgenstein does not misunderstand Shakespeare.

Nor does he understand him. He was too stupid.  

He sees himself as speaking neither from understanding nor from misunderstanding, but from that particular poverty of one who wants to articulate the cause of an absence in himself, the lack of appreciation for a body of work generally praised as the best of its kind.

This is easily done. Just say 'I like detective novels. I don't like Shakespeare. Reading him makes my head hurt.'  

In a remark from 1949 he compares the effect of Shakespeare's language to that of a dream: "Shakespeare & the dream. A dream is all wrong, absurd, composite, & yet completely right: in this strange concoction it makes an impression. Why? I don't know."

I suppose, back then, people thought dreams were the 'royal road to the unconscious' or some such shite. But Shakespeare was a craftsman. He made his money by writing and staging plays. If a speech worked, it stayed in. If it put people to sleep, out it went.  

Wittgenstein's stumbling block, I believe, arises from an anxiety or fear that The Bard's language stirs up in him.

Maybe Witless was afraid that he'd get his cock out while watching Hamlet and jump on the stage and try to bugger Sir John Gielgud. I'm not saying that wasn't what Keynes did, but behaviour tolerated in an Old Etonian is considered infra dig in lesser mortals.  

The telltale evidence for this is the sentence that concludes his disparaging of Shakespeare's similes. Wittgenstein writes: "That I do not understand him could then be explained by the fact that I cannot read him with ease. Not, that is, as one views a splendid piece of scenery."

Kids read Shakespeare with ease. Why? There is narrative energy. There are colourful characters. There is an element of dramatic tension. Then, there are the fart jokes. Say what you like but nothing in Harry Potter can compare to the moment Ophelia farts in Macbeth's face and says 'chew on that you great big haggis.'  

The notion of an inability to read "with ease" is related to a concept that occupies Wittgenstein throughout his later career and that he names "aspect-seeing." The iconic figure for illustrating the meaning of "aspect-seeing" is the duck-rabbit – a line drawing that can be seen as either duck or rabbit.

Both can be seen with ease. It is also easy to read a narrative which is ambiguous. Indeed, the thing becomes more gripping.  

Wittgenstein notes the ease with which we typically effect the gestalt-switch from one to the other. But to someone incapable of exercising this freedom or ease in reading the aspects of the world, Wittgenstein gives the name "aspect-blind."

Which is no big deal. It's like the question of whether the Blade Runner is actually an android. What's important is that he gets the girl.  

And a characteristic of the aspect-blind is the inability to register how something invites the seeing of different aspects.

Actual blind people can register stuff about colours and shapes and so forth. Indeed, Ved Mehta wrote better descriptive prose than his sighted contemporaries. Witless was worrying about an imaginary problem.  

Now notice that Wittgenstein describes his difficulty with Shakespeare in the language of a condition (aspect-blindness), rather than as a temporary aesthetic difficulty.

This is like saying 'I'm not a boring shithead. I have a deficit in being interesting and intelligent.'  

For comparison, here is Wittgenstein describing how we see a depiction "with ease": "I might get an important message to someone by sending him the picture of a landscape. Does he read it like a blueprint? That is, does he decipher it? [No.]

Because it isn't a blueprint. Nor is it a gramophone record which is why he doesn't stick it on the record player.  

He looks at it and acts accordingly. He sees rocks, trees, a house, etc. in it."

He may do. Alternatively, he may say 'ah! That's a Constable painting. The meaning is 'go to the police'.'  

But Wittgenstein imagines his difficulty reading Shakespeare as akin to the aspect-blind, someone who reads a picture of a landscape the way we read a blueprint.

We don't read blueprints unless we are architects of builders or whatever. Blind people get somebody to describe stuff to them. When I look at a landscape by a great painter, I google in and read what experts have said about it. In this way, I learn to appreciate it more. Indeed, this may be a lifelong process.  

To read a picture as if it were a blueprint is to merely know what it is about without seeing it.

No. It is to imagine it.  

That seems to be how Wittgenstein understands his condition as a reader of Shakespeare.

Sadly, he didn't get that he was equally stupid in his reading of Godel. He didn't even bother with Gentzen etc.  

While Wittgenstein professes aversion to other writers and composers, his most concentrated articulation of a failure to understand another's writing is reserved for Shakespeare.

Fuck Shakespeare. It was Witless's inability to understand Godel which damns him.  

And yet, I think Wittgenstein is being disingenuous. Casting himself as suffering from a condition (an inability to read with ease, a blindness), he avoids coming to terms with what lies behind his condition: something he does see, an aspect of Shakespeare's words that is blocking understanding.

He doesn't see that language is strategic- i.e. game theoretic. There are coordination and discoordination games. We can have Schelling focality but not 'naturality'.  

There is a likely candidate for what lies behind Wittgenstein's uneasiness over Shakespeare. Like Wittgenstein, Shakespeare can be read

in any idiotic manner by any idiot. Nobody cares.  

as responding to the threat of skepticism,

 One can have faith while remaining doubtful regarding any particular belief. 

just as Descartes can be read as skirting that threat.

by embracing Occasionalism. What does Shakespeare embrace? Fatalism? No. Beauty. What happens is not inevitable but, properly depicted, it may be sublime or otherwise aesthetically gratifying.  

The argument is made in Stanley Cavell's readings of Shakespeare,

good enough in their time, but that was long ago.  

which he offers alongside his understanding of Wittgenstein's diagnosis and treatment of our modern condition, our interest to turn our relation to the world and to others into matters of knowing, and so into matters of doubt.

The solution was the reverse game theory of mechanism design. That was what was happening in the England of Francis Bacon & William Shakespeare. Essentially, Society was trying to move from Nash equilibria to Aumann correlated equilibria based on public signals. Shakespeare himself contributed to this. We first read his History plays as kids. When we return to them, we appreciate the manner in which they contributed to the ongoing process of making this country a better and better place for all its people.  

Here is Cavell on tragedy's revelation of skepticism:

This is what I have throughout kept arriving at as the cause of skepticism

or cynicism or just going to live in a cave like Timon of Athens.  

– the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle. . .

this is only cool if 'intellectuals' have tenure and can sell their worthless books to undergraduates.  

Tragedy is the place we are not allowed to escape the consequences, or price, of this cover.

Only if the tragedy is happening to you. Otherwise you can leave after the first Act.  

If one grants this connection,

There is no connection. Tragedy is about bad things happening to good people or the high and mighty being brought low. It has nothing to do with scepticism. Even the Donald will die.  

one is likely to wonder how Wittgenstein could have failed to see in Shakespeare's tragedies, as he saw in Augustine's Confessions, a working out of his own most pressing concerns.

I may see in James Joyce's 'Finnegans Wake' a working out of my own pressing concern- which is to find the TV remote- but there is no actual connection between the two.  

But we need not imagine that he missed it. To miss how philosophy's skepticism of the existence of others mirrors our failed relations with others,

there is no connection between the two. Our relations with others fail if we end up hurting them or boring them or borrowing money off them. Philosophical scepticism is about getting tenure and publishing yet another imbecilic book.  

and how Shakespearean tragedy trades in the extreme consequences of these failed relations, would be to simply misunderstand Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's tragedies are diverse. Why? They had to make money. It was a question of 'bums on seats'. Today, ghosts and witches are cool. Tomorrow, they are a drug on the market.  

Such a reader would be left to praise Shakespeare for all the wrong reasons (e.g., for his linguistic mastery).

That is the right reason to praise him.  

Wittgenstein is not such a reader. Rather than missing how Shakespeare shares his concerns, Wittgenstein is merely covering his ears to the sound of them.

No. He merely says he doesn't like the dude. What he didn't add was that he liked hard boiled detective fiction.  

But for fear of what does Wittgenstein cover his ears?

Claudius might pour poison into them.  

Recall the charges leveled by Wittgenstein against Shakespeare's language: its unnaturalness;

no Englishman ever felt so.  

its dream-like strangeness;

it doesn't put us to sleep because it is vivid and engaging.  

its disturbing asymmetry and spontaneity,

as opposed to being well mannered and observant of Aristotelian unities.  

the sense that anything is permitted.

As in Aristophanes and Euripides.  

This is a picture of the natural world as seen from the side of chaos,

Nothing can see from that side.  

or in which chaos and madness threaten to break out at any moment

anyone can go mad at any time. 

(as they do in King Lear, in Othello, and even in the late-Shakespearean romance The Winter's Tale).

Things are resolved well enough. Catharsis is achieved. The audience goes home to their dinner feeling they got their money's worth.  

If Wittgenstein doesn't miss the skeptical problematic running through Shakespeare, then what he covers his ears to is the sound of the raw motives to skepticism,

stupidity or doing useless shite 

and of words gone wild,

not so wild that they become ugly 

absent from the philosophical elaborations and filigrees that help to preserve Wittgenstein even as he does battle with them.

Sadly, Witless's 'philosophical elaborations' were shit. He hadn't kept up with the math, didn't understand Brouwer's choice sequences or what Turing did with them, and said stupid shit about Godel. Von Neumann's game theory was useful. His own language games were useless. 

It is Shakespeare's tragic expression of skepticism,

Hamlet reproduces Agrippa's Trilemma. But the solution is independent, protocol bound, verification. Interestingly, Hamlet does find an ingenious way to get this. Then he does something rash- viz. stab Polonius. Blood will have blood.  

a skepticism untamable by the methods of Wittgenstein's grammatical investigations,

but easily tamed by independent verification. Madam Wu's experiment put paid to Kant's incongruent counterparts. The 2022 Nobel went to the guys who found experimental proof of Bell's inequality.  

that Wittgenstein has in mind when he declares: "The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry."

Look for the conserved properties and you can work out the continuous symmetries because the system is non-dissipative. I suppose Witless was too old to have been taught Noether's theorem in Collidge. 

Perhaps Wittgenstein's fastidiousness with regard to formal design betokens in this case a wish to repudiate what the unbridled unfolding of events in a Shakespeare tragedy – the turns of mind that lead to turns of fate – itself betokens.

Nonsense! A guy who enjoys a pulp detective fiction can get his head around a Shakespeare play well enough. He just can't say anything very interesting about it unless he isn't as stupid as shit.  

And that would be something Cavell means by the truth of skepticism: that humans naturally desire, not only an end to the bumps that the understanding gets by running its head up against the limits of language,

there are no such bumps. Language has no limits for the same reason that mathematics has no limits.  

but an end to the consequences of speaking altogether

there are no consequences to talking nonsense to imbeciles even if they get a sheepskin in return.  

(the consequences of expression, the consequences of acknowledging others).

Professors of shite subjects live in constant fear that they won't be 'acknowledged'. People will start using them as urinals.  

What Wittgenstein covers his ears to may be just this silence, this nothing, that the Shakespearean tragic hero craves.

The tragic hero may say 'I fucking hate this world' but we know he would feel differently if things hadn't gone badly for him.  

But if it is, then what is revealed in Wittgenstein's dislike for Shakespeare is the anxiety or fear that – as in King Lear – something will come of this nothing.

Something does. Love triumphs- if it was there in the first place. But so does death. But, that too shall pass. 

As for Witless something did come from the nothing that was his career in philosophy. It was an availability cascade of witlessness. Still, if it kept Professors from having to turn tricks at truck-stops, perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on the fellow. After all, he was a foreigner. Allowances should be made.  

Ruchir Sharma on why Nitish is India's Biden

Ruchir Sharma, writing for the FT, calls Nitish Kumar- who is a year younger than Modi at 74- the 'Joe Biden' of India. This is very foolish. Nitish leads his own party but it is the BJP which is the senior partner in Bihar.  India follows the Westminster system. Modi might be wildly popular but his party failed to get a majority at the centre in 2024. He remains in power with the votes of Nitish's party and that of a few others. Nitish is personally popular despite some health problems. But so is the young Tejashwi who is just 34 years old. Nitish has won because the 'Mahila-Yuva' (Women & Youth vote) went in his favour because of specific offers made to them by his coalition.  Tejashwi's 'Muslim-Yadav' combination held up but Congress & the VIP (a Nishad party) crashed and burned. The Left, too, lost seats.  With hindsight, it was a mistake to keep out Owaisi's party which continues to do well in the Muslim majority Seemanchal region. For the first time, the RJD has fewer Muslim legislators than a rival party.  

In his latest campaign the once earthy and easily accessible chief minister of Bihar morphed into the Joe Biden of India, rolled out for speeches but otherwise cloistered behind aides alarmed by his gaffes, blank stares and memory lapses.

Prashant Kishore, previously considered an expert on electioneering, drew attention to Nitish's health and some TV stations ran with the story. Kishore said he'd quit politics if Nitish got more than 25 seats. He got 85, just 4 less than Modi's party. Chiragh Paswan is paying court to Nitish- indeed, he is a possible successor.  

Only Nitish Kumar, 74, won, despite more obvious infirmities than Biden.

His candidates won. Nitish's record on Development helped them win. But his allies also won. Tejashwi's allies lost. Congress contested 61 seats and got just 6. The Communist parties did poorly. 

After covering Indian national and state elections every year for the last 30, this was my sixth trip to Bihar, where abject poverty scars the lush, marshy landscape. I was expecting Kumar’s health and stalled progress to be major issues.

Why? It is obvious that his partners will play a big role in the next administration. BJP is the biggest party with 89. Hopefully, Nitish will be able to last out his innings as CM so as to postpone succession issues. 

Instead, I found deeply traditional Kumar backers still grateful for all their long-standing chief minister has done for them. They consider it rude to discuss his health, much less vote him out. The opposition treads lightly.

Prashant Kishore didn't. He now looks a fool.  

And the national press largely joined this conspiracy of respectful silence.

If nobody said anything about Atal or Manmohan- both of whom were quite decrepit- why mention Nitish? It is obvious the BJP is the senior partner and that Chiragh, who has youth appeal, will have a big role.  

Before Kumar took power two decades ago, this landlocked state of 135mn people was known as “the place civilisation forgot”, a dark and lawless “Jungle Raj”.

Thanks must go to nutters like Vinobha Bhave and Jayprakash Narayan for this outcome.  

In his first five-year term Kumar imposed a semblance of order, built roads and bridges. In his second he brought electricity to the countryside. But in his last two terms, Kumar failed to take the next step and create jobs.

Why? He is a Socialist and averse to using muscle power to create a favourable business climate. By contrast, Yogiji is all muscle. This creates a sense of confidence. Work hard, pray to God, and you can rise up. Your operation won't be shut down by bureaucrats or targeted by 'labour' organizers.  

Around the city of Purnia, the top “industry” is processing fox nuts — by hand, cracking them with mallets, and roasting over open fires. Two out of three Bihari families have at least one member who has left the state to find work. After we saw touts paying children to wade neck-deep into a garbage-filled pond, groping around for mud fish as their mothers looked on, one of my travel companions went home.

The first fishing net known to archaeology was made in 8300 BC. Biharis haven't progressed that far. What's the point of writing about its politics?  

If Bihar were a country it would be the world’s 12th poorest, behind Liberia.

This is shameful. Bihar must stand first in that list.  

That Kumar won anyway says much about the clash of hope and resignation in India.

No. It says much about women wanting to get 10,000 Rupees from the Government. Youth has no objection to Mummy getting a bit of cash.  

The gap between average incomes in the poorest and richest states — Bihar and Telangana

Sikkim is the richest. 

— is six to one. The comparable gap is roughly four to one or less in Brazil, China, the US and other major nations.

Which are nothing like India.  

During Kumar’s first decade, Bihar’s average income started to catch up to the rest of India, but has fallen back since. Kumar responded by making the most statist of Indian states more so.

Because he is a Socialist.  

Total government spending is 34 per cent of state GDP, nearly double the average. Half goes to social spending, and Kumar won in good part by promising more, with new spending amounting to another 3 per cent of state GDP. Across India, this is the norm.

Buying votes is nothing unusual. Trump is now promising Americans a 'dividend' of 2000 dollars funded by Tariff revenue. Oddly, he isn't a Socialist.  

Candidates vie to see who can offer the most generous freebies, but Bihar can least afford it.

Put another way, its people can't afford to dispense with freebies.  

Facing one of the highest deficits in any state, it can’t fund new outlays without cuts elsewhere, including roads and factories.

Factories should be earning you money. There is such a thing as a toll-road.  

The problem: prioritising relief today retards development tomorrow.

Socialism is retarded. Bihar has had Socialist governments of one sort or another since the Sixties.  

In one way, modernity has deepened this “welfare trap”. India has digitised delivery of government services, cutting out the intermediaries who used to steal the bulk of transfer payments. But politicians now use this network to speedily deliver cash to voters, a practice widely seen as virtual vote buying. Just before polls opened, Kumar’s government started sending a payment of 10,000 rupees to one woman from every family in Bihar. That’s around $110, but huge against Bihar’s average annual income of 70,000 rupees. Offered as “seed money” for small businesses but with no oversight, women told us they plan to spend it on immediate needs such as goats or gifts for festivals.

Cash transfers are better than giving one person in every family a government job.  

Along with his main ally, the Bharatiya Janata party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Kumar crafted this offer to women as a way to break traditional voter loyalties, based on religion or caste.

That was already breaking down. 'Universal' entitlements have that effect.  

Modi is also in his mid-seventies but still his energetic, acerbic self.

Combative- yes. Acerbic- not so much.  

We saw him speak in the town of Nawada, where he reminded Bihar that the same Yadav clan which presided over the Jungle Raj runs the main opposition party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal. Struggling to widen its base, the RJD made offers too big for voters to believe, including one government job for every family.

Tejaswi wanted the job previously held by his Daddy & (when Daddy was in jail) his Mummy. Rahul too appears to want the family job.  

Kumar’s win reflects a global trend.

Nonsense! It doesn't reflect anything other than that Tejaswi is young and still learning the ropes. Rahul is 55 and useless. Stay the fuck away from him. Be nice to Owaisi. Muslims aren't going to play second fiddle to Yadavs. 

As developed democracies turn hostile to incumbents,

if they are shit- sure.  

their developing peers are turning the other way.

Sri Lanka, Bangladesh & Nepal have had popular uprisings leading to regime change. Pakistan seems to have put the Army Chief above the law. India remains as stable as ever. 

In India, seated leaders were losing 70 per cent of state elections before the 2000s.

Because caste coalitions kept changing. But there were exceptions to this rule- e.g. Left Front West Bengal.  

They’ve come back since, winning more than half of these contests this decade.

Sometimes, this was because 'pendulum politics' was about two former allies who fell out. If one of the leaders died before the other- there was no pendulum.  

Respect for elders,

Trump is 79. He is only 3 years younger than Biden.  

an almost spiritual acceptance of slow progress and increasing incumbent control over the machinery of state all help explain how a Joe Biden figure could win in India.

Nonsense! Biden was a poor candidate in 1988 and 2008. He remained a poor candidate in 2020 but benefitted from lockdown because his proclivity for gaffes was curtailed. COVID had tanked the economy and thus Trump's ratings had taken a hit. But it was the fact that Biden looked like Clint fucking Eastwood when compared to fatty Trump which sealed the deal. Sadly, the man wasn't up to the job. 

It may be said that Nitish lacked the charisma of Lalu or Paswan. But allying with the BJP enabled him to prevail. At an earlier period, he was an effective CM- e.g. in dealing with Naxals- but he remained a Socialist at heart. Currently, he is a good enough CM face. It will be the task of younger people in the Cabinet to deliver better outcomes for the Bihari people.  

Richard Murphy of David Graeber

 Richard Murphy writes-

David Graeber was the anthropologist

i.e. ignorant cretin 

who re-framed economics by showing that its most basic assumptions were myths.

It has no basic assumptions. It has theories which only apply under very restrictive conditions.  

Where conventional economists traced money to barter and exchange,

They didn't. Legal tender is stuff you can pay your taxes with. If you don't pay your taxes, the Government beats or incarcerates you and grabs all your cool shiny stuff.  

Graeber traced it to trust and relationships.

Like that which obtains within a family. Baby trusts Mummy. It pays her some cash so as to suckle at her breast. Mummy trusts Daddy she pays him to put some sperm into her. Sadly, my wife refused to do any such thing. She threw me out of the house.  

He argued that the origins of money lay not in markets but in morality: in obligations, promises, and the human capacity for cooperation.

None of which involve handing over cash. But being mugged does. You hand over your wallet to the guy with the knife and beg him not to stab you.  

But he also showed how those promises were corrupted: how debt, once a symbol of mutual responsibility,

Debt was never any such thing. Where there was mutual responsibility, the burden was shouldered by those better able to do so. That's why though small children may help their parents with the chores, less is expected of them.  

became a mechanism of domination.

Either there was domination based on being able to break the debtor's legs, or else the debt was uncollectable.  

Hence the David Graeber Question: if money began as a promise of mutual trust,

it didn't. You may say 'the State formed the expectation that it could buy what it wanted with 'legal tender'' but an expectation is not a promise. Nor is it based on trust. The State may not trust its people but it expects them to pay their taxes because the people have a well-founded expectation of being sent to jail and having their assets seized if they don't pay.  

when did it become the instrument of control that imprisons us?

Never. This is a fairy story. On the other hand, it is true that language imprisons us. Why are we forced to learn language by Mummy and Daddy? How come we were taught foreign languages in School? The answer is obvious. Shape-shifting, neo-liberal, lizards from Planet X have secretly taken over all the positions of power and influence on this planet. 

The false origin story

Economics, Graeber noted, begins with a fable.

No. It begins with data. It takes off when a theory fits the data and has predictive power.  

The claim is that there were once isolated individuals trading goats for grain.

Grain is traded for grain and goats are traded for goats. There are 'futures markets' in both.  

Then

arbitrageurs (market-makers) appeared. They dealt with each other. They found Schelling focal solutions to coordination and discoordination games. This involved a range of 'units of account' and 'stores of value' with varying properties. An economic model may simplify things by treating money as homogenous and exogenously determined, but it isn't really. What matters is whether you make better predictions than the other guy.  

money evolved to simplify that exchange, after which states and banks came later. This story, told in some way in almost every economics textbook, is almost entirely untrue.

D'uh!  

Instead, in every known society, people first organised economic life through relationships of credit and trust. “I owe you” came before “I pay you.” Money began as memory and not as a metal coin.

Nonsense! There were plenty of societies with no money. Now they may be fewer. The point about money is that it has no memory. There may be some people with a memory of who a particular piece of money belonged to. Suppose I get a fifty pound note from a client. When I pay it into my Bank Account, the serial number is flagged. It turns out the money was stolen. The police come to question me as to how I got the fifty pound note. I remember it was given to me by Joe Smith in return for some work I did for him. The police question Joe Smith. It turns out he was the robber. 

However, had the serial number not been noted down and if I hadn't remembered who gave it to me, there would have been nothing tying Joe Smith to the crime. 

Money can be 'laundered'. That's why some countries have 'know your customer' rules.  

Graeber's anthropology restored the social dimension that economics had erased: people do not trade because they are selfish, but because they live together.

People who don't live together trade. Even in ancient times, Chinese silks would end up in Imperial Rome. The commodity would have passed through many hands before reaching its destination.  

Debt and domination

Graeber traced the long arc of civilisation through cycles of credit and violence.

Both are based on 'Expectations' not love and mutuality and braiding each other's hair while offering gratuitous rape counselling.  

Periods of trust and mutual obligation gave way to eras of hierarchy, slavery, and debt peonage, when the moral logic of reciprocity was replaced by the coercive logic of repayment.

Debt peonage, like slavery, was based on being able to fuck up the peon or slave. The logic of coercion has to do with having a superior threat point. You can kill the other guy. The other guy can't kill you.  

Debt then became a weapon.

I would often ask Graeber to lend me fifty quid. He would then have a weapon which he could use to threaten Amartya Sen. Sadly, Graeber told me fuck the fuck off. Admittedly, I was drunk at the time and may have been talking to some other LSE Professor.  

Kings, priests, and empires used it to bind the powerless to the powerful.

No. Kings killed people who didn't do as they were told. Priests merely threatened them with eternal damnation unless the King, very kindly, leant them some troops to kill heretics, blasphemers, and guys who complained about being sodomized by the Bishop.  

Today, that same dynamic persists: in the relationships between banks and households, creditors and governments, the global north and the global south.

Fuck off! I owed my Bank a lot of money. They sold the debt on and some Debt Recovery firm used to phone me and threaten me with legal proceedings. I laughed so hard I almost shat myself. The global south was equally recalcitrant once the age of gunboat diplomacy ended. If the foreigners can't take over your Custom House, they can whistle for their money. It is a different matter that you might play 'extend and pretend'.  

Debt is not merely financial; it is moralised subordination.

No. There's a good reason no one will lend me any money. It is because I recognize no fucking moral obligation to pay my debts. True, if I were smart and had rational expectations, I would pay my debts so as to be able to borrow and invest more and more money with the result that I wouldn't be as poor as fuck. Sadly, I am not smart at all.  

The moral inversion of obligation

Graeber's greatest moral insight was that those who owe the most are the least blamed, and those who owe the least are shamed most.

This is because I used to follow him around shouting 'Graeber, mate, you got a tiny dick! Take the shame you shithead!'.  

When banks collapse, we bail them out.

Very true. Graeber & Murphy personally leant half a trillion dollars to Citibank. That is why they were constantly subjected to body-shaming.  

When citizens default, we punish them.

Graeber used to kick in the heads of people who couldn't afford their sub-prime mortgages.  

When corporations exploit tax havens, we call them efficient.

Because it helps pass the time. 

When the poor ask for help, we call them lazy.

No. We laugh heartily and then tell them to fuck off.  

He called this moral inversion the defining hypocrisy of capitalism, which is a system that preaches responsibility but rewards irresponsibility at scale.

Fuck are these two nitwits doing other than preaching? Still, if they get to sell a few of their shitty books, good luck to them. That's how the market works.  

Work, bureaucracy, and meaning

In The Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs, Graeber explored how bureaucracy and finance have fused into a single system of control, but I would argue that Debt: The First 5,000 Years is his most important work.

Sadly, it is less important than a cow-pat.  

Capitalism, he argued, now survives not through production but through paperwork, including endless forms, metrics, and managerial hierarchies, that reinforce the entrapment of people that debt creates, with people trapped in jobs that serve no purpose except to sustain debt, discipline, and obedience.

By contrast, Communist countries had no bureaucracies.  

Work has become theatre; labour, a ritual of compliance.

Rather than a ritual featuring sado-masochism and virgin sacrifices to Baphomet.  

This, Graeber wrote, is the real crisis of modernity:

as opposed to those fake crises which have big Instagram followings.  

the loss of meaning disguised as efficiency, but which is actually control.

Especially if you get the sack just because you like to take a nap at work.  

The anthropology of hope

Unlike Marx's determinism or Keynes's pragmatism, Graeber's vision was profoundly humanist.

Then he died. Now his vision is less humanist and more 'food-for-the-worms-ist'  

He believed that because our institutions are human creations, they can be remade.

We can fuck up the economy by doing stupid shit. That's true enough.  

History, he showed, is full of moments when people simply stopped obeying, meaning hierarchies collapsed because they lost legitimacy.

The Soviet Union collapsed. That's true enough.  

His activism, from the Occupy movement to debt strikes,

both were useless 

was a living experiment in alternative economics and in the reconstruction of reciprocity beneath the ruins of neoliberalism.

Graeber's hope was anthropological: he knew that cooperation is as ancient as competition, and that freedom lies in the capacity to imagine something different.

You lose that freedom when you die. Graeber died.  

What answering Graeber requires

To answer the Graeber Question, we must rehumanise money

so that it too can suffer disease and death 

and reclaim the politics of debt.

Write off all loans, not just student loans. Did you know a lot of pensioners are living off interest payments? That's usury! Get rid of it and laugh heartily as pensioners starve to death.  

That means:

Reasserting money as a public good: governments must issue credit for collective purposes, such as housing, care, and the green transition, rather than claiming that they are leaving money creation to private banks is the solution.

Trump should be allowed to print money and send checks to those who vote for him.  

Liberating the indebted, meaning governments must assist in the cancellation of unpayable and unjust debts and end the moral stigmatisation of the poor.

Unpayable debts are written off. Every debt is unjust in the eye of the debtor. It is not enough to destigmatize poverty. We must destigmatize the causes of poverty- e.g. being a drunken, workshy, cretin like yours truly.  

Redefining value because honour, care, creativity, and community are the true measures of wealth.

Tax the creative by all means. Give me the money thus raised. Nobody can deny that I lack honour, care, creativity and community more than anybody else. 

Reclaiming time, freeing people from meaningless labour

like teaching nonsense at the LSE. 

so they can contribute meaningfully to society.

By getting drunk and running naked down Houghton Street with a radish up their bum. I'm not saying that's what I did but I do feel I was wrongly advised by Prof. Amartya Sen that I would get a PhD in Social Choice theory if I did so. Anyway, it turned out, it wasn't Amartya Sen at all. It was Partha Dasgupta. Fuck your Sir Partha! Fuck you very much! 

The moral economy of freedom

Graeber taught that economics is always moral because debt is always a relationship between people.

I have relationships with people. They won't lend me any money. Sad.  

To reform money is to reform power.

But you need power to reform shit. These guys will never have any. Nor will you even if you occupy the shit out of Wall Street.  

Our age of financial abstraction has severed money from morality and replaced promises with punishment.

We don't have prisons for debtors.  

But if debt once enslaved, it can also be redeemed, and not just be forgiven but redefined as a bond of mutual care.

The Bank should come and wipe my bum because it was once foolish enough to lend me money.  

The task is not to abolish obligation, but to turn it back into solidarity.

After which, our species can hand from tree branches by our tails while eating bananas.  

Inference

The Graeber Question is the spiritual twin of the Judt Question. Both ask how a civilisation founded on care and promise lost its moral compass.

but found a safe space on Campus.  

Graeber's answer is that our debt is not financial but ethical: we owe one another the duty to imagine better.

We really don't. I told a girl in my Topology class that I could better imagine her without her clothes on. She slapped me silly. Then it turned out it wasn't a Topology class. It was remedial Arithmetic.  

Money began as trust. It can be trust again.

Politicians can fuck the economy. Smart peeps can form high-trust networks and continue to thrive. Maybe this is also the case with crypto.  

The future will belong to those who

don't drop dead. Graeber dropped dead.  

understand that economics is not about exchange, but about relationship, and not about repayment, but about repair.

and not about productivity but about braiding each others' hair while offering gratuitous rape counselling.  

Harsh Mander on 5 lessons from Zohran

Writing for Scroll.in, Harsh Mander writes that India's opposition parties can learn 5 lessons from Mamdani's win.

1 Mamdani’s emphatic assertion of his Muslim identity

Jinnah emphatically asserted his Muslim identity. Mander's family had to run away from their ancestral homes in Pakistan. 

Still, Mander is right. Rahul should emphatically assert his Muslim identity by wearing Burqa. That way, everybody will vote for him. 

The first lesson that I point to is Mamdani’s proud and emphatic affirmation of his Muslim identity.

Modi is proud to be a Hindu. He is Prime Minister.  

At no point did Mamdani soften, dilute, divert attention away from, or apologise for his religious identity.

Modi doesn't apologize for being Hindu.  

In America after 9/11, anti-Muslim prejudice and hate have become widely entrenched. Social media is filled up with charges that he supports terror and even would bring in Sharia law!

His father praises Idi Amin as the 'maker of modern Uganda'. But Idi Amin attempt to make Uganda Islamic failed. Mamdani too will fail. He won't be able to make good on his promises.  

Mamdani was undeterred. As he declared in his victory speech, “I am young” (adding ironically “despite my best efforts to grow older”. He added, “I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologise for any of this”.

He didn't even apologize for being cis-gender. Sad.  

Born a Shia Muslim,

He is a Khoja. The Brits classified them as 'Hindoo Mussalman' because they followed some Hindu traditions and had Hindu type inheritance law. Some Sunnis consider Shias to be heretics. 

he spoke to the Indian Eye of being raised in an interfaith family. “My mother’s side of the family is Hindu” he said, “and I grew up celebrating Diwali, Holi and Raksha Bandhan. Though I identify as Muslim, these Hindu traditions and practices have shaped my worldview…” His mother named him Zohran, which means the first star in the sky.

 It means radiance or flower. 

Peter Mandaville, a professor at George Mason University

i.e. a cretin 

speaks also of what he sees as his “distinctively Muslim approach to democratic socialism.

Jinnah's Muslim approach caused Mander's family to run away from their ancestral home.  

He has articulated an understanding of Muslimness that is tied to marginality, invisibility, not being seen.”

No he hasn't. That would be foolish. The Nation of Islam is highly visible. Everybody has heard of Muhammad Ali.  

Mamdani also spoke often during his campaign, sometimes tearing up, about the discrimination faced personally by him and his family. “I get messages that say the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim” with death threats to him and those he loved, he said. Just days before the election, Mamdani stood outside a mosque and spoke with tears and declared, “To be Muslim in New York,” he said, “is to expect indignity…No more.” He rejected these attacks and used his campaign to call for solidarity, urging his community to vote and assert their place in public life and governance.

It is Jews who should be running scared.  

In a commentary for The New York Times, Max Fisher explains how Mamdani’s open expression of his Muslim faith is central to his political identity, not a symbolic gesture or campaign branding. Mamdani frames his faith as a source of ethical commitment to justice, solidarity, and community care. In so doing, he challenges the assumption that American Muslim politicians must minimise or conceal religious identity to gain electoral legitimacy.

He must kill kaffirs otherwise his coreligionists will consider him a 'munafiq' or hypocrite.  

I wish I could hear, for instance, Rahul Gandhi declare with the same pride as Mamdani his diverse minority identity. Could he say something like: “My mother was raised Catholic. My father was half Parsi, half Hindu. I therefore am proud to contain within my own family history the kind of religious diversity that is India’s finest civilisational legacy.”

He says he is a janeodhari Brahmin of the Dattatreya gotra. His grandmother fought a court case to establish that her sons were Hindu. Sonia conducted her daughter's marriage (to a Christian) under Hindu rites in the same manner that Indira's marriage was conducted.  The Church refused to bless the union thus establishing that the Sonia's grandchildren would be Hindu.  

This would be the assertion of the kind of universalist identity

He should say he is half Italian and one quarter ancient Iranian. He has only one quarter Indic ancestry. Also, he should give his speeches in Italian or Spanish  to show he is universalist.  Furthermore, he should wear a frock and a blonde wig and sing 'Happy Birthday President Murmu'. 

that would include Indians of all faiths and castes, and would reassure those who are currently stigmatised and excluded.

Mander's family felt stigmatised and excluded in Pakistan. That's why they ran awayy.  

Why instead does he lay claim to be a “jenuedhari Brahmin”, namely a Brahmin who wears a jenue or sacred thread? A jenue is worn after an initiation ceremony for which only “dwija” or “twice-born” Hindus, or in other words caste-Hindus, are eligible.

Obviously, he underwent the upanayanam ceremony. Incidentally, a Shankaracharya did the 'grha pravesh' ceremony for his mother. In 2002, when Rahul returned to India, Sonia announced that, if the courts gave permission, she would put this Shankaracharya in charge of building the Ram temple in Ayodhya.  

This identity by contrast excludes not just people of non-Hindu faiths like Christians and Muslims, but also Dalits and Adivasis.

Not to mention Chinese Pakistanis.  

2 Mamdani’s proud embrace of multi-culturalism

is cool in a City where 40 percent of the population is foreign born. That's because New York is rich. It attracts immigrants from every country in the world. India isn't rich. It isn't multi-cultural. Most constituencies are linguistically and culturally homogenous.  

Still, it is true that if Rahul took to speaking in Chinese while dressed as a Zulu warrior, he would certainly win elections. 

The second lesson that the Indian political Opposition could learn from Mamdani’s example is his emphatic embrace of “multi-culturalism”.

He is a Ugandan citizen as well as an American citizen. It is obvious he has more than one culture.  

This is an idea akin to the Indian idea of “secularism”, which is not the denial of religious faith but equal acceptance of every faith including the absence of faith, an idea that also contains within it the guarantee of equal rights to people of every faith.

Jinnah said Pakistan would be secular. Sadly, secularism can't prevent kaffirs being killed.  

3 Uncompromising support for the Palestinian people

who want to kill or chase away all the Jews in the region same as has happened in other Muslim countries. India has uncompromising support for Israel. Why? The same people who want to kill Jews also want to kill Hindus. Moreover, we need Israeli defence-tech. 

In the course of his campaign trail, Mamdani often pledged to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu if he entered New York, implementing the arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court in November 2024. Netenyahu is charged with a range of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

If Mamdani tries to arrest Netanyahu, he will go to jail. Trump is watching him closely.  Mamdani was only naturalized in 2018. His citizenship can be cancelled. He can be deported to Uganda where Museveni won't be very happy to see him. 

4 Mamdani’s clear opposition to Modi and the politics of Hindutva

What the opposition has learnt is that Hindutva-lite is better than anti-Hindutva. Why? Hindus are the majority.  

Again, whatever the risk to his election, his opposition to Modi’s politics is clearly a matter of personal conviction for Mamdani. He joined a protest in 2020 on Times Square against the Ram Temple built at the site of where the Babri Masjid was demolished by a Hindutva mob in Ayodhya. 

A party which is against the Ram Temple will be wiped out at the polls. Even Owaisi says he has the highest respect for Lord Ram. Owaisi is smart. He has gained seats in Bihar.  Mander is a cretin. We get that Muslims object to the building of Temples and Churches and so forth but there is no reason to mention this if you are running for office in a country with a kaffir majority. 

During his campaign, in a town hall for mayoral candidates in May, when Mamdani was asked if he would meet with Modi if the prime minister were to visit the city again, he retorted he wouldn’t because Modi is a “war criminal”.

Pakistan and Uganda have produced lots of war criminals. India hasn't.  

5 Mamdani’s rousing commitment to democratic socialism

India, according to its Constitution, is a Socialist country. Nobody cares.  

India has plenty of dynastic 'samajwadi' parties. But Nitish, whose party is not dynastic, has won in Bihar. What is the lesson here? 'Sushasan'- good governance matters. Commit to that by all means. Can Zohran deliver good governance to New York? Maybe. But he needs the help of Governor Hochul (to raise taxes) and the cooperation of the labour unions. I suppose he will meet various legal challenges. Still, the devil is in the detail. Consider De Blasio's scheme for free pre-kindergarten care for four year olds inaugurated in 2014. Mayor Adams was lukewarm about it and there were signs it wasn't working as intended- richer families availed of it, some poorer families didn't. This was probably a mistake. If Zohran makes it his first priority to restore its efficacy and extend it to three year olds, then he may get the funding to do universal child care. This by itself creates a constituency for higher taxes because people can see that tax revenue is spent properly.  .

Mamdani’s understanding of democratic socialism is remarkably similar to that of

Kwame Nkrumah, Milton Obote, Julius Nyerere etc. His degree is in African Studies. He is a Ugandan citizen.  

the founding fathers and mothers of India’s Constitution,

Burma's Constitution was a bit Lefty. India's wasn't.  

and of Jawaharlal Nehru who Mamdani quoted in his victory speech.

Why not Jinnah?  

Unlike Marxian socialism, democratic socialism is not pivoted on the abolition of private property. It derives from an ethical commitment to egalitarianism.

i.e. is meaningless. Bernie Sanders introduced a bill in 2005 to revoke China's most favoured nation status (i.e. permit protectionist tariffs). Ten years later he could challenge Hilary who had to do a U turn on TPP (even though she helped negotiate it and Obama was still trying to push it through). But Trump offered protection not just from low wage countries but also immigrants who would work for less money. He won. 

Will the Democratic party shift to the left by embracing a 'tax the rich' manifesto? Perhaps, if incumbents feel this is the only way to fend off insurgent candidates like Zohran. On the other hand, they may feel they already have 'big mo'. Trump won't be able to restore consumer sentiment and business confidence in time for the mid-terms.  

It envisages workers’ rights at work,

If Mamdani raises the minimum wage to 30 dollars an hour, there will be precious little work for the less skilled.  

reducing inequality and the concentration of wealth in a few hands,

the rich exit the jurisdiction 

and a social welfare state that provisions or ensures affordable access of every citizen to basic social needs like food and nutrition, education, healthcare, work, social security and public transport.

The Government should run the grocery stores on the same pattern as the DMV.  

During the first four decades of the Indian republic, these duties of the state were widely endorsed and partially realised.

Then Indira Gandhi got shot. 

However, from the mid-1980s, neo-liberalism swept away all of these goals of socialism. India grew rapidly, and with this wealth also grew but only in very few hands.

Mander resigned from the IAS while a fuck-ton of wealth accumulated in the hands of many of his colleagues.  

This remained a period of almost jobless growth and the stagnation of wages. Public health, education and transport all declined precipitously. India’s position slumped consecutively in every annual Global Hunger Report, far behind much poorer countries. There is an elite capture of public policy, which serves not the working poor but international capital.

Now Mamdani has taken New York, International Capital will move out of Wall Street. I'm kidding. Wall Street has power. Mamdani has bullshit.  

Unlike Mamdani, very few sections of India’s political Opposition except the Left publicly commit themselves to a restoration of socialism and to pulling down neo-liberalism from the altar on which it was placed for four decades resulting in the comprehensive detriment of lives of the working poor.

Comrade Vijayan in Kerala wants to be the Deng Xiaoping of India. Incidentally, in the Bihar election, a Naxal splinter group allied with Congress. It lost a couple of seats to the Nitish wave. Owaisi, on the other hand, was excluded from the alliance and retained seats.  

Reclaiming moral courage

 Reclaim the ideals that were the glue that built this nation critically wounded by two centuries of colonial oppression.

They were paradise compared to life in Jinnah's Pakistan- at least in the opinion of Mander's family.  

The ideal of building a country of equal belonging to people of every faith, caste, gender and language.

That is the ideal which causes people to try to emigrate to the US. India is poor which is why lots of White people aren't trying to move there.  

The ideal, in Gandhi’s immortal words, of wiping every tear from every eye.

And wiping every shitty dynastic bum with your tongue. How else defeat Fascism, Neo-Liberalism and the Spanish Inquisition? 

 

Terry Eagleton on V.S Naipaul

Perhaps the most enjoyable, but also the most misleading, essay on Sir V.S Naipaul was published some 25 years ago by Terry Eagleton- 

A Mind So Fine: The Contradictions of V. S. Naipaul

Naipaul wasn't cerebral. Unlike Ved Mehta, he didn't write a book about analytical philosophy. Nor was he interested in Economics or Geopolitics. His work could be considered ethnographic and humanistic. Unlike Niradh Chaudhuri, it made no grand world-historical claims. 

I suppose Marxists might say that as a darkie, it was a contradiction for him not to be a Marxist. Indeed, it was a contradiction that there were any non-Marxists in the world. Such people should just slit their own throat rather than put the proletariat to the inconvenience and expense of doing so for them.  

If Naipaul didn't become a Marxist, what did he become? It is tempting to compare him to 'outsider' authors like Colin Wilson. These were the 'angry young men' who started to get published around the same time as Naipaul. They were considered Fascists who thought of themselves as Nietzschean supermen. But they were from the wrong side of the tracks and did not have university degrees. Naipaul was more respectable. He stuck to a narrow groove while Wilson and Stuart Holroyd ended up babbling about Space Vampires or ESP. I suppose, having actually got a degree, Naipaul was under no illusions about his own intelligence. 

I suppose the same could be said of Dom Moraes who was younger and who achieved fame earlier than Naipaul. But Moraes was a poet, not a novelist. Like Ved Mehta he was quite good at getting international scoops- or what might pass for them. He could get interviews with the King or Prime Minister while Naipaul had to be content to talking to the cab driver. Moraes brought out the glamour and exoticism of foreign places, or- if too drunk to do so- was nevertheless prolific. Naipaul's was stingy and relentlessly morose. It was his one gift. 

Arriving at Oxford University from a down-at-heel family in Trinidad,

They were middle class and, on the maternal side, quite wealthy and socially prominent. His father owned his own house and a Ford Prefect car. Trinidad, as an oil exporter, was relatively well off. 

the eighteen-year-old V. S. Naipaul wrote: “Gone are the days of the aristocrats. Nearly everyone comes to Oxford on a state grant. The standard of the place naturally goes down.”

They year was 1950. Rationing only ended in 1954. The highest marginal rate of tax was 98 percent.  On the other other hand, the country needed scientists and mathematicians more than ever. Thus recruitment from State Schools rose to about 40 percent. The country needed to create 'Comprehensive' Schools on the model of the American High School. In other words, all children should have an opportunity to go on to College, otherwise the country would lose its super-power status. This meant that the quality of teaching had to rise. Thus many more women and working class origin men were entering the two ancient Universities. They were aware of their responsibilities to the State. University would fit them to serve it better. The days of Max Beerbohm & Evelyn Waugh were long gone. The country could not afford intellectual or aesthetic dandyism. Naipaul's own prose was workmanlike.

It was as though Dick Cheney were to complain that there were too few Trotskyists in his golf club.

Plenty of neo-cons were ex-Trotskyites.  

My own entry into the dreaming spires, a decade or so later, was unfortunate for just the opposite reason: the place was positively swarming with patricians, almost all of whom seemed to be called Nigel.

Tax rates were high but the Tories were in power. Anyway, you could get rich by writing about sexy secret agents who had been to the right schools and had good tailors. It must be said the 'public' (that is private) schools were upping their game academically. The War had shown that the British bulldog spirit wasn't enough. Brains too were necessary. 

Towering in stature as a result of generations of fine breeding, they brayed rather than spoke, elbowed the townspeople off the thin medieval pavements, and joked about letting loose their hounds on “oiks” (working-class undergraduates) like myself. 

As a stunted North-of-England plebeian, I found myself ducking servilely between their legs like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. It was the kind of place in which one would as soon have worn a pink tutu as sported jeans. Naipaul would have been in his element.

Wrong colour, old boy. Also, the other Indians at Oxford looked down on him because he was descended from cane-cutters or crab-catchers. 

Arriving in England only to become plus anglais que les Anglais is a familiar émigré tale.

It wasn't Naipaul's. He didn't get his B.Litt. Nor did he become a barrister. He worked for the BBC's West Indian service. His colleagues were Leftists.  

V. S. Naipaul, who came to the country in 1950 and has made it his home ever since, is one of the latest in a venerable line of literary refugees,

immigrant. Had he got his B.Litt and then a PhD, he'd have been a Professor back home living the good life.  

several of them among the most eminent figures in modern “English” literature. There was Joseph Conrad, the Pole who commended the chuckleheaded values of the British merchant navy;

Values that made this country stronger and richer. The merchant marine played a great role in both World Wars.  

Henry James, the American who attended English country-house parties

those given by bluestockings where he met fellow artists and intellectuals 

as devotedly as Madonna drops in on fashion shows; T. S. Eliot, who looked and sounded like a rather dotty Anglican vicar.

But he encouraged new writing by authors with widely differing points of view. Indeed, he had boosted G. V Desani who was a broadcaster for the Beeb. Would VS write in his vein? Or would he adopt the view of Niradh Chaudhuri whose Autobiography had enraptured E.M Forster, J.C Squire & even Winston Churchill? Naipaul, disillusioned by the failure of Indian, or African, of Caribbean Socialism, moved in Chaudhuri's direction. 

Eliot famously remarked of his compatriot James that “he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,” which was a backhanded way of congratulating him on being a kosher Englishman, since the English have customs and pieties rather than fancy theories. It was self-congratulation too: it takes one expertly disguised expatriate to know another.

Where was the disguise? Neither was a cowboy by birth or breeding.  

George Bernard Shaw recognized immediately that his fellow Dubliner Oscar Wilde had appointed himself Irish jester to the English court, a role he shared with Shaw and which would later be inherited by Brendan Behan.

Behan was an IRA man. He wanted to bomb the Brits not entertain them.  

Shaw was also aware of how dangerous as well as exhilarating this bit part was. The English relished Wilde's mimicry of them

They relished his wit. He wasn't a mimic.  

but also suspected that imitation was the sincerest form of mockery. (It was Naipaul who was later to put into currency the phrase “mimic men,” the title of one of his more lugubrious novels.)

It looked as though Naipaul might be moving to the left. The Communists condemned the 'bourgeois nationalists' who had taken power in the colonies. Naipaul had been in Uganda when he started writing the book. Obote had just deposed the Kabaka and was taking his country in a Socialist direction. Naipaul had some sympathy for Cheddi Jagan who had been displaced by Forbes Burnham. Naipaul could be seen as endorsing Afrocentrism. Asiatics merely mimicked the Europeans. African origin people would forge an indigenous path to Socialism.  

Wilde's use of the English language was a shade too polished and perfect;

he was a classicist. I suppose one might say he was influenced by Mahaffy who did have Gaelic ancestry. Wilde was a descendant of a Dutchman who came over with William of Orange. His blood was English though his mother was a fervent Irish nationalist. 

the genuine English aristocrat of the Victorian era said things like “huntin'” and “shootin',” too indolent to labor over his consonants.

Whereas proles never dropped their aitches.  

And indeed, without Farquhar, Steele, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Shaw, Wilde, and O'Casey, there would have been precious little English stage comedy to boast of.

Shakespeare remains the greatest comic dramatist in the language. King Lear is a laugh riot, provided Ophelia's farts are well timed. 

Who better placed to write comedy than those who know the natives' language and conventions from the inside, yet are also foreign enough to cast a sardonic eye on their sanctities?

Which is why the Chinese wrote better English comedy than the Irish who, after all, shared the language.  

The Irish did not only have to send the British their rents and cattle; they also had to write most of their great literature for them.

While being whipped by Capitalists wearing silk top-hats.  

In Ireland, as in Naipaul's Trinidad, one of the most revered of all native customs was getting out of the place.

Ireland had a big famine. Trinidad didn't. Naipaul's ancestors were happy enough to get sent there.  

The mountains in Ireland, somewhat unusually, are ringed around the coast, as though divinely arranged to keep the natives in; but writers could usually rely on being driven out by church and state to Boston or Birmingham.

Till the place became a knowledge economy and its per capita income rose above that of the UK.  

Although Naipaul found himself hemmed in by an ocean rather than a mountain range, crossing it proved to be a one-way passage, as it did for James Joyce.

Joyce might have settled in Dublin if his cinema venture had taken off. Naipaul had married an English woman and, I suppose, that might have caused awkwardness back then in Trinidad. 

Like Naipaul, Joyce abandoned his country early but never ceased to revisit it in imagination; having escaped in reality, both men could then find their way back in fantasy.

Both Ireland and the West Indies were interesting places. Their people were artistically gifted. Still, their populations were small and thus their societies afforded fewer avenues of advancement. 

Joyce once remarked that it was this freedom from English social and literary convention that lay at the root of his talent.

Joyce was a student of literature determined to advance the modernist school of writing. His experiments were appreciated for their boldness even when readers were left baffled.  

Deprived of a stable tradition, the colonial writer has to pillage, to parody, to make it up as he or she goes along, so that exile and experiment go together like Laurel and Hardy.

One might say this of G.V Desani who left school at 13 and knocked about the world before finding his calling as a journalist and broadcaster. Naipaul had been a student of Tolkien at Oxford. He had a keen sense of literary style and exercised an iron self-discipline over his pen. Indeed, his devotion to his craft was exemplary. 

It is not surprising that Ireland was the only region of the British Isles early last century to produce a flourishing indigenous modernism.

Virginia Woolf's real name was Peggy O'Hara.  

Otherwise, Britain had to import its modernism, along with its Ford cars and chinoiserie.

Britain produced cars which it exported. Eagleton may have heard of the Rolls Royce. England produced a lot of Chinese style porcelain from the late Seventeenth century onward.  

Naipaul is not nearly as avant-garde a writer as Joyce (who is?), but he has been both blessed and afflicted by a similarly skewed relationship to the metropolis.

Naipaul isn't avant-garde. On the other hand, his real name was Peggy O'Hara. His father was a leprechaun.  

Joyce leapt over the imperial capital of London into the arms of the continentals, with whom Ireland had enjoyed a fruitful cultural relationship ever since the monastic émigrés of the Middle Ages.

Irish monks had helped re-light the candle of learning on the continent in the sixth century.  

(His fellow Dubliner Samuel Beckett was to do much the same some years later.) As a Trinidadian, however, Naipaul had no such organic affinity to continental Europe; it was England or nothing.

Had he gone to America- like Ved Mehta- he would have done well enough. But he would have been held to a higher journalistic standard. 

In the litany of literary refugees, Wilde,

did have to leave England, but he wrote little after that.  Shaw did well in England but would have been welcome to settle in Ireland. Like Yeats, he might have been appointed a Senator. Joyce faced censorship. Paris was the ideal place for him. He was pushing forward the program of Mallarme. Either that or Tin Tin. I often confuse the two. 

Shaw, and Joyce stand out in one notable way.

Wilde & Joyce were poets but Joyce wasn't much of a dramatist. Exiles is execrable.

They are the only ones who were adamantly on the political left—though “Stalinist” might describe Shaw more accurately than “socialist,” and Joyce's radical sympathies were short-lived.

So, there is no commonality between the three. Wilde ended up converting to Catholicism.  Chesterton was more Socialistic- i.e. anti-Semitic.

The others were either studiously “unpolitical,” or ensconced somewhere on the political right. For many—Conrad, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Lewis—the right in question was an unpleasantly embattled one, rather than the moderate Burkean Toryism of many of the English natives.

Conrad's Conservatism was of that sort. The others were a bit mad. 

If you think too much about conservatism, you cannot really be an English conservative, and other mimic men recognized as much.

Nor can you do any good as a Socialist if you see the Tory cloven hoof wherever you look.  

The resilience of this brand of conservatism lies in its distaste for the political in favor of the customary, instinctual, and spontaneous.

Eagleton had lived through the Thatcher era. Indeed, by the time he wrote this, Labour's Blair was pretty much a Thatcherite.  

When Naipaul disowns politics by informing us, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, that he has “no guiding political idea” and cherishes his “intuition alone,” he is telling us his politics.

He is telling us he isn't political. He is an artist.  

It is, presumably, pure intuition that leads him to conclude An Area of Darkness with the declaration that the Indians have no sense of history and their country “will never cease to require the arbitration of a conqueror.”

In other words, Naipaul is repeating Niradh Chaudhuri's verdict. At the time is seemed plausible that India might become a client state because it couldn't feed or defend itself. Nehru, 'the last Englishman to rule India', had been a mimic man. He might have gone to the same school as Churchill but he could not do for India what Churchill had done for England.  

There is, then, a well-attested affinity in British culture between the émigré and the conservative intellectual

if they fled Communism or 'National' Socialism- sure.  

—not only in the literary field but all the way from Wittgenstein

who described himself as a Communist at heart though he also said he was against it in theory but for it in practice. He was a deeply silly man. 

and Namier to Popper and Gombrich.

Gombrich was a close friend of Popper. But it was Hayek who influenced Thatcher. One may also mention Michael Polanyi, who was close to TS Eliot. But his brother, Karl, was a Leftist at the time. The theory that emigres are likely to be right wing falls down when you find two brothers who choose opposing ideologies.  

Like Conrad, some of these luminaries were in flight from political turbulence at the heart of Europe and turned to what seemed a more sedate, traditionalist milieu in the United Kingdom.

The UK was quite rich and talented men could find a market there for their work. It was only if they wrote frankly about sex that they had to cross the Channel.  

Others, such as James and Eliot, were allured by what felt like a more “organic” social order—

they were returning to their ancestral island 

mannered, devious, and stratified—in which their thought could flourish more vigorously than it would in an autocratic culture

Doestoevsky's Russia was plenty autocratic. 

or in a brashly explicit one like the United States.

Emerson was constantly taking his dick out and slapping it on the table. Henry fled to Rome where the Pope is above that sort of thing. 

And émigrés do not kick a hole in the lifeboat they are clambering aboard;

sadly, some do.  

they compensate for their outsider status by becoming honorary aristocrats—but aristocrats of wit and style rather than of blood and property.

There are plenty of left-wing aristocrats. But a man of wit and style might end up the Earl of Beaconsfield. 

From Wilde to Tom Stoppard, Ernest Gellner to Isaiah Berlin, expatriates intent on out-Englishing the English have

confined their conversation to the weather. I find it is a mistake to dwell too much on ones relations with the Royal family even if one is the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and thus entitled to tell the publican to kiss my black arse if he suggests I am inebriated.  

resorted to humor, satire, and an acerbic vein of wit. In doing so, they become spiritually superior to the philistine middle classes who want to ship them back home.

I wasn't aware that anybody wanted to ship Stoppard or Gellner 'back home'. On the other hand, I did have a student who tried to mug Stoppard's son.  

Naipaul's conservatism has been lambasted often enough, notably by postcolonial critics, though his opinion of this school of thought is not, one imagines, all that different from what Clint Eastwood's would be if he ever got wind of it.

He wasn't particularly conservative. He liked the Shiv Sena. But he also thought India would go to the dogs without the Dynasty.  

Dagmar Barnouw's Naipaul's Strangers is a bravely unfashionable attempt to rescue the writer from those who accuse him of racism, chauvinism, and snobbery; and, although some might consider this as easy as defending George Bush from the charge of being parochial,

that would be difficult. He was parochial- if not the veritable village idiot. Cheney ran things. 

the book yields some admirably sensitive readings of Naipaul's prose, despite being extravagantly uncritical of its revered subject. Its pages are everywhere redolent of the smell of incense.

She was White- German white.  She had to say nice things about a darkie. 

Barnouw does aim a few well-targeted shots at the postcolonial romanticizing of “the other,” recording Naipaul's distaste for, in the words of another critic, “privileged people who are sentimental about primitivism in the Third World.”

i.e. guys who rave about Satyajit Ray movies.  

Anyone suffering from this widespread affliction could certainly do worse than read a few of Naipaul's books, even if the cure might turn out to be more nauseating than the disease.

Vomiting is a good thing if it gets rid of a toxin.  

This, after all, is the man whose oracular pronouncements include the judgment that nothing was ever created in the West Indies;

except calypso. Lord Invader's 'Rum & Coca Cola' was a hit for the Andrew Sisters during the War.  

that the West Indians never seriously doubted the virtue of the imperialist culture to which they aspired;

Because being rich is better than being as poor as shit.  

and that the ethnic situation of African Americans cannot be the subject of serious literature.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was a book about carpentry.  

If Naipaul is understandably irritated by well-heeled sentimentalists, it is partly because they dispute his insinuation that when it comes to colonialism, the natives were at least as much to blame as their masters.

This was the Leftist view. Local elites were very evil. Indeed, they still are. Why can't they all just slit their own throats?  

If you do not wish to provoke your compatriots to helpless fury, it is probably advisable not to open your account of the Caribbean, The Middle Passage, with the sentence: “There was such a crowd of immigrant-type West Indians on the boat-train platform at Waterloo that I was glad I was travelling first class to the West Indies.”

Who wouldn't be glad of travelling first class more particularly if the Government is picking up the tab?  

Boa Vista, in Brazil near the border with British Guiana, is a “preposterous city” (the Waugh-like epithet is significant), which probably means, among other things, that they did not bring Naipaul his coffee quickly enough.

It meant it was built on the Parisian model. I suppose it had declined economically somewhat.  

It is hard to know, muses Naipaul, what the Guianese are thinking—just as it is hard to know what he himself is thinking when churning out an obtuse cliché such as that.

No. We understand that the Guyanese are agreeable conversationalists but play their cards close to their chests.  

Like the equally dyspeptic traveler Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia seems to find most of the people he meets in his wanderings so disagreeable that one wonders why he doesn't just stay at home.

Disagreeable people are more entertaining to read about more particularly if they live far far away.  

Perhaps traveling is a way of staying faithful to having grown up nowhere in particular;

Naipaul has told us a lot about where he grew up.  

you can feel homeless anywhere at all.

More particularly if you don't have kids.  

Like Gulliver, Naipaul finds the same pettiness, corruption, and betrayal everywhere he goes. India, he announces in An Area of Darkness, “invited conquest” and has nothing to contribute to the world. It is a country “with an infinite capacity for being plundered,”

Not any more. The Chinese had found nothing worth taking and had withdrawn unilaterally.  

which is rather like claiming that Ethiopian children have an infinite capacity for starving to death.

No. They have just the same finite capacity as the rest of us. 

The Taj Mahal, he reflects, might as well be transported slab by slab to the United States, since in India it is sheerly wasteful. No doubt some enterprising Texan will take the hint. In Naipaul's own contemptuous imagery, India comes down to the starving child defecating by the wayside and the mangy dog waiting to eat up the excrement.

Life under Nehruvian Socialism had its drawbacks. His successors big plan for India involved everybody skipping a meal. 

These and similarly insulting fatuities are the language of a writer who detests political generalities, works by innocent intuition alone, and is celebrated by Barnouw, among others, for the delicate particularity of his perceptions.

At least the fellow didn't gas on about evil elites and the suffering subaltern.  

The portrayal of the Muslim world in Among the Believers would make the book enjoyable bedtime reading for Richard Perle.

It was an accurate enough reflection of popular opinion at the time. 'Beyond Belief' went further because Islamists were going further.  

With their Jamesian sense of nuanced judgment and fine discrimination, novels such as Guerrillas and In a Free State appear to view all colonial emancipation as self-interested, self-deluding fantasy.

Naipaul had been in Uganda before the place turned to shit. Museveni has helped the country rebuild from the bottom up. This involves respecting local history and traditions and bringing back the Kabaka etc.  

Naipaul has only to sniff an ideal to detect in it the stirrings of self-aggrandizement. He complains of his people having been stripped of history, but does just the same himself in order to avoid the discomforting truth that colonialism may have had a hand in their present plight.

Many share Lee Kuan Yeuw's view that colonialism ended too soon.  

Few writers have a shrewder understanding of what has been called colonial cringe, and few are more adept at analyzing the self-serving myths of the powerless.

Niradh got there first and did a more thorough job.  

In my own country of Ireland, it has not been unknown for some dejected soul to down one pint of Guinness too many out of sheer depression over the Gaelic defeat at the battle of Kinsale in 1601, or for the odd nationalist, outraged by the injustice of the eighteenth-century Penal Laws, to find it hard to struggle out of bed in the morning.

The same thing happens to me when I remember the ejection of Iyers from Iyerland by Maratha leprechauns like Leo Varadkar.  

Colonial peoples can indeed be marked by shame and fantasy, self-loathing and self-deception, pious rhetoric and sentimental bluster.

Anybody can do stupid shit.  

But some of them can also laugh about the fact; and there is a difference between recognizing this syndrome and asserting, as some in Ireland have, that the Irish themselves were largely responsible for the Great Famine.

The Finns were certainly responsible for theirs. Malthusian problems have Malthusian solutions.  

This is just another version of the self-odium for which the natives are being castigated.

Everybody should scold everybody for ever and ever.  

The colonial who rebukes his compatriots had better be careful that his complaints are not just another symptom of the whining he condemns in them. Naipaul sees with brutal realism how the dispossessed can sometimes collude in their own subjugation, but he does not dwell at length on the moral obscenity of the subjugation itself.

Not to mention the moral obscenity of having money in the bank. Everybody should simply starve to death to avoid this fate.  

Instead, he believes that all causes, including the idea of justice, are corrupting, that every man is an island, and that pity and compassion for a colonial people will not do because they baselessly encourage hope.

Also, Naipaul had some money in the bank. Yet he didn't even try to chop off his own head! This is morally obscene.  

Rare is the writer as exquisitely talented as he who is so long on observation and so short on sympathy. Naipaul does not seem to know the meaning of geniality, which may well be the ultimate judgment of the colonial system under which he grew up.

West Indians are terribly genial.  

In An Area of Darkness, we learn at one point that Naipaul's female companion has suddenly fainted at his side—a surprising revelation, since he had not previously bothered to mention her presence at all.

His wife was white- a fellow Oxford graduate. Naipaul chose his wives well. The one nice thing he did was take the blame for his wife's infertility.  

What champions like Barnouw would no doubt call steelily disenchanted realism is in fact the lopsided antirealism of one who can hardly bring himself to acknowledge the realities of love and courage.

Unlike Eagleton who praises the patriotic love and courage the British Merchant Marine displayed in two world wars. 

When he writes of how the powerless lie about themselves and to themselves, he cannot resist ruining the point by adding “since it is their only resource,” which is itself a sort of lie.

They should scold elites instead.  

Literary Occasions gathers together some of Naipaul's essays about writing, mixing autobiographical pieces, prefaces to his own novels, and his Nobel Prize speech with articles on Conrad, Kipling, Nirad Chaudhuri, and other Indian writers. The volume charts the extraordinary spiral of displacements that make up Naipaul's career.

There was no displacement- just a steady rise into affluence and international recognition.  

It is a life in which one fantasy gives way to another, one fiction is concealed within a second, one potential homecoming turns out to be yet another assignation with strangeness.

Nonsense! He did well at school and well enough at Uni. He fell on his feet with the BBC- a recognized path into the book racket. Two of his books- 'House for Mr. Biswas' & 'Area of Darkness' were good. After that, he turned out dreck which, however, found a ready enough market. He was a brown Eeyore at a time when things were improving for darker skinned people. 

Born into an Indian community in Trinidad, the grandchild of indentured immigrant laborers, Naipaul came from an island that was geographically ambiguous—marooned between the Caribbean and South America—and an ethnic background that was even more so.

Nonsense! He was from the Caribbean. His ethnicity was North Indian. There was nothing ambiguous about any of this.  

Trinidadian Indians still had a smattering of their indigenous culture but one that was already on the wane, so Naipaul claims, when he was a child.

Rising affluence meant the reverse was the case. The Arya Samajis felt themselves equal to the Presbyterians.  

He could understand Hindi but not speak it.

His sister studied at Benares Hindu University. She decided that Hindi is only good for talking to cows. After Independence, many Indians stopped learning a Vernacular language. It was the Brits who had insisted on it.  

His community, at home neither in the West nor in the East, held itself aloof from the racially mixed life of the street and knew nothing of Muslims.

They knew them well enough. There was a syncretic element to life in the villages.  

Naipaul would eventually come to see his own detached, passive, observer-like status as a kind of Hindu trait;

He identified as a Brahmin but had little interest in Vedanta which teaches that the atman (soul) is a detached observer.  

it certainly proved easily translatable later on into the sardonic, de haut en bas judgments of the English gentleman.

Like whom? Anthony Powell? Whatever Naipaul's faults, he never tried to pass himself off as the Duchess of Devonshire. I suppose that is one reason the English literary establishment hasn't taken to me in the way they took to Naipaul.  

In both cases, there is an apartness, a quick sense of caste, and a horror of uncleanness.

Nonsense! The English gentleman does not practice untouchability. I suppose India, being very hot, has a sense of caste because of a primitive type of pathogen avoidance theory.  

This insider/outsider status within Trinidad, which the colonial relation to Britain simply wrote large, was a social one too: the Naipaul family was lower middle class, furnished with some rudimentary culture but socially impoverished.

The African origin people had urbanized and risen through education and skills training. The Indians were at the bottom of the heap being concentrated in rural areas.  

Naipaul senior, an odd-job man turned journalist and short-story writer, tried to raise himself a little by writing,

he succeeded. A White editor spotted his talent.  

only to look in the mirror one morning and fail to see his face reflected there. He had merged back into the anonymous masses and suffered a mental breakdown.

He had written an article which provoked the wrath of some rural Hindus. He was forced to sacrifice a goat to Kali. Being an Arya Samajist, this caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown.  

Along with the émigré, the lower middle class occupies an honorable niche among the architects of English literature. It was from this Janus-faced social stratum (“contradiction incarnate,” Marx called it) that the major realist novel of the nineteenth century was produced. The Brontë sisters

didn't do realism.  

were the children of a poor Anglican parson; George Eliot was the daughter of a provincial farm bailiff;

No. He managed a big estate. Bailiffs worked under him. 

Charles Dickens was the son of an impecunious civil-service clerk; Thomas Hardy's father was a small-time West Country builder.

He was himself an architect- a step up from being a stone-mason and builder. 

Squeezed precariously between the social establishment and the impoverished plebs, this group lived out the conflict between aspiration and frustration,

No. It rose. The whole country did.  

individual ambition and communal loyalty, which also marks the work of so many colonial authors.

The nineteenth century Brits were writers living in an age of expanding affluence and political enfranchisement. They wrote for people like themselves. Colonial authors who wrote for a foreign audience faced very different challenges and had much more limited opportunities. 

If the émigré is literally foreign, the lower middle class are internal migrants.

No. They are indigenous. Some rise, some fall.  

They are inside and outside conventional society at the same time, peevish, resentful, and pathologically insecure,

like Marx & Engels? 

yet powered by a formidable drive for cultivation and respectability.

This may or may not be the case. George Eliot & Mrs. Gaskell was happy to use dialect words to add verisimilitude to their novels.   

The impulse to belong, and the urge to break away, fight it out in the Brontës as they do in Naipaul's Mr. Biswas, a portrait of his self-divided father.

Nonsense! Biswas is a journalist with Arya Samaji leanings. He wants reform, rationality and the purging of superstition. He reads Samuel Smiles & Epictetus. He believes in progress.

Biswas is 'ghar jamai'- i.e. financially dependent on his in-laws- and Indians easily understand the source of his frustration. But so do people from Hong Kong. Timothy Mo's 'Monkey King' features a protagonist in the same position. More daringly than Biswas, he won't consummate his marriage till his father-in-law pays the customary dowry. 

The colonial writer's talent, which allows him to portray his own people, is also what cuts him adrift from them.

Nonsense! R.K Narayan wasn't adrift from his people. If you have enough talent, your people will love you.  

To write about your people is already to write your way out of them.

It really isn't. To do it well you need to find out more about them. Journalism is a good stepping stone into novel writing.  

The act of portraying from the inside is also inescapably one of alienation;

It may be if you become more and more critical of your milieu 

in possessing yourself in the act of authorship, you come to dispossess yourself of your place.

Or your loving recreation of it increases the pleasure you derive from it.  

Childhood for most of us is a time when one has no idea what on earth is going on, but for the young Naipaul

the eldest son and his father's confidante 

this state of ignorance was painfully compounded.

The boy suffered when his father suffered. He produced a great book to commemorate that remarkable man. But VS was no 'village Hampden'. He was a guy who got a scholarship to Oxford at the age of 16.  

His own experience was profoundly strange to him,

he believed it was strange to his father. But he made a career for himself as a journalist. VS would make a place for himself in the world. But other Trinidadians had been equally successful in rising from generation to generation.  

as though the usual human faculties for orienting and identifying had simply crumbled.

I suppose one might speak of 'estrangement'. I suppose Naipaul read a lot of French modernist novels.  

Not knowing others, in a fractured, unstable society cobbled provisionally together and cut loose from history, he could know nothing of himself.

He needed to get some distance from himself. Dad is nice. But to write about him you have to see him as others saw him.  

Trinidad was a “borrowed culture,” a belated society with “that feeling of having entered the cinema long after the film has started.”

During the War, the Trinidadians were glad enough to be far away from German or Japanese bombers. Indeed, the War brought prosperity- 'Rum & Coca Cola' not to mention the Yankee dollar.  

Racism permeated the place like an invisible gas.

It was much worse in the American South.  

The novels he devoured as a boy were an imported product,

like films 

the fruit of an organized metropolitan knowledge that Naipaul lacked.

All kids lack knowledge.  

Bereft of this coveted knowledge, his early efforts at fiction were thrown back on pure impressions.

First novels are derivative. My own account of growing up as an Italian Pope in the Ireland of Parnell drew too much upon the first few pages of 'Portrait of the Artist'.  

He knew nothing of his own Hindu community except for what he learned from his father's stories, so that even experience close to hand had to be mediated through art.

No. He participated in family 'puja' and listened to the Pundit and the Arya Samaji pracharak same as everybody else.  

As for historical memory, that fizzled out around the time of his grandparents. The past, like the idea of India, was a dream.

Not really. It was easy enough to find your ancestral village where the Pundit would have your genealogical records.  

Within the official, “real-life” India of Nehru and Gandhi there was a more elusive, semi-fictional India from which his family obscurely stemmed.

It was the same place. The last Indian immigrants had come only about 15 years before Naipaul was born.  

He hailed from a half-remembered subcontinent, and when he later visited the place it turned out to be not, as he had expected, the whole of which his childhood community was a fragment but a solitary, separate, derelict nation, just like life at home.

Niradh Chaudhuri had made the point once and for all.  

Later, in a repetition of Trinidad, the England he knew would be mainly Oxford and literary London. (He was an undergraduate at Oxford's University College, whose tradition of distinguished overseas visitors has since dwindled to encompass Chelsea Clinton.)

The daughter of two of the most powerful American politicians.  

The Oxford of his day could give him little help with writing:

He wrote essays same as everybody else. His Latin must have improved. He didn't know Greek but, I suppose, did learn Anglo-Saxon from Tolkien.  

it was the 1950s, when Tennyson and Thackeray were considered by the English faculty rather too recent to be adequately assessed.

People read them for pleasure.  

But it was through writing that Naipaul would explore who he was, reclaiming in such works as The Middle Passage and Among the Believers the areas of darkness around him; it was by investigating other “half-made” societies that he would be able at last to get a grip on his own.

Had Naipaul joined the Labour party and taken up journalistic assignments covering strikes and so forth, his picture of England would have been more rounded. I think his one English novel- Mr. Stone & the Knights Companions- shows an interest in the 'Corporatist' philosophy popular with Catholics. Like Niradh Chaudhuri, Naipaul feared England might tear itself apart over questions of Social Justice. But, unlike Niradh, his theme was anomie. Without the joint-family, though women might thrive, men were adrift. Apparently, his wife liked India. He didn't. There were lots of people there who looked like Mama & Chacha. But they weren't Mama or Chacha. They were strangers. How fucked is that? 

The Indians, Naipaul considers with his usual withering contempt, are botched parodies of the English;

some were.  But the botched parodies of Chairman Mao were worse. 

but England was a fantasy as well, encountered as a child only in the pages of Dickens and a few other literary imports, on which he then modeled the real-life Trinidad around him.

He should have stuck to Enid Blyton. That is the secret to my success.  

Eventually, in The Enigma of Arrival, he reverses the relation and speaks of projecting an African landscape onto a Wiltshire one, in order to write about Africa from the only spot where he has felt truly at home.

Nobody is at home in the Gloucester road.  

Yet even the English rural landscape is portrayed here as one in decline, marked by that sense of decay, fragility, and impending chaos that inspires so deep-seated a fear in his novels.

Thus Naipaul was like Niradh Chaudhuri who despaired of India and then despaired of the England he had moved to. 

The young Naipaul had to translate the English classics into his own Trinidadian terms in order to make them work—

which is why few of the characters are chimney sweeps or Dowager Duchesses.  

though he would later come to realize that writing is a kind of translation anyway, distilling and distorting the actual world into aesthetic shape.

Or distilling and distorting the books that formed you so that they become part of the reality you inhabit.  

When he came to England in 1950, the nation that had previously figured only as a fantasy

an object of knowledge 

became one in another sense, full of English people pretending to be English.

They were only pretending to pretend- unless they were Russian spies.  

If the Indians and the Trinidadians were mimic men, the English were mimics of themselves, self-consciously performing their Englishness like a second-rate drawing-room comedy;

rather than a French farce 

men like Evelyn Waugh and the later Kingsley Amis really were irascible old reactionaries, but they also reveled in acting the part.

It is difficult not to be an irascible reactionary when you grow old and drink too much.  

At the same time, the social reality of England served to dispel the literary fantasy: the more Naipaul knew of English culture, the less he felt in possession of its literature.

He contributed to it but didn't want to own it. Borges said 'every author creates his precursors'. Who were Naipaul's precursors? I don't know. He doesn't write like Niradh Chaudhuri. Who does he write like? I can't tell.  

A country of the mind was forced to yield to the reality.

What was that country? Naipaul had a mind but it was not of any country in particular. He did not create a Malgudi which, over the decades, had to yield to the reality of social change.  

Knowledge was thus inseparable from loss, as it was in Naipaul's relationship to his small-time journalist father. It was his father's unpublished writings about Trinidadian street life

a lot of it was published.  

that inspired Naipaul to begin writing himself, so that the son's text became an extension of the father's.

Lots of people from his family took up the pen. Why? It was part and parcel of the Social Reform movements which enabled communities to rise up.  

What Naipaul did not know at the time, however, was that his father had suffered disgrace and humiliation: he was caught sacrificing a goat to ward off a curse placed upon him by some farmers whose cavalier way with government regulations he had exposed in the press.

Nonsense! He had criticized animal sacrifice because he was an Arya Samaji. Then his life was threatened. He had to sacrifice a goat to Kali.  

To this extent, Naipaul's knowledge of him was mixed with a saving ignorance, a salutary blankness that lies somewhere at the origin of his art.

Eagleton has plenty of ignorance. What precisely is it saving him from? We know the origin of Naipaul's art. Like Niradh or Desani or Aubrey Menon, he wrote for radio and developed a distinctive voice and an effective writing style. We also know he was rubbing shoulders with other ambitious young men and women some of whom would go on to be successful writers. He studied the market and found his own niche in it. 

Literary Occasions, like most of Naipaul's writing about himself, is remarkable for its honest lucidity and stringent self-criticism.

This was part and parcel of 'Reformist' literature. Sadly, Naipaul had no interest in Religion. Take Religion out of Indian or Russian literature and you have miserabilist dreck.  

If he is hard on others, he is quite as ungenial about himself. He admits, for example, that his early narrators in novels such as Miguel Street are a good deal more streetwise than he ever was;

because he was a swot.  

that he did not feel competent as a reader until his mid-twenties; and that “the ambition to be a writer was for many years a kind of sham.”

This could be said by any writer looking back on his youth. You have to fake it to make it or- in my case- not make it and turn to blogging.  

He is not in the least given to posturing or self-dramatizing. The collection is the work of an artist who nevertheless exemplifies one of the minor catastrophes of the twentieth century: the fact that the conflicts and instabilities that issued in so much superb writing led also, all too often, to a harsh, unforgiving elitism.

Naipaul was born into a stable world. He moved to England after it became entirely peaceful. Things just kept getting better and better for Naipaul and his family and the people of Trinidad and the UK. Even India turned the corner as did Museveni's Uganda. 

Is Naipaul's writing 'superb'? No. It is good enough for its purpose. Naipaul was modest in his aims and, for that reason, was able to succeed. As for 'elitism', it curled up and died when a grocer's daughter became the British Prime Minister. 

Great art, dreadful politics: it is the link between the two that needs to be noted.

There is no link between the two. One might as well say Gentzen or Teichmuller were shit at logic & math just because they were Nazis.