Friday 26 June 2015

Native informants and Post Colonial Theory.


India has an official name not generally known in the West.
It is 'Bharat'.
Gayatri Spivak, in a book where she speaks of the 'native informant' as 'the name for that mark of expulsion from the name of man', also tells us that the name Bharat derives from the younger brother of Lord Rama. She is wrong. Bharat, famous in poetry as the son of Shakuntala, was a remote ancestor and already a legend in the earliest texts connected to Indian soil.
Why did Spivak say something most school-kids in India know to be false?
Well, her book came out a few years after the Babri Masjid episode.
It was a fixed meme of the Left that the Hindus were trying to invent a vengeful Father God.
Spivak was doing her job as a native informant.
She was saying- 'I'm a Brahmin. I know Sanskrit. I can confirm that the Indians have indeed named their country after the younger brother of their Warrior God because some White guy said so in his silly article.'

The trouble with this view is that the West no longer gave a fuck what the Indians called themselves.
They didn't want to rule India or meddle much with its politics.
Sure, there were some worthless academics in some prestigious Universities who pretended to care deeply about the Babri Masjid, but they had no power, their books were derided as empty verbiage, and the job prospects for their students were dwindling.
Spivak is an example of a person willing to tell stupid lies to anyone who wants to hear stupid lies.
Why?
She wants to market her worthless scribbling.
Her students too have to publish some worthless shite to get a Credential.
Shite feeding on shite without any pause for digestion.

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

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


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

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








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