To a nice White Professor who likes Manto & Mahashweta

Mahashweta Devi writes of a gang-raped tribal women but not of her own more or less distant relatives being butchered, violated, and ethnically cleansed on a far wider scale and in a more systematic manner in her own ancestral homeland.

Why?

Is it that her tribals-Dravidians like me, not Aryans, like her- could, still, at that time, be presented as 'uneducated', while her own vehicle to Class Power- and claim to authorial auctoritas as a 'Progressive' even 'Post Modern' intellectual- arose wholly out of such impotent Intellectual Credentials as can only be acquired by aborting a Civilisational, that is genuine for actually and empirically socio-geographical, computationally viable Schelling focal, solution to the Co-ordination problem for- as Prof Ken Binmore might say if I got him real drunk and held a gun to his head- the de-Kanted Carafe of the House Wine of the Folk Theorem's inter-subjective, Aesthetic?

Why does dusky 'Dopti' (Draupati, in the Mahabharata, had black skin- which is why she was named 'Krishna'- i.e. Black skinned), in 'Perfectly White' Mahashweta's short story, reveal her ravaged, bleeding, nakedness to the Culture-Vulture, albeit nominally Dravidanized and Imperialistic, Counter-Insurgency Chief, Senanayak? By doing so, she is breaking a cardinal rule of the hard core Naxal- she is revealing she is either already or potentially a leader.  Obviously, the thing for  Senanayak to do is to act out a pretense of shame, quote  a densely allusive, or Hunkadori, verse from a Hungrealist poet, get some NGO do-goodnik involved, release her and then keep tabs on her contacts or simply use her nakedly as an unwitting agent provocateur of Terrorism's self destructive stupidity.

Saadat Hasan Manto, in 'khol do', has a more sensible heroine. Hearing the words 'open it'- referring to the car window in which her rescuers are conveying her- she obediently starts unknotting the draw strings of her pajamas. This battered Sakina, oozing blood and pus, is nevertheless the Ousia of the true Shekinah- it makes the (presumably atheistical) Doctor's blood run cold; it overturns her father's attachment to Patriarchal sittlichkeit in howsoever bien pensant a form.

Manto, unlike Mahashweta, dies a drunken cadger, but only because his eyes have seen the glory- it seems his filmi P.W.A,  Bombay friends had urged their own too well-paid blinkers on him in vain-but the scandal here is not that the fucker's script for Ghalib didn't contain apocryphal shite like-

ḳhudā ke vāst̤e pardah nah kaʿbah se uṭhā vāʿiz̤
kahīñ aisā nah ho yāñ bhī vuhī kāfir ṣanam nikle!

Seek not, Simoniac, by lifting our  Cybele's veil, thy sin to atone

Lest El is revealed there eating out Porn Hub's Sunny Leone!

but, rather, that a drunken descendant of Abhinvagupta's votaries, showed himself, in articulo mortis, no stranger to shame- that is Nirlajjishvara.

The Shekinah's veils are God's mercy on us Mortals.
Ponder Abihu's fate, rather than place your faith in Progressivist Pinchas' halachah vein morin kein.

I recall an incident from about twenty years back.

A middle aged Pakistani gentleman- quite pukka, Aitchison College and all that- had graced our exiguous Iftar and regaled us with the story of his father, a General, who had been accorded every courtesy by the Saudis and given special access to 'kiss the Black Stone'.

After he left, a young Bangladeshi- good East London family, but a recovering addict- asked me to come outside because he wanted to say something to me in private. I was reluctant to go. The fact is, recovering British drug addicts make free of one's ciggies and I'm miserly in small matters.

Still, such was the fire in his eyes, I went. 

'The lips of a pig have touched the Ka'ba! Find out when the General is next visiting his son. That is all I ask. You do know, don't you, he told his troops to make sure to rape and kill every single one of your people whom they rounded up?'

I said- listen mate, I'm Dravidian. Fuck I care what you Aryans cunts do to each other? You guys ever give a shit what your Sinhala cousins been doin' to my Tamil peeps? As for pig lips and the Ka'bah- not my concern at all. There are people staying here whose Asylum Claim is going through. You bring down the Police on us, we'll gut you like a hilsa.

I'm lying. I didn't say any such thing. The truth is, though six foot and weighing 14 stone, I was probably frightened of this thin little recovering addict. What I actually said was something like-

'Ka'bah can never be desecrated. Like the Church, which is 'Bride of Christ', it is, as John Donne said, 'most pleasing to Thee then/ when most embraced and open to most men'.

Meanwhile, coz back then I was the Daily Mail's Black neighbor from Hell, Sabri Bros. had started blaring out 'shab ko mera janaza' from the Tape Deck-

Only Prayer & Fasting perfected our parting from Mother's pillowy breast

 Till baby Sakina elected to sleep on Husayn's battle hardened chest!

Not Drink, nor Death, has been, to this Dervish, a Saqi true

But, niece,- thy 'Al Atash ya Ammahu!'

Fuck is wrong with me? Time was when Poverty obliged me to keep fasts, Ugliness to observe continence, Stupidity to yield some Socially Utile species of heteroclite Obedience.

A Devdas manque, I couldn't even drink myself to death, like Majaz or Manto- but that was cool coz my poems and stories were too obviously, even to my own eyes, shite fed on shite. 

Tacitus, my first instructor in Ars Moriendi, recommended the 'gentle and unforcible' method of self-starvation- Jain Sallekhana- but then an aleatory act of what is unceasing in Jain generosity revealed even that horizon to be a but faltu or filmi Fata Morgana.

Fuck am I supposed to do, this drear Ramadan dusk without darkness, with Manto's Sakina as my only Saqi?

Seriously, I'm asking you, Prof,- fuck, I'm supposed to do?