Spivak's 'Munapha' and Munafiqat- or Profit & Hypocrisy

This is Spivak speaking at an academic conference to do with Europe. She mentions the voluntary work she does with an educational charity she established in rural Bengal-

'...my rural co-workers know nothing about colonialism, they have not seen any factories of any significant size. Some of my students have not seen trains. Yet they are not dumb. They do understand what profit or munapha is.'

The word 'munapha' (profit) sounds like 'munafiqat' (hypocrisy) and is of Islamic, that is Arabic, not Hindu, or Sanskrit, origin.

Why do the Bengalis- or tribal people living at the margins of Bengali or related Hindu, Indo-Aryan, speaking societies- use a word of Semitic, not Indic provenance to describe commercial profits?

Gujeratis use an indigenous word related to calculation. The thrifty and commercially astute Punjabis and Haryanvis use a word derived from the Sanskrit for benefit (laabh).

 'Munapha' is a 'posh' word associated with the old Persianised ruling and administrative class. For Commercial conflict resolution or jurisprudence, it is a technical term interpretable according to stare decisis Case Law.

However, it is also the word equated to 'surplus value'- in the sense of something expropriated from the proletariat by the merciless bourgeoisie- for Bengali Marxism which ruled the roost in that State for 30 of the years when Spivak- a Bengali- was making her name and establishing her fame.

But to make this observation is to explain nothing.

The question returns with greater force.

Why is the 'go to' word for Bengalis- even poor tribals at the margin- the 'posh' Arabic etymology word rather than something homely and vernacular?
Part of the conventional answer is that the Bengali intelligentsia- not just the Left- turned its back on commerce.  Only declasse Sindhi or greedy Gujeratis or benighted Marwaris merchants from West India bothered with such things.

Such people were 'hypocrites'- 'munafiqs'- pretending that transactions beneficial to themselves could benefit Society.

Let us look at a 'profitable' deal entered into by the famous Rani Rashmoni- who belonged to an agriculturist caste. The famous 'Prince' Dwarkanath Tagore mortgaged some land in the Sunderbans to her to finance his trip to Europe- one which Thackeray and Dickens memorialised in the annals of 'Eng. Lit'- Spivak's own foundational discipline from which she, with an entrepreneurial elan worthy of that Rani, developed into an 'Europeanist'.

What did the Rani do? Wikipedia says-

 Prince Dwarkanath Tagore had mortgaged a part of his Zamindari in now South 24 Parganas (part of present-day Santoshpur and adjoining areas) to Rani Rashmoni for his passage to England. This part of land which was then a part of the Sunderbans was marshy and almost uninhabitable except for some families of thugs who found the area convenient to stay and venture out for plunders in far away places mounted on stilts. Rani Rashmoni persuaded these families and helped them to build up fisheries in the surrounding water bodies that later turned into large rich bheris. They gradually gave up their 'profession' of plundering and transformed into a community of fishermen. This was a great social reform that the Rani had initiated.

The Rani, who made a big profit by doing something beneficial to Bengali Society, did, it is true use, some of that money to build a Temple.
Which one? It was that which Sri Ramakrishna made famous.

The Bengali bhadralok, at one time, were excellent Persianists- in particular the Kayasthas- and, like their Hindi speaking counterparts, they could have used the term 'phaayda' ('benefit') for their profitable dealings. This word too is 'posh' because it is derived from Arabic. After English eclipsed Persian, the Bengalis used Sanskrit derived words to describe benefits or beneficial activities by using words similar to 'Suvidha' or 'Upkaar' which have the meaning of amenities graciously provided. I suppose, it is more genteel to pretend that one isn't making a mutually profitable transaction and thus the other contracting party is actually tendering you a good or service out of some altruistic motive of a universal kind, allowing you to remain the 'obedient servant' of that magnanimous alterity.

Calcutta University was founded in 1857- the year of the 'Mutiny'. After this date, fewer and fewer  bhadralok (Hindu 'gentry') bothered with Persian. Moreover, there was a decline in entrepreneurial activity related to stagnation in local markets and unfair competition from British commercial houses. There were and are some great Bengali entrepreneurial families- but the mimetic effects associated with their success tended to diminish whereas in Gujerat and Punjab and amongst Marwaris, the opposite was the case.

Thus 'munapha' was not just a word of foreign origin, it represented something increasingly alien to the ethos of the Bengali bildungsburgertum.

 It was also something familiar even to poor villagers in remote areas because they didn't and still don't have access to super-markets with fixed prices. Everything must be negotiated. Even in the 'ration-shop' (i.e. the Public Distribution System), if not price, then quality and quantity have to be bargained over. The merchant, dirt poor though he himself may be, has to be a great actor. He has to hypocritically pretend that he is making a big loss on the transaction- however paltry. Thus profit as munapha is linked to histrionics or hypocrisy which is termed munafiqat. In Religion too there is a direct connection between the two.  The villager sees the merchant who has prospered by 'selling dear and buying cheap' (though he has been continually weeping over the loss incurred on each transaction) lavishing money on the building of Mosques and Temples- or donations to the Communist party which was in power till recently. The villager considers this type of merchant not to be a true votary of Religion or the Party but just a hypocrite- a munafiq who has grown fat on munapha.

Marxist Mathematical Economists, like Morishima- or Leftist political scientists who utilize the work of the Nobel Laureate Soviet Economist Kantorovich- may be able to give a definition of 'profit' which is quite different from the villager's 'munapha'. That profit would not involve 'munafiqat'- it would not be hypocritical. It would not arise by the exploitation of an information asymmetry and/or difference in bargaining or market power. 

Spivak probably is not aware of this. Still in her rebuttal to Chibber she says (speaking of herself in the third person and once again mentioning her charitable work in Bengal)

She points at the northwestern corner of the huge Eurasian continent and tells them that that is Europe and that, though so small, they still won. She discusses with them how they won and even uses such mid-Victorian examples as James Watt watching the lid dance on the pot of boiling water. She reminds herself not to be an ‘improver’, and discusses with her increasingly more aware coworkers (male and female teachers and supervisors) from the community the fact that she is not drawing profits from the work for and with them.

Though Birbhum, where Spivak's charity operates, is increasingly Muslim in population, still there is a Sanskrit, as opposed to Arabic, origin word which could be used for 'profit'- viz. 'laabh'. Obviously, when a person who has set up a charity comes to do some voluntary work there, there is a polite presupposition that what they are doing is creating 'laabh' not 'munapha'. They may say 'I too get laabh by working with you- I am learning so much from you' and the polite response is 'we get so much laabh just from seeing your face and gaining inspiration from your personality!'
In no case would the word 'munapha'- which is associated with hypocritical munafiqat- feature- unless the supposedly charitable person themselves brings it up.

Yet this must have been what Spivak did- unless her interlocutors were making fun of her and she was too stupid to understand how or why.
She writes-

Although they are not well acquainted with the world map and know nothing about colonialism, and have not seen any factories of any significant size, they do understand what profit or munafa is.

Bruno Betthelheim tells us that Freud- referring to Jung's shameful exculpatory letter re. the Sabina Speilrein affair- pointed out that using a word of foreign provenance (Jung used English) shows that the concept or virtue connoted is foreign to the writer or speaker.

Perhaps Spivak unconsciously accused herself of not bringing 'laabh' to poor students in Birbhum. Perhaps she felt she was acting hypocritically and that too in a manner foreign to her own ancestral ethos so as to secure a 'profit' based on fraud for herself.  So she uses a word derived from Arabic- munapha- to deny that is what she is getting even though the word naturally suggests 'munafiqat'- repulsive hypocrisy of a religious or ideological stripe. 

As a matter of fact, the Quranic origin of the word 'munapha' is perfectly innocent- manafi means 'benefit' in the same way 'laabh' in Sanskrit origin languages means benefit.

Why does Spivak keep drawing attention to this word whether replying to Chibber or speaking at some Conference for Europeanists?

Let us look at the rest of the quotation from her speech- (she is speaking of these poor students in Birbhum from whom she gains no 'munapha')

They are not “the East,” they are not “the non-West,” they can be examples of a general argument that notices that they vote in a postcolonial nation that they do not know as such. That is indeed a problem, not what they think about Europe. I know you are only thinking about the migrant problems on your own soil, but nonetheless, these are people after all, “the largest sector of the electorate in the world’s largest democracy” if CNN is going to be believed. These people do not know that they are voting in a postcolonial nation, but they vote.

What is going on here? Either those poor students and 'co-workers' in Birbhum understand the word 'munapha' or they don't. If they do, they have a concept of themselves as 'mashriq'- Eastern. Even if they don't, if they are learning Bengali, then they have a concept of themselves as belonging to the Global East, even if they are from West Bengal. Why? The Bengali literature that is taught in primary schools is of recent origin. It makes the 'East/West' distinction explicitly.

Spivak says her students and co-workers vote in a 'post-colonial nation they do not know as such'. Fair play to them. RSS pracharaks, like Narendra Modi, also vote in India believing it to be a Hindu- not a post colonial- Nation. A Muslim League worker in Kerala also votes believing India will one day come to the truth of Islam and that a more perfect Caliphate will be established there. A Christian in Andhra Pradesh may vote for YSR's son with a similar belief regarding the inevitable triumph of Christianity in the sub-continent.
Very few Indians believe 'India is a postcolonial nation'. Why? If it were 'postcolonial theory' would have something useful to say to Indians. It doesn't. It is worthless, hypocritical shite from which a handful of brain dead ex-pats Professors have drawn a Credentialised rent or fraudulent 'munafa'.

Why does Spivak associate a true assertion- viz. that poor people in India do represent 'the largest sector' in the world's largest democracy- with CNN? Why does CNN's credibility matter? The answer is that CNN is a 'news source' and news, or indeed objectivity of any kind, is foreign to 'critical discourse'. Spivak introduces this foreign term to point to something foreign to her own ethos which she nevertheless seeks to use, not for 'laabh' but 'munapha'.

Consider the naked manner in which she promotes a 'Mother Theresa' type image of herself to her fellow 'Europeanists'

Back now to the landless illiterate near the Jharkhand-Birbhum border. In the elementary schools for the rural landless where I have trained students and teachers to learn and teach the state curriculum for nearly three decades now I try to make the groups friendly with the wretched map of the world on the back cover of the geography textbook.

Has Spivak actually trained any students or teachers? Nope. Two kids went from High School to College. That is all. Spivak's educational charity is ineffective and exists merely as a vehicle for self-promotion. She says she has been trying, for thirty years, to 'make the groups friendly with the wretched map of the world'. The way to do this is to organise group activities involving drawing outlines of the continents in the mud of the school yard and organising games and songs and 'model U.N type' debate and so forth. Spivak herself could send stamps and posters and so forth from her own globe-trotting and plenty of her friends and relatives could contribute more of their own. After 30 years, something would have rubbed off. Christian schools or RSS shaka schools in remote tribal areas do a better job than Spivak's- at least, by her own account. Why?

I am not interested in importing gadgets from all over the place. I tell them that I am their race enemy and class enemy. I may be a nice person, but I had all the advantages that they did not have. They know this because I am upper caste Hindu and they are former untouchables. In fact they are still untouchable for some rural gentry. It is illegal but who cares? I therefore say that they must stop needing me at all, that all I am doing here is stupid repayment for ancestral debt, that for thousands of years we have bred them up for manual labor, punished intellectual labor, and bred them into obedience so that the smart among them has only been cunning, with rare exceptions.

Wow! Spivak is claiming that her own dirt poor family- which only came up by cramming for competitive exams- was capable of being the 'race enemy' and 'class enemy' of people who beat the fuck out of her ancestors and chased them away till, under British protection,  some crawled back and used cunning commercial tricks to extract munapha without producing any laabh. Spivak is trying to brainwash tribal, not untouchable, people- who, incidentally, refused to accept even famine relief food from Brahman petty officials under the Raj- that they have always been racially inferior to people like herself- though, as a matter of fact, more of her beggarly sort of Brahmin died of famine or were slaughtered or otherwise ethnically cleansed during the course of her own life!

It is cunning, not smart, to cram for competitive exams and acquire worthless Credentials in useless 'disciplines'. This is private 'munapha' not social 'laabh'. It is munafiqat- sheer hypocrisy and play acting, nothing more. How can Spivak's useless type of 'teaching' cancel her karmic debt? The thing is an obvious fraud.
The truth is poor Indians don't need Spivak. They do need money. It is only by doling out small sums that Spivak has been able to keep up this sham.

I ask them to remember that intellectual labor cannot be taught, that if they obey me and imitate me they are not going to learn.

Why? Because Spivak is not giving them the tools to cram and regurgitate worthless shite so as to secure Credentialised rents. She doesn't want them to become her competitors. Imagine the essays her students might write if they had been given the same opportunities she was? Those essays would be scathing about her posing as some Subaltern Messiah or Mother Theresa of Literary Theory.

I tell them I am in a hard place because I do not know how to teach them, because I had all the advantages and they are in a hard place because intellectual labor cannot be learned. I have these conversations with them. When I go to places like Utrecht on the 300th anniversary of what is called the Peace of Utrecht to keynote, I said to the whole group of teachers and supervisors as we were sitting together eating the last day, “I am going to say to them what I learned from you because I am going to use this sentence. Now I am going to say it in English, you won’t understand, but remember, this English sentence is exactly that Bengali sentence that I just told you that has come to me through trying to train you for so many years.” I just wanted to say this ,so that you understand why we look at the dreadful map on the back of the Class 3 and 4 textbooks (now defunct because newer style textbooks without world maps are being manufactured to attract students away from English-medium schools) the government gives and takes away.

WTF?! Did Spivak have a stroke? Intellectual labour- like every other type- can be learned. These things are mimetic- maybe 'mirror neurons' or something like that plays a part- but it is obvious that any worthwhile skill or corpus of knowledge can be learned by an essentially imitative process. That is why Schools exist. Kids imitate other kids who imitate what the teacher is doing when she writes upon the blackboard- or traces a figure in the dust.

Spivak's own intellectual labour has been entirely mimetic. She imitates worthless shite spouted by others and her students imitate her spouting of worthless shite.

You don't learn geography by looking at a map. You have to draw it for yourself. This can be done as a group. Little kids learn the map of the world by drawing its outline in the playground (with the teacher's help) and then playing games and singing songs in a manner that allows them to imagine a globe of interrelated, interdependent, people.

Spivak thinks 'newer style textbooks without world maps' are being 'manufactured to attract students away from English-medium schools'. A completely paranoid, deracinated elitist, at the Ballygunge Club might make a ridiculous remark of this sort after the third g&t. It would be greeted with shame-faced silence. Everyone knows that poor people, if they get the chance, pay money to switch their kids to English Medium because the Government Schools (which are vernacular language) are utterly shite because the Teachers play truant.

I recall, in the early Seventies, our Irish Vice Principal came in to talk to us about Gujarat's decision to abandon English teaching. He stressed that Gujarat was bound to get fewer people into the Bureaucracy as a result. Back then, the omission of a map of the globe from school textbooks might have been considered by very elderly elite English speaking Indians to represent an autarkic turning away from Enlightenment. But, even at that time, it was a foolish view. Gujeratis- like Ambani- went abroad and learned African or Arab or other languages and prospered in trade. They eventually set up high tech, world beating, industries. Their sons and daughters graduated from MIT and Wharton. Gujerati or Marwari speaking industrialists ended up owning prestigious companies in Europe and America.
Why is Spivak so wholly ignorant of what happened during the course of her own professional life? Why does she believe that she is racially superior to certain other Bengalis? There is no DNA evidence for any such superiority. Nor does the historical record bear it out. Her ancestors were poor and chased from place to place. She admits she is not from the prestigious land-owning 'Shakta' or Kulin class. So why is she telling such stupid lies in the age of the internet when anyone can easily find out- on the basis of a 5 minute Google search- that her lies are not just stupid, they are actually utterly insane!

I point at the northwestern corner of the huge Eurasian continent and I tell them that that is Europe. “So small, but they won.”

That is not how to teach geography to kids. You have to get them to draw maps and play games so as to get an internal, imaginative, model of the globe.

Europe did not win. It lost in 1945. It has American troops on its soil. India, by contrast, won. China won. Africa won. Europe had to pick up the pieces and get by as best it could. But it did so in a co-operative manner. So, its poor now enjoys a better standard of living than ever it did when it dominated the world.

I discuss with them how they won, in a very simpleminded way, and I use mid-Victorian examples, such as James Watt watching the lid dance on the pot of boiling water.This is a ridiculous thing, but on the other hand, what am I going to do?

James Watt died a decade or more before Victoria came to the throne. 

Revile colonialism when the rich-poor gap in the new nation expands?

Why not revile colonialism? The rich-poor gap expanded under it. 

Be politically correct myself and Christian and say, “they really know everything, although they were miserably oppressed for 5,000 years”?

How is this Christian? As a matter of fact, it is Darwinism which asserts that there is no Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics- like submissiveness or ignorance. With proper teaching, anyone anywhere can learn everything.

Or, to speak in a way that they would understand, say that the big people, the Borolok, the rich, can make their head work and the poor are made to make their body work.

Poor people can get an education and move up in the world. Spivak is not providing them that sort of education. But that is her choice.

It is very hard to learn how to make your head work, you cannot imagine cognitively damaged heads, how hard it is to make it move, it is really a scary thing.

 So- the poor are cognitively damaged. Teaching them is futile. The only reason to do so would be hypocritical self-aggrandisment.

So I describe these things.And then I remind myself not to be an “improver,” which in Ranajit Guha’s Dominance Without Hegemony, is shown to be what the first British Permanent Settlers called themselves.“Improvers, not civilizing missionaries.” I remind myself not to be an improver and I discuss with my increasingly more aware coworkers, male and female teachers and supervisors from the community, the fact that I am not drawing profits from the work for and with them, except cultural capital—lack of time
does not allow me to dwell on this—although they are not well-acquainted
with the world map and know nothing about colonialism—they know the oppression that we have measured out on them very well.

The British 'Permanent Settlement' referred to the fixing of the land revenue which made the East India Company- previously a trading company- into an administrative power based on secure rents. 'Improvement' meant reducing the cost of administration so as to increase the profit that could be repatriated.
British Imperial power was based on naval supremacy which in turn meant that it could dominate trade and industry on a Global scale.
Spivak has no naval or other supremacy. Yet she thinks she is as important as the British Empire!
What harm would there be in her improving the teaching at her school? Would she really turn into a British Viceroy if her School wasn't utterly shite.

I do not know if other countries are like this because India is so big. Also, India was a different kind of British colonialism. In 1757 when the East India Company came in, it was the Ottomans who knew how to be emperors.The East India Company had Ottoman envy, they had no idea how to be emperors. The pattern in Latin America is different because it originated in mercantile rather than industrial capitalism.

This is sheer nonsense. The Ottomans claimed to be the Caliphs of the Muslim World. England made no similar claim. By the mid eighteenth century, the Ottomans were on the defensive. Soon they were labelled the 'sick man' of Europe. Nobody had 'Ottoman envy' in 1757. Incidentally, the British had been active in the subcontinent for 150 years previously.
White people did not settle in India. They did settle in Latin America. 'Industrial capital' was irrelevant. The industrial revolution in England post-dates Plassey. James Watt got his first patent 12 years after than historic battle.

A limited concept of “Europe” must come to terms with the fact that Europe’s internal problems cannot solve the world’s problems, although that claim is, at least tacitly, made.

Sheer nonsense. Europeans know they can't even defend themselves and must rely on American troops on their soil. 'Internal problems' cant solve anything. Only solutions can.

Not just in that old Frankfurter Algemeine where European intellectuals came together and said that Europe would be better administering the world because it had known imperialism.

Sheer nonsense. The newspaper was founded in 1949. Germany was divided and occupied. It wasn't pretending it could administer the world because it couldn't even get the Soviets out of its own Eastern territory. India 'knew' Imperialism. Europe hadn't known Imperialism since the demise of Hapsburg Empire. 

Last week in Argentina someone in Buenos Aires writing about the fact that the EU woman had actually managed to do a deal, with some bad gender politics thrown in, with Iran. There was a great long essay about how in spite of everything it was the European Union, not the United States. But it is all in terms of Innenpolitik.

Innenpolitik means 'domestic policy'. A deal with a foreign country- like Iran- can't be 'Innenpolitik'

A limiting concept of “Europe,” doing its Innenpolitik as a clue to a whole world politics, must come to terms with the fact that Europe is a part of a much larger world now.

The world is the same size now as it has always been. Europe can't project force much beyond its borders so it has ceased to count. Europeans know this. There is no need to rub their noses in it.

When you go to Asia with the fierce competitive nationalisms of India and China, no one is thinking about Europe. Europe’s moment was historically important but not all-consumingly determining. The sun rises at different times upon the globe today. Paying good attention to Europe is not going to place global southern modernity  in a global context.

Nobody has ever suggested otherwise.

When the stock exchange closes in London—that is what globalization is, electronic capital moving—it must wait for Tokyo, and then Mumbai, and in between opens the turbulent and wildly unstable, speculative “marriage of socialism and capitalism”—I quote Karen Wong—where the turnover rates are ten times higher.

Sheer nonsense. The London Stock Exchange doesn't have to wait for any other Stock Exchange to open.  What has changed is that traders in London can buy and sell on other Exchanges more cheaply and more quickly than ever before. There is no 'marriage of socialism and capitalism' any more than there is a marriage of cats and dogs.

Shanghai and Shenzhen. If you think of this, you have to take a deep breath about the idea of the ekphrasis of globalization inside something that you call “Europe.” Therefore I wanted to begin with my schools where Europe is also not known.

Ekphrasis means 'vivid description', The 'idea of the vivid description of globalization inside something that you call 'Europe' is quite banal. It means showing different ethnic enclaves and showcasing stuff like the Notting Hill Carnival. You don't have to take a deep breath. There is no need for Spivak to mention her supposed charitable work in her worthless school. All she is doing is trying to get some 'munapha' for her 'munafiqat'- i.e. she is turning a profit on her own hypocritical 'charity'.