Followers of this blog will be aware of the controversy surrounding my 1977 paper in which I claimed that Hindus and Muslims had been living together harmoniously in India for hundreds of years. Prof. Jacob Kurien pointed out that since both Hindus and Muslims prefer to marry rather than sinfully live together, whether harmoniously or without a harmonium, it must be the case that any instances corresponding to my assertion must have involved butt sex because Homosexual marriage is illegal in India. Since this form of Vice is a Malthusian curb on demographic growth, the evident over-population of India was an empirical refutation of my thesis that harmonious live-in relationships between Hindus and Muslims had occurred on any significant scale over the centuries in question.
I pointed out that the letter of the law had proven no obstacle in the marriage of Kurien's own parents, nor had fact that he was both conceived and delivered from the anus, of one or other of that hideous pair, proved an impediment to his own burgeoning career as a catamite.
Well, when I say 'I pointed out &c' what I mean is 'I should have pointed out &c'; the truth being that this riposte, or esprit de l'escalier, did not occur to me till 1997 when I opened an email correspondence with Prof Kurien by bringing this fact to his esteemed attention.
Kurien replied amiably enough- clearly he mistook me for another South Indian boy in the same class who is now an Astrophysicist- but, in so doing, he raised an important epistemological problem which I've been mulling over for the last twenty years.
The portion of his reply which has caused me so many sleepless nights of cogitation was as follows-
' Ha ha. Funnily enough, my late colleague, John Bothwell told me that there was a same-sex marriage ceremony in the Eastern Church- adelphopoiesis it was called- and my family is Syrian Christian. But, precisely because they were neither Hindu nor Muslim, your counter-example fails. Rather like your pathetic attempts to pronounce 'eggs' as other than 'yeggzuh'.'
My epistemological problem arose as follows- I was not concerned with Kurien's family religion when I offered my counter-example. He could have been a Namboodri or a Moplah for all I cared. For the purpose of my argument, his religion was an 'accident' not an 'essence'. I can imagine a 'closest possible world' where one of his parents was Muslim and the other Hindu. What was important was that they were clearly of the same sex- Kurien has very evidently inherited his mother's cavalry moustache- and that the fellow was certainly a 'gandu' born from an anus, not a vagina at all.
The metaphysical problem here has to do with the ontological status of the counter-factual conditional. How licit is its use in an idiographic discipline- that which studies the harmonious living together of actual Muslims and Hindus in India- as opposed to a nomothetic theory concerned with the possibility of each religion's co-habitation with its alterity? My original approach, I must concede, was 'Orientalist' and treated of Islam's ipseity as an unchanging essence. I had applied to Kings College to work with Prof. Hardy for a Research Degree on this topic but my application was rejected, not by the great man himself- who may have been able to see the merit in my approach- but some junior lecturer in the concerned Department. Rather condescendingly, the fellow suggested that I read Edward Said and place less reliance on Victorian ethnographic works like Capt. Richard Burton's seminal research amongst Sindhi rent-boys.
Anyway, though spurned by King's, I did manage to find a Supervisor, who taught at Queen's College, London- which, to my chagrin, I later discovered to be a Girl's school and not a Degree granting body at all- who did help me plan out a dissertation on the subject. However, I must admit I found the research scheme he suggested- which focused on technical aspects of butt sex, like lubrication and the use of scented candles and so on- a little too arid and scholastic and ultimately unrewarding. In parting ways with my esteemed Supervisor, I may mention that he wished me luck and paid a condign tribute to my evident passion for the the subject which, he readily confessed, neither he himself, nor indeed, anyone of his acquaintance, would be at all desirous of requiting. I remarked that this sort of Methodenstreit was inevitable in any newly burgeoning discipline, though FYI it's a bit racist to make fun of the way one pronounces the word 'eggs'.
Be that as it may, I will not gainsay the fact that from his perspective of White Privilege, my treatment of the subject was indeed somewhat joylessly mechanical and anhedonically utilitarian. Still, I believe I have given a convincing account of how butt sex between Sardar Patel and Liaquat Ali Khan could have averted the administrative paralysis that characterized the interim government under the Cabinet Mission plan. I am aware that this is a well ploughed academic field and can't hope to rival the insights of a Dipesh Chakroborty or an Aamir Mufti with their coy and giggling references to 'Walter Benjamin' as if everybody doesn't know that is just a highfalutin euphemism for the homely prison reach-around which was the catchphrase du jour of the Cheney era during which much of my dissertation was originally composed.
Perhaps, you think I have a jaundiced view of academia because I failed to secure a Credential that accurately reflects my obvious attainments in this branch of scholarship. To be blunt, I don't give a toss what you think. I am much more than just an expert on live-in relationships featuring Hindus and Muslims. My true claim to fame arises out of my solution to the problem of counterfactual conditionals as necessary triggers of modal collapse iff cognition is costly and therefore idiographic reality deliberately bankrupts every modal approach by tempting it to an unaffordable state space explosion. In nuce, this entails, that any false binary which collapses must have a Tertius Gaudens- a rejoicing third- which thereby gains salience as necessarily true. In this case it would be the much maligned material conditional which allows us to link wholly unrelated alethic propositions by the 'if' connective even if this fails the Ramsey test- i.e. accepting the 'if' statement as true does not cause us to revise our knowledge base such that the 'then' statement is accepted . In this case, since Kurien was a Christian, his having been conceived through anal intercourse was epistemologically unrelated to Hindus and Muslims who had been living together harmoniously for hundreds of years. (Since the harmonium was only introduced by Christian missionaries in the late nineteenth century, it follows that it could not have initiated butt sex between Hindus and Muslims in the pre-Ghaddar era when, (vide Savarkar's 'Indian War of Independence') interfaith amity was at its height.) However, Kurien is clearly a gandu- born from the anus- whose very existence disproves the Reverend Thomas Malthus's theory that homosexual Vice is a curb upon population growth. True, Kurien- like Malthus- is of Christian stock. But it is possible that any given Hindu or Muslim is discovered to be of Christian stock (as happens in Kipling's 'Kim' & Tagore's 'Gora'). This does not mean they are necessarily engaging in butt sex while living together harmoniously for hundreds of years. Why? Because there is a third possibility- a Tertius Gaudens, which I alone have discovered and annotated in the relevant scholarly literature.
How it happened was this. I was reading an article about Mitt Romney in my Dentist's waiting room. It mentioned the Mormon project of baptizing all the dead people who ever lived into their own religion- which opposes homosexual activities including butt sex. Thus everybody's ancestors, sooner or later, will be baptized into the Mormon church. As such, even if the Indian law relating to homosexual marriage is changed, it follows that all Hindus and Muslims who have harmoniously lived together over hundreds of years (in which case they would be too tired and physically fragile to be having a lot of butt sex) will, at least posthumously, give up this loathsome practice and, like, have a cold shower or go for a walk or play a nice game of carom rather than continually bugger each other.
I feel my discovery resolves the main ethical objection to Hindus and Muslims living harmoniously in India. It also settles the hoary old problem of counterfactuals of a particular type, viz. those that arise out of a false binary like 'Hindu' and 'Muslim', because in death everybody becomes Mormon and those guys don't have butt sex.
Thus, to conclude, my 1977 paper has been vindicated by my own painstaking historiographical and epistemological researches. Hindus and Muslims have indeed lived together harmoniously in India for hundreds of years and- pace Prof. Kurien's prurient suggestion- they have not been incessantly sodomising each other. I am sorry if this thesis of mine offends politically correct JNU jhollawallahs but there it is. No doubt, I will be shrilly denounced as a Modi bakth crypto-Fascist by elite academic power-couples like Ranajit & Ramchandra Guha. However, I have fulfilled my duty of parrhesia- I have spoken truth to power and though I perish miserably for my temerity yet will I rise up in glory as the Sainted Martyr of a genuinely scientific Indian historiography which can at last turn a deaf ear to the incessant rattling of same-sex skeletons mindlessly rutting in the closet of Hindu-Muslim amity.
Mind it kindly.
Jai Hind!
Aiyayyo!
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