What of Spivak's confabulation about herself?
Well, born in Calcutta in the middle of the war, 1942. Earliest memories are of the artificial famine created by the British military to feed the soldiers in the Pacific theater of the Second World War.Wavell, as Viceroy, had put an end to the famine before Spivak could have any such memories.
It was obviously illegal to protest against this.Why? Bengal had an elected Government. It was perfectly legal to protest against the actions of the incumbent administration. The Communists were backing the war effort- because of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. No doubt, the ruling coalition did try to influence or intimidate the Press and its political opponents. But, it was Indian people- not Whites- doing this.
As an extraordinary political move in response to this situation, was formed what became a major phenomenon, the Indian People's Theatre Association, IPTA.IPTA was a wing of the Communist party which backed the war effort. It also backed the creation of Pakistan. That is why it was briefly crushed, at least in Bengal, by the Congress Party. However, Stalin changed his mind about the nature of the Congress regime and so IPTA and the PWA and so forth became boring and respectable soon enough.
But it wasn't a 'major phenomenon' at all. It didn't stop a single death from famine, or- later on- ethnic cleansing.
They took performance as the medium of protest. Obviously the British were not coming to check out street-level theater: the actors were not professional actors.The administration was wholly Indian. Plain clothes police officers were indeed checking 'street-level theater'. But since they knew this was a Communist outfit obedient to Stalin they took no further action.
Incidentally, IPTA had some of the best actors and music directors and scriptwriters of the period. People like Prithviraj Kapoor, Bijon Bhattacharya, Balraj Sahni, Ritwik Ghatak, Utpal Dutt, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Salil Chowdhury, Pandit Ravi Shankar, Jyotirindra Moitra, Niranjan Singh Maan, S. Tera Singh Chan, Jagdish Faryadi, Khalili Faryadi, Rajendra Raghuvanshi Safdar Mir, Hasan Premani,Amiya Bose, Sudhin Dasgupta etc.
What they were performing was the famine and how to organize against it.Yet they failed utterly. It was the new Viceroy- an army man- who put an end to it.
I was growing up as a middle-class child in the shadow of the famine. The extraordinary vitality of the Indian People's Theatre Association was in the air.What was in the air was the Partition riots. IPTAs 'extraordinary vitality' achieved nothing. The Entertainment industry enables us to idle away a few hours. That is all.
A relationship between aesthetics and politics was being deployed by people who were taking advantage of the fact that aesthetics had been officially defined as autonomous by colonial ideology.India became independent when she was 5. But Bengal had been self governing for the previous 12 years. Nobody knew anything about this 'colonial ideology' she speaks of. It did not exist. There certainly had been some Colonial administrators or British travelers who had taken note of native aesthetic forms. However, they did not think them to be 'autonomous' at all. Certain Presidencies banned specific types of dance, or literary genres. No doubt, this was due to pressure from local people. However, the principle was established that the State could and should intervene in aesthetic fields.
When India first entered the War, the Communists sided with Congress because of the Hitler-Stalin pact. At this time, Communist 'aesthetic productions' were put down with a heavy hand. Then, the Communists switched side because Hitler broke his pact with Stalin. They might still get a kicking if they acted against the regional Government, but they did not do so. The play 'Nabanna' is a case in point. Instead of asking why Fazlul Haq or Shurawardy had not implemented the Famine Code, the play paints Hindus in a sordid light. Naturally, this delighted the Muslim masters of Bengal. Later the Communists supported the creation of Pakistan from which Hindus were ethnically cleansed.
Spivak was 5 years old when the Brits formally handed over control to the Indians. However, with Atlee's election, it was clear that all power would be in Indian hands- including Defense and Foreign Policy (which previously had been reserved for the Viceroy). Thus Spivak could have no memory of actual British rule.
IPTA may have been as stupid as shit, but they must have known that it was not the British, but the Muslim League they had to fear till the Congress leaders came out of jail and took over in Hindu majority areas.
Spivak believes the enemy was the British and that they did not interfere in aesthetic matters. This is quite false. Prior to 1935, they took an active role in suppressing seditious or pornographic or politically sensitive artistic works. After 1937, elected Governments in the Provinces took over this role.
Britain itself did not hold 'aesthetics to be autonomous'. Joyce's Ulysses was banned till 1933 and Lady Chatterly's lover was banned till 1960.
They were, in other words, using the enemy's definition of aesthetics as having an autonomous sphere and sabotaging that in order to bring back the relationship between aesthetics and politics in a very direct way.Sheer nonsense! IPTA would have been banned and its members would have had their heads kicked in if they'd dated criticize the Muslim League.
The fine thing was that the plays were good; the songs were good.That's true enough.
One still sings those songs, even on marches.But the Left front has had its head kicked in by Mamta's goons and thus has stopped marching anywhere. Indeed many former Leftists are voting for Modi this time round.
That's something that colored my childhood more than I knew then. One of the big memories is of negotiated political independence, very early on. My generation was on the cusp of decolonization.Spivak can't have any such memories. The truth is Atlee took a unilateral decision to hand over power, hopefully to an undivided India, but if necessary to a Balkanised country. Mountbatten, again uniltaterally, shortened the transition time- insisting on leaving in '47 rather than '48.
On our childhood and adolescent sensibilities was played out the meaning of a negotiated political independence.The thing was a fait accompli. The British packed their bags and left.
We were not adults; yet we were not born after independence. In a way, it's more interesting to have been in my generation than to have been a midnight's child, to have been born at independence, to be born free by chronological accident.'Midnight's Children' is an interesting novel. Has Spivak produced anything as readable?
I come from the bottom layer of the upper middle class or the top layer of the lower middle class, depending on which side of the family you are choosing.So- she was middle class.
I went to a missionary school, which is different from a convent.Actually, she went to St. John's Diocesan- a prestigious Anglican institution attended by Tagores and other such such aristocrats. It is said that it actually had the status of a College but was downgraded to a School after a female student ex-student tried to assassinate the British Governor of Bengal, a crime for she served six or seven years in prison.
A convent is upper class and fashionable stuff. Mine was a cheap school, very good academic quality.Her school was more prestigious than most Convent schools staffed by nuns. One reason for this was because high caste Hindus felt they could send their daughters there without fear of them becoming infected by Christian superstitions.
It benefited from having highly educated teachers and Head Mistresses- the latter of high born Bengali families. Interestingly, Spivak thinks La Martinere was a Convent School whereas it was an Anglican institution similar to her own school.
By the time I was going, most of the teachers were tribal Christians, that is to say, Indian subalterns, lower than rural underclass by origin, neither Hindus nor Muslims, not even Hindu untouchables, but tribals—so called aboriginals—who had been converted by missionaries.Wow! Bengalis sure are racist! However, according to the traditional reckoning, women from ruling tribes were themselves considered Kshatriya- Noble- not at all on a par with 'untouchables' or, more to the point, the increasingly prosperous Namasudras which Spivak's class- and later the Left front Government- mercilessly suppressed.
So that again, if the IPTA is one early experience, another early experience which then I didn't know was going to influence me so strongly was learning—as a child from a good caste Hindu family—from women who were absolutely underprivileged but who had dehegemonized Christianity in order to occupy a space where they could teach social superiors.Tribal people don't consider Brahmans their social superiors. They refused to accept cooked food from them. I suppose this has a sound enough basis in 'pathogen avoidance theory'.
The schooling was in Bengali, my mother tongue, until the last four years when, of course, it was hard to get us into English, since teachers and students were both Indian. But "English medium" still has glamour for the Indian middle class, presumably because it is still a better weapon for upward class mobility. And then B.A. from Presidency College. I think that the strongest influence on students of my class going to that kind of college was the intellectual Left. It was, once again, a college known for academic excellence but not class-fixed, so that there was a sprinkling of students from working class and rural small bourgeois origins, as well as students from the upper middle, etc. It was a politically active institution. The atmosphere at the Ecole Normale on rue d'Ulm in Paris sometimes reminds me of my college. This was Calcutta, University of Calcutta. I left as a third-year graduate student for Cornell.
AA: How much English was there in your household?
GCS: Well, no, there wasn't much English in the household. That's a characteristic. Even now, for example, I will not write letters to my family in English. It's unthinkable, although they're all super educated. It is sometimes assumed that if one knows English well, then one would use English. That's not the case. One can know English as well as treasure one's own mother tongue. This is perhaps a Bengali phenomenon, rather than an Indian phenomenon, and there are historical reasons for this—or at least one can construct a historical narrative as a reason. To an extent there was in conversation, in writing, in reading even, in the family situation, one could say, no English. But in school, of course, English was one of the languages; English was a language that we learned in class. And we knew very well that in order to get ahead in colonial, and immediately postcolonial India, what you needed was English.What is remarkable here is that a Professor of Literature evinces no love for the language she studied. It was something she was forced to do 'to get ahead'. The Left attracted her but she felt no inclination to learn mathematical economics. Rather she emigrated to study English and 'get ahead'. This suggests that she had as little love for the Left as she did for Literature. All she wanted to do was 'get ahead' and if one could get ahead further and faster in the US, then so be it.
AA: I am interested in the ways diasporic intellectual workers describe themselves in light of their language use. For example, Jacques Derrida explained to me, in English, that he was raised in Algeria, a descendant of a Spanish Jewish family, but that he is not bilingual. Tzvetan Todorov, on the other hand, affirms the bilingualism and biculturalism of the Eastern European in the West. But it is an unequal bilingualism, weighted by time, distance, borders. How would you describe yourself?Derrida would not have been welcomed by Arabic speaking Algerians. Todorov, poor fellow, was probably reporting to the Bulgarian secret police.
GCS: From the point of view of language? I see myself as a bilingual person. As a bilingual person, I do translations from my native language. I think I would like a greater role in West Bengal as a public intellectual.But you'd have to say interesting, relevant, things to gain such a role. You can't play the brown card in a country where everyone is brown. If you boast about the school you set up in Birbhum, people will actually go there to see it is any great shakes. If it isn't, they will laugh at you.
Remaining in the United States was not at any point an examined choice, a real decision made. We won't go into the background now. I left India without any experience of what it was like to live and work in India. So I have kept my citizenship, and am inserting myself more and more into that. I have two faces. I am not in exile. I am not a migrant. I am a green-card-carrying critic of neocolonialism in the United States. It's a difficult position to negotiate, because I will not marginalize myself in the United States in order to get sympathy from people who are genuinely marginalized. I want to have more of a role in the space where Bengali is a language for reading, writing. I write Bengali competently, with the same sort of problem making myself clear as I have in English. Mahasweta asks me to write more in Bengali. So reading, writing, public speaking, television: I want to get more involved. The cultural field in West Bengal is so rich that I'm a bit envious, you might say. It's working out slowly, and I can now see myself as a person with two fields of activity, always being a critical voice so that one doesn't get subsumed into the other.This raises an interesting question. Would Spivak be able to get away with writing shite in her own language?
AA: Do you think that had you remained in Calcutta, you would do as much work in English as you do now, working in the United States? GCS: Probably so. I was an English honors student. English is my field. Remember, we are talking about a colonial country. I have colleagues there who have remained more wedded to "English," without the critical edge. There is sometimes a kind of resentment that I, living in the West, should be cutting the ground from under them, since, for them, that's their specialty rather than a contested political field. Recently I gave an interview for the BBC World Service regarding colonial discourse. The first question that the British questioner asked me was, "Do you think your activities in this critical theory have anything to do with the fact that you were born in India?" And I told her, "Look, in fact, if you were born and brought up in India you can have exactly the opposite view." So, yes, I probably would have been more like a traditional, solid, British-style (instead of maybe using the American style, who knows?) English scholar, probably a Yeats scholar.India wants good English language instruction. Christians- including 'Tribals'- may offer this. People of Spivak's sort are only interested in 'getting ahead' without doing anything socially productive.
AA: Is the choice of language, English or Bengali, for example, particularly significant for the writer writing in India?
GCS: Quite significant because India is a multilingual country. I have talked a lot about the concept of enabling violation. The child of rape. Rape is something about which nothing good can be said. It's an act of violence. On the other hand, if there is a child, that child cannot be ostracized because it's the child of rape. To an extent, the postcolonial is that.No. Mixed race people may be that. As a matter of fact, they may be ostracized and corralled into repugnant professions- e.g. prostitution.
Modi is not the child of any type of rape. Nor is Mamta. That is why they matter- but Spivak does not.
We see there a certain kind of innate historical enablement which one mustn't celebrate, but toward which one has a deconstructive position, as it were.There is no point deconstructing a stupid lie.
In order for there to be an all-India voice, we have had to dehegemonize English as one of the Indian languages.Nonsense! Rahul could be 'an all-India voice' if only he had something sensible to say. Naveen Patnaik has been CM of Orissa for twenty years though he is not fluent in that language. His very patrician English could be 'an all India voice' if he becomes a Third Party Prime Minister in a coalition government. But he isn't interested in the top job. The good news is he gets to keep his ancestral fiefdom.
Yet it must be said that, as a literary medium, it is in the hands of people who are enough at home in standard English as to be able to use Indian English only as the medium of protest, as mockery or teratology; and sometimes as no more than local color, necessarily from above. So, yes, there is an importance of writing in English, high-quality writing.What is important is the quality of thought. The language chosen does not matter. There are plenty of good translators out there.
AA: What are your thoughts on hybrid writing and speech, on a Bengalized English?
GCS: It's very interesting that you ask me that, because that is the English that is an Indian language. It's not just Bengalized. You know there are over seventeen to nineteen languages, hundreds of dialects in India. The English I'm speaking of may be used, for example, on a bus by two people talking to each other, underclass people, who clearly share an Indian language, not English. They may at a certain point break into a kind of English sentence that you wouldn't understand. The situation changes as you climb up in class. And it is this imbrication of the dynamics of class mobility with proximity to standard English that would, as I have already indicated, make the project of hybrid writing in English somewhat artificial.Dynamics means 'time-path'- even if Time is 'many fingered', a 'time path' isn't. It can't have an imbrication- i.e an overlapping tiling because that is a purely spatial notion.
There has been some 'hybrid writing'- like 'All about H.Hatterr'- but Indians found it tedious. On the other hand, Chetan Bhagat's books sell well.
A.A Let me shift the focus from India to Ireland. Could you speak to the project of writing as that of Joyce, Yeats, Beckett?This was a time when Dublin and Calcutta contended for the title of 'second city of the Empire'. Well, Dublin contended for it, whereas the Prince of Wales awarded it unasked to Calcutta in 1906. Joyce and Yeats certainly knew their mahatmas from their manvantaras. The latter promoted Tagore and translated Upanishads. However, it was Tagore's grandfather who had more influence on the revival of Celtic languages- starting with Welsh.
Tagore, Aurobindo and Iqbal can be compared to Yeats. Joyce, however, is sui generis- but, like Beckett, he required Paris to flourish
GCS: I hold on to the idea of dehegemonizing. I think I am more sympathetic with Joyce's stated deep irony. You remember Mother Grogan in Ulysses} Haines, the Englishman, who has learned Irish, speaks to her in Irish, and she asks, "Is it German?"The joke here is that, to this day, it is the Protestant elite which takes the trouble to learn Gaelic. The working class Catholic avoids the thing like the plague- even if their gand-parents speak the language.
Yeats, in the event, transformed English. But in his stated politics, language politics, I find him less sympathetic than Joyce. It has to be self-conscious or nothing.What on earth can she possibly mean?
I will now draw an example not from India, but from Bangladesh, because I've just had this discussion with a poet in Dhaka. When the British became territorial, rather than simply commercial, after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, they came in through Bengal.French expansionism in the Carnatic had been checked by people like Clive a decade before.
There was already an Islamic imperial presence in India located nearly a thousand miles away in Delhi, although the Nawab of Bengal was Muslim and there was a sizable, powerful Muslim minority, both urban and rural.The Marathas, who were Hindu, had defeated the Mughals in 1719. However, there were other Muslim forces which were able to assert themselves in different areas. However the Sikhs were on the rise and it was only after the death of Ranjit Singh that the British could dream of establishing paramountcy over the subcontinent. Thus the balance of power, in the subcontinent, had shifted against Islam prior to British hegemony.
In order to counteract Islamic domination—and I'm obviously simplifying—they played up the Hindu Sanskrit quality of Bengali.Utter nonsense. The Brits used Persian as the official language till 1835. Missionaries, however, were targeting Hindus, not Muslims and so they cultivated the Hindu variant of the language. A Persian speaking Hindu- like Raja Rammohan Roy- would reject Trinitarian Christianity as a farrago of superstitious nonsense.
Bengali was the language they emphasized, because they had come through Bengal and established themselves in Bengal.The British did not 'emphasize' Bengali. The Bengalis did. Similarly Tamils emphasized Tamil and Gujeratis emphasized Gujerati. The British emphasized which ever language was dominant in the region that came under their administration.
It must be said that because of the Bengali aptitude and appetite for speaking English, the British had less need to learn Bengali than Hindustani or Tamil in regions where those languages predominated.
However, to gain advancement, everyone increasingly learned English with the result that only a little kitchen Hindustani was required of the Memsahib- if not the Sahib.
There was therefore a colonial hype of Bengali as an Indie-Hindu language. In fact, of course, Bengali had a strong ArabicPharsi element as well.This is all sheer fantasy. Hindus developed a Sanskritized Bengali so as to elevate the vernacular. Muslims, who were stronger in East Bengal, did not go in the opposite direction because, after all, the important thing was to learn Quranic Arabic.
Unlike Urdu- which can genuinely be different from Hindi and is written in a wholly different script- the Muslim version of Tamil or Bengali does not have this property. There is lexical borrowing, not grammatical or idiomatic replacement. This is one reason why 'communal' divisions did not get as deeply entrenched in either region. However, in Tamil Nadu there was a popular rebellion against the Brahmans- which the arrogance of a few arrogant assholes richly merited- while, now in Bengal, we see a popular rebellion against the upper caste dominated Left Front.
Under the British, nearly all of it was erased, and subsequent Bengali nationalism also emphasized the Hindu element.Sheer nonsense. Hindu Bengali nationalists emphasized the Hindu element. So did Hindu Maharashtian nationalists. The Brits tried to partition Bengal- so the Muslim majority East could thrive- but the Hindu Nationalists forced them to cancel the measure. Later, once the Hindus realized that they would have their throats slit in a Muslim majority Bengal, they decided that Curzon had been right all along though, of course, being Bengali, they never said so in as many words.
(Curiously enough, the Hindu majority government of India has been playing the same game with Hindi, the national language, for some time.)How is this curious? Hindu Bengalis promoted Sanskritized Bengali. Hindu Hindi speakers promoted Sanskritized Hindi. This turned out to be a boon for South Indians who could easily write 'shuddh' Hindi but were at a loss when it came to Urdu idiom.
What would be curious is if people of one Religion decided to use a variant of the language used by a minority of a different sect.
The liberation of Muslim-majority Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 was officially on linguistic-cultural rather than religious grounds.Pakistan was constructed on Religious grounds. It could only split on non-Religious grounds.
My friend the poet has this question: How do we restore the Islamic elements in Bengali without identifying with a program of religious fundamentalism? Bengali is my mother tongue too. So there we were: he born a Muslim, I born a Hindu, he Bangladeshi, I Indian, neither of us very religious, totally against fundamentalism, and neither of us at all interested in the crazy project of a separatist Bengal, a pipedream that is occasionally brought out for sentimental or political rhetoric. I said to him that I thought that since language cannot be interfered with self-consciously, the only way to do it is absolutely self-consciously; that is to say, write manifestos, and so on. I have a great deal of sympathy with self-conscious tampering, because one knows that language works behind and beyond and beside self-consciousness.Wonderful! Language can't be interfered with self-consciously so the only way to do it is self-consciously because it can't be done but still some worthless manifesto can be written.
Incidentally, there are Islamic elements in English- the word alcohol for example. How can English Muslims restore this Islamic element in English without giving way to religious fundamentalism? Obviously they should get drunk and write a manifesto.
AA: What about Beckett's writing in French?French drama is more philosophical at least in the sense that France, but not England, conceives of philosophy.
GCS: I see it as a sort of self-distancing. When you began you were talking about identity. I have trouble with questions of identity or voice.Which is why you are shit at your job.
I'm much more interested in questions of space, because identity and voice are such powerful concept-metaphors, that after a while you begin to believe that you are what you're fighting for.Mercenaries fight for what they are not. Psycopaths will commit mayhem for no reason whatsoever. Effective fighting requires the formulation of a more than mercenary, a more than sociopathic, voice and identity.
In the long run, especially if your fight is succeeding and there is a leading power-group, it can become oppressive, especially for women, whose identity is always up for grabs. Whereas, if you are clearing space, from where to create a perspective, it is a self-separating project, which has the same politics, is against territorial occupation, but need not bring in questions of identity, voice, what am I, all of which can become very individualistic also.Spivak has been around for a long time. What has she achieved? Nothing at all. No space has been cleared. There is mere cluttering.
It seems to me that Beckett's project is that kind of self-separating project, that kind of clearing of a space. It is not possible to remain within the mire of a language. One must clear one's throat, if you're taking the voice metaphor, clear a space, step away, spit out the mother tongue, write in French.Beckett did not spit out the mother tongue. He translated his own French back into English thus gaining philosophical rigor.
I don't have that relationship to English, no.Nor to Bengali. You write like shit.
First of all, I shouldn't compare myself to Beckett. I am bilingual.So was Beckett. English speakers who live in France tend to be.
Millions of Indians write in English. How many Irish write in French?Oscar Wilde wrote Salome in French. There are 1.4 billion Indians. There are only 5 million Irish people. Some may have settled in France or Belgium. They probably do write in French.
I think the South African writer J. M. Coetzee's relationship to English—"of no recognizable ethnos whose language of exchange is English"—is beautifully articulated with Beckett's distancing from English?- The Irish have a peculiar relationship with English, too, after all.Coetzee spoke English at home. He was educated in the English medium. He lived and worked in Britain and did a Masters in the US. Later he became an Australian citizen. His 'peculiar relationship with English' is the same as that of most Irish people. It is their language and they have excelled in it. That's the whole story.
AA: Would you speak about The Satanic Verses. What do you feel about the irony that while The Satanic Verses criticizes First World representation of the Third, it, nevertheless, has become complicit in propagating such representational practices?Niradh Chaudhri writes an Autobiography which ends with a plea to White people to come back and recolonize India. It is a big success. Chaudhri emigrates to England where he receives great acclaim. Then V.S Naipaul dumps on darker people wherever they may be found. He get as Nobel. Rushdie was just following a well established publishing trend. That's not irony, it is just how the market works.
GCS: First off, let me say that I have just published a piece on reading The Satanic Verses in Third Text, and I touch on exactly the kind of questions you are asking. The fact that it has become complicit is not Rushdie's fault.Not entirely his fault. His editor has much to answer for. The question is, why was Rushdie published in the first place? The answer is that his novels were cast in a mold familiar to Submissions Editors. Grimus was trippy but turgid and didn't sell. Midnight's Children was on the money because it was like a sequel to the bestseller 'Freedom at Midnight' and the Attarian theme was familiar from Borges. Saleem Sinai's nose is like Gunter Grass's tin drum. Anyway, Latin American style Magical Realism was all the rage. Even Updike had gotten in on the act with 'the Coup' which came out in 1978.
'Shame' won a prize from the Iranians. This should have set off alarm bells for Rushdie. If crazy nutjobs think you are their guy, don't go insulting their leader. They will spend a lot of money trying to kill you.
Spivak, with her usual obtuseness could not see that Rushdie- a Britisher of a posh type- was writing in a fashionable genre and doing so somewhat better than his contemporaries.
She says
Why is Spivak pretending 'Satanic Verses' is not silly in an Oxbridge manner, but is instead 'post colonial'? The answer is that if it isn't post-colonial then the academic availability cascade she and Bhaba presides over has no objective correlative whatsoever.
How does she do so?
Satanic Verses takes aim at Thatcher and the Ayatollah. The Ayatollah puts a bounty on his head and Thatcher- a stern but protective Nanny- safeguards his life and property.
There is no global Lebenswelt because the globe is a shifting fitness landscape not what is co-evolved upon it. At the margin, global events mark the retreat of a particular Lebenswelt in the face of one better adapted to whatever change has occurred. Husserl may have taken the wrong turning at just the moment Turing was discovering an actual eidetic object- by means of Brouwer's choice sequences- but Husserl wasn't an utter cretin.
Incidentally, if reading something has become impossible, Universities should save money by firing those who pretend to do so.
I suppose it is fair to say-
Rushdie was trying to create a postcolonial novel, from the points of view both of migration—being in Britain as Black British—and of decolonization—being the citizen of the new nation, India, Islamic India.but only because Rushdie was a prancing ninny.
Less so, it appears than Spivak who thinks there is a new nation called 'Islamic India'. Rushdie's dad migrated from India to Pakistan via the UK so as to keep his Indian property. Rushdie can have dual Pakistani and British or American citizenship. He can't be a citizen of India unless he gives up his current passport.
Islamic India is strange, too, because given what the minority does, its head ritually is turned toward Mecca outside the subcontinent.So what? Not even the Mahasabha finds this strange.
He's trying to deal with this.To his credit, Rushdie does not think Islam is either a stranger or greatly in danger in India.
I've had a lot of conversations with people, Iranian friends, Palestinian friends, Black British, British Muslim friends, etc., the Southhall Black Sisters who are in Britain speaking up against the so called fundamentalist reaction.And have had zero impact.
If you read it from the point of view of "a secular Muslim," he is trying to establish a postcolonial readership— already in existence—who will in fact share a lot of the echoes that are in that book which you and I might miss. I, for example, get the echoes from Hindi films.Actually, Rushdie was thinking of the Telugu films of NTR where the actor/politician played Hindu Gods. There was a TV serial with a Muslim writer about the Ramayana at that time which was the other inspiration.
I believe the Hindi film industry is the world's largest film industry, and it's been the popular international medium now for twenty, thirty years, or perhaps more? I catch that resonance. On the other hand, as an English teacher, I also catch all the quotes from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, say.
It seems to me, then, that the implied reader of The Satanic Verses is this international, global, postcolonial migrant person.Why speak of the 'implied reader'? We know who bought the book. It was middle brow non-migrants in advanced countries.
This is not the Christian Enlightenment person for whom British literature is written; nor the jaded European of The Waste Land.Nonsense! White people with a College education read The Waste Land and the Satanic Verses. Rushdie features in Seinfeld and Curb your Enthusiasm. That's why he moved to New York.
The Ayatollah was another kind of internationalist. He does not reveal the nature of Islam as a fundamen- talist, which is a real contradiction within all fundamentalisms.God alone knows what Spivak is getting at. Imam Khomeini was highly regarded as a Jurist. However, it was his courage in opposing the Shah which gave him salience when Carter & Brezenski decided to apply a 'Green Islamic' corset to the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union.
And that, for reasons of prejudice, was taken to be the real nature of Islam in the United States. In other words, the Ayatollah succeeded in his self-representation. But that is self-representation, not acting out the nature of Islam, whatever that might mean.The Iranian Supreme Guide is an anti-Imperialist who has a high regard for Iqbal. Like Imam Khomeini, who wrote mystical poetry under the takkhalus 'the Indian, his 'self-representation' is that of a learned jurist and spiritual guide. In the main, this is a representation of the nature of Islam however exigent circumstances could cause departures from the letter of the law. There can be no question that Iran was attacked by Saddam's Iraq with the support of the Americans, Saudis etc. We can all acknowledge that this was folly. Saddam was as crazy as a bed bug. Precisely because the Iranian Clergy is genuinely religious, the Shiah majority in Iran considers the regime to have far greater legitimacy than Baathists enjoyed in Iraq or Syria.
What is the nature of a religion— always the broaching of the universal in the historical?The nature of a religion is that it binds people together and can exercise a countervailing power over despotic rule. Many religions feature no philosophical universals. They propagate as orthopraxy without orthodoxy.
We see the difference between the U.S. reaction and the British reaction.In 1993, there was no 'U.S reaction'. Bush decided not to topple Saddam- because then Iraq's Shiah majority would have gained power and this would have destabilized the region.
Rather than keeping it coded as terrorism versus freedom of expression, in Britain the incident recorded itself as fundamentalism against racism, so that you can't take either side.Nonsense! Muslims attacked Parliament and were beaten back. Rushdie was given police protection and the Brits got their European partners to lean on Iran.
The only side to take is the British Black women's, who are against both.But achieved nothing in the subsequent three decades.
It is more complicated for them. You have to create a space for doubters and transgressors; you have to create a space for the way politics uses things. It is productively confused in Britain. It shows up the living dilemmas of politics.Creating space turned out to be a huge waste of time. Arresting nutters and drone strikes on terrorist training camps were the way to go. Rushdie certainly understood that. He became an American citizen and was gung ho for regime change in Iraq. Indeed, there was a moment when Khomeini's grandson, in a fit of madness, appealed for American help to topple the regime in Tehran. Now, it is Trump- Rushdie's latest target- who is tightening the noose on Iran. But Rushdie is unlikely to get his revenge. Confabulation can only get you so far.
There may be some reason to believe that writers matter. But, if writers matter, then Professors of Literature might matter too. Since they are as stupid as shit the safer course is to accept that writers don't matter. There is a publishing industry but it discovered long ago that only very stupid people read.
It is strange to think that Spivak was once considered a person with some possible political importance. Spivak herself, in this interview given in the early Nineties, says she wants a role as a 'public intellectual' in Bengal. She has certainly been given platforms in plenty. But what has been the upshot? The Left has been pulverized. Mamta presides over a corrupt and criminalized administration which keeps falling further and further behind Bangladesh.
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