Mithu Sanyal is Indo-Polish and is a rising academic in stupid Po-Co shite which, apparently, the Germans are just discovering.
She has published a novel about
Nivedita (a.k.a. Identitti), a well-known blogger and doctoral student is in awe of her supervisor—superstar postcolonial and race studies South-Asian professor Saraswati. But her life and sense of self are turned upside down when it emerges that Saraswati is actually white.
This is foolish. Some Indians are white- e.g. Sonia Gandhi- and some Hindu religious leaders are of non Indic ancestry- e.g. Swami Ghanananda from Ghana or Gurudeva Sivaya Subramuniyaswami of Hawaii. Since the Sixties there have been plenty of White kids who have grown up in Ashrams in India and who are more native than the natives. Furthermore, Indians allow that merely having been Indian in a past life is good enough for you to be Indian whatever your parentage in this life might be. Unlike America, there was never any 'one drop rule'. On the other hand, Indians in Hitler's Germany were admitted to the Waffen SS. Subhas Chandra Bose, who had come to Germany to get Hitler's help, had an Austrian daughter. The very word 'Aryan' or the word 'Swastika' are Indic. Why would there be any great scandal if some batty professor claimed to be Indian but was discovered to be a boring Lutheran?
The other point is that to be a 'superstar postcolonial' savant, you'd have to get the imprimatur of people like Gayatri Spivak and Homo Baba and Dipesh Chuckyerbraoff. They'd quickly detect if she was some sort of Dalit or dehati Indian or Trailer Trash White.
I suppose Mithu is wondering whether she'd have any credibility if her surname wasn't typically Bengali Brahmin bhadralok. Bongs look out for each other. They'd give short shrift to a 'Saraswati' who can't even spell her own name correctly.
Nivedita’s praise of her professor during a radio interview just hours before the news breaks—and before she learns the truth—calls into question her own reputation as a young activist.
Hilarious! What fucking activism could that silly sausage have been doing in Dusseldorf of all places? Apparently, Sanyal's first book was on the Vulva, while her second was titled 'Rape'. Her third ought to have been called 'Shit on my Tits- Feminism requires nothing less!'
Do Germans really need activists telling us vulvas are nice and rape is nasty? Half the population of the world finds vulvas very attractive. But they way to get sustainable access to them is by being very sweet to vulva possessors. Try rape and you will soon be taking it up your arse in a prison cell- if your intended victim hasn't bashed your skull in.
A good wine needs no bush. Nor do vulvas- at least in Brazil. But that is a matter of taste. I like to think of German maidens as being very well provided for down there.
Following the uproar, Nivedita is forced to reflect on the key moments in her life, when she doubted her identity and her place in the world.
But her place in the world is Germany where, under Hitler, Bengali Brahmins named Sanyal were welcome to join the Waffen SS. It was the Poles whom the Nazis kept slaughtering- folks like Mithu's maternal ancestors.
As debates on the scandal rage on social media, blogs, and among her closest friends,
all of whom are as stupid as shit because Sanyal's subject attracts only cretins.
Nivedita’s assumptions are called into question as she reconsiders the lessons she learned from her adored professor.
Lie. Pretend to be really really angry about some imaginary grievance. Consider the following excerpt where the heroine claims, on German radio, that
‘ there is no language for people like us. After all, we were illegal, up until very recently.’
This is nonsense. I was born in Germany. Another South Indian kid born a couple of years later had a European mum. German had a language for both of us. He went on to become mayor of Bonn.
‘Illegal?’ ‘Illegal,’ Nivedita confirmed. To be completely honest, her internet persona had been born when she had written a term paper on miscegenation laws – or rather, the laws forbidding miscegenation.
Which didn't exist in India or Poland or England.
As fascinating as breasts were, they would never have inspired the overflowing stream of outrage that she distilled into words. Still, it had all started with sex. Legal sex, illegal sex and sex that was so inconceivable that it blew the minds of the lawmakers. ‘The Nazis weren’t the only ones who tried to prevent miscegenation.
between Aryans and Jews- but Indians were classed as Aryans. Vikram Seth's dentist uncle couldn't marry his Jewish sweetheart in Germany while Hitler was around. But some other Indian students in Germany did marry German women.
In the US, white and black people have only been allowed to marry since…’ – again, she glanced at her arm – ‘1967
In some States- true- but not in others.
and in South Africa, since 1985. When my mother was pregnant with me her doctor warned her – here in Germany! - that ‘half-castes’ were more susceptible to depression …
unless they take Vitamin D tablets or don't have much melanin. There is also a higher chance of inheriting certain medical conditions from the father's line.
than full-castes presumably. But when I told all this to my’ – she hesitated imperceptibly – ‘boyfriend, Simon just said: “You and your Identitti.”
Because most peeps know about Vitamin D. Darkies like me can't synthesize enough of it during the European winter- unless we are eating a lot of meat and fish.
And somehow the name stuck.’ As if on cue, Mona unstuck her long doggy legs but lay down again immediately on a sign from Verena. ‘Apart from your Twitter handle ‘Identitti’, you also write as ‘Mixed-Race Wonder Woman’. And one of your superpowers is that you’re able to talk to the gods, or at least one of them. to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. Most of your posts are conversations with her. Why?’
Coz the silly bint knows nothing about Hinduism.
Verena might as well have asked Nivedita to dive down into the depths of her soul and resurface with the egg of ultimate truth.
Hiranyagarbha?
But even if she had been capable of that, it wouldn’t have helped her because ultimately, there was no egg, only shell and sticky liquid from which a creature with feathers might eventually emerge. Feathers were one of Kali’s attributes,
only peacock feathers.
but Kali had so many attributes that Nivedita had long given up keeping track of them. Verena was looking at her expectantly. How long already? In a hurry, Nivedita answered: ‘Because I have to talk to someone about these things. And most people haven’t a clue. Neither have I. So I need someone to explain it all to me.’ But Verena hadn’t really been interested in Kali. She just needed her as a link to the next question: ‘From one goddess to another, from Kali to Sarasvati. Not the Indian goddess of wisdom, but the professor of Intercultural Studies and Postcolonial Theory at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.’ Nivedita felt her heart in her ribcage. ‘Sarasvati, right.’ Charismati Sarasvati, as Priti called their mutual professor. But Priti’s irony was feigned because even she could not resist Sarasvati’s charm and her sheer intelligence. ‘Why just Sarasvati, by the way? Doesn’t she have a surname?’ Nivedita shrugged, which made the headset slip slowly but unstoppably off her head and become a torc around her neck. ‘Beyoncé doesn’t need a surname either,’ she said, trying to simultaneously speak into the sticking out microphone and push the headset back up as noiselessly as possible. ‘Or… the Queen.’ ‘But both of them have surnames.’ ‘Sure. Knowles and …Habsburg?’ ‘Windsor,’ Verena corrected her. ‘If you say so. Of course Sarasvati has a surname but she doesn’t need one because she is Sarasvati – and everybody knows who she is.’
But Indians are terribly curious about caste. They'd have soon ferreted out Sarasvati's secret. Incidentally, this translator has spelled the name correctly.
‘That’s right!’ Nivedita watched Verena pick up a sheet of paper without the slightest rustling and read out: ‘In 1999,
The same year as Spivak's 'Critique of post-colonial reason'.
Sarasvati published her first book, Decolonize Your Soul, which was an immediate bestseller, and earned her a professorship in Düsseldorf.
Why? Germany didn't have colonies for very long. Dusseldorf may have lots of Turks but Turkey had been an ally, not a colony, during the First War.
But she isn’t just read in academic circles. Sarasvati is pop – so much so that her second book is called Pop Post-Colonialism. And as befits a pop star, it ignited fierce debates, especially on social media.’
How fucking backward are the Germans? Why the fuck would they have 'fierce debates' about this sort of shite? The plain fact is Hitler got up to worse shit than the slave traders and the colonizers. But punishment was swift. Germany lost a lot of territory and millions of people were ethnically cleansed, if not raped and slaughtered. Savitri Devi, the Franco-Greek nutcase, wrote about the horrible conditions she found in post-War Germany.
Nivedita shrugged again and remembered just in time to hold onto her headphones. ‘No one takes you seriously as an intellectual until you’ve had a shitstorm.’
Coz that's how Newton got his start- right? Darwin's theory of evolution only got publicity after he was cancelled for fucking monkeys in a Colonialist manner while voyaging on HMS Beagle.
And no one who’s met Sarasvati could not take her seriously.
No one who's met Gayatri can do so.
Simon, Nivedita’s (for want of a better word) boyfriend, always said: Priti has an innate compass for power, which is why her inner needle is unwaveringly attracted to Sarasvati. Just as Nivedita was unwaveringly attracted to Sarasvati’s promise to decolonise her soul.
Hinduism has plenty to say about the soul. Nivedita (which was the name chosen for Margaret Noble after she embraced Hinduism) could have 'decolonized' her soul easily enough by joining the local branch of ISKCON.
And that was exactly what Nivedita had been trying to do for the last three years since she’d begun studying with Sarasvati as her tutor. ‘But Sarasvati doesn’t just stir up the hornet’s nest that is the internet. There are also regular complaints of racism about her at the university. And there’s even a lawsuit regarding the way she treats white students.’
If they are German, surely they would expect to be treated like shit by their Professors?
‘The people who accuse her of racism…’ Nivedita toyed with the idea of saying: should suck their own nipples. In the end, she decided on: ‘…just don’t understand Sarasvati. And particularly they don’t understand what being white means for Sarasvati.’ In less than 24 hours Nivedita would wish she had never said those words. ‘This is what her hotly debated essay is all about. It is called “White Guilt. Why No one Wants to Be White”,’ Verena read from another rustle-free sheet of paper. ‘Last month, it was published in the TLS as well as the LRB and the German and French editions of Lettre International. The TLS advertised it with the tagline: “An essential text at a time when the term old white man’ has become an insult.” Is it really true that no one wants to be white anymore?’ ‘Well, I don’t,’ Nivedita lied. Half her life she’d wished for nothing else, while she’d spent the other half wishing she was darker than she actually was. Anything but this hybrid half-and-half that slipped through every framework and category,
except the Indian one. Just stick a bottu on your forehead and you're good to go.
and was so impossible to grasp that even the colour itself was described by comparing it to something liquid: cognac. ‘Why not?’ 9 Where to begin? ‘That’s because of its etymology. Up until the 17th century, the term white didn’t even exist except as a way to describe clouds or…’ –
white people- as happened in India.
Nivedita couldn’t think of anything other than – ‘…sheep. All this changed with the transatlantic slave trade. The Europeans needed to justify why they went around kidnapping and selling people off.
No they didn't. Africans and Arabs supplied the slaves. The trade was ancient and perfectly respectable. The thing is approved in Leviticus.
So they hit on the idea of claiming the superiority of the white race.
But there were plenty of white slaves. Clearly whites weren't superior unless they had better gun boats.
But to do this, they first had to invent the white race.’ Nivedita had not just read ‘White Guilt’. She had read it like the bible, like holy writ, just as she had read all of Sarasvati’s texts. ‘Before that, Europeans didn’t identify as white, they identified with the part of Europe they came from, or with their language. Where was I?’ ‘White supremacy.’ ‘Right.’ They talked a lot about white supremacy in Sarasvati’s classes. White supremacy was the original sin in postcolonial studies, the epicentre of the earthquake whose tremors were still reverberating. ‘That’s why the word white is inextricably linked with the idea of white supremacy. White has never had another meaning.
Except in Germany where brown Indians were recruited into the Waffen SS while White Jews and Poles and so forth were slaughtered.
It appears this book is about the stupidity of the Germans- by a person whose dad was from the even stupider Bengal.
So there is no other way for white people to relate to their whiteness but through the lens of white supremacy. They haven’t got any white culture or white music, because everything is white, like a snowstorm. Black people still suffer discrimination, no doubt about that, but we also associate black with revolution, subversion and Black Power. Whiteness doesn’t have any of these progressive notions. Sarasvati concludes that being white is therefore something that restricts white people as well.’
This is fine if you are African American- or claiming to be such, like Rachel Dolezal. But why the fuck would Germans want to get in on the act? How fucking retarded are they?
For a moment, Nivedita felt so close to her professor that she could almost sense the weight of Sarasvati’s ubiquitous dupatta across her shoulders, and the tendons in her collarbone pulling upwards thanks to Sarasvati’s signature ballerina pose and raised chin. Sarasvati had said to her once. ‘Your neck aches at the back – mine at the front.’ So Nivedita lifted her head and appraised Verena with a searching look under lowered eyelids. ‘What do you think? Do you feel restricted by being white?’ Verena threw back a naked, unprotected look and Nivedita thought: So that’s how Sarasvati does it.
And that's how Mithu does it. She is as stupid as shit but if Gayatri can be a 'Europeanist' she can go one up on her and be a European from the Cannibal isles who talks to Kali in between watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Still, it's good to know that badhralok Bengalis are shit even if they write in Italian- like Jhumpa Lahiri- or German, like Mithu though, in her case, being German certainly has helped. Of such is Brown, Bengali, Privilege. But it only restricts those who study shite subjects. Still, it must be said, Mithu's book may convert some Germans to the cause of Viktor Orban. Soros's shite University was probably peddling crap like this. Orban shut it down. That was popular. Now the fellow has come out against 'race mixing'. People like Mithu may soon pave the way for a return to notions of White Supremacy in Germany. This time round, they will keep Brown 'Aryans' out of the SS. I'm cool with that. The color of your skin doesn't matter unless God doesn't exist- in which case nothing matters except not being more fucking horrible than nature intended.
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