Spivak v Romila Thapar

Romila Thapar may be as stupid as shit but al least her English was better than Gayatri Spivak's. Now, however, they are equally unable to utter even a single grammatically correct sentence.

Scroll.in has the following 

BOOK EXCERPT
Romila Thapar tells Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak why India as we know it is a ‘modern’ idea

Nation States are a modern idea. However there has always been a notion of 'Indica' which sometimes was unified under an Emperor or where a number of monarchs competed for that title.  

An excerpt from ‘The Idea of India: A Dialogue,’ by Romila Thapar and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Romila Thapar & Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Romila Thapar: What do we mean by the idea of India? Being a historian, I would turn it around a little bit and ask: When did the idea of India come into existence?

The Greeks were talking about Indica 2300 years ago. Megasthenes wrote a book describing India under the Mauryas.  

One can’t date it, of course, because one can seldom date ideas with precision.

You can date Megasthenes well enough.  

Ideas have a way of wandering about – you can’t pinpoint their origins.

Not in the case of 'India' which derives from a Greek word for a country described quite thoroughly by a Greek writer thousands of years ago.  

The idea of India, I think, is a modern idea, a concept which emerged in colonial times.

But colonial times weren't modern at all.  

We often hear people saying: Oh yes, the idea of India existed in the Vedic period,

Brahmins had a notion of contiguous territory where it was possible to settle without loss of caste. This territory grew and grew to cover the whole sub-continent.  

it existed in the Gupta period, it existed in the Mughal period, and so on. I would beg to differ with that.

Thapar is Khattri. She hates Brahmins. 

We don’t really know how people saw themselves in the context of states, nations, and countries. We don’t even know what names each took.

Yes we do- if we happen to be Brahmins.  Khattris may not, but they can always ask their family priest. 

We know, for example, that the Sumerians – now I’m going really back, far back – of the third millennium BCE referred to countries to their east, one in particular with whom they had trade relations, and the items they traded were items that came from the Indus plain. So we assume it’s a reference to the Indus civilisation, which they seem to have called Meluhha, which we think might be a Sumerian version of the Prakrit Melukhkha / Milakkha / Milakkhu.

Some think this was the Sanskrit 'Mlechha' or barbarian people.  

But in the Vedic period, we begin to get textual evidence, references to something called Aryavarta. Now Aryavarta is a very interesting term because the place it refers to keeps shifting.

Because Brahmins moved East and South. 

In the Vedic texts, it extends from the Doab to just about the middle of the Ganges valley. In the Buddhist texts, the location moves a little eastwards. In the Jaina texts, it moves still further east. By the time you get to Manu and his Manava-Dharmashastra, he’s talking about Aryavarta being the land between the Himalayas and the Vindhyas, and north of the land between the two seas. That is not quite the India that we speak of today.

Because Brahmin settlement was the key factor. If you have Brahmins, you can be Hindu- i.e. within India.  

Similarly with Jambudvipa, Ashoka refers to it in his inscriptions. We do not know where it was nor what its boundaries were. Bharatvarsha is also vague and changeable. Al-Hind, which comes into use from about the 12th century CE onwards, refers to all the land across the Indus when looked at from West Asia. Then came the British, and they started referring to this part of the country as India, from the Greek Indós, referring to the Indus. (The Vedic texts also mention the Sapta-Sindhu, referred to by the ancient Iranians as the Hapta-Hendu, the s and the h being interchangeable.)

India was where 'Brahmanisim' prevailed.  

Now, what did the British mean? They talk about India when they’ve conquered certain parts of Eastern India, and have gone on to conquer other parts of the peninsula and then moved north. With each conquest, the boundaries changed until, finally at the end of the 19th century, the entire subcontinent was painted red – that is the India of the British Empire.

No. The Brits had already gained a picture of the subcontinent from the Portuguese. However, they initially set their sights on what is now Indonesia because the Mughal Empire was still quite strong in the seventeenth century. 

Is this when the concept of India, the idea of India, comes into being?

No. European scholars were aware of earlier Greek and Roman geographical treatises. There had also been reports by great travellers like Marco Polo.  

Possibly, but it’s a territorial concept. The idea of India is, of course, much more than territory – it’s culture, language, religion . . . all that is assumed. When does that begin?

With Brahmins. Spivak is a Brahmin. She could point this out. But she is too stupid. She thinks Bharat is named after Ram's younger brother! 

My guess is – although I’m not a historian of modern India, and I may be completely wrong here – that one of the most interesting decades of our times was the 1920s.

India had been admitted to the League of Nations in 1919.  But the Indian National Congress had been set up in the 1880s while agitation for greater powers of self-rule had begun in London itself in the 1860s. 

What happened in the 1920s? You had, first of all, the Indian National Congress, with Gandhi trying to convert the movement into a mass movement, which he successfully did.

By embracing the cause of the Khilafat. But he surrendered unilaterally in 1922, leaving the Muslims in the lurch.  

I’m not going to quibble with the subaltern-studies perspective and others on how far it truly was as a mass movement but, technically, yes, it certainly included a very large number of people, and the idea of India began to take hold because the end, the purpose of it, was the independence of the nation that was being created.

This had been achieved by the beginning of the twentieth century thanks to people like Swami Vivekananda.  

But the 1920s also saw the development of two other notions linked to the idea of India. There was the Muslim League that asked for Pakistan, which was a negation of the idea of India since it is a truncated version of British India.

The Pakistan demand was only articulated in the 1930s.  

Countering this was the establishment of the Hindu Mahasabha, in the 1920s again,

Nope. What would become the Mahasabha began in 1915 though there had been earlier regional Hindu Sabhas formed in reaction to the creation of the Muslim League.  

which gave way to the RSS wherein the idea of India is very clearly enunciated as the Hindu Rashtra.

These ideas had been current in Bengal and Maharashtra since the 1880s.  

Now you’ve already got three ideas – not one but three. The Communist Party of India, founded in the 1920s, retained the untruncated India but defined it as a socialist state.

There was no talk of Partition at that time. Stalin's minions attacked Partition as a capitalist fraud after Nehru had pulled the trigger on it. 

So I think the 1920s is really where the discussion should start in terms of not a single idea but the opening out of possible ways of looking at these ideas – why they happened, and what the consequences were.

No. After Jallianwallah Bagh there was only one demand. The Brits must transfer power and leave. What Indians could not agree on was the pace at which this would happen and what sort of successor state should be created.  

We know about the creation of the two nations, and then, later, Pakistan splitting into two with the emergence of Bangladesh. Associated with these was the notion of Independence, and what was being sought at the time of Independence. What was this idea of India as conceived by the anticolonial national movement, the biggest movement at that time?

The Hindus wanted to rule the roost in the successor state. The question was whether they could appease the Muslims- or trick them with temporary concessions- and get what they wanted.  

How were those people visualising the idea of India, how were they thinking of where Independence begins?

The visualized a country run by Hindus but using the machinery left behind by the Brits.  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Well that’s a big one.

It is an easy one.  

Now I’m going to respond a little to what you said, which was the question I asked you at your house in November. First of all, of course, I am deeply suspicious of ideas.

Spivak is stupid. She herself may suspect that this is the case but that isn't going to stop her uttering gibberish. 

We cannot proceed without ideas – they’re a convenience – but they’re also very dangerous, they’re like a lid you put on a boiling pot

so as to speed up the cooking process by increasing pressure inside the pot.  

under which they begin to – your word is crystallised, right?

Crystallization occurs during the cooling not the heating process 

– take control of an entire seething, boiling mass of all kinds of thoughts.

Cooking homogenizes different elements in the stew pot. 

Having spent a life trying to learn from the literary, I’m a little afraid of ideas.

She has been teaching nonsense. She has learned nothing.  

I also feel, in some ways – and again, I’m really only speaking as an Indian – that “I’m not an Indian”.

Spivak is Bengali. Perhaps, as the Muslim population of West Bengal rises, it will want to join Bangladesh.  

It’s true, you can scream at me, you have screamed at me, remember when you said, “Why are you teaching South Asia at all, you produce are these students who don’t know anything?” And I stopped. There are very few people in the world from whom I would take that kind of suggestion.

Thapar screamed at Spivak (who is a Brahmin) and got her to stop teaching 'South Asia'. Good for her.  

Another thing you told me, when I said, after Edward [Said]’s death, that I would do a biography, was: “Don’t try to research everything historically. If you think something is true and correct because of the way you’ve lived, put it down,”

Don't bother with historical research. Just make stuff up. It worked for Thapar- right? 

and so it’s the second suggestion that I’m taking up now. It seems to me that there was in the sense of India that we got – I was born in 1942, I was a precocious child, so I remember quite a bit of stuff. Of course, mostly famine, riots and so on.

Spivak's gift is for confabulation. 

But what we got later – thinking about it, I felt more and more, with my friend Edward Said, that it was a kind of an orientalist discovery of India,

I suppose Spivak means Nehru's 'Discovery of India' which was intended as a work of propaganda and which did in fact influence American policy.  

a discovery which allowed what Vladimir Ilyich would call the progressive bourgeoisie to think about India in this way,

They were thinking in this way before Lenin was born.  

however much they wanted to bring in the masses.

Cow protection and protests against smallpox vaccination and quarantine measures had given Congress a mass base by the 1890s.  

Which is why it slowly began to fade away.

Nehruvian shite faded away because it raped the economy and left the country unable to feed or defend itself. The masses were irrelevant.  

This is just an Indian person’s opinion, an Indian person who knows nothing about India from book learning. This is my sense of things. And this is why I wanted to ask you the question, and I wrote it down, the question about what you said to me in a conversation at your house last November: “When we were active in the Independence struggle as young people,

Spivak was 5 years old when India became independent. Thapar was a 16 year old student in Pune. Her father was the commandant of the Military hospital there. Neither woman was active in the Independence struggle.  

we did not expect the grave problems that would arise as the post-Independence years progressed,” or something to that effect.

Nobody expected Nehru to sodomize the economy. His first Finance Minister picks were quite sensible. Then he created the Planning Commission to get personal control over the economy.  

I’m interested in hearing from you a more detailed explanation of this, including whatever you want to say about the first Independence and the specific hopes that seem not to have fulfilled themselves.

The specific hopes that people like Spivak's dad (he too was a Doctor) and Thapar's dad had was that they would move into the nice bungalows left behind by the Brits. They would gain rapid promotion and, hopefully, line their pockets.  

I’m thinking now about the Bangladesh War, of which of course I have a good deal of experience. Both my dear friends, Zafrullah Chowdhury

presumably the famous doctor and philanthropist is meant 

and Sandhya Ray, who was very involved – she gave up her education, at 15 she joined Zafrullah – said: “We thought that when Independence came in – I could go back to school . . . We didn’t realise that that would mean nothing.”

Why not train as a nurse?  

And finally, behind it all is Frederick Douglass at Emancipation, saying, “Now the problems begin.”

He said nothing of the sort. He was thrilled by it and said ' We are all liberated by this proclamation. Everybody is liberated. The white man is liberated, the black man is liberated, the brave men now fighting the battles of their country against rebels and traitors are now liberated… I congratulate you upon this amazing change—the amazing approximation toward the sacred truth of human liberty."

You have obviously been troubled by this. I really wanted you to say something more about it – I think it’s crucial to hear from you what it was that moved you to say it on your own.

Thapar had no importance till Sonia came to power and turned to her for advise. But Thapar gave bad advise. UPA came to be seen as anti-Hindu.  

 Let me begin by saying that I agree with you. I’m also very suspicious of ideas. Largely because ideas have a habit of slipping around and changing their meaning, which is disturbing because you think they mean something and you locate them in a place, and then you discover that they mean something quite different, and so on. They’re a tricky business.

Not to a historian part of whose job is to chronicle the history of an idea.  

But yes, the idea. I wonder if I could start with an anecdote from my school days. Just to give you a flavour of what it was that we were doing in our teenage years in the early 1940s, I was at school in Pune. My father was in the army and so frequently transferred, and we went from Peshawar to Rawalpindi to Pune. We arrived in Pune in the 1940s, at at time when Gandhiji was in and out of jail. We were part of the cantonment culture, and the cantonment culture in India was a very special kind of culture, one that I wish some cultural historian would work on because it was quite distinctive.

No. It was similar to the 'Civil Lines' culture. Moreover the Medical Corps had a different type of social life to that of the aristocratic Regiments.  

It was different from the city, it was Indians and Brits working together

as they did in the Railways and the Bureaucracy. 

but not really socializing. This was something that struck me even then, that people who dropped in—and dropping in was a great thing in the evenings. You had nothing better to do, and so you dropped in on friends and sat around. It was always Indians who dropped in, very concerned about what was going on because this was the ’40s.

Indians have complicated caste based dietary rules. The Brits too had their complicated system of protocol whereby the Regimental Doctor's wife might leave a card at the Colonel's wife's house but not expect to be asked to stay to tea.  

We as schoolgoing teenagers would hang around the grown-ups, and very often my father would say to me, ‘You’ve listened to everything we’ve been discussing but please don’t go about repeating it in school. Because obviously what we’re discussing is meant only for us Indians.’ So that consciousness was very, very strong.

The Medical Corps wasn't of great interest to the Intelligence people. An aristocratic officer in a front line regiment might expect his khansama to be spying on him.  

But to return to what happened to me in school. Come 1947, my final year in convent school. A convent school because all of us ‘army brats’ had recourse to only those schools that had any kind of uniform teaching, such as the convent schools that were all geared towards what was then called the Senior Cambridge Exam. About a month before 15 August, Sister Superior sent for me. I went to her, fearful and trembling, thinking, ‘What have I done now?’ And she said, ‘Independence day is coming on the fifteenth of August. You’re one of the prefects, and we thought that it would be nice if you lowered the Union Jack, raised the Indian flag, planted a sapling, and gave a 15-minute speech about what independence means to you.’ And I heard her, absolutely aghast, and said, ‘You mean me?’ and she said, ‘Yes, I mean you.’ So she said, ‘Now don’t disappoint us, think about it, but do it.’

No one can say the Thapars didn't make great sacrifices for the Nation's independence.  Still, it warms the cockles of my heart to think of Romilla getting a chance to serve a nice White Memsahib at the grand old age of 73. 

I came out of her room and for nights on end I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking, ‘What am I going to say? Fifteen minutes—what am I going to say?’

She should have borrowed a copy of Discovery of India and copied out bits of it. Or else she could simply have read the newspapers and picked an op-ed she liked.  

I remember going to my favourite teacher, who happened to be the history and literature teacher, and saying, ‘What shall I talk about?’ and she said, ‘You keep talking about the future with your friends—what do you say? What do you think about the coming of independence? Just stand up and talk about that.’ So what was it that I talked about? I talked about: ‘We’re now going to find an Indian identity.’

Indians already had that. The Indian National Congress had been founded sixty years previously. 

Very important to us in those days. What do we mean by saying we’re Indians? We’re Indians in the context of British colonialism, yes, but now we’re going to be Indians without British colonialism—what does that mean?

It meant what independence had meant to the Irish, the Egyptians, the Afghans etc. India already had Provincial autonomy. What it would now get was a strong central government dominated by Hindus. 

The second thing we all talked about endlessly was: So once colonialism goes, the rules of ‘You can’t go here, you can’t go there,’ and ‘You can’t do this and you can’t do that,’ all of that will go, and what kind of society will we have?

It is bizarre that these kids didn't know that elected Indian politicians had been running the Provinces since 1937. It was they who made the rules.  

We did not discuss this in any very sophisticated way. We talked about it in a simple way of: Obviously, things will change because the colonial power will not be there. So what kind of society will we have? In a sense, that was what stayed with me for years, even though I didn’t realize it. It’s still with me, I think, especially these days. I’m still trying to find out what we mean by an Indian identity, and, my goodness, these days one is thinking very hard about what kind of society we should have.

Sonia's mistake was to think Thapar had 'emic' knowledge of India. She now confesses that if a White person doesn't explain what being Indian means to Indians, then they may decide they are actually animals or plants of some description.  

And it was about this, after independence, that we started to talk about much more, and continued to talk about in the 1950s.

Romilla went off to England to study. Sadly, even the White professors there could not explain to her what being Indian meant.  Very stupidly, they assumed she, being Indian, already knew. 

And what were the issues? First, that we must define our society, and there was a fair amount of socialistic thinking going around in those days, partly inspired by some of Nehru’s speeches, partly inspired by other people who said one couldn’t have a society without rank inequality.

The 1955 Avadi Congress meeting declared for a Socialistic pattern of Society. Sadly by 1957, the Second Five year plan had run out of steam. Socialism stopped being synonymous with rapid industrialization. It now meant redistributing a diminishing cake while Uncle Sam refilled the begging bowl. 

So we started thinking in terms of a society that would be reasonably equal, where people had equal status. Now this inevitably led, in the 60s at least, to an absolute obsession with the economy.

No. The 60's saw a lot of 'plan holidays'. The country could not feed or defend itself. The good news was it could still defeat Pakistan.  

Everybody but everybody was talking about what kind of an economy we were going to have. Economic growth was the subject of the hour, right through the 60s, questions about economic planning, state industrialization, employment, rural development and so on.

More and more industries become 'sick'. Nationalization meant subsidizing inefficient loss making enterprises.  

Any student who had an iota of intelligence wanted to be an economist

in the Fifties, yes. But by the Sixties, smart kids wanted to emigrate. Become a Doctor or do an MBA and get the fuck out.  

because that was the subject that mattered. Historians and philosophers were at the bottom of the pile—ancient historians in particular—nobody was interested in all that.

The Left had killed off both History and Literature by making them as boring as shit.  

And it not just economics but economic growth, statistics, demography, all that went into calculating how to build a society that one could be proud of.

No. By the 70's to say 'member of the Planning Commission' meant 'corrupt cretin' though Punjabis like Minhas were an exception to this rule.  

I remember even earlier, in the 50s, for example, before all this started off in Delhi,

Nehru launched the Planning Commission in 1950 

when I was a student in England, we used to be giving talks all over the place, at meetings of the Workers’ Educational Association, on this and that and the other. And what were we talking about? The great new society that was emerging in India. And why did we come back to India?

Because Britain was as racist as fuck and America only eased visa restrictions in 1965 

Because it was going to give us the great opportunity to build a new society, a new society to which we would be proud to belong.

No. Thapar and Sen returned to India because they would rise rapidly thanks to their phoren degrees. Raghavan Iyer and Ranajit Guha were unusual in that they re-emigrated by the end of the Fifties.  

There was that kind of innocent belief that independence was going to bring about all these changes. It was an innocent belief because I guess we hadn’t really worked out all the problems. The focus on the economy, on economic change, was so strong that there was much less attention paid to aspects of caste and religion. And so when caste and religion surfaced, we were almost taken by surprise. Where did those come from?

Thapar doesn't seem to be aware that caste had been a big political issue even before the Great War. Religion, obviously, had been around much earlier.  

And, of course, the other great claim was, ‘When freedom comes, we will be free to speak as and how we wish. We will be free to speak the way we want to.’ The first shock I had on this issues was when I was in college in Pune and was the cause of censorship. My brother Romesh Thapar was bringing out a fortnightly called Crossroads in Bombay. Very left, very revolutionary and socialist. I would go down to Bombay during my holidays and help with the proofreading. On one occasion, when I was proofreading an article whose headline stated that the chief minister’s action was unacceptable, I added the word ‘criminal’ to his action. And of course, the very next week, the censor hit, and my brother was informed that Crossroads had been banned. I was utterly, utterly miserable, because I thought the ban was because of me. That was my first experience that freedom doesn’t bring freedom of speech, and that you have to be somewhat careful about how you negotiate freedom of speech. The issue went to court, and, as it happened, my brother won the case, and it remains a foundational case. Whenever the freedom of speech comes up, they all refer to Romesh Thapar vs the State of Madras.

Nehru promptly brought in the First Amendment to clamp down on free speech. Romesh later became a sycophant of the Dynasty.  

So one had all these ideas . . . we’d all studied the French Revolution, we’d all studied the books that went with it, we’d studied the Russian Revolution . . . so we had these ideas about how India was going to be an ideal society.

Amazing! Thapar didn't know that both the French and the Russian revolutions ended horribly.  

But it didn’t work out that way, and slowly and gradually one began to recognize what the problems were.

The problem was that Indian academics were stoooopid while most Indian politicians were corrupt or incompetent.  

Spivak. Of course, what I want you to talk about is precisely what the problems were. But I want to put in my two bits. That, in a sense, the way in which my sense of building an Indian society, etc., came about was a little bit later . . . You did say you wanted to know a little about our experience. Also, Delhi and Calcutta—they’re very, very different. My uncle was Jnan Majumdar, so I was in the middle of a kind of intellectual left which was very Calcutta at that point. At any rate, I left the country because Tarak Nath Sen told me I wouldn’t get a first class in my MA.

Tarak Nath was famous for telling his students that the Calcutta MA in Literature was 'not worth the paper it was printed on'. Spivak was a brilliant student at Presidency. I believe she was already teaching some classes in Calcutta before she left for US at the age of 20.  

My father was dead. I was supporting myself, so I had to kind of buzz off. That’s why I left, right?

Tarak Nath was considered a very sound Yeats scholar. I believe this helped Spivak rise in America. Many American mathematicians and statisticians have praised Presidency College. But even in English literature, it was the equal of many American universities. 

At that time, we were really the bottom of the pile, Romila—even below the historians were the literary people. I think I would’ve been even worse off had I been reading Bengali.

Spivak could have started supplementing her income through free-lance journalism. She might easily have become an editor- a position of great prestige- of a leading paper or magazine. Meanwhile, the prestige of English as a subject of academic study was declining in the West. Spivak herself made her mark as a translator of Derrida- a philosopher of rather an obscure kind.  

Before leaving, our sense was like Dev Anand’s in that film, Guide, that ‘English is only one of the languages of the world, so that when we speak it . . .’

In 'the Guide', Dev Anand defeats a Sanskrit speaking Pundit by replying in English- a more prestigious language.  

That was absurd. On the other hand, that’s how it was, ‘When we speak Bengali, we will speak wonderful Bengali, and when we speak English we will speak wonderful English,’ you know? The first adolescent generation, postcolonial, etc.

That may have been how it was before Independence because the Brits insisted all 'gazetted' government servants pass exams in at least one modern and one classical Indian language. After about 1950 and till the end of the Seventies, you could become a Diplomat or join the Railway service without knowing a word of any Indian language. 

So, by the time I went, there was an idea of India which did not resemble at all marching in the streets, and so on.

I suppose Spivak means that Calcutta hadn't turned completely to shit at the time when she left.  

Allen Ginsberg, all that stuff . . . I sang on the harmonium with him, and it was a crazy thing, confronting that India, with ganja and the whatchamacallit and Vajrayana Buddhism and Gary Snyder and Zen . . . All that resembled nothing.

Spivak didn't like the mystic India of the Beat poets.  

On the other hand, when in 1962, Malcolm X came to Cornell to speak—he started speaking (he was a very mild-mannered man), I remember it so clearly—and the idea of India in my head made me think, ‘Gee, this is like Calcutta.’ Malcolm X is speaking, I’m 20 years old, sitting in the audience—and that’s what I thought. Because otherwise, all around me, was this other India made up in that way.

Spivak, like other Bengali intellectuals, understood that the Left was on the rise in the Academy. The spirit of McCarthy had been well and truly exorcised. 

Now the diasporics are becoming really important. Now when you first invited me to teach in India in 87—remember, I was not invited by the literature section, because I was not French and yet I was doing French theory. So Professor Thapar invited this non-historian (points to herself) to teach in the history department—and that is something that should be known, that there’s been solidarity between us for a very long time.

So, Thapar called her to teach and then shouted at her to stop teaching about South Asia because she was ignorant. 

However, back to ’87, and to what I began to feel was more and more the difference—I gave a long talk in Bengali, here in Baguiati, on the difference between onabashi and probashi, the expats and the NRIs.

Prabasi means a Bengali living outside Bengal. It was the name of a famous magazine.  

Onabashi is a made-up word. At that point in time, it had already become important for us not to acknowledge the diasporic image of India, a minority in the United States.

Why? Americans are concerned with making money. They aren't greatly concerned with the image of Pakistanis or dot Indians or gooks of various descriptions.  

Sometimes even a white-identified, good, affirmative-action minority. Sometimes a minority in that little island off the coast of France.

She means England- which, very naughtily, has a Hindu Prime Minister.  

On the other hand, not claiming the kind of 86 per cent majority that was already showing signs of violence.

It killed lots of Muslims in 1947.  

So, at that point, what happened to me was that I turned more and more to thinking about the rural Indian landless illiterate people whose children I taught who don’t even know the word Dalit and yet call themselves SC/STs, and to seeing if there was an idea of India in the largest sector of the electorate.

Sadly, Spivak didn't teach tribal kids anything useful. Still, she has burnished her reputation by making out that rural India reveres her as a sort of cross between Socrates and Mother Theresa.  

I’m not going to go on about it because I think we want to hear more about your idea of the problems and so on. But I just wanted to get this said.

I hate BJP. I love Mamta.  

Because now it is, in fact, on the rise, this business. Because of what’s going wrong abroad, with the new Khilafat which has a history which is not known by anybody.

It is known to anybody who has access to Wikipedia 

It is known, but it’s not known by the young radicals. And what’s happening in France and the rest of Europe—all the right-wing coming up. And let’s not even talk about the United States.

Donald Trump is very evil  

Of course there is a certain kind of unity coming in among the radical diasporics, but it’s an unexamined unity, so that, to an extent, the continents of Africa and Asia are becoming adjunct to these radical diasporics.

Not India. The Sikh diaspora may be pro-Khalistan but not a single Khalistan supporter can get elected to the Punjab Assembly. It may be that a sizable chunk of the Bengali diaspora still supports the Left Front, but, again, they have no influence back home.  

Which is why we who do not want to discourage this feel that we have an obligation to talk about those old nation-state type ideas, of the national enterprise as my friend Bernard Harcourt calls it.

I suppose Spivak means Harcourt's belief that the US is now at war with its own citizens.  

So how do we re-negotiate the idea of India as a safe idea?

Modi is making it a safer and safer idea- for Hindus.  

The present prime minister was just in the United States.

American Presidents have to be nice to Indian Prime Ministers- more particularly if they are going to get re-elected.  

Luckily, I wasn’t.

Darn! Them Yanks have all the luck! 

There we have a certain kind of solidarity emerging which is extremely frightening.

Spivak regularly shits herself from sheer fright.  

Therefore, I just wanted to get that in, in terms of the problems from outside, which is not only not disappearing but also increasing. And now I want to hear a bit more about what you think of as a list of problems.

Thakur helped make Congress anti-Hindu and thus unelectable. She also turned her own subject to shit. What must be making her stomach burn is the consecration of the new temple in Ayodhya.  

Thapar. Yes I think one of the problems which you’ve touched on in the notion of the idea of India, or the idea of any place for that matter, is of course that the idea changes—it’s not the same all the time. The idea of India that I had in 1947 has changed.

India did a lot ethnic cleansing of Muslims back then. It isn't doing so now. There is no need.  

Reality begins to impinge on the idea, and the idea takes a different kind of shape. At the time of those years, the 50s and 60s, the diaspora was seen as something relatively marginal to begin with, it was seen as disgruntled people who are not very happy over here, who are pushing off there because they’re getting better jobs and leading a better life, and all the rest of it.

India tried to restrict emigration to the UK but the Bench forced them to change that policy. That's why the Brits had to impose immigration controls on Commonwealth citizens.  

Initially, of course—and I know the UK better than the USA— it was a different group of people who went. It was the sailors, and some members of the working class who were especially taken to do specific jobs.

There were plenty of business houses which maintained offices in London. Many Princes and other wealthy people owned property in the UK and educated their children there.  

Their presence was absolutely marginal. But when it began to change, when professionals started going and the middle-class migrated, then two things happened, as happens even now. One: they did so well that they became, as it were, the role models for the middle class here, and their attitudes therefore became extremely influential.

No. The diaspora in the UK had enough political influence back home to make it worthwhile for the Indian High Commission, in the mid Seventies, to publish its own periodical while giving generous grants to Gujarati, Bengali and Punjabi newspapers.  I believe N.G Gore, as High Commissioner under the Janata Government took the lead in this respect. 

Interestingly, also, they developed a culture

no. Different linguistic/religious groups maintained their separate cultures 

which was divorced from the culture of the host country, the culture of the diaspora being a very specific culture—it doesn’t really feed into or draw on the culture of the host country but remains separated, initially at least. My guess is that as long as there isn’t a critical mass of Indians in American politics or British politics, or there isn’t a lot of intermarriage, it will remain a distinctive community.

Thapar doesn't seem to have noticed that Rishi is Hindu. Thatcher had many Hindu admirers. Their kids have risen in post-Brexit British politics. As India rises economically, these diasporas will have increasing importance. 

But I may be wrong about this. So, what happens in the diaspora is not something that is to be dismissed, and much of what one might call cultural or religious attitudes of the diaspora tend to have a very direct influence on the middle class here.

The shoe is on the other foot. Trends in India in fashion etc. are imitated by the diaspora but this is a wholly regional phenomena.  

And, of course, we know that the middle class today has changed completely from the ideas and ideals it had in the 1960s.

Because the world has changed.  

I’m always very intrigued by the fact that, on occasions when I switch on the television to see the news, there are advertisements, especially for private universities. Very often they show very lavish laboratories, foreign scholars coming to lecture. Describing the university, they announce loudly, ‘Your destination: Success.’ I always ask myself: Surely, the destination of a university is learning, knowledge, thinking. How does it become success? And what is meant by success? Is it making money and having power? And I think that this is a very distinctive difference that has taken place from those earlier times.

Very true. Harvard used to advertise itself as a place which would prepare you for a lifetime of failure and humiliation. 

But I’m going off a little bit. We were talking about what is it that came in the way, as it were, what was it that caused a lot of change.

Socialism turned out to be shit. Also, Religion has high income elasticity of demand. It isn't true that the priest is a vampire who sucks the blood of the superstitious peasant.  

I mentioned how there was a tremendous obsession with economic growth and economic change—very legitimate but the kind of obsession which tended not to give enough attention to religion and language and to what is generally described as cultural articulation.

Because Religion was seen as a 'Giffen good'. Also Congress was backing the imposition of Hindi on the entire country. The theory was that 'linguistic sub-nationalism' was a conspiracy on the part of the Gramscian 'intermediate class'. India must not have a 'Green Revolution' otherwise 'kulaks' will rise in wealth and power and insist that their leaders speak to them in their own language.  

There was a tendency to assume that religion is not very important in India, that the political message is much more important. That if we can solve the economic problems, we can solve all the others. Language became a problem and it was finally solved in the way in which democracy solves all its problems—that is, the numbers in support of linguistic states were counted and the majority opinion accepted. What linguistic states have done is another issue, is another question, and I think one that impinges very much on the notion of nationalism in the country.

No. The Brits had realized that an efficient administration uses the mother tongue of the majority of the people in an area. They helped develop the various vernacular languages India has today.  

Then, of course, there’s the cultural idiom which always tends to be associated with the coming in of religion, whether it is or not. And by this I mean that when people define Indian culture, and this relates a little bit to what you were saying, the idea is not to ask, ‘What is the culture of the entire Indian society? What is the culture from top to bottom?’ It’s always only the culture at the top—that becomes the identity, that becomes the Indian identity.

Thapar may have believed that Indian identity would become that of a nice Italian lady. Sadly, those at the top have to adopt an Indian identity or else they stop remaining at the top.  

And, in fact, many of the problems that we’re facing today are precisely because that identity is not sufficiently broad. The identity has not been discussed and debated sufficiently in order to arrive at a point where one can say that, ‘Yes, this is perhaps not the ideal identity but it does approximate the ideas that most people have of what they mean when they say “I am an Indian.” 

India is a Hindu majority country just as the UK is a Christian majority country. People in the UK approve of Christianity even if they aren't Christian. It is perfectly possible to be an atheist or non-Hindu while living in India and appreciating the religion of the majority.  

Spivak. It seems to me also that the idea of India is quite often metonymic of one’s language group.

Nothing wrong in that. This is a matter of 'oikeiosis' which is a set of widening circles connecting  us to our families, our communities, and our countries. 

The Indians who speak about India abroad quite often have no clue about the fact that it is an extremely multi-everything place.

But it has a strong central government. One can speak of 'India's policy' on such and such an issue while also saying that a particular State Government has a different policy.  

Forget about class and caste—just in terms of cultural differentiation[. . . .]And I think that’s a very major problem, I mean, even in scholarship sometimes, no name’s named but one thinks Bengal is India and India is the world—and that’s a book on nationalism.

It is a book about Bengali stupidity. 

I don’t even know whether one should think ‘India’—that’s another question.

Modi thinks 'India' and does right by it. These two senile hacks can't think, period.  

But if one does, then one should think about Indians who do not resemble one at all. Now that’s one of the things that’s disappearing today—it’s disappearing abroad, it’s disappearing at home, and I think it’s a tremendous shame.

No it isn't. The fact is other people are similar to us. If we understand our own motivation or 'artha' we understand that of others as well. This is the basis of 'Arthashastra' or Economics.  

When we were growing up for example, it’s a very simple thing but if something got lost, I’d say, ‘Ouf-oh! Hajir Pir ke ektu noon jol dite hobe.’ (You have to give some salt water to Hajir Pir if you find the damn thing.)

Why give salt water? Surely, sweet water is preferable.  

Now it’s all Ganesh. If you find something, it’s all Ganesh. I mean, we didn’t even think that by giving that salt water to Hajir Pir we were being middle-class syncretic secularists. It was just a natural thing to do, but it’s kind of disappeared, those kinds of things have disappeared, you know.

Haji Pir was the site of a battle during the Indo-Pak 1965 war. I have a hazy notion that Hajir Pir was associated with cow protection.  

Sometimes, when I see someone abroad and say ‘Salaam-Alaikum,’ they say, ‘Oh, you’re Muslim?’ I say, ‘No, that’s also an Indian greeting—what’s your problem?’ (Audience laughs)

It is only used by Muslims. An Urdu speaking Hindu would say 'adaab' instead. Come to think of it, someone whose surname is Spivak should be saying 'Shalom'. 

This is the kind of thing that should be practised in our everyday, I think this very, very strongly, so that somehow you begin to think not only of your own identity as the Indian identity.

Also, if female, you should refer to your dick and your testicles so as to show your Indian identity does not exclude the male sex.  

You said that one of the things you were thinking about when independence came was, ‘We talked of economic growth that would end poverty.’ Garibi Hatao.

Mrs. Gandhi's slogan from much later.  

Now here I can say something, because I’m supposed to be an expert on economic growth and social inclusion for the World Economic Forum—haan bacchalog, haat-tali lagao (audience and Spivak burst into laughter).

This is because Gayatri is brown and lacks a dick.  

You know, I have this wonderful, wonderful colleague called Xavier Sala-i-Martin

who is quite right-wing 

who has invented the competitive index. And he says—he’s a delightful man, an economist—he says, ‘Look, I can tell, because I go to meetings of the World Economic Forum, that when the Ministry of Finance of Rwanda and the Ministry of Finance of Canada come and talk to me because I show where there are new areas of economic growth, they are not talking about the same thing. But I can talk to both of them. But social inclusion? That’s in your hands.’

Don't blame me if the Rwandans decide to tray another spot of genocide.  

This separation has now gone, totally gone.

No it hasn't.  

I’m coming from Ghana. Ghana has just launched its first satellite.

A private University has done so.  

There’s the diasporic convention, but I’m not showing my face—I’m only listening to them. And what are they saying? They’re saying, ‘Now, we are no longer looking for freedom, we are looking for economic growth.’

Nkrumah, who was highly educated, was brought into politics by the Ghanaian entrepreneurial class to do economic growth. Sadly, he took a Leftist path and screwed up the country.  

And this is how the Indians talk about China. So this whole thing of economic growth—of not including social inclusion, of exacerbating the difference between the rich and the poor . . .

is what happens when you have economic growth.  

Thomas Piketty is a very nice guy but his wonderful Eurocentric book

is fine, because the guy is European.  

does not take into account how bad the Scandinavian countries became in the 90s.

They didn't 'become bad'. There was a financial crisis because of a property bubble.  

Because the Somalis and the Rwandans and the Turks were coming in, the Scandinavians were changing the rules.

This happened very recently. 

So they were no longer Piketty’s ideal, but he never once writes a sentence about the change. And he’s also talking about inheritance rather than capital, etc. Just paying taxes and so on is not going to do it. But this particular question has become so identified with the idea of India, this question of economic growth. The middle-class is going up, there’s electricity all over the place, there are latrines and so on and so forth. Economic growth, and social inclusion—I think that problem has to be questioned in a completely different way. It perhaps needs the revamping of education from bottom to top, because education is not just learning and knowledge, it is also questions, it is also questioning. I mean, the good education that you were talking about—that is also questioning. That has been completely throttled, that idea of education with which we began. We’ve both been in that business for a very long time and it’s gone from us. I would say that that the economic-growth you mentioned in your questioning, and in your discussion with me, as something you were really looking forward to. That, and that ‘Poverty would disappear.’ I think that’s something we should focus on a little bit in terms of who has an idea of India.

Garbled gibberish. To have good educational standards you have to attract good quality teachers. If an illiterate person can pay a bribe and get a job in a Government school, then educational standards will decline. 

Thapar. Let’s also clarify that one isn’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater—it’s not that one is against the idea of economic growth at all, especially economic growth related to poverty. That is absolutely fundamental. All that’s happened, of course, is that we continue with our failures on that score, except that now the talk is about development. The new mantra is development—everybody makes a speech, and says, ‘We’re for development.’ What is meant by this?

better infrastructure- roads, bridges, electricity, piped water, jobs in factories etc, etc.  

We’re never told in detail what is meant by it,

Yes we are 'bijli, pani, sadak'. 

but we’re for it. What I was trying to emphasize was not that the obsession with economic growth was the fault. But that one had to also give some importance to other factors, and that we failed to do. And one among them was the question of caste.

India gave a lot of attention to caste but neglected to grow the economy by encouraging export-led growth.  

I remember, in the 60s and 70s, there was little discussion on social inclusion. It was very much a case of . . . One was well intentioned and thought, ‘Caste had to be got rid of,’ but there was nothing done, actually, to make it the kind of thing that you can slowly slide out of your system.

Untouchability was criminalized and the system of reservations and other affirmative action programs were steadily expanded.  

On the contrary: it’s around that time that the use caste identities in politics starts to be recognized.

They were recognized before the Great War. Thapar is a cretin.  

Nehru’s original idea of universal franchise

which India could have got in 1931 along with Ceylon 

was that every individual has a vote, and that is what would make the person independent. Because he will vote the way he wishes to vote, and parties will have to woo the voter on that basis.

Nehru may have thought that 'mass contact' programs would get Muslims to stop voting for the League. But, by 1946, it was clear that Creed trumped Caste. The Congress machine, in the Fifties, carefully observed 'caste-arithmetic'. But then, so did the Communists who came to power in Kerala.  

But the reverse has happened—there are now vote banks,

just as there were vote banks in 1937 

and elections are based on vote banks, and the parties are wooing the voters not for the independent vote but the ones that belong to the right vote bank.

Not the BJP which woos voters on the basis of universal benefits regardless of class or creed.  

And I think this is really a negation of democracy. It’s a very worrying situation, but isn’t seen that way. But yes, then, the issue is not faced in terms of: How are you going to convert a hierarchical society into a less hierarchical society? You can’t remove the hierarchy altogether, but can you make it less so?

Modi has made it so by rising up from the bottom to reach the top. These two elderly ladies have contributed nothing to this change.  

And this is where, actually, I think there are two aspects that are fundamental. Again, slightly touched on in the 60s but not very much. One was, as you said, education. We, at that stage, still had an education system that did up to a point teach people how to think. That’s gone completely.

In non-STEM subjects- sure.  

Teaching people how to think has gone. Encouraging students to ask questions is frowned upon. And we have politicians who must not say, ‘You ask questions.’ Whereas for some of us, the basis of education is that you teach students how to ask questions.

Then the started asking how to ask how to ask questions before moving on to the question of how to ask how to ask how to ask questions.  

That hasn’t happened. Partly I think because it was also tied up in the issue of which language was the medium of instruction. I may, again, be completely wrong but I think that, possibly, if we’d had a dual-language system—the local, regional language and English—that there might have been much more questioning.

In practice, this is what has always obtained save in some posh 'Missionary' or 'Public' schools.  

Simply because the kinds of books that one reads, critical books, in English, tend to question much more than the books published in the local languages.

Stupid people ask stupid questions but want to get a pat on the back for displaying their stupidity.  

Now this is not true of every language at all, but there are some which are more advanced, perhaps because they have better translations, perhaps they have people that are more analytical who are writing. But I think that input from a different kind of intellectual tradition is always a very worthwhile input. Otherwise one does get very bogged down in just one intellectual tradition. And if you really go into the question of language, the difference between the intellectual tradition as expressed, for example, in Hindi and as expressed in Malayalam is not the same. There is a difference. I’m not going to comment on which I think is better because that’s not the issue, but there is a difference. And I think that one has to recognize that something coming in from elsewhere does force people to think beyond what they’re taught in their own tradition.

They may think beyond anything you like and still end up being stupid shitheads one step away from starvation. Thinking does not matter. Doing what smarter people is the way forward.  

Apart from language, the content of education is central, and here I’d like to bring in the discussion on secularism.

Which originated in India, not Europe or America, under the auspices of John Company.  

During the time of the national movement we did not endorse the Hindu Rashtra idea and say that the Hindu has primacy as a citizen.

Though that's what happened in Congress ruled States from 1937 onward.  

The second aspect, which is again where I think we didn’t discuss the issue of secularism sufficiently, is the question of not just the coexistence of religions but also of their equal status and the extent to which religious organizations control social institutions.

Minorities get to control their own institutions- which is why Christian schools and Colleges haven't turned to shit.  

And education is a very important factor there. The content of education depends on who is controlling the content and who is financing education, especially in a so-called secular state.

People vote with their feet and go to where the education provides useful skills.  

Now of course we’re running into problems because state education is far from being secular any longer.

Everybody wants to send their kids to a private school.  

But as long as you had a reasonably secular state, it was possible to have the content of education not coloured by the strength and importance of local religious organizations.

In other words, stupid Leftists could be provided with jobs as Lecturers and Professors. But the result was that non-STEM subjects turned to shit.  

That’s a very important factor in the question of secularism. So education is one area where I think we should’ve taken a much stronger stand when these issues came up in the 70s.

Janata fell apart on the issue of 'dual membership'. This meant a Fascist Dynasty could stay in power. Thankfully, assassination tempered autocracy.  

The first big debate on textbooks was in the time of the Morarji Desai government, after the Emergency, when those of us who had written the first lot of NCERT textbooks were being attacked from all sides. I think the period after that was a period when we should have insisted much more firmly on removing the textbooks from government control. But not realizing the damage that can be done, we let it be.

Thapar thinks she and her ilk had some countervailing power. They didn't. They were regarded as retarded.  

So, the content of education is absolutely crucial in this issue.

If your kid is smart you don't want Thapar or Spivak filling her head with nonsense. But, if she is a drooling imbecile, she can always become a Professor of Grievance Studies.  

The second aspect that needs much more discussion than what we give it at the moment, and that is the question of civil law. Do we in fact continue with civil law according to religious conventions? In a sense, a step was taken in that direction with the Hindu Code Bill in 1956, which was of course attacked viciously when it was first brought up and which we forget. But that was just an attempt to try and clean up one religious code relating to civil law. Now we have many—not only religious codes like the Muslim Personal Law and the Hindu Code Bill but also have Khap Panchayats in Haryana which are caste laws, caste laws which result in killings if they are broken. This claims to be outside civil law, almost, not quite officially, but in fact one wonders. The point again is: Isn’t it time that we removed all the individual laws of caste and religion, and reformulate a civil code that is truly secular? That acts as a civil code without caste or religion?

This crazy biddy is endorsing the BJP's demand for a uniform Civil Code!

So I think these two things, the content of education and civil laws, are very important items in the creation of the idea of India, the identity of the Indian and the kind of society one looks forward to.

 Uniform Civil Code plus no minority run Institution can set its own syllabus! This lady is to the right of Modi!

Spivak. I’m going to say this: Who are the we?

Who is asking? and who is asking who is asking who are the we? What about the question of what is the how of the who are the we? These are these questions elderly ladies should be discussing.  

Since I spend most of my time away from us secularists, and of course I’m completely for secular law, I mean, no problem there at all. I remember Amartya Sen once calling me from Rome, saying, ‘I’m sorry I said you were someone who supports fundamentalism because you work with Subaltern Studies.’

Perhaps he was drunk.  

I said, ‘Amartya, at least you’re calling me because you felt bad, because you know damn well I’m not.’

Amartya, you are a lying toe-rag. Still, at least you called me to express contrition.  

I’m not a fundamentalist. But it is true that there is a possibility of finding the world-historical by bringing this public discourse of religion to a crisis, a discourse we can no longer, at all, support.

You can only find the 'world-historical' by asking how the who of when can become the why of we- right? 

If we do, we are not being secular. We have to behave as if religion is like going to the bathroom—completely private, shut the door. However that’s not reflected in the whole world. And so we may pass the law, but it will be like that Shakespeare thing, right? ‘I can call the spirits from the vasty deep’. I have secular laws. Why, so can I. And so can anyone. But when you do call, do they answer? That’s what Hotspur asks in that play, right?

Hotspur is saying to Glendower that he is a lying Welsh wind-bag. He has no magical power. But a State can decree that no School or College which gets even a penny from the Government can compel students to study religious material. That is the position in India.  

So from that point of view, I think one of the most difficult things is to de-transcendentalize—sorry for that word, but you know that I’m a very obscure person—the religious which can work even at the grassroots level.

You can't change a religion. You can kill or chase away its adherents.  

I hate the word grassroots, but you know what I mean—I say they’re bottom-feeders.

I don't think she understands the meaning of that expression.  

Even at that level it can work, because when it’s not mobilized politically, then this happens. Like in Bangladesh: I’m eating kurbaan meat with very, very poor people. They don’t eat meat because they are too poor. Yet I’m eating meat, so they say, ‘Didi. Amra khacchi toh thik ache, apni keno khacchen?’ ‘We’re eating, it’s all right, but why are you eating beef, eh?’ They’re protecting my religion.

They are telling her she is a shameless atheist.  

That is a certain kind of thing which can operate when it’s not mobilized as a difference recognising violence.

Sadly, those nice Bangladeshis didn't kill this brazen kaffir.  

I remember at the two-hundredth anniversary of Presidency, Hindu College. I read stuff where the First Bishop of Calcutta in Middleton (it’s published), says, ‘These natives are so stupid that they think there are many ways of approaching the Almighty, whereas we know the right way. As in, we cannot teach them the scriptures, and therefore, they should go to Murray’s grammar, and I approve of Hindu College.’

This is nonsense. Middleton found that the EIC would not allow him to ordain natives so he set up 'Bishops College' which sadly only attracted a handful of students.  

Now why was this mistaken as access to secular education?

Hare was an atheist. That's plenty secular.  

Why can’t we not think that a certain kind of class mobility actually puts the lid on the religious cultures? There is so much of it.

I suppose Spivak means that the upwardly mobile bhadralok took what they wanted from Western education without accepting Christianity. But they had done the same thing with Persian.  

This is again a story, like your story about lowering the Union Jack.

How? Thapar's story shows her to have been an apolitical kid who didn't read the papers and who had no love for Nehru or Gandhi.  

Now I’ve been living with these people for a very long time, 30 years now. So they have finally come to accept that I behave in this way, maybe because I live in the United States.

Bengali Dalits eat beef. Perhaps, this is what her hosts were getting at.  

Fine. But one day I take a slice of tomato from the side of someone’s plate and I eat it, without thinking. And there is this huge silence for about 75 seconds. These are the people I work with, live with, eat with, everything, but a Brahman has eaten from his jhootha plate!

No. An unclean kaffir has polluted a Muslim's plate. She may also be an untouchable but what is clear is that she is a brazen and uncouth woman. On the other hand, maybe she is mad and thus close to God.  

You see, they believe this damn thing! In order to undo this, we can’t just put secular laws in place—nobody will internalize them.

You could join the RSS and organize 'inter-dining' functions. Sadly, even then, people don't want crazy ladies touching their plate or devouring the tomato garnish placed there.  

So I feel that we really ought to think of who the ‘we’ are.

and the how the why is.  

Development is insertion into the circuit of capital without any kind of training as to how to manage it.

No. Development is about raising productivity which involves training and education. Enterprises have to be well managed or else they go bankrupt.  

Forget the training to use capital for social ends. All these swanirbhar schemes with their bank accounts, etc. Yet nothing is taught about how to manage this. Hence development and the question of language within development.

not to mention the question of development of language such that the we of the who of the why becomes the how of the when.  

You know, I teach English in the United States. And I will say that one can’t have confidence in English texts being more impartial and teaching us. Mind you, at the same time, I will agree with you in that it doesn’t mean that local language texts should be celebrated. But I must say that my confidence in English-language texts has really gone somewhere after these 30 years of hanging out with these other people.

the one's who don't like it when she snatches food from their plates.  

And I will also say this, that the idea of the Global South, a deeply reverse racist idea which totally ignores class, is now up for sale.

The idea of the Global South is to gain countervailing economic power. Modi's India is doing well on this score.  

Because they do this English thing in a very superficial way, with no knowledge at all. They are proposing these alternative epistemologies, and that is also a very deeply troublesome thing.

Nope. The Global South wants better terms of trade. No 'alternative epistemology' is required to calculate this.  

So it does seem to me that the entire question of what to do with languages—again, I will go off the topic, but one of my projects which will never be funded because it’s Central Africa

people don't believe Spivak is actually a Nigerian Princess 

is the unwritten languages, the wealth of unwritten languages, survivor/survival languages, campaigners campaigning in them so that there is ethnic violence right before the elections, etc., which the UN in its wisdom thinks needs 'preservation', ‘They’re going extinct and they should be preserved.’

What's wrong with that? Spivak can't tell us.  

I have a sense of the ecology of languages which would be too off topic here. So: these languages, how they should be used, for what development has come down to, you know, agriculture and health, etc. To an extent this is a question that goes beyond India, as it were, it’s a global question.

because the how of the why of the we is actually the when of the who.  

The Indian development stuff, development as it is all over the world. I’m completely with you, because what we now have is sustainable underdevelopment, and that is called sustainable development. What is being sustained? Let’s not go there because we are talking about the idea of India, and I’m sorry I spoke at such length.

Has she had a stroke? Nope. She has always been this inarticulate.  

But both the question of secularism, and the question of English scholarship, English- language and European-language scholarships—one has to think about the concept of sanctioned ignorance.

Spivak is ignorant. Yet, she has tenure. Also she is black and doesn't have a penis. We must be kind to this crazy lady.  

That’s where we live. And the idea of what to do with languages that are in an unexamined way being called better than English. This is a fraught field. I just wanted to agree with you, but make it a little less easy to solve by saying it would’ve been better if they had read a little more—

Chinese is a better language than English for Chinese officials running things in China. You don't have to read a lot of books to understand this.  

Thapar. Yes it is a very fraught field, and one’s fully aware of that. But the point of course is that you’re in here. I’m not going into the international dimensions, the global dimensions, because that’s huge, and you’re quite right that it’s a problem which seems to be beyond solving. But with us: Are we moving towards a future where precisely these languages, the hundreds of languages that, maybe don’t have a script, or have a script, are spoken—what is going to happen to them? Are the Munda-speaking people having to convert completely to Hindi in order to survive, or can they be bilingual, and reach out to people far beyond just their one language area?

They can be bilingual. Anyway, we all use roman script more and more when texting each other. Add in youtube videos and podcasts and no threat remains save to isolated communities facing depopulation.  

I mean, this is also a problem in demography, because what you’ve got today is a degree of migration in this country that you’ve never had before. Landless labour going all over the place, from Kerala to Punjab, from Punjab to Assam—huge distances.

Kerala and Punjab receive landless labourers. They don't export them.  

What is going to happen to the languages when people grow up in an area where their own family speaks one language but everybody else speaks another, and you can’t go out because you don’t know the third language and the third language is important.

This happened long ago. Thapar probably didn't learn Marathi when she was in Pune.  

What’s going to happen? Are you going to have people being inward-looking all the time? Are cultures going to become like ingrown toenails?

Don't be silly. 

Spivak. No.

Thapar. No?

Spivak. No. It’s a very gendered question of course, the third-language thing also really affects gendering because access to language is highly gendered.

Nonsense!  

(Thapar: Yes, yes.) Now the students here, the people who go to Kerala and so on to break stones, or put coffee in bags, many of them are my students, you know, because

Columbia is shit?  

there’s no job.

She means the tribals her schools are failing miserably 

You should hear them talk about the Tatas and so on,

Were they against the Tata factory in Singur? Mamta put a stop to it but West Bengal now has to pay a lot of money to the Tatas.  

But I’m not going to enter into that thing. 

Thapar. That’s the other side of the story.

The story of the fall of the Left Front in West Bengal.  

Spivak. Let’s not go there, let’s not go there. They’re not happy. Anyway, what happens is not something we can control. It’s a kind of general realization, and takes a little time, because these ideas, they’re old twentieth-century, nineteenth-century linguistic ideas, of languages in boxes, names, orthography, etc.

The Government of India was aware that most people were multi-lingual which is why indentured laborers from different parts of India could work together well enough.  

Since 1986, I’ve been hanging out with these so called Aboriginals and they are in fact bilingual. I mean, they were speaking Magadh, Prakit, not the Kheriya language as many people in the cities thought, and they were also speaking in Bengali to me, constantly, and saying, ‘Didi, learn our language.’

There is minimal Kharia presence in West Bengal. Perhaps, Spivak met some people who had worked in the Maghahi speaking districts of Bihar.  

The Mundas and Oraons in Birbhum, for example. Now they’re also doing a little Oraon stuff on the side, which is wonderful. But what happens is that this dialectal continuity, this multilinguality on the surface, we don’t even know about this. It’s not like there is a general creolization.

Because there is no 'pidgin'. There are competing 'lingua francas' as well as the mother tongue.  

It’s more like the ecology of forests. So this whole huge thing about, ‘Oho, language extinct, let’s preserve,’—that’s the UN, that’s not what’s happening in real life.

Yes it is. Spoken languages are being given scripts and given some degree of recognition to enable mother tongue instruction at least at the primary level. 

What’s happening at the tip top of linguistics now is an acknowledgement that those un-written languages are completely dialectally continuous, very multilingual, etcetera.

Nonsense! There has been no great change in the older notion of a sprachbund.  

Those are not like the big lingua francas, you know, esiZulu, and kiSwahili, and so on. They are the survivor/survival languages—pre-scientific digitizing, written on the memory, so they’re not tied down to that old idea of named languages in boxes.

Both are named languages with many non-mother tongue speakers.  

These linguists are really at work on this. So it will not be like so many languages, about which we ask: What to do with it? For the purpose of globality, we should keep English and French and Russian and Chinese and so on.

India is keeping Hindi. It turns out to be a really useful language. When I went to Paris, I was able to get a good mobile deal from a Bangladeshi shop keeper with whom I conversed in Hindi.  

Thapar. No no, I don’t think for a moment that it’s going to be like the twentieth century—it’s bound to be different.

Automatic translation means language matters less and less.  

But it’s precisely that difference that we have to be aware of. What is the difference—and the difference is not just language. Bilingualism alone will not solve it, nor the cross-lingual use of languages. It’s tied into your professional work, your marriage relations, how far you migrate and all the rest of it. It’s a very very complex question.

Not really. Skilled workers master the jargon of their profession and can relocate anywhere on the globe. A leading Japanese car company was led by a French speaking Lebanese entrepreneur.  

What I’m trying to argue is that instead of looking at just the one strand, whether it be economic growth, whether it be caste, whether it be religion, one has to look at the totalities, and the intermeshing of that totality which we have ceased to do now.

There is no point looking at 'totalities' though we are welcome to construct a Structural Causal Model for a particular purpose.  

In the 60s, though I felt there was an obsession with economic growth,

the country was living 'ship to mouth'- i.e. it depended on US food aid 

there was still some concern, not enough but some concern, with the other aspects.

India fell behind in the Sixties and Seventies. It's share of World GDP declined precipitously.  

People were very worried about the fact that religion was beginning to enter education and law and professional activity.

It had done so long ago.  

Religiosity was on the increase.

No, it declined somewhat.  Then people noticed that 'Secular Socialist' Republics were shitholes whereas Religious Monarchies did well. 

But there were no solutions to that, or people didn’t think about them sharply enough, strongly enough. Now of course you don’t think about them at all—you just let it all ride as it’s riding. And one is looking at the future and saying, ‘But do people realize what this riding is going to lead to?’

Yes. Hinduism will thrive in India. Thapar and her ilk will be forgotten. They lost the 'culture wars'.  

And the kind of interlinkages that one had always hoped would be fundamental to the kind of society one’s going to build, those interlinkages don’t exist any more. People don’t think along those lines.

They think Thapar is a cretin.  

Spivak. In The Fourth Industrial Revolution written by the director of the World Economic Forum, Schwab, there’s this sentence, ‘It depends on us.’

He was wrong. Everything depends on the Chinese. We have to keep up with them. We don't get to set the rules for them. 

And I think that’s what’s changed. I don’t think it’s really up to us to build the society but to acknowledge how interlinkages are happening, the inter-linkages we cannot quite imagine through the training we have had. So learning to learn the things that don’t resemble the kinds of plans, if you don’t mind my quoting Marx—am I allowed?

Spivak is saying that Thapar is more Marxist than her.  

Thapar. I don’t mind.

Spivak. Okay.

Thapar. It’s the audience.

Spivak. I’m talking to you, they’re overhearing. (Audience, Spivak, and Thapar laugh). You know, that sentence I always quote: ‘The content of the nineteenth century revolutions will come from the poetry of the future.’ That’s Karl Marx, poetry of the future.

He said the 'Social revolution of the Nineteenth century# would come from the poetry of the future, not the past. He meant that Napoleon III would not raise up the proletariat. Perhaps new technology would play that role. 

So this idea that we may not be able to recognize the inter-linkages—you have been very negative all through, but that’s the one thing I really do want to hang on to. That it’s possible, that interlinkages will happen, not all good, some really, really scary, but we will not be able to plan them away because we are building a society.

You need a plan in order build properly. But Spivak and Thapar were too stupid to build anything. 

Thapar. But the inter-linkages are there.

Spivak. That’s what I’m saying.

Thapar. It’s a question of will they happen—they’re there. My point is that we are not giving enough attention to the fact that they’re there. That we’re not looking at them—we’re picking up only one thread, and then just going on and on about that one thread. Whether it’s religion or caste or economy, it doesn’t matter.

It is true that these two women gassed on and on about stuff that didn't matter.  

Spivak. We are on the same page,

of the book of Stupidity 

but carry on.

Thapar. The interlinkages are very much there, but somehow we are not making those connections. When I say we, I mean, people who are talking The connections are not being made, that’s all.

That may be true of people who talk to Thapar. This is because their brains have been damaged. 

Spivak: You know, the very uneducated, who are getting into IT, I don’t mean the tip top . . . they actually lexicalize the nouns!

Nothing wrong with that. Instead of saying you had a shit, you can say I had a Spivak.  

On the other hand: talking about curricular change. I’m just coming from Durban where a brother was talking wonderfully about how you have to have terminology to teach algebra in esiZulu.

this is also true in English or Chinese.  

No, no, no, I was saying to him, we really are gonna do something together,

have a Spivak? 

I said, ‘Look, I went to a good school but it was Bengali-medium up to Class 7. So when we learned algebra, etc., we were learning in Bengali. But we used words like equation, formula, etc., while learning in Bengali, but those nouns were there.

Algebra wasn't taught in primary school back then.  

And I was saying, ‘Look, now, when I coach the high-school students, because at high schools they teach nothing . . .

the students Spivak coaches don't get into College.  

Talk about education now and I want to weep. So the students are coming, and they haven’t learnt—I didn’t even know that algebra was beejgonit.

Because she wasn't really taught algebra in primary school.  

I know now. So the students are coming, and they’ve learnt nothing from these schools. They’ve just been taught to copy. I don’t know the Bengali word for formula, and I don’t know the Bengali word for equation. On the other hand, if my authority is undermined, then the kids will lose confidence. So I’m saying to my supervisor, ‘Ei, pata ulto, pata ulto, turn the pages, see where it’s used for the first time, prothom bar byabohaar hoyeche, bojha jabe Bangla ta ki. What is the Bengali of formula, and what is the Bengali of equation.’

Why was this nitwit trying to teach kids math? Why not stick to teaching them English? Oh. I see. Her English is utterly shit. 

This way of lexicalizing the superior into the general linguistic medium which is totally creolized—it’s extremely difficult for people like you and me to imagine this, because we don’t do it.

This silly woman doesn't get that the Brits spent a little money long ago to get math text-books published in vernacular languages long before she was born. India has no 'creole' languages because there was never a pidgin.  

It totally doesn’t resemble what we do. Especially if you’re teaching languages, right? I could give more examples but I think I’m becoming a bit absurd—you want to hear

You have always been utterly absurd.  

Professor Thapar. But this is what I would say: that the general creolity of the world,

there is no such thing.  

on a certain level, without our progressive bourgeois ideas of building societies, and so on and so forth, is taking something away . . . just one more story. I used to go to those mud schools near the Laos border where they’d never seen non-Chinese foreigners. So those schools, one person, one community, one school—they’ve been closed down. Now with some private money the state has opened central schools, they’re like prisons. They wrote a thing in Chinese for me, talking about the fact that in those one-community, one teacher-schools, which are very remote, in the Himalayas near Laos, they were teaching what they call ethics, which is socialism. Nobody talks to these people—there are no non-Chinese foreigners there at all. But the guy is showing me the rubber stuff coming in, right? ‘Look,’ he says, ‘five years ago when I showed you all the trucks bringing rubber, it was the same amount of rubber. Today you will see, some are more, some are less. We have lost our one-room mud schools.’ See, there’s stuff going on. They won’t win in the way we recognize winning, but one hopes that level of stuff will become the poetry of the future. I’m sorry if I talk like a literary person,

Spivak talks like a demented coolie 

what can you do, that’s what I am. So let’s go back to history. Tell me more.

Otherwise, I'll fuck off to Laos. 

Thapar. I think that’s about all one can ask for. You can’t ask for the idea of society, but a little move in that direction would be very encouraging. And it’s that little move that one doesn’t see in what’s going on. It’s simply not happening, and however much one may converse, and however much one may go out and talk to people, somehow that is not being understood. And that in a sense is what I find most depressing, that now we are in a situation where we can make the kinds of changes we had thought of making in the 60s. But we are stymied by the fact that we’re not recognising what is happening.

These two crazy biddies didn't know shit in the Sixties but became Professors of useless subjects. Sixty years later they still know nothing.  

Spivak. We are not acknowledging that we may have to shift class focus in order to be able to.

What? Pretend to be Commies? But the bottom fell out of that market long ago.  

You’re older than I am, but I feel very much that I’m too old, you know . . .

Thapar. My god, I’m not feeling that for a long time.

Spivak. You’re so full of energy, Romila—

But you look like shit. Spivak is a 'mean girl'.  

Thapar. No no. You know, I wish to goodness the next generation would take over more efficiently.

Sonia was the next generation. She is retiring this year. 

Spivak. In this way, we can perhaps see a mahan Bharat, eh? Then it would be something different, won’t it? Yeah. What does that mean?

Spivak will next start babbling about Akhand Bharat. Thapar should shut her down before she gets herself in trouble with Mamta.  

Thapar. Should we stop on that note?

Spivak. I think so. And you know what they say on Air India these days? They’re obliged to, after every announcement. ‘Jai Hind.’

Since 2019. 

Thapar: Well.
Spivak: Well.

Thapar: Well, just as well, they don’t say Bharat Mata ki Jai.

Spivak: Well, we have said both of those, in a literary way. (Thapar: That’s nationalism). It is after all ‘independence’ tomorrow. Within quotes. Thank you.

It looks as though Spivak, in her dotage, will come out as as Hindutvadi Modi bakht. Thapar will remain an anti-national to the bitter end.