Simran Chadha on Gayatri Spivak

Simran Chadha is an Associate  Professor at Delhi University. She writes in Outlook-

It is a well-known fact that what happens in JNU today may well be a forerunner for university scenarios across the country.

Universities, in India, are adversely selective at the post-grad level. Smart people get jobs or go abroad. Only utter dunces remain on campus.  

So when social media platforms are literally tripping on account of a gnarly exchange between a leading academic voice – Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a first-year M.A student of the sociology department,

it was a foolish exchange. Gayatri believes that Haitians pronounce the name Du Bois in the English manner as a protest against French colonization. 

the incident warrants critical leverage

she means 'scrutiny'.  

that would nuance the obvious appearance of power versus the powerless,

you don't nuance an appearance. You may find nuances in it.  

and here’s my two-penny worth. 

of illiterate garbage.  

Tipping his hat in the direction of multiplicity, particularly with regard to the inclusion of contradictory and contrapuntal voices, the French philosopher Roland Barthes, in an essay of the same name, proclaimed the Death of the Author.

Which was about how you can read what you like into any text regardless of the author's intentions.  

This heralded a much-needed epistemological change proclaiming the need to include a plurality of voices within domains of knowledge.

There is no such need. We don't want Scientists to have to listen to stupid nutters.  

This plurality was no longer viewed as a cacophony of voices to be ignored but rather as the prickly truths often marginalised by hegemonic power structures and the ivory towers they endowed.

Non-STEM subjects turned to shit. They have been marginalized. Power structures cease to be hegemonic if the subsidize stupid shit.  

While The Subaltern School of Indian historians woke all voices from the grassroots,

Rubbish! They had no interest in learning Adivasi languages or going to live amongst Dalits. They talked pretentious garbage to each other.  

another thinker, a woman this time redefined the term subaltern by using it as a reference for those marginalised by the mainstream.

Gramsci had used the word subaltern as a code word for proletarian.  

In all fairness, the term owes its origins to erstwhile military discourse wherein it referred to the lowest rung of foot soldiers recruited by the (British) Indian army.

Fuck off! Subaltern meant second lieutenant. Churchill came to India as a subaltern though his grandfather was a Duke and his Dad had been a Cabinet Minister.  

Since these ‘paltans’

A 'paltan' is a platoon. This woman is a cretin.  

were not on the regular pay wage but hired as and when the need arose, the nature of their duties remained indiscriminate, and their treatment even more so.

This is nonsense. No soldier is employed on this basis. The Army may employ some casual laborers but not as soldiers.  

With Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak”, one moves, (after slaying a dense thicket of obscurantist philosophical discourse) to address the question as to who or what category best fits the subaltern framework, keeping in mind the fault lines of the modern India nation.

No. Her essay made a false claim- viz. that her great aunty killed herself while on the rag because she was actually a revolutionary assassin. The truth was that she didn't want to go to school. She wanted to get married. Her brother-in-law teased her that she was already too old to get a 'suitable boy'. Her father should have married her off once she hit puberty. Not all girls like School. 

In this regard, it would not be amiss to begin with the fact that normatively, a subaltern refers to persons belonging to classes and categories which are economically backward and/or also to those depressed along lines of the caste hierarchies.

India has plenty of terms for such people- e.g. 'bahujan', 'bahishkrit', etc.  

These it would seem had been entirely bypassed by the civilising missions of the British Raj.

The French claimed to have some such mission. The Brits didn't. The were committed to protecting India from external and internal threats while ruling its people according to their own immemorial laws and customs. On the other hand, plenty of missionaries worked for the uplift of Dalits and tribal populations. 

Subaltern thus acquires meaning when pitted against a category such as the “elites”.

It is a Gramscian term which, following Ranajit Guha, is also associated with tribals who, hopefully, will launch a Naxalite revolution.  

Considering this, it is but necessary that development plans and goals of the modern Indian state be directed towards the betterment of subaltern categories and they hold our empathy and compassion.

The poor have votes. The Government has to pretend to be helping them.  

The subaltern, however, as per Spivak’s timely intervention escapes the limiting understanding this categorisation facilitates.

No it doesn't. The woman is a cretin. She thinks Indian women had no 'voice'. The historical record proves the opposite.  

It may not be confined to Dalits only or the proletarians only.

But neither Dalits nor proles nor women have any interest in 'subaltern studies' because it is stupid shit.  

Where, for instance, do women figure in this imbalanced equation between the Elites and Subalterns?

Where did Indira Gandhi figure? What about Margaret Thatcher? 

Female literacy, it was ardently believed would solve any and every problem in that department but did it?

Yes, if those literate women got genuinely productive jobs. Productivity matters. Virtue signaling does not.  

Spivak’s text aims its critical thrust exactly at this simplistic thinking wherein we think we have identified subalterns and have done so by pitting them against (those who overtly appear) elite and likewise, sincerely believe that ‘educated’ women are not subaltern in any way.

Who gives a fuck about Spivak's 'thrust'? Look at Mamta. True, she didn't manage to escape the shithole that is Calcutta but she did get to rule it.  

What Spivak’s classic post-structuralist text then is, that it expands cognitive, critical skills towards mindful insights regarding a socio-cultural landscape we think we know.

No. Spivak writes garbled nonsense. 

So the subaltern then, may well on the one hand refer to the proletariat oppressed by the capitalist heralding the Industrial Revolution while on the other, to, and hold your breath here -- the beleaguered aristocracy being mercilessly butchered with the Bolshevik Revolution underway in the Soviet Union.

No. The Czar wasn't subaltern. This woman has shit for brains.  

This may well be turning on its head any and every assumption we have so far entertained about what or who really fits into a subaltern category.

This cretin thinks King Charles is subaltern because he has to say, in the King's speech, whatever the Prime Minister tells him.  

The beauty of this understanding requires deep empathy with the nature of oppression and its changing forms.

Rishi Sunak is oppressing King Charles.  

No falling back on sequestered formulae here.

If the formula is 'sequestered' it is inaccessible. Nobody can 'fall back' on it.  

Unthinking known categories and perceiving the situation from within its own unique parameters is what the text advocates.

Also, you should eat your own shit. It may actually be chocolate cake.  

The final word of Spivak’s text “Can the Subaltern speak”, rests not only with those at the bottom rung of the economic ladder and/or at the lower rungs of a brutally dehumanising caste system but with a literate, middle-class person - a woman in her mid-twenties, who sadly takes her own life.

The girl was 15. This illiterate woman hasn't read the essay she is writing about.  

The reasons for this extreme step - apart from the admission that unrequited love was not the culprit - are left to the reader’s conjuncture

Spivak says she was recruited by a non-existent Revolutionary cell to carry out an assassination. True, at a later date, there were female Revolutionaries of this type. But they were graduates and lived independently.  

but what is made amply clear is that oppression exists in forms and spaces that we are happy to overlook as “elite”.

This woman is from Delhi. She knows that a woman- a Rajya Sabha MP- was beaten in the house of the Chief Minister of Delhi.  

Education, literacy – these were the hallmarks of elitism and this young woman seemed privileged enough to have both but felt her oppression so keenly that it left her with no will to carry on.

She was 15. She didn't like school. She killed herself while on the rag because according to our Shastras the menstrual blood of an unwed daughter flows back to pollute the pinda offering to the ancestors.  

The question is, may educated and upper-caste women - often categorised as privileged - live free of the strictures and taboos that oppressively govern the lives of women?

Yes. They can also become Chief Minister or Prime Minister.  

The essay, as is the case with ‘exemplary’ academic writing, leaves the question ambiguously open-ended and with a host of probing questions for the discerning reader.

No. It is stupid shit. Whitey may believe Gayatri's stupid lies but Indians know she is a fucking moron.  

Circling back to the premise with which we began this conversation, when a student queries Spivak during the Q&A following her invited lecture at the JNU campus, on the Haitian writer Du Bois (pronounced as Do Boys),

He was American not Haitian. His father was born in Haiti but deserted the family when he was two years old. That is why he pronounced his surname in the English fashion.  

as to Spivak’s upper-class and upper-caste status, the scales seem to be balanced unfairly against what appears to be a ‘privileged’, ‘upper-class’, first-world academic and an under-privileged, third-world student.

But he has a dick. She doesn't. Thus she wins in the contest of Grievances.  

Yet Brahminical studies is this student’s smug assertion - ascendant knowledge systems with clearly defined gender hierarchies.

No. Brahminism acknowledges that there were female Rishis who authored portions of the Vedas. There have been plenty of 'vidushis' and 'Panditas'.  

The scales seem to be weighing him down, and not in an oppressed way (wonder if his mother was granted the proverbial blessings of a ‘hundred sons’?).

Fuck does this mean? The proverbial blessing is 'may you have ten sons' not one hundred. This silly woman is thinking of Gandhari in the Mahabharata.  

Spivak moreover is known for her work with indigenous languages-clusters

She speaks Bengali but not Santhali. Bengali is Indo-Aryan not indigenous. Indeed, English itself is not indigenous to England.  

ousted by the Brahminical,

Fuck off! Bengali Brahmins are as weak as shit. Tribals chase them away if they make a nuisance of themselves.  

so clearly our initial understanding of who is the subaltern here may well be a misnomer.

Our 'understanding' may be erroneous. Alternatively we may use the wrong word for a thing. That's a misnomer. But an 'initial understanding' can't itself be a misnomer.  

Furthermore, with a blatant disregard of all systems of etiquette – Brahminical, colonial, academic and any other, the questioner insists on disregarding her forty-five-minute lecture wherein it was made amply clear why Du Bois (to be pronounced Do Boys) insisted on the Haitina pronunciation of his name rather than the obvious French.

This is mad! Haitians pronounce Du Bois in the French way because French, after Creole, is the most widely spoken language there.  

It was not a matter of provincial accents for the questioner perfectly intoned the French pronunciation of Du Bois and refused the Haitian (Brahminical eh!).

It is well known that Haitians are White and speak with a Scottish accent- right?  

Following this, filling in a long, summer evening’s social media was all aflame with stories tumbling out of skeletal closets

skeletons tumble out of closets. There is no such thing as a 'skeletal closet'.  

regarding the arrogance of the said academic, so numerous that #Me too would have been envious.

I believe she did fuck a student of hers- but back then that was cool.  

This until, the said subaltern rode on proudly on his victory parade and took to social media handles himself to hold the academic, linguistically, to her (inferior) gender status.

Very true. He said hurtful things about how she had a hole where her dick should be.  

Some subaltern!

Why is he not beating people? That's what students are supposed to do at University. Then they may rise to the level of Lawrence Bishnoi or Goldy Brar.