A.P Vijayan, about whom I have posted before, teaches English. Sadly, he believes Dalits can't afford to learn English and thus is absolved from having to teach his own subject properly.
He writes in 'the Wire'-
When Dalits are hardened by daily experiences of humiliations and mortifications, both physical and mental, and witness horrendous atrocities committed against their fellow beings, even by top liberal university professors of Savarna origin,
top liberal professors sodomized AP Vijayan and cut off his dick.
perfecting their English is a luxury they cannot afford.
They also can't afford to get a job and make something of themselves because top University professors keep fucking them in the ass and chopping off their genitals.
The recent controversy involving Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
who frequently sodomizes Dalits
and Anshul Kumar, a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, is an event in itself, generating a whole battery of figural excesses
equivalent to sodomizing vast numbers of Dalits and chopping off their dicks.
cutting across caste and gender.
Spivak may not have a dick but, figuratively speaking, she is using her non-existent dick to non-consensually sodomize billions of Bahishkrit people.
The turbulences of the day carve out many wounds.
Also they leave Vijayan's asshole very sore.
On the one hand, it has laid bare the structural violence built into the very edifice of postcoloniality on which many Savarna intellectuals have been comfortably placed.
He means some stupid upper caste Hindus got Professorships in postcolonial theory.
On the other, there was an individual attempt by a Dalit to employ verbal abuse as a strategy of counter-violence
there was no violence. Spivak hadn't really bent him over and sodomized him.
to meet this invisible structural violence, a gesture reminding us of the violence Frantz Fanon advocated for in his Wretched of the Earth as a political strategy enabling the subaltern to stand up straight and ask questions.
Fanon didn't think screaming abuse at an old woman was a 'political strategy'. He thought armed struggle was the remedy. Sadly, his own country decided it preferred to remain part of France.
At the risk of self-promotion,
the greater risk is that we will laugh at this cretin. Varadarajan is an American Brahmin. No doubt, he and his pals are laughing their heads off at Vijayan.
let me quote from the “Preface” of my book of poems, The Absent Color:
Violence has two dimensions.
One silences by chopping off the head, while the body remains in
its illusory appearance as skin.
The other gives you tongues where the body loses the skin.
Those tongues, I need hardly say, are in the anus which is dripping with Spivak's cum.
In my figural exegesis, Spivak’s and the violence her Savarna acolytes inflict is of the former kind, where their skin retains its illusory appearance,
Skin isn't illusory. It really exists. I suppose what Vijayan means is that when Spivak sodomizes him she does not bruise his skin. His wound is not visible. Yet his anus gives tongue to many a poetic lament or 'figurative exegesis'.
just as Rama retains his, as ‘maryadapurushothaman’, despite killing Shambuka to maintain the Vedic order.
Shambuk, too, retained his skin. What he lost was his life.
Anshul Kumar made use of the second kind of violence:
Shouting at an old woman isn't violence. It is low class behavior- that is all.
The act of questioning has given him a tongue, a voice,
He had both already
but he has lost his skin in the process.
Spivak skinned the fellow and sold his pelt to some other liberal professor. Martha Nussbaum, I'm looking at you!
He can be written off as yet another misogynist in a sea of misogynists who routinely abuse women. Nothing more, nothing less.
The fellow is a cretin. But he isn't studying a STEM subject so what more can you expect?
A naïve hermeneutic operation, typical of Savarna intellectual exercise, has already been set in motion to cancel out the two acts of violence, by finding symmetry at the level of microaggression.
Vijayan's hermeneutic operation isn't naive. It is very very funny.
However, those familiar with the nuances of structural violence
of a wholly imaginary kind.
cannot ignore the asymmetry of the effects this event will have on the two individuals.
It will have none. Spivak got into the news. That's a win for her. So did the other guy. Good for him.
While this incident may slightly tarnish the reputation of the esteemed professor, it will not end her career.
Death will. She is 81 years old
In contrast, overshadowed by this misogynistic excess, the student has all the possibility of facing a bleak future in an Indian academic system controlled by Savarna academic networking.
It will make no difference. The fact is, he managed to get into the papers. That's a win.
Only the future will reveal if shadowy deals, as some Savarnas seem to suggest, have been made to salvage his career.
If he can get into politics, he can make real money. Being an academic means having to teach kids as stupid and as ignorant as yourself.
At the moment, my concern is not the future. I want to ask why a Dalit student had to resort to this act of violence, fully aware that it could have serious consequences on his academic career, regardless of any potential shadowy deals.
There was no violence. He was rude. Spivak shut him down quickly enough. The fact is, not having a dick is a bigger grievance than being a Dalit.
The question demands a thorough historicization of our intuitions. The following is an attempt.
Vijayan will fail. He is too stupid.
First, let us agree bluntly: it is not due to the stupidity of the speakers of the English language that they end up with different pronunciations, but rather because of its writing system.
This is irrelevant. The Dalit pronounced Du Bois in the correct French manner because he had learned to do so at St. Xavier's Mumbai. Spivak ignorantly contradicted him by saying Haitians pronounced the name in the English manner because they were angry with France. This is like saying George Washington decided to call himself Jorge because he was miffed with Mad King George.
Everybody knows English is not a phonetic language. The Irish writer Bernard Shaw,
among other things, a spelling reformer
perhaps a century ago and in the style of a subaltern’s rogue laugh over the English colonizer,
Shaw's family was English. They had indeed colonized Ireland.
demonstrated how funny the English language is. He did this with the example that the word ‘fish’ could be spelled as ‘ghoti’: with ‘gh’ pronounced as in ‘enough’, ‘o’ as in ‘women’, and ‘ti’ as in ‘nation’.
Shaw made a lot of money writing in English. But, that's because he could be quite funny. Still, on the subject of spelling reform, everybody thought he was a boring cunt.
When such a funny language, having no consistency in matters of spelling and pronunciation, is learned in the postcolonial context of India, where most institutions of learning operate on casteist logic, language can wreak havoc with the lives of people, especially the first- or second-generation learners from the Dalit community.
Please don't teach English to Dalits. Also, support Modi's attempt to make vernacular language instruction for Doctors etc. compulsory.
Most Dalit students learn English from teachers whose command of the language is suspect.
Presumably, Vijayan is speaking for himself here.
This is where students from marginalized segments first taste the language. They have no access to how a so-called ‘native’ speaker uses the language.
Because they don't have smart phones.
They do not possess the cultural capital to access the English language in other ways, through movies or music.
See above.
They have no way to shadow-practice the language. All they have is what the teacher provides. Barring a few, most of the Savarna teachers are no better than Spivak
i.e. people who teach non-STEM subjects are as stupid and ignorant as their students.
when it comes to marginalizing and silencing Dalit students in a classroom.
Why not let the noisiest Dalit student teach the class?
What Spivak did is no exception;
Did you know that most Columbia students are very poor Dalits who don't know English?
it is the everyday life of the Dalits in India. Her actions possibly triggered the memories of such harrowing and humiliating moments in the minds of thousands of Dalits.
How? They don't know English and, even if they did, have no access to newspapers or Televisions.
They learn English in this stifling, crippling environment.
such as that Vijayan finds at his place of work.
They don’t simply learn English; the process is far more complicated. English is just one of the means through which Dalits learn about themselves, not merely as students but as second-class citizens, as less meritorious, as nothing.
Vijayan tells his Dalit students they don't have the luxury of learning English because they are being invisibly sodomized by top liberal Professors. Thankfully, they don't understand what he is saying.
This early stifling leaves many with permanent scars: mutilated tongues, choked throats,
prolapsed rectums
and unending self-doubt. Those Dalits who escape this condition learn English as written text, not auditory signs—all this Anshul Kumar has himself written about
But Kumar spoke in English to Spivak.
in a response published on a Dalit platform. Their early sense of the language is visual and textual rather than performative.
Whereas the Bihari Brahmin, in his village, confers only in English with his cows.
Consequently, they pronounce unfamiliar words based on their written form. For example, ‘recipe’ is read as ‘risaip’, influenced by words like ‘recite’ and ‘reside’.
Plenty of English peepul have atrocious spelling. Indeed, my own spelling is surprisingly poor by desi standards.
By the time they learn the correct pronunciation, often from cookery shows or Hollywood movies, the mispronunciation is already ingrained.
Modi, is not Dalit. That is why, when he speaks English, people mistake him for King Charles.
To unshackle oneself from this self-imposed/system-imposed Platonic cave to the bright sunlight of a native speaker’s fluency is a daunting task for many Dalits.
So far, this cretin has merely made Modi's point- viz. all Indians should be educated in the vernacular language.
They are trapped
like all Indians who didn't grow up with English as their first language
in manifold universes: the language of the family, of the community, of the region; the English, learned, unlearned, pronounced, mispronounced; the rhythm of native languages inflecting a second or third acquired language, pointing to the limits of the languages one is given. From this cacophony of internal flows, directing oneself to the ideal perfection of the native speaker demands a consciousness that kills you from within.
That's why Modi and Shah and Manmohan and Sonia Madam are all dead from within.
Within a universe fabricated by an other demanding perfection, the Dalit soul is forever reminded of her imperfection: becoming conscious of this pressure renders her already drafted imperfection more imperfect.
Which is why we shouldn't employ such people. Give them charity by all means, but do please ensure they don't get confused and try to bite off their own heads.
This struggle is something many pronunciation-purists from the Savarna community fail to understand.
There are none such. In India, as in Yukay/Amrika, money talks. If you are rich, nobody gives a shit about your pronunciation.
They often ask, ‘Why can’t you self-correct once you learn to pronounce properly?’ This well-meaning question stems from their own experiences;
Savarnas can self-correct. Dalits can't. That is the gravamen of this article. No wonder an American Brahmin published it.
even the best of the Savarnas had to consciously work on her language and pronunciation to reach proficiency. The question seeks a mirror image: if I can, why can’t you?
Vijayan explains that it is because Dalits have been too mentally traumatized by incessant sodomization by Spivak and Romila Thapar to be able to do anything for themselves. Also it is simply cruel to try to force them to learn, or teach, English. Take the dude who shouted at Spivak. His teacher at school made fun of him because he recited 'Lady of Shalott' at an elocution competition. I should explain Shalott is as gay as fuck. Boys should recite 'Charge of the Light Brigade'.
The simple answer to the question is that I am not the mirror image you are desperately seeking.
Nobody wants to look like Vijayan.
I am not a blank surface reflecting your self-conceived image of perfection.
Because you are ugly.
I am not a void to be filled with your perfection.
Spivak should kindly desist from using Vijayan's anus as her own personal cum-bucket.
As Fanon put it half a century ago: ‘I am not a potentiality of something;
Fanon had the potential to study a more useful type of medicine. He was bright.
I am fully what I am.’
Then he stopped being so because he had leukemia.
If my language contains mispronunciations, cracks, silences, stubbornness, wounds, and scars that you cannot fathom, that is not my fault.
Unless you are a Professor of that language.
That is your problem. It reflects the complexity of the world I inhabit, a world from which you have always kept a safe, untouchable distance.
perhaps Vijayan has b.o. I don't. It is because of my flatulence that people give me a wide berth.
Had you cared to touch this world, you would have realised that perfecting language is not my priority, nor could it ever be, even if I wished it.
Which is why this guy shouldn't be teaching English or writing in it.
In India, if you have observed closely, perfecting language is the business of the class or caste of people who enjoy conspicuous leisure, to use Thorstein Veblen’s phrase.
No. If you work hard at perfecting your usage of a language you are likely to be in high demand as a writer or a speaker. Thus you will enjoy higher income and status, but will have less leisure.
For instance, most speakers of Malayalam use either ‘Baratam’ or ‘Faratam’ instead of the Sanskrit word ‘Bharatam’, because un-Sanskritized Malayalam, like Tamil, does not possess the voiced plosive ‘bh’. When a Malayali uses this voiced plosive at the beginning of a word, you are in the presence of someone who is educated
virtually everybody is educated to some degree in 'God's own country'.
and who has consciously chosen to distance themselves from the ways of most Malayalis, who has Sanskritised himself/herself.
I think 'manipravalay' enrichment of Tamil with Sanskrit occurred mainly for aesthetic reasons. Since Kerala has a lot of Christians and Muslims, Religion can't have been the deciding factor.
This is achieved through intense training from an early age, focusing consciously on the texture of the language. Most Malayalis today consider this excessive focus on Sanskritized pronunciation a triviality that living Malayalam can ignore.
In other words, most Malayalis are more sensible than this cretin.
When Dalits are hardened by daily experiences of humiliations and mortifications, both physical and mental, and witness horrendous atrocities committed against their fellow beings, even by top liberal university professors of Savarna origin, perfecting their English is a luxury they cannot afford. It is a triviality they know only the Savarna can indulge in.
Few Indians bother to perfect their English. Still, those who teach English may feel a professional obligation to do so.
To paraphrase Malcolm X’s famous jibe at Martin Luther King’s dream: We Dalits were having a nightmare while the Savarnas were practicing an English that would assimilate them into the American dream.
That was functional English. America wanted brainy people with higher qualifications in STEM subjects. They didn't want blokes who could recite 'the Lady of Shalott' in the accents of Queen fucking Victoria.
On a personal note, one thing I invariably do in my class these days is inform students in advance that I may pronounce the same names and words differently within the same session, and I ask them to excuse my horrifying inability to pronounce them correctly.
Why not just tell them that you are shit at English and that they are wasting their time?
I then theoretically back this personal failing by invoking Jacques Derrida’s idea of ‘différance’, insisting that there is no original sense or pronunciation, but only endless enunciation of difference, which play havoc with our lives.
These kids just want to learn functional English. This nutter starts ranting about Derrida who had taken pains to acquire a Parisian accent.
Most students accept my incapacity as philosophically certified.
They accept that the standard of English instruction in a Government College is bound to be shit.
But the truth is, if I try to focus on correct pronunciation, I get jittery knowing I will never get it right, which makes me more nervous and forces me to abandon the stream of thought I am pursuing in the moment.
Does he also shit himself? I should check Tik Tok for videos of Vijayan shitting himself.
When correct pronunciation is dictated by the Savarna, it serves as an entry token to the citadels of knowledge for people like Dalits, who inhabit the outermost ambit of the Savarna universe.
In which case, Savarnas can't be inflicting very much mortification and humiliation on them.
The Savarnas not only close the door but also strip Dalits of their right to freely navigate a language that is unique in its spelling and pronunciation, a language notable for its fluidity.
Vijayan is getting mixed up. The Dalit complaint was that the Brahmins refused to teach them Sanskrit. He has got it into his head that English is some sort of Sanskrit probably because it has 'plosives' and Malayalam doesn't.
This fluidity allows for the formation of new identities, distinct from the languages and spaces in India that are overdetermined by casteist and feudal practices and phrases.
The best new identity an Indian can get is that of a non fucking resident. English can help in that department but so can learning Japanese.
The deterritorialization of the English language into feudal complacency may benefit you, but, as Ambedkar reminded us through Thucydides, it won’t help Dalits: ‘It may be in your interest to be our [pronunciation] masters, but how can it be ours to be your slaves?’
The answer was obvious. The slave owner has an interest in keeping his slaves alive.
The choice before the student was whether to maintain fidelity to a Du Bois, whom he had internalized through his commitments, struggles, and existential angst or to temporarily accept a Du Bois whose ‘real’ identity was mediated through the Brahmin expert.
Spivak isn't an expert. Her English is poor. But she had chutzpah and pretended to know French and Marxism and thus French Marxism.
This expert’s knowledge of Haitian sounds was deemed more authentic, more real than the questions that haunt his mind.
Du Bois did pronounce his name in the English fashion because his Haitian daddy deserted the family when he was a baby.
The student showed fidelity to his own convictions, which Du Bois or Ambedkar,
who married a Brahmin lady
if alive, would undoubtedly understand,
No. They were high IQ dudes.
as it was, more than anything, a fight for human dignity in an amphitheatre of arrogance and casteist giggles.
But lacking a dick is a bigger grievance than being Dalit. Spivak was bound to win.
Two typical oddities stand out in Spivak’s response to the controversy in The Hindu: First, ‘Anshul Kumar had not identified himself as a Dalit.’
She thought he was a Brahmin- perhaps a BJP type- who was a Professor of 'Brahmin Studies'.
An odd expectation, to begin with. Does she mean that if she had understood his Dalit identity in advance, she would have shown epistemological charity by being benign and humane, excusing his natural ignorance?
Yes. She would have started pretending that her own ancestors were Dalits. Also none of the men in her family had a dick. They all hanged themselves while menstruating. This proves they were secretly Revolutionary assassins involved in plots to kill the Viceroy.
Or, in the same vein, was she arrogant toward a Brahmin (mistakenly construed) simply because he did not exhibit the kind of knowledge perfection an ideal Brahmin should possess?
Spivak has always been stupid and ignorant. She didn't get that Du Bois mispronounced his own name because his daddy ran away. That's why he only warmed to Haiti towards the end of his life.
I don’t quite get it. Second, a condescending gesture: ‘The upwardly class-mobile Dalit person … should … work … for the entire Dalit community, especially the subaltern Dalits who do not get into elite universities.’
Stop shouting at old ladies and get a proper job you stupid cunt.
She is asking: Why waste time asking big questions? Why are you not on the ground working for the subaltern Dalits to uplift them? Meanwhile, the Savarna can live with no moral compunction in pursuing their dream of perfecting her pronunciation and her understanding of Du Bois.
The sensible savarna fucks off to the US to do scientific research. Her daughter gets to be come POTUS.
Reading Spivak’s condescending remark, a friend M.N. Parasuraman texted me this: ‘The most annoying thing is how ad infinitum, ad nauseam, Savarnas remind privileged Dalits about their duty to uplift their less fortunate fellows! At a Clubhouse discussion in 2020 one Dalit girl burst this pious balloon saying, “Okay, will a well-to-do Nair or Brahmin who gets into IIT or Central University give up his seat for a poorer caste-mate of his and go to a self-financing institution?”’
No. Nor would a Dalit. Kharge Sahib, on the other hand, generously shares his wealth with night-soil carriers.
Postscript
A long time ago, as a 22-year-old loner, spiritually devastated and torn between thoughts of suicide and visions of extreme darkness,
I suppose, his thoughts of suicide were gay and carefree
I stumbled upon the works of Emmanuel Levinas in my teacher C.B. Mohandas’s library. Levinas’s philosophy of fundamental ethical obligation towards the Other
unless the other was Palestinian
—because the Other is infinitely different and transcendental, a Judaic theme—
which is why it doesn't apply to Palestinians
resonated deeply with me. In my youthful immaturity, I interpreted the Other as ‘the other’ and imagined a world where the infinite, transcendental otherness of the Untouchable, the invisible, and the nomadic (Habiru) would evoke ethical obligation from the Varna other.
This is just Gandhi & Co. gassing on about 'Daridra Narayan'. But it is easy enough to get rid of poverty by raising productivity.
For me, Derrida via Levinas and Spivak via Derrida formed a seamless continuum until I encountered a disgusting phrase in Levinas: ‘yellow peril’.
Levinas was simply ignorant. The Jesuits in China had translated and commented on a number of texts which influenced important philosophers like Leibniz and Boscovich.
This phrase revealed my place in the universe of infinite other-concerns: no place at all.
What your essay claims is that Dalits are simply too traumatized to learn anything at all.
This disturbing realization inspired me to write a poem reflecting my troubling encounter with Levinas, Derrida, and Spivak. I used Levinas’s phrase against Heidegger for his Nazi past, against Levinas and his followers themselves for their high-sounding ethical jabber.
His own 'ethical jabber' is hysterically funny. I suppose that's why Varadarajan publishes the cunt.
Entre Nous
In alterity we can find an enemy
That’s cool, perfect, yet difficult
As if consenting to horror
One can forgive many people
But there are some people it is difficult to forgive
It is difficult to forgive you
It may be difficult to forgive imaginary crimes, but there is psychiatric medication you can take which tackles the root of the problem- i.e. paranoid schizophrenia.
Is Dalit 'ipseity' inferior in any respect to that of other Indians? No. The author of this may be Dalit and it is true that he is as stupid as shit, but plenty of 'top liberal professors'- like Spivak & Homo Baba- are just as stupid. Still, the English instruction they received in India was of a higher quality than this cretin is capable of imparting. Sad.
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