IITs must get rid of their 'Humanities' Departments. Just hire guys who can teach good spoken English and run courses in how to write about popular science for magazines.
If you hire stupid nutters to teach worthless shite, you are bound to end up with pseudo-scholarship like the following-
Revisiting Nationalist Historiography through the Narrativization of Past Events: Reading Shahid Amin’s Reconstruction of Chauri Chaura Merin Simi Raj Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
Indians know 'Nationalist Historiography' is a pack of stupid lies justifying worship of the Dynasty. Chauri Chaura is in Bihar. Everybody knows Biharis are little better than beasts. That's it. That's all that can be said about relevant 'narrativization'.
'There can be no untold stories at all, just as there can be no unknown knowledge.
Sure there can. I've never told anybody the story of how I shat myself in Swahili class in 1973. As for any piece of knowledge, there is always at least one person for whom it is unknown.
'There can be only past facts not yet described in a context of narrative form (Louis Mink)
But stories are not concerned with fact. History is greatly concerned with counterfactuals. So is Econ. Mink was stoooopid.
The preoccupation with knowledge/power in historiography and the politics of knowledge creation and its legitimization have always had an uneven and problematic history.
Who cares about the history of a useless type of historiography? Shit is shit. There is nothing 'problematic' about saying so.
This paper highlights the importance of revisiting the past through the narrativization of events, in the context of historiographical studies in India.
Did the Left gain anything by 're-narrating' Chauri Chaura as an OBC/Dalit/Muslim rebellion against upper castes? Maybe in some shitty Bihari shithole. But who actually gives a fuck?
The struggle between official narrative and the “subjugated narrative,” if one may call it so, has been the area of interest in a number of disciplines, including history, jurisprudence, sociology, anthropology and literary studies, for the past few decades.
Because useless tossers engage in useless struggles.
It has only gained prominence since the recent “narrative turn,” which dates from the late 1960s,
when everybody on Campus started tripping
and more emphasis has been placed on it since the subaltern studies initiatives from the 1980s onwards.
At one time, studying that shite seemed a path to a Green Card. Sadly, this lady is stuck in Chennai.
The present study is part of an attempt to explore the narrative web of Indian nationalist historiography, within which a number of stories and subjugated characters are embedded. Through a re-reading of two essays by Shahid Amin which claim to “retrieve” or “redeem” the event of Chauri Chaura from the web of official narratives, this paper shows that the ubiquitous presence of the discourses generated by the State or Law or the Samaj (as projected through cultural, traditional, religious laws and value systems) have been instrumental in transforming the participants of history into mere subjects.
Back then, all them Bihari dudes were either British subjects or British protected subjects. That was what they were objecting to.
The historical narratives, in any discipline, which are available for public consumption, do carry the authoritative mediation of dominant institutions like the State, the Law or civil society.
Nonsense! Plenty of 'historical narratives' are fantasies which lack any alethic content. Since this lady is not a historian, she can't provide any such thing herself.
For the same reason these narratives—handed down to posterity—have been invariably accompanied by strategic aporias which were lopsided in their perspective of what was understood as reality. As Romila Thapar puts it, there is now a “growing recognition that the past had to be explained, understood, reinterpreted. . . and that such explanations could also help us understand the present in more focused ways than before” (Thapar 1443).
Historians had been doing this for thousands of years. What we now understand is that Thapar and her ilk were shit at history. Also by saying 'there is no proof there was ever a Ram temple' they opened the door to the Court deciding there was no proof there was a Waqf created by Babur. In other words, Leftist historians helped secure the Janmabhoomi for the Hindus. No wonder they hate Chandrachud- a Harvard alum.
This “critical enquiry,” as it is called by Thapar, calls for a fresh perception of the ways in which narratives were constructed and legitimized through various authoritative mediations.
At one time Leftist historians were doing the 'authoritative mediations'. But this caused a backlash. Telling stupid lies only causes people to think you are a stupid liar.
Historians and sociologists are now realizing the need to move towards the recognition of the possibility of many narratives or histories, rather than a unitary perception of truth and reality.
Why? The answer is that you need to simultaneously argue that Biden's hatred of Hamas is dictated by his homophobia while affirming that his failure too undergo gender reassignment surgery is part and parcel of his identity as Narendra Modi- the supposed leader of 'independent' India.
This possibility of plurality in narratives can be identified and explored only when the past gets reconstructed from a different perspective,
by telling stupid lies
with greater perceptiveness.
Nope. Stupidity is what is required.
I recall being puzzled by Shahid Amin's work on Chauri Chaura when it first appeared. 'Nationalist historiography' had always seen the rioters as nationalists who were goaded by the police and who retaliated. Most agreed with Nehru that Gandhi overreacted because of his own religious beliefs. Still, this was just a case of Biharis being Biharis though it might be wiser not to say so because Biharis are hefty fellows and one slap from them might kill us puny folk from the metros.
Amin’s work on Chauri Chaura is significant
it was stupid. Everybody knew what had happened- viz. Biharis behaved like Biharis even before Lalu Prasad became CM. Truly, beasts are only capable of sustaining 'Jungle Raj'.
as it is one of the pioneer works in historiographical studies in India, which adopted the narrative technique
No. It is quite a painstaking study which draws on the testimony of the approver and others involved in the subsequent court cases. Still, it elides other things which were 'common knowledge' but which nobody talked about. The fact is Gandhi in Champaran had been used as a smokescreen to hide the anti-cow slaughter riots going on there. Similarly, Chauri Chaura had a lot to do with Muslims and OBCs resenting the Sikh zamindar- or rather, his minions.
to contextualize and retell an event recorded in official history from a different vantage point. It is also seen as a major challenge to nationalist historiography, and we need to understand how. At one level Amin’s analyses draw attention to the imbrications of elite and subaltern politics in the context of the anti-colonial nationalist movement.
Why draw attention to the obvious? At one time elites either backed the Brits or ceased to be elite. By 1922, the time was ripe to get rid of the Brits. Sadly, Gandhi decided India would turn to shit if the Brits fucked off. We all understand this, but we don't say it for the same reason that we all have a wank now and then but pretend we only put out to super-models.
The analysis of peasant insurgency in colonial India and of subaltern participation in nationalist politics by the historians of ‘subaltern studies’ has amounted to a strong critique of bourgeois-nationalist politics and of the postcolonial state.
But critiques made by powerless pedants are as weak as piss.
Through a reconstruction of the Chauri Chaura event, Amin is trying to show how the powerful strand of anti-colonial politics, launched independently of bourgeois-nationalist leaders, had been denied its place in established historiography.
This is also true of Gandhi's farts or Lord Reading getting the trots. Why has established historiography ignored the shitting and pissing and farting that occurred at that crucial period in Indian history? The answer, obviously, is that Joe Biden is a homophobe who pretends to be Narendra Modi though he is himself sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos to the great indignation of Hamas.
In India, there was a time when 'nationalist historiography' mattered because you had to mug it up to get into the Civil Service. But with the rise of the BJP as well as the OBC dynastic politicians, you no longer had to pretend to believe that shite. You were welcome to say- Brahmins like Nehru and Banias like Gandhi befooled the bahishkrit community. Mayawatiji will raise India up above Yurop-Amrika!
Nationalist historiography, which narrated the nation into being,
It did no such thing. India, as a nation, acquired legal and diplomatic recognition thanks to the actions of the East India Company. Deeds not stories were involved.
has been re-read, critiqued and re-written
by stupid and powerless pedants
in an attempt to highlight the multiplicity of narratives and to foreground the marginalized and the forgotten.
Sadly, those guys were becoming Chief Ministers and getting very very rich. But they sent their kids abroad to study Engineering or to do MBA. They didn't waste their time with history. Sonia, because she hadn't been to Collidge and was a foreigner, was foolish enough to appoint Romila Thapar as her advisor.
This nationalist historiography has been viewed as elitist,
though the guys forced to do it were middle class drudges.
false and insensitive to regional variations (Aloysius 6),
This may have been true of sycophants of the Dynasty who, truth be told, were as parochial and Provincial as shit.
thereby opening up new debates to help reconstruct the past and render new insights into the blind spots. In the last few decades the critical debates on nationalist historiography have led to the breakdown of the boundaries of disciplines such as history, sociology, literature, law and anthropology.
Why maintain boundaries between shit and shit?
The subjugation of knowledge
its absence
is employed and is visible at various levels in different realms of scholarship, especially in the body of scholarship that enables the understanding of the marginalized and the historically forgotten sections of society. These interdisciplinary approaches have enabled the production of new forms of knowledge which
are shit
were earlier lost in the monolith of rigid disciplines and canons.
previously, different types of shit were segregated in various shitty University Departments. Now, there is just shit.
Consider the following-
The Narrative Turn in Historiography Because the emphasis of this paper is on the narrative approach towards the representation of events
which is what History has always done
and how past events have been narrativised in historiography, it would be appropriate to begin with the status ascribed to narrative within professional studies.
Narratives have the status of narratives even in 'professional studies'.
Etymological studies claim that the term narrative derives fromthe Latin narrativus ‘telling a story'
the Greek verb gnarus (meaning to know),
There is no such word in Greek. Gnarus is Latin and Italic. Gnous or Gignosko is Greek.
the signifier associated with the passing on of knowledge.
Or just the telling of an entertaining story.
Interestingly recent trends in historiographical and sociological studies also point to the study of the past which informs the present as a system of knowledge rather than as a mere chronological description of the past.
There can be a 'Structural Causal Model' of the economy or polity whose parameters can be altered on the basis of historic data sets. Sadly, these nutters have no such thing.
Structuralist theorists such as Roland Barthes argued explicitly for a crossdisciplinary approach to the analysis of stories
not history
—an approach in which stories can be viewed as supporting a variety of cognitive and communicative activities, from spontaneous conversations and courtroom testimony to visual art, dance, and mythic and literary traditions.
anything at all can be so visualized. The cat's farts embody the Hegelian dialectic of Uranus.
In the following decades, by the 1950s and the 1960s, strong arguments against the attack on the narrative conception of history were launched by the historian J.H. Hexter
a decent scholar whose big mistake was to think the English Civil War wasn't about Religion. Still, he was American and so allowances should be made.
and the philosopher Louis Mink.
for whom history was like Finnegan's Wake- i.e. anything goes.
However, there was not much dialogue between the philosophy of history and narrative theory until the publication of Hayden White’s Metahistory in 1970.
This is the 'linguistic turn' which released History students from doing boring research in the archives- unless they actually wanted to make something of themselves rather than just get a credential and then a job as a sort of glorified child-minder to drug-addled imbeciles.
Hayden White, an advocate of narrativization in historiography, has explored the relationship between narrative and historical representation thus coaxing fellow scholars as well as readers to reconsider traditionally accepted distinctions between literary and historical discourse.
E.g. a Bugs Bunny cartoon as opposed to the Treaty of fucking Versailles. Did you know that nine out of ten students prefer watching the former as opposed to reading the latter?
This multidisciplinary approach to the narrative element captured the attention of scholars by the end of the 1970s.
Shit scholars- maybe.
Margaret Somers categorically stated, “Social scientists must assume that social reality itself has a narrative structure and that we must attempt to recapture those narratives by narrative means”.
E.g. Samuelson was sodomized by Elmer Fudd. This caused him to reject the Marxian Transformation Problem as gibberish. Bugs Bunny should have kept Fudd on a shorter leash.
However, many continued to be skeptical about the scientific objectivity of the narrative approach.
E.g. my account of Joe Biden's sodomization of trillions of Netan-Yahoos.
The skeptics treated narrative as inherently fictitious and imaginative, as that which lacked any trace of reality or real life. Real events were not readily available to be narrativised in a coherent manner without ambiguities regarding their structure and order.
Judges and Juries have found the opposite is the case. I am accused of a crime I did not commit. I go on the stand and give a coherent account of what I was doing and where I was. The prosecutor tries to find gaps or inconsistencies in my statement. But whatever trap he lays, I am able to steer clear of it by recalling to mind the events of that fatal day and giving a more and more fine-grained account of my actions. Meanwhile my lawyers are able to get corroborative testimony. On the other hand, supposed I told a story featuring Elmer Fudd sodomizing Samuelson, people would have thought I was a lunatic who probably did commit the crime or else that I was pretending to be a lunatic so as to get sent to the nut-house rather than the electric chair.
Hence Genette and Levonas, trying to solve this difficulty, pointed out, “[i]f the narrative is rigorously faithful to historical events, the historian-narrator must be very sensitive to the changing of orders when he goes from the narrative work of telling the completed acts to the mechanical transcription of the spoken words” (Genette and Levonas 4).
Fist you do 'transcription' then you fill in the gaps with 'narrative work'.
The event had to be translated into meaningful signifiers.
i.e. words.
The trajectory of narration was rather different from that of description.
Because it featured motives and counterfactual contingencies which have to be inferred
Genette tried to explain how narrative language was seen as different from descriptive language,
there is no need to explain what was explained to us as kids in primary school where we are told that when we are asked to describe our cat we need to mention its colour, size, type of fur etc. However, when asked to tell a story in which our cat is the hero, we may omit any such details and describe the time the cat woke us up by licking our face so that we were able to get ready in time to go to school.
that the most significant difference between the two may possibly be that the narration, by the temporal succession of its discourse,
a narrative can begin 'in medias res' and then go back and forth in time.
restores the equally temporal succession of the events, while the description must successively modulate the representation of objects simultaneously juxtaposed in space.
There is no such requirement. We may describe the cat without specifying where it is now.
Thapar even justifies the element of speculation and imagination which may come into play during the critical analysis of a historical narrative: 'Even where the explanation requires a small leap of the imagination, the leap takes off from critical enquiry.
It may 'take off' from a contemporary event. You may be able to better understand the past when something about the present becomes clearer to you.
This is the historian’s contribution to knowledge but it is also an essential process in human sciences. And in making this contribution the historian is aware that other evidence may surface, fresh generalisations may emerge and knowledge be further advanced.'
Not in her own case. She was useless.
Engaging with these ambiguities associated with narrativization, Jay Clayton points out that skepticism against the narrative approach and its authenticity stems from its “association with unauthorized forms of knowledge” such as folklores, myths, legends and oral histories or “the less privileged written genres—diaries, letters, criminal confessions, slave narratives” (Clayton 378-9).
Not in History. We are sceptical about the account a politician or party hack gives of a particular period because it is likely to be self-serving. It is unlikely to feature ghosts or dragons or Elmer Fudd sodomizing Samuelson. Moreover, those writing it are unlikely to be either Jack the Ripper or Sojourner Truth.
He supports his argument with Michel Foucault’s observation that narrative is one of the “naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity” (Foucault qtd Clayton 378).
Foucault was wrong. If you claim to have made a great scientific discovery you also have to give an account of how you came to make it. Had Einstein just presented us with a bunch of equations few would have grasped the essence of his theory. It was because he could give us a credible narrative of how he, a young patent clerk travelling by tram, came to his great 'gedanken' or thought experiment that he rose to become the most revered and influential scientist of his century.
Clayton takes his argument a little further and points out that most engagements with minority writing constitute a “rich mixture of traditional narrative forms and contemporary political concerns” (Clayton 379).
Smart white peeps are a very small minority. Our engagement with their writing is about our wanting to get a little smarter.
Unearthing the plurality of narratives and exploding the assumption of a unitary narrative would definitely be met with resistance and hurdles and hence may seem chaotic.
Unless it is done by smart peeps. These nutters weren't smart.
Ranajit Guha points out, “‘[i]f the small voice of history gets a hearing at all in some revised account … it will do so only by interrupting the telling of the dominant version, breaking up its storyline and making a mess of its plot”.
He made a mess alright- but only in his pants. Still, he was considerate enough to do it on foreign campuses.
Notably, only the narrative form effectively allows as well as supports the text’s engagement with contemporary socio-political concerns.
No. A purely economic or military description of current events is more 'engaging'. We don't care about Hamas's narratives. We care about their military resources and ability to keep up their armed struggle.
This, rather sudden engagement with the narrative approach across disciplines can be read along with the emergence of minority literature, subaltern studies, feminist literature, African American literature and Dalit Studies.
All of which have proven to be shit even if one or two imbeciles got tenure thereby. Why be content with a Professor's wage when, if you study STEM subjects, you can be as rich as Elon Musk and have as great an impact on the world?
In his introduction to Event, Metaphor and Memory, Amin says, “[p]easants do not write, they are written about . . . their speech . . . is not normally recorded for posterity, it is wrenched from them in courtrooms and inquisitorial trials”.
Amin is lying. Plenty of Indian peasants gained sufficient literacy to write 'narratives'. Nehru mentions Baba Ramchandra, who had been an indentured labourer in Fiji till he got into trouble with the authorities there because of the articles he wrote which were published back in India. I suppose his literacy was because he was Brahmin. But plenty of Brahmins are peasant cultivators in the Doab. Incidentally, the first Hindi newspaper from Gorakpur started to appear in 1854. Some people who worked on the land, started getting published and thus could devote themselves to journalism and politics.
Amin also identifies contradictory constructions of the events by local nationalists and, later, by the relatives of the participants as well. Amin’s multiple sources of information converge not to produce a simple explanation of why “Chauri Chaura” happened, but rather, to display the complexity of the event, its metaphorical power as a two-sided image of criminality and patriotism, and its persistence in local and familial memory even after it is “largely forgotten in nationalist lore” (Amin 1987: 176).
What happened was 'common knowledge'. Some of the agitators were peaceful Gandhians. Others weren't. Biharis will be Bihari you know. The problem was that the police were going after the guys who had signed the pledge. They would be tempted to turn approver. Gandhi lowered the temperature by calling off the saytagraha and going meekly to jail. That's it. That's the whole story.
Mir Shikari, the approver, is a twenty-seven-year-old cultivator and hideseller from Chotki Dumri. According to legal discourse, “an approver should be examined first and not after all the witnesses who are supposed to corroborate his evidence are examined” .
No. A person may turn approver after other testimony has been taken. What is required is corroboration.
Shikari was accordingly arrested on 16 March
whereas Gandhi's famous plea of guilt to a charge of sedition was made on 18 March.
and he made his “confession” before the Deputy Collector.
Who knew that the Govt. was not interested in prosecuting the Congress bigwigs for 'waging war on the King Emperor'.
Later in the course of the trial he provided his testimony quite extensively, with graphic details of the people as well as the incidents. Amin draws our attention to how Shikari was used as an instrument in the judicial process—
all approvers are used thus
how the Prosecution converts the renegade into an approver.
The police, not the prosecution, did that.
Amin quotes Paul Ricoeur: “Testimony signifies something other than a simple narration of things seen” (Amin 1987: 172).
It may do. It may not. In this case, it signified things seen and heard.
The appropriation of Mir Shikari and his testimony has larger implications than Shikari’s desperation to save his own life.
Not for him. He genuinely didn't want to be hanged. Still, he would have been aware that he might become the victim of vendetta.
Shikari just happens to be a tool through which the colonial government gets to easily manipulate and appropriate the event;
Why the fuck would they want to 'appropriate' the killing of policemen? They wanted to punish those responsible. True, if the police extorted money or beat or raped some people in the area, that was just a perk of office for them.
to make things easier, the nationalist leaders were not under any pressure to claim the event as their own either.
They were under great pressure to disavow and condemn it. Otherwise they might lose all their property and end up in the Andamans.
The responses of the other accused were varied and interesting; while some claimed that Shikari had some old enmity with them and was trying to frame them, some others like Abdullah were poignant in pointing out, “Shikari knows me from before. He has turned an approver and if he did not name a number of accused persons, how could he get off”.
This happens in almost all criminal cases.
Though apparently it comes across as “blame,” it is quite clear that the judiciary has appropriated the approver’s testimony.
No. The Judge decided that the approver's testimony had been corroborated as was required by the 1872 Act.
Though there are law books which warn Judges to be careful about the testimonies provided by accomplices, in Chauri Chaura the context of the relationship between the Approver’s Testimony and the judgment is fixed by the politics of the trial.
No. There was no flaw in the trial. That's why nobody bothered to appeal the judgment. Instead, Gandhi's son rushed to the spot and, on 11 February, proposed the raising of a vast relief fund for the families of the policemen who were killed. Each district in the province was required to raise 2000 rupees for this purpose, but Gorakhpur district, because of its greater guilt, was required to produce 10,000 Rs! In a letter to Nehru, Gandhi sought to deflect blame from his son. He wrote- 'Let us not be obsessed by Devidas's youthful indiscretions. It is quite possible that the poor boy has been swept off his feet and that he has lost his balance...' I should explain Devdas did not have any authority to act as he had done. Still, his father was backing his course of action. Why? He already felt that things were getting out of hand. There would be more violence unless he surrendered unilaterally. But this just meant that the Brits must stay on until all Indians become very peaceful because they are either dead or on the point of death or unable to achieve any higher brain function than is required for the turning of a spinning wheel.
One final point. British officials in India had no vested interest in the zamindari system. They were quite prepared to see incidents like the Moplah uprising, or the Chauri Chaura riot, as instances of an emaciated agricultural class trying to rid itself of its, wholly indigenous, oppressors. This is why Nehru- though he does no say so in plain words- opposed the immediate redistribution of land. He knew this is what ICS officers like A.O Hume- who founded the INC- had always wanted. The ryots would have paid a lot less to the Sarkar than they did to the Zamindar and his intermediaries, but the State would have got more money in total. Moreover, the ryot would be see it was in his own interests to pay local cesses for irrigation, schools, roads etc. In other words, India need not remain as poor as shit. It could become increasingly self-administering and self-garrisoning. English officials could focus on more 'value adding' tasks and, after retirement, could get lucrative consultancy work or seats on the boards of Indian companies with offices in London. Manchester would be happy because it could export more to an affluent India. Britain's idle shipyards could re-open to equip a new indigenous Indian Navy.
But if the peasants got what they really wanted, the barristocrats of the INC would be disintermediated. Nehru sought to avert this outcome and thus had to play second fiddle to the Maha-crackpot.
: “This violent event with its iconic status in the history of the Indian nation and Gandhi’s career, equally affords insights into the ways of nationalist historiography” (Amin 1996: xix).
At the time Amin was writing this, Indians thought Chauri Chaura was about Biharis being bestial and only interested in 'Jungle Raj'. Why did Amin not say so bluntly? The answer is obvious. He was doing an elite type of historiography which pretended that a PhD from Oxbridge brought you closer to smelly 'subalterns' (e.g. people like Winston Churchill who came to India as a subaltern or second lieutenant). Inspired by his work, I wrote a history of the British Independence Struggle which featured Adivasi women like Mrs. Thatcher and starving untouchables like Tony Benn who opposed joining the Common Market. Back in 2011, I wrote a blogpost warning the Brits that unless they adopted purely Gandhian methods, they would revert to cannibalism if they threw off the yoke of Brussels. You would once again have Cornish pasties made out of the meat of innocent Cornish men and women. Yorkshire pudding would be made out of the flesh and bones of Geoff Boycott. Welsh rarebit would once again feature the dangly bits of Neil Kinnock. Fortunately, Rishi Sunak read my blogpost and was able to persuade Boris Johnson to achieve Brexit by fasting to death while cramming pork pies into his mouth. Sadly, elite 'nationalist' historiography in Britain has completely failed to mention my crucial role in the British Freedom Struggle.
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