tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post8976023982622082288..comments2024-03-25T14:25:25.102+00:00Comments on Poetry as Socio-proctology: Ananya Vajpayei proves Sanskrit studies is shite.windwheelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18099651877551933295noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-61495189806430251942014-12-01T15:59:23.745+00:002014-12-01T15:59:23.745+00:00Lol! You are most welcome to contribute.Lol! You are most welcome to contribute.windwheelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18099651877551933295noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-47316123468501219452014-11-23T08:20:09.089+00:002014-11-23T08:20:09.089+00:00I can has access to palm-leaf manuscript bandars? ...I can has access to palm-leaf manuscript bandars? Will they bite and/or poop on me? That's ok, as long as I get teh sanskritz. P.S. Your reading of Vajpeyi is right. Everyone knows it. But she'll still get tenure. P.P.S. I like the blog.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-89158713428732920532014-08-18T11:32:29.477+01:002014-08-18T11:32:29.477+01:00'Solidarity — with the weak, the marginal and ...'Solidarity — with the weak, the marginal and the wronged — is not about appropriating the experiences of others to assuage your own conscience or aggrandize your own reputation for being conscientious. From humble beginnings, Ambedkar grew up to be educated and well-off, but he continued living in a chawl until his official duties no longer permitted it. This was something he did without any fuss or advertisement: it was consistent with who he was and what he stood for, not designed to impress anyone or seek attention for himself.'<br />So, Ambedkar stayed in his family home- maybe it was because it really was his family home. Perhaps, he preferred the love and affection of old neighbors to the glacial comfort of a posh bungalow. Ambedkar has credibility because he wrote about what he knew intimately. He wasn't teaching 'Dalit Studies' he was teaching Law because he actually was a first class lawyer.<br />Ananya isn't Dalit, nor does she come from some horrible Manuvad High Caste home. Who, then, does she speak for? Her scholarship is worthless because she is stupid and ignorant. To engage with Ambedkar you need a background in Economics, Sociology and Jurisprudence plus an intimate knowledge of Marathi. To understand Ambedkar's debt to Ayothi Dasan, you would need to consult Tamil texts. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Buddhist studies require Pali and (for comparative work) Magahi and so on.<br />Taking this path leaves no time for apple polishing sycophancy or politically correct diatribes.<br />That's why this sort of work isn't being done in the Academy- or if it is, we don't hear about it.<br />Instead we get this-<br />'A showy and self-serving solidarity without respectful empathy, impassioned hectoring without deliberative reason, and facile identity politics without moral responsibility have brought Indian scholarship, and especially the discipline of history, to a dangerous brink. It is for historians to wrest the knowledge prerogative back from the bigots and charlatans who think they can colonize public consciousness by beating again and again, their loud and hollow drums.'windwheelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18099651877551933295noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-75523267111975610632014-08-18T11:17:51.573+01:002014-08-18T11:17:51.573+01:00Ananya continues- ''... the truth of the m...Ananya continues- ''... the truth of the matter is, without a stable, consistent, and carefully tended corpus of source materials, not just of ambedkar’s writings but those of so many others, like gandhi, nehru, tagore and countless historically important figures, and without some checks on who can publish what and add what notes and make what editorial decisions, scholarly and historiographical work completely loses any kind of verifiable objective basis.<br />'ambedkar is doubtless important for us all, but his works are not a free-for-all. a person who is a publisher not a scholar, and a writer who is an essayist and novelist not a scholar, arguably have little standing or authority to first of all take as their own, and then substantially meddle with, a text like annihilation of caste. without the copyright-owning committee’s express permission, their claim to be putting forth “an annotated critical edition” is further disqualified.<br /><br />i am telling you this in confidence and not in a public forum because you seem to have a genuine concern for the way in which ambedkar gets appropriated and represented. i myself work on ambedkar, and so have no desire or intention to engage with other people’s illegalities and self-promotion. when i am ready with my book, it will contain everything substantive i have to argue about ambedkar’s life, work and importance to us as a nation. but perhaps you could alert activist and ideologue friends in this field that this book that you and they are so exercised about has legal and procedural issues besides having the discursive and political problems that you have so ably alluded to in your article.'<br /><br />So, kids, what have we learnt today?<br />Writing for a magazine, Ananya bemoans the bureaucratic neglect of Ambedkar. Writing in confidence to a fellow lefty Brahmin, she suddenly insists on the legal rights of some 'statutory body' which in fact was so lethargic as to fail to assert its copyright in the Delhi High Court. The result is- Ambedkar's books are 'orphan works'. No one is asserting copyright. It seems that this vaunted 'especially constituted committee' with statutory powers which Ananya tells us is doughtily defending high academic standards, is either moribund or dead or never existed in the first place.<br />But she already knew that.windwheelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18099651877551933295noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-53530299926526376782014-08-18T11:08:37.441+01:002014-08-18T11:08:37.441+01:00'In contemporary India, debates around figures...'In contemporary India, debates around figures from the past and their import, if any, in our lives, are driven by a crude anti-intellectual identity politics and not by the curiosity to learn about the varied, often incommensurable, historical experiences of the diverse communities that constitute the nation. The impulse on the part of certain self-appointed spokespersons for this or that caste group or religious sect is to appropriate a prominent historical person — say Chhatrapati Shivaji, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Subhas Chandra Bose or Swami Vivekananda, to cite some recently controversial examples.<br /><br />'The next step is to control the narratives around these lives, promote certain interpretations and repress, attack or dismiss others, and insist that these legacies belong exclusively to a given group, while everyone else has to keep a distance, or face consequences. Put off by the bellicose posturing of a few rabble-rousers, who make up for in vicious invective and threatening rhetoric what they lack in scholarly rigour, moral authority or rational competence, historians are reluctant to examine such characters closely. Consequently, the dominant representations of genuinely significant figures are often constituted in equal parts of hagiography and propaganda on the one hand, and ignorance and falsehoods on the other.'<br />This is Ananya writing in the Telegraph.<br />But, in a private email attacking Arundhati Roy's book she says this- <br />'one of the things not known to many people is that the writings of phule and ambedkar are controlled and managed by an especially constituted committee with an office in mumbai. it is this committee that has brought out some 22 volumes of ambedkar’s selected works over the years. It was originally headed by the distinguished ambedkar scholar, the late vasant moon, and it has a statutory status in the government of maharashtra, department of education. it basically has all the source materials — the published and unpublished corpus of phule and ambedkar — and is responsible for bringing these out in published form at a low price affordable for a wide cross-section of readers. you may have seen the blue and white hardbound volumes of ambedkar’s selected writings produced by this committee.<br /><br />it is my understanding that without explicit prior permission from this committee, no work by ambedkar may be annotated, edited (critically or otherwise), and published for profit in the public domain by any writer, editor or publisher. if anyone does so, it a violation of copyright and may attract — in fact should attract — legal action.'<br /><br />windwheelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18099651877551933295noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-56781479056611383642014-08-18T10:52:06.604+01:002014-08-18T10:52:06.604+01:00Hilarious!
Pollock's big whinge is about how ...Hilarious! <br />Pollock's big whinge is about how Indian curators don't give him access to their palm-leaf manuscript bhandars. Good to know his disciple- except it turns out she isn't one at all, having turned her back on Skt- are interested in banning books so as to gain more currency for their own illiterate rubbish. Ananyaji has restored my pride in Brahminhood. Stupidity and Ignorance are not enough. Opportunistic Careerism too is a must. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.windwheelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18099651877551933295noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-86632785024148538112014-08-18T10:33:50.607+01:002014-08-18T10:33:50.607+01:00Oh dear. Once again, your supposedly humorous blog...Oh dear. Once again, your supposedly humorous blog has missed the real meat of the joke.<br />Ananya- who protests so vehemently about the Brahmin stranglehold on Sanskrit- sent an email earlier this year to another Brahmin, Akshay Pathak in which she suggested a legal strategy to get Arundhati Roy's book on Ambedkar banned on the grounds that it breached copyright and imperilled serious research. Needless to say, Ananya is due to publish her own book on Ambedkar. Read more here- http://www.thedelhiwalla.com/2014/08/01/letter-leaks-arundhati-roy-nastily-attacked-by-author-basharat-peers-wife-ananya-vajpeyi/<br />Incidentally, she lives in India not the U.S.A as you appear to think.<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com