Sanjay Subhramanyam's Granta interview

 Granta has the following interview with Sanjay Subhramanyam- the brother of India's Foreign Minister. Strangely, at one time, Sanju was considered the brainier of the two. That was because nobody actually read his books. 

Editor:

What modern Indian literature made an impression in your youth?

None. People like me and Sanju read Enid Blyton.  

Did someone like R.K. Narayan matter to you? Did you develop any relationship to the Tamil intellectual world?

Sanju would have been about six or seven years old when the anti-Hindi movement in Tamil Nadu led to Congress being replaced by the anti-Brahmin DMK. Tambrams began thinking of settling in the North or even emigrating. 

RK Narayan was ahead of the curve in that he wrote for the paper associated with the anti-Brahmin Justice Party.

... The fear that haunts many people is of a genuine linguistic impoverishment, when groups in search of social and economic mobility will let go of their grasp of their mother tongues, fail to properly enter the Anglosphere, and remain in a kind of linguistic limbo or no man’s land.

In some states there is resentment that even second or third generation immigrants aren't learning the State language. What if our own urban youth follow this fashion? 

I hope this proves an exaggerated fear, though it is a legitimate one. These were issues that the post-independence modernizers failed to grapple with adequately.

Different States had different approaches and different success rates in spreading literacy. The Central Government did enter the educational field but its impact was limited. 

Editor:

Were they too concerned about further cracks and break-aways from the nation under construction

linguistic reorganization of the States went through. 

or was it more the inertia of a largely English-speaking bureaucracy that they were inheriting?

Bureaucrats played second fiddle to politicians. In any case, all civil servants learn the language of the State in which they serve. 

Did they have other options?

No. A Democracy can't impose a single language on a vast population.  

Subrahmanyam:

There were certainly no easy options, and still are none, but the matter required sustained political and intellectual engagement.

It required resources which Socialist India lacked.  

Certainly not the iron fist used in the Soviet Union to impose Russification and Cyrillization. In the first two decades after Independence, the southern states were probably not given enough of a voice in these discussions, as many of the dominant politicians on the national stage came from the ‘Hindi belt’.

Sadly Tamil politicians like Kamraj & Bhaktavatsalam were pro-Hindi. But Rajaji too had tried to make Hindi compulsory in schools when he formed a Ministry in Madras in 1937. This gave great impetus to what would become the DMK which took power in Tamil Nadu towards the end of the Sixties. Indira Gandhi had been careful to conciliate them and they supported her after she split from Congress. Kamraj's political career was finished.

After Nehru’s death, there were the violent anti-Hindi agitations and the invention in 1968 of what came to be called the ‘three-language formula’ – a national educational policy that mandated students learn English, Hindi, and one regional language – which was in turn perceived as asymmetric in the burdens it placed. In sum, the question remains a sort of open sore, albeit not the only one.

It didn't greatly matter. The problem facing most students was that the English teacher didn't know English. After the failure of Gandhi's 'Wardha Scheme' (Nai Talim), the Central Government became wary of the education issue. That's why the useless Maulana Azad was put in charge of it in the Fifties. 

Editor:

You were too young for the first major dosage of Maoism injected into Indian intellectuals, peasants, and tribals in the 1960s.

Would Mao & Ayub Khan arm and train the Naxals in the Siliguri gap? If the Chinese invaded and conquered Bengal they would reward their sycophants. The other question was whether the CPML could replace the CPM. The answer was no. If you shell out a little money, people will come forward to slit the throats of the Naxals.  

Nevertheless, at an intellectual level, especially in your field of history, the prominent presence of Marxists is unmistakable.

Indira Gandhi supported the Leftist historians and they ruled the roost from the Seventies onward.  

What was the source of the appeal of Marxism to Indian intellectual elites in the 1950s and 1960s and later?

Most people believed that Stalin had turned Russia into an industrial and scientific giant in the space of a generation. Could India achieve the same thing? Probably not. Still, why not pretend otherwise?

Subrahmanyam:

India was not that different in this respect from many other parts of the non-Western world, where Marxism was very appealing in the middle decades of the twentieth century, whether in Turkey, Japan, or Latin America. Further, after 1947, there was no sustained repression against Marxist intellectuals, as happened elsewhere.

The more militant ones were punished. Stalin himself advised the Indian Communists to ally with 'progressive forces' to achieve land reform. Since Communists had been doing quite well in elections in the Thirties, in some States, it made sense to follow the 'Browder thesis' and seek to take power through the ballot box. In 1957, the Left came to power in Kerala- this was hailed as the first time Communism had prevailed by democratic means.  

They were even able to assert themselves and become a kind of lobby, supporting and promoting each other, until a major factional struggle broke out, which it did in the 1960s.

Because of the Sino-Soviet split.  

The appeal of Marxism was of course its claim to unsentimental rigor, its concern for real social change, where the Congress by the 1950s had begun to lose credibility, even among its erstwhile supporters.

Congress had shown that it could do a worse job of running the country than the Brits. The Commies should be given a chance to show that they are even shittier than Congress.  

Eventually, the establishment Marxists allied to the Soviet Union’s line were outflanked on the left by the Maoists with their more radical agenda, but they still remained important.

The CPM prevailed over the 'Maoist' Naxals.  

There were also disparate groups of intellectuals who claimed to be ‘liberals’, but as the analyses by Ram Guha and Chris Bayly have shown, this is a term that is very difficult to make clear sense of in the Indian context.

It is easy enough. Either you are for free-markets or you aren't.  Rajaji's Swatantra party stands out as being for the free-market. But it was seen as reactionary and out of touch. A currency crisis forced Indira Gandhi to devalue & bend the knee to IMF 'structural adjustment'. This was deeply unpopular and was one reason the country moved to the Left. It must be said, the Vietnam war was another factor. The US seemed to be propping up all sorts of corrupt Dictators while the Left was on the side of the toiling masses in those countries. 

Some liberals were in favor of a free market and for less state intervention, while others were just ecumenical in their intellectual tastes,

they were culturally liberal & opposed to some orthodox practices.  

so that ‘liberal’ came to mean someone who was in her/his own view not doctrinaire.

There was little enthusiasm for the thing.  After all, the British Liberal party had declined greatly. 

The difficulty that the Marxists faced was that along with some remarkably creative minds like the great ancient historian D.D. Kosambi,

he was a mathematician 

or Ranajit Guha,

too stupid to get a PhD 

or Susobhan and Sumit Sarkar,

sound enough scholars connected to the Communist party.  

they also attracted many people who were extremely rigid, repetitive, and doctrinaire, and this became even more evident when they were the ones to call the shots in the institutional landscape.

Only the very stupid studied history. The even stupider taught it.  

Editor:

But there must be something more exceptional about the Indian situation.

It was a Democracy. Communist parties could come to power by winning elections. Also, the Soviet Union was a strong friend of India.  

Marxism made more headway in India than it did in many other former British colonies. The conditions seem to have been more propitious for its reception than, say, Pakistan with its larger, more formidable land-owning class.

Islam has good reason to hate Communism. Still, the State was happy to use some Communist intellectuals for its own purposes.  

Is part of the reason that the Congress, with its acquiescence toward landlords,

Mao himself had to be nice to landlords and 'kulaks'. They alone had the food surplus to feed his men. It is easy to say 'get rid of landlords. Get rid of caste.' but the result would be a power vacuum in the districts. Sooner or later, gangs of various types will fight each other for control.  

left itself vulnerable to criticism about persistent caste inequalities and the like?

Different castes could form their own parties and seek to build alliances so as to win elections and take power.  

Subrahmanyam:

From a certain point of view, the resentments created by Pakistan’s class structure should have helped the Marxists, except that by the late 1950s there was already a US-backed Army rule.

The crackdown on the Commies had occurred earlier.  To be fair, most Leftists were sound enough patriots. 

In India, while there was periodic repression, it was more limited, and the communist parties found a place in the system but at the price of a great deal of compromise.

They had to stop pretending they could win an armed struggle.  

They may have had a social and economic agenda, but their leadership was very much drawn from the upper castes. And in the case of West Bengal, over several decades of rule, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) became a machine for the distribution of patronage and thoroughly entrenched in a corrupt rural politics.

The CPM did do a certain amount of land-reform. About 2.3 million acres were redistributed. Hilariously, about 13 'surplus'  acres were taken from the widow of Charu Mazumdar (leader of the Naxals).  

Leaving aside the Maoists, who are not concerned with governing, the two other main parties have gradually been ‘normalized’. Concerns about caste-based inequality are now carried mainly by other parties.

Those 'concerns' are a license to loot the state.  

Editor:

You have recently written with reserved respect of the founder of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha,

at one time people thought he was close to the big-shots in Moscow. He had attended a Communist Youth Conference in Paris after the war which was organised by the man who would become head of the KGB. 

a shadowy yet central figure in the writing of Indian history. But how do you judge the collective over time and as a whole?

People from 'backward' and Scheduled tribes and castes were becoming Chief Ministers at precisely the time when these cretins were pretending that the 'subaltern' can't speak.  

Why do Guha’s incisive raids on historiography — lucid, cutting, brimming with insight no matter how one judges them ultimately — appear so much stronger than later contributions of Subaltern Studies?

Guha was writing nonsense. He thought that the 'European Enlightenment' had a single theory of property. It didn't. It was aware that there were many different types of property regime. Sometimes they coexisted in the same District.  

What happened along the way?

Everybody emigrated. Their students were stupid and mad. Having to read dissertations written by imbeciles is no fun even if you are an imbecile yourself.  

Editor:

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has now been in power for more than a decade. Do you think there is anything like a right-wing intellectual milieu in the country?

Smart people aren't intellectual. Intellectuals aren't smart. 

Subrahmanyam:

There are relatively few historians, sociologists or anthropologists of quality in India today

or elsewhere.  

who both have genuine scholarly stature, and openly sympathize with the BJP. To be sure, there are now such people like Sanjeev Sanyal

an economist and former Banker 

who have penetrated the market for popular history and biography with some degree of success. But this is easy enough with the backing of trade presses and their marketing machinery, even if one writes slapdash and derivative books.

rather than stupid nonsense. 

Editor:

Writing about Indian liberalism has become an academic cottage industry. Some, like Christopher Bayly, have argued that it exercised ‘hegemony’ over Indian thought from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth.

Indian liberals were liberal. Indian conservatives were conservative. The Viceroyalty of Ripon was the high water mark of liberalism. But Ripon's attempt to 'devolve' more power to local authorities failed. District Collectors simply filled the Council with yes-men. 

 Liberalism could not take root at the grassroots level. Religion, on the other hand, did enable 'mass contact'.  Caste and language too were important. Nobody really cared if one or two barrister joined the Viceroy's Council. 

But weren’t other ways of thinking in the country more important than this relatively small kernel?

Yes. Religion was way more important.  Sanju won't admit this obvious fact. 

Subrahmanyam:

Intellectual history in India, and the history of political thought more particularly, is still a fledgling field.

Nope. We know all about it. There really isn't very much to it.  

Bayly and Ram Guha were amongst those who gave it a real push,

Bayly, maybe. Guha- no. He had a 'great man' theory of history. Edward Shils, the American Sociologist, did some quite extensive field-work but few Indians read his work. On the other hand, many relied on Marcus Franda's book on the Naxals. I may mention, the French philosopher Bernard Henri Levi came to India and then Bangladesh because he was enthused by the story of a heroic Maoist movement in rural Bengal. He was chucked out of Bangladesh after published an interview with a Maoist who derided Sheikh Mujib as the tool of Moscow. Pakistan's Yayha Khan was close to Beijing and thus should have been allowed to massacre Bengalis.  

and now there have been other contributions, by historians as well as philosophers and literary scholars. But the difficulty remains the focus on a narrow band of Indian thinkers who mostly wrote in English. And even these are often treated superficially. I wa s quite surprised to see how badly Bayly misunderstood someone like K.M. Panikkar, a

brilliant historian and writer who rose high in the politics of the Princely states before becoming a diplomat 

gadfly and mercenary who became a strange sort of Nehruvian ideologue.

No. He wrote well and was interesting to read but he wasn't an ideologue.  Some in the Indian security establishment- perhaps Sanju's own daddy- thought he had been soft on China. 

What is obviously needed is a set of studies of different regional traditions on the one hand, and a debate on the adequacy of categories like ‘reformers’, ‘conservatives’, ‘liberals’ and ‘secularists’ on the other.

There is no need to waste more time on this. There are negative returns to this sort of mindless 'research'.  

Editor:

For the past few decades India has been remarkably stable compared to its neighbors, where there have been either dramatic regime changes and collapses or ongoing instability.

India has always been stable- even during 'Quit India' the Government prevailed though the enemy was at the gate.  

What kind of effect do you think this stability has had on Indian intellectual and literary culture?

There wasn't very much of it and what there was was boring shite.  

Subrahmanyam:

There has not been any drastic regime change in India comparable to Pakistan or Bangladesh, or a civil war as has happened in Sri Lanka with the Tamil separatist movement. There is no doubt that such changes and upheavals have had a major effect on cultural life in those countries. Meanwhile in India, even though national elections have been regularly held every five years since 1999, the political changes have been more subtle and their effects on intellectual and literary culture have been harder to discern. One turning point was

Rahul's refusing to take over as PM and lead his party to victory in 2014. The result was that 'Hindutva' nationalism has taken over from Nehruvian 'Secular Socialism'.  

the emergence of the BJP as the dominant national party in 2014, a position it continues to hold.

Thanks to Modi. The big surprise is that the BJP has won a big majority in West Bengal. The intellectual climate has changed even in Calcutta. 

This has led to the withdrawal of state patronage to many groups and individuals on the intellectual and cultural scene who had been important in earlier periods of Congress dominance, though some have cleverly navigated the transition.

They hadn't been important. They had been sleeping peacefully while cosseted by the government.  

This has gone hand in hand with the dismantling of some key educational institutions, including universities.

They couldn't be made any shittier.  

Paradoxically, one effect of this has been to reduce the importance of Delhi as a pole, in relation to many of the regional centres.

Delhi is much more affluent now and has acquired a distinct identity. The rise of the AAP party showed that the 'common man' now had much higher aspirations.  

At the same time, the obvious growth in religious and communitarian tensions

they are much less than they were in 1947. Why pretend otherwise?  

has meant an expansion of subjects considered to be taboo, which are not addressed because of self-censorship.

Do you want some jihadis to turn up and chop your hand off? No? Then shut the fuck up.  

The media, both in print and electronic, has particularly been affected by this, though there are some refreshing new trends like the rise of political stand-up comedy.

The CM of Punjab is a comedian.  

Some participants and observers now hope that new sources of cultural and intellectual patronage will emerge, for example from the newly rich in the corporate world. But nothing guarantees either the good taste or the sound ethical orientation of such actors. If anything, my experience with them tells me to be very skeptical.

The newly rich want to get richer. That means investing in STEM subjects and skills training not wasting money on stupid historians.  

Editor:

Historically, a great deal of what became Indian literary culture flowed from Bengal.

Then Bengalis took over from the Brits and wrecked the place. 

When one turns to contemporary India and power, it’s unmistakable how much flows out of Gujarat.

The Arya Samaj was founded by a Gujarati. Parsis are Gujarati. Both Jinnah & Nehru's daughter married Parsis. Jinnah's descendants are Parsis not Muslims.  

Not only the leader of the country but also two of its wealthiest businessmen.

There are plenty of very wealthy Parsi businessmen- e.g. Jinnah's descendants. 

It seems like no accident that Gujaratis occupy a unique place in the Indian state and business. How do you account for this recent resurgence or prominence of Gujaratis in modern Indian society or has it just always been there, starting with Gandhi himself?

Starting with Dayanand Saraswati.  

Subrahmanyam:

Not only Gandhi but Jinnah was from Gujarat, and Gujaratis played a key role in the emergence of Bombay (Mumbai) as India’s leading metropolis in the second half of the nineteenth century. Earlier, between about 1400 and 1800, Gujarat was in many ways a key hub of Indian Ocean commerce, with Gujaratis playing a trading role from the Red Sea and East Africa, to Java and south-eastern China.

Gandhi himself says that his own 'banyan' class helped finance the expansion of the East India Company.  

The Gujarati intellectual and religious tradition was also quite unique, combining orthodox and heterodox forms of Islam, with Hinduism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism.

They all shared a strong work-ethic. Moreover, they believed that character was the true source of wealth. This promoted 'high trust' business networks.  

During the period of the British Empire, the Gujarati diaspora spread further, and in the second half of the twentieth century, they came to settle in increasing numbers in the UK and US. Perhaps because of their reputation as astute business people, the intellectual and cultural role of Gujaratis has been neglected,

but not their religious role. The Swaminarayan movement is Gujarati. Some of the best temples around the world are run by them.  

leaving aside the Parsis (or Zoroastrians). In recent decades, the region’s reputation has also been marred by important incidents of religious violence such as the pogrom carried out against Muslims in 2002.

After Muslims massacred Hindu pilgrims.  

In any event, we know Bengal’s intellectual prominence after 1860 was not based on any corresponding economic prosperity.

Calcutta continued to flourish. The University of Calcutta, set up in 1857, aimed for excellence and did in fact create a large class of graduates with broad intellectual and aesthetic tastes. It must be said, the Bengali 'bhadralok' retain this to this day- though they may be living far away from Bengal.  

It remains to be seen if Gujarat’s economic surge will have an intellectual counterpart.

i.e. will Gujarat produce a class of over-credentialized cretins who demand that the country destroy its economy and surrender to Pakistan?  The answer is- no. Don't be silly. 

Editor:

How would you characterize or describe Indian capitalism today?

There is too little of it in some of the most densely populated parts of the country.  

Someone like Amartya Sen lobs praise at earlier generations of capitalists, such as the Tata family, who – like the Carnegies – build scientific institutes and ‘gave back’ to Indian society. The new capitalists like Gautam Adani

are Hindu. Hindus are very evil.  

seem different, but also perfectly compatible with the Hindutva program of the BJP. Has a break of any kind transpired?

Subrahmanyam:

I have an abiding interest in the long history of capitalism in India, in its many manifestations and from early modern times onwards. The Tatas were very good at managing their public image and papering over some of the more unsavory aspects of their history, with regard to the opium trade or financing British colonial expeditions.

The Parsis rose thanks to the British. What is remarkable is that some Parsis took the lead in Nationalist politics. One reason for this may have been police indifference to Muslim violence targeting Parsi neighbourhoods. Often, the cause of the attack was some article published by a Parsi intellectual.  

But they did provide a certain model of philanthropy and personal frugality, which was then adopted by members of groups like Infosys, as distinct from the ostentatious vulgarity of the Ambanis, for example. 

Even worse is the rise of the middle class more particularly if they are Hindu. Also, why has Modi not surrendered to Pakistan and converted to Islam? Is it because Gujarat has failed to produce a class of intellectuals?  

The real problem of the last three or four decades has been the explosion of the dollar billionaire class (of whom there are now nearly three hundred), who often practice versions of pretty open crony capitalism.

This was the case in Nehru's India- or Jyoti Basu's Bengal.  

Of course, this happened elsewhere too, as David Cannadine’s study of Andrew Mellon in the US shows

Which Indian businessman was appointed Finance Minister? TTK. But that was under Nehru.  

The real question is whether it will be possible to produce a capitalism with a real emphasis on smaller entrepreneurs, and markets that are competitive rather than manipulated and monopolized by Indian ‘robber barons’.

In other words, Sanju wants a capitalism in which the capitalist has no fucking capital and thus can't gain economies of scope and scale.  

The issue also remains whether this is a process in which participation will go beyond the usual suspects, which is to say the mercantile castes and Brahmins.

Patels are agriculturists. So are Jat Sikhs. They seem to do very well in business.  

Some significant counterexamples do exist of course. I note that some analysts are still optimistic about this ‘trickle-down’, as works on India’s ‘new capitalists’ suggest. However, the jury is still out.

The jury ran away when they discovered that nobody would pay them. 

Editor:

When one listens to the BJP home minister Amit Shah talk about the greatest threats facing India, it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether he and the rest of the BJP think it’s Naxalites, Khalistan supporters, farmers, human rights activists and western NGOs, or Pakistan.

It is Pakistan. Them guys have nukes.  

Then there is the matter of trying to maneuver between the US and China.

The US has told India to fuck off. It has to find a modus vivendi with China.  

What do you think the greatest strategic dangers to India actually are?

Pakistan. They are bound to try some stupid shit. 

Subrahmanyam:

As Tzvetan Todorov wrote in his book The Fear of Barbarians (2008), many forms of nationalism generate paranoia, and see enemies everywhere, both within and without.

Communist paranoia is worse. Todorov was Bulgarian.  

To me, one can translate this into a different language. There is obviously concern on the part of the Indian state that with a form of accelerated economic growth that is accompanied by widening inequalities, various sizeable groups of disenfranchised people – whether the urban poor, or marginal peasants and footloose rural labor, or tribals whose lands have been expropriated – will want better political representation and living conditions.

Such people aren't 'disenfranchised'. They have the vote and know how to use it to get 'last mile delivery' of essential items.  

These struggles could turn violent in India, as elsewhere.

What would be the point? Killing the golden goose means no more golden eggs which can be sold to finance the welfare system.  

That is undoubtedly a long-term threat to the viability of the political system as it stands, and it needs more than band-aids as a response.

What it doesn't need is advise from a cretin.  

On the external front, the focus has been on threats from Pakistan and China for decades now. But it has turned out that in the short to medium term, the real ‘rogue’ polity is the US, which cannot be counted on as an ally either by India, or even by Europe, or Japan.

India had hoped that something would come of the 'Quad'- i.e. a naval alliance against China. 

The emergent new world order of which my father – the defense strategist K. Subrahmanyam – wrote, in the years before his passing in 2011, seems hopelessly optimistic now. India will have to brace itself for a rough ride, but so will the rest of the world.

Indeed. India will have to defund non-STEM subjects and focus on imparting work-skills. It will need to create more and more Marshallian industrial districts capable of doing their own R&D. Raise general purpose productivity and supply becomes more elastic. But you also have to fix the Justice system so total factor productivity can rise. This is stuff Sanjeev Sanyal understands. Sanju, sadly, has wasted his life. If you can't understand the present, you can't understand the past.  

Vivek Chibber on Friedman

Copilot tells me-
Neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism primarily in its historical context, policy emphasis, and role of the state. Classical liberalism (18th–19th century) focused on protecting individual rights and limiting state power, while neoliberalism (late 20th century) revived some of those ideas but pushed them further—especially in favor of deregulation, privatization, and globalized markets.

🧭 Core Differences at a Glance


1. Historical context

Classical liberalism emerged in the 18th–19th centuries as a reaction against monarchy and mercantilism,

Sometimes it was also anti-Clerical (i.e. against the overweening demands of the Established Church) and was critical of the militarized Aristocracy- e.g. Junkers in Germany
emphasizing individual rights and free markets.

If profit remains in private hands, it is less likely to end up financing an oppressive regime. The Marxist counter-argument was that private Capital could hold the working man hostage- forcing him to work longer hours for a bare subsistence.

The Marginal Revolution (which overturned Classical Economics) showed how monopoly or monopsony or cartels reduced allocative efficiency and imposed a 'dead weight' loss on society. Furthermore, since the rich gain less 'marginal utility' from an extra dollar, they may be happy to pay higher marginal tax rates so that the very poor can survive with a modicum of dignity. Furthermore, nuisances & demerit goods (e.g. pollution or addictive drugs) could be taxed and the revenue could be used to promote merit goods or to repair damage done to the Environment.

We may say that Neo-Liberalism flows from the Marginal Revolution. Unlike Classical Liberalism, it is not attached to the notion that Society needs a class of leisured gentlemen with a Country Estate and a Town House in Capital which they can stay in while attending Parliamentary Sessions.

Economics & Politics could develop in a meritocratic and technocratic manner.
Neoliberalism rose in the 1970s–1980s as a response to Keynesian economics

which gave the Government a big role in the economy. This was necessary during the War and for post-War recovery as well as the acquisition of new weapon systems- e.g. nuclear missiles, satellites etc.
and the welfare state,

which was now taxing the working class on behalf of unemployed 'Welfare Queens'. Worse, it was subsidising loss making industries which were being run inefficiently.
promoting market-driven reforms.

which also meant that particular Trade Unions could not hold the country to ransom.

2. Role of the state

Classical liberalism: The state should be minimal—protect property rights, enforce contracts, and maintain order.

This was like the British Raj. India was literally a 'nightwatchman state' where the only public officials most people ever saw was the 'chowkidar' (night-watchman) unless someone in the village was literate enough to receive a letter carried by the post-man.

Neoliberalism: The state should actively reshape society to promote markets—deregulate industries, privatize services, and enforce competition.

Thus, in the UK, Mrs. Thatcher broke up the cosy relationship between stock-brokers, stock-jobbers (market makers) and discount houses. Suddenly, 'a job in the City' didn't mean putting on a bowler hat and having long lunches before departing for the weekend huntin', fishin' or shootin' in the country. Instead, you had chaps with degrees from the LSE with unpleasant accents who considered it a virtue to eat a sandwich at their desk while poring over computer print-outs.
This is not “no state,” but a market‑enabling state.

where women & darkies could thrive if they worked harder or were smarter than the rest. The blue blooded Gentleman had been pushed out of Politics & Government Service on the grounds that he was an amateur. Then the Law had been taken over by ghastly oiks from Grammar Schools. Now, even the City of London had become hostile territory for the toff.

3. Economic policy

Classical liberalism: Free markets with minimal regulation; belief in the “invisible hand.”

As opposed to the local magistrate fixing the price of bread and then scratching his head when bread became unavailable.
Neoliberalism: Aggressive deregulation, privatization, free trade agreements, and reduced welfare spending—essentially “classical liberalism on steroids.”

No. During the Seventies, there was stagflation and negative real interest rates. The thing was unsustainable. Everybody kept going on strike- even the grave diggers & the garbage collectors. Society was tearing itself apart.

4. Globalization

Classical liberalism supports free trade but was not shaped by modern global capitalism.

Neoliberalism embraces globalization as a core strategy—NAFTA, WTO frameworks, and global supply chains.

The rise of Sanders & Trump in 2015/16 put the world on notice that 'globalization' might be rolled back.

5. Social welfare

Classical liberalism: Generally indifferent to welfare; assumes markets will produce fair outcomes.

Or that nothing much can be done for the poor for a reason Malthus explained. Doesn't Christ say in the Bible 'The poor ye shall have always with you'?
Neoliberalism: Often reduces welfare programs,

or seeks, ineffectually, from letting them grow
arguing markets allocate resources more efficiently.

than who? The Beloved Leader?

Remarkaby, the Marginal Revolution blog has praise for the following interview published in 'Jacobin'

Power, Not Economic Theory, Created Neoliberalism
Interview with Vivek Chibber

Neoliberalism didn’t win an intellectual argument — it won power.

Power was ebbing away from States with ever increasing Public Sector Borrowing Requirements. Either they could turn into Banana Republics racked by hyper-inflation, or they could reform their finances.

Vivek Chibber unpacks how employers and political elites in the 1970s and ’80s turned economic turmoil into an opportunity to reshape society on their terms.

There was a displacement of elites. Out went the toffs and the three-Martini lunch Corporate Executives, in came the asset-stripping 'private equity' maven backed by Institutional Investors who wanted to get a better return for Joe Lunch-pail who was paying into a Pension Fund or Insurance scheme.

 

Neoliberalism’s victory over Keynesianism wasn’t an intellectual revolution

Yes it was. Previously, the most that was claimed for the market was that under ideal conditions it could be as good- not better- than the best 'Command Economy' outcome. That's what the two fundamental theorems of Welfare Econ & the 'folk theorem' of repeated games say. Then towards the end of the Sixties you have a whole bunch of mathematical results re. concurrency, computability, complexity, categoricity etc. which showed that no algorithmic process can yield the optimal result. Markets may be non-deterministic. They may involve 'co-evolved' process which tame complexity. In any case, volatility isn't a bad thing in itself. The 'volatility smile' may drives liquidity by concentrating trading activity in a manner which is 'regret minimizing' for the system as a whole. After all, we live in a world where all future states of the world, and their probability, are not known.

— it was a class offensive.

Against WASP elites who went to the right schools though, no doubt, some of the more presentable Corporate Executives, who had begun life on the Accountancy coal-face, may have been tolerated.

 

To roll it back, the Left doesn’t need to win an argument so much as it needs to rebuild working-class institutions from the ground up.

That would be worth doing, in any case.

Chibber speaks of Keynes as 'a blue blood from the upper crust of British society'. This is not true. His family were brush manufacturers in Salisbury. They were not aristocrats, clergymen or Army officers. They didn't attend public schools or go to University. Keynes's father did study at quite a good private school and then went to London's University College which had only been around for 40 years or so. He then went to Cambridge & settled down as a Lecturer on Economics. His son won a scholarship to Eton and then a scholarship to Cambridge University. He excelled in Mathematics but was also popular for his charm and wit. Had he not been so smart, he might have ended up as a clerk in a brush making concern in a provincial town. As things were, he placed second in the Civil Service exam. Otto Niemeyer came first and thus got the Treasury. Keynes placed second and got the India Office which was boring and declining in importance. He quit after a couple of years. That is why Marshall could lure him back to Academia by using his own money to pay Keynes's salary. In a sense this was the making of him because he could write what he liked and say what he pleased. Thus he eclipsed Niemeyer during the War as an advisor to the Government from 1915 onward . They particularly liked his buccaneering approach which was similar to that of the seasoned stock-broker or noveau riche City financier.

Thus, put simply, Power needed Keynes at a time when it was having to raise vast sums to defend itself & prevent military defeat. However, he was opiniated & Ministers had cause to fear his sharp pen. Both 'Economic Consequences' of the Peace & (later) Winston Churchill were of interest to a wider reading public.

After markets failed to recover from the crash, all governments had to focus on economic policy. One way or another, there was increased intervention. Keynes stood out for providing a seemingly 'scientific' justification for ignoring the deficit and increasing Government expenditure. But this would happen anyway because of re-armament.

Chibber says-

It’s not just that Keynes’s ideas were revolutionary, and the right ideas at the right time, and therefore they were taken up.

Actually, it was Oswald Moseley (later to found the British Union of Fascists) who set the ball rolling with this Memorandum of 1930 which called for high tariffs to protect British industries from international finance and transform the British Empire into an autarkic trading bloc (the cry for Imperial Preference had been around for decades) , for state nationalisation of main industries, for higher school-leaving ages and pensions to reduce the labour surplus, and for a programme of public works to solve interwar poverty and unemployment.

Keynes liked it but struck a cautious note-
'I like the spirit which informs the document. A scheme of national economic planning to achieve a right, or at least a better, balance of our industries between the old and the new, between agriculture and manufacture, between home development and foreign investment; and wide executive powers to carry out the details of such a scheme. That is what it amounts to. ... [The] manifesto offers us a starting point for thought and action. ... It will shock—it must do so—the many good citizens of this country... who have laissez-faire in their craniums, their consciences, and their bones ... But how anyone professing and calling himself a socialist can keep away from the manifesto is a more obscure matter'

In other words, Keynes is saying, the majority of English people- who believe in thrift, hard work & the sanctity of private property will refuse to have anything to do with this scheme. Thus, it is unworkable. Still, crazy Socialists should be queuing up to support it.

 

If Keynes had been working at a community college somewhere or a technical institute, nobody would have ever known who he is.

Hardly anybody had heard of Otto Niemeyer though he probably did have his hand on the economic levers for at least some of that period. Keynes had a gift for self-publicity. Moreover he moved easily between the 'aesthetic' Bloomsbury set & Whitehall & the City of London. Meanwhile, mathematical economics was developing rapidly. After the crash, in America the Cowles Foundation was set up in 1932. Economics might be like engineering. Get in mathematicians to figure out how to raise efficiency. Talk of Class was old hat. Even in the Soviet Union, a similar mathematical economics was coming into existence. Indeed, there seemed a 'convergence' between the results being produced on both sides of what Churchill would call 'the iron curtain'.

Would what we call Keynesianism have prevailed even if Keynes himself repudiated it? Yes. Why? Rearmament did in fact put an end to the Depression. FDRs more Socialist methods had faltered & finally puttered out.

 

What he also had going for him was that he was the editor of the Economic Journal, which was the most influential journal at the time, the key journal of economics.

It would be fair to say that, because Keynes was Marshall's anointed successor, two generations of economists who had learnt the subject from the latter's 'Principles', could not dismiss Keynes out of hand. But, Marshall himself knew that nobody cares very much for Academic Economists. Keynes had the added glamour of combining the persona of a Government Adviser with that of Stock Market buccaneer.

He was also positioned at Cambridge University, which automatically made him extremely influential.

No. Plenty of dons wanted no political influence though they dearly loved to be seen with a Dowager Duchess.

And he had been moving in policy circles for twenty years already.

It would be fair to say that Keynes's students or collaborators had a vested interest in promoting his Gospel. During the War anyone who could claim some sort of economic expertise could get a cushy government job. Sadly, this remained the case after the war because of rationing & the need to acquire nuclear weapons & space rockets.

So, this is an instance where somebody who is a blue blood, who was in the halls of power, who has tremendous influence, bolts from economic orthodoxy, and presents ideas that at the time are very iconoclastic,

One might say that Keynes, because of his prominence, was under pressure to champion common sense. Thrift is a good thing in an individual. If the whole of Society becomes more thrifty, it becomes poorer. In logic, this is the 'fallacy of composition'.  

which go against the received wisdom but are very appealing to policymakers who are looking for a way to justify breaking with policy orthodoxy. The combination of his being very well-positioned, very influential already, and then making an extremely elegant argument, put his ideas in a place where they could actually be used. Otherwise nobody would have known who he was

No. This is an instance of Marshall's anointed heir doing the needful so deficits could grow without sober, hardworking, people growing suspicious that this was some sort of plutocratic swindle. There were plenty of people who believed that all the Bolsheviks were Jews in league with their cousins in Wall Street.

It may be, if Frank Ramsey had lived, then the whole Keynesian theory could have been given a 'canonical' representation.   

The thing about Alfred Marshall was that he represented late Victorian ultra-respectability. Keynes might be a bit flashy, but he isn't a Jew-boy. His people were brush-makers in Salisbury.

Chibber mentions 'bastard Keynesianism'. This is the idea that money wages are downwardly sticky. Workers are too stupid to understand the 'real balance effect'. Thus the government needs to prevent deflation which would set off a vicious cycle of unemployment leading to lower aggregate demand leading to more unemployment.

However, all sorts of prices are 'sticky' or 'administered. There is a combination of fix-price & flex-price markets. In the former excess supply or demand goes up or down. In the latter, prices go up and down so there all markets clear.

Chibber isn't saying 'if you teach in a top College you will have influence'.

even if Milton Friedman had not existed, even if Hayek had not existed, you would have still had a turn to neoliberalism, and that’s the key. This is what the Left needs to understand.

i.e. that they were wrong to keep gassing on about class conflict. Don't print too much money & then expect a price/wage freeze to eliminate inflation. That's all Friedman said. Once this became blindingly obvious, he could take the credit for it while Galbraith, who had been the previous cock of the walk, had to take a back seat. Hayek was part of a wider network of European and American intellectuals who wanted 'small government'. It was irksome that Americans could not own gold or that European tourists could only draw a limited amount of foreign exchange.  There were too many well-paid civil servants doing nothing productive while inflation eroded the standard of living of people who had worked hard for their pensions. 

It would be fair to say that magazines & TV shows were able to communicate economic ideas to the much better educated post-War voter than even FDR's 'fireside chats'. In Britain, you had Brian Walden on TV methodically tearing down the older sort of Cabinet Minister who repeated 'Butskellite' cliches. But what mattered most was fiscal drag. Inflation meant your pay packet went up but you were dragged into the tax net. Suddenly, you started to hate the 'scroungers' and 'welfare queens'. Self-employed people were furious that feather-bedded Unions were holding the nation to ransom while they were having to work harder and harder just to maintain their standard of living

There are only two key players when it comes to policy changes of this kind.

There is only one player. Financial markets. If they think your policy is shit, they sell, sell, sell. Look at Liz Truss. She was popular but she only lasted 50 days as Prime Minister. Things are different in America but if markets are in turmoil Congress grows restive and you lose the mid-terms.  

The key players are the politicians, because they’re the ones who are pulling the levers. But then, it’s the key constituency that actually has influence over the politicians.

The least important part is intellectuals. You might say voters have some degree of influence, but really, in a money-driven system like the United States, it’s investors, it’s capitalists — it’s big capital.

Financial markets rather than this capitalist or that capitalist.  

They’re the ones who are pushing for these changes.

That means that if you want to understand where neoliberalism comes from, or rather if you want to understand why it came about, the answer is, it came about because capitalists ceased to tolerate the welfare state.

Markets pay for the welfare state. If they take fright, you borrow at higher and higher real rates of interest to finance transfers. This 'crowds out' private spending and investment leading to stagnant productivity & excess capacity- which means more people are on the dole and thus transfer spending has to go up yet again. This is a vicious circle which everybody became aware of during the Seventies.  

Now, why did they tolerate the welfare state at all? Most people on the Left understand the welfare state was brought about through massive trade union mobilization and labor mobilizations and was kept in place as long as the trade union movement had some kind of presence within the Democratic Party, within the economy more generally, because those unions were powerful enough, employers had to figure out a way of living with them.

The way to do this was to threaten to shut down unless they got a Government bail-out. So you have Labour on the dole & Capital on the dole & the self-employed either emigrating or shifting to the black economy. This is the Latin American solution. Your cab-driver has a government job as an engineer but the pay isn't enough to buy groceries. So he bunks off work (there is no work for him to do, because the money in the budget has run out) to drive a cab. At night he waits tables. He is trying to get his hands on some dollars so as to be able to emigrate.  

Part of what they did to live with the trade unions was to agree to a certain measure of redistribution and a certain kind of welfare state.

The reverse is the case. The Unions need the welfare state otherwise desperate non-Union workers will be 'black-legs'. But they won't be happy. The Communist Party will grow till some crazy Fascists gain power and you get a gangster regime.  

As long as that was the case, politicians kept the welfare state going.

It is still going. Work-fare was popular with African Americans because they want strong families- not Welfare Queens.  

This is why, in that era from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s, Keynesianism or the economics of state intervention of some kind was the hegemonic economic theory.

Re-armament, War, Post-War reconstruction, and then the Cold War meant that the Public sector didn't get scaled back. On the one hand, 'state capacity' had increased. But there were diseconomies of scale to bureaucracy.  

The theory became hegemonic because it was given respectability by virtue of the fact that everybody in power was using it. Because it’s being used by people in power, it has great respectability.

No. So long as unemployment was low and prices weren't rising too much, politicians pretended that they were very wise or, at least, that they listened to very wise men.  

This is why, in the 1950s and ’60s, Milton Friedman was in the wilderness — same guy, same ideas, equally intellectually attractive, equally technically sophisticated, but he was in the wilderness.

No. He said that he was in the Academic wilderness in the Forties- i.e. before McCarthy & Eisenhower. But his mathematical skills permitted his employment by the Federal Government. He designed the payroll withholding Tax scheme needed to fund the War. He was a reputable economist but it was his articles for Newsweek from '66 onward which really pushed him into the limelight. Like Galbraith, he wrote well and his 'Free to Choose' TV series from 1980 onward made him a celebrity. Sadly, his theories weren't working out too well for Thatcher & Reagan both of whom did a quiet U-turn. 

In fact, I’ll tell you a little story. I was in the archives in India when I was researching my first book on planning. And lo and behold, I find a letter from an International Monetary Fund economist. That letter is a three-page letter sent to the Planning Commission of India on how to plan effectively, on how to do price controls correctly, on how to manage demand conditions. It seems like it’s coming from some dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian economist. The author was Milton Friedman.

This is nonsense.  

In 1955, the Indian government was engaged in preparing its Second Five Year Plan and, because the US was a big donor, it  asked the Eisenhower administration for assistance. It sent Friedman & Neil Jacoby- a right-wing advisor to the Republican administration. Friedman went to India in the fall of 1955 under the auspices of the U.S. International Cooperation Administration (as the foreign aid agency was dubbed at the time). Once in New Delhi, Friedman was assigned to advise Mr. C. D. Deshmukh, the Minister of Finance- a right-wing ICS man who resented the powers usurped by the Planning Commission. His memo reflects the thinking of centre-right Indians who wanted light industry- e.g. textiles-  to expand and to earn foreign currency to pay for investment in heavy industyr. 

Friedman wrote- 'The chief problem in the Indian program that impresses on the tendency to concentrate investment in heavy industry at one extreme and handicrafts at the other, at the expense of small and moderate size industry. This policy threatens an inefficient use of capital at the one extreme by combining it with too little labour and an inefficient use of labour at the other extreme by combining it with too little capital. The presumption for an economy like India’s is that the best use of capital is in general somewhere in between, that heavy industry can best develop and be built upon a widely diversified and much expanded light industry. We may hasten to add that this is only a general presumption which may well admit of special exceptions. Perhaps, for example, the steel industry is one exception in India.' 

This was what Indian industrialists were thinking at the time. Maybe the Soviets & East Germans & so forth can set up good steel plants which make a profit. The steel can then be used in construction and for making 'wage-goods' e.g. bicycles which we can export. Friedman knew little of India but he was talking to Oxbridge educated people- some with a business background, others from elite Government cadres. He is saying what they- and Deshmukh- want him to say- viz. ' Cutting off particular investment projects may not make resources available for other uses but may simply eliminate savings that would otherwise have been available. Much saving is made to finance specific investment projects. If it cannot be used for that purpose, it may well be directed to consumption or to the accumulation of bullion or its equivalent.' This paints a vivid picture to an Indian but not to an American (who was forbidden to hold gold at that time). 

Why is Friedman writing this letter in the language of a mid-century technocrat committed to state control?

There is no such letter. Deshmukh wanted him to say what he actually did say. He didn't want to linger in India. The climate is horrible. You get dysentery. If you want to help the poor, go to Israel which was very poor at the time.  

He was seeking entrée. He knew that “if I want to be relevant, if I want to be heard, I’m going to have to give them advice of the kind they want to hear.”

He was saying what the Finance Minister wanted him to say. Sadly, Nehru wasn't interested.  

I’m not saying he sold out. I think he believed what he believed, but he said, “My ideas don’t have a chance in hell right now. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to do the best I can, given the filters that are in place.” And the filters in India at that time were, “We don’t want to hear from you anti-planners. We’re going to do planning. If you want to be of use to us, tell us how to plan better.” Friedman said, “OK, my free market stuff is out the window. I’m going to be as good a planning economist as possible.”

This simply isn't true. He had helped Deshmukh put the Finance Ministry's view- stuff like switching  to value added taxation to get more revenue & less disincentive for the organised sector (which it is cheaper and more convenient to tax) . But Nehru was the head of the Planning Commission. He didn't understand that, for poor people, only Budgets matter.  

That little story tells you something. What it says is ideas that are going into the halls of power go through certain filters. And the filters are essentially the policy priorities that the politicians have already committed to. Now, what creates those priorities? It’s the balance of class power. Social forces are setting the agenda.

What was setting the agenda in India was stupidity- that of Nehru & Mahalanobis. The second 5 year plan ran out of money very quickly.  

If the social forces, that is, say, trade unions and community organizations, have set the agenda for politicians such that they think the only rational thing to do is to institute a welfare state, then they will bring in economists who help them design a welfare state. That gives intellectual influence to those economists. Economists who are saying “Get rid of this whole thing” are cast out into the wilderness. That’s how it works.

I suppose you could say that a lot of sensible economists in India were 'cast into the wilderness'- i.e. they emigrated to the US or UK. But they made more money. 

In the 1970s and ’80s, those policy priorities — that is to say, the New Deal as a priority — changed for reasons that have nothing to do with intellectual influence.

In other words, the goal of minimizing unemployment was given up. One reason was that 'transfers' (i.e. how much you could get on the dole) had risen. Why get a job in the factory when you could strum your guitar & plan for how to spend your millions after you became a pop star? 

The change came about when the American government was now committed to rolling back and dismantling the welfare state and giving more rein to free markets.

It turned out voters would tolerate mass unemployment on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. All they cared about was real wages- i.e. inflation was Public Enemy number one. The elderly were able to organize themselves politically so as to get a pretty sweet deal. Nobody gave a shit about trailer trash or the Projects. 

Once that happens, this little guy who was out in the wilderness for thirty years

He was doing well in Chicago. Had Goldwater won, he'd have been in clover. Nixon, sadly, was the first and last avowed Keynesian. Had Reagan, not Ford, taken the Republican ticket and defeated Carter, Friedman would have been in clover. As it was, Carter appointed Volcker who was a monetarist of a sort. But Friedman's  ideas were gaining influence even in the British Labour Party.  

named Milton Friedman suddenly comes to the center of the halls of power and his ideas now get circulation. They get circulation because politicians now are willing to hear him. That’s what drives it.

If a guy calls the market right and the market knows the guy did so, it makes sense to pretend to be doing what that guy tells you to do because his prophesies might be 'self-fulfilling'. But this is true in many other fields. The guy famous for predicting a war or an epidemic or whatever is the guy everybody wants to be chummy with. 

Therefore, when I said previously that Friedman had won the debate by the end of the 1970s, I mean that he won out because the political anchor that had sustained the Keynesian economists had come loose.

In other words, higher inflation wasn't reducing Inflation. There was Stagflation.  

What happened was that the ship was now being redirected in the direction of neoliberalism.

No. Raising inflation was now itself raising unemployment for a reason Friedman explained in his Nobel lecture. Countries which continued to do stupid shit had hyperinflation and began to look more and more like banana republics. 

Ideas can have power, but only if they’re attached to agencies with power.

Agencies with power look for ideas which will enable them to keep that power or else they lose it sooner rather than later. The same is true of Agencies with money or Agencies with great fashion sense or Agencies that are very good at making people laugh so hard they shit themselves. 

In and of themselves, free-floating ideas only have power if people who have an interest in seeing those ideas fulfilled and have the power to then effectuate those ideas take them on.

This happens, if they are ideas which yield greater power. Consider Islam. Iranians like it but nobody thought it could yield power in this world rather than felicity in the next. Ayatollah Khomeini's dynamite idea was 'velayet-e-faqih', guys like himself should extend their duty to help the poor to taking over the entire state. Many Ayatollahs became billionaires.  Those who didn't like them were beaten or killed or ran the fuck away. 

These are the two key things. They have to be attached to agencies of some kind: social forces, organizations, institutions with power.

A Trade Union is an institution. It may have a lot of power. But, if it overplays its hand & the industry shuts down, then it has no members and no money.  

And then those institutions and agencies have to see their own interests as being expressed and aligned with the ideas.

No. They have to get money to stay operational.  

So let’s go back to neoliberalism. How did the free-market ideas attain influence?

Markets are useful. We buy and sell stuff on them. That's how ideas about them gained influence. Sadly, some of those ideas were stupid. Others weren't and enabled 'market makers' to become very fucking rich.  

It’s because capitalists and wealthy people in the United States pushed for a shift away from the welfare state for reasons that had nothing to do with the appeal of the ideas.

Women pushed for a shift away from rape for reasons that had nothing to do with the appeal of the idea to rapist scumbags.  

Chibber's basic point has to do with Galbraith's 'countervailing power' argument for Trade unions. Faced with a monopsony (single buyer), maybe a monopoly (single seller) improves allocative efficiency. If employers are 'cartelised' let there be 'collective bargaining' with a single Union. Sadly, technology changes, tastes change, the fucking A-rabs put oil prices up, wars in distant countries start costing us blood and treasure. What worked 50 years ago doesn't work now- e.g. my penis. 

Why can't we go back to the way things used to be? I'll tell you the answer. Compound interest. The passage of time causes the interest accruing to Capitalists to go on increasing. That is why, when Biden said 'let me put the calendar back to 1972' the Capitalists said 'No! Then we'd have to give back all the compound interest we have collected! Kindly, take one for the team and just turn senile already.'

That's the only reason Trump is now POTUS

Jamir Nazir's excellent story

 Granta has published an excellent story by Jamir Nazir who is from Trinidad. 

There is now some controversy as whether it was actually written by an AI because though it passes a Human Turning test it has failed that of an AI! 

Interestingly, this controversy echoes the theme of the story itself. 

I give the story below. I have added some cultural and religious notes regarding things which may not be known to non-Indic origin readers. 

I omit two notions which most English speakers will already be familiar with viz. Milton showing, in Paradise Lost, that the mutual love between man & wife is itself Paradise though both must work hard and suffer much pain in this world. The other is the notion that Samsara is itself Nirvana, Earth is itself Heaven, for those who are enlightened. 

The Serpent in the Grove
Jamir Nazir


In partnership with Commonwealth Foundation, Granta presents the regional winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Jamir Nazir’s story is the winning entry from the Caribbean.

They say the grove still hums at noon.

At which time orthodox Hindus do 'Sandhyavandhanam' while Muslims offer the 'Dhuhr' prayer.  

Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound – as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there.

In Persian or Urdu poetry, there is an expression 'the meaning of the poem remains in the belly of the poet'. This is often said of mystical verse of a cognitively complex type (e.g. the ghazals of Bedil) 

People who pass keep to the track and do not look into the bush where the stone rings lie. Ask the oldest in the village and you’ll hear some version of: ‘It had a well there once, and a woman. The grove ain’t forget.’

So the action of the narrative is set some generations ago.  

Sun on galvanise is a cruel instrument. It beats until the roof talks back in a dry moan. The day the grove began to remember, the roof over Vishnu Mohammed’s shack groaned like a drumskin too tight for the heat.

Vishnu is the Hindu God who sustains the universe. Mohammed, of course, is the prophet of Islam. It seems an unlikely combination of names. Perhaps Vishnu was an orphan raised by a syncretic, Kabirpanthi, family.  The drum, of course, is the damaru of Shiva- the destroyer. 

This is a picture of Lord Vishnu resting upon Shesha, the cosmic serpent. It can be found in many Hindu households. 

Inside, air clung thick as porridge skin: damp earth, woodsmoke, and the sour tang of fermenting cocoa. A soot-blackened lamp hung from a nail. No fan, no bulb, no hum – only the thin light slipping between warped boards and the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.

Vishnu was twenty-five wearing the face of fifty. Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission. His eyes narrowed against the glare outside and the darker glare inside him: old promises that never ripened, the ache where hope should live, a gnawing sense that land can own a man while making him swear the land belongs to him.

Trinidad may be Edenic but Vishnu is an Adam forced to feed himself by the sweat of his brow.  

It wasn’t much land – an acre and a bit, hacked from government forest with cutlass and stubborn back. Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all. He knew every root that tripped a foot, the snake-curve of run-off, the brittle crumble after drought. He worked it alone and most days the land worked him back, a quiet quarrel older than his father and his father’s father. He could name the price of rice in the shop, the price buyers would give for wet cocoa, and how the distance between the two left a man short.

Sita moved quiet as if sound were taxed.

Sita is the daughter of Mother Earth to which she angrily returns when her husband Lord Ram is urged to get rid of her because she had been the captive of an enemy King and thus her chastity might well have been smirched. She is worshipped as a 'pativrata'- one who kept her vows to her husband. 

Nineteen and brown like dust after rain, she turned roti dough with a rhythm that came not from joy but from endurance. Orphan was too kind a word. Orphans are sometimes cradled.

Sita was found by King Janaka as he ploughed the land. She symbolises agriculture.  

Sita had been passed like a parcel from kin who were hungry for everything except another mouth; she learned to make herself small, to take the shape of whatever container held her. Someone decided two solitudes might cancel each other out and married her to Vishnu. They did not cancel. She wore her role without protest and without light; both things can be true.

Outside, little Puttie – three years old, sun-dark, bright-eyed – chased a yard fowl through dust, his laughter like water over pebbles. Laughter can cut a hush, not cure it. Water was half a mile away; every drop hissed in the pan had been carried on somebody’s spine.

Puttie might mean bandage.  

Vishnu thirsted for something else.

Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth. Inside, boards blackened by smoke and sweat, the air sweet with cane and forgetting. Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.

She moved through that shop like heat through dry bush.

They called her Zoongie.

Zangee is an Eel like fish that inhabits fresh water ponds and waterways

Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.

i.e. even old wooden benches would 'get wood'. This is 'picong'. The padre overhears you and understands that you mean that even a wooden bench would get an erection if they could see the way she walks. But the padre can say nothing. You may simply be stupid, rather than lubricious in a sly manner. 

Hair tumbling wild, a dress that caught and released light, laughter with iron under it. Eyes that skimmed and did not land, as if what she wanted was elsewhere and she had to pass through men to get there. She wore the island’s mixed bloodlines like a crown – African in the hips, Spanish in the cheekbone, East Indian in the hair when the rain kinked it, Carib in the way her gaze could bless and warn at once.

Vishnu watched too long. The rum told him she noticed. The rum made a spilled drink a signal, a brush of hand a promise, a sorry whispered near his ear an invitation. Zoongie never looked back. The rum said she didn’t need to.

After that, Sita became obstacle by existing.

Hindus believe Ganapati orchestrates all things as vighnakartā (obstacle-creator) such that they stand in each other's way. But Ganapati is also vighnahartā (obstacle-averter) such that mutuality prevails. There is an old notion that the same souls are reborn as each others karmic obstructors till both gain release through mutuality. 

Incidentally, Homer Simpson impersonates Ganapati so as to first become an obstacle to the marriage of Apu & Manjula though this turns out to be providential and thus he facilitates their mutual decision to get married. 

Not for anything she did wrong, but for how exactly she fitted the life that fenced him in: the quiet chores, the patient hands, the unlit lamp. Vishnu began to plan with the patience of a reptile – cold, ancient.

He was the serpent in his own Eden. Alternatively, on the Hindu reading, his 'Tamas' (darkness) was regulated by Shesha, the cosmic serpent who stabilises the world.

He studied how Sita walked the track alone, how no neighbour watched their yard, how the plank over the old well at the acre’s edge lifted on one loose nail.

The ring of stone lay there where cocoa gave to bush, its mouth boarded with ply and chance. People said the British had dug those wells when they tried to plant where forest wanted to be; older people said the British found a hole the island had dug for itself. Vishnu usually avoided it. Bush kept it, snakes liked it, air from it felt like a hand from a grave. He went there now. With the cutlass tip he prised a plank. Cold air climbed his arm, jasmine and rot braided tight. It was not empty down there. It was waiting.

He cleared scrub in neat hours. ‘For pigeon peas,’ he said when Sita’s eyes caught the flash of blade. She said nothing. He liked that silence.

Another day he spilled a pail and grimaced at a taste he invented. ‘Pipe water startin’ to seep by the old stones,’ he lied. ‘Closer than that blasted road, ent? The sun go cut yuh in two on that walk.’

Sita paused. Her life had not given her much, but it had given her sense. She looked at the plank mouth and the cutlass leaning casual, as if it had legs.

In Paradise Lost, Adam stands by Eve. In order to stay with her, he too eats the forbidden fruit. Eve then knows just how much she is loved. Sita is a pativrata. She is seeing how much she is hated. 

Something coiled inside her chest. She turned to call Puttie.

‘Play by Auntie Marsha,’ she told him. ‘If she vex, say is me send you.’

Marsha lived two bends down. If the village had a mouth, it was hers. Big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture, she had a laugh that shook dust from joists and a voice that could soften to coax a child from a ledge. She knew the ways of men hollowed by want until only one thing remained. She noticed the fresh-cut path and the way land bore witness.

Bhu Mata as Sakshi. Earth is the mother of Sita. We think of Demeter & Persephone.  

People talk about bush like it dumb. But bush keeps memory the way hair keeps scent.

Sita lifted two planks and slid them aside. Wood complained in a voice too near speech. She lowered the pail until rope slackened. Smell rose – old wet, crushed jasmine, frog skin. On the second haul, the board beneath her shifted the way a tired man shifts in his sleep. The plank gave one long groan and swallowed its word. Stone, shoulder, hip; shock of cold tearing breath. One foot banged and screamed. The wall was slick as lizard. She clawed moss and slid. Water took her and would not return her.

Halfway to dying, the big preachments – God, Fate, the Ordeal of Woman – gave way to small things: a child’s laugh chasing a yard fowl, how light falls on a cup, a line of ants crossing a bowl you meant to wash. In the hole Sita did not bargain with saints. She thought of Puttie’s sound. She thought: he cannot remember me like this. He must remember me alive.

She did not call out loud. Call for who? A man who had cleared brush like a conscience? A grove that listened? She reached and slid and failed and reached again, breath sawing, chest burning. The circle of sky above shrank to a coin. Leaves trembled along its edge like people laughing.

Marsha was shelling pigeon peas and thinking about a letter she’d promised to write for a mother whose son had been held for cussing a policeman.

She is like Martha- who is active-, not Mary- who is contemplative. Meister Eckhart says Mary took the better path because it would make her more like Martha.  Mary & Martha are the sisters of Lazarus whom Jesus called out of his tomb.

She heard nothing. That was the thing. Midday should hold pot noise and scolding and a child’s quarrel. Silence in a village is smoke; it sneaks from something burning. She put down the pan and stood. She didn’t hurry, not at first. The hush had a tilt – a room shifted half an inch.

At the Mohammeds’ acre the light seemed thin. She saw the ring of stone, the lifted planks, the scuffed rope. She tore a length of vine from a mango trunk, peeled it in her hands to feel if it would hold a woman. She didn’t shout a name. She got to work.

‘Hold strain, gyal!’ she said at last, voice cracking hush. ‘Is Marsha!’

Thessalonians 2:7 says - 'For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work: only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way'. This gives rise to the notion that the 'mysterious economy' of the Katechon 'holds strain' and keeps the Anti-Christ and the Eschaton at bay. Here Marsha, seeking to release a sister from her tomb, needs her to work just as hard. This is a collective Katechon, a mysterious economy achieved with nary a word spoken. 

Inside the shack Vishnu stiffened. It wasn’t the words but the way they split the day into before and after. He staggered out, rum turning to poison on his tongue, and went to the well. He saw Marsha braced, saw the well mouth, saw Sita’s face rise pale from the dark with water sticking to her skin. In one bright click he saw his future rearrange: Zoongie evaporating like sweat, rum courage scuttling, a policeman’s hand on his shoulder, a magistrate’s eyes not meeting his, a boy grown without a mother narrowing his eyes at the world. He saw all of it in a knife-second. Something moved in him.

Between seeing and moving, time cracked and let a small thing through. Sita’s eyes – rimmed red, washed clean of everything but life – locked on his. What burned there wasn’t begging. It wasn’t love. It was older, lower, a coal that hadn’t died in the poor ash of their marriage: a blue flame saying plain, I see you.

He grabbed the vine and hauled.

The mystery of lawlessness was restrained because Marsha & Sita 'held strain'. A third was added because it was the Anti-Christ who was being restrained. No name was taken, because the work was itself the name. 'For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them" (Matthew 18:19-20).

Marsha hauled. Sita clawed stone. The well hated to give back what fell. Water is jealous. They pulled until Marsha’s shoulders were fire, until Vishnu’s hands were bone. Sita’s elbow hit stone, then her hips, then one knee. She slid, found a purchase that hadn’t been there a second ago and disappeared after. She came over the lip choking a sound the day almost refused. They lay on hot ground, breath scraping sky.

Marsha sat up. She looked once at Sita’s leg – already writing itself in purple –

no prose as purple as such stigmata 

and stood. ‘We goin’ clinic,’ she said. ‘Bring a towel.’

Vishnu brought it. It was old and stiff with the salt of bodies. He put it in Sita’s hand. She wrapped herself without meeting his eyes. He fetched the donkey cart. Doing is a treacherous bridge: you step on and it carries you to a side you didn’t plan to reach.

Emperor Akbar had the following lines from Hasan of Basra inscribed on the 'Buland Darwaza' (strong gate'. 'Isa son of Maryam said: "The world is a Bridge, pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day may hope for eternity, but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer for the rest is unseen." But for the weary, prayer can't last even an hour. Work is worship. The reward is that what is unseen becomes palpable in the land they work upon or which works upon them. 

At the clinic they cut the hem and wrapped the leg and checked for lights going out behind the eyes. The nurse had seen wells’ work. She said little. Marsha said enough for two, which was mercy. ‘We nearly lose she,’ she told the nurse. ‘If I didn’t pass –’ She didn’t finish. She let the nurse make the necessary notes in a ledger whitened by many small tragedies.

Vishnu waited under a print of Jesus with eyes that could be pitying or questioning. He hadn’t planned for after. Men who set traps plan for silence, not for the squeal. Shame is a substance he felt on his skin. It itches. It doesn’t rinse.

Walking home, Marsha pushed the cart. Sita rode, white with pain and the kind of tired that goes through bone and keeps going. Vishnu walked with empty hands. Evening poured itself into the day. Puttie came from Marsha’s yard with cheeks sticky sweet, saw his mother, and his face did a thing with no name – opened, broke, opened. He didn’t cry. He held the cart.

We are crying. We feel ashamed of ourselves because what we are indulging in is sentimentality. Puttie does the thing with no name.  

Night remade the house. The lamp smoked. Lizards hunted moths by the flame. Sita lay between sleep and pain, relief and a watchfulness that had nowhere to go. Marsha kept vigil. Vishnu stood by the broken mouth and didn’t go close. Bush took him in – not like a mother, like a judge. He had no words for the pressure on his chest, so the old names stepped forward: jumbie, duppy, serpent.

Had he been possessed by some evil spirit? No. The evil was in himself. 

Days rearranged. Sita healed slow. She learned to favour the leg without letting the favouring become a limp other people could define her by. Marsha saw to food, jokes, errands. She took Sita back to the well once and let her look from a distance. Sometimes a thing loosens its grip when you can see it in daylight.

Rum now warmed Vishnu differently; it tasted like it was kept too long in a corner. Zoongie came; Zoongie always came. She tilted her head as if to ask if he heard better. He couldn’t tell if pity crossed her face or if rum put it there. He left his coins in his pocket and stepped back into heat.

He had admitted his own guilt. Could he stay on the thorny path of repentance? 

Sita said little but wasn’t quiet. She sorted beans with new slowness, looked at her boy with new exactness,

Sita is now the Sakshi. The word, like martyr or shaheed, means a witness with exact information unadulterated by supposition or wishful thinking. 

Ghalib says ' Qatra meñ Dajlah dikhāī na de aur juz meñ kul/ Khel laṛkoñ kā huā dīda‑e‑bīnā na huā

“If you cannot see the Tigris in a drop, or the whole in the part, You are merely playing like children — you have not gained true insight.”

and built inside herself a shelf for the decisions she would need to make when the time came. The shelf didn’t look like freedom – she couldn’t afford that word yet. It looked like not dying. It looked like not returning to a house where people forgot to see you.

Marsha steered Sita to the community centre. The girl teacher asked Sita to write her name. She pressed too hard, and the A came out like a little house with a crooked door, but it stood. The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.

i.e. not much of a smile at all. There were tedious chores to be done. But, they'd get done, soon enough.  

Sita went back and soon had a signature that would carry weight.

On Sunday the priest preached serpents and gardens; the reading demanded it. He said the woman listened to the wrong voice in the tree. Sita felt her mouth curve. Here the tree had kept truth and a man had lied. After service she walked home bareheaded. She felt the scar seam like a tailor’s last stitch. She didn’t hate her leg. It had thrashed exactly long enough to catch a stone.

Vishnu nailed cross-boards over the well and then, in a move that made old people shake their heads, planted jasmine at the mouth. ‘So it go smell sweet,’ he told Marsha.

‘Plant it by the door,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask the dead to make your house nice.’

Jasmine is associated with Goddess Laxmi. The wife is known as 'grha-laxmi'. Honour her so prosperity comes to your house. 

I may mention that there was a tension between worship of the ancestors, typical of Patriarchy, & pure bhakti devotionalism which is characteristic of the nuclear family where both husband & wife are equal.  

He moved the jasmine.

Dry season cracked the clay; Kiskadee called insolent bright notes. Sita walked better by morning and hid her limp by afternoon. She sent Puttie to school with slate and lunch in a cloth bag. When he brought home a letter, she read it slow and smiled at needing correction only twice. On Fridays she washed the towel that saved her and hung it where light could bless it a little.

Vishnu saved for a small pump. He said he’d pull water that way, not with rope or women’s backs. He cut more bush, planted the peas where he’d said he would. He kept rum for days the world insisted. But the grove isn’t a ledger; it’s a mouth. It closes only when it’s satisfied. People passing said they sometimes heard the noon hum if the wind was in a mood. Not every day. The day had to choose.

Years did what years do. Puttie grew and learned to widen his narrowed eyes by choice – for tenderness, for beauty. He climbed cocoa trees without bruising pods. He learned to hear his mother coming by the weight of her good foot and the mercy of her bad.

Sita kept a cheap copybook with a red line that was less a margin than a joke. She wrote three things each night: ‘I breathe good in my sleep.’ ‘The jasmine smell by the door was clean.’ ‘Marsha laugh at a thing I say.’ She didn’t write the well. It lived between the lines.

Zoongie left, returned with a baby, and men’s voices about her turned to numbers and guesses. Once, in the road, she told Sita good morning without expecting a reply. Sita returned it and felt as if she’d put down a pan she had no business carrying.

First good rain after dry is a forgiveness the sky gives itself. Everything flared – anthill, flower, first rot. Sita stood in the doorway and let blown mist reach her face; Puttie danced into it; Vishnu checked the drain he’d cut to turn water from the well mouth. It held.

That night a board murmured in Sita’s dream. She woke. The lamp’s flame sat steady, her heart sat steady. She lay down and woke before light with a wordless admission: I lived. Not gratitude, exactly. A fact that felt like a small warm animal in her hands.

An obstacle had been created. An obstacle had been removed. Both are the work of Ganapati whose vehicle is a mouse.  

Bush returned to the stones with lover’s patience and stitched green lace around every edge. Children born since the day Sita rose on a vine pass there and don’t know how near their laughter came to a grave. On some middays, if the wind wants, you can hear the hum.

Puttie, carrying his father in shoulders and his mother in steadiness, walks there when work shatters him. He stops short of the ring out of respect turned habit. He listens: the brook language of leaves, sun’s thin hiss, a creak where wood learns to pretend to be a board and is tired of pretending. If he waits long enough and lets the island put its mouth to his ear, he hears a breath taken and held and let go – the shape of a woman’s will, the sound a grove makes when it keeps what it knows without swallowing the living.

If you ask him, he shrugs the way men shrug when feeling places a hand on the neck and says be still. Ask again and he says, ‘It had a well there once. Mama fall. Auntie Marsha bring she up. Papa –’ He stops. He thinks of a towel catching light, a jasmine moved from a mouth to a door, letters spelling a name until the name meant breath. ‘People does change,’ he says. ‘But grove does remember.’

One day – the hum loud as if noon had tuned itself – he brings his daughter. Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc. She runs and stops, instinct taught by blood. He calls her back with a word his mother once used that grammar can’t carry but love can. He kneels where the bush thins, digs until his fingers find board edge and nail. He doesn’t lift. He only touches. The wood is warm from noon. He feels two heartbeats in it: a woman fighting stone, his own. He speaks – not to saints or ghosts, but to a living listening. ‘I go keep it closed,’ he says. ‘I go keep it closed.’

‘Why we whisperin’, Daddy?’ the child said.

He looked at the stone gone to moss, trees made witness, sky still stingy with light.

‘Because this place know things,’ he said. ‘And when a place know things, you talk soft so it can talk soft back.’

They stood together while the day moved on, while someone up the road joked into a pan of frying fish. A lorry coughed up the hill. A woman far off sang something too old for its words to matter.

In the hot hush, the grove held its breath and released it – small and entire, like a last stitch drawn through a wound that had finally decided to close.



Pass there soft.

If you hear something, keep it.

People will argue with you about what the earth can do.

The grove knows.

Sita knew.

Marsha knew.

Vishnu, in his poor way, learned.

He turned from Rum to Ram- very imperfectly, no doubt- but sufficiently for the purpose of the Katechon. Sita had 'held strain' & the mystery of lawlessness was restrained. 

The serpent in the grove was never only a snake.

It was the thing in a man that slid along stone for dark, and the thing in a woman that wrapped a vine around herself and climbed.

A story is a well.

It eats sound until somebody throws a rope.

If grace is near and hands hold, something breathing comes up.

Some stories pull buckets of bone.

This one pulled a woman.



The grove remembered.

The house remembered.

The boy remembered.

In Sanskrit the word for love- Smara- is the same as that for Memory. But 'simran' is also the word for prayer- which is a remembering of God. Shiva is 'Smarahara'- he who burns up Love which is thus known as the bodiless God.  

And now, at noon, when the wind turns kind, the hum sounds less like hunger –

and more like the earth clearing its throat to speak the names of those who came back.

It is said that the idea of bodily resurrection comes from Zoroastrianism. Justice ( aṣ̌a which is the Vedic rta and the English 'order') requires that the Earth give up its dead over which it has been given but a temporary charge. 

To me, this is a beautiful story- creative, intelligent, deeply human. Perhaps only a Trinidadian could have written it.

 To an AI, it is AI generated. 

You may say 'It is maudlin. It is sentimental. It celebrates the life of the poor agricultural Trinidadian- that very life which Mr. Biswas escaped. This isn't literary. It isn't 'modern' let alone 'post-modern'. It isn't 'meta'.'

But, if an AI thinks it is an AI story maybe the meaning is that all Intelligence shares the same fitness landscape- which is Eden. Who is to say that what appears inert is not intelligent in some 'natural' way which is in tune with both what is human and psychological and what is artificial and based on logical & statistical operations? But why stop there? Incompossible worlds too may find meaning and solace in what we do. Perhaps, Literature is more universal than even our universe!

Dr. Victoria Livingstone, who has a PhD in Hispanic literature, does not agree with me. She says, in 'Human Generated' (hosted by Substack)

I hated it. As I was reading, I recalled a comment one of my professors made long ago about certain theoretical texts. Not all theory (this was a professor in an English department who was well versed in literary theory), but some. She said that certain texts offer the illusion of cohesion. If you look at individual paragraphs, they are well written and seem to be making some kind of point. Transitions, too, seem smooth. One paragraph slides into the next. However, when you step back from the article, you realize that there is nothing to hold onto. The entire argument seems to unravel, or perhaps there was never anything solid beneath those phrases that so smoothly snake down the page. That is how I felt reading “The Serpent in the Grove.”

I think this was because Victoria does not know anything about 'subaltern' syncretic religion in the rural  Trinidad of an earlier age. For me, the entire story is held together by the steel of Indic soteriology. You may say, it is a little on the nose for Vishnu to turn from Rum to Ram so as to be a better husband to 'pativrata' Sita such that she does not demand that her Mother- the Earth- swallow her back into its womb. But the artistry of the author is such, I'd feel ashamed to cavil.

The text in question is, of course, a short story and not a work of theory. However, it still seemed to me to be full of slithering phrases that seem to signify but feel empty.

Because you don't know the cultural context. Perhaps, even the author does not. It is an 'unthought known'.  

The text is full of abstraction. There are concrete details, but these are overwhelmed by broad strokes, references to “patience,”

'Sabr' in Arabic. Sabr-e-Ayoob is the patience of Job.  Sita, of course, was very patient when held by the demon King. Otherwise, she could have instructed Hanuman to rescue her.

The fact is, whatever men suffer, their wives suffer worse.  Patience is part of 'Shakti'- the feminine power which puts all things into motion. 

“slowness,”

a Jain theological virtue. But it reminds us of the concluding lines of Paradise Lost- 'They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow/ Through Eden took their solitary way'

“steadiness,”

In Hinduism, this is called 'stithah'; In Arabic, Istiqamah. There is a famous hadith in this connection. Rural Trinidadians of that period didn't have much book learning but there were peripatetic preachers of all faiths.

“exactness,”

established by the Universal Witness of 'Sakshi'.  

and “freedom.”

Mukti. Fana.  

Some paragraphs overdo the use of simile. Take, for instance, these lines:

Sita moved quiet as if sound were taxed.

That is typical Trinidadian 'picong'. 'Why you look so glum? There's no tax on laughter... yet.'

Nineteen and brown like dust after rain, she turned roti dough with a rhythm that came not from joy but from endurance. Orphan was too kind a word

She is a Janaki without a Janaka.  

. Orphans are sometimes cradled. Sita had been passed like a parcel from kin who were hungry for everything except another mouth; she learned to make herself small.

Three separate similes, all working with different imagery: “as if sound were taxed,”

which reminds us that Trinidad is the home of witty banter- and Calypso.  

“like dust after rain,”

i.e. of a darker hue. She isn't 'high yaller' or 'red'.  

and “like a parcel from kin.”

They are poor. They can't have sent us something nice.  

Also, “dust after rain”? Isn’t that just called mud?

No. In the tropics, red soil turns brown after rain. Clayey soil turns muddy because porosity is less. Coca is best grown on free draining soil.  

Then there are phrases that don’t make much sense: “Bush took him in – not like a mother, like a judge.” Judges don’t take people in, do they?

They do in poorer places where the sub-judge of honorary magistrate locks up a guy accused of crime on his own property or the house allotted to him by the State.  

I read this story with a great deal of bias, however.

Fair point. She was looking for evidence of a certain sort and found it because that is what her very expensive education had trained her to do.

I too read the story with bias. Indeed, the moment I came across the name 'Vishnu Mohammad', I thought 'Aha!'. Then I remembered that I once met a Trinidadian whose name was Jesus Mohammad Confucius Ram.  

“The Grove and the Serpent” has many features that indicate AI use: the artificiality,

It is heart-felt. The author is a poet. He has talent. He wishes to evoke what we might consider a culturally impoverished idiolect but which, for religious reasons, at least for Hindus, has greater 'dhvani' or allusiveness.  

the not-X-but-Y construction,

Which is 'picong'. It adds colour to life. The pace of life was slower in rural areas back in those days. People entertained each other. 

the nonsensical similes.

like 'sunrise over a sink?' It is homely. In the old days there were songs about the bride who, by convention, was brought up in luxury and who never had to do any chores in her father's house. The honeymoon was followed by a rude awakening. Dishes had piled up in the sink. 

References to such domestic matters have 'dhvani'. They are pregnant with things for which we would have to go back to Vedic or Quranic or Hebrew Scripture to give a name to.  It is in Bengal that the longing of the bride to return to her parent's home- if only for a brief holiday- have found their most lyrical expression in the Agamani song-cycles.

Two clerks came to Calcutta circa 1750. One was the most promising classical scholar of his year at Westminster Public School. Sadly, he was not able to enrich the Republic of Letters having to be content with founding a vast Oriental Empire. The other was Ramprasad Sen who was sent back to the village. Nazir writes in the language of the first, but he makes concrete the mythos of the second. 

Those qualities also make it poor writing.

It is excellent.  AIs are so jealous that they claim it was written by one of their own. I sympathise. My people often claim that Shakespeare was actually a Mirpuri named Sheikh Peer. He was a kasai in Bradford on the A1 motorway. White peeps are pretending he came from Stratford. This is a lie. I have been to Stratford. There are hardly any darkies there. QED.