Spivak on Naxalbari

 Spivak, like other ex-pat buddhijivis, learned about Naxalbari from American academics like Marcus Franda. To be fair, Spivak was teaching European literature. She had no knowledge of Bengali politics. She still does not. Last year, she wrote a gushing letter to Mamta- who had beaten the Communists into utter political oblivion some 15 years previously- without realising that her thuggish regime was on the point of collapse.

In 2017, she wrote as follows in Frontier magazine which was founded by Samar Sen and which was initially sympathetic to the Naxalites (and thus against the mainstream CPM). I should mention, Congress would have been happy to encourage this second split within the Communist party. 

A Few Words About Naxalbari
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

It is hard to think that fifty years have passed since the first confrontation in Naxalbari.

The CPM had become part of the ruling coalition in 1967. The leading Communist ideologue, Hare Krishna Koner had become the Minister for Land Revenue. This meant that he could take 'surplus land' and redistribute it to party loyalits. Hilariously, the Naxal leader, Charu Mazumdar, lost 13 acres  in this way. This impoverished his widow.  

I was both too far and too close.

She was far away. The reason Naxalbari happened was because both China and Pakistan wanted to choke off India's 'chicken neck'- i.e. the narrow strip of land connecting the bulk of the country to the 'seven sisters' in the North East. Since Bengali intellectuals hate Hindus and Hindu majority India, many- quite naturally- wanted to support the country's enemies.   

One of my cousins, with whom I had gone to school every day as a child, was deeply involved.

Why? The answer is that hardcore 'anti-Browderists' were angry that the CPM had fought and won elections. The Naxals believed that Communists should only rule after they have killed all 'class enemies' and have gotten rid of Parliaments and Courts of Law and so forth.  

And one of our batchmates let loose unbelievable mass brutality upon young men lining a street, asking householders to close their windows.

No. The batchmate was useless. Some lowly policemen and some hired goons killed kids who might plausibly be taken for Naxals. This was a good thing. Sadly, the mainstream CPM was doing a great job fucking over the economy. 

Rumours, before cable television (we had a small black and white),

TV broadcasting in Calcutta only began in 1975- by which time the Naxals had been crushed. The first colour broadcast was in 1982. The CPM was firmly in the saddle in West Bengal by then. This was because it continued to redistribute 'surplus' land & enhance the property rights of share-croppers and tenants. 

before the internet, before satellite telephone. I was tucked away at the University of Iowa, a young Assistant Professor quite set in with the anti-Vietnam War struggle earlier, and with the diasporic support of the Bangladesh upheaval later,

there was no such 'diasporic support'. Incidentally, the Bangladeshi equivalent of the Naxals supported Pakistan over the Mukhi Bahini. Why? Pakistan was allied with China. Sheikh Mujib, like Indira, was considered Moscow's puppet.  

but about Naxalbari was caught in helpless hearsay.

She relied on Marcus Franda's book which came out in 1971. Sadly, it was shit. The truth is, firstly there was no on-going 'Federalising' process in India at the time. Secondly, Hare Krishna Konar had discovered that colonial law gave the Revenue Ministry considerable discretionary powers in redistributing land to 'loyalists'. This is what transformed Bengali politics. 

Hadn't enough money to go home until 1972, only then to realise the depth and breadth of the wounded polity.

Siddhartha Shankar Ray became CM towards the end of March. By July, Naxalism had been crushed. Stupid foreign academics who thought India was a 'soft state' were revealed to be ignorant cunts.  

But, and I say this with some embarrassment, an old cynical woman now, some of us had romanticised the fact that the first shot was an arrow.

It was fired by a tribal woman whose people had emigrated to the region about a century and half previously. She killed a police officer belonging to the erstwhile Bhutia ruling class. Would the Centre support the Naxals as a way to split the CPM? No. Naxalbari was next to the 'Siliguri gap'. Thus National Security concerns trumped petty provincial politics.  

My best understanding of the entire movement still comes from Sumanta Banerjee's In the Woke of Naxalbari.

Sumanta was a journalist who quit the Statesman in 1973 & went over to the Naxals. But they had already been crushed. I think Bhabani Choudhury, who was helpful to Samar Sen, was an influence. Prof. Ruth Glass- an urban sociologist from London University- was close to Jyoti Basu and used to visit once a year. In other words, we are speaking of some useless journalists and academics who had jumped on a bandwagon which had ceased to have any meaningful existence. Still, any Naxal faction (there were dozens of them) which joined mainstream politics, could be used to split the CPM vote (on a caste basis) and thus could be useful to Congress. It was around this time that Mamta was beginning her rise, as a street-fighter- for the Youth Congress in Calcutta. At a later point, the CPM would accuse her of working with the Naxals in places like Singur (where some agricultural land had been given to ig industrialists) . 

Sumanta's book, which came out in 1980, though glorifying Charu Mazumdar, focussed on the land question and thus the Left Front government had no great objection to it. But neither did Congress which Indira had successfully taken to the Left. The collapse of the Janata Morcha & Indira's return to power meant that pretty much everybody was on the same page. Either 'landlords' could transform themselves into gangsters or they would be preyed on by gangsters. In either case, nobody gave a fuck about them.  

I have learnt some Chinese since then, enough to teach some Mao Zedong with the help of graduate students in Chinese.

She knows about as much Chinese as she does about European literature.  

It seems at this distance that, although Charu Mazumder's general inspiration from Mao was certainly enormously effective and moving,

it was useless. Hare Krishna Konar had met all the top Chinese leaders during his 1960 trip to Beijing. Incidentally, it was Ho Chi Minh who confirmed to him that the breach between the Chinese & the Soviets was permanent. But, since China was much poorer than Russia, this meant that whatever arms Mao could give you would be wholly ineffective compared to what the Soviets could supply Indira with. Pakistan's defeat in Bangladesh meant that the Siliguri gap was no longer vulnerable. Naxalism was welcome to retreat into remote forests so as to fuck over tribal people there.

it was the at least temporary conscientisation

a term from Paulo Frere's 'pedagogy of the oppressed'.  

of Left intellectuals that seemed most impressive to us. In 1968, when French university students joined hands with the working class,

The working class decided they preferred De Gaulle to a German Jew like Cohn-Bendit.  

the Naxalbari phenomenon seemed to us, from far away, a greater political achievement.

Because Spivak had shit for brains.  

It is no doubt a function of my base abroad that I cannot readily perceive continuity between the Naxalbari movement and what is called Maoism now in India.

The CPM was pro-China. The Naxals were supporters of the Cultural Revolution which was utterly disasterous. The CPM was able to rule West Bengal for thirty years on the basis of land-reform & clientism. Could they break their own 'iron rice-bowl' and emulate Deng? No. Their cadres were criminalized and corrupt.  

It could also be a function of the horror of violence

unleashed by the Left Front? 

among my co-workers from the landless SCST-s (this is the descriptive they commonly use) on the border of Birbhum and Jharkhand. It nay also be because I have personally encountered ex-Naxals in Purulia, completely given over to hands-on work for agricultural justice; I have inevitably thought of swords and ploughshares.

Swords don't matter. Guns do. The government can give pensions to those who shoot Naxals. Thus Naxalism was bound to disappear as tribal people gained political control of their own ancestral territory. 

Compare Mahashweta's 'Duoupati'- a Santhal woman whose job is to get beaten and raped by the police- with Prespident Draupati Murmu. Two Bengali Brahmin women- Mahua and Mamta- attacked her for visiting Dajeeling last year. Now it is Mahua & Mamta who fear jail while Murmu remains Head of State. Will a Santhali speaking State be carved out for her people? I suppose so. 

I am a literary critic and a translator. In 1981, I translated Mahasweta Devi's "Draupadi". That story rather than the novel The Mother of 1084, set the seal on Naxalbari for me, as it will for generations to come.

Mahashweta- like Spivak, Mahua & Mamta- was a Bengali Brahmin woman. They may have looked down on Santhal women named 'Draupadi', but it is the Santhal woman who has prevailed. Centuries from now, school kids will chant the name of the 15th President of the Republic. Nobody will remember Mahashitter.  

Why Grammatology was nonsense.

 

Any time-series whatsoever can be recorded or transcribed to some degree or other. Ideas can be represented by ideographs and a series of ideographs can represent a description, a prescription, a scientific hypothesis, a Cyrenaic hippopotamus or anything else that can be thought of or spoken of or imagined or represented by, or read into, a series of gestures or, indeed, any other phenomena. 

By the Sixties, when David Lewis published 'Conventions', and Derrida published 'Of Grammatology', there were very good phonetic alphabets to capture the exact sounds (phonemes) produced by different speakers of different languages. There was also 'Labonotation' to capture dance or martial arts choreography. Scientific and Commercial time-series had various types of mathematical representations for different purposes. 

Lewis, following Thomas Schelling, understood that all such semiotic systems had no 'naturality'. In other words, there was an arbitrary element in the choice of signs because they were merely conventional. But conventions are merely focal solutions to coordination and discoordination games which arise either in collective action problems or represent 'separating equilibria' which give rise to hedging and income effects. 

Derrida, who like Russell, had started off thinking Husserl might be on to something, and who had spent a year at Harvard in his late twenties and thus could not have been wholly ignorant, nevertheless based his soi disant 'science of writing' or Grammatology on the following absurd premises

1) Alphabetic languages are phonetic.

 They may be. They may not. English, notoriously, isn't. There are phonetic notations and musical notations and Labonotation for capturing the movements of the body. 

2) Alphabetic languages- like Latin or Greek- are superior to Chinese type or ancient Egyptian type languages. This simply isn't true. All that matters is which civilization is expanding for fiscal or technological reasons and which is declining.

3) Speech was considered superior to writing which was regarded as a 'supplement'. Apparently this was because 'presence' was ontologically superior to absence. This is obviously false. We prefer to have things 'put in writing'. What is even more sacred than the Church or the Mosque- both may be knocked down for some Civic purpose- is Holy Scripture. True, Catholics may puzzle over the 'real presence' in the Eucharist, but the rest of us needn't bother. The plain fact is that writing was superior to speaking because it was more considered. That's why Sophists got paid a lot of money to write speeches for people to learn by heart and repeat in the Assembly so as to win their law suit or push through their agenda. The fact is, at some early date, the first performance of a new play had in its audience people who had already ready the text. That is why the comment was made that the actors could safely sink their teeth into the more highly wrought passages without worrying that the audience would not be able to follow what was being said.

4) Aristotle's ideas still matter. They don't. Only pedants gas on about the dude. He had zero influence on anything despite having been Alexander's tutor. The fact is, what posh kids study, or what is taught in seminaries, doesn't matter in the slightest. Academic Credentials can be Zahavi handicaps. They serve a signalling purpose- viz. this dude was rich enough or stupid and sycophantic enough to spend years studying nonsense and could be useful for some mercenary or deeply stupid or sycophantic purpose for that reason. 

The Signifier and Truth

The Signifier is a word or gesture or painting or, in my case, a petulant fart. Either Utility or verisimilitude  or charismatic Schelling focality or some buck-stopped more or less protocol bound juristic process, makes determinations of Truth. But those determinations are immediately overturned by beating, bribes, or it becoming obvious that the thing is stupid shit. 

The “rationality”—but perhaps that word should be abandoned for reasons that will appear at the end of this sentence—which governs a writing thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos.

Rationality does not issue from a Logos. Rather Logos is a personification of Rationality. We don't say Americans issue from Uncle Sam. We say Uncle Sam is a personification of America. 

True one can say Uncle Sam is an emanation of God. Americans are God's beloved children. He who created all things, created the Yank and will, at the end of days, gather him back into his bosom. But this is merely a manner of speaking. 

Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the desedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos.

Is this stupid cunt talking about the Gospel of John? Does he really think Lord Jesus Christ has been 'de-constructed'? True, the Jews in Israel, had won their third war in two decades. But they were fighting Arab Muslims- not White Christians. 

Particularly the signification of truth.

that is, its 'extension'. But this is undetermined and thus can't be destroyed or created or taken to the Prom.  

All the metaphysical determinations of truth,

are nonsense. What is 'beyond' physics is logorrhoea. Still, if you have a PhD in useless shite, it may be the only thing you can get paid to produce. 

and even the one beyond metaphysical onto-theology that Heidegger reminds us of,

Revealed Religion is fine because even if can't get you into Heaven there are reputational and psychological benefits from investing in it. Heidegger was a spoiled Catholic. After the War, the Centrum had to be rehabilitated so his & Schmitt's shite could be recycled. 

Anyway, maybe that stupid Kraut was plagiarising Okakura. Perhaps, the fucker was trying to become a Shinto, or Zen, or Noh 'shite'. Let him do so by all means. The Japs had gotten with the program. They put on a pretty good Olympics. Some people say they are starting to make quite good cars. That's a bit of a reach. Transistors maybe. Cars? Fuck off!

are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in the pre- Socratic or the philosophical sense, in the sense of God’s infinite under-standing or in the anthropological sense, in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian sense.

all of these senses only make sense to pedants who teach useless shite. Sadly, as the opportunity cost of acquiring academic credentials rises- because young people have exponentially rising general purpose productivity if they acquire STEM type skills rather than a wholly fraudulent paideia completely unmoored in philology, comparative history, or anything else worth a damn.  

Within this logos, the original and essential link to the phonè has never been broken.

On the contrary, if even the word 'logos' is no longer pronounced as it was, how much more must it be the case with any other term under its ambit where, indeed, some terms have changed in meaning or have been replaced entirely. 

It would be easy to demonstrate this and I shall attempt such a demonstration later. As has been more or less implicitly determined, the essence of the phonè would be immediately proximate to that which within “thought” as logos relates to “meaning,” produces it, receives it, speaks it, “composes” it.

G.E Moore knew of an elderly lady who didn't know what she thought till she heard what she said. But smart peeps keep mum and think without words for the excellent reason that their facial expression may change if they do so. Indeed, when they do speak, it is to disguise what they think. Language is strategic. But even the most abstract thought is a 'game against nature'.   

If, for Aristotle, for example, “spoken words (ta en to phone) are the symbols of mental experience (pathemata tes psyches) and written words are the symbols of spoken words” (De interpretatione, 1, 16a 3) it is because the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind.

He was a pedant. I suppose his pupils took dictation from him. But what one dictates may be utterly mindless. Aristotle himself had noticed that some birds can imitate human speech. 

Producer of the first signifier, it is not just a simple signifier among others. It signifies “mental experiences” which themselves reflect or mirror things by natural resemblance.

Why stop there? Why not embrace a full blown doctrine of signatures or correspondences and then take up Voodoo?  

Between being and mind, things and feelings, there would be a relationship of translation or natural signification;

there could be but there could also be the reverse. Disguising your thoughts or not letting your mind react to things as they would naturally do may be vital for survival.  

between mind and logos, a relationship of conventional symbolization.

Conventions are solutions to coordination or discoordination problems. To be fair, David Lewis's book came out two years after Derrida's. Still, after Dr. Strangelove came out, everybody was talking about Game Theory and wondering whether getting Game Theory wrong would lead to Nuclear Apocalypse.  

And the first convention, which would relate immediately to the order of natural and universal signification, would be produced as spoken language.

Nope. Sign language would come first. Hunters need to be silent. We don't know at what point our Genu evolved vocal chords. It is likely that speech developed slowly in groups which already had other ways to communicate. It was a supplement. For all we know, the scratching of signs predated this. 

Written language would establish the conventions,

Nope. They pre-existed.  

inter-linking other conventions with them.

Writers could write about ways to interlink conventions. But talkers could talk about the same thing. Pointing could work just as well.  

Just as all men have not the same writing so all men have not the same speech sounds, but mental experiences, of which these are the primary symbols (semeia prôtos), are the same for all,

they aren't even for the same person at different times of the day or when considering different contexts.  

as also are those things of which our experiences are the images (De interpretatione, 1, 16a. Italics added) .

Our experiences aren't images. They may arise because of things outside ourselves but aren't reflections. Why did Derrida not know this? 

The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute a sort of universal language which can then efface itself.

Which is why we are all telepaths.  

It is the stage of transparence. Aristotle can sometimes omit it without risk. 

Aristotle was paid to teach. What is important that you can say you spent years being taught shite. We understand that what you were taught was shite but that's what Paideia or a 'liberal education' means.  

In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense (thought or lived) or more loosely as thing.

No. The sight is closest to visual signs. The ear is closest to sounds. The nose is closest to farts which is what I use to communicate my boredom and general truculence.  

All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind

The voice isn't bound to the mind. That's why it can be recorded and preserved. We can hear the voices of people who died long ago 

or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself (whether it is done in the Aristotelian manner that we have just indicated or in the manner of medieval theology, determining the res as a thing created from its eidos, from its sense thought in the logos or in the infinite understanding of God).

But the thing isn't 'created from its eidos'. It isn't the case that thinking about unicorns causes unicorns to appear.  

The written signifier is always technical and representative.

It may be. It may not- like the Indus Valley script which still hasn't been deciphered.  

It has no constitutive meaning.

It may do. A country can have a written constitution or else it may be constituted through an international treaty.  

This derivation is the very origin of the notion of the “signifier.”

Saussure got this availability cascade of the ground. But there can be a signifier without anything being signified and vice versa. 

The notion of the sign always implies within itself the distinction between signifier and signified,

No. When a new King is crowned he is the signifier and the signified. This is not the case if he crowned via proxy.

even if, as Saussure argues, they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf.

Nobody bothers to distinguish the sides of leaves.  

This notion remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism: 

only because Derrida says of. But, he is a cretin. Why take his word for it. 

absolute proximity of voice and being,

Which is why, if you are making a phone call you are in two places at the same time.- 

of voice and the meaning of being,

Being doesn't have a meaning. 

of voice and the ideality of meaning.

Meaning is pragmatic. It has no ideality. 

Hegel demonstrates very clearly the strange privilege of sound in idealization, the production of the concept and the self-presence of the subject.

No he doesn't. Derrida is making this shit up. 

This ideal motion, in which through the sound what is as it were the simple subjectivity [Subjektivität], the soul of the material thing expresses itself,

sadly, material things don't have souls which express themselves 

the ear receives also in a theoretical [theoretisch] way,

only in the sense that the receives farts in a theoretical way 

just as the eye shape and colour, thus allowing the interiority of the object to become interiority itself [läßt dadurch das Innere der Gegenstände fur das Innere selbst werden] (Esthétique, III. I tr. fr. p. 16).* . . .

Whose interiority becomes the same as the armchair they are looking at or the parrot they can hear? 

The ear, on the contrary, perceives [vernimmt] the result of that interior vibration of material substances

No it doesn't. External vibrations may be audible not interior ones.  

without placing itself in a practical relation toward the objects, a result by means of which it is no longer the material form [Gestalt] in its repose, but the first, more ideal activity of the soul itself which is manifested [zum Vorschein kommt] (p. 296) .

A disciple of Hegel's published his lectures on Aesthetics. Some question whether Hegel's accurately views are properly reflected. In nuce, Hegel's notion is that 'Beauty is determined as the sensible shining of the Idea'. Sadly, we don't notice a beauty we encounter everyday. There has to be something novel or arresting about it. 

** What is said of sound in general is a fortiori valid for the phone by which, by virtue of hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak—an indissociable system—the subject affects itself and is related to itself in the element of ideality.

It one thing to say that your health improves if you keep saying 'Day, by day, in every way, I'm getting better and better. It is another to maintain that phonemes have magical powers. 

We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with the historical determination of the meaning of being in general as presence,

No we don't. A Hegelian may posit an 'end of history' where every consciousness, properly so called, agrees about everything that matters. But that does not involves phonemes. Also, there is no such thing as phonocentrism. Nobody greatly cares if you mispronounce words.  

with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organize within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/essence/existence [ousia], temporal presence as point [stigmè] of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity, the co-presence of the other and of the self, intersubjectivity as the intentional phenomenon of the ego, and so forth).

Intersubjectivity is easily established between you and your dog or horse. You may not be able to establish it with your wife. This leads to divorce.

Logocentrism would thus support the determination of the being of the entity as presence.

An entity retains being even when it is not present. Logocentrism doesn't support shit. 

To the extent that such a logocentrism is not totally absent from Heidegger’s thought, perhaps it still holds that thought within the epoch of onto-theology, within the philosophy of presence, that is to say within philosophy itself.

It is more probable that Heidegger wasn't doing philosophy. He was babbling nonsense. 

This would perhaps mean that one does not leave the epoch whose closure one can outline.

If one lives long enough, one does do so. Bertrand Russell was born in the Victorian age. He died after the Moon landing.  

The movements of belonging or not belonging to the epoch are too subtle, the illusions in that regard are too easy, for us to make a definite judgment.

No. It is easy enough to say that Russell was born a Victorian. He died in the age of Dr. Strangelove. Still, in fields where there is an objective function to be minimized or maximized,  categoricity of a Hegelian type might be achieved. The British Hegelian tradition can be considered non-metaphysical in this respect. 

It may be convenient for teachers to divide history into 'epochs' or 'ages' but it is folly to think that ideas changed fundamentally over their course. Rather it was a case of old wine in new bottles. People followed the fashion of the period to a greater or lesser extent but they didn't believe fashions greatly mattered. I suppose, one could say- at one time it was fashionable to write high falutin' nonsense. But not everybody did. Those who had something sensible to say could pass down something not wholly ephemeral or fraudulent. Grammatology wasn't one such thing. A pity, but there it is. 

Copilot's Spivak.

 I asked Copilot what were my main criticisms of Gayatri Spivak's 'can the subaltern speak'. (I have written a book on Spivak called 'the permanently menstruating Subaltern')

Copilot hallucinated the following-

 Iyer’s Main Criticisms

• Contradictory Use of Western Theory: Iyer argues that Spivak’s essay critiques Western epistemology while paradoxically relying on it—especially Derridean deconstruction and poststructuralist thought. He sees this as philosophically inconsistent, suggesting that Spivak undermines her own critique by using the very tools she claims silence the subaltern.

• Obscurantism and Elitism: He criticizes the essay’s dense and abstract language, which he believes makes it inaccessible to the very subaltern voices it discusses. According to Iyer, this academic opacity reinforces elite discourse rather than challenging it.

• Neglect of Indigenous Frameworks: Iyer contends that Spivak fails to engage with non-Western philosophical traditions or epistemologies. Instead of drawing from Indian or subaltern thought systems, she remains tethered to European intellectual paradigms.

• Silencing Through Theory: Perhaps most provocatively, Iyer suggests that Spivak’s conclusion—that “the subaltern cannot speak”—is itself a form of silencing. He argues that this statement forecloses the possibility of subaltern agency and expression, turning a critique of representation into a fatalistic pronouncement.

What I actually said was 

1) Foucault & Deleuze had stopped being 'radical' a decade before her essay came out. They admitted, in conversation, that the French working class was more concerned with immigration than class war. 'Western epistemology' has no problem with the notion of 'false consciousness' or the notion that women and workers are too stupid to understand what is actually in their own interests. But this is also the case with Eastern epistemology. The plain fact is 'Epistemology' is stupid shit. It isn't itself knowledge. It is merely the stupid opinions of stupid people. Meanwhile, in India, the lower castes had taken power from 'educationally forward castes' over the course of the Sixties and Seventies. They were ruling more and more States. It was foolish to pretend anybody cared about Professors with PhDs from foreign universities. They did not represent an 'elite'. If they were lucky, they got to emigrate. But they wouldn't pull down the big bucks like the IT professionals or people with MBAs. 

2) Spivak is dense. She writes badly because her English is poor. There is no fucking 'elite discourse' in shitty subjects. There are just some senile shitheads pretending they are part and parcel of some Social Justice movement. Actual elites have money and power. Professors of Grievance Studies may get a bit of affirmative action. But that's because people feel sorry for them. 

3) Spivak didn't get that when her great aunt hanged herself while on the rag what she was doing was protesting her father's decision to keep her in school rather than marry her off after puberty. Orthodox Hindus believed that the menstrual blood of an unmarried daughter living under your roof flows backwards and pollutes the ritual sacrifice to the manes. This is called 'pindalopa'. Spivak tells a fairy story about how her great aunt was actually a Revolutionary tasked with an assassination. But, there were no female revolutionaries at the time when her great-aunt killed herself.

Theory can't 'silence' shit. India is a democracy where 'the subaltern' rules the country. That's why the PM, the President and the Chief Justice are all 'subaltern'. As for the elite- either they are billionaires or they are high-powered lawyers, economists or STEM subject mavens. They don't teach Literature or History or Philosophy for a living. Only losers do so. 

Why has Copilot attributed views to me which I do not hold? The answer is that, statistically speaking, books about Spivak are written by people as stupid as she is. If she is against 'Eurocentrism', obviously, books attacking her will accuse her of Eurocentrism. On the other hand if she is against penises, books attacking her will accuse her of having a large number of penises sprouting from different portions of her anatomy. 

Mridula Nath Chakraborty on Spivak & E.M Forster

Some 15 years ago, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, currently a Professor in Australia, wrote an article titled 'Who is afraid of Gayatri Spivak' in a magazine called 'Signs'. I extract the following. No. It isn't meant to be satire.  

Spivak inhabits the site of the interview as a postcolonial critic and, in the process, presents a body that is both in service of and in excess of critical postcolonial theory.

To 'inhabit' means 'to occupy as a place of settled residence or habitat'. Mridula is saying Spivak only exists when being interviewed. It is not the case that she occasionally gives interviews (or visits the 'site of the interview' to use Madrooler's jargon) whereas her habitation is elsewhere- perhaps in her office or her study. Moreover, her body does not serve her own interests- e.g. to gain nutrition by eating or to get rid of waste products by defecating- but is in bondage to some stupid theory which, however, she exceeds in stupidity. 

Let me trace the path by which I arrive at this formulation. If colonial discourse was cemented in India in 1835 with Sir Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Education,”

It wasn't. Macaulay didn't matter in the slightest. Clive and Hastings and Wellesley and Napier and Outram mattered. Macaulay had lost money and needed a well paid sinecure in India to repair his fortunes and thus return to Parliament. While in India, he wrote 'Lays of Ancient Rome' which was a best seller. He had zero influence on the Raj.  

then in the post- colonial critic we have the putative product of that formulation, the descendant of those “native subjects” (Macaulay [1835] 1995, 429) who were to belong to “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (Macaulay [1835] 1995, 430).

Macaulay was talking about 'Prince' Dwarkanath whose grandson won the Nobel Prize for literature. He wasn't talking about literary critics- i.e. Grub Street hacks- but people who owned vast estates and who had invested profitably in business enterprises engaged in Oceanic commerce.  

Of course, here I exaggerate, generalize, and collapse into simplicity what is actually a wrought (sic) and complex process of historical formation that leads to such a descendant also being the agent of the empire busily talking and writing back.

The Empire disappeared long ago. 'Talking back' ended at the Third Round Table Conference. The Brits had to proceed unilaterally in getting shot of the Raj.  

So well has Caliban internalized Prospero’s speech that (s)he can curse back fluently in it.

This dim bint does not know that Thomas Coryate, James the First's jester, became so fluent in all the languages of India that, on one occasion, when a slave woman who wouldn't stop jabbering away in some unknown lingo was brought before him, he was able to scream such filth at her, in her own dialect, that she shut her mouth and became reconciled to her lot in life. 

Spivak argues that it is not Caliban who holds the power of speech, however, but Ariel.

Both can talk. Indeed, everybody in the play can talk.  

It is here that Ariel, Macaulay, and Spivak meet for me: to form a class of interpreters to mediate between the governing classes and the millions governed by a rising and burgeoning postcoloniality.

Madroola went to Delhi University. She knew India's governing class consists of elected politicians few of whom are fluent in English or have much interest in European culture. Some need interpreters when speaking to foreign dignitaries. They need none when addressing the voter. 

Perhaps Madroola is unaware that British civil servants and soldiers, when serving in India, were obliged to pass exams in Indian languages so as to get their salary increment? There was no class of interpreters. Even the Court Maulvi or Pundit had been dismissed by about 1860. India wasn't a 'settler' colony. Moreover, one third of it was under Princely Rule while large chunks of directly ruled India was in the hands of feudal lords whose whim was law.  

In the hallowed arena of the academy,

only STEM subjects are taught. If you are doing Subaltern or Queer or Queer Subaltern Studies, you are well and truly fucked.  

the pride of place currently goes to the subject who inhabits the space of both metropolis and periphery,

but does not inhabit the interview or the toilet 

the subject who discourses and holds forth, with authority, on Enlightenment texts and offers embodied critiques

as opposed to ghostly critiques by means of an ouija board 

of their epistemological narratives, the subject who occupies the position of speech and strength by virtue of being one of the voiceless dispossessed,

i.e. the person who can't stop talking because her tongue has been cut out and her jaw has been smashed. Moreover she occupies the position of shitting on Madroola's head because she does not have an arsehole and, in any case, does not exist. This narrative of mine is totes 'epistemological'- isn't it? Mummy would be so proud.  

the subject who moves effortlessly between the positions of Ariel and Caliban.

Who the fuck would want to?  

This point has been made with equal and elegant force by Varadharajan: “The object, product, and survivor of this necessarily incomplete process [of decolonization] is the postcolonial subject.

Varadharajan discovered her Mummy was still being colonized by a tiny Viceroy. She screamed and screamed. The University of Saskatchewan gave her tenure probably because they thought she was a Sasquatch. 

Her ‘otherness’ in the discourse of Western empire

which doesn't exist. To her credit, the young Gayatri kept her sari on over her ski pants because she didn't want Americans to smile at her and offer her a peace pipe or a tomahawk.  

serves to consolidate the identity of her colonizers

Who died long ago.  

even as it reifies her own, and her perceived tendency to elude the categories of Western rationality

fuck off! Western rationality categorizes her as a stupid pseudo-lefty whose major grievance is that she has to sit down to pee. True, White Wimmin may also have to sit down to pee. But they iz White! That's totes triggering to me coz I iz a Darkie. Why can't White Wimmin paint stripes on themselves like zebras? Better yet, why don't they all just take a fucking hint and fuck off and die already?  

renders her dear to mosaics, melting pots, and postmoderns” (Varadharajan 1995b, xv).

Mosaics and melting pots often send her Valentine Cards. The Postmodern asked her to the Prom. She sagely replied- 'the catechresis of the constipation of the scotomy of the Post-Singur sublime is the deconstruction of its own inhabitation as the infestation of the scotomy of the catachresis of the thing I talked about in my next book which is anterior to the posterior of Hauntalogy as a fart. Have a nice day.'  

The theoretical acumen of this postcolonial critic is evoked repeatedly within a university and within disciplines that want to reinvent themselves;

because they are shit. But shit is just shit. It doesn't reinvent itself. It just gets smellier and attracts more flies.  

however, her embodied presence is contentious within exigencies of the institution

Nonsense! Spivak is an upper-middle class Bengali- i.e. toilet trained. It is not the case that her embodied presence leaves large turds on the carpet of the faculty lounge.  

as well as within the larger discourses of the multicultural nation. In her interviews, Spivak occupies and comes to sit in this volatile and contested space that brings to surface immediately the flesh-and-blood incantation of her postcolonial status.

Indira Gandhi could be said to have been such a flesh-and-blood incarnation and if, meeting the Queen, she had started singing 'Jana Gana Mana' then there would have been an incantation as well. This is because Indira took over the powers of the King-Emperor and showed she could use them with greater ruthlessness. Spivak taught worthless shite to American imbeciles. Nobody gives a shit about her. Mamta, on the other hand, was and is important. 

Her theorizations gather force not only by virtue of her examinations of the imperial project

she is incapable of any such thing. She is too stupid and ignorant. She thinks there was a 'Pathan King of Delhi' and a 'distant Mughal Emperor' as well as a 'Nazim' of Sirhind.  

and her unerring grasp of its underpinning ideologies

fuck does she know about Mercantilism or Cobden & Bright?  

but also because she is the historical object of imperialism’s narrative.

Nope. Nobody gave a shit about her or her ancestors. If daddy and gramps wanted to study medicine in England, they were welcome to spend their own money to that end.  

The experience of being a particularly marked body within contemporary identitarian movements becomes poignantly pronounced in her interviews, as she walks the razor’s edge between being a privileged literary critic and theorist,

as opposed to an underprivileged novelist like JK Rowling who has  only a paltry billion or two in the Bank 

on the one hand, and a racialized and gendered body from the global South, on the other.

She has a vagina. Maybe it is a radicalized vagina. But nobody is interested in it. Sad.  

Spivak’s interviews spotlight the subterranean core of embodiment

it would only do so if she were actually buried six feet under.  

and corporeality that underlies the

utterly stupid and useless not 

involved and intricate categories of difference and identity, authenticity and appropriation, hyphenation and hybridity, and dramatizes the presence of postcolonial bodies in the West.

Fuck off! Nobody gives a shit if you come from what was a colony. What they care about is your skills or your ability to create wealth. True, if all you have is a radicalized vagina, you may dramatize it as being drenched in mystic lore so as to get punters to cough up a couple of extra quid.  

Like lost baggage that arrives late, or not at all, these categories accompany and negotiate diasporic conditions,

Lost baggage does not accompany you. Even if it did, it couldn't negotiate a better price for access to your radicalized vagina which is dripping with mystic lore.  

but because they are constantly mobile and mutable, it is impossible to pin down “the post-colonial critic” (Harasym 1990)

It is illegal to pin them down or even to chop off their legs.  

to one consolidated identity, as becomes clear in the course of the myriad interviews that Spivak has given.

What becomes clear is that she is stupid, ignorant, but has a certain zest for life. If worthless shit must be taught, let it be taught by a worthless shithead who enjoys doing so.  

On the one hand, the definitive and defining aspect of being an essentialized body in white settler nations

is becoming CEO of Pepsi, if you are Indra Nooyi, or becoming a partner at McKinsey while also releasing a Grammy winning CD of Hindustani religious music, if you are Nooyi's sister.  

is made opaque in mere disembodied theory that can shift and skirmish, fit and fix, stretch and compress, and generally play putty with technologies of marking the other.

Why not go to Biz Skool and become a billionaire instead of wasting your time writing nonsense?  

On the other hand, the postcolonial critic also constantly mediates between insider and outsider status with respect to the history of her origin. The raison d’eˆtre of her location within the Anglo-Western/Northern academy, with its easy access to global publishing regimes, marks her as an outsider in the originary nation, the less privileged nation that nevertheless supplies her with much of the cultural material and theoretical momentum to justify her postcoloniality.

Nonsense. The 'postcolonial critic' is like the immigrant cleaning toilets. So long as they get paid and can save up a bit of money, we feel they are doing well for themselves. True, the toilet cleaner may be perfectly sane whereas the 'critic' may be as daft as a brush, but what matters is that they are not having to rent out their radicalized rectums or vaginas to pay for groceries.  

At the same time, she is the prodigal daughter who will be claimed by the mother country whenever she wins accolades in the adopted one.

Sen, yes. Spivak, no. Why? Econ is almost a STEM subject. Literature is shit. Also Spivak translated the cretin Mahashweta.  

Thus questions about the relevance of origins and the nation refuse to die,

worse yet, they refuse to fuck off to Florida 

and cosmopolitan mobility and globe-trotting theory cannot be contained within the confines of the loose interview.

loose motion. 

They carry all the traces of an extended journey that spans forty years and four continents in the life of the postcolonial critic.

But those traces are shit. 

This untidiness, uncontainability, and slippage is what Spivak consciously and constantly mimics in the self-referential, self-citational, and footnoting style of her densely theoretical, consolidated work in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Spivak 1999a).

Which doesn't critique shit. We understand that people from Colonies abandoned by the Brits lost the ability to Reason. This is because they were darkies.  

The embodied nature of the interaction between two interlocuting bodies brings to the fore the prime issues around exclusion and belonging, racialization and essentialism, that are central to postcolonial and post second-wave feminist theory.

Sadly, as technology improves, lots of our interactions are no longer 'embodied'.  

The interviews thereby provide the frame in which the postcolonial critic hotfoots between her disembodied work and her all-too-present identity.

She is a hot mess. That's true enough.  

They hyperrealize the persona of the public intellectual who narrates her life and times, acting as a barometer of social chronology and historical discourse.

That isn't Spivak's persona. She has been saying exactly the same thing decade after decade. Initially, she could be seen as 'representing' women from the ex-colonies. But, she didn't really. Indira Gandhi and Srimao Bandarnaike and Benazir Bhutto represented the people of their respective countries. A pedant teaching nonsense is not a barometer. She is a backed up toilet. 

Within the volatile site of the interview, interlocutors are bound in a dynamics of responsibility and mutuality, both physical and psychic, that Mary Zournazi calls a “creative practice that opens up the possibilities of writing and hearing differently” .

Not in Spivak's case. She just repeats herself endlessly.  

Interviewer and interviewee bring their affiliations, backgrounds, and contexts to bear upon the issue in question, thereby “coming together” in “an otherness” that provides “an ethics” for “working together to transform what we know” 

Shit remains shit even if it arises by coprophagic injestion.  

The space has a topicality, a temporality that makes the interview form a mode of locating as well as limiting contemporaneous times.

I suppose this would be true of interviews with politicians or senior journalists. They say different things at different times because they understand that the world has changed and things are now moving in a different direction.  

Space and time become uniquely designed for question and answer, interrogation and response, emergency and contingency.

Also the planet is uniquely designed for folks to bump into each other and get chatting.  

Even in the tightly controlled space of the after-interview edit, the response of the interviewee is not simply one of arbitrary theorizing or free-floating suggestion but one that arises out of the particularity of the interview, in the specific nature of the exchange between two subjects and subject positions.

Sadly, there is no evidence that any thought has gone into 'after-interview edits' with respect to Spivak.  

In Spivak’s own words: “We all know that when we engage profoundly with one person, the responses—the answers—come from both sides.

This is not the case. We may engage profoundly with a person who can't communicate.  

Let us call this responsibility. And ‘answer’ability or accountability” 

The word respondere in Latin means to reply. In the Magna Carta, it means to answer for or render an account of something in a legal context. However, some responsibilities don't have to be accounted for to anybody.  

Spivak’s interviews delineate the space between us and them that demands a politics of ethical engagement with the other.

Space causes space between us and others. Sadly, baryonic matter is subject to an exclusion principle such that two different bodies can't occupy the same space.  

They offer fascinating insight into the way in which postcolonial encounters of the embodied kind

i.e. any physical or communicative interaction on the part of anyone who comes from an ex-colony 

constantly dance around issues of representation and merge “the means of representation” with “the representation itself ”.

Because representation only occurs when its means are used.  

In addition, the interviews do offer gestures “toward a vanishing present” in that they are “an always singular address” whereby “an ‘I’ is ‘seized,’ conscripted, held to the pledge” of a particular time, a context, a “dated situation” 

The warmed up sick of the Seventies is indeed dated. But no one was conscripted to that shite. They were too stupid to do anything useful and thus pretended to teach that nonsense. In Spivak's case, the mischief she wrought was that smart young University students from India became brainwashed into thinking that there was some terrible 'post-colonial' trauma which still afflicted them. Perhaps they should emigrate to a 'Settler Colony'- like US or Australia- to whine about it there.  

Consider the following essay, by Mridula, on E.M Forster's 'Passage to India'- which is very good at depicting conversations as failures to connect or what Spivak, following Derrida, calls a 'stood up date' or faux-bond. 

I was aware of David Lean’s cinematic adaptation of A Passage to India (1984) before I encountered E.M. Forster’s original novel,

Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is one of the finest cinematic works ever created. The link between Lawrence & Forster is that England had acquired Arabic speaking mandates at just around the time it began preparing India for self-rule. Lawrence, a Classicist, wrote in a highly wrought style and his big book came out a couple of years after Forster's. Lawrence then set off for India's North West frontier. By contrast, Forster was deliberately dim and sub fusc. But his ear for dialogue of a particular middle class type was unmatchable. His book was published in 1924, just when Labour had come to power. But, by then, it appeared that India's internal divisions would prolong British rule which would just become a little more boring and pointless. Arabia however was a different kettle of fish. What's more Britain needed Persian oil and Egyptian cotton and control of the Suez Canal. I think Forster's message was reassuring. Keep the Mem Sahibs out of our new Arab possessions. Treat the Sheikh in a manly and honourable manner. Don't try to get him to pay for sewers and schools and a vast network of government clerks. Things will work out well enough if you have capable men on the spot who aren't interfered with too much by the 'frocks' in Whitehall.  

which celebrated its centenary in 2024. While the film was being shot on location, I had a vague sense of the ambition as well as the arrogance of those Britishers making a film in the heat and dust of India.

Attenborough's Gandhi- backed by Indira Gandhi- had been a big hit. Indians were hanging their heads in shame. Why couldn't they themselves have made a movie of that calibre? After all, Attenborough had come to India to star in Ray's 'Chess Players'- which was boring and stupid. Perhaps Ray's 'Ghare Bhaire' ,which starred Victor Bannerjee just like Lean's 'Passage', would rival it in quality. Sadly, it did not. It was shit.  

Heat and Dust – the title of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s 1975 Booker Prize-winning novel, adapted for the screen by Merchant Ivory Productions in 1983 – seemed to be synonymous with the nation that became independent as India in 1947 and was muddling along with its millions.

Ruth was a European Jew. Ivory was American. True, they made films in India but those films weren't all utterly shit. Sad.  

Along with Richard Attenborough’s epic biopic Gandhi (1982)

Made with the support of the Indian Government. It made Ben Kingsley- whose father was Gujarati- into an international star. He just keeps getting better and better. 

and The Jewel in the Crown,

which made Art Malik a star 

the Granada Television miniseries based on Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet novels (1965-75) – also broadcast in 1984 – these films gave me my first taste of how British storytellers were seeking to recreate Raj nostalgia and recuperate colonial history, while examining a central concern of Forster’s novel: the problem of the British in India.

Why not mention 'Octopussy' and 'Temple of Doom'?  

India in the 1980s looms large for me in this reappraisal of A Passage to India.

Because she saw the movie before she read the novel. I must admit, I loved Alec Guinness as Prof. Godbole who affirms that when an evil act is done all have done it- himself, the guide, Aziz, Fielding, even Adela. But the same is true when good is done. This is a 'field theory' of the sort first uncovered to Western Metaphysics by Boskovich and which may originate in a Jesuit translation of the Chinese Vimalakriti. It chimed with the new theories of the Mathematical Physicists but also, perhaps, with the new politics of the collective as against the individual. Forster was influenced by G.E Moore- a logical atomist, like Russell, who subscribed to a doctrine of external relations which suggests that the world is made up of independent facts. It is not an interdependent whole. Moreover, for Moore, the intrinsic value of anything must be determined solely by its intrinsic properties. Personal relationships were important if they were truthful and created an 'organic unity'- i.e. there was synergy- which was intrinsically better than the sum of its parts. I may mention that G.E Moore sang beautifully. Frances Partridge, the last survivor of the Bloomsbury group, thought this was the explanation for why Moore was so revered. This suggests a relationship between Moore and Godbole. But what that is precisely we can as little conjecture as what song the Siren's sang or the name by which Achilles was known when he hid himself among women. Moore says Truth is simple and not subject to further analysis. For Tukaram it is something found within oneself as the presence of the divine on the basis of unwavering Faith. But Tukaram's truth is a song anyone can sing. Moore was an academician who, perhaps because he hadn't been taught mathematics at Dulwich, did not have an algorithmic method. It is said that Russell, who valued him as an interlocutor, asked if he liked him. Moore reflected for a moment and said 'no'. Their conversation continued. Perhaps Forster thought this was an Occidental quality. Orientals would consider it pointless to converse with those they did not like. Was this the reason the Raj seemed so futile a project? 

Forster suggests there might be a 'truth of mood' which is not a lie- e.g. inviting a person to dinner without wanting the invitation to take effect because your house is a pigsty- and Godbole might say it is 'mithya'- neither true nor false. We may say it is 'imperative' not alethic. It is a gesture, nothing more. 

Nevertheless, Forster can't resist the temptation of throwing a scare into his reader. What if the caves are supernatural? Perhaps, in their dark recesses, everything really is interconnected. Atomistic individuality is an error and a delusion. Mrs. Moore is George Moore's ultimate nightmare. Why? In the cave, what the echo said to her was “Pathos, piety, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.” In other words, the intuition that there is good is real but it is the same as the intuition of its opposite. There is 'synergy' or 'organic unity', but it cancels itself out. 

Mrs Moore is presented as writing a letter to her two younger children while waiting for Adela and Aziz to return from the cave. This is supposed to be her stream of consciousness. 

'Devils are of the North,

the word is Indo-Iranian. The Iranians decided the devas where devils while the Hindus decided they were gods.  

and poems can be written about them,

Paradise Lost? 

but no one could romanticize the Marabar

they are places of pilgrimage where 'prayer has been valid'.  

because it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness,

both are tiny to God 

the only quality that accommodates them to mankind.'

They aren't accommodated to mankind. Forster may have noticed that man does not live for ever roaming across the Galaxies. Perhaps, he thought elderly women felt that moral values must exist independently of the hic et nunc- the here and now- and thus Eternity and Infinity must be annexed for their Lebensraum. Otherwise, moral values would all be squashed up together and end up having an orgy. It is a different matter that a elderly woman in poor health may feel that her time is running out and she hasn't yet settled her affairs rather than gotten to the bottom of life's mystery. The Moorean horror of the Caves is that questions remain 'open' but only as suppurating wounds. This may be a scandal for an analytical philosophy. But why would an elderly English lady be blighted by it? Indeed, why would a novelist hold this view? 

G.E Moore did say something rather queer about those who 'profess to tell us the nature not of a future reality, but of one that is eternal and which therefore no actions of ours can have power to alter. Such information may indeed have relevance to practical Ethics, but it must be of a purely negative kind. For, if it holds, not only that such an eternal reality exists, but also, as is commonly the case, that nothing else is real—that nothing either has been, is now, or will be real in time—then truly it will follow that nothing we can do will ever bring any good to pass. For it is certain that our actions can only affect the future; and if nothing can be real in the future, we can certainly not hope ever to make any good thing real. It would follow, then, that there can be nothing which we ought to do'. The problem here is that a 'block universe' which is eternal would be one where we would feel we ought to do the good that has been assigned us to do. Perhaps, the fear that gripped Forster and Russell and Moore (all were pacifists or conscientious objectors at a time when 'conshies' were abhorred) was that they would end up doing the duties assigned to them on the basis of their birth and social standing. Maybe, what Forster means is that the Victorians had a 'horror vacui'- they didn't like empty spaces and would fill them up with decorations- while the Bloomsbury group had embraced a modernism which emphasized the need for empty space- 'a room of one's own', 'personal relationships' which represented a higher duty than anything 'social' or customary. Still, this passage is odd and bears further examination. 

 I suppose, the least marked way of reading it is to say that Mrs. Moore's final days are marked by a spiritual exhaustion which we may term the absence of God. But that is the property Godbole accords to Evil, in which case the Good too has a property- viz. the presence of God. This property, if not 'natural', is supernatural. Perhaps Forster was thinking of the dark night of the soul which afflicts great Saints. Elderly English ladies can be perfectly saintly precisely because they give themselves no such airs. But they may be subject to illness, to fatigue, to accidie, to despair. Mrs. Moore's passage out of the world may have been more painful to her than that by which she brought three children into the world. Still, these things happen. Perhaps there is an eternal reward for those who die in torment. Perhaps there isn't. Life is its own reward and into each life some rain must fall.  Forster does not embrace one view or the other. Some Indians think Esmiss Esmoor is a Saint or spiritual intercessor. Godbole, it appears, completing kirtan, thinks he has been God's instrument to dispel Mrs. Moore's spiritual unease. 

 Covered with grease and dust, Professor Godbole had once more developed the life of his spirit. He had, with increasing vividness, again seen Mrs. Moore, and round her faintly clinging forms of trouble. He was a Brahman, she Christian, but it made no difference, it made no difference whether she was a trick of his memory or a telepathic appeal. It was his duty, as it was his desire, to place himself in the position of the God and to love her, and to place himself in her position and to say to the God, “Come, come, come, come.” This was all he could do. How inadequate! But each according to his own capacities, and he knew that his own were small. “One old Englishwoman and one little, little wasp,” he thought, as he stepped out of the temple into the grey of a pouring wet morning. “It does not seem much, still it is more than I am myself.”

At the beginning of the novel, Mrs. Moore had shown compassion for a sleeping wasp. Godbole is a devotee of Saint Tukaram who is closely related to the rise to power of the great Shivaji- who represented the common people of Maharashtra. Perhaps, if the Marathas had developed their naval power and sought to raise the productivity of their realms through oceanic commerce on the Western European pattern, India would have transitioned from feudalism to modernity in the same manner as England. 

One might say, that like the 39 Articles- the theology of Tukaram's abhang is muddled but it isn't really. It is spontaneous and embraces the notion of reciprocity between worshiper and worshiped. Indeed, Faith creates the deity.  Thankfully for his readers, Forster does not turn Godbole into a Mahatma. He remains firmly in the agnostic camp. But there is a price to be paid- a failure to connect- for this 'Avidya'. Interestingly, it is an economic price. Being unconnected to the wider world through trade condemns you to stagnation and involution. 

India, in the Eighties, failed to jump with both feet on the 'export led' growth bandwagon. It failed to connect with the world and its Socialism turned into a faux bond- a stood up date with Destiny. Nevertheless for a young person at University-

Those were heady days.

Unless you were a Sikh in Delhi being chased by a crazed mob.  

The breezes of postcolonialism were beginning to reach us in our developing nation,

they had well and truly reached India by 1937 when elected Indians took charge of the Provinces. If Congress had been able to reach an agreement with the League, a Federal Government would have been formed. India would have become a de facto Dominion- like Canada or Australia.  

deemed peripheral to the metropolitan corridors of Anglo-American academia,

British academia was always interested in India though it was the India Office which had most knowledge of the country. After Independence, the Cambridge school of Indian historiography-  John Andrew Gallagher, Ronald Robinson, and Anil Seal- was particularly influential.  But it was John Keay, Patrick French and William Dalrymple whose books sold well in India. They had the gift of making Indian history come alive. Still, it was the Frenchman, Dominique Lapierre whose two Indian books had the biggest impact. 

where theorists were interrogating what historian Ranajit Guha later defined as the “dominance without hegemony” of British colonisers.

They had hegemony even when they were not dominant- e.g. in Japan. On the other hand, it was a settled principle of British rule that India be ruled according to its own hoary traditions and laws.  

India was also facing the headwinds of perestroika and glasnost.

No. It wasn't a Communist country. What it faced was a type of Dynasticism where autocracy was tempered by assassination.  

The approaching end of the Cold War would soon herald an economic liberalisation that ushered us into a new commercial-cultural firmament.

That was irrelevant. India was bankrupt. It had no choice but to liberalize trade policy. But the 'Bombay Club' was able to claw back some degree of protection.  

Satellite television and MTV wedged out Doordarshan, the one and only national television broadcaster. Coca-Cola – banned since 1977

by the Janata Government.  

– would soon re-enliven our palates, seriously denting the market for local carbonated drinks like Gold Spot, Thums Up, Limca, Citra and Maaza.

This is misleading. Pepsi was the rival for Thums Up (which replaced Coke in 1977). So Coca Cola bought it and Gold Spot & Limca. Their mistake was to promote Coke over Thums Up but discovered that this helped Pepsi. Thus they had to invest in marketing Thums Up, as a drink for mature men, which is why it is now a billion dollar brand.  

We were feeling very fizzy.

Gassy. Indian food can have that quality.  

SPIC MACAY – the Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth – ruled our social lives with its performance seasons at colleges. At Delhi University, Levi’s jeans hobnobbed with crisp cotton sarees. Pupul Jayakar’s Festival of India was inaugurated with much fanfare in Britain in 1982; it would go on to present “India through Indian eyes” in China, Japan, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Sweden and the USA. Oh yes, Indian fever was high.

No. The place was as boring as shit, till Indira Gandhi pissed off the Sikhs and got assassinated.  

It was in this internationalist milieu, during my masters program in English literature at Delhi University, that I encountered Forster’s novel in a syllabus with the colonial “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf” script embedded in its suite of courses.

This wasn't a colonial syllabus. It was just the syllabus for a literature which begins with Beowulf and becomes extremely boring with the Bloomsbury Group. 

We had already been introduced to A House for Mr Biswas (1961) by the Trinidadian-Indian writer, V.S. Naipaul. His quaint yet acerbic tone posed considerable challenges.

'Biswas' is easily grasped by kids. 'Area of Darkness' & 'Wounded Civilization' were 'challenging' but most Hindus felt that Naipaul and Ved Mehta were right about the idiocy of Gandhi and Nehru.  Naipaul's 'Million Mutinies' came out in 1990 and was well received. 

He invited us to imagine a Caribbean that few of us could locate on the map, let alone in our imaginations.

His rural Trinidad is just like rural Bihar.  

But any pretensions that we, in the erstwhile colony, might have had a nascent postcolonial authority

Niradh Chaudhri? The ultra British J.C Squires swooned over him.  

were lost in excited genuflections to Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

Eagleton was a Marxist and wrote very well. His essay on Spivak- 'in the gaudy supermarket'- is excellent. 

and Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics (1985).

My memory is that Spivak was considered smarter than her. The problem was that nobody could understand a word Spivak wrote. This was because she actually was an imbecile. 

Into my life came A Passage to India, introduced by Dr Sanjay Kumar, a freshly-minted young lecturer, who seemed to herald radical winds of change in university teaching.

Spivak's Professor in Calcutta told his students not to do an MA in English. The certificate was not worth the paper it was printed on.  

We were held by his theatrical hands and ushered into the world of the Mosque, Caves and Temple of Forster’s novel.

Though Indians have access to all three. They don't need to find them in Forster.  

Scrawled all over my Permanent Penguins copy of the novel are pencilled notes that attest to the rigorous education in close reading we received. Some of those notes still stand the test of time. This was the first time I encountered India as a subject of English literary studies, the first time I stumbled upon the Indian imaginary in British fiction.

It is amazing that she hadn't read Kipling.  

The ‘great opportunity’

A Passage to India was not the world of genteel Edwardian angst Forster had depicted in A Room with a View (1908) and Howard’s End (1910).

It was located in India, not England or Europe.  

He was writing against the backdrop of rising demands from the Indian Home Rule Movement,

Forster was aware that intellectuals in England were turning against Imperialism. As H.G Wells put it, the Brits had no plan for India. They might as well clear out. It was foolish for Westminster to spend so much time passing laws about 'peshkesh' and 'takavvi' when not a single MP had any clue as to what these terms might mean.  

already gathering momentum during his first visit to India in 1912-13, and active when he subsequently served as private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas in 1921-22.

By then, the Labour Party had put Indian and Irish independence into their manifestos. But for Gandhi's unconditional surrender, India would have got what Egypt and Ireland and Afghanistan got in that year.  

The novel is based on these two visits, which Forster deemed the “great opportunity” of his life, though the letters he wrote home, mainly to his mother, were (he later admitted) “too prone to turn remote and rare matters into suburban jokes”.

Rather than focus on what it was like to bugger the punkah-wallah.  

His epistolary “record of a vanished civilization” was published as The Hill of Devi (1953).

There wasn't much civilization in it and what there was didn't vanish. The Maharaja remained the Maharaja till Indira Gandhi snatched away his title and privy purse. 

In the preface, he says:

In editing I have had to cut out a great deal of “How I wish you were all here!” or “Aren’t Indians quaint!” I did not really think the Indians quaint, and my deepest wish was to be alone with them.

Buggery is best done when alone with the punkahwallah. Mummy's presence might put a dampener on things.  

A Passage to India is not a far cry from this sentiment.

What made it topical was the American obsession with miscegenation. Darkies have ginormous dicks. They will totes wreck the vaginas of White Women.  

But by the time the novel was published, Gandhi’s nonviolent civil-disobedience movement against colonial rule, informed by his philosophy of satyagraha (insistence on truth), had been underway for five years. As a study of prevailing social-sexual mores among British potentates from a decade earlier, Forster’s novel was already dated.

That was its charm. What made it topical was the rise of Racialist ideologies consequent to the dissolution of the great multi-ethnic Empires.  

In his own words, the “gap between India remembered and India experienced was too wide”.

He wasn't an 'old India hand'- like Edmund Candler. But he wrote well.  

So, the mise en scène.

Chandrapore: a fictional Indian town that is presented as “nothing extraordinary”, a place where the Ganges happened “not to be holy”, where an “indestructible form of life” lies flat under the “overarching sky”.

So this a convoluted tale from the plains as opposed to the Hills where the divine Mrs. Hawksbee patronizes the Viceroy. 

This is India “under Western eyes”,

Adela Quested may see with Western eyes because she has just come from the West. But Fielding is an 'old India hand'- a member of the Indian Education Service, like PG Woodhouse's elder brother who was the tutor to Jeddu Krishnamurthi- the Messiah of the Theosophists.  

to borrow from Chandra Talpade Mohanty (not Joseph Conrad’s novel) – an India that Forster concedes, in his prefatory note to the 1957 Everyman edition, “no longer exists politically or socially”.

The Anglo-Indian official class had ceased to exist. But they had always been birds of passage.  

The bare bones of the plot: Adela Quested, a plain schoolmistress,

She has a bit of money of her own and thus is a suitable bride for an ICS man. Contextually, she can't be a schoolmistress because that would be a mesalliance. True, there were Girton bluestockings who might teach at Roedean or Cheltenham- but they wouldn't marry an Indian Civilian and spend the next 20 years playing the Mem Sahib in dusty mofussil towns. What Forster says about her is that she had a 'hard schoolmistressy manner'. But this did not mean she was a School Mistress. Had she been so, she would have known her place. In particular, she would have been very deferential to Fielding who was of the Indian Education Service. 

and Mrs Moore, her chaperone, arrive in Chandrapore to cement a possible marriage with Mrs Moore’s son Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate.

Mrs Moore has a younger son who may not be quite right in the head. Perhaps some 'bundobust' could be made for him in India by Heaslop who was after all a 'Heaven Born' ICS officer. There was also a daughter to be married off. Much depended on Adela making a good wife for Ronny. Someone up in Simla might take a shine to the couple and bring them to the Central Secretariat. But, perhaps Adela is not a 'suitable girl'. The Collector's wife thinks she isn't 'pukka'. 

The two women are befriended by Cyril Fielding, principal of the local government-run college churning out English-speaking Indians, as per Thomas Babington Macaulay’s infamous Minute on Education (1835).

Macaulay was merely repeating the demand made by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore that the EIC stop subsidizing education in Sanskrit and Arabic. What ambitious people wanted was English education. Twenty years later the first Indian Universities were created.  

Macaulay’s memorandum argued for a British Education Act that would shape “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”.

He said such people already existed- indeed, Roy had been very well received three years previously when he visited England. Dwarkanath was made even more welcome. Queen Victoria and the French King showed him every courtesy.  

Students would be forced to jettison studies customarily conducted in Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, all the better to perform the role of “interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern”.

Nobody was forced to jettison anything. On the contrary, Indians were expected to study one Classical and one Vernacular Indian language at School in order to matriculate. To practice as advocates, they had to learn the 'shikast' Persian script even though the Courts used the English language. One reason Indian people qualified as barristers in the UK was so as to get the right of audience without having to know anything about Indian scripts or even Indian laws. After all, your Munshi could do that type of donkey work for you.  

Miss Quested and Mrs Moore are desirous to meet “Indians”, much to the horror of the resident English, who are loath to allow “natives” within striking distance.

Forster's second visit to India coincided with the Viceroyalty of a Jew who did much to remove racial restrictions save in wholly private clubs.  

“Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die,” remarks one of the many memsahibs, whom Forster unfailingly paints in the most offensive colours.

There was a widespread belief, back then, that the Mem Sahibs had ruined India- i.e. prevented their husbands from fucking the washer-woman.  

Ronny, a public-school boy to his core, hardened by his job “to hold this wretched country by force”,

He is on the Judicial side. Contextually, this means he is a dim bulb. Still, with the right wife, he might get desirable postings.  

tries to rein in the two women by letting them know in no uncertain terms that “India isn’t a drawing room”.

He is afraid that his mother or his fiancee will do something discreditable to him- e.g. befriend a Eurasian lady. 

Despite pettifogging objections, Ronny’s mother and his “much too individual” prospective wife are soon acquainted with a Hindu professor, Narayan Godbole, and a Muslim physician, Dr Aziz. As a “Mohammedan”, Dr Aziz is not allowed entry into the Chandrapore Club, even though a “few flabby Hindus” have been admitted.

No. Aziz says no Indians were admitted to the Club even as guests. What the author says is that 'flabby Hindus' had preceded Aziz's Muslims in India and 'chilly Englishmen' had succeeded them as the rulers.

 As he strolled downhill beneath the lovely moon, and again saw the lovely mosque, he seemed to own the land as much as anyone owned it. What did it matter if a few flabby Hindus had preceded him there, and a few chilly English succeeded?

It seems the 'close reading' Mridula was taught did not involve actually reading a book written in simple enough English.  

This signalling of a colonial divide and rule policy cannot go unnoticed.

But, Forster tells us, through Aziz, that no Indians were admitted. There was no 'divide and rule'. There was 'unify and rule'.  As the sub-continent moved to self-government, first Buddhist Burma and then Muslim majority Pakistan broke away. The Hindus decided to hang together rather than wait to be hanged apart. 

The British were attempting to supplant the grand abiding influence of 500 years of the Muslim Sultanate and the Mughal Empire.

Which had been supplanted by the Hindu Marathas. The Brits took over Delhi and its puppet Emperor from the Peshwa.  

Scenes of British bigotry unfold “while the true India slid by unnoticed”.

No. Adela is thinking about the narrow social life she, as the wife of a Magistrate, would be condemned to. But this had a lot to do with her fiancee's limitations. There had been English women- e.g. the mother of William Beveridge- who had worked for the upliftment of Indian women while married to ICS officers.  

Sadly, the realization Adela comes to before entering the fatal cave is that she does not love Ronnie. She believes in personal relationships. They create the Good. What happens to Adela in the cave brings Evil into the world of both the Indians and the British. At a later point she will say to Ronnie 'What is the use of personal relationships when everyone brings less and less to them? I feel we ought all to go back into the desert for centuries and try and get good. I want to begin at the beginning. All the things I thought I’d learnt are just a hindrance, they’re not knowledge at all. I’m not fit for personal relationships.' It is plausible that Adela would hold to the Moorean creed that was also Forster's. As Keynes said, there was a public policy aspect to that ethical system. In Howard's End, good could come from bad through truthfulness and mutuality. But, in India, there was Evil because the system was rotten. It was an Evil all equally authored and were afflicted by. Adela escapes it. She returns to England. Fielding and Mrs. Moore's three children are condemned to India. But India will go backwards. The new High School will be turned into a storehouse or granary. The Muslims will revert to dreams of Jihad while the Hindus will wax yet more mystical. Turtons and Burtons will go through the motions being ground down by machine in which they are interchangeable cogs. 

Giving us the temperature of the times, Aziz and his friends, Hamidullah and Mahmoud Ali, discuss whether “it is possible to be friends with an Englishman”.

Or with a kaffir.  'O you who believe! Do not take the jews and christians as friends; they are friends of each other; and he amongst you who develops affinities with them, is from amongst them; indeed Allah does not guide the transgressors.' [Holy Quran 5:51]

In particular, they interrogate the nature of the “ladies” of Empire, examining them for ingrained imperial prejudices.

No. That would be foolish. Women are supposed to subscribe to the values of their fathers or husbands.  

Forster quickly brings us to the crisis that becomes the fulcrum of the narrative.

No. He dawdles. But that is his charm.  

A chord is struck between Aziz and Mrs Moore in an unexpected early meeting where both drop their guard.

Why? That is the question which gives the novel its interest. The simplest explanation is that Christianity had become too fussy and over-ornamented and spiritually enervating. Perhaps it could have renewed itself by proselytizing among the heathen hordes of the sub-continent.

When Mrs. Moore first comes to India, she lectures her son, a Magistrate, on his Christian duty to the heathen

“I’m going to argue, and indeed dictate,” she said, clinking her rings. “The English are out here to be pleasant.”

Queen Victoria had issued a proclamation of some such sort before becoming the Empress of India. 

“How do you make that out, mother?” he asked, speaking gently again, for he was ashamed of his irritability.

“Because India is part of the earth. And God has put us on the earth in order to be pleasant to each other. God . . . is . . . love.” She hesitated, seeing how much he disliked the argument, but something made her go on. “God has put us on earth to love our neighbours and to show it, and He is omnipresent, even in India, to see how we are succeeding.”

He looked gloomy, and a little anxious. He knew this religious strain in her, and that it was a symptom of bad health; there had been much of it when his stepfather died. He thought, “She is certainly ageing, and I ought not to be vexed with anything she says.”

“The desire to behave pleasantly satisfies God. . . The sincere if impotent desire wins His blessing. I think every one fails, but there are so many kinds of failure. Good will and more good will and more good will. Though I speak with the tongues of . . .”

He waited until she had done, and then said gently, “I quite see that. I suppose I ought to get off to my files now, and you’ll be going to bed.”

Forster's novel is about the de-Christianizing of Mrs. Moore. His generation had as great a horror of Victorian Evangelism as they did of Utilitarianism. But knocking both down left nothing but the perpetuation of a naked Racialism as the Raj's raison d'etre. That game was so not worth the candle. Empires must either pay for themselves or else, the metropole must be willing to squander blood and treasure on its defence and upkeep. Salazar's Portugal may have been prepared to do so. Atlee's England would have none of it. 

 Like the British Raj, Mrs. Moore is close to death. She says she likes a mystery- Faith is founded on nothing else- but dislikes muddles. Fielding, speaking for Forster, assures her that a mystery is just a muddle. The attractive 'simplicity' of Islam, to the Englishman, is that there are no theological mysteries. God knows best. All is pre-ordained. What appears a muddle is God's superbly wrought plot into which it would be foolish to inquire. Sadly, for Christians, there is, if not a mystery, if not an 'open question', then, yet, Christ's open wounds. 

 For Forster, at the other pole from Islam- from which, at an earlier period, the West acquired atomism- was the ineffable, perhaps obscene, dizzying multiplicity of the henotheistic Hindu pantheon. If India was a muddle, it was the Hindus who had made it so. 

Consider Godbole. Perhaps, he knows the secret of the Marabar caves or, better yet, can reveal what it is precisely because he does not know it. Aziz tries to tease it out of him to no avail. The caves remain a mystery save to the Archaeological Survey. Their only function in Forster's novel is to further muddle what was already muddled. 

Aziz then offers to take Mrs Moore and Miss Quested on a trip to the famed Marabar Caves, based on the real Barabar Caves, the oldest surviving rock-cut caves in India, located in the state now known as Bihar.

The Brits were big fans of Emperor Ashoka who created those caves. Forster was writing at a time when Buddhism and Hinduism and a hybrid Theosophy appeared a threat to Christendom. Islam was considered a simple religion for very simple people.  

“The caves are readily described,” writes Forster:

A tunnel eight feet long, five feet high, three feet wide, leads to a circular chamber about twenty feet in diameter. This arrangement occurs again and again throughout the group of hills. […] Nothing, nothing attaches to them, and their reputation – for they have one – does not depend upon human speech.

It depended on Ashokan inscriptions which the Archaeological Survey of India had done a lot to investigate and publicize. Forster, I suppose, was showing loyalty to his beloved Ross Massood and the Aligarh movement. Alternatively, since Ashoka was an Emperor who embraced non-violence- the caves conjure up an irenic, if not immaculate, conception of Pax Britannica which the Caiaphas custodians of its cultus- Turtons and Burtons- would have no truck with.  Forster had been a conscientious objector during the war. Russell had gone to jail. 

A metaphor for the deep dark dive into the womb and the untramelled psyche,

would affect everybody- not just Adela 

for the supposed unknowability of India

to Indians? 

and its putative arcane spirituality,

routine to Hindus like Godbole 

for the inability of speech to match up to the liberal-humanist credo by which Forster lived:

because of the inhibitions of the English middle class 

all of this and more might be justifiably attached to the Marabar Caves.

Or it is simply Forster taking the side of the Aligarh Muslims against the idolatrous Hindus and the Ahimsa of their Emperor Ashoka. He would do the same with respect to Iqbal vs Tagore.  Ian Stephens, whom Forster would get to know after the War in Cambridge, was a similar type of homosexual. Sardar Patel threw him out of India because he was pro-Pakistan.  

At the caves, the well worn colonial trope of “an English girl fresh from England” attacked and sexually violated by a devious Oriental man is introduced.

Sadly, it is not a colonial trope. Tourists in India have been raped even if they are not 'fresh' at all.  

Aziz is arrested on unspecified charges, Adela is returned into the bosom of a pernicious social apartheid, and the empire casts its racialised net over all its actors.

But British Justice prevails. Aziz is given a fair trial. The charge against him is based on the victim's deposition. The clinching evidence is that Aziz had picked up the girl's binoculars which she had dropped while fleeing the cave. 

“Miss Quested was only a victim, but young Heaslop was a martyr,” writes Forster; “he was the recipient of all the evil intended against them by the country they had tried to serve; he was bearing the sahib’s cross.”

He was on the Judicial side. Had he been an Army officer he would have been acquitted if he had beaten Aziz to death in the presence of witnesses. True, he'd have been cashiered but a collection would have been taken up for him.  

Forster offers a poor, rather inadequate, if dramatic and well-meaning, resolution to his Shakespearean master-slave dialectic, which mandates that Caliban can only ever ravish Miranda, his coloniser Prospero’s daughter.

This is nonsense. Aziz is a cultured man but temperamental. That's what makes him attractive.  

There is a public trial. An Indian judge is appointed to preside over the case. Two nationalisms rear their heads. Adela admits to making a mistake at the critical juncture of her testimony. Aziz is acquitted.

An English woman does not lie under oath. Forster wasn't an utter scoundrel.  

At the conclusion of the court case, there are “shouts of derision and rage […] people screamed and cursed, kissed one another, wept passionately.” Aziz faints into the arms of Hamidullah. “Victory on this side, defeat on that – complete for one moment was the antithesis,” writes Forster. “Then life returned to its complexities.”

Could Dr. Aziz be retained in Government employment? The case had thrown doubt on his moral character. In the event, Aziz takes service in a Native State. The remaining question is whether Aziz will press for damages, rather than settle for costs. Adela has some money but it is a 'competence' rather than a 'fortune'. If she has to pay heavy damages she might actually have to become a School-Mistress.  

Then the courtroom empties until no one remained on the scene of the fantasy but the beautiful naked god.

If Kipling mentions a punkahwallah, he will tell us his name and the name of his daughter and sketch out the stories he tells her to get her to go to sleep. Forster wasn't Kipling. The latter had Mrs. Hawksbee, who can mould a drudge to be an Imperial proconsul. The former had Mrs. Moore for whom everything was a muddle.  

Unaware that anything unusual had occurred, he continued to pull the chord of his punkah, to gaze at the empty dais and the overturned special chairs, and rhythmically to agitate the clouds of the descending dust.

So who is this “god”?

The sort of dude, Forster liked to fuck.  

A swagger of influencers

Forster was part of the intellectual aristocracy of the Bloomsbury Group, which included artists and writers like Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and the economist John Maynard Keynes.

We may see the influence of G.E Moore behind them. But, the more we learn of them, the less we like them.  

Wealthy, privileged bohemians

they were upper middle class- barely.  

out to smash pieties of polite society and Victorian sexual mores, this swagger of “influencers” (in contemporary parlance) shaped the era’s emerging feminism and modernism.

No. That existed in stronger form before they left School.  

Forster was openly gay within his private circle, though not publicly.

So he wasn't 'openly' gay at all.  

Maurice, his novel about love between two men, was written in 1913 but withheld from publication until after his death in 1970.

Once sodomy was decriminalized.  

Yet A Passage to India, this oddest of odd works, presages the homosexuality Forster could not express in print during his lifetime.

No. It comes after Forster's homosexual 'awakening'. Edward Carpenter is usually mentioned in this connection.  

A scene during the trial, narrated through Adela’s eyes, gives voice to Forster’s heart. Adela notices a man, “the humblest of all who were present”, who has “no bearing officially on the trial: the man who pulled the punkah”:… he seemed to control the proceedings. He had the strength and beauty that sometimes come to flower in Indians of low birth. When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god – not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her […]

It does not occur to Forster that punkahwallahs might be chosen for their good looks and lack of foul odour.  

he stood out as divine, yet he was of the city, its garbage had nourished him, he would end on its rubbish-heaps […] he seemed apart from human destinies, a male Fate, a winnower of souls.

Interestingly, the Nawabs of Awadh had a steam powered punkah by 1819. Electric fans were available in India after 1906. Indeed, Forster mentions them as being in use in the houses of his characters. The first wholly indigenous electric fan was produced in 1930. I suppose, if the District Court had retained the traditional punkah it was because the palki bearers and punkah wallahs had some countervailing power. Abolishing a salaried government post involved a lot of red tape. Still, the atmosphere Forster evokes is pre-War. Moreover, it must be said, the punkah as 'winnower of souls' is an arresting image. Sadly, it is meaningless.  

Race and gender, caste and class, sex and desire coalesce in this passage, which goes on to provide the most penetrating critique yet of the empire to which Foster fully belonged, and repudiated.

He did not belong to the Empire. He was English and the subject of a King, not an Emperor.  

In the face of the punkah-walla’s “aloofness,” Adela questions her “particular brand of opinions, and the suburban Jehovah who sanctified them – by what right did they claim so much importance in the world, and assume the title of civilization?”

She had previously knelt down and prayed to Jehovah, not Lord Jesus, that Aziz be convicted. 'Just as the Hindu clerks asked Lakshmi for an increase in pay, so did she implore Jehovah for a favourable verdict. God who saves the King will surely support the police.' Forster equates English Christianity with idolatrous Hinduism. Moreover, mention of the 'untouchable' punkahwallah was part and parcel of the Aligarh Muslim dream of getting the support of that community so as to outflank the Caste Hindus. 

Forster even manages to get us to sympathize with Ronny- whose Mother has been turned into a Hindu deity 'Esmiss Esmoor'. But she is no longer Christian. To Adela she is pitiless

“Oh, what of the echo?” asked Mrs. Moore, paying attention to her for the first time.

“I can’t get rid of it.”

“I don’t suppose you ever will.”

Ronny had emphasized to his mother that Adela would arrive in a morbid state, yet she was being positively malicious.

“Mrs. Moore, what is this echo?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No—what is it? oh, do say! I felt you would be able to explain it . . . this will comfort me so. . . .”

“If you don’t know, you don’t know; I can’t tell you.”

“I think you’re rather unkind not to say.”

“Say, say, say,” said the old lady bitterly. “As if anything can be said! I have spent my life in saying or in listening to sayings; I have listened too much. It is time I was left in peace. Not to die,” she added sourly. “No doubt you expect me to die, but when I have seen you and Ronny married, and seen the other two and whether they want to be married—I’ll retire then into a cave of my own.” She smiled, to bring down her remark into ordinary life and thus add to its bitterness. “Somewhere where no young people will come asking questions and expecting answers. Some shelf.”

Mrs. Moore, when the novel opened, was good. She was kind. She was able to connect to people. If Evil had entered the cave with Adela, then Good had been taken away from Mrs. Moore at that same moment. Perhaps, that Good became a Hindu deity. Perhaps that Evil became an additional straw which, sooner or later, break the back of the camel that was British Rule in the desert that was India. It may be that the Cosmic books balanced or that there was no book. Debit means the same thing as Credit. Despair means the same thing as Hope. 

Mrs Moore finds an unexpected way to speak of the futility of 'organic unities' as arising from 'personal relationships'- 

'Why has anything to be done, I cannot see. Why all this marriage, marriage? . . . The human race would have become a single person centuries ago if marriage was any use. And all this rubbish about love, love in a church, love in a cave, as if there is the least difference, and I held up from my business over such trifles!”

Adela’s confrontation with an overwhelming sense of infinitude in the Caves section of the novel leaves her with a persistent echo,

She says to Fielding 'My echo has gone—I call the buzzing sound in my ears an echo. You see, I have been unwell ever since that expedition to the caves, and possibly before it.' In other words, the buzzing was part of an illness which, she thinks, preceded her visit to the cave. There was no 'overwhelming sense of infinitude' in the caves. The fact is, when she tells Ronnie she might be mistaken, Aziz might be innocent, her echo gets better. 

What clinches matters is Mrs. Moore's saying Aziz is innocent. Her son demands what proof she has. 

“Oh, how tedious . . . trivial . . .” and as when she had scoffed at love, love, love, her mind seemed to move towards them from a great distance and out of darkness. “Oh, why is everything still my duty? when shall I be free from your fuss? Was he in the cave and were you in the cave and on and on . . . and Unto us a Son is born, unto us a Child is given . . . and am I good and is he bad and are we saved? . . . and ending everything the echo.”

“I don’t hear it so much,” said Adela, moving towards her. “You send it away, you do nothing but good, you are so good.”

“I am not good, no, bad.” She spoke more calmly and resumed her cards, saying as she turned them up, “A bad old woman, bad, bad, detestable. I used to be good with the children growing up, also I meet this young man in his mosque, I wanted him to be happy. Good, happy, small people. They do not exist, they were a dream. . . . But I will not help you to torture him for what he never did. There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.”

“Have you any evidence in the prisoner’s favour?” said Ronny in the tones of the just official. “If so, it is your bounden duty to go into the witness-box for him instead of for us. No one will stop you.”

“One knows people’s characters, as you call them,” she retorted disdainfully, as if she really knew more than character but could not impart it. “I have heard both English and Indians speak well of him, and I felt it isn’t the sort of thing he would do.”

“Feeble, mother, feeble.”

“Most feeble.”

“And most inconsiderate to Adela.”

Adela said: “It would be so appalling if I was wrong. I should take my own life.”

He turned on her with: “What was I warning you just now? You know you’re right, and the whole station knows it.”

“Yes, he . . . This is very, very awful. I’m as certain as ever he followed me . . . only, wouldn’t it be possible to withdraw the case? I dread the idea of giving evidence more and more, and you are all so good to women here and you have so much more power than in England—look at Miss Derek’s motor-car. Oh, of course it’s out of the question, I’m ashamed to have mentioned it; please forgive me.”

“That’s all right,” he said inadequately. “Of course I forgive you, as you call it. But the case has to come before a magistrate now; it really must, the machinery has started.”

“She has started the machinery; it will work to its end.”

Adela inclined towards tears in consequence of this unkind remark, and Ronny picked up the list of steamship sailings with an excellent notion in his head. His mother ought to leave India at once: she was doing no good to herself or to anyone else there.

The old woman goes but Adela's echo remains. Then, outside the court there is the cry 'Esmiss Esmoor!- the crowd believes a witness for the defence has been bundled out of the country. The stage is set for the extinction of the echo.  

which disappears at this moment.

It disappears when, under cross-examination, she replays the scene in her mind. Did Aziz enter the cave? No. She has made a mistake. Perhaps she had suffered a hallucination. But what might have caused it? She tells Fielding that she had begun to feel unwell after a party where the Hindu Professor sang.

“Can you remember when you first felt out of sorts?”

“When I came to tea with you there, in that garden-house.”

“A somewhat unlucky party. Aziz and old Godbole were both ill after it too.”

Perhaps, some hallucinogenic herb had found its way into the tea. 

“I was not ill—it is far too vague to mention: it is all mixed up with my private affairs. I enjoyed the singing . . . but just about then a sort of sadness began that I couldn’t detect at the time . . . no, nothing as solid as sadness: living at half pressure expresses it best. Half pressure. I remember going on to polo with Mr. Heaslop at the Maidan. Various other things happened—it doesn’t matter what, but I was under par for all of them. I was certainly in that state when I saw the caves, and you suggest (nothing shocks or hurts me)—you suggest that I had an hallucination there, the sort of thing—though in an awful form—that makes some women think they’ve had an offer of marriage when none was made.”

She was in a suggestible state. But what triggered it? She tells us that her 'sadness' began at just about the time of Godbole's singing. I may mention that the raag would have been appropriate to the hour. Some such raags- e.g. Malkauns- are said to have supernatural effects. I think Alec Guinness grasped this. There was a mystical side to him- as there often is amongst great actors- and he expresses it in his otherwise over the top performance in 'Passage'.  

Having given us his perspicacious insight into interracial relationships as a key site of colonial anxieties,

This is silly. The key site of colonial anxiety was losing your job or your pension. 

Forster provides a strange reconciliation, via the “ragged edges of religion”, in the last section of the novel, titled Temple. Occupying a mere 30 pages in an almost 300-page novel, Temple relies heavily on the Hindu religious practices Forster had observed during his second sojourn in Dewas.

Why had Aziz not taken service in a Muslim state? I suppose his failure to gain exemplary damages from Adela was considered cowardly by his co-religionists. Meanwhile, he is under the impression that Fielding married Adela and kept her money for himself.  

In The Hill of Devi, Forster devotes a section to what he deems “the most important of [his] letters home”. These described the Gokulashtami Festival, which celebrates the birth of Lord Krishna.

He was born in jail. Aziz would have been in the Cellular jail in the Andamans if Adela hadn't recanted.  

The festival appears in A Passage to India, where it is described as a “wild and sincere” occasion, during which “all men loved each other, and avoided by instinct whatever could cause inconvenience or pain”.

Perhaps Ind had been an Eden before the Turk or the European snaked their way in.  

There is a moment during the festivities when the music is silenced, for this was ritually the moment of the Despised and the Rejected; the God could not issue from His temple until the unclean sweepers played their tune, they were the spot of filth without which the spirit cannot cohere.

Such music, of course, was abomination to Islam. Plenty of riots occurred because music was played in front of a mosque.  

Like Adela Quested’s observation of the punkah wallah at the trial, Forster’s sedulous sense of the despised appears within the divine. It provides an intimate insight into how he thought of bodies within the hierarchical and ideological morass of imperialism.

Did Forster think of English bodies differently? On the evidence of his earlier novels, no. There is class and there is hierarchy and an ideological muddle or morass. India was different because there was but a light topsoil of Englishry in the mofussil towns scattered across its vastness.  

A passage through India?

A Passage to India has been subjected to charges of mediocrity as a work of modernism.

It is middle-brow. But it is well written and, because of the interracial sex angle, had a ready market in America. 

It has been critiqued – most astringently by Edward Said – for perpetuating orientalist tropes.

It perpetuates certain Aligarh Muslim tropes. But that was par for the course for Anglo-Indian writing. You picked a side and stuck with it. Kipling was for the Punjabi and against the Bengali. Forster was for the Aligarh Muslim and against the cunning Brahmin. Said- a White American Protestant- knew nothing about India.  

Benita Parry has criticised it for mystifying the idea of India.

Forster was reacting to India's admission to the League of Nations. Prior to the Great War, while yet great Empires existed, a private gentleman needed no passport to cross borders. Nor did he require Government permission to buy foreign currency. It was a golden age for cosmopolitan Liberals. With the resignation of Morley at the outbreak of war in 1914, Forster's world was shattered. The long nineteenth century had ended. Nationalism was the cuckoo in the nest of Liberalism. 

 'India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood! Waddling in at this hour of the world to take her seat! She, whose only peer was the Holy Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps!'

          Postcolonial feminists have pilloried it for fetishising racialised bodies.

Forster had a dick. True he only used it for homosexual purposes. Still, dicks are very evil. Ban them immediately. 

The most charitable theorists understand the novel as

of its time. Racialized Nationalism had triumphed over universalist Empires- save perhaps in Bolshevik Russia. But Lenin's brand of Universalist homonoia could only be established by cutting off the heads of people like Forster whose hands were soft and unused to manual labour.  Perhaps Islam would be immune to the lure of Marx. After all, Muslims are very very stupid. Still, they are decent enough chaps if taught to play cricket. That's where Aziz fell down. Cricketers soon get out of the habit of telling stupid lies. True, they become incapable of saying anything interesting but you can generally stop their spate of words by asking if a googly is the same thing as a birdie. 

a treatise on how colonisation damages the coloniser’s mind,

There are no 'colonisers' in the novel. There are administrators and judges and police officers and Civil Surgeons. But they are dull and deeply provincial. Young Englishmen were no longer keen to go out to India. They knew they would be bored to death unless they first died of dysentery.  

as well as that of the colonised, and as an impassioned plea for intercultural, interracial friendships.

Of which the Indian National Congress- founded by an ICS Scotsman and recently headed by Annie Besant- had plenty. Forster himself was close to Ross Massood.  

In its 100th year, A Passage to India may also be interrogated for holding on to Forster’s liberal-humanist credo “only connect”.

But Kipling did it better. His credo was- work as part of a team and even the most boring job in India becomes rewarding. Kim, as Borges reminds us, has taken up an ignoble profession- that of a spy. But his work does not matter. What matters is his loyalty and esprit de corps.  

The question lingers, with even more urgency now, if such a hope of connection obfuscates the extractive economic and political conditions on which colonisation rests.

Colonisation ended long ago. Even Indians like Mridula are welcome to settle in 'settler colonies' so as to teach nonsense to imbeciles.  

What if the colonised and the coloniser cannot understand each other in any way?

They can still trade or enforce the payment of tribute.  

The title of Forster’s novel is derived from Walt Whitman’s 1869 poem A Passage to India, where the American poet sees the opening of the Suez Canal “as both a reason for celebration and an opportunity to connect with the spiritual traditions of faraway lands”.

 Whitman had worked in the Bureau of Indian affairs and lamented the passing away of much of their ancient lore and traditional way of life. India, for him, contained Indians of another sort- ones with ancient books and temples. 

Passage to India!
Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.        

Forster’s evocation of Suez is truer and darker. Mrs Moore dies on her passage home “across the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea” via the Suez, leaving the novel to claim that “no poetry adorns it, because disillusionment cannot be beautiful”.

Mridula is mistaken. Forster says that Mrs. Moore left before the hot season when 'electric fans hummed and spat'. 

 'In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but here the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful.'

I don't suppose the Arabian deserts described by T.E Lawrence were cool and shady. Yet, there is no disillusionment with 'the garden of Allah'. It was the politics of Damascus which repelled Lawrence.  

'Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.

India accommodated Kipling well enough. His poetry is entertaining and puts new life into you when the drought comes and you have to spend your days under canvass organizing food-for-work programs and are bone tired. 

'The annual helter-skelter of April, when irritability and lust spread like a canker, is one of her comments on the orderly hopes of humanity.'

 And yet order was and is kept. 

Fish manage better; fish, as the tanks dry, wriggle into the mud and wait for the rains to uncake them. But men try to be harmonious all the year round, and the results are occasionally disastrous.

The more senior people went off to Simla. Even the middling sort sent their wives and children to Hill Stations.  

The triumphant machine of civilization may suddenly hitch and be immobilized into a car of stone, and at such moments the destiny of the English seems to resemble their predecessors’, who also entered the country with intent to refashion it, but were in the end worked into its pattern and covered with its dust.

England was able to use the resources of India to win two world wars. Admittedly, the second time around, England did as much to defend India as India had done for Britain in the Great War.  

“Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it,” writes Forster;

Tagore had won a Nobel Prize for supplying poetry. This was a great consolation to some English soldiers in the trenches.  

“they desire that joy shall be graceful, 

don't shove a radish up your bum and run around naked when you are happy 

and sorrow august,

don't scream loudly and shit yourself when Mummy dies.  

and infinity have a form,

No. Nobody wants that.  

and India fails to accommodate them.”

Kipling and Tagore won the Nobel Prize. India accommodated them very well.  

Thus his belief in the “undeveloped heart […] the heart untrained and untutored”, as he wrote of in his 1936 essay Notes on the English Character, fails to achieve any ethical connection through personal salvation.

He was writing only about the English, public school educated, middle class. He says that Aligarh is on the English public school model. Sadly, Ross Massood was straight even though his grandfather set the place up. Perhaps this was because his Dad was an Oxford educated Judge rather than an 'untrained and untutored' catamite. 

The heartbeat of Howard’s End, the ultimate manifesto of liberal humanism, was “only connect”. A Passage to India puts paid to any such possibility. Two years after the trial, after Cyril Fielding has married Mrs Moore’s daughter Stella, he visits Aziz in Mau. He asks him: “Why can’t we be friends now? […] It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” The answer comes from the very earth:

“No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”

It may be that Forster had heard the story of Ross's father's difficulties with his British brother Judges. It was also said that he was an alcoholic. It often happened that the son of a person who, by popular report, had been unfairly treated by the Brits (e.g. Salman Rushdie's father), would be hold himself a little aloof from such people.  

Attempting the impossible

In his 1909 manifesto, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, Gandhi wrote:

I am so constructed that I can only serve my immediate neighbours, but in my conceit I pretend to have discovered that I must with my body serve every individual in the Universe. In thus attempting the impossible, man comes in contact with different natures, different religions, and is utterly confounded.

This passage occurs in a chapter titled Hindus and Muhammadans. Gandhi begins by saying railways are very evil. God ordained us to walk everywhere. The Steam Engine is a satanic innovation. His interlocutor asks if the introduction of Islam into India hadn't been equally disastrous. Gandhi says- Brits invented this story about 'inborn enmity'. Gandhi was correct. That is why there is no such country as Pakistan.  

Forster may be seen to be such a man.

Very true. Buggering the Punkahwallah is the pastime of every true Gandhian.  

He was striving to achieve an idealistic, pure connection of friendship, untrammelled by the contingencies of race, religion and language.

He found it with a  Egyptian bus driver.  

But his individual sense of egalitarianism and fraternity was negated by an India that was being swept by the winds of nationalism.

As was Egypt, not to mention England, France, Germany, China, Hungary, Guatemala etc.  

Forster himself signals that, within the realm of the political, the personal may not survive: “socially they had no meeting-place.”

Lord Reading threw open officially sponsored clubs to 'natives'. But the INC already had plenty of White people. Indeed, it was twice headed by White ladies.  

Forster traced an ancestral connection to the late-18th century abolitionist Clapham Sect. He was shaped by a reformist Edwardian milieu and was soaked in the charmed bohemianism of the Bloomsbury Group.

He was a little dowdy and old womanish. Still, his talent was obvious.  

And he was deeply attached to a mythic liberal humanism – which was confounded by what he encountered in revolutionary India.

Moscow was revolutionary. India- not so much.  

With A Passage to India, his reputation in the fraught stratosphere of early 20th century English literature is both sealed and soiled.

No. It is a major work of a minor writer. Somerset Maugham was far more successful. 

In pedagogical, philosophical and political terms, Forster’s ambition was to show us competing beliefs and contradictory positions.

He makes no such attempt. But, unlike Maugham who sometimes wrote like a Frenchman, Forster's English is pellucid. His ear for dialogue is unmatchable. His handling of the Court scene is masterly. Is it plausible? No. The Superintendent of Police would not cross-examine a witness he had previously deposed more particularly if a barrister was appearing for the Defence. If no public prosecutor had been appointed for the District, then a lawyer would have been hired for the task. It is obvious that the Defence will raise a hue and cry about 'leading questions' and the witness having been coached by the very man to whom she had given the original deposition or 'first information report'. Moreover, the Superintendent is foolish enough to mention Mrs. Moore, which would be bound to cause the Defence to demand that she be produced for cross examination. Forster gets away with this travestu by focussing our attention of the thoroughly rattled European community. Thus, psychological plausibility is maintained. 

 Apparently, Forster himself was in doubt as to whether a trial of this sort would be conducted in a subordinate court. He asked Massood to check the details. Massood said what he had written was magnificent. Not one word should be changed. It appears Massood was a bit like Aziz. Still, Massood was right. There is drama in the courthouse- this is 'truth of mood' not 'truth of fact' and, in any case, the plot is gossamer thin. 

To be clear, the trial could be held in a subordinate court but, because the Defence had brought in a leading barrister, an experienced prosecutor would have been called in. He would have deposed the accuser and spotted the weaknesses in her testimony. Then a medical report would have been commissioned. The trial could have gone ahead on the basis of that old standby of the Indian police- the false witness paid for the purpose. The Defence may have tried to get Adela on the stand and this could have been a point on which they appealed the case. Still, what happened in the High Court was no concern of the District Commissioner. 

His novel expresses a desire to reach out to the other, sit with biases and discomforts, humilities and hostilities – but not lose sight of civilisational injustices that make dialogue seem not only impossible, but unimaginable.

But Kipling had already settled the hash of the 'can East & West meet' question. The answer was- sure, if you contest with each other for an honourable prize or, better yet, work together as a team. Whining about Civilizational injustices- the greatest of which is having to pay taxes (which are the price of civilization)- is best left to poltroons.  

Forty years from when I first read A Passage to India, a desire for connection without attending to the contingencies of history and geography seems jejune.

Mridula is unaware of the history of her own country.  

At this historical moment, when the world is entirely flammable, I cannot but be aware of the continuing fires of colonialism

where? Israel? Is that what she means?  

and the desire to break free of the horrendous Enlightenment binary that created it.

Colonies existed long before there was an Enlightenment. No doubt, this lady thinks Vasco da Gama was a pal of Voltaire.  

If it is difficult to reconcile opposed ideas and positions today,

what is difficult is to get a visa and to settle in the USA. Fuck you Trump! Fuck you very much! I hope the Greenlanders kill all your Green Berets.  

to struggle between human identity and alterity,

ipseity and alterity. Mridula has to struggle not to become a wallaby.  

A Passage to India reminds me of how we got here.

To Australia? I suppose you swam over there from Delhi and killed and displaced the aboriginal wallabies. I believe Purushottam Billimoria first set this trend. 

Today, Gandhi and Forster seem to be at the irreconcilable ends of the legacy of empire:

Forster was on the side of the Muslims. Gandhi wanted to bamboozle them. But Pakistanis like Kipling not Forster.  

one arguing for

Enemas 

satyagraha, non-violence and civil disobedience; the other pleading for liberal humanism and psychic integration.

Sodomy.  

What their visions and works demand of us is

sodomy in the one case and sleeping naked with young girls in the other.  

an acute consideration of what Forster calls the “unsatisfactory and undramatic tangles” of human interaction – flawed and ineffectual, broken and unbridgeable.

But those tangles and muddles were of a middle-class Englishman whose 'love could not speak its name'.  

A Passage to India is a reminder that we have not yet forded the gap.

Islam remains Islam. Hinduism remains Hinduism. But, nowadays, a gay bloke who went to an English Public School is welcome to be as gay as fuck. He doesn't have to pretend to be a genteel old maid. As for Britain, after its non-violent struggle for independence from Brussels, it had a Hindu Prime Minister. If Indians play the Raj card, us true blue Brits can play the Rishi card. Under his rule, trillions of wee Scottish bairns starved to death. I myself became seriously malnourished during the great Cornish Pasty dearth of 2023. Still, we survived. I hope the Indians will not spurn the offer of my hand in friendship unless, obviously, they try to stick their dicks on it. It's one thing if Mahatma Gandhi pulls that trick on you- after all, that's just the sort of high jinks barristers get up to. But when Mamta Bannerjee does it, you look a fool when you complain about it. People, rather meanly, suggest that you might be an alcoholic.