Why Indian Women Practise The 'Arts'

One of the most solidly established cultural dichotomies in Indian society can be put in this brusque manner : 'Men study the Sciences, Women practise the Arts.' To see what I mean, take a week off and travel through the halls of Indian academia : most Literature departments in Indian universities are filled with women, and the menfolk you will meet there will uneasily explain to you how they narrowly missed the entrance examination to the local engineering college. To put it more crudely, Literature is always the last available option for Indian men. Or take Education or Psychology, for two more examples : it would be an extremely intrepid Indian man who would dare to pursue an M.A. course in Education or Pyschology, knowing only too well that he is on the verge of being labelled as effeminate by his friends. In contrast, parents whose daughter has earned an M.Sc. in Physics or Mathematics will ensure that everyone (especially in the marriage-market) knows how she has risen above her gender, earned her laurels in the male bastions of the university, and defeated the men at their own game.

One reason for this ludicrous state of affairs in the Indian academy is because an ancient European rumour which says that Men are 'rational' and Women are 'sentimental' has sunk so deep into the Indian pysche that though this myth has now been thoroughly exposed in European philosophy as a dangerous untruth, many Indians still hold on to the sexist dictums of their Victorian educators of the late 19th century. Consequently, the view is still widely held across the length and breadth of India that 'precise' and 'exact' sciences such as physics and chemistry are the special provenance of the 'masculine reason', and that 'emotional' and 'mawkish' affairs such as poetry and psychology are the unique privileges of the 'feminine heart'.

Underlying this delegation of certain subjects (branded as the 'Arts') to the irrational subterranean depths of feminine sentimentality is a deep ideological conviction that Indian women should not be allowed to speak for themselves in the socio-political sphere. Women are welcome (indeed, urged) to study the 'Arts' in the privacy of their homes so long as they just shut up when it comes to non-trivial 'political' matters that cannot be left to their unreliable sentiments, and they should not pretend to rise to the universal and dispassionate heights that are the special domain of the masculine 'Sciences'. Instead, so the hidden story goes, Indian women should celebrate the freedom that has been granted to them (by the men, of course, in a magnanimous gesture) to enjoy their 'Arts', and in turn this 'humane' education in the 'liberal Arts' will help them to refine their aesthetic sensitivities, to develop their poetic feelings, and to express their 'romantic' propensities.

In this manner, even today Indian men and women are being brainwashed with the drivel that the cultivation of the 'Arts' can be detached from the process of analysis of the political aspects of our social existence, that is, the examination of the power-relations of the systems we mutually inhabit. They are brought up to accept the viciously circular argument the 'Arts' are about the essence of 'Life', and that it is this 'Life', which cannot be examined, investigated, or questioned, that is expressed in various ways through the 'Arts'. Consequently, a highly rarified and mysterious entity called 'Life' is constructed, and departments of the 'Arts' then go about training their women to study this entity which is believed to be ineffable, spontaneous, creative, organic, impenetrable, unfathomable, genderless, asocial, and apolitical. Perhaps the women students who are fed this heady fare do not quite realise that they are being trained to come out, at the other end of five years of their 'Arts' education, as entities that are as identityless as the 'Life' they had been studying.

If you still think that there is such a thing as the 'Pure Arts' that must be safeguarded from any possible contamination by socio-political issues, consider this. In 1877, a Royal Commission report declared that English literature would be a good subject for women and second-class men who could become school-teachers. In other words, the High Victorians apparently believed that there is something 'feminine' about the study of Literature, which is precisely the view of many Indian men and women in the year 2005 as I type these words.

A Transparent Life

For some time now the Transparent Ironist has been thinking of writing his autobiography A Transparent Life which will be somewhat unusual on two counts. Firstly, it will be written throughout not in the first-person but in the third so that instead of prosaic sentences such as 'I was born on a cold wintry morning when the sun was descending into the horizons' the reader will be greeted with lapidary statements of this sort 'The Ironist was born on February 11, 1976.' Secondly, the Ironist will pretend that he went through several phases during his life, and he shall invent a character for each of these phases so that the reader who wants to know who the real Ironist was will be thoroughly confused. In some parts of his autobiography, the Ironist will raise slogans very much like a Russian Communist, at others he will talk wildly in the manner of a Chicago capitalist; in some passages, the Ironist will sing paens to globalisation, and in other ones, he will think like a rural Italian peasant who grows his own food; in some chapters, he will pontificate as if he were a devout Roman Catholic, and in others he shall flaunt militantly atheistic views; in some sections, he will confess his nostalgia for the vanished glory of 13th century mediaeval Europe, and in others he will celebrate the thousand flowers that are blooming in the late 21st century; in some parts, he will admit how profoundly Euro-centric he was, and in others how strongly rooted in the Indian past he always remained; in some portions, he will dogmatise as if nobody other than Rabindranath Tagore ever composed music, and in others he will denounce in unequivocal terms all contemporary forms of music that were not composed by Ludwig van Beethoven.

Very few readers will get the point of all this meandering, though. The most common reaction to his autobiography will be that the Ironist was a person who revelled in confusing people; hence his devious mode of slipping through all conceptual categories which his readers might seek to impose on him. A few others might believe that the Ironist himself never knew who he was and was therefore forced to keep on running away from himself like a dog that tries to catch its own tail. Yet some more of his readers will conclude that the Ironist was the supreme Machiavellian who breezed through life outwitting others around him just as suited his fancy. Readers belonging to a fourth group will declare, on reading through the litany of oppositions in his autobiography, that the Ironist was a person of violent and painful contradictions, and was compelled to hide these by reinventing himself every morning, much in the manner of an actor who goes through life, picking up one mask and then throwing it away.

And yet, the Ironist is hopeful that there will be a handful of his readers who on patiently reading through his A Transparent Life will laugh out loudly at the end of it, and exclaim, 'Yes, now I have finally understood what that rascal was trying to tell us when he was alive! Oh my God, if only he had said it in so many words when he was with us!'. In that moment of delight, the Ironist will turn over in his grave and feel that his life was, after all, meaningful : he had succeeded in making at least a few human beings laugh and had helped them to forget, even if momentarily, the pervasive suffering in which they are all immersed in. Only these readers will realise that the Ironist's life was grounded on but one principle : let us first seek to remove one another's suffering, suffering that no irony can touch, alleviate or reduce, and whatever truth we aspire for will slowly emerge from this process.

A Tale Of Two Jacques

The laconic Jacques Lacan once wrote : 'A letter always arrives at its destination'. Not a man for such closures, the dithering Jacques Derrida replied back : 'It always might not'. Which makes me wonder : what if Lacan had sent Derrida an email? What would have happened to that email? Would it hang forever in a limbo like Schrodinger's kitty? No wonder that the two Jacques never quite managed to communicate with each other. Meanwhile, just step outside the Academy, and anyone on the street will comment on this lacuna as follows : 'That is old hat. Nero always plays the fiddle whenever he sees Rome burning'.

URGENT warning (Please note this SOS, and pass it on!)

The United Nations Committee for Endangered Species (UNCES), the European Commission for Displaced Communities (ECDC), and the North Atlantic Society for Threatened Groups (NASTG) has today produced a joint statement at 10:30 EST, the morning edition of The Transparent Ironist reports. In a white-paper released to a press conference at Washington, the heads of these three organisations issued a grave warning that the species called the White Male is in serious threat of extinction. The last historical period when this species flourished was the late 19th century when a considerable number of White Males could still be found in the prairies of Europe, and also in some hinterlands of Australasia, North America, and Latin America. Since then, its numbers have drastically dwindled, and this dwindling is accelarated by the curious phenomenon that members who visibly belong to this species of the White Male now wish to disassociate themselves from it. Men with white skin are often gravely offended if they are told that they belong to this species, and they reply : 'My skin may be white, but I am definitely not a White Male! Why are you so obsessed with my skin colour? Didn't I hear you accuse me of racism just a few years ago? Have you now become a racist yourself?'

Some of them have even started migrating to parts of the Mediterranean belt to develop a tanned, bronze, aquamarine, or copper skin in order to hide their previous affiliations with this much-maligned endangered species. In the Academy, in particular, if current trends are anything to go by, there will be no White Male left in another five years : everyone there would soon be a Black American, a Black Indian, a Black Italian, a Black Australian, or a Black Russian. The three heads commented that this was an extremely sorry state of affairs since very soon everyone in the world would become tarred with a black brush (no pun pretended).

This warning comes at a very critical juncture for Feminists who earn their monthly salaries by writing volume after volume, using extremely arcane vocabulary, against the species of the White Male : with the extinction of the White Male, it would seem that Feminists themselves would lose their jobs. It is no wonder, then, that immediately after the announcement from Washington, Ms Fiona McCarthy of Feminists Inc. declared that this was yet another male conspiracy to push Feminists out of the Academy. Though one might wonder : now that the White Male is dying, will it be the turn of the White Female next?

The three heads suggested that white school-children should be taught to celebrate their whiteness by wearing T-shirts with the label 'Proud to be White', and reminded that although they are not as politically correct as their black neighbours, they still have the same red blood under their white skins. In this manner, they hope that we shall be able to stem the tide and raise a new generation of the White Males who, with a little meddling with their genes, will be 'determined' to search for successful mates from among the White Females only. Ms Mccarthy was, however, not available (and perhaps fortunately so) for comment on this last bit about genetic engineering. Though we might hope that this unprecedented calamity will finally lead the White Male and the White Female to bury the hatchet and start smoking the peace-pipe in the face of this impending catastrophe against White-ness.

The Inscrutable English

Someday perhaps I shall re-write the colonial history of India with this thesis : the reason why the English managed to subjugate the Indians for two hundred years was not because the English were Imperial but because they were Inscrutable. The Americans may have overtaken the English today with their imperial high-handedness, but with their fetishization of Plain English they cannot come even an inch close to the heights that the English had one reached in their love of Plain Inscrutability. Observe these snatches of conversation between an Englishman and a Native, with the Transparent Ironist in the thankless role of an interpeter.

(A)

Englishman : This is not proper at all. No, really, it is not.

Native : 'Sahib, what is not proper? Too much sugar in your tea? The dog bit Memsahib again?'

Transparent Ironist : 'The Native is here asking a very improper question. When an Englishman says that this is not proper, he is in fact referring to everything in the world. Nothing in the world is ever proper for him. At one time, he had an unchallenged control over the seas, only to be overtaken by hordes of barbarians from other nations, and now the natives themselves are fomenting trouble in the hinterlands. Back at home, it is either the middle-classes in Manchester, the lower-classes in Dublin, the Greek-classes in Oxford, the no-classes in Parliament, or the class-less in Moscow. No, nothing is ever proper to an Englishman. As for an Englishwoman, everything in this world is proper for her, but that is just because her Englishman says so.'

(B)

Native : Sahib, last year I read all the novels of Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte.

Englishman : 'Oh, did you?'

Transparent Ironist : 'The Englishman is not asking for more information with that cryptic question. He is simply saying, 'Yes, dear Native, I bet you did. Go on, go on, what more nonsense shall I have to hear from you now? When my Cambridge don asked me to go to India and serve King and Country, little did I know that I would meet an upstart with the refined sensitivity to read Dickens and Bronte. What a nerve!'

(C)

Native : Sahib, we want freedom from your oppressive regime.

Englishman : 'Brilliant! You couldn't have put it better.'

Transparent Ironist : 'Is the Englishman agreeing to the native's demand here? Far from it, he is applying a rhetorical trope which he effectively used on his demure wife when she had demanded that she should be given the right to vote. He is saying, 'Very well, now you are finally talking like John Stuart Mill. But Mill, my dear native, is passe. Haven't you read the London Gazette? My, what is the world coming to!'

(D)

Native : Gandhi and Nehru are starting a mass movement against you. How are we doing on that front?

Englishman : 'Oh, not too bad, not too bad. The wind is picking up a bit, but London says that the storm will wear itself out very soon. What do you say, Pickles?' (Pickles is his Doberman.)

Transparent Ironist : 'This is every Englishman's last line of defence. An Englishman who utters 'not too bad, not too bad' is usually a sinking one who is catching on to any straw that comes floating his way. And considering the fact that one out every two Englishmen (2001 census statistics) mutters this inanity every morning, it is no wonder that Englishmen keep on complaining that they have a sinking feeling.'

(E)

Native : Memsahib, if you so wish, I could take you on a tour of the Taj Mahal in broad daylight.

Englishwoman : 'Oh, how preposterous! Don't you keep up with the literature? I mean, haven't you a clue about E.M. Forster? No, thank you very much, I do not need a passage to the Taj Mahal.'

Transparent Ironist : 'Not being adept at Freudian psychoanalysis or the intricacies of post-colonial theory, the Transparent Ironist desists from making any comments on this one.'

(F)

Native (on August 15, 1947) : Sahib, err, I mean, Mr. Churchill, can we shake hands now and forget the past?

Englishman : 'What? Shake hands with a man of straw! An Englishman will never, ever stoop to such a depth!'

Transparent Ironist : 'The Englishman here is revelling in his favourite tea-party game for little children called How To Build a Straw Man (And Then Destroy Him). He often applies this game to his understanding of international politics in the valiant hope that people outside his island really are strawmen. This policy has one great advantage : the next time he gets that sinking feeling, he can hold on to one of his strawmen and plead with him to rescue him.'

(G)

Native (on August 16, 1947) : Oi, you there! Didn't we ask you to leave sometime back, eh? So shake a leg and get on with it, will you, eh? It is time you left us for good, innit?

Englishman : 'Yes, mate, getting along with the job, eh. Just packing off the last few tins of curries and baltis, eh. Cheers! Care to join me later for a drink, eh?'

Transparent Ironist : 'Thus the ground was laid for the rise of one of the greatest civilisations in human history, the Indo-British of which the Transparent Ironist is himself an inhabitant. He considers himself neither a Native nor an Englishman; he is that strange hybrid that lives on the hyphenated middle between the two, and delights in each other's foibles. In the end, these foibles are also his own, for he is incurably Indo-British. In this manner, of course, he has exposed himself to fire from both sides : some will complain that he is not 'authentically' Indian, others that he is not an 'authentic' Briton. As for himself, he can only reply that he is 'authentically' Indo-British.'

Six Aphorisms Of The Transparent Ironist

(A) The unexamined life is not worth living. The overexamined life is not worth dying for.

(B) To err is human. But to err on the side of those who have palpably suffered is more human.*

(C) Do not claim that you have exhaustively understood a human being. A human being is not a rock. For the same reason, do not claim that you have exhaustively understood a rock. A rock is not a human being.

(D) Sometimes you can help others only by helping yourself. But you are already implicated in a social order; only within its horizon do you begin to recognise yourself as an 'I'. Therefore, helping yourself and helping others are two 'moments' of the same activity.

(E) If you think, in a fit of teenage insanity, that you can wipe the slate clean and start right from the beginning, remember that in order to do so you must nevertheless speak, read, or write some language. And the beginnings of this language were made even before you were born.

(F) The most conservative person is she who keeps on changing all the time. The rebel is the person who forgets to change from the morning after the revolution.

(*The Roman Catholic Franciscan Order calls this 'the preferential option for the poor'.)

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Academy

Dear Hitchhiker,

On your voyages into the farthest reaches of the galaxy we live in, you might someday happen to stumble over a remote corner of it referred to by its inhabitants as The Holy and Undivided Academy or simply as The Academy. The following guide through its labyrinthine mazes will hopefully help you on your explorations into its various layers.

The first thing to note about the Academy is that is a gigantic beehive with zillions of tiny cells, and each of these cells is centred around a King Bee who is surrounded by millions of worker bees. If you want to know why there are no Queen Bees there, do not ask further : it is simply that this species does not exist in any of the accepted taxonomies, and even if it does such Bees would be too emotional and unreliable to be placed in a seat of authority. Now you might perhaps also want to know how the King Bees got there in the first place, and to understand this let us focus on one of these cells. The King Bee that you shall meet there is usually a third or fourth-generation descendant of a Grandfather King Bee who had once shaken the foundations of the beehive with a revolutionary text whose repercussions had reached its distant ends. He was able to attract a number of worker bees who accepted his text as the absolute truth about the nature of the beehive, and who then reproduced this text into the next generation. Sometime around the third generation, however, there was an acrimonious split among these worker bees into three groups : those in group 1 claimed that they were maintaining the Pristine gospel of the Grandfather King Bee, others in group 2 declared that it was they who had finally excavated the True meaning of the Grandfather's texts, and the rest in group 3 complained that all the worker bees in the first two groups had got it horribly wrong.

Consequently, the original cell was now replaced by three new cells with three different King Bees, each of whom tried to ensure that the worker bees under Him did not transgress the boundaries of His cell. If they dared to do so, they would be excommunicated at once, and they would remain beyond the pale until they renounced their former evil ways and returned home like a prodigal child. To discourage such cell-hopping from becoming a fashionable enterprise, each King Bee has a standing army to police the boundaries of His cell and to constantly report to Him that no trans-cellular activity is taking place. Moreover, He keeps up a sustained campaign of disinformation to the effect that worker bees in each cell speak a language that cannot be understood by the worker bees in the other ones. No wonder, then, that so many of the worker bees do not even take the trouble of actually meeting one another.

This does not mean, however, that worker bees from the different cells never get together; most of them gather under the shadow of the darkness and some of them, a half-way and much-reviled breed called the comparative worker bees, even talk to one another openly in the day. Nevertheless, these worker bees are extremely sensitive about the solidity of the walls that define their identities, and would be gravely offended if you told them that these walls are permeable or, more scandalously, that they are illusory or non-existent.

One final word of caution. When you are inside one of these tiny cells in the Academy, you might be asked by the worker bees where you have come from. You are most welcome to reply that you are visiting them from cell number 56A or cell number ZRT2. But, dear Hitchhiker, please do not tell them that you have come from a place outside the beehive. They will simply not understand what you mean : trust me, for these worker bees, there can be no such place outside the beehive. For them, the beehive is The World.

Yours truly,

Your Man In The Beehive,

The Transparent Ironist

This is a photograph of St Stephen's College, Delhi, one of the most contested sites on the educational landscape of India. There are plenty of people around who can deliver extempore speeches on topics such as 'The Wonder That Was St Stephen's', 'St Stephen's, The Timeless Present', and 'St Stephen's, Now And For Ever', and an equal, if not larger, number who can produce sophisticated discourses on subjects like 'Why I Am Not A Stephanian', 'St Stephen's Unmasked', and 'St Stephen's, The Myth and the Reality'. On the basis of my observations during my 'residence' in St Stephen's (1995-1998), here are some colours of Stephanian life into which all of the above voices flow forming one somewhat confused stream.
(a) Second to None : These Stephanians believe that St Stephen's is the axis mundi around which we revolve, or will revolve someday in the not too distant future if the gospel of Stephania were to be thrown into the darkest reaches of this planet. Indeed, if St Stephen's were to be wiped out tomorrow by the bombs of some maverick descendant of Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq (a Stephanian himself), not only India but the entire world will be sent back into the Dark Ages for a thousand years in one fell swoop, and will remain there for another thousand.
(b) Second, But Only To One : Stephanians who talk this way are a bit more hesitant though, perhaps they have picked up on the cool talk going around the campus which gets yet cooler every morning. Like (some) Californians who have suddenly realised that there are other states in the US (not to mention other countries in the world), they too have stumbled over some names, perhaps picked up from their peers or perhaps culled from some esoteric journal. Harvard, for instance. So the story goes : We may be ranked second in this world, but we are second only to Harvard, and, mind you, St Stephen's is the One and the only True gateway to It.
(c) Second, But Getting There : These Stephanians have seen things for what they are and know that Harvard will be Harvard, but they do not lose hope. St Stephen's remains, they declare, the small island of light in the encircling gloom of India's educational system, inviting every one else to come and to partake of the bliss of The Stephanian Enlightenment. Their motto is, to put it crudely : 'So what if we missed out on the European Enlightenment? We shall now invent a new one for ourselves'.
(d) Second to Everyone Else : These Stephanians are collectively the Messiah promised by their distant ancestors Lenin, Mao, and Marx (and some obscure villagers from Bengal). Not that, of course, they have actually ploughed their way through the books and the speeches of these dead figures : for most purposes, a poster of Che Guevara on the room-wall or on the T-shirt does the job perfectly. They burn with an inquenchable zeal for rebellion, and meet once every weekend at McDonald's to discuss their plans for the imminent revolution over a chicken burger and french fries. To bring about this just and transparent future, they intend to subvert the Establishment from within by joining Morgan Stanley or Lehman Brothers as corporate bankers.
(e) The Very Least of Them All : At a polarised extreme to all of them are a rather different kind of Stephanians. These enjoy all the rights and privileges that St Stephen's bestows upon them, take quite an active part in their societies, and claim that they have learnt a lot of this and that from college. However, when their day's work is done, they settle down for a cosy cup of tea in an yellow wicker-chair, listening to others around them munching buttered toast with scrambled eggs and lime juice. And then, shattering the peace of the pigeons cooing in the distance, they shout : 'Do you not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying St Stephen's? Do you not smell this rotting mass - for even St Stephen's putrifies! St Stephen's is dead! St Stephen's remains dead! And you have killed her!' (At which voices can be heard in the background : 'Come on, go get a life', 'Is this Shakespeare Society's new way of punishing us?', 'Oh, we don't need no education in a coffee-house', 'Are you a feminist or some wacko like that?', or 'Erm, what was that about?'. Or something of that sort, but you get the drift by now.)
(f) How Green Was My St Stephen's : Now we come to the huge, silent, repressed, oppressed, supressed, subjugated, dominated, and unspoken underbelt of modernity's St Stephen's, an underbelt which is so paranoid of being categorised that it would be rather distressed at my calling it the 'underbelt'. Scared that they would be pigeon-holed by others (and wishing that they could fly as freely as pigeons), these Stephanians have invented a new label for themselves : 'I remain unlabelled'. Which, for most purposes simply means, 'I/we am/are al/ternative'. So a long and painful process of al/ternativity and/or al/terity gets under way : if the mainstream wears X, you wear Y; if the hoi polloi speak A, you speak A-C+Z; if the folks read writer G, you hunt down some obscure scribbler called H; and if the movie-buffs watch Hollywood, you watch Jellywater (never mind what that is). And, in any case, Stephanians have a world-wide reputation for having absolutely no taste for art, music and theatre, so you perforce have to form societies for New Art, New Music, and New Theatre. By rejecting the perceived or alleged elitism of the High (or the Low?), such Stephanians manage to congratulate themselves on having constructed a new elitism, the elitism of the Low (or the High?).
(g) The Writer Of This Blog : And finally for myself. Looking back at my days in St Stephen's I realise that I had been, at various stages of my time there, into one or more of those 'categories'. I started as someone who thought for a brief while that there could be nothing like St Stephen's in the world until, that is, I heard someone murmuring Harvard one day in the morning assembly. And yet I tenaciously held on to my belief (which I do till this very day) that St Stephen's does not need to become another replica of Harvard. (Though Harvard just might need to become another St Stephen's one of these days : I am 'inclusive' enough to leave this possibility wide open.) The Marxist side of Stephania lives on in me in some ways too; browsing through economic theorists of the red flag in Stephen's sweet-smelling library I was convinced (and remain so today) that their voices must be heard by more and more people. I breezed through three years of my life in St Stephen's like the December wind that howls through the English corridors, picking-and-mixing a bit of whatever suited my fancy, and trying to develop a knack for speaking only that which is politically correct.
And yet. And yet, somehow, I never quite managed to find out what the whole fuss was about. For me, St Stephen's was beautiful not because the colleges around it were hopeless, or the Indian educational 'scene' outside it was helpless, or because non-Stephanians had no taste for music, art and theatre, but simply because in St Stephen's I could sit on Andrew's Court reading a book under the pale wintry sun, stare at the old black-and-white photographs on the bleached walls, amble through the silent corridors in the whispering dusk, talk to some wonderful professors in the science and the art blocks, go out for coffee at two in the morning with anyone who might have been awake (or sleep-walking) at that time, smell the red bricks after the monsoon's first showers, analyse the possibility that college would have a woman President before the US had one, meet a new batch of young people streaming into college every July, wonder why the annual harmonious gathering every autumn splits apart the college into various disharmonious groups, wait eagerly to read the Principal's latest stricture against eating chewing-gum in between classes, smile at the group of smartly dressed men-in-black who would gather every Wednesday for an informal discussion on the ecological issues concerning dam-building in Siberia, and wake up the next morning to have the best breakfast in the world.
So, then, who needs, after all of that, some report in a newspaper or a magazine to remind St Stephen's that it has this rank or that, as if Stephania were a commodity to be pinned down to a dart-board? And yes, if you want the most fabulous breakfast you will eat anywhere, I beg this of you, my gentle reader, please, please, please do not go to the college across the street. (For all other junk-meals, and especially for lunch, however, you can come over to us, if you find this invitation palatable enough.)

Victims Of Ironical Abuse


+'With irony such as yours, I do not need a divorce. No, even a prozac bath would be too catachrestic. Instead, I shall willingly accept a life of imprisonment within one of your texts' --- Circumlocution attributed to the non-existent wife of a French writer who cannot be signified for post-feminist subversions.

+'We are all victims of ironical abuse today' --- "---"

Suppose tomorrow you received a text message from me on your cellphone that went as, 'Dear Reader, you do not really exist outside my text message. You are just a transient blob that has emanated from it and you shall soon be sucked back into its anonymous depthless surface', I am pretty sure that I know what you are going to scream at me : 'You male chauvinist! You Stalinist! You Communist!'. And yet, having endured these rebukes too painful for my civilised ear, if I were to give you a book which told you, 'Dear Reader, you do not really exist outside this text. The whole world is a text, and you are so deeply immersed in it that you can never extricate yourself from it', it is highly probable that you shall digest its contents at once.

And this really makes me wonder. It is indeed a truism that we speak, talk, and think through language, but does this warrant the conclusion that our language forms a prison-house or a cage within which we are trapped and from which we can never escape? Nevertheless, there are many in our generation who argue in the following manner. To begin with, they tell you that the attempt to describe what we mean can be made only through more and more streams of language and texts. From this they jump to the conclusion that the world is nothing but a collection of billions and billions of texts. Indeed, 'I' and 'you' are collapsed into these texts and we do not exist 'outside', 'behind' or 'beyond' them. As if this was not enough, there is more trouble to come : these texts have no definite meaning, and since they can be understood or interpreted only through other texts, once again we go multiplying texts ad infinitum. Consequently, there is an infinite number of texts between 'I' and 'you' so that no real communication or understanding is possible between us across this textual gulf. The 'I' itself is but an obtrusive emanation from the text, and no writer is responsible for what he or she has written for words and meanings are arbitrary.

To put all of this into a neat formula : There is nothing outside the text. There is no real 'you' for me to reach out to, no world whose biophysical 'reality' impinges on my existence, and nothing 'external' to me that sets the context within which I plot the story of my life. If I were to go to my uncle's house tomorrow and on finding therein a pink door with the notice on it, 'This room is My prison. Proceed at your own risk', I was told that my teenage cousin inhabits that prison, I would sort of understand, in my usual paternalistic manner, what she was 'going through'. But if I were to be whisked away to Rwanda, Sudan, or Kosovo and was introduced to a journalist from CNN who grinned at me and told me, 'Gee, no sweat! There is no genocide happening here outside my newspaper text', I would probably wish to run back to the prison-house of my cousin. So then the next time you are in one of those cultural capitals, drinking coffee on the pavement, and a woman comes to you asking you for some money, kindly do her a favour. Take out one of your flashing cameras, take a photograph of her emaciated face, and when you come back home mount that photograph on an ebony frame beside the long row of your polished texts. That photo will constantly remind you that there is at least one thing in this world that it outside your texts : the hunger of a starving woman that your texts are powerless to pacify.

We, The New Manichees

The first time I came across the term 'Manichaeanism' was around six years ago when doing a paper called 'Religion In The World Of Late Antiquity'. I was told that Manichaeanism was a religion that taught that the world was a battle-ground of the two co-eternal principles of Good and Evil which were constantly trying to vanquish each other. I was also informed that this religion disappeared from central Europe more or less around 1200 AD, and so did I believe until a few years ago when I began to realise that Manichaeanism has returned to haunt us, albeit in a form quite different from its classical ones. In fact, it seems that we find it hard to resist the attraction of a Manichaean mode of separating the world into two distinct blocks or chunks, one to which we ourselves belong, the domain of Light, and the other into which everyone else is steeped, the realm of Darkness.

Americans, of course, have a notorious reputation of revelling in such dualistic divisions, and they have proliferated axes of evil running through places as distant and disconnected from each other as Hanoi, Hamburg, and Havana. This is done on the basis of what might be called the faith of Americana, the faith that American values (whatever you may take these to be, liberalism, democracy, the free market, and the like) must be spread throughout the world to make it a better and more habitable place. The strange thing, however, is that quite often non-Americans turn out to be every bit as Manichaean as some of the Americans themselves, and on the basis of their faith of anti-Americana they claim to be able to discern a clear axis of evil running through Washington D.C. Moreover, all the political, social, ecological, and economic ills in the world can be causally traced back, so it is alleged, to some decision, past or present, taken in the White House.

One should, however, be equally suspicious of both Americana and anti-Americana for they are simply mirror-images of each other. It is one thing to empathise with, and even struggle with, people who affirm anti-Americana, but it is quite another matter to believe that they have the adequate tools, conceptual and material, to reverse the socio-economic inequalities in the world and establish a more transparent community than the current one. American society may indeed be a tottering edifice plagued with the sins of consumerism, individualism, pragmatism, and utilitarianism, but unless anti-Americana is to degenerate into a mere League of Retribution, a Ring of Hate-Mailers, or a Band of Slogan-Chanters it must be founded on a certain emancipatory vision of how it is going to establish a superior juster system of social organisation on a world-wide scale, a system that will be compatible with individual liberty.

Unless we, the new Manichees, learn to renounce both Americana and anti-Americana at the same time, the world will remain a collection of ships that pass one another by in the dark night, missing the little flickering light that still continues to glow.