Being Arundhati Roy:

Arundhati Roy is  in the news again. There is nothing new in this news given that her penchant for courting controversies, making outlandish statements and imagining history into existence through her felicitous prose are legendary. However, for a change, this time she did not contribute to the controversy, which is quite a thumbs down given her gargantuan ability to create conditions for her news-worthiness. It started with a state university in Tamil Nadu deciding to drop Roy’s Walking with the Comrades from the syllabus and replacing it with M. Krishnan’s My Native Land for the students pursuing literary studies. There is nothing earth-shattering in dropping or adding a text which is an ongoing process and is a necessary condition for bringing new ideas and keeping up with the times. However, many politicians and some media houses felt otherwise, as if they could tell one book from another. These politicians did not even realize that their party was part of the government which initiated the anti-Maoist offensive named Operation Green Hunt which Roy takes to task. 

Coming to the book, Roy tries too hard to deploy her fertile imagination in understanding Maoist insurgency. She calls the Indian Constitution the enemy of tribal people because “in exchange for the right to vote it snatched away their right to livelihood and dignity”. Before she embarks upon her journey to the Maoist territory, she is enthused by her mother’s conviction that the country needs Maoist revolution. And so for Roy, Maoists are a historical necessity and a moral force fulfilling a political task that even the constitution ignored. The book equates Maoists with poor tribals and denounces the state for waging war against its own people. If you thought it is the other way around, it is because you are not Arundhati Roy. She goes on to rationalize the use of children in Maoist militia; when they sing lal salam for her, she feels as though it was a folk song about a river. After the Maoists cadre leave their  camp, Roy expresses her admiration: “As far as consumption goes, its more Gandhian than any Gandhian, and has a lighter carbon footprint than any climate change evangelist”. The book is full of such gems. It remains to be seen how fast our students, after reading this book, can write papers on the environmentalism of Maoists. 

The promise of post-modernism:

The question that should have concerned media discourse after the withdrawal of Roy’s book is under what circumstances the book was introduced for literature students. I am not referring to the strict separation between the literary and the historical/political, but the thinking that rationalized the inclusion of a book that is so glaringly irrational, anti-democracy, anti-constitution and miserly on facts. Clearly the inclusion of the book was an attempt to institutionalize and normalize such an attitude and see this thinking as an entry condition for scholarship. In another book Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, Tariq Ali, Pankaj Mishra, Arundhati Roy denounce the Indian state as oppressive to the core: “Kashmir is one of the most protracted and bloody occupations in the world… Ignored by its own corrupt politicians, abandoned by Pakistan and the West, which refuses to bring pressure to bear on its regional ally, India, the Kashmiri people’s ongoing quest for justice and self- determination continues to be brutally suppressed.” Read the sentence again and see the ease with which it presents Kashmiris as Pakistan’s responsibility, something which even Pakistani politicians will struggle to believe. When the Black Lives Matter movement was turning violent in many parts of the West, a UK based academic named Priyamvada Gopal extended her support to the movement and claimed that White lives don’t matter. If you thought this is grossly against the spirit of democracy and equality, many intellectuals and news portals came out in her support.

Now let us see what are the intellectual conditions that sanction and legitimize such rants and blabbering as ideas and intellectualism. It has to be seen in the technology of legitimation for atrocious claims to count as knowledge. Though it is understood that the fascination for this radical provocative thinking can be ascribed to multiple reasons, all these can be justified in an umbrella term called postmodernism, a chimera of sorts which questions all certainties except its own and induces its believers to question truth claims of all knowledge that is supposedly coherent and stable. Though the question of uncertainty is a typical post-World Wars phenomenon, the rise of the New Left in the universities and student movements in continental Europe in the 60s and 70s created a climate when all kinds of authority came under attack. 

Giving a clarion call to resist all totalizing concepts and categories such as truth, science, religion, history, nationalism and seeing them as symbols of power, postmodernism announced the death of all such master categories as reflective of contemporary times and sought to replace them with micro and mini narratives. Various movements and intellectual developments such as postcolonialism, feminism, race and ethnicity studies, environmentalism came under this rubric. If conventional wisdom under humanism was to identify the universal experience and find ways of connecting cultures and people, the new climate promoted the particular, the different, the deviant, the transgressive, the resistant, the marginal. The feminist said, ‘no no I am not human, I am a woman’, the postcolonial critic said, ‘no no I am not human, I am native’, the queer said, ‘no, no, I am not normal, I am deviant’. In such a climate, universality, humanity, commonality, nation became bad words and were seen as false consciousness, manipulating mechanisms and carriers of power that denied marginal experiences. 

The post-modern circus:

If one goes to any humanities department and enquires about the kind of work PhD students undertake, they will find most research around questions of exclusion, marginality, minority, ethnicity etc. To streamline such pursuits and create new disciplines, in recent times, many departments of social exclusion have mushroomed in various universities. The whole humanities knowledge complex survives on the different and the particular as against the universal. Not that they are scientific studies to ameliorate and understand, but are micro narratives of experience, which means such a pursuit will never come to an end and will continue to perpetuate fault lines that separate people. It has only led to the death of the universal and has developed an academic culture that is anti-science and anti-empirical. Now this culture has been captured by hip intellectuals and market Marxists who have no patience or the nerve for real revolution. This has led to the rise of victimhood as a virtue or even cause of a meaningful life and the simultaneous boom in journals on marginal experiences. This victimology Jeremiad has become the hallmark of humanities scholarship and inculcating that value among students has become the primary objective of academics. In the absence of self-reflexivity, these scholars have moved from representing victims to romanticizing them to rationalizing their violence as the mark of authenticity. Roy’s justification of Maoist violence should be seen in this light. 

Alan Sokal, a mathematician and physicist, had seen this bluff long ago. In 1996 he wrote a spoof article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” and published it in a respectable journal Social Text. The title must have been very appealing to the editors, not to mention the alluring possibility of the debunking of science by a scientist; now none can question their belief in social constructionism, nor can question their lack of scientific knowledge to question science. Sokal had meticulously planned the coup, had spent time in mastering the abracadabra of cultural theory and pandered to the supremacy of theory over real. He claimed to have found parallels between Lacan and quantum physics, feminism and set theory and freely borrowed from postmodern critics to claim that gravity is a social construct. He proposed that belief in external reality a dogma and announced that “feminist and post-structuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of objectivity”. 

In 2017 three more ‘scholars’ (of which only one was a humanities academic) published about seven hoax papers using theoretical jargon while establishing things that can otherwise be plain nonsense. The authors (Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian) committed themselves over a year to rubbish what goes in the name of research and got many of their research published in standard journals such as Hypatia, Sexuality and Culture, Gender, Place and Culture among others. They called their field grievance studies (enough to elicit appreciation from left dominated academia) knowing pretty well that this could be music to the ears of the editors. They went on to talk about rape culture among dogs and self-penetrating dildos as a cure for transphobia etc. In a paper titled “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon” written under a pseudonym Helen Wilson, they claimed that the paper “seeks to uncover emergent themes in human and canine interactive behavioral patterns represented within urban dog parks and to study issues surrounding “queer performativity and human reaction to homosexual sex between and among dogs?”

Conclusion:

We still don’t know whether such instances completely discredit the marginality and victim obsessed academia that has gone to the brink of insanity and has unleashed an pseudo-intellectual orgy in the name of knowledge. What we do know is the reality of its continuing influence and power in the corridors of universities and spaces of the media and publishing industry. That is humanities research for you, a world of make-belief where imaginary problems and fantastic findings/solutions are the key to success. That postmodernism has become an academic master-narrative itself while challenging master-narratives is a reality, a kind of Church that does not allow any narrative other than its own. What is even more glaring is the alienation of such knowledge from the reality of contemporary times that is so avowedly characterized by master-narratives such as development, clash of civilizations, global capitalism or neoliberalism. The fact is that postmodern scholarship is oblivious of the prevalence of many master-narratives in social/political life and that it has become a carrier of dogma and orthodoxy; that reveals its increasing obsolescence among the populace.

Picture credits: https://platypus1917.org/2010/08/06/the-maoist-insurgency-in-india-end-of-the-road-for-indian-stalinism/

 

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