More From Rukun

More gems from Rukun Advani’s derelict (no design to speak of) and desolate (no comments, no updates) blog.

In “Indian History from above and below”, Advani delivers two academic parodies (published by Kaloo for Men), swiping—and wiping—virtually all academic writing in the field of Indian history.

“Walking over Woods on an Idle Evening, or, When a Tiger Becomes a Lie-On” is another spoof in which, incredibly, Tiger Woods meets Narendra Modi.

Read on for extracts from the first.

TWO ACADEMIC PARODIES

by

Rukun Advani

KAALOO FOR MEN

Note on the Parodies and their Author

THE PARODIES

These parodies on Indian history-writing have been universally condemned, making them compulsory reading for all who wish to be seen as well read, as well as for those who wish to understand how Indian history is now written. It is also meant as a career guide for budding historians in India, all of whom—like all Indians generally—wish to migrate to the USA in order to make a vast fortune there by perfecting the art of writing unhyphenated postcolonial criticaltheoretic marxistfeminist subalternstudies histoires of revolting peasants and other such texts that are believed to inhabit the thirdworld. Dollar $alaries for such historians are now upward of $ 100 million per annum, and rising—in proportion with the degree of incomprehensibility achieved. These parodies are the most lucid demonstration available of how to achieve that nirvanic state of academic bliss known as ‘the Incomprehensible Sublime in the Ivy League’.

THE AUTHOR

Rukun Advani, the author of this symphonic masterpiece of world literature, has been compared, always unfavourably, with Rabelais, Swift, P.G. Wodehouse, Groucho Marx, Karl Marx, and Professor Lavatri Lavatory Spewhack. Dumbstruck by lack of appreciation, he wallows daily in a slough of narcissistic despond, his tears of sorrow contributing considerably and on a daily basis to the above slough. He is married with one dog, Biscoot. She is the only being in the whole world who really loves him. This keeps him going.

Dedication

These parodies are dedicated to

All Bengali intellectuals
and others whose dollar salaries
have risen with the help of
obscurity and jargon

Preface

The two parodies that follow are inspired, respectfully, by Indian historians and Bengali intellectuals, these being more or less the same thing. Writers within this singular category take themselves, as well as the profound thoughts they spout, very seriously. When such people come, they come in torrents. Their seminal outpourings are generally verbal on account of India’s preference for the oral tradition, and, being unfailingly delivered in Bengali (mostly to each other), can be happily ignored as passing verbiage. But fortunately for the profit margins of academic publishers, and less so for unacademic editors, Indian academics and Bengali intellectuals also desire dissemination. They translate their native profundities and paradigms into a clogged, colonial, unfluid flow, full of blocking French noms and plumes and footnotes, e.g.:

Derrida; ibid.; see my recent essay on the modes and moods of Foucault in JPS, III.iii, 3-333; on Lacan, see Lacan, On Lacan; Barthes, How many times a day do you have one in summer?; idem., Do you really? See also differentiated peasantry and undifferentiated peasantry in Exercises for Revolting Peasants, ed. Ranajitda and Gayatridi (Boston: Hardwords University Press, 1969); and for a feminist, though partially anthropologized, hermeneutic-critical discourse on the postcolonial subversive dimensions of the undifferentiated middle peasant in Midnapore district in June 1959, see the provocative controversy between Ranajitda and Amiyada in Gayatridi, ed., Gendered, Gendered, 0h Most Gendered: Epistemology and the Male Menopause in Bengal between June 1959 and July 1959 (Ranikhet: Kaaloo for Men, forty years later).

If the two parodies that follow seem rather full of sewage, it is only because they derive from what flows into a publisher’s pipelines. I start from below and work my way up to the top, i.e. first peasants and subalterns in ‘History from Below’, then elites and intellectuals in ‘History from (Over) the Top’. If this prioritization seems merely a coprological epiphenomenon of the privileging of subalterns and peasants over elites and intellectuals in the current historiography, historiography is obviously to blame. I am grateful to all the friends who have been tickled pink by the ensuing scatology. As one of them, himself a Bengali intellectual, put it, coprophilia is a concealed academic passion. I exempt none of my friends—many of them Bengali academics, and others resigned to the hegemonic Bengalification of Indian academia—from responsibility for the rubbish that follows. All are equally imbricated. If I stop receiving academic manuscripts, I alone cannot possibly be blamed.

An earlier version of ‘History from Below’ appeared in The Statesman many years ago. Widespread condemnation of this by puritan sections of the bhadralok inspired the second parody. Rampant photocopying of both has now forced me to publish and be damned.

1

Indian History from Below: A Swiftian Exploration

In their preoccupation with the ordinary and palatable forms of popular culture, historians of the peasantry have hitherto neglected any proper exploration of an important arena of subaltern existence, namely the history of belching, wind-breaking, and defecation. A strategic intervention within this crucial space therefore seems imperative in order to complete the existing studies of subordination. To name these functions in this specific order—belching, farting, shitting—is in itself to posit a sociological hierarchy, which might more properly be designated a bourgeois hierarchy of disgust with what Marx, in one of his most derisively Derridesque derivations, termed ‘The Asiatic Commode of Production’, and what Ranajit Dumont-Strauss has called the Alimentary Aspects of Everyday Digestion. We will not here consider an important secondary peasant function, namely sweating, because:

(a) this area has already been explored adequately in two recent essays: see ‘Faces and Faeces: Peasant Expressions During Evacuation’, IESHR, Fall Issue, 1988, pp. 1-109; and ‘The Crap Trap: Peasants and Acute Constipation’, idem, pp. 110-209;

(b) because our present concern is not with India’s toiling millions, but with its toileting millions;

(c) because we are not within the confines of this paper concerned with the private space of sweat, but more properly with the more airy public domain within which these most important primary functions are ritually and symbolically, not to mention literally, performed.