The recent controversy involving Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Anshul Kumar, a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, is an event in itself, generating a whole battery of figural excesses cutting across caste and gender. The turbulences of the day carve out many wounds. On the one hand, it has laid bare the structural violence built into the very edifice of postcoloniality on which many Savarna intellectuals have been comfortably placed. On the other, there was an individual attempt by a Dalit to employ verbal abuse as a strategy of counter-violence to meet this invisible structural violence, a gesture reminding us of the violence Frantz Fanon advocated for in his Wretched of the Earth as a political strategy enabling the subaltern to stand up straight and ask questions.
At the risk of self-promotion, let me quote from the “Pre face” of my book of poems, The Absent Color:
Violence has two dimensions.
One silences by chopping off the head, while the body remains in
its illusory appearance as skin.
The other gives you tongues where the body loses the skin.
In my figural exegesis, Spivak’s and the violence her Savarna acolytes inflict is of the former kind, where their skin retains its illusory appearance, just as Rama retains his, as ‘maryadapurushothaman’, despite killing Shambuka to maintain the Vedic order. Anshul Kumar made use of the second kind of violence: The act of questioning has given him a tongue, a voice, but he has lost his skin in the process. He can be written off as yet another misogynist in a sea of misogynists who routinely abuse women. Nothing more, nothing less.
A naïve hermeneutic operation, typical of Savarna intellectual exercise, has already been set in motion to cancel out the two acts of violence, by finding symmetry at the level of microaggression. However, those familiar with the nuances of structural violence cannot ignore the asymmetry of the effects this event will have on the two individuals. While this incident may slightly tarnish the reputation of the esteemed professor, it will not end her career. In contrast, overshadowed by this misogynistic excess, the student has all the possibility of facing a bleak future in an Indian academic system controlled by Savarna academic networking.
Only the future will reveal if shadowy deals, as some Savarnas seem to suggest, have been made to salvage his career. At the moment, my concern is not the future. I want to ask why a Dalit student had to resort to this act of violence, fully aware that it could have serious consequences on his academic career, regardless of any potential shadowy deals. The question demands a thorough historicization of our intuitions. The following is an attempt.
Also read: Don’t Ask if the Subaltern Can Speak if You Will Shut Him Down for ‘Improper Pronunciation’
First, let us agree bluntly: it is not due to the stupidity of the speakers of the English language that they end up with different pronunciations, but rather because of its writing system. Everybody knows English is not a phonetic language. The Irish writer Bernard Shaw, perhaps a century ago and in the style of a subaltern’s rogue laugh over the English colonizer, demonstrated how funny the English language is. He did this with the example that the word ‘fish’ could be spelled as ‘ghoti’: with ‘gh’ pronounced as in ‘enough’, ‘o’ as in ‘women’, and ‘ti’ as in ‘nation’.
When such a funny language, having no consistency in matters of spelling and pronunciation, is learned in the postcolonial context of India, where most institutions of learning operate on casteist logic, language can wreak havoc with the lives of people, especially the first- or second-generation learners from the Dalit community. Most Dalit students learn English from teachers whose command of the language is suspect. This is where students from marginalized segments first taste the language. They have no access to how a so-called ‘native’ speaker uses the language. They do not possess the cultural capital to access the English language in other ways, through movies or music. They have no way to shadow-practice the language. All they have is what the teacher provides. Barring a few, most of the Savarna teachers are no better than Spivak when it comes to marginalizing and silencing Dalit students in a classroom. What Spivak did is no exception; it is the everyday life of the Dalits in India. Her actions possibly triggered the memories of such harrowing and humiliating moments in the minds of thousands of Dalits.
They learn English in this stifling, crippling environment. They don’t simply learn English; the process is far more complicated. English is just one of the means through which Dalits learn about themselves, not merely as students but as second-class citizens, as less meritorious, as nothing.
This early stifling leaves many with permanent scars: mutilated tongues, choked throats, and unending self-doubt. Those Dalits who escape this condition learn English as written text, not auditory signs—all this Anshul Kumar has himself written about in a response published on a Dalit platform. Their early sense of the language is visual and textual rather than performative. Consequently, they pronounce unfamiliar words based on their written form. For example, ‘recipe’ is read as ‘risaip’, influenced by words like ‘recite’ and ‘reside’. By the time they learn the correct pronunciation, often from cookery shows or Hollywood movies, the mispronunciation is already ingrained. To unshackle oneself from this self-imposed/system-imposed Platonic cave to the bright sunlight of a native speaker’s fluency is a daunting task for many Dalits.
They are trapped in manifold universes: the language of the family, of the community, of the region; the English, learned, unlearned, pronounced, mispronounced; the rhythm of native languages inflecting a second or third acquired language, pointing to the limits of the languages one is given. From this cacophony of internal flows, directing oneself to the ideal perfection of the native speaker demands a consciousness that kills you from within. Within a universe fabricated by an other demanding perfection, the Dalit soul is forever reminded of her imperfection: becoming conscious of this pressure renders her already drafted imperfection more imperfect.
This struggle is something many pronunciation-purists from the Savarna community fail to understand. They often ask, ‘Why can’t you self-correct once you learn to pronounce properly?’ This well-meaning question stems from their own experiences; even the best of the Savarnas had to consciously work on her language and pronunciation to reach proficiency. The question seeks a mirror image: if I can, why can’t you?
The simple answer to the question is that I am not the mirror image you are desperately seeking. I am not a blank surface reflecting your self-conceived image of perfection. I am not a void to be filled with your perfection. As Fanon put it half a century ago: ‘I am not a potentiality of something; I am fully what I am.’ If my language contains mispronunciations, cracks, silences, stubbornness, wounds, and scars that you cannot fathom, that is not my fault. That is your problem. It reflects the complexity of the world I inhabit, a world from which you have always kept a safe, untouchable distance.
Had you cared to touch this world, you would have realised that perfecting language is not my priority, nor could it ever be, even if I wished it. In India, if you have observed closely, perfecting language is the business of the class or caste of people who enjoy conspicuous leisure, to use Thorstein Veblen’s phrase. For instance, most speakers of Malayalam use either ‘Baratam’ or ‘Faratam’ instead of the Sanskrit word ‘Bharatam’, because un-Sanskritized Malayalam, like Tamil, does not possess the voiced plosive ‘bh’. When a Malayali uses this voiced plosive at the beginning of a word, you are in the presence of someone who is educated and who has consciously chosen to distance themselves from the ways of most Malayalis, who has Sanskritised himself/herself. This is achieved through intense training from an early age, focusing consciously on the texture of the language. Most Malayalis today consider this excessive focus on Sanskritized pronunciation a triviality that living Malayalam can ignore.
When Dalits are hardened by daily experiences of humiliations and mortifications, both physical and mental, and witness horrendous atrocities committed against their fellow beings, even by top liberal university professors of Savarna origin, perfecting their English is a luxury they cannot afford. It is a triviality they know only the Savarna can indulge in. To paraphrase Malcolm X’s famous jibe at Martin Luther King’s dream: We Dalits were having a nightmare while the Savarnas were practicing an English that would assimilate them into the American dream.
On a personal note, one thing I invariably do in my class these days is inform students in advance that I may pronounce the same names and words differently within the same session, and I ask them to excuse my horrifying inability to pronounce them correctly. I then theoretically back this personal failing by invoking Jacques Derrida’s idea of ‘différance’, insisting that there is no original sense or pronunciation, but only endless enunciation of difference, which play havoc with our lives. Most students accept my incapacity as philosophically certified. But the truth is, if I try to focus on correct pronunciation, I get jittery knowing I will never get it right, which makes me more nervous and forces me to abandon the stream of thought I am pursuing in the moment.
When correct pronunciation is dictated by the Savarna, it serves as an entry token to the citadels of knowledge for people like Dalits, who inhabit the outermost ambit of the Savarna universe. The Savarnas not only close the door but also strip Dalits of their right to freely navigate a language that is unique in its spelling and pronunciation, a language notable for its fluidity. This fluidity allows for the formation of new identities, distinct from the languages and spaces in India that are overdetermined by casteist and feudal practices and phrases. The deterritorialization of the English language into feudal complacency may benefit you, but, as Ambedkar reminded us through Thucydides, it won’t help Dalits: ‘It may be in your interest to be our [pronunciation] masters, but how can it be ours to be your slaves?’
The choice before the student was whether to maintain fidelity to a Du Bois, whom he had internalized through his commitments, struggles, and existential angst or to temporarily accept a Du Bois whose ‘real’ identity was mediated through the Brahmin expert. This expert’s knowledge of Haitian sounds was deemed more authentic, more real than the questions that haunt his mind. The student showed fidelity to his own convictions, which Du Bois or Ambedkar, if alive, would undoubtedly understand, as it was, more than anything, a fight for human dignity in an amphitheatre of arrogance and casteist giggles.
Two typical oddities stand out in Spivak’s response to the controversy in The Hindu: First, ‘Anshul Kumar had not identified himself as a Dalit.’ An odd expectation, to begin with. Does she mean that if she had understood his Dalit identity in advance, she would have shown epistemological charity by being benign and humane, excusing his natural ignorance? Or, in the same vein, was she arrogant toward a Brahmin (mistakenly construed) simply because he did not exhibit the kind of knowledge perfection an ideal Brahmin should possess? I don’t quite get it. Second, a condescending gesture: ‘The upwardly class-mobile Dalit person … should … work … for the entire Dalit community, especially the subaltern Dalits who do not get into elite universities.’ She is asking: Why waste time asking big questions? Why are you not on the ground working for the subaltern Dalits to uplift them? Meanwhile, the Savarna can live with no moral compunction in pursuing their dream of perfecting her pronunciation and her understanding of Du Bois.
Reading Spivak’s condescending remark, a friend M.N. Parasuraman texted me this: ‘The most annoying thing is how ad infinitum, ad nauseam, Savarnas remind privileged Dalits about their duty to uplift their less fortunate fellows! At a Clubhouse discussion in 2020 one Dalit girl burst this pious balloon saying, “Okay, will a well-to-do Nair or Brahmin who gets into IIT or Central University give up his seat for a poorer caste-mate of his and go to a self-financing institution?”’
Postscript
A long time ago, as a 22-year-old loner, spiritually devastated and torn between thoughts of suicide and visions of extreme darkness, I stumbled upon the works of Emmanuel Levinas in my teacher C.B. Mohandas’s library. Levinas’s philosophy of fundamental ethical obligation towards the Other—because the Other is infinitely different and transcendental, a Judaic theme—resonated deeply with me. In my youthful immaturity, I interpreted the Other as ‘the other’ and imagined a world where the infinite, transcendental otherness of the Untouchable, the invisible, and the nomadic (Habiru) would evoke ethical obligation from the Varna other. For me, Derrida via Levinas and Spivak via Derrida formed a seamless continuum until I encountered a disgusting phrase in Levinas: ‘yellow peril’. This phrase revealed my place in the universe of infinite other-concerns: no place at all. This disturbing realization inspired me to write a poem reflecting my troubling encounter with Levinas, Derrida, and Spivak. I used Levinas’s phrase against Heidegger for his Nazi past, against Levinas and his followers themselves for their high-sounding ethical jabber.
Entre Nous
In alterity we can find an enemy
That’s cool, perfect, yet difficult
As if consenting to horror
One can forgive many people
But there are some people it is difficult to forgive
It is difficult to forgive you
Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan is an Associate Professor of English at Government Arts and Science College, Pathiripala, Palakkad. Under the name A/nil, he is the author of The Absent Color: Poems.
