[Reader-list] Riotous Sentimentalism:P.Pandey

[Dr. Reyhan Chaudhuri]

>
Dear reader,
Ø Pratap Pandey’s grasp of Menippean technicalities is indeed impressive.
Though I know for sure that for some of us on the readers list, entire
comprehension of it rapidly rises to stratosphere level, despite the lecture
being interspersed with basal ,organic expletives.
Ø However my grouse is on the point when he objects about Farah Naqvi’s
quasi-sentimental pre-occupation with the victims. Any bedtime murder story
would tell you that to catch the listener or browser’s interest in the
perpetrators, a detailed, sympathetic,and circumstantial account along with
the background of the victims is imperative.
Ø Hence to accuse her of precisely doing this in a very rational tone is
hardly fair. What could have been done was ,a further suggestion to :supply
a sequel to the information by amplifying the perpetrators or criminals
curriculum vitaes.
§ Yours appelently,
§  R. Chaudhuri.To: reader-list at sarai.net
____________________________________________________________________
> Subject: [Reader-list] Riotous Sentimentalism
>Dear All,
>Sentimentalism is an ethic, a posture, a mode of representation, a
> narrative style, a gargoylic closure that emerged in the foment leading
> to the French Revolution. (I am regurgitating, with tears forming in my
> eyes, my inability to possess or even read Peter Brooks' classic text
> on this. I place a bucket under each eye.)
> Every human being is equal. Why? Because they cry.
> This is a re-statement of: Every human being is equal because they eat,
> piss, and crap.
> [Sentimentalism's relation to Menippean satire is extremely
> interesting. In Menippean satire, everyone is equal because everyone
> gorges, and pisses and craps by the litre and the tonne. In medieval,
> and even early modern Europe, till the time the peasantry possesses the
> ability to pamphleteer, Menippean satire is the mode in which the
> excesses of the rich are represented. With the supersession of
> mercantilism into primitive accumulation of capital, came a new regime
> of representation that excluded such expressivities. In an enlightened
> universe and emergent burgher culture, it was difficult to tell such
> enteric truths. Refinement was everything.
>     In a time of the transformation of the peasantry into labour,
> refinement relegated Menippean satire, and peasant celebration, to the
> sphere of obscenity. Fathers had banned Rabelais; sons were told to
> read the later Dryden, or Racine; grandsons, Shaftesbury's moral
> philosophy. Of course, you could read "well-written" satire. It was
> witty and intellectual; it never crossed boundaries, Voltaire
> notwithstanding.
>    The appropriation of Menippean satire is then filled in in the form of
> the emergence of sentimentalism. Repression, or the excess of it, finds
> a new outlet.
>        There is a change here, in how "excess" is defined. There is an
attempt
> to shift from a fantasy of control to a fantasy of agency.
> The latter fantasy, too, is appropriated.
> And how. It is turned into a regime of absolute victimisation, an
> invitation to recognise the absolute overtaking of the subject by
> external forces not under control. This eminently suited the 19th
> century European bourgeosie, which drew its strengths from a belief in
> permanent victimisation. It suited, even more, the ever-in-flux petty
> bourgeosie, which based its lifestyle on an ethic of humiliation]
>        From the French Revolution to commentary on Gujarat is really
jumping
> the gun (what does this idiom mean?). Yet I cannot but help see a
> disjunction, and one continuity.The disjunction lies in the manner in
which appropriated, distorted,unrevolutionary sentimentalism (it has
travelled wherever there exists
> a middle class; should we thank Charles Dickens for it?) is today
> unleashed as sublimatory vehicle to Global Aeducated Indian invested
> indifference to, and deliberate disinterest in, the fascisisation (ugh!
> what a noun!) of the Indian polity. (Khaa! what a sentence!) The
> forwarded Farah Naqvi article turns me into Nirupa Roy: everytime she
> comes into the scene, buckets fill up with tears. Naqvi wants to touch
> my sensitivities. In the process, she enjoins me to bring in 2 buckets,
> one under each eye. Precisely because of its sensitivities, her article
> is a perfect example of how to assuage false (comfortable) anxieties.
>
> [I can quote ad infinitum over here. If you want, readers, I'll do it]
>
> The continuity lies in always finding the Self as victim, and so
> implicilty and explicitly not bothering about the shape, size, visage,
> predilections, of the perpetrator.
>
> Please, please, please, please, please, please. Can I be informed about
> the perpetrators? Ms Naqvi, others, tell us the truth about Gujarat?
>
> To talk incessantly, in sentimentalist fashion, about the victims of
> the Gujarat unfolding-massacre, is to silkily aeducatedly masturbate.
>
> Who pissed on Muslims in gujarat? Who crapped on them, wilfully and
> with full and guaranteed freedom? Who's gorged, and are still gorging,
> on them? When will I read an ethnography of the Perpetrator,
> beautifully written?
>
> Tell me. Please, please, please, tell me. I am already angst- and
> guilt-ridden. Don't flog me. I don't need you to throw victim-shit on
> me. I am doing that all the time myself. Throw perpetrator-crap at me.
> I will revel in it. Investigate the criminals. Tell me about them. I
> need to know about them.
>
> To hell with sentimentalist coverage and commentary on Gujarat. Get
> real.
>
> Miley sewer meraa tumhara
>
> to sewer baney humaraa
>
> yours,
>
> pp