[Reader-list] Arundhati roy has become a joke: Guha

[TaraPrakash]

I am not sure if you took Guha seriously but I used to be a big fan of Roy. 
But after she shared stage with SASG, I won't be able to take her seriously, 
not even if she wins a Nobel. I am of course referring to Inder's suggestion 
that people will listen to her after she wins a Nobel prize. Probably she is 
aiming for it, since you made that suggestion. The committee doesn't many 
candidates left for Nobel peace prize. that specially seems true after they 
awarded Mr. Obama Nobel for peace last year.

When I read Inder's email suggesting that Nobel, I was thinking of a form of 
poetry once popular in Italy, called Stornelli. The first line of the 
tripplet contains name of a flower. Like this:

Flower of Roy
Nobel is the goal
Kashmir is a ploy.

Flower of peace
As it declines
The chances increase.

She's not a joke
If she keeps it up
She won't go broke.


The suggestion is not that she is getting paid for her SASG posturing, I 
neither have means to prove nor ways to disprove those suggestions. But if 
you remain in limelight, your books are more likely to sell, you are not as 
forgotten as Kiran Desai or Mahashweta Debi. Both as I understand will be 
with Roy on the Kashmir issue but about SASG ?????

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Inder Salim" <indersalim at gmail.com>
To: "reader-list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 1:37 PM
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Arundhati roy has become a joke: Guha


> “We are worlds apart, our politics, our arguments. I’m
> inclined to put as great a distance as possible between the Guhas of the
> world and myself.”
>
> This what Roy, said, if one goes by the article posted by Mr. ARK
> So what is the fuss, it is Gua ji himself who is crossing lines,
> mixing the faculty of history with activism. he is doing is at his own
> peril.
>
> . "Then > followed her opposition to Pokhran II. At that point, Guha
> in a piece titled
>> ‘Arun Shourie of the Left’ reading comments like this, my suggestion to 
>> myself is that i should not take Gua ji seriously. Paradoxically, he 
>> seeing a genius in Gandhi, but would Gandhi support Dams and Nuclear 
>> test. I saw his theatrical gestures in front of Barkha Dutt, ( his latest 
>> company ). so what to say.
>
> however, there are some good quotes “Gandhi and Nehru’s genius to
> obscure that wound, to overcome it and not make India a Hindu
> Pakistan.” much to disappointment of Patal lovers.
>
> Well, i was actually a little late when i switched on TV. to see his
> interview with our Genius Barkha Dutt ji on NDTV. . Gua said that in
> absence of MA Jinnah, both Gandhi and Nehru would not have pursued '
> Secularism' in Congress politics, vigorously those days. So, the
> indirect contribution of Jinnah in the making of India is immense,
>
> So, if one goes by this Gua logic,  how is A.Roy a joke? . Isnt she
> pushing, single handedly the Indian state to look around their
> shoulders and see the mountain of injustices piling up in every
> sector.
>
> Thanks Mr. ARK for posting this
>
> with love
> is
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 9:39 AM, Aditya Raj Kaul
> <kauladityaraj at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Arundhati roy has become a joke: Guha*Link* -
>> http://www.bangaloremirror.com/article/1/201010292010102903332299368035e3f/Arundhati-roy-has-become-a-joke-Guha.html
>>
>> Bangalore Mirror
>>
>> Nine years after the Booker winner snubbed him, eminent historian
>> Ramachandra Guha makes the most of the opportunity to get even with her;
>> says she’s a publicity fiend.
>>
>> Almost a decade after an intellectual controversy of V S Naipaul-Paul
>> Theroux proportions, Ramachandra Guha claims that his stand against
>> Arundhati Roy has been vindicated.
>>
>> “She’s crazy. Arundhati Roy has become a joke, a publicity fiend,” Guha 
>> told
>> Bangalore Mirror. “She hops from cause to cause, and just look at the
>> company she’s keeping ... the likes of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, an ultimate
>> bigot who wants to keep women in purdah and bring in an Islamic 
>> theocracy.”
>>
>> The central government is contemplating slapping sedition charges on Roy 
>> for
>> saying that Kashmir is not an integral part of India, but Guha believes 
>> that
>> far more basic issues are involved. There is a reason, Guha says, why as 
>> a
>> historian he doesn’t want to get too involved in Kashmir, the Maoist
>> insurgency or, for that matter, even conservation movements. Apart from 
>> the
>> obvious hubris of believing that an outsider can ‘speak for’ a community 
>> or
>> a victim, Guha thinks it is far more challenging and nuanced from an
>> intellectual standpoint to ‘listen to’ or ‘speak to’ victims as opposed 
>> to
>> ‘speak for’ them.
>>
>> Casting himself firmly on the side of traditional historiography as 
>> against
>> postmodern ones, that celebrate dissent and flux for their own sake, Guha
>> agreed with Edward Said’s notion that scholarship has to always oppose 
>> the
>> guild mentality that unquestioningly privileges notions like ‘country’,
>> ‘citizen’, ‘community’ and the like above everything else. But it is also
>> the scholar’s task, Guha asserts, to discern when an attack on these 
>> notions
>> are warranted and when not. The current ‘seditious’ charges on Kashmir,
>> emanating from certain quarters, in his view, certainly aren’t.
>>
>> The highly acrimonious spat between the two writers started after Roy,
>> basking in her Booker fame, became a zealot for the anti-big dam cause. 
>> Then
>> followed her opposition to Pokhran II. At that point, Guha in a piece 
>> titled
>> ‘Arun Shourie of the Left’ wrote about how celebrity endorsements of 
>> social
>> or political protest movements were fraught with danger because sooner 
>> than
>> later the celebrity would replace the cause but he offered a seeming 
>> olive
>> branch by saying that Roy and he were ‘objectively’ on the same side.
>>
>> Roy, in her riposte in the form of an exhaustive interview to a national
>> fortnightly magazine in Jan 2001, was to dismiss this in no uncertain 
>> terms,
>> criticising Guha’s “suspect politics and slapdash scholarship” and
>> concluding that, “We are worlds apart, our politics, our arguments. I’m
>> inclined to put as great a distance as possible between the Guhas of the
>> world and myself.”
>>
>> Later Guha explained to an interviewer: “There was the worry of someone 
>> long
>> involved with the environmental debate that the simplifications and
>> exaggerations of Roy would tend to polarize issues and make meaningful
>> environmental reform that much more difficult ...”
>>
>> Guha, who is busy with the launch of his latest book Makers of Modern 
>> India
>> - “a kind of bridge” between his magisterial India After Gandhi - which 
>> was
>> voted by the Economist and Wall Street Journal as the best book of the 
>> year
>> in 2007, and the two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi he’s working on -
>> said that “India has this habit of continuously surprising us.” Often in 
>> a
>> not-so-good way.
>>
>> Talking of the three interlocutors for Kashmir, who got the job “just
>> because they are close to the dynasty in Delhi”, he said the fact that 
>> the
>> Indian state was not just violent or callous but so incompetent too came 
>> as
>> a surprise. “The one Muslim in the team has been appointed for no other
>> reason than his surname. The other two don’t even speak Urdu,” he said. 
>> “Why
>> couldn’t they have appointed people who would have commanded respect from
>> both sides, people who could act as genuine go-betweens. Right away I can
>> name two - Rajmohan Gandhi and Swami Agnivesh.”
>>
>> In India After Gandhi, Guha claimed that Indian democracy was 
>> phifty-phifty,
>> with an efficient ‘hardware’ but also with recurring ‘software’ problems.
>> His implicit argument in that book, as well as in Makers of Modern India, 
>> is
>> that despite troubled times, or perhaps especially in troubled times, it
>> becomes necessary to harp on the strengths of Indian democracy.
>>
>> He explained that India was an “unnatural nation”, in that it defied many
>> norms, particularly the one where nation states are founded on a ‘wound’.
>> India had Partition, as horrible and near-fatal a ‘wound’ as possible but 
>> it
>> was “Gandhi and Nehru’s genius to obscure that wound, to overcome it and 
>> not
>> make India a Hindu Pakistan.”
>>
>> Denying that the Kashmir problem and other mutinies plaguing India were a
>> result of our founding fathers’ refusal to confront the ‘wound’ squarely, 
>> he
>> said that it was presumptuous to ponder if Sardar Patel would have 
>> handled
>> India’s post-Independence destiny differently from Nehru. “We can always 
>> ask
>> ‘what if’. But there has to be plausibility also. Patel was a great man, 
>> but
>> Nehru was always, always Gandhi’s chosen successor,” he said. “Moreover,
>> Patel was someone who never appealed to women, south Indians and Muslims
>> which would have made him a suspect ‘national’ leader. A more interesting
>> ‘what if’ would be Subash Chandra Bose - what with the man’s charisma, 
>> his
>> visions, his whole unpredictability.”
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>
>
> -- 
>
> http://indersalim.livejournal.com
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