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

Sat Oct 30 00:28:16 IST 2010

Good we are discussing something other than Kashmir in this string, even if
tangentially. Roy at least alleviated the monotony.

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 12:24 AM, TaraPrakash <taraprakash at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.”
>>> _________________________________________
>>> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
>>> Critiques & Collaborations
>>> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with
>>> subscribe in the subject header.
>>> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list
>>> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> http://indersalim.livejournal.com
>> _________________________________________
>> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
>> Critiques & Collaborations
>> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with
>> subscribe in the subject header.
>> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list
>> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
>>
>
> _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
> Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with
> subscribe in the subject header.
> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list
> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
>