Hindu Empire, Globality, and the Rhetoric of the Trikaal By
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by D-Scholarship@Pitt Fathers of a Still-born Past: Hindu Empire, Globality, and the Rhetoric of the Trikaal by Manisha Basu B.A. in English, Presidency College, 1995 M.A. in English, Jadavpur University, 1997 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2008 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH Faculty of Arts and Sciences This dissertation was presented by Manisha Basu It was defended on April 18, 2008 and approved by Paul A. Bove, Distinguished Professor, Department of English Ronald A.T. Judy, Professor, Department of English Nancy Condee, Academic Rank, Departmental Affiliation Dissertation Advisor: Marcia Landy, Distinguished Professor, Department of English ii Fathers of a Still-born Past: Hindu Empire, Globality, and the Rhetoric of the Trikaal Manisha Basu, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2008 Undertaking a genealogical study of contemporary Hindu nationalism in India, this dissertation demonstrates how a new, metropolitan, and largely Anglophone version of cultural Hinduization is signaling a transformative shift in postcolonialism as political and aesthetic self-representation. The primary archive for the study ranges from foundational scriptural texts of the ‘canon of Hinduism’ and the writings of late 19th and early 20th century Hindu nationalists to traditions to the Anglophone political journalism of new-age Hindu intellectuals like Jay Dubashi, television productions of epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and contemporary Indian writing in English. This constellation of texts reveals that if an important phase of global postcolonial culture was founded in the difference between center and periphery, then we are now witnessing new aesthetic forms which recode national peripheral space as in fact coterminous with the space of the metropolitan-center. It is precisely such a recoding that the contemporary literature of the Indian diaspora writes itself into, democratizing differences between national and imperial contexts by inducting the urban hubs of the Global South into a continuum of supranational terminals for the mobility of virtual capital. The study demonstrates how such formations overlap with the language of contemporary Hinduization, as the latter in its own way equates neo-liberal economism, militarization, and technologism with the ‘holy cows of Hindu scriptures.’ Deploying religion as a flexible adjustment of linguistic and visual signs, rather than a scriptural tradition, this new ‘rhetoric of Hindu India’ violently yokes collusive neo-liberalism and cultural iii Hinduization on a single plane of normalized regularities. Such a plane of regularities promises a post-postcolonial culture which is no longer debilitated by theories of difference, whether between tradition and modernity, or nation and empire. In the face of this dangerous historical shift, my dissertation concludes that the task of the anti-imperial mind in our contemporary time is to destabilize such applications of political-cultural sameness. It is to return ‘difference’ to its philosophical beginnings in the indeterminacies of figurative language and to demonstrate how such indeterminacies are a refracting surface for the lived histories of capitalist-imperial unevenness. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE .................................................................................................................................. VII 1.0 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 1.1 THE IMAM AND THE INDIAN ....................................................................... 8 1.2 A DHARMA OF DEMOCRACY ..................................................................... 16 1.3 PLAYING PERSEPHONE WITHOUT HADES ........................................... 26 2.0 EPIC COLUMNS AND NEO-ESSAYS ................................................................... 36 2.1 TIME’S VICTIMS ............................................................................................. 48 2.2 EPIC COLUMNS AND NEO-ESSAYS ........................................................... 58 2.3 EPIC TOYOTISM ............................................................................................. 72 3.0 A MATTER OF LIFE AND REBIRTH .................................................................. 90 3.1 PARLIAMENT OF SOULS ........................................................................... 104 3.2 YUDHISHTHIRA’S CHILDREN ................................................................. 118 3.3 POWER OVER LIFE AND REBIRTH ........................................................ 135 4.0 THE PLAY OF LIVING CREATION ................................................................... 151 4.1 LINES OF FLIGHT ........................................................................................ 160 4.2 A DEATHLY RHYTHM ................................................................................ 173 4.3 TRIAL BY FIRE .............................................................................................. 180 4.4 SNAKES AND LADDERS.............................................................................. 193 v 5.0 A BATTLE OF THE BOOKS ................................................................................ 208 5.1 A WINGÉD DHARMA ................................................................................... 222 5.2 GOD’S WANTON DISHABILLE ................................................................. 239 5.3 THE DANCER AND THE DANCE .............................................................. 253 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 271 vi PREFACE This project has been nurtured and energized by contributions from a host of people in Pittsburgh, Calcutta, and a handful of other places across the world. In my years at the University of Pittsburgh, I have had the opportunity to partake in a vibrant intellectual environment, provided by colleagues like J. Paul Narkunas, Richard Purcell, Henry Veggian, Brenda Glascott, Amy Borden, Kara Andersen, David Bartholomae, Eric Clarke, Kathryn Flannery, Ignacio Lopez-Vicuna, Dana Och, Sergio Villalobos, Anja Ulanowicz, Malkiel Choseed, Jeffrey Hole, Chris Warnick, Vladimir Padunov, Stanley Shoshtak, Rashmi Bhatnagar, Amanda Klein, Jen Lee, and Valerie Krips. Moutusi Maity, Prasanta Chakravarty, and Santanu Das have been friends who have always supported and taken interest in my work. I especially thank Amy Mueller, Elizabeth Bledsoe, Pratiti Ray Choudhury, and Shahana Srivastava for reminding me that there is a world of imaginative events outside my immediate academic circle. Arindam Dasgupta and Richard Debnath, I thank for being chums of the best kind. The latter endlessly indulges my passion for dance, music, and rhythm more broadly, while the former excites my ardor for colors. Kirsten Strayer has been a friend, a listener, and an infinitely patient negotiator of the multiple dramas in my intellectual and personal life. I thank her more than anyone else for making my experience of life in the United States such a multi-faceted and enriching one. Hers is a companionship without which I would be lost. More recently, Meheli Sen has extended to me a friendship very rarely found, and I thank her especially for always unerringly being a part of the banality of my everyday life. Over phone conversations, e- mails, and now Face Book, we share an invaluable togetherness which exceeds our mutual interests in books, movies, food, and above all, other people. As myriad as our connections are, I look forward to growing with her as the years go by. Philip Webb is one of those rare vii souls whom I loved almost instantly. Stolid, always there, and still remarkably playful, Philip inspires me to know that I can turn to him whenever I feel I have ‘messed up.’ Ayan Gangopadhyay can only be described as an absolute riot. Swinging radically between the most astute theoretical observations and the silliest of pronouncements, conversations with Ayan have taught me to know the sheer range of the mind and more importantly, to recognize my own performance of that range. Ambar Basu and Mahuya Pal have accepted my quirks and oddities without any question and have extended their home and hearth to me at perhaps the most difficult time of my life. I have grown to love them as family, and they me. It would be presumptuous of me to attempt to thank my father, the late Dr. Bimalendu Basu and my mother Ms. Kamala Basu for their roles in my life. My mother has been and continues to be a kinetic influence on my world. Sharp, witty, and radical in her thinking, mamma has taught me to never stop imagining possibilities, and to never stop reading, even in bed. My father’s has been the single most profound influence on my being. He has shaped my thoughts without ever treading or even intruding upon them, and I believe it is this attitude that called into being the way of my writing. Thus above all, daddy, this dissertation is for you. My mother-in-law, I thank for the infectious energy she has infused into my recent years in Calcutta, and for the fact that this zest has spilled into her pride in my work. My sister, Banani Saha and brother Biman Basu, despite being older than siblings usually are in modern nuclear situations, have