In a league of her own

Prof. Gayatri Spivak, the world renowned literary critic and theorist who was in Kathmandu a couple of weeks ago, told me something interesting when I was taking her to the hotel from the airport. Need I say that I was surprised to be sitting next to the hero of many of our intellectual imaginations? Her father had once visited Kathmandu as a surgeon during the time of King Tribhuvan. He had received a few gold coins which are her precious possessions now.

As I spent hours with her for two days, I understood why I adored her so much. What a piece of mind is Spivak! She writes and practices what she believes. She does not work for the downtrodden. It will be a gross mistake if you take her journeys into heartlands of the poorest of the poor of the world as a mission to uplift them. She comes across a different kind of consciousness, she says, while meeting them. That is why she communicates with them, teaches them and learns from them. She thinks that to know them, you have to know their idioms, their languages and customs, which can only be achieved by living like them.

Before meeting her, I had the impression that she must have some kind of farmhouse in Birbhum villages (West Bengal) where she goes four to five times in a year. She must have kept her Columbia University stature while living in Birbhum, I had imagined. But as she described her ways of working with the villagers, my do-gooder impression about her began to be challenged. Prof Shreedhar Lohani said she was like a saint at this phase of her intellectual accumulation.

There are many who do not understand her ways. Not long ago she was a radical thinker who was uncompromising and threatening in her ideas. She still is the same Spivak, but I can see a yogini in her now, a calm warrior who thinks that everything is doable, even the most difficult ones, although many of the things may not get done.

To think that ‘things can be done’ is her ethical position. The possibility of doablity is her optimism. Your work may not be complete, but you can still do the work. The idea is simple. That is also why it is a brilliant humanistic proposition. It is the vision of Krishna in The Gita, it is metaphorically Nietzschean. The thinker was immensely impressed by such eastern ideas.

Prof Spivak embodies the spirit of ‘doablity’, a simple idea and a great humanistic approach.

Spivak can travel with ease even at the age of 70, tirelessly moving from place to place to practice what she conceptualizes. Some of us think that she is a loner and that is the reason she is continuously on the move. But she seems to find solace in constantly learning to live with the most unknown and marginal minds.

She calls herself an Europeanist because Europe is a field of knowledge. Similarly she takes Birbhum too as a location of knowledge. You cannot avoid Europe or the West because there are always many things happening there, from the arts to developmental strategies, she says. My position is that you have to know India and China to be able to be intellectually accumulative, alert and experienced.

A similar intellectualism worked when Dabur Nepal approached us for the Excellence Series. The corporate world wants to connect to and know the academia. These are not dissimilar locations. At times, we have to think together, know the seemingly other. A student of Management has to be familiar with how literary minds work around her. This is the reason we offer courses on the methodologies of science in English departments.

I must mention how we work academically and politically in our world of parochialism. Prof. Spivak highly (and rightly) appreciated Prof. Lohani for his pervasive academic liberalism. On one hand, a globally acclaimed scholar appreciates his intellectual strategies, and on the other, university politics does not (and cannot) comprehend the value of such Nepali minds. The irony is that we are unable to challenge such mindlessness. That is why W. B. Yeats wrote, “The best lack conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Spivak reminded me of many good and bad things we are going through. We have to learn to listen to such people because we are complacent in exercising our mental ability. South Asia is a sheet of wonderful gurus, the best in the world listen. But we have lost that intellectual passion (I have not because I belong to this guru-shishya tradition). She told me how she is reminded of her students when they refer to her, as I was referring to my guru during a session with her. I must write a mail to another of my favorites, my Jahanavi-appa. Where is she?

orungupto@gmail.com