The "Calcatian antel" aka intellectual

Growing up in the mofussil in a context of the trade union movement and rural organizing, I learned early on from my everyday environment to be suspicious of the category of the "Calcatian antel" aka the "intellectual" or the "intellectual of the Calcutta brand."

You identify this kind with its class history as a collaborator of the power elite.

High on rhetorical flourish, and vacuous in substance, this is the class that will make all kinds of commitments about solidarity when convenient and disappear when solidarity is actually needed in struggles of change.

With a father working as an extractive manager for one of the large corporations that inhabited Calcutta of the 1960s and 1970s, the Calcatian antel went to an elite convent in South Calcutta, and then to one of the elite Calcutta institutions where the children of the well-heeled go.

Having grown up very much as a class collaborator, the village and the rural and the poor didn't exist in her vocabulary except for boutique trips to Shantiniketan and Bolpur and Mednipur to take in culture.

My earliest memories of such "Calcutta antels" are the jeans-and-kurta shows at the rural festivals and fairs in my neighborhood.

Her British-emulating, received pronunciation-accented English (often referred to as "tensh" by mofussil folk) stood out, dripping in class privilege.

In the eyes of the uncivilized, the "Calcatian antel" existed as a specimen category, marked by the combination of attire, accent, mannerisms.

The Calcutta Club and Bengal Club are where she socializes and was socialized into her upper class network, meeting other similar "Calcatian antels."

Sipping whisky over a Dylan song, strumming her guitar to "How many roads must a man walk down," the Calcatian antel discovers her radical edginess, conveniently erasing her father's seven-eight figure salary and the networks of her father's friends that take her places.

Having inherited from the British masters a knack for the English language, cultivated through the convents spread across Calcutta, the "Calcatian antel" masters her language games, acing the GRE vocabulary list and securing entry into US graduate programs.

Now once in the US, the "Calcatian antel" quickly finds her privileged position no longer in currency.

All her modernity and love for Dylan and U2 are brought under scrutiny when her ignorant White American professors and fellow White graduate students share their disbelief at her journey to the West. They are even more surprised that she can speak English, perhaps even better than them.

Her performance in the classroom though is not a respite from the racism of White America.

She finds herself crafting a radical position, drawing from her superficial readings of some superficial translation of Derrida and an equally superficial reading of Spivak [this sort of radical posturing unfortunately makes up a great deal of postcolonial theory].

She now has enough ammunition in her rhetorical grab-bag that she can make all kinds of radical pretense claims about orientalism, hybridity, and Asian turns.

This radical position is just the right recipe for American multiculturalism, now rewritten as respect for difference and diversity.

For all her radical posturing though, the "Calcatian antel" is very much deep inside an opportunistic collaborator, reflective of the class position she inherits.

Interrogating the class position of the "Calcation antel" offers a window into the impossibility of radical alterity in what fashionably goes as much of postcolonial theory.

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