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On casteist postcolonial claims, "The subaltern can't speak"


[I write this piece as an upper caste, upper-class academic, who through the privileges accorded by caste, and through friendships with Adivasi intellectuals, organizers, and activists, is continually learning about the violence that is scripted into my caste position in the academe].

Imagine the upper caste, upper middle-class Calcutta antel, the daughter or son of a corporate executive or a professor or a doctor, sipping their whisky in their Calcutta living room in one of those South Calcutta neighborhoods, surrounded by other caste privileged friends that followed the same trajectory, St. Xaviers and then perhaps Jadavpur or Presidency, the spaces of radical posturing among the caste privileged, and declaring, "The subaltern can't speak. For if the subaltern was heard, s/he would no longer be subaltern."

An entire infrastructure of caste privileged radical posturing that shapes the intellectual zeitgeist of postcolonial theory derives from the unquestioned privilege of caste. 

The utterances of Derrida, Adorno, Horkheimer, mediated through a Spivak or a Bhabha, with the intellectual trapeze around hybridity and so on, all produced in the perfected accent mimicking the colonizer. We are told, the colonizer must be critiqued in its own language, with its own language games.

This caste privilege, accumulated through intergenerational practices of learning to suck up to the colonizer, plays out in the sort of arrogance that mimics whiteness in its ability to make pronouncements.  The assumed place that accords automatically the right to speak comes from the right upper caste, upper class networks, from the Calcutta private convents that elite parents working in private corporations could afford, to the higher institutions of learning rife with casteist discriminatory practices built around purity.

The postcolonial elite of the metropole has perfected the art of speaking on the most relevant issues of justice, inequality, erasure and violence, in the most immaculate convent-perfected English, issuing pronouncements on the impossibility of the subaltern voice while the subaltern is expected to stay silent. 

Hindutva and caste, the postcolonial elite will tell you all there is to know about the experiences of Muslims in the new India, while sipping whisky in her Ballygunge apartment. The climate of hate targeted at Muslims, you will find your postcolonial expert. The new politics of purity in Hindutva India, you have your expert in postcolonial theory making mediocre pontifications, all the while performing the politics of gatekeeping to keep intact the casteist spaces of Spivakian theoretical purity. 

Irony lives and thrives in the postcolonial world of the Calcutta antel.

Dare the subaltern speak. Dare the subaltern learn that language of Calcutta antels. Dare the subaltern question the performative trapeze around justice and inequality. 

For to space, to raise Adivasi claims is to unsettle an entire apparatus of Savarna profiteering from savarna violence on Adivasi lives, Adivasi knowledge, and Adivasi livelihoods.

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