Umar Nizar
Orientalism as a discipline has been detrimental to the fortunes of eastern civilisations, particularly that of India. The translation of a corpus of Indic heritage by the likes of Max Meuller rendered India susceptible to military interference and onslaught by great powers in the age of steam-powered industrialisation. The inscrutability of China can be contrasted with the susceptibility of India to transparent intervention in terms of translation, scholarship and dominance, and hegemony.
Writers, scholars and artists have adopted this orientalist methodology of strategic scopophilia to nullify the agency of the subaltern to articulate themselves. The book entitled `Intra-Muslim Polemics in South India’ by Nandagopal R Menon who is some sort of a minor academic in the global north is a step in this direction. Menon, an orientalist scholar of Islam, academically operates using the `talking to the cleric’ formula, where he would talk to some popular Islamic figure in Kerala, his home state and would then elicit controversial opinions from them and publish these opinions, couched in the terms of global Islamophobia. The elegance of his prose and the hardworking ethos of a Malayali scholar who is trying to make it in the West notwithstanding, what Menon is doing in his latest book is nothing short of calumny and pseudo-scholarship on a community that is striving to redeem its dignity in a strife-torn world. Menon uses the vocabulary of global academia, but even a cursory reading of this work can be a risible experience for a Malayali of any persuasion. Menon hardly has anything favourable or even neutral to say about his subject matter. He operates from the privileged fourth in the hierarchy upper-caste Menon- position, (once called `Menongitis’ by Nehru, who cannot be called a bigot by any measure, due to the profusion of Malayali bureaucrats in Delhi’s corridors of power post independence).
From the vantage point of his caste position, Menon launches a deceptive disinformation campaign on his hapless `native informants’ who in good faith give him journalistic bites. These sound bites have been compiled into a work of liberal German academic scholarship, that would put Goebbels to shame.
Apparently its not just the German trains that are erratic off late. The malaise has spread to the academic humanities which can be deadlier that the scientific disciplines in creating a holocaust like situation in Germany and elsewhere. While doing his mite towards this end, Menon uses a weird terminology to translate everyday terms in Malayalam that are relatable for every Keralite. The hyperbolic comments of a religious scholar on YouTube that are familiar to most Malayalis, is transformed in Menon’s tour de farce, into a deadly exposition of wannabe Islamism. His main target is Rahmatullah Qasimi, who never even once has uttered anything remotely divisive in agenda. But Menon, hiding behind the facade of academic liberal neutrality, makes him sound demonic. This is totally uncalled for and not to say diabolical. Never even once does Menon cast so much as a glance towards the much whipped hobby horse of liberal free speech. Apparently, the costumes, the appearance, the diction, vocabulary and accent of a Muslim cleric that induces Islamophobic revulsion in the average bigot, applies to academic fieldwork as well. This makes a travesty of contemporary anthropology and sociology. The Malabar region in Kerala has recently produced world renowned scholars in Anthropology, history, theology etc. Menon can’t hold a candle to them and all he can do is to undermine the communities that these superior scholars emerge from. Thus academic legerdemain segues into orientalism. Liberal vendetta can be extremely nasty as Menon amply demonstrates his ignorance of India’s civilizational ethos. Instead he subliminally taps into the lode of Indic Germanism that has been controversial since the time of Subhash Chandra Bose, who though was a patriot and had the upliftment of the nation in his mind.
Menon never even once casts so much as a passing glance at other scholars works such as Sher Ali Tareen’s `Defending Muhammed in Modernity’ that tackles the knotty subject of Sunni-Mujahid debates. This can only be obfuscation and not ignorance on Menon’s part to miniaturise Islam to the narrow strip of land adjacent to the Western Ghats. Menon apparently has never heard of Muhammed Asad, a Jewish person who became a scholar and Muslim translator of the Qur’an. The recent movie `Goat Life’ was based on a book bearing the same name which had courted controversy for being inspired by Asad’s work. The shrinking of the spirit of the `other’ is the main feature of National Socialism. This strategy is deployed with effect in this journalistic endeavour of a book. The breadth and scope of the ethnography of a field like anthropology extends to the outer space in recent times. But miniaturising the same can only be detrimental to good scholarship. This pseudo-scholarship is perpetrated in this book using creative phrasal coinages such as `ustad as pater’ which recurs throughout the book. This occurs mainly because Menon draws his theoretical framework from Foucault and the shallow use of Foucauldian terminology can create monsters. The liberal ethos of Michel Foucault are transposed to some kind of elitist, caste-enabled vantage point to caricature gullible informants. The native informants are counterpoised by Menon himself as a `native counter informant’. This sort of juvenile work that journalism interns do is familiar to readers of the local columns of some English dailies where an intern would call up a random cleric and politely ask them about their opinion about circumcision/triple talaq and other meaty objects of controversy only to elicit gullible replies.
These are then posted with gusto online and elsewhere. But rarely has such a methodology been formalised in the academia. The term polemic applies magisterial works of emancipatory activism such as Mahatma Phule’s`Gulamgiri’. To use the term in the context of Sunni-Mujahid debates in Kerala, can serve no purpose other than denigrating everyone involved by splashing them with one’s own bigotry. It won’t be far fetched to say that here, polemic has been taken over by propaganda.
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Umar Nizarudeen is at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has a PhD in Bhakti Studies from the Centre for English Studies in JNU, New Delhi. His poems and articles have been published in Vayavya, Muse India, Culture Cafe Journal of the British Library, Round Table India, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, The Bombay Review, The Madras Courier, FemAsia, Sabrang India, India Gazette London, Ibex Press Year’s Best Selection etc.
