How appropriate is that?
Notes on anticolonial Brahmanism
Ham na marihaun, marihe samsara
- Kabir
[I will not vanish; this world (of Brahmin) will be annihilated instead.]
What is called “epistemic colonialism” today has been known all too well to the outcastes for millenia as Brahmanic monopolization of knowledge.
An understanding of colonization (even if engaged in dismantling it) is no bar against siding with the perennial oppressor.
Ashis Nandy despite his brilliant insights on the psychology of colonialism is blind-sighted when it comes to calling out caste.
Arundhati Roy (with all her fighting credentials) in her book, “The Doctor and the Saint”, is excoriating Gandhi and applauding Ambedkar on the surface, but in fact she is just appropriating Ambedkar according to the very Ambedkarites she condescends to be speaking for.
And more recently Norman Finkelstein, outspoken and authoritative historian sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, fails (here it’s the racialized Other at play, not Caste, but we won’t quibble as these two Otherings are close cousins).
Native Americans have a built-in safeguard in their stories which say it is as sacrilegious to voice-over someone as it is to allow yourself to be voiced-over.
Mainstream progressivism is nothing if not voicing over. Nothing if not appropriation.
It’s quite simple actually: “I can't believe what you say because I see what you do” (James Baldwin).
“I don’t think that arrogant intellectuals should be dictating to the people which way they should be heading. I think we should be listening to the people, see in which directions things are developing. People are walking where they can, not where they want to. But they are walking!
And one has to have enough modesty and humility to listen to the sound of their steps.”
- Eduardo Galeano