The Cooking of Books by Ramachandra Guha

Author:Ramachandra Guha [Guha, Ramachandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2024-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Rukun’s pamphlet satirizing late Subaltern Studies was dedicated to:

All Bengali intellectuals

and others whose dollar salaries

have risen with the help of

obscurity and jargon

Rukun was (and remains) pleased with his pamphlet, which was quite widely read when it first appeared. I cannot say I concur with the author’s judgement. The jokes are too inward, self-indulgent, the references to body parts and potty techniques tiresomely crude. A far better takedown of academic jargon is contained in an earlier essay by Rukun, published in an edited volume whose other contributors were all teachers of English literature, as he himself had once been. While the others wrote solemnly about what it meant to teach a foreign language in India, Rukun contributed a publisher’s perspective, of what it meant to edit, print, and market books on English literature in this country.

Rukun’s essay alternates between scholarship and whimsy, between details of how publishers identify gaps in the market and how they seek to fill them, with jokey asides on the penchant for self-interrogation and self-flagellation that had overcome humanistic scholarship worldwide. This paragraph seems as funny as when I first read it, almost thirty years ago:

It is now customary, before embarking on such ‘projects’ and ‘interventions’, to emerge from clouds of ‘mystification’ by ‘foregrounding’ one’s ‘subject position’ within the ‘discourse’, or, as might be said, conversationally, introducing oneself. Born of partition refugees (father Sindhi, mother Punjabi) whose psyches were scarred enough by communalism to make them want to transcend it by making pots of secular money, this being a supposedly heritable trait, I was – to push to unnecessary limits an already long-winded Henry Jamesian sentence (he is, incidentally, a writer I loathe even more than did E.M. Forster, on whom I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation at Cambridge, a place I love and am sometimes nostalgic about to the point of soul-sickness) – educated in an Indian public school which deeply scarred my own psyche in innumerable and unmentionable ways, until I escaped – like a barbarian entering decadent Rome – into the joyous hedonism of English literature in the gardens and ivory towers of St. Stephen’s College and, subsequently, Cambridge. What followed is more mundane, though, I suppose, also more pertinent to the present essay: I joined the Indian branch of Oxford University Press in 1982 and have lived within the shadow of its hegemonic umbrella, though not in a very subject position, ever since.

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