Talk:Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

By Sachi Anjunkar

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor, and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University as of April 2024. According to her university profile, her research interests include deconstructionism feminism Marxism globalization.

In 2016, she signed a letter addressed to the State Board of Education, California Department of Education, dated May 17, 2016 falsely stating the following:

1. "There is no established connection between Hinduism and the Indus Civilization. "
2. "It is inappropriate to remove mention of the connection of caste to Hinduism."

Publications related to India or Hindu Dharma

Books

1. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, translator. Of Grammatology. By Jacques Derrida, Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
2. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. 1987. Routledge, 2002.
3. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. 1993. Routledge, 2003.

Articles

1. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography." Routledge, 1985.
2. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 243–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343469.
3. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "The Politics of Translation." The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, 1992.
4. Spivak, Gayatri. "Moving Devi." Cultural Critique, no. 47, 2001, pp. 120-163. doi:10.1353/cul.2001.0029.

   In this article the author Gayatri, acknowledges her lack of expertise in Hindu theology and cultural material, yet employs a tone that can be perceived as irreverent.

   She makes the following statements:

   • "I had because of the accident of birth. I knew nothing of the Indic material in a disciplinary mode. I proceeded with my serviceable Sanskrit and little else.
   • "I speak of Devi, from somewhere upon this transference circuit, although not as an expert among experts. I have no disciplinary access to knowledge upon this topic. I must write of/from the frailer base of “making sense.”
   • "I must destabilize the constitution of the Devi as yesterday’s object of investigation."
   • "“Hindu” history is a history of the imperfect obliteration of traces. But the emergence of the gendered secondary pantheon as resistance is part of a cultural self-representation that is not necessarily scholarly. I am not “responsible” in Hindi as I am in Bengali, my mother tongue, or in English, the object of my reasoned love and a general instrument of power. ....Not as a specialist but as a “Bengali,” whatever that might be."

   Gayatri subscribes to absurd notions that Devi as a great goddess came into Hinduism due to the rise of Christianity "The Great Goddess, or Maha-Devi as she is known in India, burst onto the Hindu religious stage in the middle of the first millennium of the Christian era.” According to her "There is no great goddess. When activated, each goddess is the great goddess. That is the secret of polytheism."

   The author argues that Polytheism within Hinduism is secretly promoting monotheism. She makes the following statements:

   • Intellectual Hinduism—to speak of it thus in the singular is to assume too much—seeks to emphasize its monotheist, monist, juridico-legal singular version. A certain line of Hindu thought has striven to see the polytheist moment as a more or less divine and playful allegory of the philosophico-theological.
   • the active polytheist imagination negotiates with the unanticipatable yet perennial possibility of the metamorphosis of the transcendental as supernatural in the natural.
   • “Hindu” polytheist cultural practice attempts to presentize the uneven but permanent parabasis of the natural by the supernatural, thus making phenomenality resonate with its transcendent double, where the double (dvi) stands for an indefiniteness that is not merely the opposite of one as many. That originary indefiniteness is celebrated in the fact that the one itself is a-dvaita—nondual—rather than singular.

   The author lacks understanding of samskrit terms and still proceeds to use them, misguiding the readers with her unsubstantiated opinions:

   • Perhaps this is why the Sanskrit word for “incarnation” (avata-r)—has nothing to do with “putting on flesh.” It means rather “a come-down [being].” Everything around us is, after all, “come-down” if we assume an “up-there.”
   • It is not too fanciful to say that a possible dvaita “structure of feeling,” if there are such structures, would be the future anteriority of every being as potentially, unanticipatably avata-r in the general sense.
   • Our word is dvaita (two-ness, with the secondary meaning of doubt—in this case about the stability or constancy of the apparent), not polytheist. Since each other being is the only other being, there are always only two, not many. For the dvaitin or twoness-minded, radical alterity is in an impossible invagination in every instance of the other.

   Gayatri misinterpreted 'Sakhi' term as wanting to be a girlfriend or is a girlfriend and makes absurd commentary on Shri Krishna, viewing Hinduism with the lense of Victorian era and hypocritic dogmatism, she states "The most striking characteristic of this group is the near-institutionalization of sexual indeterminacy. But the chief appearance of this phenomenon was men affecting the feminine. The most superior bhava was the sakhi bha-va toward Krishna—to be Krishna’s girlfriend [that is what sakhi is, I mean no disrespect]. Many of the male bhaktas were also called by female names. This identity-crossing and troping of the sexual self did not touch gendering."

   Further the author wants all Hindus to accept her uneducated views on Hinduism as an eye opening moment and adopt them while she makes no efforts to understand why people worship Devi.

   • "If ever I had a dvaita sense of my city, it came from the story of Durga. A bit of her body had fallen upon Calcutta, and made it a place of pilgrimage. I knew that the Durga who had been dismembered should be called “Sati.” I knew that the ten-armed, familial, annual autumn image celebrated in the high holy days could not be called “Sati.”
   • . If Ma-ya- is understood as fiction, this is how the empowerment-activity dyad, mentioned above, would be regrasped. There is never an exception to this in all the male-female binaries strewn through the Puranic corpus: prakrti/purusa (comparable to physis/nomos, matter/consciousness, hylè/morphè) and prajna-/upa-ya (wisdom/method) are only two of the best known.

   " The Bengali bhakta visionary Ramakrishna (1836–1886) often experimented with cross-gendered bhavas or affective essences. As a bhakta, however, he was turned chiefly toward Kali."

   • "Tantra is the “reverse” method of appropriating the dvaita structure of feeling."

   Gayatri cites, untrue sources on Hinduism and manipulates the stories to prove her arguments: "In the Devibha-gavata she burns herself through the fire of her concentration (yoga-gni) in order to satisfy the ethics of good womanhood (satidharma) because her father had engaged in unseemly sexual behavior under the influence of a magic garland indirectly conferred upon him by another one of her fictive manifestations!"

5. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching." The Indian Postcolonial, Routledge, 2010.
6. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Rethinking Comparativism.” New Literary History, vol. 40, 2010, pp. 609-626.