Conferences, those central rituals
of academia, are not all the same. Some are small and intimate, tucked away in
a corner of a single university department; others are enormous and as impersonal
as the Hyatts and Hiltons at which they are held. But there is nevertheless a
certain predictability about the institution: a common promise of what is most
enjoyable as well as all that is disgusting about being a working scholar.
The big conferences are typically
annual affairs. For North-America-based scholars of South Asia, historians in
particular, the most important of these are the AHA (American Historical
Association), the AAS (Association of Asian Studies), and the South Asia
Studies shindig in Madison, WI. The first is especially notorious. Being the
major site of job interviews for historians, the AHA meeting is pervaded by the
smell of fear. There is, for instance, a blue-curtained area where the poorer
schools (which cannot afford hotel suites) hold their interviews, and rows of
young men and women sit miserably with clammy palms and increasingly rancid suits. Even
scholars who are not on the market feel a fat icicle penetrate them unnaturally
when they walk past: they are transported, for a second, to being twenty-nine,
‘finished’ and unemployed. The AAS is less stressful than the AHA, but even
more officious: ‘volunteer’ Brownshirts stand guard outside the conference
rooms to make sure that nobody without a badge (i.e., who has not paid the
hefty conference fee) gets in to steal the wisdom on offer.
Madison, in comparison, is a
laid-back holiday, a sort of fall break devoted to meeting old friends and
enemies, and to general debauchery. (It is the University of Wisconsin.) Around
midnight, the elevators in the hotels around State Street open their doors to
streams of unlikely couplings, booty calls are made, and the halls echo with the
muffled cries of intellectuals in ecstasy. I used to go every year when I lived
in the Midwest, mainly for the social side of the affair. A good friend from
Glasgow, with the look and manner of a young Kirk Douglas, would brush off a
small cloud of ardent graduate students, put away an astonishing number of
beers, pay for the drinks of his envious friends, and go off to his room to
sleep – alone. Curiously juvenile games are played at the panels. One woman used to glare reproachfully at me, to remind me of a disappointing evening in
Delhi. Another would always show up at my panels, but inevitably walk out just
as I was about to read my paper. I am ashamed to note that I retaliated in kind.
Perhaps I started it; it became hard to remember. I enjoyed going to Madison,
but I don’t miss it.
There are a fairly limited set of
‘types’ that may be found at any given conference. There is the compulsive
self-promoter: usually an ambitious sort who has not managed to climb the
ladder as far as he would have liked to. A friend and colleague, who I have
known for many years, epitomizes this type. Happy to have found a familiar face
in a sea of unfamiliar visages in the ballroom of a generic hotel, clutching your drink coupon, you may find
yourself engaged in pleasant conversation with this woman. All of a sudden, she
will spot – across the crowded room – an editor or a scholar more famous than
either of you. Before you can say what the fuck, she will have shot across the
hall like a guided missile. If you sidled up, you would hear the sounds of
vigorous posterior-kissing, name-dropping, back-biting and self-praise,
interspersed with polite exclamations. (Before you accuse me of biting back,
dear reader, please note that I have named no names.) ‘She’s such a good
networker,’ a mutual acquaintance says defensively. Indeed she is.
Then there is the acknowledged
big shot, more evident at smaller conferences. He knows – or believes, at any
rate – that the audience has been waiting for him. His entrance is a strut that
would put P. Diddy to shame. Like Diddy, he has his entourage: a small, smug
train of favored students and junior scholars. He also has his wife, who is typically a younger Indian scholar and his former graduate student, who has married up and is now well-placed in the field. He is, of course, the
subalternist. (Sometimes he is just Ashis Nandy.) He is indulgent to his
entourage, but otherwise disinclined to waste time on them: they are beneath
him. (It’s all very Gramsci, you shee.) He reserves his egalitarian-democratic
impulses for other subalternists, not for subalterns. He may find himself
approached by the occasional self-promoter like my friend mentioned above, and
he may even adopt one temporarily, but there is no question of friendship or
loyalty. If you were a young scholar up for tenure but not a full member of the
club, you would be well advised to watch your back.
The panels themselves are often
interesting for the wrong reasons, most of them anthropological. We observe,
for instance, that academics have not fallen under the spell of the clock: they
tend to treat time-limits on individual presentations as an inside joke or a
quaint suggestion. Audience members sometimes fall asleep: my old dissertation
advisor would do this quite regularly. Nudged awake by his amused neighbor, he
would smile good-naturedly and resume his gentle snoring, which never dampened
the enthusiasm of the delinquent ignoring the clock. Discussants, particularly
women from the subcontinent (for some reason, Delhi more than any other place), often
give the impression that they eat their young, tearing into paper-presenters and
colleagues with a ferocity that takes your breath away. (At a recent
conference, one such spirited historian was asked by her co-panelist – a distinguished anthropologist – whether this was really necessary. ‘You’re a
pompous ass,’ she shot back into an open microphone.) When you recover from
your shock, you realize that these are people who take the business of being
intellectuals extremely seriously. They believe their blathering
matters in the world, even when they work on the minute details of Maratha taxation.
Not surprisingly, sooner or later
at every conference worth its salt, comes the great Call For. This is an arcane
concept and needs some explanation. The Call For is a paper presented,
typically, by a big shot. But it is identified as such by a new member of the
big shots’ club. The act of pointing it out is, in fact, a ritual of admission
into the club. Following the conference, it will emerge – in an edited
conference volume, or an article in the American Historical Review, or at least a well-received monograph – that in
Washington/Philadelphia/Madison, so-and-so ‘called for us’ to chart some
hair-raising new territory, like the intersection of caste, land
revenue and Adorno in mid-nineteenth-century Bengal, or the marginality of left-handed women in nationalist narratives of penal transportation. Apparently, while my
advisor slept and I doodled airplanes in my conference-issued stationary, the rest of the
audience had thrilled to this clarion-call and gauntlet-throw, and some alert young scholar had
recognized the paradigm shift. Now this individual had given the signal, and an
army of South Asianists, shuddering with purpose and solidarity, was ready to march off into battle against
no one in particular, giving the signaler a prominent place in its midst.
Conferences are, I find, rather
lonely spaces – even Madison. The longer they last, the more depressing they
become. This is, no doubt, due to my inability to regard my own profession with
the required seriousness. But it is also because conferences bring out the eroded
condition of friendships and old loves, and the fraudulent nature
of collegiality, which seldom rises higher than one-upmanship, narcissism and
cliquish behavior of the sort patented by middle-schoolers. In the worst cases,
you find yourself doing it too. I’m always happy to leave and take a shower.
May 27, 2013
