The Dangers of Field Work

It can be dangerous to go to far afield for one's research, whatever one's motivations. Three students of the Ecole Normale, were driven to distraction by the following note they found one day while doing what they do best, reading for written exams--


"Because of their sharp intelligence, and as the only group
of Brahmins who took to the Muslim culture, they [=Kashimri
Pandits] soon distinguished themselves in their own land
and, after Akbar's annexation of Kashimir, in the Mughal
court and administration in which they rose to become an
influential element."

Aziz Ahmad, "Studies in Islamic cutlure in the Indian
environment", p.107.

This note was found in an envelope which also contained a set of keys, a library stub, and two tickets to an opera, but the ink seemed to have runneth dry at this point, and no more can be made of this final document.

Nevertheless, these students, who disappeared, never to be seen again, have subsequently been identified as the men in this photograph:




shamelessly masquerading as Kashmiri Pandits masquerading as Dards. Whatever the guidebooks say, these are not Kashmiri Pandits, and the tag should be revised. It is also suspected that the gentlemen in the following picture



are deserters from Napolean's army who managed to set themselves up in the shawl business. Either that, or they were research assistants for Slyvain Levi. We cannot be sure, but the connection with the covert Shawl takeover bid of 1793, a dasdardly conspiracy of the Colonial Peripheral Metropoles recently uncovered by a Student of the Post-Post Collective, cannot be ignored. This organization united the peripheries of two empires in a mobile blue-water center, a blue-water center, centred in hegemonic Central Asia, and assorted subalternized and alternizing hookah dens along the suppressed trade routes into depressed Kashmir.

It might also be a brilliant bit of subversive reinscription of reticulated articulations--an intervention in fact, fucking with the archive. As the French do so well.