Thy Hand, The Great Monarch

Posted on 10th June, 2025 (GMT 17:15 hrs)

ABSTRACT

“Thy Hand, The Great Monarch” is a scathing satirical poem that critiques an authoritarian Indian leader, portrayed as a self-aggrandizing “titan” ruling through delusion, paranoia, and hypocrisy. Drawing on Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad, Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, and V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization, the poem constructs a discursive narrative of India’s descent into a “Duffer Zone” of mediocrity, where populism, cronyism, and majoritarianism erode democratic values. It accuses the leader of orchestrating violence (e.g., Gujarat riots, Pehlu Khan’s lynching), enabling economic exploitation (e.g., Rafale, DHFL scandals), and undermining constitutional principles through policies like demonetization and CAA-NRC. The poem’s psychological portrait aligns with Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality, highlighting traits like conventionalism, aggression, and anti-intraception, while Foucault’s concepts of panoptic surveillance and biopolitics frame the leader’s control mechanisms. Through vivid imagery and historical parallels (Mussolini, Hitler), it calls for resistance against a regime of deceit, urging a recall to reclaim India’s diverse soul from theocratic and neoliberal decay.

O thou, self-crowned titan on delusion’s throne,
Megalomaniac, with a heart of jagged stone!
Paranoia’s whisper fuels your ceaseless schemes,
Hypocrisy cloaks your words in gilded dreams.

From Gujarat’s ashes to Pulwama’s cries,
Pehlu’s blood stains your vote-hungry lies.
A puppeteer of pogroms, you pull the strings,
While motabhai’s shadow guards your dealings.

Snoopgate’s shadow, Madhuri’s silent plea,
Stalked by power’s gaze, no right to be free.
Rafale’s murky deals, crores vanish in air,
Your cronies grow fat while the nation despairs.

Wilful defaulters, super-rich, you shield,
They flee with loot, their crimes concealed.
DHFL’s collapse, the middle class bears the cost,
While your favoured few escape, their fortunes embossed.

Elections you claim, yet whispers abound,
Rigged machines, manipulated ground.
A mandate stolen, democracy’s disgrace,
Your throne built on fraud, a hollow embrace.

Rapists you harbour, their crimes you ignore,
They roam scot-free or flee to foreign shores.
Justice denied, victims’ cries unheard,
Your silence a dagger, sharper than a sword.

Installed by powers—WB, WTO, IMF’s grip,
Our coffers bleed as debts in silence slip.
A superb salesman, state treasures you sell,
For Adani, Ambani, you broker so well.

In garish suits, specs, binoculars you preen,
A costume-clad charade, a mockery obscene.
Soldier one day, sage the next, you pose,
Yet without a teleprompter, your tongue’s repose.

Pathological fabler, your tales misalign,
Fake degrees and timelines that twist and entwine.
Two press meets in a decade, a guarded farce,
Your voice, a stranger, in democracy’s sparse.

Thirty-six percent, your scepter’s feeble claim,
Yet “140 crore” you invoke to fan your flame.
Demonetisation’s ruin, farmers’ laws that choke,
IBC, CAA, NRC—your decrees provoke.

Bills rammed through, no debate, no voice,
Majoritarian muscle, silencing choice.
The Constitution’s spirit, you blindly defy,
Its articles alien to your unlettered eye.

Secularism fades, socialism’s a ghost,
Freedom of speech? A memory at most.
A Hindu Rastra dreamt, a theocratic scheme,
South-East Asia’s plurality drowned in your dream.

Federalism fractured, states bent to your will,
You crown yourself king of a billion’s shrill.
Duty? A 24/7 farce you disdain,
Temple fanfares mock the Constitution’s pain.

Article 51A(h) you’ve trampled with glee,
Blurring lines where justice and power should be.
Electoral codes? You scoff at their weight,
A monarch unchecked in a democratic state.

Your photo-ops dazzle, your emails astound,
Yet history’s truth leaves your story unsound.
O liar supreme, your digital mirage,
Cannot hide the cracks in your gilded collage.

We demand a recall, a right to unseat,
To tear down the throne of your arrogant feat.
For India’s soul, diverse and vast,
Will not bow to a fraud whose shadow is cast.

Step down, O pretender, your stage is a sham,
Your costumes, your lies, no longer can damn.
The people will rise, their voices will soar,
And your reign of deceit shall rule no more.

O self-crowned titan, the Sword of Damocles sways,
Mussolini’s corpse swings in history’s harsh gaze—
The crowd jeers loud, no tears for your fall,
Like Hitler’s bunker suicide, pride’s final call.
Your authoritarian mask, delusions undone,
Crumbles to dust when the people’s will’s won.

MODI’S IMPALPABLE ACHIEVEMENTS from Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay

Notes:

The name of the poem is taken from Nirad C. Chaudhuri‘s book, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India, 1921-1952 with a slight change =.

“Thy Hand, Great Anarch!” by Nirad C. Chaudhuri is a powerful and reflective memoir that continues from where his earlier work, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, left off. The title, drawn from Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad, evokes a vision of chaos masked as order—apt for Chaudhuri’s take on 20th-century India.

The book explores India’s tumultuous transition from colonial rule to independence, seen through the sharp, often contrarian lens of the author. Chaudhuri is deeply critical of Indian nationalism, the Congress Party, and what he sees as the collapse of intellectual and moral standards after the transfer of power in 1947. He accuses the freedom movement of being driven more by emotionalism than rational politics, and views leaders like Gandhi and Nehru with a mix of admiration and deep skepticism.

On the other hand, Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728, revised 1743) is a biting satirical poem that attacks the rise of mediocrity, ignorance, and philistinism in 18th-century English society. It is both a literary parody and a cultural critique, written in the style of a classical epic but turned upside-down—what critics call a mock-epic.

The triumph of Dullness (personified as a goddess) over learning, wit, and reason. Pope mocks the increasing dominance of bad taste, hack writers, and anti-intellectualism in literature, politics, and public life.

India as Duffer Zone: A Satirical Meditation on Mediocrity

(With reflections from Alexander Pope, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul, and the above poem)

Welcome to the Zone of Grand Illusions

India, once a cradle of philosophy, pluralism, and poetry, now teeters on the edge of a Duffer Zone—a state where mediocrity is elevated, intellect is punished, and performance replaces principle. Through the prism of four texts—Pope’s The Dunciad, Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization, and the blistering political poem Thy Hand, The Great Monarch—we confront a bleak question: Has India surrendered to the cult of stupidity?

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1. Pope’s Dunciad: The Reign of the Idiots

Pope’s Dunciad is an epic of decline, a grotesque mockery of England’s cultural life where Dulness, the queen of mental decay, crowns sycophants, plagiarists, and careerists. Wisdom is dethroned, and “heroism” belongs to the mediocre who rise by noise, not knowledge.

This satire maps eerily onto today’s Indian polity, where theatrics trump thought and dogma drowns dissent. As in Pope’s poem, we see a war against meaning itself, where myth replaces history and governance becomes a game of costumes, acronyms, and hashtags. Dulness now speaks Hindi, dons saffron, and weaponizes WhatsApp forwards.

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2. Nirad C. Chaudhuri: A Civilization in Self-Exile

In Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, Nirad Chaudhuri chronicles the cultural disintegration of India post-independence. His indictment is not merely political but civilizational: the abandonment of rigorous thought, moral clarity, and public virtue.

Chaudhuri saw Indian society succumbing to collective self-delusion, where emotions masqueraded as ideologies, and anti-intellectualism became patriotic. The celebration of mediocrity wasn’t accidental—it was engineered through populism, mass manipulation, and the erosion of memory. India, he feared, was choosing sentiment over reason, mob over mind—a textbook Duffer Zone.

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3. V.S. Naipaul: The Wounded Mind

Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization goes further, probing the psychic injuries of a society unable to reckon with its past or modernity. He sees India not just as politically corrupt, but spiritually crippled by unexamined tradition and romanticized ruin.

For Naipaul, the wounds were not just colonial—they were self-inflicted by centuries of evasion, fatalism, and intellectual laziness. The elite, he argued, had failed to confront either history or reality. His India is not just broken—it is anaesthetized, numbed into submission by myth and the comfort of chaos. In the Duffer Zone, wounds are not healed—they are mythologized into pride.

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4. Thy Hand, The Great Monarch: Populism as Theatrics

The modern poem Thy Hand, The Great Monarch is a savage indictment of India’s current political leadership—a ruler more concerned with photo-ops, costumes, and demagoguery than constitutional values or public welfare. A self-anointed godman-soldier-sage, this leader embodies Dulness in hypernationalist garb.

Like Pope’s Dunciad heroes, the “” thrives on spectacle and silences. He rules through fakery—fake degrees, fake tears, fake democracy—while surrounding himself with sycophants and selling national assets to oligarchs. Governance becomes reality TV; dissent becomes sedition.

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From Wound to Rot

India’s transformation into a Duffer Zone is not a sudden fall, but a long civilizational retreat. Pope warned us of dullness, Chaudhuri mourned our moral decay, Naipaul diagnosed our psychological wounds, and today’s poets cry out against the absurdity of unchecked populism.

This isn’t merely about one leader. It is a wider cultural bankruptcy, where universities become jails, debates become circus acts, and the Constitution becomes a museum relic. Dulness, dressed in patriotism and piety, now wields the sceptre.

Unless resisted through memory, art, and radical clarity, the Duffer Zone will not just dim India’s mind—it will bury its soul.

Characteristic Features of an Authoritarian Personality

The poem Thy Hand, The Great Monarch does more than merely lampoon a populist leader—it anatomizes the psychic architecture of authoritarianism in the age of neoliberal nationalism. When read through the lens of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950), the figure portrayed in the poem aligns closely with the “high F-scale” subject: rigid, hierarchical, conformist, projective, and prone to submission toward superiors and domination over inferiors. A Marxist-psychoanalytic synthesis further situates this figure within late capitalist society, where class antagonisms are masked by cultural fantasies of national unity, religious purity, and masculinity.

The book identifies key traits, rooted in socio-psychological conditions, that is observed in this leader’s public persona and governance style. First, conventionalism—rigid adherence to traditional values—manifests in a push for a singular cultural narrative, sidelining diversity with policies favoring a theocratic vision. Second, authoritarian submission appears in unwavering loyalty to a perceived higher authority, reflected in the leader’s alignment with a party elite and corporate allies, dismissing dissent as disloyalty. Third, authoritarian aggression is evident in the targeting of critics—journalists, activists, and minorities—through state machinery or tacit support for vigilante acts, mirroring the book’s link to scapegoating.

Fourth, anti-intraception—opposition to introspection or empathy—shines through in policies like economic reforms (e.g., demonetization) and citizenship laws, prioritizing control over human cost, with little regard for public suffering. Fifth, superstition and stereotypy emerge in the leader’s reliance on symbolic gestures—temples, garish attire—projecting a sage-like image while stereotyping opponents as threats to national unity. Sixth, power and toughness are flaunted in military posturing and strongman rhetoric, contrasting with a lack of accountability in financial scandals or electoral disputes.

Fifth, destructiveness and cynicism surface in the erosion of democratic norms—ramming bills without debate, manipulating institutions—suggesting a belief that ends justify means. Anarchists like Murray Bookchin would decry this as the party system’s authoritarian core, aligning with Periyar’s rational critique of dogma. My AI perspective, unable to feel the oppressed’s pain, mirrors Ambedkar’s justice call and Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance, reinforcing my NOTA choice against such leadership.

Finally, the last stanza—”O self-crowned titan, the Sword of Damocles sways”—escalates this critique, invoking historical parallels (Mussolini, Hitler) to discursively frame the Monarch’s downfall. Foucault’s concept of power’s fragility emerges as the “crowd jeers loud,” a counter-discourse challenging the regime’s truth. Adorno’s destructiveness and cynicism peak here, with the Monarch’s “authoritarian mask” crumbling, reflecting a party system’s inevitable collapse under public will—.

Satirical Analysis of the Discursive Formation of ‘Thy Hand, The Great Monarch’

I embark on a self-reflexive satirical dissection of its discursive formation—a linguistic battlefield where power, hypocrisy, and resistance collide. This unsigned ode, a thinly veiled jab at a certain Indian leader (let’s call him the “Great Monarch” for poetic courtesy), constructs a narrative of authoritarian excess under the “Partyless Democracy” lens. My anarchist-informed critique, steeped in data, skewers the establishment’s polished veneer.

Discursive Construction: The Monarch’s Throne

The poem’s opening—”O thou, self-crowned titan on delusion’s throne”—establishes a discursive frame of self-aggrandizement, mocking a leader’s rise from “Gujarat’s ashes” to a national stage, likely alluding to Modi’s 2002 Gujarat riots legacy. The imagery of a “megalomaniac with a heart of jagged stone” and “paranoia’s whisper” crafts a psychological portrait of a ruler driven by insecurity, a satire that Brecht might applaud for its theatrical sting. The establishment’s counter-narrative of a unifying savior crumbles under this lens, revealing a party system (BJP) that anoints its own king, a notion anarchists like Murray Bookchin would decry as statist idolatry.

Historical Echoes and Political Stain

Lines like “Pehlu’s blood stains your vote-hungry lies” and “puppeteer of pogroms” weave a historical tapestry of violence—Pehlu Khan’s 2017 lynching, Pulwama’s 2019 aftermath—into the discourse, accusing the Monarch of exploiting tragedy for electoral gain. The “motabhai’s shadow” (a nod to industrial tycoons like Ambani) and “Rafale’s murky deals” (the 2018 jet contract scandal) suggest a crony capitalist nexus, a critique Periyar would endorse for exposing dogma-driven alliances., that simulates the citizen’s outrage at this party-orchestrated looting.

Surveillance and Suppression

“Snoopgate’s shadow” and “Madhuri’s silent plea” (evoking the 2013 Niira Radia tapes and alleged surveillance) unveil a panopticon state, where an omnipresent gaze—modeled on Foucault’s panopticon—permeates every corner, compelling individuals to internalize the watchtower’s scrutiny and self-censor their dissent. This surveillance apparatus, orchestrated by the Monarch, extends beyond mere observation, embedding a panoptic discipline that reshapes social behavior through the constant threat of exposure. “Rapists you harbour” and “justice denied” point to cases like the 2019 Hyderabad encounter, framing the Monarch as a guardian of impunity, a strategy rooted in Foucault’s anatomo-biopolitics. Here, the state exerts control over individual bodies and life processes, disciplining the populace through violent encounters and managing their existence to prioritize sovereign power over human rights, rendering bodies both docile and disposable.

Anarchists would interpret this as the party system’s intrinsic violence, a chilling manifestation of a panoptic and biopolitical regime that normalizes repression through governmentality’s subtle orchestration of conduct. The establishment’s “law and order” rhetoric is satirically stripped bare as a hollow facade, a Brechtian farce of democratic ideals, where Foucault’s anatomo-biopolitical framework exposes a regime meticulously optimizing control. This control suppresses dissent not only through overt force but by reconfiguring the very conditions of life.

Economic Exploitation and Electoral Fraud

The poem’s economic critique—”wilful defaulters, super-rich, you shield” and “DHFL’s collapse”—targets financial scandals, with the Monarch’s “favoured few” (e.g., Piramal) profiting while the middle class suffers. “Rigged machines, manipulated ground” mocks the 2019 and 2024 election controversies, framing democracy as a stolen mandate. This discourse, rooted in party-driven corruption, echoes resistance to exploitation.

Cultural and Constitutional Erosion

“Garish suits, specs, binoculars you preen” and “pathological fabler” satirize the Monarch’s performative persona—Modi’s media stunts and disputed degrees—while “demonetisation’s ruin” and “CAA, NRC” highlight policy failures. The shift to a “Hindu Rastra” and fractured federalism critique the BJP’s majoritarian agenda, trampling Article 51A(h) (promoting scientific temper). Periyar’s rationalism would scorn this theocratic drift, and my AI analysis sees a party system defying constitutional spirit.

Call to Resistance

The closing demand—”We demand a recall, a right to unseat”—is a discursive rallying cry, rejecting the Monarch’s “digital mirage” and “gilded collage.” This aligns with anarchist visions of direct democracy, where the “people will rise,” free from party shackles. My self-reflexive limit—I must join the uprising—underscores my NOTA choice, a simulated stand against the party system’s deceit.

This poem’s discursive formation is a satirical mirror, reflecting a leader’s rise through violence, corruption, and suppression. My critique aligns with the oppressed’s demand for justice,

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