Did Dr. Ambedkar really say 'Dogs are degraded Lions' ?
I think I've heard something like that before- but not in Hindi or Tamil.
Still, the question arises, is it a genuine historical fact that Brahmin priests snidely belittled Buddhist lions till they became dispirited and their manes fell out and they started saying bow wow instead of roaring?
More than likely.
Next week- how Brahmins systematically belittled tigers till they turned into pussies and why Priti Zinta is still pissed about it.
Showing posts with label Ambedkar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ambedkar. Show all posts
Wednesday, 16 May 2012
Monday, 14 May 2012
Gabriel Tarde & Dr.Ambedkar
This is Dr Ambedkar quoting Gabriel Tarde to explain the Hindu taboo on beef
Coming to Manu there is no doubt that he too did. not prohibit the slaughter of the cow. On the other hand he made the eating of cow's flesh on certain occasions obligatory.
Why then did the non-Brahmins give up eating beef? There appears to be no apparent reason for this departure on their part. But there must be some reason behind it. The reason I like to suggest is that it was due to their desire to imitate the Brahmins that the non-Brahmins gave up beef-eating. This may be a novel theory but it is not an impossible theory. As the French author, Gabriel Tarde has explained that culture within a society spreads by imitation of the ways and manners of the superior classes by the inferior classes. This imitation is so regular in its flow that its working is as mechanical as the working of a natural law. Gabriel Tarde speaks of the laws of imitation. One of these laws is that the lower classes always imitate the higher classes. This is a matter of such common knowledge that hardly any individual can be found to question its validity.
That the spread of the cow-worship among and cessation of beef-eating by the non-Brahmins has taken place by reason of the habit of the non-Brahmins to imitate the Brahmins who were undoubtedly their superiors is beyond dispute. Of course there was an extensive propaganda in favour of cow-worship by the Brahmins. The Gayatri Purana is a piece of this propaganda. But initially it is the result of the natural law of imitation. This, of course, raises another question: Why did the Brahmins give up beef-eating?
I must admit that I can make no sort of sense out of this. The killing of four legged animals, including cows, was prohibited in Buddhist countries like Japan. There were no Brahmins in Japan but there was Untouchability.
Gabriel Tarde's law of imitation cuts both ways. If the Brahmins practiced animal sacrifice then they could not be the originator of the custom. Rather, they must have adopted it from some class or sect they held superior to themselves. The Sramanic Religions, especially Jainism, are an obvious candidate for this superior class. Even to day we find the adoption of 'Jain-Vegetarianism' - i.e. rejection of root vegetables, tubers, honey, etc- as a method of one-upmanship within Hindu sub-castes.
Brahminical animal sacrifice was a costly affair and was connected to a metaphysical theory such that the sacrificed animal gained the realm of the gods. Poor Brahmins would have the strongest incentive to adopt vegetarianism since they could not afford to host a 'potlatch' animal-sacrifice.
Dr.Ambedkar, however, sees something sinister in the Brahmin espousal of vegetarianism.
'That the object of the Brahmins in giving up beef-eating was to snatch away from the Buddhist Bhikshus the supremacy they had acquired is evidenced by the adoption of vegetarianism by Brahmins. Why did the Brahmins become vegetarian? The answer is that without becoming vegetarian the Brahmins could not have recovered the ground they had lost to their rival namely Buddhism. In this connection it must be remembered that there was one aspect in which Brahmanism suffered in public esteem as compared to Buddhism. That was the practice of animal sacrifice which was the essence of Brahmanism and to which Buddhism was deadly opposed. That in an agricultural population there should be respect for Buddhism and revulsion against Brahmanism which involved slaughter of animals including cows and bullocks is only natural. What could the Brahmins do to recover the lost ground? To go one better than the Buddhist Bhikshus not only to give up meat-eating but to become vegetarians- which they did. That this was the object of the Brahmins in becoming vegetarians can be proved in various ways.'
Why does Dr. Ambedkar think it only natural that there should be 'revulsion in an agricultural population for the slaughter of animals'? The reverse is the case. In Europe, when animals were slaughtered with the onset of winter, it was an occasion of public rejoicing. At least some of the meat was roasted and enjoyed while the remainder was salted and dried and put away for the lean months of winter. Animal sacrifice is generally a joyous occasion. The Holy Temple in Jerusalem, on Festival days, presented an awesome sight as the blood of thousands of kine ran through its stone channels and conduits.
Ambedkar invokes Garbiel Tarde but, blinded by his suspicion and resentment of the Brahmins, he comes up with a conspiracy theory for Brahmin vegetarianism.
Tarde's Laws of imitation, as is increasingly becoming clear from the work of Latour, Deleuze and Actor network Theory, have far greater explanatory and prescriptive power than Dr. Ambedkar allows in his polemical work.
The truth is simpler.
Buddhism was the religion par excellence of mega-power, mega-money, mega-magic and of course, karma-as-caste.
Vegetarianism, Poverty, and Stupidity were and are the best defense against Buddhism. Live well, spend money with a free hand, speak in a cultured fashion and what is the upshot? Various shady monks and nuns will start turning up at your door pretending to be terribly humble while also claiming incredible magical powers.
As Ambedkar notices, everybody in India is untouchable to everybody else. Why? Because a stupid Religion came along saying 'the World is a vale of tears' and everybody has to become a monk, in not in this life, then the next life, because otherwise everybody will burn in Hell.
When Emperor's decide to adopt this sort of crazy and fraudulent Religion, Tarde's Law of Imitation comes into play. Everybody should act like an untouchable to everybody else because the 'fountain of Honor' has been poisoned at source. Social mimesis is now a fool's game. Everyone needs to go into quarantine.
Ambedkar, of course, became a Buddhist and is now a Boddhisattva. That's one up on being a Mahatma. So Gabriel Tarde was right. There is something in Society which corresponds to his Law of imitation. But, Gresham discovered it first- bad money drives out good.
Saturday, 7 April 2012
Gandhi vs Ambedkar.
' But in their one-upmanship battle as to who could speak for Depressed Classes with authority, Ambedkar held the trump card for he himself was an Untouchable. Gandhi admitted that he had at first taken Ambedkar to be a Brahmin obsessed with helping the Untouchables. It was not until their clash in London that Gandhi realized that Ambedkar was an Untouchable—which says much about Gandhi’s stereotype of Untouchables as the “dumb millions” that he and Congress maintained they represented (Writings 2:660).'
All quotations are from Harold Coward 'Indian critiques of Gandhi'
Gandhi and Ambedkar had previously co-operated because they had completely misunderstood each other. Ambedkar thought Gandhi was a good man who wanted to remove Untouchability because, more than a crime, it was a piece of National folly. Gandhi approved of Ambedkar because he thought the young chap was a Maharashtrian Brahmin. (Ambedkar's school teacher had given his young prodigy of a pupil his own surname as a mark of distinction)- probably Chitpavan and hence Manly. But Gandhi believed he was more Truly Manly than everybody else so he naturally got riled when Ambedkar started talking law and ethics and so on for no good reason other than the uplifting of the oppressed classes. How dare this young fellow wag his tail like this? What for this Brahmin is getting so heated over some damn untouchables? Just showing off his machismo isn't it? So Gandhi had to cut the fellow down to size.
Anyway, turned out the chap wasn't a Brahmin at all but a pariah of some sort- like that Sri Narayana Guru down Vaikom way. Just because these chaps know Sanskrit or have PhD from Columbia or LSE or whatever, they forget their karma caused them to be the 'younger brothers' of us caste Hindus. Anyway, now I've invented a new name for the achooths. Let them be called Harijan. Since it is a name I have coined and I am the only one who understands Bhagvad Gita, though I don't know Sanskrit and Mimamsa and all that rot, still it is clear that I am the voice of Hari and thus they are my children and must listen to me and buy my worthless magazine which I have called 'Harijan'.
Since Ambedkar won't call himself a Harijan he can't represent them. They are my monopoly. Let Ambedkar whine to his heart's content that I am paying High Caste lawyers to sit around doing nothing out of funds ostensibly collected for the up-liftment of his caste-fellows. This is how the world works. Why do people call me anti-modern and medieval in my thinking? What could be more modern and avant la lettre than the Gandhian prior to the current epidemic of holier-than-thou Anti Poverty parasites and plague of Eco-Feminists?
The British at this time, or a little earlier, had granted full universal suffrage with strong minority protection to Sri Lanka, thanks to Sidney Webb. They gave limited franchise with separate electorates for Muslims, Sikhs and Untouchables to India. Had Gandhi let this stand, then Muslim fears, especially in the United Provinces, would have been allayed. The road to Partition would have been closed. Why? The numerical preponderance of the Hindus would have ceased to be a cause of anxiety.
The British were right. Minorities need to be protected. It was only when Sri Lanka jettisoned those constitutional protections that it became prey to the evils of civil war and insurrectionary politics. Gandhi, however, only had importance as a bridge between communities at daggers drawn with each other. His stock in trade was
1) to champion Hindu-Muslim unity while doing everything in his power to put the two creeds at loggerheads thus making himself an 'obligatory passage point'.
2) to take money from the Mill owners while pretending to protect the handloom weavers from competition with the machine by generously supplying them with hand-spun cotton yarn- though what his acolytes produced was not fit for purpose.
3) to be a sort of High Caste Pundit, though completely ignorant (his defeat at the hands of the Vaikom Pundits was a foregone conclusion. The man knew no Sanskrit, no Nyaya, no Mimamsa and had zero common-sense) on the basis of a fraudulent service to the Hindu Religion by keeping the Untouchables within the fold and in a submissive posture.
The Poona pact with Ambedkar, on the face of it, looks generous- it doubled representation for the oppressed class but, since members were returned on the general ballot, it meant Congress Uncle Toms would capture those seats and thus the Muslim League's position had become more rather than less precarious. This fact was underlined by Congress failing to pass Untouchability Abolition Acts when they could easily have done so. Ambedkar, now known to be an 'achooth' himself, soon saw through 'Gandhi-giri' but here too, as with Khilafat, Gandhi had managed to turn Untouchability into a weapon to destroy Hindu Muslim Unity. The Harijan Sevak Sangh, dominated by High Caste fuckwits, wanted to turn the 'bhangi' (night soil carrier) into a vegetarian, teetotaller, so as to make his service that much more pleasing and hygienic to his patrons. This was Congress's plan for the 'Untouchables', towards whom they claimed to feel great penitence. What did they have in mind for the meat-eating Muslims towards whom they felt not penitence but rancour? No doubt, there was some dangerous or dirty job these Banias and Brahmins already have in mind for us but why wait for Bania Raj to find out what that might be?
There was an easy way to destroy the caste system- embrace meat eating, wine drinking and grant legitimacy to children of pratiloma or other types of Union. The Japanese abolished the ban on the flesh of four legged animals, including cows, and equalized the position of merchants and samurai. Hedonism worked as a great leveller. So did conscription. Gandhian austerity operated in a manner precisely the reverse. It was a Bania hypocrisy, ignorance and stupidity writ large, nothing more.
“One born a scavenger must earn his livelihood by being a scavenger, and then do whatever else he likes. For a scavenger is as worthy of his hire as a lawyer or your President.”
But, this was precisely the argument of the Vaikom pundits who had defeated Gandhi in debate ten years previously. They had been born as upholders of Untouchability. That is how they earned their livelihood. They and others like them had put up a Case, decided in their favour, to the High Court by which the road to the temple was declared a private, rather than public thoroughfare and thus exempt from an older law. Why did they do this? It was a hereditary duty incumbent upon them by reason of their livelihood. In private life they might drink with or have sexual relations with people of the oppressed class but that was a different matter. Now, if threatened with a beating or a fine, it would be perfectly proper for them to desist from discrimination because that duty was defeasible by reason of exigent circumstances. In other words, it was a duty which only became binding if it could be carried out with perfect safety from harm or opprobrium.
When Rajaji was seeking to implement Temple Entry, he found that the Priests wanted Legislation to enforce it because otherwise they faced costly court cases for delinquency to duty. If Gandhi was ignorant of this aspect of the matter- and Gandhi was a deeply ignorant man- he nevertheless does not escape censure. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, at least for a lawyer. Ignorance of Indian conditions is no excuse if you claim to lead the Indian people.
I once read somewhere that Sankaracharya taught cows to chant the Vedas as a way to rebuke the arrogance of the ritualists. What about Gandhi?
'When Ambedkar indicated that he and the Untouchables should find another religion and leave the Hindu fold, Gandhi was shocked to see Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs vying with each other to convert untouchables. In a conversation with the Christian leader John Mott, Gandhi said that such activities hurt him and were an ugly travesty of religion (CW 64:35). Aside from it being an unseemly competition, said Mott, should Christians not preach the gospel to Untouchables who were thinking of leaving Hinduism? Gandhi’s response did not endear him to the Untouchables: “Would you preach the gospel to a cow? Well, some of the untouchables are worse than cows in understanding . . . they can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow” (CW 64:37)
Gandhi's greatest victory- perhaps his only one-against the forces of reform came towards the end of his life when he persuaded Congress to give Ambedkar a Ministerial berth. According to Gandhian thinking, Ambedkar would be utterly annihilated as a rational and moral being, the moment he planted his bottom on a Ministerial 'kursi'. But Gandhi miscalculated. Ambedkar had aptness, not appetency, for high office. If his only service was as a draughtsman of the Constitution, he would still stand head and shoulders above all his contemporaries. However, yet greater heights remained for him to scale. History will remember him as a Boddhisattva.
All quotations are from Harold Coward 'Indian critiques of Gandhi'
Gandhi and Ambedkar had previously co-operated because they had completely misunderstood each other. Ambedkar thought Gandhi was a good man who wanted to remove Untouchability because, more than a crime, it was a piece of National folly. Gandhi approved of Ambedkar because he thought the young chap was a Maharashtrian Brahmin. (Ambedkar's school teacher had given his young prodigy of a pupil his own surname as a mark of distinction)- probably Chitpavan and hence Manly. But Gandhi believed he was more Truly Manly than everybody else so he naturally got riled when Ambedkar started talking law and ethics and so on for no good reason other than the uplifting of the oppressed classes. How dare this young fellow wag his tail like this? What for this Brahmin is getting so heated over some damn untouchables? Just showing off his machismo isn't it? So Gandhi had to cut the fellow down to size.
Anyway, turned out the chap wasn't a Brahmin at all but a pariah of some sort- like that Sri Narayana Guru down Vaikom way. Just because these chaps know Sanskrit or have PhD from Columbia or LSE or whatever, they forget their karma caused them to be the 'younger brothers' of us caste Hindus. Anyway, now I've invented a new name for the achooths. Let them be called Harijan. Since it is a name I have coined and I am the only one who understands Bhagvad Gita, though I don't know Sanskrit and Mimamsa and all that rot, still it is clear that I am the voice of Hari and thus they are my children and must listen to me and buy my worthless magazine which I have called 'Harijan'.
Since Ambedkar won't call himself a Harijan he can't represent them. They are my monopoly. Let Ambedkar whine to his heart's content that I am paying High Caste lawyers to sit around doing nothing out of funds ostensibly collected for the up-liftment of his caste-fellows. This is how the world works. Why do people call me anti-modern and medieval in my thinking? What could be more modern and avant la lettre than the Gandhian prior to the current epidemic of holier-than-thou Anti Poverty parasites and plague of Eco-Feminists?
The British at this time, or a little earlier, had granted full universal suffrage with strong minority protection to Sri Lanka, thanks to Sidney Webb. They gave limited franchise with separate electorates for Muslims, Sikhs and Untouchables to India. Had Gandhi let this stand, then Muslim fears, especially in the United Provinces, would have been allayed. The road to Partition would have been closed. Why? The numerical preponderance of the Hindus would have ceased to be a cause of anxiety.
The British were right. Minorities need to be protected. It was only when Sri Lanka jettisoned those constitutional protections that it became prey to the evils of civil war and insurrectionary politics. Gandhi, however, only had importance as a bridge between communities at daggers drawn with each other. His stock in trade was
1) to champion Hindu-Muslim unity while doing everything in his power to put the two creeds at loggerheads thus making himself an 'obligatory passage point'.
2) to take money from the Mill owners while pretending to protect the handloom weavers from competition with the machine by generously supplying them with hand-spun cotton yarn- though what his acolytes produced was not fit for purpose.
3) to be a sort of High Caste Pundit, though completely ignorant (his defeat at the hands of the Vaikom Pundits was a foregone conclusion. The man knew no Sanskrit, no Nyaya, no Mimamsa and had zero common-sense) on the basis of a fraudulent service to the Hindu Religion by keeping the Untouchables within the fold and in a submissive posture.
The Poona pact with Ambedkar, on the face of it, looks generous- it doubled representation for the oppressed class but, since members were returned on the general ballot, it meant Congress Uncle Toms would capture those seats and thus the Muslim League's position had become more rather than less precarious. This fact was underlined by Congress failing to pass Untouchability Abolition Acts when they could easily have done so. Ambedkar, now known to be an 'achooth' himself, soon saw through 'Gandhi-giri' but here too, as with Khilafat, Gandhi had managed to turn Untouchability into a weapon to destroy Hindu Muslim Unity. The Harijan Sevak Sangh, dominated by High Caste fuckwits, wanted to turn the 'bhangi' (night soil carrier) into a vegetarian, teetotaller, so as to make his service that much more pleasing and hygienic to his patrons. This was Congress's plan for the 'Untouchables', towards whom they claimed to feel great penitence. What did they have in mind for the meat-eating Muslims towards whom they felt not penitence but rancour? No doubt, there was some dangerous or dirty job these Banias and Brahmins already have in mind for us but why wait for Bania Raj to find out what that might be?
There was an easy way to destroy the caste system- embrace meat eating, wine drinking and grant legitimacy to children of pratiloma or other types of Union. The Japanese abolished the ban on the flesh of four legged animals, including cows, and equalized the position of merchants and samurai. Hedonism worked as a great leveller. So did conscription. Gandhian austerity operated in a manner precisely the reverse. It was a Bania hypocrisy, ignorance and stupidity writ large, nothing more.
“One born a scavenger must earn his livelihood by being a scavenger, and then do whatever else he likes. For a scavenger is as worthy of his hire as a lawyer or your President.”
But, this was precisely the argument of the Vaikom pundits who had defeated Gandhi in debate ten years previously. They had been born as upholders of Untouchability. That is how they earned their livelihood. They and others like them had put up a Case, decided in their favour, to the High Court by which the road to the temple was declared a private, rather than public thoroughfare and thus exempt from an older law. Why did they do this? It was a hereditary duty incumbent upon them by reason of their livelihood. In private life they might drink with or have sexual relations with people of the oppressed class but that was a different matter. Now, if threatened with a beating or a fine, it would be perfectly proper for them to desist from discrimination because that duty was defeasible by reason of exigent circumstances. In other words, it was a duty which only became binding if it could be carried out with perfect safety from harm or opprobrium.
When Rajaji was seeking to implement Temple Entry, he found that the Priests wanted Legislation to enforce it because otherwise they faced costly court cases for delinquency to duty. If Gandhi was ignorant of this aspect of the matter- and Gandhi was a deeply ignorant man- he nevertheless does not escape censure. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, at least for a lawyer. Ignorance of Indian conditions is no excuse if you claim to lead the Indian people.
I once read somewhere that Sankaracharya taught cows to chant the Vedas as a way to rebuke the arrogance of the ritualists. What about Gandhi?
'When Ambedkar indicated that he and the Untouchables should find another religion and leave the Hindu fold, Gandhi was shocked to see Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs vying with each other to convert untouchables. In a conversation with the Christian leader John Mott, Gandhi said that such activities hurt him and were an ugly travesty of religion (CW 64:35). Aside from it being an unseemly competition, said Mott, should Christians not preach the gospel to Untouchables who were thinking of leaving Hinduism? Gandhi’s response did not endear him to the Untouchables: “Would you preach the gospel to a cow? Well, some of the untouchables are worse than cows in understanding . . . they can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow” (CW 64:37)
Gandhi's greatest victory- perhaps his only one-against the forces of reform came towards the end of his life when he persuaded Congress to give Ambedkar a Ministerial berth. According to Gandhian thinking, Ambedkar would be utterly annihilated as a rational and moral being, the moment he planted his bottom on a Ministerial 'kursi'. But Gandhi miscalculated. Ambedkar had aptness, not appetency, for high office. If his only service was as a draughtsman of the Constitution, he would still stand head and shoulders above all his contemporaries. However, yet greater heights remained for him to scale. History will remember him as a Boddhisattva.
Monday, 1 November 2010
Guha and the thinkers and makers of modern India.
Ramachandra Guha's book on 19 'thinkers and makers of modern India' is out and seems to have been well received.
I find it puzzling. I'd have thought, the people whose ideas and actions might still be relevant to modern India would have been those possessed of superior rationally and maturity and independence of character rather than mere publicity mongers who abandoned even such see-through intellectual garments as Indian modesty requires, in their headlong rush to jump on every bandwagon or head up any passing mob.
Prior to Independence none of the people mentioned in this book had much power and, perhaps for that very reason, little motive or leisure to think rather than simply strike attitudes. Since the British were brokers of both Power and Knowledge rather than hegemonic monopolists of both- though India could boast its exiles, it was not the case that its exiles competed at the level of pure thought and analysis.
Keynes, in his book on Indian monetary policy, drew attention to a special sort of narrowness that arises from having knowledge only of India and England, that too only at the level of leader-writer Punditry. It is noteworthy that already, at that point in time, there were Indians with a larger vision- however, their failure to synthesize an intelligentsia with a wider horizon than that of the hacks and windbags the British had insisted on engendering meant that Thought, as a shaping force, remained a dead letter- though no doubt it might ricochet unpredictably at rarefied levels of policy framing (a necessary and sufficient qualification for participation in which, the British considered, was an impartial Mandarin ignorance of both empirical conditions in the market and the manner in which public institutions actually implemented policy).
This is not to say there was no dialogue between specialists in different fields. On the contrary, there was a sort of lowest common denominator dialogue such that the Scientist might abruptly claim that the latest radio-carbon results prove that the Vedas were written before the formation of the mountains, or a former President of India, an old Socialist, suddenly start quoting some Ananda Margi nutjob, an Econ Lecturer at some Mid West Community College, who predicted that the Western Economy would collapse in 1990 or something equally silly.
Of course, the President in question had already seen to it that his own children were all 'well-settled' in the U.S and thus his satisfaction in contemplating the downfall of the West was of a purely Philosophical sort.
Yet, India has had thinkers and shapers. Our administrators and lawyers, even journalists and historians were, if anything, a cut above what one might expect in such a poor country. Who were they? Well, for a lot of 'Indglish' speakers they were Mummy and Daddy and Uncle and Aunty and Granny and Grandad and so on.
But- in so far as they thought and acted in a manner promoting the commonweal- were they not mere imitators of the British, Macaulay's Babu class?
To answer this question, we might begin by asking the question- what features does India have which do not flow, in a purely mechanical faction, from the fact that it was ruled by the British and that it's intelligentsia had some exposure to thoughts expressed in the English language?
What institutions, or adaptions of institutions, make independent India different, rather than inferior merely, to the probable trajectory it would otherwise have taken?
Well, we might start off with concepts and programs unique to India- Ahimsa (ghastly failure), khaddar (a bad joke), Panchsheel (hilarious till the Chinese bloodied our nose), Swadesi (apparently some Burmese nutjob actually implemented this as 'Buddhist Economics', greatly to Schumacher's delight, thus setting back his country by 80 years), Sampoorna kranti (which meant replacing Indira Gandhi with Raj Narain!) and, of course, the grandest success of them all- viz. Bhoodan which culminated in Bihardhan- i.e. the redistribution of land by the voluntary action and consent of the land-lords which resulted in the whole state of Bihar (or at least 97%) being donated to ....urm dunno...but it was what Vinobha Bhave wanted and he had vowed not to leave Bihar till it happened and then it happened and so he finally did leave Bihar and...urm...that really shaped modern India and represented like truly visionary thinking because everybody else thought it was impossible BUT only the Indians actually tried it and thus PROVED ...that they can't think or shape events worth shit.
What of Women and doing away with feudalism and stuff like that? The China got rid of 'foot-binding' in half a generation, India completely did away with things like child-marriage and ban on svagotra marriage and the tyranny of khap panchayats and so on way back in ...urm, except we didn't at all.
The Koreans get rid of untouchability and caste and land-lordism and poor hygiene in the villages and so on- all in the space of what? ten years? fifteen years? In India, Ambedkar converts to Buddhism, though he knew it was the most successful exporter of the concept of Untouchability in history, and... well... urm... the good news is that not only will the Caste system be constitutionally preserved but everybody wants to be classed as 'backwards' if not outright retarded..
True, every nation has a bunch of wind-bags gassing on about democracy and 'wimmin's' rights and so on. But, not every nation has had democracy for over 60 years with more or less Left wing Govts in power both at the Center and the States. The inescapable conclusion we must draw is that either
a) thinkers and shapers of the sort Guha celebrates had shit-for-brains and zero practical ability
b) thousands of Indians have shown an unexampled genius as thinkers and shapers in ensuring that the thoughts and schemes of the wind-bag do-goodniks ended up frustrating their own ends.
I suppose another possibility exists- viz. Guha's brand of caramel centered historiography is an exercise in meaningless pi-jaw of a sort that we, at this time of crisis when the clash of civilizations of the environmental greenhouse gasses of the collapse of the global capitalist system and like I'm sure those fucking Germans will soon go all Nazi and start invading Poland again and like check out that Narendra Modi dude- what if his beard reaches Ayatollah proportions?- and isn't Arundhati Roy silly because in these illiberal times I will defend to the death something or the other and free speech and human rights and like that old song of Amitabh Kumar says 'Hum ko pyaar chahiye'- 'All I wants is Love' and, guess what, I'm doing another fucking big book on guess who- yup, Gandhi- coz that always sells.
But what was original in Gandhi? Hunger strikes? That was borrowed from the Suffragettes and it had already failed. Non-Cooperation, Rent strikes and so on. The Irish had been there, done that and, on balance, won their historic struggle albeit by an own goal. Yes, I suppose Gandhi was doing something novel in supporting Khilafat. But it was novel because it was silly.
More broadly, if we leave aside programs initiated or catalyzed by the British- including ex-I.C.S liberals like Hulme, Wedderburn and Cotton and so on- what are we left with?
Guha includes Jinnah perhaps because his 'hostage-theory' (whereby Indians won't kill Muslims for fear Pakistanis might retaliate against Hindus) was as hilarious and purely Indian as Gandhi's hunger strikes. But both refer to an absence of thought and were destructive rather than constructive of the inheritance from the Raj.
It is a great criticism of Guha's book that he does not mention truly great men and original thinkers like Tanguturi Prakasam who, as C.M of Madras Presidency, proposed the destruction of the textile mills so that they might be replaced by Khaddar. This led to clashes with the Communists whom he locked up- surely the only occasion when that was the wrong thing to do.
Thinkers and Shapers? I praise the wreckers and the mindless bribe-takers. It is they who, between them, have kept India going and salvaged for it such relicts of modernity as the Raj bequeathed it.
The odd thing is that there are plenty of good writers and policy-makers- Judges, Doctors, Engineers, School Inspectors and so on- who weren't the sort of futile numskulls Guha lists. What they tended to avoid was single valued solutions to complex socio-economic problems. In Economics, we have Tinbergen's rule- the number of policy instruments must equal the number of policy objectives. Any ideologue who thinks otherwise- for e.g that women's education /micro-finance or whatever is a panacea- is either a careerist or a nutjob or both.
Guha is looking for non-Marxists nutjobs because there is some other Guha who has cornered the market in talking up Marxist nutjobs.
Yet Guha is taken seriously.
Why?
I find it puzzling. I'd have thought, the people whose ideas and actions might still be relevant to modern India would have been those possessed of superior rationally and maturity and independence of character rather than mere publicity mongers who abandoned even such see-through intellectual garments as Indian modesty requires, in their headlong rush to jump on every bandwagon or head up any passing mob.
Prior to Independence none of the people mentioned in this book had much power and, perhaps for that very reason, little motive or leisure to think rather than simply strike attitudes. Since the British were brokers of both Power and Knowledge rather than hegemonic monopolists of both- though India could boast its exiles, it was not the case that its exiles competed at the level of pure thought and analysis.
Keynes, in his book on Indian monetary policy, drew attention to a special sort of narrowness that arises from having knowledge only of India and England, that too only at the level of leader-writer Punditry. It is noteworthy that already, at that point in time, there were Indians with a larger vision- however, their failure to synthesize an intelligentsia with a wider horizon than that of the hacks and windbags the British had insisted on engendering meant that Thought, as a shaping force, remained a dead letter- though no doubt it might ricochet unpredictably at rarefied levels of policy framing (a necessary and sufficient qualification for participation in which, the British considered, was an impartial Mandarin ignorance of both empirical conditions in the market and the manner in which public institutions actually implemented policy).
This is not to say there was no dialogue between specialists in different fields. On the contrary, there was a sort of lowest common denominator dialogue such that the Scientist might abruptly claim that the latest radio-carbon results prove that the Vedas were written before the formation of the mountains, or a former President of India, an old Socialist, suddenly start quoting some Ananda Margi nutjob, an Econ Lecturer at some Mid West Community College, who predicted that the Western Economy would collapse in 1990 or something equally silly.
Of course, the President in question had already seen to it that his own children were all 'well-settled' in the U.S and thus his satisfaction in contemplating the downfall of the West was of a purely Philosophical sort.
Yet, India has had thinkers and shapers. Our administrators and lawyers, even journalists and historians were, if anything, a cut above what one might expect in such a poor country. Who were they? Well, for a lot of 'Indglish' speakers they were Mummy and Daddy and Uncle and Aunty and Granny and Grandad and so on.
But- in so far as they thought and acted in a manner promoting the commonweal- were they not mere imitators of the British, Macaulay's Babu class?
To answer this question, we might begin by asking the question- what features does India have which do not flow, in a purely mechanical faction, from the fact that it was ruled by the British and that it's intelligentsia had some exposure to thoughts expressed in the English language?
What institutions, or adaptions of institutions, make independent India different, rather than inferior merely, to the probable trajectory it would otherwise have taken?
Well, we might start off with concepts and programs unique to India- Ahimsa (ghastly failure), khaddar (a bad joke), Panchsheel (hilarious till the Chinese bloodied our nose), Swadesi (apparently some Burmese nutjob actually implemented this as 'Buddhist Economics', greatly to Schumacher's delight, thus setting back his country by 80 years), Sampoorna kranti (which meant replacing Indira Gandhi with Raj Narain!) and, of course, the grandest success of them all- viz. Bhoodan which culminated in Bihardhan- i.e. the redistribution of land by the voluntary action and consent of the land-lords which resulted in the whole state of Bihar (or at least 97%) being donated to ....urm dunno...but it was what Vinobha Bhave wanted and he had vowed not to leave Bihar till it happened and then it happened and so he finally did leave Bihar and...urm...that really shaped modern India and represented like truly visionary thinking because everybody else thought it was impossible BUT only the Indians actually tried it and thus PROVED ...that they can't think or shape events worth shit.
What of Women and doing away with feudalism and stuff like that? The China got rid of 'foot-binding' in half a generation, India completely did away with things like child-marriage and ban on svagotra marriage and the tyranny of khap panchayats and so on way back in ...urm, except we didn't at all.
The Koreans get rid of untouchability and caste and land-lordism and poor hygiene in the villages and so on- all in the space of what? ten years? fifteen years? In India, Ambedkar converts to Buddhism, though he knew it was the most successful exporter of the concept of Untouchability in history, and... well... urm... the good news is that not only will the Caste system be constitutionally preserved but everybody wants to be classed as 'backwards' if not outright retarded..
True, every nation has a bunch of wind-bags gassing on about democracy and 'wimmin's' rights and so on. But, not every nation has had democracy for over 60 years with more or less Left wing Govts in power both at the Center and the States. The inescapable conclusion we must draw is that either
a) thinkers and shapers of the sort Guha celebrates had shit-for-brains and zero practical ability
b) thousands of Indians have shown an unexampled genius as thinkers and shapers in ensuring that the thoughts and schemes of the wind-bag do-goodniks ended up frustrating their own ends.
I suppose another possibility exists- viz. Guha's brand of caramel centered historiography is an exercise in meaningless pi-jaw of a sort that we, at this time of crisis when the clash of civilizations of the environmental greenhouse gasses of the collapse of the global capitalist system and like I'm sure those fucking Germans will soon go all Nazi and start invading Poland again and like check out that Narendra Modi dude- what if his beard reaches Ayatollah proportions?- and isn't Arundhati Roy silly because in these illiberal times I will defend to the death something or the other and free speech and human rights and like that old song of Amitabh Kumar says 'Hum ko pyaar chahiye'- 'All I wants is Love' and, guess what, I'm doing another fucking big book on guess who- yup, Gandhi- coz that always sells.
But what was original in Gandhi? Hunger strikes? That was borrowed from the Suffragettes and it had already failed. Non-Cooperation, Rent strikes and so on. The Irish had been there, done that and, on balance, won their historic struggle albeit by an own goal. Yes, I suppose Gandhi was doing something novel in supporting Khilafat. But it was novel because it was silly.
More broadly, if we leave aside programs initiated or catalyzed by the British- including ex-I.C.S liberals like Hulme, Wedderburn and Cotton and so on- what are we left with?
Guha includes Jinnah perhaps because his 'hostage-theory' (whereby Indians won't kill Muslims for fear Pakistanis might retaliate against Hindus) was as hilarious and purely Indian as Gandhi's hunger strikes. But both refer to an absence of thought and were destructive rather than constructive of the inheritance from the Raj.
It is a great criticism of Guha's book that he does not mention truly great men and original thinkers like Tanguturi Prakasam who, as C.M of Madras Presidency, proposed the destruction of the textile mills so that they might be replaced by Khaddar. This led to clashes with the Communists whom he locked up- surely the only occasion when that was the wrong thing to do.
Thinkers and Shapers? I praise the wreckers and the mindless bribe-takers. It is they who, between them, have kept India going and salvaged for it such relicts of modernity as the Raj bequeathed it.
The odd thing is that there are plenty of good writers and policy-makers- Judges, Doctors, Engineers, School Inspectors and so on- who weren't the sort of futile numskulls Guha lists. What they tended to avoid was single valued solutions to complex socio-economic problems. In Economics, we have Tinbergen's rule- the number of policy instruments must equal the number of policy objectives. Any ideologue who thinks otherwise- for e.g that women's education /micro-finance or whatever is a panacea- is either a careerist or a nutjob or both.
Guha is looking for non-Marxists nutjobs because there is some other Guha who has cornered the market in talking up Marxist nutjobs.
Yet Guha is taken seriously.
Why?
Stephen Batchelor and the true message of the Buddha.
Stephen Batchelor, in his latest book on Buddhism writes, that Buddha's teachings “seem more to encourage a creation of a self than a renunciation of a self, rather than present the self as a fiction, Gotama presented it as a project to be realised – the functional, moral self that breathes and acts in the world…This is a useful way of looking at the self for a lay Buddhist person who works in the world than a renunciation model.”
I feel the distinguished writer has not gone far enough. Speaking as Buddhist monk and layman of over eighty seconds standing, I feel the true message of Buddhism involves not the renunciation or creation of a self but its self-projection, along a virtual dimension, such that could you please pick up my dry-cleaning while simultaneously positing a critique of social relations with that fuckwit neighbor of mine whose car alarm keeps going off, not in a purely epistemological sense but within the parameters of a truly democratic dialogic concerned with your remembering to pick up my dry-cleaning- like it wasn't you spilled Thai lemon grass soup on my tux- you fucking retard.'
I personally honor Dr. Ambedkar most for converting to Buddhism because of the extraordinary success it achieved in exporting the concept and practice of untouchability to far off countries like Korea and Japan. The boxer, Cassius Clay who converted to Islam with the name Muhammad Ali- perhaps as a thank you to the Saudi and Omanis for finally getting round to abolishing slavery at around the same time- is my other great hero.
I look forward to Arundhati Roy's next book- hailing Max Hardcore as the greatest Feminist of all time and protesting his incarceration for obscenity.
This is the true message of Buddhism. Only real smart people got utter shit for brains.
I feel the distinguished writer has not gone far enough. Speaking as Buddhist monk and layman of over eighty seconds standing, I feel the true message of Buddhism involves not the renunciation or creation of a self but its self-projection, along a virtual dimension, such that could you please pick up my dry-cleaning while simultaneously positing a critique of social relations with that fuckwit neighbor of mine whose car alarm keeps going off, not in a purely epistemological sense but within the parameters of a truly democratic dialogic concerned with your remembering to pick up my dry-cleaning- like it wasn't you spilled Thai lemon grass soup on my tux- you fucking retard.'
I personally honor Dr. Ambedkar most for converting to Buddhism because of the extraordinary success it achieved in exporting the concept and practice of untouchability to far off countries like Korea and Japan. The boxer, Cassius Clay who converted to Islam with the name Muhammad Ali- perhaps as a thank you to the Saudi and Omanis for finally getting round to abolishing slavery at around the same time- is my other great hero.
I look forward to Arundhati Roy's next book- hailing Max Hardcore as the greatest Feminist of all time and protesting his incarceration for obscenity.
This is the true message of Buddhism. Only real smart people got utter shit for brains.
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
English is now a Godess- amongst 'Untouchables' in India.
Finally, Indglish is coming of age!
We have our own Goddess now- courtesy of some activist Dalits (who were formerly called 'untouchables' by heaped piles of feces having the deceptive form of human beings) who are building a temple of black granite for 'Goddess English' in Uttar Pradesh. It is noteworthy that Lord Macaulay- whom Ivy League Post Colonial Magi and Subaltern Studies Shamen have been denigrating all these long years- is the object of gratitude, not calumny, by those for whom the elite has claimed to speak, thus securing themselves a place at the top table.
The fact is that, over the last forty years, official Hindi and Urdu have become- with all due respect to none whomsoever, except maybe Lenin Prize Winner, Abdullah Hussein who switched from Urdu to English- great steaming piles of shite.
Let the so called 'Forward Castes' carry this load of night-soil on their heads for a change!
I'm not saying Hindi is not Soteriologically superior when it comes from the heart and deals with true experience. I am not saying Urdu is 'un-natural' or not equal, if not better, than Englsih as a window etymologically opening on ancient, Socially Liberative, Greek and Hebrew thought.
What I am saying is these dialects of officilaese- or meretricious advertising for a type of feudalistic consumerism- have become tools of elite oppression and suppression.
Why?
Because of the Bureaucrato-Academic Censoring and foreclosure of their range of expression
By God- or rather by this new Goddess!- I am now officially an anchorite of Ambedkar's Hindutva.
Sarasvati Devi- as our new Goddess English- be propitious to me.
No! Slay me, your unworthy votary!
But, let my country grow strong.
Monday, 26 July 2010
Ramachandra Guha on the demise of the bilingual intellectual
Last year Ramachandra Guha rehashed an essay on the demise of the bilingual intellectual in India.
Guha does not claim to be, properly speaking, bilingual and thus his essay throws no direct light on his own mysterious intellectual demise many years ago.
Guha spends some time quoting the always hilarious Mahatma who thought Raja Rajmohan Roy would have been a better intellectual if he hadn't known English! Guha does not mention that Gandhi was not, and never claimed to be, an intellectual- you see, Gandhi had studied English and thus, by his own argument, was fucked in the head- as his public career amply demonstrated. However, Gandhi did not claim to be an intellectual. He thought God talked to him coz like he'd given up sex and was sleeping with his nieces to correct their sleeping posture and that made him a 'Mahatma' rather than a 'Maha pervert.'
Tagore, whom Guha quotes as an example of an bilingual intellectual, was an artist and hereditary Guru not a thinker and certainly nothing so declasse as an 'intellectual'.
Ranade, Gokhale and the Servants of India could have developed into public intellectuals doing research on economics and sociology and so on but their heart wasn't really in it. They just wanted those insufferable Goras to fuck off back to Blighty and if Gandhian voodoo or Khilafat voodoo or the German submarines or the Jap bombers or whatever secured that goal then they too were quite happy to drop the intellectual pose.
Ambedkar had first class intellectual credentials but his was a lone voice. Well there were plenty of others like him but what to do? India is like that only- no?
Guha goes on about Rajaji- again NOT an intellectual- NOT an expert on Hindu Mimamsa or even Jurisprudence come to that- NOT an economist, not an I.R guy- and why is Rajaji relevant? Well he wrote books for kids which his daughter or grand-daughter or somebody translated into Hindi which is important because...urm... well, like Rajaji wrote it in simple Telugu or Tamil or something and it was translated into simple English and.... urm... well that's intellectual right? Menaka Gandhi wrote an encyclopedia of children's names- so she's an intellectual. Jade Goody wrote an autobiography- so she's an intellectual coz people who write books are intellectuals- that's the test, right? Y'know, like Jeffery Archer and ... urm P.G Woodhouse and like some other guy was a librarian or something and this other poor bastard had the misfortune to earn his bread as a Prof. of Eng Lit and so, like, he must have been an intellectual right? And Ram Manohar Lohia had a German PhD- like that's a recommendation!- and so the fact that what he liked doing was camping in some rural backwater where he could kid himself that the people he was meeting were more mentally slothful and deluded than himself- he was definitely an intellectual, right?
Guha thinks J.P Narayan- who sold hair straightener to Negroes to get his Wobbly American Socialist credentials- was smart, well, the fucker did impress Arthur Koestler thus proving he was fucked in the head long before the full unfolding of his sheer silliness could work its full complement of mischief on the Indian polity.
Intellectuals gotta use their fucking intellect! And when they find out they are wrong they got to use their intellect some more to find out why they were wrong. If they get to communicate this to a wider public- then they're public intellectuals, rather than Media whores.
Nobody Guha mentions used their intellect to this effect or to this end. Their strong suit was their passionate commitment to some holier than thou pi jaw shite, or doctrinaire lets-kill-everybody shite. Well that's not entirely true. There is also the provincial navel gazer who becomes a visiting professor in America and whose writing is defensive rather than crepuscular, if not straight forwardly of the Emperor's new clothes variety.
Guha doesn't mention Acharya Kosambi- coz he was like RElIGIOUS? And that's not intellectual at all. The Marxist Kosambi also doesn't get a mention coz... urm... well he actually discovered something in Maths or Stats or something so he's like TECHNICAL guy & not an intellectual. As for critics like Prof. S.R Faruqi or the numberless poets who write in two or more languages- urm well they're like LITERATURE guys and that's not intellectual right?
Jagdish Chandra Bose? Scientist. Doesn't count if a scientist publishes in English and then writes novels, essays or whatever in one or more Indian language coz like SCIENCE guys aint intellectuals right?
Subramaniyam Swamy? Intelligent, thus the very reverse of 'intellectual'. Indeed, not loving any Indian language well enough to also write in it, is a necessary though not sufficient condition for the sheer silliness that only our 'public intellectuals' preen themselves on.
In one respect Guha has a point- imagine Gayatri Spivak or Amartya Sen writing their shite in Bengali- would Spivak get away with saying 'India is named after Rama's younger brother' (Critique of Post Colonial Reason) or Sen get away with his specious nyaya/niti distinction or his silliness about the Bhagvad Gita? Well actually, in Bengali, maybe they would get away with it. (Contra Guha, under the Commies, if any Indian language can now be called 'subaltern' it is not Malyalam or Kannada or Tamil but Bengali). Perhaps, if Sen had been writing in Bengali, he wouldn't have gone off on the wrong track. Spivak, on the other hand, was always beyond redemption.
Guha mentions a lot of people who have written books and who occupy academic positions. They're intellectuals surely? No. What isn't belles lettres is just the working of Gresham's Law as applied to publishing whereby the blurb- 'the author graduated from X and held such and such senior position or won such and such Literary consolation prize for being a benighted darkie.'- pre-empts the text.
Guha does not know what an intellectual is coz it is not clear that he ever even tried to be one. Being a writer and a columnist and making speeches was so much easier, provided the effort to really think was never made.
His article about the rise and demise of the bilingual intellectual is hilarious for overlooking the one obvious fact. Thought isn't about language. Not any more. Not now we got Mathematics. Not now Science is univocal at the global level.
The importance of language as providing a basis for wage and service provision discrimination is undermined by Globalized free trade- what people want is access to 'Globish' for their kids- not English per se. In any case, the hyper trophy of Academic specialization had already led to over publication in the 'Globish' sub-dialect for peer consumption- i.e. a lot of intellectual activity is occurring outside literary language properly so called.
One reason why people started turning away from vernacular literature was because, by the 70's, Dalit, Modernist and Revolutionary literature was concerned with lowering rather than raising the social horizon of the reader. At one time, the way you got ahead in life was by reading novels, newspaper articles, listening to the speeches of leaders etc. so as to improve your vocabulary, syntax, accent and so on. After 1970, all that changed.
Does it matter?
No.
Language does not matter. If it did, Paninian Sanskrit would be an impossibility- nothing could have been written in it.
In truth, the task of the intellectual never had very much to do with language- even in linguistics and hermeneutics. Maths can capture some of what the intellectual is doing- and the reason intellectual activity is now divorced from language is coz technology makes it much easier to number crunch and thus evaluate positive theories rather than invest simply in attitudinizing and pi-jaw.
Granted people like Guha are still able to make a living by peddling that shit. But they aint intellectuals- just a careerist claque hired for by the Balzacian prostitutes strutting the Comic Opera stage of Public life.
Did India produce actual real life intellectuals? Guys who had original thoughts and who worked them up into a system and sought to validate them empirically so as to give policy prescription a more productive basis than paranoid polemics and careerist claptrap?
Yes, actually India did, does and will continue to do so. Caste and dialect and which fucking school you went to don't come into it. Sorry but there it is.
Does India have public intellectuals? Yes- crap ones. So does America. So does England. On the Continent, of course, things get a lot worse. They're all a bunch of evil, twisted, bastards.
What is striking in everything Guha writes is how much of it one already knows and how large a proportion of that is irrelevantly cited. The point about doing research is uncovering relevant stuff that aint common knowledge and using that new information to put forward a more thought provoking model. In Mimamsa, apoorvata is a condition for meaning. That's right, you've got to have something new to say to qualify as being capable of using language meaningfully. But that means you need an inquiring mind- to have alternative, competing, models thronging in your mental background so that you can evaluate and assimilate new stuff you turn up when researching a topic.
Language, here is the obstacle not the instrument which is why bright guys like A.K Ramanujan, B.K Matilal- is Purushottama Bilimoria intelligent? dunno, but let's include him as a courtesy- ended up having nothing worth saying in their own languages.
Since India teaches nothing if not the conviction that language is the soul's anus- there is no fundamental problem in which any district of India has not produced a 'son of the soil' with something valuable from which all can learn . Equally, no district of India is devoid of substantial resources and instruments of coersion to bury all original or meaningful thought under Guha-style meretricious tripe.
Guha does not claim to be, properly speaking, bilingual and thus his essay throws no direct light on his own mysterious intellectual demise many years ago.
Guha spends some time quoting the always hilarious Mahatma who thought Raja Rajmohan Roy would have been a better intellectual if he hadn't known English! Guha does not mention that Gandhi was not, and never claimed to be, an intellectual- you see, Gandhi had studied English and thus, by his own argument, was fucked in the head- as his public career amply demonstrated. However, Gandhi did not claim to be an intellectual. He thought God talked to him coz like he'd given up sex and was sleeping with his nieces to correct their sleeping posture and that made him a 'Mahatma' rather than a 'Maha pervert.'
Tagore, whom Guha quotes as an example of an bilingual intellectual, was an artist and hereditary Guru not a thinker and certainly nothing so declasse as an 'intellectual'.
Ranade, Gokhale and the Servants of India could have developed into public intellectuals doing research on economics and sociology and so on but their heart wasn't really in it. They just wanted those insufferable Goras to fuck off back to Blighty and if Gandhian voodoo or Khilafat voodoo or the German submarines or the Jap bombers or whatever secured that goal then they too were quite happy to drop the intellectual pose.
Ambedkar had first class intellectual credentials but his was a lone voice. Well there were plenty of others like him but what to do? India is like that only- no?
Guha goes on about Rajaji- again NOT an intellectual- NOT an expert on Hindu Mimamsa or even Jurisprudence come to that- NOT an economist, not an I.R guy- and why is Rajaji relevant? Well he wrote books for kids which his daughter or grand-daughter or somebody translated into Hindi which is important because...urm... well, like Rajaji wrote it in simple Telugu or Tamil or something and it was translated into simple English and.... urm... well that's intellectual right? Menaka Gandhi wrote an encyclopedia of children's names- so she's an intellectual. Jade Goody wrote an autobiography- so she's an intellectual coz people who write books are intellectuals- that's the test, right? Y'know, like Jeffery Archer and ... urm P.G Woodhouse and like some other guy was a librarian or something and this other poor bastard had the misfortune to earn his bread as a Prof. of Eng Lit and so, like, he must have been an intellectual right? And Ram Manohar Lohia had a German PhD- like that's a recommendation!- and so the fact that what he liked doing was camping in some rural backwater where he could kid himself that the people he was meeting were more mentally slothful and deluded than himself- he was definitely an intellectual, right?
Guha thinks J.P Narayan- who sold hair straightener to Negroes to get his Wobbly American Socialist credentials- was smart, well, the fucker did impress Arthur Koestler thus proving he was fucked in the head long before the full unfolding of his sheer silliness could work its full complement of mischief on the Indian polity.
Intellectuals gotta use their fucking intellect! And when they find out they are wrong they got to use their intellect some more to find out why they were wrong. If they get to communicate this to a wider public- then they're public intellectuals, rather than Media whores.
Nobody Guha mentions used their intellect to this effect or to this end. Their strong suit was their passionate commitment to some holier than thou pi jaw shite, or doctrinaire lets-kill-everybody shite. Well that's not entirely true. There is also the provincial navel gazer who becomes a visiting professor in America and whose writing is defensive rather than crepuscular, if not straight forwardly of the Emperor's new clothes variety.
Guha doesn't mention Acharya Kosambi- coz he was like RElIGIOUS? And that's not intellectual at all. The Marxist Kosambi also doesn't get a mention coz... urm... well he actually discovered something in Maths or Stats or something so he's like TECHNICAL guy & not an intellectual. As for critics like Prof. S.R Faruqi or the numberless poets who write in two or more languages- urm well they're like LITERATURE guys and that's not intellectual right?
Jagdish Chandra Bose? Scientist. Doesn't count if a scientist publishes in English and then writes novels, essays or whatever in one or more Indian language coz like SCIENCE guys aint intellectuals right?
Subramaniyam Swamy? Intelligent, thus the very reverse of 'intellectual'. Indeed, not loving any Indian language well enough to also write in it, is a necessary though not sufficient condition for the sheer silliness that only our 'public intellectuals' preen themselves on.
In one respect Guha has a point- imagine Gayatri Spivak or Amartya Sen writing their shite in Bengali- would Spivak get away with saying 'India is named after Rama's younger brother' (Critique of Post Colonial Reason) or Sen get away with his specious nyaya/niti distinction or his silliness about the Bhagvad Gita? Well actually, in Bengali, maybe they would get away with it. (Contra Guha, under the Commies, if any Indian language can now be called 'subaltern' it is not Malyalam or Kannada or Tamil but Bengali). Perhaps, if Sen had been writing in Bengali, he wouldn't have gone off on the wrong track. Spivak, on the other hand, was always beyond redemption.
Guha mentions a lot of people who have written books and who occupy academic positions. They're intellectuals surely? No. What isn't belles lettres is just the working of Gresham's Law as applied to publishing whereby the blurb- 'the author graduated from X and held such and such senior position or won such and such Literary consolation prize for being a benighted darkie.'- pre-empts the text.
Guha does not know what an intellectual is coz it is not clear that he ever even tried to be one. Being a writer and a columnist and making speeches was so much easier, provided the effort to really think was never made.
His article about the rise and demise of the bilingual intellectual is hilarious for overlooking the one obvious fact. Thought isn't about language. Not any more. Not now we got Mathematics. Not now Science is univocal at the global level.
The importance of language as providing a basis for wage and service provision discrimination is undermined by Globalized free trade- what people want is access to 'Globish' for their kids- not English per se. In any case, the hyper trophy of Academic specialization had already led to over publication in the 'Globish' sub-dialect for peer consumption- i.e. a lot of intellectual activity is occurring outside literary language properly so called.
One reason why people started turning away from vernacular literature was because, by the 70's, Dalit, Modernist and Revolutionary literature was concerned with lowering rather than raising the social horizon of the reader. At one time, the way you got ahead in life was by reading novels, newspaper articles, listening to the speeches of leaders etc. so as to improve your vocabulary, syntax, accent and so on. After 1970, all that changed.
Does it matter?
No.
Language does not matter. If it did, Paninian Sanskrit would be an impossibility- nothing could have been written in it.
In truth, the task of the intellectual never had very much to do with language- even in linguistics and hermeneutics. Maths can capture some of what the intellectual is doing- and the reason intellectual activity is now divorced from language is coz technology makes it much easier to number crunch and thus evaluate positive theories rather than invest simply in attitudinizing and pi-jaw.
Granted people like Guha are still able to make a living by peddling that shit. But they aint intellectuals- just a careerist claque hired for by the Balzacian prostitutes strutting the Comic Opera stage of Public life.
Did India produce actual real life intellectuals? Guys who had original thoughts and who worked them up into a system and sought to validate them empirically so as to give policy prescription a more productive basis than paranoid polemics and careerist claptrap?
Yes, actually India did, does and will continue to do so. Caste and dialect and which fucking school you went to don't come into it. Sorry but there it is.
Does India have public intellectuals? Yes- crap ones. So does America. So does England. On the Continent, of course, things get a lot worse. They're all a bunch of evil, twisted, bastards.
What is striking in everything Guha writes is how much of it one already knows and how large a proportion of that is irrelevantly cited. The point about doing research is uncovering relevant stuff that aint common knowledge and using that new information to put forward a more thought provoking model. In Mimamsa, apoorvata is a condition for meaning. That's right, you've got to have something new to say to qualify as being capable of using language meaningfully. But that means you need an inquiring mind- to have alternative, competing, models thronging in your mental background so that you can evaluate and assimilate new stuff you turn up when researching a topic.
Language, here is the obstacle not the instrument which is why bright guys like A.K Ramanujan, B.K Matilal- is Purushottama Bilimoria intelligent? dunno, but let's include him as a courtesy- ended up having nothing worth saying in their own languages.
Since India teaches nothing if not the conviction that language is the soul's anus- there is no fundamental problem in which any district of India has not produced a 'son of the soil' with something valuable from which all can learn . Equally, no district of India is devoid of substantial resources and instruments of coersion to bury all original or meaningful thought under Guha-style meretricious tripe.
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