Praamaanya, Prakaasha & PK's parrhesia

The theory of Prakaasha deals with how we can know what is in our consciousness as well what portion of that consciousness constitutes 'knowledge' falsifiable or otherwise. The related theory of Praamaanya inquires into the origin and apprehension of the truth of that knowledge. Svatah (lit 'from inside')-Praamaanya theorists agree that that truth of an item of knowledge has the same origin and is apprehended simultaneous with that knowledge- a strange doctrine, prima facie, since knowledge may be ab ovo speculative, oneiric, or, indeed, florid and figurative in a manner essentially fugitive from Truth, though some later event, experiment or external authority may reveal it to be purely alethic.
One workaround, that of the Prabhakara, is to make Truth a purely instrumental criteria. What works is 'true', what doesn't is 'error'. However, the desirable property of not relying on Memory but independently manifesting its object, or apprehending something not apprehended before, which is sought for Praamaanya, is lost thereby. Two methods- one Platonic, the other Occassionalist- exist to repair this lacuna and, as a practical matter, we are welcome to tune into the Sufi-Bhakti synthesis from any point on the spectrum thus defined.
Another approach, that of the Bhattas, is to consider 'jnaatataa' (knownness) as an imperceptible activity of an inferential type operating on something otherwise subliminal and not the subject of Praamaanyaa theory.However, this raises in acute form the question as to how such 'knownness' could be 'svatah'- i.e. arise at the same time and from the same cause as that which it qualifies? We may think we mistake a rope for a snake till the snake bites us. Apprehension and the truth of apprehension surely can't be simultaneous? Once way round this is to simply recast Knowledge claims as being of a Bayesian, Statistical nature. To do so, however, is to encourage us to consider ourselves citizens of a Multiverse. Suddenly, the Yoga-Vashista gains salience. We are the Bhikshu who dreamed he was a King who dreamed he was an Apsara who dreamed she was a doe in the forest who dreamed she bit off Walt Disney's head for killing Bambi's mum. All woke from their dream to find they were all each other. At this point, Yeats goes and sits at the feet of Mohini Chatterjee or some other such Chatter-box and starts translating the Gita. We can quit reading him and go order a round of Guinness with a Jameson chaser.
My own ancestral Vedantism, however, re-opens the question of how empirical truth can be 'svatograhya'- i.e. apprehended as such intrinsically and at the same time as cognized. The workaround here is facile. The subject is always false or sublatable in a long series asymptotically approaching her own 'true' self itself qualified as the 'sakshi' or unimpeachable witness.

Let us take an everyday example. I walk into the bar at the local Hilton and have a few pints. I see a young chap who went to Modern School on Barakhamba Road and go over to ask which year he matriculated. His initial hesitancy is removed when I explain that I'm an alumnus of St. Columba's and, in my day, our two schools enjoyed a friendly rivalry. On hearing my surname he becomes friendly and goes off to get me a drink leaving me with his lovely lady wife who, it turns out, is a fellow Tambram.
I am astonished when I hear that she too attended Modern School, though she quickly explains she met her older husband at Wharton.
I say to her 'Akka (elder sister) why you are telling me such a shameless lie? From his face, I could immediately tell your husband attended Modern School. It is a scientific fact that people who go to Modern have penis like physiognomy. Your face, on the other hand, is beautiful. Why you are punching and slapping me? OMG, how did nice lady like you learn such filthy type Tamil abuse words!'
Anyway, I went and hid behind her husband who was a U.P bhaiyya some twenty years younger than myself. He said 'Darling, please don't hit this fellow with your naked hand. Everyone knows St. Columba's boys have their arse where face should be. Chee, chee- kindly go and wash with dettol!'

Anyway, we have a couple of drinks while lady is in the powder room. I say 'Yaar, Shahrukh Khan is from St. Columba's. Shehkar Kapoor went to Modern.' 'How do you think Shah Rukh got his start?' he shoots back. 'After Kapoor Sahib was finished with him, Shah Rukh's features became almost human.'
Suddenly I realized that this brawny U.P bhaiyya, with the characteristic penis like face of a Modern School alumnus, was gazing upon my moon like visage in a lascivious and lustful fashion. Where was his wife when I needed her? Just I giggled nervously, paid for the drinks, and quietly slipped away.

Pop Quiz
Q 1. The author gained two types of knowledge simultaneously- viz. that a person had a penis like face and that he must have attended Modern School, Barakhamba road.  Is this a valid instance of 'svatograhya' empirical knowledge?
a) Yes. Having penis like face is an intrinsic property of Modern School alumni. Apprehending a penis like face was the origin and also the truth maker for the knowledge that the dickhead in question was indeed from Modern School.
b) No. His wife also attended Modern School. She did not have penis like face. Thus the truth-maker for 'x attended Modern School' can't be  'svatah-praamaanya', i.e. intrinsically provided and must therefore be, if at all, 'paratah-praamaanya'- i.e. arising from an external authority, experiment or event.
c) The question is framed in an impredicative manner and is therefore undecidable. The truthmaker for 'x is a valid instance of 'svatograhya empirical knowledge' can not itself be empirical because svatograhya is intrinsically self-referential. Nor can it be otherwise for that begs the question.
d) Of course it is completely valid! Abishek Bacchan went to Modern.  Just look at that horrible thing growing out of his neck. Enough to scare anybody straight. Even Karan Johar.

This is a picture of Aamir Khan before he worked with Abhishek in Dhoom 3.

This is him now.

Case closed. Q.E.D

Siddhanta

Shankaracharya of Dwarka has condemned the movie PK. Was it because Aamir spoke out openly (parrhesia) against fraud perpetrated in the name of Religion? Not at all. The Shanakaracharya, jailed during Quit India, has never condoned fraud of any type because it destroys the Nation.
Still, it may be that Aamir relied upon some paratah-praamaanya argument or authority inadmissible for a Vedantin.
 Having watched the movie, I am the 'sakshi' - that too PK- possessing 'svatograhya' empirical knowledge that such is not the case.

Acharyajee possesses not just Praamaanya shakti- ratocinative power- but also intuition of underlying Prakaasha truth. Yet it is not decent to mention the fact that there are hordes of these Modern School alumni with huge penis like faces roaming around. Acharyajee shows great 'upaya kausalya'- tact in instruction- such that by condemning the effect he warns against the truly too-horrible-for-words cause- viz. deleterious consequences of spending any lengthy period of time in proximity to Abhishek's horribly throbbing phallus of a physiognomy.
Bacchan Sahib should have sent his son to Nainital. How much grief we would have all been spared, say what you like the boy can act, had he done so!

PK, K-Pax & Jayanta Bhatta's Agamadambara

PK- Aamir Khan's Borgesian 'Justification'- differs from K-Pax  in that the Alien offers no novel therapeutic or ontologically dysphoric eschatalogical escape from the quotidian necessity of , supposedly Liberal, Panopticon 'Positivist' Psychiatry.
On the contrary, the Alien- whose 'remote control' jewel, capable of returning him to his own planet. is immediately stolen and sold to a fake Swami- is so much the opposite of the suave Kevin Spacey character that everybody assumes he is a Drunkard ('Peekee' in Hindi means 'having drunk a lot').

The Alien's aleatory trajectory, however, as this is a Hindu film, follows a path determined by Lord Ganesa- the 'creator' as well as 'destroyer' of obstacles.
Thus, when the protagonist addresses all the myriad 'murthis' (representations) of the Hindu pantheon, the camera finally focuses on the Elephant headed God. Hindus immediately understand that the obstacle to the Alien finding his path home lies in his notion that he has a 'property' type right to the jewel which is his 'remote control' command module for his space-ship and ride home.
By contrast, the fraudulent Swami who bought that Jewel claims it to be a sliver of Shiva's broken 'damaru' for which a great Temple must be constructed.
Since, the Alien still thinks the jewel is his 'property', he faces a self-created obstacle to getting it back. This entails a wrong concept of God, or false dynamic of the Divine process. He thinks appeals to the Deity are being systematically intercepted by mischievous 'wrong number' respondents.
Clearly, this is similar to Umaswati's notion of 'Karmic obstructors' as arising out of Narratological karmic 'matching problems'.
Obviously, when I say 'Clearly'- I mean 'clearly yadi tu PK is blog parh rahe ho.'- if you are reading this drunk mate.

But why not be PK (drunk) when watching PK?

Sanjay Dutt- son of two great film star patriots of  different Religions- in and out of jail because this son of a Hindu father and Muslim mother wanted to protect, in his own goofy style, people irrespective of Religion, irrespective of Geographical Origin, in Mumbai- is shown as helping get the Alien a 'voice' by taking him to a brothel & thus the Braj Bhasha of the savants turns into that Bhojpuri which renders even the tongue of emaciated sex slaves pure and worthy of adoption by the virtuous, but languageless, inhabitants of PK's planet.
Indeed, whereas Humans- that too from affluent-too-affluent America  want to emigrate to K-Pax- in India, the reverse is the case; at the end of the film a troupe of Bhojpuri speaking Aliens have turned up- Subramaniyam Swamy beware!- on our shores.

This film is calculated to incense the loony-toons Hindutva fringe. It begins with a twist on their favorite theme- the so called 'Love Jihad'. I have previously explained that Hindu girls having sex with Muslims under the rubric of marriage is nothing but rape and a naked attack upon Islam. There is no bar in Hinduism for a girl to have sex with anyone she likes. Lord Rama tells Lady Sita that he hasn't killed a lot of people to reclaim her as his property. She is free to choose any mate she likes- even his brother Laxman or the new Rakshasa King whom he himself has enthroned.
Obviously, Lord Rama is behaving like a hurt child which is kinda cute and lets Lady Sita have the last word as is right and proper coz when all is said and done Men show little heroism in battle compared to a woman in child-birth. It is the latter's heroism upon which the axle of the World turns.

However, the poor Muslim victim of an amorous Hindu girl forcing herself upon him in marriage, becomes immediately guilty of un-Islamic behavior because Hindus, unlike Christians or Jews, can not be taken in marriage, absent conversion, by pious Muslim men.
The heroine of the film PK, at the start of the film, falls in love with a Pakistani Muslim. Her father is a devotee of a bogus Godman who predicts that the boy will jilt her. She immediately asks her beau to marry her the very next day. However, there is a mix up at the Registry Office. Another bride asks her to hold her kitten. A little boy gives her a letter breaking things off which was actually meant for the other bride whose groom got cold feet. The Pakistani boy shows up a few minutes later and reads the same letter and thinks it is from the Indian girl. Both return to their own countries heart-broken.
The next thing that happens is the girl, who is a TV reporter, is holding a cute puppy and doing a fluff piece on the problem of doggie depression. Apparently the cute little canine keeps trying to commit suicide (so, contra Nietzche, God isn't dead- there's just this mentally unbalanced doggie who keeps trying to top itself). The heroine loses her cool. She storms into the TV anchor's office. Instead of fluff pieces about canine schizophrenia, why not do an investigative piece on the God racket? But the Station Anchor had previously tried to take on the fraudulent Godman and got stabbed in his rear end by a Trishul. Bogus Swamis are off limits- one buttock with Trishul stab wounds is one buttock too many. The man has learnt his lesson.
The TV reporter is fascinated by the Alien PK. He turned to God simply so as to get home but soon discovered that the various Religions have totally different ways of approaching God. He is thrown out of the Church for breaking a coconut on the altar. The Muslims chase him away when he attempts to offer wine in the Mosque. The Hindu widow wears white, but so does the Christian bride who explains that black is what widows wear. But the burqa clad women PK next approaches to condole with are furious at the suggestion that their Lord and Master has shuffled off this mortal coil. PK is chased hither and tither by irate members of all the various denominations and sects.

Back in the Fifties and Sixties, Movies would feature a song sequence where the hero bitterly berates the unfeeling stone idol of the Lord. PK harks back to that tradition but only by way of ironic homage. After all, those movies (including the Telugu classic- Sankara Varnam from the late Seventies) were very much in the 'Hubb al Udhri' tradition where Death is what unseals the Lovers to each other. Instead, in PK, another theme from the early Sixties- the love triangle, where the hero gives up the girl and arranges her marriage to another- gains salience. In the climactic televised showdown between PK and the bogus Godman, the Alien gains victory by properly explaining how and why the heroine's marriage to the Pakistani boy-friend failed to come off. It was a case of what the Yoga-Vashishta calls 'Kakathaliya'- coincidence, as when a crow alights on a palm tree just at the moment the ripe palm fruit falls to the ground.
PK the alien has used 'Viveka'- metaphysical discrimination- to provide a natural cause for what appears a super-naturally preordained occurrence. This provides him the means to regain his Jewel 'remote control', yet since his primary purpose was to selflessly benefit the heroine, not to self-interestedly assert a property right, the father of the heroine, previously his bitter enemy, himself places it in his hands. PK gains the means of returning home- not, as in the Gita, so as to never return- but so as to bring back his own people to this 'karma bhoomi' which, for those who act selflessly, is also the highest bhoga-bhumi- there being no higher joy or pleasure than in serving others- i.e. truly serving the Lord.
Aamir Khan is a great patriot as well as an amazing actor/ producer. His TV series 'Satyameva Jayate', though investigating various heart-rending Social Evils, was a smash hit comparable to 'Kaun banega Krorepati?'- 'Who wants to be a Millionaire?'
Aamir, no doubt, is a pious Muslim, incarnating the hadith  'hubb al watan min al iman'- Patriotism is part of the Faith- but PK is a great film from the Hindu perspective.
I am reminded of, the great Nyaya scholar, Jayanta Bhatta's 'Agamadambara'- 'much ado about Religion' ably translated by the Hungarian Scholar Csaba Deszo. Like PK, Bhatta's play is motivated by a Rationalist Transcendentalism. Rational Inquiry, if carried forward fearlessly and without selfish motivation, can indeed so alter one's inner ethos that the highest Gnosis, of a Transcendental type, becomes discoverable. Yet Revealed Truth- according to the various Sects claiming to possess it- appears contradictory and divisive.
In Bhatta's play a brilliant young Mimamsaka 'snatak' (recent graduate) is determined to defend Vedic orthodoxy against all rivals. Yet, during the course of the play, he learns compassion- letting off the Jains- and gives the last word to a Saiddhantika Saivite who re-establishes the Indian consensus that all Religions are univocal in so far as they proclaim true worship as partaking of selfless service to all needy beings. Yes, debauched and fraudulent sectarians making absurd magical claims should be banished or brought under the purview of the Law. But that is a matter of common sense. What is unacceptable is that arrogant and self-serving, holier than thou, polemicists sow the seeds of discord and condemn innocent people on the basis of which sect they were born into.
Religion is not about restricting free choice. It isn't about creating 'karmic obstructers'. On the contrary, as Lord Ganesha's appearance in the film PK shows, it is about helping us see that it is our own egotism which gives power to our 'karmic obstructer'. Compassion, forgiveness and self-sacrifice allow us to triumph over obstacles and 'return home'. However, the true Vaishnav does not want to remain on planet Vaikuntha living in perpetual bliss. He demands that the Lord send him back and assign him the humblest, most onerous, least prestigious tasks in caring for those who so wretchedly suffer they can't even cry out for help or offer thanks for any assistance received.

Ban Doinger's books by the hundred. They are nothing but sensationalized sloppy scholarship. Try to ban PK- an excellent Hindi film which ordinary Hindus, even worthless shitheads like me, find uplifting and wholly in the tradition of 'Agamadambara'- and you raise up a tsunami against yourself.
In any case, the box office has spoken. PK is a smash.
Once again, Aamir, you have made your countrymen proud.

Romila Thapar silencing the Public Intellectual

Sonia Gandhi knew little about the country it fell to her to rule. One of the experts she consulted regularly to remedy her ignorance was Romila Thapar.

Clearly, the distinguished historian was a 'durbari' intellectual- a courtier savant- was she also ever a 'Public Intellectual' like Emile Zola who condemned the injustice done to Dreyfus?
Of course she was. She condemned the imprisonment without trial of a host of Politicians and Trade Unionists and Journalists during the Emergency. Her book 'J'accuse Madam Indira!' was a best seller.
I'm kidding. She wrote no such book.

What she did do was attack the policies of the party opposed to Sonia Gandhi, whom she herself regularly visited and advised.

In this partisan exercise, what helped her was her long history of writing highly communal attacks on one particular type of Religion- Brahmanic as opposed to Shramanic- which she castigated as intolerant and backward. The fact that the other sort- Shramanic Buddhism- was sheer money-grubbing, elitist, misogynistic, casteist  stupidity, special pleading and magical thinking, most of whose practitioners happened to be Brahmin males- she glossed over. Instead, she affirmed that Indian history is only 'communalized' if reference is made to antagonism between Hinduism and Islam. This is because whereas India is now divided between Buddhistan and Vedistan, Muslims live happily with Hindus in places where they are the majority. Thapar, as a Hindu, may be right in saying that Hindus had no antagonism to Muslims- the Muslim population of India is now a higher percentage than at Partition- but she is surely wrong to say that Islam in India wasn't hostile to Hindus.

The facts speak for themselves. Hindus and Christians, but also Muslims deemed insufficiently orthodox, have been either ethnically cleansed or subjected to continuous intimidation, harassment and terror in areas where Muslims are either numerically stronger or feel themselves at an advantage.

For Thapar, the true story of India is one of resistance to stupid and needy Brahmins by less stupid and more greedy Brahmins who decided it paid better to pose as Buddhists. Islam was an irrelevance, except in so far as it killed off all the Hindus, in which case it was actually only avenging Buddhism and thus on the side of the angels.

Thapar explains that 'Buddhism was edged out of India by, among other things, Brahminical orthodoxy. In India, the State of Bihar derives it name from 'Vihara', the term for a Buddhist monastery. What about Naobehar, near Balkh, in Afghanistan? Its name derives from 'New Vihara'.

Who destroyed Buddhism in Balkh? Did Brahmin orthodoxy play a part? Or is it not the case that Viharas in Balkh were destroyed by the same people, for the same reason, as the Viharas of Bihar were destroyed?

Who 'edged Buddhism out' of Afghanistan and Central Asia? Who is edging Christianity out of Iraq and Syria today? Who 'edged out' Hinduism and Sikhism from Pakistan?

It certainly wasn't Islam. Perish the thought! Probably it was neo-liberalism.

Even suppose Lord Buddha was stupid or self-serving enough to commit to the theory given above, was it really the case that 'private property' alone gave rise to 'confusion and conflict'? Was there really never any invasion by an aggressive tribe to be countered? In addition to an elected Magistrate, was it really the case that no Military Chief was required?

Apparently not. Lord Buddha said-
31. 'And, Vasettha, whoever of these four castes, as a monk, becomes an Arahant who has destroyed the corruptions, done what had to be done, laid down the burden, attained to the highest goal, completely destroyed the fetter of becoming, and become liberated by the highest insight, he is declared to be chief among them in accordance with Dhamma, and not otherwise.
 Dhamma's the best thing for people
 In this life and the next as well.
32. 'Vasettha, it was Brahma Sanankamara who spoke this verse:
 "The Khattiya's best among those who value clan;
 He with knowledge and conduct is best of gods and men."
This verse was rightly sung, not wrongly, rightly spoken, not wrongly, connected with
profit, not unconnected. I too say, Vasettha:
 [98] "The Khattiya's best among those who value clan;
 He with knowledge and conduct is best of gods and men."'
Thus the Lord spoke, and Vasettha and Bharadvaja were delighted and rejoiced at his
words.

In the Agganna Sutta, quoted above, the Buddha explains to 2 Brahmin monks why his own caste is superior to theirs, just as their caste is superior to that of the Vaishyas who in turn rank above the despicable Shudras. The argument he uses is foolish and utterly false. It is not true that an 'Abhassara Brahma' world ever existed or that it will exist. The whole thing is a myth- like the Sea of Milk or the Celestial Tortoise or Jesus rising from the Dead. Buddha was a stupid fuckwit who thought sex was bad, eating was bad, and Warriors who can actually fight, Kings who can actually govern- like King Pasenadi- were also bad. He himself, he considered to be very very good because he simply went around telling stupid self-serving lies about his own greatness which was why King Pasenadi had become his disciple.

Thapar's own anti-Brahmin vitriol is perfectly understandable. Like the Buddha, she is a Kshatriya. Her Uncle was a dud as Army Chief. Clearly, her people would have been better off sticking to making money or pretending to be Marxists.  Naturally, possessing neither intelligence nor capacity for learning, she resented the Brahmin reputation for both. Thus, she is not a historian but a victim of her history. Her Punjabi Hindu Khattri ancestors, though good at making money, failed in defending their own homeland. It falls to their obedient daughter to claim that this involved no disgrace since there was never any Islamic threat in the first place. The only evil that existed in India was that of the Brahmins. Since Soniaji, being a foreigner, came to her for 'tuition', she herself had a duty to her Client which she could easily discharge by pretending that Hindutva is some sort of Brahminical conspiracy. The fact that non-Brahmins, like Modi and Amit Shah, have made it attractive to the voter probably has something to do with 'neo-liberalism'. Public Intellectuals have a duty to speak out against it. The fact that 'neo-liberalism' doesn't exist- and that those members of the Public who have intellectual inclinations can easily find this out for themselves- means that Silence is the only valid Parrhesia in this context.

Thapar, speaking of the Silence of the Public Intellectual, so nakedly reveals her own ignorance and stupidity as to stun, if not shame, her audience into silence.

Kafila, Jinniology and Secular Modernity's Tiger of Wrath

Edit- So as to take revenge for my showering uncouth abuse upon her in the course of this blog post, Aarti Sethi has written very sweetly to me to say she thinks I might be 'erudite' not in Angrezi as wot she is spoke by Queenji also, but in 'Sanskrit and Tamil and Persian' and such like. 
OMG! She thinks I'm some dehati Uncleji type! The shame! The humiliation! 
I have written back to her saying 'Beti, kindly do Love Jihad against Muslim Professors- especially if they come from Kashmir- and rape them and force them to marry you to bachao their izzat same as what Ananya Vajpayi did to that nice Basharat Peer. Remember, true Heroines of Hindutva like Ananya are allowed to marry up 5 husbands at one time. Jai Hindutva! NaMo Shivaya!'

A Tiger of Wrath.
A mentally ill young man somehow got into the Tiger enclosure in Delhi zoo. The Zoo staff should have tranquilized the Tiger, but their dart gun was locked up somewhere and Red Tape is Red Tape.

The crowd threw stones at the tiger, which was watching the young man intently. Perhaps, this was the wrong thing to do. Maybe it caused the tiger to pounce on the poor fellow and drag him away. 

Kafila, the leading Careerist, Credentialist, faux Left-Liberal website published an extraordinarily foolish post on the death of that young man from which I excerpt the following-

'Maqsood Pardesi was the bearer of a message: Maqsood comes from the Arabic root “qasad”: intention. From which come both “qasida” a petition; a prayer; a praise, and “qasid” the messenger. In Persian the Arabic transforms to “maqsad”: meaning, and maqsood: intention; desire. What is the maqsad of Maqsood’s life? How will he be remembered?

As a “mentally ill” drunk whose “obsession” was responsible for his ludicrous death? As a sad case whose strange manner of dying testified to the destitution of his brief life? Or, as a man who wagered, and lost, his life on the impulsion of an encounter? Mourning Maqsood’s death does not preclude taking seriously the extraordinary vitality of his life. To posthumously pathologise Maqsood by calling him “mentally ill” is to impoverish his memory, and denude our capacity to receive that which is given, and appears, only very rarely.

Maqsood Pardesi walked into the enclosure of a tiger! What is lamentable about a death like this? Why must it mark a “failure”: his, society’s, the zoo authorities’? Is this not perhaps how, when the world was a richer more awake place, people went to meet the spirits and the gods?

Tigers are beautiful. Unfortunately, humans are tasty. Simone Weil said 'perhaps the primordial sin is to try to eat what one should only look at.' She didn't say it to a Tiger though. It mightn't have agreed and anyway Simone was off her head and soon died of inanition.
But what has all this to do with 'Kafila'- the caravan of the Careerist Left winding its way through the vast Sahara of Indian Secular discourse?
Surely this is not a case where 'tigers of wrath' turn out to be more worthwhile than 'the horses of instruction?'

After all, Maqsood had paid for admission to the Delhi Zoo. That institution had a duty of care towards him. Whether he jumped or fell into the Tiger enclosure is irrelevant. The Zoo has a legal obligation to protect even crazy people who endanger themselves. In this case, proper procedure required the tranquilizing of the Tiger. But the dart gun was locked away. This is criminal negligence plain and simple. 

The reason rational people should lament a death like this is because, as members of the Public, we need to take responsibility for the actions of Public Bodies which act on our behalf. The Delhi Zoo is a Public Body. It had a duty of care. It failed to discharge this duty and is guilty of criminal negligence. This certainly is cause for lamentation, for breast beating, for righteous indignation and a calling of public officials to account. What it isn't cause for, at least for rational members of Civil Society, is some belles lettrist vapouring about how mebbe the world was a richer more awake place when people went to meet the spirits and the gods and ended up being mauled and eaten.

The writer of the post from which I have quoted is a lady with a Hindu name. She explicitly mentions the young man's religious and cultural background- viz Muslim and 'foreign' (the literal meaning of his surname). The tiger, incidentally, had a Hindu name- 'Vijay'- 'victory'.

A person with a male Muslim name- Imtiaz Ali- left several increasingly irate comments on the lady's post. He appeared to believe, that the duty of Hindu intellectuals is to condemn Hindutva, not parade their knowledge of Urdu and engage in Akeel Bilgrami type waffle about 'Enchantment'.
 Clearly, Hindu intellectuals need to establish that Maqsood was killed by Modi's minions- something they can easily do if they stop pretending to know Persian and Arabic and concentrate simply on doing 'a proper anthropology of Hinduism' so as to disclose 'the ontology of Hindutva'. This, surely, is the 'need of the hour'.

The lady, in reply, pointed out that Hindutva is as boring as shite and saying Hindusim is crap requires some pretence of knowing about Hinduism so fuck that and anyway all the big league Professors have already vomited all over the subject so gimme a break, hon.
The Muslim gentleman replies that it is the responsibility of people with Hindu names to vomit all over Hinduism because when people with non-Hindu names do it they just come across as ignorant or ISIL.  I mean a Muslim dude can scarcely write stuff like ' Hinduism is an evil religion which creates Hindutva which is an evil ideology responsible for thousands of people risking their own lives to kill non-Hindus.' without looking a complete wally. Thus ladies with Hindu names should take on the job coz they can always pretend they just been raped by Hindutva guys who tore open their belly, dragged a fetus out of it, raped the fetus and then ripped open its belly to drag a fetus out of it which they raped and like ever since Modi became PM it's like totally going down 24/7 in every Hindu household and nobody notices coz they aint Hindu ladies and like Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum gonna write a book about it soon which I will co-author so just take my word for it already.'
Clearly the Muslim dude is making a valid point. Hindu ladies have a duty to tell vicious lies about Hinduism coz non-Hindus don't wanna look stupid by publishing those same lies, as original research, under their own names.

 How does the Hindu lady get out of the stern task the Muslim gentleman has set for her?

To find out,  why not read the whole thing for yourself?

Imtiaz ali permalink

September 27, 2014 3:48 PM

The tragedy of secular moderns of India is their fascination with Islam. Having said that I think all attempts to understand any object of knowledge are welcome!
Aarti do you not feel that the need of the hour, the need of several decades now is to understand Hinduism in India. Bhrigu does focus on Hinduism but then again the forms which he investigates are devoid of any political agency.
Does not India desperately need an anthropology of Hinduism, particularly of Hindutva. What do we know about the maqsad of Hindutva. What is it about Hindutiva that people ready to sacrifice their life for this ideology.
Where is the definitive account anthropology of contempt that Hindutva sows.
How does Hindutva operate within a Hindu canon. What has transformed in the motivation of people who joined Hindutva organisations a 100 years back and now. What is the ontology of Hindutva.
Yes there are several hundred articles written on Hindutva, on Hindusim. Yes there are tens of book on this topic as well. But somehow on an everyday commonsensical level knowledge about Hindutva and Hinduism does not seem to be have crossed a discursive threshold.
No secular modern non-Hindu can attempt to ask questions on Hindutva in India as an object of inquiry. Even if she wants to study Hinduvta, has familiarized herself with the cannon and so on she probably will not do it. No secular modern non-Hindu can do an anthropology of the Sangh. And it appears secular modern Hindus are too busy analyzing jinns of Delhi, which is really sad!
Why is it that I can’t think of any Bollywood film or any novel for that matter any anthropological account which depicts radicalisation of Hindus in India. Maybe boys in the branches is an exception but that it is so old now. I wonder how many people know about it. At the same time films like Fiza, Shahid readily comes to my mind when I turn the angle.

Reply

• Aarti Sethi permalink*

  September 28, 2014 7:35 PM

  @Imtiaz,
  Thank you very much for your comment. You raise some very serious questions. Let me try and respond
  So first, I disagree with you :) In my opinion “Hindutva” is precisely that of which we do not need any anthropologies. Of course if someone wishes to write one they should do so, but I personally would have zero interest in such an undertaking. Why? Because I do not think such an exercise will yield anything particularly productive. When it comes to phenomenon such as Hindutva there could be, broadly, two reasons for why one might be interested in studying them. The first, which we can call an “instrumentalist” reason, is because it is good to know one’s enemy in order to fight. So we need to study Hindutva so we can sharpen our weapons against it. If this is our purpose then the hundreds of studies, as you yourself mention, on the history, emergence, demographic composition, political vocabulary, and everyday practices of Hindutva produced by a legion of political scientists and historians already give us a detailed understanding. And more, there are classic works on fascism as well that address not the specificity of Hindutva, but tell us how and why and through what means ideaologies such as Hindutva find resonance amongst particular groups at particular moments in history.
  But there may be another reason to study Hindutva: because in itself there is something exciting vivifying about Hindutva for the.researcher, and on this count for me Hindutva falls flat. This is I think the source of disagreement between us: i.e. on what constitutes a “resource”.
  You mention Bhrigu’s work and say that the sorts of popular Hinduisms he studies have no “political agency”. You are right, and I think that is precisely what is exciting about his work and the practices he looks at. Again for you the study of Djinns is a cause for lament while for me Anand’s work opens an entire terrain of . The question is, at what level must “resources” be produced and towards what purpose. The kinds of practices that Bhrigu and Anand study do not operate at the level of what you term “politics”, and therefore cannot be marshaled for “political agency”. This is precisely why they continue to produce pathways along which people find routes of escape. Because these practices have somehow (thus far though I wonder for how much longer) managed to elude capture by the state form and the dead-end exhausted trap of representational politics.
  So what sort of study of Hindutva would you wish for that has not been undertaken already? Towards what purpose?
  

  Reply
  • Aarti Sethi permalink*

    September 28, 2014 7:48 PM

    @Imtiaz,
    One last connected thought: If you ask me, the need of the hour is to turn our back on all thought that takes the current form of the state as its starting point and its destination. Everyone has their own functions to perform, and if academics have been given the extraordinary privilege and liberty to be the priests of a secular world and get paid for thinking, then at the least they can do is produce (and/or recover/discover) images of worlds which we may wish to inhabit. If this is the case, then these images, to my mind, will not come from an exploration of the wastelands (imaginative and actual) that the state has produced. They will have to come from elsewhere, precisely from sites such as Anand and Bhrigu point to.
    Does this mean that we should give up on even analyzing what the state, and things allied with it, does? No of course not. We are condemned to live under one, so we are condemned to not ignore our master. However these must be seen as reports on the doings of power. Not as sites from which alternative visions of life can flow. Therefore I think there is no need for anthropologies of Hindutva. What we have, and thankfully we have a lot, will do :)
    

    Reply
    • Imtiaz ali permalink

      October 5, 2014 4:50 AM

      Aarti,
      I am sorry but did I make an argument about knowledge? Whether the knowledge appeals to instrumentalist reason or whether it is vivifying is not the point I was trying to make. The point I wanted to raise and still want to raise pertains to the responsibility of intellectuals.
      For in a society where knowledge is such a scare resource is it not the responsibility of intellectuals who are in a privileged position to expose the lies of power, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions? And explain to the general public through the help of their training what is power up to.
      Tell me what do I do with the knowledge of emerging liberal ideologues working for the empire writing enchanting texts about chattan baba or the jinns? Their work is slowly appearing to be as crucial and critical as that of a German anthropologist working diligently in the 1930’s writing about peripatetic priests of Calvinism or the jewish mysticism in Munich.
      Should I not look upon intellectuals to explain what called the mobs to murder a techie in Pune? What message did Dhananjay Desai bear? How would you, as a trained anthropologist, look at what’s coming from Mangalwari Mahal in Nagpur? How would you look at the PMO? Can you even do an anthropology of PMO with as much of command over ideas as you wrote about Mr. Pardesi? My guess is perhaps you can but you’d rather not. Because you suggest, do you not, Hindutva as an idea, as a practice, as a system of thought does not matter now because too much has been already written on that subject, isn’t it?
      No one can tell anyone what to write and what to research. It is as much a researcher’s imperative to write as it is of a reader’s to read and comment. You wrote an extremely moving piece about Mr. Pardesi. I know now because Mr. Pardesi bore a message therefore he went to meet Mr. Tiger. Mr. Tiger did not kill Mr. Pardesi. Mr. Pardesi died a tragic death while meeting Mr. Tiger. The logic of your interpretation is resolute. Your interpretation is deeply nuanced and could I dare say absolutely brilliant! I thank you for your keen observations and look forward to read more of your wonderful writings.
      

      Reply
• Aarti Sethi permalink*

  October 5, 2014 2:21 PM

  @ Imtiaz,
  Thanks again for coming in. I think we disagree on some very fundamental questions to do with how one lives in the world and what might constitute a responsibility towards it. It remains to be seen if these disagreements are productive or not, and what their political stakes are.
  So, you say:
  

  “Whether the knowledge appeals to instrumentalist reason or whether it is vivifying is not the point I was trying to make. The point I wanted to raise and still want to raise pertains to the responsibility of intellectuals.”

  What we think of as the ends of knowledge is intimately connected to what you call the “responsibility of intellectuals”.
  

  “Should I not look upon intellectuals to explain what called the mobs to murder a techie in Pune? What message did Dhananjay Desai bear? How would you, as a trained anthropologist, look at what’s coming from Mangalwari Mahal in Nagpur? How would you look at the PMO? Can you even do an anthropology of PMO with as much of command over ideas as you wrote about Mr. Pardesi? My guess is perhaps you can but you’d rather not.”

  The responsibility of academics and intellectuals towards the world they live in is contiguous with the responsibilities of others who live in the world also. (Is this true? Can we imagine a doxastic logic based on the notion of contiguity? Sure. Why not? Cogs in a machine, or operations along a critical path, could be thought of as having 'contiguous' responsibilities. Why? Because they don't need to have an internal picture of how the whole coheres. They face no concurrency, race hazard or co-ordination problems. In other words, 'contiguous responsibilities' are precisely the sort which can be discharged without the use of the intellect or the carrying forward a Research Program.  Thus, Intellectual or Academic responsibility must always be overlapping or pre-emptive, never contiguous- otherwise, for starters, Maths would be exhaustible and thus the demarcation problem would have a canonical solution and stuff like 'angelology' be wholly Scientific and Popperian) Therefore an academic must do what they can to protect lives and limit harm, (excluding harm to people who lose their life due to the criminal negligence of Public officials at Delhi Zoo) and oppose power (Zoo officials have the power to make the tiger enclosure safe- but you aint opposing their failure to do so are you? Instead you write illiterate shite) and help, (what fucking help have you ever given anyone you stupid jhollawallah careerist? You have a responsibility to use your brain and think logically.) in whatever way they can, those who find themselves in powers’ crosshairs. And this academics do all the time. But there is something more at stake here for you I think. Which has to do with what you see as the “professional” function of academics (and by extension I presume intellection in general). So let me try and address some of this.
  If it is illumination you are seeking, then there are already several works that academics have produced that try and grapple with the murder of a techie in Pune. (Either those 'several works' are shite or the don't exist or you haven't read them or you are too fucking mean spirited to tell this poor semi-literate Muslim nutjob what great discovery they have made)  And Dhananjay Desai bore the same message that fascist thugs everywhere bear. (Fuck off! Fascism comes in a lorra different flavours. Their message aint univocal. It is an elementary rule of survival that has us look for wedge issues to divide our assailants- e.g. back in the Seventies I always called skinheads 'proddy bastards'- which meant the Catholic Irish amongst them gave me a pass. My calculation was based on the knowledge that, had the skinhand band I encountered been wholly Protestant, I'd have been kicked to death anyway. )This is why beyond stating this, there is nothing that a further excavation of his experience can yield. (Absolute shite. Look at the work of Vibhuti Narain Rai. His meticulous research and accessible writing genuinely changed the Hindu mind-set in a wholly salutary way.) What would such an exploration open? (An exploration of Dhanjay Desai would open the fact that he is a Frankenstein monster created and propped up by  the 'Secular' Congress-NCP alliance) How would it extend our expand or further the ways in which we might inhabit our worlds? (Are you fucking kidding me? By finding out about who is actually backing this worthless cunt who got an innocent 24 year old techie killed we stop living in your fucking cartoon world of 'Fascist thugs' and Foucaldian parrhesia as Arundhati Roy ranting and shite.  We wanna see that fucking double D getting titty fucked in Tihar Jail. Then we want him hanged along with his better educated, orAfsal, Gurus.) This is the rub, this is where our differences lie: on what we see as the ends of thought and its connection to responsibility....
   ...But seriously, I think you should interrogate what makes you think that an engagement with mysticism and human experiences of this sort is somehow a less valuable, or less critical, engagement with the crises of the present, than an anthropology of the PMO. BTW, I'd read a  properly researched Bourdieusian social anthropology of the PMO. So would any BRIC hedge fund manager. So would any Mechanism Design guy. So would any sensible person. Why? There are no fucking Gods and magic Tigers involved. Is it because things like mystical experience strike you as frivolous, or “not located in the real world” (a favourite barb thrown at academics such as myself)? As if somehow we are writing or thinking about experiences that inhabit some other, and indeed a lesser world? I am telling you now that if you are searching for redemption to the crises of this current moment, it will not come from undertaking an anthropology of the PMO.
  A fair question at this stage would be to ask, so to what “crises” are these engagements responding? At what level is this”crises” located? I’m afraid the answer to that is far too long to undertake here. You don't fucking know do you? You seriously haven't a clue. Deracinated poseur- you can always emigrate to La-La land. Fuck you, fuck Kafila- youse guys r shite.
  
  

  
  

So, kids, what have we learnt today?
A Public Body, the Delhi Zoo, is guilty of criminal negligence. A young life is snuffed out. Public intellectuals need to identify the cause of the tragedy and to show how the same sorts of mechanism design error in other Public Bodies is leading to massive avoidable loss of Life and Life Chances.
This is a widespread problem. Plenty of the people who read Kafila, even some vernacular contributors to Kafila,  are engaged in fighting bureaucratic inertia and stupidity of the sort exhibited by Delhi Zoo when it locked away the dart gun that was mandated to be used in an emergency of the sort under discussion.
However, sensible conversing about Mechanism Design is not what Kafila's Public Intellectuals do. Why? Because they are frivolous dilletantes, poetes maudits manque (okay me dunno French bon)  masquerading as the sort of sober, scrupulous, Careerist, Credentialized, gobshites we have come to revere.
A tiger with a 'Hindu' name kills a lunatic with a Muslim name and Kafila's best and brightest immediately play up the young man's Religion, even though it is entirely irrelevant, simply to start babbling on about Spirits and Gods and Fairies and their own worthless researches into the same.
Nobody in the comment section says 'this is a stupid post.' Instead we have a Muslim dude say 'Your duty is to tell vicious lies about Hinduism and Hindutva because a Muslim or Christian or Jew would look stupid telling the same lies because everybody can see the biggest slaughters of Muslims are
1) Fellow Muslims
2) Christian America and its drones (the boy Cameron was born to be a Drone)
3) Jews
4) Buddhists.
Hindus just don't make the cut.
This is why it is vital that women with Hindu names write pseudo-intellectual shite about 'hidden violence' and everybody getting raped and Suttee and Thuggee and so on.

Nor has this topic wholly died out and been forgotten in Kafila's caravanserai of ultracrepidarian crapping on everything. A young guy with a Hindu name who is an Assistant Prof in the U.S has written a longish post, taking on the Muslim dude previously referred to and defending his own faux Foucauldian 'jinneology'. I'm not kidding. Take a gander at this-

Jinnealogy: Everyday life and Islamic theology in post-Partition Delhi

Anand Vivek Taneja

Abstract

#In this article I explore what I call jinnealogy, a theological orientation that emerges when the genealogies of human memory are confronted with the amnesic forces of an obliterated landscape. In stories told in contemporary Delhi, long-lived jinn act as transmitters connecting human beings centuries apart in time. In petitions deposited to jinn-saints in a ruined medieval palace, medieval ideas of justice come together with modern bureaucratic techniques. Both stories and rituals attest to a theological newness intricately entwined with the transformations of the postcolonial city’s spiritual and physical landscapes. Jinn are present in the blank spaces of the map, where the plans of the bureaucracy, the verdicts of the judiciary, and the illegibility of the post-Partition Indian state coincide to attempt vast erasures of the city’s Muslim landscapes. Jinnealogy, the supersession of human chains of memory by the long lives of the jinn, challenges the magical amnesia of the state by bringing up other temporalities, political theologies, and modes of witnessing against the empty, homogenous time of a bureaucratically constituted present.'
Is this guy saying that Muslims in Delhi worship djinns in a manner different from Muslims in Karachi or Lahore or Mombasa? Nope. Djinn worship was worse before 1857. Guys born after that date stop giving credence to djinns in their autobiographies. Yet 'erasures' and 'magical amnesias' and 'bureaucratically constituted present' were a bigger feature of 1857 than 1947. In any case, it is Pakistan, not India, where 'jinneology' really flourishes- a senior Nuclear Scientist wants to harness the powers of jinns- and where the Salafis really have their work cut out. Sure, shite like that goes down amongst the very old and the very poor and the just plain stupid in India but so what? They have no institutional power. India aint a theocracy. You can appeal straight to God coz the State aint claiming to monopolize channels to Him.  You don't have to bribe a djinn or conjure up a demon or a ghost or some such shite to get your work done in despite of the Priestly Bureaucrat.  

Still, Vivek's article is not more egregiously shite than its ilk and, being penned by a guy with a Hindu name, not punishable by fatwa for heresy re. Barzakh. It is merely a silly infidel posing as an initiate but grinning so inanely and cutting such antic capers that no scandal is afforded the rightly guided.
This then is the proper terms of trade between Secular Hinduism and Progressive Islam. The Hindu's job is to make a fool of himself by fastening onto only the superstitious practices condemned by the Salafis while telling vicious lies about Hindutva so as to establish his 'Secular' credentials as an apologist for that uncreated Truth which the Secular order must serve.
Thus the author's 'jinneology' allows him to pretend that the Delhi Waqf board doesn't contain anti-social elements (they kill each other) and anti-national elements (with proper genealogies, not jinneologies, going back to the Muslim League and the demand for a chain of Muslim states linking the 'East & West' wing. No doubt, there are double agents and 'channels of communication' and so on. Still our jinneologist is being disingenuous when he pretends not to know that documents relating to property claims (not deeds, these are claims merely) are precisely what anti-social elements fasten on to back up encroachment on Public and Commonly owned land and buildings- not to mention privately owned buildings. More often than not, disputes of this sort are intra Barelvi or Barelvi Deobandi or Shiah Sunni and it is indeed anti-national to allow communities to get divided and to shed blood over such issues.
Our jinnealogist, no doubt, wants us to imagine that the State is doing something very sinister by not handing out photocopies of contradictory 'sanads'. However, the plain fact is that these documents have no force in law and can also serve to stir up trouble to no good purpose.
The rest of his post is as shite as his paper.

I have left the following helpful comment for our jinniologist who only printed it to call me a homophobe but then censored my answer. Here it is-

'Aamir Mufti’s Karachi Grammar School background and long years as a desi stowaway on American Scholarships warps his views and renders him meaningless in the context Imtiaz is framing.
The truth is that both ‘Hindutva’ & Jamaati identity politics is intended to benefit the provincial bazaari middle class by freeing them of the necessity to conform to purely local and subaltern shibboleths- i.e. the sweeper putting ‘nazar’ on you and granny saying you have to skip your shaka or Rotary club meeting to go perform some humiliating ceremony in a stinking ruin. This has nothing to do with ecology or preserving some mythical apocatastatic folk memory of organic unity such that as Savarkar pointed out prior to the creation of the I.N.C, Hindus and Muslims spent so much time hugging and kissing and cuddling each other on the street that they neglected to purchase the dhania their wives had sent them out to purchase which is why all the womenfolk (with the honorable exception of Rani of Jhansi) got very angry and complained to Queen Victoria Ji who was immediately constituting ‘Divide and Rule’ policy which involved rape of mother earth due to otherwise how to pry apart them continually cuddling Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and what have you?
Queer theory explains how like Colonialism and neo-Liberalism and stuff are like a total cock blocker dude and like how can that not be women’s fault? Which man would rape Environment if the conga line of Hindu-Muslim anal intercourse continued to wind its way down our immemorial streets? Sarmad and Abhay Chand, Bedil and that Khattri boy he cursed, along with numerous djinns and Pirs and Vir Savarkars & Naokhali’s Husseini Pir would at last achieve not the Miri of mere dominance but Hegemony also.
In Vikram Seth’s ‘suitable boy’ the son of a Secular ‘Rafian’ Congress Minister has butt sex with the son of a Muslim Nawab. Later, he stabs him? Why? Was it due to Hindutva or Jamaati politics? Was it because he’d learnt nastaliq? No. It was because of cherchez la femme. The Hindu thought the Muslim was trying to get it on with his mistress whereas in fact, as is right and proper and in accordance with Ruswa, the Muslim nawabzada was in fact trysting with the Pakeezah who, obviously, was his own half-sister and the daughter of the Hindu’s mistress who had been raped by his friend’s father while still little more than a child.
As the Mahatma was wont to say- there is a lesson here all who run can read.
What is the way forward? It is time for action not words. Only Hindu Muslim Conga lines of continual buggery can resist the Indian National Congress- which is the only truly Fascist party that has successfully taken root (due to cock blocking widows like Indira, Sonia etc) on our soil- and of which Modi sarkar is a merely meretricious and vernacular simulacrum.
So far, I have only spoken of the responsibilities of genuine intellectuals and engaged academics like you and Mufti Sahib.
What of ordinary people like me? In the late Nineties and early Noughties, it was our salutary practice to drunk dial Indian Heads of Mission claiming to be Rahul Baba and saying ‘Tell mummy I won’t come home and become PM unless she legalizes it pronto! Ciao, ciao.’
Now what are we to do? Muril Manohar Joshi, we used to say, murli him but good. But this is not a panacea. Modi has done that dirty deed in Varanasi, but what good will it do? Some say the ‘Swacch Bharat’ toilet building program will be the salvation of India. Yes, if toilets are only used for cottaging. But how to prevent women from banging on the door and passing coarse and hurtful remarks about what you are getting up to?
Maqsood and Vijay may have found one way out. But it isn’t for everybody, though I do hope you and Aamir will give it a try. Read a bit of Walter Benjamin together. That will put you in the mood.'

Mithi Mukherjee & the British Freedom Struggle

Back in the Eighteenth Century, two Irishmen, Sheridan and Burke, deeply sensible of the wrongs their motherland had experienced at the hands of greedy English overlords tried to impeach Warren Hastings & by extension the East India Company (which Burke thought a greater evil to the Polity than the Jacobins) but failed miserably. Indeed, things got worse not better in Ireland over the next seventy years. Clearly, Sheridan & Burke are part of the history of Literature but have nothing to do with Indian Political History. Indeed, the Calcutta Supreme Court- as a countervailing power- ceased to be effective precisely because Westminster was shown to be Supreme and Parliament ultimately decided issues relating to India on the basis of a peculiar interpretation of the doctrine of Necessity such that Providence had always already contrived hoary conventions such that the 'governance' type work of the 'Civilian' was minimized leaving him free to maximise Revenue Collection.
1857 created an unprecedented situation. The lazy, overpaid, undisciplined Sepoy (not to mention his Officer
- who could still enrich himself unconscionably through loot)  needed to be taught a lesson. Over the next fifty years, the pay of the Native mercenary went from being double or triple the agricultural wage to something like parity. True, land grants in the Canal Colonies sweetened the pill but the fact is by the 1880's it was clear that the 'Hindu' Punjabi who didn't enlist ultimately ended up better off than his 'Sikh' elder brother. Furthermore, the 'jotedar'- or tenant (actually, the English word farmer originally described precisely this 'kulak' type class)- was taking power from the old 'zamindari' class- i.e. the Permanent Settlement with its equation between 'Magistri' and 'Barristri' was breaking down- and this meant ever increasing contestation of entry into the administrative 'intermediate' class. Unfortunately, the Bengali bhadralok put up a paranoid fight against the Partition of Bengal and this meant that people who had heard of Sheridan and Burke were entirely disintermediated from the political process- though, of course, they were too stupid to see it. Foucauldian methods have no relevance to India. Yes there are textual availability cascades but they gain no purchase precisely because nobody who mattered knew the relevant texts. If this were not the case, any statement about Indian politics would be equally true of Pakistan and Burma and Sri Lanka and so on. Nothing of the sort obtained.
 It was only when its comprador class had lost salience or obligatory passage point status that the Brits suddenly got all Bernard Cohn type Caste constructivist and started searching around for a 'Representative' counterweight to the rising relative affluence of a class that had arisen without having been envisaged or suborned in advance.
Fortunately, for beggarly Brahmins and posh Bengali Bhadralok,  Mahatma Gandhi came along at precisely the right time to start prattling utter shit and run around in diapers and give everybody an enema and beg money from Birlas, Bajaj's and every other sort of Bania on the make.
 But even this could only delay the slide towards everyone getting a PhD in Political Science from Godhulia University and embarking on a criminal career. By 'everyone', I obviously every decent son-of-the soil or Sadhavi of the same.
Bengali bhadralok had to clear out or disguise themselves as JNU jhollawallahs.
 Which brings me to Prof Mithi Mukherjee. Disclaimer- I haven't read her seminal, or menstrual, to be Politically Correct, 'India in the shadows of Empire (sic)' but, in view of my own involvement in the British Freedom Struggle (which itself must be distinguished from UKIP's jihad) I was able to read between the lines and thus present for your reading pleasure my interview with that blushful maiden.

Iyer- Professorji, mutatis mutandis, you argue persuasively for the need to ground our understanding of the current British freedom struggle in the light of the political and legal discourse of successive waves of Colonizers from the Continent. You extend Michel Foucault's analysis to the political domain and deploy the categories of discourse and teleology (explained as goal-specific discourse) to remind readers that polity and political processes in Britain should not be simply understood as if they had no history and as if they originated sui generis. Instead, you maintain, this polity has a political and cultural genealogy, and is a product of discourses and conflicts of the colonial past. My question to you is which volume of Asterix the Gaul does all this feature in?

Prof. Mukherjee- Abhay Chutiya! How dare you? Khabardar! I will fuck you up. I will kill your parents and get your sister raped.

Iyer- (OMG, must have called up Prof. Amaresh Mishra by mistake). Salam Aleikhum, Mishra Sahib. Just called to say 'Eid Mubarak'.

Prof Mishra (for it is he)- Eid was last week, why you are calling middle of night?

Iyer- Sarkar, for true devotees of Dynasty like me, Eid does not occur till we see Rahul's Moon like face.

Prof. Mishra- Rahul who?

Sankaracharya vs Sai Baba

As a Smarta follower of Sankaracharya, should I suffer the installation of an image or icon of Shirdi's Sai Baba in my family 'Puja' room or, more importantly, in the grand temple I have promised to build utilising the proceeds of your kind donations which I hereby solicit?

H.H., the 90 year old, Sankaracharya of Dwarka, who endeared himself to us by delivering a powerful slap to a too well-spoken reporter a few months ago, says- 'No. Sai Baba's mantra was 'Allah Malik'. He was probably a Muslim fakir and ate meat in his youth. Hindus should not worship him.'

This is a perfectly reasonable argument with some alethic or descriptive force. What it isn't, what it can't be, is doxastic or prescriptive.

Why? Adi Sankara broke the rules of Smarta orthodoxy by conducting his mother's obsequies despite having previously renounced the World. Without question, he and his lineage are authoritative (Acharyas) with respect not to Vyavaharika Dharma but its transgressive sublation.

What we have here is the Hindu version of an halachic ordinance- but one that is impredicatively 'halachah v'ien morin kein'.

Slapping reporters is contrary to our Secular Scientific Sittlichkeit, but I'd love to have been that reporter because News is shite, all Views are shite, only that cow is holy whose tail doth at us gadflies deliver a slap that's tight.
In this sense, there is nothing here to drive the news-cycle re. some supposed Sankaracharya vs Sai Baba mega-smackdown pitting trident wielding, cannabis smoking, Congress supporting, naga sadhus (naked monks) against deeply petit bourgeois voters for Modi or saffronized votaries of Uma Bharti.
Indeed, though Sai's deepest devotees at Shirdi saw that donations went up not down because of the Sankaracharya's seemingly senile provocations, they nonetheless, and not from a mere motive of patriotism, decided to just ignore him henceforth.
The Sankaracharya, too, in his reply to Uma Bharti, strikes, not a martial strain, but piteous chord whining about how like Sadguru Adi Sankaracharya don't got no Temples though them Swaminarayans' got plenty and what's more middle class cunts, like the worthless N.R. Iyer writing this, prefer to go to them hyper-clean and family friendly places and put their little pittance into Dualism's hundi coz to quote a Malyallee Christian poet- 'In the heart's collection-box, 'twas Thou dropped the button/We count sheep waking, thus dine not on mutton'.
Sankara, who refers to himself as 'thy Tamil child', is of course- for what is 'of course' is merely autumnal- only capable of creation by being joined to Sharada- thy studious dawn, my drunken dusk- and though the heart is but a tear ripened fruit, we faster yet circumnavigate its route, so thy infinite alterity, Ganesha, elder brother- keep safe our sleep twixt Father & Mother.

Anyway, now I've had my say on the topic of the day as indeed is meet coz, at least, on this street, I'm a leading Hindutva blogger- which is why all the Hindus round here have converted to Islam so as to prevent my drunkenly dropping in on them and trying to shuddify their aged grand-mothers with Ganga Jal & Glenfiddich- which would be cool except them old broads go easy on the Ganga Jal and, ever since the London riots led to the strict enforcement of licensing laws, getting after-hours Whiskey delivered is now as expensive in Acton as it has always been in Ahmedabad- & anyway, the point I'm getting at is that I am now, at least within this parish, the peerless Pundit of anti Muslim polemics, the sole Sanakaracharya of Seriously Sandeep type anti-'Sickular' Scription, not to say Fulham's foulest fuckwit & West Brompton's biggest bore.

Nagarjuna's Madras Curry

When I first came to London, as a carnivorous Carnatic lad, I was compelled to choose between only three types of curry.

 Korma was too mild. Phaal blew your arse off. Madras was in between. 

(Goan Vindaloo is sour-sweet shite and only suitable for spoiled pork)

I wish I could say I always chose Madras, more especially as that's where I'm from. Sadly, I didn't. I'd drink till closing time and then order Phaal at the tandoori. 
However, when it came to Soteriological Epistemologies, I was partial to Buddhism- Jainism was constipating, Hinduism crapulous, but Buddhism was just right especially after I learnt to economise by getting drunk only on an empty stomach and could nurse a hangover with the comforting thought that-

Whatever is dependently co-arisen, 

That is explained to be emptiness. 

That, being a dependent designation, 

Is itself the middle way. 

Nagarjuna (MMK XXIV : 18)

What's more, a mid-morning hair of the dog shows you that Sansara really is Nirvana.

However, in omitting my post pub Curry, I now realize I showed a lack of true Vivek. Curry is important for understanding Nagarjuna. Not Curry, the dish, but Haskell Curry the logician.

Here's an example of Curry's paradox.

'If this sentence is true, then Nagarjuna's Madhyamika is a Madras Curry.'

With a two cornered Logic, with an excluded middle, this sentence is true even  if Nagarjuna was actually from Andhra & cooked Phaal.

A four cornered Logic need not be dialethic if there is some intensional criteria (rather than a conditional) such that two corners have a pragmatics (i.e. an interpretation or uniformly presentable ideal of a certain sort) which can be shown to be empty or asymptotically approach emptiness. However, because Set theory uses extensional definitions, and thus can't distinguish between the recursive and the recursively enumerable, it is condemned to glutty or gappy pragmatics.

Nagarjuna has Scriptural authority to make emptiness intensional in a particular way which side-steps problems caused by Time. Being a brainy guy, he formulates a Curry type tetralemma which omits mention of this Scriptural authority and yet which entails nothing he doesn't assent to.

This annoys the fuck out of the Nyaya pundits but doesn't blow the arse out of ontology and that's why Umasvati and Sankara, in their different ways, do something similar for their own traditions.

But this doesn't mean Nagarjuna is always a Madras Curry.

For incautious Westerner's he's viciously Phaal.

Take the case of Graham Priest, who has proposed an 'Inclosure Schema' to tackle various types of paradoxes, like the sorites. But we know it can't tackle, or even effectively spot, Curry paradoxes. So what could be funnier than watching Priest tackle Nagarjuna because we know in advance that he is chewing on, not Korma or Madras, but blow-your-arse-off Phaal?

Let's play the video-

This is Priest (with Jay Garfield) on Nagarjuna

'The contradictions at the limits of thought have a general and bipartite structure. The first part is an argument to the effect that a certain view, usually about the nature of the limit in question, transcends that limit (cannot be conceived, described, etc.). 
This is Transcendence. The other is an argument to the effect that the view is within the limit-Closure. Often, this argument is a practical one, based on the fact that Closure is demonstrated in the very act of theorizing about the limits. At any rate, together, the pair describe a structure that can conveniently be called an inclosure: a totality, Q and an object, o, such that o both is and is not in Q. On closer analysis, inclosures can be found to have a more detailed structure. At its simplest, the structure is as follows. The inclosure comes with an operator, 8, which, when applied to any suitable subset of Q, gives another object that is in Q (that is, one that is not in the subset in question, but is in Q). Thus, for example, if we are talking about sets of ordinals, 8 might apply to give us the least ordinal not in the set. If we are talking about a set of entities that have been thought about, 8 might give us an entity of which we have not yet thought. The contradiction at the limit arises when 8 is applied to the totality Q itself. For then the application of 8 gives an object that is both within and without Q: the least ordinal greater than all ordinals, or the unthought object...
Central to Nagarjuna's understanding of emptiness as immanent in the conventional world is his doctrine of the emptiness of emptiness. That, we have seen, is what prevents the two truths from collapsing into an appearance/reality or phenomenon/noumenon distinction. But it is also what generates the contradictions characteristic of philosophy at the limits. We have encountered two of these, and have seen that they are intimately connected. The first is a paradox of expressibility: linguistic expression and conceptualization can express only conventional (Vyavaharika) truth; the ultimate truth (Paramaartha)  is that which is inexpressible and that which transcends these limits. So it cannot be expressed or characterized. But we have just done so. The second is a paradox of ontology: all phenomena, Nagarjuna argues, are empty, and so ultimately have no nature (svabhava) . But emptiness is, therefore, the ultimate nature of things. So they both have and lack an ultimate nature. 
That these paradoxes involve Transcendence should be clear. In the first case, there is an explicit claim that the ultimate truth transcends the limits of language and of thought. In the second case, Nagarjuna claims that the character of ultimate reality transcends all natures. That they also involve Closure is also evident. In the first case, the truths are expressed and hence are within the limits of expressibility; and in the second case, the nature is given and hence is within the totality of all natures. 

We'd better stop the video here. I mean it's one thing to muffle one's giggles while watching a guy eat a Phaal curry but quite another to follow him in to the toilet.  More especially as Priest has Jay Garfield in tow and at this point the shite they are spouting is that Nagarjuna was headed out of Buddhism into a supposedly rational Dialethia without any soteriological features. This is as bad as David Kalupahana's attempt to turn Nagarjuna into a William James type pragmatic or Ewing Chinn's attempt to turn him into John Dewey. Why not just say, Nagarjuna was headed towards a career as a singing waiter at an Elvis themed Diner soon to be opening in suburban Toledo?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not whining about them Whiteys stealing our Tribal totem pole- not only are they welcome to it, they will also preserve it better than we would. On the contrary, I'm saying don't pretend your Philosophy campus is built over an old Indian's burial ground. And definitely don't order Nagarjuna's Curry coz it aint Madhyamika Madras but blow-your-arse-off Phaal.

There are plenty of pious Western Buddhists who do the Meditation and who work for Universal Welfare and so on. But they understand Buddhism is a Religion and have a Religious attitude towards it. Certainly, Buddhism has what we call Philosophy. But it isn't Psilosophy because even in the form of Nagarjuna's Curry it isn't shite. Not yet.

Buddhism can have a concept of the limit as antarabhava or (Tibetan) bardo, similar to Ibn Arabi's barzakh. This, by itself means that it can have a dynamic conception of substance similar to Jain parinami dhravya. However, if it also has kshanikavada- i.e. a doctrine of momentariness- then the dynamics are stalemated and instead you have spatial entanglement- i.e. dependent origination, which Nagarjuna defines as svabhava emptiness, but we also know- on the authority of the Buddha- that there can be a 'cetana' (intentionality) such that the entanglement is severed. Since Buddhism is radically ontologically dysphoric, this is the aim of meditation and study. Followers of Nagarjuna thus hold that 'at the limit' both instantaneous enlightenment (when sansara becomes identical with nirvana) and Bodhisattvahood are possible.
Given that all this is the case, Priest's dialethia looks pretty silly. What Nagarjuna has done is show that there is an intensional pragmatics consistent with Buddha's all manumitting message- 'Truth is One. There is no second'

Asad Q Ahmed & Sheldon Pollock's Bollocks

Asar Q Ahmed is a young Professor of Arabic at Berkeley. Though his first degree was from Yale, the bastard speaks Urdu with a correct accent. I find this very shocking and totally unacceptable. What is the point of sending our young people to elite institutions abroad if they can't even mispronounce their own names- let alone weird Dravidian cognomens like 'Raghunathananananaan'?
Okay, maybe the fellow was born in the States. Still, he should show some basic respect for Indian culture innit?
On the other hand, his views are as stupid as any of our own JNU jholawallah types as is evidenced by this article in which, apropos of the decline of Islamic Science, he says-

 In my own work, I have discovered that a number of factors played a role in bringing about a collapse of disciplines like philosophy, astronomy, and medicine.  I mention only a few of them here; the more complete picture must await further research. 

For example, the religious scholars, who were trained in a curriculum with a high dose of rationalism, faced an entirely transformed and impoverished system of princely patronage, staring at them in the middle of the nineteenth century.  Many of the rationalist scholars belonged to the establishment; they not only sat as judges in the courts or passed fatwas, but they also served as court poets, tax collectors, diplomats, personal physicians, and cartographers.  With the rise of the British Raj and the collapse of the institutions that sustained them, many of these scholars became disenfranchised and the vacuum was increasingly filled by a class of popular preachers, trained in a very different curriculum and connected with an emergent trans-regional reformist network of scholars. 

Then at least in the context of South Asia, another factor for the decline in the rationalist disciplines was the growth of Urdu as the primary literary language among Muslims.  Prior to this period, practically every single text in the rationalist sciences was written in Arabic (and sometimes in Persian).  These two languages contained within them an advanced technical vocabulary that had developed over the longue duree of rationalist disciplines.  With the loss of languages and the lack of systematic investment in translations into Urdu, the rigor of the rationalist disciplines was also compromised, since the technical baggage of the disciplines was lost with the language that carried it. 

Finally, one may mention that, though counterintuitive, the introduction and growth of print technology had a negative impact on rationalism as well. Prior to the growth of this technology, Muslim scholars regularly wrote commentaries and glosses on various texts of the rationalist disciplines by hand and in the margins of manuscripts.  This produced a diachronic and synchronic tradition of an internal dialectic with texts that was directly responsible for progress within a discipline.  The introduction of print technology fundamentally changed the way one did scholarship in the context of the madrasa.  There were no manuscripts and margins, no reproduction and living engagement with a tradition of argumentation.

Ahmed is making 3 mistakes
1) The British Raj expanded opportunities for Arabic and Persian scholars. The collapse of the Mughal Empire and successive invasions and periods of anarchy did adversely affect Islamic scholarship but the British Raj was a stabilizing factor. The Mutiny, no doubt, was a catastrophe but the British continued to patronize Islamic scholarship. In any case, Hyderabad was able to absorb many refugees from Delhi.

The real cause of the relative decline in Islamic Rationalism was that Religion was not divorced from Law. The autonomy of Secular lawyers in the West set the pattern for autonomous Science scholarship. The fact that the learned man in Islam combined various different functions- writing poetry, casting horoscopes, giving medical advice, acting as judge/tax collector- is what weakened Islamic rational scholarship. Specialization is the key to the pursuit of excellence in any empirico-rational discipline. One may say this militates against 'Wisdom' as opposed to 'Knowledge' or that it inculcates 'Materialism' but it is the only path to progress. We may admire Goethe's (or Schopenhauer's) Scientific interests but we must also admit they were shite. Strindberg, who learnt Chinese and Sanskrit, also believed in his own alchemical theories. Great dramatist, shite scientist.
The reason traditional Qazis and Muftis and Unani doctors fell behind was not because the curriculum at the Madrasas changed but because everybody had come to realize that they were shite. Smart kids didn't want to study that shite. BECAUSE IT WAS SHITE. Nothing to do with 'Orientalism' or some fucking false binary. Unani medicine, like Ayurvedic medicine, made you ill. The fatwas of the Qazis and Muftis contradicted each other and themselves. Everybody resorted to declaring their opponent an apostate more especially because the idiocy of Muhammadiya ideology created status competition between scholarly families- like that of Khwaja Mir Dard.  Everyone wanted to prove that they were descended from a purer and holier lineage and thus themselves represented the best chance for Islam to heal itself and regain its lost glory.
Maulana Azad had a traditional education. He was a massive fuckwit. Kasturba Gandhi ended up cooking mutton chops for him. In his last years he was drunk off his head.
2) The development of Urdu- as with any other mother tongue language- was good for raising Educational standards and spreading empirico-critical thinking. It began before the British came and it continued after they left. The British insisted that students also study a Classical language. They invested a lot in translating Classical works into the mother tongue- thus enriching the vocabulary. Muslims, in any case, would learn Arabic to read the Quran Sharif. There is no evidence that they stopped doing so and started reciting prayers in Urdu. Even Hindu lawyers and administrators learnt Arabic so as to apply Muslim law.
Consider the case of Iqbal. He studied in British Schools and Colleges. He wrote in Persian even though he did not have an idiomatic command of it.
Prof. Ahmed must be completely mad to say that mother tongue literacy and instruction could adversely impact Science amongst Muslims. If traditional medicine and astronomy and so on declined it was because the Western product was greatly superior. Nothing to do with 'Orientalism' or evil White people or deluded darkies at all.
3) Ahmed says printing books was bad for Islamic Science. This is batshit crazy. Printed books are much cheaper than hand-written books. Still, they were expensive. Teachers gave lectures and students took notes. In the process, all the comments and comments on comments and comments on comments on comments got recorded.
Why is Ahmed saying such stupid things? The answer is that he's done a bit of research during the course of which he noticed that some old scholar wrote something in the margin of the manuscript of another old scholar. Aha! says Ahmed. How interesting! This doesn't happen on my Amazon Kindle! It's like the scholars could email each other across the centuries! Cool!
But it isn't really cool at all, but a common practice. When I was young, the books at the library had the sort of comments and comments on comments that Ahmed is talking about. The reason was that books were expensive. Indian libraries couldn't afford to get the latest editions of foreign texts. So people updated these precious volumes by hand. Printing made it easier to do this sort of thing because printed books had wider margins (at least in those days) and bigger typefaces. Kids like me weren't allowed to write on a book- but learned people were encouraged to do so.

Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy is an actual scientist who lives in Pakistan. He was a friend of the late Nobel laureate Abdus Salam. Hoodbhoy mocks Ghazalli's 'Tahafut' and says that the Occassionalist ideology it promotes discourages Scientific inquiry. Hoodbhoy is right.  Leibnizian occassionalist casuistry added nothing to Scientific Research and Voltaire laughed it out of the Academy. Nobody laughed Ghazalli's Tahafut out of Islam. Poor old Averroes wasn't smart enough and, crucially, his weapon wasn't laughter. Ahmed says, 'look, Ghazalli's Occassionalism can be neutral w.r.t Science. But, it wasn't. That's a historical fact. Ahmed is supposed to be a historian. Let us look at his justification for rejecting 'the false binary of a Golden Age in Islamic Science'.
'The world that came after al-Ghazali, this same attitude towards reason continued to flourish - authors such as Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274), Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (d. 1311), Adud al-Din al-Iji (d. 1355) , al-Sayyid al-Sharif al-Jurjani (d. 1413), and Muhibballah al-Bihari(d. 1707) are a few among an innumerable host that come to mind.  In fields ranging from astronomy to metaphysics and well into the early twentieth century, Muslim scholars generally took the attitude that reason provided scientific models for understanding the universe and that these models were conceptually and mathematically real, though one could not necessarily prove the validity of one over another.  In other words, they adopted precisely the kind of attitude toward the scientific enterprise that has been embraced and consistently modified in the western tradition since David Hume (d. 1776), who, incidentally, also raised important questions about the metaphysical commitments in one’s assumption of causality and in one’s adherence to methods of induction.  A rather large number of works from the period after al-Ghazali explicitly state that scientific investigations do no harm to one’s creed.'

Why does Ahmed mention al Bihari? He did no original scientific work but was just  a jurist. What about al Jurjani? He wanted to do original work but couldn't because the teachers were too old or too far away. Why? Well the real reason for the end of 'Islam's golden age' was that the Mongols and Turks had taken power. Some Muslim cities never recovered. Tusi, famous now not as a Scientist but for his work on Ethics, is also infamous for his role in the the Mongol debacle. Al-Ijji is still quoted for his attacks on the 'hashish eating' Ibn Arabi. What was his great scientific accomplishment? Al Nafisi might be more to the point but he was a bigoted defender of the doctrine of bodily resurrection, so Ahmed doesn't mention him. Tusi and Shirazi could have worked with the Mongols to create an autonomous Scientific tradition totally separated from Religion. They chose not to do so. Shirazi, like many others, took the disorders of his age as evidence that Truth was to be found in devotional piety of the sort espoused by Rumi. There is no shame in that. What is bizarre is for a Western historian to quote Tusi and Shirazi and Jurjani as continuing a Scientific tradition when the truth is they and their followers retreated from it. Yes they conserved what was already seen as the fruits of a vanished golden age. But this was not some Orientalist fable of Nineteenth Century invention- it was their own empirical finding, or existential choice. The same thing happened in other traditions.which lost confidence by reason of invasion and foreign domination.
In Medicine, Islam currently allows the dissection of cadavers for Scientific research. However, not one single one of the people Ahmed mentions, despite being jurists, ever licensed this by their own fatwas. They conserved the work of their saintly forbears as a religious duty. They wouldn't chance their own salvation by procuring corpses to cut up to further their researches.Why? They didn't feel Science was truly autonomous in the way that Military technology was accepted to be. It's a bad thing for Science if stupid priests learn a little medieval Astronomy or Medicine in their seminaries. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or quit the Pierian spring.

Ahmed isn't a bad guy. He speaks up for the Ahmadiyas at a time when it is dangerous to do so- even in India. Why is he writing shit? The answer, of course, is that he's been reading Sheldon Pollock's bollocks.

'Let me end this essay with a statement about why the Golden Age vs. Dark Age narrative came to exist in the first place, without the analysis of the vast body of literature from the so-called Dark Ages; and let me also supply a statement about why the narrative still persists and will likely survive in the future, despite what we academics share with the world. 

Here my own words cannot match the eloquence and directness of Sheldon Pollock, the Arvindh Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University.  In an essay on Indian intellectual history, “Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia,” he writes:

“With respect to science and scholarship, however, especially during this critical early modern period, in-depth research in most disciplines is virtually non-existent…  whole libraries of manuscripts… remain unread today.  The factors contributing to this indifference would be worth weighing with care.  One is certainly the diminished capacity of scholars today to actually read these materials, one of the most disturbing, if little-remarked legacies of colonialism and modernization.  But there are other factors.  These include the old Orientalist-Romantic credo that the importance of any Indian artifact or text or form of thought is directly proportional to its antiquity…  Equally important is the colonial-era narrative of Indian decline and fall before 1800, so central to the ideology of British imperialism and its civilizing, modernizing mission… one salient example… is the disdain with which the remarkable achievements of Hindi literature and literary science…  were dismissed by colonized Indian intellectuals no less than by their colonial masters” (emphasis mine).

The narrative began as colonial Orientalist lore and has taken hold as a kind of neo-Orientalism among individuals who have lost access to their past.  Given this, I am afraid that Muslims really have one of two choices:  they may continue to perpetuate a hackneyed and essentialist Orientalist narrative, misdiagnose the problem, and even enable all kinds of extremists with the power of a fanciful story. 

Or they may rediscover their lost languages, produce historians who would penetrate the sources, and cultivate philosophers who would go beyond simple binaries and take control of the discourse in a sincere and sophisticated manner.  Then perhaps they may be able to revise their received histories and find some real solutions to a complex situation.

Either Islam is the same as Hinduism or it is different. If it is different, how can it suffer from the same malady as Hinduism? Colonialism? But, under the Brits, the Hindus shook off their (far worse) inherited stupidity and embraced Science. Amazingly, even the stupidest and most worthless amongst them- I refer of course to people of my own Brahmin caste- overtook the Muslims in education and the professions. Being terrible hypocrites, no doubt they pretend that their ancestors were all Scientists or Math or Computing mavens but that's only because they don't drink enough whiskey to get properly beaten up by their wives or girl friends. Interestingly, Hindu Schools- like the D.A.V or Ramakrishna Mission Schools- at one time could have gone down an anti-Science route. However, parents wanted Science subjects to gain prominence and Sanskrit type shite to be confined to Middle School. Pollock thinks this a bad thing. He is wrong. Sanskrit is easy. Middle aged people are going to rediscover it anyway. The problem Pollock mentions- viz. untranslated manuscripts- only exists because Indian Liberal Arts professors are a bunch of illiterate hoodlums who are bound to try to eat or smoke or wipe their arses on sacred palm leaf manuscripts. Everyone else can read that shite but has the good sense to see that it's mainly shite.

 Ahmed quotes Pollock though he is a crypto-Hindutva nutjob for whom Hinduism's 'dark ages' coincide with Turkish rule. But Turks turned Muslim. They were smart. They were powerful- so what happened? Well, Timur Kuran, a Turkish economist, gives us part of the answer but Ahmed isn't interested in Kuran because the academic availability cascade from which he can personally most profit is of the Pollock Bollocks type.

Gandhi was a nut-job. He wanted to believe in Ayurveda- which prescribes Arsenic and Mercury but bans milk- and so he tried Ayurveda till it made him very very sick. Then he stopped. That's also the story about Islamic science and Hindu science and Japanese science and Taoist science and Mayan science and Voodoo Science and so on. People switch from stuff which is worthless to stuff which is slightly less worthless. They may talk shite- and shite is always talked- but it's just 'preference falsification' and munafiqat is all it is.

Ahmed is worried about 'narratives'. Why? We all know that people tell stupid stories. We also know that Science is about laboratories and maths and complicated stuff of that sort. A conquered or deeply corrupt country isn't going to have a lot of laboratories or Professors who can actually do Math or understand complicated stuff. It is going to have people like Ahmed whose vaunted scholarship has only had the effect of robbing him of his common sense and turning him into a whining little gobshite who thinks some Dead White Males, a hundred and fifty years ago, told a story which by some strange magic continues to keep his people stupid and backward even now.

What's next Ahmed? Will you be the Vishva Adluri of Islam?