Andrew Nicholson's 'Unifying Hinduism'- a Nikal Seyni critique.

As a devout Nikal Seyni faqir, I feel it my duty to point out, right at the outset of my review of 'Unifying Hinduism', that Prof. Andrew J Nicholson is not the current avatar of Brigadier John Nicholson, avenger of the Mutiny, and so though this young Professor chastises the Subaltern or Sepoy or plain Silly Scholars who claimed that the Brits invented Hinduism a couple of Centuries ago, he does not do it by strapping those beggarly rebels against sweet Reason to the mouths of canons and blowing them to pieces- surely the kindest way of dealing with them- instead, he puts forward the equally ludicrous notion that actually some medieval Pandit accidentally unified Hinduism while compiling  a doxology or practising dialectics or ticking off his dhobi or some other such routine activity, and this happened a couple of centuries before British rule got off the ground. Why does Nicholson have to make this absurd claim? Well, if he admitted that the Gita already shows Samkhya and Yoga darshanas as being viewed as close to or complementary with Advaita then he pretty much admits the Hindutva 'Sanaatan Dharma' case. Indeed, since Buddhism and Jainism aren't really nastika in that both, from the earliest times, affirmed a relationship with the Rg Veda and moreover attracted a large number of Brahmin converts right from the outset, Nicholson's entire argument falls apart. Indeed, the material he presents supports only the common sense Hindutva view- viz. intellect applied to sectarian polemics is using one's brain as a bedpan- insanitary but not obligatory,
Nicholson's hero, Vijnanabhikshu, maintains a demarcation between Hinduism as against Buddhism and Jainism- but this could be because, under Muslim rule, Buddhism had disappeared and popular Jain religion was scarcely flourishing in his part of India. Prior to Muslim rule there had been many occasions, as is attested by Sanskrit and Tamil and Kannada literature, when Hindutva type Hinduism was the rule- i.e. it was a big tent affair- and sectarian polemics was a sort of hilarious joke or onerous chore Society imposed upon Soteriology so as to enliven its Saturnalia.
Nicholson tells us that prior to the 12th Century, many 'Hindu' savants devoted themselves to controverting the doctrines of rival sects. He does not tell us that this was considered very very funny and that in so far as the thing had a political dimension, or actual Sociological impact, the real question was which shrine or Saint had greater magical power or which dynasty was on the rise and which entering decline.
If it were really true that, prior to the 12th Century, there was no understanding that 'Hindu' thinkers shared a common orthodoxy, or at least had commonalities sufficient to differentiate themselves from non Hindus, then -clearly- it is only the Muslim invasion which is being remarked on (but only by implication coz otherwise one might be labelled a vulgar Islamophobe) because Jainism and Buddhism and Ajivika religion permitted dual loyalty- one could be an orthodox Brahmin or whatever and also a Jain shravak or a Buddhist lay disciple or whatever.  In other words, we can have confidence in advance that Nicholson is going to have to stack the deck in order to get the result he wants- viz. that something happened in 'intellectual history' which had nothing to do with Muslims but which 'unified Hinduism' anyway. Furthermore, we can predict how Nicholson will stack the deck based on our knowledge of the academic availability cascades of the last twenty or thirty years. To start off with, some pretty flakey whackjobs- like Paul Hacker, whom I personally drove out of Bonn in 1963 by reason of my ultra Hindu 'inclusivist' zeal to shit and piss on every resident of that small town- will get air-time simply so as to erect a straw-man purvapaksha- then, aberrant scholastics like Kumarila are going to have their importance totally overstated. For sure, foolish memes about Mimamsa and Nyaya- especially navya nyaya- are going to be repeated, as if that shite meant anything even to its own practitioners; the mainstream Jaina tradition will be ignored in favour of one or two tendentious Sanskrit belles lettrists; Sheldon Pollock's bollocks will be genuflected to- tatte utana we say in Hindi- and some perhaps sound enough PhD research is going to be stretched out into a real sketchy appearance of paradigm busting by means of a sort of self-willed cultural blindness that mimics but can't compete with that of asli head-up-one's-own arse tradition of authentic Indian scholarship.
Thus Nicholson, naively, will tell us that that he has discovered that at some point in time every sect has reckoned members of every other sect will burn in hell fire unless they convert immediately according to some complicated ritual. This is supposed to prove Hinduism wasn't unified. The trouble is the Indians already had the notion that everybody spends at least a few eternities in various Hells and Heavens not to mention countless births as bigoted upholders of the rival creed etc, etc. But karma working over infinite Time means that apparently conflicting ontologies- such as that of Umasvati, Nagarjuna and Sankara- cash out as the same thing because it turns out that all the eternities in Hell, Heaven and so on last less than a blink of an eye compared to the truly eternal eternity of kevalya/nirvana/mukti.
Nicholson, bless his cotton socks, plays the ingenue biting the finger of amazement that his hero found commonalities between totally distinct systems. But these systems were only distinct to scholars- i.e. people Indians have always recognized as utter imbeciles. This is not to say Vijnanabhikshu isn't interesting or rewarding to read. He is, but as a means of enriching our reading of contemporary riti poets and vice versa coz that kinda thing sure feeds bhakti and bhakti verily is bliss- well at least the kind of bliss that don't fast track you to type 2 diabetes.
One thing that always puzzled me was the claimed rediscovery of a living Samkhya tradition in Bengal back in the 1920's (if I recall correctly). I've got a Hindi book purporting to be from that Ashram on my shelf and always wondered whether maybe this Samkhya school is actually descended- or fabricated-  from Vijnanbhikshu, some of whose works were published in the Nineteenth Century.
Anyroad, nothing greatly wrong with the content of Nicholson's book that I could see. My feeling is that its faux naive problematization is just the two drink, intellectual dishonesty, minimum for getting into Academic Publishing's Comedy Club these days. This is Nicholson's first book- so there's hope yet is what I'm saying. Or perhaps that's just my own naive faith in the Nikal Seyni eschaton in which young Andrew is transfigured into the avenging Angel who finally puts the smackdown on, if not Michael Witzel or Sheldon Pollock, then at least Jeffry Kripal or  Purushottam Billimoria. Wendy O'Doniger, however, is off limits. But for her warning that the South Indian Brahmin female bites off the penis of her consort before beheading him, I might have had an arranged marriage myself. Not that Iyer parents are too niggardly to hire a nice electron microscope for my bride to detect my penis on the honeymoon night- it's just I don't believe in dowry system- that's all.

Silly Billimoria & his hilarious Hermeneutics

Is dialogue a good thing? Gadamer's hermeneutic shtick gained purchase in the Sixties coz, sure, dialogue sounds like a good thing- it's caring sharing and everybody holding hands and being deeply deeply empathetic and continually offering gratuitous rape counselling to each other. But, dialogue isn't actually a good thing. Talking to a shit-head is bad enough. Listening to him is worse. 'Limited arbitrage'- gossip- 'marking services'- is what makes Language useful. It gives you the option of saying- 'well, mustn't monopolize you. Gotta mingle. See you round shithead (unless I see you first).'

In contrast, dialogues- like the dialogues of Plato or the Upanishads or whatever- are a fucking shite-fest. Either it's all a straightforward con- a business of having a card forced on you- or it's a marriage- without the penny pinching and  nappy changing but your ass sure gets sore real fast all the same.

Still, there is something worse than dialogue and that is what Indian scholars in the Mehta, Matilal, Spivak, Billimoria tradition are guilty of. What is it? Essentially, it is shitting in everybody's shoe while pretending you were actually out burning buses or doing something else equally progressive.

This is Billimoria on the Brahman.

 'I wish to conclude this essay with a brief discussion of the possible areas of application of the creative hermeneutic of suspicion especially in the non-Western contexts. The examples I draw upon take in seriously both the hermeneutic of tradition and the critique of ideology, which becomes paradigmatic in post-colonial critiques of Western ethnocentrism and other (more indigenist) kinds of authoritarial elitism. To take up the latter first, one could argue that the impersonal, abstract, ahistorical, atemporal concept of 'Brahman' much dear to Vedanta philosophy is a 'dead' metaphor, in as much as it is grounded in eidos, logos , and ousia and therefore has its life or sustaining significance entirely within the discourse of metaphysics (as Heidegger would say of all grand metaphors of the subject). A culture or rather ideology of brahmanical hegemony and renunciative restrain bordering on the obsessive denial of the lived experience, was built or idealised on the basis of this dominant and powerful transcendental signifier. 

Its social praxis legitimated the rule of the priest, a strident and pervasive caste hierarchy, marginalisation of women, the under-class and foreigners as others. A wondrous evocation that may have arisen in the poetic musings of the Vedic (nomadic Aryan) bards, which in the altar of later Vedic sacrificial fire is transmuted into a substantive being (in the disguise of language), and which finally under the anvil of speculative philosophy ascends to assume the throne on highest rungs of metaphysics. Thus Brahman stands to be destructured, dismantled, disseminated (WTF?) , deconstructed by being subjected to the same rigours of the hermeneutic of suspicion and critical ideology as Ricoeur has suggested. It may then be possible to recover the latent and to reanimate the tradition in more creative ways than has occurred either through the revivalism of neo-Vedanta or the Romanticism of 19th century philological Indology. (Bilimoria, 1997a).

So, children, what have we learned today? The learned Professor has told us that 'the Brahman is a dead metaphor' and that it was used to shore up the power of priest-craft and to keep women and the underclass in their place. The same thing could be said about 'God', 'Allah', 'Tao', Justice, Beauty, Education, Wisdom, Democracy, Racial Purity, Communism, Capitalism, Biscuits, TV, Idli Sambar, Jennifer Aniston, Breakfast, Cars, Disco dancing, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and everything else in the Universe.
The fact is, what the Twentieth Century did was the reverse of Heidegger's 'Europeanization of the Earth'- Europe was shown up as a festering bog of deeply provincial pedants who wouldn't play nice till America and Russia divided up the continent between them and put those cunts back in their playpen.
True, some fucking assholes unfit for the Hard Sciences participated in a Credentializing Ponzi scheme under the rubric of 'Hermeneutics' or other such shite- not that J.L Mehta quite fits the bill, but then his people were illiterate dehatis so his getting the hots for Heidegger was like a return of the repressed dehati in him- the instinct to take a crap on the open highway, or Holwege, rather than use a flush loo- but, so what? Far larger numbers of people were travelling in the other direction to get their genitalia stroked by bogus Babas and pay handsomely for the privilege.
 'Limited arbitrage'- not 'grand narratives'- & 'bounded signalling'- not a totalizing hermeneutic- are the engine of Social change. Talk of 'intellectual genealogy' is foolish when considering convergent evolution. Indeed, when coupled with bogus breast beating of a emasculating Leftie sort, the whole exercise stinks to high Heaven.

 Prof. Billimoria says that a creative 'hermeneutic of suspicion' may help recover the latent and reanimate the (Advaitic) tradition in a different way. How? The baby was thrown out with the bathwater- what more harm is there left to do?

 The answer, of course, is that a proper Habermasian deconstruction of Ricoeur as self sodomization of the eye sockets of class enemies during an ongoing beheading with a sickle or hoe or other agricultural implement constitutes a creative re-reading of Vedas  just as fucked as stealing everything in sight, talking shite, and fondling the genitalia of all and sundry.

 However, Billimoria isn't sufficiently creative to see this. Instead he writes-  The last remark brings me the second example. The large body of texts produced and translated in Europe since around the 16th century on the cultures prevalent, literature, and peoples inhabiting the vast land mass to the east and south-east of Europe have nowadays been recognised to be suffused with "orientalism". This marks a peculiar hermeneutical act which the West ingressed upon the East. More specifically, the discourse of Orientalism underscores the wilful romantic construct of the East (the Orient or Asia) in the imagination of the West as Europe's "other", and destined to be converted, civilised and controlled by the burgeoning Western religious, economic and political might. But if we leave out any part, conscious or complicitous, involved in the formation of the text or the supplemental discourse we could be doing grave "epistemic violence" to the text. An incisive judgment along these lines has, for instance, been said of the 19th century British Raj's novel statutory judgment on sati, the Indian practice of widow burning, as constituting a legal "crime", which however failed to register the social motivations of the Hindu patriarchal order that perpetrated this culturally aberrant practice for so long. (Spivak). It is not as though such a censor was not possible within the Hindu and Pan-Indian tradition itself; indeed, there was evidence in traditional moral texts against such practices and indigenous leaders had rallied against the act on the grounds that sati violated women's rights: but is that tantamount to a criminal act under English Common Law? (see, Bilimoria, 1997b)
The story about Suttee was well understood by everybody except people like Billimoria. Essentially, wasteful status competition- burning widows rather than selling them to a brothel- was in danger of becoming normative so it was in everybody's interest to get the State to introduce a license system. This is Coasian Law & Econ 101. As for the English Common Law- it didn't ingress by a hermeneutic act but established itself by right of conquest.  To talk of epistemic violence is silly. Hitler did not do epistemic violence to the Torah- he killed Jews. The Colonial powers did not do epistemic violence to natives- they conquered them and then beat them or shot them if they got out of hand. No doubt they said unpleasant things as they were doing it but what was objectionable about this wasn't 'Orientalism' but the fact that they were beating and shooting people in a manner which turned their own Social rate of return on Capital negative.

By focussing on the discourse of Orientalism we understand better the Occidental-West, its logocentrism, and its failure to bring about genuine dialogue with the East and generate authentic methods for reading, translating and understanding the "other". The same can be said about the early British settlers judgment that the colonies of terra australis were not inhabited by any people (thus rendered as terra nullius) because the nomadic native Aborigines appeared not to have cultivated the land or invested any labour in it or asserted an instrumental interest in it. It took a Ernie Mabo to challenge this "interpretation" of another tradition in place. This massive legal and political prejudice, in the Gadamarian sense, is finally turned back on the incoming tradition for its own self-reflection, and to demonstrate that it misjudged "interest" in individualistic-utilitarian rather than in communicative-communitarian terms; and it perhaps paves the way for corrective reparation or "Reconciliation" of First and Second-Third Nations' respective claims.

 Once again, it is Coasian Law & Econ which explains why and how property rights get redistributed- nowt to do with some fuckwit Professors getting all dialogic up each others' assholes.
Third World studies and feminist movements more widely have capitalised on such insights and trans-boundary critiques, which was given a heavy political emphasis by Foucault's theorising premised on the generalisation that all knowledge is inextricably linked with power (and power is invariably corrupting). They have advocated, and developed methods for a re-reading and "de-construction" therefore of much of the past history and "civilising" or literary productions, translatory enactments, etc. resulting from the basically liberal-individualistic, imperial and patriarchy-propelled intrusions into the lives of women, slaves, marginalised groups, the "other", the outcastes, and the colonised subjects, both within the history of Western-European societies but more damagingly in various countries throughout the world. History might be more authentic and closer to the truth were its voices to emerge, as it were, "from below" rather than from the pens of the privileged, the elite, the experts, and bow-tied academic researchers who have a vested interest (unwittingly perhaps) in perpetuating certain myths — "paradigm" — of the dominant cultural force in a society or tradition at large. The requisite hermeneutics for (re-)writing history from below has been technically popularised by South Asian radical social theorists as the "Subaltern" stance or voices of the submerged subject-positions.

Last but not least, cross-cultural philosophers of religion have claimed that the Western invention of the sub-discipline or discourse of philosophy of religion with its expectations of a solid, irrefutable and logically profound "proof" (or, for that matter, "disproof") of the existence of God has triggered much unnecessary anguish, mimicery, and irreparable damage among non-Western, non-Christian peoples. (Bilimoria 1996b) When directed at the "other" this trenchant discourse has in part also helped erode local traditions, folk understandings, indigenous hermeneutics, law and social wisdom developed over many centuries in non-Western religious cultures by which they have sustained themselves. Such and more sophisticated critical analyses have arisen in recent years from movements in philosophy and the human sciences, particularly from Europe and now increasingly influential in North America, India, and Australasia.
Eddie (not Ernie) Mabo was an Australian man whose deep study of Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas et al led him to challenge the notion that native owned land was a 'terra nullius'. Thanks to great European scholars- who had already taken similar measures with respect to their own disenfranchised peoples- Australian law was changed so as to give the natives back their land. 
Actually, that's not what happened at all. The Europeans never did do anything for their own disenfranchised though once they had the shite beaten out of them they did pay some small reparation to Israel. Eddie Mabo was a gardener who got talking to some lawyers who brought a test case under Australian Common Law and that's how native land rights were vindicated. No fucking European cunts were involved at any stage. Not philosophers but lawyers and the Common Law tradition triumphed.
 Similarly in India, the Subaltern Studies gobshites & Post Colonial cunt-queefers achieved absolutely nothing. Lawyers and Accountants and Economists and good old fashioned parish pump politics, on the other hand, aren't all bollocks.

  So what is the moral of this story, children? Hermeneutics is shite . Books may or may not be shite in themselves but Hermeneutics is a turd which gets its grubby prints over all it reads. 
  Hermeneutics may claim that books are all a bunch of stupid lies and only exist to fuck over poor people but that's only because Professors have to continue to write books, and since dark skinned Professors wot are crap at thinking got to whine about how being black is so-ooo horrible, this is the sort of shite they are gonna write.

  Oddly enough this message is perfectly in conformity with Advaita. The Vyadha Gita teaches us that women and low castes should constantly tell high caste male Pundits to go fuck themselves because they are all a bunch of worthless cunts. Yet the Vyadha Gita was revealed to a King- that too one who was the incarnation of Dharma. The corollary is not far to seek. Fuck the Professors. 
  Mind it kindly.

Flatulence as Philosophy- Purushotam Bilimoria on Kant,Matilal & Spivak

This is a link to a paper by Prof. Bilimoria which makes the astounding claim that Gayatri Spivak can throw some light on Matilal's relationship with Kant. Spivak  has pointed out in a recent book that Prof. Matilal, in his final days, suffered from a serious medical condition which caused flatulence and that, to ease his embarrassment, she had quoted Derrida- 'Ontology can't lay hold of a fart'- a remark whose fatuity lies in demonstrating that its subject does nothing else- but, regrettably, Bilimoria hasn't approached his topic from this angle- one singularly fecund for Socioproctology- but rather from something he claims to be a ' genuine critique of the rational'- this in the context of the 'Post Colonial Subject'- such a critique being, he assures us, 'Spivak's gift.'

Before wading into Bilimoria's essay, let me first say that there was another female Professor at Columbia, Graciella Chichilnisky, who addressed the same issue and resolved it once and for all by using innovative mathematical techniques. Essentially, a concept of 'limited arbitrage'- i.e. constrained preference diversity as in Amos 3.3- 'can 2 walk together except they be agreed?' - is sufficient to clarify all the so called 'aporias' of Reason dating back to Hegel's career as a Calculus instructor or Kant's senile failure to engage with the drunkard, but solid Math student, Solomon Maimon.
Chichilnisky, an Argentinian Jew who, quite unforgivably, lacked a penis, studied the North South problem as an engaged intellectual. Because she was five types of Smart, she cracked the Math and published her solutions. Mediocre men hated her but great men, like Ken Arrow, but also Amartya Sen, recognized her genius. Perhaps, Cambridge, England, would have been more hospitable to her but the fact remains that her results, at least in this respect, have stood up to scrutiny and though she may not get a Nobel, she has prevailed.
Essentially, Chichilnisky's work shifts the focus to preference diversity- too much of it and there is no Economics, no Literature, no prescriptivity in 'Rational' Ethics or 'Rational Historicism'- indeed, those projects are empty. Think about it for a moment. If all human beings were completely different from each other in terms of what they wanted or how they thought or what linguistic collocations appealed or felt 'natural' to them, then there would be no Commerce, no Society, no meaningful interchange. Man would be a feral animal interacting according to some Evolutionarily Stable Ethology to which he himself had no cognitive access. Granted, this describes almost everything about my own inwardness- and it may be the vast majority of people out there are like me in being what modern Philosophy of Mind calls 'p-zombies' (in other words, beings who look like or even sound like 'real' people, but who in fact are no such thing)- but Commerce & Law, if not Literature & Ethics, do exist and supervene on the Zombie Apocalypse of my Species Being. It may be that I don't actually do 'limited arbitrage' myself- in the quod nescis quo modo fiat, non facis sense (i.e. I don't know what I'm doing so I don't really do it)- but statistically the survival (or perhaps preponderance) of people like me still gives rise to Economics and Social Choice without aporias.
The corollary of the p-Zombie, for shite Ethics, is the Kantian heteronomous subject. Billimoria, in charity to Kant, points out that some of his writing militates for the notion that  'primitive' people like Iyers and Hottentots can progress towards autonomy through trade and interaction with Europeans and, in that context, it might be a good idea to treat them as thought they possessed rights. However, Billimoria undoes his charity, he proves an Indian giver, by going on to say that Post Colonial Reason arises out of the ashes of the Nietzche-Heideggerian 'destruktion' of a 'purer metaphysics of reason'. This is sheer nonsense. It is like saying, 'Obama's thinking arose out of the ashes of the John Birch Society's critique of the Ku Klux Klan's deconstruction of the purer metaphysics of reason' of Abraham Lincoln or Dr. Martin Luther King'. The fact is, back then, Kant was still a guy who knew from Science, even Hegel had actually taught Calculus- he could do sums. By contrast, Nietzche was merely mad and Heidegger was really bad. Fuck they have to do with 'Post Colonial Reason'?
 Germany didn't have any colonies- they were taken off them at bayonet point- there is no actual Post Colonial Subject who isn't simply jumping on an academic bandwagon who pretends those two shit-heads have any fucking relevance to their own Credentialist Ponzi scheme aimed at making out they actually 'represent' some great seething subaltern mass of alterity.

 I recall reading about Alexander Gershenkron- associated in Development Econ with a (specious) theory or relative backwardness such that the State dominates Civil Society- who, while a Prof at Harvard, had to deal with the ridiculous claim that like the Ivy League gotta cater for Black Studies- mebbe 'Fuzzy Wuzzy Logic'?- coz them niggers now got guns, dude! The truth was, niggers with or without guns, were like Obama's dad- the threat they represented proved useful coz it led to the foreign language requirement being dropped in favor of more Math for Econ PhD candidates- surely a good thing.
There is no 'Post Colonial Reason'.  What there has been- and here I have been as guilty as any- is whining about how being black aint no picnic coz like it don't actually make your dick any bigger and how like Kipling aint really racist- he's a treasure trove of positive images of the kind of working class people in India I still fondly remember. I recall being addressed as 'Gunga Din' by an elderly Cockney warehouse 'gaffer' back when I was 17. I loved that little old man and the richness of his baritone 'palaver' .
 I remember I got into a little tiff with a real big, muscular, white guy and waited for him after work 'to have it out'- i.e. get a black eye and thus become properly integrated into the team- but, it turned out there was this little white guy who had been riding the big fellow all day and he was of Turkish origin and had three brothers in Jail and two out and about with Boxing fucking trophies. Anyroad, this little guy wouldn't let me get a black eye in a good cause. I ended up looking a stupid 'toff'- insisting on 'fisticuffs to clear the air' when the truth was I'd have had my head kicked in. The old gaffer got wind of what had happened and, sadly, he changed towards me. He wanted me to do the books rather than tote boxes. He even wanted to call me 'College'- the final nail in my coffin. I wanted to remain 'Gunga Din'- if only for him- and recited the poem (badly) to try to tearfully defend my 'birth-right' in this respect. How could I prevail? 'Gunga Din' is a fucking beautiful poem- the Saqi-e-Kausar as a Kabir-panthi bhishti, what's not to like?- but it did me no good- suddenly I was like Pundit fucking Nehru or Mahatma fucking Gandhi rather than just one of the lads. I had screwed myself.  Anyway, that's my bit of Post-Colonial reason. What does it amount to? Things aint what they seem. Teachers are good people but they get Literature wrong. Well, they don't get their own literature wrong- the Irish Christian Bros. at St.Columba in Delhi loved teaching us Joyce- they knew he was a good Catholic precisely because he wasn't- but I can't blame a White School teacher in Hackney or Hounslow or wherever not showing enthusiasm for Kipling's 'Gunga Din'. Indeed, if I weren't a big made feller (though crap at fighting), what's more one with a 'posh' accent,  some well-meaning idiot might have protected me, despite myself, from being called Gunga Din. BTW, Sambo was actually a little Tamil boy- so I'm reclaiming that name as well. Anyroad, it beats being called 'Iyer, you fat cunt' though I've got to admit Mum does put a lot of affection into her voice when she addresses me thus.
  Prof. Billmoria, who is probably a posh guy who never wanted to tote boxes in an East London warehouse- still the best job I've ever had and that was 35 years ago when I was sweet 17- don't get that there are actual Post Colonial people- billions of us- and we do too Reason. He thinks Dilthey and the historicist turn in hermeneutics was a good thing. It wasn't. It turned everybody against everybody. It negated Scripture and the factual truth of 'the unseen' by which we all dun be brothers from different mothers. The Turkish guy who wouldn't let me get my black eye would, according to historicist hermeneutics, be obliged to fucking give me the cold shoulder either as a kaffir or a descendant of a supporter of Khilafat. I'm supposed to hate all White people. Fuck, I'd wanna do that? But, I myself, must be an object of hate to all non-Brahmins, not to mention females (okay, the latter have a legitimate complaint against me- vide Prof. Vagina Dentata Choothopadhyay's magisterial - 'Fat is not a Feminist issue- Penis size is').
  Okay, okay, I know there was an earlier theory according to which we could all get along if we could only agree to just eat the rich already. But those days are gone. Anyway, nowadays, I feel rich- I probably am not but how the fuck is anybody supposed to know whether they are actually rich or totally impoverished what with all them shenanigans in the City and what have you?
   Billimoria, following Spivak, thinks the West wants us guys to fuck each other over coz that's like 'authentic'. Believe me Billimoria Sahib- the West wants no such thing. Not after 9/11. What they are saying to us is- Could u guys just kindly go back to just being darkies or wogs or whatever? Fuck we want to know which type of towel head sand nigger u r?  Get with the fucking program already. You know you want to. Just say yes.
Billimoria says Spivak has a defence against being cast as Brahmin apologist herself. She does- it is ignorance. She says in her book, apropos of nothing, that India is called Bharat coz that was Ram's younger brother's name. Is Billimoria equally ignorant or did he read no more than one chapter of Spivak's shite book? The notion that anyone with any power with respect to India ever read Hegel is ludicrous. Yes, Hegel was European- but from a backward, piece of shit, Princedom called Prussia which the Brits have long abhorred and anathematized. (Think Thatcher's Cabinet's fervent espousal of the traditional British belief (as in A.J.P Taylor's post-War book for Allied Occupation troops I remember reading for my History A level) 'Good Germans are Rhinelanders or Hanseatics like Schopenhauer (big fan of India)- Bad Germans are Prussians.')
Berlin did become a great Educational centre but in Maths and Physics and Electrical Engineering. There was literally no fucking bleed through, to either Brit or Indian, of their provincial, racist, shite- and, if you read the Education of Henry Adams, one can easily see why. German Gymnasiums were crap. Their PhD's- at least in Econ, were and are shit- Hoppe & Sinn looked kosher for a bit but they have now abundantly shown the kraut or cloven hoof, so fuck them. Germany has a good Economy coz it has only self-evidently crap 'famous' Economists. It's just Rothbard's Law is all it is- Economists fuck up the more the more famous they get- and Germans (I was born there myself) are very good at obeying laws coz if it aint forbidden it's compulsory (my winsome humour and sparkling wit, such as is displayed in this post, conforming entirely to the law regulating such scatology in the country of my birth).
Billimoria writes-

This is mad. Schopenhauer and Herder and Karl Krause may marginally affect Indian reception of the Gita, Hegel does not. He was too fucking Racist and, in any case, couldn't write worth toffee.
I don't know who Sardesai and Bose are- fuckwits apparently- but Tilak, Ghose and Radhakrishnan have nothing to do with Hegel. You may say, what about Bradley & McTaggart? My reply is- what about them? They don't fit the bill. Radhakrishnan could availability cascade along lines they'd laid down but there is nothing from Hegel on the Gita in them. Kosambi is a different story- indeed the only good bits in Spivak come from him- but he was a Maths guy who did folk-lore on the side. He built no Academic Empire and created no School. This son of Acharya Kosambi was the opposite of Matilal. Not a flaneur precisely- just a rasika, perhaps- but certainly not a fucking Credentialist Ponzi scheme running Academic.
  Billimoria sees Matilal not as a fuckwit rescued from penury by getting a job in the West based on knowing a bit about Voodoo- sorry I mean worthless navya-nyaya shite no fucking Hindu ever subscribed to- who tried to set up as an Analytic or mebbe Ethics guy and fucking failed- no, that would be the common sense view, Billimoria sees Matilal as doing something else- viz. listening for a 'dissident voice' (subversive of Brahminical orthodoxy) within the text.
This is incredibly stupid. The Gita and Itihasas and so on aint Brahminical orthodoxy. They are not dim & dissident but a loud and resonant voice which says- Brahminism is a worthless fucking pile of shite. The very castes and classes which patronized or purveyed this sublime message were non-Brahmin in the main. Brahmins themselves had every reason to espouse this view. Otherwise they would constantly be at risk of beheading or ostracism for some tiny ritual mistake. The rains didn't come on time- guess the Bhramins goofed up, let's kill them. Who wants this? The pure Occassionalist doctrine propounded in the Gita (God does everything, humans do nothing) doesn't just let Bhramins off the hook if the rains don't come on time or the Turks invade, it fucking re-valorizes karma kanda rituals as a purely gratuitous theistic gesture. 
An evil fuckwit like me will act as yajman for a Brahminic ceremony if
a) it's very very fucking cheap and imposes no educational burden on me- like learning that Gayatri mantra which is way too long
b) I already very firmly believe that the Lord of the Universe is just like gonna borrow my beloved Mum and Dad and everybody else I love and keep them in Heaven till the cup of my inequities is full and I voluntarily turn back to the virtuous path of harassing all those noble souls with my importunate love and affection and demands to like tell me a story already.
Come on Billimoria- you may be a high I.Q type. Did you really have no fuckwit friends or siblings like me growing up? Do you really know shit about how Hinduism works? What was the date of the last 'Smarta Vicharam' or khap panchayat down your neck of the woods? For Tamil Iyers- you have to go a hundred years back. That's a long time dude. I'm not saying there aint a specifically Hindu preference falsification based Social Inquisitorial process- I'm just saying it's non Brahmin is all. You know this. Why pretend otherwise?
Further to a pretence that Dharma-ethics does not forbid its own grounding in a rational choice hermeneutic (because, if this were possible its 'apurva' or epoche making element would vanish along with its own topos-as-Maya) Billimoria highlights a particularly crap essay by Matilal- though I suppose it has a resonance, or conjures a revenant, with respect to the crap Traditionalist anti-Brahmo polemics of the mid-Nineteenth Century, but that shite was dead in the water by the time Tagore published 'Gora'- Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghose's younger brother didn't just steal the Reformist's clothes, they fucking cat-walked it in Chicago and all points East of the Pacos- but, what does Billimoria's highlighting of that shite essay say about his own project? Only this- the availability cascades he surfs are such as might occur in not Adelaide but land-locked Canberra.
Take a butchers at this me old ocker-

The point here is that Kant and Hegel were stupid, racist, fuckwits. I'm sure Hinduism had its Kants and Hegels- them's the guys our Sacred Books hold up to ridicule, hatred and contempt. Nobody has any problem with Utilitarianism- deontology cashes out as Utilitarianism once you admit some course of action can expand your information set because it becomes your duty to so act. Buddhism knew this. No doubt some Brahmin fuckwits had fun with Buddhist wholly Intentionalist Ethics and this has been preserved somewhere BUT those Bhramin fuckwits were laughed at as fuckwits by everybody, including their teachers. 
Billimoria thinks India's corruption has to do with Utilitarianism. Why? How fucking ignorant is he exactly? Utilitarian Social Engineering- i.e. mechanism design- tackles the problem directly. It's what Arthashastra says- but also what Tiru or anybody else says. No fucking Indian, Muslim or Hindu or whatever ever said the way you get people to stop stealing is by preaching at them. No. Carrots and sticks and fucking Tiebout model Law-compliance as a local public good was what these guys not just said but actually fucking implemented.  What is Matilal's alternative? Worthless pi-jaw. His thought is irrelevant. He was a fuckwit. No fucking Indian reads him and he made no attempt, not ignominious, to get them to read him. How is his 'thought' prescriptive? Why does Billimoria mention it? To whom exactly is he flashing this Credentialist laissez passer? 
Does Billimoria really believe there was some supposedly 'liberative event'? Which Indian shares that belief? Fuck the 'official ideology'. It is 'pakhand', it is 'munafiqat', it is a 'preference falsification/ availability cascade' in the terminology of Prof. Timur Kuran- a future Nobel winner surely? (his analysis of Islamic Societies is crap, racist crap, so Stockholm has already booked his flight youbetcha).
Who does not know this?
How fucking stupid are the people who read Billimoria and Spivak and Amartya Sen? Certainly not more stupid than me. They are just more successful coz hypocrisy is a work-skill.
Read this and tell me Billimoria isn't a wanker.

Why is this fucked? What Billimoria and Spivak are talking about is a 'Transfer paradox' whereby shite donated by 'an advanced' country further impoverishes a 'developing' one. Graciella Chichilinsky did the Maths on this dude. She showed, so long as there are at least 3 countries, 'Transfer paradoxes' were phipty-phipty. 

I suppose, at this stage, I should say something nice about Matilal coz de mortuis &c- okay, he highlights an episode that is the dual to the Gita whereby Krishna prevents Arjuna killing the guy he thinks is his elder brother (as opposed to his actual elder brother whose will it is that the battle go forward). 
But Matilal misses the most important point about this (I've dealt with this in my book Ghalib, Gandhi & the Gita) which is that it shows that Krishna's Visvarupa in the Gita is a 'self-slaying', a Christ like sacrifice.
Matilal sees no mathematical structure to the Gita. Nor does Billimoria. These guys can't stop Spivak from writing ignorant, school-girl, crap- like saying 'India is called Bharat coz that's what Ram's younger bro was called and like... I dunno... well, like maybe at the end of the film he gets to be the Emperor of India or something? What? India is named after the son of Shakuntala? Oh! Right! Coz like Goethe really liked Kalidasa's 'Shakuntala'. But, I mean my point still stands coz Goethe was like all you know Bourgeois or something and like Hegel, y'know, he was like y'know totally NOT like sittlichkeit guy or maybe he was but then like y'know there was like Marx and Mamta Bannerjee- not Mamta- anyway, you know what I mean. 

Billimoria, worthless cunt that he is, writes this- 

Kant as the 'father of speculative reason'? Okay, there's an academic availability cascade there so let it slide; but 'father of the conceptual conditions for the possibility of imperialism that affected colonialism as an anthropological reality'? Are you fucking kidding me? Spivak writes shite but not quite such shite shite. What is this cunt? A fucking 'mayavadi'? Did he learn phenomenology from Colin Wilson's 'the Space Vampires' (okay, full disclosure, I did. Happy now?) where the value of pi actually changes as people get better at mensuration- or menstruation, BTW, as the only under 50 middle aged Hindutva blogger in Fulham, being 'groomed' by the witchy Wimmin at the Elderly Iyengar Mamiar Activity Centre, down Dawes road- I know it is only you guys who leave comments on my posts-  I will not fucking go down on you however menopausal you claim to be. Once bitten twice shy. Mind it kindly.