Bilgrami's Evil Enchantment.

Akeel Bilgrami believes that Gandhi was an erudite philosopher rebelling against some terrible metaphysical atrocity that occurred in the Seventeenth Century which involved killing off 'Enchantment'- i.e. fairies and elves and hobbits- and turning Mother Nature into an ugly quarry or all polluting iron-works for evil Orcs laboring under the blazing eye of Sauron who had somehow managed to unite all the multitudinous forces of Darkness under his sole command.

Bilgrami believes that Pantheists protested against Sauron but were mercilessly crushed. Perhaps, if he were writing about Islamic history, he would equate the Zanj rebellion (whose leader, though claiming to be a Syed, had an Indian slave in his maternal lineage) with a similar Pantheistic protest against Puritanical Plutocratic Capitalism. However, the crushing of the Zanj rebellion did not involve a Sauron who co-ordinated Capital, Religion and Science in such a manner that they turned into an evil 'thick' concept of Scientific Rationality which went on to rule the World and systematically exterminate fairies and elves and hobbits and everybody just worshiping trees and peacefully having orgies under the Midsummer Moon and other such hippy shite.
Why did Seventeenth Century succeed in yielding all power to Sauron while Ninth Century Iraq failed to achieve the same thing? The answer, judging by the evidence Bilgrami provides, is that Ninth Century Iraq did not have the Printing Press and so all manners of Pantheistic nutjobs- Ranters, Diggers, Quakers, Levellers, Anabaptists, Monetarists etc- did not get to circulate their silly pamphlets. True, they were crushed, just as the Zanj rebellion was crushed, but they were not exterminated and continued their corporate existence and textual availability cascades and preference falsification hypocricy down to our own day. Gandhi, according to Bilgrami, was part of this long running tradition of stupidity but for the shrill existence of which Sauron doesn't get hegemony and the ability to enforce 'thick' scientific rationality which is like totally evil and genocidal and not at all nice.
So there we have it. For Evil to triumph- i.e. for 'thick' Scientific Rationality to become hegemonic and make fun of Pantheism's pee-pee- it is both necessary and sufficient that Gandhian shite is endlessly spouted. Suppose Gandhian shite isn't spouted or its spouting is ended by killing those who spout it then Sauron doesn't get the Magic Ring which enables the unification of Capitalism and Science and Metaphysics and Ethics and dunno other such shite such that the entire planet is laid waste and no blade of grass is spared by Mammon's maw.
Bilgrami writes - 'Were we to apply the thin conception of “scientific” and “rationality” (the one that I imagine most of us in this room embrace), the plain fact is that nobody in that period was, in any case, getting prizes for leaving God out of the world-view of science. That one should think of God as voluntaristically affecting nature from the outside (as the Newtonians did) rather than sacralizing it from within (as the freethinkers insisted), was not in any way to improve on the science involved.
'Both views were therefore just as “unscientific,” just as much in violation of scientific rationality, in the “thin” sense of that term that we would now take for granted. What was in dispute had nothing to do with science or rationality in that attenuated sense at all. What the early dissenting tradition as well as Gandhi were opposed to is the metaphysical orthodoxy that grew around Newtonian science and its implications for broader issues of culture and politics. This orthodoxy with all of its implications is what has now come to be called “scientific rationality” in the “thick” sense of that term and in the pervasive cheerleading about “the West" and the Enlightenment'.'

So, kids, what have we learned in School today? Bilgrami admits that Pantheistic shite is shite. He doesn't say- 'if stupid Lefty nutjobs stop spouting holier-than-thou Pantheistic shite then there would be no market for 'thick' Scientific rationality and endless triumphalist cheerleading for 'Western Enlightenment' values and that would be a good thing coz Sauron would be foiled in his quest for the Magic Ring'. He doesn't need to say it. That's the only possible take-away point from his lecture. Unless you really believe there are fairies at the bottom of your garden. In which case, lay in a couple of six-packs and get busy with the weed whacker.

This follows if you believe, as Bilgrami does, that Spinoza was right when he said you can't predict and intend to do something at the same time- i.e. if you intend to do something it can't be because you predict it is what you want to get done. Hence, if your are an Ethical Consequentialist or Epistemological Instrumentalist, you can't intend to do anything at all- unless you are stupid and don't get Spinoza though you intend to get Spinoza and haven't predicted that you won't coz Spinoza is stupid and so are you and there is nothing to get anyway. But this also means there really are fairies at the bottom of the garden whom you are currently killing with your weed whacker while drunk off your head on Special Brew. This is because there is a predictive element in visual and all other perception. But, since you can never intend to see what you predict you will actually see, the fact that you don't see you are in the garden killing fairies proves that you can't have the intention of not killing fairies at this very moment.
 Predictions can be falsified, not so intentions. We can imagine a situation where you can intend to have your predictions falsified in a systematic way. Perhaps not seeing you are killing fairies when you intend to do so and are doing so is good strategy on your part. Ergo you can't prove you aren't killing fairies if and only if you don't see that you are killing fairies.
Bilgrami wants us to see that the World may be value laden. This is the phenomenological project which features such egregious shite as Hegel's refutation of Newton and Goethe or Schopenhauer's theory of Color and Malfatti's crazy Tantric nonsense and so on down to Weber's silly ideas about Capitalism and Protestantism and Husserl's wasting his time on Phenomenology and Heidegger's worthless rubbish and so on and so forth.
Bilgrami doesn't get that Gandhi fucked up big time with his Khadi (his chakri added negative value to cotton) and Basic Education (Zakir Hussain ultimately called it a fraud) and other such fuckwittery.
Kenneth Boulding, a Quaker and Environmentalist avant la lettre but also a great Economist, has written about why Gandhians fucked up. It was because they were as stupid as shit and refused to use their brains. Screw Scientific Rationality. Common sense tells us that prediction and intention are inextricably intertwined. But this means when you see that stuff aint panning out as you intended you stop doing what you're doing and try to think of a better solution.  Scratch that. Don't try to think of a better solution. Ask around till you find a guy who HAS a better solution. Copy him.
The alternative is killing fairies.
To see why consider Bilgrami's rejection of Economics on the basis that it doesn't permit a 'secular enchantment' of the world such that if you see a glass of water you don't think of the opportunity cost of your drinking the water but rather ask yourself- whom does that glass of water want to be drunk by?- and then go out on a mystic quest to hunt down that suffering Grail-King because only in this way can you end your own 'alienation'.
That way all the water gets spilled and you lose your job as a waiter at the Tandoori Restaurant coz the customer choked to death on his onion bhaji when you snatched away his water and so your kids back home starve to death and as for them fairies they all just laughed themselves to death at the spectacle of your stupidity.

Bilgrami thinks Gandhian politics in pre-Independence India was made possible because Indians were stupid and believed in fairies. He is wrong. Gandhi got money off the Hindus and Jains and Khojas and Memons and other such business castes. They got a 'reputational' benefit from such largesse as did lawyers who signed up with Gandhi. In the short run, some weavers did get a bit of money out of it and, ultimately, secured their main goal which was to get a quota of mill-spun (NOT HAND SPUN) yarn. Still, the Gandhian interlude meant a lot of weavers starved to death and the industry as a whole was de-skilled. Capitalist methods have revived some sectors. Gandhi himself wanted to boycott the one prosperous section of weavers because they were doing well by supplying the luxury market.
The reason the 'Untouchables' are so angry with Gandhi is that his ideas fucked them up big time. They now shrilly campaign for compulsory English medium Govt. schools. They have even declared English a Goddess and worship a statue of Macaulay!
 Scientific rationality says all human beings have evolved such that there is territory specific canalization of Cognitive and Perceptual faculties.
Bilgrami type shite says that fairies are a persecuted minority or silently suffering subaltern majority whose cause only Ivy League Professors of Philosophy can legitimately champion. But, this is killing fairies with a vengeance because only kids can see fairies and a Credentialized 'Liberal Arts' Education System,  the apex of which pyramid Bilgrami occupies, is itself the blazing eye of Sauron which destroys all that is enchanting about this our, albeit ontologically dysphoric, World.
For which, needless to say, I blame David Cameron. That boy aint right.

Guha on Gandhi

Ramachandra Guha's new book, 'Gandhi before India', is not entirely innocent of historical scholarship yet joyously jejune in its hagiographic claims- things like, 'Gandhi was born and raised a Hindu, and he avowed that denominational label all his life. Yet no Hindu before or since had such a close, intense engagement with the great Abrahamic religions. '
Is Guha right?
 Raja Ram Mohan Roy had a close and intense engagement with all three Abrahamic Religions- not just Arabic, he even learnt Hebrew- and went on to found a monotheistic sect which strictly forbade idolatry. Nor was Roy unique. Many North Indian Hindu lawyers had a profound knowledge of  Islamic law and Religion; in addition to Persian, some attained proficiency in Arabic; and, from about 1830 on wards they had a lot of exposure to Christianity. 
As for the South Indian littoral, Judaism had always maintained a presence. Indeed, in Kerala, Hindus have lived side by side with Jews, Christians and Muslims for over a thousand years. Is it plausible that not one single Malyalee Hindu- more particularly given the genius for theological speculation displayed by the people of that region- failed to engage equally intensely with 'the great Abrahamic Religions'? One way to engage intensely with a Religion is to convert to it. We know some Hindus converted to Judaism and Christianity and Islam- how can we have a priori knowledge that their engagement was less intense than Gandhis?
Consider the case of some young Hindu alive in the world today. How do we know his engagement with Abrahamic religion is less intense than Gandhis?
It may appear that Guha's absurd claim is nothing but harmless hyperbole.
Yet, when we read what he goes on to write in justification of it, we find that this absurdity lies at the heart of Guha's historiography.
He is saying that only in South Africa, at that particular time, could Hindus and Jews and Christians and Muslims intermingle in a manner such that Gandhi, despite being intellectually unexceptional and deeply provincial to boot, could suddenly turn, by some miracle of elective affinity, into the highest attainable point, at least for a Hindu, of engagement with the Abrahamic Religions.
Thus, Guha tells us that Gandhi 'understood Judaism through a highly personal lens, through his friendships with (Henry) Polak, (Hermann) Kallenbach and Sonja Schlesin especially. His interest in Christianity was both personal and theological—he liked (Joseph) Doke and loved (Charles Freer or C.F.) Andrews, but whereas he was not really influenced by Jewish thought he was profoundly shaped by heterodox Christian texts, above all Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You. His relations with Islam were partly personal, but largely pragmatic and political. He had read the Quran (probably more than once), but was never really moved by it in the same way as he was moved by the Bhagavad Gita or even the Sermon on the Mount. He had some Muslim friends, but what concerned him more—much more—was the forging of a compact between Hindus and Muslims, the major communities in the Indian diaspora in South Africa, as they were in India itself.'
Gandhi  had some Jewish friends- but they weren't orthodox- and he had some Muslim friends- but he wasn't a 'shagird' of a Sufi master or anything of that sort- and he had some friends who were ordained Christian ministers- but they didn't discuss Christian theology with him since their own Irenicism was of an eclectic type.
Under these circumstances, how did Gandhi manage to achieve a closer engagement with the great Abrahamic religions than any Hindu before or since? Virtually every Hindu with a modicum of personal charm, who studied in Europe at that time, would have had some Christian and Jewish and Muslim friends. No lawyer conducting a successful practice in Bombay or Madras or Calcutta- or even Kipling's Lahore- would not have had a friendly acquaintance with some Jews and Christians and so on. Some Hindus were good at learning languages. Some Hindus did and do learn Arabic to read the Quran, Hebrew to read the Torah, Greek to read the New Testament, Latin to read the Vulgate and so on. Furthermore, some of the same Hindus studied or study Philosophy and Theology. Many joined or join progressive organizations of various types- Beasant's Theosophical Society, Kipling's Freemasons, or even just the local lending Library. How does Guha know that Gandhi achieved a closer engagement with the great Abrahamic religions than any such Hindu? Guha assumes what he needs to prove- viz. there was something special about Gandhi. But Guha also maintains that there was nothing special about Gandhi. Had he remained in Porbandar, he would have been a nonentity. Yet it was Porbandar, more particularly his elder brother's influence there, which opened the door to a job with a Muslim firm inSouth Africa for Gandhi. It seems, Porbandar wasn't such an out of the way place after all. The threads that connected it to the wealthiest Muslim businessmen in South Africa were spun of not gossamer but steel.
What Guha fails to see is that Gandhi's world was already so interconnected as to be relatively hysteresis free. Such opportunities or acquaintances as came his way were not not unique or providential but largely interchangeable and arising out of his own autonomous life-project. Had Gandhi remained in London, working for an Indian firm, he would have blossomed from being a vegetarian activist into a broader role which would have brought him, sooner or later, within the same coterie in which he played so signal a part. Had he remained in Bombay- perhaps teaching part time while building up a clientele amongst his caste fellows- he would have slowly climbed the ladder of municipal politics while finding like minded associates in the Theosophical and Servants of India Societies. Sooner or later, Gokhale or Phirozeshah Mehta or Bownargee would have asked him to volunteer his services as the Congress Party's representative to either Fiji or Zanzibar or South Africa or Trinidad or something of that sort. Gandhi had an adventurous spirit. He was brave. He had compassion. He would have risen to the occasion.
Perhaps Guha's thesis- viz. that living outside India turned Gandhi into a totally different man (even though the means to live outside India arose entirely from his Indian connection)- is really about South Africa and the curious course of events which made it the center of World attention in the opening years of the last Century. However, the truth is Gandhi's role there was as a supporting actor, nothing more, in a drama whose real star was not Lord Milner but Jan Smuts.

Ultimately, Guha's failure in this book arises from his distaste for, or ignorance of, Religion.
Take the case of Dr. Pranjivan Mehta who who was Gandhi's first mentor in London and, till his own death, his most loyal  supporter and financier. Guha calls Pranjivan the Engels to Gandhi's Marx and mentions the influence of Raichandbhai Mehta (who was related to Pranjivan by marriage) on Gandhi but does not pause to consider why a Jain might consider Gandhi a 'Mahatma'.
The answer has to do with a crisis within Jain meta-ethics, most strikingly articulated by Acharya Bhikshu, whereby good deeds, save that of feeding monks, by reason of the exigent circumstance represented by India's cumulative impoverishment, had lost soteriological efficacy because such deeds, that too, in ever increasing volume, were now so vital for the simple survival of the species that they could not be seen as merely instrumental in creating a karmic tropism towards the diksha- i.e. renunciation- of the ascetic than which no higher temporal goal can exist for the laity. In this context, Gandhi- a Hindu- could be seen to be creating a new type of vyavahara, or customary morality, for the masses such that premature Cosmic dissolution could be averted. By an imaginative interpretation of Yasovijaya, an interesting possibility arises in this context- viz that some intermediate 'dharma' (duty) is abrogated during the period of activity of a vyavahara stabilizing Mahatma such that a layman, like Raichandbhai, could indeed have achieved kevalya (Gnosis) even though he died before he could take diksha and, in any case, no Tirthankara existed during his life time. In other words, Pranjivan had a specific soteriological stake in wishing to see Gandhi as a Mahatma and, because he himself was not 'a mediocre student' or a provincial boor, his efforts to build up Gandhi (for example by arguing with Gokhale regarding the latter's more objective assessment of Gandhi's ability) played a much bigger role in both Gandhi's self-image and the respect accorded to him than the fact that he was pals with a couple of Jews or Christians or Muslims.
Guha was not trained as a historian. He doesn't know much about Indian literature and philosophy. He isn't into Religion. That's why his comments about Gandhi are stupid.
One other point. Guha is not a novelist or a playwright. He doesn't watch crap TV soaps and old weepie melodramas. Thus he fails to understand the dynamics of what he describes. 
Take the case of Jeki Mehta- the scarlet woman of Satyagraha- Gandhi had asked his second son Manilal to nurse this daughter of Pranjivan's, who was supposedly unwell, so as to instill in the young man an immunity to the temptations of her flesh. No doubt, this ploy would have worked had the lady in question, recently married but perhaps unhappily so, not been in rather better health than Gandhiji supposed. Manilal was not a pervert. Tending to a sick person does not stimulate erotic thoughts in either patient or nurse. But, if both are healthy and young, then the situation could not be more highly erotically charged..
Gandhi has been accused of having reacted in an extreme manner to what then happened. But what was he supposed to do? The girl was the daughter of his mentor and financial supporter. She was married to a lawyer whom Gandhi had recruited and sent to Fiji. She was living under his roof. His own son was implicated. A lesser man would have hanged himself or hushed it up or shifted the blame on to someone else.

The one unquestionable contribution that Gandhi made to Indian politics was in getting women out of the prison of purdah and into proper Jail cells. How would that work if the sluts expected nookie as a reward? It really doesn't bear thinking about which is why I want you to stop thinking about it otherwise I'll just stop typing this and then you'll be all like trawling porn sites for Savita bhabi does Satyagraha or Debbie does the Dandi March or... FUCK ME the video I just thought of actually exists! Won't post the link though. That will teach you to only think pure thoughts in future..
                                                                                                                                                   

Worst aspect of Jallianwallah Bagh atrocity.

I am far from being an acolyte of Barrister M.K. Gandhi. However, I have today resolved to return all the orders, decorations, and titles, posthumous or otherwise, bestowed on me for meritorious conduct and outstanding service to the British Empire in protest at what constitutes, in my considered opinion, the worst aspect of Gen. Dyer's recent frightfulness.

Indeed, as I write this now- more in sorrow than anger- my heart goes out to the gentle and suffering Moti and Jawahar Lal Nehrus, and their toiling team of  fellow Indian National Congress lawyers, as they take depositions from witnesses to the Amritsar Massacre and the blood drains from their faces and they stare at each other in wordless horror trying for the life of them to figure out how precisely they are supposed to uphold their sworn duty, as seasoned officers of the court, to most royally fuck these peasants over even unto the seventh generation.

'Cometh the hour, cometh the man'. I have lately learnt that Barrister Gandhi- whom I feel it would be churlish to further deny the honorific 'Mahatma' or 'great soul' as the Bengalis have it- has taken charge of this nice bit of legal business.