Caliban ycrypt in Miranda eyes

Too Beautiful child, you yet are wise

To turn a negligent ear to my replies

Nor with Worldy Wit to Catechize

A Caliban ycrypt in Miranda eyes

& so, tho' partaking of a common repast

I into outer darkness yet am cast

The lad you look at, looking only at me

So all, in him, my secret see.

That Love be humbled, yet is Pride

& to Caliban, betrothed, the Church as bride

 Beauty, Child, is this unshriven hide

It seeks The Word it can't abide

Envoi- 

Prince! Milan had a Mage 'fore Prospero

Tho' Magic be all it now can know.

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.

Raj Kumar Shukla- usurer or agriculturist?

In 1911 or 1912, the King Emperor visited the Nepal border terai for a spot of shikar. 15,000 tenant farmers from Champaran turned up to shout out their grievances to him. He was told they were just shouting because they were excited to see him. They then sent a petition. This was returned because it hadn't gone through the proper channels.

If King Emperors are useless, what about Mahatmas?

Mahatma Gandhi tells us that he came to the aid of the indigo cultivators of Champaran at the insistence of a humble agriculturist- Raj Kumar Shukla.
Yet I read here that Shukla 'was accompanied by two local Marwari businessmen in his visits to Gandhiji in Kanpur as well as Calcutta. A moneylender of village Murli Bharwa near Narkatiaganj in West Champaran, earning, according to his own statement before the enquiry committee set up by the provincial government, a sum of rupees two thousand a month from interest, Shukla, by no standard, was a needy or poor man. Earlier he was in the employ of a landlord in Benares but was dismissed on account of malfeasance. So he was a disgraced man per se.'

I would like to point out  that the author of this comment, Dr. A.K. Biswas, though a former U.P University Vice Chancellor, is nevertheless not a criminal- charge sheeted or otherwise. This glaring lack of even the minimal qualification appropriate to high Academic office in the Gangetic belt totally undermines his credibility.

Still, he has solved the mystery of Raj Kumar Shukla. The man was a money-lender and thus wanted the agriculturists to have more disposable income so they could incur and service more debt.  That's why the tenants trusted him and sent him to the I.N.C meeting at Lucknow. Bihari lawyers too wanted the same thing because, as Gandhi pointed out, they charged a lot of money and, driven by insatiable greed, were scheming to expand their potential client base even in the boondocks. Furthermore, in Champaran, there were many European leaseholders so what was essentially an agitation against the illegal advabs levied by zamindaris (i.e. illegal extortion by landlords of tenants) gained a sort of 'swadeshi' Nationalist tinge. 

Prof. Girish Mishra writes- 'In December 1916, the Indian National Congress was holding its annual session at Lucknow, not very far from Champaran. A group of peasants, advised by some well-wishers, went there. This session proved to be extraordinary because, for the first time, a semi-literate rustic was allowed to speak from the dais. Raj Kumar Shukla spoke in broken Hindi but with lots of emotion and sincerity that moved the elite audience, but no one was prepared to go to Champaran to lead the agitating peasantry. Lokmanya Tilak was too unwell to accept their request. Almost dejected, they sought the advice of Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya who advised them to persuade Mohandas Gandhi who had recently returned from South Africa after leading a prolonged, but successful, struggle. If he agreed to go there, he would surely make them achieve their goal. Shukla, then, met Gandhi and narrated his tale of woes, but Gandhi did not commit though he listened attentively and asked Shukla for some time to think over his request after he reached Kanpur.

When Gandhi arrived at the office of Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi’s newspaper Pratap, he found that Shukla was already there, beseeching him to come to Champaran. Gandhi told him that he was going to Kolkata (then Calcutta) to visit Barrister Bhupendra Nath Basu and there he would give a thought to his request and decide. Lo and behold! Shukla was already there when Gandhi arrived. Shukla’s sincerity and genuineness of his case impressed Gandhi immensely and both of them set out on their journey to Champaran.'

So what do we have here? Gandhi sees this guy pop up wherever he goes yet calls him a simple agriculturist. Why? Because Gandhi liked 'experimenting with Truth'. 

THE STAIN OF INDIGO

Champaran is the land of King Janaka. Just as it abounds in mango groves, so used it to be full of indigo plantations until the year 1917. The Champaran tenant was bound by law to plant three out of every twenty parts of his land with indigo for his landlord. This system was known as the tinkathia system, as three kathas out of twenty (which make one acre) had to be planted with indigo.

I must confess that I did not then know even the name, much less the geographical position, of Champaran, and I had hardly any notion of indigo plantations. I had seen packets of indigo, but little dreamed that it was grown and manufactured in Champaran at great hardship to thousands of agriculturists.

Rajkumar Shukla was one of the agriculturists who had been under this harrow, and he was filled with a passion to wash away the stain of indigo for the thousands who were suffering as he had suffered.

This man caught hold of me at Lucknow, where I had gone for the Congress of 1916. "Vakil Babu will tell you everything about our distress," he said, and urged me to go to Champaran. "Vakil Babu" was none other than Babu Brajkishore Prasad, who became my esteemed co-worker in Champaran, and who is the soul of public work in Bihar. Rajkumar Shukla brought him to my tent. He was dressed in a black alpaca achkan and trousers. Brajkishore Babu failed then to make an impression on me. I took it that he must be some vakil exloiting the simple agriculturists. Having heard from him something of Champaran, I replied as was my wont : "I can give no opinion without seeing the conditions with my own eyes. You will please move the resolution in the Congress, but leave me free for the present." Rajkumar Shukla of course wanted some help from the Congress.

Babu Brajkishore Prasad moved the resolution, expressing sympathy for the people of Champaran, and it was unanimously passed.

Rajkumar Shukla was glad, but far from satisfied. He wanted me personally to visit Champaran and witness the miseries of the ryots there. I told him that I would include Champaran in the tour which I had contemplated and give it a day or two. "One day will be enough," said he, "and you will see things with your own eyes." From Lucknow I went to Cawnpore. Rajkumar Shukla followed me there. "Champaran is very near here. Please give a day," he insisted. "Pray excuse me this time. But I promise that I will come," said I, further committing myself.

I returned to the Ashram. The ubiquitous Rajkumar was there too. "Pray fix the day now", he said. "Well" said I, "I have to be in Calcutta on such and such a date, come and meet me then, and take me from there." I did not know where I was to go, what to do, what things to see.

Before I reached Bhupen Babu's place in Calcutta, Rajkumar Shukla had gone and established himself there. Thus this ignorant, unsophisticated but resolute agriculturist captured me.

So early in 1917, we left Calcutta for Champaran, looking just like fellow-rustics. I did not even know the train. He took me to it, and we travelled together, reaching Patna in the morning.

This was my first visit to Patna. I had no friend or acquaintance with whom I could think of putting up. I had an idea that Rajkumar Shukla, simple agriculturist as he was, must have some influence in Patna. I had come to know him a little more on the journey, and on reaching Patna I had no illusions left concerning him. He was perfectly innocent of everything. The vakils that he had taken to be his friends were really nothing of the sort. Poor Rajkumar was more or less as a menial to them. Between such agriculturist clients and their vakils there is a gulf as wide as the Ganges in flood.

Rajkumar Shukla took me to Rajendra Babu"s place in Patna.

Rajendra Babu had gone to Puri or some other place, I now forget which. There were one or two servants at the bungalow who paid us no attention. I had with me something to eat. I wanted dates which my companion procured for me from the bazaar.1 There was strict untouchability in Bihar. I might not draw water at the well whilst the servants were using it, lest drops of water from my bucket might pollute them, the servants not knowing to what caste I belonged. Rajkumar directed me to the indoor latrine, the servant promptly directed me to the outdoor one. All this was far from surprising or irritating to me, for I was inured to such things. The servants were doing the duty, which they thought Rajendra Babu would wish them to do.

These entertaining experience enhanced my regard for Rajkumar Shukla, if they also enabled me to know him better. I saw now that Rajkumar Shukla could not guide me, and that I must take the reins in my own hands.

Reading the above, one would conclude that Gandhi wanted to stop peasants being forced to grow indigo. But the invention of a chemical dye by the Germans had already made indigo less lucrative. Acreage under indigo fell from a high of 96000, in 1897,  to just 8000 acres in 1914. It was only thanks to the War that demand for indigo increased and acreage went up to 27000 acres in 1917. 
Previously, the share-croppers, under the leadership of Sheikh Gulab, had put up some resistance to the planters, including murder and arson, and this had been partially successful though some tenants, including Sheikh Gulab, had to spend some time in Jail. Incidentally, a Marwari banker had played a part in this violent struggle. He was let off with a fine of 3000 rupees. The Govt. did make
+++  inquiries in 1908 and a report was compiled but never published- a fact protested by Brajkishore Prasad in the Bihar  Council in 1911 or thereabouts.  Gandhi, of course, belittles him as an alpaca wearing lawyer sucking the blood of the tenants. Yet this man knew more in 1910 about Champaran's grievances than Gandhi ever discovered. 
Rajendra Prasad, in his book  ' Satyagraha in Champaran', paints a picture of a decline in the Government's ability or willingness to challenge 'adwabs' (illegal cesses) which distressed indigo factors were using to squeeze money out of the tenants to compensate them for their losses on capital invested in Indigo factories. Furthermore, Sir Rasbihari Ghose had given a legal opinion to the planters that they could increase rents by more than the statutory amount on the excuse of releasing tenants from growing a specific crop. Thousands of tenants agreed to higher rents so as to get rid of the onerous burden of growing indigo because, as they later said to Mahatma Gandhi, they were all beaten and dishonored till they agreed. They said that they knew indigo would disappear by itself because it was no longer profitable so why on earth would they voluntarily agree to a rent hike that would affect their posterity? Of course, the fact that War would break out and indigo once again become profitable was not known to them then.
Rajendra Prasad observes- 'every tenant was not roughly dealt with, every tenant was not tied to a tree and then beaten with leather straps, every tenant was not shut up in a chicken-pen or in some dirty place in the factory, peons were not quartered at the house 

of every tenant, Dhangars (a low class untouchables)may not have been posted obstructing the egress from and ingress into the house of every tenant, every tenant may not have been tied down in 

the hot sun or a heavy load placed on his head or breast it may be that the services of barber, washerman, carpenter and smith may not have been stopped in the case of every tenant, every 
tenant may not have been made the victim of a false prosecution in the criminal courts, the roads leading to every village may not have been closed and the grazing lands may not have been closed against the cattle of every tenant ; but this much is certain that some of the biggest and most respectable and influential among the tenants were severely dealt with in some one or more of these ways, and their spirit having been crushed, the rest of that and the neighbouring villages were easily coerced into submission.

It was only natural that they should submit to what 

they considered to be the inevitable.' 

In other words, the testimony given to Gandhi was 99.99 % lies because the planters simply did not have 
enough coercive power to inflict all the atrocities attributed to them. Still, they did have some coercive power so some at least 0.001 % of the statements taken had some substance.
This is not to say that the planter's rent enhancements were legal even if freely consented to. The District Judge, a Mr. Sheepshanks, found that in 5 out of 9 test cases the rent increases were illegal prima facie and appeals against this decision was subsequently barred by the Champaran Agrarian Act. In other words, if you read between the lines, Rajendra Prasad is telling us that Gandhi's tamasha in Champaran, aimed at disintermediating the Vakils (lawyers)  was bound to fail. Poor idiot, the Mahatma thought he was destroying a source of profit for the lawyers but the issue had already been decided in law so and all those vultures needed was Administrative compliance. Here Polack and the great C.F. Andrews- as white men- were particularly useful in the early stages but Gandhi insisted Andrews return to Fiji- the Govt. of India had sent him to Fiji in 1915 to report on the conditions of indentured labourers there and so the danger existed that he'd get the credit for the I.N.C inquiry in Champaran into India's own quasi slavery- which was maybe why nothing lasting took root in Champaran despite some pretty impressive volunteers turning up to start schools with money from, the Marwari, Birla.
Rajendra Prasad's book on Champaran is well written, Prasad was highly intelligent and well educated, and shows a mastery of the facts. But the conclusion it relentlessly militates towards is that it was the Zamindar's employment of goons which vitiated legal forms of redress. Add in well financed White planters with their ties to the Administration and the Anglo Indian Press and, clearly, the native lawyers and moneylenders were put at an unconscionable disadvantage when it came to making hay here where the Sun of Injustice shone so brightly. They needed an independent Inquiry in Champaran with popular support such that the Govt. could coopt and- because Gandhi could still, at this early point in his career, be tricked into doing something useful- that's exactly what they got. 
But Zamindari as an institution- one that overwhelmingly benefited native lawyers and moneylenders- wasn't touched. Neither was Caste discrimination. Prof. Biswas (that brazenly un-charge sheeted Vice Chancellor) points out that the Champaran Agrarian Act did nothing to abolish illegal cesses and discriminatory rents on Scheduled Castes. Which, of course, just goes to show Gandhi's visitation really was the work of the same God who devised the terrible 1934 Earthquake in Bihar. 
Yet, the fact remains, Gandhi's Champaran sojourn wasn't utterly futile. It didn't actually make matters much worse. Why? The answer I suppose is because there was no 'dharna', no hunger strikes, no jail bharao, no nonsense about satyagraha. Just some sound lawyerly work which, strangely enough, was something Gandhi had actually been trained to do. There is a lesson here such that 'all who run may read'. 

Mind it kindly.

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.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation & the Black Republican

I'm not a Black Republican but, like many constipated colored people, I have recently taken to reading Hans Hermann Hoppe in the toilet.
Homosexuals and blacks and drug addicts all have high 'time preference' which is why they are shiftless beggars, slavery being too good for them. Clearly what Lincoln actually signed was an 'E-nancification' Proclamation intended to turn slaves in the Southern States into Nancy boys.  Yet Mit Romney still hasn't endorsed the full-scale restoration of Slavery in the Continental United States so as to curb the rising tide of Sodomy amongst our rank and file. This more than anything else shows his contempt for issues of concern to Black people.

Secular Equality is best secured by Learned Failure

What is Equality? Is it a state such that some market operation exists such that agents are left indifferent between their own endowment/preference set and that of other agents? If Preferences are at least partly determined by Society, clearly this definition fails because then Equality, as a Policy Objective, would be best pursued by tampering with Preferences- i.e. reconciling people to their lot. This cashes out as amor fati and Religion has already shown it is unbeatable at that gig.

 To avoid this, one might postulate some other set of Preferences that people 'ought to have' based on their meta-preferences and work backwards from there. This fails immediately because you'd have to know the whole future fitness landscape- i.e. you'd have to have access to the sort of computing power which, if it exists, would make Evolution redundant. But this would mean that your solution would be apophatic- something outside language- because collocational Language use is clearly an Evolutionary process of some sort. So this cashes out as some apophatic Tetragramaton or Mathesis Universalis and once again Religion does that shite best.

  Another approach, that of the Economist, would be to look at equality from the incentive/mechanism design p.o.v. This is just pi-jaw tarted up with some Statistical guesswork still it's good enough for the Great and the Good. Is it good enough for the rest of us? Inequality could give rise to two different Social effects
1) Tardeian 'imitation' or Girardian 'mimetic desire' whereby the agent having less of some good adopts the mores or modus operandi of the better off while from time to time requiring the sacrifice of some scapegoat to preserve Social Cohesion and prevent an envy based uprising. The problem with looking at the World like this is that you soon feel an overwhelming sense of disgust- the game is not worth the candle- and so we're back to Religion by way of Stoic dysphoria.
2) Learned Failure- agents adopt an Information assimilation model such that any new inequality gradient they notice convinces them that this is yet another chute they're going to slide down and this expectation is self-fulfilling. Actually, for me personally, this is the, Rational Choice, best in class, Solution and I'd download an app for it except I never got round to upgrading to a smartphone coz. like telephoning is so difficult? and how they have all these little buttons and I'd just probably lose it anyway or else the tough kids will take it off me along with my lunch money even though I'm 50 years old and don't actually go to the local Primary School

  Learned Failure isn't Religion but it's the best defense against it. It's also good at reducing inequality coz it encourages fucking up and goofing off- both of which disproportionately affect the yield upon the Wealth gap to the better off- i.e. their Matthew effect Rent Take an example. If low paid people think they just can't do stuff better off people do then they won't imitate them or else they will fuck up when delegated work by them. This means the return on Income disparity to the Rich turns low or negative.

  Clearly Learned Failure is what Secular Society has to push to survive. This is the true meaning of Enlightenment as Education.

Hobsbawm dies- our disputation thrives.

   The Fourth Century Buddhist Logician, Priyankachopra, once observed that no truly worthwhile debate ever really ends- it is merely interrupted. Such were my own feelings when I heard of the untimely death of the great English Marxist- Eric Hobsbawm.
  My doctrinal disputation with him dates back to 1971- the year of the Srikakulam massacre- when I pointed out to Eric that not sodomizing the eye-sockets of Class Enemies before decapitating them was nothing but sloppy Left Adventurism with Trotyskyite characteristics and not, as Hobsbawm, perhaps somewhat tactlessly, averred a Right deviationist Popular Frontism of the Harry Pollit type congenial to the undeniable Bukharinist strain in the Vadadesi Vadamarxist Vulgate
   On that occasion, I regret to say, I threw Eric across the room and vowed never to play with him again. Mummy said 'without a Teddy Bear you have no chance of making it at Oxford.  Chellame, take Hobsbawm back to your bosom- otherwise we will have to send you to the L.S.E and the starving masses of Srikakulam will have to wait another generation to gain the sort of constructive leadership that will enable them to revenge themselves upon their tormentors.'
   I sternly refused and though I did drink up all my Ovaltine, after Mummy removed the skin, I never again engaged in debate with my dear old teddy, Eric Hobsbawm, with the result that I had to slum it at the LSE while all the other great liberators of the Proletariat were swanning around Oxford, hugging their battered old Hobsbawms, quaffing Chateau Petrus and drunkenly getting gay with each other.
   Still, as news reaches me of a new generation of Anti Imperialist activists procuring fatwas condoning sodomy for the devout purpose of enlarging their own rectums to permit the insertion of a larger payload of explosives- I turn back to reading Hobsbawm's obituary and realize, with misted eyes, that our debate is still very much alive, indeed, it is the epitome of all meaningful Left-wing debate- and thus, though our paths parted in an act of violence- one supervenient Death forbids me undo- yet, it is but the body that dies, the debate survives.