Some months ago the LARB featured this interview with Divya Dwivedi
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: It was on the occasion of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary that you made your now-controversial remarks that Hinduism was invented in the 20th century. You received a pretty enormous and immediate reaction of outrage and trolling on social media and in the public sphere. Why do you think this statement caught fire at the time it did?
The answer is that Modi, a Gujarati, has reclaimed Gandhi for the BJP. We now see Modi as a Kathiawari, like Swami Dayanand. Gandhi was influenced by Bhai Parmanand, as was Lala Har Dayal, but Gandhi initially was a 'loyalist'.
In other words, Gandhi has the same intellectual genealogy as the RSS- many of whose members were celibate.
Congress has tried but has failed to assert its property rights in Gandhi but, the truth is, the dynasty is dying nasty only because Rahul Baba still refuses to step up to the plate- or let anyone else do so.
Meanwhile, the leftists in the Academy- whom we all expected to provide good quality testimony to the Bench in the Ram Janmabhoomi case- have shat the bed. They have proved useless, utterly ignorant, and irremediably stupid. Divya's performance on the TV debate explained why the Left has declined so precipitously in electoral politics. It has lost all contact with reality. It doesn't care how absurd it sounds. It was one thing to say 'British created divisions of caste and creed'. Blaming the foreigner for everything makes sense. But saying Hinduism was invented in the Twentieth Century is just stupid. Most of us knew at least one of our grandparents who, in turn, could remember their grandparents. Thus we know our Religion was present in the Nineteenth Century. There are one or two sects- e.g. Brahma Kumaris- which came into existence in the Twentieth Century but Hinduism has been around for a very long time. Indian lawyers- some of whom become politicians- derive their bread and butter through their knowledge of Hindu law. Many of the cases they cite are from the Nineteenth Century. There is a Constitutional aspect to this. Certain sects have approached the Court to be declared non-Hindu. In refusing these requests, the Court upholds the notion that Hinduism is prehistoric. Otherwise, Nineteenth Century creations, like the Brahmo and the Arya Samaj and so forth could gain 'minority' status for their educational establishments.
Why did Divya say such a stupid thing? She could easily have hedged her bets by saying 'The political instrumentalization of Hinduism is a wholly Twentieth Century invention'. Except, she couldn't at all because she really is stupid and has been made stupider by reading stupid books by stupid people in a shite branch of the academy.
DIVYA DWIVEDI: First of all, this statement is something that has been very well researched over the past three or four decades.
Even the best research conducted by shitheads will be shite. However, Divya has a point. Fifty years ago, Professors in Departments which are now utterly shite had to at least pretend not to be paranoid nutcases. Thus, an academic who said 'Hinduism was invented in the Twentieth Century' in 1970 would have been sacked from the IIT.
Also, some academics did come out and try and refute it, which was bizarre because they’re not refuting me, they are refuting a whole host of extremely sound historical precedents and Indologists and anthropologists.
Divya told a stupid lie. Some refuted her stupid lie. She says 'this is bizarre. I am not the liar. There is a host of shitheads who utter this sort of stupid lie'.
But nothing bizarre occurred. The truth is, it isn't just Divya who is a stupid liar. The entire Left-Liberal Academic establishment is populated by either stupid liars or guys who go along with stupid lies for the sake of a quiet life.
Given that it is so well established, I definitely knew what I wanted to say on TV and I meant every single word of it.
Divya's parents may have been libtards. But did she never meet her grandparents? Did they not tell her about the beliefs of their own grandparents? Had Divya been brought up in Siberia, we might think her ignorant but not necessarily stupid. But Divya has always lived in India. Her Academic credentials are Indian. She teaches in India.
It may be that she is a RSS 'plant', or that her TV appearance was an exercise in dadaist 'pataphysics'. But the Libtards have rallied to her. Divya's stupidity is their stupidity. No wonder their 'long march through the Institutions' has ended in complete political irrelevance.
I also knew the format of television debates in general, which are not aimed at serious discussion, but I said what I said in that limited time because I feel both morally and philosophically obliged to do so.
She told a stupid lie because, morally, she is a liar and, philosophically, she is as stupid as shit. What is remarkable is that she has profited by it. The Libtards have rallied to her. That's a good thing. It meant, inter alia, that Shaheen Bagh failed before it began. Islam has a deep history. Hinduism is just some shite invented a couple of generations ago. But why was it invented? To hold Islam at bay. Suddenly, clamoring for a change in the law so non-Muslims fleeing Islamic persecution couldn't get citizenship didn't seem such a clever idea. We too might have to run away.
I thought that on this occasion, the birth anniversary of Gandhi, there was nothing else that could be said. I thought I was able to say that Gandhi is not going to be our way into a political future, because our main problem is the problem of caste hierarchy, and exploitation, and oppression,
which is why ecumenical, civilizational, Hinduism was reinvigorated by great Saints and intellectuals in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century as a way of getting rid of untouchability, purdah, child marriage, and 'outcasting' caused by the breaking of ritualist taboos- e.g. that against the crossing of 'black water'.
so we should think of a future without Gandhi.
In 1950, Acharya Vinobha Bhave agreed with Nehru that the Gandhians should concentrate on voluntary work in the boondocks while technocrats ran the 'modern' sector. By 1970, it was clear that 'bhoodan' etc. had failed in the rural hinterland. India's future involved relegating Gandhi to the status of a mascot. But Nehru's Planning Commission too had to be emasculated. The License-Permit Raj had to be relaxed, or corrupted, so 'India could grow by night'.
This is the primary fact from which everything follows: that “Hindu” as a religious category encompasses a minority, which is the upper-caste minority population.
So what? Power passed to the 'OBC' from the late Sixties onward. Brahmins vote for Modi. So do Banias and Kayasthas and Khattris and Thakurs. The problem for Divya is that a lot of Dalits too are Hindu Nationalists. Thus Hinduism is now led by its own majority- unlike Christianity or Islam. Divya may not have noticed but most people with the surname Dwivedi are as poor as shit. Some aren't but most are. Still, they are good people and come up quickly if given a chance at productive employment.
But it has been invented as a category in early 20th century in order to represent the majority.
What happened in the 'early Twentieth Century'? The Muslim League was established in 1906. The Hindu Mahasabha was created about a decade later. Is Divya saying 'Muslims invented Hinduism?' The moment they got 'reserved seats', non-Muslims got lumped together as 'Hindus'. Then the Muslims got Pakistan and ethnically cleansed non-Muslims. So 'Hindu Nationalism' is the creation of militant Islam. The thing is purely defensive. Is Divya a crypto-bakht? No. She is merely ignorant and stupid.
So it’s a false majority. And all our political problems, and our academic problems including whether it’s possible to do philosophy on the subcontinent or not, have to do with the suppression of this fact.
What fact? Non-Muslim Indians are forced to band together to protect themselves from persecution? Is that it? The big problem with the Academy on the sub-continent is that it has to suppress this 'fact' which is actually an axiom of Islamophobia.
Divya thinks she is attacking Hinduism but, like Shaheen Bagh (which protested the granting of citizenship to refugees fleeing Islamic persecution), the attack backfires. It seems Islam's intolerance is the problem, not Hindu chauvinism. Indeed, by Divya's logic, Hinduism only came into existence as a reaction to Islamic militancy.
Can you elaborate on your account of this construction of a Hindu majority? And what does this construction mask?
Why would Hinduism need to be invented at exactly the same time as a Muslim League demanding reserved seats? The obvious answer is because Muslim rule was horrible for non-Muslims. It wasn't great for a lot of low caste Muslims or those from minority sects. But for non-Muslims, it was a catastrophe.
Divya can't say 'Hinduism was invented so as to counter Islam'. Instead she has to talk paranoid bollocks.
This has been very well researched by historians like Jaidayal Dalmia,
who on earth can she possibly mean?
Heinrich von Stietencron,
Vasudha Dalmia could be said to have this sort of bias- but nobody thinks she is smart. Stietencron went with the flow. But he never pretended to know more about Hinduism than actual Hindus like my parents. Neither Dalmia nor Stietencron are considered historians.
Will Sweetman,
is a low IQ, Religious Studies, guy on some Campus in New Zealand.
Robert Frykenberg,
was born in India and is interested in the history of Christian Missionary work there. He is well aware of what happened to Christians in Pakistan.
and Romila Thapar,
Thapar is a historian. She has endorsed Divya's work. But Thapar has gone completely mad. Sonia made a big mistake by listening to this shithead. Thanks to her, Congress became anti-Hindu and now is flirting with anti-Nationalism.
The fact is Raja Ram Mohan Roy- because of his Persian education- was using the term Hindu in his English writing from 1817 onward. David Lorenzen, in his article 'Who invented Hinduism' highlights John Cruwford's use of the term 'Hindu', 'Hinduism' and 'Hindu Religion' to designate the creed of the Hindus of Bali in 1820 to prove the opposite of Divya's case. The fact is, 'Hindu' became the dominant term in English writing on India during the second quarter of the Nineteenth Century English. This nomenclature replaced 'Gentoo' or 'Indu' which had currency in European literature from the Sixteenth Century onward. By the time Mahatma Gandhi was born, 'Hinduism' was replacing 'Brahmanism' as the scholarly name for the Religion.
The term 'Hindu' is not, however, the original term by which followers of sanatan dharma referred to themselves. But it was more useful as a 'rigid designator'. Why? What constitutes dharma is 'essentially contested'. Focal solutions to coordination games are not contested. Hinduism is inclusivist and thus unobjectionable.
Moreover, it appears to have attained wide currency by the 14th Century- because of Muslim expansion. Lorenzen writes-
Given such facts, easily accessible on the internet, why would anyone want to claim that 'Hinduism was invented in the twentieth century?'
I suppose, if you are a bigoted follower of Savarkar, you would insist that all Indian citizens or those domiciled in India are actually Hindus and obliged to uphold Hindutva against any other creed. The problem with this sort of postmodernism is that it is a double edged sword. Ex falso quodlibet. From self-contradictory premises anything at all can be deduced. The invention of the idea that Hinduism was invented can be as easily attributed to the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat as to the guys who set up the Hindu Mahasabha in 1916. No question, Congress and the Communist Party were ploys by which elitist cunts got to tyrannize over the majority. So what? Other Parties were ploys for their promoters to turn into elitist cunts who got rich fucking over the Common Man. Then the Common Man Party was founded to cut out the middleman so such fucking over might burgeon without limit.
almost everything regarding caste has been articulated consistently by low-caste intellectuals including Jyotirao Phule, B. R. Ambedkar, Urmila Pawar, Kancha Ilaiah, Anand Teltumbde, Khalid Anis Ansari, J. Reghu, Meena Dhanda, Hartosh Bal, Suraj Yengde, and more.
Phule & Ambedkar were aware that untouchability existed in all religions in India. Neither thought Hinduism was invented in the Twentieth Century. Ambedkar endorsed Iyothee Dasan's theory re. Dalits as downgraded Buddhists.
Khalid Anis Ansari has written off the oppression of the 85 % Pasmanda majority by the Ashraf Muslim majority. He thinks this is because of 'Brahminism'. Yet, the problem is now worse in Iran and Iraq. Being a Syed means radically different life-chances under conditions of economic collapse or insecurity. On the other hand, widespread slavery and castration of eunuchs reduced the need for 'untouchability' in Islamic countries. But emancipation meant that groups like the Yemeni Akhdam are now more vulnerable than ever before. Hopefully, restoration of peace and economic growth will rapidly ameliorate these problems. But that is true of every under-class. Raising productivity and properly resourcing the Rule of Law is the only sustainable way forward.
“Hindu” is related to the Arabic term “al-Hind,”
which arises from the Sanskrit root 'Indu' which has a spiritual as well as a geographic meaning. In antiquity, it was usual to use a geographic term of high salience interchangeably with that of a nation. Thus 'Egypt' could refer to the Nile and vice versa. Malay mariners used the word 'Bharat' to mean West as well as to refer to the Indian subcontinent.
Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who learned Persian and Arabic before he learned Sanskrit, preferred the term 'Hindu' precisely because he considered Muslims a threat. He explicitly appealed to Westminster to permit unrestricted European settlement in India so as to help defend Hindus from militant Islam. What was important about Hinduism was not whether or not it was unified or, indeed, whether it had previously existed. In the light of the Islamic threat, it needed to exist. Thus H.H Wilson has to testify both to the inchoate as well as to the unitary nature of the Religion. On the other hand, Christendom too needed ecumenism. Britain in particular needed to stop getting its knickers in a twist about Dissenters and Catholics and Methodists and Unitarians and so forth.
which was used to designate the region around Indus river by travelers to the subcontinent. Before the 19th century, the term Hindu simply didn’t refer to religion, but to a loose collection of peoples who happened to live on the subcontinent and who were neither Muslim nor Christian.
So, Hindu Nationalism is a reaction to predatory Muslims and Christians. Thus, if you are a non-Muslim Indian, you should join the RSS because, clearly, there is still a Caliphate type threat.
On the other hand, Hinduism- e.g. in Bali- exists independently of Hindu Nationalism and has done so from long before the Europeans showed up.
The term Hindu began to be used in the 19th century, when European Indologists were trying to codify a religion.
Judges and officials codified. European Indologists did philology and hermeneutics.
European Missionaries in India were using the term 'Hindu' in the eighteenth and seventeenth century. Lorenzen, an actual historian, unlike dim little Divya, gives the following example-
Divya doesn't get that 'Indologists' actually read the texts they work with. No doubt, to curry favor with the Leftists who dominate Academia, they repeat any nonsense that might appeal to them. But, more especially if they are White, Males, they are obliged to kowtow to Blackie or risk getting labelled Racists. One White female who bucked the trend did so because she had a student who was from the Balmik community- which has done very well in London. She met that community and became convinced that Bhagvan Valmiki had indeed written The Holy Ramayana. Had A.K Ramanuja had the chance to sit in the Balmik prayer-hall- or just receive instruction over a nice home-cooked meal- he would never have written such nonsense. He may have been an Iyer- i.e. stupid- but he wasn't evil.
Divya does not believe Bhagwan Valmiki came from a great community which flourishes wherever it is given the chance to work productively for the commonweal.
The fact is great Spiritual, Scientific, and Literary works were more commonly created by poorer, lower class, people- especially women- than by Lords and Bishops. The Rg Veda itself testifies to this truth. No Indian Muslim or Hindu has ever denied that most of our greatest Poet Saints were of humble birth. Many were women.
But not women like Divya. She says-
But Indologists work only with texts, and texts are the basis only of upper-caste culture.
Codification was not based on texts. It was on the basis of customary practice, 'judge made law', and official decisions of a legislative or executive type.
So the upper castes acted as native informants for these Indologists,
No they didn't. Many German and Russian and other Indologists never met a 'Native'.
The fact is, learned Pundits and Mullahs and so forth instructed scholars and administrators as well as kids whose parents hoped they'd grow up to amount to something. Smart people got jobs and learned stuff or compiled information which was useful. There were 'Court Pundits' till the 1860s. Plenty of barristers learned Sanskrit or Arabic so as to specialize in lucrative Inheritance Law cases. Aurobindo & Chesterton's headmaster had an M.A in both Sanskrit and Law. On the other hand, there were and are plenty of Indologists who had no influence whatsoever. Why? They are stupid. They'd make a fool of themselves on the witness stand. Their 'expertise' is useless. Sadly, the Indian Left historians and scholars proved to be equally useless. They were supposed to stand up in Court and prove that the Babri Masjid was always a Mosque- never a place of Hindu worship. They failed miserably.
and as a result, what was conceived as religion at that time was only the upper-caste religion. With the 1872 British census, a new dimension came up, which was that communities were going to be enumerated, and that’s when the upper castes began to consider their category. For the longest time, they always continued to think of themselves in terms of caste rather than the category of religion.
So, even if- like Divya- your Mummy & Daddy were atheistic Commies- you should join the RSS or at least vote for Modi. Why? Because Hinduism is just the name given to resistance to Islamic militancy. Don't confuse Hinduism with upper-caste stuff like vegetarianism and studying Sanskrit. Europeans, for some reason, preferred talking to guys of that sort and so they imposed a 'Brahminical' Hinduism on us. Incidentally, they treated the Gypsies- who are related to the Doms in India- like shit. In other words, non-Muslim Indians, regardless of caste, should rally behind Modi. They should join the RSS.
By the early 20th century, censuses began to show that the upper castes are a minuscule minority.
Makes sense. In a poor country only a few are going to be able to live in an 'upper' class manner. The problem, in India, was that upper castes were very numerous in the Gangetic 'heartland'. Even elsewhere they were so plentiful that many of them were severely malnourished.
Some upper-caste people began to catch up to the new game, which was that Indians would get greater room in governing themselves.
As a gift from Whitey, coz Whitey is actually Santa Claus- right? How come South African blacks didn't get to govern themselves till quite recently?
They decided that if their numbers were revealed to be low,
but that had already happened- otherwise they wouldn't themselves have known about it.
they would have no traction in this new form of electoral politics
which gained salience only thirty to forty years after the first Census was conducted
and therefore, they needed to hide caste
But caste data was collected and published by the Government. The only reason caste tabulation did not appear in the 1941 Census was because there was a war on and so the Government decided to save a little money.
Divya seems to be unaware that Modi is forcing OBC caste listing on the 2021 census. It seems the RSS does not want to 'hide caste'. It wants to reveal it.
Once again, we have to ask- is Divya a RSS plant or just stupid?
and to produce a new category under which they would not only appear to be the majority, but also be the representatives of that majority. And that is when “Hindu” as a category was embraced, and they required quite a lot of persuasion to do so. This is all very, very well archived: Gandhi, Lajpat Rai, several other nationalist leaders were part of this.
This is pure fantasy. By the 1880s everybody was setting up Caste Associations and claiming superior status and special consideration. Young people hated this because they were being denied opportunities on the grounds that this would lower the prestige of the community. That's why Gandhi and Motilal and, a little later, Rajendra Prasad and so forth jumped on the Nationalist bandwagon. Only if Hindus had the popular mandate and constitutional right to legislate for themselves could they get rid of a wasteful type of holier-than-thou Caste competition whereby if the Iyengars marry off their daughters at 12, we Iyers must marry them off at 10.
So, in the early 20th century, they actively adopted a foreign term, “Hindu,”
which was derived from a Hindu term- 'Indu'- and wasn't foreign at all because it was the term used by Persian speaking Muslims who had been ruling much of the country for centuries.
and the religion was “invented.”
Monier Williams, who published books about 'Hinduism', had taken Shymaji Krishna Varma with him to Oxford in the 1860's.
And this constructed majority allowed them to continue caste oppression, which continues until today.
This is mad. Either there was caste oppression which continued regardless of any invention, or there was no invention at all.
Currently, the Left is trying to construct, or invent, an anti-Hindu majority by roping in Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Adivasis, and OBCs. But they are failing. Inventions often do if there is no demand for what they offer. In the case of the Left, what is offered, is rule by corrupt, casteist, utterly incompetent, dynasts.
And what about the reactions from the public to your statement? What was it like for you from the eye of the storm?
I think that the threats and the abuses, which continued for a while, definitely are scary. And there are too many other people who have faced it.
I myself receive rape threats from Hindutvadis like Mother Theresa- who, btw & fyi, was only invented in the Twenty First Century.
So it’s just the condition that we are in today. There was also pressure on me to retract my statements.
All the silly moo needed to do was to say 'by 'invent' I mean, of course, 'instrumentalized in a novel manner'.
What was shocking to me was that there is this much ignorance about this fact and that it’s a deliberate ignorance.
Google 'was Hinduism invented' and you immediately get to Lorenzen's article which was written before this silly moo got to Collidge.
And also when some academics from the so-called liberal left tried to refute what I was saying, that was very saddening and shocking. I think that the reaction was carefully aimed at me in order to make sure that this is not amplified further or given more space in a medium (TV) that does reach a very large number of people.
Divya was told to shut up because she was making her fellow libtard academics look bad. She was very saddened and shocked by this.
When you were in college and studying philosophy, was there an expectation that Indian academics outside the mainstream can expect to get so many personal threats? When did it become an expectation that if you had a certain kind of approach, this is just part of the deal?
Plenty of Indian academics got death threats in the Nineties when Divya was a little girl.
I think the attempts to try and silence academics who produce well-evidenced research contrary to the reigning dogmas have always been there.
This silly moo's own dogma is a sillier version of the one Lorenzen comprehensively rubbished when she was still in Skool.
But it never got the traction that it is having now. It didn’t have a political party representing it at the center.
OMG! This silly moo didn't notice that Atal was PM when she started College!
Previously there were groups who attacked historians, like Romila Thapar and Sumit Sarkar, and even certain texts like Three Hundred Ramayanas by A. K. Ramanujan.
Before she got to College.
There have also been episodes where academics have been attacked physically in the university, and the offices of heads of history departments have been trashed, and research centers which contained manuscripts of the Mahabharata have been trashed.
While she was at College.
But it is more recently that Hindu nationalists have occupied all political and social spheres in an unprecedented way and, definitely, that increases the consequences of attacks coming your way.
There is no evidence of this.
As a college student, speaking your mind or protesting are fairly common activities and I certainly did a lot of that. You can see now that student protests have shut down, certainly in Delhi and in most other parts of the country as well. Heavy anti-terror laws are used against people who try to speak their mind, which was not the case earlier. That should tell us something about how people now share a basic level of fear or inhibition.
It tells us that either these guys are cowards or that the Government was cowardly in not curbing a nuisance because it thought there would be 'Hindu consolidation'. It may be that Divya gave this interview before Shaheen Bagh. Still, it is good for 'activists' to know that the sort of philosopher who supports them believes 'Hinduism was invented in the Twentieth Century'. Personally, I'd prefer David Icke batting for me.
Did you feel something start to change in 2014, after the first election? Is there some kind of time frame you can put on when the fact that this Hindu nationalist administration with an unprecedented mandate made its presence felt in the academic sphere?
Back in 2014, the smart play was to show loyalty to the Dynasty and make nice with the Commies because, everybody thought, they had learned their lesson and would up their game.
There was no point wooing the BJP because the grace and favor appointments would go either to long time RSS types or else to technocrats.
I’m actually much more interested in the manner in which almost all political players and intellectual players in India have maintained the same consensus regarding the upper castes.
Which is that they didn't invent Hinduism in the Twentieth Century in the manner that Dwivedi believes her great-great-grand daddies did.
Everybody has been part of this consensus where the only fight in which one can take positions is that between Hinduism and Hindutva [Hindu-ness, the ideology informing the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party] or an Indian secularism versus a kind of more rabid nationalism or ultra-nationalism.
As opposed to the notion that Hinduism was invented around the same time as 'Hindutva'. But who was the inventor? It must have been Savarkar & Co. Thus every practicing Hindu is, like it or not, a follower of Savarkar.
Today, a lot of academics are invested in making this distinction. But to me this is still a fake wrestling match that continues to avert our eyes from the real problems, which are related to the caste hierarchy.
We are speaking of a country where a billion people have been tricked into following a Religion which was secretly invented just three or four generations ago. What other elements of our immemorial tradition were invented at that time? Indian languages are a likely candidate. The Brits invented them to 'divide and rule'. Previously, Indian agriculturists from Kashmir to Kanya Kumari conversed in Parisian French.
If you look at major conflagrations of, what are called “riots” but are most often pogroms or attacks on religious minorities, that discourse is not changed in its fundamentals.
But has its head up its fundament.
I think that continuity is something we should pay attention to, because it means that a consensus that was decided very long ago has informed the idea of India.
Every idea that has lasted has been informed by a long enduring consensus. Divya finds this very suspicious. She stands up and says something absurd. Everybody laughs at her. Isn't that strange? Doesn't it prove there is a huge conspiracy here? I mean it isn't as though Divya is stupid and ignorant- right? Oh. She is stupid and ignorant. Sad.
You’ve talked and written about how India is trapped in a Hindu-Muslim unity discourse championed by Gandhi, to the exclusion of discussing intercaste relations.
The interviewer is American- though her name is properly Indic and unpronounceable. She doesn't know Partition occurred more than seventy years ago. Hindu-Muslim unity has not mattered since. All that matters is caste.
These days, the Indian government doesn’t even release caste data from the census.
No. Manmohan funked releasing that data- though, it must be admitted, it was worthless because people put down anything they liked. Modi is determined to get the job done properly- so people will have to pick one jati from a list not just write (as I do) Honeytitted Jedi Knight.
Can you talk about that and other ways in which caste remains the elephant in the room?
Caste is difficult to talk about because it’s the elephant in a room full of upper-caste people.
Who, if they are my age, are constantly asking about the jati and gotra and astrological chart of every suitable boy or girl you might be related to. Middle aged people become obsessive match-makers. Young people find this very boring and try to run away when they see a Mama or Mami coming.
True, there are some superior sorts who went to Doon School & St. Stephens who feel this is infra dig. But they listen to people who are experts in caste arithmetic.
So you could even say it’s not the elephant in the room.
In which case, sane people would not mention it. When is the last time someone at a cocktail party said 'why are we not talking about the tiger which is not in the room?'
It’s the elephant which has been kept outside the room.
As opposed to the elephants that inhabit Divya's gracious dwelling.
It’s exactly consonant with the basic structure of the society of the subcontinent. So for 2,000 years, the upper castes maintained their stranglehold on all institutions and exploited the labor of the lower castes. They had segregationist policies and ethos and ritual and scriptural justification for it. And the oppression of women also has to do with the control of reproduction and sexuality in order to maintain caste hierarchies and boundaries.
So, the silly moo is trying to package herself as a Dalit activist! Sadly, her surname is a disadvantage. Also, she needs to marry a younger Kashmiri Muslim. Nothing else will do.
And this order, which has a feudal dimension, has carried over despite independence, in institutions like the media, or academic education at all levels, and politics itself, political representation of the people. If in all these institutions, the upper castes continue to dominate, how can the discussion of what facilitates their own privilege, how can that discussion break through?
Divya has an answer. It can break through by telling stupid lies.
How does the issue of upper-caste domination manifest in your field, which is philosophy in India?
Her field is shit. There is no philosophy in India. There is darshan gyan and meta-mathematical research and Quantum phenomenology and so forth. But no philosophy. At one time, people thought Joshi and Matilal and so forth weren't as stupid as shit. But, that time has passed.
It’s total. First of all, simply in terms of what is considered to be philosophy. There is no emphasis on thinking on your own.
Because silly moos like Divya will start saying 'Hinduism was invented in the twentieth century!'
It is a relationship to a canon.
As opposed to just saying any stupid shit that comes into your head
And for Indian philosophy, there is an idea that philosophy should have a qualifying identity, the “Indian” identity of philosophy.
If it is crap- sure. But must it be crap?
It makes sure that you only study a canon that was composed several centuries ago and you do it in the name of preserving the brilliance of this heritage, not paying attention to the fact that it was the tool for maintaining upper-caste dominance.
So, this 'upper caste' silly moo deliberately studied, and now chooses to teach, a subject which she herself believes to be about 'maintaining upper-caste dominance'.
The truth is some branches of Indian philosophy- e.g. Navya Nyaya- flourished under Muslim or British domination. Clearly, philosophy was shit at dominating anybody. Military technology is the way to go. But weapons are expensive. So, long run, as Marx pointed out, only Economic dominance- 'market power'- matters.
All research is constrained by the idea of maintaining an Indian philosophy, which really has only three or four components, including the socio-cosmic justification for the caste system.
Divya is right to say Indian philosophy, in the English language, is shit. Scrap it by all means. But Indian Soteriology has a big market. Let that burgeon. Its practitioners could make money and pay taxes. Rajneesh made a lot of money. He got his start as a philosophy lecturer.
So you study these texts as kind of metaphysical articulations, which are simply articulations of how people should remain segregated. The Brahmins are the only ones, in fact, who are supposed to do any intellectual or cognitive activity.
This would be news to the Jains and the Buddhists whose founders were not Brahmins. Indeed, it would be news to such Brahmins as know the Vedas and Upanishads.
And as [the eighth-century theologian] Adi Shankara said, Bhaja Govindam, mudha-mate: worship Govinda [Krishna], you fool! Meaning, lower-caste people simply don’t have the intellectual capacity to deal with the Vedas. They should just express their devotion by chanting the name Govinda.
Sankara saw an old Brahmin reciting a formula from Panini's Aṣṭādhyāyī. He admonished him to forget grammar and philology and seek salvation through devotion to the Lord. Sankara was speaking to a high caste man in the Holy City of Benares. His song is in Sanskrit. How were poor unlettered people supposed to understand it?
You’re not capable of engaging with the texts. You’re not even allowed to listen to the Vedas. This is an injunction in text after text studied within Indian philosophy. We have continued the same attitude in our philosophy departments, which is of ritual repetition of the texts and commentaries that you’ve been given.
This is a good argument to discontinue non-STEM subject Post Grad courses in India.
At one time it was argued that doing a PhD in shite was good coz that way poor people could become Communists. But poor people won't vote for Communists because doing a PhD stuffs your brain full of shit. So the thing is completely useless even from the Communist point of view.
Do lower-caste students drop out as the field narrows because they feel discouraged by these structural constraints?
To answer this autobiographically would be a bit of a mockery, but the fact is that the dropout rate for lower-caste invalid people is so staggering and so well recorded that it doesn’t need any personal testimony. Just take a look at the statistics. The highest suicide rates in higher academic institutions, medical colleges, and engineering institutions, are of students from the lower castes.
On the other hand, professional gangsters stay on in the Post Grad Hostels for decade after decade.
On the other hand, reserved seats are not filled, so you have a lot of vacancies. The excuse is that people are not meritorious enough. If you look at professorial posts or just teaching posts in higher education institutions, 90 percent are held by the upper castes. And then the so-called prestigious institutions, including [my own] IIT, don’t even follow the reservation policy for teaching posts, only for students. So again, dropping out is one part of the picture. The other is keeping out.
But, the big picture is that Indian Post Grad Education is almost completely shit. This is fine if you are just marking time till cracking the Civil Service or Banking or other similar exams. But it is a colossal waste of scarce resources. India could have got rid of caste by pushing girls in the villages into factory dormitories. Bangladesh has just overtaken India in per capita Income. This may be reversed but the fact remains, getting girls to work in factories, not do worthless BAs and MAs while waiting for marriage, is the only way out of poverty and casteism.
What’s the canon in Indian philosophy, loosely?
The canon would include Shankaracharya, Ramanuja, a bit of Nagarjuna, who is a Buddhist thinker, but not canonized to the same degree as a Shankaracharya.
Nagarjuna and Umasvati are more not less canonical to their respective Religions and link up with first rate modern mathematical logic and philosophy. Ramanuja isn't particularly important- though Zaehner and a few other Christians tried to make a case for him some fifty or sixty years ago. Madhava's stock has risen greatly. Yoga-Samkhya has a market. Mimamsa dovetails with judicial and other hermeneutics. Navya-Nyaya still has some mileage. But there are other avenues of approach. Robert Aumann has shown game theory in the Talmud. It would be easy to do this with respect to the Mahabharata & thus get a less shite perspective on the Gita- which, however, fools like me understand perfectly. Why bother with the Vedas when Vyasa created such an engrossing 'non-dissipative' narrative for us such that, as if by Noether's theorem, karma and dharma are conserved by the symmetries of the system.
And then there are all these schools of Indian philosophical traditions such as Nyaya and Mimamsa. And of course the Upanishads and Vedanta philosophy. And then there are 19th-century thinkers like Vivekananda who contributed to giving shape to the Hindu identity, who famously represented Hinduism in the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago.
So, kids, what have we learned today. Don't study philosophy in India. Just read up on it on the internet.
So, when one gets an undergraduate philosophy education in India, are they taught on two different tracks, the “Indian” and the “Western”?
Yes, yes. The papers themselves are called Indian philosophy, logic, aesthetic philosophy. But Indian philosophy is the one that’s grouped according to its national identity. So if you choose to study, say, aesthetics, then you will have “Indian aesthetics” and study [Ananda] Coomaraswamy.
So, steer clear of the subject. Since it will only attract imbeciles, it will only be taught by imbeciles. Don't waste your life. Join the RSS. If you work hard and stay clean, you could end up Prime Minister no matter how poor or 'low caste' your family was!
You’ve often talked about the limits of the postcolonial lens in India, which is the postcolonial subject par excellence and the quintessential “subaltern.” Why do you think the postcolonial frame has been so pervasive?
Because you could emigrate to the West and get tenure in some branch of 'Grievance Studies' as part of an intellectual affirmative action program.
Gandhi provides the major articulation of what it means to be independent in India.
Nonsense! Among Gujaratis, Dadhabhai Naoroji gets credit for doing the major articulating.
He insisted on native traditions, native knowledges, and native customs,
but was ignorant of what they were. So the thing was purely cosmetic- or 'naam ke vaaste'.
which are to be recovered after the epistemic violence or epistemic damage performed by the colonizer. And he adopted very consciously and vocally the Hindu idiom in politics:
which Bhai Parmanand indoctrinated him in
to speak of independence as swaraj, to ask people to chant the name of [the Hindu god] Rama, to ask for cow protection.
In 1893, Viceroy Landsdowne said cow-protection was what turned the INC “from a foolish debating society into a real political power, backed by the most dangerous elements of native society”. Gandhi's first intervention in Indian politics- the Champaran agitation- provided a cover for systematic attacks on Muslims in Bihar which ended in the end of cow slaughter.
So by theologizing politics,
i.e. by listening to Bhai Parmanand and parroting his line
Gandhi is the one who inaugurated the postcolonial identity,
in the opinion of a silly moo who thinks Hinduism was invented in the Twentieth Century
and the Hindu one, and then postcolonial as Hindu, and Hindu as postcolonial. And we are still living in that consensus.
This silly moo is living in that solipsistic consensus. Hindus won't kill this bovine creature so let it chew its cud in peace.
Subsequently, we found more sophisticated articulations of this same paradigm
in other words, yet more garbled and illiterate variations on a paranoid theme
— sophisticated only because the postcolonial theorists who are predominantly based abroad in First World academia borrowed approaches from European philosophy of the 19th and 20th century. So for example, the Heideggerian opposition to Western metaphysics assisted postcolonial theorists in saying that we have to oppose everything which is Western because all of that is coming from Western metaphysics.
Sadly, Me-too happened and it turned out what the students of these nutters really opposed was not Western metaphysics but greasy Indian dicks rubbing up against them.
Then Deconstruction is again borrowed in its entirety by postcolonial theorists to say that the entire edifice of Western philosophy is complicit in colonization and that we have to deconstruct them.
Whereas the truth is Hinduism was invented in Twentieth Century. Thus Twenty First Century should invent anti-Hinduism. Then BJP will disappear. Next item on the agenda is to invent anti-Poverty and anti-Naughtiness. Then Poverty and Naughtiness will disappear and everything will be sweet as sweet.
So it’s amazing that a theoretical edifice borrowed entirely from the West
by a small number of pedagogues doling out worthless credentials in return for a small wage
is used in order to speak against the West, and for the “native,” which is of course defined as Hindu, because the academia and the media are saturated with upper castes.
who are nevertheless as poor as shit because India isn't getting girls into factories but instead is subsidising their 'Higher Education' in worthless bullshit. Even IITs employ cretins like Divya as an awful warning to their students of what happens if you study non-STEM subjects.
An example is Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Her definition of “subaltern” is exemplified in a Brahmin woman who is too worried about how her family customs regarding virginity and female honor are going to look at her suicide. So she makes sure that she’s menstruating when she kills herself, so that nobody thinks she’s pregnant because of an affair. On the other hand, she also wants to oppose the British and be an anticolonial revolutionary.
Gayatri was simply lying. Girls who hang themselves are checked for signs of sexual activity. Whether they are on the rag does not matter. If they have been fucked, chances are they hanged themselves because some Uncle or brother-in-law, not content with raping her, was now trying to pimp her out to his pals. There was no revolutionary activity in the year her Aunty hanged herself. There were, however, plenty of Hindu Muslim riots. A couple of years later, there were some very competent Female revolutionaries. But they were College educated and were living independently. They weren't kids who were being teased, or fiddled with, by brother-in-laws.
Which academic fields are most susceptible to the Hindutvadis? History is kind of obvious, the low-hanging fruit. Is literature, too, for example?
STEM subjects if they are well taught and there is a demand for the credential. Non-STEM subjects attract losers. Those losers should choose losing sides because winners will arrange things so they get picked as their adversaries of choice.
Yes. There is a pressure to, first of all, teach more Hindi literature and to teach certain kinds of literature that have “Indian values.”
As opposed to Arabic literature delineating Al Qaeda values. How strange!
And if we don’t lose sight of the fact that Hindutva and postcolonialism converge extremely well and at heart are not different at all,
both having been invented in the Twentieth Century- just like 'Hindi literature'. Prior to Premchand, UP bhaiyyas were writing chansons in Provencal.
then the entire enterprise of postcolonial literary studies has been nothing other than the same agenda.
Very true! Everybody is pushing a horrible agenda which consists of saying Divya is a retard. So-oo unfair!
This idea of recovering the voice of the subaltern or of the oppressed, those who are oppressed by colonization,
is silly. Suppose the thing were possible. Then the police could recover the voice of the murder victim and get it to identify the assailant.
those whose culture was silenced and their pride was hurt, these are nothing but upper-caste traditions, upper-caste texts, and upper-caste pride.
So, Ambedkar was high caste. Cool.
Another discipline being affected is policy, and I mean all domains of policymaking. And all domains even of sciences, if they have to study so-called Vedic science and Vedic plastic surgery and Vedic nuclear physics.
But the nutters who do that would otherwise be writing Sokal type postmodern shite. The only way to deal with entrenched academic nonsense is to entrench equal but opposite nonsense in the same Department. Sooner or later, even the most Emeritus of senile Professors will understand they wasted their lives.
Then also political science. Having accepted this false Hindu majority and then the Muslim minority, only two paths are allowed to us: one is of the aggressive Hindu nationalism that we see in politics. But the other path is adopted by the academics themselves, which is for political theorists to say that instead of hating the Muslim, we should tolerate the Muslim.
Why can't 'political theorists' do mechanism design based on quantitative research? Oh. Right. They are too stupid. Well, in that case it doesn't really matter which side they pick.
What is there beyond tolerance?
Tickle fights. Please say 'Tickle fights'.
What other paradigm is there to conceptualize inter-group relations?
There is something we already have but which is very marginalized: the Indian constitution, which is the gaping gesture of what it means to be modern. A society which for centuries was run on the basis of a caste hierarchy and a feudal economic and political order came
to an end when foreigners took over. But that happened long ago. No doubt, there were feudal princes and landowners. But their power was not based on caste. It was based on beating people. Two thirds of India had been under popularly elected Governments for more than a decade when the Constitution was promulgated. But that Constitution didn't matter very much. Every newly independent country got a Constitution. But it was just empty verbiage.
at a point at least to say that we will no longer govern our mutual relationship to each other on the basis of these existing paradigms. We are going to make a break with the past, and we will found our coexistence on an entirely new ground. And the new ground is liberty, fraternity, equality, justice, which is political, social, and economic. This is exactly what the first page of the constitution says.
So what? The 1930 Lahore Resolution said the same thing.
But Hindu nationalists have recently been saying the constitution is too Western
because 'cow protection' is a Directive Principle of many Western Constitutions.
and that we need to inject some Indian values into the constitution. So what we are seeing is really a conflict between what the constitution stands for and what those who actually control society stand for.
There is no such conflict. Only the Bench can interpret the Constitution. But the Bench opened detention centers for Muslim migrants a decade ago. It was the Bench which ordered and oversaw the NRC register in Assam. It was the Bench which awarded the whole of the disputed site in Ayodhya to the Hindus.
You mentioned a pressure to teach more Hindi texts; how else is Hindi language encouraged in the academy?
As far as I can see, what encourages Hindi is everybody not bothering to speak it correctly. That and cheap beer.
This, too, has been multipronged. Hindi is not the national language, but it was chosen as the “link” or official language for independent India. It’s not just this government, but this one is doing it much more aggressively.
Nonsense! Nobody tried 'aggressively' to get us Madrasis to speak Hindi. Why? Left alone, we discover Urdu for ourselves. Everybody wants an interlocutor whose Urdu is shittier than their own. But Indian Muslims now prefer Arabic to Persian. Urdu is dying. It was but a 'supplement'- dangerous to Islam. Now, thanks to the internet, it is being supplanted by the genuine article. Hopefully, the younger generation of Indian Muslims will rediscover Arabic rationality and tell stupid Libtard Stephanians to go fuck themselves. Tijarat is Imarat. Not Grievance fucking Studies.
Hindi has been also promoted by upper-caste academics and intellectuals themselves, who say that we should reject English because it’s the language of the colonizer. So this perennial, upper-caste obsession with not being polluted by that which is foreign is combined with the effort to somehow disguise Hindi as the vernacular. But if you have to invent a new Hindi with more Sanskrit terms, making a break from the [Persian-influenced] Hindi-Urdu of the past, it already shows that you’re not speaking the vernacular. Increasingly, all the circulars that come to us faculty are sent in this unreadable, unintelligible “pure” Hindi.
Which, however, is easy to learn if you are from the South. Hindi turned into a 'scoring subject' for us. We justified writing unintelligible pure Hindu by pointing out that North Indians don't understand anything anyway. Then we learned that quoting a random sher of Ghalib's- or, in my case, just making one up- caused North Indians to immediately experience satori. Bak raha hoon Junoon me Kya kya kuch/ Kuch Na Samjhe Khuda Kare Koi
Ironically, many low-caste Indians in fact prefer English to such a Hindi.
Everybody would prefer to know English.
Yes. Lower-caste intellectuals and Dalit scholars have been openly saying that they need and embrace English and they don’t see it as an oppressive language because it is the language in which they came across the discourse on human rights, the language in which [founding father Babasaheb] Ambedkar wrote and was read, and it is the language in which employment opportunities and the prospects of a better future than the ones stipulated by the caste system is available to them. In fact, Dalit scholars can go abroad for their studies only if they have access to English. So Hindi and vernacular education, which does not give you employment and does not give you freedom, is being imposed on the very people who need that freedom the most.
This is equally true of every State language. Mumbaikars don't want to learn Marathi and people from Bangalore aren't enthused by Kannada.
I wanted to ask how you use your agency
Agency? She teaches a shite subject at an IIT! Still, she went to St. Stephens. So her English is pukka.
to push back against these trends that we’ve been talking about: this upper-caste domination, this Hindu-Muslim static discourse, this postcolonial ubiquity. Because no state of affairs is permanent, right?
No.
Hinduism was invented last century. We can certainly invent anti-Hinduism. What's that? Islam did it already? Cool!
Articulating these things is already, I think, a point of resistance. But what else?
You could roll your eyes or fart in a derisive manner.
My research and published work, including the Gandhi book with Shaj Mohan, are an assertion of doing philosophy as something related to politics, and doing philosophy as an exercise in creating new freedoms.
Freedom from sanity- sure.
So it’s both an instantiation and a plea for being modern in our exercise of our own thinking, in the exercise of reason and having the confidence in ourselves that we can do it and we don’t need the crutches of the past.
Coz the past was only invented in the twentieth century! But that invention was not properly registered with the appropriate authority. This means the past does not exist. We don't need it. I wasn't born in the Twentieth Century because that is in the past which does not properly exist! Thus I'm only 19 years old!
It also informs my research praxis
which consists of telling stupid lies
and teaching and does not at all follow the agenda of postcolonialism and nativism.
It follows the agenda of Alfred Jarry's pataphysics- i.e. it is a nonsensical parody of academic language
And a part of it is also to expose the logic of postcolonialism, which has informed several things that I published.
Only stupid people wrote that type of shite. The thing is wholly played out. Mounting student debt in the West has killed off that nonsense.
Another part is to encourage the generation for which I’m responsible and for a few generations as a faculty to be able to set their own agendas and not be trapped by the ones that have continued for so long. So the idea that I mentioned earlier of erasing the ground on which we have conducted the dominant discussions in India and clearing the ground for a new kind of discussion.
Do it on the internet. Don't pay money to listen to prematurely senile losers who would gladly buy you round after round of drinks so as to get an audience for their paranoid rantings.
Philosophy is not meant to refurbish and plaster up that which has been thought a long time ago.
Yes it is. In looking at any theorist in the Humanities, your job is to repair the gaps in their knowledge and to give the thing a more context independent formulation. But do this you have to know which problems are 'closed' and which are 'open' for current Maths and Science. Only the application of a savant's theory to an open problem is philosophical. Take Kant's 'incongruent counterparts' argument. Physics closed this starting with the Wu experiment. But there are open questions where a similar arguments are current. Thus Philosophy moves on just as Science and Math moves on.
Divya has had an appalling education. But she has access to the internet. The truth is she is simply stupid.
It’s not meant to continue or to transmit the messages of your gurus or your ancestors or of your race or identity.
Yes it is. You are meant to repair that message and find new applications for it. The same thing happens in the Law. Judge Hercules finds a new heuristic principle to permit a seamless 'harmonious construction' which is equitable.
And therefore, philosophy is not culture.
It is part of culture- when done properly. But Divya isn't doing philosophy. It isn't even 'Grievance Studies'. It's just stupid shit which makes Stephanians look like fools while Modi turns, before our eyes, into Hinduism's Paramahamsa with a beard as beautifully white as a swan.
