Why Subaltern studies is shite.

Gramsci was an Italian Commie nut job who was thrown into prison by some other Italian nut job who was not a Communist coz, at that time, being a Fascist gave greater scope for mindless bloodshed and fucking up the country big time.
While Gramsci was in prison he couldn't write 'proletariat' coz that was like a Commie word so he wrote 'subaltern' as a sort of code word.
In English, a subaltern was a junior officer- like a 2nd lieutenant in the Army- the rank Churchill held when he came to India- however a bunch of elite Bengali academics decided to use subaltern as a code word for the non elite because
1) they were pretending to be Commies while pretending to be fellow travelers pretending to be Commies pretending to be fellow travelers or I dunno... Maybe they actually started out by studying 2nd lieutenants in the Army but ended up like buying them drinks and you know one thing leads to another and suddenly you are waking up in a Ballygunge brothel betrothed to the mountain goat who serves as the regimental mascot and like fuck are them mountain goats high maintenance...
2) they were so fucking elite they didn't want the non-elite to know they were like studying them or, in not actually doing so, then in any case whining for tenure by pretending to stand up for the oppressed non elite types who, just in case they discovered what the word 'subaltern' meant, still needed to be reminded that their place was strictly below the salt.
3) they were so fucking elite they wanted to spend all their time narcissistically vapouring over how spectacularly elite they were and how 'subaltern' was such a nuanced term- and like only the elite could use it coz either the subalterns didn't have agency (Spivak- can the subaltern speak? Nope coz they are shite. Can Spivak speak? Yes coz she is elite shite) or if they did have agency- it might be like an employment agency for secretarial staff whereas what they themselves had was like a totally cool modeling agency for the hunger artists of International academia.
4) they really wanted to get in on the whole 'It's a Black thing- you wouldn't understand' shtick while preserving their elite status.
5) urm... they were Bengali. And did I mention the elite thing? Well elite is stretching things a bit. Call them 'high-brows'. What's a high-brow? 'Someone educated beyond their intelligence'. So not just Bengalis- this was a big tent affair.

Positive as opposed to Careerist achievements of Subaltern Studies-
1) They ended hunger, oppression, and discrimination based on gender or sexuality.
2) Well, they could have done, but didn't coz they're like ecological in their approach to the subaltern and do their bit, with their empty gesture politics, to conserve this unimportant sub-species to which the vast majority of human kind belongs.
3) They believe Europe in the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century was fundamentally different from Asia and Africa coz.... urm... like y'know ... urm... like there was Hegel and y'know that other guy and...urm.... like Asian and African people are actually so totally different that the very fact that they are not biting their own arms off and stuffing them up each others' anuses, is coz like y'know hegemony and neo-colonialism and stuff? Nothing to do with technology or organization or stuff unrelated to y'know Hegel and that other guy and, oh yes, that other nut-job who proved them both wrong before setting fire to his own head in the mistaken belief that it was Jennifer Aniston playing the role of Roop Kanwar in Ram Gopal Verma's 'Suttee Sri Akal'.

Won't someone please tell me why I'm wrong?

There are no small parts, just enormous ass holes.

Who said 'In the Theater, as in life, there are no small parts- just enormous ass holes?'

a) Stanislawski to Chekhov
b) Mahatma Gandhi to Tagore
c) Any Kapoor to any Khan
d) M.G.R to Karunanidhi

Answer- none of the above. I just made it up. What Gandhi actually said to Tagore was 'Sorry, my knees are somewhat knobbly.' Tagore replied 'Not at all, dear boy. Didn't feel a thing.' 'Very civil of you, all the same,' Gandhi replied, not to be outdone in savoir faire, 'It works wonders on my rheumatism.' Tagore remained silent. Gandhi raised his voice slightly, in consideration to the increasing deafness of the elderly poet, and repeated his remark by way of preamble to a rambling disquisition on the superiority of traditional naturopathic remedies to Western allopathic medicine.'
'Shame it doesn't work on hair!' Tagore suddenly said.
'What?"
'You and Nehru. Don't think I don't know.'
'What?'
'Shame it doesn't work on hair. You know- you and Nehru- what you get up to.'
'Oh hair! I thought you said hare- you know like a rabbit.'
'I didn't say hare- why would I want to suddenly bring up hares? I was referring to the fact that you and Nehru are as bald as coots whereas I have flowing locks.'
'Yeah? Well I'll fuck you up- you and your fucking Shantiniketan- just see if I don't. Your flowing locks indeed! You look like a fucking hijra!'
'I say, there's no call for that sort of language. Keep your hair on!'
"You ... cunt! Again with the hair!"
For a moment the two great men glowered at each other in silence.
Then Gandhi said, 'I say, Rabindranath, I'm sorry I flew off the handle.'
Tagore replied. 'I was about to say the same thing, Mohan Das. By the way- who is this Rabindranath you mention?'
Gandhi replied- 'Aren't you Rabindranath? And, by the by, why do you call me Mohan Das? My name's Steve.'
Tagore said, 'And mine Trevor.'
'Fancy a pint, Trev?'
'Don't mind if I do, Steve me old mucker.'
'Don't look. Nehru's just come in.'
'Eyes down. That boy aint right.'

I see the above as a Symbolist drama staged in the manner of Maeterlinck or the early Yeats. Offers from film studios are invited.

Nyaya, niti and Amartya Sen's Riti

Nyaya, niti and Amartya Sen's Riti

Vivek Iyer

In the old days, Indians like Mahatma Gandhi would come to England to qualify as barristers so as to return home and get rich by fleecing their clients.

As part of their prescribed course of studies, they would hear with amusement of the horror which the general population evinced at the prospect of an 'Eyre'- i.e. the visit of a bench of Judges empowered to inquire into any malpractice or act of omission or commission since the last such visit. Embodied in the ‘Eyre’ was the notion that Justice was something ‘top-down’ and ‘substantive’- i.e. based on an examination of all existing arrangements and the punishment and rectification of every deviation from what the Judges considered to be Righteous. The ‘Eyre’ was not concerned with procedures. It could act arbitrarily and proceed in any manner it pleased.


Was the Eyre welcomed? Did it help the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalized?

In Cornwall, the Eyre of 1233 caused the great mass of the population to flee into the woods. Again and again, the people would petition their King not to proclaim a General Eyre. Justice would impoverish them and tear asunder every affectionate or social bond between individuals because each party would fear that the other might shift the blame for some culpa levis onto their own shoulders.

Justice, though more than paying for itself by detecting irregularities and levying fines, was not desirable for a prosperous and harmonious Society. On the contrary, the people were prepared to pay the King to be excused a General Eyre which would kill the golden goose of prosperity by too closely examining how it came to thrive.

As a matter of Public Policy, it was better if there were no theory or practice of Justice save as something supplied in response to a demand arising out of crimes or torts suffered by individuals. In return for Justice being turned into a service such as the market might provide- i.e. one which was demand driven, and where the ordinary people serving on the jury made determinations of fact- the people were prepared to pay taxes agreed on by their own Parliamentary representatives.

This story about the evolution of the English Judicial system had a familiar ring to Indians from small towns- like Mahatma Gandhi's own Porbandar or Rajkot. They knew very well that if the Prince develops a passion for Justice, the prosperity of his demense would perish. That is why they showed little enthusiasm for reforming the, demand driven, Indian judicial system- or even any great passion for Constitutional Law, which, prior to Independence, was left to 'country bottled' vakils- like Sapru- or even obscure 'Eighth Standard Pass', direct entry clerks like V.P Menon.

Sadly, after Independence, we had a new type of Indian student being sent to England. Instead of the Law, they studied Economics before returning to impoverish their own country without enriching themselves.

Amartya Sen was one such student who boomeranged back to take high positions in the very Colleges and Universities which had misled his ilk.

In medieval India, there was a style of literary composition known as 'riti' which drew upon, or itself illustrated, a 'ritigranth' or manual of composition. Such compositions were 'second order'- i.e. derivative of classical models- and far removed from nature or, indeed, reality.

It is tempting to speak of Sen's oeuvre as an exercise in 'riti'.

Consider his derivative work, 'An Idea of Justice' whose 'ritigranth' is Rawl's 'A theory of Justice'.

Before doing so, however, let us ask ourselves a simple question- In formulating a theory of Justice should we begin by deciding what, ideally, Justice would imply or else decide how, in practice, Society could be made more just?

The answer is NEITHER. Before doing something we should consider whether there is any point doing it at this time, and, what potential costs and benefits might be associated with the process. After all, if we have a prescriptive theory then, it would remain the case, that to put it into practice would involve a periodic 'General Eyre'- which would be fatal to the commonweal. It would kill the golden goose. That's why English Law took the path of legal fictions so as to become a pure Service industry which, currently, earns a substantial 'invisible' surplus for the U.K.

Sen, writing his big book, never pauses to ask himself whether his project is worthwhile.
This contradicts his own stated preference for focusing on outcomes.

Consider this extract from Sen's 'The Country of First Boys'- a book whose great utility is that reading it cures insomnia.

In examining the demands of social justice in India, it is important to distinguish between an arrangement-focused view of justice, on the one hand, and a realisation-focused understanding of justice, on the other.

A guy who makes a living selling widgets should examine the demand for widgets- who buys them and why. He should also know something about the supply of widgets- why there may be a sudden shortage of the thing or why widgets might become a 'repugnancy market' or become subject to price controls or rationing or whatever.

But nobody needs to distinguish between an 'arrangement focused view' of widgets and a 'realisation-focused understanding' of widgets. This is empty verbiage. Either 'arrangement focused' means 'determinants of supply' or it means nothing. 'Realisation-focused' means determinants of demand or it is sheer bullshit.

The market for Justice, a Service, is a little different from the market for widgets, a commodity.

Justice should be seen as just in its procedures and just in its outcomes. It should not be arbitrary nor subject to interference by Ideologues. It is highly mischievous to suggest otherwise.

Sometimes justice is conceptualised in terms of certain organisational arrangements – some institutions, some regulations, some behavioural rules – the active presence of which indicates that justice is being done. The question to ask here is whether the demands of justice must be only about getting the institutions and rules right. 

This is a foolish question. Getting the rules set right only matters if the outcomes are what is desired.

Consider the following scenario- I go to a South Indian restaurant and order a masala dosa. The waiter chops off my arms. I complain that I have not received my dosa. Moreover, I did not want my arms to be chopped off. The waiter chops off my legs. I roll myself out of the restaurant to the nearest hospital. The restaurant sues me for not paying my bill. Their lawyers claim that their 'intentions and rules' were correct. Chopping off arms and legs is an effective way of supplying dosas. Do my lawyers really need to prove that this is not the case? Sen would say 'yes. It is indeed important to distinguish between an arrangement-focused approach to providing South Indian food and a realization focused understanding of the same. It may be that the Restaurant did not pay enough attention to promoting gender equality in chopping off my arms and legs. On the other hand, my refusal to pay my bill may reflect homophobia or racial discrimination. This is a complicated problem and we need to properly examine all relevant factors- including the possible impact on the Higher Education of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat- so as to properly respond to the 'demands of justice'. Indeed, we must compute all possible future states of Society. What if chopping off my arms and legs resulted in my not voting for Modi or Trump or Brexit or some similar sort of moral catastrophe?

  Proceeding beyond them, should we not also have to examine what does emerge in the society, including the kind of lives that people can actually lead, given the institutions and rules and also other influences? 

No Dr. Sen. We should not do anything so stupid. This is a recipe for endless delay and increasingly stupid and hysterical discourse. A South Indian Restaurants 'intentions and rules' don't matter. All that matters is that it provide tasty masala dosa and not chop your arms or legs off. If this is not compatible with your 'Idea of Justice', it is because you have shit for brains.

Human beings and, more recently, human institutions, have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to fully internalise the hiatus between means and ends such that there is an almost instinctive 'ex ungue leonem' test we can apply. Just as, seeing the claw of the lion, we intuit the presence of a lion, so to do we understand that Education can only be produced in an Educated manner, Culture in a Cultured manner, and Justice in a fair and just manner.

The Judiciary's procedures- which to increase its own efficacy need to be transparent and 'common knowledge'- do all relevant examining in a protocol bound manner such that the outcomes are what is Socially desirable. But 'relevant examining' is a movable feast. It evolves as Society evolves. So long as 'Voice, Loyalty' & most importantly 'Exit' obtains, we have reason to believe that the Legal system will adapt and 'pay for itself'.

Thus, a 'Law & Economics' approach is warranted because, as in Management theory, Judicial processes are internally evaluated with respect to outcomes. The Coasian enterprise internalizes associated externalities. The legal system can do the same. It is a matter of common sense that an organisation which isn't doing what is being paid to should be deprived of revenue till it mends its ways. The same is true of a profession or vocation which ceases to be socially utile.

Sen subscribes to a different view- he believes that the Law is a Dickensian monstrosity which evolved along the lines predicted by Franz Kafka and Lewis Caroll. In this context, it seems reasonable to plead for a little sanity, some basic humanity, on the part of Judges and Lawyers. 

The basic argument for a realisation-focused understanding, for which I would argue, is that justice cannot be divorced from the actual world that emerges. 

OMG! Talk of the bleeding obvious! In which country is a system of Justice, paid for out of taxes, which is 'divorced from the actual world'? No doubt, the Indian legal system is dysfunctional in several respects, but it possesses the tools to correct itself. There is no need for a Philosopher to stick his nose where it does not belong.

  Of course, institutions and rules are very important in influencing what happens, and also they are part and parcel of the actual world as well, but the realised actuality goes well beyond the organizational picture.

Nonsense! The organizational picture is either dysfunctional, in which case it should be denied money, or it is focused wholly on 'realised actuality'. Why does Sen think organisations can flourish while being wholly divorced from the world? Justice isn't a worthless branch of Academia.

This is a critically important distinction in the history of theories of justice, including those in Europe and the West. 

It is not critically important. It is very very silly. Why pretend Courts operate like something out of Alice in Wonderland and that taxpayers are too stupid to do anything about it? But I begin with a demarcation that has a clear role in Indian intellectual debates, going back to the Sanskrit literature on the subject. Two distinct words – niti and nyaya – both of which stand for justice in classical Sanskrit, actually help us to differentiate between these two separate concentrations. This is sheer nonsense. Niti means 'Policy'. Sen's first paper was published by a Journal called 'Arthaniti' which means 'Economic Policy'. Nyaya means Justice. A Court is called a 'Nyayalay'- 'Abode of Justice'- just as a School is called a 'Vidyalaya'- 'Abode of Knowledge.

Perhaps, Sen confused the word 'Niyam' (Rule, Observance) with Niti. In several Indian languages there is are expressions to the effect that 'Nyaya (Justice) is greater than Niyam (Rule)'- in other words you can break the rules to achieve Justice. But this is precisely the notion of 'equitable exception'. In Hindu law, Niyam is always defeasible. It presents no barrier to Justice though, no doubt, some casuistry may be involved. 
It is true, of course, that words such as niti and nyaya have been used in many different senses in different philosophical and legal discussions in ancient India, 

Sen is the first to confuse the two. A Minister may have a crooked or cunning policy or Niti. A Judge must always be upright though he is not absolutely bound to follow 'Niyam' (rule). However, human Justice is imperfect. After death, Yama will judge all. 

but there is still a basic distinction between the respective concentrations of niti and nyaya. 

There is a big difference between Public Policy- which is formulated by politicians and administrators- and Justice- which is the province of wholly independent Judges. Should Judges have 'niyams'? If the Judge is an arbitrator and neither party to the dispute has any objection, then- sure- the Judge can ignore rules and procedures. Also, if we are speaking of 'Judge Dredd'- i.e. a policeman who is also judge, jury and executioner- then too we may say observing 'niyam' is irrelevant. The only way to appeal a decision by such a judge is to kill him before he kills you. 

Among the principal uses of the term niti are organisational propriety and behavioural correctness. In contrast with niti, the term nyaya stands for a more comprehensive concept of realised justice. 

India rejected arbitrary 'Justice on horseback'. It is part of Democratic, Constitutional, 'Niti' to have an independent Judiciary which acts as a check on the Executive and the Legislature.

India's 'Planning Commission'- which at one time may have thought of itself as above the Law- is now known as 'Niti Aayog'- and is a Public Policy advisory body.

 

In that line of vision, the roles of institutions, rules, and organisation, important as they are, have to be assessed in the broader and more inclusive perspective of nyaya, which is inescapably linked with the world that actually emerges, not just the institutions or rules we happen to have…~~~

Institutions, rules and organizations are only important if they are wholly focused on outcomes. Acts of omission or commission on their part can be made justiciable by either the Legislature or 'due process' Judicial activism.

It is foolish to desire a return to the ideology of the Command Economy whereby idealogues could claim to be achieving 'Social Justice' by robbing and killing millions of innocent people.

A realisation-focused perspective makes it easy to see the importance of the prevention of manifest injustice in the world, rather than focusing on the search for perfection.

Does Sen really believe that there are Judges in some country who are 'focused on the search for perfection'? Which planet has he been living on?

If someone is the victim of a perceived injustice- e.g. breach of contract, tort or malfeasance- that person can approach the Court for redress. Public Policy is about improving access to the Legal system and doing 'incentive compatible' mechanism design.

Nobody except Sen thinks that Jurists sit around designing a perfect Judicial system for an ideal world.

As the example of matsyanyaya makes clear, the subject of justice is not merely about trying to achieve – or dreaming about achieving – some perfectly just society or social arrangements, but about preventing manifestly severe injustice (like avoiding the dreadful state of matsyanyaya).

Hobbesian Anarchy has nothing to do with Justice. It is suppressed by the strong arm of a Stationary Bandit who is himself above the Law. An evil Dictator may be better at eliminating street crime than an affluent Liberal Democracy.


The term ‘matsyanyaya’ means ‘the big fish eats the little fish’. In Sanskrit jurisprudence it has the meaning ‘the bigger reason swallows the smaller one’. Thus if I say you have wronged me by killing my Mother, the big reason for prosecuting you is that you are a murderer. I may also mention that you referred to me as fat which hurt my feelings. However, though this may explain my animosity against you and, perhaps, throw an unflattering light upon your character, it should be disregarded. It is not relevant to your being prosecuted for the crime of homicide.


The big factor preventing manifestly severe injustice is rigorous policing and harsh punishments. It may be that promoting ‘the idea of justice’ persuades, at the margin, some rapists and robbers to change their ways. But this would only have a small effect. Thus, the juristic principle of ‘matsyanyaya’ says that manifest injustice must be detected and punished with vigilance and severity. Gassing on about the ‘idea of Justice’ can be omitted. It is irrelevant.


Sen believes otherwise. He writes-

For example, when people agitated for the abolition of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were not labouring under the illusion that the abolition of slavery would make the world perfectly just. It was their claim, rather, that a society with slavery was totally unjust. That much, they argued, was absolutely clear, even if it might be very hard to identify (not to mention, achieve) a perfectly just society.

This is nonsense. Slavery was illegal in the limited monarchies of Western Europe. However, the slave trade flourished in the New World in a manner which Evangelicals and Quakers felt was un-Christian. Paradoxically, it was Christian resistance to the enslavement of Native Americans which contributed to the Transatlantic trade. Similarly, it was the abolition of Slavery in the West Indies which led to indentured servitude for thousands of poor Indian people.

Sen pretends that the abolitionists were interested in Justice. The truth is they were motivated by the Christian Religion and the Ethical Values of Quakers, Pietists and other 'Dissenters' who had risen up by their own thrift, honesty and enterprise. The Enlightenment was ambiguous about slavery because it was developing a 'scientific' theory of racism which rejected Religion's claim that all souls were created equal. Thus several Enlightenment thinkers thought that it was wrong to enslave White people but perfectly fine to enslave ‘for their own good’ people of my complexion.


Sen says-
Abolition of slavery was a matter of prevention of severe injustice and a significant advancement of justice; it was not meant to be an answer to the transcendental question of identifying a perfectly just society, or ideal social institutions.

It was meant to be an act of Christian virtue purging an irreligious practice which arose out of bestial greed.
It was on that basis that the anti-slavery agitation, with its diagnosis of intolerable injustice, saw the pursuit of that cause to be an overwhelming priority.
The Abolitionists were successful because they were respected for their Piety in an increasingly Religious Age. Slavery, by contrast, had been justified by some 'Enlightenment' philosophes as arising out of the natural inferiority of Black people. If Sen really believes that England was against ‘intolerable injustice’ when it abolished slavery in India in 1861, then he must also believe that England’s rule over his native Bengal involved no ‘intolerable injustice’.

That historical case can also serve as something of an analogy that is very relevant to us today in India. There are, I would argue, similarly momentous manifestations of severe injustice in our own world today in India, such as appalling levels of continued child undernourishment (almost unparalleled in the rest of the world), continuing lack of entitlement to basic medical attention of the poorer members of society, and the comprehensive absence of opportunities for basic schooling for a significant proportion of the population.

The root cause of all these maladies is lack of family planning, which is a perfectly legal choice, on the one hand and, on the other hand, widespread corruption in the Public Health, Education and Food distribution Services, which can and ought to be punished by law. However, this would require proper investigation because the crime is being committed in a secret manner.

By contrast Slavery in America was legal in certain States, whereas helping a Slave to gain Liberty by fleeing the South, was severely punished by Law. It is true, however, that for purely economic reasons- viz. that slaves were fungible assets- the Black American slave was better fed, housed, trained and medically treated than most Indian people at that time. But, had Indians been able to emigrate to America, they too would have seen a like amelioration in their lot.

This raises an important question. Why speak of 'manifestations of severe injustice' when you yourself earn a lot of money in the UK and the US while poor Indian people who may have a superior 'idea of Justice' are not permitted, by Law, to enter such paradises?

Whatever else nyaya must demand (and we can have all sorts of different views of what a perfectly just India would look like), the reasoned humanity of the justice of nyaya can hardly fail to demand the urgent removal of these terrible deprivations in the world in which we actually live.

What on earth is 'the reasoned humanity of the justice of nyaya'? How is it different from plain 'humanity'? Humanity demands we help starving people. Reasoning is irrelevant. Sentiment is what is important. Revealed Religion tells us each human being is created with a soul equal to any and all others. Science can make no similar claim.

India has laws regarding Right to Food, Education etc. Justice, as represented by the Courts, can and does direct Government Agencies to take action in a time bound manner.

Political philosophy can be of no use here. This is a practical problem which actual Public Policy and real world Jurisprudence can tackle.

Still, we must admit, poverty has a Malthusian aspect. The good news is that improving female economic participation creates a virtuous circle encompassing demographic transition.


Sen, ignoring the principle of ‘mastyanyaya’ says-

This is not only a matter for political philosophy, but also a central issue in political practice. 

How is it a 'matter for political philosophy'? The thing is wholly useless. As for 'political practice'- i.e. logrolling and virtue signalling- that's what created the problem in the first place. Dr. Jack Preger- an actual Medical Doctor though his first degrees were in Econ & Pol Sci- worked in Calcutta. He explained how things could be fixed. Nobody listened to him. Instead, he was constantly harassed by the Indian Govt. because of claims that he was actually a Missionary. He explained that he had been thrown out of Bangladesh because he had blown the whistle on wrongdoing by International NGOs and Christian Charities. In Calcutta, it was actual Christian Missionaries who were complaining about his Medical work and research on corruption within the Public Health System. They tried to get him deported by falsely claiming he was converting poor Hindus by bribing them with medicines and food.

Sen, the 'Mother Theresa of Economics' writes-

It is easy enough to agitate about new problems that arise and generate immediate discontent,

In a Democratic country, yes. The thing can or ought to be easy. Why? Because problems can and should be fixed immediately by improved mechanism design.

whether it is rising petrol prices

There is evidence that agitations in this respect can and ought to be diffused by changing incentives for those whose demand is inelastic such that they are left no worse off- i.e. the income effect is neutralised.

The 'Yellow Vest' movement in France was about a 'Green' tax whose Income effect was not sterilised. This is the sort of thing Mathematical Economists ought to be doing. If not Slutsky then Frank Ramsey provided the formula long ago.

or the fear of losing national sovereignty in signing a deal with another country. These too are, of course, issues of importance, but what is to me amazing is the quiet acceptance, with relatively little political murmur, of the continuation of the astounding misery of the least advantaged people of our country.

Sen may have 'quietly accepted' all this and thus have been able to emigrate to greener pastures many decades ago. But lawyers and politicians and administrators who remained in India did the jobs they were paid to do. This meant having to permit India to grow a little so as to generate resources for altruistic, or populist, schemes.

Sen may think that everybody should first feed and educate the poor before talking about stuff that interests them. However, that isn't what he himself did. It is a little late in the day to pretend that his own trajectory was that of an Jean Dreze and that he was holed up in jhuggi eating daal-baat rather than a Master of Trinity presiding over a richly laden High Table.

The crowding out of political interest in the colossal and persistent deprivation of the underdogs of the Indian society through the dominance of more easily vocalisable current affairs (important as they may be) has a profound effect in weakening the pressure on the government to eradicate with the greatest of urgency the most gross and lasting injustice in India.

Sen is being silly. 'Vocalisable current affairs' don't have a crowding out effect. Empty talk- like Sen's own worthless sound-bites- does not use up scarce resources.

There is something peculiarly puzzling about the priorities that are reflected in what seems to keep us awake at night.

Sen pretends that the suffering of the poor keeps him awake at night. The result is yet another content-free book designed to put us all to sleep.

But, this is just a case of market driven bis repetita placent.

In an earlier book- 'the Idea of Justice' Sen made great play on the distinction in Sanskrit between Nyaya and Niti- i.e Philosophical Jurisprudence and actual Public Policy- speculating on how Kautilya's cunning Niti might have laid the foundations for Ashoka's Buddhist Nyaya by drawing, perhaps, upon the scholarly work of T.H. White who described a similar relationship between Merlin's Magic and Arthur's Camelot in the Walt Disney Classic 'the Sword in the Stone'.

Moore foolishly yet, Sen also mentions the Gita- a sacred text for Hindus and thus a work we actually do know quite a lot about- unlike what actually happened in Ashoka's reign.

The word Niti, in Sanskrit and Hindi, refers to ethical conduct or policy. Kutniti means a crooked type of conduct or policy- like that of Kautilya.

An example of Kautilya's kutniti is the manner in which he recruited his successor. He gets a dhobi (washer-man) to annoy the learned Pundit to such an extent that the fellow loses his temper and kills the dhobi. Kautilya then gives the Pundit a choice- serve the state or pay the penalty for man-slaughter. The Pundit revenges himself by framing Kautilya and having him killed. Sen's equation of Kautilya with Niti, not kutniti, is utterly mad.

What of Ashoka's Nyaya? The guy was real pissed off when he heard that some Jain monks were worshiping the Buddha by making out he was actually one of their own rubbishy Tirthankaras. So Ashoka offered a bounty for decapitating Jain sadhus. One morning, inspecting the day's harvest of heads, he found that his own special chum had been killed by mistake. Ashoka then ended the killing of Jain monks, or, at any rate, stopped paying for it from the Privy Purse.This was actually a good thing- Governments should leave the provision of decapitation for the Jain monastic community to the market- and Sen, the economist is right to commend Ashoka's Nyaya. However, since Sen is now also regarded as a Philosopher- and moreover one with an Indian surname and thus a 'native informant'- his silliness is merely par for the course.

Underlying the notion of Niti (that is, ethical principles as guiding one's conduct) is that of Dharma (Duty/ Righteousness/Religion) which considers the nexus of obligations and entitlements that connects individuals and encompasses the wider world. Dharma, which the Greeks translated as 'eusebia'- i.e. 'pietas- is founded upon Vrta- the vow or vocation which binds an individual's choice of righteous conduct. The concepts of vyavahara and acara are relevant here. These are the procedural rules, observance of which is incumbent upon an individual belonging to a wider collective. Where all collectives in a given Society observe rules which are mutually compatible, that Society is considered Dharmic and a reflection of the Cosmic Order. However, if all possessed Dharma, i.e. had internalised that upon which all is based, then no actual judging or Judges would be needed as no transgression could arise.

Nyaya refers to Justice, in the sense that Quine pointed out, of being a stasis or equilibrium rather than an active process requiring a General Eyre.

To say this is not nyaya is to say this is unjust and contravenes either the law or the cosmic order. The Nyaya School of philosophy is concerned with Logic and Epistemology in Hinduism. In Amartya Sen's native Bengal, a 'navya nyaya' School developed which provided Hinduism with a particular type of rationalistic, or 'natural', theory of jurisprudence. Interestingly, Sir William Jones, the Judge who founded modern Indo-European philology, learned Sanskrit from Pundits of this school. Moreover, some Pundits of this School embraced the English scheme of Law and, a little later, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a Unitarian polemicist, eagerly adopted the Utilitarian theory of Jeremy Bentham. However, India as a whole did not adopt the notion of natural law. Utilitarianism remained a dogma of the India Office but had no place in the Justice system. Rather legal concepts- e.g. property- continued to be the thought of as 'samskaras'- i.e conventional or virtual, and thus empirical and mutable, rather than real, substantive, analytic or a priori.


In Sen's view, underlying the notion of Nyaya is the older concept of Rta- the Cosmic Order- which was not conceived of as eternal and unchanging. Rather Rta went through a sort of evolutionary cycle. The emergence of matsyanyaya- by which Sen means the situation where the big fish eat the smaller fish- is evidence that the Cosmic cycle is in a phase of decline and dissolution. Alternatively, in Mimamsa- the traditional Juristic hermeneutic- the maxim is a conventional lawyer's term for the 'big reason prevails over the small reason' thus giving a criterion to distinguish ratio from obiter dicta.

As an empirical matter, the Law would become more restrictive during a period of 'avasarpini' cosmic decline. In Hinduism this licenses the doctrine of exigent circumstances 'apadh dharma' which, however, can be interpreted as either enjoining greater strictness or no strictness at all.

Under the older view, harsh vows or more restrictive vocational observances-'Vrtas'- would become obligatory for wider sections of Society because of the adverse tide of events. Yet, at the same time, any substantial increase in observed license would militate to the conclusion that what was formerly prohibited has now become the norm.

Niti and Nyaya are linked, as are Dharma and Rta, by the theory of karma- or re-birth. Ethical policy or behaviour, good niti, upholds Dharma and enables Rta to right itself after the total dissolution at the end of the retrograde time cycle. The pay-off for the individual is that the good karma thus generated grants a better future birth- or, indeed, total salvation.

It should be noted that while Niti and Nyaya are words that can be used outside a theistic or soteriological context, they then lose any ethical meaning. Niti might mean a crafty policy or an individual religious observance expected to bring personal salvation without any benefit being provided for the wider community.
Nyaya, outside a Theistic context, would mean the principles or laws that operate in the actual world according to our empirical experience of it. Thus 'the enemy of your enemy is your friend' would be a statement of Niti and 'Might is Right' is a Nyaya maxim.

Sen, however, has decided to use the terms Nyaya and Niti in a wholly different way so as to bring out what he believes to be a fundamental difference between two rival approaches to a theory of Justice.

The question arises whether the distinction Sen makes is in fact useful, or indeed, meaningful.

Let us make an analogy with my own proposed distinction between the terms 'fat bastard' and 'corpulent swine'. This is a highly meaningful distinction for me personally- as I am generally referred to as 'Iyer, the fat bastard' to distinguish me from another gentleman of the same name whom, it is my fervent wish, may be termed 'Iyer, the corpulent swine'. You will readily grant, if I am not mistaken, that there is a certain amount of affectionate raillery, not to speak of covert admiration, in the nickname 'fat bastard' whereas the epithet 'corpulent swine' vividly conveys the coprophagous grossness of that other fat Iyer bastard to whom I am compelled to refer.

In this case, clearly, the distinction I have introduced is of the highest utility and could become a topic of the most fertile philosophical investigation and literary exposition.

Is the same true of Sen's Nyaya/Niti distinction?

Sen says that Niti is about deciding what the ideally just situation ought to be and then devising institutions to bring it about. Thus, Rawlsian Justice as Fairness would be 'Niti'.

Except it wouldn't. Not in Sanskrit. Why? Policy and ethical conduct can not begin from a position of disembodied omniscience, behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, because- by a fundamental axiom of Dharmic thought- only the fully liberated Sage possesses that. But such Sages give up worldly life, they cease to interact with other beings under the rubric of reciprocal obligation and entitlement- i.e. omniscience can not give rise to a contractarian theory.

Niti is relevant to us only because our existing situation is characterised by problems regarding uncertainty, information asymmetry, preference revelation and so on. Indeed, as in the story of Moses and Khizr, who meet at the barzakh between 2 seas, so too in the Gita, we see that the omniscient person will always violate deontological, rule based, Niti since it is no longer a meaningful concept for a person free of all informational and instrumental constraints.


Why did Sen decide to call Niti the stuff he wasn't doing? Well, Niti is linked in Indian languages to stuff like Morality and Rules of Conduct and 'high thinking plain living' and so on. In other words, Niti is part of Bourgeois pi-jaw and Hegelian sittlichkeit and other unfashionable stuff like Institution building for better Governance through things like transparency, cracking down on corruption and rent seeking, decentralization of decision making (subsidiarity), equity audits and other such stuff on which countries like Cuba or West Bengal's Left Front regime score badly.

Nyaya on the other hand was more general, more abstract, and hence, in his eyes, more prestigious. Sen decided that Nyaya meant operating on the actual outcome matrix in time t which he assumed could be known and changed at that very time. Sadly, this is nonsense. If Nyaya is concerned with the outcome matrix at time t, then it can only be known, that too very imperfectly in time t+x and policy instruments can be implemented only at time t+x+y with the results only coming through with a further unpredictable, hysteresis heavy, time lag.

Moreover any diagnostic instrumentalized for policy purposes at time t+x would, probably, for that very reason, have lost its effectiveness by Goodhart's law. In other words the more we seek to act upon the outcome matrix the less reliable information we will have, ceteris paribus, about it in every future time period.

In the Indian context, if one instrumentalizes Caste as a proxy for Social exclusion, then freezing up the economy with controls and irrational fiscal incentives becomes attractive because though ruining the country, and negatively impacting social mobility, it nevertheless makes a substantive (Sen would say Nyaya) rather than procedural approach more attractive. In other words, first freeze the social geography by disabling the engines of mobility- viz. education, emigration and enterprise- and you have an excuse for any arbitrary 'direct' action which simply bypasses private and institutional notions of morality and just proceeding.
However, the Indian experience is that you can't freeze Social Geography. Even if you ensure that the Govt. Schools are crap, you can't stop working class folk (irrespective of caste or religion) from paying money to private schools to get their kids a shot at an education.

In other words, Nyaya in Sen's formulation is something that can't be known, can't be action guiding in a predictable or reliable manner, and thus is utterly meaningless for any practical purpose. Yet Sen wants his 'Nyaya' coz it's a way of smuggling interpersonal comparisons of Utility- not just Utility but also other empty words like Freedom and Development and Empowerment, Exclusion, degree of Aryan blood (or is it Democracy?) and so on back on the agenda. How could he get away with it? Well, it was the 70's, everybody was discovering their inner nigger- Sen, it turned out was a black man, and- as Gayatri Spivak explains 'strategic essentialism' is okay coz gesture politics is way cooler and safer for our students than actual politics and, in any case, Edward Said had already pointed out that it was irresponsible to teach 'Gulliver's travels' to Post Grads at Ivy League without issuing repeated H&S warnings that Jonathan Swift WAS NOT RECOMMENDING EATING YOUR OWN SHIT- YOU WILL NOT GET A HIGHER GRADE BY EATING YOUR OWN SHIT ON THIS COURSE!- rather Swift was doing something called 'irony' which, ironically, meant pretty much the same thing as like irony? Y'know? Except, like, aint it ironic that people who overuse the word irony like totally don't get it, right?

Anyway, this particular silliness of Sen's worked out well for him because interpersonal comparisons of Utility, Freedom, Development, Exclusion etc, etc, is what people with power do- it's what power is about. Guys from head office are constantly inventing some new performance measure which will screw things up in some novel way. Why? Rossi's 'metallic laws' make a startling prediction.

The Iron Law of Evaluation: The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero.
The Iron Law arises from the experience that few impact assessments of large scale social programs have found that the programs in question had any net impact. The law also means that, based on the evaluation efforts of the last twenty years, the best a priori estimate of the net impact assessment of any program is zero, i.e., that the program will have no effect.
However, the business of designing performance indexes and holding seminars to thrash out methodological issues is profitable and empowering to academics enabling them to interface with big bureaucrats and get to utter sound-bites on T.V.
Since Niti would suggest ditching the whole project as corrupt and a waste of resources, Nyaya has to be invoked to continue with the practice- which in any case could be justified as keeping the serf-class of Grad Students busy building pyramids for the great Professor's sarcophagous and thus in a permanent state of deferential stupor.

Thus, so long as Power is inequitably distributed within the Academy, interpersonal comparisons are going to be big business within those constipated bowels. Human Development Indexes- apart from cooking the books to prove silly things like Cuba is better off than Florida and Bangladesh verily is Heaven- function like evaluative methods in State funded Education- i.e. they are manipulable in highly pathological ways w.r.t outcomes, not to mention being resource costly and breeding cynicism and careerism amongst those caught up in its rigmarole.

How about keeping Sen's 'Nyaya' around for 'thought experiments'? Well, Einstein's gedanken showed how stuff like Absolute Space and Time or hidden variables and so on actually fucked up scientific thinking. It is actually harmful to a Research Program, to retain a word- i.e a variable- to point to something that we can't know or control except for some purpose purely polemical or idiotically ideological. Sen has spoken of 'second order' public goods- i.e. the campaign for the provision of public goods. Notice he isn't talking about alethic arguments for Public goods coz Truth is itself a Public Good. Second order Public Goods must be based on the propagation of lies- emotive propaganda. However, subsidizing second order public goods, after the dead weight loss has been considered, is more likely to lead to less public good provision as the former crowd out the latter. The second order public good is like Sen's 'meta-preference' against whatever you are addicted to. It might lead (if there is no alethic, utilitarian, and therefore first order preference, that has negative cross elasticity of demand with the addictive product or range of products) to more consumption of demerit, addictive shite. In other words, the State could spend all its resources organising sit down strikes to demand public goods- with the result that no public goods at all are produced.

In any case, Sen ignores the fact that his Nyaya is (in the linguistic sense) extensional not intensional- hence public discourse faces a halting problem and is doomed to remain phatic rather than meaningful. Sen also ignores the Jorgenson's dilemma aspect (i.e. how licit is it to treat deontic statements as if they are alethic?) which by itself generates a lot of aporias. In plain Hindustani- ethics is 'insha' not 'khabar'.

The point about Niti is that by respecting the informational and instrumental constraints of actual agents, Niti-talk can alter your Ethos positively and, in that sense, is Ethical. Not so Nyaya nonsense. Rawlsian Justice as fairness is a pedagogic exercise of Theological derivation designed to foster 'anukrosha' or empathy. Given Rawls's background and the location of his bully pulpit- nothing else was meant w.r.t Sen 'Nyaya'.
Sen hasn't taken on board, but must even at his advanced age retain at least a vestigial awareness of, a lot of Behavioral Ec stuff & Cog Sci stuff which rigorously fuck in the ass all his unstated assumptions seven times till Sunday. The fact is Emotions are now thought of as 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind' for both individual and collective decision making. A theory of Social Choice which ignores the signalling, coordinating, and strategic functions of Sen-tentious non-alethic, value laden, second order, emotive rhetoric belongs in the crapper.

When Narendra Modi says 'I incentivize consensus in Village Panchayat elections by giving a bonus to non-contested councils'- a case could be made for Modi as reflecting best practice in current Voting theory. When Sen speaks- fucked are we all and fucked must we remain.

Ultimately, the problem with people like Sen, who appear to be but aren't actually, banging the drum of Justice and Human Rights, is that they have added uncertainty and all sorts of perverse incentives and signal extraction problems to Public Policy and so there's a good case to institute a moratorium, if not a roll back, on that shite.


Sen tells us we Indians must focus less on Niti- though that is something we can do something about and ourselves benefit by doing- and more on Nyaya- which we can do nothing about.
Why? Well, Sen himself decided not to do asymmetry of information, preference revelation, auction design, mathematical politics, behavioural Ec, and the other very fruitful avenues of research Rand Corp Game theorists had opened up. He was sticking with an old fashioned, Benthamite, type of Social Choice theory where an omniscient Central Planner can frictionlessly re-allocate resources and make interpersonal comparisons of utility, and so on. This was not, it turned out, a fruitful for Economics or Psychology or anything at all but it fitted well with a type of Moral Philosophy or Political Philosophy-without-the-Politics which certain other star fish academics, equally stranded on the beach by pi-jaw's retreating tide, were now practicing.

Oh! and the other thing is, it looked radical, maybe even Communist, without being any such thing.
In other words, Sen had opened a way for 'eel wriggling' bureaucrats and anti-Poverty parasites to make vacuous statements without every committing themselves to things like properly specified and monitorable Human Rights while still appearing to be on the side of the poor.

Thus, surprise! surprise!, Sen's Nyaya turns out to be kutniti- the corrupt international diplomacy of the Development and Anti-Poverty parasites.

Is Sen's position something to do with the fact he's Indian- that too an upper class Hindu?
Like- is it an Indian thing? Maybe it's in the Bhagvad Gita or something?
Here's what Sen said about the Gita-
Question: In your new book, The Idea of Justice, you speak a lot about the difference between niti (institutional justice) and nyaya (realised justice). Do you think we have too much niti in India and too little nyaya?
Prof Amrtya Sen: The short answer is yes. Niti has huge appeal and this applies to the great as well as to the non-great. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna’s position has much to commend it. I am not saying he should not have fought the war, but his doubts were not dismissable, in the way that Krishna dismissed them. Krishna is clearly a niti person.
How peculiar it is that someone as non-violent as Gandhiji, who was very inspired by the Gita, was on the side of Krishna, who is making Arjuna fight a war and kill people, when Arjuna is saying maybe I shouldn’t kill! The Mahabharata ends with success, but also with grief, desolation, with women weeping for their lost men and funeral pyres burning in unison.
What actually happens in the Gita? Well, you have a piquant situation where a blind King is being told what Krishna said to Arjuna, on the battlefield, by his minstrel, Sanjaya, who has been granted clairvoyant powers.
Now both Arjuna and Krishna have powers of second sight (The Mbh delights in this sort of symmetry). Arjuna had been granted chaksuchi vidya by a demi-god he'd defeated. Thus he knew that he will end up killing his beloved Guru and Grandsire.
Lord Krishna (Devakiputra in the Chandogya Upanishad) had an even higher type of second sight and, in any case was the omniscient, all action causing, Supreme Godhead.
Now Krishna, as charioteer- bound by Suta dharma so to speak- had the job of raising Arjuna's spirits. An ordinary bloke would have said 'Oy, Arjun mate, don't you know both Guru Drona and Grand Sire Bhishma have received the boon that they can not be killed and that death will come to them only at the moment that they themselves will and decide? So long as the 2 of them are there, they will defend your cousins. So your only job is to keep them busy- preventing them hurting your people- until everybody gets sick and tired of the stalemate and your cousin is forced to settle.'

Now Krishna did know what would happen at the battlefield. He had arranged it all himself. This is the delightfully dramatic aspect of his incarnation. His shtick was to pretend to be like a cowboy, or a naughty baby, or a charioteer, or whatever, when actually he was the Lord of all driven and motivated by perfect compassion which is the one true, indefeasible, form of Absolute Justice. Precisely, because he was omniscient, Niti had no meaning at all for him. I don't need to observe the rules of double entry book keeping to calculate how much money is in my Bank Account coz I have the password and can get my balance immediately. If you have perfect information you can go for substantive rather than procedural rationality- i.e. you needn't bother with search procedures and institution design and other stuff that looks deontic (but isn't so necessarily. While solving a maths problem, we may 'follow a rule'- i.e. an algorithm not because we are duty bound to do so but coz we have some empirical evidence that this yields a result close to what we desire).

Sen interprets Krishna's advise 'do your duty' to be deontological, and therefore Niti based, but totally fails to notice that
1) what one's duty is remains an unknown. The Mbh is highly symmetric (as it must be to conserve karma and dharma- by Noether's theorem- unless it is actually just a dissipative midden of mindless accretions and interpolations). To understand the Gita we must look at the symmetrically, equal but opposite, situation where Arjuna wants to kill his elder bro but Lord Krishna stops him saying the Law is very subtle and pretty much impossible to grasp. The Gita, in literary terms, represents an epoche. It is dramatic, not didactic.
2) Krishna, as the Supreme Godhead, is revealing himself to be the puppet-master here- i.e everything is Outcome based. The game has been fixed in advance. There is no Niti here at all. The only question is whether Arjun will turn against his pal when he discovers he is actually God Almighty and responsible for this whole shit-storm. There is a good reason why Arjun does not turn against Krishna. It is that in disclosing his Cosmic Form- Krishna is, in effect, killing himself, for (as he later reveals) to disclose your own great merits is to kill yourself just as to insult another is verily to have murdered him. In fact, the reader's Bhakti (emotive devotionalism) is increased when we see Krishna's apotheosis is at a tragic cost to himself.

Since no human being can be involved in worldly affairs while having full knowledge of Nyaya- i.e. the intensional Law- the formula to work out what will happen at time t+1 if you change x at time t- it follows that we have nothing but Niti- character building, institution building, but experimentation and observation are also part of that- like Yuddhishtra having to learn Game theory.

Sen is simply ignorant of the Gita. His comments are jejune. But, perhaps, one should envy him his puerility.

In the Mahabharata, we find that the Just King- Yudhishtra- must learn probabilistic game theory- this suggests that Niti does not specify ideal states but evolutionarily stable strategies as grounding its praxis. Yudhishtra himself is characterized by empathy, compassion and readiness to take the smaller share so as to get a positive sum game off the ground. However, if ther is no gradient of altruism then the game crashes- 'pehle aap, pehle aap mein gaadhi choot gaya'- In 'after you' 'no, after you," both missed the train.
The one ethical theory repeated throughout the Mahabarata is that 'The tigers can not exist without the forest. The forest can not exist without the tigers. The Kauravas and the Pandavas (the warring cousins) are the Tigers and the Forest.' There is no suggestion that Tigers are better than Forest or vice versa or, indeed, that Pandavas are better than Kauravas. They are interdependent not mutually antagonistic in their quiddity.

What happens at Kurukshetra- what the Gita is about- is a parallel to what happens to the Khandava forest. One holocaust makes the other necessary. This is Nyaya as a sort of Celestial book-keeping which makes zero accommodation with human intentionality & cognitive capacity, while Niti is but the hilarious prattle of the little fledglings who talk because they can not fly.
Though Mbh conserves karma and dharma- it acknowledges that both from the ultimate point of view are empty. This follows when we consider that Vyasa has 4 sons- Pandu, a great conqueror but one governed by the RAJSIC (passionate, thymotic) Guna (quality). Blind Dhritirashtra who is TAMSIC (inertia, darkness, passive attachment) and fosters the MANYU (dark anger born from envy) of his son Duryodhana. Vidura who is SATVIC (Truth seeking, just and self controlled) and is the champion of Niti- but ultimately futile for all that. Finally there is Suka who goes beyond Vyasa becoming one with the Universe because he has transcended the Gunas.
The message for ordinary people who are moved to a feeling of loving devotion by seeing how Lord Krishna sacrifices himself in the Gita is that this change of heart by itself cancels karma and dharma. You no longer feel 'I am born from such and such family, and have such and such physical and mental characterisitics. This is a binding constraint on me. I can not do otherwise than follow the path already marked out. What is it to me how people in superior or inferior stations conduct themselves? Mine is a lonely furrow from which it is profitless to lift my eyes."
If the MhB were a completely unique Scripture, having no similarity or connection to other Holy Books (as interpreted by Spiritual savants) then, perhaps, we should only pay it attention if the people of that book distinguish themselves in War or Wealth accumulation or Scientific achievement. However, reading the MhB gives an insight into the true glory of other Scriptures and systems of thought and this is the correct proof of its relevance today.

In the Bible, you may consider the story of the slaying of Zimri and Kosbi- this is an example of halachah vein morin kein- the law such that if it is known, disallows that very action it otherwise makes mandatory. Since all laws are broken when one law is broken we see that the relationship between Niti and Nyaya is such that the revelation of Nyaya nullifies Niti till, thus becoming the cause of its own death, a second cosmic cycle (in this case, wave of ibbur) can begin.
Subtle ideas. Subtle not Sen-tentious.
But, fuck it, the guy is just an academic. Give him a break already. At least he didn't start a hedge fund which lost billions of dollars of other people's money. And, bottom line, the guy responded to his Nobel prize with great humility and patriotism- wishing his achievement to reflect as much glory as possible on both Bangladesh and India. But this shows Sen has good Niti- he is a principled person. The Nyaya outcome (to use his terminology one last time), however, is bad because he has fed the outrageous complacency of the Indglish speaking public w.r.t stuff like
1) the notion that Famines can't happen in a democracy. East Bengal experienced two big famines after two different transitions to Democratically elected Governments. Sen was a child during the first famine. But he was an academic during the second.
2) Bengal and Kerala weren't actually fucking up the life-chances of their hugely talented people but, in some mysterious manner, superior to America coz the life expectancy of a black man in a crack house in N.Y is lower than a black man not in a crack house in East Bengal.
3) Indians don't need to study their own culture in their own languages- coz who needs Hindutva? Divisions is Society arising from Caste, Gender, Region and so on will just melt away- or have already done so. So you don't need to bring people together on the basis that God alone is the superior, the knower, the guide. Thus the Gita really has no value except to show how Lord Krishna was an utter rogue and Indians are completely stupid for still letting themselves be redeemed by His all compassionating, all encompassing, Activity.

Ramachandra Guha on the demise of the bilingual intellectual

Last year Ramachandra Guha rehashed an essay on the demise of the bilingual intellectual in India.
Guha does not claim to be, properly speaking, bilingual and thus his essay throws no direct light on his own mysterious intellectual demise many years ago.
Guha spends some time quoting the always hilarious Mahatma who thought Raja Rajmohan Roy would have been a better intellectual if he hadn't known English! Guha does not mention that Gandhi was not, and never claimed to be, an intellectual- you see, Gandhi had studied English and thus, by his own argument, was fucked in the head- as his public career amply demonstrated. However, Gandhi did not claim to be an intellectual. He thought God talked to him coz like he'd given up sex and was sleeping with his nieces to correct their sleeping posture and that made him a 'Mahatma' rather than a 'Maha pervert.'
Tagore, whom Guha quotes as an example of an bilingual intellectual, was an artist and hereditary Guru not a thinker and certainly nothing so declasse as an 'intellectual'.
Ranade, Gokhale and the Servants of India could have developed into public intellectuals doing research on economics and sociology and so on but their heart wasn't really in it. They just wanted those insufferable Goras to fuck off back to Blighty and if Gandhian voodoo or Khilafat voodoo or the German submarines or the Jap bombers or whatever secured that goal then they too were quite happy to drop the intellectual pose.
Ambedkar had first class intellectual credentials but his was a lone voice. Well there were plenty of others like him but what to do? India is like that only- no?
Guha goes on about Rajaji- again NOT an intellectual- NOT an expert on Hindu Mimamsa or even Jurisprudence come to that- NOT an economist, not an I.R guy- and why is Rajaji relevant? Well he wrote books for kids which his daughter or grand-daughter or somebody translated into Hindi which is important because...urm... well, like Rajaji wrote it in simple Telugu or Tamil or something and it was translated into simple English and.... urm... well that's intellectual right? Menaka Gandhi wrote an encyclopedia of children's names- so she's an intellectual. Jade Goody wrote an autobiography- so she's an intellectual coz people who write books are intellectuals- that's the test, right? Y'know, like Jeffery Archer and ... urm P.G Woodhouse and like some other guy was a librarian or something and this other poor bastard had the misfortune to earn his bread as a Prof. of Eng Lit and so, like, he must have been an intellectual right? And Ram Manohar Lohia had a German PhD- like that's a recommendation!- and so the fact that what he liked doing was camping in some rural backwater where he could kid himself that the people he was meeting were more mentally slothful and deluded than himself- he was definitely an intellectual, right?
Guha thinks J.P Narayan- who sold hair straightener to Negroes to get his Wobbly American Socialist credentials- was smart, well, the fucker did impress Arthur Koestler thus proving he was fucked in the head long before the full unfolding of his sheer silliness could work its full complement of mischief on the Indian polity.
Intellectuals gotta use their fucking intellect! And when they find out they are wrong they got to use their intellect some more to find out why they were wrong. If they get to communicate this to a wider public- then they're public intellectuals, rather than Media whores.
Nobody Guha mentions used their intellect to this effect or to this end. Their strong suit was their passionate commitment to some holier than thou pi jaw shite, or doctrinaire lets-kill-everybody shite. Well that's not entirely true. There is also the provincial navel gazer who becomes a visiting professor in America and whose writing is defensive rather than crepuscular, if not straight forwardly of the Emperor's new clothes variety.
Guha doesn't mention Acharya Kosambi- coz he was like RElIGIOUS? And that's not intellectual at all. The Marxist Kosambi also doesn't get a mention coz... urm... well he actually discovered something in Maths or Stats or something so he's like TECHNICAL guy & not an intellectual. As for critics like Prof. S.R Faruqi or the numberless poets who write in two or more languages- urm well they're like LITERATURE guys and that's not intellectual right?
Jagdish Chandra Bose? Scientist. Doesn't count if a scientist publishes in English and then writes novels, essays or whatever in one or more Indian language coz like SCIENCE guys aint intellectuals right?
Subramaniyam Swamy? Intelligent, thus the very reverse of 'intellectual'. Indeed, not loving any Indian language well enough to also write in it, is a necessary though not sufficient condition for the sheer silliness that only our 'public intellectuals' preen themselves on.
In one respect Guha has a point- imagine Gayatri Spivak or Amartya Sen writing their shite in Bengali- would Spivak get away with saying 'India is named after Rama's younger brother' (Critique of Post Colonial Reason) or Sen get away with his specious nyaya/niti distinction or his silliness about the Bhagvad Gita? Well actually, in Bengali, maybe they would get away with it. (Contra Guha, under the Commies, if any Indian language can now be called 'subaltern' it is not Malyalam or Kannada or Tamil but Bengali). Perhaps, if Sen had been writing in Bengali, he wouldn't have gone off on the wrong track. Spivak, on the other hand, was always beyond redemption.
Guha mentions a lot of people who have written books and who occupy academic positions. They're intellectuals surely? No. What isn't belles lettres is just the working of Gresham's Law as applied to publishing whereby the blurb- 'the author graduated from X and held such and such senior position or won such and such Literary consolation prize for being a benighted darkie.'- pre-empts the text.
Guha does not know what an intellectual is coz it is not clear that he ever even tried to be one. Being a writer and a columnist and making speeches was so much easier, provided the effort to really think was never made.
His article about the rise and demise of the bilingual intellectual is hilarious for overlooking the one obvious fact. Thought isn't about language. Not any more. Not now we got Mathematics. Not now Science is univocal at the global level.
The importance of language as providing a basis for wage and service provision discrimination is undermined by Globalized free trade- what people want is access to 'Globish' for their kids- not English per se. In any case, the hyper trophy of Academic specialization had already led to over publication in the 'Globish' sub-dialect for peer consumption- i.e. a lot of intellectual activity is occurring outside literary language properly so called.
One reason why people started turning away from vernacular literature was because, by the 70's, Dalit, Modernist and Revolutionary literature was concerned with lowering rather than raising the social horizon of the reader. At one time, the way you got ahead in life was by reading novels, newspaper articles, listening to the speeches of leaders etc. so as to improve your vocabulary, syntax, accent and so on. After 1970, all that changed.
Does it matter?
No.
Language does not matter. If it did, Paninian Sanskrit would be an impossibility- nothing could have been written in it.

In truth, the task of the intellectual never had very much to do with language- even in linguistics and hermeneutics. Maths can capture some of what the intellectual is doing- and the reason intellectual activity is now divorced from language is coz technology makes it much easier to number crunch and thus evaluate positive theories rather than invest simply in attitudinizing and pi-jaw.
Granted people like Guha are still able to make a living by peddling that shit. But they aint intellectuals- just a careerist claque hired for by the Balzacian prostitutes strutting the Comic Opera stage of Public life.
Did India produce actual real life intellectuals? Guys who had original thoughts and who worked them up into a system and sought to validate them empirically so as to give policy prescription a more productive basis than paranoid polemics and careerist claptrap?
Yes, actually India did, does and will continue to do so. Caste and dialect and which fucking school you went to don't come into it. Sorry but there it is.
Does India have public intellectuals? Yes- crap ones. So does America. So does England. On the Continent, of course, things get a lot worse. They're all a bunch of evil, twisted, bastards.

What is striking in everything Guha writes is how much of it one already knows and how large a proportion of that is irrelevantly cited. The point about doing research is uncovering relevant stuff that aint common knowledge and using that new information to put forward a more thought provoking model. In Mimamsa, apoorvata is a condition for meaning. That's right, you've got to have something new to say to qualify as being capable of using language meaningfully. But that means you need an inquiring mind- to have alternative, competing, models thronging in your mental background so that you can evaluate and assimilate new stuff you turn up when researching a topic.
Language, here is the obstacle not the instrument which is why bright guys like A.K Ramanujan, B.K Matilal- is Purushottama Bilimoria intelligent? dunno, but let's include him as a courtesy- ended up having nothing worth saying in their own languages.

Since India teaches nothing if not the conviction that language is the soul's anus- there is no fundamental problem in which any district of India has not produced a 'son of the soil' with something valuable from which all can learn . Equally, no district of India is devoid of substantial resources and instruments of coersion to bury all original or meaningful thought under Guha-style meretricious tripe.

Gayatri Spivak's fewmets

What is Literature? A question this foolish can only be answered, that is if we are to be at all guided by the Biblical injunction to answer a fool according to his folly, by rigorously posing the most fundamental question facing a sentient being- viz. is it food or shit?
Well, the answer depends on whether you are a pig- in which case books are food- or whether you are a hunter for whom Literature is the trajectory of the fewmets of the animal you are tracking as it shits itself fleeing the scene- think of the trajectory of the subaltern in the works of Gayatri Spivak and you'll see what I mean.
Now, treating Literature as shit is good for the brain whereas treating it as food is good if you're in the Education racket coz fastest-weight-gain-while-fulfilling-a-sanitary-function-by-scavenging is what you are being selectively bred for.
Developing your brain can, however, help you to escape from the Education pig sty. Hunting by tracking develops cognitive skills. Furthermore, for those with ethical qualms, I might point out, tracking animals does not necessarily mean killing them- you could be a wild life photographer or be seeking a cheap Ayah for your pre-schoolers (She-wolves are highly recommended- almost as good as Syrian Christians).
Studying fewmets also yields valuable information for the conservator/ecologist while shedding light on flight or fight strategies helpful for Evolutionary Game Theory which, I need hardly telly you, has numberless applications in Marketing and Serial Killing.
However there are some animals more inherently worth tracking than others- so nuff said about Spivak's stinking fewmets.

To end on a soteriological note- Shit appears more homogenous than food and hence suggests the idea that a Chomskian I-language exists. However, once language is recognized as belonging to the schemata of shit rather food, this fallacious appearance can easily be sublated.

For such, indeed, is the Kingdom of Heaven

A pious and honest merchant fell asleep one night beside his beloved wife only to abruptly awaken in the middle of a vast desert. He climbed the nearest sand dune but, from that vantage point, could spy nothing but further dunes vanishing into the distance.

Unable to tell the proper direction for prayer, and having no other business on which to profitably employ himself, the merchant began making his prostrations in a methodical manner moving in a clockwise direction from an arbitrary starting point on the compass.

Suddenly, rising from prayer, the merchant saw a vast caravenserai directly before him. Could this be a miracle from God? Or was it a delusive mirage?

Having nothing to lose, the merchant ran towards it. As he approached, the great gates of the caravanserai slowly opened and a splendid khidmatgar of more than mortal stature issued forth to welcome him.

"Are you a djinn?" the merchant asked

"A djinn but of the Believer," the khidmatgar replied, "and of the Believers, amongst those opposed to hypocrisy but enjoined to always speak the Truth".

The Merchant was greatly relieved to hear this.

"Could you provide me food and drink- and that too of the sort which is lawful?"

"I can provide anything for which you can pay in coin, true and not counterfeit."

"But I have no money with me!"

"It is a property of the caravanserai that whosoever is of the Believers, let him put his hand to his cummerbund and he will find there sufficient coin to pay for whatever is necessary to his survival."

The Merchant made a judicious choice of food and beverage of a quality and quantity sufficient for the maintenance of health but not the stimulation of appetite, or after the usages of profligacy.

Having satisfied his nutritional needs, the merchant put his hand to his cummerbund and found there the exact sum required to discharge the full price of his meal.

Pocketing the coins, the djinn threw the merchant down upon his belly and anally raped him in a manner brutal and disobliging.

"Wherefore this outrage?" wailed the Merchant greatly discomfited.

"Next time, buddy" the djinn, through clenched teeth, replied. "maybe you'll remember to tip!"

Sooth speaketh Iqbal- that learned Alim- if an individual says 'an'al haq' punishment is better.

If a nation speaks thus- it is not illicit.'

For such, indeed, is the Kingdom of Heaven not that other thing I mentioned in my last parable.

The mirasin's mushaira

The mirasin's mushaira- extract from Samlee's daughter.

Actually, now I come to think of it, I have been a little harsh on the kotha singers. The fact is my sub-conscious was preoccupied, all during the concert, with Prof. Pushan’s debacle at the hands of Dr. Fuckface. Indeed, it is only now, re-reading something I wrote earlier, that I feel I have hit on the correct explanation for what happened.

Perhaps, Prof. Pushan felt intimidated by the foreign lady savant because, during the Cold War era, Western Academics turned out, more often than not, to be Intelligence agents. Thus, in speaking to them, the safer course was to appear very simple and rustic. In this way, they would feel contempt for you and spare you involvement in their conspiracies. Thus, Pushan Sahib hadn’t really let the side down. It was just that he was out of date. Western Indologist, nowadays, tend to be drawn, not from the Intelligence community, but from the ranks of the less varnishedly petty criminal or borderline psychotic. Thus, Placenta Fuckface hadn’t actually been a threat. Still, one can’t blame Prof. Pushan for playing it safe.

For my part, having clarified my psychological state at the time of the concert, and with Prof. Pushan’s example before me, I find I have misjudged the kotha women. The fact is, the items they presented to us were chosen with complex political considerations in mind. They couldn’t have guessed that Placenta Fuckface was just a crazy old biddy whom nobody took notice of anymore. Zohra and Cruella had grown up in the days of the British Raj when the fate of a Princely House depended on pandering to the prejudices of people of Placenta’s colour.

Historically, the function of the mirasin was to represent, to the guests of the Nawab, views they would find acceptable. Occasionally, they may have tested the waters a little. But, if they went too far- they were, after all, only women and so no very great offence could be taken. On the other hand- if a sentiment they expressed found favour- the impression was created that the Nawab’s subjects so enthusiastically endorsed it that even the kotha-waliswere on side.

Take the following Farsi verse for example-

You paced its pilgrim path, once knew a tender mood

Attain’d your own Somnath^[1] yourself, your own Mahmud

Come, seal the pattern, shear the curls of Ayaz

For eye e’er is Saturn, whose sceptre be of Mars!

It was originally recited at the time of the first Afghan War. Perhaps, the Nawab of that period had some small martial exploit to his credit, which an avaricious marasin blew up into a Mahmud-of-Ghazni-like feat of arms. More plausibly, the sly purpose of this verse was to inveigle the then Nawab back into her bed by pretending to have been utterly undone by his supposed deflowering of her.

The verse could be read in two ways- either it supports the British, who claimed to be avenging the sacking of Somnath, but with this subtle caveat that the British should not, drunk with triumph, hurt the sensibilities of their humble native compradors whose love for them is utterly unmercenary- or else it is a conventional Sufi verse signifying everything, nothing, both, neither, and, daddy, could I borrow the car Saturday night?

This verse had, so to speak, been fossilised by popular approval and kept its place within the patch work quilt of a qawwali based on Attar’s ‘Parliament of the birds’ which had this refrain

Maujudul ism, mafqudul jism

Ta‘ir hai Ishq to Anqa qism!

(It has name not substance- how absurd!

But a phoenix rare were Love a bird.)

In typical qawwali fashion, the singers zigzagged between verses of the most heterogeneous origin and tendency. Thus, a conventional couplet like ‘my heart is the caged bird of Medina,’ might be followed by something shockingly radical- indeed, Kharijite- such as

Sunné kyoun hum kabooter-e-baam-e-haram?

Vaqt pé Abaabeel hi kuch karté karam!

(Why should we listen to the complacent cooing of the pigeons above the Ka’aba?

It was the humble sparrows who saved the sanctuary from Abraha!^[2])

Similarly- the following verse- quite a biting satire on the fundamentalists-

Aaj Rukh-e-Lailah pe kya? Hain hazaaron hijaab hi pe Majnoon!

Aur nikla Yaad-e-Shirin se mazbooth Mazhab ka besutoon!

Ki tu badnam na ho, tawfiq ho, ye tauriyah rahe jaari

Tera ye joo-e-shir hai ki hoon jahil-o-junoon!

(Our young men have been driven mad! Let the poets all hail it!

Not by Lailah’s fair form- but the desire to veil it

To save Thy good name, grant this dissembling

Thy loaves & fishes, my fear & trembling!)

was followed by this utterly innocuous, and politically null, piece of Sufi piety-

Farhat anjam, ai Farhad, té hum bhi ho yaqin

Khuddi hai Khusrau, Mawt hi har Shirin

(Lo! Love has completed Farhad’s task I ween

Khusrau’s the Self & Death each Shirin^[3].)

Sometimes the verses were ribald. Arif claimed to be scandalised by this Farsi duet which must have been composed in a less prudish age.

Cruella- Did it have the parrot’s dainty, or the mynah’s dissembling, Art

You’d disdain not the gift of the caged bird of my Heart!

In vain the indignance & scorn with which your lovely eye flashes

’Tis reborn, like the phoenix, tho’ you reduce it to ashes!

Zohra (eyelashes fluttering)- Well, the gift of a canary

is a bit airy fairy

But, ooo, what I could do

with a cockatoo!

Often, the women mocked their own material. Thus, even Attar’s great work- that qibla of the magpie minded- provoked this comment

Kya doondhna Simurgh ki nahin Aanqaa fariyaad

Sari Mantiq ut Ta‘ir sunaya Sayyaad!

(Why seek the Simurgh^[4]? Let book worms make that howler

To hear the debate of the birds, just ask the fowler!)

Actually, the seed for this couplet can be found in Rumi. Indeed, writing this now, I am reminded of another hint from the Saint- very pertinent in putting down the pretensions of themirasins- commenting on Mother Nature, that cruellest of Muses, which I have versified as follows

Learn from the bulbul’s song, the peacock’s tail

How, for daughters strong, She endangers the male!

It was not in prosody alone that the mirasins did not come up to scratch. Their political comments lacked precision and follow through. Thus, in praising a local lad who had been martyred in the Siachen battle, they employed a very hackneyed image-

Hai Hubb al watan mab‘da mo‘as‘sir

Ki Yaad-e-Shaheed ho jaam-e-Kausar!

(Patriotism turns the memory of the martyr into a draught of Heaven’s spring!)

However, they were not able to keep to this exalted theme for very long. Soon they were lampooning the very notion of martyrdom-

Kaha khagaz-o-kalam se khoon-e-shaheed

“Iska mis’ra laga gar ban na mureed!”

Sad’qah-e-siyahi se ye kalaam-e-fareed

Diya jaazib ki gilaaee jawab-e-rasheed!

(The blood of the martyr challenged pen and ink to a verse-capping contest. The ink was upset and the blotter gave a fitting reply!)

Similarly, when commenting on our Prime Minister’s, forthcoming, visit to Pakistan, they presented him (not entirely inappropriately, for the man was a poet) as wooing his opposite number with these words

Ho yaari hamari us sakth miraath uj Jamal

Jaan jalayé nazar apni khud Ayn ul Kamal!

(Let our mutual loving kindness be as that diamond hard mirror of excellence in which the Eye of Perfection (i.e. the Evil Eye) burns itself up from jealousy!)

However, the mirasins true sentiments were not long in showing themselves,-

Lo! Aaj phir sun na hai un se baang-e-daraa

Khoon mein dubaya jin ne hamara har qafilah!

(Once again the leaders sound the same call to depart as before

They who drowned our each caravan in blood heretofore!)

Indeed, embedded in the crazy quilt patchwork of their qawwali, one could discern their true opinion of our Freedom Struggle. This couplet might date back to the their own youth.

…sad haif! Hubb ul Watan ka mutazaad

Hasharaat ul Hind hi hué Azaad!

(…for shame! This is the opposite of patriotism

Only the scum of India have gained Freedom!)

But, even here, they were not consistent. A little later, I heard them complain-

Sikhaya Mashahir-e-Azadi ko Maikhana-e-Angrez

Saqigari mush’tahar ho par kajdaar-o- marez!

(Of Liberation, our leaders learnt, at the English wine-shop

To most nobly tilt the bottle, but let fall not a drop!)

To be fair, they were equally scathing of the Jamaati supremacists who disguise their nihilistic power worship under the name of Jihad.

Gar farz-e-kifaayah hi ho farz

Jihaad hazm hai joo‘ul arz!

(If outward show is considered the only religious duty

Then Jihad is swallowed by lust for dominion!)

Indeed, they roundly condemned separatism-

Kya kuch paak bhi ta buniyaad-e-Pakistan mein?

Ya kuch khaalis bhi hai jang-e-Khalistan mein?

Ho Daakh ki dukhtar hi dukh farid

Kaho, Angoor ki beti se kya ummid?

(Was there anything paak^[5] in the creation of Pakistan?

Is there anything khalis in the war for Khalistan?

If only the provenance of the grape poses grief

In wine, how hope to find relief?)

I recall a verse of theirs on our recent atomic tests. I didn’t manage to note down the exact wording, but I will have a little more to say about it. I think the quatrain went something like this

Hotha qabl az waqt koi asghar fatimah

Kya chahiye hamen bam-e-salimah?

Jihad ho tab aur us jihad mein hum

Hotha bewah yatim pe koi sitam!

(If unweaned babies cry in vain

No atom bomb, no aeroplane

For Jihad’s waging, Jihad needs

While widow cries, or orphan bleeds!)

The context for this verse, and the reason I mention it, is a sort of dhvani or echo of theStriparvan of the Mahabharata. Here we have, it seems to me, the true, pure, and very ancient female tradition of protesting conflict by focussing on the suffering caused to children and widows. I still have some vague memories of a therrukoothu performance of the Draupati Vastraharanam^[6] in the precincts of a small Draupati Amma temple in my ancestral place. At that time, the trauma inflicted by the ’62 and ’65 wars (for which our Gandhian India was woefully unprepared) was still fresh. Thus, the episode of the disrobing of Draupati had a huge emotional impact. The performers would break off- because it was all simply too unbearable- to speak to the anguished audience. Their message was always this. National humiliation can be avoided by faith in ordinary people. Lord Krishna is in the hearts of ordinary people. Our devotion can prevent the country being stripped and humiliated in the eyes of the World. This is the true Dharma Yuddha. This is the true Jihad. I may mention, the notion that these two holy terms are mutually antagonistic is a filthy lie.

There were some good things in the mirasins’ repertoire. How had they got there? Ribena said they were adaptations of folk forms. We should view these traditional female verse forms as a substitute for therapy. Indeed, since the lives of ordinary women in this region were so much overshadowed by psychological calamities and bereavements, these types of songs were not some frill or adornment, rather, they were absolutely vital for the survival of the race.

Thus, when a child dies, there are traditional mourning songs. There is a praxis of bereavement. But, for the continued survival of the family, the woman has to return to her mundane chores. People have to, quite deliberately, harden their hearts and stop asking after her grief. This can cause the build up of dangerous chthonic forces within the psyche. Thus, a socially sanctioned- i.e. a religious- outlet is required. Since these women were (at least nominally) Shi’a Muslims- and death is no respecter of persons- it was during Mohurram that pent up emotions found release in couplets like this-

Ki dafan hua dil mera tere saath bil jabr hi

Na poochne vala koi raha na saval-e-qabr bhi!

(Because my heart was forcibly buried there with you, no one is left to ask after my grief, even in the tomb!)

The Shia’s believe that burial at Kerbala means the soul will be excused the ‘questioning in the tomb’ and, consequently, will sleep ‘like a bride in the bridal chamber’ until the Resurrection. In this couplet, the woman can express her anger at having to curtail her mourning, and the fact that no one mentions the matter anymore, in a manner that is socially acceptable.

What one must remember is, these mirasins were also mothers. Degraded though their profession, deplorable though their pretensions, nevertheless I can not wholly condemn, except on aesthetic grounds, verses such as this-

Hoon haal-e-dil pe be-khabar

Ki hua waan qatl-e-Shabbar

Ho Saqi khud pyaasa magar

Tishna na ho kisi Asghar!

(What is happening in my own heart, I am not aware, because, it seems, Shabbar (Hazrat Husayn) was murdered right there! Let the Saqi remain thirsty, but suffer not a baby’s lips to become parched!)

I wonder whether the fact that heresy, not to say blasphemy, was the ever present shadow of the mirasin’s lucubrations, was not- rather than a reflection of their demoralising occupation- a specifically female psychological phenomenon. The word metre is related to mater- the womb. Poetry- or more precisely mousiké^[7]- begins when the mother-to-be sings to the child in her rahum. But, when any womb’s fruit is untimely cut off, might not the mother launch an indictment against Rahim^[8]? Is it not the husband’s duty, the son’s duty, then, for the sake of the family, to listen and parry, with a reasoned Theology, a loving Theodicy, an anger that could raze the future of the race?

Think of Annie Besant. She is the wife of an Anglican Clergyman. She is a hard working, lower middle-class, wife and mother. Then, her little baby daughter falls ill with a sickness unto death. What good is it to say to her- don’t worry, baby will go to Heaven because we sprinkled some drops of holy water on her? Or, instead, baby is doomed to Hell for all eternity- along with the wogs, spics, yids etc.- because current best practice in Canon Law is to give God the benefit of the doubt and postpone, till Confirmation, the pronouncement that a particular brand has really been snatched from burning?

Annie Besant was lucky. True, she lost her faith and, hence, custody of her children (though, once grown up, of their own volition, they joined her in India), and had to make her way alone to London where she could have easily fallen prey to the sort of, fanatically Feminist, Marxist masher, as did for Eleanor Marx or Edith Nesbit. But, it didn’t happen. Why? Championing the cause of the Byrant & May matchgirls- previously condemned to hideous death by phosphorous poisoning- Annie Besant found the one true Feminism- the dialectic of mutual mothering- and in revolutionising British politics by Unionising the masses (and thus making Labour’s displacement of the Liberal Party inevitable) she had an enormous impact on Indian history even before she converted to Theosophy^[9] and came to settle in Madras.

Yet, it is precisely because of the huge shadow Annie Besant Amma still throws over the history of my two countries, that I trace the aetiology of a malaise common to both to the heart’s hysterisis of that mother’s grief in such anomie annealed.

I have said that it is the husband’s duty, the son’s duty, to listen to the complaint against Heaven of the bereaved mother. To do less is to reduce what is human to the level of a machine. Theology has a duty, Theodicy has a purpose. But men neglected that duty, men forgot that purpose. Instead, taking Theodicy as their intellectual plaything, they finally ended up proclaiming ‘the death of God’. Of course, I know very well, there are hordes of rabid, tenure craving, ‘Feminist’ hacks who have since piled onto that particular bandwagon. But then, though uninhibited in denouncing the ‘Dead White Male’, those harpies only get by cashing his pension cheques.

Meanwhile, what is supposed to happen to the grieving mother? Or, if what you are really telling me is that all untimely death is redeemed in the spurring on of the God of Science, the God of ‘Progress’- then what about those Science doesn’t reach, has no interest in reaching- what about mothers unmothered by the Moloch of Progress, what about mothers in the Third World’s own Third World?

Think about Christ on the Cross. In the absence of the Father, it is His duty to console the Mother. She had a right to expect something better for Him. But to console Her, He has to empathise with Her- to enter into Her anger and Her grief. Hence His choice of the twenty second psalm. He is not saying ‘God has forsaken me. God is no longer Rahim’. Rather, He is singing a song well known to His mother- ‘thou art my God from my mother’s rahum;Thou didst make me hope when I was upon my Mother’s breast!’ This is a song from thezaboor of Her own family- the family of Ruth.

The Old Testament ends with the admonition that ‘the hearts of the fathers should be turned towards the children. The hearts of the children should be turned towards the fathers.’ Mothers are not mentioned. There was no need. However, times change. With urbanisation, colonialism, technological progress, women too become deracinated. They too may, debauched by some Derrida, pawn their own streedhan- i.e. the folk ways that succoured them in their travail. Christ points the way to the new duty of the new man- the man who would truly be a Post-Colonial man- he must, while embracing empathy, yet defend God and distil the sweetness of Creation, when it is ordained that the Mothers call upon the All-forgiving to submit to this most terrible of indictments.

In the words of Dard, Ghalib so much admired-

‘This too you could not bear to look upon- Cruel Sky!

Though to look upon each other was our only joy.’

In high poetic terms, Massignon has spoken of Islam as sprung from the seed of Ishmael- holding within itself balm for Hagar’s tears. We are all children of Abraham- his original name was ‘Abram’ which means winning with Ram, winning with the Father- but, not all children have an equal start. Kausalya and Kunti, too, were less favoured wives. But, what happens to this Hagar, all too common in Hindh, who runs sa‘y^[10], who runs sa‘y, but for whom the Zam Zam spring is dry?

Kya sa‘y doudoon, kya lagaoon aas?

Abh Asghar ki bhujayi Kausar pyaas!

(O Hagar heart! Thy seed is curst

Must Heaven’s spring quench Asghar’s thirst?)

Where is there comfort? Where is the consoler? Who is the protector of the orphan and the widow? Actually, nowadays, these so-clever consolers drive one mad! The mutual cursing of Religions- like a couple in the divorce court- turns those it orphans into cynics and atheists! Where is there the loving kindness- such as that practised by the Prophet- which will save us from this promise of Heaven, which, now, in our grief, is the worst taunting of Hell!

Jab taskin-e-Qais se hai khud Lailah majnoon

Aur yaad-e-Mustapha se bewa ko tishna-e-joon

Aur le’aan-e-deen se yatim munkirin

Jannath bhi kya ho Ishq-e-masnoon!

I quote one final verse from the mirasins. It combines Hindu and Muslim phraseology and even includes Christian imagery. But, what makes it affecting, at least to me, is it shows women being first denuded and then abandoned to their grief by a muscle-bound, male, hypertrophy of Theism, which, insisting on an impassable Deity, crowds out catharsis, and leaves nothing but sophistry and, nowadays, the prospect of a clerkship, in its place. Not God has absconded but, Men have played truant and women- grieving mothers- are left no recourse but some second rate advocacy supported on the twin props of shrillness and vulgarity. Against this background, the irony, though grotesque, is not without its pathetic element that even such mirasins^[11] as these cast lots for the mantle of the Pir and the Paraclete-

Cruella- Khush hoon main is kufr mein ki Khuda hi kufr data!

(In this heresy I am happy, that this heresy, too, is His!)

Zohra- Manzoor mujhé is matam sara, muskuravé Mata!

(To make the World Mother smile, I accept all that is!)

The Besura Begums- Kyoun marna har chand ki koi mané Masiha?

Ho Ishq woh Saqi jo thorr dé shisha!

(Would this cup from me would pass

Or Love- the Saqi that breaks the glass!)

---

^[1] Somnath- A famous Hindu temple. Some Persian poets equated it with the Khanqah (Sufi monastery) as the refuge of mystical religion against the narrow-minded orthopraxy enforced by Sultans and Mullahs. Mahmud of Ghazni- who never went on Hajj- plundered Somnath and cruelly persecuted non-Sunni Muslims . He once got drunk and cut off the hair of his favorite slave Ayaz- known to History as the conqueror’s first native Governor of Lahore- but who is also the emblem of humility and faithful love in Sufi poetry. In Oriental astrology, Saturn is a baleful influence.

^[2] Abraha- an Ethiopian (Christian) General who attacked Mecca in the time of the Prophet’s grandfather. His elephants were driven back by a host of small birds who dropped stones upon them. The pigeons above the Ka’bah are, proverbially, unaware of the troubles of ordinary folk.

^[3] Farhad loved Shirin, King Khusrau (Greek- Chosroes, but ultimately derived from the old Iranian Kuru) agreed to let him marry her provided he could tunnel through the Behistun mountain- a Herculean task. Khusrau was in love with Shirin and so, when Farhad was successful, he told him Shirin was already dead, hearing which the young man gave up the ghost.

^[4] In Attar’s parable, the birds journey to China to become the disciples of the Simurgh. At the end of their arduous journey they find that they themselves are the Simurgh they sought. The phrase, Mantiq ut Ta’ir,(language of the birds) occurs in the Quran in connection with Solomon who learnt that language. Popular Islamic belief associates ‘green birds of Paradise’ with the souls of martyrs who frequent the tombs of great Sufi saints & are an outward & visible sign of ongoing intercession between Human & Divine.

^[5] Pak ‘pure’- thus the creation of an ethnically cleansed Pakistan for Muslims. Khalis ‘pure’- thus the demand for an ethnically cleansed Khalistan for Sikhs.

^[6] When a villainous crook of a politician seeks to disrobe Draupati, she prays to Lord Krishna. He performs a miracle whereby her sari is infinitely lengthened. Since Lord Krishna is most famous for stealing the saris of the milk-maids (actually Sages who, longing for physical Union with the Divine, were reincarnated in human form), the episode is highly suggestive from the Theistic point of view. Equally, since Draupati is truly clothed only in devotion to the Lord - He needn’t exist. In music, (or even in simply reading, or trying to translate, Sama Veda) anāhata- the unstruck note- or, as in Elgar’s Enigma, the unexpressed theme, can give the key, or generate the affect, of the composition.

^[7] Mousike- music (Urdu) from the Greek. Socrates said, after his trial, that he ought to have cultivatedmousike rather than philosophy (hence the term for intellectual- mousikoi andros- in the time of St.Augustine) By this Socrates meant verse set to music- like our Qawwalis and Bhajans. Madam Montessori noticed that introduction of Music enabled self-evolution of order & morality amongst children at play. Hence the singular success of both the Montessori method & traditional Indian approach to elementary education. Incidentally, I wonder whether the Urdu word muzhik (ludicrous, absurd) is at all related to the Russian moujhik (peasant).

^[8] Rahim- The compassionate, the merciful. Quranic appellation of God. Kabir and other Hindustani saints equate Ram and Rahim. Etymologically, the word derives from, as in the Hebrew, rahum (womb). Hence, God’s changing the name of Abram (winning with the father) to Abraham (father of multitudes).

^[9] The Theosophical Society was founded by Madam Blavatsky (Russian), Col. Olcott (American) & drew upon both Western & Eastern Spiritual & Mystical traditions. Thus, respecting karma, their literature (vide ‘letters from Master Serapis’) upheld exotic or hybrid doctrines- eg. that though life-enjoyment was fixed by karma, time of death was not & could be affected by Social action/inaction. Such souls, untimely cut off, may live in a Swedenborgian (i.e. illusory) limbo where they could continue to receive loving ministrations of mother etc. Furthermore, mother’s continued transferal of her meritorious karma to children, avoidably lost, was not ruled out. Though Theosophy was rather an odd mixture of doctrines & eccentrically expressed- its heart was in the right place, & under Annie Besant, it inspired useful Social, Political & Cultural work. Thus, expounders of orthodoxy- be they Calvinist, Kantian or Crap-Knows-What- should kindly not play sweet Sweeney Todd with Occam’s razor- because the true doctrine of Destiny- like modern particle physics- is actually paradox piled on paradox, wonder piled on wonders. God alone is great. See (Bharat Ratna) Dr. Bhagwan Das’s unbeatableLoci Communes of Theism- “Essential Unity of all Religions” (Published by Bharati Vidya Bhawan). Incidentally, the book provides both an economic as well as an aesthetic rationale for the typically Indglish elision of the definite article.

^[10] Sa‘y- Hagar ran to get water for baby Ishmael from the Zam Zam spring. This is commemorated by Muslims in the running of sa‘y during the pilgrimage to Mecca. Baby Asghar- the great-grandson of the Prophet (s.a.w)- was refused water, despite the piteous entreaties of, his father, the impeccable Hazrat Husayn, and thus died of thirst at Kerbala.

^[11] Mirasins- lit. ‘inheritors’. Sing-song girls. Prostitutes.