Because of the collapse of the Left and the uselessness of Congress, the BJP has emerged as the main rival to Mamta in Bengal. Modi, quite naturally, made a speech praising Bengal without mentioning the bleeding obvious- Gujarat is doing much better because it was never partitioned, never run by stupid Communist, and has dealt severely with Muslim hooliganism. Many Bengalis may want the BJP to bring order and prosperity to their State. But for this to happen, the hypocritical bhadralok buddhijivi must be disintermediated. Can Modi find an OBC candidate for the Chief Ministership? That's the only way to win. But perhaps a Mamta in power is a less dangerous opponent than a Mamta out of power.
All this is obvious to the meanest intelligence. But not, it seems to a Professor at Tufts, Brian Hatcher who writes in the Scroll-
we have the former chief minister of Gujarat praising the cultural accomplishments of a state that might be thought of as almost diametrically opposed to Gujarat – geographically and politically, to say the least.
Why? Because that former C.M is now the P.M. His party has become the biggest opposition party in the Bengal Assembly. He is saying nice things about Bengal because he hopes to gain yet more seats there.
If Bengal stands for progress and reform,
It does not. It stands for relative economic, cultural and political decline. Gujarat is providing leadership for India. West Bengal has been overtaken by Bangladesh.
Gujarat – not least during Modi’s time as chief minister – came to be associated most tragically with the forces of recidivism, chauvinism and inter-religious violence.
Only in the minds of a few stupid foreign academics. Modi put an end to the cycle of riots which started in 1969. Taking a tough line with bad elements has a salutary effect.
To remember Godhra 2002 is to say enough.
No. It is to say too little. Pretending Modi was responsible for Godhra backfired. It is the reason he is now Prime Minister.
And of course, the unfortunate pairing of Gujarat and Bengal along the axis of tolerance has found expression in works of scholarly and political commentary, perhaps most notably in Martha Nussbaum’s book, The Crisis Within.
But Nussbaum, Sen's former g.f, is a cretin. She was ga ga for Cosmopolitanism twenty years ago. Then she realised she was talking bollocks.
For Nussbaum, looking at the rise of Hindutva in India
through Amartya Sen's eyes
and pondering the prospect of religious fundamentalism in the US,
why not Concentration Camps? How about the prospect of Race War? The woman is a moron.
the question was why was India trending in the direction of Gujarat and not returning to the noble example set by its Bengali pathfinders?
WTF? By 1970, the very word 'Calcutta' was a synonym for 'shithole'. Not only had Bengal had a Famine and a Partition, its Eastern half had another genocide and another Famine just because of a transition to Democracy! Meanwhile Niradh Chaudhri had been making good money telling the world that Bengalis are utterly shit. His first big book ended with a whimpering plea for Whitey- any sort of Whitey- to come back and rule over his beggarly people. He continued to write shit of this sort decade after decade.
What 'noble example' had been set by 'Bengali pathfinders'? Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore petitioned the British parliament to lift all curbs on European settlement in India. They explicitly say that this will help protect the Hindu from the rapacious Muslim. The bhadralok Hindu Bengalis were content to be compradors for a hundred years before some patriots became Revolutionaries. But they achieved little. Bengal was partitioned and Hindus were ethnically cleansed from the East whereas Muslims were not from Hindu majority areas.
I suppose Modi was referring to Bankim and Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and other such Hindu Nationalists. But they had been marginalized by the Communists.
The spatial tropes fit so easily into the narratives of Indian modernity,
No. We think of East India as a shithole. The West and the South is, at least marginally, more 'modern'. This was by no means an inevitable outcome.
and that is why Modi’s praise of Bengal for “always leading the way” is both mundane and a bit remarkable.
Modi highlighted Shyama Prasad Mukherjee as the founder of his party.
I say this because, in my recent Hinduism Before Reform, I attempt to unsettle the chronotopes that shape our understanding of religious modernity in South Asia.
Professors have no understanding of anything under the Sun. Chronotopes indeed!
Why is Bengal the epicentre?
The British considered the Bengalis to be cowardly, docile, but (at one time) skillful and productive. Calcutta, under the British, turned into a great trading and Imperial city. A comprador class received a share of that wealth. This meant there was some cosmetic 'modernity'.
What does it mean to assert that progress began there and not somewhere else, least of all across the subcontinent in Gujarat?
Nothing. Politicians are supposed to tell pretty lies.
What happens when this spatio-temporal idea of the gradual diffusion of progress, enlightenment and “jagaran” becomes normative for a nation’s understanding of its history?
Some shitty Professors shit all over it.
What role have intellectuals and historians, not least Euro-American observers of South Asia, played
a negative, but inconsequential one
in promoting, ratifying, and perpetuating a story of modern religion in which progressive religion comes from Bengal (think of the Brahmo Samaj) and retrograde religion lingers on the margins of modernity’s advance – “way off” in places like Gujarat?
According to the 2000 census less than 200 people described themselves as Brhamos. There may be 20,000 people who are associated with it. The thing is a fossil. The Arya Samaj, started by a Gujarati, has 8 million members.
What if it turned out that the celebrated “father of modern India” – the Bengali polymath Rammohan Roy – was contemporaneous with another modern religious leader in Gujarat who took advantage of the same historical moment, and not entirely dissimilar conditions, to promote another new religious movement? That would be Sahajanand Swami, the founder of the Swaminarayan Sampraday, and for members of that order, god himself.
The Swaminarayan Sect is doing well. It has good temples and Hindus of other sects have begun going to them.
The Mormon Church, founded at about the same time, is doing very well because its rank and file are quite visibly of good character and conduct.
How might our understanding of religious modernity change once we realise that the father of modern India
who? The guy who begged Whitey come and grab indigo estates and so forth?
and Lord Swaminarayan, were nearly exact contemporaries? More importantly, since both of these remarkable individuals created enduring and transformative religious movements – the Brahmo Samaj and the Swaminarayan Sampraday –
the former is a fossil. The second has the backing of the Patels- the most successful Indian social group around the world.
do we have in the coincidence of the contemporaneity and influence an opportunity to explore new models for the emergence for what we think of as modern Hinduism?
No. The Brahmo Samaj was silly. It has all but disappeared. Swaminarayan Sampraday represents proper Hinduism- though no doubt, as with other sects, there may have been some schisms and mud-slinging and so forth which are not of interest to ordinary worshipers.
In my book Hinduism Before Reform, I argue that this is precisely what we have and I explore the possibilities for setting Rammohan Roy and Sahajanand side by side.
This is silly. Roy was a comprador. Sahajanand was a priest. The Ramakrishna mission is doing fine because Ramakrishna was a priest and Vivekananda was a monk. 'Maharishi' Tagore wasn't really a Rishi. The thing was similar to the Theosophical Society which too has all but disappeared.
The goal here would not be to crown one a modern and judge the other medieval (which the standard chronotope of religious change cannot help doing) but to ask if there are any similarities in how and what the two men sought to accomplish.
There are no similarities. One guy was a priest. The other guy wasn't.
Again, my argument is that there are fascinating similarities, not least in the way both of these men can be viewed as “religious lords” who create, expand, and promulgate new religious polities. One we call the Brahmo Samaj, the other we call the Swaminarayan Sampraday.
One was amateur theatrics, the other was professional. One might as well compare Thoreau and Cardinal Manning.
And my book simply asks, “before” we judge the one progressive and assume that correlates with the spatial expansion of progress from Kolkata,
The only way to see Roy is as a native who thought the extension of British Rule was a good thing- at least for Hindus of his class.
what might we see if we looked at the work these two men accomplished as religious lords.
Roy was no such thing. I think one son of his became a judge. The family did not become hereditary Spiritual preceptors.
The exercise seems especially relevant, not least in light of Modi’s recent remarks.
This guy is just talking up his silly book by dragging up some polite nonsense uttered by Modi
As I have noted, his inaugural broadcast rehearses – and celebrates – the spatio-temporal narrative of India’s coming into being.
No! As Prof. Shanmugha Clitoris Dube has pointed out, Modi's broadcast 'performativity instantiates its own catachrestic deconstruction of some shite or the other'. Whitey should be ashamed of his beggarliness in bullshit.
That calls out for recognition and critical scrutiny in itself. But there is more insofar as Modi leads the Bharatiya Janata Party and therefore represents the official promotion of a Hindu nationalist vision of India.
No. Modi is a member of the RSS whose chief would have that responsibility. Modi's job is to run the country as well as possible.
Now, by most accounts, the work of Hindutva is regressive
No. Most accounts are by Hindus, not Professors. They majority of Hindus think Hindutva is progressive because it is against caste and sectarian divisions.
if not retrograde. If that is true,
It is not. This would be like saying 'the Republican Party represents abolitionist fervor. If Trump is defeated, African Americans- despite the Black Lives Movement- are likely to be enslaved by, if not Biden, then Harris, who is descended from slave-owners in the West Indies.'
then we might simply chalk up the celebration of Bengal’s progressive DNA as mere hypocrisy in the service of vote generation in a region not hitherto receptive to the BJP.
In other words, either you can bullshit endlessly or you can admit the bleeding obvious.
We could leave it at that, but this would mean passing on the chance to ask: how did India get here and is there no other way out?
India got to Modi because of the corruption, incompetence and cowardice of the dynastic politicians and their feudal camp-followers. Since it is a Hindu majority country, its Nationalism has Hindu features- at least for Hindus. Like other countries, it is cracking down on Islamic terrorists and the places which harbor them. That's it. That's the whole story.
To answer the former question is to engage in the work of history and a considerable amount of self-reflection around the way categories and tropes have operated over time within a variety of discourses around nation, religion and progress.
Or you could just masturbate.
The latter question is the ongoing challenge of the moment: what is the proper place of religion in Indian public life? In the standard account, the “progressive” samaj of the Brahmos is the antithesis of the “medieval” sampraday of the “swaminarayanis”. And as a result, “sampradayikta” becomes a dirty word.
So, Religion is either 'dirty' or extinct.
But if the “samaj” and the “sampraday” are but two historically contingent formations, two modern religious polities, is there a prima facie reason to praise the one and suspect the other?
Yes. Religion is a service industry. A sect which thrives and enjoys a good reputation is better than one which has pretty much gone extinct
Is this rather a legacy of colonial-era categories of religion, not least regarding the victory “spirit” over “law.” Or are they to be judged on how they both articulate and promote civic values and support the kinds of inclusion we look for in all areas, be it caste, gender or religious community?
No. Religions are to be judged by those who pay for them. Are they getting value for money? What 'externalities' are involved? This is what determines whether a sect thrives or goes extinct.
At one time, some useless University Departments pretended they could help 'fight Fascism' and that writing this type of shite held evil Nazis at bay. But who will pay for instruction of this sort now?
In between, there is another task, which is to watch carefully how the proponents of a Hindu nation work to appropriate and perhaps vitiate the better elements of either religious modality.
No matter what or how carefully this cretin and other cretins like him watch anything they will understand nothing and achieve nothing. India is as much a Hindu nation as Hindus want it to be, just as Pakistan is as Muslim as its people want it to be.
The Brahmo Samaj failed because it was boring and stupid. The Swaminarayan Sampraday succeeded by building excellent temples and schools and so forth. Highly respected communities, e.g. Patels, are devotees and this encourages other to join.
Similarly, in politics, the Party which is better at 'last mile delivery' will get elected. Being sensible, they will praise, not insult, the dominant religion. They will ignore stupid Professors of shite subjects. Thus has it always been and thus will it be always- unless, that is Rahul Baba gets elected and gets to implement his puerile vichardhara.
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