...[L]et me take up a subject over which your friends have been greatly agitated recently. Who is a patriot and who is anti-national?
A patriot fights for his country and wishes to see it grow in power and prosperity. An anti-national opposes anything which he believes will strengthen faith and confidence in the nation. The reason he may do so is that he feels hatred for the majority community in that nation. This might be the case even if he belongs to that majority. Why? Suppose the fucker wasted his time studying and teaching worthless shite. He would naturally harbor an animus against people of his own type who, though much poorer, made something of their lives and improved things for the entire country. Thus, the sour cunt may well embrace anti-nationalism simply so as to assuage his own wounded amour propre.
Isn’t that what you have been shouting about? Come, let me show you all the lies that have been told about nationalism.
Charvaka's epistemology considered all inferred knowledge to be conditional. He didn't go around denouncing 'lies'. Rather he defended a materialistic, common sense, philosophy. It is obvious that if your nation, your community, your family, is cohesive and considered strong and sensible, then you are materially better off. Why? If you attack the cohesiveness or reputation of your family or other source of oikeiosis, you will- sooner or later- be cast out by them. No one else will be keen to take you in coz u got shit for brains.
Along the way, I will also tell you about some of its truths . . .
There are no unconditional truths in Charvaka. There are assertions and arguments of a reasoned but provisional kind- i.e. sequent calculi. Essentially, Charvaka's is a Solomonoff type theory whose 'universal prior' is self-defeating. That is why the thing died out. To be clear, if you can neither offer completeness nor computability then fuck are you offering dude? Physics is useful precisely coz it has some metaphysics attached. Thus it can aim at completeness while shoving complexity onto metaphysics such that its Occam's razor stays sharp. This means what is formally uncomputable can still be Schelling focal- i.e. solve coordination problems.
Partha was a fucking cretin who wasted his time reading worthless shit. Yet Solomonoff published when the fucker was 13! There were kids at Presidency who knew all about this by the time Partha showed up there. Bengalis with Bachelors degrees were ahead, not behind, Americans in maths, stats, O.R, etc back then. Hannan himself has said so. But for the Bengali 'uchvaas' obsession with worthless pseudo-Marxian shite (where is the Bengali Kantorovich?) and displaying 'wokeness' on Western campuses, they could have revived and repaired Charvaka and thus helped the Nation. Instead they wanked their way into an ideological wilderness bereft of history, inhospitable to anything Human save Hate and Paranoid self-loathing.
There are no ancient nations anywhere in the world.
That's a lie. Egypt is plenty ancient. But so is India.
All nations (rāstra) are modern. Ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient China, ancient India – all of them may have had great civilisations whose architecture, art, and literature are objects of admiration. But they were not nations.
Egypt was and is. So is China. So is Greece. The boundaries may wax and wane but these nations are ancient. It is true that some modern nations are named after relatively recent invaders- e.g. Turkey, Hungary, Bulgaria, France etc.- and it could be argued that the invading tribe- Turks, Huns, Bulgars, Franks etc- weren't really nations ; it could also be argued that some nations have geographical or made up names- e.g. South Africa, Canada- and that there were and are other 'nations' within those territories who wish to go their own way- but this is merely to say that 'nation' is an 'essentially contested term'- at least at the margin or as a result of exogenous factors. Thus 'Belgium' is more 'contested' than 'USA' though the latter is more heterogenous. But this can change.
To realise this truth, you will have to forget for the time being the history you were taught at school. Because it is that history, drilled into your heads from the time you were children, and constantly renewed by national festivals and ceremonies, the speeches of your leaders, and novels, films, and television serials, that make it seem obvious to you that your nation is ancient.
Fuck what was taught in School. This is something we can Google.
But I will show you that this is merely a conventional idea, a samskār.
So what? The fact is some conventional ideas are ancient. Partha, cretin that he is, only mentions Charvaka because he was taught in School that the guy was ancient.
You take it for granted because everyone says it is so.
But are supposed to stop doing so coz this cretin tells you to.
In actual fact, it is not true.
Yes it is. You have shit for brains.
Your nation is not – indeed no nation on earth is – ancient.
Some are. Some aren't.
Only modern people can imagine it that way...
Only a fool can imagine that 'modern people' aren't like 'ancient people'. Why not say 'ancient people had no concept of mummies and daddies?
The Indian rashtra as a nation-state has only been in existence since the middle of the twentieth century.
No. The Indian nation became sovereign at that time. However plenty of nations may have a Monarch who resides elsewhere. Belonging to the same Empire does not extinguish nationality. Thus a subject of the Hapsburgs might belong to the Archduchy of Austria or the Kingdom of Hungary or Moravia etc. A Nation might be conquered. It might split along political or religious or other lines. But International Law recognized the existence of Nations from its very inception. Indeed, we find mention of Nations in the most ancient inscriptions and records known to Mankind.
Socialism, it must be confessed, is a lie of recent origin which nobody believes in any more.
If you want to push that history a little further back by claiming that the Indian National Congress as an organised political body was the Indian rashtra in waiting, even that would not take you beyond the last decades of the nineteenth century.
But there was a Governor General of India in the eighteenth Century and before that a Mughal Emperor who claimed to rule over 'Hindustan'.
The Indian nation would still be a very modern entity.
If so, why did Megasthenes title his book 'Indica' 2,300 years ago? That aint modern. That's ancient history.
But, you may ask, what about the great kingdoms and empires of the past? The empires of the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Delhi Sultanate, Vijayanagara, the Mughals, the Marathas – were they not great states? They certainly were. But they were empires, not nations.
An emperor may rule over more than one nation or his territory may be carved out of parts of the traditional territory of different nations.
The various parts of those states were held together by military force and tribute-paying arrangements.
But those parts consisted of nations. Later on, Nationalism prevailed against Imperialism.
That is not how the parts of a nation-state are supposed to be bound together.
But is how they came to be bound together once Emperors of various sorts were overthrown.
Even the Marathas held territories outside the Maharashtra region by the regular use of armed force and extraction of tribute from local rulers and populations who were looked upon as subjected peoples. The Marathas too had an empire, not a nation.
The Marathas were a sub-nationality which acquired dominion over a large part of the Indian nation on the basis of superior military power and political cohesiveness. Where now will you find Marathas who are not proud to be Indian nationals and who refuse to shed their blood to defend the Indian nation?
If you think about it carefully, the connection between nation and state, indicated by the word rashtra, is established by a third term. That term is “the people” (lok).
But Muslim people, in India, voted overwhelmingly for the Muslim League in 1946. That is why the Indian people (lok) got split into Indians and Pakistanis. The people may decide to ethnically cleanse minorities. Plenty of Chatterjees were chased out of Bangladesh. Indeed, the day may come when they are chased out of West Bengal.
When you talk about the nation, you do not immediately think of natural resources or ancient ruins or the Himalayas or the Vedas; you think of the people of India.
Who are overwhelmingly Hindu and who have consistently voted for Nationalist parties- e.g. Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (which means 'Indian People's Party)
Therein lies the crucial difference between the ancient kingdoms and the modern nation-state.
Some ancient Kingdoms- e.g. that of Japan- continue to exist as modern nation-states. There is a crucial difference between a Republic and a Monarchy. Only in the latter is the office of Head of State inheritable.
Asoka or Akbar may have been great rulers; their subjects may even have been relatively happy and prosperous (let us grant that, for argument’s sake). But the empire of Asoka or Akbar was not based on the sovereignty of the people.
A Nation may be sovereign or it may be subject. It may chose to assert its sovereignty under the rubric of the 'Crown in Parliament'- which is sovereign in Britain- or 'the Diet'- which is sovereign in Japan though the Head of State is the Emperor.
No one in those times could even think of such a concept.
Yes they could. If the couldn't how the fuck could Charvaka talk about it?
The people were subjects of the emperor whom they regarded as the sovereign.
Till they rebelled.
I am sure you know that popular sovereignty is a very modern idea which emerged in Western Europe and North America in the late eighteenth century,
but based on ideas found in ancient Greek and other literature, e.g the Germanica of Tacitus or notions of Gaul (later known as France) and Britain and so forth. Jordanes spoke of Scandinavia as 'vagina nationum'- i.e. the birth-place- of various nations which broke the power of Imperial Rome. The fact is, 'National' monarchies- e.g. France & England, prevailed over the more diverse 'Holy Roman Empire' till it became in effect 'the German Confederacy' minus Austria.
It is a fact of history that 'popular sovereignty' has not been achieved save with reference to a Nation, though no doubt there may be sub-national identities within that broader entity. Thus an Englishman may also be a proud Yorkshireman or an Indian a proud Maratha etc.
spread to South America and other parts of Europe in the nineteenth, and then came to the countries of Asia and Africa in the twentieth.
It came to Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century. There was an incipient Indian nationalism by then.
The revolutionaries in France, claiming to speak on behalf of the nation, demanded in 1789 that the people and not the king and his nobles must rule. They cut off the king’s head.
And then started cutting off each other's heads till a guy took the title of Emperor and created havoc.
In North, and later South, America, the European settlers of the British and Spanish colonies declared themselves as nations, rebelled against the British and Spanish empires and proclaimed republics of the people.
So did the Black people of Haiti. Why is Partha such a fucking racist?
In Central and Eastern Europe, all through the nineteenth century, various peoples declared themselves as nations
No. They were already nations and recognized as such. Medieval Universities in Europe were divided into 'nations' on the basis of language while Kings and Emperors held titles which mentioned the name of the various nationalities over whom the monarch ruled. Thus there was a King of England and Wales who ruled over the English and Welsh. Then the Scots joined in though it appears some across the border now want to got their own way. This is not to say that some 'nations' mentioned in medieval times have now further splintered. Thus Lithuania is now separated from Poland as is Slovakia from the Czech republic.
and demanded their own states. Without the claim to popular sovereignty, there can be no nation-state or rashtra.
Yes there can. Has this stupid cunt never heard of Nepal?
Therefore, all nations are modern.
No doubt, this cunt thinks Nepal under the rule of the Ranas was very modern. What about Tibet under the rule of the Dalai Lama? Partha was born before China forcibly assimilated Tibet.
At this point, if your mind is agile and you are following the discussion carefully, you may come back with a counterargument.
At this point we wonder how Partha manages to tie his own shoe-laces. He is as stupid as shit.
Fair enough, you might say: let us grant that the nation as state is a modern phenomenon. The awareness of popular sovereignty and self-determination may also be something that has spread across the world only in recent times. But what about the people themselves? Can the people not be ancient? Could they not have memories and traditions that are thousands of years old? Could not the ancientness of culture give a people its identity?
Because culture creates people- right? The reverse never happens.
I have to concede that this is a serious argument that demands a careful response. So you will have to be patient with me.
You will have to become a patient in a mental hospital for many many years before you say anything sensible.
Imagine yourself at Sarnath: you have probably visited the place before. What will you see there?
Tourists.
You will see an impressive structure which you may recognise as a Buddhist stupa.
Nonsense! My impressive structure is my dick. But I won't show it to you. I'm not a fucking Digambar.
You will see a sandstone pillar which, you will be told, was ordered to be built by the Emperor Asoka in the third century before the Common Era.
It is smaller than my dick.
There are inscriptions on the pillar which you will not be able to read,
Because you will be thinking about my dick.
unless you happen to be a specialist: the language is an eastern Prakrit which, if read out to you, may sound vaguely familiar, but the script is Brahmi which is no longer in use anywhere.
Sadly, my dick is no longer in use in such places as I would like it to be. Partha may get all hot and bothered about Stupas but ordinary people are concerned with dicks and dollars and doing well in life. No wonder the Left has collapsed even in Bengal. Cretins like Partha were jizzing on Stupas when they should have been shtupping whatever it was they had espoused.
In the museum, you will immediately recognise the lion capital of Asoka, made thoroughly familiar by its reproduction on banknotes and government stationery. You will see the ruins of a Buddhist vihara which, the tourist guide may tell you, was where more than a thousand monks and scholars lived when the Chinese traveller Xuanzang visited the place in the seventh century.
The entire place is now an archaeological monument: no one lives there and the only people you will see are tourists and pilgrims. The guidebook will tell you that the place became famous because that is where Gautama Buddha first preached his dhamma. Many of the things you see will seem quite familiar to you and, even if you were visiting the place for the first time, you will feel an exciting sensation of recognition
But stop for a moment and ask yourself: who were the people who lived here when the place was inhabited and functional?
the same people as those who now live there.
What did they wear?
Pretty much what the older of them still wear.
What language did they speak?
An archaic version of what people there now speak
What did they eat?
Similar stuff to what they now eat though, no doubt, some new vegetables and spices have become available.
Since we know
by conditional inference
that this was a Buddhist monastery and place of pilgrimage, we could make the conditional inference that the people who lived here were Buddhist monks and scholars. Therefore, they are likely to have read, written, and spoken Pali. Some of them may even have been fluent in Sanskrit.
Pali descends from Sanskrit.
Since we know that monks and scholars came to Sarnath from many places in India and elsewhere, they must have also brought with them their native languages which not everyone would have understood.
Thus Partha took his native Bengali to the University of Rochester where he got a worthless PhD.
What about the people who lived in the neighbouring villages – the farmers and artisans and traders? What language did they speak?
An archaic version of what is now spoken there.
Well, they certainly did not speak Hindi as everyone in the area does now, because the Hindi language did not exist then.
But the dialect of the people living there is a direct descendant of the archaic dialect spoken there in the time of the Buddha.
They probably spoke some variety of what the Brahmans call Prakrit
Everybody, including Brahmans, spoke a 'Prakrit' of one sort of the other. Some scholars also spoke Paninian Sanskrit. In Western Europe, till about the end of the seventeenth century, all savants lectured in Latin though they also spoke and often wrote in the 'vernacular' tongue.
Partha shows his elitism by claiming that to speak the vernacular was considered degrading. This was not the case.
(assigning it the lowly status of a coarse dialect carrying the pungent smell of virgin soil and wild forests, as distinct from their own supremely refined devăbhāsā, the language presumably spoken by the gods). Anyway, whatever variety of Prakrit these people may have spoken, I can assure you that you would not have understood any of it.
So what? Few English people can readily understand the language of Chaucer. But within a month or two of studying his texts, they can read it easily enough. Some, as a hobby, cultivate that type of speech. The thing was a nuisance prevalent in the Upper Sixth of the sort of Grammar School I attended.
What did they wear? What did they eat? Modern historians have scoured through religious and literary texts and examined inscriptions and archaeological artefacts to come up with some answers. These are conditional inferences that you will find in history books. They are all valuable information – I am by no means denying that.
But what makes you believe that those people living in and around Sarnath fifteen hundred years ago were your people?
DNA studies.
What is it that ties you and others of your kind – let us call them modern Indians – to those people in the ancient past?
DNA. Also I belong to the same religion. If I were transported back in time, I could hire a purohit to perform some of the same ceremonies I get performed today.
Let me give you another set of examples. Make one more imaginative journey and take yourself to the pyramids of Egypt or, if you prefer, the Parthenon in Greece. I have never been to those places but have seen pictures. Once again, you will be faced with impressive structures that come from ancient times. Of course, you know they are ancient only because archaeologists and historians have told you so; how else could a non-expert tell simply by looking at the stones how old they are?
So, this cretin is saying that Charvaka accepts verbal testimony as a valid source of knowledge.
But you know the pyramids (including the gigantic Sphinx) at the edge of the desert in Giza and the Parthenon on top of the hill in Athens are ancient monuments that have become famous icons of ancient Egyptian and Greek civilisations. They will be both familiar and unfamiliar to you, in the same way that Sarnath was, because you will know something about the people who lived there in ancient times, and may find out more about them by going to the library or searching the internet. There will also be much that you will not know.
But would you ever feel that the people of ancient Egypt or Greece were your people? Never. So here is my question to you: what is it that makes you imagine the people of ancient Sarnath as your people but not those of ancient Egypt or Athens?
DNA. Before DNA, we had to rely on similarity in language and the genealogies maintained by priests and bards.
The answer is obvious, you will tell me. The remains of Sarnath are in the territorial region we call India; those of ancient Egypt or Greece are somewhere else, far away. It is geography that binds together the people of India today with those of ancient India.
Because there were no very substantial DNA flows into India after that period.
To clarify your answer, let me ask you to do one more imaginative experiment: I promise this will be the last time I will ask you to do this. Imagine yourself walking through the ruins of Mohenjo-daro, the famous ancient city of the Indus Valley (or Harappan) civilisation.
I did visit the place once some years ago. With its brick houses arranged in straight lines and rectangular blocks, a central marketplace, public buildings, baths, and covered drains, the planned city seems to have been built by a people with a sophisticated culture. There are debates among scholars about who those people were: we will come to that subject presently.
But everyone is agreed that these ruins representing the urban phase of the Indus civilisation are from a period between 2600 BCE and 1900 BCE. They are also the earliest examples that have been found so far of an ancient high culture in the Indian subcontinent.
But remember, Mohenjo-daro is now located in Sindh province in Pakistan. If you are an Indian citizen, you will probably have some difficulty getting there. Does that pose a problem for modern Indians to claim its history as their own? Could you say, in the same way that you did in the case of Sarnath, that the people who lived in Mohenjo-daro four or five thousand years ago were your people?
Yes, on the basis of DNA evidence.
I know that is an easy question to answer. You will smile and say, “We have already decided that the nation-state is a modern creation but a people may be ancient. So why should the present boundaries of the nation-states of Pakistan and India prevent Indians from claiming the Indus civilisation as their own?” It is a good answer.
But just to be aware of the implications, let me point out that history textbooks in Pakistan also begin with the story of the Harappan civilisation and claim the ancient people of the Indus valley as their people. They continue the story into the Vedic period and the rise of Buddhism in which Punjab and the north-western region of Pakistan played a very important part, the ancient city of Taxila being the major centre from where the Buddhist faith travelled to Central Asia and China.
That history is not inconsistent with your answer. The people of the modern nation-state of Pakistan claim as their own, for reasons of geography, the ancient tradition associated with the lower and upper Indus valley civilisations as well as Taxila, even though they date the beginning of the Pakistani nation from the Arab conquest of parts of Sindh in the year 711. But it means that the same ancient history and tradition may be claimed by different peoples; it may not be the exclusive property of one nation.
Do the Pakistanis worship the same Gods as those found in the Indus Civilization (which straddled the present border) ? No. If India was able to invade and kill a lot of Muslims in Pakistan, then Pakistan would once more be part of India. However, nobody is going to invade Pakistan. It has nukes and its people know how to fight. What is unlikely is that Pakistan will become part of a universal Caliphate. This is not because the people of Pakistan are lacking in religious zeal but because natural and acquired endowments are very unequally distributed across the Islamic world. Furthermore, differences of language, sect and ethnicity would still pose problems. However, the ideal of a Pan Islamic State will always help bring Muslim Nations together to cooperate in a mutually beneficial manner.
Ancient history is like an inheritance shared by many. But your nationalist leaders will not be satisfied with that answer...
Yes they will. Nationalists worry that their own peeps might not be getting their fair share of the inheritance. Alternatively they may say be saying 'actually, we're holding this in trust for the vulnerable amongst our coparceners'.
Partha, stupid cunt that he is, hasn't noticed.
Scholars holding the view that the Vedic peoples were immigrants who came after the decline of the Harappa cities point to the following pieces of evidence. Linguistic analysis suggests that the Rig Veda hymns were not much older than the gāthā of the ancient Persian Avesta which are dated at around 700 BCE. Hence, the Vedic peoples were certainly later than the peoples of the Indus-Harappa civilisation.
So what? They had lost all consciousness of being immigrants. They merely recorded- as families like mine still do- their movements and affiliations across what was increasingly seen as a unitary heimat or sprachbund. Fuck is wrong with Partha? Why is he raking all this early Nineteenth Century shite up?
Further, Vedic Sanskrit adopted many loanwords from Dravidian languages to refer to various material objects of common use. It also adopted the retroflex or mūrdhanya consonants...common to most Indian languages but absent in other Indo-European languages.
Fuck off! Has this fool never travelled across Europe? There are plenty of Indo-European languages with some retroflex consonants. Indeed, some English dialects sport this feature as they do glottal stops etc.
The retroflex appears to have entered Sanskrit from the Dravidian or Mundari languages spoken in India.
But this happened in 'ancient' times. That is why we say Bharatvarsha or India is an ancient nation. Where did the retroflex consonants in Polish or Russian come from? Dravidians? Mundaris?
Then there is the continued existence of stray Dravidian language speakers in northern India, such as the Brahui speakers of Balochistan, the Kurukh of Nepal, and the Oraon and Gond of central India. Finally, textual evidence suggests beyond any doubt that the Vedic peoples were adept in the use of horses and chariots with spoked wheels. To this day, there is no clear evidence that the Indus-Harappa people used horses.
So what? All that shit went down in ancient times. Actually Brahui may be due to immigration in historic times, like Romany in Europe.
Recent scholars have been led by this evidence to conclude that, contrary to the old Aryan invasion story, the Aryan peoples migrated from Central Asia to northern India and, rather than driving the Dravidians to the south, largely mingled with the indigenous population, gradually absorbing them into a new social order marked by hierarchies and discrimination, assimilation as well as exclusion, cohesion as well as conflict.
But all societies had and have these features.
But the idea of the Vedic Aryans as immigrants unsettles the deep nationalist desire to claim an ancient past for the Indian people.
While this cunt gets deeply unsettled by such claims. Why? Who actually gives a flying fuck?
The heritage of an ancient civilisation whose record is preserved in the large Sanskrit literary canon and whose achievements rival those of classical Greece, as certified by leading European Orientalists, is held with enormous pride by modern Indians.
Fuck off! Modern Indians care about modern stuff- like getting the latest i-phone.
That pride is severely dented if it has to be admitted that the Vedic Aryans were not the original inhabitants of this country and instead came from somewhere in Central Asia.
Don't be silly. Tell an Indian that he looks like he comes from Hollywood or Monaco, and he'll be thrilled. Central Asia too is okay. Them Kazakh babes be smokin'! But, if you were to tell me I looked Nigerian or Jamaican, I'd be over the moon. What's more I'd be getting laid incessantly. One reason some of us South Indians in London would shave our head was so as to get mistaken for African origin peeps. This was coz White chicks wanted to sleep with cool Afro types- not some desi dude working in the local grocery store or pharmacy.
Not only that, it is another blow to nationalist pride if it is claimed that there was in fact an earlier great civilisation in the Indus valley bearing no relation to the Vedic people – one whose language and culture are unknown and whose subsequent fate remains to be investigated. Nationalist ideology is impatient with such cautious judgments...
No. Patriotic Indians were aware that there had been some talk of Dravidian secession. There was also some foolish notion that 'Aryans' were high caste and 'enslaved' Dravidians' etc were low caste. But Brahmins knew this was nonsense coz lots of us are darker on average than at least one 'Scheduled' Caste in our area.
We told the 'woke' Lefties to go fuck themselves. Sonia, however, coddled them. This meant Manmohan couldn't use the excuse of a Moody's downrating in 2012 to carry reform forward. Thus the baton passed to the BJP (the Commies previously having refused it) and with them it remains.
Meanwhile the Left has disappeared from the political stage- save in Kerala where the CM proclaims himself the Deng Xiaoping of India.
Partha, poor fellow, contributed to an entirely barren availability cascade. It espoused anti-nationalism, but- even then- couldn't come in its wife to save its life.
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