C.A Bayly made history by becoming the first corpse to win the Toynbee prize. Equally, the Toynbee prize made history by being shittier than the C.A Bayly's prize for being a fucking corpse.
Toynbee, the historian, may have been stupid but he could write grammatical English. Sadly, the Toynbee Prize Foundation- which 'was chartered in 1987 “to contribute to the development of the social sciences, as defined from a broad historical view of human society and of human and social problems'- publishes ungrammatical shite on its website.
The following was written by one Mahia Bashir, a graduate of St. Stephens and a postgrad from the LSE. Why is this woman so utterly illiterate?
Historical considerations of modern South Asia have been marked by a predisposition towards political, material and socio-cultural analyses.
Historical accounts, not 'considerations', show a particular predisposition. Depending on their motivation- i.e. 'consideration'- they may dwell on the political or the material circumstances or else they may highlight socio-cultural factors. Taken together these three realms exhaust the scope of history. It is foolish to say that 'Historical accounts' are 'predisposed' to dwell on all three factors. What else could they possibly look at? The limitation arises from the subject matter, not the historian's predisposition or motivating 'consideration'.
Mahira should have written- 'Historians of modern South Asia are predisposed to dwell on either political or material or else socio-cultural considerations'. This is because modern South Asia is a real place. By contrast, Historians of modern Cloud Cuckoo Land are predisposed to dwell on fairy tales.
Seldom has the remit of ideas as autonomous objects
Ideas are not autonomous objects. For empiricists, they have no separate existence outside the human brain. For idealists they are sublated and subsumed by the Absolute Idea. However, for shit poor countries, ideas don't matter. Mimetics- imitation- drives everything.
taken centre stage in the historiography of modern South Asia.
Such a thing has never happened anywhere. Ideas may motivate actions but those actions don't determine events on the basis of the power, or 'sovereignty' or 'autonomy' of the motivating idea. This is not to say that there haven't been Gandhian or Marxist or Liberal or Islamic historians of India. However, no such historian has been foolish enough to claim that 'Ahimsa', or 'Proletarian Revolution', or 'Utilitarianism' or Islam or anything else triumphed in India purely on the basis of the autonomous power of its associated idea. The truth is all of these projects failed save where a happy, or unhappy, concatenation of circumstances, militated otherwise.
Perhaps Mahia is deliberately writing nonsense so as to satirise the subject of her screed- viz. the cretin Shruti Kapila.
Shruti Kapila’s new book Violent Fraternity veers off this established trajectory and breaks new ground by looking at ideas as the wellspring of political innovation
New ideas are the source of innovation of all types. That is common knowledge. Which previous historian refused to accept that 'political innovation' had occurred because some politician, or set of politicians, had fastened on a new idea?
and fundamental to the republication foundations of the nations of India and Pakistan during what she terms the ‘Indian age’.
There was and is no such thing. The woman is mad.
A work of remarkable scope that defies easy summarisation, the premise of Violent Fraternity is that violence became fraternal in 20th-century India: it was the intimate kin rather than the colonial other that became the object of unprecedented violence.
Yet, there is not one single example of people slaughtering their own family members even if they were of different religions. Acharya Kripalani's brother converted to Islam. He showed no tendency to slaughter his younger sibling.
Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs did kill each other. But they were not related to each other. You'd have to go back several generations to find common ancestors.
It simply isn't the case that Hindus and Muslims were 'intimate'. They did not eat together and, even at the Railway station, drank water provided by different vendors. There were one or two cases of 'inter-marriage'- e.g. Aruna Asaf Ali- but the Nehru family prevented Vijaylaxmi marrying a Muslim. Whatever 'intimacy' existed, it was less than that between the English and the Indians. Rukmini Arundel still classed as a Brahmin after marrying an English theosophist. Had she married a Muslim, she could scarcely have 'Brahminized' Bharatnatyam as an art form.
As for the 'colonial other'- the Mutiny had taught the Indians a lesson they would never forget. Still, just to be on the safe side, Brigadier Dyer rubbed in the message. However, it wasn't the fact that he slaughtered innocents or made Indian men crawl on their bellies that riled Gandhi & Co. Dyer had forced the lawyers of Amritsars to do menial jobs connected with reestablishing law and order.
This is not to say that some Indians didn't try to kill specific British officials from time to time. It's just that Indians working for the CID were very adept at penetrating and rolling up the networks of the Revolutionaries who, in any case, realised they were just being silly. Their 'alterity' was not 'colonial', it was people of a different caste or creed who were competing with their own sept for Government jobs.
“Violence, fraternity and sovereignty,” Kapila writes, “made up an intimate, deadly and highly consequential triangle of concepts that produced what has been termed here the Indian Age” (p.4)
It has only been termed such by herself. The truth is there had always been 'communal' violence and this may certainly have reduced 'fraternity' but it hadn't established any sovereignty whatsoever. It is not the case that either Pakistan or India gained sovereignty by any other means than such as was in conformity with British legislation and the policy of the British Cabinet.
India’s founding fathers, who as opposed to the conventional figure of the detached scholar-philosopher
Radhakrishnan and Lala Hardayal were professional philosophers. They weren't 'detached' any more than Bertrand Russell (who was jailed during the Great War) was 'detached'.
were also actively straddling echelons
an echelon is a rank in a profession.
of the political world,
what 'echelons' of the political world were being straddled? None. Either a particular person held a political office or they did not. There was no straddling. It may have appeared that Gandhi, who held no political office, was doing some straddling. But this was not the case. He had influence. But an influencer is not a member of an echelon.
repeatedly engaged with the question of how to forge life with others in an intimate context rife with hatred and violence.
But that repeated engagement failed utterly because, truth be told, it wasn't engaging with anything political. It was merely a moral or spiritual type of camaraderie.
In seeking these answers, they authored a new canon of political thought that defied “fidelity to any given ideology, whether it be liberalism, Marxism or communism”.
But that 'new canon of political thought' defined an already established type of ideology- viz. Nationalism. No doubt, Indian Nationalism was different from Pakistani Nationalism or American Nationalism but that is because Nationalist ideologies always show ideographic differences precisely because they are not Universalist ideologies.
As Kapila demonstrates, global political thought of the Indian age departed from its western counterpart by reconceptualising the place and potential of violence.
This is nonsense. Norwegian Nationalism was different from Swedish Nationalism. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Norway and Sweden parted company without any violence. India and Pakistan too parted company without any military confrontation. It is a different matter that neither Nehru nor Jinnah made provision for a peaceful exchange of population with the result that hundreds of thousands lost their lives. But this did not involve any 'conceptualizing' or 'reconceptualising'. It reflected the fact that Nehru and Jinnah were shit at their jobs. In Delhi, on Nehru's watch, the proportion of Muslims fell from 33 percent to just 5 percent. In Karachi, Jinnah couldn't even retain his Hindu Law Minister, J.N Mandal who fled to India.
In the western canon, the state has been the natural habitus of violence.
Habitus means the norms of a class. This silly bint means 'the state had the monopoly of legitimate violence'- a Weberian apopthegm which isn't true. Self-defence is always legitimate.
In the West, a violent rebellion or revolution- e.g. that of the Americans or the French- could bring about regime change. But this was equally true of the East and the South and the North.
However, Indian political thinkers like Tilak and Gandhi dissociated violence from the orbit of state,
No they didn't. Tilak was on the side of the Revolutionaries and would have been delighted if India had been able to do what the American Revolutionaries had done- viz. throw out the Brits by force of arms. Gandhi didn't want any sort of State. He believed in autonomous, autarkic, villages where nobody had sex and so the population would die out.
and in a radical rewriting of established political vocabularies, posited violence as an individual capacity,
But everybody already knew that individuals could be violent and, moreover, that the use of violence in self-defence was perfectly legal and legitimate. Nobody denied that the Indians could, with perfect legitimacy, kill or otherwise drive away the British. They just didn't think the thing practicable or, from the point of view of their own 'class interest', wholly desirable.
thereby reconceptualising the notion of sovereignty and summoning a subject-centred political horizon.
But that 'subject centred' political horizon had been vindicated by the American Revolution and the French levee en masse. Moreover, after the Bolshevik Revolution, there was an even more, not less, 'subject-centred' political horizon of a not just Left Hegelian, but wholly Marxist-Leninist, type.
Dr. Shruti Kapila is an Associate Professor of Indian History and Global Political Thought at the University of Cambridge
which needs a place to dump cretinous kids
and presently the Co-Director of the Global Humanities Initiative.
this is an initiative which seeks to turn Western Paideia into an indoctrination in sub-Humanity.
Her research centres on modern and contemporary India
of which she is wholly ignorant- because she is Punjabi and as thick as shit. I believe she is training to be a Lacanian psychotherapist!
and on global political thought in the twentieth century. In her recent book Violent Fraternity and in her earlier work on intellectual history of modern India, Dr. Kapila has pushed the boundaries of the field beyond its conventional focus on the West.
This is a stupid woman who knows little about India- even her native Punjab (where she thought Channi's elevation would save Congress!) - and less about the West.
The boundary she is pushing is that of stupidity.
In our interview, we spoke about modern India’s founding fathers
Warren Hastings? A.O Hume? Annie Beasant?
and their intellectual contributions,
Tilak is rated by the far Right- Serrano, Evola, the Franco-Greek maths teacher Savitri Devi.
writing global intellectual histories of the non-west,
there is no such 'intellectual history'. It would be like saying 'an intellectual history of the non-Punjab'.
the future of the field of global intellectual history
which is just Begriffsgeschichte. Liebniz and Boskovich were influenced by Chinese thought.
and Dr. Kapila’s engagements beyond her illustrious academic career.
She teaches shit to shitheads. That's not an 'illustrious' career. It is one which illustrates how steeply the Cambridge History Dept.- at least for sub-continentals- has fallen in our estimation.
—Mahia Bashir, London School of Economics and Political Science
A place I attended. Three of my subcontinental class-mates, to my knowledge, became billionaires though one, a Pakistani, is awaiting extradition to the States. My point is, there is only one reason to attend the LSE- viz. to make money or understand money or just use the place as a Visa College while making money being a waiter or night-porter or whatever.
Mahia Bashir: Violent Fraternity marks a crucial departure from conventional Indian historiography in that its central focus is on the power of ideas.
Religion has power. Caste has power. Money has power. Ideas don't. Every asshole has loads of 'em.
It seems to follow from a deep-seated conviction in ideas as an animating force in history and is as much a scholarly milestone
millstone, maybe.
as it is labour of love.
If this is love, what is hate?
Might you tell us what inspired this project?
This is polite. It is courteous. It shows the girl has 'samskar' or 'akhlaq'. Even the LSE can't obliterate such things- at least, amongst the fair sex.
Shruti Kapila: Wow that’s a wonderful question and you are very right that it is a labour of love
self-love, sure, but very little labour was involved.
in that I am very animated personally by political ideas myself.
She is backing RaGa. Smart move. Punjabi women, after all, are Punjabi. They may talk modish bollocks, but are shrewd and sensible enough when it comes to practical matters.
At a basic level, I was always surprised that India, broadly conceived up to 1947, is marked by so much political rhetoric and debate—it’s inescapable at all levels of society. Yet, when I read scholarly accounts, especially about India’s politics, they tend to be very reductive and instrumental. They fall into two categories: one, in terms of institutional histories—“How Indians got some representation? Why did they get representation? Was this a form of British loyalism?”—or, two, crass social interpretations—which group is acting in which way, whether caste group or class group?
I thought this is the first country to be decolonised after America
Oh dear. It transpires that Kapila's stupidity arises quite simply from her utter ignorance of History even as taught in Primary School.
Haiti became independent in 1804. The Spanish and Portuguese lost their possessions in Mexico, and continental South America during the nineteenth century. Cuba and the Philippines were 'liberated' by the Americans at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Egypt, Ireland and Afghanistan became independent in 1922- which was the year Gandhi unilaterally surrendered to the Brits. Still, India was in the League of Nations and had provincial autonomy by 1937. Its progress towards complete independence was so slow because the INC had so thoroughly pissed off all the minorities- including Dalits, Sikhs, and (the majority) non-Brahmin Madrasis- that they made common cause against Gandhi at the Second Round Table Conference.
and this is a very significant historical change—achievement even. How can it be reduced to a bunch of these materialist analyses?
Because no other explanation fits. Why did the Indians not get what the Irish and the Egyptians and Afghans got? How come, when Independence did materialize, it was because the Brits were in a hurry to get the fuck out? Material causes, not ideas, explain everything. The fact is Indians knew their own ideas were plenty shitty. They also knew that, as Gandhi said, without the Brits the country would not be able to feed or defend itself. That's why ideas didn't matter very much.
People would have been animated by something. So for me, ideas are causes. It was both, as you say, a form of love, but also, as a historian, I have a conviction in the power of ideas as a cause in history.
Ideas are indeed a 'cause' in history. If ideas are sensible we see history moving in a sensible direction. If ideas are stupid, we see some stupid shit going down in the historical record. But material causes limit the duration of that stupid shit. Essentially, once you are starving or being beaten to death, you give up stupid ideas and let sensible people arrange matters.
MB: One of the key premises of the book is that the architects of Indian political thought or the ‘founding fathers’ as you call them were not just ‘leisured thinkers,’ to invoke C.A. Bayly’s term, but also active political actors.
Bayly may have been a silly man but even he was not stupid as to imagine that a 'leisured thinker' could have any knowledge of contemporary politics without being politically active. The fact is, the 'statistical liberals' he mentions were very busy professional men. Telang was a judge and Sanskrit scholar who was a member of the Bombay legislative council. R.C Dutt was an ICS officer, a lecturer at University College London, and then Dewan of Baroda. Both wrote knowledgably on economic topics and were active in the Universities of their respective Presidencies.
By contrast, Gandhi, Nehru & Co had more leisure because they were frequently in jail.
How did this unique vantage position, if I may, inform their political thought and also political practice?
SK: This question links to the first one, because, as I mentioned, my work is informed by a particular problem in Indian history: Indian politics and the way people have looked at it. But there is also another problem: we often assume modern political ideas came from the West, and places in the non-West, particularly colonised places like India, are mere receivers—they somehow derived their political ingenuity or innovation.
More particularly if this is what they themselves said. However, nobody was suggesting that Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism was a Western invention. Any purely Islamic or Hindu or other indigenous institution or practice was obviously un-connected with the West. Moreover, Western political theorists understood that the actual administration of any given Colony was not itself explainable in Western political terms more particularly if indigenous terms were used for the relevant institutional practices.
Kapila and her ilk are tilting at windmills. It was never the case that the West thought that the East had derived its political ideas from them. They thought the East was pretending to have Western ideas but was actually doing what it always had done under a thin, but very funny, disguise. Herbert Spenser echoes the great truth of Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado when he tells his Japanese interlocutor to keep alive traditional Japanese political norms under a mere pretense of top hatted, tail coated, British style Parliamentary Liberalism.
If you look at the canon of Western political canon, it is a very policed canon: it starts with a particular figure and ends with a particular figure.
This is nonsense. The Western 'political canon' is shite no fucking Westerner gives a flying fuck about. Nobody polices some stupid shite only a few pedagogues- mainly furriners- bother to curate in University Department's specially dedicated to the feeble minded.
They all tend to be men. This poses the second-order problem of: how will you write the political thought of the non-West? Where will you start?
Kapila is from Punjab. Can she explain the various strands of Akali politics to us? No. She is too stupid.
In England, if you look at the story of the modern state in which civil wars are really important, Hobbes becomes this great philosopher of the modern state and that’s the genesis of one side.
But English people don't read Hobbes or Locke. Only foreigners bother with that shite.
In France, against the backdrop of French Revolution, Voltaire and Rousseau
who wrote well and whom we do read but only because we are convinced that the French are utterly mad. This is because they leap about on the banks of the Seine trying to devour the legs of frogs.
generated debates about republicanism and democracy,
French Republics keep fucking up. That's the joy of being on the right side of the Channel. We can laugh ourselves sick at the gormlessness of the Gauls. Macron married his drama teacher! That's fucking hilarious.
and to say nothing about communism and what comes about from the former Soviet Union.
The Russians are very funny. Doestoevsky is priceless. But Putin's novichok poisoners wandering hand in hand around Salisbury cathedral are even funnier. Zelenskyy may be a comedian by profession but Putin's antics have turned him into Charleston fucking Heston in El Cid.
What I am saying is, in the West, the philosopher has occupied a very central role.
Not in Anglo-America. Empiricism in England and Pragmatism in America and sound Scottish common sense in Edinburgh put the psilosophers to flight. The French, on the other other hand, have to study Philosophy in High School. That's how come they end up marrying their Drama teacher which is fucking hilarious.
Treatises were written and historians can subsequently debate what was the impact of Voltaire’s work, for example, on the French Revolution or how did Hobbes inform the modern state.
Some cretins from foreign countries can debate this shite in University Departments specially tasked with the care of the feeble minded. Nobody else does so.
In South Asia, we have a completely different problem. The work is the opposite. My work is actually doing something to defamiliarise, if I may use that word. It is a bit counter-intuitive to use that word because I take some of the most prominent and powerful political actors in this period and I convert them into thinkers. The only exception here is Muhammad Iqbal because Iqbal is a trained philosopher and is one of the best known literary figures of the twentieth century, but Iqbal is someone who delved in Muslim League politics.
There were other 'trained philosophers'- e.g. Radhakrishnan and Lala Hardayal. Subhas Chandra Bose studied Philosophy at both Presidency College and Cambridge. Azad knew much more Islamic philosophy than Iqbal. Aurobindo was no slouch when it came to philosophy both Eastern and Western. Why is this stupid woman pretending that the Indians were ignorant of philosophy? In Maharashtra, the positivism of Herbert Spencer (or Harbhat Pense as the fondly called him) had paved the way to the superior mathematics and statistical methodology of Karl Pearson- and thus the emergence of a distinctive pragmatic research program in the Social Sciences which paralleled the Mahalanobis (a student of Pearson's) school of statistical science in Bengal. Kapila, being a casteist nubjob, won't admit that Ambedkar had philosophical nous. He was a student of Dewey and thus in the tradition of C.S Pierce.
The plain fact is that the Indians were more philosophical, not less so, than other revolutionaries. Tolstoy read Vivekananda. L.E.J Brouwer and Wittgenstein read Tagore. The former wanted Tagore to be put in charge of coining new terms for a Universal Intuitionistic philosophy which could save mankind from the ravages of war and civil strife. Brouwer is perhaps one of the greatest philosophers of mathematics. Turing used his choice sequences to achieve what Husserl could not. Kapila, being stupid and having to teach stupid shite, has no idea as to what is or isn't philosophy.
The question then is, are we going to look at these figures only in terms of their concrete politics or in terms of pragmatism? To that, I say no.
Why? Pragmatism is about 'cash value'- i.e. the positive effect of your thinking. Ambedkar was trained in the pragmatic philosophy. It is entirely proper to assess him with respect to it. Hardayal went in a different direction but his book sold well and is a contribution to eudaimonic philosophy. What makes your life better has 'cash value'. To say Indian thinkers had this type of utility is to praise them, not denigrate them.
These figures have profoundly torn down and rewritten the fundamental political vocabularies of the twentieth century and of modern politics itself.
Quite false. They were part and parcel of univocal movements of a universal type. Even Iqbal is related to Nietzsche and Bergson, both of whom inspired socio-political critiques. Indeed Sorel referred to Bergson as 'the French Marx'.
The fact is Indian political thinkers were in touch with similar people in other countries. There were multiple channels of intercourse and mutual influence. Vocabularies were being expanded not 'rewritten'.
I give them conceptual and reflective capacity.
Kapila lacks any such capacity. She can't give what she does not have.
We see them as busy people immersed in political action, going out there and making arguments. What is the thought behind it?
The one expressed by the argument they are making. Kapila doesn't grasp this. No wonder her very expensive and prolonged education has been utterly wasted on her.
This is an interesting issue for people wanting to study the thought and ideas of the non-West in this “moment of decoloniality”—where do you look?
In the non-West at the time when Colonialism was ebbing. What's so difficult about that?
My answer is, and I am not saying everyone should use this answer, look at the prime political actors.
Fuck have other people been doing? Looking at non-political actors who lived elsewhere? Is there really some rival professor to Kapila who has chosen to analyze Indian political thought by focusing on the activities of Belgian prostitutes? I hope so. It's what I'd have done with my grant money if I'd got an INLACS scholarship.
MB: This book is primarily a history of Indian political thought, but it distills crucial insights from some of the most influential thinkers from Carl Schmitt to Alain Badiou, Sigmund Freud, George Simmel, Ashish Nandy, and Jaques Lacan.
These aren't 'influential thinkers'. They are irrelevant and stupid thinkers whom only very stupid foreigners studying or teaching worthless shit bother with. Still, it's cool that Bashir shoehorns Ashish Nandy- who dropped out of Medical College and is as fucking low I.Q as a Bengali can be- into a place above Jacques Lacan.
Is Bashir taking a sly dig at Kapila who is now training as a Lacanian psychotherapist? Is she suggesting that Kapila would be just as well off being a Nandian analyst?
If so, Bashir is being very cruel. Kapila is Punjabi. Be nice to Punjabis. They can't help being as stupid as shit.
What were some of the challenges in writing a book as theoretically rich and layered as Violent Fraternity is?
The challenge was to see whether Kapila could write something more foolish yet than any similarly placed savant. She succeeded. Daad do, is Punjabi kudi ko!
SK: That’s such a generous question. I don’t mean to be unfair to historians but very few historians would seem to care so deeply about the theoretical edifice of their narratives.
Kapila is praising herself. Sound Punjabi strategy.
One of the issues really about political thought is its close relationship with not just the history of concepts but also philosophical propositions which have informed it.
All thought may be said to have this feature. That's why only stupid people actually say it.
One of the challenges was to really elevate and give conceptual depth to figures who are all too well received. We think we know who Sardar Patel is or what he stands for.
Kapila doesn't. I do. The Sardar was the envious younger brother of a charismatic, but eccentric, Nationalist in the Da Valera mold. That's why the Sardar went in the opposite direction. He kept Capital on side and played the long game.
Likewise, for someone like Ambedkar, we assume we know everything about him because he was the first
Nope. M.C Rajah was the first. Kapila is wholly ignorant.
and is the most prominent Dalit figure of the twentieth century.
We say so now. But back in the Seventies, we though Jagjivan Ram would become P.M. Shourie, being Punjabi, wrote a whole book shitting on Ambedkar in 1997. It was burnt all across the country. Everybody now would agree this was the right thing to do. The BJP needed to shun that cretin. Incidentally, Sunil Khilnani described Ambedkar's Mahar caste as nearly 'totally illiterate'. The truth is, it had higher male literacy because of its martial and administrative role. Ignorance of that sort amongst 'phoren' educated Indians was cool back then. Siddharth Varadarajan once plaintively asked 'who or what is a Kurmi?' despite his Dad being an U.P cadre IAS officer. Sadly for Kapila, ignorance of that sort is no longer a ticket to the top table in India. We do read Kapila's ignorant articles- but only so as to laugh at her.
We also think what they said or thought about A, B, or C controversial matters, be it about caste, conversion, Hindu-Muslim relations, or partition. But when you actually read them, I wouldn’t say their work is simply nuanced, but it is informed by so many global debates. Ambedkar, for example, has written in the full awareness of not just Nazism in the 1930s and 40s but also French revolutionary thinking, anthropological thinking, and also liberalism.
WTF?! The guy had PhDs in Econ from Columbia and the LSE. He was regularly visiting Europe all through the Twenties and Thirties. How could he fail to be aware of Nazism? The French Revolution was covered in the Political Science syllabus of his first degree in India. His Masters from Columbia included a paper in anthropology. He himself quotes Tarde's mimetic theory and invokes the 'broken man' hypothesis. As for Liberalism- that had been around in Bombay Presidency since the 1830s!
Ambedkar was smart. Kapila is stupid. What was easy for him is stuff she will never comprehend.
It does not mean that he will end up with some kind of salad of stuff. He is a totally innovative thinker.
No. He was a pragmatic thinker. 'Innovations' must 'pay for themselves' by making what is 'ready to hand' more useful.
So, the challenge was to give the conceptual due and innovation to the figure involved. For example, with Ambedkar, though he is very much about caste and justice, I think of him as a foundational thinker not only of radical democracy but also of republicanism.
That is only because Kapila's thinking is shitty. Pragmatism eschews 'foundational' thinking or rabbiting on about 'radical' this or 'subversive' that because the thing is silly. It can't pay for itself. It's just shitting higher than your arsehole is all.
The second challenge was how to make it conversant,
Kapila's English is poor. I suppose she means that she wanted to make what was ideographic, or context specific, into something universal or nomothetic- i.e applicable to other, foreign, political contexts. This requires something like a 'transfer principle' from model theory.
how to not make it so insular—that this is only about something Indian. As you say, India is instructive for the global with its diversity and scale, which it is, but also in the very nature of its political foundations. It has to produce a republican, modern kind of state formation out of sheer diversity of all kinds.
No. It could have broken up into smaller units with various different types of regime. Kapila can't explain why Hindu India, ab ovo, cohered as a democratic republic under the rule of law whereas Burma and Pakistan did not. There is only one possible explanation. Hinduism needed to break with Casteism and move towards 'Hindutva'- i.e. what it could be in an ideal world where hereditary and gender differences had ceased to matter.
That is not the story of modern Europe. Modern Europe is borne out of quite modular and homogenous ways of being.
A modular way of being isn't homogenous. Whatever can the cretin Kapila mean?
The challenge was, thus, these two or three different registers: to keep the authenticity of the Indian context and to identify where the interventions lay. That is why the book decided to be, to use the term in the introduction, ‘pointilistic’, rather than trying to write a comprehensive history of these ideas. I must say I truly enjoyed writing this book. It was challenging, but it was a challenge I really relished.
Her next challenge is reading that shite and understanding why only cretins might 'relish' it.
MB: One of the key reflections of book is that in India, violence became an individual capacity rather than being the remit of the state as it was in the West.
Did Kapila kill 50,000 people in Punjab during the Khalistani insurgency? No. It was the State. True, at Partition, lots of people got killed but some States- Sikh as well as Rajput and Dogra- made the first move. It is true that the Brits didn't have to kill very many people- save when dealing with Moplahs or other uprisings in what is now Pakistan. However, this was because everybody knew they had very great capacity to do so. Jallianwallah Bagh wasn't exactly a picnic. The air force had bombed peasants in the countryside. The Brits hade made their point very clearly.
The individual, be it Tilak’s anti-statist political subject, Gandhi’s self-sacrificing subject or the dislocated Ghadri, thus became the bearer of sovereignty.
Fuck off! They were crushed! Sitting in jail does not mean you are actually the King. It means you are a loser.
What ramifications does this have for the conceptions of the post-colonial future espoused by these thinkers?
SK: You have really read the book well. One of the problems that these political actors faced was at the beginning of the twentieth century, when India’s first mass political movement, the Swadeshi or the Home rule movement in 1905-08, failed. It really forced a rethinking on the question of violence and political action.
Both were useless. The Brits would devolve power at their own sweet will and pleasure. True, something cosmetic could have been achieved equal to what Egypt obtained. But because Indian politicians were shit at tackling bread and butter issues, power would have trickled back to Civil Servants.
From a historian’s point of view, one of the issues that animates this book is, in 1857 Indians mount what is at that point the largest anti-imperial movement in world history
There was a Mutiny. It was crushed with insulting ease. Most of India remained loyal. Kapila's own Punjabis did their bit for the Brits with great glee.
and it is also the largest scale violence the British see outside of the Crimean War.
In 1857, the Brits defeated the Persians with a handful of casualties. The Crimean War cost about 21,000 lives- mainly of disease. The Indian Mutiny took 2,300 British or allied lives but, obviously, wouldn't have taken any if needful reform and basic vigilance had been maintained. Simply keeping the artillery out of native hands was enough to ensure no repetition of that stupidity.
Indians killed British men, women, and children. It’s pretty widespread; it takes the British two years to suppress it.
Because of all the looting and raping and torturing and executing those poor souls felt obliged to do.
Ninety years later, the British are singularly spared in the fratricide, in the partition violence. What has changed? What happened?
How fucking stupid are these two women? Do they not understand that Britain had a huge army and air force in India? Any attempt to kill White people would have led to the immediate massacre of thousands of people. Back in the mid Nineteenth Century, the Brits were more exposed. Also, they were foolish enough to trust Indians. General Wheeler, the commander in Kanpur, was married to an Indian woman. All that changed after the Mutiny. Just in case some Indian was stupid enough to have forgotten this, Brigadier Dyer rammed home the message at Jallianwallah Bagh.
What has changed, to answer your question, is the rethinking of the very basic political grammar after 1905-08, particularly by Tilak, who is a known leader of the Swadeshi movement and is regarded by men like Lenin as the figurehead
does she mean 'fountainhead' ?
of revolution in South Asia. He decouples the question of violence from the state. This is not an anarchist anti-statism. It is a philosophy of a political subject that says life and death are primarily individual capacities, not capacities exclusive to the state to own, deploy, or control. This is very radical.
It is meaningless. The State decided when to lock up Tilak and Gandhi and so forth and when to let them out. It and it alone dictated the pace and scope of reform and devolution of power. Indians could have gained a deciding voice in 1922 and 1931 but they failed because they were shit at politics. Not radical shit. Just shit.
It circumvents the liberal imperial state, which had in effect depoliticised India.
But the INC had been set up by British Civil Servants! The Muslim League, too, was fostered by the Brits! The second Indian MP, 'bow and agree', was an Imperialist Tory! The Liberal Party- from Morley-Minto to Montague-Chelmsford- explicitly created representative institutions so that more and more legislation could be done locally thus reducing the burden on Westminster.
Men like Tilak and also Ghadris knew very well that the British had entered in the twentieth century a very peaceful and possibly permanent state of imperial rule. Not only was there education, progress, and co-optation, as it were, of the Indian population to a vast degree, but there was also the means and control of violence complete to the British. This philosophy of anti-statism becomes really very important, and Gandhi would make it into a very non-violent and, I would say, much more consequential force. He lays down the grammar for Indian democracy.
But that grammar had a language which turned out to be utter nonsense! The grammar of Indian democracy is wholly English. True, there was a time when 'Rajpramukhs' existed in it. But that time was of brief duration. Kapila was born after it had disappeared completely from India's constitutional vocabulary.
No doubt, Indian politics features hartals and hunger strikes. But the Election Commission takes no cognizance of them. 'Panchayat Raj' in India isn't really Indian. It is just a parish council.
You ask me, what are its ramifications. The ramifications are two-fold. One, the Indian state is unlikely or has failed to date to gain monopoly of violence.
Really? Then how come the Khalistanis have virtually disappeared? Why are Naxalites on the back foot? Even in Kashmir and the North East, it is the State which has the higher threat point. The one thing Indira's Emergency clearly demonstrated was that the State could exercise its monopoly of violence in a manner similar to Communist China or Stalinist Russia. Its autocrats could easily make themselves immune to assassination. But that's not the direction in which they wanted to go. Why? India is Hindu. Its leaders prefer to be loved rather than feared. Why? They then believe their after-life- if only in the History books- will be so much better.
Second, anti-statism remains—and as I said it’s not anarchist—a very operable political precept. We have seen it from environmentalism,
which isn't violent
to say nothing of Maoism
which is but which gets stomped because tribals prefer to get a pensionable job killing Naxals rather than risk their lives for no money.
or other openly violent movements against the Indian state.
Which have to be financed in some way. Violence costs money.
But you also have the other side of it, which is that it causes a very strong language of civil disobedience and protest, which is a Gandhian value.
It is a nuisance which costs money. The farmers prevailed because they had money. But now their financiers are wondering whether it was worth it. AAP swept the polls in Punjab. Yogiji won seats in the Jat belt.
You see it most lately in the farmer’s protest. I wrote about it in one of my columns: whether they invoke it or not, it belongs to that genealogy of Gandhian struggle.
Which cost a lot of money which turned out to have been wasted. Ik tamasha hua gila na hua. There was a big spectacle, but no political gain.
Tilak…decouples the question of violence from the state.
No he doesn't. He lived through the First World War. He knew that either a State could kick the ass of all comers or it would cease to exist. Anyway, the guy was Chitpavan. They remembered their glory days under the Peshwa. That glory had been lost on the battle-field. It could only return the same way.
MB: In his magisterial Time and Power, Christopher Clark
which is about Germany. It has no application at all to Indian history.
ruminates on the relationship between power and historicity (i.e., the assumptions about how the past, present, and the future are connected). The role of temporality in relation to political action has also been addressed in your book. How do the different protagonists of this book conceptualise time, and how does it impinge on their political thought?
The answer is obvious. The Revolutionaries thought a strong India should have a historicity of fighting and winning. Gandhians thought it should have a historicity of starving quietly while muttering Ahimsa! Ahimsa! Socialists didn't think. They just sat in a big puddle of their own poo saying nasty things about Fascism.
SK: This is indeed a minor theme of the book. The main theme of the book has really been about violence and intimacy and fraternity, and subsequently how republican foundations are laid for India’s democracy.
But every country Britain withdrew from became a republic- unless it had a Sultan or a bunch of Sultans who'd take turns being Head of State.
But you are absolutely right that temporality and history both are part of the story. First in the sense that it is quite inescapable that a large number of India’s political actors/thinkers convey their political ideas through the genre of history. Whether it is Nehru, whether it is Savarkar, whether it is even Ambedkar or even Iqbal who writes a philosophical history of Islam,
No. He didn't even write a history of Islamic philosophy. His contributions were speculative and revisionist. Basically, he was saying 'for a philosophical Islamic reason we should read such and such Scriptural injunction as meaning the opposite of what it says'. Hindus were doing the same thing.
history is the template to convey political ideas.
No. History must be distorted so as to fit the template of a particular political idea. This is 'revisionism'.
To use a technical term, it’s a prognostic, a future-oriented project
Prognostic means 'predicting'. At my age, my prognosis is that of physical and mental decline. However, I could have a 'future oriented' project- like getting into Heaven or earning a good reputation before I die. In that case we would speak of teleology or eschatology.
In that sense, history contains both positive and negative utopias inside it.
No. Revisionist history may do so. Actual history can't.
These political actors/thinkers are not writing histories the way you or I, as professional historians, would write it.
Unless they are as stupid and ignorant as Kapila- but that's a hard ask.
They are writing it in that utopian sense, that it provides a future oriented idea of the past.
The word for that is 'revisionist'.
Second, you get different ideas of temporality in terms of its civilisational grandeur, for someone like Nehru, or in terms of the epic form, like the Gita. There is a kind of hold of the epic tradition in political thinking or what I call, following Schmitt, political theology.
Schmitt was a spoiled Catholic. There was some point to his using that term. After all, his rehabilitation depended precisely on it. But why is Kapila going down that road? Is it coz that's wot all the cool kids are doing?
Then, you have someone like Gandhi whose idea of time is the everyday—a very quotidian idea of time.
Quotidian means everyday. Gandhi however believed in karma- give up sex in this world and you will be born on a celestial planet where you can live for millions of years and no sexy shenanigans occur.
Everyday becomes the framework of political action.
Only if you believe your refusal to eat or shit or do something sensible really helps all the suffering Palestinians in Ukraine.
So, you have the epic scale thinking in terms of how does a human agent act, which one sees in Tilak’s invocation of the Gita, and Krishna and Arjun.
Tilak is saying 'don't be a pussy. Fight!'
Then you also like someone like Nehru, who operates with the notion of civilisational times, which allows him to give this temporal identity to India—that India has this ancient civilisational temporality.
Coz India is sooooo special. Unlike Egypt which is puffed up coz of its Pyramids and such like. Fuck you Egypt! Fuck you very much!
Interestingly, the flipside to this is Vinayak Savarkar, who is looking at two millennia. In a way, he is quite opposed to his mentor Tilak.
His mentor was his elder brother. His patron was Shyamji Krishna Varma.
He says, ‘I don’t know Puranic history or epic stuff,
coz that's fictional
I am only interested in what can be called recorded history’. For him this longue duree is actually very static and it is only interrupted through war. This is altogether a different sort of temporality.
coz fiction is different from factual stuff
So, you have Gandhi’s everyday to Tilak’s epic timescape, and
neither matter. Why? Hindus believe in reincarnation. Be martyred or do some other really stoooopid but saintly stuff in this world and you get re-born on a paradisal planet for a gazillion years. But then it all starts again. The other thing is if you kill someone in this life, you will have to have another birth where you get killed by that dude. Hopefully, it will be a brief life- that of an ant or fly that quickly gets crushed. Still, this tends to sour Hindus on killing as a way of life unless, obviously, that is part of a proper, pensionable, job.
it informs the kind of political projects that they would want to see and the kind of political actor they would want to create. I was thus very careful not to organise the book under any political ideology, because these temporalities allow for competing political ideologies and projects to emerge in India.
What emerged in India was the realization that the Brits had economies of scope and scale in Defense and admin. India lost both. Also its leaders were as stupid as shit. So India turned into a shithole of a begging bowl. A few pedants could escape India by pretending to be 'ideological' and thus getting tenure in some worthless University Dept. in the West. On the other hand, if you wanted to get rich, you substituted straightforward religious charlatanry for Gandhian or Marxist magical thinking. Mahesh Yogi made billions teaching 'yogic levitation' which spreads 'peace rays'. C.A Bayly, poor fellow, got into Gallagher type Indian history at a moment when it was plausible to speak of 'ideology' as mattering. Surely Indira and Zulfi and Bandarnaike and so forth were influenced by that shite? Then Dominique Lapierre sexed up and then Salman Rushdie 'chutneyfied' modern Indian history. It became clear that India is a very poor part of the world where people might pretend to do ideology for a little money and the chance to escape that shithole. Finally, because of the influx of South Asian immigrants, the subject turned into a type of finger painting for the idiot spawn of a rising professional and entrepreneurial class of yahoos. Thus Bayly- who might have started off as a sensible enough chap- ended up contributing to the availability cascade which gives us Kapila and Priyamvada and the even more illiterate Divya Dwiwedi. Will this shite ever bottom out? What will its next iteration be? I suppose it will have to feature gender bending cat people fighting for the right to replace the Queen with such cats as might come to look at them. This then leads to Bridgerton type sexy shenanigans featuring trans-species relationships of a type subversive of keeping down your lunch.
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