The Parsis are Zoroastrians. Why did they leave Iran and come to India? Harmony Siganporia may think it was so as to protest against Hindutva. Non Muslims should not resist or retaliate against Islamic oppression. She mentions a 'pogrom' in 2002. Does she mean the dastardly killing of Hindu pilgrims? Of course not. She is referring to a plot by Pakistan's ISI to use Indian Muslims as canon fodder- this was after the attack on the Indian Parliament- so as to have an excuse not to comply with America's insistence that it join the 'War on Terror'- i.e. the killing of 1.3 Muslims, the vast majority of whom had no hostility whatsoever against Christians or Hindus or Buddhists or anybody else- and thus temporarily reverse its support for the Taliban in Afghanistan.
This is an extract, published in Scroll.in, from Harmony's new book 'Walking from Dandi- in search of Vikas' (the word means Development- stuff like electricity connections, taps with running water, TVs, Smartphones, better paid jobs etc. Harmony however thinks 'Vikas' is some evil, sadistic, Foucauldian shite which people are subjected to by an evil, neo-liberal, state. Harmony thought Modi would lose in 2019. People did not want Vikas. They wanted to cuddle with terrorists.
[The year] 2019 marked the 150th centenary celebrations of MK Gandhi’s birth, and anticipated the 90th anniversary in 2020 of the Dandi March, held in some quarters to be the apogee of his political career.
It failed. The Salt Tax remains in place (though zero-rated under GST since 2016) though Liaquat Ali Khan did abolish it when he was Finance Minister. But, after Independence, it was brought back under Nehru.
My project was a simple one: in February 2019, alongside two dear comrades, cultural researcher Chirag Mediratta,
a Canadian Brand Consultant
and medical doctor Sushmit Prabhudas,
not a 'semiotician' and thus not utterly useless.
I walked from Dandi to Ahmedabad,
Why not from Dandi to Canada? I'd pay to see that. Harmony's explanation is that she lives in Ahmedabad. She had to walk back to Ahmedabad to understand her own place in the present. The problem here is that she identifies as Parsi. She would need to travel from Iran to Ahmedabad to understand why her people ended up in a Hindu country which, evidently, she herself has no great fondness for.
retracing the route of the Salt March, in reverse.Were they walking backwards? Please say they were walking backwards! On the other hand, they did have a car accompanying them. Gandhi would have so not approved. Also they were eating meat! Chee Chee!
This route – the “Dandi Pāth” – is the setting against which I set out to explore what I believe to be the story of modern Gujarat.
That story was that there was a salt tax which contributed to the cost of the police and the army and the civil administration. Gandhi was a fool. To be fair, he may have thought the poor were paying 20 percent not 2 percent of their income in tax. But that's not the sort of mistake a lawyer- or indeed any type of 'bania'- should make.
We walked this route of just under 400 kilometres over the course of 25 days, covering anywhere between 16 and 29 kilometres a day,
That's impressive. But it would have been more impressive if they had done it walking backwards.
stopping at one place mid-morning, and elsewhere for the night following a dusk-time walk, much as the original band of Marchers did in 1930.
I believe Dalmia was paying for the junket. Later, because of Feroze Gandhi, Dalmia had to do jail time. Sad.
Why? Because Gujarat has come to be described as something of a social laboratory – more specifically, in the words of the (former) Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Praveen Togadia, “the laboratory of Hindutva”.
A successful laboratory. Modi is a two term Prime Minister.
Over the past few decades. I was keen to engage with this Gujarat, but I also wanted to see if there remained in it any competing visions to these epistemes:
Like what? Not paying tax so the State can wither away and the Muslims invade? That's not a 'episteme'. It is stupidity.
memories of the region’s prior avatar as the base that served as the setting against which Gandhi put into practice his “experiments” with truth, non-violent civil disobedience,
His first big campaign in Gujarat was as a recruiting sergeant for the Brits. The Gujeratis, being sensible people, chased the old fool away.
satyagraha, mass political communication, and more, during the heyday of the Indian Nationalist Movement in the early-20th century.
Which led to partition. Gujeratis were quick to chase away the Nawab of Junagadh when he tried to accede to Pakistan. It should be remembered that Gujarat produced Dayanand Sarasvati. It was the Arya Samaj which led the Nationalist Movement in North India. Indeed, Gandhi only converted to celibacy after Bhai Parmanand came to visit him. He got the 'Mahatma' tag from Swami Shraddanand who was assassinated by a Muslim.
In 1930, Gujarat was also the site of one of the most enduring chapters of this Movement,
In 2006, Sonia Gandhi launched a Dandi march of her own in a bid to dent Modi's popularity. The thing was hilarious.
the Dandi March and subsequent Salt Satyagraha, undertaken to contest what Gandhi held to be the most unjust tax levied on Indians:
Because it paid for defense and policing and other such evil shit.
the British Indian government’s tax on that most essential of all food articles, salt.
Salt had been taxed since the time of the Mauryas. Gandhi objected to any type of Government. Also, wheeled transport is wrong. As for sex- don't get me started.
The March saw Gandhi leave his Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmedabad with a band of 78 dedicated marchers (the last two to make up the front ranks would join them from Matar, two days into the walk).
Sadly, they were not marching backward. Still, they did form an orderly queue to get hit on the head. by the police. Then everybody went meekly to jail.
Together, they wound their way across nearly 400 kilometres of varying terrain to get to the sleepy coastal town of Dandi, where they broke the law by “making” their own salt.
Which turned out to be more expensive and of worse quality than taxed salt. What happened when Liaquat scrapped the Salt Tax? Its price went up. Salt is necessary for human survival. A government monopoly means you get a healthy, not an adulterated or poisonous, product.
As alluded to above, my intention was to explore two main themes: to see what (if anything) remained of the Salt March in cultural memory and oral history;
Dandi has capitalized on Gandhi to create a tourism industry. My memory is that Patrick French did the Dandi walk. But he wrote well.
and perhaps even more importantly, to attempt to discern the shape of this Gujarat I now inhabit but have little access to the rich lived inner realities of, owing to my multiple positions – along religious / caste / class / educational / urban-location lines – of privilege.
and stupidity. The woman is a 'semiotician'.
This made my endeavour one which forced upon me simultaneously and competingly insider and outsider – what ethnography would call emic and etic – positionalities.
Which is why she should have walked backwards. The plain fact is that anthropology is not 'emic' to any episteme. It is weird shite which thrives at the margin. The theory was that the anthropology dept. would be able to supply cool drugs or maybe get up orgies of some primitive kind. Then everybody discovered theme guys be boring cretins.
As Kottak
Conrad Kottak
defines it, “the emic approach investigates how local people think”
but if the 'investigators' are incapable of thought, that approach is useless. The fact is what you think about your society is 'emic'. If people pay you a lot of money to hear your thoughts, you aint just emic, you are smart. If not, you are too stupid to say anything interesting about foreign societies.
Does anybody in India say 'Prashant Kishore has tied up with the rival party. Lets call in Harmony. She be one super-smart semiotician.'? Nope. Her own colleagues are grateful if she does not mistake them for a toilet.
; how communities make sense of their world from inside-out. The etic or “scientist-oriented” approach on the other hand shifts the focus from “local observations, categories, explanations, and interpretations to those of the anthropologist (or specialist)”.
Which is fine if you have a superior Structural Causal Model and sufficiently large and reliable data sets. Thus Prashant Kishore, who is from Bihar, can advise Tamil political parties just as well as Bengali parties.
I was born in Gujarat, speak Gujarati, and have lived in this state for most of my life: this makes me an insider.
But being as stupid as shit makes you an outsider. I've attended plenty of business meetings where people assume I'm a Gujju same as everybody else. Then I open my mouth and they discover I'm a fucking cretin.
However, since I am not Hindu (and therefore caste-bound),
Parsis have a despised under-taker caste.
not male, and an English-speaking, urban location based academic to boot, this makes me an outsider, constantly forced to account for my “self” in the place I have for so long called home.
This is easily done. Just confirm you are of Parsi descent. I've noticed that younger Parsis no longer speak with a distinctive accent or vocab. I think there are only about 10,000 Parsis left in Gujarat- most of them getting on in years.
It should be noted that Harmony's two companions were non Gujerati speaking males. The natural assumption would have been that they were relatives of hers. No doubt, she spoke to them in English or some other language. Thus, they would naturally assume she too was from outside the State.
The number of times en route people began conversations assuming I was a Non-Resident Indian (NRI) attests to this “othering”.
No. It attests to an Indian preference to get the fuck out of India.
I would proceed to disabuse them of this fallacy in chaste Gujarati, only to have them insist it simply had to be true:
The same thing happens to me when I claim to be a member of the British Royal Family even though I explain in chaste English that Daddy predicted I would grow up to be a big fat Queen and, as a Hindu, it is my Dharmic duty to make his word come true. Somehow, British peeps tend to think I've escaped from an Indian lunatic asylum when I make this argument. Yet, what could be more British than a desire to contract a Lesbian marriage with the Queen Gor Bless'er?
by day twenty-two on the road, it may as well have been, because I stopped feeling the need to correct them.
This is hilarious. For twenty one days this lady was waylaying every passerby and saying 'I'm speaking chaste Gujarati to you, you fucking peasant. Why don't you believe I too am a benighted native like you? Is it coz I iz bleck?'
Gandhi has always been many things to many people
was he Nehru's homosexual lover? That would have been totes cool.
– the catholicity of his learning, philosophy, and world-view ensure this
Don't have sex. Protect cows instead. That's what Pope dudes say- right?
– and I argue that in addition to the many descriptors that came to surround him (some of which he even came, over time, to inhabit)
Bloke wot lives in that Ashram was one such descriptor.
during the course of his lifetime and even more so after it,
Sadly, you don't inhabit shit after you die- unless you are a guga guga guga guga Ghost.
he was also an astute proto-semiotician:
semi-idiotics more like.
a man who keenly understood the need to find symbols able to cut across the myriad caste-class-gender-religion and other fault lines which have traditionally marked the region known today as the nation-state of India, but which corresponds historically to an agglomeration of cultural imaginations, variously administered regions, and erstwhile kingdoms or feudal modalities.
Nonsense! India is the Hindu majority portion of the British Indian Empire plus a few places where there are separatist movements- unless China is the bigger threat.
For this reason, I hold that it is both impossible – as well as deeply reductive and even a sort of epistemic violence – to speak of India or Indians in the singular, as if these signifiers could possibly contain monolithic signifieds.
India signifies a particular territory. That is a matter of law. Harmony could be prosecuted if she engages in secessionist activity. However, being stupid is not a crime. If it were, Rahul would be in jail.
The reason I propose that Gandhi was a proto-semiotician is that he chose elements or objects which were quotidian, and elevated them into “causes” around which a community could begin to cohere.
But that community already cohered. The term Indian was well defined in Law. The country had been admitted to the League of Nations.
In other words, he took symbols from our everyday lives, and charged them with the capacity for new connotative signification.
He failed. The 'chakra' turned out to be useless. It was quietly dropped. The Salt tax remains. On the other hand, cow protection is a Directive Principle in the Constitution. Also India got rid of troublesome Muslims like Jinnah and Liaquat. Punjab and Bengal were literally cut down to size.
Salt was one such marker, since every living being needs it for their survival. That this choice was a strategic one is clear: the salt tax accounted for merely a fraction of all tax revenues collected by the British in India in any given year.
Not so small. It may have been as much as 8 per cent. Gandhi's genius was to minimize hurt to the Brits and maximize harm to the INC. The upshot of the Salt Satyagraha was that Gandhi had to attend the Second Round Table Conference where he managed to unite all the non High Caste Hindus against the INC.
Land and forest taxes accounted for significantly more, which is why the Indian National Congress (1885) was more than a little taken aback when it was salt that Gandhi decided to go after in 1930…
Previously, Motilal and C.R Das and Jinnah had protested the raising of the Salt tax. If Gandhi could get it abolished he would have shown that he had been right and his critics had been wrong. Sadly, the Salt Satyagraha was bound to collapse because the poor didn't care about it while the rich financiers could be threatened with heavy fines amounting to expropriation. This was Nehru's view though he never said so in so many words.
Is Harmony utterly stupid? Not necessarily. She is jumping on a bandwagon which can't harm her career. But it can destroy her brain. Consider the following.
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