On the fifth of September, 1995, the Taliban- which had been set up just a year previously- took control of Herat after its attack on Kabul was repelled. America lost the War on Terror. The Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan. There is an obvious lesson here. Sadly, it is one lost on Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee from whose book 'Nehru and the Spirit of India' Scroll has extracted the following-
On 21 September 1995, a devotee in Delhi declared the “miracle” that a statue of Ganesha drank the milk that was offered to it. By noon, similar claims were not only heard from temples all over the country but also from temples abroad: in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, and Nepal.
So what? Temples gained because of increased footfall and donations. There was a political aspect to this. The British and Indian Governments woke up to the fact that Hindus have votes. Pandering only to Muslims might lead to a net loss of votes.
Nehru was a stupid fellow who may have objected to Temples. But when he tried to suck Mao's cock, the fellow slapped him down. Sad. Spirit of India had a hearty laugh at the dispirited Nehru.
Debates on television and newspapers erupted between science and belief. The rationalists explained that pious devotees were duped by “surface tension” and the simple law of “capillary attraction”.
Meanwhile Manash was being duped by 'Spirit of Nehru' into giving beejays to hobos. His Mummy was saying to him 'beta, the reason your face is dripping with jizz is due to you are constantly sucking off homeless people. It is not due to 'capillary attraction'. Why not charge money instead of giving it away for free?'
However, the more intriguing question was regarding what led to the mass suspension of reason.
It pays for people of a particular faith to display their cohesion and fidelity to their own creed. To believe, or appear to believe, in an irrational shibboleth is a 'costly signal'. The Taliban prevailed over all other factions because of its superior devotion to religion. Indeed, it prevailed over both the Soviets and the Americans.
Claims based on religious belief in India are often not without an element of mischief. The mischief is invariably political. In the case of the “miracle” of Ganesha drinking milk, then Central Minister for Welfare, Sitaram Kesari, accused two Hindu right-wing groups for legitimising this rumour for electoral gains. In modernity there can be no miracle, real or fake, that is devoid of politics.
Kesari was useless. He toppled Gowda and Gujral but Sonia soon got rid of that cretin. That's why we liked her.
The Hindu right-wing interest in the mass consumption of an event like the Ganesha “miracle” is obvious.
It showed 'Mandir' could defeat 'Mandal'.
This political aspect should, however, be kept distinct from the larger issue of crazy mass-belief.
in Commie shite or Nehruvian stupidity.
Right-wing politics could exploit the “miracle” for its own ends because such occurrences gain widespread social legitimacy.
Because going to temple or church or mosque has always had 'social legitimacy'. Sucking off homeless dudes does not. Manash should charge money for guzzling jizz .
It reveals the dormant collective wish of a community to experience something extraordinary outside the rational constraints of modern life.
Modern life, like ancient life, features dying suddenly of a horrible disease. We are interested in religion because we are interested in the after-life.
The ennui of our sociological condition can lead people towards such moments of suspended reason.
Fuck off! Guys who live exciting lives will still go to Temples or Mosques or Churches because they know they won't live for ever.
The Ganesha incident, despite scientific explanations that countered the mass hysteria, marked Hindu society’s desperation for divine magic.
People want a good after-life. That is why Religion exists.
[Jawaharlal] Nehru would have abhorred such a scandal.
He'd have rushed over to Beijing so as to offer beejays to any Commie who was into that sort of thing.
But a scientific viewpoint on the matter is beside the point. Modernity is not an exclusive domain of positivism.
Which is why Manash's face is dripping with cum.
Nor is scientific rationality a panacea for the degeneration of the collective unconscious.
There is no 'collective unconscious'. Come to think of it Jung did give some older dude a beejay. He was as stupid as shit.
If modernity signifies the time for scientifically verifiable idea of truth, it does not obliterate the other truth that historically precedes the scientific: the miraculous.
There have always been materialists who debunked miracles. Indeed, Manash's own Mummy would tell him not to keep sucking off homeless dudes in the hope of imbibing 'Spirit of Nehru'.
In the absence of scientific reason, people in earlier times, before the advent of modernity, believed everything that was accidental or unexpected was a miracle.
No they didn't.
Scientism invalidates the logic of miracles through reasoning.
But Manash's Mummy had no success in reasoning with her cum guzzling son.
But miracles don’t derive their meaning and power from logic.
Manash is not deriving any meaning and power from swallowing jizz.
In a lecture delivered in 1819,
1917. Manash is utterly ignorant
the German sociologist Max Weber, spoke about “de-magification” (German: Entzauberung der Welt, a term Weber borrowed from Friedrich Schiller, also translated as “the disenchantment of the world”). The everyday life of the traditional world in Europe “before the Protestant Reformation... [was] punctuated by saints’ days, fairs, pilgrimages, festivals, seasons of feasting, atonement and celebration”.
But this continued after the Reformation. It wasn't till the end of the Eighteenth Century that the number of such high days and holidays was pruned back.
Weber writes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that John Calvin and the Reformation, in the middle of the sixteenth century, sought “to free man from the power of irrational impulses” and subject him “to the supremacy of a purposeful will”.
Weber was wrong. He was shit at Econ, History, and everything else. He couldn't even fuck his wife who, being wealthy, was able to build him up as a great intellectual after he was safely dead.
Calvin had no love for holy days but, as a matter of prudence, supported the continuation of their observance.
It led to what Weber calls the “rationalisation of the world, the elimination of magic”.
Protestants loved burning witches. They were totes into magic.
Daniel Defoe’s story on the pandemic, A Journal of the Plague Year – published in March 1772,
1722. This guy has zero knowledge of history
based on the 1665 bubonic plague that hit various parts of the world, including London, also documents the effect of rationalisation in the West.
Venice and some other Italian cities had already been successfully enforcing quarantine and the technology of disinfection for hundreds of years.
Defoe’s condemnation of supernatural practices in the novel through the character HF, a saddler who traded with merchants dealing with the English colonies in America, echoes the effects of Calvinism and the Reformation in late sixteenth century England.
Nonsense! Defoe was using source material and presenting a factual account. Charles II had been restored and thus the dissenters were in the dog-house. But Charles liked scientific research. Thus the spirit was empirical not Calvinist.
The growth of capitalism and the birth of scientism led to demystification.
No. There have always been periods of skepticism and empiricism which alternate with periods of ideological or theological storm and stress.
Science sought to drive away every mystery in the world with rational arguments.
Uncovering greater mysteries in the process.
The overwhelming material concerns of (economic) life led to the rationalisation of both life and faith. This process is understood as “secularisation”.
No it isn't. It is termed 'Enlightenment. Britain still has an established Church. This does not mean that Bishops decide things.
The coming of capitalism and the Protestant ethic saw the emergence of surrealism in Europe in the early 1920s (among others like Dadaism, Expressionism, Symbolism, etc) as an anti-modernist movement of the disenchanted world.
No. Dadaism was a reaction to the senseless slaughter of the First World War and the crazy shite- like the Bolshevik revolution- that it led to. Expressionism was pre-war. Symbolism was even older.
They produced art and literature highlighting our irrational, unconscious impulses and states of being.
Which turned out to be a very profitable thing to do because of....Capitalism.
Sigmund Freud’s 1919 lecture, “The Uncanny” – where he elaborates on E Jentsch’s earlier work on the subject – explains the paradox behind the German word, unheimlich or uncanny, which means an unconscious space where something that was once familiar is now unfamiliar, and hence we are “estranged” from it.
No. The uncanny represents 'the return of the repressed'. We ought not to acknowledge what was always familiar to us. The Scientist knows he will die and nothing material will save him. There is something demonic about the scientific project as represented by Copellius (an alchemist in the story Freud analyzed)
The uncanny reveals the source of what is repressed in us.
Europe was recovering from a War which had shaken its moral foundations.
It leads to a host of neurotic excesses, and remains the psychic surplus of modern civilisation.
Inter-war European civilization- sure.
Surrealism and its sister movements wanted to address (and affirm) the state of the unconscious that was ignored and misunderstood by the rationalist culture of modernity.
Also surrealists wanted to earn money by selling their stuff to wealthy capitalists.
These artists and writers tried to recover and produce a “re-enchantment of the world, and reorientation of human history” as a response to the psychological alienation faced by the human mind.
No. Heidegger might be said to do so but he was no surrealist. His thought was founded in Catholicism.
These critical events from the modern West are crucial to consider in our understanding (or judgements in rationalist bad faith) of the irrational, the superstitious and the magical.
These events weren't critical at all. They aint crucial to shit.
In the popular sphere of India’s cultural imagination, the disenchantment produced a bizarre episode: the miracle of Ganesha.
There was nothing bizarre about it. Militant Islam was on the rise. Hindus reacted by a peaceful but effective display of their own cohesiveness.
The common sense of modernity had never completely sidelined belief in a deeply religious society. But never before did postcolonial India witness a nationwide “miracle” that threw all considerations of reason to the winds.
But Hindu consolidation was vital to Hindus. Considerations of reason militated for faith- or suspension of disbelief- in the miracle. But all Religions have a utilitarian component.
It is possible to read the Ganesha incident as a mark of collective return to the time before modernity. What sort of time was it?
Manash does not know. He is too ignorant.
It is not the replica of a time as it existed in the past, but a delirious attempt to evoke what is lost forever.
Nehru is dead. Get over it, Manash. Stop deliriously trying to imbibe 'Spirit of Nehru' by sucking off randos.
The ridiculous is not constrained by rationalism.
Seriously, dude, you look ridiculous getting down on your knees and begging to guzzle the jizz of passersby.
People are not happy with the death of gods in their daily lives.
Nor are they happy that Manash is sucking off hobos in the street.
The daily life of rational choices is oppressive, repetitive and boring. The desire to return to the time of myth, where reason can be temporarily abandoned, is part of the collective unconscious.
Everybody goes to sleep at the end of the day. Dreams may be like myths but life too is but a dream.
Something that cannot be explained by reason is what we understand as the miraculous.
No. Something that can't be explained by reason is stuff we need to do more research on.
People are tricked by rationalist politics. The magical world of unreason is just another trick. The social fact is that people believed Ganesha drank the milk.
The social fact is that a reader of this blog won't actually believe Manash sucks off hobos- till he discovers differently for himself.
Nehru, a product of the Enlightenment,
a product of the compador Indian bourgeoisie. His ancestors, who had been kotwals under the Mughals became vakils to John Company.
grapples with this paradox in The Discovery of India. He begins by affirming his modernist mindset: “My early approach to life’s problems had been more or less scientific, with something of the easy optimism of the science of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.”
Life's problems didn't press to hard on the young Nehru because his Daddy paid for everything.
Science was the sole source of newness, optimism and progress. But the word “easy” used by Nehru also gives the impression of what is a fact: the optimism for science and the idea of progress was elitist in nature.
No. Such optimism characterized a rising technocratic middle class- people like H.G Wells.
The idea of the superiority of science was available only to a certain class of people who could afford a certain education.
No. The old elites realized they needed to set up Scientific Institutions and get clever working class lads into them.
Nehru carried the optimism for science and rationality so deeply in his intellectual makeup that he could say, “If the subjective element is unavoidable and inevitable, it should be conditioned as far as possible by the scientific method”.
In Hinduism, every matam (doctrine) has an associated vigyan (science or praxis). Nehru's ancestors were Hindu Pandits.
Nevertheless, Nehru conceded certain limitations to this optimism: in the sphere of understanding the “purpose of life”, and in learning to “appreciate goodness and beauty”. In other words, he was circumspect about science being able to provide answers to the ethical and aesthetic spheres of life.
But so was Science! Nehru's book was valuable propaganda for India in the US of A. Nehru was showing he was a bourgeois nationalist of a rational, technocratic, type not a fucking Bolshevik nutcase.
More crucially, he pointed out that science despite facilitating the “control of nature” failed to bring about self-control or “the power to control himself”.
Suppose Hitler had got the A-bomb before the Americans. Europe would have been fucked.
In a striking passage nearing the end of The Discovery, Nehru comes to pause on his firm belief in the idea of progress coming from scientific rationality:
“There is something lacking in all this progress, which can neither produce harmony between nations nor within the spirit of man.
Nehru had previously said that Gandhi was a harmless Religious nutcase. Still, he was irenic and peaceful and could ally with the Evangelical Christians against the Godless Bolsheviks.
Perhaps more synthesis and a little humility towards the wisdom of the past, which, after all, is the accumulated experience of the human race, would help us to gain a new perspective and greater harmony.”
So, Nehru's India might not be a shit-show. Sadly, that's what it turned into because Nehru believed in the magic of Socialism.
The idea of harmony is understood in both political and spiritual terms. Nehru’s “Eastern” sensibility acknowledges the limits of the Enlightenment project.
In India- sure. The place was a shithole. Nehru's greatness was to turn it into a bigger shithole which could neither feed nor defend itself but could bite Uncle Sam's hand anytime it handed out 'free money'.
This also appears to be his reflection on the dark political scene in Europe, reeling from war, the fascist uprising in Germany and the harsh communist regime in Russia.
What Europe lacked during the period of 1942-46, when Nehru was writing The Discovery in the Ahmednagar Fort prison, was any trace of harmony.
No shit, Sherlock!
What he says immediately after that shows he had a different idea when it came to his own country:
But for countries like India a different emphasis is necessary, for we have too much of the past about us and have ignored the present.
India, under the Brits, was successfully projecting force into Europe, the MENA, and the Far East. Under Nehru it would become unable to feed or defend itself or even wipe its own bum.
We have to get rid of that narrowing religious outlook, that obsession with the supernatural and metaphysical speculations,
so as to do stupid shit.
that loosening of the mind’s discipline in religious ceremonial and mystical emotionalism, which come in the way of our understanding ourselves and the world.
Thanks to Nehru, everybody understood that Indians were shite. Both the US and the USSR offered India China's seat on the Security Council. Nehru insisted it go to Mao.
Nehru felt what’s sauce for the goose was not meant for the gander. Europe has to be cautious about too much modernity, and India, about too much history.
India's history mattered so little, it was ruled by guys from a country of which the ancient Indians were wholly unaware.
What India lacked was the “present”. The past was present in excess, in the form of what Nehru calls “religious outlook”.
The lack of any such religious outlook was the reason India had been ruled by foreigners. The question was whether the salami tactics of the Muslim League and their Communist allies would prevail after the Brits left.
So, India was ripe for a rationalist revolution of the mind, which was going to be a form of modern Enlightenment in the social sphere.
Very true. Social sphere became dependent on PL480 shipments. The Americans used their rupee balances to finance a brain drain. Enlightened people studied boring STEM subject shite and got the fuck out of India to do boring work in America which however made some of them very rich.
Nehru had a supreme reason for optimism for the possibility of India’s change over from religion to rationality:
Religious Hindus had been rational enough to see that the Brits would protect them from Muslims and Commies. Then nutters like Motilal and the Mahatma demanded the Brits quit India. Tagore warned what the consequences would be. Sad.
In India, because of the recognised freedom of the mind, howsoever limited in practice, new ideas are not shut out...The essential ideals of Indian culture are broad-based and can be adapted to almost any environment. The bitter conflict between science and religion which shook up Europe in the nineteenth century would have no reality in India, nor would change based on the applications of science bring any conflict with those ideals.
Quite true. Darwin's theory helped the Ceylonese Buddhists defeat the Christian Missionaries in open debate some twenty years before Nehru was born. Indian Swamis believed that modern physics was confirming their own Scriptural beliefs. Some western physicists- eg. Schrodinger- actively endorsed this view.
Nehru holds that Indian culture encourages an adaptive and open mind. It will prevent, he feels, the “bitter conflict” between faith and reason that rocked Europe’s nineteenth century.
Europe was not rocked by any such 'bitter conflict' in the nineteenth or eighteenth or seventeenth century. It had had wars of religion and would have wars of ideology but it was Imperial, geopolitical, wars which propelled its technological rise. Still, it had the good sense to surrender to American hegemony and to eat burgers and go to Disneyland rather than fight a Third World War.
Meanwhile, Manash is jealous that he can't imbibe milky jizz of spirit of Nehru due to people of India are not considering him to be an idol. Sad. Bidenji should provide the needful. Democracy is in danger!
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