'Primitive accumulation' in Marxist theory- more particularly that of David Harvey- has come to mean the capture of land and other factors of production and the subjugation of the original population who, being as stupid as shit, are made to labour for the new class of property owners. Marx himself thought that serfdom under feudal lords was the necessary precursor for Capitalism. An occupational caste system, however, is neither serfdom nor a type of racial categorization of the type a foreign conqueror imposes- e.g. the caste system briefly imposed by the Mongols on China. An indigenous or 'organic' caste system represents a case of Trade Union like 'countervailing power' and may feature internecine rent contestation or dissipation.
I suppose, conquest by Turks belonging to a different religion could be said to have instituted feudalism in India and thus the British usurpation of power from the Mughals could be interpreted as having pushed India into Capitalist modernity. However, even a cursory reading of medieval Indian economic history dispels this cartoonish view. Still, even racists who believe in an 'Aryan Invasion theory' (which supposedly reduced the original population to 'untouchable status') would conclude that in the case of 'caste' (as opposed to tribal) Indian territory, the primitive accumulation phase must have ended some three thousand years ago.
What of 'liberal modernity'? When did it come to India? The answer, for Gujaratis, is that it started happening from the eighteenth century onward on the basis of increased integration into a global, capitalist, economy under a legal regime of private property in agricultural and other land, instituted or supported by the East India Company and, after 1858, the Crown. But this had been accomplished by the 1880s even in more backward Princely States of the region. The arbitrary power of the Prince or other 'stationary bandit' had been replaced by the authority of the law courts and Legislative Assemblies.
Prof. Akeel Bilgrami takes a different view.
I don’t believe that we can fully come to grips with the subject of Gandhi on caste unless we situate it in his very deep anxieties about modernity, in particular capitalist modernity and the political structures of liberalism…
Gandhi was aware that 'liberal modernity' existed in non-caste societies. He was also aware that no amount of anxiety about caste or creed or colour could get rid of 'liberal modernity'. Either the Brits had to be militarily defeated- as the Boers had tried to do- or else, as was happening in India, political mobilization was required to roll-back or dilute British rule.
For upper caste Hindus like Gandhi, anxiety about caste was threefold
1) Ambitious young men who wanted to 'cross the black water' and study in England should suffer no ostracism or other social disability. In other words, the rules regarding ritual purity should be relaxed in their favour. But this had already happened.
2) Non-Brahmins should get to be Mahtamas or Swamys or Maharisihis and get to run their own cults. But this was already happening.
3) Dalits should not convert en masse to some other religion nor should they join hands with Muslims so as to render high caste Hindus a minority. But nobody really wanted the Dalits because they had too many wannabe leaders of their own. The fact is everybody preferred to deal with rich or at least high status Indians because, the assumption was, almost all Indians were as poor as shit and smelled like shit and had shit for brains. Sadly, no actual Dalit was either stupid or lacking in spirit. If you convert them to your religion, rather than becoming your obedient slaves, they will start preaching to you to get you to change your ways and thus avoid Hell Fire.
It would be fair to say that some High Caste Hindus dramatized their supposed concerns about ritual pollution to gain a type of countervailing power. However, by the time Gandhi returned to India to settle there permanently, none of these anxieties were very pressing. The Great War was in full swing. This had created new opportunities as well as new threats.
The big problem for the 'barristocrat' leaders of Congress was, as Nehru reports in his autobiography, that there was a new class of peasant agitator clamouring for what the peasants wanted- viz. more land for less money. But land belongs to he who can protect it and expand his holdings by killing his neighbours. Nothing less will do. The legal regime merely permits a landowner to hire goons to enforce his legal rights. It does not provide those goons for free. Still, title to land is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry' associated with a 'bourgeois strategy' such that there are returns to scale and scope and thus cheaper 'control rights' which in turn means cheaper credit and thus more profitable portfolio diversification. But this is the sort of stuff which happens one way or another- if the game is worth the candle. Gandhi, like Nehru, Rajaji and other such urban lawyer politicians was not greatly concerned with the land issue because they could see that 'appropriable control rights' were costly and who got them was an ideographic matter.
Apart from not understanding that the Brits brought 'liberal modernity' to India where. by 1910, there was an influential party called the Indian Liberal Party and a magazine called the Modern Review, Bilgrami also does not get that the British Raj was explicitly 'multi-cultural'. De-colonization involved a great reduction in that commodity, sometimes accompanied by ethnic cleansing or exchanges of population.
Bilgrami writes-
I have, as I said, cast him as a proto-multiculturalist.
Why not as a champion of LGBTQ rights? Surely, Gandhi and his acolytes were the precursors of Pussy Riot?
But there is a conspicuous difference between his views and the more explicit recent multiculturalisms in Europe, Canada, or Australia.
No kidding! It is also the case that Gandhi was not constantly fisting himself
These have all embraced an evolving globalised form of capitalism.
No. A globalised form of capitalism would permit a private Corporation taking over and ruling territory. That's what the East India Company actually did. The plain fact is a form of Socialized Nationalism, if not National Socialism, triumphed around the globe by 1945.
Their opposition is only to a state of liberal-universalist secularism adopted by the European modern that refuses to recognise cultural difference.
There is no such opposition. There is merely some virtue-signalling. Nobody gives a crap about whether or not Macron enforces a hijab ban. What matters is pensions and taxes on petrol.
By contrast, Gandhi’s insistent recall of what he sees as India’s history of an unselfconscious pluralism
Fuck that! Gandhi, like Modi, saw Indian history as a thousand years of rule by mercenary foreigners some of whom were religious fanatics
was an essential part of his overall opposition to the threat of capitalist modernity that he felt was looming in India’s future.
The thing came into existence before he was born.
It is this opposition
taking money from mill-owners in return for helping them monopolize the national market was not 'opposition' to capitalism. Gandhi was providing a service, for which he was well remunerated, to a rising entrepreneurial class from a social background similar to that of Gandhi himself.
that has to be presented as the framework that illuminates his views on caste and the cultural pluralism in which he thought his idealised, non-hierarchical conception of caste had its significance.
Both Gandhi and Caste only had significance for Hindu India. Since Gandhi was the head of a Hindu cult, financed by Hindu entrepreneurs, he talked some nonsense about Caste and the Bhagvad Gita just as he talked some nonsense about khaddar and Nai Talim and so forth.
Let me, then, begin on these tasks of providing the frameworking backdrop of Gandhi’s attitudes towards caste by citing a remark he makes in a dispatch to Young India on 29 December 1920. "The beauty of the caste system," he says, "is that it does not base itself upon distinctions of wealth possessions. Money, as history has proved, is the greatest disruptive force in the world."
Gandhi was saying 'once the Brits hand over control of the Army to me, I won't use my power to help my moneyed pals. I'll preserve the Caste system. Brahmins will be honoured above Banias (indeed, Nehru in his Autobiography) spoke of the need to Brahminize a Society in which Banias had gained too much power) and the Maharajas and Thakurs and so forth will reign with increased pomp and splendour.
We must ask: What does he think life is before this disruption?
Life will be wonderful for Hindus once the Brits have departed and, thanks to their Army ,which they are bound to hand over to Gandhi coz otherwise he'll refuse to eat or else go sulk in jail, the Muslims will be running scared.
And what is the significance of the disruption for his conception of caste as heterogeneity?
Caste means heterogeneity of a hereditary type.
The idea seems to be that before the pervasive influence of money, different people are better or worse off in different respects.
How? If there is no money, there is no Bania. Gandhi's people would revert to being cultivators. They couldn't be businessmen, because all exchange would be local, customary, and unmediated.
So, inequality in respect x can be redeemed by a reverse inequality in respect y.
How? If I do boring, shitty, work, my inequality in respect of leisure and utility is made up for by my getting more money. If there is no money, where is the 'redemption'?
But money standardises all this heterogeneous differentiation and creates a single measure of equality and inequality
No it doesn't. Some will be taller, stronger, fatter etc. It is a different matter that there is a common unit of account or measure of financial wealth. But that does not standardize shit.
and, in fact, generates inequality along a single dimension,
a measuring tape does not 'generate' differences in height. Having a unit of account or store of value does not generate differences in income or wealth.
destroying the heterogeneity of caste in its originary ideal form,
It is true that a guy can pay money and change his class or caste. Certain endogamous communities can gain acceptance in a higher social bracket by rising in wealth, education and a reputation for piety or public service. But that doesn't mean they will give up any affirmative action entitlement they have managed to capture.
where no disrespect comes from having different professions, and where all of work, whatever it may be in this differentiation, offers dignity to the labourer.
Fuck dignity. Peeps want to be paid overtime. Also, what are stock options? Could I have some?
We have the very broad outlines of the framework that is needed to understand Gandhi’s views on caste if we link these remarks about the disruptive effects of money to his related and repeated dismissal of the subject of economics and its ‘laws’ as it developed in the West and the notion of ‘the economy’ that it studies.
Why the scare quotes? Econ may be a shitty subject but it isn't quite as shitty as whatever addled shite Bilgrami teaches. Still dismissing empirical regularities- which is all that 'laws' are- is foolish though, no doubt, if you are the leader of a cult, or teach worthless shite, that is how you earn your bread.
Like money, these distort the relations to the world that Indians have for centuries inhabited.
Indians had money thousands of years ago. Nobody told Bilgrami. Sad.
For Gandhi to deny that there was any such thing as an economy in that sense amounted to the claim that all there is in India is society and culture, not economy.
Why not also deny there were British people in India making lots of money?
Usually, when Gandhi spoke of an economy, the attitude his remarks reflected was that if society and culture simply adopted policies that were morally right, they would eo ipso amount to what was economically sound. Economy had no independent status that set it apart from society and culture and morality.
The Economy does not exist independently of the Society and Culture in which it operates. However, there is a mathematical description of the economy which can be abstracted from cultural factors just as Accountants can give an arithmetical description of the financial position of a company which is abstracted from other factors- e.g. what type of technology it uses.
This attitude is a fundamental plank of Gandhi's opposition to modernity, first formulated in Hind Swaraj, with its repudiation of the cognitive outlooks shaped by capitalism.
Shaped by businessmen- i.e. Banias- of any race or time period. If you are setting up a cult, you need to differentiate yourself from others of your ilk.
In 1909 when he wrote that work, he thought India was at the crossroads that Europe was in in the early modern period.
No. Gandhi was a lawyer. He knew that most of the agricultural land in British India had already been subject to 'primitive accumulation'. No doubt, some tribal people still occupied marginal land in remote hills and jungles but 'caste' India was like Europe or the part of South Africa he was familiar with. That's why there was a lot of demand for the services of lawyers like himself.
His shrill and harsh tone in that work reflected
concerns over the 1909 Morley-Minto Act which made it clear that elected Indians would play an increasing role in Legislative Assemblies and the Viceroy's Executive Council. Separate electorates for Muslims were established. The time was ripe for a Hindu political party to assert itself. Gandhi and his friend Pranjivan, were staking a claim to leadership- at least in diaspora contexts.
his desperate anxiety that India would seek to go down what he viewed to be the lamentable path of political economy and political governance that Europe had taken in the passage from its early to its late modernity.
The concern was that a more urbane, anglicized, type of barristocrat would take the lead while the ranks of the opposition would be recruited from radical University graduates like Aurobindo. Gandhi and Pranjivan were socially conservative and religious. Could they bypass the big Presidency cities and appeal directly to the boondocks? Sadly, the Brits didn't like the tone of Gandhi's Gujarati book and banned Hind Swaraj as seditious. Later, the English translation- precisely because it was stupid shit- was permitted.
We must interpret all of the stances that I have cited above – about money, economics, and the very idea of an economy – as reflecting his understanding of what he thought existed before and after the passage of these developments that he lamented and wished to avoid for India’s future.
Gandhi wasn't an utter cretin. He was a lawyer. He knew that India had become modern before he was born. That's why it was worth it for his family to send him to England to qualify as a barrister. If he had talent, he might become very rich representing claimants to big 'zamindaris'- i.e. landed estates.
Usually, when Gandhi spoke of an economy, the attitude his remarks reflected was that if a society and culture simply adopted policies that were morally right, they would eo ipso amount to what was economically sound.
Gandhi was influenced by John Ruskin in this respect.
What is it to think that economy was to be equated with society, not to be seen as something standing apart from it?
That is the common sense view. The word 'economia' merely means how things are managed.
Gandhi’s ideas about work are crucial to answering this question.
Gandhi did not believe that there should be any specialization or division of labour in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Thus his notion of work was divorced from notions of productivity.
When, as in India, and in Europe too for centuries prior to modernity, an economy is not something other than or independent of society, work is not something that is undertaken for ends – that is, for making a living rather than merely being a way of living.
The problem here is that Societies which have specialization and trade conquer the territory of those who don't. There is 'primitive accumulation'. The Roman Empire represented 'liberal modernity'- indeed, during its Republican phase, it was more modern and gave a higher role to the judiciary than any part of Europe till the seventeenth century. Indeed, most educated Europeans conversed in Latin and read Cicero with religious zeal till the Eighteenth Century when, for the first time, there was a consciousness that modern texts written in contemporary vernaculars were superior to anything to be found in ancient authors.
It only comes to be a means to further ends when money is erected as an object of a goal, something to be earned by one’s work for what it can gain for us.
Money was valued by savage tribes who enjoyed grabbing gold coins in between raping and murdering the towns and Abbeys they raided.
It is this which then introduces the idea of an economy as an autonomous sphere, abstracted from life or living and not determined exhaustively as it had been for centuries by the fabric of social life itself.
There was an Epicurean school of Economics in Cicero's time. Many were getting as rich as Crassus through a complicated type of portfolio management.
In Indian society, according to Gandhi, the routine structures of existence were all there was that motivated human actions and human work.
No. Gandhi wasn't an utter fool. He knew that no Indian City- or even small town, like Porbandar,- answered to this description. He was speaking of a type of benighted rural area which might exist somewhere else- like...mebbe... some really shitty part of Bihar?
There were no distinct economic motives. Not only did the millions of peasants that comprised Indian society simply do what custom demanded or indeed what their masters demanded, even the masters, for all their possessions and privilege, only did what tradition and society demanded of them, whether religious, administrative, political, military, or courtly. Neither for peasant nor for overlord was there any angle or orientation that was properly called an economic orientation. Society and its demands on them were all that defined them.
If you are setting up a cult, you pretend that all the sheeple out there have shit for brains. They are basically meat-machines. Only by joining the cult and becoming obedient slaves can they free themselves from their robotic nature.
Political ideologies of a paranoid type- e.g. Marxism- display the same contempt for the great mass of people. They are so fucking stupid, they permit 'primitive accumulation' to occur. Also, they are probably being incessantly sodomized by Top Hatted Capitalists but are too imbecilic to notice.
Though Gandhi had anxieties about the development of towns
Which had existed in Gujarat 5000 years ago.
and what they would bring in the future, at the crossroads he claimed India was in, he thought that what occurred in towns was merely ‘business’ and the conduct of business, such as it was in 1909, was also completely inseparable from non-economic social and traditional concerns.
Thanks to the Morley-Minto reforms of that year, businessmen in the towns would gain increasing influence. Gandhi would soon receive a big subvention from the Tatas for his South African satyagraha. Essentially Gandhi needed to appear to be against the Mill Owners because they were paying him so as to gain influence. The thing was an obvious con. Nobody was really taken in. Still, if you can make money by pretending to give credence to a Ponzi scheme- why not do so?
It was not prompted by the idea of a generalised conception of gain. It is partly to shun this generalised conception and to stress instead this ongoing and longstanding nature of Indian society
Bilgrami is pretending that 'primitive accumulation' hadn't yet taken place in India. But, 'caste' India had had the thing or three thousand years.
that Gandhi undertook to comment on one of the chief moral and social lessons to be learnt from the Gita –
A dialogue between 'Kshatriya' Princes whose ancestors had accomplished 'primitive accumulation' long ago. The Mahabharata is an account of the mythical transition from a 'thymotic' society to a mercantile 'homonoia' presided over by a Universal Emperor or Chakravartin.
that work must be undertaken as service and social and religious duty handed down to one by custom, rather than as something for ulterior ends of personal acquisition.
The 'dual' of the Bhagvad Gita, which treats of the dharma (eusebia) of the 'Agent', is the 'Vyadha Gita'. A wealthy butcher of meat vendor (vyadha) ignores both Pundit and Priest and, having attained the 'honeyed wisdom' of the Chandogya, lives a happy and luxurious life. Since the Vyadha is a 'Principle', not an Agent, he can pursue economic as well as hedonic and spiritual ends simultaneously. If he was being paid to be a Soldier or had he been enslaved, he would have to prioritize doing what was required of him by his employer or superior officer.
Gandhi was not denying that human nature may always have been given to avarice. What he was denying in these remarks is that this aspect of human nature was never generalised in India into an ideology or an economic outlook.
No. Gandhi did not dispute that there was an ancient 'Arthashastra' science of political economy nor that mercantile communities like his own used indigenous, highly sophisticated accountancy and other business tools of great antiquity. This was particularly associated with Jain or Vaisnav sects in Gujarat with the claim of descent from Kshatriyas who had been converted to 'Ahimsa' thousands of years of ago and who had thus entered the wholesale trade or had become jewellers etc thus avoiding the supposed violence to microscopic creatures which tilling the soil entailed.
It is only when money acquires wide scope in society, Gandhi claims, that a new and distorting element is introduced, transforming the nature of labour.
Gandhi's interlocutor was Pranjivan, a Jain. What Gandhi is speaking of is the Golden Age when there was no scarcity and everybody lived for ten billion years. Things got progressively worse. Food became scarce. Peeps started to indulge in sexual intercourse. Evil things like Education, Medicine, Law, Science etc. came into existence.
No longer does one person work for another for subsistence and sustenance.
Most poor people in India did work for other people in return for 'subsistence and sustenance'. What on earth does Bilgrami mean?
Rather, monetisation makes work into a measurable quantity, a commodity to be made available by one’s own free will, selling it in something called a market, transforming the very idea of market from the traditional idea of a marketplace to the abstract thing that generates the notion of an economy and an apparently sophisticated subject called ‘economics’ that studies it by constructing ‘laws’.
This can happen even without 'monetisation'. You can hire farm hands in return for a portion of the harvest. What Bilgrami is commenting on is 'specialization and division of labour' on the basis of the principle of comparative advantage. But this obtained to a limited degree even in the Stone Age.
To put it in a more contemporary form of words, to retain caste was to resist the market ideal that undermined traditional social relations by setting up the freely saleable labour of atomised individuals.
But Gandhi came from a mercantile caste! His surname means 'Green Grocer'. A guy can't specialize in selling vegetables unless 'atomized individuals' exist who don't grow their own vegetables. They get money by working in some different field.
Apart from labour, even the very idea of property is transformed. Some members of Indian society certainly were possessed of tangible riches – mansions, palaces, jewels, glittering dress, bullion, forts, armaments. But once these come to be expressed in monetised terms and a person’s worth is measured with a number assigned to it, this new form can be deployed with indefinite flexibility as investment for returns and profit.
Bilgrami is groping towards the notion of 'Credit'. If you own a lot of cool stuff, you can transact business on a large scale because people feel you have 'security'- i.e. assets you can sell so as to settle your debts. Incidentally, gaining a reputation for giving lavish donations improves your Credit because peeps understand you have money to burn. The fact is, Gandhi's financiers generally did very well from that investment.
With these hitherto unknown motives of working for gain or deploying one’s possessions for profit,
When were there unknown in India or anywhere else? Was it five thousand or ten thousand years ago?
the notion of an economy emerges and all of life is transformed. But no one’s life would be more transformed, Gandhi feared, than that of the Indian peasant, who would be utterly dispossessed by this transition and made into a socially untethered labourer, moving from pillar to post to sell his labour, in constant fear of destitution.
This had happened long ago. The Jains came to Gujarat after a big famine in Magadha over two thousand years ago.
His chief focus, when it came to the Indian people, was always on its millions of peasants.
No. He did not propose any type of agricultural reform. He was interested in spinning cotton so as to fuck up the weavers who wanted good quality imported yarn so as to sell high value added textiles.
This creation of the economy as a self-standing formation, independent of social relations, and the distorting abstractions that it visited upon the concepts of labour and property and the living marketplace, was precisely something to be resisted by stressing the idealised conception of caste that he, in his early writing, refused to give up.
In which case Gandhi should have concentrated on denouncing his own class. Abolish the Bania caste, get rid of all merchants and other such intermediaries and arbitrageurs, and you are left with a demonetized subsistence economy where the Warriors rule, till they are killed by a bunch of invading Warriors.
Bilgrami's mistake, is that he thinks most Indians in 1909 lived like primitive hominids on some African Savannah three hundred thousand years ago.
So, when he said that caste before its modern corruptions into a hierarchical system was just a Hindu ideal of a sort of dispersed version of guild differentiation, this should not be understood as mere social conservatism because it cannot, I claim, be understood independently of his rejection of the transformations that came with the notion of ‘making a living’ in a market society, when economy is now a self-standing thing independent of society and an abstraction from social relations.
The simplest explanation is best. 'Banyans' (as the eighteenth Century Brits called Gujarati Banias) had risen and risen. Morley-Minto would help them rise even further. Gandhi and Pranjivan wanted to cash in on the transition to elected Government by pretending to want to abolish the role of the Bania whereas, obviously, they wanted to make them all powerful by- as Gandhi repeatedly demanded- taking control of the British Indian Army. Without it, as Gandhi explained in 1939, the Muslims and Punjabis would take over because Hindus be totes non-violent- right>
It is interesting to note that Gandhi’s views here are identical to how Adam Smith describes some premodern and precapitalist societies where, to quote Smith, ‘‘each person was supposed to follow the trade of his father and would even sometimes be supposed to have committed some sacrilege if he did not.’’
Smith was speaking of Ancient Egypt. Gandhi wasn't an utter fool. He knew many Banias did not follow their ancestral trade.
Gandhi himself invokes Jataka stories to make the point and speaks of a social differentiation based on apprenticeship within families that acculturate one into the form of labour or craft or trade. Members of different castes, in Gandhi’s understanding, did their own particular differentiated work without hierarchy (as he put it, as part of their swadharma), without contempt for one another.
Only because they were spending all their time thinking about God. But, you could equally say that people who spend all their time sodomizing the eye-sockets of random strangers are not committing any violence if they are wholly focussed on proving the Reimann hypothesis. Indeed, anybody can talk any old bollocks.
That work was an end in itself
in which case it was a hobby.
in accord with social norms constitutive of society,
norms don't constitute a Society. They may underlie a particular Constitution or political regime- at least notionally.
and the notion of an economy was not separable from any of this.
Why not? The economy has a mathematical definition which is wholly independent of norms or habits or sexual peccadillos of various types.
To put it in a more contemporary form of words, to retain caste was to resist the market ideal that undermined traditional social relations by setting up the freely saleable labour of atomised individuals.
Nobody, at the time, believed any such nonsense. To retain caste was to keep Dalits, like Ambedkar, from learning Sanskrit (a 'scoring subject') in Government Schools. Mahars had already been excluded from the Army. The High Castes would have loved to monopolize Civil Service jobs and seats in Medical Colleges etc.
It is interesting to note that Gandhi’s views here are identical with how Adam Smith describes some premodern and precapitalist societies where, to quote Smith ‘‘each person was supposed to follow the trade of his father and would even sometimes be supposed to have committed some sacrilege if he did not.’’
Bilgrami is repeating himself. I suppose the poor fellow is senile.
Such a framework for understanding Gandhi’s views on caste is often missed because of a failure to grasp what should be a quite obvious methodological point. We should be drawing a significant – even if obvious – inference from the fact that Gandhi never made any serious effort to present any detailed historical evidence nor even any historical reconstruction for what he pronounced to be caste as heterogeneity of this sort, nor of the form and manner in which hierarchical corruptions were first formed.
Indians always knew that Gandhi was a cretin. The question was whether the Brits, for some reason of their own, would transfer power to him. The answer was, no. He was too stupid. Jailing him from time to time sufficed to curb the nuisance he posed.
In the commentary on the Gita, Gandhi said he read the work not as history but rather as myth and religion and poetry.
No. Gandhi was pretending to be a 'Sanatani' Vaishnav at the time. Anyway, nobody expected him to say anything intelligent. After all, he was a Bania. Them guys know how to make money. If they try to sound scholarly, they fall on their faces. On the other hand, maybe that's just what those crafty buggers want us to think. After all, a merchant who has retarded religious beliefs might be more, not less, honest because he fears the Galactic Spaghetti Monster will anally probe him if he tries to cheat us.
But, it would be a comical form of misunderstanding to think (not that this has deterred many from thinking it) that because Gandhi offered no evidence for the historical existence of his idealised non-hierarchical caste system nor made any effort to show how the hierarchies of caste did emerge in history (by, say, a study of Harrapan civilisation and its successors and the emergence of the Brahmana caste conceptions in the way, for instance, Kosambi did), he was some kind of brash and amateur historian with a false empirical hypothesis.
Gandhi wasn't any sort of historian. He was writing some stupid shite for a specific political purpose in response to Morley-Minto. Sadly, his shite was too fucking stupid. The Brits thought it seditious and banned it. Later, Gandhi tried to get people like Nehru to read it and they told him to fuck off because it was stupid, retarded, shite.
The obvious (yet significant) inference to be made instead is that Gandhi, as a social philosopher writing on caste,
why not as a Quantum Physicist writing about the Higgs boson
is invoking a conjectural past in a theoretical deployment of mythos with the same theoretical motivation as a much more modernist mythos is invoked by any number of political philosophers, who appeal to a conjectural past when they, for example, posit a social contract.
No political philosopher thinks there ever was an actual social contract. What is certain, however, is that the American Constitution was written at a time when Contractarian ideas had some sway. This is important for American jurisprudence and political philosophy. Only after the Indian Constitution was promulgated could anything similar be said about India. Consider the issue of extending SC status to Pasmanda Muslims. One type of originalist might say that this wasn't the deal Ambedkar made. Another might say that the thing is there in the 1935 Act. Ambedkar took away an entitlement Dalit Muslims previously had because his pal JN Mandal had been betrayed by the League. Dalit Christians were barred by the 1935 Act but then they weren't consulted.
No social contract was ever drawn up in history.
A Charter- e.g. Magna Carta- is a type of Contract. The fact is, Contractarianism is indigenous and has 'naturality' to certain types of polities- viz. limited monarchies of the Western European type. It has none in India though, arguably, Indian Constitutional law does reflect actual political deals between relevant interest groups.
It is not the point to present it as a historical occurrence. The idea rather is to set up a normative ideal by presenting it as occurring in a conjectural past with a view to exploring and and critically assessing what did occur in history.
Contracts actually exist and did exist and will exist. Bilgrami's 'state of nature' never existed. One may as well speak of the Garden of Eden.
The political philosophers in question explored and assessed notions of state and governance via the normative model of a social contract.
Contracts actually exist. They are pragmatic not 'normative'.
So also it was Gandhi’s purpose in setting up a normatively idealised conception of caste
which could not possibly exist anymore than there could have been a golden age when everybody was born with a twin of opposite gender and there was no scarcity or disease or sex or Education, or Medicine and people passed away peacefully after living for ten billion years.
in conjectural history to explore the facts of caste hierarchy as we know them and to assess the claims to progress in capitalist and liberal modernity as a path to overcoming them. It is with a view to presenting a negative assessment of these latter claims that Gandhi posits the conjectural past of a non-hierarchical conception of caste.
If you believe in rebirth on paradisal planets or hell dimensions then, sure, you can have this sort of fairy story. Gandhi and Pranjivan were pretending that they themselves- rather than being money grubbing Banias- were deeply stupid rustics whom the Brits should do a deal with. But Gandhi laid things on too thick. The Brits banned his book. Pranjivan shat the bed in Burma by opposing vaccination, quarantine etc even though he had acquired a higher Medical qualification in the UK (though he made his millions by trading in gems). The Brits didn't want to talk to lunatics. They'd simply lock up the nutters if they became too much of a nuisance.
So, for Gandhi, to generate such a notion of an individual freely selling his labour in the emerging ideal of a market
But that's how people got jobs in Gandhi's India. If you became a judge or civil servant or professor, you were freely selling your labour at a rate ultimately determined by supply and demand.
was the wrong way of addressing the hierarchical distortions that had entered caste.
Varna is hierarchical. True, you can pretend that if everybody is thinking only of God or Ice-cream or proving the Reimann hypothesis then nobody will bother to be snooty towards anybody else. But it could equally be said that Jack Ripper was not guilty of cruelty or misogyny if he was wholly focussed on composing a String Quartet.
What does this imply for his own accompanying assertion that over the centuries terrible discriminations had emerged between castes that corrupted it into becoming a hierarchical system? That is to say, what moral and practical response does this corruption into a hierarchy invite,
the response is to get everybody to just think about God or ice-cream or whatever. Then they'll stop taunting their social inferiors and saying they smell bad and should keep at a distance.
once the framework I have presented and the cautionary methodological point I have just made are in place?
From the point of view that I have been expounding so far, where there is no economy but only society,
which can only be the case if there is no scarcity.
Gandhi could obviously only give one answer to this question.
Think only of God or Swaraj or Khaddar or some such shite.
The problem of an emergent hierarchy was to be addressed by society, internally and morally resisting its own corruptions, rather than introducing a newfangled and extraneous notion of an economy in which each individual transcended the social embedding in caste and made him or herself available to something we now call the labour market. That would be to make labour a commodity. No longer would one man work for another in return for an assurance of sustenance and subsistence and belonging. If one now, as an individual, freely sold one’s labour to a buyer and what one was paid for it was not enough to sustain one – well, no one was responsible for that in the new freedom to be found in such a system, certainly not the buyer.
Bilgrami does not seem to understand that during a famine not just servants, slaves and other dependents but also more distant and less useful members of the family starved to death. Gandhi, on the other hand, being a lawyer knew that some 'coparcenary' heirs literally starved or had to resort to prostitution because control of the property vested in a different branch of the family. This could happen even in a family mansion where one branch lived well while their cousins starved in a separate wing.
If there is a labour market there can also be a market for unemployment insurance. Monetization means Fiscal policy can create a 'safety net'. But so could the munificence of Princes or the piety of wealthy merchants. The problem of entitlement failure by reason of exogenous supply shock or else incentive incomptability remains under any type of economic regime.
He had no responsibility over and above paying the price that he could get away with paying in what came to be called ‘the market’. What happens next was no care of his.
Stalin and Mao didn't give a shit about the millions who starved to death because of their demented policies. Gandhi & his contemporaries were aware that the Brits had ended Famine in India. What made them angry was that the Brits imposed a tax on Income to pay for this. Why the fuck should brown peeps have to pay tax just to keep other brown peeps alive? It's not like there's any fucking shortage of them.
What Bilgrami does not understand is that intervention to prevent excess mortality caused by food availability deficit was justified not on humanitarian but economic grounds. Real wages rise after a bad famine. Rents fall.
Gandhi’s economic idea of a trust, something that could not possibly be expected to be implemented in a market system so conceived,
Why not? A Trust is a legal instrument which exists in all market economies. Essentially, some piece of private property is controlled by a person, or set of persons, on behalf of the beneficial owner.
was precisely to ensure that that responsibility was not shirked in social relations.
But such responsibility was equally shirked in non-market economies.
But such social relations were exactly what were undermined by the idea of a market, a self-standing idea of an economy independent of social relations.
There is no evidence for any such thing ever happening. The fact is, market-economies attract migrants. People run away from places where property is held in common or, enforcement of contracts is weak.
So, for Gandhi, to generate such a notion of an individual freely selling his labour in the emerging ideal of a market was the wrong way of addressing the hierarchical distortions that had entered caste. Hindu society (read large by him as Indian society), qua society, not economy, must seek internal moral resistance to these emerging hierarchical distortions.
There could be no Bania caste unless those 'hierarchical distortions' had emerged long, long, ago. On the other hand, it is true that Gandhi did set up an Ashram on land donated to him by businessmen. But, it was a money-pit.
It is very important to point out here that Gandhi’s ideas of this internal form of social resistance against society’s corruptions was not the notion of religious social reform that had emerged in the last half-century before he was writing, which were drawing somewhat schizophrenically upon the ideals of European modernity, whose claims he was resisting.
No. Bhai Parmanand of the Arya Samaj had come to see Gandhi shortly before he embraced celibacy. But Gandhi was trying to show himself as 'Sanatani'- i.e. more orthodox (but also more loyalist)- which is why he babbled ignorant nonsense.
Rather, he was explicitly drawing upon much more folk and popular religious and spiritual traditions: Bhakti, including the early Varkaris, Gujarati Vaishnavism, as well as various sant poets of Gujarat, and an assortment of regional sects and movements (which D. Nagaraj discusses in his excellent early article on Gandhi 5 ) such as Satnami and Mahima, to name just two, all of which sought reform entirely outside the modernist liberal categories with which India’s colonisers had influenced the newly emerging intellectually minded social and religious reformer.
Gandhi's dad was from the Pushti Marg. Then there was a big scandal because it turned out the head of that sect had syphilis and had generously infected the wives of his followers with it. That's why Gandhi's dad turned to the Arya Samaj. Gandhi, by banging on about Ahimsa, was associating himself with the more prestigious Jain-Vaishnav tradition of Raichandbhai and Pranjivan.
Moreover, Gandhi also made clear that such internal social and moral change to overcome the emerging hierarchies of caste is possible only in unalienated societies
India was ruled by a fucking Viceroy! How much more alienated could it get?
where individuals are able to think from a larger point of view than their own, just the point of view that is undermined by the relations that defined a market conception of economy. If India were to address these emerging hierarchies that had contaminated the guild ideal of caste as diversified professions,
No doubt, Bilgrami thinks the Bania caste featured a guild of barristers.
by turning to capitalist modernity, one would have to rely not on internal resistance but rather on what Marx called primitive accumulation that dispossesses the peasantry from its embedding in existing social relations (which were, no doubt, exploitative), and sends them – as Gandhi put it – from pillar to post to sell their labour to avoid destitution, migrating to towns defined by market relations, entering there into new forms of exploitative class relations and – in Marx’s vision – forming new solidarities to resist such exploitation, and thereby overcoming the hierarchies that had emerged in the caste relations of their erstwhile peasant existence.
Gandhi and Pranjivan were gaining political salience by their interessement in the problem of Indian indentured laborers. Neither was foolish enough to suggest that the root of the problem was 'primitive accumulation', back in India, forcing peasants off their land. This was because they themselves came from India. What forced people off their land was their relatives unless, obviously, they killed them first.
I still have in my possession a scribbled note by my father in his journal, which reads: "The machine will do far more than the Mahatma did to undermine caste by bringing different castes together to work on it."
Bilgrami's dad doesn't seem to have known that by 1920, higher caste factory workers were organizing against the employment of lower caste workers on terms of equality with themselves. Industrialisation, by itself, doesn't get rid of racial or caste discrimination. Union busting is required. All power to the Billionaires genuinely don't give a fuck about the colour of the sheep they fleece.
It is these claims of modernity that Gandhi instinctively denied and I turn now to examine what those instincts were.
Bilgrami likes Gandhi coz he thinks Gandhi instinctively thought Bilgrami's daddy was a shithead.
In Part VIII of Marx’s Capital (volume I), 6 ‘primitive accumulation’ is seen as the coercive, frequently brutal, extermination of communities of a precapitalist form as a result of the deracination of petty producers from the sources or the means of their particular form of producing (peasants from their land, primarily), and who then morph into a proletariat, either in the form of metropolitan industrial labourers or a ‘reserve army’ of the unemployed.
Marx was a drunken nutcase. Primitive accumulation just meant whatever way some people got richer than other people a long long time ago. His mistake arose from his mistaken belief that 'Money is changed into Capital'. This is not true. Capital exists even if no money exists. It is a physical factor of production- e.g. a machine, a ship, or any type of tool. A person with money may be able to buy a Capital item but they may also be able to acquire it on credit on the promise of handing over a portion of the output it contributes to.
Marx does admit that 'primitive accumulation' might mean enslavement or what we would call a protection racket run by a 'stationary bandit'. But he quickly starts babbling ignorant nonsense-
'We have seen how money is changed into capital;
No. Money isn't changed into anything. If Capital goods are being sold, some people with money or credit may acquire them. But the quality and availability of Capital goods is a function of Technology on the one hand and 'Time Preference'- viz. willingness and ability to postpone consumption- on the other hand.
how through capital surplus-value is made,
Surplus value means 'The surplus produced over and above what is required to survive'. Nobody can tell whether it exists because we can't be sure we will actually survive even in the medium term. If there is a meteor hurtling towards earth and if out ICBMs can't blast it to bits because we neglected to fund research on bigger and better types of nuclear bombs then the human race will be discovered never to had any fucking surplus-value.
Still, it is a fact that some people, if they pursue certain professions, can earn more than they need to feed and clothe and shelter themselves. They have higher productivity than those who are unemployable. But, being productive can involve moving to a new location or taking up a different trade. Refusing to do so can lead to poverty and starvation.
and from surplus-value more capital.
Only if people postpone consumption. But there would be little point doing so if the rewards of investment will be confiscated. The vicious circle here is that people don't invest to raise productivity unless they live in places where property rights are well protected, with the result that the place becomes poorer and less productive and thus more of a fucking shithole. It was obvious this is what had happened in India which is why Indians paid the Brits to rule over them. But India's landlords and businessmen were somewhat shit and thus didn't invest so as to raise productivity. On the other hand, it was also true that India's workers and peasants were somewhat shit- unless they managed to emigrate to a place where useless relatives would not turn up to suck their blood if they raised their productivity and had a bit of 'surplus value' in their pockets.
But the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value;
Stalin showed you could accumulate capital by working prisoners to death on stupid projects like the utterly useless White Sea canal.
surplus-value presupposes capitalistic production;
No. If you can gather enough food in an hour for your whole family so that you can spend the rest of the day playing games, then there is 'surplus value'. For Malthusian reasons, under diminishing returns, the average wage can be driven down till there is no fucking surplus value unless some good Angel sends the Plague to kill off half the population.
capitalistic production presupposes the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and of labour power in the hands of producers of commodities. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a primitive accumulation (previous accumulation of Adam Smith) preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point.
The starting point is technological change which raises productivity by raising factor mobility. Bilgrami has witnessed the huge change in the fortunes of India's educated class heralded by the internet revolution.
These accounts, though they observe the coercive and brutal nature of this destruction of precapitalist communities, are nevertheless also presented as their transformation into a new class formation in which the old primordial, hierarchical, oppressive features of social life (whether caste, tribe, clan, or religion) are undermined, even if they are replaced by the newly minted oppressive features tied to the specifically exploitative and alienation-inducing conditions that metropolitan capital imposes on industrial labour. This is the larger theoretical claim standing behind the far too simple and facetious entry in my father’s journal.
Bilgrami lost no time fucking off to Amrika whose 'precapitalist communities' were almost wholly exterminated or replaced. It appears Leftist Professors love nothing better than to get to 'alienation-inducing' conditions which metropolitan capital imposes.
Now, it would seem that Gandhi’s inferred conclusion from his own critique of capitalist modernity (that caste hierarchies ought to be undermined by internal transformation without the destruction of precapitalist communities, that is, without their transformation into new class formations) amounts to a normative stance against this view of the levelling effects of primitive accumulation (The ‘ought’ there signifies the normativity of the stance.)
We can't infer anything of this sort. Gandhi wasn't condemning 'primitive accumulation' by Whites of African land any more than he was calling for the abolition of Zamindari in India.
This is one central aspect of what we regard as his anti-modernism and his social conservatism.
The problem here is that, in South Africa, he represented social radicalism- overturning the colour bar, and trying to get his secretary, Sonja Schesin (whom he slapped when she smoked in his presence) articles to train as a solicitor- and various modern fads promoted by cranks and crackpots of the period.
However we assess that normative stance, what I want to focus on instead is a more descriptive instinct Gandhi had, when he refused the relevance of Western frameworks of thought (including Marx’s) as being relevant to large agrarian societies like India.
Gandhi was incessantly babbling about Western crackpots like Ruskin, Carlyle and Tolstoy. He never mentioned any type of agrarian problem in India. He did espouse khaddar which was supposed to cure the problem of agricultural underemployment. Incidentally, what Dalits wanted was what everybody else wanted- viz. land and/or Government jobs.
What I am suggesting is that Gandhi understood well that in the colonised lands, given quite different empirical features,… these lands simply cannot absorb the displaced millions as industrial labour.
This shithead hasn't noticed what is happening in China. In 1990, seventy percent of the population was agricultural. The figure may be about 25 percent now. Population growth has stopped. An ageing farm workforce will lead to a further fall. It might be argued that China isn't a case of 'colonised lands'. But it was conquered by the military wing of the Communist party. By contrast, Australia- a clear case of 'colonised land'- can't hope to absorb its vast agricultural population of kangaroos and wallabies in its Fintech sector.
To expound this, let us first ask a counterfactual question about the effect that primitive accumulation (this dispossession of the peasantry from their land to create its great manufacturing towns and, in doing so, the undermining of the primordial ties and hierarchies of precapitalist community) had on European populations.
It was good for Europe. Get the fuck out of the involuted agriculture. Head for the bright lights of the City.
Imagine the following scenario that is counter to fact: There is no settler colonialism that diffuses capital by moving vast numbers of the European peasant population dispossessed by primitive accumulation to various parts of the world such as across the entire Atlantic or to the Antipodes or to the southern corners of Africa.
Then they move to London, Berlin, Paris etc. This speeds up technological progress which leads to maritime hegemony which leads to the acquisition of vast territories overseas populated by lower productivity, technologically inferior, indigenous people. The result is the same though maybe the menial work in the New World is done by imported slaves.
In this counterfactual scenario, huge numbers of peasants, who in fact migrated, instead live and remain sedentary in Europe.
That's great for per capita GNP growth in Europe. It is foolish to export your younger and more dynamic people. Look at Ireland. It overtook England only after net migration became positive.
What reason is there to think that this massive population of peasants would have been absorbed into a new community of industrial labour?
The fact that they were in fact so absorbed. Bilgrami has shit for brains. England sent out ten million emigrants during the nineteenth century- about twenty percent of total European emigration- but attracted a larger number of immigrants from Ireland and the Continent. Anglo migration, however, represented Capital export just as much as the export of manpower. Whitey didn't turn up on Ind's coral strand, barefoot. They came with capital and superior technology and turned a big profit on their endowment. I suppose the same is true of much recent Indian emigration to America or Europe which is why the UK now has a Hindu PM.
There is no serious likelihood that they would be accommodated inside the domain of capitalist production.
Yet, that is precisely what happened. African Americans from the South were accommodated inside the domain of capitalist production in places like Detroit- thanks to which the World received the great gift of 'Mo-town' music.
They would remain as a vast precapitalist community outside of capital’s domain.
This did not happen. Europe's cities swelled with migrants from its countryside. No doubt, some emigrated but that represented a net loss. It was the higher productivity employment in industrial capitalism which financed Europe's transition to affluent, Welfare States.
BTW, the West African littoral suffered great population loss due to enforced emigration- i.e. the slave trade- but that wasn't good for per capita Income growth. Switching from exporting people to exporting palm oil or cocoa or whatever was good for West Africa though, no doubt, corruption and Socialist policies fucked things up somewhat.
What grounds are there, then, for thinking that Marx’s account of the effects of primitive accumulation would so much as apply to whatever characterisation one would give of them?
None. Marx was as stupid as shit. But for the Bolshevik Revolution, only Henry George would now be remembered. Redistribute rents by all means. There's no harm taxing factors in inelastic supply. The trouble is that in the medium to long term, there is no such thing as economic rent. There is only 'quasi-rent'. The moral of this story is, to get rid of 'exploitation' (rent extraction) policy should focus on raising elasticities of supply and demand by technological and other means. The thing is 'regret minimizing' because it increases robustness vis a vis supply shocks.
The crucial question arises: would they have overcome the oppressive hierarchical and divisive features owing to caste and other such ties?
only if they wanted to. People are funny that way.
– the tribal divisions, the deeply riven religious schisms that were typical of European society of the time (just consider the fact that whole wars were fought for years on end over obscure religious issues such as transubstantiation!).
If people want war, they get war irrespective of the economic regime. Killing peeps is totes cool.
So really, I am asking whether Gandhi might have taken his normative stance about internal social transformation about caste – whether or not we agree with it – because of a canny understanding that in colonial and post-colonial capitalism, the colonised lands were the factual version of something that was merely the counterfactual scenario in Europe as I just presented it above.
But 'post-colonialism' has seen large scale migration across borders with a favoured few making it to Yurop/Amrika. In Bilgrami's native Mumbai there has been a hue and cry about 'Muslim Bangladeshi' population growth for more than three decades. My memory is that the Shiv Sena deported some supposed 'illegal migrants' back in the mid Nineties. Jyoti Basu promptly sent them back, again at Government expense.
To put it differently, primitive accumulation, as it is presented in the canonical Marxist accounts, depends, I am claiming, not on the truth of theoretical analysis, but on
stupidity and ignorance. Bilgrami is not the worst offender. There are Professors at JNU who have got it into their heads that only tropical lands can produce wealth. Thus, if Norway is now very wealthy, it must be because it once colonized some place where pineapples and coconuts grow.
the observation of entirely contingent empirical features in European history – the fact of massive departure of peasant populations to other parts of the world as a result of settler colonialism.
No. Modest migration from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century was enough to create colonies. Between 1815 and 1932, there was much larger migration- 65 million by some counts- but, as Emerson observed, these were people who had come to do manual labour. The Irish and Scandinavian immigrant was doomed hew wood and draw water and make a spot on the prairie greener by being buried there. What Emerson did not calculate on was rapid technological progress in America. But then Keynes, supposedly an economist of distinction, believed in 1918 that diminishing returns to American agriculture had set in and the New World would soon be a net food importer!
I'm not saying Economics is a shit subject but great Economists are great fools.
There could be no such analysis of primitive accumulation as Marx offers if these contingent empirical features were not also present.
About ten million Africans have emigrated to Europe over the last twenty or twenty five years. In some cases, this may boost development back home but that depends on the type of regime there. This was also true of European migration to the New World. It could lead to increased transfer of technology or export led growth if conditions back home were favourable but it could also lead to stagnation as the young and talented escaped taking their 'Human' and working Capital with them.
As a result, there is no reason to think that this particular section in Volume 1 of Capital amounts to a bit of theory at all.
The whole book is stupid shit.
A theory implies the generalisability of its main claims, or a claim to some telos, or some structural explanatory power that accounts for diverse phenomena. But, if I am right, the account has no such properties.
Because Marx was a drunken cretin.
It is a local observation about European history over a specific span of time. (If you wanted a vivid example of the ‘provincialisation of Europe’, Marx’s account of primitive accumulation, as I am reading it, seems to be stepping up to the plate.)
Two World Wars provincialized the Continent which responded by trying to turn Nation States into Provinces of a mighty Union. Perhaps, the consolidation of a 'World Island' Eurasian power-block will concentrate minds in Brussels. Once Europe gains an Army and seals its borders, it may rise out of America's shadow. But, don't hold your breath.
What I am suggesting is that Gandhi understood well that in the colonised lands,
Gujarat was exporting people to East and South Africa. Gandhi understood that well enough as he himself was one such migrant. The INC, stupid cunt that it was, helped seal this avenue of escape by ending the indenture system. Pranjivan in Burma supported the Burmese nationalists who, sooner or later, would throw out the Indians. As Salman Rushdie pointed out, after Independence, an Indian passport, more often than not, banned its possessor from traveling to anywhere nice. It was the Judiciary which forced GoI to let its citizens escape to Yukay Amrika etc.
given quite different empirical features (no prospect for large-scale migration of displaced populations
there was large scale Indian migration to Burma, parts of Africa, Malaysia, Fiji etc, etc. As with the Chinese diaspora, the Indian diaspora supported political reform back home. That's how Gandhi got his start.
– as occurred in Europe – due to laws that restrict such transcontinental migration),
Fuck laws. Where there is an economic incentive, there will be migration. What keeps you safe from immigrants is being a fucking shithole.
these lands simply cannot absorb the displaced millions as industrial labour. In fact, they are not even likely to be transformed into a reserve army.
So what? They gravitate to the service sector. Marx didn't have a theory of services. To be fair, nobody did back then.
Gandhi understood with clarity that his people,
Banias who were not rustic farmers at all
the vast agrarian populations of India, are just simply gratuitous
fuck off! Indians were welcome to work in the plantations of Natal etc.
in the kind of brave new economic formations which primitive accumulation produced in Europe, economic formations we tend to characterise with such terms as ‘growth’ and ‘development’ and view as overcoming the primordial hierarchies and schisms.
Only if people want to overcome those schisms. Guys from faraway may turn up to work in your neighbourhood. They may want to assimilate but then again they may not. If their food is tastier or healthier we may gradually adopt it as our own staple diet. The same is true of their music and religion and so forth.
Thus, internal transformation to address caste hierarchies is not just normatively right, but it is made descriptively necessary because primitive accumulation would not in any case lead to the emergence of a relatively liberated (even if differently subjugated) industrial labour in India.
Why stop there? Why not suggest that industrial labour in India will lead to the abolition of distinctions of age and gender? Everybody will have both a penis and a vagina and always remain 25 years old.
Instead, even industrial labourers would continue to be caught up in the ‘primordial’ and hierarchical features of precapitalist community,
because 'labourers' are as stupid as shit- right? But, if they are caught up in imaginary shit, why not also suggest that they are being secretly sodomized by transgender squirrels?
something we see everywhere in urban India today
if you look closely enough. Transgender squirrels are very sneaky.
and in the politics of identity that surfaces not just in rural but in metropolitan India as well. (Just to give one example, sociologists have observed that communal riots occur predominantly in cities, a symptom of the precapitalist community’s metropolitan survival.)
Bilgrami is extraordinarily ignorant. There are riots and ethnic cleansing both in rural and urban areas. The latter are easier to control for obvious reasons. However, terrorism fuelled ethnic cleansing- e.g. Pandits from the Valley- is much more difficult to reverse than the sorts of incidents Bilgrami has in mind.
Here, then, is where we are in the argument to understand Gandhi’s attitudes towards caste. We have expounded his denial that Indian society in 1909 was characterisable by an independent formation called ‘the economy’ and his insistence that in India, unlike Europe, it is society, culture and morality, and nothing else that defines our relations to each other and the world as well as shapes our motivations that yield our public behaviour.
This simply isn't true. Gandhi was aware that India was ruled by people called the British who kept talking about Indian Law and the Indian Economy and the Indian Political Situation. What's more, a whole bunch of Indians were writing on these topics. Even if there was some locality in some remote jungle where everybody was related to everybody else and thus there were no business transactions between Uncle-Daddy-Brother his Sister-Aunty- Step-Mum, no explorer had yet discovered it. Otherwise, local property owners would be paying taxes to the Government.
We then pointed out that though he had argued that those relations were once defined by an idealised set of caste relations in terms of professional heterogeneity,
in which case, there was an economy of a type which required 'Bania' arbitrageurs (i.e. market makers) to function.
these were no longer so characterisable but had admitted of deep and invidious hierarchies.
Gandhi, a 40 year old barrister who had witnessed the Boer War, suddenly discovered, in 1909, that there were invidious hierarchies in India. Previously, he had been under the impression that the Viceroy was a wet-nurse. The Nizam of Hyderabad was a barber. Bombay billionaire swept the streets.
This combination of points, we said, is what yields his inference that internal resistance within Hindu society is the only right way to address the hierarchies that now define caste relations.
At that time, Gandhi was using the antyaja- which means 'last-born'- for the pariah caste. Bilgrami thinks Banias like Gandhi were under the impression that guys who cleaned toilets were regarded as the equals of Millionaires and Maharajas. That's what happens if you live in Amrika too long. You confuse 'feather' Indians with 'dot' Indians.
We then considered whether allowing for the very notion of economy as an independent sector of human life
Gandhi repeatedly said that his own 'Banyan' ancestors had helped finance British expansion in Western India. Banyans are arbitrageurs. They make a good living because they know the economy is an independent sector of human life. Moreover, at that time, there was anxiety that life in the Cities was causing the caste system to collapse. Greed for money was causing even Banyans and Brahmins of good family- e.g. the Nehrus and Gandhis- to 'cross the black water' and thus loose caste. Many such people were not just consuming foreign meat and wine, they were even intermarrying across caste lines!
that filled Gandhi with anxiety would offer an alternative and more ‘progressive’ way of addressing these social hierarchies of caste, as is on offer in the standard accounts of primitive accumulation owing to Marx?
This is nonsense. If the 'primitive accumulation' is done by a non-Hindu, caste could be destroyed by the new ruler- unless the Hindus found a way to bribe him not to take this extreme step. As a matter of fact, high caste Hindus had managed to make inter-caste marriage illegal (save for converts) in some parts of India. Thus, in UP, a Brahmin girl could not legally marry a person of lower caste. In Bombay Presidency, Gandhi's son would not have been allowed to marry Rajaji's daughter.
With the aid of a counterfactual,
i.e. a lie. But ex falso quodlibet. From a lie any nonsense can be deduced.
we concluded that Gandhi’s instincts were that quite apart from his normative recoil from these developments of capitalist modernity, these accounts were not theoretical accounts but local observations of an extended moment in one continent of the globe, inapplicable to large agrarian economies of the colonies of the south.
Where did this theory come from? The answer, as far as the INC is concerned, is that they originated in A.O Hume's account of Indian agriculture. Essentially, Hume was saying 'get rid of the Permanent Settlement, so landlords pay more in tax and thus have an incentive to raise productivity'. Indian Congress-wallahs did not want zamindars to pay more in tax so they suggested that there was no alternative to 'agricultural involution' presided over by pious zamindars though such creatures were notoriously thin on the ground. The other point is that Indian industrialists wanted to monopolize the internal market but did not welcome competition from a rising class of artisans and skilled workers. In other words they didn't want the market to expand to a point where economies of scope and scale became available such that India could get export led growth. This was because they had a low opinion of their own abilities. After all, the majority of Indian mills were 'sick'. It wasn't till the Thirties that mercantile communities became convinced that their sons and grandsons could acquire technical nous rather than an instinct for sharp practice. Still, the fact is, post-Independence, most British concerns taken over by Marwaris crashed and burned very quickly. Alfred Marshall had warned his Indian students of this possibility in 1910.
Whatever we thought of his own normative stances, they anyway would not and could not, according to Gandhi, address the hierarchies of caste that defined Indian society.
But those hierarchies disappeared where people got rich! That is the lesson of the 'Vyadha Gita'. The wealthy butcher doesn't bother with either Priests or Pundits.
The time has come then to take up a question that I had mentioned in my opening remarks. How do these philosophical and normative stances of Gandhi, the philosopher, relate to Gandhi, the central activist figure in Indian history in the first half of the 20th century, leading a nationalist movement against British colonial rule?
Gandhi was pretending to be against Banias though financed by Banias who wanted to monopolize the Indian market through boycotts of foreign textiles. Since they wanted Western Capital goods, Gandhi refused to let anyone boycott that type of product. Indians did not need Communists like Saklatvala or Spratt to tell them this. The thing was bleeding obvious.
One way of approaching this question is to notice that Gandhi’s philosophical stances about the relations between economy and society (read as I have been reading them by viewing India in 1909 as being at a crossroads that Europe was in, in early modernity)
India was ruled by foreigners. Europe wasn't. There is no point making any such comparison.
were remarkably similar to the stances taken by the Narodniks in Russia,
Russia had only recently ended Serfdom. The Zemstvo built upon actually existing village councils or 'mir'. Narodniks also expressed hostility to Catholicism and ideas imported from Western Europe.
who stressed an idealised version of their own precapitalist formations and sought to construct a populist nationalism based on a similar recoil from the capitalist incubation that European nations had embraced, seeking more direct routes to radical transformation than Marx (at any rate, the Marx of Capital, we have been discussing) had envisaged for Europe. (The Marx of the last decade of his life, who learnt Russian and explored in his ethnological notebooks and various other writings the Russian peasant communes is, of course, another matter.)
God alone knows what those nutters were seeking. What they got was worse than anything they could have envisaged.
Now, as we all know, Lenin had conducted a famous polemic against the Narodnik position.
Nobody in India knows any such thing or gives a fart one way or another.
But what is not often noted is that Lenin had also made a distinction that is relevant to understanding Gandhi.
Jack the Ripper was like Lenin in this respect.
In a work entitled, The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of it in Mr. Struve’s Book, 7 Lenin writes this (I am going to quote him at some length):I make a distinction between the old and the contemporary Narodism on the grounds that the former was to some extent a well-knit doctrine evolved in a period when capitalism was still very feebly developed in Russia, when the petty-bourgeois character of the Russian nation had not yet been revealed, when the practical side of the doctrine was purely utopian, and when the Narodniks gave liberal society a wide berth and instead went among the people. It is different now: Russia’s capitalist path of development is no longer denied by anybody, and the break-up of the countryside is an undoubted fact. Of the Narodniks’ well-knit doctrine, with its childish faith in the village community, nothing but rags and tatters remain… In place of aloofness from liberal society we observe an… intimacy with it. And it is this change that compels us to distinguish between the ideology of the peasantry of the old Narodniks and the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie of the later Narodniks, who had become like Janus, with one face looking to the future and the other to the past with its obsolete social forms.
India like Lenin's Russia was industrializing and becoming more urban. Unfortunately, the export pessimism of the Indian industrialist and the low opinion the Indian intelligentsia had of the great mass of the Indian population, meant that some sort of agricultural involution with a thin veneer of virtue signalling was all that was on the menu. The Communists may have wanted to collectivize land and kill kulaks but they kept quiet about it unless, like the Naxals, they didn't and were slaughtered.
What should be clear is that if there is an affinity between Gandhi and the Narodniks, he, in his own mind, would have viewed himself as falling under Lenin’s characterisation of the ‘old’ rather than the ‘later’ Narodniks.
Not in 1909. You can't be roaming around the Indian countryside if you are a lawyer in South Africa.
So the question before us is whether, over the decades after Hind Swaraj and more particularly from the1930s on, Gandhi was altering his attitudes towards caste
Gandhi had to alter his attitude to caste and the position of women and the desirability of Parliamentary Government because, he discovered, the folks back home were less fucking retarded than he was.
because the contingent opportunities that the Crown was bestowing upon the national movement by constitutional concessions towards self-governance, were forcing him to withdraw his (to use Lenin’s phrase) "aloofness from liberalism"
Gandhi eagerly attended INC conferences and described himself as Gokhale's disciple during this period. His entry into Indian politics was engineered by the moderate Liberals.
and finding himself having to keep in step with and respond to Ambedkar’s (to use Lenin’s rhetoric again) "intimacy with liberalism."
Gandhi was not 'in step' with Ambedkar who was vastly better educated and informed. But Gandhi had rich backers. Ambedkar did not. The sad truth is that the industrial proletariat, back then, was casteist. Ambedkar hat to cut his coat according to his cloth.
This transformation of the national movement was not restricted to matters of governance. What Lenin calls the Narodnik "ideology of the peasantry," a label that in some crucial respects captures the Gandhian critique of capitalist modernity I have presented in this essay, could no longer fully dominate the national movement.
This is nonsense. Lenin knew that Narodniks weren't peasants. Their ideology was a drawing room affair. Actual peasants wanted more land and no conscription so their sons could labour in the fields so as to fill the parental money box. Lenin succeeded where Kerensky and the S.Rs failed because he gave the peasants what they wanted- albeit with the intention of taking it away again.
Ambedkar was, from Lenin’s point of view, par excellence the face of what he called "the ideology of the petty bourgeoise,"
No. Lenin met Indian Revolutionaries like M.N Roy. He would have considered Ambedkar- whose caste did not own agricultural land and who lacked working capital to go into business- to be proletarian. But he would have understood that the higher caste industrial working class wanted to monopolize the better paid jobs. Still, it would be pointless to try to recruit Ambedkar. He was too damn smart.
with its wholehearted embrace of the liberal-democratic apparatus.
Why would the petit-bourgeoisie want to embrace any such thing more particularly if they are a small minority in a vast agricultural population?
This was the ideology, whose effects on the national movement, forced Gandhi into chronic ambivalences and steered him to his exquisite reversals on caste, because he was now rendered by these contingent developments into resembling the later Narodniks, who Lenin describes as “Janus-like, one face to the future and the other to past, obsolete social forms.”
The earlier Narodniks had gone if for terrorism and the cult of the assassin. The Bolsheviks were more respectable. Murder should be done on an industrial scale. Still, if the SRs had been more ruthless in killing off Bolsheviks before they could themselves be killed, the future would have belonged to them.
The peasantry in India, as Gandhi pointed out again and again, has to constantly struggle so as to not be divided by caste or religion.
Clearly that struggle was pointless. But there wasn't any actual struggle.
Nothing displayed the ambivalences more than the events surrounding the signing of the Poona pact.
Which built on the Rajah-Moonje pact. Gandhi was merely following the High Caste Hindu tactic of yielding everything with the intention of taking everything back once it got control of the Army. That's why Ambedkar and Mandal thought the best bet for the Dalits was to strategically ally with the Muslims in the hope of stalemating progress towards the handover of power to the Hindu majority.
These ambivalences are more complex than the simpler dichotomies of traditional and modern, peasant ideology and petty bourgeois ideology, would suggest, because of the contingent demands of an anti-imperialist movement.
Only cretins babble about 'petty bourgeois ideology'. The thing is as dead as the dodo. Peasants make rational, regret minimizing choices but face higher Knightian Uncertainty for obvious reasons- viz. agriculture is more subject to exogenous shocks and has lower elasticity of demand and supply. Also the terms of trade tend to move against that sector. This is Bhagwati's immiserizing growth'.
Staying with Lenin’s evocative classical image, the Gandhian mask of Janus that looked to the future
where everybody has given up sex and thus Humanity has gone extinct
had to now address the issue of the representation of Dalits in electoral politics.
No. The matter was out of the hands of the High Caste Hindus. The only question was whether there would be separate electorates and a lower quota or joint electorates and a bigger quota. Even then, the Tories in Westminster would have to sign off on it. Their mistake was to underestimate the political nous of Congress Dalits. The Marquess of Zetland thought the INC would lose the 1937 elections!
This may give one the impression that it is the other face of Janus looking to ‘obsolete social forms’ which exhaustively determined his stance that there should be no separate electorates. After all, did not Gandhi say that separate electorates would undermine the unity of the Hindu people?
In other words, Dalits in the villages might be killed or subjected to even worse treatment by Congress workers.
But to take these words to be backward looking in any simple sense is to misunderstand his motives because that unity for him was – at bottom – the unity of the Indian peasantry in the freedom struggle, a unity that he regarded as indispensable for the struggle.
It was irrelevant. The peasants wanted to own the land they worked on. They didn't want to pay for it. Gandhi understood this. He said that sooner or later, the peasants would grab the land and there would be no question of compensation.
Unlike the celebrated Russian Mir, which was taken by both the Marx of his last decade and the Narodniks to already reflect the promise of peasant solidarity in the fatherland,
a reasonable view given what was happening in Ireland
the peasantry in India, as Gandhi pointed out again and again, has to constantly struggle so as to not be divided by caste or religion.
If so, they were shit at struggling.
And it was this face of Gandhi, that of the peasant ideologue (of Lenin’s description of the Narodnik) who wanted the entire peasant class to be mobilised in the nationalist struggle,
in which case the landowner and money-lender would be chased away
which was motivating him just as much as any concern about a unified Hinduism. Gandhi's Khilafat movement had been explicitly launched with a view to overcome the potential religious divisions of the peasantry by involving the Muslim kisans (as well as the Muslim urban poor).
Nonsense! It was explicitly launched to restore the power and prestige of the Ottoman Caliph. No agricultural demand whatsoever was made. Wealthy Muslim landlords who donated to Khilafat weren't secretly hoping for their own throats to be slit.
His resistance to a separatist politics of caste that would emerge if he conceded to Ramsay Macdonald and to Ambedkar was just as much to preserve an undivided Hindu peasantry in the nationalist mobilisation. (If he also made concessions to upper caste Hindus – which he did till the ‘Caste must Go’ phase of his thinking emerged – that was also motivated by this goal of unity.)
Bilgrami is thoroughly ignorant of Dalit politics. The fact is, Rajah was originally for separate electorates and, being a heavyweight, got Ambedkar to drop his support for joint electorates. Then Rajah changed his mind and did a deal with Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha. One reason for this was the very low percentage of Muslims in Madras Presidency. Separate electorates would have meant more, not less, marginalization. Ambedkar, being from Bombay Presidency, naturally had a different agenda. He was able to get a better deal from Gandhi because the Mahacrackpot was being blamed by Hindus for having united all the religions of India (and the Madrasi non-Brahmins) against the INC.
Sadly, Gandhi did not conciliate the brilliant younger man. Ambedkar, quite understandably, became furious at Gandhi's attempt to monopolize the 'Harijan' issue. Indeed, Gandhi had originally thought Ambedkar was some over-educated Brahmin whereas he himself was a true Dalit!
It is surprising to me that none of the detractors of Gandhi’s stand against Macdonald’s Communal Award
which was actually quite smart. The Brits could have disintermediated the Higher Caste Hindus from the administration. Also, a policy of confiscating property from seditious Congressmen had a great effect in curbing Gandhi's nuisance value.
have linked in detail his motivations for opposing a separatist politics of caste which would divide the peasant population of India with these motivations for launching the Khilafat movement that I have just mentioned with entirely similar motives, attributing to him instead only the motivation of preserving an obsolete form – the idealised conception of a unified Hinduism.
This makes no sense. Khilafat failed. It did not unite anybody. It was a stupid idea. Gandhi's choice was simple. Either Moonje and the Mahasabha would do the required deal with the 'suppressed classes'- in which case he himself would be disintermediated- or else separate electorates would go ahead. But, for Ambedkar and Rajah, this would mean the Dalit legislator would be impotent spectators of majoritarian politics.
Gandhi’s Khilafat movement had been explicitly launched with a view to overcome the potential religious divisions of the peasantry by involving the Muslim kisans
is this cretin referring to the Moplahs?
(as well as the Muslim urban poor). His resistance to a separatist politics of caste that would emerge if he conceded to Ramsay Macdonald and to Ambedkar was just as much to preserve an undivided Hindu peasantry in nationalist mobilisation.
Ambedkar, like most Hindu peasants, had PhDs from Columbia and the LSE. Gandhi was afraid that Ambedkar might quarrel with his fellow peasants back in this village just because their PhDs were from Cambridge or Heidelberg.
All this I say, by way of trying to get right the motives underlying Gandhi’s Janus-like predicament and the stance they prompted in him in the signing of the Poona Pact in the very specific historical and political context in which he found himself in the early 1930s.
Gandhi could have fasted to death instead. Maybe he just didn't want to die.
I have not taken up at all the issue whether Gandhi’s stance was, in and of itself, right.
It was right because Dalits are excellent Parliamentarians, Cabinet Ministers, etc. Look at Malikarjun Kharge!
Of course, it is not obvious what point there is to an assessment of an action or decision ‘in and of itself’.
Should Dalits get higher representation than their share of the population? Yes. They are better than most dynastic cunts.
Decisions and actions of this kind are always made in contexts, historical and political. So, two questions arise. Does it make sense to abstract them from those contexts and assess them in and of themselves?
Yes, if the question is whether a particular group of people are better or worse than average for some intrinsic reason.
And even if one does, should one not, then, return to the contexts in which they actually occur and see if the abstracted, context-free assessment is to be overridden by the compulsions of the context?
With hindsight, JN Mandal's decision to back the League was disastrous for his own people. Maybe, if Dalits had smaller representation things could have been different there.
I think the answer to both questions is ‘yes’. But, though I have more or less well-worked out views on it, in a brief paper I cannot address the second of these questions because that requires a very extended discussion, for which there is no space here. Regarding the first question, I do think there is point to considering and evaluating a decision or action of this sort, in and of itself. It can reveal things about both morals and politics and the human psychology around morals and politics. So, I turn briefly now to conclude this essay by doing so with the decisions and actions around the Poona Pact.
Gandhi could have fasted to death. But he didn't really want to die. Ambedkar gained by pretending he only gave in to prevent the massacre of Dalits in Congress controlled villages. The problem was that, back then, nobody believed any 'pact' or 'award' would be honoured once the Brits handed over control of the Army.
Irfan Habib, in a recent lecture, said with complete and confident conviction that Gandhi, rather than Ambedkar, was indeed right on the grounds that the Pact got the Dalits more representation than the Communal Award would have given them.
The price was Congress 'Uncle Toms' monopolizing representation- or so it seemed at the time.
I am much less confident of this and my reasons – paradoxically – owe as much, if not more, to Gandhi’s thinking on the subject as to Ambedkar’s.
Ambedkar's thinking can only be understood by really smart 'Law & Econ' mavens.
The issues, as I said, turn on the moral psychology of politics.
Both Ambedkar and Macdonald had made their moral-psychological point very clear. They proceeded from the assumption that in the electoral field, social groups vote with nothing but their group interest in mind.
What's wrong with that? Bear in mind, something of the sort would happen anyway under Proportional Representation. But even under first past the post, voters have to choose the candidate who won't trigger chaos but, rather, focus on bread and butter issues of concern to all.
Thus, if there was a general electorate rather than separate Dalit electorate voting for Dalit candidates in reserved seats, they would vote for those Dalit candidates who would best serve their, rather than Dalit, interests. Gandhi’s opposition to this proceeded with a quite different and much more idealistic assumption. A group whose members are not socially alienated from each other will not vote with narrow factional self-interestedness, but vote from the point of view of what is best for the worst-off amongst them.
In which case, why not let British voters decide India's fate? After all, Indians were worse-off. Indeed, why stop there? Why not restrict the franchise to the very very fucking rich? They would vote to hand over all their money to the worst off.
This commitment to an unalienated society is, of course, what both Gandhi and Marx – coming from their quite different political positions – had erected as an ideal.
Why not commit to an unalienated society where everybody can teleport to nice planets in different Galaxies?
Gandhi’s idealism on this matter is dismissed by his detractors beginning with Ambedkar himself in that period, with some recent commentators even dismissing this moral psychology as the hypocrisy of a ‘Brahminical hegemonist’, a remarkable accusation to bring against a man who worked at great cost to himself (and eventually to his life) for decades to oppose untouchability.
Gandhi was killed for 'appeasing' Muslims- the one thing he had never done. True, when you try to swindle a guy you might be very sweet and nice to him. But that 'appeasement' is purely tactical. Ambedkar's mistake was to let his pal, Mandal, join hands with the League. Hindus prefer Hindu Dalits to Muslims but Muslims don't prefer Hindu Dalits to other Hindus.
But even those who do not make this accusation, dismiss Gandhi’s stance as being too idealistic. In-group/out-group thinking, they say, cannot be avoided when it comes to parliamentary politics and the face of the Janus Gandhi that was forced to look to the future where such politics had been imposed by colonial rule was simply not facing up to this cynicism.
Gandhi's stance is dismissed because it was not in his power to bind the Congress to keep pacts it had previously made. The fact is, Independent India stripped Muslims of all the concessions they had previously received. Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon- every country sooner or later got rid of 'pluralism' and special protection for minorities.
My own view is that the failure of Gandhi’s moral psychology of caste politics here is not that he fails to face up to the truth in the assumption that social groups always vote with their own interests in mind. There is no wholesale crime in holding out for a more idealistic conception of what human subjects are capable of. Rather it is Gandhi’s failure to acknowledge that social groups, even when they are not cynical in this way, too often lack the imagination to really grasp the detail of the nature of the suffering of other more deprived groups and thus fail to grasp what exactly it is that will best serve their interests.
Bilgrami thinks the Americans who voted for Jim Crow laws 'lacked the imagination' to understand that Black folk didn't enjoy being lynched.
It is this failing of human moral psychology, the failure of imagination – at least until an unalienated society is substantially achieved – that makes me think that Habib’s view of the Poona Pact is not convincing.
Bilgrami might have noticed that Americans took pleasure from the horrible things done to Arab or Afghan Muslims. Indeed, even female GIs participated in sexual torture and humiliation of Iraqi men.
As I said, paradoxically, Gandhi himself, in various things he wrote, acknowledged the importance of guarding against the inadequacies of human imagination. He acknowledged it when he wrote in Young India in 1921:I would be rather torn to pieces than disown my brothers of the suppressed classes. I don’t want to be reborn, but if I have to be reborn, I should be untouchable so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings and affronts levelled at them in order that I may endeavour to free them from their miserable conditions.
Gandhi is echoing a Vaishnav sentiment attributed to King Rantideva. Bilgrami can be forgiven for failing to get the reference.
He acknowledged it again when he said in another such dispatch in 1924:We must first come in living touch with them by working with them […] we must be pariahs too and see how we feel to clean the closets of the upper castes and have the remains of their table thrown to us…Then and only then will we represent the masses…
His previous attempt at 'representing' the masses had been an abject failure. Maybe, he could get better at that job by doing something other than just spinning cotton.
Both these remarks acknowledge how much personal strife and striving must be undergone or undertaken before one can rise to the imagination that is needed. But Gandhi quite simply failed to acknowledge and guard against such failures of imagination when he insisted that we can rely on caste Hindus in a general electorate to vote for those Dalit candidates who will serve Dalit interests best.
What was the alternative? Separate electorates? How did that work out for Indian Muslims? Very very fucking badly. Either they had to flee to Pakistan or they became second class citizens harassed by the Custodian of Enemy Property.
When ambivalences are forced upon someone’s philosophical stances by the contingent demands of history on one’s political activism, such failures are hardly surprising. These ambivalences are unresolved to this day.
Gandhi was not a philosopher. Anyway, ambivalences don't matter to philosophers because, as a tribe, they are as stupid as shit.
V
I have been arguing in this essay, Gandhi’s entire thinking on the subject must be situated in the larger framework of his opposition to capitalist modernity
which is why his financiers were modern industrial capitalists
and to its destructive effects on the peasantry of large agrarian societies of colonised countries like India.
There is no destructive effect in being able to climb out of a rural shithole and head for the bright lights of the City.
Let me conclude, then, by putting aside the question of caste and speak just a word – more generally – to the lasting issues raised by this framework.
The Leninist image of Janus (for the Narodniks in their later phase), which I have invoked to present the ambivalences of Gandhi (looking both to the future of an India landed with a bourgeois-democratic framework for politics
Gandhi had no such vision. He thought Nehru would come round to his own view which was that India is a shithole whose people should give up sex and just fucking go extinct already.
while also looking back to a philosophical vision of politics and political economy that would appear obsolete within it) have continued to haunt Indian politics.
I suppose Bilgrami is thinking of Anna Hazare. But, the truth is, there has been no Gandhian politics since about 1978 when it became obvious that the Janata Morcha would fall apart. When Indira returned to power, Buta Singh put the boot into various Gandhian foundations. Starved of cash, they curled up and died.
Even when Gandhi was alive, as early as in the National Planning Committee of 1938, the backward-looking face of the Janus Gandhi, which was represented there by J.C. Kumarappa,
Kumarappa was a Chartered Accountant who acquired an American degree in Econ so as to prove that Viceroy was draining the country's wealth by sucking off Indian peasants. However, the man wasn't entirely a fool. The fact is, a lot could be done to boost agricultural productivity by using low-tech methods. Indeed, Kumarappa could be seen as AO Hume's successor in his focus on agronomy and ecology.
was sneeringly side-lined by Nehru and his associates who dominated the committee, careening forward with visionary ideals derived from Soviet models of industrial development, summarily dismissing as obsolete forms all aspirations for development built up from a peasant base with decentralised governance.
Nothing could prevent that sort of thing appearing spontaneously. What would have been foolish was to force clerks in the District Collectorate to pretend to know about soil conservation or to have quotas for composting.
In the rest of that fateful century, the only explicit representation of the peasant point of view
came from Fazl ul Haq's Krishak Praja Party. Sadly, land reform can have unexpected costs- e.g. making credit less available or affordable.
in mainstream parliamentary politics at the national level came from Charan Singh, a
Jat leader. But Jats do well in every field. He painted himself as the David who slew the Goliath of supposed collectivization of Land envisioned by Pundit Nehru. Nobody believed him because it was obvious that the Army was recruited from the sons of 'kulaks'. They would kill anybody who tried to take away their ancestral land.
leader whose aspirations for the peasantry were wholly conceived within a framework of agrarian capitalist structures that Gandhi had struggled to protect the peasantry from.
Then people discovered his son was doing very well in IT in Amrika. Also, by seeking to become Prime Minister he sank his dynasty's chances of lording it over UP and Chief Ministers.
It is this complete failure in our nation’s politics to formulate a politics of regard for the peasantry outside the framework of bourgeois politics
Bilgrami thinks the various dynastic or caste based 'Samajwadi' parties are typical of 'bourgeois politics'.
and its increasingly wholehearted embrace of late capitalist modernity,
as opposed to early feudal antiquity
that leaves us dangling to this day
Professors of Philosophy at Columbia are dangling to this day. I thought they were wrangling. I was wrong. Still, at least they aren't masturbating incessantly- unless that's exactly what they are doing. 'Dangling' is a euphemism.
with completely unresolved questions about the peasantry’s relations to a fragmented, impermanently employed, barely unionised urban working population,
Those relations are that of being siblings or otherwise related to them. Indeed, plenty of 'peasants' spend part of their time working in towns or cities.
to say nothing of the continuing unresolved questions of caste.
The question has been resolved. If you are rich you are high caste. Still, you may spend money to get SC or ST or OBC status for your community. Affirmative Action should never become the monopoly of the poor or deserving.
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