Bilgrami & Secularism in India

The term Secularism comes from the Latin word for that which belongs to a particular generation or age. The Divine, being outside time, is in the sacred realm.  A particular country might claim that it enjoyed sovereignty on the basis of a divine command. Equally, it might rely purely on its secular legitimacy as a well functioning state able to protect itself. 

Why might a secular/sacred dichotomy have gained political salience? One answer is that during the 'Dark Ages', featuring mass migrations of peoples, 'sacred' spaces- maintaining knowledge of hieratic texts- were useful in preserving ideas and institutions and a link language of a classical type which could spread rapidly once conditions became more settled. Thus, in Western Europe, the Catholic Church played a role in permitting the 'Holy Roman Empire' of Charlemagne and other Frankish or Teutonic tribes to appear to be restoring the old oikumene- or common homeland. 

Something similar might be said of the Turkish Caliphate or different dynasties which ruled China. As with Hinduism's hereditary, Sanskrit knowing, priestly and other learned caste, Islam and Confucianism had similar lineages of savants and administrators. 

Roman power may have been mainly secular though, no doubt, some Emperors declared themselves to be Gods. But Rome like other great Empires succumbed to the invasion of 'barbarian' tribes some 1500 years ago.  Thus, a thousand years later, everywhere you looked Kings and Emperors were either 'God's anointed' or his Shadow on Earth. 

It so happens that the East India Company, which was interested in making money, not spreading any particular religion, was the first wholly secular administration to control any very large and populous swathe of territory. It initially curbed the activities of European missionaries for fear of infuriating the natives but had to yield to the rising Evangelical movement back in Britain. The 1857 conflict was perceived as a reaction to missionary activity and henceforth the Crown took control of India while promising to respect Indian religions and institutions rather than seek to convert the native population. Interestingly, poorer or more ambitious members of the Hindu 'Educationally Forward Castes' including the Brahmins who had preserved the sacred language, and the Kayasthas,  who had run the administration, and the Vaidya medical professionals, first helped the East India Company as compradors and then took enthusiastically to English education to set up as lawyers and doctors and so on.

 Meanwhile the martial peoples of the sub-continent were satisfied with land grants or the chance to serve in what would later become quite a well organized Army. This meant that 'secular' British Rule in India received a degree of legitimacy from the educated classes who, in many cases, had gained financial and professional security by the 1880s. It was at this time that the Indian National Congress was formed. Would India become increasing self-governing and self-garrisoning like the Settler Colonies? No. That would have involved the upper middle class agreeing to tax itself so as to grow yet richer. The alternative viz. demanding Representation without Taxation, was more appealing. Indeed, why stop at Representation? Why not demand Reparations as well? The sad thing was that Imperialism, like Solomon's supernatural powers, was a 'treasure which could never befall another'. In other words, once the Brits went bust in that line of work, nobody else could take over their multi-national Empire. The question was- 'which type of Nationalism will triumph in India?' The answer, it turned out, depended on sacred languages. Hindus went one way having Sanskrit as their sacred language. Muslims went another way, preferring the Arabic script. Buddhists had Pali and their own prestigious vernacular. Still, it must be said, all sub-continental politicians were talking the same stipe of verbose bollocks. 

In 1851, George Holyoake- a Socialist 'Owenite' and atheist (he was convicted of blasphemy in 1842 and spent six months in jail)- had coined the term 'Secularism' for what corresponded to the way India was already being ruled. Holyoake was not directly connected to India but a fellow atheist- Annie Besant, who was closely associated with Bradlaugh and who helped run the National Secular Society - was later to become a President of the Indian National Congress and the Indian Home Rule league. Motilal Nehru became a Theosophist thanks to her charisma and his son, Jawaharlal, who was home-schooled till the age of 15, had an English theosophist as his tutor.  Thus, when we speak of Nehruvian 'secularism', there is a direct connection, through Annie Besant to Bradlaugh and Holyoake and the British National Secular Society. However, British India had always been completely secular. Had he lived in Calcutta rather than Cheltenham, Holyoake could not have been sent to prison for denying the existence of God. The only thing anybody could be prosecuted for was what amounted to a public order offence. It is a different matter that there was Racism in British India. But this applied to a Brown Christian just as much as it did to a Brown Hindu or Brown Muslim. 

One reason there was increasing support for Atheism/Agnosticism/Secularism etc in the UK was because people could see that India was being run on secular lines and yet was a source of great wealth. You could have stable government without the prop of an Established Religion.  Disraeli, in 1857, reminded the British that India had not been conquered. The Brits had established their sway by providing a service in return for hefty remuneration. But that service was wholly secular. The British were not claiming a monetary reward for rescuing heathen souls from the fires of Hell. Rather, the East India Company followed a utilitarian and secular policy. It was, after all, a commercial enterprise. Holyoake himself, at that time a popular author and champion of the Co-operative movement, had put the blame for the Mutiny on 'the Mischiefs of Missionaryism in India' in November of 1857. 

It is true that Holyoake and Besant and other militant atheists or Socialists of the mid-Victorian period softened their views and turned to Spiritualism or Theosophy or a vague 'Religion of Humanity' as they got older. In part this represented a recoil from the brutalist 'Social Darwinism' and Racialist philosophies coming into vogue amongst the upper class as well as an acknowledgment that younger people were being attracted to nihilistic, terrorism based, secret societies and conspiratorial politics. Victorian radicalism had been superseded. Besant, converting to Blavatsky's Theosophy, moved to Madras. Yet, Young Russia looked to the Revolutionaries, not Tibetan Mahatmas on the astral plane. As Lenin would later say, Tolstoy helped pave the path to the 1905 insurrection which in turn was but the prelude to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The time had passed when Religion could buy peace by making concessions to the secularists. It was the turn of Prelates and Princes to tremble with fear of the Gulag or Guillotine. 

Britain, of course, never secularized itself. England has an Established Church though the King worships as a Presbyterian when in Scotland. Still, the offence of blasphemy has disappeared save in Northern Ireland. 

What of India? In 1947, both Jinnah and Nehru said their new countries would be Secular. Pakistan quickly changed its mind and became an Islamic Republic as did Bangladesh. India, however, is officially a Secular, Socialist, Republic. Yet, Hindus- the majority- are treated differently from those of other religions (officially defined as 'minorities') in several important respects. Some Hindu politicians allege that Hindus are treated worse than others but, if this is indeed the case, the motive may well be to spur that community to make more rapid progress in dismantling barriers of caste, gender, region etc such that all Hindus benefit. Still, it is noteworthy that in India different sects would prefer to get the 'minority' tag. However, if they are not already more prosperous than average, there is little benefit in getting the right to run their own educational and other similar institutions. 

A Bengali Christian savant, Ashis Nandy attracted attention some thirty years ago by publishing an 'anti-Secularist manifesto'. A Muslim philosopher in America, Akeel Bilgrami, responded with a screed more vacuous and deracinated yet. Meanwhile, the BJP showed slightly more cohesion and administrative capacity than the other remnants of the Janata Morcha (which had split on the issue of 'dual membership' of the RSS) and thus had emerged as its successor- at least at the Centre. I suppose one could say that the Ram Temple issue is what gave the BJP the edge. This was a property dispute where, later on, the Supreme Court decided, on the basis of Colonial era law which gave legal personality to Temple Deities, in favour of the Hindu claimants. It turned out that hysterical opposition to that perfectly sensible and legal solution was a very foolish project. Sonia Gandhi, once clear of the Bofors case, issued a statement saying she- or rather a Shakaracharya who had taken a shine to her- would build the Temple if the Courts decided in favour of the Hindus. Later, neither she nor her son took the Prime Ministership. Instead, a Sikh was installed. Sonia had managed to appease both Hindus and Sikhs without alienating the Muslims. Sadly, the Congress High Command did not back Manmohan's pleas to be allowed to conduct further, needful, reforms and he became a lame duck. Rahul's refusal to step up to the plate doomed Congress to an ignominious defeat. It continues to underperform because of the moon-calf even though he has come out of the closet as a 'janeodhari' Brahmin. But this is precisely the problem. Hindus don't like arrogant Pundits. They recall that Nehru, in his autobiography, spoke of the need to 'Brahminize' Indian society which, he thought, had become dominated by 'Banias'- i.e. businessmen from the Mahatma's own caste. Indira Gandhi, a devout Hindu, had fought a court case to prove her sons were Hindu. The fact that the Catholic Church refused to bless Priyanka's wedding meant that her marriage was wholly Hindu and thus her offspring were Hindu. Moreover, a Shankaracharya had done Sonia's 'Grha Pravesh' ceremony. There were other signals that Rahul remained a Brahmin in the eyes of the numerically strong Brahmins of U.P. But he was utterly useless and so they gave him the order of the boot in 2019, preferring to elect Smriti Irani- a popular actress and charismatic politician who is married to a Zoroastrian. One could say she was 'Hindutvadi'- i.e. an ecumenical or cultural Hindu but she is not associated with any particular caste or sect. Indeed, it is Rahul, not Smriti, who keeps visiting Temples and receiving the blessings of Religious preceptors. Thus the difference between the 'Hinduism' of Rahul and Tharoor and Modi's 'Hindutva' is that the former is Casteist and upholds the dynastic principle. The latter is ecumenical and accords equality to those from humble backgrounds. Meanwhile, different States are welcome to be as religious or irreligious as they like. The Centre may promote things like Yoga and the use of vernacular language in education and the judiciary etc. but hasn't really departed from Nehruvian policies. Consider the Citizenship Amendment Act. It merely confirms the position enunciated by Nehru in 1948. Only non-Muslim refugees fleeing Islamic persecution would be granted citizenship. One or two Muslims who had been accused of blasphemy might get protection but, as in the case of Dr. Taslima Nasrin, they would have to flee to Scandinavia if the local Mullahs got riled. True, some Afghan and other such Muslim entrepreneurs could get citizenship so as to have passports which would enable them to travel and build up their businesses, but the majority of such displaced people were better off remaining in the queue for resettlement to Europe or America under UN auspices. 

I have said that Indian Secularism, that too under John Company's administration, was a reality before any such thing obtained in Europe. I should have qualified that by saying that local customs had judicial force. In other words, any given territory remained as secular or religious as it had previously been. One might say, this was merely a type of fossilization rather than anything we could dignify as the result of a political doctrine. However, the fact is, Indians could lobby for, and get, needful reforms and that various new Sects did in fact gain wide currency. This had a direct impact on Indian politics, with the Arya Samaj in Punjab and Gujarat playing a particularly militant role. Indeed, we might say Bhai Parmanand's visit to Gandhi in South Africa, was what tipped him over into embracing celibacy just as Lala Hardayal would do. Sadly, Hardayal, being Punjabi, didn't get that celibates must not incessantly wed Swiss or Swedish damsels. Still, there was something comic about Sadhu Mahatmas and self-proclaimed Maharishis and one Buddhist Acharya (D.D Kosambi's father) living happily with their wives and kids while pretending to have renounced worldly life. 

I imagine that the Indian Muslim- more particularly one living abroad who is constantly bombarded with scare stories in the NYT about Hindu Nazis slaughtering Muslims with impunity (though it was the US which killed 1.3 million Muslims in its so called 'War on Terror')- might well feel invested in Nehruvian 'Secularism'. But that was mere dynastic Brahminism of a dirigiste type in which the 'tijarat' (entrepreneurship) of the Muslim had little scope to flourish with the result that decade by decade a previously 'forward' community sank in socio-economic terms (unless, like the late Mukhtar Ansari, grandson of a saintly Doctor politician, they turned to gangsterism).

Akeel Bilgrami, I imagine, is one such 'secular' Nehruvian Muslim. Yet from the Nineties he turned to Mahatma Gandhi- though rather an odd Gandhi who, under his khadi dhoti, wore reinforced, Red- indeed, Leninist!- underpants. 

The following is an interview he gave to the Leftist savant, Jipson John

I grew up in a home, a secular Muslim home, in which Nehru was held in such affection and admiration that one thought of him as if he were an elderly member of one’s own family.

Nehru was referred to as 'Chachaji'- paternal uncle.  

My father would refer to him as “Jawaharlal”

which is a bit of a tongue twister. There is a good reason most stuck with 'Chacha Nehru'.  

even though he hadn’t, so far as I know, ever met him. Growing up, I had read almost everything he had written, including many of the speeches and less well-known writings that have been collected.

Yet, Bilgrami didn't notice that Nehru advocated 'Brahminization'. I suppose, Ashraf Muslims like the Bilgramis felt they too were honorary Brahmins. But Nehru thought of them as having a vulgar, entrepreneurial streak. After all, the Prophet himself was a merchant. 'Tijarat' (Commerce) was the foundation of 'Imarat' (the State). The Brits too were a nation of shopkeepers. We must send those vulgar counter-jumpers packing so as to re-establish Bureaucratic Boringness as Secular, Socialist, Brahminization sans sexy shenanigans.  

Gandhi was respected, of course, but he was a more distant figure. And I had not read anything but his autobiography. When I began to read Gandhi in the early 1990s, I realised—slowly, reluctantly, overcoming my upbringing—that he was a far deeper and far more original thinker than Nehru.

Because he was a Bania- moreover one who had lived in casteless Africa- and hadn't even a smidgeon of the Brahminical gene for Bureaucratic Boringness which, sadly, is too widely disseminated in the sub-continent.  

Even where one disagreed with him, one saw how strikingly independent his thinking was, how he came to familiar issues from surprising angles. And one very striking feature of his work, I realised, was that, at its most ambitious, you couldn’t see many of the things he said about politics as being independent of his much more abstract thought about human nature and experience, about moral values, and about the nature of what he took the concept of “truth” to be. Very specific political claims he made were of a piece with, perhaps even derivable from, his views regarding these more remote notions. It is this integration of politics with high philosophy that I described with the term “integrity”.

Gandhi was a faddist, not a philosopher. Smuts, Aurobindo, Radhakrishnan, Hardayal wrote books which were recognizable as philosophy. Even the poet  Tagore was thought of as a philosopher by people like L.E.J Brouwer and, at a later point, Wittgenstein (who had previously steered Russell away from the verbose bore from the banks of the Brahmaputra) 

Mahatma Gandhi was a mass leader who fought the British and led the national movement. At the same time, he was leading a spiritual life and experimenting with spiritual practices

like Hardayal, Aurobindo, Brahmobandhu etc., etc. It must be said, 'Divine Mother'- the wife of a French colonial civil servant, did India a great favour when she got Aurobindo to give up brandy and cigars so as to better fit the image of a great Oriental Sage.  

and what he himself described as “my experiments with truth”. This was quite unique and rare. No modern great figure combined both in such a unique fashion anywhere in the world. Would you agree?

There were plenty of such people in India. The fact is, Indian Secularism- as established by the Brits- permitted anybody to set up as a Mahatma or Maharishi or Imam-ul-Hind or whatever. There was something of a fad for a retired Judge or Civil Servant or prosperous jeweller or contractor to 'give up worldly life' while keeping his wife and kids about him, and presiding over an Ashram or Mutt or whatever. George Arundale, husband of Rukmini, became a Bishop of the 'Liberal Catholic Church' which, apparently, still flourishes in sunny California.  

Yes, I would. There is a great tendency today to think that Gandhi’s political successes (as a historical figure who made a tremendous difference to the direction that Indian politics took) have an interest for us quite independent of his philosophy. I think, actually, that this is a preposterous view. Not only would he not have had those successes in the effect his actions had on people and, therefore, on events, but I don’t think we would be talking about him incessantly today in classrooms and in drawing rooms in the way we do, not to mention writing about him in journals and books, if he wasn’t the philosopher he so manifestly was.

 Bilgrami is drawing attention to the fact that Prof. Raghavan Iyer had spent a lot of time building up Gandhi as a political philosopher rather than a political organizer with a strong interest in social reform. Iyer was an old fashioned Theosophist. He had returned to India after gaining high academic honours in the UK and was given an important position in Nehru's Planning Commission. But, the atmosphere in New Delhi was stifling. Iyer fled back to the West- first England then sunny California- where the Civil Rights movement had created a new interest in Gandhi. Sadly, Iyer's scholarly work was worthless though his Gujarati wife could have helped him situate Gandhi's writings in their proper context. To give an example, Gandhi's Sanskrit tutor at Samaldas College would have been Manilal Dwiwedi who had translated a novel by Bulwer Lytton which features something like a 'Super-man' or occulted master spirit. Indeed, Lytton- whose son became Viceroy and whose grand-daughter converted to Theosophy after marrying Lutyens- had a big influence on occultist thought in Europe and thus became one of the sources of Indian Theosophy but also other, more sinister, political formations. 

Lord Bhikku Parekh, being Gujarati and thus perfectly sensible, offered an antidote to Iyer's deeply boring Mahatma but perhaps his academic standing wasn't quite as high (he studied at the LSE rather than Oxbridge or Ivy League) as Iyer and his ilk.

It should be mentioned that Quakers- e.g. Ken Boulding- as well as some associated with 'Moral Rearmament' and other such high minded movements had sought to appropriate Gandhism partly as a rebuke to Nehruvian India which annexed Goa and was pursuing capital intensive industrialization. The Indians didn't like this and after Indira returned to power, Buta Singh put the boot in to Gandhian foundations which had been foolish enough to side with the nutter JP.  Vinobha Bhave, however, had supported the Emergency.  Thus, the Indian Left began to picture a Leftist Gandhi whom JP should have identified with. In this fantasy story, JP and Kriplani wouldn't have chosen the useless Morarji as PM. Maybe it would have been Chandrashekhar or some other 'Young Turk'. In this fable, the evil RSS- wallahs retire to their shakas wailing and gnashing their teeth as India becomes a truly Socialist Shithole where everybody could quietly starve to death in between protesting against Neo-Liberalism. 

He simply would not have had the impact he did on his colleagues and he would not have generated the prodigious mobilisations he did, if his political actions were not integrated with his philosophical ideas.

This begs the question, why did Gandhi suddenly become the Dictator of the Khilafat-Congress combine? The answer was the he and only he was making the maximal demand- hand over all power, especially over the Army, to us. Do it now. I won't back down as I did after Jallianwallah even if violence breaks out. Moreover, thanks to Romain Rolland, people in Europe and America know my name. You can't hang me, as you threatened to do to Aurobindo, or send me to the Andamans as you did to Savarkar.' 

The fact is, England, in 1922 had to concede independence to Ireland, Egypt and Afghanistan. The Reds prevailed against the Whites in Russia. Ataturk prevailed against the Greeks in Turkey. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff warned that thanks to 'Geddes' axe'- i.e. cuts in the Defence budget- Britain hadn't the troops to hold Egypt or Ireland or even England itself in the event of a Bolshevik uprising. Thus, Lord Reading and Secretary of State Montague would be forced to do a deal with the Indians. They were vital to garrisoning the MENA. True, Dyer had suppressed a violent uprising in Punjab and had led his troops to victory over the Afghans, but Dyerism could not be maintained in a situation where even White, British, troops- weary of war- were turning mutinous. A deal had to be done now or the Empire, East of Suez, was doomed.

Then, Gandhi unilaterally surrendered and went meekly off to jail. Thus, when a Labour Government was formed two years later, not Col. Wedgwood but the disillusioned Olivier became Secretary of State for India. The Indians had been foolish to make Gandhi their dictator. He had made the triumph of the die-hard Tory inevitable. 

That integrity is undoubtedly an essential element in the appeal he had for the Indian masses.

No. His appeal was that of a Mahatma- a holy man who sought by gentle remonstrance to deliver people from social evils like alcohol, gambling, stabbing your brother to get his property, looking at dirty pictures, spending money on Godless education for your kids, paying Doctors to cure your wife of painful diseases when the bitch should just take a fucking hint and die already. 

It is those who don’t see the mass of a country’s people as capable of responding to such integrity and who see them responding only to his political skills that have this cramped view of Gandhi; and I think it is a view that reveals an undemocratic understanding of mass politics, of what the mass of people are capable of and of what they are responding to.

Nehru explains that the masses wanted more land and less tax or rent or whatever. That's it. Nothing less would do. Still, if there was money to be made and influence to be gained by joining the Congress racket- why not? Also going to jail is cool coz it gets you away from your spouse and the kids who keep clamouring for money to buy textbooks.  

On the other hand, I should tell you that there is a view abroad (which is said, by those who hold it, to have been influenced by something I have written, an influence I strongly disavow) that claims Gandhi to be an “anti-political” thinker.

Gandhi retained salience after his 1922 debacle because he didn't mind heading up agitations which were bound to fail. No younger leader wanted to be seen doing a less than maximal deal while Gandhi would sabotage such a deal even if it was offered to him on a silver platter. In other words, Gandhi had 'interessement' and 'obligatory passage point status' only so long as there was a trade-off between the benefit of immediate political gains and the cost of being accused of being an 'Uncle Tom' or a 'sell-out' by your younger rivals. 

Of course, if the immediate benefit involved getting control of the Army, then you need fear no talk of being a 'sell-out'. You could shoot or imprison 'seditionists'. You would be congratulated for having restored 'the smack of firm government' and the big British owned newspapers would be singing hymns to your sagacity. 

This view is preposterous in inversely equal proportion to the view of Gandhi I just spoke of. What I had said at the end of that first article you have mentioned, which is supposed to have had this influence, is the following: Gandhi’s studied indifference towards notions of rights and constitutions and codes of that kind came from his scepticism about a certain conviction of the political Enlightenment (perhaps the most fundamental commitment of the political Enlightenment, from which all other commitments to rights, constitutions etc., flow) that what was bad in us can be corrected by good politics .

This is not an 'Enlightenment' view. Despotism and dogmatic beliefs might prevent the implementation of sensible policies. Rationality and Tolerance would create an atmosphere where needful reform could more successfully be pursued. But, an 'Enlightened Despot' or else the 'liberalism of the officials' (beamtenliberalismus) might do this more efficaciously than Republican or Democratic institutions. 

On the other hand, everyone had always known that good policies could ameliorate socio-economic problems and, at a later point, there were political campaigns to outlaw certain repugnant practices or to root out problems of alcohol or drug abuse, but that was post-Enlightenment thought of an Evangelical, if not Puritan, cast.  

As I put it there, Gandhi did not think (as the political Enlightenment pretty much did) that you could make human beings better by transforming them into citizens .

It was obvious that when you give people responsibilities and trust them to carry them through conscientiously, then they do become more mature and capable. This is Shakespear's Prince Hal who from being a wastrel, turns into a good and righteous King. The Courts of Europe well knew this story and, it is a fact, that some enterprising people- even Jews- were raised into the class of officials which, speaking generally, gained from granting them entrance into the ranks of the nobility. My point is that the European Enlightenment, save for a brief period during the French Republic, showed no great enthusiasm for the notion of citizenship as opposed to responsible subjecthood. Democracy, it should be remembered, was not well thought of by Aristotle. America, however, was a different story- but citizenship was denied to its indigenous people.  

When I said all this, I was, first of all, only suggesting that Gandhi did not think that what is bad in us could be put right by politics.

Though it is politics which decides what is bad in us. Either homosexuality is a horrible vice, or it is perfectly natural and a homosexual wedding is just as joyous an occasion as any other sort. Guys kissing guys is either cool or it is the sort of thing which gets a film or a concert banned.

Gandhi thought having sex was bad. Nobody should do it- least of all a 'thinking Indian'. Sadly, his sons and grandchildren were unthinking clods. 

I was not, by any means, suggesting that he thought that harms and oppressions in the world should not be resisted by a political mobilisation.

Though, as Nehru complains, he called off such 'political mobilisations' claiming that some disciple of his hadn't been strict enough in obeying him. Clearly, for Gandhi, the main purpose of 'mobilisation' was not to change the world. It was to show discipline and commitment to his own crackpot cult of personality.  

And second, I was also only suggesting that this amounted to a scepticism about the claimed efficacies of a certain kind of codified liberal politics that defined the notion of “citizenship” that typically evolved ever since Westphalia in the political Enlightenment.

The Renaissance had a strong concept of citizenship which was in consonance with Republican Roman Law. By contrast, Westphalia had a concept of subjecthood which prevailed till after the Great War. Consider Einstein's nationality. Was he German by virtue of being a 'beamten' of the State of Prussia (where he held a University appointment)? Or was he, as he insisted, Swiss by reason of having renounced German and having taken Swiss citizenship? Einstein was very careful to ensure, after his emigration to the US, that the Germans would not consider him one of their own. Turning to the UK- and thus to India- there was no such thing in law as a British or Indian citizen, as opposed to a British or British protected subject, till the 1948 Act.  

I wasn’t suggesting that he was not committed to all or any politics.

 Gandhi said he represented the INC which was a political party. Again and again, he repeated the INC's maximal demand- viz. the immediate transfer of power over the Army to the INC and nobody else. Naturally, this united all non Congress supporters against an abrupt British withdrawal. 

You will have noticed that both these readings of Gandhi that I am calling preposterous are made for each other. They both deny exactly what I am calling his “integrity”, the latter view claiming that he is all and only a philosopher with no serious interest in politics, the former claiming that our interest in him is only in his political successes, not his remote philosophy. The idea of “integrity”, thus, is precisely intended to convey that for all their open contrast with each other, these two views share an underlying common flaw in that they fail to perceive what I am calling Gandhi’s “integrity”.

The opposite view is more tenable. Gandhi was a crackpot who dabbled in both politics and a faddish type of moral philosophy so as to get money for his money-pit of an Ashram and his various other crazy schemes. He had no integrity though, no doubt, he never wavered in his belief in his own wonderfulness.  

GANDHI & MARX

Generally, Gandhi and Marx are considered as two great figures who are at two poles.

Not in India. JP wasn't the first Socialist to go over to Gandhism and Bhoodan and other such nonsense. Indeed, had Gandhi lived, he might well have decided he was actually an atheist just as much as he was a Jew, a Muslim, a pork sandwich, or a nice elephant which has taken a dump on Pundit Nehru's bald head.  

But you have identified some important similarities between them. This is based on your argument that both shared a similar critique of modernity as they considered alienation from nature and us as the basic traits of modernity. 

What are the similarities of thought in Gandhi and Marx and how do you explain it in the context of modernity?

Yes, as you know, Gandhi was quite roundly criticised by the Left both in India and abroad for many decades. I don’t particularly want to comment on the contemporary Leftist writers who have taken to anti-Gandhian invective. And, in any case, it would be absurd to think that Gandhi did not make some serious political mistakes or to deny that he had views that were sometimes quite wrong. But I do think that there is a very interesting and very original “radical” or left-wing Gandhi to be unearthed from his writings and many of his deeds as well. In doing so, one has to be selective, of course. But that is true of most important thinkers. Like all of them, Gandhi’s thought and writings contained inconsistencies, but in a way it is worse with him, no doubt because, though he was a remarkable philosopher, he was not a salaried philosopher who strives for consistency—he often said and wrote things in the context of immediate political demands from the world around him and those remarks were, as one should expect, sometimes at odds with what he said in more reflective writings.

Gandhi produced no 'reflective writings'. He would dictate any random shite which came into his head and sometimes Mahadev Desai would take a little trouble with the results. 

It was Irfan Habib, in some articles, who first broke away from some of the Leftist clichés about Gandhi.

The big Leftist cliche was that India had not become independent. Communists must rise up against the bourgeois lackeys of Wall Street. Sadly, Commies discovered that- as in Indonesia- Hindus and Muslims would unite to slit their fucking throats. Suddenly non-violence didn't look so bad. Also, lets face it, what could be more petit bourgeois than a Leftist scribbler?  

I had not read these when I wrote that early essay. Irfan Saheb’s sympathetic perspective was, in any case, historical. My initial interest in Gandhi was far more philosophical.

The affinities with Marx that I have recorded are admittedly not on the surface of either of their writing. It is a matter of interpretation both of Gandhi and of Marx. In Marx, I stress the early writings and the very late writings of his last decade on the Russian mir .

Both were irrelevant to British India. Marx had initially taken a sympathetic interest in India under the influence of a British Chartist but after the Mutiny it was clear that the Indian situation was quite unlike Ireland or Tzarist Poland or other such territory. Moreover, Indian economists and sociologists started making their presence felt in London by the end of the 1860's. The nature of the agrarian problems of India was receiving more attention. Marx could see that this was a subject on which he could contribute nothing. Meanwhile, developments in Germany- and, a little later, in Russia- meant there was greater scope for his theories there. It should also be mentioned that British Hegelianism was a factor in Marx beginning to supplant Mill and Morley on the Left. Gandhi, as a law student, was attracted to Mazzini who was Marx's enemy but there were some strains of thought in the London of the period which were directly influenced by Marxian thinking. On the other hand, it should be remembered that Alfred Marshall- who had a direct influence on Indian economists- read Lasalle (as did Hyndman) and thus came to Marx. Gandhi was setting his face against the free trade aspect of Marshall whose Indian students tended to be Listian protectionists. Gandhi was also immune to the charms of 'Harbhat Pendse' and thus his stupid shite could be seen in Bhavnagar, if not Bombay, as on the side of Protection for the rising class of Indian industrial magnates. That's one reason the Tatas gave him lots of money for his South African campaign.

My point is that if you want to find a philosophical genealogy for Gandhi, the thing isn't difficult to do. Any 'inconsistencies' or outright nonsense in Gandhi's scribblings can be dismissed as ad captum vulgi remarks aimed at stupid, rustic, banias back in Gujarat. Still, it must be said that by claiming Ruskin and Carlyle as his 'Gurus', Gandhi was sending a signal to the Brits that he was deeply conservative. This is because, in Indian circles, Ruskin and Carlyle were the evil bastards who had supported Governor Eyre- the butcher of Morant Bay- while Mill, Darwin, Spencer & Dicey (the last two were important for Indian law students) had tried to bring the rogue to justice.  

And I try to understand the monumental analysis of capital through both these.

Which is cool if Bilgrami had studied Kantorovich's mathsy shite. Come to think of it Lawvere was giving a category theoretical treatment of Hegel's dialectic at about that time- i.e. the beginning of the Seventies. It was then that the Left- which didn't want to be bothered with complicated maths- gave up the intellectual ghost and retired to safe spaces on Ivy League campuses so as to commence a 'long march' to utter senility and uselessness. I believe most ended up being 'Me-tooed' by irate female graduate students.  

 Marx argued that countries like Russia (and there is some discussion of India, too, with very revealing criticism of people like Henry Maine) need not go through the incubation of capitalism that Europe had gone through in order to seek a revolutionary transformation.

Marx mentions 'sitting dharna'- i.e. using a hunger strike to compel somebody else to do something in conformity to customary morality- and criticizes Maine's account of the evolution of tribal sovereignty to territorial sovereignty on the basis of land ownership, as opposed to kinship ties, as defining status. 

It was certainly possible for an agricultural nation to chase away the Imperial tax gatherers and magistrates and choose to set up their own local courts and fiscal authorities. But this was similar to 'Owenite' notions of worker control of enterprises. Able people would thrive. The drunkards and wastrels would receive charity or emigrate. This wasn't a particularly revolutionary outcome. It wasn't Hegelian or 'dialectical'. All that you would have would be a post-William Tell Switzerland which produced- as Harry Lime says in 'The Third Man'- cuckoo clocks. 

Of course, Gandhi was not a socialist and didn’t seek, in his visionary hopes, a socialist future for India. I would go so far as to say that Gandhi had no serious understanding of the notion of “class”, as we have come to think of it. But he hated capitalism and what it did to human mentality and human society. Hind Swaraj is really about this last theme. And Hind Swaraj is so shrill and extreme in its anti-modernism, I think, because Gandhi was anxiously (but shrewdly) aware that if capitalism begins to take hold, it really gets very entrenched in ways that it had in the passage from Early to Late Modernity in Europe, and it then affects all human attitudes and social relations very adversely and very pervasively and deeply.

To be fair, Gandhi had witnessed the Boer War and the Concentration Camps and other such horrors. The feeling was that Britain had attacked the Boers because of their greed for gold and diamonds. This was the brutal face of Financial Capitalism starving Boer wives and daughters to death so as to bring their brothers or husbands to heel.  

But even putting aside these affinities with Marx, if I am right that Gandhi thought India was at the crossroads that Europe was in, in the Early Modern period, and that he wanted to pre-empt the developments in political economy (and their deleterious cognitive and social effects) that occurred in subsequent European modernity, then an equally good comparison is with other radical dissenting voices in Early Modern Europe. For that reason, I have situated a lot of Gandhi’s thinking as being in intellectual alliance, not just with Marx, but with pre-Marxian radical thinkers like Gerrard Winstanley in Early Modernity, who sought to pre-empt developments (in England, in his case) that he presciently foresaw as emerging from the enclosures movement and the privatisation of the commons and the converting of agrarian ways of life into what we would now call “agri-business”.

Gandhi did not concern himself with agriculture or land ownership. Land was purchased for him so that he could set up his Ashrams. It is foolish to equate a barrister with a bankrupt mercer turned cowherder who had been employed by a crazy mystical lady.  Perhaps, Bilgrami is thinking of an off-hand remark Gandhi made to Louis Fischer in which he predicted that the peasants would seize the lands and the zamindars would get no compensation. 

How do you intellectually deal with the concept of modernity? How modernity shaped and influenced us in all parts of the world. What about the criticisms of modernity raised by many theorists for its “instrumental rationality”, “Western-centric nature”, “anti-religious”, “Grand narrative”, etc.?

I do feel that one cannot have been anti-imperialist through the last century without having, in some sense , been anti-modern.

HG Wells was anti-imperialist. How was he 'anti-modern'? America soon repented gaining colonies. Americans were scarcely anti-modern.  

I say “in some sense” and mean it. It’s not obvious at all what that sense of anti-modern exactly is and ought to be. That is a very complex question. Many bad answers have been given to that question. A lot of my work has been struggling with that question. Though there are many more subtle things to say, the first and obvious thing to notice is an elementary transitivity: imperialism is essential to capitalism

Nope. There can be Imperialism without markets for capital and highly developed capital markets without Imperialism. Lenin may have suggested otherwise but that was either tactical or plain foolish. The fact is, Imperialism disappeared and Capital Markets flourished as never before.  

and since capitalism is an economic formation of modernity,

Nope. Ancient Rome had highly efficient capital markets and a class of Epicurean economists who were helping their patrons get very very rich through complex financial operations.  

being anti-imperialist in any fundamental way is necessarily to be opposed to capitalism

So, Lee Kuan Yew was opposed to capitalism. Who knew?  

and that would, eo ipso , mean being opposed to modernity.

Lee Kuan Yew insisted his wives and daughters bind their feet. He himself sported a pig-tail and wore the silk robes of a Mandarin.  

Of course, many who sought independence from colonial rule

e.g. George Washington 

were not opposed to imperialism in any deep way, so they never accepted this simple point. But it is this point that brought Gandhi and the Left together.

But the Left was never 'together' with Gandhi while he was alive. Later, after Nehru had cracked down on the Commies, there was a notion that pretending to be a Gandhian might allow one to do 'mass contact' under the cover of 'bhoodan' but then it turned out JP wasn't a crypto Commie. He was a genuine idiot, not a useful one at all. Indeed, it was the Naxalites who opened JP's eyes to the fraud that was Bhave's land donation movement.  

The Left, of course, focussed much more directly on the economic structures of colonialism

which they failed to understand. The fact is, there was no mercantilist 'drain'. Rather there was the compulsory export of invisible public goods- Law & Order, Defence etc. Sadly, minorities tended to do well under Imperial masters. We need an Idi Amin to get rid of those bastards so we can sink back into poverty.  

and an emerging capitalism in its opposition, whereas Gandhi’s opposition, as I said earlier, was more focussed on the cognitive and cultural fall-out of capitalist modernity.

Sadly, you have to pay good money to gain that 'cognitive' or 'cultural' fall-out- unless you get a scholarship to study useless shite on a tony college campus.  

You list a number of portmanteau terms towards the end of your question to summarise recent theoretical critical angles on modernity. I find each one of them, as they have been wielded by critics of modernity, a little too blunt. So take, for instance, “instrumental rationality” used as a term of opprobrium. What is it meant to convey?

Optimization of 'goal-fulfilment'.  

Very broadly speaking, it is meant to capture how, in modernity, we have made reason too focussed on how to identify and pursue the most efficient means for the goals that have emerged in bourgeois society.

No. Bourgeois society has different goals from that of individuals in any type of society. This is because the bourgeoisie is a class with a certain habitus and certain entitlements and immunities. Selfish behaviour on the part of some people- whether bourgeois or not- may prevent the goals of the collective being fulfilled. 

There could be a more holistic, collective type of rationality but it would not be 'instrumental'- i.e. it would not see any social formation or mechanism to be merely a means to an individual end.  

Now, opposing this tendency of reason (let us, for the sake of abbreviation, call that anti-instrumentalism), would require very careful attentiveness to the detail of what “instrumentality” or “instrumentalism” amounts to. Gandhi understood this well.

He was wholly innocent of this type of jargon. In Hindu terms, he could have spoken of economic 'artha' or interests, and their rational pursuit through thrift, sobriety, enterprise, sound portfolio choice etc. etc. But there was little point in doing so and, anyway, other Banias had made way more money than Gandhi. Moreover, their kids were graduating from MIT (which institution Tilak greatly praised with the result that the first Indian to enrol there, back in the 1880s, was from Pune. Marshall, too, suggested that Indian students should go to America rather than England for technical education.)  

As I say in some of my writing on him, he asks a genealogical question about modernity that seems to be anti-instrumentalist, that seems to have located a very general instrumentality that he opposes: “How and when did we transform the concept of the “world” as not merely a place to live in but a place to master and control?”

This happened at the beginning of the Kali Yuga though, no doubt, there were traces of decline and decay in earlier epochs. At one time all were Brahmins. Then, slowly, some fell away from that high ideal with the result that lower castes began to proliferate.

I'm not kidding. Stuff like this was supposed to be 'Sanaatani' back then. This is what Nehru was getting at when he demanded the re-Brahminization of India. Still, it must be said, nobody at that time thought this meant getting stuck with a dynastic moon-calf like Rahul.  

But that question is so general, so omnibus, that one has no idea how to go about answering it.

Unless you are Hindu and came across this type of shite on the bookshelves of your ancestral home.  

In Gandhi’s work, we find that he breaks it down to four different detailed questions: How and when did we transform the concept of nature to the concept of natural resources ?

Nature is 'Prakriti'. It has a dialectical relationship with 'Purusha'. Ayurveda gives one type of explanation of how the two affect each other. The Jain concept of 'aashrav' or influx of karma binding particles gives another type of explanation. The Theosophists were propounding a theory of how 'prarabhda karma' could be changed in the way that an archer can shoot an arrow to deflect another arrow. There was also an English Judge who was writing about Tantra around this time. So, all in all, you had plenty of answers with a sort of occult commonality to this question. Gandhi was seen as being part of that bunch of faddists who, however, were socially prominent. PG Woodhouse's elder brother was a Theosophist. Jeeves appears at precisely the moment when PG was most worried about his brother's fate in the trenches of France. Jeeves is a Spinozan 'jivanmukta'. Worcester is the Atma which witnesses all without being personally drawn into the 'Lila' or play. Thanks go to his 'gentleman's gentleman' for this happy outcome. 

Sadly, Gandhi wanted to be a Bulwer Lytton type Master Spirit of his age rather than a quiet 'jivanmukta'- a Jeeves serving cocktails as a means to pour oil on troubled waters while, in some occult manner, ensuring that all complications and conflicts are harmoniously resolved.

How and when did we transform the concept of human beings to the concepts of citizens ?

There was no such transformation at that time.  

How and when did we transform the concept of people into the concept of populations ?

The Bible mentions censuses of the sort which the Brits were carrying out in India.  

And, how and when did we transform the concept of knowledges (to live by) into the concept of expertise (to rule by)?

I suppose one might mention Plato at this point. However, for Hindus, there had always already been experts who possessed 'Daksha'.  

Now, if one goes on to answer all these questions in specific detail and then return to show in detail how these answers are not answers to four miscellaneous questions, but, at bottom, answers to the same question (the initial omnibus question) only then would we have said something meaningful by deploying the term “anti-instrumentalism”.

Hinduism, like Islam, Christianity, Taoism etc is a complete Soteriology which, properly understood, is anti-instrumentalist.  

Until then, it is all just airy hand-waving and clichés about “means and ends”.

Bilgrami's oeuvre involves nothing but hand-waving and pearl-clutching.  

Similar cautionary points can be made about all the anti-modernity critical terms you cite.

One line of criticism I pursue in trying to understand the failures of modernity is to point out first (what is surely widely known) that its two chief sloganised ideals of “liberty” and “equality”, as soon as they were articulated by the political Enlightenment, were theoretically and methodologically developed in such a way that they were in tension with one another.

The French scrapped them almost immediately. Slavery was reintroduced by an Emperor whose big plan for Europe was that his brothers and sisters should rule over its various Kingdoms while his half-Hapsburg son inherited his Imperial mantle.  

This is for reasons that have been well-studied such as, for instance, most conspicuously the fact that the possession of property bestowed on the possessor a notion of liberty that became erected into the law of the land as a fundamental right everywhere in the spread of liberal modernity.

Anybody can have any notion they like. What Bilgrami may be trying to say is that various polities granted male adult suffrage to property owners and this was gradually widened. It is a separate matter that Magna Carta and other sources of law were considered to grant certain Hohfeldian immunities to all within a jurisdiction. But, this was a justiciable matter. What mattered was whether there was an effective remedy under a vinculum juris- or bond of law. 

How this generates tensions with the goal of equality are so well-known

People may say their goal is equality but they tend to resent one's helping oneself to an equal share of the good things they have of life.  

and so well mined that I don’t need to say anything more about it.

Why not admit that no polity from about 1970 onward considered reducing Income or Wealth inequality a worthwhile project? The thing was a vote loser or else it pushed the country over a fiscal cliff. It is a different matter that under conditions of total war, it helps morale if 'equi-marginal sacrifice' is implemented- or, at least, that fiction is kept up. But once the war is over people want an end to rationing even if this means entrepreneurs get rich.  

Much less well-studied is another source of the tension between liberty and equality, which comes from the incentivisation of talent that owes to liberty attaching to notions of dessert.

This was a feature of the Tzarist Empire. Service to the State enabled you to rise in the table of nobility. Lenin was a hereditary nobleman because his father had been a conscientious servant of the Government. It was also the case that an Emperor might grant special immunities and entitlements to particular localities or communities on the grounds that they had 'earned' such privileges by their meritorious contribution to the State or the Commonweal. One might say that the French notion of 'evolved' Black People from the Colonies becoming eligible for almost equal treatment had a similar basis. Communist countries could also have a caste system based on class origin but this seems to have faded away except perhaps in North Korea. On the other hand, many ex-colonies have 'bhumiputra' laws such that the indigenous people have superior rights and entitlements. 

It is only fair to add that in the UK there was a notion that the big role that women played in the Great War meant they 'deserved' the vote. There was a similar argument that India's military contribution meant Indians deserved home rule. Perhaps, this is what Bilgrami is getting at. 

For centuries, when there was some excellence of production (say, a work of art), it was the zeitgeist which produced it that got the praise and admiration.

Yet we know the name of Praxiteles, the sculptor, and Mani the painter, not to mention Homer and Vyasa and Kalidasa and so forth. 

If you take the long historical view, it is relatively recently that individual talent began to get the praise and reap the reward for such productions. And this happened partly out of a growing ideological view that to praise the zeitgeist for such excellence was to deny a person’s individuality, it was to see the individual person responsible for these productions as mere physical embodiments of the zeitgeist. Thus, notions of dessert became tied to the notion of individual liberty and talent thereby got incentivised. Indeed, it became part of a generalised liberty because it spread over to the idea of the liberty of others to enjoy the excellence of the productions of individual talent since the latter now was incentivised to be as excellent as it could be. So, by the time you come to our contemporary times, you have merit raises for salaried professionals, bonuses for bankers, endorsements for sportsmen, prizes for authors of books, on and on… all in the name of individual liberty; and it should be obvious how all this too gives rise to tensions with aspirations to equality. For these (and other) reasons, then, modernity’s main political tradition developed its two great ideals of liberty and equality in a way that they could not be jointly realised .

Bilgrami is observing a market phenomenon. China had very well developed markets and connoisseurs of Chinese art and calligraphy can reel of the names of great poets and artists from thousands of years ago some of whose work is still available to buy for astronomical sums. I had a friend, back in the Eighties, whose father invested heavily in art treasures being sold off by the Communist Government. Within a decade he was making a killing selling these back to noveau riche Chinese businessmen.  

Having observed this, I turned again to Marx and Gandhi and observed further that they never made either of these ideals central to their thought. Marx explicitly dismissed liberty and equality as bourgeois ideals.

Frauds, not ideals. This was certainly fair comment on what was happening in Louis Phillipe's France or the Great British Panic of 1847.  

And Gandhi, as is well known, showed a complete indifference to these liberal notions and the codes and institutions that were supposed to enshrine them.

No. From time to time, when addressing the Viceroy or setting out the INC's position, he could express himself like a barrister. That's what confused some high British officials. Was the man a Machiavellian strategist or a crackpot? The answer was the latter as Woodrow Wyatt would later explain to any darkie he chanced upon.  

I think these sources of the tension between liberty and equality were central to their rejection of both ideals, even if they did not put it in just the way I have.

Marx was a Communist. He was initially hopeful that there could be a pan-European Communist Revolution. He was disappointed. The slow pace of 'Parliamentary' reform and the modest goals of Trade Unionists and 'Owenites' and so forth disappointed him. Then he was outflanked by Henry George's more Ricardian radicalism. But for the Bolshevik Revolution he would have been a forgotten man- perhaps a footnote in a biography of Lasalle or some other such more glamorous figure. 

And I believe that they both sought something much more fundamental, much more human, and even ageless, than these ideals of Enlightenment modernity.

Both Marx and Gandhi thought they themselves were hella smart. Engels kept Marx in drink and ink. Gandhi was able to cast his net wider. Some of the scions of his financiers are still big big names on the Indian Corporate landscape. It is in their interest to keep lambent the flame of the maha-crackpot.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by the Marxist and Gandhian ideal of the “unalienated life” replacing the modern liberal ideals of liberty and equality?

In Marx's utopia, technology has progressed to a point where there is no scarcity and therefore no private property. People work because they like working and they give away what they produce to anyone who wants it. In Gandhi's utopia, technology and trade have disappeared. Everybody lives in a small village toiling equally so as to enjoy a modest repast. Unlike Condorcet (or Marx's) Utopia which Malthus warned would be overrun by starving indigents, Gandhi's utopia would feature no sex. The human race would die out.  

Yes, sure. This reading of Gandhi and Marx as replacing the ideals of liberty and equality does not mean that those ideals are irrelevant. But they cannot be the notions any longer that are found in liberal modernity. Let me try to explain. Put aside Marx and Gandhi, who are the inspirations for this form of critique of modernity, and let us look at this general issue of how to reconfigure our political ideals along these lines. In my writing, I’ve presented it basically in Kuhnian terms. Thomas Kuhn had said that radical changes in theory (what he called paradigm shifts) do not retain the old concepts and say better things about them. Rather, they change the subject. They re-conceptualise the old concepts in a new framework. It’s a meaning-change, not a theory-change. For theory change, the meanings have to be constant. But what happens in radical shifts is that the meanings get revised. So, for instance, “mass” in Einstein’s physics does not mean what it means in Newtonian mechanics. Thus, it cannot be counted as an improvement of Newtonian mechanics. It really changes the subject rather than improves the theory on that subject. Exactly that is the proposal with the ideals of liberty and equality. One shouldn’t be trying to improve on the theories of the Enlightenment, one should discard those theories as being based on the wrong (“bourgeois”, as Marx called them) ideals.

This is foolish. What was worthwhile in Kuhn was the 'no neutral algorithm' theorem which is like Tinbergen's rule that policy instruments must equal the number of policy objectives. Furthermore, for co-evolved processes, no ideas or ideals have 'naturality' or are non-arbitrary save in very limited, very pragmatic, contexts.

In Engineering, Newtonian physics is fine for most stuff. Only in certain cosmological or quantum contexts do you have to bring in relativistic effects.  But even Einstein's theory breaks down and has to be modified at low accelerations.

The next question, obviously, is: what would bring about the change in their meanings? And my thought has been that if we remove liberty and equality—riddled with inner tension as they are—from the theoretical centre stage that they have had in European modernity and put on centre stage instead the ideal of an unalienated life, then one can bring liberty and equality back (from the back door, as it were) but no longer as central now, but only as necessary conditions for this more fundamental ideal that is on centre stage.

Liberty and Equality are 'intensional' or epistemic terms about which we change our minds as our information set expands. But the same is true of 'unalienated life' or 'consummate cuddliness of Universe grokking' or anything else we might consider super-cool. 

As for whatever might be 'centre stage' for elderly pedagogues teaching useless shit, who gives a flying fuck?  

The idea is that if this is properly done, there would be a serious chance of removing the inner tension between liberty and equality that was present when they were the central notions.

Nonsense! All that you could get by this route is incommensurability. Nobody could say 'x has more liberty than y, who is his slave' because maybe y's 'unalienated life' requires him to serve x. The point about liberty is it can be 'operationalized' as 'Hohfeldian incidents'. It gives rise to something justiciable. Similarly, equality can be looked at from an economic point of view. There is a mathematical theory of 'fair division' or 'envy free' transactions and this can actually be quite useful in resolving justiciable matters arising under an incomplete contract. 

'Unalienated life' is worse than even Sen-tentious 'Capabilities' because the thing can't be quantified even 'at the end of Time'. No doubt, one could arbitrarily declare that everybody who is employed to do a job is the victim of the confiscation of 'surplus value' and is thus suffering Marxian 'alienation' in that the produce of his free labour has been turned into dead 'Capital' which sucks his blood like a vampire. But others may, equally arbitrarily, accuse you of being a zombie intellectual seeking to feast upon the brains of graduate students who, having elected to study nonsense, are as stupid as shit. Obviously, once we have vampires and zombies, gay werewolves can't be far behind. At this point the sensible thing to do is finish your drink and go home.  

So, everything turns on what is meant by “properly done” and much of my recent theoretical exertions have been focussed on that task. The first task, obviously, is to say something about what is meant by “alienation”, so that one can be clear about what one is seeking in seeking the ideal of an unalienated life.

Right at the outset, it should be said that if you take up this dialectic that I’ve set up between these three ideals, “alienation” becomes an ambiguous term. How so?

It’s an interesting fact about alienation that all its most well-known theorists (Rousseau, Marx, Gandhi, Sartre, to name just a few) saw it as a malaise only of modernity.

Coz if it was a malaise of antiquity, you'd have to be a fucking philologist and demonstrate a profound knowledge of ancient Greek and Hebrew and Hiero-fucking-glyphics.  

Premodernity had many horrible defects but alienation was not one of them. Even slaves and serfs had a sense of belonging, whatever else they didn’t have.

No. The Bible makes it clear that Babylonian captivity caused Jews to cry and cry. Indeed, in the Bible there is the notion of the 'jubilee' when everybody can return to take back their ancestral land even if some usurer had grabbed it from them. 

On the other hand, African Americans frequently express their discomfort with modernity because their kids aren't being snatched from their arms and 'sold down the river'. 

In fact, the introduction of liberty and equality as central ideals in modernity was intended partly to address those defects and deprivations suffered in premodern societies. But now, if in my dialectic liberty and equality are supposed to be necessary conditions for the achievement of the unalienated life, what is meant by “unalienated life” cannot possibly be the unalienated life of premodernity since in premodernity it was precisely un accompanied by liberty and equality. So, the term is being used ambiguously.

No. The 'concrete model' for it is a patriarchal type of slavery where the slave had a sense of 'oikeiosis' or natural, organic, connection with the plantation or homestead. Sadly, thanks to mischievous changes in the Zeitgeist (caused, I need hardly, say by 'rootless', cosmopolitan, Jews) the 'intension' of 'unalienated' came to mean having to work for wages and not having an owner. Thus slaves were tricked into becoming free and were very miserable. Biden Sahib should very kindly reintroduce Jim Crow and then, by gradual steps, lead African Americans back to the barracoons their ancestors were cruelly ejected from. 

The theoretical task here is quite ambitious—because I’m trying to transform three concepts at once .

These are not concepts. They are 'intensions' of an epistemic type. At different times they may correspond to quite different concepts because the 'background information' has changed.  

I’m trying to transform the concepts of liberty and equality, as I said at the start, by removing them from the centrality they have had in the modern period

this involves making both concepts non-justiciable or operationalizable for the Social Sciences 

and making them merely necessary conditions for the more central ideal of the unalienated life,

but, a necessary condition can't be epistemic or intensional unless there is a non-arbitrary way to fully specify its extension. In other words, Bilgrami would first have to exhibit a concrete model of 'unalienated life' and then show what 'extension' of 'liberty' and 'equality' was necessary for that model to exist. This would be the 'base case'. Bilgrami would then have to show, by induction, how every succeeding state of the system must necessarily comply (save under exogenous shock) with his stipulations. If Bilgrami can't present us with a time series of this type, he isn't doing theory. He is hand waving. 

Of course, for any protocol bound, buck-stopped, discourse- e.g. that of the Law- there is no big problem with intensional objects whose extensions are not fully known. This is precisely because an arbitrary procedure exists to get to a judgment which 'has the right to be wrong'. This is 'artificial reason'. It isn't philosophy. 

but now I am also saying that I am trying to transform the notion of an unalienated life from what it was as exemplified in premodernity.

In other words, Bilgrami is seeking to create his own Dungeons & Dragons or Game of Thrones vision of a mythical past. Will gaining 'unalienated life' give you shape-shifting abilities? How about a light-sabre? Jedi knights lead unalienated lives- right? Shame their sons keep going over to the Dark Side.  

So, it is a triangular transformation of all three concepts in concert, all at once, that I am seeking.

No. It is what George R.R Martin found when he created the GoT franchise. Or maybe not. Truth be told, I never finished watching it. Too many naked men displaying their dangly bits and not enough dragons.  

I won’t try and explain how exactly I’ve tried to do this. It would be hard to spell it out in a brief interview. I’ll just say that it involves a close look at and a critique of how liberal modernity in its theorising

Liberal modernity doesn't bother with theorizing. It likes cool shiny tech and lots and lots of party drugs. 

has presented the outlook and framework of political economy and politics, from Locke’s contractualist arguments for property down to more recent game-theoretic consolidations of Locke in multi-person prisoners’ dilemma style arguments about the “tragedy of the commons”, and trying also to get beyond the limited nature of the regulatory answers to such arguments that are found in Elinor Ostrom’s (superb) work on the commons, responding to these arguments.

Sadly, her work was and is useless. Climate change is upon us. Either State capacity must grow exponentially or the Commons is fucked because handing control rights to Oligarchs is the only viable, albeit, 'second best' solution. 

It is very much a contemporary philosopher’s effort to address these issues, but in the end the ideas and arguments I present are really in the service of a critique of liberal modernity that can be found, in one or other form, in both Marx and Gandhi.

But liberal modernity is dead in the water. Either an Eurasian 'world island' under China's leadership will gain hegemony or else some variety of populist democracy, in the West, will dispense with the shibboleths of 'Ordoliberalism'. 

Let me conclude my already too lengthy answer to your question by making one point that I feel quite strongly about, even though it may seem terminological. It is tempting to say that Marx is a figure of the Enlightenment

Nope. He started of as a Young Hegelian- i.e. a Romantic- who tried to adapt to English empiricism and 'economism' but failed coz he didn't know Math and thus missed the bus on the Marginal Revolution.  

and so how can I present him as the source of a critique of modernity?

Why not? There was a theological stripe of British Hegelianism which drew upon Ruskin and Morris and Merrie Olde England's Maypoles and Mystics. Come to think of it, George Eliot translated Feuerbach in the 1840s. It wouldn't be too difficult to cherry pick from Marx's drunken ramblings so as to present a Spinozan Marx. No doubt, some tedious 'Liberation Theology' type nutter has already done so. That was cool so long as the Soviet Union was kicking ass and taking names. Now, not so much. 

I think this is a tiresomely unhelpful way of thinking of intellectual history. It is simply to deny the weight and preponderance of liberalism in shaping modernity, which, to this day, has a dominant hold on society and is even entirely complicit, I would argue, with the so-called right-wing populist efforts to oppose it.

Yes, yes. Liberalism is also complicit in my neighbour's cat's ILLEGAL surveillance of me. Biden refuses to take action. He is no better than Trump.  

The political Enlightenment and its legacy is massively shaped by liberal thought and ideals.

No. Racism massively shaped liberal thought and the European Enlightenment. Basically, stupid Nordics didn't want Professors to keep reminding them of how inferior their ancestors were to the ancient Greeks and Hebrews and Romans and so forth. The last straw was when the Jesuits returned from China full of praise for that great Civilization. Henceforth, Europe would pretend to be racially and culturally superior to every other type of peoples. This did involve getting organized to gain wealth by fair means or foul. Sadly, the Germans decided it was cheaper and more convenient to colonize their neighbours rather than head off to darkest Africa to molest the natives.  

It completely distorts things to see the Enlightenment as a mere ragbag of doctrines and ideas in which Locke and Mill and Hegel and Marx can all be thrown in. It is far more intellectually honest to say that there were radically dissenting voices such as Marx, and Marx was in many ways part of the Romantic tradition of thought. If you take a book like Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down in which he looks at early radical and communistic views during the period of the English Revolution, you will find antecedents to Marx who were presenting ideas that would have—if they had won out rather than been suppressed

i.e. if the guys spouting them weren't clearly losers or maniacs or maniacal losers 

—pre-empted the path that England and Europe took from Early Modernity to Late Modernity.

England and Europe could have turned into shitholes. But then they'd have been conquered.  

These ideas were the antecedents to Marx and they are the start of a trajectory that goes via Romantic thought, both in England and Germany, to Marx.

But they failed in England and Germany. The Bolshevik Revolution rescued Marx from oblivion. But, for his noxious creed to revive, China will have to scrap its 'Confucius Institutes' and start promoting the drivel written by lunatics like Lunacharsky who, tragically, died before Stalin could deal with him properly.  

In fact, very often in that book, when Christopher Hill wants to present some of these radical ideas, he quotes Blake, as do other Left historians and intellectual historians like E.P. Thompson. But the Romantics often get counted as the “counter”-Enlightenment. Where does that leave one then, when a trajectory that some will describe as the counter-Enlightenment gets to fall under the label “Enlightenment”?

It leaves us with the impression that guys who write about 'Political Philosophy' for a living are as stupid as shit.  

So, I think it is just a dogmatic hanging-on to the word “Enlightenment” to insist that figures like Marx and Gandhi and the Romantics must all be counted as part of the Enlightenment. It makes for much greater clarity (not to mention intellectual honesty) to simply admit, what is in fact the case, that terms like “modernity” and “the Enlightenment” are self-congratulatory terms that surfaced when it became clear that liberal doctrine and institutions (including the institutions and policies that surround capital, as well as the constraints on capital that emerged with “social democracy”) had put their stamp on Europe from the seventeenth century on.

Why not the sixteenth and fifteenth fourteenth century? Chaucer is plenty modern and, when I was young, the explanation given was the 'Black Death' which dissolved serfdom and set markets free. 

So, I insist and repeat: modernity is pervasively defined by liberalism and the social democratic ideas that constrain classical liberalism.

No. The word modernity only came to mean something more than 'contemporary' in the late Seventeenth Century battle between the 'Ancients' and the 'Moderns'. By the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, Western Europe could feel it had exceeded the achievements of the Ancients. Vernacular languages had displaced Latin as the language in which the learned conversed. Education in English medium had begun in India and elsewhere. Where peace prevailed there was rapid accumulation of capital and a great proliferation of 'epistemic' goods and services. Fashion was something almost everybody could aspire to. To be modern meant to dress differently from your parents. But your own children would soon enough mock your attire while themselves aping some new fad.

In India, Gandhi's mode of dress was seen a reproof to the new class of educated young people. Deteriorating economic conditions meant that, as KL Saigal sang 'fashion pe marne wale, abh faqon mar rahe hain'- i.e. the guys who were 'fashion-victims' in College are now dying of famine- this was part of the appeal of Marx or some Mullah or Gandhi or some other Godman. You might have to wear dowdy clothes and listen to long sermons, but at least you could be sure of some supper- even if it was in a jail cell.  

And the fact is that modernity, so understood, though it has, as I said, been dominant, has not been and still is not totally comprehensive in its reach. There have been dissenting radical voices (going well beyond the social democratic constraints that liberalism takes well within its stride) against modernity from the early radicals of the seventeenth century through the Romantics and Marx down to Gandhi.

There were also dissenting voices which denounced the neighbour's cat for conducting ILLEGAL surveillance operations despite my having asked the local squirrels to go have a word with their feline friend.  

To count these latter ideas as part of the Enlightenment and the modernity it defined, is simply to bloat our categories to the point that they are unrecognisable and unhelpful in coming to any clear understanding of the issues at stake.

What are the issues at stake for Bilgrami? He is very upset that some nutters are called 'Enlightenment thinkers' while other nutters are not accorded this accolade. But who greatly cares what worthless pedagogues say to each other in their deeply boring seminars? All we ask is that they don't masturbate in public.  

And worse, it has the double effect of, on the one hand, giving over the critique of modernity to completely reactionary outlooks and, on the other, giving the Left a kind of narrow orthodox stamp that prevents it from exploring these interesting affinities between thinkers like Marx and Gandhi.

What prevents the Left from exploring affinities is that nobody will pay them to do it. Either those guys can run a decent administration- as they can in Kerala- or they should just kindly fuck off and let the BJP take over.  

We don’t know whether it is fair to differentiate philosophy country-wise. But in academic studies and other philosophic discourses, there is what is called Indian philosophy. Of course, every society would produce and would have its own philosophy. However, can you attribute and find out some basic characters and ideas of Indian philosophy.

It is concerned with things like karma, dharma, purushartha, moksha and other such stuff about which reams of Sanskrit have been written.  

What actually constitutes Indian philosophy? How it is different from Western philosophy, which you have been trained in? How do you engage with other traditions of philosophy?

I must not venture opinions on a subject that I’ve never studied with any care and only have a glancing knowledge of based on secondary commentary.

My own instinct (it is not a scholarly judgment) is that different traditions of philosophy, whether in the English-speaking world or in German, French, Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit ... are all addressing more or less the same issues, even if they do so in dramatically different idioms (and I don’t mean natural language idioms, but conceptual idioms).

In India, rebirth is a dogma whereas it is a marginal notion in Europe or Islamic countries save in certain esoteric sects.  

Of course, the different historical and social contexts of these traditions sometimes make for different issues being salient in each, but that is equally true within the same tradition at different historical times. So, for instance, in the Francophone tradition, no one could understand Sartre’s Existentialism who did not situate it in the historical and social context of France under the Occupation,

Nonsense! Nausea came out before the War. You have to situate Sartre as between Husserl and Heidegger- both of whom were considered smart at that time- but give him credit for shitting on Bergson whom Sorel thought would be the 'French Marx'. The bigger question was whether Sartre would go over to the Communists. The Americans fondled him when he said Existentialism was a Humanism but didn't greatly care about his post-Suez trajectory. The fact is, France delusions of glory could upset the Cold War applecart. Then the Americans were suckered into Vietnam and repeated France's mistakes on a colossal scale.  

and there is not much resonance of the issues that preoccupy Sartre within the same tradition, say, in Montaigne or de Maistre.

Because Sartre had wasted time on 'Phenomenology' which turned out to be phenomenally useless and stupid.  

But apart from such contextually determined differences, which can occur within and across traditions of philosophy, I really do feel that most philosophical traditions, however different their conceptual vocabularies and methods are, by and large focus on the same conceptual issues.

No. Some philosophical traditions are focussed on open questions in STEM subject. That yields one type of philosophy, till the Math gets too hard and so philosophers run away crying. Another tradition is connected to the Law and Political Science. But, you really do need to know the law and have a wide empirical knowledge of the polity you are writing about. A Bilgrami from Bombay can but add noise to signal with silly talk of Mahatmas when it is Mullahs which worry Amrika.  

Though I am very much a product of philosophy in the English-speaking tradition,

Michael Dummet wasn't wholly useless. I can see no trace of his influence, or indeed that of any philosopher of mathematics, on Bilgrami.  Instead the guy worships Chomsky though Kripke had tried to use Wittgenstein's private language argument (which anal-tickle philosophers well know) to show Chomsky's i-language wasn't a language. Chomsky then said it was 'biological' but not evolutionary- i.e. magic. Bilgrami, missing the genies of his ancestral religion, was enchanted.

some of the more interesting discussions of philosophical ideas I’ve had are with those who are not scholars within that tradition. I’ve had very interesting discussions about philosophy with my colleague Sheldon Pollock (on aesthetic ideas as also on different ways of thinking of the concept of “truth”),

There once were plenty of people with the surname Bilgrami who could quote highly apposite Arabic and Persian and Sanskrit texts to make such a discussion very fruitful. Moreover, it would directly connect with our reception and appreciation of our common musicological and artistic heritage. There probably are learned Muslim families in Karnataka who can add valuable information directly related to Pollock's own work. Sadly, post-Independence, the Indian middle class neglected vernacular or Indian classical philology in favour of a modish, but shallow, 'Globish' gibberish. 

or my colleague, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, in the French Department (with whom I’ve discussed ideas in Iqbal and Bergson and Senghor)—we have, in fact, taught graduate seminars together on the political philosophies of Gandhi, Nehru, Iqbal and Senghor.

 Senghor was a Professor. Iqbal could have been a Professor but preferred to remain a popular poet of genius. But Gandhi and Nehru were practicing politicians, not academics. 

I also taught seminars with Edward Said, who was not a philosopher at all, on the Philosophy of History from Vico through the “Verstehen” tradition to Hegel and Marx.

A highly eccentric procedure. The English speaking tradition would focus on the methodology of the most influential historians and how this could itself shape events. 

No doubt, what I brought to these collective discussions and seminars was the perspective of an analytic philosopher trained in the English-speaking tradition, but none of this would really have been possible if different traditions of thought did not have the same concepts and conceptual problems that vexed them.

It is possible to attribute a similar 'ur-concept' to different traditions or else to say that different concepts are commensurable for some specific purpose. But to assume that everybody has the same concepts is to beg the question and vitiate your own research program- unless you are just making that shit up as you go blathering on.  

In contrast with the Western societies, a subject like philosophy has not grown much as an academic discipline in India.

Not really. Any Sadhu of any sect is now quite well versed in philosophy. But so are Qawwali singers in Pakistan! Aziz Mian had an MA in philosophy! Farid Ayaz discusses the concept of 'barzakh' in his concerts! A philosophy that can be sung is worth listening to.  

Though it is highly relevant and needed, except here and there in some institutes, the subject has been largely neglected in India. This is also true with some other social science subjects. Why such neglect? As a philosopher, what do you have to say on this low regard for a subject like philosophy in India?

Radhakrishnan is unreadable. Matilal and Joshi and so forth wrote nonsense. Some mathsy guy could certainly lift up the subject but the maths is changing very fast. Smart peeps would prefer to keep tabs on that rather than gas on about Nyaya-Vaisesika. 

One of the things that I had noticed in academic philosophy in India until a few years ago was the far greater weight put on the history of philosophy than on “doing” philosophy, if you see what I mean. I recall during the discussion after one of my talks in India, asking a question to a faculty member about how he thought we should analyse the concept of “freedom” and his response was “Sankara said…” He really had no inkling that what I was asking him was about what he would say.

No. He was saying 'freedom' is part of Maya- it is delusional. Sankara said Freedom requires 'Viveka'- metaphysical discrimination such that 'mind forged manacles' slip away. Nothing wrong in that. 

I suppose the faculty member may have feared whether he was being asked whether he thought freedom meant giving the visitor a hand-job.  

I think that has changed a lot in recent years. By contrast, for many decades, English-speaking analytic philosophy completely ignored the history of its own subject, putting all its focus on analysing concepts. All that has changed now. But while these biases existed, there was an impoverishment of the subject on both sides.

If you employ stupid Professors only even stupider students get PhDs in your discipline. There is a vicious circle till, finally, the Board says 'we don't have enough disabled LGTQ people of colour. There's a quota we have to fill. Tell you what, appoint some cretin who fits that bill as Professor of some worthless shite.' 

Let me just make two points about academic philosophy in India. The first is that we must admit that it is not and has not been, since Independence, anyway, as strong as subjects like history and economics.

No. Indian philosophy was harder than econ or history because you had to memorize lots of Sanskrit and, even if you got to be a Professor, like Radhakrishnan, some other guy would accuse you of plagiarism. By doing history or econ, you could bluff your way to a First while pretending to be a Left Secularist thus deserving of promotion or affirmative action on an Ivy League campus.  

There is just no getting away from this. It would take too long to try and diagnose why this might be so. But it is just a fact. Having said that, I would like to point out that in the last couple of decades, basically since neoliberal policies and what is called “globalisation” got entrenched in our country, a subject like economics and, quite generally, the social sciences, lost the vibrancy and the independence of thought that they had shown in the decades immediately after Independence,

Econ became less shit because your aim was to get a job with a Corporate who would check you had good quantitative skills.  

and have taken to mimicking the curricular and ideological prejudices of Western universities, including their protocols for research.

You are welcome to do 'Junk Social Science' and publish nonsensical results but there are rules to be followed in doing so. In the old days, Kosambi could publish proofs of the Reimann hypothesis in the Indian Journal of Agricultural Statistics!  

This has evacuated them both of the historically oriented and the value-oriented approaches to their subjects. I think of this as an appalling abdication on the part of contemporary scholarship in these disciplines.

You can still tell stupid lies if you are an emeritus Professor at JNU.  

And I think, as a result, this is a moment for academic philosophy in India to pick up the slack created by this abdication in these disciplines and broaden out to consider philosophically, social, political, and economic issues that confront us and the history and intellectual history by which we have been landed with these issues.

Fuck would be the point of that? Just say- 'Boo to Modi. He is totes Nazi because Hitler invented Swastika and thus created Hindu religion as has been proved by Prof. Divya Dwivedi.'  

That would make philosophy a quite exciting thing to do in our time in India.

Not if you are paid a meagre stipend while your younger cousin, the plumber, has just bought himself a 3 BHK in Greater Noida.  

There may be pressures from a globalised society that impoverishes economics and the social sciences in these ways I’ve mentioned, but philosophy does not face the same pressures

Yes it does. If you don't get paid, people tell you you aint a fucking philosopher. You are a layabout. GoI isn't going to shell out money to create unemployable nutters with PhDs in worthless shite. 

and so it may well be a time for it to step up with this chivalrous reach to do things that other disciplines are manifestly failing to do within their departments.

Bilgrami has a point, if the other faculties aint selling drugs, there is a gap in the market. This is one way to revive the fortunes of academic philosophy.  

You are highly influenced personally and intellectually by Noam Chomsky. As a philosopher what is your take on the influence of Chomsky’s theory of language, the universal grammar, and so on?

His theory was that linguists should not study languages. They are merely 'external'. Instead we should study 'internal' language which, he says, has a 'Universal Grammar'. Yet grammar only evolved so as to ease comprehension of 'e-language'. A philologist may study the grammar of an alien language so as to be able to master it more quickly. Native speakers don't need to bother with grammar. So, Chomsky- a linguist- destroyed his own subject- so as to concentrate on babbling paranoid nonsense about everything else in the world which, to be fair, he hadn't studied at all.  

Only recently, I had to write a long foreword to his book called What Kind of Creatures Are We, in which he elaborates his most current views on linguistics, philosophy, etc., and it would perhaps be best if I just directed you to that Foreword rather than try to spell out my understanding of his remarkable corpus of work in a short while now.

I have discussed this elsewhere.  

But let me just say one very general thing about his work in this area since there is so much unnecessary controversy about it. There is a lot of criticism of him that quite fails to understand what he means by “language”,

He says what we call 'language' does not exist. There is only grammar, which- sadly- can't exist unless what we call 'language' actually exists.  

and so the criticisms are quite beside the point. Even so thoughtful a philosopher as Charles Taylor

can't endorse Chomsky's craziness 

is guilty of this in his otherwise very interesting recent book on language.

What one has to keep in mind about Chomsky is that one will never understand what his account of language is unless one is clear about the fact that he takes it to be first and foremost a biological phenomenon, not a social and communicative phenomenon.

Language is an internal brain-fart- right? Well, my speech does have that quality when I'm drunk. The problem is that we do actually communicate through language. When attending a social gathering, we make agreeable noises. Moreover, there are people who are, biologically speaking, human beings who, however, don't have the language faculty. Thus language is best considered a social and communicative phenomenon rather than a biological phenomenon- unless there's a very small lady named Alexa imprisoned inside my Echo Dot.  

He starts with the idea that our (human) biology is unique in being the location of, or for, a capacity for language. And it is, as such, that he proceeds to analyse and explain that capacity. As a result, for him, the communicative function of language is quite ancillary. He is not primarily interested in the vocalised language that has a social purpose for human beings and with which words we produce refer to things in the world. He doesn’t have anything against studying those aspects of human life, but he does not think that those things are scientifically tractable and explainable. You can say scattered wise things about them, you can say very interesting things about them, but they can’t be what the science of language is about. And Chomsky’s work is primarily the work of a scientist of language.

A crap scientist might say his subject doesn't exist even though everybody has external language and what's more you now have AIs which can talk and write quite well.  

He has nothing against other people being interested in other interesting things about language, but what he wants to produce is a scientific account in the way that scientists try to produce explanatory accounts in physics, chemistry, biology.... So, he is focussed on something relatively limited and he is very modest about these self-consciously imposed limitations. For him, language has a structure that is very close to the structure of thought or cognition and those structures are ultimately biologically grounded, though till we know more about the biological science involved, one has to track them at the cognitive and computational level.

But no such actual tracking has occurred! Meanwhile Google Translate, relying on e-language, is going great guns and earning the Company millions.  

Chomsky was one of the two or three people who founded the subject of cognitive science.

But his variety was wholly useless. 

Even evolutionary accounts of language will get things wrong if they don’t identify the phenotype correctly in this way. We need an evolutionary account of a biological capacity,

but that account involves a Structural Causal Model which enables us to alter outcomes in the real world across a wide range of capabilities. My Doctor would have a way of making me less stupid and also better at tennis. That would be cool.  

not of how we gradually came to develop the sophisticated communicative skills that we have.

The right SCM will give you that account for free.  

I am just pointing all this out because I think the incessant critiques of Chomsky by anthropologists and sociologists of language (and many others) are just off beam. They are talking about a notion of language that he is not talking about at all.

It's a notion he decided not to talk about because he had nothing useful to say. So he pretended he was doing something really special and interesting when, the truth is, he was babbling paranoid nonsense.  

(I still remember hearing—as a graduate student—a quite brilliant anthropologist

there is no such thing! 

at the University of Chicago giving a shrill, almost hysterical dithyramb against Chomsky one day, and remember coming away from it thinking, “Is he talking about the same person that I’ve been reading in my theoretical linguistics class?”) They are just ships passing Chomsky by at night while pretending that they are engaging with him.

Engaging with Chomsky means going down his rabbit hole. Bilgrami is cool with this because he wants the Enid Blyton enchantment of finding fairies at the bottom of his garden.  

Which philosopher influenced you the most and which system of philosophy shaped you the most?

No one philosopher or system of thought has shaped my thinking, though Marx’s thought has, in some loose sense, provided a framework within which to think about politics and society.

The best place for an Indian to think about Marx is in Capitalist America- right?  

Questions of politics and society interested me intensely when I was an undergraduate in Bombay [now Mumbai] and at Oxford and then again since the very late 1980s. In between, I was almost exclusively first studying and then writing about issues of language and mind,

that literature was wholly shite 

and I was relatively apolitical while doing that scholarly work, though I kept myself informed and, I suppose, opinionated on politics even through this period of more remote study.

As a child, I grew up in a home with a vast number of books because my father was quite a serious and wide-ranging reader. There were many books on philosophy in my father’s library and I dipped into them from time to time. He was also a very engaging conversationalist and I’d speak to him at length about what I read. I read a lot of Bertrand Russell quite early on in my teens. I read a lot of Marx through my college days. Though my subject was English literature in Elphinstone College in Bombay, I was much influenced by a very articulate and quite brilliant philosophy professor called James Swamidasan. In England, I was influenced by two philosophers, P.F. Strawson and a very fiery, hellishly intelligent, much younger person called Gareth Evans, who died tragically early.

Strawson tried to do 'descriptive metaphysics'- i.e. phenomenology by another name. Dummett was more interesting because he was getting into the maths. Also he was a nice, Christian, liberal sort of guy worried about the fate of minorities. Perhaps if Bilgrami had studied under him he might have avoided an infinite regress of intensional fallacies.  

In the United States, while I was studying for and writing a PhD, I worked with a philosopher called Donald Davidson, with whom Evans had advised me to go and study, and with whom I became close friends—and I learnt a lot from him.

The maths had moved on. Things like 'Swampman' are easily refuted by cellular automata theory.  

At Columbia, I’ve been influenced, to some extent, by my conversations with my colleague, Isaac Levi.

I have mentioned the problem with Levi's work here. 

And, as you’ve noticed, Noam Chomsky’s philosophical work on language has been an abiding influence on me and we have kept up a steady conversation about some of those themes (as well as about a politics that we broadly share) over the years. I’ve admired his political activism ever since I was a student at Elphinstone College, but I only got to know about his work on language when I was first at Oxford and then later at the University of Chicago. Chomsky is a very rare sort of person, and I feel a sense of privilege (as no doubt, many others do) to be alive in the time he is.

Chomsky did show promise as did Ellsberg. I suppose both contributed to getting the US out of the Vietnam quagmire. Moreover, their heritage made them important to perhaps the most intellectually important ethnic group in the world. If they went down rabbit-holes, plenty of others of their own sort did amazing work. My impression is that plenty of Indians back in the Fifties and Sixties could have built up the country as a knowledge economy. No doubt, the majority of my people aren't much smarter than me, but we have numbers on our side. If only Nehruvian Indian had been truly secular- which in a caste society means 'meritocratic' and focused wholly on 'instrumental reason' rather than things like Chomsky's attempt to replace God by some nebulous 'Universal Grammar' - then we could have had good research institutes in all fields while inferior intellects, like mine, were confined to boring, but useful, tasks like Book-keeping or compiling Statistical tables. 

Why did Nehruvian India fail to develop the ability to feed or defend itself? The answer is that there was no common 'exterior language' of a quantifiable, operationalizable type.  The vocabulary of Government featured words with no agreed 'extensions'. Good intentions could only be signalled by self-contradictory or wholly vacuous 'intensions'. 

By contrast, the East India Company and its successor, the British Crown, were focused on balancing the books. India should have continued that tradition. Only fund things which can quickly start paying for themselves. Back winners and let losers find some other occupation. Don't have endless debates about the true meaning of anything. Secularism means that instrumental reason alone provides focal solutions to coordination problems. The thing isn't rocket science. It's nice to have more food and better clothes and to be safe from gangsters or invaders. Concentrate on stuff of that sort. Don't try shitting higher than your arsehole about Imperialism or Neo-Liberalism or Modernity or Enchantment. If a particular University Department hasn't produced any cool new tech or stuff which earns foreign exchange in decades, defund the thing. This is what Secularism actually means. Scolding Hindus or pretending Brahmins rather than Banias secretly control everything doesn't actually help anybody- unless they are becoming the minority in which case it they should run away. But a shithole can become a worse shithole when smart people escape.