Nehru's ancestors had served first the Mughals in Delhi and had then become Vakils representing the East India Company. Forced out of Delhi by the aftermath of the Mutiny, 90 years later, Nehru founded a Dynasty which would still be ruling India if Rahul hasn't been gun-shy. Whatever Nehru's conception of India might have been, it was Delhi-centric- i.e. thought India should be unified and ruled from the banks of the Yamuna.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee takes a different view. He thinks Nehru saw India as a young nation- like Australia- which was seeking to become 'the contradictory whole' of many 'contradictory selves'. He writes in 'Outlook'
In an article he wrote for Time magazine in 2001, reflecting on fifty years of India’s independence, Salman Rushdie
who was Pakistani, not Indian, though he had spent his first dozen years in Bombay. Pakistan certainly had 'contradictory selves'. That's why it split in two. India did not. There is separatism where Hindus are not the majority but not elsewhere. As a Brahmin, Nehru wanted to 'Brahminize' India, not in the religious sense but by getting the fucking Banias to be a little less fucking Bania.
connected the “so-called idea of India”
Pakistanis may indeed think India is merely 'so-called'. Why can't the country just fucking disintegrate already?
to the modern Indian self, through a string of paradoxes:
A Democracy with Dynastic rulers is a paradox. Sonia could have become PM in 2004 but her son put his foot down.
“In the modern age, we have come to understand our own selves as composites, often contradictory, even internally incompatible.
Thankfully we live in the post-modern age which thinks Freud was a fraud. Disassociative identity disorder probably isn't a real thing. Yes it is! My name is Audrey and I am an eight year old girl trapped inside the body of an elderly fat bastard.
We have understood that each of us is many different people.
Only in the sense that many different people are us- I identify with Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Basically, if instead of studying Accountancy I'd gone to Hollywood and become a prostitute, that would be the life I'd have had.
Our younger selves differ from our older selves;
No. Different predicates apply to us in different contexts. That does not mean we have multiple selves.
we can be bold in the company of our lovers
more particularly if we told them we are Secret Agents
and timorous before our employers,
also we have to pretend to actually be doing some work
principled when we instruct our children and corrupt when offered some secret temptation; we are serious and frivolous, loud and quiet, aggressive and easily abashed.
Also we sometimes take a shit and, at other times, we eat food. This does not mean we have a shitting self which is separate from our dining self.
The 19th-century concept of the integrated self has been replaced by this jostling crowd of ‘I’s.
Stevenson's Jeckyl & Hyde was plenty nineteenth century.
And yet, unless we are damaged, or deranged, we usually have a relatively clear sense of who we are. I agree with my many selves to call all of them ‘me.’”
Very good of you I'm sure. Most people fight bitterly with their many selves and insist of speaking of themselves using the royal we.
Reading this article in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) library, a year before submitting my PhD thesis on Nehru and Gandhi,
Did you know that Nehru wasn't actually married to the Mahatma? Indira wasn't born of Mohandas's womb. No doubt this was because Nehru didn't stick his dick into one of Gandhi's female selves. Sad.
I detected a Nehruvian echo in Rushdie’s evocative passage.
The rest of us detected a Paki whining about how India was doing well, Bangladesh was doing well, Pakistan was going down the toilet.
We can make an analogous connection between Rushdie’s description of “selves” and what Nehru describes as the nation in this passage from the ‘Epilogue’ to The Discovery of India: “The discovery of India—what have I discovered?
Nehru was writing for a Western audience. His book was quite useful- especially in America- in depicting India as a youthful country which would pursue sensible economic policies. The Government would borrow on Wall Street to fund industrialization with GM and GE and Ford and Dow Chemicals getting big contracts.
'It was presumptuous of me to imagine that I could unveil her and
stick my pee pee in her chee chee place?
find out what she is to-day and what she was in the long past. To-day she is four hundred million separate individual men and women,
with single, not multiple, selves.
each differing from the other, each living in a private universe of thought and feeling.
whereas in Belgium everybody lives in a public toilet of thought and feeling
'If this is so in the present, how much more difficult is it to grasp that multitudinous past of innumerable successions of human beings...
Historians don't have any great difficulty in this respect. It isn't a real high IQ profession.
India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads.”
Nehru wanted to be that thread. Sadly, he couldn't make himself invisible. Still, he wore a cap to hide his baldness. Otherwise everybody would have mistaken him for Alaistair Sim.
What Nehru imagines as India’s selfhood in terms of modern life, Rushdie finds within each self of the numerous selves that make a nation.
All nations are held together by strong but invisible threads- unless the trousers split, which, to be frank, is happening to me increasingly often. This is because they use inferior quality thread. I've been a 32 waist since I was 18. I may have gained 20 kilos, but have always retained my slender coltish figure.
It is impossible to contain this vast sea of differences without, and accepting, contradictions between people and allowing them to thrive.
Nehru didn't want the Brits to stick around. That's one contradiction he strove mightily to suppress. He wasn't too crazy about the Muslim League either and ensured it ceased to exist in his India.
“Nehru did not fall into the temptation of suppressing the contradictions of history
He suppressed the fuck out of the Razakars and the Commies in Telengana
…He does not offer solutions; but shows us the way to find them.”
By telling Jinnah to fuck off to a moth-eaten Pakistan.
The Mexican poet-critic Octavio Paz
who was Ambassador to India
in his 1967 speech in Delhi said that as a political leader, Nehru “did not fall into the temptation of suppressing the contradictions of history…He does not offer solutions; but shows us the way to find them.”
By dying. That solved a lot of India's problems.
This statement acknowledges Nehru’s ideological flexibility.
He was a Socialist in the morning but became a Capitalist at lunch-time. By evening he was a Nazi but slept as baby because one of his selves was the baby Jesus.
Nehru did not follow a doctrinaire politics where a combination of scientific rationality and certain revolutionary ideas turned society into a Set Theory and provided absolute answers to the problems of human life.
Set theory does not provide 'absolute answers'. This is because there are no Godelian absolute proofs. However, Nehru was a doctrinaire Socialist of the Fabian variety.
The nation is the contradictory whole of the proliferation of contradicting selves.
No. The nation is univocal no matter how heterogeneous its population. Nations tend to be similar to neighboring nations with which they have to compete in different ways.
This is a much deeper understanding than a nation broken down to the category of individuals alone.
States are not individuals. They have their own 'Tardean mimetics' and there is 'convergence' of the Tinbergen type between competing powers.
It provokes a radical idea of individuality itself, where individuals are not defined in terms of mere cogs in the wheel.
Manash's Mummy frequently defined him as a cog or sprocket or lever of some type. Nehru's radical idea hadn't caught on in her neck of the woods.
In an essay titled ‘Personality’, Rabindranath Tagore
who got paid hundreds of dollars for lecturing rich Americans about their lack of spirituality
decried “the rampant materialism of the present age which ruthlessly sacrifices individuals to the bloody idols of organisation.”
Tagore came from a part of the world where lots of goats kept getting sacrificed to Kali
The meaning of “organisation” here can be extended to include political organisations too, where individual contradictions are sacrificed in the name of a suffocatingly singular idea of the self and the nation.
Tagore warned the Hindus that they would have to flee from East Bengal. Manash might find it very suffocating to be a soldier in the Army, but without soldiers and policemen, sensitive poets would be stabbed or sodomized.
There are similar resonances even in the imagination of the cultural self in Nehru and Rushdie.
not to mention Jennifer Aniston and Charlie Chaplin
When Sir C P Ramaswamy Aiyer, conservative lawyer and politician from Madras, said in public (sometime during 1934-1935) that Nehru “did not represent mass-feeling”,
Aiyer was a Vadadesi Vadama Tambram- i.e. as stupid as shit. Thanks to him, Keral is now ruled by the Communist party. Still, the chap could take a hint. When some Mallu dude stuck a knife in him, he moved back to Madras.
Nehru agreed and extended the point in the epilogue of his Autobiography: “I often wonder if I represent anyone at all…I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West,
like Kipling's Kim.
out of place everywhere, at home nowhere
Nehru was raised by wolves- like Mowgli. He and Tarzan frequently compared notes on the problems they faced in fitting in with polite society.
…I cannot get rid of either that past inheritance
Nehru would often howl at the moon
or my recent acquisitions…
Nehru had learned how to eat with a fork and knife
[T]hey create in me a spiritual loneliness…I am a stranger and alien in the West
people kept mistaking him from Alaistair Sim. Then he'd howl at the moon and they would suggest he see an alienist
…But in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.”
Not an exile, a prisoner's feeling. This was because he was in jail.
By eluding representation, Nehru is being not just honest about himself.
Honest people are forthcoming. They don't elude representation or pretend they don't speak Hindi to their Mummy and Wifey while speaking English at work, like Daddy and Uncleji.
He is unwittingly raising a larger question about people who claim to belong to a single cultural heritage,
like whom? His gardener?
whereas that heritage itself has evolved from its encounter with other cultural sources.
So what? You belong to your own family even if its members evolved from encounters between Neanderthals and Denisovans and various other types of hominids.
To deny that encounter is to indulge in historical bluff.
No it isn't. It is obvious that an Indian barrister would have a bit of British culture and a lot of Indian culture- which is what Nehru, like his Daddy, had. But then the founder of his party, A.O Hulme ended up a Vedantist vegetarian. What is sad is that he knew and cared more about Indian agriculture than any subsequent Congress President.
Compare Nehru’s passage to Rushdie writing in the short story on migration, ‘The Courter’, from the anthology of short stories, East, West (1994): “I, too, have ropes around my neck. I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, I kick. Ropes, I do not choose between you…Do you hear? I refuse to choose.”
Rushdie chose America just as his Daddy chose Pakistan. Sadly, he didn't choose to employ a bodyguard and has lost an eye.
What for Nehru in the 1930s was a conscious understanding of his spiritual homelessness,
he and his Daddy had started off in Annie Besant's Theosophical Society. Then he opted for a different sort of Mahatma.
unable to rid himself of the genuine rift (and conflict) between his double identity
he had a single identity as a British subject and, after India became a Republic, a citizen of India. Dual nationality was not an option because Nehru & Co wanted to prevent Muslims like Rushdie from returning to India by the back-door.
encountering western and Indian modernity,
because encountering ancient Europe requires a time-travelling DeLorean.
for Rushdie in the 1990s becomes an even more acute struggle to endorse that cultural rift by refusing a fake abandonment of that contradiction.
What fucking contradiction? People understand why Rushdie didn't want to live in a shithole country where towel-heads could get a million dollars for sticking a knife in him.
To choose being one over and against another is a false choice.
No. It is a real choice. If you can have your cake and eat it too, you don't need to make a choice.
The cultural condition of modernity is the impossibility of choosing between our many selves.
Nonsense! We have to choose to be the self who has a job or the self that is unemployed. Where there is opportunity cost, there is choice. What you can't be is a traditional Hindu Confucian or a modern Tarzan. That is a case of impossible attempt.
To choose being one over and against another is a false choice.
This cretin has no choice but to write nonsense.
The common thread between Nehru and Rushdie is
they went to British Public School and then Cambridge University. Also they made money by writing books.
the idea of the self and the idea of the nation that has a constant tendency to differ from itself, a self that experiences difference within itself.
Only in the sense that the idea of the idea constantly sodomizes itself because of all the constitutive contradictions of its ipseity.
The self is “often contradictory, internally incompatible” [Rushdie] and “a bundle of contradictions” [Nehru].
Nehru was a bundle of contradictions. He was supposed to be a Fabian type Socialist yet was following a Mahacrackpot who kept doing stupid shit. Nehru expresses his frustrations in the Autobiography. To be air, he was an effective Congress president who put India on the path to Partition. This meant that Rushdie could not remain Indian. Since Pakistanis, writing in English, are less boring and stupid than Indians, Rushdie was initially quite readable.
It is reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s famous lines in Song of Myself: “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
He was speaking of his rectum. It had taken a lot of multitudinous traffic.
These men of imagination make a fundamental point about the modern self that they realise—intuitively, poetically—being self-conflicted.
Selves have always been conflicted because doing stuff that feels good can get you killed. Look at Rushdie.
The postulate is so fundamental that an argument for it only follows from or after the proposition, or hypothesis, is laid out.
There is no such postulate. This cretin thinks you must first have axioms before you can start reasoning. Studying shite at JNU destroys the brain.
The self in modernity, to repeat, is self-contradictory.
Whereas in ancient times, the self would pre-emptively have sex with itself rather than get into an argument.
This goes against the Kantian assumption of rationalist thought
This silly man does not know that Kant argued that rationalist metaphysics is impossible. Reason has strict limits.
where reason is the elimination of contradictions,
Reason can't eliminate antinomies. JNU is a shit school.
or even the logical formulation of identity from German Idealism that ‘‘I is I’’.
that's the transcendental ego. This guy has shit for brains.
Even Gandhi acknowledged this principle.
What principle? That Gandhi was Gandhi not Nehru?
He wrote on April 29, 1933 in Harijan: “I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my pursuit after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things.”
He went on a fast for the untouchables and thus was let out of jail. The man was consistently shit.
He clarified the point further writing on September 28, 1934, in Harijan:
he had been rearrested but was released because he went on another fast
“I have never made a fetish of consistency.
Liars seldom have any such fetish
I am a votary of Truth
is what habitual liars say
and I must say what I feel and think at a given moment on the question, without regard to what I may have said before on it.”
he babbled any shit that came into his head.
The difference between truth and thinking precisely lies in the temporal space where thinking is constantly evolving vis-à-vis an ever-changing idea of truth. Time contradicts us and we contradict our older selves in time.
No. The difference between truth and thinking lies in the fact that the truth corresponds to the facts of the case. Thinking may or may not do so. An idea of truth can be as stupid as shit- as is the case with this cretin.
This idea of contradiction has nothing to do with the chameleonesque self where you contradict your past the way people change ideological garbs and wear new masks to suit the demands of the current political weather.
To change over time involves no 'contradiction'. To say 'this baby is an elderly man' is to make a contradictory statement. But no baby actually is an elderly man. Equally, every elderly man was once a baby.
That is an instrumentalist—and perfectly logical—way of “self-ing”.
Perhaps this nutter means wanking.
The word ‘‘contradict’’, in fact, doesn’t suit this case.
Yes it does. If a guy says 'I believe in merit. That's why I vote for Rahul Gandhi' he is contradicting himself because Rahul lacks merit.
This is also not an endorsement of the Hegelian dialectic where you evolve from contradictions in mere ideas alone.
That isn't the Hegelian dialectic which is like a judgment which 'synthesizes' what is presented in the thesis and the argument against the thesis. This isn't too different from the Socratic palinode.
It is rather a recovery of the older, more ethical Platonic idea in The Laws that contradictions also involve people.
Predicates applied to a person may be contradictory. The person is not himself a contradiction.
If you follow Plato, you won’t succumb to the corrupt, logical nonsense Fascists,
Plenty of Platonists were Fascists. Gentile in Italy and Kazunobu in Japan are examples. Popper thought Plato was the first Fascist thinker.
religious fundamentalists,
there are plenty of neo-Platonic sectarian fundamentalists
Stalinists and Maoists believe in:
both Stalin and Mao were considered to be Platonic 'Philosopher Kings'.
that whoever contradicts you is your enemy.
if he is also trying to stick a knife in you, he probably is an enemy. However, when Mummy says 'you aren't really a Secret Agent. You are a ten year old school-boy. Shut up and do your homework', though she is contradicting you, she isn't your enemy. The fact is, she has been brainwashed by SPECTRE.
To consider others enemies is to consider your (contradictory) self your own enemy.
No it isn't. Your contradictory self doesn't keep trying to stab you.
Nehru understood the modern self and the nation’s selfhood as one where people may avoid the dangers of what Rushdie calls “damaged, or deranged” conditions of the self.
Nehru understood that you have to get rid of Muslim majority provinces because them guys keep stabbing kaffirs and apostates and guys who look as though they might be or become kaffirs or apostates.
If you deny the fact that your self contains elements of other selves
which is probably true if their cum is dripping out of your rectum
and that you are a “bundle of contradictions” held together by “strong and invisible threads” of love, you are most likely to suffer from neurosis.
says an asshole whose 'mohabbat ki dukan' is open for business. Manash is living proof that JNU can make you as stupid as Rahul Gandhi.
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