James I of England was a learned man. He also had a strong belief in witchcraft. This was not the reason he was called the 'wisest fool in Christendom'. Rather it was because he was 'wise in small things but a foole in weighty affaires.' It is remarkable that the Reformation and the diffusion of Renaissance learning were accompanied by heightened persecution of supposed witches between 1560 to 1630.
Isaac Newton's religious writings mark a turning point. By 1680, he is dismissing the reality of demons or devils- e.g. the devils Christ cast out. Though Newton kept his views secret, many shared them. Interestingly, it was by getting rid of the mechanistic dogma forbidding 'action at a distance' (though Newton retained a substantially repurposed the Platonic notion of an all pervading 'Aether' similar to the Medieval, Alchemical, 'quintessence') that what would come to be called 'the Enlightenment' could make progress. This also meant that 'the invisible hand' of the market, as suggested by the 'natural law' School of Salamanca and, later that of Hutcheson, Hume & Adam Smith (the so called Scottish Enlightenment) could be seen as beneficial and operating spontaneously. This gave rise to 'Deism', as opposed to Theism, and thus gave the Enlightenment a potentially non-sectarian, or secular, character.
Inter alia, this meant, acting in a self-interested manner could no longer be interpreted as being possessed by a demon. Thus, if you had sex with your spouse, you were not surrendering to the demon of lust. If you, as a merchant, 'bought low and sold high', you were not possessed by the demon of greed. Usury itself was not 'unnatural'. Interest was merely the reward for thrift- i.e. foregoing present consumption. The 'Wealth of a Nation' was determined by productivity not grabbing gold. Utility, Hume said, is the aim of all service industries- including the Law and Education and even the Church and the Moral Sciences. This led to a new, 'value free' way of looking at social phenomena and ideologies. Their existence was a matter of supply and demand which could be understood by Political Economy. What was the incentive for burning witches? Did disproportionate penalties discourage people- save the mad- from claiming magical powers? Not always. Economic Science began to distinguish 'substitutes' and 'complements'. By the end of the Seventeenth Century there were quite good empirical estimations of what we now call 'price elasticity'. It was becoming clear that demand for a thing became 'elastic' if better and better substitutes became available. But certain goods are 'complements'. One thing may be bought because it is complementary to another good which yields great utility.
Consider the myth that people are superstitious and prone to magical thinking. Rationalists can dispel the fanatical ignorance of the great unwashed by making reasoned arguments. The world would be a better place if a bunch of Sciencey types went around debunking the claims of witches, warlocks, magicians, priests, politicians and ideologues. Sadly, this view is itself a product of magical thinking. Telling a Nationalist that it is irrational to believe that Nationalism is a good thing- when, without it, a particular community will suffer demographic replacement or foreign oppression- is itself irrational. No doubt, the 'Rationalist' felt the same moral or epistemic superiority as the Nationalist or the Theist or the believer in UFOs, but she was displaying an even more naive, as opposed to strategic, type of stupidity.
Consider the
Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP)
Wikipedia says it
is a program within the U.S. non-profit organization Center for Inquiry (CFI), which seeks to "promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims."[2] Paul Kurtz proposed the establishment of CSICOP in 1976 as an independent non-profit organization (before merging with CFI as one of its programs in 2015, to counter what he regarded as an uncritical acceptance of, and support for, paranormal claims by both the media and society in general. Its philosophical position is one of scientific skepticism. CSI's fellows have included notable scientists, Nobel laureates, philosophers, psychologists, educators, and authors. It is headquartered in Amherst, New York.
Is it as thorough a waste of time as it sounds? Yes. Unlike Richard Dawkin's cult, it has gained no traction. After all, Dawkins can say nasty things about Islam. The CSI can't. What can it do? The answer is it can hire an elderly lady named Meera Nanda to fulmine against Hinduism and Indian Nationalism under the rubric of attacking some sinister convergence of 'Postcolonial theory' (a sublimely silly academic availability cascade on which Leela Gandhi, a descendant of the Mahatma, wrote the handbook) and the writings of people like Rajiv Malhotra & J. Sai Deepak.
It is characteristic of paranoia, or an ignorant type of polemics, to substitute for the devils and witches of an earlier time, talk of Hitler and the imminent threat that Nazi Vampires will take over the country. Thus, according to these shitheads, if some stupid shit is not done, Hitler will rise from the dead. We must all urgently pull together to talk worthless shite, lest Hitler takes over.
Meera Nanda, who is 72 years old and who lives in Connecticut- where, no doubt, she receives a wage for propagating this type of magical thinking, has written a books titled 'Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason'. It was published by Routledge, 2025.
Since Hindu Nationalism pre-existed European Colonialism (being anti-Muslim at that time, because it was faced by Muslim, not European, Imperialism) and since it was part and parcel of the very internationalist anti-colonial ideology which transitioned into internationalist postcolonial ideology (i.e. Bandung, NAM, North-South dialogue, and now BRICS) it is utterly mad to suggest that an academic availability cascade featuring a miniscule number of tenured shitheads, teaching in wholly worthless University Departments, had anything to do with what became the dominant ideology at the very moment when Soviet and other Command Economies began to falter and fall behind initially poorer countries which pursued export-led growth (e.g. South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) and which began to transition to welfarist democracies in the Nineties. India was a separate case because it had a Dynasty which, following two assassinations, grew gun-shy of taking the top job in the country. Thus, in 2014, Rahul refused to become PM and so Narendra Modi had a work over. This gave a new lease of life to shitheads like Nanda who pretend to be fighting Fascism.
Why has the 'Hindu Right' risen? The answer is that Religion is not an 'inferior' or 'Giffen Good'. It does not have negative Income elasticity of Demand. Rather it is a Service industry with positive Income elasticity. Since Income elasticity correlates with Education in useful subjects as well as with Productivity (which correlates with the level of Technology used), Religion has risen whereas more miserabilist ideologies- e.g. Gandhian Socialism, Maoism, Dynasticism etc.- have fallen by the wayside.
This is also the case with 'Rationalism'. It was cool, back in the Sixties when most Tamils were very poor, that the handsome MGR always portrayed 'rationalist' heroes. Back then, there was always the fear that if you left your kid with Granny and he fell ill, the silly cow would take him to some Holy Shrine rather than the Hospital. Thus you took Granny to watch movies produced by leaders of the Dravidian movement where MGR or Jayalalitha or some other movie star gently explained the 'germ theory of disease' and persuaded the superstitious village folk to give up insanitary or superstitious practices. But that was long ago. Audiences were getting more sophisticated. Movie producers couldn't go on pretending that it wasn't irrational to beat a wholly obsolete 'Rationalist' drum.
Back in the mid-Seventies, in America, there may have been the fear that more and more people were taking LSD or other drugs with the result that they might believe in UFOs and Mayan prophesies and that MK-ULTRA really had 'remote viewers' and 'men who stare at ghosts' till the goats' hearts explode and that Hitler is the last incarnation of Vishnu and is living in a flying saucer inside the 'hollow earth' where dinosaurs still roam (this last was Ambassador Serrano's contribution).
The CSI was created in that obsolete context. It was wholly useless. People might watch 'Poltergeist' or 'ET'. They might even claim to have been abducted by Aliens. But this was just to pass the time. It wasn't the case that they voted for Reagan because their brains had turned to shit. It was simply that Reagan was the better candidate. Similarly, if people have voted for Modi since 2014, it is because there is no other candidate. Rahul still won't step up to the plate. He doesn't want to meet the same fate as his father or grandmother. It is safer for him to be the Greta Thurnberg of Indian politics.
The following extract from Nanda's new book has been published in 'The Wire'.
This book tells the story of two strange bedfellows, the Postcolonial Left
which was represented by Nehru, Sukarno, Nkrumah, Nasser etc. It had nothing to do with stupid shite called 'Postcolonial Theory' taught in English or History Depts. from the Eighties onward.
and the Hindu Right.
Whose vehicle to power was the Indian National Congress which was started by a Scottish ICS officer who converted to vegetarianism, Vedanta, and the cause of cow-protection. There was a split between the Garam Dal (Bal,Pal,Lal) who were allied with the Revolutionaries (Ghaddar, Jugantar, etc) and the Naram Dal (Gokhale, Sastri etc.) but after 1917 this breach was healed because British withdrawal was inevitable. The only question was whether the country would be partitioned. It was. First Buddhist Burma went its own way and then the Muslim majority areas formed Pakistan. Faced with a Muslim as well as a Communist threat, Hindus decided to hang together. Muslims lost all previous concessions and there was ethnic cleansing and an exchange of populations in some areas. Communists were killed or incarcerated till they learnt to play nice. Later, when Mrs Gandhi broke with the 'Old Congress' both the Commies and the Dravidian parties helped her rule till she won by a landslide. Like other countries in the Region, India moved to the left in the early Seventies but, since this was economically disastrous, India reversed course. Indira became more religious but so did the leaders of Pakistan and Bangladesh.
It argues that the Postcolonial Left’s relentless attacks on the “epistemic violence” of Western norms of rationality and modernity are
about appealing to the low IQ of kids in the West who are too stupid to do STEM subjects. If 'magical thinking' is what they want, serve that up to them. The fact is if you are doing a PhD in History or Comp. Lit, you know you are doing the intellectual equivalent of finger painting. Not so, people doing PhDs in Algebraic Topology or Computer Science. There is an implicit 'epistemic violence' operating on campus against Humanities students such that they feel anally raped and fat shamed by the catachresis of the desublimation of the oesophagus of the strategically essentialized catachresis of that thing Spivak referred to in her next book. Thanks to post-modernism, the subject of your thesis can be Enid Blyton's Timmy the dog whom you always thought should have his own book series and get to marry the, sadly, still cis gendger Georgie. True, your supervisor, whose Doctorate from Calcutta was on Walter Pater & Hugo von Hofmannsthal, may get you to title it 'Gramscian Giacondas- deconstructing the diaphanous doggie in Blyton's Blighty.' Still what matters is that you have struck a blow for, not just Queer Theory, but also Timmy the randy dog Theory. This subverts Neo-Liberalism, Patriarchy, and Donald fucking Trump.
providing the conceptual vocabulary for the Hindu Right’s project of “decolonizing the Hindu mind.”
Nonsense! The thing is as old as the hills. Everybody has always attacked everybody else for having fallen under the spell of some foreign or fraudulent type of thinking. Also, the Hindu Right's 'conceptual vocabulary' is Sanskrit based. One may say such and such American tech entrepreneur or Tamil Supreme Court advocate has published this book or that, but these authors are not part of the Hindu Right.
It is a different matter that there is a 'decolonization project' associated with replacing the use of English in the higher Courts with the State language or Hindi. What if it results in the use of traditional 'nyaya' maxims as substitutes for Anglo Saxon equitable rules? Some work was done on that long ago and one or two senior judges introduced Nyaya maxims into their prolix and unreadable judgments. It made no difference at all. The reason Indians need to shift from English to vernacular languages is that our senior judges are writing illiterate, ignorant, shite. So are our Professors. Consider the plight of a boy who goes to the local Engineering College. He needs to speak functional English. But the people hired to teach him gained PhDs in Eng Lit by submitting garbage to equally illiterate Professors. They can't teach English because they don't know English. All they can do is write 'The scotomization of subaltern in Singur countervailed the catachresis of the oesophagus of the Derrida of the Delueze of the Post Colonial Subject'. This does not represent a defence against Hindutva. It is merely credentialized gibberish for the sake of gibberish.
The postcolonial project of creating an alternative modernity free from the “imperialism” of Eurocentric concepts harks back to the late 19th century
which harked back to the late 18th century which harked back to the 17th and so on. The plain fact is post-colonial projects built on anti-colonial projects which, in the case of India, built on anti-Muslim projects and so on. Moreover, in India, there really were and are 'alternative modernities' cheek-by-jowl in cities and, increasingly, even the villages.
when Indian nationalists first began to “provincialize” Europe
they did no such thing. Europe became 'provincial' after the Second World War. By the mid-Sixties it was set firmly on an American path. Disneyland Paris reflects Europe's success in catching up with Peoria.
and is widely shared by the contemporary Hindu Right.
The contemporary Hindu Right is too busy ruling the country to bother with any such thing. The plain fact is, the country urgently needs bottom-up Judicial reform. The alternative to having illiterate High Court judges writing gibberish Judgements- which the Supreme Court confesses it is itself unable to understand- is to get all judicial procedures and documents put into the simplest, clearest, form of the State language. But if the same thing is done in the Humanities Depts. of Western Universities, you would shake out all the Woke nutters who have found a safe space there.
Consider the following excerpt from a judgment given by a former Chief Justice-
"This batch of writ petitions preferred under Article 32 of the Constitution of India exposits cavil in its quintessential conceptuality and percipient discord between venerated and exalted right of freedom of speech and expression of an individual, exploring manifold and multilayered, limitless, unbounded and unfettered spectrums and the controls, restrictions and constrictions, under the assumed power of 'reasonableness' ingrained in the statutory provisions relating to criminal law to reviver and uphold one's reputation"
India must put a stop to this nonsense. De-fucking-colonize the Judiciary right now! If you must talk nonsense, let it be grammatical nonsense. That way Mummy or Granny will slap you silly if you get into the habit of writing like former Chief Justice Dipak Mishra.
This book will show that far from an avant-garde progressive movement, postcolonialism in India bears a strong family resemblance, in context and content, with “conservative revolutions” of the kind that brought down the Weimar Republic
The Weimar Constitution permitted its own suspension. Weimar was brought down by Weimar. Hitler acted constitutionally because the stupid Professors who wrote the Constitution wanted a 'Caesarist' President who could act in a wholly unfettered manner.
and prepared the grounds for the Nazi takeover.
In other words, this book will display an equal and impartial ignorance of both India and Europe. The truth is 'postcolonialism' in India was about Bandung and Non-Alignment and Import Substitution and Panchayat Raj and Hindi becoming the National language and telling Coca-Cola and IBM to fuck the fuck off. Then, important people began to notice that their sons and daughters had quietly emigrated to places still ruled by White peeps. If they wanted to be able to talk to their grand-kids, they had better learn about Spiderman and Batman and so forth.
What prepared the ground for the Nazi takeover was the Weimar Constitution drafted by fools like Max Weber & Hugo Preuss. It had nothing to do with Hugo von fucking Hofmannsthal or Stefan George or, for that matter, Rabindranath Tagore. Still, there's nothing wrong in doing a PhD on Walter Pater's influence on Hofmannsthal and how this meant the German reception of Tagore diverged from the British or American reception of him.
For nearly five decades, a prominent segment of left-leaning intellectuals
have been completely useless. When Indira broke with the Syndicate, the Left kept her in power till she won a landslide victory. In return she permitted them to make 'a long march through the Institutions'- in particular the Universities- with the result that their destination was collective imbecility and coprophagic futility.
Since Indira wanted to disprove. her Dad's pal, Gunnar Myrdal's thesis that India was a 'soft state'- i.e. because she cracked down hard on lawlessness, the Janata Morcha needed the RSS to defeat her electorally. First Lohia & then JP accepted this necessity. But each time Janata tried to purge itself of the RSS, it fell apart . Thus, the BJP inherited its mantle at the centre. Then, because Rahul didn't want to get assassinated but also didn't want anyone else from his party to rule the country, Modi became PM. There being no other PM candidate, he remains in power. If Nitish & Co, pull him down, his party might once again get a majority. It appears the next elections will occur after the expansion of Parliament giving more seats to the Hindi speaking North. This means, one way or another, English's role will diminish. But this won't involve much 'decolonization'. It genuinely isn't the case that the Bihari bhaiyya's brain is stuffed full of Milton & Macaulay.
who speak for social justice and cultural rights of the marginalized have been waging a war against the ideal of secular modernity that India set upon at the time of Independence.
Very true. Their farts are very fearsome and equal to the use of chemical weapons. But they aren't waging a war because nobody bothers to fight them.
They believe that India’s experience of modernity is not organic because the elites running the show have accepted the colonial legacy of scientific reason and secularization as universally valid and universally desirable. Instead of universality, the critics find a deep difference, even incommensurability, between India and Europe.
Or Europe & Europe. Bilgrami wants a return to 'Enchantment' or 'Rewards & Fairies' as Kipling put it. But Bilgrami teaches in America. Also, he is Muslim.
These intellectuals see the critique of colonial legacy as a precondition for creating a modernity that is authentically “our own.”
Nanda lives in Connecticut. What is authentically her own is Donald Trump.
Our critics insist that Kant’s directive of escaping the tutelage of all external authorities by daring to think for oneself — the famous Sapere Aude! “Dare to use your own reason” — will not work for us in India in the manner it worked for Europe in the Age of Enlightenment.
It didn't work in Prussia. The new King was religious. So, all the Professors became so. On the other hand, no daring was needed to expound the 'Common Sense' Scottish philosophers precisely because everybody has common sense.
For the once colonized,
i.e. any part of Europe which had been a Roman colony
the Kantian spirit of Sapere Aude! demands that we first escape the apprenticeship of our erstwhile colonial lords and masters before we can dare to think for ourselves.
But Kant didn't escape his lord and master. He was a faithful and loyal 'Beamte'. Voltaire did escape. He did think for himself. But he had won the lottery earlier and thus didn't starve. That's what matters- not fucking starving.
Thus, to live more authentically and chart our independent course in the modern world, they argue, we must rediscover the indigenous modes of living and thinking that are still alive among the non-modern masses who are marginalized and condescended to by the elites with colonized minds.
Anyone can make such a claim about anything. You are a slave. Not till you eat all, and only, your own shit will you be truly free. Otherwise you are a fucking Nazi slave to 'Big Food'.
To that end, this segment of the Indian Left has produced withering critiques of the “Western” values
they can't critique shite. Also, what Westerners valued was being able to treat Easterners as donkeys. I suppose, Nanda is doing her bit for the Donald by shitting on those nasty Hindus- Brahmins in particular- who, Peter Navarro tells us, are wholly responsible for the plight of the Christian Ukrainians.
enshrined in the Constitution, especially the commitment to secularism and the cultivation of a secular worldview.
The East India Company was the first ruler of a great expanse of territory which was wholly secular. Later, during the Emergency, Indira Gandhi put the word 'Secular' into the Indian Constitution. After all, the Dynasty might become Christian and more and more European over the course of time. Thus, instead of a Brahmin dynasty, the Constitution should stipulate that the Republic must be 'Secular'. Hindus need not apply. Later Indira fought a court case to establish her sons were Hindu not Parsi. Sonia too was careful that, when her daughter married a Christian, the ceremony was conducted by Hindu priests. However, it wasn't till about a decade ago that Rahul came out of the closet as a 'janeodhari' Brahmin of Dattatreya gotra. This caused the 'Sickularists' to cry and cry.
They see these values as cast-off clothes of Europe that don’t fit Indians and turn them into pathetic mimic men.
That was V.S Naipaul. He wasn't a Leftist. Also, his book 'mimic men' referred to Trinidad which was still a colony in the Fifties. That's why Evelyn Waugh praised him. The dude understood that Independence would worsen matters. Naipaul wasn't talking about India where the leaders wore khadi kurtas. He could scarcely pretend that Lal Bahadur Shastri sought to dress an talk like the 14th Earl of Home.
Has Nanda gone quietly mad? She isn't that much older than me and could scarcely be drinking quite as much. The truth, I suppose, is that she is simply ignorant.
What unites these critics is a suspicion of the Enlightenment ideal of rational progress, something they see as a product of European history tainted by colonialism, Orientalism, and racism.
and the fact that Kant didn't eat his own shit.
We will refer to these critics of Indian modernity collectively as the Postcolonial Left.
Is Bilgrami part of it? No. This lady isn't smart enough to go after an Anal-tickle philosopher. Yet, as I have shown in two of my books ('Argumentative Indian imbeciles' & 'The fairies up Akeel Bilgrami's garden's bottom') he is even more subject to magical thinking than a Dipshit Chuckthefuckup. Anyway, Dipshit is now trying to turn from a brown turd into a green turd.
The rise to academic prominence of the Postcolonial Left through the last quarter of the 20th century coincided with
the 'Humanities' turning to shit.
the rapid rise of the Hindu Right.
No. That rapid rise occurred between 1963, when Lohia entered Parliament and gave the Sangh an alternative to propping up Rajaji's Swatantra party, and 1974 ,when JP's call for 'sampoorna kranti' turned the RSS into the backbone of the anti-Indira resistance in the North. Gujarat had a different trajectory but it was always more Hindu and Right Wing.
The same shock to the Indian polity — the imposition of the Emergency that lasted from 1975 to 1977 — that led many on the Left to rethink the trajectory of Indian modernity,
The Left Front entrenched itself in Bengal. Jyoti Basu could have been PM rather than Gowda.
also brought the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent of the family of Hindu nationalist outfits, into the public sphere from which it had been banished after the murder of Mahatma Gandhi.
This lady is 9 years older than me. How can she be so utterly ignorant? Her first PhD was from IIT Delhi. Surely she could see with her own eyes that an RSS guy- Brahmananda Gupta- had become Mayor of Delhi in 1970? But Atal- the future PM- got elected to Parliament in 1957. But there were already 3 Lok Sabha MPs from the Sangh in 1951.
The same turn away from state-led development to a neoliberal market economy that enabled a culturalist turn among “Third World” intellectuals as they moved to the centers of learning in the “First World,”
That occurred in the Sixties and Seventies when India was moving to the Left. Ranajit Guha emigrated and took British citizenship in 1959.
also brought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a political front of the RSS, to the commanding heights of Indian politics.
Nanaji Deshmukh was offered the Deputy Prime Ministership in 1977. He stayed out of the Cabinet. But Atal was Foreign Minister.
The BJP has adroitly welded neoliberal economic policies with a discourse of Hindu civilizational supremacy.
Those economic policies were brought in under Congress. They worked. The old way did not. This had nothing to do with the BJP. Nanda, of course, thinks there should be a discourse of how shitty Hindus are. Thankfully, she now lives in Trump's America.
We will refer to the 21st-century manifestation of Hindu nationalism as the Hindu Right.
In which case Hindu anti-nationalism is the Hindu Left. Does it involve love of Donald Trump? I suppose so. Nanda must be seventh heaven when she hears Navarro blame 'Hindu Brahmins' for Ukraine's suffering.
A deeply palingenetic, or revivalist, ultranationalism runs through the ideology of the Hindu Right.
Not now. The thing has been alive and burgeoning for four generations. What hasn't died yet, can't be reborn. There is no need to 'revive' that which has been gathering strength for a century.
Like Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, the late 19th-century pioneers of Indian nationalism,
this stupid woman doesn't get that they converted to the thing in their youth. It pre-existed them.
the contemporary Hindu Right seeks the rebirth of the ancient “Vedic” civilizational virtues while embracing the technological and economic opportunities of 21st-century global capitalism.
Vedic civilization is ongoing and uninterrupted in hundreds of millions of Hindu families. Nanda didn't notice.
The rebirth of the Hindu nation in a formally secular nation-state demands a reformulation of the idea of India, which in turn demands purging it of alien impurities, Western as well as Islamic. How else, Hindu nationalists ask, can the ancient nation be restored to its original glory if its ruling ideas don’t bear the mark of its primordial civilization?
But all this was done long before we were born. Even at St. Columba school in Delhi, it was dinned to us by our Sanskrit teacher. The Hindi teacher was a Yadav. He derived great pleasure from beating fair skinned Bengali Brahmins. My father, despairing of any other way of getting me to pass Hindi, sent me to him for tuition. Strangely, he developed a liking for me. He may not have been able to teach me grammar or spelling but he did transmit the Hindi version of Hindu nationalism to me. It really isn't anything a sensible person would object to.
Western ideas and ideals that first came to India through colonialism have long been targets of Indian and Hindu nationalists.
Which one's? Chucking our foreigners and becoming independent? Did they really object to that? How fucking stupid is this woman?
Following the long Hindu tradition of hierarchical inclusivism,
There is no such thing. That is why neither Muhammad nor Christ feature in the Hindu pantheon. On the other hand, Derrida is widely worshipped as part of the cult of Dattatreya.
Hindu nationalists don’t oppose these ideas outright but subsume them under the presumed superiority of the holistic nature of Hindu dharma that denies any separation between the human, social, and natural realms from the divine.
Nope. Hinduism separates this realm completely from the Divine. God is Sat- Truth/Being. Everything else is Maya or Mithak- i.e. irreal. This woman truly is as stupid as shit. She probably thinks God is not separated from the turd she squeezes out- at least for benighted Hindus like herself.
Thus key ideas of modernity — separating the secular sphere of governance from the claims of faith,
was a feature of East India Rule, not that of Britain itself. Holyoake, the guy who invented the word 'Secularism' said that if India, a vast country, could be ruled in a Secular manner by English people, why not England itself? Why should he have to go to jail for Blasphemy for saying something for which he could not be prosecuted in Calcutta or Madras?
recognizing the priority of rights-bearing individuals over the claims of the community,
which we know must have occurred before the Buddha was born.
and honoring the separation of material nature from any kind of mind-stuff,
Panpsychism isn't taboo for Western Scientists. It occurs to me that this silly moo did not keep up with developments in her own field. Thus she started talking nonsense about something she knew zero about- viz. Indian politics and the Hindu religion. Since the CSI is based on magical thinking of an ignorant and obsolete sort, they made her a Fellow. She receives the 'wages of unreason'. One can't have enough Hindoooos on the payroll mooing mutinously about how shitty those Hindus are. Peter Navarro is right to blame all Ukraine's ills on 'Hindu Brahmins'.
whether a personal God or impersonal Intelligence — are deemed to be un-Hindu colonial intrusions which must be suitably reformulated, or “spiritualized,” to conform to the imperatives of the integral, holistic worldview of Hindu dharma.
This is nonsense. Advaita means sublatability- i.e. every hypothesis is wrong because a superior one will supplant it. Moreover the matam/vigyan (dogma/ science) distinction is a lot like Reichenbach & Observational Equivalence save there is no nonsense about how Philosophy can provide 'demarcation criteria' or do any other sort of a priori work.
In a tragic reversal, left-leaning intellectuals who once stood firm in defense of the secular humanist worldview that lies at the core of modernity,
Nonsense! Leftists indulged in magical thinking of various types. The humanist view was that presiding over man-made famines for a political reason- which is what Stalin & Mao did- was not just evil, it was stupid.
and was embraced by the framers of India’s Constitution,
which is why there is a Directive Principle regarding cow- protection
have become its most vocal critics. Once some of India’s best-known public intellectuals
People have heard of Amartya Sen and Shashi Tharoor. Nobody has heard of Dipshit or whoever else this silly moo is thinking off.
went native, so to speak, and later joined forces with poststructuralist currents in the metropolitan universities, words like secularism, science, development, and the Enlightenment would not be mentioned in academic discourse without scare quotes.
But Marxists back in the Twenties were already saying that all these things were forms of 'bourgeois idealism'. I suppose, this silly moo really doesn't know about dialectical materialism. By about the time she got her first PhD, there was a category theoretical representation of the Hegelian dialectic or alternatively, a chaos theoretic approach to the materialistic dialectic. Even this cretin must have heard of Jacques Monod or Rene Thom's 'catastrophe' theory. Stuff like that was like catsnip to Lefties back then.
These critics have expended enormous intellectual labor to debunk these ideas as imposing Eurocentric conceptual categories on the post-colonial world, thereby perpetuating “mental colonialism.”
Also, European 'biopolitics' caused Indians to choose to have either a dick or a vagina. Previously everybody had plenty of both.
The Left and the Right, thus, are united in their search for “alternative modernities” that are no longer bound by the “Western” model of modernity as a progressive decline of ignorance and blind faith, along with a growth of individualism and personal freedoms.
When this silly lady was about 10 years old, even remote parts of India were invaded by 'Beatles' and 'Hippies' and so forth. It turned out that the West didn't have any 'model of modernity' of the sort she is describing. She must have completed her foreign PhD in the Eighties. Where in America would she have been able to find the shite she mentions? Who in the West was talking about blind faith? Why not mention superstitious practices and adherence to witchcraft or Voodoo? The fact is, if you said you practiced 'Wicca', people understood you had an MFA in Queer Theory. They didn't say to you- 'kindly read about Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. That will help you overcome your ignorance, superstition and blind faith in the Warlock's wand. Let me tell you, it isn't a wand at all. It is his penis. Don't let him put it inside you.'
The Argument: What the Book Says and Does Not Say
The central argument of this book is that the Postcolonial Left and the Hindu Right belong to the family of “conservative revolutions” against Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism on behalf of indigenous traditions.
All Enlightenments are 'indigenous' and have precursors within the borders of their own linguistic area. Liberalism has a separate origin story. It objects to despots, however 'Enlightened'.
Intellectuals who first called themselves “conservative revolutionaries” were a loose group of intellectuals who were bitterly opposed to the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first constitutional democracy,
They were nothing compared to the 'Whites' in Russia. Spanish 'Carlism' in the Nineteenth Century is an example of a Conservative Revolutionary movement. Legitimists in France in the nineteenth century & Jacobites in early Eighteenth Century England are other examples.
and hastened its demise at the hands of the Nazis.
Nonsense! They were useless tossers.
They condemned the rational foundations of modern liberalism and socialism as culturally alien to German Volkisch traditions and sought a “Third Way” rooted in Germanic values.
So what? They had no money, no goons, and no fucking Parliamentary representation. The Nazi party was started by Hitler while he was serving as an intelligence officer for the German Army. It carried out the maximal program of the German General Staff.
Their attempt to reawaken the German Volksgeist would provide a blueprint for the National Socialism of the Nazi party.
It didn't need any blueprint other than Mein Kamf or any one of Hitler's speeches. The Weimar Constitution envisaged rule by a 'plebiscitary' Dictator if an Emergency arose. It did when 'extend & pretend' became impossible thanks to the Wall Street crash. There was the Great Depression. Hindenburg was too old to run things himself. After he dumped General Schleicher and accepted Hitler, Enabling Laws were inevitable. Once Hitler killed Schleicher (and his wife!) during the Night of the Long Knives, General Blomberg was happy to get the Army to take an oath of personal loyalty to the new Chancellor.
The kernel of thought on which this book is based is simple: India is facing a Weimar moment,
If so, the President must be ruling by decree.
and its intellectual landscape bears a comparison, in context and substance, to the Weimar Republic before it fell to the Nazis.
Sadly, this isn't the case. Germany had some of the best Mathematicians and Physicists in the world before Hitler came to power. India does not. But it also hasn't been defeated in war, suffered hyperinflation and isn't currently in the throes of a Great Depression. It has been growing at over 5 percent a year for three decades.
The short and spectacular
shitty
life of the embattled Weimar Republic can illuminate the dilemmas and challenges facing India’s faltering democracy.
If so, people like me- who were born in Germany and who know German history would have noticed. This very stupid woman knows nothing of history or economics or political science.
The role the conservative revolutionaries played in the downfall of the Republic
was zero.
can illuminate the dangers of the intellectual assault on modernity from the Left and the Right wings of postcolonial studies.
Nobody gives a shit about that shit. Germans believed they had to conquer land to the East to avoid starvation and gain gold reparations from France (as they had in 1870) to rise up economically. That's why Weber & Preuss created the possibility for a 'Caesarist' President directly elected by the people with a 7 year term of office. Guess how long the 7 years war lasted? Seven years. This is a country which wanted a second Fredrick the Great. That's what it thought it had found in Hitler.
Pakistan could be compared to Weimar Germany. India can't.
In the chapters that follow, I juxtapose the intellectual history of India
of which she knows nothing
with the revolution against the Enlightenment in Germany between the two world wars.
there was no such revolution. There was only the Army's maximal program. The Nazis did borrow some ideas- e.g. Racial laws based on 'Jim Crow', sterilization of disabled people, like in the Myrdal's Sweden- but everything they did was within the framework of the Weimar Constitution precisely because, as Carl Schmitt kept saying, it provided for its own suspension. The Nazis didn't need a new Constitution- which is why they told Carl Schmitt, whom they considered an opportunist, to shut the fuck up.
The mantle of conservative revolutionaries in India rightfully belongs to the neo-Hindu founding fathers of modern India — notably, Mahatma Gandhi,
who was against the 'garam dal' revolutionaries
Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo
who were for them- most notably Jugantar. Why does Nanda not know this? Does she not have access to Wikipedia?
— who bought into the Orientalist and Romanticist conceptions of India as an idyllic, spiritual nation of perennial wisdom.
No such things existed. Everyone knew about the 1857 Mutiny. They understood that the Brits had plenty of White soldiers in India. They alone operated the artillery. If the Sepoys rose up again, they would be slaughtered by canon fire. As Randolph Churchill- who expanded the Empire into Upper Burma- put it, Maxim guns, not moral maxims, ruled the non-settler colonies (but were also effective against the Boers at a later date).
They were not hostile to non-Hindu minorities as the openly Islamophobic parties like the Hindu Mahasabha or the RSS were and are.
But it was Mahatma Gandhi & Nehru who ruled the roost when Indian Muslims were ethnically cleansed and expelled.
(Germany’s conservative revolutionaries, too, were not openly anti-Semitic.
Only if they weren't Jewish- like Hugo von Hoffmansthall.
Their nationalism was more cultural than racialist.) Nevertheless, they saw India as an essentially Hindu nation
because it is.
whose “soul” lay in its spirituality and its holistic communitarian way of life.
Where else, save in spirituality, can the soul lie?
When they were not openly hostile to parliamentary democracy, industry, capitalism, and socialism, as in the case of Gandhi,
he wasn't hostile to shit. He just wanted everybody to give up sex and eating nice things and wearing nice clothes.
Nanda sees herself as
an old-fashioned Enlightenment secular humanist who proudly locates herself on the side of universal norms of reason and human flourishing,
We see her as a useless shithead. Like Vandana Siva, she isn't an actual scientist. But Vandana had charisma. Nanda had zero salience in India. There is a Left which has salience- viz. Comrade Vijayan in Kerala- and a Right which matters- viz. Modi & Yogiji. There are no intellectuals in India or Germany or England or the US who matter. Musk is smart and very very rich. But he isn't an intellectual. Musk matters. This ignorant old woman doesn't matter in the slightest. Nor does the organization which pays her 'wages of unreason'.
I have watched in anguish how the Postcolonial Left has shredded the ideals we rationalists hold dear.
They were stupid but they got tenure somewhere nice. This lady didn't. Boo hoo.
I am alarmed when I see the stalwarts of postcolonial and decolonial theory — Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ashis Nandy, Nicholas Dirks, Walter Mignolo, and Anibal Quijano —respectfully cited in the Hindu Right literature.
By whom? Rajiv Malhotra? J. Sai Deepak? They have science backgrounds and may have thought Professors at Ivy League can't be utterly shite. But they can if they teach a shite subject.
I am alarmed when tirades against “mental decolonization” make their way from the Ivory Tower into the halls of government, as happened when the Modi administration made decolonization the guiding principle of the National Education Policy of 2020.
Since the guiding practice of such Policy is to create more and more illiterate tossers with PhDs- who actually gives a fuck?
Looking beyond India, I am alarmed when the European Right passes itself off as an anti-colonial movement defending European civilization against immigrants
e.g. the 1905 British Act curbing immigration of East European Jews. Chesterton was way more 'anti-colonial' and anti-Semitic than anyone we see today. Indeed, Gandhi was inspired to write 'Hind Swaraj' after reading an article by Chesterton which said that Jews in England should wear the Kaftan. They had no right to dress like Christians. Indians should not demand a Parliament. Parliaments are for Europeans. Let them, by all means, revive ancient institutions of their own. In fact Herbert Spencer, too, advised his Japanese admirers to preserve indigenous forms. They rejected his advise and rose and rose.
and the homogenizing influences of globalization, or when Alexander Dugin, the Russian ultranationalist, speaks the language of decoloniality.
Which was being promoted back in the late Sixties by Yulian Bromley at the Soviet Institute of Ethnography. That's why, as I discovered to my discomfort some forty years ago, a Sri Lankan Tamil who studied in Moscow had a more paranoid anti-Brahmin ideology than any DMK hack. But Lenin & Stalin had always supported the ecumenical 'anti-colonial' (and later the State sponsored 'post-colonial') ideology whereby a united front against the advanced capitalist powers must be maintained regardless of ideological differences within the fold.
Dugin is useful because he is saying that Slavs and 'Tartars' share something which the 'materialistic' West has lost. I visited Moscow in 1982 and was surprised at the official tolerance of what I thought off as 'skinheads'. But this had to do with the Yuzhinsky circle which was connected to a type of 'esoteric Nazism' we Indians understood because Serrano had been an ambassador to India. Nanda, being a shithead with zero knowledge of India, will not know that Foreign Secretary Rasgotra arranged a Conference of Occultists for Indira Gandhi. My father was a diplomat and thus made it his business to put an acceptable gloss on this bizarre event in case he was quizzed about it by the Soviets. There was no need. The fix was already in. Incidentally, Justice Krishna Iyer, whom I met in Moscow, was a great believer in Soviet para-psychology.
I am equally alarmed when theorists of decoloniality
crazy, ignorant, shitheads- they have no influence or importance.
embrace authoritarian states like Russia, China, and Iran (and India, too) as mascots of de-westernization and civilizational “plurivarsalism.”
Embracing a big state like Russia or China is like embracing the planet Jupiter. It is cheaper and safer to just gaze at it wistfully and have a wank. Even a Trump who goes in for such embraces is merely having a wank. Geopolitics doesn't work that way. Economic and strategic interests prevail though coalitions may change. Still, we see pretty much the same coalition in both the first and second world war. Ideology doesn't matter at all.
Above all, I am concerned about the kind of cultural values and ways of knowing that are being promoted for our salvation,
Salvation is God's business.
and if these values are adequate for creating a society that respects rational thought, human equality, and individual freedoms.
They aren't. Only Economics- that is mechanism design- matters. If useless people are paid to pretend they are capable of rational thought, they may also be willing to pretend to be very concerned about some useless tossers on the Left or the Right or the Centre. But, waged or unwaged, they are as useless as Socioproctologists.
At the heart of this book lies my concern that under the cover of radical-sounding rhetoric of “decolonization,” and making India the world’s guru, ways of knowing that have been superseded by modern science, and cultural values that belong to the premodern world of integral communities organized on the principles of hierarchy, deference, and duties are being glorified and institutionalized.
So, what this silly lady is doing is pretending that Modi will ban Western Science and get everybody to drink nothing but cow urine. If she gets paid by Whitey to do so, well and good.
Let me clearly state what the convergence of the Left with conservative revolutionaries of the Right that I describe in this book does not imply.
It implies nothing whatsoever.
I am not suggesting that Hindutva’s assault on the idea of India as a modern secular state
ruled by a half Italian dynasty?
would not have happened if it were not for the unremitting barrage of anti-Western and anti-modernist high theory emanating from the postcolonial battalions from the Left of the political spectrum.
Nor would that 'unremitting barrage' have happened if the Academy hadn't turned to shit long ago- which is why this silly moo had a career and Socioproctology has something to point a censorious finger at.
The Hindu Right does not need any assistance from the Left on this count.
The Hindu Left or Right or Center needs support from Hindus. To secure this it needs to appeal to Hindu scripture and practice. Talking about Derrida or Dirac or Darwin won't help. Mention of Dattatreaya, on the other hand, is fine.
There's nothing wrong with doing a non-STEM PhD on a topic which seemed meaningful at that time. There is also nothing wrong with teaching cretins. But it is silly to pretend you are actually fighting Fascism or Nazism or the Spanish fucking Inquisition.
What is shameful is taking money from foreigners to shit upon your own country.
In other words, I am not suggesting that the Postcolonial Left single-handedly lit the fires of Hindu chauvinism.
Hindus are bad. Ask Peter Navarro. He'll tell you.
What I am claiming is that it has enabled the fire to spread by disabling a principled critique of Hinduism and Hindu nationalism that could have acted as a fire retardant.
This retard can't retard shit.
By recklessly propagating the cult of indigeneity, the high priests of postcolonial theory have succeeded in tilting the intellectual-political center of gravity toward a politics of nostalgia and revival, which is the natural terrain of the Right.
But it is Nanda's America which has tilted right- not India. Was this too the fault of 'post-colonial theory'? I suppose one might say that the real problem was the Woke ideology and its crazy Grievance Studies spin offs. Some Indians jumped on that bandwagon to emigrate. They got paid a little money to say 'Boo to Hinduism!' Still, they were mere 'rice bag' converts without any influence.
What about people like Charlie Kirk?- who, sadly, has been shot by some nutter. Is it really the case that the Leftists in the Academy sparked the backlash we now see? It may seem so. Kirk- whom Nanda would no doubt call the 'Horst Wessel' of the Trumpian Right- got his start by pushing back against Leftists on Campuses. Vivek Ramaswamy got his political start by attacking Corporate 'Wokeism'.
Perhaps, in America which was rich enough to afford the nuisance of 'Wokeism', such people can have political influence. But not India. It is too poor. 'Reservations' matter. India may well face a Bangladesh type 'youth-quake' on the issue. Indeed, some stupid Leftists thought the rise of the BJP in the Nineties was solely due to 'Mandir vs Mandal'- i.e. was a reaction to the extension of affirmative action to OBCs.
The plain fact is the Rightward shift we see in America and parts of Europe has to do with demographics and structural changes to the Global Economy. Neither witches not ideological witch-hunts matter.
Consequently, there is now a void
its name is Rahul Gandhi. He should have taken charge of the Commonwealth Games in the manner that his Dad had taken charge of the Asian Games. He should have shouldered Manmohan aside and led his party to victory in 2014 as Prime Minister. He, understandably, was gun-shy. That's why we have Modi- who, it must be said, has been excellent.
where there should have been a strong, principled, secular-democratic front against Hindutva’s onslaught on all that was once decent and promising in the idea of India.
Nanda now lives in Trump's America. She is safe from 'Hindutva's onslaught'. But is she safe from ICE? Once people like me and Nanda have our Visas or foreign passports ripped up and are sent back to India, we may begin to feel it was always only Hindutva which preserved what is decent and promising about our sacred land.
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