Rudrangshu Mukherjee getting Bhishma wrong

 The historian, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, writing in Scroll.in, puts forward a curious theory about the death of Bhishma- a great hero in the Mahabharata epic.

The conventional view is that Bhishma refused to defend himself against a particular warrior who was born female but who exchanged gender with a Yaksha. Thus he was felled by the countless arrows fired by Arjuna. His body, however, did not touch the ground because it rested upon so many arrows which had been shot into his hide. Bhishma had the boon of dying at the moment of his own choice. Instead of dying immediately, he chose to remain on the arrow-bed for 58 nights until the arrival of Uttarayana- when the Sun begins its northward journey.  This permits Bhishma to give a long discourse in Ethics and Public Policy to the victorious Pandavas. 

a downcast Sanjaya brings to Dhritarashtra the news that Bhishma is nihata.

 निहत means 'struck down'. Bhishma was struck down by Arjuna's shower of arrows. 

The statement is unequivocal and reiterated in the next sloka with the words, “The son of Santanu, Bhishma is nihata.” The word nihata is repeated. (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya 13: slokas: 1-3). This raises two problems.

One, why announce Bhishma’s death

Bhishma was struck down. He was not dead.  

even before the description of the battle has begun? Kaliprasanna Sinha, who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, translated the epic into Bengali prose taking it sloka by sloka not only recognised this problem but addressed it in a footnote. Sinha wrote that on hearing the news that Bhishma was nihata, a surprised Dhritarashtra asked Sanjaya to narrate to him the details of the battle. Hence the first sloka of the Bhagavad Gita.

The Gita is about Arjuna seeing the assembled armies and intuiting the horrible outcome of the battle. But this occurred before hostitilites commenced. 

Thus, according to Sinha, the announcement anticipates the Gita (Sinha: i: 879). This explanation is plausible as a narrative device since it helps to understand the insertion of the Gita at this juncture –– Dhritarashtra’s question about what is going in Kurukshetra, followed by Sanjaya’s description, which begins with the Gita.

This is nonsense. Dhritarahtra heard of Bhishma's death ten days after the Gita had been revealed and the war had commenced. 

The second problem is more difficult to resolve. How can someone who has the boon of ichhamrityu be slain (nihata) in battle?

He can be struck down- more particularly if he refuses to fight back. However he remains alive because of the boon that was given to him. He departs the earthly plane at the auspicious time of his choice.  

The issue becomes more complicated as the narrative progresses and readers are presented with a graphic description of the battle on the tenth day of the war. The epic says on that day, pierced by arrows all over his body – the arrows left a space of only two fingers between them – Bhishma contemplated that this was the right moment to die and the rishis and the vasus in the sky concurred with him (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya:14; slokas: 34-37).

In other words, this was the time at which he was released from his duty to fight for the Kauravas. Death, coming at the ordained time, cancels all obligations. However, if you kill yourself to avoid paying a debt, you would be considered to have used an ignoble method to escape your duty.  

He continued to fight a little longer but soon fell from his chariot. The arrows stuck in his body did not allow his body to touch the ground, and so Bhishma lay on a bed of arrows. He realised that this was that time of the year when the sun was in the south and it was not the best moment to die. He heard the same message from heaven and announced that “I am alive and I will wait for the sun to journey to the north.” (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya:14; slokas: 97-102.)

Bhishma asserts that he has the definite freedom to choose the time of his death. (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya: 14; sloka: 109). But Sanjaya, while reporting this incident to Dhritarashtra, says that after Bhishma had been slain (nihata),

struck down, not slain 

the sons of Dhritarashtra did not know what to do (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya: 14: slokas: 112-114). The word nihata is repeated again in sloka 122; and in adhyaya 15 in slokas 3 and 5. In sloka 6 the verb killed (badh)

'badh' can mean 'tied up'. Bhishma was in their power. Should they chop off his head? No. The dude had recognised (& the God's agreed) his time was up. He would remain on his bed of arrows till the auspicious time for his soul to depart this mortal realm. The good news was that this meant he had leisure to give Yuddhisthra very detailed instruction on Ethics & Public Policy.  

is used.
This is the nub of the puzzle: is Bhisma alive or nihata (slain/dead)?

He is alive but 'tied up'. He can't move. He is no longer a threat.  

Within a space of a few slokas, the Mahabharata is making two different and contradictory statements. According to Bhishma himself he is alive and has chosen his time of death. But the epic is also saying that he is nihata.

Nihata, in context, means 'struck down' and 'badh' means 'tied up' or 'unable to escape'.  

He is alive since we hear him asking for a pillow, asking for water, advising Duryodhona and counselling Karna.

Later on in the Mahabharata, in the Santi and Anushasana parvas, he instructs Yudhishthira on kingship or rajadharma. So why the repeated use of the word nihata?

because we are touched (nihat) by it 

The word recurs so many times in the context of Bhisma, as recounted above, it cannot be written off as a slip – spots on the text as it were.

Bhishma was struck down by a big shower of arrows. We are touched by the image of this great warrior seer- regarded as the common grand-sire of the Pandavas & Kauravas- reposing on a bed of arrows while fixing his mind on celestial matters. 

A simple lexicographical solution offers itself. Apte in his dictionary gives the following meanings of nihata: Struck down, smitten, killed, slain (Apte:1957-59). It is possible to argue that the epic is using the word nihata in the sense of “struck down” or “smitten” and not in the sense of killed and slain. Such a reading would solve the puzzle at the cost of diminishing the richness of what the epic is trying to convey.

In some legends, a vetala (vampire) can possess a corpse. Perhaps Bhishma was dead. Dracula took over his body. Those stupid Hindus have been treating 'Bhishma-Niti' with venerance when it was actually dictated by Nosfer-fucking-atu!

I would suggest that something more significant is at work here. Bhishma is alive and not alive – however bizarre such a statement sounds in mundane and literal terms. There are some clues in the text that indeed this was the state in which Bhishma placed himself post his fall from his chariot.

Slokas 95 and 96 in the 14th adhyaya says that after Bhishma fell from his chariot, he was enveloped by the ambience of heaven (svargia bhava) and that the clouds brought forth rain and there was an earthquake. Such a phenomenon would suggest that this was not just a fall of any very powerful warrior, but more than that – it was the fall of an extraordinary figure, maybe even a suprahuman one.

Bhishma is the incarnation of a Vasu and thus is more than mortal. We may say that figures like Bhishma & Parasuram represent the old order which was giving way to the urban, commercial, civilization of the emporium cities of the Gangetic plain. 

This suggestion is strengthened by Sanjaya’s report to Dhritarashtra that Bhishma, on the bed of arrows following yoga, began to chant (jap) the maha upanishad (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya 14: sloka: 125). Moreover, the epic says that after learning that Bhishma would wait to die till the sun began its northward journey, his mother Ganga, the daughter of Himalaya, sent the maharishis, as swans, to Bhishma.

The maharishis asked: why would a mahatma like Bhisma depart for the next life when the sun was in the south? Hearing this, Bhishma looked at them and after some thought told them: “As long the sun is in the south I will by no means go to the next life. This is what is in my mind.” (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya:14: slokas: 102-107).

In this context it is worth noting that when Bhishma, lying on his bed of arrows, asked for water, various kinds of food and potable items were brought to him. Seeing all these, Bhishma remarked, “Now I am no longer in a position to accept any items belonging to the human world. I have been delivered from the human world, I am on a bed of arrows and waiting for the sun and the moon to alter their movements. I will drink heavenly water, not earthly water.” And it is heavenly water that Arjuna provides to Bhishma (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya:16: slokas: 10-25).

Bhishma had eaten Kaurava salt and thus had been bound to fight for them. Now, he is 'dead to the world'. If some sin was incurred by eating what Duryodhana provided, then Bhishma expiates it on his bed of arrows.  

All these pieces of evidence gleaned from the end of the Bhishma parva would strengthen the conclusion that he was no longer inhabiting the world of humans. He was in some undefined supramundane sphere.

The mind of the Yogi, sitting in samadhi, may well be in some such place. But he can continue to offer instruction to us. 

The description that his body did not fall to the ground but was propped up above the ground by arrows is perhaps the epic’s way of indicating metaphorically that Bhishma was no longer connected with the earth, he was above the earth but he still had not attained paradise. It is possible that the word nihata was used to signify that he was no longer a part of the material world. But the epic could not kill Bhishma because he had agency over his own death.

 We feel Bhishma, with the hubris of a warrior, caused great injury to Shikhandini. Let him pay for his crime in this life and be clear of the karmic debt.

Bhishma’s last moments in the world of humans are narrated at the end of the Anushasana parva. Here we learn that when Yudhishthira saw that the sun was making its way north, he with all his brothers and relatives travelled to where Bhishma lay on his bed of arrows. After exchanging greetings, Bhishma tells Yudhishthira that he had been on the bed of arrows for fifty-eight days and these had seemed like a hundred years to him (Mbh: Anushasana parva: adhyaya: 145: sloka: 27).

Which is long enough to expiate his sins of ommission or commission.  

It would not be unfair to read this as an admission on Bhishma’s part that he had suffered and felt pain as any human being would. A part of him, it would appear, is still anchored in the world of human beings. But the suprahuman dimension of his “existence” is reiterated in the description of his death or departure from this world.

He was a celibate seer who had gained 'siddhas' through itnense 'tapas'. Also, he was the reincarnation of a particular Vasu.  

The relevant slokas say that the unshackled wind of Bhishma’s life travelled upwards. Everyone, including Vyasa and other rishis who were present, was astonished to witness this.

Such things don't happen every day.  

Then Bhisma began to rid himself of his limbs and through the power of yoga each of his limbs became free of arrows. Within a short time his body became free of arrows, much to the wonder of even Vyasa and Krishna. Then his life spirit broke through his head and flew into the sky and disappeared. Thus, the epic says, the greatest of the Bharata lineage merged with Time. The gods rained flowers and beat drums (Mbh: Anushasana parva: adhyaya: 146: slokas: 2-11).
It is clear that Bhishma did not die in the manner of ordinary mortals.

He had taken and kept a 'terrible' (Bhishma) vow. He wasn't ordinary at all.  

The passing of life from his body was an ethereal phenomenon.

Celestial.  

It is also worth noting that as in the case of all human beings, the passing of a son was mourned by the mother. Ganga, Bhishma’s mother,

having been unable to drown him as a baby 

mourned him and was inconsolable. She asked how he could be slain

struck down, not slain 

by Shikhandi –– the word nihata reappears here in the mouth of Ganga. Vyasa and Krishna consoled her and explained to Ganga that it was Arjuna who had slain (again nihata) Bhishma following kshatriyadharma on the battlefield (Mbh: Anushasana parva: adhyaya: 146: slokas: 23-32).

We are thus not free of the conundrum of how a person who is declared to be nihata so many times, including by his own mother, was alive for 58 days and had been able to provide long disquisitions on aspects of ruling, kingship, dharma and so on through two of the longest parvas, save the Adi parva, of the epic –– the Santi and the Anushasana parvas.

There is no conundrum. The dude was struck down & then he decided to die on a a particular day. There were other heroes- some of them super-human- who fought and died at Kurukshetra. But they didn't have Bhishma's boon which, to be honest, isn't particularly desirable.  

The only plausible explanation seems to accept that Bhishma is not entirely human. He was originally one of the Vasu gods – Dyaus Vasu – who had come to earth in human form under a curse and a blessing of Vashistha. As a god he cannot die,

Nonsense! His mummy was supposed to drown him as a baby- as she had done with seven of his siblings- but her husband intervened. That is why Bhishma had to suffer a long life on this earthly plane. However, his mother got him educated by all the great sages. That's why Bhishma-Niti is esteemed. 

as a human he is mortal.

Krishna is god. Nevertheless, he dies.  Ashwattama doesn't die though he is no god. 

This paradox is resolved in the epic by bestowing on Bhishma the agency over his own death. Like any human warrior, he is declared to be nihata but this is not followed immediately by his mrityu since he has the boon to choose the time of his own mrityu.
It could be said that this is a situation where the universal principle of mortality –– operative in the case of all human beings – is clashing with the magical principle of a boon.

There is no clash. What requires explanation is why Bhishma decides to stop fighting. The answer is that he knows that the time of his death has come. His earthly obligations are cancelled. The gods agree.  If this were not the case, some one would be bound to ask why Bhishma didn't use some particular occult weapon or magical power to continue the fight. 

One may speak of 'prarabhda karma'- Yogic philosophy compares past actions (Sanchita) to a full quiver of arrows, future actions to arrows in hand, and Prarabdha to an arrow already fired from the bow—it cannot be called back and must hit its target. However, an expert archer can shoot an arrow to deflect another arrow. Still, everything must be paid for one way or another.  Bhishma-niti explores the 'economia' wriggle-room that exists within Hindu Shastric 'akreibia'. 

Thus Bhishma, after his fall from the chariot and on the bed of arrows, is not inhabiting the sphere occupied by ordinary mortals.

It is the same sphere as the other characters in the epic.  

This is a liminal space at the limit of life and death where the ambience is heavenly but Bhishma is able to talk and counsel Yudhishthira and set out the principles of rajadharma. Such a situation, where a universal principle and an exceptional boon that transgresses the universal principle

there is no transgression if the boon is used in an unexceptionable manner- which is what happens here

are overlapping is narratively constructed and the Mahabharata invites/expects its readers/listeners to willingly suspend their mundane disbelief.

It doesn't expect them to be as stupid as shit.  

This situation is obviously unique and therefore a marker of Bhishma’s extraordinary and suprahuman status. But Bhishma is not the only character in the Mahabharata who is on the threshold of divinity and humanity.

Lord Krishna is the Godhead.  

Vyasa and Vidura also straddle the spiritual and the secular worlds with equal ease. 

Vyasa is the biological progenitor of the Kauravas. Vidura is his son.  

Lying on the bed of arrows, Bhishma told the maharishis who had come to him as swans that “Where I was before, I will return there, my proper abode, when the sun moves to the north.” (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya:14: sloka:108) Thus at the moment of his mrityu, his life spirit moved skywards where the gods reside. His end was in his beginning.

In other words, he was a Vasu who didn't want to suffer long in a human incarnation. Sadly, his father prevented his Mum from drowning him as a baby. No wonder, he waited till the Sun was on its northward course to lay down his life so that he could follow 'devayana' (the path of the god) and thus rejoin his Vasu siblings in Heaven.  I should explain 'Pitrayana (path of the paternal ancestors) is associated with the southward course of the Sun and eventual rebirth as a human being. This is the reason Bhishma postponed his death.  

Vijay Maharaj on VS Naipaul.

V.S Naipaul's father joined the Arya Samaj which fiercely opposed the 'Puranic' Hinduism celebrated in the 'katha' (recitation of Hindu Epics) tradition of rural Trinidad. Instead, Arya Samajis were urged to focus on the Vedas & Upanishads and their spiritual message. In a previous post, I've explained how the notion of 'sampratti' is crucial to understanding Naipaul's 'Biswas'.

Sadly, a Carribean scholar- Vijay Maharaj- takes the opposite view. 

A Mala in Obeisance: Hinduism in Select Texts by V.S. Naipaul

This was Published in  Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 

 Naipaul declares in An Area of Darkness, “that, though growing up in an orthodox family,

His father was Arya Samaji (reformist). His mother's family were Sanathan Dharma (orthodox).  

I remained almost totally ignorant of Hinduism”.

Nothing wrong in that. He did well at school and won a scholarship to England.  

This sweeping generalization is, however, undermined immediately by the self-questioning that follows: “What, then, survived of Hinduism in me? Perhaps I had received a certain supporting philosophy. I cannot say; my uncle often put it to me that my denial was an admissible type of Hinduism”.

One can have a heterodox 'matam' (dogma) but if your praxis (vigyan) is the same as that of the well bred people of your community, you are 'observationally equivalent' to the orthodox. Thus a 'Sanatani' may say an 'Arya' is a sound enough Hindu.

That the thought of philosophical support should have come to him at all and that a conversation of this nature should have taken place between uncle and nephew are indications of the writer’s embeddedness in Hindu tradition.

He read Radhakrishnan who was a celebrity at that time.  

The sceptic and the seeker-of-clarification are the two categories of interrogators to whom all the Shastras, or Hindu scriptural texts, are addressed.

No. They are addressed to Brahmin priests and, by extension, the 'twice born' castes who patronize them.  

As his uncle may have well been capable of explaining, the deliberate installation, constant questioning and referencing of his Hindu background in his writing place him squarely within one or the other of these categories at various times.

Not really. He is like Niradh Chaudhuri, not G.V Desani who became a mystic. But since he didn't know Sanskrit, he was out of his depth on the subject. His sister, who attended Benares Hindu University, wasn't greatly impressed by the spirituality of the place. This was quite understandable. The future belonged to the engineers and economists and agronomists.  

He may have told him that the pursuit of faith and knowledge are seen in the Bhagavad-Gita as two sides of the same coin: the first blossoms in acquiescence and the second in self-doubt, criticism, discussion and questioning.

Nonsense! The Vyadha Gita deals with the dharma (eusebia) of the principal. The Bhagavad Gita deals with the dharma of the agent. Discussion can't get you anywhere which is why Lord Krishna is forced to grant Arjuna 'theophany'- i.e. a vision of the supreme deity. However, very few people get this gift. Arguably, Arjuna could have got this anyway thanks to a boon given by a Yaksha (demi-god). True, he did not accept the book but the Yaksha didn't take it back either. Thus it remained 'unvested'. However, Arjuna's vishada (abulia) meant he was no longer his own master & thus the boon could vest in him.

The Gita can be easily understood by ordinary people but that doesn't mean it isn't very artfully constructed.  

They lead one into the other.

No they don't. You may 'acquiesce' but still be tortured by doubt. There can be a 'dark night of the soul' in any and every religion.  

This Hindu influence in Naipaul’s work is recognized.

It is recognised that he was a Hindu. However, few know anything about Hinduism and thus they can't say what Hindu influence exists in his work.  

However, postcolonial theory, which is often applied to texts written by people from the fringes of imperial centers, privileges interpretation of the texts as responses to imperial culture. This is a debilitating approach to Caribbean literary texts because it tends to forestall and devalue interpretations that explore the texts’ relationships with the often fragmented, dislocated cultures the authors inherit from their ancestral groups or their relationships with the often equally fragmented and dislocated cultures of the populations among which the groups have settled.

West Indians are smart and as their affluence increased, they became very well educated. The Trinidadian Hindu or Christian or Muslim is just as good as any other co-religionist of theirs.  

Exploring this aspect of postcolonial literary studies is a task in itself. This paper therefore problematizes postcolonial theory by reading Naipaul in relation to a local Hindu tradition, the katha.

Which his daddy rejected. Thus he had little exposure to it.  

The underlying contention is that Naipaul’s work is not just influenced by his Hindu background but is part of a long Hindu tradition of religious and philosophical speculation intrinsic to the Caribbean katha tradition.

The katha was presided over by a hereditary priest. He could explain how events in the epics are related to rituals and sacred Vedic or Purnaic texts.  

I argue that Naipaul’s oeuvre speculates about a number of key Hindu philosophical concepts and is a form of the Caribbean katha.

Only in the  sense that his oeuvre is about elves, orcs & hobbits because he was Tolkein's student. 

The folk katha is a practice of reading or reciting and interpretation of religious texts in relation to social texts of all varieties for the purpose of bringing meaning to events in people’s day-to-day lives.

It is a highly auspicious religious practice which gives you good karma. 

In so doing, it provides spaces and techniques for self-examination, self-fashioning and re-fashioning.

Everybody already has such a space. There are umpteen self-help books. I particularly recommend 'dieter's guide to weight-loss through farting'. 

But, the Caribbean katha is not a reproduction of an Indian practice; it is a reinvention specifically tailored to the contingencies of the lives of the indentured and their descendants.

The indenture system was abolished in 1920. Hindu pundits visiting Trinidad praised the katha tradition. It was more elaborate because Trinidadians had higher income.  

Naipaul continues the process of reinvention

He started off as a guy who wrote stories and essays. Then, he reinvented himself as a tractor. In his final years he became a hippopotamus.  

for the same purpose for a wider audience, to make meaning and suggest ways of self-construction.

more particularly if you want to turn yourself into the Eiffel tower.  

 

Indeed, this attribute of his oeuvre can be seen also as an act of self-assertion and self-preservation. The embedded katha is obvious if one follows Naipaul’s dictum that “part of the point of a novel [comes] from half rejecting the fiction, or looking through it to reality” (Reading & Writing 23).

One can read Harry Potter and recognize the reality that there is a lot wrong with contemporary Brtitish society.  

To look through Naipaul’s writing is to find traces and sub-texts of Hinduism as the germ plasm around which the narratives grow.

I find 'sampratti' in Naipaul's Biswas. But few Hindu Professors of Literature know the term.   

 This essay explores some of his work to uncover the germ plasm and identify Naipaul’s position in the tradition and his synthesis of elements of the tradition with the requirements of literary discourse. Despite Naipaul’s youthful boast in An Area of Darkness that “I was without belief or interest in belief; I was incapable of worship” (41)

In other words, he couldn't go down the road of a Waugh or Greene or G.V Desani (or even Aubrey Menen). 

, as he admits in later texts such as Finding a Centre and Reading and Writing, his involvement with Hindu tradition is undeniable.

He wasn't involved with it. 

This statement in An Area of Darkness is in fact immediately preceded by the recognition of the need for belief and worship in times of adversity, and of the more specific need for them to be within the traditions of Hinduism.

I need a smart phone. This does not mean I am involved in the manufacture of smart phones.  

When his friend, Ramon, dies, he notes: We were a tiny, special part of that featureless, unknown country, [India] meaningful to us, if we thought about it, only in that we were its remote descendants. I wished his body to be handled with reverence, and I wished it to be handled according to the old rites. This alone would spare him final nonentity.

Some people could get a Hindu priest to officiate at a crematorium in the Fifties. However, it was permissible to take the ashes back to India for immersion in a sacred river. At that time, all required rituals could be performed. 

Even without a body, the 'shradd' can be performed. Still, we understand that Naipaul was mentioning a question which large scale immigration was making urgent. 

Separated from the sub-continent by time and distance,

distance, not time.  

the need for its religions and philosophy remains, if only as a bulwark against nonentity. This is compounded by the need to sanctify as Naipaul’s observations in The Enigma of Arrival demonstrate: “But at her death there was in her family a wish to give sanctity to the occasion, a wish for old rites, for things that were felt specifically to represent us and our past” (351).

Naipaul could not be present for his father's funeral. Thus 'sampratti' could not be completed. But a great book did come out of this trauma.  

The presence of an Indian heritage and people’s need for it are the central pivot on which Naipaul’s speculations revolve and it is evident from his first published work, The Mystic Masseur, onwards, even when the signs of religious and philosophical speculations are coded to make them palatable or invisible to the primary international audience.

Dhan Gopal's 'Caste & outcaste' had sold very well in America in the early Twenties. You could crank up the exoticism & retain your market.  

This encoding leads John Thieme to talk about allusions. He asserts that “the most significant body of allusions in the novel is to the various aspects of Hinduism” (43),

like what?  

but he sees these allusions relating to Naipaul’s documentation of the acculturation of Indians in Trinidad. It can be argued, however, that The Mystic Masseur not only alludes to aspects of Hinduism to document acculturation, but it is also an embodiment of a Hindu concept of the human condition.

which is determined by karma and alleviated by dharma 

It achieves this by performing a beautifully coordinated doubled triple movement.

Also, it performs kathak and ballet so beautifully that nobody notices.  

The text is an act of social criticism

Democracy is bound to be a fucking disaster?  

and it establishes an authorial perspective that becomes Naipaul’s hallmark. Naipaul constructs his protagonist in such a way that he can as easily be read within the European tradition of the picaroon hero,

he isn't a rogue.After a couple of false starts, he makes good. Is he a satire on the Kapildeo's family's main Hindu rival?  

or the Caribbean tradition of Anansi,

of which nobody had heard back then.  

as he can be read within Hindu traditions.

Or he can be read as a satire on Bhadase Sagan Maraj, a wrestler, who had made a lot of money during the war in the trucking business.  

In the latter regard, the text can be seen as performing an act of religious worship. The coup d’état of the joining of these disparate elements is that one does not hear the grinding echoes of different cultures meeting because Naipaul’s aesthetics involves a blurring of the boundaries between the three categories.

Hindus were only about a quarter of the population. They didn't matter greatly.  

Naipaul’s katha is, thus, exactly like the folk katha, which pulls together diverse discourses in a synthesizing action that is relatively smooth and soundless. This approach becomes progressively stronger as Naipaul continues to write. 

Lots of gods and demons in Naipaul's books.  

In The Overcrowded Barracoon,

Hanuman turns into a rocket-ship and flies up Uranus?  

Naipaul refers to this act of blurring when he notes that, “[l]ike the medieval sculptor of the North interpreting the Old Testament stories in terms of the life he knew, I needed to be able to adapt” .

In other words, don't write about what Duke Algenon said to Lady Angela when she declared that there was a squirrel living in her vagina. Instead, write

 'Dopti tell Ramgulam, “Yuh never go guess where that damn squirrel hide itself.”

Ramgulam say, “Same place as always, na?”

Dopti stand up there vex-amaze. “But how yuh know that? Yuh must be obeah man, bwoy!”

He adapts Hindu philosophy to the demands of the literary text and to the representation of the lives and circumstances of his characters.

He didn't know Hindu philosophy.  

In The Mystic Masseur, he adapts the iconography of Ganesh, the God, to construct Ganesh, the protagonist.

Arya Samajis don't like Ganesh or Hanuman. They believe them to be Dravidian dieties.  

The God, Ganesh, represents the human being in Hinduism.

No. It is Yama- god of death. He was the first judge & the first human to die. His vahana (vehicle) is man. 

Ganesh is the first to be worshipped as the remover of obstacles.  

Gan-esh in fact means lord/master/leader (esh) of created beings (gan).

No. He is the lord of the celestial hosts.  

He is depicted as a mighty elephant,

he has the head of an elephant 

the paramatman, who sits on a mouse, the jivatman.

This is true of the Ganesha Purana. But Naipaul's dad was Arya Samaji. Naipaul used the name 'Ganesh' because he thinks it is uncouth, rustic & probably Dravidian.  

The image is meant to show that the individual is paramatman, the Creator, God, but in embodied form the person is severely limited in demonstrating god-like qualities because of corporeal confinement represented in the mouse.

I am demonstrating god-like qualities all the time. Sadly, people think I am flatulent.  

Confinement of the spirit is the most immediately obvious element of the iconography that is unveiled in The Mystic Masseur. Ganesh, the protagonist, like his father, has a great deal of potential. Within the confines of the colonial condition, however, this potential is severely curtailed. Every area of their lives is filled with difficulties and Ganesh must play the role of Ganesh, the God, in many of his aspects, in order to assert himself and carve a place in the social structure of the Caribbean. He does this by displaying that aspect of Ganesh called Lambodar, he-of-enormous-appetite-for-all-things-of-this-world, symbolized by the great belly of the elephant. Like Lambodar, Ganesh consumes everything that comes his way, appropriating them, making them his own, using them to his own purposes. Ganesh is constructed in such a way as to show that he possesses the attribute of Ekadant, the single-minded, totally committed, and focused one. Ganesh intends to be successful, at what he does not know, but he expends undivided effort on the idea of success, of victory. The single-mindedness is Ekadantian.

He ends up as a puppet of the British calling himself G. Ramsay Muir. Similarly, at the end of the Ganesa Purnana, it is revealed that the deity changes his name to George Formby & moves to England to play the ukelele.  

Apart from developing these overt similarities between God and the human being, with a light touch in a celebratory, comic tone, The Mystic Masseur also displays a perspective that the author embraces throughout his career. Thieme notes that: “Nowhere is there any suggestion that Ganesh could be other than he is” (43).

He would have changed his name to Genji San if the Japanese had conquered Trinidad.  

The deeper philosophical ground of this statement lies in Hinduism’s refusal to label the things of this world as either good or evil.

It does so incessantly. Doing or being in contact with bad things engenders bad karma.  

In Hinduism, unsullied good and evil are confined to the realm of the devtas and the asuras, for want of a better translation, the gods and the devils.

Even they are subject to karma. Seek for the Nirguna Brahman- beyond name & form.  

In the realm of the human, there is no unadulterated good or evil. Naipaul is careful to demonstrate this in The Mystic Masseur and continues to demonstrate it in his thirty-three subsequent works.

Why bother? Why not focus on demonstating that it is necessary to breathe out after breathing in?  

He generally insists that systems, institutions, and other social constructions impact on the individual so that s/he is unable to be other than s/he is.

She can top herself.  

There is no book in which Naipaul can be said to blame the individual for what may be called his/her evil. In this regard, his attitude is Hindu.

Hindus are continually blaming me for stinking up the place by farting.  

Apart from playfully representing God and man as akin,

Naipaul didn't believe in God. We may have a need for some such thing just as I have a need to believe I'm not the shittiest poet ever. But this doesn't mean the thing you need actually exists.  

in an optimistic and convivial fashion that steers clear of judgement, the text can also be seen as performing an offhanded gesture of worship. Every child brought up in a Hindu environment learns that it is important to pray to Ganesh in the form of Vigneshwar, the remover of obstacles, before any enterprise is undertaken, for the removal of intellectual and other difficulties.

Not if you are Arya Samajis. Some of the greatest Hindus of modern times belong to that sect.  

Naipaul would have grown up with this idea of Ganesh as Vigneshwar and as Vinayak, the guardian of the doorway and of movement from one area of life to another and this book with its point-by-point adaptation of the attributes of the god to the Hindu in the Caribbean can be seen as such an act of worship.

This author is too charitable. The truth is Naipaul feared that democracy would lead to anarchy. In 'Mystic' & 'Suffrage'- this is the predominating note. It did endear Naipaul to the British right-wing but he still had to struggle financially for many years.  

It does not seem unrealistic or far-fetched to me, to think that in his difficulties with finding his voice, his material, and a publisher for his works, Naipaul would have gestured towards obeisance to the god, Ganesh, however obliquely. Whether one sees this as a “propitiatory technique” common to writers is irrelevant.8 It is no less “touching and attractive” than the “ancient drama” of ritual performances, “absurdly surviving in a Trinidad yard” (Naipaul, An Area 34).

One might say the same of the Christian mass celebrated in the Europe of the Dark Ages.  

In the works that follow The Mystic Masseur, Naipaul also engages in iconographic adaptations. This is apparent, for example, in A House for Mr. Biswas, in the fictional name, Hanuman House, given to the house called Lion House as a symbol of resistance and courage in real life. Naipaul’s objective in this act of re-naming is to critique the traditional Hindu social structure that denies individuality and enterprise. Hanuman, the Hindu deity, is worshipped for the protection he bestows against illnesses, natural and other calamities, accidents and problems of all types.

But, Arya Samajis don't like him. Naipaul sided with his dad over his Mum's family.  

Similar expectations are set up in the novel for the fictional house and the idea of community it represents. But the text demonstrates that in its new setting, the house cannot last and its protection cannot be extended beyond its shadow.

The Kapildeos continued to rise and rise.  

Beyond this is a world where individual enterprise is of utmost importance and the house does not equip its denizens with the tools for survival and prosperity in that environment.

They make one or two bad investments. Nothing wrong with doing 'discovery'.  You can't really speak of decline if people move away from the countryside to earn more in the city. 

The community thus eventually disintegrates under the pressure of changes over which no one has control. In effect Naipaul seems to be making a Nietzschean statement by naming the house Hanuman: God is dead! Hanuman is dead! He cannot protect in these new surroundings!

Nobody actually gets poorer or loses status in the book. People do grow old and die. This is because of post-colonial performativity under conditions of neo-liberalism.  

This is not an untoward act in Hinduism since the scriptural texts are replete with ideas about changing systems of worship and new and more efficacious manifestations of the paramatman. Within the context of a dead Hanuman,

Hanuman is immortal. Also he finds a herb to revive Lakshman.  

Naipaul also appears to be making a Nietzschean declaration about the superman: the person who transcends the need for the herd, who can use the resources of his own spirit to survive.

In the denoument, Biswas gains super-powers after bathing in the red sunlight of planet Krytpon. He returns to Earth & sets up a universal religion whose Pope is a pussy cat.  

This idea is dramatized in Mr. Biswas’ quest in which the idea of confinement of the human spirit re-emerges. Mr. Biswas is confined not just by Hanuman House but also by his own body.

unlike his wife who visits Uranus on the astral plane.  

This is vividly depicted for example in one of many descriptions: “He didn’t feel a small man, but clothes which hung so despairingly from the nail on the mud wall were definitely the clothes of a small man” (Naipaul, A House 157).

He had clothes. Lucky bastard! I'll never forget the time I got an invite to the Garden Party at Bucking Palace and was turned away because I was bollock naked. I explained that I was a badly paid audit clerk & thus could not afford to buy clothes. They agreed to let me in provided I stuck a radish up my bum. Sadly, I couldn't afford to buy even a second hand radish. 

Mr. Biswas must fight to maintain an idea of self, of his own value, of his own bigness despite the evidence of smallness with which he is confronted.

By whom? The guy was of average build. He wasn't a dwarf. 

Maharaj mentions the doctrine of karma & the question of whether Hinduism is fatalistic. I think Biswas is shown as interpreting prarabdha karma in a manner compatible with both Arya Samaji & Stoci thinking (particularly that of Marcus Aurelius.)  I suppose an AI could spin out a good enough essay on this topic within 5 seconds. My question is whether it could also fart while doing so? So long as the answer is 'no' Socioproctology will remain the monopoly of flatulent fools like me.  

Anwar Shaikh RIP

The doyen of Marxist economists, Anwar Shaikh, has passed away. In his magnum opus, he wrote

the theory of real competition … is the theoretical foundation for the analysis in this book. The profit motive is inherently expansionary: investors try to recoup more money than they put in,

Also true of gambling or games of skill where you back yourself. One may say, if a prize for an essay or statue or picture is announced, talented people may expend some resources on entering the competition in the hope of getting a much bigger prize. 

More generally, in relationships, we hope to get more out of it than we put in. This is why girls don't want to sleep with me.  

At a more basic level, we seek to eat stuff which generates more calories than is consumed in getting that stuff. We spread seeds whose input output ratio is more than one. 

and if successful, can do it again and again on a larger scale, colliding with others doing the same.

sounds like a crowd of shopper grabbing bargains on Black Friday 

Some succeed, some just survive, and some fail altogether. This is real competition, antagonistic by nature and turbulent in operation.

Profit can be gained purely through affectionate cooperation without any competition or antagonism whatsoever.  

Sadly, lots of people like to indulge in antagonistic competition- e.g. a boxing match- where both parties are likely to suffer injury. They may do this even if there is no reward. 

I suppose, competiton arises in zero-sum game or where the payoff is reputational or to establish an objective hierarchy. 

Profit, by contrast, arises where factors of production are combined by an entrepreneur whose reward, ceteris paribus, is proportionate to risk. This militates for cooperation, not competition. However, the formation of a cartel, or other restrictive trade practice, may be per se illegal. 

It is the central regulating mechanism of capitalism

No such thing exists. On the other hand, all the mean girls are coordinated by mind-rays emitted by shape-shifting moggies such that they all pretend my dress is ugly and that Beyonce isn't really my bff.  

and is as different from so-called perfect competition as war is from ballet.

Under perfect competiton, everybody is a price taker. They aren't competing with each other. It makes no difference if all of them are best friends or if they hate each other. 

As a matter of fact, on open markets, you are likely to get producer and consumer cooperatives. Consider the cotton grower who is part of a district cooperative. If there is a negative supply shock, he makes a big profit. But so do all his neighbours.  If there is a positive supply shock, assuming demand inelasticity, then all the cotton famers may incurr a loss. 

Competition within an industry compels individual producers to set prices that keep them in the game,

Shaikh is talking about monopolistic competiton- e.g. the local pizza guy having to compete with the local burger bag (because pizza and burger are substitutes. There is likely to be both excess capacity and product differentiation. Those who can raise quality while conttrolling costs, stay in the game. Others exit and, by and large, that is a good thing. 

just as it forces them to lower costs so that they can cut prices to compete effectively. Costs can be lowered by cutting wages

nominal wages are downwardly sticky, just like rent, interest, property taxes, etc.  

and increasing the length or intensity of the working day, or at least by reducing wage growth relative to that of productivity.

This is true of public sector or charitable enterprises. 

But these must contend with the reaction of labour, which is why technical change becomes the central means over the long run. In this context, individual capitals make their decisions based on judgements about an intrinsically indeterminate future. Competition pits seller against seller, seller against buyer, buyer against buyer, capital against capital, capital against labour, and labour against labour. Bellum omnium contra omnes'‘

Rubbish! Most agents are price takers. Where there is market power, there will be attempts at cartelization & ghe gaining of countervailing power.  Economic activity is almost always a matter of cooperation. There may be a certain amount of drama when contracts are renegotiated, but that is the exception not the rule.

To be fair, one may say that conflict in a sophisticated society is likely to be masked. On the surface everyone seems so nice, polite & obliging. But, deep down, they are all seething with anger.  

Alternatively, one could speak of gradual changes which ordinary people are not aware of but which economics professors study. I think it was for this reason that, as, Michael Roberts has explained, Shaikh enjoyed the esteem of his peers. 

Guha arguing with Gandhi

In my book on Gandhi & Ambedkar, I was willing to 'repair' the views both expressed in the light of subsequent developments in the disciplines they were familiar with. In Ambedkar's case, this can be productive but nobody wants a sensible Ambedkar. They want a paranoid cretin & by God, they are welcome to him. Gandhi's importance was a tactician. He built esprit de corps within Congress & reconciled the 'naram' & 'garam' dal. It is not his fault he couldn't tackle the land question- i.e. the only thing which mattered. But that would take hard work at the local level involving cadastral surveys & the creation of an efficient Land Registration system. This could have been done by elected governments any time after 1937 but the incentive to do so was lacking. 

Ram Guha's 'Argments with Gandhi' does not attempt to 'repair' the views of either Gandhi or anyone he disagreed with. It accepts myths as facts and creates new myths on that basis.

His first chapter gives a flavour of the whole-

Articulating Non-Violence 

The British had established the rule of Law, justiciable property and civil rights, and created a peaceful country where non-violent methods- i.e. buying and selling or going to court to settle disputes- had prevailed over 'matysanyaya' (the big fish eating the little fish).

Gandhi was a barrister. He had been taught to articulate non-violence using a protocol bound legal vocabulary. As a vegetarian- like A.O Hume, the founder of the INC- he naturally associated non killing or eating animals with non-violence. This was where he differed from most British (or, indeed, Indian) people. One other point. Gandhi was influenced by both Tolstoy and the British Quakers. The Cadbury & Rowntree families bought newspapers at the behest of the Liberal party. They tended to be critical of the Boer War in which Gandhi participated as the head of an Indian ambulance corps. 

Guha quotes Gandhi as saying 'The acid test of non-violence is that one thinks, speaks and acts non-violently, even when there is the gravest provocation to be violent.'

Clearly this is false. A weak person may be very obsequious even while he is being beaten & buggered. The acid test of non-violence is solving problems peacefully even if you have overwhelming physical superiority. 

One may say that there is a spiritual benefit in avoiding sexy or violent thoughts. But a hired assassin may do so. He isn't non-violent at all. 

To understand an argument, you need to be smart enough to evaluate statements in a rational manner. If you can't do so, you have no business writing a book about arguments. Why? You have no way to separate what is doxastic from what is merely tactical or strategic. 

 In contemporary times, 11 September, or 9/11 for short, is a date remembered for the terrorist attack in 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York. Itself an act of cruel violence, the attack provoked the US government into invading lands far distant, leading to a cycle of death and destruction that has yet to fully run its course. In the long sweep of history, however, it is another 9/11 that may yet prove to be more significant.

No. The war on terror & its aftermath is the single most important event of this century. But for it, Russia wouldn't have made its move on Ukraine. China wouldn't have risen so rapidly in economic might that it is now accepted as an equal by the US. 

On that day in 1906, some three thousand men and women assembled in the city of Johannesburg in South Africa.

They were Indian. Indians don't matter in South Africa.  

They had come to protest a new racial law imposed by the government of the Transvaal, of which province Johannesburg was the capital. The Transvaal government had passed an ordinance seeking to end Asian immigration and place sharp restrictions on Asians already in the colony. Asians were to produce fingerprints, carry an identity card at all times and be confined to living in designated locations so that they would not, so to say, ‘contaminate’ the ruling whites.

The Boers were angry with the Indians who had sided with the British. They would use the issue of 'Asiatic immigration' so as to gain support from the new Liberal government in England. Would they also be able to intimidate the Mine owners by threatening their labour supply? Thanks to Smuts, the Boers lost the war but won the peace. 

Gandhi did go to jail for a few weeks for refusing to carry a Pass. Then he changed his mind. He got out of jail and went around saying that the Pass was a good thing. All Indians should voluntarily carry one. The Boers were wrong to say that Indians were too stupid to see that Passes are freakin' fabulous. But Indians are smarter than Africans. You may have to force Africans to carry a pass, but it is insulting to Indians to say they can't see the great advantage of doing so. 

Naturally, some Indians thought he had been bribed. Some Pathans beat the shit out of Gandhi. He then realised that it is safer to stay in jail if some stupid shit you pulled backfires.  

The resistance to the ordinance was led by the thirty-six-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi. A lawyer-turned-activist, Gandhi was a figure of considerable authority in the immigrant community. At the time, he had been in South Africa for a little over a decade. This protest meeting on 11 September 1906 was held in a building named the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg. It passed a series of resolutions, drafted by Gandhi, of which the most significant was the fourth, that stated: ‘This mass meeting of British Indians here assembled solemnly and regretfully resolves that, rather than submit to the galling, tyrannous, and un-British requirements laid down in the above Draft Ordinance, every British Indian in the Transvaal shall submit himself to imprisonment and shall continue to do so until it shall please His Gracious Majesty the King-Emperor to grant relief.’1

In other words, Gandhi- like the Tory MP Bhownagree- was an Imperialist. He wanted the Milner 'kindergarden' rather than the rule of the native Boers (forget about Africans!). Sadly, multi-ethnic Empires were obsolete. Nationalism would triumph everywhere.  

The threat to court arrest was, for Indians in South Africa, a considerable departure from past practice. In the previous decade they had asked patiently, and extremely politely, in writing for greater rights or fairer treatment from the white rulers.

The problem was that the Brits, who had put Transvaal back under British control in 1902, were negotiating with Smuts & Botha to give self-rule back to it. This came to pass in December of 1906. Gandhi was arrested in Transvaal in January 1908 even though Royal Assent to the Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act was only given in May 1908. Gandhi had compromised with Smuts & released after 20 days. With hindsight, this was a ghastly mistake. 

Since his arrival in the colony in 1893, as a young lawyer in his early twenties, Gandhi had dispatched a series of respectfully worded petitions, requesting that educated Indians be allowed to vote;

Transvaal had passed a Pass law for Indians and Africans since 1885. In 1891, citizenship & grant of crown land to Indian labourers in Natal was withdrawn. Prior to 1894, some Indians had the vote in Natal. This was cancelled despite Gndhi's petition. Some Cape Province Indians retained the vote even after joining the South African Union but this was chipped away over subsequent decades.  

Gandhi may have hoped that there would be British direct rule after the Boer War but the British hd no stomach for another expensive war. If the Boers wanted to be beastly to darkies- let them get on with it. 

that Indian traders be allowed to sell goods and open stores wherever they pleased; that Indians of all classes be allowed to travel freely between the coastal colony of Natal, controlled by the British, and the inland province of Transvaal, which was controlled by Afrikaners of largely Dutch origin. The meeting of 11 September rejected the cautious incrementalism of petition writers.

It failed utterly and completely. 

But it also rejected the violent methods then fashionable among revolutionaries.

Hilarious! The Boers were doughty fighters. If the Indians had rebelled, they would have been slaughtered within a couple of days.  

In Europe, anarchists and socialists hoped to bring about political change by assassinating kings,

Indian revolutionaries were doing the same thing.  

generals and Prime Ministers. These methods were being emulated in India, where young radicals sought likewise to kill colonial administrators in a bid to frighten the British into leaving the country.

Indians thought the assassination attempts on two Viceroys (Minto & Hardinge) did pave the way for reforms.  

When the Transvaal government refused to yield, Gandhi and his colleagues courted arrest. They declined to carry passes—or burnt them—defied nighttime curfews and hawked goods without a licence. Between 1907 and 1914, several thousand Indians were put in jail by the South African authorities. Gandhi himself served several terms in prison. The methods of protest mandated by that first 9/11 were given a particular name by Gandhi. He called them satyagraha, or truth force.

The truth was that they failed completely and utterly. Why did Smuts concede the 1914 Indian Relief Act? The answer is three-fold

1) Poorer Indians couldn't pay the £3 tax. If they were deported, the British Government would have to pay for their resettlement. Smuts had already got rid of the Chinese. Getting rid of Indians (who were British subjects) would harm the economy

2) refusal to recognize non-Christian marriages was simply malicious. Wealthy Indians (like the Tatas) were pouring money into Gandhi's agitation. 

3) the danger was that the Indians would ally with the Coloureds & White Trade Unionists. Sooner or later the African majority would take leadership of this. 

Some believe that Smuts had foreseen the German threat from 1913 onward.  But the Maritz rebellion was easily crushed. The real danger was that the Germans would arm Africans who knew the land even better than the Boers. In other words, the Whites in South Africa needed the British Navy which meant they couldn't be too horrible to His Brittanic Majesty's Indian subjects.  

After he returned to his homeland from South Africa

from London 

in 1915, he applied them with even greater effect to mobilize public opinion in favour of political freedom from colonial rule.

He tried to raise troops for the King Emperor.  

In India, Gandhi led four countrywide campaigns of civil disobedience against the British Raj: in 1919, 1920–22, 1930–32 and 1942 respectively.

They failed. Still, he and his people were only jailed for sedition. They weren't hanged or transported to the Andamans for 'waging war on the King Emperor'.  

 Where did Gandhi’s technique of non-violent resistance come from?

In 1902, the Tories passed an Education bill which resulted in 'Dissenters' having to pay for Anglican schools through their rates (property taxes). They created a 'Passive Resistance Committee'.The idea was to fill up the jail with people who refused to pay their rates. Interestingly, an 'Anti-Martydom League' was formed to pay the outstanding taxes of such people! Still, the Liberals gained greatly from this campaign. 

I may mention the Sufragettes who used hunger strikes to great effect around this time. However, they were prepared to actually die when they fasted to death. The solution was to shove a tube doen their throat and forcibly feed them.  

Some commentators have seen the heavy, if not determining, influence of Henry David Thoreau’s tract of 1848, Civil Disobedience.

Gandhi read Thoreau in 1907. However, he may have heard of him through his friend, the vegetarian, Henry Salt.

Gandhi was a disciple of Gokhale & opposed the revolutionaries championed by Bal, Pal & Lal. His friendship with Pranjivan Mehta- whose brother-in-law was the great Jain avadhanam Raichandbhai- probably reinforced his attachment to traditional Vaishnav Bania beliefs. 

I may mention, prior to the establishment of Pax Brittanica, Gandhi's ancestors couldn't be Dewans (i.e. occupy the top job) in a Princely State because they lacked martial ability. Thus, his people had risen because non-violence is only viable where there is the Rule of Law backed up with military supremacy. Indeed, one might say universal relgions of an irenic stripe spread most in multi-ethnic empires with well developed commercial networks. 

Gandhi told an Indian friend that ‘the statement that I had derived my idea of Civil Disobedience from the writings of Thoreau is wrong’. Gandhi continued: The resistance to authority in South Africa was well advanced before I got the essay of Thoreau on Civil Disobedience. But the movement was then known as passive resistance.

which was credited with helping the Liberls win in 1905.

Gandhi was a firm believer in karma. This meant that a Hindu arguing with him could always say to him, 'this nutter wants to get reborn on Vaikuntha or some other paradisal planet where there is no sex or dirty pictures and everybody lives for ten billion years. Perhaps doing stupid shit in this life really will get you to such a boring paradise. At any rate, there may be some way in which this fool can be made useful.' 

In Hinduism we differentiate between 'matam' (dogma) and vigyan (praxis). Gandhi succeeded for a time because his 'vigyan' was a way of exchanging a bit of jail time for political power- or the chance of gaining it. Sadly, only spontaneous demonstrations can bring about political change. That's what happened in Egypt in 1922. Gandhi's satygraha failed in that year because it was planned. The rioters in Chauri Chaura had paid money to get enrolled as Congress members. This meant that the authorities would first want to arrest 'ring-leaders' & roll up their networks so as to strengthen their own hand before sitting down to negotiate. If an uprising was spontaneous, on the other hand, then you had to find popular leaders with whom to do a deal. 

Why was this not obvious to all concerned? The truth, I think, is it was always fucking obvious that the only thing which mattered was the land question. To solve it required doing some actual work not talking bollocks incessantly. 

Barristers are trained to argue. But they need to present actual facts and use valid methods of logical deduction. Sadly, Gandhi & Ambedkar & Jinnah & so forth were 'ultracrepidarian'. They didn't want to confine themselves to the work for which they had been trained. Instead, they turned into religious figure- Gandhi became a Mahatma, Ambedkar became a Boddhisattvas & Jinnah became the founder of a theocratic State.

We may say that Ambedkar supported British rule- as he was perfectly entitled to do- and only went crazy after Independence. Thus, he is a different league from the two Gujjus. 

I should explain, B.R Ambedkar was nominated by the British authorities to sit in the Bombay Legislative Council from 1927 to 1937. He represented the British policy of turning the Hindu majority into an artificial minority. The problem was that Dalits feared the Muslim more than they feared the Brahmins and Banias who dominated Congress. Thus, to win an election, Ambedkar had to do a deal with Congress's supremo- Mahatma Gandhi. The spadework had been done by Rajah & Moonje. Since Dalits were Nationalists, Congress didn't mind having more Dalit MPs provided they were elected by the general population. Ambedkar had to take what he was offered because he was a British nominee. If the Brits believed Churchill's claim that the Dalit hated the caste Hindu, then they could have no objection to Dalits getting more MPs. Indeed, the Tory toffs who passed the 1935 Act firmly believed that Congress wouldn't get a majority in any Province! 

Guha, shithead that he is, takes a different view. In his new book 'Arguments with Gandhi' he writes- 

When meeting Gandhi in jail in 1932, Ambedkar told him: ‘Let there be no repetition of the old method when the reformer claimed to know more of the requirements of his victims than the victims themselves.’

Gandhi had believed Ambedkar was a Brahmin whose foreign education and well-cut suits ensured that he knew nothing about the plight of 'Harijans'.  

Reading this warning now, almost a century later, one can see it as prescient.

Not if we studied a bit of Indian history to pass the competitive exams. We know that Ambedkar beleived that money raised for Harijans was being used to pay high caste lawyers not to practice law. 

Still, we may say Ambedkar's claim was like the slogan 'nothing about us, without us'. But this does not require separate electorates.  

There had to come a time when Dalits would be represented by one of their own,

that had already happened under the nomination system.  

rather than spoken for by a reformer from the upper-castes, however well-meaning he might be.

At the time, Ambedkar appeared intelligent. He had studied Sociology, Anthropology & Economics at Columbia & the LSE. He was a barrister with two PhDs. Sadly, he was a cretin. He converted to Buddhism- the religion which had spread untouchability to Japan.  

Ambedkar’s posthumous emergence as the great icon and exemplar of Dalits is thus entirely understandable.

No. If Jagjivan Ram had become PM in 1977, he would be the icon. Ambedkar's Republican party had factionalised and was clearly useless. One could say Kanshi Ram, Trade Unionising Dalit Government servants, helped spread the fame of Ambedkar to the cow-belt.  

But whether the attacks on Gandhi by Ambedkarites are entirely merited is another matter.

Gandhi was a shithead. Attack him by all means.  

For Gandhi’s own campaign against untouchability was conducted with great courage and resolve.

No. He was a late-comer to the party & remained something of a bigot all his life.  

Had he not been around, the issue may never have acquired the salience and importance that it did.

It was Churchill's 1931 speech which gave Ambedkar salience and importance. Since he was out of office, he could say what he liked. If Tories believed him, they would ask why Dalits were not getting what Muslims had been given. After all, it is that cunning Brahmin, Nehru, who is behind all this mischief.  

None of his important colleagues in the Congress Party — not Jawaharlal Nehru, not Vallabhbhai Patel, not Subhas Chandra Bose — understood how gravely the cause of Indian independence was undermined by the pervasive inequalities of caste.

It made no difference whatsoever. Elsewhere, on this blog,I  have explained Gandhi's 'game of tag' (his Mum told him, if you touch a Dalit, immediately touch a Muslim so the contagion passes to him).

Separate electorates for Muslims probably did make partition inevitable. But there could be no 'Dalitstan' because Dalits were nowhere in the majority. 

Nor did left-wing anti-imperialists such as Bhagat Singh and company.

It is obvious that a poor minority does not matter in the slightest. Virtue signalling merely helps pass the time. It doesn't get you power or wealth.  

Indeed, Indian Marxists completely ignored the caste question. This was because they looked at justice exclusively in economic terms, through the prism of their master category of ‘class’.

No. All parties and all who exercised authority or who sought power, kept in touch with (or threatened) community leaders. As the franchise expanded, every jat panchayat or caste association was courted by different political parties. When the first Communist administration was formed in Kerala, foreign journalists noted that caste, not class, had been used to win the election.  

Derived from Marx’s own focus on European history, this analytical framework had little (and often no) room for the social, cultural, and psychological aspects of caste discrimination in India.

All educated Indians chafed against caste-based legal restrictions. Thus Nehru, in his autobiography, bitterly complained that his sister had to pretend to convert to Brahmoism so as to marry a non-Brahmin. Indians wanted elected representatives to get rid of laws of this sort. Ambedkar could have played a role in this but, silly man that he was, chose to resign in a huff after the first Hindu Code was dropped.  

Among the major Indian nationalists of the day, only Gandhi recognised the hypocrisy inherent in demanding freedom from the British while allowing so many Indians to live and suffer in conditions of unfreedom.

The two were completely unconnected. America had slavery but still kicked out the Brits. Guha truly has shit for brains.  

Moreover, he saw it not just as a political problem, but a moral one.

It was neither. Untouchability arose from a primitive pathogen avoidance theory. As Western medicine grew more and more successful, people gave up these primitive ideas. Sadly, Gandhi (& his pal Dr. Pranjivan Mehta) didn't believe the germ theory of disease. 

Ignorance is no crime. We can admire a guy who lived long ago and thus who held some stupid ideas which, however, were not known to be utterly false, at that time.  

Untouchables had to be given equal rights so as to make a more persuasive case for India’s political independence.

No. If the Brits really cared about it, they would have tried to do it themselves. They genuinely didn't give a shit about Dalits but Churchill's speech meant that they had to try to see if Dalits, like Muslims, could be turned against the Caste Hindus. 

Incidentally, Gandhi's Rajkot satyagraha failed because the Dewan played the caste card- i.e. brought in Muslim, Rajput & Garasia nominees to tilt the balance in his favour. This is an early example of the KHAM strategy in Gujarat. 

At the same time, upper-castes Hindus had to atone for the ‘sin’ that untouchability represented.

This involved giving Gandhi money. That fucker always need more of that commodity.  

While his fellow Congressmen were, by and large, indifferent to Gandhi’s anti-untouchability campaign, a broad swathe of the general public was implacably opposed to it.

They didn't give a shit about it. The thing simply wasn't important. On the other hand the fight for Lebsian marriage was a defining feature of the French Revolution. Not till Madam Defarge was permited to marry her cat, Mitzi, in the Notre Dame cathedral could Marie Antoinette's head be cut off. 

Indeed, the unreasoning and extreme hostility to Gandhi from orthodox Hindus

he was himself a sanaatani Hindu as were most of his followers.  

helps explain why he adopted an incremental approach in challenging caste prejudice.

He was engaged in a game of tag, running between Muslim & Dalit when he had nothing better to do.  

Between 1915 and 1920, when he was first establishing himself in Indian politics, he attacked untouchability without calling into question the caste system itself.

He initially supported 'varna' and was a bit slow to adopt the neo-Hindu position that birth should not determine occupation or affect validity of marriage. 

One reason for this was that Gandhi was aware that Brahmin leaders- like Tilak- had to appease their own ultra-conservative caste fellows. This meant that there was a non-Brahmin party in Bombay which  attracted what we would call OBC leaders like Phule & S.K Bole. Amedkar took forward Bole's program but Bole himself, after losing his seat in 1937, joined forces with Savarkar. One consequence of reserved seats for Dalits was that many OBC leaders lost their tickets and had to look for new political homes. 

As he grew more certain of his hold over the Indian people, and especially the Hindus among them, he began to encourage inter-mingling, inter-dining, and, eventually, inter-marriage itself.

His son married a Tamil Brahmin girl. Nobody raised an eyebrow. The country had changed. A younger generation was taking over. They older generation liked Gandhi because he broke the 'kala-pani' taboo & married his son out of caste. The younger generation wanted all caste based law to be scrapped. However, what really mattered was the land question. Since nobody wanted to grasp that nettle, everybody ran around talking worthless bollocks. 

Notably, as Gandhi’s challenge to social orthodoxy became more direct, the opposition to him intensified.

He was a stupid shithead. Sadly, it was the stupid shit- stuff like khaddar- which gave him mass appeal. After all, religious rituals often involve doing mindless shite. What could be more mindless than spinning cotton? Maybe it really would get you into Heaven.  

There was an unrelenting barrage of hate mails received by Gandhi for daring to question what his right-wing critics claimed was the divinely ordained hierarchy of caste.

It is safer to direct your hate mail at a cowardly guy. What is illegal is sending him dick pics.  

Adding to the verbal abuse were threats of violence, with at least one assassination attempt provoked by his anti-untouchability campaign.

The Brits thought he had cooked up the bomb attack (1934) himself.  We don't know who was behind it.  

Ambedkar saw Gandhi as a timid and hesitant reformer.

He saw him as an hypocritical autocrat with little education or understanding of the modern world.  

Orthodox Hindus, on the other hand, saw Gandhi as a dangerous revolutionary attacking the very basis of scripture and tradition.

No. The guy was a bania who didn't know Sanskrit. If he could pull the wool over the eyes of the Muslims- well and good. If not, shoot the fucker.  

This disjuncture in viewpoints brings to mind some comments of the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass on his great white contemporary Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln had power. Douglass didn't.  

In a speech of 1876,

Which is when Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 by which the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes , was awarded the presidency under an agreement to remove remaining federal troops from Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida

Douglass remarked that ‘viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.’

Douglass was pretending the Civil War was about being nice to darkies. It really wasn't. Still, Douglass had to play the hand he had been dealt. 

The two greatest opponents of untouchability in the first half of the twentieth century were Gandhi and Ambedkar.

No wonder it persisted! When the Brits didn't like a thing- e.g. Suttee or Slavery- they got rid of it.  Indian barristers were useless.  

Their differing social locations and political affiliations produced sharp disagreements between the two men.

Their agreement mattered. Their disagreements did not. Why? They had shit for brains. Politics is about solving collective action problems in a sensible manner. It isn't about converting to Buddhism or sleeping naked with young girls.  

In recent decades, as Dalits have grown more self-aware and better organised, they have

lost power. Channi was the last Dalit C.M. He didn't last long. It is difficult now to believe that Mayawati was once considered a future PM. 

The question now is whether reservations will be renewed in 2030.  

turned more, much more, to Ambedkar than to Gandhi, to the activist intellectual who was himself a Dalit rather than to the guilt-ridden upper-caste reformer.

The problem is that Ambedkarites are crazy hatemongers who alienate everybody. Smart Dalits can join the BJP and rise. Better yet, stay clear of politics and focus on building a business.  

This elevation of Ambedkar over Gandhi was inevitable, and appropriate.

It was silly. True, you could repair Ambedkar by turning him into a Law & Econ type maven. But nobody is interested in doing so. Thus one may as well dismiss him a hate-mongering narcissist with a Messiah (or Boddhisattva) complex.  

However, the politics of the present have also led to a wholesale repudiation of Gandhi on the part of those who seek to fight against the injustices of caste.

Nobody is fighting shit. Gandhi was a fool who died long ago. Same goes for Ambedkar. Forget them. All that matters is productivity. Talking bollocks helps nobody.  

A posthumous reconciliation

When, back in the 1990s, this demonisation of Gandhi by Dalit activists was gathering pace,

Back then, Mayawati looked like a contender.  

the social theorist

aka shithead 

D. R. Nagaraj wrote an essay with the telling title ‘Self-Purification versus Self-Respect’, capturing the different paths taken by the two reformers.

Gandhi is important if there is a Gandhi capable of taking the top job. Ambedkar is important if a Dalit party (e.g. BSP) can take the lead in forming a government.  

The self-purification of Gandhi sought to make upper castes abandon their arrogance and contempt for those whom the mere accident of birth had consigned to the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Fuck off! All that matters is money. Ambedkar had plenty & thus was able to marry a Brahmin doctor. Raising productivity is how peeps get more money at which point they get plenty of respect from smart people who want to sell them stuff.  

The self-respect of Ambedkar was aimed at his fellow Dalits, urging them, as he famously put it, to ‘educate, agitate, and organise’ to claim rights of full and equal citizenship in the Indian Republic.

He claimed his full and equal right to support the British in India as their nominee. Nothing wrong in that at all.  

With the star of Ambedkar in the ascendance, Nagaraj reminded his readers that it was Gandhi who first made the eradication of untouchability ‘one of the central questions of Indian politics.’

Why didn't he ask the Viceroy to ban it? Interestingly, it was only in 1941 that Mahar recrutiment into the army was resumed.  

Now, ‘from the point of view of the present’, he argued, there was ‘a compelling necessity to achieve a synthesis’ of the legacies of Ambedkar and Gandhi.

This is a compelling necessity only for people who enjoy eating their own shit.  

To build a more caring and just society, one

needs to stop teaching or writing worthless shite  

needed both to awaken afresh the upper-caste conscience

The upper castes have come to loathe reservations.  

and to consolidate the efforts for Dalit self-respect. Hence, insisted Nagaraj, ‘Gandhiji and Ambedkar can and should be made complementary to each other.’

Add in Godse, Mao, Hitler & Barbara Streisland and you might be on to something.  

Nagaraj understood that his call for a posthumous reconciliation between two figures whom both history and politics had made implacable adversaries

Ambedkar scratched Gandhi's face after the latter pulled his hair.  

might not meet with approval. As he presciently wrote, ‘surely such efforts will be met with stiff opposition from hardened ideologues and researchers, and they are bound to unearth fresh evidence to fuel the fire between the two’.

Ambedkar was educated and smart. Gandhi wasn't. But, since Dalits aren't interested in anything smart Ambedkar said, we have to condemn both as worthless shitheads.  

D. R. Nagaraj died a few years after writing these words. His call to bring these apparently opposed legacies in productive conversation has been continued by his friend, the Dalit novelist and activist Devanuru Mahadeva.

The question is whether Priyank Kharge can get the job his father was denied in Karnataka. On the other hand, he may prefer a seat in the Union Cabinet if a Congress led alliance wins the National Election.  

Speaking to the journalist Amrita Dutta on the eve of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, Mahadeva urged democrats not to view Ambedkar and Gandhi as rivals and adversaries. In the journey towards true equality, he said, they should rather be seen as colleagues and co-workers. Thus, as Mahadeva remarked, ‘Ambedkar had to awaken the sleeping Dalits and then make the journey. Gandhi had to make the immense effort of uplifting, correcting, changing those who were drowned in Hindu caste religion, in caste wells, to take a step forward. When you see all this, maybe Gandhi would not have traversed far without the presence of Ambedkar. Similarly, I feel that without the liberal tolerant atmosphere created by Gandhi in the wells of Hindu caste religion, then this cruel Savarna [upper caste] society may not have tolerated Ambedkar as much as it did then.’

Ambedkar could have joined 'the Lal, Bal, Pal' militant section of Congress. He preferred to rise under British patronage. Gandhi too had ingratiated himself with the Brits. By unilaterally surrendering in 1922, he did the Brits a favour. Sadly, the end of British rule meant that both would lose salience. Nehru, it must be said, had a international, rather than parochial, perspective. It was his vision for India which prevailed. 

Mahadeva continued: ‘If it is our understanding that it is the Savarnas who need to change if India has to liberate itself from caste,

the Japanese had gotten rid of caste. They also burnt down Temples & beat Buddhist monks and forced them to get married. Ambedkar knew this well enough, yet converted to that highly casteist religion. 

then Gandhi is necessary. In the fight for Dalit civil rights, Ambedkar is absolutely necessary. Hence, I say that both should be brought together.’ This is a sentiment which I whole-heartedly endorse.

Because you have yet another worthless book to sell. 

Why actually 'argued with Gandhi'?  

Sadashit Dumbo's new book.

Sadanand Dhume's new book 'Tinderbox: The Unpredictable Rise and Uncertain Future of Modern India' is not

A devastating critique of India’s failure to fulfil its founding promises.

This is because Hindus wanted to take power & tell Muslims to either fuck off or pipe small. That is exactly what happened in Hindu majority areas. It must be said, after Indira broke up the Congress party, there was a period when she promoted Muslims. Thus, Nehru appointed no non-Hindu Premiers in Congress Provinces in 1937. It wasn't till 1972/73 that Indira appointed one or two Muslim C.Ms. But that was because they were loyalists without much of a base of their own.

It must be said, Muslim gangsters were often just as good or better than Kaffir gangsters and thus criminalised politics was pluralistic. Sadly, voters get tired of being robbed and raped. Moreover, crazy jihads tend to provoke 'Hindu consolidation'.

I suppose one might say Sadashit Dumbo thinks India's oundational promise was that Nehru's Dynasty would rule. Sadly, assassination tempers autocracy & Rahul doesn't want to get blown to pieces. Thus, for the last 12 years, India has had good governance & has risen in the world. If Yogi wins a third term in UP next February, he can take over from Modi & rule the country till 2040.  

Since claiming independence from the British Empire in 1947, India has dramatically changed its nature and its place on the world stage.

No. It has changed gradually & in a predictable manner. If you want drama, look elsewhere.  

Today, it is common knowledge that the country glitters with formidable potential.

It will continue to grow economically. But will it join the Eurasian power-block? No. But it will disengage with an increasingly isolationist US. But that is true of most other countries.  

India is the largest democracy in the world

Democracy doesn't matter. If Rahul wasn't a moon-calf, we'd be perfectly happy with Dynasticism.  

and it has the third-most billionaires after the US and China.

But their family offices are in Dubai or Singapore. 

It is predicted it will have the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, the largest middle class by 2033 and the third biggest navy by 2035. I

The economy matters. Who is or isn't 'middle class' is subjective.  

ndia boasts a raft of savvy English-speaking academics

all non-STEM academics are shit 

and business-leaders,

are useful 

an army of talented software engineers and a youthful population buzzing with ideas and ambition.

unless they are 'cockroaches'.  

But can all that India has promised – to itself and the wider world – come to fruition?

It hasn't promised anything to anybody. However, under Nehru, it showed it could do tit for tat ethnic cleansing just as well as its neighbours. Dumbo probably thinks Nehru protected Delhi's Muslims. He didn't. When he took power the Muslim population plunged from 33 to 5 percent.  

In Tinderbox, acclaimed Wall Street Journal columnist

aka useless shithead 

Sadanand Dhume

Sadashit Dumbo

takes a hard look at the country’s progress and potential, bringing together a view of politics, history, economic thinking and social attitudes.

i.e. anti-BJP bigotry. He thinks Congress could exist if it wasn't dynastic. He is wrong. It would splinter into regional parties (like the TMC) or get factionalised. One possibility is that Rahul nominates a technocrat if the Opposition get a majority. The problem is, he has a dog in the manger attitude. He will tear up the ordinances of his own puppet. The boy wants to be the Greta Thurnberg of Indian politics.  

Dhume points to why the economic progress of India is stuttering,

It isn't. But the global economic and diplomatic climate has turned inclement. Still, it has a large internal market & there are still plenty of low hanging fruit.  

with a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the desires of its technocrats and its politicians;

Nonsense! The politicians, no matter which party they belong to, need the Ambanis and Adanis.  

he shows how democracy is fraying,

The Hindu majority has asserted itself. Democracy means majority rule.  

Hindu nationalism cutting away at the nation’s fabled pluralism;

There was none once the Muslims voted overwhelming for Pakistan.  

and he accounts for the country’s continuing paradox of astonishing contradictions,

like those of the US. Some people are poor or addicted to drugs. Others are rich & as smart as fuck.  

what with its record-numbers of billionaires and mass poverty,

a social security safety net is under construction.  

its technological advances but overall lack of access to electricity and clean water.

Both have increased and will continue to do so.  

In short, it’s time to revisit the view that India’s growth and progress will continue at its prophesied pace.

No. Purely economic forces will continue to lift millions out of absolute poverty. Poltics doesn't greatly matter.  

And it’s time to overturn the widespread assumption that a familiar India will remain familiar.

Just as a familiar US or UK or Germany won't remain familiar. There will be more darkies. However, Indians are already darkies. They will just be less poor darkies.  

Foucault on intellectuals

 Intellectuals, in 1977, had no political influence in any country in the world- unless right-wing economists count as such. Yet, in that year, Michel Foucault, in a series of interviews, propounded the following re. 'the political role of the intellectual'. 

For a long time the 'left' intellectual spoke and was acknowledged to have the right of speaking in the capacity of master of truth and justice.

This was never the case even in Communist countries. Some leftist writers or film makers or celebrities had some influence at different times and places. But this was also true of crazy right wing nutters or folksy centrist shitheads.  

He was heard, or purported to make himself heard, as the representative of the universal.

No. Some leftists claimed to speak for the poor but there were actual poor people who could speak for themselves.  

To be an intellectual meant to be, a little, the consciousness / conscience of everyone.

I suppose Sartre was wierdly popular. 50,000 turned out for his funeral in 1980. Nothing like it had happened since the death of Victor Hugo. But Sartre was an academic who became a writer rather than an intellectual.  

I think we encounter here an idea transposed from Marxism, from a faded Marxism indeed: just as the proletariat, through the necessity of its historical position, is the bearer of the universal (but its immediate, unreflected bearer, scarcely conscious of itself as such),

nobody believed that shite. Sartre & Foucault were retarded cunts who converted to an ideology based wholly upon an economic theory which they were incapable of understanding.  

so the intellectual, by his moral, theoretical and political chOice, aspires to be the bearer of this universality in its consciOUS, elaborated form.

I suppose you could say this of Milton Friedman who said inflation was always and everywhere a purely monetary phenomenon. There was a 'free market' universalism and the beginnings of a 'Human Rights' universalism but there was no Leftist universalism. Nobody thought a Communist 'dictatorship of the proletariat' could be established in Western Democracies.  Even the notion of 'convergence' to a mixed economy was in question because the Public Sector in more and more countries was loss making. 

The intellectual is supposed to be the· clear, individual figure of a universality of which the proletariat is the obscure, collective form.

Mao was dead. The gang of 4 had been arrested the previous year. China was 77 percent agricultural. Meanwhile the industrial proletariat had begun to decline as a proportion of the working population after peaking in France at about 40 percent in the early Seventies. To be fair, it was not obvious that deindustrialization would succeed stagflation or that women and the service sector would rise and rise.  

For some time now, the intellectual has no longer been called upon to play this role.

Nobody ever gave a shit about intellectuals. Sartre, for some reason, was cool but what won in '68 was Gaullism. Cohn Bendit redirected his energies towards paedophilia.  

A new mode of 'connection between theory and practice' has been established.

That happened a couple of thousand years ago. Doctors listened to lectures on theory and then learnt on the job through practice.  

Intellectuals have become accustomed to working not in the character of the 'universal', the 'exemplary', the 'just-and-true for all', but in specific sectors, at precise points where they are situated either by their professional conditions of work or their conditions of life (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, familial and sexual relations).

Foucault was mentally ill. What worked on crazy people turned out NOT to be culture dependent. Oddly, Foucault's own psychiatrist- despite being French- wasn't shit. He had helped develop lithium salts as a treatment. Maoists forced him out of the profession but he then turned to literature and got elected to the French Academy.

Through this they have undoubtedly gained a much more concrete awareness of struggles. They have also there· by encountered problems which are specific, 'nonuniversal', often different from those of the proletariat and the masses. And yet, I believe that they have really come closer to the proletariat,

Foucault liked a bit of rough trade 

for two reasons: because it has been a matter of real, material, everyday struggles, and because they often came up, even though in a different form, against the same adversary as the proletariat, the peasants and the masses, namely the multinational corporations, the judicial and police apparatuses, property speculators etc.

Also grown-ups. They don't want us kids to have any fun.  

This is what I would call the 'specific' intellectual as opposed to the 'universal' intellectual.

Foucault was a specific intellectual who was constantly harassed by the pigs coz he liked skateboarding while playing his guitar. Property speculators hired Ninja assassins to try to bump him off. Fortunately, his best pal was the Karate kid. 

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