Per quod- Hexis' God

Not that, saving your presence,  I am poor, heathen, & black

 But that, upon my own eyes, of pleasance, its guilty glimpse

 By its own Hexis is this jealous acid attack

Per quod, God, Stérēsis pimps. Hephaestus limps.

Niradh Chauduri & Bibhuti Bhushan

In 'Thy Hand Great Anarch', Niradh Chaudhuri writes of Bibhuti Bhushan- the author of the Apu novels made famous by Satyajit Ray. 

Whatever the trials of my life as a clerk, I secured great personal happiness at that time by forming a friendship which lasted as long as that friend lived, and was shared by my wife after I married. This friend was in every way a remarkable man, and his name was Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyaya (anglicized, Banerji). The friendship began by sheer chance. Soon after I had settled down at 41 Mirzapore Street I saw a young man coming down the stairs as I was going up. He looked down at me closely and cried out, ‘Nirad!’ At first I could not make out who it was that was addressing me so familiarly, but in a moment I recognized the face: it was that of a fellow-student at Ripon College during the years 1914 to 1916.

Bibhuti was three years older than Nirad. He came from a poorer, Brahmin, family. But, having taken the Arts degree (rather than History), he had a greater knowledge of English literature. Moreover, he kept abreast of popular fiction because he himself would need to provide for his pen by writing stuff of that sort.

Niradh writes 'Bibhuti Babu never introduced sexual life in the narrow and more lurid sense of the phrase into his novels and stories. He made his hero Apu mutter to himself in English when he first saw his bride: ‘They breed goddesses at Slocum Magna.’ (I really do not know where he got that line of poetry from.)

The line is from J.C Snaith's 'Araminta' published in 1909. The heroine- who is beautiful but, as is becoming in the granddauthter of a Duke, thick as shit- comes from a small village called Slocum Magna. When asked where it is, she mentions its neighbouring and, in her estimation, increasingly negligible parishes before finally hitting on London as the most neglibilble of all. She triumphs because the impoverished painter who loves her receives ten thousand pounds for her portrait and thus can marry her & settle down in a hamlet less negligible than any other since it now holds a Goddess from its neighbour- Slocum Magna. 

Bibhuti, I believe, had been able to attend College thanks to a benefactor but, after his father's death, had to earn money to educate his siblings. His own Araminta had died but adventure was his Slocum Magna.

There he had the reputation of being very well-read and well-informed, although just out of school. But I was not very intimate with him, and was inclined to think that he was rather over-assertive with his opinions on all conceivable subjects, a trait or foible common in young Bengalis with an intellectual turn. But I had forgotten that impression and was very glad to meet an old acquaintance again. He asked me where I lived, and when I told him that I lived in that very house he said he would come and see me, adding that he himself lived next door. He came the very evening, and was very pleased to see my books. He told me that it was not the first time. Two or three years earlier he had seen me reading in the Imperial Library, with a huge pile of books before me - as he put it - and was very glad to find that an old fellow-student was still pursuing his intellectual interests. He said that he had also asked me questions. But I had no recollection of the incident. After that he told me about himself. He had to give up his studies when he was in the M.A class for want of means, and was now a teacher in a village school about twenty miles south of Calcutta, to which he went every day by train. I learned later that he was three years my senior in age, but none of us felt the difference. He was obviously a bachelor, but he informed me that he was actually a widower. He had married while still at college, and had lost his young wife in the great influenza epidemic of 1 9 1 8, after only a year of married life.

Niradh failed his MA.  

We soon became very intimate, and I may add that he was one of only three or four persons outside my family with whom I became at all so in personal relations. He told me the very first evening that he had already published a story in the foremost Bengali monthly magazine Prabasi. As soon as he mentioned its title I recalled it, for I had read it, and although I did not remember the name of the writer I had thought that it showed great originality and a delicate sensibility. I might mention here that in less than ten years he became one of the leading Bengali writers of fiction. His first novel, published in 1928, at once established his position, and the book has now become known all over the world in its film version by Satyajit Ray. It is Father Panchali.

Niradh does not seem to be aware that Dhan Gopal- a rural Brahmin from West Bengal, just like Bibhuti- had done well out of an autobiographical book published in New York in 1923. If a lyrical account of Brahminical Bengal could earn money in America, why not in Calcutta?  

In 1924, as soon as he had written the first few pages, he read them out to me. I felt so confident about it that I prodded him for three years to finish it. After its publication as a serial in 1928 I was able to secure a publisher for the novel in book form.

Dhan Gopal was writing for foreigners. He could afford to over-egg the cake with poetry and philosophy and Hindu spirituality. Indeed, there was a passage in it about a supposed 'tiger-melody' which Kazantzakis took up. The Calcutta audience wanted no such foppery.  

With his intellectual interests he wanted somebody to talk to.

He didn't find any such person.  

He was very lonely and needed companionship. So, he would come almost every evening and spend some time with me. The account he gave of his student days and of his working life since his wife’s death distressed me very much. When I was at college with him I knew nothing of the poverty in spite of which he was carrying on his studies. What he told me was afterwards embodied by him in his novel Aparajita ( The Undefeated). I his story has also been filmed in two parts by Ray, and those who have seen the films will understand what Bibhuti Babu went through. Certainly, it was he who was undefeated. I, of course, had never to experience anything like that, and had no idea of the hardships of such a life. Although by caste he belonged to one of the highest clans of Bengali Brahmins, socially his family was of the humblest rank of the Bengali gentry. His father was a Kathak or expositor of Hindu mythology, and these men stood very low in the priestly hierarchy. This man was poor, and in addition a Bohemian given to wandering. But he was also a character, and wrote verse besides keeping a diary, which has survived to be used by Bibhuti Babu’s biographer. I learned all this piecemeal, for he was extremely unwilling to speak about his father and family antecedents. He even indulged in some amount of mystification about them. 1 was often puzzled by this, for I came from a class in which talking about ancestors and parading genealogy was habitual. My intimacy with him developed in shared mental life. I might explain  that in Bengali society what is understood as social life in the West does not as a rule extend beyond family and marriage relationships. What attracted young Bengalis to one another were mental affinity, intellectual interests, and tastes. Money or social position never stood in the way of such associations. I acquired a great respect for his mind, which had a wide range of interests. But I certainly did not expect a young Bengali of his class and education to show interest in astrophysics and human palaeontology, which he did. He would talk to me of E. P. Hubble, the astronomer at Mount Wilson Observatory, and his theories, although he had never been a student either of mathematics or physics. I had heard about Jeans and Eddington, and had also read a little by or about them. I had Einstein’s book on Relativity as well. But I had not heard of Hubble.

His work provided the basis for the Big Bang theory which went against the Aristotelian tradition. It would naturally be of interest to Hindus.  

Bibhuti Babu also showed me Sir Arthur Keith’s Antiquity of Man,

Keith thought humanity had evolved in Europe & then spread outward. Indians would therefore be degenerate creatures. Niradh may have liked this view but Bibhuti was looking for ways to overturn it.  

which in spite of his want of means he had bought. At that time I had only a smattering of human palaeontology and prehistory, but he created such an absorbing interest in them in me that I soon went far beyond him, and not only read Boule’s Les Hommes Fossiles

Boule, equally taken in by the Piltdown Man hoax, agreed with Keith re. the European origin of humanity. He differed from the Englishman by dismissing Neanderthals as ape like creatures.  

and other standard works, but also bought the massive monographs on palaeolithic art by Piette, Carailhac, Breuil and others, ordering them from Paris.

But for the Depression, those would actually have risen in value.  

What I did immediately was to make Bibhuti Babu buy Burckit’s Prehistory ,

Burckit was a young Englishman whose mentors were eminent French paleo-archaeologists. However, if you didn't believe Europe was super-special, their work was of limited interest.  

when it was published in 1923, of course to read it myself. It did not take me long to discover that his interest in these subjects was not strictly scientific. He was an out and out romantic, and was drawn to them by that.

He would later write some excellent Rider Haggard style adventure stories set in Africa. Nothing wrong with being a romantic, if you hope to entertain with your pen.  

Even if he himself and his family had belonged to the well-to-do section of Bengali society instead of to the poorest, he would have been a romantic, because the commonplace and staid ease of that class would have irked him and driven him to break out of it, in spirit at least.

He had read a lot of European literature & wanted to produce Bengali stories and novels which weren't as boring as shit.  

But his poverty-stricken and drab life made romanticism a condition of mental survival for him. As he told me, even during his hard student days he would not confine himself to his text-books, to do which was necessary for examinations, but would read anything that came in his way. He did not do well in them; nonetheless he became a writer. With the death of his wife and adoption of the profession of teaching the necessity became greater. As things stood, teachers in Bengal were very poorly paid - when they entered the profession they could never hope to have more than three pounds a month. So, they had to live very bare lives.

Would Bibhuti supplement his income with journalism and some political work? Yes.  

What was worse was that as a class they made their mental life equally bare. In Calcutta those who were inclined that way could enliven their existence by going into literary or political circles as hangers-on of the established figures. But in the villages in which Bibhuti Babu worked there was no question of such relief, for village life was hidebound and trivial and so withered even in its traditionalism that it could be regarded only as the fossilized survival of civilized Hindu society.

But people would pay to learn more of what was happening in the villages. The first General Election had been held in 1923. The franchise was bound to be extended further and further. Bibhuti wasn't earning much but he was learning enough to make a niche for himself in the literary world.  

The village, at some distance north of Calcutta, in which he first worked seemed to have been worse than the normal run of such places. He could not talk to anybody and lived in a bazaar near the railway station. To all this was added the desolation of his bereavement. He told me how he sat in the evenings in his miserable hovel in the light of the flickering oil lamp and thought of his loss until the whistle of the late train from Calcutta reminded him that it was time to go to bed. The memories of his wife kept him from marrying again for twenty-three years. I always noticed a packet of papers in his breast pocket, and an embroidered hand-made fan by his pillow. He never referred to them, nor did I ask. But I could easily guess that the packet contained the few letters his wife had written to him, and that the fan was made by her. I and other friends of his tried persistently to get him married again and settled properly. They as well as I at times even brought proposals. His curiosity would make him go and have a look at the prospective brides. Once or twice matters went even farther. But in the end he always managed to give the slip. I joined in three bridal inspections. His wife’s death led him to an interest which I could not share. It was spiritualism.

Quite common at that time.  

He had already read Myers, Lodge, and Conan Doyle. He tried to convince me of the reality of the ghostly world by throwing his authorities in my teeth.

He wrote some good tales of the occult which sold well.  

His dependence on one writer provoked me sorely. He was the German Schrenk-Notzing, whose book on ectoplasmic emanations disgusted me.

But the popular fiction of the period had plenty of such things. Bibhuti didn't want to remain poor. He wanted to earn money by writing stuff which didn't bore the pants off you.  

But just as he could not convince me, I too could not shake his faith in the survival of the human personality. At last we tacitly agreed not to discuss this subject, although we talked incessantly on many others. I continued to hear, however, that to others he preached his faith eloquently, and in later life he wrote two novels with supernatural themes. I would add, however, that he showed the stronger side of his preoccupation with death by buying the little book which Dean Inge wrote on his daughter who died in childhood. I borrowed it from him and was deeply touched by it. 

Tagore, it must be said, wrote very well in that vein.  

I could easily see why he had become a spiritualist, but did not wish to hurt his feelings by making use of the argumentum ad hominem. I also saw a gradual shift in his motivation. If at first he wanted to believe in life after death for the sake of his wife, in his later days he clung to the same faith from his own love of life. So, belief in after-life became in him not only a dogma but even a superstition. Yet I could see that he was not religious. All that he wanted was to be assured of his personal continuity.

Which he certainly achieved as an artist.  

I suspected that his interest in scientific cosmology and prehistory was the product of his effort and yearning to find a cosmic location for his world of the dead. Even when approaching death he repeated his credo. He died at the relatively early age of fifty-six in 1950. However, it must not be imagined from all this that he was always mooning about the supernatural. On the contrary, he could be very matter of fact and concrete. Indeed, in his novels he showed an astonishing capacity for detailed observation of both nature and human character, combined with great humour and tenderness in describing what his observation discovered.

He worked hard at literature.  

His hard life had not embittered him, nor made him a cynic. His sympathy for ordinary people was unlimited, and he was not repelled even by the squalor in which such people had to live in our society. Somehow, he could always make them rise above their surround- ings; I would even say - far above the limitations of their world. But as he actually lived, he never, even when he had the means to do so, rose above the shabby ways of the Bengali lower middle class. In fact, he was quite insensitive to the external amenities of life, and in spite of being very sensitive, at times too self-consciously so, to beauty in nature, he did not have any perception of man-made beauty, differing radically from me in this. His room was never well-furnished, not even tidy. I had often to put it in some sort of order. He never dressed well, and had no idea of good living. Many years later, after my marriage, he became very friendly with my wife, and would come and talk with her for preference. But instead of remaining in the sitting-room, he would go straight to her bedroom, and sit cross-legged on the embroidered bedspread, placidly smoking his biri, the stinking lower middle-class smoke. My wife would make him throw it away, and ask the servant to get a packet of respectable cigarettes for him. As I never smoked, no supply was kept at home. But the strong side of his loyalty to the shabby life was that, on the one hand, he was never intimidated by wealth to become servile to rich people, and, on the other, he never became envious of them. He worked for some time as a tutor in one of the wealthiest families of Calcutta. The drawing- room of that house was a faithful replica of a room in an English country house. In fact, these Bengali houses used to be furnished by British decorators, and often with furniture imported from England. Once he showed me the drawing-room, but he seemed to be wholly unaware of what it contained and what it looked like. He was equally indifferent to his employer’s car - an enormous Cadillac. On the other hand, he could describe both the owner of the house and his ways with mischievous but never malicious humour. I have seen very few men who like him were totally resistant to external pretensions and unawed by it. Bibhuti Babu will come again and again into the story of my life. At this point, however, I shall only relate how within a few months I got him settled at 41 Mirzapore Street, in a room above mine. In this room, with temporary absences, he lived for nearly twenty years till his second marriage. One afternoon, a few weeks after I had first met him, he suddenly made his appearance in my room very proudly with a garland of marigolds round his neck. He explained that he had come from the farewell meeting at the school, where he had resigned. This surprised me very much, because he added that he was not going to a new and better job but had become unemployed. I did not press him about the reason, nor did he tell me how he carried on during the period of unemployment. Within a few weeks he got a very odd job, and it was then that I learned that he had at times to go without regular meals before he got it. Sometimes he ate a few pice worth of gram, at others a shopkeeper gave him a full meal on credit. I scolded him severely, and told him that he should have become my guest. He only replied that he did not want to bother me. The job he had secured was queer enough.

No. Bibhuti knew that Keith's 'amity-enmity' theory perfectly described the communal polarization of Bengal in the Twenties.  

It was to lecture against the slaughter of cows on behalf of the Cow Protection Society of Calcutta patronized by the Marwari millionaire Keshoram Poddar.

The Indian National Congress achieved mass contact through cow-protection leagues. Incidentally, its founder, A.O Hume- though a Scottish ICS officer- was a Vegetarian Vedantin who believed cow protection was essential for agronomic reasons.  

He described the durbar of the great man with humour to me, particularly how he was always sitting with half-a-dozen telephone sets around him, which brought him news of the stock market. So, off he went to the southern part of Chittagong district, to save cows in that predominantly Muslim area of Bengal. He said a good deal about the opportunity this lecture tour gave him to learn public speaking. Afterwards he often addressed literary  meetings and conferences.

Dhan Gopal was 4 years older than Bibhuti. His generation of emigres tended to move in a Socialist or Marxist direction. But, in Bengal, for a Brahmin, the better course was to gain Marwari patronage by being useful to the Mahasabha.  

Soon he gave up this job and became private secretary to a well-known landowner in Calcutta. I asked him to come over to the boarding house I was in, and got him the room I have spoken about, which he shared at first with another literary man, also known to me. It was then that I learned the story of his resignation. It had a romantic history behind it.* When working in the school south of Calcutta he had first taken up lodgings with a Brahmin family of the village. There was a young girl in it, who found that he was utterly incapable of looking after himself and so when he was at school she came into his room, tidied it up, and made everything comfortable. She took a fancy to him, which certainly could be called love, and after some time she began to leave letters for him. I have read these, about ten in all so far as my recollection goes. There was not one explicit word of love in them, but no one could make any mistake about their spirit. I have never read anything more simple, sincere, and pure: they gave expression to an intense yearning to serve him, as if she was saying: Behold your handmaiden! But the girl did not belong to his subcaste of Brahmins, and so in those days there could be no question of his marrying her.

A theme worthy of Sharat!  

To prevent awkwardness, he first came away to Calcutta, and then resigned from the school. This was not, however, the only one of his affairs of the heart, which were always begun and carried on by the girls and not by him. Somehow he attracted girls, and in his later years his literary standing helped him. In those days Bengali girls who were taking to higher education developed a tendency to fall in love with the writers they admired (of course, novelists and poets, and never writers like me) without ever seeing them, and afterwards tried to get personally acquainted, with the sole avowed object of hero worship. In his own response to these opportunities, Bibhuti Babu did not adhere to the strict principle he had followed in the affair just mentioned, but seemed to enjoy the game without getting entangled himself. He also seemed really to believe that the girls too would not suffer. If I had read Trollope then, I would have compared him to Johnny Eames.

There was no similarity. Eames saved the life of a rich man and got a bequest. Bibhuti was an artist.  

Until I married he would come and tell me about these affairs,

they were Platonic. Nothing wrong with having a muse or being a mentor to an aspiring song-bird.  

and I always scolded him. He never took that seriously, and either thought that I was a puritan and prig, or merely the tail-less fox. After my marriage he transferred his confidences to my wife who showed a good deal of amused tolerance of his affairs even to the point of looking on with enjoyment when one day he brought a little girl of about twelve and about four feet tall to our house and sat on my wife’s bed with her little hands clasped in his very big ones. But one affair made her angry. As it happened, a highly educated modern Bengali girl fell in love with him and out of that feeling went on repulsing a most devoted lover of hers. This girl was very well known to my wife, and a friend of hers who knew the ill-treated young man came to her and complained about the dog in the manger.

It is one thing to talk poetry. Marriage is a prosaic business.  

My wife, of course, gave a long lecture to Bibhuti Babu, without producing the slightest effect on him. He would even take a long and uncomfortable journey of three hundred miles to see the girl when he did not have the slightest serious intention. In the end Bibhuti Babu played the game once too well, and was caught in matrimony, and that at the age of forty-seven.

Bibhuti had educated his younger brother who was able to qualify as a Doctor. It is said that a contractor who had borrowed some money from Bibhuti put a house in Ghatsila in his name. Bibhuti visited it in 1938, thinking it could be a residence for his brother but fell in love with the place. He settled there and got married. Tragically, his brother, who nursed him in his last illness, felt guilty that some negligence of his own had killed his brother. Thus, he drowned himself. For a Hindu, this incident has as much mathos as pathos.  

But he did not feel punished at all, and lived happily ever afterwards. He continued his visits to my wife, and told her of his married happiness, how his wife would tie the end of her sari to the end of his dhoti and prevent his getting out of bed too early in the morning. Now, this is a very effective means of keeping a Bengali when you do not want to part with him. Bibhuti Babu himself applied the same method to me without going to its extreme length. When I went to see him and rose to take my departure he would seize the flounce of my dhoti and keep it firmly in his closed fist. In that situation, given the manner in which we wore the dhoti, nobody could get away without leaving it behind. His curiosity about women, even when he was not involved in a love affair, was uncontrollable,

He was a novelist. To be able to accurately depict Bengali womenhood was a valuable work skill.  

and it would lead him to situations which were farcical at his expense. Here I give some examples. When he was a little boy of about five or six his father brought him to Calcutta and took lodgings in a slum in a rather disreputable quarter of the city. Next to their house was a better house, and a kept woman lived there. She would invite little Bibhuti to talk or to play with her. Of course, had his father been a normal parent such a thing could never have happened. He was not, and so Bibhuti became very fond of the woman. However, towards the evenings she would say: ‘Now, child, go home, for my Babu [protector] will come.’ That must have been before 1900.

Bibhuti turned this childhood memory into a story which was the basis of 'Amar Prem' starring Rajesh Khanna & Sharmila Tagore.  

And one day in 1 925 or so he came to the house where I was living with my brothers after leaving Mirzapore Street, in a state of utter panic and seemed to be ready to say as Wellington said of Waterloo: ‘It was a damned nice thing - the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.’ The story was this. He quite remembered the house and its location, and, out of an overwhelming desire to see the woman, had gone to it. By that time it had become a regular brothel, and when the young women saw my friend with all his embonpoint they all fell on him, and each one tried to drag him to her room. Bibhuti Babu told me that he loudly protested his innocence, and was treated to hilarious and pitiless laughter. At first I also roared with laughter. But afterwards I gave him a lecture on common sense.

Bibhuti was an artist. He had the common touch. That is why his works have become part and parcel of the sensibility of people my age.  

At about the same time he came again and told me that he was going to see the girl for whose sake he had resigned his job, because he had heard she was now married and he wanted to find out if she was happy.

He wanted her to see him see her being happy. Nothing wrong in that at all.  

I was horrified and tried to dissuade him. But, of course, he would not listen. The next day he came again, and from his face I could guess how the visit had gone. He said that he had just come from the station and related his story. When he arrived he was received very politely, but before he could inquire about the girl he heard piercing screams coming from the inner house, and he was told apologetically that their niece was having her confinement. Bibhuti Babu added that he did not wait to hear another word, and ran as if for dear life. I only said that he had got what he deserved.

He got more. Platonic love is all very well. What women really want is baby. Men remain outside that charmed circle and thus approach Durga- who is difficult to approach.  

On another occasion, when he was over forty, a very mischievous writer friend of mine played him a cruel practical joke, and he came to complain about it to me in furious anger. He said that the wicked man had promised to show him an Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) prostitute if he would go and wait in Wellington Square at nine in the evening. He had gone and sat in the cold on that November night for two hours and neither the friend nor the prostitute had come. ‘Could you imagine anything more treacherous?’ Bibhuti Babu asked me. The reason for his curiosity was that at that time Eurasian prostitutes were regarded by Bengali young men as quite the de luxe things in that line, and so he wanted to find out if their reputation was justified.

A story featuring such a 'tart with a heart' would have sold well, more particularly because you could plausibly put in bits of Barrett Browning's verse into her mouth.  

Yet I know if the woman had come Bibhuti Babu would have taken to flight, as he actually did on another occasion. This time I was in no mood to be amused. I told him that I thought he still had some self-respect  left not to be led away by curiosity of that order, especially when he knew as well as I did what the character of our writer friend was. Probably at the bottom of all this weakness was the fact that Bibhuti Babu rather piqued himself on his looks. He was a stout man of middle height, and physically not unimpressive. He also had a very intelligent and pleasant expression. But nobody would have called him a handsome man. But he never took that view and he would often twit me on the smallness of my eyes. He would say that they were like little snails while his were long and large. He also had a great fascination with himself, and would ponder over his personality. He was very fond of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, as I also was, and he would tell me that he was like Peter Bezukhov.

i.e. represented 'Prakriti'- nature- rather than an artificial, or hot-house, culture.  It is to his ears that Tolstoy unseals the great truth that if we cavil at sickness, God won't grant us death. 

I, who had no less fascination with myself, at once replied that I would rather be Prince Andrew Bolkonsky. Then he suddenly asked me: ‘And who do you think is Boris Drubetskoi?’ And he took my breath away by saying: ‘Don’t you think it is X?’, mentioning the name of a friend of mine whom he knew only by report. That friend, in spite of his great qualities, was something of a climber, and had in fact pushed his way into the highest circles in Calcutta. I did not expect Bibhuti Babu would be able to detect such a character.

He didn't. Common report did.  

These almost childish weaknesses made him more lovable. But there was one trait in his character which after two decades of familiarity with him caused me both puzzlement and dismay. This was a sort of hardness, which lay at the core of his outwardly soft nature and made him incapable of strong personal affection for anybody. His stories revealed a deep compassion and tenderness for the joys and sorrows of humble people taken in the mass and typicalized as individuals. But personally I saw often that he could be totally indifferent even to those very near him. It may have come from his intensely egocentric nature or from the first sorrow of his life which made him grow a protective callousness. I heard that he doted on the son of his old age, who was very young when he died.

He was three. Which kid isn't very lovable at that age?  

But that sort of love in an old man is often a form of self-love. Nonetheless, his egocentric nature showed a good side as well, for he never felt any envy or jealousy over the success or good fortune of fellow- writers.

He had worked harder than them and his fame would outlive theirs. Thanks to the Simpsons, who doesn't know the name Apu?  

The writer class is not distinguished by this virtue, and in Bengal it is still less so. Bibhuti Babu was, however, immune to this meanness. Once, when to my thinking he was being lazy over the completion of his first novel, 1 wrote to him that he must hurry up, because some others - 1 gave names were already becoming well-established without having his ability. He replied that it did not matter, he did not grudge anybody’s success, nor did he feel upset by his slowness. He would do what he wanted to do in his time, and he did.

 I think Bibhuti was aware of the vogue in England and America for romances set in out of the way rural districts. Could he supply something of the sort himself? He needed to proceed carefully. You can't just have a rustic Bengali maiden quote 'Urn Burial' or Victor Hugo thought, Strindberg might be all right. This was a matter which required some little research.

Niradh's father was a lawyer and he had elder brothers and other family connections. Thus Bibhuti pretended to be naive and cowardly so as to benefit from such protection as this intellectual friendship could afford him. It is sad that Bibhuti did not live to see his friend's autobiography win the praise of leading English men of letters like J.C Squires & E.M Forster. Like Dhan Gopal, both were from rural Bengal but, from an early age, by their own exertions, made themselves at home in the literature of distant continents

Scruton's stupidity

Sir Roger Scruton taught worthless shit. Thus, he became incapable of writing a single sentence which wasn't egregiously false, foolish or both false & foolish. 

His short book 'England & the need for Nations' begins thus 

Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties

 National loyalties can create Nation States. Some Nation States may become Democracies. But so may multi-ethnic Empires or Commonwealths. The Austrian half of Austro-Hungary had universal suffrage by 1907 even though it contained Czechs, Slovaks, Germans etc. The United Kingdom is a Democracy. Yet the Scots & the Welsh see themselves as separate Nations. Why did Scruton not know this?  

—the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition,

they could be loyal to the same Emperor or President.  

by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole.

There may be separatist elements within the electorate. Some MPs may refuse to take their seats in the Legislature if an oath of loyalty is required of them. 

Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root.

It has failed to take root in plenty of places where the 'experience of nationality' was as strong as fuck. Is the converse also true? Yes. Look at India. It is way less nationalistic than China but, perhaps for that very reason, way more democratic.  

For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.

Fuck off! Fascits & Nazis may have very fierce 'national loyalty' but they may also want to get rid of every vestige of not just representative government but also the rule of law.  

Yet everywhere the idea of the nation is under attack

No. The idea of the nation is defended. What is being promoted is 'pooling of sovereignty'. If this means the nation is more likely to survive and thrive, then we would say that the idea of the nation is being safeguarded. True, a crazy shithead may say that all treaty based law is very evil and those fucking furriners are in bed with the secret elite (Homosexual, Jewish, Freemasons many of whom are directly descended from shape shifting lizards from Planet X) which runs everything. Also, did you know the Post Office is actually just a cover for a paedophile ring? Our kids are being sodomized by furriners so as to undermine their sense of patriotic belonging.  

—either despised as an atavistic form of social unity, or even condemned as a cause of war and conflict, to be broken down and replaced by more enlightened and more universal forms of jurisdiction.

It is possible that some Pofessor as stupid and useless as Scruton said something of the sort. But that is because teaching shite turns your brain to shit.  

But what, exactly, is supposed to replace the nation and the nation state?

Prior to 2007, when it was plausible that European per capita income would converge to that of the US, some believed there could be a Federal European union with substantial transfers & full fiscal & monetary integration.

And how will the new form of political order enhance or conserve our democratic heritage?

Well enough. The EU forced the UK to set up a proper Supreme Court. Nobody currently seems keen to go back to the old system.  

Few people seem prepared to give an answer, and the answers that are offered are quickly hidden in verbiage, typified by the EU’s adoption of the ecclesiastical doctrine of ‘subsidiarity’, in order to remove powers from member states under the pretence of granting them.

Post-Brexit Britain is still going down this road.  

Recent attempts to transcend the nation state into some kind of transnational political order

e.g. NATO 

have ended up either as totalitarian dictatorships like the former Soviet Union,

Russia was autocratic under the Tzars & became more so under the Commies.  

or as unaccountable bureaucracies, like the European Union today.

The suggestio falsi here is that the EU is like the USSR. Why not simply say 'millions of British patriots have been killed in Brussell's Gulags.' 

Although many of the nation states of the modern world are the surviving fragments of empires, few people wish to propose the restoration of imperial rule as the way forward for mankind.

Maybe Scruton wrote this before ISIS became a thing. Plenty of people would like a Global Caliphate where Kaffirs get short shrift.  

Why then and for what purpose should we renounce the form of sovereignty that is familiar to us, and on which so much of our political heritage depends?

Maybe, if there had been more pooled sovereignty, Europe would have rebounded froom the Crash as rapidly as the US. The US has had 45 percent growth in real per capita Income since 2008. The UK has had 7 percent. France has had 10 percent. Germany has had 13 percent. China has had 185 percent. This means the EU can be bullied by both Trump & Xi. As for the UK, even Pakistan can shit on us.  

We in Europe stand at a turning point in our history.

No. Europe trundled a little further down the road of irrelevance.  

Our parliaments and legal systems still have territorial sovereignty.

But, the EU will soon nationalize our rectums and rent them out to shape-shifting lizards from Uranus.  

They still correspond to historical patterns of settlement that have enabled the French,

Alsatians? Corsicans? 

the Germans,

they lost a lot of territory 

the Spaniards,

Catalans? 

the British 

44 percent of Scots want Independence.  

and the Italians

Northern idealogues

 to say ‘we’ and to know whom they mean by it.

This is also true of people with tiny dicks even if we don't know who else is 'one of us'. 

The opportunity remains to recuperate the legislative powers and the executive procedures that formed the nation states of Europe.

The opportunity always exists to fuck up the economy by doing stupid shit.  Economists estimate that UK GDP per capita is approximately 6% to 8% lower than it would have been if the UK had remained in the EU.  Personal wealth across the UK (including housing, savings, and pensions) has dropped by roughly 23% in real terms since 2020, suffering one of the sharpest declines among advanced economies. Worse yet, White Europeans have been replaced by non-European darkies- Non-EU (primarily non-White) employment in the UK more than doubled by 2024, reaching about 225% of its 2016 level.

At the same time, the process has been set in motion that would

cause dogs to marry cats 

expropriate the remaining sovereignty of our parliaments and courts, that would annihilate the boundaries between our jurisdictions, that would dissolve the nationalities of Europe in a historically meaningless collectivity, united neither by language, nor by religion, nor by customs, nor by inherited sovereignty and law.

 also kittens would say 'bow wow' while puppy dogs would say 'miaow'. 

We have to choose whether to go forward to that new condition,

i.e. some fantastic nonsense this nutter pulled out of his arse 

or back to the tried and familiar sovereignty of the territorial nation state.

Which would mean a fall in real income & wealth of the type the UK experienced. It may also mean less sovereignty as the country becomes a 'rule taker' & becomes subject to economic and diplomatic blackmail.  

At the same time our political élites speak and behave as though there were no such choice to be made—just as the communists did at the time of the Russian Revolution

There were two of them in the same year. Communists said there were more choices- e.g. a separate peace & immediate expropriation without compensation of the landlord class.  

They refer to an inevitable process, to irreversible changes,

which is the case with all entropic processes. Scruton himself inevitably and irreversibly changed into a corpse.  

and while at times prepared to distinguish a ‘fast’ from a ‘slow’ track into the future, are clear in their minds that these two tracks lead to a single destination—the destination of transnational government, under a common system of law, in which national loyalty will be no more significant than support for a local football team.

Since about 1940, it has been obvious that Wilsonian Nation-States would have to be part of a Super-power alliance. Even India had to sign up with the Soviets. 

Economists don't think there will be full fiscal convergence. Instead you will have different 'Tiebout models' offering different external economies.  

In this pamphlet I set out the case for the nation state,

which is like setting out the case for cats. They already exist. The advantages of having them around are obvious. Why gild the lily?  

recognising that what I have to say is neither comprehensive nor conclusive,

nor sensible 

and that many other kinds of sovereignty could be envisaged that would answer to the needs of modern societies.

Some nation-states are Republics and thus have one type of sovereignty. Others are monarchies and have a different sort of sovereignty.  

My case is not that the nation state is the only answer to the problems of modern government, but that it is the only answer that has proved itself.

Why isn't there a Kurdish nation-state? The answer is that some 'nations' (i.e. a bunch of guys speaking the same language or who claim a common descent from dudes who spoke the same language) have kicked ass and established themselves on an economically viable swathe of territory. They have absorbed 'broken people' of indigenous tribes or ethnicities as well as immigrants from elsewhere. But one could say the same of various species of plants or animals.  

We may feel tempted to experiment with other forms of political order.

Scruton's pals were all like 'dude, lets kill King Charles & Sir Keir so as to try out a Lesbian gerontocracy'  

But experiments on this scale are dangerous,

they are impossible.  

since nobody knows how to predict or to reverse the results of them.

Sadly, that's how life works. You feel in your bones that turning 40 mightn't be a good thing. But you don't have a fucking choice, mate.  

The French, Russian and Nazi revolutions were bold experiments;

No. They were the result of the previous leadership doing stupid shit.  

but in each case they led to the collapse of legal order, to mass murder at home and to belligerence abroad.

The Glorious Revolution wasn't very glorious for Irish Catholics. The American Revolution was a fucking disaster for the indigenous people.  

The wise policy is to accept the arrangements, however imperfect, that have evolved through custom and inheritance,

The unwise policy is to tell King Charles to kiss your black ass.  

to improve them by small adjustments, but not to jeopardise them by large-scale alterations the consequences of which nobody can really envisage.

Which is why Brexit was a mistake.  

The case for this approach was unanswerably set before us by Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution

How come the American Revolution worked out great but not the French one? The answer is that the French are fucking horrible. Chances are, if the Government you have is shitty, it is likely that its successsor will be shitty.   

and subsequent history has repeatedly confirmed his view of things.

No. It confirmed the view that a successful General may be able to turn himself into an Emperor- just as Burke predicted. 

The truth is that the Brits saw that some reform, at home, was required. British support for the 'Holy Alliance' didn't last very long. The British Great Reform Bill was passed 22 months after the fall of the Bourbons in France. 

The lesson that we should draw, therefore, is that

people who teach Philosophy have shit for brains?  

since the nation state has proved to be a stable foundation of democratic government

as well as a stable foundation for Communism, Fascism, Theocracy, Imperialism  

and secular jurisdiction, we ought to improve it, to adjust it, even to dilute it, but not to throw it away.

Also, we should not throw away Gravity. We must learn to work with it otherwise we might float off into outer space along with our kittens which say 'bow wow' and our puppy dogs which say 'miaow'.  

Scruton published this shite in 2006. Should the UK have rethought joining the Euro and pushing for gradualist reforms within the EU? Was Scruton wrong to back Brexit? 

The initiators of the European experiment—both the self-declared prophets and the behind-the-doors conspirators

many of whom were shape-shifting lizards from Uranus.  

— shared a conviction that the nation state had caused the two world wars.

Macron says 'yes to patriotism, no to Nationalism'.  

A united states of Europe seemed to them to be the only recipe for lasting peace.

With hindisght, it was indeed essential to European collective defence because the US might decide that NATO wasn't worth the expense.  

This view is for two reasons entirely unpersuasive.

To a shithead- sure.  

First, it is purely negative:

No. It was purely positive. The question was whether Europe really could have large scale transfers from the richer to the poorer countries such that it could reflate after a Stock Market Crash and also finance a kick-ass European Army. The answer, sadly was- no. But, maybe Europe will get its act together belatedly in view of the clear and present danger posed by a vast Eurasian block under the leadership of a China which can do its own bilateral deal with the US.  

it rejects nation states for their belligerence, without giving any positive reason to believe that transnational states will be any better.

The problem was that if the EU expanded to its East, then it might come into conflict with Russia which in turn might be driven into the arms of China.  

Secondly, it identifies the normality of the nation state through its pathological versions.

Which was reasonable if your next door neighbour was Germany.  

As Chesterton has argued about patriotism generally, to condemn patriotism because people go to war for patriotic reasons, is like condemning love because some loves lead to murder.

You can be for patriotism, like Macron, and against nationalism. Sadly, Le Pen may replace Macron quite soon.  

The nation state should not be understood in terms of the French nation at the Revolution or the German nation in its twentieth-century frenzy.

Can the UK be understood as a nation state or will Scotland go its own way?  

For those were nations gone mad,

The French were attacked. They fought back very successfully but then their Emperor decided he'd like his brothers and sisters to become Kings and Queens. As for the Germans, they genuinely believed that they needed to grab French gold & Eastern European land so as to avoid encirclement and eventual immeserization.  

in which the springs of civil peace had been poisoned

by the Emperor of Japan? What poisons the springs of peace is the possibility of a profitable war. What preserves it is Nuclear apocalypse which poisons the entire planet.  

and the social organism colonised by anger, resentment and fear.

also cats start marrying dogs.  

All Europe was threatened by the German nation, but only because the German nation was threatened by itself, having caught the nationalist fever.

No. Its General Staff believed they could enrich their country, and gain vast agricultural estates for themselves, by going to war sooner rather than later.  

Nationalism is part of the pathology of national loyalty, not its normal condition—a point to which I return below.

This is like Macron saying 'Patriotism is cool. Nationalism isn't.  

Who in Europe has felt comparably threatened by the Spanish,

Franco claimed Portugal 

Italian,

invaded Albania & Greece 

Norwegian,

Sami people 

Czech

Sudetens & Slovaks didn't like them 

or Polish

Poland took a bite out of Czechoslovakia.  

forms of national loyalty, and who would begrudge those people their right to a territory, a jurisdiction and a sovereignty of their own? The Poles, Czechs and Hungarians have elected to join the European Union:

for economic and geopolitical reasons 

not in order to throw away national sovereignty, but under the impression that this is the best way to regain it.

Nonsense! They just wanted to grow their economies and converge to the European average per capita real income level.  

They are wrong, I believe.

They were right.  

But they will be able to see this only later, when it is too late to change.

Twenty years have gone by. None of the new entrants wants to leave the Union. The Greeks threatened Grexit but only as a bargaining ploy.  

Left-liberal writers,

like ultra-conservatives  

in their reluctance to adopt the nation as a social aspiration or a political goal, sometimes distinguish nationalism from ‘patriotism’—an ancient virtue extolled by the Romans and by those like Machiavelli who first made the intellectual case for modern secular jurisdiction.

Prophet Muhammad said 'hubb al watan min al iman'. Love of the fatherland is part of religion. But Islamists, like Iqbal, also say that Nationalism is the shroud of Religion. The same thing could be said of Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox or Buddhist Emperors. 

Patriotism, they argue, is the loyalty of citizens, and the foundation of ‘republican’ government; nationalism is a shared hostility to the stranger, the intruder, the person who belongs ‘outside’.

One could equally say that patriotism is about xenophobia or loyalty to the clan, whereas nationalism is something broader and more inclusive. But why bother? If you aren't teaching worthless shit for a lving, you could say somethingg sensible instead. 

I feel some sympathy for that approach. Properly understood, however, the republican patriotism defended by Machiavelli, Montesquieu and Mill

not to mention Mummy & the Milkman 

is a form of national loyalty: not a pathological form like nationalism, but a natural love of country, countrymen and the culture that unites them.

Pathological love can lead you to inserting a District or a County up your arse. Kids, please don't try this at home. Let your love for your country remain decorous and wholly free of anal insertion.  

Patriots are attached to the people and the territory that are theirs by right;

Oikeiosis? Animals are territorial. There is an uncorrelated asymmetry dictating a 'bourgeois strategy'. 

and patriotism involves an attempt to transcribe that right into impartial government and a rule of law.

No. The two things are wholly unrelated.  

This underlying territorial right is implied in the very word—the patria being the ‘fatherland’, the place where you and I belong.

No. Slaves or serfs have a patria. That doesn't mean they have rights of any type. 

Territorial loyalty, I suggest, is at the root of all forms of government where law and liberty reign supreme

It may be a feature of forms of government based on cannibalism. It isn't a feature of any advanced economy though, no doubt, at some earlier period, territorial militias & 'Marcher Lords' may have had salience. 

Attempts to denounce the nation in the name of patriotism

can succeed if 'nationalism' causes you to be driven out of your natal territory. Conside the plight of the Muslim Leaguer from Uttar Pradesh. The two Nation theory meant that he had to emigrate to Pakistan.  

therefore contain no real argument against the kind of national sovereignty that I shall be advocating in this pamphlet.

Because it is of a pie-in-the-sky kind.  

I shall be defending what Mill called the ‘principle of cohesion among members of the same community or state’,

or any other situation where cohesion is displayed. But why defend it? Is it being sodomized by the principle of derision? What if it is totes gay & is enjoying the experience?

and which he distinguished from nationalism (or ‘nationality, in the vulgar sense of the term’), in the following luminous

not luminous. Boring and stupid.  

words: We need scarcely say that we do not mean nationality, in the vulgar sense of the term; a senseless antipathy to foreigners;

that's xenophobia- but it can apply to people who live on the other side of the river and who speak pretty much the same language you do.  

indifference to the general welfare of the human race,

as Blake says, only scoundrels talk of the 'general good' rather than focus on 'minute particulars'. 

or an unjust preference for the supposed interests of our own country;

nothing wrong in that at all. Mill had shit for brains.  

a cherishing of bad peculiarities because they are national,

I suppose this describes what Scruton was doing. England has a long tradition of boring shitheads writing nonsense. 

or a refusal to adopt what has been found good by other countries. We mean a principle of sympathy, not of hostility; of union, not of separation. We mean a feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government, and are contained within the same natural or historical boundaries. We mean, that one part of the community do not consider themselves as foreigners with regard to another part; that they set a value on their connexion—feel that they are one people, that their lot is cast together, that evil to any of their fellow-countrymen is evil to themselves, and do not desire selfishly to free themselves from their  share of any common inconvenience by severing the connexion.

Mill was aware that the Irish were a Nation and had always been very patriotic. But they had a decentralized system of 'Brehon law'. England was less national but more centralized and eventually prevailed. The question was whether the Irish should acquiesce in this arrangement. The Potato famine suggested that literally anything was better than British rule.  

The phrases that I would emphasise in that passage are these: ‘our own country’, ‘common interest’, ‘natural or historical boundaries’ and ‘[our] lot is cast together’.

Mill thought Ireland should stick with Britain albeit on the basis of thoroughgoing reform.  

Those phrases resonate with the historical loyalty that I shall be defending in this pamphlet.

Sadly, such loyalty has to give way with what can keep you alive. Sometimes it is better to be part of an Empire than to live in a shitty nation state.  

To put the matter briefly: the case against the nation state has not been properly made,

I just did. It may be that there has to bee a world government to properly deal with 'externalities'.  The opposite may be more likely. A world government is bound to do catastrophically stupid shit because there is no competitive pressure or possibility of 'Exit'. 

and the case for the transnational alternative has not been made at all.

sure it has. A World Governmnt would suppress negative externalities and 'nuisance goods'- like 'loose nukes'  

I believe therefore that we are on the brink of decisions that could prove disastrous for Europe and for the world, and that we have only a few years in which to take stock of our inheritance and to reassume it.

No such decisions were made at that timee. 

Now more than ever do those lines from Goethe’s Faust ring true for us: Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. What you have inherited from your forefathers, earn it, that you might own it.

What Goethe's generation hadn't inherited was a united German nation. They didn't want to earn or own a shitty situation which left them at the mercy of France.  

We in the nation states of Europe need to earn again the

ability to walk up-right?  

sovereignty that previous generations so laboriously shaped from the inheritance of Christianity, imperial government and Roman law.

not to mention the ability to make fire 

Earning it, we will own it, and owning it, we will be at peace within our borders. 

Scruton forgets that what Goethe's generation earned was 23 years of war. 

Would he have written anything so foolish if he hadn't wasted his life studying & teaching nonsense? Sure. Stupid policies should be justified by stupid rhetoric.  Scruton made a bit of money out of his stupidity. That is more than most of us can say.

How did Hitler gain absolute power?

Though Adolph Hitler served in the German Army during the Great War and though he entered German politics under the auspices of the German Army's political wing, he remained an Austrian citizen till April 1925 when he renounced his citizenship so as to avoid deportation after completing his prison sentence for his participation in the Munich putsch. 

Hitler became a naturalized German citizen only on February 25, 1932. This was done by his being appointed to a minor civil service role in the state of Brunswick (where his party had won the  election). This automatically conferred citizenship on him and allowed him to run for president. One year later, Hiter became Chancellor and then, after the death of President Hindenburg, he became Fuhrer.

What explains this dizzying ascent?

The answer is that at every step of the way, Hitler was pushed forward by the Army whose maximal program involved grabbing reparations from France while gaining agricultural land and other resources from territory to its East. The sad thing is that the German population came to believe this was their only path to salvation. 

 Suppose Ludendorrf hadn't been utterly mad (he was just as anti-Catholic as he was anti-Jewish) and suppose he hadn't broken with Hindenburg, then he could have been Hindenburg's Chancellor. As things were General Schliecher got that position but he alienated Hindenburg by seeking to reduce aid to Junker landlords in the East. Moreover, General Blomberg hated him because Schleicher had sidelined him by sending him to East Prussia in 1929. 

In early June 1934, Hindeburg gave Hitler an ultimatum. Either he crushed the SA under Rohm (which was becoming a rival to the Army) or he himself would be stripped of the Chancellorship. The Army would rule directly. Bruning, a former Chancellor, was tipped off, and fled Germany on June 3 1934. One way or another, there was going to be a big blood-letting.

Hitler's 'night of the long knives' in late June was a great success. He didn't just personally arrest Rohm but ordered him killed. Rohm didn't see this coming. Hitler had brought him back to take over from Stenner, the previous rebel leader of the SA. But Stenner had been permitted to go into exile. More signinficantly, he had General Schleicher and his wife shot in their own home. Bredow, Schleicher's sidekick, too, was killed. This was the Führerprinzip in action. Here was the Caesar who would have no truck with either Democracy or party faction. Bloomberg was delighted and got the army to take an oath of obedience to Hitler on August 2- the day Hindenburg died. After that, Hitler assumed absolute power. He then proceeded to fulfil the Army's program better than they could do so themselves. He also got rid of Blomberg on the grounds that the fellow had married a prostitute. By the time some senior officers tried to move against Hitler, it was too late. The Allies were determined to occupy Germany & annihilate its army. A 'stab in the front' could not avert this outcome. The majority of Generals had no incentive to break their oath of loyalty to Hitler. 

Hilter gained absolute power because he delivered what the Army wanted and because the German people, misled by stupid economists, believed that only the Army could save them from starvation. Sadly, because the Army was as stupid as shit, the outcome was the utter annihilation of the German Army. The Commies were delighted because they got to rule East Germany. The West chafed under Allied occupation- Adenauer wanted to get nukes!- but then the economy grew at a miraculous rate. The Germans finally understood that List & Karl Ballod & Keynes etc. were wrong. They wouldn't starve if they failed to acquire land to their East. Rather thay would become more and more prosperous selling manufactured goods and importing as much food and raw materials as they wanted. They could have a 'hard' currency without having to get French gold (which is what had enabled them to go on to the Gold Standard in 1871). 

Suppose a General like Schleicher had succeeded Hindenburg. Would the subsequent trajectory of events been more favourable for the country? 

I doubt it. The fact is German generals quarelled with each other. Their chain of command was weaker than Britain or America's. Some say this was because of its Auftragstaktik (mission command) leadership philosophy which prioritized decentralized decision-making. Thus the Army needed a Kaiser like commander or else its esprit de corps might be fatally compromised. Equally, the Kapp putsch had shown that 'Civil Society' was loyal to the Head of State. Only if the Kaiser, or President, delegated absolute power to the High Command would the orders of military officers be obeyed. In other words, militarism wasn't innate in the German population. Ceasareanism was. Sadly, Hugo Preuss & Max Weber gave Weimar a constitution which allowed for a Caesarean President. Hindenburg was too senile to do very much with his power after divisions within the SD fold caused the Legislature to accept rule by Presidential decree. Hitler was younger- he became Fuhrer at the age of 45- and he was fortunate in that the worst of the Depression was over. The Communist movement too was fragmenting or otherwise losing momentum. People could believe that a lurch to the lunatic fringe of the Right would be reversed once traditional sources of authority- the Church, the liberal professions, the more cultured of the industrialists and financiers- were able to reassert themselves. 

Could Hitler have risen to power if there had been no Great Depression? Yes. Look at Mussolini. The King himself appointed him (he also dismissed him after it had become clear that the Axis had lost the war) during the Roaring Twenties. Admittedly, Mussolini was an erudite aristocrat compared to Hitler but the assumption was that he was a placeholder for some General or aristocrat. 

What changed for Germany was the end of 'extend and pretend' which would have happened in any case even without the Stock Market crash. Once there was no net inflow on the capital account, the German Army no longer had an incentive to do secretly what they would soon do very openly. 

Verdict on Wang Wei

Flowers need neither love nor lies

Feed they but butterflies

But the Silkworm is

Pure Vanity- his.

Amartya Sen's entitled inedia.

Amartya Sen published the following paper in the Cambridge Journal of Economics in March 1977.

Starvation and exchange entitlements:

Starvation is not a matter of entitlement. It is a matter of food availability. If there is enough to go around, no one starves. If there isn't, either there is rationing or some excess mortality.  

a general approach and its application to the great Bengal famine

In 1974, there had been a second big famine in Bangladesh. It was obvious that transition to democracy meant increased corruption. In particular, food procured for the public distribution system was diverted to the black market so that some politicians and crony capitalists (e.g. the Ispahanis in the 1940s) made a lot of money.  

... Several authors have recently argued that there is evidence of increasing starvation for the world as a whole, and there has been quite an outburst of alarm about the 'food crisis of the world'

Real food prices tended to rise during the Seventies but fell thereafer.  

René Dumont has gone so far as to say that 'the biggest famine in history has just begun'. 

He was wrong.  About everything. 

It is with this context in mind that I shall examine the history of the Bengal famine
of 1943—possibly the biggest famine in the last hundred years.

The man-made Chinese famine of the early Sixties was the biggest in world history.  

I believe the analysis presented here relates to a key issue in development theory today, viz. the political economy of starvation.

The key issue was corruption. Darkies are as corrupt as fuck. The polite way to say this is 'weak institutions'.  

While a variety of causes have been considered in understanding the so-called 'world
wide famine', the most common approach has been that of 'too many mouths and
too little food'. 

Only if people were too polite to say 'darkies are greedy bastards. They will beg us for food to feed their starving people but then sell the stuff on the black market. Look at Bengal. They had a big famine on the two occassions when they transitioned to Elected Governments. Military generals did better than Bengali Muslim demagogues.'  

In this paper ... I would like to examine whether food availability per capita is a good way of viewing the problem

It isn't if neither the numerator nor the denominator are known. In a poor country, nobody knows either the total number of people nor the total amount of food available. True, some numbers could be made up but everybody would know they didn't mean shit. 

I shall argue tha framework within which the problems of famine seriously deficient.

Not having enough food is a serious problem. A deficient framework for studying the probelm of feeling a bit peckish is not a serious problem. It is stupid shit. People will spend good money to alleviate suffering. But money spent on measuring the measuring of suffering is money wasted. 

The traditional—and in some ways the most obvious—approach to famines is in terms
of variation of food availability:

both food supply and demand are inelastic butt the former, not the latter, is subjected to exogenous shocks- e.g. drought, disruption of trade routes by war, plant disease etc.  

This approach of 'food availability decline' I shall call for brevity (not premature
disrespect) the FAD view.

FAD works best when much of the food eaten by a family happens to be grown by
it without being acquired through exchange. 

No. Subsistence farmers eat the 'normal' crop (e.g. wheat or rice) while feeding the 'inferior' crop (e.g. oats or barley) are fed to livestock. In a bad year, humans eat the inferior crop. There is no food availability decline. Rather there is a change in relative prices causing an income as well as a substitution effect- i.e. people spend more in good years and retrench in bad years. One could say that Britain, under Wartime rationing, did not see much decline in food availability though 'superior' goods (e.g. butter, eggs, beef) were rationed. 

In an exchange economy, however, the terms of exchange constitute a factor of some importance of its own,

only if a large percentage of income goes on food. But, in that case, the State is likely to be weak (because there isn't enough food to feed bureaucrats) and thus nothing can be done about famine or epidemics or marauding bands of homicidal sodomites.  

and a family's ability to buy food depends on the rates at which its labour and commodity possessions can be exchanged into food.

i.e., its income and wealth. But credit too is important as is access to charitable, philanthropic or social insurance schemes. 

While food availability will clearly be an important influence on these terms of exchange,

It is the only influence 

other forces are also involved,

No. 

and famines can thus arise from causes other than food availability decline.

This has never happened.  

In an exchange economy, whether a family will starve or not will depend on what it has to sell,

Amartya Sen was living in the UK which has long been an 'exchange economy'. There had been no famine since 1620. The 'Poor Law' was a type of 'risk pooling' which also raised total factor productivity.  

whether it can sell them, and at what prices, and also on the price of food.

No. If you are spending a large portion of your income on food, then and only then are you at risk of starvation. If you spend less that ten percent of disposable income on food, you are at zero risk save if there is a massive exogenous shock- e.g. earthquake, tsunami, military invasion etc.  

An economy in a state of comparative tranquillity may develop a famine if there is a sudden shake-up of the system of rewards for exchange of labour, commodities and other possessions, even without a 'sudden, sharp reduction in the food supply'.

No. There has to be a sudden sharp reduction in the food supply. This could happen if land is collectivized and so peasants no longer have an incentive to work hard.  

An exchange economy implies 'entitlements' related to one's endowments;

No. The fact that you can sell or buy at a particular market price is not, generally speaking, an 'entitlement'. True, this may be undermined by legislation- e.g. you may not be permitted to sell to or buy from only people of a particular race- but there is no 'entitlement'. This is why you can't sell or otherwise alienate the underlying Hohfeldian incident. 

Consider the following scenario. I go into a cake shop and ask to buy a chocolate cake. The shop keeper says 'I am sorry. We have run out of chocolate cake.'  I reply 'I have the money to purchase the chocolate cake. Thus I am entitled to a chocolate cake. You must give me a chocolate cake or else I will prosecute you.' The shopkeeper tells you to fuck off. He bars you from entering his shop. You go to the police, who tell you to fuck off. At great expense, you bring a law suit against the cake shop owner. You explain to the judge that Prof. Sen says you have an entitlement to chocolate cake'. The Judge says the law recognises no such thing. Nor does Economics. An 'exchange economy' can be 'fix-price' rather than 'flex-price'. 

it gives people the ability to change a unit of commodity x into a certain amount of commodity  y.

Markets or market-makers confer this ability- up to a point.  

These are, of course, not 'rights' in the normative sense (contrast Nozick's 'entitlement theory' of justice).

Rights are wholly normative. Suppose I go into a cakeshop and order a chocolate cake. A bystander says 'what gives you the right to come in here demanding cake you fat freak?' My reply is that I have the money to pay for it. If I am refused service because of some 'protected' trait I have- e.g. being black- then I may have an action in law.  

They represent actual possibilities.

It is actually possible that I will commit murder. But I don't have the right to kill anyone.  

With an initial endowment x of commodities (including labour),

sadly, what this is can't be known. There are many types of labour I can perform of which I am unaware. 

the exchange entitlements offered by a particular set of market configurations

For a set to exist, all its elements must be known. Nobody can know what the set of market configurations is. Thus there is no such set.  

(in addition to direct production possibilities) can be seen as the set S(x) of all commodity bundles that can be acquired starting from x.

Sen is assuming no one can borrow or get charity or is covered by any type of social insurance scheme. This is highly unrealistic. Suppose you actually live in such a place. Then, you would seek 'hedges' such that you can get out of the place quickly when things turn to shit. Consider the Dutch "Hunger Marches" (Hongertochten) in 1944. Smarter, richer, people got out quicker and survived. 

(Formally, therefore, the set of exchange entitlements can be seen as a mapping S(.) from a given person's endowment vectors to availability sets of commodity vectors.)

Nobody knows their own endowment vector or what commodity vectors are available. One may say 'relative to a particular state of ignorance' such and such vectors and sets are plausible. But they are not unique. Moreover, the moment anybody's knowledge-base changes, the 'naive' set changes. That is why it is epistemic and thus can't be well-defined- i.e. can't be a set. 

If S(x) for the relevant x does not include any combination of goods that would give this person (or the family) enough food, starvation will occur.

No. An orphaned infant won't starve. He or she will be adopted or otherwise incorporated into a family or group. Human oikeiosis is highly plastic.  

The exchange entitlements

are unknowable because they 

depend not merely on the relevant exchange rates, but also on market imperfections and
other institutional barriers,

which will only become known after the fact 

as well as on the actual ability to sell or buy the com modities in question (e.g. a frustrated sale of labour resulting in unemployment is not to be ruled out).

Which is why nobody knows what exchange entitlements actually are. Arbitrageurs (market makers) may specialize in getting better information about this but they may make the wrong call.  

To analyse the Bengal famine within the limits of the information available, I shall

ask my daddy or Uncle B.R Sen who was in charge of food in '43? They would tell you that Suhrawardy, as Minister of Supply, gave 20 million Rupees to the Ispahanis to procure food for the public distribution system. A lot of this was sold on the black market. The Ispahanis then financed the Muslim League election campaign which is one reason Suhrawardy became Premier of Bengal in 1946.  

have to concentrate mainly on exchange rates (even they pose data problems), supple
menting them in a frankly ad hoc way with whatever other relevant information we
have, e.g. on unemployment. (There were, of course, no unemployment benefits.)

Because the country was as poor as shit. Since it was an agricultural country, this meant that agricultural productivity was very low. That's why the great mass of its people were visibly malnourished. What Bengal needed to do was to follow B.R Sen's (or Sen's own father's )  recommendations to raise agricultural yields. Bangladesh produced only about 11 million tons of food in 1974- which is why there was a big famine. In subsequent decades, output quadrupled while populatiion only doubled because of declinging fertility. A Malthusian disaster was averted. 

Famines can be the result of fluctuations of exchange entitlements

Sen means that poor people can starve to death if food prices go up. But the reason they go up is an exogenous supply shock- e.g. a flood or drought or America refusing to send food aid.  

altering the rules of the game on which the survival of different occupation groups depends.

The rule remains the same- viz. if you have enough cash you can enough food unless the country is Communist or occupied by an enemy army.  

For example, the 1974 floods in Bangladesh, which destroyed some of the crop, immediate agricultural labour hard, by drastically reducing the demand for labour and al the exchange possibilities open to labourers, through the development of wide unemployment.

In other words, the fact that there was less food meant that guys couldn't get work in return for food. But the real problem was corruption which led to 'compassion fatigue'. Also, Bangladesh's decision to sell jute to Cuba pissed off Uncle Sam.  

This, in fact, ushered in the famine

the floods- i.e. exogenous supply shock- did the ushering in. Bangladesh was Socialist. The Government didn't feed the people because it was corrupt and incompetent. Democracy creates famine in Muslim majority Bengal. Oddly, Military dictators did a better job.

Bengal, in 1943, wasn't a market economy. It was a war economy with price controls & extensive State control of resources. Even wealth White people found their Air Conditioners were requisitioned by the Army. Sen does not understand this.

Concluding remarks This paper has been concerned partly with economic history and partly with economic analysis of problems of relevance today.

To whom? Socialist countries. Not market economies.  

The tradition of analysing starvation and famines in terms of over-all food availability, which can be criticised in a general way (see section 1 and also Sen, 1976B), turns out to be particularly unhelpful in under standing the Bengal famine of 1943.

It was very helpful. People understood the need to get food into Bengal and distributing it to poor people through 'langars' (communal kitchens) and 'food for work' programs. Giving tax-payer money to Ispahani did no good. It just enriched the ruling party. 

Indeed, contrary to the conclusion of the official report on the Bengal famine and the often-asserted description of it as arising from a decline of over-all food supply in Bengal, 'food availability decline' seems to fail altogether in explaining the famine (see section 3).

Sen admits that reduced food availability caused prices to rise. This meant that a lot of people starved. The solution was to bring in and distribute a lot of food till output recovered.  

I have tried to focus instead on what I have called 'exchange entitlements', which include the opportunities the market offers to a person to exchange other commodities into food.

But the market wasn't allowed to function because the whole of India was a 'war-economy'.  

For those who do not grow food themselves (e.g. artisans or barbers),

or Sen's daddy & mummy  

or those who do grow food but do not possess the food they grow (e.g. cash-wage agri cultural labourers), the vagaries of the market can have a decisive influence on their ability (and that of their families) to survive.

Sen describes how civil servants as well  a lot of workers in war-related industries were covered under various procurement schemes. In a war-economy, food is given to those who advance the war effort. It may be denied to those who are too weak or unskilled to be helpful. 

There seem to have been sharp movements in exchange entitlements

a ration is not an 'exchange entitlement'. You can't sell your ration book on the open market.  

with respect to food in Bengal during 1942 and 1943, both in terms of the saleability of the commodity to be exchanged (especially rural labour)

demand for 'normal goods' fall when income falls. During a war, the real income of almost everybody falls because resources are diverted to the military. 

as well as the exchange rates vis-à-vis rice (the principal food),

Sen is saying 'the black market price went up'.  

indicating a growing cause for starvation for several occupation groups.

because less food was available 

The observed occupational pattern of destitution is consistent with the expected pattern of destitution based on observed shifts in exchange entitlements.

because less food was available 

Some preliminary attempts at going one step behind, viz. into the causation of exchange entitlement shifts, have also been presented (see section 6).

Sen admits less food was available 

The failure of the government to anticipate the famine,

It anticipated it but didn't give a toss. Bengalis are like that you know. They wouldn't even bury their own dead preferring to leave that job to White soldiers.  

and even to recognize it when it revealed itself, seems to have been the result largely of erroneous theories of famine causation,

Everyone knows the true theory- viz not enough food. Everyone also knows that Bengali Muslim politicians will steal all the money allocated to famine relief. At any rate, that is what happened in 1943 and 1974.  

rather than mistakes about facts dealing with food availability.

The official statistics were made up. Ian Stephenson, editor of the Statesman, says so in his book 'Monsoon mornings'. Sen had met Stephenson.  

Later the facts were squared with theory by 'revising' the facts, by introducing mythical variations in the unobserved item called 'the carry-over from previous years'.

There were no facts. The official figures were made up. Poor countries can't afford to count their population or figure out how much food there is.  

The approach of exchange entitlements applied to famines and starvation

is stupid & useless. Sen was pissed off that his Uncle, B.R. Sen, a former head of F.A.O, was getting publicity for helping end global hunger by focussing on the supply side. Why should there not be a UN organization for looking at the Demand side? The Green Revolution was about increasing availability of food. Why not have a Sen-tentious Revolution which focussed on telling people to eat some food otherwise they might starve to death? Indeed, Sen did warn that UK was at risk of a major famine under Mrs. Thatcher! After all, she was a 'milk-snatcher'- right?  

directs us towards general interdependences that hold in a market economy,

In 1943, Bengal was a War Economy. In 1974, it was a Socialist economy.  In England, since Tudor times, food for the poorest was supplied outside the market. Sen wasn't just stupid, he was wholly ignorant.  

away from the focus only on the supply of food, as in the alternative FAD approach.

Smart people- like Sen's dad- a soil scientist- can increase the supply of food. There is no need to tell people to eat some food. Thus the demand side looks after itself.  

As B.R. Sen had made clear, the world had the excess food supply & means of transportation to ensure there need be no more big famines. Obviously, a Communist country or other sort of Dictatorship might have one for its own reasons. After all, one can always blame 'class enemies' or 'saboteurs' for famine. 

 I would like to suggest that the exchange entitlements approach has become more relevant to famines and starvation in recent years because of the growth of the importance of exchange in developing economies.

i.e. markets were expanding as transport improved  

There seems to exist an intermediate phase of development in which the dependence on the market increases sharply (given the breakdown of the traditional peasant economy)

Sen forgets that the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 wiped out 3 times as many people

and in which guaranteed entitle ments in the form of social security benefits have yet to emerge:

sadly, such 'entitlements' can collapse if there is a severe enough supply shock. That's why you need smart soil scientists and agronomists to ensure there is a healthy margin to maintain buffer stocks.  

An important develop ment in this phase of transition is the emergence of labour-power as a commodity,

this emerged at least ten thousand years ago.  

with neither the protection of the family system of peasant agriculture,

It didn't protect 10 million Bengalis in 1770 

nor the insurance of unemployment compensation

which didn't protect Dutch people under Nazi occupation 

—nor, of course, the guarantee of the right to work at a living wage.

  Which Soviet citizens & Chinese citizens had, in theory, at precisely the time when tens of millions of them starved to death. 

Molina's middle knowledge & free market ideology

 Luis de Molina, a prominent member of the School of Salamanca which some see as originating laissez faire ideology, also proposed that God has 'middle knowledge' - scientia media- i.e. the power of knowing future contingent events. One might say, 'an expert chess player or arbitrageur may be able to predict how others will react to a series of events. Moreover, if others have equally 'rational expectations', then those outcomes will be inevitable. Thus, we see one grandmaster resigning to another once he sees his defeat is inevitable. It is 'common knowledge' that there would be no point in  moving the pieces till the foreordained conclusion is reached.'

 Similarly, we may find that 'cobwebs' arising from 'adaptive expectations' disappear as all agents expect the outcome predicted by the right economic theory. We may say, following Samuelson, that 'ergodicity' prevails over 'hysteresis'. 

We may also believe that there is something like 'natural law' or 'spontaneous order' or a 'reflective equilibrium' must exist such that there is a Social Contract which all rational people will commit themselves to even absent the passing of any type of consideration.

 Molinism is also a way of reconciling free-will & God's omnipotence (or, indeed, His being the only efficient cause). What ties Molina's theology & economics together is faith that there is a 'mysterious economy' or 'invisible hand' which solves coordination problems and prevents 'combinatory explosion' of the underlying configuration space.

Sadly, by the end of the Sixties, there were purely mathematical reasons to do with complexity, computability, concurrency & categoricity such that any type of 'compatibilism' or chaos free co-evolution appeared vanishingly unlikely. Put another way, 'naturality' seemed ever further to seek. Even if there is an objective function, the thing being optimized is arbitrary to some degree. Moreover, uncorrelated asymmetries would drive Eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'.

 One such asymmetry is thinking your God or ideology or culture is superior to all others. This puts paid to the Thomist dream of getting rid of an angry, arbitrary, God or, if that was always impossible, at least, asserting that the Katechon might be nice even if the Eschaton is going to be fucking horrible.

 Molinist 'middle knowledge' has been described as-  'God's pre-volitional knowledge of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom—hypothetical scenarios exploring what free agents would do in any given set of circumstances'. This is another way of saying every Brouwer choice-sequence is actually 'lawful' though the reverse may appear to be the case for a finite intelligence. 

Suppose 'middle knowledge' was 'volitional'. Then we might say God is a 'creative subject' in the Brouwerian sense. But then Troelstka's paradox would arise. One way around it would be to reject Markov's principle on the grounds that God, or his Knowledge, is neither possible nor impossible.

 But the thing would still come across as weak sauce. Equally, non-volitional knowledge sounds fatalistic. If the being is strong and has a will, then the thing is virtually empty or trivial. 

But the same can be said of free market ideology or natural law or Enlightened Humanism or the project of everybody being so filled with empathy as to incessantly offer gratuitious rape-counselling to all sentient beings. 

Religion has no obligation to feel at home in the world. Nor, indeed, do some positional goods and services in the commodity space. Ontological dysphoria isn't a scandal- a stumbling block- to either Faith or Enterprise or Thrift or whatever. The best Molinist would be Mayavaad.