Mihir Dalal on Arun Shourie.

 When I was young, Arun Shourie was regarded as a hit-man for Ramnath Goenka, owner of the Express. Prem Shankar Jha was his, more sober, more straightforwardly Socialist, counterpart at the ToI and, later on, the Hindustan Times. Both were the sons of ICS officers as was Brajesh Mishra who was close to Shourie more especially when they both served Vajpayee as PM. Jha, who studied at Oxford, was cultured and wrote quite well. Shourie did not- but maybe that was the fashionable new American style.  He zig-zagged politically but there was always something of the crack-pot about him. He had done a PhD in Econ from Syracuse but may have come to think of himself as a combination of Woodward & Bernstein. Some senior journalists thought he had a nose for detail and might mature. But the crackpot could never see the forest for the trees. 

Mihir Dalal, of whom I have written before, has an article on Shourie's long career. Dalal knows his stuff but his views are bizarre.

Perhaps no other journalist or thinker has impressed his passions, furies and perfidies as thoroughly upon India’s public sphere as Arun Shourie.

He became a Minister under Vajpayee. Was this because of Brajesh? But he was clearly a crackpot. Charitable people said it was because his son had cerebral palsy. Less charitable pointed out that he was Punjabi. Dalal takes the charitable view.  

Yet his influence on post-Emergency politics is poorly understood.

Goenka had been with the Jan Sangh at the end of the Seventies. No doubt, he was using his attack dog in some manner profitable to himself. People used to say 'Shourie is a World Bank man' as though that was a recommendation. But Jha was a World Bank man too. Were they good journalists? Good enough. The Eighties were a period when press exposes did have material political effects but that was because the Dynasty was dying nasty and Cabinets had turned into a game of musical chairs. 

Arun Shourie’s services as prophet of Modi’s India

Vajpayee's, maybe. Modi would have nothing to do with that crackpot.  

The most influential Indian journalist of his era, Arun Shourie traded repute as a leftist dissident

Sarkari dissident 

to shape the intellectual scaffolding of the Hindu Right

it had none- other than Hindutva which Shourie isn't into.  

– and took much of the country’s elite with him

He was a crackpot. Elites are interested in staying elite. That means making the right investments- i.e. backing winners.  

THE EMERGENCY of 1975 was the point of no return for Indian democracy.

It returned within a couple of years. Britain and Canada too had States of Emergency during the Seventies.  

The story of the next five decades is, essentially, a story of the decline of liberal politics.

There was no liberal politics before or after.  

India’s elite and middle classes abandoned the vision of the country’s founding fathers.

It became less of a starving shithole. It may be that the elites & the more affluent of the middle class no longer want government jobs for their progeny, but almost everybody else  does. 

The Emergency freed them up to disparage the pursuit of egalitarianism and sneer at the idea of shielding Muslims from the worst impulses of Hindu majoritarianism.

e.g. killing guys who keep trying to kill you. Dalal may not know what happened under Nehru in 1947/48. He probably thought 22 percent of Delhi's population decided to go for a picnic to Pakistan and liked to so much they refused to return even though Sardar Patel promised to personally cook beef biryani for them.  

But Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian interlude also jolted the oppressed masses into defiance and political autonomy.

They turfed her out but voted her back in after three years.  

They gradually withdrew from the Congress party’s paternalistic hand

There were two hands. It had split in 1969. There were more splits but the main Congress remains the ancestral property of the Dynasty.  

and began to assert themselves in ways that shocked their former masters.

e.g. shooting Indira? She should have seen it coming.  

For better and for worse, the nature of Indian democracy changed:

because such is the nature of all things 

the body politic, scarred and energised in equal measure, searched for new forms of life.

e.g. making butt babies?  

What began with

the Hindu majoritarian regime of the Brahmin 

Indira has culminated in the Hindu majoritarian regime of

the backward caste  

Narendra Modi. Years after she resigned as the British prime minister, the conservative icon Margaret Thatcher said she considered her greatest achievement to be Tony Blair, who transformed the left-wing Labour Party into a neoliberal force. With only some exaggeration, it could be said that Indira’s is Modi –

No. Priyanka says she wanted Rahul to inherit the throne. Mrs. Thatcher could not pass on Number 10 to Mark.  

the Congress’s nemesis, yet one who inherited her politics of authoritarian nationalism and forged it into a brutal instrument of Hindu supremacy.

Keep saying that if you want Modi to keep winning. Hindus are the majority and they do want to be supreme in their own country.   

Trained as an economist, Shourie emerged as an important public intellectual

Fuck off! If you are trained as an economist, you can only be a 'public intellectual' if other economists say you are hella smart. Amartya Sen was a public intellectual. Shourie was a guttersnipe.  

during the Emergency and turned into an implacable enemy of Indira Gandhi – and, later, of Rajiv Gandhi, her son and political successor.

Nobody cared. If you are a politician, your enemy is the guy who might get more votes than you next time round.  

With the exceptional courage that would become one of his hallmarks, Shourie, risking imprisonment,

If he wasn't imprisoned, there was no fucking risk. The boy was clearly cracked in the head. Blame Goenka. Why haven't you arrested him under FERA?  

accused Indira of being a fascist

Nowt wrong in that. Gandhi, Tagore, Iqbal, Bose all praised Mussolini.  

and relentlessly mocked her enablers in the upper and middle classes.

It was easy to mock Shourie. Good economists could make a lot of money. Look at Soros.  

In polemical essays, he called for the redistribution of wealth

starting with himself?  

and for the masses to assume control of state institutions.

like nuclear reactors?

As the executive editor of the Indian Express in the late 1970s, his “insurgency journalism” restored respectability to the press after its disgraceful abdication of duty during the Emergency.

No. People continued to tune in to Mark Tully on the BBC. Indian journalism was shit. Still, there were some juicy stories getting leaked from every direction.  

At the same time, his work as an activist helped open up new possibilities for civil society.

Lots of ex-Civil Servants were setting up NGOs.  

It is thus a minor irony that the inchoate, reactionary politics Indira improvised through the Emergency was hijacked and systematically constructed into an intellectual agenda for the Hindu Right by Shourie, her hated opponent.

The Hindu Right sought to consolidate the Hindu vote across caste lines. This could be done in two ways- by pointing to 'Minority appeasement' or 'aggression' or by constructive projects e.g. Ram Temple, celebrating festivals, etc. Indira, in her later years, was personally more religious than Atal or Advani but her dominance was purely the result of the disunity of the Opposition. 

Initially inspired by leftist icons like Marx and Gramsci,

I suppose they were popular on American campuses of the period- at least with darkies and other social rejects.  

he drifted towards the other end of the political spectrum after his first stint at the Express. Over the next three decades – in two dozen books, countless newspaper articles and any number of public lectures – he envisioned and detailed many of the themes that define India as we know it today: the unlikely union of capitalism and Hindutva,

An unlikely union would be between Capitalists and Communist parties. Religion based parties are natural allies for Capitalism.  

the spectre of leftist treachery, the rationalisation of dominant-caste superiority on the basis of “merit”,

i.e. getting higher marks in competitive exams. But it is 'Forward' castes not 'dominant' castes who talk of merit. Agricultural caste want a job quota on the basis of their percentage of the population  

the presumed regressiveness of Islam in contrast to the putative greatness of the Hindu tradition, a paranoid fear of real and imaginary threats to the Indian state.

We get it. Dalal hates Hinduism.  

The historian Ramachandra Guha once called Arundhati Roy “the Arun Shourie of the Left”,

because he has shit for brains. Prem Shankar Jha was the Shourie of the Left.  

charging that the free-spoken writer “falsified, exaggerated, used hyperboles, suppressed fact, overwrote – all that Shourie did from the other side.”

Guha does the same thing. He is the Huccha Venkat of Indian historiography.  

In his latest avatar, Shourie has seamlessly turned away from the Hindu Right and become one of Modi’s most scathing critics.

Nobody noticed. Nor did they notice Jha.  

He has variously described the prime minister’s rule over the last 12 years as “true fascism”, a “pyramidal mafia state”, the equivalent of “Congress plus cow” – that is, an amalgam of Hindu fanaticism and the corrupt ineptness of past Congress rule. Once he told an interviewer with fury that Twitter handles followed by Modi had “hurled abuse at me and my handicapped son.”

That was foolish. They will think they won.  

When Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won power in 2014, Shourie was in contention to become the finance minister, reprising his presence in the cabinet under the earlier BJP-led government of Atal Behari Vajpayee.

He and Brajesh were in the doghouse. Some older RSS people still rated Subramaniyam Swamy- who had better academic credentials.  

But Modi excluded Shourie, a decision lamented by numerous political commentators.

Fuck off! Shourie was shite. 

The omission of the right’s “only credible” intellectual, according to Guha, told “us all we need to know about” Modi.

Guha is not a political commentator. He is a stupid historian.  

Guha wasn’t just implying that Modi was anti-intellectual, but also that Shourie might have had a moderating influence on the prime minister.

Fuck would he know?  

Shourie’s time as a BJP member, which began in the late 1990s, ended unceremoniously in 2015. Last year, Shourie sustained his criticism of the Hindu Right with a long, critical book on V D Savarkar, a founding father of Hindutva.

The poor man is senile. Leave him alone.  

Dalal gives an account of Shourie's career, 

Shourie began writing research articles and essays, initially on economic issues and later also on politics. In a long 1972 essay titled “Conservative Influence of Liberalism”, he presented a long list of complaints against Nehru, one of his heroes. Not discounting Nehru’s monumental achievements, Shourie believed he had constructed a bland liberal system in which entrenched power and privilege were untouched.

This cretin hadn't twigged that Nehru had created a dynastic party. Unless there was one and only one biological heir, the party would split and keep splitting.  

From a “Marxian standpoint”, it was evident that the Congress was financed by the urban rich and that its rural organisation was controlled by landlords.

No. It was obvious that it had been funded by 'license-permit Raj' Corporations and 'quotas' for contractors, etc. . This was banned in 1969 who thought the Syndicate would get the cash. But, it was the same system save with black money. But there was money for other parties as well.  

The “mental makeup” of the Nehruvian elite – their psychology, ideas and culture – also betrayed the hollowness of their socialist rhetoric.

There was no elite. There were some hirelings and some bureaucrats and some dynasts. 

Shourie pointed out that since many members of the elite had read law and studied in England, they had absorbed the liberal values of British political culture and eschewed radicalism.

I suppose he thought Jyoti Basu a moderate.  

Nehru had erred gravely in discarding the “Gandhian tradition” of mass politics in favour of a technocratic paternalism embodied by elite institutions like the Planning Commission.

Vinobha Bhave & JP were wandering around the countryside doing Bhoodan. That was a grave error on JPs part, which he had come to realize around this time.  

The Indian independence movement’s vision of swaraj – which for Mohandas Gandhi meant not just an end to colonial rule but also wholesale democratic transformation – had no place here.

Actually, there was democratic transformation. People like Kamraj Nadar became Chief Ministers. 

Shourie contrasted Nehru’s mild approach with that of his Chinese peer, Mao – and also with the populism of Nehru’s own daughter, Indira. He commended her for aggressively pursuing land reform, failure to do which had been one of her father’s most damaging failures.

Shourie didn't know Land Reform was a State Subject.  

With her undisputed stature, Indira, like Nehru in the 1950s, “had a unique opportunity to be an agent of change.” Shourie mused, “Will she fail us?”

Okay. I get it now. Goenka thought this guy was a joker.  

Soon, the answer was clear: likely yes. In essays published shortly thereafter, Shourie offered a withering critique of Indira’s leadership.

 No. He revealed his low IQ. 

He observed that poverty couldn’t be reduced “without hurting the rich”, but the rich knew “that those who mouth socialist slogans in public eat out of their hands after office hours.”

Indira Gandhi would say this about JP. The pro-Moscow Communist Party were against JP, accusing him of being 'Communal' (he was trying to topple the only Muslim to have become CM of Bihar, but their support for the Emergency proved disastrous for their political future. 

 Shourie was able to get a Government job in 1976 which permitted him to return to India with his family.  

By now Shourie was writing incendiary commentary. A long essay titled “Symptoms of Fascism” was due to appear in Seminar, but with press freedom in suspension, the magazine paused publication altogether rather than submit to the censors. Still, this piece, and his other articles on Indira’s malevolence, were passed around among politicians and activists jailed under emergency powers. His work drew the attention of the newspaper baron Ramnath Goenka, whose flagship publication, the Indian Express, was one of the very few mainstream outlets still daring to dissent.

He later explained to a journalist that he had some incriminating letters between Indira and her husband. He was probably lying. An Indian Press baron has a low opinion of the intelligence, or gullibility, of Indian journalists.  

In 1978, after the Janata Party had thumped Indira’s Congress at the polls, a compilation of Shourie’s essays was published as Symptoms of Fascism. Notwithstanding its shrill tone, some of the analysis in the volume was irrefutable, and some stunningly prescient.

It was shit. Fascism only exists if there is a Commie threat.

Developing the arguments of the economist K N Raj, Shourie noted that the intermediate or middle class – lawyers, writers and bureaucrats, embodied by leaders like Mohandas Gandhi, Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and B R Ambedkar – had taken over the state after Independence.

No. Indian politicians took power at the Centre as they had in the Provinces. Previously, some British politician was top dog. 

To realise the utopian promises of the freedom struggle,

The Brits fucked off. India was free. It's performance was a little better than it had previously been. Broadly speaking, it went in the direction the majority of its people wanted it to go in. With hindsight, one might say different decisions should have been made. But, a young Nation is entitled to make its own decisions. Who could say with certainty that schemes which drew wide support were misconceived? 

they dramatically expanded the state and turned it into the primary agent of modernisation. But while the middle class increased its own power, it failed to rein in the industrialists and rural landowners – the biggest obstacles to its “socialistic” aspirations.

No. Industrialists lost power. The big estates were broken up. In some places Communists came to power. In others, regional parties did. Power shifted from educationally forward castes to 'backward castes' & Dalits. Modi is our first OBC PM. He makes the phoren educated sons of IAS officers look like a fucking Punch & Judy show. 

Aakar Patel's imbecilic diplomatic strategy

 I am old enough to remember a time when there were some old people who remembered a time when Amnesty International wasn't crap. The same can't be said for Aakar Patel, current head of the Indian branch. He writes in the Deccan Herald-

Why Have We Got So Insecure That Questions Begin To Rattle Us Now?

Any shithead can ask questions. Nobody gives a crap about them.  In this case, a young Norwegian journalist- Helle Lyng Svendsen- who is exactly as stupid as her name sounds- says her Facebook & Instagram accounts were suspended. But that was probably because lots of people complained. She simply does not matter to Indian diplomacy. I suppose, since Norway exports oil and India is a big importer, that was the only thing of interest to either country. 

For the past 12 years, India’s diplomats have been operating under a Nehruvian carapace.

Fuck off! Nobody gives a shit about Nehru or diplomats. Still, if Modi has a couple of ex-IFS officers in his Cabinet, maybe they weren't all shite.  

We have been telling the world, particularly the democratic and developed nations, that we are secular, pluralist and liberal.

No. We have been saying our economy is booming and that we are a great place to invest.  

That we respect human rights and individual liberties. This is of course false

Nobody gives a fuck about shite only virtue signalling nutters bang on about.  

When Israel is told it is misbehaving in the region, and that its idiotic war has damaged the world, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pointing to the validation of Israel offered by the mother of democracy as his defence. That medal was extremely good value for money.

Bibi is saying 'India is Hindu. We have a strategic partnership with them against a possible Turkey/Pak/Saudi/Iran axis. Even if the Yanks fuck off, the Kaffirs can get the better of the Jihadis. Aakar has shit for brains. He doesn't understand why Modi got the medal. India wants to send the message that, as Modi said, Israel will provide the innovation, while India provides the aspiration- i.e. makes cheap drones or whatever. 

Assume for a moment that I am a big and strong fellow who lifts heavy weights easily and is flexible and fit. If someone approached me to comment on what they saw as my being unhealthy and absence of strength, would it affect me?

You'd beat the shit out of him. First he tells you you are a weakling. Then he says you take it up the arse. Then he rapes you. Failure to beat the shit out of the fellow implies not just consent but that you are a cum dumpster.  

If the first assumption is true, that I am in fact big and strong, then it should not make any difference. In all likelihood, I will ignore the comments and move on.

He goes around saying 'I'm worried about X. I told him he was looking weak and unhealthy. Does he have cancer? If so, can we really rely on him? Maybe we shouldn't renew his contract. 

Assume that I am wealthy and have been for generations. Why would the remark from a stranger pitying the fact that I was poor or that I looked destitute upset me or anger me?

Because it affects your credit rating or the value of shares in your company. Sue the cunt for libel. 

It was not a reflection of the truth, which was that I was in fact not only rich but had been so almost forever. The view that someone else holds of me will not affect me negatively if that view is not only wrong but the opposite of what I know to be reality.

But your reputation does matter. If people think you are a coward, people will be more apt to challenge you to a fight. If people think you are poor, they may not want to do business with you. There's a reason laws of libel exist.                                                                     

The remarks from others about me only bite when they are close to the truth, and when I am insecure about the very things that their words carry.

Aakar's job is to tell stupid lies. Fortunately, he is, by nature, a stupid liar. Thus he doesn't feel insecure at all. 

The words of a young woman, a foreign reporter, have caused the mighty ministry of external affairs to lecture her, and the world at large, about the greatness of this nation.

Nobody cared. 

Lessons were given about our heritage and our culture and ancient traditions in response to an anodyne question about freedom.

Freedom is a matter of law. If you think your freedom has been wrongly violated take it up with the Bench, not the Foreign Ministry. 

Something about constitutional values and fundamental rights, including the right to approach the Supreme Court, was also said. The young woman followed up with a question which will not occur to most Indians. Why, she asked, did Indians have to approach the Supreme Court to claim fundamental rights?

They can approach any court including the Supreme Court. Only the judiciary can grant judicial  

The answer from our foreign office grandee was that it was his press conference and therefore presumably she should shut up.

Because she was utterly stupid  

The media here then jumped in. Not on the side of its fraternity, mind you, but to close ranks with the government and scream at the reporter for daring to ask things that were so obviously false. What the point of any of it was lost to the dispassionate observer, but it is interesting to examine the pathology here.

Beyonce gives a press conference. A reporter asks 'how do you justify your decision to carpet bomb Cambodia?' Beyonce says 'I'm not Nixon. Fuck is wrong with you?' Other journalists tell the fucker to shut up. You are making the rest of us look bad.

Why do we get angry and upset when questioned about our behaviour and values if we are secure in the truth?

Because telling stupid fuckers to go fuck themselves is a good way to release steam. 

The answer to that can only be that we are not in fact secure. And then the next questions must arise: is that because we are insecure despite the truth? Or insecure because what we are claiming is not true?

No fucking questions arise if you beat and chase away shitheads. 

Let us assume that the first is the case. That India and its government are insecure despite the truth, and the facts, which are that we are a democratic nation, where individuals have liberty and that the State is not malign.

India, like other nations, isn't going to be lectured on democracy and human rights and sodomy for senior citizens.  

We are merely touchy when we are asked about the subject.

We say 'shut the fuck up you ignorant cunt.  

If that is so, then the advice to foreign reporters and observers is to engage us as if we were children.

Tough guys. Fuck with us and we will shit in your mouth.  

We should be patted on the head, told we are good boys and girls, and given some sort of lollipop.

Aakar gets lollipop & stuffs it up his bum.  

Being asked hard questions will provoke a tantrum from us and this should be avoided.

Fuck tantrums. Beat the shithead.  

It should be mentioned here that this is how other nations deal with our government. If they want something from us, they will offer us a lollipop (or a medal) and a place to recite our little speech, and then extract from us what they need. When Israel is told it is misbehaving in the region, and that its idiotic war has damaged the world, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pointing to the validation of Israel offered by the mother of democracy as his defence. That medal was extremely good value for money.

This shithead doesn't get that Israel & India are helping each other militarily. Licking the lollipop Aakar extracts from his bum is a job for the head of Amnesty International. 

Let us now turn to the other possibility, that we are insecure because we know that what we are claiming is false. That we are not in fact as democratic or liberty-loving as we claim to be, and to be reminded about that begins to upset and anger us.

Other people have real jobs. Aakar gets paid to lick a shit-stained lollipop.  

If this is the case, there is an easier solution for it. It does not concern the external world and they do not need to calibrate their behaviour towards us or treat us as children. This solution is to simply speak the truth.

Aakar can do nothing of the sort.  

 India’s government now speaks with a forked tongue.

No. It speaks with a pragmatic, albeit, upbeat, tongue.  

It says things and behaves locally in a different way than it speaks abroad.

It does last mile delivery for its own people. It trades with other countries and has partnerships in specific areas with some of those countries.  

It does not brag to the world and their reporters about bulldozers and lynchings and bail-denials and voter-deletions and community-exclusions that are the basis of New India.

Because foreigners don't have votes in India. Thus bragging is restricted to the places where it is happening. 

It talks the language of Nehru and inclusion.

Nobody does so. DEI is DOA.  

It would be easier for all of us and for the world and its reporters, if we stopped lying about what we are actually all about.

Just say 'I'm a virtue signalling cretin. Ignore me'.  

Someone making a clever pun said that diplomats are individuals sent to lie abroad for their country.

Whereas the King lies at home. The pun arises from the fact that the Monarch is sail to lie at such and such place. The Ambassador, as the King's representative, was said to do so as well.  

But given the anxiety and anger that lying is producing, we should consider the option that honesty might be the best diplomatic policy.

Diplomacy is about signalling. Indian diplomats are signalling that India is a reliable partner for specific purposes with specific countries. Aakar thinks Indian Ambassadors should be saying 'India is a shithole. Don't visit. Don't invest. Stay the fuck away.' 

Benedict Anderson's Cretinous Imagined Communities

Nationalism exists where it is useful for a Nation to exist. A Nation exists where a bunch of people who exchange brides and information using common linguistic or other protocols band together for mutual defence. Such a Nation may merge into a larger Nation but choose to recover its sovereignty at a later date. Thus Scottish Nationality exists alongside British Nationality and would be revived if the United Kingdom breaks up. 

The word Nation was used in medieval Universities in Europe to distinguish scholars with the same mother tongue. Thus, the 'German Nation' was the German speaking students. The 'English Nation' was the English speaking students and so forth.  But this was scarcely a new idea. It has always existed. The most ancient Empires mention their Great Kings as subjugating Nations. The word 'Goy' in Hebrew means 'Nations'. The Goyim are the various types of non Jews, but the Jews too were a Nation- one chosen by God.

The ancient literatures of China and India became the basis of Chinese and Indian political theory. Both culminated in the development of a distinctive Nationalist ideology. But Arab Nationalism too has deep roots as does the Nationalism of every other ancient polity. What about Societies where a written language and literature is a relative novelty? In my experience, they have as vivid a sense of Nationality as any other type of country.

This does not mean that any Nation's boundaries are not contested or that any Nationalist ideology does not have contain some bizarre or unrealistic claims. But then almost everything in the social sphere involves an 'essentially contested concept' as well as rivalrous interessement mechanisms.

Since there is a little money to be made in writing a book about 'Nationalism' so that cretins in a worthless University Department can get and grant credentials, it follows that all sorts of silly books will be written on this topic. Perhaps the silliest book still widely referred to by stupid people was Benedict Anderson's 'Imagined Communities'.

Consider the following quotes from his magnum opus

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. 

This is foolish. The Welsh are a Nation. They are not sovereign.  Some people imagine that the Scots will be better off being completely sovereign. Others that it would be better off sovereign with respect to Westminster but not sovereign with respect to Brussels. 

There are other 'imagined communities' - e.g. 'Christendom' or 'the Islamic Ummah' or 'the Peace Loving Jew Haters of the World' or whatever- which may or may not be imagined to be sovereign or inherently limited. 

Furthermore, there is no reason believe Nationalism is 'limited' at all. A particular Nationalism may want to enslave or exterminate everybody to gain more and more Lebensraum. Indeed, it may want to storm the Heavens or sublate the Multiverse or dam up the rivers of Time so as to irrigate the deserts of solitude.

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

This may be true of Churches or Covens or certain Vocations. It is not true of even the smallest nation. Iceland is tiny. Icelanders don't believe 'the image of their communion' lives in any of their minds. I found out the hard way. I phoned everybody in the Icleandic phone directory asking them why the 'image of their communion' which was living in their mind had defrauded me? Those who took the trouble to reply assured me that this was not the case. Did I myself have an 'image of communion' in my mind? No. I'm not saying I can't imagine a world in which Anderson might not be right. But that world isn't this world where we evolved by natural selection.

Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... 

This is nonsense. If people say 'this is a Community' and 'this is how you need to imagine it'; you don't take their word for it. You test it out for yourself. Only if it really is the case that you can have high confidence in making transactions with Community members such that protocols are observed in the manner envisaged or imagined; only then will you yourself accept that this a Community and that you are a member of it. Otherwise it is just 'cheap talk' bullshit. 

Communities, like other things in the Social Realm, are to be distinguished by only one criteria- utility. It may be useful to pretend that something which is useless is actually very useful. But this is the case only for a very small number of people. 

Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.

Sadly, this is not the case. It may be useful to pretend that it is at certain times. Indeed, there may be a convention of this sort. But it is a convention of a purely ritualistic kind. 

 Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.

Anderson knew that Communism- which is not Nationalistic- had been directly responsible for the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco. Stalin's purges and the holdomor were repeated by Mao. People were killed or they starved to death because of an imagined 'horizontal comradeship' which was anti-Nationalistic. 

It is odd that an old Etonian who lived in America should write-

What the eye is to the lover — that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with - language - whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue — is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.”

This may pass as a stupid type of poetry. But it is worthless as analysis. Blind people fall in love same as sighted people. The 'eye' is nothing to the lover. Neither does language matter to the patriot. Welsh speakers have been demonstrating their patriotism since before Agincourt. Throughout history, patriots have quit their village, where the dialect, more often than not, would have been unintelligible to the 'patriots' in the Army or other National institutions, and acquired a very different mode of speech. It is sad but true that we forget the 'mother tongue' and acquire the jargon that helps us advance in life. We woo in that language. We wed in that language. Times may change. We may emigrate elsewhere and start speaking a different language. Another wooing and another wedding may make the language in which we end up mothering being entirely foreign to that of our own nativity.

Had Anderson been a rustic idiot, we could understand why he might write such tripe. But the guy was smart and cosmopolitan. Why commit the 'no true Scotsman fallacy' as if he'd never received more than a Dame School education?

“No one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling ashamed if his or her state or government commits crimes including those against their fellow citizens”

A neuro-diverse person may not 'feel shame' where it would be conventional to at least pretend to feel shame. But such a person can be a 'true nationalist' or a 'true anti-nationalist' or anything else they please.

Anderson was a good linguist. But he didn't get why Muslims in Java and Hindus in Bali might want to kill and chop off the dicks of Communists. This wasn't because he was shite at Indonesian Bahasa. It was because he was an Old Etonian. He did not feel personally threatened by news of what Stalin had done and what Mao was doing to peasants and religious people.

“It is important to keep in mind that to learn a language is not simply to learn a linguistic means of communication. It is also to learn the way of thinking and feeling of a people who speak and write a language which is different from ours. It is to learn the history and culture underlying their thoughts and emotions and so to learn to empathize with them.” ― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

Once again, there is no evidence that autistic savants or neuro-atypical people perform worse at learning languages. The poet savant Daniel Tammet can learn a language very quickly. His artistic achievements suggest that having different emotional responses is not a barrier to empathy or linguistic creativity.

Did Anderson understand his own English culture?

“It is nice that what eventually became the late British Empire has not been ruled by an 'English' dynasty since the early eleventh century: since then a motley parade of Normans (Plantagenets),

whose rule was resented as foreign till the reign of the English speaking Henry IV- a theme of much popular literature and represented in the sorts of History books used in schools at the opposite end of the social scale from Eton.

Welsh (Tudors),

 Henry VII was a quarter Welsh and half English. They are considered an English dynasty.

Scots (Stuarts),

The Lowland Scots have always been English speaking

Dutch (House of Orange)

William of Orange's Mum was English. His wife, Queen Mary, was English and it was in her right that he ruled.

and Germans (Hanoverians) have squatted on the imperial throne.

The Hanoverians were only brought in so as to keep the Catholic Stuarts out. There was no 'imperial throne' at that time. Disraeli gave Queen Victoria an Imperial throne which she took because her daughter had become an Empress and it wouldn't do if she took precedence over her own dear Mum.

No one much cared until the philological revolution and a paroxysm of English nationalism in World War I.

Nonsense! Look at Thackeray's 'Four Georges' or the Scott's Ivanhoe which turns Robin Hood into a Saxon hero. This was very much a Regency or Early Victorian notion.

Still, Shakespeare's historical plays represent the never to be re-achieved high water mark of presentment of Englishry as the highest possible claim to a place, like that of Falstaff, 'in the bosom of Arthur'. In other words, from the point of view of English literature itself, Henry IV was English and Henry V a wastrel redeemed by the Nation's need.

All this may be beneath the notice of an Old Etonian. But it is how ordinary English people imagine their history.

Consider the following line-

House of Windsor rhymes with House of Schönbrunn or House of Versailes.” ― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Why is this un-English? The answer is that there had been 'Merry wives of Windsor' at the time of Falstaff, but more recently a 'Widow of Windsor' when England attained an acme of relative power and prosperity. Thus House of Windsor does not 'rhyme' at all with vainglorious Versailles or Schonbrunn's sugary confection.

The problem with Anderson was that he had not been thought to think. All he could do was spout bullshit of a vaguely poetic sort.

Look at this-

“All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias.

Is it true? No. Amnesia does occur- but it is not associated with 'profound changes in consciousness'. Rather, it is associated with trivial things like being hit on the head or drinking too much.

Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives…

Rubbish! Confabulation may occur. But confabulations aren't narratives because they merely fill in gaps in memory with whatever seems plausible or is 'ready to hand'.

The photograph… is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence… which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory.

Photographs- like paintings- are valuable as evoking memories or helping us visualize things important to us which may have happened before we were born or are happening far away from where we now are. They don't record 'apparent continuity'. CC footage may do so- but we know that the Lizard People from Planet X are tampering with them so as to erase evidence of their complicity with the Neo-Liberal nomenklatura.

The selfies I take don't emphasize any 'loss from memory'. God alone knows what Anderson's major malfunction was. Perhaps he was a victim of alcoholism and needed someone to follow him around taking photos so as to discover what he had been up to while black-out drunk.

Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity… which, because it cannot be “remembered”, must be narrated.” ― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Narrations can be wholly fictitious. They are autopoetic. Confabulation fills in gaps. But, in general, this happens only when one is questioned or a question arises in one's mind.

J.L Mehta on Sankara & Heidegger

Some 40 years ago, J.L Mehta published the following in a book titled 'Heidegger & Asian thought'.

Heidegger and Vedanta: Reflections on a Questionable Theme 

Vedanta is an orthodox school of Hindu theology which holds the Vedas to be uncreated. It is monist and affirms karma (reincarnation).  

 What is questionable can sometimes be worthy of thought,

No. It is always worthy of thought unless the question is idle or foolish. However, of what is unquestionable, thoughts- however bitter- are futile.  

and what is unthinkable can sometimes be glimpsed as that which thinking is about.

No. The thought that such glimpsing is possible is thinkable but idle or foolish.  

Both Heidegger and Vedanta thought amply illustrate this.

Hindu thought is idle or foolish if there is no soul and no rebirth and no enlightenment or 'liberation' from the karmic cycle. Advaita Vedanta is idle or foolish if there can be no identity of soul and universal soul. An idealistic conception of Advaita may affirm that there is a 'transcendental ego'- a pure, unchanging structure of awareness. It is the "subject" that observes and is itself the one abiding object of which nothing can be predicated. The question was whether Husserl's 'bracketing' or 'phenomenological reduction' was a way to establish this. An alternative view was that what Sankara did was like Hegelian 'sublation'. If Heidegger's thought, as a criticism of Husserl, was idle or foolish, then a philosopher adhering to Advaita- e.g. Radhakrishnan- would need to see if Husserl's program could support Sankara's point of view. Alternatively, the Idealist could say 'Sankara is a religious thinker. Soteriology is separate from Philosophy. Vedantic soteriology is linked to Vedic orthopraxy (vigyan) and is supported by different dogmas (matam). Similarly Christian soteriology is founded in Christ, not some variety of neo-Kantianism. Philosophy, by itself, can't provide a proof of God, or a proof that there is an immortal 'atma' (soul) unless there is at least one 'absolute proof' (in the Godelian sense). Thus it is different from Theistic Religion.'

It would be perfectly reasonable to say Heidegger and other 'existential' thinkers enable the philosopher to keep the religious realm separate from his own subject rather than claim that it is reducible, or supervenient, upon it. 

This is not the route Mehta takes. He babbles about Weberian 'disenchantment' & the romantic trope of the old Gods withdrawing and hiding themselves from the increasingly mechanised world of men. 

No other justification can be offered for the following very questionable enterprise of bringing together two disparate ways of thinking, so wide apart in time and in their entire context.

Some German philosophers were influenced by Vedanta. Was Heidegger influenced by them? Up to a point. Equally, prominent Indian philosophers- e.g. Radhakrishnan who achieved cult status in the UK in the Thirties- were influenced by German philosophy. Some sensible points might be made in this connection. 

The attempt can have unquestioned validity only for those who believe, like Nicolai Hartmann and many contemporary comparativists, that there are “eternal problems” in philosophy,

which would be 'open problems' in other disciplines like mathematical logic. 

everywhere and at all times the same, or, with Paul Deussen, that it is the same voice of the Eternal Truth that is heard by thinking spirits everywhere. Perhaps, however, the task of thinking, in the comparative sphere, is not limited to the search for what is common to the thought-content (the thoughts, the Gedanke, the answers given) of two different philosophical traditions, or the construction of new concepts overarching them, nor to the quest of motifs in another tradition that may supplement a deficiency in one's own and so “enrich” it. Perhaps there is, beyond this, the more exciting, in the end even more rewarding, task of trying to see and lay open the hidden truth of the paths taken by thinking (the Denken, the movement of thinking, the questions asked) in each, and letting questions arise in the process and stay with us, without seeking to come up with precipitate answers.

Mehta found this rewarding and exciting. But, a Hindu might well ask, did he in fact know the 'paths taken by thinking' by Vedic priests whose livelihood derived from performing complex rituals or chanting the Vedic psalms in the prescribed manner? To do so, he would himself have had to perform karma kanda or else observe and carefully question those who did so.  

This involves a movement of thought that is less like an arrow in flight toward its target than a roving and a rambling, a movement to and fro, between two different realms of discourse and vision, an exploration of two different topologies.

If there is a topology, there is a well defined set. True, an expert in karma kanda may be able to relate everything in an Upanishad to its Brahmana (priestly instruction manual) in which the Vedic text is elaborated upon. However, some rituals mentioned there have disappeared. We may say, 'such and such Saint has given us a good enough gist of the matter'. Sadly, knowing the gist isn't enough to reconstruct 'the paths taken by Vedantic thinking'.  

There are no predetermined rules for a game of this kind,

because it is a type of playing with yourself. What's important is that you wipe up after yourself.  

only the playing of the game can generate the rules, if at all.

I suppose there are no rules for playing with yourself. What matters is that you wipe up after yourself.  

So much by way of apology for the following fragmentary, somewhat Heideggerian, remarks on this questionable theme. 

The theme is not questionable in itself. One may well ask how and why priests performing particular rituals sought to link them to a grander Monistic Soteriology which may have arisen independently in ancient India. However to do this one would need to begin with their lived experience of conducting those rituals and their intuition that they would be inefficacious or soteriologically fatal if they were not performed with right cognition. 

Deussen quotes the following passage from Sankara's Commentary on the Brahmasutra (I, iii, 33) as ‘‘characteristic for Samkara period as well as for his theological conception": 'For also, what is for us imperceptible was for the ancients perceptible; thus it is recorded, that Vyasa (the author of the Mahabharata and others used to meet the Gods and [Rishisj face to face. But if some would assert that, as for those now living so for the ancients also it was impossible to meet with gods and the like, they would deny the variety of the world; they might also maintain that, as at present, so also in other times, there was no world- swaying prince  and thus they would not ac-knowledge the injunctions referring to the consecration of kings; they ought further assume that, as at present, so also in other times, the duties of castes and Asramas had no stable rules, and thus treat as vain the canon of law which provides rules for them. We must therefore believe that the ancients, in consequence of pre-eminent merits, held visible converse with Gods and [Rishis]. The Smrti also says (Yogas Sutra 2, 44): “through study is gained] union with the beloved godhead." And when it further teaches, that Yoga bestows as reward the mastery of nature, consisting fin the freedom from embodied being and its laws, and thereby] in the ability to become as small as an atom and the like, this is not to be rejected out of hand by a mere dictatorial sentence.  Samkara goes on to quote the Sruti (Svetasvatara Ufmmsad 11, 12) pro- claiming the greatness of Yoga, and adds that we do not have “the right to measure by our capabilities the capability of the Rishis who see the mantras and Brahmana (i.e., the Veda).” Samkara remarks in conclusion, From all this it appears that the Itihasas and puranas  have an adequate basis. And the conceptions of ordinary life also must not be declared to be unfounded, if it is at all possible to accept them. The general result is that we have the right to conceive the gods as possessing personal existence, on the ground of mantras, arthavadas, itihasas, puranas, and ordinary prevailing ideas.

This is not an important passage. It is obvious that if you are a priest or a follower of Shruti & Smriti, you accept the Deity even though you have never seen him. People who say 'you are performing some absurd actions for no reason known to you' are wrong. You are praying to God in the manner prescribed by Scripture.  

Here, the gods are absent

No. A thing may be present though we do not see it.  

but they are not denied; they have withdrawn from man’s sight

No. Some men may that sight right now. It is just that if someone says 'can you see God when you pray to him? Does he answer you back?', you can reply 'nope. But my prayer is according to prescribed forms. There were great seers who did see God. We follow their precepts.'  

but still form a presence on the horizon.

Sankara never says anything of the sort.  

A world has passed, but its links with the present are not broken.

Nor does he say that. Everyone knows that there still are great seers or devotees. Maybe one such exists in the neighbouring district. Who knows? Maybe our next door neighbour has the beatific vision though he doesn't give himself any airs and graces on that account.  

The present, though impoverished, is still seen, understood and interpreted in the light of a nobler past and as continuous with it. Sankara would not perhaps have said, with Heraclitus, that “Here too there are gods,” but would have found little to quarrel with Catullus when he said of the golden age: then indeed did the gods come down and visit with men.

He would have said 'if this sentence by the Yavana had been included in an Upanishad, then the meaning is mediation on such gods is approved because 'texts, speaking of Brahman with form, have the injunctions about meditations as their main objectives. So long as they do not lead to contradiction, their apparent meanings should be accepted. But when they involve a contradiction, the principle to be followed for deciding one of the other is that, those that have the formless Brahman as their main purport are more authoritative than the others which have not that as their main purport. It is according to this that one is driven to the conclusion that Brahman is formless and not its opposite, though texts having both the purports are in evidence.' (Brahma Sutra Bhasya of Sri Sankaracharya III.ii.14 translated by Swami Gambhirananda)

Life, in this Upanisadic tradition, was still experienced as touched by the Divine,

Priests serve God. Texts devised by and for priests are going to be about God not Geology.  If you are performing a priestly function and don't have at least the aspiration to be touched by the Divine- which for Theists may be just as good because it arises from God's will or grace- then yours is the life of a miserable drudge. Your position is that of a miser who is employed in giving away to the indigent the wealth of a philanthropist. You hate to see the stock of gold depleted but can earn your bread in no other way. 

and the dimension of the holy provided the context for all inquiry into reality  and into the nature and destiny of man, and for the pursuit of freedom and immortality.

No. There was other Sutra literature about Medicine, Math, etc. But Vedanta was created for and by Brahmin priests.  

The quest for truth was still a quest for the truth of life, for the living truth, and its articulation into a coherent body of argued and examined statements; it was not just a matter of detached theoretical contemplation.

Sankara was in the God business. He wasn't saying anything about the quest for truth in chemistry or medicine or agronomy. 

It was a profoundly religious quest,

Because the dude was a monk.  

and yet a passionately intellectual one.

Because theological hermeneutics is an intellectual activity.  

The eighth century in India, when Sarpkara probably lived and wrote, was the century that experienced the impact of the Buddhist thinker Dharmaklrti, of Kumarila and Prabhakara, thinkers of the Purva Mimamsa, of Mandana Misra, the lone-wolf in the history of Advai- ta Vedanta, as he has been aptly described, and a century which was heir to the imposing and strikingly original work of the Speculative Grammarians.

All this is irrelevant. Sankara supports an orthodox view with common sense arguments. Some feel he goes too far in a Monist direction. Dualism is better. Let God be God. We are happy simply worship him and pray for his Grace. If God wishes a particular person to receive some higher mystic union, that is his business. 

But the India of this century, and of many more centuries to come, was not yet under the shadow of what Nietzsche called “the spirit of Socratism,"

there had been Indo-Greeks. The Jain Munis were known as 'gymnosophists'. Vedic orthodoxy had been challenged by Shraman sects. The Buddhists say there is no soul. But they are pious people. Does the difference in dogma (matam) matter? Perhaps not. There is 'observational equivalence' between Nagarjuna, Umaswati & Sankara. The 'vigyan' is the same. Still, for the proper performance of prescribed rituals, let each religion preserve its own traditional philosophical commentaries. 

and its thinking was not primarily an operation with concepts about a reality understood solely in terms of being, but had something of the quality of meditation, reflection, and remembrance, even in the midst of the lively give and take of argument and debate so character- istic of the Indian philosophical scene. What is to be heard, thought about, and meditated upon is not a bare ontological principle or a meta- physical ultimate, ground, or arche, but a reality experienceable and experienced as sacred.

No. It could be experienced as a delusion or dream. Mehta is talking about 'dis-enchantment'- i.e. the deplorable fact that fairies have disappeared.  

And the hearing, the reflecting and arguing, the meditating, the learning and teaching, the composition of commentaries and independent critical or creative works, all these activities are carried on within the dimension of the holy and the ambience of the Divine.

No. They are a sideshow. Verse 22 of the Bhaja Govindam says ' rathya carpata viracita kanthaH, puyapuya vivarjita panthaH / yogi yoganiyojita citto ramate balonmattavadeva – 

The yogi who wears but a quilt made of rags, who walks the path that is beyond merit and demerit, whose mind is joined in perfect yoga with its goal, revels in God consciousness, and lives thereafter as a child or as a madman.

It is not the case that shite JL Mehta got up to with his Professorial chums in Seminar rooms was associated in some way with the ambience of the Divine. 

Similarly, Heidi- who once hoped to be a Catholic priest- was no such thing even if he gassed on about gelassenheit. Still, if some German Catholics feel he struggled with what was once their common Faith to some good purpose, why cavil? 

The medium is not irrelevant to the message and is often part of it. But concern for the “philosophy” of the Upanishads and the Vedanta, for their content, has stood in the way of sufficient attention being paid to the medium; the literary structure and style; the poetry and not just the prose of these writings; the rhetoric and what appear to be minor embellishments; the magico-mythic dements still clinging to an endeavor where they do not seem rightfully to belong (for example, the role of the sacred syllable Om); above all, the verses of obeisance and praise to be found at the beginning and conclusion of most Vedanta works.

This is like saying of the Vicar's sermon- 'I deplore the fact that the fellow kept mentioning Christ. This distracts us from what's really important- viz. the medium. Why did he use his mouth rather than his anus to make noises?  

 Turning now to Heidegger, we find ourselves in a completely different life-world; it is the world of our present-day experience,

if we happen to teach worthless shite 

life as we all experience it, irrespective of how we individually choose to respond to it. The world in which and for which Heidegger writes is a world which Nietzsche meant when he spoke of “how the influence of Socrates, down to the present moment and even unto all future time, has spread over posterity like a shadow that keeps growing in the evening sun”; a world under the domination of that “profound illusion,” again in Nietzsche’s words, which lies in “the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of logic, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it.”

Nietzsche contracted syphilis and went mad. Thankfully, Socrates had no influence on medical science which, in 1943, developed penicillin as a safe and effective treatment.  

It is, further, a world which has been determined by the spread of Christianity and its subsequent secularization, so that, in the words of Arend Theodoor van Leeuwen, “in the spread of modern Western civilizations throughout the world something of the spirit of ‘Christianity incognito’ is at work.”

No. Christianity was and still is at work. It doesn't have to go incognito. It can announce itself and attribute any good it has done and is doing to Lord Jesus himself.

 Why pretend this great religion had something to do with Socrates? Nietzsche may not have liked it- but he was as crazy as a bedbug. Perhaps, if Heidi had got a Professorship in a Catholic University, he'd wouldn't have gone to the bad.  

It is a world shaped by the Enlightenment and by the spirit of technology, a world disenchanted and desacralized, as Max Weber saw.

Little kids may like fairy stories. But even they see that death is overcome by forgiveness, by compassion, by repentance. The Church needs some smart people to teach theology but even they would rather be working with the poor and vulnerable.  

As Heidegger has also described it, a characteristic feature of the modern world is the flight of the gods (Entgotterung)

Very true. Thor has fucked off with my TV remote. Fuck you Thor! Fuck you very much! 

This expression docs not mean the mere setting aside of the gods, a crude atheism,

get rid of goblins and gremlins by all means. Thor may be a great character in the Marvel Comics. But the Bible is not a comic-book.  

the disappearance of the gods is a two-sided process. First, the world image is Christianized, in so far as the ground of the world is set up as the infinite,  the unconditioned, the absolute;

Physics may do this. But why bother? Shut up and calculate! 

on the other hand, Christendom gives a new interpretation to its Christian character by transforming it into a world-view, thus adapting itself to modernity.

It would be fair to say that Christianity, as it spread during the Dark Ages, enabled Europe to return to a notion of a universal civilization capable of technological and socio-economic progress of a type scholars may well say laid the basis of 'modernity'.  

Desacralization (Ent- gatterunx' is the state of indecision regarding God and the gods. Christendom has the largest share in the emergence of this state. But desacralization does not exclude religiosity; indeed, it is through it primarily that the relationship with the gods is transformed into religious experience (Erlebnis) as a subjective process.

Hinduism does have lots of Gods but Vedanta is Monistic. Religious experiences- e.g. attainment of nirvikalpa samadhi- may be achieved by a devotee of a particular deity at a particular place but it is related to 'Nirguna Brahma'- God without predicates.  

Once it comes to this, then the gods have indeed fled.

Not from Hindu India. One may say of Catholic Italy, that the Saints took the place of the tutelary gods.  

The consequent emptiness is filled up by the historical and psychological investigation of myth, as a substitute.

That is a type of scholarship. It has nothing to do with the toiling masses who keep alive a sacred geography.  

The question of Being, as Heidegger poses it, is marked by a radical putting into question of all that has led up to this present state, of the entire Greek-Christian tradition of thought which he sums up under the word “metaphysics.”

Islam, too, knew Aristotle. Hinduism & Buddhism, however, appear not to have been directly affected by his metaphysics though there may be some borrowing in terms of astronomy & mathematics & medical science. 

Equally radical is his attempt to so transform “the question of Being” itself, from its original formulation by the Greek thinkers, through the thinkers of medieval Europe, down to his own initial manner of posing it, that this questioning itself becomes a path of preparing for a possible future in which the dimension of the holy may once again give meaning to our world, no longer forsaken by the gods, and man heal himself through a thinking which has freed itself at last from its tutelage to the Greek paradigm.

There were neo-pagan groups at that time. But, in India, they would have been orthodox. Vedanta could be found at their bottom by those who had an interest in putting it there.  

The world-historical context in which Heidegger raises the question of Being is one which he has described as “the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the devastation of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything creative’’

Or as Swinburne put it- 

 'Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
'We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

In Hindu India, however, no ascetic sect triumphed or, even if it did, forced the gods of the forests and the fields into hiding. Ganapati is to be found in Japan. Indeed, the double bodied Kangiten of the late Heian period is like our Ardhanarishvara. There seems to have been a convergent evolution in this respect. 

The essence of this darkening of the world is the absence of God, as Holderlin experienced it, in this destitute time, to which we ourselves still belong. Heidegger’s explanation of the neediness of this time is worth quoting in full: For Holderlin’s historical experience, the appearance and sacrificial death of Christ mark the beginning of the end of the day of the gods.

'Great Pan is dead'. Plutarch says this happened at the time of Tiberius. Was it a reference to Christ? No. All gods had not died. 

Night is falling. Ever since the “united three” — Herakles, Dionysos, and Christ— have left the world, the evening of the world’s age has been declining towards its night. The world’s night is spreading its darkness. The era is defined by the god’s failure to arrive, by the “default of God.”

This is the theme of 'birha'- love in separation as applied to the Deity. The Viyogini is considered superior to the Yogi. Longing is more intense than union. 

But the default of God which Holderlin

poor fellow, he went mad. His mate, Hegel, poor fellow, didn't.  

experienced does not deny that the Christian relationship with God lives on in individuals and in the churches; still less does it assess this relationship negatively. The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it.

Religion still gathers people of all sorts to it.  

The default of God forebodes something even grimmer, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world's history.

I suppose JL Mehta didn't spend a lot of time watching Televangelists or visiting Mega-Churches.  

The time of the worlds Night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. If has already grown so destitute, u can no longer discern the default of God as a default, 1 1 The question of Being, as it unfolds in Heidegger's thinking, is directly relevant to this destitution of the present age, "for which the ground fails to come, hangs in the abyss'"; it is a reaching down into the abyss, experiencing and enduring it, so that a "turning of the age" and the return of the gods may be prepared for through a rethinking of Being.

Plenty of people wrestle with their Faith. They may see this in cosmic terms. But they calm down and become happy and productive when they return to the Church and lay down a self-imposed burden.  

With all his originality and brilliance, Samkara writes as at one with his tradition, a tradition mediated, if is true, by the passing of the Vedie age and by a long period of Buddhist intellectual and religious dominance, but yet unbroken.

 He was a Namboodri. Namboodris continue to perform Vedic rituals. They are 'shrauta'. The strength of Vedanta was that it could be handed down from father to son in any or every village or forest hermitage. Buddhism had gotten used to great Universities & splendid monasteries. This made them vulnerable to rapacious invaders or Princes who coveted their accumulated wealth. Since monks are celibate, the religion can't reproduce itself in a wholly organic manner. 

Heidegger, on the contrary, starts off, with Nietzsche as precursor, as a radical thinker in whom the crises of thought and sensibility in the sciences and philosophy, in theology and in literature, are gathered to a focus.

Husserl had converted to Evangelical Lutheranism. Heidi had wanted to be a Catholic priest. He came to phenomenology, like many other lapsed Catholics, through Brentano but broke with Husserl and remained distant from the Neo-Kantians who tended to support the Social Democratic party. Many were purged when the Nazis took power. But they had little time for Heid or Carl Schmitt.  

Samkara too was not just a traditionalist intent on restoring the Vedic tradition but was a thinker moved by the experience of his age as destitute, pervaded by an absence and hanging in the abyss.

He didn't want to get married. He wanted to be a monk and to travel and to learn from and debate with the leading Pundits of his age. But he returned to perform his mother's last rites which was a transgression of his monastic vows. But we love him for it. 

The rise and development of the Buddhist schools (and of some others) in the preceding centuries was only a symptom of this, bringing to the surface a corrosion in the very substance of things, the abyss that was opening up in the very core of what is and summed up in the formula “Everything is without a self’’ and in the elevation of the subjective sphere as the ultimate frame of reference.

This is unfair to the Shraman religions. Previously, Brahmin boys who wanted to devote themselves to study joined a Shraman sect. Sankara created one for his own type of Hindu. But similar things were happening amongst other caste lineages in other parts of India. Perhaps this had always been the case. We don't greatly care. 

It is from within this awareness that Samkara understood his work and started on his way of thought,

No. Like the Brahmin priests mentioned in the Upanishads, he wanted to recover the spirit and the 'darshana' way of seeing the rituals which, for Uttara Mimamsa, are a necessary part of religion.  

seeking to exhibit how it was still possible and supremely needful to think of life as grounded in Being

This isn't needful at all. Sankara was like Nagarjuna & Umaswati. In their different ways they were upholding orthodoxy and pushing back against dogmatic distinctions without a difference. 

to show how experience is unmeaning and an unmitigated pain

It simply isn't unless you have tooth-ache & your wife just left you.  

unless thought of as grounded in a “self,” revelatory of it and therefore alive with “the radiance of the divine” (in Heidegger’s sense).

Sankara wasn't a Professor of useless shite. He had a busy life & ended up creating a prestigious monastic order. Also, he was Tamil (Malayalam hadn't split off at that time). He had imbibed Paripadal with his mother's milk. Radiance of Thirumal is imbued in all things.  

Samkara said, This tree of samsara , the round of worldly existence, which sprouts from action and constitutes the field of confusion and error, must be torn out from its very roots. Alone in pulling it out lies the fulfillment of life’s purpose. A statement like this can easily be misunderstood as a classic example of a life-denying philosophy.

Not by Hindus. Everyone knows the upside down tree in the Gita.  BTW fuck is a 'life-denying philosophy'? If you are doing that shite, you are alive though you may be approaching brain death. 

In reality, what it denies is not life but the death-in-life that consists in taking things as empty of a self, without a ground in Being and yet holding us in their grip through the illusion of being all that there is, exercising this magic spell over us.

India was a big country with diverse spiritual lineages. One could praise intoxication & delusion & say that there was an antinomian path to grace or you could say that you gained the same result following the orthodox path without having to spend a lot of money on booze or broads. Sankara was a dude who did well in his line of work. It was probably the most prestigious line, outside politics, for a Brahmin at that time. Heidi was a Professor of a shite subject. Its prestige was falling. Then his entire country went down the toilet. Einstein's stock was rising. If he subscribed to the 'block-universe' theory, people took note. Bergson & Husserl & Heidi had eternally shat the bed. 

Intellectual history of Savarkar.

In 2024, the New Left Review published a review of two recent books on Savarkar titled-

Blood and Bombast

by Sanjay Subhramanyam

The last two decades have seen a marked uptick in projects of Indian—or more broadly, South Asian—intellectual history, often using a biographical lens.

The problem here is that intellectuals who were important in the late nineteenth century- e.g. Herbert Spencer  - were later neglected. Nobody can be bothered to pour over their turgid tomes or to discover how and why they gained influence in far away places- e.g. Maharashtra where 'Harbhat Pendse' was revered. 

True, some people might say 'Shyamji Krishna Varma was the bridge' . He later sponsored V.D Savarkar & other Revolutionaries. But this elides the real question, why did a Sanskrit orator, close to the Arya Samajis, who was taken up by Monier Williams, become a Spencerian of a left wing type? What other influences were at work?  

While stimulating in some ways, these writings have also been surprisingly narrow in their ambitions.

Because broader ambition would involve reading a lot of hefty tomes & then going through newspaper & magazine archives & looking up different volumes of collected letters.  

A significant landmark was Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (2011), by the late Cambridge historian C. A. Bayly.

It doesn't go far enough. The fact is Liberal ideas were always a two way street. How did Indians affect British Liberalism? It isn't enough to mention Chait Singh & Nandakumar who found ways to communicate their grievances to Burke & Sheridan. Nor is it enough to dwell on Roy & Tagore & Bentinck & Macaulay. You have to look deeper. The fact is, wealthy and powerful Indians influenced Tory policies & covertly provided ammunition against Liberals. Bentinck was recalled from Madras after the Vellore mutiny. He was accused of trying to get sepoys to give up their traditional caste-marks etc so as to make it easier to convert them to Christianity. The Tory position was that India had not been conquered. It was being administered according to its own ancient traditions. Interestingly, the East India Company, though Benthamite in spirit, often found it convenient to uphold a notion of an ancient unchanging civilization where the Brits performed the function of a night watchman.

I may add that Secularist movement in Britain drew inspiration for British India. If a man was free to follow any religion, or none, in India, why not in the UK?  

Published in Cambridge University Press’s celebrated ‘Ideas in Context’ series, the book attracted some attention outside the field of Indian history.

Because it was well-written & Bayly had read widely about the period.  

But it could be argued that Bayly was not so much an innovator as the consolidator of a trend which had been emerging since the 1980s and 1990s, with the appearance of a number of works on the intellectual history of nationalism in South Asia by political theorists such as Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj, both of whom were associated with the group called Subaltern Studies.

Nonsense! Bayly was perfectly sane. The Subaltern school was utterly paranoid. Elites were bamboozling the masses. Did you know that Gandhi & Nehru didn't really try to gain more freedom for Indian people? They actually turned the country into a vast slave-plantation overseen by invisible White Viceroys.  

In contrast, studies of intellectual themes unrelated to nationalism in its various incarnations have been few and far between, and largely limited to the period before 1750.

It would be fair to say that writing intellectual history is difficult enough when it comes to a particular country. It becomes much more complex if you also have to look at exchanges with distant civilizations.  

In the case of India you have to look at the religious angle- e.g. connection between Utilitarianism & Brahmoism. The case of Theosophic influence is particularly complex. Headed first by a Russian woman and an American Colonel, it provoked different reactions if different people. A.O Hume, founder of the INC, was a Theosophist at one time. Thanks to Annie Beasant- a feminist & suffragette- it moved to the Left. But, in Bengal, you also had Vivekananda & Sister Nivedita- who was more radical than Beasant. How do they all fit into the picture? 

It apparently remains difficult to interest the larger reading public in the writings of a major fifteenth-century Telugu poet like Srinatha,

It is easy enough if they have watched the NTR biopic of the poet.  

or the abhanga poems and songs of Bahina Bai, the woman mystic from seventeenth-century Maharashtra.

Make a TV serial of her life. The Music CD which accompanies it will sell very well.  

In India, as in many parts of the decolonized world, nationalism remains the regular refuge of historians, even if (as an old song goes) ‘every form of refuge has its price’.

This is also true of countries which were never colonised. Nations like to feel good about themselves. Nationalism is considered a virtue.  

The two books under consideration here review the career and writings of a particularly sulphurous figure in the history of Indian nationalism, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966),

A hero of the Independence movement honoured by Indira Gandhi.  

whose life intersected with those of many other figures in the nationalist pantheon.

like Bhagat Singh.  

Hindutva and Violence by Vinayak Chaturvedi,

who was named after Savarkar. His paediatrician had procured the gun used to kill Gandhi.  

a disciple of Bayly, and Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva by Janaki Bakhle, a former student of Chatterjee, bring contrasting approaches to the subject.

The former is more philosophical. But, the question as to why a Left Spencerian would move in some arcane ontological direction is left unanswered. My own impression is that the Bolshevik revolution & the success of Spengler's books gave substance to a notion, found here and there in Spencer & other writers, that there might be something biological or organic such that different races, or civilizations, would have a different relationship to 'Being'. There were precursors to this notion, but prior to the Great War, it appeared that there would be 'convergence' to some sort of Whig model of governance.  

Though he has long been the object of a cult-like veneration, Savarkar has become far more prominent since the rise to power of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp),

which originates in a party which broke with Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha. It looks to Bengal- Vivekananda, Netaji Bose, etc.- though, no doubt, the roots of the RSS are in Maharashtra. But it always wanted to get out from under Savarkar's shadow.  

which sees him as one of its spiritual ancestors. This increased prominence, along with the outbreak of communal violence in Gujarat in 2002,

Some Muslims massacred Hindu pilgrims. Hindus retaliated. Was the whole thing orchestrated by the Pakistani ISI? Probably. The Centre took no chances and sent in the Army. Maybe the Pakis were planning an attack in the Rann of Kutch and wanted Gujarat's roads and railways to get clogged up with displaced people.  

seem in part to have led Vinayak Chaturvedi to his subject, as well as a strange autobiographical coincidence: Chaturvedi was named after Savarkar, one of whose disciples happened to be his doctor as an infant.

Doctors don't give names to babies. It is obvious that Chaturvedi's parents either liked Savarkar or were worshippers of Ganapati. Most likely both things were true.  

On the anniversary of Savarkar’s death in February 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on social media: ‘India will forever remember his valiant spirit and unwavering dedication to our nation’s freedom and integrity. His contributions inspire us to strive for the development and prosperity of our country’.

Indira Gandhi, some 40 years earlier, wrote  “Veer Savarkar’s daring defiance of the British Government has its own importance in the annals of our Freedom movement. I wish success to the plans to celebrate the birth centenary of the remarkable son of India."

The man himself was not quite as anodyne as these phrases might have one believe, however. His career was one of twists and turns, which make him far more than just the father of ‘Hindutva’, a term he popularized and reinterpreted but did not invent.

Savarkar's elder brother, Ganesh, was a revolutionary inspired by the great rebel leader Vasudev Balwant Phadke who went on hunger strike, in a British jail in Aden, and died in the year Vinayak was born. Lokmanya Tilak took notice of the brothers and, because the younger was academically gifted, got him a scholarship to study law in England where he published a book on Mazzini which was dedicated to Tlak.  Both brothers continued their revolutionary activities & Ganesh, in 1909, was transported to the Andamans for waging war on the King Emperor. He later became one of the founding members of the RSS. 

Tilak is regarded in European Right Wing circles as an exponent of esoteric philosophy. The Tilakite faction of Congress got the Savarkar brothers released in 1937 by supporting the Premiership of Dhanishaw Cooper till Congress agreed to form a Government.

An intellectual history should look at the link between Tilak's esoteric ideas & those current in other countries at the time. 

Savarkar was born in 1883 in the Nashik region of Maharashtra, formerly Bombay Presidency, into a modest family of Chitpavan Brahmins. This was a regional sub-caste of warrior-administrators that had been closely associated with the consolidation of Maratha power in the eighteenth century: they had for an extended period held the key ministerial post of Peshwa and acted, not as the actual sovereigns, but as the shoguns based in Pune.

The great rebel Phadke, was Chitpavan as were Gokhale & Tilak.  

After several conflicts with the East India Company, the Peshwas and their allies were diplomatically outmanoeuvred and dealt a severe defeat in the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817–19, permitting the durable consolidation of British rule in western India. Though some of the Maratha sardars accepted this outcome, others seized the occasion of the Great Rebellion of 1857–58 to mount one further stand against the Company. After the bloody suppression of this revolt, the descendants of the erstwhile elites associated with the Marathas may have nursed their grievances, but they came to terms with colonial dominance.

Unless, like Phadke, they rebelled.  

This included acculturation into European mores and participation in the institutions of Western-style higher education that were set up after 1860. Among these was the well-known Fergusson College in Pune, founded in 1885, where Savarkar enrolled as a student in 1902.

As Chaturvedi notes, Savarkar’s early years are difficult to reconstruct with clarity; little direct evidence survives from that time and his own later writings must be treated as somewhat slanted and unreliable. It would seem that he was regarded as intelligent, possessing a remarkable memory and a gift for languages. By his later teens, he had a good level of Sanskrit

Sanskrit was a 'scoring subject'. Shyamji Krishna Varma mastered the language in school & became a Sanskrit orator awarded the title 'Pundit' by the Brahmins of Benares. Savarka, by birth, was a Brahmin but rejected casteism. His hero, Phadke, had allied with a great Ramoshi leader. Later he sought to recruit Muslim Rohillas and even Arabs. In his first phase, Vinayak believed Hindus & Muslims would unite to drive out the British. Later, he became concerned that some Muslim leaders were saying that Islam forbade the Indian Muslim from fighting against an Afghan invader. 

and wrote a somewhat florid version of Victorian English, as well as Marathi and the lingua franca of Hindustani (it is unclear whether he learned Persian, as the Chitpavans of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often did). This early education gave him a grounding in a traditional form of philology that he would later put to use. He also read a certain amount of popular history in English, such as the ‘Story of the Nations’ series which included volumes on Greece, Holland, Mexico and so on. It was during his years at Fergusson that Savarkar became obviously politicized,

His elder brother had already politicized him.  

joining secret societies

his brother's secret society 

and beginning to publish articles in Marathi that attracted the attention of prominent nationalists such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), also a Chitpavan Brahmin. Tilak and other patrons facilitated and financed Savarkar’s passage to London to study law at Gray’s Inn, where he arrived in early 1906. A clearer picture emerges of the man from his time in London, partly because he produced a flurry of writings. These included translations of the essays of Giuseppe Mazzini, a figure of fascination for Indian and many other Asian nationalists in these years, and an original work on the 1857–58 rebellion titled The Indian War of Independence of 1857 (1909) which remains one of his most widely read books, especially among Indian nationalists of various stripes. It announced Savarkar’s claim to be a historian, not one with an academic bent or an inclination to work with archives and documents, but rather a popularizer who deployed his rhetorical skills in charged emotional prose. Here was a history full of heroes and villains, but above all of ‘martyrs’ to the cause of the nation.

Some Indians in London at that time were moving in a Socialist direction. Suppose Savarkar had found refuge in France and then Germany (where the Kaiser was interested in arming Indian rebels), would his subsequent trajectory have been to the Left alongside Chatto, M.N Roy, etc? Probably. 

The fact is, the Nehru dynasty upholds orthopraxy. Weddings and funerals are properly conducted in a Vedic manner. Savarkar, we suspect, had no time for such mummery. We readily embrace Vivekananda, but remain dubious of the younger Savarkar brother. However, he was a patriot. When he believed that Socialism was the best economic path for India, he endorsed it. 

Chaturvedi presents Vinayak as a philosopher rather than a gifted writer adapting himself to changing political circumstances. 

I suppose one could say he considered himself a 'karma-yogi' and that his devotion to India, was itself a high type of Hinduism, and thus excused him from the usual ceremonies or observances.

 

Savarkar, like other people with some knowledge of different Hindu traditions, was aware that 'tattva' could be translated as meaning different things. This was a matter of 'matam' (dogma) and, it may be, there is no difference in 'vigyan' (praxis or science). 

A little before Vinayak came to London, the view had taken hold that the Brits, in their anxiety to establish the superior genius of Newton, had not given Leibniz his due. Some popular lecturers were spreading the view that the 'essence' of a thing is what is true of it in all possible world. Hindus had already espoused a similar view saying 'sanatan dharm' (eternal religion) remains the same though the exigencies of the times cause 'apadh dharma' to prevail. But in the best of possible worlds, we would have the pure Vedic religion because there would be no discrimination on the basis of wealth or occupation or gender. 

Why does Vinayak not take this easy path? There are two reasons-

1) some creeds maintain that there are specific 'tattvas', constitutive of human experience, cognizable by the adept provided they follow the prescribed path. Savarkar didn't want to be attacked by theologians of different sects.

2) people might say 'under present circumstances, we need the Brits. Your theory is all very well but we don't live in a perfect world.' There was more than a little truth to this objection. Ireland, Egypt & Afghanistan got independence in 1922. Gandhi had unilaterally surrendered. Why had the Indian masses not fought on? 

Turning back to what Chaturvedi has written, we have to ask why linking Hindutva with Being was 'innovative'? No one had said Hindus did not exist- i.e. were part of Being. A thing which does not exist and cannot exist (e.g. Meinongian objects) does not belong in Being. We would look in vain for a vast  mountain made entirely of gold. The 'intension' has no 'extension'. 

I suppose what Chaturvedi is saying is that whereas Hindus think their religion (or, at least, its essence) is founded in God ( as is all Being) Savarkar was disassociating Hinduism from God. This is plausible. It is also plausible to say that Savarkar didn't think Hinduism or Hindutva had an answer for everything (e.g. economics, engineering, etc.) but that if Hindus of all descriptions pulled together they could solve collective action problems in a manner that uplifted the nation. 

If we ask why Gandhi was so much more successful than Tilak (who wrote a book on the Gita) the answer was that his daily life, and that of his Ashramites, was suffused with devotional religion. Moreover, he had an answer for every question under the Sun- or so it seemed.

You might say 'what is the point of spinning cotton? Weavers want mill yarn. The stuff we make snaps in the loom.' The answer would be- 'by spinning cotton you gain religious merit. You will be re-born on a paradisal planet.' 

What is the big difference between the Hindutva of Advani & Vajpayee & that of Savarkar? The answer is that ideas about caste had changed. People could see that a Dalit, like Jagjivan Ram, was an excellent Cabinet Minister. A small and frail woman- like Indira Gandhi- could be a great war leader. Hindutva could now announce its anti-caste, anti-misogyny, credo. With Modi & Shah the emphasis has shifted to last mile delivery of universal services. Caste & Creed & Gender don't matter save in so far as there may be some affirmative action. Moreover, the whole world is aware of the threat posed by Islamic terror. Vote-bank politics which celebrates terrorists will back-fire. 

Savarkar had lived in a London where young foreign students like himself were exposed to radical Socialist & Feminist ideas. He knew some of his old comrades were now in Moscow. The future of the Tilakite Congress had to be mapped carefully. Let the Left know you will back them for economic reasons while pretending to be on the side of religious orthodoxy. 

Savarkar did not have the intense Spirituality of a Vivekananda or an Aurobindo. Nor did he have the humble devotional piety of a Gandhi. Moreover, he and his brother were, quite rightly, distrusted by the British. They would always have a soft spot for brave revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh. 

Chaturvedi does a good job of highlighting Vinayak's first introduction to History through the indigenous epics (which are thought to depict the end of one age and the beginning of a darker period even though God has taken a human form to defeat a particular threat to the Cosmic Order ) and the Marathi 'bakhars' stirring historical chronicles with some supernatural elements. He suggests that parallel to German philosophical history, there was a Maharashtrian historicism of a cultural and spiritual type. 

step necessary in arguing that Being had a history. 

Hindus have long charted that particular 'intellectual territory'. Gandhi's call to establish Ram Rajya- which he defined as 'sovereignty of the people based on pure moral authority'- appeals to this long tradition. 

These were old ideas. For Hindus, karma is like the theory of evolution. Simple creatures become more complex. As their power increases, scope for merit and demerit increase. The Theosophists had been very important in Indian politics. They had developed these themes very well. Prof Raghavan Iyer (father of Pico Iyer) used to write essays speculating on whose reincarnation President Eisenhower might have been. 

It would have been rather strange if a Maharashtrian Hindu became obsessed with a question only of interest to scholars of Greek from Christian countries. 

But Heidegger went further by suggesting that Being may best be understood as history – i.e. as time itself.

For philosophy, perhaps. But not for Physics.  

In other words, what was required to conceptualise Being was a historical inquiry into history as Being.

Historical inquiry is just history. If it corresponds to what happened it is 'History as Being' as opposed to 'History as fantasy'.  

For Savarkar, by contrast, Hindutva as “a history in full" did not transcend time; it was temporally bounded.

It may be that he was no believer in sanatan dharma (eternal religion). But he didn't say so.  

Hindutva has a beginning, even if its moment of conception remains unknown. Savarkar says, "Forty centuries, if not more, had been at work to mould it as it is."

This is not the orthodox Hindu belief. It would be fair to say that Savarkar was cutting his philosophical coat according to such political cloth as was available to him & other Tilakites.  

A history in full cannot, moreover, be a complete history of humankind; consequently, Hindutva's finitude is an aspect of its Being. In other words, for Savarkar Hindutva did not transcend time, but understanding its temporality was central to its conceptualisation.

This is all very well, but why stick with a religion where there is no God and no Heaven? Savarkar was a patriot. He was a karma yogi. He may also have been 'nastik'- an atheist. Hopefully, he wasn't or, if he was, found out he was wrong after ascending to Heaven.  

I raise this parallel to suggest that the place of history was in the midst of radical reinterpretation for the study of Being.

It really wasn't. Nobody gave a fart about Bergson or Heidi. Einstein was all the rage.  

In this context, it is worth considering a lecture delivered by Jacques Derrida on this theme in 1964, in which he made an important observation about Heidegger's texts (though it is unlikely that Derrida had even heard of Savarkar, let alone read his work).

Which is odd because Savarkar was reading Derrida. That's what caused his death.  

Derrida states: "Never in the history of philosophy has there been a radical affirmation of an essential link between being and history."

Previous affirmations weren't radical enough for Derrida. Did they fuck Hannah Arendt? No. There you are then.  

He further notes that Heidegger's arguments fundamentally contradicted all philosophical writings, because history and time were generally not included in interpretations of ontology.

They always are. Human beings tend to notice that there is a present and a past and a future. On this point, Heidi was quite sane.  

He emphasises Heidegger's radical departure within the field: "Ontology has always been constituted through a gesture of wrenching itself away from historicity and temporality."

It would be fair to say that Heidegger differentiated himself from Husserl & the Neo-Kantians, Hegelians etc.  

To be clear: though some of Heidegger's work was done in the same period as Savarkar's, there is no reason to believe that either Savarkar or Heidegger was aware of the other's writings in this period. Nor is there evidence to suggest that they even knew of the other's existence. Given Heidegger's sympathies and alliances with Nazi ideology and politics, however, this may have changed in 1940, when the German Foreign Office translated Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence of 1857 into German with the title Indien im Aufruhr.

Nobody read it.  

It also appears that the Nazis were aware of some of Savarkar's activities, writings, and speeches, especially as his name appeared in intelligence reports of the German Foreign Office. After Savarkar had published a celebration of Nazism and Germany's imperial expansion into the Sudetenland, the Nazis reciprocated their admiration for Savarkar in a profile published in the official Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter.

But it was Netaji Bose, the Socialist, who showed up in Berlin & who recruited Indians for the Waffen SS. 

I think Savarkar was influenced by both Herbert Spencer & the great Shyamji Krishna Varma who founded the 'Indian Sociologist'. We may say Savarkar rejected functionalist Sociology in favour of a historicist Sociology for political reasons. He wanted priority to be given to getting rid of the British whereas the Liberals & moderates thought their assistance should be taken to bring about needful socio-economic reforms.

Chaturvedi highlights Savarkar's proficiency in several languages.

Of course, Savarkar was not unique in this context of bilingualism - not to mention trilingualism or quadralingualism.

It would be safe to say that all Indian lawyers and High school graduates spoke at least two languages- viz. mother tongue & English plus reading comprehension of a Classical language. 

Partha Chatterjee's important observation is most relevant here, namely that by the mid-nineteenth century the intellectual formation of bilingual elites marked an important conjuncture in colonial India as the intelligentsia viewed its own language as central to "cultural identity.'

English had displaced Persian and vernacular languages were replacing the previous lingua franca. The Brits encouraged the upgrading of mother tongues by means of 'Sanskritization' or 'Persianisation'. Punjab was a bit unusual in that Urdu rather than Punjabi was used.  

He explains that the intelligentsia's literary work in the vernacular, especially dramas and novels, emerged in the "inner domain" - a sphere in which "the colonial intruder had to be kept out."

Nonsense! You showed your stuff to the District Collector and hoped to gain an 'inam'- i.e. a reward of some type.  

This inner domain not only remained largely impervious to European literary and aesthetic influences,

it was transformed by it.  

but it was also the space that resisted and rejected "European conventions."

European conventions were expensive. Also you would have to hire some half-caste to learn how to use a fork and knife.  

For Chatterjee, the inner domain was the space in which the nation was imagined into existence as sovereign, independent of colonial power.

Chatterjee hadn't noticed that Nepal was independent. Why? Nepalis kick ass on the battlefield. It was fucking obvious that 'independence of colonial power' meant kicking ass militarily. But, Bengal would also need a navy. That's expensive.  

In 2025, Arun Shourie published a book on Savarkar. It awakened little interest. Savarkar may well have been an atheist. If this helped to turn him against the caste system- well and good. God grants or withdraws the gift of faith for reasons known only to himself. All we can say is that Savarkar was for Hindu consolidation rather than some caste-based electoral formula in which Muslims are told that they will only be safe if the vote for this dynastic bunch of crooks or that dynastic bunch of crooks. 

I end by giving my own brief account of Savarkar's intellectual history

1) Childhood shaped by stirring tales of Marathi history & glorification of Phadke & his determination to build a broad based coalition to fight the British.

2) Higher education when the spirit of 'Lal/Bal/Pal' (i.e. the 'garam dal' extremists) pervaded the country. Mazzini had been popularized by Surrender-not Bannerjee and Pal was said to have come to Nationalism through him. At home, however, there was the reformist spirit of the anti-caste activists which might want to do a deal with the British- i.e. follow the path of Ranade, Phule, Gokhale, Gandhi, Jinnah etc. Perhaps the new Sociological science developing out of the works of Herbert Spencer could show a path forward. Shyamji Krishna Varma, in London, and Madam Cama in Paris were beacons of light for Tilakites. But Savarkar was a rebel, not an intellectual, first and foremost. Though in London, he was doing his best to help his elder brother realise his plans for the liberation of the country

3) Jail meant Savarkar was cut off from the leftward movement of other revolutionaries in Europe & America. Tilakites were out in the cold because the charismatic Mahatma could mobilize the religious piety of the masses. The sticking point was Khilafat. Essentially, Gandhi was saying that Islam was better than Hinduism. Hindus have a duty to fight for the Caliph. No Indian Muslim has a duty to fight an invader if that invader happens to be Muslim. 

4) Universalism of any sort put the Hindu at a disadvantage unless they could overcome the temptation of pretending to ally with Muslims for purely Islamic demands. Vivekananda and Tagore & Aurobindo could be just as attractive to foreigners as to Hindus. Why fight for anything associated with them? 

5) Historicist Sociology was no way forward save by backward causation. In other words, Hindutva (unified, ecumenical, Hinduism) would have to fabricate its own past. But why bother? Why not look to the future instead? This is where Savarkar fell down. Rajaji could critique a corrupt 'Licence Permit Raj' seeking to pass itself off as 'Secular Socialism'. But Savarkar knew no economics. He was far removed from the levers of power or the centres of industry and finance.

Some say he wrote well. If so, good for him. But, as a leading Hindutva ideologue myself, I must tell you it was Enid Blyton who was the profoundest influence on my generation. I asked my Dad to get me a dog like Timmy in the Famous Five. He sang 'daddy wouldn't buy me a bow-wow'.  I cried and cried. Mummy said, 'don't be so harsh. He is only 34 years old. Tell him that after he marries and moves out of the house he can buy any type of animal he likes.'  My father replied 'the way you mollycoddled him, no wonder he turned into a big fat Queen. Who will marry that good-for-nothing'.

I was meant to hear these harsh words. But I did. I immediately set forth to Engyland so as to marry Prince Charles. Sadly, he prefers blondes. But, as soon as Camilla dies- which could happen if the Donald accidentally sits on her- I am sure the King will, out of respect to sanatan dharma, ensure that words uttered in a moment of anger by my esteemed father finally come true in a glorious manner such that universal welfare is enhanced. 

Modiji may kindly drop a hint to the British Monarch next time he bumps into him.