Consider the following-
A dramatic example of this nationalist rejection of historicist history is the Indian decision taken immediately after the attainment of independence to base Indian democracy on universal adult franchise.
Ceylon got universal suffrage in 1931 because the Sinhalese upper class accepted Sidney Webb's system of safeguards for minorities. India could not because Caste Hindus represented a majority and no system of safeguards was acceptable to the minorities. Since the Congress was confident it could win majorities under universal franchise, there was never any doubt that independent India would chose that route. But then no country adopted anything else- if they had free elections at all.
Dipshit thinks otherwise-
This was directly in violation of Mill’s prescription. “Universal teaching,” Mill said in the essay “On Representative Government,” “must precede universal enfranchisement.”This shows Mill didn't matter. The fact is the cry 'we must educate our masters' was raised after Disraeli's fait accompli of 1867.
Dipesh lives in a fantasy world where writers on the Curriculum issues prescriptions which Society faithfully followed because they were based on ineluctable Science.
Even the Indian Franchise Committee of 1931, which had several Indian members, stuck to a position that was a modified version of Mill’s argument.Because none of its Indian members were from the Party which would have won on an universal franchise. The Nehru Report stipulated for universal adult suffrage in 1928. Gandhi lobbied for it at both Round Table Conferences. It was universally accepted as Congress policy by 1932. Its success in Ceylon rather reinforced this view.
The members of the committee agreed that although universal adult franchise would be the ideal goal for India, the general lack of literacy in the country posed a very large obstacle to its implementation.They did so because Minorities were afraid that the Majority was also educationally more forward.
And yet in less than two decades, India opted for universal adult suffrage for a population that was still predominantly nonliterate.Nobody opposed it- the only question was whether villages should vote en bloc or not but this proposition was not seriously entertained.
In defending the new constitution and the idea of “popular sovereignty” before the nation’s Constituent Assembly on the eve of formal independence, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, later to be the first vice president of India, argued against the idea that Indians as a people were not yet ready to rule themselves.Nonsense! India was already ruling itself. No Indian was saying 'we can't rule ourselves, let's ask Whitey to come back.' Actually there was one idiot who did write a book which ended by an appeal for the Coloniser to return. But he was Bengali. And a Historian. In other words, a dipshit like Dipesh.
As far as he (Radhakrishnan) was concerned, Indians, literate or illiterate, were always suited for self-rule. He said: “We cannot say that the republican tradition is foreign to the genius of this country. We have had it from the beginning of our history.” What else was this position if not a national gesture of abolishing the imaginary waiting room in which Indians had been placed by European historicist thought?Radhakrishnan was an Oxford Professor who had achieved celebrity status in the Thirties as Robert Graves and Alan Hodges have recorded. He had no political or ideological importance. What he said was what Professors say about things nobody cares about. India was making a lot of nationalist gestures at that time. This was the least of them.
Needless to say, historicism remains alive and strong today in the all the developmentalist practices and imaginations of the Indian state.Only because they are crap and have little practical effect.
Much of the institutional activity of governing in India is premised on a day-to-day practice of historicism; there is a strong sense in which the peasant is still being educated and developed into the citizen.No such 'education' is occurring. The State can't get its teachers to stop playing truant and actually teach some kids. How the fuck is it going to 'educate' peasants?
But every time there is a populist/political mobilization of the people on the streets of the country and a version of “mass democracy” becomes visible in India, historicist time is put in temporary suspension.A species of time which can be put on 'temporary' suspension isn't time. It is nonsense. Why speak of it?
And once every five years—or more frequently, as seems to be the case these days—the nation produces a political performance of electoral democracy that sets aside all assumptions of the historicist imagination of time.Really? Is that what happened in 2014? Modi got in and the Dynasty was thrown out. Dipshit may think this was just a 'performance' or tamasha but Indians don't feel the same way. Previously, one bunch of goons was getting rich. Now a different set of goons is getting rich. This matters if you are a goon or related to a goon or depend on a goon financially- which, in a segmentary society, adds up to quite a lot of people.
On the day of the election, every Indian adult is treated practically and theoretically as someone already endowed with the skills of a making major citizenly choice, education or no education.The same is true of the American voter who elected Trump, the Italian voter who elected Berlusconi and the British voter who precipitated Brexit.
Dipesh may be a fool but he gets a vote so as to cancel out the equal and opposite imbecility of some other Bengali Professor.
Subaltern Studies
(The) problem of how to conceptualize the historical and the political in a context where the peasant was already part of the political was indeed one of the key questions that drove the historiographic project of Subaltern Studies. My extended interpretation of the word “peasant” follows from some of the founding statements Ranajit Guha made when he and his colleagues attempted to democratize the writing of Indian history by looking on subordinate social groups as the makers of their own destiny. I find it significant, for example, that Subaltern Studies should have begun its career by registering a deep sense of unease with the very idea of the “political” as it had been deployed in the received traditions of English language Marxist historiography. Nowhere is this more visible than in Ranajit Guha’s criticism of the British historian Eric Hobsbawm’s category “prepolitical” in his 1983 book Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India.Marx lived in London. There was, till quite recently, a British Marxist tradition. Hobsbawm belonged to it. But the British working class outgrew Marxism. It was foolish and ignorant.
If Guha wanted to criticize Hobsbawm he would have needed to shown he was shite with respect to British history. If he had wanted to say anything about Indian history, he would have had to study primary Indian sources. But Guha was a worthless lump of shite. All he was capable of was pretending that Hobsbawm was important and that attacking him using spurious Indian sources somehow redeemed Indian National honor and entitled him and his disciples to tenure in wholly worthless Departments of Western Universities.
Ranajit Guha emigrated to Britain and took British citizenship even before Niradh Chaudhri. He pretended to be interested in Indian tribals and peasants and so forth because he was a shite historian who needed to disguise himself as some sort of theoretician who might gain salience if some particular clique gained control of the CPM in Bengal.
In the old days, some naive American might believe Guha, if not Hobsbawm, knew something about the country he claimed to speak for. This is no longer the case. Dipshit jumped on the wrong bandwagon and so this book of his back peddles from his fellow historians like Hobsbawm and Guha in order to gain a spurious glamour by pretending to engage with, the Economist, Marx, and the Philosopher, Heidegger.
Can this Historian, who is shite at his own job, really understand Economics and Philosophy? Let us see.
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