Gopal Guru's cure for Untouchability.

Gopal Guru, in an article titled 'the archaeology of untouchability',  responding to Prof. Sarrukai's paper titled 'phenomenology of untouchability', quotes Louis Dumont- "it is clear that impurity of the untouchable is conceptually inseparable to the purity of the Brahmin'. 

Dumont was French. France and Spain had an untouchable community called the 'Cagots'. The last member of this community says '"When a Cagot came into a town, they had to report their presence by shaking a rattle. Just like a leper, ringing his bell."

The Independent reports-

 Daily Cagot life was likewise marked by apartheid. Cagots were forbidden to enter most trades or professions. They were forced, in effect, to be the drawers of water and hewers of wood. So they made barrels for wine and coffins for the dead. They also became expert carpenters: ironically they built many of the Pyrenean churches from which they were partly excluded.

Some of the other prohibitions on the Cagots were bizarre. They were not allowed to walk barefoot, like normal peasants, which gave rise to the legend that they had webbed toes. Cagots could not use the same baths as other people. They were not allowed to touch the parapets of bridges. When they went about, they had to wear a goose's foot conspicuously pinned to their clothes. 

Marie-Pierre sighs. "The Cagots weren't even allowed to eat alongside non-Cagots, nor share their dishes. Some said the Cagots were psychotic, even cannibals." As for marriage between Cagots and non-Cagots, it was almost impossible.

Academic research suggests that the 'archaeological' reason that cagots were shunned by the wider community was because the Cagots were either of alien- Moorish- race or else the remnants of heretical communities which had been subject to genocide by the armies of the Church. However, the populations which practiced this form of discrimination had little concept of either alien race or the evil of heresy. Rather, it was a supposed hereditary connection with leprosy which caused this abhorrent behavior. In other words, conceptually, it is pathogen avoidance theory- not Dumont's conceptualization of Hierarchy- which has salience here.

The Church and the Administration, by the Eighteenth Century, condemned this practice, yet it continued because the ordinary folk of the region still associated Cagots with leprosy. Where was the 'Brahmin' in this scenario? The 'pure' Churchman or Aristocrat opposed discrimination against Cagots. Yet this discrimination continued. It seems there is no need for there to be a 'pure' group at the top of the pyramid in order for there to be 'impure' pariahs at the bottom of it. Dumont could not explain untouchability in his own country. How could he do so with respect to a country far from his own?

It appears that the 'enlightened' metropole only changed its attitude to Cagots after they were medically examined and declared free of any infection or disease. Furthermore, they were industrious people with useful skills. Nevertheless, up in the mountains, discrimination did not cease. Was this solely because of the poverty and ignorance of the local people? Surely, there was an economic reason to keep up a loathsome practice because it drove down the price of skilled work needful to the community which the Cagots performed.

One reason Dumont may have pictured Indian utouchability as related to Brahminical 'purity' is because he was unconsciously projecting Catholic history onto Hindu India. The Church had an unusual view of lepers. A cult of Christus quasi leprosus flourished whereby Popes washed the feet of victims of Hansen's disease and, it was believed, that 'lepers had been chosen by God to atone their sins in this life, shortening their time in purgatory. More extravagantly, it was claimed that lepers were the veiled Christ and that those who kissed them gained salvation.

There is a relationship between Christ and the leper to be found in the Gospel. However, there is none between the Brahman- who first appears in the Rg Veda where no untouchability exists- and the Dalit. Like the 'Cagot', India's pariah classes are localized and created and sustained by locally dominant communities, not by the people at the top of the pan-Indian Religious or Administrative hierarchy. Thus combating untouchability must be done at the local level and by wholly idiographic and vernacular means with an emphasis on economic mechanisms and investment in education. No doubt, the Administration, the Academy and Organized Religion can play a part- but they can't tackle the problem at its roots.

Gopal Guru, it appears, does not agree. He endorses and seeks to 'expand' Sarrukai's ridiculous notion that the highest Brahmin becomes untouchable and that this somehow means that certain groups of oppressed people doing useful and necessary work become stigmatized and treated as 'social lepers'.

Thus he writes-

Dumont was wrong. Google 'Untouchability' and you get to a Wikipedia article which shows France had untouchability. Guru had access to the internet when he wrote this paper. How on earth could he still have believed that Dumont wasn't talking nonsense? There are no Brahmans in Japan or Yemen or parts of Africa where untouchability exists. How can some supposed 'deferential untouchability' of a wholly Indian class have created 'despicable untouchability' at such remote distances?

Ambedkar married a Brahman. She was blamed for his death and shunned by some of his family and certain of his followers. This makes sense on a 'pathogen avoidance' model of Untouchability. Being of a different habitus, the lady may not have known how to cook properly or observe Mahar specific hygienic precautions or apotropaic rituals. Also, she might have been an entitled bitch who neglected her husband while spending extravagantly in the manner of her elite chums. In his own defense, Ambedkar said he was marrying a Brahmin only because she was a Doctor and could help him regulate his diabetes. This does not mean that he was making himself 'deferntially untouchable' to his own kin. But, this is what Sarukkai's argument, and Guru's 'extension' of it, would cash out as. How does this help 'foreground the moral significance of' the notion that Ambedkar Brahminised himself with respect to his 'untouchable kin by an act of supplementation- viz. recruiting a Brahmin Doctor to be his wedded wife so that his own efforts to stay healthy would be supplemented- and that this was contested, after his death, by some Ambedkarities who accused her of poisoning him?

Sarrukai's position is that so long as there is some higher type of purity, untouchability we must always have with us.  If there are good Jedi Knights than there must be evil Sith Lords to bring balance to 'The Force'.
But this is fantasy, not morality. What is the point having a dialogue with such cretinism?

Gopal Guru, however, finds Sarrukai' a man after his own heart.

Buddhism has a concept of the subtle, or esoteric, body. Thus, where there is Buddhism, there will be a class of untouchables. However, there will also be ethnic cleansing of non-Buddhists, unless the Rule of Law prevails and Buddhist monks are put in jail if they try to make mischief. This is something of which we are all now all too aware. However, if Buddhists are thrown in jail if they try to persecute or discriminate against any group of people, then their metaphysics can have no malign effect. Beating and locking up evil nutjobs causes them to give up metaphysics for mendicancy and making fraudulent claims of supernatural powers.

The trouble with this view is that Buddhists claim that becoming a monk is the first step to being reborn with a perfect body which does not require food and thus does not have to go potty. Untouchables did something naughty in their last life. If they are obedient and uncomplaining they will be reborn in a higher caste. Then, they can become a monk and take the first step to attaining a status higher than that of the Gods. Hinduism, emulating Buddhism, also has some monastic sects which make similar claims. However, there have always been charlatans who claim that they are thousands of years old and that they don't eat or go potty and that they have powers superior to God. They consider their disciples to be untouchable though, of course, they swindle them and rape their kiddies from time to time.

Guru might have a point if Hitler went potty and said to himself 'OMG! I too shit just like a Jew or a Gypsy! I must stop trying to exterminate them coz I'm as impure as they are.'

Why does the Economic and Political Weekly- which once had a good reputation among social scientists because Indians were ahead in Statistics and Econometric methods- publish shite articles which babble on about Samkhya philosophy- which disappeared in India long ago- so as to arrive at a conclusion- viz all humans, statistically speaking, really are born equal- which modern science has thoroughly clarified?

Modern Medicine, not Metaphysics, can pay for itself. We now believe the Medical Doctor, not the Doctor of Divinity, because the former alone can actually cure our at least some of our ills. By contrast, the Metaphysicians wasted resources talking utter utlracrepidarian crap.

No 'moral capacity' flows from Panchamahabhute because it is a crock of shite. The body is not composed of fire or 'akasa'. Any medical system which is based on this nonsense will, like Ayurveda as Mahatma Gandhi discovered, make you very ill. This is because those idiots would use mercury and arsenic in their concoctions.

Guru was writing this shite ten years ago. There was literally nobody in India who was keen to learn Sanskrit or to become a Brahman. Everybody was learning English and Computer Languages and trying to get a Green Card.

Yet Guru writes-

Which Brahman believes that learning Sanskrit, not I.T, will assist 'Hobbesian self-preservation?' Not a single one. Once you have got a safe STEM subject berth, by all means- like Shatavadhini Ganesh- cultivate Sanskrit or Telugu or whatever as a hobby. But self-preservation involves having useful work-skills- a good English accent and employability in Knowledge based industries. This is true for all Hindus- not just Brahmans. Endogamy is not greatly affected by 'assortative mating' provided there is gender balance in the educationally advancing cohort. In other words, provided your smart and highly educated daughter can find a 'suitable boy' within your caste, no existential threat to its genidentity obtains.

Guru inhabits a Sociological universe quite different from the rest of us. He is now the editor of the EPW so, it seems, Indian Sociologists now base their research on 'Panchamahabhutae' (of which few Indians have heard) rather than the Marx or Weber or Mills.

Did you know that fire and 'akasa' are two of the constituents of your body? I did because I'm a Brahman and have read Gopal Guru and know about Panchamahabhute.

Consider what happens when I go to my Doctor and say, 'Madam kindly reduce 'Akasa' in my intestines due to it is causing too much flatulence. Also flames are jetting out of my arsehole and scorching my underpants. Please oblige me by doing the needful.'

My Doctor replies 'Firstly, I am a 'Sir', not a 'Madam' and my Doctorate is in Gopal Guru studies. Flames are erupting from your anus because this transmutation which is produced by the politics of the preservation of the hierarchically superior self, has serious implications for these five principles. They stand discredited. They are robbed of their egalitarian meaning. You must go and roll in the mud till you are thoroughly caked in it. This will increase the amount of earth in your make-up and thus reduce excessive fire and 'akasa'.

Gandhi was wrong about mud. It has no medicinal value. 'Excessive heat in the body' is not a real thing. It is ignorance merely on a par with Voodoo and sympathetic magic.

Rolling around in the mud or drinking the water in which you have just bathed is not advisable. People will think you are a dirty fellow. Also you will get very very sick and die.

However 'socially privileged sections' who 'use water for constructing morally painful asymmetry' get the fuck beaten out of them and stop being socially privileged. If they can beat the fuck out of everybody else than it is not their 'use of water for constructing some shite' which makes them superior. It is the fact that they can and will fuck up anyone who tries to fuck with them.

This is not to say that Gopal Guru's essay is worthless. It helps to explain why there is untouchability in England. You see, there is a lot of rain in England which causes the presence of Water. Human beings use water. This creates untouchability. That is why, on the Tube, you see segregated compartments for 'untouchables'.

If there was no water, there would be no life. Thus, according to Gopal Guru's logic, Untouchability is caused by water. We, in England, must immediately ban rain. This will cause water to become unavailable to sustain life on these islands. This in turn will remove the Untouchability which blights our Social Life.

However, it isn't just water that is the problem. Fire too creates untouchability. Thus Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused Japanese untouchability. On the other hand burning a book may reverse untouchability- though it did not have this effect when Ambedkar burned Manusmriti. So, to be on the safe side, let's get rid of fire. Also this 'akasa' stuff has to go coz sound waves travel through it and thus it is needful for chanting the Vedas.
Everybody should simply roll around in the mud till they die of thirst. In this way Untouchability will at last disappear.

Thus sayeth India's pre-eminent Political Scientist who has been appointed the new editor of the Economic & Political Weekly.

The Chinese have a saying. 'Science students look down on Arts students. Arts students look down on Poli Sci students. Poli Sci students look down on their teachers.' China, of course, is a totalitarian country. But India is not. Why are Indian political scientists now so despicable that they have started babbling about 'the Five Elements' and the ontological necessity of Untouchability? I think it has something to do with the abandonment of Anglo-Saxon empiricism in favor of the 'Philosophical' French 'post-modern' approach.

Consider the following passage

Lots of different cultures had a '5 element' theory. But the Greeks didn't have Untouchability whereas the Indians did. Thus 'panchamahabhute' is not necessarily connected with any social ontology. It can neither promote equality or create inequality.

Touching does not matter at all. Beating people does. Slavery was about beating people till they did what you wanted. Even if a man kept a slave as his wife, unless he enfranchised his children by her, slaves they remained. Even after the abolition of slavery in the U.S, many States retained a 'one drop' rule. Social segregation did not depend on any abstruse metaphysical theory. Rather it depends on economic mechanisms which are backed up by highly coercive methods.

Ambedkar studied in the US at a time when Woodrow Wilson was tightening the screws on African Americans. He had no truck with stupid philosophical theories. On the contrary, he should be considered a pioneer of the 'Law & Econ tradition'. It is not true that the untouchable seeks to 'establish a reverse control of sacred bodies'. The only that could be done is by Voodoo. Why pretend that the Dalit Political movements of India are into Black Magic and sticking pins into dolls?

Gandhi may have believed all Dalits are 'bhangis' and that he himself was a 'Harijan' because he too performed this useful service. Ambedkar however was a Mahar and futilely urged Chamar millionaires from Kanpur to inter-dine with their workers. He was not such a fool as to believe that 'purity' required a class of 'impure' people.
Guru pretends otherwise. He thinks 'ghambdya' (servile) behavior subverts something or other. It is wholly irrelevant. Ambedkar was not interested in mindless 'archaeology'. He wanted reservations and affirmative action and rapid urbanization and industrialization. He also wanted his own people to rise by adopting a prestigious religion and to abandon social and religious practices which appeared primitive to him- stuff like worshiping Ganesa or Hanuman, though these are popular Buddhist deities in far away countries.

There is no essence here at all. How do we know? There is a possible world in which untouchability does not exist- e.g. the world I inhabit where everybody has a water closet and so no 'manual scavenging' is required. There is no 'pathogen avoidance' based reason to shed people of any lineage whatsoever. Indeed, the Doctors in our Hospitals come from many different countries and social backgrounds. However, they are all fully inculcated in a proper Scientific praxis with regard to pathogen avoidance.

No doubt, racists could still make a nuisance of themselves- for example by refusing to be treated by a person of the wrong color or gender. That is where the Law comes in. Such people can be thrown in prison if they cross a line.

Scientific rationality and the Rule of Law are necessary and sufficient conditions to get rid of Social Evils. This was Ambedkar's vision. But it was also that of every sensible person. There was no need for any 'archaeology' or 'phenomenology' or 'ontology' or 'metaphysics'. One might as well speak of Voodoo and Vampires.

Guru thinks that when a landlord seeks to weed out 'Dalit' tenants by asking personal questions then something 'archaeological' is going on. This is silly. The fact is the landlord has countervailing power over tenants of some castes- not others. Thus, if I let out a flat I own to a fellow Tambram, I know I can throw him out if he fails to pay. This is because my connections are better. However, I won't let out my flat to a Dalit because he has superior connections to a powerful group. If I try strong arm tactics, I will be put in prison under the 'Anti Dalit atrocity Act'.  Moreover, people of my own community will have little sympathy for me. They will assume I was extorting a higher rent from the Dalit and thus deserved my comeuppance.
A different scruple applies in renting to a U.P Brahman who can quickly call up a bunch of hefty lathi wielding caste fellows from his village if I try to get tough with him. I will ask them humbly to go extort money from my enemies rather than ruin a poor man.

A Tamil Muslim, on the other hand, would be a good tenant because he and his family are running prosperous businesses. It is not in his interest to be spoken of as someone who cheated a poor, elderly, Tambram. After all, his family probably owns homes in my ancestral agraharam and commands increasing influence and respect. Like the Nawabs of old, they gain cachet by having humble Brahman clients.

Of course, when it comes to competing mercantile castes, different scruples obtain. Essentially, these groups self-segregate because of the increasing volume of 'in-group' high-trust economic relationships.  Once again, no 'archaeology' is involved. The thing is wholly economic.

Guru concludes his silly article thus

Economics understand the landlord-tenant as involving
1) information asymmetry which is overcome by signalling
2) external costs and benefits which lead to Schelling type self segregation

Both situations can be considered under the rubric of coordination & discoordination games. Law & Econ can then device incentive compatible mechanisms which improve outcomes.

Offensive or defensive 'archaeology' on the other hand can just sit around grinning foolishly with its thumb stuck up its butt.

Guru concludes by babbling about 'the irresoluble tension between the good citizen and the good person.' This entails detecting untouchability through 'arcaheological methods'- i.e. digging up long buried stuff- deep in the 'anxious self'. In other words, these idiots are setting themselves up as Metaphysical Surgeons who will dig up and excise a present and manifest Social Evil, except not yet, never yet. Why not? If they did, they would be discovered to be charlatans. Still, for the moment, they can publish their worthless articles in worthless Journals that they themselves now edit.

Is there an ineradicable strain of mystagogy and charlatanism in the Indian psyche which makes this inevitable? No. Indian Theosophy went hand in hand alethic Social and Political Reform. Even Radhakrishnan wasn't fucking up India with his 'Idealistic' version of Advaita.  Leftists, like Justice Krishna Iyer, may have believed in Soviet style 'Parapsychology' but their legal reasoning was sound. It was not till a bunch of silly French pedagogues, infected by the Occultism of the Balzac, Victor Hugo, type, discovered their own futility in '68 and started writing shite for the American market, that Indians turned back to the 'msytical organon' of Malfatti- a Doctor now chiefly remembered for poisoning Beethoven with his stupid 'Metaphysical' approach to Medicine.